The Complete Karma Trilogy (16 page)

Mars 2

A Thousand Beliefs

Hardin wasn’t going
to get a job as an engineer, apparently, all for his lack of institutionalized education. So he turned instead to the new societies that were sprouting around Earth in the wake of everyone being left to their own devices. Because the media wouldn’t advertise for them, a large congregation of representatives for those societies had coalesced in Heidelberg along Main Street, a one and a half kilometer pedestrian walkway that used to be the center of the old town’s commerce. People interested in joining a society would travel there, walk the length of the street, and hopefully find what they were looking for before they had reached its end. People were calling it the Street of a Thousand Beliefs. When he had made his decision to take a look at the new societies, Hardin took one of the run-down mag-lev trains from Leipzig to Frankfurt, and took a couple subways to get the rest of the way.

When Karma was destroyed, along with its socio-economic system, it left a large void in the world, one that was only passingly addressed by Rex Darcy. Up until that point, a living was earned by performing morally correct actions. Even before Karma was destroyed it was realized by many people that the system was unnecessary, since it produced no material worth essential for survival, but it gave a lot of people something to do with their lives and made people generally more agreeable, which was its true worth. Rex Darcy tried to create, in its stead, a worldview that was centered around agriculture. Every person was required to at least attempt to provide their own sustenance, using old dirt and fluorescent lamps that were powered by the Solar Kite, the only thing on Earth actually directly exposed to the sun. Life-giving light was captured by a solar panel, converted into an electrical current, pumped through thousands of meters of wires, and then turned back into a meager approximation of the sun in the living rooms of billions of people.

From millions of kilometers away, Rex Darcy continuously espoused the sense of moral worth that accompanied tending to plants. He described it as an act of nurturing, a fundamental piece of human nature that was buried over time in so much concrete. He proposed that focusing on agriculture would be better than reestablishing the old system, which had already proved its susceptibility to falling apart when Karma died.

Whatever a person still needed, after eating their own produce, was either shipped from Mars or from the few remaining solar farms that were left on Earth. After five years of implementation, the general trend seemed to indicate that a diligent person could feed themselves for a combined total of two weeks of the year, and the government needed to step in for the other fifty, which was provided in the form of a government stipend that could be redeemed at a local grocer. Similar stipends were granted for the other accoutrements of life, for clothes, for furniture, and all of the other things that couldn’t be made out of light and dirt.

Dissidents were already beginning to form strong support bases, and those groups of people took the form of new societies. As Hardin walked down the Street of a Thousand Beliefs, he listened to what each of them had to say before moving on to the next. What he was looking for was a way to Mars—and he believed that, given a thousand options, at least one of the societies would have some interest in that faraway planet.

The street was unbelievably crowded—there were a lot of dissatisfied people on Earth, and it was a small area for them all to meet in. Hardin was bumped, pushed, and on multiple occasions nearly knocked over, although there was always someone to stumble into if his balance failed. To get to each of the speakers, who were all easily visible from their platforms that formed little islands in the river of people, Hardin had to violently assert himself on the people around him, or find one of the quickly shifting currents that seemed to go the way he wanted.

Shouting from their platforms, gesticulating wildly, the speakers looked like so many crazed prophets. The first one that Hardin listened to spoke about old ways, and things long forgotten. Even from only five meters away it was hard to hear what the man was saying, because of all the mass confusion and more shouting just down the road, but Hardin could make out most of the words and guess the rest.

The prophet yelled, “The god worshipped during the reign of Karma was not the true God. The true God would never be subordinated to a computer.

“Is something holy because a computer says that it is, or is it holy because it possesses an innate holiness, a goodness in itself, that is independent of a computer’s judgment? Does it not seem obvious that a computer cannot make something holy by claiming it is? Otherwise the most arbitrary of things could be made holy, by the random opinions of a computer, by electricity and circuitry.

“But for generations that is exactly what was done. We allowed ourselves to be convinced that the holy things in life were the things that computers thought were holy, rather than what was truly holy. Even the one true God fell victim to this perversion, and was replaced by an artificial god, a god that served some other purpose—human subjugation. The true God serves no one but himself. For the true God is truth itself, and truth is intrinsically holy.

“There was a time, before Karma, when the true God was known. And to know the true God is to know salvation. Even though this path to salvation has been buried with time, it is still possible to excavate the ruins, and to build anew. The holy book has been found—the computer tyrant kept it hidden from all of us, to keep us in its thrall. Reading the holy book shall bring humanity back to the truth, for it is the word of God.”

Eventually the prophet had to come back from lofty ideals, and return to practical matters. The people milling around him were only so patient, and those who stopped to listen were already looking downstream for the next ideologue they would listen to. After so many repeated cycles, the prophet knew exactly how much attention span his sheep had before wandering to other pastures. “Our society is a simple one, but spiritually fulfilling as only the truth can be. We read the holy book, do penance, and renounce our sinful ways. We revere the God of antiquity, the God who made golden the times before Karma. We grow crops, as is the law. It is our goal to retake the holy land, and live the rest of our lives in prosperity. Speak to my brothers to join us.”

At the foot of the raised platform, several men were dressed in a similar fashion to the prophet—they all were in brown robes, and wore tonsures. A few people from the crowd were talking to them, as the rest formed a mass exodus to the next prophet. As they were replaced by more people behind them, Hardin could hear the man begin his next speech, exactly the way he had begun it before, exactly the way he would begin it again.

The next few prophets were much of the same, lofty ideals followed by a quick salesman’s pitch about what the member of that society’s life would look like. Every one of them included brief mentions of growing food, since Rex Darcy had made it law, but a little bit of variety was allowed for how humanity spent the rest of its time.

The literal current of people made a lot of judgments for its members. It was stronger and wider in the direction of popular societies, it was slower around the loud prophets, quicker past the quiet ones. Some prophets it bypassed entirely, as it was decided that they were of no value—since Hardin was there to listen to all of his options, not just the ones that were well liked, he often found himself struggling to stay anchored in one place.

One such unpopular prophet was speaking to no one. Even his own recruiters had abandoned him, so that he was definitively alone. He said, as Hardin attempted to listen, “Lasting societies are not built by assigning a single thing ultimate value. You will walk down this Street and you will hear people telling you that God is the only answer, or kindness is the only answer, or happiness is the only answer. It should make you wonder—life is such an open-ended question, why should it only have one answer?

“I know why those kinds of people exist, the kind with a one-track mind that only ever go in one direction out of the infinite available. It’s because it’s easier that way. It’s easier to say, ‘Nothing else is important except this.’ It takes less thought. And, for a time, it might even give value to the lives of the people that choose to listen to them. But it’s not sustainable.

“Life is too complicated to respond to all its questions with the same answer. Eventually, that answer will be inadequate. And it’s very possible that a conscious awareness of that inadequacy never happens. What will happen is that things will fall apart. Those societies will say to themselves that ‘kindness is the only answer’ when dealing with mass murderers, those societies will say to themselves that ‘happiness is the only answer’ when they are besought with venereal diseases, those societies will say to themselves that ‘God is the only answer’ when the progress of science starts to question their beliefs. And they will slowly unravel.

“What our society does, then, in contrast to all these other societies, is to offer no answers. It stipulates no values. But that doesn’t mean that its members have no beliefs—they have whatever beliefs they want. In this way, we believe that our society will still be around when all the others have failed. And that is because it is the most natural, it is the type of society that most closely mirrors the conditions under which humanity thrives. One of our innumerably diverse beliefs will always be the correct answer for the problem at hand, rather than the ‘universal’ answer for all problems, and its proponents will always champion its cause when the time is right. There will be disagreement, but that’s the price to be paid.

“When you realize how artificial all of these other societies are, come back to me. We are currently enrolling.”

After struggling for so long, Hardin allowed himself to be pulled forward again by the disinterested people around him. He decided that trusting the current was perhaps not a bad idea after all.

He heard references to the Christian Bible, to the Quran, the I Ching, the Kama Sutra, and other books that had been banned for centuries, although he was familiar with them all. None of them were as good as their prophets claimed, in his opinion. He even heard allusions to Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s unmoved mover, and Bentham’s ultimate good, all a bunch of nonsense.

Not all of the prophets were so spiritual. Some of them made more earthly offers, like a group, prophesized by an elderly man with thick glasses, that seemed more like an eternal book club than a real, functional society. Its members were to read a book every day and hold discussions in the evening, using the growing lamps as lights for reading. Until the day they died, or went blind from eyestrain. In a similar vein was a society that proposed to perfect an assortment of forgotten board games—chess, checkers, go. It was a meritocracy, where the leader of their society was the person who had the best win record.

Other societies didn’t reach so far into the distant past—the near past was good enough for them. There were a few Karma-esque societies, one of which involved each member keeping a personal diary, documenting intimate details about everything they did each day. At night the diaries were exchanged at random, and graded on a fixed moral scale. The government stipend was pooled, and members with better report cards were given a larger portion. Of course, that system relied a lot on personal integrity—other pseudo-Karma societies weren’t so trusting, and relied more on members spying on each other. But those would have their own problems, even Hardin knew. Distrust, seclusion, factionalism.

To his immense satisfaction, not a single one of the societies had agriculture as their core. Rex Darcy could go on and on about how wonderful and beneficial for the soul it was to cultivate plants, but obviously no one else felt the same. Perhaps it was defiance—because it was required for everyone to grow food, they didn’t want to do it. Whatever it was, it brought a smile to his face. Darcy’s failures were the only things that could make Hardin happy.

In spite of his fleeting happiness, Hardin was losing hope. None of the societies were ambitious enough for his purposes. What he needed, he knew, was a group with a belief system strong enough that evangelizing on a busy street wouldn’t be enough. A society that would, after it built strength, annex its new members forcibly. Only a society that strong would take him to Mars, where he would finally be able to strangle Darcy with his bare hands.

In order to be that strong, the society would have to be sustainable. As ardent as the board game enthusiasts might have been, civilization couldn’t be built with checkers as its foundation. The pseudo-Karmas seemed promising to Hardin, since they took as inspiration a system that had worked for so long, but their methodology was obviously lacking.

It was with those thoughts in mind that Hardin came across the New Karma society. What was most striking about the group’s members was that they all had shaved heads, even the women. With the lack of hair, it was easy to see the scars that were on the left-back part of their heads, where a Karma Chip had been inserted in their youth. They wore it proudly.

Their pitch was nearly identical to the other pseudo-Karmas, except that their prophet entirely omitted how it was that their Good Works were to be judged. The people around Hardin took the omission to mean that their society had yet to be fully developed, and left without talking to any of the recruiters at the foot of the platform. But Hardin knew better than that. They were quieter because they had a secret, not because they had nothing. With plenty of space to move around in for the first time in hours, Hardin made his way to the group.