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 love 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 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 ever 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 gangbang 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 oresbat wouldn't be noticed and odd behaviour 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 with 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 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.