The Domination

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Could things have turned out otherwise? My father went to his grave blaming himself for the Fall. Some others who should have known better still do so. Yet how far can any individual be blamed or praised for a historical event so large and complex? Here on Samothrace we have developed an exaggerated idea of what one person can do, perhaps. An entire solar system with less than a quarter-million inhabitants will do that. We are on our own, on a frontier whose homeland has been eaten by time and history. And our heritage is one of belief in individual responsibility, the sacredness of choice, in the human being as the embodiment of humanity. Rightly so: even to the extent of renouncing the temptations of the trans-human, whether electronic or biological. We make our own destiny here.

So we see our history-become-myth in terms of heroes and villains. My father was a very great man; the New America’s completion is his monument, for without his driving will it might well never have been ready to carry our saving remnant. This world is his monument, as much as any single man’s, for his leadership in the first terrible years of the Settlement. Yet in those final months around Sol the lovely and the lost, how many separate acts—of cowardice, heroism, treachery, honor, love, hate, stupidity, inspiration—went into the making of the Fall? The past we do not know, the future we cannot. I knew the living man, and know he never did less than his utmost. Perhaps that should be added to our new Republic’s proud motto: Ad Astra et Libertas.”

A Heritage of Liberty

by Iris Lefarge Stoddard

Adams University Press

New Jerusalem, Planetary Republic of Samothrace

Alpha Centauri

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