“Life and love of every creative thing a human being stands for and is capable of achieving,” Foy answered. “When Earth replaced the old gods of living nature with its mechanistic science, it reduced nature to inanimate matter running according to mechanical laws, within which life became a pointless accident, thought was no more than a byproduct of life, and morality an invention of wishful thinking. The gods that the new priesthood served were not knowledge or wisdom, but better technologies for accelerating the acquisition of material wealth through legalized theft and violence.” Foy looked at Vorse briefly as if for confirmation and tossed out a palm again. “And why not? All other meaning and purpose had been stripped away. The only aspect of individual worth that was recognized and rewarded was efficacy in contributing to profits. No wonder so many knew intuitively that their lives had the potential for better things, and rebelled. That was what drove the migration to Kronia.”
“So is that what you see as Kronia’s purpose?” Keene asked. “To go out and become part of a living universe?”
“Whatever is in its nature to become,” Foy replied. “The High Cultures that have emerged through human history are themselves living organisms that appear, grow, flourish, and eventually die. Each possesses its own unique soul. In the course of its lifetime, everything that a culture produces—its arts; its religion; its mathematics, its sciences; its philosophy and world view, works and constructions—all are an expression of that soul. It can be no other way. Like any organism, it has no choice but to actualize the imperative that’s inherent in its nature. Kronia will become what it is destined to become.”
“Becoming one with God?”
“I suppose you could look at it that way.”
Keene was surprised to hear himself talking in such terms. It wasn’t the kind of thing that his work or his inclinations led him into very often. Sariena talked with Vicki about similar things, and how Kronia’s scientists saw the universe as an organism designed for a purpose—a view totally at odds with the belief system that Keene had grown up hearing. Now here was Foy, promoting it as the world view of a future star-going civilization. Not that long ago, Keene would have politely respected such sentiments but would have remained unaffected by them. They weren’t relevant to what had been his world then—the world of the mathematically and physically accessible, made up of tangible entities. But now, maybe because of the change that had taken place in his vantage point and his situation, as he listened he found himself strangely stirred. Something deep inside was already glimpsing the vision of a race that would one day be, their ships casting off across voids to other worlds and other suns to find their God. Human technology functioning as the essential partner of life, not stifling and replacing life as it had on Earth. It could only have come about in the conditions that reigned on Kronia, where life and technology were mutually interdependent, and neither could exist without the other.
Foy had moved to stand with his back to the window and was watching Keene, letting him form his own conclusions in his own time. Keene stared at the image of Earth again, and then back at the white-haired figure in the silver-gray robe, looking like a prophet of old or the abbot of some remote and fabled Tibetan temple. Vorse didn’t contribute but was looking on in silent endorsement.
“That’s what you really believe here?” Keene said. “What Kronia believes. There is a meaning to it all, that we—Mankind—can discover.” What he was hearing was a repudiation of the whole doctrine of existence responsible for shaping the world he had known—the doctrine that the authorities whom that world had relied on to know had said was irrefutable and unquestionable. The immensity of the implications that it opened up for the future that was portended, and the significance of the roles that he, like everyone, stood to play in it, was dizzying.
“Or maybe rediscover,” Foy said. “One of the things that we’d very much like to know more about is the culture that existed out here before, when Earth was a satellite of Saturn.”