To Sail Beyond The Sunset: The Life and Loves of Maureen Johnson

Chapter 25 - Rebirth in Boondock

Let's review the bidding.

In 1982, on 20 June I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on my way to a Sunday afternoon motel date for some friendly fornication... and that made me a scandal to the jaybirds as I was only days away from my hundredth birthday - while pretending to be much younger and, mostly, succeeding. My assignation was with a widowed grandfather who seemed willing to believe that I was his own age, give or take a bit.

Part of the orthodoxy of that time and place was that old women have no interest in sex and that old men have limp penises and no sex drive - except dirty old perverts with criminal and pathological interests in young girls. All young people were certain of these ideas through knowing their own grandparents, whom they knew to be interested only in singing hymns and in playing chequers or shuffleboard. But sex? My grandparents? Don't be disgusting!

(At that time and in that country, nursing homes for the elderly kept their guests chaperoned and/or physically segregated by sexes so that nothing ‘disgusting' could take place.)

So this dirty old woman on evil bent got caught in heavy traffic, panicked, fell down, fainted - and woke up in Boondock on the planet Tellus Tertius.

I had heard of Tellus Tertius. Sixty-four years earlier, when I was a modest young matron with a snow-white reputation, I had seduced a young sergeant, Theodore Bronson, who in pillow talk with me had revealed himself as a time traveller from the far future and a distant star, Captain Lazarus Long, chairman of the Howard Families in his time... and my remote descendant!

I had looked forward to years of happy adultery after the War was over, under the tolerant, shut-eye chaperonage of my husband.

But Sergeant Theodore went to France in the AEF and was missing in action in some of the heaviest fighting in the Great War. MIA equals killed; it never meant anything else.

When I woke up and Tamara took me into her arms, I had great trouble believing any of it... especially the ides that Theodore was alive and well. When I did believe her (one cannot disbelieve Tamara), I was crushed with the grief of too late, too late!

Tamara tried to soothe me but we had language trouble; she is not a linguist, speaks broken English only - and I had not a word of Galacta. (Her first speech to me she had rehearsed most carefully.)

She sent for her daughter Ishtar. Ishtar listened to me, talked to me, finally got it through my head that being a hundred, years old did not matter; I was about to be rejuvenated.

I had heard about rejuvenation from Theodore, long ago. But I had never thought of it as applying to me.

They both told me, over and over again. Ishtar said, ‘Mama Maureen, I am more than twice as old as you are. My last rejuvenation was eighty years ago. Am I wrinkled? Don't worry about your age; you will be no trouble at all. We'll start your tests at once; you will be eighteen again in a very short time. Months, I estimate, instead of the two or three years a really difficult case can take.'

Tamara nodded emphatically. Is true. Ishtar true word esspeak. Four century am I. Dying was I' She patted her belly. ‘Baby here now.'

‘Yes,' agreed Ishtar, ‘by Lazarus. A baby I gene-plotted and required Lazarus to plant before he left to rescue you. We could not be sure that he would be back - these trips of his are always chancey - and, while I have his sperm on deposit, frozen sperm can deteriorate; I want as many warm-spenn babies sired by Lazarus as possible.' She added, ‘And you, too, Mama Maureen. I hope you will gift us with many more babies. Our calculations show that what Lazarus has, his unique gene patterns, he got mainly from you. You need not bear babies yourself; there'll be host mothers standing in line for the privilege of bearing a Mama Maureen baby. Unless you prefer to bear them yourself.'

‘You mean I can?'

‘Certainly. Once we have you made young again.'

‘Then I will!' I took a deep breath. It has been... forty-four years - I think that is right forty-four years since I last became pregnant. Although Ne always been willing and Nave not tried to avoid it.' I thought about it. ‘Is it possible for me to postpone seeing Theodore - Lazarus, you call him for a while? Could I be made younger before I see him? I dread the thought of his seeing me this way. Old. Not the way he knew me.'

‘Certainly. There are always emotional factors in a rejuvenation. Whatever a client needs to be happy is the way we do it'

‘I would rather not have him see me until I look more as I looked then.'

‘It shall be done.'

I asked to see a picture of Theodore-Lazarus. It turned out to be a moving holo, almost frighteningly lifelike. I was aware that Theodore and I looked enough alike to be brother and sister; that was what Father had first noticed about him. But this startled me. ‘Why, that's my son!' The holo looked just like my son Woodrow - my bad boy and always my favourite.

‘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 realised 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 ar Tamara. They exchanged words in a language I did not know (Galada, 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 print-out 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 honoured.'

‘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 a similar personality; in 1982 Justin Foote would have been a CPA, as Arthur Simmons had been. Justin Foote was carrying a briefcase. ("Plus ça change, plus c'est ta 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 Millenium Eve, 31 December, 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,1 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 7 July 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 ides 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 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.

‘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 (1870-1966) was a romantic artist of my time and place 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 MP 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 one hundred and twenty-fifth 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.

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 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 mo 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. 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 the 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 a.k.a. 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 the 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 fine... yet he had been rescued and restored without even a scar.

S) My father was ‘missing in action', too. The AFS didn't even get round to reporting him as missing until long after the fact and there were no details.

6) In the thought experiment called ‘Schrõdinger'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 tine 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 de 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 hand 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.