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Part
Four:
Hark! you
shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to condemn light.
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world's despite.
Epilogue:
The trial of
Jason Taverner for the first-degree murder of Alys Buckman mysteriously
backfired, ending with a verdict of not guilty, due in part to the
excellent legal help NBC and Bill Wolfer provided, but due also to the
fact that Taverner had committed no crime. There had in fact been no
crime, and the original coroner's finding was reversed-accompanied by the
retirement of the coroner and his replacement by a younger man. Jason
Taverner's TV ratings, which had dropped to a low point during the trial,
rose with the verdict, and Taverner found himself with an audience of
thirty-five million, rather than thirty.
The house
which Felix Buckman and his sister Alys had owned and occupied drifted
along in a nebulous legal status for several years; Alys had willed her
part of the equity to a lesbian organization called the Sons of Caribron
with headquarters in Lee's Summit, Missouri, and the society wished to
make the house into a retreat for their several saints. In March of 2003
Buckman sold his share of the equity to the Sons of Caribron, and, with
the money derived, moved himself and all the items of his many collections
to Borneo, where living was cheap and the police amiable.
Experiments
with the multiple-space-inclusion drug KR-3 were abandoned late in 1992,
due to its toxic qualities. However, for several years the police covertly
experimented with it on inmates in forced-labor camps. But ultimately, due
to the general widespread hazards involved, the Director ordered the
project abandoned.
Kathy Nelson
learned - and accepted - a year later that her husband Jack had been long
dead, as McNulty had told her. The recognition of this precipitated a
blatant psychotic break in her, and she again was hospitalized, this time
for good at a far less stylish psychiatric hospital than Morningside.
For the
fifty-first and final time in her life Ruth Rae married, in this terminal
instance, to an elderly, wealthy, pot-bellied importer of firearms located
in lower New Jersey, barely operating within the limit of the law. In the
spring of 1994 she died of an overdose of alcohol taken with a new
tranquilizer, Phrenozine, which acts as a central nervous system
depressant, as well as suppressing the vagus nerve. At the time of her
death she weighed ninety-two pounds, the result of difficult - and chronic
- psychological problems. It never became possible to certify with any
clarity the death as either an accident or a deliberate suicide; after
all, the medication was relatively new. Her husband, Jake Mongo, at the
time of her death had become heavily in debt and outlasted her barely a
year. Jason Taverner attended her funeral and, at the later graveside
ceremony, met a girl friend of Ruth's named Fay Krankheit, with whom he
presently formed a working relationship that lasted two years. From her
Jason learned that Ruth Rae had periodically attached herself to the
phone-grid sex network; learning this, he understood better why she had
become as she had when he met her in Vegas.
Cynical and
aging, Heather Hart gradually abandoned her singing career and dropped out
of sight. After a few tries to locate her, Jason Taverner gave up and
wrote it off as one of the better successes of his life, despite its
dreary ending.
He heard,
too, that Mary Anne Dominic had won a major international prize for her
ceramic kitchenware, but he never bothered to trace her down. Monica Buff,
however, showed up in his life toward the end of 1998, as unkempt as ever
but still attractive in her grubby way. Jason dated her a few times and
then dumped her. For months she wrote him odd, long letters with cryptic
signs drawn over the words, but that, too, stopped at last, and for this
he was glad.
In the
warrens under the ruins of the great universities the student populations
gradually gave up their futile attempts to maintain life as they
understood it, and voluntarily - for the most part - entered forced-labor
camps. So the dregs of the Second Civil War gradually ebbed away, and in
2004, as a pilot model, Columbia University was rebuilt and a safe, sane
student body allowed to attend its police-sanctioned courses.
Toward the
end of his life retired Police General Felix Buckman, living in Borneo on
his pension, wrote an auto-biographical expose of the planetwide police
apparatus, the book soon being circulated illegally throughout the major
cities of earth. For this, in the summer of 2017, General Buckman was shot
by an assassin, never identified, and no arrests were ever made. His book,
The Law-and-order Mentality, continued to clandestinely circulate for a
number of years after his death, but even that, too, eventually became
forgotten. The forced-labor camps dwindled away and at last ceased to
exist. The police apparatus became by degrees, over the decades, too
cumbersome to threaten anyone, and in 2136 the rank of police marshal was
abandoned.
Some of the
bondage cartoons that Alys Buckman had collected during her aborted life
found their way into museums displaying artifacts of faded-out popular
cultures, and ultimately she became officially identified by the
Librarian's Journal Quarterly as the foremost authority of the late
twentieth century in the matter of S-M art. The one-dollar black
Trans-Mississippi postage stamp which Felix Buckman had laid on her was
bought at auction in 1999 by a dealer from Warsaw, Poland. It disappeared
thereupon into the hazy world of philately, never to surface again.
Barney
Buckman, the son of Felix and Alys Buckman, grew eventually into difficult
manhood, joined the New York police, and during his second year as a beat
cop fell from a substandard fire escape while responding to a report of
burglary in a tenement where wealthy blacks had once lived. Paralyzed from
the waist down at twenty-three, he began to interest himself in old
television commercials, and, before long, owned an impressive library of
the most ancient and sought-after items of this sort, which he bought and
sold and traded shrewdly. He lived a long life, with only a feeble memory
of his father and no memory at all of Alys. By and large Barney Buckman
complained little, and continued in particular to absorb himself in
old-time Alka-Seltzer plugs, his specialty out of all the rest of such
golden trivia.
Someone at
the Los Angeles Police Academy stole the twenty-two Derringer pistol which
Felix Buckman had kept in his desk, and with this the gun vanished
forever. Lead slug weapons had by that time become generally extinct
except as collector's pieces, and the inventory clerk at the academy whose
job it was to keep track of the Derringer assumed wisely that it had
become a prop in the bachelors' quarters of some minor police official,
and let the investigation drop there.
In 2047
Jason Taverner, long since retired from the entertainment field, died in
an exclusive nursing home of acolic fibrosis, an ailment acquired by
Terrans at various Martian colonies privately maintained for dubious
enthrallment of the weary rich. His estate consisted of a five-bedroom
house in Des Moines, filled mostly with memorabilia, and many shares of
stock in a corporation which had tried-and failed-to finance a commercial
shuttle service to Proxima Centaurus. His passing was not generally
noticed, although small obit squibs appeared in most metropolitan
newspapers, ignored by the TV news people but not by Mary Anne Dominic,
who, even in her eighties, still considered Jason Taverner a celebrity,
and her meeting him an important milestone in her long and successful
life.
The blue
vase made by Mary Anne Dominic and purchased by Jason Taverner as a gift
for Heather Hart wound up in a private collection of modern pottery. It
remains there to this day, and is much treasured. And, in fact, by a
number of people who know ceramics, openly and genuinely cherished. And
loved.
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