The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  I cannot say Mycroft wept, since Mycroft’s eyes had not been dry since the pageantry began, but now they collapsed into weeping. I held them, let them sob, glad to see them so transported by a force other than grief. Then Mycroft caught their breath enough to murmur “Oxygen,” and I sobbed too. Fireworks devour oxygen. The chemicals may have been Martian, but precious breaths they fed on were Mars oxygen, crafted over two centuries of agonizing patience by the incremental growth of plants and microorganisms, fed on nutrients extracted from the bodies of Utopian dead. And now they burned it, undid that work, those lives, for this, these Games, to remind wrathful Earth of their solidarity, and salve the public’s bitterness about the Harbinger Peacebonding Strike. Their bid to not be Troy. I didn’t know enough about terraforming, or fireworks, to guess how much wasting this oxygen would really set things back: a week, a year, a minute; but even if it was only a minute, the thought of it felt hot inside me.

  “And now, on behalf of the Utopian Mars Terraforming Project, and following proudly in the footsteps of the organizers of these Esperanza City Games, Hugo Sputnik will present to the Olympic Committee our bid for Odyssey to host the Games of the Two Hundred and Eighteenth Olympiad in the year 2766, three hundred and twelve Earth years from now.”

  A fresh round of live fireworks joined the Mars broadcast, so we saw them through the screen, and three circles fired on Mars lined up with three fired here to form the six Olympic rings. I hoped the cheers were genuine, not just automatic in the noise and colored lights and the climax of soundtrack and smelltrack. Mycroft believed the crowd was truly moved, but, as people clumped out, blocks of Hiveguard with their bull’s-eyes avoiding the Remakers with their V of Vs, it was my task to doubt.

  The Games themselves were not spectacular. In fact, the 2454 Olympics set a record for setting the fewest records of any Olympic Games. The flyweight tae kwon do finals were extraordinary, as were the last few rounds of debate. People who know more about the trampoline than I do were excited by some developments there, and the ice sculptures made the distance, boat, and equestrian events spectacular. But on the whole, there was a shadow over the athletes. I don’t think it was just the war. People were nervous, knowing that, on the far side of a millimeter’s barrier, the air they breathed was deadly cold, and the water they swam in colder than ice. That niggle was enough to make a stretch a hair shorter, a breath a hair shallower, a heartbeat a hair slower, and the whole species just that much further from our best. Our technology was ready to brave Antarctica, but we were not. The seemingly endless stretches of Antarctic night were dispiriting too. Spectator attendance was low all around, record low, except for showstopper events like the pentathlon.

  Sniper placed seventeenth. Everyone was shocked except we who knew. It was a wonder they placed that well, with only three days’ rehabilitation after months of … something. But they took gold in two pistol events. Well we recall the embarrassment at the 2450 Games, when Sniper came second in the pentathlon again, after making such a great fuss about giving up the shooting-only events to concentrate on pentathlon gold. After the rapid-fire pistol gold went to a rather pathetic show from Red Team favorite Yuli Durban, a quiet but infuriated Black Team Captain hauled Sniper down to the pistol range and demanded that they fire a demo round, and Sniper broke the world record right there, where it couldn’t count. This time it counted, and when Sniper finally heard their own team anthem play over the winner’s platform, I think even they managed to forget the war. It wasn’t easy. When the shooters turned up for the match, someone had pasted pictures of the Prince on all the targets. Sniper didn’t shout, or redden, just declared they would withdraw from the Games right then if the responsible party didn’t confess, remove the pictures, and resign. It was over in eleven minutes.

  Best by far were Achilles’s exhibition matches. The Olympic Committee didn’t let Achilles compete for medals, but let them choose any event they wanted, modern or ancient, and have separate exhibition matches in which any competitor from any discipline could volunteer to participate. Achilles chose a full regimen: boxing, wrestling, the decathlon and all its subsections, long jump, javelin, discus, even the pole vault, which Achilles hated but did anyway, plus hurdles, relay, seven different foot races, one in armor, and the full ancient pentathlon, though the committee had to hunt hard to find drivers who would brave the chariot race. Achilles is something from another world. One glimpse of them in motion is enough to convince anyone, not that Mycroft’s tales of Bridger are true, but that there is less difference between the brawniest weightlifter and the sleekest diver than there is between everyone on Earth and this Greek stranger. The doctors who examined Achilles made excited noises about bones which had not grown on our diet, muscles and lungs which had not trained on our air, but seeing is believing. There is nothing extra in Achilles’s motion, or their body, just pure, streamlined purpose. If the other athletes were vigorous lions, Achilles was a cheetah, anatomy stripped of everything that wasn’t necessary for the perfection of a single goal. For cheetahs it is speed; for Achilles it is clearly war.

  Achilles didn’t win most of the matches—how could they when they measure barely 150 cm and 41 kg—but they came so impossibly close, this child-sized figure facing giants. Javelin they actually won, the cleanest, most perfect flight of anything I’ve ever seen a human throw, and they had a completely different starting technique, with a sort of half spin before the final step, so I’m told the sport will never be the same again. They won the run in armor, too, the chariot race, and their pentathlon, and, oddly, the 400-meter and 5,000-meter runs, which somehow were the two where Achilles’s tiny stride length was sufficiently compensated for by their incredible sprinting dash and impossible endurance. These exhibition matches were open to anyone, so they were adjudicated like the open divisions, but for the sports that are usually segregated they sized the obstacles to the light/women’s class, since Achilles was tinier than all but the slimmest gymnasts. That suited Sniper perfectly, who signed up for half the exhibition matches, and was even on Achilles’s relay team. There is a photograph of the handoff, Achilles’s dry, dark fingers almost touching Sniper’s, sleek and pale, and other photos of them side by side at starting lines, the ghosts of smiles softening their faces. The 3K run was suspense itself, the pentathlete’s native length, which Sniper knows so well. We all forgot the lanky frontrunners as we watched the two small heroes running neck-and-neck the whole way, now Sniper ahead by three paces, now Achilles. It was Sniper’s best time ever for the run, and if the camera claims Achilles beat them by some fraction of a meter, our hearts know when to call a tie a tie. Achilles also ran as a pacemaker with the official marathon, where Quarriman took bronze. Whispers wondered why the Committee didn’t let Achilles actually compete, but it wasn’t the Committee’s decision, it was a quiet and apologetic Mycroft who had reminded the eager runner of the truth: “Achilles, you’re not human.”

  I’ve gone on too long, haven’t I? I’m sorry, I’ll try to edit better here on out. It’s hard to face up to the Closing Ceremony. My mind keeps straying, refusing to focus on what hurts so much. It came on us quickly, as if the Games themselves passed in an hour. Everyone was working throughout, preparing, MASON’s industrial machine no less than every corner bash’house stockpiling food and water. By halfway through the Games everything had that trancelike feeling of hyperfocus, more real than real, which comes from binging anti-sleeping meds; it was reckless but we all did it. If there is a Kingdom of Dreams, I bet its gods spent that week wondering where everybody’d gone. But who could sleep when every sofa a neighbor carried in or out might be preparation for a barricade, and every tourist who strayed into an athletes’ area might be a more reckless assassin than Sniper? Everyone watched the Games at home, but only out of the corner of the eye, while they practiced first aid drills and self-defense. Then suddenly it was Sunday.

  Romanova was overcast, I remember, the kind of glaring white overcast which is painfully bright even if you haven’t
just come from two weeks of Antarctic night. I arrived with Mycroft and J.E.D.D. Mason; no one would deny Mycroft’s right to stand by their Prince in this hour of peril, nor mine to stand by Mycroft. The Forum is no stadium, so the pageantry and parade were still in Esperanza City. Only the opening of the Temple of Janus would take place here. The crowd’s colors were garish, Olympic jackets and Nurturist Cousins’ wraps, and the Mitsubishi in their summer landscapes. The Hive leaders weren’t there, they’d flown to the security of their capitals, and even Vivien had to make a show of Hive patriotism by going to Buenos Aires. Vivien had hugged me so tight as we said goodbye, and urged me over and over to keep Mycroft safe, and to keep myself safe. I managed the last, at least.

  Papa stationed me and Mycroft under the laurel trees between the Senate house and the little temple. Mycroft was tense, but in a healthy way, their stooping cringe gone, so they were all lightness and energy, like a greyhound. Achilles was even more energized, like a hound that’s scented blood, and they used the invisibility setting of their Utopian coat to range all over, coordinating the Myrmidons we’d snuck in as a precaution. J.E.D.D. Mason was, as ever, dead as wax. There were no bull’s-eyes in the crowd, but there were a lot of black looks. No surprise. The footage from the Opening Ceremony had made everyone realize at last that the faint glow you could see around the Prince on the video of the assassination was Their suit’s Griffincloth rebooting. Suddenly what had seemed to be evidence of something supernatural was instead evidence that They conspired with Utopia. If Griffincloth could fake Hugo Sputnik creatures, it could certainly fake a brain getting spattered across the Rostra. There was plenty of proof that one Griffincloth suit jacket had no power to trick many cameras from many angles, or to produce the stains science had verified as Their cerebral-spinal fluid on the stones, but people wanted to doubt, so they seized this thread and ran.

  The Temple of Janus looks like someone’s overdecorated shed, barely tall enough to be called a proper building, with the edges of the peaked roof so low that visitors can take rubbings of the embossed roof tiles. The sculptures of garlands that sealed it shut were not designed to be removed, but workmen had weakened them the night before, to make the ceremony go smoothly. The temple is modeled exactly on what we think the ancient one was like, with two gates on opposite ends, so the winds of change can blow clear through the temple of the god of beginnings, changes, ends, and end-times. It felt like end-times. We were sure apocalypse would come, we just didn’t know from where. Would some assassin—imitating Sniper—shoot the Prince the instant the gates were open? Would the mob charge in? Would fire rain down, like it had on Brussels? Sniper and Bryar had made endless speeches about how everyone should be allowed to leave the Games safely before the war began, but a game of hide-and-seek without a fixed amount of time you have to wait before pursuit becomes a game of tag. We had every safeguard imaginable: people, robots, devices, and Utopia had enough invisible monsters in the area that I smelled zoo. But I had every war film ever boogeymanning my imagination. At least we didn’t have to fear the mushroom cloud. If we died here today, it would be a reasonable number of us, a portion of the city, not an eternal scar upon Nature and human conscience. Thank Utopia.

  The Prince was to open one set of temple gates. Morally, Sniper should have opened the other, but it was too tricky working out how far to let them flee before Papa could pursue, and there was no way we could have kept Dominic from trying something. So it fell to the Censor, Jung Su-Hyeon Ancelet Kosala, the last neutral figurehead Earth has, to pry open the second set of doors. (Here I edited out a long ramble about my friendship with Su-Hyeon, which I realize was just my mind avoiding what comes next; I am the Anonymous, successor to Voltaire and Custodian of the Age of Reason, but even I cannot pretend the mind is tame.)

  No one would call J.E.D.D. Mason a sensualist, but They do use the senses in ways most of us forget to. They ran Their hands over the doors, the touch of bronze, of stone, of dust, They smelled it, tapped it, listened. My introduction to Plato said they thought disembodied souls were like flying eyeballs that could see 360 degrees, but got trapped in bodies that could only see 120, so were always unhappy, like if you have one eye taped shut. That never hit home for me until the first time I saw how desperately the Prince uses the crutches of Their senses. I thought I heard Them whisper: “With this We make war?”

  Su-Hyeon just stood clutching the prybar like a teddy bear.

  Murmur became silence.

  It was time.

  Mycroft returned to stand beside me, and I politely looked away as they faced a laurel tree, and closed their eyes, and pretended not to be praying. I remember a shard of sun that raked their hat, how the fibers had little auras of fire. Su-Hyeon and the Prince put their bars to the garlands, and we, who had just witnessed the human perfection of Achilles racing Sniper, watched the un-perfection of two human bodies trained for desks and data pulling on crowbars with all their clumsy might. Su-Hyeon’s gave first, the garland falling with a clatter, and they jumped back, as if they’d dropped a knife while chopping in the kitchen. The Prince’s clattered second, and then the two grasped the rings of the bronze doors and pulled. The groan of metal against rock made me think of tanks and armor and exploding shells. Mycroft’s right about how pictures of history hit us harder than we know. Just like how images of skirts and corsets taught us enough gender to let Joyce Faust sink their claws into the world, so images of gore and weapons had us all pretraumatized, ready to flinch at sounds we imagined should remind us of battle noises no one has really heard since the Church War.

  I held my breath. Leaves stirred in the dust as the wind blew through the open temple. I let one breath out and took another as the seconds of hush ticked by. The world hadn’t ended yet. Mycroft looked at me. We were all ready to react, not to act. Whispers started, and craning of necks. Somehow it didn’t occur to me until then to wonder what was in the temple. The ancient one would’ve had a statue of Janus with their double face looking both ways. I couldn’t see from where I stood, but Su-Hyeon was clearly peering in at something. Except now there was a murmur, and a voice which pierced the murmur.

  “Mordred?” It was a cutting voice, worried.

  A second voice: “Curie? Curiosity, can you hear me? Hello?”

  Third: “Oz? Come in, Oz?”

  “Poe? What’s going on? Poe? Answer me! Poe!”

  Now all in a torrent, different voices all around the Forum screamed out names: “Kepler! Milton! Caspian! Quark! Avalon! Watson! Kirk! Adamant! Euclid! Svalinn! Joyeuse! Kili! Pix! Mallory! Fermi! Phoenix! Delany! Olivant! Polo! Clarke! Dragon! Shenzhou! Venture! Franken! Tianlong! Hal! Gulliver! Leto! Freeport! Bochica! Hadaly! Elric! Zamyatin! Quasar! Vimana! Galileo! Talaria! Shadow! Earheart! Pluto! Arcadia! Jules! Vinndálf! Kelvin! Sherwood! Mercury! Helicon! Bard! Zuse! Aegis! Wukong! Cabal! Chaucer! Galaxi! Kusanagi! Leif! Coyote! Bletchley! Ijiraq! Starbuck! Thule! Mina! Hyperion! Mulan! Atom! Yuri! Pan! Spaceway! Capricorn! Storm! Grimm! Kamalu! Perrin! Condor! Asphodel! Nig! Sirius! Kennedy! Appleseed! Enkidu! Han! Stardust! Abbas! Lyra! Altair! Deimos! Grendel! Char! Langley! Faun! Tesla! Carnwennan! Mab! Ovid! Gandiva! Akatsuki! Argo! Sampo! Turing! Jinn!” and finally, “Atlantis! They’ve attacked Atlantis!”

  A rush of wing wind overflowed the Forum, tossing leaves, clothes, hair. Creatures lifted off all around us. We could only see them as they rose to go, abandoning invisibility for speed: rocs, hippogriffs, giant ravens, pterosaurs, dragonflies as long as horses, the twining flight-slither of Asian dragons, the hot, leathery flap of European dragons, and the rustle of coats as the U-beasts’ Utopian partners swung into their saddles, the Delian sun sigil blazing on every back. Bright fluttering things swarmed up too fast to name, joined by robots whose designers loved metal too much to feign biology, and above my head something between a kite and a stingray undulated on the wind in folds of turquoise and copper. The sky was color. Animals appeared too, and spread translucent rainbow wing films, so I saw a jaguar take to the air, a
golden stag, a python, wolves, and unicorns, and hounds, and antelope. Every rider whose beast could hold two helped another rider on, so the sky lit up with overlapping coats that turned the clouds into cities and those cities into stars. Then all at once the sky’s glare seemed to turn harsh, but it was the coats, a hundred in the sky, two hundred, more, which all together turned to mourning static, blank save for the crisp lines of Delian suns.

  A rolling thunderboom reached us from the north now, muffled and too deep, so I felt the vibration in my bones more than I heard it. That made it real. Sardinia is small; it was less than ten kilometers northwest from the Forum to the north coast of the island, then another twenty kilometers of sea to where New Atlantis nestled on the seafloor between the encircling coasts of Sardinia and Corsica, like a chick cupped by kindly hands. I had visited Utopia’s underwater city myself, seen the crystal bubble-domes framed by struts whose surfaces teemed with barnacles and weedy life. I had schooled there with wrasse and damselfish along arched shopping galleries, swim-raced friends from spire to spire, played fetch with octopus, and watched patrolling hippocampus herd young sharks away to safer waters. I spent a week there once, long enough to half forget the pack that breathed for me, to stop craving the air-filled sections, and to almost shake the terror of the warning videos about how, if I returned to the surface world too fast, my blood would bubble and bring pain, paralysis, and death. Someone had attacked Atlantis. The blast had been big, big enough to feel thirty kilometers away, but how big? Small enough to crush some structures, flood the airy sections, but leave the swimmers safe? Big enough to end all life in the ocean city in an instant? Or was it cruelly in between, so helpless thousands were now being dragged up by the currents toward the sunny surface, screaming like Icarus?

  Now I realized Mycroft wasn’t next to me. I panicked, spun, searched, saw. Mycroft always said that they could fly. This run was flight, a run across the crowd, leaping from shoulder to shoulder like a mantis, taking off again when each startled human foothold toppled. True it was Earth and leg muscle that lifted Mycroft then, not air and wing, but what is flight if not soaring above those who let gravity confine them? Mycroft leapt, and seized the leg of a whirring robot with both arms, and, after a moment’s indecision, the Delian rider helped Mycroft swing up to ride behind them. I heard Huxley beside me mutter as they mounted their own black lion to join the exodus. A whole layer of life lifted away from the Forum, taking with it color, texture, animal breath, and a hundred brilliant suns, leaving the Forum gray.