The Second Sleep

by Robert Harris

On the back was the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy—an apple with a bite taken out of it.

All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.

No wonder in the centuries after the Fall people had turned back to God: they would have needed to believe there was a life better than this one, whereas the ancients, with all their comforts, had been able to exist without faith.

An entire generation’s correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called “the Cloud.”

So if this entry had been made in ARD—Anno Resurrexit Domini, the Year of Our Risen Lord—795, it meant that the recorded life of Addicott St. George had restarted 673 years ago, 129 years after civilisation had collapsed into chaos.

She turned back a page. “His letter was written in March of their year two thousand and twenty-two. His daughter married when?” “That same summer.” “And when did the catastrophe occur?” “Three years later, in two thousand and twenty-five.”

“So Church and state should be separate?” “It would be best for both.” “Then surely we would arrive at a place where the Church would have morals without power, and the state would have power without morality. That is exactly what led the ancients to disaster.”

since they have made it a crime to investigate the past?”

It was as if the long recovery after the Apocalypse had stalled at the point civilisation had reached two centuries before disaster struck. Why?

Or had it been attempted at some point in the past, but had failed or been suppressed, and he had never heard of it?

He could not do it. It would be a sin against history.

that in due course they displaced human memory and reasoning and even normal social intercourse—an enfeebling and narcotic power that some say drove their possessors mad, to the extent that their introduction marked the beginning of the end of advanced civilisation.”

“It both made their vast trade possible and rendered them beggars when it failed. Consider waking up one morning entirely destitute, with skills no longer of value or of any use in the struggle for life! Their world was based upon imagining—mere castles made of vapour. The wind blew; it vanished.”

“Faith that cannot withstand the truth is not a faith worth holding.”