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By Root 1503 0

no further need of their all being together the whole system flew apart, but it seemed to them to be a sad moment, and that I was so delighted to be going must have hurt them all. It was left to me to decide exactly when I would depart for a different community, thus setting the date on which my loving co-parents scattered to the ends of the earth and beyond, and I seized the opportunity without having any idea of the value of that which I was casually shattering. They remained my parents, ever willing to serve as home providers, friends, mentors, and supporters, but after I took my leave, they were no longer marriage partners. After I left I never saw more than three of them together, but it wasn’t until most of them were dead that I began to feel the force of that loss.

Once it was determined that I would go to Adelaide, in Australia, to attend university it was soon settled that Papa Dom would go to Antarctica, Papa Laurent to France, Mama Eulalie to the Peruvian Andes, Papa Nahum to Alaska, Mama Meta and Mama Siorane to the moon, Mama Sajda to Central Africa, and Papa Ezra to New Zealand, but we continued to keep in touch. Papa Dom was, after all, absolutely right: in the Virtual World, everywhere within lunar orbit is close at hand, and even Jupiter and Saturn aren’t so very far away when they’re on the same side of the sun as Earth.

Seven

Although my memories of the period are understandably hazy I feel sure that I had begun to see the fascination of history long before the crucial event that determined my path in life. I’m sure that I took the kernel of that fascination with me from the valley, and I’m fairly sure that I had it even before I climbed the mountain to Shangri-La for the first time. I must have, or the meeting in the mountain could not have had such a powerful effect.

I have, of course, reproduced the details of my first conversation with Julius Ngomi and Sara Saul with the aid of records made at the time, but I do remember, even to this day, the impression left on me by Ngomi’s careful heresies. There was already something within me that responded to the mantra, “All history is fantasy,” and to the idea of a mountain whose bowels were constipated with the archival detritus of past ages.

In the context of my university studies history seemed—in stark contrast to the disciplined coherency of mathematics or the sciences—to be magnificent in its hugeness, amazingly abundant in its data, and charmingly disorganized. I thought of myself as a very orderly and organized person and looked to the study of history to loosen me up a little—but I looked forward even then to the day when I might be able to impose a little of my own orderliness and organization upon the hectic muddle of the past. I was determined from the very beginning that my vocation was to enhance understanding by negotiating between different accounts of how and why and by calming the waters of dissent. If, as Julius Ngomi had suggested, truth was what I could get away with, I wanted to get away with something virtuous as well as grandiose—but I arrived at Adelaide without having the least idea of exactly what that might be.

The last thing Julius Ngomi said to me before I left the valley—the last thing he was to say to me for more than three hundred years, as things turned out—was, “History is okay for amateurs, kid, but it’s no work for real people. Historians have only interpreted the world and its révolutons —the point is to change it, carefully, constructively, and without any more revolutions.”

I didn’t realize at the time that he was quoting or that the quote was deeply ironic. Nor did I realize that his parting shot and Mama Siorane’s reflected fundamentally dissonant views about the way the future would and ought to be shaped.

“Forget what Papa Dom says about the Universe Without Limits,” she said. “He thinks that the imagination has no boundaries, but it keeps running into the most important boundary of all: the boundary of action. History is a good subject to study because it’s all about the waves of hopeful imagination