Gone With The Wind? (page 68)
This one really touched me.
My grandmother, who could not read, and worked with her hands all her brief life before dying of pancreatic cancer, was so proud her children, finally, could.
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On June 11th, both Kaiser Frederick III and Tang Lili wrote in their diaries, one in German horizontally from left to right, the other in Cathayan vertically from up to down, “What's happening to me? I must get well again; I have so much to do!”
The Kaiser, having traveled from Spa to Spa in search of relief and not finding it, had arrived finally at his Spas, the Kaiser Spas of old Pomerania.
As Janosch A. Prufrock had observed to Emil Hering on page 13 of our tale, “Each year, on the Kaiser Days, many… interesting people come here to Vineta, oder?”
On the Kaiser Days, when the summer sun warms the cool Baltic waters enough to bathe, to sail, to frolic, the people come by train, carriage, and zeppelin.
This year, there were ten at Villa Undine (if you’d like, see page 12): Three musicians and an alchemist of the highest merit from Magna Germania, and four from Cathay, as well as Emil Hering the guesthouse-keeper and the mysterious Janosch A. Prufrock.
Were they all after the radioaktiv Edelstone, that could bring back to life a victim of the emperor of all maladies, or become death and lay waste to armies? (Discussed by Doktor Doktor Bombastus Paracelsus back on page 9)
The decent Kaiser Frederick had announced, “I do not like war gentlemen. If I should reign I would never make it.” But how many more days can the malady-stricken kaiser reign? And who would shorten or lengthen his regnal period? The war clouds were gathering over Europa. Could Fate be persuaded? Or will this briefly-alternate possibility of a world without the Great War or its sequel (and their heavy sequelae) be gone with the wind (page 16)?