by Ada Palmer
“There’s nothing we can do, Major,” I answered. “If Bridger wanted us, if Fate wanted us to be with Bridger, we would be. They don’t. There’s absolutely nothing we can do.”
The Major paused. “I’ll count to ten, shall I?”
“What for?”
“Till you admit you don’t believe that either.”
CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH
Aristotle and Alexander
Aulus Gellius preserves for us a letter of Philip of Macedon to Aristotle reporting the birth of his son. I thank the gods, says Philip, not just that he is born, but that his lifespan overlaps with yours, that with your teaching he may prove worthy of us, and of the kingdom that will be his. The letter is a fake, of course, but mere fact has no power to erase so potent an idea. So many moments, from the first cave scribbles to the stars, Fate could have chosen to give us our Alexander, but it sent him when the Philosopher was there to teach him, so that the two, in meeting, might make this world.
“You’re waiting to see who’s safe, aren’t you?” Tully was hoarse from preaching, weak from standing, our warmonger still unequal to Earth’s 1G embrace. “You’re hoping your own Hive will be exonerated when J.E.D.D. Mason and Papadelias present their findings to the Senate, as if only the guilty Hives will suffer. You still think this is a trial, where the bad guy will be punished and the innocent will go home and sleep snug in their beds. It isn’t. No one sleeps snug anymore. The Censor knows it. That’s why they’ve frozen the stock market, and set a cop on every street corner in Romanova. The exposure of this assassination system isn’t just a scandal coming to light, it’s the end of the system which has kept the peace for two hundred and fifty years. The end of peace!”
Tully paused, expecting the crowd’s voice to rise in agreement, criticism, shock, some noise, any noise, but the spectators crowding the Forum stood in sickly quiet, like children dragged from their predawn beds, not yet ready to register the waking world.
“The Censor’s doing their best,” Tully continued. “They’ve called this emergency Senate session, so at least we’ll get it over with, and get the story from neutral investigators instead of all the Hives accusing each other at once, but that’s not enough. Nothing’s enough. When that door opens tonight,” he pointed, “and the Senate session ends, the worst won’t be over, it’ll be beginning!”
The crowd’s eyes followed Tully’s gesture to the bronze doors of the Senate House, a stone’s throw to his left, where the Senate Guard in Romanovan gold, white, and blue stood pale with awareness that they were no longer ceremonial. How did this day come, reader? This nightmare day, when the Enemy, the Mardis’ spokesboy, stands, not on his soapbox in some mildewed alley, but on the Rostra! That high, wide, marble-covered podium in Romanova’s Forum, where Tribunes and Senators announce the conquests of science, the triumphs of Olympians, the births of laws, and the deaths of heroes, and where now Tully harangues the thronging thousands, while floating cameras feed his words and gestures over the tracker network to another billion souls. The Forum had not been so packed in living memory. Downpour had ended, and drizzle had no power to deter the curious swarm, who filled the nooks and streets as plaster fills a mold. The marble porches of the law courts, the Hive embassies, the secular temples where Quaestors and secretaries trembled at their desks, even the Sensayer’s Conclave, silent with panic after Julia’s arrest, all were solid crowd. A pack of daring students had even climbed the triumphal arch which framed the steep steps of the Capitolium at Tully’s back, hanging off the reliefs where our stone heroes—Thomas Carlyle, Jean-Pierre Utarutu, Sofia Kovács, and King Juan Valentín—turned forests of rifles into plowshares, and poured cornucopias of aid over what the world’s mistakes had left of her poorer regions. Papadelias’s Alliance Officers, more used to desks than mob scenes, joined the City Prefect’s outnumbered force to carve out lifelines through the crowd, standing as living dikes around the landing patch for the arriving Senators. The elected representatives of Earth did not march into today’s session, but dribbled from their cars, clumping in groups, Cousins clinging to Cousins, Japanese Mitsubishi to Japanese and Korean to Korean, most silently cursing the day they had been selected by the stockholders, suggested to the CFB, appointed by the Emperor, elected by the mob, whatever means each Hive preferred to fill those seats reserved for it in the illustrious body which oversees the Universal Free Alliance.
“I know!” the Enemy pressed on, fired with confidence that this day, this hour, was why Fate had spared him. “Many of you still don’t believe in the assassination conspiracy, but I have proof. That’s why Sniper arranged for me to speak here today. This is what the Mardi bash’ studied, what I study, the tensions and forces that make society erupt into violence. I’m certain, and if you read the data I’ve released then you’ll be certain too. Over the past two hundred and fifty years the world has come within a knife’s edge of war a dozen times, and certain convenient deaths are the only thing that nudged us back from that edge. It was a system. We can trace it. It’s real. And it’s over.”
I do not know Tully Mardi. I babysat him as a child, pulled his hair, but of that stage of his life when he became a person I know nothing. To my eye the Graylaw Hiveless sash around his waist was pure pretense, a way to seem a friend to everyone, while in his heart he encourages atrocities which would make the darkest Blacklaw sick, but that is my hatred talking. Perhaps he means it. Perhaps he has his own reasons for continuing his murdered parents’ path. Entrenched as I am on the side which must forever call him Enemy, I cannot know.
“We’re still on that knife’s edge now.” Even Tully sighed before continuing. “We have been for a few years. Peace isn’t natural, not in a world where the Mitsubishi are squatting on all the land, where a half billion Utopians spend a giant chunk of the world’s income on what everyone else sees as their crackpot Mars obsession, and where a growing third of the human race has pledged allegiance to a dictator who every day acts less like the Emperor of Alexandria and more like the Emperor of Romanova! Only the Saneer-Weeksbooth assassinations have kept us from degenerating into war already. Now we’ve lost that, and not quietly, we’ve lost it in a way that leaves us all pointing angry fingers. There have already been deaths: the Salekhard transit system backup crew, some Servicer lynchings; less than an hour ago a guard outside the Mitsubishi Executive Headquarters was killed by a mob throwing stones at the Chief Director’s window. This is my last chance to convince you. You shouldn’t spend the next few hours glued to the newscast from the Senate hearing, you should spend it barricading your doors, checking your fire extinguishers, teaching yourself basic first aid, and thinking about what side you and your family will be on, because there will be sides! Soon! There will be sides, and war!”
At the Rostra’s edge, one could see its keepers exchanging hushed hisses with three Hiveless Senators. What a painful moment for those entrusted with the scheduling of this spotlight of spotlights. The public never stops complaining about how politicians monopolize the Rostra, dooming common citizens to an eternal waiting list. Now that Sniper’s influence had handed the stage to a private citizen for once, the mob would not forgive these guardians if they silenced him, yet instinct urged them, and Senator after frightened Senator as well, to cut off Tully’s stream of words, which seemed less a speech than a shaman’s conjuration, drawing in some waiting doom.
“I’m the Canner survivor!” Tully declared at last; I had wondered how long it would take him to play that card. “I know better than anyone: humans are violent animals. In peacetime that violence gets vented in bar brawls, hate crimes, sports, and, yes, in murders, and the more and worse murderers there are the closer war is to surfacing. The last decades didn’t just produce Mycroft Canner, they produced hundreds of thousands of people who idolize Mycroft Canner, who celebrate them, photos, music, movies, plays. Cannerism is a symptom of war waiting to erupt! The Censor may measure it in statistics, but you can measure it yourself in how many people you’ve seen smile or j
oke about Mycroft Canner, or Jack the Ripper, or any of these human monsters that some fraction of the world inevitably loves. Mycroft Canner was—is—a monster, the same monster that’s forming mobs now in La Trimouille, and Brussels, and Tōgenkyō, that sacks, that pillages, that turned the world into Hell in 1914, and dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima, and Rome, and Washington, and laughed as it raped Ibis Mardi’s corpse, and bombed New York after it was evacuated, just to watch the famous skyline burn. We can’t delude ourselves into thinking the monster’s gone. This world is ready—overready—for war, and it will come, because we are the monsters! Violence, Mycroft Canner, all of it is part of human nature, and it cannot change!”
“But I rehabilitated Mycroft Canner.”
Death-soft Jehovah stepped up on the Rostra now at Tully’s side. No one would stop Him, not the Senate, not the Rostra Keepers, not while His armband, dense with insignia, bore the sigil of a Graylaw Hiveless Tribune, Tribunus Plebis, that inviolate office trusted with the mandate to veto any Senate motion which threatened the freedom of the Hiveless and, through them, everyman. I would not call it hush, but the crowd’s tone eased as He appeared, His black figure healing them as darkness heals the closed eye after day’s long labor.
“See,” He gestured, “here they stand.”
Yes, reader, there I followed, at His command, behind Him. My wrists itched beneath the crowd’s stare, my ankles too, my flesh insisting I should be bound still in my coffin-cage, as when the world first watched proud Papadelias parade his captive monster—long years ago in your experience, reader, but always yesterday in mine. I could not conceive of a billion people watching. In my mind the thousands blurred into one great eye which pierced through me, like the Great Judge’s eye in those dreams I used to have, which others would call nightmares, recurrent the last year before my crime, when I previewed in my sleep the trial which would never come.
“Mycroft Canner…” Tully seems to lose the present as easily as I do. On that platform, as close to sacred as a secular thing can be, my presence was as horrific in his eye as his in mine. “Tribune Mason, you saved Mycroft Canner?”
Jehovah’s voice, soft always as if wary of waking some sleeping child, seemed weak and intimate over the sound system designed for rabble-rousers. “Thirteen years ago the public asked the law to take a life in anger. Those who witnessed Mycroft Canner’s crimes could imagine no lesser punishment, but you also recognized the tragedy: there was genius in Canner, which could have achieved great things if set on a course to help, not harm. I asked MASON and Chair Kosala to make Mycroft Canner a Servicer. Thanks to their mercy, that genius has helped the world, served others, even saved lives. Death is infinite loss and I will not cheapen it by saying whether Mycroft Canner has yet saved as many lives as they took, but, even if they saved only one, that is a life we would have thrown away if we had fallen back into the old lie that death can undo death.”
“But you lied. Tribune, all of you lied to everyone, making us think Canner was dead.”
Jehovah seemed the dead one now, as still as stone between Tully and me as we both shook. “The public in its wisdom did not ask My Imperial father what happened to Mycroft Canner. All these years you trusted them to have dispatched justice. I hope you will not now feel that they, or I, betrayed you by substituting mercy. Is My hope wrong?”
My other guilty patrons, Caesar and Kosala, mounted the platform of the Rostra now, the Cousin Chair sharing the Emperor’s security on this most tumultuous of days. Caesar’s stone poise never changes. As for Kosala, her dark Indian hair worn loose hid most of her expression, but one could guess her feelings well enough from her husband, Censor Vivien Ancelet, who followed a cold and careful distance from his wife. He fidgeted with his dreadlocks, not daring to look at her, nor at the human sea summoned here by the Senate session he had been forced to call. The mob he had predicted, even minimized through careful calculation of the best moments to freeze the market and announce the session, but he had not predicted Tully.
“What Jed says is true,” Chair Kosala confirmed. “The Servicer Program—”
“Get off the Rostra, puppet!”
“Charlatan!” Shouts rippled through the crowd.
“We all know what J.E.D.D. Mason’s about to report!”
“The CFB is a lie!”
“The Anonymous controls the CFB, and you, Kosala!”
“Why don’t you send Brody DeLupa up here, have them tell us what the Cousins think they think!”
The Emperor moved to intervene, but Kosala stopped him with a glance, harsh-seeming from a distance, in which only we beside her could see the glint of tears. “The Servicer Program,” she continued, “exists to keep the potential good that convicts can do from being thrown away. There has never been a better use of it than sparing Mycroft Canner. Over the past thirteen years Mycroft has served as rescuer, laborer, translator, guard, continued what could be continued of their victims’ works, helped with Brillist studies, the Censor’s calculations, research, they even helped Papadelias and Guildbreaker uncover the Saneer-Weeksbooth conspiracy, saving who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people who would have been assassinated in the future. Surely everyone here can agree this is better, not just for Mycroft but for the world, than execution.” She opened her arm toward me, the long trail of her Cousin’s wrap sweeping out like a robe. “Mycroft, do you have anything to add?”
The gathered masses had surprising patience. I would have expected shouts and curses, but they waited, distant, like parents watching their infant take its first unaided steps, as the strength to speak gathered slowly in my shaking frame. I did shake, though I did not know it at the time. The video shows me, a sickly pale skeleton, digging my fingers into the tired brown hat that I clutched, as if by squeezing it enough I could shrink myself and disappear.
“H-hello. I’m M-Mycroft Canner.” The microphones had trouble catching my first words, stifled in my throat as in a dream. “I know I don’t deserve to live. I don’t ask you to accept what’s been done—I wouldn’t. All I ask is this: please, blame only me. If the Emperor, Chair Kosala, and Tribune Mason deceived you, they only did it because they believe human beings are better than most of us do. Please don’t punish them for having hope. And please don’t punish my fellow Servicers either. Three days ago rumors started spreading that I was one of them, and since then six have been killed and hundreds injured by attacks which should have hurt only me, not them. In future if one of you finds me in the street, and asks if I am Mycroft Canner, I swear to you I will not lie, or run, I’ll answer honestly, and take whatever punishment your anger wants to give, I deserve it all. But if you find a Servicer who says they aren’t me, please believe them. Please don’t attack the others. They have no more involvement in this than the bad luck of wearing the same uniform I do.”
“Enough, Mycroft,” the Emperor ordered. “Encouraging violence against one of my Familiares is a crime, even if it is against yourself. And you know you will not walk the streets again.”
“Yes, Caesar.” The command of silence was as welcome as a shield.
The Enemy stepped forward, or rather lurched forward on the crutches which helped him battle gravity. “Why are you protecting Mycroft Canner, MASON?”
Caesar did not grant Tully a glance. “The Emperor does not discuss the sentencing of Familiares.”
“But in this case—”
“That is the Lex Familiaris, Hiveless,” the Emperor snapped. “I will not break it. I will say only that, from now on, I shall never again let Mycroft Canner free to wander in public. Those of you who would use Canner as an excuse to vent on Servicers these violent instincts you’re so expert on will find their target lacking, and yourselves prosecuted for your assaults with the full strictness of Cousin’s law, and the harshness of my own. Now, leave here, Tully Mardi. The world’s eyes, like mine, should be on the Senate and my son’s report right now, not you and your vendetta. The Tribune would be within their rights to have you arrested for in
citing riot. Go.”
Tully smiled, as if he had not felt comfortable upon the Rostra until someone tried to kick him off. “I will not go, MASON, not while you’re still hiding the real reason Mycroft Canner targeted my bash’. We predicted that this war was coming all those years ago, and Canner tried to silence us so we couldn’t prepare the world for it, just like you’re trying to silence me now!”
Mason’s fists clenched, but in public he could not contradict the only living Mardi’s claims of what the Mardis tried to do.
“You’re still deceiving everyone!” Tully continued. “You think I don’t have evidence? There’s a recording circulating of you, MASON, and J.E.D.D. Mason meeting together with Mycroft Canner in Alexandria, only five days ago, both of you sharing secrets with Mycroft about the Seven-Ten list case, and proving both you and the Censor knew something about the Anonymous and Felix Faust lying about their own Seven-Ten lists, pretending they’d been tampered with, to try to cover up what really happened. You knew then what danger the public was in, and you did nothing!”
You must remember this scene, reader, when I took you into MASON’s citadel in Alexandria, and let you hear for the first time the verbal knot-work that is Jehovah’s Latin. The recording of that secret conversation had been leaked that morning, timed to do most damage, Perry’s doing, or I should say Perry-Kraye, through the complicity of a traitor Familiaris, Antonine Fusilier; MASON has not yet announced whether he will be executed when captured.
The Emperor was stone. “It is not your place, Hiveless, to interpret acts of which you have so little understanding.”
“It’s not your place to stop me, MASON.” One must admire Tully for pressing on while tasting Caesar’s anger face-to-face. “The world has a right to know what’s going to happen when the Senate session ends today. If I were telling the people to attack the Senate, or to attack you, or Tribune Mason,” he gestured at Jehovah, “you’d be right to stop me, but you have no right to keep me from warning the world there’s going to be a war.”
