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never felt guilt in my sins. I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will
not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.
I read many books for many days. Then I called the Golden One, and I
told her what I had read and what I had learned. She looked at me and the first
words she spoke were:
I love you.
Then I said:
My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names. There was
a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from all other
men. So let us choose our names. I have read of a man who lived many
thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I
wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and brought it to men, and he
taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light
must suffer. His name was Prometheus.
It shall be your name, said the Golden One.
And I have read of a goddess, I said, who was the mother of the earth
and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my Golden
One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods.
It shall be my name, said the Golden One.
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Now I look ahead. My future is clear before me. The Saint of the pyre had
seen the future when he chose me as his heir, as the heir of all the saints and
all the martyrs who came before him and who died for the same cause, for the
same word, no matter what name they gave to their cause and their truth.
I shall live here, in my own house. I shall take my food from the earth by
the toil of my own hands. I shall learn many secrets from my books. Through
the years ahead, I shall rebuild the achievements of the past, and open the way
to carry them further, the achievements which are open to me, but closed
forever to my brothers, for their minds are shackled to the weakest and dullest
among them.
I have learned that the power of the sky was known to men long ago; they
called it Electricity. It was the power that moved their greatest inventions. It
lit this house with light that came from those globes of glass on the walls. I
have found the engine which produced this light. I shall learn how to repair it
and how to make it work again. I shall learn how to use the wires which carry
this power. Then I shall build a barrier of wires around my home, and across
the paths which lead to my home; a barrier light as a cobweb, more
impassable than a wall of granite; a barrier my brothers will never be able to
cross. For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their
numbers. I have my mind.
Then here, on this mountaintop, with the world below me and nothing
above me but the sun, I shall live my own truth. Gaea is pregnant with my
child. He will be taught to say I and to bear the pride of it. He will be taught
to walk straight on his own feet. He will be taught reverence for his own
spirit.
When I shall have read all the books and learned my new way, when my
home will be ready and my earth tilled, I shall steal one day, for the last time,
into the cursed City of my birth. I shall call to me my friend who has no name
save International 4-8818, and all those like him, Fraternity 2-5503, who cries
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without reason, and Solidarity 9-6347 who calls for help in the night, and a
few others. I shall call to me all the men and the women whose spirit has not
been killed within them and who suffer under the yoke of their brothers. They
will follow me and I shall lead them to my fortress. And here, in this
uncharted wilderness, I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall
write the first chapter in the new history of man.
These are the last things before me. And as I stand here at the door of
glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of men,
which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and
the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man's freedom. But what is
freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away
from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That
is freedom. That and nothing else.
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he
was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his
birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his
brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can
take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man,
and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold
of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.
But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage
beginning.
What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men?
What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship
of the word We.
When men accepted that worship, the structure of centuries collapsed
about them, the structure whose every beam had come from the thought of
some one man, each in his day down the ages, from the depth of some one
spirit, such as spirit existed but for its own sake. Those men who survived
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those eager to obey, eager to live for one another, since they had nothing else
to vindicate them those men could neither carry on, nor preserve what they
had received. Thus did all thought, all science, all wisdom perish on earth.
Thus did men men with nothing to offer save their great numbers lose the
steel towers, the flying ships, the power wires, all the things they had not
created and could never keep. Perhaps, later, some men had been born with
the mind and the courage to recover these things which were lost; perhaps
these men came before the Councils of Scholars. They answered as I have
been answered and for the same reasons.
But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of
transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went
on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to
conceive how men who knew the word I, could give it up and not know
what they had lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of
the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.
Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight
and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word. What agony must have
been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps
they cried out in protest and in warning. But men paid no heed to their
warning. And they, those few, fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with
their banners smeared by their own blood. And they chose to perish, for they
knew. To them, I send my salute across the centuries, and my pity.
Theirs is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to tell them
that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not
without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they
died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame
of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It
may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through.
And man will go on. Man, not men.
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Here, on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build
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