Terry Pratchett - The Long Utopia

‘Of course they do,’ Stan said. ‘Game theory mandates it. No matter what system you have, a small proportion of cheats can always prosper.’

Roberta said, ‘We tolerate the cheats. Few succeed, actually. Remember that each of us can see the other’s moves clearly – it is as if you tried to cheat in a game open to all the players, like chess. It’s possible, but very difficult. And if an individual’s actions become excessive, social pressure is usually enough to correct the situation. We do have criminals, Rocky – only a handful, our numbers are small. We call them “ill”, and treat them accordingly.’

Stan said, ‘Maybe. But the very first Next individual most people heard of back on the Datum was called David. He was a criminal. Hijacked a military twain, killed most of the crew, got rescued by another twain, tried again. Next criminals are attracted to the human worlds, are they, Roberta?’

‘We are aware of such issues, and deal with them—’

‘Is it possible that the only Next that humans encounter out there in their own worlds are all criminals or insane?’

Rocky thought Roberta kept her temper remarkably well, after days of travelling with Stan, of goading like this. Maybe that was an authentic sign of superior intellect.

She said, ‘You should not rush to judgement. Now, the school …’

The ‘school’ was centred on a small building, but most of the teaching seemed to be done in the open air – if you could call it teaching.

Out in a yard fenced off by a rope, there were maybe thirty kids, Rocky thought, of all ages from toddlers up to fourteen or fifteen. They sat in groups talking, or they played at games, running, counting, clapping. Some laboured at what looked like actual school work, writing, assembling puzzles, working with tablets – no drawing, he noticed. All of this was laced by their usual high-speed quicktalk, a sound that merged into a kind of white noise for Rocky. The few adults here moved amongst the children, watching, listening, sometimes quietly talking among themselves, a few making notes on pads and tablets.

A child fell and scraped her knee, and started to cry, a very human sound. She was scooped up by a woman and taken indoors.

‘It’s like no classroom I was ever in,’ Rocky said.

Stan said enviously, ‘Yeah, but I wish I had been. All this freedom.’

Roberta said, ‘Most of the supervisors are family members. But our families aren’t like yours. Our numbers are still few, and our relationships are fluid as a logical consequence. We don’t have marriages so much as shifting alliances for child-rearing; we are trying to maximize the diversity of our gene pool. A kind of shifting polygamy.’

Rocky frowned. ‘“Maximize the diversity”? What about falling in love?’

Stan just laughed. ‘Ha ha. Rocky wants to fall in lo-ove .’ Classic Stan. ‘But it’s just another human illusion, my friend. Like fine art and religion. We’ve all been wasting our time for ten thousand years.’

Roberta said, ‘Stan, it’s suggested that when you join us you should spend some time working in the school.’

‘For the first time since you came to fetch me out of West 4 I feel flattered. You think I’ve got something to give as a teacher, do you?’

She smiled back. ‘You don’t understand. These people aren’t here to teach. Oh, they supervise, these are small children after all. But really they are here to listen.

‘We are a new kind, you see, Stan. Our intelligence is in a category above that of humanity, the old variety. Yet we know very little – not much more than humanity had discovered for itself, and even that was riddled with flaws, misconceptions and sheer dreaming. And we aren’t like humanity with its rich ancient culture stored in the fabric of a civilization outside our own heads: the books, the buildings, the sheer accumulation of inventions. We have nothing like that. Not yet.

‘And so we find we can learn from the play of even the youngest children, who arrive in this world fresh, free of the limitations and misconceptions we inherited from humanity. We may garner from their play anything from a new design of spanner to a new, intuitive approach to transfinite mathematics. Even the babies, even the toddlers, when they “learn” to speak, invent their own vocabulary, their own grammar, even their own mathematics. We don’t teach the children so much as learn from them.’

All this seemed chilling to Rocky. ‘But from what you say, they don’t draw pictures for Mom to stick on the fridge door. They don’t have stories before bedtime.’

Roberta nodded. ‘You see that as a loss. I don’t blame you; I grew up in the human world too. They are little children. They do play silly run-around games and take naps. And we have trolls, here in this world. Maybe you heard their call in the night. We bring in the trolls in the evenings. They snuggle. Help the children sleep.’

Rocky asked, ‘Why do they need help sleeping?’

Roberta glanced at him. ‘They are extremely bright children, Rocky. At a very young age they gain an awareness of the fragility of life, of their own vulnerability. Human children, I think, believe they are immortal. Whereas our children—’

‘Ah,’ said Stan. ‘No illusions. And they can’t be distracted by accounts of heaven and the afterlife, or other fairy stories.’

‘I learned this lesson myself, at a young age.’ She briefly closed her eyes.

Rocky asked, ‘Don’t you have any religion? None at all?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Come. Let’s walk on.’

They hadn’t gone much further when a group went by, quick-talking noisily, carrying picnic lunches, towels, tablets and pads of paper, heading out of town. Some of the party nodded to Roberta as they passed, and glanced at Rocky and Stan incuriously. They were mostly young, but there were a couple of women who might have been about fifty, Rocky thought. The presence of the older people made him realize how rare they were here; there couldn’t be many folk over mid-twenties. It was a young community.

Roberta pointed at one of the older women. ‘ Her name is Stella Welch. One of the brightest of the pre-emergence generation. She once worked as a relationship counsellor on the Datum, would you believe? She’d been thrown out of university – she was studying mathematics at Stanford, but the regular academic institutions of humanity couldn’t cope with her. Now, here, she’s become one of our leading thinkers on cosmological evolution. Before we found her, she worked out most of her ideas in private, on scraps of paper—’

‘Einstein in the patent office,’ Stan said. ‘Figuring out relativity in his spare time.’

‘That’s right. I told you that where we have disagreements, Stan, is at the apex of our philosophies – the levels of goals, ultimate objectives. I think we all agree that the purpose of intelligence is to apprehend the world. But how to achieve that apprehension? Some, like Stella, think big. She wants us to understand the cosmos on the largest of scales – and, perhaps, some day, participate in its evolution. But others disagree. We have a philosopher, you might call him a poet, who has styled himself “Celandine”.’

‘Like the flower,’ said Rocky.

‘That’s it. Strictly speaking the lesser celandine, a beautiful little wildflower, the spring messenger. Wordsworth admired it, yet it was treated as an invasive species in North America. Well, so it was, I suppose. Celandine, our Celandine, argues that all that is essential of our reality can be reached through the contemplation of a single flower: the mathematics of its diploid and tetraploid forms, the way its small face presses to the sunlight. Celandine says we should reach for the numinous, you see, not through the infinite but through the infinitesimal. You must meet him.’