The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  “This could be it, couldn’t it?” Kosala asked, so softly. “What sparks the war?”

  Godlike Achilles frowned. “Could be, could calm again. In a way you’re lucky everyone has so many other reasons to be angry now. Your Cousins and the Masons are united in rage against the Hives that used O.S. That rage may be bond enough to keep you from becoming enemies over the set-set issue again. A mutual and present enemy can trump an old feud.”

  The comfort wasn’t comforting. “The plan for Jed’s interim constitution calls for the Cousins to elect our Transitional Congress next week, but if it’s an angry mob that does the voting it’ll be an angry mob that we elect. That’s why I need you to teach me what makes people into soldiers, both so we can fight for peace if we have to, and, more important, so I can do the opposite right now. I want our new Congress to make peace, not war. If we fight, I want us to fight for peace and only peace, not for vendetta, or Nurturism, or whatever else. I need a sane Congress. I need calm Cousins and I need them by next week—not in a month, next week. Teach me what makes people go from screaming in outrage to screaming for blood, so I can learn to stop it.”

  The hero scratched at his hair, oily at its roots and likely itchy, but Achilles will not wash his hair in these days of mourning, nor can he crop it off to lay the offering beside the honored dead, since the child who was more than a son to both of us has left no corpse to set upon a funeral bier.

  Here I dared interrupt. “The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”

  Both stared at me.

  “That’s what Thomas Hobbes says.”

  Kosala frowned. “I don’t need grand philosophy, Mycroft, I need specifics. How do I talk down a billion-member angry mob?” She turned back to Achilles. “I need your help. I need your answer. Will you teach me? Will you help me make peace within the Cousins before the war starts, so we can make peace for everyone once it does?”

  Achilles breathed deep. “My answer is that I need time to think, and to meet the other sides.”

  “I’m not a side. I’m trying to not be a side, and I have less time than the others, only one week.”

  “And the war may start tomorrow.”

  The World’s Mom sighed, slumping like an oak bough, burdened with a child’s swing, when the child returns, grown up, and places the full weight of adulthood on the tired wood. “Just make sure it doesn’t drag us into yesterday.”

  The Great Soldier’s voice is rarely soft. “I don’t understand.”

  “War is a thing of the past, Achilles. You’re a thing of the past. This whole mess is a thing of the past, concocted out of books and nostalgia: Madame using past customs and seductions to create their power network, Merion Kraye’s storybook quest for revenge, Danaë, Andō, Ganymede, burning the world down over a love affair. O.S. is the past too, a system set up before our grandba’pas were born, and now the world is in convulsions over decisions no one living made. MASON is the past too.” I wish there were a name for that expression, part smirk, part sigh, part sniff, all irony, which we use when we acknowledge the sad, sardonic humor of our own unhappy state. “As fine a person as Cornel MASON is, their whole mystique is about empire, tradition, pretending ancient mysteries can somehow save us if we return to absolutism and ziggurats. The Mitsubishi are just as much about tradition, a rival tradition but still tradition. And now the King of Spain, just by being so reliable through all this, is making people feel as if the past is the best solution to the present, kings and emperors and coats of arms to stand firm now that the democracies are teetering. You Achilles, Mycroft, even Jed and Heloïse, helpful as they’ve been with this interim constitution, you’re all about the past. The Mardi bash’ was afraid we’d wipe ourselves out with our new technology, but I think humanity has proved itself wise enough not to push that button. My fear is that this war will drag us backward, undo this good world we’ve finally achieved, not by destroying it but by making people want to dismantle it. Look around you. This world is far from perfect, but people have never been happier, healthier, more productive, more free, more equal. We have a lot of improvements still to make, but we’ve come a long way compared to any older era.”

  “No need to tell me,” the hero confirmed. “The poorest man today lives in greater comfort than King Priam ever did.”

  “It’s the political changes that worry me. Hives and strats are not nations, and that’s important. People are free to change and choose Hives, that’s the heart of all this, but a war will change that. In war you can’t change sides so easily. If this turns into a war as wars used to be, it’ll turn us into everything that was worst about the geographic nations. Europe is the most dangerous. The Masons are just mystique, but Europe was made of geographic nations once, and still is, sort of, the nation-strats. We’ve already seen riots involving nation-strat groups: Spaniards, Croats, Greeks. The rest of the world may not know how to make soldiers, but nation-strats still have their old uniforms, their flags, their anthems, leaders, even kings. If we let that set the tone for the war, it will drag it all back to the days of borders, and rip the Hives apart. The majority of most nation-strats are European Members, but nation-strats have members in every Hive, even Utopia and Gordian, and this could rip those pieces out by force. If there has to be war, we can’t let it be that kind of war.”

  Achilles’s eyes and voice stayed dark. “Men fight best beside comrades that share their blood. That hasn’t changed, and won’t.”

  “If this resurrects the old nation-states, and destroys people’s freedom to choose their laws and governments, it will undo this world. You see that, right? Imagine how quickly the Masons would degenerate into tyranny if the Emperor didn’t have to worry about tyrannical action making Members leave. The Masons themselves are a political miracle. They’ve designed an absolute dictatorship where the ruler is still subject to the will of the people; Aristotle couldn’t wish for a more mixed government. This war puts all that at risk, and I fear Europe more than anything may turn it into the old kind of war. Worse, Europe may use you to turn it into the old kind of war, as it may use me. A king may be a ruler of men, but kings can also be dragged along by those they rule. Even us.”

  Achilles, King of the Myrmidons, nodded to his peer. “Chair Kosala said something very similar.”

  Mycroft, has thy memory blurred again? This was Kosala speaking.

  Kosala? No, good master, it is Spain who speaks, the king himself, quiet in his close-cut mourning clothes of finest lamb’s wool, woven by New Zealanders as a gift to the widower upon the loss of his first queen—a gift the king had hoped never to need again. See the sorrowful palace around us, reader? Every marble window frame festooned with black, while the furtive, broken motions of the servants tell of the grief that weighs down all Madrid like plague: Crown Prince Juan Valentín, rest in peace.

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees that danger.” Spain’s words were soft, half winged, grief making him slow like a sleeptalker.

  “National rivalries are not a problem I know how to solve,” Achilles answered flatly. “I’m more a product of nation and geography than any man living. It’s also not Europe’s biggest problem as I see it.”

  “No? What is, then?”

  “Rage,” Achilles son of Peleus replied. “That will be your problem, Europe’s cry for revenge, likely unstoppable.” He paused. “Or rather, you might be able to stop it but you won’t like the price.”

  The two kings looked out together through the window, past the guards and gardens to the street beyond, where funeral garlands twined along the eves like the roots of some black parasite. Here too people gathered, Europeans, others, an undivided mass with new cars constantly replenishing what weariness took away. Some had flowers, candles, signs in universal English or European French:

  REFORM!

  ONE EUROPE, ONE LEADER

  PUNISH OS!

  S
PAIN: EUROPE’S CONSCIENCE

  INTEGRITY STABILITY MONARCHY

  EUROPE NEEDS AN EMPEROR

  “All the Hives are angry,” the soft king whispered.

  “Not like yours.” Achilles frowned his sympathy, but darkly. “Not like yours. The others have someone to accuse: Ockham Saneer, Ganymede, Andō, the CFB, the Anonymous, but you have no one. Europe was unknowingly complicit in O.S., and Europeans who don’t want to accept that guilt will be loudest in screaming for someone’s blood. But whose? Casimir Perry went down to the House of Death together with his victims. Now you have hundreds of your leading men to mourn, a billion Members desperate to prove their innocence by punishing the guilty, and no villain to take it out on. That worries me.”

  The King of Spain leaned his head against the wall behind his chair. “I had not thought about revenge.”

  Rarely have I seen godlike Achilles astonished. “How could you not? Bridger wasn’t even my child by blood, and when I lost him revenge nearly drove me rage-mad, even though I knew no earthly power was responsible for my loss. Your son was murdered, and by Perry, a man you broke bread with, a traitor!”

  “Was Bridger that child who resurrected Epicuro?”

  Even Achilles took a moment to recognize one of Jehovah’s rarer names. “Yes. He resurrected me, too, and I raised him like a son. If any living man had been responsible for his death, that man wouldn’t be living now.”

  Spain nodded. “Both my sons were killed that day. One was returned to me, and with their resurrection came proof of the existence of the Higher Power that now holds the other. How many worthier men have not been blessed with such consolation in their grief?”

  Achilles’s words were stone. “I’ve rarely found the gods much consolation.”

  Spain paused. “Do you think your existence proves your gods are the real ones?”

  “No.” The veteran let himself sigh. “I’ve thought hard about that, and, with all I’ve seen, I wouldn’t put it past Fate’s whimsy to make me real but leave my gods a pack of empty superstition.” He peered hard at his fellow king. “You’re the first to ask me about that.”

  Spain seemed to struggle to keep his heavy eyes open. “It’s a frightening thing to ask. And without a sensayer here, if Mycroft chimes in we’ll have broken the First Law. I suspect a lot of people have these past few days. We shall have to talk to the Sensayers’ Conclave about arranging some sort of amnesty. The First Law is necessary but, with the miracle of resurrection captured on video, who could obey?”

  The ancient hero scowled. “Do you think there will be religious strife? Even if it can’t be public, I suspect many Members of the Hives, like you and I, still have … convictions.”

  His Most Catholic Majesty did not meet godlike Achilles’s eyes. “I understand you still consider yourself Greek. If you wish to contact the President of the Greek nation-strat, I can arrange it at your leisure.”

  Achilles snorted. “I still can’t believe that Spain rules Greece.”

  “It doesn’t. Europe rules both, but for now I’m the only—”

  A soft knock. “News, Your Majesty.” The voice through the door sounded more of apology than warning.

  “Come in. What is it?”

  The nervous aid wore the livery of Parliament, but bowed like a Spaniard before the king. “The Mitsubishi are calling in sick. All of them.”

  A ghost’s infernal chill could not have sent a fiercer shiver through us. “The whole Hive at once?”

  “With the exception of those with life-threateningly critical duties, every Mitsubishi worldwide that should be coming on shift this hour has called in sick, and many of those currently mid-shift are excusing themselves.”

  “A Hive-wide strike,” gentle Spain supplied. “Are they using the same language Utopia did? ‘For health reasons consider my work on indefinite stasis’?”

  Of course they used the same words. Removing more than a billion people from the world’s workforce might threaten the economy, as a storm on the horizon threatens to deprive a village of a day’s catch by trapping the fragile fishing boats in port, but those two words, ‘indefinite stasis,’ were a different danger, an armada’s black sails sighted across the blade-gray waves. Does the phrase retain its horror in your day, distant reader? ‘Indefinite stasis,’ charged with death like ‘Off with his head,’ or ‘Carthage must be destroyed’? For us the terror is two centuries old but keen as new steel. 2239. For three days, as the Senate’s consultation over the proposed new Set-Set Law stretched on, Utopia had called in sick, depriving Earth en masse of its crafts and wonders. Then, when the motion failed, they recovered as one from their ‘illness’ and refused to acknowledge any mass action had taken place. A trembling Earth wondered what Utopia united might have done had the law passed, and wondered most of all why Utopia cared so much, why, with Cousins and Masons screaming at one another in the street over the set-set issue, it was not Father or Mother but the family’s strangest child that had made so hazardous a stand. Utopia does not use set-sets. Utopia’s separate car network has never needed set-sets, nor with their varied U-beasts do they need the other types of set-sets with their many special powers. Yet the Set-Set Law moved the Utopians to the first mass action they had ever taken, and they never told us why. Danger unknown and unrealized—what a Hive united in anger might have done—that is what the phrase ‘indefinite stasis’ invokes in us. In you, reader, I imagine the phrase must either be a detail quite forgotten, or else be rank with blood.

  Achilles spoke first. “At least this time we know what they’re striking for.”

  “Do we?” Spain asked, gently. “Is it about the land law in Odessa? Or the arrest of Andō and the other Executive Directors? Or O.S.? They’re not quite the same thing. If the Mitsubishi just want Odessa settled that’s one thing, but if they want Ockham and Andō and the others freed, that may not be possible.” He closed his eyes. “This is it, isn’t it? This will start the war?”

  The Great Soldier thought a long time before he shook his head. “I still don’t know. I wish I could recognize war’s spark by instinct, but I can’t. All things feel like war to me.”

  Spain took a slow breath. “My peacekeeping forces are few. They can either concentrate on guarding vital spots or on training new forces, either on preparing short-term or preparing long-term, but not both. The same is true of my industry. I can make medicine, or I can make machines that can make a thousand times as much medicine later on, but if the latter takes too long it leaves me with nothing. I don’t know where to place my resources.”

  Achilles frowned his sympathy. “I know right now nothing would be more valuable than for me to be able to say ‘this is it’ or ‘this isn’t it,’ to give us all a date, an hour we can call war. I can’t. I want that too. All anyone can do right now is err on the side of assuming war will come sooner rather than later.”

  “And yet you yourself aren’t offering real help to anyone yet. Does that not betray the fact that you yourself think war is still some time off?”

  “No, it just means I’d rather plunge in with nothing than help someone who turns out to be my enemy.”

  “I’m not used to thinking of myself as having enemies.”

  “Perry-Kraye was your enemy for years, you just didn’t let yourself admit it. Things might have gone better if you had. O.S. and those who used them were also your enemies, and, as things degenerate, you’ll have more.”

  “I know.”

  “Things will degenerate.”

  “I know.”

  Headstrong Achilles almost smiled. “You really do know, don’t you?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You can read men. Mycroft says you read them better than anyone, your Nephew excepted.”

  “Oh? Now, I’d have thought Mycroft would reserve that praise for Ancelet.” He shot me a long smile. “Or for my Donatien.” He paused even longer now, to test me. “And we must not underestimate my sister’s senses.”

  Sister?
Nephew? I know my dynasties, Mycroft. Isabel Carlos II had no siblings.

  Of course not, reader, and the king, who hoped so long that Kraye-turned-Perry might still be redeemed, is no reader of men.

  Faust: “Since you ask, the answer, in fact, is no, I don’t have a good sense of how things will fall out, largely because of you.”

  Achilles: “Me?”

  Faust: “Pick a number, any number.”

  Achilles: “What?”

  Faust: “Don’t pause, don’t overthink, just say a number, first one that pops into your head.”

  Achilles: “Twelve.”

  Faust: “Magnificent. How many of the others did you test before me?”

  Achilles: “What?”

  Faust: “I assume you’re testing every leader before you pick a side. The interesting question is what order we fall in, in Mycroft’s estimation of our importance. They’ll have taken you to MASON first most likely, and Ancelet. Oh, I see you haven’t seen Ancelet yet?” I had not spotted the flinch or blink or lack thereof that let Faust guess this. “Fascinating. Mycroft, has Ancelet becoming a Humanist lowered them that much in your hierarchy of masters? Or … ah, I see, Ancelet is … never mind.”

  Achilles: “What?”

  Faust: “When I say never mind, I mean it.”

  Achilles: “Do you have a sense of how and when the war will start?”

  Faust: “All the others asked you that question, didn’t they? And now you’re asking me? No, I don’t know. I thought the Odessa mess might start it, or this Mitsubishi strike, but it might start when the Senate meets on Monday, or when the Cousins have their election, or when the Saneer-Weeksbooth trial starts, or when it ends, or if Spain refuses to let Europe make them an Emperor, or if someone says something stupid about Sniper in an interview, or if Mycroft here wanders outside and gets killed by an angry mob and MASON finally cracks. It could be anything. Normally I love suspense, but not this kind.”