The idea that human children might be stolen by the fairies, and taken to a land where time passes far more slowly than it does on earth, was a common one in superstitious days. The idea was compounded, rather paradoxically, out of hope and fear: the hope of immortality and eternal youth; the fear of becoming alien and inhuman.
The time into which I was born was, by contrast, an era of antisuperstition and exotic manufacture, in which all children were told that they had every chance of becoming emortal, returning to the full flower of young adulthood again and again and again. We had not entirely given up our anxieties, because we knew about the Miller Effect and had conceived the idea of robotization, but we were bold pioneers and we put our fears aside.
Even so, my world bore certain significant similarities to the world of medieval legend, which helped pave the way for new Tam Lins.
I could have changed the name my foster parents gave me, but I never wanted to. I accepted it as my own, and something precious. I know now that I was right to do so.
The Faerie of my first youth was the world of PicoCon and OmicronA, pioneers and manufacturers of nanotechnology. These friendly rivals sold to my peers the successive generations of Internal Technology that were supposed to constitute the escalator to emortality. That Faerie had no queen, but it did have a dictator of sorts: a shadowy committee known only by a rich assortment of nicknames, including the Inner Circle, the Secret Masters, the Dominant Shareholders, and the Hardinist Cabal. Even a man forewarned
by his name could never have guessed that he might become a changeling by virtue of their endeavors, but I never knew how fortunate my name was until I became a helpless traveler in time, in dire need of redemption. It was, of course, a fluke of chance; those responsible for my plight took no account whatsoever of my name. But when I woke up, everything I felt and did thereafter was colored by my consciousness of my name. My surname helped to define the quality of the experience, and to control the way I navigated myself through it.
It helped, too, that I arrived in a world where all names were chosen, some more carefully than others. Those chosen names imprinted their back-stories on the pattern of events with a force and irony that could only be appreciated by someone as fascinated by names as I was or so I believe. That is why I am telling you this story. The people who have asked me to do it have asked for a history, but it is not that. It has always seemed to me that stories which pass themselves off as histories ought to be conscientiously hi lofty, distant, and imperious while my character and profile have always been obstinately lo, working from beneath rather than above, craftily rather than authoritatively.
I am, therefore, happy to leave the history of our adventure to the expert pen of my good friend Mortimer Gray; my own account is nothing but a lostory, more comedy than drama, more cautionary tale than epic. Others will doubtless offer their own accounts of the events of the Last of the Final Wars, many of whom were fortunate enough or unfortunate enough to be far closer to the action than I was, but I dare to hope that my poor lostory might cut more deeply than its rivals to the bone and marrow of the tale.
When I underwent the adventure described herein I was not the man I am now. I was a fearful stranger in a world that I had not even begun to understand but no matter how crippling that disadvantage might be to a historian it is no disadvantage at all to a storyteller of the lower kind. Every tale requires a teller, no matter how impersonal he may pretend to be, and there are tales for which the fearful stranger obsessed by his own petty plight is the ideal narrator.
I have the aid of hindsight now, but I shall try to reserve its additional insights for the occasional sidebar and tell the story itself as it actually unfolded around me and in my mind or as it seemed to unfold, given that I was never able to find the experience entirely convincing while I was in the thick of it.
How did Tam Lin feel, do you think, when he first met Janet of Carterhaugh? He had a reputation as a ghost, and she must have taken him for one at first, but how did he see himself and the world he had forsaken? Must they not have seemed like fragments of a dream, after so long a sojourn in Faerie?
How did Tam Lin recover his sense of the reality of Janets world, and his sense of his own reality within it? The ballad does not say, because that is not the function of ballads, whose ambitions are essentially low, compared to the lofty pretentions of history. Ballads engage and provoke the imagination; they do not satisfy it. This is a different kind of lostory, and I must try harder to answer such questions or at least to point out their relevance but there will always be something of the balladeer in me, because my name requires it.
This is the way that I imagine it.