"Mm," Renna's dark eyebrows came together. "Not so much, perhaps. I've seen your Great Library, and spoken with your savants. This isn't a dark age, Maia. What you see around you is the result of deliberate planning. Lysos and the Founders carefully considered costs and alternatives. As products of a scientific era, they were determined to prevent another one happening here."
"But—" Maia blinked. "Why would scientists want to stop science?"
His smile was warm, but something in Renna's eyes told Maia this was a topic fraught with personal pain.
"Their aim wasn't to stop science as such, but to prevent a certain kind of scientific fever. A cultural madness, if you will. The sort of epoch in which questioning becomes almost a devotional act. In which all of life's certainties melt, and folk compulsively doubt old ways, heedless of whatever validity those ways once had. Ego and 'personal fulfillment' take precedence over values based on community and tradition. Such times bring terrible ferment, Maia. Along with increased knowledge and power comes ecological danger, from expanding populations and misuse of technology."
No pictures formed in Maia's head to accompany his words. The content was entirely abstract, without reference to anything she knew. Yet, she felt appalled. "You make it sound . . . terrible."
His exhalation was heavy. "Oh, there are benefits. Art and culture flourish. Old repressions and superstitions shatter. New insights illuminate and become part of our permanent heritage. A renaissance is the most romantic and exciting of times, but none lasts very long. Way back, before the Phylum Diaspora, the first scientific age barely got us off the homeworld before collapsing in exhaustion. It came as close to killing as liberating us."
Maia watched Renna and felt positive he spoke from more than historical erudition. She saw an ache in his dark face. He was remembering, with both regret and deep longing. It was a kind of homesickness, one more final and irredeemable than her own.
Renna cleared his throat, briefly looking away.
"It was during another such age — the Florentina Revival — that your famous Lysos grew convinced that stable societies are happier ones. Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they'll understand their children, and their children will understand them. Lysos wanted to create such a world. One with net contentment maximized not for a brilliant few, but over time for the maximum number."
"That's what we're taught." Maia nodded. Though once again, it was a different way of phrasing familiar things. Different and disturbing.
"What you aren't taught, and my private theory, is that Lysos only adopted sexual separatism because Perkinite secessionists were the strongest group of malcontents willing to follow her into exile. They provided the raw material Lysos used to make her stable world, isolated and protected from the ferment of the hominid realm."
Never had Maia heard the Founder spoken of like this. With respect, but of an almost-collegial sort, almost as if Renna had known Lysos personally. Anyone hearing this would have to believe one basic truth — the man was, indeed, from another star.
For a long time, Renna looked out across the sea, contemplating vistas Maia couldn't begin to picture. Then he shrugged. "I ramble too much. We started talking about how sailors are taught to scorn a man who relies on tools he doesn't understand. It's the major reason they despise me.
"You? But you crossed interstellar space! Wouldn't sailors res—"
"Respect that?" Renna chuckled. "Alas, they also know my ship is the product of vast factories, built mostly by robots, and that I couldn't control the least part of it without machines almost smarter than I am, whose workings I barely comprehend. You know what that makes me? The savants have spread mocking fairy tales. Ever hear of the Wissy-Man?'
Maia nodded. It was a name boys called each other when they wanted to be cruel.
"That's me," Renna finished. "Helpless Wissy-Man. Dispatched by fools, slave to his tools. Rescued by vars after crossing the stars."
Renna gave a short laugh, almost a snort. It did not sound amused.
That evening's Life match was a disaster.
Sixteen hundred game pieces, fully wound, had been divided into two sets of stacks on each side of a cargo hatch grooved with forty vertical lines crossed by forty horizontal. Maia and Renna joined the other passengers for dinner, eating from chipped porcelain bowls, looking out over choppy seas. Then, with an hour of daylight remaining, they went back to await their opponents. The junior cook and a cabin boy arrived a few minutes later, the former still wiping his hands on his apron. They don't take us very seriously, Maia guessed. Not that she blamed them.
