Tree of Truth (Book of Pilgrimage 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

upon a rickety shelf in a dusty Library much like this one, the record of the final days of my brief journey upon this earth collecting the particles that float out of sight until the sun’s light shines on them at just the right angle. In those brief moments of clarity one can almost grasp the illusion of human reality, reminded by cosmic light and ancient dust of the vastness of the universe that lies unknown just before our very faces, those billions of particles, perhaps each a universe in itself, unseen to the naked eye and barely visible even under the enlightening glare of our neighbor star.
    For hours I browsed Book after Book of life and death, hope and doubt, certainty and conjecture. Among the stories were dozens of theories on the Great Disease, mostly about how it might be cured, but some speculating its origins. Everything from a conspiracy of scientists to the wrath of God was blamed. Perhaps the pestilence was a product of evolution, a natural development by our own planet to protect itself from the sickness wrought by the overpopulation of man. Because the Disease spread so rapidly, because it was so devastating, it caught mankind off-guard. We didn’t even have a name for it; we just called it the Great Disease. It was, in fact, the greatest disease man had ever known, and yet where it came from we knew not. No matter what the cause, we sought the Cure.
    As I walked from under the shade of one of those shelves, the afternoon sun shining through the uncurtained window nearly blinded me. “Bloody viruses! I’m late for school!” I bolted for the door, but something stopped me—Benjonsen. His Book drew me to it. I yanked it off the shelf, stuffed it in my bag, and dashed through the double doors of the Library and into the street. I had to get to school. I didn’t care about missing class—school was the only place I was sure to see Shelley.
    *.*.*
    I slipped in surreptitiously through the back door of the classroom and took my seat right next to her. “Where’ve you been?” she whispered.
    “The Library.”
    “All this time?”
    “I got distracted.”
    My teacher stood up from behind her desk. “So good of you to join us today, Marlowe.” My cover was blown. I rose from my seat, but left my head hanging low.
    “I’m sorry—I had to take the Pilgrim’s Book to the Library, and I, uh, I got distracted.”
    “Your assignment is on the board. You have until the end of class to finish.” It was English, and we were writing essays. Luckily, I missed science and math. That was in the morning. Every day, science and math in the morning, English and history in the afternoon. We didn’t really learn math—we had to know it for science. It was the same with history—we studied history to learn more English. It was all quite boring and tedious. We didn’t have time for much else—we only went to school until we were sixteen. The Ancients sometimes went to school for decades and even studied subjects like philosophy, art, and music. We had precious little time before work and family took over. So the elders decided long ago that English and science mattered most. To them, books were our keys to the past, and science was our key to the future.
    In the days before the Disease, the people did not revere their language as they do today. They wrote their words on computers, even let the computers write for them. And their words were simple because they were obsessed with pictures and images. But after the pestilence, those computers stopped working, and their technology ceased. Our teachers were taken by the Light, our records were lost with technology, and the people were indifferent to history amidst the chaos of the Disease. But we still had our books, and so at some point in our plaguy history, books and words became sacred to us.
    You may still hear the old dialects among the uneducated nomad and bandit tribes. They were as bad as the Ancients. They didn’t value books and knowledge, only silver