contained a song sung in Latin titled "Cursum Perficio." What the actual lyrics of the song may be about I have no clue, but somehow its rhythms sounded both military and ecclesiastical to me, and I was put in mind of an early Christian martyr tale I'd once run across called

"The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani." The fast-forward version of this goes: a certain Roman legion was wintering in Dacia, up beyond the

Black Sea, at a period when the high command was flip-flopping over the acceptability of this new religion. Orders came down for the

Christians to recant. Forty men refused, and were ordered to stand

out naked on the ice of a frozen lake until they changed their minds.

Only one man broke. A watching Roman officer was so impressed

with their fortitude, he went out to join them, to make up their round lot again, and they all froze to death. It seemed a very Barrayaran sort of tale to me, somehow.

I had also read T.E. Lawrence's The Mint, an account of his basic training when he re-enlisted in the British Army after World War I, under a pseudonym, as an enlisted man. Now, admittedly ex-Colonel

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Lawrence was not in the best psychological shape at this point in his life, but the account was nonetheless relentless in its description of the brutality and banality of training camp life.

Hanging on the wall of my father's home office for years, and now

on mine, was a print titled "Alaskan Outpost," an almost art-deco stylized scene of an arctic weather station, with a parka-clad man out collecting data from his instruments, a snow-covered glacier sliding down the mountain in the background. It was a gift dated 1952 from

his colleagues at the Battelle Memorial Research Institute, where he worked as a physicist and engineer till moving to his teaching post at the Ohio State University. In addition to his research and teaching, my father moonlighted as the second television weatherman in the

United States, at Channel 10 Columbus, Ohio; most of the many

Central Ohioans who knew him as "Bob McMaster, TV Weatherman,"

had no idea of his professorial day job. When the show first appeared, the weather segment used to be fifteen minutes long and he would

always get in a short meteorology lesson as well as the forecast. He was so good, the Strategic Air Command pilots at Lockbourne Air

Force Base used to call him up for pre-flight weather reports, in

preference to their less reliable military weather sources, till their command caught up with them and made them stop.

So somehow, between one dish and the next, Enya; The Mint,