John Dalmas - Soldiers

The marriage produced two sons and a daughter. One son was named Arjan, the other Isaiah. The daughter was named Jael. The family visited the senior Jael and Isaiah several times after returning from Wyzhuursok.

Retiring from the military, Esau and Bjorg lived on Eridani Prime, to enjoy the 0.87 gee gravity. There they bought and resided on a small frontier "hobby farm," which Esau worked himself. They died in their nineties of natural causes.

The pirate ship Minerva, with Drago Dravec and his crew, showed up haggard and hungry in the Hart's Desire System. This was two days before, and most of a hyperspace year away from, the battle of Shakti. Dravec helped set up the planet's own "Project Noah," and a few weeks later married Ambassador Annalis Khai. After the peace, he managed a marginally legal import-export office for Harlan Cheregian, but seldom traveled offworld.

He is credited with having introduced war-gaming to Hart's Desire.

After the war, Male Infant Doe 731 had his name legally changed to Charley Gordon and, with Ophelia Kennah, left government service on liberal pensions, fortified by a very generous annuity to Charley, voted by parliament. Meanwhile, Alvaro Soong retired from the Admiralty and married Ophelia Kennah. Charley "gave away" the bride. For several years the three shared a comfortable condominium, in an affluent retirement community in the mountains of the Chiapas Prefecture, in the Central American Autonomy.

During those years (with travel breaks to attend live concerts all over Terra), Charley's major activity was research on a unified field theory that included psionics. His mathematics was largely incomprehensible, however, except to a very few. More successful was the music he composed in odd moments. Strange, mostly beautiful music-some for instruments, some for voices, some for both. It was found therapeutic for many persons with physical as well as mental problems. (For still others it was psychologically addictive.)

Charley's research period led into what came to be known as "Charley Gordon's meditation phase," ending with three years spent mostly in silence, beneath a lovely canopy in a chan (zen) monastery garden near Kunming. There he was tended by monks, and visited by pilgrims not only from all over Terra, but from other worlds, including exchange youths from Wyzhuursok.

Afterward Charley remained at the monastery, but treated himself to a well-accessoried artificial intelligence, and spent a year secluded with his new "toy." After programming it to suit his needs, he composed a musical work which he titled Opus Number One: Logos for the Emotionally Centered. It was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, to a video/holo audience estimated at 2.7 billion, and a live audience of 11,736. In a post-performance interview, Charley described it as an improved form of his unified field theory.

Following a brief period of CNS deterioration, Charley Gordon died at age 67, one of the best-known and most loved persons in the Commonwealth.

Ophelia Kennah, then 84 years old, dictated her best-selling Memories of Charley, and died shortly afterward.