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.

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

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