Days with The Sylvan became weeks, months, years.

He learned their language. They could soon convey to each other that he did not know what exactly had happened to him, and that they had no idea, either; nor did they know the fate of his time, of 2025.

Their world certainly included his white casket. They had grown up with it; grown up with him. Not among them, but nearby, and known to them. The casket had been lying in a corner of one of the ruined buildings as far back as any of their ancestors could remember.

They had assumed he was dead, but they could see he was not decomposing; and because of the latter, no one had ever buried him. The casket had been hauled outside just a few days before his emergence when the green light on the control panel, which had been illuminated all along, fell black.

He also never learned why the container opened when it did.

*

“Long ago there were crowds.” That was the only folklore he heard which alluded to his time. There was nothing else, no explanations for what had happened. No tales of seas of fire, nor meltwater floods, nor machines run amok. Only this acknowledgment that once, long ago, there had been many more people around. Their oral histories didn’t attempt to explain why.

He asked the older man and woman he had met by the campfire about this. They were the oldest people there, it seemed; they looked to be in their seventies, perhaps closer to eighty. Their names were Willen and Arina.

“Has anything else been told about these crowds you mention?”

“No,” Arina said. “Just that there were crowds. More people.”

“Do you know where? Did they exist right here?”

“It must have been here. Our people have always lived here. As far back as any stories tell, at least.”

“And did your elders speak of why they – went away? Why there are fewer of you?”

“There are no stories about that. Just that there were more people, once. And less woods, fewer open streams. That’s all that has come down to us.”

“And now we know these stories are true,” Willem said. “From you.”

“There were certainly more people than I see here,” Perry said. “I can’t say what happened to them, though.”

*

Two years on, Perry could do no better in estimating the amount of time that had passed than simply examining and thinking about the ruins, which didn’t illuminate anything much for him. How long would it take a concrete and steel building to crumble? He thought of Chernobyl, in his own time: forty years on from the disaster, windows were broken and animals had the run of the abandoned streets, but the buildings were intact, from what he could remember.

Here, various ruined buildings were around; but he found no tattered calendars, no canned food with long-gone expiration dates, no yellowed newspaper clippings. He found no messages left behind by the people before the fall who intended to pass an explanation on to future generations. A monument with inscriptions carved into panels of aluminum? A stela of immortal plastic? A gold record of the type placed on the Voyagers? He found nothing like that.

The stars had not moved. He knew that the constellations would change over thousands or tens of thousands of years. But they had not. He didn’t know many of them, but the Big Dipper was still the Big Dipper, and Orion’s Belt looked the way it did during his previous life, and Cassiopeia’s chair looked the same as ever. The North Star, he knew, had not been in its current position as recently as the Roman Republic; but it was still there now, just as he remembered it, about six lengths away from the far edge of the Big Dipper. So it came back to the buildings: had the constellations changed, that would mean that the buildings were not the ones from his time; but they clearly seemed to be.

Stolen story; please report.

He knew the Sylvan language might suggest how much time had passed. It was clearly descended from English. Come, brother, hound, midday, and many other words were the same or little changed. The written version of the language, too, was obviously based on English; many of the letters were the same. But the spoken language was different enough that he did have to learn it – it was far more than just a changed accent – and he knew from his studies that such a change would likely have taken at least five hundred years.

*

He now thought of the casket as a sort of warm cryogenic chamber –

Warm cryogenics, makes perfect sense, he thought –

– which had delivered him perhaps five centuries into the future, and which had negotiated its way around what must have been a catastrophic breakdown of some sort.

And he couldn’t really complain, he knew. He was welcome here. There was enough food, and mild winters. He had become a very good bow shot, hunting deer, and was fastidious about cleaning skins and other chores. He would sing around their campfires, at night, sometimes, and the people enjoyed that. He sang whatever he remembered – Stand By Me; Changes in Latitudes. Whatever struck him, they liked.

But he felt he needed closure, oddly, for Araceli and Jennifer’s sakes, even though they were long gone. He felt he owed it to them to figure out what had happened.

At night in his tent this would bore into him, and ruin his sleep. They must have lived their lives, and died, waiting for me, and I’m not even able to tell them what happened. During the days, he realized that the stress he felt about this was ridiculous; it was not his fault.

But, he thought, at the same time, I can feel what I feel. No one else has ever been in this position . . . as far as I know. There are no other caskets lying around, certainly.

The Sylvan had very earnestly told him everything they knew about their environs and what could possibly have happened to his time, but that left him with no explanation.

Few of them had traveled very far. Some had been to the ocean, which was a five-day walk to the east. One of them had walked north to trade for copper several times, a ten-day journey through mountains.

The odd foreign traveler and trader would pass through, but they had never been concerned about trying to come up with any explanations regarding the end of the long-ago age when there had been crowds.

One man of the tribe had left, years ago, to journey south, to try and see a legendary land “of sand but no sea.” He had never returned. Some of the villagers thought he still might, one day.

Perry began to gather supplies: dried food, extra moccasins, a smaller tent. His hosts noticed, but said nothing.

“I need to journey,” he eventually told Andolen. “I have to try to find out – something. Find out anything about what happened to those crowds.”

“I know.”

“Maybe as far as the shore, and then up or down it. Or beyond the mountains. I have to try.”

“I know, Perry.”

He picked up his pack.

“Watch for bears,” she said.

“You’ve taught me well. No bear is going to bother me.”

“And catamounts. Moose, if you head north. Bison.”

“I’ll make you proud. Everyone will respect The Sylvan. You taught me how to stay alive.”

“How to stay alive? For a long time? You were already the greatest at that, Perry.”

He slung his pack over his shoulders.

“I’ll come back.”