Henary took on the task of preserving the memory of his teacher and friend, knowing that if he did not then his wisdom and knowledge would be lost as well.
He had loved the man and wished to do a proper job, teasing out the sense and the value even in his later work, when he became wild and unbalanced in his assertions. It meant trying to find out all those things which he had never known, and then crafting them into a narrative which summed up his life. The good and the bad had to be there; the scholarly achievements, greater than he knew; the final death, sadder than he feared.
Etheran had gone mad, he thought. He had begun to question the Story, but without knowing how to answer his questions. Loyalty and curiosity came into murderous conflict, and his heart broke under the strain. So his tribute was also an exploration and an apology, for Henary had grown apart from Etheran in his last year. He had accused his teacher of becoming foolish and indulgent, giving credence to the irrational, lending support to those who disdained intellectual rigour. Henary thought it was irresponsible.
A terrible lesson, and as he wrote — taking his time, for the dead are in no hurry — he often thought of Jay, who resembled Etheran in some ways, as he was also incapable of restraining his questions and was tempted to stray into dangerous areas. Often Jay was disciplined and punished, but it never made any difference. There was a structure to argument: thesis; evidence from the story, preferably examples separated by several Levels; counter-argument, similarly backed up; and conclusion, where the most important quotations and examples were deployed. Simple enough, surely?
It was for most people, but not for Jay, who seemed to see it as a surrender. He was a good student, and Henary was pleased to see how he learnt quickly and developed a real feel for the Story. In all respects except one he demonstrated time and again that Henary had chosen well. The exception, however, was troublesome, for Jay found it difficult, even painful, to conform to the styles of disquisition that marked out the true scholar. How do you prove iron wheels were not as good as wooden ones? It was a simple task, set to all students after five years of study when they had mastered the language and scripts. All he had to do was cite the example of Yadrel, in Level 1, the cartwright who built the wagons which brought the travellers south, and who hewed yew trees and seasoned them and cut them to make wheels strong and pliant. What more was needed?
Jay ignored the tale of Yadrel, because he had gone mushroom hunting in the woods when he should have been at a lecture on the subject. Instead, he went and talked to a wheelwright and a blacksmith, and wrote about the way iron could shatter under strain. Right conclusion, wrong argument. His teacher (not Henary on this occasion) had hardly known where to start.
‘Jay, just stick to the texts next time,’ Henary said wearily after he had spent an hour listening to the teacher’s complaints. ‘Everything is to be found in the Story. Go and do it again.’
Look where that sort of thing led Etheran, he could have added. But he was loyal to the memory of his master, and loyal to the potential of Jay. Both had a spark which promised wonders and threatened disaster. So he used Etheran’s story to present the case for such wildness and equally the need to discipline it. To gather evidence for his case, he took himself off to the Story Hall, where Etheran’s papers had been stored, trying to understand how his mind had developed, and why it had then broken down.
There he came across the hermit Jaqui once more.
This encounter happened one evening, when anyone watching the main square of Ossenfud might have glimpsed a curious sight. A shadow passed across, and, hugging the walls of the buildings, made its way around the central area where markets were held every second Tuesday. The shadow paused by an opening in the great wall that formed one of the massive sides of the Story Hall and there was the lightest clinking of metal, the faintest scrape of a key turning in a lock.
Henary was at that moment breaking any number of rules. Against being out after dark, which was frowned upon even for senior scholars. Against going into the Story Hall out of hours. Against taking a light in without someone else to guard against accident or fire. Luckily, he was much too grand a figure to be questioned, and when he entered he paused in the semi-dark, savouring the smell and atmosphere of this most wonderful place, the quiet, the banks of boxes climbing the whitewashed walls, each containing their precious scroll or book. The whole world was there; Henary was conscious that he was standing in the very centre of the entire universe, and it gave him, as usual, a profound sense of humility and peace.
The papers he sought were grouped in five bundles and he made his discovery in the third: scraps of paper in a very different hand that stood out amongst his old master’s appalling scrawl, which, on its own, was almost enough to ensure that his thought remained forever hidden.
There were two letters only; Henary tucked them into the pocket of his thick cloak, carefully replaced the manuscripts, blew the dust off the table so no one would suspect he had been there, and then, as quietly and surely as he had arrived, slipped across the great echoing hall, through the little side door and back into the alleyway.
The letters described the encounter between Etheran and Jaqui, although as only half of the correspondence was there, it gave the impression that his poor teacher submitted silently to a torrent of meaningless abuse.
‘You tell me that the Story contains everything, and I reply that you are a fool, Etheran the Wise. You don’t think, and prefer silly tales and blind belief. How is it that someone like you is considered intelligent? What must your colleagues be like if a dunderhead like you is acclaimed?
‘How can this Story of yours contain everything? Ah, you say, only in potential, and its meaning will not be understood until Esilio returns and brings it to its end. Obscure nonsense. Meaningless babbling.
‘What do you mean by containing everything? Every bird and leaf and insect? What pathetic creatures you are! You await your end like cattle, and it will come, believe me. You will vanish as if you had never existed; it’s all you deserve.
‘Everything is something to do with the giants. But who were they? You don’t know. You are here because of the great Return from Exile. What was that? You don’t care. All you do is compare this tale to that tale; see that a certain phrase in one part of the Story is used in another part; discover that one dead scholar generations back contradicted another dead scholar generations back. You call this learning?
‘“When the Story is finished, it will fold into the world and each will extinguish the other.” One of your quotations. When? How? Anyone can come up with grandiose and meaningless phrases. I can too. How about this: “The world will end on the fifth day of the fifth year.” Is it any more nonsense than the sort of thing you recite with such reverence? No. Except that what I say is true. Wait and see.’
There was no notion of what prompted this lunatic outburst because Etheran had not made copies of his own letters. Henary could guess, though. In his last year, Etheran had been preoccupied with stories of the End, when the god returns to judge his creation. Silly stories, ignored by serious scholars, but Etheran had become alarmingly fascinated by them. It had been the cause of Henary’s disaffection from his master.
What astonished Henary was not just the content, but the fluency and ease of these letters. An interesting lunatic, he thought. None of it made sense, though, and he thought no more of Jaqui the hermit until the time came for Jay to consider his thesis.
9
The key problem I was working on derived from a computer simulation that was ordered by Hanslip in one of his fits of caution. It was carefully designed to do two things: firstly to establish the degree to which the course of history would be altered by changing an event, and secondly to test various theories of the nature of historical evolution. This was supposed to be a preliminary investigation into the practicality of altering parallel universes to create suitable conditions for exploitation.