The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  She threw her head back into laughter. “Says the cannibal.”

  “You can’t see, can you? How wrong you are?”

  Again her warm, slow smile. “Are you going to make me see? Come on, then? Make me, Mycroft Canner. Make meeeeEEEEEEAAAAAAA!”

  There she screams, the proud witch. I can see her through the newborn darkness as the savaged lamp-wires above me bleed their white-hot sparks. Do you see her, reader? Frozen like a rabbit on the floor, where she fell in her terror. I see her. She knows it. Shall I let her see me, through the dark I made? There, witch. Have a glimpse of my arm, and the javelin in it, with the entrails of the ceiling light still knotted ’round. Will you realize my weapon was, moments ago, a chair leg? Or will you think I sprout blades when I will them, or that I keep them hidden in my flesh and draw them from under old scars when the hunt is ripe? Oh, you fumble with your own chair now, as the spark-shower wanes and the blackness that surrounds us both becomes perfect. Do you want a weapon? Do you fear I might pierce that glass and reach your side of our divided cage? Useless. These prison chairs are welded metal; you need to know just where the weak points are, and how to twist, to snap a sharp leg free. The darkness is complete now, the spark shower gone, but I still hear you panting on the far side of the glass. I know you’re listening, but I let you hear nothing. Ask yourself, as your breath speeds, which one of us is hunter in the dark, and which is prey? One tardy spark lets me see you again. There. Those are eyes that realize this is my domain. If you only knew how much. I know this compound, Thisbe. I studied every wall and wire. This is the facility where they would have held me, if I’d been captured early with my work undone, stray Mardis still at large. I had to be ready to escape. And the interrogator’s side of these rooms is so much more vulnerable. Here! Let this crunch and echo thrill you, one stab in the wall two hand spans left of the window to take out the junction box, then I count one, two, three, four, five hands down and stab again—crunch—echo. Three more stabs, Thisbe, is all I’ll need to rip the belly from this wall and be in there with you. Your portfolio? How dare you think yourself an artist? How dare you place your idle hobby on a nobler level than works of heroes? Loyal Prospero, brave Sniper, and Mycroft Canner! You dare compare yourself to Mycroft Canner? Stab—crunch—echo. Do you smell me now, through the wall’s wounds? I smell you. I don’t smell urine yet, or vomit, but I smell your fear sweat, Thisbe, reeking sour salt, and I smell you. How well I know your smell, that was so often near the Major and his men, near Bridger. Bridger.

  Bridger’s gone.

  Martin and Papadelias with four Utopians escorted me with some haste back to Alexandria. It was judged best that I not visit Thisbe anymore.

  CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

  The Witch Again

  Written August 16, 2454

  Event of June 14

  Herstedvester Compound

  Thisbe: “Are you so official now that you have clearance to visit prisons? How times change.”

  Achilles: “You used it on Mycroft Canner!”

  Thisbe: “No ‘Hello’?”

  Achilles: “You manage to smuggle in one capsule of your psycho perfume and you use it on Mycroft Canner?”

  Thisbe: “No one else came by. And you must admit it was a glorious audition.”

  Achilles: “Audition?”

  Thisbe: “It took you, what, three hours to get here? And I’m sure you’re the first of many. Everyone in the world worth working for will have heard by now.”

  Achilles: “You did it to get attention?”

  Thisbe: “I’ve been here nearly three months, and haven’t seen a soul apart from crawling little interrogators. I hadn’t figured Guildbreaker and Papadelias for such cowards, and you can tell them from me that, if they want my services, they have a lot to make up for.”

  Achilles: “Consequences, Thisbe. Actions have consequences. How could you do that to Mycroft of all people? You know he’s hallucinating half the time already. This could snap the thread!”

  Thisbe: “Making me wait has consequences.”

  Achilles: “Too hard for you, is it? Tasting the bitter grind of patience? You’re asking the wrong man, Thisbe, if you want pity. Come to me when you’ve waited years, when you’ve had to watch your comrades drop and die!”

  Thisbe: “That isn’t funny. Come on, who sent you?”

  Achilles: “Rage.”

  Thisbe: “Is that a hint? Should I be guessing?”

  Achilles: “No one sent me. I came on my own, to face you, to give you a chance to answer, just in case there was some justification for what you did to Mycroft.”

  Thisbe: “I told you, I’ve been neglected. I had no better way to get attention.”

  Achilles: “I respected you, when I heard you’d stayed and let them catch you so you could help Papadelias protect Bridger. I thought you did a brave thing, sacrificing O.S. and liberty, but you didn’t think you were sacrificing anything, did you? You thought some power would snatch you up, since you’re so valuable.”

  Thisbe: “I presume you know by now what I can do.”

  Achilles: “I know.”

  Thisbe: “I won’t be unreasonable about sides. I realize at this point I have to give up helping O.S., but I’m willing. I’m not as stubborn as Ockham and Cardie. I recognize things need to change. O.S. can’t work anymore, not as it was. A new order is shaping up. I’m prepared to help lubricate the transition, for whoever is far-seeing enough to realize what my special arts can do to a riot, or a battlefield.”

  Achilles: “No one’s coming for you, ever. You know why?”

  Thisbe: “Pray tell.”

  Achilles: “You’re evil.”

  Thisbe: “You must be kidding.”

  Achilles: “Murder has consequences, Thisbe, the unnatural betrayal and murder of your lover, of three lovers!”

  Thisbe: “Unnat—”

  Achilles: “No semantics. I know what terrible acts are forced on men by desperation and the will of Fate, and what terrible acts we bring into the world ourselves. You kill people because you enjoy killing people.”

  Thisbe: “And Mycroft doesn’t? You don’t?”

  Achilles: “Not in cold blood. You risked exposing O.S., and blackmailed your own bash’ into letting you get away with murder, because you enjoy pushing people to suicide, just for selfish fun. No one wants that, Thisbe. No one wants you. No one will ever want you. The trial starts tomorrow, Prospero’s trial, the great trial that will test the mettle of all these leaders and Hives and peoples, and you won’t be there because you’re not worthy of it. I’ve talked to Papadelias. You’re not going to be tried for being part of O.S. You’re going to be tried for the murders of Luca Cormor, Quinn Prichard, and Alex Limner—your lovers, Thisbe, whom you drove to their deaths for nothing!”

  Thisbe: “My portfolio. I’m the only one in the bash’ who has one of my own. Even Ockham just has their government commissions, but I took the initiative.”

  Achilles: “Would you have tried it on me? If I weren’t immune since I never watch movies. Did it bother you, having someone in your life you couldn’t play like a puppet? Or did you comfort yourself thinking that you could crush me between finger and thumb, like the bug you seem to think all other human beings are?”

  Thisbe: “I’ve hurt you. It wasn’t like that, Major, not between us. What we had was—”

  Achilles: “You are nothing to me, Thisbe! You love nothing and you honor nothing.”

  Thisbe: “You won’t get better terms by throwing a tantrum. I know from your face you’re thinking about what my craft could do on a riot field. Do you want me to fix Mycroft? Consider it done. Shall I fix Carlyle Foster? Fix the Senate? Anyone? Mycroft started to ask me for help with something involving Cardigan. I can do it. I don’t know what it was, but I can do it.”

  Achilles: “Sniper…”

  Thisbe: “Yes?”

  Achilles: “Nothing. I want nothing from you, and neither does Sniper or anyone. You’re a traitor, Thisbe. You
betrayed O.S., and human dignity, and all of us, this whole, beautiful world that you apparently don’t care about, you’ve treated it like garbage, and now you think we’ll invite you back to gloat in your comfy armchair like some leisure-bloated queen, spraying your potions while the rest of us sweat and fight it out with honest arms? Well, now you reap the consequences. Now Fate’s going to grind on without you, and if this war makes a thousand names immortal, yours won’t be one of them. Even if you could help, I’ll never beg you. I’d rather face a man bare-handed than with some coward’s poison knife, and so would Sniper!”

  CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH

  Terra Ignota

  Written August 17–18, 2454

  Events of June 15–July 15

  Written at Alexandria

  “Human Ockham Prospero Saneer, you may now choose the Hive membership of two of the three judges who will oversee your case, or, if you prefer, you may request Hiveless judges. Be advised that, because of the coindictment of all Humanists in the Wish List conspiracy, you cannot choose a Humanist, nor can the Prosecution when they select the third judge.”

  This was the first of the many crises which burst from the trial like Zeus’s lightning from a churning storm. It was impossible to say whether any given blast would scar only a small patch of Earth, or spark a wildfire to ravage the tender slopes of peace. My madness, worsened by Thisbe’s ‘audition,’ kept me tethered in MASON’s custody through these weeks, where I worked to finish my history. When I could, I watched the newsfeed, but most of the trial I experienced in jolts, bald summaries as each fresh shock reached Alexandria.

  Prospero was beautiful that first day, that first week, the second week, the third, as balanced and statue-steady as when he had stood master in his own house. “I request a Mason and a Graylaw Hiveless. Let my trial begin.”

  “Perfect.” Apollo’s voice was gentle, his awe-hushed syllables vanishing into the soft walls of my cell as shadows fade into an overcast day. He lay some moments more in silence, stretched on his back with his feet against the floor-length window, so the Masonic capital spread sideways at his feet like a metropolis dreamed by those gulls that nest on cliff walls. “Perfect.”

  It was not the common reaction. By then the words ‘He chose a Mason!’ were ricocheting like shrapnel through the streets outside, and within minutes media speculators would weave conspiracy out of it: Was Ockham threatened? Blackmailed? Bribed? No one could believe O.S.—or any defendant!—would willingly choose the Hive that always handed down the harshest sentences. Offered any member of the family, would you choose severe Father over a manipulable sibling or doting uncle, or the kindly fallback Mom? So famous is the Cousins’ tendency to sympathize with all, and to think of sentences as rehabilitation more than retribution, that it is a rare day when any defendant chooses anything but a Hivefellow and a Cousin. But a Mason? The mob outside reels, baffled. Are you baffled, reader?

  Reader: “Insult me not, Mycroft. It is easy enough to see why the former O.S. would choose the Hive that already believes its leader has the authority to kill.”

  Hobbes: “Quite so. Your Empire will commit hypocrisy, Mycroft, if this Mason dares argue that President Ganymede had not Capital Powers when he defended his Leviathan in Time of…”

  Reader: “It was not wartime, Thomas. Not in the years O.S. was working.”

  Hobbes: “Friend reader, Leviathans are wild humans made macrocosmic, so all Leviathans live in a state of constant War: the war for resources, for land, for subjects. President Ganymede did not trust Civilization’s pledge to keep the Peace between Leviathans, no more than does MASON, or any who has sat beneath the sword of Damocles.”

  Apologies. I had forgotten that the reader now has so expert a companion. Apollo too knows Hobbes well, but most in my era never learned to think so bloodily, so could not see how Prospero’s choice here put the Empire on trial too.

  “Don’t relax yet, Mycroft,” keen Apollo warned. “The prosecutor could still choose Utopia.”

  “Never,” I told him, and myself. “Over so many berserking Cousins and Brillists?”

  “It would make the trial much more just. Three Hives on trial for killing members of another three. With six compromised, the seventh should be a judge.”

  “Utopia must keep its hands clean.”

  “They aren’t clean.” Apollo said it so serenely, without passion, without emphasis even on the fact that there was no emphasis, a turning point so far behind him that he no longer wasted time remembering the sting.

  “But they must seem clean!”

  He rolled over so he could face me on his elbows, the coat turning his outline into a hole in MASON’s palace, smoking rubble. “Mycroft, I know what chapter you—”

  “They’re announcing it! The third judge!”

  We both held our breath as the feed relayed the prosecution’s choice: Gordian. The word warmed me like winter tea. “Providence wants you out of the limelight.”

  Apollo blinked, his eyes resetting to their calm blue keenness—or was it the vizor that reset them? “I know what chapter you’re avoiding.”

  Guilt drove my gaze as far from my writing desk as possible. “I should see who the judges are.”

  “Mycroft…”

  “Did you see Heloïse’s report? Cook threw everything behind trying to get a Nurturist in the Cousin judging slot, and now it’ll come to nothing.”

  “Mycroft…”

  “MASON must have planned carefully too, so—Xiaoliu Guildbreaker!”

  It was Xiaoliu who mounted the bench first, his jaw set, cheeks afire with passion, resolution, pride, the opposite of the leeching lifelessness that illness brings. When the athletes take the field in Esperanza, they will flush so.

  What? No. Surely even thy incestuous government must acknowledge bias here. A judge who is married to the primary investigator, on whose word so much evidence relies?

  Ah, but we need that bias, reader. This Masonic judge must face the Mycroft “Martin” Guildbreaker, Familiaris, Nepos, bearer of Imperium Vicarii, he who will be Emperor should the Addressee refuse. No Familiaris—indeed, no Mason—is better prepared to doubt Martin Guildbreaker’s word than the spouse who knows Martin’s weakness in the face of cauliflower, and watches his sleep-dazed shuffle as he hunts for his shoes in the morning. Besides, by this appointment clever MASON has snuck a child of the Chinese nation-strat onto the bench, doing what he can to give the three accused Hives some voice.

  “Mycroft.” Apollo’s voice was gentle in my ear, like summer wind. Was he behind me now? “You have to tell the truth about me.”

  I didn’t turn. “I don’t know this Graylaw. Sithembile Creswell-Stead. No famous cases. A merit appointment, then. How marvelously uncorrupt.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. You want your history to tell the truth about the Mardi bash’ without telling anyone I set out to start my own war.”

  “I should listen to the judges’ opening remarks.”

  “You’re willing to hurt the Alien by telling the whole world that they think they are a God, but you’re not willing to tell the truth about me?”

  What else could Apollo call Him, reader? Utopia’s title, the truest, noblest title any power ever gave: the Alien.

  There was a taste in my mouth, a meat taste. “Apollo…”

  “You think the truth will make people fear Utopia?”

  “Xiaoliu’s talking about precedent, I want to listen.”

  “You think it’ll make them blame Utopia?”

  “This is important. The tone of the trial—”

  Digital eyes caught mine, so kind and unkind. “You don’t have the power to determine who gets blamed, Mycroft. This war won’t be about what you say in your book. It won’t be about how others twist what you say. It won’t even be about O.S. It’ll be about a hundred different things for different people, and a month into the fighting it’ll be about different things yet. The one power you do have is to let those few who will find comfort in it know th
at, whoever wins, the destruction is protecting something better.”

  Apollo waited, let me think now, and we listened together to the judges’ admonitions to the chamber. The best was Xiaoliu Guildbreaker, as stone-faced as his Emperor, who talked of geographic nations. “There are acres of precedent if we dig into the laws and cases of the old nation-states. There are international treaties, charters and conventions, codes of conduct, honor and chivalry, manuals of statecraft, ancient trials. These have no place in this courtroom. We are Hives, our ever-changing members voluntarily united by shared ideology. This is not the place for such geographic concepts as homeland, foreignness, citizen, subject, nation, patrimony, birthright, birth-debt, or territory, nor is it the place for language or thought which privileges those Hives which do have geographic nations as part of their background. You will not find one case from the geographic era which treats the justness of government-ordered assassination without relying on several of these concepts. We are Hives. We will not import to this true terra ignota the junk we left behind in making this more perfect age.”

  How long had I been shaking? “This world is so good, Apollo. It’s far from perfect but it’s so good. How can you expect them to forgive you for—”

  “Worlds,” his instant answer. “Maybe they won’t be better. Maybe no time in human history will be as comfortable as this one. Or maybe they’ll be better someday, but for a long time they’ll be hard, scraped out with plow and sweat and stuffy rockets. But there will be more than one. There will be Mars, Europa, Titan, more and more, safeguarded by this war. You must let those who are about to die know that, have that. You must tell them what I did, and tried to do.”

  He waited now, patient Apollo, returning to the window to survey the sprawling world with his distant, digital eyes. He knew it would make me work. I would keep myself locked on task, just to spare myself the sight of Alexandria’s martial glory as his coat turned every passing Mason into either a soldier, or ghostly nothing. Days blurred as I wrote, and nights thanks to a tube of anti-sleeping meds a good servicer friend had helped me steal. Martin testified about his visits to the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house, while I wrote about how he had arrested Prospero, and how Thisbe had showed Croucher to Papadelias, and might have saved Bridger. A broken Carlyle testified about the characters of his parishioners, while I wrote of how he came again to Avignon and learned What our Jehovah truly Is. Papa testified about deaths stretching back for centuries, while I wrote of when Caesar found me, on my knees before the statue of Apollo, and I had to tell him … had to tell him …