Post by NeoEllis on Nov 8, 2005 22:18:00 GMT -5
Prologue
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history' - yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and clever animals had to die.
One might have invented such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same sense of self importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge..."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
In all the time since humanity left Earth, a billion, billion human beings had come to live in the vacuum of space. In a parsec wide bubble of space, commonly called the Inner World, countless islands of man, each worlds of millions in their own right, drifted together in the void. Pious and decadent, conservative and liberal; homogeneous in their symmetry, they were the majority and main stream of the world.
Beyond that in a seven parsec sphere was the Middle World. With under a third of the outposts of the Inner world in such greater of a space, the Middle World found itself to be a much more rugged existence than the Inner World. So sparse was the Middle World and so dense, relatively speaking, was the Inner world that it could be viewed from a Middle World colony as definitive cluster that occupied so much of their sky. More freedom lived in the Middle World than in the Inner; the people were hardier, cruder in their humor, sharper with their tongues and above all, more jaded.
And beyond the Middle World lay, of course, the Outer World. Deviants of all walks of life - and sometimes death- populated the even still more thinly spread Out World. There they found the privilege to live out their lives with a freedom even the most hardened men and women of Middle World would find repugnant. Worshiping Gods of bestiality and rape and pedophilia and any number of strange behavior; despising the tastes of their fellow deviants, they had few people they could trust outside their own communities.
Rohtacks was the captain of an interstellar trawler in the employment of the Spectacle Agency, a Middle World based venture that combed the Outer World for the newest, strangest examples of culture to be recorded and delivered to the prying eyes of Inner World patrons, eager to ogle and judge the train wrecks of the human mind from the safety of their respective colonies.
Malic was a nomad of the Middle world. His home colony had been destroyed in a civil war when he was 14, and had been driven out of two colonies since then, he now found himself on a colony near the unofficial line between the Middle World and the Outer world, a mining station of only two million or so. By some accounts, his station was well within the Outer World. Now in his early twenties and in a middle level government position, he could feel more and more power flowing into his grasp with little of his own will, and he felt despair. Not the despair of a man could not be satisfied nor the despair of a lover who could not, but the despair of a man who look endlessly and tirelessly for the meaning of life and found that such a thing simply did not exist, a philosopher’s despair.
When Zora was 24 years of age and poised to enter a carrier of lucrative professionalism, she left her colony in the Inner World and lived in the farthest of the far Outer World colonies. For ten years she pursued no goals, spoke only when spoken, watched, listened, and lived a far happier life than she knew she would have otherwise. After ten years of this life she looked upon the nearest star and knew it was indeed time to return to the world of the living, and teach what she could to those who would listen.
