Individuality -- Fiction; Love stories; Men -- Psychology -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
Then we knew what we must do. Our discovery is too great for us
to waste our time in sweeping the streets. We must not keep our
secret to ourselves, nor buried under the ground. We must bring
it into the sight of all men. We need all our time, we need the
work rooms of the Home of the Scholars, we want the help of our
brother Scholars and their wisdom joined to ours. There is so
much work ahead for all of us, for all the Scholars of the world.
In a month, the World Council of Scholars is to meet in our City.
It is a great Council, to which the wisest of all lands are
elected, and it meets once a year in the different Cities of the
earth. We shall go to this Council and we shall lay before them,
as our gift, this glass box with the power of the sky. We shall
confess everything to them. They will see, understand and
forgive. For our gift is greater than our transgression. They
will explain it to the Council of Vocations, and we shall be
assigned to the Home of the Scholars. This has never been done
before, but neither has a gift such as ours ever been offered to
men.
We must wait. We must guard our tunnel as we had never guarded it
before. For should any men save the Scholars learn of our secret,
they would not understand it, nor would they believe us. They
would see nothing, save our crime of working alone, and they
would destroy us and our light. We care not about our body, but
our light is...
Yes, we do care. For the first time do we care about our body.
For this wire is as a part of our body, as a vein torn from us,
glowing with our blood. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or
of our hands which made it, or is there a line to divide these
two?
We stretch out our arms. For the first time do we know how strong
our arms are. And a strange thought comes to us: we wonder, for
the first time in our life, what we look like. Men never see
their own faces and never ask their brothers about it, for it is
evil to have concern for their own faces or bodies. But tonight,
for a reason we cannot fathom, we wish it were possible to us to
know the likeness of our own person.
PART SIX
We have not written for thirty days. For thirty days we have not
been here, in our tunnel. We had been caught. It happened on that
night when we wrote last. We forgot, that night, to watch the
sand in the glass which tells us when three hours have passed and
it is time to return to the City Theatre. When we remembered it,
the sand had run out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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