The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
Ray Douglas Bradbury
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic poetry collections, available in ebook for the first time.A poetry collection from a master of fantasy celebrates the familiar and unusual in verses dealing with subjects from Ty Cobb to dinosaurs and strawberry shortcake to the Vatican.It includes many of Bradbury's best verses, including "They Have Not Seen the Stars," "This Attic Where the Meadow Greens," "There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain," "Farewell Summer," "Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few," "Doing Is Being, "We Are The Reliquaries of Lost Time," and others.
THE HAUNTED COMPUTER
AND THE ANDROID POPE
Ray Bradbury
Copyright (#ulink_7ee2b661-d75f-5329-846a-5a9e3e0af879)
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1981
Cover design by Mike Topping.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539918
Version: 2014–07–18
Dedication (#ulink_c74b6f6b-ca76-5344-b32b-f184e3aae2a4)
With love for my granddaughter, Julia, whose face promises me immortality
Table of Contents
Cover (#u5bc5e41d-47e1-51bb-a7d9-c05353a97bbb)
Title Page (#ufe1c2956-b889-57d7-afb3-8181a8fd2321)
Copyright (#ulink_9319935b-8818-5cee-85ec-5ba44176afb6)
Dedication (#ulink_0cbaaf4e-1b46-5100-bf05-941d9f6ad3e0)
The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope (#ulink_13d02fa8-20a7-52a6-afee-c3c6592404ee)
Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind (#ulink_8606bf2b-fa4c-5a4a-9755-d34b1eba1f57)
Poem from a Train Window (#ulink_829fd5eb-168d-5969-bba9-e7a556d9aa32)
Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone (#ulink_0a0b4cad-c843-532d-a90b-dc26bd0fa56a)
Joy Is the Grace We Say to God (#ulink_813991cf-e647-5ac9-b78b-edf2cacb2bed)
They Have Not Seen the Stars (#ulink_e958e773-289c-5da2-bf6e-885528214fc6)
This Attic Where the Meadow Greens (#ulink_b92b74f3-3f83-5277-aac1-f0b8ee54f24c)
Abandon in Place (#ulink_f3c6ade0-543d-5dc1-80f6-bd7c4d93a348)
The Great Man Speaks (#ulink_5030fa8b-7c48-5b0a-a0a4-78b65d2e939f)
Shakespeare the Father, Freud the Son (#litres_trial_promo)
A Miracle of Popes, All with One Face! (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bike Repairmen (#litres_trial_promo)
The East Is Up! (#litres_trial_promo)
If Peaches Could Be Painters (#litres_trial_promo)
Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few (#litres_trial_promo)
Satchmo Saved! (#litres_trial_promo)
God Blows the Whistle (#litres_trial_promo)
The Infirmities of Genius (#litres_trial_promo)
Farewell Summer (#litres_trial_promo)
The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Impressionists (#litres_trial_promo)
And Yet the Burning Bush Has Voice (#litres_trial_promo)
To an Early Morning Darning-Needle Dragonfly (#litres_trial_promo)
Poem Written on a Train Just Leaving a Small Southern Town (#litres_trial_promo)
Too Much (#litres_trial_promo)
There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
I Am God’s Greatest Basking Hound (#litres_trial_promo)
Doing Is Being (#litres_trial_promo)
Ode to an Utterance by Norman Corwin, Who Punned the First Line, and Must Suffer the Rest (#litres_trial_promo)
Nectar and Ambrosia (#litres_trial_promo)
We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time (#litres_trial_promo)
Anybody Who Can Make Great Strawberry Shortcake Can’t Be All Bad (#litres_trial_promo)
And Have You Seen God’s Birds Collide? (#litres_trial_promo)
You Can’t Go Home Again, Not Even if You Stay There! (#litres_trial_promo)
Schliemann (#litres_trial_promo)
Of What is Past, or Passing, or to Come (#litres_trial_promo)
Within a Summer Frame (#litres_trial_promo)
Ode to Ty Cobb, Who Stole First Base from Second (#litres_trial_promo)
GBS and the Loin of Pork (#litres_trial_promo)
Let Us Live But Safely, No Bright Flag Be Ours (#litres_trial_promo)
Everyone’s Got to Be Somewhere (#litres_trial_promo)
The Past Is the Only Dead Thing That Smells Sweet (#litres_trial_promo)
Ode to Trivia (#litres_trial_promo)
Good Shakespeare’s Son, the Typing Ape (#litres_trial_promo)
Que Bella! The Flagella of the Beasts (#litres_trial_promo)
Pope Android Seventh (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope (#ulink_4c009809-20b5-5c27-b503-bfdf594f6316)
Haunted Computer, Android Pope,
One serves data, the other hope.
The late-night ghosts of man’s dire needs
Are snacks on which computer feeds
To harvest zeros, sum the sums,
Knock something wicked ere it comes,
And drop dumb evil to its knees
With inked electric snickersnees.
While Android Pope takes up from there,
Where physics stops mid-flight, mid-air,
There Papa’s primed electric mind
Grows faith in countries of the blind.
Where mass and gravity bulk huge—
Andromeda its centrifuge—
Or matter dwindles to mere flea,
There Android Pope makes papal tea
To serve to doubtful Thomas me
And thee and thine and thine and thee;
Last suppers his to circuit there
Where physics loses self in air,
And man surprised by large or small
Sees naught beyond the two at all.
That is the moment where, well-met,
Electric Pope/Computer fret
Where stuff gives up its ways and means
And emptiness fills in-betweens
Where label-less the mystery goes
In veils and prides of cosmic snows
Which rationed out by God beyond
Are light-year sea and lake and pond
Which shallow are but drowned in deeps’
Computer mind that finds and keeps
But cannot answer final thirst:
Which, egg or chicken, arrived first?
The primal motive hides in stars
Where astronauts in rocket cars
Will never solve it, so bright Pope
With fireworks inside for hope,
With tapes for tripes, A.C.-D.C.
Speaks metaphors from Galilee
And bakes good bread and serves a wine
That bloods the soul most super-fine
And emptiness fills up with words
Like flocking flights of firebirds
That move and motion, merge and mull
So men gone empty now are full.
Yet, all mysterious remains,
So man stands out in ghosting rains
And makes umbrellas with machines
Half-satisfied with in-betweens,
His life twin mysteries given hope
By Ghost Computer, Android Pope.
Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind (#ulink_f64fb7ce-0930-5d61-8e60-0e352b8388fb)
Go not with ruins in your mind
Or beauty fails; Rome’s sun is blind
And catacomb your cold hotel
Where should-be heaven’s could-be hell.
Beware the temblors and the flood
That time hides fast in tourist’s blood
And shambles forth from hidden home
At sight of lost-in-ruins Rome.
Think on your joyless blood, take care,
Rome’s scattered bricks and bones lie there
In every chromosome and gene
Lie all that was, or might have been.
All architectural tombs and thrones
Are tossed to ruin in your bones.
Time earthquakes there all life that grows
And all your future darkness knows,
Take not these inner ruins to Rome,
A sad man wisely stays at home;
For if your melancholy goes
Where all is lost, then your loss grows
And all the dark that self employs
Will teem—so travel then with joys.
Or else in ruins consummate
A death that waited long and late,
And all the burning towns of blood
Will shake and fall from sane and good,
And you with ruined sight will see
A lost and ruined Rome. And thee?
Cracked statue mended by noon’s light
Yet innerscaped with soul’s midnight.
So go not traveling with mood
Or lack of sunlight in your blood,
Such traveling has double cost,
When you and empire both are lost.
When your mind storm-drains catacomb,
And all seems graveyard rock in Rome—
Tourist, go not.
Stay home.
Stay home!
Poem from a Train Window (#ulink_f7a4e23e-2c4f-5f8a-bb7a-12d2cd3bed58)
I’ve seen a thousand homes go down the tracks
Away, away …
Late night or early morn,
There goes the house, all white, where I was born.
My traveling train
Gives back to me by moon or noontime’s rain
The house, the house, the house
Where I’m reborn again.
As common as sparrows in flight,
There flies by my front porch and me,
Out of sight, out of sight.
We are common together: common house, common weather,
Common boy on a bike on a cool dark night lawn,
Sinking in clover,
Or boy on brick street at dawn, roofing a ball:
Annie over! Annie over!
Where I’ll pop up next, Peoria or Paducah, I don’t know;
All I can say is:
Here I come, here I come,
There I go, there I go!
Always the same boy, bright-eyed as a mouse,
Always the same folks on the porch of that house,
Swinging by in the light,
Drowning deep in the night,
There they drift, there they fly
At the train whistle’s cry:
O good-bye, O good-bye.
Lawn and porch on the run; boy’s face like the sun
Looking up through the rain
As again and again, the boy who was me
Climbs a branch, drops from tree,
But arrives to depart
While his shout cracks my heart.
Lord, does anyone see
All those boys who are me,
And does anyone know all those homes white as snow
That like riverboats glide
In the tide of the train as it takes me away?
Who can say, who can say?
Just my time machine moves
Through the land of my loves,
And more houses and boys and more trees and more lawns
Wait there just ahead in the circling dawns.
A procession of dreams!
O, isn’t God clever?
He’s cloned me in teams.
So? I’ll live here forever!
Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone (#ulink_e95b90e2-4cd1-5d24-b3f3-1d215ac9a305)
They say that we must falter, fail, and fall away
To all that’s lost;
I say the cost is overmuch
I’d spend us better with our will.
The mills of our machine-made gods grind swift not slow,
I with their lightning-arcs and wild illuminations go
To light a path
Not to the grave but walking on the air
On stairs of weather, cloud, and sky.
I would not doom us with those easy repetitions
Of old kettledrumming dooms
I heard from childhood on in dull, drab,
Ideas long since gone to incestuous
Intellectuals’ rooms …
Where they make litanies of night to scare their souls
And turn from birds and skies and stars
To imitate death moles or morbid beetles ticking death
Which if we let them would dig deep in time and keep
Our flesh in most inconsequent black holes.
That’s not my game,
Nor is the aim of man to stay beneath a stone.
To own the universe, our aim. And never die.
That’s mine, and yours, and yours, and yours,
To shame dumb death, leave Earth to dust, tread moon,
Vault Mars, and win the stars with flame …
Or know the reason why.
Joy Is the Grace We Say to God (#ulink_1e89b8d3-4857-5361-abe9-335d3d4edfef)
Joy is the grace we say to God
For His gifts given.
It is the leavening of time,
It splits our bones with lightning,
Fills our marrow
With a harrowing of light
And seeds our blood with sun,
And thus we
Put out the night
And then
Put out the night.
Tears make an end of things;
So weep, yes, weep.
But joy says, after that, not done …
No, not by any means. Not done!
Take breath and shout it out!
That laugh, that cry which says: Begin again,
So all’s reborn, begun!
Now hear this, Eden’s child,
Remember in thy green Earth heaven,
All beauty-shod:
Joy is the grace we say to God.
They Have Not Seen the Stars (#ulink_19374315-59c5-5749-b1a7-0156ca749c64)
They have not seen the stars,
Not one, not one
Of all the creatures on this world
In all the ages since the sands first touched the wind
Not one, not one,
No beast of all the beasts has stood
On meadowland or plain or hill
And known the thrill of looking at those fires;
Our soul admires what they, oh, they, have never known.
Five billion years have flown in turnings of the spheres
But not once in all those years
Has lion, dog, or bird that sweeps the air
Looked there, oh, look. Looked there, ah God, the stars;
Oh, look, look there!
It is as if all time had never been,
Or universe or sun or moon or simple morning light.
Their tragedy was mute and blind, and so remains. Our sight?
Yes, ours? To know now what we are.
But think of it, then choose—now, which?
Born to raw Earth, inhabiting a scene
And all of it, no sooner viewed, erased, gone blind
As if these miracles had never been.
Vast circlings of sounding light, of fire and frost,
And all so quickly seen then quickly lost?
Or us, in fragile flesh, with God’s new eyes
That lift and comprehend and search the skies?
We watch the seasons drifting in the lunar tide
And know the years, remembering what’s died.
Oh, yes, perhaps some birds some nights
Have felt Orion rise and tuned their flights
And turned southward
Because star-charts were printed in their sweet genetic dreams—
Or so it seems.
But, see? But really see and know?
And, knowing, want to touch those fires,
To grow until the mighty brow of man Lamarckian-tall
Knocks earthquakes, striking moon,
Then Mars, then Saturn’s rings;
And, growing, hope to show
All other beasts just how
To fly with dreams instead of ancient wings.
So, think on this: we’re first! the only ones
Whom God has honored with his rise of suns.
For us as gifts Aldebaran, Centauri, homestead Mars.
Wake up, God says. Look there. Go fetch.
The stars. Oh, Lord, much thanks. The stars!
This Attic Where the Meadow Greens (#ulink_79da9c05-3083-5a65-a54a-dd2050090757)
This attic where the meadow greens
Now keeps itself a world between two worlds,
One world of weather, one of blood and dream.
Its architectural scheme there high above
Was to make heaps and sprawls of silent time
Abide it there to know a slower beat
Than any river street or dogprint lawn.
Here yawns lost yestermorn
When loss and death were yet unborn
And fear, locked in the womb, stopped up its breath
To let it whisper forth some other year.
A gardener lived here once—
My grandpapa whose notion
Was to tend and seed a rooftop sea of grass
And garret-mind it under glass—
A private lawn, each blade an hour, minute, second
Burning bright
Where boys and dogs might meet to fight, or gambol on,
And smile.
And all the while poor beasts below
In stifled traffics come and go.
So, late and drowned in night
Or striking midriff day,
The old man bent to rattletap croquet
And marched between the arching hoops
And found it clever to knock brightly colored balls
That comet-ran forever down our hidden sky.
In meadow-attic, with fanatic skill and ease
He touched to kill wrong destinies with games.
Full joys, fine aims he planned and played above the trees.
Death’s sneeze? was corked! And if dark came some future day
He would be challenged to delay awhile,
Take up croquet, seize mallet,
Stop balloting for night,
Stand bright, know day,
Whack blazing orb-sun, rolling fire,
Lose at croquet to Gramps,
The champ of champs who sent dark down and out away from town.
Toward other years and hours
When high lawn brown and sunk to seed knew weed for flowers.
The games went on till I was ten.
Death, back again, brought grimmer tools
And played Gramps by some older, stricter rules and won.
In mid-June’s bright-noon sun
The croquet stopped in full mid-scene.
We buried old man, mallets, orbs, and hoops in that high green.
That’s years ago.
We rarely visit now in attic meadows where you’d need a plow
To find his treasuring of bones
Or make a measuring of where the ancient joys
Still play themselves on air
For boys.
I only know on days like these
I hear his rushing run above the trees
Where his ghost tells me what life means
From attic where the meadow greens.
Abandon in Place (#ulink_d10fd500-2d0d-5f3d-ac4e-745dedad7766)
Three elegies written on visiting the deserted rocket pads at Cape Canaveral
1
Abandon in Place.
No Further Maintenance Authorized.
Abandon. Turn away your face.
No more the mad high wanderings of thought
You once surmised. Let be!
Wipe out the stars. Put out the skies.
What lived as center to our souls
Now dies—so what?—now dies.
What once as arrow to our thoughts
Which target-ran in blood-fast flow
No longer flies.
Cut off the stars. Slam shut the teeming skies.
Abandon in Place.
Burn out your eyes.
2
Where firebirds once
Now daubers caulk the seams;
Where firewings flew
To blueprint young men’s dreams,
Now warbler here and osprey weave their nests
From laces lost from off a spaceman’s tread.
The great hearthplace stands cold,
Its Phoenix dead.
No more from out the coals
Bright salamanders burn and gyre,
Only the bright beasts’ skins and restless bones bed here,
And lost the fire.
O, Phoenix, rub thy bones,
No more suspire!
Flint souls, strike mind against wild mind.
Return! Be born of spent desire.
Bright burn. Bright burn!
O mighty God’s voice, shorn,
Give shout next Easter morn. Be born!
(Our prayer calls you to life.)
Reborn of fire!
3
Abandon in Place.
So the sign says, so the words go.
The show is spent, the fire-walkers gone,
And gone the glow at dawn.
This day? No rockets rise like thunder.
The wonder still remains
In meadows where mound-dwellers not so long ago
Envied the birds, the untouched stars,
And let their touching envy grow.
Machineries stir here with falls of rust;
The lust for space still echoes
In the birds that circle lost in mourning cries
Repeating shouts of crowds long-spent
Whose aching shook the skies.
The sea moves down the shore
In wave on wave full-whispering,
No more. No more.
When will the harvesters return
To gather further wonders as a fuel
And let them burn?
How soon will all of Earth mob round, come here once more
To stop the night,
Put doubt away for good with rocket light?
O soon, O let that day be soon
When midnight blossoms with grand ships
As bright and high as noon.
Prepare the meadows, birds, and mounds,
Old ghosts of rocketmen, arise.
Fling up your ships, your souls, your flesh, your blood,
Your blinding dreams
To fill, refill, and fill again
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’s
Promised and re-promised
Skies.
The Great Man Speaks (#ulink_4dd73c04-4be2-505e-b925-19e3ae2773c5)
(famous last words)
The famous one was there
Like a statue put out upon our loving green.
His wife was mean and talked a lot,
The air was hot with all her talking
Chalking out a line and running along
Her mindless song filled up our ears.
We looked at him. Our mouths were grim.
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