Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

What is knowledge? A belief that is shared by all the respectable people in a community, whether there is any real evidence for it or not.

What is faith? A belief we hold so strongly that we act as if it is true, even though we know there are many who do not believe it.

What is opinion? A belief that we expect other people to argue with.

What is scientific fact? An oxymoron. Science does not deal in facts. It deals in hypotheses, which are never fully and finally correct.

Cecily was in the kitchen, fix

ing dinner. Nick was upstairs, playing videogames. Lettie and Annie were out on bicycles, probably going on busier roads than Cecily officially permitted them to use, but they would at least be wearing their helmets. John Paul was alternating between coming into the kitchen and complaining that he was bored, and going into Nick's room to offer unwelcome advice on whatever game Nick was playing.

Mark was in the back yard, looking up into the tallest oak in the neighborhood. And the Nigerian boy, Chinma, was somewhere up in that tree. Judging from the angle of Mark's neck as he looked up, Chinma was very high in the tree.

Chinma had asked for permission before climbing the tree. He was such a polite boy. But so quiet, so inscrutable. Babe had taken her aside to warn her that Chinma showed almost nothing in his face. "It's an African thing. Particularly a Nigerian thing. You don't want to let anyone see any emotion, except, when you feel threatened, a cheerful smile."

"So a smile isn't a good thing?" asked Cecily.

"A real smile is. Believe me, you'll know the difference."

Of course she had taken in the boy, but Cecily couldn't help resenting the fact that somehow the President and Cole and Babe had decided her life wasn't complicated enough, so she of all the people in the D.C. area needed to take this boy into her care.

At the same time, it was flattering, too. When they wanted the boy to have a good, safe home, they thought of her.

Unless they somehow thought they were doing her and her kids a favor, giving them a wonderful new brother, someone to take their minds off their troubles. Men sometimes thought that way, because few of them had any calendar sense. Her husband had been dead for three years. Any comfort she might have derived from having a pet child added to her family in the aftermath of Reuben's death, the need for it had long since passed.

None of them would have guessed the real reason she felt comfort at Chinma's presence in her home. To Cecily, it was a sign that God still knew where she lived.

She would never say this to anyone outside of church, because it was such an unintellectual idea. To think that God bent events to bring certain people together would simply be scoffed at by hard-minded men like Torrent or Cole or any of the people who knew her only as a policy wonk. But Cecily lived in a world where, when someone had suffered enough, God would assign some person or family to be angels in their life, to bless them. Clearly Chinma was on the suffered-enough list, and it felt good to Cecily that she and her family had been chosen as the angels of comfort.

Even if Torrent or one of Reuben's soldiers believed they had thought of it, Cecily knew that God could make anybody think of anything, and make it seem like a good idea. It didn't take away any of their freedom, for God to use them as an instrument of his will. To them, it was something they did in passing. To Chinma and Cecily, it was a potentially transformative connection.

And if Chinma's coming to their home was only temporary, and it accomplished nothing more than this, Chinma had finally arrived in America. Until now he had been in institutional custody, surrounded by walls, breathing air-conditioned air, and dealing only with soldiers and doctors and scholars and politicians.

Now, though, Chinma was high up in an American tree, looking out over an American landscape, with an American boy at the bottom of the tree looking up at him with … what, awe? Consternation? Hard to read Mark's expression in profile.

And now she wouldn't have to. He was trudging toward the house.

Cecily had taken Cole's and Babe's warnings about the food seriously. She had never thought of American food as bland and flavorless, but as Babe said, "They have to do something with a diet consisting mostly of flavorless yams, so they spice everything to the limits of human endurance. The more subde flavors we appreciate are indistinguishable to them."

"What are you saying, they can't tell a tuna sandwich from peanut butter?"

"They could probably tell the difference, they just wouldn't care," said Babe. "Like the difference between Sprite, Seven-Up, and Sierra Mist."

"I can tell the difference," said Cecily.

"But compared to the difference between them and champagne … "

"I'll spice things up a little," said Cecily.

"No, you don't get it," said Babe. "Chinma won't notice you spiced it unless it's so hot it makes your children cry. So get him some pepper sauces and let him add it to his own food."

So Cecily had made a run to Wegmans and come back with a dozen tall narrow bottles of sauces that bragged about how impossibly hot they were. She had also bought a dozen jalapeh***os and a few habaneros, and handling them both with rubber gloves, and leaving all the seeds intact, she had made two different sauces that had not been attuned to American tastes at the factory.

Tonight would be angel-hair pasta with a choice of tomato and alfredo sauces. The tomato sauce was Newman's Own Sockarooni, which was too spicy for Mark and Annie, though Lettie and Nick were fine with it.

Mark came into the kitchen. "I can't believe how high he climbs," he said.

"Well, he can't climb higher than the tree."