To Sail Beyond the Sunset

  Between here and there is the unmistakable tall shaft of the War Memorial…but it is not the War Memorial in this universe; it is the Sacred Phallus of the Great Inseminator.

  (It reminds me of the time Lazarus tried to check the historicity of the man known as Yeshua or Joshua or Jesus. He had not been able to track Him down through census or tax records of that time at Nazareth or Bethlehem, so he went looking for the most prominent event in the legend: the Crucifixion. He did not find it. Oh, he found crucifixions on Golgotha all right—but just common criminals, no political evangelists, no godstruck young rabbis. He tried again and again, using various theories to date it…and got so frustrated that he started calling it the “Crucifiction.” His current theory involves a really strong Fabulist of the second century Julian.)

  The only time I’ve been outdoors here was the night of Fiesta de Carolita…and then I saw only the big park in which the Fiesta was held (Swope Park?), with many bonfires and flambeaux, endless bodies wearing masks and body paint, and the most amazing gang bang I have ever heard of, even in Rio. And a witches’ esbat, but you can see those anywhere if you hold the Sign and know the Word. (I was stooled in Santa Fe in 1976, Wicca rite.)

  But it is amusing to see one held right out in public, on the one night of the year when correct dress for a sabbat or esbat wouldn’t be noticed and odd behavior is the order of the day. What chutzpah!

  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 any accounts that I have read of America under the Prophets. So far as I know the Time Corps does not 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 Deceiver 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 M.D. 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 have him not 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 been always 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’s 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 as vocabulary 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 clear back at the time of the Space Precautionary Act, when all licensed space pilots were employees of Spaceways, Ltd., or some other Harriman Industries subsidiary. He told me that Galacta was still recognizably 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 was a romantic artist of my time and place (1870-1966) 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 M.P. 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 125th 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.

  At that time (Galactic 4324) the Long family had seven adults in residence: Ira Weatheral, Galahad, Justin Foote, Hamadryad, Tamara, Ishtar, and Minerva. Galahad, Justin, Ishtar, and Tamara you have met; Ira Weatheral was the executive of such government as Boondock had (not much); Hamadryad was his daughter who had obviously made a pact with the Devil; Minerva was a slender, long-haired brunette who had had a car
eer of more than two centuries as an administrative computer before getting Ishtar’s assistance in becoming flesh and blood through an assembled-clone technique.

  They picked Galahad and Tamara to propose to me.

  I had no plans to get married. I had married once “till death do us part”—and it had turned out not to be that durable. I was most happy to be living in Boondock, my cup overflowed at growing young again, and I was looking forward with almost unbearable delight at the expectation of being again in Theodore’s arms. But marriage? Why take vows that are usually broken?

  Galahad said, “Mama Maureen, these vows will not be broken. We simply promise each other to share in taking care of our children—support them and spank them and love them and teach them, whatever it takes. Now believe me, this is how to do it. Marry us now; settle it with Lazarus later. We love him—but we know him. In an emergency Lazarus is the fastest gun in the Galaxy. But hand him a simple little social problem and he’ll dither around about it, trying to see all sides to arrive at the perfect answer. So the only way to win an argument with Lazarus is to present him with an accomplished fact. He’ll be home now in a few weeks—Ishtar knows the exact hour. If he finds you married into the family and already pregnant, he will simply shut up and marry you himself. If you will have him.”

  “In marrying all of you, am I not marrying Lazarus, too?”

  “Not necessarily. Both Hamadryad and Ira were members of our founding family group. But it took several years before Ira admitted that there was no reason for him not to marry his own daughter—Hamadryad just smiled and outwaited him. Then we held a special wedding ceremony just for them and what a luau that was! Honest, Mama Maureen, our arrangements are flexible; the only invariant is that everybody guarantees the future of any babies you pretty little broads give us. We don’t even ask where you got them…since some of you tend to be vague about such things.”

  Tamara interrupted to tell me that Ishtar watches such matters. (Galahad tends to joke. Tamara doesn’t know how to joke. But she loves everybody.) So later that day I said my vows with all of them, standing in the middle of their beautiful atrium garden (our garden!)—crying and smiling and all of them touching me and Ira sniffling and Tamara smiling while tears ran down her face, and we all said, “I do!” together and they all kissed me, and I knew they were mine and I was theirs, forever and ever, amen.

  I got pregnant at once because Ishtar had timed it so that our wedding and my ovulation matched—Ira and Ishtar had planned the whole thing. (When I had that baby girl, after the usual cow-or-countess gestation period, I asked Ishtar about the baby’s paternity. She said, “Mama Maureen, that one is from all your husbands; you don’t need to know. After you’ve had four or five more, if you are still curious, I’ll sort them out for you.” I never asked again.)

  So I was pregnant when Theodore returned, which suited me just fine…as I was sure from past experience that he would greet me more heartily and with less restraint if he knew that it was certain that copulation with me would be solely for love—and sweet pleasure—and sheer, sweaty fun. Not for progeny.

  And so it was. But at a party that started out with Theodore fainting dead away. Hilda Mae, the head of the task force that rescued me, had rigged a surprise party for Theodore, in which she had presented me to him dressed in a costume of high symbology to him—heeled slippers, long sheer hose, green garters—at a time when he thought that I was still in Albuquerque two millennia earlier and still in need of rescue.

  Hilda did not intend to shock Theodore so sharply that he fainted—she loves him, and later she married Theodore and all of us, along with her husband and family—Hilda does not have a mean bone in her little elfin body. She caught Theodore as he fainted, or tried to, and he wasn’t hurt and the party developed into one of the best since Rome burned. Hilda Mae has many other talents, in and out of bed, but she is the best party arranger in any world.

  A couple of years later Hilda was director general of the biggest party ever held anywhere, bigger than the Field of the Cloth of Gold: the First Centennial Convention of the Interuniversal Society for Eschatological Pantheistic Multiple-Ego Solipsism, with guests from dozens of universes. It was a wonderful party and the few people killed in the games went straight to Valhalla—I saw them go. From that party our family gained several more husbands and wives—eventually, not all in one day—especially Hazel Stone aka Gwen Novak who is as dear to me as Tamara, and Dr. Jubal Harshaw, the one of my husbands to whom I turn when I truly need advice.

  It was to Jubal that I turned many years later when I found that despite all the wonders of Boondock and Tertius, all the loving happiness of being a cherished member of the Long Family, despite the satisfaction of studying the truly advanced therapy of Tertius and Secundus, and at last being apprenticed to the best profession of all, rejuvenator, something was missing.

  I had never stopped thinking about my father, missing him always, with an ache in my heart.

  Consider these facts:

  1) Lib had been raised from dead, a frozen corpse, and reincarnated as a woman.

  2) I had been rescued from certain death, across the centuries. (When an eighteen-wheeler runs over a person my size, they pick up the remains with blotting paper.)

  3) Colonel Richard Campbell had twice been rescued from certain death and had had history changed simply to calm his soul, because his services were needed to save the computer that led the Lunar Revolution on time line three.

  4) Theodore himself had been missing in action, chopped half in two by machine-gun fire…yet he had been rescued and restored without even a scar.

  5) My father was “missing in action,” too. The AFS didn’t even get around to reporting him as missing until long after the fact and there were no details.

  6) In the thought experiment called “Schrödinger’s Cat” the scientists(?), or philosophers, or metaphysicians, who devised it, maintain that the cat is neither dead nor alive but simply a fog of probabilities, until somebody opens the box.

  I don’t believe it. I don’t think Pixel would believe it.

  But—Is my father alive? or dead? away back there in the twentieth century?

  So I spoke to Jubal about it.

  He said, “I can’t tell you, Mama Maureen. How badly do you want your father to be alive?”

  “More than anything in the world!”

  “Enough to risk everything on it? Your life? Still worse, the chance of disappointment? Of knowing that all hope is gone?”

  I sighed deeply. “Yes. All of that.”

  “Then join the Time Corps and learn how such things are done. In a few years—ten to twenty years, I would guess—you will be able to form an intelligent opinion.”

  “‘Ten to twenty years’!”

  “It could take longer. But the great beauty about time manipulations is that there is always plenty of time, never any hurry.”

  When I told Ishtar that I wanted to take an indefinite leave of absence, she did not ask me why. She simply said, “Mama, I have known for some time that you were not happy in this work; I have been waiting for you to discover it.”

  She kissed me. “Perhaps next century you will find a true vocation for this work. There is no hurry. Meanwhile, be happy.”

  So for about twenty years of my personal time line and almost seven years of Boondock time I went where I was told to go and reported on what I was told to investigate. Never as a fighter. Not like Gretchen, whose first baby is descended both from me (Colonel Ames is my grandson through Lazarus) and from my co-wife Hazel/Gwen (Gretchen is Hazel’s great-granddaughter)—Major Gretchen is a big, strong, strapping Valkyrie, reputed to be sudden death with or without weapons.

  Fighting is not for Maureen. But the Time Corps needs all sorts. My talent for languages and my love of history makes me suitable to be sent to “scout the Land of Canaan”—or Nippon in the 1930s—or whatever country or planet needs scouting. My only other talent is sometimes useful, too.

  So wi
th twenty years of practice and some preliminary research in history of time line two, second phase of the Permanent War, I signed off for a weekend and bought a ticket on a Burroughs-Carter time-space bus, one with a scheduled stop in New Liverpool, 1950, intending to scout the history of the 1939-1945 War a little closer up. Hilda had developed a thriving black-market trade through the universes; one of her companies supplied scheduled services to the explored time lines and planets for a bracket of dates—exact date of choice available if you pay for it.

  The bus driver had just announced “New Liverpool Earth Prime 1950 time line two next stop! Don’t leave any personal possessions aboard”—when there was a loud noise, the bus lurched, a trip attendant said, “Emergency exit—this way, please”—and somebody handed me a baby, there was much smoke, and I saw a man with a bloody stump where his right arm should have been.

  I guess I passed out, as I don’t remember what happened next.

  I woke up in bed with Pixel and a corpse.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Pixel to The Rescue

  After that Mad Tea Party in which I woke up in bed with a cat and a corpse in Grand Hotel Augustus, Pixel and I wound up in the office of Dr. Eric Ridpath, house physician, where we met his office nurse, Dagmar Dobbs—a gal who was at once awarded Pixel’s stamp of approval. Dagmar was giving me a GYN examination, when she told me that tonight was La Fiesta de Santa Carolita.

  It is a good thing that just before she put me on the table she had required me to pee in a cup, or I might have peed in her face.

  As I have explained in excessive detail, “Santa Carolita” is my daughter Carol, born in Gregorian 1902 at Kansas City on Tellus Prime, time line two, code Leslie LeCroix.

  Lazarus Long had initiated “Carol’s Day” on June twenty-sixth, 1918 Gregorian, as a rite of passage for Carol, marking her transition from childhood to womanhood. Lazarus toasted Carol in champagne, telling her what a wonderful thing it was to be a woman, naming for her both the privileges and the responsibilities of her new and exalted status, and declaring that June twenty-sixth should then and forever be known as “Carol’s Day.”