Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 48 — page 63: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION speaking my thoughts. My effort to complete this docu- ment for the Solar Records Centre has brought me a strange tranquillity. Soon the final thought will be fixed on the micro-strip and I shall be able to lie back in my seat and wait for the medical robots. They will start to give me my daily injection of elixir, but I shall refuse it. I need cling to life no longer. When you scan this record at the Centre you will want to know my name. It is Cha Tabarnt. I am very tired and very, very old. Yet this moment was worth living for. It was worth the centuries of decep- tion and hiding, of standing aside as others suffered. For now the system is at peace. These solar beings, these feeble, arrogant, lovable chil- dren who live on the Moon, on Mars, on Venus and on the Earth, have learned a little wisdom. Killing is no longer a pastime. Work has taken 62 jts place in popular esteem. Now the Constructors are revered as once the Fighters were. Of course there is still a death lust abroad. The revo- lution involved so much kill- ing that many Venusians and Lunics, who had never killed before, derived a fierce plea- sure from it. Even the Ter- rists bared their teeth a little. The revolution was a two- edged weapon, as Takato might have put it. Yet its benefits have been great. Now a solar being is conscious of his own innate dignity and his thoughts are free. The Mertians, with their failing for ! eroes and leaders, tried to raise the Takatos to the rank of supernatural beings. Surely here, they argued, was the very stuff of myth. The Takatos were almost the same person, a killer and a life-giver, two facets of the same character. And that unknown rebel whose prophecy seemed to §ind them inexorably to their comicloooks.com