Ishtar pronounced me done in only fifteen months. I can't give details of my rejuvenation because I knew nothing of such details at the time - not until I was accepted as an apprentice technician years later, after I had become the Boondock equivalent of RN and MD. At the medical school hospital and at the rejuvenation clinic they use a drug tagged ‘Lethe' that lets one do horrid things to a patient but not have him even recall that they happened. So I do not remember the bad days of my rejuvenation but only the pleasant, lazy ones during which I read Theodore's memoirs, as edited by Justin... and I spotted the authentic Woodie touch; the raconteur lied whenever he felt like it.
But it was fascinating. Theodore really had felt moral qualms about coupling with me. My goodness! You can take the boy out of the Bible Belt, but you can never quite take the Bible Belt out of the boy. Not even centuries later and after experiencing other and often better cultures utterly unlike Missouri.
One thing in those memoirs made me proud of my ‘naughty' son: he seems to have always been incapable of abandoning wife and child. Since (in my opinion) much of the decay that led to the decline and fall of the United States had to do with males who shrugged off their duty to pregnant women and young children, I found myself willing to forgive my ‘bad boy' for all his foibles since he never wavered in this prime virtue. A male must be willing to live and to die for his female and their cubs... else he is nothing.
Woodrow, selfish as he was in many respects, in this acid test measured up.
I was delighted to learn just how intensely Theodore had wanted my body. Since I had wanted him with burning intensity, it warmed me all through to read proof that he had wanted me just as badly. I had never been quite sure of it at the time (a woman in heat can be an awful fool) and was still less sure of it as the years wore on. Yet here was proof: eyes open, he shoved his head into the lion's mouth for me - for my sake he had enlisted in a war that was not his... and ‘got his arse shot off as his sisters expressed it. (His sisters - my daughters. Goodness!)
In addition to Lazarus' memoirs, I read histories that Justin gave me. I also learned Galacta by the total-immersion method. After my first two weeks in Boondock I asked that no English whatever be spoken around me and asked Teena for the Galacta edition of Theodore's memoirs and reread them in that language. Soon I was fluent in Galacta and beginning to think in it. Galacta is rooted in Spanglish, the auxiliary language that was beginning to be used for trade and engineering purposes up and down the two Americas in the twentieth century, a devised language formed by taking the intersection of English and Spanish and manipulating that vocabulary by Hispanic grammar - somewhat simplified for the benefit of Anglophonic users of this lingua franca.
At a later time Lazarus told me that Spanglish had been adopted as the official language for space pilots back at the time of the Space Precautionary Ad, when all licensed space pilots were employees of Spaceways Ltd, or some other Harriman Industries subsidiary. He told me that Galacta was still recognisably the same language as Spanglish centuries, millennia, later - although with a much amplified vocabulary - much the same way and for the same reasons that the Latin of the Caesars had been conserved and augmented for thousands of years by the Church of Rome. Each language filled a need that kept it alive and growing.
‘I always wanted to live in a world designed by Maxfield Parrish - and now I do!' These words open a journal I started to write, early in my rejuvenation, to keep my thoughts straight in the face of the culture shock I felt in being lifted bodily out of the Crazy Years of Tellus Prime - and plunked down in the almost Apollonian culture of Tellus Tertius.
Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was a romantic artist of my time and place who used a realistic style and technique to paint a world more beautiful than any ever seen - a world of cloud-capped towers and gorgeous girls and breath-stopping mountain peaks. If ‘Maxfield Parrish blue' means nothing to you, go to the museum of BIT and enjoy the MP collection there, ‘stolen' by means of a replicating pantograph from twentieth century museums on the east coast of North America (and one painting in the lobby of the Broadmoor) by a Time Corps private mission paid for by the Senior, Lazarus Long - a birthday present to his mother on her one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday to celebrate the silver anniversary of their marriage.
Yes, my naughty-boy son Woodrow married me, sandbagged into it by his co-wives and brother husbands, as a result of their having sandbagged me into it - a working majority of them; Woodrow had three of his wives with him, his twin clone-sisters and Elizabeth who used to be Andrew Libby before his reincarnation as a woman.
At that time (Galactic 4324) the Long family had seven adults in residence: Ira Weatheral, Galahad, Justin Foote, Hamadryad, Tamara, Ishtar, and Minerva. Galahad, Justin, Ishtar, and Tamara you have met; Ira Weatheral was the executive of such government as Boondock had (not much); Hamadryad was his daughter who had obviously made a pact with the Devil; Minerva was a slender, long-haired brunette who had had a career of more than two centuries as an administrative computer before getting Ishtar's assistance in becoming flesh and blood through an assembled-clone technique.
They picked Galahad and Tamara to propose to me.
I had no plans to get married. I had married once ‘till death do us part' - and it had turned out not to be that durable. I was most happy to be living in Boondock, my cup overflowed at growing young again, and I was looking forward with almost unbearable delight at the expectation of being again in Theodore's arms. But marriage? Why take vows that are usually broken?
Galahad said, ‘Mama Maureen, these vows will not be broken. We simply promise each other to share in taking care of our children - support them and spank them and love them and teach them, whatever it takes. Now believe me, this is how to do it. Marry us now; settle it with Lazarus later. We love him - but we know him. In an emergency Lazarus is the fastest gun in the Galaxy. But hand him a simple little social problem and he'll dither about it, trying to see all sides to arrive at the perfect answer. So the only way to win an argument with Lazarus is to present him with an accomplished fact. He'll be home now in a few weeks - Ishtar knows the exact hour. If he finds you married into the family and already pregnant, he will simply shut up and marry you himself. If you will have him:
‘In marrying all of you, am I not marrying Lazarus, too?'
Not necessarily. Both Hamadryad and Ira were members of our founding family group. But it took several years before Ira admitted that there was no reason for him not to marry his own daughter - Hamadryad just smiled and outwaited him. Then we held a special wedding ceremony just for them and what a luau that was! Honest, Mama Maureen, our arrangements are flexible; the only invariant is that everybody guarantees the future of any babies you pretty little broads give us. We don't even ask where you got them... since some of you tend to be vague about such things.'
Tamara interrupted to tell me that Ishtar watches such matters. (Galahad tends to joke. Tamara doesn't know how to joke. But she loves everybody.) So later that day I said my vows with all of them, standing in the middle of their beautiful atrium garden (our garden!) - crying and smiling and all of them touching me and Ira sniffling and Tamara smiling while tears ran down her face, and we all said ‘I do!' together and they all kissed me, and I knew they were mine and I was theirs, forever and ever, amen.
I got pregnant at once because Ishtar had timed it so that our wedding and my ovulation matched - Ira and Ishtar had planned the whole thing. (When I had that baby girl, after the usual cow-or-countess gestation period, I asked Ishtar about the baby's paternity. She said, ‘Mama Maureen, that one is from all your husbands; you don't need to know. After you've had four or five more, if you are still curious, I'll sort them out for you.' I never asked again.)