“We’ll have to work something out,” he said. “Can’t we?”
“Yes.” She’d paused to kiss his shoulder. “But not if it risks some blue-nosed bigot locking you up for conduct unbecoming, or convinces the admiral’s staff that I’m a two-kopek whore they can grope or safely ignore, which isn’t too far from what some of them think already.”
“Who?” Martin rolled over to face her, his expression grim. “Tell me—”
“Ssh.” She’d touched a finger to his lips, and for a moment, he’d found her expression almost heartbreaking. “I don’t need a protector. Have their ideas been rubbing off on you?”
“I hope not!”
“No, I don’t think so.” She chuckled quietly and rolled against him.
Martin was sitting alone in his cabin some days later, nursing wistful thoughts about Rachel and a rapidly cooling mug of coffee, when somebody banged on the hatch. “Who’s there?” he called.
“Mail for the engineer! Get it in the purser’s office!” Feet hurried away, then there was a cacophony from farther down the corridor.
“Hmm?” Martin sat up. Mail? On the face of it, it was improbable. Then again, everything about this voyage was improbable. Startled out of his reverie, he bent down and hunted for his shoes, then set out in search of the source of the interruption.
He didn’t have any difficulty finding it. The office was a chaotic melee of enlisted men, all trying to grab their own mail and that of anyone they knew. The mail had been copy-printed onto paper, sealed in neat blue envelopes. Puzzled, Martin hunted around for anyone in charge.
“Yes?” The harassed petty officer in charge of the sorting desk looked up from the pile he was trying to bundle together for transfer to the His Majesty’s courier ship Godot. “Oh, you. Over there, in the unsorted deck.” He pointed at a smallish box containing a selection of envelopes; missives for the dead, the mad, and the non-naval.
Martin burrowed through the pile, curious, until he came to an envelope with his name on it. It was a rather fat envelope. How odd, he thought. Rather than open it on the spot, he carried it back to his cabin.
When he opened it, he nearly threw it away immediately: it began with the dreaded phrase, “My dear Marty.” Only one woman called him that, and although she was the subject of some of his fondest memories, she was also capable of inspiring in him a kind of bitter, anguished rage that made him, afterward, ashamed of his own emotions. He and Morag had split eight years ago, and the recriminations and mutual blame had left a trench of silence between them.
But what could possibly have prompted her to write to him now? She’d always been a very verbal person, and her e-mails had tended to be terse, misspelled sentences rather than the emotional deluges she reserved for face-to-face communications.
Puzzled, Martin began to read.
My Dear Marty,
It’s been too long since I last wrote to you; I hope you’ll forgive me. Life has been busy, as they say, and doubly so, for I have also had Sarah to look after. Shes growing very tall these days, and looks just like her father. I hope you’ll be around for her sixteenth birthday …
He stopped. This had to be an elaborate joke. His ex-wife seemed to be talking about a child — their child — who didn’t exist. And this was nothing like her style! It was almost as if someone else, writing from a dossier of his family history, was trying to—
He began to read again, this time acutely alert for hidden messages.
Sarah is studying theology at college these days. You know how studious she’s always been? Her new teacher Herman seems to have brought her out of her shell. She’s working on a dissertation about Eschatology; she insisted that I enclose a copy for you (attached below).
The rest of the letter was filled with idle chatter about fictional friends, reminiscences about trivial and entirely nonexistent shared memories and major (presumably well-documented) ones, and — as far as Martin could see — a content-free blind.
He turned to the “dissertation.” It was quite long, and he pondered Herman’s wisdom in sending it. Did New Republican schoolchildren write eight-page essays about God? And about God’s motives, as far as they could be deduced from the value of the cosmological constant? It was written in a precious, somewhat dull style that set his teeth on edge, like an earnest student essay hunting for marks of approval rather than a straight discursive monograph asserting a viewpoint. Then his eyes caught the footnotes: 1. Consider the hypothetical case of a power that intends to create a localized causality violation that does not produce a light cone encompassing its origin point. (We are implicitly assuming a perfectly spherical zone of sinfulness expanding at velocity c with origin at time TO.) If the spherical volume of sinfulness does not intersect with the fourspace trajectory of the power’s initial location, we are not dealing with an original sin. Consequently we do not expect the Eschaton to condemn the entire sinful civilization to damnation, or a Type II supernova; redemption is possible. However, damnation of the sinful agency that causes the causality violation is required.
He skipped down the page and began underlining significant words and phrases.
2. Does the Eschaton always intervene destructively? The answer is probably “no”. We see the consequences of intervention in issues of original sin, but for every such intervention there are probably thousands of invisible nudges delivered to our world line with subtlety and precision. The agency by which such nudges are delivered must remain unknown for them to be effective. They probably flee the scene after intervention, hiding themselves in the teeming masses. The agency may even work in concert with our own efforts, as Eschaton-fearing human beings, to ensure no violations exist. It is possible that some Eschatologically aware government agencies may assist the Eschaton’s secret friends, if they are aware of their presence. Others, secret agents of sinful powers, may attempt to identify them by evidence and arrest them.
Well, that was all fairly instructive. Steganographic back channels generally irritated Martin, with their potential for misunderstandings and garbled messages, but in this instance, Herman was being quite clear.
Distrust the New Republican secret police. Possible help from other agencies — did that mean Rachel?
No retaliation against the New Republic itself: that was a big weight off his conscience, for however much he might dislike or despise their social affairs, they didn’t deserve to die because of their leader’s inability to deal with an unprecedented problem. However, one last footnote remained impenetrable, however he tried to understand it:
3. Of course, few people would contemplate breaking the law of causality without at least a very major apparent threat. One wonders what the invisible helpers of the Eschaton might do when confronted with the need to prevent a causality violation in the face of such a threat? At that point, they may find themselves with split loyalties: on the one hand, to defend the prime law of the anthropic cosmos, while at the same time, not wanting to surrender their misguided but nevertheless human peers into the claws of a great evil. Under these circumstances, I feel sure the Eschaton would tell its agents to look to their fellow humans’ interests immediately after preventing the rupture of space-time itself. The Eschaton may not be a compassionate God, but it is pragmatic and does not expect its tools to break in its service. However, the key issue is determining which side is least wrong. This leads us deep into the forest of ethics, wherein there is a festival of ambiguity. All we can do is hope the secret helpers make the right choices — otherwise, the consequences of criticism will be harsh.