Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
‘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.