The Third Book of Unexpected Enlightenment, Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland came to an end yesterday, and it is now the dawning of the fourth book, The Awful Truth about Forgetting.
Today is the day Gaius Valiant convinces Rachel to sneak off campus with him and accompany him to the headquarters of the multinational company, Ouroboros Industries, in Detroit.
There she receives an unexpected lesson in mathematics and physics—so that next time, she won’t think she could budge a jumbo jet by flying into it fast enough, and she also runs into her second cousin, Blackie Moth, a young man who has been robbed of his memory by mysterious circumstances.
Blackie watched Rachel unfold the note he had handed her. “Found that when I woke up in the lab without my memory. First thing I remember seeing.”
The note on the folded paper was written in Blackie’s handwriting. It read:
I, Blackie Moth, attest that my memory was removed with my permission. Furthermore, I charge myself not to investigate the reason it was taken or to continue my current line of research.
Some things are too dangerous to know.
Coracinus Nefarious Moth
A scene with Blackie Moth occasionally mentioned by reviewers:
He looked at her frankly. “I didn’t realize you’d be Oriental.”
Rachel gave him a kind smile. “My mother’s half-Korean.”
…
Gaius leaned back on his heels. “I think you mean that Rachel’s Asian.”
Blackie scowled, “I ain’t buyin’ into that newspeak nonsense. ’Specially as their word-alchemy sucks mothballs.”
“Word alchemy?” Gaius leaned farther back than he had meant to and had to step back rapidly to regain his balance.
“They try to move the essence of an idea from an old word to a new one, leavin’ behind the qualities they don’t much like. Isn’t that alchemy?” asked Blackie. “Only to make it work, they have to endow the original words with the essence of hatred and vitriol, in order to get folks to stop usin’ em. Turn ’em into swearwords. Look at: Oriental, Colored, cripple, retarded. Perfectly good words, ruined.”
“I…never thought of it that way,” said Gaius, who was looking decidedly uncomfortable.
Blackie continued, “Homeless now means what used to be meant by bum or tramp. And let’s not even get into what happened to that little word that used to mean full of fun.”
“They’re just trying to be kind,” countered Gaius. “Does this ‘word-alchemy’ do anybody any harm?”
“Sure does. Perfectly good older books suddenly banned, because now they have swearwords in ’em that weren’t swearwords when they were written,” spat Blackie. “Bah. You should have heard the nonsense words the American Sorcery Council wanted to use to replace Unwary—Mundie? Muggle? Flobbit? Thank goodness the Wise actually showed some wisdom and voted it down.”
This last comment caused Gaius to snort with amusement, though he was still a bit red in the face.
Rachel listened, but she did not weigh in. She had always vaguely thought that Asian was a word for people and Oriental was for rugs or gardens—though she knew both words had been used differently in ages gone by. She was amused to notice, however, that, even without his memory, Cousin Blackie had retained his talent for turning an innocent conversation into something that caused offense. Rachel’s grandmother, the Duchess of Devon, had once described him as having the manners of a mutt who ran into the house after capturing a rabbit—so that when he shook the creature to snap its neck, he also broke the household crystal.