Panthos kept silence for a span, watching the fugitives. Most were braving the sun, leaving the shelter of the sanctuary to the vulnerable among them. Mothers comforted children, fathers led them to what meager shade lay at the building or under trees. Exhausted, stunned, they nonetheless bore themselves well and talked softly. Always their glances went back to the evangelist.
“What is this lifeway of yours?” Panthos asked.
Kernaldi smiled. His voice eased, the tone of one reasonable man to another. “That’s nothing to explain in a single quick lecture, my friend. How much of the history do you know?”
“Very little. Tell me what you can.”
Still Kernaldi spoke calmly. “Selador was not the first to see that all existence is unity and life its culmination — its purpose, for how can a lifeless universe have meaning? Intelligent life, awareness, is the goal. Rather, I should say, it’s the forefront, for it’s to evolve onward, till at the end it is identical with the Ultimate that realizes itself through life. We humans, though, have taken a wrong turning. If we persist as we are, we’ll become more and more irrelevant to the Meaning, or even, on Earth, a threat to it. In the course of time, our race will go through misery to extinction.” He shrugged. “In everyday language, a mistake of nature’s. Selador didn’t want that to happen.”
“He, uh, preached against machines, didn’t he?”
“No. He was not technophobic It’s unfortunate that some of us today are. Having a technology is part of being intelligent. But humans have taken it too far, and in bad directions. They’ve adapted themselves to it, rather than it to the Meaning. They’ve cut themselves off from the living world. Too often, they’re its enemy.” Kernaldi gestured. “The desert here was once woodland and prairie. Our souls have shriveled like this country. Our duty to it, to the future, and to ourselves is to restore it and begin to live wholly with life.”
He smiled again, ruefully. “But now I am preaching. Sorry. I’ll only add that a great many local people, both high and humble, hate the idea. It would make them, or at any rate their descendants, the enclave.”
“I’m surprised they don’t regard it as just a daydream,” Panthos said, wishing he could be kindlier.
Kernaldi took the remark in good part. “Oh, it is possible. I won’t live to see it carried through, but we can make a start, and will if we’re given the chance. Including the right sort of technology.” He lowered his voice. “Bioengineering doesn’t have to produce monsters. Apologies to those brave men of yours, but they are an example of what I’m talking about. Our scientific knowledge is valuable, but we should use it to restore a natural world that is in accordance with our own natures. Spacefaring is another example. It gave us many wonderful things and insights, but it is not an end in itself — that attitude has also produced monsters, of the spirit if not the body — and the time is overpast for us to take what we have gained from it for the enrichment and enlargement of life and mind, here and now.”
Had Kithhood brought him to his faith? wondered Panthos. Generation after generation within metal, cruising the hollowness between the stars; alien planets, alien beings; on his own brief visits to Earth, an ever dwindling Kith Town from which Earth grew ever more estranged. . . .
Kernaldi put aside the emotion that had begun to show and went back to practicalities. “Well, obviously, in the course of time we Seladorians have developed our peculiar rites, observances, practices; and we stick together, if only because we have to. That alone gets us disliked. And we have our conflicts with the Governance. As a Kithman, I understand all this very well.”
Sharply: “Have I said enough? Your turn. What about these people you see before you?”
The sun was a fire, the air a furnace. In the darkness of the sanctuary, a baby cried.
Panthos was young. Decision came fast. Yet he felt quite coolheaded as he answered, “You’re right. Holding you guarded is no real protection. We’ll escort you to the garrison.”