27.

Now he was in a filthy little apartment, lying on the bed. His vertigo was gone. He sat up, refreshed as if after an incredibly long sleep. He glanced around the one-room apartment--there were beer cans everywhere, papers, a computer, shelves of tattered books, books on the floor, papers scattered everywhere, dust on everything, all of it wretched and stained.

He heard a key in the door, and jumped up to a sitting position. Had he broken in here? Was whoever lived here going to kill him, call the police?

The door opened to a black man--a great black man of perfect physique. He had a few scars on his head, right beneath the line of his full woolly hair; and birthmarks below these puncture-scars gave the impression of flowing blood, their reaching paths precisely those that blood would take in running down the face. He wore soft and simple clothes, neither stylish, expensive, nor coarse.

He merely nodded to Joshua, then turned the computer chair around and sat before him.

They stared at one another in silence. Neither had said a word for what seemed like five minutes. Joshua began to feel uncomfortable and would not meet his gaze. Finally the stranger said, "What is the father of history?"

Joshua only looked at him. "Is he asking me?" he thought incredulously.

"History is defined as social change," the man said. "No matter what change happens in a society, it can have one and only one cause, the one aspect of society that develops and develops forever, never ceasing to advance. Without that, all societies would be static--history would not exist--there would be no change from Monarchy to Democracy, Democracy to Tyranny. One thing is in constant development in any society, and only this one thing. Therefore all social change has its root in this thing, from which all the historic phases must issue."

"Technology," said Joshua.

The man nodded. "Hegel missed it, Marx missed it. At the beginning of the 20th century men thought war would disappear from the earth. They assumed the past wars were a kind of settling down, a defining of national borders, a controversy between differing ideologies and religions. All of which was slowly being erased--peoples the world over were becoming homogenous in their beliefs, there were not likely to be any more secession conflicts nor conflicts that decided a country's limits. Europe was becoming of a single mind--religion was fading from the developed world--men were entering into the final stability at the end of history--wars would be no more, and we shall have entered the last stage, to find a perpetual peace. And then, though nobody knew how it began, though it was a mystery how on earth it happened, the 20th century became the bloodiest century in all the history of Earth."

Joshua stared at him and nodded.

"Whenever there is a leap in technology, it reaches down into the very consciousness of all the world. Men and women and children cease to be quite what they were thirty years ago. It lends a dynamism to every aspect of society, such that the whole system of it destabilizes, and in this way does history transform, move from epoch to epoch, stage to stage. Ten thousand years ago a man could hardly commit more than two or three murders in his life--he simply did not have the technology to do so--all he had was stones to smash into someone's head, spears to impale him. Now if a man should plan it right, and perhaps get a stroke of luck and remain undetected, he could kill off a million people before he is discovered. Technology means power, and power is used for good and evil alike. Scientists believe they are the salvation of the race--oh, if they could only see things from the perspective of the philosopher of history. But they are too intent on their microscopes, staring through their nearsighted eyes at the little genes, in work that someone else will use to kill millions."

Joshua was staring at him with wide eyes, and he began to notice that the dark skin of this man's arms, when he moved them in his gestures, left little images behind them. Gradually he distinguished the image of wings--wings coming of--was it the arms or the back?--he didn't know, but he saw wings there, metamorphosing, on the fringes of being there, flirting with the status of not being there at all.

"Utopians like Marx hope in an end to history--a solution to history--a final stage after which all social problems are solved. Dystopians fear a totalitarian world from which we shall never emerge back to freedom. Don't they know that so long as there is dynamism in that sole engine and fuel of history--technology--that we shall reach no final stage, whether utopia or dystopia? We shall change and change forever--forever transform--until we find our ending. And our ending shall come--yes, it shall--we shall destroy ourselves and make ourselves extinct once and for all. There is but one hope, there is but one possible solution."

Joshua stared up at him in wonder like a child. He did not care whether the answer came in the slightest--he was too deep in his astonishment at this man's face, eyes, hands, gestures. The stranger was beautiful--yes--this was what beauty meant, this man was what that word was invented to describe.

"There is but one way out," he continued. "Should a generation of men and women be born, not a single one of them taught to read, not a single one of them taught how we create these things--telephones, computers, all of it--therein lies the only possible utopia. In such a world, the present age would die with the last old man who knew how to read, and from thenceforth all the younger people will know how to do nothing but hunt and eat the weeds of the fallow field. But it must be complete for it to work--we must teach this golden generation not even where babies come from, lest they deduce from this that a planted seed will yield grain. This is the only solution possible. Failing this, we shall run ourselves into the ground with this machine called history. And I think we both know that such a scenario is impossible."

"I saw--I saw the words 'God has come near' just before I woke," said Joshua.

"To God," said the man, "it matters not in the slightest whether the whole world at once is wiped out in disaster."

"Does not God love every man and woman?" asked Joshua.

"To God," said the stranger, "it is more important that some old man's beloved dog survives its surgery than whether all the world is slaughtered in holocaust."