Zambendorf. “I’ve already told you the answer, and it’s final—there’s no way
you’re going down there, and nothing that Clarissa Eidstadt says will change
it.”
14
“IT HAS LONG BEEN MY CUSTOM TO TRUST NO ONE’S ACCOUNT OF another’s words, and it
has served me well,” Dornvald said to Thirg, who was riding alongside him.
“Whether any Lifemaker speaks to priests and hearers, I know not—that is His
affair and theirs. But it seems to me that any services of mine that He would
lay claim upon, He would be able enough to make known to me Himself.” The party
was moving just below the skyline along a ridge that would bring them to a high
pass through the mountains. The main column had doubled up on the barren, open
terrain, and scouts were riding a short distance ahead and on the flanks. The
forests of southern Kroaxia now lay far below and behind.
Thirg had been surprised and impressed. Although for most of the time Dornvald
affected a simple and direct manner, his conversation revealed glimpses of an
acuity of thinking and a perspicacity of observation that Thirg rarely
encountered. The outlaw seemed to display intuitively the same disinclination to
take anything for granted that Thirg had taught himself only after extensive
labors. Did the outlaw way of life breed suspicion of appearances and assurances
as a habit, Thirg wondered, or did outlaws become outlaws because they were
doubters already? At any rate the discourse was providing a welcome distraction
from the monotony of the ride.
“A proposition which I would not desire to contest,” Thirg agreed. “So does the
possibility not suggest itself that Nature is no more obliged to contrive an
explanation of Life that is simply comprehended by the minds of robeings than it
is to construct the world in a shape that is simply perceived? Did Lifemaker
indeed create robeing, therefore, or, more likely I am beginning to suspect, did
robeing create Lifemaker as the more convenient alternative to widening his own
powers of comprehension?”
“I have no answer to that,” Dornvald said. “But it seems to me that you are
substituting a worse unknown for one that is mystery enough already. Round
worlds and worlds beyond the sky are strange notions to contemplate, yet not
beyond the bounds to which imagination could accommodate itself. But is not the
riddle of Life of a different complexity? For is not all Life in the form of
machines that were assembled by machines, which in turn were assembled by
machines, and so for as far back as we care to permit our imaginations to
postulate? But however far that be, must we not arrive inevitably at the bound
which requires the first machine to have been assembled by that which was not a
machine? Even if your round world of distances dispenses with need of any
Barrier, this barrier more surely bounds the world of imagination. Or would you
make a circle out of time itself?”
“Again I am unable to quarrel with your reasoning,” Thirg replied. “Nor with
that of priests, for that matter, for this is their logic also. That that which
was not machine assembled the first machine I would not argue, since were it
machine, then that which it assembled could not have been the first machine by
our own premise. Nor do I take exception to him who would name this nonmachine
machine-assembler ‘Lifemaker,’ since it is as well described by such a name as
by any other. But that the one conclusion should compel us also to construct of
necessity a realm beyond reach of reason and unknowable to inquiry, I cannot
accept. That is the barrier which I would dispute.”
The column closed up again to pick its way in single file along a narrow track
crossing an icefall, with a steep drop below on one side and a sheer cliff
extending upward to the crestline on the other. Beyond the icefall the ground
became open again and resumed its rise; the riders took up open order once more,
and Thirg moved alongside Dornvald.
“The question is no more answered than before, Questioner-of-Barriers,” Dornvald
observed, evidently having turned the matter over in his mind. “For now we must