[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

ensure than man, with his violence, cruelty, and tyranny, could never destroy
himself was to keep man forever in a state of knowledge where such weapons and
such means could never be even imagined. The bright ones who might change
things either were taken up to the leadership to fall under its commands
directly or were either managed or killed. Superior knowledge was reserved for
Council, and even that has limits, which is why I run. I know now a piece of
knowledge that it thought long extinguished from the mind of any person."
"It is evil. It came out of the formation of all evil, the fire pits, and it
rules us." She shuddered. "You speak almost as if those of Council worship
it."
"They do worship it. It is their god, their sole belief, and they serve. They
do not, however, love it as we love the Creator, the Great Spirit who created
the universe. They serve because they fear it and cannot fight it. They hate
it, for evil is hate, and fear, and terror, and brutality. They must have all
these things to serve it properly. It is the Lord of the Inner Darkness, the
ultimate void, which encompasses everything. It is an ancient story. Once
human beings occupied its place, and they were set to destroy not only
themselves but everything. So others, in fear, built their own god and gave it
dominion over the rulers of men. That is the tragedy of it."
"What?" She yawned again, unable to stave off sleep much longer.
"That men have always dreamed of being the rulers of the Inner Darkness, and
some finally made it, only to have it snatched from them by another. Our
leaders now do not hate its power; they envy and they covet it. They wish to
reclaim it for themselves. Otherwise, there is only one Lord of the Inner
Darkness; as much as they can ever be are Lords of the Middle Dark, above all
but one but forced to carry out only the will of the one. They preserve the
Outer Darkness in which we all must live."
He had gotten preachy, and she had finally surrendered to her exhaustion.
Still, it was truth that he spoke. Only he now knew the secret of the Inner
Lord; he knew that there was something it feared, that there was one way to
challenge its power and perhaps defeat it. Five gold rings. Precious good that
knowledge was doing him, of course. He was squatting here in a foul stable
dressed only in a rope and a rag, at the mercy of one of the least of the
chain, a Lord of the
Outer Dark named Roaring Bull, whom he understood perfectly. If he could not
deal with Roaring Bull, he could hardly deal with Lazlo Chen and others as bad
or worse.
Still, for the first time he was beset with doubt. What was he really doing
anyway? Carrying the secret of the keys to the Inner Dark to one who might be
far worse than what they had now. Those five, whoever they were, who wore the
rings they had not been appointed to those positions by the Master System
because of longevity or family breeding. They had earned their way with the
blood of others, mortgaging their souls in the process. Men like them, perhaps
better than them, had reached the point where mass genocide and mass suicide
were taken for granted. Would humanity be better off in the hands of five evil
people? Would his own people, whose way of life was spiritual and fulfilling,
be among the first to be penned up, perhaps extinguished, while others again
slaughtered the buffalo and deer and elk into near or total extinction just
for sport?
Oddly enough, he decided that the attempt to find and use the rings was worth
the risk. If it could be done or if he could just spread the knowledge of the
rings so that someone, some day, could and would do it, he should try.
Cloud Dancer was not truly correct. Master System, whatever it was, had not
coalesced all evil into itself; its evil had been entirely taught to it by
Page 62
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
humankind. It was not an evil creation, just one that had done its job and
then kept on doing it. It was evil now, the ultimate evil, because it had gone
on past its time and threatened to go on forever. By locking the people of
Earth
into their own past, it had rendered them powerless to destroy themselves. And
it had done more. It had taken the huge masses of people who could not be
supported by such a system or controlled by it and scattered them among the
stars. He hadn't mentioned that part to Cloud Dancer, because she thought the
stars were spirits, and the concept of billions of humans was beyond her.
Still, it was exactly so.
Even if Earth again reached a capacity for self-destruction, humanity would
not die. So many worlds out there were populated now that humanity would
probably live in some form or another as long as the universe lived. Yet those
worlds, too, were held down, suppressed by the Master System. It treated them [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]