Robert Asprin - E.Godz

On a lovely spring morning in the hyperborean wilderness of Poughkeepsie, New York, Edwina Godz decided that she had better die. She did not make that decision lightly, but in exactly the manner that such a (literally) life-altering choice should, ought, and must be made. That is to say, after a nice cup of tea.

It wasn't as if she was about to kill herself. Just die.

She reached the aforementioned decision almost by accident, while pondering the sorry state of her domestic situation and seeking a cure for the combination of headache, tummy trouble, and spiritual upheaval she always experienced every time she thought about her family. Under similar circumstances, most women would head right for the medicine cabinet, but Edwina Godz was a firm believer in the healing power of herbs. Better living through chemistry was all very well and good, yet when it came down to cases that involved the aches, pains, and collywobbles of day-to-day living, you couldn't beat natural remedies with a stick.

Especially if the stick in question was a willow branch. Surprising how few people realized that good old reliable aspirin was derived from willow bark.

Edwina realized this, all right. In fact, she was a walking encyclopedia of herbal therapy lore. It was partly a hobby, partly a survival mechanism. You didn't get to be the head of a multicultural conglomerate like E. Godz, Inc. without making a few very ... creative enemies. When you grew your own medicines, you didn't have to worry about the FDA falling down on the job when it came to safeguarding the purity of whatever remedy the ailment of the moment demanded. Perhaps it was a holdover from her chosen self-reliant life-style all the way back in the dinosaur days of the '60s, but Edwina Godz was willing to live by the wisdom that if you wanted to live life to the fullest, without the pesky interference of the Man, you should definitely grow your own.

No question about it, Edwina had grown her own, and it didn't stop at herbs for all occasions. However, at the moment, herbs were the subject under consideration.

Specifically: which one to take to fix Edwina's present malaise? It wasn't going to be an easy choice, not by a long shot. Peppermint tea was good for an upset tummy, though ginger was better, but valerian was calming and chamomile was the ticket if you were having trouble getting to sleep. Then again, green tea was rich in antioxidants, which were simply unsurpassed when it came to maintaining one's overall health, and ginseng was a marvelous source of all sorts of energy, while gingko biloba—

Edwina sighed and stared at the multicolored array of boxes in the little closet sacred to her tea things. It was built into the wall beside the fireplace in her office, though "office" wasn't quite the right word to describe the room Edwina used for transacting most of her business. "Office" conjured up visions of sleek, sterile twenty-first century furnishings, pricey pieces with surfaces made of wood, stainless steel, brushed aluminum, and name-brand plastics, garnished with a liberal sprinkling of high-tech trappings.

While Edwina did command enough bells-and-whistles machinery to satisfy even the nerdiest of technogeeks, she chose not to show them off. Discretion was her watchword, in both her personal life and her business dealings. It was enough for her to rejoice privately in the fact that she owned a very special kind of fax machine (to put it mildly); she didn't need to put it out on a marble pedestal so that visitors might ooh and ah over it in green-eyed envy.

Like so much else in her life—from technotoys to tea—the fax machine was tucked away, out of sight but never out of mind, in one of the many hidey-holes that riddled her office: either behind the dark wood paneling that flanked the fireplace, the faux-Oriental papered walls, or within one of the many unique items of furniture so tastefully taking up floor space. Let others more insecure than she flaunt their desktops, laptops, and palmtops: Edwina Godz's office looked like nothing more than the plush, snug, and inviting parlor of a Victorian mansion.

Which it was.

None of which self-congratulatory knowledge did a thing to help her in the matter of deciding which herbal tea to take right now.

If she brewed herself a cup of comfort incorporating every last one of the herbal essences she needed to cure everything that ailed her, there wouldn't be any room left in the teapot for the boiling water. She shrugged and closed the tea-closet door, and instead ambled over to the other side of the fireplace where the liquor cabinet reposed. Gingko biloba was all very well and good when you were confronting the ordinary headaches of day-to-day life, but when it came to dealing with one's children there was no substitute for single malt scotch.

Grain was an herb, when you got down to it, and so was malt, she told herself. As for the peat that was involved somewhere in the manufacturing process of a decent single malt, well, you couldn't get any more back-to-Mother-Earth than that unless you got down on all fours and sucked topsoil. Edwina was still rationalizing in top form as she downed the first shot and poured the second, all while standing in front of the liquor cabinet with a grim expression on her face that would have stopped a charging wildebeest.

Not that there were many wildebeest running loose in the greater Poughkeepsie area (unless you went by appearances alone, in which case some of the individuals to be found roaming the vast bureaucratic savannahs of nearby Vassar College might be considered as—ah, but that was strictly a matter of personal opinion). Edwina Godz's palatial home stood in splendid semi-isolation on the banks of the mighty Hudson River with a breathtaking view of some of the loveliest countryside on the whole Eastern Seaboard. Her back yard was refuge to vast nations of squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, opossums, deer, and the occasional fox. A fabulous assortment of birds also called Edwina's estate home, but the only winged wildlife that made it through the great oak and Tiffany- stained-glass front doors was the dusty bottle of Wild Turkey shoved into the rear right corner of the liquor cabinet.

Edwina polished off the second shot and considered taking a third. She was not a hard drinker, as a rule, but there were some situations that drove her to it and kept the motor running.

"Bah," said Edwina, gazing at the empty shot glass in her hand. "Who's to be master here?" She knew the answer to that one well enough, and slammed down the glass to prove it. Shoulders squared, she closed the liquor cabinet, returned to the tea things, and brewed herself up a steaming pot full of the ginseng-ginger blend. The present situation had given her a bellyache that screamed for ginger, but it would take the energizing powers of ginseng to give her the mental and physical oomph she'd need to deal with the cause of it all.

The causes. Plural.

Edwina settled herself on the sofa, sipped her tea, and stared stonily at the framed family photograph on the small marble-topped table at her elbow. Of all her attempts to evoke the American ideal of domestic harmony, this photo was the best and only thing she had to show for her efforts.

"Smiling," she said, regarding the three faces in the picture. "We were all smiling. I know that I meant it, but how on earth did I ever manage to persuade Peez and Dov to do it? Was it bribery or just good old-fashioned threats?"

She set down her teacup and picked up the framed photo for closer study. It had been taken some ten years ago, maybe a little farther back than that, certainly long before Dov and Peez had left the nest to pursue their own fortunes.

"And mine," Edwina muttered.