The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [19]
It helped, too, that I arrived in a world where all names were chosen, some more carefully than others. Those chosen names imprinted their back-stories on the pattern of events with a force and irony that could only be appreciated by someone as fascinated by names as I was — or so I believe. That is why I am telling you this story. The people who have asked me to do it have asked for a history, but it is not that. It has always seemed to me that stories which pass themselves off as histories ought to be conscientiously “hi” — lofty, distant, and imperious — while my character and profile have always been obstinately “lo,” working from beneath rather than above, craftily rather than authoritatively.
I am, therefore, happy to leave the history of our adventure to the expert pen of my good friend Mortimer Gray; my own account is nothing but a lostory, more comedy than drama, more cautionary tale than epic. Others will doubtless offer their own accounts of the events of the Last of the Final Wars, many of whom were fortunate enough — or unfortunate enough — to be far closer to the action than I was, but I dare to hope that my poor lostory might cut more deeply than its rivals to the bone and marrow of the tale.
When I underwent the adventure described herein I was not the man I am now. I was a fearful stranger in a world that I had not even begun to understand — but no matter how crippling that disadvantage might be to a historian it is no disadvantage at all to a storyteller of the lower kind. Every tale requires a teller, no matter how impersonal he may pretend to be, and there are tales for which the fearful stranger obsessed by his own petty plight is the ideal narrator.
I have the aid of hindsight now, but I shall try to reserve its additional insights for the occasional sidebar and tell the story itself as it actually unfolded around me and in my mind — or as it seemed to unfold, given that I was never able to find the experience entirely convincing while I was in the thick of it.
How did Tam Lin feel, do you think, when he first met Janet of Carterhaugh? He had a reputation as a ghost, and she must have taken him for one at first, but how did he see himself and the world he had forsaken? Must they not have seemed like fragments of a dream, after so long a sojourn in Faerie?
How did Tam Lin recover his sense of the reality of Janet’s world, and his sense of his own reality within it? The ballad does not say, because that is not the function of ballads, whose ambitions are essentially low, compared to the lofty pretentions of history. Ballads engage and provoke the imagination; they do not satisfy it. This is a different kind of lostory, and I must try harder to answer such questions — or at least to point out their relevance — but there will always be something of the balladeer in me, because my name requires it.
This is the way that I imagine it.
When Tam Lin saw Janet, and had his attention caught, as if by a fisherman’s hook, she must have seemed to him a glorious mystery, whose solution lay deep within himself. Tam Lin would surely have gone in search of that solution, delving into the depths of his transformed being in search of memories of the world which had such creatures in it. He could not have found them immediately, for the Queen of the Fays had confounded his memory. She had not been willing to wipe it out, because that would have obliterated him — her captive, her prize, her toy — but she had blurred it and hidden a few significant details. Perhaps he struggled to fill in the gap with confabulation, telling himself a tale about how it might have been that he had stumbled out of the world and into Faerie. He probably did — not because he was a natural