To Sail Beyond the Sunset (55 page)

“Yes, he’s your son.”

“No, no! I mean that Captain Lazarus Long whom I knew as Theodore is a dead ringer—sorry, a twin-brother image—of my son Woodrow Wilson Smith. I hadn’t realized it. Of course, in the brief time I knew Captain Long, my son Woodrow Wilson was only five years old; they did not look alike then, or nothing anyone would notice. So my son Woodrow grew up to look like his remote descendant. Strange. I find I’m touched by it.”

Ishtar looked at Tamara. They exchanged words in a language I did not know (Galacta, it was). But I could hear worry in their voices.

Ishtar said soberly, “Mama Maureen, Lazarus Long is your son Woodrow Wilson.”

“No, no,” I said. “I saw Woodrow just a few months ago. He was, uh, sixty-nine at the time but looked much younger. He looked just as Captain Long looks in this picture—an amazing resemblance. But Woodrow is back in the twentieth century. I know.”

“Yes, he is, Mama Maureen. Was, I mean, although Elizabeth tells me the two tenses are equivalent. Woodrow Wilson Smith grew up in the twentieth century, spent most of the twenty-first century on Mars and on Venus, returned to Earth in the twenty-second century and—” Ishtar stopped and looked up. “Teena?”

“Who rubbed my lamp? What’ll you have, Ish?”

“Ask Justin for a printout in English of the memoirs he prepared on the Senior, will you, please?”

“No need to ask Justin; I’ve got ’em in my gizzard. You want them bound or scrolled?”

“Bound, I think. But, Teena, let Justin fetch them here; he will be delighted and honored.”

“Who wouldn’t? Mama Maureen, are they treating you right? If they don’t, just tell me, ’cause I do all the work around here.”

After a while a man came in who reminded me disturbingly of Arthur Simmons. But it was just a general resemblance combined with similar personality; in 1982 Justin Foote would have been a CPA, as Arthur Simmons had been. Justin Foote was carrying a briefcase. (“
Plus le change, plus la même chose.
”) There was a degree of awkwardness as Ishtar introduced him; he seemed about to fall over his own feet from excitement at meeting me.

I took his hand. “My first great-great-granddaughter, Nancy Jane Hardy, married a boy named Charlie Foote. That was about 1972, I think; I went to her wedding. Is Charlie Foote any relation to you?”

“He is my ancestor, Mother Maureen. Nancy Jane Hardy Foote gave birth to Justin Foote the First on New Millennium Eve, December thirty-first, year 2000 Gregorian.”

“Really? Then Nancy Jane had a nice long run. She was named for her great-grandmother, my first born.”

“So the archives show. Nancy Irene Smith Weatheral, your first born, Ancestress. And I carry the first name of Nancy’s father-in-law, Justin Weatheral.” Justin spoke excellent English with an odd accent. Bostonian?

“Then I’m your grandma, in some degree. So kiss me, grandson, and quit being so nervously formal; we’re family.”

He relaxed and kissed me then, a firm buss on the mouth, one I liked. If we had not had company, I might have let it develop—he did remind me of Arthur.

He added then: “I’m descended from you and from Justin Weatheral another way, Grandma. Through Patrick Henry Smith, to whom you gave birth on July seventh, 1932.”

I was startled. “Good heavens! So my sins follow me, even here. Oh, of course—you’re working from the Foundation’s records. I did report that case of bastardy to the Foundation. Had to keep it straight there.”

Both Ishtar and Tamara were looking puzzled. Justin said, “Excuse me, Grandma Maureen”—and spoke to them in that other language. Then he added to me, “The concept of bastardy is not known here; issue from a coupling is either genetically satisfactory or not satisfactory. The idea that a child could be proscribed by civil statute is difficult to explain.”

Tamara had looked startled, then giggled, when Justin explained “bastardy.” Ishtar had simply looked sober. She spoke to Justin, again in Galacta.

He listened, then turned to me. “Dr. Ishtar says that it is regrettable that only once did you accept another father for one of your children. She tells me that she hopes to get many more children from you, each by a different father. After you are rejuvenated, she means.”

“‘After,’” I repeated. “But I’m looking forward to it. Justin, you have a book for me?”

That book was titled
The Lives of Lazarus Long
, with a secondary title that started “The Lives of the Senior Member of the Howard Families (Woodrow Wilson Smith… Lazarus Long… Corporal Ted Bronson—[and a dozen other names]) Oldest Member of the Human Race—”

I didn’t faint. Instead I teetered on the brink of orgasm. Ishtar, aware somewhat of the customs of my time and place, had hesitated to let me know that my lover of 1918 was actually my son. But she could not know that I had never felt bound by the taboos of my clan and was as untroubled by the idea of incest as a tomcat is. Indeed, the greatest disappointment of my life was my inability to get my father to accept what I had been so willing to give him, from menarche till I lost him.

▣

I still haven’t been able to do anything with Lizzie Borden’s disclosure that this city I’m in is Kansas City. Or one of its permutations, that is. I don’t think I am in one of the universes patrolled by the Time Corps, although I can’t be certain. So far, all I have seen of the city is what can be seen from the balcony off the lounge of the Committee for Aesthetic Deletions.

It’s the correct geography all right. North of here, about ten miles away, is the sharp bend in the Missouri River where it swings from southwest to northeast at the point where the Kaw River flows into it—a configuration that causes big floods in the west bottoms every five or six years.

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 career 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.