Neverness (The Neverness Cycle Book 1)

by David Zindell

But the people had no lord—nor masters, sensei, matriarchs, kings, protectors or anyone else to direct their day–to–day activities. They were anarchists. As I learned, they were probably the descendants of hibakusha who centuries ago had fled the oppressive hierarchies of the Japanese Worlds. However, they seemed to have only the sketchiest memories of their passage through the Entity. No one could tell me how they had once piloted their deep ships and scurfed the windows of the manifold because no one remembered. And no one cared. They had lost the noblest of arts, and most other arts as well. The planet’s few hundred thousand people were barbarians who spent their long days eating, swimming, copulating and roasting their bodies brown in the sun’s red oven. The society of Kamilusa was one of those stale utopias where robots did the work of man’s hands and made more robots to do ever more work. And worse, they had programmed their computers to direct their robots, and worse still, they had let their computers do all their thinking for them. I spent five hundred–hour days there, and not once did I find a woman or man who cared where life had come from or where it was going to. (Though many of the children possessed a natural, soon–to–be–crushed curiosity.) Remarkably, no one—except perhaps the computers—seemed to realize that Kamilusa lay within the brain of a goddess.