So, dear reader from necrotech,

                               we have almost reached the end of the story: the story of humanity. You have arrived at the completion time where my life is, and there is little more to tell. At the beginning of my story for you, I promised I would tell you why the people of my time are taking journeys into our past, which is your future.

   My story for you has been my thesis for the Completion Archive. When I have finished it, I shall return to my village. We do not know if anyone will read these books. Perhaps no one will, but in case the last cycle of the ages has not yet come, we are leaving a record of our understanding for those who follow. We set these records down in writing, not to be preserved in physical form, but to go to the patterns as writing to be picked up as such, and set down again. I have chosen to write my book for the troubled time at the end of necrotech.

   I have not put anything about myself in until now, because I felt that it would confuse you, my reader, who had so far to come and so much to take in. So I shall say just a little now.

   I am now doing the final copying out from the records I made of my shifts. At dawn this morning I climbed barefoot all the way up the hill above our village, up the natural stairway of stones beside the stream to the tree I call the fire tree. It is past harvest season now and the tree is laden with glowing berries. Its scarlet and orange leaves within leaves make tongues of flame against the sky. Opposite the fire tree, is a great flat rock, overhung by another, and thatched from above with a thick grass mat. It is cosy and sheltered here. I am sitting with my legs crossed, tucking my cold feet under my thick knitted gown.

   I made this gown while awaiting my baby. Others from my village went on the journey to where the fibre plants grow, which was too tiring for me with my great belly. They gathered the stems, and soaked them to remove the threads. With juice from crushed berries, I dyed some of the rolls of fibre a soft blue. I spun the thread myself using a distaff and spindle. Then I knitted the garment slowly. We prefer to work slowly, and interweave our working rhythms with our wanderings in the paths of time. The patterns in the wood of the tree from which the needles were made added their immortal nature to each stitch, and the patterns of the lifetimes of my baby were reflected in the fabric.

   My baby came late in my bleeding years. Other girls conceived when they were twelve, thirteen, or fourteen summers. I was sixteen, and thought myself infertile, like so many others in this twilight of our kind. For two years I suckled him. Then he went for his raising to those who had done their completion task. Now my work is nearly finished, and it was decided that this should be the last. We are expecting the call for the last journey to reach us very soon.

   I am writing in the book which I made. The paper itself I made from fibre plant pulp, pressed and dried. I stitched the bundles of sheets together, over tapes, and glued the bundles to webbing with boiled animal glue. I made thick card and treated some skins and formed these into a cover. I glued the first and last pages and the tapes to the inside of the cover, and the book was done. The squareness of the book frightens me, and my name, whose letters I pressed onto its spine. They are firesoul patterns.

   We had a naming before the book making. Before the naming I had no name: it is not our way. My name is Pool. They gave me this name for my blue eyes and calm round face and wavy hair. I like the name but I shall forget it when the task is done. Not long now; the birth of my book is near, the last stage of labour almost over.

   Before the book-making were the shifts: journeys through the patterns of the present past, which we remembered and recorded. Then we had to select the ones which made up a journey a reader could follow, and reach coherent understanding of the patterns of humankind. Then if there is another cycle, we hope it will be less painful than the one before.

   Before the shift we learnt the language of words, so that we could understand the thinking of the subject of the shift. When we knew the language of words we explored the Completion Library, smoothing threads of puzzlement by picking through the thesis books of past completion tasks, until we felt ready.

   The completion age has been the age of reconciliation and letting go. The watersoul at last gave up their fear of firesoul. The firesoul learned to recognise what the watersoul had achieved, and gave up their futile ambitions and pride.

   My people are the last embers of the firesoul, although we are scarcely firesoul at all, having absorbed much of watersoul nature. As you know, we have eversight. We also live almost in the watersoul way in that we do not use fire or disturb the ground. But we have the firesoul conception of time, and so we expect there to be an end to any journey or story. We see the completion as the end, and hence as the death and extinction of humankind. We fear annihilation and oblivion in the time following that final death.

   We have the firesoul need to understand before we can let go the lofty human aspirations which were never realised. There will be no brave journeys through outer space to the stars. There will be no colonisation of galaxies. We shall never know if there are firesoul people on other planets, but we hope that if there are, they draw on the lessons we have learnt, rather than carrying our pain and suffering into the future.

   The process we have engaged in during the completion age – and a long age it has been, of many generations – has taught us what the completion is not. The completion is not the working out to reach understanding. It is not the death, the end or the letting go. What the completion is can be stated very simply: it is the stage in the life cycle of a pattern when all its potential has been experienced. At that stage, time has no meaning because there is no further change. The completion of the human pattern would be humanity’s complete fulfilment.

   The irony is that human fulfilment has already been attained: by the watersoul in the pattern age. What more could there be to achieve than a life of communal pleasure, harmony and security in the immortal past? The watersoul enjoyed complete happiness: the satisfaction of gardening and craft work and indulgence in indiscriminate sensual delight. They were wise, passionate, brutal yet wholly innocent. The population of watersoul individuals grew to be greater than that of necrotech at its most populous, since their gardens were highly productive and caused no destruction. Wilderness beyond human influence flourished and evolved undisturbed. New life forms spread into the forests bordering the watersoul gardens, introducing fresh variation for the designs. The pattern age rolled on as if interminably, while the watersoul continued to intermingle with nature in their gardens and nearby forests. At times and places, natural events destroyed some villages or moved them on. Ice Ages, in particular, drove a slow human tide away from or towards the poles, onto and off coastal land. Still the watersoul thrived.

   There were occasional New Beginnings of firesoul during the pattern age. Cities were built, large areas of wild forest were destroyed. Once their resources were exhausted, the cities failed, and the forests recovered again from the perpetual patterns. As the cycle repeated, the firesoul grew sometimes nearer and sometimes further away from the realisation that to take any more from nature than food, clothing, a few utensils and shelter for sleeping destroys the wild forest and makes shortages and conflict, and begins a vicious spiral of destruction and suffering: the cultural pattern of firesoul. The watersoul suffered enslavement and displacement at firesoul hands. They grew sometimes less and sometimes more afraid of firesoul patterns destroying their ways and inturning their minds.

   You may wonder what happened to Roy’s New Beginning, but that is not important. I doubt whether the firesoul men would have been deterred by Roy’s insights. The burning desire to keep going is a strong firesoul pattern, and unless many others had become close enough to the watersoul to question their own nature, the march would have pressed on regardless.

   Roy did come to understand what completion is. On another shift, I became Roy, still on the march, in conversation with Alfred.

‘I still don’t see what the completion of the human pattern would be,’ Alfred was saying.

   ‘I’m not sure, but I think it’s when we’re just going round and round the same cycle, and the tiny bit of difference each time round just vanishes, and the cycles of time cease, but we’re all still there: complete and unchanging.’

   ‘Could our pattern “shine through the holes”, like in the pattern mathematics, and be part of further patterns elsewhere in the universe?’ suggested Alfred, his eyes sparkling.

   ‘Maybe,’ said Roy, ‘but wouldn’t thinking that just be firesoul ambition and arrogance?’

   ‘That’s a bit hard! Surely, there has to be intelligent life on other planets, in other star systems, in the past or in the future, and wouldn’t we influence each other – completed or not?’ Alfred persisted.

   ‘We can’t know there are other stars,’ Roy remarked.

   ‘Of course there are – we can see them.’

   ‘Perhaps we’re seeing the same star repeated in space and time. The watersoul villagers don’t see any stars. They make love and sleep at night, and don’t worship any gods they might look for in the heavens.’

   ‘I wouldn’t want such a limited vision of the cosmos!’

   ‘The watersoul see depths of complexity and change around about them. To them, what is near is unlimited, what is beyond the horizon or above the sky has no appeal or reality, and so it doesn’t exist for them. It is our vision that is limited – tiny sparks of life isolated in eternities and infinities of space and time, and eventual oblivion for everything.’

We do not expect there to be any further New Beginnings: we few remaining firesoul have lost any desire for civilisation. To us it seems that the watersoul people have already gone from the earth, having dwindled away in their villages, untroubled by their end coming upon them since they know they cannot cease to be present and aware in the timeless patterns.

   We remain, awaiting our end, doing whatever it occurs to us to do before we are able, at last, to face the final letting go.

   In my time humanity has been waning. In all the villages the courtship time narrowed. Fewer babies were born to younger and younger mothers. Some failed to mature sexually and were sterile.

   What little is still to come I can tell you now.

Next        Back to Contents