To Sail Beyond The Sunset

Could this possibly be my own time line during the reign of the Prophets? (The twenty-first century, more or less - ) The fact that they know of Santa Carolita lends plausibility to the idea, but this does not match too well with any accounts that I have read of America under the Prophets. So far as I know the Time Corps does not www.computerbooksstore.ru maintain an office in Kansas City in the twenty-first century on time line two.

If I could hire a ‘copter and a pilot I would search fifty miles south of here and attempt to find Thebes, where I was born. If I found it, it would give me an anchor to reality. If I failed to find it, that would tell me that after a while some husky nurses would take me out of this wetpack and feed me.

If I had any money. If I could get away from these ghouls. If I wasn't afraid of the Supreme Bishop's proctors. If I didn't think it would get my arse shot off in the air.

Lizzie has promised to buy me a harness for Pixel. Not to walk him on a leash (impossible! ) but to carry a message. The bit of string around his neck that I used on my last attempt apparently did not work. He may have clawed away that bit of paper, or broken the string.

Ishtar set a date seventeen months after my arrival in Boondock for rendezvous with the persons involved in rescuing me in 1982: Theodore/Lazarus/Woodrow (I have to think of him as three persons in one, like another Trinity), his clone-sisters Lapis Lazuli and Lorelei Lee, Elizabeth Andrew Jackson Libby Long, Zeb and Deety Carter, Hilda Mae and Jacob Burroughs, and two sentient computers both animating ships, Gay Deceives and Dora. Ishtar had assured Hilda (and me) that seventeen months would be long enough to make me young again.

Ishtar pronounced me done in only fifteen months. I can't give details of my rejuvenation because I knew nothing of such details at the time - not until I was accepted as an apprentice technician years later, after I had become the Boondock equivalent of RN and MD. At the medical school hospital and at the rejuvenation clinic they use a drug tagged ‘Lethe' that lets one do horrid things to a patient but not have him even recall that they happened. So I do not remember the bad days of my rejuvenation but only the pleasant, lazy ones during which I read Theodore's memoirs, as edited by Justin. .. and I spotted the authentic Woodie touch; the raconteur lied whenever he felt like it.

But it was fascinating. Theodore really had felt moral qualms about coupling with me. My goodness! You can take the boy out of the Bible Belt, but you can never quite take the Bible Belt out of the boy. Not even centuries later and after experiencing other and often better cultures utterly unlike Missouri.

One thing in those memoirs made me proud of my ‘naughty' son: he seems to have always been incapable of abandoning wife and child. Since (in my opinion) much of the decay that led to the decline and fall of the United States had to do with males who shrugged off their duty to pregnant women and young children, I found myself willing to forgive my ‘bad boy' for all his foibles since he never wavered in this prime virtue. A male must be willing to live and to die for his female and their cubs. .. else he is nothing.

Woodrow, selfish as he was in many respects, in this acid test measured up.

I was delighted to learn just how intensely Theodore had wanted my body. Since I had wanted him with burning intensity, it warmed me all through to read proof that he had wanted me just as badly. I had never been quite sure of it at the time (a woman in heat can be an awful fool) and was still less sure of it as the years wore on. Yet here was proof: eyes open, he shoved his head into the lion's mouth for me - for my sake he had enlisted in a war that was not his. .. and ‘got his arse shot off as his sisters expressed it. (His sisters - my daughters. Goodness! )

In addition to Lazarus' memoirs, I read histories that Justin gave me. I also learned Galacta by the total-immersion method. After my first two weeks in Boondock I asked that no English whatever be spoken around me and asked Teena for the Galacta edition of Theodore's memoirs and reread them in that language. Soon I was fluent in Galacta and beginning to think in it. Galacta is rooted in Spanglish, the auxiliary language that was beginning to be used for trade and engineering purposes up and down the two Americas in the twentieth century, a devised language formed by taking the intersection of English and Spanish and manipulating that vocabulary by Hispanic grammar - somewhat simplified for the benefit of Anglophonic users of this lingua franca.

At a later time Lazarus told me that Spanglish had been adopted as the official language for space pilots back at the time of the Space Precautionary Ad, when all licensed space pilots were employees of Spaceways Ltd, or some other Harriman Industries subsidiary. He told me that Galacta was still recognisably the same language as Spanglish centuries, millennia, later - although with a much amplified vocabulary - much the same way and for the same reasons that the Latin of the Caesars had been conserved and augmented for thousands of years by the Church of Rome. Each language filled a need that kept it alive and growing.

‘I always wanted to live in a world designed by Maxfield Parrish - and now I do! ' These words open a journal I started to write, early in my rejuvenation, to keep my thoughts straight in the face of the culture shock I felt in being lifted bodily out of the Crazy Years of Tellus Prime - and plunked down in the almost Apollonian culture of Tellus Tertius.

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was a romantic artist of my time and place who used a realistic style and technique to paint a world more beautiful than any ever seen - a world of cloud-capped towers and gorgeous girls and breath-stopping mountain peaks. If ‘Maxfield Parrish blue' means nothing to you, go to the museum of BIT and enjoy the MP collection there, ‘stolen' by means of a replicating pantograph from twentieth century museums on the east coast of North America (and one painting in the lobby of the Broadmoor) by a Time Corps private mission paid for by the Senior, Lazarus Long - a birthday present to his mother on her one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday to celebrate the silver anniversary of their marriage.

Yes, my naughty-boy son Woodrow married me, sandbagged into it by his co-wives and brother husbands, as a result of their having sandbagged me into it - a working majority of them; Woodrow had three of his wives with him, his twin clone-sisters and Elizabeth who used to be Andrew Libby before his reincarnation as a woman.