Nothing ever came of the far-out colonization schemes. When all was said and done and the Blight was truly gone, it turned out that the habitable planets and moons had been hospitable enough to make room for the frightened and the desperate. Once they had departed, Thyker had found itself greatly depleted but much more homogenous. By coincidence (though there were those who alleged otherwise), the largest number of surviving and remaining inhabitants on Thyker had been High Baidee, devotees of the Overmind, followers of the prophetess, Morgori Oestrydingh, who had appeared on Thyker a thousand years before through a Door which no one had known was there.
The Door had been and still was—if anyone wanted to go look at it—near an oasis park a little beyond the western suburbs of Serena. It most resembled a twisted loop of timeworn metal set on a spacious dais of native stone, which, because of its undoubted antiquity and its convenient location, had acquired a certain mythic reputation and had come to be used as a site for all kinds of concerts and celebrations.
On that dais, during the solemn celebration of the bicentennial of the colonization of Thyker, while the patriarch of a local sect was delivering his annual blessing of the herds (drought-tolerant vorgashirs resulting from a cross between the ancient Manhome camel and a horny lizardlike creature found originally in the Vlees System), the twisted monument suddenly lit up with a curtain of fire and a dragon came through. The patriarch’s blessing was being recorded for posterity, and thus, perforce, the arrival of the dragon was recorded also: a great horned and callused beast with fangs and a fiery mane. Said some. Actually, the dragon did not show up terribly well on playback. Everyone saw something, but few people could describe or agree upon what they saw. Archives was no help. It could not recall what it had never actually seen, and there was not enough there to extrapolate from.
Everyone agreed, however, that the prophetess was riding upon a partially visible and quite formidable creature, that she dismounted and came forward to take the patriarch by the hand and pat him familiarly upon his shoulder. The patriarch, whose back had been turned to the monument, had not seen her arrive and believed for a moment she was part of the celebration, a notion of which he was disabused when he turned and caught a glimpse of the dragon before fainting dead away. A brave subdeacon had carried him to safety, and after a moment’s hesitation the prophetess had turned to address the crowd in archaic and imperfectly understandable language, which was later transcribed and annotated by the Circle of Scrutators and thereby made perfectly clear.
“My name is Morgori Oestrydingh,” she had said. “My companion has no name.”
A student of ancient languages in the crowd appointed himself translator and asked her why she had come. She told them the dragon had come to explore, and she herself had come to preach the opening of the mind. It was all there, on the recordings, the old woman with her feathery white hair floating like mist around her head, her intensely bright eyes seeming to stare into the hearts of those she spoke to, and, hanging like mist upon the air behind her, confused elements of tooth and claw and scale, which added up to an impression of dragonhood without ever condescending to be representational.
Prophetess Morgori Oestrydingh stayed on Thyker long enough to teach them that the twisted structure was an ancient Door to non-human worlds, that it had been built by—and those worlds had once been occupied by—the Arbai people, and that the Arbai people had been of surpassing abilities and goodness. She stayed long enough to preach at them for the better part of a season, naming them the Baidee, or “New Bai” people. They must become a new Bai people she had said. The first Bai people had been the Arbai, inventors of the Doors, and there were other Bai people on worlds Morgori had visited since. The prophetess’s life had been spent in a search for the Arbai, throughout a thousand worlds and over some thousands of years, so she said, and she told stories of those worlds and times that astonished the people.
She also said other things:
“God does not know our names any more than we know the individual cells in our brains,” she had said. “God is the Overmind of which all minds are part.”
And, “It is our minds and not any other attribute which gives us personhood and value. We share intelligence with other living things, and they are no less important than we. Even creatures without detectable intelligence have adapted themselves to play necessary roles. To make God in our image or we in God’s is blasphemy.”
And, “When our minds are gone, our purpose is gone, and we are only meat, whether living or dead. Personhood resides only in the mind, not in the body, though once the mind has gone, there are always those who will try to maintain the body, because the body and what the body did are all they knew or cared about.”
And, “Freedom comes only with uncertainty. Because man does not like to feel impotent, he would rather believe himself guilty of causing evil than to know he is helpless before uncertainty. If there is uncertainty, there must be evil, just as there must be good. You must accept that evil and pain may be among the inevitable consequences of every action, just as goodness and joy may be. Do not attempt to find explanation either in good intentions or
