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am I and so are you. Even outside, some have great grace and beauty, and can
do many things that you and I cannot, as well as everything you or I
can do."
"You couldn't live on Mars," she said skeptically. "Hell, I may have forgot
more'n I can ever learn, but I
know there ain't no air up there."
"Not enough air, and not in the right mixture, but, nevertheless, it is true.
I am a Martian. I was born and raised there."
"You downtimed," she guessed. "You tripped over before comin' back here."
He grinned. "See? You aren't so dumb as you think you are. It is true that
this is not my natural form,
although I
am a priest and I'm fated to be a priest, no matter when in time I stop. I am
certain I don't have to explain that to you."
"You can say that again."
"So, Holly, tell me am I human or not?"
"You are now
."
"So, tell me, Holly, what makes a human being? Is a human being this physical
flesh or what is inside the head?"
She shook her head in irritation. "I don't know. I ain't smart enough no more
to figure that one out."
"Well, I have seen the future of the human race. I have seen both futures of
the human race. I have seen the Earth sink into a horror of misery and
degradation, a humanity enslaved whose very souls are captive from birth to
the dictatorial whims of a government elite, its resources depleted, its air
fouled almost beyond redemption. The Earth of the future is death. The elite
live over three hundred years, on average, in technological comfort. The
slaving billions of the future have an average lifespan of less than thirty
years worse than in your own time by far, and live in a wasteland of medieval
primitiveness. There's no power, no unspoiled vegetation, and few animals,
ex-cept on the elite's preserves, where even human beings are hunted for
sport. I can prove this. I have many pictures of this future Earth, or you
could be taken there to a far corner to see for yourself.''
She sighed. "I believe you. So the shits will inherit the Earth. What else is
new?"
"
We are," he replied softly. "Listen, my ancestors came to the New World and
found great civilizations there. We did not try to integrate them into our
society we destroyed theirs. A priest of the Catholic
Church burned the entire master royal library of the Mayan people in the
Yucatan, and others of the
Church and the Spanish state destroyed much of what was left. We destroyed
their culture and reduced those proud people to slavery, and we were proud of
it. They had a different culture, a different religion, and they looked and
dressed wrong by European standards. They were, therefore, not human to my
ancestors, but subhumans, intelligent but not ever equals.
"When this old world began to run out of its exploitable resources, the fuels
and minerals that made civilization good for everyone, they had to go out to
the planets to find more, and find them they did. The trouble was, they were
in places Earth humans could not live without expensive and extensive life
support.
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Mars had much value beneath its rusty soil; many of the asteroids and moons of
Jupiter and Saturn had even more. To change those places to the type on which
humans could live and work easily would take a fortune and centuries. Earth
did not have cen-turies, and the amounts it needed from its planetary sisters
was far too great and too expensive to be economically feasible. The only
solution they had to this was to make humans into creatures that could live in
such places as easily as men could live on Earth. Not easily but at least as
easily as men lived in the Antarctic cold and the desert wastes of the Sahara.
Do you follow me so far?"
She nodded. "I think so. They got a bunch of people and changed them into
monsters."
"Not exactly. There was no shortage of volunteers. Skilled technicians and
scientists were lured by the challenge and the romance of it. Workers were
drawn from the poor and the dispossessed who saw a chance for becoming
some-thing great. It was a new frontier, and it was tamed, in a way, by such a
breed.
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