The Adventures of Lady Jaine, part 5

The sun set, pulling its light behind itself. Jaine tried to monitor the shadows creeping over the trees, but they seemed to only move when she blinked. Darkness fell, and Jaine waited. Crickets had come out for their nightly orchestra, always tuning but never playing. They did not bother Jaine, but the self-absorbed croaking of the tree frogs did. The crickets seemed to hum to amuse themselves, but frogs were determined to steal attention. Hmmm sang the crickets. Grooooock! interrupted the frogs.

Crunch, went the leaves to Jaine’s left. Jaine looked for her monster, seeing only a little man with silver curls that swirled around his head. He wore a gray suit and red tie, and had nothing peculiar about his appearance but overly bushy eyebrows, which splayed outward as if they were wings. Jaine felt strengthened by the ridiculousness of his eyebrows.

“Hello,” she greeted the stranger. “Who are you?”

“Greetings, Lady Jaine,” replied the stranger. “Have you been comfortable?”

“I have been comfortable, sir, but I am not presently.” Jaine adjusted against her ropes. “Are you here to let me down?”

“Oh, heavens, no. You’re a hazard.” The man sat at the edge of her alter and looked up at her.

“Are you the reason I’m here?” Jaine asked.

“No, you are the reason you are here.”

“But you caused me to be here.”

“Yes.”

Jaine thought. “So I suppose that virgin sacrifice was a bit of nonsense?”

“Oh, no. That is an important factor. You see, you are here because you perform as
you believe, and considering the beliefs you have talked about in the village today,
you are very dangerous.”

“…So you don’t fulfill your beliefs, thus you are safe to society? Is that what you
are saying? If you believe I am dangerous and should be tied to a post, but that
acting on your beliefs is dangerous, you should let me go free for fear of being
dangerous yourself.”

“No, no,” the man shook his head. “I’m not dangerous, because I believe true things.
You believe false things and spread your malicious gospel, thus you are dangerous.”

“Wait, what?” Jaine blinked rapidly. The tree frogs croaked loudly at that moment,
further stupefying her.

“You are promoting the spread of your dogmatism through brutal and demeaning
methods. I disagree with your underdeveloped, biased worldview, but must oppose you
when you attempt foisting your beliefs on others. There is no beast in these hills
to devour you except in your imagination, but I wish there were one to dispose of
you and all your kind.”

“Good…sir…” Jaine sputtered. “I don’t understand your defamation of my beliefs and
actions, and while apparently your worldview is different from mine, I don’t see how
differing with your beliefs makes mine incorrect. What is your worldview?”

The man straightened his tie. “My worldview is based on scientific studies of the
moon, its orbital patterns, surface structure, volcanic eruptions, eclipses, and
atmosphere. You bludgeon my students with talk of ultimate standards and theories on
right and wrong, which cannot be scientifically proven.”

“I don’t see your point. And what do you mean by your students? You are a professor
at the university?”

The man sat straighter. “No. I am the president of the university.”

“Ah.” Jaine felt her thoughts align. “That makes sense; so Bedlam is under your
command, and apparently your tutelage. Yes, I see the correlation – his drivel was
too rote to be original, so I assumed he had learned it. So his half-applied
trumpery about tolerance and cultures deciding their own standards came from you?”

“Half-applied?”

“Yes – lectures on tolerance seem to only be applied to the listener. Let us resume
my point. How can you claim to disprove my philosophies by studying the moon?”

“Your theories are not measurable. I can explain everything I want to know by
applying science to them – measuring and testing my results. You cannot prove your
theories, thus they are meaningless. You breathe empty hypotheses into empty minds.”

“I didn’t know I had such influence!” Jaine felt complimented. “Tell me, though –
you say you can explain everything you want to know by science and your studies of
the moon, but can you explain what I want to know?”

“What is it?

“Why is the moon pretty?”

The president looked at her sourly. “It isn’t, innately. Beauty isn’t something that
exists independently of human perception.”

“Then what is it that I feel when I see something I call beautiful?”

“When you see something that you call beautiful, it releases positive hormones in
your brain - what little you have of one.”

“But why?”

“I suppose you like the moon.”

“Why do I like it? I don’t have any biological associations with it – it doesn’t
remind me of a good meal, or a handsome face, and it isn’t as useful as a candle
when I read after dark.”

“I don’t know what positive associations you have made with the moon,” insisted the
president.

“So according to you,” Jaine pressed, “beauty is a name for a reaction to biological
preference or positive association?”

“Yes.” The president looked more intently at her. “It is a shame – you are not as I expected. I could have done something with your mind at my university, if it were not so riddled with inherited myths.”

“My mind or my brain?” smiled Jaine. “Wouldn’t my mind be an abstraction created by my brain out of a desire to exist independently from a fleshly body reliant on electrical impulses?”

The president sighed. “You nearly make me regret my decision to leave you here. You seem intelligent – perhaps you are not incorrigible?”

“I assure you, I am,” beamed Jaine, “if by incorrigible you mean I refuse to believe that truth and beauty are fictions, and that morality varies by location. What is more, I cannot accept your beliefs as you have yet to disprove mine – mine are still perfectly functional. I believe that something can be true even if it cannot be scientifically proven, so you can’t tell me that I am errant because I can’t prove scientifically that not everything needs to be proven scientifically. You, however, seem to ignore ideas that you don’t want to believe. How is that intellectually honest?”

“My dear,” the president said as he stood, “you are stupid.”

“Is disagreeing with you the test for that? That doesn’t seem very scientific.”

The president left. Jaine was still tied to the pole.