by Ada Palmer
“Apollo knew?” The Anonymous looked to Mushi, then to Caesar. Then to me. “Apollo knew Mycroft was the killer?”
“They foreglimpsed, it seems,” Mushi answered. “We don’t know how early. We ask…” Mushi’s voice quavered, hard words for one of the ba’pas who raised this light of lights from infancy, “… we ask that you honor their request.”
The Anonymous peered hard at the Utopian, perhaps wondering whether grief’s red around the digital eyes was real. “You want us to spare Mycroft?”
“I don’t,” Mushi corrected at once. “Apollo did. Collectively Utopia sides with Apollo.”
The Utopian halted in the center of the room, a knife-stark silhouette wounding the salon’s veil of antiquity. Mushi’s Utopian coat fills the world with ants, billions upon billions, the incomparable colony that ants would erect if the whole world were given over to their intricate industry. A lesser imagination would leave it there, but Mushi reads deeper, for ants’ paths, as they weave about their work, may by chance trace the shapes of letters, and with time such letters may by chance form words. While fools wait infinitely for the monkeys at their typewriters to reproduce Shakespeare, Mushi’s coat collects and displays the new, alien poems ants write as they march. But the ants were dead now, the ant world switched off, leaving the coat a block of flickering static, flat and shapeless as if someone had sliced a hole in space. Those who lived through it cannot forget the days after Apollo’s death, when across the globe the coats which should be windows to so many other worlds turned blank. When a Utopian dies before his time, the Hive mourns together, all the coats in the world turning to static for as many seconds as their kinsman lost years—thirty seconds for a centenarian, ninety for someone full of midlife’s promise, a full two minutes for a child. Apollo’s murder was different. For him their mourning would not stop. They left the static for hours, days, four hundred million walking holes in space, their vow that they would catch the killer and end this nightmare where all other Hives had failed. It was terrifying, wounds of static around every corner, everywhere and organized, reawakening a fear Earth had not tasted since the Set-Set Riots. I saved Apollo for near the end of the seventeen because I knew I could not last long once I woke that sleeping dragon, but even I underestimated their speed. Four days is all it took. They caught me with my work unfinished, Mercer still breathing, Tully still free. Poor Papadelias will never stop cursing the fact that they, not he, took down his long-awaited Moriarty. The static stayed, though, for eleven hours after I was caught. The popular assumption has always been that they were waiting for Caesar to carry out my execution. It is half true: they were waiting.
“I side with Apollo too,” MASON pronounced, forcing the words out stiffly. His eyes fixed on me, my first taste of the rage which has not dimmed in thirteen years. “You will live, Mycroft.” I already knew him well, Cornel MASON. I knew his smiling eyes on soft afternoons when he came to see Aeneas, Geneva, or Apollo. I knew his rich bronze face aglow with pride as he showed his capital to me and the Mardi children, as if we and we alone were the posterity who would inherit this greatest of empires. This was a different man. “You will live. You will finish the Mardis’ work: Geneva’s, Aeneas’s, Mercer’s for Faust, Kohaku’s for the Censor, Jie’s for Andō, Leigh’s for Kosala, Apollo’s most of all. All of it.”
“No!” Bryar cried. “You’re talking like they can all be replaced!”
“Of course they can’t!” Caesar bellowed, his full power, which before that time no man had ever heard. Even the World’s Mom fell silent.
“Caesar, please,” cooed the dark Lady whom I did not yet know to call Madame. “My salon is not the place for harshness.” She stroked his black hair, her touch dispelling the electric anger in the Emperor’s stance.
“Apologies, Madame.”
She kissed him again upon the cheek, as if the tender courtesy were her apology for having to be strict.
“And you, Déguisé,” she continued, holding out a slim black mask to the Anonymous, “one must observe the forms.”
“Sorry, Madame.” He donned the mask, and seemed at once more confident and comfortable, more like himself than his fake outside persona. Madame’s quick eye caught mine, saw that I was watching, and she had a smile for me, sweet as a mouse, before she locked the crosshairs of her attentions back on the Emperor. My mind, honed by so many leaders, caught more and more the scent of something rotten.
“Of course they can’t be replaced,” Caesar began again, more calmly, “but the pieces that remain must be picked up. They were all Mycroft’s teachers. Apollo especially spent hours with Mycroft every week, telling them everything from research ideas to what’s supposed to happen in the unfinished chapters of their ridiculous science fiction Iliad.” His eyes locked again on me. “You’ll finish writing that book for Apollo, Mycroft. You’ll finish everything. You’ll work until you die.”
“I refuse.” In those days I was headstrong enough to match Caesar glare for glare. “You think I killed Apollo and the others just to become them? I’m not some psycho lashing out for revenge or lust or fame. I loved the Mardis more than any of you! I know perfectly well what great things they would have accomplished if they’d lived. If there had been better people in this world I would have killed them instead. I’ve destroyed something wonderful just for destruction’s sake, proving once and for all that the human animal can do evil for the sake of evil. I’m not about to undermine that by replacing what I’ve destroyed.”
“You have no choice,” the Emperor countered, Madame’s hands reminding his fist not to slam her gilded chair. Who was this Lady who could chide and temper MASON and Anonymous?
“You’re the ones with no choice,” my young self shot back. “The world won’t rest until it sees me dead. That’s how it ends. They’ll keep chanting my name until I’ve had my day in court, and there the world will see that it’s possible to choose evil over good, over happiness, over family, over love, over the future potential of the human race, and over life itself. When the axe falls, or the electricity turns on, or whatever you decide to use on me, the world will taste again the base satisfaction of getting its hands dirty, as the human animal was meant to do. You can’t avoid it. The world won’t let you, and neither shall I!”
Does it sound rehearsed, reader? It was. I felt giddy in my cage, drunk on the idea of that supreme moment when all men would become killers again, and my Saladin watching, proud. Saladin would live, and hide, and watch what humanity became after we taught it that, with the death of Nations, the supreme predator on Earth was once again Man. That I would be the one to die and Saladin to live had been determined by Providence—which in those days I still called Chance—nine years earlier, when the rescue workers found me after the explosion, but left Saladin for dead. He was out there at this very moment, waiting to see his Mycroft hold his head high in the court, and recite to the world these speeches we had practiced a thousand times. I would not betray him by surviving.
The Emperor did not lighten. “I do what I will.”
“To Masons maybe.” I was tempted to spit, but did not want to smear the precious window of my cage. “I’m no Mason.”
“Silence that monster, would you, [Name]?” Caesar spoke the true name of the Anonymous, which, though you know it, I refuse to use before the desperate day.
“Happily,” the Anonymous answered, though it was Mushi Mojave’s hand which worked the controls, which means it was Mushi’s choice to set the cage so I could still see and hear, though not bark back.
“But I’m afraid Mycroft’s right, Cornel,” the Anonymous continued. “The world wants them dead. I suspect most of the people in this room do too, am I right?”
Mute in my cage I trembled—first names, reader. MASON and Anonymous were supposed to be strangers, two lords in distant citadels who keep a cold and distant eye on one another like Light and Dark Manichean gods, and here they call each other by first names? Curiosity matured to a fearlike itch as it became clear
er and clearer that this was not the same political landscape I had studied with Aeneas and Apollo.
“Well, I’m against killing Mycroft Canner,” Headmaster Felix Faust volunteered first. “I’d never have so rare a specimen put down. Spain? Thumbs up or down?”
The King stroked his temples, already graying at forty-six despite science’s efforts; he had been on the throne eleven years now and a widower ten, long enough to begin to gain those character lines which give portraits of older men more interiority than those of youths. “I think, as world leaders, we should not set a precedent by reviving the death penalty when our personal friends are killed. Andō?”
The Chief Director took a long breath. “Mycroft would be useful if rehabilitated. Ganymede?”
The Duke Consul shrugged. “What I’m worried about is how to justify it to the public. We can’t exactly say we spared Canner because they were going to be the next Anonymous, and saying we’re doing it because a Utopian wrote a note on a scrap of paper isn’t going to fly, not with a victim from every Hive involved.”
Headmaster Faust sniffed. “Why bother justifying it? We just have to refuse to suspend our own laws, no justification needed.”
Ganymede sniffed back. “It may not matter to you, Felix, but some of us have to get reelected. Right, Spain?” The Duke-Consul seemed happy that the King–Prime Minister had no good answer. “We have to give the mob a trial, and we have to let Mycroft speak at the trial or we’ll have lawhounds on our backs. Mycroft was tutored in oratory by two Senators; if they want the crowd screaming for blood, it will.”
Andō shook his head. “No trial. We can’t allow a trial. The more the world thinks about this business the more harm it does. There hasn’t been an incident of global trauma like this since the Set-Set Riots. No trial or the world will go mad.”
Ganymede frowned. “What if we get an actor to impersonate Mycroft in court and play penitent? That’ll calm the mob, then we can accept whatever the judges decide, fake an execution if need be, and Caesar can do what they like with the genuine article.”
Prime Minister Spain shook his head. “I will not so abuse the law.”
“Besides,” Andō continued, “even a false trial will have devastating effects on the world.”
Upon your Hive you mean, Mitsubishi, as the police probe your Canner Device.
“It must be stopped,” the Director pressed, “at all costs.”
The Duke scowled. “Does anyone have a better solution?”
“No, but we all agree we—”
Kosala’s voice, though soft among men, was still strong enough to interrupt the King. “I haven’t agreed.”
“Bryar?”
“I haven’t agreed to letting Mycroft live.” She shuddered, tempting the Anonymous to tighten his embrace. “Oh, I’ll go along with it, I’ll even supply a justification for you, but I don’t agree.”
Ganymede arched an eyebrow. “You’ll put a humanitarian veto on the trial?”
“I’ll get one of my charities to. Everyone expects Cousins to do that sort of thing, it’ll seem natural. I’ll tell the public how Mycroft Canner is a poor, sad trauma victim, and all this is the tragic lashing out of a bash’orphan who needed help. From me they’ll accept it. I can even make them feel good about themselves for being so forgiving, but I want all of you to remember that I’m against this. When a dear, beloved, wonderful pet dog starts killing people, you put it down. If you don’t, more people die.”
The husk of Felix Faust’s body was, even back then, barely strong enough to sigh. “I appreciate the thought, my dear, but it won’t work.”
She scowled. “You think I can’t control my own Hive?”
He smiled, but one can always feel the scientist behind the man reading numbers instead of faces, and judging by Brill’s criteria, as arcane as craniometry or horoscope. “It’s not that, Bryar, it’s just that you’re a bad liar, and you need at least another two weeks to recover from Leigh’s death enough to talk about this in public.”
“You think I can’t—”
“Make a speech,” he challenged. “Make a speech for us right now about how Mycroft Canner is a poor puppy who got kicked once too often. If you can orate on the subject for two minutes without crying, then I’ll believe that you can get us out of this.”
Rage swelled in Kosala’s face, but turned at once to tears.
The Anonymous pressed her to him. “I think Felix is right. You’re proposing that you lie to your own Hive about your opinions. It’s a brave offer, but do you really want to live with that? I don’t think any of us could do it, and I don’t want to ask it of you.”
“Quite right.” The unknown Lady spoke up now—‘Madame’ they had called her? She seemed all smiles and good sense beneath the mask of makeup which made her seem as otherworldly as a china doll. Are you surprised, reader, that she stayed quiet so long? What cares she what happens to this little murderer when the fact that only her salon can solve the crisis is a victory itself? “We’ll find another way to persuade the populace, one that doesn’t put all the strain on one person, or endanger reelection, or precedent, or the law.” She glanced from Power to Power as she listed each one’s concern. “I have all the resources we could want here, and no one expects this decision to be quick. We’ll take our time and sort it out as friends. That is what my salon is for.”
She looked straight at me during the last sentence, exposition for the outsider’s benefit, to make sure I understood her, what she was, her place among the Powers. Doubt burned through me. What I had done I did in the confidence that I knew how the world worked, how it would react, how the Hives and strats and laws and numbers ebb and flow, as Geneva, Aeneas, and Deputy Censor Kohaku taught me to predict. Now, just as Eureka Weeksbooth would thirteen years later, I found a snarl in my web. I felt like an old astronomer, who had spent a lifetime plotting the courses of a flock of distant stars, only to discover on my deathbed that there was a great black something out there pulling all astray—what doom did this spell for the rocket I had launched, loaded with hopes and false calculations? Curiosity is a dangerous thing for a dead man; it tempts one to want to live.
That moment was when I saw the Child. I do not know how long He had been there, standing close beside my cage, a volume of Cicero forgotten in His hands as His studies found a new object. He wore a tiny mourning suit, fresh from the tailors, period and perfect, trimmed with a Porphyrogene’s imperial purple, since at eight years old He had not yet discovered that the adults would accomodate if He voiced His preference for pure black. His eyes reminded me of the late King Isabel Carlos the First, whom Makenna Mardi had brought me to meet upon his royal deathbed at the venerable age of one hundred and forty-nine. There had been something unfair in the old king’s eyes, a hunger to snatch this world back from the foolish children who had inherited it. I remember shuddering, thinking my generation would have stood helpless against his political guile, honed over a century and a half, that only death relieved us of the necessity of parricide. And now those terrifying eyes seemed to stare at me once more, from a Child’s face.
Seeing me spot Him, Bryar Kosala called to the Child. “Jed, honey, come away from there. It’s not good for you.”
I shuddered in my bonds of Cannergel (Utopia later named it for me). You had a birth bash’, reader. You know the special way your ba’pas gazed on you, grave and loving, parents even if it was not their blood coursing through your veins. The Powers all looked at Him that way now, the King, Director, Headmaster, Anonymous, even Bryar who is everybody’s Mom was His Mom more. There is no glue like a child to keep a quarreling couple from cutting the knot, so what of quarreling empires?
Madame called now, since the Child did not move. “Jehovah, mon Petit, viens ici.” She made room for Him on the couch between the Emperor and herself.
Still the Child lingered, staring, thinking, crafting His words. For me. “You disappoint me, Master Canner. I thought to see the Liberated Man, but you still hid behind a caus
e.”
This was the death of what was Mycroft Canner. It was impossible. The Child saw in an instant the hypocrisy that I had not quite admitted even to myself. He was right. I was never strong enough to do evil for the sake of evil. Saladin was the true, free beast. I had merely followed, leaning half on him, half on the crutch of a hidden good that lay beyond the Mardis’ deaths. The Child saw, as if my inmost self were an open book before Him. He was monstrous, with powers humans should not have, and here the Seven leaders of the Earth were doting on Him as on a Son. Panic is too weak a word. Metamorphosis, perhaps? An ant which strays onto someone’s clothes, and is spirited in a car to an alien land incomprehensibly far from home and colony, could not feel more lost. All my strength had stemmed from the conviction that I could read the shape of the future as it unrolled interminably from the present. That present had been a lie, the rivalries, the enmity between Mason and Mitsubishi, the competition among Hives, all lies. Was I wrong, then? Had they not had to die, Luther, Geneva, Kohaku, Laurel, Seine? Apollo? I suffered many injuries during my capture, but only this wound bled.
Spain took the Child by the hand, His small fingers locking around the royal thumb with the speed of habit.
It does not matter what I screamed at that moment, for, through the cage, no one could hear me. I realized who the Boy must be. Everyone knew the Emperor had an adopted Son, but the young Porphyrogene glimpsed in heartwarming shots in newspapers had no more factored in my calculations than the child of any Senator.
