Heaven (44 page)

“Will is right, Sam,” said Stun, feeling how close
Talitha
’s captain was to berserk rage. “Their Church has condemned billions of sentient beings to the living hell that they call
Heaven. Their religious perversion has caused incalculable harm. Incalculable.” Her blue eyes flashed, daring anyone to contradict
her.

“So, after all that, you want to
save
them?” Will snarled in disgust. “You’re mad, Sam. Stark, staring mad.”

If only it were that easy
, Sam thought.
It would be simpler if I were mad
. “They will be told to destroy their weapons and abandon their ships. I am sure that Ship can monitor the entire process
to make sure there are no tricks. They can be brought on board and confined in one of the holds. Then Ship can tow the empty
vessels to a safe orbit,” he said tiredly. “They will pose no further threat.”

“I am not disputing that it can be
done
,” said Will. “I am disputing whether it is wise.”

“I am not sure whether it is wise,” Sam replied. “But I
know
that it must be done.”

ASK HIM WHY,
the pond told Second-Best Sailor.
NO ONE HAS YET THOUGHT TO ASK HIS REASON. THEY ARE TOO ANGRY.

The polypoid complied. “Sam, it’s an evil religion what turns people wicked. Why d’ya want to save ’em?”

“Because it’s an evil religion that turns people wicked,” said Sam. “To combat it, we must be different from them. We must
show them mercy. Tolerance. Love. All the things that Cosmic Unity preached but never
did
. We must restore our lifesouls to the path of peace. Not Cosmic Unity’s peace of universal enslavement to the trap of uniformity—true
peace.”

“But . . .”

“‘We should not reject the good because it has been attempted badly,’” Sam quoted from the
Conversations with Huff Elder
. “I have been contemplating the Memeplex, which previously I denounced as evil, and I’m now convinced that I misunderstood.
There’s nothing wrong with its intentions. What’s wrong is how they have been manifested.”

“You are still infected by Church ‘logic,’” protested Stun. “You are just saying that because of your training as a lifesoul-healer.
You yourself called Cosmic Unity evil. You vowed to destroy it; I heard you!”

“What better way to destroy the perversion that calls itself Cosmic Unity,” said Sam, “than to heal its defective Memeplex?
I said there is nothing wrong with the
intentions
of the Memeplex, not that there is nothing wrong with the Memeplex itself.”

“Fire,” said May. “Frying pan.” Wondering what the archaic words meant. But they all knew what the proverb meant.

“No,” Sam insisted. “We must make the attempt. Do you not agree that ‘All sentient creatures should live together in harmony,’
as it is recorded in the
Archives of Moish
? Ignore the source. Do you not agree? The alternative is interstellar war.”

“Which is what we have just fought,” said Will. “And won. Now you want us to volunteer to become the losers, just to make
the real losers feel better.”

“There are no winners in war,” said Sam. “Remember, I have trained as a lifesoul-healer. I
know
.”

“You also trained as a torturer, Fourteen Samuel,” Second-Best Sailor pointed out.

Sam nodded. A tear trickled down his cheek, and he wiped it away. “I did,” he admitted. “And I now see my error. Not in the
central content of the Memeplex, but in the methods used to propagate it. Tolerance is not something that can be enforced.
And love should not be imposed, or limited, according to quotas.”

Will’s fists clenched. “So we demonstrate our universal love by pulling Cosmic Unity’s irons out of the fire? And then you
think that they will be so grateful that they will change their wicked ways?”

“Cosmic Unity is already changing from within,” said Sam. “All over this spiral arm of the Galaxy, Heavens are being depopulated
as fast as the servomechs can run their incorporators and find suitable habitats for the newly incorporated. Without Heavens
to hide people away and distract them, the Church will naturally become sociologically unstable and come to pieces. The ecclesiarchs
will lose their power. The Memeplex is already redefining itself.”

THE GALACTIC MIND IS THINKING A NEW THOUGHT.

Yes
, thought Second-Best Sailor.
But they ain’t ready to believe that, matey. Let’s keep it to ourselves, huh?

“You do realize,” said Sam, his voice quiet but determined, “that this is a pivotal moment in Galactic history? If you choose
the path of empathy, you could start a whole new religion.”

Will rolled the idea around in his mind. “Yes,” he said sourly. “Despite which, I reluctantly concede that we should rescue
our enemies. Before they come to any further harm.”

Consensus
.

Every opening is an ending

Every ending is a beginning

Every beginning is a closure

Every closure is an opening

Koans of the Cuckoo

S
econd-Best Sailor was still getting used to his new boat.

Ship. I am a ship
.

He apologized mentally to the vessel now under his command.

In place of a keel, the ship had extradimensional displacement. In place of a sail, it had a string of tame magnetotori.

It had hydrive, too, but that was boring. Even the ultrafast kind.

The mariner’s new ship was mostly filled with water from No-Moon’s ocean, detoxified and restocked with No-Moonian flora and
fauna from the seawater that
Talitha
had used to transport him and his companions to Aquifer.
Short Apprentice swam in that water
. It had been taken from the eastern equatorial ocean; he could still taste the runoff from the Dune Continent, the spicy
tang of chlorocarbonates and bacterial peptides . . .

Checking the time, Second-Best Sailor told the ship to head back to Aquifer. He had an important appointment to keep.

His friend the pond was on board, in its own compartment. Without a pond, the hydrive would have been as limited as
Talitha
’s had been when he’d first sailed in it. But the pond wanted to be on board, anyway. It wanted to see the Galaxy.

All of it.

Close up.

The ship had a place for the mariner to keep his wifepiece, of course. Not the one that the Neanderthals had returned to him;
she was needed elsewhere. No, Second-Best Sailor now had the pleasure of a new piece of a new wife, salvaged from the death
throes of the reefmind. She was sterile, but no matter.

The boat—

Ship
.

The ship had formerly been a Cosmic Unity monk carrier, a peripheral part of the No-Moon mission fleet, saved like the rest
from a fiery death in the nuclear inferno of Lambda Coelacanthi. After Cosmic Unity’s fleet had surrendered, leaving its ships
empty, and
Talitha
had towed them into a safe orbit, Second-Best Sailor had cannily claimed salvage rights on one of them.
Talitha
had cross- infected it with her own brand of advanced Precursor technology. Sam’s decision to save the Church fleet had been
so ethical that some of the credit had rubbed off on the polypoid—enough to equip him with one of the most impressive ships
in existence. Now Second-Best Sailor sailed the Galaxy’s spiral arms instead of No-Moon’s seas. He still traded simulations,
but he’d cut out the Neanderthal middlemen.

The Neanderthals didn’t mind. They now had a new role, one to which their empathic sense was ideally suited. Sam had started
a new religion. He hadn’t intended to, but it had happened anyway. It called itself Universal Harmony, which to his mind was
much too close to Cosmic Unity. He had no choice there, either. His followers had invented the name, not he.

The Neanderthals’ role was to stop the new religion from getting out of hand. Whenever a large group of sentients became too
harmonious, and community was in danger of sliding into enforced conformity, the Neanderthal “priesthood” was there to sow
the seeds of discord. It amused them that their total absence of any sense of the spiritual uniquely qualified them to be
priests. A thought like that could almost make you religious.

It was all a case of checks and balances. Yang and Yin. Giver and Stealer. As the pond repeatedly told anyone who would dip
in a translator attached to the newly developed chemolingual:
A HEALTHY GALAXY IS FOREVER POISED ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS, TRANSFIXED BETWEEN THE STERILE WASTELAND OF ORDER AND THE MAD WILDERNESS
OF RAMPANT ENTROPY. LIFE IS NOT SOLELY A GALACTIC DISEASE. IT CAN BE PARASITIC OR SYMBIOTIC. WE MUST SEEK A SYMBIOSIS WITH
OUR GALAXY. FOLLOW ME AND I WILL SHOW YOU THE WAY.
It talked like that a lot and had gained a growing reputation as an eccentric philosopoet. In its way of carving up reality,
this Galaxy was returning rapidly to health, as the revisionist, Samuellian heresy (now orthodoxy) of
genuine
tolerance spread its new memeplex like contagion.

Which it was.

A COSMIC IMMUNE SYSTEM IS HEALING THE GALAXY
, the pond insisted.
YOU ARE WITNESSING THE MECHANISM OF ITS THOUGHTS
.

The others weren’t so certain. The pond was prejudiced. It and the Galaxy were ecologies, not organisms.

Yet, every organism was an ecology. Every cell of Sam’s body, for example, had evolved from an ancient symbiosis of bacteria,
archaea, and other microorganisms, which had grown so interdependent that they had united into a new kind of autocatalytic
system, the eukaryote cell.

And every ecology was an organism . . . the old Lovelockian image of Gaia the earth goddess. So there was much room for argument,
which made the Neanderthal priests’ task far easier and more enjoyable.

Universal Harmony’s aim was to become a eukaryote religion. A synthesis, a symbiosis, a complicity—not a sterile uniformity.
It was structured to thrive on diversity, multiplex thinking, multicultural societies.

Nice trick. Starting is easy.

It’s keeping it going that’s so hard.

The new religion’s founder was suffering agonies of shame.

He would have had every right to be proud of his part in the defeat of the mission fleet. He’d helped to raise
Talitha
to unprecedented ethical levels; he’d been one of the rescuers of Fat Apprentice, who had picked at a dangling thread of
logic and unraveled the fabric of Cosmic Unity; and he’d initiated the Samuellian heresy, in which tolerance was encouraged
and valued—but never, never,
never
imposed.

Instead, Sam was deeply ashamed of the ease with which he had tossed away his humanity when transibled to Aquifer, and had
accepted the querists’ justifications for torture and murder.

He just couldn’t get it out of his mind, and it was eating him up. It didn’t matter that Second-Best Sailor had forgiven him.
He couldn’t forgive himself.

How could anyone who believed in harmony among sentients, and the virtues of universal love, talk himself into such a frame
of mind that he would betray every principle on which his beliefs were based? He found it incomprehensible, even though he’d
done it.

Had he been mad?

He sought out Epimenides. He’d noticed that the Thumosyne’s pedantry often held nuggets of wisdom. And right now, he desperately
needed some spiritual insight.

Epimenides heard him out in silence and then extracted the essence from Sam’s pain and confusion.

“What torments you, Fourteen Samuel, is the Querists’ Fallacy.”

“The phrase is unfamiliar. What does it mean?”

“It refers to the flawed logic of those who
put the question
. The question is belief in religious orthodoxy, and they put it with sharp blades, red-hot steel, molten ice, searing blasts
of oxygen . . . or bombs, plagues, and planetwide devastation.

“Yet most of them are not evil. Yes, there are some sadists, who torture for pleasure and use religion as an excuse. And others
whose motives are political. But most querists honestly believe that what they do is necessary for the good of their victims’
lifesouls. You know why. You have heard their reasoning.” Epimenides paused for emphasis. “And you have asked them: What if
their reasoning is wrong?”

“I have,” said Sam. “And I can’t detect any flaw in their answer: ‘By accepting the possibility of error, we risk our own
lifesouls for the good of others. What greater love can there be than this?’ That was the answer that led me to become a torturer
myself. I tried to inflict mortal harm on Second-Best Sailor!”

“You did,” said Epimenides calmly. “But nevertheless, there is a flaw. You could not find it because you looked for it within
the querists’ logic, and that was what seduced you. But the flaw lies in the context, not in the content. Understand this,
and you will never make such a mistake again.

“The Querists’ Fallacy is to pose the entire argument within the context of their own belief system. However, if they are
wrong to torture innocents,
those beliefs may also be wrong
. In particular, the belief that the querist’s own lifesoul is at risk may be wrong. And then, what they do is based not on
love but on ignorance and superstition.”

“But—are you saying that the Lifesoul-Giver doesn’t exist?”

“No. Neither am I saying that it does. I am saying that it is a fallacy to make deductions on the basis of false hypotheses.”

It was all so obvious that Sam marveled at his own stupidity. He
had
been mad! “How can anyone live a life founded on such flawed logic?” he asked, forgetting for a moment that he had done just
that.

“Because our minds require a definite context in which to think,” the Thumosyne replied at once. “We cannot make a decision
if the alternatives have no limits. We always worry that we have omitted some new possibility. So we fall back on the context
in which we feel most comfortable, and use that to set the limits of our thinking. We forget that a wider context may alter
the whole picture.