A third sort of time — well, I’m obliged to write some history, for if you exist you have only guesswork to tell you what’s happened to my part of the world since the period we call the Years of Confusion. I think there must have been a similar period for you — my guesswork. Your nations were stricken by the same abortive idiotic nuclear war and probably by the same plagues. Your culture showed the same symptoms of a possible moral collapse, the same basic weariness of over-stimulation, the same decline of education and rise of illiteracy, above all the same dithering refusal to let ethics catch up with science. After the plagues, your people may not have turned against the very memory of their civilization in a sort of religious frenzy as ours apparently did, determined like spoiled brats to bring down in the wreckage every bit of good along with the bad. They may not have, but I suspect they did. The best aspects of what some of us now call the “Golden Age” were clearly incomprehensible to the multitudes who lived then: they demanded of the age of reason that it give them more and more gimmicks or be damned to it. And they kept their religions alive as substitutes for thought, ready and eager to take over the moment reason should perish. I can’t suppose you did much better on your side of the world, or you would possess ships that would have made contact with us already.
I keep wondering whether, over there, the spooky religion of Communism may not have slugged it out with its older brother Christianity in the ruins. Whichever won, the human individual would be the loser.
Ever notice that only individuals think?…
After the collapse, human beings evidently existed for some time in frightened dangerous bands while weeds prepared the way for the return of forest. Those bands were interested in nothing but survival, not always in that — so we’re told by John Barth who saw the beginning of the Years of Confusion. He gives them that name in his fragment of a journal, which ends with an unfinished sentence in the year the Old-Time calendar called 1993. The Book of John Barth is of course totally forbidden in the nations we have left behind, possession of it meaning death “by special order” — that is, directly under supervision of the Church. We must make more copies as soon as we can set up our little press somewhere on land with a chance of renewing the paper supply.
Book-voices of Old Time tell me also of the vastly older ages, the millions of centuries extending back of the short flare which is human history to the beginning of the world. When I speak of even a small interval like a thousand years I can hardly grasp what I mean — but for that matter do I know what I mean by a minute? Yes — that is the part of eternity in which Nickie’s heart asleep will beat sixty-five times, give or take a few, unless I touch her, and her pulse hastens perhaps because in sleep she remembers me.
By starting after my fourteenth birthday I made myself responsible for yet another time, the deep-hidden years before then, the age no one quite recalls. Once improperly straying I looked up at the underside of a dark long table, myself surrounded by a forest of black-robed legs and big sandaled feet, by the unwashed smell — and there in a corner shadow a gray spider hung and twitched her web, disturbed by me or by the clash of plates, rumble and twitter of empty talk overhead.
Nickie is my age, twenty-eight, pregnant for the first time in our years of pleasure with each other. (What is time for a being in the womb who lives in time but can’t yet know it?) She told me about it last night, when she was sure. Across the cabin from me, staring into the flame of a candle she held, Nickie said: “Davy, if it’s a mue—?”
Touched with anger, I said: “We didn’t bring the priestwritten laws of that country with us.” She watched me, Miranda Nicoletta lately a lady of Nuin, and I afraid — I shouldn’t have said “that country” in the unthinking way I did, for Nickie has a natural remembering love of her homeland, and used to share her cousin Dion’s visions for it. But then she smiled and set down the candle and came to me, and we were as near as we ever have been — considering the inveterate loneliness of the human self, that is very near. Love is a region where recognition is possible. Her way of moving when she is drowsy makes me think of the motion of full-grown grass under the fondling of wind, the bending with no brittleness, yielding without defeat, rising back to upright grace and selfhood after the passage of the unconquering air.
Captain Barr always calls her “Domina” because it sounds natural to him even out here where old formalities hold no force. Back in Nuin after he got his knighthood he could have addressed her as “Miranda,” or “Nickie” for that matter, but he was born a freeman and recognition came late — not until Dion was Regent and searching for men of brains and character to replace the hordes of seventh cousins, prQfessional brown-nosers and what not who swarmed into the state jobs under Dion’s mentally incompetent uncle Morgan III. A respect for the older nobility is ingrained in Captain Barr, and in this instance it’s not extravagant, considering the amount of dignity that Funny-puss can pile on at will. Let’s clear up that St. Clair-Levison thing, by the way. It merely means her pop’s name was St. Clair and her mama’s Levison, both being of the nobility or, as she is inclined to say, “nobs with knobs on”, a peculiar expression. If Senator Jon Amadeus Lawson Marchette St. Clair, Tribune of the Commonwealth and Knight of the Order of the Massasoit, had married a commoner, which I can’t imagine Buster doing under any circs, Nickie’s last name would be just St. Clair.
The deMoha is largely imaginary, like a bridegroom’s seventh round. I mean, when I became slightly important in Nuin, Dion felt I should possess a more decorative handle, as a social convenience. After kicking my intellect around the bush and coming up with nothing better than Wilberforce, I asked his help and he suggested deMoha. With which I am stuck. You should have seen how relieved and happy the Lower Classes felt about washing my linen and so on after I got thus labeled but not before: for a top-flight snob, give me a poor man every time. And since according to our notions (but not those of Nuin) Nickie and I are most sincerely married, she calls herself deMoha and you can’t stop her. She claims I possess a natural nobility that remains in evidence with my clothes off, a rema’kable thing, and she has me so bewitched and bewattled that I naturally agree.
“Even with a light burning?” s’s I.
“Or widout,” s’s she. Nuin people can pronounce th perfectly well, but often they don’t bodda.
Now I suppose you want me to explain why Nuin is called a Commonwealth when it’s been governed by a monarchy known as a Presidency, and a Senate with two left feet, for going on two hundred years. I don’t know.