The priest touched his cross and it became a circle with two legs, a Tauran religious icon. “Symbol, metaphor. The nameless, I think, are more real than we are.”
“But you’ve never seen or touched one,” I said. “Just guessing.”
“No one ever has. You’ve never seen a neutrino, but you don’t doubt their existence. In spite of `impossible’ characteristics.”
“All right. But you can prove neutrinos are there, or something is there, because otherwise particle physics wouldn’t work out. The universe couldn’t exist.”
“I could just say, `I rest my case.’ You don’t like the idea of the nameless because it smacks of the supernatural.”
Fair enough. “Okay. But for the first fifty–or fifteen hundred–years of my life, and for thousands of years preceding me, the universe could be explained without resorting to your mysterious nameless.” I turned to Antres. “That’s also true of Taurans, isn’t it?”
“Very much so, yes. The nameless are real, but only as intellectual constructs.”
“Let me ask you an old question,” the priest said. “How likely is it that humans and Taurans, evolving independently on planets forty light-years apart, would meet at the same level of technology, and be similar enough psychologically to fight a war?”
“A lot of people have asked that question,” I nodded toward Antres, “and a lot of Taurans, I suppose. Some of the people from my future, under my command, belonged to a religious sect that had it all explained. Something like your nameless.”
“But you have a better explanation?”
“Sorting. If they had been pre-technological, we wouldn’t have interacted. If they’d been thousands of years ahead of us, there would have been no war. Extermination, maybe.” Antres made a sound of agreement. “So it’s partly coincidence, but not completely.”
“It was not at all coincidence. We Omni have been on both planets since before humans and Taurans had language, which we gave you. Or technology, which we controlled.
“We were Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton. In your parents’ time, we took control of NASA, to retard human development in space.”
“And you masterminded the Forever War.”
“I don’t think so. I think we just set up the initial conditions. You could have cooperated with one another, if it had been in your natures.”
“But first you made sure our natures were warlike,” Marygay said.
“That I don’t know. That would be far before my time.” He shook his head. “Let me explain. We’re not born the way you are; nor you, Antres 906. I think there are a fixed number of us, around a hundred, and when one of us dies, a new one comes to be.
“You’ve seen how I can split into two or several pieces. When it’s time for a new Omni–when one of us dies somewhere–I or someone else will split, and half will stay separate, and go off to become a new individual.”
“With all the parent’s memories and skills?” Rii said.
“I wish. You start out a duplicate of your parent, but as the months and years go by, that fades away, replaced by your own experience. I would love to have a hundred fifty thousand years of ancestral memory. But all I have is hearsay, passed on by others of my kind.”
“Including this `nameless’ stuff,” I said.
“That’s true. And at various times in my life, I’ve wondered whether it might not be a delusion–some sort of fiction that we share. Like a religion: there’s no way you or I could prove that the nameless don’t exist. And if they do, their existence can explain the otherwise inexplicable. Like the coincidence of parallel evolution, Taurans and humans coming together at just the right time. Like random people exploding.”
“Which happens all the time,” Cat said.
“All sorts of inexplicable things happen. Most of them do get explained. I think sometimes the explainers are wrong. If, in the normal course of things, you came upon the remains of someone who had died the way your friend did, you would have assumed foul play; some kind of bomb or something. Not a whim of the nameless.”
The sheriff gave words to my thoughts: “I still haven’t ruled out foul play. We’ve watched you do all sorts of things we would call impossible. It is much easier for me to assume you did this, somehow, than to posit the existence of invisible malevolent gods.”