The Holy Pilgrim Time Traveller

A young man is hiking in the rocky hills when he comes across a small stream he didn’t remember.    He follows it to a small waterfall that shimmers.  Behind the curtain of the water he can see glimpses of a cave.  As the day is warm, he decides to see.  He splashed down into the stream and to the fall.

When he wakes up, the landscape outside is changed.  It seems lusher at first glimpse.  Also inhabited, albeit lightly.

He has a few weird conversations with scattered people he runs across in oddly accented English.  He has read a lot of science fiction and knows a few things so he quickly concludes that he has been transported to the future.  It turns out his conclusion is correct.

He comes down to a little town between two of the hills.  In the town square he meets the mayor equivalent and explains his situation.  “Ah, yes, you are a holy pilgrim!” the mayor said, and excitedly starts introducing him around.  Everyone he meets that day starts calling him holy pilgrim.  It doesn’t take too long for him to ask why.

Instead of getting a straightforward answer of the kind he expected, they respond as if he were a guru or a wise teacher propounding a Socratic question.  The small crowd he is with give different answers, the answers being personal, anecdotal, and heavy with spiritual and moral content.  As if he had asked the question as a teacher in Sunday School.  But taking the answers all together, he gathers that although rare its not unknown for someone like him to appear from mysteriously distant lands or times and the normal thing is for the stranger to wander the area asking questions about the land and its people, which they find spiritually invigorating.

He is quite willing to wander the land learning about it, so he does.  What he learns is that the area is now a very small country after, presumably, some kind of collapse.  Or perhaps multiple collapses.  He is not sure how far in the future he is.  They live a very self contained sort of life with highly efficient smallholder agriculture and a huge emphasis on regreening and regenerating the land.  In his day the land was semi-desert though greener in the hills.  Now it is almost lush.  The water is managed and reused, there are greenhouses everywhere but more to condense the water out during the night for reuse in the plants during the day than for protection against the cool.   The hills are full of fruit trees, with specially bred birds that eat the insect predators of them (though they accept a certain amount of fruit loss so that there are enough insects every year for the birds to live). Eventually he learns there are space colonies, huge O’Neill cylinder style, and the society around him is so self-contained and so intraconnected that he assumes the land was actually resettled from a space colony.  They correct him.  It was the other way around.  There peculiar style of living made it possible for mankind to finally settle space.  Their little country and other little countries like them provided the settlers.

Eventually he makes his way to the fringe of settlement out on the plains.  It is almost like a great public work.  Every couple of hundred yards a huge broad ditch has been dug where the runoff gathers and is captured by improved soil and other means.  The settlers will do a few ditches at a time, improving the soil and working the system until they feel it will mostly sustain itself.  The next wave of settlement will build a few more ditches.  The pale of settlement advances at a very slow rate.

Slower, because there are nomads on the plains, and like nomads everywhere, they raid and pillage.  And burn and destroy, because they resent even the very slow encroachment of the settlers.

The young man has seen what these people do with the specially bred birds and a hundred other similar biological wonders and he asks some of the settlers why they don’t come up with some kind of animal or disease to exterminate the nomads.  The young man is, after all, a product of our own time and has the materialist/rationalist way of looking at things that a young man of his type in our time would have.

They are momentarily shocked.  But the look of horror on their faces passes and is replaced with awe.  Even for a holy pilgrim, this is truly a profound question!  How wonderful that with such insight he forces them to reexamine what is implicit and taken for granted so that they can be fully aware of who they are and what they are about!  They have a long discussion afterwards, something in the nature of a testimony meeting and something in the nature of group therapy and something in the  nature of a homespun philosophical seminar.

Yes, the holy pilgrim has reminded them that all men are brothers.  The nomads are humans.  To exterminate them would be to do a great wickedness.

Yes, the holy pilgrim has reminded them that boundaries, and in a sense therefore enemies, are good.  To know who they are, there must be those who are not them.

Yes, the holy pilgrim has reminded that that their people need challenge and stress and misery and loss lest they grow soft, or mad.

They thank him tearfully.