In palmier days, Julian explained, the house might have been crowded with visiting Aristos and Owners and Senators and such. But the hanging of Bryce Comstock had cast a shadow over the family, and Mrs. Comstock had been shut out from the elite social circuit. Since then her companions had been drawn from the Manhattan show business crowd, or from the lower ranks of rising wealth; and Edenvale was not the social magnet it once had been.
After two weeks these small entertainments began to pall, and Julian proposed taking me on a tour of the wilder parts of the Estate—the Estate as he had known it as a child, before he was sent to Williams Ford. I readily agreed, and we set out from the house on a sunny, cool morning. Julian carried an unusual piece of luggage with him: a canvas bag, narrow, and about three feet long. I asked him about it; and that was when he quoted his father’s remark about the nature of sport.
“Is it sporting equipment of some kind, then?”
“Yes, but I’ll keep the nature of it to myself for now—I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
We had dressed in clothes not much grander than what we had worn in Williams Ford when we hunted squirrels in the forest; and this was a relief after the complex and constraining Aristo fashions into which we had recently been belted and braced. A breeze turned the leaves of the ailanthus and the birch trees as we walked beneath their overarching branches, and it was as if we had become young again, for a few hours, at least.
In Williams Ford such expeditions always put Julian in a philosophical mood. That hadn’t changed. We paused in a grove of cork trees to refresh ourselves from the canteens we had packed, and Julian said, “This is where I learned to love the past, Adam—as a boy, this was my private Tip.”
“More trees than treasure, as far as I can tell.”
“So it was meant to be. But all this forest has grown up over layers of scuttle from the days of the Secular Ancients. Dig anywhere and you’re bound to unearth an old spoon or button or bone. Over that way”—he pointed at a hillside lush with birch and blackberry—“over that way there are foundations cut into the slope, and the remains of tumble-down houses. Do you know what I found there, as a boy?”
“Beetles? Spiders? Poison ivy?”
“All those; but more importantly—books!”
“You loved books so early, did you?”
“Even when I didn’t know what they meant. The books I found were mostly foul and water-damaged, but here and there a readable page was preserved. I didn’t just read those fragments, Adam, I nearly memorized them. It was a peculiar delicious feeling just to hold them in my hand—as if I’d found a way to eavesdrop on a conversation that faded into the air a hundred years ago.”
“What sort of books were they?”
He shrugged. “Novels, mostly. Stories of intimate relations, or murder, or fantasies of flying to the stars or traveling in time.”
“Not Dominion-approved, of course.”
“No, and therein lay half the pleasure. The fruit was forbidden but it was sweet, even when it surpassed my understanding. What it told me was that the history the Dominion teaches is partial at best. The Dominion’s truth is built on a cracked foundation, and buried in the cracks are things of immense interest and great beauty.”
“Dangerous things,” I said, though I was intrigued by the idea of stories about traveling in time and other such abominations.
“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”
“Are we going to see those ruined buildings, then?”
“Everything valuable I took away from them long ago. No,” Julian said, “today we’re going fishing.”
So saying, he led me another half-mile through a stand of birch and ailanthus to a lake—a glass-flat blue oval in the woods, its banks choked with goosegrass and purple loosestrife. Julian began to unroll his bundle, which I assumed would contain the rods and reels necessary for fly-fishing. But it did not.
We fished from kites, instead.
The kites—a pair of them—were of a design I hadn’t seen before: a wedge of silk with stubby “wings” and a vent in the lower quadrant, supported by three parallel sticks of supple lathing. The kite thus conformed was not rigid, but was what Julian called a “parafoil.” When lofted into the wind it opened like a sail, and was very stable in the air, and did not dip and bob like the crude kites I had made as a child, or fly upside-down, or plummet to the earth without warning. Julian sent his kite aloft first, to give me the idea, though the business wasn’t complicated. Left to itself, the kite was stable enough that it hung in the sky as if riveted there by the gentle breeze. By tugging the string or running the reel Julian could make the kite rise or descend, or travel left and right, according to his will.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Attached to the bridle of each kite was a second string, which carried a cork float and a hook with a tied fly. Thus “kite-fishing.” The kite carried the bait farther from shore than even an expert fly-fisher could have cast it, and fish grew plentifully in those deep and undisturbed waters.
I told Julian the invention was ingenious, but I wasn’t absolutely certain the fish would cooperate in this novel means of persuading them to undertake the journey from their watery home to the frying pan. He nodded and smiled. “You’re right, of course. Which is as it should be. Remember my father’s maxim? A sport, to be a sport, must be difficult, impractical, and slightly silly.”
“I guess this qualifies on all counts, then.”
“But you’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” He stretched out on the mossy bank of the pond, his spine braced against a tree trunk and the kite reel cradled in his lap. Clouds of midges circled lazily over the sunlit lake, while a turtle sunned itself on a nearby rock. “Which is the entire purpose of a sport.”
“These kites are unusual. Where did you learn how to make them?”
“From an antique book—where else?”
“Did the Secular Ancients really bother about such trivial things as kites?”
“Astonishing as it may seem, Adam, the Secular Ancients didn’t spend all their time fornicating outside of wedlock, afflicting the faithful, marrying individuals of the same sex, or terrorizing schoolchildren with the Theory of Evolution. They had their innocent amusements just as we do.”
They were people, that is, as human as Julian or I—a commonplace truth, but one that slips too easily from the mind. “They seem to have been very powerful, and very smart about kites and engines and such things. It’s a surprise to me that they declined so rapidly during the False Tribulation.”
“The False Tribulation—so called, and what an impudence on the part of the Dominion, to name a disaster after their own misinterpretation of it!—wasn’t one event but many. The End of Oil, or more precisely the end of cheaply acquired oil, crippled the Ancients’ top-heavy economic regime. But there were similar crises involving water and arable land. Wars for essential resources expanded, while machine agriculture became more expensive and finally impractical. Hunger stressed national economies to the breaking point, and disease and plague overcame all the hygienic barriers the Ancients had erected against them. Cities that couldn’t support their own populations were inundated by starving peasants and eventually looted by angry mobs. With the Fall of the Cities came the establishment of the first rural Estates and the sale of able-bodied men into indenture. All of this was complicated by the Plague of Infertility that reduced the world’s population so drastically, and from which we’re only now recovering.”