A Darkness in My Soul

cleverness-but another part was based on my own impetuousness, and Morsfagen knew my personality like the back of his hand-or better.
        Look at yourself, Kelly, I yammered inside my head.
        The only esper in the world, amplified by a partial absorption of the psychic energies of the most complete genius-and still a failure. Still charging around with delusions that invariably trip you up.
        Before my meeting with Child and my therapy in the mechanical psychiatrist, I had been going on the assumption that I was some holy character, some bright and shining product of godly grace, the Second Coming. Basically, I had been nothing more than a man, and I had only suffered by my refusal to understand that. I blundered into things acting like a god, and when I got hurt or frightened, I couldn't cope. I had never prepared myself against hurt and fear, for I could not see where either commodity would impinge upon a god.
        Now, with Child, I had unconsciously begun to accept the god role again. Smug in the knowledge that I was esper with a genius inside me, I slipped back into the habit of looking on lesser mortals with contempt. And in my self-assurance, I had failed to use all my talents and intellect, had underestimated my enemy as the first CroMagnons underestimated the Neanderthals for a while.
        For a while…
        I stood up, suddenly less angry than I had been, and more determined. Okay, so I was not a god. I was not omniscient and omnipotent and superior to the military. I could not excuse past stupidity, but I could improve my outlook until I was able to be something which they could not cope with. The reason Morsfagen and other men could trip me up was simple to see: they were less powerful men, but they were fully developed, capable, and sure and confident. And I was fractured and unsteady and filled with doubts beneath the sheen of smugness. It was time to get to know myself, understand what I was and what I could expect to accomplish. After countless circuits of the main room of the apartment, I sat down on the bed again and relaxed. And that night, I came to know myself better than I ever had in my life.
        I turned esp fingers back among the streaming thoughts of my own conscious mind. It was something I had never attempted before, though it now seemed the most natural exercise in the world. Perhaps I had always felt that I knew what I WPS thinking, that I was aware of myself.
        But, of course, like every man, I hadn't the faintest damn idea of what was going on inside my head. Head-tripping in countless other minds, I had left the territory of my own thoughts sacrosanct. Perhaps because I was afraid of what I might find.
        In those rambles, stirring down into my own id and ego and superego, I found that I was purer, cleaner, less rotted than I might even have hoped for. There were things, of course, that terrified me and revolted me. But I took heart in that they indicated my basic humanness, my basic brotherhood with men, despite the fact I was made from chemical sperm and chemical ovum.
        In that one long night, I finally understood the nature of society as I never had before. I had wrongly judged men. I had labeled them as inferior to me, when this was not the case. Some were inferior, some my equal, some even my superior in ways. Each minim of intelligent life on this planet was such an individual spark, such a varying quantity and quality that no sweeping comparison could ever be made. What I had always sensed and what I had misinterpreted was that society was inferior to me. No man. Society.
        Society was an agglomeration of individuals equaling less than its separate parts. In governments and institutions, the men chosen to rule, chosen to make policy and enforce decision, were those elected by the society that supported them-and because each member of society is different, because some median must be reached through the ballot, mediocre men assume office. The very intelligent vote for the intelligent candidates, but no one else does, for everyone else distrusts intellect. The reactionary and blind vote for their own slogan shouters, but no one else does. In the end, the people in the middle range elect their people, simply because they are in the majority. We get the mediocre. And because the mediocre are ill-gifted to deal with the problems of all factions of society, they make bad government and bad institutions. They distrust the