timing is everything.’
‘A director. There are no women on the board.’
‘There will be when you nominate me and I am elected.’
‘Maureen, please! All directors are major stockholders.’
‘How much stock does it take to be eligible?’
‘One share complies with the roles. But company policy calls for major ownership. In
the holding company or any of its subsidiaries.’
‘How much? Shares. No, dollar value by the market; the various corporate shares are
not all the same value per share. Not any, I should say.’
‘Uh, Mr Harriman and I think a director should own, or acquire soon after election,
at least half a million in market value of shares. It fixes his attention on what he
is voting on.’
‘George, on Monday at the close of market my summed up position in all of your
companies was $872.039.81 – I can bring that up to an even million in a few days if
it would help to smooth the way.’
George’s eyebrows went way up. ‘Maureen, I didn’t know that you owned any of our
stock. I should have spotted your name in connection with any large block.’
‘I use dummies. Some in Zurich, some in Canada, some in New York. I can get it all
into my own name if there is any reason to.’
‘We’ll need some intelligences filed with us, at least. Maureen, am I free to tell
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Mr Harriman about your envelopes? Your prophecies?’
‘How would he feel about them?’
‘I’m not sure. He and I have been in business together since the twenties… but I
don’t know him. He’s a plunger… I’m a plough horse.’
‘Well, let’s keep it a bedroom secret for now. Perhaps you will want to open the
next envelope in his presence. Or perhaps not. George, if the public, particularly
the Street, got hold of the idea that you were making business decisions on the
advice of a soothsayer, it might damage Harriman Industries, might it not?’
‘I think you’re right. All right, bedroom secret.’ He suddenly smiled. ‘But if I
said that I consulted an astrologer, half of those knot-heads would consider it
“scientific”:
‘And now let’s. drop it, and let me see if I can get our plough horse interested in
ploughing me. George, do all the men in your family have oversize penises?’
‘Not that I know of and I think you are trying to flatter me.’
‘Well, it seems big to me. Hey! It’s getting bigger!’
Chapter 21 – Serpent’s Tooth
My problems for the next ten years were Princess Polly, Priscilla, Donald, George
Strong… and a curious metaphysical problem I still don’t know how to resolve – or
how I should have resolved it, although I have talked it over in depth with my
husband and friend Dr Jubal Harshaw and with some of the finest
mathematico-manipulative cosmologists in any universe, starting with Elizabeth
‘Slipstick Libby’ Long. It involves the age-old pseudo-paradox of free will and
predestination.
Free will is a fact, while you are living it. And predestination is a fact, when you
look at any sequence from outside.
But in World-as-Myth neither free will nor predestination have meaning. Each is
semantically null. If we are simply patterns of fictions put together by fabulists,
then one may as well speak of free will for pieces in a chess game. After the game
is history and the chessmen have been placed back in the box, does the Black Queen
lose sleep moaning, ‘Oh, I should never have taken that pawn!’
Ridiculous.
I am not an assemblage of fictions. I was not created by a fabulist. I am a human
woman, daughter of human parents, and mother of seventeen boys and girls in my first
life and mother of still more in my first rejuvenation. If I am controlled by
destiny, then that destiny lies in my genes… not in the broodings of some
near-sighted introvert hunched over a roboscriber.
Mie trouble was that there came a time as we neared the end of the decade that I
realised that Theodore had told me about a tragedy that could possibly be prevented.
Or could it? Could I use my free will to break the golden chains of predestination?