Some theorists emphasized technology as a means of making humans powerful, equipping them to hunt and fight; others emphasized its role in making them sociable, facilitating the development of language, and hence of abstract thought. Some saw the domestication of fire—the first great technological revolution—as the origin of metallurgy, others as the origin of the culinary art. None of them were wrong, but none of their accounts were complete. None of them had ever stood back far enough to see the whole picture or identified with their subjects with sufficient intimacy to grasp the aleph that bound the complex picture into a unity.

My contention was that the prehistory of humankind could best be understood with reference to the most elementary aspect of existential awareness: the consciousness of death. Protohumans began to be human not when they became aware of their own mortality but when they did not immediately retreat into denial. Protohumans began to be humans when they decided to use whatever means they had to keep that awareness and thrive in spite of it: to fight death instead of refusing to see it. Of course the domestication of fire was the beginning of cooking and of metallurgy, but its first and foremost purpose was to illuminate: to rage against the dying of the light. Even warmth was secondary to that. Fire was enlightenment, literally and symbolically, and the fundamental purpose of that light was to allow the first humans to see and face the fact of death and to take arms against it.

Humankind’s second great technological leap—the birth of agriculture—had previously been interpreted by many archaeologists as thekey event in human prehistory. Human beings had lived for nearly a million years as hunter-gatherers before beginning to settle down, but once they were finally and firmly settled down, after tens of thousands of years of apparent prevarication, their condition had begun to change with remarkable rapidity. If the Crash could be regarded as its first terminus the process of civilization had been completed in a mere ten or fifteen thousand years.

Most commentators had seen agriculture as a triumphant discovery, but I took a greater interest in the minority who had seen it as a desperate move unhappily forced upon hunter-gatherers whose more subtle management of their environment had been far too successful, generating a population explosion. This minority argued that farming, and the backbreaking labor that went with it, had been a reluctant adaptation to evil circumstance, whose tragic dimension was clearly reflected in multitudinous myths of an Edenic or Arcadian Golden Age.

I had more sympathy with this minority than their traditional adversaries ever had, but I refused to take it for granted that it was solelythe need to secure food supplies that had caused and controlled the development of settlements. I argued that although the sophistication of food production undoubtedly met a need, it ought not be reckoned the main motivating force for settlement.

I proposed that it was the practice of burying the dead with ceremony and the ritualization of mourning that had first given humans a motive to settle, and that the planting of crops and domestication of animals had been forced upon them as much by that desire as by the environmental pressures of “protofarming.” This was, inevitably, a highly contentious claim—but such discussion as it engendered was initially confined to the ranks of vocational historians.

The original version of the The Prehistory of Deathattracted little immediate attention outside the ranks of dedicated academicians. The traffic through its aleph was by no means heavy during the first few years of its presence in the Labyrinth—but I was not unduly disappointed by that. It was, after all, merely an introduction. I had several more layers to build before my admittedly speculative “whole picture” of the origins of humanity was transformed into what I hoped would be an utterly compelling “whole picture” of the entire human project.

TWENTY-THREE

For ten years after the disintegration of my first marriage I lived alone. I did not think it would be difficult, and in 2995 I had rather looked forward to life in a cozy private realm undisrupted by continual arguments, where I could make final preparations for the launch of The Prehistory of Deathin peace. I had not realized that the disruption of long-standing routine would be as deeply unsettling as it was. Nor had I realized that solitude requires long practice before it becomes comfortable. Nor had I been fully conscious of the extent to which I had been economically dependent on the Lamu collective.

None of my seven partners had made large amounts of money from their employment. Labors devoted to the General Good are not conspicuously well rewarded—but there is all the difference in the world between a household supported by seven steady incomes and a household devoid of any. Such extra-allowance income as I had generated during the marriage had been trivial and sporadic, and all of it had been secondhand, in the sense that it was work subcontracted to me by my marriage partners. That vanished along with their direct support.

I did manage to pick up a little paid work in the ten years leading up to the launch of the Prehistory, most of it derived from work on the teaching programs used by my alma mater. A percentage of the unused credit accumulated by Papa Domenico and Papa Laurent had been transferred to my account shortly before the marriage, but the greater part of it had been reabsorbed into the Social Fund, and almost nothing remained by 2595. For the next ten years I was, in effect, totally dependent on the Allocation I received merely by virtue of being alive.

I could have obtained better-paid work easily enough—the LDA still had plenty to go around, given that the Coral Sea Disaster had set its best laid plans back by more than a century—but I did not want to take time away from my true vocation, at least until the Prehistorywas launched. Once the first part of my project had been launched into the Labyrinth, I thought, its use would generate an income—which would facilitate work on the second part, whose publication would generate more income, and so on. I was hopeful that the process would build up sufficient economic momentum to be self-sustaining, if only I could get the snowball rolling.

It sounded easy enough when I formulated the plan, and it should have been easier than it was. I obtained an elementary apartment in a capstack in Alexandria, and if I had only managed to play the monkish scholar all the way down the line, focusing my attention entirelyon the introductory section of my work, I would have had ample credit to draw everything I needed out of the Labyrinth and to eat as lavishly as I desired. Unfortunately, I had grown used to interleaving my Lab-work with more relaxed and more expensive real-space researches laying the groundwork for the second section, and I found it very difficult to break that habit—especially now that I was more conveniently based for excursions to Greece, Kurdistan, Israel, and New Mesopotamia.

Things became difficult even before the release of The Prehistory of Death;afterward, they became far worse. The income it generated was not nearly enough to clear the debts I had accumulated in anticipation, and as interest was piled on interest my situation began to deteriorate.

In addition to the other temptations to which I had fallen prey, I had felt compelled to reconstruct and repair the network of virtual relationships that I had allowed to slip away while I was living in close physical proximity with my partners. Some of the people with whom I restored regular contact would have been willing and able to offer me charity, but I was extremely reluctant to take it. It would have seemed that I had only repaired my relationships with them in order to obtain a financial advantage. In any case, I had my pride—and all charity carries a price.