Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

He actually knew very little about India, but he remembered having been shocked as a boy by accounts of the 1857 rebellion. “Does anyone want us anywhere?” he heard himself ask. “Why do we assume these far-flung places are ours?”

“Because we won them, Eddie,” Gilbert said, after a brief silence. “One assumes that the natives of England were perhaps not unanimously delighted by the arrival of our twenty-second great-grandfather, but, well, history belongs to the victors.” “William the Conqueror was a thousand years ago, Bert. Surely we might strive to be somewhat more civilized than the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider.”

This isn’t out of keeping with Edwin’s experience of Canada—if anything, he reflects, it would come as the shock of his life if after half a year in the New World he were to find himself suddenly able to charm the locals—but the flat uninterest of the women’s gaze is unnerving. This is a moment, he realizes, when he could express his views on colonization to people on the other side of the equation, so to speak, but he can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound absurd under the circumstances—if he tells them he believes colonization to be abhorrent, surely the logical next question will be Then what are you doing here?—so he says nothing further, and then they’re behind him and the moment has passed.

Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.

Ephrem was an arborist. He liked to go to old cemeteries to look at the trees. But then they found the grave of another four-year-old girl, Ephrem told me, and he just wanted to leave after that. He was used to graveyards, he sought them out, he’d always said he didn’t find them depressing, just peaceful, but that one grave just got to him. He looked at it and was unbearably sad. Also it was the worst kind of Earth summer day, impossibly humid, and he felt like he couldn’t get enough air. The drone of the cicadas was oppressive. Sweat ran down his back. He told his daughter it was time to go, but she lingered by the gravestone for a moment. “If her parents loved her,” Meiying said, “it would have felt like the end of the world.”