Ten Tomorrows

by Roger Elwood

  1. Should an assistant professor of his ilk be defined as a pedagogue at all and not rather as a dictum-grinding laquey (sp?) of the establishment?

  II. Do I really intend to become a historian?

  A. Family would like it but don’t insist.

  B. How many bloody times have I changed my mind about this since, say, 5710? (Featherhead!)

  III. Having spent forty dolas ($40) on that silk tunic (honest admission of sin), insufficient funds remain to purchase Heretics Edition of Chaucer for Nora’s 18th birthday 3 wks off. Slob.

  A. Aid fr Andrei?

  1. No; he’s already spent a wad on that pen for her.

  B. Begging:

  1. Rejected because no training in public relations.

  C. Offering fair white body in public streets:

  1. Rejected as unlikely to succeed. Also cf. III, B, 1.

  D. Establishment of Hunnington Foundation for Aid to Indigent Freshmen, spelling eleemosynary correctly:

  1. Unsound because requires more than 3 wks.

  E. Write home?

  1. . . .

  F. Qu fr Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire cribbed fr Snokes’s Cultural Panorama, 7th Edition: History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

  Having studied the outline, Elmo searched for his desk scissors, which Nora had borrowed again; with his jackknife, he cut the page between I,A,1 and II. The first section he pasted on a fresh sheet, and he wrote across the top in capitals: NOTES ON THE FIFTIETH (TWENTIETH) CENTURY. He deleted the word ilk, inserting an ornate caret and placing over it the word kidney. The rest of the outline he scrumpled up and chewed morosely. He was spitting it out into the wastebasket when third-year student Andrei obMeredith Zenas strolled in, lean and grave, flung his architecture books into the armchair, and sat on the tiger-rug by the fireplace in the lotus position. “Curious habit.”

  “Had a Gibbon quote on it,” said Elmo.

  “Still odd. Gibbon—Gibbon—”

  “Historian, 1734-1794 Primitive Calendar.”

  “I know, I was just nattering. That how you get all the A’s? By chewing assignments? What profit if spit out?”

  “Benign sir, never criticize others’ possible protein deficiencies,” said Elmo, watching his friend, counselor, and roommate lift his thin shape until he was standing on his head, arms folded. “That is very beautiful. How long can?”

  “Twenty minutes the most I ever.”

  The other roommate Nora abMargaret Dane stamped in, her brains freshly rumpled by Post-Diluvian Literature II-B, and tossed Andrei’s books out of the armchair and herself into it. A second-year student (sophomore to use an ancient term lately revived), she was already known as a poet of some force. “How long has he?”

  “Minute or two. Said twenty the most he ever. In silent mood.”

  “And you, Elmo? You look like disaster stewed and strained.”

  “Oppressed in spirit. Look upon this muck!” Elmo flipped her the page with the pasted-on heading.

  Nora viewed it soberly, sinking the shafts of her black-rimmed spectacles into her thick black curls. “Was spelled l-a-c-k-e-y in the fiftieth. And I would omit part about Mahew. Tact, man.”

  “First draft, Buttonbrain. For own guidance and instruction, as any cretin would know. Know anything about the fiftieth, love?”

  “Age of the Wasters. Deluge Century. Red Plague.”

  “Common misconceptions, little sophomore. The Red Plague came in the first decade of the twenty-first, only properly speaking, there never was any twenty-first. Primitive Calendar went out in the Collapse with the rest of the waste paper.”

  “And for ten wormy old years eight centuries ago, you, a creeping freshman, would make an upper-class scholar a liar, my Elmo?”

  “Further, not a deluge, sweetheart, except locally. It was a rise in water level over at least fifty years, beginning late in the fiftieth and continuing through the Collapse when nobody was capable of keeping records. It says here—see Snokes.”

  “Age of Wasters, anyhow. Start of mue-period. See Snokes.”

  Elmo’s pain broke forth: “And I got to do it in historical perspective in two goddamn thousand words!”

  “Allow me to analyze your tone of voice. Ah, yes—diagnosis simple.” Nora slipped off her chlamys and dropped it on Andrei’s notebooks. “Well, must shower. Post-Dil Lit would make anybody stink, even me. Why, dear crawling child, this is merely a thing done to freshmen. They search for the faint gleams of intellect that may appear even in the remote gray wastes of a skull like yours.”

  “Explains my headaches.”

  “Poor soul!” she said, and kissed his forehead, and pulled handfuls of his shoulder-length yellow hair, right and left, like ringing a bell. “A kind of initiation. Mahew’s a nice joe, by the way. See, they want to know whether you think two thousand words too long or too short. Scholarly ambition versus freshman slobostasy.”

  “A conspiracy to make me think? Oh, I see the whole plot now.”

  “Yes, you’ve been warned.” She paused with clawed fingers beside Andrei’s quiet, lifted feet. Andrei said: “Don’t.”

  “Wasn’t going to,” said Nora, and departed for the washroom.

  Elmo hollered after her: “Anyhow there wasn’t any old Post-Dil Lit until the Collections of Jermyn Graz, obit 5465.”

  Nora’s reply through spattering water was an angry howl: “Bloody furnace out again—cooowwlld-d-d! Low on firewood, some creep goofed his work-day, no doubt some ill-begotten freshman, birthed by a tinker’s drab behind a hedge—hey, pentameter!”

  “Meant to warn you,” Andrei called, upside down.

  “Fine time now! And by the way, there was so, Elmo. Barr Wain, fifty-fourth century if I’m a day old—I mean his stupid Siege of Shattum—mucky antique mooings but a poem nevertheless, my hearties, even if half of it was a steal from the very Old-Time Song of Roland, which goes back to thirty-ninth century no less, and a fat mystery how Wain ever got hold if it. And there were the Narratives of David deMoha—fifty-fourth century sure-enough.” Nora came forth full of thorny learning, her admirable body lobster-pink from icy spring-water and toweling. “DeMoha was one of the the Nuin Heretics, if you don’t know—those guys that tried to bring back some of the Old-Time knowledge. And he did sail around the world, did he not!”

  “Good for him,” said Elmo absently. “Look, it says here in Snokes: ‘The terminal quarter of the fiftieth century was characterized by an awareness of rapidly approaching man-made disaster accompanied by a paralysis of will and a failure to develop a rational ethics in spite of all the teachings of history and of native intelligence. We can only wonder what might be the status of our culture now if the dazed billions of that century could have learned restraint and reason in time to avoid the Collapse. It was not to be. Decadence into antique magic, spookery, miscellaneous pieties, was only one of many retreats. Human beings shuddered away from the technological and psychological monsters they themselves had created and set free, and stumbled over the cliffs, led by the blind.’ ”

  “Slaps it right to ’em, don’t he?” said Andrei.

  “And I must deal with that in two thousand words. In historical perspective, he do say through his thicket of beard.”

  “Why, if it’s a fact,” said Nora, combing her black curls, “you go collate it. That’s what I’m always doing with facts.”

  Andrei’s heels thumped. He rolled Nora’s chlamys into a pillow, selected a notebook, and lay there studying like one dead.

  “Going to the Freshman Spring Orgy?”

  “Suppose,” said Elmo. “Maybe I’ll ask a boy. The freshman bints are mainly pigs.”

  “Good precedent,” Nora said. “Zeus and Shakespeare were queer. But I have observed three or four freshman quail who are not at all bad, by liberal standards.”

  Elmo growled around the pencil-end he was gnawing: “Dare say sooner orge with you.”

  “Why, anytim
e, steamy stripling. Anytime I say so.”

  “And I feel inclined, high-toned hoyden.”

  Andrei muttered: “How serene if you ungainly aboriginal types would scamper off to bed, or stop quarreling, or both.”

  Elmo lowered his feet from the desk and crouched over Snokes’s Cultural Panorama, bane of freshmen, bible of historians. Tilted back in his chair, he had seen through the eastern window at his left the green-gold and pink and diminishing blue of early evening sky; now he could watch the mild Hudson Sea, and the small white beach a quarter-mile away, where in a few weeks the heavy south winds of March would bring the girls and boys bathing and romping. And because the evening was sweetly lucid he could see, far and faint, a blue irregularity of the horizon marking the eastern shore of this narrow part of the Hudson Sea—after all, only a great channel across the time-beaten earth between the Atlantic and Lorenta Seas, cutting off the wonderful island of Nuin from the mainland. Nuin is a venerable place to all of us, capital, place of beginnings, cultural and spiritual center of a somewhat thoughtful world.

  The Hunnington family managed a trading company jointly with three other continua of Nupal and a small (five-mother) continuum—or commune, since they preferred the old classical term—near Mount Orlook in Ulsta. The families had many other interests, but the trading company kept them modestly prosperous, able to contribute a good surplus to the larger community’s expenses.

  Elmo’s biofather David obSamel Hunnington dealt with the company’s paperwork; Elmo felt closer to one of his commune-fathers, Alan obJonas Hunnington, whose share of the trading-house work included that goodly loafing called traveling, with spurts of lyrical horse-trading when in port. Four years ago, in 5709, when Elmo obDavid was thirteen and convalescent from a moderate attack of red-pox fever, Alan had taken him on the great triangle cruise aboard the company’s fast, three-masted frigate Amanda: from Nuber in Katskil, with white pine from the far north, and sugar from the south, and canned goods, to Plymouth; from Plymouth to Table Mountain (known in Old Time as Cape Town, and crumbled traces of Old-Time ruins were still there for Elmo’s curious gaze) with English wool and electrical fixtures and other fine manufactures; and return to Nuber with ivory, cameras, mahogany, chocolate. A year well spent, as Alan obJonas had expected: Elmo came back shining-healthy, no longer able to sing lead soprano in the Nupal choir, and carrying a fresh cargo of memories.

  He remembered a rainy wind-dance of palms along the Cornwall shore on the approach to New Dover. He remembered a rambling conversation with a startlingly old violin-maker at Table Mountain. Such a conversation could have taken place at Ceylon, Manila, Valpo, anywhere in the modern world, but it did happen at Table Mountain, how many thousand miles from home?—beyond the Tropic of Capricorn anyway. Elmo was as happy remembering it as he had been while smelling the roses in the artist’s garden and feeling the cool onshore winds, because the old man had treated him like a contemporary, with an exacting love.

  He remembered with other overtones of pleasure the fortnightly meetings in the open sea between big, racy Amanda and the Government Copter that brought mail and occasionally lowered or took up a passenger. Amanda’s radio would always have word of the approach hours in advance. You could wait and watch, speculating with Alan, who generally had a bet with the skipper about some aspect of the rendezvous. And Copter would come waddling out of the horizon, far enough off schedule to have teased you for a while, and bumble into largeness, a comic lovely dream. Then she would show a logical structure of whirling blades and streamlined cabin, sliding in fantastically precise above the ship and hovering with that illusion of not moving at all, or only as a dream moves.

  And if the sea is what sailors humorously call calm, the ladder dribbles down and is made fast, and there are the mail packages, and maybe a passenger slightly green in the cheeks. There’s the ribald exchange of sailors’ news and comment and impractical advice while Elmo’s ears flap merrily in the verbal breeze.

  Something of a polluter, the Copter, for her alcohol engine must be heavily powered to keep her safe in all weathers, and beastly expensive because so many of the materials needed for her building were hoggishly squandered in the long-ago—imagine being lavish with tin, or tungsten, or iron itself! Well, to every century its own evil—there’ll be another one along in the next. But since Government allows only a hundred Copters to operate in the entire world service, the expense is bearable and the corruption slight.

  Elmo secured a grip on his hair with his left hand. He dipped his ebony-handled steel pen (present from commune-mother Sylvia) in the Chinese jade inkwell (present from Andrei). He admired the architectural study for a theatre pinned to the wall above Andrei’s desk: pure lines, no fuss; such a building would grow out of the earth as if the sky were another friend. Nora’s desk, off to his right on the other side of the window, was fantastically neat as usual—amazing for a poet, until you remembered that she wrote most of her poetry with a stub pencil, in bed, in a beat-out notebook she was always losing. Evening light, a reflection of beginning sunset, was giving the big room unearthly color, flooding the cream-white walls with hints of yellow and rose; and the air was all a sweet stillness. The clock on the far wall of the study by the bedroom archway read a few minutes before six—almost time for the vesper bell to ring in the tower of University Hall. An hour after that the alto chimes downstairs will go tang-tong-tang for supper, and we shag ass down there for roast pork and mashed potatoes and punkin pie. Meanwhile, this should be a little time for working, and thinking. But other historians before Elmo have noted that the fiftieth century can affect one like a clawed hand poking out of a grave.

  The small fire had burned low. Andrei put away his notebook and rolled over twice along the tigerskin to reach the woodbox without bothering to stand. He arranged fresh sticks; the new fire lived in motion, in the hearth and along the rises and hollows of Andrei’s flesh as he lay contemplating oceans, shores, continents of his own thought. His upper lip was full, wanting the taste of living, his chin firm, his eyes unfathomably dark. Nora was lounging naked in the armchair watching the evening, the towel at her shoulders in casual lines of grace, and she was quiet as the light.

  In a patch of bushes between Jermyn Hall and the beach, a white-throat sparrow sang his five celestial notes—again—and a third time. He burst from the leaves and darted across the evening; as if answering his signal, the vesper bell sounded from the tower. Presently the beacon on Grange Hill would shine, indicating that anyone of the University who needed stronger light than lamp or candle might properly use the power from waterfall and windmills until midnight. Nora smiled, liking this time of day. Andrei, unpredictable, sent Elmo an open, unguarded look of affection, brooding and bemused, all barriers down. Elmo’s spine shivered: it was suddenly known to him how much he loved these two, and how rare a thing is the recognition of a present happiness.

  One year more than half gone, of the five that the University of Sortees considered desirable for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Four to go, only three for Nora, two for Andrei. He supposed he would stay here for the doctorate, if he held to his plan of becoming a historian. (What is history, that you should catch it in a net of words?) Four years is a wealth of time; Elmo was precociously aware that treasures of time are soon spent. The vesper bell rang on and on within him till Nora’s voice dismissed it, speaking out of her own revery:

  “A thought, Elmo: so far as time-lapse is concerned, the fiftieth century is to the present as the forty-second was to the fiftieth.”

  “Mm, yes. So what did the best minds of the fiftieth—were there any?—think about the century of the Crusades? Thanks, passion-flower. Crusades—Frederick Barbarossa banging away at the Popes, trying to swallow Italy, urping up undigested chunks of it, uhha . . . Well, both were centuries of imbecile warfare, but weren’t alone in that. Forty-fourth was another such, with the Black Death an ulcerated hole in the middle of it. And then at the end of the forty-second, what they called the twelfth century
after Christ, no Collapse. In fact, things looked up a bit, didn’t they, for a couple of centuries?”

  “Big bonny cathedrals,” said Andrei, “some of which went whomp. Monastic orders. Albigensian Crusade.”

  “Something to be said for monastic orders maybe.”

  “You be monk, I be superior.”

  “Up yours too, venerable third-year monster.”

  “Historical parallels,” Nora suggested, “are rickety suspension bridges over a torrent of truth.”

  “Figures of speech,” said Elmo, “are rainbow bridges to a region where Assistant Professor Mahew would prefer I didn’t walk.”

  Andrei said: “And love is more than bird-wing in the sun.”

  “O Andrei!—may I steal that?”

  “What will you give me for it, nubile madam?”

  “How he does run on in pentameter! I must think . . .”

  She was saying something more, but Elmo lost it. His pen had long gone dry in waiting. He dipped it again in the jade well that was Andrei’s gift, in the oak-gall ink that was dark as Andrei’s eyes, and wrote with exploratory slowness:

  The fiftieth century began with a minor disturbance known as the First World War (4914—4918); only about nine million dead. Essentially a European political uproar, this conflict marked the first major development of the internal combustion engine as a weapon of destruction—airplanes, tanks, etc.—although the possibilities were imperfectly realized. Another field opened for investigation was chemical warfare, mainly with phosgene and mustard gas. Defoliants were not thought of until the civilization was much further advanced in decay.

  He interrupted his work, and Nora’s soft conversation with drowsing Andrei, to ask: “Is this Monday, anybody know?”

  Andrei said: “I think we had some sort of day off yesterday.”

  “Did we? Jasus!” said Nora. “I’ve been thinking this was Tuesday, all day long.”

  “So maybe it is. If so, I am doubtless screwed, because this fornicating paper has to be in Mahew’s obscene clutches by Thursday.”

  Andrei asked: “Nora, are your hippies still hanging on the same hook as the bedroom calendar?”