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Revenge is for dreams...never for reality.

He was suddenly overwhelmed with the revelation that what makes life worth living is, precisely, the emotions. But, then — this was awful! — maybe girls with their tears and laughter were getting more out of life. Shattering!

That nameless something that had stopped his heart was Beauty.

He awoke. He was alive. He wasted no time on prayer or thanks but continued the business of survival.

“Wait,” Foyle commanded. He looked at the beaming grin engraved in the steel robot face. “But society can be so stupid. So confused. You’ve witnessed this conference.”

“Yes, sir, but you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society.”

“To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?”

“Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.”

“Quite mad,” Dagenham muttered.

“But fascinating,” Y’ang-Yeovil murmured.

“There’s got to be more to life than just living,” Foyle said to the robot.

“Then find it for yourself, sir. Don’t ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.”

“Why can’t we all move forward together?”

“Because you’re all different. You’re not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.”

“Who leads?”

“The men who must … driven men, compelled men.”

“Freak men.”

“You’re all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.”

“Thank you very much.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

Powell repressed the wave of exasperation that rose up in him. It was not exasperation with Chooka. It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.

“Damn you!" Dagenham raged, “Don’t you realize that you can’t trust people? They don’t know enough for their own good.”

“Then let them learn or die. We’re all in this together. Let’s live or die together.”

“That’s me,” he said, motioning to the robot. “That’s all of us. We prattle about free will, but we’re nothing but response...mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves.”

Lewis had been his mainstay in this half-year of sounding the depths of his grief. It was he who had said that Davy's death was a severe mercy. A severe mercy — the phrase haunted him: a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that was as merciful as love. For it had been death in love, not death of love. Love can die in many ways, most of them far more terrible than physical death; and if all natural love must die one way or another, Davy's death — he and she in love — was the death that hinted at springtime and rebirth. Sitting there on the rough wood of the bridge, he remembered his absolute knowing — something beyond faith or belief — in the moments after her death, in that suddenly empty room, that she still was. She had not ceased with that last light breath.

She and he would meet again.

“You fought for your freedom and won a different kind of prison. I will fight for mine—”

“You can’t fight me,” Tearle reminded him harshly.

“I know.” In the placid light, his face looked chilled and very weary. “But I can die.”

An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.

I could not find my way back in dreams, I knew then. They were memory and desire, terror and hope; they told me only what I already knew.