THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#43)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

Words had never come easily to me. But then I remembered I’d managed to deliver a few sharp comments the day before. So I gathered up my courage and plunged in.
“Your Boldness”—this was the first time I’d used the Duke’s honorific—“I am very well, thanks be to Giver, and I wish you a good day.”
Well, that was a less than wonderful start. “A good day?” he mocked. “In this devastated time, where we find ourselves adrift with pitifully few resources, living like parasites off the dregs of a higher civilization whose achievements we have no access to? A very good day indeed!”
Silence. My wits had frozen solid.
“If you’ve really been to the world of Light and Love, he went on, “you ought to be able to tell me what happened to cause the Great Miasma.”
But that was something withheld to me. Finally I said, “The animals know more than we do, Duke.”
He stared at me. “What exactly do you mean?”
“If you want to know what it was like before the Great Miasma, ask your animals.” Though I hadn’t tried to explore their minds very deeply— caught up as I was in my own new powers—I’d sensed this ability, in a very diminished form, in the cows and sheep back home in Frog Creek.
“That’s ridiculous!” He started to turn away.
“If you want, I can ask them for you.”
“Ask them how?”
“By way of thoughts that pass back and forth between me and them. Animals have access to the world of Light and Love just like humans do. In that world outside time and space lies the truth about our history. But domestic animals are just as confused about the past as we are. Animals born wild are purer that way.”
He seemed to be thinking hard. “Let me not expose us both to the laughter of my court. I’ll have one brought here.” Then, ironically: “Pray, which is the best raconteur?”
“The bear,” I said, following Giver’s counsel.

(to be continued tomorrow)