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“I won’t be this badly off for very long,” I assured her. “It’ll be good for me to struggle for a while. I’ll enjoy it all the more when things get better.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you might have a masochistic streak, Mister Mortimer?” she asked, reverting to the form of my name that she alone employed, inconsistently, in order to emphasize that she didn’t really mean what she was saying.
“Of course it has,” I said. “I’m the historian of death—the man whose self-appointed task it is to remind New Humankind of all the fear and pain that went into its making. I’m probably the last of the truly great masochists.” I had no inkling at that time of the appalling magnitude of the masochism that was yet to visit the world, whose emortal exponents would outshine me as easily as the sun outshines a candle.
“Well,” Emily said, reprovingly, “you know the money’s there whenever you need it. You can always change your mind.”
I probably would have, eventually. As things turned out, though, I found another solution to my straitened circumstances—or had another solution thrust upon me. Putting it that way makes it sound crudely materialistic, but in reality it was anything but that. When I got married for the second time it wasn’t for convenience, or even for companionship, and it certainly wasn’t for money, although setting up another joint household did solve my financial problems. I married for love, carried away on a tide of passion.
I should, of course, have been immune to such disruptions by the age of eighty-five, but I had contrived to skip that stage of my sentimental education by going straight into a group marriage without bothering with the conventional pair-bond experiments. When I should have been getting the capacity for infatuation out of my system I was busy with other things, like the Great Coral Sea Disaster.
It was, of course, seasickness rather than the fact that I had boarded the Genesisas a singleton that had saved my life, but my singleton status had certainly saved me from the sharpest pangs of grief. Had I been part of a couple, I would almost certainly have lost a lover. That had had no consciouseffect on my continued wariness of pair-bonding experiments, but I have to admit, in retrospect, that it might well have had a subconscious effect. At any rate, I had never suffered the legendary tempests of swift passion in adolescence or earliest adulthood and had been safely insulated from them for nearly forty years while I had been a relatively contented Rainmaker-in-Law.
Perhaps I had been storing up trouble all the while I had lived in Lamu, and swift passion had always been within me, waiting patiently for its fuse to be lit so that it might explode at last. If so, the match applied to that fuse by Sharane Fereday was one that caught almost instantly. I was greatly taken with her from the very first time I caught sight of her, although attraction did not blossom into something more elaborate until we had talked for seven hours—by which time it seemed that we had everything in common and that all our emotional well-springs had flowed together into a common sea.
Had I let my poverty restrict me more tightly we would never have met, for it was on one of my most self-indulgent excursions that Sharane and I were thrust together, and as passengers on the bus from Eden to Nod that we were able to converse for seven hours at a stretch.
The early twenty-sixth century had had no shortage of so-called Edens. The tidal waves of the Decimation had obliterated no less than twelve, ten of them Creationist islands. The Eden that I visited on the shore of Lake Van was widely reckoned to be one more folly in the same vein, although its makers had claimed that they were merely remaking the “original” Eden of ancient Hebrew myth on the site where a vanished Elder race had played a godly role in raising the ancestors of the heroes to fully human status.
I was interested in the myth in question—which had survived all the religions that had temporarily appropriated it—because it could be interpreted in a way that linked it to my own theories of the origin of humanity. One way of reading it was to infer that the knowledge which had been allegedly imparted there to the first true humans was the knowledge that they must die.
The other tourists gathered at Lake Van at the time of my visit were interested in the garden that had first been planted there some two hundred years earlier and subsequently embellished by some of the most famous Creationist engineers. Even Oscar Wilde, late in his career, had forsaken his beloved flowers in order to collaborate in the design of the Tree of Knowledge—a much more impressive individual than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that an earlier generation of genetic engineers had supplied.
Given that the evidence the archaeologists had found of early human habitation had not yet produced the slightest indication of the préexistence of godlike Elders, Watchers, or oversize Nephilim, I expected to find myself alone in preferring to interest myself in the digs that were still in progress, but I was not. Sharane Fereday was in the museum dome when I arrived, grubbing about in the slit trench with a magnifying glass the size of a di
“Hello,” she said, smiling. “Have you come to distract me?”
“I’ve come to work,” I told her, hesitating only for a moment before adding: “The risk is that you’ll distract me, whether you intend to or not.”
She hesitated too, but only for an instant, before saying: “Oh, I intend to. I’m bored already—I’ll just have to hope that even though you’re not, you’ll consent to be distracted, at least for a little while.”
Even if I had not found her physically attractive, Sharane and I would still have fallen into conversation, and I would probably have decided before the day was out to join her on the bus to Nod, on the shore of Lake Urmia, following the alleged route of the very first human to be consciously aware that he had committed murder.
I did find her unusually attractive, perhaps because rather than in spite of the fact that she did not resemble any of my foster mothers, but that would not have been enough in itself to excite passion. What excited passion was the fervent interest she took in matters that had not previously interested any of my closest acquaintances.
I soon discovered, of course, that the nature of Sharane’s interest in Eden and its significance was markedly different from mine, but that did not seem to matter at all. Given that I had been married for forty years to a company of ecological engineers, the similarities between my notion of history and hers seemed far more important than the differences. Even the differences seemed exciting and productive—if we had been in perfect harmony, our conversations could not have been deeply engaging or so lively.
TWENTY-FIVE
The long conversation that Sharane and I had on the bus to Nod was not the best of the many we shared, but it remains the most precious in my memory because it was the one most sharply edged and focused by gathering emotion. That seems a little absurd now, given that my response to the gathering in question was to become even more intense and pompous than was my habit, but I would be a poor historian were I to deny or conceal it.
“The awareness of death inevitably gives rise to many corollaries,” I told Sharane, having explained my own interest in the Lake Van sites and my own need to make actual physical contact with the faint traces of the remote past. “One of them—perhaps the most important, from the point of view of the New Humans—was the notion that killing required some kind of justification, in terms of both meaning and morality. Even if the leap to death consciousness didn’t occur until protohumans had spread out of Africa, at least as far as ancient Mesopotamia and what is now Kurdistan—in which case it must have been made more than once, in several different places—one can hardly blame myth makers for insisting on a single point of origin and a psychologically satisfying first cause. Having conflated a whole community of primal humans into the parental couple of Adam and Eve, it made perfect sense to make one of their sons the first murderer and the other the first murder victim.”