"Is he worth something?"
"Maybe he was your ancestor. Maybe he fed the ancestor of the designer who made this ship."
"What's that worth? What's anything worth, if you don't believe in systems?"
"Ah. You still misunderstand me. Anything is worth everything. Everything is important. It's all one system, from the dustmote to the star. It's only that our systems are too small."
"So you give this world up? You're leaving it?"
"Aren't you?"
"I've got business out there."
"Good. That's very fine. Remember the cabbages."
"What's your business out there?"
"History."
"You don't believe in it!"
"And stories. They're equal. Fusing the past with now and tomorrow. That's what's in the crates. History. Stories."
"Where are you taking them?"
"As far as I can. You know what I'll do when I get there? I'll sit down with you and your kids born somewhere far from Earth and I'll say: listen, youngest, I've got a story to tell you, about where you came from and why you're going, and what it all means anyway. It's a story about you
, and about me, and a time very much like this one. . . a dangerous time. But all times are dangerous.
"Once upon a time, I'll say. Once upon a timeis the only true enchantment the elves left to us, the gift of truthful lies and travel in time and space.
" Once upon a timethere were listeners round a fire; once upon a timethere will be a microfiche or—vastly to be treasured—a real paper book aboard a ship named Argo(like the one ages past) in quest of things we haven't dreamed of. But they'll dream of something more than that.
"Youngest, I'll say, when I fly I always look out the window—I do it as a ritual when I remember it. I look for myself. But I also look for the sake of all the dreamers in all the ages of this world who would have given their very lives to catch one glimpse of the world and the stars the way I can see them for hour upon hour out that window.
"Someday, youngest, someone will take that look for me—oh, at Beta Lyrae; or at huge Aldebaran; or Tau Ceti, which I've named Pell's Star—"
I pause. I sip my drink, almost the last, and look at the clock, where the time runs close to boarding. It's time to think about the baggage. We have, perhaps, amazed each other. Travelers often do.
We send our baggage off with the handlers. We exchange pleasantries about the trip, about the schedule. We retreat to those banalities better-mannered strangers use to fill the time. Words and words. A story teller isn't concerned with words.
The boarding call goes out. We form our mundane line and search after tickets and visas. The dock resounds with foreign names and the clank of machinery.
It is of course, always an age of wonders. The true gift is remembering to look out the windows, and to let the thoughts run backward and forward and wide to the breadth and height of all that's ever been and might yet be—
Once upon a time, I tell you.
I
I sit in the observation lounge. Window-staring. The moon is long behind us, and Earth is farther still. And a step sounds near enough to tell me someone is interested in me or the window.
"Ah," I say, and smile. We've met before.
"What do you see out there?" you ask. It sounds like challenge.
"Look for yourself," I say. It's a double-edged invitation. And for a time, you do.
"I've been thinking about history," you say at last.
"Oh?"
"About what good it is. People fight wars over it. They get their prejudices from it; and maybe what they think they remember wasn't even true in the first place."
"It's very unlikely that it is true, since history isn't."
"But if we didn't have all those books we'd have to make all those mistakes again. Wouldn't we?
Whatever they were."
"Probably we'd make different ones. Maybe we'd do much worse."
"Maybe we ought to make up a better past. Maybe if all the writers in the world sat down and came up with a better history, and we could just sort of lieto everyone—I mean, where we're going, who'd know? Maybe if you just shot those history books out the airlock, maybe if you wrote us a new history, we could save us a war or two."
"That's what fantasy does, you know. It's making things over the way it should have been."
"But you can't go around believing in elves and dragons."
"The myths are true as history. Myths are about truth."
"There you go, sounding crazy again."
I laugh and flip a switch. The lap-computer comes alive on the table by the window. Words ripple past. "You know that's all myths couldbe. Truth. A system of truth, made as simple as its hearers. The old myths are still true. There's one I used to tell to my students—"
"When you taught history."
"Languages this time. Ancient languages. Eleven years of teaching. The first and second short stories I ever wrote were myths I used to tell my students. I'll show you one. I'll print it so you can read it. It was the second. It speaks about perceptions again." I press a key and send a fiche out from the microprinter; and smile, thinking on a classful of remembered faces, eleven years of students, all 'gathered together in one classroom like ghosts. And I think of campfires again, and aGreek hillside, and a theater, and the dusty hills of Troy. We all sit there, all of us, torchlight on our faces, in all the ghostly array of our cultures and our ancestral histories, folk out of Charlemagne's Empire, and Henry's, and the Khazars; we come from the fijords and the Sudan and the Carolinas, all of us whose ancestors would have taken axe to one another on sight. All of us sit and listen together to a Greek myth retold, all innocent of ancient murders.
"Stories matter," I say. "And what is history but another myth, with the poetry taken out?" Dear old Greek, I think, passing on the microfiche, by whatever name you really lived, thank you for the loan. And thank you, my young friends of some years ago. This one's still your own. 1976
CASSANDRA
Fires.
They grew unbearable here.
Alis felt for the door of the flat and knew that it would be solid. She could feel the cool metal of the knob amid the flames. . . saw the shadow-stairs through the roiling smoke outside, clearly enough to feel her way down them, convincing her senses that they would bear her weight. Crazy Alis. She made no haste. The fires burned steadily. She passed through them, descended the insubstantial steps to the solid ground—she could not abide the elevator, that closed space with the shadow-floor, that plummeted down and down; she made the ground floor, averted her eyes from the red, heatless flames.
A ghost said good morning to her. . . old man Willis, thin and transparent against the leaping flames. She blinked, bade it good morning in return—did not miss old Willis's shake of the head as she opened the door and left. Noon traffic passed, heedless of the flames, the hulks that blazed in the street, the tumbling brick.
The apartment caved in—black bricks falling into the inferno, Hell amid the green, ghostly trees. Old Willis fled, burning, fell—turned to jerking, blackened flesh—died, daily. Alis no longer cried, hardly flinched. She ignored the horror spilling about her, forced her way through crumbling brick that held no substance, past busy ghosts that could not be troubled in their haste. Kingsley's Cafe stood, whole, more so than the rest. It was refuge for the afternoon, a feeling of safety. She pushed open the door, heard the tinkle of a lost bell. Shadowy patrons looked, whispered.