We went on a time in silence, I remember, but it wasn’t long before Michael took hold of my arm and said without smiling: “You are now in touch with someone who can admit you to probationary membership in the Society of Heretics. Do you still want it?”
“You yourself? You have that authority?”
He grinned then, more like a boy. “For six months, but in all that time until now I haven’t found anyone who met the requirements. I didn’t want to mystify you, but had to sleep on it myself. Probation only — more I can’t do, but in Old City I’ll guarantee you a welcome, and you’ll meet others who can take you further. They’ll set you things to do, some of which you won’t understand right away.” All I could say was a stumbling thanks, which he brushed aside.
We had halted there in the sunny road, and I noticed I could no longer even hear the pilgrims who had gone on ahead. It was a tranquil open place, where a small stream crossed the road through a culvert and wandered away into a field. The Bland-Mordan argument was less than dust on the breeze, but I said: “Should we catch up with them?”
“For my part,” Michael said, “I’ve no more use for them. I enjoyed traveling with them, if only for the privilege of hearing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ sung in Oxfoot English with guitar accompaniment, but now I’d sooner go on to Old City with no company but yourself — if you like the thought. I have money, and a skill with this little pigsticker that makes up for my lack of brawn. I don’t know the wilderness in the ways you were telling me about last night, but from here to Old City it’s all roads and safe inns. How about it?”
“That’s what I’d like.”
He was studying the stream, and its vanishing in taller growth some distance from the road. “Those willows,” he said — “away off the other side of that thicket — would they mean a pool, Davy? I’d like a dip, to wash off Mordan’s original sin.”
I think that was the first time I’d ever heard a priest mentioned without his title. It gave me a chill that was at first fright, then pleasure, then matter-of-fact amusement. “It should be a pool,” I said, “or they wouldn’t be clustered like that…”
I suppose there could have been some danger out in the grassland, but it seemed like safe country as we slipped through the grass, the pilgrims becoming long-ago things and then forgotten, and found the pool. I had begun to understand about Michael, but not entirely until I saw the shirt impatiently flung away from a ridiculous bandage that bound his upper chest. Then that was gone, the small woman’s breasts set free.
She took off the rapier with care, but not the clumsy trousers — those she dropped and sent flying with a kick. She stood by me then all gravity and abstracted sweetness, proud of her brown slimness, hiding nothing. Seeing I was too dazed and too much in love to move, she touched the bluish tattoo on her upper arm and said: “This doesn’t trouble you, does it, Davy? Aristocracy, caste-it means nothing among the Heretics.”
“It doesn’t trouble me. Nothing should trouble me much if I can be with you the rest of my life.”
I remember she put out her golden hand against my chest and pushed me lightly, glancing at the pool, smiling for the first time since she had bared herself. “Does it look deep enough?” Nickie asked me. “Deep enough for diving?”
25
Six years ago I wrote that last episode, and laid down my pen to yawn and stretch with pleasure, remembering the pool and the hushed morning and the love we had on the sunny grass. I supposed that in a day or so I would go on writing, probably for several chapters, in spite of my feeling that I had already ended the principal part of the story I set out to tell. I thought I would go on, residing simultaneously here at Neonarcheos and at this imaginary inn of ours on the blind side of eternity or wherever you would prefer it to be-whoever you are-with many events belonging to a later time.
Particularly I had it in mind to tell of the two years that Nickie and I spent in Old City before what happened to us at that Festival of Fools. It is another book. I think I shall try to write it, after the Morning Star sails again and I with her, but I may not be able to. I don’t know. I am thirtyfive, therefore obviously not the same person who wrote you those twenty-four chapters when Nickie was no further away than a footnote and a kiss. I shall leave what I have written behind me, with Dion, when I sail.
The years in Old City after the Festival of Fools, the work with Dion in the heady, exciting, half-repellent atmosphere of high politics, the laws and councils and attempted reforms, the war we won against a pack of thieves and the war we lost against a horde of the self-righteous — all that is certainly another book, and I have a suspicion that Dion himself may be writing it, shielding himself by a dignified reticence from possible footnotes.[23] If I attempt that, it will not be for a long time.
I laid down my pen that evening six years ago, and a few moments later I heard Nickie call me. Her voice brought me out of a hazy brown study: I think I had wandered back to the time of my father’s death, and I was reflecting unoriginally how grief is likely to translate itself into philosophy, if you can wait for it, because it must.
As I see it today, my father’s death appears to be a true part of the story I was first compelled to write. That story ended, not as I thought at first, when the tiger entered the village and I learned who Sam was, but with the death of Sam Loomis, a loner by trade. For that was surely the occasion when the subject of this book, less homely than a mud-turkle and well-hung, got turned loose on the world (which still turns, I think) — oh, but why now should I bother my head over what did or didn’t belong in that story? There were so many stories I could never be certain which I was telling, and it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did when I was bothering you and your Aunt Cassandra about varieties of time. It may be well enough to look at the enigma, the crazy glory and murk of our living-and-dying with a pen in your hand, but try it yourself — you’ll find more stories than you knew, and you’ll find mirth, tragedy, dirt, splendor, ecstasy, weariness, laughter and rage and tears all so intricately dependent on each other, intertwined like copulating snakes or the busy branches of a jinny-creeper — why, don’t be troubling yourself about opposites and balances but never mind, take hold of one branch and you touch them all.
I heard Nickie call me. Her pains had begun. It was the same time of evening that it is now — but this is May 20, 338 — in the same tropic shelter which has held up well for six years, same chair and desk, same view of the quiet beach. But since everything has crept forward six long years in time, nothing at all is the same, not even the flesh of my fingers curved against a different pen. The light appears the same, a luminous red flush receding from the pallor of the sand, and a few high white clouds drifting on the eastward course that the old Morning Star will be taking in a few days.
The labor pains were a month premature. That alone did not alarm us too much in the first hours. Ted Marsh and Adna-Lee Jason, who know more Old-Time medicine than the rest of us, did whatever was possible. Old-Time knowledge we have, wretchedly incomplete. Old-Time drugs and equipment we have not — unattainable as the Midnight Star. Therefore diagnosis is mainly guesswork, important surgery unthinkable, and our partial possession of the ancient knowledge often a mockery.
Nickie fought the pain for eighteen hours and was at length delivered of a thing with a swollen head which was able to live an hour or two of shrieking empty existence, but the bleeding would not stop. The mue weighed twelve pounds, and she — why, at our lodgings in Old City I used to carry her up two flights of stairs for the joy of it and be hardly winded at the top of the climb. The bleeding would not stop. She had glimpsed the mue in spite of us and understood, and so could not even die with the consolation of an illusion. In the world that Old Time left to us, these things have happened and will again.
I sail before long in the Morning Star with Captain Barr and a small company — five women and nine other men, all of us chosen by Dion because we clearly possess what he calls a “controlled discontent.” All voluntary, naturall
y, and me he did not exactly choose, but only asked me: “Do you want to go, Davy?” I said that I did, and he kissed my forehead in the manner of the old Nuin nobility, a thing I haven’t known him to do for years, but we’ve said nothing more about the sailing and probably won’t until the day Barr chooses.
I am thirty-five and Dion is fifty. We fought in two wars together. We tried to draw a great nation a step or two beyond the sodden ignorance of this era. We sailed together into the great sea and found this island Neonarcheos. We loved the same woman. “Controlled discontent” — well, I think that appraisal was meant for meas much as for the rest. It is a compliment, but with the inevitable dark side too: we fourteen, Captain Barr and myself and the others, fitted by temperament and circumstance for the task of explorers, are to a great degree unfitted for anything else.
The explorer’s task has, I’d say, very little of the splendor a boy’s imagination gives it. I dreamed a multitude of fancies lying in the sun before my cave on North Mountain; but Captain Barr and I are now much more decently concerned with survival biscuits and pemmican and sauerkraut, and trying to rebuild the head of the Morning Star a mite further aft if you’ll excuse the expression. But all that doesn’t mean that the glory goes out of exploring. It is there, and the inner rewards are real enough. The sea of ignorance is vast beyond measuring, and so I, an animalcule with his dab of phosphorescence, set that light against it and find no reason to be ashamed of my pride.
In the six years we have been able to build another sailing vessel, a neat small thing the Old-Time builders would describe as a yawl. Those who remain behind can make use of the other islands while we are gone.
Our flax seed has grown well on Neonarcheos, so the Morning Star has good new canvas. We carry provisions for four months. Our immediate mission is to reach the mainland of what was called Europe, which should take far less time than that, learn what we can of it, and return. Our first landfall should be the coast of what was Portugal, or Spain, we suppose. But currents and winds are not as they were in Old Time.
We who sail are all childless. The women may not be sterile, but none has ever conceived, and the youngest is twenty-five. In the six years at Neonarcheos, twenty-one normal children have been born, to seven of the women. I did not father any of them. I did make Nora Servern pregnant. It was her wish, and Dion’s too; they thought, and the same as told me, that they hoped it would draw me out of a black and self-destroying mood that had held me for a long time. What did draw me out of it I’ll never know — just time, maybe. Sweet Nora was good to love, and that part of the episode certainly helped bring me back into acceptance of daily living. But though Nora was able to bear Dion two healthy girls, the child she bore me was a mue not unlike the one for whom Nickie’s life was thrown away.
Thus I am obliged to understand that the fault was not in Nickie’s seed but in mine. I am not illogical enough to say that I killed her; who could live with that? But it is true that she was killed by an evil that Old Time set adrift, that came down through the generations, through Sam’s body or my mother’s — who could say? — to hide in that part of mine which ought to be the safest, the least corrupted. This happened, to me and to countless others, and will again.
My only children are certain thoughts I may have been able to give you. I can sometimes be tranquil in my heart about this, when I remember how much exploring there is to be done. There seems to be enough undiscovered territory, in the mind and the rest of the world — I think I could have written, in the world and the rest of the mind — so that we shall not have it all mapped before sundown, not this Wednesday.
I went down to the beach last night, because I heard the wind, and the ocean was long-voiced on the sand, and the stars were out. Before long 1 shall hear that music at the bows, or as a following whisper in the times when I have the wheel in my hands. I sail because I desire it; I have no children except those in your care, but may I not tell you that exploration also is an act of love?
I gave words to the breakers last night, a game I have often played, a harmless way of aiding the mind to speak to itself. You who are the earth can ask, and you who are the sea may answer, and if there is truth spoken you know the source.
I asked whether the generations could some day restore the good of Old Time without the evil, and the ocean that was a voice in my mind suggested: Maybe soon, maybe only another thousand years.
Footnotes
1
Davy means, no northern visitors. They have some commerce with the region known in Old Time as South America . In 296 a handful of refugees from some Misipan political tempest reached Penn overland, and gave this and other information before they died of malaria, infected wounds and dysentery. They spoke an English so barbarous that there has been argument ever since over much that they tried to say. I learned of this by listening in as a small boy on semi-formal conversations between my grandfather President Dion II and the Penn ambassador Wilam Skoonmaker. My poor uncle, later Morgan III, held me in his lap while he took notes on Skoonmaker’s stately talk and I admired his embroidered pants. — Dion Morgan Morganson of Nuin
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2
Davy has asked Dion and me to ungoof the spelling here and there, but nobody could claim this one isn’t an improvement. — Miranda Nicoletta deMoha.
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3
They have the Church’s grudging permission to exist, and rate a whole paragraph in the Church’s celebrated Doctrine of Necessary Evils. This monument of shrewd piety is believed by the public to have been devised by the disciple Simon at the supposed founding of the Church in 44. Actually the document they call the original is on a type of parchment that was developed in Nuin, not Katskil, and only about 50 years ago. I examined it myself on a visit to Nuber. No scholar can say exactly when the Holy Murcan Church began to exist, but it cannot have been a functioning institution for more than 200 years. — Dion M. M.
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4
Anyone by paying a candle, a prayer and a dollar may enter the Murcan Museum in the cellar of the Cathedral at Old City and look at ancient fragments of automotive vehicles. In other words Davy knows perfectly well these mechanisms are not legendary, but must have his fun. — Dion M. M.
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5
Matter of fact, dear, I was merely wondering if supper would stay down. — Miranda Nic etc.
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6
Or if smart he marks it with the wheel-sign and sends it to one of the shops in the large cities that specialize in dudaddery for the sophisticated — that is, the suckers. One in Old City is famous for selling nothing the owner can’t guarantee to be totally useless — Carrie’s Auntie Shoppy, well I remember it. Because the Regent was expected to encourage commerce, I bought an Old-Time thingamy there, a small cylinder of pale gray metal with a tapered end. That end has a tiny hole, out of which pops a wee metal whichit if you push the other end; push it again and the thing pops back. One of my philosophic advisers suggests it may have been used in the phallic worship that we assume was practised privately along with the public breast-belly-thigh cult of ancient America: I don’t find this convincing. I believe you could use the gidget for goosing a donkey, but why wouldn’t any Goddamn pointed stick do just as well? There is need for more research. — Dion M. M.
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7
That was easy — all I had to do was give you a bust in the face. — Dma. Miranda Nicoletta St. Clair-Levison de Moha.
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8
Beast! No respect for Shakespeare. Classifies his wife with the rest of the livestock, no special privileges. Rips the veil from her most intimate deceptions. A beast. I’m going to walk home. — Nick.
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9
Moha idiom. Davy means the type of anecdote known in Nuin as a “tickler” or, for some undecipherable reason, “smut.” — Dion M. M.
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10
Any odd-shaped
stone supposed to have medicinal powers, more often called vitamin-stone. I made quite a few for sale when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers; rubbing with wet sand gives them a nice weathered look. My own footnote, by damn! — D.
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11
I dunno, Davy. I may form a Sisterly Protective Order of Phernale Women, myself president as well as founder if the salary is nght, for the constitutional purpose of taking you out somewhere and drowning you. After the historical event we’d hold commemorative meetings, and drink tea. — Miranda Nicoletta.
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