Surprisingly enough, the sentry absorbed the concept of an aspect. He already understood that time could be described both discretely and continuously, and he not only knew how to form the different aspects but also, according to himself, was always conscious of them when he did so. My first thought was to be elated and happy for my student, to be grateful that I could have had the opportunity to teach one who knew little but was so bright that he could eventually know all; but then I thought back to the days, the weeks gone by, how absorbed the both of us would become in my lectures, and I knew that there inevitably had to have come a point where he stopped viewing my lessons as idle talk and began to dwell on them in his free time, like a proper student, which did not so much testify as to his eagerness to learn than as to my didactic prowess. I didn’t know which it was; but, in any case, either he was a good student or I a good teacher—and I was satisfied with the thought of both possibilities.
The concept of a tense, however, baffled him: though he did not complain of its difficulty, as a child complains of how much homework his teachers assign to him; he complained as a scholar who was adept enough to follow the reasoning of the theories and to ask questions as to their nature, to the extent where they became so obscure, undefinable, and complex that even I, the professor, got confused.
“You’ve spoken of progressives, perfects, and simples,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his hooves. “And now you speak of past and present combined with them. Now I know that can’t be right. You’re missing some tenses.”
I told him that it was a gray area how many unique aspects there were, that different languages have different numbers of tenses, that there was a disagreement whether or not auxiliary verbs in certain contexts were distinct tenses, and his confusion was in an area that was not as precise as he wanted it to be.
“That’s not what I meant,” he replied. “You’ve spoken of past and present—but never the future.”
“There is no future tense.”
The sentry laughed. I laughed too, but for much, much different reasons.
“Well,” he smirked, “I really don’t know what I can say to that.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Of course you would say and think that. You’re speaking of the indicative mood, after all.”
“What else would I speak of?”
“The subjunctive. In the indicative, you speak of the future; but if you were to speak in the subjunctive, you would not.”
He coughed bemusedly. “You speak all the time of how your first language is all about the subjunctive. Am I really supposed to believe that you can’t speak of the future?”
“Yes.”
The air settled around us. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears as I stared at him. He looked back, his mouth open, his eyes wide.
“What?” was all he could say.
*
We did not deal with the future; there was nothing to deal with. We did not speak of the future; we had no need. Our language was not built to display and proclaim that which we found useless. The subjunctive has no future tenses.
If you fancy yourself a pure philosopher, I can tell you right now that in this issue exists no problem that you will find substantial. Here you will find no epistemological or metaphysical conundrums to satisfy your churning mind. It is purely a linguistic one.
For the concept of a future was not unknown to us. We had both a noun and an adjective for future. We knew that the future became the present, which in its turn became the past. Even our indicative mood (though only a few of our writers and orators knew how and when to use the indicative mood), which was as vestigial and unwieldy as this language’s subjunctive, had a future tense (and from those aforementioned writers and orators, even fewer knew how to use the future tense).
Go across all races, all cultures, all languages, ask about their subjunctive and the future tense, and though you may not understand the responses given to you, I can translate them for you right now: The subjunctive has no future tenses. The future indicative? Always, and indispensable.
The future is solely a property of the indicative, not the subjunctive. I was not surprised by the sentry’s confusion.
But, remarkable enough to say, the sentry’s confusion was not exclusive to him and his race of indicatives. Plenty of scholars, myself included, have struggled to find the answer to the problem, but have inevitably come up short:
“Why does the subjunctive not have future tenses?”
So asked I during the first years of my education. A teacher (there were many) whom I posed this question to would respond with one of the following: either he would look at me in complete silence; he would give me an incredibly unsatisfying answer ripe with fallacies; or he, especially if he was old, would laugh at me.
But the question didn’t go away. When I’d finished my education, most of my research went into this problem. It became my obsession, my own Last Theorem, to which, for a good part of my studies, I dedicated all and obtained nothing. There was a reason, I knew. I tried to formalize that reason and voice it, once and for all; I tried to synchronize logic with intuition. I looked at our culture, our customs, our methods, our means, looked for anything in our way of life to find why the future tense in the subjunctive, the most important of moods, was not just unnecessary but impossible. I came up with a few arguments, but none held up to rigorous scrutiny. In the end, as in the beginning, I had no physical or scientific basis to support the fact. It was only after a certain conversation with one of my old, trusted mentors that I stopped:
“Why does this bother you so much?” he had asked.
“Because I don’t know why. I want to know why.”
“Do you think the subjunctive mood should have future tenses? That it ought to, that it must?”
“No!” I shouted. “It’s not needed.”
“Why isn’t it needed?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Yet you said that to me, ‘it’s not needed,’ with such conviction. You’re certain it’s not needed?”
“Yes. I just don’t know why!”
“Well then,” he said, smiling, “that should be enough. You’re certain it’s the case, that it can’t be any other way. So as I think. Why bother then? Do something else.”
Yes, it was yet another unsatisfying answer; but, nevertheless, it had made more sense than anything else I’d ever been told.
Even though I and my brothers and sisters had grown up with the subjunctive mood, even though no sentence went by without our using it, we would not be able tell you why the subjunctive has no future tenses. There’s a reason for it, but an ineffable one, a reason that is felt rather than voiced. It is unsatisfying to me, the scientist, to have something within me that I know yet cannot give reasons as to why I know; but to one born in the subjunctive, who operates in it—nothing else is needed. The latter holds it as axiomatic.
For my part, that question has been consigned to the same mystery as grammatical genders. Genders of nouns are supposedly arbitrary; yet they’re so consistent across languages for the same nouns, and so ingrained into the mind as true that a speaker needs not even think about it.
Unfortunately, I have to end the explanation there, because I’m sincerely unable to say more. All I can say is had you grown up with this mood, had it been a part of your life ever since your birth, you would understand why the subjunctive does not, and cannot, have future tenses; and you would understand how, even without these tenses, it’s still more useful and versatile than the indicative. We, the creatures of the subjunctive mood, the superiors, understand this intuitively, if not formally.
And we had to content ourselves with that.
*
“That’s why.”
The sentry looked down and shook his head for a long time in silence. The hair of his mane fell down around him, dejected, helpless, yearning, and rejecting.
“I know it’s an unsatisfying answer,” I went on, “but that’s all—”
“Where are you from?” he said suddenly. He had stopped listing, but his head was still lowered. I could not see his mouth or his eyes as he talked; and, for a moment, I felt that that sentence could have and had been spoken by all, by the air and the city, to elucidate every confusion, every obscurity.
“Fillydelphia,” came the stock response.
“I didn’t ask where you went to university,” he said, looking up. A certain ineffable quality traced his countenance and ended in the fluctuations of his voice, low, quiet, but carrying that malice peculiar to frustration. “Where do you and your people, with your own language and culture, come from?”
“Fillydelphia.”
“Horse apples!” he said. Though the sentry was prone to grandiose gesticulations, clapping, and general physical demonstrations to intensify his words, he did not move for this comment but stared straight at me with that same look as before. There weren’t many curses in this language, and he had used one on the lower end of the spectrum; yet, all the same, it gave to me all the intended strike of a curse with none of the implied vulgarity.
“Why?”
“The Fillydelphian accent is the most distinctive in Equestria and the most easily caricatured. It’s so recognizable that even the worst impressionist can do the most offensive and inaccurate mockery and still ponies will say: ‘That’s a Fillydelphian accent.’ Wanna see?” And he turned from me, presumably to grab the attention of another.
“You,” I quickly said, coughing, “you can . . . hardly ascribe an entire region a single accent and dialect . . .”
The sentry turned back, shaking with the weight of frenzied thoughts trying to make their escape. “But that’s just it!” he said. “Your accent is unplaceable!”
“There . . .” I stammered, “are technically—theoretically, I mean—an infinite number of accents and . . .”
“Even if you were from other places . . .” He rubbed his cheeks with a hoof, blinked rapidly, coughed, and generally took every pretense to avoid looking at me directly. “Most ponies,” he continued, “with most ponies who have unplaceable accents, it’s because they’ve been around a lot, picking up the accents as they go, till they have their unique blend. But always you can sort of say ‘his accent sounds kind of like the accent of so-and-so a country’ or ‘it sounds as if she has lived in so-and-so an area a while’—but you? Your accent . . . it’s a ghost. I’m not even sure it’s from this world.”
I didn’t say anything. It was only now that the sentry looked at me, albeit hesitantly. I couldn’t help but look away.
There was a long silence. I knew he felt as though everything I’d said to him, not just the fabricated stories of my origin but also my lectures, were terribly unimportant in the face of this question. I felt as though I had lost something—what exactly, I couldn’t say.
He sighed, nodded respectfully, and stood up. “I have to go,” he mumbled. “So you’re not going to tell me where you’re from?”
Again, I said nothing.
“You are a very strange thing, Dr. Errenax,” he murmured, casting me a sidelong glance. “A very . . . very strange . . . eccentric . . . mysterious thing.”
“Then arrest me,” I whispered.
He laughed and turned to me. He had not yet assumed the mien of a soldier. When he spoke next, I knew that he was not the sentry I referred to him as but the pony Foil.
“Arrest you?” he said, laughing once more. “Last time I checked, being strange and mysterious wasn’t illegal. Frustrating, yes, unbelievably frustrating . . . but not illegal.”
When he moved away as a soldier, he marched hesitantly, twitching his neck as he strained not to look back, as though he were being ordered to retreat from a battlefield the enemy was still storming.