The Lotus Eaters

Spaceport Rome, Province of Italy, United Earth

Two armed guard rode in seats behind Wallenstein as her shuttle descended to the Eternal City.

Rome, much restored, spread out beneath them as that shuttlecraft broke through the clouds. Marguerite resisted the urge to press her face to the porthole of the little craft. After all, the guards were lowers, Class Fours, she thought, and they would be watching. Even so, her head twisted, her chin dropped, and her eyes searched out the landmarks she had not seen in more than a decade, even since her last trip home to convey the late—I hope the bastard is "late" . . . though Carrera never expressly promised me to kill him—High Admiral Martin Robinson to his new command around the alien star.

Just as Geneva was the bureaucratic locus of United Earth, so was Rome its emotional heart. Indeed, nearly half of Old Earth's half million Class Ones made the city their home. Why this should be so Wallenstein was not quite sure. Perhaps it was the more pleasant weather, especially as more northerly Europe, like Canada, was in the grip of a little ice age. Little, they call it . . . but it seems to go on and on and has since the early twenty-first century. Perhaps it was a harkening back to the glories of the Roman Empire.

Wallenstein slowly shook her head. But I think it has more to do with the emotional satisfaction of having triumphed over a stifling Christianity and taken the Vatican for ourselves. Certainly, when the last pope was burned by the Ara Pacis, we at least half-intended to show that we were the power in the world . . . and Christianity was dead.

Of course, Christianity is demonstrably not dead on Terra Nova, though it is rather arguable how Christian it is. And it wasn't just Christianity we wanted to extirpate here; all the Abrahamic religions had to go, except for Islam which had earned itself a place.

Marguerite shivered, unconsciously, in fear for her planet. At least it wasn't very "Christian" of Carrera to nuke an Islamic city in revenge for his first wife and their children. I wonder what he'll do if and when he finds out that Martin was at least partially responsible for that. Can a couple of hundred light years be space enough to shield Old Earth from a vindictiveness of that magnitude?