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The man took a hammer and smashed the machine, so that he could have his dreams back. But even when he started sleeping again, he was never able to come close to the clarity of thought that the machine had had.
Of course he could never publish what the machine had written-- it would be unthinkable to put forth the product of a machine as ff it were the work of a man.
After the man died-- in despair-- people found the printed text of what the machine had written, and thought the man had written it and hidden it away. They published it, and he was widely acclaimed as the greatest genius who had ever lived.
This was universally regarded as an obscenely horrifying tale because it had a machine stealing part of a man's mind and using it to destroy him, a common theme.
But why did the indexer refer to it in the midst of a discussion of tool-making?
Wondering about that led Leyel to think that this story itself was a kind of tool, just like the machine the man in the story had made. The storyteller gave his dreams to the story, and then when people heard it or read it, his dreams-- his nightmares-- came out to live in their memories. Clear and sharp and terrible and true, those dreams they received. And yet if he tried to tell them the same truths, directly, not in the form of a story, people would think his ideas were silly and small.
And then Leyel remembered what Deet had said about how people absorb stories from their communities and take them into themselves and use these stories to form their own spiritual autobiography. They remember doing what the heroes of the stories did, and so they continue to act out each hero's character in their own lives, or, failing that, they measure themselves against the standard the story set for them.
Stories become the human conscience, the human mirror.
Again, as so many other times, he ended these ruminations with his hands pressed over his eyes, trying to shut out-- or lock in? --images of fabrics and mirrors, worlds and atoms, until finally, finally, he opened his eyes and saw Deet and Zay sitting in front of him.
No, leaning over him. He was on a low bed, and they knelt beside him.
"Am I ill?" he asked.
"I hope not," said Deet. "We found you on the floor. You're exhausted, Leyel. I've been telling you-- you have to eat, you have to get a normal amount of sleep. You're not young enough to keep up this work schedule."
"I've barely started."
Zay laughed lightly. "Listen to him, Deet. I told you he was so caught up in this that he didn't even know what day it was."
"You've been doing this for three weeks, Leyel. For the last week you haven't even come home. I bring you food, and you won't eat. People talk to you, and you forget that you're in a conversation, you just drift off into some sort of-- trance. Leyel, I wish I'd never brought you here, I wish I'd never suggested indexing-"
"No!" Leyel cried. He struggled to sit up.
At first Deet tried to push him back down, insisting he should rest. It was Zay who helped him sit. "Let the man talk," she said. "Just because you're his wife doesn't mean you can stop him from talking."
"The index is wonderful," said Leyel. "Like a tu
"No, Leyel, we keep losing you. The index is poisoning you, it's taking over your mind--"
"Don't be absurd, Deet. You're the one who suggested this, and you're right. The index keeps surprising me, making me think in new ways. There are some answers already."
"Answers?" asked Zay.
"I don't know how well I can explain it. What makes us human. It has to do with communities and stories and tools and-- it has to do with you and me, Deet."
"I should hope we're human," she said. Teasing him, but also urging him on.
"We lived together all those years, and we formed a community-- with our children, till they left, and then just us. But we were like animals."
"Only sometimes," she said.
"I mean like herding animals, or primate tribes, or any community that's bound together only by the rituals and patterns of the present moment. We had our customs, our habits. Our private language of words and gestures, our dances, all the things that flocks of geese and hives of bees can do."
"Very primitive."
"Yes, that's right, don't you see? That's a community that dies with each generation. When we, die, Deet, it will all be gone with us. Other people will marry, but none of them will know our dances and songs and language and--"
"Our children will."
"No, that's my point. They knew us, they even think they know us, but they were never part of the community of our marriage. Nobody is. Nobody can be. That's why, when I thought you were leaving me for this--"
"When did you think that I--"
"Hush, Deet," said Zay. "Let the man babble."
"When I thought you were leaving me, I felt like I was dead, like I was losing everything, because if you weren't part of our marriage, then there was nothing left. You see?"
"I don't see what that has to do with human origins, Leyel. I only know that I would never leave you, and I can't believe that you could think--"
"Don't distract him, Deet."
"It's the children. All the children. They play Wrinkly Grandma Posey, and then they grow up and don't play anymore, so the actual community of these particular five or six children doesn't exist any more-- but other kids are still doing the dance. Chanting the poem. For ten thousand years!"
"This makes us human? Nursery rhymes?"
"They're all part of the same community! Across all the empty space between the stars, there are still co
"But these are the ideas you already rejected, Leyel. Language and community and--"
"No! No, not just language, not just tribes of chimpanzees chattering at each other. Stories, epic tales that define a community, mythic tales that teach us how the world works, we use them to create each other. We became a different species, we became human, because we found a way to extend gestation beyond the womb, a way to give each child ten thousand parents that he'll never meet face-to-face."
Then, at last, Leyel fell silerit, trapped by the inadequacy of his words. They couldn't tell what he had seen in his mind. ff they didn't already understand, they never would.
"Yes," said Zay. "I think indexing your paper was a very good idea."
Leyel sighed and lay back down on the bed. "I shouldn't have tried."
"On the contrary, you've succeeded," said Zay.
Deet shook her head. Leyel knew why-- Deet was trying to signal Zay that she shouldn't attempt to soothe Leyel with false praise.
"Don't hush me, Deet. I know what I'm saying. I may not know Leyel as well as you do, but I know truth when I hear it. In a way, I think Hari knew it instinctively.
That's why he insisted on all his silly holodisplays, forcing the poor citizens of Terminus to put up with his pontificating every few years. It was his way of continuing to create them, of remaining alive within them. Making them feel like their lives had purpose behind them. Mythic and epic story, both at once. They'll all carry a bit of Hari Seldon within them just the way that children carry their parents with them to the grave."