Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part Three)
Elmgrove
August 21, 2209
It was less than a week after the first group of refugees arrived on August 14 that problems hosting them started to emerge. The Raffaloviches didn’t have a refugee family themselves, not because they had refused to take one but because the Hewetts across the cul-de-sac had insisted on taking the ones assigned to their street, out of, as they said, Christian charity, a term that Joe did not like to use. Jess and Joe went to the reception that the Hewetts, a couple whose children had all been constituted and were all at college on Mars, gave for these people two days after the Assumption, at which point they found that this particular refugee family involved three parents and everybody had a different last name.
The father was named Hans-Hermann Yudkowsky—which seemed reasonable enough, and got Joe excited that he might have another Jewish man living in whitebread Elmgrove to talk shop with—and the mothers, who appeared to be partnered sexually with each other as well as with Hans-Hermann, were named RCA Victor de la Renta and Halliburton Pepsi. The children were named Apple-Adidas Bostrom, Murray Hanson, Random House Amazon, and Starbucks Mittal. Jess didn’t know what to make of these names, obviously, but they interested her, compared to Jessica Raffalovich, Joseph Raffalovich, Milton and Lucinda Raffalovich, Thomas Hewett, Clarice Hewett, and so on, and she was more than willing to debate whatever view of the world it was that had led these people to name themselves and their children after corporations and, she assumed, public figures she had never heard of.
The first sign of trouble came when Tom Hewett let it be known that he was not interested in how these people arranged their affairs, only in showing them what charity he could, an on paper reasonable statement that he worded like an insult and that Hallie seemed deeply offended by. The second sign came when Hans-Hermann took Joe aside and confided in him that he thought that Hallie and RCA Victor’s “alliance”—his word—was disgusting and wouldn’t have had it under his roof for one moment longer if the AI had been around to parse out where their contractual obligations ended. Joe relayed this immediately to Jess, who herself then took Hans-Hermann aside and gently suggested to him that, given that he himself seemed to have two wives, he should perhaps attend to the beam in his own eye.
“That isn’t how we see it in New Northumberland,” he said, “and they’re not my ‘wives.’ I was hoping people here would understand a little better than people back home, since there’s more of a ‘value’ orientation here. Guess not.”
“There’s more to having a ‘value’ orientation than you seem to think,” said Jess, “but I’ll leave that to you to learn over your time here. I know I’ve had to learn it. Joe’s still learning it.”
“Sure,” said Hans-Hermann. “Thanks. I hope you’re right.”
When Jess got back to the dinner table, Hallie was telling Tom and Clarice about the philosophical differences between people like her who were willing to accept some help with what she called the family startup process in exchange for names like “Apple-Adidas”—a name that she seemed especially proud of and treated as something just short of theophoric—and people like her husband who saw this as a form of dependency and who had convinced RCA Victor to name their second-born (who was apparently RCA Victor’s only biological child) Murray instead of Fox. Tom pointed out, more politely than he had been earlier in the dinner, that Fox was a well-attested last name and thus also made a perfectly good first name, even independent of whatever branding RCA Victor had initially expected from, he assumed, Disney.
“I’m surprised that companies like RCA Victor and Amazon have anything to do with New Northumberland, considering how out-of-the-way we all are out here,” Clarice said with a pained, polite smile. “Are there literal branding agreements involved or is the practice more, well, aspirational?”
“That would be superstitious,” said RCA Victor.
At the same time, Hallie said “I take offense to that question.”
“Well, sorry,” said Clarice. “I’m not intending to pry. Anyway, can I get anyone another cocktail? I’ve been meaning to try to make a blue Hawaii for a while now.”
It was at this point that Jess had the incredibly discouraging realization that nobody’s children had said a word all evening, not even her own.
That was August 17. The next evening, the evening news and the domestic evening paper both carried a human interest story about a refugee living in a public building on the outskirts of town who had been offered a job at a struggling dishware company but refused to sign the contract because it asked that he pay dues to the company’s in-house union. The people of Elmgrove did not take kindly to this story, even the part of President Grantland’s base of support that was more skeptical of the unions and thought that people like this refugee should have more scope for independent action in dealing with their bosses. Jess suspected that it was because he was a refugee that people were treating the issue the way they were; she suspected this in part because there were plenty of other such cases involving Elmgrove citizens in which the person involved became something of a cause celebré for a day or two, but also, in a big way, because on her next supermarket trip—that would be today’s, the day on which she was thinking back on all this—she had heard some people complaining about this “Northie” and asking how come somewhere else, somewhere like New Chelsea or even Eris, hadn’t been able to take his kind in instead of Elmgrove. Unfortunately, she thought she heard Etta Cleary making such complaints.
She couldn’t remember if Etta had ever said anything to the effect of considering Jess suspect since she and Joe had come here already relatively late in their lives. A lot of engineering had had to be done to keep Jess, in particular, young; she was not looking forward to going through a second menopause, but it had been what she and Joe had needed to do to have children after a doomed young adulthood of sensual privation on his part and several miscarriages and one or two instances that her confessors had falsely thought were early-term abortions on hers. They had come here in search of a simplicity that was not really simplicity, since their high school history educations had both been good enough that they had had no actual illusions about what the real 1950s had been like. Elmgrove advertised itself, to the extent that it advertised itself at all, as a “dwelling of simplicity,” a term that it had apparently jacked from a science fiction story from hundreds of years ago. It had to guard itself heavily against incursions by racists and sexual perverts who had factually accurate but politically dangerous ideas of what mid-twentieth-century America had been like, but for the most part it had chosen to do this by being less selective and discriminating about who it allowed to immigrate rather than more. They had at one point, in Elmgrove, used the term “displaced person,” which had initially referred to World War II refugees, for people who had despaired of the situation in the rest of the Solar System and had decided to avail themselves, as exiles, of the dwellings of simplicity.
The Lord Chancellor of New Chelsea, a mouthpiece for GOM-5 whose degree of independent power was a subject of speculation, was in the morning foreign paper on the twentieth discussing his own country’s experience with the refugees. Apparently they had only arrived three days previously but so far were inspiring even more suspicion than they were in Elmgrove. He was considering sending an ambassador to Elmgrove to confer with President Grantland.
Jess was still waiting, day by day, for somebody to come and depose her and Joe. She thought back, as she waited for the deposition, on her marriage to Joe, and on what it had implied and entailed for them around the time of their wedding. He had been forty-eight and she had been forty-five; it had been five years before they had immigrated to Elmgrove. She had had to get a dispensation from the Archbishop of Ganymede, in whose jurisdiction they had been living at the time, and he had had to start going to a synagogue that frowned less determinedly on intermarriage. It had at that time been seen, including by Jess and Joe themselves, as very unlikely that any children should come from the two of them. They had married because of what they had been through together and because each was flattered by the other still showing them physical attraction in middle age. Jess and Joe had been intimate several times in their younger years, sometimes in transient rendezvous and sometimes in prior, failed attempts to be in love, but had not slept together for about a decade at the time that they got married. Jess’s sexual tendencies, which had been close to downright indiscriminate from age sixteen or so onward, had not taken well to matrimony at first, and it had taken almost two years of marriage, two years of therapy and confession on her part and pained, anticipatory patience on his, for her to stop sleeping with other people when the opportunity arose. It was about half a year after her last adulterous fling that they had first begun to seriously talk about leaving the world at large and immersing themselves in one of the dwellings of simplicity. They were, back then especially, in search of something that was lost.
When Jess got back from the Safe’n’Smart on the twenty-first, she cancelled a swimming pool date with Etta and a few other women and instead sat in her and Joe’s bedroom with the Venetian blinds drawn and the ceiling fan on, peeping, almost against her own will, through the occasional crack in the blinds down at something that was going on in the Hewetts’ front yard. Hans-Hermann and RCA Victor seemed to be having some sort of argument, which was not physical or even very loud but evidently involved deep, boiling anger on both sides; Halliburton was a few yards distant, trying to get them to stop. Jess couldn’t see the kids; probably they were inside, since the refugee children were not attending Elmgrove summer camps due to concerns about whether or not the relevant efforts should be made to assimilate the newcomers. (It would probably not be resolved in time for them to start the new school year either.) Already some people on the City Council had begun throwing around words like “unassimilable.” Watching what was going on down there on the Hewetts’ lawn, Jess could sort of see why.
At the Safe’n’Smart Jess had run into those potential confirmed bachelors again and talked to them for a good few minutes. They were named Rusty and Dave and had come here as children; if they were to be constituted, it would likelier than not be as late adolescents, even though they had lived here in such a way that they were now, or felt now, maybe a touch shy of thirty. Dave, it turned out, worked at the same dishware company that had briefly attempted to employ this New Northumberlandish guy, Comcast von Mises. He had met him, briefly, and had an opinion of him that he described to Jess as “mixed and extremely negative at the same time.” He pitied the guy, he said, but he didn’t understand what his kind of person expected Elmgrove to do about them. He sarcastically asked if President Grantland was considering any kind of intervention against New Northumberland, its AI, the diehards who were still living there and loyal to the AI, and the various ships that the AI and its diehards were sending out to try to collect their rebellious daughters. In fact Jess had heard somewhere else today that President Grantland was strongly considering doing just that.
❦
Assisi, Italy, Earth
August 21, 2209
Esteban had come here alone, without Father Aguerra, to pray at the places holy to such great saints as he could find, before his newest and probably last journey towards the stars began. He stood upon the summer hills looking down over the town and the yellowing hills around it, little changed, all things considered, from centuries long past, kept in a Janus-faced bubble of commerciality and sanctity. The mountains behind him were wooded still, new growth, coppice growth, old virgin hardwoods, and here and there he had been told that wolves had been reintroduced, so that, to give one example, Gubbio was much as it had been in that fable of a millennium ago.
He had been trying to ignore the news. Coordinating Minister Trinder had met with the heads of government of Australia and Mars to try to come up with a joint position on what was called the New Northumberland crisis, although really what was meant was not that it was a crisis for the New Northumberlanders but that the New Northumberlanders were creating a crisis for kindlier and more sympathetic peoples through their obstreperousness and ill-favor. Esteban recognized in this the signs, long known and long understood among the wise, of brainwashing and the mental torpor that came from the sway of being ill-ruled. Trinder and company did not.
The arrangement was that Esteban, along with someone who worked with Bella Cooby but was not the great woman herself, would take a DA military ship—just like in the old days—to Titan, where, he felt now at a hundred, it had almost been his youth that he had spent. From Titan a chartered Riggs-Hathaway freighter would take them to Eris, at which point Grantland, the President of Elmgrove, the simulator where Jess and Joe were living, would send out an automated ship of his own to take Esteban alone the rest of the way. Once at Elmgrove, Esteban would be deconstituted, a process that involved putting him under heavy sedation and then in stasis and hooking his brain waves up to seven different mainframe computers, so that he could actually walk the streets of that distant, long-ago city and see his old comrades again. The entire process was expected to take about a week. The DA ship would leave from Monaco at 1310 tomorrow, which, since this was Western Europe, actually would be around midday. It was called the Hernan Cordeiro and carried, among other things, six space-to-planet missiles, which he had been told fell under the nuclear ambiguity umbrella. He had no idea what this meant, since it had been clear for two hundred years that “nuclear ambiguity” was a polite term for unacknowledged and potentially illegal nuclear stockpiles, something that he associated mostly with put-upon countries with siege mentalities such as Israel had had centuries ago and Canada had now. The commanding officer of the Hernan Cordeiro was named Leila Sassoon and came, if Esteban remembered correctly, from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Judging from the name, Esteban would have guessed that Commodore Sassoon’s family had not been in Southeast Asia forever, but then, questions could also, once upon a time, reasonably have been asked about a Japanese man named Esteban.
Esteban walked back into the town and went back to his hotel room, in one of Assisi’s older-fashioned and more firmly established pensions, where he could watch the news without having to fiddle with the innumerable gadgets one carried on one’s person these days. When he was younger, he would have done this fiddling happily. Now, most of what he wanted from those gadgets was just his songbooks, and he had not been able to practice on his piano in weeks.
He watched for long enough to see that military action against New Northumberland was “on the table,” then turned off the television and pulled up some of his music. He had it play through some songs by First Aid Kit and other twenty-first-century folk bands, then switched it to his Gershwin playlist, took a mild sedative, and tried to get an early start on his night’s sleep as a sudden late-summer evening approached.
He woke up a little before midnight after a long, complicated, mostly very pleasant dream involving his mother, the nun Tanizaki who had put him through some of his paces in his seminary days, and a woman who ran a beachfront hotel out on the flats below Matsumae with whom he had had a potentially dangerous friendship about twenty-five years ago. He was able to write this dream down, in broad strokes at least although not, unfortunately, in its particulars, before it entirely left his consciousness. Esteban felt almost as if keeping this dream in his memory or writing it down for his future perusal constituted a form of control over his own life of a kind that could not any longer be gotten or grasped or insisted on otherwise. He had never really believed that he was the master of his fate or the captain of his soul, but that lack of mastery or captaincy was beginning, in his old age, to get to him in a way that it had not when he had been a younger man who was more thoroughly and honestly concerned with duty.
After a while, he turned on the television again. Coordinating Minister Trinder, Australian Prime Minister Cheung, and Martian Director-President Santorini were speaking at a joint press conference in New Chennai. Trinder had a big, fleshy, expressive face with obvious cybernetic implants, a receding head of greyish-brown hair, and a slight stoop, and spoke in a faintly “cowboy” version of American English that Esteban had heard actually was spoken natively these days in parts of the region around Spokane where the great man came from. Cheung was tall and a little heavyset with long beautiful brown hair and an expression of fixed, pained determination, and Santorini looked like a Crivelli saint, complete with excessive ornamentation and texture. Trinder spoke for about five minutes, repeating variations of a “this aggression will not stand” canned speech that sounded centuries old, before Cheung took the podium and actually started to explain what the New Northumberlanders were doing that was inspiring this kind of response from the beautiful and the good.
There had been apparently about a fifth or a sixth of the original population of New Northumberland that had turned out to be true believers, so to speak, and had committed to staying in the initial New Northumberland O’Neill cylinder even as everybody else had fled to the surrounding countries and the four winds and the black Oort void around the Solar System. What the actual number of these people was, was difficult to determine because until recent months nobody in the Inner Solar System had talked much about or really knew much about New Northumberland, and its initial population was far from easy for Esteban to look up, or at least to look up at the same time as he was trying to pay attention to the press conference. It was probably not as many people as Cheung’s language was suggesting, but they had dubious intentions and seemed well-armed. It seemed they had been sending out ships to try to vacuum up the refugees and drag them back to the O’Neill cylinder to honor their contractual obligations. Implications were now being made that New Northumberland might launch military attacks on Elmgrove, New Chelsea, and possibly even Eris. The way Cheung was talking implied that Eris was much more tenuously connected to the rest of the Solar System in terms of transportation and military supply lines that most people seemed to think, and Eris succumbing to pressure from New Northumberland would put the entire Erisian fusion bomb stockpile in the hands of a rogue, irrational actor.
Esteban thought that this was a silly way to be talking about a weakened, very obviously dysfunctional entity—it insisted it was not a state—the vast majority of whose population had just abandoned it a matter of weeks ago. However, his emotional reaction to what Cheung was saying was not immediate rejection or contempt, but deep ambivalence that trended more towards concern and worry that there was a serious problem here than he would have liked it to.
He was able to sleep for a little while before being awoken by a light, insistent knocking on his door. He got up, got half-dressed, and staggered to the door, opening it to find a short black man with a shock of reddish hair wearing one of the greenish-blue robes that had been à la mode for the past few years. “Esteban Okada?” this man said in a South African or Botswanan accent.
“Yes, that’s me,” said Esteban in English. “And you are…?”
“My name is Kyrillos Fevvers. I work with Bella Cooby and Ryan Cortez-Knight. I wanted to introduce myself to you before we have to go to the spaceport later this morning.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s 0645. We should be on the road by 0940.”
“Did you get here last night?”
“Yes, from Rome. Are you doing okay, Father Okada? You look more than a little stressed.”
“The news is beginning to get to me.”
“As to all of us.” Fevvers clapped Esteban on the shoulder and flashed him a grin mediated and made imperfect and intriguingly withholding by a couple of bright blue-green false teeth made of some polymer or polymer-adjacent substance whose name Esteban could not remember. “C’mon. Want to get some breakfast? We’re going to be working together in pretty close quarters for the next few days.”
“If you’re trying to ‘schmooze’ with an old and enfeebled man, Mr. Fevvers,” said Esteban, “I regret to tell you that there’s not much you’re going to be able to get out of me; I’m discredited even in the priesthood for essentially every other purpose than this. If you really want to get to know me, then yes, I’d be happy to have some breakfast.”
Fevvers assured Esteban that he really wanted to get to know him, and they proceeded downstairs for one of the more traditional Italian breakfasts possible, involving antipasti (possibly lab-grown), biscotti dipped in orange juice and sweet red wine, some small salads made mostly with plants that had been introduced from South America long centuries ago, and so forth, and so forth. The breakfast was leisurely by Esteban’s standards and apparently by Fevvers’s as well but not necessarily by those of either of their countries and certainly not by that of a pension meal in Italy. They were done a little before 0800 and packing only took about another half-hour, because Esteban had decades and decades before become a master, a “dab hand” some English-speakers would put it, at packing light even for long-haul space travel. Fevvers had apparently sent his gear—he called it his “gear,” which coming from somebody from Southern Africa was a term that Esteban perhaps stereotypically associated with safari adventures of old—ahead of him to the Monegasque spaceport where they would presumably be spending at least an hour or two when it approached the hottest part of the day. Esteban was grateful that they would be leaving from a warm and dry climate; it would keep him comfortable at least within his own mind as a ward against the chill dankness that he had started to feel on spaceships in his old age. He wished the sun-sailors went further from Earth; at least within the Inner Solar System he had a difficult time understanding the technological reasons why they should not work better and further out than they did.
“Right,” said Fevvers after a little bit of lounging around. “Time to get on the road.” He clapped Esteban’s shoulder again before they were off.