“Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk,” Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.

“Well, we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.”

“But the fact is,” said Dearri, “that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what’s the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machine!” he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.

“But we don’t experience the universe only successively,” Shevek said. “Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?” He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone “Mr.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says ‘Once upon a time’? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.”

“Yes, the mystics,” the shyer man said, eagerly. “Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote, The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.”

“But we’re not babies,” Dean cut in, “we’re rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?”

There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was enough.

“Maybe you could see it,” he said, “as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time—never of the circle of time.”