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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.
Chapter 26 – Pixel to the Rescue
After that Mad Tea Party in which I woke up in bed with a cat and a corpse in Grand
Hotel Augustus, Pixel and I wound up in the office of Dr Eric Ridpath, house
physician, where we met his office nurse, Dagmar Dobbs – a gal who was at once
awarded Pixel’s stamp of approval. Dagmar was giving me a GYN examination, when she
told me that tonight was La Fiesta de Santa Carolita.
It is a good thing that just before she put me on the table she had required me to
pee in a cup, or I might have peed in her face.
As I have explained in excessive detail, `Santa Carolita’ is my daughter Carol, born
in Gregorian 1902 at Kansas City on Tellus Prime, time line two, code Leslie
LeCroix.
Lazarus Long had initiated `Carol’s Day’ on 26 June 1918 Gregorian, as a rite of
passage for Carol, marking her transition from childhood to womanhood. Lazarus
toasted Carol in champagne, telling her what a wonderful thing it was to be a woman,
naming for her both the privileges and the responsibilities of her new and exalted
status, and declaring that 26 June shall now and forever be known as ‘Carol’s Day’.
the notion of calling it ‘Carol’s Day’ had suggested itself to Lazarus from
something he remembered from a thousand years in the future – or in the past,
depending on your time frame. On the frontier planet New Beginnings he and his wife
Dora had declared `Helen’s Day’ to celebrate puberty in their oldest child, Helen.
That was their stated purpose. Their unstated purpose was to attempt to place some
control over the sexual behaviour of their growing sons and daughters, in order to
head off the sort of tragedy I ran into with Priscilla and Donald.
Neither Lazarus nor I (nor Dora) had moralistic notions about incest, but all of us
had feared the damage incest can do, both genetically and socially. `Helen’s Day’
and `Carol’s Day’ gave each set of parents some leverage in handling the touchy
problems of sex in young people, problems that can so easily end in tragedy… but
need not.
(I most despise in Marian her self-indulgent failure to carry out the parental duty
of maintaining discipline. `Spare the rod and spoil the child’ is not sadistic; it
is hard common sense. You fail your children worst if you do not punish them when
they need it. The lessons you fail to teach them will be taught later and much more
harshly by a cruel world, the real world where no excuses are accepted, the world of
TANSTAAFL and of Mrs Be-Done-By-As-You-Did.)
Lazarus told me (centuries later or years later – a matter of viewpoint) that he was
half-way through his toast to Carol when he suddenly realised that he was
inaugurating the most widespread holiday of the human race: Carolita’s Day – and
that he has been trying ever since to decide which came first: the chicken or the
egg.
Chicken or egg, Carol’s Day did develop over the centuries and on many planets into
a public holiday – this I learned when I was taken to Tertius. Usually it was
celebrated just for the fun of it, the way the Japanese celebrate Christmas, as a
secular holiday having nothing to do with religion.
But in some cultures it developed as a religious holiday peculiar to theocracies:
the safety-valve holiday, the day of excesses, of sin without punishment, the
saturnalia.
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While I got out of those silly stirrups and down off that cold table and put on my
`clothes’ (a caftan rigged. from a beach towel), Dr Ridpath and Dagmar looked over
my test results. They pronounced me healthy-merely out of my skull, which neither of