"I don't have technical hitches."
"Well, get rid of him somehow. It's only some stupid piece of bureaucracy. We're on the verge of a major breakthrough in physics here."
Polk vanished, and there was a short pause. "Okay, you're off the hook," VISAR said. "I faked a message into the comnet saying that the Terran end is having problems. Can I ask you not to make a habit of this? I have a reputation to consider."
"I'll bear it in mind," Hunt promised. At the same time, he saw that Eesyan was waiting for his attention.
"It makes a lot of sense," the Thurien said. "So much so, that I can't think why it wasn't obvious before. Yes, Vic, I think that Madam Xyen and the rest of you are onto something. This has to be the way."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Frenua Showm sat alone in the part of the house that she called the eyrie, staring out at the cliffs and ridges and the distant peaks. The falls at the far end of the gorge, dyed orange in the light of the setting sun, were being eaten up slowly by advancing shadows. The crescent of Doyaris, one of Thurien's two moons, hung brightly above, waiting to take charge of the night. It was one of those times when Showm withdrew from the world of duties and day-to-day affairs, and turned her focus inward to this being that her mind and her body served, exploring its thoughts and feelings. The ability was rare among Terrans, and the few who knew their true nature and inner souls were not understood by the others. Their impetuousness and the compulsive violence with which they attacked everything, or else were themselves attacked by others, drove them to lives where attention was permanently externalized. Perhaps it was another quality that developed in its own time as a race matured.
She had thought much about Terrans and their nature as a result of her studies of Earth's history. Life had its seasons like the year, and when one came naturally to its close it was time not to dwell on false attachments to the past but to move on into harmony with the next. Showm's life was in its autumn now, the season for returning nourishment to the soil, when the wisdom and experience accrued along the way made it possible to give back what the earlier stages had necessitated borrowing. Spring had been the season for creating, and summer, that for nurturing and sending forth life. For the Thurien, the spiritual delight of experiencing life and growth, of creating and building, was the most precious reward that the universe had to offer. It was the reason for existing, and making it possible was the reason why the universe existed. The universe was a desert waiting to be brought to life. Although the aberration was not entirely unknown in the long history of their species, the notion of willfully killing a sapient being was about the most abhorrent that most Thuriens were capable of conceiving.
They believed that in a way similar to that in which the observed universe was an infinitesimal grain of the totality making up the Multiverse, so the Multiverse itself was merely an aspect of something incomparably vaster. In this domain dwelled the true soul that the heart of a thinking, feeling being connected to. It continued to exist while the personas it created came and passed, each of a nature and formed in such circumstances as the soul needed to heal and to grow. Although the personas might be discarded, the things their experiences had revealed and taught were retained and absorbed, much as with the characters that were temporarily manufactured for some kinds of game. Although the death of a persona, when it came, was thus seen as merely the closing of another season, to cut short the soul's connection would be to starve its essential growth.
Even more, the transient lives of the personas served as nurseries for developing such qualities conducive to the soul's higher life as understanding, creativity, gentleness, and compassion. But the act, or even the contemplation, of killing and destruction invoked all the emotions and insensibilities that were the precise opposite. The perpetrator was debased and deformed, violating the self's inner nature in a way far exceeding any outrage done to the victim. To the Thurien, it represented the ultimate denial, a rejection of all meaning to the universe, and any reason for it to exist. Small wonder then, Showm reflected, that in the world reduced to mindless matter that they had created, and themselves to purposeless accidents of it, that the majority of Terrans knew of no higher aspiration than the accumulation of money or a craving to control the minds and lives of others.
She had known close love and the tenderness of motherhood, the ties of friendship, the privilege of being able to help others find happiness in their lives, the joys of creating and accomplishing, the feelings of admiration and gratitude toward those whose work made hers possible. The high moments of significance, when the splendor of existing and the meaning that the universe stood for were revealed, she saw in the bright eyes and enraptured faces when sages inspired the minds of the young; in colonizing ships lifting out of orbit to head for a new world; in the communion of elderly sharing dreams and reminiscences as they neared the end of their journey; in worlds clothed in forests, mountains, and oceans. These were the things that the universe existed for, in accord with its nature, that brought it to life. Life and the universe produced a music that was heard by the soul. Everything that grew was an expression of it.
She still had disturbed nights and moments of cold, gnawing horror at some of the things she had learned in her researches of Earth: children forcibly regimented into cults of mass murder; industries dedicated to death, the annihilation of cities, eradication of whole cultures. She had read accounts of armies seized by blood lust, hunting defenseless innocents down like vermin and hacking them to pieces; of families burning and screaming under collapsing buildings; of people starving, people drowning, people driven from their homes into the snow to die. And all of it was planned, deliberate, celebrated by some side or other as heroic and glorious. Showm had watched the recordings of aircraft pouring bombs down upon the dazed and terrified survivors of towns already turned into smoldering rubble; ships and vehicles packed with human beings incinerated, cut to shreds, blown apart; people fleeing and falling like blades of arui grass in a hailstorm. She had stared numbly at pictures of the corpses, grotesque and stomach-wrenching: charred, mangled, dismembered, disemboweled; twisted in ditches, ensnared in wire, crushed in mud, rotting in heaps. She had watched the sorry processions bringing back the limbless, the blind, the maimed, the insane wreckage of what had been husbands and sons, brothers and lovers, youth with its dreams. At one point she had appealed to VISAR for guidance on how such things could be. VISAR was unable to offer any. And so she had wept. How could beings who were capable of thought and feeling do such things? How could they believe the lies?
Even more incomprehensible, how could those who ruled and commanded promote such lies? Not just to advance petty ambitions or carry out their schemes of conquest, but in every sphere where humans struggled, plotted, allied, and betrayed to set each against all, everyone a threat or a rival, to gain some advantage one over another. The whole philosophy underlying their dealings with each other was not only predicated on but exalted and glorified self-seeking and exploitation, oppression, rapacity, cruelty, and the enslavement of the weak to serve the strong, all rationalized in the ruthless calculus of money that recognized efficacy of contributing to profit-making as the sole measure of an individual's meaning or worth.
Mildred had described the leaders as the worst of thieves and scoundrels, and didn't listen to them. But Mildred was the exception, resigned to the private life of a minority with no voice. Among Thuriens, the quality most looked to for leadership was benign maturity and the selfless compassion that it engendered. Government office or the power to make responsible decisions were looked upon as privileged opportunities to serve the people. To abuse such a position for personal gain or to coerce the unwilling beyond basic restraints essential for a community to live together would be the most heinous of offenses. To say such transgressions had never occurred would have been untrue… but it came close to being unthinkable.