“But the story clearly symbolizes the ancient conflict between nomadic herdsmen and settled agriculturalists,” Sharane objected, assertively but not aggressively. Her eyes seemed to sparkle like gemstones when she was assertive—I was to discover soon enough that they seemed to flash like lightning when she was aggressive.

“Possibly,” I admitted, “but I suspect that the conflict in question had more to do with different ways of revering the dead than any material conflict of interest. Anyway, the awareness that the act of killing requires special justification must precede the attachment of a particular justification. The idea of a fundamental social conflict between the settied tied and the unsettled must have been powerful because it was the first root cause of war, which was subsequently to be the principal occupation of that time which organized communities did not need to devote to mere survival.”

“That’s a cynical way of looking at it,” she objected, lifting her slender chin and lowering her dark eyebrows in the slightest possible gesture of censure.

“It’s not cynical, it’s realistic,” I riposted. “Anyway, the particular meaning attached to killing by the Eden myth was selected from an already available set that also included legal execution, human sacrifice, and self-defense—as can easily be seen if the linear sequence of Hebrew myths is tracked a little further. All the other meanings and justifications are there, leading inexorably to the establishment of the crucial commandment: Thou shalt do no murder”

“Isn’t it Thou shalt not kill?”

“No. That’s a much later and rather sloppy translation. The whole point of the commandment is to forbid illegitimatekilling.”

“I suppose you’ve even got a better explanation for the serpent,” she said, without undue sarcasm. She meant, of course, a better explanation than the one poor Grizel had carelessly trotted out in her reference to phallocentric fools rather than the Christian reinterpretation, which had imported an evil anti-God into the older myth.

“Another immediate corollary of death awareness,” I pointed out, “is the notion oí poison.Snakebite must have been the first example to spring to mind, closely associated with bad food. That the serpent proffers fruit is probably an homage to warning coloration. Sometimes, with all due respect to the complexities of symbolism and metaphor, a serpent is just a snake, and a bad apple is just something that tastes nasty and does you no good.”

“That’s quite brilliant,” she said, with a smile like life itself. “Mortimer Gray, you’re by far the most interesting person I’ve met in ages.”

“The feeling’s mutual, Sharane Fereday,” I assured her. “My friends call me Mort, or Morty.”

She smiled broadly at that too, perhaps having seen the meaning accidentally contained within the short form of my name.

“So shall I,” she informed me.

Sharane’s love for the ancient past was even more intense than mine, but it was very different in kind. She was forty years older than I and had already passed through half a dozen pair-bond marriages. She was a moderately successful writer, but her writings were far less dispassionate than those of a true historian—even a narrative historian who took it for granted that all history is fantasy.

Sharane’s writings tended to the lyrical rather than the factual, even when she was not writing manifest fiction. Her most popular works were scripts for “dramatic reconstructions,” most of which were performed in VE by widely scattered casts of thousands. Some of them were actually acted out in real space with the aid of artful costumes, clever machines, and deft psychotropic biotech. She was the veteran of a hundred battles and a thousand rituals.

On the bus to Nod, Sharane told me that she could never be content merely to knowabout the past; she wanted to re-create it. Even the designing of VE adventures wasn’t enough for her, although she had started out that way. She had always wanted to make her creations more solid, so that they had to be actively improvised rather than passively experienced. She was eagerly and flamboyantly old-fashioned in almost everything that she did. She was dressed in an ordinary suitskin when I first encountered her in Eden, but that was because she was traveling. When I first saw her at home, the passion that I had already conceived and nurtured was further inflamed.

In the privacy of her own home Sharane loved to dress in gaudy pastiches of costumes represented in ancient art. She had a particular fondness for Greek and Egyptian designs, and she programed her wallscreens to produce decor to match her moods. She was widely considered to be a garish eccentric, and I suppose I surrendered far too rapidly to that consensus when we eventually split up, but in the beginning I saw her very differently, as a defiant individualist and a true artist.

When I introduced her to my four surviving parents—whose number had only just been diminished by the loss of Mama Meta, sixteen years after the death of Papa Nahum—their recently reinforced disapproval of my lifestyle was quickly redoubled. They were instantly affrighted by her taste in telephone-VEs, and the more they learned about her the more their worst suspicions were confirmed.

“Morty,” Mama Siorane told me, in one of her rare transmissions from the vicinity of Saturn, “that woman is quite mad. I have long thought that your fascination with the past had slowed down your own intellectual development, but that woman is so retarded as to be infantile.”

When I passed these comments on to my beloved, suitably edited for diplomacy, she merely smiled, saying: “What can you expect from someone who can’t even spell her own name?”

I had expected Mama Eulalie to be the only one who might approve, but even she was distinctly puzzled. “She’s hardly your type, Morty,” she said. “Not that I’m accusing you of being boring, of course, but you have always kept company with seriouspeople. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“I’m ready,” I assured her.

The only person who wished me well wholeheartedly was Emily Marchant, although the good wishes of my previous spouses were undoubtedly sincere and only fell short of wholeheartedness by that margin which inevitably moderates the enthusiasm of an ex-partner contemplating a replacement relationship.

TWENTY-SIX

I moved into Sharane’s hometree on the island of Crete in September 2619 and we married in March 2621. Even though we had been living together very happily for some months, many of our mutual friends were mildly astonished that we actually formalized the arrangement. The difference in our personalities seemed glaring to others but was quite irrelevant to us.

Solitude, poverty, and intensity of purpose had begun to weigh rather heavily upon me before we met, and my carefully cultivated calm of mind had threatened to become a kind of toiling inertia. Sharane brought a welcome breath of air into an existence that had threatened to become rather stuffy. I always knew, I suppose, that from her point of view I was merely one more amusing distraction in a long sequence, but for her the very essence of life was play. She was not in the least disposed to hide that fact or to be ashamed of it.

“Work is only the means to an end,” she told me. “Play isthe end. Life is a game, because there isn’t anything else it can be—certainly not a job or a mission or even a vocation. Without rules, life has no structure, but if the rules become laws, life loses its freedom and becomes a sentence; they have to be rules of play.People like that mother of yours who can’t spell her name think play is silly, but that’s because they’ve made their own rules too rigid and unforgiving. Play is very serious, especially the kind of play that involves dressing up and pretending. The ancients understood that—that’s why they had exotic costumes and special scripts for use in their most solemn religious ceremonies and sternest legal rituals. The past is an intellectual playground, just like the Labyrinth, and you and I are just happy children delighting in its use and transformation.”