Tap-tap-tapping; peering, the screen glare casting his shirtfront with a bluish glow. He paused a moment. His brow furrowed slightly. He inhaled sharply. He stabbed the transmit key, sending his resume hurtling through the torrents with electronic certainty.
Then, staring blankly at his now-blank screen, he sat a while, still folded around his blue virtual space, while the rain sheeted in a solid grey mist through the trees.
There was a kind, hard edge to certainty. You could decide, right or wrong, but just decide, and then you stopped being virtual, and started being hard and certain as the rain-pelted trees. As certain as the peepers in their quest to spawn in the midst of a hurricane. The wind could blow and blow; the trees could lash; you could just laugh at the rain hitting the truck like a shower of lead pellets, and all of that became real and green and smellable, and not hunched and wavering and peering. One keystroke, and you could walk right through the screen and into another life.
New Scotland
They were back upstairs in the anteroom. Back at the table. This time, Rod Blaine was with them. Renner was not playing Renner. Neither was he smoking. Blaine said nothing, for a very long time. Jackson feigned relaxed, patient interest, but clearly he was bored, and tired, and wanted to go home.
Blaine’s fingers lay flat on the table, his thumbs wrapped beneath the edge. Still flat, they drummed a random, rhythmless sequence as he stared fixedly at the two men. Finally he seemed to reach some decision.
“I’d rather hoped that either one of you might have carried that debate.”
Jackson stopped feigning patience. Renner merely shrugged.
“Let alone both of you?”
Renner shrugged again. “You saw what it was. We made the pitch, and—”
“And lost control of the Commission. ”
Jackson was visibly irritated. “I’d hardly say lost control. You got your—representative—in, didn’t you?”
“My representative? How amusing. I should have thought Quinn was your representative?”
“Whatever. In any case—”
“Whomever. In any case, at the cost of showing my hand.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
Jackson widened his eyes and shook his head in mock abject ignorance. “Please! Do enlighten me!”
At this, Blaine’s thumbs slipped from beneath the table, and pressed into two thumb-shaped indentations on its edge. His fingers tapped that a-rythmic sequence again.
“Perhaps this will jar your memory. It is a report on the First Jackson Mission to New Utah. The so-called failed mission of 3035? When, according to your report, New Utah refused accession to the Empire? Was formally declared an Outie world? Anathema? Placed under permanent Trade Ban? Anyway, this is another report, written by someone Bury termed ‘useful to the Empire of Man.’ ”
Milky light glowed in a square just below the polished surface. Blaine dragged his fingers downward over the glow, twice, then dragged his index finger rightwards across a row, then tapped twice on a point about a hand’s breadth above his navel. Text appeared, floating in the milky haze. He placed one finger in each of the topmost corners, crossed his hands, and shoved his fingers across the table toward Renner. The text page rotated one-hundred eighty degrees, appearing right-side up to Kevin. Renner glanced at it briefly, then with two hands tapped once in the uppermost corners, then again to the left of the page. A copy appeared. With his left palm on the table, he shoved it toward Jackson, who reached out, dragged it palm-wise the rest of the distance, then re-oriented it.
Jackson was visibly annoyed that he’d been second-in-line for the handout. Until he began reading.
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
His Excellency Horace Hussein Bury
Sinbad
Eid-al-Fitr, 3035
My dear Abu Nadir,
A pleasure, as always, to find myself in your service. I trust this letter finds your family well.
Attached is my full report on the Jackson Mission to New Utah. I believe that you will find it interesting reading. Here follows a summary of the most salient issues.
Bottom line: The delegation is deeply divided, and have papered over their differences with the creative fiction that New Utah has “refused” accession to the Empire.
The reality: The New Utah True Church has become dominated by its paramilitary arm, the True Church Militant (TCM), over which the Elders of Maxroy’s Purchase have ever-diminishing, but desire total, control. Insofar as there is a New Utah planetary government, it is de facto the TCM. However, TCM authority does not penetrate deeply beyond Saint George, where it has nationalized city-state lands and therefore dominates most of the food supply. Whatever the Jackson delegation may report, the vast majority of New Utah’s citizens are at best barely aware of the Empire’s existence. The term “Outie” is a fiction conjugated by the TC on Maxroy’s Purchase, to divert attention from transgressions against the Empire perpetrated by external actors and their own paramilitaries.
Key issues: To boost short-term agricultural yields, the TCM has sanctioned return to “traditional” industrial agricultural practices, with predictable results. Soils surrounding Saint George are essentially dead, and the TCM is now dependent on commercial agrochemical inputs to maintain food production. As these must come from Maxroy’s Purchase, the True Church is desperate to maintain its monopoly on agricultural input deliveries—in order to maintain its hold over the TCM.
Most of the non-Mormon Saint George civil population, weary of the constant infighting among the TC/TCM factions, have drifted ever-further into the New Utah outback. I managed to travel as far as Bonneville, at the edge of TC authority on New Utah, where the TCM does collect annual “tithes,” but does not provide basic services. A vibrant Levantine quarter has grown up in the old Founder district there, with intermixed Muslim, LDS Sixer, Armenian, Chaldean, Fijian, and other Christian communities.
As you know, on Maxroy’s Purchase, following the self-proclaimed True Church purges of urban LDS Sixer wards around 175 years ago, missionaries from the New Ireland Church of Him made great inroads among the displaced victims of that pogrom. What is less well known (few on MP would admit to it), is that in 2965 these Purchase Himmists dispatched what they called “His Mission to Heaven” to New Utah. Most passed through Saint George, directly onward into the outback.
I am told that everything beyond Bonneville is “pilgrim country,” wherein not even the TCM holds sway. I did not manage to visit there, but did manage to speak with so-called “pilgrims” traveling incognito, en route to visit what they called their “gathering” in the outback. More they would not tell me, unless I joined them, which given time constraints I could not do.
Why, you are no doubt asking, am I conveying this colorful religious history? Because it is key to the factionalization within the Jackson delegation. “Pilgrim country” is clearly the source of opal meerschaum, on which the TCM depends for revenue to purchase agrichemicals. Yet, because of TC strictures, effectively only non-Mormons may travel and trade there. The Purchase TC position is that all Himmists are worse than non-believers: they are “excommunicants.” Therefore, no TC Mormon may missionize there, on pain of the same fate. They have got themselves into a real internal dilemma regarding church, state, and mammon—and any number of off-world opportunists (among them ITA entrepreneurs) have moved into that vacuum.