The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  Kosala switched to speaking Hindi with Bandyopadhyay here, the intimacy of their shared strat-language demanding extra honesty with it. She has kindly translated for me.

  Kosala: “Do you think the Mitsubishi Hive might split?”

  Greenpeace: “No, but there’s been discussion|People will be more comfortable if it’s clear that, if things do turn sour, these properties will still be governed by Greenpeace members, the slice of the Hive that’s likely to be less involved in violence|The landgrab isn’t Greenpeace’s policy, after all|”

  Kosala: “Are the properties being offered all Greenpeace-owned?”

  Greenpeace: “No|Actually hardly any of them are, but the owners who pledged the land have agreed to Greenpeace Members overseeing things|”

  Kosala: “How much of this land comes from Mitsubishi ruling families?”

  Greenpeace: “Some, I guess|I’d have to check how much|”

  Kosala: “And how soon can I have it?”

  Greenpeace: “Today, if you want it|”

  Kosala: “I do, but I’m going to sleep on it, run it by some people|Is forty-eight hours alright?”

  Greenpeace: “Sure|Oh, there is one other proposal|”

  Kosala: “Proposal or condition?” The backroom-savvy Cousin Chair pricked her ears as deer do at the rifle’s loading click.

  Greenpeace: “Somewhere between|We want the Cousins to help us push a Senatorial Consult through Romanova|Well, a Blacklaw clarification, actually|”

  Kosala: “The set-set law?”

  Greenpeace: “No, no|A clarification of the Second Black Law|”

  “Now?” I cried aloud as I read the transcript later in the safety of my cell. “You’d bring another assault on the Black Laws now?”

  Kosala: “The Second Law?”

  Greenpeace: “We want Romanova to officially declare that engaging in combat in designated nature reserves, or transporting or storing war materials there, legally constitutes ‘action likely to result in extensive or uncontrolled destruction of Nature,’ and is thus banned by the Second Black Law|We have a list of about two hundred and fifty thousand individual areas we think are justified in being declared off-limits to the war|”

  Kosala: “Doesn’t the Second Law already restrict what can be done in nature preserves?”

  Greenpeace: “Yes, but its past interpretations have all related to restricting particular types of equipment or materials|We want to argue that any kind of military action, even just having food stores there, or moving troops through, will give the enemy an incentive to destroy the area, thus endangering Nature|”

  Kosala: “You’re asking me to create borders|” I imagine Kosala sighing like some great shaman whose apprentice pledged to join the master’s desert journey of enlightenment, but arrives for embarkation still clinging to a teddy bear.

  Greenpeace: “I’m asking you to create borders around rainforests, and orangutans, and baby elephants|We need these borders|”

  Kosala: “Creating peace zones means creating war zones|”

  Hobbes: “More than that: creating a peace zone is the announcement that you have given up on peace. This will feed fear, and the Will to Battle with it.”

  Greenpeace: “That’s the whole point|Creating peace zones, and by extension war zones, will show people that not only the whackos and criminals like Tully Mardi are taking the danger seriously|If the Mitsubishi and Cousins together—whom everyone sees as enemies in this, on the O.S. front and the set-set front—if we’re seen jointly preparing for the possibility of World War, people will wake up and realize that Word War might actually happen, and they just might get off their butts and do something to preserve World Peace|That’s what we both want|This way if we succeed there will be peace, and if we fail there will be protections for orangutans and baby elephants|”

  Kosala: “This,” Kosala’s Hindi sounded so intimate here, so cautious: “This idea came from Dominic Seneschal, didn’t it?” It is such a good thing, reader, that Kosala has drunk of Madame’s poison, such a good thing that there is someone at the Cousins’ heart who can recognize its taste.

  Greenpeace: “Y-yes|Seneschal’s a weird, weird person, but I can’t deny they’re a great Acting Chief Director|This is a good plan, and, in the public eye, it will be you and Greenpeace at the center, not the Mitsubishi, or Seneschal|Don’t forget, Greenpeace is clean of any involvement in O.S., and we’re in complete agreement with you Cousins in thinking that the top priority is protecting everything we can in this mess|A public Cousin-Greenpeace alliance will combat the Cousin-Mitsubishi enmity|You want the strike and riots to end too, don’t you?”

  The Cousins’ great poison taster did more than hesitate before agreeing. She consulted friends, board members, experts, even, with Caesar’s permission, Martin and myself, who know Dominic better than anyone outside Madame’s. It was in that visit that she gave permission for me to add this transcript to my chronicle, and brought some brightness to my cell with her stories of growing food stocks and nurses’ training. You must not think my captivity in MASON’s sanctum dank, reader, nor he a cruel protector. It is a cheery room where I sleep and work, cozy with cushions, alive with screens which show me anything I wish, from light-swift news to warming dawnscapes. I have visitors: constant Martin, Ἄναξ Jehovah, Xiaoliu Guildbreaker, my Saladin, Mercer, Kohaku, sometimes playful Faust, exhausted Ancelet, or calm Geneva. Kosala was the steadiest of all through this, the reed that bends and springs back when the oak falls. But I could not help her understand Dominic. Nor can I tell you much of his activities. The Mitsubishi are my blind spot. I want to show you how Dominic did it. I want to trace, threat by bargain, how the bloodhound played that vast harp, stringed with favors and blackmail, which he had so long watched Chief Director Andō play. But Andō has his victory, his cunning surrender, not to the Master, but to His hunter whose shadowed path no one can follow—no one but Andō who laid out the course and waits, in prison’s peace, for its completion.

  “What does Dominic want?” Kosala asked me when she visited, healthily unashamed to seek help wherever help is found. “This proposal is totally reasonable and beneficial, and really looks like it might help the peace. Why would Dominic do this?”

  I answered the truth. “The only thing Dominic wants, or ever thinks about, is Ἄναξ Jehovah. I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if someone told me Dominic had a scheme to wipe out the rest of the human race just to eliminate all distractions. I don’t know why he’d try to stop the war, or protect Nature, but that does seem to be what he’s doing.”

  The Greenpeace proposal was not the only evidence of Dominic’s unlikely peacemaking. That same day, April fifteenth, the Sensayers’ Conclave presented to the Senate their plan for stabilizing public discourse about the resurrection. The plan reeked of Julia, and gave unprecedented liberty for small-group in-bash’ religious discourse, enough so that some wise and bitter critics warned it would turn the world from ten billion independent minds into a billion bash’-sized churches. But every single Mitsubishi voted for it, and enough others to let the motion pass.

  The fifteenth also saw a sudden announcement from the Mitsubishi which promised a bewildered Papadelias complete and open access to all Directorate records, and the personal files of Directoral families, back to the foundation of O.S.

  “Suspiciously candid,” Papa called it when he too took a turn on the couch between Martin’s desk and mine, seeking our advice on Dominic’s psychology. Papa was calm by then, but had not been when he first arrived, and hurled a list of curses that only a centenarian could accumulate against Martin and everyone: How could they have let Mycroft—the Mycroft, Papa’s Mycroft—slip, however briefly, into mortal danger? But so skeletal a chest can only rant so long. After securing Martin’s promise that he and Papa would work together to discover who stabbed me the second time, Papa was again a smiling font of sport-swift speculation. His smile was false, though. There is a twitch one picks up from abusing anti-sleeping-meds too much. I h
ave had it for years, but had not seen it in Papadelias since the rich days of my capture. Papa didn’t—couldn’t—mention details, but World Riot is someone’s job. Local city governments relied on Romanova as a backup, but the not-quite-untiring Commissioner General couldn’t back up every city on Earth at once.

  “What I don’t get,” Papa continued, “is why the Mitsubishi don’t just sell off some land? No one’s saying they have to give up Asian land. They could sell in Detroit, Dubai, Manchester, Naples, Halifax, their half of Athens. They could sell farmland, marshland, or those hunks of rainforest that just sit there being ecologically important and full of frogs.”

  “They think all power comes from land.” Martin aided our speculation game. “Location doesn’t matter, they won’t sell their patrimony.”

  Patrimony? I chuckled at Martin, such a Mason, still measuring value in man hours, and human lives. It isn’t the work ancestors put in to accumulating the land that makes the Mitsubishi cling for dear life. Land is real. Immortal, as the fruits of lifetimes’ labors cannot be on Time’s grand scale. Just as the ancient bronzesmith leaves no fingerprint on our towers of steel, so today’s great achievements will someday be invisible within the great machines that are to us the future, and to distant generations trash. Yet after a million sunsets there will still be acres, dirt, and dawn. The Earth is real, and one who owns a sliver of her owns something eternal. I know why Martin couldn’t see it. He never sees his labors as his own, only as part of the Masonic Leviathan whose projects outlast ages. But one corner of me is still European, and had Providence blessed me as it has blessed Papa with twelve acres of olive groves and grazing land where young goats frisk after their dams, it would take a harsher threat than politics to pry that property from me. If it were Greek, that is. My Greece I know, and love, and understand. Twelve acres near Detroit or Halifax are to me as interchangeable as empty euros. But perhaps the Mitsubishi truly are wiser than Europe, and truly can love all Earth the same.

  Danger, Mycroft. Thy tone reeks of territories, regions, borders, not thy elastic nation-strats but the geographic nations whose battles were so bloody, and so long. Art thou already so infected by thy embryonic war?

  Perhaps I am. Perhaps I always was.

  “I think Martin’s right, Papa,” I said. “I think the Mitsubishi see all their land as homeland, regardless of location. We have to imagine they’re all going to be as stubborn as we’d be giving up Delphi or Mycenae. We’d do worse than go on strike. I think that’s why Dominic understands the Mitsubishi well enough to work with them; he’s slightly French.”

  I don’t know whether Papa quite believed me. I don’t know whether I quite believed myself.

  Dawn’s kindling on April sixteenth saw fresh crises in the Senate, with the Mitsubishi at the heart of both. Up for debate first came Minister Cook’s hateful reintroduction of the Set-Set Law, which heightened the fervor around the Mitsubishi strike. While the Mitsubishi administration claimed that the Odessa land redistribution edict was their only provocation, the world remembers the Set-Set Riots, and knows that the entrepreneurial Mitsubishi train and employ the lion’s share of set-sets. The same session saw the first discussion of Natekari’s motion to declare Sniper an enemy of the Alliance to be killed on sight, a proposal which spread bloodlust farther than any but myself had done in living memory. I want to tell you, reader, that the world was noble in restraint, like Spain and MASON. I want to tell you there were no more skirmishes, no toddler set-sets delivered bewildered to orphanage doorsteps. I want to tell you that when Voltaire Seldon next visited my office-cell his coat did not keep flickering with mourning static, that the photographs Martin failed to hide from me were fake, that these eyes never saw the rainbow-leaking limbs of a lynched dragon, nor its master’s scarlet blood commixed. May I, please, master? May I gently lie?

  No, Mycroft. Never. Not and still call this a chronicle.

  Then pray, master, let me at least be brief. These days were darker, I think, than Martin let me know, if not yet dark enough for Achilles to call them war, as Hobbes does. I cannot tell all that happened. What I can deliver is a patchwork, more holes than cloth, of Dominic’s maneuvers as the Mitsubishi walked the tightrope between strike and war.

  Martin received the call first, one of hundreds I half tried not to listen to as he carried on his duties as Minister Porphyrogenito, and bearer of the Imperium Vicarii. “Am I correct, Acting Director,” I heard him ask, “that this proposal actually comes from Acting Chief Director Seneschal?” Pause. “Tell them to call in person. Caesar does not deal with intermediaries.” Another, patient pause, then, “Caesar also does not deal with lies. Tell Dominic to call directly.” There was no malice in Martin’s face as he ended the call, just mild efficiency, as when rain moves in to work its life-giving duty, parade or no.

  The consequent conversation I received in transcript later:

  Dominic: “Thank you for taking my call, Votre Majesté Impérial.”

  MASON: “Don’t waste my time.”

  Dominic: “I need your help to end the Mitsubishi strike.”

  MASON: “Your hold is too weak?”

  Dominic: “The stakes are too high for me to win them over.”

  MASON: “Tell them they’re destroying themselves. The people who are out of work or losing money because of the strike are spending their lost hours watching Tully Mardi’s videos. Every minute this drags on brings another hundred people to the edge of riot, not anti-set-set riot, anti-Mitsubishi riot.”

  Dominic: “I know, Majesté, but every man has his sticking point, these Mitsubishi no less than yourself. They will not cave, not so long as there’s any bill in motion anywhere, whether in Romanova, Odessa, or Easter Island, to force the Hive to give up land. But if you were to speak out and publicly oppose forced land redistribution, your word, and the votes it commands, would be enough.”

  MASON: “I support land redistribution.”

  Dominic: “I don’t care.”

  MASON: “The landgrab is an economic bottleneck, not to mention poison for the Mitsubishi themselves. Land monopoly turns tenants into lynch mobs.”

  Dominic: “I said I don’t care. The strike won’t end unless you condemn forced redistribution. I didn’t say you have to actually prevent it, just imply that you will.”

  MASON: “MASONS do not lie lightly.”

  Dominic: “Do this for me, and in return I promise to fight tooth and nail to get every Mitsubishi Senator to vote for Natekari’s motion to kill Sniper on sight.”

  MASON: “That’s no offer. You’ll do that anyway. You want Sniper dead. Are you planning to rip their throat out with your teeth, or burn them alive?”

  Dominic: “My plans are my own, Majesté, as yours are, and we both know that the only real difference between Votre Majesté and myself here is that I don’t care whether or not it’s legal when I do it. You want the law to kill Sniper. If you want that, you need my votes.”

  MASON: “It is legal for me to kill Sniper by the only law that matters: Lex Masonica.”

  Dominic: “Are you really going to pretend your law trumps Romanova?”

  MASON: “My law predates Rome, let alone Romanova.”

  Dominic: “Do you really expect Romanova to accept that?”

  MASON: “Romanova is a mere alliance. Either it respects the laws of its members, or it means nothing. Alliances come and go.”

  Dominic: “Fine, then. Every man has his sticking point, Majesté, and we all know yours. Speak out against land redistribution, or my Mitsubishi bloc will vote for Cook’s new Black Law.”

  MASON: “What? That’s insane. Mitsubishi use more set-sets than anyone.”

  Dominic: “True, but the bill will be vetoed by the Blacklaw Tribunes anyway. It won’t become law, but you swore to fight it with your dying breath, and I’m prepared to make that fight Hell for you to get what I need. Do this favor for me and you have my twenty-seven votes; add your sixty-one, the Utopian eight, say twenty of the Humanist twent
y-two, likely at least two Hiveless on your side, that’s a hundred and eighteen votes right there, the bill’s dead. Refuse and your side has ninety-one, while on Cook’s side would be my votes plus the Cousins, Gordian, dissenting Humanists, probably the Whitelaw Hiveless, that makes eighty-four, which leaves you begging favors from waffling Europeans, plus you still risk the bill passing, then the veto, then Cook’s push to overturn the veto, and while that drags on you know there will be riots, and Utopia will strike, just like they did in the days of Son Majesté Impérial Mycroft MASON. That’s when it turns nasty.”

  MASON: “Cook’s law is targeting you personally, canis, you as a Blacklaw and as Madame’s creation.”

  Dominic will not object to being called a cur in any language. “Were I a free man, Majesté, I’d be in Hobbestown right now burning Cook in effigy, but I have a Hive to save. From itself. I’m sure you know the feeling.”

  MASON: “I am willing to publicly announce that I oppose any attempt to legislate the land question until after the Mitsubishi Hive submits its proposal for self-reform to the Senate a month from now. Is that enough to end the strike?”