There walked into the room a
chimpanzee, shaggy and grey about the muzzle, yet upright to his
full five feet, and poised with natural majesty. He carried a
scroll and walked to the young men.
"Fellows," it said, "why does
Pickering's Moon go about in reverse orbit? Fellows, there are
nipples on his chests; do he give milk? And what, pray tell,
Fellows, is to be done about Heisenberg's Law?" It paused.
"SOMEBODY HAD TO PUT ALL OF THIS CONFUSION HERE!"
And with that it revealed its
scroll. It was a diagram, like a yin- yang with a pentagon on one
side and an apple on the other. And then it exploded and the two
lost consciousness.
They awoke to the sound of pins clattering, and
found the bowlers engaged in their game and the server busy with
making coffee. It was apparant that their experience had been
private.
They discussed their strange encounter and
reconstructed from memory the chimpanzee's diagram. Over the next
five days they searched libraries to find the significance of it,
but were disappointed to uncover only references to Taoism, the
Korean flag, and Technocracy. It was not until they traced the
Greek writing on the apple that they discovered the ancient Goddess
known to the Greeks as Eris and to the Romans as Discordia. This
was on the fifth night, and when they slept that night each had a
vivid dream of a splendid woman whose eyes were as soft as feather
and as deep as eternity itself, and whose body was the spectacular
dance of atoms and universes. Pyrotechnics of pure energy formed
her flowing hair, and rainbows manifested and dissolved as she
spoke in a warm and gentle voice:
I have come to tell you that you
are free. Many ages ago, My consciousness left humanity, that they
might develop themselves. I return to find this development
approaching completion, but hindered by fear and by
misunderstanding.
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