The Distributive Passions

MEMORIES

1986: Meredith is ten years old, and they’re headed for the lakeshore. Yvette is on an errand to Gilead, where Gil Spooner is once again at war with the state waterways people. Days alone with Merry are a multiply-guilty pleasure, and a rare one. Today, he wishes she would chatter, as she so often does. He could use some of that generally infectious cheer. But she seems to have absorbed his mood today, more or less pensive in the passenger seat of the old Dart, watching the flooded fields roll by. The sun is coming out again, and the outlook is for a fine, bright week. “I hear that Yvette bought you a new bathing suit.” “Mmm. Yeah.” Meredith seems a bit unsold. “Why do they call it a bikini, Papa? Isn’t that a funny word?” “Hmm.” Oh, God. He grips the wheel a little tighter, slows. He can feel the Thing happening. Something passes just outside the range of memory. His mental map reveals another of those blank spaces. Here be monsters. He unclenches a bit, eases back up to the legal limit. “You know, sweetie. I don’t recall. We’ll have to wiki that when we get home, eh?” Half a nod. “Was it the Thing, Papa?” Clench. Release. “Heh.” That’s my girl. “Sweetie, you’re not supposed to know about the Thing. But, yeah. It’s OK now. I’m OK.”

2005: Some days, like today, Morningstar Solly just feels done. He’s always been one to pick his battles—sometimes, he will admit in an honest moment—with a seemingly callous disregard for the effect of those choices on others. Lately, though, even the most carefully picked battles seem to be decidedly uphill affairs. All of his decisions—the family he left behind, the new one he started here, the formation of the Alliance and the Pluriversity—all have seemed to him points on a line which he has seen stretching out in front of him, however dimly at times, for more than forty years now.

1963

The first Catholic in the White House was a member of the Third New Church, and his assassination was widely believed to be religious in its motivations. The shower of space debris which struck the Pacific Northwest within days of that assassination did nothing to dispel the more apocalyptic rumors in circulation. Whole-cloth fabrications abounded. Dates for comets and meterorite falls were reprinted with a fine disregard for facts, and correlations between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations essentially fabricated. Naturally, the Northwest strikes (Willamette, St. Mary’s, Port Orford) became part of the emerging mythology. Less than twenty miles separated the two primary impact sites along the St. Mary’s River.

When the Report of the Standing Committee on Assassination implicated the Vice President in the plot and “did not disconfirm” (as a spokesman said) either the Roman Catholic or the anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, the door was opened to wholesale change. The Third New Church transformed itself into the American Church, and Congress passed in rapid succession the Act of Tolerance and the Acts of Separation and Establishment. Scrubbed free of Romish taint, and with a new, hard line against Association, the American Church began to pull from Conventional and Second-Church Catholicism, but also from the mainstream protestant sects and the semi-secular faiths. A renewal of interest in The Fundamentals formed the glue cementing together a new center-right coalition, and the Church rebuilt itself around a heterogeneous core of Christian Anti-Associationism, fundamentalism, and a secular dogma that probably owed as much to Saint-Simon and Andrew Carnegie as it did to the Gospels.