Chaos Space - Marianne de Pierres [37]
Manners and grace, he thought sourly. An interest in humanesque kind? All crimes, no doubt, to the current Pre-Eminence.
As Amaury bit into a pastry, Thales became aware that he was waiting patiently for him to speak. ‘My apologies again, Amaury. Meditation sometimes leaves me preoccupied. Rene, my wife, calls it my introspection hangover.’ His laugh was intentionally bitter. ‘Not only that, but I am somewhat uninformed about wider political topics. I have been so consumed by Scolar’s own problems. Though it seems that little changes out there. OLOSS maintains its deep suspicion of the Extropists, and continues to hold to its ridiculous apartheid. Since the Stain Wars no one travels to the Extropist quarter of Orion.’
‘You are not fearful of the transhumans, Thales?’ asked Amaury.
Thales answered plainly. ‘I am more fearful of my own demons.’ He glanced up from his last mouthful of egg. ‘Does it shock you to hear that?’
But the old man was still smiling. ‘There is very little that would shock me and, in truth, I am of the same mind. If humanesques were more concerned with mastering their own “demons”, as you called them, and less with mastering the demons of others, then harmony would not be merely one of our ideals.’
‘Aren’t ideals our vocation?’
‘Ideals are our life force,’ corrected the old man. ‘Realising those ideals is our vocation. Anything less is our failure.’
Thales detected something then: a conviction within the man that was as compelling and fervent as any he had known, but so delicately... so subtly veiled that it might have slipped past unnoticed. And yet the very quietness of it, the surety, stirred Thales’s passion. ‘Have you heard of the discovery near Mintaka? A godlike Entity, it is being called.’
Amaury leaned forward, his eyes alight and keen. ‘Only scraps. Tell me what you know.’
‘Precious little, other than that it is a manifestation of dark energy which has the means to communicate with regular sentients.’
‘And how did this energy make itself known?’
‘There is talk of it saving the life of a simple mineral scout, an average man who now goes by the title of God Discoverer. From that point a bevy of researchers have collected to study it. It is said to have intelligence far beyond anything we could imagine. Hence the title of God.’
‘It is curious, our obsession with the concept of all-knowing and how so many of us cling to it as their vision of God. When, I wonder, will we be brave enough to cut our umbilical cord to the notion of something greater?’
‘You sound like an atheist, Amaury.’
‘It is not a word I acknowledge. For as you know, Thales, giving credence to one thing gives equal credence to its opposite. I would personally erase all religious concepts—including the naturalistic’
‘You mean God within nature?’
Amaury nodded. ‘We lose autonomy each time we lend our thoughts to these beliefs.’
Thales felt a tingling in his body. The man’s discourse was both stimulating and uncomfortable. ‘You mean we refuse to grow up.’
Amaury nodded. ‘You. Me. All of us, Thales.’
‘But surely choice is more important than anything else. We should be free to choose what we believe.’
‘Only when we can see the whole picture, Thales, not just our little corner of it.’ Amaury’s eyes sparkled. ‘Surely you agree that informed choice is the best choice? And humanesques are eternally mired in their own limitations. Now tell me, is the Entity old by our measuring?’
Thales shrugged. ‘One would expect so, although I have not seen any empirical reports.’
Amaury moved his fingers in the air as if flexing them, yet Thales knew it to be more of a mental stretching than a physical. ‘Why would an ancient wisdom choose now to reveal itself? Has anyone thought to question its appearance?’
‘OLOSS has sent Astronomeins to study it and has allowed Geneers, Lawmon, Dieters and archiTects into its tutelage—but no philosophers