Uncle Kevin said it would be all right, but it was not. Everyone was sick. Everyone had died a little, inside. The ship was sick. Doctor Cynthia was sick. But she crawled to Grampa Horace’s side. She did things. She was his Doctor. He just lay there, on his back. But then I could hear him again. I thought: he is a very old Grampa. He should have died. It is too soon. I don’t know anything. What will I do, if my Grampa dies? What will I do without Doctor Cynthia beside his bed?

I went back to him. He did not speak. I just listened. I did my best, but I cried and cried. Uncle Kevin could not hear. Doctor Cynthia could not hear. But I thought MaMa could hear. And MaPa, and Auntie Omar, and Sir Eudoxus. I wanted them all to know: I am doing my Duty. I will do my Duty. Even this horrible sickness will not make me stop my Duty. I will not leave his side.

And then Uncle Kevin said he would do it again. Make the ship accelerate. Squash Grampa Horace down into his bed, so he could not even breathe. They were talking about the Eye. They were talking about a jump through the Eye. It would kill him! So I jumped first! I jumped as hard as I could, and hit Uncle Kevin in the chest, and said, “NO! Not Again!” But Grampa said “Here, Ali Baba,” so I went. And then the Engineers moved Doctor Cynthia’s travel couch right next to Grampa Horace’s bed. I hid my head under Grampa’s arm, and just listened. And then we jumped again.

This time, she was there. Doctor Cynthia. She was a Doctor, but she could talk to everyone too. And when the others were gone, she often talked to Grampa Horace. Uncle Kevin passed out, but she never did. I never did. She breathed for him. Breathed for Grampa. I heard her breath go into him, and come back out again. Again, and again. Again, and again. I thought there is a machine for this. But I also knew: she is doing her Duty. She is doing her Duty for him.

I could hear his heart. It never stopped. It boomed. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. On and on it pounded. I timed my breathing to it. I timed my breathing to her breathing for him. And then I heard his breath go into her. Again and again. Again and again. I was sick and afraid with joy. I thought: it is over now. It is done. He will be safe.

Even when Uncle Kevin said “Cynthia, how much can he stand.” Grampa answered. He said: “Anything. Kevin. Do what you must It is now in the hands of Allah.” I did not know who Allah was, but his heart was so strong. Grampa’s heart was strong. They all still listened to him. Whatever he said, they listened, and so did I.

3

Sanctum, Sanctus, Sancta

On the other hand, we shall expect to find that the influence of Calvinism was exerted more in the liberation of energy for private acquisition. For in spite of all the formal legalism of the elect, Goethe’s remark in fact applied often enough to the Calvinist: “The man of action is always ruthless; no one has a conscience but an observer.”

—Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Makassar

Asach stared out into the dusk, awaiting the first twinkling stars. People were clearly the problem, always and everywhere. People were unfixed, and needed fixing. Unfixed in place, in time, in purpose; unfixed in principle or intent. Unfixed in their aims or views or desires or even likes and dislikes.

Or, alternatively, entirely fixed, in all these things. People were, generally speaking, slippery and contrary things: saying one thing, doing another, and oblivious to the contradiction. Generally speaking, the only things truly fixed about them was rut and routine. Ruts so deep that they never peered out to any horizon.

And down there in their little ruts they stayed, bored and boring, changing aims and principles alike in a daily quest for the preferential familiar. Familiarity substituting for—Asach was going to write “character,” but stopped to ponder this presumption. A preference for the known defined character, rather than negating it. Familiarity was not a substitute for character at all. Merely for purposefulness. Familiarity was a substitute for purpose—or at least for purpose of the rut-busting sort.

Hence the need for fixing. Down there in the deep well of rut-ness, a few found true solace and contentment, but in Asach’s experience most found a deep well of resentment, and spent a good part of every waking day trying to affix this resentment on some blameworthy party.

Which was tough news for Asach, now fixed to a purpose, which the unfixed smelled like hot blood at a fresh kill. Asach the finally-motivated, the living contradiction of rut-ness, the past practitioner of constant movement, the perfect focus for veritable wellsprings of hostility. Asach, bearer of the unforgivable flaw: Asach, the different. Asach underlined different.

And yet, somehow, to Asach they trooped (and always had done) for fixing—hence the decades-long stream of reportage. At this juncture, some days Asach simply wanted to stand up and scream: go see for yourself! Open your eyes, open your ears, open your petrified, suburbanized, rut-encrusted brains and for once in your predictable life, think! But knowing better: knowing the sheltered [fill in class name here] class’s insatiable thirst for talking to itself about other people, out there, unseen beyond the rut, Asach, hermeneutic chronicler extraordinaire, donning keyboard and point-of-view, would set out once again to explain.

Yes, the food is different here. No, those people over there are not criminals. They are just poor. In this [village, town, city, country, planet] those are not the same thing. Ad nauseum. A lot of the explaining was more prosaic, having to do with enabling a warehouse operations chief to talk to an ITA implementation team, but it all boiled down to the same thing: amazing but true, other people do not live in your rut! They live in a different rut!

The explanation went that this made them actually different. But in Asach’s mind, the opposite was the case: they were all exactly—exactly—the same. Hide-bound, parochial, inexperienced, defensive, and, generally speaking, hostile, although they papered that over with varying degrees of hubris. In need of fixing.

It was late evening. The soft air and crickets recalled so many other evenings, filled with crickets, or peepers, or cicadas, or all three. A lot had changed in Makassar over thirty-five years. A lot more might have changed—and not for the better—if the ITA hadn’t originally dumped the Prince Samual’s World exiles into the most god-awful, pestilential armpit of the continent. Thankfully, MacKinnie’s successors were still fully occupied with re-creating Church, State, and the Silk Road among the winter-frozen peasantry scattered from Jikar to Batav. Which had the added benefit of occupying the jihadis allied against them, and leaving the warm, gracious, civilized realms of the Bungar delta to the (thankfully largely absentee) colonials and Tambar traders. The local wealth generated by all the movement of exotic woods, and spices, and coffee made life here quite comfortable indeed. And yet.

Asach underlined: fixing, and reassessed. So far, Pie, Coffee, People, Different, Fixing. Asach decided, personally, to head into the kitchen, fix some pie and coffee, and give up on this book thing. It just seemed safer that way. Asach was, generally speaking, profoundly tired of being different. It was probably a fair trade for the heaven-sent experience of knowing fifty-seven different ways to explain coffee, but right about now a little rut would be nice. Just a different rut. Somebody else’s rut. A rut that didn’t require so much fixing.