The New Death and others Read Online Free PDF Page A

or shame.
    I lost all memory of the sun
    forgot I had a name.
     
    ---
     
    They found me lying in the desert
    ranting without words
    as senseless as a new-born lamb
    gone wandering from the herd.
     
    As senseless as a new-born lamb
    but has that lamb less sense
    than animals that stay at home
    content behind their fence?
     
    Who stay at home and rest content
    and never wander far.
    Would they insist the lamb was mad
    who saw the abattoir?
     
    They talked to me, pronounced me cured
    allowed me to walk free.
    They said that I had dreamed and I
    pretended to agree.
     
    Our old, well-known, familiar world
    substantial as it seems
    is nothing but a story-book
    and nothing but a dream.
     
    (back to contents)
     
    ++++
     
    The Face in the Hill
     
    On a hill in the desert there is a rock
formation that, from certain angles, resembles a face. The local
tribes consider it to be alive, and to possess magical powers.
Hardly surprising, since those wretched people see omens in every
cloud and tree. By that I meant, of course, to contrast their
superstition with our rationality. But the increasing burden we are
said to be placing on Nature is the most-discussed issue of our
time, so it could be said that we too see omens in every cloud and
tree, or perhaps in the lack of them. In any case this 'face' is
believed to give true counsel to the one who approaches it in the
correct manner and at the correct time.
    I found that this myth excited a strange
fascination in me. Or perhaps not so strange, given my position. I
can call upon experts in any field. Yet I am never sure whether
they are giving the best advice, or the advice they believe I want
to hear, or the advice some underling wishes me to hear. Or, at
worst, deliberately bad advice that would play into the hands of my
rivals, which is to say the opposition party, my colleagues in the
governing party, and all other parties. The reader will perhaps not
wonder that I was seduced by the dream of advice both knowledgeable
and untainted.
    It would not do to approach the thing openly.
I represent the party of stability, of commerce. Perhaps, in the
minds of some, I represent stability and commerce themselves. I
have ever argued that Nature is not dying at our hands, that we
must not change our ways, that to argue otherwise is to embrace
irrationality. I would be flayed alive by the media. As if that
crows' chorus of screeching halfwits have the right to accuse
anyone else of irrationality! Yet this is forgotten when one's
enemies are the victims, and I am the enemy of many.
    My life is restricted in many ways, but not
in material things. It was easy enough for me to arrange the use of
an air-car which could bring me to the hill in question. I went in
the night, both to hide myself and because the face was said to be
silent during the day ('sleeping', the desert people say).
    I had imagined that it would be roughly the
size of a living face, but it was vast. The 'mouth' was wider than
I am tall. Its resemblance to a face was quite remarkable, and
confronting it alone in the night was rather unnerving. Nonetheless
I approached it, and performed the ritual that is rumored to be
necessary. The final part of this ritual was for me to lie curled
up, fetus-like, with my ear to the great 'mouth'. My position
reminded me of a baby, lifted up by its mother who wishes to kiss
it. I asked my question, and listened intently. Despite its huge
size, the thing was said to have a voice as quiet as the approach
of death. I heard nothing.
    I suddenly felt very cold, very tired, and
very stupid. Then I heard a voice: my own, angrily denouncing my
own idiocy. I stood up and brushed myself off. I considered kicking
the so-called oracle, but there was still something intimidating
about it. I walked back to the air-car and prepared to fly back to
my home in the city.
    As I sat in the cockpit, I realised that, in
a sense, I had received a message. The face had said nothing. And
'nothing' was the answer to my