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Show Acting Alone Page 438 ease yourself back on your good couch, be lulled into dreams now, or dreamlike reverie, and hear you now the Parable of the Post-Endtime: "A richly-bearded Wiseman, scribe, oracle, alchemist and philosopher, totally dispossessed and forgotten, aimlessly wanders the broken streets of his beloved city after the Endtime, the final unlimited - as opposed to limited - series of thermonuclear police actions. He sees, with some strange, sad mixture of amusement, scorn and admiration, that a group of young idealists whose physical energies have been only partially sapped by radiation sickness are manipulating broken pieces of warm concrete and asphalt in a burned-out parking lot, trying to re-mantle a library. The youths are stocking their library, their center of preserved knowledge, with what few pieces of printed matter have managed to escape the Endtime unincinerated. "Our scribe goes in among the makeshift tumbledown walls, mostly to seek temporary shelter from the radioactive chills that permanently burn the marrow of his bones and nauseate the lining of his duodenum these days. He chances to see a blackened but mostly intact book flopped lopsidedly on top of an old, scorched, empty (of course) oil drum. He opens it and, as he expected, sees that the pages have been gutted, as most books' pages were gutted in the years just prior to the Endtime, for smuggling potatoes and other such contraband past the robot sentries that were posted at every block and street-corner in every quarter of the city. The scribe sits down among the flash-shadows of writhing corpses on the walls and flips through, reading impassively the fragments of words around the edges of his life's work - for it is his own book, his own published composition, which he'd written in a time long ago when it had seemed that something as artificial as printed language, so |