Author's Afterword: Unfinished History

When I completed the final revision of this book, the Stargate Calendar was already approaching the year 12,784. Fine rain often falls over Southern Book City after autumn begins. The railcars slow as they pass Three Institutes Street outside my window, and at night I can still hear distant bookshops unloading paper. The modern section ends around 12,760, scarcely more than twenty years before the present day. In ancient history, such a span would not amount to a speck of dust; in a human lifetime, however, it is long enough for a cohort of students to graduate, for a street’s shops to change hands, and for some questions that provoked furious arguments only yesterday to fade gradually into old news.

While writing about remote antiquity, I often felt that what confronted me was not history, but a shore gnawed by darkness. Myths, broken stones, dead Realms, unidentifiable artifacts, and traditions unknown to one another surface from different places. We know that life once passed through them, yet often do not know what those people called themselves, much less what troubled them on an ordinary morning. The silence left by the Great Loss is greater than all the surviving words that can still be read.

The ancient era was the opposite. It left too many voices. City-state ledgers, academy debates, letters home from long-range travelers, contracts for port workers, old decrees of orders, battlefield communications, and survivors’ oral accounts collide with one another. After the first year of the Stargate Calendar, distant places abruptly ceased to be mere legend. Gate routes brought strangers face to face and placed upon the same table principles that each had previously been able to uphold in isolation. Many questions later called “disputes over paths” may have begun simply with an apprentice wishing to leave an order, a gate worker wishing to go home, or a dreamborn person asking why they did not count as a person.