“Then you can appoint other people to fill them. Look, Sal, we are talking about a bootstrapping process. We have to start somewhere.”

“Let’s war-game it,” Sal said. “A male Arkie from Outer Bizarristan rapes a female Arkie from Andorra. It happens in a place where we don’t have any cameras.”

“There are very few such places,” Markus pointed out.

“Okay, fine. It happens in an arklet. Or so the victim claims. She goes to sick bay, where medical evidence is gathered.”

“Do we even have rape kits?” Markus asked.

“How should I know?” Sal returned. “But we should get some. Anyway, based on that, in some countries a judge might issue a warrant enabling the police to look at the video records from that arklet. Because in some countries, Markus, people have a right to privacy and you can’t just be surveilling them all the time.”

“And what is the situation here?”

“It’s fascinating that you don’t even know, but I’ll tell you that the CAC recognizes certain rights that, however, may be abrogated or curtailed during periods of simplified administrative procedures and structures.”

“PSAPS,” Markus said. “That, I know about. It is a euphemism for martial law.”

Sal looked somewhere between pained and amused. “May I suggest you stop thinking about it that way—or, failing that, never say it out loud.”

“But nevertheless—”

“A better analogy might be the authority a captain wields over a ship at sea. The captain can do things, like preside over marriage ceremonies or order someone confined to quarters, that would not be acceptable if the same ship were tied up to a pier in Manhattan.”

“Look, I do not have time now to war-game a whole prosecution of a hypothetical rape,” Markus said, glancing at his wristwatch—Swiss, naturally, and made specifically for him by a famous Geneva company, as a sort of legacy, a way of saying we existed once, and here is what magnificent things we were capable of. “I want to talk about something very basic, very fundamental, which is: How do I have authority? Or if I am replaced by Ivy or Ulrika, how does she have authority?”

Sal didn’t quite see where he was going. “Authority meaning . . .”

When this elicited no response other than impatient muttering, Sal tried: “Authority can mean many different things, Markus.”

“In this case I am not speaking of moral authority or leadership qualities or any of that stuff. I do not mean the theoretical loyalty that Arkies have to the so-called captain of the ship. I mean, what happens if we go to arrest the rapist from Outer Bizarristan, and he decides to put up a fight, and his friends decide that they are going to fight with him?”

Sal, to this point, had been viewing the conversation as an enjoyable exercise in legal theory. He now looked more serious. “You’re talking about power. What it really means. What it really is.”

“Yes.”

“It’s an old question. A pharaoh, a medieval king, the mayor of New York City, they all have to think about the same thing.”

“Yes,” Markus said again.

“When you give an order, what assurance do you have that it will be carried out? That is the essential question of power.”

“Jawohl, counselor!”

“Normally here I would speak to you about moral authority and loyalty and all of that. But you have already ruled this out.”

“When push comes to shove, as the English expression has it—”

“The traditional answer has always been that the king has his guard, the mayor his chief of police, the commander his military police, or what have you. And it is their ability to physically coerce others that is the ultimate foundation of the leader’s power.”

“Now you’re talking. And what is that for me, under the CAC?”

“You understand,” Sal said, “that the more you actually call upon such persons to coerce, the less power you have, in a way. It is an admission of failure.”

“Sal,” Markus said, “how long have you been up here?”

“Two hundred and some days.”

“How many hours have we spent talking about the CAC?”

“I have no idea, probably a hundred hours over that time.”

“And of that, how much time have we spent talking about this one thing?”

Sal checked his own watch. “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

“So, based on that allocation of time,” Markus said, “maybe you can see that this is not all that important to me in the big scheme of things. But it is important, Sal. When the moment comes when I have to arrest a criminal who is being protected by his comrades, I must have an answer. I must know what to do. I must be prepared. This is what I do. This is why I have this job.”

Someone was knocking on the door to Markus’s office, which was unusual. Markus ignored it for now.

“Under PSAPS you can deputize specific people to enforce your decisions using appropriate levels of physical coercion. Once we get out of PSAPS . . .”

“How soon do you think that is going to happen?” Markus’s tone of voice suggested he had his own opinions on the matter.

“If we are lucky enough to survive? It will be years,” Sal said.

“So we must confine ourselves to PSAPS for this discussion,” Markus said. Then he hollered at the door, “Just a minute!” Then, back to Sal: “Appropriate levels of physical coercion, what does that mean? Who decides?”

“Well,” Sal said, “if you make me attorney general, head prosecutor, justice of the peace, and chief justice of the supreme court, I guess I do.”

“If someone gets Tased, and his heart stops, and he dies, is that appropriate?”

“Jesus Christ, Markus, what has gotten into you?”

“I am war-gaming,” Markus said. “Trying to be prepared. You should do it too. Not with hypothetical rape cases but with what is likely to start happening soon.” He held Sal’s gaze until Sal answered with a nod. Then he aimed his voice at the door. “All right! Come in!”

“Door” was a landlubber term for what, on a boat or a spaceship, would be called a hatch. A convention had developed where, in a part of Izzy that had simulated gravity, it was referred to as a door. In the floaty bits, it was called a hatch.

The door opened to reveal Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris. The look on his face, combined with the mere fact that he had interrupted Markus during a meeting in his private office, suggested that something serious was happening. Markus’s mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: “Is the president nuking people again?”

Dr. Harris looked startled by the suggestion, then shook it off. No, it wasn’t that.

“Does this meeting require privacy?” Markus asked, with a look at Sal. Sal stood up, volunteering to make himself scarce. But Dr. Harris just got a bemused look. “It concerns the least private thing that ever happened, or ever will,” he said. “So no thank you. I have reason to believe that the timetable has just been pushed up very significantly. There is a chance that the White Sky could happen as soon as six hours from now.” He checked his watch. “Call it five.”

Markus’s eye flicked to a display on the wall. “I see no uptick in the BFR.”

“It will be triggered by the passage of an asteroid through the cloud.”

“Does anyone on the ground know?”

“It depends on to what extent this office is under surveillance.”

“So, your information does not come from the ground.”

“No. It comes from deep space.”

“Via encrypted Morse code?” Markus inquired casually. He and Sal exchanged a look. Their conversation had begun, an hour ago, with reading a memo from J.B.F. complaining about such transmissions and demanding that action be taken. It was in discussing how to take such action, and whether the White House had any authority in the matter, that Markus and Sal had wandered into their more general discussion of power. Which was how Markus liked it, for now. Because if someone was sending mysterious encrypted Morse code transmissions from Izzy, it had to be his girlfriend. And he wasn’t going to arrest her. People would howl about conflict of interest: people who would be dead soon, people who had no way to enforce their authority here.