The method was sterile. The Niori had no "world-view" in the Spenglerian sense. Their cities expressed only function and a sense of beauty and order.
In those early days, he had said to himself: These people have no cinemas, theaters, churches, art galleries, concert halls, football fields. Let me see what they have instead, and perhaps I will begin to understand them.
He had seen the Niori, sitting in a circle of six or eight, solemnly capping one word with another, around and around. To him, the sequences of words were sense-free and followed no discernable pattern. To the Niori, evidently, they fulfilled some function analagous to those of poetry and group singing.
He had watched them debating in the governing council. There was no rhetoric and no heat, even when the issue was important and the opinions widely divergent. He had seen their shops, in which each article was labeled with its cost to the merchant, and the buyer gave as much more as he could afford. It was incredible; but it worked.
He had followed their culture through a thousand other avenues until he wearied of it, having learned nothing more than he knew at the beginning. Afterwards, for twenty years he had not left the Quarter except to transact business, or to oversee the unloading of merchandise at the spaceport.
Today he had gone once more, feeling an obscure compulsion: perhaps because he knew the day was coming when he would see the City for the last time; perhaps hoping, in that small spark of himself that still allowed itself to hope for anything, that one more visit would show him the miraculous key to all that he had misunderstood.
He had learned nothing new, but the morning had not been altogether wasted. It was a clear autumn day, good for walking in so green a city. And paradoxically enough, being the only Earthman on the streets had made him feel less alien than before. He attracted no attention, in a spaceport city: he walked side by side with squat Dritik and spidery Oladsa, beings of a hundred different races from as many stars. When he returned to the Quarter, he felt oddly refreshed and calmed.
We have very little left, he thought, except one or two minor virtues that have no bloodstains on them. Kindliness, humor, a sense of brotherhood ... perhaps if we had stuck to those, and never learned the martial virtues, never aspired to be noble or glorious, we would have come out all right. Was there ever a turning point? When Carthage was sown with salt, or when Paul founded the Church—or when the first caveman sharpened the end of a stick and used it for murder? If so, it was a long way back, dead and buried, dust and ashes.
We took all that was best in thousands of years of yearning and striving for the right, he thought, and we made it into the Inquisition and the Star Chamber and the NKVD. We fattened our own children for each generation's slaughter. And yet we are not all evil. Astereos is right: if the other races had been like ourselves, it would have been bearable; or if we ourselves had been creatures of pure darkness, conscienceless, glorying in cruelty—then we could have made war on the Galaxy joyfully, and if we failed at least there would have been an element of grandeur in our failure.
Olaf Stapledon had said this once, he remembered—that there was an artistry in pure, uncontaminated evil, that it was in its own way as real an expression of worship as pure good.