“Ah, Excellency. It requires so much to run this household, and Michael—”
“Do not call me that. I work for a living.”
Asach’s voice had not risen one decibel. Nevertheless, all three men winced, but relaxed again under Asach’s jolly smile.
At which point, Lena arrived with tea, accompanied by a mountain of little cakes. They huddled together around a pretty stone table, dragged to the cool corner beside the waterfall. The Lads said nothing, and drank no tea, but finally removed their shades and wolfed their way through the mountain, pausing occasionally to cup a handful of water from the fountain.
The little man was Nejme Silelyan; Lena was his daughter. The tea-and-cake elf was his wife, Mena, who bubbled forth briefly, smothered the top of Asach’s head with kisses, then disappeared again, Lena in tow. The household was in a frenzy, preparing for a wealthy group expected the following evening. A small army, under Mena’s direction, was pressing linens; making beds; airing rooms; dressing suites. A group of what, the Lads could not quite make out: Asach and Nejme shifted among languages, none of them Anglic or Tok Pisin. The Lads did not ask. If they needed to know, they’d be told. If they did not need to know, it was best that they not find out.
“Michael of course resents having to—to—to—”
“To run a hotel?”
Nejme’s eyes sparkled. “For me, it is not so…it is only...it is a way, you know? but for Michael, it is—demeaning. Well, not demeaning, exactly, but—”
“Oh, I can imagine Michael’s views. Is that why he’s away?”
“Oh, no. Michael—”
But not wishing to tax Nejme’s hospitality, before the last cake was devoured, Asach rose, declined three offers to remain at table, and motioned The Lads to follow. They trudged up the stairs, then around a turning into an unrestored, ramshackle staircase that took them up to the flat, beaten-clay roof.
The view of the city was stunning. Up there, above the urban canyons, it was windy, and the night was turning cool. It was amazingly soothing to hear late evening traffic in the distance. Fireworks sparkled over some celebration or other further off in the hills. A wedding was going on down below, with attendant laughter, chatter, music, song, arrivals, departures, and fireworks of its own. Finally, a muezzin made the midnight call to prayer, the aching poetry of that timeless call to God washing over the sleeping Lads, who neither heard nor stirred. It was everything Asach remembered a wonderful time in New Utah to be: that easy-going mix of Mormon and Muslim; High Church and Himmist. Heaven, in fact.
What had happened?
Bonneville, New Utah
Next morning, after washing down nutty-flavored mush with hair-raising coffee (for Asach) and bright red tea (for the rest of the household), Asach sent The Lads on a payback mission. The house Stirling was acting up. It sucked up heat from a solar collector on the roof, and used it to pump water, power the house electrics, and run an air compressor for mechanical jobs. Or, it sucked up motion from the rooftop wind turbine, and used that to pump heat out of the house in the summer, and into the house in the winter. However, at the moment, it was doing none of these things with any great efficiency, providing The Lads with potential hours of fascination as they poured over house energetics diagrams.
If that failed, according to Nejme, there was a coop daisy field not far away? Set up on the bulldozed remains of an old industrial warehouse, with the collection tower retrofitted into the old crane deck? The daisies were small, self-orienting parabolic dishes. Anyone could add one (for a fee). Anyone could buy power from the coop (for an even bigger fee). But the coop had not yet wired this neighborhood, and Michael had not wanted to bear the expense, personally, of a rooftop line? So the house was dependant upon the (thankfully low-maintenance) Stirling? So if it needed a part, maybe The Lads could run down to the souk and get it fabricated? And if not, maybe lug some backup cells down to the daisy field, and wave their TCM badges around?
No problem, said Asach, and sent the ecstatic Lads off for a day of mechanical engineering. Meanwhile, Asach returned to the roof. The early morning sun had broken over the horizon, and its shadow was slowly climbing an opposite wall. Asach moved out of what was soon to be the shadow of the parabolic collectors that fed the house Stirling and kitchen cooker, spread the cloak out flat on the deck, then unzipped the hood.
From within the collar, Asach pulled a thin wire, ending in a connector. Asach then inverted the hood, and jerked a toggle near what had been the throat tie. The hood, now with a shiny side out, snapped into a rigid, octagonal shape, with stays connecting each point to the center. From the cloak facing, Asach extracted what looked like a disjointed snake. Another tug on its end, and this became a rigid staff, about a meter long, which socketed neatly into the center back of the hood-parabola. From a pocket, Asach extracted a pencil-sized tripod, which worked to stand and stabilize the staff.
Then, from the cloak hem, Asach extracted four objects, each the size of two thick thumbs. These fit together to form a four-pointed star, with another short staff that socketed into the dish center. Asach sat cross-legged, plugged the wire into the base of the dish antenna, wiggled the tripod around so that the whole thing faced roughly the opposite horizon, and then pulled back a flap on the cloak, revealing a flat keypad below a flexible view screen. Fishing around in a pocket, Asach found two nano-clips. One snapped into place on the back of the hood-dish; the second just above the keypad.
Asach waited for the sun to clear the roof and power the solar cloak. It climbed slowly. Asach daydreamed, and wondered about all those things, on all those worlds, that were known and unknown.
For example: Asach knew what a duck-billed platypus was. Asach knew about its leathery beak, aquatic habits, mammalian kinship, and bizarre reproductive habits, including now-forgotten details of courtship and its near-uniqueness among mammals of laying leathery eggs. The egg-laying somehow loomed larger than their absolute uniqueness among mammals of possessing venomous—spines? The method of poison delivery had dimmed, but Asach was nonetheless sure of the fact, despite never actually having seen one of the creatures, now a millennium away on another, unvisited world.
Sure. With an absolute, stalwart, evangelical faith, of the existence and hard, objective reality of the duck-billed platypus. It was reassuring to know that, on a distant planet, in a touchable closeness of memory, there lived sleek, furry little mammals that might be cute, save for their toxic, egg-laying, leathery qualities.
That Asach knew this was at the same time immensely disturbing, because Asach did not know why. The how was easy: it was depicted in school texts; there were explanatory panels at zoos (not that Asach ever saw an actual platypus there, either); there had been video excursions to a sort of duck-billed platypus theme park, which Asach found most bizarre. But why? Of all the things of this galaxy that are known or knowable, why, in the end, was it so sure, and so certain, and so ensured that Asach knew of the duck-billed platypus? Was there some hidden institutional wisdom in teaching the truth and palpability of a bizarre little creature, based upon the evidence of things unseen?
Asach was not at all sure that the Empire was—that Asach was—at all doing the right thing, on the right path, in the right way, here. Asach was not at all sure that the Empire was not merely planting seeds of disappointment. Asach was not at all sure that they had not made a cascading series of enormous mistakes, ending up in a backwater of obscurity, with nothing much to show for the dislocation and travail but the evangelical depths of a montoreme faith. See the platypus, and believe: anything can happen. Anything often does. Insh’ Allah.