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thoughts of self-destruction from her heart. I must think of him now, not of me.
Not of me. Not of me me me me.
CHAPTER 6
 LIFE IS A SUICIDE MISSION
"Do the gods of different nations
talk to each other?
Do the gods of Chinese cities
speak to the ancestors of the Japanese?
To the lords of Xibalba?
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To Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu?
Is there some annual get-together
where they compare each other's worshippers?
Mine will bow their faces to the floor
and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one.
Mine will sacrifice animals, says another.
Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third.
Here is the question I think of most often:
Are there any who can honestly boast,
My worshippers obey my good laws,
and treat each other kindly,
and live simple generous lives?"
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
Pacifica was as widely varied a world as any other, with its temperate zones,
polar ice sheets, tropical rain forests, deserts and savannas, steppes and
mountains, lakes and seas, woodlands and beaches. Nor was Pacifica a young
world. In more than two thousand years of human habitation, all the niches into
which humans could comfortably fit were filled. There were great cities and vast
rangelands, villages amid patchwork farms and research stations in the remotest
locations, highest and lowest, farthest north and south.
But the heart of Pacifica had always been and remained today the tropical
islands of the ocean called Pacific in memory of the largest sea on Earth. The
dwellers on these islands lived, not precisely in the old ways, but with the
memory of old ways still in the background of all sounds and at the edges of all
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sights. Here the sacred kava was still sipped in the ancient ceremonies. Here
the memories of ancient heroes were kept alive. Here the gods still spoke into
the ears of holy men and women. And if they went home to grass huts containing
refrigerators and networked computers, what of that? The gods did not give
unreceivable gifts. The trick of it was finding a way to let new things into
one's life without killing that life to accommodate them.
There were many on the continents, in the big cities, on the temperate farms, in
the research stations -- there were many who had little patience with the
endless costume dramas (or comedies, depending on one's point of view) that took
place on those islands. And certainly the people of Pacifica were not uniformly
Polynesian in race. All races were here, all cultures; all languages were spoken
somewhere, or so it seemed. Yet even the scoffers looked to the islands for the
soul of the world. Even the lovers of cold and snow took their pilgrimage -- a
holiday, they probably called it -- to tropical shores. They plucked fruit from
the trees, they skimmed over the sea in the outrigger canoes, their women went
bare-breasted and they all dipped fingers into taro pudding and pulled fishmeat
from the bones with wet fingers. The whitest of them, the thinnest, the most
elegant of the people of this place called themselves Pacifican and spoke at
times as if the ancient music of the place rang in their ears, as if the ancient
stories spoke of their own past. Adopted into the family, that's what they were,
and the true Samoans, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Tongans, Maoris, and Fijians smiled
and let them feel welcome even though these watch-wearing, reservation-making,
hurrying people knew nothing of the true life in the shadow of the volcano, in
the lee of the coral barrier, under the sky sparked with parrots, inside the
music of the waves against the reef.
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Wang-mu and Peter came to a civilized, modern, westernized part of Pacifica, and
once again found their identities waiting for them, prepared by Jane. They were
career government workers trained on their home planet, Moskva, and given a
couple of weeks' vacation before starting service as bureaucrats in some
Congress office on Pacifica. They needed little knowledge of their supposed home
planet. They just had to show their papers to get an airplane out of the city
where they had supposedly just shuttled down from a starship recently arrived
from Moskva. Their flight took them to one of the larger Pacific islands, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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