Michael smiled, and Malenfant heard voices.

A.D. 2051:

In Britain, and other parts of the European Federal Union, God

is dead. Or if not dead, irrelevant.

Believe me, Monsignor, I know. I just got back from a year’s assignment in London. Religious practice and belief has genuinely collapsed, on a mass scale.

It’s clear that the absorption of the Carter message in some corners of the world has led to a kind of group despair, the feeling that nothing is worth struggling for. In Britain, this is manifesting itself in a denial of any external basis for moral action. Essentially the Brits are redesigning the moral basis of their community. They are appealing to such philosophical doctrines as ethical relativism, the weighing of moral codes relative to each other and not against any imagined absolute; and emo-tivism, action on a gut response to injustices and so forth; and prescriptivism, reliance on the announcement of appropriate moral standards based on human authority without appeal to a higher or external source.

That the British state is holding together at all, that it hasn’t all lapsed into barbarism or chaos, is probably some kind of tribute to the basic British character. But then, just as the Brits were the first industrial society, so they became, arguably, our first postin-dustrial culture. Similarly they are comparatively recently postimperial. Now they seem to be becoming the first truly postreligious nation.

Strange that a country we think of as being staid and old fashioned should once more be forging the way into an unknown future.

Will the Brits survive? Will they tear each other apart? I find myself hoping they have a chance to grope their way out of this darkness, to find the end of their story, before the curtain falls on us all in a couple of hundred years — assuming it’s all gloomily true, of course.

But maybe these are controversial views for a Jesuit. We are all, after all, missionaries.

I’m recommending that the Vatican fund further missions, a presence. We have to go in there and talk about God, as well as study this new phenomenon. But how much good it will do — or even what good means in this context — is hard to judge…

A.D. 2079:

You must not be alarmed. You must understand why extreme force was required to quell the unrest in this neighborhood. Orientation classes like this are provided as a service to help you come to terms with the losses you have suffered, and your long-term injuries.

Unrest is fueled by nostalgia for an imagined “better time,” when America governed herself, when there was economic growth and fast cars and cheap food, and so forth.

But you must not be nostalgic. Nostalgia is harmful.

Look at the big picture. Earth has passed through the Malthu-sian bottleneck. We avoided major war, and more than three billion souls have passed into a better future. The others, on the whole, met their end with dignity, and we salute them.

Today Earth is stable.

We have become a closed-loop economy, a giant spaceship. From the surface of the Earth, raw materials production and energy production have all but disappeared, along with the damage they did — particularly pollution through mining, refining, transportation, combustion, waste disposal. It is important to understand that the amount of key commodities such as metals and glass in circulation at any moment is constant. The only requirement is an input of energy, which is largely provided from the orbiting solar power plants and the quark-nugget installations.

Certainly there are costs. The standard of living of some is not as high as it once was. But the standard of living of us all is about equivalent to the well-off of Soviet Russia, circa 1970: that is, beyond the dreams of much of humankind for much of our history.

Economic growth is not possible. But growth was always an illusion, bought only by exploiting other people or the Earth’s irreplaceable resources or burning up our children’s future. Now we are mature.

Consider the indicators the UN uses to measure our wealth and happiness today.

We count more than simple economic facts. We measure the health and education and even the joy of our children. We consider the beauty of our poetry and our art, the strength of our families, the intelligence and integrity of our public debate. In a very real sense we are measuring our courage, wisdom, learning, and compassion: everything that makes life worth living. And by every such measure the world is a better place.

You are not as free as your grandfather was to foul up the neighborhood, or to own three cars. But what would you want with such freedoms?

Some say the UN has become undemocratic. But the control required to run the planet today would be impossible without the powerful central authority wielded by the UN.

What would happen to us without central control?

Remember the lesson of history. Easter Island — remote, cut off — was a close analogy to our present situation, a human population essentially isolated within a finite resource.

The islanders bred until they destroyed their biosphere. Then, starving, they almost killed each other off in the resulting wars.

So do not mourn freedom. Freedom was an illusion, paid for by the death of others less fortunate. Today you have the freedom to live in peace, and not to starve.

Support us. We will save you from yourself. After all, without us things would be a lot worse.

And, incidentally, Peacekeepers are not police. They merely reinforce the popular will. There is a difference.

AD. 2102:

But what we call the biosphere — yes, make a note of the word — was left badly depleted before the end. There was a great wave of » extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?

The sea fared a little better than the land. We lost some species, mostly from overfishing and from the dumping of pollutants and washed-off topsoil in the shallow waters around the coastlines. But today things are fairly stable. In fact there are enhanced cephalopods, squid and octopuses, managing the big undersea farms for us now.

Still, it was a severe extinction, in historical terms. Worse than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago. Not as bad as the one at the end of the Permian.

Now, of course, we live in a world where evolution has been ended, and the future depends on conscious management by…

No, Maisie, I never saw a chimp or a gorilla, so I can’t tell you what it would have been like. Now you are the only surviving primate species. Anyhow I’m just an e-person. I don’t know how it would have felt to meet your cousin like that: like you, yet not quite you.

I can make a guess, though.

A.D. 2147:

So there are sixty years to go before the Carter firework show and the population is increasing, despite all the UN can do to discourage us.

It sure is in my house.

What, you’re surprised?

Look, for a long time many people accepted the UN below-replacement-number childbirth guidelines — and a lot even went further, having no kids at all because they were depressed about the future. That is, they didn’t expect there to be any future. It seemed unfair, maybe even immoral, to bring kids into a situation like that.

After all, you never treated anyone unfairly by leaving them unborn, because they never existed to suffer in the first place. Right?