"Jason," I asked. "You brought in three new guests last week. Obviously, you want the Tribe to grow. But toward what? What's the vision? How can I tap into it too?"
He smiled. He put his arm around my shoulder as we walked. "I don't have a vision-and I do. I know, that sounds confusing. Let me tell you, Jim, when people speak of their visions very often they're talking about the pictures that their belief systems produce. Listen to me: your standards and ideals are your ego in disguise. Your belief system is your ego in disguise. So, to talk about that kind of vision is to not talk about what's truly possible, but about the way you think it should be done. I don't have that kind of vision.
"When I talk about my vision, I'm talking about what I've seen in the Revelations. The new gods, Jim, are a message to us." He stopped and squatted to the ground to examine something. He stood up and held out his hand. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"
I looked. He was holding out a tiny red marble of a creature. It had eight tiny legs and two black eyes. I shook my head. Jason put it back on the ground carefully. "It's a Chtorran insect. Have you ever noticed what perfect little machines insects are?"
I shrugged. "Yeah. I've always been fascinated by insects. They're so alien."
"Mm-hm," he said. "They don't have any choice, do they? They're just little biological machines. Their functioning is determined by the pattern of DNA in their chromosomes, right?"
"Right."
"Have you ever noticed what perfect little machines human beings are?"
"Uh, well, biologically, yes."
"But not mentally?"
"That's a loaded question, Jason, isn't it?"
He grinned and clapped my shoulder. "Well . . . ?"
"Jason, you know this is the stuff that makes me angry. Every time you insist that my mind is a computer program, I just go crazy."
"Wrong. You don't go crazy. Your mind does. Don't get confused, Jim. You're not your mind. You're just the place where it happens. And that 'craziness' is one of the things your mind does to keep you from hearing the bad news. It's a programmed response, Jim. Your mind is a computer program that likes to insist it's not a computer program. Very boring. And not very productive either. The only difference between you and that insect is that you are a complex enough machine that you have some choice in your programming. You are a machine that programs yourself. The insect isn't. But you have to know what you are before you can be it."
We started walking again. I wasn't sure where he was going with this train of thought.
"Think about this, Jim: everything that human beings know is a product of human experience. The human machinery only knows those things about itself that the human machinery can discover. We can't know anything that we can't know. Do you follow that?"
"Just barely."
"All right, let's try it this way. Suppose you wanted to know what was on the other side of that hill, but you couldn't go there to see. What would you do to find out?"
"Um, I don't know. Look at a map?"
"You don't have a map. You're trying to make one. That's why you want to know what's on the other side of the hill. What do you do?"
"Try and figure it out?"
"You're guessing. Figuring it out is another way of making something up. You might just as well write 'Here there be Dragons' in the space. You know that's what people do when they don't know something. They make something up instead. What's the responsible thing to do when you don't know something?"
"Ask. Ask someone who knows."
"Right. You see, there's the opportunity here. We can only know what human beings can know. That means that all our gods are human gods. They are reflections of ourselves. God an this world is a mirror of our own flaws.
"The Chtorrans know things that we can't know. We're trapped in our own physiology. We're apes. We always will be. All we can know is ape stuff. We can never escape the trap-we'll always be apes. But we can know what's beyond apeness if we will take advantage of the opportunity that the Chtorrans represent. They know what the world looks like from their side of the hill. They can share that with us.
"Do you see? They bring us new gods-new mirrors. The opportunity is for us to get beyond our own humanity, for us to transcend the machinery of our biology, and to finally discover those things that we could never discover by ourselves. The new gods can be our teachers, Jim. I've seen things in the Revelations that I cannot explain because our language doesn't have the words for it. We don't have the concepts. We don't have the paradigms. We have no models. We don't even have any contexts in which to construct the paradigms, models, and concepts.
"I have had experiences that I cannot share yet because there is no one else on the planet who can receive the message. Do you know how lonely that can be?" He put his arm around my shoulders and held me close while we walked. "What I want to do here is share the vision. Every time we have a Revelation, the whole Tribe advances. Do you know what a god really is, Jim?"
I shook my head. "I always thought a god was beyond human comprehension. "
"That's one of the aspects, of course. But let me give you the simple definition. A god is anything you use as a power source. Before the worms, before the plagues, people used money and sex and possessions as gods. That's where they found their identities. We've found a new power source in the Chtorrans, and a new domain of identity for the human machine. The question of validity-or right and wrong-that's all irrelevant. The important thing is that this new domain produces results. It works. You can see it in the faces of the Tribe. Already, most of them are more awake than I was when I first let Orrie into my life. Do you know what his full name is?"
"No."
"Ouroboros." He waited to see if I would react.
I knew the reference. "The worm who eats his own tail."
"You're literate, Jim. I'm surprised."
"My dad was a fantasy-programmer. He wrote a game called Ouroboros. I helped with the research. Ouroboros is the great worm of the world; he symbolizes the eternal process of death and renewal. It's a good name for a god," I added.
Jason shook his head thoughtfully. "It's a human name. Eventually, Jim, we're going to have to abandon human names and human language and human identities."
"And replace them with . . . ?"
"If I knew, then we'd already be doing it," Jason said. We walked on for a while.
A question occurred to me and I voiced it. "Orrie is different from Falstaff and Orson," I said. "In fact, Orrie's different from all the other worms-Chtorrans-I've ever seen. Why is that, Jason? What is it that makes Orrie so special?"
"Orrie's not special," Jason said. "But he's different and that difference makes him seem special. The truth is, he's really the first one. He's the first Chtorran to be raised by human beings: He's the linkage. Or maybe we should say that we're the first human beings to be raised by the new gods and we're the linkage. So are you. Either side of it is only half of it. The point is, this is the place where the linkage is happening. The other two-Falstaff and Orson-they were wild. Orrie brought them in."
"But, they're bigger than he is. I don't understand how ."
"Size doesn't have anything to do with it, Jim. The Chtorrans are not a species where bullying determines who's in charge." Jason took me by the arm. "Come with me, Jim. Let me show you something. Orrie is building a family. After you build a family, then you build a tribe. Then a nation. But you start with the family." He led me toward a part of the camp that Falstaff had never let me explore before. "Orrie can't build a family with Falstaff or Orson. They're older than he is, so the bonding wouldn't work. He wouldn't be the head. Also, they're all males now. "
"Huh-? What do you mean now? How do you know that?"