To be alive. Life has to be more than just existing.'
'Life doesn't insist on that.' I finally spoke. 'We do. Most creatures do little more than exist and perish.'
'That isn't exactly Dzin, is it?' A wry smile crossed Sanselle's lips.
'Hardly. Dzin says that the concern is the perfection of the work, not the perfection of the worker.'
'Like termites.' Sanselle laughed. 'The nest is all'
'There's not much difference in Rykashan society,' I pointed out. The nest is bigger and more complex, but look at you ... us.' I realized that I was no longer insisting that I wasn't a Rykashan. 'To find the meaning you want from life, you have to work twice as hard to ensure your freedom doesn't endanger the nest or waste its resources.'
'What if there isn't... meaning, that is?' asked Seriley.
I shrugged.
'I mean it.'
'I know.' I shifted my weight against the restraint of the sticktites. 'I'd say the universe doesn't have a meaning or a purpose. Throughout history, people kept inventing gods because they couldn't conceive of or imagine that creation and existence were an accident or occurred as a result of purely natural processes.'
'Dzin ... does it... ?' Sanselle shook her head.
'Dzin avoids the issue,' I admitted. 'It provides a set of rules for a meaningful life within a society and assumes that the meaning is provided by the continuation of an orderly society. Society is, in effect, God.'
'I'll bet that would get you readjusted, or whatever mites do,' suggested Seriley.
'Executed or exiled,' I said.
Tm glad I'm not a mite.' Seriley tossed her head.
'Rykasha isn't that much different.' I grinned at Sanselle, then smothered it and waited. 'Society still makes the rules.
We don't call it God, but, so far as controlling us, we might as well. What with nanotechnology and micronics, we either live by the rules or get readjusted one way or another to live by the rules.' I smiled. 'The difference is that we can talk about it.'
'What if there is a god?' asked Seriley.
'He hasn't shown much interest in us,' answered Sanselle. 'Human beings have been building cities for something like ten thousand years, and it's been a long time since anyone's documented a god's presence.'
'Why would a god care? Would anything that mighty worry about our opinion?' I asked.
'Probably not.' Sanselle finished her bottle of whatever Dhurr beverage she'd been drinking.
'The Believers say engee is a god,' offered Seriley. 'There's something out there. Even the astrophysicists say so. They just won't say what.'
'Except that it sends forth signals that affect some people,' I added.
'That something doesn't change things here or anywhere else,' countered Sanselle. 'We still have to play by the rules that people set up.'
Gerbriik's image appeared in the space between Sanselle and me, his lower extremities cut off by the canteen table. 'I beg your pardons for interrupting your theological discussion, but the Tailor is coming in. Sanselle and Seriley need to get ready to off-load.'
'Yes, ser.'
'Yes, ser.'
'There's God,' said Sanselle after Gerbriik's image vanished. 'For now, anyway.'
Seriley frowned but did not speak.
I let them go, then slipped back to my cube and the reading screen. What really was the point of discussing
God - or gods? Discussion wouldn't determine the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being. Nor had any such supreme being ever directly affected the conditions under which we lived, not in any scientifically demonstrable way.
Yet, even in the rational culture of Rykasha, people believed - some, anyway - in a god called engee. Yet in what seemed an unlimited universe, far more was possible than Rykashans or mites had envisioned.
But if the improbable occurred, the proof of a god, an alien intelligence, a cosmic catastrophe, a great many people would overreact, as if the merely unknown or improbable had been heretofore impossible.
What did that say about people? That most don't understand the universe? Or Dzin? Or themselves?
I knew all that already, including the fact that I didn't know as much about myself as I once had thought, and I laughed to myself as I climbed into my sleeping net, flicked on the reading screen, and called up more history - hard history.
46
The universe has no destination.
I had just climbed out of sleep, four hours after the Tailor's arrival, awakened by my internal timekeeping demons, and was stowing the sleeping net, when Gerbriik's image appeared.
'Once you're cleaned up and ready for duty, see me first.' The image vanished as quickly as it had come.
I showered, put on clean coveralls, grabbed an egg-cheese pie from the canteen formulator, washed it down with lukewarm tea, and scrambled up to the maintenance bay.
The area was empty, except for the maintenance officer himself. Gerbriik's eyes snapped from their glaze - totally -when he turned from the console. 'The Tailor brought back the response to your request.'
'Yes, ser?' Was I to remain on OE Station for another seven years? Or two? Three? I waited for the cold words.
'You're returning to Runswi for training as a Web pilot. On the Tailor. Immediately. Apparently, we need Web pilots more than maintenance techs.' Gerbriik smiled, one of the few times he'd done so. And we'll see you in a few years.'
'I hope so, ser.' I paused. 'I'm sorry ... if you're short-handed. I don't want the others to work too hard.'
A second smile crossed Gerbriik's face. 'They did send a replacement. So Sanselle and Seriley won't be muttering imprecations at your hasty departure.'
'Sanselle wouldn't.'
'No ... but I might have.'
I didn't have a ready answer, but Gerbriik went on. 'Don't waste any more of your life, Tyndel. You have more to offer than you realize.'
'The time here wasn't wasted, ser.' It had been necessary, all too necessary, because it had taken the time on OE Station for me truly to learn how to apply Dzin.
'I hope not. You were a good tech, even if you took some educating.'
'Thank you.'
'We'll look forward to seeing you bring a ship in. Good luck. You need to hurry. The Tailor will be sealing locks in less than two hours. I let you sleep because you'll need it.' His eyes were on me, fully on me, until I left the maintenance bay.
In the end, I didn't bring back as much as I had brought, and I wore dull gray coveralls, not the greens I had worn out to OE Station. I'd earned the grays.
HYSTERESIS
47
You may know your body, but you are not your body.
Once away from Earth Orbit One on my way down to Runswi, I sat halfway back in the shuttle's windowless passenger cabin, beside a redheaded woman in a blue-trimmed, silver suit - the colors indicating some type of support to a senior administrator or controller. She kept her narrow face averted from me.
Most of the dozen on the shuttle wore blue or red, although a slender man near the front was dressed in green, a darker green, with a gold collar pin in the shape of a triangular web. Web pilot, supplied some source within me. No one sat on the couch adjacent to him.
The shuttle slid down the invisible magfield slope and along what I knew to be the permacrete strip at Runswi even if I could not see it.