Eidolon by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

Author:Sharon Lee & Steve Miller [Lee, Sharon & Miller, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, sharon lee, liad, steve miller, korval, rugs, pinbeam
Publisher: Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

--END--

PERSISTENCE

Beba walked faster now, nearly running; she'd actually stopped and looked around to see if anyone was within range and now she'd be late. For her, proximity was important. Long range was ten or twenty paces of clear sight distance, or just a few paces if a wall intervened. No one there. And she was late.

Ignorance is winning.

Somewhere between five deck and six deck the idea surfaced, and at first she wasn't sure if it was hers or not, it was so subtle, so tentative. She rarely picked up something as direct as a thought, though once or twice she had; mostly when she was young and hormonal. No one was in range though.

The idea was persistent, so she turned it over in her aware mind, saw the signs that it was her thought, and that made it more necessary to think about it:

Ignorance was winning.

On consideration, that's what this morning's time with the news round-up had showed: incontrovertible evidence that ignorance was winning. Market flux caused by the industrial committee's decision to favor blue over green this year, the newest student-style of self-lighting ring hats that fluttered in the presence of multiple low-power comm calls to the student accounts that invited conference calls, so that they might all flap together in a spotlight mocking illumination, the resurrection of the so-called Mind Safety Administration. This run of strangeness, all these things together, illustrated the fact that ignorance was winning.

Beba sighed heavily, a flip of the hand telling the unseeing wall that even the freshly minted shift schedules handed down by the new Bazaar administrators were created more by wishful thinking than thoughtful planning. Orders came down by fiat, by . . . ignorance. "Persistence."

She said that word out loud, knowing that, after all, she'd done this to herself created in her own head the idea that there were only two volitional forces at work in the inhabited universe. Those forces were not necessarily antagonistic, except that somehow persistence ultimately was superior since ignorance was entropic and the evolutionary dialectic favored life's anti-entropic organizing principles.

Alas, she'd written that in a paper for philosophy class back when she'd still been permitted public schooling and the result had been a severe setback to her grades as well as her social range. Original thinking, it turned out, was antagonistic to her novice philosophy instructor's preordained lesson plans; she could see it in the stiff shoulder and neck muscles when he walked into class, in the way he avoided looking at her shape, in the swirling purple fog that wisped around his eyes and ears, and in the scent.

By then her emotive-control tutor, long since banished off-planet as a threat to world order, had deduced that the scent information she got was as real as the visual, and that she ought not tell anyone about it, just as her sister--off-planet now as well!--should not mention that she could-so pull names out of people's heads, nothing else, just names they were thinking of.

The so-called philosopher was

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