Deathless asking:
"'Who can make a medicine against time?'" (p. 250)
- echoes Carl Farness of the Time Patrol saying that, against time, the gods themselves are powerless.
A Taoist, asked how he would survive under Mao, responded, "Would it not be laughable if a life-long follower of the Lord Lao were to fear change?" However, human beings experience two qualitatively different kinds of change. Taoists like Tu Shan and shamans like Deathless are familiar with the cyclical seasonal change of agricultural societies but not with the linear historical change of urban civilizations. (I suggest elsewhere that Christianity, with its death-and-resurrection presented not as a perennial myth but as an historical event, is at the crossroads between two kinds of time - time being a function of change.)
Deathless says:
"'I have known change. I have felt time rush by like a river in flood...'" (ibid.)
- but this, as he has just indicated, has been the immemorial change of birth and death, not the disruptive change of technological innovation. He stops seeking omens because "'The future has become too strange...'" (p. 253). He has learned that nothing is forever. When his people must or will change their way of life, he walks away to seek renewal or death.
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