Gregory Greene

WALKABOUT

THE STORY OF A BRIEF CENTURY

© 2000, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted inany form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permissionin writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are theproducts of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblanceto any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1............................................................................................................................................51. I’m Off!...................................................................................................................................62. Seoul, Korea.........................................................................................................................113. Tokyo, Japan.........................................................................................................................144. The Monk..............................................................................................................................205. Bread and Circuses...............................................................................................................26

PART 2..........................................................................................................................................346. The Kapitan Fedosov............................................................................................................357. The Northeast Passage..........................................................................................................418. Polar Bears............................................................................................................................509. Land of the Midnight Sun.....................................................................................................5510. Self-sufficiency...................................................................................................................6111. Midsummer.........................................................................................................................6612. Hanover, Germany..............................................................................................................7113. The Giant............................................................................................................................7614. The Raid..............................................................................................................................8115. Organic Farming.................................................................................................................88

PART 3..........................................................................................................................................9416. Brussels, Belgium...............................................................................................................9517. Paris, France.....................................................................................................................10118. The Emperor.....................................................................................................................10919. Off with His Head!...........................................................................................................11420. Taizé.................................................................................................................................11921. Rome, Italy.......................................................................................................................12422. The Cooperative................................................................................................................13023. Vesuvius...........................................................................................................................13724. Palermo, Sicily..................................................................................................................14225. Seas of Lights....................................................................................................................14826. Oran, Algeria....................................................................................................................154

PART 4........................................................................................................................................16027. Dorset................................................................................................................................16128. Creation.............................................................................................................................17429. Unidentified Flying Object...............................................................................................17930. Wales................................................................................................................................18931. Washington DC, USA......................................................................................................19532. Who Dunnit?.....................................................................................................................20333. Minneapolis MN, USA.....................................................................................................209

PART 5........................................................................................................................................21934. Home.................................................................................................................................220

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35. Campus Life......................................................................................................................22636. Advanced Study................................................................................................................23337. Graduation........................................................................................................................240

PART 6........................................................................................................................................25138. The New Farm..................................................................................................................25239. “I’ll Be Seeing You”.........................................................................................................25940. Operation Noah.................................................................................................................26541. Music of the Spheres........................................................................................................27242. The Historian....................................................................................................................278

POSTSCRIPT..............................................................................................................................283

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To MarieAntoinette

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All you need is love.

-The Beatles

PART 1

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1. I’m Off!

The international terminal at Sydney’s Mascot Airport, Australia’s largest, was as busy as ever. It came as no surprise that I was still lining up to get through the security check when the loudspeakers announced the last call for my flight. In fact, I didn’t worry too much, as last calls are usually repeated at least twice. “Passengers for Pacific Rim Airlines flight 765 to Tokyo and Seoul are requested to go to gate number fifty-three at once...” But I still was a good five minutes’ walk from the gate, and ahead of me the security guards were taking their time. From a recent press article, I knew that they were still ironing out the last bugs in their new T-ray imaging security gates. Having long trained myself to look for vulnerabilities where others thought they had all their bases covered, I found myself whiling away the delay by trying to think of alternative ways to bring contraband on board. I ended up with a scheme involving an accomplice who would sneak up the stairs at the far end of the gangway to the aircraft door and swap my carry-on bag—X-rayed, searched, and found harmless—for one containing my weapon of choice. Then the line moved again, and I got other things to think about.

Sprinting along the moving walkway, I listened to the loudspeakers paging the last missing passengers by name: a list of about ten European-sounding male names, plus my own. It struck me as somewhat odd that, when I came to the gate, the attendant closed it behind me, although I hadn’t seen any of the other people on the list. At the end of the gangway, I noticed that the “Authorized Personnel Only” door leading down to the tarmac was ajar and unguarded. But finally, I was on board and looking for my seat, and pushed all those seemingly unconnected observations to the back of my mind, to be considered at some later time.

The six extendible gangways were retracted and the plane’s six double swing-out doors closed with the quiet sound of perfect hydraulic engineering. Towed by a heavyweight tractor, we were gently turned around and were ready to begin our journey. The flight attendants went through their demonstration of the life vests and carried out the final preparations for takeoff.

Every last seat in the huge machine was taken. Almost a thousand people were more or less comfortably seated on its two decks and looking forward to the two-hour supersonic trip to Tokyo. Our six engines began their barely audible rumble, and I was reminded of the impressive technology surrounding me. The plane was built as a giant flying wedge, designed to “surf” the hypersonic shock wave as it flew, thus reducing its engine power requirement. Its engines ran on hydrogen, and its exhaust fumes consisted of water vapor and a trace of nitrogen oxides, nothing else. And, thanks to a technique of surrounding the jet exhaust by a ring of airflow at a special combination of speed and temperature, those engines were so silent that, other than at takeoff and landing, they couldn’t be heard on the ground. When a plane flew overhead at its cruising altitude of sixty-five thousand feet, you hardly even noticed the sonic boom.

I folded down my tray and turned on its built-in computer, hoping to read my electronic mail while the Hyper Jumbo taxied out to the runway. Normally, I’d have dealt with my messages first thing in the morning at the entertainment center at home, but, after all, it isn’t every day you pack up and leave on a trip around the world.

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It was, I reflected, a bit of a shame that you couldn’t break away from the obligation of being in touch even for the few moments you spent traveling. Now that every jet airplane passenger had the use of a computer connected to the Internet, flying had become a very silent affair. Hardly anyone talked to their fellow passengers anymore, as even the longest flights took only a few hours. You felt you had to make the most of the opportunity to sort out any lingering business, catch up with the news, or send in-flight greetings to your friends. Even the children kept quiet: with all the games, they never had a chance to get bored.

So it was somewhat unexpected when, as I folded up my tray for the takeoff, the passenger in the seat next to mine spoke to me. A little embarrassed over having paid her no attention, I turned to find myself pleasantly surprised: she was a very pretty young lady, of Asian origin, with beautiful, long, black hair. Her complexion was fair and her eyes very dark—in a word, she was attractive. Her demeanor was gentle in a way you don’t often encounter in Australia, and she spoke excellent English, in spite of a slight accent.

“You don’t seem at all apprehensive about flying,” she suggested. “You must be very used to traveling!”

This was true. I had traveled a lot, and I had taken the Hyper Jumbo several times before, with each trip reinforcing my conviction that it was the best airplane ever built. I was so fully at ease in the giant machine that, to me, it seemed just as safe as my own living room at home. It was a plane that could travel at 3,000 miles an hour entirely under computer control. Yet, in an emergency, the pilot could fly it by him or herself at low speed and land it safely on as few as two engines. Now that, in my book, was a well-designed airplane.

“You’re quite right,” I replied. “In my experience, this is a very reliable plane. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

“Maybe I’m being silly,” my newfound acquaintance excused herself. “I’ve never been in an airplane with so many people before. It makes me nervous to think of what could happen if something went wrong.”

As the plane climbed and built up speed, we continued our conversation. I tried my best to convince the young lady about the reliability of the plane and the competence of the crew. The main problems with fly-by-wire technology had been solved many years earlier after several tragic Airbus crashes and a number of near misses involving the Boeing 777. In my daily work as a contingency planner, I had stayed fully up to date with all the gossip about air safety on the Internet. Even the most cynical critics had had to admit that, this time, Boeing had got it right from the beginning.

I soon found out that my fellow traveler was from Korea, on her way home to Seoul a few months after graduating as an English teacher from an Australian university. Her name was Jin Ju, which means a pearl. Her interests were wide-ranging; she had no trouble following me when we discussed the technical safety features of the plane, and she managed to enlighten me in many things I had never paid attention to, given my rather narrow outlook as an engineer. Jin Ju displayed an impressive amount of common sense and a courteous directness. Although I believed our risk for a crash was very slim, I had to agree with her that unexpected things might, indeed, happen.

But I was still trying to reassure Jin Ju after our in-flight meal, when I became aware of some unusual activity around me. A number of tough-looking men with assault rifles were positioned in the aisles in every section of the plane that I could see. I had a good view of nearly half of the lower level of the plane from where I was sitting, close to door number two on the port side of the lower, economy class cabin. When, bewildered, I half got up out of my seat, the

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nearest armed man barked an order in rather broken English, and waved his gun in my direction. Jin Ju told me to sit still and take no risks: those guys meant business, she said.

“I recognize their leader from a newscast a couple of weeks back,” she added. “They’re from the mercenary force that lost the bid for the latest UN peacekeeping mission to Africa.”

I couldn’t believe my bad luck. I began to work out the full implications of what was happening. The airplane would have to land rather soon, because it didn’t carry much extra fuel: keeping the liquid hydrogen cold was expensive, and leaving one or two of the tanks empty could mean the difference between profit and loss for a leg of the flight. Also, to get any money, the hijackers would have to bargain with someone who could be expected to take enough of an interest in the safety of the plane and its passengers. Since the Korean government held a substantial stake in Pacific Rim Airlines, it was a good candidate. The passengers would be used as bargaining chips while somebody, either PRA or the Korean government, came up with the required ransom—if they did. Security forces would be sure to be waiting for the airplane on the ground.

Looking around once more, I saw the hijackers taking down shoulder bags from the overhead lockers. Having made some kind of adjustment inside the bags, the men put them on the cabin floor near the fuel tanks in the wings, warning the passengers not to touch them. On the upper deck, similar devices would have been put back in the overhead lockers, to be near the main fuel tank on top of the passenger cabin. The plane was now booby-trapped, and presently I saw the leader of the hijackers, who had been moving around giving orders, holding a remote control device of some kind.

Jin Ju had been watching what was going on, too, and she kept up her background commentary with amazing calmness.

“They’ve left it to the last moment to pull this off,” she said. “In a few months from now, all cash payments will be replaced with electronic ones, and dollar bills will be worthless. As it is, they’ll be aiming to get a trunk full of cash and fuel to continue the trip to wherever they think they’ll be safe. Some hostages will have to go along, of course. I hope it won’t be us.”

I, too, wished we wouldn’t be thus honored. I found it ironic that I should be on this plane at all. It was precisely because of the impending monetary reform that I had decided to go now rather than a year later, when I’d have been due for long service leave and wouldn’t have had to quit my job. I had wanted to go while I could still hope to pay my way using cash, traveler’s checks, and a credit card. The new payment system, according to the Internet gossip, was going to make it impossible to remain anonymous when paying for anything, and I just didn’t like the idea of leaving an unbroken payment trail of myself at a time when repressive governments were multiplying all over the world. So now, instead of enjoying the first leg of the traditional, carefree Australian wander around the globe, I was in an airplane hijacked by a shady troop of professional soldiers that wanted to pad their bank accounts while it was still technically possible to do so through crime. After the introduction of the new payment system, every payment would be traceable, and enjoying the proceeds of a heist like this would become quite a challenge.

The plane began to slow down and lose height. For the first time the crew were allowed to make announcements. The captain was brief and to the point: he told us that the plane had been hijacked and that we’d be landing in Seoul shortly. He instructed us to stay calm and follow all orders given by the hijackers—they were in control, and it was our duty to cooperate with them and try to avoid casualties.

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As soon as we had landed at Incheon, all the lights at the airport went out. The airplane remained at the end of the runway with its own lights on. Some kind of negotiations must have been going on over the radio, but we heard nothing of them. Outside, everything was dark; the airport seemed dead to the world. The hijackers were getting nervous and kept peering out the windows. Evidently, the Korean authorities meant to keep them guessing. In my mind I recalled horror stories of hijack victims having to spend days in their airplane seats without even being allowed to go to the toilet, while authorities tried to gain time and win the argument simply by exhausting the perpetrators. I gave a brief thought to the possibility of turning on the seat computer and somehow calling for help, but soon realized how useless and dangerous it would have been.

But Jin Ju had a different worry.“Our government won’t just give them the money. I think they’ll send in the antiterrorist

squad.”She was dead right. Through the window I could see a swarm of armored personnel

carriers, followed by fire trucks and all kinds of special vehicles. In an instant, mobile lounges loaded with crack troops were closing in against the doors. Moments later, the doors, activated from the outside, began to open.

Meanwhile, the hijackers had been busy. With brutal efficiency, they had rounded up some of the passengers to form a human barrier inside the doors. Jin Ju and I had been sitting closest to door number two and were first in line. We now found ourselves squashed against the edges of the opening doors, while troops and hijackers shouted commands and threats over the screams of the panicking passengers. Before I knew what was happening, I was falling toward the ground ten feet below between the body of the plane and the still approaching lounge, while above, the first shots rang out.

I had hardly landed, quite shaken but essentially unhurt, when Jin Ju fell right on top of me. She was the last one; the lounge had closed up to the side of the plane and the troops were forcing their way in. Jin Ju was unconscious but not from the fall: I had managed to half catch her so she hadn’t hit the tarmac at all. Not waiting for instructions, I picked her up and started running. It was, quite possibly, the fastest one hundred meter dash I’ve ever run, in spite of my load. Well clear of the plane, I had to stop to take a breath.

All the efforts of the troops and the fire brigade were directed toward the port side doors. Nobody was paying any attention to us, but we were still far too close to the action for comfort. I started running again. Fortunately, Jin Ju was very light, and about half a minute later I was able to stop and lay her down, having put a considerable distance between us and the besieged airplane.

The gunfire was intensifying, punctuated by the bright flashes and deep thuds of stun grenades. I started wondering why the plane hadn’t caught fire, and the thought got me to my feet again. I picked up my companion and ran like a bat out of hell. I had remembered the explosives so close to the tanks, where untold tons of liquid hydrogen were still left.

All of a sudden, a giant hand swept me off my feet into a somersault. Again the lucky outcome was that Jin Ju landed on top when we both hit the tarmac. I sat us up and cautiously regarded the ongoing explosion. I had expected a blinding inferno, but the light of the fire was only just starting: hydrogen burns hot, but without a visible flame. I could see parts of the airplane still on their way up into the air, while round about, the closest vehicles were disintegrating, ignited by the intense heat and blown up by fuel and ammunition. As it turned

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out, we were far enough from the plane to escape the fire and the flying debris. That was just as well, since I had lost all ability to run any further.

“Just like the Hindenburg, but worse,” Jin Ju said softly.She had regained consciousness, but was still leaning against me. And as before, she was

right: hydrogen is an excellent propellant, as well as a very buoyant filling for airships, but it’s a deadly dangerous explosive.

Quite relieved that my new friend was, at least, alive, I got up again and helped her to her feet. All we could do was move further away from the fire—I had no idea where the airport buildings might have been or which way to turn. In the light of the blaze we must have been clearly visible, for soon an ambulance arrived to pick us up. Next thing, we made the fastest and least complicated entry into Korea anybody has ever made. The ambulance took us directly to the nearest hospital, and we received the caring attention of a very competent emergency crew.

For whatever reason, the press didn’t find us that evening. Having been assured that neither of us was seriously hurt, I was soon resting in a wonderfully clean, although slightly too short, Korean hospital bed. Then it struck me: I had to call Laura!

Laura, my girlfriend back in Sydney, had helped me plan my trip and had almost decided to come along. But then she had settled for Plan B: as a travel agent, she had a limitless supply of free travel, and could fly in and join me at convenient points along my route. Laura always watched TV late at night and would have seen the news about the disaster. Calling my parents could wait: they’d be asleep since a couple of hours and would know nothing about it all until tomorrow.

Laura picked up the phone right away. Without saying “Hello?” and before I could utter a word, she demanded, “Gregory, who’s that girl?”

My surprise was such that I burst out laughing, which she pretended to take as an admission of guilt. After much sputtering on my part, Laura told me about her ordeal watching the story on TV. First, a text banner had announced that an airplane had been hijacked in Korea. Big deal. A minute later, the movie she’d been watching had been interrupted for a special newscast from Seoul: the plane was PW765 en route from Sydney to Tokyo! Oh no!

Initially, only a blurred satellite picture had shown the plane on the dark tarmac. It had taken at least five minutes before the first camera drones—unmanned miniature airplanes adapted from military spotting use—had got to the airport. Then the helicopter had arrived, and then the ground crew with telescopic lenses. And suddenly, the antiterrorist attack had commenced. Laura had known the plane was doomed.

She had also known that I was not, so she had kept a sharp lookout for anything unusual. And there, in a long shot of the blaze, she had seen somebody sitting on the tarmac far off to the left. She had done an instant replay and had zoomed in on that part of the picture, and had recognized me, with a girl in my arms. Oh boy!

Quite possibly the only viewer to have picked out such a fleeting detail, Laura needed little by way of particulars of my story. She told me to get some rest and call her back in the morning. But first, she had a piece of practical advice for me.

“Now don’t you get too close to that Korean girl you rescued, so she doesn’t fall in love with you! You’re mine! After all you’ve done for her, it would be such a waste of everybody’s time if I had to come there and kill her...”

This was music to my ears, and I did my best to calm Laura’s dramatic imagination, promising to behave and to encourage no romantic feelings on Jin Ju’s part. More out of concern for me than out of jealousy, Laura almost seemed to think that she should, after all, join me on

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my trip, but then she resolved to stick to her original decision. I wished I could have hugged her long and hard.

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2. Seoul, Korea

The doctor’s round took place early in the morning. He gave me a clean bill of health, and let me know that both Jin Ju and I would be released from the hospital within the hour. He had already seen her, and told me that apart from a few bruises, she was in perfect shape. He advised me to take it easy for a while, and warned me that I could expect quite agonizing flashbacks and nightmares for months to come. Being on a holiday, I had no intention of overexerting myself. I told the doctor so, and thanked him for his services and those of his hospital.

Before we could leave the hospital, we had to wait for customs and immigration to come and officially admit us into the country. Jin Ju’s parents had been located at the airport and brought to her bedside the night before; they were now on their way to pick her up. Using my smartphone that I had kept in my pocket, I had called my parents to reassure them of my well-being, and I had had another talk with Laura.

The immigration procedures turned out to be painless. Jin Ju and I had, of course, lost our luggage, but not our money nor our traveling documents. Mine were in a money belt and Jin Ju had hers in a small backpack that she had managed to slip on while we had been waiting to land.

When we were done with the formalities, a couple of airline representatives came to see that we were well taken care of. Pacific Rim Airlines was the epitome of generosity and promised to fit us out and reequip us, and to pay us compensation for our horrifying experience. The airline also wanted to have its doctors ensure that we’d get over the aftereffects of our ordeal, and insisted on putting me up in a downtown hotel for a week, before I’d be sent off, first class, to Tokyo to resume my trip.

Now Jin Ju’s parents arrived in an airline limousine, and I was introduced to them. There was no mistaking their joy and gratitude over their daughter’s miraculous survival. I explained, interpreted by Jin Ju, that I was just as grateful for what had happened, and that my part in it was rather minor in comparison with the kind of break we had both been given by Providence.

Jin Ju’s home was on the other side of Seoul, and her parents offered me a lift to my hotel. In the car, Jin Ju turned to me and gave me a big hug.

“Thank you for saving my life, Gregory,” she said. “My parents and I would be very honored if you’d like to come and visit us in our home. It would be a great privilege for them to be able to show you a token of their gratitude before you continue on your trip.”

I gladly accepted the invitation. Now that, for the moment, all our concerns were over, I, too, felt the shock of being a survivor of a disaster that had claimed nearly twelve hundred lives. Acknowledging and beginning to sort out this harrowing experience was something best done together with Jin Ju and her parents. We exchanged phone numbers and agreed to meet again as soon as possible.

At the hotel, I was met by PRA officials who made every effort to ensure my comfort. Two gentlemen took my garment sizes and set off to procure clothes and personal necessities. I was installed in a suite and made as comfortable as possible. Lunch was brought up. The hotel staff was instructed to look after me with no expenses spared, and a doctor and a psychiatrist set to work treating me for posttraumatic stress syndrome. I asked if Jin Ju would get similar attention and was assured that this was the case: arrangements had already been made with her parents.

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In the days that followed, I came to realize how fortunate I was to receive this treatment, although, for a start, I had been more than a little annoyed over all the fuss. Wherever I looked, memories of the destruction of the plane kept coming back to me. TV talked about little else; the papers were full of it. Walking down the street, I’d see a mother with a young girl, and the image of the child across the aisle from me would flash back to my inner eye. Encountering a wrinkled old man with particularly dark skin would make me think of charred bodies, and then I’d realize that there hadn’t been any: the incineration of the passengers had been complete and instantaneous. Every person in and around the airplane had turned to ashes in a firestorm that had paralleled the intensity of a major napalm bombardment. My sleep was disturbed by fits of panic, as I would relive in my dreams my flight from the airplane and its fiery destruction.

But I knew I had to put the hijacking behind me. During the next several days, I toured Seoul and visited the lovely palaces, the ancient gates, and all the other sights I had never taken the time to see before, when I’d been there on business. I went for a long walk in Namsan Park and had my dinner in the skyline restaurant in Seoul Tower on the top of the mountain, just to prove to myself that I hadn’t acquired a fear of heights. The park was a splendid sight at this time of the year: the greenery was fresh and young. In the National Museum of Korea, I discovered that the country’s culture is over 5,000 years old. A lot older than Australia, I mused, but then I corrected myself: no, less than one tenth the age of Australia’s Aboriginal culture.

Just as interesting was the National Folk Museum, not far away. Here, I got a glimpse of the way Koreans had lived and worked in bygone days. Then I took a guided tour of the Ch’angdokkung Palace and the Piwon or Secret Garden in the back of the palace grounds.

Finally, after I had spent a week in Seoul, the doctors agreed with Jin Ju’s parents that our recovery was well enough underway for my planned visit to take place. I took a cab to their home in a working-class suburb, a stark contrast to the Westernized hotel where I had been accommodated by the airline. It turned out that Jin Ju had a younger brother. This was a good thing, as Koreans don’t like having an even number of people at a table. Jin Ju’s parents were simple people, who spoke only a few words of English, but their sincerity was great, and Jin Ju was kept busy interpreting.

It was clear to me that the hijacking and this unexpected exposure to a totally different culture were having a profound effect on my priorities and my attitude to life. My earlier travels had always taken me to environments similar to that in which I worked and lived. Business meetings were held in offices of sister companies and vendors to my employer, and my lodgings were never very different from one country to the next. Here in Korea, for the first time, I had met foreign people who were in no way involved with international trade. Instead of the inferior civilization our customary Australian underestimation of Asians had led me to expect, I had encountered a cultivated, intelligent family with refined manners and ancient traditions.

The contrast was made even more striking by their simple home and their humble circumstances. I might have expected this dwelling to make me miss the creature comforts of my own home. Instead it set my mind working on how much of our automated luxury might, in fact, be a kind of addiction. I began seeing a dependence carefully nurtured by industry and commerce, relying on advertising and peer pressure to make us always want more. I had to admit that the lifestyle of my circle of acquaintances in Sydney revolved entirely around gadgets. In that peer group, your degree of success was, very simply, judged on how many of the latest imported machines you owned.

At home, my clean-line, space-age kitchen had a computer set in the counter, with commands for doors to slide open and for the selected item to present itself. For making a

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simple cup of coffee I had six different machines—from a plain instant coffee maker to the steam-trap for the flavor that couldn’t be beaten. In comparison, Jin Ju’s home was primitive. But the fare I was served was simply superb; the hospitality was congenial, and the place was quiet, without the constant whir of fans and beeping of timers. Over the strong, green tea that so perfectly complemented our dinner, I expressed a thought that had been growing on me during the week.

“Just being alive now seems like such a privilege, such an important thing. I really want to live every minute of the rest of my life. Overcoming habit and prejudice, learning from others, experiencing everything that comes my way—I can’t think of anything more essential.”

Jin Ju had come to similar conclusions.“You know,” she said, “since I nearly died there, I see everything in more vivid detail. I

see colors I didn’t even know existed. I hear the birds like never before. Every day holds so much that’s new—I only regret that I’ve spent all these years without knowing how precious life really is.”

I returned to my hotel at peace with myself, and feeling not a little excited over my new insights. After a good night’s sleep, I waited for my two doctors to arrive. Following a brief closing session, I announced that I now wished to equip myself for the rest of my journey. I thanked them for their help and set out to use my open-ended account at the big department store in the underground mall connecting to the hotel.

To replace the suitcase I had started my trip with, I got myself a sturdy, good-looking rucksack with a magnesium alloy frame, on the hunch that I could just as well prepare for a rather more adventurous trip than I had originally envisaged. I filled it up with high-quality outdoor clothes and hiking gear for different climates, and, for good measure, strapped onto it a tent, a self-inflating foam pad, and a warm sleeping bag. A first aid kit and some simple cooking gear completed the setup, and after purchasing some tools and camping provisions, I was ready to continue my journey.

My seat on the flight to Tokyo had been booked for that afternoon. I stopped at the PRA head office to thank my benefactors there, and was treated to a ride in one of the company’s chauffeured cars. Waiting in the back seat were Jin Ju and her parents. My minder at PRA had been kind enough to invite them to see me off. Soon we arrived at the airport and it was time for me to go.

“I’ll never forget you,” Jin Ju said, bowing lightly in her Oriental fashion.We said good-bye, and I was grateful for our friendship, and content that it hadn’t turned

into infatuation.

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3. Tokyo, Japan

In comparison with the Hyper Jumbo, the old 787 that took me to Tokyo seemed like a small commuter plane. Nevertheless, my flight was pleasant, and no incidents occurred to justify my newfound apprehension of flying. I arrived at Narita airport at the peak of the afternoon rush, and, once again, was lost in wonderment at the genius of the Japanese for organization and efficiency.

Pacific Rim Airlines had booked me a hotel room in downtown Tokyo, and to get there, I had the choice of taking the levitating bullet train or the underground airplane. Or I could have waited for the bus and spent the next two and a half hours watching commuters leave Tokyo by road, but I decided to cut short all delays and go high tech one more time. The train seemed like the less oppressing alternative, since it traveled above ground—I’ve never learned to enjoy flying through a tunnel at 375 miles an hour.

Ten minutes and 45 miles later, I got off the train at the Shinjuku station, just a brief walk from my hotel. I knew the area well, having stayed at the same hotel several times earlier during visits to the head office of the company I had worked for. Still, the tall building now seemed somehow alien to me. This time, I was here to relax, to observe, and to listen. No longer was I ruled by a tight schedule and the demands of business efficiency. Determined to make the very best use of the week’s free stay in Tokyo that PRA had bestowed on me as a parting gift, I shouldered my rucksack and joined the throng of business people in dark three-piece suits heading in the general direction of my destination.

The clerk at the registration desk recognized me and gave me the best room available. As I was installing myself in my room, the automatic windows were closing and getting lighter for the night. The room computer, a miniature entertainment center that also acted as an interactive high-definition TV set with a video camera and a microphone built in, greeted me in flawless English, and inquired into my wishes for entertainment. I told it to give me the news and a beer, and sat down within easy reach of the delivery tray of the minibar. To my amusement, the beer was served in a glass: during my previous visit less than a year earlier, it had still been my job to open the can, find a glass, and pour the beer.

Much of the news was the usual, depressing stuff. Pollution and algal bloom had finally killed off all marine life around Japan, and the country’s oceangoing fishing fleet was roaming ever further in its search for natural protein. Although reasonably priced, alternative products based on soy, algae, insects, and synthetically cultured meat were available, the affluent Japanese still couldn’t be persuaded to switch. The actors advertising the fake foods swore they couldn’t taste the difference, and they were probably being honest about it. But staying with the traditional foods was seen as a matter of maintaining your status and living standard.

Wars, floods, and earthquakes were ravaging the globe. The screen showed an ever-changing succession of images conveyed live by remote-controlled, airborne Kamikaze cameras at the centers of calamity, bringing the starkness of hitherto untold suffering into every living room.

Never before had those scenes so affected me. I realized that my own brush with death had cracked the callousness I had used to share with most of those who watched such happenings every day, but were lucky enough not to be affected. In part, my indifference had been due to my awareness of the fact that one never knew if the disaster reports were true or not: both public and corporate propagandists constantly fed the networks skillful blends of old video footage, computer animations, and tailor-made crisis acting just to keep up the climate of fear and further their political

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interests. After my own ordeal I decided that, from then on, I’d have to give the stories the benefit of the doubt, at least until I could do some checking.

The ultraviolet danger was proving worse than expected. As the northern summer approached, only patches of the ozone layer remained. The radiation, in combination with resulting, unwanted chemical reactions in polluted air made large cities such as Tokyo patently unhealthy places to live in. I was glad I was only passing through.

The political news wasn’t much better. The Japanese emperor lay dying, leaving no heir. No agreement on a constitutional amendment was in sight. The shaky truce in the Middle East was showing signs of crumbling: citing terrorist activities, Israel had again attacked one of her Arab neighbors, and even her critics had lost count of how many UN resolutions Israel had already violated.

The depression in America was getting worse. An analyst explained that America had run out of technical talent: generations of belligerent fundamentalists, implacably hostile to science, had succeeded in removing or diluting the science curricula of US schools to such an extent that the country’s supply of young engineers and scientists was drying up. The gifted instead became doctors, lawyers, and bonus-grabbing business executives: too many people dividing the cake and not enough bakers. While America had long been able to compensate for this trend by importing research and development staff, a point had now been reached where equal or better pay at home combined with unwillingness to risk their children’s education had reversed that flow.

This trend was exacerbated by the fact that America was no longer able to find lenders to finance her growing deficits resulting from the waste of trillions of dollars on wars for profit, outdated superpower weaponry, and the world’s most expensive—although only modestly effective—health care system.

Moreover, as the Chinese-supported de-colonization of South and Central America cut into long established cash flows of US capitalists, many large corporations were failing. China itself, however, was running out of arable land, drinkable water, and breathable air, with Beijing gradually disappearing under desert sand. Only Europe was going from strength to strength.

The hotel provided access to a number of international TV channels, and now I tuned in my regular Sydney station. Back home, it was an hour later, and the main news and current affairs bulletin were over. I watched the familiar succession of local entertainment news, TV comedy news, soap opera news, quiz news, and rock music news. After the preview of the week’s new TV commercials my favorite talkback show started.

The subject was the new “Total Experience” helmets that were in the process of replacing virtual reality body suits on the market. The host began with an overview of how the helmets worked. While sight, sound, and smell still came to you through your normal senses, the sensations of touch, position, temperature, and movement—indeed, even that of taste—could now be conveyed with an accuracy hitherto unknown, as they came directly to your brain in the form of precisely targeted electromagnetic impulses. Likewise, your commands and movements, as well as your reactions to advertising and propaganda, were picked up from your brain. Gone were the clumsy gloves and sensors you used to have to strap to your body; all that was needed was a painless one-time injection of nanorobots into the brain, where they handled the necessary interaction with the body’s own neurons. Although expensive, the helmets were going like hotcakes, partly due to the fact that they extended virtual reality into the realm of sex, something that had never before been possible without purchasing embarrassing, remote-controlled sex toys.

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At the time, this was already a fact of life, and the host didn’t go into how the Internet had come to understand human sexual needs. But it was a remarkable story: for the first time, artificial intelligence had created something entirely new and useful that its designers never intended.

To ensure that helmets and nanorobots would work for everybody—seeing how different we all are—they had been designed with an ability to learn and to adjust their functions to each brain and each personality. But this learning capability went deeper than the designers realized. Initially, a new helmet worked much like a game console, interpreting the wearer’s movements, gestures, and words while providing feedback in the form of artificial stimuli for the senses. But then the helmet began picking up moods, feelings, sensations, and thoughts and accurately conveying them to other players. Electronic telepathy suddenly existed without having been consciously created. And before long, somebody tried having remote sex that way and succeeded.

Pioneering users soon found that the art of training your helmet for sharing sex could be taught to others. First there were face-to-face courses; then interactive Web seminars. The breakthrough came when an automated application was developed that enabled every helmet owner to learn the skill on their own. Within a year, the developer of the app was a billionaire.

The host pointed out the absurdity in keeping the awkward, sexless body suits on the market for so long: people were, after all, male and female. In his opinion, the manufacturers of VR body suits had come close to fraudulent advertising when they had promised what they had called a “complete sensual encounter” from a suit that simply ignored a basic human need, that of sex.

Nevertheless, the host said, it was a worry that the market was now being saturated with uncensored, clandestine software for the smartphones and computers controlling these helmets. Shady vendors were busy creating virtual reality programs that made it possible to act out every conceivable sexual perversion. As porn sites were made interactive, traditional consumers of pornography, by interacting with their helmets and home entertainment centers, could now perform and experience all the depravity they had formerly only been able to read about or watch on X-rated videos and Web movie clips. Anything was available, albeit without run-time victims, from child molesting to sex with decaying corpses or extraterrestrial monsters, not to mention rape, torture, and murder. Those wanting to share such activities were free to connect with willing partners over the Internet, and weird-sex groups were now more popular on the Internet than chat rooms and role-playing games combined.

Not all such interactions had been strictly voluntary, however. On several occasions, computer crackers had illegally connected their equipment to the entertainment centers of unsuspecting women enjoying their helmets in the privacy of their homes. This, obviously, was a cause for concern. Imposing your sexual deviations on an unwilling partner in such a fashion was much worse than a mere obscene telephone call; it was more like a rape. Moreover, no such intruder had yet been traced and brought to justice.

People started calling in and voicing their opinions. Most callers thought the helmets were a great thing: being able to connect to any partner of your choice—via a computer dating agency, if you so wished—and having whatever kind of sex you wanted without any concerns for pregnancy or AIDS, was a phenomenal instance of progress. A married couple called in and reported how their helmets had improved their relationship: they were free to share the wildest of fantasies in their home whenever they wished. Or, if they wanted a change, they could swing with their friends or call the dating agency, all without the hassle of going out and getting involved with strangers.

By now four viewers and the host were shown discussing the subject. A clergyman thought the availability of the perverted software might turn out to be a blessing in disguise, since potential rapists could satisfy their needs without assaulting anyone. A woman who had been raped

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disagreed. She thought that virtual sex would only serve to whet the appetites and lead to an increase in assaults on women and children, as men with sick minds switched to the real thing, just like playing violent computer games simulating car theft and reckless driving was known to generate deadly manifestations of road rage.

Few people, however, shared the reservations the host had mentioned at the beginning. Several men had noticed that their sexual performance with the helmet was markedly better than without it, and wondered what the difference could be. That was something I knew, so I decided to call in and make my contribution.

For some reason, the manufacturers of the helmets didn’t advertise the fact that the scent generators they used gave off more than just smells to make the experience of virtual reality lifelike. Those generators could also release odorless pheromones that act directly on the brain to induce a number of emotional states. Via two tiny pits in our noses, called the vomeronasal organ, such pheromones can make us feel happy, angry, afraid, sexy, and so on. Hunger, or the lack of it, can also be induced.

It was the hunger pheromone, released into the air, which made fast food restaurants so irresistible when you walked past them in a shopping mall. At home, your TV set exuded the same pheromone along with the smells of food when it showed a commercial for, say, a home delivery pizza service. When you went into a slimming parlor and felt so wonderfully capable of fasting forever—until you came home again—it was the opposite agent at work. Since staff breathed the stuff all day long, anorexia was a common occupational disease in the weight loss industry.

According to inside information, such techniques were being used to intensify the experiences people were having while using their helmets. This would also make you more likely to come back for more, increasing the revenues of the software vendors, as if the Internet weren’t addictive enough on its own. Another little known aspect of the technology was that the nanorobots were also programmed to react to more generalized, longer-distance signals while the bearer wore no helmet. In shopping centers, you could induce euphoria and impulse shopping, while another code, beamed from crowd control vehicles, produced fear and submission.

As soon as a person started using his or her helmet, it began analyzing the bearer’s behavior and reactions, and after a couple of weeks, it delivered a diagnosis to its manufacturer. Lesser psychological problems like shyness and a tendency to procrastination could be addressed by remotely reprogramming the bearer’s nanorobots; more severe personality disorders required in-patient care.

The official list of personality disorders had recently been augmented with some new ones like disrespect for authority, political cynicism, and a phobia against getting in debt. Obviously, such hang-ups severely interfered with a person’s ability to lead a normal life. Adult patients thus diagnosed with personality disorders received a series of subliminal messages through their helmets, urging them to check in at a local clinic affiliated with the helmet manufacturer. At the same time, all their social media “friends” suddenly recalled that they had been to such clinics and began gushing about how great the experience had been. The cure turned up in every possible context as the in-thing to have, and bonus apps were promised for smartphones and VR helmets as a reward for obtaining it. Next-of-kin were mobilized to help get the sufferer to treatment. Free transport to the clinic, often by limousine, was part of the deal.

Once at the clinic, sick leave was instantly obtained on behalf of the client over the Internet, and a routine operation was performed to fit him or her with a brain implant designed to cure whatever was wrong with his or her personality. Full coverage for the procedure was automatically granted by all health insurance schemes, public and private. The patient remained blissfully

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unaware of the presence of the implant while the VR helmet delivered continued diagnostics to the manufacturer and took care of any necessary fine-tuning of the chip.

A standard but unadvertised feature of the helmets and their nanorobots was that they could surreptitiously be used to erase true memories and implant false ones, including false learning. If someone in power wanted you to think that the earth is flat, black is white, and politicians are honest, you’d forever be convinced that those things were true and had always been so.

The nanorobots would outlive their bearer—they were coated in special oils and proteins, modeled on viruses, to protect them from the bearer’s immune system—and couldn’t be removed, only reprogrammed to add new, fashionable VR experiences and enhance their crowd control features. A hack to disable them via your own VR helmet existed, however, and could be obtained through unofficial channels. Removing the personality correction implant was surgically possible, but a clever feedback loop in the chip killed off any such desire in the patient as soon as it formed.

I thought the public ought to know about all this, so I dictated an abstract of my planned comment to my combined computer and TV set. I positioned myself in front of the camera in the set and rehearsed my observations in my mind. But nothing happened.

Questioned, the computer said it had sent the abstract to the TV station in Sydney and received an acknowledgment. I had taken part in these talk-back shows many times, and had become accustomed to being on the air within seconds of throwing in my token. The station was known to favor people it often got interesting feedback from, and I found its silence rather annoying. Could there be something wrong with their computer?

So I sent in another abstract—cleverer, I thought, than the first one. Still no reaction. Quite incensed, I decided to call the marketing manager of the TV station at his home, something I felt free to do, since I knew him well and had visited him several times.

“Steve, what’s wrong with your talk-back contention program?” I asked. “I have a sensible comment to make, but your computer just keeps ignoring me!”

“Hold on a moment, Greg,” he answered. “I’ll log onto our system and take a look.”A while later, he picked up the telephone again. “Yeah, I can see your two abstracts here.

They look really good. You should have been on the air ages ago!” “So what’s the problem?” I insisted. “You never treated me like this before!” “You aren’t calling locally, are you?” Steve asked.When I confirmed that I was in Tokyo, he knew the answer right away.“That explains it,” he said. “That contention program automatically weeds out interstate and

international calls. You wouldn’t believe how many people all over the country watch us over the Internet, and we just can’t use their comments.”

“And why not?” I inquired. “Are Sydneysiders the only people with any smarts, as far as you’re concerned?”

“That’s not the point,” Steve retorted. “You aren’t here buying anything. Our sponsors pay us for the names, addresses, and personality profiles of our viewers, and those sponsors are here in Sydney. While you were here, you were hot stuff—a well-to-do yuppie with an early adopter profile. We’ve made many a nice dollar on computer-analyzing your opinions, my lad. Now you’re thousands of miles away and no one wants to know a thing about you. Try some local show!”

“They wouldn’t care one yen about a traveler passing through Tokyo,” I told him. “Can’t you wheedle in my comment somehow from where you are?”

“I’d have to change the parameters of the program to do that, and we’d have a dozen people from Perth and Hobart breaking in along with you,” Steve replied. “No go. That show is earning us

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good sponsorship money as it is, and we’re not changing anything. How long will you be away for?”

“Heaven knows! A year, maybe two. I’m going around the world, and I’ve made no firm plans.”

“Then I’ll delete you from our files,” Steve told me. “You don’t want the junk mail piling up while you’re gone, and we don’t want to waste anybody’s time on you.”

“One more question, Steve. Why is all your news about things that don’t matter?”“I distinctly remember telling you this before, Greg, so why do I have to tell you again? The

purpose of commercial media news is not to inform, it’s to maintain consumer confidence. Have a good trip!”

And with that he hung up. I returned to watching the TV, dismayed at the realization that my sincere participation in shows such as this one had only served to give the marketers of consumer goods a better handle on how to sell to me. Gradually, I began ticking off in my mind what I had seen so far that evening. Apart from the world news, every bit of programming had been about entertainment of some kind. Entertainers selling their own wares? Yes, along with everybody else’s: over half the program time was taken up by commercials.

What about real life? Did anybody know anything about real life anymore? Did anybody care? Even the world news seemed more like entertainment than concern about reality. Was there, I wondered, a difference between politicians and entertainers? Not a very big one, I thought.

Commercial TV news habitually presented a disconnected series of snippets about what the station management considered the in-happenings of the moment, and good for the station’s ratings. Well-groomed, familiar experts, provided and paid for by the multinational business community through innocuous-sounding consulting subsidiaries of their advertising agencies, followed up with predigested views and conclusions for all to adopt. By the end of the newscast, all the thinking the nation was going to do on the subjects it covered had already been done by the performers, and public amnesia, induced by information overload and incessant entertainment, wiped the slate clean until the next newscast.

In contrast to reality, which, if you care to study it, forms a continuum of observation and reflection, TV shows a disjointed world where nothing other than entertainment and advertising matters very much. Suddenly, I understood why Laura always knew the next phrase to be said on TV: it’s all fully predictable, because the programming is tailored to what the public has been taught to like and expect.

I had soon had enough of it all and went out for my dinner. Upon my return, the intelligent toilet gave me a douche, a blast of warm air to dry me up, and a whiff of cologne, and told me what I already knew: I was fit as a fiddle, all my urine analysis readings were normal, and I wasn’t pregnant. Before I retired for the night, I found the switch to turn off the ever-watching computer, rather than having to tell it that I wanted none of its nightcaps, lullabies, through-the-mattress massages, scented breezes, heart beat monitoring, and soft rocking of my bed.

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4. The MonkDuring the days that followed, my wanderings took me to many parts of inner Tokyo. I walked about the streets, watching men hurrying to meetings, traffic roaring in all directions, and women shopping, always shopping. Many young women, hoping to get in touch with a young man interested in marriage, were trying their luck at vending machines dispensing their horoscope and details of a suitable male participant in the scheme. But more young women, it seemed, had joined the men in the pursuit of a career, and showed little interest in domestic things. With equality in the workplace, Japanese women have been handed a harsh set of choices: marry and run a household on their own, while their husbands spend most of their waking hours at work or drinking with their colleagues, or accept the same kind of workload and have no time for a family.

Robots scurried around, keeping buildings and sidewalks clean. A considerable proportion of vehicles were electric. Still, pollution was heavy and disposable gas masks were available from vending machines everywhere. And people bought and carried the masks with them. Some wore them whenever they were outdoors, either because of pollution or due to a widespread phobia of other people’s germs; others just kept them on hand for the case there’d be a poison gas attack. There hadn’t been one for many years, but these people didn’t want to be caught unprepared.

I descended into the underground. I took an express elevator five hundred feet down to the lowest level of Alice City and began working my way up. I was in one of three huge, cylindrical office blocks, together forming a city of their own where a hundred thousand people worked. Ascending from the lowest car park level, I came to a deep train line station, the main gateway between the cylinders and the outside world. An interminable flow of commuters and shoppers came and went. There was nothing to reveal that I was in the very bowels of the earth, rather than in a regular subway station a few feet below the surface.

A couple of floors up, I entered the lower garden, at the bottom of the cylindrical center of the block. Here, birds sang and fountains sparkled. Daylight, concentrated by huge, movable mirrors on the roof, beamed down the shaft and was amplified by the silvery windows lining it all around. A gigantic shopping mall encircled the garden, providing every imaginable service. The people who worked here had no reason ever to see the Tokyo that bustled more than 300 feet above their heads.

A further ride in an elevator brought me halfway up to the surface. Office suites extended several ways from a luxurious lobby, nestling against the windows toward the light shaft in the middle of the cylinder. Along the sides of the lobby, the video wallpaper showed peaceful sceneries from the gardens above. The pictures were live: you could see people moving about and airplanes flying overhead. Everything had been done to relieve what claustrophobia there might have been to expect among the occupants. But wherever I looked, I saw fire escapes and fire fighting equipment prominently signposted. There was no doubt it was a long way up.

Ascending closer to the surface, I encountered a distribution point of the Greater Tokyo subterranean freight network. This was a robotized web of special tracks, comprising 200 miles of tunnels and 150 storage depots. In a never-ending stream, thousands of containers moved along these tunnels. On their way, they passed through automatic sorting centers and were, eventually, deposited at distribution points such as the one I saw. Subsequently, electric trucks drove them to their destinations along the streets of Tokyo.

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Via a series of escalators I then arrived at the terminal of the underground airplane, or Geoplane, that I could have taken from the airport. Moments later, I was again above ground, much relieved. I decided to wait a while before I took the subway to my next point of interest.

The building in question was in plain view, although several miles distant. It was Sky City, a giant, hexagonal tower, 3,300 feet high. Between its six soaring concrete pylons, each dividing into two legs halfway down their length, were suspended fourteen fifty-story building blocks, one above the other, separated by wind gaps to lessen the load from typhoons. 100,000 people lived in the upper blocks, and 35,000 worked in the lower ones.

Standing at one of the entrances to Sky City, I marveled at its sheer bulk. The tower was 1,300 feet in diameter at its base and 500 feet at its top. Just as in Alice City, the center of the tower was hollow. Each of the fourteen blocks had its own garden at its base, covering the entire central shaft at that level. Here, too, mirrors, augmented by fiber optics, distributed daylight.

My brief excursion into the building confirmed my expectations. From the top, the view would have been spectacular, had the air been clear. And, as I had thought, anyone who lived and worked in Sky City had no reason ever to leave it save for recreation. Everything was there, including a hospital. And next door was a high-tech funeral parlor, not the kind I was used to from home. This one was complete with laser light show, dry ice mists, motorized coffin, and computer-animated interviews with the departed.

By this time, I had had my fill of architectural marvels. I didn’t care to visit Pyramid City, over a mile tall, which housed a million people. I had taken note of the 500-story Aeropolis tower out in Tokyo Bay, the home of 140,000 residents, with 300,000 places of work, but I felt no desire to take the fifteen-minute elevator ride to its top. I wanted to see something beautiful for a change.

So, the next day, I went to the gardens of the Imperial palace, the great oasis in the heart of Tokyo. The cherry trees were in blossom and the gardens were a sea of pink and purple. Everything was quiet. Ancient buildings and elegant little bridges showed off their ornamentation in the bright spring sunshine. I sat for a long while on a bench, just taking in this piece of nature in the middle of the chaotic city.

The contrast between city and garden was enormous. Here, the ducks and the carp would continue their peaceful existence even if life in the city stopped, as it would have to do in the case of, say, a major strike or power failure. The millions of people in Tokyo, as in other large cities, could only be fed, housed, employed, transported, and entertained through the flawless workings of a high-tech, commercialized infrastructure.

It seemed to me that a society so highly organized was somehow, in its very essence, different from and more restricting than older, simpler communities. In the old society, people worked on their own or together, as the case might have been, to survive and better their living standard. Although cooperation was important and beneficial, your life and your survival were, first and foremost, your own responsibility. Here, the technical workings and the organization of society were out of reach to every ordinary citizen. All of that was decided for you by an invisible elite. There was no element of self-sufficiency left, not even a tiny bit. And the interaction between people was no longer a matter of choice or convenience; it had become a fixed kind of role-play with no alternatives.

An elderly Buddhist monk seated himself near me and commented on the beauty of the surroundings. I welcomed his friendly approach, counting myself lucky that he spoke perfect English. I told him about my interest in his country and her people, and something about my musings on the workings of modern society.

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The two of us soon found that we had much in common, and we were getting along marvelously. The monk, whose name was Mikio, had been a business executive until several years earlier, when he had decided to change his lifestyle. He didn’t care to talk very much about himself, but he gave me a quick outline of his background.

“I was the Chief Information Officer at a large bank for many, many years. Then my wife died, and I reexamined my life. I found that I knew too much about how we’re being controlled and manipulated. I wanted my freedom from the consumer society and I simply dropped out and became a monk. It turned out to be a complete break with my relatives, as well: they haven’t talked to me since, as I brought shame on them by leaving my ‘respectable’ job. Now a robe, a pair of sandals, a bowl, and a few other things are all I own, and I find I need nothing else.”

However, when it came to explaining the workings of the society he had turned his back on, Mikio had no inhibitions.

“Japan is very much a prototype of the ‘ideal’ consumer society. And it’s by no means an accident: this country has always been run according to plan. We’re a very governable nation. Many years ago, when computers were quite new, our government came up with a national scheme for what was then called the Information Society. The idea was to create an information intensive way of living and working. Our consumption of goods and services couldn’t grow any faster, so this was the next logical step in the process of continuing the expansion of the economy.

“The course then chosen has remained through all the intervening economic ups and downs. In short, the very design of our society forces every citizen to use the technological services provided by government and business. They must do this in order to be competitive enough to be able to satisfy the growing expectations advertisers keep generating. Our owners and leaders have succeeded in engaging every Japanese in the rat race, and peer pressure ensures that there’s no escape.”

“Surely, this isn’t a specifically Japanese outlook?” I observed. “North Americans, Australians, and Europeans do very much the same thing, don’t they?”

“This is true,” the old man in his saffron robe replied. “But our ambition level in this respect is higher than anybody else’s. We have a tradition of total conformity. We’re used to concerted, government-led campaigns to carry out every policy that our leadership has adopted as beneficial. Elsewhere, part of the population wouldn’t pay any attention to such campaigns. But here, everybody accepts this kind of programs without coercion. Most of us actively want to conform. And for the rest, a tempting materialism is inducement enough.”

“Who is tempting whom?” I asked. “Materialism is a normal way of life for nearly everyone, isn’t it?”

Mikio, clearly, was no materialist. Everything he owned was on his person. His home was a bare cell in a monastery. He had to beg for every meal he ate. Yet he seemed freer from care than anybody I had ever met. Now he had found some crumbs in his bundle and was feeding the squirrels. A tender joy was in his eyes, as he watched them eat. When he returned to economics, his expression changed to one of kind endurance with my ignorance.

“You must understand how human society is structured before you can grasp where the influences come from. Think of Australia for a while. Have you ever seen a sheep farm back home?”

Around my childhood home, sheep farms were all you saw wherever you turned. This I now told Mikio, and he made me describe to him the rolling hills, the dusty, browning pastures, and the black and white dogs driving the flocks to the shearing shed until, in the end, they were walking on top of the sheep as the mob pressed together in the sheep-yard, waiting for the hardworking

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shearers inside. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all this was now gone, replaced by robots, GPS-actuated virtual fences, and injections of a special protein to make the sheep shed their fleece.

“If you want to understand how society works, it’s an excellent exercise to think of sheep first,” Mikio said. “There are four basic classes of people in every society, and these classes interact in a very clear-cut and purposeful way.

“The great mass of regular people are sheep. The sheep convert natural resources to wealth and provide services, for their own and everybody else’s benefit.

“Every flock of sheep has its owners. There’s an owning class in every society. Even where so-called socialism was tried—in truth, the Eastern Bloc countries of the past century practiced state capitalism, not socialism—the party bosses were in the position of owners. The owners are idle and live off the sheep’s back, as you say in Australia.

“Then, to keep, indoctrinate, dupe, and protect the sheep, and to extract the wealth that’s needed to support the owners, the latter employ shepherds. Politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, brokers, financiers, soldiers, professionals, police, clergy, entertainers, teachers, and managers fall into this category. Evidently, the shepherds will receive a handout for their trouble. A lot of wool is pulled over their eyes, as you say, to prevent them from seeing what they actually do, but should they understand it, their self-interest will keep them serving the purposes of the owners, anyway.

“The owners also promote conservative political views among the shepherds. This breeds right-wing politicians and keeps the attention of the shepherds on any unearned benefits given the sheep, and away from the large-scale welfare payments society bestows on the owners in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and preferential procurements.”

“It seems that you just placed everyone in society into three categories,” I said. “Which is the fourth one?”

“The last class is the wolves,” Mikio continued. “In Australia, you’d talk about dingoes, of course. The wolves—that’s to say, the criminals—take their sustenance from the flock, just like the owners do. Neither class can get rid of the other, nor could they live without each other. The wolves need the owners to maintain the flock, and the owners need the wolves to justify the existence of shepherds with their fees, taxes, rules, and regulations. Both classes share a way of life and a habit of tax avoidance. As long as wolves and owners stay within accepted limits, they tolerate each other; indeed, occasionally they even cooperate.”

“At Australian police academies,” I interjected, “cadets are taught that the public is their enemy. Not the criminals. That seems to agree with what you just said.”

Mikio nodded thoughtfully. “Law enforcement’s foremost duty is to protect the owners and their businesses from the people, not the people from the criminals. Think about the meaning of the term ‘Public Order.’ That’s what the police are here to maintain. But who would threaten it? Not the burglar, nor the rapist, nor the embezzler. When public order is disturbed, the culprit is the public. Regular, honest people who, for some reason, have become enraged. They’re the danger, and they’re the enemy.

“There’s strength in numbers, but that strength must be meticulously circumscribed. Control of the many by the few is a fact of life, even where it goes by the name of democracy.

“From time immemorial, human society has been organized along these lines. What has changed in the past century is the practical role of the sheep. Technology has eased their burden, marketing has replaced the stick with the carrot, but their shackles remain.”

“I wonder if it’s really as clear-cut as that,” I ventured. “There are few people one could unequivocally class as owners, for example. Modern times must have blurred the distinctions of

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your model of society. But I can see that it would have been very accurate up to about the year 1900.”

Mikio agreed.“Ownership is more widespread now than at the beginning of the industrial age. Many

members of the shepherd class are also owners on a limited scale. But, what’s more important, ownership has become institutionalized and internationalized. As companies grew bigger, individual capitalists had to bring in outside shareholders. Now institutions control most of our accumulated wealth. Some of those institutions are sovereign funds, owned by rich states, not individuals. This has made the power of ownership faceless, merciless, and utterly conservative. Most of the people now exerting that power are employees of the owning institutions: they aren’t authorized to show compassion on anybody.

“However, behind the institutions are wealthy individuals operating globally. The richest 2 percent of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth; the poorer half of the world’s population owns less than one percent of our shared assets. Middle-class ownership, which was an important force as late as at the turn of the century, has fallen off sharply, as more and more people have been drawn into on-line speculation. The stock markets are mechanisms for concentrating wealth to the rich: the latter create the fluctuations, and sell when prices are high and buy when they’re low, while everybody else buys highly valued stocks, and then panics and sells them off when they’ve dropped below some limit.

“Another thing that’s different today is that many of the sheep in society now wear white collars and work in a service profession. Some of them are highly educated, some unemployed. But allowing for these changes and a lot of overlapping, the basic setup of interests remains the same. Politicians, bureaucrats, and media pander mainly to the owning institutions. Efficiency is still measured only in terms of profitability and minimizing the work force. The only newsworthy economic indicators we have are those that gauge how well human activities cater to the needs of the owning class. In short, the only economic process of any consequence taking place in our society is that the rich are getting richer. And among the rich, the most powerful ones are those that get richer on conflict and distrust between people, ethnic groups, and nations.”

“And what’s the alternative?” I queried. “You already pointed out that Communist revolutions didn’t change anything. George Orwell showed the same thing in his Animal Farm. Should we rather strive for anarchy, perhaps?”

“Anarchy is an elite fantasy,” Mikio retorted. “There may be a small minority of idealists who could live briefly without any kind of leadership. But, as with other utopian thought systems, anarchy simply became an excuse for vandalism and terror as soon as it became widely known. Anarchy doesn’t work with real people.

“Human society readily lends itself to exploitation of the people by the clever and the ambitious. Many will grumble against such abuse and may support the political opposition or a revolutionary movement in the hope of getting a better deal. But, as we know, any such change of the ruling layer only results in more of the same. Losing the customary social structure would hurt everybody. The masses can’t function without leadership, the shepherds would lose their jobs, and any vacuum at the top would just sit there waiting to be filled.

“Have you noticed how the media report on civil wars and popular uprisings? The most calamitous news isn’t how many people have been displaced, killed, maimed, and tortured. The most dreaded line, the one that’s meant to make us shudder from uncertainty and fear, is, ‘Nobody seems to be in control.’ If total freedom, or, in other words, anarchy, were such a desirable state, then, surely, we’d be expected to react differently to such news.”

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“You’d think the wolves would like it, though, if the flock lost its protection!” I suggested.“Not for long,” Mikio replied. “After a quick kill the flock would scatter and perish, and the

wolves would starve to death—or would have to learn to eat grass; in other words, to do honest work. The wolves are just as dependent on the productivity of the sheep as are the owners and the shepherds. In fact, if all the latter were lost, the wolves would sooner herd the flock themselves than risk losing the social fabric that keeps them in business.”

I still had some objections. “I worked for a large corporation for nine years and had a great time. I had a fine boss, smart colleagues, and a generous employer. Big business can’t be all that bad.”

Mikio didn’t disagree. “There’s nothing wrong with business and capitalism per se. The alternative doesn’t work. Enterprise brings out the best in people. The problem arises when we, the people, permit corruption and loss of transparency. When society neglects the need for checks and balances on big money, it abdicates the power that belongs to the people to the owning class. Greed feeds on itself, and on a large enough scale, it knows no morals at all.

“The model of society I’ve described to you remains the only workable one. It caters to the ambitions, abilities, and inclinations of practically every human being. Whether it turns out well or poorly depends on the character of the leadership. And here we come back to the old rule: in the long run, people get the kind of government they deserve. Good government comes about only through the strength of individual character and integrity among the people.”

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5. Bread and Circuses 

As we were talking, Mikio guided me through the gardens and kept pointing out interesting and beautiful things. Now a path with low steps took us up toward a large, traditional-looking building, surrounded by trees and shrubs. On a table by the path stood a collection of little bonsai trees in their pots, looking like exact, miniature copies of their larger cousins growing on the hill. It was as if the camera makers had finally succeeded in producing lifelike, three-dimensional photographs. But the small trees were just as much alive as their bigger relations. We found seating in the shade of the veranda of the building and resumed our discussion.

“As I think about your model of society,” I observed, “I can’t help visualizing hard work in dirty, dangerous nineteenth-century factories. Life is easier now, but it seems to me that today’s society is both better and worse off than the old one. The living standard is higher, but there’s so much fear and dissatisfaction. Crime and corruption flourish while honest people are subjected to more and more control and restrictions. What has happened, and when did it happen?”

Mikio thought for a while. “Technology hasn’t created a paradise,” he said, “for a very simple reason: human society is designed to provide power and profits for the few, not health and happiness for the many. To benefit the owning class, today’s humanity is quite unlike that of a few generations ago. But the changes have been so gradual, so slow, that no one has reacted. The idyll is gone; instead, people seem to be mainly mean and selfish.

“A major difference between our days and times past is that we now live under the illusion of ever growing wealth and inexhaustible resources. Before 1950, scarcity was the normal state everywhere. As a consequence, those who formed public opinion—owners and shepherds—then set a norm to the effect that it was proper for the lower classes in society to work hard and be content with little. There were strict laws against vagrancy, and those who couldn’t or wouldn’t be employed were put in workhouses to produce goods or carry out unpleasant maintenance work without pay. All this ensured that most of what wealth there was could conveniently be accumulated at the top of the social ladder.

“During the latter half of the twentieth century, a world economy emerged, where technology and the availability of energy other than muscle power had created such a degree of prosperity that, in industrialized countries, there was enough for everyone. At that time, it became the interest of the rich and powerful that the lower classes borrow, spend, and consume as much as possible. That way an adequate proportion of our collective wealth would still end up in the hands of the former—as taxes, interest, and profits. Whether people work or not is no longer important to the owners, as there are enough machines to help out with production and services.

“To this end, the term ‘Consumer’ was given a respectability that’s totally alien to the word. As late as in the 1940s, ‘Consumer’ was an insult, meaning the same as ‘Parasite.’ If you couldn’t call yourself a producer of something or a provider of a service, you had nothing to be proud of. But by 1962, President Kennedy could say ‘we’re all consumers’ without being tarred and feathered on the Capitol steps.

“Just as mass production had enabled the owning class in the industrialized countries to turn their populations into profit-generating consumers, so, at the end of the twentieth century, they decided to do the same to people in poor and developing countries, as well. But such countries are bound to stay at a much lower level of prosperity for a couple of powerful reasons.

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First, big business still needs below-minimum wage labor, so the exploitation of poor nations must continue—normally by installing corrupt tyrants, or, where democracy has taken too strong a hold, through the economic extortion that becomes possible when nations are deep enough in debt.

“Second, the great powers need enemies.”“Why is that?” I asked, quite taken aback.“You have to realize whose needs we’re talking about. The national interests of a great

power are the interests of its owning class, the owners of its big business.“The tax revenue of a large country is special in that it’s a predictable and reliable flow of

truly serious money. As such, it holds an attraction to the owning class that’s in quite another league from that of a small country. If you’re one of the owners of big business, you’ll be eyeing that money and plotting how best to divert the largest possible slice of it to yourself. The answer is no secret: it’s been known for as long as there have been states in this world. The safest and most profitable way of dipping into the national revenue is getting the nation into a war; selling it weapons, oil, and military supplies and services; and lending it the money to buy all that from you. War is the most dependable consumer there is.

“The politicians controlling the national budgets of the great powers tend to welcome such machinations, because a large country can only be held together if its leaders can point to an adversary that’s always producing new, unsettling threats at the national level. Failing this, people’s attention strays to local and provincial matters, and the national government becomes abstract, distant, and even irrelevant.

“But great powers can’t fight each other anymore—it would be too dangerous—so now the chosen enemy is terrorism. To ensure a steady supply of terrorists, the arms makers and defense contractors, under great patriotic brouhaha, tend to put their own men into the governments of the great powers, where they can make sure that someone, somewhere, suffers enough insult and injustice to resort to armed resistance and retaliation. They’ve gotten really good at this: America’s military-industrial complex managed to spend more on fighting a few tens of thousands of ragged insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan than on defeating Italy, Germany, and Japan in the Second World War.

“When the Cold War fizzled out around 1990, it became a matter of urgency for the arms makers and the governments of the great powers to find new enemies. As we know, the choice fell on the world’s Muslims, who have the advantages of a culture based on honor and vengeance, widespread poverty, and minority status in nearly all the large nations involved. They are easy to fear because their fertility is high. They have internal divisions that can be used to play them against each other, and they can be provoked as needed by indulging Israel. Their local religious leaders, always looking to maximize donations to their noble causes, have it easy to find young men with no prospects for a job and turn their minds to extremism and holy war, enabling our governments, once again, to raise our defense budgets.

“There you have the two main reasons why misery will persist next to affluence and wastefulness. But, while withholding prosperity from the developing world, we’ve managed to export the new covetousness alright: everybody consumes First-World entertainment, even if they have nothing to eat.”

“Going back a little, my understanding of how values form is quite different from yours,” I ventured. “I’ve read about all kinds of cultural and sociological influences interacting with developments in technology and communications. Isn’t your model of values being manufactured by the owning class a bit simplistic?”

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“You can’t separate human behavior from economics. Our minds don’t have separate compartments for different aspects of our interaction with society, just because those aspects are studied by different scientists. Economics is the foundation of our survival, and will always be one of the strongest influences we experience.

“Insight doesn’t come from knowing the right answers. It comes from asking the right questions. The most important question you can ask when you want to discover hidden influences or find out who committed a crime, is, ‘Who benefits?’ This question has been the basis of criminal justice since Roman times, and it’s all you need when you try to understand where our ideas come from. If those in power clearly benefit from the current values and preferences of the public, then you can be pretty sure that, ultimately, they’re behind those same values and preferences.

“The main difference between the morals of today’s postindustrial society and those of the famous good old days is that greed is now quite acceptable for everyone, not just for the rich. Because we have all been taught greed, our values have changed, and in many respects disappeared. Without the old values that made a virtue of restraint, there’s no more peer pressure against enriching yourself by whatever means you seem to be able to get away with. And, sad to say, peer pressure makes up the main part of the conscience of many of us.

“What’s left is envy. Vengeance and envy provide the last checks that remain at society’s disposal for curbing economic crime. Either the guy has taken something from me, or he’s getting away with something I couldn’t get away with. So I turn him in. This is something entirely different from concern for his integrity. But it’s very useful for somebody with an interest in enlisting my vote for putting more stringent controls on civil liberties.”

“What you’re saying,” I interjected, “is that greed and the crimes it induces provide an excuse for more control, and attaining more control over citizens requires more power to be given to the authorities. Is there any other way?”

“In the old kind of society, there certainly was one,” Mikio replied. “People were honest. Respect for the rights and property of others was instilled into every person from childhood. But modern parents that are taught greed by opinion makers have no way of teaching their children integrity. Children learn by following the parents’ example, not by what they’re told to do. Today, we’re fast forgetting that people should be honest and that their honesty should be taken for granted, as a basic tenet of society.

“Where greed is fulfilled, there’s prosperity. With prosperity come stress, boredom, and spoiled children. As soon as we no longer have to struggle for our survival and our betterment, we turn against each other, bickering and destroying, like birds or mice crowded together into too small an area, even if they’re given plenty of food.

“We Japanese have a particular problem because we’ve all been raised to conform without questioning, and we therefore tend to be quite gullible. Moreover, we have no traditional sense of morality to fall back on. Shinto, our main religion, has no code of ethics, and Buddhism provides only our burial rites. Our concepts of duty and obligation, Giri and On, apply only within the group we belong to, such as a company, a school, or a family.

“As the crime rate rises, politicians can campaign for more government control over people on the premise that we can’t trust each other and, hence, will think it a good thing that the authorities protect us by keeping track of what everybody is doing. When we’re far enough removed from the old tradition of integrity and honesty, we’ll sacrifice our own freedom in order to have protection from others. When a politician argues for more control because of the threat

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from criminal elements, we accept that the alternative of raising well-mannered children and trusting each other is no longer available, scarcely even remembered.”

“Raising well-behaved children is no easy task,” I objected. “You’re certainly right there,” Mikio confirmed. “That’s another thing that’s completely

different now. Before automation, kids had chores in the home, and the family needed their work to survive and prosper. Give children a productive task, and they’ll keep busy and be responsible like anybody else. But today, child labor has been outlawed—ostensibly, to put children in schools and protect them from overwork and exploitation—with the aim of eradicating all remaining pockets of family self-sufficiency by breaking off the transfer of traditional skills to the next generation. To protect children from accidents—under the assumption that their parents are careless idiots—they aren’t even allowed near the equipment the family farmer uses for his living. Today’s few remaining farm children are nearly as ignorant of where our food comes from as city kids, and, as adults, just as likely to become mere consumers without any complementing skills.

“Where children of bygone days played traditional games and made their own toys, modeling them on the working environment their families depended on for a living, today’s children must be inundated in expensive, technical playthings to keep them from becoming unmanageable through boredom. The toys represent no aspect of any productive process, only fantasies, armed conflict, and conspicuous consumption. To put it simply: children that grow up without responsibilities become adults who think that someone owes them a living. They have short attention spans, they lack a sense of purpose and punctuality, and they tend to expect something for nothing. Nobody is easier to manipulate than people with those characteristics.

“For their own survival in old age, yesterday’s parents and grandparents relied on the ability of children and grandchildren to carry on the productive work the family was engaged in. Because of this, adults had a vested interest in fostering in their children a solid work ethic and values like compassion, prudence and productivity. Today, children are mostly in the way of their parents’ hedonistic consumer lifestyle. Employers, social security, and pension schemes are assumed to take care of the aging—few realize that there can be no security for the old unless the young stay productive and competitive. So parents think it’s the task of schools and officials to teach their children how to behave, and to intervene when correction is needed. The only remaining entities with a direct, pecuniary interest in children’s values are retailers who want their money, and the retailers’ advertising agencies. Advertisers raise our children, and we wonder why we don’t understand them.

“These children, tethered to the Internet from infancy, are the first generation ever to grow up entirely without traditional values. With them, the mainstream of humanity has lost its ability to produce moral individuals. Morality isn’t an inherited trait: it can only be passed on to the next generation by means of cultural traditions. These traditions, both religious and secular, are unknown or meaningless to today’s parents. So when their children reach out for moral guidance, all they get is selfish consumerism and money-spinning on-line cults. Traditionally, everything a child learned was provided by someone with the child’s best interest at heart. Today, everything the Internet provides is available to nearly every child, and nobody teaches them that the most attractive role models there are often evil.

“But liberal democracy wasn’t made to cope with a population without values. Neither was any other form of government the world has known so far. Even where dictators forced their views on defenseless populations, they had to depend on some kind of norms and values that made people react predictably. They had no means of keeping tabs on everyone

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individually, so they had to impose at least two mechanisms based on respect and values: a power hierarchy of privileged officials, and economic sanctions or rewards, as the case may have been.

“Today, the disappearance of values makes us ever harder to govern. There are hundreds of millions of people with resources at their disposal that two or three generations ago were either unknown or the privilege of the very few, such as cars, computers, efficient communications, lots of money, unscrupulous lawyers, and the ability to travel fast and far. Suddenly, very many of us are both very selfish and very powerful, and society has run out of constructive ways of keeping us honest. Introduce a restriction, and someone will find a way around it. Promise a reward, and it’ll be abused.

“Clearly, this situation is untenable. To preserve their credibility, politicians must come up with a solution to the problem of mass dishonesty that they and the business community have created by teaching us greed and covetousness. Given today’s technology, and considering that nobody wants to stem the consumer’s appetite for ever more gratification, the solution will have to involve computer control over everybody’s actions and over all movements of money.”

The afternoon was now cooling off, and Mikio wanted to walk again. Knowing the parks in detail, he took me to see the ruins left from the buildings forming the keep of the old Edo castle in the East Garden.

Following my history lesson on the ancient Shoguns, I still wanted to pursue a few questions.

“Tell me something, Mikio. Why is entertainment such a central matter in life? It seems that somebody is pushing the idea that entertainment is really important. The media dedicate more time and effort to reporting on entertainment than on reality.”

Mikio looked at me and laughed.“You just answered your own question,” he said. “You haven’t been away from your

entertainment center two weeks yet, and already you’ve discovered that beyond all the brainwashing, there’s a whole world out there. If those in power didn’t keep people glued to their televisions, computers, and game consoles, this society would fall apart.

“Modern society is built on exploiting the masses as workers, dole recipients, and consumers. To ensure that the exploited don’t discover what’s going on, it’s vital to engage everybody’s mind without actually exercising it. That’s why the entertainment and gaming industries are among the strategically most important ones we have.

“In our traditional, mainly agricultural society, priests took care of keeping people ignorant, superstitious, and subservient to their betters. Wandering minstrels provided entertainment to fill what little free time there was. News rarely travelled far because of the lack of communications. That kind of society was very stable.

“Today, mass media provide all the elements needed to cause social unrest: news, ideas, and contacts. Religion has split into fanatical fundamentalism and inconsequential ritualism, and is no longer a stabilizing force. Despotism and censorship work poorly in the Internet age. So it falls to the media to counteract their own destabilizing influence by drowning all this dangerous knowledge about reality in something more attractive, i.e., non-stop entertainment and advertising. And, fortunately for the economy, people are willing to pay for having their minds switched off.

“To find a historical precedent to our current society, we need to go back to ancient Rome seen as a city state, with an easy flow of local news and a mock democracy like our own,

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where the owning class can’t just do as it wants, but has to buy votes and bribe elected politicians.

“In Rome, after its great conquests had been made, the interests of the ruling class—interests known then, as now, as ‘the security of the state’—were threatened by the growth of a bored, angry mob of unemployed lower class citizens. The solution then adopted for pacifying the masses was to give each person a set amount of flour every month, and to build large arenas where grandiose and violent shows and competitions were held. In return for food and the interminable spectacle of the cruel killing of beasts and humans, the crowds stayed manageable and fulfilled their only civic duty, that of voting, to the satisfaction of their patrons. This was the well-worn concept of ‘bread and circuses for the people.’

“Modern society is managed along the same lines. Basic material security —if need be, through handouts—and entertainment provide the dope for people nowadays. Make entertainment so fascinating that a majority of voters never care to seek any other views than those you feed them through their favorite TV channels and Web news services, and you have a perfect rubber-stamp democracy.

“This system of government now prevails all over the world. It’s very similar to the state of the late Roman Empire just before the Barbarians overran it. But this time, lacking a superior outside enemy, the fatal attack will come from within.”

“What happened to all the other things people used to do?” I persisted. “I know that people had to work harder before TV was introduced, but surely they had some spare time then, too?”

“Most of what people did in their homes before television took over had to do with some productive activity that helped them survive and prosper. They also put great value on just being together and talking to each other. In all sound societies, there always was an element of self-sufficiency and independence that gave the citizens the guts to stand up for their rights. Such societies were based on individual initiative and responsibility. Government and all other social activities were characterized by the words, ‘By the people.’

“Now we’ve let our guard down. We’ve accepted the idea that everything, including what the government does, should be ‘for the people.’ Evidently, this is what politicians want, as it makes them and their bureaucrats indispensable. It also makes for a centrally controlled society. Electronic entertainment is the ideal means to achieve such a state, as it replaces all other leisure activities with the act of perceiving, or interacting with, a centrally distributed monologue. Thus, people’s opinions and outlook become standardized by those in power, whereas, in earlier times when people communicated locally, there were a variety of views of the world, which helped keep leaders and opinion makers honest.

“Virtual Reality was the best invention ever for business and government. Virtual Reality is so fascinating, and it’s so much nicer to have your own choice of realities than having to put up with the one decaying environment we’ve got left in the real world, that we’ll soon have a majority of people, i.e., voters, who actually prefer VR to the real world. The entertainment industry is working hard to ensure that they never have to come back to reality. They can get news that relates to their virtual worlds; they can eat exotic dishes in Martian restaurants even though the food is just the regular supermarket slop, ordered, heated, and served by their own alimentabot; they can mingle exclusively with fantasy beings of their own preference. This majority can be totally manipulated by the propaganda channels, and it will decide what our society is going to be like.”

I had a comment at this stage.

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“Another crucial attraction with Virtual Reality is that you can present yourself as anything you like and vary that for different times, people, and occasions. When you can appear to others as an avatar with absolutely any kind of attributes, you don’t often want to re-enter reality and be your boring old self.”

Mikio nodded.“Lots of other people, too, have lost their ability for meaningful communication with

each other. They prefer the uncomplicated illusion of interacting with celebrities as they talk back to the computers of the TV stations. What time is left over is spent on fashionable, expensive hobbies. It’s easy to see that once you have thus destroyed self-sufficiency, more must be bought, perhaps with borrowed money, and profits will benefit.

“What we have, once more, is a political system that favors non-accountable government, big enterprise, big media concerns, big banking, powerful propaganda machines, and, where labor unions still remain, corrupt union leadership. Such organizations willingly take care of imposing conformity and exerting control. This is much easier for those in power than dealing with individuals and small enterprisers who all have different needs and interests.

“Once upon a time, such a system was called corporatism and the political philosophy supporting it was called fascism. At the end of the Second World War, we were told that fascism had been defeated and would never return. In truth, however, fascism was far too valuable to big business to be allowed to disappear. So instead of open fascism like there was in the 1930s, we now have something called democracy that serves as a cover for wholesale corruption of politicians by big business. Since even leftist politicians are now for sale, and intimidating them is no longer necessary, the more disgusting public features of the old fascism have been left to parading, powerless neo-fascists. But the traditional corporatist connection between big business and government is closer than ever.

“However, in an important sense, our society is the direct opposite of the old despotic regimes. Multinational business is now stronger than government, and the latter takes its orders from the former. Where business in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the 1930s was made to serve the purposes of party and government, today government and parties alike serve the needs of transnational enterprise. In olden days, strong-arm governments supported by national armed forces put the people to work for the interests of the country’s power clique. Today, government and media keep people happy and ignorant, borrowing and spending, in order to profit an absent, transnational owning class.

“Almost no one seems to realize that all the good intentions of national and international politicians and bureaucrats, and all their pious talk, mean nothing at all, because they don’t make the decisions. All issues of any consequence are decided by billionaires and their business executives, with the sole aim of maximizing the next quarter’s profits.”

At the end of the day, after many more insights on my part, Mikio invited me to share his customary evening meal. We joined a number of other monks, and a few dropouts, for a free dinner generously provided by the kitchen of the Palace Hotel.

Mikio introduced me to his friends. Most of the monks had begun as young novices. But a couple of the older ones had a business career behind them like Mikio did. One had suffered burnout and a nervous breakdown, and had quit his job to protect himself from karoshi, or death from overwork. The other had seen himself relegated to the class of madogiwa-zoku, the “window-side people”—elderly workers that were never promoted, but regarded by their employers as useless. They were placed by the window, something that would have been

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counted a privilege in the West. In Japan, it meant that they could be assumed to waste time by looking out. Humiliated in every way, some went mad or became alcoholics. Mikio’s friend had found a new way of life that was slowly giving him back his self-respect.

The dropouts were furosha—homeless—or burakumin, members of the lowest caste in a society that, since 1868, officially has been casteless. Traditionally, the burakumin did the most defiling jobs, such as slaughter, corpse disposal, and removal of human excrement. But by now, most of them had been made redundant by automation. Rather than accepting handouts and helping feed the corporatist system that kept denying them basic human dignity, the burakumin I met had elected to stay on the outside and shun consumerism.

In all its humbleness, this small group of nonconformists presented an enormously uplifting experience. True, they couldn’t feed themselves, but they claimed survival because of their basic right to life. And while living as beggars and scavengers, they had refused to sell out to the coercion that ruled the lives of the rest of Japan’s population.

I hated parting from Mikio, but I knew our time together had come to an end. I thanked him profusely, wondering if I’d ever be able to meet him again.

Once more, Mikio straightened me out in his patient manner.“It’s true that we’ve become friends, Gregory. But I’m old, and I remain here. You have

a mission and you must travel on. If you can act with more wisdom thanks to what you’ve learned from me, you’ll have repaid me. Now go on your way; my thoughts go with you.”

I felt very strange going back to my hotel room after that day’s experiences. The entertainment center was still shut off, and I left it that way. Many thoughts filled my mind, and sleep came slowly.

My stay in Japan was drawing to a close, and the next day I went to visit the Tokyo outlet of my favorite Sydney outfitters, there to buy myself the traditional Australian Akubra hat, Drizabone raincoat made of wax-impregnated fabric, and Blundstone boots. Although all this, by Australian standards, was frightfully expensive, the familiar outfit made me feel like I had regained a part of my personality lost with my original luggage.

Upon my arrival in Tokyo, I had decided to trade in my air ticket and continue by sea and land transport. After some searching, I had found an adventurers’ travel agency that had sold me on the idea of taking a freighter to Europe through the Northeast Passage.

Many cargo ships carry passengers, but no more than twelve. That way they aren’t obliged to have a doctor on board: the medical training of the ship’s master is considered enough. So, for the next leg of my trip, I would travel on board a Russian bulk carrier scheduled to join a convoy to Murmansk in the northwest corner of Russia. From Murmansk, I hoped to find some convenient means of getting to Finland, just beyond the border. There I had an old friend who had issued me a standing invitation to drop in on him at any time, should I be passing through.

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PART 2

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6. The Kapitan FedosovBetween 1918–1920, when Amundsen made his voyage through the Northeast Passage, and 1993, the route was closed to all but Soviet shipping. In August of the latter year, however, a French Arctic research ship, the L’Astrolabe, made the trip as the first foreign vessel for over seventy years, using only occasional icebreaker assistance and convincingly demonstrating the usefulness of satellite radar reconnaissance of the ice situation.

In the summer of 2005, the ice at the north shore of Russia melted for the first time. Subsequently, the Northeast Passage has been open every summer since 2007. Since then, by combining Western satellite navigation technology with sophisticated Polar Sea icebreakers, the Russians have managed to keep the Passage open for up to nine months of the typical year, and sometimes all through the winter.

Aided by the steady retreat of the arctic ice due to global warming, the Russians have been perfecting their methods. The result is that going through the Northeast Passage has become faster and expends less fuel than taking the alternative route, nearly twice as long, from the Far East to northern or western Europe, or vice versa, through the Suez Canal. The ships to be used on the route have to be extra strong, of course, but enough foreign shipping prefers this alternative to make the enterprise profitable for Russia.

Nevertheless, I was facing a sea journey of 6,000 nautical miles, most of it through pack ice. Having procured a few additional items of warm clothing, I boarded the Kapitan Fedosov and installed myself in my cabin. One of my concerns had been how to pass my time during three weeks of sea voyage, but if Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia didn’t do the trick nothing would—the battered old volume I had found in an antiquarian bookstore in Tokyo was nearly three inches thick, and promised some fascinating reading. Laura had the same book in paperback and had asked me to read it, but I hadn’t had the time before I had left.

One of the advantages of travel by freighter is that you get to dine at the captain’s table, an honor bestowed only on the select few on passenger liners, where such are still in use. Come dinnertime, I put on my best clothes and joined my fellow passengers in the officers’ mess on poop deck, with a splendid view of the darkening Tokyo Bay.

To my surprise, the captain of this Russian ship was African. His name was Joel; he was a Hausa from Nigeria, a professional seaman who had obtained his Master’s degree from none other than the Australian Maritime College at Launceston, Tasmania. A sincere, intelligent man in his early thirties, he described his current job as a step along his career. The Nigerian merchant fleet hadn’t had an opening at the level of master at the time, and here was an opportunity both to learn Russian and to gain experience of Arctic navigation, while commanding a good, strong, new ship with a reliable, international crew. It was his second season sailing the Northeast Passage, and Joel assured his passengers that we’d have a safe, routine trip—a little noisy, perhaps, but we’d soon get used to traveling through ice.

This early in the year, there still was room to spare on board: we were only eight passengers in all. To my left were seated Mrs. Dana Frost, her daughter Evelyn, and her husband, Dr. James Frost, a newly retired American professor who had ended up his career teaching computer systems design at Macquarie University near Sydney. Between James and the captain sat Sheila Johnson, a middle-aged English spinster who was on annual leave from her place of work, an international organization on the US East Coast. Her modest looks belied an adventurous spirit: the year before, she had “nearly climbed” Mount Everest on a trip to Nepal, and she seemed to be in a habit of

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dividing her vacations between visiting her elderly mother in Devon and going off on the most unusual treks the world had to offer.

On my right was Dieter Braun, a German economist. He was a bachelor, in his mid-thirties, on his way back home from an assignment in Indonesia. He worked for a large multinational corporation and had decided to spend some time between projects on a relaxing sea voyage rather than going straight home by air.

On the captain’s left sat Katherine Davis, newlywed wife of Michael Davis, a young American investor who praised modern communications technology for affording him and his bride this opportunity for a honeymoon in the form of a trip around the world, while he could continue managing his portfolio using his satellite-enhanced all-wireless notebook computer. A grimace from Kathy at the mention of the computer gave me the impression that she’d have preferred more of Mike’s attention for herself and less of it given to her electronic rival.

The chief engineer, Ilya Sergeievich Yakovlev, completed our party; he was a jovial, gray-haired man with the most intensely blue eyes I had ever seen, and a loud, booming voice never far from laughter. He had only praise for the Kapitan Fedosov: her builder, the old Navy shipyard in St. Petersburg, was, in the opinion of Ilya Sergeievich, fit to compete with any shipbuilder anywhere in the world. The company had weathered the post-Soviet turmoil well by specializing in submarines and Arctic ships.

Our discussion eventually turned from pleasantries to the deeper things in life. A random collection of strangers who never expected to meet again following the end of our trip, we found it easy to bare our thoughts to each other and share things you never hear mentioned, say, in the workplace.

Predictably, I got everyone started by telling Dieter about my talks with Mikio in Tokyo. Dieter confirmed Mikio’s description of human society as a flock of sheep with owners, shepherds, and wolves.

“It’s an unconventional way of putting it, but in essence it’s precisely what you’re taught in the economics class at college. It seems, however, that your Japanese friend didn’t want to put any other system in its place. So what was he trying to prove?”

I was still having a hard time answering that question in my own mind, but I welcomed the opportunity to think out loud.

“Mikio’s main point was that the system lends itself to many different purposes, depending on the leadership. Today, the only discernible motive of those in power is greed, and greed filters down to every layer in society. During some brief periods in past history, there seem to have been leaders who were motivated by nobler ideals.

“But another cause for concern is the sheer complication of this society. Humanity has been around for several million years, and during nearly all of that time, almost every family lived on the land and wrenched its living from that same land. Now, during what’s just a brief instant in history, we’ve attained a population larger than anything the earth has ever supported before, and nearly everyone is far removed from the process of producing food and providing shelter. We have no historical indication that such a society can continue for any length of time.

“The social mechanism for maintaining this population is utterly complex and inherently unstable: not only is it dependent on the whims of the weather, but it’s also at the mercy of the hunches and fears of millions of speculators with their computerized trading systems. Our society is very much like a military airplane with a canard up front instead of the traditional tail plane at the rear. It’s very agile, but it can fly only under computer control: it was built unstable in order to be able to maneuver faster, and it changes direction so fast that only a computer can steer it.

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“I think Mikio would like to see a society where each person and family would be more immediately responsible for feeding, housing, and clothing themselves, and, therefore, less susceptible to being controlled. More of the ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ sort of thing, I guess.”

“But there again,” Dieter retorted, “it’s precisely because there are so many people, and in the wrong places, that we need this commercialized society. Up until a few generations ago, starving masses could be given land through revolutions or land reforms, and, eventually, they would prosper as smallholders or members of cooperatives or kolkhozes, providing social stability and a reliable tax base. But today, they live in megacities and have to have money to buy their food and water and to pay for their housing and other needs. They need a way to support themselves, but they have no skills, and, in particular, no survival skills. If there were land to give them, at least ninety percent of them would be dead within the first few months, because they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves out in the countryside.

“When modern hunger riots erupt, they are aimless and destructive, not targeted at land and land politics. The rioters are simply seen as demanding something for nothing. The police aren’t concerned with giving anybody either paid work or handouts, only with suppressing the unrest. With current surveillance technology, they can do that in the most effective way possible: they identify leaders with the help of cameras, microphones, and computers, and take them out on the spot using snipers and robots. Without leaders, the rest of the protesters simply go back home.”

“The plan,” I chipped in, “was to use face recognition to spot known troublemakers in the crowd and eliminate them before they could cause problems. But people learned fast and started wearing masks. The masks make face recognition impossible and distort speech so much that voice recognition becomes unreliable. What’s more, it becomes impractical to get computers to understand the meaning of what’s being said or shouted. Instead, they now analyze the flow of information between the protesters and pinpoint who said each phrase first. That person must be a leader. The really scary thing is that trying to restrain a demonstration is now just as lethal as egging it on.”

“Either way, you shouldn’t be there in the first place,” Mike Davis pointed out. “As you said, the owners provide the sheep with shepherds; the sheep shouldn’t have leaders of their own.”

“Do you really believe in that, Mike?” Kathy Davis asked. “It’s very cynical.”“I’m not rich enough to have a stake in the matter,” Mike replied indifferently. “I just know

how power thinks.”Dieter continued his observations on my musings.“The recycling idea, of course, is very nice, and it has helped conserve some of our scarce

resources. But recycling hasn’t reduced our dependence on business. Germany has the strictest recycling laws anywhere, and the only thing they’ve cut down on is the amount of landfill produced. Costs and the general complication of life are only up, up, and up.”

Mike Davis had his own view of recycling. Holding up a bottle of Russian mineral water, he stated, quite categorically, that it did nobody any good just to clean the bottle out and reuse it.

“Any fool can wash a bottle and refill it. If that’s all you do, you haven’t created any employment, and certainly no opportunities for making a profit. I’m all for recycling plastics, for example. Plastics can be sorted at a conveyor belt and sent to industry for raw material. If it’s cheaper than using new plastic, why not. As for glass bottles, you can crush them and send them to the glass works. Recycle, if you have to, but the bit about reducing and reusing I don’t buy. All you’ll get out of that is unemployment and recession.”

Sheila Johnson had another interesting comment to my tirade.

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“You know, I’ve been watching the workings of what we call official development aid for quite some time now. It strikes me that what we’ve been doing to Africa, Asia, and South and Central America for the past several decades, has had the effect of turning their entire populations from subsistence farmers and fishermen into urban consumers. The statistics say that their living standards have grown tenfold, as measured by the amount of money they turn over. But where once there were a lot of poor people fending for themselves and spending little money because they didn’t need to buy much, now there are urban slums full of discontented consumers, some unemployed, some being worked to death. However, they have to spend money to survive, and the money, of course, goes to business.”

Mike didn’t see anything wrong with that.“Whenever there’s an increase in business income, the wealth trickles down to the people.

That’s how the West got prosperous in the first place. Without profitable businesses, there are no jobs and no getting anybody out of the slums!”

“There’s a difference, though,” Jim Frost cut in. “The West and Japan got rich at a time when national markets were strictly protected and regulated. Foreign competition rarely was allowed to damage domestic production. Colonial empires helped build up the wealth of the owning class, and labor unions and social legislation ensured that more income was diverted to the people than what the capitalists would have let them have on their own. Once the industrialized world had strong enough businesses to go global, it began dismantling trade barriers, purely in its own interest. The developing countries weren’t ready for trade liberalization, but it was forced on them through Structural Adjustment Programs, as a precondition for continued aid and more loans.

“These SAPs, as they were called, took away from the poor countries every one of those protective factors that had helped the West and Japan become so strong, just when they’d have been needed the most. It isn’t overly cynical to say that the SAPs enabled the rich of this world to reintroduce colonialism. They also resulted in a ‘trickle up’ effect rather than the ‘trickle down’ of economic theory, and they were designed that way.”

“In Indonesia,” Dieter took up Jim’s thread, “I saw many effects of what you just said. Tens of millions of people, who once got a fair livelihood on their own land, from growing and hunting their own food and making their own things, now work at minimum wage for large employers. They own nothing, especially not their homes. The employers are companies owned by a few rich Indonesians, usually together with multinational corporations.

“In Europe and America, regular people became prosperous only after the aristocracy’s absentee ownership of all land and resources had been abolished. Today, in the developing world, we have a situation of absentee ownership of everything, like in feudal and colonial times. But now the colonial masters are multinational corporations and their local allies, not foreign governments.”

Not that much earlier, Costa Rica, with a long tradition of democracy and social justice, had attempted to reintroduce some of the laws that her SAP had forced her to abolish. At the time, Costa Rica had managed to pay off most of her debts, and her democratic institutions had thought the time had been ripe to better people’s lives again. But the country had soon found out differently. Traditionally, the US Marines would quickly have invaded such a rebelling country and brought it back to order. But no such clumsy methods had been needed this time: the handful of multinationals controlling Costa Rica’s exports had applied some subtle financial pressure, and within months, everything had been back to normal again.

The captain, Joel, referred with a few words to this well known incident, and added, “The world, as we see it from the perspective of regular Nigerians, has become one huge profit-making mechanism. Our villages have lost their ability to support their people. Ogoniland is covered in

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crude oil pouring out of badly maintained pipelines. Health care has become too expensive for regular people, so we’re back to using witch doctors. But our rich and our military leaders live very comfortably, indeed.”

Jim Frost had mentioned his interest in history early on during our meal, and now he drew on some of his insights.

“It’s a long-standing conflict we’re talking about, and the rise of big-time capitalism hasn’t always been smooth sailing. What makes the rich so much stronger today is that their power has been institutionalized. We’re no longer dealing with individual owners, who once could be made personally responsible for their actions, at least in theory. Now, as soon as somebody is rich and powerful enough, their holdings are turned into corporations. Other large companies and funds have no predominant owners, and are still harder to pin down.

“It’s interesting to observe how, during the past century, our language was manipulated for the purpose of safeguarding the power of the institutions. During the nineteenth century, capitalism meant unrestrained private enterprise. Democratic government then derived most of its power from free individuals; not, as now, from the manipulation of public opinion by advertising agencies on behalf of political parties and other institutions, and from lobbying and bribery by the business community.

“In those days, the term ‘Public interest’ meant the good of the many individuals and families forming the governing public. ‘Private interest,’ on the other hand, was that which was profitable for the few, rich and powerful capitalists.

“Public and private interests were, by necessity, in conflict with each other. Through the efforts of concerned politicians and activists like US Presidents Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many laws were passed that limited the abuses practiced in the private interest, at the expense of that of the public.

“That way, eventually, a new, liberal capitalism emerged, where the unabashed greed of the few had been replaced by the more responsible concept of the institutionalized profit motive. To ensure that private enterprise respected all the social and environmental obligations society had now imposed on it, a number of new public bodies were established.

“Naturally, with institutions increasingly dealing with and controlling each other, the influence of both private entrepreneurs on the one hand, and of individual activists on the other, was replaced by a much more harmonious interaction of bureaucratic minds on all sides.

“To protect their newly gained territory in society, the bureaucratic minds set about changing our way of thinking. A foolproof way of doing so is to retain accepted values and attitudes, while switching around the names we call things by. So in the case of institutions vs. individuals, the ‘public interest’ became that of the institutions, ostensibly representing the public, and ‘private interest’ became the incidental concerns of regular individuals and families.

“We’d all come to accept the concept of public interest as something good, and private interest as something dubious, if not outright bad. And now, in the name of us, the people, all those institutions—business, government, and so on—have usurped the right to define a standardized public interest, which uses every available excuse to increase the institutions’ control over us, while decreeing that your and my individual needs and demands, by definition, are antisocial and bad.

”But if changing our use of the language by stealth would take too long, the powerful can always call in favors from those who owe them. U.S. law once mandated that only natural persons could make anonymous political campaign contributions; corporations had to disclose theirs. This was inconvenient for the rich, so the Supreme Court decided that corporations, too, are persons. The law wasn’t changed; it was rendered ineffective by obtaining a decision that

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can’t be altered, to the effect that black is white. High-level political corruption in America is now much more discreet but perfectly legal.

“By now, most of the health and safety regulations built up during the twentieth century have been abolished in the name of “streamlining government’ and ‘self-regulation by industry,’ and the public is again at the mercy of big business, just as during the 1800s.

“What we have today is a resurgence of unrestrained capitalism on a global scale, where the only regulation comes from unelected international agencies that represent the so called ‘public interest.’ Worse, many multinational corporations and even individual speculators are so rich and powerful that they’re more influential than most national governments. That’s why all trade barriers have been broken down: it gives the multinationals free access to all markets, for goods, services, and labor. It’s illegal for local authorities to produce their own drinking water and run their own schools and hospitals, if some corporation can show that it can do it at a lower cost to the taxpayer—higher user fees don’t affect the outcome. The world is, basically, one big sweatshop, where only the largest enterprises can compete, and an individual’s only choices are to become an employee on their terms or find a niche where being local still matters.

“We also have better communications and transportation systems than ever. Communications have always been a means of exploitation. Early on, roads, canals, shipping, and railroads enabled large manufacturers to undercut and bankrupt small, local ones and then use their labor more cheaply afterwards. The Information Revolution only furthered the same trend. Those who know most about people also wield the greatest power over them.”

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7. The Northeast PassageSix days after our departure from Tokyo, we passed through Bering Strait and crossed the Arctic Circle. Although it was May, it was very cold, and as we turned our course westward, the ice floes got more numerous, and soon we were flanked by pack ice on both sides. Still, the Kapitan Fedosov was doing a good fifteen knots: we were following the zigzagging channel made by an icebreaker a few days earlier. On the bridge, Joel explained that we’d be sailing on our own for another day until we came to the seventy-first parallel: the convoy was being formed at Ambarchik, where our two icebreakers were waiting. There’d be six ships in all; three were ahead of us, one could be seen on the horizon astern, and the last was presently passing through the Strait.

“A ship that’s built for use in the Arctic isn’t just any ordinary tub,” Joel told me. We had become friends during the past week, and with my background in engineering I found the bridge a fascinating place, so I spent a lot of time there.

“First of all, she has to be built to the highest standards of hull strength, which means Lloyd’s ice class IA Super. Second, she has to be incredibly agile. We don’t just have a regular screw pointing backwards, like many other ships. We have a propeller assembly that turns a full 360 degrees to move us in any direction that may become necessary. Water jets on the sides of the hull enable us to move the entire ship sideways. We also have a sophisticated setup of computer control, combined with satellite navigation. Data from our radar and from electronic sensors in the hull and propulsion gear of the ship are constantly combined with satellite information on the ice situation. The result is that the ship noses her way along the easiest route available, avoiding contact with icebergs entirely.”

The sun was low and cold over the southern horizon; it was about noon. Suddenly Mike Davis stormed in, yelling and complaining. His computer had lost contact with its satellite, and he was out hundreds of dollars for every hour he was cut off from the markets—or so he claimed. He had followed the instructions for his computer, placing its amplifying external antenna outside his cabin window, but the computer had simply stopped working that morning. So now he demanded the use of the ship’s antenna gear, and wasn’t taking no for an answer.

It took all of Joel’s phlegmatic patience to make Mike understand that the ship’s satellite and cognitive radio communication gear was built for entirely different frequencies than those used by the telecommunications carriers, and that even if it had been technically possible to assist him, the ship’s equipment was meant for navigation purposes and wasn’t available for other uses. The existing Local Area Network, having Internet access, couldn’t be made available to passengers for security reasons: if a passenger brought in a computer virus or otherwise crashed the network, the safety of the ship would be at stake.

I volunteered to continue the lesson, saying a few words about the differences between the Inmarsat marine communications satellites and the low and medium earth orbit satellites serving portable computers and telephones. To spare Mike the humiliation of being evicted from the bridge, I suggested going down to his cabin to see if we couldn't check out his gear and get it working again. We tried, but to no avail—there was no cellular telephone network anywhere near, and the outside temperature was way below the rated limit for his satellite antenna—and to divert Mike’s wrath, I thought to ask him about his investing business.

“What industries should one invest in these days?”Mike gave a grunt.

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“Death deferment is your best bet,” he said. “It’s a little-known business, operating under the guise of health care. At the current state of the art, it’s possible to keep almost every dying body biologically alive for as long as there’s insurance cover and the families have any assets left. The returns are formidable: for every day you leave the life support systems on and the body keeps vegetating, you take in thousands of dollars with very low operating expenses. Then, when the money runs out, you pull the plug and harvest the organs. Simple. Just make sure you go for the large hospital chains that have divested terminal care into separate subsidiaries. But if you get into individual contracts on specific people, avoid AIDS patients: they tend to die unexpectedly, and can’t be revived. Stroke victims and people in a coma are best. Now that we’ve got death with dignity and assisted suicide outlawed altogether and everyone is an organ donor, it’s really good business. Even living wills are now invalid, thanks to our lobbyists and all the free help from the churches.”

“Who are ‘we’ here?” I asked.“An informal group of socially aware, progressive investors. It has no name, but we

work well together. We’re into nursing homes, as well. Our nursing homes have higher occupancy rates than the average, also thanks to efficient lobbying.”

“What’s the connection there?”“The key success factor is getting into our homes and terminal care facilities those old

people that have the best insurance and the most assets, plus relatives that can take over the payments when needed. Choosing them is easy: everybody’s medical and financial information is accessible through the Internet by hiring the best hackers.

“As you identify your next clients, you need to round them up. For this we use local police officers whom we pay kickbacks—quite unofficially, of course. For a beginning, the success rate was poor: officers tended to give up if a spouse or a caregiver refused to give their consent. We’ve got that problem solved now.”

“How did you solve it?” I inquired.“We got a Federal program set up that directs money to the county level for the purpose

of rehabilitating young offenders. Local authorities can reduce their police budgets by hiring precisely the recruits we need: easily corruptible thugs. Now objecting caregivers are tasered or shot point-blank, and the new client is simply carted off. A cop is a cop, even when he’s lining his own pockets, and you shouldn’t try to resist him. It’s pretty shocking when such cases get into the news, but these federally funded guys are practically impossible to fire, once counties have started accepting the money for them.

”Another law that we had a hand in passing says that, for the good of the patients, once you’re in one of these facilities, you can never get out again, as long as you can pay. It’s a fine industry, really.”

“That would take nerves of steel,” I mused. “Anything less gruesome for a beginner?” “The peace-of-mind industry is hot, too.”I lifted an eyebrow.“Peace of mind includes anything and everything that makes people feel good and secure.

Industries such as entertainment including religion, belief systems, motivation, inspiration, fashion, trend bureaus, cosmetics and cosmetic surgery: in general, having your personal matters in order and belonging to the right crowd. From an investor’s point of view, the best branch of this industry is televangelism. With the depression, a lot of good talkers, like used car salesmen, are out of work and available to do the delivery, but they need capital for the necessary

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investments and connections to find a distribution channel. They don’t need to know what they’re talking about: all the material is available from Internet vendors.”

“Wouldn’t that make for rather bland sermons?”“No,” Mike replied, “it now works fine. The first attempts at simply computer-

generating sermons fell flat, but the vendors learned fast. They went and bought up tens of thousands of real sermons, cut them into paragraphs, and classified the paragraphs. That’s where the science part comes in. The preacher picks a subject that he knows will appeal to his audience just then, and the software he’s bought from the vendor assembles a sermon from the right paragraphs in the vendor’s on-line library. When the preacher has made his own adjustments, the software checks the language, makes sure there are an optimum number of appeals for donations, and creates the teleprompter material and the audiovisuals, including the Bible quotes. You need a call center to take in the money: that’s cheap, because they’re all located either in India or in American prisons, and the labor costs are way below minimum wage. I own a chain of televangelists, and they’ve made me rich.”

The crassness of it all flabbergasted me. “What on earth makes people want to pay for evangelization by a guy who doesn’t believe in what he’s saying?”

“We’re not talking evangelization here. The thing that brings in the big money is hate speech.”

“Hate speech? Isn’t that illegal?”Unfazed, Mike kept revealing his business secrets. “Someone else would end up in jail,

yes. But at least in the States, anybody who calls himself a Christian priest or minister is free to rant and rave right up to, and including, the point of raising a lynch mob. There was a law against it for a while, but it didn’t last. Totally un-American. The preacher and his audience are simply practicing their religion, and nobody can stop them from doing that.

“You just have to choose your targets right. Blacks and Jews are out; gays and Muslims are in. Political liberals, pro-abortionists, gun control proponents, and women’s rights activists go like hotcakes. If you promote concern for Nature over the profits of big business, you’ll be hounded as a ‘New Age environmentalist,’ and prayers will be said to protect the nation from your demonic influence. Anybody who is anti-war, anybody who speaks out for civil rights, anybody who defends the interests of other nations against those of America (that is, the interests of America’s billionaires), teachers who teach evolution, politicians who are in favor of any kind of fiscal transfer of wealth other than to the rich: we get them all. It’s called moral coercion: Either you live your life as I say (not as I do, of course!) or I’ll make you. My televangelists get the people up in arms and put the thumbscrews on politicians and civil servants, and the tax-free money keeps rolling in.”

“Nothing to do with standing up for what’s right,” I concluded.“Nothing whatsoever. We play on the basest instincts and we need real bogeys for that.” “You mean you target individuals, not just objectionable behavior in general?”“Yes, of course,” Mike confirmed. “Old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preaching is

perceived as challenging the hearers themselves, and who wants to pay for that? The viewers I’m after are prepared to help finance campaigns against other people, and it has to be identifiable individuals, real flesh-and-blood villains who are out there, and whom they could take a baseball bat to, if it came to that. We get lots of leads from Conservative Internet vigilantes as well as from right-wing Christian bloggers and Web forums. My office coordinates teams of on-line volunteers from the churches who dig the dirt on the targets. When we have enough material, we distribute the dossiers to the televangelists. I own a law firm, as well, so I

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can take the targets for everything they’re worth and avoid being sued. The process, once it’s set in motion, doesn’t stop until the target is dead, imprisoned, or destitute and on the street. You don’t want to be a liberal in the Bible belt.”

“A modern witch hunt, then,” I concluded with poorly concealed disgust.“Yes, only we’re much more efficient than they could be in the old days, even in their

home villages. The Department of Homeland Security has the data on everyone, and the people we want are already blacklisted there. Many of our volunteers work in law enforcement and have access to the Federal data bases. Often we simply pick somebody off the blacklist who is conveniently located for a preacher who needs a new target. The Feds say nothing—we’re just doing their dirty work for them.”

“How do you get on the blacklist?” I asked.“If you’re anything other than a regular credit-dependent consumer, you’re already in a

gray area. Add to that things like no mortgage, no car loan, or frequent use of cash, and red flags go up. If you read books other than those sold in supermarkets, you’re dangerous. If you read a quality newspaper and listen to the Public Broadcasting System, you’re doubly dangerous. Using public transportation while having the means to drive shows you’re anti-American. Hinting or asserting that those who made billions on the wars that resulted from events like Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, and 9/11 could in any way have been involved in organizing or enabling those atrocities gets you directly on the blacklist.

“All your Internet use is routinely monitored, and anything other than shopping, local news, sports, and harmless comedy gets analyzed. Any interests or hobbies beyond church, sports, and entertainment are bad. Any gaps in your paper trail with the authorities make them really nervous. Even being unusually healthy and of normal weight is flagged: it indicates that you may have the wits to see through the advertising that governs typical consumer behavior. Having contacts with people on the blacklist will get you blacklisted, too. If you have objections to making your personal information public, you obviously have something to hide. If your computer has an unusual operating system that doesn't provide back doors for market researchers and intelligence agencies, you're a terrorist suspect. After that, it only takes an overseas phone call or a view of a news item on a foreign Web site to bring the jack-booted federal thugs to your door. On the other hand, speeding tickets, petty crimes, and occasional financial troubles only prove that you’re human, and are never held against you.

“If you have a problem with the way one per cent of the population enriches themselves at the expense of the other 99 per cent, you’re antisocial and a Communist. The quickest way to get on the blacklist would be to stand on a soap box in front of the White House and recite the Bill of Rights: it contains statements so dangerous for the oligarchy that runs the country, that you’d be booked for sedition before you were half-way through with it. Doing something similar on the Internet would have the same result, but there you’re easier to silence—your social media accounts would simply be closed down the moment you’d step out of line.”

I realized that before I left Sydney, I had been entirely harmless according to Mike’s criteria. I also knew that when I’d return to Australia, I’d be the perfect candidate for blacklisting.

“What about you, then?” I asked. “You don’t fit the description of the innocent consumer. Aren’t you worried for yourself?”

“No, I’m rich enough to be exempt from all that. As you probably know, the rich don’t even pay taxes. I’d have to do something to hurt other rich people, like insider trading or setting

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up a pyramid scheme, to get myself in trouble. Although I’m only a multimillionaire, the billionaires tolerate me, because they figure I’m in the same boat with them.”

The computer was still off-line. I was treated to some more foul language on primitive Russian ships that didn’t have the most basic services, and on how Mike would be suing the pants off the ship owner.

That metaphor soon came home to roost. Looking quite ravishing in a silk negligee, Kathy emerged from her dressing room and put an end to our fiddling with the computer.

“Mike darling, don’t worry about your money! It’s doing quite nicely where it is. Money is just like a garden: if you disturb it too much, the flowers don’t grow as well. We’ve got better things to do...”

Quite alarmed, I watched her begin her strip-tease performance for her husband, altogether indifferent to the fact that I was still in their cabin. Slowly and sensuously, she peeled off her wedding present from Mike, a morphing, stretching mobile phone in shocking fluorescent pink that she had kept wrapped around her left forearm. Not waiting for the next garment to come off, I departed quickly and discreetly, and didn’t see them again until dinner.

After lunch I went to my cabin to read, as it was too cold to spend much time on deck. A while later, there was a knock on the door, and young Evelyn appeared. I asked her to sit down, and wondered what the matter was: she seemed bored and upset at the same time.

“Did you bring your helmet, Gregory?” she asked.After giving a fleeting thought to my motorcycle helmet, stored away back home in

Sydney, I realized that she meant the Virtual Reality variety, and told her that I didn’t own one.It turned out that Evelyn, too, had lost touch with the rest of the world.“I only brought along the most basic sex software because I had this really cool thing

going with a guy in Adelaide. It’s been a couple of days now that my computer has been dead. I guess we’re really out of touch—my cell phone isn’t working, either. It’ll be weeks before I can get back on-line again, and I thought maybe you and I could have hooked up our gear via the wireless interface. All I have is Godzilla and the Incredible Hulk, and it’s so boring!”

Having seen her out, I reflected on the fact that she hadn’t done the obvious thing, which would have been to ask me to go to bed with her. Just as well, because I’d have had to turn her down: in that regard I wouldn’t have had the excuse that I wasn’t adequately equipped. It left me wondering what Virtual Reality might have been doing to the procreation of the species.

I returned to reading about Islandia and John Lang’s very different problems with his women. Unrequited love aside, Islandian society and the ethics of her people were a fascinating proposition, and I wondered if anything similar would be possible in real life and modern times. Before I knew it, it was nearly six o’clock, and dinner was announced.

A relaxed Mike Davis turned up with his smiling wife, and somehow he seemed a lot less concerned over his financial isolation. Nevertheless, our discussion over dinner turned to money, due to the news of a large-scale corruption scandal that had been uncovered in Europe.

Apart from occasional Siberian radio and TV stations along the coast, and rather spotty satellite service, our main source of news was digital shortwave radio. The ship’s public-address system carried the World Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation several times a day, and now and then I’d listen in to other stations with Dieter, who had brought along a pocket-size all-band receiver. It was very stimulating to hear actual newscasts without commercials and with no mention of entertainment. For those who wanted to know, there still was access to real information.

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The latest newscast began as we sat down for dinner. According to the BBC, special prosecutors in several European countries had conducted a concerted investigation into official corruption in high places, and had uncovered a multitude of improprieties, often connected to the laundering of criminally obtained money, and to tax evasion by shady enterprisers. Dishonest officials were to be found everywhere, and bribes had been paid for turning a blind eye to ongoing criminal activities as well as for favoring privileged vendors in public procurement programs, just to mention the most obvious entanglements.

A closer analysis of the problem had showed that drug money was often involved. It had been known for a long time that many terrorist organizations financed their activities by producing or selling drugs, and in spite of long and expensive campaigns, organized crime was still riding high all over the world, often well connected to the corrupt civil servants.

But now the tune would change. The BBC interviewed the president of the European Union, who took the opportunity to present his administration’s final solution to the problems of economic crime plaguing Europe and, indeed, the whole world.

“The root of the whole crisis is cash. As long as shady deals can be paid in cash, there’ll be money laundering and corruption, tax evasion and terrorism. Europe is now ready to give this festering cancer on society a lethal blow. Our new bar code-based payment system has been thoroughly tested and will be implemented in all European countries during the next few months. Corrupt officials will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And to deny terrorists and criminals their main source of income, legal drug companies and pharmacies will take over the production and distribution of all recreational drugs except cannabis. The tobacco industry and its distribution network will act as the legal supplier of marijuana and other cannabis products. Cannabis products will be freely available; other recreational drugs will require a doctor’s prescription and participation in an approved therapy program. Science has proven that drug addicts are ill, not delinquent. So let them have their medicine through legal channels, along with the care they need. Drug prices will be held as low as possible to discourage illegal suppliers.

“I was critically injured once and I live with pain every day. I know what pain is like. But there are millions upon millions of terminally ill people all over the world that are denied pain medication because of the scattergun approach of this misguided war on drugs we have been waging. Let them have morphine so they can die with dignity!

“The nations of the world have finally taken the matter of economic crime into their own hands and will solve it completely. No honest person has had any reason to use cash for years now. Cash has outlived its usefulness and has become a public enemy. By abolishing cash, we will force all payments into the banking system, where automated controls will ensure that any illegal transactions are reported to the authorities, and that taxes are collected fairly and consistently.

“Economic crime is directed against the people, and the people will mercilessly stamp it out. By legalizing drugs, we not only take an immense amount of cash flow away from criminals, we also make an army of qualified law enforcement officers available to fight economic crime and other expressions of disloyalty toward the people and its elected leadership. The nations of Europe are to be congratulated on their resolve in standing up to this challenge, and on their determination to end, once and for all, the scandal of the uncontrolled use of cash!”

The BBC continued with a special program on all the gory details of tax evasion, forging of currency, money laundering, and corruption, making it evident that the reform was long

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overdue. The Japanese prime minister and the US president read statements in support of the scheme, and made it clear that they weren’t far behind in implementing it.

“It’s about restoring the conditions for civilized life,” the American president concluded, announcing, at the same time, the reorganization of the Drug Enforcement Administration as the Dollar Enforcement Administration.

“And it’s about time,” Jim Frost said. “Every man and his dog has been forging currency on color copiers and personal computers and getting away with it. Laundering dirty money has been as simple as buying valuables for cash in the name of some phony company, and then reselling them, plus depositing the proceeds in the bank. Taxes are bound to go down when all this leeching on decent people is stopped!”

“This campaign may catch some small fish and put some drug dealers out of business, but the big schemes will go on,” Mike Davis commented. “The top operators in the criminal world never touch cash, and their payments can’t be traced or taxed. Big business will continue its legal lobbying and its clandestine payments to politicians. Its pawns in government are safe from all those investigations. This whole show is on for some other purpose.”

“Could you please be a little less cryptic?” Dieter Braun asked him. “How do those in the know handle their payments?”

“Just an example: they may pretend to play the futures markets. Futures markets are great for the purpose, because they normally generate big losses and big gains in a short period of time. Let’s say that A is to be paid a million dollars by B. A buys a futures contract on some commodity whose price is likely to go up. B sells an identical contract in a totally unrelated deal in another part of the world. If they’re right, they then reverse the deal and A gains the money, while B loses the same amount.”

“And what if they guess wrong?” Ilya Sergeievich wanted to know.“These people have deep pockets,” Mike explained. “They can take a few fluctuations.

It’s no worse than flipping a coin until you encounter a head. They’ll continue, perhaps for stakes that are twice as high, until the right amount has been transferred. To the outside world, it looks as if one person has been smart or lucky and the other has had a bad run. No amount of auditing can hope to be able to pair such deals and find out who’s been paying whom.”

“And, of course, we aren’t really talking about persons,” Sheila Johnson added. “All the big fish operate through corporations; the smart ones even pay their corporate taxes so everything looks legal.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a government exposes some petty crime in order to take people’s attention off the large operations conducted by its friends with its blessing,” Joel noted. “This happens in Africa all the time; it’s so ingrained that nobody expects anything else. So what could be the real purpose of this entire high-level hullabaloo?”

“It can’t be denied that economic crime has been getting a lot too popular lately,” Dieter said. “Like Gregory’s Japanese friend pointed out, the public has been taught greed; it can’t be governed by appealing to values anymore. In this day and age, the logical solution is to confine all payments to the banking system and apply automated controls and on-line taxation.

“But there are other aspects to the official supervision of payments. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to go for a day without making a payment of some kind. Without cash, you’ll always pay with something that has your name or account number on it. Such a payment system always knows who the payor is, and where the payee is located. What’s more, an electronic payment transaction isn’t just a transfer of value. It also records every item we buy and every service we use.

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“Once all our payments go through the banking system, there’ll remain, in the computers of banks and retailers, an unbroken trail of all our whereabouts and all our consumption. If the government or somebody else—typically direct marketing companies—wants to analyze our payments, they can find out not only where we’ve been, but also who else was there at the same time, and how often we’ve been in the same place with specific people. That way, they can nip emerging protest movements in the bud. And they’ll know exactly what we buy and what services we use. The statistics can tell them what newspapers and books we read, what TV programs we watch, whom we talk with on the phone; in short, both our opinions and our tastes, as well as our circle of acquaintances, depending on who wants to know.”

“There’s yet another side to the matter,” I added. “Once electronic payment is legal tender, and there’s no cash, you’ll have to have a bank account in order to be able to buy or sell anything. If they don’t like you, they can close your account. You’re likely to stay in line if the alternative is giving up eating, aren’t you?”

“And do you know what?” Joel said. “A generation ago, most people in this world wouldn’t have given a hoot about such a change, because they fed themselves then, and water was available for free. But now, what you’re saying affects everyone, even those in the poorest countries. Since the Great Drought destroyed family farming and enabled big business to buy up all sources of clean water, everybody has had to pay for their food and water, and this kind of blackmail passes nobody by.”

“If that’s the objective, then they’ll also have to abolish personal checks,” Mike observed. “Checks can be negotiated and used much like cash.”

“How will I go about selling something I’ve made, if nobody can pay me with either cash or checks?” Dana Frost wanted to know. “I’ve sold a lot of quilts and other handicraft items, and it’s been a nice extra income for me.”

“Technically speaking, you’ve also been cheating on taxes by not reporting that income,” her husband reminded her. “With the new payment system, you can’t do that anymore. You’ll have to get some kind of software and a bar code reader from your bank, and as you ring up the payments, sales tax and income tax are deducted then and there!”

“Would you really bother with all that?” Kathy Davis wondered. “Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler and cheaper to take the quilt or whatever to a concession store and let them handle the payments?”

“Here we have another important property of the new system,” Dieter exclaimed. “It can be used to stop trade between individuals and force everyone to use business as an intermediary. In the process, like the Japanese monk pointed out, more profits, taxes, and interest are generated, and more of our wealth will be transferred to the owner and shepherd classes. Gone are the days when you could hire your neighbor’s teenager to mow your lawn and give him ten euros for his trouble. Now you have to engage a landscaping contractor and pay not just the cost plus profits and taxes, but also health and liability insurance, Social Security, leave loading, and what have you. Plus a fee to the bank for recording the payment. Great!”

“I don’t think I like it,” I said, half to myself.“But I do,” Mike retorted. “It’ll do the economy a lot of good, like Dieter says. Sure, it

may add some complication to life, but there are efficiencies to this system that will save many losses and expenses. And if the result is that some crooks get caught, what could be better?”

He had actually mistaken Dieter’s sarcasm for an endorsement. As I was pondering this, Jim handed me a plate of cakes and pronounced his verdict on the new order.

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“It looks to me like you’re beat, Gregory. You may like it or not, but you won’t have much of a choice. You do want to keep eating, don’t you?”

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8. Polar BearsOn the day we had been at sea for two weeks, we rounded Severnaya Zemlya, the Northern Land. Somewhere to port, beyond this group of islands, lay Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point in Siberia. Our position was about 82 degrees northern latitude.

For more than a week, we had been enjoying the midnight sun, if you want to call it enjoyable when it doesn’t get dark at night. It was biting cold: winter seemed to have returned, and the pack ice had been causing us and the other ships in the convoy a lot of trouble. Finally, at the point of entering the Kara Sea, we were stuck.

The two oblique icebreakers assigned to our convoy weren’t having any trouble moving about. They were ingenious, asymmetrically built vessels that normally could open a channel wide enough for a large freighter or tanker by traveling sideways through the ice. Now, however, the strength of the pack ice forced them to move forward like regular ships, so both were needed to make the channel wide enough. The exceptional cold, combined with the slow progress of the convoy, caused the channel quickly to compress and freeze over again, and even though we were only the fourth vessel in line, the sea had already frozen around us.

“The Kapitan Fedosov may be a strong ship, but she’s no icebreaker,” Joel told me as we were surveying the ice. “Our computerized navigation system sees us through ice that’s on the move, but here, it’s frozen solid. We’ll wait and see what the icebreakers will do.”

Joel was watching something through his binoculars, and presently, he handed them to me and told me where to look. I searched for whatever it was, and then I spotted something that moved. A polar bear had caught a seal by pulling it out of its breathing hole, and had just begun eating his catch. The seal still looked intact, as if it had been alive. It was the first seal I had ever seen outside a zoo. Naturally, it also was my first glimpse of a wild polar bear.

“Take a good look,” Joel said, when I told him this. “It may well be both the first and the last wild seal and polar bear you’ll ever see. The Arctic Ocean is the only water in the world where there still are some seals left—the other oceans have been overfished and polluted, and all their marine mammals are extinct. Now the Japanese are talking about fishing from nuclear submarines under the Polar icecap, so soon there’ll be no fish left for these seals, either. And when the seals go, so will the polar bears.”

A little later, I spotted another bear, no doubt on the lookout for prey. I would have liked to see a bear cub, and asked Joel if there were any about.

“The cubs are still with their mothers in and around their winter lairs on the shore. They wouldn’t show themselves while we’re here: we make too much noise. A few months from now, we’ll be able to see them on the ice, if we’re lucky.”

To port, we could see the Taimyr Peninsula. There were no trees, and the tundra was covered in snow. The first mate, a Russian officer, told me that there had never been any trees this far north. But further south, Siberia had used to be covered by a nearly unbroken boreal forest. It was now largely gone, due to clearcutting by foreign corporations, invited by incompetent or corrupt local officials following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Those marauders had been allowed to get away with just devastating the forests and carrying off the timber, although they had committed themselves to comprehensive forest management programs.

“Too many mistakes were made around the turn of the century,” the mate concluded. “Maybe Russia could have become a democracy if somehow we could have produced officials capable of something more than just taking bribes and obeying orders. We should have pulled

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ourselves up by our bootstraps, but, evidently, it was asking too much. In the end, the secret services won, and we’re again governed like we’re used to being governed. You’ll have to remember that Russia has never had anything other than autocratic rule during all of her thousand-year history, except for brief experiments with democracy that have all led to failure.”

“But, at least, Russians are now allowed to travel, and there aren’t any Gulags,” I observed.“The Communists were paranoid, and wasted their strength on trying to spread their system

over the world. In one sense, the West should be more worried about today’s Russia than they were about the late Soviet Union. This government is pragmatic and seeks only what’s in Russia’s interest. We don’t subsidize anybody’s revolutions or bankrupt economies like the Soviets did: all our efforts are directed toward strengthening Russia. We’ll accept any foreign investments and joint ventures if they contribute to that goal. And, like Henry Kissinger pointed out long ago, a strong Russia has always tended to retake her empire, even if she’s lost it during periods of weakness.”

At that we left it: the icebreakers were back in action around us, and we were on the move again. Our course turned to the southwest, and the wind turned, too; during the next days, spring returned, and our speed settled at the seven to eight knots required for keeping our timetable. The loneliness of the East Siberian and Laptev Seas was only a memory as we entered the bustling oil and gas fields of the Kara Sea and the Yamal peninsula. Two 120,000 ton oil tankers joined our convoy, and with one and a half days to go, we passed north of Novaya Zemlya and entered the largely ice-free Barents Sea.

Inevitably, our last dinner discussion on board the Kapitan Fedosov returned to Europe and the payment system we had talked about on several occasions before.

Ilya Sergeievich wondered aloud what it was with the European leader that had made him so popular.

“I think he’s creepy! He’s so sly, and they say he has cold-bloodedly eliminated some of his opponents.”

Dana Frost agreed, and thought she knew how people had been conditioned to be able to admire somebody like that.

“Remember, most people get their values from TV these days. I’ve always liked watching old movies, and I think there was a kind of turning point at some time in the sixties or seventies. Until then, the hero was always a good guy. Then somebody started introducing new values.

“The first really different programs were the massive TV serials that began with Dallas and Dynasty. The drama those serials depicted seemed larger than life because of the huge personal business interests involved. But their main attraction lay in their controversial lead characters, J. R. Ewing and Alexis Colby. These imagined individuals coined a new concept in the public mind: the admired son of a bitch.

“When Dallas was new, viewers reacted as could then be expected. They thought J. R. was a creep. They found him revolting. They positively hated him. But Dallas was formidable entertainment, and people kept on watching it. Then came Dynasty and all the other takeoffs from Dallas, and soon the familiar lead character was a household concept. Eventually, there was no resentment: the strong leader who gets stronger and wealthier by immoral means and by walking all over other people had turned into a hero.

“Action drama developed the same way. Before The Seekers, John Wayne was always a gentleman, and when right had won over wrong, he rode off into the sunset with no reward and no resentment. But your typical hard-core cop in the movies of the eighties and onwards isn’t sympathetic, not by a long shot. He kills and maims with vengeance written all over his face. He

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drives home the idea that hate and violence are legitimate means of solving problems, especially when you happen to be on the right side of the law. It seems that an entire branch of the entertainment industry has dedicated itself to getting us accustomed to seeing the antihero replace the old-fashioned, sympathetic, unselfish, true hero. I think this is the main reason people can now accept, even idolize somebody like the Leader.”

“There was a similar development in comedy, as well,” Dieter Braun remarked. “Modern comedians have nothing in common with true clowns and great performers such as the heroes of the silent movie. Today’s comedy is removed from reality into a studio environment packed with one-liners and canned laughter. It concerns itself not with exposing human weakness as comedy used to do, but with excusing it. To make people laugh, the key ingredient is insincerity.”

Soon we got back to talking about the payment system. Mike Davis wanted to know what I’d be doing for money now that I’d be having no more free meals on board, and, reluctantly, I had to admit that I didn’t know.

“Maybe I’ll go back to Australia, buy myself a piece of land somewhere, and grow my own food,” I said, full of doubts.

Jim Frost didn’t think I’d make it, either.“Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan, gave an apt description of life in the state of nature:

‘Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Today it’s harder than ever to wrench a living from the soil, because so much of it has blown away. The temperate zone has become hotter than it was until the end of the last century, and has suffered a long period of alternating floods and droughts, and with the droughts, wildfires. The result is that hardly any traditional farms remain.”

“I think it’s strange, though,” Sheila Johnson commented, “that, once more, we’re so often solitary, just like Hobbes’s savages. There aren’t that many people living in traditional families anymore.”

Dieter attempted an explanation.“We’ve learned that the task of the masses today is to borrow, spend, and consume.

Because of all the automation we have access to, it’s no longer essential that everybody works. Earlier, while the masses had to be kept working in order to produce wealth, the family truly was the cornerstone of society, because it was a functioning unit of production, and it kept people responsible and industrious. In fact, the traditional way of living always implied a local economic structure that extended far beyond the core family: a clan or a village comprised a number of professions, and had a considerable degree of self-sufficiency. Further, it didn’t borrow outside its own boundaries, and its members traded goods and services without using money: no taxes, interest, or profits could be extracted from its internal trading.

“Big business, with the enthusiastic support of corrupt civil society, is systematically eradicating every last trace of this traditional self-sufficiency. Children spend half their waking hours on schoolwork designed to turn them into specialized consumers with no skills apart from their professions; the other half is taken up by commercialized entertainment. They learn little from their busy, disinterested parents. They learn nothing from their grandparents, disposed of, as useless, in nursing homes. Big business has purloined the interpersonal space that always served to pass on tradition: we’ve been rendered ignorant of everything our forebears knew, robbed of the accumulated wisdom of thousands of generations. We only know how to use what business has to sell us, and some more to handle the side effects.

“The paradoxical result of this is that while people now live and retain their mental powers longer than ever before, the younger generations learn less and less from their elders, especially about child-rearing. The traditional, discipline-based way of raising children that served humanity

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well for millions of years is now forgotten, even outlawed by inept bureaucrats and legislators, leaving cajoling and bribery as the only legitimate means of persuading your own offspring.”

That rang a bell. “In Australia, the large retailers are lobbying to make it a criminal offense to deny your children things and lifestyle aspects that their peers have. Such deprivation is supposed to make kids prone to being bullied and excluded, and then to committing violent acts by way of revenge. Yet it’s well known that those states in the U.S. that have this type of laws have a higher incidence of school and workplace shootings than those that don’t.”

Dieter acknowledged my contribution and continued.“Now that the most important objective of society is to maximize consumption, families are

a rather undesirable impediment. A family keeps itself occupied; its members can specialize and satisfy some of its needs by producing goods and services themselves, or by cooking their own food. It’s a sad fact that the interests of business are better served by a population of lonely people. The single spend more time out of the home, they buy more just to console themselves, and they can’t combine complementing skills. So they spend more money than those who are members of a family, clan, or village living together. The disappearance of the family is very much in the interest of business; consequently, mass media have long since given up portraying the traditional family as something inherently better or more desirable than being single or divorced, or cohabiting with persons of the same or opposite sex. It’s called ‘political correctness’; what it really is, of course, is conditioning the public to place itself at the mercy of business.”

Kathy Davis had heard what she wanted to hear, and got hold of her husband to give him a big squeeze.

“See, Mike, I told you it was going to be better for us to be married! Ooooh, I love my hubby!”

I, too, had heard something I liked.“There are still a lot of people keeping up their skills in the old crafts. What we need is that

enough of them get together with traditional farmers in places where there’s still soil and water, and form local communities that are to some extent self-sufficient. That’ll be a good beginning. I can’t be the only person in this world who objects to being marked with a bar code!”

The one property of the new payment system that I had found most offensive was that the identifying bar code was to be applied to each person’s skin. This was something I couldn’t abide by: it stirred up some kind of deep, ancient revulsion in my soul. I realized, though, that I wasn’t going to find much sympathy for this feeling among the others: a generation so casual about tattoos and piercing wasn’t likely to take exception to a simple number added somewhere on their skin.

“You’ll need access to some kind of money, though,” Ilya Sergeievich said. “One of the worst difficulties we had after the fall of the Soviet Union was the lack of money. Inflation was so rapid that money was practically useless. People did a lot of bartering, but it isn’t enough to get an economy going.”

Dieter thought for a while, and agreed.“Prosperity only comes about by having a working payment system. Without it, everyone is

on their own, more or less. But the governments of this world may well abolish cash and checks and still fail to do away with money as we’ve known it. They can’t take away the coins people have hoarded. Paper money is worth something only as long as the central banks say so, but coins will remain usable if people want to use them. After the governments withdraw all the coins they can get their hands on, the remaining coins should, in fact, go up in value.”

“People have used seashells and wampum as money, too,” Sheila added. “Just about any object that’s hard to forge can be used as money. I can think of stamps and gambling tokens, for

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example. Gambling tokens even have a casino backing them up, willing to redeem them just like the central banks guarantee their money.”

So there was hope. I felt I had support from my fellow passengers, even though they didn’t seem to share my reservations about the new payment system. Before we parted for the night, Dieter gave me his address and asked me to contact him when I came to Germany. On the morrow, we’d be approaching Murmansk, and breakfast would be our last time together. The others were going to take the train to St. Petersburg, while I intended to hitch a ride to Helsinki, Finland.

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9. Land of the Midnight SunThe ship’s Russian steward had promised to set me up with a driver who would take me to Helsinki. While the Kapitan Fedosov would take a few days to unload her cargo of plastic pellets and take on another of nickel ore, the container ships that had arrived with us were already half empty. Special tractors were scurrying in and out of their huge forward and aft gates, towing container-laden trailers to be attached to waiting long-haul trucks, while cranes were lifting the containers that had been stowed on the ships’ decks onto railroad cars at the quayside.

The steward took me to the harbor office of a Finnish trucking agency, and quickly found me a driver. As I had expected, there was a trucker who needed a passenger, just for looks. The road safety rules required each truck to have two drivers, while the old school of trucker still liked to go it alone. So a hitchhiker was always welcome.

Following a few formalities, we were on our way. The road was too narrow for heavy traffic, but my trucker didn’t let this disturb him in the least. He was a friendly type who understood little English, and said less: his radio seemed sufficient to keep him entertained. The only disruption to our trip came on the Finnish border, where the entire truck was X-rayed for undeclared goods. Although the operation took less than three minutes, the driver seemed to feel that he had to make up for the lost time by driving faster. Entering Finland, I also entered the European Union, and didn’t expect to have to show my passport again until I left the European mainland. By noon we were in Ivalo in northern Finland, and after a hearty meal we continued south on a much better road.

Jukka, my driver, used the opportunity to increase his speed further. When we stopped for dinner, he logged himself out of the truck’s computer cum trip recorder, and after dinner, he moved the driver’s license that read “Jukka” to another pocket, replacing it with one that read “Pekka,” but still showed the same portrait. Then he logged himself in again as Pekka and continued on his neck-breaking journey. This was his routine, and the truck’s log would show that everything was legal and no limits on working hours had been exceeded. Jukka/Pekka was a bit apologetic as he tried to explain his system: it kept him in business, and he had a family to support. Had he actually had to hire a co-driver, he wouldn’t have stayed competitive with large trucking companies.

We arrived at the land transportation center in the northern outskirts of Helsinki, the Finnish capital, around ten o’clock at night. Jukka was a trucker of the old school alright: he had covered 750 miles in one working day, and had done all the driving himself. It was still light, and after giving Jukka a Japanese souvenir I continued my trip by city bus. By eleven I was lying in a hard, but comfortable bunk in a youth hostel, trying to get used to the quiet, the deepening darkness, and the fact that my bed didn’t move at all.

After three weeks at sea, it was strange to have to pay attention to what day it was. Luck had it that the next day was a Friday in early June: Antero, my host, would be free for the weekend by four that afternoon. I called him at work and set a time and a place for our meeting. Then I was free to tour Helsinki, and made the best possible use of my day, visiting the National Museum, Finlandia Hall, the Opera building, a couple of churches, and the Suomenlinna fortress museum, set on a number of islands at the entrance of the harbor. The Gibraltar of the North, it had been called; it had never been taken, just betrayed once, in its only significant battle. Or perhaps the renegade commander had been a pacifist—it was hard to tell.

Antero, or Andy, as I called him, was an old mate from Australia. He had been one of those would-be immigrants who’d stay in Australia for a few years and then decide it wasn’t for them. I

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had once been an intern at a yacht marina on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney, and Andy had been my foreman. Together, we had fixed up many a boat and done many a test run on the river. We’d also seen some real action during a bush fire that had swept through the Ku-Ring-Gai National Park and very nearly overwhelmed the marina: it had jumped the river upstream and we were surrounded by flames on all sides. The firefighters had their hands full elsewhere; it was up to the marina staff to protect the facilities and the customers’ boats. This we succeeded in doing in the end, with the aid of some good firefighting equipment and an ample supply of water.

Thus, Andy and I were close friends, and meeting him was like a homecoming. He still worked at sea, as the engineer of a tugboat in the Helsinki harbor, but for my sake he was now taking two weeks of his summer vacation. After doing some shopping for supplies, we set out in Andy’s car to drive to his home, an old house some forty miles out of town, on an island in the Gulf of Finland. We took the freeway east, going toward Porvoo, and turned off south. We crossed a long, high bridge that led to the island, and drove for nearly half an hour on a narrow road that didn’t seem to have any straight portions. Just shy of the far end of the island we turned off into a private road, and finally into Andy’s driveway.

The house was a rather small timber building with a gambrel roof and a glass veranda. To one side of the front yard was a workshop, to the other an old shack that Andy called the playhouse: he had played there as a child. Its other use was as a summer guest house for children of visiting relatives—Andy had none of his own, as he was a bachelor. The seashore was just a few steps away, with a pier and a boathouse, and further on, a sauna, the inevitable adjunct to every Finnish dwelling. Most Finns are regular users of an electrically heated sauna in their home or apartment, or in the basement of their apartment block, but Andy’s sauna was the real thing, a low, squat log cabin ten steps from the water’s edge, with wood heating and a sitting room that served as a summer guest room for visiting relatives.

Andy turned on the garden hose and filled up the big boiler in the washing room of the sauna. Then we lit fires under the boiler and in the heater in the steam room, and waited until the draft was good enough to close the doors. Only after seeing to this necessary preparation for the focal point of Finnish hospitality, the sauna bath, were we free to tour the rest of the property and view the house.

The shoreline next to the sauna was a jumble of granite rocks and boulders forming a small point and bay at the tip of the larger peninsula where Andy’s place was situated. The sun was in the west, but far from down: it was about seven, and sunset would be at about half past ten. The view of the bay and the surrounding islands was beautiful; the Finnish archipelago with its 10,000 islands is a summer paradise for a considerable number of Finnish families. The same Ice Age glacier that carved out the archipelago also left some 118,000 lakes, on the shores and islands of which the rest of the nation’s half million summer homes are located.

We passed several other houses and greeted their inhabitants, all Andy’s relatives; there were no fences to demarcate the different plots of land. Finally, we entered Andy’s home, which I found rustic and cozy. My room was upstairs, and I was soon installed. Having added wood to the fires in the sauna a couple of times, we eventually thought it hot enough, and proceeded to enjoy our steam bath, flagellating ourselves and each other’s backs with freshly picked bunches of young, soft, fragrant birch leaves. Then followed the mandatory dip in the sea, clean and still very cold this early in the season, but immensely refreshing, leaving my skin tingling in the weirdest way.

Afterwards, wrapped in curiously rough linen towels, we lit a fire in the open fireplace of the sauna sitting room, and ate like Finns, grilling delicious sausages on the glowing embers, and drinking cold, tasty Finnish beer—to replace the water lost by sweating, as Andy pointed out,

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winking an eye. The sun was low in the northwest, shining in through the windows of the sitting room, and life was just about as pleasant and peaceful as it gets.

“So, tell me: what brings you here?” Andy inquired. Like most Finns, he didn’t lightly delve into anybody’s personal matters, but he knew that as his friend, I’d welcome his interest.

“I’ve gone walkabout!”Andy was well acquainted with this Australian expression: it denotes the urge of Australian

Aborigines to go wandering off on their own every so often, especially when work gets to be boring.

“Like so many Australians, I want to see the world, and living so far away from everything, we usually take at least a year before we return.”

“You sure picked a strange time to do it,” Andy said. “All these new European laws have us wondering what the world is coming to. I’m not so sure I’d care to go traveling anywhere until we know what it’s all about. Like this latest thing, taking away cash altogether. You’d think it would be more important to make sure everybody has clean drinking water! After those two comet fragments fell down and poisoned so much of the world’s drinking water, ensuring decent living conditions should be the European Union’s first priority.”

Being the one who had decided to do the traveling, I couldn’t allow myself to be as pessimistic as that. However, hoping to compare notes on the new payment system, I gave Andy a brief account of my discussions about the cash question with my fellow travelers on board the Kapitan Fedosov, and found, to my surprise, that he was quite familiar with our conclusions.

“Here in Finland, we’ve had lots of time to think about those things. This is where the new payment system was tried out over the past couple of years. Since the 1940s, we’ve had the most advanced payment system anywhere: as an example, we’ve never used personal checks to pay bills. We hardly use cash anymore, either; not even the banks keep a lot of cash on hand. And it’s true that eliminating cash cuts down on crime: our rate of bank robberies and muggings has gone down to almost nothing. Our bankcards and bank transfer forms have bar codes on them, and it’s all very efficient. In place of small change, we use smart cards. But in this country, putting the bar code on your skin rather than using a card is optional, and anyone who wants to use cash, is willing to pay the extra charge for it, and is prepared to explain to the tax office where he got it, is free to do so.”

“Would you say, then, that the European scheme is a good one?”“No, I don’t think so,” Andy replied. “In Scandinavia, we have strict privacy laws, but it

doesn’t seem that this current European Presidency cares at all about such restrictions. Without guaranteed privacy, what to us is just an efficient payment system becomes a tool of tyranny, especially when cash is abolished and having a bar code on your skin is made mandatory. And legalizing drugs just so they can use the drug police to enforce compliance is crazy. If those laws are forced on Finland and she doesn’t leave the European Union to avoid them, I think there’ll be an uprising of some kind here.”

“Are all Finns against the new laws? If so, leaving the EU would be the obvious thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

Andy admitted to a slight exaggeration.“No, most people don’t think it would be much of a change if the system became

mandatory. I guess it takes a certain kind of mentality to see the danger. You have to realize that in this country, like in the rest of continental Europe, people are used to being written up in church or government data files. We’ve been keeping accurate records of everybody for the past millennium. Now, after generations of stable, democratic government, only a few people understand that those files, apart from being a necessary tool of our enlightened social policy, also could be used to

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control everybody, just by ignoring the laws that now protect our privacy. Those few deviates—I’m one of them—try to point out that right through human history, it has never yet happened that a tool of tyranny, once developed, hasn’t been used. Why should this one be an exception?”

“Europe isn’t alone in keeping track of her citizens,” I observed. “I’m sure the nations on other continents have their act together, as well. Even countries like Britain, Australia, and the US, where privacy activists managed to avert a regular national ID card scheme the longest, have other tools doing the same job.”

“Quite so. But now surveillance is being taken to a new level altogether. We’re talking about being permanently marked with a bar code that shows your national ID number, and we know that scanners for such codes can be installed anywhere. If they want to, they can keep track of you wherever you go, in addition to knowing your location every time you pay for something.”

I, too, knew about the long-distance bar code scanners that could pick out a marker at tens of feet away. Originally, this type of scanner was developed for scientific use in the Antarctic, where a method was needed to keep track of individual penguins in order to map their behavior. The birds were labeled with a bar code on their beaks, and as they passed along their well-established paths on their way between their colonies and the sea, they were weighed and timed. The marking gave scientists the opportunity to recognize the individual birds, which would have been difficult without computerized help, since all penguins of a certain species look very much alike. As a result of this demanding beginning, the long-distance scanners entered the commercial market as very mature, rugged products that would work at temperatures down to -100ºF and in driving snow, if needed.

“What’s this marking like?” I asked. “Will we all look like a piece of merchandise with a black bar code all over our faces?”

“Certainly not!” Andy had himself a good laugh. “You’re talking about consumers, vain people who have to be kept happy with their looks. The bar code is invisible to the naked eye: the scanners use infrared light. It’s a simple laser tattoo; you don’t feel a thing when it’s put on your right hand. They figured most people are right-handed, and holding out your hand was the natural thing to do at the checkout. The left-handed lost out as usual: since the code is invisible, its location must be standardized.”

“What about those who don’t have a right hand? Or no hands at all?”“There’s one alternative location for those who don’t have a right hand. It had to be one

everybody is sure to have, because you can’t leave checkout clerks and bank tellers guessing and looking all over a person. They picked the forehead because it is rarely covered by clothing; hair and makeup don’t bother the scanners. If you don’t have a forehead you don’t need a payment system identifier anymore...”

“Why can’t we keep on using plastic cards? They’ve been working well for a long time!” “Remember,” Andy answered, “the whole idea of the new system is that it’s going to be

mandatory for everybody. Electronic payment will be legal tender, and the only kind. Plastic cards were designed to be used by an elite, those who have an interest in getting them and are competent to use them. They aren’t issued to criminals, the homeless, children, or the mentally handicapped. If you were opposed to the new system and wanted to be exempt, all you’d need to do would be to claim that you can’t keep track of a card or its Personal Identification Number. Also, cards can be lost and stolen, and there’s a lot of card fraud going on. All these problems can be solved by attaching the identifier to the person so it can’t be removed. It takes only one more principle to make this a nearly unbreakable system.”

“And what’s that?”

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“It’s the simple requirement that everybody is to be marked. That way, every person will have an official identifier. Its location is known, even though you can’t see it, and changing or removing it would be very difficult. You won’t have to contend with a minority of unmarked people who might amuse themselves by stamping their hands with forged identifiers in order to defraud someone else. Once everybody is marked, the system is supposed to be so foolproof that, in staffed environments like at checkouts, you won’t even need a PIN number anymore, so they’ll actually be able to include both the incompetent and the uncooperative. That’s where the new European system differs from the pilot system we have here, and it makes all the difference in the world.”

”I can pay for a lot of things with my cell phone,” I observed. “That payment method is widespread and reliable. Why didn’t they choose it instead?”

“For a very simple reason,” Andy answered. “A phone is too easy to separate from its owner. Moreover, the new system will be mandatory: you can’t mandate a phone for every person in the world. Also, the availability of phone-based payment depends on too many parties—retailers, banks, network operators, phone manufacturers, and so on—all of which make profitability a condition for their participation. It’s a multi-billion dollar business, and, as long as it serves a purpose and generates profits, it’ll continue to exist—with the added requirement that the owner has to identify him or herself to his or her phone for every payment, by scanning his or her bar code. But it can’t be made legal tender.”

“What about biometrics like fingerprint or iris recognition, or a computer chip under the skin?” I inquired.

“Those are good ID systems, but they can’t be made mandatory. Biometric methods are fine for limited-scale applications like access control and on-line banking, but they would be hopelessly slow and expensive in a universal payment system, where all the billions of people of the world have to be uniquely identified to a high-transaction volume system, even when away from their normal shopping environment. An implanted chip can be removed: muggers would go around armed with scalpels, and dissidents would cut them out on their own. They’re also a cancer risk, so, as tumors and, say, allergies would develop, part of the population would have their chips removed and would lose their ability to pay. Others would be getting worried and causing trouble. Implanted chips are fine for pets, but for people they’re usable only in limited applications where the bearer has an interest in getting the chip. The bar code costs practically nothing to apply, and all the equipment needed is already installed in both retail and finance. The laser markers are cheap variations on industrial equipment. The existing bar code scanners are sensitive enough to determine that the ID code is read off living skin at body temperature, and that there’s blood glucose in the tissue below. Only a software update was needed to add those checks.”

I could see a problem, however.“This system seems to work much like a debit card or an ATM card, doesn’t it? Well, those

cards always have a daily withdrawal limit, so if you’re paying more than that limit, you have to use a credit card or a check, or get the cash from the bank. If you take away cash and checks, and perhaps credit cards too, you still have to have a way to make larger payments.”

“That withdrawal limit came about when ATMs were off-line, to minimize overdrafts, and also to make sure the machines didn’t run out of cash too soon. Nowadays, all point-of-sale payment terminals are on-line to your bank, and there’s nothing to keep you from spending all you’ve got plus all you can borrow, as long as we know for sure who you are. That’s the beauty of an active identifier, a number tattooed on your skin and known to be genuine. The computers don’t have to go through a set of security checks to verify an identity tendered by you, which may or may

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not be your true identity. Instead, your mark tells them positively who you are, just like the license tag on a car.

“What happens when we abolish plastic cards is that we shift from the American principle of identifying a business relationship, using a plastic card that can be lost or forged, to the European idea of identifying a person, which allows us to grant the person all the privileges they’re entitled to without worrying about misidentification and card fraud. Americans might miss their plastic card accordions, of course!”

“What about a backup system?” I inquired. “With cash and imprintable plastic cards, and with checks, you can always complete a transaction manually, if you lose power or if something isn’t machine-readable. How do you sell stuff where there’s no electricity?”

Andy had this one figured out, too. “Every shop will have a simple battery-powered blacklight as a backup, or as the main system where there’s no automation. In ultraviolet light, you can read off the code in clear, just like you can read it in regular light on every product package if the scanner doesn’t pick it up. Nothing like manual backup!”

“That’s a lot of analysis all at once,” I marveled. “How did you figure all this out?”“My bank manager is one of those opposed to the new system,” Andy answered. “We’ve

had many long discussions about it. If the mark is made mandatory, a lot of people, including us, will kick up a stink in the courts, and we simply won’t take it. There’s just one very important thing we have to do, and it’s kind of curious to get such advice from your bank manager. We have to make sure all our debts are paid off before the new system becomes compulsory. That way, the banks don’t have the option of calling in our loans to help persuade us to take the mark.”

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10. Self-sufficiencyThe next morning, Andy and I got up bright and early and spent an hour working the garden. Most of Andy’s land was either forest or rocky heath, but there was a small, rather shady spot where he had some berry bushes growing, and next to them he had planted his carrots, radishes, parsley, and dill.

“Never mind this,” Andy said. “This little kitchen garden is here just to keep this plot from growing over. I’ll show you where I’ll be getting my food.”

Off we drove, along the curving main road of the island, across the bridge, and almost all the way back to the freeway. After a mile on another narrow, winding road, we came to what must once have been a stately home. The manor was built of timber and dated from the nineteenth century. Everything told of class and ancient traditions. This far north, the topsoil remained intact. The south of Finland had been spared forest fires, as most forests were private and small, and as enough water remained in the many lakes and rivers, in spite of low water levels during droughts. Also, clearcutting was only practiced in large forests, mostly up north. So the trees remained, protecting the topsoil.

The master of the house came out to greet us, and Andy introduced us to each other. Ingmar was a distinctly rotund-looking gentleman around fifty. His figure was round, his face was round, and his hands were round and chubby. A handlebar mustache completed his appearance. He spoke fluent English with a strong Swedish accent: he belonged to the Swedish-speaking minority living along the Baltic coastline of Finland. His sense of humor and his love for puns and wit were never far from the surface. It turned out that he had worked in the telecommunications industry for nearly thirty years, while keeping his inherited estate going on the side, but this year he had quit his job in order to work the farm full-time. Ingmar gave me a quick orientation of his business.

“After Finland joined the European Union, farming rapidly declined. The EU Common Agricultural Policy directs farm subsidies mainly to large farms run by agribusiness, with the aim of eliminating family farming and making the land available to big corporations. Many Finnish farmers had to give up. In the north of the country, where some meager special subsidies remained, mostly dairy farms survived. I was lucky: I had my job and didn’t have to make the farm pay every year, so I managed to keep it going. Now food prices are higher than they’ve been in a century, and farming is again profitable. Many farms have been started up anew here, and locally grown food is quite competitive. But the new payment system is really giving us a boost, because there are so many people who want to bypass it and deal directly with a grower.

“We now run the place as a community supported farm. It’s an idea that’s been tried out in the States and Sweden for many years. A number of families commit themselves to buying their food here, as a kind of subscription, and we grow it for them to order, with the advantage of knowing that we can sell everything we produce. To keep costs down, all our customers come here and work whenever they can. Today is such a day: in a while, we’ll have dozens of people here.”

Andy was one of Ingmar’s clients, of course. We were early, and Ingmar took us for a ride in his four-wheel-drive. The estate bordered on a river, with another estate, larger than Ingmar’s place, on the opposite shore. On the river’s edge, naturally, was a sauna. There were over two hundred acres of fields and a similar area of forest, housing for several families, a stable for horses, and barns full of pigs and chickens. Ingmar hadn’t kept cattle so far, although the old barns could have accommodated quite a number: it would have been too much work while he had farmed only part-time.

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With all those customers willing to pitch in, Ingmar was able to grow his produce organically, using no chemicals. The chickens roamed free in a fenced run: no battery hens there. To save on fuel costs, he had acquired several draft horses and had fixed up the old horse-drawn farm machinery that neither he nor his father had bothered to get rid of: now he had lots of people to operate it. He still had his tractors, as well, and kept them in good nick, but thinking of a time when his customers would be unable to pay him with money, since they’d be unmarked, he wanted to make sure he could keep his cash expenses to a minimum.

“Inevitably, that goal will require us to keep dairy cows, so we’ll get enough manure and won’t have to buy fertilizer,” Ingmar pointed out. “We’ll have to get hold of some top-class cows, and hire some permanent staff. Presently, I’m looking into ways of employing somebody without paying their full wages as money.”

When we got back to the farmyard, it was getting crowded with people: Ingmar’s family and customers were getting their tools ready, bridling horses, and exchanging gossip. While Ingmar went to work making sure everybody knew what to do, Andy and I joined the throng and got ourselves rakes and pitchforks. It was an early summer, and some of the hay had been mowed. During the morning, we followed a horse-drawn hay rake and made haystack upon haystack, and got a few blisters on our hands in the bargain.

After lunch I got reacquainted, after all the years since my childhood, with gardening without herbicides. If you don’t want to spray poison on your garden, nor spend money on propane gas to singe the weeds, you have to pull them. It’s backbreaking work, but it leaves a very nice-looking result. I also found out what you do to avoid using pesticides: you combine every crop with the right companion plants. The companion plants either repel the bugs or taste better to them than the food plants, and the latter stay healthy.

At the end of the day, Ingmar and his wife Ritva asked Andy and me to stay for dinner and sauna. Ritva was Finnish-speaking, and their children were growing up bilingual, something I understood was not uncommon in the coastal areas of the country. They had both taken a little longer—a few months to a year—to begin talking than other children, but now they were perfectly fluent in both languages, apparently without any trace of an accent in either. The trick, Ingmar said, was to be totally consistent about speaking your own language to the child, even if you switched languages for others, including your spouse.

Self-sufficiency was on everybody’s mind here, and Ingmar’s family had spent the past two years making intense preparations. Where in earlier days the farm had grown just a couple of crops, now, between them and their neighbors, they produced nearly every kind of food plant that would grow in Finland. The pigs were new, too; chickens and sheep they had always kept. By the river, there was a small-scale fish farm that had been restocked after the comet-induced toxicity of the water had cleared. It was only logical that our dinner consisted entirely of homegrown food.

Dessert was a sweet pudding made of berries, which made me wonder what they’d be using for sweetening: sugar cane grows only in hot climates. Ritva pointed out that they could grow sugar beets instead. Sugar beets grow well in Finland, although their cultivation is more costly than further south. When, early this century, the EU caved in to pressure from the multinationals and the World Trade Organization, and allowed the importation of some cane sugar from plantations in developing countries, it sacrificed the less economical sugar beet production in the Nordic countries in order to protect the large-scale growers in Central Europe. Now, with community-supported agriculture, independent of subsidies, Ritva and Ingmar could grow anything they and their clients wanted. Their neighbor across the river still had the equipment needed to produce sugar and molasses from the beets. There was also honey, fruit, and berries.

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“While Ingmar was fixing up his old farm machinery, I spent a lot of time going through the attic,” Ritva continued. “Apparently this family has never thrown anything away! I found all these old cookbooks, guides, and manuals from the Second World War, when the whole nation had to live mostly from the foods that could be produced here. I also found books on canning and preserving, on organic gardening, and on keeping your family and animals healthy. A place like this, of course, has an immense root cellar, and we can use all the methods from those old books just like they were used then.”

“In those days there was no refrigeration, but they knew how to keep all their foods from spoiling, anyway,” Ingmar added. “By using those old methods, we can cut down our power consumption considerably. But we’re not going to give up using electricity altogether, since we’ll be running a dairy farm. The milk has to be refrigerated, or it can’t be sold.”

“You’ll need money, then,” I said, “unless you can trade milk for electricity.”“That’s all taken care of!” Ingmar had that characteristic, cunning look. “We make our

own! About a kilometer up the river, there’s a small hydroelectric power plant. Last year, the power company was about to retire it, but our neighbors, on whose land it sits, found out and offered to buy it. In the end, we shared the cost with them, and it was quite affordable. The plant can support several hundred homes if their owners make an effort to conserve energy, so now all our and our neighbors’ customers living in the area buy the electricity we produce, delivered via the national grid. We feed more electricity into the network than we sell, so the local power company gets compensated for the distribution costs. For now, our customers pay us with money, but we’ll figure out another method when it becomes necessary.”

“Don’t you need staff to operate it?” I asked, quite fascinated with this kind of self-sufficiency, but still wondering if it would work without money.

“No, it runs unattended. My computer over there in the office monitors it and alerts us if something needs to be done. We do some regular maintenance on the turbine and the generator, and keep the river clear of logs and debris. That’s all—it’s been doing its job for over a century already, and with some modern electronics to regulate it, it runs like clockwork. As you see, self-sufficiency doesn’t have to mean returning to the Stone Age!”

“We use wood, solar, and heat pumps for heating, and wood for cooking, and I even do my ironing with an old iron that sits on the wood-burning cook stove to get hot,” Ritva interjected. “It works just as well as my electric one. The only machine I won’t give up is my washing machine.”

“That's really convenient!” I mused. “You're more fortunate than most people who might consider living without money.”

“True,” Ingmar admitted. “But there's more than convenience to it, and anybody who wants to try some degree of self-sufficiency would be well advised not to forget their power supply. This old building functions perfectly without electricity, because it was built that way. But many of our customers live in modern homes with mechanical ventilation. If their power is cut off, the ventilation fans stop and the house begins developing mildew. Next thing you know, the local authority may condemn your home and turn you out of it even if you own it outright. And it would be nearly impossible to live in an apartment without electricity: the only other way you could cook would be with gas, and that has to be paid for, too.”

Dinner was over, and it was time to see to the animals for the night. When the chores were done it was the sauna’s turn, and I found out that the river was a lot warmer than the sea. I actually had myself a proper swim.

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Returning to Andy’s place with a sack of potatoes in the trunk, I felt that my knowledge had increased at least as much as my waistline, and compared notes with Andy.

“As long as we can still use our bank accounts to receive our salaries and pay our bills, this system with community supported agriculture will work, even if we have no access to the official payment system,” Andy concluded. “The worst problem I can foresee for our little community is that we might lose our wheels if we have no way of paying for gasoline or bus fares. That would make it harder for the farms to support customers living at a distance. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. My ancestor who built the original home out here on the island rowed a nineteenth-century rowboat 20 kilometers to work in Porvoo, and back, every day. Except in winter, when he skied the same distance. We’ll make it!”

Sunday morning, we took Andy’s sailboat out on the bay.“Normally, I’d be checking the nets at this time,” Andy told me. “But there’s no fish left in

the Baltic. For many years, the Scandinavian countries financed cleanups and antipollution measures in the Baltic countries and northwest Russia. We got the Baltic to where the fish were quite healthy, but where man left off polluting, nature took over. In hot years, regular algal bloom had already done damage, and then the comet took the rest.”

So we rounded a shoal and sailed back. Andy wanted to show me some more locally grown food, and we walked into the forest. There we found some alpine strawberries and blueberries just beginning to ripen. It would be a good year for wild raspberries and lingonberries, too, Andy told me, and pointed out large tracts of unripe fruit between the pine trees. The northern European forest, he continued, was a larder, free for all who cared to gather what it offered: many kinds of berries and mushrooms, and moose for the hunters. Last of all, the rowanberries would ripen: some made jelly from them, but most were left for the birds. In the fall, you could tell how severe the winter was going to be from how many rowanberries there were: a good crop spelled a long, cold winter.

“Somebody up there thinks of the birds, it seems,” Andy concluded.“So far, you’ve arranged for a fine supply of vegetarian food,” I pointed out. “With no fish,

what will you do for meat? Or will you become a vegetarian?”Andy had a young dog named Jack, a friendly, sociable hunting dog that had been following

us all over the place without a leash. He was a cross between a Finnish hound and a Bavarian mountain hound, and you’d be hard pressed to find a smarter dog. Most hunting dogs will take to the woods if you let them go, but Jack preferred our company. Now Andy turned to the dog and said, “Go get it, Jack!”

Jack disappeared with his nose to the ground, and a few minutes passed. Then Jack returned with a dead jackrabbit in his mouth. He laid it down in front of Andy and was duly praised and patted.

“Jack took his first jackrabbit at just ten months of age. Now he does it on cue. He eats the entrails and brings me the gutted carcass. It makes a fine dinner, as you’ll see!”

Jack was an extraordinarily caring and helpful dog. He always kept track of what we were doing, and whatever he could do to help, he did with great enthusiasm. If Andy was digging a hole in the ground, Jack dug with him. When Andy filled the hole again, Jack was there, pushing dirt into the hole with his nose. Once, when Andy’s mother had lain down on the couch for a rest, Jack had located first a pillow, then a blanket, and had brought her both in turn to make her comfortable. He knew what she needed because he had been observant when she had gone to rest before. Jack did this sort of thing because he cared; he had never had any training as a companion animal.

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Touring Porvoo later that day, we saw another business, essential for the people who were interested in self-sufficiency. They had got together and restored an ancient mill by a river east of town, and it now had a miller and was in daily use. Around the mill was a reconstructed village with a bakery and a number of craft shops. All this had once been rebuilt in order to attract tourists, but now most of the customers were locals who used the different services for their daily needs. Much of the trading was based on barter, and the miller accepted payment for his work in kind, as a percentage of the flour produced; this he took to his wife in the bakery, and between them they supported their family quite nicely.

We also visited a greenhouse gardener cum plant nursery who was part of the group of people preparing for life without money. On our way back, Andy stopped by a garage along the road and took me to the back yard. There, looking like something out of a fairy tale, stood an old building housing a forge, all reconditioned and in daily use.

“Once, this family were the blacksmiths of the village. Now, after generations of repairing cars, they’ve opened the old smithy for business again. With so many draft horses in use, they keep a couple of people employed reconditioning old machinery, and as farriers. We’re really lucky that so many farmers just kept the old machines stored away in the back of their barns, or as ornaments. I don’t know if anybody thought they’d ever use such old implements again, but now they come in very handy.”

“One thing mystifies me,” I had to admit. “Where did all these horses come from? You don’t raise draft horses from nothing in two years!”

“Well, they didn’t come about by accident,” Andy assured me. “Finland has a national committee on civil defense, which was never disbanded nor subordinated to any European Union organs, even though we joined the EU. The committee retained its original purpose, which is ensuring that the country always has a measure of self-sufficiency and organization for making it through an international crisis that might disrupt our normal exports and imports. This committee, using its small budget and a network of men active in the Army Reserve, managed to preserve a supply of tens of thousands of draft horses, part with the Army and part with volunteer farmers. It also organized a seed bank of strains of food plants bred for our climate. When the new payment system was introduced, everybody agreed that the popular movement for self-sufficiency was fully qualified to take over and expand this program.”

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11. MidsummerIt was Midsummer Night’s eve, a Friday night near the summer solstice, and all Finland was getting down to serious drinking. This nation of reserved and sensitive people drinks in bouts, none more manifest than the eves of Valpurgis Night, Midsummer, and New Year. After two weeks of making observations, I had come to the tentative conclusion that, in addition to a known genetic predisposition, the reason for this might lay in their custom of quietness: you never talk to strangers, you never talk about your problems, and, in some parts of the country, men hardly talk at all, except about work. Unless they’re drunk.

Mobile phones have brought about a small change in this respect among the younger generation, but even those who grew up with the phones still don’t talk much face to face as adults. Here—as everywhere else—gaming, texting, and social media have left the young with few social skills. You might see them in the same room, messaging each other and sending each other links, laughing and grunting, but never looking at each other or uttering a word. Their SMS shorthand is becoming their native tongue, and it isn’t even meant to be pronounced. You’d be excused for wondering if we’re witnessing the emergence of the first generation of hearing humans without a spoken language.

For most people, living without the outlet that talking about their feelings affords would be near impossible, but in Finland, idle talk isn’t acceptable. Being drunk gives the Finn an excuse to break the taboos and talk to anybody: to himself, to strangers, to his spouse, to his friends. Unfortunately, a lot of Finns don’t carry their liquor well, and as a result, there’s a lot of fighting and wife beating on weekends.

In view of all this, my location on that day was a good one. During the latter part of our holiday tour of the country, Andy had taken me all over the Lake District, and for Midsummer, we were visiting some old friends of his in the area of Suomenniemi near the large lake Saimaa. This area borders on Karelia, where the people are gregarious and talkative, and also less prone to drinking too much, which would seem to corroborate my theory.

The people from the area were getting together at a dance pavilion on the shore of a smaller lake, the Kuolimo, where a band was playing and entertainers were performing. A large bonfire had been prepared, and would be lit at sunset around eleven. The Midsummer bonfire is one of the dearest traditions of the Scandinavian nations, and here it was a true family celebration. The mosquitoes, incidentally, were also having their party of the year.

After much dancing with pretty Finnish girls, I watched the bonfire burn high against the pale blue sky, where no stars could be seen among the flying sparks. Many boats moved silently on the lake; their view of the fire must have been spectacular. The volunteer fire brigade was standing by, but had no need of intervening: the bonfire had been built on a rocky islet in the lake, and it burned down without causing any harm.

The next day, we made the compulsory tour of our host’s farm. It was of a size similar to Ingmar’s, but Mr. Anttola, the owner, ran it the normal way, using tractors and chemicals, and specialized in timber, milk, and two or three crops for the wholesale market. He also kept genetically engineered cows and hens producing raw materials for a pharmaceutical company. His recipe for surviving fluctuations in food prices and farm subsidies was simple: don’t borrow money. It seemed to be well-founded advice—the weather vane on his home was a plain sheet metal banner brandishing the year 1723, sixty-five years before British settlers first came to Australia.

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Neither Mr. Anttola nor his wife or sons spoke English, although Matti, the youngest of the three boys, clearly had no problem understanding me. He just hadn’t had an opportunity to learn actively to speak the foreign languages he had studied at school. Andy did enough translating that I could follow his conversation with the Anttolas: they were discussing the new payment system, as could be expected. With a large kitchen garden, a root cellar, and their cows, pigs, and hens, the Anttolas weren’t overly concerned about the likely disappearance of cash. Their farm income would continue to flow through the bank, and they were practically self-sufficient for their daily needs. Phlegmatically but optimistically, Mr. Anttola summed up his impressions in what seemed to be his favorite saying:

“It’ll all sort itself out, as long as we don’t rush into anything!” Mrs. Anttola, who was active in the local congregation, agreed, and stressed that most

particularly, they weren’t going to take any kind of mark in a haste. There was talk among the people at the church that it might be unbiblical to take it. She wanted to be sure it wasn’t, before she did any such thing.

Late on Midsummer Day, we returned to the island, and landed in the midst of the continuing festivities among Andy’s many relatives, all of which were at their respective summer homes. One of the cousins, who lived in Germany, upon hearing that I was heading there, warned me that the cutover to the new payment system was almost complete, and that cash was presently being withdrawn. It had been a simple change without any technical problems, as all the equipment was already in place and working well. It had only been a question of reprogramming cash registers to accept the payor’s ID information through the ever-present bar code reader instead of through the card and check readers, and of deactivating the cash box. Nearly everyone was already marked, and the use of bar-code-inscribed plastic cards was to be discontinued within days.

The next day I parted from my old friend, and boarded one of the large passenger ships in the Helsinki harbor, bound for Stockholm. Majestically, the tall, white, floating luxury hotel rounded the Suomenlinna fortress museum and set out westward through the beautiful archipelago. I was having my dinner in the first class restaurant and couldn’t decide which I was enjoying more, the food or the view.

Half a mile astern followed the competition, a red ship every inch as elegant as the one I was in. The Gulf of Finland was dotted with sailing yachts and powerboats, all on their way to some beautiful spot in this northern summer paradise. Most Finns had begun their summer vacations. The Swedes would go on their great migration a week later, at the beginning of July, and, following Andy’s advice, I had timed my trip so I’d be out of Sweden before the crush of cars bound for the Mediterranean would be unleashed on July first.

After, once more, having done a lot of dancing with tall, pretty blondes, I retired to my cabin and felt very much at home with the movement of the ship and the quiet rumbling of the engine. Too quiet, I thought, but reading the welcome leaflet, I found out why: behind the wall paneling, the cabins were lined with a plastic film acting as both a moisture barrier and an active noise suppressor. The film was covered with a piezoelectric layer that functioned as a loudspeaker. This layer was fed a signal exactly the same as the sounds entering the cabin, but inverted, so it canceled out most of the outside noise.

I had thought it was time for bed, but it was still light, and I wasn’t sleepy. So I went to one of the bars for a beer and to see if I could find someone to chat up; on the dance floor, the loud music had made talking next to impossible.

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The only free seat at the bar happened to be next to a man who had already had a drop too much. He was slightly bent, of middle age, with a narrow face disfigured by prominent lumps under the skin. His ash blond hair was greasy and unkempt, but he clearly wasn’t poor: he was well dressed, and drank only the best. Insisting on buying me my drink, he blabbered on, making sure I knew what to call him: his name was Janne.

Janne’s life’s story and all his woes were pouring out of him: here I was in the position of the stranger he could legitimately talk to, because he was drunk. He wasn’t unpleasant, though, and he knew a lot; he had been rather high up at European Computers before he’d been given early retirement.

When I made a lighthearted comment about still being able to pay cash for a drink, Janne suddenly got serious and almost sober.

“You shouldn’t joke about payment systems, Gregory! You shouldn’t joke with me about payment systems! Do you know who designed this new system they’re installing just now?”

I didn’t, but I could guess. I was right.“Yes, I led the project to develop it; they thought a Finn stationed at headquarters in Paris

was the right person for the job. The system was piloted in Finland, you see.”I told him that I knew, and that I was familiar with some of the workings of the system.There was an air of utter anguish about Janne when he continued.“Technically, it’s the greatest information system ever built. It addresses all the problems

the European Presidency wanted to solve. It’s simple and reliable, and if it could be implemented as planned, it would be fair and secure. Imagine a system that makes economic crime impossible—not just for the little guy, but for the big shots too, and for their friends in government! But do you have any idea what it can be used for?”

“A pretty good one, I think!” I told him briefly what I had picked up so far.“Well, you seem to have found out a lot already,” Janne conceded, “but you don’t know half

the story yet. Did you see the three-dimensional TV show in the central gallery of the ship? Right, you’ve seen the new European TV standard at work. But here on the ship, only part of the TV standard is in use: you see a lifelike holographic image of the entertainers, and you’re impressed. But the other half is the sound system, and that works only with the new payment identifier. On the Continent, the complete system is going into public spaces, such as shopping centers, at a tremendous rate, and homes are being equipped fast, too. This is politically important, so the European Union not only financed the development of the system, but keeps subsidizing the manufacture of sets, as well. So the sets are cheaper than the old, much simpler High-Definition TV sets with plain stereo sound.

“Now don’t be impatient! This sound system consists of a grid of loudspeakers mounted in the ceiling, something like a checkerboard. There’s also a grid of microphones, because this is an interactive system. The microphones, between them, can pick out everybody’s voice in a crowded room, and the speakers simultaneously deliver an individual sound channel, modulated onto a precisely targeted ultrasound beam, to everyone present, just as if you had your own, personal headset with stereo headphones, and your own microphone. It isn’t complicated; it’s merely a question of finally having enough computer power where it’s needed. In a simpler form, grids of microphones have been used for a long time to pinpoint the location of gunfire in the slums.

“That computer, however, must know exactly where everyone is in the room, in order to process all these superimposed sound channels correctly. It also has to direct a set of laser light beams at the eyes of each viewer to create the three-dimensional holographic effect. So it has to be able to locate everybody at all times. We solved that problem with a simple pattern recognition

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system fed by a couple of panoramic video cameras. In addition, we use a matrix of ultrasound transmitters that work like radar: the microphones pick up the reflections and keep track of the movements of each individual. But the politicians and the advertisers had another, more exacting requirement. They wanted to know who everybody is, not just where they’re sitting or standing. So we had to enhance the locating of each viewer by also identifying them, and, since the new TV standard is being introduced at the same time as the new payment system, what could be more natural than deploying an arrangement of simple infrared scanners that recognize bar codes? These scanners can pick out the face of a dime at a hundred feet. An utterly reliable system, no fuzzy logic that could make mistakes: just ask people to show their hand to set up a channel or to restore it if the sound is lost for some reason.

“Alright. Europe now has a payment system that allows you to buy and sell if, and only if you’re marked with a bar code. Europe also has a three-dimensional TV standard that allows official computers to keep track of how you’re reacting to the propaganda. Do you know what’s special about the UPC/EAN bar code that consumers are now being marked with, just like merchandise has been marked for years and years?”

“It looks different from industrial bar codes, but I don’t know why.”“I’ll tell you.” Janne was now dead serious. “The UPC/EAN code was designed to be

particularly robust and readable in both directions, because of the unpredictable way merchandise passes over the scanner in the checkout counter. It has three guard patterns; take a look here on the vodka bottle. At each end and in the middle you have two narrow lines, slightly longer than the others. Can you see what two narrow lines stand for?”

“It must be a six,” I calculated.“That’s right. Every UPC/EAN bar code comprises the numbers 6,6,6. Six hundred and

sixty-six. That’s what the European Presidency is marking people with. Do you know this book?”He pulled out a dog-eared New Testament from inside his jacket. It fell open to the Book of

Revelation, chapter 13, verse 14, the pages much thumbed and highlighted. It was an English New Testament, and Janne read to me:

Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he (this is a publicity person called the second beast) deceived the inhabitants of the earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who would refuse to worship the image to be killed.

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.

This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.

“The latter part is perfectly clear,” I said, quite shocked. “The first part sounds like a breathing, speaking statue of some kind.”

“It takes a bit of thinking to understand it,” Janne answered. “This propaganda person deceives all the people on Earth, not just those in one particular place. The image causes all those who won’t worship it, to be killed. That means it isn’t just one statue, but millions of life-like images all over the world. ‘Breath’ simply means ‘Life.’ A living, speaking image, reproduced everywhere, capable of keeping track of whether you worship it or not, is interactive, holographic TV, nothing but. With full identification of every viewer, I should add. The whole damned system

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was defined two thousand years ago, by an old man who described what he saw so well that no systems designer could have written the specification any better or more concisely. Do you have any idea how it makes me feel? Do you understand why I drink?”

“Let me see your book,” I asked; there was another passage I could see about the image and the mark. So I read it out, at chapter 14, verse 9.

If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which will be poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.

I could see Janne’s anguish increase. He had caused this to happen to mankind, and he could find only blame for himself. But I began thinking that he was wrong, altogether wrong.

“Look, Janne, I certainly don’t know much about religion, but since a man of God wrote all this down 2,000 years ago, and since, evidently, he was right, there’s no way you could say that what’s happening isn’t God’s will! This second passage shows that there’ll be a culling process. It reminds me of something I’ve heard earlier: ‘You cannot serve both God and Money.’ It would seem that God has a need for some kind of test to find out who will choose to serve him, and who will take this mark and worship this image in order to be able to keep on using money. You may have built the system to the Leader’s specifications, but, as far as I can see, they were also God’s requirements. As you said, he provided the system description long before the EU was around.”

There was a light growing in the eyes of this unhappy alcoholic. He visibly straightened up.“Gregory, you just saved my life. Tonight, when I’d have been drunk enough, I was going

to jump overboard and drown myself. But you’re right: it is God’s will. There’s nothing we humans can build or make that God hasn’t figured out how to use for his purposes.

“This has completely changed my life. I take you for my witness, Gregory: I’ll never touch alcohol again, as long as I live! You’ll be my support, won’t you? You don’t have to be around, just say you believe in me! Thank you ever so much... Now please help me to my cabin!”

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12. Hanover, GermanyIn Stockholm, I took my time touring the city. I saw the Old Town with the royal palace and the changing of the guard, the restored seventeenth century ship Wasa, the zoo cum amusement park at Skansen, and many other sights. While I was visiting a combined hardware and housewares store in the Old Town, who should have walked in but the queen, accompanied by a solitary security officer. In the absurdly egalitarian way of the Swedes, she looked at vases and quietly waited for her turn, while the storekeeper finished helping me with a small repair to my rucksack, albeit with a slightly nervous look in the direction of Her Majesty now and then. When I was finished and had paid, I could think of nothing better to do than to make a bow in appreciation of the queen’s patience, and left the store not a little confounded.

Then, following my usual scheme, I found the dispatch office of one of the large international trucking companies, and located a driver who was willing to take me to Germany on the morrow.

The drive south from Stockholm was a pleasant one: the freeway was excellent, and the Swedish countryside looked beautiful. There still was a lot of farming going on, some of it using horses like Ingmar did. I concluded that the worldwide food crisis was a high-level phenomenon, consisting of the multi-million-ton grain shortage in the commodity market and the disappearance of marine sources of protein. Although a majority of people were trapped in the crisis and had no other source of food, here and there some had found local solutions by using the resources at their disposal, and by relearning old skills.

Along the way, we stopped a couple of times for fuel, food, and bathroom breaks. I noticed that Swedish service stations had a curious way of demanding a deposit of some kind before allowing you to fill up at the pump. This was due to frequent fuel thefts, I was told. Fine, but why did they need my passport before they’d let me use the toilet—were they afraid that I’d abscond through the back door with the commode? Well, they had to be consistent: they wanted surety for every transaction. Reporting thefts and vandalism to the police was useless, as the police had neither the resources nor the powers to help. Not even somebody caught red-handed could be arrested. Being denied justice, the station operators relied on a kind of vigilantism of their own. They couldn’t wait for the new payment system to be introduced: with proof positive of the identity of every visitor, they could bypass the police and get redress using their own lawyers, collection agents, and security services providers.

In the afternoon, we crossed Öresund strait along a bridge nearly five miles long, an artificial island, and a more than two-mile long tunnel, and didn’t even stop for a customs check when we arrived in Denmark: all the formalities were handled automatically by computers along the road and in the truck, interacting via radio.

What little I saw of Denmark gave me the impression of a nice, cozy place. A traffic sign read, “Please observe the speed limit; Denmark is a small country and you’ll get to your destination soon enough. There are only five million Danes and we need every one of them!”

Emerging from the tunnel between Denmark and Germany at Puttgarden, we ran into a line of cars and trucks at the customs barrier. Stig, my driver, was furious; it was unusual to be held up there, as customs procedures were fully automated on all intra-European borders. It turned out that the German police were stopping all vehicles and offering to mark their passengers, so they’d be able to pay for their stay on the Continent.

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It seemed strange that you could be marked out of your own country, but the procedure was simple, when it was explained to me. From a standard EU identity card and passport—a credit card size plastic card—a computer read your national ID number. Most people also had their bank contact information recorded on the same card; if not, your bank or credit card was read, which created the connection to your bank or charge account. The marking standard had been worked out to accommodate the different European national ID numbering schemes, so it really didn’t matter where the marking was done.

I held up my Australian passport and was waved through. Stig told the policeman in Swedish to go to hell, and stepped on the accelerator. We were on our way, going past Lübeck and Hamburg to Hanover.

North of Hanover Stig turned into a truck stop at the huge Mellendorf junction and we went to have our dinner. After some negotiation, the cashier accepted payment by travelers check. It was to be the last check I managed to use at a retail business in continental Europe. The food was hearty and the serving immense, and the beer was as good as only German beer can be. I’ve never yet regretted a meal at a truck stop, nor have I ever had anything but a good time in the company of truckers.

After a relaxed evening with a dozen truckers of half a dozen nationalities, I spent the night in the lower bunk of Stig’s truck cab. Following a breakfast enjoyed on the balance of my check from the night before, Stig set off for Frankfurt, while I positioned myself at the entrance to the Autobahn spur to Hanover.

My plan was to tour some of northern Germany, continuing to Frankfurt to see Dieter, then to travel through Belgium to France. All the while, I’d have to find ways to live on my old-fashioned travelers checks and credit card, and avoid getting in trouble with the law for not being marked like everybody was supposed to be. Granted, I had the excuse of being Australian and not yet eligible to be marked, but I wasn’t planning to flaunt that status.

But now I was on my way into the city of Hanover in the company of a fat and jolly German trucker, presiding over a battered old Volvo. He was from Magdeburg in the eastern part of the country, and he let me know that he was very happy to stay there although life in the East continued to be more austere than it was in the West.

“We don’t need that much,” he said in his simple manner. “We have less stress than the Westerners. Our old people still remember the Soviet occupation, and we don’t mind a lower living standard because we have our liberty.”

I told him about my concern for the bank identifier.“I feel we’re all losing our freedom with that mark. The authorities can keep track of

everything you do. I just can’t bring myself to take it,” I admitted.Jürg, my driver, gave me a strange look.“You’d lose more than your freedom if you took that mark,” he said. “You’d lose your soul.

I’m not taking it: hardly anyone I know in the East has taken it. We’re very religious people, and we don’t play with such things. That identifier is the Mark of the Beast!”

This was the same warning I had received from Janne. I didn’t yet feel as strongly about that aspect of the matter as Jürg did, but I was impressed by his conviction.

“How do you pay for things then?” I asked. “I had a terrible time trying to pay for my food with a travelers check last night. Cash is no longer accepted, and they don’t take credit cards, either.”

“We exchange what we need between us,” Jürg answered. “Today, I drive vegetables to Hanover; my payment is two sacks of carrots. One I’ll give to the gas station owner for the fuel, the

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other I’ll take to my good wife. Yesterday, I delivered a load of coal, and now we have coal for the rest of the summer. It works very well, especially when enough people get together and accept services from each other. Alone, we’d never make it; our garden is too small.”

Jürg dropped me off in Herrenhausen and continued westward to deliver his cargo. I crossed the street and found myself in a park every inch as splendid as anything I had seen anywhere. A fountain in the middle of the park was pumping water in an unrelenting column—at 273 feet the highest in Europe—accompanied by a marvelous rainbow. Further investigation revealed that I had come upon the royal gardens from the era when Hanover shared a king with England. The city’s affinity with Britain was strongly in evidence as I toured the buildings and the royal grounds, and it gave me much needed encouragement.

I briefly toyed with the idea of taking a tram downtown, but watching people board one at the tram stop quickly convinced me otherwise. Sternly supervised by the driver, each passenger in turn held out her or his hand in front of a box inside the entrance door, and proceeded only upon receiving the blessing of the machine in the form of a green light and an approving “beep.” What deterred me was the red light also mounted on the box, and the knowledge that with the red light went a piercing and most embarrassing sound signal. I’d heard its likes in Helsinki where bus and tram tickets were a kind of proximity card that held a season ticket or a balance of money, and if you presented an empty card, you knew about it.

Left to my own means of locomotion, I watched in amazement how the tram driver took off down the street in a death-defying career worthy of a Stuka dive-bomber pilot. Its bell ringing incessantly, the tram forced its way past the cars, demonstratively ignoring the existence of occasional crossings without traffic lights. On the Autobahn, the Mercedes was king; in the city, the tram reigned supreme.

Eventually I passed the railway station and a little later ended up in a triangular plaza that seemed to form the dead center of Hanover. My breakfast was now but a memory, and I set myself the task of finding out how I was going to get hold of lunch. Clutching my travelers checks, I went into a bank and announced to the lady at the information desk that I wanted to exchange some foreign currency.

I now know what it’s like to be a time traveler and to arrive a couple of hundred years into the future. The lady excused herself and went to find a manager. The manager proceeded to confer with the head of the exchange section. Every now and then they looked my way and shook their heads. Maybe I should have left quietly, but I was nearly as curious as I was hungry, and I really wanted to find out what they were going to do.

As it turned out, I was lucky. They didn’t call the police on me.The manager came to talk to me and said, “Unfortunately, we can’t help you, sir.

Technically, your travelers checks are valid, but since you don’t have an account with us, there’d be no way you could use the proceeds, if we exchanged them for euros. There’s only one means of payment for individuals now, and you have to have a bank account to use it.”

He was a decent fellow: he didn’t bring up the question of my being marked or not. He motioned with his eyes for me to leave, and I was quick to take his advice. Customers and staff alike were staring at me by now, and I got a very clear idea of what it’s like to be the odd one out in a crowd.

The triangular restaurant with its big flat roof in the middle of the triangular plaza seemed like the next logical place to try, and I sat down at a table on its terrace and began reading the menu. A nice thing about the EU is that menus have to be printed in a number of languages, including

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English. A waitress, carrying one of the battery-powered laser readers, came up to me to take my order.

“Do you accept travelers checks?” I asked her, hoping that an establishment so clearly oriented toward serving tourists would prove to be my rescue.

“Not anymore,” she answered cheerfully. “All our customers can now use the reader. It’s so simple: no money to count, no change to give, and my tip goes automatically to the bank.”

“Well, you now have a customer who wants to pay with a travelers check,” I said. “I was just told by the bank that my checks are still valid. Surely the bank will accept one from you?”

“I don’t think we can take them,” she said, “but I’ll ask my manager.”What the manager said when she found my table unoccupied, I’ll never know. I determined

that there was a distinct possibility that I had met my last decent German manager for the day at the bank, and, brusquely overruling my growling stomach, grabbed my backpack and left.

Heading south and west, for no other reason than having started out in the north, I arrived at the Hanover City Hall and stopped to admire its architecture. It’s a beautiful building with a huge dome, and behind it I later discovered another enchantingly pleasant park. Across from City Hall stood the City Hotel, and as a new idea formed in my mind, I approached its liveried porter with a question.

“Does your restaurant accept travelers checks or credit cards?” I asked him, realizing that I was going to be asking the same question ad nauseam, unless I found some new way out of my predicament soon.

Here, again, I had met an upright man, and, after a quick glance around to ascertain that no one was listening, he told me that it did, but that this was very unofficial, and that, unfortunately, the cost would be rather high, as the proceeds had to cover certain necessary expenses.

I had seen the “German glance” before, in old movies depicting Nazi times, and realized that things were worse than I had imagined. The “necessary expenses,” of course, were bribes.

“What would it cost me for lunch?” I asked.“You’d be out at least 100 euros,” he answered.I didn’t need my calculator to figure out that I’d last a couple of months, at the most, if I had

to eat at places like the hotel. I thanked him and continued on my way.On a park bench in the deep green shadow of the trees behind City Hall I took stock of my

situation. I had my credit card and my checks, technically still valid. However, I was unable to use them, other than under the counter at the most expensive establishments, those that catered to the moneyed elite that didn’t have to worry about the restraints imposed on regular mortals. I had enough money to return to Australia with my tail between my legs: Travelers Charge would honor my checks and my card and sell me the ticket, because its name was on them. But then what? Australia was going to mark her people, too, and I still hadn’t figured out how to establish a reliable way of living without the mark. Surprisingly, the more my stomach hurt, and the less hope I saw of ever being able to buy myself a meal again, the more determined I found myself to stick it out. I tried to imagine what Laura would have done in my situation, and became convinced that the answers to my questions were to be found here in Europe, and that I was going to complete my tour of the world just as planned.

From the shade of the park, I now emerged into the brightness of a spa setting, surrounding a lake a good mile long. Small sailboats and windsurfers filled the surface to saturation, and a rowing team was practicing close to the hither shore. I later learned that the lake, the Maschsee, is man-made; it was excavated in the 1930s and is supplied by a river. It was one of the public works

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projects that served to relieve the unemployment of the time, helping give Hitler the initial popularity that soon propelled him to absolute power.

My interest, however, lay with the numerous restaurants and food stalls along the lake, not with how it had come to be there. As I walked along the sidewalk, observing the commerce, I finally got the message. There was no buying without the mark. In fact, there was no selling without it, either. I watched the change of shifts at one of the restaurants: as a morning waiter turned over his laser reader to his afternoon counterpart, first the one, then the other scanned their hands and pressed the keys, apparently entering their passwords and balancing their totals. Just as well that I hadn’t come to think of the possibility of trying to get a temporary job as a waiter, hoping to get a meal on the house now and then. I’d have been in for another rude awakening.

It was then that I realized that I was now cut off from consumer society for good, and that, consequently, there was another way of life awaiting me. I felt tremendously impatient to discover what it was going to be like. I left the lake with its glittering celebration of leisure, and was soon walking along residential streets. Behind a supermarket I found a veritable smorgasbord of food packages with recently expired use-by dates, destined for the garbage compactor. With a mysterious sense of reverence I gathered up my first free lunch, all vegetarian just for safety’s sake, and sat down on a bench in a small park, officially to begin my life as a tramp.

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13. The GiantHaving eaten like a rabbit, I did what every sensible cottontail would have done in my situation. I turned my course due south, aiming to put as much distance between myself and downtown as I possibly could. There was nothing for me in that direction: the city lived by and for money, and money I hadn’t got.

Walking parallel with the eastern shore of the lake, I passed a brewery on my left that covered an entire city block. The aroma of beer brewing was just heavenly. In spite of the fiercest pressure from the rest of the European Union, Germany has stubbornly retained her purity law, dating back to the year 1516, mandating that beer can be brewed from malt, hops, yeast, and water, nothing else. Let others drink the synthetic stuff if they like; the Germans won’t. I’m a great friend of good beer, and I truly respect the Germans for this. Walking so close to the brewery, and so far from a glass of beer, made me feel rather nostalgic.

At the next corner, a large cemetery began, and I started feeling that I was going too far to the east. I veered right toward the lake and headed down a narrow lane running along the wall of the cemetery. Nestled against the wall stood an old red brick building with arched windows, its front yard surrounded by a wall of its own, branching out from the one I’d been following. The upstairs windows of the building could be seen over the garden wall, and somehow they gave the impression of darkness inside. It took a while before I realized that one of them was a blind window: the black paint marking its panes was no blacker than the glass in the real ones.

This was a morgue if I had ever seen one. The ground level windows on the street side had heavy iron bars in them. The back yard was walled in, as well—whatever secrets the building held, they were well guarded.

There was something unusual, however: there were curtains in the windows on this side, and one window, on the upper level, stood open. Through it, I heard voices.

Morticians at work? It sounded more like a kitchen. Looking around, I saw more signs of habitation. In front of the gate to the back yard stood a three-seater VW Beetle. I’d never seen a three-seater Beetle before, and had to take a closer look. The driver’s seat was mounted right against the back seat, so there was no room to sit behind it. The useless space was, instead, taken up by a nondescript pile of junk.

I heard the back door of the house open, and saw somebody look down at me over the gate. There must be a step up to the back yard, I concluded. Then I saw the man’s feet under the gate, and as he opened it up, I found myself facing a giant.

“How can I help you?” he asked in German.The man was not just tall; he was huge. His upper arms were nearly as thick as my thighs.

His hair and beard formed an enormous black mane with many gray streaks; he could have been in his sixties. He wasn’t fat, but he must have weighed close to 350 pounds.

At six foot two, I’m somewhat taller than the average of the population, and I seem to have developed some kind of unconscious expectation that people will be more or less shorter than I. Looking upward to see the face of my new acquaintance, who must have stood nearly seven feet tall, I couldn’t help feeling that I was a child, looking up to an adult. My last memories of physically looking up to people were, undoubtedly, from my childhood: I grew to this height during my mid-teens. The resulting confusion must have shown all over me, and the giant concluded that I hadn’t understood what he had said.

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Repeating his question in English, he soon obtained an answer. I blurted out my predicament, without ever thinking of what risks might have been involved in telling a stranger that I wasn’t marked.

“You’ve come to the right place,” the giant said, took a basket of groceries out of his Volkswagen, and asked me into the house.

The tiny back yard turned out to be a terraced kitchen garden, with manicured vegetable beds covering every square inch between the back gate and the cemetery wall, apart from the narrow path to the back door. Inside, a vaulted hallway cut right through to the front yard; through the open door I could see another garden, larger and brighter, with food plants growing in profusion. A well-worn stairway took us upstairs, where I was greeted by two women, one around twenty, the other in her forties. The women, whom my host introduced as his daughter and granddaughter, were both about as tall as I.

“Did you have any trouble finding us?” the giant asked.He had told me his name was Polder, adding that it was his nickname. Apparently, he never

used his real name. I had it a little hard to switch, however, and once nearly addressed him as “Mr. Giant.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You found me, didn’t you? At least, I didn’t know to look for you.”

A spirited discussion followed about what had brought me there. It turned out that Polder’s home acted as a kind of clearinghouse for unmarked people with nowhere to go, which was why they had assumed that somebody must have sent me to them. When, finally, they were convinced that I had just strayed into their arms, their amazement was great, as was mine. I realized that I’d been extraordinarily lucky to stumble over this place in a city of nearly a million; I had to agree with my hosts that it seemed like a lot more than plain luck.

The doorbell rang, and somebody went down to open. More family members arrived, all at least bilingual, and the conviviality of the household rose to new heights. Our supper, sincerely blessed by Polder, was delicious. The dining table, an ingenious contraption with a lever that could be used to raise it or lower it to serve as a coffee table, was in the living room, the windows of which I had seen while approaching the house. I wondered why the room had seemed so dark from the outside while, in reality, it was rather bright due to the large windows. I decided that the impression must have been due to the high ceiling, and perhaps also to the dark furniture.

Everything in the room was old, without the ostentatiousness of an antique collection. Most objects seemed handmade, frequently with soft, asymmetric shapes. A photographic portrait of a stern-looking thinker, in a broad frame made of natural wood, gazed down at us from the far wall. We ate and drank nothing artificial or addictive: the tea served after dinner was herb tea. I got the impression that this family was well founded in a strong faith.

There was no TV in the house, not even the old flat-screen type. Instead, an ancient AM/FM radio was turned on and tuned in to the BBC evening news. The developments of the day had been dramatic, to say the least. The French president had been shot dead during a heated argument at the National Assembly, where he had gone to explain his refusal to budge to the demand of the right-wing majority that direct EU rule be introduced. The assassin had been the prime minister; such was his popularity that he hadn’t been apprehended for the murder, but had coolly proceeded to lead the Assembly in confirming the transfer of executive power to the European Presidency in Brussels.

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“The third horn plucked up by the roots,” Polder said. “First Italy, then Germany, and now France. The smaller states can keep their puppet governments; they’ll never challenge the Leader. It’s well underway.”

Amid all the knowing nodding and agreement, I was completely lost.“Could somebody please explain?” I asked. “What’s all this about horns plucked up by the

roots? And what is it that’s well underway?”Polder’s son-in-law, a clergyman, volunteered to enlighten me.“You probably know that these times we’re living in have been predicted in the Bible,” he

said.I confirmed that I knew about some prophesies in the Book of Revelation that seemed to be

quite accurate.“The three horns that were to be plucked up are mentioned in the book of Daniel in the Old

Testament,” the minister continued. “Daniel 7 describes how the ten core states of Europe are to revive the ancient Roman Empire and its quest for world domination. Like earlier world governments, the EU is described as a beast, but with ten horns, representing ten kings, that is, heads of government. Our Leader, the president of the European Union, is easy to recognize as the first beast in the Book of Revelation. But he’s also the little horn in Daniel that arises after the ten, and before whom three of the earlier horns, or heads of government, are plucked up by the roots. M. Dupont was the third one to go, so the Leader is now officially premier of Italy, president of France, and federal chancellor of Germany. The other seven core states have nominal prime ministers, but the Leader always participates in important sessions of their governments via videoconferencing, and makes all the decisions.”

A couple of years earlier, the Leader had challenged the Italian premier to a sword duel over some insult, a clever publicity stunt in many people’s opinion. The duel had been televised, and it had ended with signor Altamura, the premier, dead, and the Leader critically injured. Before being taken to hospital, the Leader had managed to claim the Italian premiership in front of the cameras, and who was going to oppose him? The following year, while the German chancellor, Herr Kempten, had been on a visit to Brussels, terrorists, using a vacant apartment, had fired a missile at his car, as it had turned a street corner. The antitank warhead had made mincemeat of his bulletproof Mercedes, and the carnage had been great. Minutes later, EU secret police had hung three people they had said were the terrorists in the street, without any process of law. It was widely believed that the attack had been staged by the Leader, as Herr Kempten had been opposed to the transfer of executive power to the European Presidency, just like signor Altamura and M. Dupont.

“Thanks for explaining,” I said. “I keep learning more about these Bible prophesies wherever I go. Is it the Leader’s reign then that’s well underway?”

“Yes,” the minister answered. “We know from the book of Daniel that he’ll hold sway for seven years. The last three and a half years of his reign will be a period of severe terror. The Leader has been in office for three years now, so there should be four left.”

A couple of Bibles were produced—one of them, mercifully, in English—and I was given a quick lesson in history written before the fact. I learned that not just Revelation and Daniel, but Ezekiel, a number of other prophets, the Gospels, and several of the Epistles contain bits and pieces of prophesy that together describe the present world events with amazing accuracy. I was a little envious of my hosts for knowing it all in advance, and decided to make better use of this incredible source of knowledge in the future.

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During the evening, a steady stream of people came and left again, all greeted like friends, but not entertained as guests. After the usual chatter, they were taken into a small room off the kitchen, from where I could hear the sounds of an old-fashioned personal computer. I asked Polder what was going on in there—it seemed that all these people were somehow his customers.

“We run a trade club,” he said. “The computer keeps an account for each member. It’s a form of barter, but when a few hundred people get together like this in a club, it works out more like an alternative currency. Trade clubs provide the payment system for us who aren’t marked.”

I told Polder about my driver of the same morning, and how he made his living with the help of barter.

“The difference between his simple form of barter and a trade club is that he has to trade one-on-one,” Polder explained. “He has to find someone who needs what he can offer and has what he needs, and the value of what’s exchanged must be comparable, so neither party loses out. It works, but it’s clumsy. We run a LETSystem, short for Local Exchange Trading System; a form of trade club, which records the value of goods you’ve sold and services you’ve rendered to other members, as a commitment, measured in LETS units, from the local community to you. When you procure goods or services provided by others, you make a commitment to the community. In fact, it’s just like money, with two very important differences: you can get started buying without having anything to pay with, and the system is isolated from the mainstream economy, so outsiders can’t exploit its members through speculation.”

“You really run a bank then, don’t you?” I concluded, but Polder corrected me.“Not quite. We only run the accounting for the payment system. Our members may have

credit or debit balances, but the LETSystem neither pays nor charges interest. A small commission on each payment covers our costs. Furthermore, we issue no negotiable checks. Because of all this, and since we don’t offer euro accounts, we don’t qualify as a bank, and we need no permits to operate. Another nice thing is that there’s no government supervision like banks have.”

Polder took me to watch the operation of the LETSystem in the small office room. One of his grandchildren was keying data into the computer from good old-fashioned credit card slips. A club member arrived with a couple of vouchers, and had his account credited. Then the old inkjet printer produced a statement for him, and he left, visibly contented with having his finances under control. It all looked so professional, although on a small scale.

“Where do the credit card slips come from?” I asked my host. “I’ve tried to buy things with both travelers checks and credit cards, and I understood that neither are accepted anymore.”

“These slips come from small stores whose owners are members,” Polder answered. “The only cards they accept are LETSystem cards. Their official trade is in euros, but they also deal in LETS units, so our members can both sell to them and buy local goods and produce from them. Most of these store owners aren’t marked themselves. It’s a very curious situation when the store can deal in euros and has a bank account, but the owner pays him or herself in LETS units.

“In fact, we’d better fix you up right away; you have to get on with your life,” he continued.Polder pulled out a plastic card and a book of vouchers, looking just like checks, but without

the word “Check” on them, and his granddaughter opened an account for me. So far, so good, but I had to point out to them that my balance was still zero.

“I forgot to tell you that you have a job,” Polder replied. “A guy who runs a market garden was here a while ago and asked if we knew anyone who could help him out for the rest of the summer.

“I accepted on your behalf while you were busy with your Bible study,” he laughed. “It isn’t far away, just a few kilometers south of here. We have a bicycle you can use, and you can stay

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with us, if you like. You start tomorrow morning. You’ll be paid in LETS units, of course. Since you won’t be drawing a salary paid in euros, officially you’ll be a volunteer, and you won’t have to worry about a work permit.”

I felt grateful beyond words. Only then did I realize that I had been so much at ease in this house that I hadn’t given a thought to where I’d be sleeping that night, or what I was going to do with myself, come morning. Earlier that day, I had assumed I was going to be a tramp. Instead, I’d be living a perfectly ordered life, with a home, a job, and an income, thanks to Polder, his family, and his trade club.

Somewhat later, I was installed in a downstairs bedroom, with windows to the lane. The strong iron bars seemed to provide protection against the turmoil of the world, and I felt wonderfully secure. For a long time, I listened to the nightingale singing in the mellow summer night, and, finally, I drifted off into restful sleep.

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14. The RaidThe next morning, as I was getting ready to leave for work, the doorbell rang angrily, and there was some loud banging on the door for good measure. Outside were three uniformed policemen with a search warrant, and over Polder’s loud protests, they entered and went upstairs, heading directly for the office of the trade club. It looked rather comical with Polder towering over them—I got the impression that he could easily have picked them up and disposed of them, had he wanted to. But he was very careful not to obstruct what they were doing. My pleasant sense of security from the night before was badly shaken, as I watched the policemen disconnect the computer, collect backup media and printouts from the desk, and carry it all downstairs to their waiting van.

“This is terrible!” I exclaimed. “Now they know who the club members are, and they’ll all get in trouble. How could they have found out about you?”

“We knew to expect this,” Polder answered. “We don’t keep anybody’s name or address here, either in the computer or on paper. We only have numbered accounts. We don’t allow the club to grow any larger than that we can still recognize all our members. We conduct no business over the telephone or by mail. That’s why all the members come here. The only exceptions are that we have a young man on a motorbike pick up vouchers and credit card slips from our merchant members, and we do some clearing via encrypted messages over the Internet. Besides, what we’re doing isn’t illegal—not yet. These policemen do it just to harass us.”

“But what about the backups they took?” I asked. “Don’t they have some important data on them? And what happens when they start up the computer and go into your programs—they’ll see everything you’ve been doing!”

“These guys are just the local constables and not very smart,” Polder reassured me. “The trade club system has password protection, which they’re not likely to be able to break. The data on the hard disk are encrypted; it’ll tell them nothing. Even if they got into the system, all they’d find is a bunch of numbers. We’ve changed the original program and taken out every heading and help text that could give a clue as to what it’s used for. This makes the application very difficult to operate, but I have bright grandchildren.

“The backup media we leave on the desk have only computer games and harmless graphics on them. The printouts they took have random numbers arranged in tidy columns without headings. It’ll keep them busy for a couple of weeks, and then we’ll get a letter saying that we can come and pick up our computer. They’ve done this before, so we’re used to it.”

My gigantic host was taking on new proportions in my perception of him. He was anything but naïve; he had known to protect his clients. For official purposes, he was simply a retiree with a family and many friends; his pension was paid into his bank account, and covered the rent, the telephone, and the utilities. Not being marked wasn’t punishable as such, although it was likely to turn the crowds against you. We expected that it would soon be illegal not to salute the Leader when he appeared on TV, but if you had no TV and never went into the shopping malls where the public entertainment centers were located, you were pretty safe.

I could see a practical problem, however.“What are you going to do without a computer for such a long time?” I asked. “The trade

club won’t be able to function, and nobody will have any money, isn’t that right?”“Come along, and I’ll show you one of the advantages of living in a morgue,” Polder

answered.

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We went downstairs into the utility room across from my bedroom. By the wall stood an antique dresser, a massive mahogany piece with an inscription carved out in old Gothic script, to the effect that a well-stocked and well-ordered linen closet was every woman’s rightful pride. Well-stocked it was, to be sure: as we pulled it out of its place, I thought I was trying to lift a ton of bricks. Polder’s end moved without any trouble, however, and soon we had exposed an opening in the wall, about six feet long and two feet high.

From inside the aperture, Polder took out a big iron crank, which he inserted into a hole in the wall.

“This is the old corpse elevator,” he explained, as he started cranking down a platform that had been resting just above the top of the opening. “The upper access has been closed long ago, but the lower one comes in handy at times.”

On the platform stood a complete, rather old-fashioned personal computer, very similar to the one that had just been impounded. We took it upstairs and I set it up, and from a well-concealed safe Polder’s grandson took a data stick.

“Here’s the backup data from last night,” he said. “We’ll be up and running in no time.”My relief was great. We had won a victory, however modest, over the forces of repression.

Looking out of the office windows, I understood why it was here, not downstairs, where club members would have had it so much easier to enter. The office had an unhindered view over the lane and the back yard. In the case of a raid, there’d be several minutes to put things away. But I couldn’t help thinking of how fragile our security was. What if the Bundeskriminalamt came? They, the Federal Criminal Police, weren’t to be fooled as easily as the local junior constables.

“Remember the gentleman who came while I showed you the computer last night?” Polder asked. “He’s our neighbor, the Lord Mayor of Hanover. He’s one of us. He lets his boys play around with our computer, but he doesn’t allow them to call in the BKA or any other outside help. He makes sure they have their priorities right. For now, we don’t have to worry. We’ll deal with the next obstacle when we encounter it. And it’s about time you went to work!”

Gardening turned out to be an immensely rewarding profession. I acted as both gardener’s apprentice and handyman, and had the privilege of helping Hans, the gardener, and his family turn out harvest after harvest of beautiful, organic vegetables. Much was sold directly to customers who came to the garden, and the rest was delivered to stores and markets around southern Hanover. I did some of the driving and learned my way around town, while my German improved tremendously. Hans didn’t speak English with me, so I had to adapt to him. For a beginning, it was hard, and then I reached some kind of a breaking point and made great strides every day.

I also got further insights into the workings of the trade club system. Since Hans’s market garden was a business, he was free to use its money without being marked: he paid by check or bank transfer on behalf of his business where, as an individual, he’d have had to present a tattooed identifier to a laser reader. Since he traded in both euros and LETS units, he acted as one of a number of clearing points for the members of the trade club. If a member needed something that couldn’t be had in a store accepting his or her trade club card, she or he would ask somebody like Hans to obtain it with euros and would then pay the agent, typically Hans, in LETS units. This helped Hans balance his cash flow: frequently, his business would have more euros than he wanted, and he’d be very willing to trade some for LETS units.

I asked Hans if this kind of interlinking with the mainstream economy wasn’t a form of exposure to precisely those influences the LETSystem members had wanted to isolate themselves from: inflation, speculation, and price competition from industrial goods and commodity markets.

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But Hans said that in his experience, this could be handled. First, most of the members weren’t marked, so their only widely usable payment method was the LETSystem. They were also quite prepared to pay higher prices for locally made goods and local services. Second, the only people who could exchange LETS units for euros and vice versa were local businesses like Hans’s garden and a small number of merchants. These agents would only carry out such transactions on behalf of members, and only regarding payment for goods that couldn’t be produced locally. If an outsider came and wanted to speculate in LETS units, they’d be turned down. Finally, should one of these enterprisers turn around and disregard those rules, they’d be instantly excluded from the club.

We were beating the system, and we were using its own method, computer payment. What intrigued me most was that all these thousands upon thousands of unmarked people were continuing their lives much as before, although they were unable to go shopping in large supermarkets and department stores. Most of them were to some degree self-sufficient: no one with a yard of any size grew grass, apart from those who kept sheep and goats. Vegetable gardens filled every nook and cranny of their land. Even the banks of the numerous railway lines were being utilized as vegetable gardens for the railroad employees. Surprisingly many of the unmarked stayed on in paid jobs although they were no longer able to spend their euros freely. I did some asking about this and discovered that some were paying off their debts at accelerated rates, while others who didn’t owe any money were paying off other unmarked people’s debts. Since their rent and other bills were paid by standing order or bank transfer directly out of their bank accounts, the abolition of personal checks didn’t really matter.

The hardest hit were those who lived in apartments without any land of their own. The few communal gardens the city provided were utilized to capacity. In fact, not many unmarked people were in this situation. There had been a mass migration to suburbia, and even further out, during several years before the identifier was introduced. Those who remained in apartments were all more or less being helped out by others and were leaving the cities as fast as they could.

Hans knew a lot about urban agriculture and told me things I found very encouraging. Being done on a small scale and close to the markets, it had remained labor-intensive all over the world and gave employment to nearly 200 million people. Another billion people in cities were somehow involved in it, mostly by way of growing their own food in their own back yards. Abandoned high-rise buildings were being turned into vertical farms in big cities everywhere. In Chinese cities, urban dwellers had traditionally grown 85 percent of their vegetables themselves; in Singapore, 80 percent of the poultry consumed was raised locally, on a small scale. All this had escaped the onslaught of the multinationals. Urban agriculture was doing fine all over the world, and city market gardens like Hans’s business provided not only fresh food, but also lots of jobs.

Just like the banks of German train tracks, similar vacant land was in productive use elsewhere. In Rio de Janeiro, the power company allowed farmers to use the land under the power lines, itself assuming the task of keeping squatters at bay. Elsewhere, farmers cooperated with racetrack owners, cleaning up and using the horse manure, and were allowed to farm the edges of the racecourse, where they had the benefit of a chain link fence protecting their produce from theft. Others grew duckweed for fish and chickens on municipal sewage ponds, benefiting from nutritional qualities in the duckweed similar to those of soybeans. On a larger scale, the sewage of Mexico City was being pumped hundreds of miles out into the countryside, where it was used to grow forage crops for beef, as well as for smaller animals back in the city.

There was a weakness in the basic approach of the official-commercial system that had set out to turn every human being into a consumer, dependent on credit and money. It worked on such a high level, relying on mass media, computer control, and statistics, that it just missed out on what

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a lot of people kept on doing for themselves. In Latin America, urban gardens and farming lots were often hidden behind brick or stone walls, invisible to the street. This helped protect them from thieves, and, apparently, also from being noticed by the enemies of self-sufficiency. Angrily, the latter kept denouncing the “gray” economy, from which they got no profits or interest, but, praise God, so far they’d been unable to do anything about it.

It struck me that the life we led was, in fact, much more desirable than that of the marked people. We had everything we needed and we were able to obtain anything they could buy, if we wanted it. But our food was mostly homegrown, and always organic, while the supply to supermarkets of food products free of chemicals and genetic engineering had almost ceased. We also led a nearly stress-free life, spending so much of our time in nature; the rat race was just an ugly memory. The few times I had to go downtown I was appalled by the tenseness in evidence everywhere.

Still, the decision to refuse the identifier hadn’t been an easy one. It had been a step into the unknown—on my part, I’d been convinced I’d be living like a beggar. It had been much the same for everyone I asked, as the movement that was now so strong had, by necessity, started out from nothing. It seemed that our trust was being rewarded, and I was particularly touched by an elderly lady who assured me she’d never had it so good, and quoted the Bible, saying, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

My peaceful life during that summer was in sharp contrast to what many others had to go through. With the opening of the monsoon season, floods displaced millions of people in northern India and Bangladesh. In the resulting chaos, the habitual border clashes over the Line of Control between India and Pakistan flared up and became a regular war. Pakistan drew on her pact with China, and the Chinese came driving down their new highway, threatening northeastern India. India dropped one of her nuclear bombs on a strategic pass along the road to halt the advance. China, eager to divert the attention of her people from her food crisis, mounted a major armored advance through Indochina and Burma, destroying everything in its way, and soon the Chinese troops were in India proper. India invoked her pact with Russia, which attacked China from the north. By this time, the fighting was indiscriminate, all four powers began nuclear bombings, and on the densely populated battlegrounds, civilians were mowed down like grass.

When it was all over, a full third of Earth’s population had perished. The number of troops, mostly armored, that had taken part in the fighting, had been an unbelievable 200 million. Only a few million soldiers remained in the end, when the war petered out due to the near-total destruction of the participating countries.

The world was stunned. This had been a regional conflict lasting just a few weeks, but still, the devastation was worse by orders of magnitude than during either of the World Wars. And if anybody had been cynical enough to think that the food crisis would have been eased at all by the loss of so many people, they were wrong. Much of the world’s food producing capacity had been destroyed, too, and as the soot from the burned cities rose into the stratosphere, nuclear winter would be spreading fast, first over the northern hemisphere, then further south; open-air agriculture would be severely hampered for years to come.

Nevertheless, there was no change in the consumerist lifestyle of the rest of humanity. With the radioactive fallout, outdoor life became even less practical than before, and the more time you spent indoors, the more you consumed. There seemed to be a sense of abandon: let’s eat and drink; tomorrow we may be dead. Where there should have been incessant fund-raising campaigns for aid and reconstruction in Russia and Asia, it seemed that Western people couldn’t be bothered anymore.

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The closest Western media came to expressing concern was a widespread fear that the Internet would crash as it lost nearly half of its servers and communication links in rapid succession. But the Net worked as it had been designed to work: it automatically set up alternate routes and kept the rest of the world connected.

With many cities leveled and uninhabitable due to radiation, and few people surviving, the countries that had been destroyed were, in effect, reverting to subsistence farming. As James Frost had explained, with no cities and no communications, those people couldn’t be effectively exploited, so they didn’t interest investors. Not even the Russian mafia cared for Russia anymore; its operations turned up all over Europe instead, causing great consternation. In my book, the remaining Russians were now free, and so were the survivors in China, Tibet, India, and Pakistan.

I called Laura as often as I could to find out how she was doing, and she reported that the radioactivity was lower in Australia than in the northern hemisphere. She was taking every precaution, and expected that by the coming spring, she’d be able to grow her own vegetables like before.

At Hans’s garden, we were largely spared radioactive fallout: we had no rain during the weeks when the radiation was at its peak. We were also well north of the worst belt of fallout material. It seemed that most of the people we knew were able to continue feeding themselves as they had become accustomed to do. We stocked up on iodine tablets, and there was a little-known Hungarian oat bran preparation that we took in the hope that it would help remove radioactive strontium from our bodies. In the end, there was a great deal of fatalism, too, and after all, we had to keep on eating.

One Saturday in October, Polder sent his son-in-law, the minister, and me, to fetch a load of produce and meat from his relatives near Greifswald in the East. We took Stephan’s, the minister’s, hatchback, filled it up with hardware and other necessities that the relatives had requested, and set off for the farm.

The Opel was a lot newer than Polder’s VW, and moved silently through the city, its electric motors taking their energy from the flywheel. I got no end of fun out of switching the car’s audio alert system between different languages and voices: it would talk French with a deep, sexy female voice, then German like an SS major, and I could make it say something absolutely incomprehensible in Turkish, sounding like a choir boy with a cold in his nose. Stephan got exasperated with me and said that it was terrible to have a schizophrenic car—once you got used to a certain voice you more or less connected it to a kind of personality you imagined the car to have, and he wasn’t recognizing his wagon any longer.

Restored to its normal self, the Opel announced that we were coming to the Autobahn, and asked for permission to authorize the payment of the toll. Stephan queried how much it would cost to Greifswald. “16 euros,” the car answered, which Stephan thought reasonable.

Now Stephan switched on the gas turbine and steered the wagon into one of the four inner, fast lanes. He told the car when we wanted to be in Greifswald, and sat back. The car picked the 150 km/h lane and took over the driving. There was nothing more for Stephan to do until we got to where we were going.

This car did just about anything you told it to do, apart from scratching your back. Stephan asked it to give us a commentary on the sights along the Autobahn, which it duly delivered. He had given it a standing menu of news topics he wanted it to monitor, and every now and then it provided us with a quick rundown of the latest news from the international wire services and a number of radio stations, without bothering us with things that didn’t interest us. Getting a list of the next ten

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departures from Berlin’s Schönefeld airport was no trouble at all, and, just to try something difficult, I requested a roll of the ships in the harbor of Melbourne. It took no more than five seconds before the car started listing them, and I had to cut it short, as I really didn’t want to know. Conveniently, this didn’t necessitate any form of shouting match: I just made sure to look bored, and the considerate car computer immediately checked if I wanted it to continue.

This car, like all modern ones, always was in communication with the mobile Internet. The network provided both a high-speed data link to local traffic computers and a location service, complemented by the car’s Galileo satellite positioning unit. Thus the car at all times knew its exact location down to a precision of 30 feet or less. This system was intended to complement the car’s navigation unit and keep track of everything concerning traffic, such as speed limits, roadwork, and deviations. In the case of a crash, the car would call the emergency services itself, getting help much faster than survivors and bystanders could.

Few people worried about the fact that the traffic computers also kept track of the location of every car. The location information, freely shared with vehicle owners and operators who were willing to pay for it, was very useful for trucking companies, also giving them exact data on the status of vehicle and shipment. If the engine started acting up, or the cargo was in danger of spoiling, they could take immediate action by sending the driver to a depot or routing a repair vehicle to intercept the truck. Car drivers could elect to have their emergency road service providers perform that kind of monitoring, as well.

Hence, the whereabouts of every vehicle on the road were always known to the authorities, and not only could you be followed and found, but your route remained on record for a few months, for the case that you were later apprehended for some crime. The official message was that such information wasn’t perused, except when a car had been stolen: finding a stolen car normally took the police just a few minutes. Found or not, newer model cars could be immobilized at any time via a mobile phone message sent by its owner. The police, of course, also could immobilize a pursued car: they had their own passcodes to override the access control systems of car computers.

Less known was the fact that every modern car, thanks to the combination of a main computer connected to all its cameras, sensors, and Electronic Control Units with an always-on mobile data link, could be remotely driven and—should it come to that—crashed by the police, the secret services, or their private contractors from anywhere in the world. If this feature was used, the driver had no more control over the car than a passenger. Not surprisingly, the prices of old, computerless cars with refurbished, powerful engines were high and still rising.

If you used a phone navigation service to find your way on foot or by public transport, your route remained on record just as if you had been driving. In the name of the war on terrorism, the EU had eagerly followed the lead of the US and outlawed printed road and street maps and atlases, so as to force as many people as possible to leave electronic traces of themselves. Stiff fines for publishing driving directions as anything other than latitude and longitude, to be interpreted by GPS or Galileo-based navigators, were part of the legislation. Mobile telephones and smartphones, whether equipped with GPS or Galileo chips or not, could always be located by the mobile telephone networks down to a few tens of yards in cities, and a few hundreds of yards in the countryside. Mining the computers of the phone operators for the movements of individuals carrying cell phones or for cars equipped with Internet links was thus, in principle, possible. However, because of the cost of storing these data, the operators had won concessions that made such searches difficult and often fruitless for the police—hence the importance of promoting the use of on-line navigation services.

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Surveillance wasn’t one of our worries, however, and presently the car alerted its driver to the fact that we’d soon be leaving the Autobahn. On the exit to Greifswald, the guidance system ended and Stephan was again in charge. Still, he asked the Opel to help with navigating, as it was some time since he’d been in those parts. The car obliged, showing us the street map and our progress on its computer screen, and reading out the names of the streets as we crossed them, along with clear instructions as to when and which way to turn.

At one time Stephan didn’t notice a car breaking in front of us. But the Opel, equipped with both radar and infrared sensors, did, and overrode Stephan by instantly slowing down. Stephan, who had been distracted by some landmark along the street, thanked it profusely, to which the Opel responded with a modest, “That’s nothing.”

To me, Stephan admitted that when alone in the car, he would hold long conversations with it.

“I spend time driving between my congregations, and I find it fantastic to have a talking and listening car that can do everything my computer at home can do. The car can retrieve any knowledge humanity has over the Internet, and, in particular, there are several sites that have interactive Bible search programs available to the public. With my hands free for driving, I can ask the car to pursue a subject or a concept right through the Bible, to give me different translations and use different concordances from the various sites, and, in the end, to print out the chain of thought and the references I’ve selected. So I no longer sit at a desk preparing my talks; I arrive at the church with a slip of paper and a fresh new sermon in my head.”

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15. Organic FarmingWe now were truly in the countryside, and, having passed through a village, we arrived at a large, thriving farm. It had hundreds of acres of land, well interspersed with forests and hedges that had protected the topsoil. There were herds of cattle as well as pigs, fowl, sheep, horses, vegetable gardens, and an orchard with fruit trees and berry bushes. The farmer’s wife, Frau Schmidt, looking healthy and happy, greeted us and announced to all and sundry that dinner was ready. Many German families customarily eat the main meal of the day at noon and have only a modest supper after work has ended.

The story of the family and the farm was long and fascinating. They had been on the land at least since the eighteenth century. After the Second World War, East Germany was occupied by Soviet troops and became the German Democratic Republic. The Schmidts, as landowners, automatically had been classed as enemies of the people, and had been forced to bear many indignities, including accepting more laborers than they had been able to use or feed, frequently people with an attitude of class hatred. Some fifteen years after the war, old Herr Schmidt had died, and the state had turned the farm into a collective. The current farmer vividly retold the family legends about the anguish of the heirs of old Herr Schmidt, when they had found themselves mere state employees on what should have been their own land.

The reunification had given them their land back, but it had also caused the collapse of the market for East German farmers, and had left the Schmidts with debts that had taken a long time to pay off. As with so many others in the alternative movement, our hosts said that they now had it better than at any earlier time in their lives: they had a faithful clientele and a protected market. The currency of the unmarked, the LETS unit, wasn’t freely convertible, and prices could reflect true costs without being forced down by commodity prices on the world market. On the other hand, Herr Schmidt chuckled, there were many other farmers supplying the trade club market, and the competition was keeping him quite honest.

The apartments left over from the days of the collective farm had been repaired to serve as homes for their workers. Since the Schmidts now used no chemicals and hardly any motorized farm equipment, they were again able to employ many laborers. The latter were paid in kind and in LETS units; what income the farm received in euros, had to be used to pay taxes and fees for the mandatory health and pension schemes. Since all the laborers and their families were mark dodgers, the arrangement suited them perfectly.

I asked Herr Schmidt if they hadn’t sort of reverted to a system similar to Communism now that they had set up this close-knit community where their laborers were treated more like family than like employees. But he didn’t agree at all.

“Our community reflects our Christian faith. Although the two systems seem to have similar objectives, Communism is but a bad imitation of the Christian economic ideal. Christian communities are based on love and giving, while Communism is based on envy and taking. A member of a Christian community thinks in terms of contributions; a Communist thinks in terms of entitlements. That’s why Christian communities work, and Communism doesn’t.”

The Schmidts’ main worry was a certain group of environmentalists with its campaign to close down traditional farms, which the activists considered polluters of the environment. With commercial food production more and more in the hands of big business, modern farming methods relied heavily on greenhouses, hydroponic growing, robotics, automated recycling of all runoffs, and genetically engineered food plants. During the Great Drought, the water shortage had forced

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agribusiness, and rising food prices had allowed it, to develop closed processes that minimized pollution through runoffs. Organic farmers didn’t pollute either and their soil erosion was minimized through conservation tillage, but the environmentalists, recipients of large grants from agribusiness, had adopted a policy demanding the abolition of traditional farming altogether so as to restore the lands of old-fashioned farmers to nature and halt the inevitable runoffs from their livestock.

The attitude of the local authority wasn’t entirely positive, either. Farms like this one, together with their customers, formed a separate economy that didn’t contribute to the turnover and profits of business. Local politicians, many of which had a stake in that turnover, tended to make life as difficult as they could for the self-sufficient. Official harassment included frequent health inspections and tax audits, and lots of red tape concerning the legal benefits of the employees. The unions had been engaged in the campaign as well, and regularly tried to get payment of wages in anything other than euros outlawed.

Herr Schmidt invited Stephan and me for a tour of the farm on horseback. I was impressed by the dedication of everyone working there, by the cleanliness of the barns and the milking process, and by the care and attention to detail that showed all over the place. Buildings and fences were in good repair, the animals were healthy, the land was well cared for and free of weeds, and the forests were well kept and productive. The recent fallout had caused little damage, and the radioactivity was back within safe limits.

I didn’t think those environmentalists could ever have seen a farm like this, or they wouldn’t have been trying to close it down. To help Herr Schmidt counter their attacks, I told him of some research I knew about: organic farms typically use 60 percent less energy and emit 40 to 60 percent less carbon dioxide than conventional ones. They also provide sanctuaries for many endangered species, and their emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are lower. Since they don’t use chemical fertilizers, organic farms help protect the groundwater. They add no phosphorus to the environment, and thus they don’t contribute to the eutrophication of the waterways.

We unloaded the hatchback and filled it up again with sacks of wheat, potatoes, turnips, onions, and other produce that Polder couldn’t grow in his small garden, as well as meat and sausage from the Schmidts’ recent slaughter. On top of everything Polder had ordered, Frau Schmidt gave us eggs, butter, cheese, a couple of chickens, and a four-liter container of fresh milk. This was old-fashioned bartering one-on-one, plus some true generosity for good measure.

During our trip back to Hanover, I decided to send a letter to Matti, the youngest son of the Anttolas, my hosts in Suomenniemi in Finland. He was the only one in that family with an interest in computers and an Internet account. I switched the car’s language to English and dictated a report of my discussion with Janne on the ship to Stockholm, and the follow-up study of Bible prophesies in Hanover. Stephan helped me get it all straight and inserted chapter and verse where needed, and added a personal greeting to the parson of the Anttolas’ congregation. The Opel corrected the grammar and read it all back for our approval. Last, I asked the car to translate the letter to Finnish and send it off to Matti’s electronic mail account.

Back in Hanover, just like at the farm, the outdoor growing season had ended, and Hans no longer needed my help. I also thought I had stayed long enough in Germany, and so I began a round of parting visits to all the friends I had made. My trade club account showed a nice balance, and I had been assured that it would be usable wherever in the world I encountered trade clubs. With the introduction of the mandatory new payment system, the different LETSystems all over the world had begun inter-club and international clearing over the Internet in order to facilitate travel by their

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members and payments for trade between communities of mark dodgers. In fact, the LETS unit was an international currency, independent of the official ones. (The existing Internet payment schemes, while popular and efficient, had yielded to government anti-terrorism pressure and now demanded user identification by means of the Mark.) Polder gave me a list of trade clubs: I’d always have an introduction to friends, wherever I went.

And so, one Friday morning in late October, I was back at the Mellendorf truck stop north of Hanover, heading south. I soon got a lift, and was on my way to Frankfurt. I arrived and got a ride downtown without any sign of problems.

Here was another city of glass and steel, the financial center of Europe. Ill at ease in cities by now, I was, nevertheless, much better prepared than when I had come to Hanover. I had provisions in my backpack and a trade club card in my pocket. And I had a friend waiting for me. At the end of the day, when I had seen all the sights I wanted to see, Dieter Braun picked me up in his Porsche and took me out to dinner.

Dieter was profoundly interested in my experiences and gave me credit for finding out the hard way.

“I never thought much of taking the mark, but there again, I had no idea that it’s written up in the Bible. In principle, I’ve half condemned myself to hell, I suppose—I’m marked, but nobody’s been asked to do any worshipping of the Leader or his image yet. You said that those who do both those things are in trouble, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s impossible to tell from the texts,” I replied. “First it reads that you’ll be condemned if you both receive the mark and worship the beast or his image, but I looked at that passage again with Stephan, and another verse down, it says ‘there’s no rest day or night for those who worship the beast or his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name.’ But Stephan said that, personally, he’d give a pretty good chance to those who have been marked, but back off and change their lifestyle when the worshipping part is introduced. After all, for most people the mark came as a surprise, and it’s only afterwards that the alternative ways have got some serious publicity.”

“Well, it’s worth my while to give it a go, then,” Dieter said. “Tomorrow I’ll show you a place somewhat like those you’ve seen, but using a different approach again.”

Dieter lived with his parents, who very kindly put me up for the night, and in the morning we all drove off toward Fulda to visit Dieter’s elder brother. We arrived in a small town, and continued a mile or so on the other side. Here we encountered a well-kept institution with fields, animals, farm buildings, workshops, dormitories, a school, and a large community building. The architecture strongly reminded me of some of the handmade ornaments in Polder’s house, and when we entered the community building, I found, prominently displayed, the same picture that I had seen on Polder’s wall. The institution was a home for the mentally handicapped, and it was run according to the educational principles laid down early in the twentieth century by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the man in the portrait.

The coworker who welcomed us—patients were called villagers and staff coworkers—explained some of those principles, which included respect for the patient as a human being, a holistic approach, education even for the most severely handicapped, an emphasis on artistic expression, and a productive task for everyone, so as to assure their sense of self-worth. Their kind of institution would receive patients from public centers for the retarded who had been kept sedated and in shackles for years, and would, almost without exception, turn them into happy, productive people who needed no drugs or coercion.

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The Camphill movement, as this group of communities called itself, existed in many countries and shared the same approach, while, otherwise, the communities were entirely independent. The combination of farming and crafts as industries for villagers and coworkers alike was common, although many communities did more of one or the other, depending on their facilities. The architecture was part of their legacy from Dr. Steiner: he had avoided squareness and right angles in the buildings and objects he had designed.

The community was partially self-sufficient: its members grew most of their own food, and made many of the things they needed themselves. Much of what they produced was sold to help meet costs. They also had a charity supporting them, and the villagers’ pensions were paid to the community. Everybody shared a common household and none of them was marked: the community did all the buying and selling for them. Coworkers were paid mostly in kind.

Dieter’s brother Johannes had Down’s syndrome. Johannes was short and had a round face and slanting eyes. His handshake was weak; he didn’t have a lot of physical strength. He had a slight speech impairment. But he was a happy, positive person with a shrewd sense of humor. As people came and went—it was Saturday, and many visitors passed through the community building—I noticed an uncanny gift in Johannes: he saw right through every person’s façade to their true personality. He perceived humans, not roles; he was entirely unaware of the significance of titles, dress, mannerisms, and position in society. Cats and horses, and some dogs, have the same gift, but I had never seen a person with it. There again, I had never met anybody with Down’s syndrome: there were hardly any around.

Had the system had its way, Johannes wouldn’t have been born, either. But his mother, Frau Braun, when informed of the condition of the fetus, had refused to have him aborted. She had wanted a child for a long time, and she wasn’t going to give him up. The city had taken away her entitlement to child allowance for the baby, but she hadn’t budged. She had given birth to Johannes, and had raised him with much sacrifice: Down babies require a lot of care, and they cry a lot. When Dieter had come along, she had had two babies to care for, and her task had got no easier.

Johannes had lived at home all the way through school. His parents had found a Waldorf school—part of the same movement as the community where Johannes was now—that had accepted him and given him expert care. After finishing school, Johannes had needed a job in a sheltered environment, and the Camphill community had been the natural place for him. He was now around forty, old as Down people go, but in perfect health and still working.

“I’m the mailman around here,” Johannes told me. “Everybody gets their mail delivered by me. I also weave: I made that rug over there on the wall!”

It was a beautiful rug. The woof was wool, dark green with a mottled look that made it intriguing. It would have fetched a thousand euros in a craft shop. The Brauns had a similar one, which I had already admired, in their home. All the materials for the rugs had been produced by the community, including the linen warp and the vegetable dyes.

“I have an offer for a job there as a coworker,” Dieter told me during our trip back. “Not that I expect to be forced to any kind of Leader-worship, as we don’t have a 3-D television, but dictatorships have a way of making you take a stand. They don’t allow anybody to take the middle road. You either go all the way with the crowd, or pull back and refuse. And the latter act gets noticed. So I think I’ll take the community up on its offer soon.”

“Is it that bad?” I asked. “Germany is still a democracy, isn’t she?”“Germany is a democracy alright,” Dieter said. “It’s Europe that’s turning into a

dictatorship. And next thing, it’ll be the whole world. No national government can stop the

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Leader’s personal influence, because he talks to everybody right in their homes and where they shop. Once you have a power-hungry leader inciting crowds to fanaticism, you have a dictatorship that can ignore national laws at will. What the people demand, they’ll get; any national and local authorities trying to get in the way will simply be sticking their necks out.

“I have no doubt about where the EU is headed. Not long ago I was cleaning out the attic and came across some old magazines left there from my great-grandfather’s time. He was no Nazi, but he kept everything that had any interest, and these magazines sure gave me something to think about.

“It was a rather complete collection of Signal, a high-quality Nazi-German propaganda magazine for foreign sympathizers, printed during the second world war, when Germany controlled just about all of the current European Union. My ancestor must have been stationed abroad or had them sent to him, because Signal wasn’t available in Germany. I spent some time reading an article on European unity. All these nations were working for the same noble goals, looking forward to the same rosy future, and just loving their profitable association with Germany and each other. Clipped to the page was an EEC information leaflet from the 1970s using, word for word, the same text, without the by then irrelevant passages on the war and the hegemony of Germany. So little had changed in those thirty years that they hadn’t bothered to rewrite the propaganda.

“The Europe we have today is that same dream come true. It took only five years from the end of World War II and the demise of the military attempt at creating a single European market, until undaunted German, French, and Italian politicians, on behalf of big business in their countries, began setting up the forerunner of the current EU. As we know, a large market allows the rich to get richer a lot faster than many small ones.”

“How soon will the Leader’s influence spread abroad to places like Australia?” I asked. I’d have to get back in time to get hold of Laura and organize something for us before Australia fell under the influence of the Leader.

Dieter was up-to-date with the latest international developments that I had missed during my sheltered summer as a gardener’s apprentice.

“His domination will take hold as fast as the new TV standard can be implemented. The way Europe has organized the production of the new TV sets, they’ll spread like wildfire. They’re cheap because they have no screen and because the European Union paid for their development. The rugged models include a satellite dish and a solar power unit, so you don’t need electricity. They’re being built in a number of low-wage countries; the loss of the Indian and Chinese plants hardly made a dent in the total production capacity. Here in Europe, they’re still making more production machinery and shipping it to waiting factories in Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. The sets are already available in Australia, although there’s no local programming yet. But instead, the EU’s official Artes network can be seen all over the world. And the World Trade Organization sees to it that nobody tries to stop people from getting the sets and watching. Hollywood, eat your heart out!”

“What about the language barrier? Most people outside Europe don’t speak any of the European languages, at least not as their first language.”

“The translation takes place in the sets themselves,” Dieter told me. “The set gets the appropriate translation program and dictionaries from the satellite, and—Presto!—the Leader speaks Hottentot! Along with the translation program, the sets also get parameters to adapt their artificial intelligence modules to the local culture and way of thinking. That way, the impact of the propaganda is maximized. Other parameters enable the sets to interpret facial expressions and body

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language characteristic of each population. This helps the propagandists gauge the effectiveness of the program better than verbal feedback.

“Add to that the individual personality profiles of the viewers, readily available from advertisers and social media, and you can give each person precisely the message they want to hear. Everybody will think the Leader is a politician just to their liking, and will demand that his policies replace any remaining national ones. Once the autocracy is in place, there’s no further concern about what people think they actually got—anyway, people’s attention spans these days are short.”

When we got back to the Brauns’ place, I called Laura and woke her up bright and early Sunday morning. I told her what I had learned, and she confirmed that the new sets were already for sale in Sydney.

“I’ll be looking around, Gregory,” she said. “The mainland is too hot and dry. I have this strong feeling that we should go as far south as we can, to Tasmania. Soon, I’ll have a couple of weeks off. I’ll drive down to Melbourne, take a ferry across to Devonport, and I’ll see what I can find.”

Tasmania! What a strange thought—I had never been there, and couldn’t imagine what kind of a place it could be. It seemed like the far end of the world. I knew there were over half a million people living there, but I wondered what you could do with yourself in such a remote place. Still, I had come to trust Laura’s feelings, and I told her so.

“How do you like the opening words of my latest book from the antique bookstore on the corner?” she continued. “Listen to this—it’s from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

“You need me, don’t you?”“Yes, Laura, I need you and I want you,” I said. “My fortune may not be all that fabulous,

but I love you and I’d like you to be my wife!” “That’s nice!” she said, her voice full of laughter. “I love you too. Bye-bye now!” I had proposed, but she hadn’t said yes, the tease, not yet... But there again, she was the one

who had brought it up. I knew I’d live the rest of my life with Laura.

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PART 3

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16. Brussels, BelgiumThe following day, Sunday, Dieter and I found the nearest trade club on my LETSystem list, and on my recommendation, Dieter was accepted as a member. We took some time getting to know the people running the accounting for the club and finding out about the merchants accepting its card, and my traveling plans were soon being discussed. One of the members that happened to be there, a barge captain, offered me a ride down the Main and Rhine rivers, and it was settled that I’d go with him as far as Cologne.

So Dieter drove me to his home to pick up my luggage, and after lunch, he took me to the harbor by the river Main, where we easily found the right barge. It was ready to leave, and I said good-bye to Dieter. A little later, the barge was nimbly steering down the river, and after an hour, we joined the Rhine in Mainz.

The Rhine was surprisingly swift in places, and by late afternoon, we passed the famous Lorelei, the tall rock jutting out into a sharp bend of the river, where, in earlier days, many shipwrecks have happened. The loudspeakers of a passing cruise boat played the melancholic theme of the Lorelei, and the mood was somber.

But soon everybody cheered up again, and I long enjoyed the view of the steep riverbanks with their vineyards. It got dark around six, and at eight we arrived in Cologne. I thanked the crew, and the barge continued downstream, headed for Rotterdam in Holland. Then I walked to the youth hostel listed in my LETSystem catalog, and installed myself for the night.

The next day, I crossed the Hohenzollern Bridge and toured Cologne’s Old Town. I went to see the museum next to the bridge, admired the Heinzelmännchen fountain, and visited the cathedral. The latter is an imposing sight, its spires soaring to a height of 515 feet. I climbed the winding spiral stairs up the south tower, losing count of the steps around two hundred. According to the guide leaflet, there are 509 of them in all. The upper part of the staircase is made for single-lane traffic only. Whenever I met another tourist coming down, one of us had to retreat to a landing, as there simply isn’t room to pass on the steps. Finally, I got to the platform at a height of 318 feet, and stayed for a while, admiring the view. It was clear enough to see the mountains to the south, the east, and the west, and I had a perfect view of the Old Town from above. This was quite a treat after years of smoke and ash that had often blocked the view so effectively that landmarks such as mountains and islands had been invisible for months at a time.

I had lunch at a cozy Gasthaus—a small hotel with a restaurant—easy to recognize as belonging to the LETSystem on the card decal in its window. One of the patrons offered me a ride to the western outskirts of Cologne. Back on the Autobahn ramp again, I got a lift to Aachen on the Belgian border. I decided to spend the night there, found a small hotel that accepted my vouchers near the railway station, and thought I’d see at least the local cathedral before my fleeting visit was over. It was late afternoon, but the doors were still unlocked. I seemed to be the only person in the old sanctuary.

The cathedral is an extension of the original court church of Charlemagne, the Frankish king who was crowned Roman emperor in the year 800. Inside is the original Carolingian eight-sided dome, surrounded by a sixteen-sided two-story ambulatory with bronze grilles closing the openings on the upper level. The only light, apart from a few spotlights, came through the high stained-glass windows: enough to see the large picture, but too dim to perceive the fine details.

Normally, the grilles should have been shut, as there was no guided tour going on. But now they were open, revealing the ancient throne of Charlemagne. The throne is a large, square chair

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made of simple, close-fitting marble slabs with a wooden seat and an unhindered view of everything below. After taking in the beauty for a while, I walked to the end of the chancel to find the gilded shrine of the old emperor, where the relics he collected during his lifetime are kept in silk cloth.

While I was there and well out of sight, a slightly built man, unaware of my presence, entered the church and quietly went up the stairs to the upper level of the ambulatory. Then, scanning the church to check if anybody was watching, and, evidently, missing me behind the altar, he climbed the six steps to the throne and sat down. It was way too big for him—Charlemagne was seven feet tall—and the little man seemed too minute to fill the emperor’s seat. But there he sat for a while, enjoying some unknown vision and looking mighty pleased with himself. Then, with a grimace toward the altar, he disappeared out the far door where he had come from. I was quite sure that he hadn’t seen me, so the grimace must have been for somebody else. That was just as well, for it had been a fierce expression of hate.

I left by the nearest exit and sauntered around to the western end of the church. An official EU car was just pulling out, but I couldn’t see anything through its dark windows. Whoever the visitor had been, he must have arranged for the cathedral to be empty and the grilles to be open, which I was quite grateful for. Wondering whom and what I had seen—it had been too dark to see the man’s face clearly—I walked through the darkening town to have my dinner, again at a small cafe that was a LETSystem member, and, eventually, to bed.

Come morning, I continued to Brussels. Apart from being the Belgian capital, Brussels also is the seat of many EU institutions. Moving on foot, I had to restrict my sightseeing to just the center of the city. But there was nothing wrong with that: I navigated the narrow streets of the old town and emerged into the Grand’ Place, a spacious open square surrounded by gilded buildings. I long admired the beautiful City Hall with its magnificent tower and hundreds of little statues. The main tourist season was past, and the city was uncrowded. I had myself a leisurely stroll, much enjoying the feeling of being in a distant past when the troubles of my own era were unknown and unheard of.

There was another landmark I had to visit and to find it, I took rue des Grand-Carmes, crossed rue du Midi, and there, in the intersection with rue de l’Etuve, he stood, the little Manneken Pis. High up on its pedestal, no more than life-size for a small child, the statue was somehow surprisingly tiny compared with the impression I had got from the pictures I had seen. He was still putting out his fire, and probably would keep doing so for a long time to come.

A man my age, accompanied by three girls, stopped and shared my fun as I stood there. We got to talking, and he introduced himself as Jean-Luc Fortier. When he found out that I had nowhere in particular to go, he invited me to his home, not far away. He and his family lived in a large, stately old apartment that he had inherited from his parents, now deceased. His wife’s name was Michelle, and they had four young daughters in all.

It had become a regular experience during my trip that I always seemed to run into mark dodgers, and I was slightly worried that, as a result, I might become complacent and careless about how I moved about. But I put the thought off until tomorrow, because here, again, I was enjoying the selfless hospitality of a family just as pleasant as those I had met in Finland and Germany. It was lunchtime, and Michelle easily accommodated me at their table, placing me between Martha and Natalie, the two middle girls, to keep them from bugging each other. All the girls were extremely nice, well-behaved, and articulate, so I couldn’t believe that Natalie and Martha could have been all that naughty when I wasn’t around.

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Marie-Louise, the oldest of the girls, spoke a little English, and wasn’t at all shy about trying it out on me. The younger ones knew only French, however, so I got a good opportunity to brush up on mine. Little Sophie, who was only four, thought I sounded really funny, and giggled whenever I spoke. But she was still very polite and we got along fabulously.

The Fortier family had returned from Africa only a few months earlier. Jean-Luc and Michelle had been running a mission school in Gisenyi in Rwanda until they had finished training local teachers to continue the work. Now Jean-Luc was employed as a social worker by the church that had sponsored them in Africa, and Michelle was a full-time homemaker. Their church had devised a scheme with the local LETSystem, whereby its employees could be paid in LETS units, while the church handled some of the necessary buying for trade club members.

“Did you run into any of those nasty locusts?” I asked Marie-Louise in my best French, after first checking with Michelle how to translate “Locust.” One of the recent asteroid impacts had hit an undiscovered uranium deposit in Western Africa and had generated a plague of mutant, stinging locusts.

“Yes, they were all over the place, but they never bit me!” she answered.“Me neither!” Martha and Natalie broke in, and little Sophie echoed, “Moi non plus!” “It’s a fact,” Jean-Luc commented, “that we don’t know of a single person we’d consider

one of God’s people, who ever got stung by them. They were very selective, to the point that several persons who were stung during the beginning of the plague, and then joined the church, were spared from then on, while everybody else was suffering horribly. It was the same story all over Africa and the Middle East. And I’m not just talking about Christian churchgoers. Good people—those who cared for each other, whether Christians, Muslims, Jews, or anything else—seemed to be exempt.”

“That never was on the news,” I marveled. “I guess it wouldn’t have sat very well with officialdom.”

“I can assure you that we didn’t advertise our luck,” Michelle said. “But word spread fast, and many thought they’d be protected by staying inside the church or the school. It didn’t work that way, however. They soon found out, because the church wasn’t insect-proof, and the school didn’t have glass windows. But still, we were able to continue teaching without any disruptions. The couple of problem children we had got stung early on, and dropped out of school.”

“You taught school along with your husband, Michelle,” I observed. “Do you feel you’re missing out on something now that you’re staying home?”

“No, nothing that I’d regret not having. Living in Europe, I want to be with Sophie, and because I’m not out working, the older girls can have lunch here and come straight home from school, without going to public day care. We don’t want them in a day care center; all they’d learn there is how to be conformist consumers.”

“I’ve been told that children who go to day care learn social skills earlier,” I answered, “but looking at your girls, I don’t see how they could be any better behaved!”

“There’s a difference,” Jean-Luc pointed out. “In an institution, children learn how to fend for themselves in a group. And that’s okay for most people: that’s what they want for their kids. But a mother can raise her children to be individuals, and she can teach them manners on top of that.

“Unless one of the parents is a full-time caregiver, kids learn the laws of the jungle too early, and may never accept that the good of the family comes before the desires of the individuals. Many children seem to lack basic manners and social skills simply because they’re only aware of their own interests. What makes the problem worse is that modern homes are automated to the extent that there are no chores left for children, and kids find it an imposition if anything is expected of

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them. Because Michelle is aware of this, our girls have learned from the beginning that we’re a family, that we do things as a family, and that their needs will be taken care of by the family. When this is their starting point, selflessness comes naturally.

”Another crucial reason for one parent to stay home with small children is seeing to it that they eat correctly. In this endeavor, we have the entire business community and a good part of the medical profession against us, and not even the schools can be trusted to keep junk food, soda pop, and sweets out of the reach of children.

“In Africa the whole community looks after everybody’s children, so Michelle was able to work full-time, never having to worry about the girls, other than for feeding them. And even that didn’t keep her from doing what she had to do, say, if she had to go to town. One of the other mothers would breast-feed our babies, when needed, and Michelle did the same for them.”

“No concern for AIDS, then?”“Not in our congregation,” Lean-Luc said. “AIDS is rampant in Africa. Women and

children are especially at risk. The main reasons for this are male promiscuity and the custom that forces a widow to sleep with her brother-in-law in order to purify herself from the influence of her departed husband’s spirit. So even if the late husband was faithful and didn’t have AIDS, the widow still runs the risk of becoming infected.

“The people in our church had solid family values, and they rejected superstitions. So for the most part, they weren’t a risk group for AIDS. It was a very good community and we had a wonderful time there. Our church also runs a fine little hospital.”

“My friend Joel from Nigeria said that it takes a village to raise a child,” I recalled.“That’s very much the African way,” Michelle answered. “Here, society has long since

disintegrated into individuals and nuclear families that don’t trust each other. So they have to use social and commercial services for everything. Add the gender equality hype, and you have a situation like here in Europe, where, in theory, I’m not even allowed to stay home.”

“How’s that?” I wanted to know. “How can they stop you?”“Through taxation. Jean-Luc has a job; I work at home—so he’s supposed to pay me a

salary and the salary gets taxed. The minimum wage is enough, mind you, but with all the extra fees for pension schemes, insurance, what have you, only the very rich can afford housewives anymore!”

“We get around it by keeping Michelle registered as unemployed,” Jean-Luc added. “She even gets a small unemployment benefit that pays our condominium fee and our utilities. But it’s quite clear that gender equality has been welcomed with open arms by those who want to prevent all forms of self-sufficiency. A family where both parents work has to buy many things and services that we don’t need.”

Lunch was over, and I went with the girls to be shown their treasures and artwork, while my hosts cleared up. Jean-Luc got ready to walk the three older girls back to school, and invited me to come along and see the church. He had no appointments for the afternoon, and we both felt like talking some more. So we wished Sophie a nice nap, and set off.

I was quite interested in the Fortier’s experience of living in Rwanda, especially since the country had quite a history of internal conflict. Jean-Luc told me that their church had been sponsoring the mission in Gisenyi for several generations, and that the rebuilding of the congregation after the troubles of the nineties had been quite successful. Much of the traditional village structure of society remained intact there, in part because the people felt they belonged together and hadn’t given in to the lure of larger cities.

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Having dropped the three girls off at their school, Jean-Luc showed me his church, and invited me for a cup of coffee in the office. I felt I had to commend him and his wife again on behalf of their lovely daughters.

“Jean-Luc, I don’t think I know another family with such well-behaved and positive children. Are there any other secrets to it than a mother’s dedication?”

“A father’s love and steady hand help a lot, as well,” he answered. “But looking at our little family, you see only part of the picture. We were members of a traditional village in Gisenyi, and we still have strong support from the congregation here.

“A village consists of people with a common identity. In the clan or village, there’s uniformity between authority, values, and common interest. You have to remember that peer pressure is the strongest influence on people’s values and behavior. Humans have the peculiar streak that they won’t unconditionally trust too large a group: a village or a clan are OK, but a city, a nation, a country are too big.

“If you remove the social authority too far, to where the members of the group no longer have emotional contact with those who set and teach the norms and values, the peer pressure will remain on a local level and will, inevitably, rise in rebellion against the distant authority. Where the village brings about the necessary degree of conformity, according to its traditional values, mainly through education, example, and emotional pressure, industrialized society tries to govern our behavior through fashions, legislation, economic incentives, and policing.

“Modern, urban society has taken away the traditional close contact between small, local groups of people. Instead, we all get a standardized culture and a uniform propaganda from mass media. We don’t visit our neighbors, because it’s too dangerous to go out; rather, we converse with strangers via electronic networks. These are people with no claims on us, and we ask them for nothing other than intellectual interaction. We share none of the things with them that create solidarity in natural communities, such as common adversity and mutual achievements. When we need to talk to somebody, we go to professional, paid counselors, like myself, society’s only remaining personal representatives in our lives.

“Children naturally pick up the values of their social environment from older children. If one of them does something wrong, the band of kids, which instinctively plays at arm’s length from adults, will punish the offender immediately and in a way he or she understands—through scolding, shunning, or deprivation of some kind. If a child has a tendency to show off and try to attract attention by being difficult, the other kids will set it straight very effectively. In contrast, a teacher in a day care center or a kindergarten can’t help but reward such a craving for attention, because she can’t legally do anything to the child that it would experience as true punishment. Whatever discipline a difficult child receives from an adult, short of physical harm, constitutes precisely the attention the kid wanted in the first place, and its disruptive tendencies are reinforced.”

I could see his point.“In Aboriginal communities in the Australian outback, you see very much the same thing.

The children get constant care and tenderness as babies, and by the time they’re three or four years old, most of the time they spend away from their mothers they play with other kids. They all grow up with values that put white people to shame. They don’t know greed, for example. If somebody is successful, it would be an unbearable disgrace for them to enjoy a better life and not share it with their family and relatives.”

“It’s the same in rural Africa,” Jean-Luc answered. “Modern society has had to break up the small communities in order to get people out consuming. So, since it doesn’t have access to the basic educational medium of village-level values, it uses bureaucratic and commercial means

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instead. Within the clan, aberrant behavior isn’t tolerated, and there’ll be immediate confrontation and coercion until either the behavior is corrected or the culprit leaves or is expelled. The latter is rare, since it would mean a loss of identity. Because of the strong emotional bonds between members, clan pressure is very effective. Where official society is left to handle asocial behavior, it does so in an impersonal way that leaves the transgressor unrepentant. No official attention given a person can replace the emotional involvement of a clan with its members.

“In the end, without the clan, society has to choose between the two evils of oppressiveness, which might prevent some problems but inspires no loyalty, and reactiveness, which educates no one and always deals with problems only after they’ve become impossible to fix.”

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17. Paris, FranceAt the end of the day, Jean-Luc and I, between us, had pretty much put the whole world to rights, and he invited me to dinner and to spend the night in their guest room. First, however, he was kind enough to arrange my trip to Paris. I was planning on going the next day, but Jean-Luc warned me against trying to hitchhike there. There had been ethnic unrest and a couple of bombings in France, and apart from being unlikely to get a ride, I’d be sure to attract attention that I should avoid. Instead, he took me to a travel agency his church used and bought me a package trip on the high-speed train, which included a one-week Metro/bus/train pass for the greater Paris region and tickets to all the important museums. Jean-Luc paid with a check on behalf of the church, and I paid the church with a trade club voucher: a very practical arrangement.

When we got back to the Fortiers’ apartment, Jean-Luc continued his arrangements. He got onto his computer and started its old Nautilus package. This program made the computer work just like a telephone, but instead of a regular phone line, which could be tapped, or a Voice over Internet Protocol connection, which legitimate authorities could decrypt, this package, freeware from the early days of the Internet, used an encryption scheme that nobody had yet broken and no authorities had any escrowed keys for. As I watched, he called a friend in Paris and began arranging my lodging.

“Hello, Oliver! Is your room there at the back of the church available at the moment?”Clear as day, the response came through the computer’s loudspeakers.“Certainly, Jean-Luc. Whom do you have for me this time?”“A wandering Australian by the name of Gregory. He’ll be leaving in the morning; I’ll send

him directly to the church, if that’s alright with you.”“That’s fine,” the man called Oliver answered. “Roger or his wife will let him in and give

him the keys. Is he there with you?”“Yes, I am,” I broke in. “Thank you ever so much for your kindness. Is it okay to stay for a

week?”“A week will be fine. Stay longer if you want to. We don’t have a lot of use for that room

at this time of the year. It could be a little cold, however: it only has a small electric heater.”“I’m equipped to camp out in the middle of winter, so don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m

looking forward to meeting you.”“Come to our place for dinner tomorrow night! Roger will show you the way; we live right

around the corner from the church.”So I was all set. After exchanging some shoptalk with Oliver in French, Jean-Luc signed off

and told me some of the background. Oliver was an English-born Protestant minister with a church in the 20th arrondissement in Paris. The church had a building at the back of the courtyard that was used mainly for storage, but it also included a simple guest room. Oliver was always happy to accommodate traveling friends there. Roger was the name of the caretaker of the church; he and his family lived in an apartment next to the church entrance.

Michelle had dinner ready, and we continued our spirited discussions. After dinner, we watched the news on the family’s old TV, guaranteed to have no means of feedback to prying marketers and officials.

Italy was in the news in a big way. The Leader had decided to move his office to Rome, and Brussels was in an uproar. Although the European Commission had given repeated assurances that none of the other EU institutions currently in Brussels would move, everybody was afraid that jobs

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and municipal income would be lost. Finally, a spokesperson for the EU Presidency read an official statement to the effect that no other changes would take place: the Leader already used videoconferencing for most of his work anyway, and the office of the commissioner for sports, entertainment, and the arts, where he was often needed in person, was already in Rome.

“She means the propaganda commissioner,” Jean-Luc remarked, “the second beast of the Book of Revelation. That office also houses the headquarters of the Artes TV network. That’s why he wants to be there—he governs by TV.”

The next piece of news from Rome was that the pope had died. A new one was to be elected as soon as there was agreement on the candidates. The Sistine chapel was already being prepared for the election.

“He was an old man and, lately, he seemed to withdraw a little from the world,” Michelle observed. “It’ll be interesting to see what kind of a man the new pope will be. With the Leader in Rome, there could be friction.”

Then, with much fanfare, it was announced that Europe had received a welcome addition to her electric power supply with the inauguration of a new satellite transfer system from the big hydroelectric power plant that had been built in Zambia with European development aid. A huge array of open waveguides beamed the energy produced by the power plant to a geostationary satellite that reflected the microwaves back to a farm of parabolic dishes in Italy, where the power was converted to 400 kV alternating current and fed into the European electricity grid. The European commissioner for energy was seen congratulating the Zambian prime minister on the successful completion of the project, and hinted that Zambia’s national debt would soon be just a distant memory.

Jean-Luc had a less rosy view of the story.“Here’s a classic case of donor-driven development aid. The dam and the plant were

designed to be bigger and more costly than anything Zambia would need or could pay for. Half a million people were displaced, and many still live in camps with no way of supporting themselves. Zambia was talked into accepting the entire cost as an addition to her national debt. Then, when all the money had been paid to the European firms that built the thing, the lenders decided that Zambia couldn’t afford to finance the power lines to distribute the electricity to the planned industries that she also could no longer borrow the money to establish.

“So, to save Zambia from bankruptcy, Europe agreed to buy the electricity at fire sale prices and put in the microwave link at her own expense. There it sits, the whole automated complex, remotely controlled from Europe, with not one electrical wire coming out of it, adding not a dozen jobs for Zambians. All it does for Zambia is to pay enough of a trickle of money to keep her new, huge debt from defaulting. Meanwhile, any bird that flies in over one of the antennae at either end instantly bursts into flame and turns into ashes by the time it falls down. All-ceramic robots keep the equipment clean, drawing their energy from the microwaves. It’s cases like this that make some people talk about neocolonialism.”

“While we lived in Rwanda, we, too, were giving development aid, in a sense,” Michelle commented. “But people like us, who go to poor countries and give of themselves, can make a real difference in the lives of those among whom they live. There are still a lot of nurses, doctors, teachers, missionaries, engineers and others out there, quietly helping regular people improve their lives.

“After the Structural Adjustment Programs, rural women, who had always done the farming, were devastated when their markets were flooded with cheap food imports and their raw materials were no longer subsidized. While most just disappeared into slums with their children, a few

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managed to hold on to their livelihoods thanks to help from organizations like the Appropriate Technology Groups.”

“What I’ve found quite remarkable during this trip,” I told them, “is that in the midst of all these disasters, all the crime, and all the cynicism, there still are some of us who actually love other people, apart from their own families. It has made me quite optimistic about the future. As long as there are a few of us left who care, we’ll make it.”

“That’s right,” Jean-Luc said. “And to be fair, I’ll have to add that there are many people working for the official aid agencies, who genuinely want to improve the lives of the poor. They have the unenviable task of finding a compromise that their employer can accept between, on the one hand, actually reducing poverty and, on the other, catering to the business needs of the donor nations and the multinationals. The corporate culture of their employers lives and breathes the assumption that the sole key to improving any country’s economy lies in attracting foreign investment. In such a culture, it must be hard to defend a program that attempts to raise the productivity of the poor in their own right, rather than turning them into minimum wage sweatshop workers, benefiting first and foremost the coveted investors.

“It’s through such initiatives from the development agencies and the international financial institutions that banking to the poor has taken off. Take Albania, for example: after the fall of Communism, when conditions were so desperate that you couldn’t lend money to farmers at all, because they had no income to pay it back from, somebody invented animal banks. They lent a farmer five or six pregnant ewes or nanny goats, and when the lambs or kids had been weaned, the farmer gave back the mothers plus one of the young as interest. This helped them get ahead and greatly improved their situation. And there were no defaults; village solidarity guaranteed the payback to the ‘bank.’ Where there was enough money around to generate turnover for small businesses, small-scale banking became very successful, and credit losses were always less than in mainstream banking in the same countries. Usually, the enterprisers that took advantage of these programs were women. The first and most notable one of these banks for the poor was the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. It was started by a private individual and served to demonstrate that the long-neglected poor, in fact, are good credit risks. The bank and its founder received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.”

I found our talks that day so interesting that I could have continued all night, but I knew better. So that memorable Tuesday came to an end, and the next morning, I took my seat in the Thalys train to Paris.

The ride was so soft that it was difficult to believe that the train ran on wheels at a speed of over 200 miles an hour. As long as the nearest trees or buildings were a good way off, you didn’t really see how fast you were moving. But when they came closer, and when the train went under viaducts and through tunnels, the experience was impressive.

Less than an hour and a half after leaving Brussels, I stepped off the train at Gare du Nord in Paris. I was duly sniffed out by the police dogs that were there to detect explosives, and allowed to pass. I took the Metro to Belleville and soon found the church.

Roger opened the door and introduced himself. He was an economics student from the Chad with a fine government job waiting for him. But while he was finishing his studies, he worked as a humble caretaker, assisted by his wife. They had three cute little children, all at home because it was Wednesday and elementary school was off. So I had all the assistance I could ask for as I installed myself in the dark but rather spacious room at the back of the courtyard. Its only door let out into the yard and provided some daylight through large glass panes. There also was a narrow window. Next door was a rest room for the community hall, with a toilet, a washbasin, and

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running cold water. Not bad for free accommodation. No doubt I’d soon figure out how to get myself a shower; for now, lunch was a much more pressing issue.

So I walked back the way I had come, planning to take a look at the shops along rue de Belleville. Here, I was in a predominantly North African and Chinese area, with a very interesting ethnic aspect. Far from encountering any trouble, as I had half expected, I found the streets safe and calm. Turning into a side street, I came across a small cafe that had the LETSystem—SEL in French—decal in its window, and ate a tasty and filling meal with couscous as its main staple ingredient. Over a café au lait at the counter, I asked the owner if it was common for the Muslim population to be involved with the LETSystem, and he confirmed that it was; more so, he thought, than among the native French.

“It’s very much a matter of religion, and the French aren’t very religious,” he said.I told him that this was new to me: during my trip, so far, I had been mostly among

Europeans, and had only heard the Christian motivations for not taking the mark.“Political fanatics apart, Muslims are peaceful and hardworking people like you and I,” the

host explained. “They can recognize the signs of what’s coming just as well as anybody else, and they know that the mark will lead to the worship of false gods. If anything, they’re more wary of that than Christians.”

I paid, thanked the owner, and went out to see Paris. It was a blessing to be a tourist in the fall: nothing was crowded, and I had all the peace in the world, admiring the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and all the other treasures in the Louvre.

My dinner at Oliver’s home was enjoyable, but the mood was quite serious, and for the first time I learned about real trouble building up for the unmarked. Under her right-wing leadership, France intended to set an example in Europe and begin enforcing the obligation visibly and unconditionally to honor the Leader as the symbol of European unity and progress. This meant that it would be risky to go to shopping centers, or “Shopping Temples,” as they were increasingly called, because if a TV broadcast featuring the Leader were to start, the police would be checking for any signs of lack of loyalty.

I couldn’t quite fathom what this meant, and felt rather sure that I, a foreigner, wasn’t likely to be targeted. All the same, it was bad news for my hosts and their congregation. But they didn’t seem apprehensive. Oliver told me that whatever happened to each of them, they all knew where they were going.

“What’s coming out of all this?” I asked. “We’ve already seen disasters worse than anybody could have imagined, but the economy is chugging along and consumer confidence is high. When the Asian war broke out, everybody thought it was the end of the world. But we’re still here. How much more can Earth take?”

“Remember,” Oliver said, “that everything in this world happens in cycles. Every time some trend is going in the wrong direction, some doomsayer gets rich on describing the turmoil and destruction we’re headed for. It’s sensational, and people love sensations. They have all been wrong, because when things go too far, common sense kicks in and some kind of correction is applied.

“At the same time, few observers take note of very small, gradual changes that add up to real differences over the years. The political climate the world over is now about as far to the right as in Germany in the late 1930s. But, just like then, nobody has stood up to challenge the politicians, because every little change for the worse always came in reaction to some emergency or provocation, usually engineered either by operatives of the intelligence services of the great powers,

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or by mercenaries of transnational big business with the tacit approval of the politicians concerned. We still think we’re basically free, but with the propaganda telling us we’re beleaguered by crime and terrorism on every side, we’ve been giving up our civil rights very fast.

“Now seems to be the time when those who refuse the mark will be branded traitors. We’ve known to expect it. Those who have gone out into the countryside are still rather safe. We who remain in the urban consumer society will be put to the test.”

“You mean mass arrests and concentration camps like under Hitler? How can they suddenly start doing that in a modern society? Where will they get the guards all at once?”

“Hitler and Stalin just held local rehearsals for what’s about to happen now all over the world. Finding thousands of enforcers isn’t difficult: they already work for law enforcement, and they’ll just be obeying orders and protecting the public. The problem is the millions of ordinary citizens who, once again, will allow such a gross violation of human rights to happen. Initially, they won’t feel affected, so they’ll think it’s none of their business. The propaganda will tell them that they’re on the side of the oppressors and that the victims are their enemies. Tolstoy wrote: All that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

“But whether it’s the end of the world or not, we’re not going to speculate about. We believe that one of these cycles of emergencies and repression will be the final one, when humanity suddenly goes off on a tangent. Meanwhile, our commitment is to live as if any moment could be our last, or, as we prefer to see it, the beginning of something new.”

“It’s scary to think of persecutions, though,” I ventured.Oliver agreed.“Yes, it’s a frightening prospect. However, it could also be a blessing of sorts. The

Christian church retains its original form and purpose only for as long as it’s being persecuted. Look at the early church: for three centuries, it remained undivided and true to the apostles’ teachings, and it became the majority religion in the pagan Roman empire because the heathens could see that Christians, living their faith, had something infinitely more valuable and emboldening than what they themselves had. The persecutions targeted church leaders more than other Christians, and only the brave, compassionate, and selfless became leaders and teachers.

“We still have this situation in parts of Africa and Asia, and Christians from there put all of us who live securely and comfortably to shame. As soon as it’s safe to belong to some religion or denomination, its ranks of leaders fill up with politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, just like any other organization. The death-defying evangelists are beatified, sidelined, forgotten, or declared heretics and killed, and the original gospel is relegated to pre-sales work and to draw crowds on big holidays, where it’s always proved its worth.

“From that point onward, clergy simply become peddlers of guilt.”“That’s a rather sweeping statement,” I observed. “How about a bit of commentary?”“A code of behavior—even an onerous one—and the supervision needed to maintain it

can be sold for money, as long as the promised reward is attractive enough. Just look at the martial arts, as an example. On the other hand, who’s going to pay you for advertising a free gift? Well, that’s evident from any marketing campaign: only the giver of the gift. So preaching salvation as a free gift by the grace of God and the blood of Jesus requires living on faith, something professional church leaders and clergy aren’t very good at.”

”Oliver,” I said, “please explain this thing about a free gift!”“OK. Let’s think of it this way. Let’s say that humanity lives on a malfunctioning space

ship, headed right into the sun. The captain, at great cost to himself, has prepared an escape pod.

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Everyone is invited to board it when the time comes to leave, but only a few turn up to get the free ticket.”

“Why?”“The ship’s trajectory isn’t straight but elliptical, so it takes discernment to understand

where it’s going. The on-board entertainment insists on the approach of ‘eat, drink, and be merry.’ And it’s evident that those who have been to get the ticket are so grateful that they have become unselfish. That’s too high a price to pay: one doesn’t just quit looking after one’s personal interests while the going is good.”

“I’m following,” I confirmed. “But there’s bound to be some nagging doubts among those who have heard about the problem but can’t be bothered to take a stand. Maybe they’re still waiting to be persuaded?”

“There’s a whole industry out there catering to any such uncertainty. ‘Join our group, follow our fashions, obey our rules, and pay us money, and we’ll numb all your fears and, yes, if it comes to that, we’ll get you on board that pod in the end.’”

“That would be the peace-of mind industry, or what?”“Precisely”, Oliver confirmed. “And, sad to say, most religions and most Christian

churches are willing members of that industry.”“But that isn’t the way it works, right?”“No. You have to go to the captain yourself and make a commitment in order to pick up

your ticket. Nobody can get it for you. This is the best kept secret in all Christianity. Letting it out would mean the end of living comfortably for the clergy. Only a few denominations make it known, but they often put on a big charismatic show instead, to ensure that they’re still seen as indispensable by their members.”

“So when do we impact?”“For each one of us,” Oliver said, “that’s when we die. If the world comes to an end as

the Book of Revelation says, a lot of us will die at the same time. But it’s the very nature of the thing that we don’t know when our time is up. That’s how it’s meant to be, because hedging your bets and waiting until the odds are right doesn’t work. We only get the ticket if we commit ourselves completely and never look back.”

I wanted to get back to the parallel with the martial arts industry.“Some would take offense at such a direct comparison between religion and business,” I

noted.“Hypocrisy, by its nature, is defensive,” Oliver confirmed. “But the analogy is accurate.

Clergy are in the business of evaluating people’s actions and outward appearances, and selling a cure, much like the weight loss industry.

“In an officially accepted church, the objective of a preacher is no longer to share a message at any cost to himself, but to make a living, preferably in a comfortable manner. Although such a priest or pastor liberally claims the same authority Jesus gave his apostles when he first sent them out to preach, he normally isn’t prepared to live on faith as the apostles had to do.

“So if you’re a people person in need of a job, and you chance upon a belief system, led by amateurs, emerging from struggles and persecutions, this is what you do. You take its original message of faith—ancient mythology, the Gospel of Jesus, the revelations of Mohammed, the writings of Marx and Engels, whatever—and transform it into something entirely different: a code of conduct, against which you can gauge people’s performance. Since you can’t supervise every person yourself, the code has to be uncompromising and emotional

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enough to lend itself to both rueful self-criticism by the individual and callous monitoring by others. In effect, you take a message of joy, victory, and triumph, and turn it into one of obligation, guilt, and condemnation by the holier-than-thou crowd.

“To make the scheme fly, you have to come up with just the right mix of euphoria over belonging to the in-group and remorse over one’s inevitable failings. When you’ve got this straight, you also have to cater to births, marriages, deaths, and other rites of passage, plus provide a regular supply of holidays and celebrations according to the seasons. It’s always a good idea to take over the feasts of the old order and rename them after your own saints and potentates; this tends to keep the people happy through the transition. The result is a lucrative profession that provides peace of mind for everyone involved. This is the way the early church met its end in the fourth century.”

“Very complex, compared with the original idea of a free ticket,” I observed.“Like a different story altogether,” Oliver replied. “The reason is that there are three

parties involved, not two.“If only you and God were concerned, it would be a no-brainer. God wants you in his

kingdom; you don’t want to go to hell. You accept his offer—case closed. But then there’s the church with entirely different interests. The church wants maximum mileage out of you in terms of your tithes to help it prosper and your participation to help make it appear relevant.

“God’s message to you, as recorded in the Bible, is clear and simple: ‘You have come to me sincerely and in the name of my son Jesus who already bore the punishment for your sins on the cross. Those sins are now forgotten and you have eternal life. Here’s how you can help me spread the Gospel, try to make life on Earth a little nicer for those around you, and preserve your integrity and a healthy amount of self-respect for when you come to my kingdom. And, by the way, you don’t owe me anything other than gratitude.’ This message exists in the church but it’s well hidden. What you’re taught instead is this: ‘Here are all the moral rules we’ve been able to establish from Scripture and tradition. Follow them, pay us well, and we’ll get you to Heaven. You’re too small to understand God: leave that to us. Our holy, magic rituals will keep you on his good side. Amen.’”

“Somehow it seems to me that you’re talking about the Catholic Church now,” I said. “Didn’t the Reformation change all this?”

“Every revolution only ends up with more of the same. After the Reformation wars, it became safe and respectable to belong to the Protestant clergy, and the old business model was put right back to work.

“The Catholic Church with its confessionals says nothing about personal salvation but encourages its members to push the envelope of morality to see what they can get away with. If you go too far, you get a penance to do, and on you go until next Sunday. Fundamentalist Protestant denominations—the kind that produces Bible-thumping, ‘born again’ Christians—foster Old-Testament style legalism and bigotry to make their members feel superior and keep the checks coming. A number of Protestant and Orthodox state churches offer respectability and patriotic traditions combined with the feel-good awareness that members are helping finance charity and social work. The true message of salvation is as scarce as hens’ teeth in nearly all churches.

“An established religion is more concerned with a solid social position than with changing lives. It makes both membership and salvation contingent on partaking in rituals and paying tithes, while the early church had no such conditions. It persecutes those who leave it and murders its competitors, whether heathens or heretics. It transfers holiness from the object of

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worship to the organization and its leaders. It dilutes faith in God with faith in the church, and strives to convince you that this faith is all you need. Although St. Paul says clearly that love is greater than faith, such a church will teach you little about love, least of all by example.

“St. Paul, in I Cor. 1:10-15, wrote a strongly worded condemnation of divisions among the faithful, based on following different authorities. Nevertheless, this kind of church invariably throws up barricades between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ so dissent can be demonized as treason. Belonging to the church, joining its interest groups, taking part in its activities, and paying your dues become the focal points of a religion that’s concerned more with fundraising than with saving souls. No wonder so many find it impossible to accept such churches and their authority over people’s lives.

“Organized religion doesn’t have what it takes to bring salvation to anyone. Only individuals can do that—including, of course, individual pastors.

“Those who teach or practice this kind of religion fall under Christ’s denunciation in Mt. 6:1-17: they have had their reward. If persecutions come, they won’t be affected. But the rest of us may again get an opportunity to show what it means to live one’s faith.”

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18. The EmperorThursday, I set myself the goal of seeing the Tuileries garden and walking avenue des Champs-Elysées from place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. For a beginning, I was making good progress. Then I came to the Elysées palace, where a throng of official cars was making ready to leave, with police everywhere, keeping people at bay. In such a situation, I kind of naturally tend to gravitate closer to the action rather than away from it, and, while doing so, I kept looking around for clues as to what the commotion was all about.

One of the officials was just about to get into his limousine, with his driver already holding his door open, when he saw me standing nearby. He took one look at my Akubra hat, and greeted me in unmistakable Australian: “G’day, mate!”

I had by then espied the Australian flag on the car, and guessed that I must have been talking with the ambassador.

“G’day, sir,” I answered, feeling quite thrilled over running into so prominent a compatriot.“What brings you here?” he inquired.“I’m just a tourist,” I replied. “About halfway through a tour of the world!” “Jump in the old bus,” the ambassador said. “I’m off to have lunch by meself, and I’d much

rather have an Aussie to talk to!” Once in the back seat of the car with the formalities sorted out, I motioned in the direction of

the palace and asked, “What was all that about?”“You won’t believe this,” the ambassador told me, “but we’ve all been watching TV for the

past two hours!” “That is hard to believe,” I confirmed. “It must have been a mighty important program!”The ambassador was shaking his head in disbelief at what he had experienced.“There’s no doubt that what happened was important. Alarmingly so, in fact. The Leader

had arranged a grand ceremony in Rome, at the Coliseum, of all places, and there he declared himself emperor! Ambassadors to the EU had been invited to attend in person; lesser mortals like myself watched the whole thing on holographic TV. Mind you, the entire French government was there, too, so we were in good company. Unbelievably, all available seats at the Coliseum were packed with regular people. He’s riding a wave of popularity right now, and he seems to have bet on the likelihood that he was safe with all those people there.”

The car had soon covered the short distance to place de la Madeleine, and we got out. We entered a five-star restaurant, the flagship of one of the fast-food empires, which had taken it over when the last private chef-owner had gone bankrupt. No fast food here, though. It was an establishment of such class that the tuxedoed waiters never even raised an eyebrow at my blue jeans and coarse traveling clothes. Having the guts to venture in their door was proof enough of your right to be there. The service was impeccable and the food was superb. Plush carpeting and red velvet formed a rich setting; dark, sculptured wood and beveled mirrors covered the walls; crystal chandeliers provided lighting. In the men’s room, a valet brushed some specks of dust off my Drizabone. A sumptuous flower arrangement decorated every table. If there was a food crisis on in the world, this restaurant made it its business to keep its patrons blissfully unaware of it.

“I’d like to understand more of what happened today,” I told the ambassador over lunch. “The Leader is now emperor. Emperor of what? Rome?”

“That he didn’t say. I think the announcement was calculated very carefully to be open-ended as far as his territory goes. Contrary to previous rulers, who had very specific empires—and,

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if they wanted to expand their realm, had to conquer more in battle—this bloke has designs on the whole world, but he doesn’t necessarily plan to go to war over it. He uses the term ‘Emperor’ kind of generically; he means to be emperor everywhere and nowhere in particular. And via his TV propaganda, and considering his alliance with the transnational business community, he can do it. If he rules the minds of the citizens, national elites and governments will have to follow his wishes.

“This coup was very well planned and perfectly timed. For many months, the Artes TV network has been pushing romantic films about olden days, when there was an emperor, and all was well. It’s become a worldwide fashion: national TV networks have had to follow suit in order to hold on to their ratings. The propaganda has quite fertile ground to grow in, too: nearly every country on Earth was once part of some empire. Even where this isn’t strictly true, if you allow for a kind of ‘grandfathering,’ you could say that Denmark and Norway, for a few years, were occupied by a Germany that had had an emperor a generation earlier; you could say that Brazil was a colony of Portugal, which was once part of the Roman Empire, and so on. There may be no more than a handful of places, such as Sweden, Thailand, and Hawaii, where the EU propagandists just can’t point to any Imperial past whatsoever.”

“That reminds me,” I said, “has the Japanese emperor died yet?”“Yes,” the ambassador answered, “he kicked the bucket a fortnight ago. There’s no heir, but

conveniently, the Japanese ratings of the Artes network are now higher than those of the domestic channels. Ten to one that the Leader will be at least honorary emperor of Japan within three months!”

“What’s the point in being precisely emperor? Couldn’t he have become Secretary General of the UN or something?”

The ambassador knew his political history.“It’s a very significant move, and the Leader has done his homework well. Traditionally,

the role of the emperor was that of a savior. That’s why we think of emperors as having special powers. The politician who reached such a position always attained it by playing on people’s fear of some danger. Usually, the threat came from either external enemies or internal divisions. In our day, the problems are crime, protest movements labeled ‘Terrorism,’ and the helplessness of authorities everywhere trying to cope with those things. The emperor is the man who can convince people that he can set all this right, and the mood is now such that the harsher the measures he proposes, the more support he’ll get.

“This thing about honoring him, even his TV image, has all the markings of a personality cult. The early Roman emperors from Augustus onwards were considered gods; the Leader seems to be after a similar situation for himself.”

At the end of our meal, my host pulled out his Travelers Charge card as if he’d never heard about bar code markings.

“How come you can still use your card?” I asked. “I ran out of luck with mine as soon as I came to the Continent last summer!”

“You have to know where to present it,” he told me. “It never was a bargain basement card. Nowadays, it’s more expensive than ever to use it: only the best establishments accept it. It’s all very discreet, but you can still see the old decals here and there. How would you be paying your bill, if you were to use your card during your trip?”

“I have travelers checks that I also can’t seem to use, but I guess I could ask my girlfriend back home to take money out of my account there and pay the bills.”

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“Listen,” the ambassador said, “I’ll take you to Travelers Charge and see that you get everything straightened out. They can be very helpful when they want to.”

Another short drive, and we were at the Travelers Charge office near the Opera. Inside, a man came and greeted the ambassador, and the latter introduced him to me as the president of Travelers Charge France, who very conveniently happened to be in that office just then. My card was found valid and I was advised to deposit part of my travelers checks in the card account: that way I didn’t have to worry about payment for a while. Then I got a list of businesses where I could use the card—all very fancy, as I’d been warned—and so I had another way of paying while I was traveling.

To my question as to what was happening to credit card companies now that most people could no longer use cards, the president replied that Travelers Charge was doing quite well, thank you.

“You have to realize that we never were in the business of peddling plastic cards or travelers checks. Our business idea is selling a sense of security to middle-class people. Our clients pay us an annual fee for the peace of mind that comes with belonging to an exclusive group. With the spread of the bar code payment system, nowadays most of our transactions are made without either cards or checks. Instead, we give our customers other little tokens, like key rings, address labels, knickknacks, and lapel pins, as physical symbols of their relationship with us. Our logo prints out on the receipt when they choose to pay via their account with us. As long as we maintain our clients’ confidence that their social status will be recognized, our earnings stay healthy.”

It was now past two, and the ambassador had to get back to his embassy. I thanked him for all he had done for me, and he wished me well and left. Having been diverted from my original plan, I toured the area between the Opera and the Madeleine, and had my afternoon coffee at the Café de la Paix, just for the fun of paying with my Travelers Charge card again.

Before noon on Friday, I took the train from Montparnasse to Versailles, planning to see the palace and its park. Walking from the station, I came across a bakery where I could pay in LETS units, and had myself a piece of the most delicious chocolate cake I’ve ever tasted. I found Versailles a charming place, with most downtown buildings built in the same style as the palace, and often lined with the original sandstone. Even brand new buildings were very tastefully designed to blend with the old ones.

Standing in line to see the palace—even in November, you had to wait to get in—I struck up a conversation with a French couple who were just in front of me. They were celebrating their anniversary that day, and had decided to go and see the palace. Literally go, that is, in the old sense of the word: they lived within walking distance, but had never taken the trouble to visit the main attraction of their hometown. They were good fun to talk to, although they didn’t speak English. Instead, I had to do my best in French, and they were very patient, humorous, and helpful, like all French people are when you make an effort to communicate on their terms.

While we toured the palace, Édith and Louis discussed their plans for the weekend. They had a small apartment in Angers, where Louis hailed from, and Saturday they were going there with their children to spend the night. Suddenly they turned to each other with that look of “do you know what I’m thinking?” and burst into laughter; then, with one voice, they invited me to come along. There always was room for a friend in the car and in the apartment, too: there was an extra bed in the children’s room.

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I gratefully accepted, but felt I had to tell them that I’d be unable to pay my share the regular way. This was duly brushed aside—I was to be their guest—and so I had a date for Saturday morning.

After seeing the palace, we took a long walk through the park with its many statues and fountains. When, finally, we returned to the palace gate and took avenue de Paris back toward the station and Louis’ and Édith’s apartment, I was exhausted from walking. I bought some more chocolate cake to take back and share with Roger and his family, and began the one-hour train and Metro ride back to my lodgings.

For my trouble, Roger and his wife, whose name I could never pronounce, invited me to share their evening meal, and I got myself an orientation as to what it was like living in the Chad. It wasn’t an easy life, but for them, it was home, and they were eager to return there. Roger had only one more semester left until his graduation; his job was waiting for him, assuming that the same side remained in power. The country was still split along partisan lines, and neither the new oil money nor the long drought had brought any more agreement. But once more, the church provided a circle of friends that was sure to pull through together.

Saturday morning, I was back in Versailles, found Édith and Louis and their two children ready to go, and folded myself into their Citroën. Édith sat in the back with the kids, and turned out to be a fabulous backseat driver. How Louis managed to get to our destination without accidents through all the loud interchange of ideas about which way to drive, I’ll never know. But we arrived in Angers alright, and I was treated to both room and board, and a tour of the city.

The outstanding experience of the day was my visit to the old castle. There, along the walls of endless hallways, hangs a collection of nearly a hundred handwoven medieval tapestries depicting the scenes described in the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse, as the museum calls it. Louis was still feeling generous and bought me a guidebook with color photographs taken of the reverse sides of the tapestries. The fronts, which can be seen in the exhibition, are faded from hundreds of years of exposure to light, but the original colors, still remaining on the back, had been deep, bright, and vibrant.

Armed with my book, I took my time studying the collection. Édith and Louis went along a different route with their children to give me time alone. For a beginning, there was little I could relate to: lots of medieval-looking characters performing symbolic acts. Then there was a mounted rider called Famine. Why not: we’d had enough of that. But then, pane 21 showed a star falling into the sea and wrecking ships. That had happened! And next thing, in pane 22, another star was falling, making the river water bitter. That had happened, too, just a couple of years ago! A few more steps, and pane 24 depicted the plague of stinging locusts. Pane 26 had riders on lion-faced, fire-breathing horses killing civilians, and there were to have been two hundred million of them. Well, in the Asian war, two hundred million armored troops had been doing just that, with fire and brimstone coming out of the mouths of their tank cannons. Close enough for me.

I walked past several panes with scenes I couldn’t connect to anything that had happened so far. But then, here was the beast out of the sea, our emperor, with seven heads that were supposed to symbolize the remaining seven prime ministers of the ten core states, receiving homage from the people. This was repeated in panes 41, 42, and 43: a momentous thing, as we knew. Then there was the other beast, which Jean-Luc had told me was the commissioner for propaganda, calling down fire from the sky. Not a falling star, but fire. In the next pane, number 45, he was making people worship the image of the emperor. All so true.

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And here, in pane 46, the commissioner for propaganda was marking people with the Mark of the Beast. I had always wondered why the payment system project had been managed by the propaganda commissioner and not by, say, the central bank in Frankfurt. But, as I knew, the foremost purpose of the mark was to enable the EU Presidency to keep track of who was watching holographic TV, and to extract homage from them when the emperor so required. It almost was just a convenient extra feature that the mark also empowered them to stop you from eating and drinking, should you disagree with them.

Then it seemed that the action passed me by: the rest had to be in the future. It was highly symbolic, but I could see that it wasn’t pretty. However, there also was the remnant of people that were to be saved out of the earth, and I began to realize that I had cast in my lot with theirs.

I tucked in my guidebook and went to find my hosts out on the battlements, and tried to tell them about my findings. It largely went over their heads: their attention was elsewhere. Soon we were off to dinner, and the rest of my visit to Angers was just a pleasant tourist trip.

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19. Off with His Head!We left Angers soon after lunch on Sunday. Édith and Louis wanted to go shopping, and, out of curiosity, I decided to tag along. We drove along the autoroute past Le Mans and Chartres, and then we took a smaller freeway through Orsay to Vélizy-Villacoublay. There we turned into the parking lot of the huge Vélizy II shopping complex, and parked the car. Édith and Louis were what’s known as “educated consumers,” and had opted to be kept up to date with the latest offerings at their favorite shopping mall. As soon as we were in the parking lot, their and the children’s mobile phones began providing them with video advertising messages from the stores at the mall. An electric bus dropped us off at the main entrance to the new central mall, a true shopping temple.

Since I needed nothing, I just followed my hosts, and I also found that there was little I could have bought. Here in the suburbs, not even Galéries Lafayette sported the Travelers Charge decal; none of the shops here was listed in my LETSystem directory. The suburbanites were quite content with their new, universal payment system.

The central promenade of the mall had a great cupola in the middle, and here, for the first time, I saw one of the new public entertainment centers Janne had described during my passage from Finland to Sweden. There was a nonstop show going on, unbelievably realistic in three-dimensional full color, keeping the viewers and the passersby happy and cheering. As we watched a commercial for one of the local department stores, I could see that the system worked just like Janne had said. Every marked viewer seemed to have a clear sound channel from the grid of silver-gleaming, drop-shaped overhead speakers, while I heard nothing other than a fading, changing murmur and hiss. The picture generating system seemed to work independently of the sound system though, and had found my eyes immediately as I arrived.

Like all commercials, this one employed the best and most popular actors, and it went to great lengths to tease information out of the viewers. I heard Édith and the children squeal with delight, as the lead character flattered them and probed for their innermost wishes. Later, as they’d be led toward the department store by precisely timed, personalized messages on the TV monitors along the walkways, those wishes would materialize as special offers just for them. The mall computer network would closely monitor their progress through the ever-present game consoles, where rewards and surprises were awarded to every user. A department store hostess would meet them at whichever entrance they would happen to choose, would know them by sight, and would have their shopping list ready for them, with a financing plan for Louis, tailored to his ability to pay.

Now something great was about to happen on TV, however. After a tremendous fanfare, the Artes network announced the emperor. We were going to see the emperor, almost in person! Instantly, the area under the loudspeakers was crowded to saturation, with people holding up their right hands to get their sound channels clear. A hush fell over the gathering, and the emperor appeared.

I had been pushed close enough to Louis that I could hear his channel, and to get better audibility still, I borrowed his hand and briefly held it up above us. When I kept my head just over and behind his, we both heard quite well. The emperor was still consolidating his new position, drawing on the romantic feelings of the French for their great and glorious days under Napoleon I and the beautiful life under the later Napoleons. It was strange to think that, at the same time, he must have been talking to the Italians about Roman emperors, to the British about the days of their empire, and to the Austrians about the greatness of old Franz Josef.

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He continued by reporting on the tremendous strides taken in the struggle against crime and corruption, and promised lower taxes for all and sundry from the new year onwards, thanks to all the public expenditure saved from fraud. The people cheered and waved their left hands, quite aware that they didn’t want to confuse the viewer locating system by doing anything with their right hands.

Then the emperor asked the viewers to tell him their concerns, as he held each one of them dear and would endeavor to help them in every way he could. Louis wanted a promotion, and the emperor told him, addressing him by name, that he had well deserved it, and would get it in due time.

“Thank you, computer,” I was tempted to say, but bit my tongue.“A raise, too!” Louis continued, and the emperor duly answered that a raise would, indeed,

go with the promotion.Louis was satisfied, and I still had the sound channel.I couldn’t help myself, and burst out in English, “Will you ever stop?”“No!” came the answer in my ears, and I got an uneasy feeling, seeing that two of the close-

up cameras of the entertainment center were pointed straight at me. Fearing that I had done something stupid, I told Louis that I’d be close by, and backed away toward the nearest walkway. Here I encountered a young man handing out pamphlets, and, collecting myself, took one and started to read.

It was a Christian leaflet, warning of the dangers of the payment system in very explicit terms. I turned to the man and asked if he didn’t think it risky to be here with such a message. He heard my accent and answered, in English, that he knew the danger, but that he felt obliged to keep warning people.

We continued talking, and the youngster introduced himself as Henry Allen, from England, studying in Paris since a couple of years. Henry was well acquainted with my host, Oliver, and invited me to drop by at his own church, the Anglican St. Michael’s church in rue d’Aguessau near the Madeleine. There always was something going on there, he said, with many of the local English-speakers attending, and students in particular.

Now the crowd cheered in a frenzy, and everyone was holding up their right hand. This must have had some particular significance; so far they had been using their left hands to express their agreement. Henry knew what it was; he had been here when it had begun a few days ago.

“This is emperor-worship going on. By holding up their right hands, they can all be recognized as having shown their loyalty. Not that they have any qualms about what they’re doing. He’s popular enough to be worshipped even if he didn’t mandate it.”

I was about to ask what was going to happen to us who weren’t taking part in the worship, but I didn’t have to. In short order, two policemen swooped down on us, frisked us, clapped us into handcuffs, and marched us off to a waiting police van. Henry’s leaflets were confiscated, and we were quite roughly pushed into the back of the van.

I didn’t see Louis and Édith again, and never knew what they thought when they didn’t find me. After a ten-minute ride with the siren blaring, I recognized the City Hall of Versailles, and the van pulled up at the Police Prefecture on its left side. Quite an ignominious way to return to such a beautiful city, I thought.

After the expected formalities, depositing our property, and recording of our identities, we were taken to a cell and locked up. No charges had been read to us, but we knew what they were, anyway.

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I was feeling not a little uneasy, but that was nothing compared with what I went through when Henry told me, almost casually: “You know that the punishment for failing to salute the emperor is death, don’t you?”

“What?” I burst out. “Since when?”Henry was still calm.“Since yesterday, to be precise. France is leading the pack, showing the world how to deal

with enemies of the people. I think you and I have the dubious honor of being the first to be caught in the act. Let’s see what happens.”

It took hours of waiting, hungry and miserable, before anything transpired to give me reprieve from my uncertainty. A couple of hours after dark—my watch had been taken away—a policeman came for Henry. He was gone for a long time; then he returned in such a stupor that he said nothing. But now it was my turn; at least I’d find out where I stood.

The interrogation room was an unfriendly affair, as could have been expected. I tried to be plucky and demanded to know what I was being charged with.

“Failure to salute the emperor,” was the nonchalant reply. “The punishment is death. There’ll be no need for court proceedings or lawyers; our officers witnessed your crime, and everything’s quite clear.”

“I have the right to make a telephone call!” I exclaimed. Surely, some trace of legal rights had to remain: after all, this was a country that had, until quite recently, been ruled by law.

Apparently, the reformers had overlooked this detail. After conferring with his colleague for a while, the officer reluctantly agreed. But there was neither a phone book nor a computer for finding anybody’s number. And what could I have used them for? I knew nobody in the area except for Louis and Édith, who couldn’t have done anything for me. I also knew that should I ask Oliver to intervene on my behalf, I’d be endangering not just him, but his family and his congregation, as well. The ambassador’s home phone number would be unlisted, for sure.

But I did have a telephone in front of me, and so I did the only sensible thing—I called Laura. I knew she’d still be at home: it was early Monday morning in Australia. She answered on the second ring, sounding sleepy and cute.

“Laura, I’m in trouble!” I blurted out.She was fully alert immediately.“Where are you?”“At the police prefecture in Versailles,” I said. “I didn’t salute the emperor.”“And they’re going to chop off your head, right?” she replied, blissfully unaware of how

concisely she was expressing my predicament.“The punishment is death, darling,” I answered. “Call the Australian ambassador to France,

right away. I love you!” The last three words I only managed to call out from a distance, as the officer took the

handset away from me.“Thirty seconds are up,” he said. “One minute for local calls, thirty seconds for long

distance. Our budget is very tight.”There was nothing else to say, and I was led back to my cell. Henry was kneeling by his

bunk, praying. I felt like doing so myself, but gave up the thought: I didn’t think I had the connection. Then I found that I could make out some of the words Henry was whispering. He was praying for me.

After a while, Henry looked up, and spoke.“Gregory, I’m going to die tomorrow. Take this.”

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He took a worn, pocket-sized New Testament from inside his clothes and handed it to me. The police officers had missed it when they had frisked him.

“Do you think I’ll have some use for it, then?” I queried, doubting that I’d live much longer than Henry.

“You haven’t finished yet,” he said. “My task is completed. I’ve given out hundreds of leaflets during these couple of days, and some people kept them. That’s quite enough. Tomorrow, the guillotine. It was designed to be humane.

“Read it,” he added.It didn’t seem to be the right time for further chatter, and I took Henry’s advice. I read for a

long time, until the light went out. It must have been ten o’clock. Eventually, I fell asleep, restless and scared.

At daybreak, two officers came for Henry. We hugged each other, and I whispered a sad “Good-bye.” A while later, a siren started its “poussez-vous!” outside and disappeared in the distance. Nothing had happened to me so far, but I was desperately upset over Henry’s fate, so totally unjustified.

About an hour later, somebody brought me breakfast. Eventually, I managed to swallow a few morsels, and realized that they were doing me good: after all, I was still alive, and giving up has never been my way. So I finished the food, and waited.

Around nine, or so I thought, I was finally off to somewhere. A constable took me to a different part of the building from the night before. To my surprise, I was shown into the office of the prefect himself. The policeman closed the door and left. The prefect, a man in his sixties, looked up.

“Good morning,” he said in English, with genuine friendliness, and told me to sit down.“Good morning, sir,” I replied, unsure of what was coming my way.“Sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” the prefect continued. “I got the call from my

friend, the ambassador, last night, but in the current situation, I can’t let the staff know that you’re getting special treatment.”

“What treatment, sir?”“Apparently, the EU Secret Police needed more time to figure out how to apply the new law

to non-Europeans who aren’t yet eligible to be marked in their home countries. So you’re still here. Fortunately, your fiancée had the good sense to call the ambassador at his residence. She had got the number from some VIP customer of hers; I understand she’s a travel agent to some very prominent people. The ambassador and I know each other well. Of course he knew that I’d intervene on your behalf. At this stage, official protests would only have made things worse.”

Good old Laura! No doors were closed to her.The prefect continued talking.“I want you out of Paris immediately. I mean immediately. You can’t leave France yet,

however: you’d be stopped at the border. Do you have some place to go?”“No, sir; I know nobody outside the Paris area.”“Never mind,” the prefect continued. “I know where you can go. There’s a place in central

France where you’ll be safe for now. I go there myself every summer. I’ll call the people and tell them to expect you. When things have settled down a bit, get yourself out of France, preferably to the south.”

He made his phone call, then another to the railroads, to book me a seat to Mâcon.“You can pay your ticket with your credit card,” he said. “Credit card transactions are so

rare that they aren’t being routinely monitored like bar code payments are.”

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“What about my luggage?” I asked. “It’s still with my hosts.”“You live in the 20th?” he inquired, which I confirmed. “We have the time to go and pick it

up. You’ll be leaving from Gare de Lyon at noon.”Next thing, he marched me to the front desk, asked for the envelope with my belongings,

and told the officer on duty that he was going to turn the prisoner over to the Paris authorities himself.

“Let them decide what to do with a non-European,” he added, and we left.In the car, the prefect kind of broke down and looked depressed.“Things have gotten really bad,” he said. “I’m unmarked myself, as you might have

guessed. I’m staying on in this job for as long as I can do some good. I wish I could have done something for Mr. Allen, but the matter was taken out of my hands last night before I knew of the arrests. As you can expect in a dictatorship, junior officers are now made to report directly to political personnel, bypassing their superiors. The young Englishman is beyond help: there’s no obligation to inform Britain, and the EU people are eager to get started.”

“I don’t think the British are going to be very pleased,” I ventured.“No, they’re not,” the prefect agreed. “I believe this will be the very thing that makes them

leave the Union, like they’ve been threatening to do for a long time. I’d have liked to send you there, but there’s an ID check at the border now, and you’re in the computer files of the EU Secret Police already.”

We drove through the center of Paris. The prefect knew all the right streets, and said it would be faster than taking the périphérique, the ring road, which often and unpredictably tended to be clogged. I couldn’t help thinking of the personal risk he was taking: he was sure to be under EU Secret Police surveillance, and they could monitor his route via the traffic computer system.

Presently, we came to place de la Concorde, where workers were putting up a platform in a big hurry. TV trucks were lining up, and, held back by ropes, people were jostling for the best view. Behind us, police were blocking off the bridge: the square would soon be filled with spectators. And on the platform stood a guillotine! They were going to execute Henry in public, returning to the barbarism of the French Revolution!

“This is sickening!” I cried out. “Whatever happened to civilization?”“It left us so subtly that nobody noticed,” the prefect answered, deeply disturbed. “I’m

sorry.”

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20. TaizéWhile we continued our drive to pick up my backpack, the prefect let me know that he’d try to remove me from the national database of crime suspects, using the excuse that the EU Secret Police was now responsible for me. Since that agency never gave out any information to national police forces except when requesting specific cooperation, the prefect’s staff in Versailles shouldn’t be unduly alarmed by not getting a confirmation that this was really so.

“But keep a very low profile,” he told me. “It’s almost certain that the media will find out that a detainee has gone missing. Use only public telephones, and only when you have to. Stay within the compound where you’re going as much as possible, at least until Christmas. Then go to Côte d’Azure. Take a cruise to Italy or Spain. Just leave the ship when you’re there and make no fuss. That way you don’t have to cross the border. It isn’t a big matter to the cruise operators if a passenger doesn’t return.”

“Will it be safe to go to those countries?” I asked. “They’re among the core states, too. Won’t I be getting into the same trouble there?”

“Not if you continue and leave the Continent before March. This harsh interpretation of the law is being piloted in France; there’s a specific evaluation period like with all the other bureaucratic projects the EU has conceived of. General implementation in the core states is set for March first, and in the rest of the EU for June first.”

We stopped outside the church, where everything looked peaceful.“I’ll see if I can delete these people, too, from the database of suspects,” the prefect said. “I

have access to it, or at least I did this morning. I’ll have to go along with you.”Inside the gate, Oliver and Roger met us, and their concern was great. The prefect explained

the situation, and gave them the same advice he had given me: lie low. My things were soon packed, and I said good-bye to my friends. Oliver said a prayer for Henry and another for my safety and that of the prefect, and we drove off.

At the station, I bought a ticket to Mâcon with lunch included, and with a connecting bus ride to Taizé, and the prefect took me to the train. He insisted on staying with me until the train left, saying that he could take no chances. I thanked him several times, and asked him to be careful, too. As he left the train, the prefect reminded me that Henry was about to lose his life.

“But, as we know, that way he’ll gain it. Good-bye and take care of yourself.”The ride was as speedy and smooth as my previous experience of the high-speed train when

I came to Paris. I barely got through lunch before I was in Mâcon and had to get off the train. At the station I found a pay phone and called Laura. I told her that I owed her my life, that I loved her, and that I couldn’t wait to hold her again.

When she heard that I was planning to stay in Taizé until Christmas, and then go to Italy or Spain, where it would still be relatively safe for a while, she decided to postpone her visit to Tasmania, and instead use her leave to join me for the trip south. I was thrilled beyond words, but also worried for her. She soon set me straight, saying that I should know by now that she could handle trouble as well as I. Better, in fact, we agreed. I was to call her again before she left, but not unnecessarily. My smartphone had to be off at all times.

A short while later I was on the bus to Taizé. My destination, a religious community by the same name, lay within walking distance of the village. The bus stopped in Cluny and then continued up the valley of the winding river Grosne. Some 22 miles out of Mâcon, we arrived in Taizé, a small farming village on top of a hill amidst more rolling hills all around. A fair number of

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people, mostly young, got off the bus with me, and they all turned out to be going the same way as I, to the Community of Taizé.

Each one was welcomed personally as we arrived in the community, a sprawling group of buildings with a campground where, for the first time, I got to use the tent I had bought in Seoul. In spite of the cold and humid weather, there was a warm spirit of openness and friendliness all over the place, and a degree of loose organization soon became evident. The community was run by a group of brothers, as they called themselves, celibate men who had committed themselves to the community for life. They weren’t literally monks: most of them came from Protestant backgrounds like the late founder, Brother Roger. But there were men there from all denominations, including Catholics.

Visitors who had been there before, or even for just a few days, also acted as hosts and hostesses, making us newcomers feel at home. A huge, boxy, concrete assembly hall, called the Church of Reconciliation, was the center of the place, where everybody gathered several times a day. There was ample opportunity for study and meditation, as well as discussions in small groups; meals were communal. It’s a place where one can endeavor to find oneself spiritually, and since 1957, people from all over the world have been coming there, returning year after year, to celebrate a special kind of togetherness.

My stay was to be longer than the customary week, and my main concern was making myself useful to my hosts. There was work to be done to maintain the buildings, and my offer of pitching in was gratefully accepted.

Taizé had harbored refugees before, including Jews and others fleeing the German occupation of the northern part of France during the Second World War. After the liberation, the brothers had made themselves unpopular among their neighbors by showing compassion on German prisoners of war held at a nearby camp. Nevertheless, they had later formed an agricultural cooperative together with those same neighbors, and the cooperative was still active. Most of the food the community served its members and guests was homegrown.

During the weeks that followed, I spent a lot of time taking part in the spiritual life of the community. The days followed a set routine: the wake-up call was at 7:30, the first communal prayer at 8, breakfast at 9, meetings in small groups at 10, prayer at 12:20, lunch at 1, a meeting and tea at 4:30, dinner at 6:30, and evening prayer at 8. In the church, everybody sang a selection of simple but beautiful chants, mostly in Latin. I found it amazing that all these people from all over the world, most with no musical training whatsoever, could harmonize like a professional choir as soon as they stepped inside the church.

Still, I didn’t feel that I had found the “it,” the true spiritual meaning of what was so clearly a source of the greatest devotion and joy for many others there. I was by no means alone in that situation: a considerable part of the visitors didn’t appear to be very religious people to begin with, nor did they necessarily seem to come to any kind of pervasive faith while they were there. I felt really good about Taizé, though; there was neither dogma nor fanaticism in evidence anywhere, and the compassion those people showed everyone was genuine.

Taizé had been sending small groups of brothers to poor parts of the world for many years, and wherever they went, a pilgrimage of young people turned up to help them relieve fear and despair. Thus, the community had first-hand knowledge of the problems I had learned about through hearsay during my trip. They also had an inside view of everything that happened in the Vatican: Brother Roger had been a personal friend of both John XXIII and John Paul II, and Taizé

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had observers in place covering the current election of a new pope. When the result was announced, I got a full explanation of its significance.

It turned out that Henry Allen’s execution had lost the EU not only Britain, which had immediately ceded from the Union, but also the Vatican. The College of Cardinals had received the news just before it had locked itself up in the Sistine chapel, and in record-breaking time, it had elected its youngest and most radical member pope. Hardly had the white smoke cleared over the chapel before the new pope had published his first encyclical on the World-Wide Web, condemning the rising persecution of believers of every faith, and forbidding Catholics from taking part in the emperor-worship. His conviction was such that he claimed papal infallibility, something the pope has had the right to do since the first Vatican Council in 1869–1870. This wasn’t a claim made lightly: it could only be applied when in the exercise of his office as pastor and teacher of all Christians, the pope defined, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. It was a shrewd thing to do, however, considering the uncertainty of the times, because, according to the Council declaration, such definitions by the Roman pontiff are irreformable: nobody can undo them, neither a successor nor the Church.

Incredibly, the Artes network had done a risky thing that had backfired badly: it had invited the new pope to a question-and-answer session that had been broadcast all over the world, using the complete Imperial setup. Apparently, the propaganda commissioner had thought that he’d be able either to befriend the pope or else to intimidate him into cooperating. But no such luck: for a whole hour, the pope had been saying just what he thought, and the obedient computers had adapted his views into automated answers for millions of callers. This was an official blunder that went down in history; the last time anybody could think of a politician agreeing to anything so stupid was when John Kennedy approved the Cuban emigrant invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

Moreover, to the emperor’s request to be crowned by the pope in St. Peter’s Basilica, the latter had said a resounding “No,” and had proceeded to discipline bishops and priests who had been leaning toward collaboration with the worship peddled by the Artes network.

Taizé was celebrating this news, all the more so as the community’s annual European meeting was to be held in Rome during the coming New Year’s holiday. But there also was a somber undertone, acknowledging the lack of power behind the papal statements, and knowing that the emperor wasn’t one to be easily cowed. The consumer feast all over Europe was continuing, and most people, many Catholics included, gave little heed to the words of the Holy Father.

Christmas was drawing near, and with it my special treat. On Christmas Eve, Laura drove up in a rented car. In addition to her free flights into Paris and out of Rome—Laura and I had decided we’d be going along to the European meeting—she had a complete prepaid package including the train to Mâcon, the car, and fuel coupons, and had thought of every detail like the professional she was. I was happy as a child and couldn’t take my eyes off her.

The tent would have been a most inhospitable place to make Laura live, coming directly out of Sydney’s hot summer. Instead, we moved into El Abioth, one of the community’s multifamily guest houses. As soon as we were installed, Laura, with her usual determination and with me in tow, headed for the workshops. She had done her homework well, and knew all about Taizé and what was for sale there from the Web. Presently, we were viewing the goldsmith’s showcase and trying on rings. Laura found a style she truly liked, and announced that we’d buy two of them, according to local custom. I thought they were beautiful, too.

“I told the ambassador I was your fiancée, to make it sound more urgent. I don’t want to be called a liar, so we’ll get engaged for Christmas!”

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It was one of those situations in which I tend to get a tad mushy, and I was running the risk of being seen as too emotional. But I managed to retain a measure of decorum, and was rewarded with a long kiss.

Much more relaxed, Laura then let me show her the small group meeting rooms and the library. She asked the brother in charge of the library about me and was told that I had been very busy, but that I hadn’t taken enough time to understand the spiritual side of Taizé. Questioned, I told her about my feeling of not fully having caught on to what it was these people had that so filled their souls.

Laura said nothing, but headed for the library shelves. She quickly homed in on a particular section and went straight for a small red paperback. She told the librarian that I’d be borrowing it for the next few days, and handed it to me.

“Here’s another book I’ve been begging you to read,” she said. “Now’s the time. It’s the right kind of book for intellectuals like you.”

The book, authored by a long-dead Church of England priest by the name John Stott, was titled Basic Christianity. It was old and well worn. The librarian expressed his agreement: he couldn’t have found me a better introduction to his faith than this very book.

I read the book during Christmas, and it did explain Christianity to me. It did more than explain: it made me internalize the faith and commit myself to it. Again, I knew how much I had to be grateful to Laura for; I kept thinking of her as my guardian angel. But I knew better than to tell her that, having an inkling that women didn’t like being thought of as angels.

Sharing Christmas with the brothers of Taizé was an experience never to be forgotten. The Church of Reconciliation was full of candles, with young and old alike sitting or kneeling on the carpet: there were no pews in the church. Never had I heard the chants sung more beautifully. Predictably, Laura had brought me presents from Australia, and knowing that I wouldn’t have taken the time or the thought to get her any, she had already found a set of beautiful earthenware dishes in the potter’s shop and had set it aside for me to buy her. Laura was so full of life that it was a challenge just to keep up with her. But I loved every minute of it.

On the day after Christmas, the buses arrived to take a good part of the brothers to Rome. Laura and I packed the car, and were lucky to get a couple of brothers to ride with us; the buses were filling up, as many extra visitors decided to go along. Feeling a bit sad, I said good-bye to Taizé; it had very much become part of me.

The drive through Lyon and Turin was beautiful, with the Alps covered in snow. We didn’t hit any bad weather, and there was no trouble on the border: apparently, the Versailles police prefect had succeeded in deleting me from the files. Soon, we were driving south from Genoa along the seashore, and by evening, we were in Rome. With expert skill, the advance parties had arranged lodging for everyone, and Laura and I were housed with a friendly Italian family.

The next days were filled with activity. We took part in shared celebrations in local churches, visited people who couldn’t get around due to age or illness, and managed to see a good deal of Rome in the process. On New Year’s Eve, all the people taking part in the European meeting assembled in St. Peter’s Square, holding lit candles, mingling with tourists and locals, and handing out candles to them, too. During his midnight Mass, the pope gave a special address in view of the meeting, talking about the gathering forces of darkness and the hope of overcoming. Not a man to mince his words, he bid Christians everywhere to welcome the beginning persecutions: they would set believers apart—in the world but not of the world, as Christ had commanded— and they would cut out the cancers of power hunger, greed, and complacency within the Church hierarchy from among the faithful, the true body of Christ.

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On January 2, the meeting was over, and our friends were getting ready to return to Taizé. Suddenly, as they were boarding the buses, the community’s two resident representatives at the Vatican came hurrying along. To everyone’s surprise, they were leaving Rome, and the news they brought was devastating: the pope was dead!

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21. Rome, ItalyTo say that we were thunderstruck would be putting it mildly. We felt we had lost our protection, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

“What did he die of?” was everybody’s first question. We had seen him not two days earlier; he had been in vigorous health, a strong man who was known to work out regularly and who hadn’t been sick a day of his life.

“A brief but serious illness,” one of the brothers said. “That was the official word. Whatever it was, it must have killed him within a few hours. He was being laid out in state when we left.”

Laura expressed the fearful thought that had been growing on me, and probably on others, as well.

“He was poisoned, then. It’s been done before in the Vatican. What a mean and cowardly thing to do!”

“We felt it was time for us to leave,” the brother continued. “The place is in an uproar. Ever since the pope turned down the emperor’s request to be crowned, those who always wanted to compromise have been plotting some kind of rebellion. They were afraid for their own skin and weak in their faith. This is how they mean to gain the emperor’s favor and be allowed to continue living in peace.”

In spite of what had happened, we had to part from our friends. Rome was peaceful enough and we didn’t feel threatened in any way, so Laura and I turned to what we had planned for the day: sightseeing. We had no guidebook, but Laura didn’t have the patience for such constraints anyway; we just followed her intuition.

At the Spanish Steps, Laura had a question and thought she was turning to me to ask it. Instead, before she realized it wasn’t me, she had put it to a passerby who actually knew the answer, because he was a local. After much laughing and apologizing, she got us into a spirited discussion with the gentleman, eventually remembered to introduce us, and, in no time at all, had him totally dazzled and eager to show us all the sights of Rome. This most pleasant young man introduced himself as Dottore Lorenzo Benedetto, a lawyer and, as it turned out, a true connoisseur of the beauty of his city.

All in its turn, however, and first things first. Lorenzo took us to a cozy little cafe in one of the old streets. There he treated us to coffee and cake, talking about the history of the buildings we had made a note of, the architects and artists who had created them, and their current use. Outside once more, he kept taking us through lanes and porticos, pointing out artistic details and beautiful spots. I wanted to know how one goes about acquiring such knowledge of a city; Lorenzo replied that it took a special interest, dedication, and a systematic approach of finding a new route every time you walked to a familiar place.

Eventually, Lorenzo apologized and said that he had to return to his law office, but insisted that we get together again. He gave us his card and told us to call him any time, should we need anything.

Laura wanted to see a shopping mall with one of the new entertainment centers, and after lunch we set off in the car to the newest one in the surroundings, following instructions Lorenzo had given us. Trusting that we wouldn’t be breaking any laws, as Lorenzo had assured us, we parked, went inside, and found the center, again under the main cupola.

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Every few minutes between commercials and programs, there was some kind of special announcement, and I asked a man standing there what it was all about. He answered that the emperor was to speak at three o’clock, and that it was going to be something very important. Laura remembered my description of the throng of people in Vélizy II during the emperor’s speech, and said that she was too claustrophobic to be there when it happened. Still, she wanted me to hear it, so we’d know what was going on, and said she’d go and have her hair done in a beauty shop we had passed earlier. It had a credit card decal on the door, so we knew she could pay there. We agreed that I’d come and pick her up, and so I stayed on.

The man who had helped me continued to be talkative, and introduced himself as Vittorio. When he found out that I wouldn’t be able to have a sound channel of my own, he offered to lend me his hand. He understood English very well, and suggested that we’d ask the center for the English version of the speech. Any one of the EU languages could always be had anywhere in the Union, and English wasn’t about to be abolished as long as Ireland remained in the EU.

The clock struck three, and suddenly, the area under the cupola was crowded to saturation. The sound system worked out as expected, and the emperor’s speech began. The setting was a magnificent room with gilded walls, and the emperor was seated between two immense winged lions, also covered in gold. This time, he spent little time on pleasantries: the steel was showing through his velvet gloves. He didn’t try to conceal his satisfaction over the demise of the rebellious pope, and got the viewers cheering when he condemned the threat to European unity the pope had posed, and proclaimed good riddance.

The crowd was getting excited and Vittorio was clearly regretting that he wasn’t hearing the emperor in his own language. But he was a gentleman and didn’t want to deprive me of the favor he had planned for me. I was grateful, because I expected the next part of the address to be the central message. Vittorio would hear it over and over again, until it would become part of him.

The emperor now left the matter of the pope: he was dead and of no consequence. Instead, he turned against everything the pope and the Church had stood for.

“Who has been promising you peace on earth for thousands of years? God! And has he provided peace? No! Since time began, people have been killing each other in the name of God! As I’m speaking, Muslims are killing Christians, Jews are killing Muslims, Protestants are killing Catholics; all in the name of God!

“Who was it that promised a land flowing with milk and honey and then turned around and gave you hardship and famine instead? God! Who told you to turn the other cheek when somebody assaulted you? To give the mugger your coat, too, after he’d taken your money? God and his clown Jesus Christ! Is that what you want?

“Who’s leading the rebellion against the European Union and its Presidency, persuading ignorant people to refuse our common identifier that makes it possible, once and for all, to stamp out all graft and crime? Who are the foremost protectors of fraud, corruption, terrorism, and tax evasion? God and his iniquitous lackeys, the priests!

“Listen: Your enemy isn’t the neighbor who has a different skin color from yours. You both wear the same identifier; you belong on the same side! The enemy isn’t the criminal who breaks into your house. He’s the victim of the wrong circumstances and the old, imperfect society. When he’s marked, like you and your possessions are marked, crime becomes impossible and his temptation disappears.

“The enemy isn’t another nation: when every nation obeys the same emperor, they’re all brothers. The enemy is God! He’s preventing us from having the society we want. His system is

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bankrupt: he hasn’t given us peace, he hasn’t given us affluence, he hasn’t provided order and security.

“So we’re going to have our own religion! We’re going to honor the things that matter to us: peace and prosperity, law and order. You’ve seen for yourselves who can deliver these things. You know that your emperor can make them happen! But your emperor can act only if you are united and determined to let nothing and no one detract you.

“That means that we’ll have only one religion. As of today, I’m replacing all the divisive nonsense that goes under the name of religion with the simple act of honoring your emperor. You’ll be gathering like this, holding your right hands high, receiving truth and guidance from me personally. I speak to each of you individually. I hear everyone. Tell me your concerns, and I’ll answer you!”

As the crowd burst out in supplication, Vittorio had his say in Italian, which automatically changed the language of his sound channel. Again, I watched with utter amazement how grown-up people firmly believed that they were all having a personal conversation with the same emperor at once. They’d have it easy to worship him: they actually thought he was doing it through some miraculous power.

I suppose this could be seen as the ultimate achievement of the systematic dumbing down of public education that started in the United States in the 1950s, and then spread via Britain and Sweden to the rest of the industrialized world, until, in our times, regular people everywhere learn only consumer skills plus the necessary minimum they need to do their jobs. It was no accident that already in 1980, functional illiteracy in the US was 35% and rising: if you can’t read, you have no other source of information than commercial radio and TV, controlled by big business, and your vote will always be pro-business. Talking and listening machines, even talking newspapers and reading telephones, were hurriedly developed and perfected to ensure that the illiterate were comfortable with their deprivation. When the Internet became accessible to a large segment of the population, it, too, was rapidly commercialized to flood it with consumer propaganda and to hide its last vestiges of independent thought from all except those who knew how to find them anyway.

For me, there was nothing more to hear, save the excitement of the people and the murmur of the loudspeakers overhead. Desperate for some air and elbowroom, I moved away toward the nearest entrance, from where I had a view over the space under the cupola. It wasn’t yet time to go and pick Laura up at the beauty shop.

As I leaned against the glass pane I realized I was standing next to a man dressed in black, tight-fitting clothes, who looked distinctly familiar.

I couldn’t help staring at him for a moment, and, apparently thinking I had already recognized him, the man asked me in good English, “Don’t you like the speech?”

Something told me to be diplomatic, so, while trying to think of where I had seen this man before, I answered that I couldn’t follow it because I didn’t have an identifier.

His eyes turned to steel as he snapped, “Why not?”Then I knew who he was. This was the little man I had seen trying out Charlemagne’s

throne in Aachen. This was the emperor himself.“I’m Australian,” I replied. “We haven’t got it yet.”I tried hard to control my fear and agitation—here was the man who had very nearly had me

killed less than two months earlier, and who, most likely, had just had the pope murdered. I realized now why I hadn’t recognized him right away: he was only about five foot four, while the image I had been watching showed him as closer to six feet tall. It was very skillfully done with computer

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graphics: not just a magnified image, but stretched, so he looked naturally taller than he was, and always taller than those around him.

Tyrants, I remembered being told, have always been short men, from Nero and Caligula right down to Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin. And just as regularly, they’ve had their statues made bigger than life. Antero, my friend in Finland, had told me about a Finnish politician of the last century who had met Lenin in life, and knew him as a very short man. When encountering a supposedly life-size statue of Lenin during a 1939 visit to the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow, this politician had remarked on how much taller the statue was than its late model. He, and his country, subsequently found themselves in rather poor standing with Stalin.

When he heard my excuse, the emperor’s expression changed again. Instantly, he was condescending, nearly friendly.

“I understand. You’ll introduce the mark later this year, right?”“So I hear,” I said. “I’ve been away for eight months, and I don’t get much news from

home.”“You’ll be able to get the mark at your embassy. You must take it as soon as it becomes

available to you. Your life would be very hard without it. Soon, it’ll be impossible to live in Europe without an identifier. And everyone must demonstrate their unity and loyalty by listening to the official messages like the people are doing over there, in their homes and in public places. You don’t want to miss out on the great future of Europe while you’re here.”

“I did get to hear part of your speech just now,” I remarked. “I borrowed somebody’s hand.”

“How did you like it?” the emperor asked. “It’s important for me to know how I come across.”

My diplomatic skills, if ever I had owned any, were nowhere to be found. I felt lonely and frightened.

“It was very impressive,” I said, truthfully. “But your words scare me. It all sounds just like what I’ve read about Hitler...”

“Hitler was a fool!” the emperor sneered. “He had some good ideas, but he wasted his opportunities. This world hasn’t had competent leadership for two thousand years. Napoleon, Mussolini, Stalin: clumsy idiots, all of them. I’ll tell you who was my kind of man: Augustus Caesar. He took what he wanted, he gave peace to the world, and the people worshipped him as a god. He deserved to be worshipped: he was the source of everything good. That’s the kind of leader the world needs, and now it has one again.”

I felt a weird mixture of revulsion and admiration, like when you watch a beautiful but lethally dangerous animal.

“You really believe in yourself,” I observed.“I know you,” the emperor said, his eyes turning steely again. “You asked me in France if

I’d ever stop, didn’t you?”“Yes, I did,” I answered. “But I thought I was talking to a computer.”“You were talking to me. I happened to be looking at a zoom-in on you at the time. My

assistants pick out singular viewers along with a holographic composite of audiences in different locations, so I can see how both random individuals and various nationalities react. I didn’t recognize you immediately just now, because I didn’t know then that you were speaking in English. No time for details, you understand?”

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“I very nearly got executed afterwards,” it slipped out of me. “I lost my borrowed sound channel, and didn’t do what everybody was supposed to do. So the French police took me and almost had me guillotined.”

“You were released through my personal intervention,” the emperor answered. “An example had to be set, so your English friend couldn’t be spared. But you had shown courage that had to be rewarded.”

I knew this to be untrue. Laura and the Versailles police prefect had rescued me, not the emperor. This was an incredible situation: here was the most powerful man in the world, drawing on a perfect memory but improvising a blatant lie only to ingratiate himself with a helpless stranger. I was lost for words, but was saved by the crowd, whose cheering just then rose to a roar over some particularly hard-hitting statement.

“It’s an amazing system,” I said. “Not only do people see you lifelike and experience direct contact with you, but you don’t even have to be present in a studio. Here you stand watching them from behind while they think they’re talking to you.”

“This speech is prerecorded, of course; we did it this morning in Jerusalem. But all the interaction is handled by the computers. When we do a live program, along with the visual feedback, I get continuous statistics showing the dominant mood of the viewers and the computer’s suggestions for my next argument as I go along. Europe has many nations and I must appeal to them all. There’s no room for trial and error.”

It struck me that this man, in spite of his short stature and slight accent, didn’t look typically Mediterranean. He didn’t look typically anything, other than European. As a leader of such a diverse continent, he certainly had the right appearance. And then I saw the faint scars of plastic surgery at the edges of his face. He wasn’t a man to leave anything that important to chance.

“I didn’t think the setting looked like your regular studio, not by a long shot,” I ventured. “What was the significance of doing it precisely in Jerusalem?”

“That was the new Temple! The logical place to proclaim yourself a god—don’t you agree? Besides, there are a lot of people in Israel that think I’m the Messiah, and who am I to deny that and disappoint them?”

For the first time I saw the emperor laugh: an evil, dirty smirk and chuckle.“Your computers must be something special,” I suggested. “I’ve seen a TV studio recently,

but they did trivial things compared to this. Games and commercials, just to collect marketing information.”

There was pride in the emperor’s demeanor now. “Well, yes, we’re not a commercial operation; we’re the Presidency of the European Union.

I have my commissioner for propaganda, my right-hand man, as you say. He makes all this possible. Without a skilled human at the helm, computers are worth nothing. Then I have the three Sixes: the six best computer scientists in the world, six of the fastest supercomputers ever built, and six giant communication satellites in a geosynchronous orbit around the earth. Six is my lucky number.”

“And then there are computers in every country and every home, too,” I added, feeling that I had to show off some of my own knowledge at this point.

But the emperor brushed my comment aside.“They only handle the simple mechanics of translation and virtual interaction. The

important work is done by those six men, my closest associates. We do everything together—they, the propaganda commissioner, and I—we live together, eat together, worship together.”

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“Worship?” I asked. “You’ve just told the world to worship you—do you need to worship something, too?”

“We worship the Powerful One,” the emperor answered, almost reverently. “But you wouldn’t understand. It’s not what you’re used to.”

“Satan, you mean?” I replied.“So you know,” he said. “Do you worship him, too?”“No.”The emperor nodded and said, “You’ll understand one day. Satan gives us power. Power is

what’s needed in this world.”Yes, I knew I was facing power and determination.“Why are you telling me these things?” I asked miserably.“Because you want to know,” came the nonchalant reply. “Look at those people—they

don’t care to understand what’s going on. They want to believe it’s a miracle. They’re like sheep, so they’ll find themselves a shepherd. Fortunately, they’ve got an emperor who knows what’s good for them.”

The roar of the crowd now rose to a crescendo, marking the end of the address. The emperor quickly excused himself and headed for the exit, where he was joined by four of the uniformed security men who had been standing around, casually watching everything including me. His incognito excursions certainly were well prepared: even his bodyguards dressed for the occasion so as to blend in and draw no attention to themselves.

Vittorio had seen me and approached in a state of wild elation.“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he exclaimed with the utmost pride. “I’ve just had

a personal talk with the emperor!” I felt sick.

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22. The CooperativeLaura was done at the beauty shop, and her long, dark hair shone with a deep, reddish glow. When I had told her of the speech and my encounter with the emperor, she said that this wasn’t the end of it: there’d be more coming. Wandering through the mall, we came upon an appliance store, and went inside to watch Cable News Network. The staff were understanding, and quickly gave up trying to sell us the latest model entertainment center.

Things were happening all the time, and CNN hardly had a need for repeating old news. The office of the propaganda commissioner had taken over the Holy See: word had got out that the pope’s death might have been homicide, and the EU Secret Police had arrested the entire staff and all the visiting cardinals and their assistants for questioning. The College of Cardinals being unavailable to hold a new election, the commissioner for propaganda had assumed the pope’s position and responsibilities. He began his inaugural speech with a sardonic sop to Canon Law, boldly claiming that he had been led by the Holy Spirit to become pope. The rest of his address mirrored the emperor’s recent statements: Catholics were now part of the worldwide solidarity movement for peace and prosperity, honoring the emperor as humanity’s paramount symbol of unity.

The new pope’s first official act had been to crown the emperor in St. Peter’s, during a private ceremony early in the morning.

In Japan, the Great Restoration of classical Shintoism was now complete, with the emperor—the European one—as the ritual head of both state and religion, and all other religious systems banned. A national committee had been working hard to align existing Buddhist and Shinto rituals; since the Japanese had long used each for different purposes, the task had been mostly political, and less a doctrinal matter. The nation’s fear of the many doomsday cults had made the restoration relatively easy to get through Parliament. The cults, of course, simply would have gone back underground. The real victims of the restoration were the various minor religions, including Islam and Christianity, which were now outlawed.

The citizens of Russia and China—what remained of them—had thrown off the yokes of their militaristic, secular governments and restored their Imperial traditions, going toward a bright future of rebuilding and unity. In a break with Britain, the spoilsport, most countries of the Commonwealth were celebrating the return to Empire. And so on.

In Israel, a couple of days earlier, a crowd of animal rights activists from all over the world had stormed the Jerusalem Temple, determined to stop the massacre of innocent sacrificial animals. In the ensuing clashes with Israeli police, several EU citizens had been killed or injured, and Eurofor, the EU Rapid Reaction Forces, had intervened. Conveniently, a powerful amphibian detachment of Eurofor had been in the area: the emperor had sent it to threaten Egypt over her failure to live up to the peace agreement from four years earlier, but had found reason to change his mind when the US Sixth Fleet had steamed in to cool things down.

In the interest of peace and justice for Israel as well as to prevent the wastage of precious food resources, the EU—by virtue of having made the rebuilding of the Temple possible in the first place—had now imposed a ban on further Temple sacrifices that Israel, an associate EU member, had been forced to respect. However, in response to appeals from his many supporters in Israel, the emperor had decided to give today’s crucial speech there, in the innermost part of the Temple, the Holiest of Holies, which was henceforth to be open to the public, in the name of equality for all

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Jews. Traditionally, only the High Priest had been allowed to enter the Holiest of Holies, and only once a year, on the Day of Atonement.

Further, to maintain the tradition of Temple worship, the European Union had donated a jumbo-sized entertainment center, the first of its kind, to Israel, and had had it installed in the Holy Place, the large anteroom of the Temple, where hundreds of people could now come together to honor the emperor. The propaganda commissioner had stayed behind in Jerusalem, and was seen inaugurating the new entertainment center. Knowing what to look for, I could see that the first program shown was the recording of the emperor’s address.

As an aside, CNN reported on a sudden and totally inexplicable mass exodus of thousands of residents of Jerusalem and its environs, heading up into the hills that were still largely uninhabited since the devastation of the Temple war four years ago. People were simply jumping into their cars, commandeering buses, and taking off on scooters, bicycles, and mules, in the middle of winter, without stopping for even the most basic supplies. The Red Cross was hurrying behind with tents and blankets, while authorities and reporters were trying to figure out what had befallen these terribly misguided people. Nothing coherent was yet to be made of it, but someone had mumbled over their shoulder to go and read the Book.

Returning to the Temple grounds, we were shown the latest nuisance, two shoddy-looking deviants dressed in jute robes and peddling some kind of message in what seemed to be ancient Hebrew. Having appeared out of nowhere, they were getting in the way of the official departure speech of the commissioner for propaganda, and security personnel were trying to shove them aside. The operation was going poorly, however: it seemed the two agitators were carrying hidden flamethrowers. For the present, the police were retreating, and the commissioner was seen quietly disappearing to his helicopter.

CNN now shifted its attention elsewhere: there had been a serious earthquake in California. The aftershocks were still going on. Rescue efforts were underway, but fires were raging, and the destruction was widespread.

Laura and I had seen and heard enough and left the store. There was a storm coming, and we decided to stay on and have dinner. Soon a violent thunderstorm was roaring overhead, and the rain turned into hail. Fortunately, our car was parked in a covered garage: the hailstones were heavy enough to shatter panes in the skylights of the mall. We got back to our lodging in Rome late at night after the main roads had been cleared, and went to bed, exhausted.

Morning came, strangely quiet. It was a bright and beautiful winter day, and we decided to go and see the Forum Romanum. See it we did, from a suitable distance to get a general impression. Then, before we got any closer, Laura stopped and stared at a young woman walking in the opposite direction.

“Emy!” she cried, and the two of them fell into each other’s arms.Emy was rather tall, about five foot nine, with an athletic look. She had long, ash blond

hair, and was dressed in jeans, Blundstone boots, and a warm jacket. Soon, Laura remembered that she now had a fiancé, and introduced us.

“Emy is my special friend from Sydney,” she told me. “It’s a couple of years since I saw her; she just disappeared. What have you been doing all this time, Emy?”

Emy seemed to be about to reply, but all of a sudden it was my turn to have her in my arms. She held me tight and buried her face against my shoulder for a good while. I was getting quite used to the fact that there never was a dull moment around Laura, and since she didn’t seem to mind, I decided to enjoy the hug while it lasted.

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“Is she done?” Emy asked.Laura looked behind us and said, “Yes.”Emy stepped back and was about to continue the conversation, but I interrupted her.“Is that it? I know I’m tall and, who knows, perhaps even somewhat handsome, but there’s

got to be some other explanation to such a sensuous embrace from a beautiful woman I hardly know!”

“Oh yes, you’re good-looking alright,” Emy chuckled. “But I just wanted to hide my face from that tourist’s camera. She was about to take a snapshot in our direction. Every photo taken with a digital camera or a smartphone is tagged with time, date, and location, and as soon as the image hits the Internet, all the cloud servers and photo sharing sites apply automated face recognition and send the identity of every person in the picture to the NSA in Maryland, along with the time and the place.

“I just try to stay out of that system—not because I have anything to hide, but because I value my privacy.”

“What about all the surveillance cameras, then?” I inquired.“They’re not such a problem,” Emy said. “Europe still has privacy laws, and the footage

from those cameras stays here. It’s all these naïve regular people with cameras and smartphones that provide the NSA with practically real-time tracking of every human being. It so happens that most photo sharing sites and cloud storage providers are American companies, and they have no choice but to act as front-ends for the NSA. And the worldwide face database is American-owned, as well.”

“Soon, you’ll need to be a mind-reader,” I remarked. “The next generation of augmented reality glasses will be contact lenses, and they won’t just overlay Web information over what the wearer is looking at. Although it isn’t advertised, their cameras and microphones, hidden in jewelry and amulets, will upload everything the wearer sees, hears, and says to the Internet: lock, stock, and barrel. Filtering this jabber for faces, contraband, and key words takes place in the cloud, using free cycles on all available computers, and the NSA will know what it wants to know about everyone except true hermits. You’ll have to hide from everybody, as you can’t tell who wears them.”

Emy gave me a look that could have killed a feebler man.“And what about always-on-line, talking toys that listen to everything in the home and,

when there are no adults around, question the children about their parents’ doings and opinions?” Laura asked.

Emy may have felt a bit cornered then. “I haven’t got children,” she said defiantly.Laura still wanted an answer. “Anyway, you were saying…” “I have Italian ancestry, as you know,” Emy replied. “I came to Rome on a scholarship to

study archaeology, and soon found that there were lots of people here who wanted to leave the cities and their consumer lifestyles, but couldn’t afford to buy the land. Back home, I know several Italian families who still own land here. So I asked my partner, who had stayed in Sydney, to go and talk to the families with land, and persuade them to lease their farms to cooperatives that the people here were willing to form.

“In the end, it’s worked out very well. Most of the land was leased at no charge, or for only nominal rent, and there are now many communities out in the countryside, where people live on the land and trade within the LETSystem. My partner kept going to the Italian clubs around Australia, finding more land as fast as I could pass it on. Right now, I’d have enough people for one more cooperative, and I have the farm for it, too, but I can’t get ahead, because the neighbors, who are

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relatives of the owners, are using the land and won’t give it up. The owners are old and can’t do anything from Australia, and I’d need a lawyer here to sort the matter out. But I don’t know any lawyers, and I can’t just walk into a law office at random: this whole thing is getting rather sensitive these days.”

“You’ve run into the right people, then!” I began, and Laura told Emy of our acquaintance from the day before, Lorenzo Benedetto. A little later, the three of us were sitting in Lorenzo’s waiting room, and now his previous client was leaving and Lorenzo came out.

He was overjoyed to see us, and immediately promised to help Emy out; he would hear no talk of a fee. It was only 8 PM in Sydney, and he asked Emy to call the owners of the farm, so we could get started. Soon, Lorenzo was talking to them in Italian, sorting out all the details of what the relatives were doing, and getting a confirmation that the owners were more than willing to help Emy’s friends. Lorenzo obtained the name and fax number of the owners’ solicitor in Sydney—also a descendant of Italian immigrants—whom he’d ask to convey the necessary power of attorney, and got the names of everybody involved, as well as detailed driving instructions.

Having told his secretary what to write to the Sydney solicitor, Lorenzo then asked all of us to come along; we’d be driving out to inspect the farm and serve a preliminary notice on the neighbors. We drove east, taking the autostrada to Popoli, where we arrived in time for lunch. To make up for not having stopped for any sights along the way, Lorenzo took us to the fourteenth-century Taverna Ducale, a combined house-and-shop, looking very authentic and adorned with coats-of-arms and amusing bas-reliefs. There we had a delicious lunch, after which we continued south and east, now on narrow mountain roads. On both sides, snow-covered peaks rose into the blue sky. We passed through Sulmona, the birthplace of the classical Latin poet Ovid, and continued south. Somewhat later, we turned left and were now driving north and east. Eventually, we took a right turn, and crossed a river where a small farming village lay nestled between a lake and the mountains.

We found the home of the people we were seeking, and Lorenzo introduced himself and the rest of us. If I had thought that he’d be strong-arming these people into giving Emy what she wanted, I couldn’t have been more in the wrong. He was all smiles, bringing them regards from their relatives in Australia, having Emy tell all about how they and their children and grandchildren were doing, and complimenting our hosts on looking after their land and keeping it from going fallow. However, there was no mistaking that he was an avvocato from Rome, and that he was making them “an offer they could not refuse.” But all the while, he and Emy kept describing how the cooperative would bring new commerce to the village, what wonderful people would be coming, and how everything had been approved by the owners. In the end, there was no need for formalities: it was winter and the neighbors had no harvests to gather. The changeover would be clean-cut and painless.

We went over to the other farm and found it well tended. The buildings would need repairing, as nobody had lived in them for a couple of generations, but that wasn’t a problem—the members of the cooperative were expecting to have to do such work. They’d need to build more dwellings, anyway. The neighbors would begin mending fences and rounding up their goats and sheep onto their own land. Our business finished, we thanked our hosts, and got ready to return to Rome.

Lorenzo promised to take care of the lease and see that everything went smoothly. We got back to the city with no mishaps, and thanked him for his help.

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Emy invited Laura and me to her small apartment. It had a rare treasure, a gas range provided in full working order by the landlord, who was also the proprietor of the restaurant downstairs. This was in flagrant breach of the city fire code—who knows what number of palms had had to be greased in order to leave a gas line running up from the restaurant, where gas cooking was still permitted, if you could prove that the theme of the establishment was rustic enough to require cooking on the premises. Apartment dwellers, like all consumers, were supposed to eat commercially supplied foods only, and needed nothing more hazardous than an alimentabot, or, with special permission granted only on health grounds, a microwave oven, an espresso maker, a toaster, and a hot dog grill at the most.

I felt a joyful sense of pride and security, watching the two young women cook like professional chefs: one taught by her mother, the other by her grandmother. This in an age when only old people knew that anybody could prepare food, assuming that you had the skills and could get hold of the utensils and the raw materials. The young generation had never had home economics at school: such courses, deemed costly and out of touch, had been replaced with Internet sessions where students were advised to watch advertisements and product promotion videos. Industry fashion consultants had taken over every household-oriented program on TV, and cookbooks no longer existed in bookshops and libraries.

The meal was vegetarian, made from fresh produce delivered to Emy by grateful cooperative members. To my musings on the sheer import of the situation, Emy responded with a discourse on freedoms lost.

“Isn’t it amazing how people accept it when the propaganda calls bondage to business freedom? Doing something for yourself is weird, suspect; buying everything ready-made and having things done for you is cool. I spent some time with friends in suburbia and cut up a fallen tree for firewood; the neighbor’s girls brought in their friends to see ‘the blonde who chops wood’. The only freedom we have left is the freedom to spend.

“In the early Soviet Union, there was a serious discussion on whether it should be legal for a comrade to bend down on the forest path and pick berries to eat, or whether former commons such as berries and mushrooms should be harvested by state-employed workers, to be distributed to the people according to Marxist principles, independently of private initiative. Today, we have solved that dilemma like good Communists: fashion dictates that nobody has any survival skills, and the establishment sells us the berries that we don’t want to pick.”

Our candlelight meal was as enjoyable as watching it being prepared. We talked the happenings of the past days over, and made plans for the near future. Emy said she was finished with what she had wanted to do in Italy: her thesis had been accepted and she had helped establish her last cooperative. If more people turned up, they could always join one of the existing cooperatives.

“So where are you going now?” I asked Emy.“I plan to go and see my relatives in Sicily, and then I’ll go home,” she answered. “I want

to be out of here before March first.”I knew very well why.“So do I!” “Then you two should stick together!” Laura said. “I’ll be leaving the day after tomorrow,

but Gregory wants to continue his trip around the world. If you’re looking after him, Emy, I’ll know he’s in good hands for a while, and I won’t have to worry.”

I was a little taken aback, but not Emy.

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“Gladly, Laura,” she said. “We’ll drive down in my car, and I’ll look all the more respectable for traveling with a gentleman!”

I must have looked rather dumb, because Laura burst out laughing at me.“Don’t be stupid, Gregory! I’m not worried that Emy’s going to take you away from me.

Emy is gay; she has no use for you! I couldn’t be jealous of my best friend, anyway!” And so it was settled. The next day, Laura and I finally got in a full day of touring Rome,

while Emy was wrapping up the business of the cooperative. Then came the day when Laura’s flight back to Sydney was to leave, and Emy came with us out to the airport, where Laura returned the car. Lorenzo was waiting at the departure gate, and gave us an account of his decisions: he was going to close down his law office and join the cooperative he had helped set up. He was a devout Catholic, and had drawn the line when he had seen the propaganda commissioner usurp the papacy. Lorenzo was a bachelor and had only his aging mother to take care of; she would join him and help out as well as she could. And his secretary would go, too: out of a job, and just as fed up with power politics as her boss, she hadn’t hesitated to ask if she could come along.

So Laura went off to her plane, and we were both swallowing hard. But she kept a brave face and walked quickly down the walkway: she didn’t like long farewells.

Back in Rome, Emy and Lorenzo proceeded to plan our trip to Palermo. Between them, they knew enough places along the way where we’d find friends and be able to pay for food and fuel with the means at our disposal, our credit cards and our LETSystem cards and vouchers. The ferry from Reggio to Messina had to be paid for, too; Lorenzo quickly found a travel agency that accepted my Travelers Charge card. By evening, all was settled, and Lorenzo took us out to dinner.

Laura and I had thanked our kind hosts and left their home that morning, taking my backpack to Emy’s apartment where I was to spend the night on the couch. After leaving Lorenzo and wishing him well, Emy and I sat up for a couple of hours, discussing the way of the world. Eventually, the matter of Emy being gay came up.

“I hope I’ll live to see the day when we’re considered a variation, not an aberration,” Emy sighed.

“A variation in brain structure, mostly,” I agreed. “Take Laura and me, now. She multitasks and thinks laterally. Me, I think within the box and focus on one task at a time. I get tense and irritated unless I can finish that task without interruptions. Maybe I’m working on a trellis in the garden while she’s already talking about a stone wall. So I go and fetch a tool, and she tells me I could have brought a few stones while I went there empty-handed. Between us, we get amazing things done. But all her teaching about doing several jobs at once, in fits and spurts to save steps, goes in one ear and out the other, because my brain just doesn’t work that way.

“Sexual orientation would seem to be a similar variation: it takes no more brain differences than that to shape a life in a way you can do nothing about. Yet nobody treats lateral thinkers like outcasts because they’re different from those with a one-track mind.”

“Rarely has anything united those who thrive on hate like hating gays does,” Emy mused. “Religion shapes culture; culture shapes identity. People are mindless sheep who want to be told what to think, what to feel. Their leaders—be they cultural, political, or religious—tell them to hate us. The leaders need enemies to justify the existence of their organizations.”

“No enemies, no revenue,” I confirmed. “That’s quoting my mentor Mikio somewhat liberally. The good news, now, is that over time, the Religious Right has lost every one of its wars. They lost the war against Jesus and his followers: they put him to death, but within a few generations, the majority of people in the known world were Christians. They lost their medieval

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war against the midwives: in spite of Eve’s punishment in Gen. 3:16, it’s legal to relieve the pain of childbirth, and women no longer get killed for knowing herb lore. They lost the war against the reformers and the Enlightenment: anybody is allowed to read the Bible, and we don’t get burned at the stake for saying that the earth orbits the sun. They lost the war against the abolition of slavery: no matter how much Noah cussed, the children of Canaan have equal rights with those of Shem and Japheth.

“They lost the war against the left-handed: people with dominant right brain hemispheres no longer get cursed as devil’s spawn, and they’re allowed to favor their left hands so they avoid stuttering and other speech impediments. The Religious Right lost the war against women: in most civilized countries, women have the vote and the right to make their own decisions, and are approaching equal pay and equal rights. And just the same, their war against gays is lost: homophobia is a dirty word, and, as the years pass, equal civil rights are granted in more and more countries.”

“So they’re all the same crowd, in a sense,” Emy said. “Businessmen of the high moral ground.”

“The Religious Right is always the same,” I confirmed. ”They make their money by controlling the minds of the public. They’re incapable of any kind of innovation, so where the rest of humanity improves its lot by making progress, these conservatives perceive change as nothing but a threat to their established cash flows. And it’s intrinsic to their business model that they always have to have an enemy to demonize. With witches and goblins now things of the past, in our time it’s sexual minorities.”

“I belonged to a church when I came out,” Emy observed. “I thought I’d better tell them, too. They were very understanding: naturally, I could stay in the church; I just had to be celibate. If I were to have lesbian sex, I’d be sinning, and sinners, of course, weren’t welcome there. So I left.”

“While they’re free to fornicate as much as they want, because they do it the majority way,” I said sarcastically. “I actually know a Bible verse that applies to your church: ‘For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.’ Pharisees, that is.”

“So I’m a sinner then,” Emy concluded with a shrug. “I used to think that you sinned if you went against your conscience. But it seems that those who are holier than I will never agree with that.”

I found myself thinking back on what I had learned in France. “Well, maybe that isn’t so bad after all. As Christians, we should take comfort in the fact that Jesus is looking specifically for sinners. He wants people who have been there and done that—maybe their background makes them more useful for certain tasks than those who have walked the strait and narrow all their lives. Folks who thought themselves good enough to pass judgment on others he turned his back on, saying that the healthy don’t need a doctor. So even if you’re giving up on the Religious Right, you needn’t give up on Christ.”

“This was a good talk,” Emy said. “I can easily see that in a different society, I’d have been married off young and would now be busy having kids. I’d never have discovered my true preference, and wouldn’t have had a clue as to why I might not have been all that turned on by my husband.

“Maybe I’d have been happier that way, maybe not. This is the way I am now, and my greatest satisfaction is that my parents accept me for what I am.”

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23. VesuviusAfter a rather uncomfortable night, all the more restless because of dream after dream about an elusive Laura who always seemed to be just out of reach, disappearing into a crowd of admirers, I packed my backpack and made ready to leave the Eternal City behind. Emy was doing the same. Remarkably, after two years of living and studying in Rome, she was able to fit all her belongings into the same rucksack she had brought with her. She admitted to having mailed a few books and souvenirs home, however. Like me, Emy also carried some tools, a tent, a foam pad, and a sleeping bag, and we felt quite prepared for any situation we might encounter.

One small formality remained: before leaving Rome, Emy drove her little Fiat to the office of the school of archaeology in the Città Universitaria and ran inside to pick up her certificate. She wasn’t staying for the graduation ceremony, but she did want that piece of paper for her trouble. Returning to the car, she slipped in behind the wheel and threw a plain brown envelope onto my lap.

“If you want to look at it, Gregory, now’s your chance! Over there is the post office, and in a minute I’ll be mailing it home to my mom!”

It was an incredibly decorative diploma, all in Italian, which I couldn’t read, but the message was plain: my friend had a bona fide Ph.D. in archaeology. I expressed my congratulations, and got her all fuming and sputtering by calling her “Doc.”

“I may be a dottoressa here in Italy,” Emy said, “but an Italian Ph.D. is no different from your MES from Sydney. So cut it out, will you?”

At the post office, Emy parked the car under a concrete roof, and the location system went into local mode, complaining of loss of the Galileo signal and too many echoes in the mobile Internet phone connection. That gave me an idea.

“Can you find your way to Sicily without that machine, Emy?” I asked.“I might get lost, but so what? I’ve got a map and a map-reader. Go ahead—I’ve

thought of it myself, too, but I don’t know how to do it!” Said and done. While Emy went inside to mail her letter, I inched myself down, head

first, on my back, with the shift stick uncomfortably poking into the small of my back, and ended up with my head wedged between the clutch pedal and the wheel well of the car. Using a flashlight, I soon found the hidden fuse in the 12-volt supply line to the car’s main computer, the Galileo unit, and the mobile Internet link, which were never supposed to be turned off when the car was moving, and took it out. I happened to know that the car was perfectly maneuverable without that computer: all the control functions for the engine and other parts were handled by smaller processors elsewhere.

My legs were hanging out the passenger door, and there Emy found me, hopelessly stuck with the steering wheel firmly grasping my rib cage from below. Emy’s sense of humor wasn’t always in evidence, but now I got myself a full broadside of it. She must have been tickling me for at least five minutes before she finally helped me out. Gay or not, Emy was a woman alright: seeing that I felt much like killing her, she shamelessly offered me her cheek to kiss, patting it with her finger to hurry me up.

Having settled our score, we drove off and were soon heading south. The highway authority and all the nameless agencies that might have been interested in our whereabouts now knew nothing better than that we were still parked at the post office in the Città Universitaria. To avoid getting involved with the various guidance and toll debiting systems built into the

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autostrada, we had decided to use smaller roads, slower but much more picturesque and interesting.

Around noon we arrived at our first scheduled stop, a small tavern near Sarno, not far from the steaming Vesuvius. A few years earlier, the mountain had exploded, along with the ancient supervolcano in the Campi Flegrei nearby. The landscape around the town was depressingly bleak, with thick layers of muddy volcanic ash covering everything. Only buildings whose roofs hadn’t collapsed from the weight of the ash, and such as had been repaired afterwards, had been cleared and dug out. Roads and driveways were barely passable. Mudslides had torn through both town and country and had left considerable devastation behind. There must have been new growth and living trees around, but this was January, and there was hardly any greenery to be seen. Ruined structures, too damaged by the earthquake and the mudslides to be repairable, were visible all around. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

But the welcome we were given by the proprietors quickly dispersed the gloom we might have brought along when we entered. It turned out that Emy had used the tavern as her base while taking part in the re-excavation of the ancient city of Pompeii, already buried once by an eruption of Vesuvius, in AD 79, to be precise, and painstakingly exhumed and restored, beginning in 1748. In the process, she had written her thesis on the effect the hot volcanic ash had had on the paintings with their different techniques, such as wax, distemper, and encaustic, by comparing pictures taken before the second eruption with the appearance of the paintings she had rediscovered. Using computer simulation, she had then recreated the original colors, undoing the observed changes twice over. She had also compensated for the fading of the pigments caused by exposure to the elements after the first excavations. X-ray fluorescence, spectrophotometry, and several types of microscopes had provided more information, as had Emy’s knowledge of the pigments available in antiquity.

Emy had brought along a copy of her thesis and gave it to the friendly couple that ran the tavern. Everybody admired the bright and beautiful colors of the illustrations, showing the ancient works of art in their original splendor, and the owners would hear nothing about payment for our food and our biodiesel fuel.

Much refreshed, and with a generous dinner stowed away in the car, we continued our trip toward Sicily. But our lunch break had been longer than planned, and the roads were much worse than we had expected. So at dusk we had only reached Cosenza; it seemed clear that we wouldn’t get as far as Reggio di Calabria that day, where we had planned to spend the night in the youth hostel.

“Never mind; we’ll just pitch our tents in some farmer’s field,” Emy said.“There seems to be a camping area not very far from here, near Lamézia,” I answered.

“We could stop there so at least we can have a shower in the morning.”So we drove on into the darkening night. The air was mellow—we had reached a warmer

climate. This was the region where the rich Romans had built their winter residences, and I could see why. But I had little occasion to dwell on past history: reading the map by flashlight and checking road signs and landmarks in the dark was a nerve-wracking task.

Somewhere along the way I must have missed a fork in the road. I started sensing that something was wrong: we should have been approaching the town, but instead, the roads were getting narrower and the darkness grew only deeper. Just as I was about to tell Emy that I had got us lost, we came to yet another crossroads. It wasn’t signposted at all.

“Which way?” Emy yelled.“Right, according to the map,” I replied, “but I think we’re lost!”

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“Alright—if we find nothing here, we’ll turn around. By retracing our route, sooner or later we’ll come across a road sign to set us right.”

I now knew for sure that we were going the wrong way, because the road led up into the hills. Lamézia lies near the shore. But with no moon or stars, I hadn’t been able to figure out which way we had been headed, and I also hadn’t taken the time to get my compass out.

Suddenly, Emy stopped the car. A locked gate blocked our way; a high chain-link fence, capped by strands of razor wire, marched off left and right, fading beyond the reach of our flashlights.

Finally, we knew where we were. The sign on the gate was clear enough: in all the main EU languages, it announced that this was the receiving ground station of the microwave power link from Zambia, and told us to stay out, or else! Threatening yellow and black warning signs, indicating radiation hazard beyond the sinister barrier, were fastened to the mesh at regular intervals. The road leading here was, of course, too new to appear on Emy’s bootleg antique road map. No wonder I had been so completely lost. Using a phone navigation service would have compromised our purpose of staying out of sight, so we had never even considered that.

Assuming that it was safe to stay for a while, since the fence must have been placed at an adequate distance from the beam, we turned off the car lights and the engine, and stood there, straining our eyes, ears, and noses toward the invisible flow of energy from space. Nothing happened. It was dark, and it was quiet. But, unwilling to admit the possibility that we could have come that far without finding any excitement to show for it, we thought up reasons for postponing our retreat: the weather was dry, and it was only seven o’clock; we had lots of time to get where we were going.

To escape the swarms of small flying bugs, we returned to the car, unpacked our dinner, and turned on the radio. Munching away at delicious Italian food, we sat in the car and looked out at the empty darkness over the dell in front, concealing the farm of parabolic dishes that lay there somewhere, staring south, hungrily suckling billions of watts of electric energy from their distant, orbiting teat in the sky.

And then we saw them: eerie tongues of fire, leaping up out of thin air, momentarily glowing, and then fading away as abruptly as they had begun. I got a glimpse of one through my pocket-size binoculars, and thought it was made up of glowing specks rather than a uniform flame, but was none the wiser for it.

“Listen to the radio!” Emy said.“Non comprendo,” I answered. “Your car isn’t translating, there’s something wrong with

its computer...”“It’s the propaganda commissioner,” Emy cut in. “He’s in the outskirts of Catanzaro,

which ought to be just over the hills there, and he wants us to believe that these lights are some kind of fire he’s calling down from heaven! They’ve blacked out the whole town, and everybody is out gaping at the spectacle. In fact, it’s going out on worldwide TV, as well! I guess he wants to be taken seriously as pope, and now he’s here demonstrating his powers!”

“Just like on the tapestries in Angers! But how does he do it?” I wondered, half to myself. “It can’t be northern lights, since it’s overcast and we’re looking south.” My compass was out and in service by now.

To get a better view, we got out of the car, only to be pestered by the insects again. And then it struck me.

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“Gnats! Those are hordes of gnats flying into the beam! We see those that flare up right here in front of us, and across the dell they must have a view of the other side of the beam. Just like the birds, they’ll ignite and burn for a while. The commissioner calling down fire, indeed!”

Our musing on the matter was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter approaching from the southwest. It was flying low, without lights, and it was headed in our direction. When it hit the microwave beam, its engine died, but the rotors kept on turning, preventing it from falling straight down. Through the windows, we could see bright flashes like lightning crisscrossing the cabin in the weirdest way, for the entire time the craft was in the beam. We laid ourselves down on the ground just to be sure, and didn’t dare turn on our flashlights. The softly swishing machine passed just overhead, clearing the fence, and crashed onto the north-facing slope of the hill we had driven up to reach our vantage point. Following some snapping and groaning from rotors and undercarriage, everything was quiet. There was no fire.

The radio finished off its program with the EU hymn, and suddenly all the lights came on. A ring of red beacon lights surrounded the dell; the fence was brightly lit, and beyond the ground station, city lights illuminated the clouds. The microwave hazard was now clearly marked, but thanks to the great illusionist show that had just finished on the other side of the valley, the warning had come a minute too late for the unlucky helicopter crew.

We grabbed our flashlights and scrambled down the hillside to search for survivors. The wreck was relatively intact. It had landed somewhat softly onto the descending slope, thanks to its rotors keeping on turning as it lost speed and height. The bushes and the volcanic ash had cushioned the landing. As a result, the bodies of the people inside were hardly mangled at all. But they were all dead.

It was a strange sight: four microwaved human bodies, severely burned inside their clothes, but without a trace of fire on the garments. Being larger and faster than birds, they hadn’t burst into flame, but their blood had coagulated—there was no bleeding from their wounds or their burns. The helicopter, a stealth model with no metal in its cabin structure, had provided no shielding at all. As a consequence, all its electrically conducting contents, including instruments, wiring, passenger, and crew, had been fried. Thin metal parts as well as metallized surfaces of plastic details had vaporized, enabling the lightning-like electrical discharges we had seen, as the air had been ionized. The fuel tank and lines were made of plastic, so they had stayed cool.

There were some mysterious points: the running lights and the radar, as well as all the communications and navigation gear, were turned off. Only a compass, the night vision gear, and a laser altitude sounding unit had been operational, in addition to the normal flight instruments. They must have been going on dead reckoning, following a map just like we had done, staying close to the ground to avoid being detected by air traffic control radar. They also hadn’t wanted any satellites to know about their flight. I could sympathize with that.

The machine had no identifying markings, but it was an advanced military craft, that much was evident. Its rotor blades were characteristically turned up at the trailing edges: at a slight loss of efficiency, this has the effect of deflecting the shock wave away from the next blade, thereby reducing the flapping noise helicopter rotors usually make. The crew were in uniform—Emy recognized them as belonging to Eurofor—but the single passenger was a civilian, apparently a North African. He was clutching a briefcase, which seemed to have taken no harm from the crash.

Now why should an EU military helicopter crew want to be flying over an EU country without being detected? It had been a dangerous enough flight in the dark, even if they hadn’t

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happened by while the microwave beam was unmarked. With an expert pilot and a good navigator they could have made it, but, evidently, they hadn’t been warned about the commissioner’s need for a blackout.

“The explanation must be in here!” Emy said, grabbing the briefcase from the dead passenger.

Reluctantly, his well-done fingers disintegrated and let go. Inside we found an official-looking document and a passport. That’s when it struck me that we were about to get ourselves in trouble on a truly grand scale. This had been a secret, official mission, and, no doubt, all manner of law enforcement was already homing in on us.

“We’d better be off, Emy! Leave the damn briefcase and let’s go!” With eminent logic, Emy put the briefcase back and kept the contents.“What do you want those for?” I asked nervously. “Once they find their chopper, there’ll

be an army after us!” Our footsteps were clearly visible in the ash. In my imagination, we were as good as

caught, but Emy wasn’t worried at all.“They can’t trace us after you fixed the car. They don’t know who we are nor that we’ve

been here. They may not even miss their helicopter for a while. If the mission was so secret, very few people knew about it, and any search party will have to come from Rome: they wouldn’t let these Calabrians in on their high-level politics. In fact, they have no way of looking for it until tomorrow morning. I have a feeling that these papers might come in handy one day!”

“Your fingerprints are on the briefcase,” I muttered, but to no avail. Emy had never been fingerprinted anywhere.

With surprising ease, we found the camping area, abandoned for the winter. We pitched our tents, avoiding rocks and bumps in the dried ashen mud, and sat down to decipher the papers. The passport was an Algerian diplomatic one, belonging to some important government figure. The document, marked Top Secret, constituted an agreement, written in Arabic and French, committing Eurofor to be deployed, at the request of the Algerian government, to help stamp out the fundamentalist rebellion in that country. Only the signatures were missing.

We had our explanation. The helicopter had been taking the Algerian government representative to Rome, and had been evading detection by any means in order to keep the planned operation an absolute secret. Well, the secret was out, and it was quite a thrill to be the ones to know it.

With slightly trembling hands, we hid the papers in the map compartments of our backpacks, ate another sandwich each, and retired for the night.

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24. Palermo, SicilyGetting across to Sicily turned out to be easy. The huge suspension bridge had been damaged by the violent earthquake that had caused the volcanoes to erupt, but was in partial use. While it was being repaired, the old railroad ferry was back in service, carrying the trains and some of the cars. Several lanes were open on the bridge, but traffic was moving very slowly up the high ramp. So we were much better off taking the ship.

Our little car was waved on board as soon as we got to the jetty, and our prepaid tickets relieved us of any dealings with the payment system. The old ferry had no equipment for communicating with car computers, and our lack of one caused no commotion. Had we tried to get onto the autostrada to take the bridge, we’d have been pulled over for driving an unsafe car. Soon, we drove off the ship in Messina, having seen no trace of either Scylla or Charybdis, the monster and the whirlpool that so dogged Odysseus when he had to travel through that strait three millennia earlier.

From Messina, we continued our trip toward Palermo, staying off the highway as before, and enjoying the succession of towns along the old coastal road. It was a winding road, climbing the mountains in places, and offering a beautiful view of the sea almost all the time. We advanced steadily, and got to Palermo in the early afternoon.

In Palermo, Emy had distant relatives, a clan whose long-dead patriarch had been the first cousin of Emy’s great-great-grandfather, immigrated to Australia early in the twentieth century. Emy’s parents had taken her to see these relatives when she had been a little girl, and now she was in Sicily to reestablish the acquaintance.

Though their blood bond wasn’t close, the clan welcomed Emy and me with open arms. We were to stay with Ruggero, the current head of the family. For the next several days, our lives revolved entirely about visiting and eating. On the odd day, we also managed to take a few hours in the morning or afternoon to see the sights, including the magnificent cathedral, the Norman palace, and the lovely cliffs of Mt. Pellegrino at the northwestern end of the bay.

Wondering why the buildings where the relatives lived, both houses and apartment blocks, were so poorly kept and in such disrepair on the outside, while the homes and apartments inside were so absolutely splendid, I was told that you didn’t want to keep a high profile in Sicily. Somebody might come around and offer you protection. Generally, the clan seemed to be an economic entity of its own and wanted no interference from outside. When a young couple married, they needed no loans: their entire household was given them as a gift from all their relatives. When the next marriage took place, they in their turn contributed from their savings. The result was manifest prosperity, combined with the most sensible frugality.

Part of the shoddy look of the buildings came from the fact that more often than not, the ground floor of a building would be unfinished to the degree that only the pylons supporting the upper stories were there, along with a staircase leading up into the home above. This had to do with property taxes: you didn’t have to pay them until the building was finished. Some of those buildings were quite old...

Toward the end of the week, we had finally lunched or dined with all of Ruggero’s grown children and all their first cousins. Friday afternoon, they all piled into their cars with their children and aged parents, and Emy and I found ourselves in the middle of a convoy of vehicles heading up into the mountains of central Sicily. Just like us, the clan members preferred to stay off the autostrada.

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The road was narrow and steep, at times rising in serpentines, or desperately clinging to a mountainside with a precipice uncomfortably close on the other side. Here and there bits and pieces of the road were missing, lost to the great earthquake, along with every semblance of a barrier. Once, the car ahead of us got stuck, after a section of the edge of the road had vanished under it. The right-hand back wheel was knocked off and disappeared down the mountain; the car was left resting on its axle. But somebody climbed down to retrieve the wheel, new lug nuts were found, and the car was repaired and towed out of the hole. The caravan, undaunted, continued on its way.

We arrived at our destination in time for dinner. The clan hailed from Resuttano, a small town up in the mountains. This was where Emy’s great-great-grandfather had lived, and here the entire clan still felt it belonged. The town lay hugging its hilltop in the midst of rugged farmland, interspersed with steep, eroding cliffs and a few trees in the dells. The houses were small and old, built of stone and lovingly repaired after the big earthquake. Etna had also erupted and had spewed as much ash as Vesuvius, but Sicily was used to it, and only grew more fertile with each new ash cover.

As modesty would prescribe, Emy and I were accommodated with different families. Emy had simply introduced me as her friend, but it was evident that at least the womenfolk assumed I was her boyfriend. Still, it would have been unthinkable for us to share a room: we weren’t married.

Saturday was spent visiting and viewing the farms. Every family had a few goats and sheep, and the cheese made from their milk was one of the staple foods. Donkeys and mules were the faithful beasts of burden, and carried their masters up the wearisome hillsides. Tractors would have been of little use here. We saw a number of homes, dating back at least a couple of hundred years, and were then taken to see the family tombs where faded photographs, flanked by flowers and mementos, adorned each finely sculpted crypt. Here we could see the portrait of the old Cavaliere, the cousin of Emy’s ancestor, along with reproductions of the decorations he had received from King Vittorio Emanuele III.

Sunday came, and following Mass, all the men of the clan got together in a large room where wakes for the deceased would have been held. The priest who had said Mass was there, and I was allowed to sit near the door with Ruggero’s youngest son Umberto, who was fluent in English and could interpret for me. I didn’t trust my smartphone with translating Sicilian: it was programmed for northern Italian idiom and body language, and already around Naples it had begun giving me quite farcical translations.

Some of the women were busy serving coffee and pastries, but they didn’t take part in the meeting. Emy, the clan’s academic, whose participation was required because of her knowledge of things going on in Rome and the rest of the world, was the only female there, in the seat of honor at Ruggero’s right.

The reason for the meeting was soon evident. The world had changed, and our friends didn’t like the way it was going. What did it mean that you couldn’t pay with cash anymore? What was this idea of getting tattooed by the government? Nobody trusted the government, and the thought that it should be allowed to put its mark on you as a permanent identifier was alien to their way of life. It was bad enough that you had to have a driver’s license to drive your own car. Why had the Church changed? They had barely got used to hearing Mass in Italian rather than Latin, and suddenly everything was different again. Explain, Emilia, please.

And the young dottoressa spoke. She told them all about our insights and adventures, and had me relate the story of my meeting with the emperor. I was grateful for my interpreter: a

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machine doing the translating would have left them distrustful and doubting. When I got to what the emperor had said about himself and the pope being satanists, all hell broke loose in the room. It was too much—was I sure of this? I swore it was true, and called on the priest to verify Stephan’s and Jean-Luc’s explanations of who was who in the light of Daniel and the Apocalypse.

Father Giuseppe had been quiet until then, but with all eyes on him, he now rose and cleared his throat.

“As Catholics, we’ve been taught that the Church is here to stay. The whole idea of an end to time is uncomfortable for the Church, because it would imply the completion of her task on Earth. Although we pray every Sunday for Christ’s return and the coming of his kingdom, the Church has never wanted us to think of this as imminent. The Church’s official view of the Apocalypse and other Biblical descriptions of great catastrophes to come has always been that they’re difficult to understand, but likely to be connected with Israel’s and the early Christians’ struggle against their Roman oppressors. So we were never encouraged to read the Apocalypse; in fact, most Catholics have no idea of what it’s all about.”

Farther Giuseppe was a Jesuit, which made him uniquely fit to deal with sensitive matters, where the official line of the Church was difficult to reconcile with Scripture.

“However, now it seems that we’ve come to the time the Apocalypse talks about. We have the two beasts deceiving all mankind, one of them looking like a lamb—pretending to be Christ’s representative, the pope—but speaking like a dragon, that is, like the devil himself.

“And the sad fact is that if the devil were to come among humanity, looking for a religious community to take over for his own purposes, the Roman Catholic Church would be his ideal victim. This is precisely because we Catholics have been so carefully taught both blindly to trust the hierarchy of our church and not to worry about the end of the world.

“Now it has happened: what our friend Gregorio has just said confirms all the disquieting things that have begun coming down to us from the Vatican. With our lack of understanding of the Apocalypse, we’ve been at a total loss as to what has been going on.”

“So what are we to do, Father?” Ruggero asked. “We aren’t used to finding things out from Scripture. We’ve always come to you to be taught. You’ll have to guide us. If we can’t trust the Church anymore, it falls to you, our own shepherd here in our own town, to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“I was afraid of that,” sighed the priest. “Well, first of all, everything Emilia and Gregorio have told you is true. We mustn’t allow the government to mark us with that tattoo. We’ll have to live off the land and use our family ties, like we’ve always done here in the mountains. We’ll come to no harm—we’ve lived without money for many months already while waiting to have these questions sorted out.

“Second, each one of us should search his or her conscience and make sure we live a life worthy of the bride of Christ. We, together with everyone else in our position in the whole world, still constitute the true church, even though the official church has become a front for the enemy.

“You ask me to teach you what’s right and what’s wrong. Well, you know the Ten Commandments. They still apply. Follow them, and you’ll be doing what’s right. But our Lord also taught us many other things, and I’ll repeat some of them to you. Don’t worry—I’ll give you just seven brief passages that will tell you the most important things about living during these last times.”

The room had filled up with silent, listening women and children. More people were there to hear Father Giuseppe than had attended Mass that morning. It was so quiet that I could hear a mouse or an insect gnawing away at the doorpost behind me.

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“Jesus said, ‘None of those who cry out, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of God but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.’ You’re not going to get away with being pious and calling yourselves religious. Piousness, in fact, is one of the most hazardous attitudes mankind is heir to—it’s just one little step removed from pride and hypocrisy. No, you have to do God’s will.

“What, then, is God’s will for us? Very simple: to follow the Greatest Commandment. ‘You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love is the most important thing for us, and not just some distant kind of sympathy in the mind, but a love that we express by caring for each other. That’s how we become willing channels of God’s love for all his children.

“Many are worried about the idea of loving their neighbors as themselves. If we’re to put ourselves last; will we be left with nothing in the end? One can easily show that in an economy where everyone only caters to other people’s needs, everybody would be well off. But such an economy isn’t realistic, and it isn’t necessarily what the commandment means.

“Think about what the Greatest Commandment would imply if the idea were that you’re supposed to neglect yourself completely. The less you’d care for yourself, the less you’d need to care for others while still keeping the commandment. If self-denial were the objective, those in need among us would have nowhere to turn, while the rest of us could pat ourselves on the back for keeping our commandment. Such a concept makes no sense: it would lead to economic collapse and mass starvation.

“We need to turn that thinking around. To be able to look after others, we must look after ourselves first. If our circumstances allow, we need to be strong, healthy, and capable of caring for our families and our neighbors. That done, we’ll have the resources to make good on the Greatest Commandment and act virtuously in our lives.

“An example: many of you wear glasses. In some families, several people wear glasses. Glasses get dirty. Say you’re off to clean your glasses and you find that you can clean somebody else’s glasses at the same time. Whose glasses do you clean first? Why, your own, of course, so you can see to do a better job on the other person’s glasses. That isn’t selfishness, it’s thoughtfulness, and it’s precisely what the Greatest Commandment intends for you to do.

“I’m here to serve you, but I don’t work 24/7—I’d end up dead or burned out, and I’d have deprived you of a pastor. I need to look after myself so I can look after you.

“If there’s a famine, you don’t starve yourself so you can feed your children a little more. When you’re dead, who’s going to feed them? Even if one of your children dies, you still need to be able to feed the others.

“Now for the next verse I wanted to quote to you. “‘He who tries to save his life will lose it; it is the man who loses his life for my sake, that

will save it.’ Trying to preserve your lifestyle as consumers will deprive you of eternal life. Giving up your seemingly secure life will be both an adventure and a good shot at ending up on the right side when all this is over.

“‘Whoever acknowledges me before men I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven. Whoever disowns me before men I will disown before my Father in heaven.’ We’re dealing with a dictatorship. You can’t hope to evade the system and go unnoticed. Prepare yourselves mentally to let people know what you’re doing and why.

“‘Because of the increase of evil, the love of most will grow cold. The man who holds out to the end, however, is the one who will see salvation.’ There’s corruption and violence all around us, and many people are arming themselves and isolating themselves from others for fear of being

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attacked or defrauded. The command to love your neighbor still stands, however. In fact, even more is expected of us:

“‘My command to you is: Love your enemies, pray for your persecutors.’ Whatever they may be doing to you, they’re hurting their own prospects more, and they’re the ones in need of prayers.

“‘And there’s no need to fear those who kill the body, but have no means of killing the soul; fear him more, who has the power to ruin body and soul in hell.’ There’ll be persecutions; they’ve already started. Some of us may be killed. But that isn’t the worst fate that could befall us: losing our eternal life would be much more terrible.”

Father Giuseppe sat down. Everybody was quiet for a while. Then Ruggero thanked the priest and started talking about how they could hope to carry all this out in their everyday lives. He was especially concerned about the lack of money: their wages were building up in their bank accounts, but only standing orders could be paid, and many were hurting.

That made me think of my German experience with the trade club, and so, with Emy’s help, I explained to the clan how the LETSystem allowed you to create your own local money. Emy knew about several trade clubs on the mainland, but none in Sicily. However, we could set one up! The software was available, free for the taking, on the Internet, in Italian along with dozens of other languages. It would run on any common home computer. So I volunteered myself and Umberto, who worked with information systems at a bank, to establish the Palermo & Resuttano Trade Club. Others with connections to local retailers were engaged to get them involved, and the Resuttano farmers were very keen on being included.

The trade club became our main occupation for the next few weeks. Getting the LETSystem software to work was the easy part. To create a real, functioning enterprise, a lot more was needed. We had to issue plastic cards and find imprinters and vouchers for the retailers we were signing up. Members also needed transfer vouchers to use in place of cash and checks. But Umberto worked wonders with his bank, and soon we were the proud owners of all its obsolete plastic card stock, its old card embossers and imprinters, and thousands of multi-part vouchers. We put all the clan’s children to work sticking labels with the trade club’s name over the bank’s logo, and a couple of weeks into the process, payments began coming in for posting to accounts.

Meanwhile, we had trained a number of people to act as staff, opened hundreds of accounts for the clan’s members, friends, and acquaintances, and printed up promotional literature explaining what the LETSystem was all about. Soon, the club took off in earnest, and we began to see its benefits: it created employment where there had been no jobs before, it enabled people to sell and buy both goods and services, and it gave everyone involved a wonderful feeling of hope and optimism. Rarely had I experienced such a sense of achievement.

It was late January and everything was going well. The time had come for Emy and me to return to Rome—she to fly home to Australia, and I to continue my trip by catching any available transport to Great Britain. We wanted to leave the EU well before March first.

But nothing was to come of our going back to Rome. The evening before we had planned to leave, the emperor again appeared on TV. He was unhappy with the implementation of his marking scheme. To succeed in combating crime and terrorism, the mark had to have one hundred percent coverage, but too many people were still unmarked. With eerie accuracy, he attacked an unspecified number of vagrant foreign infiltrators, promoting all manner of dissent and evasion of the marking process. He had clearly been too lenient, allowing people a choice; this was something

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the citizens of the Union held sacred, and the only way to make the new payment system fulfill all its promises was to make it strictly mandatory.

All over Europe, new checkpoints, equipped with the latest long-range scanners, would be established. Anyone caught without an official identifier and refusing to be marked on the spot would be summarily sentenced to death. Unmarked foreigners had no excuse either, and would be hounded down everywhere, even at airports and border crossings, if they’d try to sneak out of the Union. The measures were already being implemented, and immediate results were expected. The cooperation of all citizens was necessary, and the emperor made it a matter of personal loyalty to him to turn in anybody suspected of being unmarked. The amnesty period for getting marked without legal consequences was one week.

This meant us. It also concerned our friends all over Europe, but on the one hand, they had to stay, and on the other, they were leading a very quiet life and were steadily migrating to the countryside, where enforcement would be lax or nonexistent. Consumers were urban folk, and it was in their golden cages—the cities and the suburbs—that they could be controlled and held to their obligations. So Emy’s relatives assured us that they’d be alright, but they wouldn’t for a moment let us consider going back to the mainland and Rome. “Capice?!”

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25. Seas of LightsSicilians have a peculiar way of solving every dilemma with the calmest determination, while never missing an opportunity to apply to it the noisiest, most agitated, and least organized form of human communication: the family discussion. No Sicilian ever has a personal problem. Each open issue, even if it truly only concerns one person or one couple, is a family matter. And so, in due course, nearly every Palermo member of Emy’s clan had their say on our predicament. With so many brilliant, laterally thinking brains and so many loving, kind, and caring hearts at work on our escape plan, it took shape within the span of just one long, sumptuous dinner at Ruggero’s house.

Sicilians live in the middle of the Mediterranean, and they’ve never been particularly focused on the Italian mainland. Apart from occasional subsidies that only resulted in corruption and more influence for the mafia, all they’ve ever got from the mainland is interference and inefficiency. Sicilians are used to looking after themselves, and, historically, their communications have been directed just as much toward North Africa as toward Europe and the Italian mainland. Consequently, where I was thinking of myself as being stuck in the toe of a hostile boot, the clan saw open, friendly, and passable seas all around.

So, four days later, after getting visas for Algeria and the necessary shots, Emy and I quietly boarded a rusty Tunisian trader. Our route would take us through Algeria and Morocco to Britain. We couldn’t take a ship directly to Great Britain, because such vessels were under tight surveillance by customs and immigration.

Emy had sold her car to Umberto, receiving a good price for it, paid in British currency. Following her break with the EU after Henry Allen’s execution, Britain had left the European Monetary Union and reintroduced the pound sterling. Since Umberto had money in the bank, he was only too glad to find a use for it.

The Tunisian crew were very friendly and understanding, and gave us every possible bit of advice to prepare us for our train journey to Rabat, Morocco. They also brought us up to date on what the emperor had been up to in their parts. Knowing that the title Emperor would bring him no favors with Muslims, but would rather remind them of their own struggle against the late Byzantine Empire, he had instead declared himself the Mahdi. According to tradition, recorded by both Sunni and Shia Muslims, the prophet Mohammed had promised that during the last days, one of his descendants, bearing his own name, would appear as imam and bring about a revolution and fill the world with justice and equality, as well as unheard-of wealth.

There was disagreement among Islam’s learned as to whether the Mahdi was to be born in the latter days, or would supernaturally have been around since the ninth century, but whichever way you preferred it, the emperor fit the bill: there were no records of his background. He had been unknown until he had joined European politics as an adult, and, apparently by design, his biography simply didn’t exist from before that time. This gave each person and every journalist an opportunity to present the wildest speculations about his origin, and EU authorities never commented on such conjecture.

As could be expected, this had brought the emperor an enthusiastic following among Muslims, but also many enemies. The king of Morocco, himself a true descendant of the Prophet, and bearer of the titles imam, emir, and caliph, had waged a publicity campaign against the usurper, but had found reason to tone it down after the EU had threatened to review Morocco’s associate membership status.

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It lay in the nature of most Islamic states that no agreement resulted from the widespread acceptance of the emperor among their populations: lacking functioning democratic institutions, the popular mood in such countries didn’t directly carry over into politics, but politicians would exploit or ignore such moods entirely according to their own perceived advantage. So where the “Mahdi” had promised unity and peace, his followers saw strife and repression instead, and laid the blame for it on their own governments. This created much official resentment against Europe, but, for the time being, any such feelings lay hidden, as the region was dependent on its trade with its powerful northern neighbor.

After a two-day trip, and much more knowledgeable about the people we’d be traveling amongst, Emy and I arrived in the harbor of Algiers, a rather modern port with a nice view over the city, gently rising from its waterfront toward the hills beyond. The lower, modern, French-built part of Algiers was spread out in front of us; the old city or Casbah formed the upper portion, including a sixteenth-century walled fortress. However, it wasn’t going to be possible for us to tour the city: we had reservations on the fast train to Oran the same morning we arrived, and had only the time to clear customs and change some currency. The railroad station lay next to the harbor, and we made it to the train.

An hour later, we had passed Blida, a mere 30 miles out of Algiers. Our fellow passengers were getting visibly nervous: the men were putting out their cigarettes, and some of the women were arranging their scarves around their heads. There was much talk and speculation about the Islamic terrorists that sometimes attacked trains in this area, which the locals kept referring to as “the triangle of death.” In fact, the terrorists demanded much more than what had been done so far on board the train: they wanted separate compartments for men and women, all women fully veiled, and no substance abuse whatsoever. Although the acrid smell of the local tobacco was slowly venting out through the open windows, there still were nicotine-stained fingers in plain view, and one man had clearly been drinking.

It was also getting quieter, as the passengers were shutting off and packing away their radios and Web-enabled MP3 players, which had practically replaced CD players. Apart from the apprehensiveness of everyone around us, the trip was very pleasant, and Emy and I took the opportunity to finish off the last of our Sicilian provisions.

Around Khemis-Milliana, the train passed through a lot of tunnels. Everything was quiet, and nobody smoked. At one point between tunnels, there were high banks on both sides of the track. There, without warning, the train braked violently and came to a standstill.

The train’s communications cord had been removed, so nobody could have pulled the emergency brake. There must have been some other action taken to force the engineer to stop the train. Within seconds, what everybody had feared was happening, and our car got its allotment of guerrillas. In pairs, they started at each end of the car, demanding to see the passengers’ ID papers. I knew that anybody belonging to the military or the police would be shot, while Army draftees would be abducted and either persuaded to serve in the terrorist troops or killed.

The first shot rang out behind us. In front of us, the guerrilla working our side of the aisle had come to his first unveiled woman and shot her in the face. I noticed that he was more zealous than his comrade on the other side, who had already passed two women over. “Our” terrorist, an unhealthy-looking, skinny youth, had found an ID card he didn’t like, and shot the man through the head. Next to the victim was a woman with no veil; he shot her face off. Her screams filled the car until, mercifully, she passed out. Even I could see that the killer was high

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on something, probably crack cocaine. Our talkative fellow passengers had told us that the terrorists habitually recruited among young, unemployed drug users and dealers in the cities. Drug money was inseparable from terrorism, as the emperor had pointed out.

Within a minute, he’d be at our seat row. The maniac would kill Emy then and there, and probably me, too, being a foreigner. Something had to be done, before it was our turn. He had to be snapped out of his routine. But how? Ten months earlier, I had been pushed off an airplane; this was different. I had to solve this one myself.

“Offer him our documents!” Emy whispered in my ear.Clearly, that was what I had to do, although my French was still shaky. Emy, who was

fluent, couldn’t talk to the guy. So I threw all caution to the wind, and made my best effort to attract the killer’s attention.

After some waving and a couple of “Hey, there’s,” he finally left off a few rows in front of us and came over.

“What do you want?”His gun was pointing at Emy’s face. I gently pushed it aside and motioned for him to

lean down so I could whisper to him. Reluctantly, he did so.“We’re Australians on our way to Morocco,” I said. “We came across something terribly

important for your commander while in Italy. We have to see him as soon as possible!” Suspicion was written all over the terrorist’s face as he straightened up. How did we

expect to meet their commander just by taking a train? What was it we had that he couldn’t simply get off us at gunpoint? We were foreigners; why shouldn’t he just shoot us as he was used to?

What was it Dale Carnegie wrote again? “If you want somebody to do something for you, show them that doing it is in their own best interest.” So I shamelessly pointed out the recognition he’d be due, and assured him that the secret was too sensitive to be mentioned here among all these people: there were sure to be government sympathizers all around us. When, again, he aimed at Emy, saying that I could come along but not she—we didn’t need her—I hurried to explain that it was such an important thing that we had split the knowledge between us, and could only deliver it together. Eventually, my visualization of what I wanted him to think began to bear fruit. The youngster motioned for us to get up, had to be persuaded to let us take our backpacks along, and led us out of the car at gunpoint.

The worst was over for the moment. The officer we were left with was a hard man, but no psychopath. My years of training in the Australian Army Reserve now came in handy: I could talk to him as a soldier to another, and got him to believe that we had something sensitive and truly important to say to his commander. After all, why should we have put ourselves at the mercy of people who were known to kill foreigners, unless we had something to show for our boldness?

We waited by an old Land Rover, painted Battleship Gray—after the battle. From our vantage point, we could see what had stopped the train: a truck had been driven across the track. More shots rang out on board the train. But a few minutes later, the raid was over, some loot and a couple of young men were brought back, and the caravan of off-road vehicles started up the slope to the south of the track. Emy, saying nothing, was tense: she knew her jeans were forbidden attire, and she made sure to avoid eye contact, although the soldiers in the vehicle were scrutinizing her closely.

After a long and very rough ride, ascending ever higher into the L’Ouarensis mountain range, we arrived in a town. It really was a village, but it had had a bank and a post office once,

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and there were plenty of signs of life. This was the base of the terrorists, where the civilian population gave them support and fed them. There was a mosque, naturally, and nearby was Town Hall, where now the commander of the terrorists, the emir, held court. The captain who had taken charge of us took us directly there. Following a long, uncomfortable wait in the afternoon heat, we were finally brought in to see him.

The emir was a rather refined man. He treated us as his guests and was clearly curious about Australia and what had brought the two of us to “his” railroad line from so far away. We were offered food and drink, and the emir was in no hurry—the raid had been successful, and we were his captives and not about to go anywhere. Emy and I played along as best we could, and endeavored to gain the emir’s trust. Eventually, we were telling him about our drive through Italy, and quite naturally came to the story of the microwaved helicopter and its passenger.

We described what we had found, and why we felt it was important to the emir and his people. Without straying too far from the truth, we told him how we had thought ourselves lucky to encounter an Islamic group that day and be able to warn them of the danger we had discovered.

This was the right time to bring out the evidence, and we both dug into our backpacks, handing the passport and the agreement to the emir. From his reaction, it was clear that we had done the right thing. Whatever alternatives we might have had if we’d arrived safely in Oran that afternoon, the fact was that we had gone through considerable danger in order to bring him this news. Before the emir said anything about the documents, he sent the guards out of his office and had the doors closed.

“This talks about 50,000 Eurofor troops! They’d finish us off in a month. Until now, we’ve been free to wage our war because the government and its corrupt army and police haven’t wanted to stick their necks out and come up into our mountains. But Eurofor is battle-hardened and well equipped. If they come here, they’ll do what they came to do. How long ago did you say you found this?”

“About a month ago,” I replied. “Evidently, the loss of these copies and one messenger didn’t necessarily nullify the agreement. By now, they’ll have had the time to sign it and may be preparing for the attack.”

“We’re a very loosely organized movement, and there are several Islamic factions that don’t always agree. I’ll have to get busy organizing our resistance!” There wasn’t much hope in the emir’s voice, just determination.

“If you don’t mind,” Emy broke in, “I’d like to suggest that you change your strategy!”“How do you mean, Mademoiselle?”“Give up trying to reform all of Algeria,” Emy continued. “You have your land and your

people here; why don’t you just settle for being left alone? Use whatever strengths you have and negotiate a truce!”

“All through Europe,” I took up the thread, “I’ve seen people who were cutting their ties to the consumer society and would have given anything for the distance you have between yourselves and the state. Many people I trust have assured me that these are the last times. They made their message known, but they accepted that they weren’t going to be able to convince everybody. For them, the important thing was that there was an alternative, and that those who wanted to, could choose to return to a simpler life and avoid taking this tattoo that the new payment system requires. Maybe you know that Christians consider it a thing of the devil.”

“Long ago, the goal of Islamic fundamentalism was the same,” the emir answered. “People just wanted to return to a traditional lifestyle, without stress, without high technology,

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and live in peace with everybody. But such ideas were too dangerous for those in power: they needed workers and consumers they could exploit. So we ended up fighting for our rights, and before we knew it, we were locked in an endless struggle against the state. But I don’t know what message there is in this for our people. We’re Muslims, and we’ll follow our own authorities, not those of Christians.”

“But Islamic tradition also tells about these times, and confirms everything we’ve found out in Europe!” Emy said. “Maybe you know about the book Seas of Lights?”

“No, I don’t. What is it about?”“It’s an ancient book compiled in what is now Iraq, a collection of traditions concerning

the appearance of the Mahdi and the return of the Son of Mary—peace be upon him. I’d like to list just the most prominent of those prophesies, and you can judge for yourself. I think it’s quite likely that Muslims will agree that there are more important things just now than trying to grab power over the whole country and reform the entire population.”

“I appreciate your offer, Mademoiselle, and I’m interested in hearing what you have to tell me,” the emir answered. “But it’s against my religion to be taught by a woman, especially in matters of faith. Why don’t you tell your friend in English, which I don’t understand, so he can instruct me in French? Just let me send for our imam, so he can help me understand everything and relate it to Islam.”

As the emir turned to his telephone, Emy was rolling her eyes in my direction. But she knew we had to go along with everything, and she was too knowledgeable and tactful to worry about what her rights might have been as a Western woman.

The imam arrived, was told, over refreshments, about the subject of the discussion, and waited, noncommittally, to hear what the two strangers had to say. We were in over our heads already, and had no option but to forge ahead. So Emy talked and I translated. As if to set the tone for the difficulty of my assignment, she began with the traditional Muslim opening: “In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful.”

There were a number of predictions in the old book that Emy, with the help of an Arab friend, had studied at the British Library in London. Much like in Christian eschatology, the fulfillment of those things was to indicate that the time of the appearance of the Mahdi, followed by the return of Jesus son of Mary, was near, and with them, the end of the current era of mankind.

Among the prophesies were a war between Turkey and Europe, the destruction of Baghdad, the spread of old and new diseases over the world, the legalization of homosexuality, and small wars just about everywhere. A big, red comet was to appear, visible in all parts of the world. There were to be earthquakes in Iraq, Egypt, and many other places, and a major war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Two thirds of the world’s population were to perish due to diseases and wars. A scarcity of food and jobs would be an unsolvable problem in all countries. The public was to become indifferent to the fate of the innocent that the rulers were to kill. And a good person would use technology to talk to people everywhere, and they’d be able to see him and talk to him easily. This good person would, however, be killed by a powerful ruler.

Here was a series of predictions quite different from those I had studied in Germany, but no less factual. The description of the late pope’s appearance on Artes, written hundreds of years earlier, couldn’t have been much more accurate. Turkey, a great power at the time the book was written, was driven out of the Balkans during a series of wars ending with the First World War. Baghdad was partially destroyed already during the first Gulf war in the nineties, and further

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damaged during the second Gulf war in 2003; something rather unthinkable at the time the predictions were made, when Baghdad was the splendorous center of a vast Arabic realm.

Emy’s expertise and her polite discourse won the respect of the imam, and he willingly entered on a wider discussion of our experiences, finding many parallels with Islamic eschatology. In the end, his advice to the emir was the same as ours. We told them about the many communities in Europe that had managed to separate themselves from the rat race by embracing the ideals of love and simplicity, and how they had been helped by the LETSystem. Doing some quick lateral thinking, I suggested that they could reopen the bank in their town and make it a local, Islamic bank that would operate according to principles they could accept, charging no interest, and using coins to replace the currency that would soon be worthless. Emy pointed out that they were about to lose their income from the drug trade: the government would be more than happy to implement the EU directive on legalization of recreational drugs, and take the profits for itself.

It was late; there would have been much more to discuss, but prayer time was near, and life had to go on. We were introduced to a family that would feed us, and received permission to pitch our tents in a vacant lot near Town Hall. We were free, we were rather respected guests of the emir, and we might have made a difference. Not a bad ending to a day that had taken us so near death.

Exhausted, I was lying in my tent, thinking the day over, hearing Emy sharpen a knife in her tent a few yards away, and drifting into a kind of disconnectedness that wasn’t yet sleep, but bordered on it. I was enjoying the music, mingled with the faint sounds around me, pondering the things that had happened. Nice music; Haydn maybe. No, it was fuller, newer: Beethoven, perhaps? Nothing that I could recognize: I knew all his major orchestral works pretty well, and this was a major work. I also was quite sure that it wasn’t by Schubert, Bruckner, or Sibelius.

I stopped worrying about who the composer might have been, and just took it in. For how long? Minutes, certainly. Emy had stopped her work; all was quiet around my tent. I drifted back into more consciousness, and realized that there was no radio going. No CD player, no MP3 player. No concert hall nearby. Nothing. But the music was there. And then—as I became aware of all this—it just ceased, as abruptly as turning a switch. I was wide awake, wondering what faculty of the brain might be capable of retaining and perfectly reproducing so much music, the full score of a symphony orchestra, in flawless performance, for the better part of a movement of a major orchestral work. And there again, even if I had it in my brain to hold and reexperience all that, how come I had never heard it before? That was a matter I was sure of: I knew my classical music well enough to know when I heard something new. Another thing I also knew for a fact: I couldn’t have been the composer. Was this what the ancients had called music of the spheres? The answer was unknowable; one of life’s unsolved mysteries.

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26. Oran, AlgeriaA muffled cry from Emy! It was midnight, perhaps, and I was awakened from a deep sleep. As fast as I could function, I got hold of my flashlight, tore open the tent zipper, and ran the few strides to her tent. Its flap was open, and inside she was struggling with a man who was covering her mouth and trying to hold her down. He held a handgun and was just about to strike Emy on the head to render her more cooperative.

Coming from behind, I had the advantage, and managed to disarm him and lock his arms behind his back. I dragged him out of the tent, stood him up, and shone the light on his face. It was the dopehead maniac from the train! He had come to rape Emy, thinking he’d be able to scare her into submissiveness.

I began to yell for help. A couple of guards appeared, and then more. I told them what I had witnessed, demanding punishment for the creep: he had accosted the emir’s guest. He couldn’t even deny what he’d been up to: his pants were falling down.

All the while, I could hear Emy growling and struggling to get free of her sleeping bag, the zipper of which had got stuck during the attack. The senior guard said that they could as well shoot the culprit then and there; bringing him to justice in the morning would mean bothering the emir unnecessarily. The latter was in a habit of beheading criminals like this one; why not spare him the trouble?

“You leave him alone!” Emy shouted.She had appeared out of her tent, tying her hair into a knot. She was wearing her karate

suit, which she used as pajamas. The belt tied around her waist was black.“I’ll take care of him,” she growled, and her expression was so fierce that none of the

guards dared say a thing.“Give him to me!” she yelled at me, as I was holding the maniac and couldn’t see myself

releasing him except to a firing squad. “He’s mine!” I was too slow. With a scream of rage, Emy tore him out of my hands by his wispy

beard.“Alright you filth, let’s have it out! Pull up your wretched pants!” This he did, and the next moment, he had a knife in his hand and was going for Emy’s

heart. I lunged out to catch him, but I didn’t need to. With a triumphant laugh, Emy wrenched the knife from him and threw it behind me.

“You stay out of this!” was her advice.The creep had stopped in his tracks, looking bewildered. I assumed that he had never

confronted anyone without a lethal weapon in his hand. A manifest coward, he didn’t know what to do. He certainly wasn’t used to opposition; probably his only use among the troops had been terrorizing civilians.

For Emy, this meant that she had a problem. She was seething to get back at the guy, but her strict karate ethics prevented her from attacking anyone, including an assailant who had so nearly injured her. Her rage doubling, she looked fiercer than ever, and her opponent took a step backward. That gave Emy an idea.

“So you’re afraid, you coward,” she taunted him. “What happened? I never saw you scared of a woman before! Come on, little girl! Come on, my little one! Are you afraid of a grown woman?”

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This was unheard of, of course. No female Muslim ever calls a Muslim man or boy a little girl. The guards burst out laughing, cheering Emy on and helping her ridicule the maniac. I could see that it was working: for every “ma petite” he got more enraged, now shaking uncontrollably, now moaning with anger. Then came the insult that broke him, and with a scream he threw himself forward, aiming for Emy’s throat.

For Emy, it was over far too soon. It took her no more than twenty seconds and one tornado kick to reduce her enemy to a whimpering, writhing heap on the ground. No amount of coaxing could get him up on his feet again to face her. As he crawled away out of the ring of onlookers, between the legs of his former comrades-in-arms, Emy took out some of her remaining rage by aiming a good last kick at him, where it mattered. That wasn’t in her Kyokushinkai karate manual, but there again, nobody’s perfect.

Roaring with approval, the guerrillas heaved Emy up in the air and passed her around the ring on their hands in triumph, while the defeated maniac slunk away into the darkness. Not that it made much of a difference anymore, but I still wanted to know if he was going to receive some form of official punishment.

The emir had turned up and entered the ring, illuminated by a dozen flashlights. He had his sword by his side, and I realized that he’d been ready to carry out the death sentence himself. Word traveled fast in the village, even in the middle of the night.

“He would have been dead by now, but thanks to Mademoiselle Emilie here, he’s got himself a punishment far worse than death. He’s been defeated by a woman: in our culture that means a shame that makes him a pariah wherever he goes. He’ll be out of here before morning, empty-handed. He can’t go to government-held areas; he’d be caught and tortured to death. His reputation will go before him wherever he goes in Islamic territory, and he’ll be shunned and given nothing. Before long, he’ll end up in the desert with the jackals, and they’ll finish him off—the sooner, the better for him.”

“Sounds good,” Emy said. “He deserves it.”“May Allah have mercy on him,” the emir replied sincerely.The rest of the conversation between the guerrillas was in Arabic, and the crowd

dispersed. Emy and I were left to our own devices, and the shock of it all began to wear off.“Give us a hug,” Emy suggested, and we held each other for a good while.As the emir had predicted, the maniac was gone by morning. It turned out that he had

been intensely disliked by everyone, and the women in the village were celebrating his defeat and departure. It seemed that our breakfast was never going to end.

The emir called us into his office around ten. He wanted us to continue our journey, and expressed his gratitude for our advice, along with his respect for Emy’s courage. There was just one little problem.

“I’d like to offer you a ride back to the train, but as you might understand, our people would be risking their lives, and yours, if they drove into one of the towns along the coast. You can’t walk back, either. Would you object to riding camels?”

“Not at all,” I answered, overruling Emy’s hesitation. “I learned to handle camels in the Army Reserve. Australia has lots of camels, both feral and tame, and the Army thinks it important to be able to use them. We have a compass, and as long as we have water and know where we’re headed, we’ll be right.”

And so it was agreed. We got their two best-natured camels, extra water containers, provisions, and directions. The trip wasn’t going to be overly long. The day before, we had gone more west than south, and now we’d be heading for Chlef, seventy miles west of where we

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had been abducted, and some thirty miles north of the village. There was a dirt track, so we wouldn’t get lost. We’d be in Chlef before evening. The camels would return on their own when released.

So we said good-bye, and the emir let us know that he hadn’t seen us leaving. It was uncommon in those parts to let hostages go without ransom being paid, and he had a reputation to maintain...

We promised to tell everybody that we had escaped and stolen the camels, and so we parted under good auspices. The trip was uneventful, and our story held up when we began encountering the curious. Predictably, we had to tell it to the police as well, but we made sure that we gave no clues as to where we had been taken. The camels we had sent back before we had reached the first town, to ensure that they weren’t followed. We didn’t want our efforts wasted.

After a night in a hotel, we got back on the train around noon. We thought we could have used some of our terrorists: the air was thick with tobacco smoke, and the radios were blaring. In the afternoon, we arrived in Oran, two days late, but enriched by an experience that we wouldn’t have missed for anything.

Beginning with the railroad station with its beautiful Moorish architecture, we found Oran a most pleasant city. Over a thousand years old, it has always had strong ties with Europe, and its port was very busy. Looking out over the harbor from the spectacular boulevard Front de Mer, both Emy and I began wondering why we had to go all the way to Morocco to find ourselves a ship to Britain. Our Sicilian friends had thought it unwise to get off the train at all in Algeria, so they had told us to head for Rabat and hope for the best. Well, we had already got off the train, twice, and had been through the worst, and here we were in Algeria’s second largest city, enjoying manifest safety. So we set out for the harbor, looking for the Union Jack on the foremast of any suitable vessel.

And there she lay, our ship: the M/V Scheherezade, of the Gulf Islamic Shipping Lines, loading containers and flying the British flag. Feeling that we could handle anything Islamic by then, we went straight for the gangplank. The crew were very friendly when we told them we were looking for a passage to Britain, and, having free passenger cabins, they took us to see the purser. Nothing could have been simpler: we were to depart the same evening, and we left our luggage and went to see the ship’s agent and to settle our emigration formalities.

Once again, dinner saw us seated at the captain’s table. When he turned up, I had this strong sense of déjà vu—he was black.

“What’s the news from Australia?” he greeted us, friendliness personified.“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re Nigerian, you went to the AMC in Launceston, and

you’re a friend of Joel Eliahu!” “Yes, how did you know?” the captain laughed. “Joel and I shared a house in Mowbray.

How’s he doing?”After that, there was no ice to break during this journey, literally or figuratively. Our

captain, whose name was Oyoba, was another economic refugee from Nigeria. Earlier, he had worked for a Nigerian shipowner, but the corporation had nearly folded due to fraud by its previous president, who, during five years in office, had embezzled over a billion dollars from government subsidies and the sale of old, unserviceable vessels. Oyoba was a Muslim Yoruba and found nothing strange in being the friend of a Catholic Hausa. The third student sharing their house had been an Anglican Ibo: so what? They were fellow countrymen and friends.

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Interestingly, Oyoba’s father was a Christian and his mother a Muslim, so Oyoba knew both faiths equally well.

I made a rather insensitive comment to the effect that the two religions really weren’t in the same league, and how could he prefer to call himself a Muslim if he had the choice. One tends to do that kind of thing when one’s faith is new and shallow. Oyoba looked at me with deep sympathy, and corrected me in a most tactful manner that left me quite ashamed.

“Gregory, it’s natural for you to feel that your own faith is all you need, and that everyone who believes differently must be mistaken. You may have been influenced by teachers who had a vested interest in encouraging you to reject every other way of looking at the world. But there’s a fact that you should be aware of: Islam is God’s word for two billion people, and no matter how enamored you are with your own version, there’s positively nothing you or your Christian ministers can do to change that fact. So if you’re the least bit interested in God’s perspective on communicating with all those people, you’d be well advised to keep an open mind regarding their faith and their traditions.”

Emy and I were soon telling Oyoba about our Algerian adventure. When we came to the preoccupation of the terrorists with smoking and drinking, Oyoba offered us an insight I hadn’t thought of before.

“The Holy Quran, of course, forbids the use of alcohol and other addictive stuff. But thinking of your interest in breaking free from the official payment system, there’s another reason not to use such substances. Nobody’s easier to blackmail than an addict. If you haven’t kicked your habit by the time you want to give up the use of money, the system has you just where it wants you. Either you’ll end up taking the mark so you can go on feeding your habit, or you’ll be dependent on criminals to keep supplying you with your fix. You don’t want your hands tied when you should have the freedom to choose.”

“That’s true,” I commented. “I like a beer now and then, and some of your Sicilian relatives, Emy, couldn’t get up in the morning without a double-strength espresso in bed. I think there was more to the emperor’s legalization of recreational drugs than meets the eye! He wasn’t content with having most people hooked on prescription medicines. He wanted a population of addicts, and he wanted the supply of formerly illegal drugs, too, inside the official economy, to make sure that the sick, the hypochondriacs, and the addicts would be dependent on his payment system.”

“Giving up a dependence like a drug is doubly difficult,” Emy added. “In the case of each substance, there’s a chemical dependence, but the worse bond is your psychological addiction.

“Every day, we reward ourselves by doing little things out of habit. We prefer certain foods, we use more or less addictive drugs, we think familiar thoughts, and we reexperience our old attitudes and prejudices. There’s nothing in human life that’s dearer to us than these regular mental rewards. That’s why we’re all conservatives at heart. That’s why, to others, we’re predictable and known by our habits. The strength of this dependence is such that we automatically consider anyone crazy whose habits we can’t identify. No one unsettles us more than an unpredictable person whom we can’t categorize.

“TV commercials can be very enlightening. Advertising agencies employ the best practical psychologists, and know just how to push the right buttons. Many commercials for addictive beverages such as coffee, caffeine-laced soft drinks, and alcohol, tell us to drink the product in question as a reward to ourselves. It’s very persuasive, this idea that when you deserve a break and a drink, it has to be an addictive drink. Maybe our receptiveness stems from being denied such drinks in childhood.

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“The difficulty we’re trying to come to grips with here isn’t habits as such. Many habits are desirable and good: human society and every religion are based on fostering good habits, among other things. The problem is being told to give up a bad habit by someone who has no idea of your subconscious need to reward yourself. What we have to understand is this: to successfully rid yourself of an addiction, you have to identify your own self-rewarding scheme and decide that you can live without that particular reward.”

“This is very much in line with what I’ve concluded, myself,” Oyoba said. “Our need for the familiar is such that only the very few can successfully adapt to change without intolerable stress. And it seems that the most important thing for us is to be among people of our own kind.

“I think we have three basic, biological needs: Survival, procreation, and belonging to the in-group. Survival covers food and shelter, fight or flight, and all that. Procreation includes sex and nurturing. But stronger than both of those is our need to conform and belong to a group that we perceive to be in the right.”

“I agree,” I broke in. “People will gladly go to their deaths, abstain from sex, and sacrifice their children, if that’s what the group requires of them. This is instinctive behavior based on neurobiology and has been identified with a neuropeptide called oxytocin.”

“All of us,” Oyoba continued, “except the very rare individualist, belong to this kind of group or groups, and the group tells us what to think. We set out into our relationship with the in-group by deciding—not discovering—that it is in the right. Consequently, we can’t be shaken in this belief: whatever the group tells us to think, we think.

“The world is full of do-gooders who try to tell us as individuals to consider this or that matter, to be tolerant and generous, to resist war and work for peace. People who think we’re in the wrong will argue with us or will patiently try to point out our error, and expect us, on our own, to draw conclusions from their insights. This is unbelievably commonplace and incredibly naïve: we’re not going to change the way we think unless our in-group does it for us.

“Media and politicians seem to put on a front of pretense to the effect that if they have called for, say, tolerance and moderation in this fashion, they’ve done their job—such a shame that it didn’t work. Yet, everybody whose job involves influencing the public knows that there are no groups without leaders, no belief systems without teachers and preachers. If you want to influence the thinking of the public, you have to change the thinking of the leaders, and that can only be done either through coercion or by showing that it’s in the interest—in terms of power and money—of the leaders to comply.

“A powerful and charismatic leader aiming for autocracy, like the emperor is doing just now, knows how to grab the role of de-facto leader of important in-groups, while making doubly sure by intimidating existing leaders into toeing the line. Leading the public toward new and controversial goals has to be done like that: you can’t take away anybody’s in-groups; you have to take them over.

“It’s this need to be approved and belong that the powerful will always use to manipulate and blackmail people. Naturally, humans, being such woefully inadequate animals, wouldn’t have survived the hunter-gatherer stage without such a herd instinct. But in the current situation, like under so many previous despots, this basic drive for self-preservation by the human species has, once more, been put to use for the forces of evil.”

I wanted to take the matter of evil a little further.“There’s this general idea that our animal nature with its instincts and imperatives is evil

as such. People have spent lifetimes in monasteries and deserts trying to flagellate it to death, only to have it play more dirty tricks on them as soon as they turned around.”

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“How can it be evil if God made it?” Emy asked.“It isn’t the animal nature that’s bad,” Oyoba retorted. “There’s no way God would have

bothered to put us here on Earth to grow in animal bodies if there weren’t some divine purpose to them. I think the key challenge is placing the animal nature, along with all your talent, in the service of unconditional love.”

“What’s unconditional love?” I asked. “It sounds simple enough, but what does it mean in everyday life?

“Have you ever had a dog?” Oyoba asked.“Sure,” I replied. “When I lived at home, our dog was very much my dog. She made

every visit to my parents something to look forward to later, as well.”“Then you know what unconditional love is,” Oyoba concluded. “It’s loving the way

dogs love their folks. No ifs or buts involved. Like the dog that saved his master’s life after the man had taken the dog out in a boat to drown him, and fell into the water himself. I’m sure God gave us dogs so we’d all know first-hand what he expects of us by way of loving each other.”

During our trip, we learned an interesting thing about seamen: they had no need for getting marked. They lived on board and the ship provided for all their requirements. They were always on the move and didn’t have to get in the way of those enforcing conformity. And freighters had no room for interactive TV. Plus, sailors had the time to think about things, and got their news from different sources. When they went ashore for their time off, many of the crew had found that they liked it that way, and had figured out ways to avoid the mark. This was very encouraging for us.

All too soon, we arrived in Southampton, and had to say good-bye to Oyoba. But we were also content finally to be on friendly ground, and breathed many a sigh of relief over being through with the European Union. In spite of Britain’s otherwise stringent, hi-tech approach to counterterrorism, Henry’s execution had dissuaded her authorities from any effectual enforcement of the global requirement to be marked.

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PART 4

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27. DorsetLate winter was turning into spring in the south of England. The weather was warm for the season. Emy was enjoying it while it lasted; she was getting ready to go off to her second winter in a row, but since she was going home, that didn’t matter. We rented a car in Southampton and drove to Heathrow airport. Before Emy had to leave, we decided to call Laura and report our survival.

Laura was at home, and was content that we were safe. She wanted to join me in Britain, which was wonderful. I had to wait another week, however, until she could get the time off. Meanwhile, she suggested that I look up some of her friends. She gave me their address, and promised to call them and forewarn them.

Emy gave me another one of her special hugs, and then she was off to board her Qantas flight. I had assured her that she’d be safe: the Hyper Jumbo was such a reliable plane...

My destination was in Dorset, so I drove back to Southampton and returned the car. From there I hitchhiked to Dorchester, and, following lunch, continued along smaller roads. Getting rides was easy, thanks to the Australian flag on my backpack. Soon I arrived at the place I was to visit.

This was a community farm, far from the madding crowd, owned and operated by a couple of dozen families. The community had been founded in the sixties, and the farm was well established. They didn’t belong to any particular movement: the original owners had simply got together, pooled their money, and decided on a certain constitution. Thus, the families lived in their several homes, but their meals were shared. All the equipment and every crop was common property. They had a small elementary school of their own, and were practically self-sufficient in foodstuffs, basic building materials, and clothing. They traded and sold their surplus in the nearby town, where they were well liked and considered an important resource for the region.

My hosts were a middle-aged couple, Sarah and John, whose children were away at school and not due back until Easter. They offered me their eldest son’s bedroom, but they also showed me a small shack near the edge of the property, where guests of the community often stayed. It wouldn’t have been very warm in winter, but the weather wasn’t cold, and I gratefully accepted the privacy of the shack. The isolation didn’t seem to be a problem, particularly as I could again use my smartphone.

This community had been a Christian one from the beginning, and the members of the current generation showed their faith in everything they did. I had arrived in time for their evening meal, and got to share it with the entire group. As was their custom, they gave thanks for their meal, praying sincerely.

Over a cup of tea following dinner, my hosts and I were joined by Adrian, the elder of the community, and his wife Barbara. They remembered Laura and gave a vivid account of her visit a few years earlier. She had been going on instinct as usual, and had turned up unannounced in the middle of haying time. As if it had been the most natural thing in the world, she had put in a full afternoon’s work with the members of the community before even mentioning a need for lodging. Then she had come down with an allergic attack, and had needed rest and soothing liquids. Before she had continued her tour of the country, she had become their friend for life, and they were looking forward to seeing her again when she was due to come and pick me up.

We got to talking about the things I had seen on the Continent, and my hosts were happy to hear about all the new cooperatives Emy had helped set up in Italy. John said that their own

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community had faced a problem of its own due to its age: just because a number of adults got together and did what they believed was right, their children and grandchildren didn’t necessarily see things the same way when they grew up. He and Sarah, both born on the farm, had gone off to university and had spent many years in regular employment. However, each had always come back to visit their respective parents, and when they had got married, they already knew what life in the community was worth, and what a wonderful place it was to raise children. So they had moved back and had found it easy to settle in with the people they had grown up with.

John asked if I was a Christian, and I answered yes, a new one. I had to admit that I still had little to go on, but I told them about the book, Basic Christianity, that had opened my eyes. They knew it well: they had it in their library, too. To help me along, Adrian volunteered to explain his faith to me in practical terms.

“Life is like a two-story building with a basement,” Adrian said.I was rather taken aback and didn’t know what to make of his statement. I grew up in a

house like that, so maybe I should already know all about life, then? But clearly, there was some further reasoning to come, so I answered with a noncommittal “Really?”

“Yes, that’s right!” Adrian affirmed. “You and I and everybody else live on ground floor. The landlord and his household live upstairs, but we don’t get to meet them, because the stairway is concealed. When we’re born, we’re brought down from upstairs; then we live our lives, as it seems, very much on our own terms, and when we die, they bury us in the garden and say that’s the end of it. The lease, which is posted all over the place for all to see, says differently, but we don’t want to believe it.”

“What does the lease say, then?” I asked, beginning to get interested.“The lease says that we’re only temporary tenants downstairs. It tells who owns the place,

what we’re doing there, and where we’re going when it’s all over. It gives the terms of tenancy and some sensible advice to make our stay as pleasant as possible. It also says that in the end, the entire ground floor will be remodeled, and everybody will have to be relocated. In fact, that’ll be a time of rather thorough rearrangement, which will include sorting out even those who were dug down in the garden, as well as the then current downstairs occupants.”

“Where does the basement come in?” I asked, hoping to get a picture of the overall situation before going into detail. I could perceive that Adrian had worked out his model of our earthly existence with care; he seemed like someone who thought a lot and liked to put an argument in precise terms.

“The basement is reserved for those who don’t get to move into the remodeled house, where the connection between upstairs and downstairs will have been restored. Although it’s pretty well known that the basement is no pleasant place, the caretaker, who knows he’ll end up there himself, does some very efficient recruiting. He secures his own by encouraging our natural tendency to pride, greed, and selfishness, and leads us to believe that it’s our inborn right to ignore the terms of tenancy we’ve been given.”

We enjoyed more tea in silence for a while, as I tried to piece together what Adrian had just said. It sounded like the old concepts of heaven and hell alright, assuming that God is the landlord and the devil is the caretaker. But there were interesting parallels with renting a home here, and I wanted to know more.

“What are the terms of tenancy?” I asked, accepting that by referring to a lease Adrian meant the Bible. “Surely we have to pay the rent, at least, but what else?”

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“Well, that’s the crux,” Adrian answered. “We don’t have access to upstairs and we don’t have a currency to pay with. Nothing of what we have downstairs is of any value upstairs, and, anyway, we literally can’t take it with us.

“Instead, the landlord offers us a new kind of status that absolves us of all obligations to him for debts we may have incurred in the past, and which also constitutes our permanent membership in the community that is to occupy the future remodeled premises. All we need to do is accept that new status. But this is where the power of the caretaker comes in. Through disinformation and ridicule he has managed to distort our understanding of this simple option. He has turned the tide of fashion against it and set up all manner of alternative ways to exploit our natural need for spiritual security.

“Then there’s the matter of convenience: even if we can see for ourselves that the house must have been built by someone, we prefer to think that it came about by itself or that it’s always been there, and that we can squat in it without any obligations to the owner. We ignore the central message of our lease, the fact that our life on ground floor serves to sort out those who will move upstairs from those who will go down to the basement.”

I found it necessary to keep drawing parallels with what I knew from before.“The new status is that of being saved, of accepting Jesus, I assume?”“Yes, of course,” Adrian said.“But why couldn’t the landlord approve rent payments made to other tenants?” I asked.

“Clearly, some of us are in need, and he should be happy if we used our nonconvertible currency to look after those he’d otherwise have to support!”

“The lease states clearly that we have no way at all to pay our debt,” Adrian replied. “The privilege of being here is too great and our means are too crude. In fact, the idea you just put forward is part of the disinformation spread by the caretaker since man first set foot on this planet. You’ve just defined the concept of religion.”

“Wait a minute!” I exclaimed. “I thought you were talking to me about religion just now. What do you mean?”

“I’ve been talking to you about faith,” Adrian corrected me. “Religion is something entirely different. Religion is a human invention. Take any primitive society: it’s evident to everyone that there are forces around that people can do nothing about. Rivers and mountains, sun and moon, rain and drought, fertility and famine: they’re all greater than man. But man, by his nature, is a problem-solver, and if he can’t get his way using his own strength and shrewdness, he’ll try bargaining and persuasion. His obstacle, however, is getting through to those higher powers in order to present his case. In this he’s assisted by his fellow man, the priest, who knows there’s power and wealth in acting as a broker between the people and the gods. The pagan priest is a swindler, selling something that can’t be bought, and keeping the proceeds for himself.

“So a religion is born: man brings a sacrifice or does a good deed—pays a price—in order to receive a reward or escape a cruel fate. The priest takes the money and the glory and uses his influence to shape society to his liking, forming alliances with political leaders as opportunities arise. If you want a really good description of how this is done, read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited. The cult leader—a bolder person than the priest—goes a step further and promises you power in return for your money.

“The key concept of religion is ‘my will be done—here’s the payment,’ while faith allows us to say, ‘Thy will be done.’ God invites us to have faith in him and advises us on how to show our love for him by loving his children, our fellow human beings. Faith is something you live and share, while religion is a product you can make a living on.”

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“I don’t quite understand the bit about paying the price,” I objected. “The Old Testament calls for all kinds of sacrifices, and those commandments came from God, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did,” Adrian confirmed. “The true faith was revealed in stages. The Mosaic Law was given to the Israelites at a time when they knew of no other belief systems than paganism and its rites. God gave them similar rites, but for the purpose of seeking forgiveness for their sins rather than selfish favors. The sacrifices he demanded served the dual purposes of testing their sincerity—only the best was good enough—and pointing forward to the sacrifice Jesus later made of himself to atone for the sins of all of us who believe in him. Without contrition and sacrifice—either sacrifice according to Mosaic law or Jesus’ sacrifice of himself—there’s no forgiving of sins in the Bible.

“The perversion of Judaism set in when empty observance of the law became the measure of piousness in those who professed to believe in Yahweh, while others reverted to fashionable, local pagan gods.”

“How does this relate to Christianity?” I asked. “Don’t Christians try to be good, like both the Bible and all the churches teach?”

“Christianity consists of two opposing forces that coexist but can never be reconciled: faith and religion. The Christian faith has to do with accepting the new status we talked about: acknowledging that we have no means of bridging the gulf between God and ourselves on our own. As a result of accepting salvation through Jesus, Christians can expect both the desire and the ability to live lives of compassion toward each other, doing the best they can to be channels of God’s love for all people.

“Perfection is something we can never achieve through our own efforts, and God knows that. Yet, to be able to face him when our physical life is over, we have to be perfect. This is where faith comes in: Christ already attained perfection in his human life, and went through death in our stead. When we accept his salvation, he perfects us with his own perfection, and keeps us out of the clutches of spiritual death, which is separation from God forever.”

“Doesn’t Purgatory figure somewhere?” I asked. “I seem to recall that we have to be purified through some kind of suffering to attain perfection.”

Adrian didn’t seem to mind my digression.“The idea of Purgatory is based on verses 12 to 15 in the third chapter of St. Paul’s first

letter to the Corinthians. But Purgatory pretty much falls by the wayside when you read 1 Corinthians 3:12 to 15 in the light of verses 1 to 11, as St. Paul wrote them. In those introductory verses, he criticizes the Corinthians for creating schisms by grouping around different leaders and says that all their teachers are one, because they build on the same foundation, laid by St. Paul as the master builder. Then he goes on to compare the work of any and all Christian preachers and missionaries to gold, silver, and precious stones on the one hand, or wood, hay, and straw on the other.

“The phrase that the Catholic Church draws on to prove that Purgatory exists is ‘(Being saved) so as through fire’ in verse 15. But that phrase actually applies only to clergy whose work is perishable like wood, hay, and straw. In order to conjure up Purgatory for all of us out of verses 12 to 15, you’ll have to take those verses out of their context.

“In verse 9 St. Paul makes it quite clear that he is talking about the work of teachers of the Gospel: ‘For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.’ Thus, in verses 12 to 15, ‘anyone (who) builds on the foundation’ that St. Paul had laid is one of the builders, not a part of the house they’re building. It’s the workmanship of these builders that will be tried by

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fire, not the lifetime works and omissions of the laity that forms the building. The latter are saved once and for all through grace, not works. Purgatory is only for bad priests and ministers.”

“Fair enough,” I noted.“Back to religion as opposed to faith. Religion is a business. It turns the basic concept of

salvation by grace alone on its head and says that we can become acceptable to God by doing good works, following the rules, and paying our tithes. Religious persons strive to please men, not God; like Jesus used to say, they’ve had their reward. Often they are quick to condemn those who are less pious than they.

“Religion serves the needs of the proud and the cautious, of conservatives who want to show that they respect the values of the dominant, local, and current culture. As Christians, we follow a revolutionary leader; we have no right to be conservative. Jesus asked only for faith—be it no greater than a mustard seed—but, in his lifetime, all he got was religion. For the religious he reserved some selected sayings, many of which begin with the words ’Woe unto you, Pharisees, hypocrites!’

“The typical church teaches a blend of these two opposites: religion with a little faith mixed in for show. Some, especially the cults, leave out the message of faith entirely. This is what makes churches so incomprehensible to many of us: their central message is supposed to be based on the New Testament, which is all about faith, but their rites and sacraments reflect religion, whose objectives are political cohesion and fundraising. Yet each of them would have us think that their doctrine is an indivisible, Bible-based entity.

“The early, apostolic church taught faith only, grew like wildfire in spite of the persecutions, and didn’t worry much about finances. It was only when the persecutions ended and Christianity became the state cult of the Roman Empire that professional clergy—the priests of the Empire’s official cult of the sun god, Sol Invictus—took over and introduced religion into the church in order to safeguard their cash flows. They knew nothing about living on faith.

“Most of our current Christian denominations derive their rites and traditions from this merger of the cult of the sun god and the apostolic church. This is why we go to church on Sunday, not on Saturday, the day the early church celebrated the Jewish Sabbath. It’s also why we celebrate Christmas at the time of the pagan winter solstice festival, when no shepherds are out with their flocks in the pastures of Palestine. Likewise, we observe Easter not in connection with the Jewish Passover when Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead, but at the time and in the traditional way of the spring equinox celebration of the pagan cult of Ishtar/Astarte—where we get the word Easter—complete with ancient heathen fertility symbols like eggs and bunnies.”

“If we know all this,” I interjected, “shouldn’t we go back to the original ways?”“Who cares?” Adrian quipped. “The main objective with religious celebrations is

separating the people from their money. If God gets some praise in the deal, he’s pleased no matter when it happens. Better that it goes to him than to non-existent pagan deities like Isis, Cybele, Ishtar, or Odin. If the church hadn’t taken over the old feasts, the people would have continued their customary pagan worship on those days, so the current calendar is a matter of necessity, not just the result of collaboration with paganism. You hear so much about Saturday worship and restoration of the Apostolic church mainly because every sect and denomination needs bones of contention to set them apart. Picking on the calendar is the easiest way to put down the mainstream church, but all it demonstrates is a devotion to legalism. Let’s get back to the Constantine merger operation.

“Even the pagan superstitions were carried over unchanged. To this day, Creationists think that the birth of a blind or intersex child is a sign of God’s displeasure with the parents, just

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like the ancient, pagan Romans did. When the Medieval Warm Period ended and the Little Ice Age began, priests and ministers initiated the witch hunts. Crops failed all over Europe, and that was, without a doubt, God’s punishment for this particular parish or congregation for tolerating sin in its midst.”

“Are there any original rites left from the Apostolic church?” I asked.“Jesus was no cleric. He was a carpenter with a mission. There were plenty of religious

rites: he didn’t institute any new ones. He taught his followers to pray, love, give thanks, and trust the Lord, not to try to work out their salvation through allegiance to some particular creed. Still, unquestioning loyalty is the paramount requirement our churches place on us: whether we understand anything else of their teachings is often immaterial to them.”

“What about baptism and communion?” I asked. “Didn’t Jesus introduce those?”“Baptism had been practiced by the Israelites since centuries,” Adrian replied. “John the

Baptist baptized Jesus, remember? I’ll talk about communion in a while. Let me say a few more words about religion as opposed to faith first.

“The political function of myth and religion is to maintain the economic status quo, to perpetuate the fleecing of the sheep in human society. For this, any strongly emotional belief system will do; it doesn’t have to include divine elements. Thus, in addition to despotic religious institutions, both Communism and blind faith in the virtues of private enterprise have been used to cement the position and prosperity of ruling elites.”

“Religion, then, leads to the basement?” I inquired. I still wanted to explore how Adrian’s two-story building applied to our discussion.

“That’s not for me to say,” Adrian replied. “Pride and selfishness lead there, that much I know. But I’m not one of those who maintain that everybody else’s version of religion sends its followers to hell. I’m more inclined to think that God can use every belief system and its spiritual teachers to reach out to someone who can be saved. He’s omnipotent, isn’t he? Somewhere among the sectarian dogma there’s bound to be a ray of divine truth that’ll catch the attention of those who have it in them to receive it. I believe there are good shepherds among the clergy of every denomination and every religion that isn’t just a cult or plain idolatry for the sake of fundraising.”

“My skipper Oyoba,” I commented, “pointed out that Islam is God’s word for two billion people, and that there’s nothing we Christians can do about that.”

Adrian agreed. “He’s right. Belief systems have a clear role set out for them. God could easily speak directly to the mind of every human. But then we’d be no different from the angels, who have an undeniable knowledge of God and no doubts to overcome. God limited our means of perception so we’d have to work on our understanding of him and help each other find the way. We value our communion with God more when we have had to beat our own path to his door.

“Being herd animals, we depend on our groups to provide us with our beliefs. Most people can only be reached in matters of faith through their established belief system. So God has chosen to communicate with us through those belief systems, no matter how imperfect they are and disregarding their bickering over who’s right.

“Another thing to remember is that we have no business condemning followers for being misled by leaders they trust, nor misguided teachers for teaching what they think is right. People in general will sincerely believe they’re doing the right thing if told to do so by a revered and established institution like the religion they were born into. God won’t blame them for accepting religious beliefs if they know of nothing else.

“God’s people are distinguished by their love for each other and their desire to keep God’s law. The only way the average person can find out about God’s law is through his or her church,

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mosque, or synagogue. If your preacher tells you that the law forbids eating meat on Fridays, you’ll eat fish instead and get all those healthy omega oils in the bargain. If you belong to another denomination that says you have to worship on Saturday, you’ll go to church on Saturdays and have Sundays free. Either way, you’ll have done your best to keep God’s law because of your love for God, not as an attempt to earn your way to heaven, and God will be pleased with your effort. The fact that the clerics can’t agree on these things is no part of the equation.

“But those who have a choice, those who have received the message of faith and have rejected it, are no more helped by religion than by atheism. If we knowingly turn down the free ticket upstairs, we deny ourselves the chance to move there. No matter how high we build our ladders of conformity and respectability, they can’t go through the ceiling.”

“Why is the opposite view so popular?” I asked. “In my experience, just about everyone with an interest in church is the kind of religious person you described. They can be ever so nice and helpful, but the moment they find fault with you, their judgment can be severe.”

“You’ll find that there’s another kind of believer around, too,” Adrian told me. “But, indeed, they are few and far between. The others, the religious people you mentioned, may follow every commandment that involves outward appearances, but they never follow the Greatest Commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

“Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that people shouldn’t go to church. I’m saying that conformity and ritual are no tickets to Heaven. St. Paul, in Romans 12:2, tells us in so many words not to conform to the ways of the world. Yet, church normally is all about conformity to Conservative prejudice, politics, and social mores.

“It would be impossible to fulfill Christ’s command to reach out to all people on Earth without a church, but, alas, a church is an organization. The problems we’ve been talking about arise when being part of that organization becomes too comfortable, and the clerics forget their commitment to humility and self-denial, along with ceaseless penance and renewal.”

“I’m still confused,” I complained. “Is it or is it not right to do good to your fellow man?”“The question,” Adrian countered, “concerns something else: whether a good deed was

done out of love for the other person, and thereby for God, or for your own purposes. This simple test determines whether you’re righteous or self-righteous. The unselfish Christian charity work quietly going on all over the world isn’t an attempt at earning points with God. It’s done out of love for the suffering and a burning desire to right what’s wrong. It is what the Bible calls ‘the fruits of the Spirit.’ You can be an atheist and still act out of love. Evil acts tell of mental health problems, desperation, or an evil heart; good acts may be the fruits of love springing out of a savable soul, but they don’t buy you anything with God.

“You can’t change what you’ve done, but you can clean up your attitudes. God always gives us the benefit of the doubt, so if we repent our sins, he doesn’t grade us on our deeds. He may choose us on our attitudes. The seven traditional mortal sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth—are attitudes, not acts. In like manner, the Koran, in Sura 33, verse 35, lists a number of selfless habits and attitudes characterizing men and women for whom Allah has prepared forgiveness and great reward.

“This simple idea about attitude is too hard for the churches, and you won’t hear it from them. The Catholic Church, the custodian of the ancient wisdom of the seven mortal sins, doesn’t point out that they are attitudes, not acts. Her priests keep assigning penance for all our offenses and omissions, deed by miserable deed, and the faithful always come back for more. Protestants are no better: a prominent evangelist of the twentieth century wrote a book on the

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seven mortal sins, but he merely used them as headings under which he grouped all the sinful acts he wanted his readers to give up. It’s like treating symptoms without doing anything about the underlying disease: all that’s certain is that the patient will keep returning, and that a lot of money will change hands. Or, from the individual’s point of view, it’s like trying to stop smoking without really wanting to.

“Every religion offers its followers rules for their behavior. People are desperate for clear-cut guidance, and they’ll pay anything for rules that they find acceptable and that make them feel they belong to the group that’s in the right. This is part of our genetic, animal nature, and just about instinctive. Watch children at play: before they do anything at all, they settle the rules. Not democratically—the older children dictate them. But everybody agrees that there has to be rules. For children, this is right and necessary: that’s how they learn the values of their social group and become well-adjusted adults.

“But afterwards, most adults, too, settle for or seek out a belief system that continues the rule-based focus on behavior when it’s no longer necessary. The idea with following rules is that you can blame the one who gave them for the consequences of your conduct. This isn’t adult behavior, but it guarantees the purveyors of belief systems a living. Imposing rules on others, on pains of being sent to hell, is an effective means of keeping underprivileged members of society in their place. Yet, acting morally out of fear, or, for that matter, under surveillance and computer control, doesn’t make anybody a better person. What God is looking for are people who treat others with compassion, even in hard times, and who can take the responsibility for their own actions.

“If you mean to work out your salvation by following rules, then you’ll have to follow them all. At that point, you’ll begin condemning others for being less perfect than you. That’s why God doesn’t recommend that approach: it doesn’t work. In fact, he made the rules conflicting, so it’s impossible to follow them all. There’s a shortcut: accept that you need help, refrain from judging, and in all your actions, try to resolve conflicts and seek what’s best for the most people. Love God above everything, and your neighbor as yourself.”

“Now, somewhere in the Bible it says, ‘Faith without works is dead,’” I protested. “So good works are necessary, or what?”

“Do you know what you just did?” Adrian asked.“No?!” “You just rewrote the Bible. You put words in St. James’s mouth that he never uttered. The

way you rephrased his statement, it would say that you have to do good works to be saved. But that isn’t what he wrote.

“Can you hear the difference between these two statements: ‘A body without breath is dead’ and ‘if you breathe, you’ll stay alive?’”

“Yes,” I replied. “The first is a diagnosis; the second is a conditional statement. The first statement is pretty accurate; the second isn’t even close. You could be breathing cyanogen!”

Adrian lit up. “Now you’re talking! ‘Faith without works is dead’ is a diagnosis. The reason you so readily changed its meaning is that you’re stuck in wishful thinking about being able to bargain with God. You can’t.

“To approach God, you need to get rid of the attitudes you can’t bring into his presence: selfishness, hate, anger, greed, pride, and so on. But it’s he who picks you, not you presenting an admission ticket in the form of your good works.

“Neither did St. James undertake to screen the comers; he just wanted to teach his disciples how to tell who’s pretending. Where there’s a living, genuine faith, it shows its fruits in the form of loving acts toward others. If there are no such acts, the person’s faith is dead.

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”Gregory, what we’re trying to do here is to sort out cause and consequence. Since about 1,700 years, the church has been telling us that its magical sacraments and moral living are going to get us to Heaven. This is the business model the clergy of Sol Invictus brought with them when they took over the Christian church under Emperor Constantine I and killed all those who wanted to stick to the teachings and customs of the original apostolic church.

“Yet the New Testament consistently states that salvation comes first and holiness is its result. Wherever it deals with Christian conduct, its message is ‘you have been saved; now you have the opportunity to live the way you’ll be leading your lives in the Kingdom of God—unless, of course, you blow it first and revert to selfishness, materialism, and superstition.’

“None of those Bible passages says, ‘act thus and thus, and you’ll go to Heaven.’ They say things like, ‘you belong to God; here’s how you can show that you’re worthy of him.’ Or, ‘you are God’s people; set yourselves apart from the heathens.’ It’s taken centuries of effort by the best brains of the church to explain how these clear statements can come to mean their exact opposite, i.e., the essence of the business model I just mentioned. The resulting brainwash is so powerful that we automatically read such Bible passages backward like you just did.”

“But wait a little!” I interjected. “What’s all the talk about books being opened on Judgment Day? Eventually, we’ll all be judged on our deeds, won’t we?”

John took over the thread. “That depends on your own choice. If you’ve accepted the offer of salvation we’ve been talking about, remained faithful to God, and lived your faith, your past deeds and your remaining human frailty won’t matter. It’s those who elect to be graded on their actions that will be so judged. For them, not a jot or a tittle has changed in the Law. And no one comes even close to perfection that way.”

“How do you choose the second alternative?”“By trusting your own moralistic perfection over your need for God’s mercy and

forgiveness,” John answered. “And by judging others by some set of rules; this ensures that you’ll be judged by the same rules yourself.”

“Earlier, you seemed to be talking about some kind of self-help that doesn’t involve the church,” I observed. “But the churches quote Jesus as saying that no one comes to the Father except by him, so we need them and their formulas for salvation.”

Adrian continued the tutoring. “He also said, ‘I am the way.’ Not a church, not a ritual, but he himself. He delegated a lot to the church, but not the selection of who comes to the Father. This decision he sovereignly reserved for himself, and, contrary to what the clerics would have you believe, they can’t stop him from picking whomever he wants, even someone who’s never heard of him.

“Jesus instituted a church to help him with outreach and administration. Power-hungry men, corrupting the teachings of both apostles and reformers, split it up into denominations. Many of these, each in its particular, fanciful doctrine, claim to have the monopoly on the keys to Heaven. Be wary of those with such claims.”

“Why?” I interjected.“Try a simple logical exercise,” Adrian suggested. “If even one of them were right, then—

since they all base their identical claims on the same Bible—they must all be right, and every person on Earth is going to hell. Conversely, if even one of them is wrong, we still have a chance, and whether the others are right or wrong is no longer relevant. The whole idea is just another part of the clerics’ struggle for turf and revenue.

“Each denomination has its own formula, and each formula has only symbolic value. They amount to so much magic, nothing else. Why settle for myth and magic when we have a record of

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the actual way Jesus chose some of his apostles? One he found collecting taxes, four he told to stop fishing, two he just picked up, one he nearly blinded. But he called each of them personally. He didn’t say, ‘Go to church and complete a formula!’ It was always, ‘Follow me!’”

“You’re talking about some central things in the churches, like the sacraments,” I interjected. “Time was when you’d have been burned at the stake as a heretic already…”

“Yes, this line of thought is heretical alright,” Adrian confirmed. “So why don’t we look at the Eucharist itself, or Holy Communion, as applicable, since I have nothing to lose? Jesus held up the bread and the wine in turn and said, ‘this is my body and blood, respectively. Do this in remembrance of me.’ According to some denominations, bread and wine magically, but invisibly, become Jesus’ body and blood during the ceremony. This implies that each Eucharist held in thousands of churches the world over is a holier occasion than the original Last Supper: there at the table, Jesus’ body and blood were still on his person, and it would have been entirely irrational to interpret his words in the literal sense like we’re supposed to understand them today.”

Adrian took the sugar bowl and the creamer and placed them in front of me. “Let’s say that the sugar bowl is me and the creamer is you. I’ll move them around a little”—he shuffled the two back and forth until their placement was opposite to where they started—“now tell me: where am I?”

“Here,” I replied, pointing at the sugar bowl.“Well, no, I’m right here, as a matter of fact! That’s the sugar bowl. We used the two

dishes as representations of us, but that didn’t turn them into us. I used a common figure of speech when I said that the sugar bowl was me. So did Jesus when he said that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood. The early Christians did meet and eat together, and they did break bread and share a cup of wine, remembering the sacrifice Jesus had made for them. But Communion as a magic sacrament, to be administered only by ordained priests and ministers, is of a much later date. It’s useful to ask, ‘who benefits from this?’ The answer is that the churches and their clerics benefit from having turned the symbolic memorial meal into a mandatory sacrament that only they can perform.

“No doubt some symbolic acts, like an adult baptism, can help in defining a turning point. Since Jesus is no longer physically present and here for us to follow, we’re more comfortable if we can connect our new direction to something tangible such as an awe-inspiring event. John Wesley pointed out that this is much like choosing a destination at a crossroads: you know where you’re headed because you made a conscious choice, and the crossing is the point in space and time you relate your decision to. Churches try to provide such experiences through their rituals and sacraments. But no amount of ritual can add up to a ticket to heaven.”

“Isn’t it all pretty hopeless, then?” I wondered. “I could want to be saved ever so sincerely, but if he doesn’t pick me, I’m still lost.”

“There’s an ironclad guarantee involved,” Adrian retorted. “If you come to Christ in humility and offer your life to him with no strings attached, he will choose you. He’s said that in so many words. You can gain a place with God, but you can’t earn it.”

“Very well,” I said, “but how do I know that I'll be good enough for him in the future? I'm no saint.”

“You're almost there, Gregory. Here's the cinch. If you have given your life to Jesus, he has already reserved you for himself. He'll send experiences your way that will help you mature. Your greater or lesser goodness is merely your thanks to him for what he did for you on the cross.”

John continued the discussion.

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“This knowledge about God’s plan for mankind seems to have been there all the time, in most of the main religions of the world, as a vestige behind the elaborate systems of worship the priests established in order to secure their own power and wealth. If you dig deep and allow for some distortion over the centuries and the millennia, you often find the basic message about returning to God by repenting your sins, accepting God’s mercy, and voluntarily living his principles of truthfulness, obedience, and unconditional love.”

“So this isn’t something unique to Christianity, then?” I asked. “Not at all,” John answered. “The Jewish Scriptures, by which I mean the Old

Testament, emphasize this idea from cover to cover. Jesus was a Jew and taught from the Old Testament, remember? He didn’t have a problem with Jews or Judaism; he had a problem with organized religion. If he came back today to teach what he taught then, most leaders of organized religion would want him crucified all over again.”

“Hey, hold it!” I exclaimed. “Surely you’re not including Christian leaders in that statement, are you?”

“Yes, I am,” John asserted. “Organized religion is still the same as it was then; it hasn’t changed. You only need to advocate love and tolerance, and those who make their living from traditional moral coercion will clamor to have you silenced.

“Jesus did away with moral coercion and replaced it with unconditional love and voluntary compliance with conscience and good advice. This was a concept his contemporaries could not understand, and, to most of them, his teachings and parables remained mysteries. The apostles did their best to clarify the matter, but by the time the persecution of the early church ended, moral coercion was firmly back in its place as the only workable basis for a revenue-generating ecclesiastical organization. The occasional enlightened evangelist can talk about salvation as a free gift until he’s blue in the face: people will just turn around and ask for the rules they’re supposed to obey and impose on others. Yet, no matter how much someone like me gripes about organized religion, God still uses it to reach out to humanity because there’s nothing better available.

“But back to the basic message we just discussed. Islam teaches the same thing: repent your sins and return to God. Take Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, whatever: scratch the surface and you always find the same idea. It was very prominent in the old beliefs of American Indians and Australian Aborigines. Christian mission to these nations thus was rather redundant, which may help explain the enthusiastic way the clergy supported the genocides of the aboriginal populations of Australia and North America. Conversion by the sword in partnership with political expansion became the preferred strategy when the religious message had little novelty to offer, just like with Muslim mission in Europe during the Ottoman Empire.

“The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—is the same in Baha’i, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at least.

“The reason there’s so much ado about the differences between belief systems lies in their role as instruments of control over populations. In traditional, illiterate society, the only means of mass communication was the pulpit. Mass communications are absolutely necessary for building a social structure of common values and goals. Therefore, the priests were always part of the ruling layer, conveying the message of the owning class for the purpose of getting the masses to recognize shared objectives and common enemies.

“This role of religion has resulted in local additions and changes to the basic message of faith, as required by culture, temperament, and social structure, and by the political aspirations of

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the leaders. Take the reincarnation and Karma bit in Hinduism, for example: it’s needed to maintain their particular brand of economic exploitation, the caste system, and explain to the lower classes the reason their lot is so harsh. Islam was, to some extent, tailored to the expansive politics of the Arabs under Mohammed and his followers. Allow for those aspects and you sometimes find a message rather similar to ours.

“If you want to know what’s divine in the different Christian denominations, look at what they have in common. The differences between them are mostly human invention for human purposes, and have been put there with the specific objective of dividing and conquering, to provide leaders with loyal and committed followers.”

“As in throwing in your lot with somebody,” Barbara interjected. “Once you’ve accepted, or been born into, somebody’s belief system, you have a vested interest in thinking they’re right, or you’ll make a fool of yourself if you have to concede that they were wrong. So you shut out all other points of view in order to protect your conviction and your traditions. Plus, you get a lot of help from social pressure: in many places, there are still harsh punishments for leaving the local religion.”

“I’ve heard another comparison between religion and faith,” Sarah said. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Of course,” I answered. “Fire away, like my friend Emy would say!” “The difference between religion and the Christian faith,” Sarah began, “is demonstrated

every year by that jolly old elf, Santa Claus. Santa makes a list and checks it twice: he sets out to reward those who have been good. Santa Claus institutes a religion, in this case temporary parent-worship, which, mercifully, ends the minute the presents have been secured. In his book, there’s no pardon and no way out of a bad record even if the guilty understand their failure.

“This is a modern perversion of the original story about Santa. The historical model for Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, was a fourth-century bishop of Asia Minor, the Asian part of today’s Turkey. He didn’t invent Christmas gifts—they had been given at that time of the year since centuries—but he gave them to orphaned street children, unloved urchins who didn’t deserve them and knew it. He did so not just out of his good nature but also to illustrate the unearned gift of salvation available to all of us who are willing to admit our sins and call on Jesus for help.”

What an interesting thought.“So the commercial Santa Claus is a heathen,” I mused. “That’s what keeps alive this idea

that you have to buy your salvation by being good! Santa is the only exponent of Christianity most people ever encounter, and, knowing no better, they let the cartoonists tell them that God—or St. Peter—will decide their eternal fate based on a list of their doings just like Santa!”

“You said it,” Sarah replied. “The true message about salvation through God’s grace and the blood of Christ just doesn’t make it into the headlines. It’s too undramatic, and it threatens the cash flows of all those who are out there selling their services as intermediaries. Cutting out the glitzy ritual and the complicated dogma takes away the entertainment value, and most people lose interest.

“Salvation through grace alone, as a free gift, is the central message of Christianity. But the churches don’t want to tell this to anybody on a personal level. So they hide the salvation concept in plain view by making it a mechanical piece of boilerplate that’s rattled off as a routine chant in their liturgy. No churchgoer experiences that chant as a personal message.

“Salvation isn’t explained in Catechism. It’s blocked out in all church teaching by talk about sin and suffering, legalism and behavior. This leaves the average Christian with the impression that salvation is an automatic by-product of going to church; that regularly partaking of

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some interactive entertainment, maintaining a pious mien for an hour, and doing the required calisthenics is going to accomplish what, in truth, only a personal commitment to Jesus can do.”

“Also, not that many people are willing to proclaim such a message,” Adrian added. “Messing with established cash flows is the most dangerous thing you can do in any walk of life. Every prophet in the Old Testament did just that, as they preached repentance and turning away from idols. They took away business from well-established pagan priests, and, normally, they paid for that with their lives. So did Jesus Christ, throwing the merchants and moneychangers out of the Temple and telling people that they needed just one rule, the Great Commandment. He was ruining the business of both merchants and experts on Mosaic Law. Every reformer of the faith after him did the same thing to some established and corrupt branch of the Church, and most were killed for it. Even the prophet Mohammed made powerful enemies, teaching that Muslims were to face Allah directly.”

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28. CreationIt was a grand feeling to be back on the land and help out with the early spring work at the farm. Before I knew it, the week was almost over, and I realized that Laura was going to arrive the next day. I was reliving my Christmas expectations, undisturbed by thoughts about who was the real Santa.

That evening, John and Sarah were going to attend a lecture at the church hall in the nearby town. John had asked me if I’d like to join them, and I had gladly accepted the invitation.

John’s old car agreed to start, and we were on our way. The evening was overcast and very dark. Ours seemed to be the only vehicle on the road, and the distant lights of occasional farmhouses did nothing to dispel the feeling of utter loneliness. John said nothing during the drive—he seemed lost in thought. Sarah must have felt a need to lighten our spirits and started a conversation about the man we were going to hear that night. She had met him before and was impressed with his insights. It seemed that he specialized in new perspectives on things, and he usually managed to keep his listeners attentive, although it was sometimes hard to know if you had fully understood him.

After the isolation on the road it was a complete contrast to find the hall nearly filled. We got good seats, nevertheless—somebody had been holding them for us—and everyone around seemed to know Sarah and John. I was introduced to people left and right, and heard more names in five minutes than I could have memorized in a week. Then the speaker arrived and the lecture began.

The lecturer, whose first name was Cliff, started by stating his purpose, which is always nice to know. He said he deplored the fact that we were being taught one thing by science, and another by the Church, and that it was seen as practically an obligation for Christians to disbelieve the scientific point of view. Not surprisingly, then, nearly everyone, including a lot of clerics, chose to consider the Church’s official standpoint untenable. And, since that standpoint was supposed to be based on the Bible, it would seem that the latter was just a collection of ancient legends without any meaning to modern man.

Cliff’s objective, then, was to reconcile the two opposing views and to show that the Bible was in full agreement with the scientific version of the origins of the world and of man as a species. But he warned his hearers that he’d be rocking the boat of the Church quite heavily, and that it would be hard to find a churchman who would endorse what he had to say.

The central part of the lecture went something like this.“The material world, as Shakespeare pointed out, is a stage set apart out of reality. On the

stage, certain limitations apply. Only three dimensions are available. Time seems to progress evenly and endlessly in one direction: we’re too close to it to be able to perceive its beginning and its end. Gravity holds everything in its place. Certain physical laws are in force, as long as you don’t look too deep into either the atoms or outer space.

“The set on the stage is a planet absolutely stunning in its beauty and in the creative genius it bears witness to. Every living organism—except hairless man, his domestic animals, and his cultivated plants—is perfect in a perfect environment. At long intervals, a phase in the preparation of the set and its resources was completed and some of the organisms that took part in that phase were removed and others put in their place.

“The designer had lots of time to make working prototypes of the actors. He preferred to let the prototypes prove themselves in the actual environment over designing the end product from

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scratch without any feedback. Thus he laid the foundations for the practical science of industrial design. Just as with other forms of life, he used minerals from the earth’s crust, literally the dust of the earth, to form a succession of hominids, culminating in a creature in his own likeness, Homo sapiens.

“Then, some time between twelve and six thousand years ago, in his infinite love, he took one of the latest prototypes and gave it an immortal soul. He put it, too, in a perfect environment, but since the new man was rather fragile, his environment had to be confined to a garden at Eden. Seeing that the man was lonely, his maker cloned him and made a woman with the same immortal soul. He walked with them daily in the garden and taught them to care for it and use it for their own needs.

“Why did God go to all this trouble? Making billions of years of time must be quite a job. Figuring out how things might be made to work in just three dimensions, on the other hand, could pass for a hobby. Creating living organisms certainly is occupational therapy of the highest kind, but millions of different species?

“My guess is that he wanted company. Granted, the higher realms are said to be populated by countless angels and their likes, but their existence is one without limitations and without the challenges of physical needs. If angels aren’t subject to time, they may neither grow up nor mature. So, with all due respect, maybe their exclusive company became a trifle boring. If it’s possible to be bored where there’s no time, that is. In any case, an intelligent being with a free will, set in a three-dimensional physical environment and given the need to eat, would certainly gain some experiences that could be worth discussing.

“But what did the new couple do? They went and ate that infamous apple. Nothing wrong with apples, but they had been given a restriction in their paradise so they could show obedience to their maker. Not too much to ask under the circumstances, really. But now they had changed the rules, they had rebelled. Their maker is perfect; nothing imperfect can endure his presence. Gone was the hope of interesting company for those long, timeless eons. Unless...

“With their souls, men also received ambitions. For millions of years, hominids and prehistoric humans had existed as stone-age nomads capable of little organization and leaving few traces of themselves. Then, after Adam, over a space of just a few millennia, the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age dawned, kingdoms and empires arose, writing and science were introduced. All this is the mark of the independent will God gave Adam and Eve and their descendants, to use for good or for evil as they would choose.

“The rest is history. Mankind sank to the most miserable depths of wickedness. Having drowned all of Adam’s descendants save one family in the Flood, God gave humanity a fresh start, but within a few generations, their ways were as evil as before. Then God set one nation aside for himself and gave it a law, and some went on breaking it while others made it their selfish pride to try to fulfill every letter of the law while despising those who couldn’t or wouldn’t.

“These living souls made complete fools of themselves and became totally unfit to be allowed back into the regular regions of reality, once their stint on the physical stage was over. But their maker still loved them. He loved every one of them as a parent loves his or her child. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

“The Lord Jesus, Son of God, became a human being and lived a short physical life of thirty-three years. Then he, who had never done anything wrong, laid down his life as a voluntary sacrifice for all humans. He rose from the dead, demonstrating that physical death is temporary. The eternal life in the company of God that every one of us has forfeited now became ours for the

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asking. Perfection before God that we could never attain through our own efforts, because we’re sinners by nature, is now available to us as a free gift, through the blood of Jesus and by the grace of God. But true to his initial design of man as an intelligent being with a free will, God forces no one to return to him.

“This is why becoming and being a Christian is an independent act of your own will. Whether you’ve been brought up in a Christian environment or not, only you can decide if you’re going to be a Christian. Being born again, or born from above, is a very accurate description of what takes place when you accept the Lord Jesus and the supreme sacrifice he made for your sake. At physical birth, you receive physical life. When you accept Jesus you receive the kind of life that applies in the larger reality, the eternal life you and I and everyone since Adam have forfeited through our rebellion against our maker.”

Slightly dazed from trying to grasp all that, I registered little of the discussion during the compulsory cup of tea following the lecture. On the way back in the car, I tried to sort out my thoughts by asking questions of John, who was now chattering away and full of enthusiasm over Cliff’s speech. What I wanted to know was whether Cliff had meant that God made the world and the first humans, or if he had been talking about evolution like everybody else. John’s answer was a simple “Yes.”

“Yes to which question?” I insisted.“Both,” John answered. “He refuted two opposite views that turn out to have very similar

purposes. View number one goes like this: ‘Since I’m a traditionalist and I want to think that my understanding of the Bible’s creation account is the only correct one and must be taken literally, I’ll refuse to believe any so called scientific proof that things happened differently.’ View number two, on the other hand, starts from the opposite extreme: ‘Since I want to think that God doesn’t exist, or if he does, that he is irrelevant, I’ll pretend that this subjective premise is, in fact, a valid conclusion drawn from scientific findings.’

“The first view denies God’s sovereign right to use any methods he wants, and to choose the way in which he preferred to communicate the account of his creation work to us. It tries to squeeze God into the limitations of fourteenth-century human understanding. The second view starts out from the preconception that there must be no God, and replaces him with mere chance. But both the creationist who fails to see that the fossil record is a revelation from God just like the Bible, and the evolutionist who thinks he has proven that there is no God, make the same mistake: they put human pride and narrow-mindedness above God.”

“So what was Cliff saying then? I thought he was talking about the evolution of modern man, beginning with early hominids millions of years ago. Those hominids were quite ape-like, weren’t they?

“Cliff was talking about a design process, not about spontaneous evolution,” John replied. “But to answer your second question first, the early hominids were much more human than ape-like. You see sketches and animations of them all hairy and with faces like apes, but that’s pure guesswork. Although we have only pieces of their skeletons, it’s evident that they were human and walked on two legs. Apes and hominids, although apparently descended from common ancestors, split up at least six million, perhaps thirteen or more million years ago, depending on whom you ask.

“What’s significant is that there were a distinct number of different types of hominids, not a continuous chain of slowly changing specimens, as you’d expect to find if there were such a thing as spontaneous evolution of one species from another. The different species of hominids appeared and disappeared rather abruptly. Some of them coexisted at the same time, but they didn’t change

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much over the span of their existence. If we compare the brain volumes of the succession of hominids, it’s evident that God chose to develop our capabilities in stages: first basic survival skills, then the ability to make and use tools, then communications, competitiveness, and teamwork, and so on.”

I was more confused, not less.“Let’s get back to basics. As I remember the creation story, God made Adam from clay or

something, and then took one of his ribs and made Eve out of that. Why bother if there were people around already? Or rather, wasn’t Adam the first human being, and if so, was he a hominid or something else?”

John had the patience of an angel, and just then he needed every bit of it.“Adam was a Homo sapiens like you and I alright. What Cliff tried to say is that the Bible’s

account of Creation pretty much agrees with the knowledge we have from fossils and the like. First of all, Adam, like every living thing including you and me, was made of the dust of the earth. That means stuff like carbon, minerals, water, and so on. The point in mentioning this in the Bible is that it’s no mean feat to make a living being in the image of the eternal God from the same materials the dead, mineral environment of the earth is composed of.

“Adam was the first man with an immortal spirit. He became a living soul, the Bible says; from that you can deduce that, first, he was something else. Our friend Cliff wants us to combine trust in the validity of the Bible’s claim that God made the world with acceptance of legitimate scientific observations, such as the fact that Homo sapiens has been around for at least 150,000 years. Adam, on the other hand, was made a living soul perhaps ten thousand years ago. The radical changes in Stone Age living Cliff mentioned, such as cities, trade, construction projects, government, and slavery, happened at about that time, and they began in the Middle East, where Genesis places Adam and Eve. So evidently, God took his time and allowed Homo sapiens to be perfected until he had one individual that was just right for his purposes. Then he took this individual, Adam, and breathed his Spirit into him. God also chose to make Eve by cloning her from Adam’s rib, which was a straightforward way of ensuring that she was just as perfect as Adam.”

“But that last thing about Eve just doesn’t make sense. How can you make a whole adult human from a rib?”

“Well, you or I can’t, but God can. He performs miracles all the time. Don’t you think you’re a miracle? If you want to know what a miracle is, take empty space and see what you can do with it. Everything else in the universe is a miracle. We just take too many things for granted because we’re used to them. Still, even if we use the regular definition of a miracle, the suspension of natural laws by God, miracles do happen every now and then. Some are well documented, like the healings at Lourdes; dozens of them have passed years of scrutiny by doctors and bishops and have been officially declared miracles by the Catholic Church.”

“Can I just back up a little again?” I asked. “The Bible says that the world, including Adam and Eve, was made in a week, doesn’t it? Well, then the planet didn’t exist for all those billions of years, but God made it! And if God made Adam and Eve, and they were the first humans, then there weren’t any before them, or what?”

“You realize that Genesis, as a story, is pretty old, don’t you?” John asked.As I nodded consent, he continued.“Its creation myth is compiled from several different sources, dated between the ninth

and fourth centuries BC. There are inconsistencies between the parts, but they’re less important than the central message, namely, that the One God of Israel is credited with the whole of

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Creation, all the way from the beginning, when there was nothing. This principle is quite different from most other ancient mythologies.

“Moreover, as Bronze Age creation stories go, Genesis is pretty accurate. Science shows that everything happened much like Genesis 1 tells. (Genesis 2 comes from a different source and contains many inconsistencies.) First the earth cooled off and all manner of mist and vapor cleared, revealing sun and moon. Then life appeared in the seas, then on land, and finally humans came on the scene. According to our dating methods, all this took about fifteen billion years. But St. Peter wrote that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.”

“Well, that would allow for six or seven thousand years,” I calculated, “but not for fifteen billion!”

“You weren’t listening,” John corrected me. “That wasn’t an arithmetic statement, it was an allegory. St. Peter didn’t mean to hand us another crutch in place of the old one of a calendar week. A thousand years is a long time; what St. Peter meant is that God is outside of time and can fit any long period of time into a working day, or conversely, cut short what to us appears like an eternity and just skip past it.

“The dating of Genesis 1 is very similar to that used by geologists. They look at sediments in the earth and say that a certain era produced this layer, and another left the layer on top of it. The visible results define the different eras, not the exact number of years each era lasted. God happens to call his periods of creation ‘Days,’ a word that often has the precise meaning of ‘Era’ in the Bible. So let him do so and don’t try to force him into a calendar week or a few thousand years, when he’s given us the scientific insights to understand something of how he did his work!

“Astronomy, geology, and archaeology are part of God’s revelation to us of how he went about creating us and our world. The ancient Israelites had no idea of these sciences, but, still, Genesis had to be understandable to them. What you have in Genesis 1 is a reasonably accurate abstract of the true story. If you still insist on reading it literally, then you’ve absorbed none of the progress humanity has made during the past three thousand years.

“What Cliff was telling us is that no one has the right to let past or present human understanding of singular Bible passages dictate limitations on God’s actions. If God has chosen to leave us evidence of the way he works, like when he showed Galileo that Earth is a planet, then it’s time to use our God-given intellects rather than our fear of having our horizons widened.”

“So then you’re saying that evolutionists are more right than creationists, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I’m saying that the observations evolutionists draw on are accurate, as far as they are valid research results, accepted by the scientific community. It’s their conclusions that are totally and tragically wrong. They pretend to be intellectuals; nevertheless, they fail the most basic test of objectivity by disguising a subjective premise, that of the nonexistence of God, as a conclusion, and they perform the ultimate act of mental acrobatics by simply ignoring the laws of probability.”

By now we had arrived at the farm, and Sarah set about preparing a real cup of tea—with no tea bags in it—while John started building a fire in the fireplace. My head was spinning with all these thoughts, and my hosts knew that there were a couple of hours still to go of that evening.

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29. Unidentified Flying ObjectWhen we were comfortably seated in front of the fire, I began scratching my head, trying to draw some conclusion that would have brought the discussion a step forward. But Sarah was quicker.

“I can see what Cliff meant when he said he’d be rocking the boat,” she said. “It’s been rather simple so far: either you believed in God or you believed in evolution. Cliff says we can safely accept both. Now what?”

“Good question,” John said. “It hits the nail on the head. Hardly anyone realizes that evolutionists haven’t at all proved that God doesn’t exist. That concept is simply scientific fraud, a parasite on legitimate research. Not even Charles Darwin made such a claim, but rather saw God creating life through the laws of nature. But just as with political propaganda, it’s been repeated so often that, to most people, it has become a fact. And the faith of many Christians is so fragile that they panic at the thought of accepting the scientific findings evolutionists have used to fabricate their so called proof.

“This crisis of confidence among Christians is the result of naïvely swallowing the opposition’s argument to the effect that if something evolved slowly, then God can’t have made it. However, some of our greatest scientists, including some Nobel Prize winners, have pointed out that there’s no other valid explanation for the world than that it was created by God. And that should be plenty of reassurance for those in doubt: there’s nothing out there that isn’t God’s work. Even if something took ten billion years to complete, it still didn’t come about by itself; it just happened to please God to make it that way. A definite, creative act of God doesn’t have to produce an instant result like a magician’s trick. That perception is just something we’ve blindly taken over from our superstitious ancestors. Who are we to dictate how God is allowed to work?

“When evolutionists run up against the problem that spontaneous formation of ever higher forms of life goes against the laws of probability and thermodynamics, they habitually resort to conjuring up a benevolent tendency in the background that compensates for their trouble with such laws. They can’t say that it’s a Creator they’re missing, so they capitalize Evolution or Nature to give an impression of divinity. It would seem that the faith of the typical Christian is so feeble that we think giving up the traditional calendar week of creation means admitting that Nature and Evolution are stronger than God. Well, the comforting fact is that God made everything in this world. Without God, there would be no universe, no evolution, and no evolutionists. Nature is a creative and controlling force in the universe only because God made her that way; she didn’t invent herself.”

“Can we talk about the laws you just mentioned?” I asked. “How does probability come into this?”

“If you want to believe that there’s no Creator,” John replied, “you’ll have to assume that the universe has always been here, which goes against scientific findings. Without a Creator, the probability for it coming about is zero. Science tells us that the sum of matter and energy is constant, so neither can just pop up out of nothing. If you want to make new energy—as opposed to using solar energy either directly or stored in fuels, wind, waterfalls, and so on—you have to use up matter by way of a nuclear reaction. Adding new matter to the universe is possible only by consuming existing energy. Therefore, the Big Bang—the sudden appearance, out of nothing, of all the energy needed to make the entire universe—can’t have been anything other than a creative act of God. Evolutionists simply choose to ignore or brush off this basic scientific truth.

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“The second law of thermodynamics tells us that energy always seeks to return to its least useful form, and, as a corollary, that everything, if left alone, tends to return to a state of the least possible organization. The heat from the fireplace dissipates and becomes part of the local microclimate. The steam from the kettle condenses on the windows and wafts out the door. Your car will rust and fall apart if you don’t maintain it. So when we observe life defying death and decay, and evolving toward greater perfection, we know there’s a higher force at work than mere physics.

“When any life form dies, the same chemistry that kept it alive and sprouting or bouncing about, sets to work to return it to the earth. Nothing needs to be added or removed: all that happens is that life departs. We can explain all the actions of DNA and hormones and enzymes and electrochemical nerve impulses and their roles in supporting living organisms, but our sciences can’t explain life.”

“I hear there’s a school of scientists that has been putting electrical charges through gas mixtures and getting amino acids similar to those in living cells,” I said. “That would go to show that the origin of life on Earth could have been the result of the right amino acids forming sometime during the thunderstorms of billions of years. There’s some significant probability for that to happen, isn’t there?”

“That’s precisely what I’ve been talking about,” John said. “We can make guesses at the processes God used. But when you choose to look at just those processes and quietly assume that the universe and the right atmospheric chemistry just happened to be there, needing no explanation, you’re insulting the intelligence of your audience. It’s just as silly to say that life came to earth on board comets. Then where was it made? The probability for anything at all existing without a Creator remains zero.

“The interesting thing here is that evolutionism fulfills all the criteria of a religion. It has its own prophet, Charles Darwin; its own holy book, The Origin of Species; its own creed—there must be no God, so we’ll conveniently forget that Darwin called the sum of the animal and vegetable kingdoms ‘Creation’—and its own man-made creative deity, Evolution (capitalized). Evolutionism even has its own scientist-priests whose more or less lucrative task it is to assure believers that nothing more than blind chance is needed to explain the universe and everything in it.”

“The creationists, now,” I said. “They’ll have all this popping into existence as we see it today, within six revolutions of the earth.”

“And they hire all these quacks to refute every scientific finding that shows how it was actually done,” John added. “Their big thing, explaining everything from dinosaur bones to ancient geological formations, is the Flood, covering the whole earth. The poor dinosaurs all missed the boat when Noah closed the gates. They cater to people who can’t handle any challenges to their traditional view of the world.”

“They haven’t taken the plane from Sydney to Melbourne,” I mused. “It took more than forty days of rain to carve that landscape out of the bedrock…”

John continued.“You may wonder why this is so important to them. It’s all to do with identity. Our sense

of identity depends, among other things, on protecting our convictions, and in a changing world, we’ll pay good money to those who have the ability to reassure us emotionally and shield us from what others consider facts. The ignorant, the quacks, and the purveyors of fundamentalist nonsense form a thriving economy of their own, and everybody’s vested interest in its product—protection from the need to think—and in the revenue it generates, gives it some status and makes it self-perpetuating.”

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“Explain that reference you made to identity, John,” Sarah said.John obliged. “Our identity is the central and most important part of our psyche: we can

handle most other losses and privations and retain or regain some measure of composure, but not the loss of our identity. Amnesia causes such trauma in part because the sufferer doesn’t know who he or she is. Old people suffering from dementia go through a distressing process of losing the sense of identity they’ve built up during their lives, and often become very depressed.

“There are ways we can lose our identity while having all our mental faculties intact. Take the people in the witness protection program: you can’t just erase their old identities; you have to give them new ones. Migrants stay together in ghettos, neighborhoods, or professions where they can safeguard their traditions, language, and other facets of their common identity. Only their children eventually make the transition to the culture and language of the host country. This brings us to the importance of the in-group for our sense of identity.

“Humans are herd animals. Most of us can conceive of and define our identity only in terms of the groups we belong to: gender, nationality, language, profession, religion, race, rank, title, service club, football team allegiance, and so on. Exclude us from the community—point the bone at us—and we tend to lie down and die. Preserving our sense of identity as members of our in-group can therefore be a matter of life and death. This is why our leaders have such power over us, and why peer pressure is the most compelling way of influencing our decision-making.”

“Emy, my friend that I mentioned earlier,” I interjected, “once said that any religion that has the power, by excommunicating you, to cut you off from your friends and family—your in-group, that is—or to put you to death, is not of God. Such organizations twist their ever so holy scriptures to suit their politics, and they use people’s natural need for spiritual security to keep their members captive and to enrich their leaders.”

“She may well be right,” John answered. “But the power of the in-group is an inescapable fact. It follows that our world is neatly and permanently divided into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ More specifically, ‘we,’ the members of the in-group, are always right and ‘they,’ the others, are always wrong.

“An in-group is defined first by common rules, values, and behavioral patterns; only secondarily by skin color, language, creed, nationality, age, and so on. An outsider who acts differently and has other values will be rejected by the members of the group. This is part of human nature, and the logic behind it is the following: as long as you share my values and play by the same rules as I do, you’ll make the same deductions as the members of my group from the cues available, and recognize my place in the group’s pecking order. You’ll perceive my social position, however modest, and respect me for it the same way I value my place in the scheme of things. On the other hand, if your background and your values are different, you may not appreciate my worth, my rank, my identity—and so I fear you and distrust you, and my children aren’t allowed to play with your children.

“Now, suppose that ‘we,’ the members of the local in-group, happen to hold some really tenuous beliefs, maintained since generations by conservative leaders who see their market segment as consisting of people who reject all change and progress. We are the laughing stock of the world. Some of us may be wondering what’s going on and looking into alternatives. We are threatened as a functioning in-group.

“Is this a tolerable situation? No. We will look to our leaders for reassurance that we’re still in the right. The leaders will gladly provide that service, because their livelihoods depend on the viability of our group and its idiosyncrasies. The methods invariably employed for this are disparaging and attacking reason as something godless and dangerous, substituting it with

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blind faith in the hypocritical and conniving (or inept) leadership, and labeling all questioning as treason and all doubt as mortal sin. Man’s capacity for self-deception is practically infinite, and its foremost driving force, apart from wishful thinking, is the desire to conform.

“Here we can note that American fundamentalist leaders, the most fanatical of Protestants, have no qualms about using the same methods for safeguarding their revenue as those the Roman Catholic Church so successfully wielded during the Dark Ages. For almost a millennium the Church kept Europe stagnant in ignorance and superstition just to enrich herself, while Arabic science provided shining examples of inquiry and progress.

“Now, we don’t want to oversimplify an important concept like identity. You must understand that what people do is just as crucial to their identity as what they are and what they think. That’s why we won’t change our habits even if our very lives depend on it. Most people who learn that their diet is unhealthy aren’t prepared to change the way they eat. Informed only by custom or its modern substitute, advertising, they think they have no choice, and unwittingly elect illness and untimely death over breaking with the culinary pattern of their ethnic group or social class. Only by offering them membership in an alternative group, such as an imaginary club of clients of the weight loss industry, can you persuade a small proportion of those who really need it to improve their lifestyles. This has nothing to do with fat addiction or unwillingness to cut down on the salt: most of us simply can’t bring ourselves to let go of even the slightest facet of the rituals and behaviors that help define our identity as members of our in-group.”

“Expecting people to change their habits is like pulling teeth,” I concurred. “You’re saying that our established habits and beliefs are part of our identities. That would be the reason why becoming a Christian is so traumatic that we have to be promised a supernatural regeneration to find the courage to take that step.”

“That’s true,” John confirmed. “It’s a step into the unknown. We have to be trusting like children—born again—and break with our old in-group, which, in Jesus’ days, simply was our extended family or clan. The relatives of someone who may have considered following Jesus when he first taught the new faith, by definition, weren’t Christians.

“Everybody’s in-group was his or her clan. There were no other in-groups available then, as everyone worked at home and was held in a viselike grip by the clan allegiance required of them, and as no groups could form over large distances for want of communications. The only exception would have been the Roman army: its soldiers had already changed their allegiance away from their civilian roots. In the same way, the new Christians had to disavow the authority of their clans and form a new in-group of their own.”

“Is this the meaning of ‘hating your father and mother’ and all that?” Sarah inquired.“Yes,” John replied. “That’s a Bible passage that has been misunderstood and abused

more than most. Every cult that needs young converts to solicit money for its leaders draws on that passage. It should be understood in its linguistic and cultural context: you change your in-group and get a new identity; that is, you become a new person. You don’t get a license to break the fourth commandment or start beating your wife and children.”

The warmth of the fire really made itself felt by now, and we sipped our tea in silence for a moment. The clock on the mantelpiece showed that it was past ten, but I still wanted to know more.

“John,” I said, “I bet you can explain something that’s always puzzled me. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel, was banished, and went off and married. Only afterwards did Eve bear Seth and an unspecified number of sons and daughters. So where did Mrs. Cain come from?”

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“We’re beginning to split hairs now,” John said, “because that account in Genesis doesn’t spell out in which order all this happened. Either you’ll have to assume that Cain didn’t marry until one of his sisters was old enough, or else you can draw on Cliff’s theory that Adam was taken from an existing tribe of prehistoric humans, as a perfect example of the species, fit to be given an immortal soul. Eve wasn’t conceived the regular way—this we know for sure. Genesis tells us that God cloned her from Adam’s rib. She might still have had a surrogate mother—if we can clone embryos and implant them, we can be sure God can, too. Adam had the time to wait: he lived for 930 years, and was 130 by the time Seth was born.

“But after they were barred from Eden, they would have returned to Adam’s tribe, where their children would have had no trouble finding mates. Remember that God marked Cain so people wouldn’t kill him on sight as a murderer. This shows that there were others around, and that Cain knew their law. Also, Cain went to a country that had a name, Nod, where he built a city: you need people for that.

“Adam and Eve had nearly been made immortal, and the first few generations of patriarchs, and, I assume, their sisters, as well, had life spans of around nine hundred years. They had the time to produce many times more children than the old kind of people who had a life expectancy of twenty-five to forty years, at the most—the men, most likely, with several wives at a time. We can safely assume that the descendants of Adam, with their free will, also had a superior ability of organization, as well as any amount of ambition. In view of all this, they would soon have dominated the region where they lived.”

“Could there still be untouched pockets of the original humans somewhere in the world?” I asked, thinking of the small bands of Stone Age people that were still found in the Amazon jungle as late as early this century.

“Why not,” John answered. “Australian Aborigines have been in that country for 60,000 years, which is more than the most generous estimate of the time since Adam. They have their own legends about surviving a great flood by going up into the mountains. Creationists say the Biblical Flood killed all humans, but the Genesis story of the Flood deals only with the nations of the Middle East. It’s rather silly to think that a stone-age chronicler living perhaps 7,000 years ago could have known that the world extended beyond the area he knew about and whose tribes he could list, and that people lived on other continents, untouched by the disasters of his own. Think about it: as recently as 600 years ago, the expression ‘the whole world’ included neither America nor Australia.”

I took out my smartphone, checked a few figures on the Internet, and made some calculations. “The amount of water we have on Earth now is about 302 million cubic miles, 98 per cent of it in the oceans. Raising the sea level by 13,000 feet—the typical elevation where Noah’s Ark tends to be found on Mt. Ararat—would require an additional 490 million cubic miles, or 1.6 times the current amount of water. To raise the sea from its current level to the top of Mt. Everest and covering all dry land, the amount of additional water needed would be 1,083 million cubic miles, or 3.6 times the current amount of water.

“The extra water could have been delivered from outer space by comets, although they would have obliterated all life on Earth in the process. However, the only way to send it back would have been by splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis or catalysis. Then, over a long period of time—millions of years, not 150 days—the hydrogen could have gone back to space, while the heavier oxygen would have stayed and raised the proportion of that gas in the atmosphere to a point where all organic matter would have self-combusted.”

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John was pleased with this reasoning. “Myself, I prefer to limit Noah’s flood to the Neolithic settlements on the Black Sea shore that were inundated around 5,600 BC when the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus Strait and suddenly raised the surface of that former lake by about 500 feet. Like Cliff said, God at the time was disgusted with the wickedness of Adam’s and Eve’s descendants. The people on the south shore of the Black Sea at the time were early farmers and may well have been identical with that progeny. Anyway, if the Flood was world-wide, how did the armadillo and the kangaroo get to the Ark and back?”

“That makes sense,” I concluded. “It seems like a bit of a let-down, though.”“Not as far as Noah is concerned,” John retorted. “He performed a monumental work of

faith, building a seagoing ship with a displacement of at least 20,000 tons using stone-age tools. He spent decades of his life doing this while others scoffed at him. Not only did he save himself and his family when the flood came, he also did a splendid conservation job. No wonder he’s counted among the patriarchs.

“Anyway, we aren’t here to disparage Noah or his ark. We’re poking holes in one of the deceptions used by Creationist leaders to keep their followers in medieval ignorance and safeguard their cash flows.”

“Now, if God is so good and perfect,” I inquired, “why does he allow such bad things to happen to people?”

“Well, which do you want,” Sarah retorted, “God or a babysitter? Most of the things you’re talking about are caused by people, the rest by our natural environment or your own poor judgment. No matter how advanced our technology, we’re here on Nature’s terms. As to the rest, why do you blame God for what people do? He gave you a free will, and you’re quite happy to have it and use it. Is God then supposed to tamper with everybody else’s free will in order to protect you? Tyrants do that, not God.

“God didn’t design this world in such a way that he’d have to run it himself. He doesn’t. He turned that job over to us: humans run the world. That’s why it’s being done in such an awful manner. But the bright side of it is that we’re also masters of our own destinies. ‘Help yourself and God will help you’ is an old saying in these parts. When God does interfere in our lives, it’s in response to prayer, usually lots of it. You need to be very specific as to what it is you want, and you need to have an unshakeable faith in God’s ability to do what you need done. He often works through apparent coincidences and fortuitous meetings between people: always leave the timing to him. And when it turns out that you aren’t getting what you want, realize that God knows the future, and is the better judge of what’s good for you in the long run.

“God permits hardship in order to enable us to mature: we’re born with personality traits, but character comes about only as a result of living through tough times. He’s great enough to be able to use both chance happenings and willful human acts to further his purposes concerning us. Your task is to match some of that greatness by profiting from your experiences without building up cynicism and resentment that would ruin both your disposition and your prospects for an eternal life.

“We mourn our deceased friends and relatives and complain about the unfairness of our loss because we can only think of ourselves, our grief, and the here and now. But the loved ones we have lost are normally safe with God and on their way to much greater things than what we have here. If not, they weren’t very lovable to begin with.

“Don’t forget what the Bible says: God can use everything for the good of those who love him.

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“Never ever think of yourself as a victim, Gregory! It’s a debilitating attitude that clouds your judgment and could, in the extreme, get you killed. You have no right to self-pity. If you ever feel that you do, think of the movie The Passion of the Christ.”

“Thanks, Sarah,” I said sincerely. “I’ll remember that. But if I may continue for a while, what did Cliff mean with his first statements about the world being a stage and having only three dimensions? I got the feeling that he put the entire known universe in a rather insignificant light. How many dimensions are there in all?”

“I’ve told you that we’re here to mature,” John explained. “We come from somewhere, ‘upstairs,’ as Adrian said, when we’re born, and we go somewhere when we die. So there must be other realms than this three-dimensional world we can perceive. St. Paul, in Ephesians 3:18, talks about his prayer that we’ll all come to ‘comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth,’ so it seems that we should count on four dimensions, at least. But if there are more than four, we really don’t have to worry about them; the difficult thing is to imagine anything at all beyond the three dimensions we know.”

I pulled out my New Testament from Henry Allen, and found a slightly different version of what John had cited. It talked about all those concepts as dimensions of Christ’s love.

“What I just quoted is the English rendition of the original text,” John said. “Its obvious, literal meaning was too far-fetched for most Bible translators. They needed an object for the dimensions, so, as a rule, they opted out and applied them to the next verse. If you want to study the Bible, always use several different translations, including at least one literal translation. Many translators have recorded not only the limitations of their imagination and understanding, but also their political and sectarian agendas.

“The idea Cliff expressed so briefly, is that we’ve been given physical requirements, along with many limitations that don’t exist in the spiritual world, so we’ll be forced to make difficult decisions and get a chance to test our love for each other by caring for those in need.

“In that sense, this world is a stage: most of what we do here wouldn’t be necessary in the larger realm. The environment, its physical laws, and the existence of time provide a script for our lives, steering us in certain mandatory directions. However, the important difference between our lives and a play as we know it is that we can exercise our free will and make choices.”

“Mathematically, I know how to deal with any number of dimensions,” I told John. “But it seems really hard to try to visualize what it means that there could be more than three in real life.”

John had been through this before.“We live in three dimensions, right? That’s one more than two dimensions. Use analogy,

my friend. If you lived in a two-dimensional plane, you could go in all directions in the plane, but you couldn’t go outside it. You couldn’t see or imagine three-dimensional space or any other planes than your own, because you’d be built flat, with no eyes on the sides facing away from your own plane. The third dimension, now, is at right angles with the two you can grasp, but you can’t point that way, because no matter how you turn, your arms move only in your own plane.

“If you could move in the third dimension, you’d find that it’s much like the first two: you could measure the way you had gone, you might encounter other two-dimensional planes with interesting new worlds in them, inhabited by other kinds of two-dimensional beings, and you could return and find your way back to where you had come from. Perhaps it would be a little too much to handle, but for the adventurous, quite exciting.

“We who live in three dimensions—in a space rather than a plane—have exactly the same limitations when it comes to the fourth dimension. It’s got to be perpendicular to the space we live in, with other spaces and, perhaps, other worlds in it. We can’t point in the direction of that fourth

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dimension, because no matter how we turn, our arms move only in the three dimensions we know. But seen from that elusive perspective, we’d be open to inspection right into the marrow of our bones, just as you, from outside a plane, could see the innards of the two-dimensional beings that populated it.”

It was a good analogy. Still, I was missing a real gut feeling of what it would be like. Somehow or other, leaving this space would have to be similar to the idea of rising above a familiar plane, staying in the same spot, in a manner of speaking, but still being removed from it. You’d be so much removed, in fact, that there’d be no communication with those left behind, even though the distance, measured in the new direction, wouldn’t need to be very great.

So questioned, John came up with yet another analogy.“Imagine you’re four years old. You’re about three foot four, still a bit timid but ready to

explore the world as far as you’re allowed to go. So one evening, when your mom turns her back, you come upon this roll of corrugated cardboard standing on its end. The roll is four feet wide, or, rather, high: well above your head. What do you do? Of course, you find the end of the cardboard and look between the layers.

“Then you start walking into the roll. Never mind that it was neat and tightly rolled when you found it, and that you’ll leave it unraveled and wobbly. You don’t know that, and so you walk on. And on and on and on. Within a few minutes, you may have walked five yards, then ten, then fifteen. Eventually, you have to stop, when the stuff won’t give any longer. Now where are you?”

“In the same spot, but 15 yards removed from the rest of the world!” I exclaimed, realizing what John was after. “I’ve walked a certain distance, I can’t be seen, and I have to walk all the way back to get out again. So I’m really not in this space anymore, except that Mom can see me, if she looks down the top of the roll.”

“God couldn’t be everywhere, so he made mothers,” John remarked. “I’m told that’s an old Arab saying. The same way, I imagine, God looks on us, seeing every cell in our bodies, from the fourth dimension that we can’t perceive. Now, I like this analogy: I used to walk into rolls of corrugated cardboard as a child, and, I’ll tell you, it was quite scary. The further you go, the dimmer the light gets; sounds from outside become muffled, and you know perfectly well that there’s no panicking in there, because you have to get out the way you went in, and in an orderly manner. If you knock the roll over and crawl out the top, you’re bound to flatten and break the material, and then Mom will get you alright.”

“Great,” I said. “Now for the last of these mysteries: time. How can time be an option? It seems like the most inflexible limitation we have.”

As I had expected, John had an answer ready for this question, too.“All this reasoning about physical space and dimensions agrees well with mathematics.

Time, however, is different. There’s no basic mathematical principle to say that time must go in just one direction. Time is something we wouldn’t easily be able to think up theoretically if we didn’t have it. We can only observe it and try to interpret what we find. That leads me to believe that time is a tailor-made property of this three-dimensional space where we live.

“Time is a necessary convenience for life in three dimensions. Without it, you could never walk through a door—it’s possible only because the door can be open at certain times. God has made time to enable us to mature; it is, hence, the most precious resource he has given us. Those who have had near-death experiences tell us that the first question we’re asked after we die is how we’ve used our time here. God remains outside of time and sees everything that goes on like you see traffic on a one-way street from a helicopter: you can pretty well predict what lies ahead for somebody who won’t know until they get there. So if God wants to use an evolutionary process

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that takes a billion years, he just sets it going and comes back later to use the results—he doesn’t have to sit around and wait.”

Soon I thanked my hosts and said good night. John wouldn’t have me walk the quarter mile to my shack, but came along and started up his car. Halfway to the shack the road turned to the right, and just as we approached the bend, the car’s engine suddenly died, while ahead, beyond a shrub-clad ridge, I saw a bluish light approaching.

There were no roads or buildings there, and I gasped, “What’s that?”“A UFO,” John said. “They come here sometimes.”“Do you mean you’ve seen them before? What are they?”I was petrified, but John’s calmness gave me a lot of comfort. So far, nothing worse had

befallen us than the fact that the car had no life whatsoever.“I reckon their crews are custodians of the earth,” John said. “Time travelers, who stop here

in our age now and then, perhaps for a breath of fresh air. They’re the ones who watch the long, slow processes of development and regeneration here on Earth, by zipping from one eon to another. I got taken along once by accident.”

I thought I had heard a lot about John, but this sounded just incredible.“You must be joking! Taken along where?”“To another era on Earth. It could have been right here, but it was a different time alright. I

came driving one night along this same road, with the dog in the car, a little earlier in the evening. The UFO appeared in just the same spot as now: they have their regular places they come back to. I went out to investigate why the car had stopped, and the dog came with me. He was so scared he stayed by the car, while I went ahead to the bend in the road. I felt dizzy, and as the UFO came closer and landed next to me, I found I was in a different place altogether. It was a wasteland with no life anywhere. There was a little light, but the sky was practically black. A couple of men came out of the UFO and looked very mystified and concerned to see me. ‘You don’t belong here,’ one of them said. ‘How did you manage to tag on?’

“I didn’t know, and I didn’t seem to have the power to answer, either. They returned to their craft and a little later I found myself back by the car, with no more signs of the UFO. The dog was lying where I’d left him, so weak that I had to lift him into the car. He recovered alright by morning, however. The car lights, which had gone out when the car had died on me, were on again, and when I tried to start the car, it worked just as before. I haven’t noticed any side effects from that adventure, but I decided then not to leave the car if ever I saw one of them again.”

The light in front of us now became brighter, and for a moment I saw a round object with openings along the edge and underneath, from which the light emanated. Then the UFO took off, abruptly, to the left, and disappeared behind the trees. The car lights came on again and, like John had said, the car started up without trouble.

“Are you too scared now to sleep alone out there?” John asked me. “Just let me know how you feel, and we’ll put you up in Bruce’s room.”

Strange enough, I wasn’t.“Please drive on,” I said. “Tell me, how do you know you weren’t taken to the moon or

some other part of space?”John laughed. “I can tell you it wasn’t the moon, because I was able to breathe, and I felt

just as heavy as usual. If they managed, unwittingly, to carry me through space, in no time, outside the craft, without me exploding on the way, to another planet where I was able to breathe the air, well, then they’re to be congratulated. I’ve just guessed at the simplest explanation: that I didn’t go

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anywhere geographically speaking, but was ported through time to some era, perhaps in the future, during which the earth is being regenerated following a major catastrophe. With no human life around, these people look after it and regulate whatever processes are at work, so that millions or billions of years later, as we reckon, another world, full of life, is again at God’s disposal for whatever purposes he has.”

“Were those men small and green with those beady eyes, then?” I asked, thinking of all the science fiction stuff I had absorbed during my teens.

“No,” John answered, “they looked like regular people, with tight-fitting clothes and some form of helmets on their heads. Working gear for a tough environment, I’d say. Don’t believe any of that occult stuff you read about UFOs. Somebody is out to make money, that’s all. As I see it, there’s nothing mystical at work here. God has said he’ll finish off this present world with fire, and then he’ll make everything new. I believe I visited that time of regeneration. It could be a very long time, counted in years, while new life is created. But God’s people will be taken past that time, via Heaven, and put back into the new world, without experiencing any more delay than what it takes to exchange formalities up there.”

“What if they hadn’t noticed you and had gone off to some other eon?” I asked, aware that John had been through something quite out of the ordinary.

“Well, I had no way of calling for help, so in that case, I suppose I’d soon have perished. Fortunately for me, they had some reason to leave their vehicle. I’d have had to blame my own rashness, of course, going toward the thing, knowing full well that I had no business around it. But I don’t regret having gained the understanding I now have concerning UFOs.”

By the time I got back to my quarters, it was midnight, and I should have been scared to death. But I felt outright elated and assured John that I’d be OK. If I needed any support, there was always the smartphone. I had little trouble going to sleep and dreamed about weird and wonderful things.

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30. WalesLaura arrived at the community the next day around noon, and we spent the rest of the day catching up with her old friends. We made a special point of trying to absorb as much as possible of the insights and skills the people there had learned during their considerable history of communal living and organic farming. None of that was easy, and we felt we needed every ounce of help we could get.

Once again, Laura managed to astound me by taking my UFO encounter in stride like something perfectly credible and ordinary. She not only offered me the same explanation John had given me, she added many aspects I hadn’t come across before. I had thought to impress her with the fact that both my watch and the clock of my smartphone had lost exactly the same amount of time, two minutes and sixteen seconds, while the UFO had been around, but she didn’t need such proof. By way of an explanation, Laura told me how, as a teenager, she had regularly gone up into the mountains with her boyfriend Jamie. Jamie had a car and knew about a UFO base with a landing platform made of some unknown metallic substance, and from the nearby cliffs, he and Laura had often watched UFOs landing and going about their business.

The following day, we said farewell and drove north along small roads, until we came to the Severn Bridge north of Bristol. From there we took the M4 as far as Cardiff, and then turned north into the hill country of South Wales. All the while we compared notes and talked about our experiences on opposite sides of the globe. It was good, finally, to have some time to discuss our future life together.

We drove through Brecon and then stopped in Builth Wells. Laura showed me some of the old buildings she loved in that town, and then drove on east along ever-narrower roads. I navigated as best I could, using a detailed map. The previous times she had been to Builth Wells, Laura hadn’t known about the place she was now looking for.

The village we were heading for had a name similar to Laura’s surname, and she had an inkling that her Welsh-born grandfather might have hailed from there. We soon reached the hamlet, finding that its center consisted of little more than a farm and a church, both looking like they’d been there for centuries. We left the car and walked through the churchyard, but didn’t see Laura’s surname on any of the tombstones. A false lead, apparently. Then we went further down the road to admire the landscape, and Laura had a kind of revelation.

“Do you know what this reminds me of? Tasmania. This is what central Tasmania looks like: the green fields, the hills and the mountains, the trees, everything. No wonder I’ve wanted to live in Tasmania since I first saw it! This landscape is in my blood! Now I know why I feel like I belong in Tassie!”

“You’ve got me convinced,” I said. “I can’t think of a more beautiful place to live. I hope we don’t have to wait much longer!”

“It’s up to you!” Laura answered, and we returned to the car, parked by the church.“Not yet,” Laura said as I went to open the car door.She had a faraway look in her eyes, and took my hand. Leading me back to the beautiful

churchyard, Laura stopped on the path where the view was at its best.“Listen,” she said.We stood there quietly. The afternoon sun warmed our faces. Time seemed to disappear.And then, up in the sky—neither bird, plane nor Superman, but an angel. The whiteness

was out of this world, like a blinding light. However, it didn’t hurt the eyes. Then a second, and

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a third one. Each in turn had a message. The words came directly to the hearing center of my brain, just like the music that evening in Algeria: crystal clear, but without the sensation of sound affecting my ears. The words were in English, but people of other nationalities would have heard them in their own language.

It was quite different from hearing a person speak. Perceiving the words directly, I heard no echo, no indication of direction or distance, and no specific voice, either male or female. Nevertheless, those were spoken messages, with clear, perfectly enunciated words.

Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, and the springs of water.

Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink of the maddening wine of her adulteries.

If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast or his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name.

As the vision of the three angels disappeared—neither up, down, north, nor west; it just removed itself —Laura, with her eyes closed, kept holding me tight, and said:

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Yes, they will rest from their labors, for their deeds will follow them.

First the murder of the pope, then the persecutions, and now this special blessing. The Third Secret of Fatima was right on the money.

We sat down on a bench: my legs were wobbly. For a while we just sat there; then Laura got up and told me it was time to move on.

“The world has been put on notice now,” she said.We returned to the A470 and drove north and west along the river Wye. The river soon

looked like no more than a creek, and, still following it, we took the A44 toward Aberystwyth. Then the road crossed the river and Laura turned into the yard of a farmstead.

She went to the back door like a neighbor popping over for a chat, rapped on it, opened it up and called out, “Annie!”

“Laura!” came the reply from inside.The lady of the house emerged, followed by a daughter and a son aged around twelve and

ten. She took hold of Laura and hugged her like she hadn’t seen her for ages. Which was precisely the case: it had been three years since Laura had dropped in for bed and breakfast, and had stayed on for a week, because she had liked it so well at the farm. Naturally, she hadn’t called ahead this time either, but Annie wasn’t the least bit perturbed: she had thought of Laura an hour earlier, when she had heard the angels’ messages, and had known Laura was near. Women are that way.

Annie no longer ran the B&B, but she still had the extra rooms, and gave us Laura’s attic hideaway from last time. Her husband, Marvin, with two grown sons, soon returned from their day’s work, and we greatly enjoyed the company of the family and their hospitality.

“This is really it, then!” Marvin said, as we all compared notes about the angelic messages.

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Our hosts were Catholics, and had only recently become acquainted with the Apocalypse, as the Roman Catholic Church in Britain had broken her ties with the counterfeit pope, and had instead established a close liaison with the Church of England. Laura and I confirmed that we believed the end times were at hand, and told them something about our experiences.

The BBC reported great unrest on the Continent and all over the world. The propaganda commissioner was seen busily denouncing the dirty trick played by the opposition that day as just a simple matter of holographic projection and airborne loudspeakers. The commissioner didn’t attempt to explain the vision to those who had seen it indoors.

The official enforcement of the will of the people would be tightened: not an inch of ground would be given to terrorism. The execution of traitors was to be stepped up: it was evident that the enemies of peace and justice had now resorted to biological warfare. Around the globe, good people, loyal to the emperor, were suffering from some unknown skin disease, causing ugly and painful sores all over their bodies. Epidemiologists presented confused and contradictory theories about how it was transmitted. The affliction had first been noticed in Italy, and had spread to every country in the world in a matter of days. Nobody could say how it had been able to turn up everywhere so soon.

It had also become clear that the unmarked, who were being arrested at an accelerating rate, were not affected. In spite of intense questioning, their conspiracy had held, and it wasn’t yet known how they had managed to spread the disease while, apparently, succeeding in vaccinating themselves with one hundred percent efficacy. No effort would be spared, however, to obtain a cure, and laboratories all over the developed world were working around the clock.

The BBC added that the Channel tunnels had been closed as a precaution, and that travelers arriving from the Continent were being quarantined. Nevertheless, the epidemic had spread to Britain, albeit with a lower infection rate than in most EU countries.

The two agitators that had appeared in Jerusalem in January were still delivering their message, and since it was much the same type of misinformation as had been heard around the world earlier that day, EU officials assumed that they were the driving forces behind the rebellion. Unknown Israeli hackers had released a computer virus that had added the archaic Hebrew they used to the automatic translation programs of all Web and TV channels. In spite of energetic attempts at eradicating the virus, it always popped up again, and it seemed impossible to keep the subversive preaching off the airwaves and the Internet. So uncontrollable had the electronic media become that the concerted efforts of law enforcement seemed to be in vain; there always was some TV channel or Web Forum that ran the prophets’ ravings.

The pair couldn’t be dislodged from the Temple grounds: they stood back to back; they didn’t seem to need food, drink, or sleep; and their hidden flamethrowers—some said the fire came from their mouths—didn’t run out of fuel. So the Israeli police had notified the EU author-ities that they wouldn’t be going near the two anymore: too many officers had already been lost, and the pair’s bulletproof vests couldn’t be pierced.

At the end of the day, Marvin gathered his family and visitors together, and read a text that seemed most appropriate.

Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.

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The farm was quite a remarkable place. The next day, I found out that not only was it large, over two thousand acres, but it also had a number of attractions. A mountain popular with hikers stood on Marvin’s and Annie’s grounds. And the source of the Wye was there, next to the mountain.

The national saint of Wales, St. Eistedd, had rested in this place on his way inland to establish a church. During later centuries, a lead mine had operated on its grounds. Large heaps of black gravel lined the creek some way back from the homestead. One of the barns incorporated a stone building that had served as communal housing for the miners and their families. It was in two stories, with the upper floor missing. You could see rows of old open fireplaces, no more than little niches in the stone walls, every ten to fifteen feet all around the building, both upstairs and downstairs. That meant one family to one fireplace. There weren’t any real windows—why pay window tax on housing for plain laborers. I could only guess at the life expectancy of those miners and their kin, breathing lead dust and coming home to those cramped quarters with no daylight.

Marvin raised sheep and did hauling jobs, and had a nice business going with his sons and son-in-law. With so little left of the ozone layer, I wondered what kept his sheep from going blind: he used no contact lenses for them like Australian sheep farmers had to do. He thought that they didn’t have enough sunny days in the year to have to worry about ultraviolet light. Also, his sheep were bred the natural way from old stock; most of the Australian sheep that needed contact lenses had been cloned from just a few original individuals that had happened to have the best and richest wool.

In the afternoon, Annie went off shopping to Aberystwyth, and Laura decided to go along. Laura told me to go up and take a look at the old mine, but to stay on the path—there were all kinds of pits to fall into. I duly promised, and they left. It was some time before I actually set out for the mine: Marvin had things to do and I tagged along. About an hour before sunset we were finished, and I said I’d wander up the track along the Wye. It was drizzling, and Marvin wouldn’t have me walking in such weather, so he drove me all the way to the mine, which was as far as the road went.

With the mine and the rest of the view explained, I got the idea that I’d like to see the actual source of this well-known river. Marvin said that it was just a short way from where we were, on the other side of a hill, and assured me that I’d make it there and back before dark. With a sign Marvin had put up for the tourists who came to climb the mountain in full view, warning not to leave the path, I set off in a different direction, following the creek, walking through the heather.

I was soon forced to leave the creek and cross over the hill, while the creek skirted around its base. On the far side of the hill I thought I could see the place where the creek began, but not very clearly. So on I trekked. The heather and the coarse grass got more difficult to walk through, and I decided to cross over this nice little flat expanse of green, maybe fifty feet across, opening up to my left. So I stepped out on it, and sank down in a bog, level with my chest. My unexpected close-up view of the nice, flat patch of greenery revealed that there wasn’t a blade of grass growing in it, just moss that covered the surface of the water. Talk about feeling stupid.

There I was, facing away from the edge of the swamp, slowly sinking deeper as the air escaped out of my coat, unable to swim or make any effective movements in the thick, stinking, rotting mire around me. For a moment I wondered if this was the end of it, but, having said a prayer, I decided it wasn’t. Using my arms, I managed to turn around and sank only a little deeper as I did so. I discovered that I could reach the tufts of grass on the shore, and pulled

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myself out. I got back to the Land Rover before dark alright, and found that Marvin had dozed off, listening to the radio while keeping the engine running and the heater on, to prevent the windows from fogging over. He’d never have heard me, had I shouted for help, and he wouldn’t have known where to look for me.

The sign on the gate was still visible. “Stay on the path!” I got myself showered and my clothes laundered before Laura and Annie returned.“Why didn’t you stay on the path?” Laura asked.If only I knew.Something good was to come out of my blundering, however. Marvin hadn’t known

about the bog, and he’d been wondering why he kept losing sheep at a steady rate. The next day, he and I went back there in full daylight, and found not only the big, messy hole in the green moss where I had fallen in and struggled to turn around, but also a smaller hole, neat and oval with no marks of movement at all. A sheep had gone down after me, just a few steps to the left. Poor thing, down there head first, without a chance to right itself up and try to swim: the muck was far too thick. Marvin said he’d fence the bog in as soon as possible.

Now we could also see how it had come to be there. Its eastern embankment, next to where the sheep and I had fallen in on the south side, was a man-made stone wall. The western shore was a natural incline, and we saw that some sheep had approached it from that side too, and had been able to turn around. The pool had been built as a rainwater dam for the ancient mine, and, being stagnant, had become a bog during the centuries that had passed since the mine had been closed. No wonder it stank so: there would have been ever so many rotting sheep carcasses in it.

After all this, I checked on the Ordnance Survey map where I had been, and found that there are two creeks up there forming the headwaters of the Wye. And it’s the other one that’s called the Wye all the way to its source.

The source of the Wye. Right.

Eventually, it was time to leave this hospitable place where we had rested just like the old saint, and we drove off to the north. This tour was my first opportunity to see something of Britain: my business trips had never got me any further from London than St. Albans. Laura had been on those roads before, but didn’t mind doing it again for my sake. We traveled slowly through North Wales and the Lake District, and on into Scotland, passing briefly through Glasgow. We drove the length of Loch Ness, never seeing a trace of Nessie, and turned west at Inverness. After a long drive along a narrow, lonely road between the mountains, we came to Ullapool, which was as far north as we’d be going.

I could see why Laura had been raving about Ullapool ever since I had met her. She hadn’t been exaggerating. I felt that the language didn’t have enough superlatives properly to extol the beauty of the loch and the quaintness of the town. But there was something else of interest there, too: a thriving group of alternative-lifestyle people, with their own trade club, keeping the economy going very nicely, although the traditional livelihood, fishing, had long since ceased.

Returning southward, we drove along the east coast, stopping over in St. Andrews to pick up golf-related souvenirs for waiting Australian friends. I got to see the ancient underground bunker nearby that had been built to serve as a top-secret nuclear war command center for Scotland, and had been staffed and operational for the duration of the Cold War. Wherever we stopped for meals or bed and breakfast, I witnessed Laura’s incredible ability to cheer up people

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who often seemed to have no hope for the future. Everyone she met always ended up with a reflection of her vitality showing in their demeanor.

All too soon, our two-week holiday was drawing to a close. I was to continue to the States; Laura would fly back to Sydney. I had been thinking of finding a freighter again, so Laura drove us to Southampton. But instead of looking for ship owners and agents, she headed for the marinas. There, among the pleasure craft, we found ourselves wandering along the pontoon berths on our last afternoon together. True to her character, Laura was chatting up everyone we met. When we came upon a man stocking up his 32-foot fiberglass sloop, she found out that he was heading for the US east coast on the morrow, and that he needed someone to crew for him. That ended up being me—I had done enough sailing to qualify, and Laura was content to let me go, having checked out the boat and learned to know the skipper.

The next day, I parted from Laura for the third time, hoping that I’d never have to do it again. Laura didn’t show how it hurt her: she kept a happy face, not wanting to add to my burden. She watched us set out to sea, waved, and went to her car to drive to Heathrow.

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31. Washington DC, USAThe northern route to America is the fastest way to get there. The normal thing to do would have been to sail south to the Canary Islands, then west across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and north along the east coast of the United States. But Chuck, my skipper, wanted to get across fast enough to arrive in Washington by April 18, which gave us only six weeks. Furthermore, taking the southern route would have delayed us until well after the onset of the hurricane season.

So we sailed west from Southampton into worsening weather. I needed all my warm clothes, as well as the foul weather gear Chuck provided me with. We knew to expect head winds, fog, and at least a couple of storms. The harvesting of icebergs had slowed down: we were prepared to encounter some along the way. This was the route taken by the Titanic in April 1912. But in contrast to her crew, we were equipped with radar and a pair of Russian infrared binoculars that Chuck had obtained from his favorite surplus store.

We soon settled into the normal cruising routine of four-hour watches alternating with four hours of rest, sleep, and a quick bite to eat, around the clock. Whenever the going was hard, both of us were needed topside. After a while, it became very tiring. To keep myself alert while running on autopilot, I checked up on the Global Positioning System navigation using Chuck’s sextant and sight reduction tables, along with my watch and dead reckoning; this was a skill I hadn’t wanted to lose. Now I had a good opportunity to brush up on it, especially because of the demanding conditions.

Our first storm hit south of Iceland. It was dark, but once it was clear what we were facing, we lowered the sails and continued under storm canvas, smaller and heavier sails that were meant to keep us going safely in the howling weather. We didn’t have the options of heaving to or running off under bare poles: we were in a busy shipping lane and had to stay maneuverable at all times.

Our radar was practically useless: there were too many reflections off the waves, and the boat was heeling too much. While I was at the helm, Chuck kept a lookout, frequently using the infrared binoculars. That was just as well: at one time during the night, we suddenly had to change our course when a freighter turned up at close range, bearing down directly on us. They couldn’t blame their radar, which would have been a lot better than ours, but maybe they weren’t watching it very closely. Chuck’s boat had a transponder for the new satellite navigation system, and the freighter might have had satellite navigation gear, in which case her crew should have seen our position, but we weren’t going to wait to find out.

Once on a safe course, we contacted them over the VHF radio, and got a confirmation that they could now see us. They also gave us a warning of some floating debris ahead; they had bumped into what they thought was a truck container and had sustained a minor leak. For us, such a collision would have meant certain death. We doubled our vigilance: usually, drifting containers are completely submerged, and extremely hard to see.

Knowing the position of the flotsam, we got an observation of it: a single blip on the radar, which checked out as the container through the binoculars. We gave it a wide berth and continued on our way, not much relaxed.

It was time for a cup of coffee, and I went below while Chuck took the helm. It wasn’t necessarily the easier task to prepare the coffee in the heeling, stamping boat. Chuck didn’t believe in galley straps; he wanted to be free to move about. Instead he had enough handholds

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below deck, and I did get the coffee into two insulated mugs without mishaps. Armed with the mugs and a supply of snacks, I emerged into the cockpit and fastened my lifeline.

We both took a sip of the coffee, and promptly spit it out again. It was salty: we had seawater in our fresh water tanks! Chuck went forward to check the deck fillers and came back, saying that one of them had a faulty seal. He went below to close off the feed line from that tank, but returned with the news that the contamination had already spread to the other one through the cross-bleeding pipes.

“Remind me to keep them closed, will you?” Chuck said, mostly to himself.All we had to drink now was some spare water in a number of one-gallon plastic milk

bottles. Nevertheless, the faulty seal had to be replaced in spite of the storm: we still needed to protect the water in the tanks for washing. Collecting rainwater would have to wait until the storm abated, and then it was anybody’s guess if we’d get any rain before the next storm. A small reverse osmosis device would provide emergency water when needed, but operating it was a lot of work. Our water was now rationed, and we decided to wait until morning for that cup of coffee.

After a full 36 hours, the storm finally subsided. Now was the time for repairs and recovery. While the boat continued under autopilot, we checked everything above and below deck. Soon, we found that a rigging screw had failed on the lee side; it had stripped its threads to the point of breaking. The shrouds had been in the water for most of the duration of the storm. The tension must have been too much for the screw. Luckily for us, it was holding the lower aft shroud and not the top one, or we’d probably have lost the mast. The repair involved going up the mast to the spreader to check the fittings there, tensioning a halyard to the mast top to loosen the shrouds, and replacing the failed screw.

A winch on the same side had jammed because of all the salt. I took it apart, cleaned it and greased it, and had a hard time reassembling it again. It was a two-speed winch and rather complicated, but very useful when it worked: you needed the higher power ratio for the mainsail sheet when the wind picked up.

Which it did, soon enough. Back to storm sails, and another sleepless day and a half. By now we were in the foggy area of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland where icebergs from West Greenland drift south from March until July. The International Ice Patrol broadcasts iceberg maps twice daily, and we made good use of them. But our own radar could only see large bergs, where reconnaissance airplanes had dropped radar transponders. So our lookout had to be kept up constantly. That meant very little sleep, something we were getting quite used to. Staying alert wasn’t becoming any easier, though.

The radar and other electronics were draining our electric supply, although the boat was well equipped with six 24 volt deep-cycle batteries. At regular intervals, we had to run the engine, an old three-cylinder, 38 horsepower Volvo. After the second storm, the starting batteries could no longer turn the engine over, and Chuck gashed his knuckles badly on the crank. He needed bandaging, and his mood got no better. As soon as the batteries were charged, the engine had to be turned off again: the tanks held only 52 gallons of diesel fuel, and we had to conserve it.

Sailing down the Maine shore, we suddenly found ourselves becalmed. After waiting a few hours, and getting no hope of a wind anytime soon from the weather service, we started up the engine again, and began motoring. We were now close to land, and could buy more fuel if we needed to.

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As we were rounding Cape Cod in a strong current, the propeller got stuck in something and shook the boat violently, and then the engine ground to a halt. We had an emergency on our hands. The boat was adrift in a busy shipping lane, and we still had no wind. We did have full batteries, though, and Chuck contacted the Coast Guard on the VHF radio. A cutter turned up within minutes, and not long afterward a boat from a towing company. We got safely to harbor at Chatham, and could begin inspecting the damage.

It turned out that we had run into some polypropylene netting—treacherous stuff, as it floats and stays at the surface if lost by fishermen. There was no removing it from on board: it had melted into a glob around the propeller shaft. We also had a slow leak around the propeller shaft bearing, where the lamination had been shaken loose. Chuck had the materials needed, and so we set about making the repairs ourselves.

I had an Open Water II scuba diving license from NAUI, the National Association of Underwater Instructors back in Australia. So I rented a suit, a weight belt, a regulator, and a tank, and went down to check the damage. Toxic red algal bloom covered the water: it wasn’t pleasant, but the work had to be done. Using suitable tools, I soon had the remnants of the netting removed. Chuck prepared the epoxy mixture and a fiberglass patch, which I duly applied to stop the leak. To complete the outside repairs, I fastened a stainless steel bracket around the propeller shaft at the end of the boat’s long keel, to secure the weakened structure.

Inside, Chuck was checking and repairing the engine mounts. We were fortunate that the propeller shaft hadn’t been bent; the propeller itself was still straight, as well.

In all, we spent two days in Chatham. When we were done, the wind had picked up again, and we set sail late in the afternoon. Continuing down the coast, we passed Long Island on the outside to save time, and got some rough sailing in the deal.

Heading for the New Jersey shore across the open sea, we had a scare, when the GPS began reporting high speeds, over 70 knots, and a position a long way from where we actually were. Now our navigating skills came in handy, and we were at no time unsure of our position. But we got a good reminder of the dangers in relying solely on high technology. After a couple of hours the GPS returned to normal, without any explanation from the Coast Guard or anybody else. But other boats in the area had experienced the same problem, as we found out when reporting it to the Guard.

After six weeks in the Atlantic Ocean, we were content to round Cape May and head up the Delaware Bay. We sailed up the river until we came to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal; then we motored the seventeen miles through the canal until we reached Elk River. The Chesapeake Bay is somewhat protected and gave us an easier time than the Atlantic, but it can be choppy at times. We still had two hundred miles to go to our destination, and kept sailing through the night. Around midnight, we rounded Point Lookout and were in the Potomac River.

About eight in the morning we rounded Maryland Point, and headed north for the final thirty miles to Washington. Daylight revealed that the river was just as red and mucky as the sea. It was an overcast day, the 19th of April. We had caught up some of our delay and were one day behind schedule. Chuck wasn’t happy: he had missed an event he had wanted to attend, but he was an experienced sailor and didn’t complain.

Without warning, there was a blinding flash of light ahead. “Wha...” Chuck began, but I didn’t give him a chance to finish. My Army Reserve training turned out to have the intended effect.

“Don’t look! Get down!” I yelled, covering my face and throwing myself to the cockpit sole.

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In the process, I caught a glimpse of my watch. It was 9:02 AM.The intense light continued for several seconds; then it began to fade away. I had found

my sunglasses and got up again. A quick check confirmed my guess: a fireball was still expanding ahead, turning from yellow to orange and then to red; then a mushroom cloud broke out of the top of the ball and rose rapidly upwards. A hole had formed in the cloud layer above the fireball, and the mushroom cloud now spread out in and above the hole.

“A nuclear bomb,” I said. “Let’s lower the sails, quick!” We had them down in less than a minute. At 9:04:25 we heard the explosion, a rather

sharp “crack” followed by a long, thundering growl. The delay of two and a half minutes put the blast at 30 miles away, in Washington. We didn’t feel any wind or shock wave, which indicated that the charge had been relatively small, in the 10 to 20 kiloton range. Had it been a 20 megaton hydrogen bomb, we’d not only have been severely burned, but we probably would have been sunk by 100 mph winds.

Chuck and I looked at each other. Neither of us needed to say it—had we kept to our schedule, we’d have been there now. But we had to decide what to do. This wasn’t the right time to arrive as tourists in the area.

“We can’t go back to Britain: our stores are finished,” Chuck said. “But we could turn around and go to Annapolis or Virginia Beach, to be out of the way. What do you think?”

“There’ll be martial law all over the country, or at least in the eastern half,” I speculated. “They might not let us in. We may have to go to Cuba or Bermuda on the rations we have left. I’d like to keep going: I’m on my way west. Perhaps, after all, we’re less likely to be turned away here than in an undamaged area, where the authorities aren’t overloaded with emergency management. The wind’s from the northwest: if the target was Washington, we should be able to get to Alexandria without passing under the fallout cloud. Let’s go on and see what happens!”

So we set sail again and continued. There was little traffic on the river, as could be expected. At Quantico Marine Base, we saw frantic activity everywhere, but nobody challenged us. We sailed on, listening to local radio stations that confirmed ground zero as Washington DC. A commentator found the time to bemoan the timing of the attack: Washington had barely finished digging itself out of the mud from the tsunami generated by the Atlantic comet impact, and now this! Toward two in the afternoon, we passed Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, and soon thereafter, we turned the last bend in the river and had an unhindered view of the scene of destruction in front of us.

Washington was still burning. A pall of smoke was trailing off to the right, drifting over the poor residential areas in the southeast, where fallout was least needed. The trees on the shores we passed by had been hit by gale force winds, but hadn’t caught fire. I revised my estimate of the blast to a ten-kiloton bomb exploding at ground level. One of the famous backpack nukes, perhaps: the instructions to build them had been on the Web for ages, in such detail that there must have been something going on for real.

In Alexandria, Virginia, on the western shore of the river, we landed at the City Pier. Predictably, the police officer on patrol didn’t want to let us ashore. But we sensed uncertainty and guessed that there were no such orders: it was unlikely, I thought, that an acting government would yet have had the time to issue directives about such a trivial matter as arriving foreign yachts. Chuck did his best to persuade the officer that all he needed was a cruising permit from customs so he could sail south along the Intracoastal Waterway. I, on the other hand, wanted to get ashore to continue my trip west. So, drawing on past experience, I decided to get in on the action if nothing else would work.

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“Officer, I’m a contingency planner! I’m sure I could be of some use here. I need no visa: I’m an Australian. Couldn’t you get in touch with the Emergency Management Services so I could offer to help them?”

To prove my words, I fished out my passport and a tattered membership card from the Australian Association of Contingency Planners. The good officer saw my point, waved Chuck on to shore to be done with him, and contacted his superior over his two-way radio. The captain made him wait while he talked to the regional coordination center. Then the message came back: the center was sending a helicopter to pick me up. All was going well, although I realized that I’d be delayed. I was ashore.

The helicopter headed for Bolling Air Force Base across the Potomac, only three miles south of downtown Washington. I asked the pilot to make a detour so I could see some detail, and he took me up the river as far as Arlington Memorial Bridge. The devastation was appalling. At Reagan National Airport on the western shore, just north of Alexandria, the all-glass terminal building had lost most of its windowpanes and was burned out: the blast had thrown a number of planes into the building. The Washington Monument had broken off at the joint between the lighter and darker stone a third of the way up; the fallen part lay on the ground as a jumble of sandstone and marble blocks and elevator cables. The Lincoln Memorial looked intact from a distance, but its roof had been blown off, and polluted rain had blackened the statue inside. What I could see of the city was mainly rubble downtown, and burning and smoking ruins all around.

At Bolling, the brick buildings were standing, though mostly without windows. Emergency vehicles were everywhere. The air was filled with the powerful hum of diesel generators providing emergency power. The officer who had come for me took me to the huge, unmarked glass and aluminum building of the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center at the north end of the base. It still had its windows: they were covered in a dark film that had kept them from shattering. The main purpose of the film would have been to be electrically conducting so as to prevent electronic eavesdropping from without, but at the same time, it also filtered the sunlight to save on cooling costs, and protected the windowpanes from breakage.

I was taken to the colonel who was acting as incident commander of the recovery effort. His name was Adams. Soon after my arrival, he finished a meeting and called me into his office.

“What can you do?” he asked after shaking my hand.“I’ve been a contingency planning coordinator at a large company for nine years, sir,” I

answered. “I know computers and the Internet. And I’m a lieutenant in the Australian Army Reserve.”

“Lieutenant Greene, consider yourself on active duty indefinitely, under the provisions of the ANZUS pact,” Colonel Adams replied. “We’ll sort out practical matters as soon as we can. For now, I need you to complement our staff. We lost many of those who were here this morning to blindness, and part of those who were still on the road to the blast.

“The District of Columbia Emergency Management Agency at 14th and U Street NW has burned down. Their backup center has no power and no communications; we don’t know if there’s anybody there. Normally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency would coordinate the government’s response to a crisis like this, but its headquarters at 5th and C Street NW is no longer there. According to plan, FEMA’s Philadelphia regional office should take over, but it’s too far away. Since we’re still relatively intact here, and have a direct view, we’re acting as the regional operations center. We’ve managed to establish communications with the rest of the country using satellites and the National Communications System, so we’re getting

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things done. But everyone here is overburdened with the recovery effort. I want you to find out what happened!”

“I judge it to have been a 10 kiloton charge exploding at ground level, sir,” I said. “It could have been brought in by any vehicle, or carried by hand: its weight would have been around 58 pounds. I’ll need access to all available satellite images before and during the blast, and all remaining footage from traffic cameras.”

“Everything’s here,” the colonel answered, motioning out over a large room full of computers and terminals. “Our system administrator will give you a user name and record some biometric data. Copies of the contingency plans of a number of Washington area agencies and businesses are on the shelves here. Spare no effort: if we can find out anything at all, we might get some clues as to who did this and why.”

Said and done. I was soon engrossed in the most ambitious and large-scale instance of on-line sleuthing I had ever imagined. The DIAC, obviously, was connected to the very source of an abundance of satellite images: its parent, the Defense Intelligence Agency, ran many of the American spy satellites. I was able to use the classified kind, with much better resolution than anything I had seen before. Although optical images weren’t available from the morning because of the clouds, radar and infrared images provided nearly the same level of detail.

The destruction in the city radiated out from a crater, a good hundred yards in diameter, in the eastern half of the Washington Mall. By comparing the images with the map, I determined that the crater was centered on Madison Drive between 7th and 9th Streets NW. An almost circular area two thirds of a mile across, including the National Museum of Natural History, the National Archives, and the National Gallery of Art, was leveled with the ground. Outside this core of total destruction, everything was wrecked and burned down as far as Dupont Circle and Eastern Market, an area around three miles in diameter. The White House, the Capitol, and the Australian embassy had been inside that area. Serious fire damage extended as far as the National Zoo and Anacostia. Burst gas lines fed the fires, and severed water mains meant that there was no water to fight them with.

The radiation and the fallout would have been deadly in the area of total destruction as well as ten to twenty miles downwind, to the southeast. The total amount of radioactive fallout would have been comparable to that of the Chernobyl disaster. Tens of thousands of people were dead; thousands more were dying, including many of those trapped since the morning rush in the total chaos on the roads outside the destroyed downtown area. Evacuating survivors by road would have been just about impossible in this country where public transportation is by car.

Managing the combined efforts of the emergency services of the neighboring counties, along with the volunteer companies that were streaming in from all over the nation, and ensuring that they could get through and that they were helping those that could still be saved, was the urgent task of my colleagues. The Pentagon had taken over the running of the country, monopolizing the window repair services of the area for the next several days. I contented myself with my assignment.

Having found out where the bomb had been placed, I needed archive images from the morning. Soon, I had lined up a series of satellite images ending with the blast itself, pinpointing it to a bus, parked on the north side of Madison Drive, between the Ice Rink and the National Sculpture Garden. Earlier images in the series showed the bus arriving in the area around eight in the morning, parking, and setting down a load of tourists, just like a couple of other buses parking at the same curb. Nobody was carrying anything bulky or heavy: the bomb had been left on board, probably among the luggage. I marked the debarking passengers and ran the series of

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images following the arrival of the bus as a movie clip; the computer showed where each had gone. They had headed for the Sculpture Garden, but two had continued to the nearby Smithsonian Metro station. Going south, they could have reached Reagan National Airport in about fifteen minutes; going north, they could have been at Union Station in ten minutes or less.

Now I wanted the passenger list of the bus. I gave a fleeting thought to following its route backward to see where it had come from. But that would have taken forever. What I needed was the video from the traffic cameras, or else the traffic computer records of where each vehicle in the area had been at eight in the morning, so I could get the license plate number of the bus, or perhaps the name of its operator off its side. It had no markings on top, which made it impossible to tell its identity from the satellite images.

From the contingency planning manual of the District of Columbia Department of Public Works I found out that the Department’s computers had been located in several buildings that were now destroyed. But the traffic camera computer had had an on-line link to a mirror site in Pennsylvania. The manual listed IP address, user names, and passwords for the backup computer. Within seconds, I was logging onto it.

The passwords had expired: the manual was over a year old. I could have called the provider in Pennsylvania and tried to convince them that I was authorized to get access. But that could have been a slow operation. The manual told me the type of computer I was dealing with, and so I logged in as “root,” which would give me system administrator privileges. I tried a well-known default password, and found that it was still good: nobody had bothered to change it after the installation had been completed. I was in.

Finding the video footage was a simple matter of following the directory structure and deciphering a very sensible addressing scheme. Soon I was looking at the morning’s video from the traffic cameras on Madison Drive, and comparing the frames with satellite images from exactly the same points in time, I could identify the bus as a white tour bus from Minnesota. Its license plate number was both visible to my eye, and recorded in the computer in clear. Using a service provided by a backup center of the FBI, I now assembled the route of the bus from all the traffic computers along the way from Minnesota, and looked at satellite and surveillance camera footage of all its stops between origin and destination. There were no signs of anybody staying behind. My terrorist was likely to have traveled all the way to Washington to ensure that the detonation was set off at the right time and in the right place. That meant that he or she would have wanted to leave in a hurry that morning.

A call to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety gave me the name of the owner of the bus, a tour operator. I called its office and said that I needed the passenger list of the bus for a roll of victims of the bombing they had heard about; I figured there was no need to alert anybody in Minnesota to the connection between the bus and the bomb just yet. Within minutes, the passenger list came in by electronic mail.

Now for some more passenger lists. I called the airlines that used Reagan National Airport and, with the aid of code words issued as part of the state of emergency, obtained the passenger lists for all planes that had left the airport between 8:15 and 9:01 that morning. Then I called Amtrak and got the same list for the trains, but put the cutoff time at 8:40. The bus operators leaving from terminals near Union Station supplied the same kind of information. Just to be sure, I also checked the car rental companies in the area, but, as I had expected, I found no matches. Renting a car can be slow and driving in DC slower still; it wouldn’t have been a sensible way of escaping with just an hour to go.

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Fortunately, all these companies had made adequate backup arrangements, and the data I needed were available in spite of the destruction in Washington. Soon my computer had correlated two of the names on the passenger list of the tour bus with names on two of the other lists. One suspect had left on a plane for California; the other had taken the train toward Minneapolis.

Here I needed assistance. FBI headquarters no longer existed, but their field offices in Los Angeles, California, and Albany, New York, were helpful. In Albany, agents boarded the train and arrested the suspect in his seat. In Los Angeles, others traced their suspect to a motel room and arrested him, too.

By midnight, all this was wound up, but I wasn’t content. It had been way too easy.

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32. Who Dunnit?Colonel Adams shared my feelings. Over a drink at the Officers’ Club of the Air Force base, half a mile to the south and more intact than the buildings near the DIAC, he congratulated me on my work, but admitted that he, too, felt it had been too simple.

“We’ll have to be on our guard against a conspiracy,” he said. “Remember, yesterday was April 19th, the anniversary of Waco and Oklahoma City. Normal logic would deduce that this was another job by right-wing militia sympathizers. But our two suspects, if they had something to do with the bombing, may have been patsies. If the objective had been to cover their tracks, they could have done a much better job. It seems we’ve been led to these people.”

“So you think someone more powerful was behind the crime, and used a couple of naïve fanatics to deliver the bomb,” I observed. “Who would that be?”

“Well,” Colonel Adams answered, “the government just legalized drugs and knocked the bottom out of the drug trade. Theoretically, you could suspect the drug cartels. But whoever planned this has also prepared to take over. There are demagogues in several parts of the country that have timed an anti-government propaganda campaign to coincide with this attack; it looks like they want to become regional dictators and break up the Union. We’ve been following their doings, and the declaration of martial law in the whole country right after the blast is our attempt at preventing such things from happening. But if the Feds end up with just a couple of loners acting on their own, we won’t have anything against the big shots behind this deed.”

The colonel’s smartphone rang. It was an FBI agent from Los Angeles named Smith.“I’d like to update you on our status here, Colonel,” Smith said. “The suspect you sent us

after is a black man from Washington DC. The man by the same name who boarded that tour bus in Minneapolis was white and a resident of Washington County, Minnesota. The man we arrested is very upset that he can’t go home and check up on his family.”

“Why haven’t you released him?” Colonel Adams asked, quite taken aback.“It’s against company policy,” the FBI man replied. “Since the Justice Department, and

ourselves with it, were privatized, we have to do what our owner, Crime TV, wants. It’s better for the ratings if some hero of a lawyer points this out in court and makes us look like fools. So we’re holding him, while Crime TV prepares for the trial to start tomorrow. They have to keep this thing going or people will lose interest. The viewer surveys already show that the public can’t take much more coverage of the bombing; they want a trial. Fortunately, Crime TV owns the federal courts, too, so they can reserve one on short notice and keep the show going.”

“It’ll take weeks before the poor sod gets released, while you guys squeeze the last out of those ratings! What are you, cops or soap opera actors?” Colonel Adams asked, furiously.

“Same thing these days,” Smith answered. “Thanks for all the help, anyway.”“Just a second, Smith,” the colonel said, and the tone of his voice set Smith pointing his

ears. “If that man isn’t back in his motel room, with an apology, within fifteen minutes, we’re coming to get him. And you don’t want to know what happens to people who obstruct martial law.”

“You’ve got me convinced, Colonel,” Smith replied. “I’ll let the boss know.”Trusting his own better than the FBI, Adams made a call to a friend in the California

National Guard, and got a promise of a follow-up visit to ensure that our mistake was corrected as far as humanly possible. Then he continued briefing me.

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“They’re not going to look any further, seeing that they still have one genuine suspect they can put on trial. The one that was arrested on the train has checked out as a militia member back home in Minnesota. I want you to go and see that militia before the FBI gets there, and find out if there’s been anybody there prodding this guy to do this. Look for an outsider who’s bolted by now.”

Having arranged my air ticket for the morning, the colonel turned to me again.“The good people out there are very suspicious of both the federal government and the

US military. Anybody from Washington turning up alone to ask questions in this situation would be in danger. In order to be safe and get any information, you’ll have to make it clear that you’re no part of us. I think it’s best if you travel in an Australian Army uniform.”

“Sounds good,” I said, “but where do I get one?”“We have a supply here.”“How come?”“It’s all part of these weird games we play,” the colonel said, shaking his head in evident

amazement. “In the scheme of things, the FBI is supposed to do the domestic surveillance, while spooks like us and the CIA are to stick to spying abroad. But, although the FBI boasts that it knows everything about every American, the information they collect is often quite useless to us. Their assigned task is to detect every trace of independent thought and frame the anti-big business dissidents they find as criminals. (The government, of course, calls such people ‘anti-free enterprise’ activists.) It’s the same old witch-hunt: J. Edgar Hoover called them Communists; Senator Joseph McCarthy accused them of un-American activities; we call them terrorists. Gripe about the rich and you’re an enemy of the State.

“Since the FBI is too busy looking for non-conformists to concern itself with national security, we also have to spy on people who live in the US, albeit without any official right to do so. The National Security Agency does more than that: they monitor all communications here and abroad, and scan them for key words. To keep matters quiet and avoid upsetting the FBI and the Secret Service, the NSA and we draw on an old treaty from 1948, often referred to as UKUSA, which says that member nations can spy on each other’s populations without warrants or limits, and that the information can be shared with the spied-on country’s Signals Intelligence agency. The US and Britain were the original signatories; nowadays, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are also members of the treaty. So when we and the NSA need people to operate the US part of the NSA’s vast electronic eavesdropping system Echelon, we use staff from the other countries involved. Conversely, American staff does the domestic spying in the other member countries. Everyone shares the information as required, and Big Brother knows everything he needs to know. Our rights under the USA PATRIOT Act come and go with every mood swing in Congress; this arrangement never changes. Your uniform comes from the Australian Defence Signals Directorate; that’ll have to do.”

Now my smartphone rang. It was Laura calling from work. She had been following the news of the bombing and was worried.

“Where are you? This thing isn’t telling me your location as it’s supposed to. Are you anywhere near Washington?”

I placed the smartphone so she could see both the colonel and me.“Is it classified?” I asked.“No, not at all,” Colonel Adams replied. “It’s just normal practice that telephones don’t

identify American defense installations. It’s built into their GPS chips: we maintain a low-intensity, coded radio signal that deactivates the chip while you’re here.”

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I turned to Laura. “I’m at the Officers Club at Bolling Air Force Base, near Washington. I’ve been drafted into active service, and have taken part in tracing suspects. This is my boss, Colonel Adams. And please don’t be concerned: I arrived after the blast, and the fallout went elsewhere.”

“I want you out of there right away!” Laura exclaimed. “You’re always getting yourself into some kind of trouble. You’re coming home now!”

“It seems I’ve been overruled,” the colonel observed, good-naturedly. “Don’t worry; he’ll be on his way in the morning. I just need him to handle something for me in Minneapolis; it could take a day or two. If he does a good job there, I’ll release him!”

“He always does a good job,” Laura countered. “Oh, by the way, I’m Laura, Gregory’s fiancée. Hi, Colonel!”

“Hi, Miss Laura,” the colonel answered. “It’s a pleasure to get to know you.”“I’m booking you on a flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Honolulu, Hawaii for the

22nd,” Laura said, typing away at her computer. “I’ll meet you there; it’ll be your birthday present!”

“I couldn’t think of a better one!” I told her. “I’ll be on the first plane out of Dulles in the morning.”

Laura signed off, and a late newscast began on TV. An exhausted member of the Fairfax County, Virginia Urban Search and Rescue Task Force gave an account of the worst day of his life, bemoaning the lack of radiation experts and heavy equipment.

“We’ve lost a number of victims that could still have been helped. Priorities being what they are, the people we’d have needed in DC have been busy certifying the undamaged shopping areas in Arlington, Alexandria, Chevy Chase, and so on, as radiation-free. Most of the available cranes and tow trucks have been in use to clear the roads and bridges outside the damaged area, so the people in the inner suburbs can get back to the shopping centers tomorrow. I guess it’s hard to see the larger picture when you’re digging at ruins with a pickax…”

After some scouting in FBI and NSA files, a bit of Web surfing, and a few precious hours of sleep, I got my uniform and put it on. It was a good enough fit; my regular clothes went into my luggage. A helicopter took me to Dulles International Airport, and soon I was on my way. It was a direct flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul, like sitting in a living room—whatever made me think of flying as dangerous...?

A couple of seat rows ahead of me, there was a young mother with two unruly children, holy terrors that did their best to ruin everybody’s flight. I had thought to catch up on my sleep, but it was impossible. Exasperated, I turned to a lady in the seat next to mine, and wondered what could be wrong with those kids.

“They’re well on their way to becoming narcissists,” she answered.“That was a quick diagnosis, now,” I marveled. “What does that mean, exactly?”“It’s an emotional disorder, very common these days, and nearly impossible to cure.

Oh,” she continued, “I should probably tell you that I’m a child psychologist by trade. I see this kind of child often, but after three or four years of age, it’s usually too late to do anything for them. And the worst problem is that it’s the parent or parents that need to change, and they often can’t understand that, or can’t be bothered.”

“It’s such a total contrast to the beautiful kids of so many of my friends in Europe,” I told her. “They’d never behave that way, nor would their parents tolerate anything even remotely like it.”

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“That’s what makes the difference,” my fellow traveler explained. “Likely as not, your friends are strongly involved with their children’s development. Here in front of us, you see the result of turning over the raising of children to the television set and the computer. Minute for minute, mechanical entertainment takes the place of fantasy play and normal interaction with people, and robs the child of that much development of creativity and learning of social skills. This is doubly injurious because kids are almost always left alone with the TV and the computer. When small children are exposed to more than occasional electronic entertainment, they develop an expectation that their lives should always be dramatic and exciting. They don't learn to enjoy quietness or to occupy themselves. A forced break in the entertainment generates protests like you see here.

“When you watch, or interact with, machines and impersonal characters, you have no obligations, and you get no emotional response to your actions. It’s through experiencing other people’s reactions to our doings that we learn to understand who we are, as persons. Children who don’t get that interaction grow up not knowing who they are. The result of this lack of self-image is an inferiority complex that expresses itself as an irrational rage against others.

“The narcissist is emotionally disturbed, and retains the sense of omnipotence characteristic of a three-year-old right through to adulthood. He or she is totally reckless and selfish, and incapable of positive emotions toward others. The world and its people exist only for the benefit of the narcissist. He or she knows no morality and has no conscience.

“The narcissist is often a child of parents who have detached themselves from the development of the child’s emotions either through indifference or as a result of embracing modern ideas of a liberal upbringing. He or she may have had a single parent who’s been overwhelmed by the task of raising children while trying to make ends meet. The parents may themselves be narcissists, or both parents may have been working during the child’s infancy, and the child may have had too many day care arrangements, so that no permanent emotional bonds have developed.

“Another thing you can see in those kids is confusion and uncertainty, which they try to compensate for through aggression. This happens when the caregiver isn’t consistent with the child. Children, like everybody else, learn through repetition. That way, permanent nerve paths form in their brains and, eventually, they do things with confidence, because they have practiced enough. This goes for all skills, including personal relationships and expressing their feelings. If the parent is inconsistent, the learned material is different each time, and no permanent nerve paths form in that particular aspect. As a result, the child compensates for feeling incompetent by being aggressive, and also turns inward in order to find something familiar. So what you see is also due to self-centeredness, together with great confusion, and a lack of social skills.”

“And the mother doesn’t stop them!” I added, quite annoyed.“That’s because she doesn’t understand the importance of setting limits for them.

Children, like nearly all juveniles of warm-blooded animals, are always on the lookout for their limits. If a mother animal didn’t discipline her young or call them back when those limits have been reached, she’d soon lose them to predators. With people it may take longer, because we don’t live among our natural predators anymore, but, at the latest during adolescence, human ones will do the job.

“From the child’s point of view, if its parents don’t show enough concern to define and enforce limits for its behavior, the child is left in the understanding that it isn’t loved. Normally, the disinterest of the parents also means that positive behavior in the child goes unrewarded and thereby unreinforced.

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“The most devious facet of a liberal upbringing, however, is the notion that the child is supposed to learn from its own mistakes. This is plain cruelty on the part of the parents: a small child can’t understand consequences that occur later in time than what it takes to get hold of it and administer a regular smack on the behind. Any punishment or misfortune that takes place later, in the child’s mind, remains unconnected with the transgression: he or she experiences it purely as unfairness. If the parents bother to explain the connection between cause and consequence, the child will still, intuitively, know it’s being treated unfairly, because it can’t be expected to have such foresight. Foresight is the duty of the parents, not of a small child.”

“But then again,” I observed, “that smack on the behind is illegal.”“It’s been banned by cunning lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists who stand to profit

from turning the population into ill-adjusted and dissatisfied narcissists that live mainly to consume and provide full employment for law enforcement and child protective services. The smack helps the child remember which actions to avoid without having to go through their consequences. If you can’t slap a child’s hand when it reaches for pots on the stove, it could eventually pull down a kettle of boiling water over itself. This has nothing to do with violence against children as advocated by some religious fanatics.

“Our commercialized society has broken up the extended families that had known and passed on good child-rearing practices for thousands of generations. The human personality isn’t a finished product at birth: each one of us is shaped as much by nurture as by nature. When you deprive the young of the parenting skills that, in an earlier day, were available from the older generation, you rob their children of learning that’s essential for forming their characters. Many young people who raise their kids without involving their elders miss out on that traditional knowledge and make grotesque mistakes like negotiating with two-year-olds, turning them into self-centered monsters by age three. If you indulge a child when the terrible twos hit, rather than guiding and restraining him or her until at three, he or she has begun to understand that others also matter, the child's personality will grow out of the terrible twos rather than out of the greater understanding of a three to four-year-old.”

I knew what she was driving at. “I’ve seen it done. A well-meaning mother without a clue about the actual capabilities of a toddler trying to get the whining kid to agree to something when all the child can grasp is its own immediate desires. She thinks she’s respecting the kid’s right to self-determination when she should simply make the decision because only she is capable of making it.”

My companion continued her lesson.“Even if the parents are honestly misled into thinking they’re being good to their child by

giving it all this latitude, their actions remain evil: instead of guiding and protecting their child, they allow consequences to build up into a form of impersonal revenge. In the extreme, such parents would permit a child to learn to cross the street the hard way, by trial and error. The whole idea of a liberal upbringing is against nature: there’s no such behavior among higher animals that care for their young. Further, prompt correction of a truant or misbehaving child prevents autism, while indulgence aggravates it.

“Since parents are only human, the situation will, eventually, make them bitter toward the child who seems to have more liberties than they have. In the end, indifference and resentment build up both ways, and love, the most essential component of any family, remains unknown to the child. Such children’s hate for their parents is well documented and often leads to violence and murder.

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“It remains for the parents to try to buy the child’s affection with presents. So, in addition to being emotionally disconnected from human fellowship, the young narcissist, typically, is also spoiled and ready for an instant-gratification lifestyle.”

“I’ve had colleagues like that at work,” I exclaimed. “Selfish, manipulative, and deceptive. They force you to become hard as flint, or they’ll take you down.”

The lady agreed. “Mainly, they prey on the weak: they have the mentality of bullies. But you’d always have to be on your watch, that’s true.

“Narcissists are like a new breed of people, and there are lots of them. It’s taken decades of reality game shows on TV to figure out what makes them tick and to devise methods to control them. The business community needs to know both how to maximize sales to them and how to use them as employees. Narcissists have to see an immediate benefit to themselves in every assignment at work. Since they lack empathy and team spirit, they are unusable as managers, yet they can’t be held back indefinitely or they become vicious. That’s why so many managerial posts are filled by robots these days: it gets the job done and makes it plain that the position isn’t available to humans.

“The marriages of narcissists often break up: they only ask what they can get out of a relationship, not what they can put into it. Divorcing a narcissist can be a traumatic experience: they’re calculating and vindictive, and they’re skilled and ruthless liars. In the end, Big Brother has to watch them at all times.”

“Was there ever any help in this matter from the nanorobots?” I asked.“Nanorobots are used mainly to suppress individualistic traits and political dissent. They

also have a beneficial effect on problems that respond to psychotropic medications, such as attention deficit and hyperactivity. But nanorobots can’t do anything about narcissism because it’s an organic anomaly due to an unnatural upbringing in infancy, and permanently programmed into your brain.

“Narcissism can be treated psychiatrically, but with much difficulty. It certainly doesn’t cure itself: the patient can’t become aware that anything is wrong because he or she simply lacks the ability to experience emotional contact other than resentment. We all know of old people who feel and act this way and who just seem to get worse with age.”

Again I had learned something valuable, this time about bringing up children. I promised my mentor and myself to do it right when it became my turn.

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33. Minneapolis MN, USAUpon arriving at Minneapolis-St. Paul, I rented a car and left my luggage in my motel room in Bloomington near the airport, after which I set out to find the Blue Cedar Regional Militia, a group belonging to the Minnesota Minuteman Militia. Based on my research, I knew where to find the group, and who ought to be its leader.

As expected, I aroused great amazement turning up in my uniform, but I was so far removed from any of the things they knew about and hated—the Feds, the United Nations, and the black helicopters they thought were standing ready to come and attack them—that I encountered no animosity. I needed to get to the point without any beating around the bush that could have aroused suspicion, so I found Anderson, the commander, and told him and those around him precisely who I was, what I was doing in America at the time, and what I needed to know and why. They had no trouble following Colonel Adams’s reasoning, but were incredulous that there could be someone in Washington who could have thought of it and was prepared to admit the possibility that there could have been a setup behind the attack. I told them Adams was a good man, and deserved their help.

Tall talk about blowing up the federal government wasn’t uncommon there, they all admitted. But why Madsen, the man arrested on the train, had been that serious about it, and how he had obtained the bomb, wasn’t clear. The evidence against him was convincing enough, but they had thought he was all talk, nothing else. Except for one thing: his girlfriend, the radical Scandinavian, what had become of her, now? She was the one who had been on his case all the time, getting him angrier and angrier at every kind of authority above county level.

This was what I was after.“Is she here?” I asked.A search revealed that she wasn’t. I needed to know more about her. When was she last

seen? Was she marked? Did she frequent any stores or bars in the neighborhood?Yes, she was marked. Most of the militia members weren’t, and they had made a note of

her payment habits. She had often gone to the local mini-market for cigarettes, food, and beer. I asked Anderson to come along to show me the way, and drove off to the market. There, with Anderson’s help, I persuaded the owner to let me investigate his checkout computer. He remembered the Scandinavian woman, and had a rough recollection of when she had last been there and what she had bought. The transaction was easy to identify, because it had been paid for through the scanner. Almost everyone else had used cards, which hadn’t yet been abolished. Now I had her identifier.

Next, I activated my smartphone and logged onto a computer at the DIAC. By linking to the FBI, I brought up a map of the US, featuring a lot of multicolored dots that roughly corresponded to the population density. I showed Anderson the purpose of the display: it indicated the whereabouts of all marked people, with the color of the dot turning from blue through green, yellow, and orange to red, depending on how far the person was from their home. The information on where everybody was located came in as a constant stream of data from TV sets, home security systems, point-of-sale terminals, security cameras, long-range scanners, and traffic computers.

The newest car models wouldn’t start until the driver and all passengers had been scanned and identified. The driver could only be one of those the car had been authorized to accept. Thanks to this precaution and the inability to move the car if there was an unidentified

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person on board, these new cars didn’t get stolen or carjacked at all. The arrangement also was necessary for the accuracy of the display we were watching, since Americans spend a good part of their lives in cars.

Now I increased the threshold value of the distance from home, so we saw only those who were out of their own neighborhoods. The image turned redder and lost its blue and green spots. In the end, I made the threshold value 3,000 miles, eliminating nearly everybody except those from overseas. There still were thousands of red dots on the display.

Then I fed in the identifier of the woman we were looking for. All but one of the dots disappeared, but the one that was left, now blinking to attract our attention, was somewhere in the area of New York. She was still in the country! I quickly zoomed in on New York State, then on New York City. She disappeared; I had to zoom out again. Anderson saw it before I did: she was at Newark airport in neighboring New Jersey! Zooming in on the airport showed her as being in the SAS departure area.

I immediately called Colonel Adams and told him the situation. He confirmed the message and said he’d call me back. Anderson, the storekeeper, and I kept watching the display; the dot still wasn’t moving. But suddenly it did: she was on her way somewhere. Soon we saw that she was going away from the gates, back into the terminal.

A minute later, Adams was on the phone and said, “We’ve got her! And this time it’s the Military Police doing the job, not Crime TV. Thank you, Greene!”

“The thanks are due to Commander Anderson here, sir,” I said. “Without his help I’d be nowhere.”

“I salute a fellow patriot,” Colonel Adams said. “We’ll save this country yet!” “You said it, Colonel!” Anderson answered. “Now let them try to cover their tracks!” “Greene, you’re released now,” the colonel continued. “Put the gear in the mail and have

a good trip!” “Thank you, sir! It’s been very exciting.”“Oh, while I remember: there’s a reward for catching these terrorists. It looks like it’ll go

to you.”“Not to me alone, sir,” I said. “Half goes to Blue Cedar!” “So be it,” the colonel closed.At Blue Cedar headquarters, there was great satisfaction over the news. But even more

than the resolution of the hunt for the apparent snitch, the tracking system I had used fascinated everybody. I was persuaded to show it to a larger audience, but was unable to log in: I had been released, and my user name was no longer valid. Fast work, I had to admit. I had the tutorial for the system, however, and gave a convincing demonstration of its functions. Several of those present remarked on the value of not being marked.

The tutorial also revealed a startling fact: although America had officially resisted the emperor’s virtual power grab, the FBI used his worship sessions to find people to add to the blacklist. For America’s oligarchy, emperor worship dissidents were a good enough fit when looking for elements subversive to their own rule.

Commander Anderson knew about the leaking of the blacklist to interested hate groups, and told me that the average life expectancy of the blacklisted was three months and steadily diminishing. Those who weren’t lynched with the police looking the other way normally disappeared or died in unexplained and uninvestigated single-car accidents. Civil rights groups and advocacy centers had long since vanished as their members and staff had simply died off. Mike Davis must have been filthy rich by then.

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I returned to my motel, and slept. Sometime around midnight, I awoke and turned on the TV. Not having watched the

thing for a year, I was in for a shock: since the legalization of drugs, Hollywood had completely retooled the crime/action/drama genre with Mark dodgers now acting as the bad guys. Under the new order, a corruptible cop was one who had it in him to discern the inherent goodness of the folks he was supposed to hunt, maim, and kill. Gunfights were back out in the rural settings where cowboy movies had once started them, and car chases took place deep in the woods with four-wheel drive police cars pursuing the horses and all-terrain vehicles of the self-sufficient. Somehow, it seemed surreal.

Late the next morning, I got up and found that I had a day to myself. Bloomington has an attrac-tion I’d always been curious about: The Mall of America. It’s the largest shopping mall in America, and the most visited location in the country. I had to see it. Off I drove.

At the mall entrance I had picked, a protester was handing out stenciled slips of paper. I took one; it was a brief little story:

The archeologist showed his students a vast ancient city with suburbia stretching in all directions as far as the eye could see. He pointed out the main landmarks and said, “Most of the buildings that stand out are temples. The people who lived here in the twenty-first century had two main gods. In the temples of the head god, or watching his in-home brainwashing devices, they spent their evenings, their Saturdays, and their Sunday afternoons, making abundant offerings.

“In the temples of the secondary god—those with the crosses on them—they spent one hour each Sunday morning. His popularity was, however, considerable, because the offerings spent on him were tax-deductible. That way more was left over to spend on the head god. The temples of the latter were called shopping centers, the act of offering to him was called consumption, and his name was Mammon, the ancient Greek god of money.”

Strong words. Thus enlightened, I threw all caution to the wind, and entered. I could see something that needed adding to the little story: this place was packed, even though it was the middle of the morning on a working day. There was no way you could have told that there was a depression on, nor, for that matter, that the country had just lost her capital and her government.

The mall was huge, in four levels: it included four department stores, an eighteen-hole golf course (in miniature, but anyway), an aquarium called Underwater World, a wedding chapel, and hundreds of specialty stores. It would have held seven Yankee Stadiums or thirty-two Boeing 747s; there were 30,000 live plants inside it.

The mall featured a mall walking club designed to get you coming back there, offering Frequent Walker Awards and health advice, all for a small annual fee. Memberships were available through Bloomington Community Education: the local authority had no qualms about cooperating with the mall. And, really now, why should it have had any? It was too dangerous to walk outside with all the crime, and Midwesterners don’t walk outside anyway, they drive. Moreover, the perverse Minnesota weather makes it unbearable to be outdoors for eleven months of the year. Here, the people were happy and safe: adults were admitted to the mall only if cleared by a major credit-reporting agency. When you live in a gated community, you don’t want to go to public places that don’t screen visitors.

America has her own special definition of happiness, evident from the most dependable expression of her popular culture, her TV commercials: happiness is spending money. Even

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more happiness is to be had from the fact that you can borrow all the money you can spend. Nowhere else have I seen such a persuasive cavalcade of happy role models as in American advertising. Whatever the problem, a solution can always be had in a box or a bottle, or just a phone call away. All you need is a charge account—on the other hand, those without credit need not apply. The implied conclusion is that as long as you’re a creditworthy American, you can always buy your way out of every problem situation. The occasional reality check can be a very traumatic experience.

The idea that you could be a happy consumer of medicine hadn’t even occurred to me before I first came to America. Elsewhere, you’d be unhappy if you needed medicine, because it would mean that you’re sick. But here, you’re happy that such powerful medicine is available, that it promises an instant cure to whatever ails you, and that you can so totally rely on the manufacturer in question to have your best interest at heart. Common health problems are just a normal part of life, and another opportunity to spend money, be happy, and trust your life to the tender care of big business. The idea that simple changes in lifestyle and diet might eliminate diseases causing symptoms like headaches, heartburn, and allergies altogether, doesn’t enter into the equation. Risk avoidance, being free, would hurt the businesses that want to sell you expensive remedies. So the advertising message is that since you can afford the treatment, you have a right not to bother with prevention.

And why not? If you were the business community and your market was a large nation with a constitutionally guaranteed right to the pursuit of happiness, what would you like its understanding of happiness to be? Quiet evenings on the porch chatting with neighbors? Serving others in unselfish acts of charity? Or a hectic chase after the latest fashions, gadgets, and remedies? Now, considering that you’d also own the most powerful propaganda machine humanity has ever known, commercial TV, you could manipulate everybody’s beliefs and perceptions as you liked. So, no doubt, you’d be busy giving old words precisely the meaning that suited you and your bottom line best, while creating fresh needs and conjuring up novel diseases as fast as you could invent new products and services.

I stopped and looked at the store directory, knowing that not even I with my good legs could hope to see the entire mall in a day. A prominent banner extolled the prize-winning sales slogan of the week. “Born To Shop: In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.” Under Entertainment - Family, an entry caught my eye: The Consumer Church of Instant Gratification. That I wanted to see. On my way to the mall, I had passed an old Church of the Immaculate Conception; it had been closed and abandoned. How about this one?

It was full, packed with happy people. A special event was about to take place: confirmation for the teenagers in the congregation. Above the altar, where no crucifix disturbed the view, a singer in full-color, three-dimensional, holographic projection was praising the joys of retail therapy.

The song ended, and the preacher took over, chanting, “What do we want?”The congregation responded with “More!” The preacher continued, “When do we want it?” and the response was “Now!” For the last stanza, the preacher asked, “How will we get it?”The crowd answered, “We’ll charge it!” A general cheering followed.Now it was the youngsters’ turn. There were little chapels named after the various credit

card operators (they no longer issued cards, but were still referred to by their old industry

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classification). The kids lined up at the booth they or their parents had chosen, and had their identifiers connected to brand new charge accounts. The brief talk that followed had as its theme a piece of semantics: just like in school, credit was a good thing, something to work for, and always worth having and using. Debit was bad, it was for little kids, it sounded just like “Debt”; don’t use debit even if the checkout allowed you to.

Then the sponsors got their own pep talk about their important responsibility to teach these kids to be good consumers, always seeking self-fulfillment, but with respect for their credit limit. The sponsors, often as guarantors in addition to the parent or parents, were responsible for seeing to it that the kids retained good credit records and that the parents didn’t steal their credit.

Repeating what the children had been taught at school, with the aid of pamphlets issued by the credit card companies, the congregation got a reminder of the old rule of thumb that it was reasonable to spend 20 percent of your net earnings on credit card interest. Quite a price to pay for having things before you could afford them—a purchase power just 80 percent of what it could be.

The sermon was on the necessity to overcome all lingering doubts about the blessings of instant gratification. Always seek the truth: the truth is what pleases. The greatest joy is to give: give generously now, charge it by all means; scanners were installed in every pew. All donations were tax deductible. Then we were sent off with the admonition to go in excitement and serve the economy. Wow.

Somewhat later, I came upon the public, interactive, 3D entertainment area for that level and corner of the mall. Everything worked just like in Europe. And before long, who should appear in holographic projection, other than my old acquaintance, the emperor! I nearly ran away, but his demeanor was so friendly that I began thinking that this couldn’t possibly be a compulsory worship session. Also, there were no cops around. So I stayed, and the throng served me well, because I could place myself behind a shorter person and catch her sound channel without seeming intrusive.

I couldn’t believe my ears. The emperor was advertising the US credit card industry. As if the church I had just left needed any more help! He was using his hypnotic speaking skills to endorse private enterprise. He did put in a plug for his marking scheme, too: apparently, the credit card companies were somehow involved with applying the mark.

Air! I had to get out of there. Outside it was crisp; patches of snow remained here and there, and the wind was from the northwest. I took Interstate 494 west and turned north on France Avenue. At the older Southdale shopping center I found a mall where you still got to the shops from the outside. It was quieter than the big mall, and I went into a cafe where I ordered lunch.

At the table next to mine I espied a minister, and asked what had happened to the old church I had seen.

“The parish just died out; it ran out of young members to replace the old ones,” he answered.

“What is it with America,” I continued, “this thing that even churches have to be so commercial? I just sat through a service at the Consumer Church of Instant Gratification, which was a farce, of course, but even serious churches here use marketing methods that are identical to those of business.”

The minister, who had introduced himself as Reverend Cooper, had a very friendly and understanding attitude.

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“You’ve noticed that when the church stoops down to compete with popular entertainment on entertainment’s terms, the message of faith goes out the window, right? You’re not alone.

“I think the root of the matter you’re talking about can be traced back to the very beginnings of this country. The pioneers that founded America, just like those who came after them, left their old countries behind because they wanted freedom and opportunities. After the Revolution, they outlawed all the things that had denied them those precious things in Europe: royalty, nobility, and the liaison between church and state that had allowed European churches to grow rich and despotic. They created a power vacuum, which was filled by the smart and the ambitious, taking the place of those with inherited wealth and authority in the old countries. This is why business became so powerful here: it was handed a position of strength that its counterpart in most of the rest of the world never had. It’s also the reason America became so efficient: her upstart ruling class lived from the dynamism of business, not from the ownership of tenant land, which makes you resist all change.

“Since the early Catholic Church managed to destroy the theatres of antiquity, the churches had been Western society’s only channels for mass propaganda, and, as such, they habitually allied themselves with those in power. Heralds and town criers could distribute announcements, but only the churches had the means to influence the value system of the public. These means they would put at the disposal of a patron, but only at a price. The Catholic Church had worldwide power of her own and could negotiate with rulers as an equal, while Protestant and Orthodox churches normally became state churches. Most other important world faiths are state religions, as well. In America, the only available ally with comparable strength and a similar need to influence people’s value systems was the business community. The state was separated from the churches by law. It’s because of this orientation toward business among their churches that many Americans don’t know that there’s a difference between evangelization and marketing or entertainment.

“This is why you find that most churches in America are clients of the business community, take an active part in pro-big business politics as the so called ‘Christian’ Right, and spend a good part of their time promising the faithful material wealth and nurturing the American Dream. Denominations that reject such a client relationship are seen as weird: you have your Quakers, your Amish, and other quiet churches that never are in the headlines, and exist mainly outside middle-class suburbia.”

Ah, yes, the American Dream: the notion that anybody, given luck and perseverance, can become rich, famous and powerful—or at least have a home and a mortgage—and therefore legislation and taxation have to be favorable to big business. After all, it could be me... In reality, maybe one in a million ever strikes it rich, but to keep the door open, the public puts itself at the disposal of business on business’s terms.

I moved over to Rev. Cooper’s table.“Now, many Americans are churchgoers, and yet they’re marked, and they’re shopping

like there’s no tomorrow. I can see why few Europeans worry about being marked: they don’t go to church. But here a lot of people still do. How come they haven’t been warned?”

“First of all, Catholics have never heard about such a mark, and aren’t told that the end times may be near. Less so now than earlier, since the Vatican became part of the EU Presidency. Greek Orthodox Christians don’t even have the Book of Revelation in their Bibles. And among Jews, the only authorities paying any attention to these things are the Messianic

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ones, and other Jews consider them Christians and don’t listen to them. Only Muslims here are, for the most part, aware of what’s going on.

“The Messianic Jews have mounted an admirable effort lately: like the Mormons, they have started sending out their young men as missionaries to other countries, including Israel. Last I checked they had some 144,000 of them. With the payment system reform, life has become very hard for them: they refuse to be marked and their folks have problems sending them money to live on. Yet they aren’t giving up.

“To understand the ignorance of Protestants, we should remember that some two centuries ago, Miller and Darby invented the idea of a pretribulation rapture. Once launched, the concept turned out to have a special attraction for many Americans who have come to think that they ought to be exempt from all hardship. (‘You can’t do this to me; I’m an American!’) Tribulation is for all those other people overseas, who live among war and poverty.

“A pretribulation rapture is an unbiblical best-case scenario, spiritual snake oil that has never served any other purpose than fundraising. ‘Beware of best-case scenarios!’ I tell my congregation, like, no doubt, you advise your contingency planning constituents.”

“Amen!” I chimed in. This was a man of my mettle.“Protestant fundamentalism in this country has degenerated into little more than legalism,

bigotry, and right-wing political extremism. Fundamentalist leaders and media permit no deviation from their central doctrine of a pretribulation Rapture. So since the fundamentalists haven’t been raptured yet, the emperor, who builds his political support on everybody’s fear of and hatred against everybody else, can’t be the Beast, and his payment identifier can’t be the Mark of the Beast. The result: fundamentalists are marked and support the emperor, and their leaders are making more money than ever by parroting him. There’ll be some very surprised people here a couple of years from now.

“Your typical Evangelical preacher is quite prepared to ride the public interest in the Last Days. But he’s stuck in centuries-old imaginings of demonic attacks foiled by heroic ministers, and of unflinching Evangelical resistance against Papish conspiracies with the devil. Because Protestant theology is his whole life, he thinks that the battle to be fought is theological and that his defense of every letter of his particular creed will deliver the enemy the fatal blow. What escapes him is the fact that the supreme evil of our times isn’t anywhere in his antiquated gallery of supernatural terrors and diabolical temptations, nor does it have anything to do with his competitors.

“Our understanding of evil is incredibly subjective: we automatically assume that it’s always done by others, that it’s something unfair or immoral that offends, injures, or threatens us, and that we’re always the good guys in the story. This conception of evil is political, not based on faith. It’s a paramount tool of leaders looking to unite followers. There’s a universal rule: if you want a population to do your bidding and pay you money, you’ll have to show them an enemy, and that enemy is the external evil we’re talking about. The only difference between a political leader and a charismatic religious leader going for your pocketbook is that where the politician tries to turn you against minorities, foreigners, and terrorists, the preacher adds witches, demons, and homosexuals to the list. But objectively speaking, any outside evil is irrelevant to you and me, because the only evil that matters is our own pride, greed, and selfishness. They are the main things standing between us and God.

“Time was when everybody knew that selfishness is bad for you. But we’re no longer raised that way: now our greed and covetousness are the very motors of the economy, and they are energetically nurtured by all the advertisement and entertainment that shape our culture and

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our outlook on life. Our preachers should be screaming bloody murder about this, but instead, they’re fighting fairy-tale windmills and meddling in politics.

“Also, you should realize that here in the States, so many people attend church because most of our churches are actually a form of social clubs. Their religious teaching often has deteriorated into something rather bland that has been called Moralistic-Therapeutic Deism. To attract members when the evangelistic fervor is gone, churches have to have all these lavish buildings and sports facilities, and all that, normally, has been financed by issuing bonds. Five or ten years later, the bonds begin falling due, and suddenly the fundraising of the church has to become truly effective. That’s why you find them making members pledge themselves to firmly planned giving with computerized invoicing. If church members couldn’t use the payment system, the churches would go bankrupt and the preachers would be out of a job. And remember, he that serves God for money, will serve the devil for better wages.”

“Those churches that are serious about it pull out the Old Testament and say they’re due a tenth of your earnings,” I continued his train of thought.

“That’s a great example of how you can prove just about anything by taking singular passages of Scripture out of their context. Tithing came about because one of the twelve tribes of Israel, the Levites, was set aside to serve as priests. They had to be supported by the other eleven tribes. A twelfth part of their income would have made for equal distribution of wealth, but seeing that the Levites had to use very expensive garments for their work, a tenth was fairer.

“Now, since when do preachers and their families make up a tenth or even a twelfth of our current population? A quarter of a percent of the working population are clergy. Church buildings have to be paid for, of course, but when religious communities, some of which don’t even have salaried priests, still demand a tenth, and often a tenth of your earnings before tax, you know it’s business. It would be just as right if Israel went out and killed every inhabitant of Palestine. That’s in the Bible, as well, but it, too, was a specific instruction for a once-off situation.

“I could go on. St. Paul wrote that women weren’t to teach or be heard in the congregation. That was correct in the culture of the times, where the only women who ever spoke in public were pagan priestesses and prostitutes. Christian women were not to behave like prostitutes or pagan priestesses. Christians had to be model citizens if they wanted their churches to grow. Moreover, a woman in those days couldn’t obtain an education, no matter how smart she was. A good woman had her prescribed place; by filling that role, she made her best contribution. She let her father, brother, husband, or son do the teaching and make the decisions, because hers wouldn’t have been respected anyway. In return, she and the whole household, submitting in everything to its head, were saved with him. In our society, every adult is qualified to make their own decisions, and also answers for his or her own deeds. Women are free, educated, and capable of teaching. What we’re dealing with is just a bunch of feeble old men trying to preserve their privileges by quoting out of context.”

“And wives were to submit to their husbands,” I recalled. “That seems pretty out of date, too.”

“It was correct in the cultural context of the time,” Rev. Cooper answered. “The responsibility for the whole household lay squarely on the husband’s shoulders, and assuming he did his best, he deserved support. But this command is another one of those that have been taken out of context. In Colossians 3, St. Paul gives four strongly interdependent commands concerning families: Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in

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everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.

“The first pair of commands is meant to be inseparable, likewise the second pair. Expecting women and children to obey and submit to a man that doesn’t love them is an illusion; it’ll only happen through terror. Yet, for 2,000 years men have chosen to notice and enforce only the first and the third of these commands, while ignoring the second and the fourth. Encouraged by their like-minded preachers, they have thought themselves Christians, while, in fact, they’ve simply been tyrants.”

“So, for the average churchgoer, what’s the alternative? What can you do if your preacher is more concerned with money and morality than with love and salvation?”

“There’s a simple way to set things right,” Rev. Cooper replied. “Get together and pray for him. Within six months, he’ll either change or move. It works; I’ve seen it happen.”

“Happiness is spending borrowed money, right?” I asked.Rev. Cooper saw my point and agreed.“If you believe the advertising, it certainly is. In fact, you could add, ‘and being

constantly entertained’… But real happiness isn’t something you can search out and attain for its own sake. Happiness tends to come about as a by-product of other things, such as serving others. What you do for yourself, specifically to become happy, often leaves you dissatisfied.”

“How did it happen that Crime TV took over the Justice Department and the FBI?” I continued, thinking to use my opportunity to have things explained.

“Any government function with a potential for making a profit must be privatized or at least outsourced—that’s a creed in this country. This nation has always had a lurid fascination with court drama, so Justice was a prime candidate. Crime TV got the upper hand by fixing the jury system when it was so broken that it had ceased to function. Juries had become capricious and disrespectful of the law; a common joke was that you were being judged by people who were too stupid to know how to get out of jury duty. At the same time, in urban areas, it became more and more dangerous to be a juror, because of intimidation by crime cartels and urban killer gangs.

“Crime TV offered to replace the juries with a popular and anonymous vote among its viewers; it had a secure interactive system ready at the right time. This was found constitutional: everybody has the right to be judged by a jury composed of his or her peers, and what’s a more representative group of peers than the TV-watching public? So Crime TV got the contract for the jury system renewal. When the outsourcing contract for the Department of Justice was put to bid, Crime TV had a big lead over all its competitors, and easily got the business. This was the last main step in a long campaign to privatize criminal justice in America.

“During the nineteenth century, the basic principle of the legal system was changed from one of vengeance to one of correction. Legislative bodies adopted the belief that criminals could be rehabilitated. In the beginning, felons were put in solitary confinement with only a Bible as company: this was the idea of the penitentiary. Later, more effective methods were developed, aimed at reintegrating criminals into society. While the idea often worked, the line between rehabilitation and indulgence was hard to draw, and the prison system became more and more expensive to run.

“So we began privatizing the prisons, outsourcing the work of looking after felons to the lowest bidders. Those were big companies that knew to use the prisoners as cheap labor and generate revenues way above what civil society was willing to pay them. Privatized prisons are

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business enterprises, intended to punish and produce profits rather than apply correction, and, specifically, designed to brutalize inmates so irreversibly that they’ll be sure to come back soon. Rehabilitation has been entirely abandoned, and America’s prison population per capita is many times higher than that of comparable countries.

“During the eighties and nineties, when crack cocaine became a common street drug, sympathetic state governments helped the prison contractors get started: mandatory sentencing laws ensured an endless supply of young minority men, whose average prison terms for possessing and dealing crack were much longer than those meted out for homicide. At the same time, federal, state, and local governments busily privatized the prisons. Among politicians and civil servants, ‘Hard on crime’ became a euphemism for ‘paid off by the prison contractors.’ As long as drugs were illegal, all went well.

“But now, since drugs were legalized, the prison contractors’ labor supply is threatened, and they’ve had to take quick action. During the past year or so, their lobbyists have staged an unprecedented campaign to direct federal money to state and city police forces for the purpose of enforcing laws against loitering, littering, noise pollution, and everything else that could be described as ‘hanging out while black or brown.’ Harsh mandatory sentencing is also being fast-tracked through the state legislatures for such petty offenses. The strategy is simple: get a disproportionate number of minority youths imprisoned to serve as slave labor, brutalize them enough to turn them into habitual criminals, and collect the profits. For your information, the Civil War didn’t cure America’s rich of their fondness of slavery.”

“They’ve been quite happy to implement it in sweatshops all over the world, as well,” I added. “But tell me another thing. What’s the connection between the emperor and the consumer credit industry? I just saw him doing a TV commercial for the credit card operators.”

“That’s another instance of privatization of a traditional government function,” the minister explained. “When cash was abolished, the Federal Reserve stopped printing dollar bills. The U.S. Mint stopped minting coins, was privatized, and switched to fine mechanics manufacture. Since there was little reason for the Fed to remain involved with individuals, it decided to focus entirely on regulating the money supply and handling wholesale funds transfers, and sold off the rights to process personal payments to the credit card operators, which already had the technical infrastructure in place. So they now do the marking of people, which explains the emperor’s interest in them. For regular Americans, the result is that you’re more or less guaranteed a credit account once you’re an adolescent.”

“Meaning,” I concluded, “that for adult Americans, getting in debt is now the only available way to pay. Not only is usury legal, it’s mandatory. But, I guess, few people here would know what they’re missing... They never heard my grandpa’s favorite saying: ‘If you can’t afford to pay cash for something, then you don’t need it!’”

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PART 5

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34. HomeLaura was waiting for me at the gate when I arrived at Honolulu International Airport. As fascinating as my trip had been, this was its culmination: now there was nothing more I wanted to do without her. She had a rental car ready, and soon we were on our way northward on the Pali highway, away from the commercial, tourist-oriented area around Honolulu and Waikiki Beach, going toward the lush northern end of Oahu.

At the highest point on the road, we stopped to take in the breathtaking view from Nu’uanu Pali Lookout. We were among green mountains, looking over the eastern end of Oahu. Laura found us a seat out of the wind. She was carrying an unusual-looking book. When she opened it, I saw that she had taken the trouble to print out a number of photos taken with the camera in her smartphone and put them in an album. Laura didn’t think a slide show on a computer screen was good enough for telling a story.

“I could have sent you these pictures by phone,” she said, “but I wanted to be with you when you see them. Where do you think they’re from?”

There were dozens of pictures in her collection, taken in a place looking somewhat similar to where we were just then. But they weren’t from the tropics; they resembled Wales more than Hawaii.

“Let me guess,” I said, “it’s Tasmania!” “Yes, it is,” she replied. “This is where we’ll live. I bought us a farm!” She never ceased to amaze me.“Only you could go to Tasmania and buy a farm, just like that! Tell me about it!” “It’s in the north, kind of in the middle of the island, near Sheffield south of Devonport.

It’s next to Mount Roland: this is the mountain here. We’ll have 148 acres of the best farmland, lots of trees, a dam fed by springs, and a rain forest. There’s a house to get us started, but it isn’t very nice, so you’ll build us a better one. It’s wonderful. But the best part is how I found it.”

“Please tell me!” I said.“When I came back from England, I couldn’t stand being apart from you anymore, so I

decided it’s time for us to settle down. I asked Emy to come along, and we drove down to Melbourne and took the ferry to Devonport. Then we drove all over Tasmania, on every mile of road they have there. We camped wherever we happened to be and saw so many beautiful sights. In the end, we always found ourselves coming back to Mount Roland; that was the place where I wanted to be. But there was nothing to buy: the real estate agents had nothing other than regular houses, and there were no ‘For Sale’ signs anywhere.

“Finally, we had to go back to Devonport and the ferry, but we were early and stopped for a cup of tea before we came to the harbor. Then, to pass our time, we popped into a pet store across the street. They had this lovely little kitten, but he was so sick with mites in his ears, all skinny from worms and looking like he just wanted to get out of there. So I bought him, thinking he’d be good company for Keli, my first cat.

“When we came to Melbourne in the morning, I meant to take Hume Highway straight back to Sydney. But somewhere in South Melbourne I must have taken a wrong turn, because instead of going north on Royal Parade, I was going south on Kingsway and then on Queens Road, and with the traffic, all I could do was to continue east on Dandenong Road. So we settled for going home along the shore on Princes Highway: I wasn’t going to turn around and go back into that traffic. Anyway, it’s a much nicer drive, although it takes a lot longer. And Emy told

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me how you two had got lost in Italy, and ended up with those papers that saved your lives, so I didn’t feel bad at all.

“Eventually, we crossed the state border into New South Wales, and a little later, there was a sign by the roadside, saying ‘Vet.’ The kitten was in such bad shape, so we turned off and found the veterinary. She’s a very nice lady; her husband is a farrier, and when I told her about our trip—you know how I always chat people up—and how I hadn’t been able to find a place to buy, she said, ‘I have a farm in Tasmania that I want to sell!’

“You won’t believe this: their farm, which she and her husband had been kind of thinking to sell for some time, lies right at the foot of Mount Roland. She showed me pictures, and I recognized the spot: I had stood at the roadside nearby, looking at that very farm, just longing to live there. So I wrote her a check for earnest money, and said you’d be back soon to settle the sale with them. She cleaned the kitten’s ears and bathed him, and gave me medicine for him. They had had to move away from Tasmania because she had got sick with her lungs. That had been because of the drafty house, and when she told me about it and showed me pictures of it, I decided that we’ll need a new house as soon as possible.

“Well, then Emy and I continued to Sydney, and I started packing and put my house and your apartment on the market. And then I came here to take you home.”

“You’re unbelievable. And it must be a very special kitten, to have been able to help you find us that farm like that! What’s his name?”

“Ned, of course,” Laura said, as if I should have known all along. “When I call the two cats, I want it to sound like ‘Ned Kelly!’”

Two cats named after Australia’s famous outlaw, who wanted to establish an independent Irish republic in Victoria in the 1870s. In the end, his campaign against the British-led police became so bloody that they hunted him down and hanged him. But his name lived on, as a symbol of that peculiar Australian distrust of officialdom.

We stayed in Hawaii for a couple of days. Laura showed me places she liked on the island of Oahu, including the Polynesian cultural center near Laie in the north. Near Waialua on the north shore we picked up a hitchhiker, a young lady named Ellen. We took her to the local soaring club west of town; she was a glider pilot. Ellen was a cheerful, strong, determined woman, and we felt that we had met a new friend.

As we drove, there was a lot of girl talk between Laura and Ellen, most of which I didn’t listen to. (I have—but don’t much suffer from—male selective hearing disorder.) But then I pricked my ears; Ellen was talking about her new boyfriend at the soaring club. She was upset at getting her period, as she had quite made up her mind to get rid of her virginity. Laura said something to the effect that this was a rare commodity, and that there was a better use for it.

“You mean saving it for my wedding night and all that?” Ellen said. “That’s a bit outmoded. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be watched over all your life and then find out that you’re the only girl around who hasn’t slept with anybody?”

I couldn’t help offering a comment on what it’s like to be of the other gender.“I’d like to put in a word for the groom here, thinking of that wedding night… Fact is

that the only known predictor of a woman’s fidelity in marriage is her past behavior. Since most men want a faithful wife, a woman with a reputation as an easy lay is likely to be left without a husband, or with a choice of only those men that other women don’t want.”

Ellen made protestations about equality, but Laura came to my rescue, pointing out that equality between the sexes was a nice idea, but in some aspects, it just wasn’t the way the world

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works. Then we got to the airstrip, and said good-bye to Ellen. We watched her take off, and continued on our journey.

Returning to the south, we saw a number of sights in Honolulu that had to do with the ancient Hawaiian kings and queens. We visited the splendid Iolani palace, built by Hawaii’s last king, Kalakaua. His sister, Queen Liliuokalani, was the last of Hawaii’s monarchs—a remarkable woman, who rather gave up her throne than allow her people to be hurt by a struggle against America. Viewing the queen’s private home, Washington Place, I learned that she was a prolific composer, and, among other works, wrote the famous melody Aloha Oe. We also saw a wonderful collection of Polynesian artifacts in the Bishop museum, and admired the stately Kawaiaha’o church near Iolani palace.

Then we were off on our first flight together, going back home to Sydney. It was fall, and we had a lot to do, if we were to move to the farm before winter. But ahead of everything else, we had an important matter to settle.

Our wedding was an intimate affair, with only family and our closest friends in the church, and only candles to light it. Laura had arranged everything; all I needed to do was to get the wedding bouquet. She had even had wedding rings made for us. They were plain gold bands with an eternity symbol in raised white gold, and we wore them on our little fingers next to our engagement rings from Taizé.

The practical matters sorted themselves out with amazing speed. Soon our dwellings were sold. My bank graciously agreed to transfer my mortgage to the farm. Its owners came up to Sydney with all the required paperwork, and the farm was ours. Our removal load left, and we drove down in Laura’s car; my motorbike was in the moving van. An hour after disembarking the ferry, we stood on our own ground.

The farm lay on sloping land, facing the mountain across Claude Road and a narrow river, the Dasher. Mt. Roland is 4,000 feet high; our land rose from 600 feet above sea level at the gate down by the river to 1,300 feet along the far, northwestern borderline. The house lay on a hill at an intermediate level of 800 feet, just next to the southeastern borderline, from where we had an unhindered view of the road and the river across a neighbor’s land, where beef cattle grazed in great numbers.

On a clear day, we saw the sunlit northern side of the mountain all day, while every change in lighting caused the strangest variety of colors and hues in the steep rock face. At sunset, the rounded peak at the western end nearest us became the curly head of an ancient Aborigine, with the slanting sun casting shadows in three caves forming his eyes and mouth. When there were clouds, a stationary mist would sit on top of the mountain like a cap, forming on the windward side and dissolving just as fast on the lee side.

The house was a log cabin, looking like it had been built with no more sophisticated tools than a chain saw, an ax, a hammer, and a trowel. At night the possums roamed noisily in the attic, and scorpions crisscrossed the rough concrete floors. The bathroom was cold, with the fierce sou’wester blowing through the cracks between the logs. The only source of heat was a wood-burning heater in the corner of the living room; the bedroom was as cold as the bathroom. The kitchen was primitive, to put it mildly. Fist-sized huntsman spiders and huge centipedes lived in every nook and cranny. Laura was not pleased with the house.

The previous owners had run a horse stud on the land, and across the yard from the house stood a stable, built much better than the house. After a few days filled with discoveries all over

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the fallow fields and the nearly impenetrable bush, we were standing in the yard, looking at the stable.

“That’s where we’ll live,” Laura said.We got our tools out. We removed the corrugated iron walls, and everything inside the

building, until all that was left was the steel frame and the corrugated iron roof on top. Then we brought bottles of bleach, brooms and scrub brushes, as well as the garden hose, connected to our gravity-fed water mains, bringing a seemingly endless supply of pure, sweet spring water from the dam up at the 1,000 foot level halfway up the fields to the northwest. When we had finished the job, the concrete slab was so clean you could eat off it, and every spider web was gone from the framework and under the roof.

Before the end of winter, we had a nice little 20 by 40 foot cabin ready, well insulated and lined with rough, vertical pine siding. On the sunny northwestern side, it had large windows; at the northeastern end, there was a glass sliding door for the morning and noon sun. All day long, the sun, when low, warmed a low natural-rock wall that separated the living room from the kitchen on the southeastern side, and the passive solar heat helped conserve firewood. The whole house got enough heat from this wall and a slow-combustion wood heater with a catalytic combustor, made from two thirds of a 55-gallon drum. The wood-burning stove in the kitchen heated our hot water, with electric backup. A small bedroom at the southwestern end completed the little house, and copped that same fierce, howling sou’wester all night, but without a trace of a draft.

Then Laura took a long look at the old house and said, “I don’t like it. It comes down.”Said and done. We built a couple of sheds for storage, and emptied the log cabin. Then

we invited neighbors to help us take it down, against a share of usable timber as well as roof tiles and windows, and asked them to haul away all the logs that anybody wanted. In the end, the last of the logs lay in a large heap on the slab, and then we set fire to them. When nothing more than ashes remained, we cleaned off the slab and arranged our garden furniture on it. This was a cleansing the place had needed, Laura said, and we celebrated the departure of every legacy of the murky past of the old house. After the previous owners had left for the mainland, all sorts of shady characters had lodged there, and Laura had always sensed evil among the spiders and the scorpions that we couldn’t get rid of. Not one of them came along to our new cabin.

Spring arrived, and we needed to start farming. The soil was good but hard, and with our hand tools we only managed to create a small garden. The land was too steep for tractors: a farm hand who had driven one along a slope instead of up and down it, against orders from his boss, one of the previous owners, had been crushed under the capsizing tractor and had become a paraplegic. The owners before that had used oxen, and had run a successful seed potato farm. Now all the fields but one were overgrown with noxious weeds. Still, in a sense, we thought ourselves lucky that the land had been left fallow for so long. That way, it had never been entered into the statewide registry of satellite-mapped farm fields. As a result, no authorities would be keeping track of what we grew and how. This bit of liberty was something we valued for its own sake.

We needed draft horses and implements. A Clydesdale left behind by the vet and her farrier husband roamed our fields, together with two race horses belonging to a neighbor. But Elvis, the Clydesdale, liked his freedom, and avoided anybody carrying a rope like the plague. Anyway, we had 148 acres, and we had to approach farming with a sufficiently grand kind of vision.

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We also had to manage other animals. We had a herd of about eighty feral goats, ready to devour anything we might have planted. Rabbits burrowed in the ground. We had acquired about sixty sheep that also roamed free. So fences were priority number one. Shooting rabbits and goats came a close second. We also needed people: without modern machinery, the two of us couldn’t hope to farm this land, especially with a baby on its way.

We were also fast exhausting our savings. It was clear that the farm wasn’t going to support us that season, so we decided that I was to go to work. In Tasmania, that was easier said than done: generations of Green-dominated politics had so thoroughly estranged Tasmania from big business that the state had a serious long-term unemployment problem. Although we had joined the local LETSystem as soon as we had arrived, that didn’t automatically provide work and earnings, as it was a small club with perhaps a hundred members. Like us, they all had excess firewood, and like me, all the men knew how to build. There also was an oversupply of computer skills. Until we could start producing food, the club wasn’t going to do much for us. Selling firewood to the cities would have required a truck, which we didn’t have. We also didn’t want to take a loan to get our farming started: we weren’t planning on growing cash crops that could have paid it off.

But I found somebody who needed my skills. I was hired as a lecturer by the University of Tasmania at Launceston, the main city of northern Tasmania, 50 miles east of our farm. They only needed me for three days a week, so I had the other four for Laura and the farm. On my motorbike, the commute took an hour each way, which wasn’t so bad. The meager salary was enough to keep up the mortgage payments and buy our food. Our immediate problem was solved.

Laura sometimes drove me to Launceston and spent a day there. One day in late summer she found a common on the hillside below West Launceston—not far from Laura Street, in fact—with two interesting aspects: two giant pear trees grew there, and in the field below them lived a remarkable young couple. We filled the car with pears, and befriended the people.

Thomas was an idealist, living a life as close as you could come to self-sufficiency on a very small scale. He and his common-law wife, Elizabeth, lived in a tiny camper that Tom had built out of scrap wood—complete with four wooden wheels, allowing it to be moved a short distance and positioned as needed. The camper had a small wood-burning heater that would also cook a pot of water, a bunk along each side, and a piece of glass for a window. A few necessities could be stored under the bunks. In a pen next to the caravan, Tom and Liz kept two Nubian dairy goats and a few chickens. Their mornings were taken up by laboriously moving a number of homemade wooden fence sections around their field, to provide fresh grass for the goats each day. Their rent for the common was $10 a month.

Tom had deep and interesting views on many things, seemed entirely devoid of materialism, and was goodness personified. He made his own clothes from scraps of fabric and sackcloth, and he proudly presented me with a hat carefully stitched together from the latter material. He had made his shoes, as well: he tried to live by the principle that if he couldn’t make something, he didn’t need it.

Liz, on the other hand, had almost no skills. She had run away from her wealthy mother in Brisbane, Queensland, in her own sports car, and had chanced upon Tom and fallen in love with him. She had never lived in anything but luxury, and although she was eager to learn to live like Tom, she didn’t know the first thing about looking after herself. Tom had taught her to cook—naturally, he was a vegetarian, which was another thing Liz had to learn about—and was

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slowly teaching her other skills she needed. They were happy as children, with no thought for what they were going to do in the fall when it got cold. The car was already sold, and the money from it was running low. Tom wouldn’t accept unemployment benefit, but Liz was drawing it, so they had a little money coming in. And they had a few potato plants growing by their compost heap.

I didn’t know what to make of them. In a sense, they were pathetic; but they were also brave. But Laura had no hesitation.

“We have a large place; why don’t you come and join us? You can pick any spot on the farm you like, and there you can build yourselves a cabin. There’s unlimited grazing for the goats, and we have a lot of new fences to keep them from straying.”

So we borrowed a trailer and hitched it behind the car. Tom’s and Liz’s neighbors helped us move the caravan into the trailer and followed behind with the goats and the chickens in their station wagon. Before nightfall, the caravan was in its new place, in a corner of our only field that wasn’t overgrown with weeds, near the creek that ran down from our spring-fed dam. During the next several weeks, Tom built what for him was a large house—a 10 by 12 foot one-room cabin constructed from wattle and daub, with secondhand windows, an earthen floor, and artfully sculpted gables. Then he was going to cover it with scrap wood for a roof.

That’s when Laura put her foot down.“Your wife’s pregnant, and the rains we get here are fierce, just like the wind. We have

leftover roof tiles from the old house: idealist or not, you’re going to use them!” Tom had had a hard time accepting the fact that he’d been forced to use a few nails to

hold his house together. Now he was to cover it with aluminum roof tiles! His principles were rising up in protest, but the idealist hasn’t been born who’d have a hope in hell of sticking to principles when Laura has made up her mind. So roof tiles it was. After we discovered that they were taking their water from the creek in a pitcher, we also put in a branch from our water mains to their cabin, and Laura found them a secondhand wood-burning stove with a hot water tank. Apart from insulation, the cabin was now kind of livable. I had never seen two happier people than Tom and Liz.

We had avoided defaulting on the mortgage, and we had two people on the farm. But these were people who wouldn’t be contributing very much: they were dreamers and milkers of goats. How were we to get ahead?

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35. Campus LifeOne more person was due any day now: our first child. Along with everything else, Laura had managed to find the local midwives. She was going to have the baby at home. (“I’m not sick—why should I go to a hospital?”) Her doctor at the nearby Latrobe hospital gave his OK: she was in good health and he expected no complications. He saw her on the due date, and said that first babies sometimes come a couple of days late. Two days after, the contractions began and her water broke.

The midwives, two of them, duly arrived. One was an old hand, the other was in training; this was to be the last delivery she had to attend before she was to receive her diploma. So she did all the work, and her instructor supervised. My task was to hold Laura’s hand, see to her every need, and help her with her breathing. Laura accepted no medications and passed her time between contractions reading poetry. Toward the end, she didn’t pick up the book anymore. It was painful, and the doctor, who was now on hand, had to cut her a little. But there was no going back, and in due time, our son was delivered: big, strong, and red as a robin from plentiful oxygen. I was allowed to see him bathed and laid to Laura’s breast. Then the midwives sent me to cook pea soup; they didn’t think men were up to watching the afterbirth. But Laura said the placenta was the most beautiful thing she had seen—lately, that is: all silky and smooth, the home of our baby; and she took a photo of it, as she had done all through the birthing process.

Young Dorn thrived and grew, and Laura was back in business harvesting in her garden. Coming home from Launceston one day, she saw a sign along the road: Donkey for Sale. She followed the directions, found the donkey, and promptly fell in love with him. The price was next to nothing, and now we had a beautiful Jerusalem donkey. He was quite an original; he liked company and was always near the house. Eventually, he found himself a job: Tom shoed him and rode him to Sheffield, six miles away, when he wanted to go to town. A top-class saddle had been part of the bargain.

At least once a day, the donkey came for a hug, laying his heavy head on the shoulder of the person he had picked, and just stood there, accepting all the stroking and petting you cared to give him. At other times, he’d sulk for no apparent reason, but a treat always cheered him up. Especially, he liked fruit, and seeing him eat an orange was hilarious: he placed it whole between his front teeth, bit down on it, and squirted orange juice all around. He also contributed to the farm in a very tangible way: in contrast to the horses, he always passed his dung in the same spot, and from there it was easy to cart it to where it was needed.

Thanks to Laura’s gregariousness, we already seemed to know nearly everyone in Sheffield and Kentish, the local district. Sheffield is a tourist town: the walls of every downtown building, as well as many freestanding walls erected specifically for the purpose, are covered in murals painted by local artists over many years. To enable visitors to see the murals at a leisurely pace, a German fellow by the name of Otto offered guided tours in a horse-drawn carriage. His horses were an impressive-looking pair of Clydesdales, whose sturdy appearance probably contributed to his business.

One day Otto approached us about our farm. He knew where we lived, and suggested that he might build himself a cabin on our land and help us farm, using his horses, in return for being allowed to stay with us. His current home was in Lorinna way up in the mountains, and driving his horses down to Sheffield was a whole-day trip. Because of this, he spent most of the

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summer boarding in Sheffield, and had extra costs from this. This was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

Otto had many horse-drawn farm implements, and we could easily find more with our neighbors, the people whose forebears had farmed this land before tractors came around. Now we knew that we’d have the winter crops going on time for the next season. Otto started plowing on his days off even before any decisions had been made as to building a home for him. The whole question was confusing: would he just put up another illegal shack somewhere on the land, or should we attempt to get a building permit, with all the complications that would entail?

Next, Emy and her partner Helen with their housemates, a pair of young gay men, as well as Emy’s older brother Nick with his wife Susan, wanted to come and join us. They were fed up with having to tell suspicious Sydney officials why they weren’t going to get marked. We would have welcomed them with open arms then and there, but we had nowhere for them to stay. That was no problem: they’d live in their tents until their homes were ready. There was no talking them out of it, and within a few days, they were with us, their respective household goods stored away in another shed, hastily put together.

Buying seed and building materials put our finances to the test, and it wasn’t looking good. We weren’t going to be able to meet the next mortgage payment. As we were checking our bank statements over the Internet, Laura told me calmly and optimistically to keep looking. So I looked up another account that had been dormant for a long time; it was still empty.

“There’s got to be something else,” Laura insisted.“The only one left is Travelers Charge,” I said, “and that’s at zero. All the money I

deposited there during my trip has been used up.”“Look anyway,” Laura told me.So I accessed the account, and said, “See, that’s just a bunch of zeroes.”“No, it isn’t,” Laura countered.Hmm. There was a five there. I had expected an empty account, so I had seen only

zeroes. But in front of the six zeroes, and a couple of more zeroes for no cents, there was a number five. That made five million. Five million US dollars?! Was there some mistake?

Now the phone part of my smartphone rang, and in place of the Travelers Charge statement, the screen showed the face of Colonel Adams.

“Hey there, Greene! And top o’ the mornin’ to you, Miss Laura! What have y’all been up to?”

“We have a farm, sir,” I replied. “A wonderful place in Tasmania.”“And a baby boy!” Laura added. “Why don’t you come and see us?”“I sure wish I could,” Adams answered. “But all isn’t yet well here. We saved the

Union, but there are difficult investigations to carry out, a new and much smaller federal government to set up, what have you. However, I wanted to call and tell you that the award money has been paid out. We didn’t have your address, but knowing your Travelers Charge account number, we deposited it there. They’ll make it grow for you, have no fear!”

“We were just wondering how to pay the mortgage, as a matter of fact,” I said, still confused from my brief glimpse of the account.

“Well, now you can pay it off altogether!” Adams said. “You’re five million dollars richer.”

“You mean there’s no mistake about that sum?”

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“No, of course not! Except that it would have been ten million, if you hadn’t insisted on being so fair to the militia. However, there it is: all yours, tax free, as far as Uncle Sam is concerned. Like a lot of things here: nobody wants the Internal Revenue Service back, it seems...”

“Talk about saving the day,” was all I could say.Laura handled the expression of our gratitude: she’s never been tongue-tied, ever. Before

Colonel Adams hung up, she had made him promise to visit us, no matter what.A stroke of luck, or a well-deserved reward: we didn’t care which. Now we could plan

for the future of our farm on a completely different level. Still, this was a very special place and very unlike regular agriculture. We needed to build a labor-intensive farm that would be able to supply most of the needs of those living there. We couldn’t just go out and buy a lot of machinery—we didn’t want it, and the land was too steep for it anyway. But how to accomplish what we wanted to do wasn’t at all clear. There were rules on how many people could live in a place before it had to be zoned as a suburb; in that case, we’d have had to connect ourselves to the statewide water and sewer provider. We also needed to understand how to invest the money so it wouldn’t all go to Australian taxes. We didn’t want to be seen as builders providing our guests with homes, nor did we want to be employers with all the expensive obligations that would have brought with it.

Fortunately, we had access to the best tax advice available. The summer I had been in Germany, Laura had mailed me all my documents for the tax year ending that June, but they had never arrived. When she had gone back to the Post Office to complain, the gentleman behind her in line had expressed his sympathy and had handed her his card: he had been a manager for the Assistant Commissioner for Taxation at the Sydney Tax Office. When later I had reconstructed my tax return, he had been extremely helpful, and I had ended up with a nice refund. Now I wrote him again, and received every imaginable advice on how to set up a not-for-profit business that would be practically tax-exempt.

Nick, Emy’s brother, was a computer technician by trade, and he found the time to keep surfing the Web even in the midst of his introduction to country life. Trying to learn about organic farming, he found the Web site of the Orange Agricultural College of the University of Sydney, and came to tell Laura and me that the college offered an external study program in sustainable agriculture. You could study organic farming by correspondence, as long as you had access to a farmer for project work, and the local support of a mentor or tutor. A Graduate Diploma in Sustainable Agriculture was available after four semesters of external study; a Graduate Certificate required two semesters.

We immediately started thinking about how we could take advantage of such a program. I called one of my senior colleagues at the main Hobart campus of the University of Tasmania, who also was a member of the Schools Board of Tasmania, and asked if the university would like to establish a campus for sustainable agriculture on our farm. But all I got from him was a bureaucratic “thank you, but no, thank you.” If the university were interested in such a campus, and it wasn’t, it would use state land, and didn’t need a private partner.

So I called the Orange Agricultural College, and offered to set up a distance-learning center on our farm, with our own money. All I needed from them was some kind of franchise to make us legitimate. Laura and I, both qualified to teach, would be the local mentors, the farm would provide the opportunity for project work, and all our guests would be external students of the college, or instructors, depending on their background.

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The college was most cooperative, and soon we had a formal agreement in hand. With that, we went to the local authority in Sheffield, where Laura already knew the man in charge of zoning. Now there was no problem with building permits: where a regular 148 acre farm would have been expected to house just one family, or two at a maximum, we now were free to build all the student and teacher housing we needed, along with the necessary teaching facilities. We got permission to use our own water after having it tested, and were exempted from paying the state for the water used. We got a special dispensation from the requirement for a sewer hookup; we were going to use composting toilets in place of the flush variety.

To top it off, the gentleman offered to fix up our driveway and pay two thirds of the cost out of the district budget. There was an old law on the books from more than a century earlier, meant to encourage new settlements by facilitating road access. Hardly anybody knew about it and no more than two roads were built under it each year in all of Kentish. Our driveway, half a mile long and doubling as a steep, muddy, rocky-bottomed storm drain when it rained, was designated a Pioneer Road, and soon the district crews had rebuilt it into a fine gravel road, with proper trenches and culverts, requiring only a minimum of maintenance. When, eventually, we got the bill, it was for just $2,000; our neighbor with the beef cattle, who owned an earth-moving company, had once offered to fix the driveway for $20,000, and his closest competitor down the road had wanted $10,000 for the job.

All the money to be invested in the learning center was tax exempt. Now we could start building. Everybody picked their favorite spot to live, and an architect friend designed a functional and good-looking, basic one-family dwelling that could be built on sloping ground to allow easy access to the basement. Each home would have a root cellar, running water and basic conveniences, a kitchen garden, and suitable outbuildings. All the while, more people who had heard about us turned up and were welcomed. The local trade club members found all the construction work they could wish for, and the hardware stores were competing for our business.

We had the timber milled from our own trees at a sawmill in nearby Gowrie Park, and put in proper insulation in walls, floors, and ceilings—something quite unusual in Tasmania, where the old English attitude still prevails to the effect that it doesn’t really get cold enough in England, or Tasmania, to worry about. Well, like the English, many Tasmanians have runny noses in the winter, whereas we didn’t, because we knew the value of a warm, snug house with low heating costs.

At the end of the semester, I quit my job at the university to devote myself full-time to our new enterprise.

Old Elvis soon found himself drafted back into productive work. But all our people and horses made only moderate progress clearing the fields of weeds, a nontrivial effort on this fertile land. We had blackberries, thistles, and bracken fern growing on every square foot of open land except the one field where Tom and Liz lived. The rest of that field was already planted, but we wanted all the fields productive for the next spring. Eventually, we brought in a bulldozer crew: it was a one-time task, and we needed the job done, so we didn’t worry about the deviation from our sustainable methods. Very conveniently, we were having enough rain to be permitted to burn the heaps of brush as soon as they formed. The crew also built a track around the fields to allow better access.

Then we built a school building, workshops, barns, and storage: everything that was needed to support our people and our animals. When another work crew turned up from neighboring Paradise, we had them extend our little house, adding two rooms around the south corner of the old stable.

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Meanwhile, it was getting colder, and Tom, Liz, and their baby were cold in their pretty little cabin. What was more, as the winter sun remained hidden behind the ridge to their north, their lovely little spot never thawed out during the day, and the insides of their wattle-and-daub walls were covered in hoarfrost. So, once again, Laura had to tell Tom what was best for him and his family: as luck would have it, we completed another house right then, and moved them over.

Liz’s lack of homemaking skills was evident as Laura, Emy, and I went to clear out the cabin. Between the hay-filled bolsters in the built-in double bed, rats had made their nests. The earthen floor was covered in old vegetable peelings and food scraps, providing the rats with an inexhaustible larder. When we had disassembled the bed, we found a dead, foot-long rat under it. We burned stuff for a whole afternoon, including the old camper, and finally had the cabin empty and ready to serve as a garden pavilion during coming summers.

While we were raking up, a homeless mouse strayed right between Laura’s boots, losing its direction from fright as Laura began yelling, “Gregory, Gregory, come kill this rat!” But there was no need for me to do so: Laura was performing a frenzied war dance while screaming at the top of her lungs, and landed right on top of the hapless creature, crushing it in one hefty stomp.

Soon after, Liz was enrolled in Laura’s homemaking class. Laura had a library of books, some as old as the late nineteenth century, all dealing with how to run a traditional household. For keeping us and our people healthy, she put her trust in Dr. Henry G. Bieler’s Food Is Your Best Medicine from 1969 and Brian Halvorsen’s The Natural Dentist from 1986. Her mainstay were several books by Mrs. Beeton from the 1910s and 1920s, and she had a closely guarded treasure, a thin volume from 1928 called Fowler’s Red Book of Kitchen Kraft and Guide to Home Economy, listing all the tricks to cooking, cleaning, mending, and healing a housewife practicing self-sufficiency would ever need. All the young women on our little campus were thus learning the old arts of homemaking, while the men were taught sustainable farming. In the process, we eventually reached a state where we produced all the basic foodstuffs and fibers we needed and more, and became the main trader of the local LETSystem. Its currency was called the roland, after our mountain.

For me, setting up the learning center was not only a challenge; it was an exercise in character-building. In my former job as a contingency planner I had been successful and felt competent; I was respected and had some influence on the management of the company. After all those years of being measured on what I was good at, I now found myself trying to make a contribution in matters I knew practically nothing about. Success was never certain and my opinion didn’t always prevail. In the end, everything worked out, but in the process, I learned an awful lot about patience and humility, and I learned it the hard way.

The herd of feral goats, now fenced off into the back pastures bordering on neighboring bushland, provided us with our meat. They were difficult to find, but we had our special ways.

Soon after we had moved to the farm, Laura had got stuck with her car on the driveway, trying to negotiate a steep uphill curve during one of the fierce rainstorms that are so common along Tasmania’s north-south centerline. That was all it took: she turned back and drove all the way to Devonport, where she traded the car for a used four-wheel-drive. It was an emerald-green old Lada Niva, the Fiat-designed Russian all-terrain vehicle with constant four-wheel drive. The gasoline engine, the only part that ever wears out on a Niva, had been replaced with an electric motor, the roof rack had solar panels for a bottom, and the space behind the back seat

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was covered in a foot-deep layer of batteries. This Lada was now our primary means of getting around the farm, apart from walking. It would negotiate every incline we had, up to 40 or 45 percent, and mostly kept itself charged just by being left outside.

Whenever the mood took them, Nick and Emy would set out in the Lada. Nick would drive all over the upper hills, with Emy seated on the hood, feet on the bumper and bull bar up front, and armed with a .22 Magnum with telescopic sights. Before long, they would outrun one of the goats, Emy would shoot it from her perch, and so we had a hearty meal for the day. Or, if we had Muslim or Jewish visitors, and Laura wanted the animal slaughtered the traditional way, Emy would jump on its back from the running board of the car, grab its horns, and hold it down, while Nick deftly swerved around her and returned to help lift the goat into the back of the vehicle. In the same way, they also rounded up several Nubians among the goats. As a result, we eventually became self-sufficient in goat’s milk.

Emy and Helen were vegetarians, but Emy was our best shot, and she liked the hunt. She also shot rabbits and wallabies for the cats and dogs, and every evening she would clean her bounty at a wooden chopping block under a floodlight at the end of our house, with two dogs and three cats sitting in a semicircle around her, patiently waiting for their dinner.

Emy’s not only a great disciplinarian; she’s a natural-born teacher. At our little learning center, she ran her own teaching program. She taught blacksmithing, woodworking, martial arts, and the humane killing of animals. The latter was her pet project, although small: she couldn’t stand seeing animals suffer. Her workshops produced most of the implements we needed, and kept our machinery in good repair.

Nick installed and maintained the computer network we utilized for the distance-learning program, and made himself useful in many other ways. Together, he and I set up a small water turbine in the one of our two creeks that wasn’t used for drinking water, plus a number of wind turbines, to take advantage of the near-constant sou’wester. The wind turbines had cylindrical, spiral rotors on vertical axles and were compact, quiet, and highly efficient, not needing to turn into the wind. We installed solar panels and low-voltage lights and appliances in all the houses, and eventually disconnected ourselves from the Hydro power grid. This wasn’t an economical proposition, as the gear was expensive, but we wanted to eliminate our dependence on money, so for us, it made sense to make even a large up-front investment in a case like this. And remembering Ingmar's advice, I wasn't going to risk any deviations from the building code that would be usable for persuading us to stay within the official economy.

Helen and Susan helped run the cooking and homemaking courses; Susan was a professional cook. In this way, we provided a real learning experience for all those who came to us. They all worked for their living, but they were students, not employees, receiving their spending allowance in rolands, and we succeeded in avoiding taxation almost entirely. We needed no advertising: word of mouth along with our Web site, maintained by Nick, brought us all the people we could accommodate.

By the end of the first year of our learning center, we had used up the American reward money, but when we needed more, there always was some subsidy from either Tasmania or New South Wales to help us erect another house or build another shed or workshop.

By the time our daughter Lynn was born, we were well established on our land, and along with us, several dozen people drew their sustenance from it. There never was any hassle about being marked or not: the fiercely independent-minded Tasmanians would have none of the coercion mainland politicians permitted. Tasmania lies in the Roaring Forties and during the

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Great Drought, its climate had changed very little: the constant winds coming up from the Antarctic regularly dumped their moisture on the western half of the island as they had always done. Thus, those who lived in this sparsely populated state still had the option of growing their own food, and were not inclined to pandering to big business. The aversion was mutual: strict environmental laws made Tasmania unattractive as an investment target and the multinationals stayed out. Nothing could have suited us better at that stage of our lives.

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36. Advanced StudyOur third winter at the farm was beautiful. We had no snow, and on clear days, the midday sun would warm us, up there on our hills, to the point where we were often working outside in shorts and T-shirts until afternoon. Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere was having a scorcher of a summer, literally. They had no ozone layer left, and it was hazardous to go out in the sun: blisters and damaged eyesight were sure to ensue. Soon the smog in most cities was so thick that it was dark in the daytime and darker still at night, and, as the price for some relief from the sun, people got breathing trouble from the toxic smog.

Nevertheless, the official line was that there was no cause for concern: everything needed to protect oneself was for sale, from dark glasses to gas masks. Late US President Ronald Reagan was often quoted in earnest. When new in office and first faced with the proposal to limit the production of chlorofluorocarbons, he had explained that it was much better for the US economy if the demand for sunscreen and other protective supplies went up as a result of ozone depletion, than having to attract extra costs for changing over to other propellant and refrigerant materials. The multinationals congratulated themselves, and distributed extra dividends to their shareholders and generous kickbacks to the politicians: the last global commons, air and sunshine, had successfully been turned into profit-generating commodities. Meanwhile, high-priced consultants met in ponderous councils to figure out what the next strategic business direction was going to be.

The summer heat also had the effect of drying out what remained of many northern hemisphere rivers, and one newscast dealt at length with the repercussions this was having on Syria and Iraq, where no more water was coming down the Euphrates past the Turkish dams in that river.

One such fine morning, when the babies had been fed and cared for, Laura went out in the front yard, as was her wont, without a stitch: a sight for sore eyes. Our neighbors two hundred feet below us couldn’t see the yard, and our student and staff homes had been situated so our privacy was protected. There she would stretch in the sunshine, sing, and talk to the animals. I usually left her alone, but that day she wanted me near her, and I got to join in her workout.

It was so wonderfully quiet, and we stood hugging each other for a long time. Then the earth shook. Just a little, but enough that even I could feel it. Enough also that the animals needed reassuring.

Mild earthquakes occur in Tasmania, but it isn’t an earthquake zone. Yet I thought that the epicenter of the quake should have been somewhere within northern Tasmania, if we could feel it. Laura didn’t agree. She’d been in earthquakes in California, and said that this one was nowhere near us.

“And, mind you, we’re due for a big one. Go find out where it was!” Both the shortwave newscasts and the Internet had begun reporting on the earthquake. It

had happened in the Andes Mountains in South America. Preliminary measurements indicated a strength of over 12 on the Richter scale. Satellites showed that parts of the Andes had sunk down several thousand feet, and some of the islands off the coast had disappeared. Entire cities had been obliterated. A satellite picture showed one of the Andean capitals split in three parts with great chasms between; there was no confirmation as to which city it was, as the entire area

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was soon covered in volcanic ash and smoke. I wished I’d had access to those radar images at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center.

The shares of the pharmaceutical companies distributing Colombian and Peruvian cocaine crashed, triggering a panic on the world’s stock exchanges.

A tsunami, a giant wave, was fast advancing toward the South Pacific islands, and would, in due time, reach Australia, as well. It had been the strongest earthquake ever recorded. No wonder we’d been able to feel it halfway around the world.

With the immense release of energy, exceptionally violent thunderstorms were soon raging all over the disaster area. From the towering clouds, huge hailstones fell down for hours; some had weighed in at a hundred pounds. Expressing his solidarity with everyone in the stricken areas, the emperor came on the air, and voiced what could have been a popular mood: he blamed all the current troubles on God, as proof that nothing other than grief was to be had from that quarter.

As expected, the tsunami caused great destruction in the South Pacific, washing right over some low islands like Fanning, Christmas, and the Society Islands, at a speed exceeding 500 miles per hour. On some islands, nothing was left standing; others were partly or totally washed away. When the wave hit New Zealand and Australia thirteen to fifteen hours after the quake, it inundated the eastern shores and caused considerable destruction. Laura’s agony over the suffering of victims and survivors was almost palpable.

Staying outside at night at the farm could be scary sometimes. That evening, all the weird animal noises seemed stronger than usual. The devils were squabbling and screaming in the bush. A flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos flew low overhead, constantly wailing their ghostly cries. A screech owl could be heard from the direction of the dam. The harsh, rasping calls of native hens from the cow paddock below continued far into the night. Keli the cat must have been guarding his territory against some quoll or feral cat, and argued noisily in the shrubs across the driveway. To the south, the aurora australis lit up the sky with an eerie reddish glow. Our little house felt so secure in the midst of all those noises.

The last piece of news I caught before going to bed was that the emperor and the commissioner for propaganda had moved back to Brussels. No specific reason was given. Neither did I care; I was soon asleep in Laura’s arms.

Our spring work began early that year. We were now skilled and knew what we were doing, and for the first time, we planted the entire area we had set aside for cropping. Our flock of sheep shared the upper pastures with the goats when the latter emerged from the bush; our pet animals, including the donkey and some hand-reared sheep and goats, grazed in and near the yard. The rest of the land, apart from bush and homes, was used for planting. Emy and I even seeded a small field with barley, intending to malt it and brew some beer.

Several times a month, Laura and I would drive to Devonport, the nearest city of any size, to shop and sort out necessary business. On such a trip, approaching downtown over the high Victoria Bridge across the tidal estuary of the river Mersey, Laura, while driving, picked out something on the water down below with her ever-searching peripheral vision.

“Look, there’s a new yacht in the harbor... Rather beat-up like she’s come from afar... She isn’t Australian... Looks familiar, don’t you think?”

I had figured out which boat she meant, and took a better look as we turned into Formby Road.

“Very familiar, I’d say! I crossed the Atlantic in her!”

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Laura made one of her famous U-turns, which are strictly banned on this street. It’s divided and partly at different levels. She just drove into the Shell station, weaved her way between cars filling up, left by the other entrance, and crossed the street there. Then it was back up onto the bridge, and down again on the East Devonport side. This is where the pleasure craft are; on the downtown side of the river is the harbor.

We parked the car and went down to the pier where the boat was moored. There was old Chuck making repairs, and it would have been putting it mildly to say that he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw us. He stamped on the deck to alert his companion who hadn’t noticed us. Chuck introduced her: she was Bridget, his wife. Bridget was deaf.

Chuck has always been a man of action: when one day he had met Bridget and fallen in love with her, he hadn’t been the least put off by her handicap. Instead, he had immediately set about learning sign language, and soon after, they had been married. Having sailed across the Pacific, barely feeling the tsunami as it had lazily heaved them 300 feet up in the air, they had headed for Tasmania in order to be as far from mark enforcers as they could get. But what they’d be doing there they hadn’t begun thinking about yet.

Obviously, we invited them to come and live on our farm. While we went about our business, they packed their things and locked up the boat, and in the afternoon, we all headed back up toward Sheffield and Mount Roland. The beauty of that mountain was beyond words. Our guests were impressed, and to me it always was such an intense feeling of homecoming as I watched it grow in front of the car. As with earlier arrivals, we had a place for Chuck and Bridget to live, and they were soon part of our little community.

One evening in the fall the news spread among us that Rome had been bombed. Again I went to my news sources and found the rumor accurate. Rome had been totally obliterated by a large nuclear explosion. When I got a satellite picture of what was left, I calculated that it must have been one of the largest hydrogen bombs, between 60 and 100 megatons’ worth.

The official word from Europe was that Israel was to blame. Due to her failure to silence the two preachers on the Temple grounds, Israel had long been at odds with the European Presidency. But would Israel attack like that? As far as I knew, Israel had never built such a large bomb. As the European propaganda machine turned on its turbo boost, I called Colonel Adams and asked him where the missile had come from.

“From France,” he replied without hesitation. “We have it all on record.”I was understandably shocked.“Does that make sense?”“It makes eminent sense,” Adams answered. “Step back and think a little. Since years

and years, nation-states have been losing power to the multinationals and their investor-owners. The WTO, regional bodies like the EU and the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the international financial institutions have been making the laws for every country in every important aspect. The only tasks left for nation-states have been security services, infrastructure, and the social safety nets, plus education and health in countries with those traditions. Business handles everything else, and mostly, business is big.

“The emperor took over the nation-states without really trying. Why should he stop there? He’s after real power, not symbolic titles and figurehead positions. So he got himself appointed chairman of the three bodies that set the course for the world: the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations here in the States. Between

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them, these bodies, representing the transnational owning class, run the world; national governments take their orders from them.

“But the emperor specializes in executive power; these old boys’ clubs that meet once or twice a year give only general directions. So he formed a new governing body of the ten most influential men from the three groups. This Council of Ten is now the true world government, but its very existence and all its actions are secret. All we see is the implementation of its decisions, as carried out by the national governments and the business community. This is why the enforcement of the payment and identification system has become so much more effective lately: it’s now in the hands of private security firms, or, if you like, the private armies of the multinationals.”

“I’ve read about those three groups in the protester blogs I used to monitor as a contingency planner,” I commented. “But how does this relate to the bombing?”

“Patience, Greene!” Colonel Adams said. “Rome had become the absolute center of the worldwide peace-of-mind industry, riding on the emperor’s popularity after his crowning and takeover of the Catholic Church. The advertising and fashion industries, the European entertainment industry, makers of every kind of knickknack, lapel button, and T-shirt telling the world that their owner belongs to the in-group: all these homed in on Rome and more or less merged with the church. This new church did away with all the old dogma that had kept the Catholic Church separate for all those years; its official line was to accept and cooperate with every other religious group on the planet.

“Over the past couple of years, these upstarts had generated a huge turnover, and because they used religious organizations as their distribution channels, they had a captive clientele that traditional business had it hard to break into. Even the Rome water works, one of the last remaining public utilities, was making a nice buck on bottling its tap water in atomizers and selling it through church channels as holy water. Add to that thousands of local translators, consultants, and lobbyists not affiliated with the multinationals, and depriving them of billions of dollars in annual turnover: Rome accumulated so much wealth that the old moneyed elites became honestly envious.

“The emperor didn’t need his church anymore: he now holds the real power through his new council, and can quit pretending that he cares about popularity. So he left Rome and threw in his lot with the old money. As president of France, he holds the keys to that country’s nuclear deterrent. Now he’s rid of the competition in Rome and, with China and India out of the picture as well, revenue flows can return to those who used to enjoy them. Of course, many smaller enterprises that were suppliers to the people and businesses in Rome will be hurting now.”

“How come nothing of this gets out through the press?” I asked. “This is quite a sensational story!”

“The days of independent media and investigative journalism are over. Media and publishers are owned by the multinationals, and they print and broadcast what the propaganda commissioner tells them without asking questions. Like national governments, they get their instructions from the three groups we just talked about, and they never report on the proceedings of the groups, even though their senior editors are always invited to the meetings. What’s more, these groups are very secretive; we can’t prove what we know and deduce. We haven’t managed to break into the computers of the Council of Ten, and neither has the CIA or the National Security Agency.”

“That really cleared the matter up for me,” I said. “Besides, speaking of bombs, did you find out where Madsen got his?”

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“From the EU Secret Police,” Adams replied. “We traced his girlfriend back to them. They, in turn, do as the emperor tells them. It was the old idea of divide and conquer: by destroying the Federal government and supporting the regional demagogues, the emperor thought he’d gain full control over the whole country. I’m afraid we disappointed him.”

I said good-bye to Colonel Adams and wondered what kind of agony the people around Rome were going through just then. Our Italian friends were at a safe distance from there, but there must have been millions of people injured and suffering from radiation sickness. With disasters happening all the time, there were few resources left for relief efforts, and the charities that used to distribute donations had been nearly paralyzed by endless corruption scandals. The only thing stricken areas got plenty of was flying camera drones. People seemed to perceive disaster scenes as just another, more realistic form of reality TV, and didn’t think they needed to do anything other than cheer. Next time, it might be their turn, so why not enjoy it while they could?

Out of curiosity, I thought to try and find out what I could about this new council over the Internet. The conspiracy theorists had the story, albeit in less detail than Colonel Adams, but they had no evidence either: no sources, no references. No search engine could find the slightest hint of such a group. The Web sites of the three parent bodies only advertised their ostensible, official interest in economic and political research and the like.

While I was thus occupied, Nick came over and found me at the computer. I told him what I had heard, and complained that I couldn’t dig up anything to verify what Adams had said.

“That’s because you’re looking in the wrong place!” Nick said. “If you want to get into computers that aren’t meant for you to find, you’ll have to use different methods.”

“Why don’t you try, then?” I asked. “I’d really like to know if there’s anything to support that story.”

Nick sat down at the computer. I noticed right away that he used only the keyboard. I realized that the pointing device was too slow for him; he knew all the keyboard shortcuts by heart. His hands moved so fast over the keys that I couldn’t see what he was typing. I asked why he didn’t talk to the computer; that could be a very fast way to interact with it, as well.

“Real hackers don’t use voice,” he replied. “We take so much trouble staying anonymous; we don’t want our voice prints all over the net.”

“Do you hack into all kinds of computers to delete files and the like?” I asked, disturbed by the thought that my friend called himself a hacker.

“Don’t be stupid,” Nick answered. “You’re talking about crackers—adolescents and petty criminals who need to prove something. Real hackers don’t give that kind of people the time of day, and they’re too dumb to use our methods. We break into computers like others climb mountains: just because they’re there. In nature, you’re supposed to take only photos and leave only footprints. A hacker takes nothing and leaves nothing, and nobody knows we’ve been into their computers and networks. Or at least, they’ll never know who it was, if they happen to see us.”

“And what about cybercrime and cyberterrorism?” I queried. “You wouldn’t want to be involved with anything like that, would you?”

“Hackers are techos, not criminals,” Nick answered. “We often help the police out with cybercrime—anonymously, of course. The only time we get in trouble with the law is when we expose high-level corruption.”

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What Nick was accessing with my computer was quite unfamiliar to me. I realized that my playing around with computers had been just that; this was somebody who knew what he was doing.

“I’m using what we call the Undernet,” Nick explained. “It’s a parallel network, maintained by hackers on their own servers. You can get to it from anywhere via the regular Internet, but only if you know how. This is where we share our knowledge. Just now I’m accessing a server belonging to a friend of mine. Of course, I don’t know his real name, and I don’t know where he lives or what he looks like. I only guess it’s a ‘he,’ besides. Most people who know me via the Internet think I’m a woman, just as an example.

“This guy has a server that provides information on how to break into secure computers and networks everywhere. If you ask the server for something and don’t get an answer, the guy has an alarm that alerts him, any time of day or night. If you’re somebody he knows he’ll get you the information himself. He offers a guarantee that you’ll have your answer within fifteen minutes. He does this just for the fun of it: there’s no money in it for him.”

Nick’s request seemed to have been of the difficult kind, because the server didn’t have the information stored from before. Soon, there was Nick’s friend on the other end. With a “just a minute,” he disappeared for a while, then came back with strings of characters that included Internet addresses, user names, passwords, and other information. If this didn’t work, just get back to him—and so he signed off.

“After all these years of trying to close the loopholes in operating systems and network software,” I mused, “you’d think computers would be better protected.”

“They are,” Nick replied, “but people like this guy make their own back doors. They release self-building viruses, in several string fragments, over a period of many months. When, eventually, a corporate network has been penetrated by all the parts, the virus puts itself together, using loopholes in the operating system to make itself invisible to the operating system, the user, and the antivirus software. But it still doesn’t do anything the technical staff or the users could detect; it just provides its creator with clandestine access.

“Since the vendors of antivirus software can only find and eradicate viruses that their customers have discovered and sent them, they never get to know about this type of invisible virus, and their antivirus products don’t remove them. Even so, the virus can reconstitute itself under a different name and with new characteristics if it’s removed: all the parts are still there.”

Nick set to work. Gradually, he worked his way in through firewalls and routers, and before he proceeded any further, he checked out the topology of the organization’s network and all the servers and workstations on it. Then, armed with the access information, he approached what he thought should have been a computer with strategic information on it, judging from how well it was protected. Soon he was inside, and began to download memos and presentations.

They were encrypted and unreadable. That didn’t faze Nick at all: you didn’t try to break encryption; you went and found the encryption keys belonging to the person who had stored the texts. The keys were protected, too, of course, but using simpler means that could be broken. Some minutes later, Nick was trying out keys and soon found one that worked.

After decrypting some memos with no bearing on Rome, he opened a presentation with an interesting file name. After the first couple of frames we knew that we had what we’d been looking for: here was the plan to destroy Rome! Pros and cons, different scenarios, possible ways to carry out the mission. Recommendation: a French long-range missile with a single, 60-megaton warhead. As an addendum came the outline of the plan to place the blame on Israel: the

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country had become too much of a drain on the coffers of her supporters with little political leverage to show for it, so Israel could go.

Nick saved the presentation on my computer, and I asked if I could send it to Colonel Adams. I knew his public encryption key, so the transmission would be secure from prying eyes, except, perhaps, from Nick’s friends, whom I counted as allies by then. Nick had no objections, as long as I didn’t reveal how I had come by it. So I sent it off, and received a compliment by return mail. Then I moved the presentation to a removable memory bank and locked it in the safe. My computer was on a network and could perhaps be broken into, and I didn’t want to take such a risk.

I had to marvel at the way Nick and his friends trusted each other while maintaining this absolute, paranoid anonymity. Nick would go through three separate Internet shell accounts in different parts of the world to confuse investigators. If the third account, the one a sleuth would encounter first, sensed that it had been breached, it would alert the second shell account, which would then trigger a shutdown of the first account, the only one where Nick’s true IP address could be determined. The second account looked just like an original account, but had no actual contact information in it. None of the service providers knew what was going on, and, of course, Nick wasn’t paying for any of the accounts. His friend, who didn’t know who Nick was, trusted Nick with his life—if the wrong crowd found out what he knew, he’d be as good as gone.

Before Nick got up, he proceeded to give me a lesson in the various ways the Internet was being used to protect the security of Mark dodgers around the world. Just as the Council of Ten was able to hide from the NSA and others that wanted to find out about it, the unmarked community, with the help of hackers like Nick, also enjoyed its privacy from unwanted attention. This was another instance of using mainstream technology while staying separate from the emperor’s world.

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37. GraduationIn Israel the followers of the emperor felt the need to do something to appease him, so they assembled a truck bomb. One morning they drove it up next to the two Jerusalem prophets and detonated it. The staying power of the two was great, but not enough to withstand the explosion. In the middle of the rubble, their bodies, still intact, lay motionless.

Every TV channel carried the scene in detail, and showed people all over the world celebrating the end of these uncomfortable messengers. Supporters of the emperor kept vigil on the site, preventing every attempt at recovering or burying the bodies. This went on for three days with business around the world at a virtual standstill as people partied, overloaded social media, and exchanged gifts. It was a rare break from the tension and the sense of doom that had prevailed for so long. The general sentiment was that finally, there’d be peace and security: the agitators were dead.

The English-speaking world burst out chanting John Lennon’s “Imagine” while folks in other parts sang local and translated ditties with similar lyrics. It was the high point of the emperor’s career as a peace-monger. While we didn’t have a TV antenna anymore—the old high-definition TV channels had been put to new uses—our Internet news feed was as good as everybody else’s, and we were able to follow the whole spectacle live.

Meanwhile, in our church in Sheffield, the Prince of Peace was quoted as saying, ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’

Then in the afternoon, as wearied TV crews were preparing to pack up and go off to something new, suddenly the two bodies stirred. Nobody had thought to wonder about the fact that they were unhurt and not decomposing; now they stood up on their feet again. The celebrating crowd dispersed in a panic, but the cameramen stayed; their job demanded that they show the world whatever was going on, no matter the risks to themselves.

But the two preachers had no further need to spew fire or deliver hurtful speeches. Their job was done. There was a voice from nowhere saying in Hebrew: “Come up here!” The TV channels had no time to turn off their automatic translation, so everybody understood the message. The two then rapidly ascended to the sky and disappeared in a cloud. The TV commentators lost composure altogether and forgot the official line of denying such things; for a good while they kept interviewing eyewitnesses and making it clear that there was no mistake about what had happened.

Then, with the cameras still running, there was a violent earthquake. In the aftermath, we learned that a tenth of Jerusalem had collapsed; the death toll was seven thousand people. The Mount of Olives had split in two, creating a new valley from east to west. This was too much: the emperor’s fans disappeared from the scene, and the terrified survivors could only talk about the greatness of God who had clearly revealed his hand that day.

This gaffe on part of the Israeli media and authorities sealed the fate of the country. European troops, just finished with a strike against Egypt, invaded Israel and Palestine, stopping only at the Jordanian border. The attackers entered Jerusalem, raping and pillaging, and drove half its inhabitants, Jews and Palestinians alike, out into the mountains. With Palestine now joining the battle, the Israelis eventually managed to push the EU troops north to the area of the ancient city of Megiddo, now merely a kibbutz, where they halted to await reinforcements.

A month after the departure of the two evangelists, all was ready for the attack up into the highlands toward Jerusalem. Troops from all Europe were there, along with volunteers from

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most other countries. Strong reinforcements had arrived from Asia, driving right across the dried-out riverbeds. At that point in time, America entered the war on Israel’s side, and got several hits by European nuclear warheads for her trouble.

Back home on the farm it was winter; our harvest was over, and our stores were full. We followed the news in horror: there was a world war on; all the remaining intercontinental ballistic missiles were being launched. No one was spared. By the time Indonesia was drawn into the fighting, she launched several nuclear bombs against Australian cities. Radioactive fallout was building up, the sky was darkened, and it truly looked like the end of the world.

All our people met in the schoolhouse. We debated what to do. We couldn’t be sure that we’d escape the fallout: Melbourne had been bombed just three hundred miles to our north. There was no time to dig bomb shelters. Anyway, I wasn’t at all attracted by the idea of sitting in a shelter for weeks or months, only to emerge into an uninhabitable world with no one else alive. Most of us were truly worried.

Chuck wasn’t. He had once been a missionary for Operation Mobilisation, helping take a floating book exhibition across the oceans in the trusty old ship MV Logos Hope. At the time he had done a lot of Bible study, and he had no doubt about the right course of action.

“All we need to do is follow the instructions we’ve been given. We’ll go home and close doors and windows, each in their own house. That’s all.”

“What instructions are those, and where did they come from?” somebody asked.“It’s in Isaiah 26:20,” Chuck said.

Come, my people, enter into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.

“That, as far as we can determine, comes from God.”“Anybody got a better suggestion?” Emy asked, always the practical one.Nobody did. So Laura and I said good-bye to everyone and went home with our babies.Evening came. The night was darker than anything we had seen. As we turned off the

kitchen lights, there was a flash to our east behind the mountain: someone, somewhere, had seen fit to launch a missile against little Launceston, a town of just 50,000 people. Nobody held back anymore—it was like spending all you had while you could, just to make sure that someone else suffered, too.

Time seemed to slow down. Computer, TV, and radio fell silent. No doubt CNN’s camera crew up in the space station were still transmitting what they saw down on earth, but we didn’t get it. The babies were asleep. Our cats and dogs snuggled up under our bed. The grazing pets outside were locked away in their winter shelter. There was no sound from outside, and nothing could be seen through the windows. There was positively nothing to do. We went to bed and eventually fell asleep.

Morning broke after what seemed like an indeterminate time. I couldn’t tell if it had been eight hours or eight days. It was a clear, glorious morning, more like early spring than midwinter. Everything seemed intensely bright and beautiful. Our Geiger counter registered no radioactivity. Below us, the land was covered in a fog, but the mountains across the river valley towered in splendor against the blue sky. Laura was happy and confident: we’d have no more trouble.

There were no broadcasts; the TV was dead. A few ham operators could be heard on shortwave radio, some reporting death and devastation, others commenting on a bright new day like ours. People seemed to have different perceptions of what was going on.

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Toward noon, a neighbor came wearily up the driveway, clutching a gas mask. It was Hunter, a carpenter from Gowrie Park who had done occasional work for us on the buildings. We had declined to hire him again after discovering that he’d been filling his pockets with hardware and fasteners, carrying our property home with him every evening. When questioned, he had said that this was something he always did when working for somebody: he felt that it was part of his compensation to cater to his own needs from the stores of those who had more than he.

Now Hunter came into our yard, looking sick and hungry. We made him take a bath, gave him fresh clothes, and buried his radioactive belongings in the bush on our neighbor’s side of the hill. Then we fed him lunch and learned that the entire neighborhood had been covered with radioactive smog for the past month and a half. Hunter had thought that he’d been the only survivor in all of Claude Road and Gowrie Park; he had moved around with his gas mask, scavenging for canned food, and finding only decomposing bodies wherever he had gone. He had wanted to come up to our place earlier, but had been unable to find our gate, a matter he couldn’t understand, as he knew the neighborhood like his own pockets. Now he asked if he could stay with us, since the fog had cleared up on our hill. How had we made it through the six weeks of hell?

I asked Hunter what day it was, and discovered that the date on his watch was 45 days ahead of mine. Piecing together this puzzle, we began to understand that, somehow, we’d been taken past more than six weeks of time in what we had experienced as just one long night.

We found Hunter a place to stay, and spent the rest of the day talking with our people and enjoying life. Only Hunter couldn’t figure us out: how could we be so content when the state around us was gone? Eventually, he thought, we’d perish just like everybody else.

I asked Chuck if the Bible had an explanation to this time lapse. It did, he said.“The central prophesy about these days is in Matthew chapter 24. Matthew 24:21

describes the recent war like this: ‘For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.’

“Matthew 24:22 says, ‘And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.’ That sounds like what just happened to us. Verse 29 then describes nuclear winter: that’s how we know that by a great tribulation, verse 21 means a nuclear war, the worst disaster ever to hit the earth. It certainly doesn’t relate to oppression of Christians or the reign of a political leader like some would have it: such events aren’t immediately followed by nuclear winter, nor does a bit of human hardship compare to the extinction of the dinosaurs or even, if you prefer it, to the Flood of Noah.”

“Nuclear winter?” I marveled. “What did they know about nuclear winter 2,000 years ago?”

“It’s a prophesy,” Chuck replied. “Biblical prophets described a lot of things that weren’t understood in their day. This is what verse 29 says:

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.

“Nuclear winter darkens the sun and the moon, and makes the stars invisible. ‘The powers of the heavens’ normally denotes the planet gods. Their being shaken could refer to the shift in the positions of the five visible planets during our 45 day trip through time.”

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“But what about the stars falling down?” I asked. “That hasn’t happened, and it wouldn’t even be possible.”

“You need to appreciate how the contemporaries of Jesus visualized the universe,” Chuck said. “The earth was flat and extended from India in the east to Gibraltar in the west; from Ethiopia in the south to Ultima Thule—a frigid place where no one had been and where no one wanted to go—in the north. Over this flat earth lay an inverted bowl, the firmament. In the daytime, Apollo drove his fiery chariot, the sun, across the firmament from east to west; in the night, you saw the firmament with its fixed stars rotating in the same direction. The moon and the planets somehow moved along predictable paths below that firmament. Some kind of glue held the stars to the firmament, but everyone had seen a star fall down once in a while, so, clearly, they weren’t attached very securely.

“Nuclear winter means that there’s so much air pollution that sun and moon are dimmed. You also can’t see the stars, even though you know the night is clear. So where have the stars, those luminous little dots on the underside of the firmament, gone? Well, if they aren’t up there, they must have fallen down. They don’t just stop shining if they’re still in place.”

“But Jesus should have known better than that!” I exclaimed.“Jesus didn’t come to teach astronomy,” Chuck answered. “He came to offer humanity

an escape from the consequences of our sins. He used parables his contemporaries could understand and left the astronomy to us.”

“You know,” Hunter said, “that makes a lot of sense.”Chuck continued the lesson. “Then there’s some arithmetic in Daniel 12:11-12: ‘And from the time that the daily

sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.’ The difference there is 45 days. And the bombs fell 1,290 days after the emperor gave his address from the Jerusalem Temple.

“And then you have Revelation 3:10: ‘Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.’”

I began realizing that a lot of church people had been kept completely in the dark about these chillingly accurate prophesies.

“Chuck, many of those Bible passages you mentioned have been thought to be symbolic and not to be taken literally. What will happen to the people who were led to believe that all this would never happen?”

“They’ll be alright if they’re sincere about their commitment to Christ, no matter what they’ve been taught about prophesy. Bible eschatology is kind of like an extra feature for those who care to know in advance.

“Declaring selected Bible passages symbolic is a popular way to set your teachings apart from others if you want to establish your own denomination or group of followers and divert their tithes to yourself. It’s also great if your approach is to claim that we needn’t worry about the end of the world anytime soon. You get enamored with your own cleverness and demand that your followers believe as you do. And the Bible is full of passages where symbolism can easily be found.

“The thing such leaders forget is that even when the symbolism is there, you ignore the literal meaning at your peril. Where something is actually meant to be understood in a symbolic sense, the Bible always says so.”

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Hunter had never heard about any of the Bible’s predictions for those times, and became intensely interested in what Chuck had to say. I left the two of them to continue. Before the day was over, Hunter had a good understanding of how we cared for each other and why we had been spared.

The telephones and our broadband service were dead, of course. Still, we wanted to find out how our friends were doing: there were people of our persuasion in both Sheffield and Paradise, as well as just north of Launceston, in Bangor, where the McCurdys, who were Baha’is, had been working toward self-sufficiency for many years.

We had two different backups to the telephone network: UHF Citizens Band, and two-meter packet radio, which formed a worldwide digital network of its own, working just like the Internet, but using the transmitter-receivers of individual ham operators as its communications channel, and their home computers as nodes and servers. I now started up our two-meter equipment, aiming the antenna in the direction of Bangor, and immediately got a signal. Sam McCurdy must have had the same thought.

Using voice, I found out that they had woken up that morning, just like we, to a splendid day, while the area around them was covered in a vile mist. I told Sam what we had learned from Hunter and Chuck. They, too, had seen the bomb go off over Launceston, but the light had died down abruptly, and after that they hadn’t seen a thing outside their house anymore that night. Apparently, that had been the strange shortening of time at work.

They were not as confident as we, however. Their cattle needed hay. They had just bought several bales from a neighbor, but it hadn’t yet been delivered, and where it was, even if they could have found it, it would now be radioactive. Also, it was clear that they were lacking in many necessities, as they were just one family and hadn’t attempted to grow everything they needed themselves.

Laura, who was taking part in the conversation, had no hesitation.“We have gas masks here, and our Lada is fully charged. Gregory and I will load up our

trailer and bring you the hay and a carload of food. We’ll start out tomorrow morning; have no fear!”

So it was settled, and many willing hands helped us load up the trailer and the Lada. We wrapped the hay tightly in plastic to keep the radioactive fog from penetrating it.

In the morning we set out, with gas masks and spare filters, and, on Hunter’s advice, we took along the .22 Magnum and a chain saw. Hunter believed there might be survivors who wouldn’t mind robbing us if they got a chance, and around Launceston, trees would have fallen across the roads because of the bomb.

We didn’t want to drive the usual way to Launceston, cutting across past Paradise to Bass Highway along a narrow, hilly road appropriately called the Bridle Trail, as we’d have had to go through the city and its suburbs, now likely to be impassable and dangerous. Instead, we took smaller roads further north, aiming for the Batman Bridge across the Tamar River south of George Town. We took the Frankford Main Road from Latrobe to Exeter, and turned left onto the West Tamar Highway, with less than ten miles to go to the bridge. Unwisely, I contacted Sam on the CB radio, reporting our progress in detail. The solar-powered repeaters up on the mountains were still operational, and I had no trouble getting through.

Someone else must have heard me, as well. Driving through a wood between Loira and the bridge, Laura suddenly had to break hard: a large gum tree had fallen across the roadway. Its leaves were fresh and green: it hadn’t been lying there very long. The bank on the left was too steep to drive around it; on the right, the bush was too dense. Laura grabbed the chain saw and

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told me to keep watch with the rifle. It should perhaps have been the other way around, but Laura was as good with a chain saw as I, and never took the backseat just because she was a woman.

Two men armed with chain saws approached from behind and I ordered them to stop. As they started up their saws, I hesitated just a little too long before deciding that I had to shoot. The closest of the men boldly swept the gun barrel to the side with his saw, and the chain cut into the stock, tearing the .22 out of my hands. Next, he aimed for my throat, ripping the gas mask off my face. The oily fog began to choke me. I could only imagine Laura’s reaction behind me.

“Lord, help me!” I yelled, having no other means left.That instant, perhaps displaced a tiny bit in that mysterious fourth dimension, I was in

bright sunlight, the same sun our farm was basking in, breathing its fresh, crisp air, standing straight without any fear. The saw blade came down on my neck and passed through my body without touching me; then the saw fell out of the hands of my startled attacker and its engine died. Their eyes wide from fright behind their goggles, the two turned tail and fled.

“Good on ya!” Laura called out, closing off her saw. “Get in the car!” I picked up the gas mask where it was lying at my feet. The rifle had fallen in the bush; I

didn’t bother looking. With this kind of protection, who needed a .22? I returned to the car, and the light followed me, now shining on the Lada, whose electric motor picked up speed and power from the intense exposure of its solar cells. The batteries had been rather flat when we had stopped, partly due to the need for headlights in the gloomy fog. Now the car easily pushed away the severed treetop, and we were on our way. The sun still shone on us; the batteries were charging up, and the air inside was fresh and pure.

“Wow!” I gasped. “I take it that we’re on the right side?”“You bet,” Laura answered. “And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” When we were right on top of the spectacular Batman Bridge above the deadly fog, there

was an underwater nuclear explosion far to our left. Before the familiar mushroom cloud appeared, there was a mile-high dome of boiling water way out at sea, well beyond George Town. I allowed myself to envision a missile submarine commander seeing the fatal torpedo approaching from an attack submarine, and priming his remaining missiles during the few seconds he had left, just to make sure he took his assailant along as he went. The bridge quaked perceptibly under our wheels. For us, it meant that we had to get to higher ground fast, as a considerable wave was sure to follow, forcing its way up the tidal estuary of the Tamar. The light, still on our Lada, gave the engine the required boost, and we were well up on the East Tamar Highway before the water came crashing behind us.

With full batteries and the light now fading away, we turned left toward Lower Turners Marsh and continued to Bangor, where we soon emerged from the fog into the familiar yard of the McCurdys. We unloaded, exchanged news with our friends, ate lunch, and set out for the return trip. We took the same way back, except that we went the northern way from the bridge through Beaconsfield rather than via Exeter, and so avoided the ambush spot. And we maintained strict radio silence.

During the next days, I managed to find a working broadcast satellite and, to our amazement, we learned that the emperor was still in Israel, regrouping his forces and preparing an all-out attack. The cities of the world were largely gone, less than a billion people remained on Earth, and many of those were dying with radiation sickness. But, nevertheless, he was going to attack Jerusalem,

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and with no one else left to fight, more units from countries that had recently been at war with each other were joining him at his staging area in the Jezreel valley.

By this time, such madness was of no consequence to us. We felt like we were on a different planet, along with those like-minded families and communities that we had managed to locate via radio. No doubt there were many more that we couldn’t reach. Our common experience was one of peace and happiness, and intense anticipation. Something good was bound to come our way soon, we all agreed.

After our trip through time, none of us had eaten any meat. The .22 was gone and Emy had stopped shooting animals. The cats and the dogs wanted only what we ate, and seemed none the worse for it. Rabbits, mice, wallabies, wombats, possums, quolls, potoroos, echidnas, and other mostly nocturnal animals had begun wandering freely about our land in broad daylight, with nobody bothering them. Even the devils, apparently still feeding on carrion, seemed more peaceful than before.

As morning broke over Israel, it was high noon in Tasmania, and Laura had invited everybody on the farm to lunch at our house. There was a feeling of utter peace and contentment as we enjoyed it, and I talked so much that I hadn’t started my dessert when Laura announced that we were all going outside.

The farm had never looked more beautiful. The north face of Mt. Roland had a purple hue from the sunshine, and the old Aborigine at the top looked down at us with approval and friendliness. I realized that his eyes and mouth were showing even though it was the middle of the day.

All our pets were with us; they didn’t seem to want to be separated from us. The hand-reared sheep might have strayed, if left to their own devices, but the donkey made sure they stayed in the yard. Otto was tenderly grooming his horses. Tom and Liz sang quietly to their dairy goats, as was their wont. The children were happy and peaceful.

Laura went from one pet to the other, caressing and reassuring them, and whispering something in their ears.

When she came to the donkey, I overheard her saying, “Don’t worry, you’ll be OK. Mommy has prayed for you. Soon we’ll be together again.”

“Alright, you guys,” Laura said. “Take a good look, because we’re moving!” Most of us adults didn’t know what she meant, but the children had no trouble following.“Bye-bye, farm!” they chanted in chorus.Then there was a strange phenomenon: up above the mountain a cloud formed, as it often

did. There was an intense light emanating from it, so sharp that it formed a cross like a bright light does at night. A man’s shape could be discerned in the light, and there was a loud, musical note, reminiscent of a trumpet. And then we found ourselves no longer in the yard at the farm, but in a new place: removed from the earth, but next to it, with a perspective of the earth that changed according to what we were being shown.

More important than the earth, however, was the company we were in: great numbers of people of every race and color, all dressed in white linen robes. So were we, besides: we hadn’t changed our clothes, but had somehow been transferred into these robes. We were all together, the children with their parents: no chaos, no confusion, in spite of the countless masses of people. Even Hunter was there with us, quite bewildered. Everybody was assembled in front of a splendid arrangement of twenty-four thrones—each with a kingly character seated on it—surrounded by an expanse of sparkling crystal, and in the center was a singular throne occupied

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by a glorious person defying description. At his feet sat Henry Allen, waving to get my attention.

I felt so good, and Laura looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. She was feeding Lynn at a full, perfectly shaped breast. As always, she seemed to know what was going on, while I was still trying to get my bearings.

“Open your mouth!” she said.This I did, and she smiled her dazzling smile.“Your gold teeth and all your fillings are gone; your gums are healed, and you have your

missing molars back, along with a pair of healthy tonsils. Check this out!” She put my hand on her tummy, which was flat and firm: the scar and the bulge that had

formed there after Lynn’s delivery by cesarean section had disappeared. We had been healed of everything that had ailed us. That’s when I realized that Kevin, one of our students who had been confined to a wheelchair, was standing next to us, on two stout legs, making no attempt at containing his joy.

Next, I became aware of Bridget: she was holding her ears with a look of utter amazement on her face, exclaiming, “I can hear you, and I can talk like you!”

Bridget had never been a very good lip-reader, and her speech had been almost unintelligible.

The story repeated itself wherever I looked: all these people had been remade into the ideals they had been created from. You could see who was old and who was young, but this came from a difference in maturity and wisdom, not from wrinkles and gray hair.

As this began to sink in, a general cheering and singing erupted, and continued for a long time. I kept looking around, and found that I had telescopic sight if I wanted to: I could see people standing a long way off as if they had been next to me, and as I recognized friends, I also could talk to them wherever they were. Some I knew had been killed in the persecutions, but here they were in the flesh again, just as much alive as we. In fact, I realized that all those who had already been there when we had arrived were people who had died at the emperor’s hands during the past several years; we were in the last contingent, which consisted of those of the unmarked who had been around when the vision in the clouds had appeared.

Not far from us, Emy and Helen were talking to their housemates, a gay couple named Stan and George. All of them had got along fabulously since they had joined us.

I realized that this was the moment that would answer an important question in my mind. We had all been perfected: had our gay friends gone straight in the process?

But that was not the case. They were just as before, apart from the visible improvements in body and posture. Helen and Emy were like two turtledoves; Stan and George had never seemed closer.

Homosexuality, then, is not an imperfection in God’s creation. The four of them had been born gay; none of them was a straight person somehow fallen into sinful debauchery. I looked around with my telescopic vision, and using my supernatural awareness—both of which soon enough would turn out to be strictly temporary—found Johannes in the company of his family. He still had Down’s syndrome, but his frailness was gone. Natural accidents in the creation of individuals were part of the person and had not been undone in our translation. But on the other hand, there were those with hereditary or acquired illness like Bridget: they had been cured. Variety remained like colors in the rainbow; infirmity and disease were gone.

I found myself very happy with what I saw. Johannes was just right the way he was; had he lost his Down’s syndrome, his personality would have been violated. Emy is my closest

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friend, and I can’t imagine her as a straight woman. Laura is right in never being jealous of Emy: she could no more make love to a man than I could. Knowing a person like Emy is a powerful antidote to the objectification of women. Had any of this changed, our identities would have suffered, and suffering is not on the agenda of our new existence.

Now the person whom we had seen in the cloud turned up riding a white horse. There

was a great host of white-robed men with him, also on white horses. The center consisted of Jews (the 144,000 Messianic missionaries); the right flank was made up of Muslims, led by the real Mahdi. The riders on the left flank were Christians; their leader was the last genuine pope. The three generals rode up to the main throne and saluted the Creator. Although the man from the cloud, whose red clothes bore the inscription “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords,” was clearly the senior among them, he fell slightly behind the others as they approached the throne, ceding the front row to his lieutenants.

Returned to lead their troops, the generals raised a war cry: “Yerushalaim!” the center began, “Al-Quds!” the right flank echoed, and “Jerusalem!” the left answered. Then all the riders transferred themselves down to Earth, and we could see the emperor’s army in northern Israel getting ready to move against Jerusalem. Its staging area was within view of the Mount of Megiddo, or Har Mageddon in Hebrew.

We must have been taken somewhat back in time for this performance. The riders placed themselves between the attackers and the city, and waited. It looked rather uneven—horses against tanks and armored personnel carriers—but I never had any doubts about the outcome.

The emperor was in the first line with the propaganda commissioner, in his personal vehicle, a heavy old battle tank from the last century. He didn’t seem to trust modern lightweight armor. The old Leopard had been modified into a supreme command post with all the necessary communications gear, plus a lead-lined inner chamber meant to shield the two passengers against radiation from nuclear explosions. The crew were not so fortunate, but still better off than the rest of the force in their newer tanks and APCs with less steel in their armor.

Just as the emperor was preparing to give the order to proceed, his signal man broke in with an announcement he had received from Eurofor headquarters: the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a satellite always watching the sun, had reported an exceptionally violent solar flare headed straight for the earth. A huge coronal mass ejection, produced by the sun two days earlier, was about to impact, as well, the soldier added.

“So what?!” the emperor yelled, and refused to be bothered with any explanations.Had he listened, he might have changed his plans: the news meant that very soon,

possibly in less than an hour, a powerful geomagnetic storm would arise and interfere with electronic communications and control systems.

The Imperial tank advanced faster than the rest of the attacking force, which had to arrange itself on damaged roads leading up into rough mountain terrain. The emperor had covered a good part of the distance to the target area when he got intelligence of the mounted army awaiting him before the city. With his own units too far behind for swift deployment, the emperor ordered his fleet, assembled before Haifa, to launch nuclear cruise missiles against the city and its defenders. He had an inkling of where the white cavalry had come from, and now he would finish it off, once and for all.

As the cruise missiles navigated their way up along the same roads taken by the main force, the solar flare hit, generating an unprecedented geomagnetic storm that destroyed all electronics on and around Earth. Its effect on the missiles, whose warheads had already been

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primed, was to detonate them, annihilating the allied forces. Those in the area of each explosion were vaporized; people further away were turned into skeletons; those on the sidelines were burned to death. The emperor’s tank, miles ahead of everyone else and made mostly of steel, was the only one still intact, apart from its control and communications gear. It ground to a halt, but its old-fashioned diesel engine was still running.

The tank crew began showing signs of radiation sickness, which the two passengers in their lead-lined chamber had escaped. The emperor ordered the tank commander to resume the drive: he wasn’t going to stop now, and he didn’t care if anybody was following. He had a tank: Hitler already demonstrated the effectiveness of tanks against horses in Poland in 1939. When the white host came into view, the driver wouldn’t go any further. The emperor shot him and took his seat, forcing the tank back into gear.

With the tank now in a favorable position, he ordered his gunner to begin firing. When the gunner complained that he had received no training in how to operate the main gun without the fire control computer, and that they were too far away to use the machine gun effectively, the emperor shot him, too. Then he ordered the propaganda commissioner to handle the machine gun. That’s when their lonesome war came to its end.

In an instant, the two found themselves transported out into the open, standing helpless in front of the commander of the cavalry. Ranting and raving, the emperor groped for his pistol, but it was no longer on his person. The commissioner was pale and knew he was defeated. He had produced fake miracles long enough to know real supernatural powers when he saw them.

What happened next must have taken a bit of coordination at the highest level. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, that the sun had flung at the earth a couple of days earlier, was a hundred times more massive than the biggest one observed to date; five times heavier than all living matter on Earth combined. Normally, most of this superhot plasma would have been deflected by the earth’s magnetic field, passing harmlessly around the magnetosphere and continuing into outer space. Spectacular auroras would have been its most prominent manifestation. But there was more at work than that.

The event that had triggered the record earthquake on the west coast of South America earlier that year had been the subduction of a considerable part of the continental slab down into the earth’s mantle. The resulting deformation of the mantle had begun interfering with the flow of molten metal in the earth’s core that generates the planet’s magnetic field. At the present time, this interference gave rise to a geomagnetic excursion, a disturbance in the magnetic field that began with its total disappearance. Within a few thousand years, the field would gradually reestablish itself, but for the moment, that wasn’t much help.

Arrested by the planet’s gravity and unimpeded by any magnetism, the CME now enveloped the earth, fell straight down, and mingled with the atmosphere. Along the way, it vaporized everything in orbit around the earth. The CME brought with it the heat of the hottest spot in the sun’s corona, around ten million Kelvin. The resulting air temperature was 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit, turning the whole atmosphere into plasma, where the atoms of the elements dissolve into positive ions and negative electrons. The entire surface of the earth was, for a considerable time to come, going to be subjected to the same levels of heat and radiation as those existing, momentarily, at a distance of 50 yards from the center of a medium-yield nuclear explosion. All human artifacts burned, melted, evaporated, or crumbled into dust. All life on land and in lakes and rivers, as well as all higher life forms in the seas, died instantly or almost instantly. Years later, after the smoke from this planetary conflagration would have cleared, the vastly increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise the temperature of the sea

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enough to kill all remaining life except the most primitive forms, anaerobic bacteria living around volcanic vents in the deepest abysses of the oceans.

While we and the cavalry were outside the three-dimensional space where this took place, the emperor and his commissioner were not, and within seconds, they were burning. Then, before their nerves ceased transmitting pain to their brains, their time stopped. Every human still alive on the planet was dropped out of reality, left behind in a limbo that went nowhere, in a lake of fire that would never end. Without time, they were immovable, they had no way of communication, their existence never changed, and their bodies would never burn up nor decompose. Only their consciousnesses continued, slowly realizing that this was what their eternity was going to look like. Nobody would ever go back to the blind alley of time where they had been left, to check up on them or release them. They had been created immortal and their souls couldn’t be destroyed, but they were now of no further consequence to anyone but themselves. And they had only themselves to blame.

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PART 6

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38. The New FarmAnything I could say about our relief and joy over our salvation, having seen the final spectacle on Earth, would be mere banalities. This was happiness perfected, just like we were.

Now some more people turned up, and a pretty young lady headed straight for me.“Hi Gregory, I’m Christina!” she said.This was a different world alright. In the old one, I’d have expected Laura to look her

hard in the eye and demand, “What do you want with my husband?” But not so here.“Hi babe,” Laura said, adding to me, “This kind of lady friends you can have.”I have but one complaint with my new self: I still don’t think any faster. I didn’t know

what to say.“I’m your little sister,” Christina said, looking up at me with tender, loving eyes.I knew about a sister, two years younger than I, who had died within minutes of being

born. Her name had, indeed, been Christina. But here was a grown woman, albeit with the perfect countenance of a child. In fact, she seemed so perfect that I’d rather have said she looked angelic.

Christina laughed and gave me a hug.“You’re absolutely right,” she said, reading my thoughts. “I’m your guardian angel!“I grew up with you, cared for by our grandparents. At every turn of your life, I’ve been

at your side. I didn’t always keep you out of trouble, but I gave you some ideas and got you thinking when you were headed the wrong way. Sometimes you drove me nuts, and sometimes you made me happy. But it was fun. Now we can be together: I’d love to help out with your children!”

I meant to say, “Thanks a million,” but that would have been understating my gratitude. So I took a while before I let her go out of my arms, now that I held my only sister for the first time. In the end, I found no words adequate for expressing my feelings, but Christina knew them all the same.

So I just said, “Christina, I love you!”Then I took her to my mother and father, who had the incredible joy of being reunited

with the daughter they had lost.The young man in white now approaching Laura had an uncanny resemblance to the

pictures I had seen of her maternal grandfather, who had died when Laura had been five. Laura looked at him with more solemnity than I had seen in her for a long time.

“You’re Anthony, aren’t you?” she asked.“Yes, ma’am,” the angel answered.I recalled that Laura’s brother Anthony had died in infancy a couple of years before

Laura’s birth.The way Laura looked at him, it seemed to me that she had expected to meet him.

Perhaps her keen spiritual awareness, her extensive Bible study, and her habit of nearly constant praying had sensitized her to these things in a way I couldn’t have shared. It was as if she just continued a conversation from where it had last broken off.

Anthony and Christina then introduced us to two of the cutest little children, our kids’ guardian angels. They weren’t related to us, but their parents were among those around us, and we were privileged to witness the joy of their reunification with their children. There’d always be a special bond between them, Dorn, and Lynn.

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The victorious rider on the white horse, whom everyone seemed to refer to as the Boss, for short, now called us to attention. He explained to us that we had deserved a break and were going to be put down on Earth again. It was all new, and, as in Adam’s and Eve’s days, blessed with everything that would make our time there enjoyable. Our lives would be easier than in the old world. Since we all had his law in our hearts, there’d be no government, no taxes, and no law enforcement; everybody would be free and without fear of either nature or their fellow man. All the occupations that had been necessary to govern, administer, and regulate, as well as the healing and nursing professions, and most of the jobs where people had used to make their living by just talking, were now superfluous.

Everybody would have land, although we were free to live any way we chose, say, in cities. There’d be no such thing as title to any land, however, and no absentee ownership of anything: occupation and operation of a resource made for ownership. If we felt like moving, someone else would be found to keep up our work, and we’d be accommodated in the new location, but land and real estate could be neither bought nor sold, nor taken away from you if you wanted to stay.

No money would be needed, as the economy would be based on giving, sharing, and plenitude, not on striving for gain. Our productivity would be enormous, as we’d be working together, and would need to spend no efforts on supporting any absent owners, suppliers, distributors, or regulators. Everything we needed would be available in abundance, and no middlemen, banks, insurance companies, or profit-takers of any kind would be required. We could choose to live from the land, or find another vocation, but there’d be no want, and no need to accumulate wealth.

There’d be no sickness, and no hurting or killing of any warm-blooded animals including people. If we met predators, we were not to be afraid, because they now lived on fish and vegetarian food. Neither would we be eating meat anymore.

The Lord’s Prayer had been answered.With that, he wished us luck, said that he’d be checking up on us, and sent us on our way.

I wondered if there’d be some kind of view of rapidly changing millennia as we were transferred to a distant future—I was sure that John’s description of what would happen was correct—but it wasn’t like H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. We just found ourselves in a lush valley, under a clear blue sky, surrounded by natural beauty. A mountain rose on one side, rolling hills marched off on the other, a river emptied into a lake between them. It looked somewhat like our old farm. But there were neither weeds nor flies: this was no wilderness, although we should have been the first people there. It looked more like a homestead. There were fields with maturing grain, albeit not sown by any machine. There were immense orchards. Vegetables, herbs, nuts, and berries grew in profusion. Every plant held the soil together, like trees and grass, produced food or fibers, or was patently decorative. Only the buildings were missing.

We were more people than on the old farm: parents and friends had joined us. Plus everybody’s guardian angel was there. Were they to be counted as people? Yes, they were there to be with us and help us out, but they needed nothing. Where we who had been taken up at the end were still in need of food, clothing, and shelter, those who had died and been resurrected had no such needs.

Suddenly, as if it had been the most natural thing in the world, my old dog from my childhood home, Tummeli, walked up to me and greeted me with her forepaws on my chest. Like us, she had been perfected: there wasn’t a white hair on her face where in her later years her

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snout had been all gray, and her long, black fur flowed in beautiful, shiny waves over her body. She was slim, strong, and supple; all her overweight was gone. She moved with the effortless fluidity of youth, but she was muscular and powerful, not lanky as she had been at one year old, from when I last remembered her looking so picture-perfect. She didn’t seem to touch the ground at all when she ran.

Tummeli had died more than ten years before our move to the new world, but there was no sign of separation anxiety in her demeanor: after I had patted her and gushed over her for a while, she just wagged her tail and went to find my parents and brothers. That done, she came back to befriend Laura and the children. Tummeli was now our family dog, no doubt about it.

Laura looked around and asked Anthony, “Are there other pets here?”“More dogs than people,” Anthony replied. “Plus a few cats, horses, parrots, elephants,

donkeys, and so on. All animals that ever loved their humans without conditions, and had died before the end, are here to make new pets for you translated folks. Only those whose people will be resurrected a thousand years from now aren’t here yet: they’ll join their owners then. God wouldn’t let a single soul like that be lost.”

With everyone dressed alike and looking quite normal, it was hard to tell offhand who had which background. But I soon learned that all the angels looked angelic. That was the easy part. The resurrected looked like everyone else: they had grown to maturity on the old earth. However, they had powers we didn’t have: you’d find them talking to you without opening their mouths, in your own language even though they hadn’t known it before, and they’d contribute in awesome ways, such as defying gravity, splitting rocks, and teleporting things.

Obviously, such powers couldn’t be given to anybody whose free will hadn’t been voluntarily subordinated to unconditional love and obedience to their maker. That’s why the selection process out of the old world had been so rigorous.

Eventually, Christina told me, we’d all have to die in order to come into our proper form and acquire all those powers. That was the shape the Boss needed us in for the next stage of his plan for us. But the Boss, rather than allowing us who had managed to survive the persecutions to die in the flare and later be resurrected, had decided to place us in this thousand-year paradise. Here we would live out our natural lives, which, in our perfected form, might span up to a millennium like those of the patriarchs.

“What will happen to our descendants at the end of that time?” I asked. “Unless we and our kids are now completely barren, there’ll be new generations around then, people in the prime of life!”

“The Boss has thought of that,” Christina replied. “There’ll be another culling. He’ll release Satan for a while, and anybody whose heart isn’t firmly in the Boss’s camp will fall for Satan’s guile and temptations. There’ll be a war against the remaining chosen people, and then Satan will be transferred to the same cozy little niche where you left the emperor and his admirers, while everybody who takes his side will be consumed by fire from the sky.”

“Oops!” I said. “I can see that our task in bringing up children and grandchildren will be no less demanding here than in the old world. Even more difficult, in fact, without natural hardships. And I had thought I could just put up my feet now!”

Our latitude was well up in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere, and come winter, we’d need shelter. Although the resurrected might have had the power to whip up homes for everyone then and there out of nothing, there was no need to rush: the summer weather was such that staying outside was never a problem. Had we been so inclined, we could have become

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simple gatherers and idled away our days, living off the plenty surrounding us. But we were used to working for our living, and so we began inventing work.

While we lived on the farm in Tasmania, Laura once stopped the car at an antique store in Spreyton just south of Devonport. We went inside and bought a few things, and then Laura found a set of four books, called How Things Work, finely bound in aluminum-plated leather, and in like-new condition. She immediately bought them for me. The publisher was a Swiss company; the original had been in German, and the set I got had been printed in the United States. But one thing was missing: there was no year of publication anywhere. From the contents, I deduced that the books must have been written in the 1960 to 1970 timeframe. Volume I dealt with computers as they stood in about 1960; volume IV included the first moon landing in 1969 and described plans for the first mission to Mercury in 1973.

The great thing about those books was that they depicted technology as it was during the last period when you could still have hoped to build some of it yourself, given the right tools. From that time onward, almost every branch of engineering became a kind of assembly industry, where nothing much could be made without immensely complex components and subassemblies that could only be produced by specialized, high-technology factories. That’s why the books had appealed so much to me: they were an aid to self-sufficiency.

Having read about how a slide rule worked, I had acquired one and learned to use it. Calculators were fast and accurate, but I couldn’t build them, and they required batteries or solar cells. A slide rule didn’t, and if I lost mine, I could make one myself. Which I did in our new valley, as soon as I had a few woodworking tools.

I had found the time to read the four books before we had left our old life, and had been quite absorbed doing it. Now they came in handy: it turned out that my memory, like the rest of me, was perfect, and I recalled every detail of the descriptions of things in those books. So whatever we needed, I knew how it worked, and could plan how to make it. We needed tools, but first, we had to produce steel and other metals, and to manufacture them, we had to build furnaces and make coal, and so on. Having all the basic engineering knowledge in my head, I was able to plan our activities and help bridge a development of crafts and skills that had taken thousands of years the first time around.

One of our first days in the new world, Laura found a spot at the foot of the mountain, where a brook with crystal-clear water flowed, and said, “Here I want you to build us a house.”

As we investigated the place, we found that everything was there, as promised. There was a hot spring—no need to have a boiler for hot water. A ready-made kitchen garden grew nearby. An orchard lay beyond it. The drainage was perfect. The spot was sunny and dry, but shade trees grew in the right places. It was splendid, and we didn’t have to feel that we were taking the best site, because everybody else had found similarly ideal locations where they wanted to live. This just happened to be our place; Laura sensed that with her unerring intuition. All our people would be living in nice settings, at a comfortable distance from each other.

When I mentioned something about timber and having to build a sawmill, Laura brought me right back to earth again.

“No, no; this won’t be a timber house. I always wanted to live in a stone house. All the natural stones we need are already lying here. I’ll show you how to use them!”

Laura had once attended a demonstration of the ancient Romanian art of building a stone house without mortar. She had memorized everything she had seen and heard, and now, without knowing much about building and its terminology, she managed to teach my fellow builders and me the old techniques. Slate for the roof was available, too, a short distance away.

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Emy was already building a furnace to make iron and a forge for making tools; she didn’t mind camping out for a beginning. She and Helen would build themselves a home in due course. For Laura, the home was priority number one: we had small children, and Laura had once said that a woman’s home is like an extension of herself, her way of expressing herself. From that statement I had concluded that a woman would take it much more seriously than a man when she invited someone into her home; having unpleasant or unwelcome visitors, or being burglarized, must have felt much like being raped. Fortunately, that wasn’t going to happen to us here.

The house began rising at a good pace. The brook flowed through the kitchen and the bathroom, and continued into a pool set in the living room floor. The ice it brought down from the glacier above was skimmed off and automatically dumped into the ice box set into the kitchen wall. The hot spring lay between the kitchen and the bathroom, providing both with steaming hot water, and could be diverted under the floors for heating in the winter.

As we got to more demanding tasks, Emy was making ever better tools. She, too, had read and unwittingly memorized important books, such as Eric Sloane’s A Museum of Early American Tools, that now proved invaluable. Fall came and the abundance around us increased, but it didn’t become cold, wet, or nasty. When winter arrived, we had a roof over our heads and room to spare for those of our friends who didn’t, including Helen and Emy. Anthony and Christina graciously accepted a room each; they didn’t need to live in a house, but they found it a thrill to share our lives for real and stay in our dimension with us. Everybody else’s guardian angels were around, too, helping out and making us happy.

We lived among the familiar Australian flora and fauna, with the added excitement of having several species of animals that had been extinct, like the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, and the shy bandicoot. But the former predators didn’t kill anymore: they ate plants, roots, fruit, nuts, mushrooms, fish, and the like—much like bears had used to do when they could get no meat. Clearly, scavengers were still necessary, and both devils and birds were there for the purpose. But they were friendly and never harmed anything living.

The way Christina helped me with problem solving amazed me: she had no science degree, but she regularly outdid me. But why should that have surprised me, really? She had that kind of bent, plus a perfect mind, and she had sat through every lecture and every tutorial with me in Sydney. Now I understood where, so often, the solution to a difficult problem had come from, when, suddenly, I’d had the answer without knowing how I had arrived at it. Christina had told me. So, in fact, I had made it through university by cheating...

“You’d have figured all of it out by yourself, sooner or later,” Christina said with a smile. “I just decided to tell you sooner, since you don’t think all that fast. After all, you’re a man…”

A year or so into our new life, when Lynn was weaned and the homes were livable, Laura told me that she wanted to go traveling with me. It didn’t matter where; we’d take a look around, and return when we felt like it. Christina and Anthony would look after the children.

So we donned our white linen robes. After we had begun making working and everyday clothes from the fibers available, we had put the robes away for special occasions. This was one of them.

There was a herd of horses in our valley, and we went off to see them. Laura went straight to the herd leader, a wise old mare, and explained that we needed two of the horses to ride on. I had no idea why she thought this would work. Wild horses aren’t noted for understanding English.

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But I could as well have trusted her more. The horses, knowing no predators, had no fear of us, and, as they were learning to know us, they seemed as tame as our old pet horses and our donkey in Tasmania. Laura, whose bond with the donkey had been so strong, had it easy to win the complete trust of these horses, and it was as though they began picking up what she was saying. The herd undulated about us, and gradually two young horses were showing a definite interest in us. One was a mare, the other a stallion. The mare had picked Laura as her special friend, and the stallion was just as keen to be mine.

There was no question of trying to break the horses in like in the old world. It was a matter of gaining their complete trust and making them comfortable around us. This we succeeded in doing, and were soon able to mount our new steeds. The two whinnied in farewell to their herd, and set off down the river with us. We were on our way.

We had neither reins nor saddles, but we didn’t miss them: we were comfortable, the horses were treading softly, and since we didn’t care where we went, we let them take us where they saw fit. They rounded the lake and continued north down the river. This was the most pleasant form of travel I had experienced: no rush, no baggage, and no worries.

At noon, the horses stopped near a spring and a grove of trees by the river, and we dismounted. While the horses grazed, we ate lunch off the trees and bushes: nuts, almonds, fruit, berries. When we sat down in the shade, squirrels came to play with us, and were soon bringing us pine nuts for dessert. Soon after, we were fast asleep.

I woke up from a gentle nudge by a soft muzzle: it was time to resume our journey. During the afternoon, we passed a settlement and got to know our neighbors. They were Australians like we, and had had similar experiences. We promised to stay in touch, and continued on our way. At nightfall, we slept in the open: we had no need for a tent, as the weather was so good. During the night, a warm rain gave us a light soak; we just moved closer together and woke up dry again.

After many days of leisurely riding, passing more settlements and occasionally spending a night as somebody’s guests, we noticed the landscape changing. Now it looked more like Europe: the gum trees had given way to oaks and beeches, and there were deer and foxes instead of kangaroos and thylacines. Eventually, we came to a settlement that looked rather like a town, snuggling in the fork between our river and another that joined it just there. The combined stream, twice as wide, continued onward. Two more settlements could be seen across the tributaries, but the rivers between them made effective barriers, and crossing over in small boats looked like a strenuous undertaking.

We were welcomed by the people who, like everybody we had met underway, hadn’t seen travelers before, and thought it a great thing to find out what was going on elsewhere. These people, like others that we had encountered for the past few days, were Croatians. The two other settlements consisted of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, respectively; they had been put back in adjacent areas, but separated by the rivers, so they could get used to each other without having to worry about territory. Beyond the Serb settlements, on the other side of another tributary, lived Kosovars and Albanians.

We had found the same arrangement elsewhere during our trip. White Australians and Aborigines were close to each other, but not intermingled. You could meet your fellow countrymen, but you lived in your own, homogeneous group. Everywhere, the same principle was at work. Good fences had used to make good neighbors in the old world—here, no fences were needed, but there was a distance. You had to make an effort to go and see your neighbors, you didn’t have them crowding in on you. It had the effect of teaching people who had

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distrusted each other to get along, in a gentle manner, allowing them the comfort of retiring to their own group before the exposure to others got overbearing. Those with roots in two or more ethnic groups lived in the border areas.

Our Croatian hosts had begun crossing the rivers in boats. They had learned that their neighbors were good, regular people like themselves. They had found that each had something the others could use; thus, the Croatians traded their iron ore for cement from the Serbs, and glass from the Bosnians. Between them, they had the materials to build good homes and make the tools they needed. None of this had come about by accident, I was sure.

However, the rivers were quite rapid, and they had started thinking about the need for bridges. Their neighbors were in agreement: they ought to have good communications. But it looked like an overwhelming job, and they didn’t know how to start. Wisely, their resurrected friends hadn’t offered to use their powers to conjure up the bridges from nothing. Bridging the chasms between former enemies was to be an effort you had to work at. They first wanted to build a bridge to the Serb side, from where they got heavy loads of cement.

Laura and I, by now, knew something about building stone structures. But this one was to carry traffic, and couldn’t be built like a house. It had to be done right, the way the old Romans built their bridges, which could last for two millennia or more.

Here, like elsewhere, there were few people with an education. Most of the settlers were simple folk: the better off you had been, the more of a temptation the emperor’s consumer lifestyle had constituted. The Croatians in this settlement didn’t happen to have an architect or a civil engineer among them, and neither did their neighbors. So I volunteered my engineering skills, and found a young man, a student of architecture, for an assistant. We set about designing a stone bridge and diving down into the river to check the foundations for a series of piers to hold up the arches.

The settlements had good stonemasons with excellent tools; their houses were made of the local stone. Now we’d need massive amounts of stone and it had to be moved down to the river on both sides. More and bigger boats were needed to haul the stones for building the piers and arches out on the river. With great enthusiasm, everybody set about building them. Whosoever had a team of horses and a wagon was drafted into the transport detail, and the bridge started rising.

A few months later, the two teams met in the middle and completed the last arch of the bridge. All had gone well; there had been no settling or accidents, and when the railings had been built, the bridge was inaugurated with much celebration. Next, the two teams would use their experience, led by my apprentice, and begin constructing a bridge each toward the Bosnians. We had made a worthwhile contribution and had gained true friends, and so we found our horses and set out for home again. Even in a paradise, there were challenges, and bridge building was a very rewarding one.

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39. “I’ll Be Seeing You”Our home had all the conveniences we’d been able to think of, without introducing complex technologies like electricity. The children were growing; Dorn had started school. Helen had decided to become a schoolmistress: she always talked like an encyclopedia, and had every bit of knowledge the kids needed in her head. Laura and I had made several more trips on our horses and had found other lands where other nationalities lived. Going south, we came first upon white Americans; to one side of them lived Native Americans, to the other US immigrants of Latino extraction, beyond those, Central and South Americans. On the far side of the white Americans lived African-Americans; beyond them Africans. And so on.

One day the Boss came to visit our village. He walked around, complimenting everyone on what they had achieved, and ended up in our home, sharing our dinner and accepting one of our guest rooms for the night. This was another exponent of the extraordinary tact of the resurrected: they didn’t need food or shelter, but they gracefully partook of everything we felt we ought to offer them for hospitality’s sake. I believe that after a meal, they simply willed the food out of their system; they certainly had no use for it.

After dinner, the Boss told us why he had come. He was starting up a project and he needed people. The job at hand consisted of going back in time to various periods of the evolution of the old earth, and bringing life forms over to the new one, in order to regenerate it following the cooling-off period after the coronal mass ejection had dissipated. The work would be carried out with the aid of a number of transports, tailor-made for the purpose.

Some of the team members would be drawn from the resurrected, some from the translated people. He was offering me a place on the team: my skills would be useful there.

The project was to be set up in the region where the American, Australian, and European settlements met, since many of the people would be coming from those areas. That way, most team members had to travel about the same distance. This was a couple of weeks away by horse.

Talk about being excited. I could hardly contain myself, although it meant separation from my family.

“Take him away, Lord!” Laura said. “The house is finished, everything grows by itself; he’s crawling the walls not knowing what to do with himself. He needs a job!”

I hadn’t known it showed that badly.“Of course I want the job, Lord!” I said. “When do I start?”“We’ll leave on the morrow,” the Boss replied. “Take some tools and working clothes,

and a bedroll; everything else will be supplied. We’ll start by building the vehicles; then we’ll do a few trial runs, and when we know that everything works, we’ll begin the regeneration work. You won’t have to be away from home for all the length of time you’ll be working. Once you’re into time travel, you’ll always come home for a break just a few days after leaving, even if you’ve put in a year’s worth of work. That way your family won’t have to miss you so much.”

“Can he come home for lunch?” Laura wanted to know.“I’m afraid not,” the Boss laughed. “But after the first stretch for building our ships, he’ll

be here nearly every weekend.”“Daddy will be working in a flying saucer!” Dorn exclaimed. “Can I come along?”“We’ll be taking the families up for a spin,” the Boss told him. “Just give us some time

to get ready.”“Can you bring our pets?” Laura asked. “I miss my donkey!”

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“Yes, we’ll bring them. That’s part of the deal.”

In the morning, the Boss and I set out for our journey. My horse was waiting in the yard as always when I was ready for a trip, and Laura’s mare was grazing alongside him.

“She’ll be honored to carry you, Lord,” Laura said. “And so will I if you’ll take her.”“They’ll return on their own when we’ve reached our destination,” I observed.Laura kissed me good-bye and said, “I’ll be seeing you...”We rode up along the river, forded one of its tributaries, then turned and rode over the

highlands. We passed several settlements and the Boss hired more people as we went. He carefully picked out scientists with a background in biology or medicine, as well as veterinarians and laboratory technicians. We also found a paleontologist and an expert on marine mammals that had worked for a conservation project. When we arrived at the camp where the work was to take place, we were ten recruits in all. Others arrived from different directions, and within a few days, we were about sixty people there, with many more professions represented.

Looking about the area, I felt a bit disappointed. There was nothing there. No buildings of any kind. There was a lake with a beach, the usual endless supply of edible plants, trees for shade, and a large cave where we could sleep. It didn’t look exactly like a factory for any kind of vehicles. But that wasn’t my problem.

“Well, if it isn’t Lieutenant Greene!” a voice said behind me.I turned to face good old Colonel Adams. It was great to see him again. Better still, I

found out that he was to be my team leader. Adams assembled his crew and we went down to the beach for our first briefing. The Boss told us to design a fleet of vehicles that would be suited to transporting every kind of life form through time, and could dive into the sea as well as handle turbulent weather and high speeds through the atmosphere. It didn’t need to be a spacecraft: we wouldn’t be leaving Earth. In all, we’d make ten of the craft, beginning with a prototype to prove the design.

The biologists went off to discuss the order in which life was to be restored on Earth, beginning with the lowest bacteria and algae, while the team leaders and the few engineers among us started talking about the design of the craft. I was still confused by the fact that we were planning to build a highly sophisticated vehicle without any kind of factory, but Adams told me not to worry about that. We’d get to production methods in a while. So we discussed the shape of the craft. Everybody knew that we were talking about the mysterious vehicles that had come to be known as flying saucers, so wasn’t this a bit of a circular argument? Someone must already have decided to make them disk-shaped. But Adams pointed out that there had been observations of both triangular and cigar-shaped objects, as well, and cautioned against jumping to conclusions.

In the end, we decided on the saucer shape, because it was roomy and stable. It would have to be able to carry land and aquatic animals, as well as birds and insects, of course. Plant life would be transferred, too. We’d also need facilities for handling microorganisms, so a laboratory would have to be fitted on board one of the ships. We started drawing designs in the sand on the beach, and soon got down to questions like landing gear, doors, windows, and the like. Evening came and we called it a day, but thinking our work over, I realized that we hadn’t yet given any thought to propulsion methods, aerodynamics, or engines. What were we doing, I wondered.

While I was having breakfast the next day, I realized that none of the ten team leaders was there. They hadn’t been in the cave where most of us had slept, and they were already

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working while we were eating. The logical conclusion was that they were all resurrected. Adams, too? I went and asked him. Yes, he had managed to get himself killed, going on an assignment to Paris just before the world war had broken out. He had still been there when Europe had started bombing America, and nobody had paid any attention to the Geneva conventions anymore. When the police had found out that he was unmarked, they had summarily sent him off to the guillotine. Seconds after it had fallen, Paris had been bombed, so it had been six of one and half a dozen of the other.

That meant he had all those supernatural powers, right?Yes, he did. That’s why he was the skipper, he said. All the flying and the time travel

was going to be handled using those powers, so I didn’t need to worry about engines and the like. This was getting interesting.

We went back to designing landing gear and doors. The wheels were to be spheres of metal, freely turning inside inverted spherical cups mounted on the ends of four simple elastic legs. That way, the ship would be able to move in all directions while on the ground. We figured out how the bearings and brakes were to work, and then turned to how we were going to retract the legs for flight. It looked like they’d interfere with the use of the hold.

We left that problem and began discussing a door design. An opening segment in the edge of the ship, large enough for crewmembers, would suffice as a door, since most of the cargo would be loaded and unloaded by psychokinetic means. But how would the door be hinged, or where would it slide? It wasn’t as simple as it had seemed at first glance.

“We’ll just design legs and door in four dimensions,” Adams said. “From the point of view of the three-dimensional ship that’ll be handling the cargo, they’ll simply disappear when not in use. Leave that to me.”

I had to figure out what he meant. I took my knife and made a two-dimensional ship, a simple ring of wood with a segment missing where the door was to be. Then I made a door, a sheet of bark with a rectangular hole in the middle. This I set into the door opening, but perpendicular to the plane of the flat ship. By sliding the door up and down, I could open or close the door opening as seen from the perspective of two-dimensional beings existing in the plane of the ship. One instant, the passengers would see the door open; the next it would be closed, without any visible moving parts. On either side of the door, I placed a cherry on its stalk for landing gear. By bending them out of the plane of the ship, I could do away with them without pulling them inside. Yes, I knew what Adams was after, but translating the concept into four dimensions wasn’t within my grasp.

Luckily, I didn’t have to do that part. I also had stopped worrying about having no factory. When, eventually, every detail of the hull design had been worked out, the team leaders got together and began visualizing the ship. Then, as the rest of us watched, it materialized in front of us out of thin air. It was made of a silver-gleaming metal that I didn’t recognize. I asked Adams why it looked so strange, and he answered that it was a four-dimensional material, of which I saw a three-dimensional projection; it simply wasn’t anything I could have seen before. (Well, I had, but that was in the middle of the night!) The windows, at least, looked like any clear glass, but I assumed that they, too, were made of some unknown substance. As the ship hung there in the air, Adams tested the landing gear and the door; and just like in my model, they simply appeared and disappeared, never moving anywhere in the three dimensions I could observe.

Going inside, I noted that the ship was about as high tech as a cattle car. There was no engine, no instrumentation, no fuel tank. There was no electrical system and no lights inside.

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How would we mortals see at night? The skipper would arrange for the lighting. If a woman’s home was an extension of herself, this ship was a continuation of the skipper’s mind. Without further ado, the whole company of sixty got on board for a test flight. We moved in all directions, abruptly changing speed and course without feeling any acceleration. This was logical, as the skipper simply would have applied whatever force he was using evenly to the ship and everything on board.

The ten ships would specialize in different life forms. There’d be a huge, cigar-shaped one for large animals up to the size of whales. There’d be one equipped with fish tanks for smaller fish and sea animals. Some would carry land animals, others mainly plants. There’d be a laboratory ship for microorganisms and one with containers for insects.

But where would we get the laboratory gear and everything else we needed? To begin with, there were no seats in the prototype, and we weren’t equipped to make them.

“We’ll buy the gear!” Colonel Adams said.Incredulous silence. There were no stores. No money, either.“What’s wrong with you people?” Adams asked. “You’ve been hired to work in time

machines, and you don’t see that the obvious thing is to go back and buy what we need from the same vendors you used in your old professions! You’ll have the same equipment you worked with before, so you’ll waste no time learning something new. Get it?”

Now we got it. We set about making lists of everything that was required to equip the different ships. When the list for the prototype ship, which was to be used for general, easy things like land animals and plants of historic times, was ready, Adams called his crew on board: the first ship was going to be ours. We’d begin with the furnishings for our ship—partitions, tools, cages, and the like. Then we’d take along some of our colleagues and get them what they needed.

How were we to take delivery of all the gear? We couldn’t just land in a parking lot and carry the things in; we knew that we had to conceal the ship and where we were coming from. At times, it could be practical to use a locally registered truck and take the stuff to a remote area. How would we pay? Adams said that he’d be obtaining lost, burned, and stolen cash. We didn’t need to return it, as we had no business interfering with the way things had worked out in the past.

I thought I had a usable idea and told the crew. Our old farm in Tasmania was large and isolated enough; nobody could see what was going on there. I knew the hardware stores and other retailers in the area well and could basically tell where to get everything. Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, was a center for Antarctic and high-sea research. We could use the old Lada for hauling things or have them delivered to the farm and pick them up when the delivery truck had left. I suggested going to the farm during the period before we had started the college campus: most of the time only Laura and myself would be there, plus Dorn as a little baby. Tom and Liz were out of sight of the yard. At that time, cash had still been in use, which would make the buying easier.

Adams accepted the plan, with a few modifications.“One of the cardinal rules for this work is that we’re not to run into ourselves and create

illogical situations like telling ourselves the future or, conversely, thinking we’ve met an impostor,” he said. “So we’ll pick days when you were off to work. Laura can handle the knowledge; we don’t have to hide anything from her. In fact, she’ll be a great help: she can

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receive deliveries and divert suspicions. The baby won’t know the difference between you then and you now. Let’s go!”

It was as simple as that. The next instant, we were hovering over the old farm with its newly built little home. Adams suggested that I land and brief Laura, and get myself some clothes so I’d be able to go into stores without arousing wonderment. What I had on was far too rustic. So, next thing, I was ported down into the old yard, and the ship was gone for the moment. I entered the house the familiar way—through the glass sliding door—and found my sweet Laura enjoying her morning cup of coffee. Baby Dorn had been fed and cared for, and was asleep.

“Hey, where did you come from? You just went off to work! And where did you get those lovely homemade clothes?”

Laura was a bit taken aback, and I didn’t blame her. She had heard the motorbike leave, but not return.

“From the future, darling,” I told her. “I’m into time travel now, and we decided to ask if you’d like to pitch in. And you made me the clothes yourself. In the future.”

I wasn’t sure if that made for correct grammar. But never mind.Amazingly, Laura was entirely unfazed.“Oh, tell me, what’s it like? Is everything alright?”“It sure is, my love! We have a fantastic place, better than this one; all our friends are

with us, the kids are doing great, and you’re more beautiful than ever!” “Wonderful,” she exclaimed. “Don’t tell me more, that’s all I need to know. But don’t

you look different!” Laura had got up and, unbuttoning my shirt, was taking a closer look at me.“Look at that chest and those muscles, and that flat tummy... Not a drop of gray in your

beard! I like it!” “Well, this is the perfect me that you’ve been asking about all along! Good body, perfect

memory, a full head of hair, that sort of thing. I guess I’m not yet as attentive and romantic as I’d like to be, but I’m working on it!”

“A hunk like you doesn’t need to be romantic! Shut up and kiss me!” Her dark eyes sparkled; her beautiful smile had an impish look to it. Her kiss was long

and sensuous. My desire for her was unbearable.“I can’t wait!” she said when she had caught her breath. “Actually, I won’t wait!” She took my hand and led me to our bedroom. I couldn’t quite figure out if she was

cheating on me or not, but I knew for a fact that I wasn’t cheating on her, so I had no inhibitions. What followed was heavenly.

No wonder her embrace that evening had been so hot. That was the night we had made Lynn. Come to think of it, maybe we made her that morning. Lynn is a very special child.

“I thought to change into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt,” I said when we got up. “These clothes are great, but the idea is not to seem out of place.”

Laura found me what I needed, pulling out a T-shirt that read “BACK TO THE FUTURE.”

“How about this one?” she asked, laughing.“That’ll be perfect,” I answered.“How come you don’t have any marks on your back? I thought I scratched you good and

hard...”

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“Little things can’t hurt me anymore. We don’t get sick, either. I understand it’s still possible to drown or get killed accidentally, but you’d have to be very unlucky for that to happen. I don’t know of anybody dying yet in the new world.”

“Do you want something to eat?” Laura asked.“Thanks, but I don’t think so. We’re not supposed to bring back any microorganisms.”“You’d better shower, then,” she chuckled. “You’re crawling with microorganisms...”When I was ready and had presented the idea to her, she was game for everything. We

could have the things delivered, as I had suggested, and she’d receive them and have an explanation, if needed, for what we meant to use them for.

“You’d better leave,” Laura said. “My husband might come home...”I kissed her and kissed her some more.“Come back soon!” she said.Which I did, whenever I could think of something the ship needed from Tasmania, and to

pick up life forms from there. At the time, I never suspected that she had a lover. But there again, I hadn’t been wronged, since I was the lover...

“I’ll be seeing you,” she had said when we had parted in the new world, smiling that impish smile of hers.

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40. Operation NoahAs planned, we now began equipping our ship. It got compartments, cages, rows of planters and flowerpots, shelves, and containers of every size and shape. For the crew, there were chairs and some tables to work at. We bought all the tools we would need: as a gardener, I made sure we had spades, hoes, pitchforks, and rakes, plus many other things. Fuel cell generators would provide electricity for the instruments. Strangely, the material of the ship could be drilled into on the inside, allowing for things to be fastened, while the outside was totally impenetrable.

Back at our base, more ships took shape. Since our crew had developed a reliable way of shopping, we helped the others get started by obtaining their basic gear. Afterward, the crews went off to suitable locations on their own to get all their specialized equipment. Finally, after weeks of work, we were ready to begin our real assignment.

Our skippers felt we needed a name for our project. It didn’t take long for a consensus to form: we wanted to call it Operation Noah. One of the skippers came up with the idea that it would be appropriate to go and ask for the blessing of Noah himself, since he, after all, had pioneered that kind of work, and we were borrowing his name.

The Boss volunteered to take us, and the whole party found itself back in the lofty do-main where we had been for our first stopover after the ending of our old existence. It turned out that Noah was one of the venerable elders who had occupied the twenty-four thrones. Now that the occasion was less formal, he simply walked up to us and received us in the friendliest man-ner.

Noah was happy that the project was to bear his name, and offered much advice on how to handle animals and break new ground for farming. After our main business had been dealt with, I couldn’t resist asking the affable patriarch something I had always wondered about.

“When you left the ark, sir, you must have planted every kind of crop to support your family. But the records only mention that you planted wine. Why was that so important?”

“I was six hundred years old, and had another three hundred and fifty to go,” he replied. “Anybody who didn’t know how to handle themselves would have been senile by then. I couldn’t afford to risk that. You ought to know that a little wine helps keep the mind clear.”

Of course. French researchers have shown that moderate amounts of red wine prevent Alzheimer’s disease. There’s nothing new under the sun, it seems.

We thanked our patron saint and returned to work. Before setting out to our various destinations, we held a general briefing session so everyone would understand where their efforts would fit into the large picture.

The scientists had decided on a compressed schedule for remaking the earth, drawing on selected stages of the evolution of life on the old version of the planet. Creation had already taken place and wouldn’t be repeated. We’d be bringing over only such prehistoric life forms as were necessary for generating an environment to sustain modern vertebrate life; there was no need to go through all the different ages of paleontology. For one thing, the new earth didn’t need fossil fuels; they had only been put into the old one so men would be able to develop the materialistic way of life that the selection process of the last days had required. No lengthy evolution sequences needed to be repeated, cutting billions of years from the timetable.

Yet, the earth had been through enough upheaval that not a trace remained of anything man-made from the old world. I found this a positive blessing: I had always had this sense of horror at the thought that, one day, somebody would have to be the archeologist whose task it

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would be to sift through the landfills and garbage dumps of the industrial and post-industrial eras to try to describe our material culture to his or her contemporaries. As interesting as archeology had been, the new world didn’t need it, and, to me, that was a relief.

On land, the food chain would be flattened out: there’d be no carnivores save scavengers. No parasites, pathogens, or noxious weeds and pests would be brought over. Modern animals, including many that had been extinct during the last centuries of the old world, would be placed in the new one several thousand or even tens or hundreds of thousands of years before people would arrive. This would allow them to adjust to an environment of plenty, where the fittest to survive would no longer be those most fiercely territorial and sexually prolific, but rather the moderate and the adaptable. Predators would be put in places with no access to warm-blooded prey but plenty of alternative food; over time, they’d evolve, much like the panda, to feed on fish and vegetable matter only, and would then be released to roam free. Population control would happen through a lowered birth rate rather than by predation, starvation, and disease.

In the sea and the inland waterways, where full-scale vegetarianism wasn’t practical, the food chain would be left intact. No predators capable of hurting people would be brought over, though, and neither would animals like piranhas and warrior ants that could do so through their numbers. None of the algae that had caused the eutrophication of the old seas would come, either. Generally, nasty and hurtful things had no place in the new world, and neither did any that produced toxic or addictive substances, unless they had a practical purpose, like hemp and potatoes. To collect honey, we’d bring stingless bees like those in Australia. If one of the organisms that were to be left behind had played a significant part in the web of life in the old world, there usually was another to take its place. Things were simplified by the fact that the new world didn’t need to be designed for long-term sustainability through drastic variations in its climate: it was to be used for just a thousand years.

A debate arose over yeast: some didn’t want to bring it, fearing it would lead to alcoholism. We had decided to ban all addictive substances, hadn’t we? But the biologists insisted: ruminants needed yeast to digest their food, and the decomposition of organic waste depended on it, as well. After all, alcoholism had never been caused by alcohol, but by genetic and psychological defects that were no longer present. So we got yeast, and with it, both beer and wine, and, of course, bread. No yeast infections, though: our immune systems were as perfect as everything else about us. This was the reason we could visit the old world and bring back no infectious agents. But to protect us against autoimmune diseases like allergies and diabetes, we were all carrying a few harmless nematodes in our guts.

When our teamwork was all sorted out, my fellow crewmembers and I packed a lunch and boarded our ship. Our first few runs would be with a tame and easy cargo: we dubbed the undertaking Project Pet Rescue. Like Laura, many of the people leaving the old world had asked for their pets to be taken along, and Adams read off those prayers in some timeless dimension like so many entries on a shopping list. We headed for the brief span in time between the ascent of the people and the arrival of the flare, picked up a cat here and a dog there, always returning to the same starting point in time over and over again, as Adams ported us to different parts of the old earth without any perceivable, physical travel in between.

Eventually, the ship began filling up for the last time, and there was only one place left to go: our old farm in Tasmania. There I found our and our students’ pets together in the yard, some of them smelling our empty clothes on the ground, calmly awaiting what would befall them. I got out and took a look around while Adams ported the animals into the ship; they had to

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go without whatever pests, pathogens, and parasites they might have had, even without their intestinal contents. In the new world, they’d regenerate their intestinal flora, but they’d never again fall sick or get worms.

Several times since we had come to our new home, Laura had sighed and mentioned how much she’d like to have her jewelry back. She had always used it with exquisite taste. Although precious stones and metals were plentiful in the new world, no one, as yet, had the tools needed to make anything like the fine works of the goldsmiths of the old one. So, remembering this, I went one last time into our house and picked up Laura’s jewelry box. Then I stopped and saw my dessert that I had left on the table. I couldn’t resist it—I just had to eat it. I’ve always had a sweet tooth.

When I emerged from the house, the loading had long finished. Adams had come back out from the ship to look for me and stopped me before I could go on board.

“That’s against the rules!” he said, pointing at the jewelry box.We all knew that things from the old world were only for our use during Operation Noah;

they weren’t to be taken along when we went home.“True, sir,” I replied, “but so is Laura...”“Insubordination...” Adams muttered. “You’re late, too! Because you had to finish your

interrupted lunch, the arrival of the coronal mass ejection had to be postponed by a whole minute. Don’t go anywhere! I’ll have to port you into the ship without your dessert. A lot of use you had for it, too!”

I felt the familiar sense of dizziness and found myself inside. There was a big hole in my stomach where the wonderful dessert had been just before. But I had the jewelry box, and right after me, Adams appeared, and we were on our way.

So I had changed the course of history by blundering that day, altering the timing of the end of the old world. It reminded me of a story Dieter had told me about his great-grandfather, the one who had left him the collection of old Nazi propaganda magazines. The ancestor had been a radio-operator on board the ship of the commander of the last voyage of the Imperial German Navy after the end of the First World War, when most of the fleet was interred at Scapa Flow in Scotland, awaiting surrender to the victorious Great Powers. Toward the end of their seven-month stay there, things had got a bit slow, and when, on June 21, 1919, a coded message had been received from Berlin, the two young signalmen on duty had been goofing off and had postponed the decoding work. When they had got around to it, the message had turned out to be an urgent one, ordering the vice-admiral to scuttle the fleet at noon that day. But lo and behold: it had already been past noon Berlin time, and the job had had to wait until one o’clock. Luckily for the radio-operators, vice-admiral von Reuter had covered for them, and had taken it upon himself to use British time instead. Headed for British soil in one of the boats, Dieter’s great-grandfather had had occasion to ponder the consequences of his dalliance, just like I in the flying saucer. There ended our similarities—the ancient signalman had got a public accolade, albeit tongue-in-cheek, from the Vice-Admiral, in front of all the expedition members, to the effect that he had done more for the fleet than any other sailor by saving every one of its ships from sinking, if only for an hour.

Delivering our cargo of pets to their owners, we aroused so much joy and gratitude that it seemed we’d be on our way forever. Eventually, however, it was the turn of the last ones, and I invited Adams and the crew to stay and be our guests in the village. Finally, the colonel was able to fulfill his promise to come and visit us, and everybody had a jolly old time.

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The pets spread out to investigate their new home. The sheep and the horses simply continued grazing. The goats went on the lookout for somebody to charm tidbits off; the donkey, the only one of them to understand that something momentous had happened, stood for a long time with his head on Laura’s shoulder, accepting all her love and tender caresses. The cats set out to establish fishing territories by the creek. The dogs took one look at Tummeli and instantly accepted her as their pack leader. Their behavior had never been better.

And my family, along with everybody in the village who wanted to, got their ride in the ship. The kids were fascinated with the view from above, and got to take a peek at themselves playing earlier in the day, just as a taste of time travel.

This was the end of my first stint on the job, and I could look forward to a brief holiday. In the evening, with the guests gone and Christina and Anthony looking after our children, Laura and I finally got some time alone together.

Laura looked at me with that knowing smile and asked, “How did you like it?”“I adored it! And you knew all along and never said a word. I thought you talked a lot,

but you sure know how to keep a secret!” Laura had been busy spinning, weaving, sewing, and embroidering. Our bed had a

beautiful new set of linen sheets and pillowcases. She had spread rose petals all over it; a bottle of wine and two glasses were waiting for us and candles were burning in the bedroom. Laura’s loving attention to detail has always endeared her to me. I just had to pick her up and carry her into the room.

Caressing my back, she purred, “Not even a scratch to give you away after you’ve been with your girlfriend…”

Then she sank her teeth into my shoulder, hissing: “I’ll teach you to fool around with other women!”

But she still drew no blood, and soon agreed to another kiss. The night was ours alone, with no one to distract us.

The next morning, Laura laid out all her jewelry on the bed and looked at it. She came back many times during the day, setting pieces aside and making little groups of items. Then she got a lot of decorative jars and boxes off the shelves in the house, labeled them, and placed the things and sets she had selected each into their own container. During the days that followed, she thus distributed most of her jewelry to all the women in our village, keeping for herself only her pearl earrings that she loved best of all, a small diamond pendant on a gold chain, and our engagement and wedding rings. She had put them in her jewelry box a couple of days before we had left our old existence, without telling me why she wanted me to take mine off. Her best diamond ring she now stashed away in the prettiest little container she had, saying that she’d keep it for some special need.

Putting on her pearl earrings, she commented, “the Boss made me all new, but he left the holes in my earlobes. So I know he approves of my wearing my pearls!”

Soon afterwards, a traveler came riding along the river and stopped when she recognized me. It was Ellen, the glider pilot, who had left her American village to go and see the world. She had never built herself a house but had lived in a tent, which she now carried in her luggage, along with her few other belongings. It was fun meeting her again, and Laura promptly invited her to stay.

“Oh, by the way,” Ellen said when there was a break in our discussion, “I took your ad-vice.”

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Ellen’s guardian angel traveled the old-fashioned way, hovering over her or occasionally riding behind Ellen on the horse. With her white robe fluttering in the wind, you could sort of visualize wings, like people have always pictured angels as possessing. Ellen introduced her as Lisa, her sister.

“Did you die in infancy, too?” I asked Lisa.“No, I was aborted. Most of us who came from the industrialized world have that

background nowadays, with low infant mortality and lots of abortions. You should have seen my parents when they met me! Talk about pangs of conscience!”

It wasn’t long before Ellen met Emy and got to see the workshops, smithy, and foundry that Emy ran. The two got along like soul mates, and Ellen began carving things for all and sundry just for the fun of it. Then one day she got a faraway look in her eyes, and asked just how large of a thing could be built in the woodworking shop. Emy couldn’t say; she was willing to try anything and would expand the shed if necessary. I happened to be there with Laura, and figured I knew what the matter was.

“You’re thinking of your next glider, aren’t you?”“I can’t help it—look at all this wood, and the wonderful tools! Do you think we could

build one?”“For you, I’ll build anything!” Emy declared.“I’ll help with the design,” I added. “But we’ll need balsa wood; the trees that grow here

are good for furniture and houses, but not for anything that’s supposed to fly without an engine.”“Balsa trees grow down south, in the tropics,” Emy said. “Or they used to. Somebody

needs to go there and buy a few logs!” Stan was there, too. “None of us has been that far south,” he said. “How do we know

there are any on this continent?”“I’ll tell you how we know,” I told him. “When my crew gets around to planting balsa

trees, I’ll see to it that we put some there.”“But how do we haul them home from there?” Ellen asked.“Ask your boss if you can use the ship!” Emy told me.“Let’s see if we can get by with our own means,” Laura suggested. “Our river is mighty

long; maybe it comes all the way from the tropics? If it does, we can float them down here!” “All right, maybe,” Stan retorted. “But we don’t know. We’d be traveling for months,

and then we might find only mountains and no balsa trees!” “Ah, but there, too, Operation Noah can help,” I said. “I’ll ask the people who go back

really far, to fashion the surface of the earth so as to make the river long enough and put its headwaters in a climate that supports balsa trees! I tell you, it can all be done!”

“So we’d set off on a trip like that on faith?” Stan was shaking his head.“Same thing, in fact,” I answered. “We’ll set out in the certainty that we have friends in

high places that are independent on space and time, and have the power to do what we need done. The request is neither selfish nor unreasonable. We all agree that balsa logs are what we need. So we’ll go, and we’ll find balsa by the river. Trust me; I’m an expert on finding the sources of rivers...”

A few days later, our expedition was ready. Laura and I, Emy, Stan, Ellen, and Kevin, who was a skilled carpenter and normally busied himself in Emy’s workshop, were mounting our horses in the bright morning sunshine. Laura’s donkey had mournfully accepted the role of pack animal: we had a good supply of saws and axes to take along. Food and drink, luckily, were to be had along the way, both in nature and from the friendly people we knew we’d encounter. We

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took the now familiar path up the river and through the highlands, and made steady headway. We traveled first through English-speaking areas, and then the language of the inhabitants changed to Spanish. Finally, when the river was just a narrow stream, we came to a land in the tropics where we found balsa trees.

Between us, we knew enough Spanish that we could make ourselves and our quest understood to the people living there. They thought our project was very exciting, and offered us all the trees we could cut. We took two straight and well-shaped ones, trimmed them and cut them into logs, and rolled the logs down to the river. There we tied the logs together into a raft, which we fastened to the shore.

Evening was at hand, and our hosts threw a party for us. We gave them our tools in return for the timber, and had the time of our lives. These former South Americans had made musical instruments and wouldn’t have considered spending an evening without dancing to their fiery rhythms well into the night. Laura, who has always been an excellent dancer, moved to a different plane from me and outperformed everybody in the arms of the best-looking Don Juan in the land. Dancing is something I’ve never been able to do well, not even in my new, perfected incarnation. But as much as I had regretted not being able to treat Laura right in that respect, I now was happy for her and cheered her on more than anybody.

It was many days before we finally set off for home. Ellen and Kevin went on board the raft with paddles, and the rest of us, along with their horses and the much more cheerful donkey, kept pace with them on the shore. At night, we tied down the raft and rested, and before long, we were home again. Then the logs were cut into different sized boards and the drying process began. Meanwhile, Ellen and I made a design for the plane.

When next I returned from moving all kinds of plants and animals into their habitats on the new earth, work on the glider was well advanced. Stan’s partner George, an artist, had become our supplier of paints and varnishes on the side, and had developed a special finish for the hemp cloth the plane was covered with. I got to see the final assembly of the plane, admiring its sleek lines and the beauty of the painted canvas. Emy herself had built the compass and the instruments. She had calibrated the altimeter by climbing up the mountain. To do the same to the variometer she had jumped off the mountain in a hang glider she had built for the purpose. To test the speedometer she had swung it around on a rope of known length, while somebody counted out the seconds for each revolution. Emy’s enthusiasm over the glider project was at least doubled by the hang glider, which became one of her favorite hobbies from then on.

In our excitement, we got as far as rolling out the plane, standing it at the end of the field that was to be used as its runway, and laying out a long rope to tow it up by, before we stopped to wonder how that was to be done. Did anybody have a pickup truck or a single-engine airplane handy? I couldn’t help feeling a bit stupid.

Conceivably, we could start building a turbine in the creek, and attach gears and a winch for the rope. Or, I suggested, we could build a diesel engine with a winch, and run it on vegetable oil. That would have been a portable assembly.

“That’ll take us a year!” Emy said. “Any other really bright ideas?”Ellen was close to tears. Then her horse came casually wandering up to her, followed by

Kevin’s. They stood and smelled the rope and looked at their owners like they had something to say. When that didn’t convey their idea, they gave a loud whinny. That got our attention all right.

“My darling horse wants to tow me up!” Ellen cried. “Somebody get them harness!”

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And off they sprinted. The two horses, guided by Kevin mounted on his own steed, easily towed the glider up to a safe height. There she went, our glider pilot, the first to fly in the new world, other than those who had been in flying saucers. With no Plexiglas canopy on the glider, we could hear her singing and laughing for a while, and then she hit the thermals above the grain fields and soared away out of earshot.

An hour later, Ellen landed and had a list of minor adjustments for us to make to the plane. Then she asked Kevin to take the passenger seat, and the two horses, now knowing what to do, launched the glider without problems. The second flight was longer, and we took the opportunity to clean up after our work on the plane. When the two of them returned, their happiness had taken on a further facet: up there, between heaven and earth, Kevin had proposed, and Ellen had said yes. She would stay in our village, settle down in Kevin’s house, and live among Australians. It had been done before—many brave foreigners have married Australians and found that they’ve made a good deal.

When the day arrived, the assembled ladies pointed out that the wedding band Kevin had made from a gold nugget he had found in the creek was too big for Ellen’s finger: in fact, it fit Kevin himself quite well. Poor Kevin was at a loss. That’s when Laura took him aside and pressed her little box in his hand. And so Ellen got a fabulous diamond ring as her wedding ring, and, like the diamonds, Laura’s eyes sparkled through her tears of joy.

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41. Music of the SpheresOne day, Laura stopped to listen to the children singing, and asked me, “Can I have a piano? Ever since we went to see the South Americans with their instruments, I’ve been longing so badly for real music. All we have here are some flutes and drums, and nobody plays them really well. I’d like a grand piano right here in the living room, by the poolside!”

“A tall order, but I can’t imagine why not,” I replied. “Let’s see—we’ll need some more exotic wood, I suppose, and...”

“No, we won’t,” Laura corrected me. “When I bought my upright piano back in Sydney, they told me it had been built of local wood. The Japanese imported the wood from each region where they sold their pianos, and made the instruments for every country from the wood that had grown there. That way the wood was used to the climate, and behaved in the best possible way, they said. So you build it from our own trees that grow right here!”

“Hmm. I know what goes into a grand piano—it was in one of the books about how things work. I could probably even draw the action if I thought about it for a while. But that doesn’t make me a piano builder. We’re going to need some expert help here.”

“The last of the piano builders were Chinese and Japanese,” Laura said, “and they don’t live on our continent. Anthony!”

“Yes, ma’am!” Anthony answered.“We need the angel telegraph! Tell your buddies on the other side of the sea to send us

some piano builders, please!” “Well, what do you know,” Anthony told her. “It just so happens that there are two

Japanese piano builders, good friends who also used to sail together, who have recently decided to build a yacht and go sailing. In fact, they intend to cross the sea and find out who lives on other continents. Their angels will tell them of the pleasant task that awaits them here. You did find that our river is navigable all the way, didn’t you?”

“Yes, it is,” both Laura and I answered. We once had been all the way down to the sea.Not that I believed it was just plain coincidence that those men were headed our way:

nothing ever was around these angels. We had come to expect this kind of thing: Providence seemed to smile on everyone in the new world.

Now Emy and I had to get busy. The iron frame, which would have to take a force of 18 tons from the 220 strings, would be the largest object Emy’s foundry had ever cast. We had made some springs and knew how to make the steel for them, but we had only the most primitive gear for drawing wire. Now we had to develop the machinery for drawing many different gauges of piano wire. We also needed to kiln-dry some of our best timber.

The nice thing about working in the new world is that you aren’t under pressure. There are no production quotas, no set time schedules. If we need a batch of iron or steel, we collect the ore, fell some trees, make some charcoal, and, eventually, end up with a few ingots. There’s no need to keep a mill going around the clock or produce enough to pay off loans and make a living. So also in the case of the piano: we had lots of time and much to learn, and we made it an enjoyable experience.

So it was that we had everything ready on our side when, one day, a fine-looking sailboat landed at our new pier down at the lakeshore. Our piano builders had decided to make a bigger boat than originally planned and bring their families along, since they’d be staying for many months.

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We had two guest houses ready for them, and spent several days just getting to know them and showing them around. Their children began learning practical English and ours Japanese.

For me, the most wonderful surprise was a letter from Mikio.We soon got down to planning our project. New tools had to be made, wood had to be

steamed and bent, and the right kind of materials had to be produced. What would the keys be made of? We couldn’t make plastic, didn’t even want to. Huon pine for the white keys and blackwood for the black ones, we decided. They weren’t the ideal materials, but they’d have to do.

It was a great help to have accurate measures. In the ship, I had a measuring tape and a vernier caliper, but I couldn’t take them home: it would have been against the rules, like the jewelry. But the rules only forbade taking home objects, not information. So I had made a few measuring rods at home and taken them along to work, calibrating them there. During off hours in the ship, I also had made a copy of the caliper. So the piano builders could use the measurements they remembered by heart.

Work progressed, and the piano had legs, a frame, its sounding board, and its strings. Now came the turn of the keyboard and the action. We made a few keys and assembled a mock-up of an octave of the keyboard. Quaint, but I could see the disappointment in Laura’s eyes, in spite of the encouragement she gave us at every turn. Real black and white would have been better.

Then Laura lost interest in the piano and began preparing the guest rooms in the house. She had sensed visitors drawing near. At dinnertime—she had cooked for more people than were there—two travelers came down the path from the south. Their beasts looked strange in the distance; Dorn was the first to recognize them.

“Camels!” he yelled.Three pack animals followed behind the riders. When the two finally drew near, we

could see that their skin was dark.“It’s Oyoba!” Emy shouted.“And Joel!” I seconded. “Two sea captains riding camels. What is this world coming

to...?”My old friends now got to meet my family and all our neighbors, and were eventually

introduced to the piano builders. We proudly showed them our project. When we got to the question of the keyboard, one of the Japanese told the guests about our choice of wood for the keys, and added that ivory and ebony would have been the preferred materials. Joel and Oyoba looked a bit funny, and started laughing.

“Alright!” Joel exclaimed. “Now we know why we thought it such a good idea to bring you those heavy presents! What do you think we just unloaded from our pack animals?”

“One of those long packages contains an elephant tusk, the second an ebony log,” Oyoba said, as nobody had an answer ready. “That’ll take care of your keyboard!”

“How did you get hold of the tusk?” Dorn asked, his eyes shining with excitement. “Did you go big-game hunting?”

“Hey, you don’t think we’d hurt an animal?” Joel chided him. “We did something much better: we befriended a herd of elephants and got them to show us their graveyard. There’s so much ivory there that we’ll never run out of it. It’s just awfully heavy to haul abroad.”

“What’s in the third package?” Laura asked.“Bamboo,” Oyoba answered. “We figured you might find a use for some of it, too. The

thick and strong kind doesn’t grow here, I bet.”

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In spite of all the rejoicing among old friends, the project advanced. George had learned how to make lacquer from the piano builders and had prepared the finest black finish for the instrument. Laura wanted to know the brand of the piano: every piano always has a name over the keyboard.

“For all intents and purposes, it’s a Steinway,” the senior piano builder answered. “No one has improved on Mr. Steinway’s design from 1884. That’s what our employer used, like all good piano makers. We couldn’t label it as a Steinway, though. Maybe we’ll call it a Kawai, since we used to work there.”

“I’ll take a Kawai any day,” Laura said cheerfully. “My old upright piano was one, too.”Then one day, the piano was finished and tuned. Nobody had a tuning fork, but all those

with perfect pitch agreed that it was in tune. The living room had been made festive with dozens of candles, and everybody was there.

Laura sat down to inaugurate her piano. Her special musical gift is improvising. She’ll create all manner of melodies, often making up songs as she plays, to the joy and amusement of us all. This was what she did now, too, and we were treated to a long and humorous account of the piano building project.

Then she got serious and began Bach’s prelude number 1 from the Well-tempered Clavier. She played it beautifully, and got a long round of applause when she finished. One spectator was cheering louder than the rest of us, and Laura noticed him: it was Alexander, a long-lost friend who was a conductor and had been working as a professor at Monash University in Melbourne when we had last heard from him. Now he was standing in our living room with his wife Anne, a former colleague of mine, and their children, and couldn’t take his eyes off the piano.

Laura got terribly embarrassed. Here was a real conductor and professor of music, and she, an amateur, had presumed to give a performance. She covered her face and fled to the kitchen, while we all tried to tell her how well she had played, and not to be silly. Soon, the maids brought her back—we still have regular help from young women who want to learn from Laura—and Alexander took her hands and told her how much he had loved her playing, and that he was awarding her a full A for it.

Relieved, Laura asked Alexander to sit at the piano and continue the concert. This he did, enjoying himself so visibly that his face alone was reward enough for all our toil. When, finally, he stopped for a break, Laura and I got to welcome him and his family properly. We also wanted to know what had happened to them since we had last seen them, and how they had managed to turn up just then.

Anne gave us the story.“First of all, you should know that Alex is resurrected. He got into a frenzied mob rioting

on the university grounds and was lynched for being unmarked. Along with several of his students, who had come to his defense, I should add. I’m lucky to have him back so soon, but imagine living with a husband who doesn’t need to sleep, and who eats the food you cook just to be nice, if at all! Anyway, we’ve learned to overcome such trivialities, and, in fact, he’s really handy to have around the house now... But tonight, just as we had sat down for dinner, Alex got this urgent look on his face, got up, and told us to forget about eating, pack the essentials, and get ready for a quick trip: ‘Laura Greene has a piano!’ There was no stopping him, and a few minutes later, we popped up here, just in time for the prelude. If I understand the geography right, we live only a couple of days by horse from here, but we never went traveling anywhere. So it’s nice to see new and familiar faces, but I could have done with some warning...”

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What better reason to have dinner? The maids called everyone to the tables, and Alex, who wasn’t hungry, ever, continued entertaining us. Apparently, word of the piano had spread all over, because more and more people turned up. Resurrected musicians from every part of the world were there, some alone, some with families, some with musician friends who were regular mortals like we. Several got to play the piano, and many had brought along instruments they had made. Before long, a chamber orchestra was playing around the pool. This was a sensational turn of events.

Sometime past midnight, with children sleeping on every bed in the house, the concert imperceptibly turned into a jam session. Alex and Laura took turns at the piano; then they stood aside, and the new player looked just like Duke Ellington. It must have been the witching hour, because next, there, unmistakably, was Louis Armstrong with a beat-up old trumpet.

To questions as to where he had got it, he just laughed, saying, “This is the horn Lil put away for me!”

Then he struck up When The Saints Go Marching In.In the morning the visitors from bygone days had left, and Alex called a meeting. There

were enough musicians there for a symphony orchestra: he wanted something proper to conduct! But many more instruments had to be produced. We had the workshop, and Alex knew where to find instrument makers who could build every kind of musical instrument needed.

It was all go from there. Emy’s workshops were taken over by dedicated craftspeople. She had run a tight ship with her coworkers and apprentices, and was a bit worried that things would get out of hand, but those fears never came true. No tools disappeared, but many new ones were added to her collection. Work progressed apace.

The materials Joel and Oyoba had brought now found many uses. Every piece of ebony was carefully kept, and eventually became part of, say, a clarinet or a flute. Slivers of ivory were turned into beautiful inlays to contrast with the wood. The bamboo made first-class reeds for the wind instruments. We didn’t have the opportunity to age the wood for string instruments for the required thirty to forty years, but we achieved the same result by heat-treating it for just twenty-four hours at 400º F.

The rest of us built more housing, including a kind of hotel down by the lake. It looked like we’d be running a resort, with a music festival. We were greatly excited. But where would concerts be held? Alex pointed out that the dell between our house and the mountain was shaped like an amphitheater, and so we constructed a wooden stage at its bottom.

We had many practical issues to settle: sanitation for so many people was an urgent one. We were still using composting toilets, and built many more. Agriculture in the region got a boost in the process...

With everybody washing in the creek, we knew we had to build bath facilities. But we didn’t have water mains; all the homes used the naturally provided streams and hot springs. That’s when Andy came sailing up the lake, having arrived from the northern shores with his wife, two young sons, and Jack the dog. Andy had married not long after I had visited him; now I had the pleasant duty of introducing him to my family and friends.

Andy knew just what the place needed: a Finnish sauna bath. So we set about building a large one by the lakeside next to the hotel. The pine logs we had been drying for the past year now came in handy. Many skilled hands shaped them and joined them into walls, and inside, the classic wood-burning heater was made from brick and steel. Emy cast a large iron boiler to provide hot water. It wasn’t long before the sauna was in constant use, with steaming, naked

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people running along its pier and diving into the lake, children laughing and loving it, and everybody going home relaxed and squeaky clean.

With everything now going smoothly and rehearsals switching into high gear, I was called back to work. During earlier stints, we had practically finished our task of populating the earth with plants and animals. We had successfully changed feeding behavior where needed, and had reunited all the animals we had kept separated for those long periods of time. Now we began establishing homesteads. We’d fill the ship up with grain and other seeds obtained from non-hybrid seed banks, and from the grain surpluses of days before genetic engineering. We even went back quite far into pre-industrialized centuries to recover as many as possible of the 7,000 food plants humanity had utilized before mechanized agriculture cut our base of food plant species down to just 150, with the majority of people living on no more than 12. In like manner, we salvaged as many domestic animal breeds as possible, putting them where the people who had used them in earlier days, or their descendants, were now going.

The skipper would clear away grass and brush using his psychokinetic powers, and we’d scatter the seed from the air. This was done during the spring before our arrival; in the remaining time, the fields would establish themselves and provide abundant harvests for all. Wild rice—really a kind of marsh grass—already grew in place of reeds on all swampland that would support it; we only planted enough regular rice of several varieties to ensure that those who insisted on it and were prepared for the work could propagate it from there.

Gardens and orchards required more effort. All ten ships were hard at work for several months. Fruit trees need many years to begin producing fruit. Thus, that work was placed in the period ten to twenty years before our arrival. Some fruit trees require grafting: obviously, we were too few to do such labor-intensive tasks for all the millions of families that were on their way. So instead, we planted some large orchards in the centers of each settlement, and left it to the new arrivals to propagate the trees from there. Laura’s and my home was one of those selected for this task, which was the explanation for our oversized orchard.

When, finally, I got home again, I had been working for nearly a year. But to my folks, I had been away for just two weeks. I was happy and relieved to be back, but everybody had been so busy that they had hardly noticed my absence. Weird things one gets into.

Colonel Adams had chosen the return date carefully: the same evening, the symphony orchestra was to give its first concert. Alex had picked the foremost music mankind was heir to, and the high point was the final piece.

Between dying and being resurrected, Alex had gone to find Ludwig van Beethoven himself, for some form of meeting of kindred souls. There, in that spiritual dimension, Beethoven had transferred to Alex’s mind his entire eleventh symphony, composed posthumously, quite literally. Knowing that Alex would be resurrected a thousand years before himself, the composer had wanted his finest work to be heard as soon as an orchestra could be assembled. That day was now here.

The composer had dedicated the work to the Boss, and Alex had invited the latter to the premiere. He arrived soon after the ships had landed, and spent a busy afternoon greeting all the people who wanted to see him and talk to him. Eventually, he came to our home, too. Within moments, Dorn and Lynn were sitting in his lap. The Boss always had time for children.

“I’m so sad that Mr. van Beethoven can’t be here to hear his symphony played,” Dorn said. “He even was too deaf to hear the ninth one. And now all the musicians will play the

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eleventh symphony, and he isn’t with us. Couldn’t you let him come here for just a couple of hours? Please, Mr. Boss Man, sir?”

“Pretty please?” Lynn echoed.“I’ll do better than that,” the Boss told them, an image of tenderness. “I’ll bring him here

for the entire festival, and he isn’t going back until he’s heard all the music he ever composed. What do you think of that?”

It wasn’t just children cheering, we were all tremendously excited. As always when the resurrected were on a case, there was no need to wait. A moment later, the famed composer was there among us, quite composed—pardon the pun—in spite of the strange surroundings. His gratitude to the Boss, to Alex, and to all of us who had made the festival possible, was great. I found it enormously stimulating to be able to speak German with him, and he, too, was amused at talking with an actual voice again.

So it was that we sat down with the Boss, Mr. van Beethoven, and all our guests and neighbors, to the first symphonic concert held in the new world. As propriety would have it, the concert opened with works by lesser composers, but the performance was superb. We had built a shell-shaped reflector behind the stage, and the acoustics were fine, in spite of the open-air setting.

Following the intermission, the eleventh symphony began. The beauty of the music was breathtaking. It was the most wonderful composition I had ever heard. But it was familiar: how come I had heard it before? Where and when? Then, as the first movement came to its finale, at the exact moment when I knew it had been interrupted when first I had heard it, it came to me: this was the music I had heard as a hostage in Algeria! Finally, I had the explanation to my mystery. But this time, I could continue listening, all through the four spectacular movements.

The strangest thing about the whole matter was that I’d never been able to recall a single bar of the music I had heard so clearly that night. Thus, the memory of the experience had taken on an abstract character: I knew I had listened to the music, but I couldn’t repeat any part of what I had heard. Not so with music I had perceived with my ears: I’ve often gone around humming or whistling bits and pieces of new melodies I’ve heard just once, and could easily identify them by calling up a service that gave the name and origin of a melody based on just a few bars from anywhere in the score. (The eleventh symphony, of course, would have drawn a blank, and my confusion would have been even greater.) Now, finally, this great composition had taken on real life and meaning to me; no longer was it a disembodied recollection of an unreal haunting many years ago, but rather a resonating, living symphony getting more familiar the more I thought about it.

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42. The HistorianOperation Noah was over. I had put in years of work, but my absences had been brief, and nobody really understood why I was again becoming restless. What difference did it make if I had something to do elsewhere for a couple of weeks at a time, or just stayed at home pottering about the house? Well, I felt the need to do something more than that, and, eventually, my longing crystallized and became a project.

Colonel Adams was visiting us one night when Laura brought up my absentmindedness and said, “Can’t you think of something for him to do, Colonel? He’s suffering; I don’t think he knows how to live in Paradise...”

“Well, what do you want to do, Greene?” Adams asked. “I’ve always seen you doing things for others—isn’t it time you did something for yourself?”

“I want to write a book, sir!” I replied.“A book?” Laura mused. “What about?”“I want to write about all these things we’ve seen and experienced. I think

they’ve been quite remarkable, to say the least.”“Who’s going to read it?” Adams wondered. “Everybody knows what

happened; do you think you can dramatize it enough that you can add some value to the story?”

“No, sir, I couldn’t hope to get readers just by being a good writer. In fact, I’ve never written anything more exciting than business reports. I’m thinking to go and write for those who haven’t been through it yet. Publish it in the past, if you see what I mean. I’d be counting on you to get me there and back, of course.”

“Now, that’s an idea,” Adams agreed. “Why not tell people before the fact; some might even come to conclusions and act more wisely when it happens to them.”

“How much beforehand would that be?” Laura asked. “Assuming Gregory writes such a book, for all I know, it wasn’t on the best-seller list any time recently!”

“Let me tell you.” Adams looked quite determined. “It should be published sometime near the beginning of the century. That’s when there was an interest in the future and what the new millennium would bring. Later on, nobody cared for that anymore; attention spans grew shorter than they had ever been, and consuming was everything.”

“But then the people who read the book will be old or dead when it all happens,” I said. “I figured it ought to be available to everybody during the end times.”

“It wouldn’t work quite like that,” Adams countered. “Publish it as an e-book on the Web. It’ll build up a following and be printed out; by the time it gets banned, it’ll be a cult object and nobody will be able to keep it under wraps.”

“You have a point there,” Laura agreed. “What will you call the book, Gregory?”

“I haven’t thought that far yet. Maybe A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century?”

“Boring!” Laura exclaimed.“You won’t be able to pass it on it as history or fact,” Adams pointed out. “Think of

something that suits a novel! You’ll have to classify it as fiction.”

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I was shocked at the thought.“What? Everything we’ve been through—is it to be held for mere fiction?”Everybody was nodding at me. I could spot some sympathy in the children’s

faces.“Alright, then. I’ll call it Walkabout. That’s what I set out for when it all

started. I’ll just write down everything that happened, and my readers will get the gist of it.”

“That’s a start,” Laura said. “Tell what happened, change people’s names, and you’ve got the makings of a novel. Just put in a postscript at the end. Remember, you’ll have to take your readers from the beginning of the century to a very different world the year we met. That way you’ll get to write some history. You’ll enjoy that!”

“You’ll need a subtitle,” Adams said. “That’s where you can put the bit about the brief history of the twenty-first century.”

“Boring!” Lynn countered.“It doesn’t have to be,” Dorn answered. “How about The Story of a Brief

Century?”“That’s better,” Laura agreed.“So now I have a name for the book,” I concluded. “Just as well that I’ll go to the old

world to write it at a time when there were computers. I need to rewrite my drafts so many times that we wouldn’t have enough paper here even if everybody started making it right now.

“Will you come and see me sometime while I’m there, Laura?”“Perhaps,” she answered, cryptically, with a twinkle in her eye.“Mom, you’ve got to,” Dorn said. “Dad will be lonely!” He hadn’t seen the twinkle.“Maybe,” Laura insisted.“Dorn, my boy,” I said in a lecturing tone. “Let me teach you something I picked up

once from some wise old man... It might have been King Solomon, or one of his buddies. When a woman says ‘Maybe,’ she often means ‘Yes.’ When she says ‘No,’ she sometimes means ‘Maybe.’”

“But how do you know?” Dorn asked.“You have to be observant. Watch her body language.”Laura winked an eye at Dorn.“I saw that!” he declared.“There’s one rule that’s pretty reliable,” I continued. “When a woman still discusses a

subject after she’s said no, she wishes to be persuaded.”“I’ll remember that,” Dorn promised.“However, all of the above might also be the other way around. Women don’t like being

thought of as predictable…”“Let’s get him, Lynn!” Laura shouted.In an instant, the two of them were all over me, hammering away with loving little fists.“Are you saying we’re fickle and unpredictable just because we’re females?” Laura

demanded.“Hey, I’m not saying anything against females,” I defended myself. “If there had been

something wrong with the female mind, the Boss would have fixed it when we came here. But since it’s exactly what it was, we know it was already perfect, don’t we?”

“Or else, maybe he gave up on it...” Anthony suggested.

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He had adopted the role of big brother with relish, to make up for all the years he had missed out on, and teased Laura whenever the occasion arose.

“I’ll get you for that!” Laura yelled, and set out for Anthony.But he was already sitting in another chair across the room.“I’m sure glad the male mind was somewhat improved,” Christina sighed. “At least

Dorn’s easier to handle than his dad was!” “Daddy, you’ll be going to a time when the devil was about, won’t you?” Lynn

asked, still in my lap. “You be careful now: his idea was to get people hooked on things so they’d get stuck on the old earth. I want you coming back to us!”

“He’ll be back, in just two weeks,” Adams assured her. “Greene, when you’re ready, I’ll take you to Washington and set you up there. It’s the best place for you to be, with the broadest views of the world at the time. How about tomorrow morning?”

And with a “Good night!” he was gone. Oh for the days when you could see your guests to the door and say proper farewells...

The next morning, I left as I had often done. But this departure was different: I’d be staying behind in the past, alone. Adams and I were walking on a quiet street in southern Arlington, the Virginia suburb of Washington just across the Potomac River. It was a beautiful morning in early summer.

“This is where I grew up,” Adams said. “Just now, I’m off to summer camp. That’s our house: nobody’s home. There, across the street and further down, lives a little old lady who lets out an upstairs apartment to college students. They left last week, and she had it all cleaned up. We’re going to rent you that apartment for the summer. If you need it longer, you just stay on; she’ll like you so much by then that she won’t want you to go. I look just like my dad, and she’ll think it’s he introducing a young friend from Australia. The landlady needs no further references and doesn’t ask for an ID or a credit card or your social security number. Here’s a wad of cash; let me know if you need more.”

Everything happened just like he had said. When I was installed, Adams took me to his childhood home, found the spare key, and let me into the house.

“You’ll need a computer for your writing. Here’s my old computer: at this time I had just managed to talk my parents into buying me a new one. They thought I needed it for schoolwork—the truth, of course, was that my games required a faster processor and more memory. We’ll take this whole machine across the street.”

Adams placed all the units near the door, then went to the desk, found a notepad, and started writing in a powerful hand, bearing a close resemblance to its younger version as seen on various items lying around. “Note to self: lent the old computer to a friend down the road. Remember to tell Mom and Dad.”

He thought for a second, and added, “PS: Hang in there, all’s well.”“This is where time travel becomes tricky,” he said. “How can I ignore the fact

that I already saw this note back then? Yet, what I wrote, I had to decide just now. Wonder what would happen if I tore this up and wrote something different?”

“I noticed your hesitation before you wrote the last sentence, sir,” I observed. “Were you thinking of changing the past then?”

“Not exactly—I just wondered if it really was fair to give myself such an advantage over other insecure adolescents. But there it is: there are no alternative

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pasts or futures, there’s just the one reality that always is. It’s composed of all our acts and decisions, and all the chance happenings in this world, and it constantly becomes the tool of the Creator, who is outside of time and its master. This act of mine is what it is because I willed it, irrespective of what I knew about it from before.”

“We’re all better off because you did leave yourself that piece of encouragement, sir,” I pointed out.

Adams took the keys to a station wagon standing in the driveway, and we drove off to the nearby Potomac Yards shopping center to provision. In addition to food and necessities, I also bought a bicycle, so I could get around. Downtown Washington was just half an hour’s ride away. I was ready.

“I’ll send you Laura when you’ve got going properly,” Adams said, as we parted. “For her, it’ll be a week into your absence; after two she’ll have you back. You, of course, don’t have any time limits here: just write until you’re finished!”

It was a good setting for writing. The apartment was on a quiet street with no through traffic; the I-395 and the occasional ambulance could be heard, but presented no distraction. The planes landing and taking off at Reagan National Airport were noisier, but I could handle them. Huge old trees lined all the streets around, and the area was peaceful and virtually crime-free.

In the daytime, my apartment was often too stuffy in spite of its air conditioner, and I made it a habit to ride off on warm mornings to Washington, or, occasionally, to Alexandria or Fairfax, to take in life as it was then. One day, I went to stand on the spot where the bomb had gone off the last time I had arrived in the area, which, of course, was really in the future. All was so solid and normal—there wasn’t even parking for tour buses at the curb—and I could only marvel at the way the passing of time orders our lives, in spite of the ease with which it can be bypassed when you have the right connections.

Nevertheless, my writing progressed better than I had expected. One day in July, when I had almost finished the manuscript, I was sitting on a bench in the Mall, the long park extending from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, when I heard a deep, husky female voice next to me say, “Hi, handsome! Want to come home with me?”

It was Laura, and my joy knew no bounds.“I’d love to, but I still have to think of an ending to my book!”“Don’t you worry about that,” she answered. “We’ll figure something out!” She actually made me stop fretting, and I could focus on just enjoying her

company. Eventually, we began wandering along the north side of the Reflecting Pool, mingling with tourists and beggars like perfectly regular visitors. There was a difference, though: Laura’s otherworldly beauty raised a small sensation among the people we met, and both men and women were staring at her. Her homemade dress was a work of art in its own right; on Laura, it was a flowing, glowing tribute to her sensuousness. Gracefully, Laura smiled at the passers-by, and had a kind word for everyone who talked to us.

We walked in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial, where I had left my bike. Laura espied a newspaper on a park bench, and picked up the magazine part of it as we sat down.

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Having leafed it through, she handed it to me, saying, “That’ll help you with your writing!”

A lawyer had written a feature story on pedophilia, brimming over with justified indignation at laws that treated rapists of their own offspring more leniently than those who assaulted other people’s children. In a box called “Our Search for Love,” he stated that all children had a birthright to unconditional love, but that it could never be received by adults. All love between adults was conditional, he wrote. “Love toward an adult requires behavior; it must be earned and maintained.”

That’s one way of looking at it. As we rounded the far end of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, we passed a speaker’s podium and got a second opinion. A preacher was just finishing his address, and I caught his closing words:

Soon, there will come a point in time when only life forms based on unconditional love will continue. All other life forms will cease.

Like Laura had said, there it was, the conclusion of the book. 300 pages worth in two sentences. Thanks, unknown preacher.

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Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”

-Rev. 6:6

POSTSCRIPT

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And now for the history bit. Between my childhood and the time when I quit my job to go traveling, the world changed. In some respects, those changes were greater than anything that had gone before, including the industrial revolution.

In the early part of the twenty-first century, the world suffered an extended period of dry weather that became known as the Great Drought. When the drought began, I was a young boy growing up in a small town in southern New South Wales, Australia. For a beginning, I was only aware of what I saw happening to my family and neighbors. I had no idea of the magnitude of the problem or of how long-lasting its effects would be.

Most of the land around our home belonged to sheep farmers. For months, there was no real rain, and once the drought began in earnest, our neighbors’ sheep ran out of forage at the height of summer, in January.

The earliest indication I got of something out of the ordinary going on, was that first the new lambs began dying, and then the adult sheep. Droughts were nothing unusual in those parts, and normally the ranchers would have sold their sheep, perhaps at a small loss, to somebody else who still had pastures able to support them. But that summer most of the Australian mainland was dry, and there was nowhere to send the sheep.

Then I started picking up from grown-ups’ discussions that everybody living on the land was in trouble. Most rivers were reduced to a salty trickle. During previous summers, irrigation had been a normal occurrence: powerful pumps fed arrays of large sprinklers on both cropland and cultivated pastures for beef and dairy cows. But now there was no water at all.

As the year wore on, the situation got worse. Then came another dry year, and yet another. One by one, our neighbors gave up, sold their land, and moved away. Our little town came to a near standstill, and my parents’ agricultural supply business folded.

The larger picture was no less bleak. The drought affected nearly every Australian farmer. Compared with most other countries, government subsidies given Australian primary producers were very low, and when their crops failed and their animals had to be slaughtered, the only support left to them was government drought assistance intended to tide them over for a limited time and helping them find new professions. No help was provided that would allow people to stay on their land through an extended disaster. In retrospect, the Great Drought spelled the end of the Australian family farm.

I didn’t know it then, but this calamity wasn’t limited to Australia. In one way or another, primary production the world over was in a crisis.

At the end of the twentieth century, the growth of the earth’s population had stabilized at about a billion people every ten years. At the same time, living standards in South and East Asia—especially in India and China, the two countries with over a billion people each—had been rising steadily due to successful industrialization. For the same reason, that region’s agricultural output had been falling, as more and more of its farmland was urbanized and its forests were clearcut to provide fuel and timber, resulting in growing soil erosion. With close to half the world’s land area being used for agriculture and fast being lost to environmental degradation, no more arable land was available to be opened up.

With the rise in living standards, the predominantly grain-based diet of the Orient was gradually replaced by a Western-type pattern of eating that included a lot of meat. And, as it happens, for every pound of poultry consumed, two pounds of grain are needed; for every pound of pork, four pounds, and for every pound of beef, seven pounds of grain. When the drought hit, the world’s grain exporters were unable to keep pace with demand.

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Millions of people that traditionally had subsisted on shore-based fishing in rivers, lakes, and land-enclosed seas, and on the continental shelf, lost their livelihoods as fish and other seafood disappeared. The reasons were many. Most of the world’s large rivers had been successfully dammed and diverted for agriculture, and with the loss of outflow into the seas, the marine life that earlier had fed off the nutrients brought by the river waters had died. Genetically engineered fish populations, escaped from fish farms, had caused the eradication of entire species of native fish. What they didn’t eat outright, they outcompeted at spawning, and the reduced viability of the offspring eventually led to the loss of the host species itself.

As the fish in the North Sea, the northern Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea were driven to extinction through overfishing and loss of biodiversity, European fishing fleets turned to the coasts of Africa. The impoverished governments of the countries along the shore were unable to enforce territorial water limits, and the Europeans simply stole the fish there, sinking many a rickety indigenous fishing boat during their hurried, nightly raids. Some countries such as India had sold offshore fishing rights to large, often foreign corporations, whose high-efficiency methods quickly depleted the fish stocks and left the traditional fishing populations with nothing to catch.

Toxic algal blooms resulting from overfertilization of the water by household and agricultural chemicals, along with pollution, also contributed to the death of the shallow-water fish. Immensely profitable high-sea fishing and industrial-scale aquaculture took over the supply of marine protein at ever-rising prices.

In their wisdom, the international financial institutions had long been pushing what they called Structural Adjustment on the poor countries of Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. In return for continued credit to save them from bankruptcy, most of those countries were forced to open up their markets to the worldwide commodity trade, which soon obliterated their self-sufficiency, as cheap imported food drove most farmers off their land and into city slums. When the drought hit and food imports became prohibitively expensive, poor countries had no farmers left that could have reestablished their self-sufficiency. Private farmland was lost to jungles, deserts, single-crop farming, and urbanization, while average real wages dropped below the poverty level, government social programs were discontinued, and growing profits from cash crops and low-wage export industries vastly enriched foreign investors and small local elites.

Countries like Libya and Saudi Arabia that traditionally depended on water from nonrenewable underground aquifers for irrigating their subsidized, high-cost agriculture were in a food crisis due to the depletion of those water stores. For the same reason, food production in the High Plains states in the US, where the water of the huge Ogallala aquifer had been used more than ten times faster than it was being replenished, dropped dramatically after the bottom of the aquifer had been reached. Meanwhile, farming in the Low Plains states had suffered severely from the regular flooding of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers. As their insurers went bankrupt, so did the farmers, who left and turned their land over to agribusiness.

Actually, the Great Drought wasn’t all that unique, apart from its duration. Since the nineties, floods and droughts had been alternating in just about all food-producing areas of the world. A pattern had formed: a couple of years of drought, enough to ruin a considerable number of farmers and allow a good amount of topsoil to blow off; then a couple of years of flooding to hurt yet more farmers and wash away more topsoil. Some large countries, like China and America, had been having both floods and droughts at the same time in different regions. The loss of topsoil was bad enough in First World countries with large-scale agriculture. In the US, for example, the topsoil had been used up seventeen times faster than it was replaced by Nature, and already in 1995, the

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average depth of the topsoil had dropped to 5.9 inches from 9 inches in 1776. The crescent from Korea to the Middle East, home to half the world’s population, had soil erosion rates three times as high as the US and Europe.

What set the Great Drought apart as a global disaster was the highly unlikely fluke of severe drought in all the earth’s main food-producing regions at the same time. Many other places had normal or unusually high rates of precipitation—the water in the atmosphere has to fall down somewhere. But such pockets of successful harvests couldn’t mend the deficit in the global commodity trade. With most of humanity now dependent on that trade, the shortage of basic foodstuffs and the resultant rise in food prices resulted in famine among poor and middle-income people everywhere all at once. The crazy thing is that enough food was still being produced to feed everybody, but rather than being distributed to consumers, it was being hoarded by speculators that kept waiting for still higher prices.

One of the single worst results of man-made environmental degradation was the loss, for a number of years in a row, of the Indian monsoon. Without monsoon rains the subcontinent was unable to produce its main staple, rice. Wind-borne plant diseases spread around the world, destroying cereal crops on entire continents. A lack of understanding of the needs of bees and other pollinators led to forms of industrialized agriculture that killed off bees en masse, with the result that fruit-producing food plants didn’t get pollinated and yielded no harvest. In like manner, bats, one of the main natural pest control agents, were poisoned by pesticides in the insects they fed on, or starved to death when no insects were left for them to eat, resulting in uncontrollable outbreaks of mosquitoes and crop-destructive insects.

As there’s no human suffering that somebody can’t make a profit on, robotic bees, whose tiny fuel cells actually ran on flower nectar, were developed at great expense and deployed to do the pollinating. But as the hungriest people were also the poorest, the financial side of the plan never worked out: impoverished growers didn’t have the money to buy enough mechanical bees to make a difference.

With all the problems that had gone before, humanity’s ability to feed itself was already severely impaired when the drought began. To the surprise of many, thermoelectric power plants turned out to have priority over thirsty humans as authorities rationed the remaining potable water. A growing demand for grains and palm oil for the biofuels industry accelerated the rise of food prices. Soon, the situation was catastrophic. Food and water prices shot up and out of reach of a large number of people, and rioting was widespread. The average family would have had to use its entire income just to buy the food they were used to eating. Incomes, however, were dropping, as multinational employers played workers in industrialized and developing countries against each other in a no-win competition for minimum-wage jobs. Many wars ensued, as politicians sought to divert the wrath of the people and strongmen fought over the profits from dwindling water flows, harnessing thirsting tribes and nations to provide them with self-sacrificing soldiers.

Had there only been water for them, Australian farmers would have done quite nicely. But the years went by, and no rain came. Scientists pointed to numerous causes for this: with the expansion of the tropics, the winter rainfall zone shifted past the southern edge of the continent; disturbances in the ozone layer increased wind speeds around Antarctica, also drawing the winter rainfall to the south. Longer, often back-to-back el Niños also deprived Australia of its normal precipitation.

All over the world, wildfires burned almost unchecked due to the dryness of forests and the lack of water. Millions of people suffered badly from respiratory diseases due to the smoke. Large

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predators turned on people and domestic animals as they ran out of grass-eating prey. In disaster areas, packs of dogs got used to eating human bodies and became dangerous to the living, as well.

Now, in retrospect, this sounds like statistics, but at the time, it was anything but. The sense of personal tragedy among the affected farmers and ranchers was overwhelming. Four years into the drought, it was said to be the worst one ever, and that was just the beginning. It was the end of an entire way of life that had embodied freedom, enterprise, risk-taking, and an intense love for the land. People kept hoping for rain against all odds; they took on more debt and agisted their livestock for another year or two, only to lose everything anyway. Marriages broke up and suicide was common among the men left behind. It was an awful time.

As the family farms went out of business, the land lost most of its value. At the same time, thanks to rising prices due to the worldwide food shortage, the profits of the multinational food processing companies were skyrocketing. To safeguard their supply of raw materials, those companies had been buying up all the best farmland for years; now they could multiply their land holdings many times over.

Where individual farmers had faced a dead end, the multinationals with their money saw a bright beginning. Rather than fight dry cropland and the lack of topsoil, they began building vast, robotized and computer-controlled, often hydroponic, greenhouses that they stocked with genetically engineered food plants, resistant to pesticides and herbicides. Lack of rain and salty water tables didn’t faze them: they purified the remaining groundwater and any available city sewage, and recycled all the condensation inside the greenhouses. Some of the food plants they used had also been genetically engineered both to be frost-resistant and to tolerate salt in the soil. The new factory farms were immensely productive, but, because of the investment required, a possibility only to big business.

Growing grain under glass, of course, wasn’t practical. Where enough topsoil remained, it was still done in the open, but irrigation was necessary. However, traditional sprinklers wasted too much water in the hot, dry weather. The solution the big companies came up with was characteristically capital-intensive: overland pipelines fed vast networks of computer-controlled in-ground irrigation pipes. The water was obtained by towing in icebergs from the Antarctic, where huge sheets of ice were breaking off from the ice shelves. Research vessel and cruise ship operators were grateful to the multinationals for clearing up the lanes. Small icebergs could be placed in dry docks and the melted water pumped out; for large ones entirely new methods had to be developed, based on mooring the icebergs, insulating their outsides, and pumping fresh water out of their centers. Costly desalination plants requiring lots of energy were built in coastal areas, but they helped only those who could pay for the water they produced.

Australian farming, albeit under new management, was again competitive with that of the northern hemisphere, where similar exploitation of the ice in the Arctic Sea was well underway. But, as usual, the Europeans and the North Americans were enjoying subsidies. Their respective governments strongly encouraged the harvesting of Arctic ice in an attempt to ensure that an increased meltdown of the largely saltless ice wouldn’t dangerously dilute the waters of the Greenland Sea. This could have disrupted the Gulf Stream, which for its “motor” depends on the abrupt descent of heavy, salt water into the depths of the sea between Greenland and Svalbard.

Where pastures had disappeared and the topsoil had blown away, sophisticated feedlots took over the raising of pigs and beef cattle, and the keeping of dairy cows. After years of ignoring the pressure from environmentalists and locals to limit their toxic runoffs, the lack of water and the rise in food prices finally persuaded agribusiness to begin recycling them. The remaining sludge,

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saturated with antibiotics and growth hormones, was used to replace some proportion of chemical fertilizer on the factory farms, and the multinationals began calling their produce “organic.” They were free to do so, as the World Trade Organization had abolished all national and regional regulations on the purity of foods as mere trade barriers, leaving only general World Health Organization guidelines. After repeated outbreaks of E. coli the experiment was called off, but not before ruining the reputation of the label Organic.

This incident was to be the last time mass media made the mistake of biting the hand that fed them by criticizing their owners, transnational big business. Following some wide-ranging personnel changes, the media were ready to treat any news about mishaps in the commercial food and drink supply chain in the proper way: as impersonal statistics that didn’t affect anybody they knew. Consumers were to be kept happy with being mere collateral and fully expendable in the quest for the holy grail of ever growing corporate profits, and a rapidly evolving entertainment technology ensured that less and less attention was paid to uncomfortable truths. Public and small-scale providers of food and drink enjoyed no such protection, however.

Even where some pasture still remained, sheep farming became impractical to regular Australians because of the ozone holes. To keep the sheep from going blind from the abundant ultraviolet light, they had to be fitted with contact lenses, and the lenses had to be checked regularly. Men and dogs couldn’t compete at this with the robots of the large companies, and, at the same time as the prices of wool and mutton kept on rising, sheep farmers disappeared as a breed. Hardly anyone else lived in the countryside, either: all farm work was now performed by roving minimum-wage laborers and unmanned, computer-controlled robots that found their way around the vast, uninhabited farms using machine vision and GPS navigation.

Since the multinationals had bought up all the large seed companies, only genetically engineered seed varieties that needed the factory farm environment to grow were available, further complicating the task of subsistence farming. Where individual farmers still remained, the multinationals paid spies to report on anybody saving seed rather than buying or licensing them every year from the seed companies. This way agribusiness simply got rid of the competition by having the farmers thrown in jail for infringement of the companies’ patent rights. Even farmers who had never bought genetically modified seed fell victim to the campaign. It was enough that a few plants in their fields had been wind-pollinated by pollen from GM crops on neighboring land. The multinationals successfully demanded user fees and shares in the profits from the harvests of such farmers, even where the farmer had drawn no benefit from the special properties of the affected plants. This greatly speeded up the disappearance of independent farmers and natural foods. Stealthy politicians lent their enthusiastic support to the undertaking: every outbreak of disease among farm animals served as an excuse for indiscriminate mass slaughter, leaving family farms devastated and forcing the affected farmers off their land. Banks did their share by calling in perfectly good loans. Regulators, led by the European Union, banned the agricultural chemicals used by smallholders as another installment in their overt campaign to favor agribusiness.

As a result of the changes brought to a crisis by the drought, billions of people who had formerly fended for themselves were now consumers of processed foods. It goes without saying that the multinationals didn’t stop at taking over the world’s primary production. In order to get serious profits, they needed to add value to all food humanity ate, and soon basic foodstuffs, all of which were channeled to the food processing plants of the multinationals, weren’t being sold to the public anymore. Instead, a blend of local and American-type fast foods became the mainstay for people everywhere, and American-style advertising began inducing them to overeat junk food, without thought for what was good for their health. After several generations of eating only fast

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foods, broad layers of the population no longer knew how to eat off a plate with a fork and a knife, let alone with chopsticks. Old-timers complained that not only had our self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs been lost, but now the most elementary of all survival skills, that of cooking, was also fast going down the drain. The French, who had more to lose than most, talked angrily about MacDomination and Cocacolonisation.

As household water became scarce, expensive, and often undrinkable, the multinational water bottlers and soft drink manufacturers took over the market as well as the remaining springs and clean waterways, and soon the food and beverage producers surpassed every other type of business—even the oil, arms, and illicit drug industries—in turnover and influence. Their interest in food and drink was limited to their profitability, so where you’d have thought that they should have been concerned with health and nutrition, all they cared for in their products was low costs, long shelf life, and addictiveness. For the latter, they used copious amounts of sugar, salt, and fat or fat substitutes—along with flavor enhancers to maximize their effect—plus actual addictive drugs. For long shelf life combined with low costs, they spiked their products with additives. Better still, artificial freshness and user-tailorable taste sensations could be engineered into industrially produced food on a molecular level using nanotechnology. By including novel chemical compounds that temporarily disable human taste receptors for bitter, food scientists were able to increase the use of low-grade raw materials and introduce a wide range of new additives that in earlier days would have rendered their products unpalatable, or made the customers think they were being poisoned. In the long run, this may well have been the case, but as many of the new additives were needed in such small amounts that they didn’t have to be included in the lists of ingredients, there was no way of telling what you were being fed.

As immoral as it seems to be drugged so you’ll come back for more junk food, nothing unlawful was taking place. For every illegal mind-altering drug there are a number of closely related alternatives with similar effects that haven’t been outlawed yet. The stimulants used for making fast food addictive are mild and meant to go unnoticed. But anybody can observe their effects by feeding a hungry kid three burgers at an outlet of a major fast food chain. The high resulting from the triple overdose is powerful enough that physical restraint may be necessary.

With the spread of fatty, adulterated junk food and sweetened drinks, obesity and all its side-effects, including diabetes, various cancers, and circulatory diseases, became prevalent all over the world. It was the fastest-spreading epidemic humanity had ever encountered. The multinationals didn’t mind, of course: they also owned the weight loss and cosmetic surgery industries, and they manufactured the drugs that everybody now needed to survive. Nothing was left to chance: drug dependence was induced from infancy through environmental allergens and nutritionally worthless junk food, as well as by lacing soft drinks with caffeine to induce hyperactivity and force children to use tranquilizers.

Parents who defied the normal pattern faced an uncertain future. Breastfeeding was labeled unsafe when the levels of industrial pollutants in mother’s milk rose above recommended maximums. Home cooking for children was placed on the suspect list along with home birthing and home schooling.

Early in the new millennium, US federal legislation made it mandatory to put all foster children on a dangerous cocktail of addictive psychotropic drugs, ostensibly to make them easier to manage. With feedback from prescribing doctors the mix of pills was tweaked to maximize the profits for the pharmaceutical industry while minimizing traumatic side-effects, and next, the pilot program was extended to cover adopted children, as well. A few years later, all children had to take the drugs to be allowed to go to school, and, finally, home-schooled children were included.

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The program was then adopted by other countries, including Australia. With every pill reporting to Big Brother via the Internet whether it had been taken on time, the scheme was hard to circumvent; yet, my dad figured out a way to take the sensors out of the pills and put them in our milk instead. Other kids had to take the drugs, however, and by the time I was old enough to start thinking about having a family, practically every young person in the industrialized world was addicted to so-called ethical drugs from an early age. Political protests began disappearing from the news, as the sedated youths settled down to play video games instead of worrying about income distribution and human rights.

And then the Virtual Reality helmets with their nanorobots and brain implants turned crowd control on its head: people lined up to be assimilated at their own expense, and national health schemes scrapped their funding of the no longer mandatory sedatives. While Big Pharma went to court and lost, humanity shrugged off its withdrawal symptoms and forgot about politics altogether.

Regulatory agencies, acting on behalf of agribusiness, banned all health benefit claims that couldn’t be scientifically proven on food and food supplement packaging and in their advertising. This meant the loss, for practical purposes, of all traditional herb lore and health awareness: what once worked on our unpolluted ancestors could always be shown to have no effect on the average stressed-out consumer, saturated with drugs, additives, and environmental pollutants. Science, long beholden to big business, obediently played its part and assured the citizens that only the pharmaceutical industry had the means to keep them well, and that commercially provided food was just simply nutritious and delicious.

While agribusiness had to accept the sad sight of some of its own cash cows biting the dust in the process, the overall effect of the ban was as intended: demand for organic and locally produced food and drink continued its decline.

A few remaining purists maintained that there was a connection between the new eating habits and the declining health of humanity, and that people, like all animals, were meant to eat other living things from nature, not the end products of genetic, chemical and nanotechnological engineering. Moreover, they wanted to reintroduce the tradition of eating slowly and enjoying both the meal and the company. But they, like everyone with an interest in nutrition, were hampered by inconsistent and meaningless scientific data: researchers, preferring to play it safe, stuck to the traditional myth that it’s only what you eat that matters to human health, not how it’s been grown or reared, treated, preserved, processed, and prepared. As their novelty wore off, the last critics of agribusiness were effectively silenced by the multinational-owned media.

The barely literate broad public was already beyond help, however. Unable to read lists of ingredients or comprehend the significance of nutrients and additives, it could only be reached by means of well advertised and easily recognizable, but often meaningless fads like “Low Fat,” “Diet,” and “Light.” If introduced, such varieties then had to compete against slogans along the lines of “Yummy,” “Delicious,” and “Wholesome.” Little could be achieved this way, and agribusiness only took part as far as it could increase its profits by thus diversifying its product lines.

My memory of the years of the Great Drought is dominated by the simplicity of the life we led. We never had new clothes, and we recycled everything else, too. My father drew unemployment benefit and did odd jobs, and somehow managed to avoid foreclosure on the mortgage. My mother ran the household, sewed and mended, and used a lot of imagination in her cooking. But strangely enough, I never went hungry. We had a couple of acres of land and a well that didn’t dry up, and we grew nearly all the food we needed ourselves. We had about a dozen hens and a rooster, and we

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always had enough eggs. A couple of dairy goats somehow managed to feed themselves and kept us with milk. A pig or two ate all our food scraps and provided a little meat. Every summer and fall, we did a lot of canning, freezing, and preserving of the foods we had grown. My brothers and I were always busy watering the garden, cutting firewood, and looking after the animals, and we were none the worse for it.

Our parents also saw to it that we did our level best at school. In the midst of all the misery, most of us still believed there were better times coming. And they came. By necessity, some of the formerly independent farmers and fishermen got jobs as employees of the multinationals. My father was lucky and became a manager at the local office of one of the big agribusiness firms.

Eventually, my brothers and I moved out to go to college and work. At the same time, my parents grew older, and, gradually, we gave up our self-sufficiency from the drought years. I kind of missed it, especially when a particularly woody store tomato reminded me of how absolutely wonderful a homegrown tomato can taste when plucked ripe off the vine. But my career as an engineer soon overshadowed everything else.

Early on, I had set myself the goal of getting a real full-time job, once I was finished with my education. Somehow, the idea appealed to me: my father had a job with regular working hours, and back home I had often held summer jobs that had made me feel useful and content.

Everybody else at the university in Sydney was busy building careers as telecommuting contractors, staying up late at night and scanning the Internet for opportunities to take part in projects within their own area of competence. Such projects appeared on the Web all the time, and automated “digital agents” would match up the project owner’s requirements with people’s resumes and exam results. Once you were given a chance, it was up to your own persuasiveness and perseverance to get the job; then you’d be part of a virtual project team spread out all over the world, working with impossible deadlines in three or more shifts. As the American and Pacific team members finished their day, New Zealanders, Australians, Indonesians, and Asians took over the work, and eight to ten hours later, they passed it on to their European, Middle Eastern, and African counterparts. Add the Indians, the Brazilians, all the time zones in Russia, and the people working odd hours, and you had a true mixture of working periods to manage.

My studying habits were too old-fashioned for all this. By 9 PM I was too tired to go on learning, and by ten o’clock I was in bed. Sure, I used the Internet—there was no way to study without it—but I wasn’t building my career on it. I did my internships and got my pocket money working at traditional jobs, and I liked meeting people. At graduation time, I walked into the office of the president of one of Sydney’s most reputable telecommunications companies—a subsidiary of a Japanese-owned multinational—and offered him my services. It turned out that my education, my personality, and my experiences from the drought-stricken countryside made me their best choice for a contingency planning coordinator for the company’s entire Australian operation, and so I was hired not only into a permanent position, but also into a managerial one.

Work, including much traveling, kept me busy, but I took time out for things such as the Army Reserve, cycling, lifesaving, and sailing. Given dark glasses and some sun sense, the Sydney beaches were still gorgeous places, and the girls there were all a young man could wish for to rest his eyes on.

Meanwhile, an entire generation of pale-faced, sun-fearing knowledge workers sat holed up in their apartments. They were devoid of emotional contact. They interacted only with computers, games, and smartphones. They communicated exclusively on an intellectual level with people they had never seen and would never meet. They scheduled their entire lives, leaving precious little of it for personal interaction. They saw hardly any difference in meaning between the real world and

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virtual reality. They exercised only on machines. They ventured outside only in vehicles. They ordered their pizza over the same network that provided them with their work, their sex, their play, and their cult religions. It was my job to maintain enough sanity in the midst of all this to ensure that my company survived any disruptions. Consequently, I made sure to cater to my own lucidity by living what I thought was a normal, healthy life.

All this time, Nature continued to become less predictable. Seemingly, to spite mankind and its progress, she caused frequent and devastating destruction. As if the drought, the storms, the pollution, and the fires hadn’t been enough, the ocean temperatures kept rising, and with the ensuing death of protective coral reefs, millions of people in low-lying areas became refugees. Diseases were rampant in spite of all the medical breakthroughs: new viruses and new mutations of old bacteria, resistant to long overused antibiotics, kept causing epidemics in both developing and industrialized countries. Heavy rains following droughts in India and Africa regularly triggered an explosive increase in the rodent population, each time generating an outbreak of the plague. Cholera, caused by normally rather harmless bacteria, became more deadly, as ever-mutating viruses kept infecting the bacteria in the gut of the victims, making the bacteria produce lethal toxins and thwarting any attempt at creating a successful vaccine. To complete the devastation, the combined pandemic of AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis, over the years, had practically depopulated some parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Of the land left empty, the most desirable areas were filling up with Chinese and European immigrants, as well as with wealthy Americans in their walled and gated communities—built, serviced, and supplied by US companies, and blissfully isolated from the dying country around them.

Several years after the end of the Great Drought, there was a violent earthquake in the Mediterranean that was felt far away from its epicenter. The quake triggered simultaneous eruptions of four volcanoes: Etna, Stromboli, Vesuvius, and the 35,000 year old supervolcano in the Campi Flegrei west of Naples. Etna produced mainly lava and volcanic ash; Vesuvius and the supervolcano also generated pyroclastic flows that engulfed Naples and the towns around its bay. There was no warning and no time for evacuation. Nearly half of the 3.5 million inhabitants of the area were killed.

The amount of ash and volcanic gases in the upper atmosphere was calculated at 20 cubic miles, more than Earth had been subjected to for 1,500 years. The ash darkened the sun and made the stars invisible, and all that could be seen of the moon at night was a faint red glow. Global mean temperatures dropped by 5˚F, and took years to return to normal. Practically the only food production that was left relatively intact was that of the multinationals, which was mostly covered and had protection from the falling ash, and was spread out over both hemispheres, allowing the owners time to recover the part of their grain production that was between harvests for winter. Air travel was impossible for a long time: jet engines tend to clog up when a plane flies through volcanic ash. Several smaller earthquakes followed, and the destruction was great, particularly as nearly a billion people lived on the fertile, but dangerous slopes and ancient mudflows of the world’s 1,500 active volcanoes.

Hardly had humanity recovered from the aftereffects of the triple eruption, when a new threat appeared. A few years earlier, a previously harmless comet had got entangled with the planet Jupiter and had broken up into several chunks, two of which had been thrown off their course by the gravity of Jupiter’s moon Callisto. The rest of the fragments had gone off in a new orbit as minor comets, but the two that had been disturbed turned out to be on a collision course with Earth.

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Each of the fragments was rated 10 on the Torino scale: enough to create a global climatic catastrophe. The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration had long been preparing an interceptor spacecraft for just such an emergency, but it had recently been launched at another target, a moderate-risk asteroid that NASA had selected many years earlier. Within the timeframe available, building more interceptors wasn’t practical. No other preventative measures were available, and Earth stood defenseless.

The fragments, continuing in their orbit, were preceded by a part of the comet’s tail that had been diverted along with them. For a number of weeks, meteorites were falling incessantly, lighting wildfires everywhere. It was another dry period, and again, the fires couldn’t be put out. A full third of the earth’s remaining forest cover was lost, and whole towns burned down.

Then the comet fragments themselves came. One of the chunks fell in the Atlantic and the other, a couple of weeks later, in a sparsely populated part of Siberia, which wasn’t so bad in itself. But they were large, over 500 yards across, and the one that fell in the sea created a giant wave that sank nearly every ship then in the Atlantic—over 30 percent of all the ships in the world—and caused great havoc along the coasts. The fallout from the first fragment was high in both phosphorus and nitrogen, and caused an abnormal level of fertilization in the seas. The resultant toxic algal bloom turned the seawater red wherever enough of the mixture fell, and killed about a third of the remaining biomass in the oceans.

The dry summer in the northern hemisphere contributed to a very nasty turn of events when the second chunk fell down. The added fallout, extremely rich in phosphorus, raised the level of unwanted fertilization in lakes and rivers to unheard-of levels. The extraction of water for household and irrigation use was high, and water flows were slow, creating ideal conditions for an uncontrolled proliferation of blue-green algae, especially cyanobacteria like Microcystis aeruginosa and Anabena flos-aquae which, in this case, happened to have the specific genetic characteristics that make some of these algal blooms toxic.

The resulting eutrophication saturated many bodies of surface water with foul-tasting substances like geosmine and methyl-isoboreol. Moreover, the algae produced dangerous poisons like microcystin and anatoxin. High enough doses of microcystin induce toxic hepatitis, fatal within a matter of hours or days, while anatoxin, a neurotoxin also called Very Fast Death Factor, causes respiratory failure and kills within minutes. Many water treatment plants were unable to remove either the poisons or the bad taste and smell. As a result, within a few weeks of the second impact, more than 30 percent of those communities worldwide that took their household water from rivers and lakes had bitter, undrinkable water, and human fatalities as well as animal die-offs were widespread for months afterward. Filtering devices and bottled water were, of course, hoarded up immediately.

The public’s indignation over being poisoned by their drinking water was, understandably, profound. It soon became clear that the main fault lay with the remaining public water authorities. Privatized suppliers generally had newer equipment and changed filters more frequently. Carried by the anger of those affected, the multinationals put their lobbyists and advertising agencies to work, and took over the public water utilities. Subsequent protests over the steep rise in water prices were easy to handle—the multinationals simply pointed to the alternative, death by poisoning.

Between them, the two fragments generated so much dust and ashes that the world was again darkened. On average, we had only two thirds of our normal daylight hours for several months. The only bright spot was the expectation to find diamonds in the crater in Siberia: scientists estimated that the impact would have created tens of thousands of tons of microscopic

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diamonds, buried in the crater left behind by the explosion of the impact. Earlier, a similar discovery had been made in southern Germany, where the town of Nördlingen lies in a crater 14 miles wide and 15 million years old, estimated to hold 70 million tons of submillimeter diamonds.

This kind of catastrophe, but on a much larger scale, apparently finished off the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. A smaller body, but still bigger than the present chunks, probably destroyed the civilizations of antiquity and inaugurated the Dark Ages by falling in AD 534 or 535 and depriving the earth of sunlight over a period of months or years. A competing theory places the blame for this latter event on a volcanic eruption violent enough to blast Sunda Strait out of a former land bridge between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia.

Not long after the dual hit by the two comet fragments, a small asteroid, not related to them, also turned up headed for the earth. The only existing interceptor was on its way to another asteroid in a different direction and didn’t have enough fuel to be rerouted. So the newfound asteroid was left to its own devices, particularly as it was “only” about 300 yards in diameter, and seemed to be headed for the area around the Equator, away from the great powers themselves.

What happened then largely remained a mystery. The asteroid fell in western Africa, apparently on an undiscovered uranium deposit. The impact created a nuclear reaction combined with a volcanic eruption at the impact site, resulting in an intense release of radioactive smoke.

Again, the sky was darkened for a while. But the worst result of the impact didn’t become evident until months later. The impact area happened to be located in a locust breeding ground, and the radioactivity seemed to have caused the insects to mutate in the most insidious way. The adult locusts, apparently, had lost the ability to eat, because they never touched the vegetation, and after five months, they just died off. But they looked different from regular locusts, and they had a tail and a sting, and venom like scorpions.

Maybe it was a genetic engineering experiment gone horribly wrong, or else perhaps the sum total of mutations in both locusts and scorpions somehow enabled and induced them to interbreed. The mongrel insects were, in any case, sufficiently different from locusts to be immune to the fungal bio-insecticide normally used to eradicate locusts.

The lack of control became painfully evident when the insects swarmed and spread out over Africa and the Middle East. They were aggressive and seemed to hate people, for they attacked humans, leaving animals alone. The sting wasn’t lethal, but it was very painful, and no antidote was developed before the plague subsided by itself.

To the pessimists, and they were many, it seemed that any progress made was always undone by natural catastrophes and by ensuing strife due to the displacement of people and the scarcity of resources. In the midst of all this distress, political repression increased, and even in democratic countries, people were demanding strong leadership due to crime and unrest. The US Federal Government happily complied and continued the abrogation of civil rights begun in 2001. In Europe, the European Union provided the leadership, while its nation-states lost more and more of their sovereignty. Elsewhere, the democracies showed less determination.

Europe’s increased strength and unity were due mainly to the new president of the European Union, popularly known as the Leader. A charismatic ruler who had made a comet-like career in EU politics, he was immensely popular and had a remarkable TV personality. In his new position, his first political coup was to break the deadlock in the peace proceedings in the Middle East, following the brief but disastrous Temple war.

The war started as a direct consequence of the decision by Israel’s conservative government to demolish two key Islamic sanctuaries, the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque on Temple

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Mount in Jerusalem, and to build a Jewish Temple in their place. This seemingly senseless decision had been looming for a long time, and the conflict between Jews and Muslims in the matter, by its nature, was unsolvable. The beautiful Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third holiest shrine, stands on or near the site of the original Jewish temple, the second version of which was destroyed in AD 70 and never rebuilt. However, the Jews insisted that Jerusalem was theirs, and that Scriptural prophecies made it clear that the Temple was to be rebuilt on its original site, assumed to be al-Haram al-Sharif or Temple Mount. Although there were several competing scientific theories as to the exact location of the original Temple, some of which had it lying either south or north of the Dome, the Israeli government preferred to listen to the belligerents who wanted the project to entail a confrontation with Muslims.

As soon as the decision was announced, Libya, Iran, and Sudan mobilized. Thousands of Palestinians and Jordanians occupied the Dome and the mosque, and chained themselves to every obstacle in their surroundings. Russia, allied with Iran and eager to expand her influence southward, joined the campaign and received support from some of the Muslim republics of the Eurasian Economic Community. Soon armored Russian troops poured through Azerbaijan into Iran, from where they, joined by Iranian forces, continued through Iraq and Syria into northern Israel. Whether Iraq and Syria had given their consent was never clear, but they couldn’t have done a thing to stop the advance, anyway.

The air support of the attackers was poor. Turkey, a NATO member, refused the Russian aircraft carriers in the Black Sea access to the Mediterranean, and Russia was unwilling to escalate the conflict to involve NATO. The Israeli Air Force bombed Russia’s poorly equipped naval base in Tarsus, Syria as soon as the attack commenced. The Russian Northern and Baltic Fleets were too distant to be of any use. As a consequence, Israel maintained air superiority and managed to keep both Iranian and Libyan warplanes at bay. Sudan didn’t attempt to commit air power.

Libya attacked from the sea, and the Sudanese, in like manner, poured in through the Gulf of Aqaba, where Israel was poorly defended, following a long period of peace with Egypt and Jordan. The attackers devastated Israel, they showed little consideration for the people of Palestine, and within a few days they stood on all sides of Jerusalem. There was no question of negotiations: the Israelis holding Jerusalem weren’t talking, and NATO, their traditional ally, hadn’t had the time to find out if it wanted to be involved. NATO member countries had sent a few pleading messages to Moscow, but had received no reply.

An all-out attack on Jerusalem was planned for the morning, but it never took place. During the night, a magnitude 7 earthquake hit Jerusalem, devastating the city. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque were both damaged, but remained standing, while parts of the Old City around them were leveled with the ground.

The destruction among the surrounding armies was great, but it soon got worse. For a beginning, they were drenched by a torrential rain that turned into baseball-size hail. Then, a shower of meteorites fell on them out of the overcast sky, leading the tank crews to believe they were being shot at. In the confusion, the different armies all thought their allies were the Israelis, and practically annihilated each other. The alliance had been put together so fast that nobody had taken the time to harmonize the different Friend-Or-Foe detection systems, and the Israelis were jamming all allied communications.

Come morning, the real Israelis appeared and finished off what remained. Less than seventeen percent of the participating Russian troops returned to Russia. Of the other attackers, not much was left. With all the devastation that had befallen Israel and Palestine, burying the fallen enemies took over seven months.

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In the end, the war turned out to be a net gain for the surviving Israelis. Among the booty left by the allied troops, they found tons and tons of depleted uranium antitank ammunition, as well as dozens of tactical nuclear warheads. Taken together, this constituted many years’ worth of fuel for Israel’s fast breeder reactors. Israel also seized a number of Libyan tankers waiting offshore to refuel the allied vehicles and aircraft. Adding the fuel trucks they had captured plus the proceeds from selling refurbished enemy military hardware and scrap iron, and considering the decimation of the Israeli population and economy, Israel managed to get hold of enough petroleum products and money to buy oil for to cover her fossil fuel needs for the next seven years.

In Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams found most of the inhabitants in rather good shape in the city’s bomb shelters, where they had sought refuge from the impending attack.

Importantly, while clearing up the rubble south of the Al Aqsa mosque, work crews and archaeologists found irrefutable evidence that the ancient Temple had, in fact, stood south of and below Temple Mount. However, the Israeli government and its conservative supporters, now victorious, refused to take the new research into consideration, and announced their intention to proceed with the original project, giving Palestine, Jordan, and other neutral Muslim states only a few weeks to strip the Dome and the Mosque of their salvageable details.

At this point in time, Lebanon, backed by strong words from Syria, warned that, should the project proceed, Lebanon would stop pumping water from the Litani River into the Jordan. This was language even the most conservative of Israelis could understand.

Naturally, the threatened act would also have affected Jordan and Palestine. Several years earlier, all three countries had hit rock bottom in the nonrenewable underground aquifers where they had been taking their water. This was all the more catastrophic because during the Great Drought, other, formerly renewable, aquifers had become so polluted and salty that they were now largely useless. Following the Lebanese threat, the Egyptians gave a similar ultimatum concerning the delivery of water from the Nile. Next, there was a general, angry stalemate.

It took unusual diplomatic skills to solve the conflict, but the Leader possessed them. He negotiated a deal that involved European assistance for repairing the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque, and for erecting the Temple south of Temple Mount, and only there. He obtained the consent of the Arab governments concerned that the Temple could operate for the next seven years. European and Japanese reconstruction aid to Israel and Palestine and European trade concessions to involved Arab countries were added to make the agreement more attractive. As a result, the new Jewish Temple could be inaugurated on schedule—since many years, the Temple Institute had been preparing plans, building implements, and training priests—and traditional Temple service including animal sacrifices began according to scriptural instructions.

Accepting the agreement wasn’t straightforward. Egypt broke off diplomatic relations with Europe and began an attack on Israel. Honoring his commitment to Israel, the Leader intervened with European troops. After an intense engagement that remained inconclusive, the Egyptian government lost its nerve, and, going against its own president, agreed to an armistice. A peace conference was held between the Leader and the Egyptian president, but neither came clean about the issues involved, and each faced continued political pressure at home.

So far, the peace had held, reconstruction efforts had brought about an economic boom, and the region was thriving on its closer association with Europe.

Australia was still far removed from most of this political trouble, and back home in Sydney, I continued to enjoy my work. One of my old-fashioned quirks was that I insisted on using a travel agent to arrange my business trips. My company had a contract with one of the remaining Sydney

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travel agencies, and while many of our staff ignored this option and booked their tickets themselves via the Internet like most people had been doing for years, I always made a point of calling or visiting the travel agency whenever I was planning a trip. I enjoyed good service and traveled in comfort, just like our senior management.

One day I asked my charming travel agent, Laura, out for lunch. Time flew, and I became more and more fascinated by her. Afterwards, we walked through Hyde Park, down Pitt Street, and past Circular Quay to The Rocks, Sydney’s Old Town. By the time we had wandered about The Rocks for a while, it was time for dinner. At sunset, we walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and, exhausted, got on the Underground at Milsons Point. It had been a perfect day and a perfect evening.

Laura was more than just a superb travel agent and a gorgeous young woman. She had the prettiest smile and when she looked at me with her big, brown eyes she made me feel there was nothing and no one else in the world that mattered to her just then. She made me trust her completely, and before I knew it, I had told her my life’s story and everything else I could think of, as well. Much later I was to find out that she acted as a similar sounding board for many of the people she met, and that, actually, being their confidant was a heavy ordeal for her. Keeping her eyes opened so wide gave her a headache, and the mental strain of sharing people’s deepest pains and secrets was a drain on her energies.

While her “clients” walked away relieved and refreshed, Laura was left to bear the burden of all those confidences. Some of the people she helped, I later learned, would become her friends; others were embarrassed at having bared themselves to a stranger, and would turn against her, often quite viciously. This was terribly unfair to her, as she never gossiped and had, in fact, gone out of her way to do the person a service, but she always overcame her disappointment at such rejection.

As intensely as I had come to like Laura, I might have remained just another of her casual acquaintances: she tended not to become too attached to people. But I had my own ideas and persisted in courting her, and, in time, she came to consider me a not unwelcome part of her regular surroundings.

It turned out that Laura and I shared many interests, and during the summer that followed, we did a lot of sailing and bush walking together. Laura was one hundred percent a woman, and soon had me securely wrapped around her finger, which I didn’t mind at all. All the same, she was incredibly thoughtful and unselfish, and while she clearly liked having a big, strong man at her disposal that would do anything she wished, she also always had my interests foremost in her mind, and did nothing except what was best for all involved. Her ability to weigh all factors affecting a situation and think of long-term consequences put me, as a contingency planner, to shame, but if I tried to learn how she did it, she’d just shrug me off. This was something she did instinctively as a woman.

Over time, I discovered that Laura was, at the same time, a mother figure, a sensuous woman, and a little girl. She could be totally vulnerable or hard as flint, as the situation demanded. She would get utterly absorbed in whatever she was doing, but in the process, she could put on any kind of face like an actress. Her style and taste were of a royal kind. Laura got whatever she wanted from authorities, vendors, and professionals: she had immense courage and was impossible to ignore.

Laura’s keen sense of smell would end up doing wonders for my personal hygiene. Her hearing was incredibly acute, as was her peripheral vision. She always knew what was going on; she could tell what people across a noisy room were talking about, could see and smell what substances a person might have been addicted to, could predict the lines TV and movie actors and

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actresses were going to say at every stage of a plot. I sometimes thought that Laura could read people’s minds, and, apparently, she felt this was quite normal, for when she wished for something for herself, she often didn’t say anything, preferring that I surprised her by thinking of it on my own.

As we compared experiences and went places, I found out that Laura had survival skills of every kind: she could bargain in the market, she could grow her own food and raise her own animals, and she was a superb cook. I adored her and thought of her as the best companion I could ever have. I was in love.

Following a marvelous summer with Laura, I was faced with a difficult decision. I had been saving up for a vacation for a long time, and, after nine years of working for my employer, I thought the time was right to go. I wanted to travel around the world without a specific itinerary, like so many young Australians before me, and learn all I could from mingling and living with people in many parts of the globe. The political developments in Europe at the time made me want to leave sooner rather than later, but I felt terrible about going without Laura. In her usual sovereign manner, Laura settled the matter for me.

“You go alone, Gregory,” she said. “Meeting people is much easier when you’re on your own: a couple always turns toward each other and tends to put outsiders off. I get all the free travel I can use: when you come to a place where you want to stay for a while and you feel like seeing me, give me a call and I’ll be there.”

Laura made all the sense in the world, and I felt great. Then she ruined it all by looking at me with her “little girl” expression, snuggling up to me, and saying, “I’ll miss you.”

You know the rest. Thanks for your time.

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