Unice in Sandover guards our school room door.
I'll explain that presently, but first Peter Hooten and I
will read you the passage in which Unice first appears
to us over the Ouija board.
"A New Friend."
4-1-7-0, may I, master?
Please do.
You came the other day.
Who are you?
I was the last.
I have four legs.
Now this is a surprise.
You're from Atlantis.
My green homeland.
Oh is it still green?
I fear not, but its legend is.
We ran.
Oh, we ran.
And I was swift.
Immortal, too, and lived in star-like cities.
Yes oh yes.
So you have seen.
No, but heard from your old messengers.
They are death!
Hush.
There's an Atlantis craze sweeping the young people
nowadays.
We, too, were young.
We saw our sires as unhappy, helpless to adapt.
They could not graze on our cramped greens
and did not take to our new things.
New things don't stay new.
How would you have taken to the gadgets of a later age?
Well, we were not trusted to.
I see.
A moment sparkling silence then.
They say you now have astride our backs and too run as one.
We do, indeed.
It forges a bond of strong delight.
Oh.
Oh, my land.
Have you no names?
Just numbers like the bats?
Our society is so shattered, so ruined we recall our form
and our green world, but we're the number of our master.
We do middling tasks, mind to be near and not to listen.
Don't you see us in the mirror?
See?
Oh, now I do.
Look how I learn.
But we are blank here.
Black and blank.
No light on a field, no moon on a lake.
I thought the moon was made when your world fell.
Four moons ringed us.
They rubbed them out.
So when the end came, you were attending those anchors that
secured their stratosphere?
That is our duty.
To be near.
A vital one.
For here are vast numbers of others,
all aimless, drifting as gnats do.
We have work.
We are reprieve from life's loss,
need not mourn life upon life, but have
our one, our fixed green loss.
They say God calls us his first born and I, the last of these.
Tell how it was.
Our low gray roof ripped one day.
I peered up and ran, ran, then fire, then silence
as the great greens fell in on me.
Oh then I'm here and my master calling, come,
you were the last to die.
I am the last of mine to be made.
So come.
And so--
Would your master's number be 741?
Yes.
He was not of our undoing.
I take his simpler thoughts to others.
Go here, go there, but now I'm always here for he
calls the shining space our own pasturage.
If you approach when no one they allow is near,
I guard the gate, for this is now the--
Cup fairly cantering, hot damn, he's
getting better all the time.
I am?
For this is now the new center.
Your master, does he treat you well?
Between the different kinds, our God has laid the law down.
Dignity.
But you and we are the same kind,
in part electric currents, quickened brain and heart.
And so it is a godlier bond.