Holmgren introduced his number-two man, the head of the League Peace Police. Mum had said this Dreikirch fellow was a Nationalist-Capitalist, someone barely fit to live. His rant was even worse than Holmgren’s. Today the League would have an emergency meeting to talk about me. I could tell. I wasn’t going to get their cheers and congratulations for solving the Maze.
I changed channels to the Persona News Network—All Personas, All the Time. My satellite feed went into a distributor box. From the outside, the mythical people who live here were perpetually viewing a dozen channels, giving outsiders no chance to see which channels I actually watch. The Persona Network was discussing various plans to capture me, once I was found. I’d’ve been happier if they didn’t have a half-way accurate estimate of how much power I’d used to make my last getaway. They kept talking about the network’s big program, this evening, all about ways to kill Eclipse and capture the Namestone, at which moment the Earth would become Paradise. I set the video’s recorder to be sure to capture that program. I am not much interested in people saying how great I am. I am extremely interested in people who think they have newer and better ways to kill me.
I cleaned up after breakfast, and decided that it was time for another nap. I was alert, but physically exhausted. When I woke the sun was beyond the zenith, I felt much better, and I really wanted something to eat again.
Two roast chicken sandwiches, all grain bread, plenty of lettuce, just a bit of butter, and more of the curried vegetables did quite nicely. I postponed the ice cream and fudge crumbles until later. Water came to a boil while I was cleaning up. Some parents would have been scandalized that I was brewing coffee, worse, cocoa-tinged coffee. I really am a persona, not easily poisoned. Coffee makes me a bit sharper while I am reading, but all the alkaloids burn off fairly quickly, leaving me ready to drop into sound sleep. Besides, I really am too young for chocolate to have its alleged effect. I suppose if I always ate like this I would worry a bit about my figure, but that is one of my gifts. I may eat, but I remain leanly athletic.
After lunch it was clearly time for my next book. I could start studying again. I decided to read a history. For some reason, Mum did not entirely approve my reading historicals. I agree that most books on history are pretty pointless. Here are these great men and women and their heroic deeds that you can copy. Here is a record of past ages and their mistakes, leading upward to the present when we do everything right. If you don’t like moral histories, there are historical mysteries. Historical mystery books tend to be completely crazy. Yes, it is hard to understand how the eight different civilizations of ancient Washington, 2000 years ago, could clearly have coexisted along the Columbia River, had advanced science, technology, mathematics, and art, yet failed to notice each other. Even if they weren’t all there at exactly the same time, whichever came later might in their historic records occasionally have noted ruins of the past. No such luck. Massachusetts is even more confusing. There are 12 or 15, I tend to forget, different ancient advanced civilizations whose traces may be found near Massachusetts Bay. Most of them left at least some reasonably detailed historical records. Seven left observations on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, observations that make no sense. They had the moons in wrong places. You’d think they couldn’t see the sky. There was a mystery here, one in which most people seem to be remarkably uninterested. The few people who are interested in ancient civilizations write totally crazy things. They talk about world civilizations of 50,000 years ago, before Homo sapiens evolved, with a remarkable collection of nonsense as allegedly serious evidence.
