The Tides of God by Ted Reynolds

Author:Ted Reynolds [Reynolds, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9780441808946
Google: fQS9AAAACAAJ
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1989-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

“But haven’t there always been people who thought like that?” asked Bromwyn. “Even in sane times like ours?”

Piri Linblade amiably eyebrowed up at her from his bridge console. “Of course, my dear, just as we’ll never be rid of psychopaths and such. The asylums are full of neo-Christians and mystics. There’s a genetic component to insanity, you see. But if they’re not encouraged to breed, they can be kept within limits.”

“Oh,” Bromwyn said, admiring his knowledge as she seemed to admire everything about the Tech One, a character trait that Linblade could not but find engaging. He enlarged on his point.

“It’s gotten steadily better for five hundred years; though as late as the early thirty-first there were still secret cults turning up. It’s only in Black Years, when we’ve been under those alien influences, that the nonsane psychic elements are encouraged, even institutionalized. I know you find it difficult to grasp, Brom, but in the ninth century, say, or the twenty-fifth, it was as hard to believe there wasn’t some sort of god-thingummy as it would be now to believe there is.”

“Could there be?”

“Huh?” Linblade looked up again. He knew Bromwyn well enough—she Used her position as Kimberlin’s personal aide to visit the bridge at every opportunity—not to expect extreme sophistication. But he’d hoped she wasn’t as ingenuous as that.

Bromwyn pushed her russet hair back from her forehead. “Could there really be a god-thingummy up or out behind the universe somewhere? We don’t know everything yet, do we?”

“We damned well know enough to know we don’t need that hypothesis,” Linblade assured her. “We understand why the universe is here; no one made it. We’ve traced back three big bangs, and it recreates itself in cycles by natural laws.”

“But who made those laws?” pressed the girl. “Who planned the whole big shebang in the beginning? Why couldn’t there be some sort of super-intelligence who started everything? At least it’s a hypothesis, isn’t it, Piri? If you just toss it away out of hand, you’re no better than the early medievalists, are you?”

Linblade groaned audibly. “Bromwyn, in that case he or she or it would have to live in a vaster universe with laws of its own, and we’d just have to ask what created that one. No, we’ve got a comprehensible, self-contained, self-explanatory universe; but you’d need years of higher math before I could explain it to you rigorously. Maybe you’ll take my word for it.”

“Oh, quite.” Bromwyn smiled. “I was just wondering how anybody could know all that for sure.” She tweaked his mustache playfully, and the uneasy moment had passed.

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