The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  Martin spoke up at last, for my sake. “Caesar, Mycroft domum ferendus est. (Mycroft must be taken home.)”

  Black-fisted MASON glanced at me with rage’s crimson still darkening his cheeks. Then he turned to Spain. “We will discuss this more another time.”

  “Why?” The quick, light question would have sounded natural on other lips, but coming from the king, who fashions his words so gingerly, it sounded like a curse. “In this matter we are not people but peoples. Neither Europe nor your Empire can compromise on this. Discussion will not resolve it.”

  MASON’s brows furrowed. “What will?”

  Gentle, still so gentle, the king, as if he sees with every breath the millions that a king’s too-hasty word can ruin and so, Leviathan among the Lilliputians, steps on tiptoe. “Hopefully not violence.” His eyes beamed empathy. “I owe you an apology, Caesar. I let harm come to your Familiaris when you kindly lent them to me. I gave you my word of honor that I would return Mycroft Canner safely as soon as we completed the transport of the duke, and I failed.”

  “The fault was not yours.” MASON would not look at Madame.

  “The promise was mine,” the king answered quickly. “The stain is on my honor.”

  Caesar frowned long at the king. “You can’t maintain this, Isabel. You can’t be an honorable gentleman and be with Joyce. They’re a whore. I don’t mean prostitute—you and I both know prostitution can be an honorable profession in its way—but Joyce actively wants to live up to the old archetype and be a filthy, treacherous, honor-destroying whore. Right now you’re the only evidence the world has that there can be a morally pure leader anymore. Joyce will tear that all down. For fun. To prove they can.”

  The king smiled, soft. “Joyce has the right to tear it down; they built it up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When Madame and I convene for our … trysts … Madame plays Vice and has me play Virtue, and we’ve been doing it for twenty years; after enough play a part becomes habit.”

  The Emperor shook his head. “I don’t believe you’re a good man just because of that. I think you always had this in you, Madame just brought it out more.” He limped a step toward the door. “Same as with me.”

  Martin did not yet help me to my feet. “Caesar, may I address Madame a moment, before we go?” he asked.

  MASON had a smile for a Guildbreaker scion, even here. “Of course.”

  Madame herself perked, adjusting her skirts as if to get the rustling over with before the next scene of an opera. “What is it, Martin?”

  “It would benefit you at some point to recognize that, like the Porphyrogene, I too have grown up. My Emperor has given me literally unlimited resources, public and clandestine, and the trust of Romanova gives me even more, all dedicated to the service and safety of Domini Jehovah. I could likely have captured Sniper today if you had made me your accomplice instead of, or in addition to, Dominic. I caught you, after all.”

  Madame’s smile had a lively, rolling glow, as Hera or Demeter wear in frescoes. “My dear Martin, Dominic I can predict.”

  Martin frowned. “I do not exaggerate, Madame, when I say I believe myself to be possibly the most predictable person on Earth.”

  “Of course you are, dear Martin,” she answered, “but you can’t keep a secret from Jehovah for five minutes, and only Earth’s greatest fool would dare try to predict what He will do when you tell Him something.”

  Martin considered that a moment. “It is certainly true, Madame, that I keep secrets from Domine only in the most extreme situations, but that is because, if Dominus orders or advises something, it is the right thing.”

  She shook her head. “What He wants is not always what’s best.”

  “False, Madame. Dominus always wants what is best. You raised them thus.”

  Spain and Caesar watched in quiet fascination as ever-calculating Martin judged it worthwhile to raise his voice in argument against immovable Madame.

  “You flatter me, Martin,” she replied. “Every mother wants to think her child is perfect, but I know it’s not quite true.”

  “Perhaps, but Dominus is morally perfect if not absolutely perfect. What they order does not always lead to success, but it is always the best of all possible human actions. If Dominus says we should kill Sniper, we should kill Sniper; if they say we should not, then there are reasons we should not.”

  She laughed. “Jehovah isn’t actually infallible, Martin, appropriate as your devotion is.”

  “No, Madame, nor are they omniscient, but still I believe no one in the history of the human race has ever erred less. It is not hubris when I say that I am myself reasonably wise, yet observation has proved to me that I am wrong much more often than Dominus. I know therefore that I choose the right thing more often when guided by Domine than when I choose on my own. To ignore or avoid their council, as you have done, Madame, is both irrational and immoral.”

  “Dear Martin”—she reached toward him, as if to cup his cheek in her hand—“not even you can think it’s that black and white.”

  “In fact, Madame, I do.”

  “Martin the Manichean!” I screamed. I screamed it, reader, full force despite the pain, anemia, fatigue, and the utter inappropriateness of a slave interrupting kings. I couldn’t help it. If at an outdoor theatre, with brave Antigone monologuing her last hours, you spotted on the hill above the stage a unicorn, elusive, pure, and real, you too would forget decorum and shout and point to let actor and audience alike enjoy the long-sought vision. “Martin! That’s why our Master calls you Martin!”

  It was an odd moment for dawn to break at last upon the dusty mystery. Martin the Manichean. Mycroft ‘Martin’ Guildbreaker had borne the nickname, and its cultish stigma, patiently since he was sixteen and the Master Who renamed him six. Why He chose ‘Martin’ we never knew. The Child Jehovah was too tangled in Earth’s many languages back then to answer complex questions, and by the time He semimastered speech, the secret behind the nickname had already become a puzzle-quest which Martin felt he had to solve himself. On the ride back to Alexandria I apologized for blurting the solution, but middle-voice Martin only smiled, content that he had arranged the conjunction which unlocked the mystery. We had been on the wrong track all these years, thinking it must be Saint Martin, or Martin Luther, or some other historic Martin, or perhaps the bird, when the answer was in our Eighteenth Century the whole time: Martin the Manichean, the character from Voltaire’s Candide. I got to watch Martin over the next days, as I worked on my history while he, in the corner, read, reread, and memorized his namesake’s scenes. The ancient Manichean cult believed the universe was a great war between a force of Good and one of Evil. In such a world there is true right, true wrong, and Evil was not mere imperfection necessitated by our Maker’s Plan but a Maker in itself, which schemes and undoes while the other loves and gives. This Manichean sentiment leaked quickly into other cults, especially those veins of Christianity which imagined the universe as a struggle between God and Satan, instead of a play where God the Author scripts out rebel Lucifer and loyal Michael with equal absoluteness. The Manicheans had vocal enemies, the Platonists, Saint Augustine, many who argued that light is something, shadow its mere absence, so Good is Real but Evil merely a diluted good, like fabric with too many holes to hold. So fierce were the Christian counterarguments that later generations used the Manichean heresy for target practice, re-proving its folly in theology exams to demonstrate their syllogisms. Soon the Manichees became Europe’s stock stupid heresy, something only an idiot would fall for. But then she breaks, the Dawn of Reason with her rosy fingers, and brings us Montaigne, Descartes, and Pierre Bayle. Bayle raised the problem first, the ambidextrous Bayle, as Voltaire called him, forever seeming to write one thing with his right hand and another in a footnote with his left, confounding censors by hiding his arguments in pieces, as prisoners hide their tools. In his dictionary entry on the Manicheans, Bayle wrote that, for all the centuries of attempted disproofs,
no one had ever actually made Good versus Evil seem truly unconvincing as a model of the world. What good was Logic if it could not best this oldest folly? A generation later, Voltaire’s long-suffering Candide pauses in his troubles to muse on old Manicheanism, so abused a dead horse that no one could possibly be a Manichean anymore. Sheepishly his fellow traveler Martin confesses, “I am one, and I don’t know what to do about it, but I find myself unable to see the world in any other way.” Soon, reader, I would have the privilege of watching our Martin Guildbreaker read that line, and understand at last the blessing our Master had given him sixteen years before: “Live on in your black-and-white world, Martin my Manichean; I will never tell you you are wrong.” So Martin would understand, and smile, musing on how rare and useful his black-and-white mind is in this too-distracting world—but that will be tomorrow. Today, in Spain’s cloister, a lifetime’s curiosity could not make Martin interrupt his Emperor’s business for his own.

  “My point, Madame, is that the pledge Caesar demands of you—that you not go after O.S. on your own—is easily kept; have me hunt for you.”

  The lady frowned chidingly at Martin. “We’d dropped that, dear.”

  “Enough, Martin.” MASON’s words were half sigh. “A Blacklaw’s promise would have meant something, but I put no value in the word of someone who’s been a Spaniard for half a day and already stained their king’s honor.”

  Spain frowned, as I imagine Cassandra frowns when she watches her doomed brothers march to war. “I know small betrayals are habit for you, Madame, but once you become my queen they will also be high treason against the Spanish Crown, which I will be obliged to prosecute.”

  « Majesté! » Madame offered a plaintive stare, but no argument: even she could not bring logic to her side.

  “You are entering a law, Joyce.” His Majesty spoke firmly. “Of your own free will. You are taking vows of your own free will. There will be consequences to your actions henceforth, and nothing you do will manipulate me into lightening those consequences by the weight of one hair if you violate the honor—national and personal—whose preservation is the very reason I shall marry you.”

  MASON gave a sour smile. “You can’t have everything, Joyce. You can’t become a European and keep acting like a Blacklaw. You can’t marry a Hive leader and still demand we treat you as Hive-neutral. You can’t promise to live as a strict Catholic and pretend you’ll maintain our polyamory. And you can’t use tricks and twists and seductions and technicalities of the law to snare us over and over and expect us not to snare you in return.”

  “But I can still love you both.”

  She got them. One could feel it in their strides, their breathing, as they hurried wordlessly away in opposite directions, Spain across the courtyard, Caesar out to the world. Love. If social mores have one purpose, it is to armor us against the instincts that Hobbes knows made wild life so brutish, and so short. Here are the two most civilized men in the world, who teach admiring billions the difference between savage and citizen, yet, as their eyes meet over Madame, her machinations regress them irresistibly: two rivals who can no longer share one mate. Their pulses race, their faces flush, and Caesar’s black-sleeved hand thirsts for Spain’s throat for a moment, as it does for mine. She did this to them, reader, planned it and enjoyed it. I dared pray in that moment that, if these two great men must fall, they will not fall for her.

  CHAPTER THE TENTH

  Our Secret Truce

  Written August 2–3, 2454

  Events of April 15–23

  Observed from Alexandria

  It failed. It was inevitable. No one knew. The pact between Sniper and my Master could restrain Caesar, Papadelias, Spain, even Tully Mardi for a month, but a leader’s urging has only so much power over a frightened widow with a jagged stone. Not a day passed from the fifteenth to the twenty-third that did not see riot, fire, and somewhere or another a peppering of death. Still, the Will to Battle was not yet Battle. When every guest at a dinner has a motive for wanting the host dead, in one sense it doesn’t really matter who strikes first, the oppressed stepdaughter or the vengeful rival—either way, the victim dies. Yet, in another sense, it does matter which heart heeds conscience, and which breaks civilization’s most ancient law and makes itself a true hospiticide. Peace was our murdered host, the dwindling chance, nurtured by Senate, Kosala, and Ancelet, that our recent wrongs might be righted by Law. In one sense it did not matter which act snuffed that hope first, but those industrious guardians who bought us precious days deserve due credit, especially the strange ones.

  Kosala: “This offer came from Dominic?”

  Greenpeace: “Partly, though I developed the details.”

  Kosala: “To give me one point one million properties?”

  Greenpeace: “Distributed fairly evenly around the globe, well located, mostly urban. You’re welcome to renovate the existing buildings as needed. We’ll offer an indefinite lease, no payment asked, on condition they are returned to their current owners when the crisis, and the recovery from the crisis, are done. No time limit specified, but the situation should be reviewed annually starting in four years.”

  Kosala: “And I’m to use these properties for what, precisely?”

  Fine print spread, hypnotic as zebra stripes, across Kosala’s office wall as Mitsubishi Greenpeace Director Jyothi Bandyopadhyay summoned her draft. “The current language suggests hospitals, refugee housing, soup kitchens, storage of humanitarian supplies, fire stations, and quote ‘other comparable use.’ We didn’t want to limit it since no one knows what might actually happen in this conflict. Will we need quarantine sites? Radiation scrubbers? POW camps? We want you to decide what to use them for, since you’re the one who’s pledged to build a new emergency center in every city in the world.”

  Dark times, reader, when a million free hospitals do not make a Cousin’s face brighten. “That plan isn’t public yet.”

  Greenpeace: “Then both can be announced together. We want to give you as much freedom as possible to use this land to help the human race.”

  Kosala: “And you hope that giving us rent-free land for hospitals will defuse the demands for the Mitsubishi to give up your land monopoly?”

  Greenpeace: “Monopoly is a strong word.”

  Kosala: “Majority.”

  Greenpeace: “Majority is a strong word.”

  Kosala: “It’s also true.”

  Greenpeace: “You’ve been listening to too many of Tully Mardi’s broadcasts, Chair Kosala. But, so has the whole world, and that’s the point. If this proves to the public that the Mitsubishi are willing to share land with other Hives, that could defuse the tension. We all want the Mitsubishi strike to end. We’re giving you this land as long as you use it for the public good, and we trust you entirely to decide what that good is. We’ll appoint a committee—mixed Greenpeace and others—to review the sites periodically and make sure they’re being used well, but it’ll be pure formality.”

  Kosala: “Greenpeace? Not Mitsubishi?”

  Greenpeace: “Well, Greenpeace Mitsubishi. We said Greenpeace in the draft because…”

  Because recent scars reopen easily. All Hives are Frankenstein chimeras, stitched from mergered peoples: the Humanists were born from the Olympians and One Big Party, the Cousins absorbed Rainbow Bridge and Schools Without Borders, Europe swallowed Volemonde and IBN; so many names from the heady decades after the Great Renunciation, when dozens of newborn Hivelets vied for slices of mankind. The fittest survived, but with the conquered within them, as conquered bacteria became the mitochondria which feed the cells that crawl through volvox, trilobite, and coelacanth toward Mars. One suture is still fresh. To me it is history, but to Papadelias, Jin Im-Jin, Joyce and Felix Faust, sixty-four years ago is very living memory. Greenpeace, lean of members but fat with forests, farms, and mountains. In Greenpeace had gathered those who loved the land, the farmers, shepherds, seaherds, naturalists, Earth Mother’s self-appointed guards. Here too, as the geographic
nations died, accumulated their parks, wilderness, sanctuaries, refuges, and reserves, adopted by guardians determined to ensure that the Church War’s carnage left the untouched untouched. India quickly became the Hive’s heart, that exquisite subcontinent whose many peoples have always been so prudently reluctant to subject the smallest parcel of their paradise to outsiders’ exploitation. Soon, in addition to owning most of India, Greenpeace guarded a quarter of the Earth, pristine, primordial lands, in business terms untappable. Untappable but real. How the Mitsubishi hungered for it, the land-crazed Mitsubishi who lust after the sweet curves of hills or the dusky laps of mountains just as much they do after rent-rich high-rises and commodity-plump factories. Those Hives that think only manpower is real power laughed when the Mitsubishi bought out Greenpeace, as when Prometheus duped Father Zeus with his trickster’s offering of rich fat hiding empty bones. Some gods want bones. While for a European or a Humanist one life is one vote, every unit of property a Mitsubishi Member owns is one extra share in the corporation, an extra vote. A more valuable property might be two votes, twenty, a thousand. Even if each wilderness acre was worth a hundredth of a house, there were millions of acres. I know the Directorate, and the courting dance they play with the voting blocs that feed their power. All Directors come from land-rich families, but family property is only the tiny axle which anchors the great wheel of a billion supporting votes, bound to their chosen Director by promotion ladders, nepotism, debt, trust, and tribe mentality. Greenpeace’s property brought two billion new votes into the Mitsubishi Hive, one billion to raise a Greenpeace Director, the other billion to be wooed by the dominant voting blocs which vie eternally for the other eight seats. If Shanghai now had two Directors, it wasn’t just because of property in Shanghai. It is no coincidence that crowd-courting Andō has always made his love of nature sanctuaries so very public. For sixty-four years, then, there has been no Greenpeace, but in history’s terms the sutures are still raw, and when ex-Greenpeace Members smell blood on Mitsubishi hands, their minds are quick to chop ‘they’ off of ‘we.’