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367 Caduceus Dr. Futurity entitles the medical profession to raise the healing snake emblem above all other totems in an alternate future of mankind. The protagonist, Parsons, is a physician who time slips into the future where healing and surviving are outmoded personal effects readily sacrificed to the future life of the race, species, or kind. Parsons was summoned or met halfway by a renegade Indian clan seeking to restore the family values of reproduction in a Teen Age that cooks up its future generation out of the frozen stock taken from boys fixed in preadolescence. Sexuality is thus charged with child abuse. Not only did the Indian chief Clothis escape castration and introduce family resemblance into future generation, living on into midlife, but even his mother, the Urmutter, continued to live (on arrested grief). In the world around these renegades the average age is fifteen. Parsons, who is the other unfixed male in the cooped-up clan headquarters, becomes a reproductive part of this family society. He sires twins, a boy and a girl, who replace the wolf totem of the clan with the caduceus in honor of their ancestry, which escaped via time travel the fixings of progress: “crossed snakes twining up a staff topped by open wings. The caduceus. The ancient sign of the medical profession” (159). Parsons arrives by California freeway in another time zone—the neck of the woulds and shoulds in which the only answer is death. As he struggles to survive the hit-and-run attempt, Parsons recognizes the young drive-by’s shocked confusion: “the boy thought I wanted to be run down!” (8). He merges on the freeway heading for the future on suicide drive. The future is a hub of time-traveling connections between past and future times, which is porous to the flow of past times and again. All it takes is “displacement” for frogs, an extinct species, to fall in the streets 368 Caduceus (20). The future has a history that Parsons can identify: it’s more of the same, only with the slant eyes of mixed color. Are there no black people in California, compared to East Coast population centers, or is it more to the point that whole Back East country clubs of white people are missing ? In the future, everyone’s of color. The teens speak a kind of polyglot that’s less language and more jargon. They have the attention spans to match. “There are no spirits”—just the high spirits of the forever young who, no matter what shade of off-white the color, still view themselves, via their ego ideal, as beached blank bimbos. The kids go by tribal names, totems painted on their car doors. (I brake for Mickey Mouse.) A series of contests reorganized the world along these lines following the H-war. Al Stenog, who has a last name, turns out to be the wild card in deregulated time travel. He aims to make the legacy of the last name last and to put white into the future mix, too. Clothis thought he alone was using time travel to make adjustments to the history of white colonization of the new world. Ahead of Pisarro and Cortez in the lineup of terrible adventurers is a certain Drake who landed on the West Coast. As the Urmutter explains: “So my son went back. To the first New England. Not the famous one, but the other one. The real one. In California” (101). Clothis goes back to assassinate Drake. But he is mortally wounded instead. When rewind and playback functions don’t succeed in averting the mishap, time travel is used to bring a physician from the past to the rescue. In the future it is a crime to avert death. When Parsons saves the life of a seriously wounded young woman he is charged with a crime that, as a term, is the mongrelization of Nazi German: Rassmort (35). Stenog explains that the only life that counts is the life stored in all its potential perfectibility—their version of immortality—as billions of zygotes frozen inside “the cube.” “‘Our total seed. Our horde. The race is in there. Those of us now walking around—’ He made a motion of dismissal. ‘A minute fraction of what’s contained in there, the future generations to come’” (45). Parsons recognizes that the minds of future teens inhabit their posthumous future (so bright they are shades) and not the present. One man’s...

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