Jack L. Chalker WOS 1 M

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"What a horrible idea," Vardia said disgustedly.
"If that were true, it means that even perfection is imperfect, and that when
our own people finally reach this godhood, they'll find it wanting and die out
by suicide, maybe leaving a new set of primitives to do the same thing all
over again. It reduces all the revolutions, the struggles, the pain, the great
dreams
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everything to nonsense! It means that life is point-
less!"
"Not pointless," Brazil put in suddenly. "It just means that grand schemes are
pointless. It means that you don't make your own life pointless or useless
most people do, you know. It wouldn't make any difference if ninety-nine
percent of the people of the human race or any other lived or not. Except in
sheer numbers their lives are dull, vegetative, and nonproductive. They never
dream, never read and share the thoughts of others, never truly experience the
fulfilling equation of love which is not merely to love others, but to be
loved as well. That is the ulti-
mate point of life, Vardia. The Markovians never
found it. Look at this world, our own worlds all re-
flecting the Markovian reality, which was based on the ultimate materialist
Utopia. They were like the man with incredible riches, perhaps a planet of his
own designed to his own tastes, and every material thing you can imagine
producible at the snap of his fingers, who, nonetheless, is found dead one
morn-
ing, having cut his own throat. All his dreams have been fulfilled, but now he
is there, on top, alone. And to get where he was, be had to purge himself of
what was truly of value. He killed his humanity, his spirit-
uality. Oh, he could love and buy what he loved.
But he couldn't buy that love he craved, only service.
"Like the Markovians, when he got where he'd wanted to be all his life, he
found he didn't really have anything at all."
"I reject that theory," Vardia said strongly. "The rich man would commit
suicide because of the guilt that he had all that he had while others starved,
not out of some craving for love. That word is meaning-
less."
"When love is meaningless, or abstract, or mis-
understood, then is that person or race also meaning-
less," Brazil responded. "Back in the days of Old
Earth one group had a saying, 'What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain
the whole world, and lose his own soul?' Nobody listened then, either. Funny
haven't thought of that group in years. They said
God was love, and postulated a heaven of communal
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love, and a hell for those who could not love. Later on that got crudded up
with other stuff until the ideas were gone and only the artifacts were left.
Like the
Markovians, they paid more attention to things than to ideas and, like the
Markovians, they died for it."
"But surely the Markovian civilization was heaven,"
Vardia said.
"It was hell," Brazil responded flatly. "You see, the
Markovians got everything their ancestors had ever dreamed of, and they knew
it wasn't enough. They knew that something attainable was missing. They
searched, poked, queried, did everything to try and find why the people were
miserable, but since every-
thing they had or knew was a construct of themselves, they couldn't find it.
They decided, finally, to go back and repeat the experiment, little realizing
that it, too, was doomed to failure for the experiment, our own universe, was
made in a variety of shapes and forms, but it was still in their own image.
They didn't even bother to make a clean start they used themselves
as the prototypes for all the races they'd create, and they used the same
universe the one they'd lived in, rose in, and failed in. That's why their
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artifacts are still around the two artifacts they had their cities and their
control brains."
Vamett let out a gasp. "Suddenly I think I see what you mean. This Well World
we're on, if you're right, not only provided the trial-lab runs for the new
races and their environments, and the way of chang-
ing everything to match it was also the control!"
"Right," Brazil affirmed grimly. "Here everything was laboratory-standard,
lab-created, monitored, and maintained by automatic equipment to keep it that
way. Not all of them just a representative sample, the last races to be
created, since they were the easiest to maintain."
"But our race here destroyed itself," Varnett pro-
tested. "I heard about it. Does that mean we're out of it? That the best we
can do is destroy ourselves, de-
stroy others, or, perhaps, reach the Markovian level and wind up committing
suicide anyway? Is there no hope?"
"There's hope," Brazil replied evenly, "And de-
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spair, too. That religion of Old Earth I told you about?
Well, those who believed in it had the idea that their
God sent his son, a perfect human being filled with nothing but goodness and
love, to us humans. Son-
of-God question aside, there really was such a person born I watched him try
to teach a bunch of people to reject material things and concentrate on love."
"What happened to him?" Wuju asked, fascinated.
"His followers rejected him because he 'wouldn't rule the world, or lead a
political revolution. Others capitalized on his rhetoric for political ends.
Finally he upset the established political system too much, and they killed
him. The religion, like those founded by other men of our race in other times,
was politi-
cized within fifty years. Oh, there were some devoted followers and of others
like this man, too. But they were never in control of their religion, and
became lost or isolated in the increased institutionalizing of the faiths-
Same thing happened to an older man, born centuries earlier and thousands of
miles away.
He didn't die violently, but his followers substituted things for ideas and
used the quest for love and per-
fection as a social and political brake to justify the miseries of mankind.
No, the religious prophets who made it were the ones who thought in Markovian
terms, in political terms the founder of the Corn, for example, saw conditions
of material deprivation that made him sick. He dreamed of a civilization like
that of the Markovians, and set the Corn on its way. He succeeded the best,
because he appealed to that which everyone can understand the quest for ma-
terial Utopia. Well, he can have it."
"Now, hold on, Brazil!" Varnett protested. "You say you were there when all
these people were around. That must have been thousands of years ago. Just how
old are you, anyway?"
"I'll answer that when we get to the Well," Brazil responded. "I'll answer all
questions then, not before. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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