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thoughts are about the last thing I would have expected from you of all
people," Calazar said. "You have always been one of the most intransigent when
it comes to distrusting humans. I'll credit you with being the least surprised
of all of us when we finally discovered the deceptions of the Jevlenese. And
you were always of the opinion that the Terrans were more than willing pupils
of the agents the Jevlenese infiltrated to set them against each other.
Doesn't everything you've studied for this history you're working on uphold
it? At one point you were all for writing them off as beyond hope, and going
ahead with the containment option immediately. It's strange to hear you
sounding as if you might be going soft now."
Yes, it was true. Calazar's last remark referred to a measure the Thuriens had
been preparing to defend against the insatiable Terran lust for conquest that
the exaggerated Jevlenese accounts had painted. It was not the Thurien way,
nor in the Thurien nature, to meet a threat of violence with counter-violence.
In accord with the colossal schemes they had devised when the occasion
demanded, such as building webs of engineering around burnt-out stars, or
power distribution grids that spanned sizeable portions of the Galaxy, their
response had been to begin the construction of immense g-warp engines that
would be positioned in a configuration to create an impassable shell of
deformed spacetime enclosing and isolating the entire Solar System. And the
Thuriens would have done it. As some previous episodes in Ganymean history had
demonstrated, the same faculty that enabled them to divorce professional life
from personal factors made them perfectly capable of setting sentiment aside
when higher considerations depended on it.
"I admit it," Showm replied. "I don't know how much of Terran history you've
studied yourself, Calazar. There are magnificent and stirring chapters, but
most of what's recorded, century after century for millennia, is . . ." she
shook her head, looking for a word, "horrifying. Even allowing for the
Jevlenese distortions, I came to the conclusion that there was simply
something inherently wrong in the human condition Terrans, Jevlenese, all of
them. Something innate and incurable, going back to the genetics involved in
that biological experiment on Minerva long ago. If that were the case, then we
owed it to ourselves and the other races that depend on us to be protected
from it. It couldn't be allowed to break out into the Galaxy. But they are
sentient living beings nevertheless, and we couldn't destroy them. It was
ironic: Although the Jevlenese had been deceiving us to advance an agenda of
their own, the solution that it induced us to devise was correct. Except that
it didn't go far enough. I would have contained Athena as well." Athena was
the star of Jevlen and its companion planets.
"Yes, I remember. So what has caused you to think again? The progress they
seem to have been making in more recent times?" It had been Terrans, after
all, notably those associated with the irrepressible Dr. Hunt, who had figured
so much in the events concerning the Ganymeans. They had gone to extraordinary
lengths to save the Shapieron from a Jevlenese plot to destroy it, made
contact with Thurien, and it had been they who first awakened the Thuriens to
what was going on.
It would have been easy for Showm to go along with the rationalization that
Calazar was unintentionally offering. But to do so would have meant deceiving
him. To speak or imply anything but the truth when functioning in a formal
official capacity was unthinkable. Earth had seen periods of hope and apparent
progress before, only to slide back again, sometimes to a worse state than had
existed before. Their European culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries had actually concocted a code of what they called "civilized"
warfare to the point where by the end of that period some optimistic
commentators had seriously believed the end of war and oppression as
instruments of human affairs to be within sight. . . . But the century that
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followed witnessed the two most savage and destructive wars ever, the
perfection of industries of mass killing and mass destruction modeled on their
methods of mass production, and some of the most murderous and repressive
regimes the planet had ever seen. Even America, formerly hailed as the
champion of individual freedom and the rule of law, had sunk for a while to
plundering small and defenseless, resource-rich countries. It was now
fashionable there to blame the Jevlenese and say that epoch was over. Showm
would have liked to think so, but the cautious side of her nature overrode the
temptation to wishful thinking. No, she couldn't pretend that she was
convinced.
What way was there to explain that what had caused her outlook to change, and
forced her to look again at habits of thought she had never before questioned,
was listening to a lonely Terran woman of little consequence and no influence,
tolerated by her cousin and regarded amiably but depreciatingly by her
co-worlders as mildly eccentric? Showm replied finally, "We belong to a
culture in which work that serves the well-being of all is morally fulfilling
in itself. It gives us our sense of worth. To seek personal gain through the
loss or detriment of others would be incomprehensible. In a world that lives
by such an ethic, truth becomes the rule, and justice follows naturally. So
naturally that we take it for granted. Thuriens have no concept of the
brutality and suffering that can result from injustice. I hadn't, until I
started delving into the story of Earth and saw what happens when injustice
becomes not just the norm, but a mark of distinction for those possessing the
power to inflict it to be envied and emulated. . . . I don't want us to risk
being guilty of inflicting an injustice, Calazar."
They came to the end of the parapet and entered a small cupola marking an
angle in the perimeter wall. Inside was a seat, an intriguing design of tiled
mosaics on the walls, and a g-well going down to the arched cloister below.
They emerged onto the continuing ambulatory on the far side. Calazar paused to
admire the garden below, where one of the staff was cleaning the edge of a
fish pond at the base of stepped lawns leading up to the house. Showm allowed
him time to ponder on what she had said. He seemed to have no questions or
demurrals so far. When they began moving again, she resumed.
"I believed that humans suffered from an inherent, ineradicable flaw. Now I
find I can no longer be so certain. They have undergone cataclysms and traumas
that our ancestors never knew. I suspect now that something else which once
existed and should have flowered might have been destroyed. Something noble
and magnificent, with the potential to transcend everything we have become,
just as their ability to endure what they have defies our imagination. But
it's still there. I see glimpses of it in their tenacity, their determination, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]