“Hold on, Bitsy, “ she goes, “you haven’t even heard my latest story. “
“And I’m not Bitsy any more, “ I go. “You don’t want to be called Muffy, I don’t want to be called Bitsy. I’m grown up now. Call me Betsy or Elizabeth. That’s what Josh calls me. Elizabeth. “
She laughed. “And where is dear Josh today? I don’t want to totally blow him away again or anything. “
“He’s seeing patients this afternoon. “
“Good, “ goes Maureen, “then you can knock off for a little while and listen. “
“I’m not going to listen, sister. I’ve got work to do. Why don’t you find a psychoanalyst to listen to you? It would do you like just so much good. “
“Ha ha, “ she goes, ignoring everything I said to her. Then she started telling me this story whether I wanted to hear it or not, and I didn’t want to hear it.
I think she thought we were still friends.
You remember the last time I bopped by, I told you all about this battle in the far future I won like singlehanded, okay? [As stirringly recounted in “Maureen Birnbaum on the Art of War,” in Friends of the Horseclans, edited by Robert Adams and Pamela Crippen Adams (Signet, 1987).] So after I left you and your darling doctor hubby in Bermuda, I decided to whush on out of your honeymoon suite and try to find Mars again. Mars is, you know, my destiny, and where I met that totally bluff Prince Van. I was still drooling like a schoolgirl over him, and I’d been dying to run into him again. But I just kept missing Mars, and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Maybe it was my follow-through, or I wasn’t keeping my head down or something. I just didn’t understand how I was messing up.
Anyway, from down by your hotel’s pool I aimed at Mars, but I landed someplace that didn’t look anything like the part of Mars I knew: no ocher dead sea bottom, no hurtling moons, no bizarro green men. I jumped up and down a couple of times to see if maybe it felt like Martian gravity, but no such luck. Good ol’ Maureen wasn’t going to have any help carrying around her heroinely poundage here. Matter of fact, I was just a teensy bit heftier in this place than on Earth. Right off, I figured wherever this was, it wasn’t going to make my short list of fave vacation spots. My God, like who needs a complimentary gift of an extra fifteen pounds to lug around, know what I mean?
I was disappointed, but so what else is new? If these thrilling exploits of mine have taught me one thing, it’s that you can’t always get what you want. Yeah, you’re right, Bitsy, Mick Jagger said the same thing entire decades ago, but I don’t get my wisdom from ancient song stylists of our parents’ generation.
The first thing I do when I dew hush in one of these weirdo places is try to sort out the ground rules, ‘cause they’re always different. It pays to find out up front if you’re likely to be scarfed down for lunch by some hairball monster, or worshiped as the reincarnation of Joan Crawford or something. Between you and me, sweetie, being worshiped is only marginally better than death, but we savage warrior women won’t accept either treatment. You must’ve learned that much from me by now, and I hope you’ve let your Josh know all about it.
Bitsy, can I get something to drink out of your fridge? I mean, I just got back from saving the civilization of an entire world from destruction, and I’m dying for a Tab. Jeez, you don’t have any Tab, and you used to be Miss Diet Bubbles of Greater Long Island. And no beer, either! Whatever happened to Blitzy Bitsy Spiegelman, the original party vegetable? You’ve got five different brands of bottled water in here, and not a single one of them is Perrier! What, you serve one water with fish and another with meat? ‘ A pure, delicious water from the natural miracle of New Jersey’s sparkling springs.’ You drink water from New Jersey? Bitsy, are you like fully wheezed or what? Josh’s idea, right?
So where was I? No, never mind, I’ll just die of thirst. Anyway, I looked around and at first it didn’t really seem like another planet or anything. I was standing ID this road, okay? I was most of the way up a hill, and behind me the pavement wound down through these trees and stuff, and I could see a pretty big town down there. It reminded me a lot of this time Daddy and Pammy took me to Santa Barbara, except I couldn’t see anything like an ocean from where I was on that hill. Up ahead of me was a big building with a dome on it, like one of those places where they keep their telescopes, you know? I can’t remember what they call ‘em, but you know what I mean. Well, the dome place was a lot closer than the city, so I started booking it up the road the rest of the way.
Now, at this point, the only evidence I had that I wasn’t on Earth somewhere was my weight, and you’ve probably noticed that I’ve tended to bulk up just a smidge from one adventure to the next. So maybe, I think, I really am just outside of Santa Barbara or somewhere, and the extra fifteen pounds is like this horrible souvenir I picked up in the World of Tomorrow. I did have lots of healthful exercise there, bashing skulls in the fresh air, a diet that would lay Richard Simmons in his grave-I mean, look at these muscles! These lats would make Stallone jealous!
This is how I’m talking to myself, until I notice that there’s a partial sunset going on off to the left. A partial sunset. That’s where not all of the suns in the sky seem to be setting at the same time. See, there was this yellow sun plunking itself down on the horizon, and making a real nice show out of the mists in the valley, and ordinarily I would have stopped and admired it because sunsets are like so cute. Why do people get so totally poetic about sunsets, anyway? I mean, there’s always another one coming, like buses, and they’re all pretty much the same, too. You don’t have critics reviewing sunsets. Today’s will be just like yesterday’s, and there’s not much hope that tomorrow’s will be any more special. So what’s the big deal?
Well, even after the yellow sun faded away, it was still daytime, ‘cause there was still this other little sun hanging around. I thought it might be the moon, except it was almost as bright as the sun that had set, and it was red. “Okay, Maureen,” I go, “this is not Earth. And it’s not even in the whatyoucall, the solar system. You really flaked out this time. “
A couple of seconds later, I realized I was in big trouble. See, my interspatial whushing depends on being able to see my goal in the heavens. That’s how I got to Mars, remember? I stood out under the night sky and raised my beseeching arms to the ruddy God of War, and like whush! there I was. So, despite my steering problems, I’ve always found my way home ‘cause I’ve always stayed sort of in the same neighborhood. Now, though, it was all different. I wasn‘t going to be able to see the Earth in the sky at all. And the sun-the right sun, our sun-would be just one bright dot lost among all the others. If it was even there at all.
But I hadn‘t been entirely abandoned by Fate. After all, I was only half a mile downwind from an observatory. They’d be able to point me in the right direction, I was sure of it.
I cranked uphill for a few minutes, starting to feel a little weirded out. The light from the small sun was the color of beet juice, and it kind of sluiced down over the trees and the road and made me look like I’d been boiled too long. I was just telling myself that I hoped no one would see me until I got inside the observatory, when I spotted this guy hustling down the road toward me.
“Great,” I go, “he’ll think I’ve been pickled in a jar or something.” But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I stopped worrying. After all, his color was halfway between a crabapple and an eggplant, too.
He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, either, even though in that light he looked like the Xylocaine poster child. The only odd thing about him was his clothes. He had on a kind of silvery jumpsuit with those stupid things that stand up on your shoulders, like the visitors from the future always wore in old sci-fi movies. He looked like Superman’s dad from back in the good old days on Krypton. “Oh boy,” I go, “welcome to the World of Superscience. “
I guess he was just as freaked to see me. I mean, I was wearing my working outfit, which was just the gold brassiere and G-string I picked up on’ my travels, with Old Betsy hung on my hip. Maybe it was the broadsword, or maybe he was just overcome by my ample figure, but he just came to a stop in the middle of the road and stared. I mean, if I whush through space in a drop-dead outfit I stumbled on at Lillie Rubin, I land in Fred Flintstone’s backyard. If I slide into my fighting harness instead, it figures I end up in some totally tasteful garden party beyond the stars. You can’t win, right?