I don’t suppose a race that effects social homeostasis via the planetwide extermination of species can afford this sort of moral delicacy, ambiguity. They can never be wrong. So their “evaluation” of O’Hara’s propriety, no matter how important to the survival of the human race, does not weigh heavily on me as her sister, or daughter, or only living relative. I have to agree with O’Hara: she was, later in life, both amused and appalled by the eveloi, because they were such a literal personification, almost a cartoon, of the gods that graced six thousand years of human history: omnipotent, capricious, bloodthirsty. And thickheaded.
It was belief that had destroyed the earth, the collision of incompatible political faiths, and a specific kind of religious fanaticism that strangled New New and thus almost destroyed Newhome en route. (A clan called the Devonites precipitated a “Ten-Minute War” that left half the population dead and systematically destroyed all of the satellite’s technology that was not related to life support.) Neither catastrophe was inconsistent with O’Hara’s sentiments about religious belief.
O’Hara had been brought up indifferent to religion, but experimented with its comforts when young. By menarche, sixteen, she was impatient with it, and was actively hostile to it by the time she got her first degree, four years later. Her senior thesis, “Public and Private Religions of the American ‘Founding Fathers,’” was cynical and pragmatic, and incidentally gave her a start in politics. Sandra Berrigan read it and asked her to be a Privy Council intern. That experience did nothing to mellow her. Most of New New’s administrative class saw religion as something between a nuisance and a weakness to be exploited.
O’Hara spent a century pulled in one direction by a perceived intellectual necessity for atheism and in another, not quite opposite, direction by the emotional necessity to recognize that there was more to the universe than was presented by the evidence of the senses and the operations of logic. The experience with the eveloi helped her reconcile the two intuitions. She wrote about that in one of her last columns, a month before she died:
“They decided to let us live. Otherwise, what was the most important gift we received from the eveloi? Not admission to a community of strange-looking creatures from various planets; we would have discovered one another soon enough. Not even transshifting, since we’re allowed to use that only at their whim.
“What the eveloi did was give us an actual physical manifestation of God, an It rather than a Him, that demonstrably did have our fate in its hands—or its tentacles, anyhow—but which did not desire worship or even attention. Having allowed us to survive, it became benign and aloof; we are free to love it or hate it or ignore it.
“I confess to being surprised, and obscurely disappointed, that no one has yet cranked up a religion to celebrate the goodness and mercy of these cosmically vicious fiends. Maybe people are reluctant to draw their attention. The history of religion would have been shorter and simpler if God kept materializing and poking a finger into your brain.
“The philosophical advantage of having an actual physical Godlike thing to stand in awe of, and to keep out of the way of, is clear. New religions, and the old religions that survive, tend not to feature Gods who will hurl you into Hell for eating with the wrong hand. Instead they spend their efforts in ‘good works’ and the investigation and celebration of mystery, both activities easy to endorse.
“I never wanted to believe that awe in the presence of beauty was simply a response to cultural programming, or that all love could be traced to the gonads, or that truth was meaningless outside of social context. But I would take all three bleak simplifications before I would accept beauty and love and truth as gifts from a sometimes be-nevolent God. Without the white-bearded authority figure hovering in the wings, mystery is as comfortable and prosaic and wonderful as science—and as useful, when you get around to sorting out really basic whys and where-fores. At my age, you find yourself doing a lot of that.”
O’Hara died peacefully, suddenly, having a cerebral embolism in midstride during her morning walk—her “dawn hobble”—around the park lake. She had asked that there be no memorial service and no real estate wasted on a monument, but that her ashes be incorporated into the soil of an anonymous flower bed. Of course the result of this was that there are now 149 flower beds on the planet with monuments proclaiming that she was really buried here.
They are all right, in a way—precisely in a way that she was once wrong. When she was young, she thought that no one born on a planet could ever be at home in the Worlds, as they called their community of orbiting vessels, and that no one born in space could ever really make a home on a planet.
This one became her home. They named it after her.
Author Bio
Joe Haldeman (1943 - )
Joe William Haldeman was born in Oklahoma City in 1943. He holds degrees in physics and astronomy, and served as a combat engineer in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded and earned a Purple Heart. This experience informed his best known work, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning The Forever War. He is one of SF’s most decorated authors, boasting 5 Hugos, 5 Nebulas, the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial and James Tiptree, Jr. Awards and the SFWA Grand Master Award amongst many others. In addition to continuing to produce top quality SF, Joe Haldeman teaches writing at MIT.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Joe Haldeman 1992
All rights reserved.
The right of Joe Haldeman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-575-11151-6
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
