by Mary Carmen
Len followed the correspondence carefully. If he received any messages from Sam, he never shared them with us.
There is no entity more precious to God than you. When God is occupying your consciousness, you are the most important entity in the universe. Never assume another entity to be more spiritually elevated than you.
Len Builds the Pool
Back on Octula we continued with our busy lives. My work remained interesting, and Anna loved working with Miss Ruth Worrell and the two younger children.
Len showed me some beautiful pictures of the indoor pool at the Hearst Castle in California, by that time twenty feet under the Pacific Ocean. I admired the pool’s setting and distinctive lighting.
Octula had one clear advantage over Earth in that energy was very plentiful. The snows produced waterfalls all over the planet, and many of these waterfalls were modified to produce electricity. In addition, the winds that blew nearly every night ran giant electricity-generation equipment. Finally, Octula had developed a way to store electricity for use in later centuries. A heavy demand for electricity could always be immediately met.
According to Sam, the small indoor swimming pool in Montpelier had required a special permit, at considerable cost, to offset the cost of producing enough energy to heat the water.
In contrast, a large swimming pool in New Philadelphia would use much more electricity, at next to no cost for the ongoing operation.
With the large library occupying the southeast corner of my wing, Len’s architect designed the indoor pool to be added onto the northwest corner. Near the point where my wing joined the main house were my bedroom, my sitting room, and my kitchen. Outside the sitting room’s door was a long hallway that ran the length of the wing, from the library’s entrance to the theater. The pool was designed to be approached from a door near the entrance to the theater, and the pool enclosure itself was designed with heavy windows all around with various scenes from Earth etched onto them. Small underwater lights made interesting patterns, aided by a computer that controlled their timing. The architect’s plans were just astonishing, and nobody in our circle had ever seen anything to equal the plans for that room. Even Miss Gasnes, normally emotionless, threw up her hands in wonder.
The River at Pex Osmeapt
The Assemblage was able to hold onto the town of Pex Osmeapt on the southern coast after it was taken in January of 2089.
Pex Osmeapt was also a port on the largest river on the continent, the Nittittiqqi. Mr. Mipdomp had often talked with his generals about the benefits that could come from the control of all the ports on that river, but the naval unit that had conquered Pex Osmeapt was not trained or equipped to go inland to conduct land campaigns.
General Hsapv, however, was well suited to lead such a campaign. In June of 2093, he started to march his division from Pex Osmeapt toward the headwaters of the Nittittiqqi, conquering everything along the way.
The first major battle was in a smaller town near Pex Osmeapt, Widltcush. After six weeks the Alliance general surrendered, giving up thirty thousand soldiers. General Hsapv continued upstream, eventually reaching the Assemblage’s border. Effectively, the lands of the Alliance were split, and the Assemblage gained a considerable advantage by having another route for the delivery of supplies and soldiers.
Mr. Mipdomp was very encouraged. He started to consider a total victory within reach, and he lifted food rations for a month in the districts of the Assemblage.
Len Starts the Pool
By August of 2093 Len was ready to begin the construction of the swimming pool building, using the plans with the etched glass and the tiny underwater lights. It did not seem to matter to Len that workers still came every day to add finishing touches to the library and the theater.
New Philadelphia is at its warmest in July and August, and this was the best time to dig the hole and put down the first layer of plaster. The snows were infrequent during these months, and the temperature was usually above forty degrees all day.
Len paced around while the workers dug, occasionally redirecting their efforts and frequently complaining to the forewoman that the architect’s plans were being ignored. By 2093 only seven other large pools had been constructed on Octula, and this was planned to be larger than any of those. The company that dug the hole had dug the other seven and many, many smaller pools, but Len correctly pointed out their several mistakes while they worked in our yard. During the three weeks of the dig, he was more nervous and bad tempered than I had ever seen him.
“Daddy, anything can be fixed,” Anna assured him. “Come and take tea with Mattie and me.”
Len was not to be drawn away. “I’ll come in a few minutes, sweetheart. I need to watch just another couple of scoops,” he said.
Of course he never left the diggers, and he paced around most of the evening while he considered the mistakes of the day.
To give Len his due, the pool digging took three times the forewoman’s estimate, and Len was asked to pay about ten percent more. At the end, the forewoman asked Len to look over her next project, and he agreed to stop in once a day.
Then the sides of the building were quickly constructed, using temporary glass where the artwork would be installed. By September the structure was entirely enclosed and ready for the detail work.
Franklin Goes to High School
By May of 2093 Franklin had been told he would not be admitted to St. Paul’s School for the fall term. His scores on the admission test for private school students were not high enough.
Miss Worrell and Sam enrolled Franklin in the semipublic high school near the house in Montpelier. Here he would attend classes with twelve other children, and we would be expected to pay just under half the tuition of St. Paul’s. In addition, Miss Worrell or Sam would need to attend school one day a week to help the teachers.
In May of 2093 Miss Worrell submitted Eliza’s application for entrance to St. Paul’s for the fall term of 2094, and Eliza continued to study at home.
The news Franklin wrote to us in his messages was encouraging. He was the tallest boy in his class due to the light gravity on Octula and his parents’ height, and he was asked to try out for the basketball team. Since Franklin had not seen a basketball game until he arrived in Vermont, Anna and I were worried he would not have the years of experience required for success.
By that December our fears were realized. Franklin was good with looming over the opposition, but he just did not have a good hand with throwing the ball. The coach, trying to make a successful player out of this novice, invented a defense that had Franklin stand under the basket and keep the other team away. Then, one of Franklin’s teammates slipped under Franklin and took a shot. This worked very well and Franklin was very popular at school.
General Mee Enters the Lands of the Assemblage
By March of 2094 General Mee, the Alliance officer who had been responsible for most of its victories, decided to move his troops into the Assemblage district just north of the country’s border.
General Mee had been entirely successful during late 2093 and early 2094, and Anna and I were starting to worry the tide could be turning against the Assemblage. Although the victories were not significant in terms of casualties, the fact that the troops of General Jooles were on the run was alarming to us.
In fact Anna and I were surprised General Jooles had not been replaced. Mr. Mipdomp was quick to change his supreme field commander when news of defeats reached New Philadelphia, but General Jooles proved to be resilient. He was, as I wrote before, a very good talker, and Mr. Mipdomp remained willing to listen.
Mr. Mipdomp also had to take into account the embarrassment of the large numbers of women who followed General Jooles and his troops. I often wondered what General Jooles told Mr. Mipdomp about that situation.
When news of General Mee’s movement into the Assemblage reached General Jooles, he sent General Heoshe Neafe with two divisions to the district where General Mee appeared to be headed.
The
two opposing units met in a small town, Hevvytcush, for a terrible three-day battle. Certainly General Neafe had the larger number of soldiers and, at Hevvytcush, better positions. These positions were easier to defend, and General Neafe and his troops also were able to more easily attack.
After three days General Mee retreated into the lands of the Alliance. General Neafe did not follow.
The news reached New Philadelphia that the Alliance was broken. This proved to be untrue, but certainly the Alliance was significantly damaged by the costly battle at Hevvytcush.
Eliza Goes to High School
By the summer of 2094 Anna was pregnant again. I was very worried about her health, but she assured me Miss Gasnes and Miss Ruth Worrell would make this pregnancy very easy. After all, Anna reasoned, Morris was ten years of age, and Mattie was nearly eight. They would be more likely to be able to amuse themselves and not require her constant attention.
The news from Vermont was promising, too. Eliza had been accepted to attend St. Paul’s School in the fall, and Franklin was quite content to go back to his own high school.
Len was elated about Eliza’s admission to St. Paul’s School. He remembered the note from Miss Martha Worrell about the need for a new gymnasium, and he sent the Head of School a donation of Universal Gold.
Miss Worrell and Sam were not required to help at St. Paul’s, but they continued to assist at Franklin’s school. Miss Worrell wanted to assist the mathematics teacher so she could help Franklin with his homework, but Franklin truly needed no help with mathematics. She had made sure he could solve fairly complex problems in arithmetic in his head, something other children cannot do in modern America, and he was always at the top of the class in algebra, calculus, and astrophysics.
Eliza was an excellent student at St. Paul’s, and we were very proud of her. The teachers wrote to us that she did not make friends easily but she was always pleasant to everybody. We wrote back that this year was her first year in a classroom with other children, and we had expected to hear about problems with interactions. The teachers all assured us there were no problems except that Eliza appeared to be lonely.
Anna was very faithful to the doctor’s instructions. Of course Anna celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday in 2094, and the doctor was even stricter about the regimen. We spent every evening in her bedroom playing bridge with Louella and Len. Morris or Mattie would occasionally take a turn at the bridge table, with Louella as the tutor.
Then, on March 18, 2095, the doctor took Sarah. She lived just two hours.
The Anthony Waltrop Wing of the Anna Murphy House, Continued
Len seemed reenergized by the completion of the fabulous swimming pool. He and Miss Gasnes kept up with their weekly tours of the library, and they added the pool to the itinerary. Miss Gasnes asked me to find some American recipes for little snacks they could serve to the tourists, and I located recipes for hors d’oeuvres in an old cookbook written by Fannie Farmer in 1900 among the treasures Len had brought to the library. Soon the snacks were being offered to Octulians while they waited for the tours to start. Within a few months they were as popular as the tours themselves, and Octulians occasionally dropped out of the tours after the snacks had been passed.
Since the start of his increased income from the sale of platinum, Len had taken an interest in oil paintings. He modified the long hallway in my wing so its climate was perfect for the long-term preservation of old masters. He communicated with Sam about the pieces being auctioned by Christie’s in Albany, and Sam drove to New York to bid. Our messages from Eliza were full of the adventures on these outings.
By the start of 2096 Len had seven really important works hanging in the hall, and he added information about these to the tours. He bought one Utrillo, one Degas, and several works by twenty-first century artists. He bought a doodle of a piano player by the great opera singer Caruso, placed that in a prominent location in the hall, and started the tour with that amusing piece.
By 2096 I had had over fifteen years to observe Len and his business practices. I knew how much platinum he was selling, and I was amazed he could run the business and tinker with all the building projects at the same time. Len’s secret was that he alone knew everything, and each of his sons knew only a portion of the business. He had established clear divisions between the parts of the business, and each division’s work started and ended with some action from Len. He had to approve everything, and no son had any need to talk to any of his brothers to run his part of the concern. Len had no fear of a takeover because his knowledge made him absolutely indispensable.
By 2096 platinum was in great demand on the planets Len traded with. One planet’s major export was a material that allowed the fastest communications in the universe, and the manufacturing process for this material used platinum. By 2096 this material had made that planet extremely rich, and the dependency of the manufacturing process on Octula’s platinum had made Octula and Len very wealthy. I knew the platinum mines in the north would have still been sealed if the Assemblage had not desperately needed Universal Gold to pay for the war. I also realized Len was a war profiteer, and I was, too.
Meanwhile, Len needed to find things to buy with the spare cash. The oil paintings took some of the cash, to be sure, but he continued to buy precious first editions for the library and equipment for the theater.
The library was my sanctuary. Anna and I had dinner there every evening on a beautiful old table by the southern fireplace, and I spent most evenings reading in a leather chair by the eastern fireplace. Here the war and its demands were far, far away.
Len Starts the Observatory
By mid-2096 Len was restless. All his projects were complete, and he had only to review auction materials for books and paintings to buy. I was not surprised when he brought me another set of architectural drawings, but I certainly was surprised to see what he planned to build next.
“An observatory! We are only four miles from the one at the main university,” I said.
“Always good to have your own,” Len told me. “No good having to wait in line to use the telescope.”
I knew Franklin was interested in astronomy, and I also knew amateur astronomers were credited with most of the important discoveries of comets and curiosities in the night sky. This was true on both Earth and Octula.
“Franklin will be back here as soon as it is complete,” I guessed.
Len slowly nodded.
The building of this observatory took Len until 2102. He never was satisfied with the first thing he bought, and he continually looked everywhere for the latest equipment. The main optical device came from a planet in the constellation of Ursa Minor, and that planet sent Len an update to the device every six months.
When I think about my life on Octula, riding the elevator with Len from the theater’s lobby to the top of the observatory is one of my favorite memories. I think this was the project that gave him the most joy. Certainly he loved to scan the heavens with all the equipment and send the images to screens all around our compound. He also loved to allow the scientists at the university to use the equipment while he looked on. During the trip on the elevator, he became more and more anxious to begin his next session with the telescope.
General Hsapv is Victorious Again
In late 2096 the war was dragging on, and Mr. Mipdomp was very concerned it would never end. We did not know where the funding for the Alliance was coming from, but we certainly suspected some support was being sent, in the form of Universal Gold, from two of the other planets orbiting Zeta Pisces. The platinum mines continued to support the Assemblage’s war efforts, but food was always very scarce and clothing was usually in short supply.
Mr. Mipdomp was especially interested in gaining a foothold in the central part of the Alliance, east of the great river. General Hsapv was patrolling that area and steadily building up several divisions of well-trained troops. In November of 2096 General Hsapv’s troops mounted a three-day campaign to clear Alliance troops from the
lands surrounding the city of Djavvapooha, an agricultural center.
After the battle Djavvapooha was clearly under the control of the Assemblage. The silos of grains were emptied so trains could carry food to distribution centers in the Assemblage, and large sections of land around Djavvapooha were set aside for use by incoming troops from the north, commanded by General Ximmian Veduntej Tjesnap.
Franklin Completes High School
In June of 2097 Franklin graduated from his high school in Vermont. Miss Ruth Worrell and Morris traveled to Earth to attend the ceremony and to get Morris himself started in high school.
Franklin had decided to go onto college to further study astrophysics. Certainly his grades from high school and his aptitude tests suggested this would be a good major, and he was enthusiastic about it. He applied to several colleges, including my alma mater, Princeton, and was accepted by Ohio State. This seemed to us to be a very fine school for Franklin, and Anna and I encouraged him to attend. He and Sam left for Columbus in August of 2097.