1
“Okay,” I said. “I think I have the middle and the end of the story down pat.”
Ishmael nodded and I started the tape recorder.
“What I did was start with the premise: The world was made for man. Then I asked myself how I would write the story as a treatment for Nova. It came out like this:
“The world was made for man, but it took him a long, long time to figure that out. For nearly three million years he lived as though the world had been made for jellyfish. That is, he lived as though he were just like any other creature, as though he were a lion or a wombat.”
“What exactly does it mean to live like a lion or a wombat?”
“It means … to live at the mercy of the world. It means to live without having any control over your environment.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Okay. In this condition, man could not be truly man. He couldn’t develop a truly human way of life—a way of life that was distinctively human. So, during the early part of his life—actually the greater part of his life—man just foozled along getting nowhere and doing nothing.
“As it happened, there was a key problem to be solved, and it was this that took me a long time to work out: what the problem was. Man could get nowhere living like a lion or a wombat, because if you’re a lion or a wombat…. In order to accomplish anything, man had to settle down in one place where he could get to work, so to speak. I mean that it was impossible for him to get beyond a certain point living out in the open as a hunter-gatherer, always moving from place to place in search of food. To get beyond that point, he had to settle down, had to have a permanent base from which he could begin to master his environment.
“Okay. Why not? I mean, well, what was stopping him from doing that? What was stopping him was the fact that if he settled down in one place for more than a few weeks, he’d starve. As a hunter-gatherer, he would simply clean the place out—there would be nothing left to hunt and gather. In order to achieve settlement, man had to learn one fundamental manipulation. He had to learn how to manipulate his environment so that this food-exhaustion didn’t occur. He had to manipulate it so that it produced more human food. In other words, he had to become an agriculturalist.
“This was the turning point. The world had been made for man, but he was unable to take possession of it until this problem was cracked. And he finally cracked it about ten thousand years ago, back there in the Fertile Crescent. This was a very big moment—the biggest in human history up to this point. Man was at last free of all those restraints that…. The limitations of the hunting-gathering life had kept man in check for three million years. With agriculture, those limitations vanished, and his rise was meteoric. Settlement gave rise to division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. With the rise of technology came trade and commerce. With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science, and all the rest. The whole thing was under way at last, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“And that’s the middle of the story.”
2
“Very impressive,” Ishmael said. “I’m sure you realize that the ‘big moment’ you’ve just described was in fact the birth of your culture.”
“Yes.”
“It should be pointed out, however, that the notion that agriculture spread across the world from a single point of origin is distinctly old hat. Nevertheless the Fertile Crescent remains the legendary birthplace of agriculture, at least in the West, and this has a special importance that we’ll look at later on.”
“Okay.”
“Yesterday’s part of the story revealed the meaning of the world as it’s understood among the Takers: The world is a human life-support system, a machine designed to produce and sustain human life.”
“Right.”
“Today’s part of the story seems to be about the destiny of man. Obviously it was not man’s destiny to live like a lion or a wombat.”
“That’s right.”
“What is man’s destiny then?”
“Hm,” I said. “Well. Man’s destiny is … to achieve, to accomplish great things.”
“As it’s known among the Takers, man’s destiny is more specific than that.”
“Well, I suppose you could say that his destiny is to build civilization.”
“Think mythologically.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know how that’s done.”
“I’ll demonstrate. Listen.”
I listened.