/

He was twenty thnee yeanA oid when he teﬁt g, He had lived hi4 tiﬁe to it’i ﬂuiieat, both ' m Mace/mes and 6MWLP/5. He had many goau “d ambitiona, a ﬂaw he even achieved. He waA a‘.

- .0d man. . . . . ‘ _ 6 She opened hen eyeA and aaw the tean itained

wee aeﬁiecting ﬁaom hen minnoa. She aaw aemoaae

m the ﬁeatuaeé 05 the image and 6eit iomaohat a

wt 06 it. Ah, yes, Ahe aemembe/Led now. . . .the

whdb Ahe’d heand 60 oﬁten without meaning....had

wme to gneet hens.." She'b Atiit young...Ahe hat

mm whoie iiﬁe ahead 05 hen..." So did he...onee.

0 did they.....togethen.

The aim WM thich'with the Awpathy 05 ﬁat/4e Miendéhipé; both paat and pneaent. They wene aw to behoid.....but you 6eit theia pnebence iihe.

002d wind. '

He/L eya expneMed hen [son/Low, and hen body ttembi'ed ws Aha raw him 6cm the [Last time. Hi/s wee waA caim nav...not iihe beﬁoae. Hen iove gm.him aeﬁieeted hi4 iove 60a hen, they wene one, now to be tonn apaat.

Seiﬁ pity wad heavy upon hen at Ahe prayed Mn peace. She had been him AOWn into the Lohd’i mm gaaden and the envied, and pnayed 60h hii‘ hmgiveneaa.......4he waa a good woman.....

ament“ j

Old family houSe left standing,

collapsing, abandoned.

The shades of life faded now,

showing grey against the green.

Ten times passing of frosts and bleaching summers created this sadness

better,not seen.

Farmers return each Spring,

ploughing; encircling

house and wild garden,

,with whorls of sweet red earth, ‘ ,

Wallowing now, ridiculous, dying without dignity,

only window frames, wood shingles, considered any worth.

The Gillies used to stay there

thriving, contented.

Working through their seasons.

the years full occupied.

Real home then for people, living, laughing. Silent echoes now and blackness.

Time satisfied. ' /

egrets‘ ' r

I thought I was abnormal.

I was grieved and fretful, _

everyone had told me I feel it right away.

I was impatient to loVe them

realised I'd tried too hard

so had to start again.

But love grows with the child

all the while getting wider

until it fills/you, hurting. They became'little girls I spent my life explaining. And sometimes that seems all I did there was so much else to do. But all the time I loved them. Now they are people \ '

. ~ and time is overtaking. ‘ ‘ There's no chance to recapture those learning times again.

Judy Whitehead.-

nis UPEI SUN,’Ih1irsday,Nov.I6,I978,page 7

Gateway

The First Imperium had called it "New Greenland" in the old Terraspeech and like the anchient Eric the Red's infamous misnomer, it had been a supreme con job on the hapless settlers. Of course, it had been monstrously worse, yet totally unintentional, in this case. An error had been made. The bio—pod of oxygenéproducing bacteria designed to turn the planet's lethal reducing atmosphere into a suitable cradle for terran life'had never reached its mark.

A wayward asteroid perhaps, or a comet, or merely the relentless radiation of deep space had destroy- ed the pod and its precious cargo light—years from its goal. ' ‘

' The settlers had come, a thousand years later, only to find a planet whose atmosphere was no more breathable than the exhaust of ancient land vehicles. They had attempted makeshift ways of survival. They had invented ingenious methods'of oxygen reclamation from the ice—water of the polar caps. But their numbers were too great. Wave after wave of colony ships came, only to awaken their willing captives to planet-wide civil war, starvation, overpopulation:

a hell worse than that they had fled. Self-exter— mination was the sole justice, the only peace they fOund from their pitiful struggles. It ended in chaos in the year 3112. -

The sterile mass-grave laid undisturbed for thousands of years. The Imperium waned and coll— apsed. Scattered colonies fought for trade routes to the richer planets. The result was a bilateral division of Manking into two great races; the pol- tically authoritarian Mentors, and the enterprising Techs... ,

VST 1173 grew bored of the monotonous images. He knew every word of this histape, every scent, by heart. "by heart!" he mused, "What a Strangely inappropriate phrase." He willed the images away, and.called upon his filtering systen to flush the fatigue poisons from the cerebral fluid coursing through every neural fiber of his disembodied brain- Switching to another circuit pattern he began to check his co—ordinates and position. A 3-D star field swept in to fill his View. All ship sensors scanned the surrounding vastness. Locating his reference stars, he rotated the field one way, then another, until the pattern matched the super- imposed map perfectly. Increases in magnification shot him in a blinding plunge toward the target point, fresh detail arising with every jump. 'Ahh,"

' he thought coolly, "perfectly on course." ,

Everything about a Tech was perfect. He was Han and Starship at once: the perfect vision brought to life. The cumbersome, inefficient animal body, doomed to return to the dust, had been Victoriously discarded. Only that most perfect of tissues, the brain and spinal nervous system, remained, fed, cared for, and intimately wedded to its_cubic miles of machine. Someday this last link to the savage past would be severed as well. Someday...

‘VST 1173 finished the orientation procedure and gazed inwardly at the results. There, amid that small cluster was the source of all this bother: Epsilon Indi II, second planet from the G2—type star of the same name. -$till too distant for any direct observations, he traced into the core library for a series of very old holograms of the planet; the only known records. "Stolen from under the Mentats' repugnant, fleshy noses," he recalled in satisfac— tion. Quickly, emotion depressors washed away his gloating exhilaration and returned him to the task at hand.

It was neary time to end the tedious braking pro- cedure. The headlong dive,into the solar winds of many stars was almost complete, the stream of par- ticles against his fully extended hydrogen sails having slowed him more and more every year.until now, the year of his arrival at a dust—enveloped epitaph to stupidity. The year was 21585. The planet was Epsilon Indi II, long—forgotten New Greenland of death. I