To Sail Beyond the Sunset (56 page)

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 with 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.

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.”

The notion of calling it “Carol’s Day” had suggested itself to Lazarus from something he remembered from a thousand years in the future—or in the past, depending on your time frame. On the frontier planet New Beginnings he and his wife Dora had declared “Helen’s Day” to celebrate puberty in their oldest child, Helen. That was their stated purpose. Their unstated purpose was to attempt to place some control over the sexual behavior of their growing sons and daughters, in order to head off the sort of tragedy I ran into with Priscilla and Donald.

Neither Lazarus nor I (nor Dora) had moralistic notions about incest, but all of us had feared the damage incest can do, both genetically and socially. “Helen’s Day” and “Carol’s Day” gave each set of parents some leverage in handling the touchy problems of sex in young people, problems that so easily can end in tragedy…but need not.

(I despise most in Marian her self-indulgent failure to carry out the parental duty of maintaining discipline. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is not sadistic; it is hard common sense. You fail your children worst if you do not punish them when they need it. The lessons you fail to teach them will be taught later and much more harshly by a cruel world, the real world where no excuses are accepted, the world of TANSTAAFL and of Mrs. Be-Done-By-As-You-Did.)

Lazarus told me (centuries later or years later—a matter of viewpoint) that he was halfway through his toast to Carol when he suddenly realized that he was inaugurating the most widespread holiday of the human race: Carolita’s Day—and that he has been trying ever since to decide which came first: the chicken or the egg.

Chicken or egg, Carol’s Day did develop over the centuries and on many planets into a public holiday—this I learned when I was taken to Tertius. Usually it was celebrated just for the fun of it, the way the Japanese celebrate Christmas, as a secular holiday having nothing to do with religion.

But in some cultures it developed as a religious holiday peculiar to theocracies: the safety-valve holiday, the day of excesses, of sin without punishment, the saturnalia.

While I got out of those silly stirrups and down off that cold table and put on my “clothes” (a caftan rigged from a beach towel), Dr. Ridpath and Dagmar looked over my test results. They pronounced me healthy—merely out of my skull, which neither of them seemed to regard as important.

Dr. Ridpath said, “Explain things to her, Dag. I’m going to take a shower and get ready.”

“What do you want to do, Maureen?” Dagmar asked me. “Doc tells me that your total assets are that terry cloth tent you’re wearing and this orange cat. Pixel! Stop that! This is not a night you can go to a police station and ask your way to the county poor farm; tonight the cops skin down and join in the riot.” She looked me up and down. “If you go out on the streets tonight—well—you’d have a quieter time in—a lion’s den. Maybe you like such things—many do. Me, f’rinstance. But tonight a gal is either locked up or knocked up. You can stay here, sleep on the couch. I can find you a blanket. Pixel! Get down from there!”

“Come here, Pixel.” I held out both hands; he jumped into my arms. “How about the Salvation Army?”

“The what?”

I tried to explain. She shook her head. “Never heard of it. Sounds like another of your daydreams, dear; nothing of that sort is ever authorized by the Church of Your Choice.”

“What church is your choice?”

“Huh? Your choice, my choice, everybody’s choice—the Church of the Great Inseminator, of course—what other church be there? If it’s not your choice, a ride on a rail might clarify your thinking. It would mine.”

I shook my head. “Dagmar, I’m more and more confused. Back where I come from there is total religious freedom.”

“That’s what we have here, ducks—and don’t let a proctor hear you say anything else.” She suddenly smiled like the Wicked Witch of the West. “Although there are always some proctors and some priests found stone cold dead in the dawn’s early light, grinning in
risus sardonicus
, the morning after Saint Carol’s feast; I am not the only widow with a long memory.”

I must have looked stupid. “You’re a widow? I’m sorry.”