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I want to be! I want to act and accomplish something. And every year it becomes more necessary. Every year, too, it slips further and further away.
The thing about the Mentufacturer, he reflected, is that he can renew everything. He can abort the decay process by replacing the decaying object with a new one, one whose form is perfect. And then that decays. The Form Destroyer gets hold of it—and presently the Mentufacturer replaces that. As with a succession of old bees wearing out their wings, dying and being replaced at last by new bees. But I can’t do that. I decay and the Form Destroyer has me. And it will get only worse.
Ship of theseus
“I don’t want to know anything; I don’t want to hear anything.” He heard his voice bleat out in its weakness, steeped in its paucity of knowledge. The bleat of foolishness, of the greatest amount of insanity of which he was capable. He knew this, heard it and recognized it, and still he clung to it; he continued on. “I know I’m not perfect,” he said. “But I can’t change. I’m satisfied.”
“So it manifested itself to you as a man. Interesting. If it had been as a woman you wouldn’t have listened to—”
“Nothing changes. Despite Specktowsky’s theory of God entering history and starting time into motion again.”
I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful for all of us to know our purpose?”
“Nothing changes. Despite Specktowsky’s theory of God entering history and starting time into motion again.”
“The somatic environment is one of the realest environments in which we live,” Babble said testily. “It’s our first environment, as infants, and then as we decline into old age, and the Form Destroyer corrodes our vitality and shape, we once against discover that it little matters what goes on in the so-called outside world when our somatic essence is in jeopardy.”
Compassion is the basis of the person who has risen from the confines of the Curse.
“You have no faith in prayer?” Wade Frazer asked, nastily. Belsnor said, “I have no faith in prayer that’s not electronically augmented. Even Specktowsky admitted that; if a prayer is to be effective it must be electronically transmitted through the network of god-worlds so that all Manifestations are reached.”
Faith in secular matters, as well as in theological matters, was a necessity. Without it one could not go on living.
“Specktowsky says, ‘The soul of brevity—the short time we are alive—is wit. And as regards the art of prayer, wit runs inversely proportional to length.’”
Seth Morley said to her, “How come we need to shoot a petition-prayer eighty thousand miles up from the planet’s surface, but this sort of prayer can be done without electronic help?” I know the answer, he said to himself. This prayer now—it really doesn’t matter to us if it’s heard. It is merely a ceremony, this prayer. The other one was different. The other time we needed something for ourselves, not for Tallchief. Thinking this he felt more gloomy than ever.
“I think we’re doomed.” “We’re always doomed. It’s the essence of life.”
Maggie, here—” He gestured toward her. “She lives in an illusory world of prayer and fasting, doing service to a deity which isn’t interested in her.”
“I want to contribute something; I don’t want to be just a consumer, like the rest of you.” His tone was hard and flat and very earnest. “We live in a world created and manufactured from the results of the work of millions of men, most of them dead, virtually none of them known or given any credit. I don’t care if I’m known for what I create; all I care about is having it be worthwhile and useful, with people able to depend on it as something they take for granted in their lives. Like the safety pin. Who knows who created that? But everyone in the goddam galaxy makes use of safety pins, and
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To give life meaning.
“The Deity accepts even that,” Maggie said. “Even an attempt which led nowhere. The Deity knows your motive, and motive is everything.” “It wouldn’t matter,” Belsnor said, “if this whole colony, everybody in it, died. None of us contribute anything. We’re nothing more than parasites, feeding off the galaxy. ‘The world will little note or long remember what we do here.’”
“There are no miracles. As Spinoza proved centuries ago. A miracle would be a sign of God’s weakness, as a failure of natural law. If there were a God.”
“They didn’t create the universe. They’re not Manifestations of the Mentufacturer. All we have is their verbal report that they are Manifestations of the Deity. Why should we believe them? Naturally, if we ask them, ‘Are you God? Did you make the universe?’ they’ll reply in the affirmative. We’d do the same thing; white men, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, told the natives of North and South America exactly the same thing.”
“And God contains all categories of being. Therefore God can be absolutely-not-God, which transcends human reason and logic. But we intuitively feel it to be so. Don’t you? Wouldn’t you prefer a monism that transcends our pitiful dualism? Specktowsky was a great man, but there is a higher monistic structure above the dualism that he foresaw. There is a higher God.” He eyed her. “What do you think about that?” he asked, a little timidly.
Better if all men, wherever they are, were to die without knowing who did it or why.
As in my dream, he thought. The enemy within. Age, deterioration and death.
“You know, Specktowsky speaks about us being ‘prisoners of our own preconceptions and expectations.’ And that one of the conditions of the Curse is to remain mired in the quasi-reality of those proclivities. Without ever seeing reality as it actually is.”
“Isn’t it amazing, the lengths people will go to in an unconscious effort to block their having to face reality.
Again Maggie wrote. “I’m now asking, ‘Is there a God?’” She placed the slip before the tench and all of them, even Ignatz Thugg, waited tensely. The answer came. You would not believe me.
Death, he thought. That’s all I can think of now. And it’s easy to see why. Death for us has blotted everything else out; it has become, in less than twenty-four hours, the mainstay of our life.
There is a macabre irony about it; we all came here because we wanted to live more fully. We wanted to be useful. Everyone in this colony had a dream. Maybe that’s what was wrong with us, he thought. We have been lodged too deeply in our respective dream worlds. We don’t seem able to come out of them; that’s why we can’t function as a group. And some of us, such as Thugg and Dunkelwelt—there are some of us who are functionally, outright insane.
We made it up, Seth Morley thought, bewildered; memory of Specktowsky’s Book still filled his mind. The Intercessor, the Mentufacturer, the Walker-on-Earth—even the ferocity of the Form Destroyer. Distillate of man’s total experience with God—a tremendous logical system, a comforting web deduced by the computer from the postulates given it—in particular the postulate that God existed.
We could have survived the twenty years, Seth Morley said to himself, Knowing it would end; that would have kept us sane and alive. But the accident had come and now they circled, forever, a dead star. Their transmitter, because of the accident, functioned no longer, and so an escape toy, typical of those generally used in long, interstellar flights, had become the support for their sanity. That’s what really worries us, Morley realized. The dread that one by one we will slip into psychosis, leaving the others even more alone. More isolated from man and everything associated with man.
How about a world, he thought, in which we lie good and dead, buried in our coffins? That’s what we really want.
He thought, We will miss Roberta Rockingham when she dies; of us, she is the most benign and stable. Because, he realized, she knows she is soon going to die. Our only comfort. Death.
