"What did you learn, as a slave?"
"That no one can ever be a slave to another man."
"That is a lie."
"Then I learned a lie."
"But you believe it."
Will nodded.
"There are people who do things for fear of the lash. There are people who do things for fear they will lose their families or their lives. There are people bought and sold. Are they not slaves?"
They are slaves to their passion. Their fear rules them. What power do you have over me if I am not afraid of your lash? Am I your slave, if I am not afraid to lose my family? I obey you, faithfully, completely, because I choose to; am I your slave? And when you come to hate me for my freedom, which is greater than yours, and you command me to do what I will not do, then I stand before you in disobedience. Punish me, then; I choose to be punished. And if the punishment is more than I am willing to accept, then I will use such force as is necessary to stop the punishment, and no more. But never, for a moment, have I done anything but what I choose to do."
"Then no one is as strong as you."
"Not so. I've given my obedience to God, and use my best judgment to carry out his purpose, when I have some understanding of it. But those who have chosen to give their obedience to their passion, or to their memory, they freely choose to obey. The glutton freely overfills his belly, the pederast feeds on innocence, and the fearful man obeys his fear--freely."
"You make it sound as if our desires were separate from ourselves."
"They are. And if you don't know that, then you might as well become Unwyrm's slave after all."
"I know something of the doctrine of the Vigilants."
"I am not talking about a school of doctrine. I'm talking about the answer I gave Heffiji. The reason Unwyrm calls to me."
Now she could ask him outright. "What question did Heffiji ask?"
"She asked me whether dwelfs have a soul."
"Then it is theology."
"What she really was asking--and it's a question you'd better answer before you face Unwyrm--she was asking what part of her was herself.''
Patience studied Will's placid face. How could he have known the question that so haunted her? "My father taught me to listen to everything and believe nothing."
"The dead do that much," said Will.
“The dead don't listen."
"If you believe nothing, then you are listening exactly as much as the dead."
"I'm not dead," Patience whispered.
Will smiled. "I know," he said. He reached out as if to touch her cheek; she recoiled from him and shook her head. So he sat back, making no effort to conceal his disappointment, and began to teach. "Each part of the triune soul has its desires. The passion has the desires of pleasure and survival and the avoidance of pain. Those who are slaves to passion are the ones we see as hedonists or cowards or addicts or drunks, the ones we pity or despise. And these slaves think that their passion is themselves. I want this drink. I want to breathe. Their identity is in their needs. And to control them is easy. You simply control their pleasure or their pain."
She smiled. "I learned this in the cradle. People who are that easy to control, though, aren't worth controlling."
So," he said. "They're the weakest. Are you one of them?"
"When he calls me, I can hardly think of anything else but the need for him. Even when I remember what he looks like, from the gebling memories within me, even when I should loathe him, he makes me want him, want his children."
"You came through Tinker's Wood when he didn't want you to."
"If he had really wanted to stop me, he could have."
"I say he couldn't. Because you long ago separated yourself from your body's desires."
She remembered the cold breeze from the unglazed window of her room. She nodded.
"So." He did not teach as Father did; there was no sense of triumph when she bent before his argument. He merely went on. "The second part of the triune soul, the memory--it's More difficult. It has another kind of desire, one that is born in us as surely as the need to breathe, but because it is never satisfied, we don't know that it exists. For a moment, between breaths, we don't need to breathe, so we recognize the need to breathe when it returns."
“But this one is never gone, so we never notice it."
"Yes. Yes, you see--our memory can't hold everything. Can't hold every vision we see, every sequence of events that happened to us, everything we read, everything we hear about. It's too much. If we actually had to do that, we'd be insane before we left our infancy. So we choose. The things that are important. We remember only what matters. And we remember it in certain orders, in patterns that mean things together. In daytime, the sun is up; and all daytime becomes one day, and all nighttime becomes one night--we don't have to remember every day to remember the idea of day. But we -don't just remember this--we remember the why. It is daytime because the sun is up. Or the sun is up because it is daytime. You see? We don't remember randomly. Everything is connected by threads of cause."
"I'm not one of the Wise," said Patience. "Maybe the Wise understand the cause of everything, but I don't."
"But that's just it, that's just where the hunger comes. Every shred of experience that we remember comes as a story--a series of events that are connected by the pushes and pulls of cause. And we believe this story, of how everything is causally connected, without questioning it. I did this because. I did this in order to. And this is the world we live in, this pattern of events that cause each other. It becomes the framework by which we remember everything. But some things come along that don't fit."
"Not just some things."
"The weak-minded never notice it, Lady Patience. Everything fits for them, because they simply don't remember the things that don't belong. They never happened, the memory is gone. But for those who live in the mind, the places that don't fit, they don't disappear. They become a terrible hunger in the mind. Why, they shout. Why, why, why. And you can't be content until you know the connection. Even if it means breaking apart all the network that existed before. Once there was a time when mankind was locked on a single planet, and they thought their star circled that planet, because that was all they saw. That was the evidence of their eyes. But there were some who looked closely, and saw that it didn't fit, and the why pressed upon them until they had an answer. And when it all fit, they were able to send starships to worlds like this."
"Every child asks why," said Patience.
"But most children stop asking," said Will. "They finally get a system that works well enough. They have enough stories to account for everything they care about, and anything their stories can't handle, they ignore."
"The priests say that the self is in the memory--that we are what we remember doing."
"That's what they say."
"But I remember doing the acts of hundreds of Heptarchs, and a few geblings, too. Are they part of myself?"
"You see the problem as few people see it," said Will. "The self isn't in the memory, only the story we believe about ourselves. It can also be revised. It's constantly being revised. We see what it was we did, and we make up a story to account for it, and believe the story, and think that we understand ourself."
"Except the dwelfs, who can't hold long memories in their conscious minds."
"Yes."
"So what did you tell Heffiji--that she had no soul?"
"Only that her soul had no story. Because ourself is something else."
She knew what he would say; it was clear to her now.
"The will, of course. It's strange, Will, that you're named for the thing that you think is most important. Or did you decide it was important because it was your name?
"Will wasn't the name I was born with. I took that name the day Reck looked at me and said, 'Who are you?' "
"What's the desire of the will, then? You said all three parts of the soul had their desire."
"The will makes only a simple choice, and it's already made. Your whole life is nothing but acting out the choice that defines who you really are."
"What's that?"
"The choice between good and evil."
She let him see her disappointment. "All this talk, and we come to that?"
"I'm not talking about the choice between killing people and not killing people, or between stealing and not stealing. Sometimes killing a person is evil. Sometimes killing a person is good. You know that."
‘Which is why I decided not to care about good and evil a long time ago."
"No. You decided not to care about legal and illegal."
"I decided there wasn't any absolute good and there wasn't any absolute evil. You just said the same thing."
"No I didn't," said Will.
"You said sometimes killing is good and sometimes it's evil."
"So. Killing isn't absolute. But now, when you go to Unwyrm, what's wrong with doing what he wants? What's wrong with you having his children?"
"Because I don't want to."
“Why? You know he'll give you pleasure. And your children--they'll be human, perfectly human, only stronger and smarter, wiser and quicker, and they'll no doubt have a perfect connection between their minds, all of them like Unwyrm combined with the best human traits. You'll be the mother of the master race. The most magnificent intelligent beings ever created. The next step in human evolution. Why don't you desire it?"
"I don't know," she said.
"If you don't know, then at the crucial moment, when you are with him, and all your desire is for him, you still won't know. You'll still refuse, but perhaps not with all your strength. And it'll take all your strength to resist him, I promise you."
"Come with me," she said. "Kill him for me."
"I'll come with you, if I can. And I'll kill him, if I can. But I think I won't be able to. I think there's only one person who'll ever come close enough to hurt him, to stop him."
"Then tell me. What is it I need to know?"
"It's simple. Nothing exists except in relation to something else. An atom is not an atom. It doesn't exist, except in relation to other atoms. If it never responded to anything else, it would not exist. All existence is like that--utterly isolated pieces that only come into existence in their interaction with other pieces. Human beings too. We don't exist except in relation to the other events of the world. Everything we do, everything we are depends on our responses to other events, and other events' responses to us,"
"I knew that."
"You didn't know that. It's so obvious that no one knows it. If nothing you did caused any change in the world outside, and nothing in the world outside caused any change in you, then you wouldn't know there was a world outside, and it wouldn't know you existed, and so it would be meaningless to speak of your existence at all.
So your existence, all our existence, depends on every piece, every person in the universe behaving according to certain set patterns. The system. The order in which everything exists. The laws that bind atoms and molecules are very firm. They have no freedom to vary, because as soon as they vary, they cease to be. But life--ah, there the freedom begins. And we who think we are intelligent, we are the freest of all. We make our own patterns and change them as we like. We build systems and orders and tear them down. But you'll notice that none of our choices have any effect whatever on the way that atoms and molecules behave. Just as we have no idea what any particular molecule is doing, they have no notion of what we're doing. We can't change their order at all. We can use it, but we can't break down their system and cause them to wink out of existence."
"I suppose that's true. We can burn wood, but the atoms that are torn from certain molecules combine again with others, and the system hangs together."
"Exactly. So we can't do good or evil to most of the universe. Only to other living things. Mostly to each other. Because the systems of human beings are ours to control. They're every bit as real as the universe itself, and they are what gives us our existence--but we can manipulate them. We can change the systems that create the terms of our life. And we do change those systems, according to the single simple choice of our will."
"What's the choice?"
"It arises from the desire of the will. And the desire of the will is simple. To grow."
"I don't want to grow."
"Every living thing has this same desire. Patience. Angel touched on it, in his childish way, when he spoke of people who own things. That's the most pathetic way people have of growing. The way Sken makes this boat part of herself--it makes her larger. Eating .also makes her larger."
She smiled. "You're being ridiculous now."
"I'm not. Kings also make themselves larger, because their kingdom is part of themself. Parents make themselves larger through their children. Some few people, though, have such a powerful hunger that they can't be satisfied until their self includes everything alive."
"The King's House is all the world," murmured Patience.
"What did you say?"
"Something my father taught me."
"Oh."
"So, is it good or evil to desire to be larger?"
"Neither. It's how you choose to grow larger. The system lives on sacrifice. No order could exist in which every person in it received everything he desired all the time. The system that gives us our existence depends on people making sacrifices. I give up something I desire, so that others can receive some of what they desire. In turn, they give up something they want, so I can have some of what I want. Every human society depends on that simple principle."
As always, her mind raced ahead, trying to solve the problem before it had to be explained to her. "So you're saying that good people sacrifice everything, and evil people sacrifice nothing."
"Not at all. I'm saying that good people sacrifice anything that is necessary in order to maintain the order that allows all others to exist, even if they have to sacrifice their own life. While evil people manipulate and force the sacrifice of any and every other person in order to wholly gratify their own hunger. Do you see the difference?"
"This is theology. Kristos was good, because he sacrificed his life."
"Don't speak foolishly, Patience, not to me. Everybody dies, and some have been martyrs in stupid causes. Kristos is Kristos because we believe he sacrificed himself for the whole world. For the largest order of all. He would not have died for anything less. Because his self had grown to include all the systems of mankind, and he acted to protect them all."
"Now I see how you became a heretic."
"Of course you do. These fools who think their Kristos will come to unite humans in perfect peace, without including the millions of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs--it would not be good, because such a Kristos would be forcing the sacrfice of half the people of the world, to serve herself. So if Kristos is to be Kristos, she is willing to sacrifice anything to maintain the order that gives life to all."
No comments:
Post a Comment
You may leave a comment here: