He sat and made his mind go hard and tried to analyze what it was he
sought and there was no name for it. Except happiness. And happiness
was a state of being, not a thing to regain and grasp.
* * * * *
But he could remember how it felt. With his eyes open in the present,
he could remember the brightness of the day of the past, the
clean-washed goodness of it, the wonder of the colors that were more
brilliant than he ever since had seen--as if it were the first second
after Creation and the world was still shiningly new.
It was that new, of course. It would be that new to a child.
But that didn't explain it all.
It didn't explain the bottomless capacity for seeing and knowing and
believing in the beauty and the goodness of a clean new world. It
didn't explain the almost non-human elation of knowing that there were
colors to see and scents to smell and soft green grass to touch.
I'm insane, Andrew Young said to himself. Insane, or going insane.
But if insanity will take me back to an understanding of the strange
perception I had when I was a child, and lost, I'll take insanity.
He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes go shut and his mind drift
back.
He was crouching in a corner of a garden and the leaves were drifting
down from the walnut trees like a rain of saffron gold. He lifted one
of the leaves and it slipped from his fingers, for his hands were
chubby still and not too sure in grasping. But he tried again and he
clutched it by the stem in one stubby fist and he saw that it was not
just a blob of yellowness, but delicate, with many little veins. When
he held it so that the Sun struck it, he imagined that he could almost
see through it, the gold was spun so fine.
He crouched with the leaf clutched tightly in his hand and for a
moment there was a silence that held him motionless. Then he heard the
frost-loosened leaves pattering all around him, pattering as they fell,
talking in little whispers as they sailed down through the air and
found themselves a bed with their golden fellows.
In that moment he knew that he was one with the leaves and the
whispers that they made, one with the gold and the autumn sunshine and
the far blue mist upon the hill above the apple orchard.
A foot crunched stone behind him and his eyes came open and the golden
leaves were gone.
"I am sorry if I disturbed you, Ancestor," said the man. "I had an
appointment for this hour, but I would not have disturbed you if I had
known."
Young stared at him reproachfully without answering.
"I am kin," the man told him.
"I wouldn't doubt it," said Andrew Young. "The Galaxy is cluttered up
with descendants of mine."
The man was very humble. "Of course, you must resent us sometimes. But
we are proud of you, sir. I might almost say that we revere you. No
other family--"
"I know," interrupted Andrew Young. "No other family has any fossil
quite so old as I am."
"Nor as wise," said the man.
Andrew Young snorted. "Cut out that nonsense. Let's hear what you have
to say and get it over with."
* * * * *
The technician was harassed and worried and very frankly puzzled. But
he stayed respectful, for one always was respectful to an ancestor,
whoever he might be. Today there were mighty few left who had been born
into a mortal world.
Not that Andrew Young looked old. He looked like all adults, a fine
figure of a person in the early twenties.