Wesley Pruitt

Record

Wesley Pruitt was seventeen years old in January 2043, the son of the dockmaster at Galesville, Maryland — a post his father held for thirty-one years. He is the record's only direct witness to the slip-side encounter that followed the staged drowning that opened the Eternal Witness masquerade, and the account he gave of it survived, essentially unaltered, for more than three centuries.

Appearances

On the night of January 26 or 27, 2043, nine or ten days after the reported drowning of "Andre L. Freeman, 52," Pruitt saw a man using the name Cole standing in the Pelican's empty slip at the Galesville dock. Cole told him: "Nobody drowns off a slip, son. The slip's the one place everybody comes back to." He then wrote out a rental agreement for the slip and cancelled it on the spot, in front of the boy.

Pruitt did not understand what he had seen. He carried it anyway. At seventy-seven, in 2103, he gave an oral history to the Maryland Oral History Project describing the encounter and, in his own words, "the changed bay."

Significance

Centuries later, Pruitt's recorded words were carved verbatim into the Landfall Compacts — the charter negotiated among the settled worlds at Rest, 2701 to 2711 — where they stand without gloss for readers on worlds where the word bay requires a footnote. The testimony records Andre listening to the original 2103 recording decades afterward, on one such world. The dockmaster's son never learned who he had spoken to that night, and gave the record, unknowingly, one of its longest-traveled sentences.