But about our ages: Oliver Cromwell was buried alive in a mass grave during the Black Death and still doesn’t want to talk about it. He says dying by suffocation is something to forget forever. Scented Song escaped the sack of Tientsin by the Mongols when they piled 100,000 severed heads into pyramids. Her description makes Dachau sound like a picnic. The Wandering Jew is Christ, of course. You can pick up the clue in Luke 24:3. A writer — D.H. Lawrence, I think — smelled the truth when he met Jacy in 1900 and turned it into a fantastic story about how Jacy might have lived a normal life if he’d only balled a bod. He didn’t know Jace. We call Christ Jacy because if you use his real name it sounds like you’re swearing.
There are many others whom you’ll meet later on. The oldest, by far, is Hic-Haec-Hoc. He got that nickname because that’s what his grunts sound like; he’s never learned to speak any language although he can unnerstan simple signs. We think Hic may be from the late Pleistocene or early Holocene and got his charge in some cataclysm that was dramatic enough to make a Neanderthal aware. Who knows? Maybe he got clobbered by a meteor or trampled by a Hairy Mastodon.
We don’t see much of Hic these days; people scare him and he’s always pulling back from the edge of civilization. We used to wonder how he was going to adapt to the population explosion but the space explosion solved that. He’s probably homesteading in a crater on Mars, Mother of Men; a Moleman can live on anything except nothing. Pepys, who keeps track of all of us, like Celebrity Service, claims that Hic was spotted once, mousing around the snows of the Himalayas, and he swears that Hic started the legend of the Abominable Snowman.