“Well, in your wife’s case, from the point of view of society, they took someone who violated the law and made her into a productive member of that society who won’t violate any laws. Not the important ones, anyway.”
“Important to whom?”
“To the state, of course. To understand my job, you have to remember that our task is to restore abnormal people to normal. Normality isn’t an objective standard, but rather a subjective term imposed by each society on its people by laws and culture. Ancient cultures used to sacrifice people to appease the gods. In those societies, anybody who objected to that sacrifice or doubted the existence of the gods wasn’t normal. The social fabric of the civilized worlds would be horribly abnormal to many of our own ancestors, but it’s ours. We were born into it and accept most of its values, even if we question or violate one or two. Cerberan culture is nothing but a modification of the civilized worlds’ own culture adapted to local conditions and limitations. Deep down you can understand that.”
This line of conversation was making me slightly uncomfortable, and I couldn’t really figure out why.
“Now, in your wife’s case,” he continued, “we have somebody with a couple of problems from the state’s point of view that made her abnormal. First, she escaped from the motherhood, something which is culturally forbidden and which held the threat of undermining a basic underpinning of Cerberan society. But since everybody here in any position got there by getting away with breaking the rules—and she had only bent them slightly—they couldn’t do much to her at that point without questioning their basic values and themselves. Besides, she overcompensated for her previous cloistered life by taking on a profession most Cerberans consider suicidal.”
“Overcompensated?”
He nodded. “Sure. The unhappy ones in the motherhood are basically of two kinds—those really unfit for the role, who are usually given psych treatments, and the romantics. Extremely bright and very limited by her assigned role, Dylan had only one view of outside, in this case outside her House—that dock and those adventurous seamen. She fantasized about what she knew and could see, and that really was Hroyasail. But when she did get out and did attain her dreams, they weren’t all they were cracked up to be. The fantasy was far more romantic than the reality. It was either as dull as the motherhood or horribly life-threatening, and when you take risks like that day after day, knowing the odds, even that becomes unsatisfying. Like most people who work on the boats, she was really past caring. The motherhood was dull and repressive, and her fantasy was dull and in its own way equally repressive. So she continued going through the motions without much hope for the future, knowing that sooner or later her luck would run out and she’d be killed. Being killed in her work became her new romantic fantasy.”
I was a bit shocked at this. “You mean she was suicidal?”
He looked back down at his charts. “In a sense, yes. Oh, she wouldn’t try to kill herself, but she herself must have told you that you get to be captain mostly by attrition. Everybody likes thrills, but with the kind of odds in her business you have to have a death wish. It shows tip clearly in her profile.”
I shook my head in wonder. “I can’t believe that of her.”
“Oh, it’s true. What in fact her profile suggests she really wanted was to be what she is—a mother. But a complete mother, one who not only bears but raises her children, frontier-style. In fact, for all her rationalization, the addition of a new factor in her life, when her odds were surely running low, was the final trigger for her to take the action she did.”
“New factor?”
He nodded. “You. She fell in love with you. And suddenly she found it more and more difficult to go out on her daily hunts. For the first time she started getting scared because she no longer was content to die at the helm, so to speak. When you restored her will to live, you shortened her odds of surviving to a tiny fraction. She couldn’t consciously face this, but her subconscious knew, and that’s why she decided to give in—to violate the law—and take the girl Sanda along that day. She was at her peak, of course, because she had both you and Sanda to protect, but you have no idea the risk you took that day. Half of Tier, I’m sure, considered the idea of going down with those she loved, a tidy and romantic ending. She didn’t, because she loved you too much.”
“You’re saying she knew she’d get caught?”
“I’m saying she wanted to get caught. If she hadn’t been caught this time she’d have done something else. She wanted out so she would no longer be faced with inevitable death and separation from you.”
I felt at once touched, uncomfortable, and incredulous. “But she could have quit. We’d have created a place for her with the company.”
“No, no. She couldn’t consciously face that either. I suspect that the idea never entered her head, since she also feared losing you. You admired her courage, even as you feared for her life. She was afraid that any such move would be interpreted as cowardice on your part and might leave her without you—and that was the only thing that mattered to her. You.”
“But that’s ridiculous! I wouldn’t have—”
“You probably wouldn’t,” he agreed, “but the human mind is more than a computer, which is why we have psychiatrists at all. We’re individualists, with emotions and a streak of irrational thinking that both makes us humans great and is our biggest weakness.”
“I still can’t really accept this,” I told him.
“Ah! Love!” he sighed. “Our craziest failing. It has almost been eliminated on the civilized worlds, and it’s pretty damned rare here on Cerberus, too. But give it half a chance, give it a little crack to slip into and it raises its head nonethless. Look, Zhang, I can tell you really don’t like Cerberan culture very much, but next to the frontier the Warden worlds—all of them—allow one thing that makes them, I think, better places. Here we still dream, we still fantasize and romanticize. On the civilized worlds they’ve eradicated that, and they know it. That’s why the frontier’s a continuing operation. It’s the only place where people can still dream. All of humankind’s advances—since the precursor of Man came down from the trees on ancient primordial Earth—have resulted from dreams, fantasies, imagination. Dylan broke free of the motherhood for a dream—she found a way. But as with the civilized worlds, which were begun with the most glorious of dreams in mind, the reality proved less than that Hollow. If you search inside yourself you know it, too.”
I gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I can see how you wound up here.”
He gave a genuine chuckle in return. “They made a mistake on me. Sent me off to the frontier because they had a shortage of medical officers for a short tour. When I returned to the civilized worlds I couldn’t believe how hollow and empty they were—the same places I loved and yearned for only a year before. I became convinced that civilization as I knew it would continue of its own momentum much as other ancient empires bad continued, but being hollow, it was also fragile. I knew that we’d crack against any good assault from outside, and [started a] campaign to restore some vigor, some mental health.” He spread bis arms. “And here I am. And know what? I really haven’t been that sorry about it.”
“Suit yourself,” I told him. “I certainly see your point, even if I don’t accept your conclusions on the civilized worlds or on Dylan.”
“An interesting metaphor, one that appeals to me. Your wife and our old civilization. History will eventually prove me right on the civilized worlds, but I can prove my point on Dylan easily.”