going to try for pilot training and the space program. Can I invite them up to home for the Novembers?
Anyway, I miss you all the time. Mother, and Pa, too, and Edwina and Dionysia and even John but don't tell him or he'll be even worse than he usually is. And Tantie Rahksan and Deng, too, and the house and everything.
Love,
Yolande
P.S. The stables are pretty good here, so could you send down Foamfoot? The school hacks have all got mouths like saddle leather.
Letter from Yolande Ingolfsson to her parents Dated: October 21st, 1968
From Contemporary Poets Series
Trackways of the Heart
Archona Press, Archona, 1991
BAIAE SCHOOL
DISTRICT OF CAMPANIA
PROVINCE OF ITALY
DOMIMATIOTI OF THE DRAKA
SEPTEMBER 18, 1968
The classroom was comfortably cool, even though the day was growing sultry in the hours after noon. Half the frosted-glass panels of the inner wall were folded away, leaving gaps between the slender pillars of white-streaked rose marble; beyond was the shade of the inner colonnade, and hot white light on the courtyard's gardens and fountains. Yolande still fought to stifle a yawn; there was a feeling of drowsiness to the hot air. It smelled of cool stone, seawater, and the summer-scent of pine resin baking out under the unmerciful sun. Her eyelids fluttered down, and she brought herself back up with a jerk. It had been like that since her periods started a year before. Wild energy, and then sleepiness in the middle of the day; despair and happiness switching on and off like a light-switch.
And I don't even have breasts yet , she thought resentfully, looking down at a chest still almost as flat as a boy's. She looked over at Mandy, in the next desk. She already looks like a woman and she's tall, too. It isn't fair !
Myfwany hissed at her and she rose as the teacher walked briskly through the colonnade, followed by a serf with a double armful of books and papers.
"Make yo'selfs comfortable, girls," the instructor said. There was a rustle as they sat again. "Just leave it all, Helga," she added to the servant.
How elegant she looks , Yolande thought, watching the teacher as she arranged the materials. Sort of distinguished .
Sixtyish, with graying brown curls cropped close to her head; slender, with a scholar's well-kept hands and an athlete's tan, dressed in a long gray robe with a belt of worked silver vine-leaves. And a miniature gold circlet pinned over her heart; the corona aurea , the Archon's highest award. Awed, Yolande wondered what it was for. Usually for
bravery-above-and-beyond, or some really important accomplishment for the Race.
"Service to the State," the teacher said formally.
"Glory to the Race," the students murmured in perfunctory unison.
The class was a little over average size, twelve pupils seated at desks of African flame-cedar in irregular clumps across a floor tiled in geometric patterns of blue and green, facing the rear wall and the teacher's station.
"I'm Catherine Harris," she said, sitting with one hip on the edge of the green malachite slab that was her desk.
There was a big display-screen on the wall behind her, one of the new crystal-sandwich types; she touched a control on the desk and it lit with a world map in outline. The smaller screens on the students' desks came alive as well, slaved to the master control. Countries were shown in block colors: black for the Domination, with the Draka firelizard sprawled across it, and shades of green for the nations of the Alliance.
"Well start with a regression. This is the situation today, with more than half the world under the Yoke." All Africa, all Europe, all of mainland Asia except the southern peninsulas running India-Malaysia-Indochina. "Now before the Eurasian War, in 1940." The area of black shrank; now the Domination was mostly Africa, with the Middle East and Central Asia and only a toehold in the eastern Balkans. The names of vanished lands reappeared on the screen: Germany, France, Russia, China.
"Now 1914,
Anyway, I miss you all the time. Mother, and Pa, too, and Edwina and Dionysia and even John but don't tell him or he'll be even worse than he usually is. And Tantie Rahksan and Deng, too, and the house and everything.
Love,
Yolande
P.S. The stables are pretty good here, so could you send down Foamfoot? The school hacks have all got mouths like saddle leather.
Letter from Yolande Ingolfsson to her parents Dated: October 21st, 1968
From Contemporary Poets Series
Trackways of the Heart
Archona Press, Archona, 1991
BAIAE SCHOOL
DISTRICT OF CAMPANIA
PROVINCE OF ITALY
DOMIMATIOTI OF THE DRAKA
SEPTEMBER 18, 1968
The classroom was comfortably cool, even though the day was growing sultry in the hours after noon. Half the frosted-glass panels of the inner wall were folded away, leaving gaps between the slender pillars of white-streaked rose marble; beyond was the shade of the inner colonnade, and hot white light on the courtyard's gardens and fountains. Yolande still fought to stifle a yawn; there was a feeling of drowsiness to the hot air. It smelled of cool stone, seawater, and the summer-scent of pine resin baking out under the unmerciful sun. Her eyelids fluttered down, and she brought herself back up with a jerk. It had been like that since her periods started a year before. Wild energy, and then sleepiness in the middle of the day; despair and happiness switching on and off like a light-switch.
And I don't even have breasts yet , she thought resentfully, looking down at a chest still almost as flat as a boy's. She looked over at Mandy, in the next desk. She already looks like a woman and she's tall, too. It isn't fair !
Myfwany hissed at her and she rose as the teacher walked briskly through the colonnade, followed by a serf with a double armful of books and papers.
"Make yo'selfs comfortable, girls," the instructor said. There was a rustle as they sat again. "Just leave it all, Helga," she added to the servant.
How elegant she looks , Yolande thought, watching the teacher as she arranged the materials. Sort of distinguished .
Sixtyish, with graying brown curls cropped close to her head; slender, with a scholar's well-kept hands and an athlete's tan, dressed in a long gray robe with a belt of worked silver vine-leaves. And a miniature gold circlet pinned over her heart; the corona aurea , the Archon's highest award. Awed, Yolande wondered what it was for. Usually for
bravery-above-and-beyond, or some really important accomplishment for the Race.
"Service to the State," the teacher said formally.
"Glory to the Race," the students murmured in perfunctory unison.
The class was a little over average size, twelve pupils seated at desks of African flame-cedar in irregular clumps across a floor tiled in geometric patterns of blue and green, facing the rear wall and the teacher's station.
"I'm Catherine Harris," she said, sitting with one hip on the edge of the green malachite slab that was her desk.
There was a big display-screen on the wall behind her, one of the new crystal-sandwich types; she touched a control on the desk and it lit with a world map in outline. The smaller screens on the students' desks came alive as well, slaved to the master control. Countries were shown in block colors: black for the Domination, with the Draka firelizard sprawled across it, and shades of green for the nations of the Alliance.
"Well start with a regression. This is the situation today, with more than half the world under the Yoke." All Africa, all Europe, all of mainland Asia except the southern peninsulas running India-Malaysia-Indochina. "Now before the Eurasian War, in 1940." The area of black shrank; now the Domination was mostly Africa, with the Middle East and Central Asia and only a toehold in the eastern Balkans. The names of vanished lands reappeared on the screen: Germany, France, Russia, China.
"Now 1914,
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