Forty-two-year-old delegate of the Esikongo Gilberto Rezende exited his house in the prefabricated neighborhood for diplomats and walked the distance to the offices of the still nascent world alliance under a pleasant sun. The building was an amalgamation of multiple styles, and Gilberto was proud of the part of it he had suggested. Between the ampleness of the main entrance with its luxurious water fountain and the busy interior with its hundreds of corridors and offices was a small domed passageway where the visitor could feel less overwhelmed by the immensity of the work that happened there. Gilberto had described it to the architects as a place for making a pause.
His pocket watch indicated that the workday had not yet begun, so he sat on one of the benches that surrounded the fountain and admired the white landscape beyond the city. It was said that, in the times before the heating of the world, even the farthest hills his sight could reach had been buried under a heavy blanket of thick snow. He looked down at the cement beneath his feet and tried to imagine how much hardened snow still separated him from the real ground. Choosing to build the city in the first place had been the material affirmation of a purpose: its precarious location, not on solid rock but on what only by the continuous effort of all peoples was kept from melting away, was meant as a reminder of the need for a common direction and for persistence in its pursuit.
“Good morning,” he heard behind his back in Spanish. “Or good whatever time it is here.”
He turned and saw Hana standing by the fountain. “Hana! It’s been years.” He embraced her and took a long look at her. “Where have you been? And when did you finish learning Spanish?”
“I was back home, in Rēkohu.” She sat next to him. “It’s something of a relief to see you. The Moriori tribal leaders have handed me so many responsibilities I can barely set aside any time to meet with a friend and just talk.”
Gilberto nodded. “Some days I forget what my own face looks like.”
“That can’t be true.” Hana turned to the fountain behind the bench. There’s a mirror right here under those gigantic windows of yours.”
“Don’t you have days when you don’t lift even your eyes off your desk?”
“Oh, I was wishing we wouldn’t talk about work. Independence has brought so much work, organizing the new government, adjudicating land rights, returning slaves to their families.”
“That sounds really impressive.”
“Yes.” She touched the water with her fingertips and found it tolerably cold. “Isn’t this supposed to shoot water up high?”
“It does, but they only turn it on during office hours.”
“Then I’ll wait. To answer your question: I picked up my Spanish while coordinating with the tribes in Encoberta. Mainly the Anmatyerre and their neighbors.”
“What are you working on?”
“We have a project to reconstruct precolonial history, and they’ve been great help; their mnemonic mapmaking techniques are second to none. Right now there’s an expedition around the Pacific islands to catalog medicinal plants.”
“I almost envy your duties,” he said with a chuckle.
People started arriving at the building; Gilberto only recognized the attire of half of them, and that increased his satisfaction with how things were turning out. The world was still inexhaustibly richer than he knew.
“I know; I shouldn’t be complaining. Who knows what keeps you busy, what with keeping the world in one piece.” They couldn’t resist laughing at their smallness in the stage of history and at the humbling significance of each baby step. “Lots of things are happening, and I can hardly keep track. Next month we’re receiving an engineer from the Han who’s going to teach us to build irrigation systems. It just never ends. I thought expelling our invaders would be the hard part.”
Gilberto nodded with resignation. “In Likasi we have dozens of old families we can’t send back to Lisbon because they’ve mixed with us; they’ve put down roots with us.”
Hana’s sigh came out as an exhausted cry. “I keep waiting for the moment we can jump into doing politics like a normal country, but the people who used to run the place when they had no business being there broke everything.”
“I can say the same for Zaire. And for the rest. We are learning the art of statecraft the hard, slow way.”
“It’s been worth the effort,” she said with a smile she hadn’t felt able to make for her entire life. “No more empires. No more colonies. No more subjects or slaves.”
He looked down, reluctant to share the full extent of her excitement. “I was in panic when we did it. We came dangerously close to losing the moral argument.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that. It was a rotten system; it was in its nature to damage anyone who was part of it.”
“But you can’t trace an obvious route from there to here. In one possible version of events, we launched the bomb, we found that we liked being in charge, and we lost sight of what we were trying to defend.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder. “I was there too. I wouldn’t have let you cross that line.”
That calmed him somewhat. “Thank you. It means a lot.”
“That’s the point of making allies. We make each other better.”
Gilberto consulted his pocket watch and looked up at the giant office windows. “I still regret that we had to resort to intimidation. But I keep thinking that if, due to some whim of fate, they had made peace with us out of their own good will, they’d spend the rest of history congratulating themselves and expecting our thanks. I doubt we would’ve owned that victory.”
Hana shifted positions on the bench and suddenly looked more serious. “The task of taking care of what we’ve won is what brings me here. I was fortunate to get some days just for myself, but next week I’ll start working with you.”
“Really? That’s great news! Are you still a delegate?”
“No. Now that the Alliance is dissolved and we’re making up this new thing here, we’re learning that there’s more to do than keep the peace. There’s talk of creating a division in charge of preserving cultural heritage. I’m supposed to help draft all the preliminary paperwork and, as they say, get things in motion.”
“You’re going to like it here. In my neighborhood we have restaurants with every type of food you can imagine.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve… been named Director of this new world alliance.”
They paused their conversation to bow their greetings at the approaching delegates from the Peruvian Federation, the Italian Union, and the Kurdish Republic.
“Now that is a surprise. I didn’t know we were going for a vertical hierarchy.”
That made Gilberto laugh out loud. “I’m not going to rule the world. But I will have a prettier chair at meetings. The position of Director will be rotated, of course.”
“But you’re going to be the first. You get to leave your mark.”
“A worthy one, I expect.”
“So, Director Rezende, what are you going to call this union of all the world’s states?”
“I’ve given thought to that. This alliance will belong to no one in particular. No one nation, no one language, no one faith. I’m giving it the obvious name.”
“Don’t disappoint me.”
“First let me explain. It’s always been meaningful to me that this unique opportunity for the world came because Neema discovered that two continents had the same rocks. I’ve kept that story as a reminder that we may be many, as you said, but the world is one.” Gilberto smiled. “I’m calling this alliance the United States.”
She mulled it over. “It’s boring. Bland. Generic. Unimaginative.”
“That’s why it’s the name we need. We must take care to not be tied to one region or one culture. The dream we’ve been fighting for is a space where it doesn’t matter where you come from or what you speak or what you look like. That’s the dream I call United States, and it must be open to the world. That’s what makes it different from all regimes that have existed until now.”