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.

Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part Two)

Elmgrove

August 8, 2209

“Are they going to live with us, Mom?” Cindy asked at the bus stop.

            “I don’t know where they’re going to live,” said Jess. She felt a little harried. If it had only been Cindy, twelve years old now, she would definitely not have been walking her to the bus stop still, especially if, as today, it was only for summer school. But Milt was seven, and the bus came through the same way, and didn’t seem fair to leave Cindy alone on days when Milt didn’t go out, even though Milt’s little genius kid training or whatever it was only happened three days a week. (Why Cindy had never gone in for the genius kid training even now that she was in middle school, despite getting grades in math and civics that were almost as good as Milt’s and grades in English and science that were better, had occurred as a question to Jess in the past, and she thought that to pose it was to know the answer.) “President Grantland just said he’d take them in only last night.”

            “I hope some come to live with us,” said Cindy. “I might beat Trudy Bellingham in civics if I get up close with how people from other countries live.”

            “I don’t know if I hope some do or not,” said Jess. “I think we’ve earned a quiet life, your dad and I, but I want us to do our part if we can.”

            “Maybe we could give money to support the refugees if they don’t come stay with us,” Cindy said. “I overheard you and dad talking about our nest egg a few nights ago.”

            Jess blanched and said “The nest egg is to get you and Milt constituted and sent to college when the time comes for that. We’ll also see about trying to get your baptisms authenticated if we can; that’ll cost money for communicating with the Apostolic Vicar on Eris.” She had never been sure whether or not Cindy really cared about this. As a little girl Cindy had been very devout and even now that she was on the cusp of her teens she came to Mass every Sunday and without any complaint but Jess had noticed that she had been praying less during the day and had mostly stopped writing “JMJ” on her homework. Jess supposed that she herself had also drifted towards not caring anymore when she had been in her teens, although she had never quite gotten there, probably because her own proclivities and tendencies had been much more theatrical than her daughter’s and people like Father Okada had always been around to appeal to those theatrical feelings. Even far, far back in her Worcester days Father Cordeiro had been something of that kind, although his sense for theater and pantomime had always felt glibber and less innate than Father Okada’s had, possibly because he was more obvious about them. Jess had no idea if Father Okada had ever even considered the possibility of being a demonstrative or artistic person. It came out of him grudgingly, like drip coffee.

            “I’ll try to raise some money around school,” said Cindy. “Milt can probably do the same. Maybe not till the school year starts next month, though.” She paused and then said “Mom, two hundred and fifty years ago most schools didn’t actually have these summer semesters, did they?”
            “I don’t think so,” said Jess. “If we were more like New Chelsea I’m sure things would be different for you. I guess I just can’t make any promises about life being more like that or about us being able to really immerse ourselves here, even if you decide not to go to college.”

            “Does President Grantland really want to not let us immerse ourselves?” asked Cindy. “I thought that was what you and dad voted for him for.”

            “It’s what a lot of people voted for him for,” said Jess, “but even the President’s power has some limits. Haven’t they gone over the checks and balances with you by now? The City Council still has a majority for keeping ourselves open to the world.”

            “And how do you feel about that?”

            After reading the news reports out of New Northumberland, Jess no longer knew how she felt about it. She had talked to Etta and Robert, and they no longer knew either. New Northumberland was about forty-five light-minutes away, so a long-haul ship could have gotten there within a day, but the ships that the refugees were on were moving a lot slower, partly because they had only been intended for mining nearby comets and partly because the refugees had had to shut down a lot of their more advanced functions in order to stop the AI that they were fleeing from asserting itself over the controls and drawing the ships back to New Northumberland to enforce the refugees’ contracts some more. The refugees, only to survive, were getting away from New Northumberland and coming towards Elmgrove and New Chelsea as fast as they could, but there was reason to believe that they still felt indebted to the AI, to New Northumberland, and to their contracts, and would attempt to keep up their obligations amongst themselves even after possible resettlement. The newspaper had contained samples of the titles of some of these contracts, such as “A Contract of Employment in Service to Discharge Debt Obligations over a Term of Thirty-Five Years,” “A Contract of Safe, Sane, and Consensual Sexual Power Exchange over a Lifetime Term” (the newspaper had censored the word “sexual” but it was easy to figure out from context), and “A Contract for Private Security and Adjudication Services on Behalf of a Staff of Employees and Miscellaneous Laborers.”

            “I don’t know, sweetie,” Jess said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what life demands of us.”

            Cindy got on the bus and Jess walked home with her hands in the pockets of the shorts she was already wearing for her tennis date with Etta and Lauren in the afternoon. She was sure Lauren would have her opinions on what was going on.

            Jess got home and sat down alone in the kitchen, since Milt was at the Barrows boys’ house for a playdate and Joe had just been pulling out of the driveway to go to work when she had been walking back up to their front door (he had honked and she had blown a kiss). As was often the case when summer dragged on, she felt a sudden urge to listen to a Christmas album, one of the ones that had been released on ten-inch LPs about six or seven years ago (six or seven years ago in the Elmgrove “cultural time” that everyone had imprinted somehow like a vaguely and newly-formed instinct in their heads along with the actual procession of the dates and seasons, which was synced to the outside world). So on this album went, and Bing Crosby’s voice came wafting over the crackle, and in a few minutes the Andrews Sisters joined in, and Jess did not bother to read today’s article about the Partial Hydrocarbon Ban Treaty and the continual, now century-and-a-half-old efforts to stabilize the albedo and seacoast back home.

            Jess poured herself a glass of white wine and sat back guzzling it, not waiting for it to kick in but exulting in the images that she had built up from the raw materials of her life. She remembered that a few months ago Reggie Chan and the Sangha-in-Arms had condemned something or other that Promethean missionaries were doing in the Asteroid Belt, and she remembered the brutal but haphazard and stop-and-go war against Chan’s and the SIA’s predecessors that she had fought for America in fifty years ago. She remembered also that other world, the world that had proven to her satisfaction and Joe’s that Milton had had it right and that dark materials really were used to create new worlds, and she thought “now more than ever” when she connected that past, in her head, with the fact that the future was going to know about it soon, and when she allowed herself, even if only for a few minutes, to have some confidence in the hand of God to wave aside the trajectories of gamma ray bursts and clathrate guns.

            She knew that it was seen as funny, in the literal sense, the sense that people actually found it amusing and worth their laughing at, that she still had this confidence in the Age, to quote a phrase she had heard maybe thirty years or so ago soon after the position of Coordinating Minister of the Democratic Alliance had been established, not of Aquarius but of Orion. The great huntsman. Bows turned outwards into the starry abyss and shields turned inwards at the smoldering Sun. The foreign paper also had something, that she skimmed over as she had skimmed over the thing about the PHBT but in which she took at least a little more transient interest, about something called the Committee on Directed Panspermia. Life, apparently, life itself even if not as known or desired for oneself, really was going to be rocketed out into the stars. Moreover the transmissions from the latest round of Centauri probes had started coming in, and discussion was being had of an unmanned long-haul probe directed at Sirius or perhaps Vega. Jess did not expect to see the last outcome or the last end of such a probe at any point in her lifetime, although in the end she supposed it would depend on what she decided to do when it came time to think about vanishing into the clouds. The track record of her life so far did not bode well for the likelihood of her ending up having a Catholic end. She was worried about what people would think of her, but it was not always the right people about whom she was worried. In this case, she was not worried enough, she knew, about Joe, who had every reason to decide to go about vanishing into the clouds the old-fashioned way, and who had been much firmer than Jess had been in all of the conversations that they had had about their desire, and their children’s, for the children to be constituted. She knew that things would come to a pretty pass sooner or later. She didn’t know whether or not she hoped she would be here to see that.

            At a certain point while she was relaxing with her wine she got a phone call. She took the call—“Raffalovich residence. Jessica Raffalovich speaking; may I ask who’s calling?”—and it turned out that it was somebody from President Grantland’s office.

            “The President wants to speak with me? This is an unexpected surprise—and honor,” she quickly added.

            “Not the President himself,” said the young-sounding secretary, “but somebody on his staff has been asked to depose you about, well, that business you were mixed up with forty-nine years ago, back before you moved out this way. Would you be amenable to this? The request to get your testimony on how things happened back then is coming straight from the Democratic Alliance Central Command.”

            “Brussels or Titan?”

            “They didn’t say. Either way, you aren’t being asked to leave Elmgrove unless you decide that you need to yourself in order to get your testimony out the way you think it would best be gotten out. Your husband’s testimony will be requested and required as well; another secretary in our office is calling him at work.”

            “Sorry, you said this was coming from DA Central Command in Brussels—are Coordinating Minister Ignacio’s fingerprints on this, can I ask?”

            “The Coordinating Minister for the past year and a half has been a man named Trinder, Mrs. Raffalovich,” said the secretary.

            “Yes, I know that. What I’m asking is if this has been in the offing since Mrs. Ignacio was in office.”

            “No, this appears to be a recent request.”

            “All right. Send someone to my house to depose me and I’ll let myself be deposed.”

            “Perfect! –Now, if this is all right, I’ve also been asked, and this is coming from within President Grantland’s office, to ask you if you would be willing and able to host a refugee family that’s coming over from New Northumberland; it was just decided a couple of hours ago to send out some vehicles to meet them and bring some of them in.”

            “Uh…I would have to ask my husband, obviously, but if it were up to me, I would say yes, absolutely,” said Jess, although it was really Cindy, and she guessed probably Milt also, saying yes through her right now, since her own mind was still preoccupied, for the first time in what felt like forever and a day, with that little chink of transparent firmness rolling and tracing lazy but perfect circles in Father Okada’s palm.

            “All right,” said the secretary. “I’ll have my colleague as your husband as well when we get through to him.”

            “Thank you,” said Jess. “Have a nice day now.”

            “You too, Mrs. Raffalovich. Goodbye.”

            “Goodbye.”

 ❦

Special Extraterritorial Zone 7, Harbin, China, Earth

August 1, 2209

Wang Xiulan swept down the armored, seven-gated hallway to where that portion of the Thiel Thousand that lay under her protection floated in their dreams. The priests Okada and Aguerra had passed all of the checks that the government and the Party had applied to them yesterday, and this morning the word had come from Brussels that they did indeed have the approval and the currency of the Democratic Alliance and its constituent governments. Representations had been made that China would come under renewed pressure to join the Democratic Alliance or any one of its penumbra of looser defense pacts if it did not cooperate in stage-managing the release of the Cavafy reports. Xiulan did not see herself as particularly patriotic, and she did not have particularly warm feelings towards the Thiel Thousand themselves—she saw them as perilous, chill, and pale—but she had done much better for herself in her career so far than most twenty-eight-year-old security contractors, and she liked the idea of keeping SEZ-7 the way it was far better than the idea of having it, and having herself, fall under the sway of other contractors from God knew what exotic lands or stars. Her twenty kilograms of body armor and technical gear felt to her as if they were almost as fully hers for the command the keeping as were the cassocks and collars that Okada and Aguerra were wearing underneath their hazmat suits.

            Xiulan indulged in some upper-class and femine affectations off the job, which she saw as the proverbial carrot against the stick of how little the future had opened itself before her during her days looking idly and wistfully from the window of her precarious-class high school over the steaming Pearl River. She had familiarized herself with a brief, heavily redacted biography of Jessica Raffalovich, née Martinelli, in preparation for the priests’ visit, and it seemed to her that they had a lot in common, Raffalovich’s experience of Worcester and her own experience of Shenzhen. Xiulan still had a tenuous understanding of Westerners; she wasn’t exactly glad that she was dealing with Okada and Aguerra rather than someone like Bella Cooby or Ryan Cortez-Knight, since she would have appreciated a chance to practice her English rather than the Japanese that the priests were speaking with her. Why they couldn’t have sent somebody who knew Chinese escaped her, especially given the factoid that had been drilled into her head at school that for the past couple of generations an outright majority of planetside mankind had at least some command of it. She had expressed this annoyance to Father Aguerra, who had said that he was actually in the process of learning Chinese and becoming good at it fairly rapidly, at which point in the morning she had started carrying on little conversations with him in it and leaving Father Okada, old and lean as he was, a little bit in the lurch.

            “Remember,” she said, in Japanese, as she led them along the corridor, “the Thiel Thousand are from a different generation than anybody else in the world, so even if you’ve dealt a lot with people about to vanish into the clouds, this is a form of life-in-death that might be beyond the outward edge of your understanding. Their concerns are of a different time and practically a different world; they’ll have difficulty understanding you and you’ll probably have difficulty understanding them. Don’t expect receptiveness to common moral or emotional tacks. They tend to ignore the sorts of feelings appropriate to the living at best or treat them as contemptible or exploitable at worst. If they propose some sort of deal or bargain to you, the best thing to do is to offer one of your own instead and sell them on it; if you strike them as firm enough in what you’re demanding then they’ll probably stick to an agreement once they’ve made it. I assume you passed all the psychological testing we normally have to do before exposing people to them?”

            “I did,” said Aguerra. “Father Okada was given an exemption because of his age and his personal involvement.”

            “Did he take the nootropics that he would have been offered last night, then?” asked Xiulan. They had slipped into Chinese at this point but Okada seemed to know what she had asked because he shook his head with a short, grim smile.

            “That was stupid of you,” said Aguerra.

            “Yes, they’ll be sure to notice and it won’t be much the better for you that they’ve noticed, I can tell you that much,” said Xiulan.

            “I’m pretty sure I can—” began Okada.

            “I wasn’t finished talking,” said Xiulan. “Please don’t interrupt me.”

            “I’m sorry.”

            “It’s okay but don’t do it again. In any case, some of the Thiel Thousand are more sensitive about their condition than others; some are perfectly happy with how things went for them and what became of them but others are very much not, and it will become clear to you before very long which one it is for the one we’ll be having you talk to. I would tell you now to forewarn you but I’m not sure myself because I have not really talked to him before.

            “His name is Bruce Montgomery and he was in his late eighties back in those days but has a mental picture of himself as a much younger man now, as most of them do; the ones who were youngest at the time were already about seventy. Keep in mind that most of them were pumped full of nootropics themselves well before they ended up the way they are now. Back then the science was crude and it wasn’t clear what geriatric nootropics would end up doing if combined with other life extension measures. The result, over the hundred and seventy-five-odd years since then, was to encourage certain…well, some of the traits that you’re likely to notice immediately and not likely to like very much.

“Just be on your guard and remember what I told you about making deals with them and you should be all right,” Xiulan finished. She turned, grinned at them, and opened the last door.

The room holding this contingent of the Thiel Thousand was warehouse-sized and lit by reactor-arc LEDs in long zigzagging strips in the ceiling; the lights looked white but there was an undertone to them that cast a faint greenish tinge over the room, which was supposed to make visitors more relaxed; Xiulan hadn’t found that it did that, exactly, but the effect might have been too subtle for her to notice. The tanks in which Bruce Montgomery and his cohort were suspended had in them a clear liquid that turned reddish and stank when exposed to the air, which had only happened twice, by easily remedied accident, in Xiulan’s five years working here. Some of the Thiel Thousand were perfectly still in their tanks; others bobbed gently, so that the curves and whorls on their opalescent surfaces seemed to swirl and flow like the patterns on the Damascus swords that Xiulan had seen in a museum of antiquities once. Each tank had electrodes placed at the ends of rigid wires at strategic points within the liquid, as if at Lagrange points between the Earth and the Moon. The wires congregated at the bottom of each tank and ran through the podia on which the tanks stood and into speaker and microphone setups about a hundred and fifty centimeters above the floor.

Xiulan led them on a zigzagging route through the room to Bruce Montgomery’s tank, where he floated pearlescent, latent, and coded. This tank’s speaker and microphone apparatus was in good working order but Okada, who was tall for his background and especially for his age, had to incline his head very slightly downwards in order to speak into it.

“Hello, Mr. Montgomery,” said Okada, whose English Xiulan guessed was better than Aguerra’s since he had been a DA military chaplain whereas Aguerra was just somebody whom the Archdiocese of Manila had sent to assist Okada for reasons that eluded her. “My name is Esteban Keiichi Okada. I’m a Catholic priest and a former member of the Constantine Cavafy expedition through the Great Einstein-Rosen Bridge of 2160, as you may have heard of.”

“Yes, I have heard of you,” said a deep, clear voice from the speaker on the podium. “Mostly good things, I promise. 2160…that would be about fifty years ago now, wouldn’t it?”

“Forty-nine,” said Okada.

“Forty-nine years. Goodness gracious, how time flies. I still remember where I was when John Lennon was shot on December 8, 1980. Every Baby Boomer does, you know.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard,” said Okada. “In any case, since you have some influence over the communications system between here and off-world, my hope was that you could find some way to lend further…credibility, I guess would be the word, to our attempts to contact someone living out on the far frontier, in one of the simulators carved out of ASPs that you may have heard about.”

“ASPs?”

“It stands for artificially static plutinos, sir.”

“Oh. So it does. Anyway, I hate to be a pain in the buttinski,” said Montgomery, “but what in particular would you like to see done about it?”

“I was wondering if you could see a way to have one of the commercial freighters expedite our passage through the Outer Solar System,” said Okada. “Preferably the Spacing Cooperative, although Huawei or Riggs-Hathaway will do in a pinch.”

            “To what end?” asked Montgomery after a long pause.

            “Because we need to gather a deposition or a testimony about certain events that took place on the Cavafy expedition,” said Okada. “For various reasons related to the nature of the simulators, I’ve been advised that this is best done in person.”

            “Why don’t you have someone like Bella Cooby or Kateri Ventvögel do it? Pam tells me they have the full faith and credit of the Democratic Alliance.”

            “Trinder wanted a personal touch. Don’t ask me why. I think he’s also trying to build bridges to the Holy See. I assume you remember Vatican II; there was some goodwill left in that period that’s being pined for.”

            “Not just by you, I can assure you. But the position I’ve heard on the Catholic Church is that it did great things for humanity—and to humanity, sometimes—way back when, but it’s lost the magic touch and it’s not really about what most people are about any more. Why not send the Prometheans or the Church of the Universal Spirit into the breach?”
            “Well, first of all, Mrs. Raffalovich is Catholic.”

            “Oh.”

            “Second of all, the Church of the Universal Spirit has been half-dead since I was a young man, and the Prometheans are mostly concerned with environmental engineering.”

            “Are they really? Well. Time flies, I guess. Anyway,” said Montgomery, “forgive me, but I’m still trying to figure out just what it is that you expect from me.”

            “Who would be likelier than you to be able to help us?” Aguerra interjected.

            “Did I imply that I wasn’t going to help you?”

            “It’s a hypothetical question, sir.”

            “Well, I would say that you might want someone in a government position to pull some strings. You might want to put pressure on the DA government to make this more of a priority if they want it to get done. I would be more able to help apply such pressure than I would be to get Huawei or Riggs-Hathaway to jump through hoops. The nature of our influence here in the Thiel Thousand is often misunderstood. Just give me one thing in return.”

            “And what’s that?” asked Okada. At the same time, Xiulan whispered into Aguerra’s ear not to on any account agree to Montgomery’s terms without clearing it with her superiors. He annoyedly nodded his understanding.

            “Editorial rights, basically,” said Montgomery. “Official reports on this are sure to be a fascinating intellectual-media property and I think that deserves some protection beyond what younger people can give it. You take for granted the seriousness people treat these things with now; people my age don’t; we can’t. I remember back when people who didn’t know what they were talking about ran amok and any idiot who thought he ‘had a story to tell’ could get himself published through the internet, back when we all thought it was the great equalizer. We wouldn’t want the Cavafy expedition to go the way of those South Korean pop groups my grandson used to listen to.”

            “I understand,” said Okada, “but first of all I want to clear this deal you’re suggesting with, well, whoever’s most interested.” Aguerra whispered into Okada’s ear and Okada nodded. “Right, yes, thank you, Father Aguerra. —Mr. Montgomery, this is my associate, Father Manfred Aguerra.”

            “Yes, I’ve had him looked up,” said Montgomery. “And I can look you up myself, too, now that you’ve given me your name and a little bit of your bio. Be mindful of that.”

            “I will,” said Okada. “Just—let’s talk this over, Miss Wang,” he said, and the three of them coolly withdrew.

Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part One)

The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien, and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.

—Pope Pius XII, apostolic constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana

❦ 

Elmgrove, New Jersey, Oort Cloud

July 30, 2209

Joe Raffalovich did not have what he considered the bad habit of watching television in the morning, so he did not actually know whether or not NBC had come on for the day when, every morning, he shuffled downstairs, sat down at the table with the wife, and started flipping through the day’s paper while she calmly ate flapjacks and asked him the occasional question about the state of things these days. The two sets of news each day had been hard to sort through for a while but now that they were carried in different papers it was easy to figure out what was going on out in the wider world and what were just domestic issues. It was rare that the two intersected; President Grantland was good about keeping it that way, and, at least going by the way the first six months of his time in office had gone, which was admittedly not as much to go by as all that, Joe and Jessie both fully intended to vote for him for another four years three Novembers from now.

            Today’s foreign paper was about the same as it usually was. He got to explain to Milt what the Partial Hydrocarbon Ban Treaty was and why the Democratic Alliance was considering relaxing it (which he opposed, and thought he had every right to oppose as a retired officer in the DA’s military); Cindy asked both mommy and daddy to explain tidal locking to her since there seemed to be features about Einstein-Rosen expeditions to exoplanets on and off year in and year out these days, and it turned out that Jessie still after all these years understood tidal locking a lot better than Joe did. He handed Jessie the crossword—she was better at it than he was, and the foreign paper had better games than the domestic one—and briefly noted an item some sort of humanitarian disaster that had produced a bunch of DPs in a neighboring country before moving on to the domestic one.

            The domestic paper, much to his surprise, had more on the DPs, who had had to flee some country called New Northumberland that Joe guessed was of pretty recent foundation considering that he’d been living here for almost twenty years, New Northumberland was apparently right next door by these days’ standards, and he had never heard of it.

            “Jessie, you ever heard of this place?” he asked after she got back from showing Milt and Cindy to the bus stop. She brushed off her hands on her dress, a little nervous habit of hers that she had not had yet when he had first met her, and reached out to take the paper from him and scan the article.
            “New Northumberland.” Jessie crinkled her nose and flexed her fingers against each other. “I think I remember reading about it six or seven years ago. Some public intellectual who studied early medieval legal systems or something like that at Harvard founded it with a bunch of fans of his books. It’s a shame to see it’s not doing so well.” She flipped the paper over and read the end of the article where it continued for about two thirds of a column below the fold. “Yeah, this looks really bad,” she said. “Do you think it’s possible that we’ll be asked to take in some of these people?”

            “Elmgrove? Sure, maybe, since it’s in the domestic paper,” said Joe. “They don’t come right out and say that in the article but that’s the implication.”

            “Well,” said Jessie, “‘give me your tired, your poor’…that’s what we’re here for. I’d be all for that.”

 ❦ 

Hakodate, Japan, Earth

July 31, 2209

Esteban had just turned a hundred years old a few months ago and was finally beginning to feel it. He had been retired from active ministry for fifteen years and could very well still be hanging in there retired from active ministry fifteen years from now. He was back in Hakodate, living in one of the newer developments in what had once been the harbor, with a middle-aged Dominican and some girls from a Buddhist prep school near the station who came around now and then to look after him. The middle-aged Dominican was friends with the pastor at St. Paul Miki’s, where Esteban had taken to going to Mass now that his arms and legs were a little too weak to say it regularly himself.

            Today he was going on an adventure. Esteban had lost his taste for adventure half his lifetime ago, and he thought that the people with whom he had been when he lost it had probably lost it too. It had confused but at the same time perversely strengthened his faith, since he was now able to believe that God had made so many worlds to live in that the unsatisfactoriness of this one was nothing doing, taking the long view. This view of his had been criticized as potentially not orthodox in the same debriefing process in which church and state had for once agreed on suppressing or falsifying the results of the expedition for half a century. It had been that agreement that had taken Esteban away from active ministry for seven years and away from the sacraments for four and a half before being incardinated in the Diocese of Sapporo again and attempting to live out a faith in which he saw now confusion and betrayal and the loss of a richer and wider history. He made jokes, sometimes, when he was in a joking mood, that he was the kind of traditionalist now whom he’d mocked as a younger man, people now a quarter of a millennium outside the times. Many such people were these days only very loosely Catholic. Esteban aspired to more than looseness.

            “Remember me if you ever feel adventurous again,” Admiral Kurtoglu had said the last time he had seen her in the flesh before she had vanished into the clouds. “If ever you want to see the Fires of Titan again, or the Pyramids for the first time, think about the place where you and I became friends.”

            Esteban had not told Admiral Kurtoglu then that he did not consider them friends, and by the time they last corresponded, a few months after that, he was surprised to find that he did think of her as one at long last.

            When in a year’s time the records of what had happened in that other world were finally unsealed, the Democratic Alliance and the Holy See had—once again—agreed that they wanted Jess and Raffalovich to come back to Earth to depose themselves the old-fashioned way, in front of human record-keepers in one of the courtrooms in Brussels or Rome. Failing that, their testimonies were to be gathered from wherever they were living currently—Esteban thought probably in one of the ancestor simulators that had been set up a couple of decades back out in the Oort Cloud after the first Einstein-Rosen highway out that way had been established, but he wasn’t sure which one. He tried to imagine Jess living happily in a world of flickering gas lamps in Victorian urban fog or roaring fires in a medieval keep, resplendent in a taffeta hoop skirt or a linen wimple. It was almost as ridiculous as it was to remember that it had been forty-nine years now since he had known that brilliant, lively, heartless young lady who had slept her way through half the US Space Marine Corps and gone in guns blazing on the plains of Ganymede.

            Esteban was helped into the car that would take him to the airport. The flight would be suborbital, in one of the little sun-sailors that had been so dear to him when he had been so enamored of the history of flight as a child. He had not been told whether he was being taken to Seoul, Khabarovsk, or Harbin, only the rough length of the flight and the insinuation that there was going to be a transition to a jump-train after landing.

            “Now remember,” Father Aguerra, who’d been sent from Manila to help him here, said to him as they got in the little shimmering flickering ultramarine wisp of a thing that was the sun-sailor, “some of the Thiel Thousand are sensitive about their situation relative to us, just as some of us are sensitive about our situation relative to them. It’s best not to draw attention to the differences between us. We’re all humans here.”

            “I wonder if the Thiel Thousand would see it that way,” said Esteban. “I suppose if they do see it that way at long last then there’s some hope for the rest of us.”

            They climbed higher into the limpid atmosphere, with no haze beneath them and only a few clouds around them. The misshapen gully of the Tsugaru Strait had, from above, the beauty almost of former days, and Esteban felt for the first time in many years that sensation of the overlooking panorama, that astronauts and cosmonauts in the early days had felt, that as the sea passed beneath them he was looking down at a common, fragile, and beloved home.

            They landed eventually and were ushered on the jump-train to, as it turned out, Harbin once the pressure and oxygenation issues had been straightened out. Esteban actually felt younger and invigorated from the travel, rather than weaker or likelier to succumb to something.

            “How do you feel, Father Okada?” asked Father Aguerra.

            “Better,” said Esteban. “Heaven help me, people were right when they told me I’d feel adventuresome again.”

 ❦ 

Elmgrove

August 2, 2209

Jess was at the Safe’n’Smart picking up some dish soap and drain cleaner when she bumped into Etta Cleary, one of the women from her mothers’ group at St. John the Evangelist whom she also knew from the occasional PTA meeting at the middle school. Etta didn’t like to talk about her past and Jess had from time to time suspected her of being an Elmgrove girl born and bred but she was a good friend and what Jess would once upon a time have called a dab hand with any old recipe you could wish to see tried out. Her aspics kept their shape very well and didn’t have the strange alkaline aftertaste that had made Jess dislike so much of the cooking here for so long, especially given that Jess was still really not much of a homemaker herself. The Clearys’ summer potlucks were always high-demand events; Jess and Joe were proud to say that they had been invited thirteen years running now, ever since Jess had been first expecting Cindy.

            “Do you hear about this New Northumberland crisis?” Etta said. “My heart breaks for the poor devils. They’d been getting along pretty well for themselves as far as the outside world could see. I guess it just goes to show you can’t always know what’s going to be a crisis before the crisis happens.”

            Jess balanced in one hand the brand of dish soap that she always got and in the other a brand that was on sale. “I heard New Northumberland didn’t have a government,” she said, “only an AI that enforced contracts. Eventually some people who were stuck in bad contracts decided that enough was enough, so they tried to reprogram the AI, but it got wind of what they were up to and vented a tenth of the population into space. That’s when most of the rest abandoned ship.”

            “Just goes to show what happens when people don’t think there’s anything doing outside the rat race, I guess,” Etta said. “You and I are lucky that Robert and Joe aren’t that kind of guy.”

            “Easy not to be when your boss likes you,” said Jess. “Joe’s lucky the electrical workers’ local is so good around here too.”

            They chatted for a few more minutes and then Jess processed to the checkout, which, she had the suspicion, was something that should have felt statelier than it did, something more like Father Marley’s procession to the foot of the altar. She felt that there was an economic equilibrium at the checkout much as there was a sacrificial equilibrium on the altar. People talked about the “economy of salvation,” but for Jess, economy and sacrifice had always been held a ways apart from each other. It might have had something to do with that Ptolemaic world, which she had still never shaken the suspicion had died in order to be apprehensible to them.

            In line for the checkout she saw a couple youngish guys, probably bachelors, maybe of the confirmed subspecies, piling up corned beef on the conveyor belt and chatting about what she and Etta had been chatting about.

            “…yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna get any help from the superpowers on this. The Coordinating Minister of the DA and the Prime Ministers of Australia and Mars have all said that they think this is a problem for New Northumberland’s neighbors to take care of. And that’s us. So we’re pretty much on our own.”

            “What about New Chelsea?”

            “GOM-5’s gotten more isolationist lately, you know. I think it might be taking a leaf out of its namesake’s book, or maybe think that’s what it’s doing. I dunno enough about British history to say. Besides, they’re a lot more ‘plugged in’ in New Chelsea than we are here. I think some of them actually do believe it’s 1887.”

            “I guess you’re right,” said the second young man. “Still, Elmgrove has a tradition for this, right? It’s not like anybody’s really native here anyway.”

            There was a lull in the conversation, then the first man said “I hear there’s a bunch of religious leaders on the warpath on Earth. Not often you see the Pope and the Cult of Prometheus united on anything. Even Reggie Chan’s people on Io are weighing in that the DA should do more to help.”

            “Well, Reggie Chan would say that, wouldn’t he? Anyway, it’s a shame nobody’s probably gonna listen. I can’t remember the last time anybody paid attention to the Pope out here. I think it was way back when that bridge out to beyond the beyond opened. Before our time, you know.”

            “Don’t we have some people in Elmgrove who were mixed up in that thing?”

            “I think so. I mean it’s very classified, obviously, by international law, so nobody’s really sure who they are, but I’ve heard one of those real buttoned-up couples on Oakleaf Terrace actually went on that expedition in their previous life.”

            “Probably the Agronskis. I’m pretty sure he’s an ex-serviceman and I think she might be too.”

            Jess steeled herself, did some counting exercises in her head to stay closer to the moment she found herself in, and walked surreptitiously to another register.

 ❦ 

Paektu, Korea, Earth

July 31, 2209

Esteban and Father Aguerra looked out a little diffidently, probably for different reasons, as the mountains zipped past. Esteban had opened up one of his content crystals and was sight-reading some Cole Porter and Taylor Swift songbooks that he had bought a few months ago, thinking to himself as he did that he really needed to be practicing piano much more regularly, not only if he wanted to get good at it but if he wanted to keep his fingers limber at his age. Father Aguerra had no such compunctions, partly because he was less than half Esteban’s age and partly because he had mentioned on the sun-sailor that he was already pretty good at two or three different string instruments and also messed around on synthesizers sometimes.

            The train ride from Pusan to Harbin in total would take about an hour and a half, counting the five minutes or so it would take the train to be scanned upon crossing the border into China. There were still several minutes to go because the train, at least according to Esteban’s reading of the map and timetable, did not cross the border at Paektu but skirted the Korean side for a little while before crossing the border elsewhere. There was time to pull up the dining menu and order a box lunch and a caffè giapponese but probably not enough time to make the three-car trek to the dining car and have this little repast the old-fashioned way. After thinking about it for a few moments, Esteban decided to wait until they were scanned and then in fact go to the dining car and have it the old-fashioned way.

            “Does it concern you, Father Okada, that there’s a portrait of Coordinating Minister Trinder in our passports now?” asked Father Aguerra as they pulled up their passports to be subjected to the scanner.

            “It does, actually, yes,” said Esteban. “I voted for the fellow over that anti-historical madman Cipriani, of course, but that doesn’t mean I support most of what he’s done so far.”

            “I couldn’t agree more. Voting one’s own conscience is all very well, but, well, my own conscience isn’t exactly proud of having cast in my lot with somebody who thinks we need an entire dwarf planet devoted to nothing but producing fusion bombs.”

            “That’s not Trinder’s fault; that’s been a crowd-pleasing policy for longer than you’ve been alive,” said Esteban. “Remember that I lived on Titan for a while. Plenty of people out that way have family who work on Eris; I remember people would migrate out that way and stay and build up a nest egg for a few years even before the ERHs were dug.”

            “And would you take the ERH?” asked Father Aguerra. “If His Holiness wanted you to talk to the Raffaloviches in person, I mean.”
            “If His Holiness wanted me to talk to the Raffaloviches in person, I’m sure Trinder would go over his head and send someone like Malala Stanislawska or Bella Cooby to do it instead,” said Esteban, maybe a little derisively, “and, I’m being perfectly honest when I say this, I think they’d be a lot more qualified than I would be to deal with that, because they have less of a history with the Raffaloviches and in particular with Jessica. The main point about the Coordinating Minister,” he went on after a pause, “is that sometimes it feels to me like you’re not allowed to be publicly critical of him or people will accuse you of lacking national feeling. I remember when ‘national feeling’ was called patriotism and we only owed it to our particular countries, not to the Democratic Alliance. Back then, of course, there was no Coordinating Minister, only summits of heads of government and the combined military brass.”

            They came to the border and the train stopped. After a couple of minutes the scanner passed over them, a very bright, but intermittent, flicker of greenish light that took about fifteen seconds to pass from one end of their car to the other. They waited in silence until the train’s intercom emitted a drawn-out, warbling ding, after which the train started moving again. As they passed into China Esteban saw out the window three or four people whose passports had not been up to snuff straggling out onto the platform and being taken into custody by autonomous police units.

            “As I was saying,” Esteban said, “I do think there’s something pernicious that’s developed in the DA over the past fifty years. I grew up back when the war was hot and there was obviously a lot of support for ‘the cause’ then but it’s a lot harder to be motivated by it now, and yet we’re expected to be. –Father Aguerra, are you listening to me?”

            “Sorry,” said Father Aguerra, who had his nose buried in something else he had pulled up. “It’s a news alert. Apparently there’s a refugee crisis going on out in the Oort Cloud; the population of one of their O’Neill cylinders bailed after a massacre by their government.”
            “The only Oort Cloud O’Neill cylinder I’m aware of is the one Paul X condemned about fifteen years ago partly because of what it had instead of a government,” Esteban said. “Is it that one?”

            “Um, it’s called New Northumberland, and yes, it looks like it had an AI whose only purpose was to enforce contracts rather than a judicial system,” said Father Aguerra with his brow furrowed meaningfully, “possibly rather than a legislature too.”

            “Unbelievable,” said Esteban. “And this AI massacred them? Well, I guess that’s what you get when people who worship the almighty dollar pretend to be an anarchists. Anyway, it’s going to be interesting to meet the Thiel Thousand. Maybe we should fill them in on this, since it’s relevant to the Oort Cloud, which is where the Raffaloviches live.”

            “Did we ever establish which ancestor simulator it is that they live in?” Father Aguerra asked as more mountains, more clouds, more afforested valleys, and another small city zipped by.

            “I was just wondering that earlier,” said Esteban. “I’m actually not sure that she is living in one of the ancestor simulators; I just seem to remember it about her that she had mentioned at one time that she might go out that way. It’s definitely beyond the Kuiper Belt.”

            “Did she really want to be all the way out near where…that happened?” asked Father Aguerra. “No, silly question. What am I asking? It wasn’t out near where that happened; that happened in an entirely different region of space, didn’t it?”

            “Outside the observable universe, no less,” said Esteban. “At least fourteen billion light-years away.”

            “I’m surprised the universe expands fast enough that that’s even possible,” said Father Aguerra.

            “Yes, so was I. Apparently the expansion of the universe is the whole concept of scale itself changing,” said Esteban, although he did not really have the clearest idea of what had been meant by this when it had been explained to him, “not of things zooming apart or of the universe expanding ‘into’ anything.”

            “Interesting,” said Father Aguerra. “Could it be said then that it was an entirely different universe, at least for all practical purposes, that you found yourselves in?”

            “I don’t understand why you’re asking the question unless His Holiness’s people or the Coordinating Minister’s people told you much more than anybody at our level is supposed to know. Can I ask you, does it look like they’re going to open up on it a year ahead of schedule?”

            “I think if they were going to do that then the Raffaloviches would have been deposed sooner,” said Father Aguerra. “No, I just guessed that it was that or something of similar consequence—an alien civilization, maybe. Your reaction’s telling me more than anything else has.”

            “Oh, yes, that is an old trick, isn’t it? Shame I fall for these things.”

            “It’s not a question of falling,” said Father Aguerra. “I can tell you’ve wanted to talk to someone about what happened for a long time now.”

            “It’s the Thiel Thousand I’ve been asked to talk to about it. It’s my job here that I want to do.”

            Father Aguerra laughed a light laugh. “No it’s not.”

            Esteban stood up with a sigh. “This is silly. I’m going to go to the dining car. Do you want anything?”

            “Maybe a cup of hot chocolate.”       

            “Why would you want hot chocolate on such a hot day?”

            “I don’t know. Call it a craving.”

            “If you say so.” Esteban walked down the car and stepped through the doors into the next. Once in there, in an unfamiliar crowd, in strange and maybe dubious company, he felt for the first time in a long while like he was alone.