I grunted.
“So how are you going to use this biography? It doesn’t say how he broke the law. It’s just a complete record of how he lived, and much of it is bound to be irrelevant.”
“Okay, but I can see that it gives me another guide. I now have three: what makes their society work well, what they never do, and what he did that they never do.”
2
“Very good. These are precisely the three guides you have to the law we’re looking for here. The community of life on this planet has worked well for three billion years—has worked beautifully, in fact. The Takers draw back in horror from this community, thinking it to be a place of lawless chaos and savage, relentless competition, where every creature goes in terror of its life. But those of your species who actually live in this community don’t find it to be so, and they will fight to the death rather than be separated from it.
“It is in fact an orderly community. The green plants are food for the plant eaters, which are food for the predators, and some of these predators are food for still other predators. And what’s left over is food for the scavengers, who return to the earth nutrients needed by the green plants. It’s a system that has worked magnificently for billions of years. Filmmakers understandably love footage of gore and battle, but any naturalist will tell you that the species are not in any sense at war with one another. The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers. The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn’t massacre them, as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion right in their midst.
“All this comes about because there is a law that is followed invariably within the community, and without this law the community would indeed be in chaos and would very quickly disintegrate and disappear. Man owes his very existence to this law. If the species around him had not obeyed it, he could not have come into being or survived. It’s a law that protects not only the community as a whole but species within the community and even individuals. Do you understand?”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I have no idea what the law is.”
“I’m pointing to its effects.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“It is the peace-keeping law, the law that keeps the community from turning into the howling chaos the Takers imagine it to be. It’s the law that fosters life for all—life for the grasses, life for the grasshopper that feeds on the grasses, life for the quail that feeds on the grasshopper, life for the fox that feeds on the quail, life for the crows that feed on the dead fox.
“The club-finned fish that nosed the shores of the continents came into being because hundreds of millions of generations of life before them had followed this law, and some of them became amphibians following this law. And some of the amphibians became reptiles following this law. And some of the reptiles became birds and mammals following this law. And some of the mammals became primates following this law. And one branch of the primates became Australopithecus following this law. And Australopithecus became Homo habilis following this law. And Homo habilis became Homo erectus following this law. And Homo erectus became Homo sapiens following this law. And Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens sapiens following this law.
“And then about ten thousand years ago one branch of the family of Homo sapiens sapiens said, ‘Man is exempt from this law. The gods never meant man to be bound by it.’ And so they built a civilization that flouts the law at every point, and within five hundred generations—in an eye-blink in the scale of biological time—this branch of the family of Homo sapiens sapiens saw that they had brought the entire world to the point of death. And their explanation for this calamity was … what?”
“Huh?”
“Man lived harmlessly on this planet for some three million years, but the Takers have brought the whole thing to the point of collapse in only five hundred generations. And their explanation for this is what?”
“I see what you mean. Their explanation is that something is fundamentally wrong with people.”
“Not that you Takers may be doing something wrong but rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with human nature itself.”
“That’s right.”
“How do you like that explanation now?”
“I’m beginning to have my doubts about it.”
“Good.”
3
“At the time when the Takers blundered into the New World and began kicking everything to pieces, the Leavers here were searching for an answer to this question: ‘Is there a way to achieve settlement that is in accord with the law that we’ve been following from the beginning of time?’ I don’t mean, of course, that they had consciously formulated this question. They were no more consciously aware of this law than the early aeronauts were consciously aware of the laws of aerodynamics. But they were struggling with it all the same: building and abandoning one civilizational contraption after another, trying to find one that would fly. Done this way, it’s slow work. Proceeding simply by trial and error, it might have taken them another ten thousand years—or another fifty thousand years. They apparently had the wisdom to know there was no hurry. They didn’t have to get into the air. It made no sense to them to commit themselves to one civilizational craft that was clearly headed for disaster, the way the Takers have done.”
Ishmael stopped there, and when he didn’t go on, I said, “What now?”
His cheeks crinkled in a smile. “Now you leave and come back when you’re prepared to tell me what law or set of laws has been at work in the community of life from the beginning.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing here for the last half week, if not from the very beginning: getting you ready.”
“But I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“You do know. You have the same three guides as in the case of the A’s, the B’s, and the C’s. The law you’re looking for has been obeyed invariably in the living community for three billion years.” He nodded to the world outside. “And this is how things came to be this way. If this law had not been obeyed from the beginning and in each generation thereafter, the seas would be lifeless deserts and the land would still be dust blowing in the wind. All the countless forms of life that you see here came into being following this law, and following this law, man too came into being. And only once in all the history of this planet has any species tried to live in defiance of this law—and it wasn’t an entire species, it was only one people, those I’ve named Takers. Ten thousand years ago, this one people said,
‘No more. Man was not meant to be bound by this law,’ and they began to live in a way that flouts the law at every point. Every single thing that is prohibited under the law they incorporated into their civilization as a fundamental policy. And now, after five hundred generations, they are about to pay the penalty that any other species would pay for living contrary to this law.”