The Octagonal Raven by L. E. Modesitt Page A

father’s inability to protect his own family. Or his organization.”
    “A power grab…” I mused. “Someone high within UniComm…”
    “Or a competitor.”
    “Someone who knows power,” I added.
    “That’s only one possibility,” he pointed out. “There are always revolutionaries, and you make a less protected target, and you can be depicted as a playboy, dilettante edartist living off your name and the fat of the land.”
    “But…I’m working hard as a methodizer….”
    “Daryn…what you do is immaterial to how you can be depicted.”
    Mertyn was right about that, and it was so obvious I wondered why I hadn’t considered it.
    “You hadn’t considered it,” he added, as he often had, as though he had read my thoughts, rather than my face, “because you want to reject the image of your family. You think you’re different.”
    Mertyn’s voice said that I wasn’t that different, and maybe he was right. “Who are the revolutionaries, and why would we have any?” I gestured toward the south. “People have never lived so well—even the poorest. They have a good life.”
    “Life is never perfect. Even a good society is not perfect, and perfection is the enemy of all that is good. Those who seek perfection will destroy an imperfect good.”
    “I seem to recall a lecture along those lines—and a test,” I said, reaching for the beaker once more.
    “Kyciro used to lecture on that. That’s one of the few statements I’ve chosen to remember. When one can recall anything, one must be careful what one chooses to recall.”
    “You’ve said that for years.” I laughed.
    “It becomes more important each year,” he countered. “People forget. The old pre-Collapse Noram culture had the best and most fair society in the history of the world to that point. That didn’t stop it from collapsing into anarchy and civil war. The diversists insisted that the system was destroying their individual heritages. And it was. It was showing their pettiness, the lack of accomplishment, and their failures to meet the material needs of most of the members of those precursor societies. The diversists couldn’t counter that argument. So…they focused on two things that couldn’t be countered. One was that spiritual values were more important than material ones, and the second was that the dominant culture still oppressed women. Since you can’t measure a spiritual value, the materialists were lost there. And since women were in an inferior social and power position, the materialists’ argument that women were better off there than in any place and in any time in history before came off as mere apologism.” Mertyn shrugged. “You should know the rest. Human technology may have changed, but not human nature, or not that much. Now…we have people protesting once more that the system isn’t fair.” He snorted. “Of course it’s not. No system is fair. It’s only a question of being as fair as possible, given the physical limits of the world and the various limits of the population. But people don’t think that way.”
    That was history, and Mertyn had certainly beaten it into me those years before. “You’re telling me that the Dynae aren’t the revolutionaries. Maybe you should offer some insights into the Dynae.”
    “I’m never been that extreme, Daryn.”
    “I didn’t say you were. I was talking about insights.”
    “You always did have fixations.” He sighed. “The easiest way through this one is to disabuse you quickly.”
    “Please do.”
    “You know, Daryn…sometimes you’re still an arrogant prig.”
    I winced inside. “I’m sorry.”
    “I don’t know why I bother, except you’re the best of the lot, and because I’m an old optimist.” He took a long swallow of the amber brew I couldn’t stand. “It goes like this. The Dynae believe in evolution, natural evolution. They oppose what they see as the misuse of genetics, particularly nonocloning. They don’t believe that