Free Empire Dreams by Ian McDonald

the sea there stood a city of warm red brick. In the winter the snow lay deep in its streets and in spring and autumn the sea-fog would hang for weeks over it like wet, gray wool, but in the summer the red brick buildings would sigh and stretch and release a gentle friendly warmth into the air.
    Now, this city had but one Law, and it was the wisest Law ever made, for it held that nothing was higher than Happiness. To this end, every child who reached the age of twelve (for the years of that city are longer than yours, Fraser) was tested so that they might find the station in life which afforded them the greatest happiness. For everyone was happy in that city, from the street sweeper with his besom to the High Portreeve with his gold chain of office, for everyone was in the position to which he was best suited, and everyone who married, married someone who had been tested to be their perfect match in temperament and character, and there was no envy or greed or jealousy of another, for everyone was content. Tears were never seen in the streets of that city, nor the sounds of sorrow ever heard, for sadness and sorrow had been abolished.
    Now, in this city lived a boy. In many ways he was like you, Fraser, for he loved to watch the steam-tugs laboring up the Musgrave Channel to Templemore Dock with laden transports wallowing in tow, or sometimes he might ditch school and cycle out along the pier to the Mole House with borrowed binoculars to wait for hours for the tremendous fountain of sunlit water that heralded the arrival of a ship in the bay. But though he loved the ships, as all boys can before life grinds the love out of them, there was something he loved better. For he was clever with his hands and had a quick and playful mind and what he wanted most in the world to be was a toymaker. He wanted to make little painted wooden farm animals, and clever, intricate puppets, and toy trains with real steam locomotives, and baby dolls so lifelike that you would hesitate to hug them for fear they might cry: this he knew would make him truly happy.
    At the age of twelve he went to be tested, as everyone must if they wished to remain a citizen of that city. He filled the forms and completed the aptitude tests and submitted to the medical and psychological examinations, and in the middle of his gene-scan chart they saw a great peak in the graph and they knew then that he was that most singular of men, one possessed of the gift of foursight, who could see into a wider present than they did, one that went a little bit outward and a little bit inward into time.
    So they summoned him to the Bureau of Happiness and told him that with such a gift he could never be truly happy as a toymaker, that he must go to Trinity House and learn the Pilot’s Art, for such a great gift must be used for the good of the people of all the worlds and not be buried forever in some dingy toymaker’s workshop. Finally convinced that he could not be happy any other way, the boy let them put him on an Admiralty ship called the
Edmund Foxx
, and the ship spread her sails to catch the winds between the worlds and sailed away from the city where Happiness was Law and the boy never returned there again.
    And though many worldbound years passed, it only seemed a few days to the boy until he found himself treading the ancient halls of Trinity House. There they taught him to use his foursight to sense the possible futures that radiate away from the pivot-pin of
present
like the ribs of a fan, and the possible pasts that likewise converge upon it; they taught him to feel the tides on his skin, and the currents that flow under space and time; they taught him shipcraft in thrilling races round the sun in solos which were little more than a sail and a lifepod; they taught him the mysteries that lie at the unseen hearts of black suns and how they might be twisted to permit a ship to pass safely through to another place and time. And when they had taught him all they knew,