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of Earth's history. Life had its seasons like the year, and when one came
naturally to its close it was time not to dwell on false attachments to the
past but to move on into harmony with the next. Showm's life was in its autumn
now, the season for returning nourishment to the soil, when the wisdom and
experience accrued along the way made it possible to give back what the
earlier stages had necessitated borrowing. Spring had been the season for
creating, and summer, that for nurturing and sending forth life. For the
Thurien, the spiritual delight of experiencing life and growth, of creating
and building, was the most precious reward that the universe had to offer. It
was the reason for existing, and making it possible was the reason why the
universe existed. The universe was a desert waiting to be brought to life.
Although the aberration was not entirely unknown in the long history of their
species, the notion of willfully killing a sapient being was about the most
abhorrent that most Thuriens were capable of conceiving.
They believed that in a way similar to that in which the observed universe was
an infinitesimal grain of the totality making up the Multiverse, so the
Multiverse itself was merely an aspect of something incomparably vaster. In
this domain dwelled the true soul that the heart of a thinking, feeling being
connected to. It continued to exist while the personas it created came and
passed, each of a nature and formed in such circumstances as the soul needed
to heal and to grow. Although the personas might be discarded, the things
their experiences had revealed and taught were retained and absorbed, much as
with the characters that were temporarily manufactured for some kinds of game.
Although the death of a persona, when it came, was thus seen as merely the
closing of another season, to cut short the soul's connection would be to
starve its essential growth.
Even more, the transient lives of the personas served as nurseries for
developing such qualities conducive to the soul's higher life as
understanding, creativity, gentleness, and compassion. But the act, or even
the contemplation, of killing and destruction invoked all the emotions and
insensibilities that were the precise opposite. The perpetrator was debased
and deformed, violating the self's inner nature in a way far exceeding any
outrage done to the victim. To the Thurien, it represented the ultimate
denial, a rejection of all meaning to the universe, and any reason for it to
exist. Small wonder then, Showm reflected, that in the world reduced to
mindless matter that they had created, and themselves to purposeless accidents
of it, that the majority of Terrans knew of no higher aspiration than the
accumulation of money or a craving to control the minds and lives of others.
She had known close love and the tenderness of motherhood, the ties of
friendship, the privilege of being able to help others find happiness in their
lives, the joys of creating and accomplishing, the feelings of admiration and
gratitude toward those whose work made hers possible. The high moments of
significance, when the splendor of existing and the meaning that the universe
stood for were revealed, she saw in the bright eyes and enraptured faces when
sages inspired the minds of the young; in colonizing ships lifting out of
orbit to head for a new world; in the communion of elderly sharing dreams and
reminiscences as they neared the end of their journey; in worlds clothed in
forests, mountains, and oceans. These were the things that the universe
existed for, in accord with its nature, that brought it to life. Life and the
universe produced a music that was heard by the soul. Everything that grew was
an expression of it.
She still had disturbed nights and moments of cold, gnawing horror at some of
the things she had learned in her researches of Earth: children forcibly
regimented into cults of mass murder; industries dedicated to death, the
annihilation of cities, eradication of whole cultures. She had read accounts
of armies seized by blood lust, hunting defenseless innocents down like vermin
and hacking them to pieces; of families burning and screaming under collapsing
buildings; of people starving, people drowning, people driven from their homes
into the snow to die. And all of it was planned, deliberate, celebrated by
some side or other as heroic and glorious. Showm had watched the recordings of
aircraft pouring bombs down upon the dazed and terrified survivors of towns
already turned into smoldering rubble; ships and vehicles packed with human
beings incinerated, cut to shreds, blown apart; people fleeing and falling
like blades of arui grass in a hailstorm. She had stared numbly at pictures of
the corpses, grotesque and stomach-wrenching: charred, mangled, dismembered,
disemboweled; twisted in ditches, ensnared in wire, crushed in mud, rotting in
heaps. She had watched the sorry processions bringing back the limbless, the
blind, the maimed, the insane wreckage of what had been husbands and sons,
brothers and lovers, youth with its dreams. At one point she had appealed to
VISAR for guidance on how such things could be. VISAR was unable to offer any.
And so she had wept. How could beings who were capable of thought and feeling
do such things? How could they believe the lies?
Even more incomprehensible, how could those who ruled and commanded promote
such lies? Not just to advance petty ambitions or carry out their schemes of
conquest, but in every sphere where humans struggled, plotted, allied, and
betrayed to set each against all, everyone a threat or a rival, to gain some
advantage one over another. The whole philosophy underlying their dealings
with each other was not only predicated on but exalted and glorified
self-seeking and exploitation, oppression, rapacity, cruelty, and the
enslavement of the weak to serve the strong, all rationalized in the ruthless
calculus of money that recognized efficacy of contributing to profit-making as
the sole measure of an individual's meaning or worth.
Mildred had described the leaders as the worst of thieves and scoundrels, and
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