Chapter 59: Information
Tulland suddenly stopped short. In all the reading he had ever done about the System, he was told two things about it. The first was that it had handled system-type things in his world long before he was born, before the Church seized control of the same responsibilities.
The second was, put plainly, that the System was bad. That it was skulking about, just outside the light, waiting to do harm. What harms it would do if it could was a pretty long list, at least in the claims of the Church. It would destabilize their world, destroying cities, starving countries, and opening the doors to violence both by turning humans on other humans and giving the beasts that lurked outside the defended, safe territory of humanity access to the inner parts of their lands.
But things it had actually done? Direct accusations, things that could be checked against historical records and accounts that might pop here and there? Tulland was realizing, for the first time in his life, that those accusations were fairly thin in terms of specifics. The System was going to do massacres, they said, but didn’t actually list any it had caused. The System led era was a time of violence and war, they said, without exactly saying how this was promoted by the System’s actions.
Which, of course, didn’t mean that the Church was necessarily hiding anything. He was talking about near pre-history here. Facts would have gotten lost over time. It was possible the Church wasn’t lying. It was also possible that the System wasn’t such a horrible thing, as disturbing a thought as that seemed.
There. You’ve found the right questions to be asking.
It’s going to be hard to convince me of that.
I have no doubt it would be if I were to try. But I won’t.
No interest?
No use. We are here. No amount of belief or disbelief will change that.