The Final Circle of Paradise

Seven years ago, in your mother's house, I saw a truly marvelous mirage: both of you standing before me almost grown up…" No – I was saying that for myself, not for them. It should be said differently. "Friend Len," I said, "seven years ago you explained to me that your people were accursed. We came here and removed the curse from you and Reg and from many other children who had no parents. And now it's your turn to remove, the curse, which…"

It will be very difficult, but I'll explain it to them.

One way or another, I'll get it across. We have known from childhood how to remove the curses on the barricades and on construction sites and in laboratories, and you will remove the last of the curses, you will be the future teachers and educators. In the last war – the most bloodless and the most difficult for its soldiers.

Upstairs Vousi screeched and Len started to cry piteously.

Oscar's voice boomed in the study. How well off he is, I thought. Simple: slug is bad, harmful, unnatural. Therefore, it must be destroyed, forbidden by law, and then you must watch closely that the law is strictly enforced. Only Matia is smarter than that, because he is older and more experienced.

Matia can still be pulled over to my side. My word doesn't mean anything to him, but others will be found to whom he will listen… How wonderful that I can now cry out to the whole world and be heard by millions of like-thinkers!

And then I thought that I would not leave this place. I had been here only three days. It could not be that there was no one here who would be with us. No one who hated all this with a deadly hatred, who wanted to blast this dull sated world out of its stasis. Such people always existed and always will.

Perhaps that bibliophile driver or that tall, harsh one of the Intels… and who knew how many more. They stumbled about as though they were blind. We would do everything in our power to help them so that they would not waste their anger on trifles.

It was our place to be here now. And my place, too.

What a labor lies ahead, I thought, what a task! For the time being, I didn't know where to begin in this Country of the Boob, caught unprepared in a flood of affluence, but I knew that I wouldn't leave here as long as the immigration laws permitted. And when they stopped permitting it, I would break them…