In the beginning I used to go to the location of the Agati’s garden and look across at the spot where I left our cottage and Catty. It was an empty pilgrimage. Now I content myself with the work which needs doing. I shall stay here till I die.
Catty. Haggershaven. Are they really gone, irrevocably lost, in a future which never existed, which couldnt exist, once the chain of causation was broken? Or do they exist after all, in a universe in which the South won the battle of Gettysburg and Major Haggerwells founded Haggershaven? Could another Barbara devise a means to reach that universe? I would give so much to believe this, but I cannot. I simply cannot.
Children know about such things. They close their eyes and pray, “Please God, make it didnt happen.” Often they open their eyes to find it happened anyway, but this does not shake their faith that many times the prayer is granted. Adults smile, but can any of them be sure the memories they cherish were the same yesterday? Do they know that a past cannot be expunged? Children know it can.
And once lost, that particular past can never be regained. Another and another perhaps, but never the same one. There are no parallel universes—though this one may be sinuous and inconstant.
That this world is a better place than the one into which I was born, and promises to grow still better, seems true. What idealism lay behind the Southron cause triumphed in the reconciliation of men like Lee; what was brutal never got the upper hand as it did in my world. The Negro is free; black legislatures pass advanced laws in South Carolina; black congressmen comport themselves with dignity in Washington. The Pacific railroad is built, immigrants pour in to a welcoming country to make it strong and wealthy; no one suggests they should be shut out or hindered.
There are rumors of a deal between northern Republicans and southern Democrats, betraying the victory of the Civil War—how strange it is still, after fourteen years, to use this term instead of the familiar War of Southron Independence—in return for the presidency. If this is true, my brave new world is not so brave.
It may not be so new either. Prussia has beaten France and proclaimed a German Empire; is this the start in a different way of the German Union? Will 1914 see an Emperors’ War—there is none in France now—leaving Germany facing ... whom?
Any one of the inventions of my own time would make me a rich man if I could reproduce them, or cared for money. With mounting steel production and the tremendous jump in population, what a success the minible would be. Or the tinugraph. Or controllable balloons.
The typewriter I have seen. It has developed along different and clumsier lines; inevitably, I suppose, given initial divergence. It may mean greater advances; more likely not. The universal use of gaslight must be far in the future if it is to come at all; certainly its advent is delayed by all this talk of inventing electric illumination. If we couldnt put electricity to work it’s unlikely my new contemporaries will be able to. Why, they havent even made the telegraph cheap and convenient.
And something like HX-1? It is inconceivable. Could it be that in destroying the future in which Haggershaven existed I have also destroyed the only dimension in which time travel was possible?