by Ada Palmer
Liar. Thou forgetest how well I know thee by now, Mycroft Canner. Thou canst not pretend that the week of transformation is truly thy most vivid memory.
You are with me again, then, are you, gentle reader? I had hoped you’d come. It is a strangely lonely labor, this chronicle which, by law, no contemporary eye may see. I am glad to have somebody share it.
Yes, I am with thee, Mycroft. I come to have my patience tried again. Abuse it not. Thou canst not fool me. The two weeks of thy rampage are thy most salient memory, whose abominable details thou hast so often inflicted upon me: the thumping of thy sadist heart, Apollo’s blood upon thy tongue. That atrocious fortnight, not the seven days of thy first history, is the true centerpiece of thy distorted memory.
Innocent master, your error proves again your goodness. Horrors like mine are so remote from your imagining that you believe they could become memories, recorded by the brain like common trials and griefs. No, reader. My two weeks are not salient letters etched deep to withstand assaults of wind and tempest in the battered graveyard of my mind. My two weeks are the storm.
“Caesar, this is Achilles.”
I could not forget this. The Major was the first man I had ever seen enter the citadel of Alexandria without pausing for that tremor of awe which we owe ancient monuments, as we remember the mountainsides that gave their hearts to form these sky-rivaling columns, the thousand dead hands that hewed those rocky hearts, and the great chain of people running from deep antiquity through ourselves to generations yet unborn who will stand here and tremble. Achilles did pause on MASON’s threshold, but it was a different pause, not awe but the slow, saturated study men give to sunsets, trees in blossom, laughing children, brief things we like to linger on before they vanish. I wonder whether it was Ilium that taught Achilles not to mistake kings’ wonders for eternal things, or whether, by his essence, he has always known. “I’m told you need me to teach you how to have a war.”
“So Mycroft thinks,” the Emperor answered.
It was a bright but dark-walled chamber. MASON’s throne of blood-purple porphyry stood in the center of a reflecting pool, fed by channels of flowing spring water which braided through the marble floor like a thousand rivers gathering toward Ocean. Cornel MASON was not on his throne, but stood by one wall, gazing at the carved web of archaic symbols which covered the room’s stone walls like lace. Even standing on the same floor as his guests and guards, so imperious was Caesar’s stance that my mind insists he held a scepter in his hand, though I believe it was, in fact, an apple.
“You think Mycroft is wrong? That there won’t be war?” Achilles asked.
“I think there may or may not be a war,” MASON answered, turning. “I think the engine of human civilization is not so track-bound that it cannot be steered, even at this point.” The Emperor spoke slowly to Achilles, his inner engines churning as he studied the impossible creature he had heard me rant so much about. “You disagree, I trust?”
Achilles cannot make his flashing eyes gentle. “It has never been the will of men, or kings, that steered the world. I judge a man by whether he faces Fate bravely or whether he squirms like a coward. So does history.”
“You think I should not try to prevent the war?” Caesar asked.
“Of course you should try, just don’t imagine you’ll succeed. There’s honor in urging the right course, even when the wrong is set. Many of my old friends are still called wise for their efforts to make peace with Troy. Fail well, as they did, and be ready to fight well once you have failed.”
The Emperor frowned. “I want to hear this from your own lips: you are not a human being born of human parents, but the fictional Achilles, brought to life by divine fiat. Is this true?”
“Brought both to life and back to life.” The hero brushed back the Greek curls which fell around his neck like drops of hyacinth. “You’ve seen the remnants of Troy and Mycenae in museums, as I have now. There was a Troy, and I think I was the real Achilles then, but ghosts forget. We need friends and descendants to recount our glories, speak our names, remind us of ourselves with prayers and sacrifices. After three thousand years, most of my contemporaries have lost even their names, since spirits forget our names as history forgets them. I remember myself mostly as Homer painted me, since that is how men know me now. Thus I am brought both to life and back to life, since I once walked this earth a breathing man, but have never before walked it as the man of myth and verses I am now.”
MASON did not shudder. “And yet somehow you are also a soldier of the World Wars?”
“Yes and no.” Against the gray, imperial marble, the Major’s green fatigues made him look like an invading weed, as if patient Nature had wormed through the stony citadel and emerged, vibrant and fresh, to bring her gentle doom to all man’s lofty towers. “The child Bridger, who made me real, didn’t understand history chronologically as much as thematically. I fought in the Epic War. Three hundred or three thousand years ago, it’s still ancient by a child’s standards. I think you of all people, Caesar MASON, shouldn’t be picky about that kind of anachronism.”
Caesar paused only a moment. “And you also fought Apollo’s future war?”
Achilles tensed. “Apollo Mojave’s, you mean? They were all the god Apollo’s wars.”
It takes MASON some heavy breaths to digest any sentence involving our lost Apollo. “Yes.”
“Yes, then,” the veteran answered. “I remember fighting in Apollo Mojave’s future version of the war too—not that my experience with robot suits and A.I. space gods will help us much down here.”
“Do you have proof you are what you say?”
“I have Patroclus.”
Achilles’ gaze guided the Emperor’s to his pocket, where Patroclus Aimer leaned out, tiny enough to make a chess piece seem a looming monolith. “This is a beautiful hall, Caesar!” he shouted in his tiny voice. “I’d heard the rumors that Daedalus built this place, and your Masons had it hidden for eons before moving it here. I didn’t believe it before, but seeing it now I’d recognize Daedalus’s handiwork anywhere. You recognize it too, Major?”
“You can use my name in front of people now.” Swift-footed Achilles felt with his toe along a channel in the marble floor, where flowing water reflected the ceiling’s starscape, the beasts and gods of the ancient constellations bright against a field of lapis blue. It was not real sky but diagrams in veins of gold, while the stars were fire, a thousand points of flame, tiny as candles, fueled by hidden channels in the ceiling. “Yes, I recognize Daedalus’s work,” the hero answered. “Do you suppose we recognize it because the Masons did a good job copying ancient sources? Or because our memories are made out of current expectations of what ancient things should look like?”
MASON stepped toward Achilles. I had not seen the Emperor’s eyes alive with wonder in thirteen years. “May I see your companion more closely?” He extended his right hand, cautiously.
“Must be touched to be believed, I know.” Achilles helped tiny Patroclus out into his own palm first, then passed him to MASON. “Careful. Hands are scary places when your world is measured in centimeters, and I don’t think I have to tell you what I’ll do if anything happens to Patroclus.”
MASON took more time than most in his examination, and less care, not that he wasn’t gentle with the tiny figure, but most people handle the little soldiers with paranoia, as if they were butterflies or eggshells. MASON treated the Lieutenant more like a mouse or slim-limbed lizard, testing his weight, offering him fingertips to grasp and lean on. This too was Apollo’s touch, I think. In their tender years, the young Emperor’s beloved had shown him so many wondrous U-beasts that he was used to handling creatures which should not exist.
“Thank you.” Caesar smiled. “Will you break bread with me while we talk?” MASON did not even have to gesture for the throne room wall to open, baring a dining room, a modest summer feast, and a window-wall, where Alexandria’s roofs and thoroughfares stretched out behind tinted glass which ma
de it seem forever dawn.
The ancient hero savored the drifting scents of wine, meat, cheeses, fruit, and oil-rich flatbread. “Gladly, and I appreciate the gesture.”
The Emperor led the way. “My throne is older than your epic, Achilles. You’ll find that many familiar arts and customs survive here.”
Achilles King of the Myrmidons paused beneath the doorway, not arched but a protoarch, a flat lintel with an open triangle above, as men had used when Troy still stood. “But not the art of war.”
“No, that arm of my Empire has slept too long.”
As the two walked together before me, I realized suddenly how tiny Achilles was, not just a head shorter than Cornel MASON but nearly two. It should not have been surprising. Achilles was out of scale, made from Bridger’s child body as Patroclus was from a plastic toy, but the Major seemed so comfortable, and so vast in my eyes, that I had not noticed the discrepancy without a real man’s bulk as contrast. I asked Achilles later if he finds his youthful tininess a hardship. He laughed as he reminded me how tiny are the artifacts of ancient days, and how we moderns, bulked by abundance, are to him as lumbering giants, while he alone retains the light and hound-sleek shape of natural humans.
The Emperor took his seat at the table’s head, and set Patroclus down between the trays, offering a cube of hard cheese to serve as a stool. “Do you think war is unavoidable?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Godlike Achilles filled his cup, half wine, half water, but frowned at the results with our thin modern wine.
MASON broke the bread. “What side will you be on? Mine?”
The soldier arched his brows. “You waste no time. That’s good. I don’t know. We don’t know what the sides are yet.”
“Mine will be best, and strongest.”
Achilles reached out and sorted through the meat for the best pieces. “There’s a boast worthy of an emperor.”
“It’s not a boast, it’s fact. My mandate is to stabilize, protect, and expand the bounds of human empire, as my predecessors have done as long as there has been human empire. If there is war, my goal will be to end it, by whatever means and with whatever allies my advisors recommend. If you are on my side you will have my full trust and resources, and I shall put at your command the largest force the Earth has ever mustered. Any cause you choose I shall strengthen and protect, and any you oppose I shall attack with more resources than anyone has ever marshaled. If, on the other hand, you make yourself my enemy, it’s possible you will defeat me, but the difficulty, and the cost in human life, will be astronomical.”
“Quite the bribe.”
“It’s neither bribe nor boast. It’s fact. I use all my resources to their maximum. If I had you, I would not waste your time with distrust, doubt, second-guessing, conscience, or bureaucracy, as others would. You have seen that in how I use Mycroft.”
MASON will not break bread with Mycroft Canner, but gestured to a stool in the corner where I could have some rest.
Achilles’s sharp eyes flashed. “Would you make me a Familiaris, then?”
“Yes, if you accept. I know,” the Emperor added, “you have good reason to be wary of rulers who would claim the authority to command you because they rule greater kingdoms…”
Achilles son of Peleus tipped his cup toward MASON, silent acknowledgment of the Emperor’s prudence, both in seeing the parallel between himself and Agamemnon, and in avoiding the Greek king’s hated name.
“… But the rank of Familiaris is not about command, it’s about trust,” MASON continued. “When I trust a person, I place in their hands a fraction of that absolute duty I owe my predecessors through the ages of the past, a duty which I have sworn to place before all other things: friendship, love, life, family. Last week my only child died in my arms. I felt their blood. I prayed inside, for the first time in what feels like forever, a desperate, insane prayer, beyond hope. And, impossible as it was, some miraculous Power heard and brought my child back to life. That Power had Its own reasons, but still, It answered a father’s prayer. I would destroy that Power and the child It saved if duty required it of me. A person whom I trust to share that duty should be prepared to forfeit their life should they betray me, as I am prepared to forfeit things more precious than my life.” He stretched back. “You too, I think,” Caesar continued, “are more native to a world where a traitor forfeits their life, and where the betrayed revenge themselves upon the betrayer, than to this modern age that waits for the clumsy wheels of bureaucratic law. Living as in antiquity, trusting and risking as in antiquity, that is what being a Familiaris means. I expect you will find no more comfortable option in this world. Your answer?”
Achilles studied Caesar carefully, as Caesar studied him. The veteran was right, I think, to sense something strange in Cornel MASON’s gaze. I had noticed it too, the Emperor’s eyes ranging Achilles’s frame rather than settling on his face. His gaze lingered especially on those areas Achilles’s tired uniform left bare: his neck, his wrists, the texture of his hair, his callused hands. MASON’s stare led me to stare too, and I think we shared the same illusion, projecting familiar contours onto Achilles’s cheekbones, the shapes of his fingernails, his brows. Achilles does not resemble our Apollo, but a lonely mind can make him seem to.
“This is welcome food and welcome honesty, MASON,” Achilles answered. “Thank you.”
MASON frowned. “Is that a ‘no’?”
“It’s a ‘not yet.’”
“You intend to talk to each leader in turn before you choose?” quick Caesar guessed. “You will waste time.”
The hero’s eyes grew sharp. “I don’t waste living hours, MASON, I know what it’s like to have none left. You don’t. I’ll learn things if I come to each of you while I’m still undecided that you’d never show me if I’d already picked a side. I also intend to help all of you equally with some things. In war, all sides benefit if the players are competent at bare basics. I want to help you keep this war from being stupid.”
“Isn’t all war stupid? In that it’s the mass destruction of life and the produce of civilization?”
“It is that,” the veteran acknowledged. “But some wars are stupider than others. You don’t want a war of attrition, or starvation, and you don’t want plague, or needless civilian deaths.”
“What are civilians when we have no soldiers?”
“Good question. It’s going to be near impossible to keep groups of semi-civilians from massacring potential enemy semicivilians, especially since conscience is the only reason to spare captives when you don’t have an established ransom system, and don’t make much use of unfree labor.”
The Emperor glanced at me, but said nothing.
“What you need first and foremost is a plan to avoid destroying things you don’t have to. You don’t want to accidentally starve a city. You don’t want to kill your own people because you can’t tell them from the enemy. You don’t want to burn down Alexandria again, as your namesake did.”
Caesar did not smile.
A knock at the door. “Nova imminentia, Caesar. (Urgent news, Caesar.)”
“Come,” Caesar commanded in common English, “tell us all.”
Here entered a rare creature: Martin’s famous spouse, Xiaoliu Guildbreaker. Xiaoliu is slim as a young tree, his Mason’s suit, with the bold white sleeve of the Ordo Vitae Dialogorum, always so crisply pressed that he more resembles the strict lines of an obelisk than the curves of a living body. His long, feminine neck seems incongruous against the suit’s broad shoulders, like a lily arching up from jagged rocks, and so slim are his limbs that the tips of the Masonic Square and Compass on his Familiaris armband meet on the underside. It took rare courage for the young Xiaoliu to don that armband, to turn his back on a Mitsubishi birth’bash and brave the glares and labels—‘outsider,’ ‘seducer,’ ‘stranger,’—that came with ‘luring’ Martin Guildbreaker to mix his four quarterings of purely Masonic ancestry with a novitiate. Rare too is the spouse who feels no
jealousy of Martin’s complete devotion to our Master. Yet rare things are not surprising in the Guildbreaker bash’, for what spouse could match our Martin, understand him, share his hours, who did not, like Martin, love Empire first and all else second?
“There are massive riots in Odessa,” Xiaoliu reported. “The mayor and city council have issued an order requiring the redistribution of real estate in the city so that the proportion of property owned by each Hive matches the resident population of that Hive.”
MASON closed his eyes as we all felt war’s poison leak into that cheery recitation we have heard a thousand times: “The Six-Hive Transit System welcomes you to [someplace] … for a list of local regulations not included in your customary law code, select ‘law.’” Mayors and city ordinances have always had power over more than building height and street food stalls, we just trusted each other to leave these old swords in their glass cases on the wall. No more. “What are the proportions?” MASON asked.
“More than seventy percent of the land in Odessa is currently Mitsubishi-owned, but it’s a very mixed city, fairly even populations of all major Hives, and a very large Brillist population.”
“What Hive is this mayor?” Achilles asked quickly.
Xiaoliu did not need to ask who this small stranger was to know that a man sitting at Caesar’s table must be answered. “A Cousin, European-raised, in the Ukrainian nation-strat, with Nurturist connections. The Mayor’s announcement contained Nurturist language lifted from Tully Mardi’s broadcasts.”
Caesar’s hands twitched, mine too, quick signals ordering our lenses to bring the scene in Odessa before our eyes. At once our lenses showed us massed Mitsubishi hurling rage and rocks at the chalk white columns of Odessa’s city hall, their suits a tapestry of vibrant spring against the classical façade, while a greater mob surrounded them with fists and screams. Achilles watched the footage too, not through lenses but a hand screen, which the veteran held warily, like a magic window lent by some kind-seeming god.
