_But I knew him_, Brian thought, stunned. _I met him once. Nuber?
Newburg, the temporary capital of the Soviet of--oh, the hell with
that. Met him in 2071--he was 102 years old then, could still walk,
speak clearly, even remember an unimportant concert of mine from years
before. I could have picked him up in one hand, but nobody was ever
more alive. The wheel?_
"And when did he die, boy?" Brian asked.
Jonason moved fingers helplessly, embarrassed. "Long, long ago." He
glanced up hopefully. "A thousand years? I think he who told us to call
him Jonas did not ever teach us that."
"I see. Never mind." _Oh, my good Doctor--after all! Artist, statesman,
student of ethics, philosopher--you said that if men knew themselves,
they would have the beginning of wisdom. Your best teacher was
Socrates. Well you knew it, and now look what's happened!_
Jonas and Abigail--some visionary pair, Brian supposed, maybe cracking
up under the ghastliness of those years. Admirers of Brown, perhaps.
Shocked, probably, away from the religions of the 21st century, which
had all failed to stop the horrors, nevertheless they needed one,
or were convinced that the children did--so they created one. There
must later have been some dizzying pride of creation in it, possibly
wholehearted belief in themselves, too, as they found the children
accepting it, building a ritual life around it.
It was impossible, Brian thought, that Jonas and Abigail could have
met the living Abraham Brown. As anyone must who faces the limitations
of human intelligence, Brown had accepted mysteries, but he did not
make them. He was wholly without intellectual arrogance. No one could
have talked with him five minutes without hearing him say tranquilly:
"I don't know."
The wheel at Nuber?
The _wheel_?
* * * * *
Brian realized he could never learn how Brown had actually died. Even
if he had the strength and courage to go back north--no, at seventy-six
(eighty-six?), one can hardly make a fresh start in the study of
history. Not without the patience of Abraham Brown himself, who had
probably been doing just that when the wheel--
An awed question from the girl pulled Brian from a black pit of
abstraction: "What is that?" She was pointing to the clay image in its
dusty sunlight.
Brian spoke vaguely, almost deaf to his own words until they were past
recovering: "That? It is very old. Very old and very sacred." She
nodded, round-eyed, and stepped back a pace or two. "And that--that was
all they taught you of Abraham Brown?"