Edgar Pangborn - Davy

The labor pains were a month premature. That alone did not alarm us too much in the first hours. Ted Marsh and Adna-Lee Jason, who know more Old-Time medicine than the rest of us, did whatever was possible. Old-Time knowledge we have, wretchedly incomplete. Old-Time drugs and equipment we have not — unattainable as the Midnight Star. Therefore diagnosis is mainly guesswork, important surgery unthinkable, and our partial possession of the ancient knowledge often a mockery.

Nickie fought the pain for eighteen hours and was at length delivered of a thing with a swollen head which was able to live an hour or two of shrieking empty existence, but the bleeding would not stop. The mue weighed twelve pounds, and she — why, at our lodgings in Old City I used to carry her up two flights of stairs for the joy of it and be hardly winded at the top of the climb. The bleeding would not stop. She had glimpsed the mue in spite of us and understood, and so could not even die with the consolation of an illusion. In the world that Old Time left to us, these things have happened and will again.

I sail before long in the Morning Star with Captain Barr and a small company — five women and nine other men, all of us chosen by Dion because we clearly possess what he calls a “controlled discontent.” All voluntary, naturally, and me he did not exactly choose, but only asked me: “Do you want to go, Davy?” I said that I did, and he kissed my forehead in the manner of the old Nuin nobility, a thing I haven’t known him to do for years, but we’ve said nothing more about the sailing and probably won’t until the day Barr chooses.

I am thirty-five and Dion is fifty. We fought in two wars together. We tried to draw a great nation a step or two beyond the sodden ignorance of this era. We sailed together into the great sea and found this island Neonarcheos. We loved the same woman. “Controlled discontent” — well, I think that appraisal was meant for meas much as for the rest. It is a compliment, but with the inevitable dark side too: we fourteen, Captain Barr and myself and the others, fitted by temperament and circumstance for the task of explorers, are to a great degree unfitted for anything else.

The explorer’s task has, I’d say, very little of the splendor a boy’s imagination gives it. I dreamed a multitude of fancies lying in the sun before my cave on North Mountain; but Captain Barr and I are now much more decently concerned with survival biscuits and pemmican and sauerkraut, and trying to rebuild the head of the Morning Star a mite further aft if you’ll excuse the expression. But all that doesn’t mean that the glory goes out of exploring. It is there, and the inner rewards are real enough. The sea of ignorance is vast beyond measuring, and so I, an animalcule with his dab of phosphorescence, set that light against it and find no reason to be ashamed of my pride.

In the six years we have been able to build another sailing vessel, a neat small thing the Old-Time builders would describe as a yawl. Those who remain behind can make use of the other islands while we are gone.

Our flax seed has grown well on Neonarcheos, so the Morning Star has good new canvas. We carry provisions for four months. Our immediate mission is to reach the mainland of what was called Europe, which should take far less time than that, learn what we can of it, and return. Our first landfall should be the coast of what was Portugal, or Spain, we suppose. But currents and winds are not as they were in Old Time.

We who sail are all childless. The women may not be sterile, but none has ever conceived, and the youngest is twenty-five. In the six years at Neonarcheos, twenty-one normal children have been born, to seven of the women. I did not father any of them. I did make Nora Servern pregnant. It was her wish, and Dion’s too; they thought, and the same as told me, that they hoped it would draw me out of a black and self-destroying mood that had held me for a long time. What did draw me out of it I’ll never know — just time, maybe. Sweet Nora was good to love, and that part of the episode certainly helped bring me back into acceptance of daily living. But though Nora was able to bear Dion two healthy girls, the child she bore me was a mue not unlike the one for whom Nickie’s life was thrown away.

Thus I am obliged to understand that the fault was not in Nickie’s seed but in mine. I am not illogical enough to say that I killed her; who could live with that? But it is true that she was killed by an evil that Old Time set adrift, that came down through the generations, through Sam’s body or my mother’s — who could say? — to hide in that part of mine which ought to be the safest, the least corrupted. This happened, to me and to countless others, and will again.

My only children are certain thoughts I may have been able to give you. I can sometimes be tranquil in my heart about this, when I remember how much exploring there is to be done. There seems to be enough undiscovered territory, in the mind and the rest of the world — I think I could have written, in the world and the rest of the mind — so that we shall not have it all mapped before sundown, not this Wednesday.

I went down to the beach last night, because I heard the wind, and the ocean was long-voiced on the sand, and the stars were out. Before long 1 shall hear that music at the bows, or as a following whisper in the times when I have the wheel in my hands. I sail because I desire it; I have no children except those in your care, but may I not tell you that exploration also is an act of love?

I gave words to the breakers last night, a game I have often played, a harmless way of aiding the mind to speak to itself. You who are the earth can ask, and you who are the sea may answer, and if there is truth spoken you know the source.

I asked whether the generations could some day restore the good of Old Time without the evil, and the ocean that was a voice in my mind suggested: Maybe soon, maybe only another thousand years.

Davy means, no northern visitors. They have some commerce with the region known in Old Time as South America . In 296 a handful of refugees from some Misipan political tempest reached Penn overland, and gave this and other information before they died of malaria, infected wounds and dysentery. They spoke an English so barbarous that there has been argument ever since over much that they tried to say. I learned of this by listening in as a small boy on semi-formal conversations between my grandfather President Dion II and the Penn ambassador Wilam Skoonmaker. My poor uncle, later Morgan III, held me in his lap while he took notes on Skoonmaker’s stately talk and I admired his embroidered pants. — Dion Morgan Morganson of Nuin

Davy has asked Dion and me to ungoof the spelling here and there, but nobody could claim this one isn’t an improvement. — Miranda Nicoletta deMoha.

They have the Church’s grudging permission to exist, and rate a whole paragraph in the Church’s celebrated Doctrine of Necessary Evils. This monument of shrewd piety is believed by the public to have been devised by the disciple Simon at the supposed founding of the Church in 44. Actually the document they call the original is on a type of parchment that was developed in Nuin, not Katskil, and only about 50 years ago. I examined it myself on a visit to Nuber. No scholar can say exactly when the Holy Murcan Church began to exist, but it cannot have been a functioning institution for more than 200 years. — Dion M. M.

Anyone by paying a candle, a prayer and a dollar may enter the Murcan Museum in the cellar of the Cathedral at Old City and look at ancient fragments of automotive vehicles. In other words Davy knows perfectly well these mechanisms are not legendary, but must have his fun. — Dion M. M.