"This is getting confusing," Burton said. "Start at the very beginning."
"Very well. But I'll have to be as brief as possible. By the way, where is Gilgamesh?"
Burton told him.
The Ethical said. "I'm sorry."
He paused, then said, "Like his mythical counterpart, he failed to find the secret of immortality."
Loga rose, saying, "I just want to see the screens. I won't go near them."
They kept their weapons trained on him while he limped to the edge of the revolving platform. It was useless to keep him in their sights, Burton thought. He could elude them at any time by making them kill him if he was telling the truth.
Loga limped back to his chair and eased himself into it.
"We may be able to do something. I don't really know. We do have some time, though. So..."
He began in the beginning.
When the universe was young, when the first inhabitable planets had formed after the explosion of the primal ball of energy-matter, evolution brought about a people on one planet who differed from those on other planets.
"I don't mean just in physical construction. All the sentient peoples have either bipedal or centaurine bodies, hands, stereoscopic vision, and so forth. They were intelligent but had no consciousness of self, no concept of the I ."
"We speculated on that!" Frigate said. "But..."
"You must interrupt as little as possible. I'm telling the truth when I say that all sentient beings throughout the universe were without self-awareness. As far as we know, anyway. I know it's very difficult for you to believe. You can't conceive of such a state. But it was and is true—with exceptions now.
"The people who differed did not differ in their lack of self-awareness in the beginning of their history. They were like the others in this respect. However, they did have science, though they didn't go about dealing with it as self-aware sentients do.
"Nor did they have a concept of religion, of gods or of a God. That comes only with an advanced stage of self-awareness.
"Luckily for these people, called by those who followed them The Firsts, one of their scientists had accidentally formed a wathan during an experiment.
"It was the first indication The Firsts had that there was such a force as extraphysical energy. I use the term extra-physical to avoid any confusion with paraphysical, with such evidently existing but usually uncontrollable and elusive forces as telepathy, telekinesis, and other extrasensory perception phenomena."
Burton forebore saying that it \vas he who'd coined the term ESP on Earth, though he'd called it extra-sensuous perception.
"The wathan may be a form of this, but, if so, it's the only one that's controllable. This nameless scientist who accidentally generated a wathan from the extraphysical forces did not know what it was. He or she continued to experiment and generated more. I say generated because the equipment he was using formed the wathan from the extraphysical energy. Shaped it or perhaps plucked it from the field that exists in the same space as matter but usually doesn't interact with it.
"The first wathans probably attached themselves to the living beings in their proximity."
"All living creatures?" Nur murmured.
"All living individuals. Insects, trees, starfishes, all. After millions of years of experiments, we still don't know why the wathans are attracted to life energy. One of the hundreds of theories is that life itself may be a form of extraphysical energy. An interface, rather."
The effect of the attachments was not immediately noted. The wathan was the source and genesis of self-awareness. But it could not develop this except through living entities, and these had to have highly developed nervous systems if the potentiality for self-awareness was to be realized.
"But that also can't be realized if the wathan attaches itself to a human entity beyond the initial zygote stage. Beyond the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. Don't ask me why. Just believe me when I say that it's true. Apparently, there is a hardening in the entity, a resistance to the interface."
The machine spat out billions of wathans during the experiments. Millions attached themselves to the zygotes of the sentients. And, for the first time in the universe, as far as anybody knew, self-awareness was born. Infants grew up with this, and neither the older nor the younger generation could understand that this was unique and new. Self-aware children and youths have always had difficulty understanding the adults, but never before had there been such an empathy gap, such lack of comprehension.
"Eventually, the unself-conscious people died out. It wasn't until twenty-five or so years after the first wathan was formed that the reason for self-awareness was discovered. Then it became a matter of necessity to keep producing wathans."
Centuries passed. Space flight via rockets came. After several centuries, a new form of propulsion was discovered. Interstellar flight became possible at speeds unheard of before when a method of sidepassing matter was invented. Even so, it took seven days of Earth-time to go a lightyear.
"The old science-fiction concept of going through other dimensions was realized?" Frigate said.
"No. But we don't have the time for the necessarily lengthy explanation of it."
By then The Firsts thought it was their ethical duty to bring immortality and self-awareness via the wathan to all other sentient people. Many expeditions set out to do this. When one found a planet with people whose brains were capable of developing self-awareness, waf/iaw-generating machines were buried so deep in the earth that it was unlikely that they would be discovered by the aborigines.
"Why hidden?" Nur said. He was pale; he looked as if he'd been hard hit by Loga's revelations.
"Why hidden?" Loga said. "Why not just give the machines to the first self-aware generation? You should know why not. Consider your fellow human beings. The wathan generators would have been misused. There would be power struggles to monopolize them and through them the basest exploitation of others. No, the wathan generators can't be entrusted to people until they attain a certain ethical stage."
Burton didn't ask why The Firsts hadn't set up garrisons on each planet to insure that the generators were the property of all. With their scientific knowledge and ethical knowledge, they could have taught the aborigines to advance much more swiftly. But The Firsts would not consider that ethical. Besides, they wouldn't have enough of their own people to rule all the planets they found.
The faces of his companions reflected an agonizing struggle, though Frigate seemed the least affected. Nur, who had always been so flexible, so invulnerable to psychological shock, was suffering the worst. He could not accept the idea that wathans, call them souls, were synthetic. Well, not quite that. But they were formed by humanlike creatures through machines. They did not come parceled out by Allah. Nur had believed this far more deeply than some of the others who, though religious, had not had his firmness of faith.
Loga must have been aware of this.
He said, "There is no Creator unless we accept the creation, this universe, as evidence. The Firsts did, and we do. But there is no evidence whatsoever that It has any interest in Its creatures. It..."
"It?" Alice and de Marbot said.
"Yes. The Creator has no sex—as far as we know. The language of Monat's people has a unique neuter pronoun for the Creator."
"His people are The Firsts?" Tai-Peng said.
"No. The Firsts have Gone On long, long ago. Monat's people are the recipients of The Firsts' work through a line of five other peoples. These, you might say, have handed on the torch to others and then Gone On. Monat himself is just one of ten thousand of his own kind yet alive. The others have all Gone On.