"Where do you come from?"
"Millstone." The young man spoke automatically, but then his facial
rigidity dissolved into amazement and some kind of distress. He glanced
at his companion, who giggled uneasily.
"The old man pretends to not know," she said, and smiled, and seemed
to be waiting for the young man's permission to go on speaking. He did
not give it, but she continued: "Sa, the old ones of Millstone are
dead." She thrust her hand out and down, flat, a picture of finality,
adding with nervous haste: "As the Old Man knows. He who told us to
call him Jonas, she who told us to call her Abigail, they are dead.
They are still-without-moving for six days. Then we do the burial as
they told us. As the Old Man knows."
"But I don't know!" said Brian, and sat up on his pallet, too quickly,
startling them. But their motion was backward, readiness for flight,
not for aggression. "Millstone? Where is Millstone?"
* * * * *
Both looked wholly bewildered, then dismayed. They stood up with
splendid animal grace, stepping backward out of the cave, the girl
whispering in the man's ear. Brian caught only two words: "Is angry...."
He jumped up. "Don't go! Please don't go!" He followed them out of the
cave, slowly now, aware that he might well be an object of terror in
the half-dark, aware of his gaunt, graceless age and dirty hacked-off
beard. Almost involuntarily, he adopted something of the flat stilted
quality of their speech: "I will not hurt you. Do not go."
They halted. The girl smiled dubiously.
The man said: "We need old ones. They die. He who told us to call him
Jonas said, many days in the boat, not with the sun-path, he said,
across the sun-path, he said, keeping land on the left hand. We need
old ones to speak the--to speak.... The Old Man is angry?"
"No, I am not angry. I am never angry." Brian's mind groped, certain
of nothing. No one had come for twenty-five years. Only twenty-five?
Millstone?
There was red-gold on the dirty eastern windows of the Hall of Music,
a light becoming softness as it slanted down, touching the long rows
of cases, the warm brown of an antique spinet, the arrogant clean gold
of a 20th century harp, the dull gray of singing stones five thousand
years old and a clay face much older than that.
"Millstone?" Brian pointed southwest in inquiry.
The girl nodded, pleased and not at all surprised that he should know,
watching him now with a squirrel's stiff curiosity. Hadn't there once
been a Millstone River in or near Princeton? He thought he remembered
that it emptied into the Raritan Canal. There was some moderately high
ground around there. Islands now, no doubt, or--well, perhaps they
would tell him.
"There were old people in Millstone," he said, trying for gentle
dignity, "and they died. So now you need old ones to take their place."
The girl nodded vigorously. A glance at the young man was full of
shyness, possessiveness, maybe some amusement. "He who told us to call
him Jonas said no marriage can be without the words of Abraham."
"Abr--" Brian checked himself. If this was religion, it would not do
to speak the name Abraham with a rising inflection, at least not until
he knew what it stood for. "I have been for a long time--" He checked
himself again. A man old, ugly and strange enough to be sacred should
never stoop to explain anything.
* * * * *
They were standing by the seven-stone marimba. His hand dropped, his
thumbnail clicking by accident against the deepest stone and waking a
murmur. The children drew back alarmed.
Brian smiled. "Don't be afraid." He tapped the other stones lightly.
"It is only music. It will not hurt you." He was silent a while, and
they were patient and respectful, waiting for more light. He asked
carefully: "He who told you to call him Jonas, he taught you all the
things you know?"
"All things," the boy said, and the girl nodded quickly, so that the
soft brownness of her hair tumbled about her face, and she pushed it
back in a small human motion as old as the clay image.
"Do you know how old you are?"
They looked blank. Then the girl said: "Oh, summers!" She held up both
hands with spread fingers, then one hand. "Three fives. As the Old Man
knows."
"I am very old," said Brian. "I know many things. But sometimes I wish
to forget, and sometimes I wish to hear what others know, even though I
may know it myself."
They looked uncomprehending and greatly impressed. Brian felt a smile
on his face and wondered why it should be there. They were nice
children. Born ten years after the death of a world. Or twenty perhaps.
_I think I am seventy-six, but did I drop a decade somewhere and never
notice the damn thing?_
"He who told you to call him Jonas, he taught you all that you know
about Abraham?"
At sound of the name, both of them made swift circular motions, first
at the forehead, then at the breast.
"He taught us all things," the young man said. "He, and she who told
us to call her Abigail. The hours to rise, to pray, to wash, to eat.
The laws for hunting, and I know the Abraham-words for that: Sol-Amra,
I take this for my need."
Brian felt lost again, dismally lost, and looked down to the grave clay
faces of the image for counsel, and found none. "They who told you to
call them Jonas and Abigail, they were the only old ones who lived with
you?"
Again that look of bewilderment. "The only ones, sa," the young man
said. "As the Old Man knows."
_I could never persuade them that, being old, I know very nearly
nothing._
* * * * *
Brian straightened to his full gaunt height. The young people were not
tall; though stiff and worn with age, Brian knew he was still a bonily
overpowering creature. Once, among men, he had mildly enjoyed being
more than life-size.
As a shield for the lonely, frightened thing that was his mind, he put
on a phony sternness: "I wish to examine you about Millstone and your
knowledge of Abraham. How many others are living at Millstone?"
"Two fives, sa," said the boy promptly, "and I who may be called
Jonason and this one we may call Paula. Two fives and two. We are the
biggest, we two. The others are only children, but he we call Jimi
has killed his deer. He sees after them now while we go across the
sun-path."
Under Brian's questioning, more of the story came, haltingly, obscured
by the young man's conviction that the Old Man already knew everything.
Some time, probably in the middle 2080s, Jonas and Abigail (whoever
they were) had come on a group of twelve wild children who were keeping
alive somehow in a ruined town where their elders had all died. Jonas
and Abigail had brought them all to an island they called Millstone.
Jonas and Abigail had come originally from "up across the
sun-path"--the boy seemed to mean north--and they had been very old,
which might mean anything between thirty and ninety. In teaching the
children primitive means of survival, Jonas and Abigail had brought
off a brilliant success: Jonason and Paula were well fed, shining with
health and cleanliness and the strength of wildness, and their speech
had not been learned from the ignorant. Its pronunciation faintly
suggested New England, so far as Brian could detect any local accent at
all.
"Did they teach you reading and writing?" he asked, and made writing
motions on the flat of his palm, which the two watched in vague alarm.