These are some of the figures I remember. The United States, with a population of more than two hundred million, lost forty-two million dead. This was from para alone: it does not include those who died in riots, and in the famines that gripped many communities, causing panic evacuations into a countryside that had no means of caring for the refugees. It does not include the millions who survived with major disablements — usually deafness like Sharon’s, but there were some who came out of it with limbs crippled as if by poliomyelitis, and some whose throats never recovered speech; and there were a few — I am speaking in terms of thousands — whose brain tissue was so damaged that they are not actually among the living. The United States of Europe, and South America, suffered in about the same proportion; Africa and India rather more. Interesting to note, however, that the death rate was only slightly higher in those countries where sanitation and public health work had never advanced to anything like the American level. It is supposed to have been somewhat higher in those countries merely because convalescents could not receive the care they did in more prosperous places, and therefore many died from inevitable neglect who might have lived.
The disease certainly reached Asia. That much we know. It must have done its slaughter there, after two years of major war, more horribly than anywhere else. But we also know, from the Satellite Authority, that some kind of war still goes on there, a slow fire of death, perhaps dying down, perhaps not. There is talk of sending in medical rescue expeditions — with armies in front of them for protection. I don’t know. It couldn’t be done soon; not until the rest of the world has had a little time to recover. It should be easy enough to by-pass Canton, Murmansk, Vladivostok, where they combined demolition with radioactive cobalt, but all effort at communication since the war began has been met with the sullen fury of silence; so far as I know all the land approaches to the sick continent are still viciously guarded in depth; their radar is good, and somehow they still have the means — aircraft, anti-aircraft, guided missiles — to destroy all foreign planes without inquiry, as they have done for the last three years. To break through would require a major military operation. The Western world has no heart for that at present; quite probably the slave populations would consider it an invasion, and hate the foreign devils as thoroughly as their masters do. It may be the logical finish for a national paranoia — all the same, you can’t throw away a third of a planet. Sooner or later sanity will have to tear down the barrier, if only for its own sake.
What has been the quality of the years for you, Drozma? In your letters you say little of yourself. I know you stand apart, watching both worlds with a clarity I have never achieved. I hope (though you do not say so) that the administrative burdens have been lightened, to give you better hours of contemplation. In spite of the plague, in spite of the continuing division of the world and the great weariness that will linger everywhere for a long time, I still believe that Union may be possible toward the close of my son’s lifetime. We must discuss that when I see you, that and many other slow-maturing fruits of the centuries. I gave the Minoan mirror to Sharon and Abraham, thinking you would approve the gift.
They have the essentials of maturity. Now I wish you could see Abraham waiting on the customers in that little store, or sometimes presiding over the rambling talk of old men and young on the rickety porch! He has even picked up a trace of the accent, though nobody could take him for a Vermonter. The small village was ravaged by para, like all the rest of the world — about a hundred dead from a population of less than four hundred — but it coheres and goes on about its decent business in the stubborn Vermont way. The owner of the store is an old man who lost all his family to para; he is worn down to a gray shred of humanity, but he is not confused. He thinks of Sharon and Abraham as his “new children,” and for himself he chiefly wants just to sit in the sun and wait a while.
They live over the store. One room has become a library, and Sharon reads a great deal…. “We shan’t be here always,” Abraham said to me. It is a pleasant and probably necessary temporary retirement from the livelier world. They need some years of quiet and study — Sharon to build a wholly new life on the ruins of what she lost, Abraham to digest and understand the past and the present and go on to new discoveries, new efforts that I would never dare to predict. He learned the deaf-mute sign language before Sharon did; learning it from him was one of the first steps she took out of her private maze of despair. He has other methods too of bringing the world to her. Sharon had never read a great deal before; the piano took the place of it. Now she is following his mind wherever it goes, and they are never lonely.
There is no undercurrent of guilt in his devotion to her, only love and a receptive interest in the endless mystery of another personality. He has no tendency now to blame himself for the world’s troubles. He sees himself very simply, I think — as a human being with possibilities that are not to be thrown away or lost or stultified. He has learned, Drozma, how to look in a mirror.
He is painting, too, for his pleasure, and Sharon’s, and for whatever others may choose to see in his work. I have two new canvases he gave me, in a waterproof cylinder, and am bringing them home to you. I wish you could see a certain fantasy of the underground river of Goyalantis — but I couldn’t accept that one, because I knew that Sharon wanted it even more. And tentatively, not too humbly, Sharon is approaching that art herself, partly under his guidance, more under the guidance of her own warm imagination — something may come of that; it’s too soon to tell. They are never lonely.
All that I have told you has the pathetic incompleteness of words. I remember my report of 30,963, and my journal of this year, and I am constantly amazed to think how intricate was the reality, how partial my story of it, like those telescopic photographs of Mars that tickle and excite the human imagination with a sense of truth just beyond reach. I remember Latimer, New England’s queer blend of history and tomorrow: I can smell it, and hear again the street sounds, yet my words were feebler than a photograph, and a photograph would have told you very little.
I remember my first meeting with Angelo Pontevecchio. How can I describe the certainty of recognition in myself when he limped into the house, set down the Crito, studied me with twelve-year-old curiosity behind his mother’s friendliness — the certainty that I was in the presence of what I must always love without ever understanding it?
Did I make you see Feuermann? Or any of those other bewildering complexes of contradiction we call human? Mac — I’ll never know if I wounded him by shoving that damn toothbrush out of alignment. Mrs. Keith and her amethyst brooch…
I shall always remember Rosa, the pretty eyebrows in her round face always slightly lifted in wonder at her son and at the world beyond him.
I remember Amagoya.
I remember too the first time I saw the Satellite. In the Americas they call it the Midnight Star, and I saw it rising from the north and passing, not swift like a meteor but far more hurried to the eye than any star. The most dramatic achievement of human science, I think, and something more than science too — a bright finger groping at the heavens. It moves in daytime, invisible, over the Pacific, but I shall see it again when I am coming home.
I remember the sea, from centuries past and from tonight, the sea that changes forever only to be the same.
Never, beautiful Earth, never even at the height of the human storms have I forgotten you, my planet Earth, your forests and your fields, your oceans, the serenity of your mountains; the meadows, the continuing rivers, the incorruptible promise of returning spring.