fandomhigh | Practical Philosophy, Tuesday

It had always been Ender's wont to have this class meet on the school's lawn, in the sunlight. There were pillows and picnic blankets, simple sandwiches and thermoses of coffee, tea and water. He was already there when class arrived, looking content to sit and enjoy the feeling of the wind in his hair.

"Sit down in a circle, please," he said when class arrived. "I like to keep things equal, when I can at all help it."

There were quite a few familiar faces here. "Most of you know who I am," he observed. "For the rest of you, my name is Andrew Skywalker. Dean Skywalker," he nodded at Anakin, "is my grandfather-in-law, and Ben here," another nod, and a smile, "is my husband and father to our three children. I'm sorry, sometimes it's hard to escape making something on this island a family affair. Especially when you are an alumnus."

He looked at the students he didn't know. "I am a Speaker for the Dead," he said. "When someone dies, and I am summoned, it's my job to poke and pry into the life of the deceased, to learn about the decisions they made and why they made them, so we can form a true picture of a person without claims to higher judgment. I'm not here to teach you how to be a Speaker, obviously, but this is the lens through which I try to conduct this class: we ask questions. Sometimes we pose hypotheses. But I won't tolerate harsh judgments, because they close the blinders on us, and make it harder for us to understand both ourselves and the world."

"While 'philosophy' is in my class's title, we're not here to talk about the philosophers of old or the specifics of particular lines of thought in philosophy. Here, we make some attempt to put our own experiences into a greater perspective through conversation and debate. Above all, philosophy is about asking questions about everything in the world around us - and about everything we feel about it. That means I expect some level of participation from all of you."

He smiled wryly. "That doesn't mean you always need to speak up about yourself," he said. "No topics are everything to everyone. If that week's subject veers too close to something you want to keep private, be my guest - just try and pitch in when someone else speaks. I'll try to raise a theme each week, but don't feel beholden to it. If there's something on your mind you'd like to discuss, please do throw it into the group."

He picked up a bottle of water. "So let's talk," he said, twisting off the cap. "How do you feel about where you are now? What kind of experience has the island been for you? Has there been anything that made you cry or made you think or made you wonder?" He glanced at Ghanima and Anakin with a wry curl to his mouth. "Perhaps I should say 'in the past five years', just to give ourselves some kind of a limitation."

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"We can go even further back and ask what does it mean to be human, can't we?" Liliana countered. "I am human, fully and completely, and yet I am far more than what most humans are and also far less than I once was, yet that entire time, I have always remained human." She spread her hands. "I am once again immortal and unaging, does that make me less human in your estimation? I am separate from two of the most universal human experiences, aging and death. Do I still count, then?

"On my home plane of Dominaria, humans have always been one of many. I could travel south from my home country of Benalia and end in Llanowar, speaking with elves, or north to the Hurloon Mountains and find myself amidst the minotaur tribes, or travel west to the sea and talk philosophy with the merfolk that live in the shoals around the Spice Islands. And, among them, I would be a stranger - though I have more in common with them than, say, a human from Earth, because when I mention Urza and Mishra, the Phyrexians, and Slivers, and the Ice Age and the Weatherlight, and Gerrard Capashen, you have no idea what I mean, and for any Dominarian, regardless of race or culture or continent, such information is fundamental to who we are. I haven't been on my home plane in over two centuries and yet, just a few months ago, I was shown just how deeply Dominarian I remain."

She shook her head and gave a leisurely shrug. "I am a stranger here, as I am a stranger on every plane I visit. And I would be a stranger even if I returned to Dominaria. It is a trade I didn't know I was making when I made it, but it's one that I would never unmake, either."

"One theory about humanness is that it extends to all beings that we find ourselves capable of understanding," Ender noted, "And that the alien and the strange are all those creatures whose point of view we find entirely impossible to explain to ourselves or each other."

He took a sip of his water.

"In that frame of reference, you are as human as any other, though some might struggle with the concept of such a long existence," he said. "I don't know what it's like to live as a blind man, but I can grasp most experiences such a man can have. Which brings us to the more interesting question: how many points of reference can we remove until only the strange remains? Or is there one singular experience we really do all share?"

Liliana shrugged slightly, unconcerned about those who would struggle with the concept of her lifespan. That seemed like a them issue.

"That was a question that was grappled with by many of my peers, long ago," Liliana said softly. "Before things changed and changed us with them, disconnecting with...humanity, I suppose we'll call it for the conversation--" it seemed rude to apply that to creatures who were never human and had never wanted to be, but a shared vocabulary was useful "--was a frequent fact of life. It seemed more a matter of scale than a complete incapability of understanding. Living for hundreds of thousands of years, not needing to eat or sleep, aging only when you wished and then only in the manner of your choosing, death almost completely defanged...the gulf of power between the two was incalculable. On the one hand, you had ordinary mortals living and dying on the plane of their birth, on the other hand, you had beings who could walk across the cosmos, create whole planes of existence from thought, and call forth new races of creatures to populate them." She sipped at her lemonade. "It didn't happen right away, of course. But the longer you existed, the easier it was to separate yourself from what mortal life was like. Your mortal friends and family died, leaving you alone. Those who created races were either worshipped at gods, took on the role of eternal parents, withdrew some to manipulate their people's futures from the shadows, or withdrew entirely. None of those options created bonds of equality, and left behind people yearning to understand the whims and behaviors of one they would consider 'strange.'"

"'Sentients' is also a decent enough word," Ender provided gently. "It's what my husband's galaxy uses."

Then he listened.

"Have you found it difficult?" he asked, after she was finished. "Keeping connections to mortal life?"

"Oh, I was a positive baby when we lost all of that," Liliana scoffed, waving a hand. "Not even a hundred and fifty. And I never got involved in playing god to a bunch of sentient races. I still remembered making my dolls kiss in my girlhood bedroom, I didn't need to act it out again writ large with people with actual lives."

Ender managed a wry huff, something approaching a laugh. (He wasn't so sure all of that was entirely true, but he felt no need to press too explicitly so early.)

"I don't pretend to know what it's like to be as you are," he said. "But as you've said, the rules are different in every universe. In my husband's, travel from planet to planet aligns with time in any other place. If you leave at three in the afternoon, and arrive at the next planet at nine, then it's nine back where you came from, too."

He set his bottle down.

"My universe doesn't work like that," he said. "The faster you move, the more time... bends. You leave at three and arrive at nine, and yet a century has passed for everyone you once knew at the point of departure. So we've had to make deliberate choices about who we let into our... sphere of emotional attachment, so to speak. It can't be all sentients in whatever time we find ourselves at the moment."

Edited 2024-05-15 05:24 (UTC)

"I am not what I was any longer," Liliana said wryly. "The rules of the Multiverse were rewritten and we were with them." She stopped. Frowned. Thought. "...I might actually have been the last-born of the Oldwalkers. Last-born and last-sparked. My. I had never actually considered that."

She was just going to sit with that for a moment, and then blinked and it was like that moment hadn't just happened, expression smoothing back out to pleasant conversation, though her right hand fell down to her side as she absently stroked a veil made of burnished metal.

"You were saying...? Oh. Your sphere of emotional attachment. Yes. Excellent phrase. Is there much space travel in your world, then? That you grow up knowing that you may end up leaving all these people behind to travel to a distant world?"

"There wasn't when I was young," Ender said. "But that was quite a few centuries ago, now."

He had seen that moment, and privately considered what to do about it, leaving his own answer short and to the point, if amiable enough. "You are not what you were?"

Liliana shook her head. "As I mentioned, we lost much of our previous power when the laws of the Multiverse were rewritten. We lost out immortality, our ability to create new planes of existence, our bodies became bodies again, rather than psychic projections, and required care and maintenance again."

The indignity of physicality, Ender. The indignity.

"You said you don't know what it's like to be as I am. Currently, I am a very powerful necromancer with an ability to walk through worlds. I have regained my immortality and youth too recently for that to play a role in things again."

Practical Philosophy, Tuesday

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