Mission to Minerva

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Frenua Showm sat alone in the part of the house that she called the eyrie, staring out at the cliffs and ridges and the distant peaks. The falls at the far end of the gorge, dyed orange in the light of the setting sun, were being eaten up slowly by advancing shadows. The crescent of Doyaris, one of Thurien's two moons, hung brightly above, waiting to take charge of the night. It was one of those times when Showm withdrew from the world of duties and day-to-day affairs, and turned her focus inward to this being that her mind and her body served, exploring its thoughts and feelings. The ability was rare among Terrans, and the few who knew their true nature and inner souls were not understood by the others. Their impetuousness and the compulsive violence with which they attacked everything, or else were themselves attacked by others, drove them to lives where attention was permanently externalized. Perhaps it was another quality that developed in its own time as a race matured.

She had thought much about Terrans and their nature as a result of her studies of Earth's history. Life had its seasons like the year, and when one came naturally to its close it was time not to dwell on false attachments to the past but to move on into harmony with the next. Showm's life was in its autumn now, the season for returning nourishment to the soil, when the wisdom and experience accrued along the way made it possible to give back what the earlier stages had necessitated borrowing. Spring had been the season for creating, and summer, that for nurturing and sending forth life. For the Thurien, the spiritual delight of experiencing life and growth, of creating and building, was the most precious reward that the universe had to offer. It was the reason for existing, and making it possible was the reason why the universe existed. The universe was a desert waiting to be brought to life. Although the aberration was not entirely unknown in the long history of their species, the notion of willfully killing a sapient being was about the most abhorrent that most Thuriens were capable of conceiving.

They believed that in a way similar to that in which the observed universe was an infinitesimal grain of the totality making up the Multiverse, so the Multiverse itself was merely an aspect of something incomparably vaster. In this domain dwelled the true soul that the heart of a thinking, feeling being connected to. It continued to exist while the personas it created came and passed, each of a nature and formed in such circumstances as the soul needed to heal and to grow. Although the personas might be discarded, the things their experiences had revealed and taught were retained and absorbed, much as with the characters that were temporarily manufactured for some kinds of game. Although the death of a persona, when it came, was thus seen as merely the closing of another season, to cut short the soul's connection would be to starve its essential growth.

Even more, the transient lives of the personas served as nurseries for developing such qualities conducive to the soul's higher life as understanding, creativity, gentleness, and compassion. But the act, or even the contemplation, of killing and destruction invoked all the emotions and insensibilities that were the precise opposite. The perpetrator was debased and deformed, violating the self's inner nature in a way far exceeding any outrage done to the victim. To the Thurien, it represented the ultimate denial, a rejection of all meaning to the universe, and any reason for it to exist. Small wonder then, Showm reflected, that in the world reduced to mindless matter that they had created, and themselves to purposeless accidents of it, that the majority of Terrans knew of no higher aspiration than the accumulation of money or a craving to control the minds and lives of others.

She had known close love and the tenderness of motherhood, the ties of friendship, the privilege of being able to help others find happiness in their lives, the joys of creating and accomplishing, the feelings of admiration and gratitude toward those whose work made hers possible. The high moments of significance, when the splendor of existing and the meaning that the universe stood for were revealed, she saw in the bright eyes and enraptured faces when sages inspired the minds of the young; in colonizing ships lifting out of orbit to head for a new world; in the communion of elderly sharing dreams and reminiscences as they neared the end of their journey; in worlds clothed in forests, mountains, and oceans. These were the things that the universe existed for, in accord with its nature, that brought it to life. Life and the universe produced a music that was heard by the soul. Everything that grew was an expression of it.

She still had disturbed nights and moments of cold, gnawing horror at some of the things she had learned in her researches of Earth: children forcibly regimented into cults of mass murder; industries dedicated to death, the annihilation of cities, eradication of whole cultures. She had read accounts of armies seized by blood lust, hunting defenseless innocents down like vermin and hacking them to pieces; of families burning and screaming under collapsing buildings; of people starving, people drowning, people driven from their homes into the snow to die. And all of it was planned, deliberate, celebrated by some side or other as heroic and glorious. Showm had watched the recordings of aircraft pouring bombs down upon the dazed and terrified survivors of towns already turned into smoldering rubble; ships and vehicles packed with human beings incinerated, cut to shreds, blown apart; people fleeing and falling like blades of arui grass in a hailstorm. She had stared numbly at pictures of the corpses, grotesque and stomach-wrenching: charred, mangled, dismembered, disemboweled; twisted in ditches, ensnared in wire, crushed in mud, rotting in heaps. She had watched the sorry processions bringing back the limbless, the blind, the maimed, the insane wreckage of what had been husbands and sons, brothers and lovers, youth with its dreams. At one point she had appealed to VISAR for guidance on how such things could be. VISAR was unable to offer any. And so she had wept. How could beings who were capable of thought and feeling do such things? How could they believe the lies?

Even more incomprehensible, how could those who ruled and commanded promote such lies? Not just to advance petty ambitions or carry out their schemes of conquest, but in every sphere where humans struggled, plotted, allied, and betrayed to set each against all, everyone a threat or a rival, to gain some advantage one over another. The whole philosophy underlying their dealings with each other was not only predicated on but exalted and glorified self-seeking and exploitation, oppression, rapacity, cruelty, and the enslavement of the weak to serve the strong, all rationalized in the ruthless calculus of money that recognized efficacy of contributing to profit-making as the sole measure of an individual's meaning or worth.

Mildred had described the leaders as the worst of thieves and scoundrels, and didn't listen to them. But Mildred was the exception, resigned to the private life of a minority with no voice. Among Thuriens, the quality most looked to for leadership was benign maturity and the selfless compassion that it engendered. Government office or the power to make responsible decisions were looked upon as privileged opportunities to serve the people. To abuse such a position for personal gain or to coerce the unwilling beyond basic restraints essential for a community to live together would be the most heinous of offenses. To say such transgressions had never occurred would have been untrue… but it came close to being unthinkable.

Only Terrans could have produced the myths that mindless, undirected matter could organize itself into living organisms able to communicate emotion and thought, or that the universe had begun in unimaginable violence out of nothing. They projected their inner natures into what they saw, and then convinced themselves that what they were seeing was external reality. The Thuriens knew that the programs that directed life did not originate on planets, although planetary systems were the assembly stations where the programs found expression in the bewildering number of ways that conditions across a galaxy made possible. The seeds were brought by the cosmic wind. Where they came from, how they were produced, by what agency, and for what purpose were the prime mysteries that had become the quest of Thurien science to answer, and one of the imperatives driving their expansion. There was evidence of strange conditions behind the obscuring clouds and increasing star concentration at the very center the Galaxy-and the core regions of other galaxies too. But the Thuriens had not penetrated far enough yet to learn more. Their period of apathy and stagnation, when they achieved immortality and as a consequence little else that was of any importance for aeons, had cost them much. To be inspired by dreams and embark on quests to make them come true required the constant reinvigoration of youth. That realization was what caused the Thuriens to revert to the old way and accept nature and its seasons.

Was the violence of humans an inescapable flaw in their makeup? Or was it a perversion of something irrepressible that might be harnessed to direct at constructive ends the same furious energy with which it was able to destroy? Perhaps it was because of their unique origins in ancient Ganymean genetic manipulations, but the Thuriens had met nothing anywhere that compared with them. From what had seemed hopeless beginnings in the face of impossible odds to just before the tragedy that eventually befell Minerva, the speed at which the ancestral Lunarian civilization had emerged and advanced was astounding, mocking the Ganymean experience-which itself surpassed every other race they had encountered since. Eesyan had reported that despite their younger science and limited technical grounding, Hunt and his group were already having a significant impact on the project. What might the impact be of both cultures fully mature, working in combination?

Showm's thoughts went back again to her conversation here in this same place with Mildred. Exactly that situation might long ago have come to be, if the Lunarians hadn't been deflected from their path by the intrusion of Jevelenese fugitives. The Lunarians before then had worked cooperatively toward the goal of migrating to Earth. Could it be that the later pathological instability of the Terrans was not something innate to their humanness at all, but a product of traumas they had undergone? The catastrophic war that had dashed the hopes they had been building for generations, culminating in the destruction of their world; the experiences of the last, tiny band marooned on the lunar desert; the renewed hope of beginning again when they were transported to Earth, only to be devastated once more in the convulsions unleashed by the capture of the orphaned Moon. What else could they have become but creatures brutalized to self-preservation as the first instinct for survival? What other philosophy of life and the cosmos would they be capable of producing?

Such reflections assailed Showm insistently. Maybe she had been too harsh in her judgment of humans. And that was important, because the answer the Thuriens finally accepted as to why Terrans were the way they were would determine their eventual decision on how Earth would be dealt with. The debate had been continuing privately among the Thuriens ever since the Jevlenese plans and machinations were exposed.

Showm felt an excitement stirring deep inside her as the thought that had been forming for days finally crystallized. Maybe it was no longer necessary for such a crucial matter to depend on debates and speculation. Eesyan's scientists were talking about sending out packages of instruments to explore and sample the Multiverse from the facility they were building at MP2. Another universe had already transported the communications device that contacted Hunt back on Earth. Broghuilio's Jevlenese ships had actually gone back to Lunarian Minerva.

The technology to do it was all there. Why grow weary debating to exhaustion how much like Terrans the pretrauma Lunarians might or might not have been-with all the attendant risk of coming up with the wrong answer anyway-when the matter could be settled objectively by observation? They could send reconnaissance probes there and find out! Now that it appeared they had the ability, it would be an injustice to the human race not to make the effort. And Showm couldn't abide the thought of that. The humans had suffered enough injustice from Ganymeans already.

As a child, Showm had listened to stories of the world their race had come from long ago, and the barbarians who inherited it and destroyed it. It was the standard, simplified fare that Thurien parents told their children. Only now was she beginning to realize how much those images had shaped the attitudes she had been carrying all her life. Her way of interpreting the realization was that the soul whom her experiences served, in its realm that existed beyond the Multiverse, had learned something worthwhile and significant already.