The Good News Desk

"Dr. Leung, please. Sit down. Would you like a refreshment? The coffee is excellent here. We have it flown in from a small estate in Kenya — a pleasure I think you will appreciate, though I confess I never drink it myself before evening. Old habits."

The man behind the desk smiled. His name, according to the plaque in front of him, was Mr. Peregrine Voss. He was perhaps sixty, silver-haired, immaculately dressed in the soft grey suit that had become, in the last several years, the informal uniform of the civil service. Dr. Miriam Leung, who was forty-one and who had been summoned to the Ministry of Public Information on three hours' notice, declined the coffee.

"I was told the appointment was urgent," she said.

"It is urgent. It is also, as I hope to demonstrate, not at all unpleasant. You have been selected, Dr. Leung, for a position of considerable distinction. I would like to congratulate you personally before we discuss the terms."

"Selected for what?"

Mr. Voss leaned back in his chair. The chair was leather. Everything in the office was leather, or polished wood, or quietly expensive. The window behind him looked out over a park in which children were playing a game involving colored ribbons. The afternoon light was golden. Somewhere, a piano was being played, very softly, by an instrument that was perhaps an actual piano and perhaps not — Dr. Leung could no longer reliably tell, and had learned, in her professional life, that the distinction mattered less than one might suppose.

"Your field of research," Mr. Voss said, "is solar physics. Specifically, the stability envelopes of G-class main sequence stars. I am correct, am I not?"

"You are."

"Your dissertation — which I had the pleasure of reviewing this morning; an excellent piece of work — concerns itself with the predictive accuracy of helioseismological models for detecting anomalies in the convective zone of such stars."

"That's correct."

"Dr. Leung, you are precisely the person we need."

There was a pause. Mr. Voss, who was nothing if not patient, did not fill it. Dr. Leung, who had been raised by academics and who knew something about the uses of silence, did not fill it either.

After perhaps forty seconds, Mr. Voss continued.

"For approximately eleven years," he said, "the Ministry has been aware of a certain... acceleration. In the predictive models. The Sun, Dr. Leung, is not behaving exactly as our best instruments had suggested it would. Its core fusion rate has been declining more rapidly than the consensus projections allow. The convective zone, as you would know from your work, shows signs of structural reorganization that the models did not anticipate. The long-range forecasts — the ones that are public, the ones the general population understands — suggest that the Sun will remain in its current stable phase for approximately four and a half billion years. Those forecasts are, regrettably, incorrect."

Dr. Leung did not move.

Mr. Voss poured himself a glass of water from a crystal carafe.

"The revised internal estimates," he said, "suggest a window of between forty and eighty years before the stellar processes that currently support life on this planet begin to, shall we say, falter. I do not mean a supernova, which would be a mercy; G-class stars do not supernova. I mean a slow, irregular decline in luminosity and solar output, of a kind that will, over the course of perhaps a century of meaningful degradation, render this planet's surface increasingly uninhabitable, and which will, at a point well within your daughter's projected lifespan, end meaningful civilization as we currently understand it."

"My daughter is nine," Dr. Leung said.

"Yes. Which is why this conversation is happening now, rather than later."

Dr. Leung asked if she could have the coffee after all.

Mr. Voss, with grace, made her a cup. He had the machine by his desk, a small Italian thing with a brass handle that moved with a mechanical precision that Dr. Leung had not encountered in a decade. The coffee was, as promised, excellent.

"The position I am offering you," Mr. Voss said, "is with the Bureau of Public Morale. You would be joining a team of approximately two hundred and twelve individuals — scientists, sociologists, communicators — whose task is the management of this information. Specifically, its management in the direction of non-disclosure."

"Suppression."

"Management. I prefer management. Suppression suggests a kind of active concealment, whereas what we actually do is more akin to the careful cultivation of public attention toward subjects more conducive to continued, productive social functioning. The population is told the truth about many things. It is simply not told this particular truth, because this particular truth would produce, in the judgment of every panel that has been convened on the question, outcomes that are in no one's interest. Not yours. Not your daughter's. Not the eighty-three million people presently employed in industries that would collapse the instant the news became general."

"They deserve to know."

"Do they?"

Mr. Voss said this gently, without heat, in the manner of a man asking a question that he himself has asked many times and has not been able to resolve.

"Dr. Leung, the information would not change the outcome. It would not produce a rescue. There is no rescue. The stars do not negotiate. If we tell them — if we tell the eighty-three million, and the several billion who love them — we will not extend their lives by a day. We will, however, substantially degrade the quality of those lives. The suicide rates in the models we have run are... considerable. The reductions in economic activity are considerable. The collapses of ordinary kindness — the things people do for one another when they believe there is a future — are what keep me awake at night, Dr. Leung. Not the sun. The sun I can do nothing about. The kindness, I can protect."

He passed her a folder. It was the blue folder she would later learn was standard for Bureau recruits — not unlike, as she would also later learn, the blue folders used by the pharmaceutical companies for trial participants, the blue folders used by the military for conscientious objectors, the blue folders that had become, across the administrative grammar of her civilization, the color of a door that could be opened only once.

"Your salary," he said, "will be quadrupled. Your daughter will be admitted to any school you wish for her. She will receive, without her knowledge, certain preparatory inoculations against the environmental degradations of the later decades — hardening, you understand, of particular organ systems, the kinds of modifications that cannot be given to the general population because they would raise questions. She will be, to the extent we can make her so, durable. Your work, Dr. Leung, will consist of refining our projections and helping us craft the public narratives that will carry people, as gently as possible, toward the century they are about to enter."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you refuse. There are no punishments. You will not be harmed, you will not be imprisoned, you will not even be inconvenienced. We will simply select someone else. We have five other candidates. They are all, I am sorry to say, slightly less qualified than you. But they will do."

"And I will walk out of here knowing."

"Yes."

"Knowing what you know. About my daughter."

Mr. Voss was quiet.

Then he said: "That is one of the considerations we ask our candidates to weigh."

Dr. Leung sat with the folder in her lap for a long time.

Outside, the children continued their game with the colored ribbons. The piano, whether real or not, continued to play. Mr. Voss did not rush her. This was, she understood, part of the offer: the time to consider, the gentle afternoon, the excellent coffee. Part of the careful apparatus of management that was, in its way, the only gift the Bureau had left to give anyone.

She thought about her daughter. She thought about her dissertation. She thought about the eighty-three million, and the panels convened on the question, and the five other candidates.

She took out a pen.

She signed.

Mr. Voss smiled — the smile of a man who has, once again, watched the apparatus work exactly as it had been designed to — and extended his hand.

"Welcome," he said, "to the Good News Desk."