The Journey of Rick Heiden
All Rights Reserved © 2018, Rick Haydn Horst
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I could not fathom coping with what David had gone through at nineteen years old with his parents. In my opinion, he paid too high a price. He said he made a temporary move to Magnar's home not long after the incident until he could get a place of his own.
David knew the area around his parents' home well, so rather than returning to the penthouse, he showed me places he enjoyed while growing up. One seemed unusual for a fourteen-year-old, they called it the Primorium. I saw the unmistakable building from the overlook at the temple. Built on a grand scale, they made it of white stone. It had colonnades with towering ionic columns, styled in the highest form of neoclassical architecture.
The Trust had existed over a thousand jears, and it always had the Prime, an elder deciding when someone had demonstrated themselves worthy and performed the ceremony to bring them into the Trust. The Primorium consisted of ten floors of corridors lined in alcoves. The inside of those alcoves held a life-sized stone statue of the one hundred sixty-two Primes that had come before Amaré. The figures stood upon beautifully inscribed rectangular pedestals, the interior of which contained an ossuary filled with the remains of the Prime. Upon Amaré's death, his statue would stand among them.
The people of Jiyū didn't consider the mausoleum an abode of morbidity. The quiet stillness inspired a solemn reverence, and they viewed it as a beautiful place of quiet contemplation, to sit and read, study the artwork, or enjoy any quiet activity.
"I came here often in my youth," David whispered as we slowly walked down a corridor lined in gracefully posed statuary of long-dead Primes. Crafted in the Ancient Greek style, they looked exactingly realistic, but they left them unpainted. "I enjoyed the quiet, and I found it fascinating how people automatically lowered their voices upon entry as people do in libraries on Earth, I even do it myself. There's peace here like no other."
"Perhaps people come here to experience some peace, so their everyday lives feel bearable," I said.
He looked at me with a sad smile. "Perhaps."
My comment sounded strange, even to me. I recognized Jiyū as a paradise. What problems could anyone there possibly have to endure? As it turned out, people had quite a few. By comparison, sure, Jiyū readily evoked visions of paradise to what many people on Earth experienced daily. However, problems persist in every culture, precisely because they involve humans. No one should view them as a competition as to who had more. So, I proposed a more appropriate question; what sort of issues have we the will to face, entirely avoidable ones intentionally made by humans for others to endure, or those emanating from sources beyond anyone's control? If we did nothing to stop the former ones, as they had on Jiyū, we would still have the latter ones to deal with as well. So, while humans will never see a real Utopia, is it not foolish to maintain an existent imperfection only to suit the prosperous few?
Just after 11:00, David took me to the Archives on the edge of Bragi college --the only building never replaced during the college's reconstruction. They built the archives into part of a five-story, annulus disk shape building cut into three, equal but separated pieces. This created walkways to a charming little courtyard in the center where each building had an entry.
They contained an array of departments on a variety of topics. One of the buildings comprised the entirety of Jiyū's planetary studies, its atmosphere, and environmental sciences, geology, geography, glaciology, limnology, and botany. It also held the catalog of the planet's plant life, and they kept samples of the more unusual botanical species on display in stasis.
They used the second building for astronomy and astrophysics. Jiyū had no ground telescopes. An artificial intelligence known as Rom controlled all the robotic satellites and telescopes, whether in orbit or distantly located at the edge of the solar system.
The last building housed the museum of Jiyū history on the first four floors, and the archives on the fifth. The repository contained the writings of everyone that had ever written anything found the last 3154 jears and beyond. They kept the original manuscripts sealed in a stasis room of their own, but we could view electronic copies on a portable device like Jiyū's version of a tablet, made mostly of unbreakable glass. It displayed the texts of every book and writing scanned or translated by computer into its system.
However, the fragile writings farther back than 3154 jears had too much damage. They took on the arduous but necessary task of unrolling and hermetically sealing them to protect them from further deterioration. I wanted to see those pieces. I asked one of the archivists to show me the text referring to the earliest days. He gave me a puzzled expression, but he brought me the sealed documents anyway. He placed on the table stacks of about four dozen incomplete text pages written in ancient Japanese. Of all the languages I knew, I had only studied the classical forms of Japanese, which made me curious to see if I could read them. I could not detect a discernible difference from the ancient language I knew, and I could understand quite well the legible texts available to me. I found myself lost in them for the rest of the day.
David quietly sat watching me, occasionally rubbing his hand up and down my back, letting me know he found satisfaction in my proximity.
I saw nothing of much interest in most of the texts, like daily struggles, trial-and-error with food, and building shelter, but on one of the documents, I found an interesting passage. I showed it to David.
"Why does this look like Chinese to me?" he asked.
"Japanese didn't have characters of its own back then. They wrote in Chinese characters."
"That sounds a bit odd, doesn't it?"
"Not really. English, along with multiple other languages, uses Latin characters and Arabic numerals.
"Okay, that's true. So, what does it say?"
"From what I've gathered," I said, "these people originally came from the area near the fire mountain, that's Mount Fuji in Japan. While on Jiyū, they wrote of a journey to the west. The text has something too damaged to read here. Then it says something about not wanting to leave freedom, they traveled far to the west, it forced them to --and I think that character means
to abandon
-- to abandon the sun to seek food only to find the sun had followed them."
"If you travel west, the sun will follow you," David said.
"Or it can lead you depending on the time of day you leave," I said. "See how that doesn't quite make sense? How do people abandon the sun?"
"How old is this in Earth years?" David asked.
"Well, the language comes from Feudal Japan, and based on certain characters, I would say...early Fourteenth Century maybe."
The Archivist came back hours later to ask how I was doing.
"It's been enlightening," I said.
He crumpled his face in confusion. "You've studied these for many hours. Can you read these?"
