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dangerice in the cavern-ice Palacier …”
    The time came when Landish thought Deacon was old enough to hear how he and Landish had come to be together. He told him how his father died, of his mother’s letters, of Cluding Deacon and the fifty dollars that he gave the orphanage in exchange for Deacon.
    At last Deacon spoke his first words. A torrent of words by the time he was barely four. He asked Landish to repeat the true story about his parents and about how he and Landish came to be in the attic. He nodded as Landish spoke. He said that, because he’d nevermet his parents, he wasn’t all that sad that they were gone. Landish said he might be sad about it one day. He might hate Captain Druken. But Deacon shook his head.
    Where was I before I was born?
    The same place I was.
    What’s it called?
    The Womb of Time.
    What do you do there?
    You wait.
    Who picked us?
    God did.
    Why?
    God only knows.
    What’s God like?
    I don’t know.
    Who picked Him?
    I don’t know.
    What’s this place called?
    The world. You go from the Womb of Time into the womb of your mother and from there into the world. The world leads to the Tomb of Time, the place from which no one knows the way back home. From the Womb of Time to the Tomb of Time. Life.
    What happens in the Tomb of Time?
    Only Lazarus and Christ went there and came back. They never said what it was like.
    Landish told him that you passed from the Womb of Time into what he called your birth “Murk,” which was the interval between your “commencement screech” and the first moment of your life that you remembered. No two Murks were of the same duration. Some lasted eighteen months, others twice or even three times that. No one really knew what went on in your mind throughout the Murk, what caused it or what its purpose was. While you were in the Murk youlearned things that you remembered when you left, but you did not remember learning them. Your caretakers could tell that you were learning and remembering and years later told you what you did and what you looked like, but you had to take their word for it.
    They may have photographed your body while your mind was in the Murk. They may have kept a diary and let you read it. But none of it rang a bell. Your actions and appearances as recorded and recalled by others while you were in the Murk consisted mostly of mis-remembrance, embellishment and outright fiction. You emerged from the Murk knowing the names of things. It was not possible, even in retrospect, to tell where the Murk left off and your memory began. You didn’t burst from the Murk. You left it gradually. Memory didn’t dawn on you. It came and went, came and went, the Murk breaking, then re-forming, memory like the sun behind a threadbare cloud. The Murk lifted until you could nearly see through it, but then closed in again. And so it went, a seesaw flux of memory and Murk, a fast succession of eclipses from which some light as weak as that of soon-to-vanish stars survived.
    You emerged from the Murk and then life as you would remember it began: the stages of life that were known as “hoods.” Childhood, boyhood, manhood, fatherhood, many more including some you had no way of naming yet. Oldhood comes next to last …
    Deacon imagined a procession of hooded figures approaching him in single file, each one shorter than the one behind it, all faceless except for the first, which bore his face.
     … Over time, some hoods, especially the early ones, dropped out of the procession, and some walked side by side with others until the final hood went by. The final hood. The largest of the hooded figures. The nameless one, abandoned by the others, left by them to walk alone into the Tomb of Time.
    “What are you in?” Deacon said. Landish thought of saying fatherhood, but said manhood instead. Deacon nodded.
    Landish told him that Deacon’s father had fallen short of fatherhood by ninety days. From the procession of his life, fatherhood had been removed, and