Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer

  “You’re alive today for a reason, Mycroft, and it isn’t shoveling shit. Get in the car.”

  “Yes, Censor. Just—”

  “Now.” He seized me by the hair, and I could see from angry faces that some of my fellows read abuse in the gesture, but it was actually a tender grip, the roughness of familiarity, as when a mother lion lifts her cub in gentle, razor jaws. “We have five hours to rerun the entire Seven-Ten list impact. Humanity needs that a lot more than they need ten square feet of pavement anyone could clear.”

  The truth stung. “Yes, Censor. Sorry.”

  The Censor’s guards fanned out around us, and he gestured to one to retrieve my fallen hat. The rest, strong bodies in bold Alliance blue, pushed back my muck-stained comrades, while tiny flitting robots scanned their faces, masks of wonder and concern.

  One face still showed anger. “Just ’cause you’re the Censor doesn’t mean you can—”

  “It’s all right.” Again the comrade who had seen such scenes before restrained my bold defender with a soft hand. “The Censor knows what they’re doing. Mycroft’s a little … damaged in the head, and it takes some gentle roughness to get them … re-anchored in the present sometimes, but it’s not the Censor’s mind we have to change, it’s Mycroft’s.”

  The Censor—who, through long acquaintance, permits me to call him Vivien—smiled to find on hand another who understood the burden of putting up with me. Do not misapprehend, reader: all that is wrong in this scene is indeed my fault. Violence, abuse, even unfreedom is abhorrent to our good Censor, who keeps violence’s great adversary, our Patriarch Voltaire, forever with him, as a bust in his private office, and a model in his heart. If you see violence here, it is not Vivien’s violence, rather I infect those around me with a shadow of my own.

  “I’m sorry.” I let myself be hurried to the car, smiling reassurance at my fellows. “I’ll be fine. See you later, everyone. Make sure you don’t miss the speeches!”

  “They won’t but we might, thanks to you.” The Censor released me to a guard, who helped me strip off my muck smock. “It’s not just my time you wasted. I had to call around looking for you, interrupting I don’t know how many meetings.”

  I winced. “I’m sorry you had to take the time to fetch me.” I stepped up onto the first step of the waiting car, and paused to let its hoses rinse the refuse from my feet.

  “Have you heard what’s happened?”

  “The Black Sakura Seven-Ten list manuscript was stolen, then recovered.”

  “Exactly.” He made the car run its rinse cycle twice for him, to get the last muck off his cuffs. “Now the seventh-most-popular list shoots up to number one in everyone’s attention, and all our calculations go out the window.” He turned to the system console. “Romanova, Censor’s office.”

  We started on our calculations, even as the car accelerated. Riding in one of Mukta’s children, the hop from Marseille to Romanova is so brief that we did not even achieve full acceleration, and Vivien set the screens to window mode, to let us savor the beauties of the capital with which, after sixteen years in office, he is still so much in love. The colored banners of the day’s festivities flooded the streets, lively but almost wrong, like paint caught in the cracks of an old statue, once colored but nobler in its naked white. The cheerful gold and blue of the Alliance flag were everywhere, but Renunciation Day also brought out Hive pride, and the festoons and streamers color-coded the populations that clustered on our new Rome’s artificial hills: Mitsubishi red, green and white up on the Quirinal, Gordian red, black and gold on the Caelian, European blue and gold mingling with Cousin white and azure in the valleys, Masonic gray and purple on the Esquiline, while across the Tibernov river the bright Olympic rainbow made the Humanist district even more exuberant. On such a day one can really see that Romanova is Earth’s most Hive-mixed city, even more than Sydney or Hyderabad, since here the ratio of the seven Hives is fixed, not only in the city’s charter, but the Alliance’s. When the death of Chairman Carlyle made it no longer possible to put off picking a world capital, three issues faced the committee: the design, the distribution of the real estate which would soon be the most desirable on Earth, and who would pay. Spreading the cost equally would hit the poor Hives hard, especially the Cousins and Olympians, who then sheltered most of Earth’s surviving poor, but divvying by wealth would take the lion’s share from tiny, patent-rich Utopia, which could then reasonably demand the biggest slice of the land all powers coveted. The project languished ten years in committee before the Masons made their offer: we shall shoulder the whole cost of building the city ourselves, and divvy the property among the Hives by population. All we ask is that you let us choose the city plan. All welcomed the end of deadlock, so, for a mere few hundred billion euros, the Hive of myths and empires made the world capital be their copy of Rome. Has any government ever invested so wisely in propaganda?

  “The Six-Hive Transit System welcomes you to Romanova.” The car’s voice greeted us in its recorded ritual. “Visitors are required to adhere to a minimum of Gray Hiveless Law, and to follow Romanovan special regulations regarding concealed weapons, public gatherings, and graffiti. For a list of local regulations not included in your customary law code, select ‘law.’” To most, it is a formula familiar enough to bore, but it still lit the Censor’s face as brightly as a mother’s welcome.

  “Took you long enough!”

  We were met at the steps of the Censor’s Office by his ba’kid, apprentice, and Chief Deputy, Jung Su-Hyeon Ancelet-Kosala, as the public prefers to order his names. Seeing Su-Hyeon now, his short black ponytail half fallen out, his gray and purple uniform veined with the wrinkles of a night spent sleeping at his desk, it felt even more surreal remembering his name on the stolen Seven-Ten list. It was true that this Deputy Censor walked the corridors of power in his master’s wake, but it is as hard to imagine Su-Hyeon as a world-straddling titan as to imagine a snowy wading crane battling eagles. Su-Hyeon is absolutely tiny in that special way that only Asia’s women can be tiny, as if childhood refused to leave, and kept the frame so light you fear it might blow away like grass upon a breeze, or snap like porcelain. Indeed, Su-Hyeon’s delicacy makes it hard for me to stick to ‘he,’ and there is just enough flesh on the bone beneath his tightly tailored uniform to confirm those are a woman’s hips and chest, but ‘he’ will be easier for you, reader, since that way apprentice will match master. Su-Hyeon had a smile for Vivien, but a righteous frown for me.

  A second frown waited on the other face which welcomed us, the Censor’s most promising new analyst, Toshi Mitsubishi. She is another of the adopted brood of Chief Director Andō and Princesse Danaë. Africa and Europe are cofactors in her ancestry, visible in her rich, medium-brown skin and afro-textured hair, which she wears in a thousand little twists like tongues of flame, but Japan dominates her syntax, her posture, her reflexive half-bow as we arrive, and she wears a Japanese nation-strat bracelet. The month before this I had been honored with a slice of cake from the celebrations when Toshi passed her Adulthood Competency Exam, and, at the time, I felt some smugness in having guessed correctly that, despite the honorable Mitsubishi surname, she would exchange her minor’s sash for Graylaw Hiveless. She could have worked for the Censor even as a Mitsubishi Member, but the gray sash is almost a uniform in the office, required by superstition more than rule, as if these public servants would somehow make the numbers lie if they chose to bind themselves to any other law.

  “Where on Earth was Mycroft?” Toshi asked at once.

  “Halfway down a sewer.”

  I apologized to Su-Hyeon with a wince, to Toshi with a bow.

  “How much have you done since I last called?” Vivien charged up the steps, already stripping the tracker from his ear as he passed the sanctum’s bronze-faced gates.

  “A lot, actually. The last list just came in.” Su-Hyeon followed the Censor into the vestibule and tossed his tracker to the guards.

  “Excellent. We made some prog
ress in the car as well.”

  I held still as the Censor deactivated and removed my tracker, while his guards confirmed permissions with the police. Tracker free, and shedding even the Censor’s robot escort, we passed the inner doors together, and let the Censor’s sanctum seal us in. Perhaps, reader, you have never been off the network for any length of time, except on portions of the long trip to the Moon. There are now few places so secure that they forbid trackers. The unfamiliar cold of having nothing in that ear makes that inner chamber feel more special than other seats of government, as a buried temple reached by slithering down the archaeologist’s tunnel feels more pregnant with the past than ruins which stand in sunlight. The extreme sensitivity of the Censor’s data excuses the ritual, but it is still a ritual, no more nor less necessary than the bath one took before entering this building’s predecessor in the real Rome, where it had marked the cremation spot of the Divine Julius.

  “Do we have the Brillist editorial yet?” Vivien asked, plunging into his favorite sofa in the center of the octagonal, screen-walled room.

  Toshi shook her head. “Just the list. I talked to the Headmaster themself as well as the editor; they promised it within two hours.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it. Bring up the full grid.”

  The walls obeyed. Shall we play a little game here, reader? First you read the Seven-Ten lists, then I shall read your mind and tell you in what order you read them, which you heeded and which you skimmed. You think I can’t do it? The Censor would not call on me if I did not have some little skill at prophecy. Try me. Read naturally, skipping what you choose, not forcing yourself to study every name just so you can scoff: Thou underestimatest me, Mycroft—I am unbiased and skim nothing. It is not natural to study all with equal keenness, reader. Men only read every line of a contract so they may boast about it later. Read what you will—even the Censor reads only what he will.

  Are you done yet? Then I shall begin. If, reader, you are my near contemporary then you looked first for your own Hive in every list, smiling as you see your fortunes rise, scowling as foreign papers underrate you. Next, you read in full the list of your Hive’s native paper, then the omni-Hive opinions of The Romanov, and the Anonymous (whether you agree or disagree with the Anonymous, you must know what the weightiest voice in politics believes). After that you reviewed Black Sakura, which history’s spotlight has turned into the “protagonist” of papers. The others you skimmed, noting only conspicuous changes: those who rate Cousin Chair Kosala above the Anonymous, or who raise Brillist Headmaster Felix Faust above the seventh line. And if you are not yourself a Brillist, then you turned last, and grudgingly, perhaps after you began to read this paragraph, to read the Brillist list, for you cannot in good conscience admit that you trust a stranger above the leading commentator of your own Hive, but neither can you pretend that you do not believe the Brillist Institute think tank is a greater oracle even than myself.

  And if I am not thy contemporary, Mycroft? you ask. If I am posterity instead, gazing back from centuries after these ‘days of transformation’ thou describest? Then, reader, the list you rely on is the last. You skimmed the rest, eye catching on celebrities: the Emperor, Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi, those already familiar from my tale, while the rest blurred until the final list, for Shanghai Daily is the only paper so courteous to the future as to list the Hive names beside their leaders. If my Hives are to you as antiquated as the feudal system is to me, you must not fear that you will understand less of the story because you are not fluent in the names and ranks of my dead age; comfort yourself that these attempts to name the ten most influential people in our world are, in point of fact, all wrong, and that you see the clearer without the nearsightedness of a contemporary. You know already one name which should be on all these lists, but never could be: Bridger.

  “I don’t like what I’m seeing with the Mitsubishi.” Su-Hyeon flopped beside the Censor on the fur-soft couches at the chamber’s center. “It’s never happened before that a Hive fell a notch on every other list but rose in their own primary journal. It looks like self-obsession, rating themselves so high when everyone agrees they’ve slipped, and, with the theft bringing everyone’s attention to Black Sakura, the effect will be amplified.”

  Vivien nodded, the sofa’s texture ruffling his slim dreadlocks, which fall in a shell around his head just to the shoulders, semi-stiff, like the living surface of a willow tree. “The Anonymous rated the Mitsubishi under Felix Faust this year, and there are no Mitsubishi names in the bottom three on any non-Mitsubishi list.”

  Su-Hyeon frowned. “It’s embarrassing. It’ll lower Sam Neung in everybody’s eyes.” Su-Hyeon uses the Korean name for the Mitsubishi. “They fell one notch on the lists this year, but with that it’ll be as if they fell three.”

  No one beats Vivien Ancelet’s poker face. “Toshi, what do you think?”

  Toshi paused a moment to compose her answer. “I don’t think it’ll be that grim, not with the theft making Black Sakura seem important. One notch down, that’s what the public will think.”

  The Censor stroked the gold piping of his purple sleeve as an old sage strokes his beard. “Mycroft? What are you thinking?”

  I had paused to strip off my uniform jacket before the scent of sewage made too much headway in the room. “I think everyone hates Prime Minister Perry,” I began. “I think the public knows Europe would be higher on all the lists if they had a more popular leader, that Europe’s influence is greater than Perry’s is. Black Sakura included Crown Prince Leonor in their bottom three instead of King Isabel Carlos to remind everyone that the next generation is coming. I think everyone will read Europe as a notch or two above wherever Perry’s name appears, which puts the Masons, Cousins, and Europeans all above the Mitsubishi on most lists, even the Humanists on some. The Mitsubishi will come off as the weakest of the big five this year, by a long shot.”

  “Probably…” The Censor held us in suspense, taking a long, deep breath. “You know, any of the three of you at ten years old could have impersonated Tsuneo Sugiyama better than whoever Hagiwara got to write this Seven-Ten list.”

  “Impersonate?” Su-Hyeon’s eyes went wide. “Who’s Hagiwara?”

  “Black Sakura’s editor.” Vivien Ancelet knows every reporter worth his salt. “Whom I wouldn’t have called an idiot before today. Didn’t want to disappoint the readership, I guess, probably strong-armed some unsuspecting intern into writing it, but step one of faking a star reporter’s article is telling said star reporter not to message their entire gaming club to say they’re taking the week off.”

  Toshi Mitsubishi had gone very quiet, and very stiff. It was me she stared at, and I stared back, each of us uncertain what the other had learned from her bash’parents at Tōgenkyō. I did not know Toshi well. I knew her intellect and skill, but not the human side of her, how close she was to Masami among her many ba’sibs. If I had had my tracker, I would have called Chief Director Andō to ask permission to discuss the truth. But Toshi is stern stuff, and spoke first. “It has to come out. Masami wrote the list. My ba’sib.”

  The Censor released a slow, hissing sigh, like a punctured balloon. “The Chief Director’s ba’kid … This is going to be a firestorm.” A deep breath. “I want to see numbers. Su-Hyeon, run what’ll happen if the Mitsubishi fall to the bottom of the big five. Mycroft, do a precedent check, see if there’s ever been a confidence shift this abrupt. Look especially at the 2380s, right before the Greenpeace-Mitsubishi merger.”

  Su-Hyeon’s eyes widened. “You think there’ll be a Hive merger?”

  “No, but some of these numbers feel familiar, and my gut says it’s from then. I’ll comb older records, see if I can figure out what I’m remembering. Toshi—” He froze mid-order, catching sight of her face, her trembling lip. “I’m sorry. Nothing can stop this being hard on your bash’, but at least we’ve caught it a bit before the public. Do you need a minute?”

  She turned to the screens. “No. I’ll run t
he Mitsubishi internal numbers, see which way Wenzhou is likely to swing if the Beijing and Shanghai blocs both try for the Chief Director’s seat.”

  Vivien reached out, as if fighting the urge to offer her a warming hug, but he and Toshi are not quite that familiar. “I don’t think your ba’pa will necessarily fall.”

  Toshi shook herself, the springy twists of her hair dancing like windswept grasses. “We won’t know without running it.”

  We each took a wall and made the numbers dance. It is tedious work, even with the computers’ aid, a thousand judgment calls as we tried to extrapolate the consequences of this crisis of confidence. We didn’t only factor in obvious things, like investment trends or youths choosing their Hives this year, but subtle things too, the ratio of rice to wheat consumption, exports to the Great African Reservation, apartment rental prices, the million strands which weave through the world economy, and which we search for snarls in the weft. There was a reason Chairman Carlyle named his corporation Gordian. It wasn’t, as so many think today, a symbol of that yet unconquered mystery, the brain. It was the sword which hacked the knot that Carlyle cared about, a sword he turned on clients’ economic snarls. When those prophets men call economists predicted revolution or collapse in some weak corner of the globe where a subscriber had investments, Carlyle’s Gordian would fly in Mukta’s children and evacuate everything: factories, goods, workers, families, capital in all its forms all snatched to safety in a day, like good fruit from a rotting tree. As the tremors of the Church War grew, Gordian carried out the affluent of every nation, leaving governments and poor to slit each other’s throats. But Mukta worked as a sword back then only because those snarls were geographic. In our world all powers are global powers, and all snarls global snarls. That is why, while Thomas Carlyle could snip out the shape of a new world like topiary from the overgrowth of nations, today our Censor—with the same data at his disposal—laughs at those who put him on their Seven-Ten lists: Vivien Ancelet, the world’s accountant, maker of Senators but slave of numbers, helpless as the astronomer who watches the universe’s pool balls act out their predetermined dance.