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NOTE FOR THE READER

Much of this book’s action takes place in the future, and the characters taking part in that action are, of course, future characters. In the more than three hundred years postulated between the present and the novel’s setting, with a massive catastrophe in between, a great deal would have happened to our language. It may well have become unrecognizable to the reader of today.

As a reminder of this fact, fabricated words (some will look like typos or misspellings!) are used for flavoring throughout to remind the reader that a different—or greatly modified—language is being spoken by people living in, or originating in, the future. (This of course will not be true of the present-day characters who appear in the final chapters of the book!)

In the “future” language:

Day, days are rendered as Dae, daez.

Night, nights are niot, niots.

These words hold in combinations: middae, midniot, dae-light, overniot.

Sike is used for year; tenite, meaning ten nights, is the unit of temporal measurement used instead of “week.” Mont is used instead of month.

Lens and lenses become len and lens.

Some changes in common punctuation practices are also employed to contribute to that future “flavoring.”

—Lloyd Biggle, Jr.