the Mauve Decade, with a record of my menstrual periods. The calendar would be no
problem, but a record of my menses, while I did keep one at that time, is long gone
and irretrievable – or nearly so; it would take a Time Corps operation to retrieve
it. But here is my theory: Briney was often away on business; he was `ringing the
cash register’ his own way, as an analyst and planner for corporate mining ventures,
one whose exceptional talents were increasingly in demand.
Neither of us had heard of the simple fourteen-day role for ovulation, or the
thermometer check, much less the more subtle and more reliable techniques developed
in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dr Rumsey was as good a family doctor
as you could find at that time and he was not constrained by the taboos of the time
– he had been sent to us by the Howard Foundation – but Dr Rumsey knew no more about
this than we did.
If it were possible to prepare a calendar showing my menses 1900-1912, then mark on
it by the fourteen-day role my probable dates of ovulation, then mark the dates that
Briney was away from Kansas City, it is long odds that such a chart would show that
those little wigglers never had a target to shoot at on those occasions that I
failed to catch. This seems certain, as Briney was a prize stallion and I was Myrtle
the Fertile Turtle.
But I am glad that I did not know the roles of ovulation at that time, because there
is nothing that beats the tingling excitement of laying back, legs open and eyes
closed and bare to the possibility of impregnation. And I know that this is not just
one of Maureen’s many eccentricities; I have checked this with endless other women:
the knowledge that it can happen adds to the zest.
I am not running down contraception; it’s the greatest boon to women in all history,
as efficient contraception frees women from that automatic enslavement to men that
has been the norm through all histories. But the ancient structure of our female
nervous systems is not tuned to contraception; it is tuned to getting pregnant.
So it was grand for Maureen that, once I ceased being a bawdy school girl, I almost
never needed to use contraception.
One balmy March day in 1912 Briney nailed me to the ground on a bank of the Blue
River, almost exactly duplicating an earlier occasion, 4 March 1899, on a bank of
the Marais des Cygnes. We both delighted in making love outdoors, especially with a
spice of danger. On the occasion of that 1912 prank I was wearing opera-length silk
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hose and green round garters, and my husband photographed me so, standing, naked in
the sunlight, facing the camera and smiling – and that picture played a major part
in my life six years later, and seventy years later, and over two thousand years
later.
That picture, I am told, changed the entire history of the human race in several
time tines.
Maybe so, maybe not. I’m not fully sold on World-as-Myth even though I am a Time
Corps field agent, even though the smartest people I know tell me it’s the real
McCoy. Father always required me to think for myself, and Mr Clemens urged me to,
also. I was taught that the one Unforgivable Sin, the offence against one’s own
integrity, was to accept anything at all simply on authority.
Nancy has two birthdays: the day I bore her, which was registered with the
Foundation, and the date we handed out to the world, the day that matched more
properly the date of my marriage to Brian Smith. That was easy to do at the end of
the-nineteenth century, as in Missouri vital statistics were just beginning to be
taken. Most records were still of the family-Bible sort. The County Clerk of Jackson
County recorded births and deaths and marriages if offered to him, but nothing
happened if such milestones were not reported.
Nancy’s birth was reported correctly to the Foundation, a report signed by me and