“Oh?”
“There was the Church. Don’t forget that. Was it really so dark? Look what the Church gave him, a chance for eternal life, a meaning for his existence. The Church explained why he was alive. And it gave him the key to salvation.”
“It promised him salvation. Empty promises to keep people in line. They sucked the people dry. Worked them to death. Fairy tales, glitter and pomp to make up for their empty lives. Don’t you remember what Lenin said?”
“ ‘The opiate of the people.’ ” Harry Liu nodded. “I remember. God, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Birth. It doesn’t mean much to us today. But it meant a lot, then. I wonder if it was really so dark. The Dark Ages. We call them dark, but there was a spiritual activity there, a strong spiritual feeling. They didn’t consider their times dark. The early Christians were willing to die for their Church, for what they believed.”
“They were swindled.”
“By our standards. But our emphasis is so much different. We have lost interest in their things. The idea of God. The hierarchy, physical and moral. The levels, earth to water to air to fire. The universe in which a moral God moved. In which there was a visible rise to purity from the gross earth below, to more pure water, to the heavens, and finally to God’s realm, the fire beyond the heavens, the stars. And someday every man was taken up there, lifted and purified.”
“Empty words.”
“Perhaps. And perhaps the New Christians bring only empty words, too. Promises. Promises and a new Dark Age. Brutality and ignorance, and the end of reason. But our words have meaning for us, the way their words had a meaning for them. The Holy Trinity. Empty words—now. But not empty then.”
Verne glanced at Harry Liu curiously. “Do you believe in God?”
“I? Oh, no. But it depends on what you mean by God. We took down the ikons and put up pictures of a man instead, and perhaps he is our god. Some of us may bow down in front of him, before his will, and it it said that he can do no wrong.” Harry Liu considered. “So perhaps we have the Holy Trinity back again, in a new form. Old wine in new bottles. We have restored a lost age. And perhaps the brutality and ignorance, too.”
Verne stopped to light his pipe. Harry Liu’s eyes followed the flick of the lighter with interest.
“A pipe lighter,” Verne said. “Quite a gadget.” He passed it to the little Chinese.
Harry Liu studied it. “Yes. Much better than these.” He tapped his box of Chinese matches in the pocket of his coat. “Only a few of them light.” He held Verne’s lighter out.
An impulse seized Verne. “Keep it.”
“The lighter?”
“You can have it I can get another easily. A present. From the old world to the new.” He smiled grimly.
Harry slid the lighter into his coat. “Thank you.” He was silent for a time. “The others. You said there were two others here.”
“Yes. A woman and a young boy.”
“Where are they?”
“Off someplace. Probably listening to his treatise on ethics. At least, that’s what they say they do.”
“Do you have doubts?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re reading. It doesn’t matter.”
“What are they like, the woman and the young boy?”
Verne shrugged. “Nothing unusual.”
“Is the woman young? Is she attractive?”
“As a matter of fact she’s a girl I had an affair with, years ago.”
“Does the young boy know?”
“I doubt it. I doubt if she’d mention it. It wasn’t too pleasant. She was very young at the time.”
“And you were much older, of course.”
“Of course.”
“You and I are perhaps the same age,” Harry Liu said thoughtfully. “We are getting old. I am getting bald and your hair is thinning. It was not like that when you and the girl had your affair, I assume.”
“It had started.”
“I wonder why an affair between a young woman and an older man should be unpleasant. In China such things are common. But they’re not usually unpleasant.”
“She wasn’t even twenty. It was at a vacation resort in New England. She was staying with some college people. We met by accident. I drove her back down in my car. She didn’t know what was happening. I took her to a motel and pushed her into bed. It’s a good way to learn realism.”
“Your society places such a value on realism. I noticed it when I was in Peoria.”
“Don’t you?”
Harry Liu set his lips. “What is wonderful about the real world? Atoms and void. I will tell you a very interesting fact. In our society, we older people are forbidden by law to destroy the fantasies of youth. In fact, we create fairy tales for them to believe.”
“So I’ve heard. Your scientists are under the thumb of the politicians. They can’t tell the truth about the world. And the artists the same way.”
“That’s so. Like the science of the Middle Ages. Our science and art are bent to social needs. Servants of our political planning.”
“Slaves of your new religion. You approve?”
“I think so.”
“You want a country of children? You want to keep them from growing up and learning the truth about things?”
Harry Liu smiled. “Are we doing that? Perhaps.”
“It’s vicious. What are you? A new Church with a new pope, ruling the people with an iron club, dictating to them, telling them what to think and do and believe—”
“Yes. We direct them now. And hope they will be able to direct themselves, someday. I and my group are almost gone, the group that knows our tales are fairy tales. Fantasies. Those who are coming will believe them and call them truth. They won’t want to grow out of them. They will not even know there is such a thing as growing out of them. And I will not tell them, because I can’t. It is the law. And it is a very wise law.”
“You don’t want them to know.”
“It’s for their own good. Atoms and void.... It is social realities that count. That must come first. All other truths must be bent. Art, science. We provide them with myths, wise myths. As the Church did. They are not literally so. But they are wise. They have meaning. They will help, when they are needed.”
Verne and Harry Liu walked along in silence, neither of them speaking. At last they came to the huge heaps of slag, the quarries dug out of the ground, the miles of rubbish and scrap that had been discarded, voided by the great machines and factories.
“This is the end,” Verne said, stopping. “There’s nothing more from here on. We might as well go back.”
They walked back.
“Well?” Verne said finally. “What are you going to do with it? It’s all yours. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. It’s not for me to decide.”
“Are you going to use it? Or break it all up?”
“Some things will be destroyed. We need parts, tools, materials. But everything will be reworked. We will have to change everything.” Harry Liu kicked at a piece of rock in the road. “We’ll cart off all the piles of rubbish. Tear down the towers. A lot of cleaning will have to be done. And then reworking, reforming. Changes everywhere.”
“For good ends, I hope.”
“Good? Good, beautiful, truthful. I wonder.”
“You wonder?”
They had come to Harry Liu’s bicycle. The little Chinese swung himself onto the saddle, lowering himself in place. “I wonder if such things are real. Remember what your famous judge said. Pilate. The judge in the Bible.”
“Pontius Pilate.”
“He said one very good thing. ‘What is truth?’ ”
“But Christ said, ‘I am the truth.’ ”
Harry glanced at him. He smiled, a thin hard smile. “ ‘I am the truth.’ Precisely.”