Introduction (original)

The Original Introduction

(unfinished)

Why should you want to know about this story, it being as it is beyond your future? Why, for that matter, should I want to relate this story to you, you being as you are beyond my past?

Just as according to your poet “no man is an island, complete unto himself,” so also no period of time is adrift in this universe. There are threads that bind us all together in both time and space, as family: as species, as race, as culture, as reverie.

So while you can never hear what I am about to relate (you having been dead for thousands of years!) I will relate it just the same. Because of the wonder of the thread; that amazing thread that binds me to you whom I shall never, can never, know.

By the way, I am ... Oh, never mind; just think of me as Narrator. For now at any rate. You shall know more later – if events warrant it.

***

First you will want to know (because you will need to know) what has come and what has gone between us. Between you and the beginning of “the story” at least. Follows then a few threads you will want to pursue so that the world in which they terminate might not seem so utterly alien to you as it might otherwise appear.

I reach back through the millennia to a woman who was ninety-one in the year 1970 CE. For you, dear lady, stand at the beginning of a thread that grows to be a bundle of threads, and eventually a great cable of bundles that bind nations and cultures in their own time. Just as you stand near the end of the 20th century CE, I, and the actors in our story, stand near the middle of the 56th century CE.

The beginning came in 1970 CE, in the form of a moment of reverie . . . or of revelry . . . which became known among those few who knew of it at all as “The Gratuitous Hole Digger’s Society.”