E.R. Barnes
Lor Linden presents the musketeers
with another challenge
Without warning, the Seniors on Outer Space Station had been faced with the serious problem of housing and teaching and protecting children who were too young for their school. For a dozen years, the accidentally begun experiment had blossomed and grown.
The venture did not come to an end with the successful conclusion of their University education. The classmates were presented with one more challenge and another five years to be together; to prove completely the results of trust and love freely given and freely returned.
Lor Linden is the conclusion of the experiment and the further adventures of Ian, his friends and their families. The companions would be isolated in preserved forest land far to the north of Ardrey where they would build homes, family and a community.
Mrs. Barnes is a native and once again a resident of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina and a Master of Science from New York University.
After eight years at the Metropolitan Opera House and another twenty-five teaching in the New York Public School system, the widow has returned to the backwoods of Pennsylvania to live on a farm, work as a volunteer with the local volunteer fire Company and pursue her love of writing.
The author cheerfully answers readers’ letters.
For five years, a carefully chosen group of Cadets had studied and played together. For five years they had lived and worked in unison, successfully and for the most part with happy hearts.
The center of the group, the glue that had united them, was Ian Alexander Malcolm. Born to be a leader and generous of heart, he had neither demanded nor requested his house mates’ fealty. Having learned well the need for fidelity, and with an extraordinary dedication to duty, Ian had earned their trust. One by one, his companions had responded to his loving heart, his true compassion and brilliant mind. And year after year, they had showed their trust by appointing him head of their group.
They were adults now, ready to wed and prepared to take their places in the community. Most of their elders expected that each pair would go its own way; children, different occupations and interests would pull them apart.
Tuesday afternoon, fourteen newly-hatched adults had flown from University at Berne to the Duchy of Ardrey in the company of their parents. Bethany, Ardrey’s Duchess and Van’s great grandmother, had herself planned the festivities which would celebrate their twentieth birthdays as well as wish them God speed in their new venture. That evening, fourteen special Interne Juniors were paraded to Appledor’s largest Gather House to be formally accepted as adults by Duchy Council and to watch their parents be formally and legally moved up to Senior rank.
More than a dozen parents and kinfolk had been accepted as participants in the experimental village and would go on before their children to settle in to their work in Lor Linden. The rest would leave their children behind and return to their homes or go on to new endeavors. On Wednesday morning, the new Seniors bid their children farewell and left them to enjoy the festivities; breakfast with this group, dinners with that, suppers with another, not to mention performances with the finest artists that Ardrey could provide. The celebrations would end on Friday night with a Grand Ball.
For five years the Internes would be their own musicians and actors, expected to entertain themselves. For five years they would be isolated far to the north in forest land long preserved against the depredations of homo-sap; even the two Ardreyans in the group had no notion of the exact position. They would go to Lor Linden to build a home, a family, a community, with the motto they had set for themselves:
‘Every home was a brick in the great wall of
decent living that men erected...
Women made the bricks and the durableness of
each civilization depended on their quality...’
