He lifted the Letter in his hand and held it, hesitating. When he opened it, that would be the end of it. There would be no more handing down, no more of the Letter and the Reading. For this was the moment toward which the Letter had traveled down through time, from father to son for many generations.
Slowly he turned the Letter over and ran a thumbnail along the sealed edge and the dry wax cracked open and the flap sprang loose.
He reached in and took the message out and spread it flat upon the counter top underneath the lamp. He read, his lips moving to form whispered words, reading as one must read who had spelled out the slow meaning of his words from an ancient dictionary:
To the son of my son many times removed: They will have told you and by this time you may well believe that the ship is a way of life, that it started in a myth and moves toward a legend and that there is no meaning to be sought within its actuality and no purpose. It would be fruitless for me to try to tell you the meaning or the purpose of the ship, for while these words are true, by themselves they will have little weight against the perversion of the truth which by the time you read this may have reached the stature of religion. But there is purpose in the ship, although even now, as this is written, the purpose has been lost, and as the ship plunges on its way it will remain not only lost, but buried beneath the weight of human rationalizing. In the day that this is read there will be explanations of the ship and the people in it, but there will be no knowledge in the explanations. To bring the ship to its destination there must be knowledge. There is a way that knowledge may be gained. I, who will be dead, whose body will have gone back into a plant long eaten, a piece of cloth long worn out, a molecule of oxygen, a pinch of fertilizer, have preserved that knowledge for you. On the second sheet of this letter are the directions for the acquiring of that knowledge. I charge you to acquire that knowledge and to use it that the minds and lives which launched the ship and the others who kept it going and those who even now reside within its walls, may not have used themselves, nor dedicated themselves, in vain, that the dream of Man may not die somewhere far among the stars. You will have learned by the time you read this, even to a greater degree than I know it today, that nothing must be wasted, nothing must be thrown away, that all resources must be guarded and husbanded against a future need. And that the ship not reach its destination, that it not serve its purpose, would be a waste so great as to stun the imagination. It would be a terrible waste of thousands of lives, the waste of knowledge and of hope. You will not know my name, for my name by the time you read this will be gone with the hand that drives the pen, but my words will still live on and the knowledge in them and the charge. I sign myself, your ancestor,
And there was a scrawl that Jon could not make out.
He let the Letter drop to the dust-laden counter top and words from the Letter hammered in his brain.
A ship that started in a myth and moved toward a legend.
But that was wrong, the Letter said.
There was a purpose and there was a destination. A destination? What was that?
The Book, he thought—the Book will tell what destination is.