Keene had the uncomfortable feeling that it was something she would have expected a child to understand but was being too polite to say so. But they were too close now to so many things that he too had wondered about for a long time for him to feel offended. “But wouldn’t you still have all those things if you didn’t put in the effort?” he said. “I mean, what are they going to do—throw you out on the ice?”
“Of course not—no more than they would an invalid or a mental incompetent.” Sariena shook her head again. “But why would anyone do that deliberately—deprive themselves of the fulfillment of being needed? That’s surely what the essence of being human is all about. Has Earth really forgotten?”
Keene stared at her. The message was finally getting through.
“Kropotkin,” Vicki murmured distantly. “The first base that they established on Dione was called Kropotkin, wasn’t it?”
“Some Russian, oh . . . way back, wasn’t he?” Keene said. He was still digesting what he had heard from Sariena.
“Peter Kropotkin,” Sariena confirmed, nodding. “Mondel adopted a lot of his ideas. He was a revolutionary who tried to change the face of revolution by arguing that people need each other. The necessity of mutual aid should be sufficient to guide human affairs. On Earth, he failed. But . . .” She waved a hand resignedly and let the sentence hang. Maybe it had just needed the different environment, the gesture seemed to say.
A system that measured success by giving, not taking; where “wealth” was assessed not by possessions but by what one was able to contribute. Perhaps such a scheme came naturally in an environment where the survival of all depended on the competence of each. Keene tried to visualize what it would feel like to be part of such an order, to be motivated by its values. But he was unable. He didn’t have the conditioning. Inwardly, he was also skeptical. Such utopian-sounding ideas had been tried through the ages—often with some success in the early phases—but always, invariably, as numbers grew, the ideals of the founders became diluted, and the realities of human nature asserted themselves, such experiments had ended in eventual strife and disintegration. Maybe, as Sariena said, in a new environment removed from Earth and its legacies from the past, the social dynamics could evolve differently. Time would tell.
Vicki seemed fascinated. Perhaps being away from Earth for the first time and seeing it in a new perspective against the vastness of everything else was affecting her. “Is it just a social structure?” she asked Sariena. “Or is there some deeper belief system involved too?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh . . . it sounds pretty close to what all the great religions tried to teach for thousands of years—originally, I mean; not the political counterfeits that always end up taking over.”
“Kronia doesn’t have anything like a formal church,” Sariena replied. “It’s more of an internal, personal thing.” She waved an arm at the panorama outside. “But most of our scientists believe that all of that and our being here talking and wondering about it suggests design for a purpose more than the meaningless, impossible accident that your systems teach. It means that our sciences operate within a different intellectual climate. If you insist that `science’ only deals with the mechanical and material by definition, you might turn out to be excluding it from the only questions that really matter.”
Sariena’s answer surprised Keene and touched a skeptical note. “So is this intelligence behind it all the same God that armies hacked each other to pieces for, and people used to get burned at stakes over?” he asked dryly.
Sariena shook her head—a trifle impatiently. “Of course not. Those are results of the political counterfeits that Vicki mentioned, when the heirs of a religious tradition sell out to the power structure and give them a means of social control. I doubt if the intelligence I’m talking about has any concern with the day-to-day affairs that we imagine are so important.”
Keene fell silent with a nod. It was close to what had been happening with the heirs of the scientific tradition on Earth, too.