Strange days indeed, as “truth and reconciliation commissions” took hold in the human family, which finally sought to shake off the past. Strange days indeed, when people valued a public airing and admission of the truth above so much else that still needed to be done. . . .

  When President Jeb Prescott was sworn in after the three-party elections of 2084, he appointed me to replace Judge Thomas, and I was confirmed by the Senate’s mercy, along with Harriet Miers, newly rejuvenated with only a small loss of memory to replace the recently committed John Paul Stevens. I then spoke these grateful words:

  “I, Alberto Gonzales, tried and rehabilitated by the Hague Tribunal, and newly recommitted to our Constitution and to International Law, now take office as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.”

  This, of course, was where I needed to be, but not as an Associate Justice. Briefly angered, I know now that a rational Providence had only prepared a more careful way for me to my rightful place.

  My time as a criminal, when I was Attorney General in the first decade of the twenty-first century, remains a great lesson to me—to go with whomever or whatever gets you there. That was my way from the time George W. Bush made me his general counsel in the mid-1990s, then appointed me Secretary of State in Texas in the late ’90s, and then gave me a place on the Texas Supreme Court until 2000, before making me his White House Counsel and finally Attorney General of the United States in 2005.

  It is from this last service that I most regret my actions. What was I thinking? What was he, my previous self, thinking? I am not the man I was decades ago, the man who needlessly, as it turned out, supported torture and termed the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and “obsolete,” who denied the intent of habeas corpus in our very own Constitution, who agreed to warrantless domestic wiretapping of Americans, who wrote capital punishment briefs for Bush when he was governor of Texas that made it impossible for the future planetary boy king, as he was called by his critics, to pardon anyone on death row. I was the one who smiled into the television cameras in such a sickly way that millions of Americans developed an unkindly hatred of me. As a Roman Catholic I regret that most of all, that my face brought out so much hatred in my fellow Americans. Hatred is not good.

  I always gave George what he wanted, and he nicknamed me Fredo, after the weak and traitorous brother executed by Michael Corleone in those frightening “Godfather” movies. What was that all about? That he would have me killed if I refused to be a “yes man?” I was glad to be one, so why the obvious threat on my life?

  I remember what it was to be that man, and what it took to open his eyes and change him, as the shadows of the future took on substance and grew teeth. Justice needs teeth, but they need time to grow. Our history is a teething child, but I imagined that I could make of it what I wished, around myself and my family, as if I could repeal gravity. The junta told me, especially Karl Rove, that they could do anything, even make two and two equal five.

  But the teeth of justice have deeper roots than those who pull them, and they grew back, I learned when I was released from prison, where they gave me new organs and increased my modest intelligence. Without this help I would not have understood Vice President Cheney’s death, Bush’s pardoning of Wolfy, Rummy, Rice, Rove, Libby, and himself, with many others, just before his disappearance. Oh, how I repent of the man I was. I am not he, and never will be again! Never, never, never!

  But now the Twelve have chosen Jesus One as their candidate and another, Jesus Two, as his vice president, and despite being banned from running for office, Jesus One has proclaimed that the two of them will win on a write-in.

  My time has come. Chief Justice Roberts has resigned in despair, saying that he now knows too much to function with a clear conscience. I have taken his place, and our court stands ready.

  Is theocracy the worst form of government, as some have claimed? Where are values to be found? Where does the buck of moral judgment stop? Where should it stop?

  My conscience whispers to me that the rule of Jesus would make all courts unnecessary—for no one would govern us better than the Son of God, if he would truly come to us, and stay. If we could truly know that it was He, we would rejoice that there is a being in whom all problems dissolve, from whom we can learn how we should live and what we should know about our universe, because he loved us enough to send us a savior out of his own cosmic body, to die at our hands in payment for our sins, past present and future, and to show us that death is nothing to fear.

  But Jesus One and Two are not the Sons of God. On their tour before the court’s decision went against them, they proclaimed their social agenda of so-called love and sharing; but this professed goal is not of the Kingdom of Heaven. One and Two would take everything from the strong and leave them with nothing but insults about rich men and camels unable to pass through the eyes of needles. The Twelve have insisted that they will not bargain with private wealth and privilege, give no preference to prideful individuals and families whose hearts hold back allegiance to universal love and sharing. The Twelve only lie to us when they say that theirs is a kingdom not of this world, because it will take our world from us if their ways are accepted.

  If they seize the presidency, my court will strike down the election. If by some strange chance they take office and attempt their destruction of our history, my court will strike down their laws. For only ours is the kingdom that is One with God.

  Twelve legal crosses await the imposters.

  2007

  Settlements

  A worthy successor to the grand idea SF of Olaf Stapledon and the philosophically literate Stanislaw Lem, George Zebrowski writes with an uncompromising vision and a firm pen. His early masterpiece, Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia, was included in the Library Journal’s list of the best 100 SF novels of all time, while his newest novel, Brute Orbits, won the 1999 John W Campbell Memorial Award. A tireless crusader for excellence in science fiction, George was quoted in Science Fiction Weekly as saying, “Be critical, give warning, but also show constructive possibility. Failures, of course, make for more drama. But the utopian/dystopian pendulum swing of SF since Frankenstein was published is the way to go. It’s only when the pendulum stops that we should worry about the health of the field.”

  I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.

  —Leo Tolstoy

  Jefferson James sat with the small tactical nuke in his right leg, his mind settled and ready to make the final decision. A year after he had lost his leg to a terrorist bomb he had left field operations and returned to low-level diplomacy, where his leashed tongue was trusted by his superiors and his opposite numbers. It occurred to him as he waited that he was either a fool or the most important man in all history.

  “This is what you get for serving your political criminals,” his fiancée had said one day as she stared at the stump of his leg.

  “Criminals?”

  “Liar! The powerful steal from everyone—and we all connive with them to survive! You work for the thieves—from a desk. God knows what you did before!”

  “It’s the leg, isn’t it?” he had said. “But I’ll wear this dead one only until they grow my own.”

  “Sure they will. You’ll never have a truthful leg to stand on until you get a new brain!” She had raged for a week and then left him. For a better thief. How could it be otherwise—if what she said was true?

  Now, as he waited for the meeting to start, he felt unsuited to talk to the aliens. No one was and no one could be, and the impossible moment waited just up ahead in the orderly divisions of time, freeing him to say anything, constructive or not. Talk for effect, agree to nothing, he had been told.

  He tried to believe that he was here on his own, free of the person in his files. It was the only way to care now for a world that was ready to go on without him. How much time did he have to care? He could choose any moment after the meeting started. It was the only freedom left to him outside his thoughts.

  Waiting, he wondered if a sum ever came out differently without errors in the addition. Maybe there was something he had overlooked, that everyone had overlooked. A faraway hope whispered to him that he wanted to live and heal into the new leg grown out of his own cells. They had long delayed that miracle, because life spans doubled by perfect replacement parts would diminish the power of the topmost. A leg had waited for him instead of a bride—but in his present state of mind he would gladly take a leg instead of a bride, and success over his life. She had been right, of course, up to a point, but that was just the way things were, and it was difficult to see how else humankind might have risen out of the subsistence poverty of nature, which was content to let an organism become just healthy enough to reproduce before it died; no wonder that the first few to achieve a surplus made pigs of themselves. One day all the horror of that first human climb would have to be redeemed.

  There, he told himself, that was settled, as he thought of 2029, the first year of his prosthetic, a number obscuring numberless and differently noted histories, as the many still struggled in the grip of the few (who had learned well from the insurgencies of the many), and the year in which the alien breadboxes had appeared. Three in North Africa, where they were taken for a new form of impregnable American base; one in Germany, whose zealots hailed it as the long-awaited return of the wonder-weaponed Fourth Reich and demanded the dissolution of the government; near Colorado’s NORAD-Space Command, where they were declared to be inflatable confusions raised by protestors; three around Shanghai, where a bitter old architect insisted that they were his very own mental projections; three around Moscow, which wisely said nothing; and one in the Australian outback, to which frenzied citizens rushed with the hope of buying tickets to an apotheosis, or at least to an extravaganza of happy revelations.

  White rectangular boxes a thousand meters long and half that across. No comings and goings. No communications, despite officious government lies about being “directly in touch,” while people within a hundred kilometers or more insisted that they heard a soft starsong calling for them to “gather ‘round.”

  “Once they get a toehold, we won’t be able to drive them out,” Jefferson was told.

  “Can we now?” he asked. More of a foothold than a toehold, it was an insult to the power of the world’s hierarchies, whose client states began to doubt their allegiances as they called their anxious masters on secure lines from undisclosed locations for their usual daily instructions and were told to do nothing. Bunkered high officials took their calls in panic and anger, but gave no advice except to wait. Were the major states ready to collaborate, even surrender if it meant retaining their positions? asked the lesser states. Ballets of fearful ifs danced through the houses of power, and the word came down that no collaboration would be tolerated.

  Wounded but doggedly loyal, doubts had wandered into Jefferson James as climate change slowed, diseases died, sterile oceanic zones filled again with life, and a large asteroid missed the Earth. The sway of the fossil fuel families weakened as alternatives surged into a truly free market. Adam Smith and Karl Marx smiled in their graves as officialdom denied that the alien presence had anything to do with these long-planned improvements, but seized the various black boxes into which anything electrical might be plugged with no limits on amperage or voltage output—and found empty “quantum vacuum wells” that unnerved older physicists and happily awed younger ones. Several smaller nations claimed these innovations to be the result of their own secret efforts.

  The topmost fewest whispered amongst themselves that they were no longer the masters of the many. Too much “peace and plenty” withered power. More for the many, less for the few undermined the very meanings of “more” or “less.”

  “We won’t let it happen!” they had cried in secret conclave, trembling before the likely loss of domains so carefully interlocked with other topmosts—and had declared the alien structures to be illegal settlements.

  There was no choice left but to safely bomb from on high.

  But the wondrous boxes were not breached by even the cleanest of clean bombs in the most acute angular strikes. The humiliation of the fewest festered as their bottom-feeding clients awaited a new master. In desperation, the fewest of the few hand-carried a message to the domes on large posters, in every language:

  CAN WE TALK?

  “Of course,” answered a female voice, heard everywhere.

  “Where?” asked the startled UN secretary-general, addressing the air in front of his newly renovated glass building. Buried strategists had pushed him forward to carry a sign for the planet. “Where?” he had asked again.

  “Anywhere. All will hear.”

  “Couldn’t we . . . keep this . . . private?”

  “We are being heard everywhere in the world’s commons. But if you like, come to the Central Park Zoo Cafeteria in New York City.”

  Three need-not-to-know delegates were sent with the nuke in Jefferson’s leg. If you can’t beat an enemy’s weapons, you must defeat the occupiers face-to-face and not count the cost. We must do what they least expect, he was told as they readied him for this sacrifice of one for the many, including the topmost, however one felt about the mass of humankind, his lost bride included.

  He looked up as four figures walked into the bright, windowed daylight of the cafeteria—tall, healthy-looking humanoids with olive skin and short brown hair, two men and two women, it seemed to Jefferson James. They glided in with an irritating arrogance, sat down on the other side of the large wooden picnic table, and smiled.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “And by what right have you built . . . put these things on our homelands?” asked Hugo Herbert, the pale German at his right.

  “Please realize,” said John Ke, the tall Chinese delegate whom everyone also knew as an acceptable Russian double agent, “that we feel strongly about your uninvited presence.”

  “There was no need to use weapons against us,” said one female, and they all smiled like sophisticated children.

  We won’t apologize for anything we do, Jefferson wanted to say but restrained himself. “Who are you?” he demanded again. “And where have you come from?”

  The second, plainer-faced female said, “From here, half a million years ago.”

  “Impossible!” cried Hugo after a silence.

  The Chinese speaker said, “We are the oldest.”

  “The evidence is beneath the domes,” said one of the males. “But we offer our genome for examination, if you wish. We would not be able to converse easily if we were not from here.”

  Still startled, Jefferson asked, “But why would you want to come back?”

  “Sentiment,” said the second male.

  “Our roots,” said the first woman.

  Jefferson labored to laugh. “With all your obvious advances, you are moved by . . . sentiment?”

  The woman smiled and said, “Some of us, but sentiment and sympathy are the basis of ethics, as you may well know.”

  “Well, it’s one theory,” Jefferson said, and felt useless; the aliens had already enforced their will and were capable of much more even if a few of them died here.

  “You have no rights here,” he said calmly, wondering if his superiors would advise him through the implant or rely entirely on his judgment. The matter had been left open.

  “How long will you stay?” asked Hugo.

  “For as long,” said the first male, “as the need sings within us.”

  “Sings?” asked Ke.

  “Sings!” cried Hugo. “Who are you, really, and why did you leave, as you claim?”

  “We were helped,” said the first woman.

  “And our ancestors were left behind?” said Ke.

  “A small population at the time,” she said.

  So there are at least two humanities, Jefferson thought. Maybe more, if all this was true. “Who or what helped you?” he asked.

  “We don’t know much about them,” the second woman said.

  “Tell us what you do know,” Jefferson said.

  “Quantum-field trollers, you might call them,” she said, “but they rarely interfere.”

  “More than enough,” whispered Hugo.

  Jefferson said, “And they . . . helped only a few?”

  “Enough.”

  “What were they?” he asked.

  “We never saw them.”

  “But why did they take you?”

  She said, “To string intermediaries between emerging forms of intelligent life.”

  “And you’re here to add us to the string?” Jefferson asked. Or reattach a lost piece, he thought.

  “Perhaps.”

  So there was a purpose, an uncertain one, Jefferson thought as he scratched his phantom limb. The ghost behind the interim prosthetic had not visited him for some time. Cutting free an earlier sample of humankind was a survival strategy, but there might still be another motive beyond stringing neighborhoods across the cosmos.

  “But this is absurd,” he said. “Half a million years invalidates all rights of return.”

  The second man said, “You are getting much better at destroying yourselves.”

  “And you will save us?” Jefferson said.

  “Do we ask permission to aid the injured?” asked the first woman.

  “Please request our help,” said the second man.

  Jefferson looked blankly at him. Odd responses, misunderstanding, stupidity, or a hidden purpose?