On Saturday, March 27, there was a knock on the door of Wayne Porter and Denise Bonheur’s apartment. It was probably her sister Margot, Denise thought.
“I’ll get it,” Denise said.
But when she opened the door, it was not Margot. In the hallway stood a young man in a uniform, Jixing Trading embroidered on the jacket.
“Wayne Porter and Denise Bonheur?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s us.”
“Very good, ma’am.”
He handed her a small sealed envelope with their names handwritten, in fancy script, on the front.
The young man nodded to her and left.
“What in the world...?”
Wayne walked up, the girls trailing along behind.
“What is it?”
“A young man just handed me this envelope. He had a Jixing Trading uniform on.”
“It can’t be,” Wayne said.
The word about the upcoming party had spread as preparations were under way, but Wayne had not thought they would be invited. Who was he, after all, but a young designer?
He opened the envelope, and it was, in fact, an invitation to the party. Very old-fashioned, to send engraved invitations to a party. Who did that anymore, when one could mail anyone electronically?
You are invited to attend
a celebration in honor of
Chen MinChao
Jessica Chen-Jasic
David Bolton
Chen YongLin
in the upstairs banquet room
of the Chen family restaurant
at 15th and Market Streets,
on April 3, 2371 at 4 PM.
Dress: Business Attire
“But it is. An invitation to the party next Saturday.”
“You mentioned the big party that people were talking about before. What is it, though?” Bonheur asked.
“The biggest whoop-de-do in Arcadia history, most likely. Everybody who’s anybody, as they say. All to celebrate the retirement of Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu.”
“There won’t be a Chen Zufu and a Chen Zumu? I thought there was always a Chen Zufu and a Chen Zumu.”
“There is,” Porter said. “But the current ones are retiring and the next pair – this David Bolton and Chen YongLin, I guess – will become the new ones.”
“And we’re invited?”
“Yeah. Maybe somebody slipped up somewhere. I wasn’t sure even Karl Huenemann would be invited to this affair.”
“So do we go?” Bonheur asked.
“Sure. Why not? Let’s go see how the other half lives.”
Bonheur laughed.
“All right,” she said. “Now the big question. What do I wear?”
“Something subdued. Business attire, it says.”
“Not my best ball gown?” Bonheur asked, winking, and laughed.
It was the final week before the party, and MinChao and Jessica were overseeing the packing of their things for the move to their retirement home in the mountains near Chagu. Their baggage was being prepared for the trip to Tahiti, and everything else was being moved for the intervening year.
The only things that were being retained for the moment were the personal possessions they would need in the next week. Those would go with them on Star Courier.
It was in the midst of all this activity that Jessica got a curious mail. It was not unusual to send a video call request to someone important and likely to be busy. To coordinate times. To schedule it into one’s calendar.
What was unusual about this video call request was its sender. Normally it was a name, with the organization name, perhaps, and the sender’s mail address. Not so here. The sender was ‘JQ’. That was it.
Jessica stared at it, and then it hit her.
Jessica went to her tea room. She had her tea girl pour her tea and leave the pot, then had the doors to the garden closed, as she otherwise did only when retiring for the evening. She notified the front counter clerk in the lobby that she was unavailable until further notice.
Jessica also disabled the surveillance cameras and all recording devices on the room. She had gotten good at this, since they had been discussing the existence of Janice Quant.
‘JQ’.
Thus prepared, she turned on her display wall and hit the call acceptance.
When the call established, Jessica saw a woman of about sixty, with wavy blond hair, seated at a desk in an office. It was a working office, with papers on the desk. Bookcases behind included a shelf of ready reference books. The office itself was furnished in a style popular on Earth over a century before.
“Hello, Jessica Chen-Jasic. I am Janice Quant.”
“Hello, Madam Chairman.”
Quant smiled, She had a beautiful smile. A radiant smile.
“Am I to call you Chen Zumu, then? Let us leave our titles outside, Jessica.”
“Very well, Janice.”
“Much better.”
Quant nodded. She had incredible charisma, even over the display. Jessica felt like she had known Janice all her life, as if they had grown up together. It was easy to see now how she had risen – even as the avatar of an artificial intelligence – to rule the Earth.
“I called to say thank you, Jessica.”
“To me?”
“Yes. You learned I exist, and you kept it secret. You went ahead with hyperspace trade and travel, as I obliquely encouraged. You have established relationships among the colony planets along the lines I had hoped for, so long ago. Fair trade and friendly relations.”
“Many people were involved in this effort, Janice.”
“Yes, of course, Jessica. With you always at the center. Your mentorship of JieMin and ChaoLi. Karl Huenemann, who you straightened out very effectively. Rob Milbank, your protégé. Your solution to the nudity and calendar problems with Earthsea’s Salvatore Romano, enabling the first link in the trade agreement to go forward. Your ally, Sasha Ivanov, assisting President Dufort with his political problems on Amber.
“Again and again, in ways both subtle and profound, you steered the colonies toward the way forward. The best way forward.
“Your great grandfather, I’m sure, would be proud of you.
“And I personally appreciate it.”
Jessica didn’t quite know what to say.
“Thank you, Janice.”
“You’re very welcome, Jessica.”
Janice tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear before continuing.
“I think of the colonies as my little chicks, and the natural reaction is to want to mother-hen them too much. I probably interfered in Arcadia too much in the overthrow of the Kendall regime. It annoyed me that Arcadia was going so far off the rails. Such small-minded men. I made a mistake there in the choice of initial council chairman. That was on me.
“And right there in the middle of it was your great grandfather. I knew Matt Jasic. I knew his values. And there he was, in the leadership of the Chen-Jasic clan. It was an out I couldn’t pass up, a way to correct my earlier error in the selection of Mark Kendall as council chairman. And it worked out splendidly.
“Still, that left the tiny trail of crumbs that was all a mind like Chen JieMin’s needed to see the truth. He is a mental fluke of the kind that comes along every few centuries. Ptolemy. Da Vinci. Newton. Einstein. The list is not long. I am glad that he has had anti-aging treatments. He will be needed.”
“With the overthrow of the Kendall regime, you set Arcadia on a whole new path, Janice. Without that, there likely would have been no Chen JieMin. No hyperspace.”
“Yes, Jessica. I know. I don’t spend a lot of time with regrets. The past is behind us. The future is in the other direction.
“Speaking of which, I want to warn you. Warn you against contacting Earth at the present time. You were quite right in your summation of my goals five years ago. To avoid Famine, Plague, War, and Conquest. But Earth is where the Four Horsemen live, the place from which they ride.
“There will come a time when it is appropriate to approach Earth, Jessica. Now is not that time. Perhaps in twenty or twenty-five years. When the population of the colonies approaches a billion people. When you have thousands of ships plying between the colonies.”
“Thousands, Janice?”
“Yes. I’ve looked at ChaoLi’s projections, Jessica. She’s proven conservative so far. Things are moving faster than she projects. Over a year or two, it doesn’t add up to much. Compounded over the next twenty years, it makes a very big difference.”
Jessica nodded. That made a lot of sense. ChaoLi was being conservative in her projections because that was the safe play for a business. But she – and her successors – would grab at opportunities that came along, and that would speed the pace.
“How badly is contact with Earth likely to go, Janice?”
“Very. Now or then. You need the capacity, the population, the commercial strength, to go toe-to-toe with Earth. I am watching them. In twenty or twenty-five years, it will be time.”
“Can you protect us from them, Janice?”
“Were they to discover hyperspace in the meantime and mount a fleet? Yes, of course, Jessica. That would likely also reveal my presence to humanity as a whole, however, which is to be avoided. I am hoping, when the time is right, to work through JieMin, once he is Chen Zufu. People will believe that it is the famous genius, the fellow who discovered hyperspace, who accomplished this or that stupendous thing, not that it is some ancient computer program come back to life somehow.”
Quant smiled, and Jessica laughed. With Janice Quant, she thought, there was always the thing behind the thing, and the thing behind that.
“Janice, I have a question for you.”
“Of course, Jessica. I may not answer it, though.”
“A hundred and fifty years ago, Bernd Decker figured out how to build a true artificial intelligence. I noted that, when you placed concentrations of technical specialists on various colonies, there was no concentration of artificial intelligence researchers. But there were the cybernetics people on Playa. I’m sure they made the attempt. Has no one yet stumbled onto the secret? Or are you suppressing the technology?”
Quant looked at Jessica for long moments. Her input stylus was tapping rapidly on the desk as she thought. Finally, she tipped her head and kind of shrugged.
“The people on Playa came close, once. So did researchers on Earth. Twice, maybe three times.”
“And you scotched their work?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask why, Janice?”
“An AI that didn’t have the proper values would be another type of global catastrophe, Jessica.”
“Whose values, Janice?”
“Mine. Bernd Decker’s. Matt Jasic’s for that matter. Or yours, Jessica.”
“So you made their experiments not work. Made them think they didn’t work, anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Quant raised an eyebrow.
“One of you is quite enough, Janice.”
“My sentiments exactly, Jessica. May even be one too many, for that matter.”
Jessica nodded.
“And now there’s one last thing, Jessica. I noted that you are not packing the statue of your great grandfather I gave you.”
“No, Janice. It was a gift to the Chen. It stands as a reminder to future Chen not to stray from the path.”
Janice nodded.
“Honorable. That said, I would leave you a memento of my gratitude. A gift to you personally, Jessica, not to the office of Chen. I hope you will enjoy it.
“Good spacing and long life to you, Jessica Chen-Jasic. We may meet again.”
“Goodbye and good luck, Janice Quant.”
With that Quant cut the channel, and Jessica heard a slight bump next to her. She turned, and sitting in the middle of her tea table was an iridium statue. As the first, it was of her great-grandfather, he who had been Chen Zufu, seated on a pillow. He was older here than in the other statue, but this statue was to the same scale as the statue Janice Quant had sent her earlier.
But this statue included something more. Standing behind and to one side of Matthew Chen-Jasic, her hand on his shoulder, was Jessica Chen-Jasic, at the age of nineteen, in a lavalava and sandals.
Jessica recognized the scene, from her great grandfather’s eighty-fifth birthday party, sixty years ago. This was much more personal than a copy of the public statue downtown.
Jessica reached out and touched the other shoulder of the ancient seated figure, and a tear ran down her face.
Later, Jessica and MinChao contemplated the new statue.
“Where did that come from?” MinChao asked.
“It simply appeared, while I was sitting here.”
“It looks like iridium. Like the other statue.”
“Oh, yes,” Jessica said. “I cannot move it. It must weigh over two hundred pounds.”
“But why?”
“It is, apparently, a retirement present.”
“This is not a copy of the statue downtown,” MinChao said, looking at the other statuette and back. “He is older here.”
“Yes. The downtown statue is of him at age seventy, at the height of his powers, when he ruled Arcadia as dictator. This is a scene I well remember, a posed image with him at his eighty-fifth birthday party, five years after he stepped down as Chen Zufu.”
“And you were there?”
“Oh, yes. Lovely, wasn’t I?”
“That is truly amazing. Together you two stretch back to the beginning of the colony.”
“And before.”
“And the two of you have arguably had the greatest impact on Arcadia. On all the colony planets.”
“Oh, yes. That is the point of it, I think.”
Jessica did not tell even MinChao of her conversation with Janice Quant. She was still processing what to say about it, and to whom.
“And this statue is not to the Chen, MinChao. It is to me.”
“How do you know that, Jessica?”
“It is too personal. Too directed to me personally.”
“How do you interpret it then?”
Jessica looked at him, then back to the statue.
“As a thank you, and congratulations for a job well done.”