This couple have their children and educate them and they are absorbed into the stream of inheritance which carries them like a river. I can see these two young things - like us, Sharma - in love, and loving, but not in the service of some "cause," and not grabbing love as a shield against horrors. Which is what we are doing, Sharma. They are kind, and playful... I can see them doing simple pleasant things like walking along a riverbank, and swimming naked in fresh good water with their friends. And visiting each other's houses, visiting friends. Can you imagine what friendship must have been like in those days? Now our friends are usually in another continent, or are going to move away next week. I like to think of what friendship must have been then.
And I can see these two with their young children, enjoying them, enjoying every minute, because there is not the sort of pressure we know. And watching how they grow and show this trait or that, show the past which they are carrying into the future.
And I can see them, still young people, very young, a hundred, two hundred years old, vigorous and lively, and their family is grown and self-supporting but not flown as we take for granted must happen. Imagine the relations between children and parents who may know each other for hundreds of years? I wonder what kind of bond that might be. Imagine, it might take three hundred years or more for a person to reach maturity. You can think about it, and think about it all and not really grasp it, it is too hard for us. The high marriage. A real marriage. It happened once, I am sure of that.
Do you like this dream, Sharma? I wonder...
Or, if you don't, how about this... we are back in time, back, back... people are physically very different from these I have just written about, and of course different from us, with our diseases and our degenerating organs and our pitiful little lives.
That was a time when this earth had close links with the stars and their forces... does this annoy you, Sharma? You probably think it not useful. You are a very practical girl, and I admire you for it. Any situation offered to you - in no time you have grasped it, summed it up, seen how it may develop into the future. It is a capacity rooted in the deepest part of your nature - you value the capacity but not what it is rooted in! There isn't anything I value in you I could tell you about, and you would be pleased! Do you know that? Isn't that amazing? You think I value what you value in yourself - your cleverness, your ability to manage situations, your brilliant sensible speeches, the way you are so concise and quick in committees. Even your humanity... Do you know, you would be angry, it I told you what I love to see in you... it is a marvellous grasping of the actual, a sense, a gift, an instinct, I watch you pick up a bowl of rice and your hands have in them a language of understanding. You put up your hand to adjust your sari. I could watch that gesture forever. It has such certainty in it, such knowledge. One of the children come running, and it is not what you say, but how you touch and hold. It is a miracle, this thing in you. I can never have enough of it, I watch you, how you put your feet on the earth, so absolutely right, every step, and the movement of your head as you turn it to listen. I tell you, Sharma, there is something there that I - I simply give up! I salute it, and that's all.
In those days of this other older dream of mine, there were few people on the earth. These people who did live here knew what their lives were for. Because we don't, we have no idea at all. They existed to keep life flowing into this planet. It was they who regulated the cosmic forces, powers, currents, so many, and so different, and all with their patterns and flows and rhythms. The lives of these people were regulated, every minute, by their knowledge. But this did not mean a clockwork regularity, which is how we have to think and feel, but a moving with, and through, these always changing flows of the currents.
When a man and a woman married, it was not "to have children" or "to make a family," not necessarily, though of course children had to be born and when they were, it was exact and chosen. No, these two would be chosen, or choose each other, for they were born with the knowledge of how to do this - because they were complementary, and this was judged always by how they stood in relations to stars, planets, the dance of the heavens, the forces of the earth, the moon, our sun. It was not even that they chose each other, rather that they were chosen by what they were, where they were. When they "married" - and we cannot even begin to guess how that seemed to them - their being together was a sacrament, in the sense that everything contributed to the harmony. And when they mated, this was a sacrament, in the true and real sense, used consciously and exactly to adjust, fuel, add to, lessen, powers and currents. And what they ate was the same. And what they wore. There could not be disharmony, because they were harmony. Everything, their thoughts and movements... they were suspended, on this earth, between earth and heaven, and through them flowed the lives of stars, and through them flowed the substance of the earth to the stars...
That was how marriage was then, Sharma. I can see your face as you read this.
I must end now. My personal life has been sad recently. My father and mother died. They were wonderful people. There are family problems.
I will see you soon.
RACHEL SHERBAN'S JOURNAL
A lot of refugees have arrived from the new war, and we have had twenty of them in this flat. Fitting in somehow. Now they have gone on to a camp. Survivors. Surviving. I can't understand why they try so hard. Each one, a story of amazing escapes.
A million people died last week. Why then should it matter if Rachel Sherban stays alive? That is my question. I don't know who to ask it of. There must be a reply to it. If George was here, what he did would be the answer. He is always at it, rescuing people. One way or another. Mind you, I wonder if some of the people he rescues would be pleased if they knew they have genetic value. Genetically useful, said George once when I asked about someone.
A million people. I try to take it in. The people that were milling around in this flat are alive. But the unlucky ones are dead. Why one alive and one dead? It makes no sense to me at all. Out in the streets at night, all the rioting and shooting and then someone dead on the pavement. It might just as well be me. I went out last night. Curfew or no curfew, I walked about the city. All night. Soldiers. Trucks. Shooting. I did not even cover my face. No one saw me. I walked back into this flat this morning quite alive thank you. Well, answer that, whoever you are. Suzannah was out of her mind. Do you want to kill yourself, she shrieks.
I have seen something. I wonder how it was I didn't before. Who is it needs this killing, this agony, this suffering, the death, death, death, death. The blood and the blood. The reek of blood going up from this planet must be in somebody's nostrils. Somebody needs it. Something. There isn't anything that doesn't have a function. What happens always fits in with everything. What happens is needed by something. It happens because it is drawn out of a situation by need. There isn't anything that happens that is extraneous. There is somebody or something that needs this savagery and the blood.