It was very interesting, the
way history had doubled back on
itself, like a worm re-growing part
of its body but re-growing it in the
wrong place. At one end of the
kink—of the fresh, pink scar—was
a purulent hell of fire and smoke
that no one might have expected
to live through. Yet, people had, as
they have a habit of doing. And at
the other end of the kink in time—Giulion
Geoffrey's end, Harolde
Dugald's time, The Barbarian's
day—there were keeps and moats
in Erie, Pennsylvania, vassals in
New Brunswick, and a great stinking
warren of low, half-timbered
houses on the island of Manhattan.
If it had taken a few centuries
longer to recover from the cauterizing
sun bombs, these things might
still have been. But they might have
had different names, and human
history might have been considered
to begin only a few hundred years
before. Even this had not happened.
The link with the past remained.
There was a narrow, cobbled
path on Manhattan, with sewage
oozing down the ditch in its
center, which was still Fifth Avenue.
It ran roughly along the same
directions as old Broadway, not because
there was no one who could
read the yellowed old maps but because
surveying was in its second
childhood. There was a barge running
between two ropes stretched
across the Hudson, and this was
The George Washington Bridge
ferry. So, it was only a kink in history,
not a break.
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