Imagine. Instead of this tiny playing field, we have it all. Instead of Y2K, it's Y2000K. What might we have learned?

A lot, to be sure. Everything imagined by science-fiction writers, plus much more. And along the way, no doubt, we would have had big successes and big failures. Fanfares and folderol. Saturnalias and slaughters. Transcendences and treacheries.

Eventually, one guesses, we come out into a place where the central part of culture--that which children know as well as they know anything--is the highest art, that of nurture.

We will have long studied this vast cradle in which we find ourselves, will have observed its baffling pedagogy. "Red in tooth and claw"? Of course. Anyone can see that. Is there more? Of course. But who sees the more, and what might it be?

Imagine. We can be anywhere, anytime, anyshape. What then? We will have found no final answers, no real beginning, no real end. Only more questions, more beginnings leading to more ends leading to more beginnings.

We will have found gardens and jungles, ecologies of all sizes from planets to galaxies and more coming to life and growth and love.

Tyrants, gentle and severe, will have tried to forced their vision, and some will have for a time succeeded. Though it may take eons, their total and perfect eventual failure becomes a paradoxical object lesson for all.

We will surely have concluded that the mystery is so vast that, having come so far, we are left only with benign non-interference. Having thought ourselves so smart for so many billions of years, we find that a difficult conclusion. But eventually we come to it, and rest.

What to do, what to do?

Only plant seeds. And go away. Because the rest, anything else, is interference, which however gentle is a form of violence.

Plant seeds and go away.

But which seeds?

Ah. In our cosmic diaspora we will of course have become quite the cultural horticulturists. Don't you think it likely that, in that position, the best, richest, most stimulating seeds will be those of paradox? Couched in whatever terms are comprehensible to the culture in question.

So one, in the large variety of one's hard-learned horticulture, plants seeds. And, having learned the futility of worrying about how some seeds will fall in fallow soil and grow distorted and ugly while others will flourish, one goes away.

END

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Magellan's Log IX

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