Sophus took his seat. Tchicaya exchanged glances with Rasmah; they could not have hoped for a better ally. Tchicaya was glad, now, that he hadn’t raised the same benefits for the Preservationist cause himself; they sounded far more credible coming from Sophus, and hearing them first from the opposition would only have put people off.
One of the recent arrivals spoke next. Tchicaya had never been introduced to her, but her signature named her Murasaki.
“There might be sentient life here, there might not,” she said. “What difference should that make to our actions? Responsibility on our part can only arise through the hope of reciprocity — and many great thinkers have argued that sentient beings that bear no resemblance to us cannot be expected to conform to our own moral codes. Even on the level of pure emotion, these creatures will have arisen in a world we would find incomprehensible. What empathy could we have for them? What goals could we possibly share?”
Tchicaya felt a chill of horror. Murasaki spoke in a tone of mild puzzlement, as if she honestly couldn’t understand how anyone could attach the slightest value to an alien life.
“Evolution works through competion,” she continued. “If we don’t win back our territory and render it secure, then as soon as these far-siders learn of our existence, they will surely find a way to push the growth of the border all the way up to lightspeed. While we still possess the advantage of surprise, we must use it. If there is life here, if there are creatures for whom the far side is a comfortable home, the only thing that changes is that we should redouble our efforts, in order to wipe them out before they do the same to us.”
As she sat, a faint murmur rose up in the audience. If the Preservationists had resolved to give nothing away in response to the petitioners, their own members could still get a reaction. In all his time on the Rindler, in all his travels between worlds, Tchicaya had never heard anyone express a position as repugnant as this. Many cultures proselytized, and many treated their opponents' choices with open derision, but no champion of embodiment or acorporeality, no advocate for planetary tradition or the freedom of travel, had ever claimed that life in other modes was such a travesty that it could be annihilated without compunction.
These words could not be left unchallenged. The idea of genocide might have shrunk to little more than a surreal figure of speech, but in modern times there had never before been a situation in which the effort required to commit mass murder would not have been vastly disproportionate to even the most deranged notion of the benefits. If anything could still awaken horrors from the Age of Barbarism, six hundred years of dislocation, and the opportunity to eradicate something truly alien, might just be enough to end the nineteen-thousand-year era in which no sentient being had died at the hand of another.
As Tchicaya struggled to frame his response, Tarek said, “I’d like to answer that, if I may.”
Tchicaya turned to him, surprised. “Yes, of course.”
Tarek walked to the podium and rested his hands on the lectern. He looked up and addressed Murasaki directly.
“You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata — who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home — who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind.
“If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem — though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border.
“You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity — fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way — and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them.”
Tarek gripped the lectern tightly, but continued in the same calm voice. “You’re so gloriously, indisputably right: if there is sentient life behind the border, we should wipe these creatures out of existence, on the mere chance that they might do the same to us. Then we can learn to predicate everything else we do on the same assumptions: there is no other purpose to life than an eternity of grim persistence, and the systematic extinguishment of everything — outside ourselves, or within us — that stands in the way of that goal.”
He stood in place for several seconds. The room had fallen silent again. Tchicaya was both heartened and ashamed; he had never imagined Tarek taking a stand like this, though in retrospect he could see that it was an act of constancy, not betrayal. Perhaps Tarek had left his own family and friends behind solely in order to fight for the security of their future home, but in the very act of coming here, he’d been transformed from a member of that culture into an advocate for something universal. Maybe he was a zealot, but if so, he was an idealist, not a hypocrite. If there were sentient creatures behind the border, however foreign to him, the same principles applied to them as to anyone else.
Tarek stepped back from the podium. Santos, another of the newcomers, stood and delivered an impassioned defense of Murasaki’s position, in similarly chilling language. When he’d finished, half a dozen people rose to their feet simultaneously and tried to shout each other down.
Tarek managed to restore order. “Do we have more questions for Rasmah and Tchicaya, or is this the time to proceed with our own debate?”
There were no more questions. Tarek turned to them. “I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”
Tchicaya said, “Good luck.”
Tarek gave him a reluctant smile, as if to concede that the two of them finally could mean the same thing by those words. He said, “I don’t know how much longer this will take, but we’ll keep going until we have a decision.”
Out in the corridor, Rasmah turned to Tchicaya. “Where are those people from? Murasaki and Santos?”