“He’s a nineteenth-century man, insofar as he’s a historian at all. Not one of us.” By us he meant specialists in the twenty-second century: the most eventful era in human history, when history itself had trembled on the brink of extinction; the era of the great plague, the Crash, the New Reproductive System, and the nanotech revolution.

“He designs beautiful flowers,” Julia said. “He’s an artist. There are very few true artists in the world.” “But he’s not original,” Stuart said. “It’s all recapitulation and recomplication.” “All human life is recapitulation and recomplication,” she said, with the casual confidence of unfalsified youth.

“No, it’s not,” he assured her. “There are genuine ends and authentic beginnings. Conrad Helier was a true artist. He put an end to the old world and forged a new one. He designed the womb which ultimately gave birth to the New Human Race. He, not Eveline Hywood, was the original designer of the fundamental fabric of the alternative ecosphere—the stuff she tried to pass off as alien life after his death. You can’t compare a mere flower designer to a man like that.” “According to the best evidence available,” Julia said gently, “Conrad Helier only designed one of the chiasmatic transformers, and his was only the first artificial womb to be mass-produced—at best, a tiny recomplication of designs that were being produced in some profusion. The time had come to put an end to so-called natural childbirth, and it would have ended anyhow. When historians put the bloody knife in Helier’s hand, it’s as much a matter of scapegoating as anything else. He’s the heroic villain appointed to the role, but he was just an instrument of causal process. As for Hywood’s fake alien life, it was her foster son who actually worked out most of the key applications: LSP, SAP systems, shamirs, and so on. In any case, you can’t call that kind of utilitarian endeavor Art. Art is essentially superfluous, and that’s why it’s so necessary to human existence.” “Nothing is historically superfluous,” Stuart told her sternly. “Nothing is outside the causal process by which the world is made and remade. Art is merely an expression of that process, no matter what individual artists may think.” It was a serious argument, but not in the sense that their disagreement might come between them as a hurdle or a moat. He and Julia had an understanding which allowed them to debate points of intellectual nicety without being divided.

That, in Stuart’s view, was what friendship amounted to—and in spite of the difference in their ages, he and Julia were the firmest of friends. The rapport between them went far beyond their common interest in the study of history.

“Even the art of murder?” Julia asked lightly.

“If murder were not an expression of historical causality,” Stuart insisted, “it would have to be considered devoid of artistry, even by the most daring interpreter.” Stuart had always considered himself a daring interpreter. His ambition had always been to understand the whole of human history and the whole of the human world: to hold it entirely in his mind’s eye, as if it were a vast panorama in which every element stood in its proper relation to every other element, a huge seamless whole whose horizons held the promise of infinity. In a way, he had to reckon himself a failure, because he knew well enough that there was a great deal which he did not understand, and never would understand, but he could forgive himself that inadequacy—which was, of course, an inadequacy which he shared with all other living men—because he had at least made the effort. He had never allowed himself to be intellectually confined in the way that men like Urashima and Teidemann had. “You must understand that you too will fail to grasp the whole,” he had told Julia when she had first come to him as his pupil.

“Everyone fails, but there is no shame in failure, provided that you have set your sights widely enough. The human condition has its limitations, and always will have. Even if the genetic engineers are right in claiming that they have at last brought the human race to the very threshold of emortality, and even if the prophets of man/machine symbiosis are right in saying that the fallibility of human memory can be compensated by appropriate augmentation of the brain, there will still be limitations of understanding. A man may live forever, and remember everything, and still understand hardly anything. It is as easy—perhaps easier—to breed a race of immortal fools as a race of mental giants. The majority of men have always made fools of themselves, and the vidveg will undoubtedly continue to do so, however long they live and whatever ingenious devices may one day be connected by artificial synapses to the substance of their souls.” Julia had listened to such speeches very dutifully, in the beginning, and that had pleased him immensely—but their friendship was not based in anything as shallow as adulation. He was not in love with her; erotic orthodoxy had long ago begun to bore him, and he had never felt the least impulse to reinvest in it when the many and various unorthodoxies with which he had briefly experimented had similarly begun to pall. In fact, since becoming young for the third time Stuart had experienced a dramatic loss of libido which he had not the slightest interest in repairing. He felt—he understood— that there might be advantages in being old, to one who was as cerebrally inclined as he. Nor was he particularly flattered by Julia’s attentiveness; he had been an educator for so very many years that he drank up the respect of pupils by sheer force of habit, not tasting it at all. If she had been more to him than a mere sounding board, which reflected his thoughts in a pleasing manner, he could not have felt as close to her as he did. He valued her disagreement as much as her agreement now; he loved to exchange ideas with her. He needed someone like her, who would not merely listen to his ideas but challenge them, playing white to his black in an endless game of intellectual chess.

Ideas were healthier when they were challenged; kept inside, in the dark and secret theater of the mind, protected from exposure, they did not nourish half so well. If ideas were to grow—and thus give birth to understanding—they must be let out, and tested.

“Will you stay for dinner?” he asked his companion. “We can eat on the veranda, if you wish. It’s going to be a beautiful evening.” “Of course,” she said. “But I don’t know how long I can stay afterward. There’s something I have to do—I have to go to one of the other islands.” “Which one?” he asked reflexively.

“One of the new ones. I have to visit a Creationist.” “Why? I didn’t think they encouraged visitors.” When it became clear that she did not intend to answer the question, he carried on. “You’ll have to be careful—you must have heard the rumors about dinosaurs and giant spiders, and the jokes about the Island of Dr. Moreau. How long will you be away?” “I don’t know,” she said. “It depends.” It occurred to Stuart that Walter Czastka was a Creationist, and that Walter Czastka had been at the University of Wollongong in 2322—and that he had once walked on a beach with him, much as he was walking with Julia now, discussing some project that Walter had dreamed up. Walter had wanted his help… but Stuart could no longer remember exactly what it was that Walter had wanted from him, or whether or not he had obliged.

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Julia whether it was Walter Czastka that she intended to visit, and what she could possibly want with a man like him, but he suppressed the impulse. It would probably seem like prying motivated by jealousy.

“I’m glad that I retired here,” he said, glancing briefly upward in the direction of the blazing sun, then more languorously downward at the glints that its light imparted to the crests of the lazy waves. “The heat suits me, now that I’m growing old for the final time, and I can’t see the twenty-sixth century creeping up on me. There was never any but the most rudimentary agriculture here, you know, not even in the Colonial Era. The volcanoes are tame now, of course, and the bigger islands in the group were badly affected by the population movements following the plague wars, but Kauai’s seen less change than almost any other place on the earth’s surface since the beginning of the twenty-second century.” “But it’s not the same, even so,” Julia pointed out. “Every time you step, indoors, it must be obvious that you’re living in the present—and you’re entirely a product of the present. There were no men of your antiquity in the twenty-second century.” “Granted,” he said. “But still, I’d far rather live beside the blue sea than the green, and I could never be content in a valley between SAP black hills. I can still remember the days before the green seas and black hills, you know; I think my memory has held up better than most, in spite of the unease of illusory deja vu. Sometimes I’m half-convinced that I’ve known you before, in the long-gone days of my first youth… but I understand how these tricks of the mind work. In these days of cosmetic engineering, when everyone is beautiful, it’s easy to recognize in the woman one sees today some or all of the women one knew many years before, who are simply phantoms imprinted on the vanishing horizon of remembrance…” He trailed off because they had reached the threshold of his home: a place at which he always hesitated.