“That teapot belonged to your grandmother. Put it back on the shelf.” The mother’s tone was sharp. She brought the handle of the broomstick smartly down on Timothy’s bare back, leaving the skin a little red. “You are not worthy to set eyes on that great lady’s possessions, let alone touch them with your dirty hands.”
“I saw a speck of dust on it, and wanted to clean it, O Great One.” Timothy’s parents had taught him from an early age to use that epithet in addressing them. According to the great, almost Confucian traditions of that white land, children were slaves to their parents. If a child was happy, it meant that its parents had been remiss in raising it.
Timothy was sixteen, and though he had an impeccable sense of hygiene, cultivated through years of endeavoring to find something by which to judge himself superior to his cohorts, who seemed otherwise superior to him on all counts, his parents always described him as dirty or filthy, and never said other than hurtful things to him – things that would have driven a weaker person to suicide.
Timothy’s only querencia in the cruel, utopian world in which he lived was his private temple of knowledge. To this he had obtained access by being made the secret recipient in his grandfather’s will of his great collection of books and scrolls. The old man had been the only one who had ever had any affection for Timothy, and recognized him for the bright, handsome boy that he was, a boy who would elsewhere have bloomed into something magnificent.
But tradition was the religion of this land of untouched purity. It was vanity that drove its men and women to work every day, even though no ultimate goal was in sight, nor had ever been. Indeed, vanity was the currency of virtue in this land, if vanity be defined as one’s satisfaction in knowing that one has done everything possible not to stray from the rigid path of tradition.
Some centuries since, it was said in obscure folk lore whispered surreptitiously among the trees on the fringes of the land, where the influence of its tradition was not quite so strong, there had lived great scholars in this land: there had lived great scholars who had made great progress in the sciences and philosophy, and to whom barbarians from distant, impure lands would come for enlightenment. But the scholars now, as Timothy had once heard from an ancient woman with severe wrinkles, when the oppressiveness of the town had driven him to seek out more salubrious climes, were but names carven into the fossils of their forefathers’ past greatness.
“You, boy, are destined for greatness,” the woman had told him; then she had added, plaintively, “or would be, if the world could see that you are superior to it.”
By no means was Timothy oblivious of how different he was from everyone else. He had realized when he was quite young that he was the only one he had ever seen who walked upright: the others had spines cast into grotesque shapes, like the sickles they used to harvest their grain and to slaughter one another. His skin was fair and pure, while that of the others was invisible under their hideous fur. His eyes were blue, while the others had monstrous, yellow orbs staring out of their hideous skulls through black slits.
If his grandfather had been alive today, if the legendary scholar Jupiter had been alive today, he would have told him that Timothy was the last of the race of men, that the world had long been overrun by these creatures from the deep south.
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