It took place one day that a retired spacefarer named Quinton Lipx found himself relating tales of past adventures to an audience of young cadets. Having lived a long life he was full of these tales, and they, living for a comparatively short time, were thirsty for the taste of experience.
“Now tell us another,” they would beg as soon as he had finished one.
“Aye, maybe just one more,” he would say and spin the next. This he did obligingly, and with great pleasure and enthusiasm, until the sun dipped below the horizon and the blazing afternoon had burned away to the charcoal of evening, in whose paling light he said, “But it is late now, and you boys should hurry home to prepare for tomorrow’s lessons.”
“But, Captain Lipx, your stories are better than any lesson!”
With a grumble on his lips, but a smile in his heart, the old spacefarer looked out at the boys’ expectant faces and said, “But this shall certainly be the last.” He began: “Once, when I was a young officer on a grand imperial vessel called the K—, we came across a most peculiar planet. It was called Exiji and…
It appeared to be covered entirely by a single inorganic structure, a kind of man-made crust, so that the planet’s true surface was visible neither to the eye nor to the vessel’s scanners. From this most bizarre planet was emanating a distress signal, and the vessel, being an imperial vessel, and the empire being a great empire, responded.
Upon doing so the crew discovered a single living human on the planet, a sole survivor who recited the following history:
On Exiji there were once two opposing nations, the honourable nation to which belonged the survivor, and their barbarous and savage enemies. The nations were in a prolonged state of war, and it was decided by the leaders of the honourable nation to build a wall separating themselves from the savages. However, rather than build the entire wall themselves, the leaders instructed the builders to use a new self-replicating technology that would allow them to construct only sections of the wall, and the spaces between: the wall would itself fill in by self-replicating. The advantages were speed and efficiency. The risk was the untested state of the technology. As it transpired, the technology proved effective in filling the spaces and completing the construction of an imposing, impenetrable wall around the entirety of the planet. But once that goal had been completed, the self-replication did not cease, and having no more space in which to expand around the planet, the wall began to expand outwardly, so that what was at first a wall fifty feet across became a wall one hundred feet across, then one thousand, one hundred thousand…
Because the honourable nation could find no way to stop or restrict the wall’s growth, the wall expanded until it had enshrouded the whole of the planet, herding and destroying both the honourable nation and the savages in the process.
“What happened to the planet?” one of the cadets asked.
“And to the survivor?” asked another.
“The survivor lived for another thirty years before dying of old age,” answered Quinton Lipx. “As for the planet, instead of answering your question, I shall pose one of my own: What lesson do you derive from the fate of Exiji?”
The cadets began whispering amongst themselves.
Finally one spoke up. “I would say the observation is that in their desire to keep the savages from their territory, the honourable nation unleashed a force it could not contain. The lesson is that the honourable nation erred by continuing, even escalating, the conflict by the construction of the wall. They should have sought peace and cooperation for the benefit of both nations. Moreover, who is to say that the honourable nation was honourable and the savages truly savage. That is the perspective of the survivor, who was not an impartial observer. It is very possible that to the so-called savages it was the so-called honourable nation that was brutish. The very idea of borders—”
“Thank you,” said Quinton Lipx. “Anyone else?”
“To me, the lesson is about the need for caution, especially when using untested technologies,” said another cadet. “The honourable nation rushed an unready technology into action and ended up paying a catastrophic price.”
“Perhaps a third volunteer?”
“Yes,” said a dark haired cadet seated near the back of the room.
“Go ahead,” said Quinton Lipx.
“There is only one lesson to be learned from the fate of the planet Exiji. There exists no such thing as shared stability. The honourable nation’s decision to build a wall was a mistake. Anything the honourable nation would have done, save total extermination of the savages, would have been a mistake. Safety is the elimination of the enemy, militarily, culturally and biologically. There is, however, a supreme victor in the survivor’s story, a hero of Exijian history, and that is the wall. The wall brought peace to Exiji. The wall, which no one has described in the worthless moral language of either honour or savagery, acted with the pure expression of its will. We too must be like the wall. We too must dominate.”
—from A Portrait of the Autarch as a Young Man, p 76, as quoted in The Wisdoms of the Autarch (Second Scholastic Edition), p 155.