a Bible thing.”
“That’s the cream of the crop who are doing that,” Enoch said. “The one percent. That’s Joseph and a few dozen of his handpicked elite. People you could actually have a conversation with. The other ninety-nine percent don’t know anything about Leviticus and they don’t understand or care about the theology—the repudiation of the doctrine of the New Covenant and the idea of Tactical Jesus. They just know that you had better do what Joseph says, or else. And Joseph for his part gets to claim with a straight face, to anyone who cares, that his approach to law and order has a kind of divine authority.”
“So who are you in all this? Why’s Jake paying you to risk your life?” Anne-Solenne asked.
“Yeah, I didn’t catch your last name,” Julian added.
“Oh, don’t bother Googling. Root is my last name. But it’s a nightmare on Google because it’s an old name that has been in the family forever and so you’ll be pulling up stuff that goes back centuries.”
“Count of Zelrijk-Aalberg,” Julian muttered, having already ignored Enoch’s admonition not to bother.
“Yes, there is an old family connection to that place.”
“One of your ancestors . . .”
“Was a mathematician. Yes,” Enoch said, getting clipped and impatient as Julian continued sifting through old dead Enoch Root hits.
“Julian!” Sophia barked, and caught Anne-Solenne’s eye.
“Yeah, Julian! Snap out of it. Rude, boring.”
“Okay, okay . . .”
“I have had some dealings, back in the day, with the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes, and more recently with Elmo Shepherd,” Enoch explained, “and through Elmo I met Jake Forthrast, who imagined that I might be of use, or at least of interest, to his spiritual research. So I am an adviser to ONE and I interpret my responsibilities broadly and some would say creatively.”
“Some would say a little dangerously!” Sophia put in.
Enoch considered this as if it were a novel idea and gave just a hint of a shrug.
“Oh, cool! Fractals,” Julian muttered.
“Julian! Fuck’s sake,” said Anne-Solenne.
“Math major?” Enoch asked him.
“CS and math,” Julian returned.
“I’ll bite,” said Sophia. “What is the connection to fractals?”
“One of Enoch’s ancestors was, like, the great-great-granddad of fractal geometry,” Julian reported. “In 1791—”
“Oh, god, please don’t read the Wikipedia entry,” Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified.
“I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage,” said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value.
“But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don’t have to consult an online source.”
“True that,” Julian admitted, and finally shoved his glasses up on his forehead just before Anne-Solenne, flailing at him from the front seat, could claw them off.
“So, this place Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium and the Netherlands but has never quite belonged to either of them,” Enoch reported. “It makes Andorra look like Siberia. Its total size is barely large enough to play a regulation game of cricket—supposing that all of its territory could be collected into a continuous oval. But it can’t. The length of its borders is enormous compared to its area. Someone described its map as a doily that had been attacked by moths. It encompasses eleven separate enclaves that are not part of Zelrijk-Aalberg. Four of those are Belgian and seven Dutch. One of the Belgian enclaves contains a Dutch subenclave, and one of the Dutch enclaves contains no fewer than four subenclaves, of which one is Belgian and the remaining three are all parts of Zelrijk-Aalberg proper. The largest of those contains a Belgian sub-subenclave consisting of a single root cellar measuring one by two meters.”
“Do they sell a lot of fireworks there?” Phil says. “This is jogging a memory of when I was driving around Flanders with my family and we came across this incredibly illegal-looking fireworks stand in the middle of a town.”
“Most of its revenue, until recently, came from selling fireworks that were illegal in the neighboring countries,” Enoch agreed. “What Julian here is referring to, with the fractals, is a thing that happened when a former count of Zelrijk-Aalberg paid a visit to the property to engage in the ancient custom of beating the bounds.”
“‘Beating the bounds’?” Phil asked.
“Oh, this I’ve heard of,” said Anne-Solenne. “They do it in London, and other old places with complicated boundaries. Once a year, an entourage of bigwigs walks the circuit of the property line and beats it with sticks.”
“Since Roman times,” Enoch said,