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Elizabeth Alice Bluemud was twenty-two years old, the only child of Eldridge Bluemud and
a mother who died when Elizabeth was fourteen. Since that time she had, whenever
possible, tended to all the affairs of Bluemud's household. Elizabeth was an intelligent, good-humored girl, attractive and fairly tall with longish straight brown hair and good proportions. At school she had been highly regarded, considered diligent, sensible and reasonably talented at her work and in her involvement in many projects. However she had formed few close attachments and had been regarded as a little too domineering by boys of her own age. By no means was Elizabeth reclusive but she was devoted to her father and accepted without question his mode of life. Elizabeth had lived two separate lives. The first, in the time before Elizabeth's mother died and thereafter until she finished her high school had been the normal life of a daughter of a family of their people. Her parent's principal residence was within walking distance of the Capital and in the Golden Lands they had a normal complement of friends and acquaintances. As was not uncommon for people of their class, the Bluemuds also maintained a second residence in the wilderness on the coast of northern Florida which they visited occasionally for short periods. In fact the only thing that had been at all unusual about most of Elizabeth's childhood was that her father traveled a good deal more than most and he was sometimes away from home for extended periods. However, after her mother's death Elizabeth her father gradually made her aware a) that he held the Government in considerable contempt and b) that he considered, without any apparent exception, their friends to be shallow people who never questioned the system under which they lived. He had a vision of a better, more decent world, he said, and he knew how to go about putting it into effect. Because the young people of her race led sheltered lives, her father's objections to the system were not something Elizabeth understood at first. However she loved her father deeply, felt inspired by his vision, and became convinced that he really wanted and needed her to help realize it. And she understood that, for some reason, there wasn't a lot of time left. This was brought home to her on the day of her school graduation. 'Once more, congratulations, my dear, Elizabeth' he said kissing her on the cheek as they returned home, 'and now I can get rid of this damn house! We're moving out.' These words didn't really surprise her. It was nearly two years before she would have to attend the University at Shining River to complete her education and she suspected he had planned a trip for them. However their destination was still a shock. After his wife died Bluemud had begun looking for a place, not for its scenic values but for its isolation and proximity to his stuff of dreams: coal and iron ores. He had found such a location in a valley in the mountains several hundred miles south of the Capital and north of Shining River and he had built a house there. 'Welcome to Granite Gorge, my dear, Elizabeth. This valley is all yours now' he said proudly but somewhat anxiously as they walked in the back door in the middle of the night. It was an excellent house but it didn't take her long to realize that this was not a place you could invite your friends to visit. In fact, it had to be kept secret even to the point of retaining their old second residence so that they would have somewhere to say they were visiting when they were not. Still, it was an exciting challenge to begin to carve out a wholly different way of life from the wilderness and even though they were living in isolation from her own kind it was not as if her life in the valley was devoid of all human contact. As well as the few original inhabitants of the valley, Bluemud had brought in small numbers of recruits and continued to bring in more over the next couple of years. All the peasant women in the valley were placed in Elizabeth's charge. She was made responsible for the village in which they lived and organizing their farming activities which yielded sufficient food for all the inhabitants of the valley. Thus, at Granite Gorge Elizabeth happily became the mistress of much that she surveyed and for more than eighteen months, when she was nineteen, she disappeared from the sight of her own people completely. However, the people of Elizabeth's race did not consider young men and women of her age to be free of obligations to society and state and she could not disappear forever. Qualification for the University was a matter of routine and attendance at the University at Shining River during one's early twenties was absolutely required. There, it was earnestly hoped, not only would the young person emerge with a qualification but more importantly with a proper understanding of their place in society and usually with a mate as well. Thus, in her twenty first year, Elizabeth was obliged to move to a student residence at Shining River and began her studies. Though most of her instruction was of a general sort, she did manage to enroll herself in classes on gardening and agriculture. This raised some eyebrows as agriculture had become by then a rather theoretical and historical subject since, for her people, food production had long since been completely automated and the bulk of the production was in far off regions that were almost never visited: it was mostly a question of learning which buttons to push and when. The useful aspect of these classes was that no one questioned her when she asked for old books on the subject from the library. It was near the end of her first year at the University that the rumors of the impending Public War began to circulate, not at Shining River, but Bluemud picked them up immediately. When Elizabeth returned to Granite Gorge at the semester's end to she found him in an agitated state. Then he felt that he had no choice then but to confide to her information which, had it been known that he had done so would have caused them both to be subject to immediate incarceration, he for treason and she for the possession of the knowledge. Therefore, in a theoretical sense at least, by the time her second year at the University began Elizabeth knew all there was to know and, though the reality of this knowledge had not yet been brought to bear, it was a heavy weight on a young girl's shoulders however sensible she might be. Then the War began officially, classes at the University were suspended for the duration and Elizabeth returned to Granite Gorge to wait. |
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