In article <3b652aa0.13342883@gizmo>, thegrouchybeast@hotmail.com says... > On Mon, 30 Jul 2001 05:27:27 -0500, Jeff Huo > > > "What about your husband? Toreth asks. Wouldn't > > you want him back?" Alex thinks for a moment. "We loved each other very much," she says simply. The unintentional conviction those words carry leave utterly no doubt of the truth of those words. "He was mortal, so am I," she says. "One of us would have had to die before the other. This life lasts but an eyeblink..." "It would not have mattered if we had both lived for a thousand, thousand years...if he had died but even one day before I..." "...it would have been too short." She smiles. "For a few brief years I knew true love upon this Earth...most people never get that chance, no?" "I do not complain. I have no right to. I am content." She goes to sip her cocoa again, before realizing her mug is now empty. "Hm," she says, frowning into the mug. "Perhaps, Toreth, Padraic, another story for another mug? Would that be acceptable?" "A story that I think I owe..." She fingers the locket around her neck. ...... "I was born the year the world turned their eyes towards the heavens," Alex begins. "1950 was the ninth year of the Fourth Pan-European War, and by far the most devastating. The war had begun in betrayal and nuclear fire, unrolled with devastating speed and had now ground down into bitter partisan combat in which the Concordat had conquered but had not won. Another story, perhaps, for another time..." "I was born the very day the future was born," Alex continues. "The day the Traveller quietly, and without any fuss, settled down upon the Green of New York's Central Park." "Like most Concordat citizens, I have gone to see the holo- projection of the Traveller at the Air and Space Museum in London...I have even had the chance to see the Traveller in person in it's isolation facility on Bermuda... It's... it's hard to describe. It looks like it's made of crystal, or something like it --it catches the light and makes it play into a thousand rainbows; it looks like something a glassblower would make on a whim, all warm curves and smooth, soothing lines. It's about ten meters tall and five meters wide, like a stylistic flame or a teardrop. It has a band of angular symbols cut along it's surface in a narrow band that wraps around the flowing surface like a sash..." "Noone has any idea what it is. Noone has any idea where it came from. It just sort of one day very gently came down from the sky and landed in New York, like it was meant to be there." "It caused massive panic at the time, of course. At first we were afraid it was some kind of new EurCon weapon, destined to ash New York just as they had destroyed Frankfurt to start the War. It was quickly decided to have Her Majesty Chancellor Mara move it temporarily to a barge which was quickly towed out to sea, while we figured out what to do with it." "Eventually, it was moved to Bermuda, and remains there to this day, studied by Concordat scientists." "It's like nothing that ever came from Earth --no test we have performed yet has given us the slightest bit of information about it." she notes. "We didn't have space-tracking radar at the time, so we couldn't have tracked it in, and thus we have no idea where it might have came from." "One of the few things we *did* figure out about it was that, etched along the edges of the sash, in tiny microdots and dashes, in base two, are the first one thousand and twenty four known prime numbers." "That sealed it --the Traveller *had* to be of intelligent origin. Prime numbers are not the workings of random nature." "The fact it landed in New York, in front of millions, precluded any cover-up attempt--as if such things could be done with all those Inci lying around. And it would not be like covering it up would be particularlly useful, I think. It changed the Concordat profoundly -- for starters, it really put the War in perspective. What was the Concordat doing fighting this endless war against EurCon when there was this unknown that was clearly out there, out beyond the vault of heaven? It took a few more years, but in 1954 the Concordat, after much acrimonious debate, unilaterally withdrew from the EurCon territories still under dispute and basically ended the War." "Secondly, it refocused the Concordat skywards --we didn't have the barest shred of space technology. We still, big picture speaking, don't. But it was obvious that we weren't alone in the universe. The Universe clearly had come to us --we had to go out and meet it. To find where the Traveller came from, and be prepared to meet those who made it --if they still lived." "The Concordat began an accelerated push towards space and the technology to make it happen that has not let up since. Francis Corvin became the first man in space in 1958; Neil Armstrong the first man on the moon in '69; we landed Britons on Mars in '95 and orbited Titan in 2010. Our first Kumar-Ledistra starship prototypes are under construction now, and we hope to make our first interstellar jumps before the end of the decade. But I get far, far, far ahead of myself here..." ....... "That was the times in which I was born --in the darkness of the most brutal war, and the dawn of mankind's greatest dreams. I was born far, far from the battlefields of Europe; in a town called Evanston, on the Lakefont ten miles north of Chicago, a beautiful part of the country lined with trees and sandy beaches where the cold waters of the Lake lapped. My mother was a professor at Northwestern University; my father a violinist and painter who did his work from home." She smiles. "I was very, *very* lucky growing up -- very lucky, really, my whole life. My parents loved me very much, and I was always surrounded by books and learning from the time I was very young. I still remember skipping through the stacks at Deering Library, or running a kite along the lakeshore, or watching the sailboats make out to sea from the marina at the end of the ship channel, under the shadow of the great white dome of the Bahai temple. Evanston was a good place to grow up..." Alex pauses, considering where to go next. "It can be the little things that can become the most hurtful." She pauses again. "It was a letter, a simple little, handwritten letter on plain white college-ruled paper. It came when I was fourteen. It just appeared one day in the mailbox." "It was a letter from a boy a few years older than me. He was living in Pittsford, NY, a small village on the banks of the Erie Canal. He liked books and music and poetry, and wanted to be my pen-pal, and hoped I would write back." "Well, not *my* pen-pal, since the letter wasn't addressed to me. It was addressed to a girl named Constance --which was my *last* name, not my first. Perhaps he meant the people who lived in the home before I did --that made the most sense as to why I recieved it, even though I had never requested a pen-pal." "We had no idea what had become of the people who had lived in our home before us, and no way of forwarding the letter. But the boy was so sweet, and so funny, and so good-natured I felt bad about just letting it drop, so I wrote a letter back to him explaining the mistake and apologizing for the trouble." "The following Tuesday I got a letter back from him." She pauses again. "It took almost four years before I met him in person...by which time we were exchanging letters on virtually a weekly basis. Cards. Little gifts. Big ones. We were good friends by the close of that first summer...and boyfriend and girlfriend by postal correspondence." She smiles. "We were an Internet couple long before there *was* an Internet. I knew him inside and out, his every thought, his every dream, and he mine, even without a word exchanged. I suppose we could have called, or even met before we did, but there was something..." "...I think we were both afraid that seeing or hearing each other would spoil the fun, shatter the dream, that somehow we wouldn't quite be what we expected when we met in person. That's why we didn't even exchange pictures. We had a good thing going that we didn't want to spoil with reality..." "Eventually, he went to college. Everyone warned me that things happen when you go to college... the rush of meeting new people, the freedom of being away from home for the first time; people change. I refused to believe. And indeed, the letters kept coming, now with Boston postmarks instead of Rochester...telling of life out there, the swirl of classes and events; I was enchanted. I didn't want the dream to end..." "Then the letters stopped suddenly." "The letters had been coming every six days, almost like clockwork --I'd write to him, three days later he'd write back to me, back and forth. One day, in late May of my senior year of high school, the next letter didn't arrive. I told myself it was just a delay in the mail --but a week passed and nothing. I wrote him again. The letter came back undeliverable. I wrote again. I even called Cambridge-West for information, but they refused to give it to me. Nothing. He had dropped literally off the face of the Earth." She sighs. "I'm sure you've suffered greater losses in your life. Certainly in the big picture, it was a tiny thing. But to me, this sweet young boy to whom I had given my heart, who had written every week for *four years*...to suddenly just up and disappear like that..." "He promised he would never do that. And I *believed* him!" "Everyone builds a little mental picture of their world. To have someone suddenly rip your dreams and your fantasies out from under your feet...you fall hard, *hard*." "I didn't go to prom. I went to graduation --I had to, I had to give the speech-- but my heart just wasn't in it. Everyone else was excited about graduating from high school and moving on, and by all rights I should have been, too. Going on to Cambridge at Boston was no minor accomplishment for a high school senior in the Concordat...but to go to Boston now...was maybe more than I could handle. I tried to put up a brave face on it, but inside I was coming apart, bit by bit, surrounded by all my friends who had their boyfriends by their sides and me whose Prince Charming had dissolved back into thin air. Backstage, I couldn't take it any more. I had to get out --I fled to one of the dressing rooms and just started to cry." "I heard my father calling after me, out in the hallway, but I didn't care. I heard the door open, my father's voice calling again, then a silence. The sound of feet, and a hand on my shoulder. I knew my father meant well, but I was in no mood to be comforted by my father --I batted his hand away angrily--" " 'Forgive me, m'lady,' he said." Alex pauses for a breath. "It wasn't my father who was kneeling there." "He was dressed in a highly rumpled dress uniform -- Army Cadet grey, saber at his right, the crossed swords and rifle of the Royal Army on his breast, his Inci off-kilter in his pocket, his ribbons on his chest...including the minature of the Star of St. George, second highest of the decorations for Valor the Concordat has." "And one of my letters --my last letter to him-- clutched in his hand." Alex smiles. "It was James, of course. *My* James. My Knight in shining armor, come all the way to Evanston for me. He was handsomer than I dared imagine, strong, but gentle, kind, compassionate...more perfect than I ever dreamed..." "Well, that's in retrospect. Really he looked like hell," she grined. "Black eye, barely-healed scars, his white dress gloves lumpy from where the bandages were underneath. Heck, one arm was in a sling! His hair under his half-crushed cap was a mess and one ear bandaged up bad --but he was James, *my* James, real and in person..." "If I thought I was in love with him before, it was nothing compared to what happened now. And somehow," she says with wonder, "he fell just as in love with me. Which, really, should have surprised neither of us, since we already knew each other better than most husband and wives ever do..." "We must have looked like quite the couple --me with tear-soaked, mussed up graduation gear, him looking like he just crawled off the battlefield --which, in fact, was what he had just done!" "Some weeks before, he had been preparing for a calm summer of drill and research --you see, he was a Cadet at Castle Island-- the Concordat's highest Military Academy, a campus of Cambridge- West itself. He was training to become an Army Officer...which is why they pressed him into service when they needed someone who spoke Bangathi --an extremely obscure dialect of Bantu-- fluently, which he did, from his family, which had escaped from Africa when he was just a baby. Being just about the only Army officer handy who did-- even just an officer in training-- he was pulled aside to help break coded communications the Concordat had recieved at its peacekeeping operations in South Africa...apparently, Concordat Intel had concluded EurCon was trying a variation on the Fourth Pan-Euro War use of Navajo code-talkers with Bangathi. James might have been one of the only uniformed speakers of that language in the Concordat! They gave him ten minutes notice before he was on a transport to England. Then when he got there, there was some kind of problem and the powers that be changed their minds again and decided to send him straight down to the refugee base down in Capetown rather than wait to bring the captured code-talkers up here and off he went." "Of course, what was supposed to be nothing more than a simple fly there-fly back went all to hell when EurCon-backed terrorist forces decided to overrun the Capetown Free States. The Concordat peacekeepers down there, including James, decided they didn't think becoming hostages was such a swell idea and so decided to fight their way out." "Obviously, this whole turn of events didn't exactly leave him the time to let me know he was going to be out of letter contact for a little while..." "Somewhere, during the whole bloody chaos of resisting against ten-to-one odds long enough to get all of the civilian aid workers in one place, and somehow finding himself in charge after the more senior officers were killed, commandeering EurCon transport planes at gunpoint and flying said civilian escapees the heck out of Dodge, he decided that if he ever got out of that alive he was going to come straight out and see me --he wasn't going to risk dying again without ever having met me. And after he and his troops, and the civilians they had rescued crash- landed on Mauritius --after desparately convincing the RAF there *not* to shoot them down-- and were flown on to London, where the High King himself met the airplane and made James a Knight of the Order of St. George right on the spot, when His Majesty asked James if there was anything he could do for James, James had answered instantly " 'Please get me to Chicago, your Majesty.' " Alex smiles. "Do you know how that makes a girl feel to be wanted like that?" "The newspapers found us out of course --the story was too good to let go. Not that James or I really cared. They say that relationships built on intense experiences don't last --but ours were built on far more than that... we each had a trunk full of letters to prove that point. They gave James the summer off after that whole episode, and he spent it with me in Evanston...he helped me move to Boston..." Alex smiles, remembering a hundred different memories. "We were married just a few years later. Ten years to the day his second letter arrived." ..... Alex sits there, lost in thought. "I always wonder what is the purpose of telling a story for which you already know the ending...I wonder if I am wasting the listener's time," she muses out loud. "I think," she says quietly, "I think in the end, that in the retelling it honors the fallen...which is the least I can do for him whom I loved." She sits there for a moment longer. "I...I...I never quite know where to begin, how to put it all in context," she begins. "The Concordat was a nation in upheaval in the '60s and '70s...a nation searching for answers, for direction, in the aftermath of the disasterous Fourth Pan-European War, a war we did not lose a battle but somehow lost the War...the lessons we were intended to learn from it throughly unclear." "The roots of the Fourth lay squarely in the Third, and then in history before...oh hell, might as well just thumbnail it all out --the motives of the terrorists won't make sense otherwise..." "They may still not make sense after..." "After the three Reformation Wars of the sixteenth century, the United Kingdom consisted of the Isles, Scandinavia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Protestant northern German states --Prussia, Silesia, etcetra. Over the next few hundred years, while the United Kingdom would grow overseas, the lines between British Europe and everyone else hardened. There were repeated wars, escalating into the American Civil war of 1776; the First Pan-European War with Napoleon, the Second with Louis Napoleon in 1870. Each time the United Kingdoms --and after 1860, the British Concordat-- beat their opponents -- usually the French, the Spanish, and the Russians-- soundly. All three tried *again* in 1914 in the Third Pan-European War, trying once more to crush the German states of the Concordat...and after four long years, failed." "But just as Concordat forces made their breakthroughs, just as our forces stormed down on Paris and Munich and their armies were collapsing in mutiny, a bomb devastates the Parliament, killing many of its members...and tossing the balance of the House of Delegates and Concordat Council, among the survivors, towards an ungainly political coalition which, for political reasons of its own, decides to abruptly call in the troops and negotiate terms with the French and Austrians...just as the Concordat was on the verge of crushing them totally." "To this day it can only be suspected what the Doves was...some believed it was finanical gain; others say to avoid blackmail...but the result was peace on terms extrodinarily favorable to those who had started the war in the first place!" "We call it the Age of Dishonor --the shameful, peace- at- any-price mentality that seized hold immediately after the Parliament House Bombings and held on for the next twenty- one years of appeasement...as we sold state after state down the river to the aggression of the Communist dictatorships of France, Baravia and Russia...as we sat idly by while they formed EurCon...up until we got nuked and invaded in 1941." "We lashed back hard...within five years, we had throughly overrun our enemies...but we could not hold it. The apathetic masses that might have acquiesed, even welcomed, British rule in 1918 had become the brainwashed proles fighting to the death for a government most of them didn't even belive in...beliving the lies that the Ministry of Information fed them about the horrors the Concordat would perpetrate...and fearing more the horrors that their own Secret police would do if they backed off.. and the Concordat was trapped in a quagmire of fending off gurellia warfare for six more long years before we finally washed our hands of the whole thing." "So in 1960, when the oppressed Africans of South Africa began to rebel against the racist tyrannical rule of the South African regime --ruled by the descendents of the slave-owners who lost the American Civil War-- violent arguments broke out between those who thought the Concordat had an obligation to help the oppressed free themselves and those who thought the Concordat should stay the heck out, two groups drawing totally different conclusions from the past. As the situation in South Africa became more and more bloody, and the atrocities committed by the Vorster regime to keep the Africans in check grew ever more horrible, the debate grew ever louder." "Wrapped into this time was the entire age of the counterculture --when the huge population boom post- war came of age-- Make Love, not War, Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out --oh wait, none of that will mean anything to you," she realizes. "Okay. There were a huge number of young people who had no desire to go to war in far-away Africa to die for someone else's freedom. Who rebelled against society's standards on drug use, on sex, on many other things. Who, most of all, rebelled against the establishment, fixated their anger at the system --at Her Majesty, at Parliament, at the Inci. They marched, the protested, they made a lot of noise." "They also didn't make a lot of sense, frankly --Rebels Without a Clue, I used to call them. And really, they didn't --we're talking animal rights protesters that wore leather jackets, anarchists advocating for the abolition of private property driving to protest marches in Bentleys. They lapped up EurCon's bullshi--propaganda about the Glorious People's Revolution and the Evil Capitalist Hegmonies even as the same protesters enjoyed a standard of living ten times better than any EurCon citizen could dream of and the right to protest in ways that would have gotten them shot in the EurCon! The fools didn't sit down to *think* about the slogans they chanted or *why* they were throwing bricks through windows and petrol bombs at policemen--" Alex catches herself on the beginning of a rant. She closes her mouth and shakes her head violently. "And EurCon of course played them all like violins...using the most radical of these radicals for their own ends --very easy to convince yourself you are the glorious Hero of the People when you're on drugs and getting great head from a bombshell blonde undercover EurCon State Security agent!" "Pawns! Fools! More interested in the protest, in the violence, in the shouting, than in actually making some *real* change in the world! Better to raise hell gloriously and famously than actually work humbly towards a goal and actually accomplish it!" She shakes her head fircely, and pauses to calm a bit. ..... "James graduated from the Academy in 1972," she says in much more calm voice, "and within a year he had earned his way into the Concordat's Coldstream Guard --it's most elite combat unit. Into it's Bravo Detachment --the Hostage Rescue Team. During an age of constant hostage takings, hijackings, terrorist bombings...he kept very, very busy. As EurCon could not defeat the Concordat by conventional means...it resorted to unconventional ones...and James and Bravo Detachment were very busy indeed." "He was trained as an aeronautical engineer at Castle- Island Cambridge, so he specialized in planes when he joined Bravo Detachment --investigating plane crashes, flying planes, jumping out of planes, charging *into* planes, tracking, hotwiring, sabotaging, even blowing them up if necessary." "The strange thing was that his work wasn't secret at all-- no real reason to be, I guess; a plane hijacking or a bank hostage situation is pretty public. Being domestic work, mostly, he came home almost every night, and being declassified, he could talk about what he had done..." Her face touches with sorrow. "He had nightmares -- shaking nightmares-- the terror, the fear, the hatred...I was his companion through his darkest hours, his valleys; I was the one who took his confessions...the world saw only the fearless warrior...the man who added an almost unprecedented *second* Star of St. George to the one he had won before...I saw the man wracked with guilt about being not fast enough, not smart enough, to save every hostage, to catch every terrorist...the frustration on being unable to send some piece of scum back to hell because of some legal technicality, because there were things the "good guys" didn't do...the sheer hatred of those who would betray the Concordat, kill the innocent, for some half- baked ideal the perpetrator had never really sat down to *think* about..." She looks away into the distance for several moments. A tear silently rolls down one cheek. She looks down, suddenly, struggling to go on. "Bravo Detachment wasn't merely a combat team --it was a full-fledged investigative unit --think New Scotland Yard crossed with Rambo-- a bit like you were saying, Paddy, the folks who investigated and took down the dangers too much for the Police to handle. A lot like the Texas Rangers of old --the lawmen you sent in when the bandits have hanged the local sheriff and torched the marshal's office." "There were many legitimate enviromental advocacy groups in the Concordat at the time, trying to make headway against the skepticism of the Concordat...but there were many organizations that advocated much more radical solutions. And were willing to use much more violent means to achieve them. There were many that were almost on the verge of neo- Luddite, a reaction perhaps against Chancellor Mara and the establishment's push into high technology and the space race...if she was for it, therfore, they had to be against it. And certainly anything that sought to monkey-wrench the work of the Concordat was of interest to EurCon..." "James and his unit were on the trail of a web of radical eco-terrorist organizations ...again, organizations without a clue. Take the Galveston disaster that first put James and his unit on the trail -- no, refineries aren't the most perfectly benign things to have lying around. But it wasn't like it was deliberately polluting the enviroment --there were strict laws against that. And more to the point, when the group calling itself November 9th *did* blow up the refinery, the resulting massive fire blackened the sky and caused a black toxic rain of burning chemicals downwind for four days that defoliated and permanently poisoned hundreds of acres, a massive oil and chemical slick that slaughtered the bay and miles of beach, as well as permanently fouling the ground water, as well as killing hundreds of workers and fire-fighters! I wouldn't exactly call that a net *gain* for the enviroment..." "Or when November 9th blew up the Materials Research Center at Stanford, which singlehandedly set back solar-energy research by two years...or burned a Colorado greenhouse that they claimed was pursuing evil transgenic technology but actually housed an effort to save three highly endangered speicies of flowering trees..." "The irony," she says drily, "of November 9th being singularly responsible for the final extinction of those species of plants is amazing." "These acts, all within less than a week period, put November 9th on the map...and at the top of Bravo Detachment's hit-list...and frankly, when you have the whole weight of the Concordat against you, you don't last long. Less than a week and a half after Bravo started looking, November 9th's next plan --to disrupt the wedding of the High King-- was discovered just days before it was to happen. As every major leader in the Concordat assembled in London, a great global take-down was coordinated --James and his team was assigned to hit a November 9th cell just as it was sneaking equipment into London City Airport. To this day I don't know how James ended up all the way over there. James's team hit like a Texas tornado, stunners blazing -- the Concordat had invented and perfected effective sonic non-lethal weapons, and had begun issuing them to it's elite combat units-- and the cowards never knew what hit them." "To James's horror, they discovered exactly *what* equipment November 9th was bringing in for their next job --a multi- megaton Fusion Weapon. It wasn't a suit-case nuke --no, this was a *monster*. Just mere miles from the Palace at Wesminster. And the timer was already running." "God alone knows *what* November 9th thought they would accomplish by that act --how the enviroment would be saved by reducing London to ash..." Alex pauses. "There were no options and no time. Chancellor Mara was on the other side of the planet, helping survivors of a Venezulean earthquake. The bomb *had* to be gotten as far away from London as possible, as fast as possible. James ordered the bomb immediately loaded aboard a nearby airborne Valkerie assault transport --a small, high-speed transport plane-- and James immediately took off, firewalling the engines, gunning for the North Sea, some seventy-miles East past Gravesend." "He was a pilot, this was a plane, twenty million lives in the very heart and soul of the Concordat were at stake. I don't think it ever even occured to him to find someone else to fly." Alex pauses again, trembling with emotion. "He actually *did* survive the explosion," she finally says, very quietly. ..... "You see, his first thought was just to get as far away as possible from London and out onto open water...it wasn't just that London was one of the world's biggest cities, or that virtually the entire Concordat's central government was headquartered there, along with almost one out of every four of the Economist 500 corporations, Cambridge East, the Exploration Corps Mission Control and the Bank of England.... just west of him, at that very moment, the High King, all five Viscounts, nineteen of the twenty other Dukes of the Concordat Council, virtually the entire House of Delegates and half the Fellows of the Royal Academies were assembled at Westminster. The bomb in his plane could literally decaptitate the Concordat, and the first priority was to get as much distance as he possibly could before the bomb went off. But as he did that, on his way out there, in consultation with Ground control, all realized that the EMP blast from the bomb could be almost as devastating as the explosion itself --London was the very nerve center of the Concordat--frying its electronics might very well plunge the Concordat into a devastating depression, as well as kill tens of thousands as machinery went berzerk. And having the bomb go off at eighty-thousand feet even a hundred miles off-shore could still wreck the heck out of everything electronic in the bomb's horizon. The decision, therefore, was made to dump the bomb into the ocean, where, hopefully, it would sink far enough down that the depth would shield much of the EMP blast, as opposed to having the bomb go off at altitude. The North Sea is only about fifty meters deep in most places, but it was better than nothing." "Nobody had the slightest idea how long the timer was set for, so nobody really knew how far out James had time to go. They didn't even really know how big the bomb was --guessing it couldn't be more than 50 megatons, the decision was made to ditch the warhead about sixty miles --about six minutes at full speed-- offshore." "The explosion clocked in at about thirty-megatons, they say; it killed about a hundred people, trapped on North Sea Oil platforms or ships caught out there. But had the bomb gone off as planned right on the tarmac, all of central London would have been inside the 12 psi ring --in which nothing but foundations would have reamined of the Palace of Westminster and the skyscrapers around it." "James had time to get maybe twenty-five miles away before the bomb went off. Somehow he managed to eject before the shockwave tore his plane apart, I am told. His personal locator beacon suriving the destruction of his aircraft, the High King himself ordered everything that would float or fly into finding James --even local fishermen on their own accord put out to sea to try to save him, having watched the footage on BBC of the massive explosion...and knowing what it could have been." "It was actually a fisherman that found him, after four hours; barely alive, incredibly, actually conscious. His injuries were grevious, and the best doctors in the Concordat fought to save him. The wounds and trauma were terrible..." "...the direct dose of gamma radiation he took...was fatal." ..... "I think the surgeons knew that immediately, knew that ultimately, it was hopeless...but I think they were fighting to try to keep him alive long enough for me to make it to his side...to say goodbye." "They sent for me as soon as they realized what James was doing...by the time the bomb went off I was already in a police car racing for Logan International Airport. They diverted a Olympus supersonic passenger jet just to get me to London..." "He looked horrible, but I didn't care. I was afraid to hurt him by touching him, but he seized my hand in his bloody, oozing palm; the pain of his raw flesh must have been excrutiating to him, but clearly it mattered to him not. He could only croak out words, but that was enough. Somehow, impossibly, he actually managed to force his burnt and torn lips to make a smile." She stops, staring out, into the past, and she is no longer here in the Pub, but in a hospital room fifty years before with a man already on the other side of Death... ...with a man whose love not even Death could stop. Her words are barely a whisper. "I wanted him to relax, to rest, you could see that every effort was exhausting him, killing him, even. I tried to protest, to tell him to take it easy, but he shook his head. 'I'm already dead,' he gasped...and we both knew it. My head sagged as I tried my damnedest to choke back tears --and he with one shaky hand tipped my chin up so that my eyes could meet his one last time..." "He was still smiling--my God, what the pain must have been!-- he managed to slowly half-squeeze one eyelid closed with a mischevious wink, the one I'd seen a hundred times when he was up to something. And he said, grinning even as tears ran across his own burnt flesh:" She takes a deep breath. " 'Remember? Don't forget the spoon,' he said." "He grinned even wider. Then he pulled my head closer and kissed me, gently, his ragged lips on my forehead. " 'Love ya, Alex,' he said. And then he died." Alex says nothing more for several moments. ..... But when she does start speaking again, while her eyes glisten, her voice has found quiet new strength... "I'm sure you have heard the old story...it was a story that we'd heard many times in our wonderful little church back in Boston, a story that's probably told every day in some sermon somewhere. The story of the old lady who always used to advise her children and grandchildren not to let anyone take away their spoons after the Sunday evening meal, for soon to follow would be desert; to save their spoons, for the best was yet to come..." "Many years later, after a long and fulfilling life, surrounded by her loving children she finished the last few pieces of business left to her in this life. She planned her funeral, what she would be wearing, what music would be playing, the flowers she would like on her stone, next to her husband, long gone before. And at the very last, she made one last request of her children: could they not bury her with her Bible in one hand and a spoon in the other?" "A spoon? Her children were puzzled. But she smiled gently. Did they not remember what she had taught them? What was it that she had always said during all those Sunday meals together --hold onto your spoon; the best is yet to come?" "Her faith was strong; she knew what lay ahead for her. And she wanted, after a lifetime of shared love and laughter, to share one last thought with those who would come to see her for the last time...even in death, hold on to your spoon...for the best, is yet to come." Alex pauses, for just a moment, for the last push. "They gave James every final honor our nation could bestow: the caprisoned horse; the Missing Man. They gave him the Grand Cross of St. George, to go with the two Stars he already had; no single man in three hundred years had ever earned such honors for courage in battle. He lay in state in Westminster Hall, carried in on the shoulders of the High King and Viscounts of the Concordat themselves, whose lives -- and those of twenty million others-- he had personally saved. And three hundred thousand people came, night and day, to pay their respects," she says, still awed by the thought, even after so many years. "Tens of thousands more lined the streets when he made his last journey to St. Paul's..." "And every one of those thousands, and the millions I am told were watching on BBC, saw, on top of the casket draped with the the Concordat's proud banner, with the Grand Cross of St. George and the Mouse and Horn of the Figments, a simple tea-spoon." "The one he reminded me to set there..." Alex smiles, as she finishes her tale: "To remind all that the best...is yet to come!" She closes her eyes, still smiling...and now the tears come. She shakes her head back and forth, humming to her self...and then she breaks into quiet song, mournful, at the same time, joyful and strong: " Lord brought the animals two-by-two / The horse, the giraffe, and the kan-ga-roo / No-ah made the ark both high and wide / So that when the rains came No-ah was high and dry--" "Oh Lo-rd! Give me his courage! / Lo-rd! Give me his strength! / Lo-rd! Give me his pow-er! / Lo-rd! Give me his faith! " "Tomorrow, Lord, we may ride into battle, / Tomorrow, might be *our* Judgement Day. / Let me fight, with the sword in one hand, and your good Word in the other, / And then, I shall know, no fear!" "So Lord! Let me die, facing forwards! / Oh Lord! Let me die, facing the Enemy! / Let my people know, / That I died fighting for Freedom / And I'll see them, on the Other Side! " ..... -Alexandra Constance Talibah Good night, sweet prince; and may flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.