Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“The times constrain us, Vaemar, my love. How you put your mind to work is not a matter of personal preference. No man is an island, nor a kzin either. Mathematicians are ultimately the most practical of people; once you see things clearly there are no choices.”

Vaemar considered. He recalled that she had once pulled his tail playfully. Very few other beings could have done that and lived. But she saw everything with a terrible clarity and she saw his mind. She saw him as a mind; the outer form was not important to Dimity, just something to be played with. What Dimity said was right. There were no choices.

“Thank you, Dimity. You have opened doors for me into strange and wonderful worlds. And now the abbot has opened another, and I must pass through. But I will not forget the other worlds. Nor the joy of exploring them.”

“Come and see me when the need arises, Vaemar. When the squalor of engaging with mental and moral pygmies becomes too much to bear; when the pain of not being able to say what you think becomes intolerable, for fear of its effect on fools, I shall be here for you.”

“Where does it all come from?”

“There’s this little village, out in the boondocks. East of the range. Started off just after the kzin surrender, lots of people realized they’d starve to death without a government to organize bringing stuff into the city, and we hanged or shot most of the collabos. So some smart folk went out to do some farming and keep themselves in food. And some were already out there. Seems to have worked, there’s a whole collection of villages out there now, and the land around gets farmed and hunted.”

“But gold? And other stones?”

The trader shrugged. “There’s other stuff besides farming land. There’s a whole lot of country out there, some people just upped and grabbed their share of it. Like the Wild West in some of those old movies. Someone found the gold. There’s big seams of the stuff in quartz sometimes. And there are things pushed up from the deeps by volcanoes, plenty of those around. The abbey’s built on one.”

“And this comes from the other side of the abbey?”

“So they tell me.”

“Don’t you want to go off and get yourself some of that there gold?” The man was hungry. You could see it in his eyes.

“Nope. There’s other things out there besides gold. Like kzin hunters, who went out too, wanting to stay away from the conquerors, and with a mighty big grudge against humans, some of them. And other things, some of them as murderous as a kzin. The tigrepards and the lesslocks are bad enough, and the Morlocks, when they come out onto the surface at night, are worse. Me, I’m a city boy. Don’t fancy getting ate.”

“Still, if a bunch of guys, say a dozen of us with guns, was to go and find this place, we could get us our hands on some of the gold, maybe?”

“Maybe. And then again, maybe not. One of they kzin could take out a dozen men with his bare claws ’n’ fangs afore they could work out where to point the guns. Believe me, I’ve seen it. Thirty of us jumped a kzin during the war. I got away.”

“Can’t be much kind of law out there, yet,” the man argued. The trader could read him like a picture book, one with really dirty pictures. Yes, and a dozen armed men could find that village and take all that gold without having to do much digging at all, at all. Some people couldn’t abide work. He shrugged. No point in telling them the village was well armed. He remembered a psychopath in the early days of the Occupation, maddened by everything, a really nasty piece of work, who had enjoyed killing orphaned children. A kzin had decided the children were the Patriarch’s property. What had happened to the man had not been pleasant. This man, and his accomplices too, were the sort of people Wunderland would be better off without.

“I wouldn’t know. Like I said, I don’t want to get ate.”

This wasn’t quite true. The trader had spent some time yarning and exchanging gossip with the men and women and the odd kzin who had come in from the village. And he had heard of the judge. Judge Tom, the Law East of the Ranges. He sounded a tough cookie.

“Dimity Carmody says that you have a lovely, simple mind,” Vaemar told the abbot. He nodded.

“Yes, I do have a simple mind,” he admitted. “But it has taken me many years to get it that way. I think she was born with one, lucky girl.”

“She said that in a better world, you might yourself have been a mathematician. She said you have the hunger for transcendence which is the mark.”

“She would know. I have never seen myself that way. I feel myself to be too muddled, too confused. Still, it could be worse. I could be like so many people, who are so muddled and confused they haven’t even noticed they are muddled and confused. I give thanks to God that He has shown me something of the extent of my muddle and confusion. Just enough to see it and not so much as to make me despair. And now you have some questions about politics, I think.”

“Yes, some quite basic ones. For a start, why are there two political parties? What is special about two?” Vaemar was puzzled. He was stretched out before a roaring fire, polishing his ear-ring, while the abbot was sitting in a chair close by.

“I believe there was some mathematics developed about a century ago to consider that question, but it has puzzled others before you,” the abbot told him. He went on and started to sing in an artificial deep voice:

“ I often think it’s comical, Fa la la, Fa la la,

“ That every boy and every girl that’s born into this world alive,

“ Is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative.

“ Fa, la, la. ”

The abbot looked quizzically at Vaemar, who was astonished by what seemed to be unusual frivolity, even by human standards, and explained:

“That was written in the last part of the nineteenth century, so you are hardly the first person to find it puzzling. Gilbert’s guardsman did too. It has something to do with stability. You see, human beings have a good share of herd genes. Ninety-eight percent of our genes we have in common with chimpanzees, and about seventy percent we share with cows. And rather more with wolves. We have an impulse towards the collective. We also have an impulse towards hierarchical power structures, as do you kzin. We also have some who are individuals with a strong wish for freedom. These things are written inside us, and we all have something of them. In our various cultures, some of those impulses are expressed more freely than others, and get buttressed by memes.

“A political party is a coalition of memes, and these can change. For example, in Gilbert’s time, conservatives were generally much more collectivist and hierarchical, and the liberals much more individualist. In our day it is nearly the other way around, the conservatives are more inclined to individualism, the liberals are more collectivist. Of course, a coalition of individualists can be formed, but they tend to argue with each other rather a lot, so they are underrepresented in the political system. The individualists in the present conservative party are perhaps less individual and more hierarchical than those who vote for them.

“Of course, the general population has all these dispositions to different degrees. In any society, individuals learn that they have to cooperate to stay alive, and collectivists learn they have to be able to be independent sometimes. But the collectivist impulse ensures that people gather together with those who think alike, that’s the nature of collectivism. And those who need freedom stay away from them, disliking the mutual coercion the collectivists habitually use on each other. But the individualists, too, need the support of a collective. They tend to feel ‘There is no such thing as society,’ because they make relatively few concessions for the approval of their partners. They expect to have to fight for what they want. The collectivist impulse means that an individual who has it strongly virtually lives for the approval of other members of the collective. Both are survival strategies, and are seldom met in their pure forms, but the genes are there, and the memes to express them in any culture.