Kitabı oku: «The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope»
THE HAUNTED COMPUTER
AND THE ANDROID POPE
Ray Bradbury
Copyright
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1981
Cover design by Mike Topping.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539918
Version: 2014–07–18
Dedication
With love for my granddaughter, Julia, whose face promises me immortality
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind
Poem from a Train Window
Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone
Joy Is the Grace We Say to God
They Have Not Seen the Stars
This Attic Where the Meadow Greens
Abandon in Place
The Great Man Speaks
Shakespeare the Father, Freud the Son
A Miracle of Popes, All with One Face!
The Bike Repairmen
The East Is Up!
If Peaches Could Be Painters
Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few
Satchmo Saved!
God Blows the Whistle
The Infirmities of Genius
Farewell Summer
The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring
Two Impressionists
And Yet the Burning Bush Has Voice
To an Early Morning Darning-Needle Dragonfly
Poem Written on a Train Just Leaving a Small Southern Town
Too Much
There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain
I Am God’s Greatest Basking Hound
Doing Is Being
Ode to an Utterance by Norman Corwin, Who Punned the First Line, and Must Suffer the Rest
Nectar and Ambrosia
We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time
Anybody Who Can Make Great Strawberry Shortcake Can’t Be All Bad
And Have You Seen God’s Birds Collide?
You Can’t Go Home Again, Not Even if You Stay There!
Schliemann
Of What is Past, or Passing, or to Come
Within a Summer Frame
Ode to Ty Cobb, Who Stole First Base from Second
GBS and the Loin of Pork
Let Us Live But Safely, No Bright Flag Be Ours
Everyone’s Got to Be Somewhere
The Past Is the Only Dead Thing That Smells Sweet
Ode to Trivia
Good Shakespeare’s Son, the Typing Ape
Que Bella! The Flagella of the Beasts
Pope Android Seventh
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
Haunted Computer, Android Pope,
One serves data, the other hope.
The late-night ghosts of man’s dire needs
Are snacks on which computer feeds
To harvest zeros, sum the sums,
Knock something wicked ere it comes,
And drop dumb evil to its knees
With inked electric snickersnees.
While Android Pope takes up from there,
Where physics stops mid-flight, mid-air,
There Papa’s primed electric mind
Grows faith in countries of the blind.
Where mass and gravity bulk huge—
Andromeda its centrifuge—
Or matter dwindles to mere flea,
There Android Pope makes papal tea
To serve to doubtful Thomas me
And thee and thine and thine and thee;
Last suppers his to circuit there
Where physics loses self in air,
And man surprised by large or small
Sees naught beyond the two at all.
That is the moment where, well-met,
Electric Pope/Computer fret
Where stuff gives up its ways and means
And emptiness fills in-betweens
Where label-less the mystery goes
In veils and prides of cosmic snows
Which rationed out by God beyond
Are light-year sea and lake and pond
Which shallow are but drowned in deeps’
Computer mind that finds and keeps
But cannot answer final thirst:
Which, egg or chicken, arrived first?
The primal motive hides in stars
Where astronauts in rocket cars
Will never solve it, so bright Pope
With fireworks inside for hope,
With tapes for tripes, A.C.-D.C.
Speaks metaphors from Galilee
And bakes good bread and serves a wine
That bloods the soul most super-fine
And emptiness fills up with words
Like flocking flights of firebirds
That move and motion, merge and mull
So men gone empty now are full.
Yet, all mysterious remains,
So man stands out in ghosting rains
And makes umbrellas with machines
Half-satisfied with in-betweens,
His life twin mysteries given hope
By Ghost Computer, Android Pope.
Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind
Go not with ruins in your mind
Or beauty fails; Rome’s sun is blind
And catacomb your cold hotel
Where should-be heaven’s could-be hell.
Beware the temblors and the flood
That time hides fast in tourist’s blood
And shambles forth from hidden home
At sight of lost-in-ruins Rome.
Think on your joyless blood, take care,
Rome’s scattered bricks and bones lie there
In every chromosome and gene
Lie all that was, or might have been.
All architectural tombs and thrones
Are tossed to ruin in your bones.
Time earthquakes there all life that grows
And all your future darkness knows,
Take not these inner ruins to Rome,
A sad man wisely stays at home;
For if your melancholy goes
Where all is lost, then your loss grows
And all the dark that self employs
Will teem—so travel then with joys.
Or else in ruins consummate
A death that waited long and late,
And all the burning towns of blood
Will shake and fall from sane and good,
And you with ruined sight will see
A lost and ruined Rome. And thee?
Cracked statue mended by noon’s light
Yet innerscaped with soul’s midnight.
So go not traveling with mood
Or lack of sunlight in your blood,
Such traveling has double cost,
When you and empire both are lost.
When your mind storm-drains catacomb,
And all seems graveyard rock in Rome—
Tourist, go not.
Stay home.
Stay home!
Poem from a Train Window
I’ve seen a thousand homes go down the tracks
Away, away …
Late night or early morn,
There goes the house, all white, where I was born.
My traveling train
Gives back to me by moon or noontime’s rain
The house, the house, the house
Where I’m reborn again.
As common as sparrows in flight,
There flies by my front porch and me,
Out of sight, out of sight.
We are common together: common house, common weather,
Common boy on a bike on a cool dark night lawn,
Sinking in clover,
Or boy on brick street at dawn, roofing a ball:
Annie over! Annie over!
Where I’ll pop up next, Peoria or Paducah, I don’t know;
All I can say is:
Here I come, here I come,
There I go, there I go!
Always the same boy, bright-eyed as a mouse,
Always the same folks on the porch of that house,
Swinging by in the light,
Drowning deep in the night,
There they drift, there they fly
At the train whistle’s cry:
O good-bye, O good-bye.
Lawn and porch on the run; boy’s face like the sun
Looking up through the rain
As again and again, the boy who was me
Climbs a branch, drops from tree,
But arrives to depart
While his shout cracks my heart.
Lord, does anyone see
All those boys who are me,
And does anyone know all those homes white as snow
That like riverboats glide
In the tide of the train as it takes me away?
Who can say, who can say?
Just my time machine moves
Through the land of my loves,
And more houses and boys and more trees and more lawns
Wait there just ahead in the circling dawns.
A procession of dreams!
O, isn’t God clever?
He’s cloned me in teams.
So? I’ll live here forever!
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