by Ada Palmer
* * *
“Thank you for inviting me to address you, Senators.”
Bryar Kosala had refused to change her wrap, so faced the concentric tiers of Senators with her sleeves still speckled with Jehovah’s blood and brains. The luminous egg-white marble of the hall around her crackled with the fabric hiss of Senators fidgeting in their seats, pretending not to be prisoners as the restoration of the transit network made the mob in the Forum outside swell and swell. The Senate ranks had never been so thin, patches of different Hives, who in peaceful days comingled happily, clumping with rows of No Man’s Land between them. The Masons were in good attendance, the Cousins also, Brillists, the eight Utopian Senators clustered in the back row, and the four Hiveless Senators in the front near the Hiveless Tribunes, but the guilty Hives had deserted. The Europeans used the meeting of their own Parliament as an excuse, while the Humanists were simply AWOL, and the Mitsubishi sent only two Greenpeace Members and one lone Korean to make a savvy quorum call; without a two-thirds majority, even the Senate of the Universal Free Alliance could do nothing more dangerous than talk.
“Two weeks ago,” Bryar continued, “O.S. used their assassination system to force Black Sakura reporter Tsuneo Sugiyama to retire and let Masami Mitsubishi write this year’s Seven-Ten list. That’s the same list that was later stolen and left in the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’. This stunt was engineered to bring more attention to the list, and to one name on it: Cousins’ Feedback Bureau Chief Darcy Sok. The resulting investigation of the CFB released a report last night, and conflicting versions have been circulating ever since. Jed Mason was to present a full report to you today, but Sniper’s attack has made that impossible. I am grateful, therefore, that you have invited me to present the truth myself.
“The CFB sorts the suggestion letters by which the Cousins are run. Since millions of letters arrive each week, sorting is done by a computer. Every letter is dealt with eventually, even unique ones, but the volume of letters in each folder after sorting is used as an indicator of how important the issue is, so, if the number of letters on a subject abruptly increases or decreases, that is when it receives the most immediate attention from the administration. We now know that the CFB staff has been altering this data by changing the computer’s search terms. For example, the terms ‘land grab’ and ‘turf slurp’ are both slang for the Mitsubishi effort to buy up land, so letters using those phrases are usually sorted into the same folder. On January twelfth of this year, CFB staff intentionally altered the program to route these into separate folders, making it seem as if the number of letters concerning Mitsubishi land policy had suddenly dropped, whereas it had, in fact, increased. This prevented the Cousins’ Board from taking action to place more blocks on Cousins selling land to Mitsubishi. That’s just one example. The records I have uncovered reveal hundreds of such alterations made every year, which have controlled the flow of information, and effectively dictated much of the Hive’s policy for decades. No records survive from the beginning of this system, but it seems to go back over a century. The common belief within the CFB is that they invented the trick in the twenty-three forties, but the Anonymous quickly realized what they were doing and blackmailed them into allowing the Anonymous to dictate the alterations they made.”
Kosala flinched here, catching her eye straying to the ex-Censor, who sat in the non-voting seats with the Minor Senators, and a number of other officials who had taken shelter in the Senate from the mobs outside.
“Now,” she continued, “this makes it sound as if the Anonymous has been corrupting the CFB to their own ends, but the facts do not support that. Upon deeper examination, the alterations I discovered are primarily reactive, engineered to conceal brief spikes or drops in the number of letters on a subject, and always relating either to some new Masonic law or policy, or to a subject that the Anonymous is about to publish an editorial about. For example, the surge in letters about the Mitsubishi land grab was caused by the Emperor passing a law restricting sale of land by Masons to Mitsubishi, and the spike of letters on that topic lasted only three weeks, after which the number of letters normalized and the CFB restored the search terms to their original arrangement. In other words, the Anonymous and the team at the CFB have been altering the letter sorting to prevent Cousin policy from being dictated by short-term, emotional reactions to Masonic policies or the Anonymous’s own editorials.”
Kosala let herself glance at Vivien again, her expression neither forgiving nor reproachful, but seeming to agree with him that, if the pair had had the power once in their lifetimes to stop time and take some private hours before the world churned on, they would have spent it here.
“I found it hard at first,” she continued, “to believe that the corruption could be so innocent. I was sure we’d uncover some incidents of the Anonymous stifling suggestions which came from the Cousins themselves. I found none.” She froze a moment. “Let me clarify that. I didn’t just find no incidents of the CFB conspiracy squashing Cousin-initiated movements, I found remarkably few confirmable Cousin-initiated movements, at least relating to matters of political policy. The number of letters advocating particular political actions or policies seems to spike or fall primarily in reaction to sudden outside events, the Masons or the Anonymous, or in response to world-famous incidents like the Mycroft Canner murders. These spikes are short-lived, usually normalizing after a few weeks. The information I have seen suggests that, if not for the Anonymous controlling the CFB, the Hive’s core political policies would have been dictated all these years by wild short-term oscillations of opinion, resulting in a chaotic and panic-driven system incapable of long-term stability. I wanted to ask the former Censor Vivien Ancelet to testify about this. Obviously, since the Censor was also the Anonymous and running this conspiracy, that is not appropriate, but I did put the question to their Deputy Censor, Jung Su-Hyeon A-ancelet Kosala.” She tripped over her own ba’child’s name here, her eyes ranging the benches as if afraid someone would rise to cry nepotism, but no one did. “It is Jung Su-Hyeon’s belief that, if these reactive political swings had been allowed to dictate policy, the Cousins would have suffered crippling economic decay over the past century, or even fallen apart, rather than remaining the second-largest Hive. In brief…” Here she paused, with the face of one who looks out over the cliff’s edge, and must jump. “In brief, this conspiracy’s effect has been to conceal and protect the Cousins from the fact that the feedback system does not work as a form of government. For many things it works well—local issues, disaster response, social protections, health and human services—but it does not work for political decisions, the quick but considered responses to actions by other Hives, or to global crises, that all governments need to be able to make. The feedback system cannot do it, and has only ever seemed to do it thanks to corrupt intervention.”
She paused again, a long pause this time, brushing back her black hair as if to fight off the temptation to hide behind it, and scanning the room once more, giving others the chance to interrupt with heat and fury which might have taken the spotlight from her. Fury was not so kind. “An hour ago,” she continued, “the Anonymous spoke publicly for the first time in history. They urged us all to move slowly, to keep our reactions to this crisis in check in order to preserve what they have called utopia. I disagree. I don’t believe this world where four out of seven Hives are ruled by corruption can be called a utopia. I don’t believe that, having recognized our long-term dependence on these corrupted systems, we should try to keep ourselves dependent on them. I don’t believe that any delay can prevent this crisis from being anything but what it is, the complete transformation of the Alliance. Better to act honestly and quickly than to succumb to corruption and base means to prop up what is already broken.” Her eyes flicked across the ranks of Cousin Senators, some weeping openly, others still stunned. “The CFB has not been shut down,” she continued. “Letters are coming in, in unprecedented numbers, and a new and uncorrupted staff has been there all day
sorting them. One billion, two hundred million letters have been received so far today, representing more than two-thirds of the Hive. They have proposed a range of actions, but two demands above all are supported by the vast majority of letters. These ideas do not initiate from the Masons or the Anonymous. They could be called rash reactions to a short-term fear, but, since they represent the first uncorrupted voice the Cousin Hive has had in over a century, it would be the ultimate betrayal of my office to ignore them, or even delay acting on them. The first demand is that I resign as Chair.” Could you, like Kosala, reader, deliver such words without even a wince? “This cannot be treated until the Administrative Board convenes tomorrow morning, but if at that time the board consents, I will step down. Meanwhile, so long as I remain in office, I shall pursue the second suggestion, supported by over one billion Cousins, who have requested that we enter negotiations with Emperor Cornel MASON, first to have the Masonic Hive take over administration of our most vital social services, schools, hospitals, and such, to buffer them through this transition, and second to begin the process of merging the Cousins with the Masons, not fully but as a sub-Hive, like Greenpe—”
“Aunt Bryar, stop!”
The Titan armies, risen from Tartarus for their revenge, with the Hundred-Handed Ones raging beside them, a club in every hand, could not have stirred the Senators to more surprise, more outcry, more astonished awe than the sudden entrance, panting, disheveled, and in tears, of a young nun.
“Heloïse!” Kosala cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Thank Heaven I’m not too late!” The habit thrashed around Heloïse’s knees like rough surf as she rushed, the veils across her forehead slipping back to let her red-gold curls trail free. “I’ve just come from the hospital. The draft survived! Seigneur Jehovah wouldn’t let the doctors start their tests until He knew it was safely on its way to you!”
Kosala met the little nun in the center of the house floor, standing close as if hoping her flowing wrap might shield the stranger from Senators who gawked like zoo-goers. “What draft?” she asked.
Heloïse pressed a packet into Kosala’s hands, twelve crumpled pages, dense with ink and dyed red-black with gore. “An interim constitution. Seigneur Jehovah had it in His jacket. He and I spent all last night drafting it. You can use it to transition away from the CFB!”
“An interim constitution?” Kosala’s eyes locked on the pages, though whether on the words or on the crust of blood I cannot say. “For the Cousins?”
“He thought you might need one. It’s ready to implement. It uses strats and interest groups to divide the Cousin population into two hundred and twenty voting groups, which will each elect a representative to a temporary Assembly, which will then draft a new permanent constitution.”
These words hardly reached any ears as the thunder of astonishment churned the House. Perhaps, reader, you would enjoy guessing which Senators are clients of Madame’s and which free. Review the photographs: where confusion washes like Death’s white mask over a Senator, there the nun’s rough figure is as alien as a centaur’s; on the other hand, where shock mingles with blush, or where faces hide behind hands, these perhaps have laid lustful eyes on Sister Heloïse before.
“Order!” The Presiding Speaker rose now, Jin Im-Jin, a tiny, white-haired Korean Brillist old enough to remember four Emperors, and to frown down from the hard-earned Speaker’s seat at whippersnappers like Faust and Papadelias. “Order! Order! Chair Kosala, you will answer for this interruption. Who is this … person?”
“I can answer for myself!” Heloïse faced the Speaker, curtseying a quick apology. “Madam Speaker”—the Speaker grimaced at the title—“my name is Heloïse D’Arouet. I am Tribune Jehovah Mason’s bash’mate and fiancée. Before the doctors put Him under, the Tribune appointed me his Proxy In Extremis.” Gasps rose anew as Heloïse produced from the folds of her scandalous habit the Tribunary sash of gold-edged gray which Tribune Mason wore when filling his Graylaw office here the Senate. “The Tribune is determined not to let this assassination interfere with duties which have been trusted to Him, either in His office as a Tribune, or as an Executive of the Cousins’ Chief Council’s Office.”
The tiny Speaker took a long and thoughtful breath. “There is good precedent for selecting a bash’mate as Proxy In Extremis, but why did the Tribune involve you in drafting the constitution? You say that was last night, before the assassination attempt, yes?”
‘Attempt’ already, reader; how quickly mankind hastens to erase the miracle; the assassination succeeded.
“He had me help because I grew up with gender.”
All other faces were pure shock, but on the Speaker’s face shock mixed with a Brillist’s delight at human bizarreness. “What do you mean by that?”
“The Tribune and I both grew up with gender, so we can see and talk about the Cousins clearly, where no one else can.”
“What do you mean?”
“Being a Cousin is all about gender. Specifically about the feminine. I don’t mean anything biological, I mean the old cultural construction. All the eclectic things we associate with Cousins—nurturing, helping, healing, child rearing, tenderness, charity, welcoming the lonely, comforting the sick, tempering the violent—they’re all things that, in olden days, were associated with the feminine. That’s what all the Cousinly activities have in common, but because we’re scared to say the words no one knows how to articulate it anymore. None of you can articulate what the Cousins are about, can you? Not without gender.” She turned to the benches, inviting answers, but remember, reader, how hard it is at the best of times to interrupt a nun. “The old concepts of masculine and feminine were huge,” she continued, “complicated, centuries in the making, and deeply rooted in people, consciously and unconsciously. They facilitated bigotry and oppression, yes, but they had a lot of other social functions too. People who identified as feminine were caretakers, peacemakers, hostesses, consciences to balance the aggressive masculine. In the last centuries of the Exponential Age gender began to be liberated from biology, but that process wasn’t nearly finished when the Church War came. The worst cults in the war were also associated with gender oppression, so after the war the nascent Hives tried to purge all gender differences so abruptly that there was no time to come up with substitutes for all the other social functions gender used to have. Imagine if an ancient surgeon, on seeing penicillin work for the first time, had renounced his scalpel, calling on all fellow surgeons to vow never again to cut into a patient when pills could cure without wounds, totally ignoring the fact that there were countless illnesses for which surgery, perfected over centuries, was still a more effective treatment than nascent pharmacy. That’s what happened when we suddenly silenced gender. The broad, vague, cultural concepts of masculine and feminine had served a lot of social functions beyond oppression. Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that. Since masculine was the empowered gender, the rushed transition encouraged everyone to act masculine, and all at once humanity went from a race of half peacemakers to a race where those with instincts toward the feminine felt ashamed of the label, or ended up sheltering in its only acceptable modern form.”
“The Cousins?” Speaker Im-Jin guessed, Brillist eyes bright with delight at this unique new specimen, and at the equally unique shock on the faces of the many members of the gawking Senate.
“Exactly, Member Speaker,” Heloïse continued. “The Cousins are our feminine. They’re where the people who felt drawn to feminine concepts gathered in the wake of the Great Renunciation. That’s the heart of the Hive, but the words are taboo so no one dares admit it, and it feels like the Hive is weak and teetering. Of course it’s teetering! The Masons would teeter if we banned the word ‘Empire’ and Gordian if we banned the word ‘psyche.’ How could the CFB’s computer sorting figure out what the Hive really wants when the words we need to expre
ss it are forbidden? Motherly affection, sisterly devotion, uxorial duty, filial piety. Those concepts are the real heart of the Cousins, and we need them now more than ever, with violence and talk of war looming before us. To let the Cousins be themselves we have to undo the silence of the Church War and accept the fact that gendered thoughts are still in us, not innately, but because our ancestors chopped down the tree without killing the roots, so new shoots have sprung up. Gender has changed since three hundred years ago, having less to do with sex and bodies, but it still affects our thoughts. We teach it unconsciously, just as our ancestors did, in stereotypes, associations, pre-modern stories, subtle differences in how we treat children we see as ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ We can’t stop passing it on, or even study how we pass it on, when we won’t admit that it’s happening. We stopped the conversation too quickly. After the shock of the Church War, the survivors declared that equality and feminism had won when we had only slapped a patch over the surface. We need to admit that gendered concepts are still affecting how we think, and let the Cousins voice them, now. Think of the Set-Set Riots. How many fewer people might have died if the Cousins had felt free to say overtly why they were really upset? That their motherly feelings judged it inhumane to do such things to children. Without that vocabulary, the real cause of the conflict couldn’t even be discussed!
