The classes contained between four and forty prisoners, and each was led by a pedagogue. These were all of the same round-faced, gray-skinned bloodline, from a city several hundred leagues downriver which had achieved enlightenment, as they called it, early in the war. Most—they proudly admitted it—were no more than children, so young that they had yet to determine their sex. They were a small race, smaller even than Pandaras. They dressed in loose black tunics and trousers, and their glossy black hair was tied back in elaborate pigtails with scraps of white silk. They ruled the prisoners with an iron will. Those who walked away from the discussion classes in disgust or anger were immediately chased by the pedagogues, who screamed at them and whipped them around the ankles with sharp bamboo canes; those who did not return or who tried to fight back were taken away by the guards, shot, and kicked over the side.
At first, Pandaras had a great deal of trouble understanding what the pedagogues were trying to teach him. He sat next to Tibor in the sweltering heat in a kind of stupor, his stump throbbing under a slithery, quasi-living dressing which absorbed the discharges of blood and pus, and which Tibor changed twice a day. His head ached from the ever-present odor of burnt fish-oil from the barge’s reaction motors and the sunlight which reflected in splinters from the river and, most of all, from the high, singsong cadences of the pedagogue as it urged, cajoled, corrected and harangued its charges.
Each morning the discussion classes started with a chant of the slogan of the heretics. Seize the day! It echoed out across the river, sometimes lasting no more than a minute, sometimes lasting for an hour, becoming as meaningless as breathing but always ending at the same moment in all the classes scattered across the barge’s broad deck.
After that came the long hours of argument in which the pedagogues set out some trivial truth and used it as a wedge to open a door onto a bewildering landscape. It seemed to Pandaras that everything was allowed except for that which was forbidden, but it was difficult to know which was which because there were no rules. The other prisoners had the same problem, and all their objections and expressions of bafflement were met by the same answer.
“You do not see,” the pedagogue would say in its sweet, high-pitched voice, “because you cannot see. You cannot see because you have not been allowed to see. You have not been taught to see. You are all blind men, and I will open your eyes for the first time.”
At the heart of the heretics’ philosophy, like the black hole at the center of the Eye of the Preservers, was a single negation. It was so simple and so utterly against the self-evident truth of the world that many of the prisoners simply laughed in amazement every time the pedagogues repeated it. It was that the Puranas were not the thoughts of the Preservers, set down to reveal the history of the Universe and to determine the actions of right-thinking men, but were instead a fabrication, a collection of self-justifying lies spewed forth by the victors of a great and ancient war that was not yet over. There would be no resurrection into eternal life at the end of all time and space, because the Preservers had fled from the Universe and could not return. They had created Confluence, but they had abandoned it. The fate of each man did not lie within the purlieu of the infinite mercy and power of the Preservers, but in his own hands. Because the Preservers could not return from the Eye, they no longer existed in the Universe, and so each man must be responsible for his own fate. There was no hope but that which could be imagined; no destiny but that which could be forged.
The pedagogues were more fervent in their unbelief than any of the pillar saints or praise chanters who had devoted their lives to exaltation of the glories of the Preservers.
They would allow no argument. This negation was the central fact that could not be denied; from it, all else followed. From the first, Pandaras was quite clear on what the heretics did not believe, but it took him a long time to understand what they did believe, and once he had it, it was so simple that he was amazed that he had failed to grasp it at once. Like the woman in the pictures in his master’s copy of the Puranas, the heretics wanted to live forever.
Seize the day! It was a plea aimed directly at the base of the brain, where the residue of the animal self was coiled like a snake, insatiable and quite without a conscience. Do anything in your power to survive; bend your entire life toward it. The Universe was an insensate and hostile place; worlds were so few and remote that they counted for nothing; almost anywhere you went would kill you instantly and horribly. Therefore, life was infinitely precious, and every man’s life was more precious still, a subtle and beautiful melody that would never be repeated. The heretics wished to revive the old ways of indefinitely prolonging life, so that everyone could fulfill their destiny as they pleased.
For Pandaras, whose bloodline was short-lived compared to others on Confluence, no more than twenty-five years at most, it was a seductive song. “Written in air,” yes, but suppose it could be stone instead! What sublime songs and stories he could make if all time were at his disposal, and what joy he would have in seeing them spread and change and enrich his fame!
Once this thought took root, Pandaras paid more attention to what the pedagogue told the discussion class. For amusement, he told himself. To pass the time.
The heretics admitted no gods, but believed that each man could become a god—or better than a god—with enough effort. Any God of the First Cause in a universe such as this must surely be counted a failure, the pedagogue argued, because He must be omniscient and yet allow immense suffering. Most of the Universe was uninhabitable. All men died, and most died badly.
“If the Preservers care about their creation,” the pedagogue told Pandaras and his companions, “then either they wish to take away evil and are unable, or they are able but unwilling, or they are neither willing nor able, or they are both willing and able. If they are willing and unable then they are feeble, which is not in accordance with claims made for their nature; if they are able yet unwilling then they are envious of the condition of their creation, which is equally at variance with their nature; if they are both unwilling and unable then they are both envious and feeble, and therefore cannot be what they are claimed to be by their worshippers; and yet if they are both willing and able, which conditions alone would satisfy the claims of those who believe in the omnipotence of the Preservers, then from what source come the evils of the world? From what place flow all the hurts and trials which you have all suffered? Why are we victorious, and why are you defeated? All the evil in the world can be accounted for by one principle, and that is the nature of the Universe of which it is a part. And yet that evil is not absolute. It is well known that a wilderness can be tamed and cultivated and made to yield crops. And so with any wilderness, even to the end of space and time, for there is no limit to the transforming power of human reason and human will. And given these two things, nature and human reason, why, there is no need for the Preservers, or any other gods.”
Several of the prisoners in Pandaras’s discussion class passionately disputed this argument. They said that although the Preservers had given men free will, it did not mean that men had infinite power, and even if they could gain infinite power it did not mean that they would then be unchanged, as the heretics appeared to believe. For surely anyone who could live forever would be changed by the simple fact of becoming immortal, and so would no longer be subject to the fears of ordinary men. The pedagogue listened to their arguments and smiled and said that they had not yet opened their ears, that they were still in the thrall of the propaganda of their priests and civil service, who together conspired to assign every man a place and punish those who tried to change things because change threatened their power.