The Seed of Evil

Shortly he left and walked to his own apartment in the same building. He stood by his living room window, looking out. He had a good view of the city: buildings interspersed with parks and small woods. If he liked he could tune the window to any of thousands of alternative views piped from around the world. Lian Li, however, preferred to see the here-and-now.

His apartment, like all those in the college’s residential section, was tailored to meet the needs of a single young person. It had a calculated amount of psychological space—large enough to be a real domain, and to entertain in, but small enough to be controllable with little effort. He could furnish and decorate it however he wished, but actually he had left it unchanged since the day he moved in. Rearranging his living quarters was not something that readily occurred to him.

Running the length of one wall was a shelf lined with books. Lian Li took a volume from it, sat down at the table and began to read.

Also on that shelf was a volume to be found in every home in the commonalty. Had Lian Li opened it at a certain page, he could could have read:

“The history of revolution has been a story of repeated effort in which many mistakes were made. Early revolutions were almost entirely economic in their concerns, and even with this limited goal several painful experiments were necessary—several revolutions—before unrestricted access to the economic commonwealth became available to every citizen, both as producer and user, and the impediments to the growth of wealth were removed.

“With the material problem solved, it began to become evident that there were other sources of human suffering than economic inequity. Even when disease and physical disfigurement had been entirely overcome, it could not be said that the perfect society had been created. Emotional unhappiness stemming from frustration, disappointment and general unfulfilment remained rife.

“Revolutionists therefore turned their attention to areas of emotional distress. In this, the natural human desire for happy personal relationships loomed large, and most grief was, at that time, due to the desire for relationships having a sexual element. Revolutionists came to feel deep indignation over the very real sufferings caused by unreciprocated love, and thwarted desire generally, especially as these deprivations were borne by some and not by others.

“The final revolution, then, was psychological in character. Its aim was to eradicate emotional suffering, particularly in the field of personal relationships.

“In this it was successful.

“Success had been due in part to important discoveries that were made during the course of the revolution. The first of these is that human types are highly specific in their permutations, and that attraction between human beings is also highly specific. It was found that while a person might feel attracted in various degrees to countless other people he met in the course of his life, there existed for him, on a world-wide basis, only a very small number of the opposite sex who would inspire in him total love, total fascination and total commitment. In pre-revolutionary society a citizen would sometimes meet with one of this small number, though this was by no means universal. For this love to be reciprocated, however, for the other person to be inspired in the same degree, required a double coincidence that was of a very low order of probability. When rare encounters of this kind did occur, therefore, those involved could be counted fortunate in the extreme.

“Following the revolution, however, the science of psychic typing made it possible to bring such perfect lovers together as a deliberate social act. When this practice began to become established a second discovery was made: children born to such unions are more talented and are much better balanced mentally than children born to the commonplace pre-revolutionary union. This is only partly due to their being raised by a couple who are supremely happy with one another. In greater measure it springs from the transference phenomenon, whereby the feelings experienced by the parents during love-making help determine what sort of individual will result from fertilisation. The transference phenomenon was entirely unknown in pre-revolutionary times, when it was always assumed that the outcome of conception was independent of the emotional relationship of the parents or of the quality of their lovemaking.