Read Online Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson - Free Book Online Page B

present can foresee what will happen in a future that has approached perfection and abolished limitations. Still, one dared look ahead, and in fact there had been those already in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who did. They saw dimly, Xuan more clearly, the Transfiguration—a thousand years hence, a million?—and it in its turn might be only a beginning—the whole cosmos evolving from blind matter to pure intelligence—
    A surprise jolted Sayre back into Guthrie’s hereness. “I did study the math,” he heard the download reply. That had not been said earlier, no matter how intensive the interrogation. “After all, as a doctrine it was acquiring more true believers every day. Your Avantist Association was becoming a political force to reckon with, uh-huh. Though mainly because of the half-believers, the hordes who supposed the scheme must have something going for it because everybody said it was objective and scientific, didn’t they? I’d better check it out for myself. So I got a logician to help me, and we waded through the psycho-tensor matrices, the
lao-hu
operator, the quantitative studies, enough of the whole schmeer to give me a pretty fair notion, before I decided my time was worth more than this.”
    “Which proves you learned nothing,” Sayre retorted. “Did you never ask yourself why those ideas appealed to so many?”
    “Sure I did, and came up with the usual reasons. Oh, yes, the world was in a bad way, in the wake of the Renewal and the Jihad and the other hydrophobias it’d been through. This country wasn’t the worst off, but it had better days to remember than most did, which made its people feel like they’d fallen further and harder. Xuan had made some predictions that were more or less right and issued some prescriptions that weren’t totally absurd. North Americans always have been suckers for salvationism. Enough of them swallowed Xuanism—or, I should say, its sound-bite slogans—that your gang got itself elected, never mind how. The last halfway free election the country had.”
    “Nonsense. The public saw what was being accomplished.”
    “Some positive things, yeah. Mostly of the flashy sort, tenements, reclamation, universal genetic counseling, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing I couldn’t have thought of myself, with common sense and experience of people.”
    “Untrue. You might as well claim that Einstein thought of nothing you could not have yourself.”
    “Different case entirely. General relativity was new. It explained a good-sized chunk of reality. At bottom, under the fancy language and equations, Xuanism is the same collectivist quackery that’s been peddled these past two or three thousand years, over and over and over. Longer than that, I’ll bet.”
    “No. For the first time, we have a theory that explains the facts of history.”
    “Some of the facts. Astrology or a flat Earth explain some of the facts too. The rest of Xuanism is just about as useful as they are. Or as disastrous, rather. Exactly how well has the Union done under its Avantist government? Where have all your restructurings and redistributions and reorientations brought you, except deeper into the swamp? Somebody said once that a fanatic is a man who, when he’s lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his efforts.
    And your purpose was never scientific anyway. It was religious. Crank religious. Why, your power elite don’t call themselves a board or a council but a synod. Interesting connotations, hey? As for your pipe dream of a world-intelligence that’ll eventually embrace the whole universe—”
    “Bastante!” Sayre exclaimed. “I didn’t come here to listen to your nescient ranting.”
    “No, you’re an intellectual,” Guthrie gibed. “You believe in the free exchange of ideas.”
    “Among minds capable of it, minds that have learned sanity.”
    “Yeah, I reckon I am an anti-intellectual. Always have been. Listen. I was born in 1970, when the young intellectuals were