Generations
by Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl’s current principal activity is traveling around the world as much as possible—he visited his seventh (and last, because that’s all there are) continent in 2004, and hopes to get to his fifty-first and fifty-second countries in 2006—but he keeps on writing when he can find the time. His short story collection, Platinum Pohl, out this year from Tor, is his one hundred and thirty-fifth book. His one hundred and thirty-sixth will be a novel, Underneath the Mountain, in which he will bring the ruined old city of Pompeii back to life. In his first tale for us in more than ten years, he takes a harrowing look at the future and a legacy that may be passed on.
* * * *
Stephen Avedon, B.Sc., M. Ed.
The truth of the matter is that I knew Sheila Carrington was out of my class from the first moment I saw her. That was when we were stuck in the waiting area at LAX, made to mark time until our plane, which had been delayed getting in because of bad weather, would open its doors. What I noticed first, of course, was that she looked very trim and blonde and pretty. The other thing I noticed was that she was busy fending off a plump guy in the next seat who was hitting on her.
I could see right away that she was definitely first class.
And first class is where she went when we boarded the plane, too. I didn’t. I was back in steerage, where the seats are constructed for nobody over five feet five and there’s always a line for the toilets. Even when the flying is smooth, which this time it wasn’t.
The captain turned the seat-belt sign off at cruising altitude, but five minutes later he turned it back on again. “Folks,” he said on the horn, his voice deep and, of course, basically Texan, “I really hate to say it but the radar’s telling us that this next little bit of air’s going to be kind of bumpy. So what we have to ask you to do is return to your seats and fasten your belts. Hopefully the turbulence won’t be that long. Then I’m looking for a smooth ride all the way to JFK.”
He didn’t get what he was looking for, though. The sign was off for maybe ten minutes or so over Arizona, and then it was back on all the way over New Mexico. Even when the sign was off the ride wasn’t really smooth.
That didn’t bother me much. I don’t get airsick, and I was watching the movie, anyway. I barely noticed when the stews began to stagger around and slop us our lunch, choice of some kind of chicken or some kind of beef, until all of a sudden the whole damn airplane took a kind of unexpected roller-coaster dip and slide. Somebody’s salad went flying across the aisle and landed in the lap of the lady next to me. So did the stew who was trying to serve it. She caught herself just as she was following the salad into the lady’s lap.
Then it got worse.
I’d never had a ride quite like that. For a pretty long time after that first scary drop, the stews were scurrying around to get their carts locked down and themselves strapped into their seats, and nobody from the cockpit was saying anything to us at all. Meanwhile the plane was flopping this way and that and making unpleasant little squeaky and scrapy noises. When the bouncing around eased off a little we got the captain back on the horn. He was more apologetic than ever. There was nothing in the world to worry about, he told us, but there were rules they had to follow. One of the rules was that when an aircraft had been subjected to that much turbulent stress they were supposed to land and check it out before proceeding, so our first landing wasn’t going to be at JFK but at Kansas City International. When we got there—the passengers clapped like crazy as we touched down—they made us all get off and sit in the waiting area by the gate.
That was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
The thing is, just as I was reaching for a magazine to read, that nice-looking blonde woman from first class plunked herself down into the seat beside me. “May I?” she asked. But she was already there, and anyway there wasn’t any real question about whether she might or might not.
Actually, one of the reasons I’d taken that package tour to Yosemite was that I was sort of hoping to meet some nice, maybe kind of Helen-Hunt-looking, woman to replace the one who’d dumped me at Easter. That hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t entirely because of my good looks and savoir faire that the woman from first class had joined me, though. Mostly she was trying to get away from the plump little fellow I’d noticed with her before, who was in paper products and had a company hotel suite waiting for him in New York ... and had already been refused a fourth Cosmopolitan by the stew, even before the worst of the turbulence hit us. I didn’t care why she picked that seat. I was just happy to have her there.
I stayed happy, too. Even when I learned that she was some kind of Wall Street lawyer, and so really, definitely out of the class of a physics teacher from Brooklyn Technical High School. Putting it in numerical terms, that’s to say about a quarter of a million dollars a year out of my class. Only, because God was being good to me that day, it turned out that her own high school had actually been Brooklyn Tech. She had been majoring in the civil engineering courses, before she changed her mind and decided she was never in this world going to be happy as an engineer and so wound up in Harvard and Harvard Law and the kind of a job that kept flying her all over the place to negotiate merger contracts and IPOs.
She remembered some of her old Tech teachers. I was able to tell her which ones were still there and which ones were retired, and how Mrs. Einborg was still as fat as ever and Miss Kornfeld never did get married, and that the food in the cafeteria was all different now—not so much of the french fries any more, more two-percent milk than Coke—but not really a lot better.
We were there in that airport for nearly three hours. There was plenty of nonstop pissing and moaning from most of the stranded passengers, but those were three very good hours for me. They finally let us get back on the plane—”Good as new, folks, they’ve checked everywhere and there’s no trace of structural damage at all”—and by that time I had her name—”Just call me Sheila”—and she had given me her phone number.
* * * *
Actually the kind of money Sheila was pulling down didn’t make as much difference as I was afraid it might.
Loaded or not, Sheila was not a high-maintenance date. She didn’t mind that we didn’t go to Twenty-one for lunch and Vail for a skiing weekend. Probably she’d had enough of those things to last her, and anyway there were a lot of things we found to do in New York even on a teacher’s salary. Up to the Cloisters on one Saturday, to the planetarium at the Natural History museum on another. Old movies at MOMA. Swimming at Jones Beach a couple of times in the summer. We went there in her car because it was a Beamer convertible and a lot more comfortable than my old Corolla, but she politely asked me to do the driving and didn’t criticize when I did.
It was a good time. Well, actually it was the best time I’d ever had in my life. The only thing we ever quarreled about was which movie to watch on her industrial-sized television, and we generally settled that by the flip of a coin. When we were in my own place Sheila had no interest in watching the Mets lose their ordained 60 percent of their games, but she was content to let me watch them in one of the two little rooms of my apartment while she curled up in the window of the other, reading one of my physics texts or science magazines. They were recreational reading for her. She still had all of the curiosity about how the universe worked that had made her twelve-year-old self take the entrance exam for Tech. The career had gone a different way, but the interest hadn’t left her. Still fascinated her, in fact. She couldn’t believe what weirdnesses had come along in, say, cosmology since she was in school. Branes? Dark matter? Dark energy, for Christ’s sake? The one that really pulled her cork, though, was the announcement that some of the most distant galaxies weren’t slowing down as they fled away from us, as gravitational attraction should have made them do, but were actually speeding up in the universal expansion. “That,” she told me, “is crap, Steve. It doesn’t make sense. Somebody’s made a pretty stupid mistake.” And then, when I explained to her about all the observational evidence, and how many separate sources it had come from, she sighed. “Oh, hell, hon,” she said. “I don’t get any of this at all. Maybe I should sign up for some night courses at CUNY.”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll tutor you.”
I did, too. I tutored the hell out of her, all that spring and summer and fall and well into the winter. And the only times that were better than the times when we were walking around the Park and talking, or staying up late to watch Jon Stewart on the “Daily Show” and talking, or lingering over a Japanese or Greek or Indian meal—always pretty cheap places, but places where they didn’t mind if we stayed a while, holding hands—the only times that were better than those when we were out of bed, I’m saying, were the times when we were in. That was better than I’d ever had it and, bless her heart, Sheila said it was for her, too.
And then it was Christmas, and we went out to the Island to meet her parents.
That was a little scary. The Carringtons seemed to be happy enough about Sheila and me, though. The only problem I could detect anywhere in the world was still the fact that she made so much more money than I did.
Then it was New Year’s. Not just your average New Year’s, remember, because this was Happy New Millennium time. The year that was coming up was 2001, and everything was going to be different.
I hoped so, anyway. So when the ball dropped and we had done that first formal New Year’s kiss I said, “I wish it could stay this way forever.” And Sheila rubbed her cheek against mine and didn’t say anything, and I said, “I love you, hon.”
She said, “I know.”
I said, “I can’t imagine a life without you in it.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she sat up, wearing the face she always wore when she could see I was stalling about something, and said, “Oh, shut the fuck up, Steve. If you want to ask me something for Christ’s sake go ahead and ask it.”
So I did. I said, “Sheila, will you marry me?”
“Damn straight I will,” she said. “My mom would kill me if I didn’t, anyway.”
So then we kissed some more, and then she sat back, looking almost as pleased with herself as I was with me. “Actually,” she said, patting her hair back into some kind of shape, “it’s probably a good idea for us to get married, because I kind of think I’m pregnant.”
* * * *
Silvie Avedon Khoshaba
My Dad never wanted me to become a physicist because there wasn’t any money in it. So I didn’t do it. I married one, though, and I never regretted it. I didn’t marry Ron because he was a scientist, or at least I don’t think that was the reason. I married Ron because he was a hunk, and because I liked the guy a lot, and maybe mostly because he was a hell of a fine folk dancer.
That’s where we met, in the little park by the river where our group danced on Tuesday nights in the summer—where my father let me go because there isn’t anything very sexy about folk dancing and where I didn’t mind going without having a date to bring me, because most of the other girls didn’t have one either. Ron and I were both regulars, so I danced with him pretty often. I did my best, trying to be inconspicuous about it, to get next to him when we did the Hora or the Miserlou. I liked the way he spun me around when we were doing that kind of dance. I especially liked the way he did those falling-down-drunk kinds of Greek dances that are for men only, and those of us who weren’t men could have a pretty good time sitting on the grass and checking out the beefcake.
I didn’t take him seriously, though. How could I?
It wasn’t really the fact that he was an Arab, even if an American-born Arab, that worried me, but I couldn’t help noticing that he was getting along in years. He must have been at least thirty-five or thirty-six. To me that was Methuselah. I was seventeen. I hadn’t even been drafted yet, and he was a lieutenant-colonel, which I knew because sometimes that winter, when we were doing our dancing in the basement of the Y and the skinheads were cruising the streets, he’d show up in uniform so the skinheads wouldn’t start something he’d have to finish.
Anyway, what happened was that at one of the Tuesdays toward the end of the summer it rained.
The rain had let up a little after dinner. Most of us hopefuls showed up at eight anyway on the chance the rain wouldn’t start up again. We hadn’t even finished the first Israeli Hora when it began to come down again. The most hopeful of us didn’t give up. We retreated to our cars to wait the rain out, and as I didn’t have a car I joined Ron in his. We talked for a while. Then we began to kiss and, hey, like they say, the rest is history.
We didn’t rush into anything. We sneaked around for a year and a bit before I decided I wanted something more permanent than an occasional afternoon in the bed in Ron’s BOQ at the fort. So I told Dad I wanted to marry this Iraqi-American leaf colonel.
Dad stopped eating when I said that. I’d waited for dinner to tell him, and I’d had our part-time cook make his favorite sauerbraten with red cabbage and potato pancakes, just the way he liked it. He sat for a while rubbing his forehead and looking into space, but not at me. I knew what he was doing—that is, he was rehearsing all the mistakes he’d made bringing me up as a single parent. Lately he’d been doing that a lot. (He hadn’t really done that bad a job, you know. When my mother got killed and left him stuck with a two-month-old squalling baby he took a year off and changed my diapers himself. Fortunately there was plenty of money from the indemnities, so he could easily afford a full-time nursemaid, and it all worked out all right. I wasn’t wild, you know. I didn’t do drugs or anything, but on the other hand I hadn’t been a virgin since my sixteenth birthday, and Dad kind of suspected that was the case.)
Finally he said, “I thought you hated Arabs. Because of your mom, I mean.”
“Ron was born in Duluth, Minnesota,” I told him. “You don’t get much more American than Ron Khoshaba.”
“He’s in the weapons-analysis corps,” Dad said. “He could be sent to a combat area any time.”
“So could I,” I said. “After I was inducted, I mean. So could you, even.”
That wasn’t very likely. Dad was way deep down in the reserve-activation list on account of being a teacher. He didn’t argue about it, though. He just sighed. “I wish you hadn’t lost your mom so early,” he said meditatively, and then, “Oh, hell, I guess you probably know what you’re doing. All right. You’ve got my blessing. I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until you were, say, nineteen, though.”
We did wait. Ron wouldn’t have it any other way, because he still had that old-world reverence for fathers. Anyway, we were still getting it on a couple of times a week in Ron’s BOQ suite.
There was some disputation about the wedding. Dad and I would have been happy with a justice of the peace. Ron put his foot down. “When my parents came to America they became Lutherans. They had me baptized as a Christian and I guess I still am one. Anyway, you’ve got a minister right across the road, don’t you?”
We did. We had Billy de Blount’s father and Dr. de Blount was definitely a minister—Presbyterian instead of Lutheran, sure, but, once we gave in on the church wedding, Ron didn’t make a fuss about denominations. Rev. de Blount was an old friend, well, sort-of friend. He had talked my dad into sending me to his Sunday school when I was ten, and sometimes he took Billy and me to some G-rated Disney movie or for a soda at Friendly’s Ice Cream. I finally put a stop to that. Although Billy was two years younger than I he had a serious crush on me, and it got annoying.
I think Dad was a little worried that Ron would pull rank on him, since Ron was doing real physics research and Dad was only a high-school teacher getting ready to retire. That didn’t happen. Ron wasn’t like that. I wouldn’t have married him if he was, and anyway the kind of research Ron was doing wasn’t anything like the kind Dad had always wished he could be doing himself. The War took care of that. Ron was pretty anal about security, so he never exactly told me what he was doing, but some of his assistants weren’t as cautious. So I knew. Basically he was sniffing around captured Islamic positions for traces of radionuclides that didn’t belong there. Their checking for isotopes was done down to the parts per trillion level, in the hope that they could keep track of what the Arabs had up their sleeves. And what made Ron go into physics in the first place was exactly the same thing that had done it for Dad. They both had wanted to know what rules the universe ran by. They still did. They spent a lot of after-dinner hours talking about what the Australians and the Scandinavians were doing.
Which wasn’t much. Since so many American facilities got merged or shut down entirely due to the War not a lot was happening in theoretical physics. It wasn’t actually that much better in most of the rest of the world, either. The Europeans were too busy fighting their own war against the terrorists, with the Islamists a lot closer to European heartlands were to ours. They barely even kept CERN going. And, maybe because they no longer had anybody important to compete against, I guess the Russians and the Chinese had more or less lost interest.
That seemed to piss my father off even more than it did Ron. “You’re too young to remember,” he’d tell me, “but I was around when places like Fermilab and Stanford and Bell Labs were turning up new stuff every day. You don’t know about Bell Labs, do you? They invented the transistor there, and Claude Shannon developed his information theories, and Rudi Kampfner invented the traveling-wave tube and God knows what all else. It wasn’t the Arabs that did the Labs in, either. It was just corporate greed.”
And so on and on, the two of them taking turns in their nightly deploring contest. I loved them both. Quite a lot, in fact. But sometimes I did wish that they would now and then look on the bright side.
* * * *
Because, you know, we didn’t have that bad a life. My father and I had lived all my life in the big house on the shore that my mother bought for the family just before she got killed. I loved the place. When Dad turned it over to Ron and me as a wedding present I cried. He said it was too much house for a single man. Even with the part-time help we’d always had from the town it was too much house for me, too, but then Ron hired a couple of refugees named Bruce and Rebecca so I could get on with school. Dad didn’t move out. Ron wouldn’t let him. So Dad took over the maid’s quarters on the third floor, had his own sitting room and bath and, quite unnecessarily, kitchen. That meant that the servants had to sleep in the place we fixed up for them in the basement, but it wasn’t that bad, really. Anyway they didn’t mind. It was undoubtedly better than the plastic tents in the Hessa Hissa camp they’d lived in, back in the Sudan, until the lightning struck and they got that visa to America.
By then I was twenty, going on twenty-one, and just about to start my second year at the local community college. My major wasn’t physics. English lit. I still loved listening to Ron and Dad talk about the black holes and the quarks and all, though not enough to have any wish to follow in their footsteps. Thus, an English lit major. The war was going badly, as usual, but we had plenty to eat and plenty of time on our own—well, I mean when Ron hadn’t been sent off to poke around Barcelona or Marseilles or Haifa or some other place that we had just recaptured from Islam, before the Islamists recaptured it back. And not counting the optional, but not very optional, third weekend of every month. That’s what we spent in our voluntary (but not very voluntary) training with the Citizens’ Defense Corps, learning how to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at an Arab tank, if one ever appeared in New Jersey. None ever did. Even the servants had to sign up for the CDC, or risk losing their green cards. They didn’t mind. They hadn’t forgotten what it was like in Dafur. They had a pretty good practical idea of what Arab tanks could do, too, and anyway all the CDC stuff was entertainingly theoretical. None of us was likely to be called up.
Dad wasn’t teaching regularly any more, but he still took on one or two physics classes a semester. It would have made sense for him to take a little flat in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights, but he wasn’t willing to abandon the house Mom had bought for us. Commuting, though, was a problem. Mom had had her own arrangements, at least when the weather was halfway decent. A hydrofoil would come and pick her up at our little dock and whisk her right across New York Bay to the Battery Park City pier in lower Manhattan, and it didn’t even cost her anything because the company paid for the whole thing. Dad wouldn’t do that. He didn’t have a rich company to pick up the check for him, though he really could have afforded it if he’d wanted to. He said it was because it was too extravagant, but I think it was because it reminded him too much of my mother.
So he got up early every morning he had classes and drove himself in to Brooklyn across the Verrazano. That shot his whole coalcohol ration, but I never used all of mine up and Ron had a surplus—got a field-grade officer’s ration to begin with, and was often enough deployed to somewhere where he couldn’t use it. So Dad got all the coupons he needed. Besides, we walked a lot when the weather let us.
That was one of the reasons I hated to see the summer come to an end. Well, that and the vine-ripe tomatoes and the corn, of course. Labor Day was pretty much the cutoff for us. We didn’t celebrate the holiday by marching in any parade, but it was the alarm-clock ring that told us to get ready for cold weather and school. When I sat on the porch that day, I could see that the seed pods were beginning to drop off the catalpas. Dad and Ron were nursing their beers in one corner of the porch, talking particle physics, as usual, and debating whether to go in for what might be their last swim of the summer. I was on the porch steps trying to get a head start on the school year by reading the American lit text ahead of time. I heard somebody go “pssst”—yes, literally “pssst”—from behind the hydrangea bushes. The only person I knew who would say “pssst” was Billy de Blount. I sighed, turned the book off and stood up. I kept my voice low and said, “For God’s sake, Billy, why don’t you show yourself like a normal human being?”
He stood up enough so that I could see his head. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” he ordered. “I just didn’t want to disturb your dad and—” he jerked a thumb in Ron’s direction—”him.”
I have to admit that in some ways I didn’t altogether mind having a teenager who had such a crush on me that he hated even to say my husband’s name. Still, he really was a pest.
“You disturbed me,” I informed him. “What do you want? And come out of those damn bushes.”
He didn’t come out from behind the hydrangeas. If he had, Ron and Dad could have seen him, and that was something Billy tried to avoid. He did answer the question, though. He peered at a piece of paper in his hand that looked familiar—actually, it turned out to be a page from my father’s notebook—and asked, “What is ortho-positronium?”
I held out my hand. “Give me that.”
He made a face, but he passed it over. It was a list in Dad’s sloppy handwriting:
g 
c 
Fine structure constant 
Ortho-positronium decay 
Planck’s constant
The list didn’t make a lot more sense to me than it had to Billy. “Where’d you get it?” I demanded.
He hung his head, the way he did. “It was on the lawn. I picked it up. Anyway, when your dad and him were writing this stuff down they were talking about God, and I wondered—”
“You wondered if they were getting religion?”
He didn’t answer that, just scowled. Then he said, “So what does it mean?”
“How the hell would I know? Why don’t you ask them?”
That time he just pointed, but it answered the question, sort of. Ron and Dad had made their decision. They were already stripped to their shorts, on the way down to the river.
Of course, Billy wouldn’t have asked them anything anyhow, since that would have meant actually speaking to my husband. But it made his point. “All right,” I said. “I’ll ask them when I get a chance. But next time you come to the door and knock. Okay? I’m tired of you sneaking around the house.” And then, as he started to turn away, still scowling—he scowled a lot, for a teenager—I had to add, “You sure they were actually talking about God?”
* * * *
Rebecca had made one of Ron’s favorites for supper that night—hamburger Stroganoff, where it didn’t matter how tough that range-fed beef was because it had been ground to about the consistency of a Big Mac. I didn’t ask the question while we were eating. What we talked about was how muddy the river was getting, and whether our eel population was ever going to recover from the depredations we had waged on it in the bad times before rationing started, when you had to know somebody to get a pork chop at the Safeway. And then we talked about how I felt about starting another school year, and why Ron had to make a quick trip to some damn island in the Caribbean next week. He wouldn’t say the “why,” of course. He wouldn’t even say which island, but Rebecca had already been told to pack both his snorkel and his hill-climbing boots, so I was pretty sure it was Jamaica.
Then Rebecca cleared everything away and Ron tipped the last of the bottle of Peruvian merlot into our glasses. I thought that was a good time to ask them about what Billy had said.
They both looked puzzled. “He thought we were talking about God?” Ron said, and Dad said, “Let me see that paper.”
When he looked at it he began to laugh. He passed it to Ron, who laughed just about as much. Then Ron leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He turned to Dad. “You want to show her the book, Steve?”
Still grinning, my father reached over to where he had left his shoulder bag, and pulled out a book. What I mean to say here is a paper book. With the data printed on it in ink. The cover told me its title was The Universe Next Door, and it was written by someone named Marcus Chown. “I’ve had this for thirty years,” Dad informed me. “So when this story about the Moon came along I remembered it and pulled it down to show Ron.”
“What story about the Moon?” I asked, but Ron was already talking.
“A lot of it’s out of date, of course, but the guy had some interesting ideas,” he said.
“Always did,” Dad agreed. “Best science writer there was.”
I gave them both a look, about ten seconds apiece of my don’t-be-such-pains-in-the-ass,—will-you? look. “Ortho-positronium,” I reminded them.
“Oh, sorry,” Ron apologized. “It’s just that it takes a little explaining. Ortho-positronium is—I guess you could call it an element? Sort of, anyway?” He was looking at Dad, who shrugged. “All right,” Ron said, “let’s say it’s some kind of an element. A very simple one. Like hydrogen. Only instead of being made of an electron and a proton, the way hydrogen is, positronium is made of an electron and a positron. You know what a positron is?”
Dad gave him an indignant look. “Of course she knows what a positron is.”
I did, more or less—it was like an electron, only it had a positive charge, like a proton, instead of the electron’s negative one. I nodded because I was actually understanding what they were talking about. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t, because they began talking about mirror matter and it didn’t really sound as though they were talking to me. “Oh, hell,” I said, holding out my hand. “Why don’t you just give me the damn book?”
* * * *
Having the actual book in my hands was better, but not a whole lot better. I was getting lost in stuff about time running backward and baby universes being born, and my father’s thirty-year-old scribblings in the margins of the pages didn’t help. Then it occurred to me to use the index. That was a lot like looking something up on my screen, though a lot slower, but then I did find out what they were talking about.
There turned out to be more than one kind of positronium, but the kind they were talking about was called ortho-positronium, never mind why. Ortho-positronium was something that got made in particle accelerators, and after it was made it didn’t stick around very long. It lived for.000000142 of a second, after which it blew up into three photons and was gone. Or, anyway, that’s when it was supposed to do it, but when they came down to measure the time exactly, the damn thing dissolved into photons one tenth of a percent faster than that.
Big deal, right? But they seemed to be sure about the numbers, God knows why, so I kept on reading and—after a lot of really weird stuff about mirror universes and such—I came to some talk about a man named Edward Harrison.
Harrison had an idea that might explain the discrepancy. Suppose, he said, that there’s a really advanced race of space aliens, off somewhere in infinite space and time. Suppose one of them wants to understand how the whole universe works. How would they go about it?
Well, if they were like human scientists, Harrison reasoned, they would make something like a computer model that they could study. Only, since they were really advanced superbeings, they would make a really good model. In fact it would be so good in all its details that it would contain every last aspect of the real universe.
Including, for example, us.
And the “us” in that model universe would have no idea they were nothing but computer simulations, as indeed we did not.
All right, I thought that was kind of interesting. Scary, even, although only in the way that ghosts and vampires were scary when you were eight years old and already pretty sure that such things didn’t really exist. What I didn’t see was what had made it interesting to Ron and Dad right now.
Then I took another look at Dad’s scribbles. One of them had a date next to it, and the date was a recent one: Woomara, 24 August 2022.
It only took a moment of searching on my omnibook to find what that meant. A couple of weeks earlier some radioastronomers at the old radio-telescope in Australia were doing some routine testing of their equipment. What that amounted to was just bouncing radar off the corner reflectors that early astronauts had left on the Moon a couple of generations before. And then they reported that, gosh, funny thing, the radar reported that the Moon now seemed to be about 350 meters closer to the Earth than it was supposed to be.
Well, that was peculiar, though what it meant I could not say.
So then I tried to track down every one of Dad’s scribbles in the margins of the Chown book. There were dozens of them. Most of them were only updating a lot of things Chown had got wrong, because he had written about them way back before the turn of the century and a lot had happened since. Some were just kind of puzzling, like a note about something called the heavy neutrino that was supposed to be like a hundred million billion times the mass of a proton—but when they finally caught one and measured it it was only about ten billion times heavier.
Then I hit a man’s name—John D. Barrow—and when my searcher finally located him it produced a paper he had written that answered all the questions.
If some superbeings did make that kind of a model and we were in it, Barrow said, they might not get everything straight on their first try. They would want to know if that was the case, of course, so they would be careful to build some kind of an error-checker into their model. Something that could detect mistakes ... and then correct them.
So, to do its job, every once in a while the error-checker would make little changes in the model universe’s programming—that is, in its basic physical laws.
What that meant was that until the error-checker did its job, sometimes things wouldn’t exactly add up in the model. Computation and observation might give numbers that were a tad different from each other—I don’t mean big time, I mean like maybe a difference in the tenth or twelfth decimal. Like, Barrow said, the afore-mentioned apparent variation of a few parts per million in the fine structure constant.
That was one of the things that had been on Dad’s little list, I remembered. It wasn’t all. There was also the way the Moon had suddenly seemed to jump into a closer orbit. Or the heavy neutrino thing. Or the way this ortho-positronium stuff decayed a little bit too fast. So I turned off my book, and closed Dad’s paper-and-print one, and went out to the kitchen to see how Rebecca was coming along with dinner. And I thought, no matter what Dad thought of my career choices, it might be a good idea if I tried to sign up for some physics or astronomy courses this semester.
* * * *
Because Labor Day was late that year, Tuesday was the first day of school. It rained. Cold breezes came in off the ocean. Summer looked like it was finally, definitely over.
That is always a pretty sad time of the year for me, though not for the reasons my husband thinks. It’s really just because of the weather. September means that pretty soon the ice and snow will be coming, and all those lovely green landscapes will turn to brown and black, and all the butterflies will be heading for Cape May and the long flutter across the bay to Delmarva and their winter home in Mexico.
What Ron thinks it is, of course, is because of what 9/11 means to me. He doesn’t want me sitting around the house on the day when I might accidentally catch a glimpse of the pictures the government makes the newspeople show on every anniversary of the day, so we citizens won’t forget to hate the Islamic terrorists. It’s always the same scene they show, too. The two towers are standing there with one of them on fire already. Then the second jet slides silent and deadly across the sky. Until it passes behind the tower that’s burning, and, a few moments later, a great big tulip of flame pops out of the middle of the other tower. That was the scene that had sent shivers of horror over a thousand audiences, over the decades since it happened. Especially—yes, Ron wasn’t totally wrong—especially for me. Because I knew very well that what that flame jet contained, among a whole lot of other things, was the few puffs of thousand-degree plasma that were all that there was left of my mom.
So I can’t deny that the subject crossed my mind now and then on that day. I didn’t cry, though. Not even once. Not even when I was in the ladies’ room, in the break between World Lit 211 and Poli Sci 218, and no one was there to hear. And I wasn’t surprised when I came out of my last class for the day and Ron was standing there with a white-rose wrist corsage in one hand and my dancing shoes in the other. “Feel like a couple of lesginkas tonight, hon? Maybe dinner first at that oyster place down by the water?”
As I say, he was a sweet man.
So we did have the dinner—bluefish for him, pepper shrimp for me—and Ron was just paying the check when his phone chirped. The voice was my father’s, upset, shouting so loud that I could hear the phone across the table. “It’s crazy, Ron,” he yelled. “Jesus! Can you believe it?”
For some reason my husband reached over and put his arm around me then. His voice was tight when he asked, “Believe what, Steve?”
“You didn’t hear? Christ, turn your damn omni on! All the labs are reporting it—Argo-Fermi, Caltech, four or five others. The spectra went nuts for all of them at the same time. It’s the fine structure constant, Ron! It isn’t constant any more!”
* * * *
Brigadier General Ronald R. Khoshaba
Even now I have trouble believing that what Steve Avedon told me was true, but there it was. Every lab was confirming it—not only what was left of the American labs but ultimately CERN and Bologna and Beijing as well. And not just the fine structure constant, either. That radar measurement that put the Moon closer than it should have been wasn’t because the Moon had moved, it was because c, that utterly unchangeable speed of light called c, had gone and changed on us and was now just that little bit faster. Half a dozen other numbers that had been holy writ for generations were suddenly in doubt, too. And so the question that we faced—and that the whole scientific community faced, and before long that the whole world faced—was: who was doing this? And was it possible that all those long-ago speculations had any conceivable basis in fact?
Common sense said “No!” Well, that wasn’t really it. What common sense actually said was, “Holy crap, man, are you out of your mind?” I mean, ideas like that weren’t science. They were the stuff of the electronic games the little kids were playing when their parents weren’t paying attention, because they were busy on their own computers. Comic-book stuff. Nothing that any sensible person would believe in for a single second.
Except that even the sensible people had just about run out of alternative explanations for the way scientific dogma was turning out to be just dumb-headed wrong. So we sensible people were stuck.
We couldn’t believe it, and couldn’t dismiss it, either. The evidence was right there, in every physics lab and astronomical observatory in the world. Like it or not, there was a real, non-zero possibility that somebody—some Somebody, somewhere or other—was running a simulation of a universe as some kind of an experiment, and that simulated universe was the one we all lived in.
Well, in a certain way that wasn’t all bad, you know. Since Somebody Else was making up the rules that this universe ran by we didn’t have to drive ourselves crazy trying to make sense of the contradictions. For instance, now we didn’t have to invent negative gravity to explain the acceleration of distant galaxies. Nor did we have to postulate such weird concepts as scalar fields—that is, particles like a photon or proton, but incomparably bigger, in fact light-years in diameter—just so we could account for some anomalous clumping in some other galaxies. We didn’t need to account for anything at all, really. Anything that was puzzling was, hey, just one more glitch in the superbeing’s simulation. Made science a lot easier.
But all of that was a long time ago. When Silvie was still my wife, when the United States was still run by the President and the Congress, when nobody had yet heard of the Doctrine of the Beloved Experimenter.
Still, I should have guessed that some human beings would have seen a way to do themselves some good out of it. Somebody always had, out of every other unexpected disaster in human history, hadn’t they? Why should this be any different?
* * * *
The big thing on my mind that day wasn’t scientific anomalies. I was more concerned about how badly the War was going. The War had never gone very well, but I was just beginning to see just how bad badly could be.
All my life I had hoped that some day I would get a chance to go back and visit Baghdad, which was where my parents had lived up until the time that Saddam made the whole country of Iraq unlivable for them. They talked a lot about the old place while I was growing up in Minnesota. Homesick, I guess, and probably that made them glamorize it. What they made it sound like was a real Ali Baba-Scheherezade kind of movie-set place, only with flush toilets.
Well, Baghdad wasn’t like that any more. (Though neither was anything else.)
Apart from all the other things the War had done, it made a pretty big change in my personal life. Congress got nervous, and so weapons research got a huge infusion of money. The Fort doubled its lab space. So then they needed somebody with the right degrees and the amount of right at-the-front experience to head it up. The one they picked was me. I was never sure why. Silvie—we were still married then—refused to believe that it was just that I was Iraqi by ancestry and the government wanted to show all the other Arab-Americans that Arabs were considered as loyal as anybody else, but I was never really convinced that that hadn’t been a big part of the reason.
Naturally the promotion was the end of my career as a working scientist, even as the kind of working scientist that sniffed around captured Islamist labs for signs of worrisome weaponry. I had now become an administrator.
Whether I was qualified for that sort of thing or not is a whole other question. The government didn’t care much about physics any more. Biowarfare looked cheap and effective. And what, for instance, did I know about polymerase chain reactions or maintaining a database of aerosolizable organic molecules? Not much, surely, but things like that were pretty basic to the Fort’s work those days. We just didn’t make nasties to kill Arabs with, we did our best to identify Arab bioweapon nasties before they spread enough to kill too many of our people. Like, for instance, inventing quick-acting techniques to electrospray suspicious compounds into a mass spectrometer and—well, never mind. That’s the general idea, anyway.
Of course, we did do the nasties, too, because the DOD was convinced that you could never have too much of a bad thing. The big debate in the Fort one week was picking the best ways to deploy the toxic strains of Sargasso actinobacteria and firmicutes that the biomass people had come up with. The way they seemed to think would be most convenient was to seed the shallow waters of Arab bathing beaches with them.
That was when I realized I was losing Silvie. “But you’re talking about killing children,” she complained when she heard about it. She was really, really angry, but I refused to discuss it with her. She wasn’t supposed to know about those things, and I had a pretty good idea of which of my scientists had leaked it to her. I thought about turning the leaker in, but that would have been too personally embarrassing, since he, as it happened, had recently become my wife’s lover.
But, as I say, that was a long time ago.
* * * *
When those Beloved Experimenter kooks began to show up I didn’t take them very seriously at first. The Fort wasn’t their first target, and I didn’t really care much about what they were doing to the churches.
Not to just some of the churches, either. What I mean is to all of them. I guess that was predictable enough. The churches were the institutions that got hurt worst when the idea of an alien experimenter began to take hold, and human beings, like hyenas, do love to pick on the weakest animals. So first, at Sunday services—well, at the Jewish Saturday ones too, because the Beloveds were a pretty ecumenical lot—you’d see one or two pickets wearing sandwich boards with messages like, “You do know it’s all a lie, don’t you?” Then you’d begin to see dozens of the pickets, then hundreds, marching civilly enough around the churches’ parking lots. Then, when it got to be thousands, the picketers hardly had anybody left to picket anymore, because by then they way outnumbered the handful of people that were still inside.
Then, when the religions were so battered that they weren’t much fun any more, the Beloveds began to move on to other targets. First they did the Congress and the Senate and the White House and all the lesser governing bodies.
Why did they pick the politicians? Certainly not because there was anything the politicians could do, because there wasn’t. But when things go wrong you blame the politicians. You don’t necessarily have any better ideas than they do, but they’re there for the purpose of being blamed. That’s the American way.
Then, I guess having run out of more powerful people to blame, they got around to us.
Actually I was a little surprised they had taken so long. It seemed to me that the Fort, and all the other scientific labs and institutions in the world, were tempting targets for more reasons than one. The Beloved Experimenter people really got a kick out of having this new proof that the world’s most celebrated scientists were as full of crap as their local Congressman.
We couldn’t debate them any more, either. That was a letdown, because we’d really been used to those debates, you know. Since time immemorial, we scientists had been plagued by arguments from the inerrant Bible people and the flat-Earthers and the anti-evolutionists and the flying saucerers and every other sort of nut that thought their intuitions trumped natural physical law. We didn’t always win the debates. Witness Galileo and the Roman Inquisition, for instance. But we did win sometimes then and couldn’t win ever again now, because this time the flakes and the nutcases weren’t any wronger than we had been all along.
Even when the demonstrators multiplied into the thousands they weren’t a serious physical threat to us. The town cops just borrowed more crowd-control stuff from neighboring municipalities, and the Beloveds got herded off to side streets and parks where no one would be much bothered by them. Half of the cops were overseas veterans from places like Iberia and the Moroccan beaches. After their struggles with the mujahadeen, a few thousand chanting crazies were no problem.
Until they were.
The biggest mob yet turned up on Christmas Eve. They were divided about half and half between the ones chanting slogans about the Beloved and the ones who were singing “Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” They weren’t divided any other way. They stuck together no matter what the cops did and, of course, because of the holidays the police force was depleted. The cops left on duty couldn’t hold them. Two or three thousand of the demonstrators came boiling through our gates, and then it was up to our MPs. Who were, God (if any) be thanked, up to the task, because the MPs’ numbers weren’t depleted at all. None of them had received any Christmas leave; the Fort had abolished all holidays long before. Those guys were combat veterans, too, and they were spoiling for the fight because policy had made us keep them out of all the crowd-control problems that the town cops were supposed to handle. Military didn’t bother with civilian and civilian didn’t touch military, those were the rules. The MPs kept the mob moving right down to the parade ground, and then they began carving them up into parcels of a hundred demonstrators or so and herding them to places where they could conveniently be detained for as long as we liked.
* * * *
When I saw from my window that Billy de Blount was in the crowd it occurred to me that it would be a generous act to have him brought up to my office, maybe even to share my Christmas Eve meal.
I don’t know why I wanted to be generous to the little turd. He had been nothing but an annoyance all those years when he was growing up across the street. Not so big an annoyance, though, that I wanted to stick him with the dried food packets and unbottled water which were all he would get from my MPs.
I always thought that was no way for a civilized human being to live. Certainly I wouldn’t like it for myself, and I don’t suppose my cousin Fahzeed had liked it either.
I haven’t mentioned Fahzeed. His problem was that his parents had emigrated to the States just as mine had, all right, but they had taken their time about it. They wanted to be absolutely sure before they moved. So Fahzeed had been born in Basra. Which meant that when the War got sticky and the American government began rounding up all the country’s Arabs and Islamists they left me alone. U.S. born, already a first lieutenant in the American army, I was a protected species. Fahzeed wasn’t. He got a resettlement camp in Utah that was called the Salt Lake Protective Custody Depot, along with eighteen or twenty thousand other possible, but not definite enough to make it to the penal camps in Alaska and Guam, security risks.
I only visited Fahzeed at his camp once. That was plenty. I never wanted to see again how that kind of confinement could transform a bright, well educated professor of meteorological science into a crotchety old fart with serious complaints about the wilted condition of the mess hall’s salad greens.
Well, if my father hadn’t crossed his fingers for all of us and taken that great jump into the American unknown when he did—why, that could have been me. Fighting to get the last bowl of Jell-O at supper, viewed with suspicion by my fellow inmates because I refused to join the improvised mosques they had set up, where the principal sermon subject was the iniquity of that Great Satan, the United States of America.
But I had, I was reminded, problems nearer at hand. What reminded me was MP Major Kressmer, tapping at my door—which was, of course, already open. I gave him the usual now-what frown.
“I’m just reporting that it’s all secure now, sir. What are your orders?”
“Feed them,” I said. “Keep them overnight. Around daybreak you can start releasing them, fifteen or twenty at a time.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, turning to go.
“Oh, and one more thing, Major,” I said. “Have de Blount brought up here.”
* * * *
Up close, Billy was a lot taller and skinnier than I remembered him, and he had grown a fairly creditable beard. He walked in under his own power, the two MP escorts staying just outside the door until I waved them away. He took a seat without being invited, and leaned back to see what I was going to say. He didn’t look uneasy, not even uncomfortable, just patient.
“Hello, Billy,” I said. “Merry Christmas.” He didn’t respond to that, just looked a little more patient, so I got specific. “I’m just about to have my dinner sent up from the mess. It’ll be turkey, of course, with the usual trimmings and stuff.”
“Fine,” he said, dismissing the subject. “Is that why you had me brought up here?”
“Not really, no. Your father came to see me the other day.”
That made him grin. “Sure he did. He probably told you his Sunday attendance is down 50 percent, but it’s really nearer eighty.”
“He did say that, yes. It isn’t only your father’s church, though, is it? Father Alexius at St. Viator’s told me that they’ve cut out two of the three morning masses, and they’re running short of altar boys.”
He said reasonably, “What did they expect? Their people have been lied to all their lives. There isn’t any God, just some Experimenter that doesn’t give a damn what they do. There isn’t any Heaven, there isn’t any Hell. So now they understand that it doesn’t matter if you’re a good guy or a shitheel. You don’t get rewarded, and you don’t get punished, either. So Pop can’t scare them into showing up every Sunday any more. Can’t bribe them, either. Doesn’t have anything to bribe them with. So naturally they came to us, Ron. We’re giving them the truth.”
God knows I’m not a religious person, but he was getting under my skin. “But that’s not all religion is, Billy. What about morality?”
“Oh, now, Ron,” he said, “really. Do you honestly think it’s a sin worth going to hell for to eat pork or fail to bang your head on a rug six times a day? And I’m not even talking about the people who thought their God’s morality commanded them to murder as many unbelievers as they could, from the Crusaders to Hamas.”
“Besides that sort of thing,” I said. “I mean thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not bear false witness.”
He gave the sort of look that one gives to a person who has made a legitimate debating point. It was the first time. He thought for a moment, and then he said, “You’re right about that, Ron, kind of. We’re going to have to give them some kind of commandments, aren’t we? As soon as I make them up. Now, what were you saying about turkey?”
* * * *
That wasn’t the last time I saw Billy de Blount, just the last time that I was physically in the same room with him. That kind of close encounter didn’t happen again. Not even when he and his team of tame biochemists commandeered the Fort, because by then I was two or three thousand miles away, being reeducated in the Salt Lake Correctional Compound. (Yes. Same place. Different name but the same place that had held, among others, my cousin Fahzeed. I never did find out what became of Fahzeed, but I have a pretty good idea it wasn’t anything nice.)
I did see a lot of Billy de Blount in the Correctional Compound. Had no choice. We inmates were made to watch him on the TV whenever he was doing something important, like ordering another retaliatory strike against the Syrians or the Iraqis, or whoever. Or announcing the development of a new cannabis strain for, what did they say? Stress reduction and recreation? Or whatever. Billy wasn’t the president, exactly, or whatever the Experimenter people called the guy who did the kind of things that an elected president used to do. But he sure did get a lot of digital time.
Some of the people I knew were really surprised when the Experimenter groups got into politics. I wasn’t. Where else did they have to go?
I wasn’t surprised that they won pretty much every race they got into, either. The regular politicians were pretty much licked before they got started. The population was really shook up by then. They wanted to kick somebody’s ass for messing up their lives, and who was a better target than the old-style politicians? Who, you had to admit, by and large well deserved it, anyway.
What did surprise me about all the Experimenters having all that power, though, was what use they made of it. I would not have thought that they would finally have won the Islamist War, and I certainly didn’t expect them to win it the way they did.
* * * *
First Intermediary Willis Wardman de Blount
I do my weekly TV address on Tuesdays. That’s the bottom of the week, when the animals need to be thrown some new bone to get them through to the weekend. Marta and Heinrich were prepping me for it when a page brought me another letter from my father.
I didn’t greet it with joy. It had been nearly a week since the last one, and I had almost begun to hope that he had given up on me. Or died. Or at least fallen into some kind of irreversible coma, but no such luck. What was left of the physical body he had been born with was still hanging on, and that old brain was still working away.”What’s that?” Marta asked, not taking her eyes off the tan she was mixing for my cheeks. Sometimes she forgets herself, but when I gave her a look she paled and fussed harder over the mixing palette.
She probably did know, when she sneaked a look at the folded paper. It was written in my father’s unmistakable crabbed hand. As well as everything else he has lost, he doesn’t have much in the way of vocal cords any more, so he can’t dictate like a normal person. That doesn’t keep him from being my most dependable correspondent. He doesn’t actually have a lot of choice about that, since he isn’t allowed to correspond with anybody else, just lucky me. I don’t usually read his letters. There’s no reason to, because they all say pretty much the same thing, so I just flame them and go on with whatever I’m doing. This time I said, “Give me a match.” Heinrich always has one, or something like it, because he’s smoking again. He listened to the bone I threw almost a year ago, when I informed the people that our scientists were pretty sure that by the end of the decade they’d be able to repair the alveoli that cigarette smoke damages. He went right out and picked up a carton of Old Golds—they say you can get them on any street corner, but I never thought it worthwhile to ban them entirely. Then he went shopping. God knows where, maybe some antique store. Anyway he got himself a solid gold cigarette lighter that still worked.
It made a nice flame, and he held it out to me. I started to shove Dad’s letter into it and changed my mind. “Let’s get the goddam hair done,” I said, sticking the letter into a pocket. “Don’t you know I’m speaking to the people in ten minutes?”
Marta took a chance. She didn’t look up from her work, just said, “And they love you for it, First Intermediary.”
Well, they do, kind of. The trouble is a day later they forget what I’ve done for them, and then they always want more and more. It’s so unjust. I won their goddam war for them, didn’t I? You’d think that would be enough all by itself. But no. They want more and more and more.
And I give to them, because I’m afraid of what might happen if I stop. “Less talk,” I said, “and more getting me ready there, Marta.”
* * * *
What I promised the animals that week, I think, was more public executions on TV. Not just killing somebody by shooting or electrocuting, the way we’d been doing it, either. We’d make a little crime play for it. Like we’d find some photogenic criminal and cast him as a spy from the Arab war, and the good guys catch him when he’s trying to get away across the frozen, let’s say Hudson River, and they shoot him. Just wounding him, though. Then he falls into the river and can’t get out. Then the last scenes are him trying to scratch his way out from under the ice as he’s drowning. Powerful stuff. Only when that greaseball Hemphill suggested it I said, “For God’s sake, how are you going to get any felon to volunteer for it?” And he had an answer for that. We’d shoot a kind of a pilot where the convict would do all his apparent dying by the special-effects way Hollywood had always done it, morphing and computer-generating and like that, so nobody’s really getting hurt. Then we’d tack on a little trailer showing how we did it with the special effects, and we’d have the con sitting in the screening room and looking proud as Punch at seeing himself on the screen. And then, Hemphill said, well pleased with himself and grinning like the asshole he was, we’re going to reshoot those last scenes, only this time we don’t do any special effects. The con really dies. And that’s the version that goes up onto the satellite for the animals to gawk at. But then, see, when we make another one we show the next con we’ve picked the fake version, and we tell him when it’s over he’s going to get a pardon and freedom and a new identity so as not to spoil it for the audience. Then he’s happy to volunteer for a starring role of his own.
Worked, too. Hemphill had a lot of ideas. I didn’t like him having so many of them, though, especially when he began taking bows for them. So now he’s retired for health reasons, in the same hospice as my Dad.
Of course, I didn’t explain any of that in my broadcast. It went well, according to the instant reads. And then I went back to the war room for a staff conference with my cabinet.
I’m not a micromanager. When it comes to agriculture or manufacturing or crime suppression I leave it to my lieutenants. They do a good job, because they know what would happen if they didn’t. What my cabinet is supposed to do is think up exciting new programs for me to promise the people every Tuesday.
They’re good at it, sometimes maybe a little bit too good. Hemphill isn’t the only pain in the ass on my so-called “A Team.” Danny Kirsten is just as bad. Maybe worse. He’s the one I put in charge of Rites and Rituals, which is a big part of the Beloved Experimenter code. Which he knows. And therefore feels free to interrupt almost any team meeting with his inspiration of the week, like right after that broadcast: “First Intermediary! Hey! Listen to this! Suppose we teach kids to count, one to a hundred, using the periodic table instead of numbers. Like hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium instead of like, one, two, three, four.” And when everybody had a good laugh about that, then, “Okay. Then how about this. When somebody’s done something bad like, I don’t know, murdering somebody or stealing something, maybe we don’t just put them in jail the way we do now. What we do is, get this, we shun them. You know? The way the old Amish used to do? So they’ll die, all right, because nobody will give them food or even sell it to them, but we’re not exactly killing them, you see, because—”
I stopped him there. “Shut up, Danny,” I said. “Has anybody got any real business?”
Then Larry Willett stood up. “Talking about prisons, they’re having a lot of trouble in them,” he said, not that we all didn’t know that but just so as to lay the groundwork for what came next. “Guards are getting killed, every con has a weapon or two, the cons are pretty nearly running the prisons. I think I know what could straighten that out in a hurry, First Intermediary. How about if we give one of them a little of your thousand-to-one treatment? Lock one of the prisons up, get all the guards and civilians out and then pow!”
I knew what the “pow” was.
I should. I invented it. It was the way I had won the war against the Arab terrorists. For every one of our guys who died, I let the Arabs know, I would bomb, gas, or biokill a thousand of them. Since the Arabs didn’t come in convenient thousand-person packs I waited until maybe a hundred or so of ours had been killed by snipers or suicide bombers or whatever. Then I wiped out some Arab town of, say, a hundred thousand.
I mean, after all, the one thing we had plenty of was things to kill people with. I admit that the plan didn’t work right away. The whole war escalated. But after I’d done Cairo, Baghdad, Ryad, and, hell, I can’t remember all the others, their killing began to stop. It wasn’t so much that we defeated them in any military way. It was just that we could kill a lot more people than they could, and we made them see that there was a real chance, if this kept on, that sooner or later they might just run out of Arabs.
I encourage discussion, within limits. Maurie Haglaund was the first with his hand up. “What if we can’t get all the guards out?”
“Cost of doing business,” Willett said complacently. “We’ll pay indemnities to their families.”
“But some of the cons will be there for minor crimes, or some of them getting close to parole. Do they get killed with everybody else?”
Willet spread his hands. “Fortunes of war,” he said. “And what are you worrying about? Didn’t you ever hear of collateral damage? In the War a lot of the Arabs we killed were women, seniors, and babies. We didn’t let that stop us, did we?”
There was an immediate silence while the others waited to see how I would respond to that. I wasn’t angry at Willett, though. I had heard worse. I had been called a mass murderer and a genocider, which I guess I was, though mostly by people who were now in one of those prisons. “Cost it out,” I said. “I like it. And that’s about enough for today.”
* * * *
And then, back in my own quarters, waiting to see if any of the individual Team members would show up as petitioners, I remembered Dad’s letter. I knew what it would more or less say, because all the others had said just about the same thing. All the same I took it out of my pocket, poured myself a decent shot of twenty-year-old Scotch and opened it up.
It said:
“Billy, suppose when you go to sleep tonight an angel, or perhaps just me, your father, appears in a dream and says, ‘Look. If this alien experimenter wanted to make a complete model of a universe wouldn’t he make it really complete? Including, let’s say, God? And a heaven? And a hell?’ And, dear Billy, are you really so sure he didn’t?”
Some petitioner was knocking on the door by the time I finished it. It was not a good time for me to be petitioned. My father was a crazy old fart, all right, but after all these years he could still make me blow my top with rage. I crumpled the letter up and tossed it toward the fireplace, and then I opened the door.
It was that greatest of all shitheads, Danny Kirsten. “First Intermediary,” he said, ducking his head and smiling up at me, “I just want to say how much I hate that idiot, Willett. And I’m sorry to have wasted your time. But what I wanted to ask is, what do you think, could I appear at your side next time you talk to the people? And would you be willing to wear vestments?”
I wouldn’t have thought anything could make me madder, but he did it. “God damn you, Danny,” I said—I guess, shouted, “the answer is fucking no. To that. To anything else you might ask, and to anyone else who might come by this evening to ask for anything at all.” And because I didn’t want to actually kill him I turned around and left the room, and I slammed the door behind me.
* * * *
The Elevated Daniel Kirsten, Who Was Prophesied
If You are indeed there, O God, let me make these facts known to You.
As to the conversion of former churches and other temples: 30 percent of them deteriorated so severely during the interregnum that they can only be pulled down. Another 45 percent are still in the process of restoration, but the remaining 15 percent are completely renewed and reconsecrated, with all old icons and symbols wholly effaced.
As to Divine Science: nearly every old telescope with an aperture greater than 1.5 meters has been refurbished when necessary and set to the continuous exploration of Your infinite universe.
As to Doctrine: a new catechism for senior citizens is now being completed, to add to those already established for adults, teenagers and younger children. The Reproval measures for senior citizens who fail in this subject are the same as for younger children, namely withholding of one or more, but not more than three, meals, and sleep deprivation for not more than twenty-four hours.
As to the Giver of the Word and His Son: they are both resting in the Place of Meditation. Their physical condition is as good as is feasible; the Giver still retains the ability to swallow and stand up. At holidays, Giver de Blount appears on all video channels, fully robed and smiling. That’s just His physical image, naturally. His message is spoken by a carefully chosen and morally sound actor, and it is hoped that before long some more sophisticated method of stimulating the appropriate areas of the brain will not only allow us to cause Him to smile but even to lipsync His holiday messages. His Son, of course, is never publicly displayed. It upsets Him. He says troublesome things and becomes unhappy.
Finally, O (I presume) God, when I picked from the fireplace that sacred Letter from the Giver of the Word I supposed it to be a sign from You. I do hope I was right. The thing is, (I hope) God, I don’t doubt but I have recently ordered some new measures, including the True Believer Faith Brainscan for every citizen above the age of six, with compulsory reindoctrination for those who fail the test. So, You see, I would hate to think that this, or any of the other measures we’ve taken, is wrong, because it’s getting to be a good deal too late to take them back.

Copyright © 2005 by Frederik Pohl.