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With this sudden realization my dark perception of Olaf as a heartless monster drained away. His make was noble. He missed his mark, because he wasn't smart enough, but in his awful fumbling he might have done some good after all, though infinitely more good could have been done had he done things right for those who sought his help. He might have elevated the people with best principles that mankind once knew, like those that the 'O' people had discovered for themselves.
As my perception of Olaf changed, so did my perception of Zy change.
Zy, unlike Olaf, was a simple fellow like most other men. He, apparently, had been drawn into the game of helping civilizations by the same emotional strains that I was drawn into when I and Werner Heisenberg went after the Goran fleet to help the 'O' people. If we had been 'successful' in our dark quest of using force we might have destroyed the 'O' people too. I could understand Zy new. Under normal circumstances Zy might have looked even cute at times sitting in his mud pond, especially after he had submerged into the hot mud and then stood up with globs of it sliding from his face.
The unfolding nightmare of the two men telling their stories appeared to have had all in all a deadening effect on Wendy. In spite of the comical situation with the sliding mud on their faces and hair, and whatever, Wendy never smiled. It seems we all paid our price of having that story told to us that Olaf had warned us against at the beginning.
The setting in which the story was told seemed quite appropriate now. The mud clung to us mentally as it did physically. It would likely take some time a deep reasoning to cleanse the mud away, the mud that we had been wallowing in.
There were numerous mud pools in operation in this park that was advertised as a health center. Not all of the ponds were occupied. Ours was somewhat remote from most of the others. Zy said that the mud was 'cleaner' there, although it was everywhere artificially circulated and constantly 'washed and filtered.'
Sitting in such a mud hole, one felt like one is floating in air, surrounded by this constantly up-welling, bubbling ooze. As to its supposed medicinal effects, neither Zy nor Olaf could actually vouch for any. Strangely I liked the small of the place. The entire complex smelled faintly like a sulfur pot. The smell reminded me of the swamps of the Everglades. A few sparse plants somehow managed to grow between the pools of mud. They looked as strangely foreign to the place as did the towering great city of Monar Aquilae in the distance, which was regarded as some kind of national monument of this well-functioning and culturally rich nation-state planet.
Zy also didn't fit the environment. He often stood up in the mud pool lecturing us as if standing before a class of students.
I was surprised however by Martin's reaction, or rather his lack of reaction. Something was missing in this doom and gloom atmosphere. Martin's presence always brought light to a situation, a super nova type light. Maybe he was waiting for me. But what could he be waiting for? Martin always spoke about the principles of the universe that reflect it all-pervading Spirit.
"The principles of the universe are error-free," I interjected into the still unfolding discourse on the doom of civilizations. "The principles of the universe are not antagonistic to one another, if they were the universe would not exist. Even if a single principle of the complex array of principles that construct and atom, for example, that make it functioning for countless billions of years, was to be altered and be made antagonistic instead of harmonizing, every atomic structure would collapse; and with it the universe would collapse. There are evidently no errors incorporated into the design of the universe." I threw this up for Martin to pick on.
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