I believed, as I’d been taught, that the world consisted of an area of land three thousand miles square, which was a garden where God and the angels walked freely among men performing miracles until about four hundred years ago when men sinned by lusting after forbidden knowledge and spoiled everything. Now we’re working out the penance until Abraham the Spokesman of God, Advertiser of Salvation whose coming was foretold by the ancient prophet Jesus Christ sometimes called the Sponsor, Abraham born of the Virgin Cara in the wilderness during the Years of Confusion, slain for our sins on the wheel at Nuber in the thirty-seventh year of his life, shall return to earth and judge all souls, saving the few and consigning the many to everlasting fire.
I knew the present year was 317, dating from the birth of Abraham, and that all nations agreed on this date. I believed that on every side of that lump of land three thousand miles square the great sea spread to the rim of the world. But — what about that rim? The Book of Abraham, said the priests, does not say how far out it is — God doesn’t wish men to know, that’s why. When I heard that in school, naturally I shut up, but it bothered me.
All my doubts were young and tentative: new grass struggling up through the rotted trash of winter. I did think it remarkable how the lightning never roasted me no matter how I sinned. At the close of my last school year a whole week was devoted to Sin, Father Clance the principal giving it personal attention. The Scarlet Woman puzzled us: we knew whores painted their faces, but it did sound as if this one was red all over — I didn’t get it. We knew what the good father meant by the Sin of Touching Yourself, though we called it jacking off; a few of the greener boys were upset to learn that if you did it your organs would turn blue and presently drop away; two fainted and one ran outside to vomit. Girls and boys had been separated that week, so I don’t know what sacred information got rammed into the quail. I could see that I must be too altogether trifling for God to bother about me, since I’d been taught the technique at least four years earlier at the orphanage, wasn’t even slightly blue, and still had everything. Father Clance was large and pale; he looked as if his stomach hurt and someone else was to blame. You felt that before blundering along and creating human beings male and female, God might in common decency have first consulted Father Clance.
The Church made it plain that everything connected with sex was sinful, hateful, dirty — even dreaming of a lay was called “pollution” — and also deserving of the utmost reverence. There were other inconsistencies, mevitable I suppose. The Church and its captive secular governments naturally wished the population might rncrease; with so many marriages sterile, mue-births coming nearly one in five, it’s an empty world. But the Church is also committed to the belief — I don’t understand its ongins — that all pleasure is suspect and only the joyless can be virtuous. Therefore the authorities do their best to encourage breeding while solemnly looking the other way. Something like a little show we used to put on when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers: four couples munching a nobility-type dinner with slaves bowing in the baked meats, and those aristocrats jawed gravely about the weather, fashion, church affairs never cracking a smile — but the audience could see under the table, where a squirming of fingers and bared thighs and upper-class codpieces was wondrous to behold.
The mind of Father Clance could take that kind of inconsistency with no pain; not mine. Religion requires a specially cultivated deafness to contradiction which I’m too sinful to learn.
Of course at fourteen I understood that you agreed out loud with whatever the Church taught, or else. I watched my first atheist-burning after I started work at the Bull-and-Iron. The attraction was a man who’d been heard to tell his son that nobody was ever born of a virgin. I’m not clear how this made him an atheist, but knew better than to ask. In Moha the burnings were always part of the Spring Festival — children under nine were not required to attend.
From my maple I watched the birth and growing of the day. Unexpectedly I thought: What if someone were to sail as far as the rim?
It was too much. I shied away from the thought. I slid from my tree and climbed on through deep forest, where the heat of day is always moderate. I traveled slowly so as not to raise a sweat, for the smell drifts far and black wolf or brown tiger may get interested. Against black wolf I had my knife — he hates steel. Tiger is indifferent to knives — a flip of his paw will do — but he usually avoids mountam country to follow the grazers. He’s said to respect arrows a little, and thrown spears and fire, though I’ve heard of his leaping a fire-circle to take a man.
I wasn’t too concerned about those ancient enemies that morning. My perilous thought was generating others: Suppose I went to the rim, and saw the sun catch fire?…
In heavy woods at any time of day there’s an uncertainty of twilight. Objects seemg more and less than real, when the light reaches them in a downflowing through the leaves. Part of night lingers. The question what is behind you may hold something more than fear. A good or desired being might walk there instead of danger, who’s to know?
My cave on North Mountain was a crack in a cliff broadening inside to make a room four feet wide and twenty deep. The crack ran up into darkness but must have reached the outside, since a draft like the pull of a chimney kept the air fresh. Black wolf could have entered, even tiger though he would have found scant room to maneuver. I’d driven out copperheads when I found the cave, and had to watch against their return; sweeping with a branch for scorpions was another housekeeping routine. The approach was a narrow ledge that widened in front of the cave with enough earth to support some grass and then led on more steeply to the other end of the cliff. The cave was on the east face of the mountain, Skoar in the south shut away. I could build small fires at night, searching the glow for a boy’s visions of places unexplored, faraway times and other selves.
That morning I first made sure of my bow and other gear. All there, but I felt a strangeness. I wet my nose to sharpen the scents; nothing wrong. When I found the cause, on the back wall where my glance must have gone at first unseeingly, I was not much wiser. A picture had been drawn by a point of soft red rock. It must have been done since my last visit, in November. It showed two faceless stick figures, with male parts. I’d heard of hunters’ sign messages, but this said nothing of that sort. The figures merely stood there. One was in good human proportion, elbows and knees bent, fingers and toes carefully indicated. The other reached the same height but his arms were too long and his legs too short with no knee-crook. I found no tracks, nothing left behind in the cave and nothing stolen.
I gave it up. Someone had passed by since November, and left my gear untouched; no reason to think he meant me any harm. I made sure a horse-shoe hidden under a rock in the front of the cave was still in place, though I’d never heard of pictures being left around by witches or any other supernaturals. I gathered fresh boughs to sleep on, and a mess of firewood, and lay out in the sun for daydreaming, naked except for my knife-belt. Without such free time now and then, how would we ever find new methods of protecting the moon from the grasshoppers? I didn’t forget the picture, but I supposed the visitor was long gone. My thoughts sailed beyond the limits of day.