Short Story: “Quintessence”

Esteban Okada was born in Hakodate to a Japanese father and a Filipina mother, in a time of improving fortunes for Japan after the demographic and humanitarian collapse of the previous century. Hundreds of years ago Hakodate had been a flourishing seaport; now, it was close to a Democratic Alliance military elevator under the joint custodianship of Japan and Indonesia. It was around the base of this elevator that he and his friends had played in childhood, flying kites and antique model planes. He had been raised in his mother’s Catholic faith, still uncommon in Japan but not looked upon with as much suspicion as in some other Alliance countries. He discovered young that he was called to be a priest but was not ordained until he was past thirty, due to poor typing skills and reluctance to break an engagement to a famous young artist into which he had rashly entered.

When he was ordained, everybody figured that he would be a military chaplain; growing up in a space elevator community he had gotten a good head for the ins and outs of military life, and the Japanese chaplain corps was severely undermanned. This was in the time of the Alliance’s long war against the Australian-Martian coalition, which in a few years would end very abruptly and thus without showing many signs of ending any time soon before it did. Esteban had qualms about chaplaincy mostly due to a long-standing distrust of the wider society that the military represented and defended. He told this to one of his old seminary professors, an old nun named Tanizaki, and received from her the dressing-down that he had not known he needed.

“Okada,” said Tanizaki, “people like you and me need to keep in mind that the enormous structural problems of the last couple of centuries have for the most part been adapted to or solved. You and I may not like these adaptations and solutions. You were talkative enough in your Catholic social teaching class that I know good and well how you feel about them, and I feel the same way.”

“But,” said Esteban, taking a wild guess at where Tanizaki was going with this, “it’s still our duty to protect and minister to the society in which we find ourselves. I know that’s right; I know that’s the answer. I know what I should do.”

“I’m not telling you what you should do,” said Tanizaki in a sweet and likely tone. “If you have an objection to military culture itself then that’s more than reasonable. But if you’re concerned that the society around us isn’t up to snuff, then all I can say is that you’re not wrong, but even if God had not moved us to adapt but had sustained us in an existence that was just barely worth living, that would have been enough.”

 ❦

Jess Martinelli was from Earth, too, and was not as inclined to make negative judgments about the situation there as Esteban was. She was well aware that her ancestors had taken more delight in (for example) snowfall than she could, but she was more or less content experiencing it mostly in extreme weather events in which she took no real satisfaction or pleasure. She had joined the US Space Marine Corps right out of eleventh grade for the old classic reason, that young people like her were clean out of opportunities in her native Massachusetts, but the perceived abilities to screw and fight as she pleased were definite perquisites. That had been two and a half years ago. Now she was nineteen going on twenty and had been given positions of impressive responsibility faster than many people, Jess herself foremost among them, thought her levels of sagacity and insight merited. This was less because she was a great shot with a positron rifle, although she was, and more because occasionally-weeks-long voyages in deep space gave her ample time, in addition to her other leisure pursuits, to read and become well-spoken and knowledgeable.

Jess had first met Esteban about eighteen months into her USSMC career, when both of them had been stationed at the Democratic Alliance Combined General Staff headquarters on Titan. Esteban had been a Japanese- and Spanish-language chaplain, Jess an orderly for one Colonel Ridge-Roundel. Afterwards she had spent several months on the Galilean moons of Jupiter pumping hot lead into whom the news media characterized as radical Buddhist nationalists and she just thought of as “the terrorists.” He was still on Titan when she got back in contact with him and asked him to come with her on this voyage.

He asked her why she had volunteered for this voyage herself and she said that she wanted to do something romantic and exciting with her military career, even if it got her killed. He asked her why she wanted him to come along and she said that she wanted somebody to confess to so that, even if she did get killed, she’d have a fighting chance of making it out, so to speak, Alive.

“Okay,” he said in English in their third phone conversation, the one in which he actually agreed to do this. “That’s—can I ask if you actually feel bad about any of this, Jess? Your confessions won’t be valid unless you’re actually contrite.”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘feel bad,’” said Jess, and continued before he could groan. “I think I should feel bad, and I know I can’t go on like this forever, but I’m young and I’m not sure how I feel about living differently right now.”

“So you don’t dislike who you are, but want me around to stop you spiraling out of control?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

After a long pause, he said “All right. I think God can work with that.”

 ❦

“All right. We don’t have any clear idea of conditions at the other end of the bridge, so until further notice duties stay on the Ganymede schedule,” said Rear Admiral Kurtoğlu. “Day duties from 1330 to 0430, night duties from 0430 to 1330, meals at 1400, 1900, and 0200. You’ll be issued with atomic watches in case the main clocks stop working. Let me reiterate that this is the first time a naturally formed Einstein-Rosen bridge has opened in the Solar System and humanity does not have experience with this. Death, either immediately upon going through the bridge or at any time thereafter, is a live issue. This is a pun on the word ‘live.’ Rules for fraternization are according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice of the United States of America. Rules for…”

“Do you think she’s upset that we didn’t laugh at her pun?” Jess whispered to Lieutenant Raffalovich.

“I think she’s upset that getting us all killed isn’t a guarantee,” Raffalovich said.

 ❦

The bridge was just a hair inside the heliopause, which meant about a week of travel in a long-phase ship, most of which was taken up with exactly this sort of procedural briefing and babble. Esteban spent most of this time rereading some of his favorite spiritual classics, as well as a book of medieval Jewish mystical poetry that Raffalovich, the only actively religious Space Marine on this mission whom he knew personally other than Jess, had lent him. The book was ancient; the publication date was in the 1990s and it had a faded, tattered library checkout card on the inside of the back cover showing dates leading into the early 2000s. Esteban had seen books far older than this in church and university libraries and sometimes in the private collections of friends, but he had never felt confident enough in his ability to take care of them to buy any himself.

“Does that come on ‘film?” Jess asked him a few days in when she came by his quarters for confession. (She said that she preferred confessing anonymously or with an illusion of anonymity, but because they both knew who the other was and knew that nobody else on the voyage was likely to be confessing to Esteban, they had decided to dispense for now with screens and grilles.) “I’d like to read it but I don’t read paper books much these days.”

“I don’t know; sorry,” said Esteban. “It’s very, very used. Look at the publication date.” He held the book up and showed the title page to her; her eyebrows went up. “Raff lent it to me.” Jess made a polite sound of assent and Esteban, suddenly frustrated, got up out of his chair and looked her straight in the eye. “Jess, does it bother you that everybody on this voyage other than you and Raff thinks of me as dead weight?”

“I don’t pay much attention to what ‘everybody other than me and Raff’ thinks. Does it bother you?”

“Not in particular.” This might have been a lie but, if nothing else, he did not know that it was a lie at the time that he said it. It was later that night, at around 0945 when he got up for a midnight bathroom break and stood there in the dimmed hallway listening to the maternal thrum of the engines, that he started to wonder if it maybe bothered him more than he let on, and more than somebody like Tanizaki would be comfortable with it bothering him.

“Glad to hear it,” said Jess, in the moment as it were. She sat down. “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last confession, and these are my sins.”

Esteban listened patiently, gave what advice he could, assigned a reasonable penance, and, once Jess had left his quarters and was out of earshot, groaned loudly and threw himself down on his bed with his left hand fanned over his eyes like a fainting grand dame in an old-time American stage play.

 ❦

Jess, along with everybody else other than Kurtoğlu and the madrigal singers who had to keep singing to give her some sense of the subjective passage of time, was in suspended animation when the Constantine Cavafy passed over the bridge. There had been experiments done with artificially instantiated Einstein-Rosen bridges in the past to establish a procedure for how to go about this, but Kurtoğlu had not been exaggerating when she had described the scale of this one, and its natural occurrence, as without precedent. All attempts to figure out where exactly the other end of it was had proven abortive. Certain of the more arcane and specialized radio telescopes had mapped small portions of the sky as seen from the other end, but the stars were too strange to make much sense of.

One of the singers, Lassalle, was the first to see the structure that awaited them at the other end and that had stymied the astronomers of Miranda. It was about sixty light-hours from them as they surfaced, and a little over a light-day across; it sparkled and shone, a battered sphere of crystal bristling with bright lights that had probably once been brighter still. Lassalle kept it in her heart until Kurtoğlu sent up the signal to stop the madrigals; they were several thousand kilometers clear of the bridge, and seemingly in relative safety.

When Lassalle told Kurtoğlu what she saw, and Kurtoğlu awoke some of the pilots to confirm it astrophysically, the admiral made an immediate decision to try to determine what part of space they were in before going any further. The pilots did untold calculations well into the hours by which they were expecting to have been able to wake up the rest of the voyagers. Eventually, rather than reaching a conclusion, they admitted failure.

“We seem to be in an entirely new region of space,” said one of the pilots. “We might be beyond Earth’s light cone, outside the observable universe.”

“Oh, dear,” said Kurtoğlu. She rubbed her forehead. “Is it worth trying to get messages back through the bridge to Ganymede to explain the situation?”

“It’s certainly worth trying. They might be garbled but hopefully somebody would be able to understand what we mean.”

“Great. Work on that. I’ll wake up the crew. Once you’ve got a message to Ganymede, plot an orbital course to start studying the object we’re looking at and see if it’s amenable to a landing party.”

 ❦

Jess and Esteban spent the morning of their first full day after waking up swapping book recommendations and jogging up and down the halls of the ship trying to get their circulation going again. It almost made him feel young again, and it made her feel all of her brief years. In the afternoon she drank space grog and hid in her room to avoid a Lithuanian shock-trooper whom she had slept with on a previous mission (Jogailė, maybe, or Jūratė?), then got started on Moby-Dick, which Esteban had told her she might find appropriate to their present situation. She gave up when she realized that he had probably been pulling her leg, but later, after dinner, she spent her last hour before bed trying to decide whether or not to pick it up again, and ended up getting through one more chapter before she crashed.

The day after that, Esteban tried to rustle up some people who were interested in coming to Mass and actually got a decent crowd, although not as many as at the Sunday Mass that he had said two days before going into the bridge. Raffalovich came out of curiosity and Kurtoğlu poked her head in briefly at one point in order to be seen. Esteban kept hoping Jess would show up but Jess was too immersed in the book by this point. Nobody came up for communion; the only reason Esteban could take it himself was that he had gotten a general absolution from his superiors in Tokyo before consenting to volunteer for this mission. He spent the rest of the day getting to know the only other chaplain on the voyage, a jumpy imam about halfway between Jess’s age and his own.

“I wish they wouldn’t be so secretive about what they’re expecting this thing to be like when we get there,” said Esteban to Jess one day about two and a half weeks into the voyage, with another week to ten days to go until they entered orbit around the shining sphere. “I really don’t think the tension on this voyage needs to be any higher than it actually is.”

“Really?” said Jess. “You think they’re being too secretive? If anything I wish they would tell us less. They can’t just dribble information down on us like they are. Either tell us conclusively that it’s some, some vast military space installation long since abandoned by long-gone forebears, or don’t bring it up. Don’t just say over and over again that you’re ‘studying the possibility.’ No matter how excited the materials scientists are about this thing.”

“Did you hear one of them yesterday,” said Esteban, “that awful pompous one with the 2040s Berlin hairdo? He was saying that ‘the history of the natural sciences has come to a crossroads’…because of this substance that he admits to having no idea about and currently no way of studying.”

“Yeah, I love it when these people act like they still need to shill for funding. I mean, I do feel bad for them—I went to a poor school in a poor state; I left for space as soon as I could; I know how it is—but you’d think they could be a little more honest about their intentions now that they’re working for the Combined Fleet and on an essentially unlimited budget.”

“Raff was saying to me that one of them told him that they’re concerned about being left in the dust by whatever studying this thing comes up with, and because of that they are trying to get a jump on it, so to speak, and position themselves as early experts on it. He used the term ‘paradigm shift’ even though nobody involved in this conversation thinks that ‘paradigm shifts’ are actually how science works anymore.”

“Really? Even Raff doesn’t think that?”

“Even Raff doesn’t think that.” Esteban raised an eyebrow and a cup of tea. (They had gone on a more casual schedule of duties a few days before, and he and Jess were spending their lunchtime in a tearoom instead of the mess.) “Is there any particular reason why that’s surprising? I don’t know him as well as you do.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I guess it’s just that from what I know religious people prefer to think of it that way, and I know Raff tries to be as observant as he can even if that ends up being ‘not very.’” Esteban wanted to ask why that was what Jess knew, but he did not. Jess poured some tea of her own. “By the way, this is the longest I’ve gone without needing to confess in a while. I don’t know if that means that I’m getting more virtuous or that my chances to misbehave are getting less frequent. I would honestly rather think it’s the latter.”

“Why would you rather think that?”

“Because I haven’t noticed myself trying to change. And I’m not a good enough Catholic to want God to change me without my noticing.”

“Do you wish you were?”

“Were what?”

“Were that good a Catholic.”

“I don’t know. I definitely wish I were that good a Marine.” Jess yawned, stretched her arms, and started walking around the tearoom. A gaggle of French and Italian soldiers looked up at her apprehensively as she passed them. Suddenly Esteban could almost hear the hum of the lights again. “So what do you think this thing is?” Jess asked Esteban abruptly when she sat back down. “Any predictions?”

“I think I’m going to bet carefully and go with the ‘military installation’ concept,” said Esteban. “Even if they haven’t said straight-out that that’s what they think it is, they seem to think it’s the likeliest, and some of them do seem pretty set upon the idea.”

“My grandma might say they seem ‘wedded to’ it,” said Jess.

“Yes, I think that works very well,” said Esteban.

 ❦

Esteban heard that if there was going to be a landing party then it was probably going to include Jess. He prayed many times that if Jess should be sent down she not insist on taking him along, but he prayed this always with the caveat that if he be called for this then he would accept it. This was a rote, correct thing to pray, and he was pleased, more or less, that the feeling, that the conviction that this was something good to pray for, came so easily to him. He was aware of Catholic priests in some of the early space adventure stories from way back when having harrowing experiences planetside, and some hackish part of him did worry about encountering some of those difficulties that one looked back upon in the literature. He also thought about the process of conversion. Assuming this was indeed a long-abandoned station, possibly millennia or even longer past all use and usefulness, the Democratic Alliance would probably plant a flag and slap some plaque on it much as the United States first had with the Moon. Thérèse of Lisieux almost three centuries ago had written of her (dubiously worded, perhaps even dubiously conceived) desire to “plant the glorious Cross on infidel soil,” but was what the mortal nations did any better? Or was it perhaps a fond fancy that it was acceptable for the Church to be like the nations in this way? It was not in any case as if Esteban would get any chance to leave his mark. It was not what he was here for. It was not what he wanted to be here for.

He prayed for a while to Thérèse for her intercession that he might accept his lack of power to make these sorts of claims. He prayed that he might continue to not want what he now did not want.

Moreover Jess had been giving him furtively guilty looks when they met up for tea, to the effect that she could probably come to confession again. She did not receive communion at their first Sunday Mass in orbit. When he had serious conversations with her she mostly just talked about how Moby-Dick was coming along. She was almost halfway through; normally she didn’t read quite this fast, but she had had death on the mind, and if this was to be the last novel she ever read then she wanted to read the whole thing.

The reason she had not been to confession yet was that she felt that going to confession, or even asking for general absolution, would be a sort of surrender to the possibility, what she felt deep in her bones was the probability, of death. If she did not go to confession or ask for absolution then she could believe that she had a better chance here than she really did. She was sure that if she told Esteban this he would advise her (as a friend) to come to confession anyway, because there was no telling when anyone might be taken up. She knew that this was right but she did not want to hear it.

The friendship that they had been developing struck both of them as honestly very odd. They had much in common, once one bracketed out age, sex, nationality, and characteristic failings. They were not the only people on the voyage who came to Mass but they were the only people who would have particularly missed Mass had it been absent. They liked books and tea. Esteban had become more easygoing about the pitfalls of the world as it was since he had become a chaplain and Jess had become more exercised about them since she had become a Space Marine. It made sense as a friendship but it still felt, to Jess, like there was some line that they were crossing; maybe Jess just thought this because she was not used to the idea of confessing so frankly or to someone who was coming to know her so well.

Word came that Kurtoğlu wanted to assemble a landing party comprising herself, Jess, and Raffalovich. “There’s something about this place, if my hunch is correct, that’s more along Martinelli and Raffalovich’s line of interest,” she said when Lassalle, by now a confidante, asked her why those two and not any of the shock-troopers or materials scientists. “Make of that what you will. We’ll go down with flags and some motorcycles. They’ll have the basic USSMC communications training already, I expect; they’ll be able to hail you in case of mishap.”

“Do you think Martinelli will want to bring that priest of hers?” Lassalle asked.

“I think she’ll insist on it,” said Kurtoğlu. “I’m fine with that; it might actually help repair relations with the Holy See.”

“Do you think that’s really an adequate reason? It seems nakedly political to put someone in that much danger because…”

“Oh, go talk to your imam about it. I’ve made up my mind.”

 ❦

Kurtoğlu gave the whole mission a briefing about what the spectroscopists and the materials scientists had determined about the object that they were orbiting.

“It’s definitely of some substance not found in the Solar System or by any of the Centauri probes. It’s hard and durable but completely transparent; what Captain Lassalle saw when we first came through the bridge were luminescent objects lodged in the outermost layer. It’s possible that there was an opaque coating of some kind that has since worn away. The outermost layer is stationary; the lower layers rotate on a shared axis, but at different speeds. The layers are impenetrable except for tiny pores through which we may be able to send a small craft carrying four people. If it proves workable, the landing party will comprise myself, Lieutenant Raffalovich of the USSMC, Lieutenant Martinelli of the USSMC, and Lieutenant Commander Okada of the JSSDF. Radio communications with Ganymede have been reestablished. I should mention that there are objects moving in the direction of the bridge that have yet to be identified. We will keep you posted on what these objects are as we find out more.”

“Well, that sure doesn’t inspire confidence,” whispered Jess to Raffalovich. “You looking forward to the landing party, Raff?”

“More than I was before, and I don’t know how to feel about that,” Raffalovich said.

 ❦

Esteban, Jess, and Raffalovich got a full inventory of everything that was coming into the object with them before they embarked. If possible they would use the pores to get all the way down to the innermost layer. The course would be autopiloted and all four of them, even Kurtoğlu, would be in suspended animation until they could not go any further. They had high pressure gear, breathing apparatuses, flags of the Democratic Alliance and of all individual countries participating in the mission (to no surprise of Esteban’s), and, most exciting to Jess, motorcycles to explore whatever surface they ended up on.

“I haven’t driven anything myself in months,” said Jess. “It’s been all piloted or self-driving since Titan.”

“I’ve driven around Titan, but not on one of these things,” said Esteban, who was a little more apprehensive but did have some dim positive recollections of teenage years spent tearing around Hokkaidō on his dad’s antique Kawasaki. “I look forward to it.”

They dressed in standard fatigues with steel helmets, generator belts, and, in the two Marines’ case, positron rifles, then filed into the landing craft. Esteban heard Jess’s confession, the same usual scenario, including the mounted frustration on both parts. Then they fell back into their slumber.

 ❦

They awoke lying on a green lawn with their breathing apparatuses on but not their high pressure gear. Jess awoke first, then Raffalovich, then Esteban and Kurtoğlu—all within what felt like a few minutes, but was according to the watch logs actually about forty. The craft, with its contents robotically disgorged and assembled on the lawn around them, stood about a hundred meters distant. A luminous object seemed to be lodged just under the horizon of whatever layer this was; it must not be moving, because the light did not change; they were on a twilit plain, stark and enduring. Stone circles surrounded them and crumbled battlements peeked out into their line of sight from off in the descending distance. In another direction there were what looked like they might be hills. Atmospheric composition earthlike, flashed a message on Jess’s visor. Gravity and pressure earthlike. Removing breathing apparatus.

She heard a clunk and unfiltered air rushed into her lungs. It was heady and faintly noxious—a slightly higher oxygen concentration than on Earth, maybe, plus the smell of something dead quite nearby—and felt like home.

“The descent took about nineteen hours and we’ve been lying here for about seven,” said Kurtoğlu when they finally stood upright, checking her watch. She walked over to the bundle of flags and, with much improvised ceremony, planted that of the Democratic Alliance and then that of Turkey. Jess and Raffalovich together planted Old Glory, Esteban planted the Hinomaru, and then the four of them took care of the rough score of other participating countries between them, in a line leading just about to the edge of the stone circle. The flags fluttered faintly in a slight whisper of breeze.

“Premodern earthlike civilization,” said Esteban, officially but, in his own mind and to Jess’s ears, with an unmistakable wonder. “A whole civilization at the core of an artificial structure, now presumably long-gone.”

“Probably because the main light source stopped moving,” said Raffalovich, pointing towards what for convenience Jess thought of as the “western” horizon.

Esteban had a flash of recognition and locked eyes with Jess. Neither of them wanted to say it.

❦

For another hour or two they explored the plains immediately around the stone circle, their motorcycles whizzing silently over the silent turf. The dead thing was a small animal, like a rabbit but adapted to the twilight. Something had killed it and left it uneaten and unwanted. Raffalovich elected to bury it, using a part of his standard toolkit that Jess could not quite make out in this light as a spade. After a few minutes spent sitting in the now-empty craft grazing on their rations, a message came in from one of the pilots.

“Admiral, we’re getting increasingly concerned about those objects that Ganymede said were incoming. We’re using the near-light-speed comm and we’re going to ask Ganymede to ask Brussels to investigate possible ceasefire violations.”

“Maneuvering out of projected flight path of incoming objects,” said another, calmer voice. “We’ll also make sure to tell Ganymede that you’re down there, as a precautionary measure. We might lose contact with you. Are you prepared for some period of independent action?”

“We are,” said Kurtoğlu. “We’re amply stocked with rations and conditions down here are earthlike enough that we may be able to find alternate food sources.”

“Conditions down there are earthlike? Did I hear you correctly, Admiral?” Jess and Esteban mimed raising their eyebrows to each other, as they imagined the pilot was doing.

“You did. Further descriptions to come. Good luck up there.”

The line went dead. It was not clear if Kurtoğlu had ended the call or if the call had dropped because of the Constantine Cavafy’s maneuvering far above.

“Well fuck me,” said Jess. “Raff, you know more about comms than I do; do you think it should still be possible to get reports on conditions down here up to them?”

“It should be possible once the instruments in our craft readjust,” said Raffalovich. “Not to usurp Admiral Kurtoğlu, but I’d like to suggest that two of us stay here with the craft and two of us explore further.”

“I’d approve that, but only if we’re in regular radio communication,” said Kurtoğlu. “Why don’t I and Lieutenant Raffalovich wait for the instruments in the craft to readjust, and Lieutenant Martinelli and Lieutenant Commander Okada go reconnoiter?”

 ❦

Jess and Esteban drove to the remains of a small town. There were rotting houses of clapboard and broken-down houses of stone, and a little square in the middle with a statue-laden fountain. The statues were chipped and worn but might well have once been human figures; something standing in the middle, still even in its half-ruin puissant and grandiloquent enough to be called kingly, had something like a creeper or an ivy growing tenaciously around it from a dirt-packed crevice about halfway up. The fountain was dry except for some dark damp at the very bottom of the basin, likelier to have been from rain than from anything else.

“We’ve gotten to a settlement,” Jess radioed to Raffalovich and Kurtoğlu. “We’re going to rest here for a few hours and then head back. There are statues here; the inhabitants seem to have been bipedal, possibly humanoid.”

“Fascinating,” said Raffalovich, who genuinely did sound fascinated. “Well, keep us abreast.” Raffalovich hung up.

“Do we want to talk to them again?” asked Jess.

“Yes, but not right now,” said Esteban. They sat down in the ruins of a little house. Next to them were earthenware jars. “Right now I want to know what you make of this place.”

“I think I know exactly what this place is,” said Jess. “I think we both do. I think people of centuries past would know.”

“I think so too. I wonder why Kurtoğlu didn’t tell us outright before we came down here. Heaven knows she shared with all and sundry every other suspicion that she had about this place on the way in. I wonder if she’ll share it with Raff while we’re gone. I hope so.”

Jess let herself slump to the floor and ran her hands over one of the earthenware jars. “I smell honey,” she said. “And honey doesn’t go bad.”

“Good to know,” said Esteban. “So, are you…?”

“Trying to wrap my head around it. You?” He nodded. “I wonder what this’ll mean on Earth if we make it back there.”

“Only the best, if it means anything at all, which I’m not sure it will,” Esteban said. “But, yes…if it means anything, it ought to mean the best…”

“You’re the one saying that? Aren’t you a third of a century older than me?”

“Do you think it’s a sentiment more appropriate to the young? I’m not sure I agree.”

  “Well,” said Jess, “this is a very, very old world. And I feel at peace here. I wonder what happened to the people who lived here.”

“A ‘paradigm shift,’ we can assume,” said Esteban. The sarcasm was unbecoming of him, and Jess told him so. “I feel bad for them. I am sure it was a wretched civilization, in common with every other.”

“Aren’t priests generally supposed to be on the side of civilization?” asked Jess.

“My mother taught me that,” said Esteban, “but she also taught me that a priest—a man, even, any man or woman or child—ought to call things what they are. And I feel very comfortable here too. But there’s something to the fact that it’s been abandoned for apparently so long that makes it comfortable. I wonder if Raffalovich feels the same way.”

“Did you bring that book of poems of his down here with us? I brought a hard copy of Moby-Dick but it’s in the craft. Although I’m not sure that’s the whale story that suits us the best anymore.”

“I didn’t bring the poems,” said Esteban. “I did, however, bring this.” He reached in the pocket of his fatigues. “One of the materials scientists scooped it up floating loose near the ship. It must have chipped off whenever those ‘pores’ of the Admiral’s were drilled. Let me show it to you. Then you can see how short life really is.” The way he said this was faint and odd but Jess trusted him enough by this point. She wished, in a sudden, idle, irrelevant flash, that with their honey they could have some tea, instead of just shoving it into their mouths like Winnie-the-Pooh as they inevitably would do.

Esteban held before her a chunk of glimmering crystal, transparent but just barely catching the light. As Aristotle and Ptolemy long millennia ago had predicted, it was moving in little circles over the surface of his outstretched palm.