The Rats and the Ruling sea

24

One by one they died. All of them, the vicious and the virtuous, the Drellareks and the Diadrelus, their lovers, their foes. The nations they bled for, killed for: those perished too. Some in extraordinary style, a conflagration of prejudice and greed, coupled to war machinery. Others were simply buried as the vast, unsound palaces they dwelt in collapsed, those houses of quarried contradiction.

They died, you see. What else could have happened? I witnessed a number of deaths, heard others related by those who were present; I even contributed some names to the tally — your editor is a murderer; it's not as rare as you think. Until quite recently I had comrades from that time, fellow survivors, people in whose eyes a certain light kindled when I said Chathrand or Nilstone or the honour of the clan. Never many. Today, none at all.

It was all so long ago, an age. How many of the young scholars around me today, in my incontinent dotage, believe that the world of Pazel and Thasha ever existed — that it was ever as cruel or as blessed or as ignorant as we found it? No one in this place even looks like a Pazel or a Thasha. Why should they believe in them? So long as I live I am proof of a sort — but I, who sailed on Chathrand to her last hour, resemble myself less and less each passing year. And when I die there will be those who pause on the library stair to gaze at my portrait, wondering if the artist were mad.

What's left of those people? The ones I loved, the ones I detested? Not their faces (you must give them those yourself), nor their bones (though I keep Ott's skull on the parlour table, and talk to it sometimes; he's the only one whose looks have improved), nor their skins, shoes, teeth, voices, graves. Even the museums that collected artefacts from that time have crumbled, and the stone markers that read Here stood the museum. What's left? Their ideas. Still today — when the world is utterly changed, when men of learning begin to argue that human beings never had a time of glory, never built great cities, never tamed the Nelluroq or tasted the magic that moves the stars — still today, we need those ideas about the dignity of consciousness, the brotherhood of the fearless and the sceptical, the efficacy of love.

I hear your laughter. The young scholars laugh too, and whisper: That old spook upstairs has gone sentimental, mixing up his memories and his dreams. Laugh, then. May your mirth last longer than a thunderclap, and your ironies, and your youth. In the end you'll be left with ideas — nothing else — and one or two of you will have spent your lives working honestly to help the best ideas flourish and grow. My friends on the Chathrand were such people. That is why I must record their story before I go.

We are not blood and gristle and hair and spit. We are ideas, if we are anything at all. That part of us that was never truly living is the only part of us that cannot die. Now then, back to Bramian.