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world where every man hates me.
Great."
It didn't really worry me all that much. It looked like the sort of thing I
could handle. I only get into difficulties when the situation demands that I
be nice to people.
Charlot, on the other hand, was very worried. He was nursing a lot of
bitterness about Chao Phrya. I could afford to be philosophical about the sad
story he'd just told us. It's a big galaxy. Things go wrong. People are always
getting hurt. When cultures collide, someone always suffers. But there's never
any way back to square one. These things happen. Too bad.
Being philosophical and cynical about things doesn't make them any
better, though. Charlot couldn't be cynical and philosophical, because he
saw his purpose in life the purpose of all human life in making things better.
He was unalterably committed to New Alexandria (just as the colonists were
unalterably committed to their Promised
Land), and he could never afford to shrug his shoulders. He had tremendous
faith in New Alexandria as an instrument of his brand of good.
I don't believe in any brand of good, and I have dire suspicions about New
Alexandria, and even direr ones about New Rome. It's not only generation
ships which give rise to the Promised Land syndrome, and at least
the children of the
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Zodiac would eventually be able to take a practical view of existence. I
doubted that New Alexandria and New Rome would ever change. Sacred ideas
are always more difficult to reify than sacred soil. I can't help thinking
that New Alexandria might be the biggest cultural-genocide machine of all
time. No matter how sincere its concern for the alien races of the galaxy, its
philosophy is unavoidably anthropocentric. Its precepts are human and its
methods are human. It's some comment on the New Alexandrian Way that the
much-vaunted synthesis of human and Khormon intellectual heritages resulted in
a big step forward on human technology. No Khormon, so far as I knew, was
flying a
Hooded Swan.
I didn't want to argue any of this with Charlot. I think my way, for
me. We could never even have compared ideas on a sensible basis. But I
knew that if he sent me down alone to the surface of Chao Phrya, I wouldn't be
able to throw myself wholeheartedly into his mission. He knew it too. I just
don't believe in
Homo galacticus, much
less in
Homo deus.
That's the way it is.
Meanwhile, back at the plot, Eve and I had both caught on to the dimensions
of the problem by now. We could look forward to trouble just as much as
Charlot.
"What do they think of the colony, down there on Chao Phrya?" I asked.
"They hate the very idea," said Charlot. "So what reception are they
likely to offer to the woman and the girl?"
"I don't know," he confessed. "I think they'd prefer to forget that
the colony existed. They won't thank anyone for reminding them of it.
They won't give the
White Fire permission to land. There's no possibility of that."
"But that's not what worries you?" inserted Eve. "You think they'll go down
anyway," I amplified. "I hope not," he said.
"But it makes for a diplomatic mess if they do," I said.
"Obviously."
But that wasn't what he was worried about, and I knew it.
His worries had been betrayed by his insistence that
I not let the
Zodiac mob suspect that the whole weight of New Roman Law might not stamp them
flat if they told us to buzz off. What frightened Charlot was the possibility
that New Rome might have far more interest in preserving peace than in solving
Titus Charlot's problems for him. He was afraid that the powers of
New Rome might conveniently decide that the evidence of kidnap wasn't
sufficient. Diplomatic trouble didn't bother him at all. But he thought that
the ground might be cut right out from under his feet if we had to wait for a
decision from New Rome and if the
Zodiac people managed to put in a strong protest. I could see why he was
willing to let me go down on my own, if there proved to be no other
immediate alternative.
For once, he had more faith in me than in the Law of New Rome.
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