“The Maker offers us creation itself as proof of his greatness,” said Maxym, “and we are to seek his will in what we see in the creation, in the green grass, in the trees, in the stars above. Not build great edifices of our own to tempt the wrath of the Maker with our presumption and ingratitude.”

They went on arguing, just Maxym and Amel, Maxym pushing at Amel with his assertions ever harder. Maxym believed life was too easy in Atalantaya. Maxym believed its people were lazy and selfish. Maxym believed Amel had fostered a population of pampered beings who never became true adults. Maxym believed in the superiority of those who struggled in the Wilderness lands.

“When will you realize,” Maxym asked, “that Earth doesn’t need luracastria and all the dazzling personal enrichment you have used to corrupt the population! When will you realize that you have taken upon yourself an authority that you do not have?” Maxym’s eyes were large and dark brown and searching and accusatory. “You have robbed these people of ambition. You have robbed them of the capacity for deep concerns. You have robbed them of the opportunity to grow in spirit.”

I sat listening to all this, realizing something quite remarkable—that Amel apparently allowed this being to live here in his service, though they violently disagreed on these vital distinctions, and therefore Amel must have had some use for Maxym that we could not fully understand.

At the end of a particularly nasty exchange, perhaps one of the most heated I’d ever witnessed between any two beings, Maxym rose to his feet, hurled his wineglass at the faraway translucent wall and stormed towards the doors. Then turning back he declared with fierce unnatural volume, a volume no ordinary mammal could modulate, “You will see. You will see in the end that in your hatred of Bravenna, in your endless defiance of the Parents, you have led the inhabitants of this planet to reject that which may well be what the Maker has always wanted—penance, and self-abnegation, and self-denial. You have cast doubt on the inherent value of denying oneself, starving oneself, disciplining oneself to know things spiritual that cannot be learned in the midst of endless feasting and drinking and dancing and surrendering to one’s appetite to couple day in and day out!”

Amel sat calmly facing him, with one arm on the back of the couch, and now it was Amel who gazed on Maxym as if from afar. “Maxym, Maxym, you make Makers where there are no Makers, and endow them with powers where there is no power, and all to assuage your endless guilt!” He sighed. His voice remained level. “Bravenna has never punished you for your defection,” he said. “I have never punished you for your assault on me. And so you devise a Maker to punish you, some great awesome being beyond Bravenna, to make you miserable. You break my heart.”