She sighed, profoundly weary. “I should have gone directly to Tolerance years ago, instead of being so damned … tentative.”
“You didn’t want to upset them, upriver.”
“That, and also I was working with the avalanche theory: A few little falling stones, and whoops, here comes a general downfall to make Council Supervisory question what it’s doing!”
“Your petitions. So nicely thought out. So very nicely executed. With my help!”
She laughed. “I shall not forget your description of Boarmus’s face when you made him believe he was breaking out in words. That was fun. At my age, I’m entitled to have fun. Surely even God must have fun occasionally. I meant the petitions to provoke thought, to create discussion, but I underestimated the inertia in the system. I forgot that inertia is what bureaucracies are all about!”
“Except for the Provosts, no one heard of the petitions.”
“I chose the wrong audience. We should have gone to the people themselves. I heard Fringe say it, with my own ears, on the trip up from Shallow. She said, ‘You’ve got to leave people a way out.’ We should have offered the people a way out.”
“Isn’t that a little beyond your power? Where would you have had them go?”
She sighed. That was the question, of course. Only two Doors on Elsewhere. Both of them in Tolerance. Both of them guarded. No way to use either of them without a fight. “There’s home,” she said. “There’s beyond the wall here on Panubi. There’s room for some. Just because there isn’t room for everyone doesn’t mean I couldn’t have saved some. Or can’t now. There’s still time to save some!”
“Marjorie….”
“Come death or destruction, old friend, I will offer a choice to some.”
“To whom?”
“There’s only one more province upriver of us. Thrasis. I’ll offer a choice to the women of Thrasis.”
“Despite how those upriver are going to feel about it?”
“Despite that. Why should the women of Thrasis go on suffering alone if we can give them a way out, a change in their lives?”
His voice in her mind was amused but tender. “You’re still hoping for change!”
Change. Oh, yes, she went on hoping for change. She had always hoped for change since … When had it been? When she was nine? Ten? As a special treat she had been taken to an exhibition of things found in an ancient tomb, artifacts of a people who had lived—what had it been?—five or six thousand years before she was born. Oh, the anticipation of that! She had thought of it as utterly wonderful, seeing things so old….
And she had seen: wooden chairs, carved and painted, not unlike chairs at home, a wagon that looked a lot like her pony cart, a hand mirror not unlike one her mother had—bronze, not glass, but otherwise much alike.
She had waited for the wonderful, but there had been only ordinary things: tables, boxes, wagons, jars, dishes, spoons.
“You were disappointed?” He’d been reading her mind.
“Not so much in the people from the past as I was disappointed in us. I’d had a childish belief that man was changing. Past was barbaric and primitive. Present was civilized and advanced. That was my faith, strong as my religion! But here we were, after six thousand years, still using the same furniture!”
“So man hadn’t changed much?”
“When I got older, I decided it was our own fault, that we’d stopped evolution. We’d defined ourselves as what man was supposed to be. We’d looked in the mirror and said, ‘That’s Homo sapiens, right there, right now. The brightest and best among us are Homo sapiens, but the sick, stupid, sociopathic ones are also Homo sapiens. Every warped and evil thing born to us is nonetheless Homo sapiens because it comes from a human womb and is therefore sacred! Homo sapiens, crown of creation, the only important living thing! When God made the rest of the universe, he was only kidding around, but when he made man, he meant it.”
Laughter, deep and abiding.
She flushed angrily. “Well, it’s true! It’s exactly the way we thought and acted. Man didn’t have to be better! At least, not in terms of western thought, he didn’t. He strutted and crowed and told himself just as he was, he was made in the image of God! It was easier to depend on heaven than be responsible on earth, but humans were divinely created, so why worry.”
“And you don’t believe he was? Human?”
“He wasn’t what I thought of as sapiens. In my opinion, very few of us were sapiens. Maybe none of us were. Maybe we’d had a chance at becoming sapiens, but we threw it away.”
“When did mankind do that?”
“In Nela’s time, I think. It was then that pitiful people who saw no reality and knew no science declared the holiness of reproduction. And while the liberals were preserving the right to beget, the reactionaries were preserving the faults in our gene pool. We could corrupt and destroy all the rest of creation, but our own germ plasm was sacred. It didn’t matter that there were billions of us, that anything sapiens about us was far more threatened by our numbers than by any change we might make in ourselves….”
“But man was saved, wasn’t he?”
“You mean out there?” She gestured at the far stars. “Yes, in spite of ourselves, we were. Almost incidentally, we were. But not here. Here priests and prophets are doing what priests and prophets have always done, forbidding their people to become anything except what they already are! No interference. God, what foolishness!” Her shoulders shook and she mopped at her eyes.
“I know.” The feel of a pat on a shoulder, a hug, a vast unhuman sympathy.
“Just such a pity, that’s all,” she said, recovering herself with a last shuddering sob. “And when I’m foolish enough to try to improve matters, I have to struggle against all the weight of human nature plus the nature of those upriver. It’s like being married all
