The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  “What about the Utopians?” I interrupted, my voice shrill as I tried to will away the tickling torture of my phantoms. “Your policy to never kill Utopians, was that someone’s request?”

  The prisoner said nothing until his president nodded consent. “Targeting Utopians is forbidden by the injunction against deaths which would trigger investigations likely to expose us.” He raised his manacled wrists, letting the light catch on the inner padding of glistening Cannergel. “You know why.”

  President Ancelet sat silent, peering, not at the prison walls, but at the realm of thought beyond. “Then, so far as legal investigation will be able to uncover, all hits made by O.S. were directly ordered by a Humanist Executive, and no other figure ever made the decision. Correct?”

  “Almost, Member President.”

  “Almost?”

  Prospero Saneer took a long breath. “As O.S., I was authorized to use the means at my disposal to prevent misuse of those means. In other words, it was my duty to execute anyone, outside O.S. or inside, who attempted to pervert, misuse, or steal the means we used to kill.”

  “And you’ve exercised that authority?”

  “We killed our bash’parents.” Prospero stopped there, but the president’s stare demanded more. “Five years ago. My mother, Osten Saneer Eleventh O.S., my father, also the Snipers, the Typers, the Weeksbooths, they were planning to bypass government approval and select targets themselves, based on their own judgment of what would be best for the Humanists. We, the younger generation, arranged a rafting accident. Cato planned it and myself, Ojiro, Thisbe, and Lesley actually carried it out, but we all consented, and we all helped.” He frowned at the hints of pity which showed in his president’s face. “They plotted treason, Member President. Former President Ganymede commended the action when I informed them.”

  Such perfect calm. Something inside, an older part of me, envied it, reader—envied him. You see, I never managed patricide. Or matricide. Parricide aplenty as I worked my way through my adoptive family, but Providence took my blood-parents before I could attempt the one offense so unthinkable that my ancestors teach me to hold it up as proof that the universe needs Furies and torments. What a privilege for Prospero to have passed the absolute test: love, Nature, and nurture all on one side and only loyalty upon the other. I think the wilder creature I once was would have had the strength to kill the parents who gave me life, but I will never know. Nor can I console myself that at least their deaths do not add to my guilt, for I lost Bridger, so all dead blood, from my own parents’ blood to the first Cro-Magnon who sharpened a stone, is on my hands, and well the Furies know it.

  President Ancelet leaned back with a full-bodied sigh, his dreadlocks making the shatterproof foam seat back hiss like a snare drum. “They can’t accuse you of hypocrisy at least.”

  “They can accuse me of anything they like, Member President,” Prospero warned. “Whether these facts or any others should be released to the public during my trial must be your decision. Unless you prefer that I not stand trial.”

  “That’s why you let yourself be captured, isn’t it? You wanted a trial.”

  “Making the whole truth public was the only way I could think of to calm the other Hives, or at least to ensure that, if we are destroyed, it will be due to truth, not paranoia. But my trial may not be necessary after all; when Ganymede fell, I didn’t expect to have a strategist of your caliber come forward to help us.”

  The ex-Censor nodded slowly. “Out of curiosity, how would you expect to avoid a trial at this point?”

  “Through my escape, incapacitation, or death. Any could be arranged; we still have Ojiro.”

  Ancelet twitched: this was the first time, I think, he had seen a man offer to die for him. “No. The trial will go forward.” His voice turned from conversation to command. “You will plead terra ignota.”

  Ockham Prospero Saneer does not flinch at monsters, be they flesh or words, but I do. Terra Ignota, our young law’s Unknown Lands. The geographic nations had 3,934 years from Hammurabi to the Great Renunciation to map out the kingdoms of their law, while our Hive laws were breech-born in the hasty wilderness of war. The European Union had only to revise its constitution for the umpteenth time, and tradition claims that the Masons have not changed a letter of their law since law began, but the rest of the Hives have patchwork law codes, stitched in haste from those of corporations, clubs, families, custom, fiction, and, yes, relics of the geographic nations, too. The newborn Hives soon learned to handle crimes that tangled two of them, but what can our young law do when two Hives’ Members break a third’s law in a fourth’s house? Or when a beast like me tangles all seven and the Hiveless in one bloody spree? If Gordian law demands that all records must stand open to science, can the Cousins force them to conceal the background of a Gag-gene? If the Mitsubishi consider self-defense justifiable homicide, can the Utopian equation of homicide with libricide force the Mitsubishi to forgive lethal force if it is used to save, not a life, but a manuscript? For ordinary crimes, the criminal’s Hive pays reparation to the victim’s, then each Hive disciplines or compensates its Member as its own laws prescribe. When Hive preferences are incompatible, exchange of favors settles many tangles: I will fine my Members for discussing your Imperator Destinatus if you enforce my modo mundo on your Members when they kill Utopians. But as commixing genes forever find new ways to make the species stranger, so commixing Members ever conceive new ways to stray beyond the edges of the law. Hence the honest and necessary plea: terra ignota. I did the deed, but I do not myself know whether it was a crime. Arm thyself well for this trial, young polylaw; here at the law’s wild borders there be dragons.

  “Terra ignota for murder!” I half screeched the words as the wraiths around me churned in protest.

  I deserved the glares the others fixed on me.

  The president spoke first. “What O.S. did was ordered by the Humanist government through its own due process, and served legal mandates: O.S.’s to serve the Humanists, the Humanist government’s to serve its Members, and the Hives’ contract with Romanova to support the good of all Hives and the human race. I can’t say with certainty whether or not such Hive-authorized homicides were, or should have been, illegal. Neither can you.”

  Prospero watched contented as these facts flowed from his new commander’s lips.

  “But, Censor,” I cried, “even back in the days of geographic nations, assassination was—”

  “And if we still lived in those dark ages, that might mean something,” Ancelet snapped, too much in haste to chide me for letting his old title slip. “A nation could kill to protect its sovereign soil. Can you define a Hive’s sovereign soil, Mycroft? Can you define the limits of Hive self-defense?”

  Had I a more yielding soul, it should have been Ancelet whose wise words silenced his troublesome apprentice. It was not. Instead it was the Great Specter Thomas Hobbes, who loomed suddenly over my mind, as he had loomed over Europe in those grim decades after 1651, when all the lights of scholarship united in the struggle to forge some mental weapon that could pierce logic’s armor and slay the dread Leviathan. Perhaps no mind has ever so united all the spearpoints of philosophy in one phalanx against him, but the Beast of Malmesbury—Hobbes’s title, as saturated with dread as the Patriarch’s with honor—used Reason’s highest arts to paint portraits of Nature, God, and Man so perfect that not one brushstroke could be criticized, yet so abominable that they left the reader unable to respect humanity. So desperately Hobbes’s readers cried, “We are not brutes! We do not hate and fear each other so! Humanity is a fair race! Noble! Good!” But they could not prove it, not against Hobbes’s flawless descriptions of the realities of human malice. All the land’s horses and all the land’s men could not cure the Hobbesian infection, not for the twenty years it took John Locke to develop his Blank Slate, the only antitoxin. And even with that antitoxin in our reading list, Leviathan looms still from time to time, when some new dreadful deed of humankind reminds us how
well Hobbes’s cold, aggressive war of all on all describes our state. Our selves. We in 2454, with two thousand secret O.S. victims shoring up our near-utopia, can we prove we do not live on murder? Now I felt anew this shadow, conjured by Ancelet’s words—the nation’s right to kill in self-defense—which summoned in my mind some lines of Hobbes which slipped out of me—lines which, try as I might, I can neither unread nor refute: “Hobbes says that neither passion nor action may be called a sin until they know some law that forbids them, and that, where there are no man-made laws, the immutable and eternal Laws of Nature and Reason state that all men must and may, by whatever means we can, defend ourselves.” I shivered, finding myself stared at. “Such a Law of Nature could not convict O.S. Can Romanova?”

  The grim set of the ex-Censor’s face made me wonder whether he too, so deeply touched by our Madame, had already felt Hobbes’s bestial shadow. He turned back to the prisoner. “You will stand trial, Prospero. You first, alone. Yours is the core case, and doesn’t get us into the tangle of prosecuting a former head of state, and there won’t be any complicating issues about your mental fitness to stand trial, unlike with most of your bash’mates. Your terra ignota will set the precedent.”

  Prospero Saneer breathed deep. “Do you actually expect them to acquit me?”

  “That’s a long-term concern. Short-term, petitioning the Senate for a terra ignota will force Romanova to admit that no one’s sure whether or not what O.S. did was criminal. When people believe their side is in the right they’ll fight tooth and nail for it, but no one wants to tear the world down over a maybe. The instant the Senate officially accepts your terra ignota, the mobs will calm.”

  “That is … that would work.” It was not quite zeal that tinted Prospero’s tone, but something heavier, gratified relief, as a knight might feel, required to pledge his life to a new-crowned prince, on finding that Divine Right has chosen well. “What about the mobs that aren’t about O.S.?”

  Ancelet sighed. “You mean the Cousins Feedback Bureau affair?”

  “I mean the incident with Perry and the rest of you at that gender brothel, and what Ojiro says about J.E.D.D. Mason. Is it true there’s a conspiracy to merge the Hives?”

  The new president met Prospero’s eyes straight on. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you prepared, as Ojiro is, to use any means necessary to protect the Humanist Hive from such a conspiracy if it exists?”

  “I’m not about to try to kill J.E.D.D. Mason, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Kill again,” I corrected, the gravity of his error justifying my interruption.

  “What?”

  “Try to kill again. Ἄναξ Jehovah died.” It was reflex for me by now to pounce upon the lie repeated so many times these past days: ‘tried to kill,’ ‘attempted assassination,’ while so few face the reality: Our Maker’s Guest departed, and returned.

  Prospero’s brows knit. “I thought J.E.D.D. Mason survived.”

  “He was resurrected.”

  “Enough, Mycroft,” Ancelet ordered. “This meeting is about the Humanist Hive, not theory or theology. As for Ojiro, if I had a way to contact them”—the president glanced pointedly at me—“I would tell them that, until or unless Propsero’s trial makes it definitively unlawful, I am open to using deadly force, and Ojiro’s resources, to protect the Humanists, but I intend to try other ways first. If Ojiro stands by, ready to act if needed, I will count them an ally. If they disrupt my plan, if they stir up hostility by continuing to release these videos of Tully Mardi urging war, and especially if they go after J.E.D.D. Mason again, then they and O.S. will become my enemy.”

  Prospero nodded. “A useful message; I hope it reaches Ojiro.”

  Ancelet returned the nod. “Now, I have all I need for today. The Senate meets tomorrow. I need time to muster votes so they accept your terra ignota.”

  The president rose, and Prospero tried to rise by reflex, forgetting for a moment the fetters which kept him seated. “Will a majority be hard to achieve?” he asked.

  It was the old Anonymous, I think, who smiled here. “Not for me. Now, I’m leaving Mycroft here with you for a little while. You two will write up a report on O.S. and the events that led to its exposure, both for Mycroft’s history and for use at the trial, concentrating on recent things, the last few weeks, the Seven-Ten list. I need to know everything. When you’re finished, tell the guards to call me, and I’ll collect Mycroft and the report myself. The report will be for my eyes only, and, once I’ve read it, I’ll give you instructions specifying what information should be made public and what should be concealed. Once you’re confident that you know what I want you to conceal, then you will tell the police that you’re ready to make a statement. Until then, you should continue to refuse to say anything to anyone, except Mycroft or myself.”

  “Yes, Member President.” A pause. “The boots suit you.”

  Shock delayed Ancelet’s smile at this, the highest praise that Prospero could give. “Thank you.”

  They did suit him, the president’s new Humanist boots, and betrayed too that he had long been mulling over what boots he might choose should he give up his Hiveless sash for the Humanists, instead of for his bash’native Europe. The boots’ surfaces were palimpsests, the dull tan of old parchment covered with hand-inked text in antique brown, but with a different script beneath, faint but still legible, the tightly crammed script of an earlier century. Around the soles, the bronze and gold Olympic stripes of Ancelet’s medals in mathematics and oratory sparkled against the tricoleur of the French nation-strat, while on the sole the treads were crammed with letters like the type in a printing press, locked in loosely, so they shifted chaotically with every step and stamped out different almost-words.

  Ancelet knocked for the guard, frowning as the bolts began their clicks and groans. “Prospero, are they treating you alright?” he asked. “Any harassment?”

  “None, Excellency. Their courtesy has been conspicuous.”

  “Yes, well … siege makes people careful.”

  “Siege?”

  Prospero did not understand, but I did. Walking from the car to the prison yard an hour before had been my first taste of outside since the fatal day. Slivers of media had shown me crowds, small riots, speeches, police lines, Humanist clubs and sports bars besieged by outraged mobs, but images are not the taste and touch of our new world. I noticed the sky first. The customary streaks of cars were too slow, too low, obtrusive. It frightened even me, not so much because it meant the transit network was in timid and unstable hands, but because the sky had changed. The world had changed. As we had landed at the prison I could see no ground around it, only people, the near ranks packed tight as fans around an idol, while the farther reaches gave way to tents and chairs and umbrelounges. My instinct labeled it a ‘mob,’ but it was too quiet. A siege, as Ancelet so aptly called it, stagnant, patient, an aimless force waiting for an aimer. In that directionless week, when everyone wanted to act but no one had a plan, these people felt that standing close to the living linchpin Ockham Saneer would ready them to be the first to move when the time came. The besiegers around us did not even have sides, only clumps where Hive dress clustered, but even these blurred one into another, as if they were all too timid to tell each other what causes they served. I think they didn’t know.

  “Ancelet! That’s President Ancelet!”

  Walls of stone and science are no match for assaults of sound. Prospero and I heard the mob’s scream even here in the prison’s heart as the new president emerged from the gates outside. He could have left by the roof patch, but he chose to show himself to the besiegers for the few minutes it took for them to snap enough photographs to serve his purposes, before he dove into the car and thence the sky. For sixteen hours President Ancelet’s visit to the jail in Almoloya de Juáres eclipsed all other questions in the world’s eye. Why was he there? What did he say to Ockham Saneer? What role would the new president take in the coming trials? For those si
xteen hours anyone but Ancelet could move invisible.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  Is This the Spark?

  Written July 11–13, 2454

  Events of April 8–9

  Alexandria &c.

  I skipped the ten days between the cataclysm and Ancelet’s visit to the prison. These were important days, the days of Ancelet’s election, of more arrests, of counting Perry-Kraye’s victims, of press conferences confirming facts and fears already half public. The whole world held its breath, a frozen, false calm, like rabbits praying that the predator won’t see us if we don’t move. Businesses closed, towns ordered curfews, bash’es stayed home to watch again and again the videos of Sniper at Madame’s, of Tully Mardi’s war sermons, of Perry-Kraye’s maniacal last moments laughing amid Brussels’s flames, and of what no one wanted to call Jehovah’s death. I barely remember. If ever, reader, you have seen a graveyard, where the centuries of Zeus’s tempests have rinsed away the faces of carved angels and the names they mourned, my memory is much the same. Facts which in a sane mind would stay clear wear away quickly, their contours barely traceable upon the weather-beaten stones. Here and there a monument is carved of sterner stuff, some porphyry or dense volcanic basalt that endures time’s touch, still legible. The seven recent days of transformation are the graveyard’s central monument, each step in the chain from the theft of Sugiyama’s Seven-Ten list to Bridger’s final deed etched deep enough to withstand an aeon’s war with wind and rain. Yet the ten days that followed are a blur. They were a blur even as I lived them, the haze of grief leeching the strength from me like fever, swamp mud, gravity, old age, the many fetters Fortune uses to remind us that the strength of flesh is hers to grant and take away. I cannot even say which fortress—Paris? Alexandria?—served as my protective prison, or what I did those days apart from mourn and serve as translator for the Great Scroll’s Addressee, Whom I am fortunate to call my Master. His contact with His Divine Peer had left Him so invigorated that He had to learn again, as if from scratch, how to sort His languages as humans do. I could research those ten lost days, but crisis may at any moment cut my writing short, so I will first record what I remember, those few still-legible inscriptions already fading in the graveyard where only the days of transformation stand truly indelible.