The End of All Songs

"To destroy my old-fashioned notions. Not myself."

Perhaps those notions are essential. Perhaps they are the Amelia Underwood I love, or at least part of her…" He subsided; words again failed him.

"I think you are mistaken." Did she deliberately put this distance between them? Was it possible that she regretted her declaration of love, felt bound by it?

"You love me, still…?"

She laughed. "All love all at the End of Time."

With an air of resolve, she broke the ensuing silence. "Well, I will look for Harold."

He pointed out a yellow-brown metal pathway. "That will lead you to the place where you left him."

"Thank you." She set off. The dress and the boots gave her a hobbling motion; her normal grace was almost entirely gone. His heart went to her, but his throat remained incapable of speech, his body incapable of movement. She turned a corner, where a tall machine, its casing damaged to expose complicated circuits, whispered vague promises to her as she passed but became inaudible, a hopeless whore, quickly rebuffed by her lack of interest.

For a moment Jherek's attention was diverted by the sight of three little egg-shaped robots on caterpillar tracks trundling across a nearby area of rubble deep in a conversation held in a polysyllabic, utterly incomprehensible language; he looked back to the road. She was gone.

He was alone in the city, but the solitude was no longer palatable. He wanted to pursue her, to demand her own analysis of her mood, but perhaps she was as incapable of expressing herself as was he. Did Bromley supply a means of interpreting emotion as readily as it supplied standards of social conduct?

He began to suspect that neither Amelia's society nor his, for all their differences, concerned themselves with anything but the surface of things. Now that he was in the city it might be that he could find some still functioning memory bank capable of recalling the wisdom of one of those eras, like the Fifth Confucian or the Zen Commonwealth, which had placed rather exaggerated emphasis on self-knowledge and its expression. Even the strange, neurotic refinements of that other period with which he had a slight familiarity, the Saint-Claude Dictatorship (under which every citizen had been enjoined to supply three distinctly different explanations as to their psychological motives for taking even the most minor decisions), might afford him a clue to Amelia's behaviour and his own reactions. It occurred to him that she might be acting so strangely because, in some simple way, he was failing to console her. He began to walk through the ruins, in the opposite direction to the one she had taken, trying to recall something of Dawn Age society. Could it be that he was supposed to kill Mr. Underwood? It would be easy enough to do. And would she permit her husband's resurrection? Should he, Jherek, change his appearance, to resemble Harold Underwood as much as possible? Had she rejected his suggestion that he change his name to hers because it was not enough? He paused to lean against a carved jade post whose tip was lost in chemical mist high above his head. He seemed to remember reading of some ritual formalizing the giving of oneself into another's power. Did she pine because he did not perform it? Or did the reverse apply? Did kneeling have something to do with it, and if so who knelt to whom?

"Om," said the jade post.

"Eh?" said Jherek, startled.

"Om," intoned the post. "Om."

"Did you detect my thoughts, post?"

"I am merely an aid to meditation, brother. I do not interpret."

"It is interpretation I need. If you could direct me…"

"Everything is as everything else," the post told him. Everything is nothing and nothing is everything. The mind of man is the universe and the universe is the mind of man. We are all characters in God's dreams. We are all God."

"Easily said, post."

"Because a thing is easy does not mean that it is difficult. Because a thing is difficult does not mean that it is easy."

"Is that not a tautology?"

"The universe is one vast tautology, brother, yet no one thing is the same as another."

"You are not very helpful. I sought information."

"There is no such thing as information. There is only knowledge."

"Doubtless," said Jherek doubtfully. He bade good day to the post and retreated. The post, like so many of the city's artefacts, seemed to lack a sense of humour, though probably, if taxed, it would — as others here did — claim a "cosmic sense of humour" (this involved making obvious ironies about things commonly observed by the simplest intelligence).

In the respect of ordinary, light conversation, machines, including the most sophisticated, were notoriously bad company; more literal-minded even than someone like Li Pao. This thought led him, as he walked on, to ponder the difference between men and machines. There had once been very great differences, but these days there were few, in superficial terms. What were the things which distinguished a self-perpetuating machine, capable of almost any sort of invention, from a self-created human being, equally capable? There were differences — perhaps emotional. Could it not be true that the less emotion the entity possessed the poorer its sense of humour — or the more emotion it repressed the weaker its capacity for original irony?