“True.”
“The world would not meekly submit to man’s rule, so he had to do what to it?”
“What do you mean?”
“If the king comes to a city that will not submit to his rule, what does he have to do?”
“He has to conquer it.”
“Of course. In order to make himself the ruler of the world, man first had to conquer it.”
“Good lord,” I said—and nearly leaped up out of my chair while striking my brow and all the rest.
“Yes?”
“You hear this fifty times a day. You can turn on the radio or the television and hear it every hour. Man is conquering the deserts, man is conquering the oceans, man is conquering the atom, man is conquering the elements, man is conquering outer space.”
Ishmael smiled. “You didn’t believe me when I said that this story is ambient in your culture. Now you see what I mean. The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was born to do.”
“Yes. That’s very clear now.”
5
“Now the first two parts of the story have come together: The world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it. And how does the second part contribute to your explanation of how things came to be this way?”
“Let me think about that…. Once again this is a sort of sneaky way of blaming the gods. They made the world for man, and they made man to conquer and rule it—which he eventually did. And this is how things came to be the way they are.”
“Nail it down. Go a little deeper.”
I closed my eyes and gave it a couple of minutes, but nothing came.
Ishmael nodded toward the windows. “All this—all your triumphs and tragedies, all your marvels and miseries—are a direct result of … what?”
I chewed on it for a while, but I still couldn’t see what he was getting at.
“Try it this way,” Ishmael said. “Things wouldn’t be the way they are if the gods had meant man to live like a lion or a wombat, would they?”
“No.”
“Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world. So things came to be this way as a direct result of …?”
“Of man fulfilling his destiny.”
“Of course. And he had to fulfill his destiny, didn’t he?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“So what is there to get excited about?”
“Very true, very true.”
“As the Takers see it, all this is simply the price of becoming human.”
“How do you mean?”
“It wasn’t possible to become fully human living beside the dragons in the slime, was it?”
“No.”