father, but not your response to it. Clarify. What is faith?”
“Faith is—is—” I stopped and wrestled with my thoughts. This interview was already proving torturous, but it was also ripping away the knots that had ensnarled my feelings for so long. What I wanted now, above all else, was to be liberated from my inner conflicts, that I might be able to act decisively. If, to achieve such a freedom, I must submit to the Quintessence’s invasive interrogation, then so be it.
My pulse slowed. I gathered a reply and delivered it word by word, straining to keep my voice steady and my meaning clear.
“Faith is to have conviction in, and gain comfort from, a hypothesis, despite there being no empirical evidence to support it. In my father’s case, the premise was that all existence is created by a single supreme being, and that its meaning cannot truly be understood until a life has been lived and the actions taken during it have been judged by the creator.”
A long silence followed my statement. I managed to clamber to my feet and stood weakly, watching the motionless trinity.
Finally, it spoke again. “The notion presupposes a different manner of existence that can only be properly perceived after, and possibly before, the current one.”
“Yes, it does.”
“We are intrigued. Why do you not share your father’s faith?”
I shrugged. “Proponents of the hypothesis claim the creator is perfect and good. If that’s true, why is existence so flawed? Why does the opposite of good exist—conflict and suffering and injustice—the things we term ‘evil’? Are they to test us, so we might be judged? Are we, then, nothing but an experiment? Why has a faultless creator fabricated something so unsound that it requires evaluation? It makes no sense. There is no logic to it. I cannot believe in it.”
“Yet you mimicked acceptance of it.”
“I desired the equanimity and happiness that I saw in my father.”
“You were unable to achieve those things independently?”
“I was afraid to try. I was a coward.”
“But you hoped imitation would develop into authenticity.”
“Yes.”
“And the result?”
I swallowed and took a few trembling breaths before answering.
“Guilt! The emotion you’ve identified is guilt. I wasted time. Lived a lie.” I gritted my teeth, fisted my hands, and snarled, “And when I finally found the courage to come out of hiding—this! Here! Ptallaya! Where I have control over nothing and am pushed from one predicament to another. Whatever I do, it makes no damned difference and no damned sense!”
There was another long pause, then the Quintessence responded, “Aiden Fleischer, by rejecting your father’s hypothesis you also rejected a context through which your experiences and actions might have meaning. Also, you made central to your repudiation the notion that your creator is responsible for the defects that you perceive in existence. What if that is untrue? Might there not be a second agency at work? If there is a creator, why not also a destroyer?”
I instantly recalled Clarissa’s insistence that evil did not spring from specific circumstances but existed independently of them, as a causeless force. She’d once asked, “Do you not think it time you gave the Devil his due?” But no, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. The Bible says of Lucifer: Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. In other words, the Devil was a faulty product of a supposedly flawless progenitor. What, though, if Clarissa had been wrong in attribution only? What if evil came not from one of God’s own creations but, as the Quintessence had just suggested, from a source equal to and separate from the deity?
“Yes,” I murmured. “It’s a more plausible proposition.”
“Might it not then also be true,” the Quintessence said, “that these conflicting forces echo through every level of existence, from the macroscopic to the microscopic; in every animal, vegetable, and mineral; in every social structure; in every individual?”
“I don’t oppose the concept.”
“Then in order to gain another context, and thus achieve the meaning, equanimity, and happiness you desire, you must better understand the opposition we have identified.”
A peal of bitter laughter escaped me. I quoted myself: “To do the greatest good, I must know its opposite.” They were the exact words I’d said to Carissa Stark so long ago, and now they were being reiterated by a bizarre intelligence on another world!
“I can help you,” the Quintessence boomed.
“How?”
“The evil you must confront—it is here.”
“It’s—what?”
“If our conjecture has validity, Aiden Fleischer, then Phenadoor exemplifies the perfection