“Okay, I see what you mean. I think. If the world was made for us, then it belongs to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.”
“Exactly. That’s what’s been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You’ve been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you.”
“Yes,” I said, and thought for a second. “Actually, that’s pretty amazing. I mean, you hear this fifty times a day. People talk about our environment, our seas, our solar system. I’ve even heard people talk about our wildlife.”
“And just yesterday you assured me with complete confidence that there was nothing in your culture remotely resembling mythology.”
“True. I did.” Ishmael continued to stare at me morosely. “I was wrong,” I told him. “What more do you want?”
“Astonishment,” he said.
I nodded. “I’m astonished, all right. I just don’t let it show.”
“I should have gotten you when you were seventeen.”
I shrugged, meaning that I wished he had.
7
“Yesterday I told you that your story provides you with an explanation of how things came to be this way.”
“Right.”
“What contribution does this first part of the story make to that explanation?”
“You mean … what contribution does it make to explaining how things came to be the way they are right now?”
“That’s right.”
“Offhand, I don’t see how it makes any contribution to it.”
“Think. Would things have come to be this way if the world had been made for jellyfish?”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
“Obviously not. If the world had been made for jellyfish, things would be entirely different.”
“That’s right. But it wasn’t made for jellyfish, it was made for man.”
“And this partly explains how things came to be this way.”
“Right. It’s sort of a sneaky way of blaming everything on the gods. If they’d made the world for jellyfish, then none of this would have happened.”
“Exactly,” Ishmael said. “You’re beginning to get the idea.”
8
“Do you have a feeling now for where you might find the other parts of this story—the middle and the end?”
I gave this some thought. “I’d watch Nova, I think.”
“Why?”
“I’d say that if Nova was doing the story of creation, the story I told today would be the outline. All I have to do now is figure out how they’d do the rest.”
“Then that’s your next assignment. Tomorrow I want to hear the middle of the story.”
FOUR