Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Two)

4.

The First Visit 

At a few different points in the second half of October Rosie asked her family when she could expect the winter weather to start, and she got a different answer each time she asked it. First Uncle Franklin told her that it usually started snowing around Thanksgiving, then Grandpa told her that she could expect it after Halloween. Finally Grandma and Aunt Margaret explained to her that most years what would happen was that there would be some flurries or perhaps one or two snowy nights beginning at the end of October or early in November, and then in the waning days of November the snow started in earnest and stayed on the ground in some form or fashion till spring. That being the case as it may be, it seemed that the weather reports had been saying that this year in particular New England could expect a major snowstorm in the days heading up to Halloween. Two sets of guests cancelled their reservations because of this, and the Baring household set about planning for this big Halloween storm.

            Mags took over shopping from Uncle Franklin and brought home canned food, lots of tea and coffee, and several boxes of taper candles from various department stores and buyers’ clubs around Greenfield. Grandpa Baring spent an afternoon out with a pair of young gay women whom he was friends with for some reason, and came back with a new winter coat and a manual that was supposed to exposit certain things about the kind of hot water system that the house had. Grandma and Uncle Franklin brought in chairs and tables from outside. As for Rosie, she put up storm windows, made sure the family’s three cars were properly serviced and up-to-date on all their checks, and spent a few hours each day with her laptop open checking every now and then for new reports on the nor’easter as it developed. So passed the last couple of days before the storm was supposed to hit Western Massachusetts.

            Rosie and Mags were actually on the UMass campus when the storm itself hit, driving through it on their way back from an Asian market in another part of Amherst. There they had picked up a can of some sort of Vietnamese coffee that Uncle Franklin insisted on having in the house; evidently it had been in Chicago that he had first discovered it once upon a time. They pulled up a side road at first and parked the car by one of the UMass dorms as the clouds of white descended darkly; then the silver-blue flash of an exploding transformer lit up the sky from somewhere else on campus, and Mags decided to high-tail it home.

            “How long did Uncle Franklin live in Chicago?” Rosie asked, by way of a topic to discuss that would distract her from Mags’s almost preternaturally aggressive driving.

            “At least fifteen years or so if I’m not mistaken,” Mags said. “He first left home because of some sort of conflict or jealousy with my father, actually, to hear Aunt Margaret and your grandmother tell it. Don’t ask me the details of that, though; I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. He made a life for himself out there and it was not actually the accident that killed my parents that made him feel as if he had to come home; it was some other thing that happened, that had something to do with a woman he was close to out there, if I’m not mistaken. One of those classic tragedies, or classic subgenres of personal tragedy, if you prefer to look at it that way.”

            “I don’t prefer to look at it that way at all,” Rosie said.

            “I suppose I could say that’s just as well,” said Mags. “It helps me to think of this life of ours as part of a ‘story’ of some sort, but I’m willing to accept that that might be a little cold of me. Back when I had a therapist I went to see she said much the same to me. Food for thought, I guess; the question is just whose thoughts, you know?”

            “I think I know what you mean, but Ma—Mags you are about to hit a moose.”

            Sure enough, there was some sort of large animal—maybe not a moose, but something large enough and uncanny enough to fool a suburbanite like Rosie—lumbering across the interstate just in front of them. Mags swerved hard to avoid it and the car drifted far into the shoulder. It took them several hundred feet of roadway to straighten themselves out again.

            “We can’t get home soon enough,” Mags observed. “That transformer blowing back on campus was sure a wakeup call, wouldn’t you say?”

            “I sure as hell would,” Rosie said, thankful that they hadn’t hit that animal, whatever it had been. “By the way, what do you think that animal was?”

            “You seemed pretty confident it was a moose.” Mags cast a quizzical eye on Rosie. She seemed amused by the situation in which they had just found themselves. Rosie had ridden in the car with Mags several times now and knew that it was her custom to drive like a madwoman whenever there wasn’t a cop car to be seen, but she had supposed that the danger of doing so on ice-slicked roads with very poor visibility would mitigate that. Quite the contrary, it seemed to have made it even worse, likely because Mags was getting downright desperate to get home. Rosie was starting to seriously wonder how bad exactly her cousin expected the storm to get. It did seem like, mostly on Mags’s instigation, their household had gone to much more trouble to prepare for this nor’easter than had many people in the area. Rosie wondered if Mags was one of those odd people you ran into now and then who seemed to have some sort of prescience about such things, or, on the other hand, whether she tended towards paranoia about winter weather due to past experience or by some quirk of her nature.

            The got home in one piece. Evening was coming on. Uncle Franklin told Rosie that she could expect to hear odd sounds from the radiators as they gurgled into heavy-duty service for the first time this winter. Grandma and Grandpa were upstairs making sure the storm windows in one of the guest rooms were properly secured. What constituted an improperly secured storm window Rosie could not guess at, but she figured she might learn soon enough. She hoped she had done a good enough job.

            Mags spent most of the evening, before the power failed, making a bracelet for something called Carmilla and brainstorming ideas for the more-familiar (to Rosie) The King in Yellow. Then the power did fail and she decided to go to bed. It was about nine o’ clock and without a way to keep her laptop charged up there was not much more left to do. So she lit a candle, cracked open a book, and turned away from Rosie to settle in for the night.

            Rosie herself must have drifted off at some point soon after, because the next thing she knew it was around midnight, the storm was still raging, and somebody was boiling a kettle of water. Something about the way this house was set up made it difficult to tell what direction sounds in it were coming from, but in this case it must be in the kitchen. Somehow, she could not think how, Rosie felt a compulsion, a needful frenzy, to go out to the kitchen herself and see who it was.

            Mags was sleeping soundly when Rosie crept out of their room, tiptoeing like a disobedient child. It was still dark-white outside. If the stove had been electric rather than gas there would have been no way any of them could use it under these conditions.

            There were two or three intervening rooms or hallways between Rosie and Mags’s room and the kitchen; it depended on whether you went clockwise or counterclockwise around the front hallway’s central staircase that led inevitably and composedly down to the rarely-used front door. Rosie went counterclockwise, the long way round, which passed through the front hallway, the dining room, and a section of the living room in which a spinet piano much like her sister’s stood collecting dust. The sound of the singing kettle was still going on and on and seemed to be coming from every direction at once. Rosie felt a chill, then a sudden pump of warmth as she passed the radiator that stood at the doorway through with the living room and kitchen communicated.

            The kitchen, miraculous to report, was empty. The candles were out and the stove was off. Rosie realized with a sudden laugh that the sound of the kettle, the sound like a kettle rather, was in fact the steam in the pipes and in the radiators, keeping the cold out in this winter’s first furious storm.

            Rosie’s heart was pounding for reasons that she could only guess at as she looked out the kitchen window at the storm. There was a light in it, and what looked like a woman stuck outside, insufficiently dressed for a nighttime blizzard, on the patio or in the overgrown garden beyond it. Rosie, not thinking, ran out into the mudroom, put on her coat and gloves over her pajamas, and went out to see what was wrong.

            The doorway to the patio opened into warm air and the dim not of an autumn midnight but of nine or nine-thirty one evening in late June. The “door into summer” of the Heinlein title must, Rosie thought, have been something like this, this moment when she walked outside into something like the past.

            A woman was indeed standing there, in that summer dusk. She looked much like Mags—glaring eyes, russet hair—but she was clearly someone who was entirely new to Rosie, someone who was uncanny and unfamiliar. Unfamiliar, and probably not family—doubly strange, doubly elsewhere. Fireflies were flitting around her, and she was wreathed in their glow as it were in the fires of purgatory, with a pschent of them circling her high-held head. Her hair was up in a high knot or bun and she was in the corset-and-hoops clothing and accoutrements of a hundred and fifty years before. Rosie suspected without having to know, or knew without having to suspect, that she was a ghostly vision of some ancestor, or a manifestation of some ancestral strain in her and Mags’s shared familial past. The ghost looked solid, and looked like she had a full complement of emotion and intellect and will, but there was no way for Rosie to be sure of any of this unless she spoke to her.

            The dead began to speak. The ghost had the strange accent one sometimes was liable to hear in plays or movies about Lincoln, or Whitman, or other figures of that day and period. She spoke respectfully but with a clear note of feeling that she represented some higher place or calling. It was a note that Rosie, amazingly to her own mind, found herself respecting as well as resenting. It came by way of an introduction.

            “I am Margaret Clooney, ancestress, as you might say, of your relation Margaret McNulty,” the ghost said. “I lived in these parts many years ago after being born during a sea voyage from Ireland, just before or in the earliest days of the famine there. You are Rosary Newgarth, a friend and to some minds perhaps a kinswoman of my descendant, are you not?”

            “I am,” said Rosie. “To my time it’s the night of October 29, 2011, a Saturday. Mags—Margaret, your namesake, anyway—is asleep in bed.”

            “Asleep in bed, Saturday night,” the ghost said. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.’”

            “And you?” Rosie asked. “What are your day and time?”

            “Late evening, June 23, 1860,” said Margaret Clooney. “A Saturday also. St. John’s Eve, if that holds any meaning to you. Just a few days after midsummer.”

            “The light out here is that of a summer night, I can tell,” Rosie said. “And the fireflies too, of course. Are you—that is, have I slipped back into the ‘present’ for you, or am I ‘seeing’ your living life with you as a ghost, a phantom, here for me to show me the way the world use to be for you? I’m sorry,” she said with a sudden burst of self-consciousness. “I hope the question isn’t gauche, or unwelcome? And I’m sorry for how badly I worded it.”

            “A little gauche perhaps, but not unwelcome—or, at least, it is clear and easy for me to see why you are asking it,” said Margaret Clooney. “I am, as you might say, a ghost, although my true self, my soul, my heart, is elsewhere than this garden. I will miss it, when I go totally beyond.”

            “And this is 1860 I’ve entered into?”

            “This is, yes. However, observe.” Margaret Clooney glided up onto the patio, which here was an older-fashioned porch or portico, and pointed a spectral finger over Rosie’s shoulder into the kitchen window. Rosie saw that it was not a kitchen after all but a storeroom of some kind, a dimly firelit chamber in which two men were arguing. It would seem that it was money about which they were arguing—some sort of debt, something that one of them experienced as a violence done to him. Rosie could not tell if it was the indebtedness that was being claimed to be violent or the unmercifulness with which the indebtedness was being received. Like any moral economist, she was on the side of the debtor.

            “The two men arguing—who are they?” she asked.

            “Men of the year 1813, when this home was first built ere in Greenfield,” Margaret Clooney said to her. “The debtor, who is the first owner of this house, is a man by the name of Asaph Oldmeadow. Do you know of the Oldmeadows? If you do not, it would be my pleasure to tell you a bit about them. They are a part of my history, and my descendant’s history, and your history also.”

            “I’ve heard of the Oldmeadows. The Barings are descended from an Oldmeadow woman, aren’t they—that is, aren’t we?”

            The ghost of Margaret Clooney nodded. “Your grandfather’s grandmother, whom I believe he is given to occasionally mentioning, was Horton Oldmeadow,” she said. “The name Horton was reused in the family, just as the name Margaret has been reused. Probably the name was something along the lines of Hortense in the beginning—In principio, if you’ve ever looked through a Vulgate Bible. This Horton Oldmeadow was the daughter of a close friend of mine—but that is a story for another time.” The ghost, Rosie realized, was vanishing as she said this.

            “I will see you again, Margaret?” Rosie asked.

            “You will,” said Margaret Clooney. “I promise you that; you will.”

            She dissolved into the firefly dusk. Rosie blinked, then went back inside, into the storm-choked house. The kitchen clock read twelve-thirty, and the radiator pipes were still singing, joyful in having a reason to serve at last.

5.

The Folktales 

A week or so into November, once power had been restored in the house and life had gone more or less back to normal, Rosie asked her grandfather about Horton Oldmeadow. Who he told her about instead was Horton Baring.

            Horton Baring had been Grandpa Baring’s older sister, the oldest of three siblings (the middle sibling, the first Franklin Baring, had been killed in the Korean War). She had been half-feral and barely literate, with a knack for beating people up that had already emerged by her early teens. In 1949 she had been expelled from Greenfield High School three weeks before she would have graduated, and she had spent most of the 1950s in and out of the Franklin County sheriff’s office. (Rosie asked her grandfather if she had ever actually been convicted of anything and he had said that on two occasions they had managed to make contempt of court stick and kept her around for a few weeks before letting her out again.) She had been a liberal smoker and drinker but was not known ever to have associated romantically with either men or women. Going into her thirties she had become something of an enforcer of her own justice, and it had actually been she who had brought Carl McNulty into the household after beating up his father as his father had been about to beat up him. This had been in 1968 or so, turbulent times for Grandma and Grandpa’s growing family as for the world as a whole. Carl and Horton had, by Grandpa’s account and also by Mags’s, been inseparable pretty much as soon as she had knocked his father to the ground on his behalf. A year or two after that Horton had died in unclear circumstances, still in her late thirties.

            “What happened to her?” Rosie asked. “If it’s not too hard to say.”

            “Wouldn’t say it’s too hard exactly,” Grandpa said. “She took a fall from the French King Bridge—you know, that bridge out on Route 2 to the east as it passes over the Connecticut going towards Boston. She’d been visiting with a friend who lived on a hill nearby by the name of Weatherhead, and she was walking across the river back from Weatherhead to meet with another friend when something happened. Never figured out what. Might could have been an accident, suicide, someone she’d crossed coming back to get her…” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “Any number of things my sister could’ve gotten herself involved in,” he said. “Anyway, it damn near broke this family apart. None of us ever really looked at little Carl the same after that, and I think he knew it.”

            He showed her a picture of the three siblings then. Horton and Franklin I both looked a lot like her grandfather, like Tom. They all had the same ruddy complexion, meaty hands, and tragicomic resting expression. The picture must have been taken right before Franklin I had gone to Korea because Grandpa seemed already to be in his early teens and Rosie recognized Horton’s dress as a fashion of the very early fifties.

            “What did your brother do in Korea?” she asked.

            “Fighter pilot,” said Grandpa. “Lived on a base in Japan, near Osaka; commuted to the war zone in his Sabrejet from there. Got shot down by some Chinaman in a MiG right before the ceasefire in ’53. Nineteen years old.”

            Rosie had not been aware that the Air Force had ever had fighter pilots quite that young, and wondered if perhaps Franklin I’s exploits were being exaggerated somewhat—if he had instead been a wingman or something like that, or if it had been a bomber instead of a fighter, or, or, or…She shook her head. In the end, it didn’t really matter. He was dead, and Horton was dead, and her grandfather was still very much alive.

            “Probably shouldn’t say Chinaman,” her grandfather said. “Not polite, not these days.”

            And that was their first conversation about Horton Baring. It took a few more conversations in that month of November to get to the subject of Horton Oldmeadow, who had lived a much less disputable and apparently much less tragic life. Grandpa still remembered some of her stories, when he had been a child, about her own childhood—the days of taffeta bustles and shirtwaists, narrated to the days of pinstriped suits and trilbys.

            Also right after Halloween Rosie started going on little adventures around Western Massachusetts with two women about her and Mags’s age named Mattie Greer and Ellie Soren. Mattie and Ellie were not a couple; they were definitely both gay, but they seemed to be gay separately. Mattie was a graduate student at UMass, apparently doing a master’s in some foreign literature or another, and Ellie had arbitraged a BS in economics much like Rosie’s own into a job writing ad copy for a liquor distributor. On one day in particular the three of them were at a sort of embankment or landing along the Connecticut River, from which one could watch almost minute by minute as crimson-and-gold October turned to russet-and-silver November. Mattie, who had a taste for swimming in ludicrously cold water that Mags apparently shared, was doing backstrokes in the river’s shallows; Ellie, who looked and talked like she should have been much more adventurous than Mattie but apparently was not, was in a sport coat and a light scarf, hitting golf balls across the river with one of Grandpa Baring’s nine-irons.

            “You know, until he handed you that club this morning I didn’t even realized Grandpa played golf,” said Rosie.

            “He doesn’t,” said Ellie. “Fore!” Whack. A ball went flying up, up, and left Rosie’s vision against the whitish sky. Mattie seemed unperturbed and contemplative.

            “Well, be that as it may, hitting golf balls across a river is certainly a new idea,” said Rosie.

            “Is it?” asked Mattie dreamily from the water. “I’m not so sure. Did you ever see that old episode of—what was it?—the sitcom.”

            “Fair enough,” said Rosie, who knew what Mattie was alluding to, but only vaguely. “Okay, that’s fair enough.”

            “Mattie’s been watching a lot of sitcoms lately,” said Ellie. “She says they have a lot of the ‘amoral moralism’ of folk stories. That’s what she’s studying at UMass. Fore!” Whack.

            Mattie swam up to the landing and hauled herself up halfway onto the shore; Ellie handed her a towel to wrap around her shoulders. “ ‘Amoral moralism’ is a phrase I’m using in my thesis but I’m not actually sure how much I like it,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun, though. Writing the thing, I mean. I’m glad I went back to school.”

            “How old are you exactly?” Rosie asked.

            Mattie crammed on her glasses under her wet sheets of black hair and frowned at Rosie theatrically. “Don’t you know never to ask a lady that?” she said. “I’m twenty-five.” She yawned and pulled herself fully up out of the water. “Well, that was exhausting,” she said. “It probably kept my heart rate nice and low, though.”

            “Is this something you do every winter?” asked Rosie, gesturing at Mattie and at the river.

            “No, I actually just started doing this a year or two ago on your cousin’s recommendation,” Mattie said. “Where she got it from I have no idea. Turn around, I’m about to change back into my clothes.” Rosie turned around and Mattie kept talking. “Did you ever hear of the folktale called ‘The King of Cats’ or ‘The Prince of Cats’? I think it’s delightful, and it has the same feature that I notice in sitcoms where, when you hear it told, you keep thinking it’ll build to a moral conclusion and then it just doesn’t. It’s from Cornwall originally, I think; I found it in a Breton source; technically the literature I’m studying is French.” Rosie shook her head and said she hadn’t heard of it. “Would you like me to tell it to you?” Mattie asked. “You can turn around now, by the way.”

            Rosie turned around. Mattie was now dressed much the same as Ellie was and was wringing out her swimsuit so she could put it in her backpack. “Go ahead and tell me ‘The King of Cats,’ Mattie,” Rosie said.

            “So, the story goes,” said Mattie as they started to walk back towards Ellie’s car, “that an old farmer, long ago, had a mean, cussed old black cat, as so many old farmers do. He was walking along a lonely road one evening, trying to figure out what to do about the cat, when he saw a procession of other cats, carrying a cat-sized coffin. He marveled at this sight, of course, and up to him there walked a cat with a grave and official-seeming expression, like that of an undertaker or a coroner.

            “The grave, official-seeming cat said to the old farmer, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ The old farmer, not knowing what this meant, went on his way and went home to his own cat, and to his wife.

            “A few nights later, the farmer was walking along that same road when he saw the same procession of cats and coffin. The cat coroner or undertaker said to him again, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He still did not know what this meant, and he went home and the cat clawed him and his wife nagged him.

            “Finally, a third time, the farmer was walking along and he saw the funeral procession. The coroner or undertaker said to him, for the third time, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He was struck with a great fear, and he ran, did not walk, on home.

            “He said to his wife something to the effect of ‘I keep seeing these cats, this strange procession.’ His mean, cussed old black cat was looking at him intently now.” At this point in the story they reached Ellie’s car and set about getting into it. “He said ‘I just don’t know what it means,’” Mattie went on. “‘They’ve spoken to me, you know. They want me to find somebody called Tom Tildrum and tell him that Tim Toldrum is dead. I don’t know who either of those men are!’

            “‘Tim Toldrum is dead?!’ the mean, cussed old black cat suddenly screamed. ‘Why, then, I am now King of the Cats!’ And with that, the cat rose up the old farmer’s chimney like some, flew out into the night with a blood-curdling caterwaul, and was never seen or heard from in those parts again. And so goes the story.”

            “Isn’t there a Steven Vincent Benét version of that story, Mattie?” Ellie asked, putting the golf club and her back of golf balls in her trunk.

            “I don’t know who Steven Vincent Benét is,” said Rosie.

            “I think there might be,” said Mattie.

            On the drive back up to Greenfield there were a few more flurries. Rosie tried to think of an Italian folktale that she had once heard from her grandmother; she wanted to tell it to Mattie and Ellie as a sort of reciprocation, since she had enjoyed the story about the King of the Cats more than she had expected to. Try as she might, she could not put her finger on it. It had something to do with the devil, and a fig tree, and an old woman being cursed to have small breasts; it was just the kind of bawdy story, with faint hints of internalized misogyny, that Grandma Newgarth loved. Eventually it occurred to her that she could just tell them those elements—devil, fig tree, old woman, small breasts. Mattie might be able to put it together from her own knowledge base, or, if not, she might be able to look it up whenever she got home or to wherever her laptop currently was.

            “I think I have heard that one,” she said when Rosie told her the basic elements. “Neapolitan or Sicilian or something like that, right?”

            “I believe so, yeah,” said Rosie. “I heard it from my grandmother, on the non-Baring side. Do either of you have grandparents who have that—well, who get salty with you like that?”

            “My grandmother does occasionally,” said Ellie. “I think most of Mattie’s family is probably too buttoned-up for it. That’s probably why you can come across as stuck-up and retiring, isn’t it, Mattie?” she shouted into the back seat where Mattie was lying down.

            “Well, that and the depression,” muttered Mattie, who seemed to be half asleep.

            Rosie felt suddenly like she he had gone through the looking glass. There was something irreducibly manic and madcap about spending time with these two women, something that was starting to make her uncomfortable. Surely they couldn’t be like this all the time; with her own family, with Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin and Mags, and certainly at home with Mom and Dad and Madison, it was easy enough to imagine that they more or less always were the way they appeared to be. It was easy enough to imagine that Madison was thinking of George and Ira Gershwin more often than not, or that Mags spent most of her free time reading genre novels and making those bracelets based on them, or that Aunt Margaret was just as reluctant to talk about her estranged husband and children with everybody else as she was with Rosie. Surely that wasn’t the case here; surely Mattie and Ellie were not always hitting golf balls across rivers and saying things like “well, that and the depression,” were they? Had her grandfather somehow put them up to it, as a way to entertain her after the downbeat conversations he had been having with her lately. She obviously could not just ask them, but she felt the need to know.

            They returned to Greenfield. When Rosie got back home she found Mags and Uncle Franklin standing together pensively in the kitchen, looking out the window across the driveway to a plot where they had planted some garlic just before the blizzard. Rosie wondered what they expected it to be doing right now, exactly; you planted garlic in the fall before the first frost, and it burgeoned in the winter and came up in early spring. The book that Mags had shown Rosie had been very clear about that, and the process sounded very straightforward.

            It occurred to her that maybe they were not, after all, expecting anything from the garlic in particular. Maybe the garlic was beside the point, and their gazes out the window were in reality gazes at something quite different, much more dangerous and arcane. Maybe they were just standing there, looking pensively, looking carefully, looking at something together because they, they in particular, could not bear to look at each other.

6.

The Holiday

December 2011, that year’s long Advent, was a time of consequence. Between Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas Eve, Herman Cain suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the United Kingdom severed diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kim Jong-il died abruptly and was succeeded as leader of North Korea by his twentysomething son, the Obama administration formally declared an end to the Iraq War, and the German novelist Christa Wolf died at eighty-two. Christopher Hitchens also died, as did Václav Havel. Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines and killed almost thirteen hundred people. In Western Massachusetts, winter came on in earnest, the water got too cold for even Mattie Greer to go swimming in before freezing over entirely, the days shortened into abbreviations that were already almost completely dark by four or five o’ clock, and Greenfield’s half-dozen or so Catholic and liturgical Protestant churches got fully into the Advent-Christmas season. The thin edge of the present advanced further into the future from the past, the last ends of Rosie and her family came closer day by day as always, and Mags started dating somebody.

            “I’ve had a crush on him since I was young,” she explained to a slightly gobsmacked Rosie, “or at least I think I have. We don’t have as much in common now as we did when we were twelve. I suppose I wanted to see there was any way we could recapture those days.”

            “Can I ask if you’ve ever been in a relationship before?” said Rosie. “You’ve never mentioned any exes or anything.”

            “I had a couple of casual hookups at UMass before deciding that wasn’t the way for me,” said Mags. “And I had a horrible jealousy-fueled high school ‘friendship’ with a girl called Jessica Winters. Other than that, no.”

            “What is he like, if you and he don’t have much in common anymore?” Rosie asked her then. For some reason the idea of Mags dating somebody just to see what was like filled her with foreboding. It was like being told that Madison had lost her virginity or that Dad was getting promoted at work—in some sense it represented forward progress, but it was also a move out of a situation to which the people concerned had already long since been habituated.

            “I guess he’s just your typical guy from around here,” said Mags, which did not inspire confidence. “He loves the Patriots and he wants to move to Boston at some point. He’s a manager in a farm store and I’ve had his cooking a couple of times; it’s pretty good, so that’s worth pursuing this for, I think.”

            “Do you want to move to Boston at some point, Mags?” Rosie asked.

            Mags shook her head. “I don’t,” she said. “And that’s why I’ve decided I’m not going to have sex with Zachary.”

            “I’m sorry,” said Rosie, “but what?”

            Mags shrugged. “It’d feel like I was ascribing some sort of weight to the decisions he’s making about what to do with his life,” she said. Something about her tone of voice as she said this made Rosie realize, with a sudden realization, that her cousin was seeing this man out of nothing so much as good old-fashioned garden-variety boredom. For some reason that Rosie could not put her finger on, having realized that made her feel a bit better about it.

            Rosie behaved a little grouchily the next day around one of the guests, a woman named Francine Kipperman. Francine was a middle-aged New Jerseyite who reminded Rosie of her mother, and as such, Rosie felt a certain uncertainty around her. She was entitled, or seemed that way; Rosie’s mother was not entitled, so perhaps it was one or more of her paternal aunts of whom Rosie was actually reminded. What Rosie snapped at Francine about was Francine’s complaint that she had missed the foliage season.

            “The foliage season is mid-fall, Ms. Kipperman,” she said with a heaviness to her voice. “It’s December 11.”

            “It’s still fall till the solstice, though.”

            “Are there still autumn leaves on the trees in Morris County?” asked Rosie. “No? Then why would there be autumn leaves still on the trees here? We’re like two degrees of latitude further north, and we’re further inland too. There’s half a foot of snow on the ground.”

            “I paid to see foliage. My hubby Roy told me it’d be here still.”

            “Your hubby Roy was mistaken or poorly informed, Ms. Kipperman.”

            “Are you mouthing off to me?!”

            It had taken the expert—as in literally taught to him at a postgraduate level—conflict resolution skills of Uncle Franklin to get Rosie out of that jam. He had even extracted a promise from Francine to visit Franklin County again next year earlier in the fall. There was a poem by Dickinson that Mags cited to Rosie when she told her about this little altercation she had had.

If you were coming in the Fall

I'd brush the Summer by

With half a smile, and half a spurn

As Housewives do, a Fly

❦ 

If I could see you in a year

I'd wind the months in balls

And put them each in separate Drawers

For fear the numbers fuse

❦ 

If only Centuries, delayed…

“How does the poem end?” Rosie asked Mags once she had trailed off at the beginning of the third stanza.

            “‘It goads me, like the goblin bee that will not state its sting,’ ‘It’ is time—not knowing when something dearly longed for and waited for is going to happen. If it is going to happen.”

            “I think that’s all of us, at some point or another in our lives,” Rosie said with a glance out the bedroom window at the road.

            “I think it is,” said Mags. “On the other hand, I completely understand that I doubt any of us are exactly longing for a repeat visit from Francine Kipperman or her ‘hubby.’”

            “All I can say is that I’m certainly not,” said Rosie with a theatrical little flip of her hair.

            “On another note,” said Mags, “do you have any Christmas Eve plans yet? You mentioned a while back you do tend to go to church on the big holidays. I’d be happy to go to Midnight Mass this year with you.”

            “I’m actually not feeling the Christmas spirit nearly as strongly in this year as in years past, but sure, Midnight Mass sounds good to me,” Rosie said. “What can you tell me about the Catholic parishes in Greenfield?”

            “There are two pretty standard Catholic parishes, like ones you could find anywhere, in Greenfield itself,” said Mags. “One is called Blessed Sacrament and the other one is called Holy Trinity. The main difference between them is that Blessed Sacrament has uglier architecture but prettier music. One town over in Turners Falls there are Our Lady of Czestochowa and Our Lady of Peace, and the main difference between those is that Czestochowa is very conservative and Peace is very liberal. I’m happy with any of the four since I can go either way on architecture versus music and I’ve never really liked politics with my religion. Do you have any preference given those descriptions?” She cast a somewhat concerned, assessing eye on Rosie, for some reason. It was the kind of gaze that made Rosie feel more relevant to other people’s worlds than she would have liked to be.

            “Let’s go with Holy Trinity,” she saqid. “That’s the white-and-green Carpenter Gothic one across from the co-op on Main Street, right?” Mags nodded. “A pretty building without any political philosophy to speak of sounds good to me for Christmas,” Rosie said. “Maybe if it were the Assumption or something I’d feel otherwise.” She shrugged. “That work okay for you, Mags?” she asked to make sure.

            “Sounds great to me,” Mags said. “Let’s make a plan of it.”

            “Will your boyfriend be coming with us?”

            “Almost definitely not. Are you okay? You sound almost a little jealous.”

            “I wouldn’t say I’m jealous, no,” Rosie said. “I just don’t get it.”

            “To be honest, I’m not sure I do either some of the time with him,” said Mags.

            “Then why…? Never mind. I know there’s a childhood crush involved. That’s reason enough, and I’ll try to be respectful of it.”

            And that was how the conversation between the two of them ended. When Christmas Eve actually did roll around a few days later, however, Rosie went not to Midnight Mass with Mags but to a Protestant service in Amherst with Grandpa and Uncle Franklin. This was how that came to pass.

            Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret had a friend called Clara Warman who lived in Turners Falls. Clara was about seventy-five years old, so a year or a few older than Grandma and Grandpa, and went to the same church in Bernardston that Uncle Franklin usually did. Aunt Margaret, who was agnostic, heard from Clara that she lacked “wheels” with which to get to Bernardston on Christmas Eve. Aunt Margaret knew at this point that Grandpa had prevailed upon Uncle Franklin to accompany him to Amherst, and so she suggested to Clara that she carpool with the two of them. Why exactly Grandpa insisted on going to church in Amherst in the first place, which was to say half an hour away even with no holiday traffic, was a riddle for the ages as far as Aunt Margaret was concerned.

            Clara was happy to carpool to Amherst but was, she said, uncomfortable riding in a car alone with two men, even ones she knew and trusted like Uncle Franklin and Grandpa. So Aunt Margaret offered to go with them. This would have worked out well for all concerned, but mere hours after the decision to do it this way had been arrived at, Aunt Margaret got an unexpected call from her ex-husband, asking that she accompany him and their three teenaged children to the service at the Lutheran church near the Honda dealership. This would have been her first time spending Christmas with her children in about four years. There was of course no way she could say no to this, so she asked Grandma, Rosie, and Mags if any of them were willing to schlep down to Amherst in her stead. Rosie objected to the plan the least, and so off she went.

            The drive down to Amherst on Christmas Eve was in fact a delight. There was a light snow and the other cars on the interstate, and on Route 116 once they got off the interstate, seemed somehow to be in good spirits, as if Christmas brought inert metal to life and emotion just as (old tales said) it imbued nonhuman animals with intellect and will. Grandpa was driving and he had on an old CD of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby alternating holiday standards, with the Andrews Sisters on one track and (of all people) a young David Bowie on another. The car’s heating system was turned up high enough for the benefit of the oldsters to be a little uncomfortable for Rosie, but she barely minded when she kept in mind how cold it was outside. Grandpa and Clara sang along to many of the songs on the CD, and after a while Rosie felt comfortable joining in with them. The level of bonhomie was actually beginning to surprise her. There was something almost like a spiritual experience about it, unselfconscious and looking outwards.

            When they got to Amherst there was, miraculous to report, yet more confusion, this time about to which specific church among the several mainline Protestant churches in and near Amherst Center they would be going. The assumption had been that they would go to First Congregational but it seemed Clara had heard wonderful things about the music at Grace Episcopal and so wanted to go there instead and see how she liked it. They argued for about ten minutes before deciding to defer to the wishes of a sweet old guest and go to the eleven o’ clock service at Grace.

            Grace was a greystone Gothic Revival building overlooking the snowbound common in the middle of Amherst. It was just the kind of church to attract a large congregation for an old-fashioned Christmas Eve, even though, as Rosie was given to understand, most Episcopal parishes these days had a hard time retaining worshippers on ordinary Sundays. She thought that was a shame; it was a lovely building, and she hated to think of a denomination with buildings like this struggling.

            The music was as promised. Rosie had never heard some of the carols they sang that evening—“Good Christian friends rejoice,” a setting of “O little town of Bethlehem” that she did not recognize, a few others. “Silent night” and “Joy to the world” were familiar, of course, as was “In the bleak midwinter,” which appeared on a King’s College Choir CD that Madison sometimes liked to listen to at this time of year. (Rosie missed Madison; indeed, she was surprised to find that most days she missed the kid more than missed most of her friends from high school and from SUNY Binghamton.) She wasn’t sure how Grandpa and Uncle Franklin were feeling about this service; her impression was that the one at the Congregational church would have been much more sober and more stripped-down. Conversely, she wasn’t sure how that one would have made her feel if they had gone to it the way they had planned to at first. It was funny how preferences—needs, even—could be in conflict like that, even between loved ones, between relatives.

            They left the church at half past midnight and came out into the chilly night air. Clara huddled in an overcoat; Rosie zipped her jacket up to the top. In the sky, above the lights of Amherst Center, she could see a few bright stars. Grandpa and Uncle Franklin wished a merry Christmas to five or six different people, then ushered the four of them into the Subaru and headed on home.

            Mags had already long since gotten back from Holy Trinity, which would seem to have its major Christmas Eve Mass quite a bit earlier in the night. She was relaxing in her and Rosie’s room, listening, it would seem, to something acoustic and contemplative. It did not sound particularly seasonal. “Vashti Bunyan again?” Rosie asked, naming an artist of this sort whom she remembered Mags enjoyed, even though as far as she recalled Vashti Bunyan’s voice did not sound much like this woman’s at all.

            “Close,” said Mags in a manner of speaking that signaled to Rosie that she had not really been that close. “Jen Cloher.”

            “Hmm,” said Rosie. “Got sick of hymns?”

            “You could say that. Holy Trinity just does the old standbys for its Christmas hymns. It’s lovely and always lifts my spirits, but once you get out you sort of…how should I put this…?…You sort of realize that there’s been this blast of concentrated Christmasiness that you’ve been hit with hard for the past hour and a half, and, if you’re me, you start to want to listen to something else when you get home. Am I making any sense?”

            “You are,” said Rosie.

            “You’re happy to sit with me listening to this for a little while?”

            “I am,” said Rosie.

            “Good.” Mags—who had just made reference to sitting, to sitting with Rosie—instead flopped down on her bed in that customary girlish way of hers. Rosie sat on her own bed, letting herself relax after what had, after all, been a hectic evening. Something like Christmas joy came down and rested, gently, on the two of them.

Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part One)

Note: This is part of a thematic series called Compulsory Figures, and not the first part. I wrote it in the great and terrible year 2020. Compulsory Figures in its entirety—written on and off between 2017 and 2021—will see the light of day eventually.

1.

The Train

Rosie Newgarth graduated from college in 2011 and moved back home right away. Since the Great Recession had hit she had had no idea what “came next” for her, and she did not want to live with her friends. She had majored in economics and graduated on time with a good, not great, GPA; she was physically attractive and had done some sportswear modeling one summer, and between that and a series of merit scholarships she graduated with less debt than one might have expected. Home for Rosie was the 1950s pseudo-Cape where her parents Richard and Martha and her sixteen-year-old sister Madison lived on Long Island. Newgarth was an anglicization devised at Ellis Island ninety or a hundred years before, and the family still owned a velvet painting of Luciano Pavarotti that Rosie’s paternal grandmother had given her as a Christmas present when she was ten years old.

            “You really should visit my folks one of these days, Rosie,” Martha Newgarth said to her one day that summer as they sat in their backyard drinking sangria—Martha in a sundress with a warm-toned, youthful pattern, Rosie in her bikini top and a pair of palazzo pants.

            “In Massachusetts?” Rosie asked, and Martha nodded. “I dunno; maybe,” Rosie said. “I’d like to. But I’d also like to focus on finding a job before I go around visiting people.”

            “That’s actually part of why I’m bringing this up, Rosie,” said her mother. “That bed and breakfast your grandfather was trying to start up might finally work now and they want someone there managing the books. You’re smart, you’re good with figures and with money. You studied economics. I think you should consider it.”

            “Mom, I just got back from four years in the Southern Tier. Forgive me if I’m not plotzing at the idea of moving to Discount Stars Hollow to work at Grandpa’s bed and breakfast.”

            “Don’t call it ‘Discount Stars Hollow’; there’s nothing cheap about it,” said Martha. “Rosie, it’s just a suggestion. Think it over, okay? Please just see how you feel about it for my sake?”

            “I think I already know how I feel about it, but okay,” Rosie said.

            And she did think it over; for the next two or three weeks she spent about half an hour each day, on average, contemplating what it might be like to be on the outskirts of Greenfield, Massachusetts 01301, managing the books for Grandpa Baring’s passion project hotel. She called him once, and he was glad to heart from her.

            “Rosie! So good to hear from you! Your mother told me you might call,” he said in a canny tone of voice. “How are things? Got that fancy diploma yet hanging on your wall? How’s the boyfriend? Still together?” he asked without waiting for an answer to the question about the diploma.

            “No, not still together, sorry to say,” Rosie said. “He wanted to be in some living situation with some friends of ours that I didn’t want.” She did not wish to get into the details with her grandfather, who was closing in on three-quarters of a century and had married before 1960. “So we had a big fight right before graduation and now we don’t speak anymore.”

            “Relationships are difficult,” said her grandfather after, apparently, a moment’s contemplation. “A donnybrook or two now and then is one thing. Survivable, I’d say normal. But right before graduation seems like about the worst time for it possible. Do you feel okay about it? I’m happy to send your Uncle Franklin down in his truck if I need to.”

            “There’s no need to send anybody down in his or her truck, Grandpa. I feel…I feel as if it ought to hurt more than it does. I find myself wishing that a lot of things these days hurt me more than they do.”

            “Live to my age, life’ll get to you,” her grandfather said. ‘Some day soon you’ll stop wishing things hurt more.” There was a lull in their talk; then he asked “You give any thought to coming to work up here for a bit? I figured that could be what you were calling about.”

            “It is to an extent,” said Rosie. “Is what I’m calling about to an extent, I mean. I have been thinking about it; the issue is that I don’t know what I want adult life to look like for me quite yet.” She avoided the temptation to add out loud but I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to look like that. There was another lull in the conversation; from downstairs Rosie could hear Madison practicing on her spinet piano that they had inherited from Great-Aunt Jenny, and outside Rosie’s bedroom window the back yard sat green-brown and pluripotent.

            “Just be in touch more, okay, Rosie?” her grandfather asked. “It does me and your grandmother a world of good to hear from you, mentally speaking.” She nodded, and made a little sound in her throat to indicate to him that she was nodding. Then they hung up. She set her phone—a few years old; still not a smartphone—aside on her writing desk and flopped down on her bed. Vague yet not unpleasant memories of times when she had gone up to Greenfield to visit her Baring relatives there passed through her mind the way rosary beads had passed through her pious child fingers ten or fifteen years before. A house painted in the colors of a barn; a door being opened to let some kind of long-haired cat in; a car ride to a garden supply store with her Aunt Margaret and another young girl whose face Rosie remembered more faithfully than her name. There had been cool summers back then up that way, and she had once or twice gone for a fully clothed swim in some river or other, falsely thinking it would keep her warmer. She recalled food of some heavy, tragic ethnic origin, and a Christmas Eve service in one of those whitewashed churches with windows of mostly clear glass. She recalled raspberry ice cream and astonishingly bitter iced tea.

            Would life really be so much different if she did spend a while up there, she wondered? What was she doing here, in Nassau County, that was so worth her while that she could not stand but to stay? Each day she got up, texted, listened to music, listened to Madison practice piano (which practice, increasingly, could also be called music), ate and drank, sat with Mom or with Dad in the back yard, and so on, and so on. Some Sundays she went to St. Agnes for lack of anything else to do, and some Tuesdays she went to see a blockbuster at the Loew’s in the shopping center. In this manner three and a half months had already passed by, and passed her by, since she had graduated in Binghamton in May. It was a life of leisure, but leisure with little chance of gaining dimensions, of developing mystery or depth. She felt an attachment to it, but it worried her to think that this feeling might not correspond to anything in the real world. An observer who did not know her might very well conclude that what she was doing these days was little worth her while. She almost felt just such an observer, some unknown titan lurking deep in the early history of her brain, convicting her of a vague and mild but somehow undeniable guilt. It was not a feeling that she relished.

            After August passed Rosie made up her mind. She had still not found a job with enough hours or enough pay to seriously change her situation here, so she might as well take the Amtrak up to Greenfield to see what she could see there. It would be an open-ended visit, probably not a very long one, but she could not honestly say that for sure. She called her grandfather again and he told her that he was able and ready to host her for just as long as she wished. Now all that remained was to arrange the travel itself. Somehow the romance of doing it by rail was not a romance that Rosie was willing to give up.

            She secured her ticket. It was one-way even though she fully intended to return to New York, because she did not want to commit herself to returning at any particular time, and in particular not at any time that might fall after she got sick of her Baring relatives. She was still convinced that indeed she would get sick of them eventually; they were old, and had a dour and uncool flintiness to them, one and all. Rosie did not understand herself to be cool, but she certainly did not understand herself to be flinty or dour either. She was picturing an environment like in that book Cold Comfort Farm, tragicomic to a point that would be difficult to take seriously.

            Her last evening at home Madison put on a little concert for her. Madison’s voice was a beautiful contralto much richer than you would expect from a rising high school junior, better actually than her skills with the piano as an instrument; she plugged away at the chords of “St. James Infirmary” and “These Foolish Things” while her voice carried the melodies, and even when she got to one of Satie’s piano pieces she hummed, or keened, along with it. They had lox bagels for dinner; ten or twelve hours after the appointed time for such a meal, but an important and crowd-pleasing send-off considering that in much of small-town New England you couldn’t find a decent bagel sandwich for love or money. It was the middle of September and the wind had an aroma of fall or even of early winter when Rosie went outside to look down the evening street for the last time in weeks or months.

            The nearest train station to Greenfield was an unmanned little platform in Amherst, through which the Vermonter passed once a day in either direction. Amherst was known for Emily Dickinson, lefty politics, and at least two or three different colleges, including the one Madison’s friend Jessica wanted to go to in a few years. Rosie wasn’t sure what Greenfield was known for, other than her family; she had asked her grandfather this over the phone and he had observed that not everywhere had the luxury of being known for something; and besides, what was Rockville Center known for other than police unions and an obscure Catholic diocese? “There are quite a few Underground Railroad houses in this area though,” he conceded, “our own house not least of all. Or at least that’s the family lore that’s come down to us from your Baring great-great-grandmother. Remarkable character, my grandmother, she was. I feel somehow you’d have liked her if you’d have been alive back then.”

            “When did your grandmother die?” Rosie asked. “Out of curiosity, if you don’t mind the question. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother mentioning having known her.”

            “No, she never did,” Grandpa Baring said. “People had kids younger back then but they tended to die younger too. My grandmother passed in 1950, when I was eleven or twelve; I forget which side of my birthday it fell on. Not a good birthday for me either way.” He paused. “I apologize,” he said, “for sharing too much about it, if share too much about it I have.”

            “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I’m easygoing about oversharing.”

            “Oversharing,” said her grandfather, and she actually heard pen scrape against notepad. “I’d better remember that word, I feel. So thank you for it, Rosie. I’ll see you soon?”

            “Yes, Grandpa. I’ll see you very soon.” Rosie hung up. She sighed. At this time tomorrow evening she would be just settling in up in Greenfield, probably wanting to sleep after a long journey. It was odd to think of, and she felt that something about her life was changing more irrevocably than the fact that it was meant to be a temporary visit would suggest. A strange feeling, a feeling that left her with little in the way of sympathy for herself. She wondered if she would be able to explain it to her family when she got up there.

            She took the train into New York and got on the Vermonter at Penn Station. It had been her hope that she would embark at Grand Central, a much better-looking and better-feeling and thus more auspicious station from which to begin a long journey northward, but she was to have no such luck. So she let herself be content with Penn Station, and settled onto the train as best she could as it passed out of the city.

            Between the city and the Connecticut state line the train passed through an odd borderland of coastal wetlands, abandoned factories, suburban tracts, and sometimes a school running track or a dreary baseball diamond. The businesses whose signs she was able to see from the window of her compartment mostly had name like Moskowitz’s and Martinelli’s. As the train passed into Connecticut and turned north on its long line towards Canada, the Italian and Jewish names on the signs and billboards gradually gave way to—or, at least, were gradually supplemented with—Irish and Waspish ones: Shea’s, Clark’s, Murphy’s.

            The train came to Amherst. By that time Rosie had read about half of a Haruki Murakami novel, which she had disliked, and maybe a third of an old horror paperback, which she had loved. A taste for horridness in her literature had coexisted with normalcy in her dress and affect for about a year now; the former was something to which her now-ex-boyfriend had introduced her.

            The station in Amherst was, as she had been told, an unmanned landing with a little red brick building that looked like it was long-disused. Trees now showing the first blush of fall color shielded a busy-sounding road from view. A man with a short white beard and an expression that implied a tragic sense of life stood next to a Subaru Outback waiting for her. It was her grandfather. She waved, and he came over and hugged her tightly. The outer voyage was over and the inner voyage would soon begin. 

2.

The Dinner

The drive from Amherst to Greenfield was pleasant, if a bit chillier than Rosie would have expected. Her grandfather, for reasons best known to himself, evidently did not feel the need to discuss how her train ride had been or how she felt about being up here after having said before that she would rather not. Instead he would laconically, almost churlishly, point out the sights with a jab of his pink, hairy hand and a few words from his close-pursed lips. The way he spoke about the things they passed would seem to heighten a feeling of some kind of inevitable tragedy. “We’re passing the UMass campus,” he’d say, or “We’re passing the First Church of Sunderland,” or “That there’s the Yankee Candle headquarters; its says ‘Scenter of the Universe’ on it.” Rosie felt that he would likely take much the same attitude towards showing her the house when they got to it. “Your cousin Mags went to UMass,” he observed at one stage, and Rosie did not want to wonder out loud who her cousin Mags was and why she never heard her mother talk about her.

            They took a few back streets through Greenfield and ended up on a partially suburbanized road leading up away from the town. The house was just after a graveyard on this road, between and behind a patchy curtain of yellowing and browning trees. It had been repainted since Rosie was young and was now a mousy sage-green color that made it fade somewhat into its surroundings. It was in what she believed was called a Federal style, vernacular, wooden and shingle. Her grandfather turned the Subaru up a longish gravel driveway and waved hello to a young woman Rosie did not recognize who was watering a raised bed of what looked like some kind of fall root vegetable. She was a few inches taller than Rosie, looked about her age, and had a pale face with a pointed nose between curtains of auburn hair. She was dressed in a tan jacket and a long multicolored skirt and the watering can that she held was of battered and slightly corroded metal of some kind.

            “Mags, this is your cousin Rosary Newgarth,” said her grandfather as they got out of the car. “She goes by Rosie.”

            “I remember. It’s good to see you again after all these years, Rosie.” Mags shook her hand and pulled her into a loose half-hug. Rosie racked her brains and then finally saw it, something unchanged in the roiling hair or the big glaring grey eyes. Yes, this was that girl with whom she had gone to the garden store and swum in the river long ago. She tightened the hug a little, and it felt like a long-forgotten instinct.

            “You have a good trip up, Rosie?” someone asked as they entered into what Rosie believed was called the house’s mudroom. He was a thick-set man with very dark hair and dark blue eyes, standing next to a tall, thin woman who seemed to have been painted from the same palette. They looked to be between forty-five and fifty years old, about Rosie’s father’s age and a little older than her mother, and she recognized them as Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret, her grandparents’ two eldest children. Uncle Franklin was in a plaid shirt and black jeans, Aunt Margaret in a plaid shirt and bluish-grey jeans. She held in her hand a pitcher of what looked like the bitter iced tea that Rosie remembered from her girlhood. One or two lemons wedges, which had clearly been squeezed out as much as humanly possible, floated in it like tablets or oracles cast into the sea. Rosie nodded, and told Uncle Franklin that, yes, her trip had gone fine and she felt excited for the weeks to come. And after all, that was true now; something about actually getting up here had reminded Rosie of the fascination that this place had held for her back in her early days, and she looked forward now to rediscovering that if she could.

            It was a little before six o’ clock and dinner was at seven, so Aunt Margaret took it upon herself to give Rosie a tour of the house. It had a nineteenth-century skeleton on which an up-to-date kitchen and bathroom had at some recent point been grafted like old skin around new wine—or was it the other way around? There were five bedrooms, three upstairs and two downstairs; one was Grandpa and Grandma’s, one was Mags’s, and the other three—two up and one down; the three that were easiest to reach considering the house’s warrenlike floor plan—were in principle for guests. Rosie was what was in principle about it and Aunt Margaret told her that Uncle Franklin was living her for the time being after a collapse in his life, a collapse of some unspecified but dramatic-seeming kind. One of the two real guests room, then, was at the moment occupied by a family from Maine, who were out visiting with friends right now and would be taking off after breakfast tomorrow (Aunt Margaret would be leaving after dinner tonight to return to her divorcée’s apartment in downtown Greenfield). Rosie wanted to ask where, all this being the case, she was going to sleep, but it slipped her mind when Aunt Margaret started telling her something about the house’s radiators.

            Dinner was something called a New England boiled dinner; it was a plate of boiled potatoes with other vegetables and some sort of corned beef. Grandpa Baring informed Rosie that it had entered the region’s cookery via immigration from Ireland, and Rosie said, by way of a joke, that it tasted like seven hundred and fifty years of oppression and regret must have felt. To her relief, everybody laughed at this.

            “I know the family that’s staying in that upstairs room won’t be eating with us tonight in particular,” she said, “but in general, can we expect people staying here as guests to eat with us more dinnertimes than not? I just want to know what to expect in terms of, well, privacy in this house, frankly. It’s a question that I have to admit I’ve been apprehensive about.” Nobody answered immediately. “I’m sorry if there’s something obvious that I’m missing,” Rosie said. “I don’t know much about what it’s like to run and bed and breakfast; I’m a numbers girl, not a hospitality industry girl.”

            “I’m going to address you as ‘Numbers Girl’ from now on, Rosie,” Mags said. “It’s cute.”

            “Go right ahead,” Rosie said. “Can somebody please answer my question about who will be here at a typical dinnertime?”

            “Just those of us who live here,” said Rosie’s grandmother, who looked almost exactly like Aunt Margaret only with silver hair and a more advanced set of crows’-feet. “Guests are responsible for their own meals other than breakfast. We have a narrow view of what the mission of a bed and breakfast ought to be, in part because of our own much-depleted resources, a subject that I would have been wondering about for a while now if I were you.”

            “I had been, actually, now that you mention it,” said Rosie. “Is this paying for Grandma and Grandpa and Mags and Uncle Franklin’s keep?” Uncle Franklin shook his head. “Okay.”

            “We’ve got money in the blue chips,” Uncle Franklin explained. “Just not as much of it as we used to.”

            “What does the bed and breakfast business actually pay for, then?”

            “Itself, barely,” said Grandpa Baring. “It holds a fascination for me, hosting people for a living. Something to do in my golden years—in my retirement, that is.” Rosie realized that she actually had no idea what manner of a career it was that her grandfather was retired from.

            “I see,” said Rosie. “If all that’s needed is to keep the bed and breakfast itself in the black, then I think I can manage that reasonably.”

            “You’re staying?” asked Uncle Franklin.

            “I’ve been here two hours,” Rosie said. “Ask me that again when I’ve been here two weeks. That is how long my dad always told me I should stick with a task to see how it goes.”

            “Helluva name, Newgarth,” said Uncle Franklin. “Where’s it come from, if you know?”

            “Ellis Island anglicization,” said Rosie, “I think of an uncommon Italian name called Nogarotto or Nogaretti. People think it’s German or Dutch for some reason; I’ve never understood why.”

            “Helluva name, Nogarotto,” Uncle Franklin said with a little bit more of a twinkle in his eye than he had had at any point before this.

            “Or Nogaretti,” said Mags. “Rosie, I’m sorry we couldn’t welcome you with a more impressive dinner. There was this elaborate salad that I found a recipe for in an old book of Aunt Margaret’s, but I couldn’t find some of the ingredients when I went to Foster’s this morning so I went with the old standby instead. I know it’s not very impressive.”

            “Did you cook it?” Rosie asked. Rosie herself was an acceptable cook, and Madison was growing into a good, if unsystematic, one, so back home their parents need not cook nearly as often as their inability ever to agree on a takeout option would normally have implied. Rosie was cautious about how such things were handled in such a household as this one appeared to be.

            “I cook more nights than not,” Mags said. “Breakfast is Grandma and Uncle Franklin’s responsibility, though, and we’re each responsible for our own lunch. That’ll include you, of course, once you’ve been here for a while and have your own stuff in the pantry and the fridge and so forth.”

            “I had no doubt,” said Rosie. It came out a bit more aggressive than she had meant it or wanted it to. Aunt Margaret looked up from her corned beef and potatoes to give Rosie a somewhat sharp look, probably because of that accidental but unmistakable harshness.

            “So you have issues with preparing your own food, Rosie?” Aunt Margaret asked. It sounded like a sincere question, much more sincere than it probably would have been had Rosie asked it of somebody herself.

            “No,” Rosie said. “That system sounds all right to me. Sorry if I gave the wrong idea.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” said Aunt Margaret. Rosie was unsure what that meant here.

            “What do you like to eat, Rosie?” her grandfather asked her then. “Franklin usually does the shopping so if you’ll just put things up on the Big Board when you want ‘em or need ‘em then we ought to be able to get ‘em for you.” He jabbed a thumb at a whiteboard on one of the kitchen’s walls. Rosie would not have called it a particularly big board, but it did have the pride of place amidst the other items in the kitchen that a genuinely big board might well have had. Currently it had written on it peanut butter (chunky), hot sauce, rice cakes, bacon, black tea, Earl Grey tea, unsalted butter, and incense. Rosie asked what the incense was for.

            “Mags likes the stuff,” Grandma said. “Burns it all hours.”

            “Couldn’t tell you why,” said Grandpa. “Might could be a habit she picked up from her mom and dad.” This raised, more or less explicitly, the question of who exactly Mags’s mom and dad actually were. Rosie’s occasionally-seen Aunt Lizzie and her husband, maybe? Aunt Lizzie was the little sister of Mom, Aunt Margaret, and Uncle Franklin, and she had married someone almost-famous. It was not at all clear to Rosie why, if Mags was Aunt Lizzie’s child, she would be living here rather than somewhere “better.” Rosie looked at Mags. Her big grey eyes were turned down to her plate of vegetables, but not, apparently, with embarrassment or with desire not to be understood. Did Rosie want to be understood, she wondered? For a long time now it had haunted and bedeviled her, the prospect and possibility of knowing what she wanted and being known for who she was. It was one of the scariest things in the world to think of, and something about Mags, this putative cousin of hers whose face had always stuck with her, made her feel as if her fears might soon come true.

            “Some day I’m going to tell one of my online friends the awful truth about this family,” Mags said archly. Rosie wondered if she really meant this. Somehow or other, she hoped that she did not.

            “Eat your vegetables, Mags,” Aunt Margaret said to her offhandedly.

            “Rosie,” said Mags as she ate her vegetables as instructed, “what music do you listen to?”

            Rosie shrugged. “Lady Gaga, Adele, Arcade Fire, sometimes Taylor Swift or something off some opera CDs I got from my Newgarth grandmother. You know, white people music for the most part. You?”

            “Much the same,” said Mags, “as well as some stuff that’s a little more wooish and mystical like Loreena McKennitt and Heather Dale. Do you know either of them?”

            “I know of Loreena McKennitt,” said Rosie. “Oh—I forgot to mention traditional pop. Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, and so on. Would you believe my sixteen-year-old sisters got into that stuff and then got me into it?”

            “I’d believe it,” said Grandma.

            Grandpa nodded. “Lotta younger people getting sick of the stuff on the radio and going back to the classics,” he said. “Not to make a moral thing of it of course like some of my old-man friends do, but it can do my heart good sometimes to be able to discuss this stuff with the young. You and I could have some good talks about it, Rosie. Helen O’Connell is a favorite of mine.”

            Rosie nodded. “Helen O’Connell is great,” she said, even though she had only heard a few of Helen O’Connell’s songs and was worried she might be getting her mixed up with Kitty Kallen. “I’d be glad to talk music with you or with Mags,” she said. “It’s a good thing Mags and I listen tot a lot of the same stuff since Aunt Margaret implied she and I will be in the same room for the first little while I’m here.”

            Mags looked at Aunt Margaret. “That’s the decision that’s been arrived at?” she asked.

            “Are you unhappy with it, Mags?” Aunt Margaret asked her. Mags shook her head. “You seem a little perturbed,” Aunt Margaret said.

            “I’m not unhappy with it, quite the contrary,” said Mags, whatever that meant, “but ‘perturbed’ is a good word for the fact that you didn’t ask me about this beforehand and I’m just hearing it from Rosie now at this dinner. That’s all,” she finished, with a bite of carrots.

            “Would you rather set things up otherwise?” asked Rosie. She was honestly hoping that Mags would say yes; having a roommate was not an aspect of college life that she missed now that it was over.

            “I would rather we see how it works out, to be honest with you,” said Mags. “We might as well. More room for guests.”

            “More room for guests,” conceded Rosie, and she felt uncomfortable about it till she saw how honest Mags’s smile was.

3.

The Conversation 

September passed into October and Rosie got to know the guests, the family, and how the house and the area worked. She reassured her grandparents early on that, although she was Catholic, they did not need to worry about getting her to Mass except on the major holidays. Mags was also Catholic, but otherwise the whole household was Yankee Congregationalist; indeed, Uncle Franklin had apparently been ordained as a Congregationalist minister at some church out in Chicago before coming back East after his crackup. Grandma and Grandpa went to a church in a nearby little town called Bernardston rain or shine each Sunday morning. Rosie took a ride up there with them once and was interested to see that the church had a rainbow flag out front of it and was just up the little town’s main drag from a pizza place.

            She and Mags managed to share a room more or less convivially. It was an odd room, with a boarded-up fireplace and a closet that stretched out strangely along one of the outer walls of the house; it had two twin beds in it. Rosie was unsure what exactly Mags did in terms of work, whether it be for the bed and breakfast or managing the blue chips or doing something else to earn her own keep. She spent many afternoons cooped up in their heavily shaded room, reading old pulp paperbacks in her one of the two small beds. Some evenings she would sit up late with a jeweler’s glass in one eye working on crafting projects of beadwork and wire. She kept the resulting pieces—decorations, jewelry, or wherever they may be—in the drawers of a work desk that took up one corner of the room; Rosie was loath to go over there and rifle through it, wanting to be polite despite the temptation.

            One day in early October, when the trees of Massachusetts were blazing, Rosie complained of a pain in her stomach.

            “What’s wrong?” Mags asked, casting a brief glance at Rosie before going back to one of her crafting projects.

            “Oh, it’s just my period,” Rosie said, feeling a little embarrassed. “Lately it’s been coming in weird fits and starts. It’s more painful than it used to be too.”

            “I know of numbers of herbal remedies you can take to regulate that,” Mags said casually. “Although I wouldn’t recommend most of them if you sleep with men and have strong feelings about abortion.”

            Rosie shook her head. “Haven’t slept with a guy in six months, don’t think much about abortion unless someone else brings it up,” she said. “Hit me.”

            Mags proceeded to rattle off the names of five or six different flowering plants Rosie had never heard of, plus something called cramp bark that she remembered from a joke in an old episode of Seinfeld. Mags—whose puffy white blouse and dark jeans were also reminding Rosie of Seinfeld—noted Rosie’s lack of recognition and wrote down the names of the herbs on a legal pad for her. “If you do start sleeping with men again then these might be best avoided,” she reiterated.

            “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Rosie. “It—do you mind if I ask if you’re one of those girls who have an interest in witchcraft, spells, what-have-you?”

            “Don’t call me a ‘girl’; I’m pretty sure I’m two years older than you,” said Mags. “And yes, sort of. I like herbs, I like flowers, I like cooking, and most of the prayers my mother and father taught me were to get boons from various saints. So I’m Catholic, but…” She shrugged. “Catholicism’s probably the most witchlike form of Christianity anyway,” she said, “although you didn’t hear that from me if someone chats with us after Midnight Mass in a couple months or whatever.”

            “Who exactly are your mother and father?” asked Rosie. “Your last name is McNulty, right?”

            Mags nodded. “My name is Margaret Evangeline McNulty, yes.”

            “I’d been assuming you were Aunt Lizzie’s daughter, but if I remember right, Aunt Lizzie’s husband’s last name is Scott or Skerritt or something like that.”

            “Scott, yes. Chuck Scott, the Food Network guy. No, I’m not Aunt Lizzie’s daughter; she was only sixteen when I was born, and she got married young but not that young. My parents were Charles and Sherrill McNulty; the McNultys and the Barings always had close ties in these parts, and your grandfather’s family took my father in when his father turned to drink and started beating on him. This was in the early sixties, when Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin were babies and just before your mother was born.”

            Rosie paused to give this some thought. There was much that this still did not explain—Mags and her father going completely without mention in twenty-two years of Mom’s stories about the family, the fact that Mags called the same people “aunt” and “uncle” that Rosie did but referred to Grandpa Baring as “your grandfather,” the fact that Mags had affirmatively called herself Rosie’s cousin for weeks now rather than qualifying it in any way. Rosie guessed that some of this would probably make sense if she put two and two together, but she did not have the energy to do that just this minute; she was still having a bad period, and she had slept badly the night before.

            “What’s that you’re working on?” she asked Mags. “With the beads and the wires.”

            “This is what I do to earn my living,” Mags said. “I make jewelry inspired by classic sci-fi and fantasy novels and sell them through an online store. I started doing it for friends in the UMass sci-fi club when I was a student there four or five years ago, but it surprised me how many people were willing to pay good money for the things. It takes up a lot of my time, but I enjoy it and I’m good at it and some of the money I make from it does go to help the rest of this family stay afloat.” She got up from where she was sitting, handed a bracelet of some sort to Rosie where Rosie sat in her own bed, and went back to where she had been sitting. “That one is for A Case of Conscience by James Blish. The ones I’m working on now are for The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.”

            Rosie looked at the bracelet that Mags had handed her. It was made of a tight spiral of thin strong wire and on it were green and silver beads and charms depicting a crucifix, a lizard, a television set, and several other things for which she lacked context. “Have you read it?” Mags was asking her.

            She shook her head. “I haven’t even heard of it. I’ve heard of the other two, though.”

            “Not many people have heard of Blish these days except as an author of Star Trek novelizations, but in his own day he was, as our esteemed Vice President would say, a big fucking deal,” Mags said. “I’d recommend A Case of Conscience if I’ve read your tastes right over the past few weeks. If you take that recommendation, I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it?”

            “Of course I will,” said Rosie.

            “So what about you?” asked Mags, with her legs crossed and her arms crossed and her head held high and arch over her body. “What’s your story, Rosie? I’ve gleaned bits and pieces of it over the past few weeks, and of course I remember you from back when we were girls, but I don’t think I’ve ever been privy to the full Rosie Newgarth experience, so to speak. You went to a state university in New York, didn’t you?”

            Rosie nodded. “SUNY Binghamton,” she said. “Generally considered the best SUNY campus, although believe it or not that wasn’t why I applied; I just didn’t want to be too near home.” Mags nodded sympathetically, but probably not empathetically given that if she had been to UMass Amherst herself it had clearly not been that much of a consideration for her. “Binghamton is an interesting place. It’s one of those old industrial cities out near the Pennsylvania line. Lots of poor black people and what I guess used to be called ‘white ethnics’ whereas the campus was mostly middle-class kids, mostly white, lots Jewish. So you can imagine that town-gown relations were a bit touch-and-go. But that itself is something I learned a lot from, especially considering that I’d spent my whole life until then in Nassau County, on Long Island, with its police unions and so forth.”

            “Aren’t Jewish people themselves considered ‘white ethnic’ among people who use such terms?” asked Mags. “Never mind; I know that’s not the point. I understand what you’re saying.”

            “Thank you.”
            “You majored in economics, right?”

            Rosie nodded. “So did both my parents. Actually when they met my mom was doing her BA in resource economics and my dad was in the MBA program at the same university. They graduated in the same year and got married right after. I don’t think they were ever in a situation where he was helping teach a class she was in; they’re both too ethical for that, I think. They were always very concerned that Madison and I not feel like we were owed a living or like the rules didn’t apply to us. That’s probably part of why rather than coming right up here when it was suggested I fired off a few last salvos of job applications first. I don’t like nepotism, or whatever you’d call it instead of nepotism in a granddaughter’s case.”

            “Hmm,” said Mags with what sounded an awful lot like mild disapproval. “But that isn’t your real number one reason for not having wanted to come back up here, is it, Rosie? I don’t doubt that it played a role, but when you did come here, as a little girl, I remember that you were always so concerned to go home and get back into things with your parents and sister. Do you remember the Heath Fair? It’s that little agricultural fair we went to together in I think the year 2000, when you were eleven and I was thirteen.”

            Rosie thought back on it and came up with vague, pleasing memories of deep and unapologetic rurality. Petting zoos; competitions in various things that could be grown or jarred or bottled; a string band; some sort of contest in feats of strength between a series of tractors. It had been in late summer, probably, a series of warm evenings with a breeze with fall’s first bite in it. She remembered that it had been a long drive up to the fairgrounds, even from Greenfield; it must have been very deeply and very specially local, and thus, since she was a visitor, very carefully and very magnanimously shared with her. She nodded. She did remember it, whether or not she remembered it in the way that Mags apparently wanted her to, whether or not she remembered about it the things that Mags apparently wished to evoke.

            “I think you were apprehensive about being among people you knew less well in a situation where everybody would have to constantly evoke blood family ties rather than actual familiarity to justify spending all our time together,” Mags said. “Of course, you and I can’t evoke even that and have to rely on a network of relationships that existed twenty or thirty years before either of us were born. But now you’re here; you volunteered yourself for that ordeal. And it is something of an ordeal; I don’t say that sarcastically at all.”

            “Are you going to let me speak for myself, Mags, or are you just going to analyze me all afternoon?” Rosie asked.

            “I’m sorry,” said Mags, and she genuinely did seem to be sorry. “Please, go ahead with what you were saying about your parents.”

            “Oh, just that they’re very well-matched and it’s in fact a little strange to think of Mom as having originally come from another family—from this family—given that it’s always been Dad and Dad’s family who I’ve…known along with her,” said Rosie, trailing off as she realized that known along with her was a belabored phrase of a kind that deflated what she was getting at.

            “I wish I could say the same about my parents,” said Mags. “Things weren’t easy when I was a kid.” She shrugged. “Probably I shouldn’t make this about me, though,” she said. “Aunt Margaret’s always telling me I’m a little too focused on myself and my own needs. You seem not to have that problem, at least not as much.”

            “I wish I had that problem,” said Rosie. “I have the ‘productivity’ problem; the Recession’s not letting me ‘contribute’ the way I think I’m supposed to, and being an econ major makes me feel better about that rather than worse. I thought I’d be working at some regional business or the branch headquarters of some big white-collar firm right around now. Not glamorous, maybe not even that socially useful, but, well, something I wouldn’t feel embarrassed telling others. When I was at that coffeeshop downtown the other day I ran into this other girl who was new in town and she asked me what I was doing up here. I told her I’d taken a job in hospitality management.”

            “But you have taken a job in hospitality management,” said Mags. “You helping Aunt Margaret talk down our electric bill the other day is going to save us at least fifteen hundred dollars a year without us having to raise prices for the guests.”

            “It feels weird when it’s for your family,” said Rosie. As she was saying it she realized that there was a slight ambiguity here, around the idea of family. Mags had put her finger on this when she pointed out that it was just family that Rosie had here, not people with whom she was familiar. Yet the two words, family and familiar, were similar enough that Rosie had a difficult time making the distinction, especially since they had the same etymology; therefore she felt guilty, as if to complain about her family was to complain about being among people who loved her, rather than about being among people whom she did not let know well. Mags seemed to understand at least well enough to nod.

            “I doubt it would feel less weird if we weren’t your family,” Mags said. “New subject, but do you have any pets at home you’re missing? I’m thinking of getting a cat—not a black one, if you can believe it; I’ve always liked tabbies and calicos.”

            The change of subject was abrupt, but Rosie experienced it as a lifeline; probably Mags had meant it as one. As it happened, she had a late, lamented, beloved dog whose history she could relate to her cousin. Mags was happy to hear that history, and so they passed the time companionably as that afternoon winged into a chilly autumn evening.

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.