“I don’t understand what you’re saying too well,” Wuju put in, “but I think I get the basic idea. You’re saying that the Markovians were gods and could do or have anything they wished for, just like that.”
“That’s about it,” Varnett admitted. “The gods were real, and they created all of us—or, at least, the conditions under which we could develop.”
“But that would be the ultimate achievement of intelligence!” Vardia protested. “If that were true, why did they die out?”
Wuju smiled knowingly and looked to Nathan Brazil, once the only human, now the only nonhuman in the party, who was being uncharacteristically silent.
“I heard someone say why they died,” Wuju replied. “That someone said that when they reached the ultimate, it became dull and boring. Then they created new worlds, new life forms here and there—and all went off as those new forms to start from the beginning again.”
“What a horrible idea,” Vardia said disgustedly. “If that were true, it means that even perfection is imperfect, and that when our own people finally reach this godhood, they’ll find it wanting and die out by suicide, maybe leaving a new set of primitives to do the same thing all over again. It reduces all the revolutions, the struggles, the pain, the great dreams—everything—to nonsense! It means that life is pointless!”
“Not pointless,” Brazil put in suddenly. “It just means that grand schemes are pointless. It means that you don’t make your own life pointless or useless—most people do, you know. It wouldn’t make any difference if ninety-nine percent of the people of the human race—or any other—lived or not. Except in sheer numbers their lives are dull, vegetative, and nonproductive. They never dream, never read and share the thoughts of others, never truly experience the fulfilling equation of love—which is not merely to love others, but to be loved as well. That is the ultimate point of life, Vardia. The Markovians never found it. Look at this world, our own worlds—all reflecting the Markovian reality, which was based on the ultimate materialist Utopia. They were like the man with incredible riches, perhaps a planet of his own designed to his own tastes, and every material thing you can imagine producible at the snap of his fingers, who, nonetheless, is found dead one morning, having cut his own throat. All his dreams have been fulfilled, but now he is there, on top, alone. And to get where he was, he had to purge himself of what was truly of value. He killed his humanity, his spirituality. Oh, he could love—and buy what he loved. But he couldn’t buy that love he craved, only service.
“Like the Markovians, when he got where he’d wanted to be all his life, he found he didn’t really have anything at all.”
“I reject that theory,” Vardia said strongly. “The rich man would commit suicide because of the guilt that he had all that he had while others starved, not out of some craving for love. That word is meaningless.”
“When love is meaningless, or abstract, or misunderstood, then is that person or race also meaningless,” Brazil responded. “Back in the days of Old Earth one group had a saying, ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ Nobody listened then, either. Funny—haven’t thought of that group in years. They said God was love, and postulated a heaven of communal love, and a hell for those who could not love. Later on that got crudded up with other stuff until the ideas were gone and only the artifacts were left. Like the Markovians, they paid more attention to things than to ideas— and, like the Markovians, they died for it.”
“But surely the Markovian civilization was heaven,” Vardia said.
“It was hell,” Brazil responded flatly. “You see, the Markovians got everything their ancestors had ever dreamed of, and they knew it wasn’t enough. They knew that something attainable was missing. They searched, poked, queried, did everything to try and find why the people were miserable, but since everything they had or knew was a construct of themselves, they couldn’t find it. They decided, finally, to go back and repeat the experiment, little realizing that it, too, was doomed to failure—for the experiment, our own universe, was made in a variety of shapes and forms, but it was still in their own image. They didn’t even bother to make a clean start—they used themselves as the prototypes for all the races they’d create, and they used the same universe—the one they’d lived in, rose in, and failed in. That’s why their artifacts are still around—the two artifacts they had—their cities and their control brains.”
Varnett let out a gasp. “Suddenly I think I see what you mean. This Well World we’re on, if you’re right, not only provided the trial-lab runs for the new races and their environments, and the way of changing everything to match—it was also the control!”
“Right,” Brazil affirmed grimly. “Here everything was laboratory-standard, lab-created, monitored, and maintained by automatic equipment to keep it that way. Not all of them—just a representative sample, the last races to be created, since they were the easiest to maintain.”
“But our race here destroyed itself,” Varnett protested. “I heard about it. Does that mean we’re out of it? That the best we can do is destroy ourselves, destroy others, or, perhaps, reach the Markovian level and wind up committing suicide anyway? Is there no hope?”
“There’s hope,” Brazil replied evenly. “And despair, too. That religion of Old Earth I told you about? Well, those who believed in it had the idea that their God sent his son, a perfect human being filled with nothing but goodness and love, to us humans. Son-of-God question aside, there really was such a person born—I watched him try to teach a bunch of people to reject material things and concentrate on love.”
“What happened to him?” Wuju asked, fascinated.
“His followers rejected him because he wouldn’t rule the world, or lead a political revolution. Others capitalized on his rhetoric for political ends. Finally he upset the established political system too much, and they killed him. The religion, like those founded by other men of our race in other times, was politicized within fifty years. Oh, there were some devoted followers—and of others like this man, too. But they were never in control of their religion, and became lost or isolated in the increased institutionalizing of the faiths. Same thing happened to an older man, born centuries earlier and thousands of miles away. He didn’t die violently, but his followers substituted things for ideas and used the quest for love and perfection as a social and political brake to justify the miseries of mankind. No, the religious prophets who made it were the ones who thought in Markovian terms, in political terms—the founder of the Com, for example, saw conditions of material deprivation that made him sick. He dreamed of a civilization like that of the Markovians, and set the Com on its way. He succeeded the best, because he appealed to that which everyone can understand—the quest for material Utopia. Well, he can have it.”
“Now, hold on, Brazil!” Varnett protested. “You say you were there when all these people were around. That must have been thousands of years ago. Just how old are you, anyway?”
“I’ll answer that when we get to the Well,” Brazil responded. “I’ll answer all questions then, not before. If we don’t get to the Well before Skander and whoever’s with him, it won’t make any difference, anyway.”
“Then they could supplant the Markovians, change the equations?” Varnett asked, aghast. “I at one time thought I could, too, but logic showed me how wrong I was. My people—my former people, those of the night—agreed with me. It was only when word came that Skander might make a run for it that they decided to send me to head him off. That’s why I joined up with you, Brazil—you said you were going to do the same thing back in Zone. Our mysterious informant told us to link up with you if we could, and I did.”