Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream

by Judith Moffett

Genres: Science Fiction; Dystopian

Synopsis

Judith Moffett returns to the future with this moving tale of the Hefn occupation of Earth and how it affects the planet's native humans - two in particular: Pam Pruitt, a talented young woman from Kentucky, and Liam O'Hara, whose unique friendship with the Hefn Humphrey saved his life. The two teens journey to a special place in remote Kentucky, Hurt Hollow, where the painter Orrin Hubbell and his wife, Hannah, found a way to live in peace with the planet during the twentieth century. The prospects of living peacefully seem distant for Pam and Liam, both of whom must find peace with themselves as well as with the Hefn Directive. The marvelous events that befall them en route to Kentucky and in the Hollow itself beautifully depict the subtle ways in which the world shapes them, and the stunning ways in which they change the world.

Release date: May 29, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

The popular old hymns “Peace! Be Still!” and “There Is Power in the Blood,” along with “Blessed Assurance,” can be found in several editions of The Broadman Hymnal, available from The Baptist Sunday School Board of Nashville, Tennessee.

The description of how to milk a goat is adapted from The Homesteader’s Handbook to Raising Small Livestock by Jerome D. Belanger (Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press, 1974).

The description of swarming bees is drawn from Keeping Bees by John Vivian (Williamson Publishing, 1986)

I am grateful to Val Gonzales of the Franklin Institute’s Fels Planetarium, Philadelphia, for the information that the moon will be gibbous on May 11, 2014, and in the last quarter on May 21 of the same year.

Lori Ferguson provided newspaper accounts of the 1974 tornado that devastated Hanover College, using the college library files as well as personal materials.

Alvin Johnson, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, checked Liam’s setting of Pam’s poem “Stars” for gross errors of notation and composition. Liam has broken the rules in one measure, but he was warned.

I wish to thank Chief Engineer Dennis Shenk of the Delta Queen, for answering my host of questions about navigating a steamboat on the Ohio River.

Very special thanks go to my editor, Gordon Van Gelder, whose fertile imagination and very hard work have helped make this a better book.

All the characters in this work are products of my imagination, save two. Hannah and Orrin Hubbell are modeled upon real people named Anna and Harlan Hubbard, who died in 1986 and 1988, both well up in their eighties. In presenting Orrin and Hannah I have tried to be as faithful to the models as possible, apart from taking the one small liberty of attributing to Hannah Hubbell the journals that Anna Hubbard never kept, but which so many of us wish she had. To the interested reader I recommend Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society, by Harlan Hubbard (New York: Eakins Press, 1974), and Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, by Wendell Berry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).

From the November 2026 issue of Time:

… Liam O’Hara, 28, the mathematical wizard chiefly responsible for the discovery (see cover), was all of twelve years old in 2010, when the Peach Bottom Nuclear Facility meltdown ousted his family from Main Line Philadelphia. Relocated to Maryland, young Liam attended the College Park Friends School. Three years later, phenomenal aptitude and achievement scores brought him to the attention of the Hefn Humphrey, then recruiting budding math geniuses for the first class of Apprentices at the brand-new Bureau of Temporal Physics, headquartered in Washington. (The BTP has since been moved to Santa Barbara, where the Hefn sleep response to cold weather is not a problem.)

The first pricklings of the ideas which were to eventuate in the Hot Spot formulas came the following spring. …

If proved “in the field,” as most experts expect them to be, the O’Hara Equations are certain to give an enormous boost to the force of the Gaian Mission, whose youthful Missionaries have been at work among us for the past couple of years. Carefully selected, intensively educated by pre-Takeover environmentalist veterans (drawn from the top ranks of such well-credentialed groups as Greenpeace and The Nature Conservancy), rigorously trained in research of the human past at the BTP, the Missionaries have been rapidly changing the way many people think and feel about Planet Earth.

Asked to comment on the discoveries, the top Gaians had plenty to say. “We know that all ground is holy ground—in itself, and potentially for people who know how to live upon it appropriately,” says the “gafr” of the San Francisco Mission, Beatrice Trace. “If the O’Hara Equations prove that some ground is ‘holy’ whether anyone lives appropriately on it or not, the implications are just terribly exciting. Because what happens when you put the two things together—when a Hot Spot has been the dwelling place of people who have ‘lived into’ that ground for many years in a deeply interdependent way? Think about it!” Adds Tran Van Ky of the Saigon Mission: “Dy-no-mite!”

Reactions among other Gaian leaders are more cautious. “This is an exciting development, but it’s important not to let the sexiness and glamour of the ‘holy places’ idea make us lose sight of the homelier truth that all ground is holy ground,” advises Michael Kamante, Chief Steward of the Kikuyu Mission. …

“We’re going to do the calculations for a few obvious potential Hot Spot sites first, check them out,” O’Hara explains. “Lourdes. Stonehenge and Avebury. Delphi. Nazca. Rennes-le-Château. That place in Mexico, I forget its name, where the Virgin has been seen so many times, and another place or two I know about.”

His reference to the Nazca desert, in Peru, is a reminder that there is another group every bit as excited as the Gaians by the discovery of the O’Hara Equations. This is the remnant of a once-numerous association of amateur archeologists, chiefly British, who call themselves “ley hunters.” Leys are straight lines drawn on the landscape, on which important features such as churches, castles, stone circles, burial grounds, and natural features are precisely aligned. Of prehistoric origin, they are nevertheless found worldwide; the Nazca lines are perhaps the most famous.

Half a century ago, ley lines briefly appeared in the popular press, as a host of credulous people came forward to claim that certain leys had been seen by psychics to glow with magnetic force, that they were dowsable, that they were part of a global network of power. Inevitably, serious investigation suffered as leys became linked in the public mind with crackpot theories and “New Age” spiritualism.

O’Hara himself is generous about all this. “I’ve learned a lot about leys since the story of the Equations broke. Some of it sounds pretty mumbo-jumbo, but not all. Maybe some of those New Age types really could see a glow. Many leys radiate out from a central point, usually a hill or a mountain, with a tradition of being a holy place. Lots of aligned churches in England are built on the former sites of pagan temples. Those sites are old—and nobody knows what the leys were there for—nobody! Now we have a tool we can use to find out if primitive peoples, people with a relationship to the landscape we can’t even imagine, may have been sensitive to forces most modern humans can’t sense at all.”

He looks happy, as well he might. “There may be thousands upon thousands of nodes where the beelines of electromagnetic power intersect—we’re using ‘beelines’ for that and ‘leys’ for the lines on the ground. Now, not counting my chickens or anything yet, but if these equations work out, so we know for sure where some of the Hot Spots are, and if they coincide with the sites of ancient holy places, it’ll be great news, the greatest.”

Why? The answer reveals O’Hara’s Gaian sympathies. “Well, I don’t want to go too far out on a limb, but if it turns out to be true that prehistoric people could tune in to the Earth’s magnetic currents directly, then I’m betting we can learn to do it too. We’ve got the time transceivers, they’ll help. And who knows what that might lead to, in the way of connecting up to the Earth again?”

But if ordinary people could sense the nodes and lines, what further use would the Equations be? Wouldn’t the mathematicians’ noses be put out of joint? O’Hara smiles a wide, charming smile. “Finding out how to live here still has to be everybody’s top priority,” he says with obvious sincerity. “No, the really great thing would be if all this math should become completely unnecessary.”

21 December 2026Hurt Hollow, Kentucky

 

Dear Mathematical Wizard,

Sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long, and especially sorry never to have answered your letter from last summer, which was interesting and amusing and cheered me up at a bad time.

I want to thank you for hanging on throughout my long silence, and for checking in with my mother every so often. Your messages are always faithfully passed on. She was terribly excited to find you and Humphrey and Bea on the cover of Time, by the way; she bought two copies, one to send me and one to keep for herself. (Shouldn’t they have invited a ley hunter to be in the picture too?) I’m fully expecting to find that cover picture, matted and framed, hanging on the wall of the living room when Humphrey and I go there for Christmas dinner. Mom continues to think of you as the brass ring on the merry-go-round, that I’m too bonehead stupid and stubborn to grab. “You never had one ounce of sense about that boy, and he’s always been so crazy about you! He’d have married you ten years ago if you’d a let him,” etc. etc.

I haven’t had the heart—or maybe the energy—to tell her different, but one of these days she’s going to pick up a copy of People magazine and get the shock of her life.

Actually, that’s not true. I am about to give her the shock of her life. Sometime after the holidays are over I’m going to talk to her about Dad; and once that blow has fallen I doubt that even a shot of you emerging from the baths with a beautiful youth on each arm would have much impact. (Even if you make the cover again.)

I have sometimes pointed out that she’s proceeding from obsolete assumptions, that there’s almost no incentive anymore for young people to rush into matrimony. She argues back that even in her day people didn’t usually get married just to start a family, or just to get a break on their income tax, or from fear of getting AIDS, or so the wife could get in on the husband’s health benefits. She says they did it because it was a way for young people to make a public commitment to each other. The implication being that even with no assurance that the Baby Ban will ever be lifted and no legal advantages whatsoever to entice them, serious and decent-minded young people would want to get married anyway.

I’m afraid of letting her irritate me to the point where I find myself asking just what the Sam Hill was so hot about her marriage that she should feel qualified to take this pious tone with me, so when we get that far I change the subject.

They managed to get the story pretty accurate, didn’t they? Humphrey sent me an advance copy of the report for Science, as I expect you know. You can imagine how fascinated I was to read

22 December 2026

Hurt Hollow

 

The scene: latest in an even stream of quiet evenings before the fire. Solitude, lamplight, my chair dragged close to the logs and flames, here at the end of another long, ferociously satisfying day of plain hard work. The work: chiefly cutting wood, but also feeding and medicating hives, putting cold frames to bed, milking Floria, making cottage cheese. The other does have been dry for a month and Floria’s not far behind them now, but I’m glad she lasted this long. Humphrey would be disappointed not to get his cottage cheese. And I’ve been saving a surprise Christmas present for him too: a hard cheese with a nice rind, painted with beeswax and aged in the springhouse since early fall, before finishing the novel swept all before it and I had no time or energy to undertake extra projects, making cheeses and such.

I’d let a lot of things slide—including, obviously, keeping this journal current; impossible to manipulate words one way all day and another way all evening, impossible at least for me—while writing my way down the difficult home stretch of the novel, and had gotten way behind in the seasonal chores. The woodpile, even with this mild autumn we’ve been having, was down to practically nothing. So I’ve been cutting wood for three or four hours every day. And I butchered my first goat, something I probably shouldn’t have tried without help—it was hard, bloody, unpleasant work, one chore I never helped Jesse do, so I had to proceed, in a manner of speaking, with a book in one hand and a gun or butcher knife or saw in the other.

My chosen victim, the male kid, had been destined for this end from birth, of course, but I truly hated to kill him—kept seeing visions of him as a youngster, bouncing around, butting Gloria’s udder, bopbopbop!—but I need meat for the winter and the Hollow doesn’t need another buck yet, Moria’s good for a couple more years anyway, and those who are not prepared to accept the terms of the homesteading life should clear out and make way for others who are. There would be no shortage of takers, after this discovery of Liam’s, if he turns out to be right (which I’ve no doubt he will) and if the Hollow turns out to be a Hot Spot (and how could either of us doubt that?).

Anyway, it’s done: thirty-one quarts of canned goatmeat down cellar, and a tough, stiff, black-and-white hide stretched on the wall of the studio. Also fried liver for supper several days in a row, with onions and potatoes. After Christmas I’m going to read up on tanning leather and see what might be made out of goathide—moccasins, maybe? Book covers (next year’s Christmas presents)? I saved the hooves (and horns) with some vague notion of boiling them to make glue, another project undertaken, so far as I know, by neither Orrin nor Jesse and another case of book-in-one-hand, etc., but why not? Next year’s Christmas presents for selected friends: small, attractively packaged pots of goatsfoot glue … why not? Everybody needs glue.

Last night after supper I started the letter to Liam. I didn’t get too far with it. Very difficult to know how to put my request. I sat and thought for a long time between sentences, till I began to feel exhausted. Yet tonight I pick up this book and the words tumble out with no effort at all.

After the long year of solitude, talking to myself has obviously become all too easy.

Tomorrow I’ll try again. It should go better, now the pump’s been primed.

F

     My name is Pam Pruitt.

     I don’t like to do it.

     I’ve never been partial to effin’.

     Eff man or eff woman?

     Eff intersexed human??

     I’d sooner be effed by a Hefn.

If all is proceeding according to plan, Humphrey is in Cincinnati tonight. He was flown from Santa Barbara to Washington nine days ago, intending to meet with assorted government officials and spend untold hours with the Hefn Directors at Thingvellir, after a hurried visit in College Park with Carrie and Terry. Humphrey does hate those sessions at Thingvellir. I picture them all gathered together in the round room, fifteen or twenty of them, sitting on proper Hefn chairs drawn into two concentric circles, eyes opaque and beards waggling, bald spots showing here and there in the pelts of those who’ve been on duty the longest, from the anti-hibernation drugs. Occasionally one of them forgets and simulates a human facial expression. … H. won’t have enjoyed himself one bit, even though they all kowtow to him now and listen to everything he tells them—this time, I’d guess, that something needs to be done soon about the Baby Ban.

The last time I was over at Mom’s, she was harping away on The Little Granddaughter theme again. “You were always such a roughneck! Oh, I’d just love to have a cute little girl to fuss over and play with, etc.” I told her grumpily that I’d never thought much about having a kid anyway, but if the Ban’s lifted and if they let us choose the sex, then I might have one, but it would definitely be a boy. She was hurt, as if I’d said this out of pure contrariness, but I meant it. She’d get more satisfaction out of Liam’s sister Brett, who’s turned into exactly the sort of sour-tempered childless woman I’d have predicted … though if the Ban’s lifted soon she’s still got plenty of time to have at least one baby, which I’m sure is all anybody’s going to be allowed at best. I’m also sure Humphrey would prefer for the Gaians to create enough voluntary restraint in enough people so the Hefn didn’t have to manage the situation at all, but there isn’t going to be enough time. Either there’ll be a Hefn-monitored transitional period, or a lot of geriatrics are going to be raising a lot of test-tube babies. Assuming the Mission succeeds at all, on the necessary scale, and humanity doesn’t just follow the dinosaur into oblivion.

Anyway, after the meetings Humphrey was to take the train as far as Cincinnati. If nothing’s happened to screw up the plan, he should board the steamboat tomorrow morning and be here by 1:30 P.M. or thereabouts on the 24th.

This afternoon, after cutting and hauling my day’s stint of wood off the hillside, I took a hatchet and scouted around until I found a little cedar, about four feet tall and growing too close to an enormous sugar maple to be likely to get much bigger. It’s standing out in the workshop now in a bucket of water, waiting for Humphrey and Christmas Eve. How happy I was to see Hannah’s little sack of clip-on candle holders when it turned up last spring, when I was moving in; and how carefully I’ve kept track of it ever since, against this very need. Humphrey will love dipping candles and stringing popcorn for the tree—he’s invariably delighted by that sort of thing—and I’m looking forward to reliving the Christmases I did all that with Jesse, when I was back home for the holidays at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, and had managed to give my parents the slip for an evening.

At some point while he’s here I’m going to try, one more time, to make Humphrey understand why I left—had to leave—the BTP. Up to now, every time I’ve tried to talk to him about it—Dad’s accident, my panic attacks and subsequent (probably consequent) loss of intuition, the discoveries I started to make with the emergency therapist in California, all that—he just gets wistful and blank. Maybe the Hefn don’t have breakdowns; only what would you call the Mutiny then? Elphi didn’t take up his life as a hob in Yorkshire by choice. Humphrey talks about “the rebellious Hefn” as if they were a fascinating variant on the basic pattern represented by himself; then he’ll allude to difficulties caused by his own obsession with bonding, which from the way he’s always talked about it is clearly disapproved of by the Gafr.

I suppose it would be no different for them than for us: a spectrum of normal, abnormal, non-functional. Humphrey’s abnormal; Elphi/Belfrey and the others were non-functional in Hefn terms when they mutinied. Maybe if I drew the analogy like that it would get through to him, finally.

As a matter of fact I think Humphrey may experience my leaving the BTP as a violation of our bond. I have become an analog of a rebellious Hefn—alien in a way not covered by the fact of our being technically aliens to one another. And I would like to be able to make him understand that it’s nothing to do with him and me. That the curve of my life would have had to break off at some point no matter what, and be reorganized, and that this necessity could have been forecast from the time I was nine at the oldest, which was before the Hefn even came back. But I don’t know if he’ll believe me.

The psychological screening they did for the BTP Apprentices was designed specifically to tag and eliminate people who were unlikely to go the distance; but how are you supposed to get a useful answer if you don’t know the right question to ask?

23 December

 

You can imagine how fascinated I was to read it, the elegance of the calculations and the relevance to me, my life in the here and now.

You might have wondered what I’ve been doing down here, apart from keeping the place going. Well, I’ve been writing a novel. That’s what the box of pages underneath this letter is: the novel. Not poetry. Not fiction either, not exactly: a novelization of things that really happened. What things? he asks himself. Ho-ho. I bet it’s about that spring in the Hollow when we were kids.

Indeed. What else would it be about? Nothing else that important ever happened to me; but my reasons for writing a novel at all are kind of complicated.

You know, of course, that this is not even the first novel I ever wrote in Hurt Hollow. Remember how you were always pestering me to let you read the first one? And I never would (and I never will, either!); but I’ll tell you this much: that early effort now strikes me as uncannily like the book in this box. All the same themes and obsessions are already present, and most of the same characters, or versions of them, at their same ages, with the exception (as I’ve had you point out in Chapter 14) of the Liam-character. Yet the first is pure wish-fulfillment fantasy, while this second—

—is my one-shot all-out effort to recall—and, more to the point, to re-feel—everything that happened as it appeared to me then, during that crucial week in May 2014. It’s all been viewed through a lens which is small, personal, tightly focused upon my fourteen-year-old self; I’ve tried my damnedest to reinvoke my own exact experience of that time, unelaborated by anything I’ve learned or understood since.

What made me undertake such a project? There were a couple of things.

After I lost my intuition and couldn’t set coordinates any more, and slunk off home with my tail between my legs to teach math at Scofield, I continued to go through various stages of hell. I probably didn’t let on to you how really bad it got. The therapist I saw a couple of times in Santa Barbara thought I should start seeing somebody when I got back here, and gave me the names of some people in Louisville, but it would have cost a bundle and I didn’t feel up to all the traveling back and forth, and I guess maybe the real truth is that I just didn’t want to do that right then.

But I was in such terrible shape that I felt like I had to do something. So I read a lot of psych books, and lights started to flash on; and one day I was suddenly struck by a funny notion: that by becoming a sort of time transceiver myself, I could make contact with my own past and recover the memories and feelings that were so hard to get at because they’d been repressed so deeply and so long. It was a powerful metaphor for what I needed to do; I got very excited about it.

Besides that, I’d always kind of assumed that one day I would write a personal account of that time, putting what happened on the Delta Queen, and here in the Hollow, into the big picture. You can imagine the kind of thing. The book would describe in vivid detail the post-Directive and post-Broadcast resistance movements—people scrambling to change their means of production faster than was strictly possible, and fuller of rage the harder they scrambled and the hungrier they got—Gafr fed up and teetering on the very brink of deciding we could never be made sensible and tractable by any deterrent they could devise—ready to leave for a hundred time-dilated years and return (if they did return) to a planet sterilized of people—and so on and so on. Then with the context established I was going to show how you and I and Humphrey, and the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Peking, turned it all around.

I figured I could write the public book and the therapeutic personal one all at once, and kill two birds with one nonfictional stone; because the one placetime I knew to start looking for answers to questions I’d never before asked out loud was Hurt Hollow in May 2014, where the historical narrative (ley) line and the personal one had intersected.

Makes sense, right?

Well, I tried. Many, many false starts later I finally admitted that before I’d be up to making a balanced assessment of what had happened to the human family on a global scale, I was first—and not simultaneously—going to have to work out the meaning and resonance of those global-scale events for and within my own family, my own life. I’d understood by then that trying to write the history of that placetime, even a personalized history, was actually quite an effective way of evading the answers I needed. And once I knew that much, I also knew that my account would have to be cast in the form of a story.

This was all happening right before Jesse died. I’d been coming down here to the Hollow every few days to take care of things anyway all the time he was sick, so when he died and left the place to me—The Place Where Time Stands Still, as the tour guides used to tell their charges—the next steps seemed natural. I quit my teaching job, took myself to the site where the events I needed to make contact with had occurred, locked the gate behind me, and focused the fixed lens of memory upon May 2014. I was able to set the coordinates precisely.

23 December 2026

 

Snow! Whoopee! When I got up this morning the light coming through the big window felt so diffuse and strange I couldn’t imagine what could be going on, till I looked out and saw white everywhere, all the way down to the obsidian expanse of the river. Only an inch and a half, but the temperature stayed down around 25° all day so it’s all still out there; and when I got through milking, about an hour ago, and came out into the dark, big furry flakes had started sifting down again. The creek has a skin of ice on it, and there’s a rime of ice along the riverbank.

I don’t suppose it’ll stay below freezing for long, it never does, but what a treat—and so well-timed! I haven’t seen a snowfall since January 2019—in Louisville, back here for Granny’s funeral—and that was just a flurry, enough to powder everybody’s coats and hats at the cemetery and give the dead zoysia grass the look of a blond-haired person going gray. Seven years ago next month. The morning of Dad’s funeral, almost four years to the day after Granny’s, was so freakishly mild nobody was even wearing a coat, which made the occasion feel even more surreal than it did already.

Hurt Hollow hasn’t had a white Christmas in twenty years; I looked it up. Though five will get you ten that over at Scofield, where they’re presumably enjoying the same weather I am here, Mom’s on the phone with somebody right this minute, complaining about how you used to be able to heat a house by turning a dial, and how the snowplow used to come through and clear the roads so you could ride around in a car in weather like this all warm and comfy, before the Hefn came. She thinks the greenhouse winters a great improvement, like retiring to a milder climate without having to leave home—but I’ll defer to the season and not go on being snarky about Mom.

Humphrey would love a sleigh ride. We’ll have to go over to Scofield for Christmas dinner anyway. I should be able to fix it up, if the cold weather hangs on another couple of days.

I wish I could learn to forecast the weather, not just better but at all! I had no idea it was going to snow. Jesse always knew what to expect. Of course, if I end up living here as long as Jesse did …

Weather be damned; how about learning to forecast my life?

I wrote some more on Liam’s letter last night. It went better, though I still haven’t worked my way round to explaining why I’m sending the novel to him.

Leafing through it this evening, trying to anticipate Liam’s reactions to various things, I caught myself feeling chagrined about the constricted viewpoint of that wretched young girl, my point-of-view character. It’s hard to tell, from her perspective, what an atmosphere of crisis people were having to live in at that time. I picture Liam shaking his head and musing, in a condescending way, that he hadn’t realized, back then, the extent to which Pam couldn’t see past the end of her own self-absorbed fourteen-year-old nose.

I wouldn’t blame him if he did. By 2014 Liam O’Hara, future public figure, was nowhere near as sunk into himself as I still was. His problems—the meltdown, Jeff’s death—were traumatic, not chronic like mine. By 2014 he’d pretty much come through, and was able to look around and take an interest. Or so I surmise. And I couldn’t. And of course as an Apprentice, a member of a privileged elite, it wasn’t too hard for a kid as quietly desperate as I was then to remain oblivious to the desperations of outsiders. Not my fault; but I do regret it—and also am nervous that Liam will hold it against me or the book, when he reads the book, if he does read it.

Supposing there’d been no Jesse and no Hurt Hollow, might I have been equally oblivious as a teenager to the fate of the Earth? Because I wasn’t at all. It’s worth asking. I grew up, after all, in a world without Missionaries, Gaian ones at least; but I think my arboreal childhood and natural sympathies—and even, strange to say, my identification with Dad, which has otherwise been the source of so much anguish—would have inclined me to care more about the Earth in any case than about its teeming human population. Just like the You-Know-Who. So I probably would have thrown in my lot with the You-Know-Who if I’d never gone to Washington or Santa Barbara, never known Humphrey or Jesse, or needed them as alternatives to Dad.

Certainly I had a lot of faith that the Hefn would do what the people had refused to—that they would fix things—that when they got through doing whatever they were doing here, the world would be a better place.

Now, I think I probably trusted them mostly because they weren’t people.

Having said all that, it still seems odd that I didn’t wonder more about what they were, in fact, doi