Davy

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, naturally, 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.