Ross peered into the shifting shadows. “But,” he said, “you are the masters of the planet——”
“Masters? We are slaves! Fully alive only here where we are born and die. Abstracted and as witless as they when we are among them—well we might be. For each of us, square miles to stand guard over. Our minds roving across the traps we dare not ignore, ready to leap out and straighten these children’s toppling walls of blocks, ready to warn the child that sharp things cut and hot things burn. The blue lights—did you think they were machines?” They were us!
“You’re torturing yourselves!” Ross exploded. “Let them die.”
“Let—ten—billion—children—die? We are not such monsters.”
Ross was humbled before their tragedy. Diffidently he spoke of Halsey’s Planet, Ragansworld, Azor, Jones. He warmed to the task and was growing, he thought, eloquent when their smiles left him standing ashamed.
“I don’t understand,” he said, almost weeping.
The voice corrected him: “You do. But you do not—yet—know that you do. Consider the facts:
“Your planet. Sterile and slowly dying.
“The planets you have seen. One sterile because it is imprisoned by ancients, one sterile under an in-driven matriarchal custom, one sterile because all traces of divergence have been wiped out.
“Earth. Split into an incurable dichotomy—the sterility of brainless health, the sterility of sick intellect.