“This is not the best of all possible worlds. For if it were, would there be illogic? Tyranny? Injustice? Even evolution, the wellspring of diversity and the heart of nature, is so very often a callous process, depending on death to bring about new life.
“No, life is not just. The Universe is not fair.
“And yet” — Gailet shook her head — “and yet, if it is not fair, at least it can be beautiful. Look around you now. There is a sermon greater than anything I can tell you. Look at this lovely, sad world that is our home. Behold Garth!”
The gathering took place upon the heights just south of the new Branch Library, in a meadow with an open view in all directions. To the west, all could see the Sea of Cilmar, its gray-blue surface colored with streaks of floating plant life and dotted with the spumelike trails of underwater creatures. Above lay the blue sky, scrubbed clean by the last storm of winter. Islands gleamed in the morning sunlight, like distant magical kingdoms.
On the north side of the meadow lay the beige tower of the Branch Library, its rayed spiral sigil embossed in sparkling stone. Freshly planted trees from two score worlds swayed gently in the breezes stroking over and around the great monolith, as timeless as its store of ancient knowledge.
To the east and south, beyond the busy waters of Aspinal Bay, lay the Valley of the Sind, already beginning to sprout with early green shoots, filling the air with the aromas of spring. And in the distance the mountains brooded, like sleeping titans ready to shrug off their brumal coats of snow.
“Our own petty lives, our species, even our clan, feel terribly important to us, but what are they next to this? This nursery of creation? This was what was worth fighting for. Protecting this” — she waved at the sea, the sky, the valley, and the mountains — “was our success.
“We Earthlings know better than most how unfair life can be. Perhaps not since the Progenitors themselves has a clan understood so well. Our beloved human patrons nearly destroyed our more beloved Earth before they learned wisdom. Chims and dolphins and gorillas are only the beginnings of what Would have been lost had they not grown up in time.”
Her voice dropped, went hushed. “As the true Garthlings were lost, fifty thousand years ago, before they ever got the chance to blink in amazement at a night sky and wonder, for the first time, what that light was that glimmered in their minds.”
Gailet shook her head. “No. The war to protect Potential has gone on for many aeons. It did not finish here. It may, indeed, never end.”
When Gailet turned away there was at first only a long, stunned silence. The applause that followed was scattered and uncomfortable. But when she returned to Sylvie’s and Fiben’s embrace, Gailet smiled faintly.
“That’s tellin’ “em,” he said to her.
Then, inevitably, it was Fiben’s turn. Megan Oneagle read a list of accomplishments that had obviously been gone over by some publicity department hack in order to hide how dirty and smelly and founded on simple dumb luck it all had been. Read aloud this way, it all sounded unfamiliar. Fiben hardly remembered doing half the stuff attributed to him.
It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why he’d been selected to go last. Probably, he assumed, it had been out of pure spite. Following an act like Gailet will be pure murder, he realized.
Megan called him forward. The hated shoes almost made him trip as he made his way to the dais. He saluted the Planetary Coordinator and tried to stand straight as she pinned on some garish medal and an insignia making him a reserve colonel in -the Garth Defense Forces. The cheers t›f the crowd, especially the chims, made his ears feel hot, and it only got worse when, per Gailet’s instructions, he grinned and waved for the cameras.
Okay, so maybe I can stand this, in small doses.
When Megan offered him the podium Fiben stepped forward. He had a speech of sorts, scrawled out on sheets in his pocket. But after listening to Gailet he decided he had better merely tell them all thank you and then sit down again.
Struggling to adjust the podium downward, he began. “There’s just one thing I want to say, and that’s — YOWP!”
He jerked as sudden electricity coursed through his left foot. Fiben hopped, grabbing the offended member, but then another shock hit his right foot! He let out a shriek. Fiben glanced down just in time to see a small blue brightness emerge slightly from beneath the podium and reach out now for both ankles. He leaped, hooting loudly, two meters into the air — alighting atop the wooden lectern.
Panting, it took him a moment to separate the panicked roaring in his ears from the hysterical cheering of the crowd. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and stared.
Chims were standing on their folding chairs and waving their arms. They were jumping up and down, howling. Confusion reigned in the ranks of the polished militia honor guard. Even the humans were laughing and clapping uproariously.
Fiben glanced, dumbfounded, back at Gailet and Sylvie, and the pride in their eyes explained what it all meant.
They thought that was my prepared speech! he realized.
In retrospect he saw how perfect it was, indeed. It broke the tension and seemed an ideal commentary on how it felt to be at peace again.
Only I didn’t write it, damnit!
He saw a worried look on the face of his lordship the mayor of Port Helenia. No! Next they’ll have me running for office!
Who did this to me?
Fiben searched the crowd and noticed immediately that one person was reacting differently, completely unsurprised. He stood out from the rest of the crowd partly due to his widely separated eyes and waving tendrils, but also because of his all too human expression of barely contained mirth.
And there was something else, some nonthing that Fiben somehow sensed was there, floating above the laughing Tymbrimi’s wafting coronae.
Fiben sighed. And if looks alone could maim, Earth’s greatest friends and allies would have to send a replacement ambassador to the posting on Garth right away.
When Athaclena winked at Fiben, it just confirmed his suspicions.
“Very funny,” Fiben muttered caustically under his breath, even as he forced out another grin and waved again to the cheering crowds.
“T’rifically funny, Uthacalthing.”
Postscript and Acknowledgments
First we feared the other creatures who shared the Earth with us. Then, as our power grew, we thought of them as our property, to dispose of however we wished. The most recent fallacy (a rather nice one, in comparison) has been to play up the idea that the animals are virtuous in their naturalness, and it is only humanity who is a foul, evil, murderous, rapacious canker on the lip of creation. This view says that the Earth and all her creatures would be much better off without us.
Only lately have we begun embarking upon a fourth way of looking at the world and our place in it. A new view of life.
If we evolved, one must ask, are we then not like other mammals in many ways? Ways we can learn from? And where we differ, should that not also teach us?
Murder, rape, the most tragic forms of mental illnesses — all of these we are now finding among the animals as well as ourselves. Brainpower only exaggerates the horror of these dysfunctions in us. It is not the root cause. The cause is the darkness in which we have lived. It is ignorance.
We do not have to see ourselves as monsters in order to teach an ethic of environmentalism. It is now well known that our very survival depends upon maintaining complex ecological networks and genetic diversity. If we wipe out Nature, we ourselves will die.
But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure.