Perpetual Change

"…individual human beings were still mysterious. Jane had concluded: No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought he was doing when he did it, and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain what he will do next.

"-it did bother him a little that Jane had every bit as close a relationship with Miro as him.

            Isn’t it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other?  Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? My wife. My friend. My lover.

"But Wang-mu said nothing, because this was one of the first lessons she learned from Master Han. When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely.  But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.  Qing-jao was not hungry for wisdom from Wang-mu, and never would be.  So silence was all that Wang-mu could offer.  She could only hope that Qing-jao would find her own road to proper obedience, compassionate decency, or the struggle for freedom.

"… she couldn’t take credit because she hadn’t meant to do it; she had thought she was just repeating Qing-jao’s questions.  Could she take credit for something she did by accident?

            People should only be blamed or praised for what they meant to do.  Wang-mu had always believed this instinctively; she didn’t remember anyone ever telling it to her in so many words.  The crimes that she was blaming Congress for were all deliberate…

            But was that what they meant to do, either? Maybe some of them, at least, thought that they were making the universe safe for humanity by destroying [an entire planet] – from what Wang-mu had heard about the [disease], it could mean the end of all Earthborn life if it ever started spreading world to world among human beings…[spoiler]…Maybe they all had good purposes in mind for the terrible things they did.

            Certainly Qing-jao had a good purpose in mind, didn’t she? So how could Wang-mu condemn her for her actions, when she thought she was obeying the gods?

            Didn’t everybody have some noble purpose in mind for their own actions? Wasn’t everybody, in their own eyes, good?

            Except me, thought Wang-mu.  In my own eyes, I’m foolish and weak.  But they spoke of me as if I were better than I ever thought.  Master Han praised me, too.  And those others spoke of Qing-jao with pity and scorn- and I’ve felt those feelings toward her, too.  Yet isn’t Qing-jao acting nobly, and me basely?  I betrayed my mistress. S he has been loyal to her government and to her gods, which are real to her, though I no longer believe in them.  How can I tell the good people from the bad if the bad people all have some way of convincing themselves that they’re trying to do good even though they’re doing something terrible?  And the good people can believe that they’re actually very bad even thought they’re doing something good?

            Maybe you can only do good if you think you’re bad, and if you think you’re good then you can only do bad.

            But the paradox was too much for her.  There’d be no sense in the world if you had to judge people by the opposite of how they tried to seem.  Wasn’t it possible for a good person also to try to seem good? And just because somebody claimed to be scum didn’t mean that he wasn’t scum.  Was there any way to judge people, if you can’t judge even by their purpose?

            Was there any way for Wang-mu to judge even herself?

            Half the time I don’t even know the purpose of what I do.  I came to this house because I was ambitious and wanted to be a secret maid to a rich godspoken girl.  It was pure selfishness on my part, and pure generosity that led Qing-jao to take me in.  And now here I am helping Master Han commit treason – what is my purpose in that? I don’t even know why I do what I do.  How can I know what other people’s true purposes are?  There’s no hope of ever knowing good from bad. 

            She sat up in lotus position on her mat and pressed her face into her hands.  It was as if she felt herself pressed against a wall, but it was a wall that she made herself, and if she could only find a way to move it aside – the way she could move her hands away from her face whenever she wanted – then she could easily push through to the truth.

            She moved her hands away.  She opened her eyes …

            She remembered Wiggin telling her what the gods would be like.  Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.  Why would he say such a thing?  How could he know what a god would be?

            Somebody who wants to teach you how to know everything that they know and do everything that they do – what he was really describing was parents, not gods.

            Only there were plenty of parents who didn’t do that.  Plenty of parents who tried to keep their children down, to control them, to make slaves of them.  Where she had grown up, Wang-mu had seen plenty of that.

            So what Wiggin was describing wasn’t parents really.  He was describing good parents.  He wasn’t telling her what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was.  To want other people to grow.  To want other people to have all the good things that you have.  And to spare them the bad things if you can.  That was goodness.

            What were gods, then?  They would want everyone else to know and have and be all good things.  They would teach and share and train, but never force.

            Like my parents, thought Wang-mu.  Clumsy and stupid sometimes, like all people, but they were good.  They really did look out for me.  Even sometimes when they made me do hard things because they knew it would be good for me.  Even sometimes when they were wrong, they were good.  I can judge them by their purpose after all.  Everybody calls their purpose good, but my parents’ purposes really were good, because they meant all their acts toward me to help me grow wiser and stronger and better.  Even when they made me do hard things because they knew I had to learn form them.  Even when they caused me pain.