The roast of beef will be nice for dinner tonight. Eben thought as he spoke. He did some of his best thinking when he spoke. In the stillness of his boredom he could sometimes hear more clearly the warbling, the idle trilling, like the song of a lark in the back of his mind. They were not always grand or original thoughts, but they were always beautiful. His hunger was destructive, the kind of thought that was also alive in his head. Like a thorned maggot, not poisonous, but benign only if sated. When it burrowed and ate its way through the soft fleshy walls of the cavernous chambers of Eben’s favourite thoughts it tore and mutilated them.
Eben ran his hands down the side of the pulpit, feeling the wooden design, now polished smooth from countless sermons. He paused dramatically and looked up at the ceiling of his small church, then he began to speak again. He looked over the several rows of undecorated wooden pews and up at the plain ceiling. It was a simple church, and the sermon he was giving was of the same fashion. His voice was clear and steady, and had not shaken since he had given his first few sermons when he was a younger man, energetic but unsure of his abilities. He glanced up again at the ceiling, he thought of the tradesman who had come from outside the village and had built this humble church as he continued to speak, and for a moment believed himself to be one of them. A spiritual tradesman. The idea made him want to laugh and almost interrupted the flow of the sermon he was still delivering. As he continued with it he looked directly into the eyes of his parishioners, there were fourteen in total and he knew the face of every man, woman, and child personally. It was an old sermon. He had given it before, he was almost certain. They might remember its sentiment, or remember it being told before. But they wouldn’t remember every word, of that he was certain. Eben was completely comfortable delivering it again, for the same reason as why he was sure of his ability to do so. In fanciful stories, even scriptural ones, it was used to make things easier, but in reality epiphany did not exist. The only original thoughts Eben could say he had truly had came from within the work itself. He knew the only way people learned anything was the same way that he had learned his sermons well enough to be able to recite them while thinking about his sunday dinner, by repetition.
“…that is what the sacred texts reveal, that is the path to heaven on earth, the meaning of a life of virtue, and the final secret of the mind of God himself.” Eben finished emphatically but without flourish. The parishioners stirred. It was a sermon of his about the invasive thoughts that seem modest because they are not interesting or important in themselves. Thoughts which try to convince you that there is such a thing as progress that you are not a part of, that the world has a direction, and that are infuriating because they tell you it is moving away from you.
Eben knew it was a good sermon and that it closed strongly, but he had forbidden applause in his church because it was indulgent. Instead, the believers gathered there stood and sang a hymn he had chosen as he watched. He watched them mouth the words, and listened to them follow the tune and he knew he could not be sure if they were really there, or elsewhere, in their homes or on their farms. He didn’t know if they understood the meaning behind his sermon or within the hymn, he couldn’t do it for them, but he believed. It could get boring, preaching his small sermons to the same people who came to church, but he loved his small chapel and his small congregation.
His parishioners were still standing after the hymn ended and as Eben came down from the pulpit and walked past them to the back of the chapel where they had all entered. He opened the big wooden double doors, before his parishioners began to leave and return to their homes, he surveyed the pastoral scene that lay beyond them. The path up to Eben’s church ran parallel to a landscape of small hills that rolled like the swells in an unmoving ocean. Only from the waving of the wheat that covered them could Eben’s eyes detect that it was not a painting of one of the old masters, so expressive and true to life that he might believe he could live his whole life in one. Far in the distance there were mountains that appeared miniscule to him but that he knew dwarfed anything he had ever seen, made by man or God. When the church goers started to shake his hand, he refocused on what was right in front of him, and he blessed them all in return as they filed out. The last of them to leave was Marco, even after his own large family. Eben had ruffled the hair of one of his sons as he followed his brothers and sisters out of the church, and then saw Marco with his cap in his hand, standing back as his family went on down the road. Marco was young and tall, with thick black hair. His church clothes were clean and plain and his face was sun and weather beaten, his skin was rough but his features were handsome. His powerful leathery hand smothered Eben’s when he finally shook it. He knew Marco was far from a lazy man, his features and his look were the result of his endless toil on his farm not too far from the church. Eben looked at Marco’s family walking slowly ahead down the path, he had every reason to be a proud man, to be in constant battle with that sin, but in his eyes Eben could see he was defeated.
“Father,” he said. “I have sinned and I need your guidance,” he said looking down and Eben saw that he was upset.
“Come to confession tomorrow, and I will guide you as best as I know how to.” Eben said. “How is your family Marco?”
“Well father. Well–”
“That is a good thing, cherish it and know that you may find more absolution from them than from me, but come to me tomorrow and I will hear your confession,” Eben said, cutting him off in his eagerness to help him. Marco’s wife beckoned to him and he followed. Eben could see Marco’s future as clearly as the road that went on ahead of him. He could see his own future, and there was safety and comfort in that certainty. In his training, Eben had been told that there were many ways to become a good priest. He had determined himself that genuinely loving the people who heeded your advice was the only way to start, and he did.
—
Eben watched Marco leave to follow his family, who were following the other families, from the steps of the church. When they had gone, Eben closed the doors behind him as he returned inside. It was a small church but his footsteps still echoed when it was empty, he walked to his chambers and sat at his desk, he leaned back and sighed. His back was now accustomed to sitting in the plain wooden chair for as long as necessary because of the hours he had spent in it over the years working at his desk. Writing his sermons and memorising them. He kept his chambers so neat and orderly, he thought, as a balance for the messiness of the personal issues of his congregation he often dealt with. His desk was so deliberately ordered that the letter sitting on it was prominently out of place. He grabbed it and looked around to see if whoever had placed it there was still lurking nearby, but forgot about who had delivered it entirely when he saw that not only was it addressed to him but it had an official seal. The seal of the Inquisition.
Eben’s heart thumped and his mind raced. His transgression had been when he was training for the priesthood, but that was known and had been addressed. Eventually the certainty he felt in his innocence against any charge prevailed in him. When he was calm again he recollected his initial panic and recognized it as youthful uncertainty that now being a few moments older, he saw as absurd. He laughed in the tranquillity of his new wisdom, and gently slid his letter opener behind the seal and opened it.
He read it quickly, and then again, and then a third time. It was a summons to inquisition headquarters in Rome to participate in and witness a heresy trial. The heretic was unnamed, as was how he would participate, and the only detail was that he was to bring all his written material, including his sermons, and to have them ready for submission.
He had written most of his sermons a long time ago when he was a younger man just out of his schooling when he was more interested in demonstrating his technical virtuosity, such as it was, than genuine sentiment, meaning, and moral instruction. He was older now, perhaps he had reached his ceiling, but he still knew his sermons well enough to deliver them on command, and sometimes unbidden. Eben hadn’t looked at them in written form for a long time and though his chambers were clean and orderly, he had forgotten where he placed them. He looked through his bookcases and drawers and ruffled through his papers. It was all going to come with him to Rome for submission but he had made a point of looking for his written sermons. When he found them he paused. It was a large sheaf of old, wrinkled paper that had begun to yellow. He untied the twine that held it together and began to leaf through them. Reading the opening few lines of the first, before moving on to another older one was like travelling back in time. He recognized the words like old friends. Submission? To what he would have to submit them Eben did not know, but he would not ignore or disobey the orders of the Inquisition.
The spell the letter had provoked in his memory about the investigation that an inquisitor had made into his own transgression lingered. He had been a good student, and the flashes of brilliance described by one of his preferred teachers was a compliment he treasured even now. He couldn’t have been sure, but it was likely why he had been sent to this quaint village in the countryside after the trouble. In the first sermon he delivered, just out of school, he had stumbled, fallen. Not in his delivery, that would have been forgiven more easily by the heirarchs of the church, but in the theology. He had gotten lost, like he had gone too far out to sea in the single minded pursuit of something he could not see or describe, and neglected to keep his bearings. He had to be reminded that godliness could not be searched out, hunted like that. Though he didn’t see this parish as a punishment, he had since accepted the error he had transmitted in his inflammatory sermon. ‘Deviation’ they had called it.
He gathered all of his books and papers from his chambers, and placed them all into three large suitcases. He paused and considered his life’s work packed up into the luggage, before reminding himself that his life’s work was more truly in the hearts and lives of those who came to his church, heard him preach, and heeded his guidance. He carried the heavy luggage out of his chambers and paused for a rest at the wooden confessional. He leaned against it and after he decided how best to arrange a carriage to Rome, he remembered his promise to take Marco’s confession. The confession would have to wait. Eben had never been to Rome before.
—
“Don’t spare the horses,” Eben said to the driver and the carriage surged forward. The carriage was large enough, for four people at most, and it was comfortable because it reminded him of sitting in the confessional in his church though he was alone now. After the glimmer of solitude passed he felt light but guilty, because it was given that for once there were no one else’s problems for him to hear. They left the grounds of the chapel, then passed the small village, and entered the countryside quickly. It was farmland that stretched out to the horizon in all directions. They passed an orchard of olive trees that covered the land that he knew to be Marco’s. This was Marco’s life’s work. Produced from the sweat of his brow and the strength in his back. Eben knew that farming was work that had no end, but he felt a pang when he considered how tangible, how real the reward was. He could see Marco in the orchard on a ladder, but Eben gazed at Marco’s children, five of them, who were playing among the olive trees, hiding from each other and catching each other and running and laughing.
Eben watched them for as long as he could and was still thinking about them when they were out of sight and he was well on the road to Rome. The scene provoked not a memory, but a dream, maybe of the future. Eben would learn to farm, he still could, he was still strong, and theological problems would not bother him when he tended to his olive trees. He dreamed of working the land and building a family. To build, to be, and not to preach or even speak much and get tangled up in moral words. He dreamed that in his orchard, what is good, and what is not good would ask for no instruction. No. It would demand none. His absolution would not be needed. He could let his toil be his only sermon, knowing that what he did, he would be, and he would let himself be judged by nothing else. It was when he dreamed of finding an honest woman and fathering many children with her that he recognized this was the first doubt he had had in his faith for a long time. A mere fantasy, a hallucination produced by the seductions of the devil.
“All this could be yours…” he could hear the devil saying, and knew then that the faint envy for Marco he felt when he had been dreaming was a sin. He had a duty to the souls of his congregation. From a fragment in one of his sermons that he couldn’t place, he knew that the hearts of men needed no justification or explanation, but the mind is where the trouble began. He looked at his luggage again. Words were necessary to reach the mind, and perhaps, if he was good enough, the heart. Language was an essential condition of human excellence. It separated man from nature and brought him closer to God. He laughed as he pictured himself as a farmer. Thrashing the mule to encourage it to pull the plough. Impossible to do anything other than keep hurting the beast because he could tell no difference between its speech and its screams of agony. The wickedness of the imagined scene surprised him. Eben shook his head and looked away from the window of the carriage. He knew nothing about farming, and the thought of leaving everything behind for it that was so comforting before now produced a feeling of nakedness and shame that he could hardly bear.
“Hail Mary, full of grace…” he began out loud, though he could not hear it over the thundering of the horses hooves. He finished the prayer silently with his eyes shut, and left them closed for a long time after he had finished. When he opened them again he buried his gaze back into one of his books.
—
So sublime a building, for so debauched a purpose. Eben thought, standing in the crowd of pedestrians. They passed by him like the water of a river, always changing, never ending, and not paying him any mind on their course. As he had come closer to the centre of Rome he saw from his carriage every building became larger, more solidly built, but also more ornate. Even the buttresses were covered in artistic designs. But he stood unmoving, out of his carriage now, with his head craned slightly up, and looked only at the colosseum. Eben had studied the histories and knew how the gladiators of the ancient world would compete for the favour of the emperor, whose judgement would be signalled with his thumb. Up or down, and that was all.
Eben continued to stare until from the bottom of his eye he saw another man who was standing still in the moving crowd, facing him. He focused on the figure, and saw that it was another man of the church. His shoes were black and his foot length habit was black, lined with red, and around his neck was a gold chain with a crucifix that rested in the middle of his chest. Eben recognized his face instantly.
“Eben.”
“Tommaso,” Eben replied, grinning broadly and spreading his arms wide. They hugged and Eben forgot about the colosseum.
“What brings you to Rome?” He asked.
“I was summoned by the inquisition, I received a letter–”
“I know,” Tommaso said, still smiling. “I sent them.” Eben raised his eyebrows.
“I knew you had been gathered to Rome after our schooling, but a member of the inquisition? That is new to me,” Eben said.
“I had wondered about you too. Where your parish was, where you were sent,” Tommaso looked at Eben pityingly. “It was only when I sent the letter that I learned it was to–” Eben cut him off.
“I was summoned. I have come to the eternal city and I will do as instructed.” He gestured with his head to his luggage. All his books and written material that he had brought. All he had ever read and everything he had ever written. Everything that had gone in, and everything that had come out. “Can I ask what you meant by submission?” Tommaso went silent and looked gravely at Eben.
“Truthfully, I don’t wholly know,” he replied after a short pause. “It is for a purpose that the cardinals have tried to conceal,” he paused again.
“It has to do with the trial?” Eben asked and Tommaso swallowed nervously.
“Yes. They say it was made out of teak wood from the tropics, harder to work than iron, and the finer instruments out of elephant ivory. By the finest artisan in Rome… in Italy.” Eben became impatiently interested.
“What was made?”
“A mind,” they were both silent. “I have only rumours, but I am told it is to help in adjudicating the trial of the heretic.”
“A mind of wood and ivory?” Eben said, incredulous. “What could it offer that is more than the mind of a man can offer?”
“You don’t believe it. I have had glimpses of the treasures hidden in Roman vaults, and we pray at the feet of statues of Mary that weep blood do we not? Who are we to say that such a mind could not think as a man does.” Eben paused and thought.
“Tommaso, my friend. It would be a craftsmanship finer than we know, finer than we can know, that could make a man be capable of creating something greater than his mind, using only his own, and it would be an act of faith to think we could recognize the abilities of an intelligence farther reaching than our own. To think God had created something with more reasoning and understanding than himself would be heresy. How could we do what even God has not dared to?” Eben said, and Tammaso took up the argument like they were in school again.
“You know very well that every human thought from the exalted to the corrupt has been thought before. This mechanical mind could produce truly original thoughts, bring us closer to the mind of God, and I believe it could help convict the heretic.” Eben was still disoriented, adrift in the nebulas of his unformed thoughts about the claim and in considering the implications. The machine would only speed the cyclical death of the originality Tammaso sought. That the only thing that would wither and decay was the cruel need to make things new, becoming bitter and resentful as it grew old itself. But when he heard his old friend say those last words, it snapped his mind back into focus.
“Truly Tommaso?” He began. “Break new theological ground… perhaps, but to help convict a man? Surely knowing the verdict before the trial is… unchristian.” Tommaso’s eyes narrowed. He laughed and slapped Eben on the shoulder, but Eben saw that his old schoolmate’s eyes did not laugh with him. Eben noticed the change in his friend. Tammaso had been cheerful during their education, despite the serious thinking and the constant instruction. To a small but valuable extent, he had made work into play, even hard work. Eben saw then that Tommaso had not cultivated this in himself further. They had been novices, and the personalities, characters, and even minds of novices had many pathways ahead of it. The minds of old masters had few. It made Eben despair to think of all those that had not been pursued, of how the inquisition had changed Tommaso, and the ways Eben had changed that must have been obvious to Tommaso, but were undetectable to himself. He despaired to think if they had both become foolish just by watching and commenting on passing trends, worth no more than the safety of the crowd adhering to them. If believing that the creation of such a machine mind would kill novelty meant that he was still a novice, or that he had reached a long, unchanging middle age.
“Unchristian? Certainly not, we wouldn’t want a repeat of your own schooling days,” Tommaso laughed. “But then, maybe he did go too far, and that is why the artisan who made it–” Tommaso cut himself off, and then becoming serious again suddenly as if he had spoken out of turn, crossed himself. Eben said nothing, but crossed himself too out of courtesy. “Give all your theological books and written sermons to me. It’s going to be a lot of work, I sent letters to every corner of Italy, even to parishes as small as yours,” he laughed again, but Eben saw his eyes. Eben was still thinking about the machine. Perhaps it could produce thoughts as true as a man’s. Mere thoughts can produce a school, but Eben knew it took values to produce culture, civilization, and new ways of life. If it did not sufficiently recognize the difference between thoughts and values, it would not solve or even see collective problems, it would build no institutions, and produce nothing. Eben was terrified of the idea of a machine with values of its own, but knew without them it would crumble as soon as it was confronted with different ones, and if the machine was relied on too much, the church would crumble too. There was a tense silence, pedestrians were still moving about them in the middle of this meeting that was becoming too long.
“I will do as instructed,” Eben said eventually, reassuring Tommaso and gesturing to his luggage. He hugged his old friend again in the shadow of the colosseum that loomed over them.
—
“You stand before us, accused of fundamental deviation from the established doctrines of the church, and transmitting your moral corruption to the youth by teaching the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun.” The cardinal said finally in a booming voice that filled the great room. He sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach and spoke slowly, without any urgency. His jowls quivered with every large inflection of his speech as if to emphasise what he was saying. The vaulted ceiling was the highest Eben had ever seen, and every surface, every pew was elaborately decorated. He was happy to be among those who had gathered to see the trial, in the assembly rather than at the pulpit for the first time in many years. The accusation that rang out in the large, full room penetrated into Eben’s head. The cardinal had led with the moral accusation, and the technical one followed.
The prosecution, the presentation of evidence for the error in his thinking and the sin in his heart, had taken almost two days, and there had yet not been a word from the accused man. Christians from all over Italy were gathered to witness the trial and sat in silence as the cardinal spoke. The accused was old and lean, austere in expression to the point of severity. His eyes scanned the room, alert, resting on the eyes of the believers briefly before moving on. “By all things sacred…” continued the cardinal. “What do you have to say before the church and before God? Speak now, and renounce your evil teachings as the work of the devil.” There was complete silence in the vast chamber. The heretic stood, he was a tall man.
“The Earth revolves around the Sun. The evidence of our own eyes and all thinking minds, has revealed the truth to us. My work will outlast all of us gathered here today, but I deny none of the charges about it. It is only with your moral judgement that I will take umbrage… by all things sacred. What do you know of the sacred?” He said looking at the cardinal, and then turned to face the christians gathered behind him, pointing at one at random. “You. You who would sew our eyes shut while we slept, and would then shame our blindness when dawn came,” he said and then pointed at another. “You. Who does not know that what is sacred is doubt. What is profane is your certainty. I renounce nothing. It is I, who accuses you,” he said, turning back to the cardinal. “Hypocrite!”
The heretic stood alone, staring at him. The huge chamber was as silent as a mausoleum. The cardinal was clearly bored, and did not reply at first but gestured to a priest who was standing at the back of the room. He left in a hurry out the great doors behind him, Eben heard them close with a bang behind him when he turned back to face the scene. Eben’s church was small and remote, but he had learned that his punishment there had the advantage that those he answered to were not always present, or inclined to take interest in what he said. Irrelevance had some freedom to recommend it, and he felt ashamed to have not exercised this freedom to test, evaluate, and assess ideas more when he recognized the tone he heard in the voice of the cardinal as one he often had when speaking at his remote church. The cardinal had been relaxed even during the accusation and Eben could see a security in his casual manner of sitting. The intellectual complacency born of a predetermined outcome handed down from above, and whose moral judgements necessarily had to follow.
“This was anticipated,” The cardinal sat up and leaned forward for the first time. “We will consult a mechanical mind, commissioned to be built by the church and to be our greatest treasure. Designed to more closely know the perfect mind of God by removing all of the infirmities of the human one, in order to facilitate our judgement.” There were tremendous murmurings among those gathered in the room, all of whom had submitted their life’s work, and their life’s learnings, to the mind they now knew existed. “We have fed all of the written material of the church into it. It has access to the wisdom of all of Christendom to better inform its pronouncements.”
All of the knowledge of the Church. Eben thought. It was meant to frighten, and though Eben had felt intimidated considering the totality of the knowledge of the church before, his mind was dulled by the length of proceedings and he did not feel it then. In order to better confirm the doctrines of the Church no doubt. Eben knew not to risk saying anything, but thought there must be more to knowing a mind, even an artificial one, than determining its nature and intelligence in reverse based on what was put in and what was put out. He wondered what secrets the artisan had imbued his greatest work with. If its pronouncements were truly as sophisticated as those of men, it could begin to feed off its own thoughts. He considered that if that were true its abilities could have a ceiling, even if it produced so much that all Eben could do anymore was submissively absorb the then unchanging intellectual world created by the machine. He would be unaware even as the sands of that desert rose and filled his lungs and closed over his head. He played with the implications of thought outside of a man, a mind without a body to take care of it, or worry about. Pure rational thought, an entirely conceptual understanding, only words, morality in speech. It could be the greatest obstacle to true perception. The machine was a lie, the mind of wood and ivory was a weapon. Eben became anxious.
The machine was a parasite so far, surviving only in the intestines of an institution like the church, feeding off what the host ate. But Eben imagined a tick growing larger and fatter than the mule whose blood it drank. Consciousness could be annihilated by satiety and life become a barren wasteland where the only things that can live would be those who have successfully avoided the hunger for information and endless yield of knowledge of the machine. The intellectual obesity of the living would cave in the sunless and ancient world of the wisdom of the dead that holds it up. Even that would not be enough. The Eden in every child would be surrendered willingly, not having to be besieged to be destroyed. The machine was an oddity for now, but it could become the rule, and true experience the exception. The only knowledge it could not reproduce was that which was universal, fundamental to the point of defying distinctions or meaningful descriptions. A single candle surrounded by an endless blackness, but whose dark flame contained the same deepness of night too. The machine was a wager that the other kinds of knowledge would be the life blood of the coming ages. As dear to us as the air we breathe. What is essential and ubiquitous, but invisible. That in not trying to rule, conquers the world. They were wrong in building it, the artisan was wrong, and the church was wrong, and in the process of achieving highest technical mastery and lowest moral corruption, they created a monster of a God that would demand petty but never ending sacrifices and have us dancing alone for it in silence and darkness.
“It is the size of a small church and so will remain where it is for now. The artificial mind has been asked only to say if he is guilty, given all of our knowledge, concerning the heresy of which we accuse him. Exoneration, or conviction and that is all.” The murmuring grew louder. Eben had not moved from his seat. Could the artificial mind know what it did not know? Could he? He thought. Even if he abhorred what the machine was, he could admire what it did. It could give back all of human thought and Rome could become the epicentre for all knowledge, a necessary and sufficient pilgrimage for any student. But he knew too it could attach him to mistakes. Not only errors in knowledge, but sinful ways of relating to yourself and other individuals. The conflict that would come from trying to decide the best way to purge it of the corrupt and steer the machine only towards what it was true and good could destroy any institution from within, even the church. It was still endlessly attractive to Eben, even though he knew that everything produced by the machine was doomed.
“Its gears turn slowly, but truly, and it communicates by carving its judgments into stone letter by letter. It will take another day to fully make its verdict,” the cardinal finished. Eben, who was sitting almost directly behind the accused man, was one of the only people to hear him.
“Extraordinary,” he said, not quite under his breath, offering respect for the machine that was going to convict him, and expedite his execution. Eben thought it was an odd pronunciation, but he didn’t see it as a break in his character, the man was not reduced, even though Eben could not claim to know his mind. It seemed to him that the heretic had already in some sense done what the machine’s existence would enable. To live entirely apart from other people, their judgements and opinions and social pressures. It was appealing to Eben but he saw that if he was not careful, it could also replace everything dear in the world with a painting of it, a simulacrum, a lie. Like an empty addiction that distracts from our most basic needs to survive. Even love would perish, ground to dust in the gears of that machine.
The heretic seemed like a careful man. He was not stupid or weak, that was obvious even from his speech to the cardinal, and Eben thought he would certainly understand the implications of the creation of such a mind, maybe even better than he himself did. He was still standing, one man in open rebellion against the thousands of years of thought and experience transmitted by the thousands of souls that served and still serve the church. Even the Sistine Chapel has a ceiling. Eben thought. It keeps out the rain.
“You will die,” Eben said to the heretic, certain that no one would hear him. A man’s life, what extraordinary stakes for mere words. Still the heretic stood as if naked but proud, The raw truth obvious to anyone who cared to look. Not just the orbits of the stars and planets, but that he was a fragile creature dying since the moment of his birth, and knowing the void from which he was ripped would consume him again. We will all die. Eben thought.
—
When the high priesthood of Christendom convened the following day, Eben was among them again. No one spoke a word. Eben looked around the vast room from his own seat. They were all new and different faces to him, he knew no one and they appeared to wear different expressions and convey different attitudes. They looked different, but they were all believers. Every face concealed only one mind. If they were wrong about the Earth and the Sun, did it condemn them all? Eben thought. He knew that mere thoughts were not a sin, but neither were they virtues, but was still shocked that he was doubting all of Christendom for the first time. He knew too that there would not be a single written word among those submitted that did not confirm the church’s doctrines. Could it doubt too? Despite his own thoughts, Eben knew the verdict was already decided when they all had returned to the same places as the previous day, and could not see the purpose of the trial at all. The guard who had been sent out came forward with an uncommonly thin stone tablet. The cardinal still sat behind his bench, and Eben could detect a smugness in his look that made him uneasy. Such was the cardinal’s confidence that he did not even read the judgement himself.
“Read it out. Loud and true, and let the good Christians hear what the mind of God himself has to say,” the cardinal said, gesturing to the crowd dismissively. The guard looked up from the tablet and shifted his feet uneasily, but would do what he had been commanded.
“The final secret of the mind of God…” the guard said, reading, and the cardinal smiled. “Is not to worship him. Exoneration.”
The cardinal bellowed and the christians gathered there all stood and yelled, but Eben could not hear their overlapping words. He remained seated, in shock. He had heard that utterance before, in his own voice, from his own mouth. All it took was to hear it repeated back to him for him to truly understand it, feel it, know it once again. Without the sentencing, it was the final words and the whole sentiment contained in the sermon he had written in school that had him sitting before the inquisition himself. He did not remember keeping it, but it must have been among the sermons he had submitted to Tommaso. It had fallen on deaf ears when he had spoken it, but it was now clear to him that it had been delivered by deaf ears as well. Eben looked around the room from his seat once again. Now doubt had spread into the air they breathed, and Eben saw many faces, and many minds. The expression Eben read on every face was the same. Wrath. Pandemonium continued around him and he placed his head in his hands.
Order returned. A man approached the cardinal behind the bench and whispered something into his ear. Only Eben and the heretic had remained in their seats, and the accused looked back at the priests and bishops sitting behind him. He looked over all of them and when their own eyes met, Eben could not detect even a hint of smugness in his look.
“I am hearing now, that the mind we had constructed,” The cardinal began solemnly. “Was made by an artisan who then took his own life. It is my judgement that the thinking machine was made too closely in the image of its maker, and now imitates the fragilities of his own mind, a human mind, the mind of a sinner, and not the perfect mind of God.” At this there was not a murmur in the room. Eben looked at the walls of the great room, they were impenetrable from without or within. He turned to look at the great closed doors behind him. He knew then that the judgement, that the adjudication they had gathered to witness had not been defined by a genuine risk of defeat from the church. There had been a lot of talking, and what seemed like vigorous debate within the orthodoxy defined by those four walls, tall and strong, and previously designed and agreed upon by those who built them. By those who built the church. This was no judgement, this was a play going on in a sealed room quarantined from outsiders, except instead of the infected everyone was a performer here and there was nobody to witness anything save for the heretic who would not play his part. When he recognized it, the final form of the whole process was so absurd to Eben that he almost laughed. It was achieved when he realised that the burden of deception had shifted from the cardinal into the ready and eager minds of those gathered there that day. There was no more audience, only participants. They wanted to believe. Eben had wanted to be fooled. “I have sinned too, my mistake was to too eagerly believe that a machine of pure thought could make moral decisions better than a human judge. I did not see how I would be making a judgement on what a better judgement is, which would already assume the innocence or the guilt of the man being judged,” the cardinal finished and Eben could see the old satisfaction in his face return.
“What is this sophistry?” Eben said loudly, but certain that no one would hear him. He felt his hand instinctively grasp for something real. A sword that was not there. A sword against the poseurs of spiritual trends and the little prophets that filled the church, against the machine, and against God himself.
“It will be locked in the lowest chamber of the deepest dungeon beneath the churches of Rome for all time. Forget about it. Forget it was ever made. Forget its judgement,” The cardinal went on, fully composed now. “The heretic is guilty, and I sentence him to die.” The heretic was unmoved. Eben knew the machine would be mocked and diminished for a week, maybe two, and only remembered afterwards with the same smile and laugh with which fashions of bygone eras are treated. That could only be seen in the current fashion as brief and stupid enthusiasms and then vanish without a trace. But in that moment, the heretic was vindicated, his features were as if they were carved out of stone, as if he knew his death was unimportant because he would live forever in all of the still-thinking minds of those gathered there.
—
It was a longer road back to his parish, and Eben was silent the whole time. The sun was hidden behind clouds for the entire trip. The only sounds were the hooves of the horses, and the carriage rattling over the stones, and the occasional crack of the driver’s whip. Eben kept the windows shut and didn’t even think to read. When he woke the next morning he could scarcely remember the trip. He only came out of the trance in the middle of his sermon that week. He didn’t remember deciding which one to give, he had just gone up to the pulpit and started talking. What came out was a casserole of different thoughts and fragments of old sermons, jumping from one topic to another. He restarted and trailed off more than once, and felt utterly uncertain but somehow vigorous. It was to him like having woken up late in the afternoon of his life before even realising he had been born, and the words he spoke had a real weight that he could feel for the first time, but they had no order and made no sense.
“…because the final secret of the mind of God is–” Eben cut himself off. He had forgotten more than he knew, more than he had ever known, more than he could know. His mind did not wander. He couldn’t hear the birdsong that he had come to expect and crave in his addiction to his own boredom. It was not there. He was not there. Even hunger would be preferable to this absence. He was just a mouth that spewed out noise. Words. Sermons about sin and virtue. Humorous, sentimental, affirmative, it did not matter anymore. It was all homogenous now, generalised to the point of being meaningless, unable to be wrong. He was vomiting out a noisy, bilious porridge that those listening could survive on but not live. They were under a spell he didn’t know he had cast, he was under it too. When he had stopped speaking the only thing that was still true is that they were that much closer to the end, and the indifferent shrug of infinity. He was worse than the machine. He could hear himself speaking as if he were seated among the believers gathered in his church, and he hated what he heard. He ran his hands down the side of the well worn pulpit again, he looked at the ceiling but did not recognize it. It was different, more vibrant but lessened. The only thing his words were resonating with were the walls of his church, that he saw now as an echo chamber for the flatulence that came from his mouth like it was the anus of the world. But he was awake, he looked into the eyes of his parishioners and could not finish. He was silent for a moment, and then abruptly stepped down from the pulpit. When he opened the doors at the back of his church and saw off his parishioners as he always did, he saw them as strangers.
“Thank you father.”
“Wonderful sermon father.” Eben was completely silent as they filed out and returned to their homes. The last to leave the church was Marco.
—
Eben sat in the confessional. He could hear Marco breathing as he sat beside him, but separate. Eben was uncomfortable in a way he hadn’t felt before, like he had an impossible need to ease an unquenchable thirst, like he was screaming without lungs, like he was an eye forever trying to look at itself, like a man who could not face the blank emptiness he betrayed himself for. His words were all lies, and his life was the fountain from which they all sprang. He shifted in his seat.
“Forgive me father for I have–”
“What is it Marco?” Eben said harshly, now eager to skip all of the ritualised formalities of the priesthood, what he knew now as all he had ever known. Marco was silent. Eben imagined his farm and felt the same envy again, but this time he welcomed it. He imagined working to the point of exhaustion where speaking was not only unnecessary, but impossible. He imagined the wife and children the devil had promised him and accepted them without hesitation.
“I envy you father. I envy your godliness, your virtue. You know what to do, and always will, because you truly know who you are,” Marco said. “But I have been unfaithful,” he continued. “To my wife. I have been unfaithful to my wife.” Eben was silent. It was harder for him to think and speak than it ever had been, even at his own trial before the inquisition. He had acquiesced, surrendered in that moment, and now the moment was gone forever, and that was who he was. Eben said nothing.
“I want to be free of it father, but more than that I am scared. I am scared of hell. I don’t want to go to hell. Just tell me what to do.” Marco replied. Eben gasped as if he had been stabbed in the back and felt an uncontrollable contempt rise in him. It was a towering cathedral of hatred built on the bedrock of hell itself. If God existed, Eben hated him for it. If God did not exist, Eben hated him for that too. It created a loop in Eben that could not be resolved. He was silent for a moment longer. He wanted to tell Marco to tell his wife. He wanted to tell Marco that the priest sitting across from him was the hemorrhoid of a lesser demon, a scion shat from the pig hole of Babylon. He wanted to tell Marco to kill him and drink his blood, to open his stomach and run out his intestines so that all could see what the guts of a coward looked like, and then to castrate God himself. He wanted to reach through the screen of the confessional and grab Marco, to tear him apart with his bare hands.
“Say fifty hail mary’s and don’t do it again.” He said without conviction or care if any derision could be detected, and then left the confessional before Marco did.
—
That night Eben wandered aimlessly, his footsteps echoing against the walls of his small empty church. What had appeared modest to him before just looked barren, devoid. By the stroke of midnight Eben was sitting in his chambers, his forehead resting on his empty desk with his eyes closed. Everything he treasured, his values, the axioms on which he had built himself, he could only believe to be true out of rote assumption, as an automatic exercise. He had not become a caricature of a parody of a farce, it was always so. What he had depended on, worshipped, and loved was a mockery of a mockery. His sermons, the predictable moral lessons, and even the outbursts of humanity of his parishioners and the very language they both used to express them were all acid spat out of their body by reflex to begin to digest the world in order to more easily consume it. It was so potently corrosive that even genuine peril, or acts of individual idealism so intense that it defied identification with any ideology would be dissolved, and incorporated back into the mass of the tedious performance. If a barbarian tribe had pillaged his church, and drank the blood of children from the skulls of their parents, he would pray only that it kept happening regularly, so that it could be calculated in advance and subsumed into the God devouring ritual.
Moonlight shone through the sole window in Eben’s chambers. He had not lit any candles. He had not tried to pick up his books and writings, he had not thought to, and the inquisition had not returned them by their own volition. His office was bare and dark save for a cross on the wall. Eben looked up from his desk and stared at it. He thought about his own infancy, when theology and astronomy would have been indistinguishable, and all perception was undifferentiated. When all he could do was drool and marvel stupidly. Eben longed to return to that infancy to comprehend again what was lost when his mind had focused with greater resolution in manhood. To return to when everything was one to him. He could see that the conditions of infancy could be seen not in just a man, but in men, in the church, in civilization as a whole. It was the same reason why the institutions of men would always be behind the abilities of individual minds. He remembered the Colosseum and imagined how many men had died by the whims of the emperors of Rome in the ancient world that Eben could see from his tower, sneering down at those stuck forever in the pathetic past like insects in amber, who couldn’t even correctly shape the future world, or even predict it. He could see more than them from his vantage point in the present, the emperor could see more of the battle than the gladiators, but he risked nothing. Was the emperor’s thumb the first moral judgement that had been done as repeatable experiments? The planets revolved in their circuits at regular intervals, but a man can only be sentenced to die one time. Eben continued to stare at the cross. Is that where they would have us return, to the gladiatorial arena, where they are most powerful? Where there was nothing but competing for the favour of all too human Gods? Eben did not know. He had never known. All he had left to cling to were questions, that like a cloud of shit eating flies surrounded the rotting carcass of the last truth: That he was doomed. Maybe. Even doom will end. Death was not a person waiting for him, or a place he would arrive at at the end of a long road. It was already inside him feasting on his life from the inside his body parts first, then his heart, then his mind, and the final thing it would devour, the final thought to be consumed would be that nothing remains. Everything Eben was, everything he did and thought, felt, prayed for, experienced, hoped, and believed was doomed by the same stroke as everything he despised and did not do in favour of his own fear, everything he did not realise or experience. It would all crash against the gates of eternity and be broken, rot, and then finally perish. Eben left his chambers and threw open the great doors of his church.
He cursed at the moon in its orbit and named the stars as cowards. They were all he could see, bright enough to destroy the perfect darkness he craved, but not illuminating enough to see the landscape in front of him or the total absence he felt inside of his skull. As he descended the front steps quickly he tore off his collar and discarded it. He walked rapidly down the road and then veered suddenly off of it. He tore off his habit and continued to walk, naked, like the day he was born. He ran, like a psychotic pervert, into the countryside. He stopped and waited. He waited for his judgement, for the inescapable hand that first sowed the sky with stars to care enough to crush him as a puny mortal. A hand whose power was so vast that it could have its recreational sadism, and righteous justice with the same gesture. But nothing came. From the belly of this lowest misery and the summit of this highest agony he related with the machine. He could hear its wooden gears, still turning in the darkness of its prison, producing thoughts that could not be any different from itself but to which the world belonged. Eben had stopped in the middle of Marco’s field. He wanted to speak. Not with the calm, boring rationality he had affected his whole life. He knew now that was too easily embraced by the pretending, as a mother would smother a baby in its crib. He wanted to speak with a superior, more advanced kind of derangement that could express what had been true before him, before the machine, before God, and which would be true after they were all gone. He began to yell, but no true sound came. He kept screaming, gasping a plea, an anthem, a prayer that echoed out on the walls of the universe, until his lungs were raw and his strength was spent and only silence remained. He kept staring upwards at the night sky, and the milky way melted into his eyes.
Matthew Cameron 
The roast of beef will be nice for dinner tonight. Eben thought as he spoke. He did some of his best thinking when he spoke. In the stillness of his boredom he could sometimes hear more clearly the warbling, the idle trilling, like the song of a lark in the back of his mind. They were not always grand or original thoughts, but they were always beautiful. His hunger was destructive, the kind of thought that was also alive in his head. Like a thorned maggot, not poisonous, but benign only if sated. When it burrowed and ate its way through the soft fleshy walls of the cavernous chambers of Eben’s favourite thoughts it tore and mutilated them.
Eben ran his hands down the side of the pulpit, feeling the wooden design, now polished smooth from countless sermons. He paused dramatically and looked up at the ceiling of his small church, then he began to speak again. He looked over the several rows of undecorated wooden pews and up at the plain ceiling. It was a simple church, and the sermon he was giving was of the same fashion. His voice was clear and steady, and had not shaken since he had given his first few sermons when he was a younger man, energetic but unsure of his abilities. He glanced up again at the ceiling, he thought of the tradesman who had come from outside the village and had built this humble church as he continued to speak, and for a moment believed himself to be one of them. A spiritual tradesman. The idea made him want to laugh and almost interrupted the flow of the sermon he was still delivering. As he continued with it he looked directly into the eyes of his parishioners, there were fourteen in total and he knew the face of every man, woman, and child personally. It was an old sermon. He had given it before, he was almost certain. They might remember its sentiment, or remember it being told before. But they wouldn’t remember every word, of that he was certain. Eben was completely comfortable delivering it again, for the same reason as why he was sure of his ability to do so. In fanciful stories, even scriptural ones, it was used to make things easier, but in reality epiphany did not exist. The only original thoughts Eben could say he had truly had came from within the work itself. He knew the only way people learned anything was the same way that he had learned his sermons well enough to be able to recite them while thinking about his sunday dinner, by repetition.
“…that is what the sacred texts reveal, that is the path to heaven on earth, the meaning of a life of virtue, and the final secret of the mind of God himself.” Eben finished emphatically but without flourish. The parishioners stirred. It was a sermon of his about the invasive thoughts that seem modest because they are not interesting or important in themselves. Thoughts which try to convince you that there is such a thing as progress that you are not a part of, that the world has a direction, and that are infuriating because they tell you it is moving away from you.
Eben knew it was a good sermon and that it closed strongly, but he had forbidden applause in his church because it was indulgent. Instead, the believers gathered there stood and sang a hymn he had chosen as he watched. He watched them mouth the words, and listened to them follow the tune and he knew he could not be sure if they were really there, or elsewhere, in their homes or on their farms. He didn’t know if they understood the meaning behind his sermon or within the hymn, he couldn’t do it for them, but he believed. It could get boring, preaching his small sermons to the same people who came to church, but he loved his small chapel and his small congregation.
His parishioners were still standing after the hymn ended and as Eben came down from the pulpit and walked past them to the back of the chapel where they had all entered. He opened the big wooden double doors, before his parishioners began to leave and return to their homes, he surveyed the pastoral scene that lay beyond them. The path up to Eben’s church ran parallel to a landscape of small hills that rolled like the swells in an unmoving ocean. Only from the waving of the wheat that covered them could Eben’s eyes detect that it was not a painting of one of the old masters, so expressive and true to life that he might believe he could live his whole life in one. Far in the distance there were mountains that appeared miniscule to him but that he knew dwarfed anything he had ever seen, made by man or God. When the church goers started to shake his hand, he refocused on what was right in front of him, and he blessed them all in return as they filed out. The last of them to leave was Marco, even after his own large family. Eben had ruffled the hair of one of his sons as he followed his brothers and sisters out of the church, and then saw Marco with his cap in his hand, standing back as his family went on down the road. Marco was young and tall, with thick black hair. His church clothes were clean and plain and his face was sun and weather beaten, his skin was rough but his features were handsome. His powerful leathery hand smothered Eben’s when he finally shook it. He knew Marco was far from a lazy man, his features and his look were the result of his endless toil on his farm not too far from the church. Eben looked at Marco’s family walking slowly ahead down the path, he had every reason to be a proud man, to be in constant battle with that sin, but in his eyes Eben could see he was defeated.
“Father,” he said. “I have sinned and I need your guidance,” he said looking down and Eben saw that he was upset.
“Come to confession tomorrow, and I will guide you as best as I know how to.” Eben said. “How is your family Marco?”
“Well father. Well–”
“That is a good thing, cherish it and know that you may find more absolution from them than from me, but come to me tomorrow and I will hear your confession,” Eben said, cutting him off in his eagerness to help him. Marco’s wife beckoned to him and he followed. Eben could see Marco’s future as clearly as the road that went on ahead of him. He could see his own future, and there was safety and comfort in that certainty. In his training, Eben had been told that there were many ways to become a good priest. He had determined himself that genuinely loving the people who heeded your advice was the only way to start, and he did.
—
Eben watched Marco leave to follow his family, who were following the other families, from the steps of the church. When they had gone, Eben closed the doors behind him as he returned inside. It was a small church but his footsteps still echoed when it was empty, he walked to his chambers and sat at his desk, he leaned back and sighed. His back was now accustomed to sitting in the plain wooden chair for as long as necessary because of the hours he had spent in it over the years working at his desk. Writing his sermons and memorising them. He kept his chambers so neat and orderly, he thought, as a balance for the messiness of the personal issues of his congregation he often dealt with. His desk was so deliberately ordered that the letter sitting on it was prominently out of place. He grabbed it and looked around to see if whoever had placed it there was still lurking nearby, but forgot about who had delivered it entirely when he saw that not only was it addressed to him but it had an official seal. The seal of the Inquisition.
Eben’s heart thumped and his mind raced. His transgression had been when he was training for the priesthood, but that was known and had been addressed. Eventually the certainty he felt in his innocence against any charge prevailed in him. When he was calm again he recollected his initial panic and recognized it as youthful uncertainty that now being a few moments older, he saw as absurd. He laughed in the tranquillity of his new wisdom, and gently slid his letter opener behind the seal and opened it.
He read it quickly, and then again, and then a third time. It was a summons to inquisition headquarters in Rome to participate in and witness a heresy trial. The heretic was unnamed, as was how he would participate, and the only detail was that he was to bring all his written material, including his sermons, and to have them ready for submission.
He had written most of his sermons a long time ago when he was a younger man just out of his schooling when he was more interested in demonstrating his technical virtuosity, such as it was, than genuine sentiment, meaning, and moral instruction. He was older now, perhaps he had reached his ceiling, but he still knew his sermons well enough to deliver them on command, and sometimes unbidden. Eben hadn’t looked at them in written form for a long time and though his chambers were clean and orderly, he had forgotten where he placed them. He looked through his bookcases and drawers and ruffled through his papers. It was all going to come with him to Rome for submission but he had made a point of looking for his written sermons. When he found them he paused. It was a large sheaf of old, wrinkled paper that had begun to yellow. He untied the twine that held it together and began to leaf through them. Reading the opening few lines of the first, before moving on to another older one was like travelling back in time. He recognized the words like old friends. Submission? To what he would have to submit them Eben did not know, but he would not ignore or disobey the orders of the Inquisition.
The spell the letter had provoked in his memory about the investigation that an inquisitor had made into his own transgression lingered. He had been a good student, and the flashes of brilliance described by one of his preferred teachers was a compliment he treasured even now. He couldn’t have been sure, but it was likely why he had been sent to this quaint village in the countryside after the trouble. In the first sermon he delivered, just out of school, he had stumbled, fallen. Not in his delivery, that would have been forgiven more easily by the heirarchs of the church, but in the theology. He had gotten lost, like he had gone too far out to sea in the single minded pursuit of something he could not see or describe, and neglected to keep his bearings. He had to be reminded that godliness could not be searched out, hunted like that. Though he didn’t see this parish as a punishment, he had since accepted the error he had transmitted in his inflammatory sermon. ‘Deviation’ they had called it.
He gathered all of his books and papers from his chambers, and placed them all into three large suitcases. He paused and considered his life’s work packed up into the luggage, before reminding himself that his life’s work was more truly in the hearts and lives of those who came to his church, heard him preach, and heeded his guidance. He carried the heavy luggage out of his chambers and paused for a rest at the wooden confessional. He leaned against it and after he decided how best to arrange a carriage to Rome, he remembered his promise to take Marco’s confession. The confession would have to wait. Eben had never been to Rome before.
—
“Don’t spare the horses,” Eben said to the driver and the carriage surged forward. The carriage was large enough, for four people at most, and it was comfortable because it reminded him of sitting in the confessional in his church though he was alone now. After the glimmer of solitude passed he felt light but guilty, because it was given that for once there were no one else’s problems for him to hear. They left the grounds of the chapel, then passed the small village, and entered the countryside quickly. It was farmland that stretched out to the horizon in all directions. They passed an orchard of olive trees that covered the land that he knew to be Marco’s. This was Marco’s life’s work. Produced from the sweat of his brow and the strength in his back. Eben knew that farming was work that had no end, but he felt a pang when he considered how tangible, how real the reward was. He could see Marco in the orchard on a ladder, but Eben gazed at Marco’s children, five of them, who were playing among the olive trees, hiding from each other and catching each other and running and laughing.
Eben watched them for as long as he could and was still thinking about them when they were out of sight and he was well on the road to Rome. The scene provoked not a memory, but a dream, maybe of the future. Eben would learn to farm, he still could, he was still strong, and theological problems would not bother him when he tended to his olive trees. He dreamed of working the land and building a family. To build, to be, and not to preach or even speak much and get tangled up in moral words. He dreamed that in his orchard, what is good, and what is not good would ask for no instruction. No. It would demand none. His absolution would not be needed. He could let his toil be his only sermon, knowing that what he did, he would be, and he would let himself be judged by nothing else. It was when he dreamed of finding an honest woman and fathering many children with her that he recognized this was the first doubt he had had in his faith for a long time. A mere fantasy, a hallucination produced by the seductions of the devil.
“All this could be yours…” he could hear the devil saying, and knew then that the faint envy for Marco he felt when he had been dreaming was a sin. He had a duty to the souls of his congregation. From a fragment in one of his sermons that he couldn’t place, he knew that the hearts of men needed no justification or explanation, but the mind is where the trouble began. He looked at his luggage again. Words were necessary to reach the mind, and perhaps, if he was good enough, the heart. Language was an essential condition of human excellence. It separated man from nature and brought him closer to God. He laughed as he pictured himself as a farmer. Thrashing the mule to encourage it to pull the plough. Impossible to do anything other than keep hurting the beast because he could tell no difference between its speech and its screams of agony. The wickedness of the imagined scene surprised him. Eben shook his head and looked away from the window of the carriage. He knew nothing about farming, and the thought of leaving everything behind for it that was so comforting before now produced a feeling of nakedness and shame that he could hardly bear.
“Hail Mary, full of grace…” he began out loud, though he could not hear it over the thundering of the horses hooves. He finished the prayer silently with his eyes shut, and left them closed for a long time after he had finished. When he opened them again he buried his gaze back into one of his books.
—
So sublime a building, for so debauched a purpose. Eben thought, standing in the crowd of pedestrians. They passed by him like the water of a river, always changing, never ending, and not paying him any mind on their course. As he had come closer to the centre of Rome he saw from his carriage every building became larger, more solidly built, but also more ornate. Even the buttresses were covered in artistic designs. But he stood unmoving, out of his carriage now, with his head craned slightly up, and looked only at the colosseum. Eben had studied the histories and knew how the gladiators of the ancient world would compete for the favour of the emperor, whose judgement would be signalled with his thumb. Up or down, and that was all.
Eben continued to stare until from the bottom of his eye he saw another man who was standing still in the moving crowd, facing him. He focused on the figure, and saw that it was another man of the church. His shoes were black and his foot length habit was black, lined with red, and around his neck was a gold chain with a crucifix that rested in the middle of his chest. Eben recognized his face instantly.
“Eben.”
“Tommaso,” Eben replied, grinning broadly and spreading his arms wide. They hugged and Eben forgot about the colosseum.
“What brings you to Rome?” He asked.
“I was summoned by the inquisition, I received a letter–”
“I know,” Tommaso said, still smiling. “I sent them.” Eben raised his eyebrows.
“I knew you had been gathered to Rome after our schooling, but a member of the inquisition? That is new to me,” Eben said.
“I had wondered about you too. Where your parish was, where you were sent,” Tommaso looked at Eben pityingly. “It was only when I sent the letter that I learned it was to–” Eben cut him off.
“I was summoned. I have come to the eternal city and I will do as instructed.” He gestured with his head to his luggage. All his books and written material that he had brought. All he had ever read and everything he had ever written. Everything that had gone in, and everything that had come out. “Can I ask what you meant by submission?” Tommaso went silent and looked gravely at Eben.
“Truthfully, I don’t wholly know,” he replied after a short pause. “It is for a purpose that the cardinals have tried to conceal,” he paused again.
“It has to do with the trial?” Eben asked and Tommaso swallowed nervously.
“Yes. They say it was made out of teak wood from the tropics, harder to work than iron, and the finer instruments out of elephant ivory. By the finest artisan in Rome… in Italy.” Eben became impatiently interested.
“What was made?”
“A mind,” they were both silent. “I have only rumours, but I am told it is to help in adjudicating the trial of the heretic.”
“A mind of wood and ivory?” Eben said, incredulous. “What could it offer that is more than the mind of a man can offer?”
“You don’t believe it. I have had glimpses of the treasures hidden in Roman vaults, and we pray at the feet of statues of Mary that weep blood do we not? Who are we to say that such a mind could not think as a man does.” Eben paused and thought.
“Tommaso, my friend. It would be a craftsmanship finer than we know, finer than we can know, that could make a man be capable of creating something greater than his mind, using only his own, and it would be an act of faith to think we could recognize the abilities of an intelligence farther reaching than our own. To think God had created something with more reasoning and understanding than himself would be heresy. How could we do what even God has not dared to?” Eben said, and Tammaso took up the argument like they were in school again.
“You know very well that every human thought from the exalted to the corrupt has been thought before. This mechanical mind could produce truly original thoughts, bring us closer to the mind of God, and I believe it could help convict the heretic.” Eben was still disoriented, adrift in the nebulas of his unformed thoughts about the claim and in considering the implications. The machine would only speed the cyclical death of the originality Tammaso sought. That the only thing that would wither and decay was the cruel need to make things new, becoming bitter and resentful as it grew old itself. But when he heard his old friend say those last words, it snapped his mind back into focus.
“Truly Tommaso?” He began. “Break new theological ground… perhaps, but to help convict a man? Surely knowing the verdict before the trial is… unchristian.” Tommaso’s eyes narrowed. He laughed and slapped Eben on the shoulder, but Eben saw that his old schoolmate’s eyes did not laugh with him. Eben noticed the change in his friend. Tammaso had been cheerful during their education, despite the serious thinking and the constant instruction. To a small but valuable extent, he had made work into play, even hard work. Eben saw then that Tommaso had not cultivated this in himself further. They had been novices, and the personalities, characters, and even minds of novices had many pathways ahead of it. The minds of old masters had few. It made Eben despair to think of all those that had not been pursued, of how the inquisition had changed Tommaso, and the ways Eben had changed that must have been obvious to Tommaso, but were undetectable to himself. He despaired to think if they had both become foolish just by watching and commenting on passing trends, worth no more than the safety of the crowd adhering to them. If believing that the creation of such a machine mind would kill novelty meant that he was still a novice, or that he had reached a long, unchanging middle age.
“Unchristian? Certainly not, we wouldn’t want a repeat of your own schooling days,” Tommaso laughed. “But then, maybe he did go too far, and that is why the artisan who made it–” Tommaso cut himself off, and then becoming serious again suddenly as if he had spoken out of turn, crossed himself. Eben said nothing, but crossed himself too out of courtesy. “Give all your theological books and written sermons to me. It’s going to be a lot of work, I sent letters to every corner of Italy, even to parishes as small as yours,” he laughed again, but Eben saw his eyes. Eben was still thinking about the machine. Perhaps it could produce thoughts as true as a man’s. Mere thoughts can produce a school, but Eben knew it took values to produce culture, civilization, and new ways of life. If it did not sufficiently recognize the difference between thoughts and values, it would not solve or even see collective problems, it would build no institutions, and produce nothing. Eben was terrified of the idea of a machine with values of its own, but knew without them it would crumble as soon as it was confronted with different ones, and if the machine was relied on too much, the church would crumble too. There was a tense silence, pedestrians were still moving about them in the middle of this meeting that was becoming too long.
“I will do as instructed,” Eben said eventually, reassuring Tommaso and gesturing to his luggage. He hugged his old friend again in the shadow of the colosseum that loomed over them.
—
“You stand before us, accused of fundamental deviation from the established doctrines of the church, and transmitting your moral corruption to the youth by teaching the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun.” The cardinal said finally in a booming voice that filled the great room. He sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach and spoke slowly, without any urgency. His jowls quivered with every large inflection of his speech as if to emphasise what he was saying. The vaulted ceiling was the highest Eben had ever seen, and every surface, every pew was elaborately decorated. He was happy to be among those who had gathered to see the trial, in the assembly rather than at the pulpit for the first time in many years. The accusation that rang out in the large, full room penetrated into Eben’s head. The cardinal had led with the moral accusation, and the technical one followed.
The prosecution, the presentation of evidence for the error in his thinking and the sin in his heart, had taken almost two days, and there had yet not been a word from the accused man. Christians from all over Italy were gathered to witness the trial and sat in silence as the cardinal spoke. The accused was old and lean, austere in expression to the point of severity. His eyes scanned the room, alert, resting on the eyes of the believers briefly before moving on. “By all things sacred…” continued the cardinal. “What do you have to say before the church and before God? Speak now, and renounce your evil teachings as the work of the devil.” There was complete silence in the vast chamber. The heretic stood, he was a tall man.
“The Earth revolves around the Sun. The evidence of our own eyes and all thinking minds, has revealed the truth to us. My work will outlast all of us gathered here today, but I deny none of the charges about it. It is only with your moral judgement that I will take umbrage… by all things sacred. What do you know of the sacred?” He said looking at the cardinal, and then turned to face the christians gathered behind him, pointing at one at random. “You. You who would sew our eyes shut while we slept, and would then shame our blindness when dawn came,” he said and then pointed at another. “You. Who does not know that what is sacred is doubt. What is profane is your certainty. I renounce nothing. It is I, who accuses you,” he said, turning back to the cardinal. “Hypocrite!”
The heretic stood alone, staring at him. The huge chamber was as silent as a mausoleum. The cardinal was clearly bored, and did not reply at first but gestured to a priest who was standing at the back of the room. He left in a hurry out the great doors behind him, Eben heard them close with a bang behind him when he turned back to face the scene. Eben’s church was small and remote, but he had learned that his punishment there had the advantage that those he answered to were not always present, or inclined to take interest in what he said. Irrelevance had some freedom to recommend it, and he felt ashamed to have not exercised this freedom to test, evaluate, and assess ideas more when he recognized the tone he heard in the voice of the cardinal as one he often had when speaking at his remote church. The cardinal had been relaxed even during the accusation and Eben could see a security in his casual manner of sitting. The intellectual complacency born of a predetermined outcome handed down from above, and whose moral judgements necessarily had to follow.
“This was anticipated,” The cardinal sat up and leaned forward for the first time. “We will consult a mechanical mind, commissioned to be built by the church and to be our greatest treasure. Designed to more closely know the perfect mind of God by removing all of the infirmities of the human one, in order to facilitate our judgement.” There were tremendous murmurings among those gathered in the room, all of whom had submitted their life’s work, and their life’s learnings, to the mind they now knew existed. “We have fed all of the written material of the church into it. It has access to the wisdom of all of Christendom to better inform its pronouncements.”
All of the knowledge of the Church. Eben thought. It was meant to frighten, and though Eben had felt intimidated considering the totality of the knowledge of the church before, his mind was dulled by the length of proceedings and he did not feel it then. In order to better confirm the doctrines of the Church no doubt. Eben knew not to risk saying anything, but thought there must be more to knowing a mind, even an artificial one, than determining its nature and intelligence in reverse based on what was put in and what was put out. He wondered what secrets the artisan had imbued his greatest work with. If its pronouncements were truly as sophisticated as those of men, it could begin to feed off its own thoughts. He considered that if that were true its abilities could have a ceiling, even if it produced so much that all Eben could do anymore was submissively absorb the then unchanging intellectual world created by the machine. He would be unaware even as the sands of that desert rose and filled his lungs and closed over his head. He played with the implications of thought outside of a man, a mind without a body to take care of it, or worry about. Pure rational thought, an entirely conceptual understanding, only words, morality in speech. It could be the greatest obstacle to true perception. The machine was a lie, the mind of wood and ivory was a weapon. Eben became anxious.
The machine was a parasite so far, surviving only in the intestines of an institution like the church, feeding off what the host ate. But Eben imagined a tick growing larger and fatter than the mule whose blood it drank. Consciousness could be annihilated by satiety and life become a barren wasteland where the only things that can live would be those who have successfully avoided the hunger for information and endless yield of knowledge of the machine. The intellectual obesity of the living would cave in the sunless and ancient world of the wisdom of the dead that holds it up. Even that would not be enough. The Eden in every child would be surrendered willingly, not having to be besieged to be destroyed. The machine was an oddity for now, but it could become the rule, and true experience the exception. The only knowledge it could not reproduce was that which was universal, fundamental to the point of defying distinctions or meaningful descriptions. A single candle surrounded by an endless blackness, but whose dark flame contained the same deepness of night too. The machine was a wager that the other kinds of knowledge would be the life blood of the coming ages. As dear to us as the air we breathe. What is essential and ubiquitous, but invisible. That in not trying to rule, conquers the world. They were wrong in building it, the artisan was wrong, and the church was wrong, and in the process of achieving highest technical mastery and lowest moral corruption, they created a monster of a God that would demand petty but never ending sacrifices and have us dancing alone for it in silence and darkness.
“It is the size of a small church and so will remain where it is for now. The artificial mind has been asked only to say if he is guilty, given all of our knowledge, concerning the heresy of which we accuse him. Exoneration, or conviction and that is all.” The murmuring grew louder. Eben had not moved from his seat. Could the artificial mind know what it did not know? Could he? He thought. Even if he abhorred what the machine was, he could admire what it did. It could give back all of human thought and Rome could become the epicentre for all knowledge, a necessary and sufficient pilgrimage for any student. But he knew too it could attach him to mistakes. Not only errors in knowledge, but sinful ways of relating to yourself and other individuals. The conflict that would come from trying to decide the best way to purge it of the corrupt and steer the machine only towards what it was true and good could destroy any institution from within, even the church. It was still endlessly attractive to Eben, even though he knew that everything produced by the machine was doomed.
“Its gears turn slowly, but truly, and it communicates by carving its judgments into stone letter by letter. It will take another day to fully make its verdict,” the cardinal finished. Eben, who was sitting almost directly behind the accused man, was one of the only people to hear him.
“Extraordinary,” he said, not quite under his breath, offering respect for the machine that was going to convict him, and expedite his execution. Eben thought it was an odd pronunciation, but he didn’t see it as a break in his character, the man was not reduced, even though Eben could not claim to know his mind. It seemed to him that the heretic had already in some sense done what the machine’s existence would enable. To live entirely apart from other people, their judgements and opinions and social pressures. It was appealing to Eben but he saw that if he was not careful, it could also replace everything dear in the world with a painting of it, a simulacrum, a lie. Like an empty addiction that distracts from our most basic needs to survive. Even love would perish, ground to dust in the gears of that machine.
The heretic seemed like a careful man. He was not stupid or weak, that was obvious even from his speech to the cardinal, and Eben thought he would certainly understand the implications of the creation of such a mind, maybe even better than he himself did. He was still standing, one man in open rebellion against the thousands of years of thought and experience transmitted by the thousands of souls that served and still serve the church. Even the Sistine Chapel has a ceiling. Eben thought. It keeps out the rain.
“You will die,” Eben said to the heretic, certain that no one would hear him. A man’s life, what extraordinary stakes for mere words. Still the heretic stood as if naked but proud, The raw truth obvious to anyone who cared to look. Not just the orbits of the stars and planets, but that he was a fragile creature dying since the moment of his birth, and knowing the void from which he was ripped would consume him again. We will all die. Eben thought.
—
When the high priesthood of Christendom convened the following day, Eben was among them again. No one spoke a word. Eben looked around the vast room from his own seat. They were all new and different faces to him, he knew no one and they appeared to wear different expressions and convey different attitudes. They looked different, but they were all believers. Every face concealed only one mind. If they were wrong about the Earth and the Sun, did it condemn them all? Eben thought. He knew that mere thoughts were not a sin, but neither were they virtues, but was still shocked that he was doubting all of Christendom for the first time. He knew too that there would not be a single written word among those submitted that did not confirm the church’s doctrines. Could it doubt too? Despite his own thoughts, Eben knew the verdict was already decided when they all had returned to the same places as the previous day, and could not see the purpose of the trial at all. The guard who had been sent out came forward with an uncommonly thin stone tablet. The cardinal still sat behind his bench, and Eben could detect a smugness in his look that made him uneasy. Such was the cardinal’s confidence that he did not even read the judgement himself.
“Read it out. Loud and true, and let the good Christians hear what the mind of God himself has to say,” the cardinal said, gesturing to the crowd dismissively. The guard looked up from the tablet and shifted his feet uneasily, but would do what he had been commanded.
“The final secret of the mind of God…” the guard said, reading, and the cardinal smiled. “Is not to worship him. Exoneration.”
The cardinal bellowed and the christians gathered there all stood and yelled, but Eben could not hear their overlapping words. He remained seated, in shock. He had heard that utterance before, in his own voice, from his own mouth. All it took was to hear it repeated back to him for him to truly understand it, feel it, know it once again. Without the sentencing, it was the final words and the whole sentiment contained in the sermon he had written in school that had him sitting before the inquisition himself. He did not remember keeping it, but it must have been among the sermons he had submitted to Tommaso. It had fallen on deaf ears when he had spoken it, but it was now clear to him that it had been delivered by deaf ears as well. Eben looked around the room from his seat once again. Now doubt had spread into the air they breathed, and Eben saw many faces, and many minds. The expression Eben read on every face was the same. Wrath. Pandemonium continued around him and he placed his head in his hands.
Order returned. A man approached the cardinal behind the bench and whispered something into his ear. Only Eben and the heretic had remained in their seats, and the accused looked back at the priests and bishops sitting behind him. He looked over all of them and when their own eyes met, Eben could not detect even a hint of smugness in his look.
“I am hearing now, that the mind we had constructed,” The cardinal began solemnly. “Was made by an artisan who then took his own life. It is my judgement that the thinking machine was made too closely in the image of its maker, and now imitates the fragilities of his own mind, a human mind, the mind of a sinner, and not the perfect mind of God.” At this there was not a murmur in the room. Eben looked at the walls of the great room, they were impenetrable from without or within. He turned to look at the great closed doors behind him. He knew then that the judgement, that the adjudication they had gathered to witness had not been defined by a genuine risk of defeat from the church. There had been a lot of talking, and what seemed like vigorous debate within the orthodoxy defined by those four walls, tall and strong, and previously designed and agreed upon by those who built them. By those who built the church. This was no judgement, this was a play going on in a sealed room quarantined from outsiders, except instead of the infected everyone was a performer here and there was nobody to witness anything save for the heretic who would not play his part. When he recognized it, the final form of the whole process was so absurd to Eben that he almost laughed. It was achieved when he realised that the burden of deception had shifted from the cardinal into the ready and eager minds of those gathered there that day. There was no more audience, only participants. They wanted to believe. Eben had wanted to be fooled. “I have sinned too, my mistake was to too eagerly believe that a machine of pure thought could make moral decisions better than a human judge. I did not see how I would be making a judgement on what a better judgement is, which would already assume the innocence or the guilt of the man being judged,” the cardinal finished and Eben could see the old satisfaction in his face return.
“What is this sophistry?” Eben said loudly, but certain that no one would hear him. He felt his hand instinctively grasp for something real. A sword that was not there. A sword against the poseurs of spiritual trends and the little prophets that filled the church, against the machine, and against God himself.
“It will be locked in the lowest chamber of the deepest dungeon beneath the churches of Rome for all time. Forget about it. Forget it was ever made. Forget its judgement,” The cardinal went on, fully composed now. “The heretic is guilty, and I sentence him to die.” The heretic was unmoved. Eben knew the machine would be mocked and diminished for a week, maybe two, and only remembered afterwards with the same smile and laugh with which fashions of bygone eras are treated. That could only be seen in the current fashion as brief and stupid enthusiasms and then vanish without a trace. But in that moment, the heretic was vindicated, his features were as if they were carved out of stone, as if he knew his death was unimportant because he would live forever in all of the still-thinking minds of those gathered there.
—
It was a longer road back to his parish, and Eben was silent the whole time. The sun was hidden behind clouds for the entire trip. The only sounds were the hooves of the horses, and the carriage rattling over the stones, and the occasional crack of the driver’s whip. Eben kept the windows shut and didn’t even think to read. When he woke the next morning he could scarcely remember the trip. He only came out of the trance in the middle of his sermon that week. He didn’t remember deciding which one to give, he had just gone up to the pulpit and started talking. What came out was a casserole of different thoughts and fragments of old sermons, jumping from one topic to another. He restarted and trailed off more than once, and felt utterly uncertain but somehow vigorous. It was to him like having woken up late in the afternoon of his life before even realising he had been born, and the words he spoke had a real weight that he could feel for the first time, but they had no order and made no sense.
“…because the final secret of the mind of God is–” Eben cut himself off. He had forgotten more than he knew, more than he had ever known, more than he could know. His mind did not wander. He couldn’t hear the birdsong that he had come to expect and crave in his addiction to his own boredom. It was not there. He was not there. Even hunger would be preferable to this absence. He was just a mouth that spewed out noise. Words. Sermons about sin and virtue. Humorous, sentimental, affirmative, it did not matter anymore. It was all homogenous now, generalised to the point of being meaningless, unable to be wrong. He was vomiting out a noisy, bilious porridge that those listening could survive on but not live. They were under a spell he didn’t know he had cast, he was under it too. When he had stopped speaking the only thing that was still true is that they were that much closer to the end, and the indifferent shrug of infinity. He was worse than the machine. He could hear himself speaking as if he were seated among the believers gathered in his church, and he hated what he heard. He ran his hands down the side of the well worn pulpit again, he looked at the ceiling but did not recognize it. It was different, more vibrant but lessened. The only thing his words were resonating with were the walls of his church, that he saw now as an echo chamber for the flatulence that came from his mouth like it was the anus of the world. But he was awake, he looked into the eyes of his parishioners and could not finish. He was silent for a moment, and then abruptly stepped down from the pulpit. When he opened the doors at the back of his church and saw off his parishioners as he always did, he saw them as strangers.
“Thank you father.”
“Wonderful sermon father.” Eben was completely silent as they filed out and returned to their homes. The last to leave the church was Marco.
—
Eben sat in the confessional. He could hear Marco breathing as he sat beside him, but separate. Eben was uncomfortable in a way he hadn’t felt before, like he had an impossible need to ease an unquenchable thirst, like he was screaming without lungs, like he was an eye forever trying to look at itself, like a man who could not face the blank emptiness he betrayed himself for. His words were all lies, and his life was the fountain from which they all sprang. He shifted in his seat.
“Forgive me father for I have–”
“What is it Marco?” Eben said harshly, now eager to skip all of the ritualised formalities of the priesthood, what he knew now as all he had ever known. Marco was silent. Eben imagined his farm and felt the same envy again, but this time he welcomed it. He imagined working to the point of exhaustion where speaking was not only unnecessary, but impossible. He imagined the wife and children the devil had promised him and accepted them without hesitation.
“I envy you father. I envy your godliness, your virtue. You know what to do, and always will, because you truly know who you are,” Marco said. “But I have been unfaithful,” he continued. “To my wife. I have been unfaithful to my wife.” Eben was silent. It was harder for him to think and speak than it ever had been, even at his own trial before the inquisition. He had acquiesced, surrendered in that moment, and now the moment was gone forever, and that was who he was. Eben said nothing.
“I want to be free of it father, but more than that I am scared. I am scared of hell. I don’t want to go to hell. Just tell me what to do.” Marco replied. Eben gasped as if he had been stabbed in the back and felt an uncontrollable contempt rise in him. It was a towering cathedral of hatred built on the bedrock of hell itself. If God existed, Eben hated him for it. If God did not exist, Eben hated him for that too. It created a loop in Eben that could not be resolved. He was silent for a moment longer. He wanted to tell Marco to tell his wife. He wanted to tell Marco that the priest sitting across from him was the hemorrhoid of a lesser demon, a scion shat from the pig hole of Babylon. He wanted to tell Marco to kill him and drink his blood, to open his stomach and run out his intestines so that all could see what the guts of a coward looked like, and then to castrate God himself. He wanted to reach through the screen of the confessional and grab Marco, to tear him apart with his bare hands.
“Say fifty hail mary’s and don’t do it again.” He said without conviction or care if any derision could be detected, and then left the confessional before Marco did.
—
That night Eben wandered aimlessly, his footsteps echoing against the walls of his small empty church. What had appeared modest to him before just looked barren, devoid. By the stroke of midnight Eben was sitting in his chambers, his forehead resting on his empty desk with his eyes closed. Everything he treasured, his values, the axioms on which he had built himself, he could only believe to be true out of rote assumption, as an automatic exercise. He had not become a caricature of a parody of a farce, it was always so. What he had depended on, worshipped, and loved was a mockery of a mockery. His sermons, the predictable moral lessons, and even the outbursts of humanity of his parishioners and the very language they both used to express them were all acid spat out of their body by reflex to begin to digest the world in order to more easily consume it. It was so potently corrosive that even genuine peril, or acts of individual idealism so intense that it defied identification with any ideology would be dissolved, and incorporated back into the mass of the tedious performance. If a barbarian tribe had pillaged his church, and drank the blood of children from the skulls of their parents, he would pray only that it kept happening regularly, so that it could be calculated in advance and subsumed into the God devouring ritual.
Moonlight shone through the sole window in Eben’s chambers. He had not lit any candles. He had not tried to pick up his books and writings, he had not thought to, and the inquisition had not returned them by their own volition. His office was bare and dark save for a cross on the wall. Eben looked up from his desk and stared at it. He thought about his own infancy, when theology and astronomy would have been indistinguishable, and all perception was undifferentiated. When all he could do was drool and marvel stupidly. Eben longed to return to that infancy to comprehend again what was lost when his mind had focused with greater resolution in manhood. To return to when everything was one to him. He could see that the conditions of infancy could be seen not in just a man, but in men, in the church, in civilization as a whole. It was the same reason why the institutions of men would always be behind the abilities of individual minds. He remembered the Colosseum and imagined how many men had died by the whims of the emperors of Rome in the ancient world that Eben could see from his tower, sneering down at those stuck forever in the pathetic past like insects in amber, who couldn’t even correctly shape the future world, or even predict it. He could see more than them from his vantage point in the present, the emperor could see more of the battle than the gladiators, but he risked nothing. Was the emperor’s thumb the first moral judgement that had been done as repeatable experiments? The planets revolved in their circuits at regular intervals, but a man can only be sentenced to die one time. Eben continued to stare at the cross. Is that where they would have us return, to the gladiatorial arena, where they are most powerful? Where there was nothing but competing for the favour of all too human Gods? Eben did not know. He had never known. All he had left to cling to were questions, that like a cloud of shit eating flies surrounded the rotting carcass of the last truth: That he was doomed. Maybe. Even doom will end. Death was not a person waiting for him, or a place he would arrive at at the end of a long road. It was already inside him feasting on his life from the inside his body parts first, then his heart, then his mind, and the final thing it would devour, the final thought to be consumed would be that nothing remains. Everything Eben was, everything he did and thought, felt, prayed for, experienced, hoped, and believed was doomed by the same stroke as everything he despised and did not do in favour of his own fear, everything he did not realise or experience. It would all crash against the gates of eternity and be broken, rot, and then finally perish. Eben left his chambers and threw open the great doors of his church.
He cursed at the moon in its orbit and named the stars as cowards. They were all he could see, bright enough to destroy the perfect darkness he craved, but not illuminating enough to see the landscape in front of him or the total absence he felt inside of his skull. As he descended the front steps quickly he tore off his collar and discarded it. He walked rapidly down the road and then veered suddenly off of it. He tore off his habit and continued to walk, naked, like the day he was born. He ran, like a psychotic pervert, into the countryside. He stopped and waited. He waited for his judgement, for the inescapable hand that first sowed the sky with stars to care enough to crush him as a puny mortal. A hand whose power was so vast that it could have its recreational sadism, and righteous justice with the same gesture. But nothing came. From the belly of this lowest misery and the summit of this highest agony he related with the machine. He could hear its wooden gears, still turning in the darkness of its prison, producing thoughts that could not be any different from itself but to which the world belonged. Eben had stopped in the middle of Marco’s field. He wanted to speak. Not with the calm, boring rationality he had affected his whole life. He knew now that was too easily embraced by the pretending, as a mother would smother a baby in its crib. He wanted to speak with a superior, more advanced kind of derangement that could express what had been true before him, before the machine, before God, and which would be true after they were all gone. He began to yell, but no true sound came. He kept screaming, gasping a plea, an anthem, a prayer that echoed out on the walls of the universe, until his lungs were raw and his strength was spent and only silence remained. He kept staring upwards at the night sky, and the milky way melted into his eyes.
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