A History Maker

NOTES & GLOSSARY EXPLAINING OBSCURITIES

NOTES ON THE PROLOGUE

Page IX

scunnered = a shrinking recoil more intense than disgusted. It derives from the noun sickener or scunner.

dreich = grey and dull; cold and dismal.

Page X

snibbing = latching; bolting; locking. uisge beatha = Gaelic for aqua vitae or water of life; a spirit obtained by distillation from a mash of cereal grains saccharified by the diastase of malt; otherwise known as whisky or Scotch.

Page XI

ramfeezle = muddle; confuse; exhaust.

Page XIII

tholed = suffered, endured or been afflicted with pain, grief et cetera. bumbazing = perplexing; stupifying.

Page XIV

malagroozed = injured; hurt.

clanjamfries = miscellaneous assemblies.

Page XV

lang-nebbed = long-nosed; over-intellectual; seeming wiser than is the case.

Page 3.

Five commanders … with … deeply scarred faces. Since medals were as obsolete as monarchs and presidents who had awarded them scars were now the only outward sign of a soldier’s experience. Many senior officers rejected medical treatment which would heal their faces completely, but unlike German student duellists of the late nineteenth century did not invite medical treatment which would make the scars more conspicuous.

Page 7.

An epoch when most men are over six feet tall. In the historical era good feeding and healthy exercise were often a perquisite of the officer class, whose average height, health and lifespan was usually greater than those who did not inherit wealth. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some scientists attributed such class differences to heredity: if the difference was genetic no political movement to better the lives of the badly fed could succeed. Yet in less than a century the average height of white Australians came to equal the average height of the British officer class, though at that time most white Australians were descended from poor people the British officer class had evicted.

Page 10.

bairns = infants, young folk, children or offspring. Of Teutonic and Scandinavian origin, this word was widespread in England as well as Scotland before the 18th century. Shakespeare and Swift used it.

loons = young people, usually male, of a mischievous, rascally, sexually over-active or violent character; also used as an affectionate disparagement of someone the speaker likes or of the speaker himself. Natives of Forfar liked being called Forfar loons; it was the preferred nickname of that town’s football team.

Page 11.

When your wounds heal join the veterans and Boys’ Brigade in the Warrior house where you will be the only officers … Teach the Ettrick youngsters how to avoid them.

There were no private soldiers in modern armies. The lowest ranks were the Boys’ Brigades which were seldom allowed to fight before the age of sixteen. Those who survived their first war and remained in the army at once became officers with full voting rights.

Page 13.

The Ettricks pull on their helmets and form a circle.

The helmets contained the only electronic equipment modern armies allowed themselves: earphones through which soldiers could hear their commander’s voice on a wavelength

inaudible to anyone else.

Page 20.

whins = gorse or furze, a prickly flowering evergreen shrub that thrives throughout Europe and Africa in thin or stony soils.

Page 21.

The only signs of battle on the moorland slopes were some gangrels collecting scattered swords, helmets, shields.

gangrels = tinkers, tramps, vagabonds, vagrants, gipsies, nomads of no fixed abode. The earliest kind of humanity were of this sort and wandered around the land for millennia in small family groups, improvising tools and shelter, gathering and consuming their food as they went. In some countries they acquired sheep and goats which they drove before them. The early Jews and Arabs were this sort of folk. When some early gangrels settled and started farming, weaving and making clay pots those who still moved between them became the first traders. Increasing settlement produced city states, empires and vast civilizations so gangrels inside their boundaries lived by migrant labour such as fruit picking, horse trading, scavenging, mending kettles, conjuring and making music. On the vast grasslands of northern Eurasia travelling nations of horse-riding herdsmen grew strong enough to counter-attack the settled lands of China pressing from the east and Rome from the west. Their attacks broke the Roman empire into the Christian nations of a new Europe, for the invading horsemen could not have gainfully managed the towns and territories they conquered without help from a priesthood who read and wrote. Their attacks gave China also a new ruling dynasty. When such gangrels became landlords their travelling days ended, except when they raided their neighbours.

Governments of the historical era who wanted to distract public attention from their greed or uselessness usually went to war, but when war with outsiders seemed too dangerous or expensive they declared war on a part of those they ruled, and for at least two thousand years Jews and gangrels were the traditional victims. Between 1942 and 44 the German government tried to kill all the gipsies and Jews in Europe and killed about six million of each. In 1990 the British Home Secretary (a politician employed to protect British households) accompanied a police attack on a camp of gangrels on the ancient common of Glastonbury. Men and women were clubbed, their mobile homes smashed with truncheons, and next day the British Prime Minister announced in Parliament, “I see it as my duty to make life hard for these people.” Yet while making life hard for these people governments who served big property owners kept making people homeless. At the start of the twenty-first century for every tramp, gipsy, tinker or vagrant who liked the life there were a dozen too poor to rent a home and twice as many migrants in temporary accommodation where employers used them to cheapen the wages of settled workers. Before homes became self-supporting and the commons were restored to everyone most people became travellers after forced eviction.

CHAPTER TWO — PRIVATE HOUSES

Page 24.

A stately woman of fifty was mother that day.

Every home had at least six experienced women who could order the powerplant and who did the job by turns, a week at a time. During that week whoever did the job was regarded as mother of the whole household. It was hard work so no younger women wanted so stern a title. Besides, many girls bore children when too young to patiently nurse them. In modern homes no infant was in danger of neglect. Most attached themselves to an aunt (the title given to any childbearing woman over eighteen) or granny (a title given to all women past childbearing).

Page 25.

Silencing the organ she attended to the orders of the day.

The organ could draw from the powerplant every recorded form of music, art and industry less than the diameter of the stalk. All housemothers were skilled musicians since anyone who could play Bach’s Mass circa 1740 easily managed the fingering which summoned the components of a Triumph motor cycle circa 1956. No skill in fingering was needed to make simple substances like chocolate or dynamite, though for health reasons organists kept this knowledge from children. (Note: the noise, stink and danger of the oil-fired Triumph made many adolescent youths prefer it to the safer, cleaner, more efficient models of the twenty-first century.)

Elastoplast

Trade name of an antiseptic adhesive bandage first manufactured in the early twentieth century.

Page 25.

The cooks [ordered] milk, cheese, flour, sugar, coffee beans.

The extra fertilizing of the powerplants’ roots after large funerals let them deliver meat with unusual speed. Most families avoided the taint of cannibalism by being vegetarian for a fortnight unless hunters brought in game from the commons.

Page 26.

Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty.

Granny Tibs was not an immortal. Her age (like the greater average height) had grown naturally with modern housekeeping, which used the elderly with affection and respect. The link between long lives and respect for them was first discovered by a joint team of U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. scientists who visited the Russian Caucasus in the late twentieth century, investigating rumours of unusual longevity there. They found the rumours true, and that the longevity had little to do with diet and climate. Their discovery was tersely summed up by the Anglo-American Alistair Cooke who said, “If you want to live a long time teach your children to love you, and your grandchildren to revere you.”

Page 29.

A marble bird-table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier.

This must have been derived from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s pond sculpture in the garden of Little Sparta, near Biggar in Lanarkshire.

Page 30.

A fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house.

Powerplants could synthesize any form of healthy nourishment but food connoisseurs believed that synthesized foods more elaborate than maize, rice or cornflour lacked the flavour of natural growth, were as tasteless as the food in days when vegetables and livestock had their growth forced by factory farming and genetic engineering, their decay retarded by freezing, atomic radiation and chemical additions. Apart from grain crops the foods ordered from the powerplant were those which could not be grown locally such as tea, coffee, sugar, oranges and lemons in northern Europe. All modern households had large kitchen gardens. Berrying, nutting and mushroom picking on the commons were popular seasonal pastimes, hunting and fishing were popular sports. The increasing popularity of these activities during the last days of the early matriarchy were among the factors which helped humanity survive the great plague with so little loss of life.

Page 30.

On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife.

In northern Europe the henwife of large households had a status which gave her a place in folklore. Her work with poultry outside the walls made her a commoner, but she brought her produce directly to the senior lady of the manor, since fowls were meat for nobility when the main diet of the lower classes was flesh of beasts killed and salted at the onset of winter. The henwife’s permit to enter or leave the great house when she chose made her inconvenient to the janitor or doorkeeper. A fifteenth-century Scottish poet (sometimes thought to be Dunbar) tells how his wife dies of thirst, goes to heaven, gets work as the Mother of God’s henwife, “holds Saint Peter at strife”, and finding the ale of heaven sour, works in a public house outside the walls for travellers on the way there. The likeness between this henwife and Wat Dryhope’s mother is a consequence of their profession.

… Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan.

The wooded character of this scene is recorded in the ancient ballad of the Outlaw Murray, which describes King James Stuart leading an army of full five thousand men against the border clans:

They saw the derke forest them before,

They thought it awesome for to see.

In the eighteenth century this ancient forest was destroyed by a system of housekeeping based upon sheep and the wool industry. Sir Walter Scott later celebrated the transparency of the loch but also its arboreal devastation:

Oft in my mind such thoughts awake

By lone Saint Mary’s silent lake.

Thou know’st it well — nor fen nor sedge

Pollute the pure lake’s crystal edge;

Abrupt and clear the mountains sink

At once upon the level brink;

And just a trace of silver sand

Marks where the water meets the land.

Far in the mirror, bright and blue

Each hill’s huge outline you may view;

Shaggy with heath, but lonely, bare,

Nor tree, nor bush, not brake is there,

Save where, of land, yon slender line

Bears thwart the lake the scattered pine.

By the end of the twentieth century overgrazing had destroyed the topsoil, exposing grey slides of rubble-like stone in places. The end of industrial housekeeping let Ettrick regain its ancient forest with the addition of fine gardens around the homesteads.

Page 30.

Large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet.

Like the trees on which it was modelled the powerplant lived and fruited by synthesizing sunlight, air, moisture and dirt, though the nature of the fruit was decided by human programming. Roof, walls and foundations of houses — all but the polished parquet floors — were extensions of the plant. Stalks easily reached cloud level since their tap root touched the geothermal layer.

The first modern powerplant was developed in the twenty-first century by a team of more Japanese geniuses than can be listed here. The world was then so disastrously polluted by competitive exploitation that the richest exploiters were acquiring shares in self-contained ecosystems (some on Earth, some on satellites) where they hoped their children would survive when human life became impossible elsewhere. The same greedy madness for more existence than they would allow others had driven American, British and Russian governors to build nuclear bomb bunkers in the twentieth century, Egyptian governors to build huge pyramids and burial chambers in the dawn of history.

The company who had developed the powerplant foresaw it could replace monetary housekeeping. They also knew it would cause panic in the bankers, stockbrokers and executives who then ruled the civilized world by manipulating money. (Note that civilized = citified.) Money was then the most beautiful and desirable of possessions and wars were fought against people who reduced its value: the Japanese therefore promoted their powerplant in secret, selling seedlings at huge prices to heads of governments and transnational businesses as a means by which the wealthy could get self-supporting private households. Millionaires saw that such households were safer than any others and began seeding them on privately owned islands off the shores of their native lands, but not all millionaires and heads of state acted selfishly. Without openly saying so the governments of Japan, Switzerland and Israel planted the roots of a powerplant economy which would eventually benefit their whole country. Soon after an Arab syndicate began secretly donating cuttings to Islamic nations everywhere. By then news of powerplant culture had spread to users of the open intelligence network, who saw it could be used to liberate everyone from want. Millionaires faced the fact that their private havens would only be perfectly safe in a world where most people were safe.

The first of the national plantations reached maturity near the end of the century, after which the foreign imports of nations possessing them dwindled to zero. By this time every country in the world was following their example though in highly organized police states (Britain and the U.S.A. were the last) an underclass was maintained for many years by denying powerplant housekeeping to folk herded in ancient cities which were used as concentration camps, causing the destruction of several beautiful buildings (Saint Paul’s Cathedral, for example) which the modern world would have preserved as song schools, exhibition halls or travellers’ hotels.

Page 36.

clyped = to have made public a private matter which the publicizer was expected to keep private. The noun clype (sometimes clype-clash) means, one likely to inform on others. sleekit = soft and smooth to the touch. In a great poem Burns applies it affectionately to a field mouse. Applied to a person, however, it connects with the adjective slee meaning clever, skilful, deft, but also furtive or cunning, therefore not to be trusted.

Page 38.

blethering = making a wordiness as senseless as those windblasts Yorkshire farmers call wuthering, but less offensively than is implied by blustering. It derives from the Old English word for bladder or windbag.

obstrapulous = loudly or assertively troublesome, from the Latin adjective obstreperus meaning noisy.

Page 39.

weans = infants or children, so almost synonymous with bairns, but tending more to the baby end of human growth.

The world holds hardly a dozen tribes of professional Amazons.

Greek legends say the Amazons were a nation of women on the banks of the Danube whose strength in battle kept them independent of men. They had a wholly female population because they conceived from the men of a neighbouring nation, getting rid of male offspring at birth. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European travellers gave the Amazon name to large female regiments who fought for the African kingdom of Dahomey. Sometimes conscripted before birth — often recruited from slaves — trained to endure pain, fight in the hardest areas of combat and wholly at the disposal of their king and his chieftains when out of it — they had as little independence as other soldiers of the historical epoch. Through most of history women only attached themselves to armies when they had no better livelihood. Homeless travelling women lived parasitically on equally parasitic hordes of male mercenaries, trading sexual relief and alcohol for money between the battles, trading water and crude medical help for anything they could get during them. With total nationalization of warfare in the twentieth century women were conscripted into army storekeeping, driving and signal work. Few were directly employed to shoot and bomb people.

The independent female armies imagined by the Greeks only appeared in the early modern era. Every continent but Antarctica got two or three Amazon Warrior houses, none recruited from local clans but drawing highly combative volunteers from all parts of the globe. Broadcasts of their battles were highly popular with men, but since modern Amazons refused to recognize the Geneva Conventions no male army dared fight them. They had nothing in common with North American military sisterhoods who dressed in parodies of male combat dress, marched to war beside their brothers and lovers, lined up on the edge of battlefields and incited their clans to greater efforts with choral chanting and synchronized body jerks. Counted together the military sisterhoods and Amazons were less than 0.05 % of the world’s female population. Since warfare stopped invading their homes or supporting their families over 99.95 % of women have avoided it. Many younger women, however, still found fighting men more attractive.

Page 40.

neep = tumshie or turnip.

Page 44.

stoor = tiny particles in a chaotic or stirred-up state. In Lament for the Makaris Dunbar uses it for the dust clouds raised by battling warriors. In To a Mountain Daisy Burns applies it to newly ploughed topsoil. It can also mean windblown spray. Twentieth-century Scots most frequently applied it to fluff collected in vacuum-sweeper bags.

Page 45.

Groombridge … was testing my fitness for immortality.

Since dead parents and friends meet and talk with us in dreams we are sure to return as dreams in the heads of those who remember us. Folk who entertain others with tremendous examples, ideas, stories and music can survive in thoughts and actions for many years after their deaths. This was human immortality until the twenty-first century when a federation of transnational pharmaceutical companies (who pretended to be competing for tax avoidance purposes) found a treatment which could make bodies younger again. They could not be made younger than when the treatment began, but after seven years they could be restored to the exact state they were in when it began. The rejuvenated brain cells had therefore no recollection of the previous seven years.

No biological solution has yet been found to this problem, which scientists called the Struldbrugg factor from Jonathan Swift’s diagnosis of it in 1726. A brain cannot contain more than a normal lifetime of experience without being wasted and warped by it, so youth can only be restored by undoing biological experience. However, the problem had a technical solution. Shortly before a person of thirty or forty was restored to their twenty-three-or thirty-three-year-old state they recorded a summary of what their renewed cells would find useful to know. Since the businessmen and scientists who financed and discovered this process valued information more than sensed experience they embraced the treatment but kept it secret. In the twenty-first century lifespans varied greatly from nation to nation and class to class, but competitive housekeeping ensured that malnutrition, disease, famine and warfare kept the average human lifespan for the whole planet less than forty years. The effect on even a prosperous nation of many people not dying would have been catastrophic.

Immortality only became possible for many after the creation of extra-terrestrial living room. By that time powerplant housekeeping had returned the earth to a stable ecology and most intelligent people had come to prefer sensed experience to manipulating units of information. Since fear of death is an obvious sign of an unsatisfying life few nowadays want their bodies to exist forever.

Page 50.

perjink = trim, neat, of smart appearance.

Page 55.

I hate women for their damnable smug security and for always being older than me, always older and wiser.

This spasm of rage against women from a man who personally preferred them to men was a symptom of the spreading war fever.

CHAPTER THREE — WARRIOR WORK

Page 59.

jorries = small glass or porcelain balls and the game children play with these on pieces of level ground. In Dumbarton it is called jiggies (from the verb jig meaning to turn or dodge quickly) and in other parts of Scotland, bools. It should not be confused with the bools played by adults with much larger, wooden balls on smooth green lawns, though the rules of play are similar.

Page 61.

whaups = curlews.

Page 63.

The Warrior house was built over the short river flowing into Saint Mary’s Loch from Loch of the Lowes.

This modern structure was on the site of Tibbie Shiel’s Inn where James Hogg (poet, novelist and tenant farmer at Altrieve and Mountbenger) gathered with his neighbours in the first decades of the nineteenth century. A large statue of the poet with crook, plaid and sheepdog was placed on the lower slope of Oxcleuch Rig near the end of that century, and now overlooks the Ettrick veterans’ garden of remembrance.

The Warrior house was drill hall, armoury, canteen, dormitory, gymnasium, infirmary, cinema, library, stable, garage, youth hostel, club room and old men’s home. Four distinct ranks used it.

1 — The Boys’ Brigade. These soldiers of any age over twelve had joined the army but not yet fought a battle. They spent a third of their time in martial exercise. A dedicated few spent more time on that but most enjoyed playing other games too.

2 — Officers. Between wars these spent two days a week training the Boys’ Brigade, the rest in martial sport, study and love affairs.

3 — Veterans: officers who had tired of war or grown too old for it. Their pastimes were advising the Boys’ Brigades, playing bowls or cards and visiting old men and women in quieter houses.

4 — Servants. These had a talent for housework, no wish to fight and preferred the company of men to women. They seldom left the Warrior house because their love affairs were with each other. The only class conflict was slight tension between servants attached to the officers’ mess and hero-worshipping cadets who sometimes worked as waiters.

Page 65.

March, march, Ettrick and Teviotdale etc. Based on March, March, Pinks of Election, a song published by Hogg in his Jacobite Relics, Blue Bonnets Over the Border is one of the many lyrics which Walter Scott (1771–1832) scattered through his novels. It is sung by Louis (one of Julian Avenel’s followers) in The Monastery. Set to a pleasant marching tune and slightly bowdlerized it was so popular with anglophone choirs in the late historical era that T.S. Eliot quotes it inThe Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles. Like other Scottish songs its local popularity was ensured by emphatic use of place names.

Page 74.

coronach = a Gaelic lament for the fallen.

Page 75.

bogie = a call to cancel a game while people are still playing it.

Page 80.

glaikit sumphs = irresponsible dullards.

Page 82.

girning = whining or wailing through teeth exposed as in a grin.

dour = determined, hard, stern, dull, severe, obstinate, unyielding, sullen, humourless, slow, sluggish, reluctant.

ahint = behind; at the rear end.

disjaskit = disjoined or discombobulated.

pawkie = crafty; shrewd.

couthie = friendly; sympathetic.

Page 88.

YE GOWK! = you cuckoo.

YE DOITED GOMERIL! = you crazed idiot.

YE STUPIT NYAFF! = you puny insignificance.

YE BLIRT! = you unexpected squall of rain; rain or wind; you childish outcry; you externally visible part of the genitalia of a female horse.

CHAPTER FOUR — PUDDOCK PLOT

Page 107.

carnaptious = irritable; contentious.

Page 108.

Secret societies (like governments, stock exchanges, banks, national armies, police forces, advertising agencies and other groups who made nothing people needed) had ended with the historical era.

All these organizations existed to create and protect money which everyone needed in the last centuries of the historical era. Wat did not know the wonderful value huge amounts of money added to the lives of those who owned them.

Page 111.

The times are racked with birth pangs. Every hour Brings forth some gasping Truth, etc. These lines are by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94) Bostonian doctor, professor of anatomy and essayist. In 1858 his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table made him famous by its playful wit, fresh unconventional tone and vignettes in verse. The monstrous but quickly domesticated truths he describes here are nineteenth-century geological and biological discoveries not foreshadowed in the Bible. At first many feared these contradicted the word of God, undermined organized religion and would overturn established authority. In a few years it was obvious that ecclesiastical, legal and political bosses were as firmly established as ever, and scientific discovery was making industrial investment more profitable.

It was written by an American judge heralding fascism.

This statement is untrue. The speaker has confused the nineteenth-century doctor and essayist with his son of the same name, a U.S.A. Supreme Court Chief Justice who ruled in 1927 that third generation idiots could be legally sterilized, and also lived to see the rise of Hitler. The first O. W. Holmes could not herald fascism. He lived when the world’s most fascist states were European monarchies or the colonies of European monarchic empires. In those days no American would have thought such places patterns for the U.S.A.

Page 111.

Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep right on to the end! etc.

Probably the best-known song recorded by Sir Harry Lauder (1870–1950) Scottish mill boy and coal miner who became one of Britain’s most popular music-hall comedians. The mindless, onward-trudging optimism of the words and tune comforted many in the era between two World Wars. Lauder’s trite verses and use of a Lowland Scottish accent while wearing a Highland kilt made him particularly loathed by the great poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who also spoke with a Lowland Scottish accent and often wore a Highland kilt.

Page 116.

Those [eighteenth-century] Europeans thought they were safer than the Imperial Romans.

The historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) began his most famous book thus:

In the second century of the Christian Aera, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence; the Roman Senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period, A.D. 98–180, of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the two Antonines.

Gibbon deliberately used phrases prosperous Britons used about their own nation: most civilized portion of mankind, extensive monarchy, union of the provinces, free constitution etc. He then described Roman civilization slowly, continually collapsing through thirteen centuries of Christianity, German invasion and Mohammedan conquest until nothing remained but impressive ruins and words in books. However, he found differences suggesting his own civilization was more secure. The Roman Empire had failed because ruled by a single city: first Rome, then Constantinople. The civilization to which Gibbon belonged was European — not just British — and ruled the world from London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Madrid et cetera, from many capitals of nations too strong to be defeated by outside invaders, too united by shared advantages to seriously damage each other. Some were monarchies, some republics, but mutual toleration and an intelligent economic system were common to all, and their mastery of explosive armaments made them safe from barbarians.

Gibbon completed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1788. The French Revolution started a year later and convinced him that civilization would always be a few brief decades between eras of barbarism. In this he differs from Thomas Carlyle who believed human history would have been meaningless if the French Revolution had NOT broken out.

Note: The notion that a civilization, empire or nation is a prosperous minority for whom the rest exist was a historical commonplace, though the size of the minority varied. Here are a few of their names: Aristocracy, Equestrians, Lords, Gentry, Officers, Brahmins, Mandarins, Court-and-Camp, Church-and-State, The City, The Bourgeoisie, Le Monde, Society, The Party, The Nomenclatura, The Executive Class and (in twentieth-century England where social manipulators were too modest to declare themselves) The Middle Class.

Page 116.

Our rational Utopia is about to go boom and fall apart too and you, Wat Dryhope, are the virus of the plague which is going to destabilize it.

destabilize = to secretly undermine or subvert a government or economy so as to cause unrest or collapse, thus making a land available to outsiders who have not declared war on it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries civilized traders did this by giving native tribesmen, in return for local produce, blankets in which people had died of smallpox; but the most effective way of weakening people was by destroying their food supply. After the United States government had signed a peace treaty with the central American redskin nations it built forts across the prairies to ensure the treaty was kept. The soldiers in the forts, assisted by white settlers and sportsmen, then exterminated the buffaloes on which the Indians depended for food. Indians who fought to prevent this were killed with rifles and machine guns because they were breaking the treaty. The starving remainder (chiefly women and children) had to beg for food at the forts and were given some on condition that they shifted to less fertile lands, lands which the white man did not want until oil was discovered on them a few decades later.

In the twentieth century rich trading companies toppled electoral governments in South America and Asia by a combination of bribery, financial manipulation and lying news stories. They were assisted by governments they had bribed. Since these governments were nominally democratic the assistance was given chiefly through secret intelligence networks.

The virus used by Delilah Puddock to destabilize the modern world was developed on the K20 asteroid, and aimed to combine the advantage of all previous methods. It was a normally harmless strain of the common cold which she passed to Wat through sexual congress after weakening his immune system with drugs. It was so infectious and contagious that a few hours later he passed it to almost everyone he spoke to or who shook his hand. The virus had hardly any noticeable effect on people’s health, but harboured a nanomechanism which became active and started replicating when it touched a powerplant, eventually destroying the plant’s ability to photosynthesize. The inventors of this plague hoped to achieve the following results.

1 — The death of half the world’s powerplants in a week. Households using them would have no food but what they grew or could hunt on the commons. Besides hunger they would also lack heat, lighting, sewage disposal and means of recycling waste.

2 — In seeking help from uninfected neighbours they would spread the disease further. When households in uninfected districts realized this they would keep out infection by creating boundaries and forbidding the starving to cross. This would enclose the commons, make all travellers dreaded and rejected, divide humanity once more into the desperate poor and selfish prosperous.

3 — The frontiers would be defended by soldiers who would want guns, grenades and bombs to avoid being infected through hand-to-hand fighting. These would be ordered from domestic powerplants, thus depriving homes in the uninfected areas of items everyone took for granted and putting women under military rule. Generals would also form world-wide alliances to keep the poor householders in their places. A stern military patriarchy would therefore replace mild matriarchy as a system of government.

4 — The Red Cross would try to organize famine relief co-operatively through the open intelligence net but be defeated by the size of the problem. The network would soon evolve seedlings of a plague-immune powerplant, but since these would be distributed under military control the dominant officer class in healthy areas would first replace their own powerplants with the plague-immune kind, postponing help for the poor indefinitely for reasons of security.

5 — Powerplants take at least thirty years to reach household-supporting size and before then the new ruling class would see any wide extension of peaceful prosperity as a miserable levelling down, a failure of law and order. Like all patriarchies they would have acquired wives and mistresses who supported them and wanted to give their advantages to their children. They would do so by continuing the scarcity which allowed them to dominate the rest. The patriarchs would therefore grow powerplants on estates carved out of the commons, employing some of the poor to keep the rest out and paying them with food and occasional luxury items. In these conditions it would soon become possible to run the world on a monetary basis again.

6 — Chaotic historical eras tend to be dominated by monstrous egoists. Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, William the Conqueror, Tamerlane, Henry the Eighth, Ivan the Terrible, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Thatcher would have been harmless if treated as equals by sensible people. But in competitive historical states common sense is scorned. Both rich and poor want leaders who embody Godhood, Destiny, Unyielding Reality, so many give unlimited obedience to whoever best acts such parts. Delilah Puddock’s clique of plotters gloried in their insane egoism. They were sure their longevity and foreknowledge of events would make them rulers of a new historical era.

Page 119.

The bright old day now dawns again etc. This is the last verse of a ballad which Charles Dickens contributed to The Examiner in August 1841. It parodies a right-wing popular song. Here is the full text.

THE FINE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN

(New Version, to be said or sung at all

Conservative Dinners)

I’ll sing you a new ballad,

and I’ll warrant it first rate,

Of the days of that old gentleman

who had that old estate;

When they spent the public money

at a bountiful old rate

On ev’ry mistress, pimp and scamp,

at ev’ry noble gate,

In the fine old English Tory times;

Soon may they come again!

The good old laws were garnished well

with gibbets, whips, and chains,

With fine old English penalties,

and fine old English pains,

With rebel heads, and seas of blood

once hot in rebel veins;

For all these things were requisite

to guard the rich old gains

Of the fine old English Tory times;

Soon may they come again!

This brave old code, like Argus,

had a hundred watchful eyes,

And ev’ry English peasant

had his good old English spies,

To tempt his starving discontent

with fine old English lies,

Then call the good old Yoemanry

to stop his peevish cries,

In the fine old English Tory times;

Soon may they come again!

The good old times for cutting throats

that cried out in their need,

The good old times for hunting men

who held their father’s creed,

The good old times when William Pitt,

as all good men agreed,

Came down direct from Paradise

at more than railroad speed.

Oh the fine old English Tory times;

When will they come again!

In those rare days, the press was seldom

known to snarl or bark,

But sweetly sang of men in pow’r,

like any tuneful lark;

Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds

were in the dark;

And not a man in twenty score

knew how to make his mark.

Oh the fine old English Tory times;

Soon may they come again!

Those were the days for taxes,

and for war’s infernal din;

For scarcity of bread,

that fine old dowagers might win;

For shutting men of letters up,

through iron bars to grin,

Because they didn’t think the Prince

was altogether thin,

In the fine old English Tory time;

Soon may they come again!

But Tolerance, though slow in flight,

is strong-wing’d in the main;

That night must come on these fine days,

in course of time was plain;

The pure old spirit struggled,

but its struggles were in vain;

A nation’s grip was on it,

and it died in choking pain,

With the fine old English Tory days,

All of the olden time.

The bright old day now dawns again;

the cry goes through the land,

In England there shall be dear bread —

in Ireland, sword and brand;

And poverty, and ignorance,

shall swell the rich and grand,

So, rally round the rulers

with the gentle iron hand,

Of the fine old English Tory days;

Hail to the coming time!

CHAPTER FIVE — THE HENWIFE

Page 126.

powsoudie = sheep’s head broth.

drummock = raw oatmeal with milk.

kebbuck = home-made cheese.

farle = a three-cornered scone or bannock.

Page 136.

The stove was called the Aga.

Aga was the trade name of the cast-iron stove manufactured in the twentieth-century period. It burned household waste besides coal, wood or peat and was a thrifty source of heat for household uses.

We should all be gangrels.

Kittock’s faith in the superiority of possession-less people may seem the sort of romantic perversion sung in the ballads of Johnny Faa and The Raggle Taggle Gipsies. It was also entertained by Greeks, Jews, early Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Hindus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Borrow and many others who found natural justice incompatible with state-enforced laws, the earth which supports us at variance with owners who evict natives from it, often murderously.

Page 138.

wheen = several; a few; a number which is sufficient when used approvingly, deficient when used disparagingly.

Page 142.

The men exchanged tobacco pouches.

This custom started in the seventeenth century when tobacco was imported to Europe in so many states that almost every smoker had his favourite blend, but thought it friendly and interesting to offer and taste other blends.

[The men] discussed whether the ten thousand years of civilization should be called The Dark Ages because of their greed and cruelty, or The Middle Ages because they had achieved some splendid things. Breaking the past into easily labelled sections is a habit as ancient as thought. Ways of doing so is a brief account of mankind.

PREHISTORIC folk split time into two: the dream time or days of the gods when earth, sky, creatures and the first people were made; the human time which flowed from then. They believed that the earlier time was eternal, that gods in the sky, the neighbourhood and underground still helped the sun and seasons and human generations return. Before civilization destroyed such people their past seemed a continually renewed present extending forever through their children.

EGYPT AND CHINA were the longest-lasting nations of the historical era and both existed because farmers on fertile plains had combined to share large irrigation systems. Both systems got armies to defend them from marauding gangrels, a class of civil servants (priests or mandarins) to run them, one big landlord (Pharaoh or Son of Heaven) to unite the whole. In both nations the civil servants invented pictographic writing and by keeping no record of earlier times mythologized their state by teaching that the one landlord, his surveyors and tax collectors were incarnations and agents of gods who had made the universe. This meant that everbody else must serve them forever. The past was divided into periods named after the presiding Pharaoh or Son of Heaven.

GREEKS AND HINDUS split the past into four:

1 — The Golden Age when people were content to gather food without cultivating it and had weather which let them live without clothes and houses.

2 — The Silver Age, a colder time when they began living in caves and thick bushes, cultivating the soil and domesticating animals.

3 — The Bronze Age, when they formed settlements which sometimes raided each other.

4 — The Iron Age, when cities, navies, trading, warfare and every social evil were perpetrated on a vast scale. Since the Iron Age was modern and the Greeks were in it they saw history as a deterioration. The Greeks did not know how it would end. The Hindus thought the four ages amounted to a single Great Age which would be repeated eternally, each iron age collapsing into chaos before a new golden age arose.

ROMANS also split time into four: the time of gods and heroes who founded Rome, the Roman kingdom, the Roman republic, the Roman empire. After the kingdom many prosperous Romans thought each of these states an improvement on the last, so viewed their history as a continual social improvement. Augustus, the first emperor, was especially fond of the notion and got poets to advertise it. This progressive view of history was later adopted by the officer class of empires too recent to claim that they had always existed.

JEWS had a recorded history too intricate to be simplified, for they dated it from the creation of the world. It told how their ancestors lost a happy garden where they lived naked without toil, became nomads and shepherds, and then guestworkers, slaves, immigrants, invaders, conquerors, farmers and civic exploiters who were again enslaved, colonized, dispersed by the Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires. To make this unending story bearable the rabbis explained it as a harsh middle age between the good garden where humanity was once happy and the happy Jewish city which God was preparing in the future. Sometime in A.D. 30 the Rabbi Jesus said the good future city was for everyone who loved God, even if they died first. This view of history became popular with slaves, women, labourers and other Roman subjects who did not view the empire as a continual improvement. Roman governors persecuted Christians as malcontents until the empire started cracking under its own weight.

OFFICIAL CHRISTIANITY. In the fourth century after Christ the Emperor Constantine saw the political usefulness of a history which promised mankind a happy future if it left the management of the present time to landlords like himself. He made Christianity the Roman imperial religion, officially splitting time into four again:

1 — The prehistoric happy godly garden where life started well but went wrong.

2 — History without hope before Christ.

3 — History with hope after Christ.

4 — The posthistoric happy godly city where hopes come true (if you love God as the rulers and priests tell you).

This Christian division of time lasted over two thousand years, though when famine and administrative collapse made the present unbearable the majority revolted against their priests and landlords and demanded some heaven at once.

THE RENAISSANCE. Around A.D. 1400 some Italian republics and dukedoms so prospered by trade between Asia and Europe that they recovered the Roman sense that people could use intelligence to improve their community. Historians called this recovery the Renaissance and redivided time as follows:

1 — The Ancient World — All time before Christianity became the Roman imperial religion.

2 — The Middle Ages — everything between the Ancient World and the Renaissance; a better time than the Ancient World, because it made Europe Christian.

3 — The Modern World — everything after the Middle Ages but better than these, because with Christian faith in the future modern Europeans were scientists continually enlarging the wisdom of the present, artists continually adding to the world’s stock of beautiful things, traders bringing back rare goods from every continent in the world. Some historians felt so pleased with their part of Europe that they thought history had reached a lasting state of perfection. Bishop Bossuet felt this about Catholic France in the seventeenth century, the French revolutionaries about equalitarian France in the eighteenth, Professor Hegel about Protestant Prussia in the nineteenth.

MARXISM. Yet even in those states folk were excluded from social improvements. Many of the rich lived wastefully with two or three huge houses while labouring families lived in one or two rooms. Landlords kept great fertile parks uncultivated while peasants paid them rents for the right to scratch potatoes out of stony soil. The hardest workers were taxed to pay for wars which left the rich uninjured and did the poor no good, unless a soldier son came home with loot to compensate for his wounds. The development of industrial factories enriched several new classes of people while impoverishing an equal number. In 1867 Karl Marx suggested a new division of time:

1 — Tribal Communism, when people live in communities so small that most families have a voice in the governing council so are seldom much poorer than their richest neighbour.

2 — Class Warfare, when folk live in big states ruled by small unions of conquerors, scribes, landlords, factory owners, businessmen and/or moneylenders. These unions keep power and great incomes by the continual creation of poverty in the underclass.

3 — World Communism, when the underclass form their own unions, take the land and factories from their masters and manage them for the good of themselves, whereupon the evicted upper classes have to join them, riches and poverty vanish in a fair sharing of goods, and all states wither away.

This resembled the Jewish and Christian time division in giving hope for the future, though the future was to be created by human effort instead of God. Many labourers and poor tradesmen in machine-making nations were then forming unions to improve their conditions. In some states they created political parties which helped them do so.

In 1914 an inbred clique of owners who had inherited the Russian Empire went to war. They commanded a vast, obedient, conscripted people but could not give them enough food, boots and bullets to defeat smaller armies of industrially efficient neighbours. This caused a workers’ revolt. A clique of middle-class Marxists rushed back to Russia and seized control in the name of World Communism. The new clique created a party dictatorship which did not share its advantages with other Russians and died of broken promises before the end of the century.

POSTMODERNISM happened when landlords, businessmen, brokers and bankers who owned the rest of the world had used new technologies to destroy the power of labour unions. Like owners of earlier empires they felt that history had ended because they and their sort could now dominate the world for ever. This indifference to most people’s wellbeing and taste appeared in the fashionable art of the wealthy. Critics called their period postmodern to separate it from the modern world begun by the Renaissance when most creative thinkers believed they could improve their community. Postmodernists had no interest in the future, which they expected to be an amusing rearrangement of things they already knew. Postmodernism did not survive disasters caused by “competitive exploitation of human and natural resources” in the twenty-first century.

MODERNISM developed when households became the largest units of government on earth and satellite co-operatives the largest off it. Once again time was split into three.

1 — Prehistory, before people lived in cities.

2 — History, when increasing numbers did so and city cultures shaped family life everywhere.

3 — Modernity, when the open intelligence network and powerplants made cities, nations, money and industrial power obsolete.

The simplicity of our modern divisions misled many into treating history as a painful interval between prehistoric tribal communities and modern co-operative ones. Others wanted to lump the historic and prehistoric eras together with a new calendar dated from the start of modernity, but disagreed about where to place the first year. Open intelligence gurus said the new era opened when the United States government let an early open intelligence network take over the Montana state education service in the 1980s. Others put it in the twenty-first century when the first modern powerplant synthesized a bowl of rice, a Samurai sword and a perfect Hokusai print on a Japanese peninsula — others when the first self-sustaining powerplant community took root in an Israeli kibbutz or in Salt Lake City or in the Vatican — others when the Islamic league began distributing powerplants to every Mohammedan nation on earth — others when the open intelligence network announced an accord with Japan through which it would sell any sixty people in the world their own powerplant if they owned an area of land able to support one.

I will end this far too lengthy note by quoting Pat O’Rafferty, a guru unknown to the open intelligence since he only speaks into the ears of friends: Modern housekeeping and modern gangrelling grew from more than two thousand years of decent people struggling to live as Jesus advised — struggling to do as they would be done by, not as lords and government officials did with them. The fact that Buddha (a former hereditary lord) and Confucius (an ex-government official) said the same centuries before Jesus proves they too were God’s excellent sons. Calendars were invented to help us keep appointments with each other. Using them to cut us off from a host of the dead is like using fire to burn a library instead of keeping it warm.

Page 147.

The public eye presenters and telecom gurus and commanders broadcasting just now seem part of her conspiracy, but so do I.

The epidemic of military enthusiasm following the Ettrick — Northumbria draw was a worldwide male reaction to the omnicompetence of women who only needed them as inseminators. It is impossible to know what damage this epidemic would have done had it not been interrupted by another. The military threat had not been contrived by the conspirators. They merely tried to take advantage of it, fortunately for humanity.

Page 151.

About great-grandmothers: Their gossip has been the only government and police the world has needed for more than a century. Among modern folk the very calm healthy intelligences of old women had most leisure to ponder and exchange news about their families: families whose total sum (if the gangrels are ignored) was humanity. Even loving families bred people who could only bear life by changing their world or finding another. A poet called this state divine discontent because good new things are made or discovered by those who tholed it. In historic times, however, neglect steered many potential makers and discoverers into crime, insanity or that legal compromise between the two, remorseless competition for power and property. In modern time the great-grandmothers ensured nobody was neglected by distributing among their daughters and grand-daughters news and suggestions which brought friends and opportunities to the most lonely and despairing. This news only reached men through remarks made by aunts, sisters or lovers, so like Wat most fighting men did not notice the power of the grandmothers.

When Wat had been carried off to the circus Kittock ran at once to Dryhope house and told the great-grannies why she thought this might have dangerous results. As he shook hands with folk from six continents in a Selkirk meadow the old women began a worldwide enquiry which spread through the solar system. Starting with grannies and mothers it came to involve everyone who knew anything about Meg Mountbenger and her colleagues. It lasted fifteen hours, those who directed it dozing in relays.

Meanwhile Wat, with a mixture of boredom and perplexity, saw a creative evolutionary opera called Homage to Ettrick. The overture was a firework display representing the explosion which created the universe and the origin of species. Glancing at the programme Wat saw four acts would follow depicting the heroic, religious, industrial and modern periods. He fell asleep halfway through the heroic period and was nudged awake by General Shafto near the end of the modern. Lulu Dancy was projecting a mirage of his last battle onto the dawn sky. In a pause after a crescendo of organ, trumpet and bagpipe blasts a Russian Orthodox church choir chanted “Do you surrender?” and Wat saw a mile-high coloured shadow of himself sing a splendid “No!” stab another shadow and dive down into the globe of the rising sun, preceded by a shining golden eagle pulling after it a banner like the tail of a meteor.

Then came the breakfast banquet served in a vast marquee with more speeches, back-slapping, kisses from visiting soldiers’ wives, congratulatory speeches and toasts. Beside him in the place of honour sat Meg-Delilah-Lulu in a silk dress as scarlet as her lipstick. It seemed impossible to talk with her but she kept filling his glass with champagne and giving him such lovingly mischievous glances that he gazed at her in puzzled wonder and hardly saw anyone else. Shortly before the breakfast ended she whispered, “I’ll be back soon,” slipped away and never returned. She was never seen again by anyone who admitted to knowing her. An hour later the foreign guests flew home while Wat, drunk for the first time in his life, raved and threatened violence through the circus caravans in a search for Meg Mountbenger. He was overpowered and carried to Ettrick Warrior house by Archie Crook Cot and the Boys’ Brigade. He arrived there unconscious.

By noon the old women had informed the open intelligence of the following. Meg Mountbenger and two public eye people and three biologists in the lunar Clavius laboratory were the K20 clique who had killed Haldane. They were still morally stupid, having kept in close touch with each other while pretending not to. By using vast amounts of public energy, then drugging him, they had infected Wat Dryhope with a harmless-seeming, highly contagious virus which could spread to all who talked with him. This virus must be a host to something more sinister since there could be no good reason for spreading it.

As a result of this information Wat was visited by a team of scientists who took him to a quickly improvised quarantine hospital and laboratory on top of Ben Nevis. Before they isolated the nanomechanism, however, its target became obvious. In Dryhope house the powerplant started gulping and wheezing, the stem grew grey and blotchy, lost its transparency and power to synthesize anything, and finally began crumbling into powder from the summit down. A few hours later this plague struck homes of nearly all who had been close to Wat or close to people close to him. All over the world centres of light, heat, and nourishment died. Knowledge unique to these districts — music, stories and local records — only survived now in memories of the living and a few old books that were mainly read by gangrels. Meanwhile biologists discovered that, though quarantine would reduce the speed of the plague’s spread, it could never be finally eliminated. Animals could carry the virus, and windblown dust from withering powerplants.

Yet the worldwide panic and collapse into barbarism expected by the plotters never came, partly because wrist communicators did not depend on local power supplies so everyone stayed in the intelligence network. No military action to quarantine homes was suggested or needed. Infected families quarantined themselves. The uninfected raised their powerplant food production to a maximum while reducing what they ate to the minimum, leaving a surplus which was airlifted and dropped to deprived families. Since this could only be a temporary measure while the virus spread further, and since some time would pass before a plague resistant powerplant could be bred, men put their military discipline into planting crops, building wind and watermills to provide local energy supplies, building and manning fishing fleets — luckily the oceans were as throng with life as in prehistoric times, since for over a century only sportsmen had fished them. The enthusiasm with which men turned to such work looked like thankfulness for a world where women required their labour. The Council for War Regulation in Geneva had extended its moratorium on war games for the foreseeable future, pointing out that folk who enjoyed these had plenty of recordings to watch, yet public eye replays of these records were no longer popular.

“Warfare now seems a fatuous way of passing the time,” said the former commander of the East Anglian Alliance who now commanded a North Sea trawler, “Obviously our lives were so valueless then that we wanted to lose them. I’m glad the biology mandarins are developing a plague-resistant powerplant but in future I think women should use it as an auxiliary source of necessities — enough to keep them independent of us, not enough to make us dependent on them. I don’t know how family life will be reshaped by the present emergency — I hear that monogamous crofting communities of husbands and wives have started in Ireland and the Scottish west. It may not be a bad thing. Whatever the future holds it looks like containing less killing. I suspect that what some gurus now call the early modern period was just another bit of bloody history which spared the women and children. It’s a funny thing, but since the plague erupted nobody has died except of old age and unforeseeable accident. Those plotters deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.”

When Meg Mountbenger’s fellow plotters were shown proof of their guilt they readily admitted it. One said, “We dislike modern life so wanted to make it exciting. We thought this required killing a lot of people, but everyone who has swatted a fly or poisoned a rat knows it is no crime to destroy inconvenient lives. You find us inconvenient — make your own lives exciting by having us gassed, electrocuted, guillotined, garrotted or hanged. Or revive the old English punishment for treason. Hang us by the neck, cut us down while still alive, rip out our intestines, burn them in front of our eyes, hack off our limbs and genitals. Tapes of the event will be replayed for centuries.”

They refused to be accepted singly into families or co-operative satellites where they would receive the friendly, careful attention due to the immature. They asked for a habitat of their own and were given a station on Titan where they could only maintain their lives by working so co-operatively that their children (should they have any) could not be corrupted by antisocial examples. Through years during which the effects of the plague were being mastered this station remained a stubbornly silent part of the intelligence network, receiving information from it but returning none. Then one day they suddenly entered a music channel as a song group called The Plagues. In harsh discordant voices they mocked every aspect of modern life they thought stale, smug and stupid. They were popular with children. Adults thought their broadcasts were signs of returning sanity. If Napoleon’s poetic ambitions or Hitler’s artistic ones had been attended to and encouraged they would have done less damage.

So, the old ladies’ speedy discovery of the Puddock Plot probably stopped mankind reverting to historic barbarism.

Page 152.

There was hatred in what she did with me last night but nothing calculating, nothing political. It’s a miracle that she’s needed me all these years.

Meg Mountbenger had a rare, quick, energetic nature, slow to develop and held back from emotional maturity by a childhood sense of unattractive loneliness, maybe because her mother had weaned her too soon, maybe because her dad was a gangrel. Only aunts and grandmothers knew who her father was, but it may have influenced them into treating her like the outsider she became. When five years old she grew so devoted to a girl friend from Mountbenger that she insisted on going to live there, perhaps thinking she would be more popular than at Dryhope. Her later furtive visits to Dryhope suggest she was disappointed. Always on the edge of family life she recognized Wat as one of the same sort. Unluckily Wat, like most males, wanted girls who were his opposite and treated her with the disdain he had learned from Kittock.

Like all intelligence networks the grannies could make mistakes. Before Haldane died too many old ladies thought talented malcontents were best occupied turning remote space stations into worlds of their own. From the age of twelve Meg Mountbenger had wished to work in a cloud circus. Instead the grannies deflected her to K20, making that unhealthy concentration of egoists even less stable.

Like all those working on K20 she was immediately enrolled as an immortal. At that time the damaging effects of rejuvenation on the young was only suspected and Haldane, oscillating between a boyish fifty-eight and sixty-five, looked forward to an eternity of exploiting bright young people. For them work with the great satellite designer seemed heaven, at first. They worshipped him as young Italian artists worshipped Michelangelo, imitated him as young German Protestants imitated Luther.

Meg’s work and membership of Haldane’s harem may have made her happy until rejuvenation restored her adolescence. Losing seven years of sensory experience causes an emotional void in old and young alike, but hurts the young most because they have poignant memories of a recent-seeming but remote past. Meg’s obsession with Wat returned. It was worse for being with a man who had forgotten her, grew worse still after her second rejuvenation. She was thirty now and the awkward young lad she remembered rejecting her three years earlier (seventeen years in communal time) was now a famous hero in a world more intricate and beautifully varied than any Isaiah Haldane could create, a world which still housed the greatest number of people in the universe.

By this time most of Haldane’s team were sick of him and life on K20. Someone smashed his head in a way which made repairs impractical; the rest refused to inform on the killer. More grief would have followed if humanity had not dispensed with elaborate laws and police forces. The open intelligence network knew Haldane had been a brilliant but selfish man who had made good things in his hundred and six years but had begun to repeat himself so could only impress the young. His former colleagues were advised to let twenty-one years pass before they rejuvenated again; this would make them less impatient with the elderly. All but five found work on other satellites or the moon. Meg and four others asked the Global and Interplanetary Council for Age Regulation Sitting in Lhasa for permission to work on earth. This was granted when they promised to stop rejuvenating. It was a promise they gave but meant to break.

For at least six years before Haldane’s murder the group of five had planned to combine eternal life with earthly power. They meant to grasp it by putting mankind into a state of competitive anarchy, breaking up the open intelligence network and restoring government by minorities. They planned an alliance with a military élite amidst the chaos of a worldwide food and energy famine. That is why Meg, their chief agent, got work with a circus which specialized in celebrating military triumphs. So Meg Mountbenger’s seduction of Wat Dryhope was both personal and political. She hoped to seduce him into her plot. Failing that she infected him against his will.

When Wat Dryhope returned from his Ben Nevis quarantine to Ettrick he worked hard at planting, hoeing, mill building et cetera between fierce bouts of drunkenness. Women stopped liking him and he seemed to have lost interest in them. He worked less frantically in the second year when the effects of plague were obviously being mastered. He boozed more but wrote A History Maker. Having given it to his mother he said, “Now I’m going for Meg.” His mother told him the open intelligence had found no news of Meg Mountbenger so she was most likely dead, probably by suicide. He said, “Meg is too brave and too competent to end that way. She’s done what I would do if I were her — turned gangrel. I’ll track her down, Kittock. I’ll kill her for what she did to me, then I’ll kill myself.”

He left Dryhope house and has never been seen since by any who admit knowing him.

Page 153.

But Meg Mountbenger is another kind of woman altogether. She’s also your … The unspoken word, of course, was sister.