~o~O~o~

The Brown Homestead outside of Moab, Deseret
July, 2059

Sarah Brown gazed fondly at her husband’s image as it floated over her holodesk. She loved him when he was working in their garden, or cooking. She loved their family time, and the time that the two of them could spend alone together. But somehow, she loved him most when he was “on project,” when his mind and heart were focused on trying to understand another person. To speak their truth. Maybe for the last time.

Maybe for the only time.

“So, I take it you’ve got the green light.”

He chuckled. “That transparent, am I?”

“Only to anyone who isn’t an idiot. How did it go?”

“Surprisingly well. I think their goal was to get me to agree that they could edit the speech, but the Cardinal didn’t push when I refused.”

“I expect he could tell that your ‘no’ meant ‘no.’ There have to be some advantages to walking around looking like an Old Testament prophet.”

His pale eyes glinted with humor that few others would ever see. “Even if it means you have to put up with the beard.”

“Such burdens the Lord God lays on me,” she agreed. “If it were softer, it would just tickle!”

He smiled, and then — as was his habit — turned serious. “I’ll need to run down a few things while I’m here. Lunch with two of the Cromwell children tomorrow, then a trip upstate to see the oldest sister. I’m still trying to reach the youngest one. And, I’m trying to find some contacts from Cromwell’s university days, but that’s complicated.”

“I imagine,” she said with a snort. Since Tash had suppressed old Columbia University even before declaring himself Emperor, it would certainly be difficult to find any people who had known Cromwell then.

“In any event,” he continued, “I should be back Thursday. I expect I’ll be doing most of my interviews by holocall, but some of them will require more travel.”

“As long as the planting gets done,” she teased.

“Depend on it,” he said, still serious.

“I always do.”

~o~O~o~
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
Two days later

“Oh, goodness, I don’t know.” Tilda frowned and looked down towards the playscape. “Careful, Charlotte! Watch your handhold!” When she wasn’t thinking, Tilda’s German accent resurfaced, faint but unmistakable.

“Anything at all,” Brown said. “I assure you, it’ll be helpful.” Although he’d had a productive lunch with the twins — Clara and Max — he had a sense that he would need to follow up with them individually. He had gotten less useful information from them than he’d hoped, and so far Dr. Elsa Cromwell was proving very hard to contact.

“Well . . . I was barely twelve when he was captured by the junta; we didn’t see him for three years — not until Mutter died. I guess for me, there’s kind of a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’. ‘Before,’ we didn’t see him much, but when we did, I guess we weren’t too sure what to make of him.”

“He wasn’t living with your family?”

“No, he was. But he was often gone before we were up, and worked until well after our bedtimes. Even on weekends, he was usually at the lab. But we might come down for breakfast on a Sunday or a holiday, and there was this intense man sitting at the table, talking to Mutter.”

“Intense?”

Tilda nodded; her ‘yes’ almost sounded like a soft ‘ja.’ “He never raised his voice. Not that I remember, anyway. He and Mutter . . . I guess you’d call them formal. They would have these long, low conversations, sitting together at the table. Then one of us would show up, and Father would ask us about our school and our friends, like he was trying to keep up. He would remember everything, but I always had the sense he was thinking about other things, too. I don’t think he really ever stopped working, even when he was asleep.”

She had relatively few stories of Quentin from her childhood. Walking through a Christmas market, and giving him her opinion on gifts he could buy for Mutter. Visiting Aachen Cathedral, hearing his detailed explanation of the structural differences between Charlemagne’s pre-Romanesque octagonal Palatine Chapel and the gothic ‘glashaus’ choir that was added in the fourteenth century. The time he was called to her school to deal with a disciplinary issue.

When he’d exhausted her early recollections, Brown switched tacks. “What can you tell me about how he was captured by the junta? I realize you were very young.”

“Mutter said he had gone to America for business. Later, she explained that the military authorities were holding him, but that he was safe.” She shrugged. “When we all came to New York after Mutter died, he didn’t want to discuss it. Of course, he was essentially under house arrest until that last year, when the junta put him on the constitutional commission. The house was guarded, and he was driven into the city with a military escort.”

“Did you at least have an opportunity to get to know him better at that point?”

“I was the oldest, so I had a different relationship with him. He needed me to step up, to help with the little ones. He couldn’t be as hands-on as he wanted to be, and he gave me a lot of responsibility for a fifteen-year-old.” She smiled softly. “Of course, by the time Father was fifteen, he was already off on his own. He assumed I could follow his general guidelines, and he was very clear about those.”

Her eyes, which had never strayed from observing her children, suddenly narrowed and her dark eyebrows lowered. “Christopher Michael!!!”

On the playscape below, a young face, smudged with dirt and mischief, looked up and turned pale.

Tilda was already on her feet and charging down the grassy slope. “Stop that this instant! On what planet is that acceptable?”

Brown remained on the bench, watching her discipline her son for having shoved his little brother to the ground. The tongue-lashing she administered was sharp, impassioned, and very thorough. When she was finished, she knelt on the ground so their eyes were level, ensured that her point had been made, then sent him back up to the house.

As she walked back up the incline, her eyes followed him until he disappeared indoors. Only then did she resume her seat. “I’m sorry. I don’t recall where we were.”

“I understand,” he said. His expression was distant. Thoughtful. “Really.”

~o~O~o~

The Brown Homestead outside of Moab, Deseret
Three days later

“Thank you for agreeing to speak with me.” Brown schooled his voice to show respect – more than he had shown for the old Cardinal, truth to tell – but Werner Kaufmann was something of a legend in his own right. Brown also addressed him in his native German – a language which, like English, Mandarin, and Hindi, was necessary for most professionals.

In the center of Brown’s holodesk, Kaufmann’s unnaturally crisp image nodded in acknowledgment. The crispness was a statement of its own. Of course Kaufmann’s chrome and glass office possessed the latest and very best optical scanning equipment. He was, after all, chairman of the largest battery manufacturing company in the world, including the massive factory outside of Aachen that sprawled just beyond his windows.

“My time is very limited, I’m afraid,” Kaufmann replied, with what appeared to be genuine regret. “But I will help your research if I can. Without Dr. Cromwell” – Kaufmann gestured to the vast factory which had been his life for more than thirty years – “none of this would have happened.”

“I’ll keep my questions brief, as I promised. Other biographers have thoroughly covered his inventions themselves, as well as his decision to partner with your company after fleeing the States at the beginning of the Purge of the Elites. What I’d like to know, however, is what he was like to work with in those days?”

Kaufmann leaned back in his comfortable chair, remembering. “He was the most driven man I’d ever met. He was always so sure of his ideas, and he knew what a difference some of them would make to the lives of people. Especially poor people. He could see how abundant energy, coupled with easy and portable energy storage, would revolutionize culture, society, politics . . . everything. As, of course, it has. But his vision – his ability to see it, like it had already happened – it would drive him into a frenzy.”

Brown cocked his head. “A frenzy?”

“Ja.” Kaufmann nodded sharply. “He was impatient, you see. He would always say, ‘People need this yesterday, not tomorrow.’ Every setback made him push himself harder. Every roadblock made him furious.”

“He sounds difficult to work with?” Brown probed.

“I shared his urgency, so, no.” Kaufmann's smile was thin, almost pained. “Of course, I was the one who was dealing with the financial side of the enterprise, and investors are notoriously impatient.”

“But it was your management of the ‘financial side’ that ultimately led him to leave, was it not?” Brown kept his tone nonthreatening and inquisitive. There was no accusation in his words; the facts were public knowledge.

“While at the same time making him a very rich man, yes.” Kaufmann chuckled humorlessly. “Not that he appreciated it very much. He was otherworldly, that way. His later work in advanced solar power, he essentially bankrolled then gave away. But in the early days, he needed money, as we all did. He just refused to think about the concessions that entailed.”

“Why was he so driven, do you think? Love of his fellow man?”

“I couldn’t say.” Kaufmann’s shoulders lifted slightly. “It wasn’t relevant to our discussions.”

~o~O~o~
The Brown Homestead outside of Moab, Deseret
The next morning

“A genuine Truth Speaker. I honestly didn’t know you guys were still around.” Kurt’s image over Brown’s holodesk featured a smile — as usual, both amused and ironic.

“Some of us are, at any rate,” Brown replied. “Thank you for making time, especially so late in your day.”

“And early, in yours. No worries. Look, I’m generally familiar with what you guys are supposed to do. What would you like to know from me?”

“Let me start with the easy one,” Brown replied. “Just give me your impression of your father, in your own words.”

“As an inventor? A philanthropist? A patriot? My father was many things, Mr. Brown.”

“He was,” Brown agreed, his voice steady. “But what was he to you?”

Kurt Cromwell’s animated face grew unnaturally still, like the holo feed had frozen.

But it hadn’t. “To me . . . my father was many things.”

Although Kurt’s words, and more, the way they were delivered, seemed designed to cut off conversation rather than invite it, Brown was undeterred. If anything, this sort of response told him he was on the right track. To speak truth, you must first seek truth.

Getting more specific, Brown asked, “What was he like as a parent?”

“He gave what he could. But . . . during all the time that I lived with him, he was a very busy man. He was launching his solar company when I was born, and we didn’t see much of him. When the American military captured him, just after the end of the Empire, we didn’t see him for two years. Then our mother died in a plane crash, and he was able to have us join him in New York. I was eleven.”

Kurt lapsed into silence, his memories of those crazy months pounding into his head. The earth-shattering news that his mother had died . . . the woman who had almost single-handedly raised all six children. That terrible flight to North America . . . landing at what was then still called Tash International Airport.

Unlike the fat emperor in his heyday, the military hadn’t gotten around to renaming everything. What they were good at, though, was shows of force . . . and the contingent in urban combat kit that had “greeted” their plane and transported them to their new home was sizeable.

And then, seeing Father again . . . . wounded, haunted, guilt-ridden. And guarded. Day and night, the military guarded him. They’d barely even managed holocalls in the years since his capture.

“For the first two or three years, his time wasn’t his own. The military wanted his expertise. When the junta decided to liberalize, and created the new constitutional commission, he got himself on it and then we didn’t see him for another year.”

“When the Second Republic was proclaimed, you would have been . . . fourteen?”

Kurt nodded. “Thereabouts. And the military were finally out of our house. Out of our lives. That was probably the first time we saw very much of him. But Max left home just a year later; Clara and Oskar the year after that. I was kind of a late bloomer and stayed until I was eighteen.”

“Eighteen is the usual age for advanced studies,” Brown observed. He knew better in this case, but he wanted to prod Kurt further.

“Father attended old Columbia at age 15. Let’s just say that set some expectations.”

“He pushed you.”

Kurt shook his head. “Never. He believed . . . I mean, really believed . . . in personal autonomy. It was like a second religion to him. But, look. Grow up in the shadow of everything he did – everything he was – it’s hard not to look at your own life and wonder how you could ever measure up. We pushed ourselves.”

~o~O~o~

The Brown Homestead outside of Moab, Deseret
A few hours later

Sarah walked down toward the gardens, shielding her eyes from the glare of their northern solar array. She’d spent the morning working on a background analysis of the new trade agreement between the Guangxi Republic and Madras, but she was adamant about taking time for lunch. In the Brown household, meals were prepared by hand – often, multiple hands – and whenever possible, eaten together. While not opposed to modernity, the New Apostles stressed the importance of simplicity and community.

John looked up from where he was meticulously planting kale, a centimeter deep and two-and-a-half centimeters apart. Seeing Sarah coming down the hillside, he rose, smiled, and began to brush the rich, dark soil from his workpants.

“You had an early start,” she said as she reached him.

He nodded. “One of Cromwell’s sons is in Kuala Lumpur at the moment. It was hard to arrange a time that worked.”

“Ready for some lunch?”

“More than ready. How’d your morning go?”

She talked about her work as they walked back up to the house. John got cleaned up, then they took their sandwiches out to the patio. The air was dry and hot — a typical day in the desert — but under the shade of a solar awning it was pleasant enough. Any discomfort was a small price to pay for the view of towering red buttes against a clear blue sky.

When Sarah asked him about his investigation, John was happy to discuss it. She was always his best sounding board. “The years before he fled to Germany are still a puzzle. He never knew who his father was, and his mother died when he was away at college. No siblings. And unfortunately, he grew up in Jacksonville.”

“Hurricane Asmodeus.” Despite the heat of the day, Sarah suppressed a shiver. “I remember seeing it on TV when I was in school.”

“Most everyone was evacuated in time, but of course they’ve scattered to the four corners now. Honestly, though, I don’t think the Jacksonville years will be all that important. I think the answer to the puzzle of Quentin Cromwell will be found in New York.”

“Ah.” Sarah gave a knowing smile. She knew how her husband’s mind worked. “You found a discontinuity?”

He waggled his fingers. “More a hint of one, and the information is maddeningly thin. The Salazar biography at least included excerpts from interviews with one of Cromwell’s former instructors at old Columbia, and he’d tracked down some students— God knows how. But Salazar’s book came out ten years ago and none of his sources are still alive.”

“So, what did those sources say?” She poured herself more water and silently offered some to Brown with a lift of her eyebrow.

“Yes, please,” he said with a smile. “Thirsty work this morning. . . . Everyone agreed that Cromwell was brilliant, but there is a suggestion that his focus at the time was on software and virtual reality. Salazar indicates that he joined up with another student to work on some advanced gaming ideas.”

“Gaming?” Her eyebrows rose. “That sounds pretty far afield from where he ended up.”

He nodded. “Yes — and, if that’s right, that’s definitely the kind of break between one period of life and another that can really help in understanding someone.”

“I assume you’ve tried to find the student he was working with?”

“Lukas Wolff – Cromwell married his sister after he fled to Germany. Wolff was an early victim of the purges. I’m still tracking down the ministry records, but Cromwell told his children that he’d been sentenced by the ‘Star Chamber’.”

She grimaced. “So, the death penalty.”

“Right.” The Imperial Court on Unamerican Activities only handled capital cases.

Sarah could understand her husband’s frustration, given the dearth of witnesses. But . . . “Could Cromwell’s change in focus simply be a reaction to the Purge?”

“Easy to see it,” John agreed. “He’d been at Columbia for close to ten years when the troubles started – undergrad, grad student, post-doc. And of course, that was ground zero when the Purge of the Elites started. His whole life was torn apart.”

Sarah thought back on the slogans she’d heard growing up, all through school. Everyone had learned them; they’d been mandatory in both public and private schools all during the imperial period. How the Emperor was ridding the country of ‘globalists,’ ‘degenerates,’ ‘communists,’ and foreigners. Fortunately, she’d learned differently at home.

John, she knew, had learned the truth from the Presbyter of the meeting house his parents attended – a radical whose arrest prompted John to join Chief Elder Markley when he brought the New Apostles into the Defiance Movement.

The pain in his eyes told her that his mind had gone down the same paths. She reached out and twined her fingers in his, sharing a wordless understanding. It’s over. That world is over. Deciding it was time to shift the conversation, she said, “What do you think of his children?”

“Another frustration.” He gave her hand a squeeze – a gentle thanks for her understanding. “They all appear to have admired him. But when I press them, it’s like there’s a barrier.”

“They don’t want to tell you what he was like?”

John chewed on a bite of his sandwich while he chewed on the question. Sarah was used to his silences; it didn’t bother her when he took time to think before responding.

“I don’t think so,” he said, after nearly a minute had gone by. “It’s more like they don’t really know what he was like. I learned about as much from people who’d worked with him on charities, or from Werner Kaufmann.”

A slow fly buzzed toward Sarah and she waved it away as she focused on her husband. “He was pretty busy,” she suggested.

Again, he thought carefully. “It’s not like they didn’t spend any time with him; they did. And you can sense his impact on them in the way they act. The things they say, and the things they don’t talk about.”

“But . . . ?” She raised an eyebrow in inquiry.

“But for all of them — including Clara, who was with him at the end — it almost feels like they learned about him from a biopic. Even when he was with them, I think they felt he wasn’t completely present, if that makes any sense.”

“Don’t ask me,” she protested. “You're the one who tries to understand people. I just try to make sense of easy things, like product substitution and elasticity of demand in the new states of Southeast Asia. Still . . . I’m guessing Cromwell’s distance from his children tells you something.”

“Several things.” His smile was crooked. “I just don’t know which ones, yet.”

~o~O~o~
The Brown Homestead outside of Moab, Deseret
Late that night

Brown cocked his head inquisitively, silently inviting the wizened old man whose image appeared over his holodesk to elaborate.

“Really, I thought Cromwell was the devil, back then. I still smell a touch of sulfur when I think of him.” The former minister’s eyes twinkled. “Not a majority opinion, I expect.”

“Hardly,” Brown replied. “Most people seem to regard him as something of a saint.”

“More of an angel, if I understand the Christian pantheon correctly. The type you see depicted with a fiery sword, yes? He was personally incorruptible. No question of that. But he had a vision. A purpose he pursued ruthlessly and without pity. Very much without pity.”

“What was the vision? An end to poverty?”

“Even that, I think, was a means to an end. He saw the flip side of Acton’s Axiom – that if power could be sufficiently diffused, corruption and tyranny would become more difficult to sustain.”

“Acton wasn’t talking about energy though,” Brown countered.

“You make the same mistake my old party chairman made.” The old man’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “Power is power, if you understand what I’m saying. When someone controls your source of energy, they control you.”

Brown knew the type; a once-influential man who dearly missed playing the game — although it had been no game to the people affected by the regime he’d served. The ex-minister would need no prodding to continue.

Nor did he. “Study your history. Think of how much power the House of Saud accumulated in the Twentieth Century. They had the ability to control the world-wide price of the critical input to the then-dominant energy technology. Their decision to flood the market with cheap oil directly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.”

Brown was generally familiar with the story, but not in detail. “Before my time, naturally.”

“Well, nevermind. Take my word for it. Anyhow — Cromwell put cheap, portable power into the hands of every person, in a way that couldn’t be controlled by any enterprise or government. It revolutionized political and economic relationships across the globe. And governments built on scarcity, patronage, and fear were undermined in ways they never expected.”

“Including the government you served,” Brown observed.

But the old man just chuckled. “Just so. Cromwell saw it, better than my former masters. Oh, they probably understood it at some level, but the technology was irresistible. They’d heavily invested in the big stuff – the expensive stuff, that could be controlled. But this was so cheap and easy. So ubiquitous. Their legacy systems couldn’t compete, and they couldn’t stop it from spreading.”

“So that was what drove him, do you think? A dislike of tyranny?”

“People say he loved his fellow man, and maybe he did. I don’t know.” For once, the old man looked completely, stone-cold serious. “But one thing I know with absolute certainty. Quentin Cromwell loathed authoritarians with every fibre of his being. Emperors, dictators, presidents for life, whatever. There is nothing he wouldn’t have done – no person he wouldn’t have sacrificed – to wipe every tyrant off the face of the earth and throw them all in the pit of hell.”

~o~O~o~
The Brown Homestead outside of Moab, Deseret
The following day

The man whose image appeared on Brown’s holodesk stood in the middle of a cinderblock room, wearing a standard neon jumpsuit. There was no chair where he could sit.

The Second Republic’s Constitution and Fundamental Charter of Rights and Liberties banned capital punishment and compelled humane treatment of prisoners. The government adhered to those standards to the letter . . . but it didn’t coddle those convicted of human rights crimes during the two decades that separated the last years of the First Republic and the end of the junta in ‘45.

The last holo image that Brown had been able to find was twelve years old, from the day when the Denver Tribunal on Human Rights and Remembrance sentenced former Chief Judge Robert Powell to spend the rest of his life in one of the former empire’s many prisons. Time had both greyed and thinned his hair, and his once-powerful frame was shrunken. But the savage chin, the fierce wedge of a nose, and the hard, cold eyes were unmistakable.

Powell didn’t wait for Brown to begin. “A ‘Truth Speaker?’” he sneered. “For Quentin Cromwell?”

Brown’s own gaze was stony. “Yes.”

“He was a criminal. A traitor. Nothing else matters.”

“Your judgment and sentence were reversed by your own court. As you know.”

“My court? Scarcely. The generals had already pushed me out, and the new crew just did what they were told.”

“And you didn’t?” Brown kept his own tone level, devoid of heat. But that was only because he had a great deal of practice.

“No-one had to tell me my job. There was never any daylight between the Emperor’s desires and mine.”

Brown bit back a response, knowing it would be pointless to argue. Zealots like Powell never apologized . . . or even changed their minds. “You didn’t convict Cromwell of treason, anyway.”

Powell made a dismissive gesture. “We were in the middle of negotiations with the Europeans and didn’t want to make waves. But there’s no question he was helping them – and not us. If we’d gotten that battery technology, instead of Kaufmann and the Germans, it would have been a game-changer.”

“He only fled to Germany after the regime arrested his business partner,” Brown reminded him. “That was three full years before Tash made himself emperor.”

“Ah, yes. His brother-in-law, Lukas Wolff.”

“Cromwell’s marriage to Anna Wolff didn’t happen until a year after Lukas was disappeared.”

“So what?” Powell demanded. “Lukas Wolff was an immigrant and a German spy.”

“That judgment was also reversed. Posthumously, of course.”

Powell’s eyes narrowed. “Wolff confessed, under oath, both to spying, and to carnal acts in violation of the Decency Code. Specifically, with Quentin Cromwell.”

“The ‘Decency Code’ wasn’t even in effect until well after Wolff’s arrest.”

“What’s your point?”

“The old Republic didn’t allow ex post facto laws,” Brown said, though of course Powell knew that.

“Well, they didn’t get around to charging him, and the Empire wasn’t that kind of stupid. Anyway — if you’re a ‘Truth Speaker,’ you must be one of the New Apostles, and they practically begged for the Decency Code. You should be a fan.”

Brown reminded himself that he hadn’t arranged the interview to argue law with a disgraced former judge. Only the facts matter. “Confessions obtained by torture are notoriously unreliable – as the later tribunal determined.”

“Every confession was completely reliable.”

“You sound very sure of that,” Brown challenged.

“Of course I’m sure. Do you know why? Can you begin to understand it?”

“Try me.”

“I will. Get this through your stupid cranium, Truth Speaker. The confessions weren’t reliable because they were true. They were reliable because they were useful.”

Again, Brown forced himself to stick to his mission. “So the charges against Wolff and Cromwell were false, and based on manufactured evidence?”

“Idiot. I knew that talking to you would be a waste of time.” Powell’s voice positively dripped with scorn. “Your question assumes that there’s some ‘truth’ out there, floating around in the ether. Something independent of the people in power. I don’t know what Wolff and Cromwell did with each other, or too each other. Maybe they played video games, or talked about batteries. Maybe they talked about sex. Maybe they did more than talk. A professor might care, or a ‘New Apostle.’ I don’t give even half a shit.”

“I see,” Brown said neutrally, while mentally agreeing that the conversation had been a waste of time. Robert Powell wouldn’t recognize truth if it grabbed him by the foot and dragged him kicking and screaming into the fires of perdition . . . which Brown devoutly hoped it would.

The old man glared at the Truth Speaker through the holo. “You think I’m embarrassed about any of that? Ashamed? Think again. We were at war. External enemies. Internal enemies. The Emperor could have made us great again – and would have, if people like Cromwell had been patriots!”

“I see.”

~o~O~o~
The Brown Homestead outside of Moab, Deseret
The following day

The transmission lag was just a couple seconds each way, but it was disconcerting nonetheless. The young man whose image floated above Brown’s holo table looked older, and sterner, than his twenty-nine years. While Clara favored her father and both Tilda and Max took after their mother, Oskar Cromwell appeared to be more of a blend of the parents.

The young man didn’t beat around the bush, either. “Clara asked me to call you, so I did. But I think the whole project is a mistake.”

“Yet, you agreed to it, didn’t you?” Brown’s deep eyes bored into the image before him, as if he could reach across the gulf of space to an office high above on Luna Station.

After a couple seconds, Oskar responded, “Max asked me to let Clara do it her way. He said we owed her, for being there when we couldn’t be. I couldn’t argue with his logic.”

Brown’s thick eyebrow rose. “Forgive me, but to an outsider, this sounds like an elaborate game of emotional blackmail."

“I don’t see it that way . . . and I honestly don’t care how anyone else sees it.” Cromwell’s expression was closed. Guarded.

“How do you see it?”

“None of your business.”

“Alright.” Brown took a moment to regroup. “Perhaps you could explain why you think it was a mistake for Clara to hire me?”

Unfortunately, Brown’s moment of silence after his first words, coupled with the transmission delay, meant that Oskar spoke over his question, saying, “I’ve got a busy schedule today, so I need to ask you to get to the point.”

When they had unscrambled the conversation, Brown said, “I will need no more than ten minutes. Now . . . why is Clara wrong?”

“If anyone is going to judge my father’s life, they should do it based on his actions. Nothing more, nothing less. He made a difference in the world. I think it was a difference for good. Maybe other people disagree, I don’t know. But if they’re going to argue about it, the public facts should be the beginning and the end of it.”

Cromwell nodded. “And you think the Cardinal can more than adequately address those public facts?”

Oskar’s hand waved dismissively. “Whoever. I gather Cardinal Darcy is competent, and I guess Father was Catholic, nominally. Tilda and Max, too, though Clara’s joined the New Apostles. I never had time for any of that.”

“So your father didn’t have you raised Catholic?”

“No. The idea of forcing his own beliefs on anyone – even his children – was anathema to him. And rightly so.”

Brown decided that a little deliberate provocation might break something loose. “But how do children learn values, if not from their parents?”

“I’m not saying they don’t, or that we didn’t. But I learned those values the way that Father would have wanted me to learn them – by watching what my parents did. How they treated each other. How they treated us. How they treated friends and even strangers.”

Brown nodded. “An inductive approach, then.”

“If you like.”

“It is my own approach, and what I was taught,” Brown said mildly. “I haven’t been spending my time studying your father’s speeches, after all.” Without giving Oskar an opportunity for a retort, Brown said, “What was he like as a parent?”

The young man’s jaw visibly tightened. “The public record will reflect that he kept us safe in a very dangerous time, and that all of his children went on to lead productive lives. Lives which, I hope, would be a credit to his memory. Now if you’ll excuse me?”

“Of course. Thank you for your time.”

The image cut off from the holo desk, and his AIPA automatically dimmed the lighting in the room. Brown sat back in his chair and sighed.

He’d run across many men like Oskar Cromwell in the course of his work. He had even been tasked with being a Truth Speaker for several of them. They were invariably high achievers, extremely productive, and pillars of their society. More often than not, they were also miserable.

For a Truth Speaker, such men were depressingly easy to decode.

A quick wrap of knuckles on the doorframe caused him to swivel his chair around.

Sarah stood in the doorway with a serving board holding some cheese and bread, together with a sliced apple. “Brought you a snack.”

“A good wife is worth more than rubies,” he said. “Are the kids asleep?”

“Noah is, but Ellie’s still bouncing around.”

“She did seem to enjoy the bread baking,” he said, unsurprised. When Ellie got enthused about something, sleep was always the first casualty.

“Hopefully she’ll get as good at it as you are.” Sarah shook her head. “Mine might as well come from the autocooker. . . . You going to be much longer?”

“An hour; no more. I’ll need to leave early for my flight.”

“Good.” Her smile was warm. Intimate. “I’ll wait up.”

– To be continued.

For information about my other stories, please check out my author's page.