Jack Vance

So much existed: so much to be felt and seen and known! A single life was not enough…

By an axiom of cultural anthropology, the more isolated a community, the more idiosyncratic become its customs and conventions. This of course is not necessarily disadvantageous.

Jantiff gave a hollow laugh. “Who now is the exploiter, monopolist, elitist tycoon and all the rest? What of egalism now?”

Esteban retorted in a debonair, if somewhat edgy, voice: “Egalism is all very well, and I subscribe to it! Still: why deny the obvious? Everyone wants to make the most of their life.”

Every Arrabin desperately asserts his individuality, with personal tricks and fads. A futile kind of life, no doubt, but isn’t all life futile?

Here was the milieu he loved: conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence, and the verbal facility of the company.

“Still, moderation, I beg of all of you!”

“But not too much of it!” Dobbo called out. “We’d be defeating only ourselves. Moderation must be practiced in moderation.”

“Remember, my dear, Jantiff isn’t an egalist like the rest of us; he wants to do something quite extraordinary and individualistic.”

“Yes, partly that,” said Jantiff, wishing that he had never ventured an opinion. “But it’s more like this: here I am, born into life with certain capabilities. If I don’t use these capabilities and achieve my utmost then I’m cheating myself, and living a soiled life.

“Hmm,” said Tanzel sagely. “If everyone were like you, the world would be a very nervous place.” Jantiff gave an embarrassed laugh. “No cause for worry; there don’t seem to be many people like me.”

“I am not skilled at inventing punishments.”

“Nor are they to my taste. I enjoy creating conditions of justice. All too often, however, I must ordain harsh penalties. It is the disagreeable side to my work. The preferences of the criminal, of course, can’t be considered; as often as not, he will opt for leniency even no punishment whatever.”

Still, this way of life, peculiar as it seems, is not necessarily a bad system. I suspect that every style of life works our to be a tradeoff between various kinds of freedoms. There are naturally many different freedoms, and sometimes one freedom implies the absence of another.

“Only children are intolerant of conventions. They are indispensable to an organized civilization, like discipline to an army, or foundations to a building, or landmarks to a traveler. Without conventions civilization is a handful of water. An army without discipline is a mob. A building without foundations is rubble. A traveler without landmarks is lost.”

Lorcas stated that he opposed not all convention, but only those which he found irksome and pointless.

“As I listen to you I hear only ingenuousness and didactic theory.”

Lorcas compressed his lips. “Perhaps because you are hearing views which contradict your emotions.”

“While we were gone someone broke into my case and stole most of my things.”

The news seemed to drive Skorlet close to the limits of self-control. “And what do you expect?” she snapped in an unpleasantly harsh voice. “This is an egalistic country; why should you have more than anyone else?”

“I have been over-egalized,” said Jantiff drily. “To the effect that I now have less than anyone else.”