“You’re certain you’re ready to talk about evil now?”
“Seems like before I do my best to kill people might be better for it than afterward.”
He answered that with silence, and she actually took the time to think about it. Ready, really? She was and she wasn’t. And her heart needed the words now, like a thirsty tongue needs water, even if it be a trickle licked off a stone and not a full glass.
“Ready enough to hear. Maybe not to accept,” she admitted.
“Then you know your own heart better than most,” Quentin said.
“Very well, then. I’m a smart man, but often not a wise one, which can make for an impoverished theology or at least a poor application of it. But here’s the best I’ve got. Why is there evil if Orholam loves us and has the power to stop it? My answer is that we are the apprentice painters, working under the master’s watchful eye. He is a good master, and He has sworn not to make our work meaningless. Every smudge and every blot and every unsteady line we draw will remain. The master will soften a line or turn the darkest graffiti to chiaroscuro, but never will He take the palette knife to gouge out an imperfect piece of the work, for if He erased the imperfections made by our hands, where would He stop erasing? Everything we paint we paint imperfectly.”
“Then the whole scheme is shit. He should paint it all Himself, were He not too lazy,” Teia said. She wasn’t doing a good job of listening, though, and she knew it.
Quentin flashed a quick, apologetic grin. “Sure, sure, if we are to call lazy the one who created the Ur, the Primes, and all the Thousand Worlds—not a heretical notion, by the by, despite what certain scholars . . . never mind. If we’re to call lazy He who spread the stars with His cloak and blows the winds between them, who forms every beating heart and mountain and lake upon them, and is creating yet every life and love and every chick within each egg, bursting out into the light . . . if we’re to do that, then I’m not sure the word ‘lazy’ has a stable definition. But certainly, we could conceive of Orholam as being so vast, so omnipotent, so intelligent that He could direct every moment of every man’s and every woman’s and every child’s and every dog’s day. He could do so, and the picture created thus would be flawless, and every head in the cosmos would nod as one that it was flawless, for they could not do otherwise than nod in unison. For in their perfection, they must recognize His perfection. They must bow and bob at His every command. They wouldn’t need commands, for they would be but extensions of His fingers. Such creatures would be capable of everything except freedom, and therefore, everything except love. And for some reason, Orholam values love—not just of Him but our love toward others, toward even ourselves. The master takes joy when the apprentice grows in her mastery, when she sees the line for herself the first time, when her hand can finally paint what her heart conceives, and when she partakes of the beauty for the first time and the five hundredth.”
“Murdered slaves and dead babies part of that beauty?” Teia asked bitterly.
Quentin folded his hands. “Part of the beauty? No. But part of the canvas. A wag asks from the secret bitterness of his heart, ‘So then, is this the best of all possible worlds?’ If Orholam is watching, and Orholam is acting, is this the best He can do? Because the best He can do appears to be shit.”
Teia was still a bit surprised to hear Quentin use such language.
Quentin grinned, glad to have shocked her. “What? He made shit, too.”
She grinned momentarily, but the ache didn’t abate.
Quentin said, “There was a master who loved his slave, so he freed him immediately. Another master loved his slave, so he wrote into his will that the slave should be freed after he himself died. Which of these loved his slave?”
“The one who freed him.”
“I agree!” Quentin said, “But the master who kept his slave would object that what he did was for the slave’s own good: a free life is a dangerous one, the free man might end up destitute! The master would guarantee a good life for him, meaningful work, and protection—until he passed away and could guarantee it no longer.”
“He’s lying,” Teia said. “Though maybe to himself first. It’s none of the master’s business what happens to that slave.”
“But so long as the slave belongs to him, it literally is his business,” Quentin said.
Teia blinked. “Well, sure, financially, but . . . but the master can’t call it love, then. He’s just making sure no one destroys his investment, the way a free man might destroy himself. The first master is assuming the financial loss in giving the slave his freedom. He’s not investing in property; he’s investing in a man. And not for his own enrichment but for the former slave’s.”
“What happens,” Quentin asked, “if that freedman recognizes his master’s love and continues working in his house, though now as a free man?”
“Everybody wins, I guess?” Teia said. “The master knows his former slave cares about him, and the former slave gets a fair wage and dignity and the ability to leave if things change.”
“But the same work gets done?”
“I daresay that more work gets done in the good master’s house. Slaves have ways of letting their will be felt.”
“And yet you ask that Orholam be the kind of master who keeps His slaves as slaves forever and calls it love.”
Quentin smiled, and she felt like she’d fallen into the kindliest trap ever. Despite Quentin’s gentle demeanor, Teia felt like she’d been slapped.
“What? No.” Teia shook her head. “Look, I hear you. But that doesn’t close the gap for me. Sure, blame war on men. There’s evil in my own heart. I fight it all the time. But . . . floods and cancer and famines? Why would there have to be those for us to have freedom? Why would that be the consequence of our evil choices? I don’t get it. If Orholam made the whole system, He should have made it . . . I dunno. Better.”
Quentin said, “There are those who claim that as men’s rejection of Orholam’s will for us has corrupted our very nature, so, too, those elohim who rebelled have corrupted the natural world. But I don’t know. Personally, I think the proper response to those who’ve suffered a tragedy is not to teach them but to grieve with them. I’ve asked many times, and angrily, would it have upset some vast eternal plan if my father hadn’t had a seizure and drowned while bathing me in the river when I was four years old? Why did our dog Red pull me out but not go back that time for my father, whom he’d saved from his fits before?”
And suddenly, Quentin was too overcome with emotion to speak.
It seemed to surprise him even more than it did her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, clearing his throat. “I haven’t told that story.”
Teia got the idea that he meant ever, that he’d never told that story to anyone.
He dashed tears from his eyes and tried to smile to smooth it over. “I guess I can choose to be angry at that dog, or angry at Orholam for that day, or at Orholam for my father having the falling sickness in the first place. Or I can be grateful that He made dogs to love us and that Red saved my father from the fire and the waves four times before that day so that I might even be born, and I can be grateful that that beautiful animal saved me that day.