“What about your banishment, Asir?” she asked gravely.
“Wait and see.” He envisioned the pandemonium that would reign when girl, man, and robot marched through the village to the council house, and he chuckled. “I think that I shall be the next Chief Commoner,” he said. “And my councilmen will all be thieves.”
“Thieves!” she gasped. “Why?”
“Thieves who are not afraid to steal the knowledge of the gods—and become technologists, to kindle the Blaze of the Winds.”
“What is a ‘technologist’, Asir?” she asked worshipfully.
Asir glowered at himself for blundering with words he did not understand, but could not admit ignorance to Mara who clung tightly to his arm. “I think,” he said, “that a technologist is a thief who tells the gods what to do.”
“Kiss me, Technologist,” she told him in a small voice. Big Joe clanked to a stop to wait for them to move on. He waited a long time.
1965 (published in 1952 as It Takes a Thief)
THE BIG HUNGER
I am blind, yet I know the road to the stars. Space is my harp, and I touch it lightly with fingers of steel. Space sings. Its music quivers in the flux patterns, comes creeping along the twitch of a positron stream, comes to whisper in glass ears. I hear. Alec! Though I am without eyes, I see the stars tangled in their field-webs, tangled into One. I am the spider who runs over the web. I am the spider who spins, spinning a space where no stars are.
And I am Harpist to a pale, proud Master.
He builds me, and feeds me the fuel I eat, and leads me riding through the space I make, to the glare of another sun. And when he is done with me, I lie rusting in the rain. My metal rots with ages, and the sea comes washing over land to take me while I sleep. The Master forgets. The Master chips flint from a stone, leaving a stone-ax. He busies himself with drums and bloody altars; he dances with a writhing snake in his mouth, conjuring the rain.
Then—after a long time—he remembers. He builds another of me, and I am the same, for like the Soul of him who builds me, my principle lies beyond particular flesh. When my principle is clothed in steel, we go wandering again. I the minstrel, with Man the king.
Hear the song of his hunger, the song of his endless thirst.
There was a man named Abe Jolie, and he leaned against me idly with one hand in the gloom while he spoke quietly and laughed with a female of his species.
“It’s finished, Junebug. We got it made,” he said.
And the girl looked her green eyes over me while the crickets sang beyond the wall, and while the shuttling of their feet echoed faintly in the great hangar.
“Finished,” she murmured. “It’s your success, Abe.”
“Mine, and a lot of others. And the government’s money.”
She toyed with the lapel of his coveralls, grinned, and said, “Let’s steal it and run away.”
“Ssshh!” He looked around nervously, but there were no guards in sight. “They can shoot you for less than that,” he warned. “The S.P. doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
“Abe—”
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
He kissed her.
“When is that going to be illegal, too?” she whispered. He looked at her grimly, and she answered her own question.
“As soon as the eugenics laws are passed, Abe. Abe Jolie, who built the spacedrive, a genetic undesirable.”
“Don’t!”
They stood there breathing quietly, and there was hate in their throats.
“Well?”
He looked around again, and whispered, “Meet me here at eleven o’clock, Junebug.”
They parted to the sound of casual footsteps.
At eleven o’clock, a lion roared in the hangar. At eleven o’clock a steel juggernaut tore through the hangar wall and paused on a concrete ramp while bullets ricocheted off the hull. Then the first star-chariot burnt a verticle column of flame in the night. Thunder walked upward on fiery stilts, while men shouted angrily. When we were alone in the airless, star-stung, sun-torn blackness, I stroked the web of space, and listened to the muted notes. When the tune is memorized, I speak. I contradict. I refute the universe. We lived in a spaceless space beyond stars.
The man and the woman had gone. But the plan remained on Earth. My principle lingered on the drawing boards, and in the dreams of men—men who said they were sick of wars and politics and the braying of collectivist jackasses. Others were sick of petty peace and cheapness and Independence Day speeches and incorporated jackasses who blubbered disgustingly about various freedoms.
They wanted the one Big Freedom. They built me again, these pale, proud bipeds, these children of an Ape-Prince who walked like a god. They packed themselves in cylinders of steel and wandering, riding starward on a heart-tempest that had once sung them down from the trees to stalk the plains with club and torch. The pod of earth opened, scattered its seed spaceward. It was the time of the great bursting, the great birth-giving. Empires shivered in the storm.
Sky-chariots flung themselves upward to vanish beyond the fringes of the atmosphere. Prairie schooners of space bore the restless, the contemptuous, the hungry and the proud. And I led them along the self-road that runs around space. The world seethed, and empires toppled, and new empires arose whose purpose it was to build the sky-chariots.
Young men, young women, clamored at the gates of launching fields. Those who were chosen grinned expectantly at the stars. They climbed aboard in throngs and deserted Earth. They were hard laughers with red freckles and big fists. They wore slide rules at their belts like swords, and they spoke familiarly of Schwarschild Line-Elements and Riemann-Christofel tensors. Their women were restless talkers, big women, with flashing white teeth. They teased the men, and their hands were strong and brown.
Poets came—and misfits, and saints, sinners, dirt-farmers. Engineers came and child-bearers, fighters, utopianists, and dreamers with the lights of God glowing in their starward eyes.
“Why were we taught to pray with downcast eyes?” they asked. “When you pray, look starward, look to the God at the north end of the Universe.”
Man was a starward wind, a mustard seed, a wisp of Brahma’s breath breathed across space.
They found two corpses in an orbit about Arcturus. The corpses were frozen and the ice was slowly sublimating into space-vapor. One of them had an Engineering Union card in his pocket. It gave his name as Abe Jolie. The other was a girl. And, because the corpse had given them the blueprints that led to space, they hauled him aboard with the girl. Somebody sang the “Kyrie” and somebody said, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Then they cancelled out the orbital velocity and let the corpses go toppling toward Arcturus, toward a burning sun-grave where their light would shine forever.
There were those who remained behind. There were those who made Earth their business and stayed at home. Their tribes were numbered at two billion souls. And they were somehow different from the spacers. They liked to sit in their rocking chairs. They liked prettiness and a one-hundred-cent dollar. They voted for the Conservative Party. They abolished centralization. Eventually they abolished government. And for the first time in anyone’s memory, there was peace on Earth, good will among men.
My Master was hungry for land. My Master sought new worlds. And we found them.
There was a yellow sun in Serpens called 27 Lambda, lying eight parsecs inward toward the galactic heartland and seven parsecs north toward the galactic pole. A lush green planet drifted at one hundred twenty megamiles from the friendly sun-star, and it awoke in the wandering biped nostalgic thoughts. We paused in space-black, we looked, we came down on tongues of lightning from the clear sky to set jet-fires in the grassy plain near a river and a forest.