And here I had been thinking that these people had no more curves to throw at me!
“What would happen if you broke open the box and got all your mail at once?” Ian asked.
“Oh, that would be very dangerous, sir. The box and all the letters would burn up!”
“I see. Booby-trapped to conserve causality.”
I thanked Kowalski, and asked her to write up something nice and appropriate to put in the personnel files of each of the three officers and then bring it back for my personal signature. That sort of thing was very important to American officers, and I imagine that all military outfits are pretty much the same.
“So. It was just an electronic glitch, and all of this detective work amounts to little more than a wasted exercise in paranoia on our parts,” Ian said.
“Paranoia, probably, but I wouldn’t call it all a wasted effort. I intend to redesign the temporal circuits as the leftenant recommended, no matter what it costs, or how much it delays our next try at time travel. It makes you wonder how many of those test canisters that didn’t return failed because of this same glitch.”
“Another point is that even paranoids can have people who are trying to kill them,” Ian said. “The only question still in my mind is why did Hasenpfeffer raise such a stink about our going on that trip, and why did he choose such a strange way to stage his protest?”
“Why indeed? I suppose that we could go and ask him.”
“We could, but I’m not sure that I will like his answer. Tom, my gut level feeling is that we should just let this one lie.”
“Moved and seconded.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Wedding Preparations
As the day of my wedding approached, things got increasingly hectic around Camelot, and around the Taj Mahal as well, since with Ian as best man, and Ming Po as Barb’s bridesmaid, all of Ian’s ladies were soon roped into helping out my girls.
Barring attendance at a few rehearsals, I managed to stay out of the loop as far as most of it was concerned, but I couldn’t help noticing a few of the stranger things go by.
A special issue of a book on Catholic American wedding customs was printed and distributed to everyone concerned, including yours truly. It’s strange, the things people do simply to state publicly that they intend to shack up together. Rings are exchanged; bouquets are thrown about; brides are denuded of their garter belts, which are then thrown to the bachelors in the crowd; and atrocious things are done to the groom at bachelor’s parties.
I wanted no such things to happen to me. This wedding was a serious thing to me, and I didn’t want it spoiled by any nonsense. I talked about it long and hard with Ian, and he eventually promised that a surprise bachelor party wouldn’t happen. Then I took steps to insure that no one else would try any stunts by posting public notice, promising to fire anyone involved with any crude jokes on my person.
I wanted Barb to go through the whole, days long ritual, mostly to impress upon her the seriousness of the whole thing. Once we were married, I wanted us to stay that way.
The book said, among a huge number of other bits of trivia, that Barb’s father was to pick up the bill for the wedding reception. Since some three thousand people were eventually scheduled to attend, it seemed a bit much to ask the guy to pay for all of it, and over breakfast, I asked Ian to see to it that I caught the bill instead of him.
“Not a good idea, Tom. It would embarrass him. Wedding ceremonies are much like the potlatch festivals that the Northwest American Indians used to throw. They are a display of wealth and power that vastly increases the prestige of the guy throwing it.”
“I’ve heard about those things. Isn’t that where the guy hosting it gives away absolutely everything he owns, and if he can’t find somebody to take the last of it, he’ll burn whatever was left over, just to make sure that he’s totally destitute?”
“Usually, it doesn’t go quite that far. Anyway, in the long run, he comes out way ahead, because everyone who accepts a gift is morally, or at least socially, obligated to give his host a gift of far greater value, once it’s his turn to throw a potlatch.”
“Weird custom, sort of like a voluntary income tax, except that with the Indians, you eventually get something back for what you have to shell out. So the Smoothies have a custom like the potlatch, too?” I asked.
“Damned if I know. Nobody ever gave me a handbook of Smoothie customs. But you know, I’d be willing to bet that from now on, they adopt your Catholic-American customs as the standard way to get married.”
“Bullshit,” I said politely. “There is no way that so many couples could possibly get a real Catholic priest to marry them.”
“Okay, you’ve got me on that one. But the huge ceremony, the massive display of wealth, and the social commitment that these public displays enforce, could well become permanent things hereabouts. For one thing, marriage customs quickly become permanent anywhere. Look at the way that the giving of a diamond ring to announce an engagement quickly became universal. Most Americans would say that the custom was ancient, whereas it really has only been around for less than a century.”
“The reason for that one is obvious. Besides the millions that the DeBeers diamond cartel spends on advertising, a woman naturally wants to know that the guy has made a serious commitment to her before she makes the commitment that he wants from her. I’m surprised that the custom wasn’t invented sooner.”
“Without any sort of dependable birth control device, and what with the social stigma placed on giving birth to a bastard, most properly brought up women back then weren’t likely to give in to their man’s desires before marriage, in any event,” Ian said.
“What about the medieval lord’s droit du seigneur, where he got to take all of his peasant girls?”
“Traditionally, he only had the right to take them on the night before their wedding, so her husband to be was there to take care of the kid, in case the lord’s sperm got lucky. You know, there is a similar custom in Southeast Asia, where the Buddhist monks take on the hard duty of relieving the local maidens of their maidenheads.”
“Purely for religious reasons, of course.”
“Of course. The causing of pain and the spilling of blood are sinful acts according to Buddhist tenets. Due to the strength of his soul, a monk is best suited to do the onerous task. They even get paid for doing it.”
“A typically religious justification for the defloration of the youth, while raking in the money,” I said.
“Some religions, perhaps. Not mine, of course.”
“You figure that the Smoothies are going to pick up on that one, too?”
“No. But they have a culture without much real depth, and such cultures are quick to adopt new customs. Like any other new culture, they slosh around a lot, like water carried in a shallow tray.”
“How do you get off calling them a ‘new’ culture? We keep hearing that they’ve been around for thousands of years!”
“They have and they haven’t,” Ian said. “Don’t forget that almost everyone here left wherever they came from when they were teenagers, and spent at least their next ten years scattered throughout the United States. That amounts to a very definite cultural break. Now that they are together again, they want a feeling of cultural solidarity, but they don’t have the customs, the symbols of cultural solidity, to work with. Being absolutely uncreative, they have to get those customs from us, the only creative people around.”
“Huh. I don’t mind being responsible for creating the technical basis for their sick little culture. I mean, they’re not an evil people, or anything like that. But I don’t know if I feel right about being the cause of their social customs as well. I don’t feel that I’m competent to handle a job like that.”
“You’re not. Neither am I. But then again, I don’t think that we’ll do more than modify a few surface things, like wedding customs. The real basis for their culture, and the reason for their uncreativity, is the way they use time travel. For that, we certainly are responsible, perhaps to the damnation of our souls.”
“I can’t buy that,” I said. “We just made a machine. We never forced anyone to use it, to make it the basis of their whole culture.”
“Once the machine was there, it was going to be used. I’ve heard it argued that Henry Ford, along with the other early auto makers, was responsible for the change in morals that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. Maybe all Henry wanted was to give people a cheap, convenient means of transportation, and to make a fortune doing it, but he also gave the average young man an enclosed, self-mobile box to take his girl out with. No longer was he forced to spend his Sunday afternoons sitting with her in her father’s well-chaperoned parlor. He now had a way to take her somewhere else, as well as a convenient place to have sex with the girl.”