Exponential

As a child, I knew the world was the way it was, and that was that. Changes, even small ones, were difficult to accept. I knew that the world was and would remain static. Our enclave of skin tents in the forest was where I would live, hunting and raising a family, for my entire life.

I should’ve paid more attention when the elders talked about how fast the humans advanced. The elders understood that human advancement was exponential, even if they didn’t have the language or math to describe it.

Still, I began training as a far-speaker before I took my first step or said my first word. By the time I was nearing adulthood, humans were putting down metal rails and wires in the east. Humans had no far-speakers, but could send messages along the wires, the elders said.

These humans were different, the elders had said. They said that the light-skinned humans in odd clothes were “English” and carried a curse in their touch. I don’t know how much I believed them, but enough that I feared the “English” and wouldn’t go near them.

The other humans, the ones that had come long before, wore clothes like our own. We spoke enough of the other’s language that we traded with them and shared knowledge of game movements, weather warnings from our seer, and anything relating to the “English.”

I took my first wandering when I reached the age of adulthood, at sixty. Traveling with only my bow, a spear, and what I could carry on my back, I left the forest and wandered the plains. It was there that I fell in love with a human woman, Stands In Grass.

She was far younger than I in years, but in terms of a human lifespan, my peer. I stayed with her tribe for an entire year, becoming fluent in their language and teaching her mine.

I took part in one of their horse raids on a neighboring tribe and was accepted as a brave after. For the next forty years, the only contact I had with my own people was by far-speaking. My name in the tribe became Sharp-Ears Holds Spear.

The time I lived with the tribe was my first real introduction to the rapid pace of human change. We had no children, sadly. Of course, I know now how rare non-assisted human-elf pregnancies are. Still, I never wavered in my love for Stands, nor she for me.

In no time at all, she grew old before my eyes. It was forty years and six days after I moved into her family’s tipi that I held her head in my lap as she took her last breath. Far too short a time.

Still, I looked at my belongings in the tipi. My headdress, my winter rabbit-fur pants and jacket, a bison shawl, my summer breechcloth, the buckskins I was wearing, and — beside my spears and bow — a rifle I’d taken from a Blackfeet brave.

I dressed Stands in her two-skin dress, best moccasins, and all her jewelry and regalia. Since we were the only ones living in the tipi, I moved everything out of it and used it for the viewing. For two days I sat beside her as the tribe came to pay their respects.

She had no surviving kin, so it was up to me alone to bury her. The chief, who was just a child when I first arrived, offered his family’s help. I was glad of it, as the ground was beginning to freeze.

I returned home to the forest after that, no longer feeling at home among the Newe. I gave away all but my best horse, my bow, my favorite spear, my rifle, and the buckskins I wore.

When I rode in on my horse, I expected surprise from my kin at the horse and rifle. Instead, I found a number of horses, rifles, pistols, and even a few pieces of Cavalry clothing that had been “cleansed” by the healers.

The rate of change started to become clear. The elders were correct; every human innovation was built on top of earlier innovations. The more that humans invented, the more — and faster — they would come up with new miracles. Their towns spread across the land and grew into cities.

Still, I felt there was a certain permanence to the world itself. The sun rose and set, the seasons changed, and the world was immune to the short lives of the creatures on her skin…including us. I still clung to the illusion of permanence.

When I look back on it now, I realize that at just over a hundred years old, I was still young and naïve. The more the humans spread, bringing with them orcs, halflings, gnomes, and others, the less we saw them as cursed.

We were, by small, gradual steps, assimilated into the United States of America. At some point, we dispersed. Not all at once, of course, but one by one we moved to the towns and cities.

I moved to San Francisco when the railroad was completed across the former hunting grounds of the tribes. The nearest city, Cheyenne, had a telegraph office, and no use for a far-speaker like me.

In California I met humans who spoke languages that had no relation to that of the tribes and little or no relation to English. I learned the languages of those around me — Spanish, Mandarin, German — and took employment wherever I could find it.

At the start of the Great War, I enlisted. The presence of far-speakers was a boon for the Army. They had the new “wireless” devices that had about a two-thousand-yard range, weather permitting. Far-speakers, however, could communicate over tens of miles.

There were few of us, but it made a difference. During the war, I realized how outdated and useless was my Henry repeater rifle compared to the new firearms. At the war’s close, I returned to San Francisco and sold my repeater to a collector for four dollars.

Horses and carriages disappeared from the streets. Streetcars and automobiles took their place. Steam and diesel ships plied the oceans, and the air over the south of the city was often black with coal smoke. Meanwhile, I got a formal education, all the way up to a bachelor’s degree.

When the Second World War rolled around, there was no more need of far-speakers. The new radios could communicate over hundreds of miles and didn’t require years of training or any magical ability.

I re-enlisted and found myself trained as a B-29 radio operator and gunner in the Army Air Forces. I spent two combat tours in Europe, — forty-eight combat missions flown — often limping home in a bomber that resembled Swiss cheese.

After the war, I decided I needed to slow down, go somewhere that didn’t grow and change as rapidly as San Francisco. The crew training I’d received had been at a military airfield outside the small city of Phoenix, Arizona.

At one tenth the population of San Francisco, it seemed perfect. Sure, the city had ramped up some for war production and distribution, but with the war over that was certain to come to a halt, especially given the nature of the place.

Faster than I could have imagined, Phoenix grew from an agricultural center to a major industrial area. From the city itself, the suburbs sprawled across the inhospitable desert like a spreading infection.

In recent years, I’ve looked at the housing development that has taken over what used to be the fields where I labored, and sometimes wondered why I haven’t moved. My house was still newish when I bought it after the war. Now it sits as an anachronistic piece of architecture amidst carbon-copy homes.

If life has taught me anything, it’s that the only constant thing is change. Not just tools and weapons, but politics, morals, social ethics, utopian ideals, and the very earth itself. Like everyone else, I’ve been pulled along by those changes.

After the fields got paved over, I finished out a doctorate in the history of indigenous Americans, with a focus on how the indigenous elves and humans interacted. There’s an old joke about elves being history teachers because they all lived it. In my case, it’s true.

Every year since I began teaching this course in 1962, I have my freshmen students make a list of every technical and social advancement that has been made since their birth. I do this exercise as an eye opener of sorts; get the students thinking about the rate of change in the world. They all know the adage, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” but they don’t really grasp its importance.

As the students see the ever-lengthening list over the years, it becomes clear just how easy it is to be blind to recent history. “The noise and clamor of change drowns out the lessons of the past,” I tell them, “unless you are careful to pay attention.”

This was typed on a computer in an air-conditioned room, under LED lighting, while trying to avoid the messages on my cell — the most recent iteration of the far-speakers, telegraph, phones, wireless, and so on. What will replace that, I don’t know, but I’ll be here to see it, probably sooner than anyone expects.

That is both the blessing and curse of being an elf in a world where humans have almost completely taken over. Not through conquest, but through their ever-increasing rate of invention. In a world where change occurs at an exponential rate, nothing is static, there is no permanence, tomorrow is not predictable…and I can finally say, I’m okay with that.