Across the zodiac: the story of a wrecked record
The frame's "Greg" narrator talks to a CSA officer (Ubernarrator), goes to Mexico to fight for Maximilian and then is shipwrecked in the Pacific. The officer found this manuscript in an aerial shipwreck.
The manuscript Unnamed Narrator writes congealed bad Latin, but who expects interplanetary travel to soon fulfils his boyhood daydreams. His friends, Ubernarrator assumes, may still be alive. Ubernarrator thinks he left Earth for Mars in 1830!
The narrator spends pages setting up his apology ship, named the Astronaut. He has a garden to refresh the air, with birds, all netted in. Were the bird's emergency rations? He does not say.
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