There once lived a king who was troubled by the past.
It was not that he regretted anything he had done. On the contrary, he considered himself an exemplary monarch. His difficulty was that other people kept remembering things differently from the way they remembered them yesterday.
A minister who had praised a royal decree would later criticise it. A judge who had declared a law just would sometimes declare it unjust. Even the royal philosophers, who were employed to establish what could be known with certainty, occasionally announced that they had changed their minds.
The king found this intolerable.
“What is the purpose of wisdom,” he demanded, “if it cannot remain wise?”
His ministers consulted the royal philosophers, who met for forty days in the Hall of Immutable Truth. At the end of their deliberations, they presented the king with a proposal.
The kingdom, they advised, should abolish yesterday.
The king was delighted. He issued a decree that from that day forward, the past would have no legal existence. Once a day had ended, all claims concerning what had been thought, said or done on that day would become inadmissible. No citizen could be accused of inconsistency with an earlier statement. No judge could be challenged for reversing a decision. No philosopher could be asked to explain why a conclusion he now rejected had once seemed compelling.
The royal scribes were instructed to remove all dates from the records. The royal historians were dismissed. The royal schools ceased teaching history and began teaching the correct interpretation of the present.
For a time, the kingdom prospered.
The king's ministers agreed with him more frequently than ever before. The judges delivered their verdicts with unprecedented confidence. The philosophers published a new book every morning, each establishing truths that had never previously been in doubt.
The king himself became famous for his consistency.
When an ambassador reminded him that he had once promised to lower the taxes, the king replied that the promise belonged to yesterday and therefore had never existed. When a farmer complained that the king had ordered a bridge to be built across a river that had since changed course, the king explained that the bridge had been entirely appropriate at the time of its construction, which was a time that could no longer be discussed.
The farmer went away satisfied, although he still had to travel forty miles to cross the river.
The king's chief philosopher was especially pleased. He announced that the kingdom had at last escaped the tyranny of experience.
“Experience,” he explained, “is merely the present contaminated by what is no longer present.”
The king awarded him a gold medal.
Then, gradually, peculiar things began to happen.
The roads became difficult to maintain. A road that had once led to a thriving village now ended in a field, but nobody could remember why it had been built. A stone bridge crossed a stream that no longer flowed beneath it. A mountain pass had been closed by a landslide, yet the royal maps continued to show the road as open, since the landslide belonged to a day that had ceased to exist.
The king ordered the roads repaired.
His engineers asked for the original plans.
“Those are records of yesterday,” the king replied. “You know that yesterday has been abolished.”
The engineers attempted to reconstruct the plans from the roads themselves, but the roads had been built in response to circumstances they were forbidden to remember. They could see where the roads went, but not why they went there.
The repairs were abandoned.
Next, the kingdom's orchards began to fail. The royal gardeners had forgotten which varieties of apple flourished in which soils, when the trees had been pruned, and why certain orchards had been planted in sheltered valleys. They retained their knowledge of gardening, but each morning they were required to begin again from the garden as it stood that day.
When the harvest failed, the chief gardener explained that the trees had not obeyed the royal decree.
He was dismissed.
The king was increasingly annoyed. He summoned the chief philosopher.
“Why does the abolition of yesterday seem to have made everything more difficult?”
The philosopher thought for a long time.
“Perhaps, Your Majesty, we have not abolished yesterday thoroughly enough.”
The king ordered a second decree. Henceforth, no one could refer even indirectly to anything that had occurred before the present moment. The kingdom's clocks were redesigned so that they displayed only the hour, without indicating whether it was advancing or retreating. The royal astronomers were forbidden to compare observations. The physicians could no longer consult a patient's earlier symptoms, and the royal physicians began treating every illness as if it had appeared without warning.
The kingdom became quieter.
People stopped telling stories about their childhoods. Friends no longer recalled old quarrels or the occasions on which they had forgiven one another. Craftsmen ceased passing their techniques from one generation to the next, because instruction required the telling of what had been learned before. Even parents found it difficult to explain anything to their children.
The king, however, remained satisfied. His ministers continued to agree with him, and his philosophers continued to publish.
One afternoon, while inspecting the palace gardens, the king encountered a child sitting beside a dry fountain.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Waiting for the water.”
“There is no water.”
“There used to be.”
The king stopped.
The child looked up at him. “My grandmother told me that the fountain once flowed all year. She said the water came from a spring beneath the hill.”
“Your grandmother has been speaking of yesterday,” said the king. “That is forbidden.”
“But the spring is still there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we dug down to find it.”
The king stared at the child.
“You dug?”
“My grandmother and I. We found the old channel. It was blocked by stones. We cleared some of them, but we couldn't finish.”
“Why did you not ask the royal engineers?”
“They said there was no reason to dig, because the fountain had no water.”
The king looked at the dry basin. For the first time, he wondered whether the kingdom had lost something more than its records.
He asked the child to show him the spring.
Together they walked behind the fountain and descended a narrow path into the hillside. There, beneath a tangle of roots, lay a stone channel. The child had cleared enough of it for a thin thread of water to emerge. It trickled between the stones and disappeared into the earth.
The king knelt beside it.
“Can you make the fountain flow again?” he asked.
“I don't know,” said the child. “But we could try.”
The king returned to the palace and summoned his engineers. He told them to restore the fountain, and when they asked for the original plans, he did not forbid them to consult the old records. He asked instead whether they could discover what the builders had understood about the hill, the spring and the channel.
The engineers searched the abandoned archives. They found drawings, measurements, accounts of floods, descriptions of the soil and letters exchanged between the original builders. Some records contradicted others. Some were incomplete. But together they revealed how the fountain had once worked.
The engineers restored the channel.
When the water rose through the basin, the king ordered a celebration. He invited the philosophers, the ministers and the judges, and he announced that the kingdom had achieved a new kind of consistency: one that permitted people to change their minds without requiring the world to forget what they had thought before.
The chief philosopher objected.
“Your Majesty, this appears to reinstate yesterday.”
“Not entirely,” said the king. “Only those parts of it that might help us understand today.”
“But who shall determine which parts are relevant?”
The king looked at the fountain.
“I do not know. Perhaps we shall have to learn.”
The philosopher considered resigning, but he could not remember whether he had already done so.
In the years that followed, the kingdom slowly recovered its roads, its gardens and its craft. The royal historians were recalled, though their salaries remained modest. The schools began teaching children how things had changed, and the philosophers were permitted to disagree with their earlier books, provided that they did not insist those books had never been written.
The king never entirely overcame his dislike of the past. Whenever someone reminded him of an unfortunate decision, he would still mutter that yesterday was an inconvenience.
But he no longer tried to abolish it.
He had learned, at least, that a kingdom could not move forward by making it impossible to discover where it had been.
And the fountain continued to flow, carrying water from the hidden spring beneath the hill, through stones laid by hands no living person had ever seen, into a basin where children gathered to play.
One day, a little girl asked her grandmother who had built the fountain.
The grandmother told her the story.
“And was the king right to abolish yesterday?” the girl asked.
The grandmother watched the water for a while.
“I think,” she said, “he was right to want tomorrow to be different.”
“But why did he abolish yesterday?”
“Perhaps he thought that was the only way to make it so.”
The girl considered this, then dipped her hand into the water.
“I'm glad he changed his mind.”
“So am I,” said the grandmother.
Neither of them asked whether the king would have agreed.
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