by Ada Palmer
Sniper’s smile accepted the compliment. “The Directorate meets with J.E.D.D. Mason far more often than any other advisor. Some even call them the ‘Tenth Director.’ Some even say they’re really Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi’s son.”
“I have heard such a thing said.”
“Do you believe it? Do you believe J.E.D.D. Mason is Andō’s son?”
Faust sighed, swatting at the cameras which buzzed close in the Old Town’s unaccustomed cramp. “Is this why you came to see me? To bait me into embarrassing one of my colleagues in front of millions of viewers? Not a very elegant game, my dear.”
Sniper shed its smile at once. “No game. I want the truth. That’s what the public eye is for, to hold us accountable if we tell lies. I brought my witnesses, don’t pretend you don’t have yours.”
It nodded at the crowd of Institute Fellows watching from behind a bread cart, like naturalists stalking a pair of wild tigers. The observers tried to hide at once, and old Faust snickered at their failure as they ducked behind a bread sign which concealed them from their chins up, but left bare their Brillist sweaters, spelling out their numbers like biographies. The Clothing as Communication Movement began in the 2170s, that same stretch of postwar regeneration when Chairman Carlyle proclaimed the Death of Majority, when Utopia launched the first terraforming ships to Mars, and yes, when Cartesian set-sets took Earth’s bloody helm. As we left the Exponential Age behind us, the Clothes-as-Com leaders called for our new modern age to be an ‘honest’ one, where our clothing would proclaim Hive, work, hobbies, allegiance, a glance proclaiming what makes each stranger special. We tend to assume the Brillist sweaters sprang up in that same decade, along with Mason suits and season-changing Mitsubishi cloth, but it was actually earlier, 2162, when a freshly converted Thomas Carlyle was channeling half of Gordian’s budget to the Institute, that Fellows began to home-knit sweaters which spelled out their numbers, the first digit coded by the texture of the knit, the second by the waistline, the third by cuffs, etc. I myself have found the code impossible to master, too unintuitive, like Brillism itself, but I have picked up four things: shorter sleeves go with better skills at math, the patterns on the fabrics get less complicated as a kid grows up, quiet types wear turtlenecks, and a hood on any Brillist makes me feel fear. Whatever Faust could see in his hiding students’ sweaters, it won a belly laugh.
“My students aren’t robots, Sniper,” he answered, “I can’t switch my audience on and off at will like you can. Isn’t that a little unfair?”
“True enough,” Sniper conceded. “If you won’t be baited, answer me this: usually executive Mitsubishi pass their shares and influence down in the family, or at least within the bash’, but Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi doesn’t have any children, apart from possibly J.E.D.D. Mason.”
“Andō has lots of children.”
“Lots of adopted ba’kids,” Sniper clarified. “Lots of half-trained set-set adopted ba’kids. Do you think Andō could really make one of them their political heir, the next Japanese strat-leader, with how much Cousins and Brillists hate set-sets?”
No man enjoys surprise so much as Felix Faust. “How did you know they’re set-sets?”
“And here you accused me of being behind in the news.” Sniper smirked. “There’s a bio of Masami Mitsubishi, released by the Rosetta Forum this morning. Black Sakura’s not the only paper with top-notch snoops. There were details on Toshi and Ran Mitsubishi as well, and it’s not hard to guess that, if these three are from one batch, the other seven adopted Mitsubishi ba’kids are the other seven children that Minister Cook’s Nurturist saboteurs carried out of the ruins of the training lab. You know who I couldn’t find a good bio on, though? J.E.D.D. Mason.”
“J.E.D.D. Mason’s still a minor, protected by the Celebrity Youth Act. Poor Masami, Ran, and Toshi didn’t think it through when they took the Adulthood Competency Exam so early.”
“You know J.E.D.D. Mason personally, though, don’t you?” Sniper pressed.
“Yes, I do.”
“They’re a Fellow at your Institute, aren’t they?”
“Of course.”
“To study or be studied?”
Faust smiled at a flower seller who glowed at the sight of Sniper, as at a passing angel. “You ask as if the two were separate.”
“I’ve heard a rumor—”
“You’re ripe with rumors today.”
“—that you have a whole room in your offices just for files on J.E.D.D. Mason: old toys and drawings, recordings, tests, that they’re your favorite specimen.”
The Headmaster smiled. “And I hear Ganymede offered to prostitute you to Andō in return for rent concessions. What imaginative things rumors are.”
Even Sniper’s cheeks sometimes grow grave. “Have you picked the next Gordian leadership yet?”
Faust snorted. “I can’t make crowds swoon like you and Ganymede, child, but it’s a little early to put me in my grave now, don’t you think?”
“I don’t mean the next Headmaster, I mean the Brain-bash’. You’re supposed to pick the most innovative and original bash’ you can find, with the rarest number combinations, and put them in charge of picking new political and intellectual directions for Gordian. ‘The guiding light must be one that has never burned before, the spirit of the age personified in its rarest newborn,’ isn’t that what Chairman Carlyle wrote in their memoirs?”
Faust laughed. “Have you added constitutional scholarship to your list of hobby strats?”
“The last Brain-bash’ was assigned almost seventy years ago, and the position’s not hereditary. You must have your eyes on a replacement. Is it J.E.D.D. Mason’s bash’?”
The German murmur of the watching fellows peaked.
Faust took his time enjoying Sniper’s face. “It is fascinating to see you of all people trying to drag a minor into the spotlight, flouting the Celebrity Youth Act which you yourself have benefitted from more than anybody I can name. You must tell me what’s set you so abruptly on this scent.” Faust frowned as the street forked, both options lined with identical antique shops. “This corner isn’t on my directions. Left or right, do you think?”
“Directions? We’re not just meandering?”
Faust winked.
Sniper shrugged. “Left, then. What are J.E.D.D. Mason’s numbers? Rare, I expect? Unique? Their bash’mates’, too?”
“You know I don’t release numbers without permission.”
“Do you know what ‘J.E.D.D.’ stands for? I can’t find it anywhere.”
“I know your first name too, Sniper, but I don’t use it in public, since you don’t like it.”
Sniper had to laugh. “Touché.”
Take a moment, reader, to reflect that one of the most critical decisions of this century has just been made by Sniper without thinking. Left or right? In one direction lies the course history chose, and in the other, what? A longer conversation with the Headmaster? Different questions? Different world. Is this an act of Providence or of Freewill? Or both? Did God craft His creation Sniper so it would choose left? Or did our Maker know from time immemorial that Sniper would choose left, and so sculpted the slopes of Ingolstadt so the square best suited to the Enemy would be built in Sniper’s inevitable path?
“What are they like?” Sniper pressed as it led the Headmaster across rain-scented cobbles toward an open square. “J.E.D.D. Mason?”
Faust frowned. “Surely you two have met.”
“Actually, they’re a Humanist Balloting Officer just like me, but, funny thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them at a Balloting Officers’ meeting. Whenever I arrive they’ve had to leave or vice versa, ships in the night.”
“Is that so? How improbable. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy by the bash’ that runs the transit computers to keep you two apart—you should look into that.” Faust’s chuckle invited Sniper to feign laughter with him. “No, couldn’t be. You ride standard cars but I hear young J.E.D.D. Mason only rides Utopian cars.” Faust met Sniper�
�s eyes at last, and held them. “Why is that, do you suppose?”
I wonder how Sniper trained itself to cover fear so well. It laughed, naturally, delightedly, no hint in its warm dark eyes that Faust’s teasing had touched so close to home. It took a deep breath, ready to answer, but Faust hushed it, the Headmaster’s brows arching at new words, which floated toward them from the square ahead.
“We speak so smugly of economic determinism. We say the French Revolution was inevitable because an expanding population made it untenable for a miniscule nobility to keep monopolizing ninety-five percent of the wealth. We say fascism and Nazism were inevitable because the economic idiocies of 1919 made it impossible for peace to last. We say all this as if past peoples were not only locked into their choices, but were stupid not to realize that they were.” The voice was thin, tired but used to being tired, just audible over the breathy shifting of the gathered crowd that filled the square. “But what did it actually feel like? Did a French peasant wake up every morning thinking about the inequitable distribution of wealth? Or that the Old Regime was on its last legs? Or did they wake up thinking that they were hungry while their noble masters weren’t? They felt uneasy, unhappy, tense, they wanted things to improve, wanted them back the way they were, perhaps, in the imaginary idyllic past. But war? War wasn’t in their minds.”
Sniper craned its neck, even hopped with its Olympic grace, just high enough to see over the sea of heads. There he stood, Tully Mardi, perched on the steps of an old church. He was thin in his Hiveless gray, leaning on crutches as his legs—unused to Earth—threatened to fail despite their braces. The Enemy—as I shall always call him—had guards around his soapbox, Apollo’s bar friends, sledgehammers and metal pipes more frightening in sober hands than drunk as they waited for me. “Who is it?” Sniper whispered.
Faust held a finger to his lips. “It’s what has so many of my students playing hooky.”
“And what do you feel when you wake up in the morning?” Tully pressed, quick eyes flicking from face to face across the crowd. “When you make out fat rent checks to your Mitsubishi landlords? When you see more and more Mason suits on the streets? When you pay huge royalties to Utopian inventors, and watch them squander the profits lobbing expensive rocks at Mars? Do you feel uneasy? Unhappy? Tense? Do you want things to go back to the way you think they used to be? The Romanovan Censor publishes new numbers every month, and you worry about your savings shrinking, a rent hike, a recession, as if a salary cut is the limit of what horror humans can inflict. Why not war?”
The back fringe of the crowd was starting to recognize the new arrivals now, whispering Sniper’s name, and shying back from their Headmaster like guilty pups, but Faust just smiled, sliding his dry hands into the pockets of his sweater as he took his place as spectator.
“The restless French didn’t see war coming,” the Enemy continued, “but they had the excuse that back then economists didn’t yet know how to see which tensions lead to war. The survivors of 1918 even called the second half of their World War by a separate name, as if unable to see the connection as the tanks rolled out a second time. We’re being just as self-blinding. We have the evidence, but we refuse to believe, because it’s a matter of faith to us that war’s impossible. It isn’t. War is the human norm. We’ve had three hundred years of peace after thousands of years of war. How can you think that we’ll never do it again?” His pleading eyes hopped from face to face. “We say war ended with the Exponential Age, that humanity matured after the Church War, developed peaceful means to settle conflicts: sports, debates, elections; that we’ve shed nations, armies, all the apparatus of warfare, but the French peasants didn’t have those either! They just had torches, and pitchforks, and very hungry children. It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark. You think there aren’t plenty of sparks today? What if this Seven-Ten list theft turns out to be a plot by one Hive to sabotage another? What if this mystery at the CFB turns out to be Mitsubishi set-sets taking revenge on the Cousins for sabotaging set-set training bash’es? Remember the Set-Set Riots? Riots turn to war in a heartbeat when the situation is ripe, and then what? Don’t think it would stop with fists and bricks and torches. What city in this world doesn’t have a factory that could switch production from stoves to guns in an instant? What kid can’t cobble together a rocket in chemistry class?”
“Magnificent specimen,” Faust whispered, unable to stifle the delight in his eyes. “Preaching on a street-corner soapbox, when they could post it to the web and reach millions.”
Sniper nodded softly, eyeing the sea of captivated Brillists. “It’s a performance. One more nutcase on the web, no one would care.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Tully pressed, his voice edging to frantic. “Let me put it even more simply, then. I’m Tully Mardi, Mercer Mardi’s child, the only survivor of the Mycroft Canner massacre. Some of you must remember when Mercer used to bring me here as a child. You know what I lived through. I’ve just learned, as you have, that Cornel MASON and Bryar Kosala conspired to protect Mycroft Canner after the capture. Would you be surprised if I tried to assassinate MASON and Kosala? And if I did, and afterwards if people said the Utopians helped me do it, how long do you think it would take for that to turn violent? Days? Hours?” Tully’s gesture led the crowd’s eyes to his fifth guard, a Utopian who slouched against the church wall behind the soapbox, shadowed in a nowhere sea where derelict ships of every age from Babylon to Space drifted through ghost-mist like frozen leviathans. “The Utopians were protecting me all this time, out of charity. Apollo Mojave gave their life to save me, gave me their seat on the Moon shuttle so I could get safely out of Mycroft Canner’s reach, but, if I assassinated someone like Cornel MASON, how long would it take you to start wondering if it was a Utopian conspiracy? If they planned it? Did they cultivate me all these years on the Moon as part of a scheme to kill the Emperor? You’d think that, anybody would!”
I suspect Tully had never before faced a crowd so silent. Cousins will cheer politely, Europeans debate, Humanists cheer or heckle, but the expressionless Brillists just took notes in a dozen silent formats, or whispered technical terms in breath-soft German, as if safely separated from this fascinating subject by a mirrored wall.
“Obviously I’m not going to assassinate anyone,” Tully continued, “and I don’t really think set-sets are sabotaging the CFB, but is something similar possible? Could a spark like that really set the world at war?” He scanned the crowd, restless. “You tell me, you’re the experts. You from the Institute know the human psyche inside out, what we are, what we can become. Is the human animal still like it was hundreds of years ago: aggressive, territorial, competitive, ambitious? Do we still think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’? When drunks lash out at someone from another Hive, isn’t that really the iceberg tip of something bigger? Or have we changed? Is the human psyche really better, wiser, more peaceful now? Are we really, as we are required to believe, incapable of war?”
“No.”
All eyes sought the interrupter, glaring, a flock of scientists wondering what fool had shattered the walls of objectivity with that most dangerous of missiles: an opinion. All breathed relief to find it was not one of them.
“I’m capable of making war.” Sniper stepped forward, the crowd parting before it like mist before breath. “I’m not a Brillist, and I can’t speak for anybody else’s psyche, but I love my Hive. I love my bash’. I love scanning the news each morning to see what great deeds my fellow Humanists have added to the sum total of human excellence. If something threatened to destroy that, I’d fight to stop it, kill to stop it, I know I could. And I can’t be the only one who feels this way.” The master crowd-pleaser slid slowly toward the podium. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from helping the President these past years, it’s that the balance between the Hives is a lot more fragile than people imagine. They say the geographic nations were the cause of
past wars: borders, nationalism, that Hives are better. But I think Hives could be worse. Our fellow Members are our comrades, not by chance, but because we think alike. We choose them. If in the past people would kill or die for the field they happened to be born in, then I think most of us would fight ten times more fiercely for the Hive we chose. That doesn’t mean I hate the other Hives; of course I don’t.” Sniper spread its arms, its androgynous torso offering the world a broad embrace. “I love the other Hives too, all of them. They’re part of this. There have to be multiple Hives to make the choice meaningful. But if another Hive threatened my own, I’m sure I’d fight back, I’d fight anyone: a Mitsubishi, a Hiveless, a traitor Humanist, even my own President if they somehow threatened what makes us us.” Sniper’s clear, almost-black eyes disarmed even Tully’s guards, who stood frozen like caryatids as the celebrity, and hundreds of millions of viewers with it, stepped up onto the steps beside Tully’s soapbox. “Would I fight for my Hive?” Sniper continued. “Yes. And I’d kill for it, I know that. I think I’d die for it too, though there’s no way to know if I’d really be brave enough until the day comes.”
Sniper smiled on Tully, who stood ice-stiff, as if he feared the slightest breath would dispel this apparition at his side. I like to imagine dark ambitions wriggling through Tully’s mind here, scenarios tumbling mechanically like a Jacob’s Ladder, his next five moves, ten, how best to exploit the weapon of celebrity that Chance had thrown him. But Tully is not such a creature. I have so many reasons to hate him, it would be a disservice to the true ones to pretend he is worse than he is. Tully was stunned by Sniper’s presence, dazzled, and if any thought of personal gain pierced the veil of disbelief, it was doubtless no more than a prayer of thanks to whatever Power he believes in.
Marking Tully’s stunned silence, Sniper shifted its smile to reassuring-mode, developed for that fragile genus of love-mad fans who burst into hysterics upon meeting their idol in the flesh. “You’re a very brave person, Tully Mardi. You’re trying to save the world by preventing, or at least preparing us for, what would probably be the worst war in human history if it came. You don’t mind being called a crackpot, you don’t mind sacrificing time and hobbies to be gaped at by ungrateful crowds, and you don’t mind publicly implicating yourself in a plot to kill the most powerful person in the world, if that’s what it takes to drive the warning home.” It offered Tully its hand, clean calluses still soft from swimming. “You’re right, there could be a war, and if there was one I’d like to hope that you and I would wind up on the same side.”
