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center of the Ryuku Empire with China. Boats laden with spices, slaves, coral, ivory, silk. Swords, coconuts, hemp. The shouts of men would have filled the bustling harbor, old women would have knelt in the marketplace, with their scales and piles of fruit and dried fish. Girls with obedient breasts lean out of the dusky windows, over the flower boxes, promising, murmuring.…
    Now it’s all gone. Long gone. Okinawa became a squalid apology for a fiefdom, squabbled over by masters far beyond its curved horizons. Nobody admits it, but the islands are dying now. The young people are moving to the mainland. Without subsidies and price-fixing the agriculture would collapse. When the mainland peaceniks get the American military rapists off the islands the economy will slow, splutter, and expire. The fish are all being fished out by factory trawlers. Tracks lead nowhere. Building projects have been started, but end in patches of concrete, piles of gravel, and tall, thorny weeds. Such a place would be ripe for His Serendipity’s Mission! I long to awaken people, to tell people about the White Nights and the New Earth, but I daren’t risk bringing attention to myself. My last defense is my ordinariness. When that wears out, I have nothing but my novice’s alpha potential to protect me.
    The island’s bewhiskered policeman spoke to me yesterday. I passed him outside a snorkel shop while he was bent over tying up his shoelaces.
    “How’s your holiday, Mr. Tokunaga?”
    “Very restful, officer. Thank you.”
    “I was sorry to hear about your wife. It must have been terribly traumatic.”
    “Kind of you to say so, officer.” I tried to focus my alpha coercion faculty to make him go away.
    “So you’ll be off tomorrow, Mr. Tokunaga? Mrs. Mori at the guest house said you were staying for a couple of weeks.”
    “I’m thinking of extending, actually, just a few more days.”
    “Is that a fact? Won’t your company be missing you?”
    “Actually, I’m working on a new computer system. I can do it here just as well as in Tokyo. In fact, the peace and quiet is more conducive to inspiration.”
    The policeman nodded thoughtfully. “I wonder … At the junior high school the youngsters have recently started up a computer club. My sister-in-law’s the headmistress there. Mrs. Oe. You’ve met already, I believe, at Mrs. Mori’s. I wonder … Mrs. Oe is far too polite to dream of imposing upon your time herself, I know, but …”
    I waited.
    “It would be a great honor for the school if you could go along some time and tell the computer class about life in a real computer company.…”
    I sensed a trap. But it would be safer to get out of it later than refuse now. “Sure.”
    “That would be very kind of you. I’ll mention it when I see my brother next.…”
    I met the husky dog on the beach. His Serendipity chose to address me in its barks.
    “What did you expect, Quasar? Did you think raising the curtain on the age of
Homo serendipitous
was going to be easy?”
    “No, my Lord. But when are the yogic fliers going to be dispatched to the White House and the European parliament, to demand your release?”
    “Eat eggs, my faithful one.”
    “Eggs, my Lord?”
    “Eggs are a symbol of rebirth, Quasar. And eat Orange Rocket ice lollies.”
    “What do they symbolize, Guru?”
    “Nothing. They contain vitamin C in abundance.”
    “It shall be so, my Lord. But the yogic fliers, my Father—”
    My only reply was a barking dog, and a puzzled look from the two lovers, jumping up suddenly from behind a stack of rusty oil drums. The three of us looked at each other in confusion. The dog cocked its leg and pissed against a tractor tire. The ocean boomed its indifference.
    •  •  •
    The little baby girl in the woolly cap, she had liked me. How could she have liked me? It was just some facial reflex, no doubt. She gurgled at me, smiling. Her mother looked at whom she was smiling, and she smiled at me too. Her eyes