Short Story: “Crave Nothing Save the Song”
His Eminence had no particular reason to want or to have a sexbot; rather his friends and allies had wanted to test how far extended his willingness to accept exotic gifts. He had put her in the spare room upstairs in his English-style official residence, where he kept paintings by artists he disliked and audio equipment that was too of-this-age for him. She looked a little bit like Gérard’s Teresa. He did like Gérard, though no churchman of these times could or had real reason to collect him any longer. He thought of her as a Teri or maybe in morbid moments a Rosamund, up there with the canvasses and the frames and the refraction-sounding crystals.
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.
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.”
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
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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.
Short Story: “Quintessence”
Esteban Okada was born in Hakodate to a Japanese father and a Filipina mother, in a time of improving fortunes for Japan after the demographic and humanitarian collapse of the previous century. Hundreds of years ago Hakodate had been a flourishing seaport; now, it was close to a Democratic Alliance military elevator under the joint custodianship of Japan and Indonesia. It was around the base of this elevator that he and his friends had played in childhood, flying kites and antique model planes. He had been raised in his mother’s Catholic faith, still uncommon in Japan but not looked upon with as much suspicion as in some other Alliance countries. He discovered young that he was called to be a priest but was not ordained until he was past thirty, due to poor typing skills and reluctance to break an engagement to a famous young artist into which he had rashly entered.
When he was ordained, everybody figured that he would be a military chaplain; growing up in a space elevator community he had gotten a good head for the ins and outs of military life, and the Japanese chaplain corps was severely undermanned. This was in the time of the Alliance’s long war against the Australian-Martian coalition, which in a few years would end very abruptly and thus without showing many signs of ending any time soon before it did. Esteban had qualms about chaplaincy mostly due to a long-standing distrust of the wider society that the military represented and defended. He told this to one of his old seminary professors, an old nun named Tanizaki, and received from her the dressing-down that he had not known he needed.