The Wizard’s Boon

There once was a land that was blessed with the greatest wizard of all time.  He just spent his time muttering and wizarding in his high tower, so from a practical standpoint his presence didn’t make much difference.  But everyone agreed it was neat.

But one day God put it in the heart of some tradesmen and yeomen to ask the wizard for a great gift for the people.

With increasing trepidation they climbed the slope to the crag and with fear knocked on the door and with trembling told them they wanted him to give them the greatest gift that God had for him to give.  But he only responded that he would.

He went to a cave to fast and contemplate for 3 days, and on the third day he came out and did his magic.

When he was done each person in that land, small and great, had a small sphere floating in front of them.  When they did or thought wrong, it lowered.  When they did or thought right, it raised up.  Each sphere had a gradient of color on it showing the general recent trend of shifts, so that at a glance one knew if a person of low morality was nonetheless on the mend, or a person of high morality was nonetheless on the plunge.  There were a number of other subtler indicators on the spheres too.

There were surprisingly few very bad people and very good ones, and some surprises about who was actually good or bad.  There were also some surprises about what was good and what was bad.  Their culture celebrated a few things it shouldn’t, not as such, but more so suppressed a number of things that shouldn’t have been suppressed.  Mostly, however, what the spheres revealed was not a surprise.

After the first furor, even the wicked, especially the wicked, were very much relieved.  From there this people went from strength to strength.  They were so good.  They prospered madly.  They had arts we could never know.  Most of all, the pushed the science of virtue beyond what any other people had ever known.  When the first scientist to think of it decided to do deliberate experiments on good and bad behavior his sphere dropped–this was wicked thing to do–but when he instead decided to just make careful observations and notes throughout the day, his sphere went up.  And when he and other scientists–and with time they were  a great many of them scientists of virtue, men and women alike–decided to reason from their observations, their spheres lurched upwards again.

One day one of their thinkers was idly mulling the idea of asking the wizard to remove his sphere, just for the experience of it, when he noticed his sphere was responding to that line of thought oddly.  It neither dipped nor bobbed.  Instead it circled.  This meant, he felt, that the answer was not so clear.  He then decided to go ask the wizard about it, at which his sphere brightened and pushed upward.

The wizard said it all could be easily explained.  The spheres were the greatest of God’s gifts.  But they were not his only greatest gifts.  Just as this people had been blessed with goodness and knowledge, other peoples had received the equally incomparable gift of beauty and daring, to always plunge on into the dark never fully knowing if they did good or bad.