I heard her say, ‘I'll tell him, Doc. Keep your guard up tonight. See you in jail. Bye.' She half turned. ‘That was Daffy Weisskopf, Boss. He has a preliminary report for you. Cause of death, suffocation. But - get this - stuffed down the old bastard's throat, before the catsup was poured in, was a plastic envelope with a famous - or infamous - card in it: "The Committee for Aesthetic Deletions." ‘

‘So I figured. Did he say what brand of catsup?'

‘Fer cry eye yie!'

‘And what are you doing peeling down? Festival doesn't start for another three hours.'

‘Look here, slave driver! See that clock - ticking off the precious seconds of my life? See what it says? Eleven past five. My contract says that I work until five.'

‘It says that you are on duty until I relieve you, but that overtime rate starts at five.'

‘There were no patients here and I was changing into my festival costume. Wait till you ser it, Boss! It'd make a priest blush.'

‘I doubt it. We do have a patient and I need your help.'

‘Okay, okay! I'll get back into my Florence Nightingale duds.'

‘Don't bother; it would just waste time. Mrs Long! Come in, please, and take off your clothes.'

‘Yes, sir.' I came in at once, while peeling off that scrounged caftan. I could see what he was doing: a prudent male doctor has a chaperone when examining a female patient; that's a universal. A multi-universal. If the circumstances happen to supply a chaperone in her skin, so much the better; there need be no time wasted on "angel robes" and other such nonsense. Having helped my father and having stood years of watches in the rejuvenation clinic at Boondock and in the associated hospital, I understood the protocol invoked; a nurse in Boondock wears clothes only when the job requires it. Seldom, that is, as the patient is usually not clothed. ‘But it's not "Mrs Long", Doctor. I am usually called "Maureen".'

‘"Maureen" it is. This is Dagmar. Roast, meet Alice; Alice, meet Roast. And Pixel, too, Dagmar. He's the one with the short legs.'

‘Howdy, Maureen. Hi, Pixel.'

‘Mee-ow.'

‘Hi, Dagmar. Sorry to keep you late.'

‘De nada, ducks.'

‘Dagmar, either I am out of my skull, or Maureen is. Which is it?'

‘Couldn't it be both? I've had my doubts about you for a long time, Boss.'

‘Understandable. But she really does seem to have lost a chunk of her memory. At least. Plus possible hallucinations. You've studied materia medica much more recently than I have; if someone wanted to cause a few hours temporary amnesia, what drug would he choose?'

‘Huh? Don't give me your barefoot boy act. Alcohol, of course. But it might be almost anything, the way the kids nowadays eat, drink, snort, smoke, or shoot anything that doesn't shoot back.'

‘Not alcohol. Enough alcohol to do that produces a horrible hangover, with halitosis, twitches and shakes, and bloodshot eyes. But look at her - clear eyes, healthy as a horse, and innocent as a pup in the clean laundry. Pixel! Stay out of that! So what do we look for?'

‘I dunno; let's operate and find out. Urine sample. Blood sample. Saliva, too?'

‘Certainly. And sweat, if you can find enough:

‘Vaginal specimen?'

‘Yes.'

‘Wait,' I objected. ‘If you intend to poke around inside me, I want a chance to douche and wash:

‘Not bleedin' likely, ducks,' Dagmar answered gently. ‘What we need is whatever is in there now... not after you've washed your sins away. Don't argue; I wouldn't want to break your arm:

I shut up. I do indeed want to smell good, or not smell at all, when being examined. But as a doctor's daughter (and a therapist myself) I knew that what Dagmar said made sense... since they were looking for drugs. I didn't expect that they would find any... but they might; I certainly was missing some hours. Days? Anything could have happened.

Dagmar had me pee in a cup and took my blood and saliva, then told me to climb on to the table and into the stirrups. ‘Shall I do it? Or the Boss? Out of the way, Pixel! And stop that.'

‘Either of you.' (A truly considerate nurse. Some female patients can't stand to be touched down below by females, others are shy with males. Me, I was cured of all such nonsense by my father before I was ten.)

Dagmar came back with a dilator... and I noticed something. Brunette, I said she was. She had remained undressed save for scanty panties - which were not opaque. she should have shown a dark, built-in fig leaf, no?

No. Just skin shade and a hint of the Great Divide.

A woman who shaves or otherwise depilates her pubic curls has a profound interest in recreational sex. My beloved first husband Brian pointed this out to me in the Mauve Decade, circa 905 Gregorian. I've checked Brian's assertion through a century and a half, endless examples. (I am not counting prepping for surgery or for childbirth.) The ones who did it because they preferred that styling were without exception hearty, healthy, uninhibited hedonists.

Dagmar wasn't prepared for surgery; she (obviously!) was not about to give birth. No, she was about to take part in a saturnalia. QED.

It made me feel warm toward her. Brian, bless his lecherous soul, would have appreciated her.

By now, in the course of chatting while she took samples, she knew the essentials of my ‘hallucination', so she knew that I was a stranger in town. As she was adjusting that damned dilator (I have always detested them, although this one was blood temperature and was being handled with the gentle care that a woman can bring to the task, having been there herself) - while she was busy with this, I asked a question in order to ignore what she was doing. ‘Dagmar, tell me about this festival.'

‘La Fiesta de Santa Carolita? Hey, you clamped down! Watch it, ducks, you'll hurt yourself.'

I sighed and tried to relax. Santa Carolita is my second child, bron in 1902 Gregorian.

I remember Earth.

I knew her when she was clean and green, mankind's beautiful bride, sweet and lush and lovable.

I speak of my own time time, of course, numbered ‘two' and coded ‘Leslie LeCroix.' But the best known time lines, those policed by the Time Corps for the Circle of Ouroboros, are all one at the time I was born, 1882 Gregorian, only nine years after the death of Ira Howard. In z88z the population of Earth was a mere billion and a half.

When I left Earth just a century later it had increased to over four billion and that swarming mass was doubling every thirty years.

Remember that ancient Persian parable about doubling grains of rice on a chessboard? Four billion people are a smidgen larger than a grain of rice; you quickly run out of chessboard. On one time line Earth's population swelled to over thirty billion before reaching final disaster; on other time lines the end came at less than ten billion. But on all time lines Dr Malthus had the last laugh.

It is futile to mourn over the corpse of Earth, as silly as it would be to cry over an empty chrysalis when its butterfly has flown. But I am incurably sentimental and forever sad at how Man's Old Home has changed.

I had a marvellously happy girlhood.

I not only lived on Earth when she was young and beautiful but I also had the good fortune to be born in one of her loveliest garden spots, southern Missouri before people and bulldozers ravaged its green hills.

Besides the happy accident of birthplace, I had the special good fortune to be my father's daughter.

When I was still quite young my father said to me, ‘My beloved daughter, you are an amoral little wretch. I know this, because you take after me; your mind works just the way mine does. If you are not to be destroyed by your lack, you must work out a practical code of your own and live by it.'