Omega

That November Lyneth announced that she was pregnant. By mutual agreement I’d continued using condoms, and inevitably there had been accidents with slippage and haste. They happened so infrequently I’d ceased to take account of them and even Lyneth, who demonstrated perfect recall for such instances, couldn’t specify this particular occasion. Perhaps it had just split. Perhaps there had been a leakage. Perhaps, it occurred to me much later, she’d actually contrived it out of sheer impatience.

It was obvious she wanted the baby. My feelings were more mixed but the alternatives were far too ugly. Apart from anything else I felt that I owed it her.

Sara was born shortly after Lyneth obtained her B.Ed. and shortly before Geoff and Tanya returned from California. We’d married by then, in a church near her family home. Her parents were thrilled. Even my father raised a smile. Rhys was my best man. He made a near-incomprehensible speech in which he likened us to the n-p junction of a transistor.

I realised I was laughing. Geoff was sitting there, looking quite perplexed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something else.”

The door opened and Tanya poked her head into the room.

“Everything all right?”

Her hair was tied back, a pencil propped behind one ear, her reading glasses hanging from her neck.

“Wonderful,” I said, deadpan.

Tanya glanced at Geoff before giving me a look that I read as sympathet to my plight in the specific sense of having to accommodate Geoff’s professional interest in it. In that moment it was easy to imagine that he was the visitor and I the resident, that Tanya and I somehow still had the closer relationship, despite the formalities of marriage and cohabitation. I felt quite blithe.

TWENTY-FIVE

Morning prayers.

It was a small chapel—or rather a room furnished as one. Field Marshal Maredudd and Giselle Vigoroux sat with their heads bowed in the front rank of chairs as a chaplain gave the usual thanks for their blessings and asked that true believers everywhere be allowed to stay in God’s grace.

Most of the desk chairs packed into the room were filled with personnel. Owain was sitting alone at the back, waiting for the service to end. The chaplain stood in front of a gilt cross set on a small covered table. A picture of a haloed Jesus hung on the wall above it. He floated above a landscape in which the wretched and needy worshipped at his feet, accepting the shining spiritual bounty that flowed in golden rays from his outstretched hands.

His uncle always made him attend the services when they were together, judging his declared atheism irrelevant to the requisite observance. Maintaining ritual, he would declare, was vital to a healthy spirituality, irrespective of belief. Without God, he often added, the whole damn thing was meaningless. Owain found it hard to disagree with this.

His uncle had been raised a Methodist, but now most Christians in the country, and in western Europe at large, belonged to the officially sanctioned United Ecumenical Church, which embraced everyone from Catholics to Nonconformists. The flexibility of its creed suited the diminished availability of both congregations and places of worship.

Now the chaplain was espousing the righteousness of their cause and asserting his belief that with God’s help they would ultimately prevail against all the forces of darkness that sought to overwhelm them. He made a point of stressing that he did not identify those forces with specific races or religions: all beliefs were tolerated and valued within the Alliance borders through the enlightened assimilation of refugees and liberated populations. Far from being exclusive, the Church sought to embrace everyone in a holy community of civilised values they were forever determined to protect.

The small multinational congregation murmured its “amens” at appropriate points. I found myself wondering if any of them were Moslems, Hindus or Sikhs. If any were, they would have found little in the chaplain’s words to offend their religious sensibilities. The expressed allegiance transcended both faith and nationality. It was rooted in an unspecified yet pervasive sense of protected territoriality, one based on values that were essentially military. The enemy was simply the spiritual barbarians outside the walls of the city.