The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  “Is this it?” the Emperor asked, his voice slow as stones groaning as a mason drags them into place. “The beginning?”

  “The spark of war?” Veteran Achilles peered at the mass of faces on his screen, while MASON and I watched like men illiterate. There are more illiteracies than script, reader: Ancelet can read numbers, Headmaster Faust the subtleties of face and phrasing, Madame blushes, Eureka Weeksbooth her ten billion balls of light, while others read stones, DNA, star streaks, the flights of birds—all hen scratch to the untrained. I think all humans feel rage at our finitude when we see others read what we cannot. In some eras fire was the solution, to burn, like infected sheets, the witches and heretic philosophers who read too well the signs and stars. But wiser eras hold such prophets dear.

  “Perhaps it’s the spark, perhaps not,” the hero answered. “Swift-acting leaders can waylay Ruin in her coming a long time.”

  The Emperor frowned, as at a pond too murky to reveal its depths.

  Achilles’s sigh was almost apology. “If war were an exact science, you would not need me.”

  MASON breathed deep. “Xiaoliu, have you compiled tracker numbers for all my subjects in that part of Odessa?” he asked.

  “Sic, Caesar. (Yes, Caesar.)”

  “Connect me.” The Emperor sat straight as the microphone prepared to carry his commands to distant ears. “To those Masons involved in the violence in Odessa: desist at once, and leave the area. Your behavior disgraces and endangers our Empire. Law and I will settle this, not sticks and stones.”

  On the far side of Earth, swift-departing lights burst from Odessa like fireworks before Sidney and Eureka’s keen, blind set-set eyes.

  Thou forgetest thy time again, Mycroft. Some other set-set watches the cars now. The Saneer-Weeksbooth reign is over.

  How wondrous humanity must be by your era, my noble master, that you believe ten days are enough for us train a new daimon to rule that ebb and swerve which keeps eight hundred million cars in flight. Alas, the human animal is not yet so excellent. Perry, in the thoroughness of his machinations, killed the backup crew, and the art does not come swiftly, even to a monstrous set-set. Sidney Koons was captured, but is working the system still, wired into the heart of the great network, and guarded by Papadelias as closely as a rider may guard the horse that carries him. As for Eureka Weeksbooth, the set-set who fled with Sniper would not leave forty out of forty-five senses behind.

  “What other advice have you for me?” Caesar asked.

  Achilles breathed deep. “Not much.”

  “Because you are not yet sure we’ll be on the same side?” MASON tested.

  The famous runner smiled. “Exactly. At this point all I’m willing to share are universals. There are certain mistakes you don’t want even enemies to make.”

  “Like what?”

  “You need food.”

  “That’s obvious.”

  The veteran shook his head. “You need more food than you think. Assume your productive capacity will be gone as soon as the war starts. Pump out a hundred times as much food as normal for however many days we have left. You want stores of food in every city, enough to feed the population for six months, more. Assume most of it will be destroyed or stolen. Think of it as currency as well as food, assume you’ll need to trade and bribe with it as well as eat it. Assume however much you have is half of what you need. Assume whatever supply lines might exist will fail. Think of it as preparing for a giant siege, where every city on Earth will have to feed itself. Flood the world with food.”

  “You’d say this to an enemy? Starvation has often been key to victory.”

  “Better that my enemies have food stores I can steal than that we both starve.”

  A nod. “What else?”

  “Guard the food. Looting will hit the food stocks quickly.”

  “We don’t have vast food stocks lying about, these aren’t the olden days. Most bash’houses buy extra rice, and flour, and cream, and things, but they actually can feed themselves for six months on a few sacks of salt and fertilizer for their algae tanks, meatmaker, and kitchen tree.”

  “Assume the kitchen trees will burn, and that, before they do, people will fear they’ll burn, and loot things anyway. In my day, when we ran low on food, we’d attack whatever town was nearby, loot it, and kill whoever we didn’t feel like taking prisoner. That technique still works; you don’t want your people using it.”

  “What else?”

  “Medicine.”

  Kosala smiled. “Already on it. We’re triple stocking every hospital on Earth, our own and those few run by other Hives.”

  Achilles shook his head. “Triple’s not enough. Imagine the most you could possibly need; you need ten times that. And field medics. Train a hundred thousand field medics, then have them train more. Your doctors are miraculous, but too accustomed to their miracle machines. You have some people who know old medicine—hikers, survivalists, antiquarians who’ve studied how to stop a man bleeding to death with two sticks and a torn-up sack—but you need more than you have. Make everyone on Earth a field medic and you’ll still want more.”

  Kosala sighed. “You’re so sure there will be fighting.”

  Mycroft, why is Kosala here? When did she come into MASON’s sanctum? Are MASON and Cousin truly so close that Caesar would let Kosala walk in on this critical meeting?

  MASON’s sanctum? This is Casablanca, reader, the Cousins’ capitol, whose tiered tent-roofs rise above us in ever-expanding folds like a dream ship, half sail, half bird, wafting and expanding as the sun and ocean breezes make them breathe. See, here Kosala and Achilles sit side by side in her roof garden, gazing at the ever-shifting colors high above.

  No, Mycroft, we are in Alexandria, behind Daedalus’s flame-roofed throne room, where Caesar and Achilles break bread together, and exchange unspoken vows of hospitality and trust. Dost thou forget?

  Alexandria? No. Surely you recall the war of sand crests against wave crests along Africa’s northern shore as Achilles and I crossed here from Alexandria, and how, after the strange Pacific waters of Cielo de Pájaros, the Mediterranean’s familiar blue brought tears, not only to my eyes, but to the Great Soldier’s. Or is the error mine? My memories blur sometimes, I warned you. I took Achilles to every leader’s house that day, those two days, the thirty-first of March and first of April, not an easy week to persuade the leaders of the world to carve out time for something that sounded like fantasy: a meeting with Achilles? It was with Kosala that he discussed the hospitals, food too—or was that Caesar? Was that both? The meetings were quite similar in many ways, the questions, tests, curious fingers probing patient Patroclus. I beg your pardon, generous reader, but I doubt even Achilles can remember precisely which power asked him which question. Some questions, though, only one would ask.

  “Has it not occurred to you, Achilles, that you may well be here to help make peace, rather than to make war?”

  He who shatters battle lines laughed aloud.

  Cousin Chair Bryar Kosala did not. “You’re in the perfect position to do it. If you and Mycroft succeed in convincing all the relevant leaders to treat you as an expert, you’ll become the de facto final word on war, and if you use that influence to move us toward peace, you could have an enormous impact, greater than anyone.” Her sigh grew soft. “I know you believe in Fate, and, given what you claim to be, you may have no choice but to believe in Fate, but repeated Fate doesn’t have to be a repetition of mistakes. It can be a chance to change, to learn, to pay for what was done before, to redeem yourself. You don’t have to be an emissary of war. You can be peace.”

  The veteran gazed out between the shifting roof-tents to Casablanca’s wave-chopped shoreline, where the Mediterranean and vast Atlantic mix and mate. “I knew you were going to cry for peace, but I expected it to sound naïve, cowardly. It doesn’t. Your words sound like good sense. Actually, the world you paint makes better sense than mine, since, in your world, all this repetition would achieve somethin
g, instead of just leading us back to the slaughter-fields again and again. And you have every reason to believe in that world, since no one but me and Mycroft have really seen the counterevidence.” He met her eyes. “I notice you avoided the word ‘karma.’”

  “You avoided answering my question.”

  “Apologies, Lady.”

  She scowled. “I know my gender fetish is public knowledge now, but feigning antiquated chauvinism is not a fruitful shortcut to convincing me you are what you say you are.”

  “No offense intended,” Achilles answered quickly. “It’s habit, that’s all. You remind me very much of Athena, and my mother.”

  Kosala made a face neither goddess ever would have. “Both of them at once?”

  Achilles shrugged. “They’re the only women who’ve spoken to me in such a competent and imperious way. I’m not from your time. I’m not used to women in council, trading words and plans as you do. In my world only a goddess or a queen would speak like you, or an Amazon perhaps, though I mainly met the Amazons in battle, not council.”

  “I thought you’d been living in our world more than a decade.”

  Achilles frowned across to where I leaned against a breeze-kissed railing. “Hiding in a junk-heap with a squad of all-male soldiers, a child, and no visitors apart from Mycroft and Thisbe Saneer has not given me many opportunities to interact with what the last millennia have made of womankind. I’ve seen your sort of modern woman in media, in books, but you’ve seen—or read about—men like me too; that’s not the same as meeting one.”

  “I guess not.”

  Kosala looked the Great Soldier over anew, studying his toil-hardened arms and shoulders, which he had bared to let his skin enjoy the salt touch of his grandfather, the Old Man of the Sea—a god who has either guarded the fish-rich depths since Earth began, or never existed.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” she pressed. “Will you help me make peace?”

  The most violent man alive—as Homer once had Agamemnon call Achilles—shook his head. “It’s not going to work. There will be war.”

  “And then there will be peace. Wars end when somebody makes peace. I’m going to start making that peace right now. There may be a bit of war first, but the peace that will come afterward is the important part.”

  “You…” He peered. “You’re not trying to prevent the war?”

  “Certainly I’m trying to prevent the war, but I only have a couple eggs in that basket. And, happily, trying to prevent the war and working to make peace after the war require many of the same actions. Wars drag on when no one is trying to end them. I won’t let that happen. This war, when it comes, will have a well-organized peace movement from the beginning, which will end it on the best terms possible. Will you help me?”

  “Toward peace? You’re asking Achilles to help the world toward peace?” A chuckle died in his throat. “If you have specific peace tasks only I can do, I’ll do them, gladly. After life itself, peace is the greatest gift a mortal man can enjoy, we know that well.” Achilles paused to frown at frail Patroclus. “But I won’t set aside war business for peace business. You know more about peace than I do—your whole world is peace. My task is to do what only I can do: teach the other rulers how to turn their angry people into soldiers.”

  Chair Kosala sighed. “I need you to teach me that too.”

  “Teach the Cousins? No,” the headstrong runner answered quickly. “When the war comes you need to stay out of it.”

  “Stay out of it?” Kosala repeated, cold as I imagine Amazons would be. “You think we’re not capable of fighting? I mean to pursue peace by any and every means I can.”

  “Don’t take offense. Of course you’re capable, but you’re also more capable of not fighting than anyone.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “I didn’t phrase that well. What I mean is that none of the other major Hives can stay neutral in this. Utopia and Gordian might manage to keep out of things, but they’re tiny, and they’re not powers anyone would run to for sanctuary. You are. Of all the great Hives, the Cousins have the greatest capacity to avoid being drawn into battle. If you remain neutral, then there will be a corner of this world that’s separate, inviolable, safe. There will be someone who can negotiate with all sides—what priests and women used to be in wartime. That’s the road toward peace that only you can take. It’s a valuable thing.”

  I know the little wince Kosala makes that signals almost tears. “I don’t know if neutrality is still possible,” she answered. “The Cousins are angry right now, more angry than we’ve ever been. We’re splitting on the inside. We’ve been manipulated, lied to, betrayed, had loved ones murdered, our own most precious institutions violated by people we trusted.” She would not say ‘Vivien’ or ‘CFB,’ but the wetness in her eyes said both. “That has reopened even older wounds.”

  “Nurturism?” Achilles guessed.

  Kosala nodded. “Lorelei Cook and their faction are gaining influence every day. Yesterday’s board meeting degenerated into screaming. Three of our Romanovan Senators are openly calling for a set-set ban.”

  “But you can talk them down.” He glanced at me. “You calmed them after Mycroft’s rampage. You calmed the whole world down after the worst thing that had happened in a hundred years.”

  “This is different.”

  Achilles sensed, I think, something specific in Kosala’s voice. “Why?”

  Holding up a finger, Kosala signaled her tracker with her other hand, and called aloud. “Heloïse, what’s the situation in Odessa?”

  “Aunt Kosala!” Kosala set her tracker on speaker, so we could hear Heloïse’s words, as bright as birdsong. “Pray excuse me, Mayor Bagry, gentlemen, I should take this call, it’s Chair Kosala.”

  Polite permissions and light footsteps carried Heloïse to sufficient privacy for her to add image to her voice call, which Kosala brought up on the side of a nearby bench. Heloïse stood in a small office, where we could see a crystal chandelier, a Ganymedest painting of Antony and Cleopatra, and two hulking security guards. Heloïse wore what flattery might call a cloak or poncho, but honesty must call a sack: floor-length, gathered at the neck, with slits for her arms and a hood drawn around her hair, though the contour of her nun’s headdress still showed beneath. Never was the letter of the law so meticulously followed and its spirit so ridiculously failed. There was no malice intended, or imagined, on the nun’s part, but the world knew what forbidden habit lay beneath this sack of concealing gray, and the shapeless folds spurred one to imagine the more important shapeless folds beneath. A crusader’s tabard could not have so overwhelmed the mind with thoughts of Church.

  “What’s the situation?” Kosala asked again.

  “Mixed. A little good news.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “I think we’re close to a temporary settlement, and everyone has agreed to keep land sales frozen during negotiations. The violence has almost subsided outside City Hall. There’s still one patch of fighting to the south, but the crowd on Prymors’ka Street has calmed entirely, and the Mitsubishi quarters are clear. Confirmed fatalities have not passed thirty. I can also confirm not a single Servicer injured. We got them all out.”

  The Cousin chair let herself smile. “And the bad news?” Her smile died as she saw Heloïse wince. “You’ve found more?”

  “Ye-es, Aunt Kosala.” Heloïse’s ‘yes’ was more sob than syllable.

  “How many?”

  The nun fidgeted with the Minor’s sash that looped about her shapeless sack. “Two since last you called.”

  “Show me pictures, the worst you have.”

  “You don’t want to see this, Aunt Kosala, honestly—”

  “It’s not for me.”

  The memory itself does not feel real. We see images of ruins so often in movies: burned-out houses, castles, cities, Dresden, New York, Pompeii, vivid with fire and artistry, with music and smelltracks to add pathos. What we saw on the screen no
w was artless, a tumbled, jagged something, dim and badly framed, hard to differentiate from a construction site or unsuccessful art. On either side stood houses, gardens, children’s swings, but the shapelessness between had nothing to prove it used to be a home. Uniformed people were searching through the blackened rubble, and some sort of robot twitched its many probe-arms through the ashes like a crab. Stretchers on their way out testified to some survivors, but I know I must have seen a corpse among the coals because my mind strayed to Chiasa Mardi’s coiled intestines, and sweet hot blood, and Saladin. I do remember the graffiti, smeared across the surviving garden wall: “Set-Set = Slavery.”

  Kosala looked to Achilles. “There were six bash’es training set-sets in Odessa, one of the largest concentrations outside Asia. All but one of the six now look like this.”

  “You think Cousins did this?” he asked, wide-eyed.

  “I think Brillists did most of it, but Cousins helped. Most of the ‘rescued’ children have already turned up at our orphanage doors. Either way, in twenty minutes the world will be full of these images, and in thirty it will be full of Cousins trying to pretend they don’t support it, and feeling guilty that they really do, and getting upset, and making poor decisions while upset, and making enemies. The claim that Nurturism isn’t violent anymore is wearing thin. Everyone’s seen films of the Set-Set Riots, and if these images are called ‘New Set-Set Riots’ the world will panic.”

  I took a heavy breath, thinking on the burns Earth suffered last time the Leviathans bared fangs one at another over this. The 2239 set-set kidnapping trial had been a centrifuge which proved that our commingled sand grains could still be sorted into factions, pro and con, red and green, yes and no. Two hundred and fifteen years is longer than even our extended life spans, but today’s elders remember elders who could recount those days of fear and bated breath.