Seven Surrenders--A Novel

by Ada Palmer

  “It’s true, Caesar,” I affirmed. “I have no way to prove it to you here and now, but it’s all true.”

  He seized the back of my collar, hauling me up until I had to face him. “I don’t care if they can bring toys to life or not, you had no right to give that book to anyone.”

  “It was for them!” I cried. “Nothing in history has ever been so clearly meant for someone. Providence had me find Bridger, me of all human beings, this impossible child, no origin, no bash’, no parents, no explanation except … If you saw them, Caesar, you would think Apollo had come back to you: their eyes, their hair, precisely the right age to have been born at the moment of Apollo’s death.” I could not meet his gaze. “It is not strange for the deaths of saints to be accompanied by miracles.”

  Caesar shook me, anger commixed with disbelief, as if he had not imagined this madman was quite so mad. “You think Apollo came back from the dead as this Bridger?”

  In the downpour I could no longer tell if I was crying. “Bridger isn’t Apollo, Caesar. I hoped at first they would become Apollo, but they’re a different person, timid, kind. They want to use their miracles to create a perfect world, to save everyone, the living and the dead. But they’re also terrified. So many times leaders and governments have tried to use reason or science to remake the world, and so many of them, the first French revolution, Stalin’s Russia, they were disasters, killed thousands, millions. The risks here are infinitely greater, even one mistake!”

  He shook me hard. “And with that excuse, you kept the power for yourself.”

  “For myself?” I grasped Caesar’s wrists to steady myself. “How can you say that when you know what selfish miracle I would choose in an instant if I were to let myself abuse the power? I haven’t.”

  “What?”

  I did not look behind me, but even the hiss of rain against the statue made the old pain worse. “You built this statue, Caesar. Look at Apollo, ready to leap down off the pedestal and tell us about some great new future they’ve imagined. Every day, every hour of every day, I could have brought Bridger here to bring Apollo back, just one touch. Providence didn’t just make me kill Apollo once, I killed them over, and over, and over, and over. I kept them dead, every day, still, every day I choose to keep them dead.” I let myself look up into the Emperor’s eyes. “Do I deserve to endure this? Even me? Living knowing every day that I could give my life to bring Apollo back?”

  “What?”

  I shook. “Bridger can’t make permanent life from nothing. If they didn’t keep recharging it, the statue would only live a few days before turning back to stone, but we tried it on a cat once: with a costume Bridger can turn one living thing into another living thing, forever. We have Apollo’s coat, Apollo’s clothes. I could die as I deserve, and give this lump of meat over to the person in the world we both most want to live. These hands!” I raised my hands before me, seeing blood upon them even without Apollo’s coat to stain them so. “I can’t look at these hands without wanting to hack them off and give them to Apollo, but I can’t! We can’t bring Apollo back, Caesar! They would just do it again.”

  “Do what? Make war?”

  I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood, measuring in my mind how hard I would have to bite to cut it off and choke and end my life, if I had had the right to.

  Caesar seized my hand and pressed it against the statue’s stone base. “Swear.”

  “What?”

  “Here, with your hand upon Apollo’s tomb, swear to me there are no war plans hidden in that Iliad. It’s just a storybook, the Utopian weapons are just defensive, this chaos a coincidence. Swear!”

  Strength left me, drained by that stone where his slim bones make their slow return to dust. It is half your fault he lies here, reader, and half mine. You denied him the Pantheon. I destroyed his chance to join his kin among the stars. The autopsy and chemical tests left what remained of Apollo’s body too contaminated to be processed into that organic essence which, after the rocket journey, will become the soil of Mars. Year after year, those Utopians who could not live to see the terraforming done at least become a part of it, each ounce of powdered flesh another fertile plot of their new world. All his brief lifetime Apollo watched the launches, yet in death he could not even send his dust where dust is precious. That is my guilt. As for yours, only a handful of Apollo’s kind have been buried on this Earth in the two and a half centuries since the Mars Project began, yet, for all Utopia has given you, you would not give this orphan shelter in your Pantheon.

  “It’s not the Mardis’ war plans, Caesar. It’s Apollo’s. Apollo was trying to start their own war.” The truth leaked from me slowly, like an infected wound milked of its pus. “Apollo came to Luther and Aeneas, before the Mardi bash’ made up their minds, back when they were first convinced that the length of time that passes between wars was what determines how devastating the next one will be. The others were undecided, not sure whether they should try to start a war now to keep the next one from being so big it would wipe us out entirely, or whether they should believe that the peace was real, that humans could outgrow the violence as we outgrew the trees. They were uncertain, but Apollo was honest, and loved them, and told them point-blank that whatever the bash’ decided, Apollo would make their own war.”

  “Why?” Caesar cried, his arm convulsing as he held me. “Apollo moved me to tears dozens of times, their future, their vision of the infinity of human potential. Now you’re telling me that was a lie? That even Apollo believed we’re doomed to eternal war? That the instinct to violence is so ingrained it can’t be overcome?”

  We both shook, I and Caesar, weak as leaves. We heard Apollo’s words again, his certainty, his vision of our bold posterity which will stamp footprints onto worlds too distant for us to yet imagine how to find them, but find we will, he knew we will, as the boundary of human knowledge, art, and hope expands like a parabola sweeping ever closer to infinity. Have you wondered, reader, what made Apollo special? Why his classmate Aeneas Mardi introduced him so eagerly to Cornel then-not-yet-MASON? Why MASON brought him to Andō, Kosala, Spain, to the Anonymous? Rewrote the definition of Familiaris for him? Why they all relied on him as sole ambassador from this strange Hive whose crisscrossed constellations reveal no leader? His gift was this: he could explain Utopian thought in words the rest of us could understand. The wall that makes them alien, the vizors, U-speak, their cold and separate plans, was lifted somehow with Apollo, so the light that guides the rest of them, for once, could touch us, too. Perhaps it was because he burned brightest, enough to pierce the veil, or perhaps he alone among them tried to pierce it, not believing with the others that long peace and the desire to maintain this happy present had bred all ambition out of the rest of us. Some men are built to love many times, some once, and MASON used his once, not on Madame, not even on his Empire, but on Apollo.

  “Apollo never lied to you, Caesar,” I replied, gasping as my lungs lurched with the power of my tears. “How can you even think that? Apollo believed there was no limit to humanity, no world, no transformation, no dream beyond our power to make real, that with reason and ambition in our blood we can achieve anything, become anything! Just not in time.”

  He gripped me harder. “In time for what?”

  “Mardi,” I answered. “War day. Mars day. In two hundred and fifty years the next stage of the Great Project will be complete. Do you think a greedy, selfish Earth will sit back and watch the minority they most distrust take sole possession of a whole new world? How many wars were fought over the Americas? Over Africa? Over expansion? In ten thousand years, maybe in one thousand years, humanity will have progressed enough to no longer feel envy or greed or hate the ‘other,’ but in two hundred and fifty? Utopia is optimistic but not blind. When the terraforming is complete there will be war, all the Hives of this complacent Earth united against Utopia. The conflict will consume one or both, unless by then we have had another war to change the character of the Hives, or, at the very lea
st, to leave some veterans to teach us again how to wage wars, and how to survive them.”

  “War now to prevent war later?”

  “Not to prevent, Caesar. To soften. We no longer even vaccinate against the plagues which claimed the billions of the last war, but samples survive. Imagine if they were loosed on Mars, the new world uninhabitable for a century. Or imagine if they were let loose on Earth by those on Mars, fearing their own destruction. What if some new technology we’ve never tapped for war, Mitsubishi cloth or smelltracks, turns out to be able to wipe out a planet in a day? We need to find that out now, in a gentler war, one where no one is willing yet to go all the way. That was Apollo’s project. They designed their special coat, the weapons inside, trained, wrote up plans for how the war would probably begin, how to proceed. Later the Mardis chose to join them, but Apollo would have done it on their own.”

  As a storm’s first tremors in the still-sleeping deep shake a slim ship, not yet in danger but helpless against the tempest that must come, so Caesar’s trembling shook me. “Apollo’s coat showed ruins, soldiers, even myself uniformed for war.”

  I glanced back briefly at the Emperor’s guards, his childhood ba’sibs for the most part, or Guildbreakers, reliable as caryatids in the face of secrets, dumb as stone.

  “Yes, Caesar,” I answered. “Apollo’s coat is a simulation, this world one year into Apollo’s predicted war. The people who don’t appear in it, the ones it makes invisible, those are people Apollo thought would not survive the first twelve months.”

  “Including themself,” he supplied.

  I nodded. “Apollo would have died on the front lines. It’s not a fate they wanted, but it’s what they expected, and when we faced one another in battle—”

  “What you did wasn’t a battle, Mycroft,” he interrupted, grim. “It was a murder.”

  “It was to save Earth and Mars together, Caesar! My attempt to let us vent our war rage without killing millions. I had to stop the Mardis, but if I could make people as outraged as a war would have, get Earth to vent its killing rage on me, instead of billions on billions, maybe it could’ve been a tiny war, we two, Saladin and I, against the Mardi nineteen, ending with all humanity, ten billion together, killing me. Apollo understood. Our battle might have been enough!”

  “Not battle. Murder.”

  Something in me dared glare back at him. “What is a battle if not a confrontation between two enemies, armed and prepared to kill or perish in a struggle whose outcome will determine the fates of many? It was a battle, Caesar! Saladin and I against Seine and Apollo. We were soldiers. The first soldiers in three hundred years! The other Mardis’ deaths, those I admit were murders, but Apollo was a battle, the first and only battle of Apollo’s aborted war.”

  He choked. “Second.”

  “Caesar?”

  “It was the second battle.” He released me, turning to peer up through the alley toward the Capitoline Hill behind us, its columns bright as a lighthouse through the rain. “You think you shed first blood in this, monster? You were years too late.”

  “Caesar, who—”

  “Apollo. Five years before my succession, they called me to meet them behind the Rostra. They had already realized I was Imperator Destinatus, that was easy, but it had never come between us, not before. I found them in tears, leaning against the Milliarium, and, in their coat, the column was defaced, singed, the inscriptions gouged or burned away. It was horrible.”

  I could well imagine it. I passed it almost daily on my way through the Forum to the Censor’s office or Julia’s, the Milliarium Aureum, the column by the Rostra on which are inscribed in gold the distances to the great metropolises of the world empire: to Brussels, Tōgenkyō, Alexandria, to Ingolstadt, to Casablanca, to Buenos Aires, soon to be the Humanist capital again after the fall of Ganymede and La Trimouille, and the mechanical device implanted in the stone which tracks the ever-changing distance to Luna City.

  “Apollo said,” Caesar continued, “that Mushi Mojave had been selected to go to study the ant colony they found on Mars. I didn’t understand, I congratulated them on their ba’pa’s good fortune, said it was wonderful, but that just made them cry more. I asked why. They said Mushi was the number-two ant expert in the Hive.”

  I nodded. “After Mirai Feynman.”

  “They said Feynman was offered the position first, but turned it down because they had a bash’, a family, and going to Mars is dangerous. A Utopian said going to Mars was too dangerous.”

  I too remembered well Apollo’s tears, hysterical, hearing that news.

  “Then Apollo asked me which the world thought was more important,” MASON continued, “the present or the future. I didn’t understand. I kept trying to be a friend, but Apollo didn’t want a friend, they wanted the Imperator Destinatus.”

  Is this not, reader, the strangest of titles? Imperator Destinatus, the future Emperor. The successor’s name is sealed in the Sanctum Sanctorum, never to be revealed until Succession Day on pain of the harshest penalties that justice can inflict, and even speculation is forbidden under Romanova’s First Law. The title, then, exists only so it may not be used, like a god’s forbidden name, which cannot be pronounced without invoking his wrath.

  “Remember”—Caesar limped back a pace, gazing up at the statue’s mirrored vizor—“I was not yet Emperor, did not yet understand the real relationship between Utopia, the other Hives, and mine. You know how passionate Apollo was. All it took was some new discovery about fish or enzymes to move them to tears, but I’d never seen them hysterical like this. Eventually they made me understand. Humanity has everything now, everything: power, prosperity, stability, longevity, leisure, charity, peace. Vocateurs earn society’s respect doing the work they love, and those who aren’t vokers put in their twenty hours and spend the greater part of life at play. Happiness has taken the place of wealth as our prime measure of success, and envy no longer hungers for rare riches hoarded by the great, but for smiles and happy hours which all Earth has in infinite supply. This is what past civilizations wished for, worked for, what emperors and presidents and prime ministers and kings are supposed to try to give their people. We have. We’re done.” He gave a little hiccup, my first proof that the water on Caesar’s cheeks was more than rain. “Every life has the potential to be a good one, for the first time in history. And everyone’s secretly afraid that it’s fragile, that if we try to make it better, change something, if the Hive proportions shift too much, if science raises the life expectancy too fast, or Brill’s Institute finally figures out how to upload our brains into computers, or make us all into impossible geniuses, it will fall apart. Golden Ages always end with Dark ones. The Exponential Age, from the Black Death to the World Wars, was all about growth, acceleration, future-building, change, recovery first, then progress, advancement, exploration, interconnection, every generation experiencing a new world, different, more advanced than the generation before, a state of constant change, mixed but usually more for good than bad. When our modern age began after the Chuch War, as the Hives rose and happiness with them, humanity slowed down. We started taking baby steps, not exponential ones, a few more cured diseases, new Olympic records, some new toys, but calling that enough. Too much change is dangerous. A happy world wanted progress to stop. Apollo understood in a way I couldn’t what it meant to be the Imperator Destinatus: I was going to take on the duty to maintain history’s greatest empire and protect my three billion citizens by not letting anything change. That conversation was the first time in my life I regretted being a Mason. The Humanists, Europe, the Mitsubishi, the Cousins, it’s the same for them. They vie with each other, get better at what they’re already best at, but change nothing. Even Gordian’s experiments rarely leave their Institute. Now we’ve discovered O.S., the dark side of our paradise, and it’s horrible, unforgivable, but what is two thousand murders to what we’ve already given up? The future. Only Utopia thinks the future is more important than the present, that there are worlds th
at we could make which are worth destroying the one we have here. Or, at least, they used to think that, but if Mirai Feynman would rather stay home with their bash’ and kids than study the first ants on Mars, maybe even Utopia is vulnerable to too much peace. Our happy world has made complacency contagious. Apollo asked me then if, in two hundred and fifty years when Mars is ready, there would be anyone left, even among Utopians, willing to give up all the pleasures of Earth’s greatest Golden Age for the harsh life of a colonist. Then they stabbed me with a pocketknife.”

  I choked. “Apollo attacked you, Caesar?”

  He squeezed his own left shoulder, his thumb tracing the contour of a scar beneath. “They said, if they were going to wound me, they wanted to do it honestly with their own hand, that, if everything was to be their fault, they should shed first blood. I didn’t understand. I thought they were just being hysterical, but that wasn’t it, was it?”

  My chest contracted, as if the statue’s gaze, though blind and stone, was strangling me. “Apollo asked me once if I would destroy a better world to save this one. That wasn’t the real question, the real question was if I would destroy this world to save a better one. Apollo didn’t just think the war was necessary to keep the next one from wiping us all out. They thought we had to make the world less perfect or no one would be willing to face the hardships of moving on. There are few people left anywhere who are willing to die for something, for their children maybe, but not for a cause, and certainly not for a patch of raw and barren Mars ground. Apollo thought that we need suffering to create people capable of enduring suffering. World Peace does not breed heroes.” My lips trembled. “The day you’re talking about, August twenty-second, 2426, the day Mushi was asked to go to Mars, that was the same day Apollo told the Mardis they had decided to make the war come, even if the others wouldn’t help.”