I had been aiming for San Francisco in 1972; hitting a small village three miles south of Munich in 1936 was pretty good. I will not here describe the experience of landing in a world so foreign to my experience, so brutal and so intoxicating in many ways. Suffice it to say that it is a most peculiar business. The new reality is so overwhelming that you quickly forget your own past circumstances: I found that I spent little time thinking about my previous life, which very speedily took on the nature of a dream, dissociated from my current existence.
That didn’t make it any easier, mind you; even when I returned to sanity, the chances of making mistakes and attracting attention were enormous. Social mores were very different, for a start. Getting money was a strange business and quite how you were supposed to behave with others — depending on your age, sex, wealth, education, location and beliefs — was incomparably complex. I was, in fact, quite glad I had a long time to get used to it all. I was convalescing, so I thought I might as well make it pleasant. I had set my heart on a surfboard and a Thunderbird but, once I moved to France in 1937, I found there were more than enough pleasures to fill my days for a while.
I had left with a full suite of implants which made my life very much easier. I could speak German fluently, for example, and could manage just as well in twenty-three other languages. I had the expertise to be a highly successful lawyer or surgeon; I could have won the Nobel Prize many times over simply by printing other people’s work a little ahead of them. By the standards of the day, I was also quite remarkably beautiful and healthy, and could easily have become a major film star. I did none of that, of course, as I did not want to attract any attention, just in case.
The lack of newspapers was a nuisance, though; I remembered that a war was going to start, for example, and knew more or less who would win it, but I had no more idea what the following day would bring than anyone else. Foolish, no doubt, but I was a psychomathematician whose speciality was time; events were mere epiphenomena which interested me not at all. I was briefly worried that the lack of stock market reports (I wanted a simple life, but not a poor simple life) might doom me to poverty, but soon enough realised that calculating asset price movements was absurdly easy. Rudimentary mathematical ability and a simple star chart were the only things needed.
So I spent several months in Paris amassing some seed money in the most enjoyable way women could in those days, and also worked out the formula for predicting the markets. I then sorted out my finances once and for all and settled in a quiet location in the countryside where a studied eccentricity — my behaviour was, in fact, very bizarre, and it took years to learn how to behave properly and inconspicuously — protected me from prying eyes until I felt able to blend in.
Only during the war did I emerge, as not doing anything would have been more noticeable than actually taking part. I also relocated to England, as France didn’t promise to be so very entertaining. Then I was free to get on with my work. Oddly I found that my greatest advantage was having no assistance whatsoever. My mind could roam freely and, unshackled from the limits of standard procedure, could approach the problem from entirely new directions. It was wonderful.
10
As the years passed, Jay worked, learned and grew. By the time he was nearly seventeen, he had become a young man who was more self-confident and somewhat better at hiding his natural tendency to doubt authority, query orders and try to do things in the way he thought best. He had his friends, although he was not known as one of the wild and sociable students. He was still difficult to manage but, on the whole, this was confined to his work and only rarely affected his behaviour, which was polite and considerate. It was true that he was often chastised for missing lectures, but the talks he missed tended to be judiciously chosen. Only the most tedious had reason to complain that he had not turned up again. Jay considered an afternoon sitting by the river staring at the sky with a dreamy look on his face to be more valuable and instructive and often enough Henary found it difficult to disagree.
He progressed through the levels of studentship well and without major incident; his knowledge grew, his understanding grew much faster. Only the indiscipline remained; sooner or later the frustration at the unasked question would burst forth. Some of his contemporaries nicknamed him ‘Master Yesbut’.
‘You know,’ Henary had said after one lesson, ‘that part of your training is to write your own thesis?’
Jay nodded. He also knew that soon enough he would have to appear before a committee and say what his subject would be. Most chose some old scholar, their work unread for generations, who was disinterred from the shelves and analysed. Then put back and forgotten again.
‘Do you have any ideas?’
‘I’ve thought of many. But they are all so...’
‘Boring?’ Henary said lightly. Jay blushed. ‘You are quite right. Many of the commentaries are entirely useless, except to lull you to sleep late at night. Besides, all the really good ones have been gone over again and again.’
‘Laszlo and the weather,’ Jay said despondently.
‘A fine body of work, and very useful for sailors. What is there to say apart from that?’
‘Fered on theft?’
‘Then you would end up as a lawyer. A worthy trade, no doubt, but not what you are ideally suited to do with your life. You are not nearly precise enough.’
‘What I would like to do is something on the Shrine of Esilio. You know, collect writings on the subject and compare them. I’ve read a lot about it.’
‘A bit sophisticated for one of your age.’
‘Then what? Who?’
‘I have an idea. You do not have to take it, but if you do, it will mean a little travel for you. You might also care to render me a small service and go and meet someone.’
‘Who?’
‘A man called Jaqui. A hermit.’
Two days after their conversation, and armed with a letter of introduction for the elders of Hooke, Jay took leave of absence from his lessons and walked out of Ossenfud on the Great West Road. It led, so he knew, to the towns and settlements that were scattered throughout Anterwold, curling down to the sea in the south, and west into the mountains. It was itself a tributary, so to speak, of other roads: Garlden had mapped them many generations back and tried to explain why they were as they were, although his account was so amateurish that no one ever read it. But the maps — annotated and corrected as travellers found errors — were the best available.
According to Garlden, he had a twenty-mile walk on the road, then had to branch off to the north for about twenty-five miles to the village of Hooke.
When Henary had made the suggestion, Jay had looked almost scornful. ‘A hermit?’
‘Yes. A very strange man. I assume he’s still alive. He is an intriguing character. I think you might consider writing your dissertation on the subject of painting. It is an interesting topic, in my opinion. We always think of the Story in terms of words, but there are countless times when a drawing or illustration has been added. A map, or a plan, or a scribble in the margin. No one has ever looked at how they contribute to the Story as a whole. You will find a fascinating example of storytelling through pictures at Hooke.’