Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

He planned to go west immediately, but it’s so easy to linger in Halifax, where he falls prey to a personal weakness he’s been aware of all his life: Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia.

“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.” Edwin stopped talking then. Everyone at the table was staring at him.

Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him.

“Fomites aren’t a major mode of transmission with Covid-19,” Gaspery said. Fomites? Covid-19? Mirella had never heard either term, and the other two were frowning too. “Oh, right,” Gaspery said, seemingly to himself, “it’s only January.”

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

“And what do you do?” the other traveler asked finally. “I write books,” Olive said. “For children?” he asked.

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”