Brannock Meets Laurinda

In that garden mentioned two posts ago here, Christian Brannock meets Laurinda Ashcroft. We already knew that, in Laurinda's time, English had become Inglay (not Anglic) but now we read three words of it and it does not sound like English:

"'Benveni, Capita Brannock,' she greeted." (Genesis, p. 147)

(Of course, English absorbs everything else. What is the English for "yoga"? Yoga.)

With their self-introductions, we learn a little about these characters' chronologies. Brannock is from the twenty third century. That is later than I thought. I took his childhood in Alaska to be either contemporary or "day after tomorrow." Laurinda was born about two hundred years after Brannock's death so that, very approximately speaking, she parallels van Rijn. Here is the beginning of a Time Chart for the Genesis future history although extremely unspecific.

They are young, although they remember aging and dying, and are now in an emulation of a mid-eighteenth century estate in the English county of Surrey. Gaia has adjusted circumstances and memories so that the maid who serves them tea and cakes believes that the London-based owners of the estate have lent it to their friend, the eccentric Miss Ashcroft. The maid is conscious and believes that she lives and works in Surrey in the eighteenth century. Do you and I merely believe that we live and work in the twenty first century? We should continue to believe so unless and until we encounter evidence to the contrary.

There is more unexpected information about Brannock's period:

he was born in the Yukon Ethnate of the Bering Federation;
his Ethnate maintained wilderness preserves;
his nation (the Ethnate or the Federation?) was prosperous and progressive with links to Asia, the Pacific and renascent Europe;
his education was partly in Europe;
the Commonwealth of Nations kept global peace;
he saw combat twice during his time in the Conflict Mediation Service;
then human partnership with the consciousness-level units of the growing artificial intelligence network fostered stability;
he played leading roles in the domed Copernican Sea, the Asteroid Habitat, the orbiting antimatter plant and the Grand Solar Laser launcher of interstellar vehicles.

Suddenly, we get a lot of information that was skipped over in the earlier chapters about Brannock when he was alive! It all adds richness to this compact Heinleinian/Stapledonian future history.