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less than ten minutes.”
    “They still don’t know who did it?” Snowbird said.
    “No one ever claimed responsibility. More than twenty years of intense investigation haven’t turned up one useful clue. They really covered their tracks.”
    “So it was done by someone like you,” Moonboy said. “Not really like you.”
    “I know what you mean, yes. It wasn’t some band of foaming- at-the-mouth anti-Semites. It was a country or corporation that had . . . people like us.”
    “Could you do it?” Paul said. “I don’t mean morally. I mean could you manage the mechanics of it.”
    “No. You can’t separate the mechanics from the morals. After twenty-one years, we still don’t have one molecule of testimony. The people who drove the car bombs died, of course—and we don’t think they knew they were going to die; they were all on their way to someplace, not parked at targets—but what happened to the dozens of other people who had to be involved? We think they were all murdered during or just after Gehenna. It wasn’t a time when one dead body more or less was going to stick out. Every lead we’ve ever had ends that day.”
    Carmen was nodding slowly. “You don’t hate them?”
    I saw what she meant. “Not really. I fear what they represent, in terms of the human potential for evil. But the individuals, no. What would be the point?”
    “I read what you wrote about it,” she said, “in that journal overview.”
    “ International Affairs , the Twentieth Anniversary issue. You’ve been thorough.”
    She smiled but looked directly at me. “I was curious, of course. We’ll be together a long time.”
    “I read it, too,” Paul said. “ ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable.’ Carmen showed it to me.”
    “Trying to understand why I was, why we were, selected?”
    “Why military people were selected,” she said. “The pressure for that was obvious, but frankly I was surprised they gave in to it. There’s no way we can threaten the Others.”
    She was holding back resentment that I don’t think was personal. “You’d rather have three more xenobiologists than three . . . political appointees? We’re not really soldiers.”
    “You were, once.”
    “As a teenager, yes. Everyone in Israel was, at that time. But I’ve been a professional peacekeeper ever since.”
    “And a spook,” Elza said. “If I were Carmen, that would bother me.”
    Carmen made a placating gesture. “We probably have enough xenobiologists, and really can only guess what else might be useful. Your M.D. and clinical experience is as obviously useful to us, personally, as Namir’s life as a diplomat is, to our mission. But we don’t know. Dustin’s doctorate in philosophy might turn out to be the most powerful weapon in our arsenal.
    “I won’t pretend it didn’t annoy me when I found out the Earth committee had chosen an all- military bunch—and then spooks on top of that! But of course I can see the logic. And it’s reasonable in terms of social dynamic, a secure triad joining two secure pairs.”
    That dynamic is interesting in various ways. The committee wanted no more than three military people, so the civilians would outnumber us, but they didn’t want to upset the social balance by sending up single, unattached people—so our family had a large natural advantage.
    But how stable is it, really? Everybody’s married, but Carmen and Dustin and Elza are all under thirty, and the rest of us are not exactly nuns and monks.
    In the first hour all of us were together, I suppose there was a lot of automatic and unconscious evaluation and categorizing—who might bond to whom in the winepress of years that we faced? At fifty, I was old enough to be Carmen’s father, but my initial feelings toward her were not at all paternal.
    I could tell that the attraction was not mutual; she had me pigeonholed, the older generation. But my wife was her age, actually a few months younger. She must have known that as a statistic.
    Was I