MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World Part 49

George Phillies phillies at 4liberty.net
Sat Aug 20 13:25:06 PDT 2016


What else needed doing? A slow walk around the house and barn, slow 
being the fastest I could manage, showed no weather damage, no sign of 
people attempting to force entry, no mark of anything else unusual. 
Keeping an eye open for approaching cars, I walked out to the mailbox, 
slipped open the rear door of the hopper, and pulled out everything that 
had been delivered in the past week. The nice thing about a hopper type 
mailbox is that the post man drops things in the front end, but he has 
no way of telling how often the mail is being picked up. What did I 
find? Newsmagazines. Advertising. Three new bank statements. All of my 
bills were on automatic payment, so as few people as possible ever saw 
one of my checks. I realized I’d been out dealing with the barn and the 
cats and the ponies for several hours now. I don’t usually need nearly 
that long, but until arm and ribs recovered I was going to be a bit slow.

I left my barn cleaning shoes in the box at the back door, my barn 
cleaning clothes in the back closet, dropped all the mail on my desk, 
and went back to my room to shower and change. I’m sure if anyone else 
had been around they would’ve agreed I had a distinct smell of horse. 
The hot water felt very good over various bruises and strains.

Finally I curled up with a book, a history of the Grand Tradesmasters of 
All Leviorkianu, many of whom were real characters, to put it mildly. 
Stanford Smith was by far the most pleasant and sensible of the lot. He 
had made a vast number of westerns, films whose location is in dispute 
between Utah and Mongolia, and the esoteric, substantially 
incomprehensible motion picture Casablanca, which is still said to be 
one of the greatest films made in the last several thousand years.  The 
history listed all the books that had attempted to interpret a scene at 
the end of the book, in which the Inspector throws a bottle of water 
into a trash can. The scene is so brilliant that no one can understand 
it. Smith was the sort of person you would like as an older friend, if 
he hadn’t died three thousand years ago.

My den had a very comfortable sofa, and I had a warm blanket.  At some 
point, several cups of tea later, I drifted off to sleep for half the 
afternoon, waking when I was ravenously hungry.  Grilled steak, salad, 
and rice mixed with artichoke hearts and pine nuts simmered in chicken 
broth, did quite nicely.  The healing matrix insisted I break out more 
ice cream.  It was burning through calories like mad to do repairs, and 
I had to eat enough to catch up.

Uncomfortable or not, I made a list of all the things I had to start 
doing. Living by yourself is a real chore.   Schoolwork.  Housework. 
Home improvement. Exercise.  Okay, serious exercise waits until my ribs 
and shoulder finish reassembling. At some point, after I am completely 
recovered, I need to work up my nerve enough to deal with the Namestone. 
   I had done the Maze, and now I had second thoughts about the next 
step. I really did have to finish healing first.  Yes, the Namestone was 
perfectly safe, sealed behind a quarter inch of Impervium, but in the 
end I have to deal with it. First, I have to recover from several hand 
to hand fights, gifts carefully suppressed, followed by the League Elite 
Strike Team and the Screaming Skull vigorously trying to kill me.

It wasn’t that late in the day, the sun not yet approaching the winter 
horizon, and Medico spoke up for more moderate physical activity. I 
walked back and forth between the work shed and the family room, on each 
trip carrying a single bookshelf, painted two weeks ago, the enamel now 
being cleanly cured. Carrying a shelf under each arm was just out until 
my shoulder finished healing, and mounting the shelves one-armed would 
be tedious, but I could at least get the shelves into the right room. A 
solid hour took care of that chore.

Finally, it was time for real studying. Chemistry and astronomy were on 
the list for tonight.  I felt terrible, but when I really focussed 
deeply on what I was reading the pain faded. Chemistry and astronomy are 
fun.

Up on the screen came my chemistry reading.  A side panel reminded me 
about the classes I was neglecting.  The answer appeared to be all the 
science, math, rhetoric,…everything except the topics I had crammed to 
prepare myself for the Maze. The good part: If I’d gone to a public 
school and taken a three month vacation ever year, I’d be incredibly far 
behind where I am. The bad part: Studying is something you tend to 
forget how to do. I would be slow for a few days yet, but then there 
would be serious catch-up.  Nonetheless, a while to settle down, and 
then I sort of forgot how uncomfortable I was in favor of the periodic 
table of the normal elements, and the electron orbits that made the 
table the way it was. After an hour and a half Medico interrupted, to 
announce that it was my still-early bed-time.  I did what it told me to 
do, and went to bed. Well, I did after fifteen minutes of peeking at the 
lesson for astronomy, this being the extended chapter on archeological 
explorations of the planets, moons, asteroids, and Kuiper bodies, much 
of which made no sense. Yes, I have flown to some of the ruins myself, 
and I can’t explain them either.




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