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     The far doorway was hidden in the monitor; part of the pict just swung open. It led directly to the outside of the building, and we were confronted with the interior of the ellipse. Since entering at the helmet, I had walked so far that I could not tell whether the posteriors of the Living Spaces matched the facades I had seen. The ellipse was so immense it was impossible to see the entire structure. Straight ahead, despite its great distance, the Gnomon quietly dominated the landscape.

     The whirring sound of the approaching barkos drew my attention to the ground, and I was surprised to see that the "roads" I had seen from the sonicopter were actually raised cords, some thick and some quite thin; they reminded me of tree roots. The barkos was equipped with spiked concave wheels which allowed it to dig in and ride the roots.

     "The driver's appearance may shock you," said Doctor Atum. "Please be prepared."

     But when the robot driver stepped out of the barkos my companion screamed anyway.

     "Hold no fear," MakeMake said quickly, shaking Spirit-To-Change's hands. "Loosen your vision ."

     I must say that even a man as battle-tested as myself would have felt a visceral terror at the sight of this creature; it was two organisms in one form, a hybrid split right down the middle. One half of its body was completely metallic, while the other half was ... completely human. His head was half flesh and half vivimonitor, and his human eye was complimented by a vaguely formed globule that floated in the grey madness that was the right half of his face. His genital organ was covered by shorts.

     "I'm sorry, I wasn't ready ... I didn't expect - "

     "The apology is mine to offer, and I offer it a thousand times. RevoloveR - " and here Doctor Atum spelled the name - "is a unique creation, and he is my friend. He wishes you no harm."

     "RevoloveR will guide us to the Gnomon," added MakeMake. "He is here to help."

     RevoloveR could not or would not speak for itself. After a while I went over and shook its hand to show everyone I was not afraid of it, although the desert heat had tightened my voice somewhat and I chose not to talk to it.

     "Friendly enough," I told the Doctor when I had returned to the group.

     After more small talk intended to calm my research assistant we all entered the barkos with RevoloveR driving. I sat in the far corner. Our destination was the Gnomon, and the roots, which formed a complex grid across the body of the desert, served as our pathways. The ride was not smooth but the vehicle had air-conditioning. It gave me time to think. The half-human, half-robot, driver-thing turned toward me to make an adjustment in the barkos controls. Our glances met.

     The line I would take against the Doctor came to me in a flash.

     Thus far I had shrewdly masked my true reason for requesting this interview, and I had carefully cultivated my relationship with Doctor Atum to the point that he now trusted me. It was time to begin his interrogation.

     As the Gnomon loomed before us, I made my move, masking my agenda behind a kindly expression. "Tell me, Doctor, why have you waited so long to grant an interview with the press? As I understand it, you haven't talked to anyone in years."

     The Doctor faked bemusement. "But that's not true, Professor. I grant interviews freely, and my work has been widely published."

     "Yes, I do seem to remember reading something about you. So tell me about yourself. Your parents were named Atum?"

     He and MakeMake were sitting across from me and my research assistant, with their seats facing us. Doctor Atum took the bait whole. "Actually, Keter Atum is a name I have taken. Keter is the Hebrew name - a cabala name - of a primal essence which existed before matter - without form, without intention, without attributes of any kind. It is an idea that I like to keep in front of me." He smiled slyly, like a cat which has just eaten the canary.

     "Atum, on the other hand, is an Egyptian god who created polarity - duality - the world - from his semen. From one came the many. I see Atum as a structurally sound next step in the development of Keter, and so I joined them to make my name."

     "I see," I said with disguised sincerity.

     "I also chose Atum because he was Egyptian, representing a civilization rife with many interesting ideas. They, like the Navajo," and here he looked at Spirit-To-Change, "saw the world as a living entity. There were no degrees of life in ancient Egypt -a flower participated in the idea of life equally with a god.

     "Moreover, Egyptian dieties didn't live in the heavens - they lived on the land, each one in a specific area separate from other gods - a kind of territorial imperative. Think of it - ideas attached to the earth itself; stability and reality associated with the purely abstract. What better way for the Egyptians to express their feeling that ideas are as real as the earth?"

     MakeMake put one arm around Doctor Atum and began drumming her fingers on his chest as he spoke. Her garish ruby-painted fingernails bounced up and down as though playing a tune. To the Doctor's credit he pretended not to notice and continued speaking.

     "The function and attraction of mythology is the identification - the naming - of the unseen but felt forces which permeate our lives - gods and demons, creation and destruction, fertility and sterility, power and weakness, good and evil, love and hate, life and death, and all the degrees of power relationships between and among them. We name them and make them part of the visible psychic architecture - we name them to reveal them and make them conscious.

     "The forces, of course, are the primordial power relationships descended to us from the Big Bang, the progeny of a potent birth. And from the beginning of recorded history men have identified the activities of these unseen energies as clashes between gods.

     "Let me show you the kind of power this naming may have had on an early man. Go back for a moment to the demonstration we did in the laboratory: one plus one equals ...."

     "Again?" I said. But my research assistant signalled that she had complied.

     "Now imagine the first time that a human heard that sound in his head. A human still familiar with savagry. A human, perhaps, still carrying a club in his hand. Imagine. He hears a sound in his head. Imagine." Here Doctor Atum turned toward a window and closed his eyes. MakeMake stopped drumming on his chest, and there was a lengthy pause. "Imagine. Do you think he felt it was the voice of a god?"

     After a few moments of peace my research assistant squealed "Yeoooww." It was easy to assert my authority with this group, and so I did.

     "I wouldn't even try to guess, Doctor. What is your point?"

     "I was merely making a pict for you, a dramatization of the importance early humanity may have placed on naming things - on creating the spoken word. And we are still naming things - still naming and renaming the same primordial titans of our most ancient ancestors. But our terminology has evolved, has become more discrete, more exacting. Today we no longer give a power relationship the name of a god - instead we call it Schrodinger's wave equation, or a neurotransistor, or Slecter vs LIFEunlimited. Yet these modern names dominate an arena of thought just as intensely as a Mars dominated the idea of war to the Romans.

     "Ideas, gods and forces are all manifestations of the same essence, Professor. Ideas are gods and forces, gods are ideas and forces, forces are ideas and gods. These ideagodforces are the same progeny of the Big Bang our forefathers tried to explain. Ideagodforces exist as expressions of the elementary particles which compose them."

     MakeMake leaned toward me, closing the distance between us. "In my homeland, we worship both mortal and immortal gods. Human heroes - expressions of our highest ideals - were elevated to the status of gods - but they lived and died while the immortal deities watched. Just the ideas that our heroes incarnated lived on."

     "Like pict stars today," said Spirit-To-Change, in what I assumed was an attempt to be facetious.

     "Yes, yes," I said loudly. "It's all about control."

     "At this level, Professor, control is an illusion."

     MakeMake put a hand on my knee. "'Naming' is a euphemism for constructing - the focused attention gives psychic form to - crystallizes - the felt power relationships." I advised MakeMake of a physiological problem I suffered in my joints, and she removed her hand before she went on .

     "We name forces to build a physical psychic structure for them. These forces fabricate the Universe, and therefore fabricate our conscious - and unconscious lives. We name them to give them structure, and define them by describing their power relationships with - their influence over - other forces - other names."

     "But what about feelings?" said my impetuous research assistant, looking back and forth from Doctor Atum to MakeMake. "You haven't said anything about feelings."

     The Doctor's face took on what he no doubt thought was a sympathetic expression. "What are feelings but power relationships? Feelings are the naked primordial forces, the things themselves. Abstractions define feelings, feelings define power relationships. And power relationships define the interactions of energy.    "You already know that you are an energy trader with your environment - you breathe air, eat food, drink liquids - extract and process their energy - and return their byproducts to the environment. You are strong when you take in more energy than you return, and you are weak when the opposite occurs. Love is the name we give to an equal trading of energy - love is no more, and no less, than a state of balanced trading."

     MakeMake hooked arms with Dr. Atum, and then alternately pulled away from and bumped into him in a rocking motion. "Love and war are parts of the same design," she declared. "Aristotle said 'We make war that we may live in peace'. War is the traditional arbiter of power disputes; it's function is to maintain or renovate power relationships between competing states.

     "Ares, the Greek god of war, was described as under the continuous spell of Aphrodite, goddess of love. In the Greek mind the struggle to re-arrange power relationships was directly related to the balance of forces embodied by Aphrodite.

     "Feelings are everywhere around and inside us. Music is the relationship between sounds, and sounds are the names of feelings, and feelings are the naked power relationships among energy forces."

     "All this mixing," said Spirit-To-Change. "It sounds almost sexual."

     "Almost?" smiled MakeMake.

     Spirit-To-Change, I am sorry to say, smiled back. "Ideas, gods and forces," she said with a rising voice. "MakeMake, I can see it, I can see it."

     The roots we were riding on were becoming progressively intertwined; tangled is perhaps a better word. I pointed this out.

     "Like a ganglia of nerves," my research assistant said. I had never seen ganglia and therefore I could not agree with her. The Gnomon was growing in size as we approached; from its direction I felt an unexplainable tugging at my abdomen.

     The barkos stopped at the edge of a frozen lake. A thin layer of water covered the ice, and it was lapping onto the sand. "This is as close as we can safely go," said the Doctor. He stepped out , placed his hands on his hips, and said, simply, "The Gnomon."

     It was close enough for me. Though we were still several kilometers from the Gnomon, it dominated the landscape like a fermenting planet. The Gnomon was a spherical force at once luminous and nocturnal, a reactive ... titanic ... thought suspended between earth and heaven, a swirling mass of white, grey and black torrents. It is difficult to describe the sense of ... power that one felt while gazing upon it. It was pulsating with ebullient pressures, and glittering with billions of evanescent ignitions, ecstatically swimming in a plasma of darknesses. Strangely, I felt no wind, and heard no sound; this somehow made the experience all the more threatening. After a moment I noticed that the lapping of the water coincided with the throbbing of the Gnomon; uninvisible precipitating waves spread out from the Gnomon's presence as they do from a stone tossed into a placid pool.

     "Unrealized passion," murmurred Spirit-To-Change, her chin pointed upward and her eyes misty from the heat. "I feel an immense unrealized passion."

     As though her own words had awakened her, my research assistant suddenly lifted her piCrystallizer and began snapping away. Oddly enough, it was to her that the Doctor spoke.

     "The Gnomon is a intimate balance of fire and ice, of energy and mass. It is composed of every possible power relationship - it is the refined essence of infinity. It is the creator of reality itself - because its thoughts are its will, and its will is identical to the architecture of reality. It is the child of the children of the Big Bang, containing all the energy relationships of the vast knowledge, the vast consciousness, the vast soul from which every individual thing was born."

     Doctor Atum gushed on in this manner for a long time, long after my enthusiasm for this freak of nature had waned.

     On the way back to Living Spaces the Doctor looked at me and said "You asked me if the Gnomon is alive. I am ready to answer you - I am ready to answer your editor, now. An idea is its meaning, and its meaning is its structure, and its structure is determined by the power relationships of the primordial particles which compose it. And because every primordial particle is influenced by the particles which surround it, and every idea is composed of particles, then every idea is in some measure influenced by the particles of other ideas. Every idea affects the structure of the universal architecture; every idea is part of the geometry of ideas; every idea is a building block in the macrocosm that the combined ideas create.

     "Ideas are composed of primordial particles, and human beings are composed of primordial particles. The Gnomon is alive in the same sense that a person, a tree, or ideas themselves are alive; every primordial particle is related by universal forces to every other, and every human being is a Gnomon."

                                   *         *          *         *          *         *          *

     For some reason I was not blindfolded on the flight back from Living Spaces. I used the time to transcribe from my recorder the conversations you have read in this report. Spirit-To-Change was delayed and did not return with me.

     At the office, the door clanged shut behind me. An old man, his face concealed by flickering shadows, was in the room. I didn't have to be told who he was.

     My grim-faced editor dispensed with formalities and asked me the question I had been sent to answer.

     "Well? Was Doctor Atum born a man - or a robot?"

     I answered in four words. I never heard the name Doctor Keter Atum again.

                                                   THE END

                          
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