by Mary Carmen
In anticipation of Mattie’s return, Len had the entire compound cleaned from top to bottom, especially the three stages with the pianos and the organ. Layers of dust are not much of a concern to the Octulians, but Len insisted all dust be removed because Franklin had told him how careful about dust the Vermont housekeepers had always been.
In the weeks before her arrival, we sat in the theater and watched the film of Mattie’s high school graduation over and over. She looked so pretty and so happy posing for the camera with Eliza, Morris, Miss Ruth Worrell, and Jonathan. Len watched the film at least six times and continued to cajole the housecleaners.
Mattie arrived just before Christmas in 2103 with Nathaniel Redding. We had not been aware he was coming, and Len was not pleased. But Mattie spent so much time teasing her grandfather that all was soon forgiven. Within a week both young people were working with Anna in the food business and Mattie was helping with Len’s tours.
Len and Franklin Inventory Moons
By the start of 2104, Len and Franklin were known by many civilizations for their work on the planet inventory. They received at least five requests for information each day, and about once a month they found out about a new planet that was able to communicate with a planet already on their list.
Before that inventory, people creating roadmaps for space travel always allowed for large distances between any traveling craft and stars of any mass. It was known that avoiding stars was a good way to avoid any unanticipated gravitational pull. Some stars were known to appear small but to have an unusually powerful force that sucked matter toward them. Keeping your distance was the best way to safely negotiate the trips back and forth in time.
As the inventory matured, space travelers were able to account better for safe zones for travel. Planets around a star meant that the gravitation pull could be measured more accurately, and Len’s and Franklin’s correspondents were very generous with sharing information. Nobody wanted some space object traveling through a planetary system if that object might crash into a life-supporting planet or moon. Furthermore, Earth, in the first part of the twenty-first century, had gained a reputation for discarding used unmanned craft by crashing them into planets, causing untold damage and loss of life.
As the data in what is known as the Murphy-Waltrop Planetary Guide became more reliable, people started sending information about moons, and Len and Franklin figured out a way to add this information. As it turned out, moons are very common, and the number of moons on the inventory soon far exceeded the number of planets. By 2105 Len and Franklin had found three moons that were populated with communicating civilizations. By 2106 they had found one moon that had a moon of its own with a civilization.
All this information made space travel somewhat speedier. The gravitational pull of some stars became better established, and travelers could take shortcuts based on this information.
By 2107 Len and Franklin were so busy with the database and the constant stream of correspondence that Franklin gave up any thought of returning to Earth for graduate school. In fact, he was often asked to write a paper for a scientific journal, something usually reserved for the most learned of academics. By 2107 Len had significantly upgraded the observatory so it could accommodate four helpers, and Franklin remained very busy with supervising their work.
One thing that never stopped was the stream of questions about the pair’s logo, a drawing of our kaleidoscope. We made a film showing the famous kaleidoscope in action during all the seasons, and Len and Franklin sent that film to anybody who asked for it.
Eliza Finishes Medical School
By 2106 Eliza had finished her training at Johns Hopkins and had moved onto a residency at Massachusetts General, relocated after the flooding in the 2020s to North Adams, near the Vermont state line.
She emphasized to us her desire to return to Octula in 2109 to practice, and we certainly were happy to hear about that plan.
Morris Attends Business School at Stanford
In 2103 Morris graduated in the top fourth of his class at Penn and was accepted by Stanford University’s business school for a master’s program.
During the flooding of the 2020s, Stanford had moved from the California coastline to a large tract of land near Denver, Colorado. In 2103 the Stanford business school was still located in Colorado, very near the place where Morris’s Olympic tryouts had taken place in 2099.
By 2105 Morris had graduated from Stanford, and Len asked him to come to Octula to document the family’s procedures for the import and export business. Morris arrived in October of 2105 and began this work immediately.
The documentation was never completed. Len continuously added subjects to the list of things to write about, and Morris needed to go here and there to interview people. By 2107 Morris knew more about Len’s business than anybody, even Len. While Len worked in the observatory, Morris ran the business, occasionally asking his grandfather for advice.
Mattie Helps Her Mother
In the spring of 2104 Nathaniel Redding returned to his home on Earth, leaving Mattie with us on Octula.
By that time the family’s food business was taking more of Anna’s time than she wanted to give to it, so Mattie took over as the second in command. She sent samples to many of the places on her brother’s database, and frequently people on these faraway planets asked for shipments, sending Universal Gold ahead of time in payment.
By 2106 Mattie needed more help in the food warehouses, and she asked Mr. Kojptop for permission to bring more workers from Earth. These workers were, again, prison inmates who had selected a life term as a worker on Octula instead of a life term in an American detention facility.
Mr. Kojptop was anxious to have more helpers, but not for the food warehouses. He wanted to open more closed platinum mines, and he wanted to retire some of the older Octulians who were working in the mines.
To meet all these requirements, Mr. Kojptop assigned a scientist to work with Mattie to design a special robot for her warehouse. Then, he hired a contractor to build special housing for the Americans near the mines that would allow them to keep warm at home and on the way to work. Next, he had that contractor refit the mines with efficient heaters that would keep the temperatures close to sixty degrees in all sections. Last, he offered Americans a significant sign-on bonus in Universal Gold for agreeing to work in the mines for five years.
Americans lured by the gold had to tell themselves the contract could not be broken for five years. There was no way to get home without a pass from the Octulian government. There was no way to build a house without a permit from the Octulian government. Anyone who came to Octula had to have a visitor’s visa to stay in a hotel. Either you fulfilled the five-year contract or you froze to death on Octula.
Mattie and Anna also started to put together quilts from Octulian fabrics, and they frequently included a small quilt, one they called an infant coverlet, with food orders going to other planets. In the last ten years, I have seen some of these coverlets in the great auction houses of Albany, New York, described as art from Octula and commanding significant prices.
Harrison Learns to Play the Pianos
In 2103 Harrison was six years old. Mr. Worrell concentrated on mathematics and piano scales that year, teaching Harrison the G major and D major scales and expanding to six octaves with both hands playing together.
I admired the little fellow’s determination. He worked diligently on the scales, and then he played numbers from memory for an hour or two each evening. He especially liked Tchaikovsky and was able to play relatively simple piano versions of some of the orchestral recordings Len had imported for the theater.
Harrison also was something of a mathematical wunderkind, just as I had been nearly sixty years before. He could solve multiplication and division problems in his head, and his grandfather loved to try to stump him. Len bragged about the boy until even Anna was embarrassed.
By the time Harrison was ten, he was a good English reader and an excellent piani
st, even better than Mr. Worrell. His skills in mathematics far exceeded those of average ten-year-olds in America.
Anna and I Retire
In 2105 I announced my retirement to my colleagues at the Commerce Department. I was sixty-five that year, far older than any of the Octulains I worked with, and nobody was surprised.
Miss Gasnes was just over forty-five that same year, and she told us she would continue as our major domo until Harrison left for high school on Earth.
Anna was forty-eight that year, and she was still very involved with the food export business and the quilt hobby. She agreed to allow Mattie to take over more responsibilities, and Miss Gasnes was able to find a friend of hers who was willing to act as Mattie’s assistant.
Since money was still no problem, Anna decided to spend her time working with Len on the tours and taking over his responsibilities for buying art.
By 2105 Anna was no longer coming to my bed every night. We always had dinner alone together in my library, and I treasured those hours when we would talk over the day’s activities. But I missed the intimacy of our sexual life. I knew as a sexagenarian I no longer was the attractive stud she had asked for in 2179, but I had learned to love her dearly in every way. I was so happy on those nights she came to me.
Len Leaves Us
On the morning of Thursday, March 28, 2108, Anna and I were in the theater listening to Harrison practice his Czerny when his grandmother ran in.
“Honey, I can’t get Pappa out of bed,” she cried. “You come and talk to him.”
Anna left immediately to help her mother. I followed.
Len was on the left side of the bed, staring at the ceiling. He blinked his eyes from time to time.
“Daddy!” Anna shouted. “Oh, Tony, do something!”
I called for the hospital’s emergency vehicle and started to dress Len for the trip in the cold air. By the time I had found his boots, he was no longer blinking. By the time the emergency crew came into the bedroom, he was no longer breathing. The young German doctor declared him gone within a minute of her arrival.
The next two weeks are something of a blur to me now. Mr. Kojptop came to the house that afternoon to comfort Louella and Anna, and he brought nearly fifty of the top government officials of his administration to assist. Miss Gasnes started to cook hot meals for the crowds, and she rarely stopped, using Mattie and Mattie’s young assistant as sous chefs.
By the end of the two weeks, we had fed nearly half the population of Octula, by my estimate, including all members of the American colony at least twice.
People brought the flowers they could find in that cold month. I understood later that each florist in New Philadelphia had sent rush orders to florists in other cities for all the flowers available. Our house and Louella’s house were filled with every kind of floral arrangement known on the planet, and some arrangements were so exactly the same we knew they had come from the only large New Philadelphia firm.
We did not display Len’s dead body, out of respect for him. At eighty-nine, he was somewhat shriveled, certainly not the robust character Octulians had learned to recognize. We dressed him in his favorite suit, packed his coffin with family mementos, and sealed it for the trip to the family cemetery in Iowa.
We gave tours of the wonderful architectural works Len had brought to Octula. The compound was full of unique touches, and my wing was certainly the high point of these tours. Harrison and Mr. Worrell played the pianos and the organ for our guests, and Mattie, freed from time to time from her duties in the kitchen, described all the great works of art in the hallway. Franklin took each group of guests in the elevator to the top of the observatory to point out Len’s usual worktable there, with its many plots of the star maps they used. Morris showed the guests the warehouses with all the products Len introduced to the Octulians. Morris also passed out pictures of the home for elderly Octulians Len had built near the center of New Philadelphia.
Anna and I were bereft. Anna had loved him more than anybody else, and I had found him to be the best friend I had ever had. Anna cried a great deal during those weeks, and I kept to my bedroom. The children had been very fond of their playmate, but they had rarely seen him at his best. Anna and I had known the strong, forceful, intelligent human who would not be with us again.
The Reading of the Will
A month after Len left us, the family gathered in Louella’s house to receive the clerks.
On Octula all agreements between two or more people are handled by clerks. These agreements are signed and filed, sealed or unsealed, with the city clerk. If a person cannot reference a filed agreement, that person essentially has no claim on anyone else.
When Anna and I married, the marriage contract was witnessed by Len, Louella, and three clerks, only one of whom could actually read English, the contract’s language. The next day the contract was filed with the New Philadelphia clerk and we were free to leave on our honeymoon. The filing was the moment our marriage began. When our children were born, their birth certificates were filed with the clerk. The actual birthday celebrated by an Octulian is this filing date.
Civil trials are rare on Octula. Agreements are written in simple, everyday Octulan, and even the most uneducated citizen can interpret them.
Len’s will was no exception. He made only four provisions:
1. Anna was the executrix.
2. Anna was directed to have all assets of the company appraised, including the buildings in the family’s complex, their contents, the office and warehouse buildings, their contents, all real estate on Earth and Octula, and all goods in transit. From each asset would be subtracted any liability, such as a mortgage.
3. After the appraisal, Anna was to pay me in Universal Gold one seventh of the net appraisal.
4. After paying me, Anna was to continue to run the company and continue to pay company and family salaries and expenses as she felt was appropriate. Len left a special note for Anna about the care of Louella, and, as I shared this note with her, I realized Len believed Louella was an alien who could live forever.
The appraisal took six months. During this time our lives went on much as usual. Anna and her brothers ran the several divisions of the company, continuing with the profitable mineral trading and the unprofitable food line. During the six months, the company’s income exceeded its expenses, but this profit was not part of the appraisal. Anna paid all the bills for Franklin’s observatory equipment, Eliza’s medical training, and Harrison’s schooling. Except for the loss of my great friend, I could see nothing different in the running of the family or its business.
It was clear to me that Anna leaned very heavily during this time on Morris. He certainly had had expensive business training, and he had spent time writing down how Len managed the several divisions. He knew how to manipulate the company’s cash to make additional money, and he helped his mother file all the required forms with the Octulian government. Anna and I were very proud of how resourceful he was when issues arose.
At the end of the six months, Anna called all the family to a meeting in our library. Her four brothers and Eliza had returned to Octula, and Len’s body had been, on that day, laid to rest in Iowa next to the small bodies of four of our children.
She gave each of us an envelope. In each of them was an audited report of the appraisals.
Len’s net worth was eye-popping. Louella’s house was the most expense private home on Octula, and ours was the second. Each piece of the artwork collected over the years had significantly appreciated. The houses on Earth were located in places where people wanted to live, so they had appreciated. The value of the Universal Gold on deposit was nearly half the estate. The man had had a Midas touch.
In my envelope was a check for one seventh of the total. The check was drawn on a bank in New Washington, West Virginia, and had been countersigned by the company’s Octulian auditors.
I was speechless. I remembered the conversation with Len in my little house in 2078. I looked at my five child
ren there in the library, and I realized Len had believed he had received excellent value for his money. And he never knew how precious his Anna had become to me.
Anna Speaks
Anna lingered as the children and their uncles left the library. I was still sitting, stunned by the enormous check, and I played with the envelope as I looked up to her.
“Tony, I need to talk to you,” she began. “We need to talk about the future.”
“Of course, Anna. Is now a good time?”
She sat down at her usual seat at my dining table and looked at me in my reading chair. Miss Gasnes came in to clear the tea service, and Anna waited until she had left the room.