by Alyson Miers
"Dana, what were those little kids doing around our house this afternoon?" Brian asked his older sister.
"They wanted to pet Charlinder's sheep," she answered drowsily.
"You all be quiet up there and go to sleep," came their father's voice from downstairs.
As comfortable as he was with the arrangement, this didn't seem like a family that often received guests.
"Hey, guys," he whispered, "why do you have an extra bed up here?"
"Dad got that bed made after he married Annette," Sarah explained, "so the next baby would have a place to sleep when it got older."
"And this would be the baby that never came?"
"Yeah, that one."
And they’ve kept it here in the house the whole time? "Right."
Charlinder thanked the family for their hospitality and said goodbye after breakfast the next morning. He set off again with Lacey, who gave him a haughty bleat and stayed several feet ahead of him.
"Yeah, I know, but you got a break from walking!"
As his host had requested, Charlinder didn't tell anyone else in the village what he'd told David's family. He didn't talk at all to the rest of the village except to say hello, if even that, to the ones who stared at him as he passed. He left with his ewe from their territory and continued north along the Mississippi, hoping that most of the human settlements he encountered in the future would not leave him feeling as sad and frustrated as this one.
Chapter Fourteen
Susan and Eileen
As he'd suspected, there were a number of villages along the river. This was fortunate, as he still needed to acquire some solid food. He would periodically net a fish from between the ice floes in the river and sometimes eat it raw straight away, other times barter it for a hot meal in the nearest village, where he would then trade a pot of Lacey’s milk for some dried foods to carry in his pack. Some villages were as uniformly white-populated as the first one he'd visited, others showed some ethnic variation, which meant that Charlinder was sometimes but not always the object of much staring. His hosts occasionally offered him a bed for the night, but he usually continued up the river that same afternoon. Though he had yet to see another society like the Paleola village, he was also relieved to find that most of the people he encountered were not as punitive as in that first one. There were times when Charlinder even came close to meeting someone he could tell about his trip's purpose with a clear conscience.
West of the Mississippi River's source he met a girl named Susan, of about Judith's age, who thought it was very intelligent of him to know how to spin and knit and do other "women's work." While she showed him how to turn reversible cables, the interaction became so comfortable that when the questions about his journey happened as they often did, Charlinder decided this was someone he could tell the whole truth. Once he was finished explaining his intentions, she stared ahead at the ground in front of them, frowning as though to collect her thoughts.
"Where do you get your information about the pre-Plague era?" she asked at last.
"You know Eileen Woodlawn, that I told you about? She left a lot of journals, and she wrote about all sorts of things that happened in her lifetime. Especially what happened during the Plague."
"Who else left written records?"
"Pretty much just her, actually. You'd be surprised at how much ground she covered, though; her writings formed the basis of most of our educational program."
"Are you saying there was only one person in your community who left any writing to future generations?"
"Well, they were all so busy learning how to survive, it looks like no one else in her generation thought it was important to keep a journal."
"You have no way of knowing what they were thinking, as you weren't there with them."
"I know I wasn't there with them, and since I wasn't there to see it, there's a lot I don't know, so that's why we need written records from the ones who were there, which is where Eileen comes in."
"But don't you think it's a little suspicious that no one except that one woman left anything in writing?"
This was far from the confidante Charlinder had thought he would find in Susan. At first he’d thought she was the first person he’d met since leaving home who didn’t look at him like a weirdo because he knew how to hold a spindle as well as a saw, and now she was treating him like a fool for seeking answers. "What, do you think she burned the writings from her fellow survivors so no one could leave anything to disagree with her?"
"I'm not accusing her of anything, I'm just asking how you can rely so much on the word of only one person from a time that would be so strange to you."
"Look, I can show you her journals, and you can see how knowledgeable she was, and her insights are really intelligent..."
"I'm sure she was brilliant," Susan cut in, "but we're still talking about just one person's experiences, and you're getting her opinions along with her facts."
"But her opinions don't make her facts any less valid."
"I'm not arguing with that. I'm saying you can't get a full picture from just one person's account."
Charlinder was now seriously asking himself how he had walked into this conversation. Exactly what kind of conclusion was he supposed to reach? "Well, regardless, her part of the picture is all I have to go on, unless you have a more unbiased account here?"
"No, all the story we have of the Plague is oral, and it's pretty vague," she admitted. "But you don't see any of us taking off more than halfway across the world based on what little we know."
"But I've already taken off, and I'm not inclined to drop the whole idea and turn back."
"I'm not asking you to go back home already," Susan shrugged. "Just to keep in mind what you may or may not find once you get to where you're going."
Charlinder was thankful that he hadn't received an invitation from anyone to stay the night. What he may or may not find? What was that supposed to mean?
Enough time had passed that the daylight hours ran longer now. He was able to get a good distance from the village before it was too dark to walk any more, and he was very tired indeed when he unrolled his bedding that night. Beware of teenagers bearing complicated cable skills, he thought ruefully, because you never know what other tricks they’ll have up their sleeves.
What might he find or not find? That question gnawed at him as he fell asleep: what was the what here? The next thing he saw was not the Midwestern springtime forest in which he’d bedded down for the night. It was the paradox of dreaming; that sensation of being somewhere totally unknown or inappropriate but thinking it’s perfectly natural to be so confused. He was standing at the junction of a tangle of roads, all curving outward and stretching off into the distance in an unknowable maze of incomprehensible intersections and bypasses. He didn't take any of the roads in front of him, only looked around. "I'm trying to find something," he said out loud to no one in particular.
"And if you set your sights broadly enough, you can hardly expect to be disappointed," said a voice behind him. It was a woman, young like him, with the same accent as the Paleolans.
"That much is obvious," Charlinder responded, "but what might I not find?" he turned around to find the source of the voice, but even though no one appeared, he knew the woman was just behind him. "How broadly should I set my sights?"
"Now, that's the right question to ask," said his friend. "You must ask yourself whether making sure you find something to say your mission is accomplished is as important as getting the answer to your question."
"Of course I want the answer," he said. "So what will I have to find to get it?"
"And now you open up the possibilities," said his friend. "The answer you seek will influence the evidence you find. So are you looking for your answer, or Eileen's?"
"I think we're both asking the same question, really," said Charlinder.
"But you forget that Eileen is not a part of your world, and she lived in a very different time, so make sure that what you see
k is not tied to what Eileen would have hoped to find."
"But if Eileen would have looked for the right thing, then shouldn't I do the same?"
"You should look for the right thing, not aim to do the same as Eileen. What matters is that you find your answers."
"And if I don't find them?"
"Then perhaps you were looking in the wrong direction."
"Who are you, anyway?" he asked the voice.
"Who, me?"
"Yes! Who are you?"
"Oh, I’m just an old friend," was the breezy reply.
Charlinder woke up that morning with a part of himself expecting to find a sprawl of roads in front of him, and wasn't quite sure what to make of Lacey standing over him and demanding to be milked. Then he remembered to consult his compass again to continue west.
He had so far worked out two customs for his stops at villages. The first was for his map; every time he stopped at a settlement, he found someone to mark where they were so that Charlinder could measure his progress. That was so far turning out to be depressingly slow, but his direction was reassuring. The other custom was to help himself to the local food, which of course meant what he could fit in his pack as well as what was served to him at the table. He didn't think of it as stealing; he called it "sampling," and he didn't do it at all the villages he visited. On occasion he also snatched a few scraps of leather if he could find it because he was wearing out moccasins at an alarming rate and needed the material for new ones. His criteria were concerned with how much the settlement had to spare. If they were doing well enough that they wouldn't notice what he took, then he figured he wasn't really hurting anyone. If they barely had enough to feed their own people, then Charlinder did without and moved on.
He walked for several days with no company except for Lacey before he decided he needed to hear from someone other than a sheep. He stopped in a clearing to prepare lunch one day and took out one of Eileen's journals.
While paging through the worn-out old paper, he found an entry that he especially enjoyed. It began, as so many of Eileen's personal writings did, with a fight with Mark.
The great irony in the elusive beast of Being Right is that in order to win this status, one must put one's ego in the backseat. This is a tall order for a pursuit whose ultimate goal is to boost the ego, but a necessary step. The mother of Being Right is Getting it Right, and many people--not naming names, but it's obvious--would like to skip over the mother and head straight to the finished product, but it's a cheap victory if they manage. Achieving the status of Getting it Right means subordinating one's ego to the cruel slavedriver of reality. It means focusing on the facts, which exist independently of anyone's agenda. It means applying objective, multilateral, externally accountable logic, which means allowing oneself to be the meek underling of logic rather than trying to force the other way around. It means preparing for the possibility that one may eventually be proven wrong, because otherwise one will inevitably put the cart before the horse and therefore lock oneself out of a measurable process of identifying the correct answer. It means taking the risk of being wrong; you choose a position, be able to defend why it works for you, and stick with it, but you also need to know when to give it up. Guessing a correct answer doesn't mean anything if it was hedged between guesses at every other possible solution available to the imagination.
Using God as your answer is the ultimate hedge. The first division runs between: was something the work of God, or not? If it was, then Bob's your uncle, but if it wasn't, then the debate is nowhere near done. A much more specific answer, with all the leaks plugged and ends tied, must be found before the fun is over. And as long as some holes remain unfilled, God will always hold a place as the default answer. Then at the end, even after every blank is filled and every variable explained, you still hear the philosophizing about how God made all that happen, which makes Our Lord and Savior also the Great Face-Saver. There is no burden of proof on choosing God as an answer in the first place, no evidence required for defending Him as your position, and no way to rule Him out of the equation in the end. He is the quickest and easiest way to be right at the beginning, without carrying the risk of ever being proven wrong. As long as you can create a could/should/would, there's no need to find an is/does/did. I guess the thing that makes me a godless heathen is that I'm not satisfied with a could/should/would; they're always so unreliable. Is/does/did is there no matter what, if you know where to find it.
After days of feeling rattled by the conversation with Susan, it was such a relief to find that Eileen’s words on paper were still reassuring. A more sensible person would, perhaps, be turned off by her endless annoyance, but something Charlinder always admired about Eileen was that she had different ideas of what it meant to be sensible. She was not around for him to ask her opinion, but surely, she would have approved of his journey, and that was good enough.
Chapter Fifteen
Hyatts
While the conflicts in his own head were easy enough to manage, the outside world was another matter. Much like his and Eileen's sacred facts, the weather did not care what he or anyone else wanted. They were in the madness of springtime and far north of his native latitude. He came eventually to a mountain range that was marked on his map, but a bunch of pointy marks on a sheet of parchment could never prepare him for the Rockies.
There was no way around the mountains, so he led his ewe forward and proceeded, imagining that he would remember the Rockies as majestically beautiful once he was in Asia. As spring came closer to summer, some days were so sunny he could take his hat off and his dark curly hair trapped the heat from the sun. Then it would be all freezing rain or sleet the next day, or he would ascend a ridge and encounter frightening cold and snow again. April stumbled into May, and Charlinder kept telling himself he didn't need to shear Lacey, not yet, as she needed her insulation when they climbed those mountains. His excuses were soon to run out, as the sunny days in the valleys were now just as hot as at his home, and on those days she showed the strain from the heat.
The mountains were not as empty of human population as he may have pictured them; he normally spotted if not visited a village in every big valley. There came a point when he found valleys as usual but no settlements for a week. At the end of that week, he found what had to be the largest settlement he'd ever seen. It stood out like a post-Plague city between the mountains and forests, and Charlinder, being hungry for solid food and human conversation, ventured in.
As he began to walk inside rather than around their settlement, his first impression of the people who saw him was that they were not curious about him. They didn't bother with the shameless staring he'd received at the first village along the Mississippi River; they went straight to the apprehension from when David had invited Charlinder to his house. This was a curiously mixed village; he saw mostly white faces looking at him, with the occasional mixed-black person here and there. The odd part was he didn't see any lighter brown faces like most of his neighbors at home, or in most of the communities he’d seen up to that point. Before he and Lacey had gone far enough to hear a word of welcome from anyone, two very large and mean-looking white men flanked him.
"You'll need to come with us, sir."
As he was comparatively unarmed, alone and travel-worn, he decided not to complicate matters with a struggle. They led him to a building in what appeared to be the middle of the town, built from wooden planks with uniformly placed windows. There was a large wooden desk at the back and center of the room, occupied by a man who looked like he owned the air they were breathing. He was smaller than Charlinder, not much older, delicately pale, even frail-looking, but entirely entitled. He looked up with interest at the two thugs--Charlinder supposed they were considered guards--when they led him and Lacey inside.
"What's this?" asked the man at the desk, putting down his quill.
"I didn't do anything wrong," said Charlinder at once.
"You haven’t been accused," he said. "Simply tell us who y
ou are, and what you're doing here."
"I'm no one in particular."
"Then what is your name, and where are you from?"
"My name's Charlinder, and I'm from a village I'm sure you've never heard of in a place I'm sure you've never seen."
"Then tell us where it is," said the entitled man, in a slightly threatening tone.
"On the Paleola River, on the eastern side of the American territory."
Now the man looked impressed. "Yes, I know where the Paleola River is, so you're a very long way from home. How did you get here?"
"I've been walking for months."
"Interesting. Who else from your area is here?"