“I think you’re crazy,” I told him. “An idealist would have certainly changed the system on Lilith. At the very least pawns would be far better off, the ruling class taken down several pegs.”
Father Bronz laughed and shook his head in wonder. “You poor soul. Let’s look at Lilith first, in light of all I’ve said. The social system is not merely determined by individual power. It is determined by the need to have Lilith support a non-indigenous human population, something she was simply not designed to do. The-Warden organism defends the planetary ecosystem—the plant and animal balance, the rocks, the swamps, the air and water—against change. It struggles to retain an equilibrium. Total balance. We’re the aliens here, the incomprehensible ones, son. We have power, yes, but it’s of a very limited nature. We cannot reshape this planet, but can only adapt to its existing conditions. The Warden beasties won’t let us. Now, dump thirteen million totally wrong aliens here and see what happens.”
I couldn’t see where he was going and said so.
“It’s so simple,” he responded. “You’re so used to technology as the answer to all ills that you don’t see what we’re faced with here. All of human history is the history of technology, of using that technology so that man can change his environment to suit himself. And we have. On Earth we changed the course of rivers, we bent sun and wind and whatever it took to our ends. We levelled mountains when they were inconvenient, and built them where we wanted. We created lakes, cut down whole forests, tamed the entire planet. Then we went out to the stars and did the same thing. Terraforming. Genetic engineering. Using our technology, we changed whole planets; we even changed ourselves. Man’s history is warring with his environment and winning that war. But, son, on Lillith—and only on Lilith—man cannot declare war. He must live within the environment that was already here. On Lilith the environment won. One lonely skirmish, true, but we were whipped. Beaten. We can’t fight it. We can build a castle, yes, and get insects to carry us to and fro, but we can make only minor dents, dents that would be instantly erased if they weren’t being constantly maintained.
“You see, son, Lilith’s the boss here, thanks to Warden’s bug. We all dance to her tune or compromise with her, but she’s the boss. And yet we must feed and house thirteen million people. We must support thirteen million alien interlopers on a land not meant for them and on which we can’t really perform more than cosmetic changes. Somebody has to grow the food and ship it. Somebody has to raise the great insect beasts and keep them domesticated. The economy must be kept going, for if those thirteen million were suddenly left entirely to their own devices they’d go out and eat and drink their fill and denude the melon groves. They’d fight each other as savage hunters and gatherers, the most primitive of tribal structures, and all but the toughest would die.
“Don’t you see, son? Nobody enjoys the kind of hard labor it takes to keep the system going—but name me another that would work. Without technology at our disposal, we are condemned to mass muscle power.”
I was appalled. “Are you claiming that there’s no other way to do it?”
“Nope. There are lots of other ways, all more cruel and worse than this one. There may well be a better way, but I don’t know it. I suspect that’s the way Kreegan sees it, too. I’m sure he doesn’t like the system, since it’s so much like the Confederacy—if we’re right about him, that is—but unlike the Confederacy, he, like me, can’t see any better way.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. To have all one’s basic beliefs challenged in an offhanded manner like this was a bit much. “What do you mean, this system is so much like the Confederacy?” I challenged. “I certainly can’t see any similarities.”
Father Bronz snorted contemptuously. “Then you do not see what you see. Consider the so-called civilized worlds. Most of humanity have been equalized into a stagnant sameness beyond belief. On a given planet everybody looks pretty much the same, talks pretty much the same, eats, sleeps, works, plays pretty much the same. They’re pawns, all of them. They think the same. And they are taught that they are happy, content, at the pinnacle of human achievement, the good life for all, and they believe it. It’s true they are coddled more, their cages are gilded, but they are pawns all the same. The only real difference between their pawns and ours is that ours know that they are pawns and understand the truth of the whole system. Your civilized worlds are so perfectly programmed to think the same that they are never even allowed to face the truth.”
“It’s a pretty comfortable pawnship,” I pointed out, not really conceding his point but allowing his terms for argument’s sake.
“Comfortable? I suppose so. like pet canaries, maybe. Those are small birds that live in cages in people’s homes, in case you don’t know—not on the civilized worlds, of course, where pets are not thought of. But at any rate these birds are born in cages; they are fed there, and their cages are regularly cleaned by there owners. They know no other life. They know that somebody provides them with all they need to exist, and having no other expectations, they want for no more. In exchange, they chirp comfortably and provide companionship to lonely frontiersmen. Not only is no canary ever going to engineer a breakout that cage, but he’s not even going to imagine, let alone design and build, a better life. He can’t even conceive of such a thing.”
“Those are animals,” I pointed out. “Like Sheeba here.”
“Animals, yes,” he acknowledged, “but so are the humans of the civilized worlds. Pets. Everybody has an apartment that is just so in size, just so in furnishings, just so in every way the same. They look the same and wear the same clothes, as if it mattered, and they perform jobs designed to keep the system going. Then they return to their identical cubicles, get immersed in entertainment that involves them totally in some formula story that’s all about their own world, offering nothing-new in thought, idea, concept. Most of their free time they spend on drugs in some happy, unproductive never-never land. Their arts, their literature, their very traditions are all inherited from history. They have none of then- own. We’ve equalized them too much for that—equalized out love and ambition and creativity, too. Whenever equality is imposed as an absolute, it is always equalized at the least common denominator, and historically, the least common denominator of mankind has been quite low indeed.”
“We still advance,” I pointed out. “We still come up with new ideas, new innovations.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Bronz admitted. “But you see, my son, that’s not from the civilized worlds. The masters of those worlds, the Outside supervisors and knights and dukes and lords, know that they can’t let progress die completely or they die and their power with it. So we have the frontier, and we have selective breeding of exceptional individuals. The elite, working in the castles of Outside.”
“We don’t have those ranks and positions and you know it,” I retorted.
He gave a loud guffaw. “The hell you say! And what then, pray tell, are you? What is Marek Kreegan? What, for that matter, am I? Do you know what I my real crime was, Tremon? I reintroduced not merely |religion but the concepts of love, of spirituality, to those pawns. I gave them something new, a rediscovery of their humanity. And it threatened the system! I was—removed. As long as I was on the frontier giving aid and comfort to the miserable and the uncomfortable, why, I was fine. Let the churches be. But when I started making headway on the civilized worlds—oh, no, then I was dangerous. I had to be removed or I might accomplish the unthinkable. I might awaken those pawns from their total environmental entertainment mods and drug stupors and show them they didn’t have to be trained canaries any more, they could be individual human beings—like me. Like you. Like the ruling class. And I got slapped down.”