I did not know why I had set the beacon, but I had done so.

It had burned long and fiery in the Gorean night, on the stones of the beach, and then, in the morning it would have been ashes, and the winds and rains would have scattered them, and there would have been little left, save the stones, the sand and the prints of the feet of sea birds, tiny, like the thief’s brand, in the sand. But it would once have burned, and that was fixed, undeniable, a part of what had been, that it had burned; nothing could change that, not the eternities of time, not the will of Priest-Kings, the machinations of others, the wilfulnessand hatred of men; nothing could change that it had been, that once on the beach, there, a beacon had burned.

I wondered how men should live. In my chair, I had thought long on such matters.

I knew only that I did not know the answer to this question. Yet it is an important question, is it not? Many wise men give wise answers to this question, and yet they do not agree among themselves.

Only the simple, the fools, the unreflective, the ignorant, know the answer to this question.

Perhaps to a question this profound, the answer cannot be known. Perhaps it is a question too deep to be answered. Yet we do know there are false answers to such a question. This suggests that there may be a true answer, for how can there be falsity without truth?

One thing seems clear to me, that a morality which produces guilt and self-torture, which results in anxiety and agony, which shortens lifespans, cannot be the answer.

But what is not mistaken?

The Goreans have very different notions of morality from those of Earth.

Yet who is to say who is the more correct?