The most difficult part was the number of things that he had to learn.
There was no trouble about anything he wanted done by others; he simply
commanded, and that was the end of it. But the mass of knowledge about
the Terranovans and their world before he came appalled him not only by
its sheer bulk but by its intricacy, the unexplained gaps, the
contradictions. For a long time after the founding of New
Washington--later New Jerusalem--he was still bothered a little by
doubt. He wanted to learn all that there was to learn about the
Terranovans, so that finally he would understand them completely and the
doubt would be gone.
Eventually he confessed to himself that the task was impossible. He was
forty-seven years old; he had perhaps thirty years ahead of him, and it
was not as if he were able to devote them solely to study. There was the
written history of the Terranovans, which covered minutely a period of
nine thousand years--though not completely; there were periods and
places which seemed to have left no adequate records of themselves. The
natives had no reasonable explanation of this phenomenon; they simply
said that the keeping of histories sometimes went out of fashion.
Then there was the biology of the Terranovans and the countless other
organisms of the planet--simply to catalogue them and give them English
names, as he had set out to do, would have occupied him the rest of his
lifetime.
There was the complex and puzzling field of social relations--here again
everything seemed to be in unaccountable flux, even though the over-all
pattern remained the same and seemed as rigid as any primitive people's.
There was physics, which presented exasperating difficulties of
translation; there was engineering, there was medicine, there was
economics....
* * * * *
When he finally gave it up, it was not so much because of the simple
arithmetical impossibility of the job as because he realized that it
didn't matter. For a time he had been tempted away from the logical
attitude toward these savages of his--a foolish weakness of the sort
that had given him that ridiculous hour or two, when, he now dimly
recalled, he had been afraid of the Terranovans--afraid, of all things,
that they were fattening him for the sacrifice!
Whereas it was clear enough, certainly, that the _former_ state of the
Terranovans, their incomprehensible society and language and customs,
simply had no practical importance. He was changing all that. When he
was through, they would be what he had made them, no more and no less.
It was strange, looking back, to realize how little he had seen of his
destiny, there at the beginning. Timid little man, he thought half in
amusement, half contemptuously: nervous and fearful, seeing things
_small_. Build me a house, like the one I had in Schenectady!
They had built him a palace--no, a _temple_--and a city; and they were
building him a world. A planet that would be his to the last atom when
it was done; a corner of the universe that was Algernon James Weaver.
He recalled that in the beginning he had felt almost like these
creatures' servant--"public servant," he had thought, with
self-righteous lukewarm, pleasure. He had seen himself as one who built
for others--the more virtuous because those others were not even men.
But it was not he who built. _They_ built, and for him.
It was strange, he thought again, that he should not have seen it from
the first. For it was perfectly clear and all of a pattern.