Ray Bradbury - The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

Ray Bradbury

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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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Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539918

Version: 2014–07–18

With love for my granddaughter, Julia, whose face promises me immortality

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind

Poem from a Train Window

Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone

Joy Is the Grace We Say to God

They Have Not Seen the Stars

This Attic Where the Meadow Greens

Abandon in Place

The Great Man Speaks

Shakespeare the Father, Freud the Son

A Miracle of Popes, All with One Face!

The Bike Repairmen

The East Is Up !

If Peaches Could Be Painters

Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few

Satchmo Saved!

God Blows the Whistle

The Infirmities of Genius

Farewell Summer

The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring

Two Impressionists

And Yet the Burning Bush Has Voice

To an Early Morning Darning-Needle Dragonfly

Poem Written on a Train Just Leaving a Small Southern Town

Too Much

There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain

I Am God’s Greatest Basking Hound

Doing Is Being

Ode to an Utterance by Norman Corwin, Who Punned the First Line, and Must Suffer the Rest

Nectar and Ambrosia

We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time

Anybody Who Can Make Great Strawberry Shortcake Can’t Be All Bad

And Have You Seen God’s Birds Collide?

You Can’t Go Home Again, Not Even if You Stay There!

Schliemann

Of What is Past, or Passing, or to Come

Within a Summer Frame

Ode to Ty Cobb, Who Stole First Base from Second

GBS and the Loin of Pork

Let Us Live But Safely, No Bright Flag Be Ours

Everyone’s Got to Be Somewhere

The Past Is the Only Dead Thing That Smells Sweet

Ode to Trivia

Good Shakespeare’s Son, the Typing Ape

Que Bella! The Flagella of the Beasts

Pope Android Seventh

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About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

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

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.