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.""The probabilities -""Of course," he interrupted, "the possibility exists that the plutonium will never decay and I willnever die.""But you will die.The Timekeeper has seen to that.""Of course! And it will be a sublime death.I must compose a poem to celebrate it.""To never know one moment if it will be the last - that's hell!""No, Pilot, there is no hell.We are creators of our heavens.""Madman!" I said.I pushed off the air duct, and landed on the floor with a slap.Dawud's response, when it came, was so faint I could barely hear it, muffled words lost down ablack tunnel of stone: "You're just afraid the gas will kill you, too."From Dawud I learned little pieces of news he had gleaned during his audience with theTimekeeper.The news was not good.Apparently, the Timekeeper had loosed his tutelary robots uponthe City.Warrior-poets had been captured and banished, The robots had "accidentally" pinched theheads off of three pilots - Faxon Wu, Takenya the Fearless and Rosalinda li Howt - who were ready todesert the Order for Tria.(I later learned that hundreds of autists had mysteriously vanished from theFarsider's Quarter at this time.The Timekeeper, I knew, had always hated autists.) When the pilots,high professionals and academicians had learned of the Timekeeper's violation of canon law, therewas talk of taking a deepship and leaving in swarm for some new planet on which to start an entirelynew Academy.Somehow, the news of my imprisonment had spread, and Soli had called for mybeheading, while Justine and the Sonderval had called for a convocation of the Pilot's College.Theywould ask the other master pilots to remove Soli and elect a new Lord Pilot - so the rumor went.Nikolos the Elder, the Lord Akashic, had surprised everyone by asking for a convocation of theCollege of Lords.Would that plump, hitherto timid little man really call for a new Timekeeper, asKolenya Mor warned he would? No one seemed to know.No one - especially not the Timekeeper -seemed to know where my mother was, or what she was doing.And all the while, Bardo waspetitioning the Timekeeper for my release, petitioning, blustering, threatening, and bribing variousmasters and lords to add their names to the petition.He had called for me to be tried before theakashics.I was innocent, he argued, and I should be allowed to establish my innocence.But Soli, whohated Bardo for stealing away his wife, invented a counter-argument.I should not go before theakashics, he said, because their computers were made to model only human brains.Who could knowwhether or not my brain - my Agathanian-carked brain - could fool the akashic computers? (Whocould have suspected that Soli was my father, that he feared the akashics would unfold this fact andmake it known? Who knew what anyone's motives were during that maddest of times in our City?)Ironically, the Timekeeper's judgment filled Dawud with joy.He was so excited that he couldneither eat nor sleep.He would pace his cell for days at a time, composing poems and shouting theverses out until his voice grew hoarse."Imminent death is the spice of life," he quoted."It is true, ofcourse.Pilot? Are you listening? Tell me your thoughts - are you thinking about the possibilities?"I am not by nature a meditative man.I dreaded being left alone in a moist, dark cell with nothing tohold my mind other than my own fearful thoughts, thoughts of painful possibilities.Most of the time,I slumped against the freezing walls; I stared at the blackness in front of my face, waiting.I listened tothe warrior-poet as he paced and howled out his ecstatic verses, and when the pacing ceased and hewas quiet, I listened to the plip-plop of the condensation droplets spattering against the floor.Ilistened to my heart beat.Often, usually after I had just awakened from a fitful sleep against the hard,moist flagstones, I was stiff and cold.I ate the nuts and bread dropped at intervals through the slit atthe base of the door, and I slurped down water from a large bowl.Into that same bowl I dropped mydung and piss, hoping that the robots had been programmed to clean it before refilling it.(I havealways, incidentally, disregarded Turin's Law, crudely put that any robot sufficiently intelligent toclean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes.That may be true of human beings, but the cold, soullesstutelary robots guarding us possessed only those specific intelligence functions required of them.Suchas killing the Timekeeper's enemies should they try to escape.I cannot believe they were self-aware.)I am ashamed to admit that I fell into long spells of self-pity.I thought about myself too much.I triedto concentrate on externals, but sensa of any sort were weak and few.The clanging of the robotsbeyond the door, the muted words of Dawud's poems - these sounds I listened to, but as Icontemplated a robot's self-awareness, or lack thereof, and judged the quality of the poet's verses(they were not extraordinary), I was led ever inward to my deepest worries and fears.After a while, I found that my sleeping habits were being destroyed.I would sleep for long periodsof time, perhaps as long as a day, escaping myself.Then would come fits of anxiety, surges of mania.I paced my cell and my muscles knotted and relaxed, over and over, rhythmically rippling like thewaves of the sea.I had thoughts.I tried not to think about the origin of my thoughts.I tried not tothink at all.I scratched my dirty beard and felt along the slick wall for cracks or weaknesses, but Icould not stop thinking, I brooded, wondering what I was becoming.How I dreaded this becoming!There was something new inside me - when I thought about it and tried to conceive its shape anddirection, I was as excited as I was terrified [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]