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. The notion that the darling
lady who had comforted me had a son twenty-four centuries old... but was herself
a mere child of a century and a half- Hell, some days it doesn't pay to get out
of bed, a truism in Iowa when I was young and still true in Tertius over two
thousand years later. (If it was!) I had been perfectly happy with Minerva on
one shoulder and Galahad on the other and Pixel on my chest. Aside from bladder
pressure.
Maureen reminded me of another discrepancy. "Justin, something else frets
me. You say that this planet is a long, long way in space and time from my
home-over two thousand years in time and over seven thousand light-years in
distance."
"No, I do not say it because I am not an astrophysicist. But that accords
with what I have been taught, yes."
"Yet right here today I hear idiomatic English spoken in the dialect of my
time and place. More than that, it is in the tall-corn accent of the North
American middle west, harsh as a rusty saw. Ugly and unmistakable. Riddle me
that?"
"Oh. Strange but no mystery. English is being spoken as a courtesy to you."
"Me?"
"Yes. Athene could supply you with instantaneous translation, both ways,
and the party could be in Galacta. But fortunately through a decision by Ishtar
many years back, English was made the working language of the clinic and the
hospital. That this could be done derives from circumstances around the Senior's
last rejuvenation
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