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but Bridger, the thirteen-year-old hugging his knees here beneath Thisbe’s table, he made the future in which you now live.
Mertice McKay left posterity no notes when she created the term—she had no time to, working in the rush of the 2140s, as society’s wrath swept through after the Church War, banning religious houses, meetings, proselytizing, and, in her eyes, threatening to abolish even the word God. The
three people in a room talking about religion was then, as now, a “Church meeting,”
His pauses convinced me more than his conclusion, pauses in which the sensayer wrestled against the gag order, forbidden by anti-proselytory laws and Conclave vows from letting slip whether his beliefs labeled this encounter Chance, Providence, Fate, or the whimsy of pool ball atoms. But Carlyle was good. He didn’t slip, even in extremis.
“By something, yes.” A smile warmed Carlyle’s cheeks here, pride, I think, in the firmness of his faith in the Something he had faith in. “I can help you. I’m trained for this. I’m not afraid of the word ‘supernatural.’ I’m not afraid to explore this, not by pushing anyone to do anything, but with hypotheticals, thought experiments, listening and talking.”
Does it distress you, reader, how I remind you of their sexes in each sentence? ‘Hers’ and ‘his’? Does it make you see them naked in each other’s arms, and fill even this plain scene with wanton sensuality? Linguists will tell you the ancients were less sensitive to gendered language than we are, that we react to it because it’s rare, but that in ages that heard ‘he’ and ‘she’ in every sentence they grew stale, as the glimpse of an ankle holds no sensuality when skirts grow short. I don’t believe it. I think gendered language was every bit as sensual to our predecessors as it is to us, but
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Saneer of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’, custodian since birth of one of the most powerful engines of our civilization.
Mercifully it was my uniform that caught Carlyle’s eye, and I recognized the familiar judgmental half-step back which free men take around the guilty.
Murder for profit is the crime most people think of when they see a Servicer’s uniform, a crime the convict has no reason to repeat now that law has stripped him of the right to property.
Knowing what these convicts were, no citizen would give them food or rest except after a day’s work, and, with nothing to gain or lose, they served the community in ambitionless, lifelong peace.
“I have a job.” It was no lie: a summons from the Mitsubishi Executive Directorate had been buzzing in my ear for some time. I had lingered, since Bridger took priority, but now I had a reason of my own to visit Tōgenkyō. My searches had sliced deep. There were not many Gag-genes born in precisely 2426, not many parents who would produce a child with eyes that shade of blue, hair edged with that tint of gold, and not many hospitals whose records would not open before the security codes I had the privilege of borrowing. That led me to Tōgenkyō.
Hive pride, Humanist Members excited to think the great Saneer-Weeksbooth computers are humming away beneath their boots.
Cousins here, Mitsubishi, clusters of Gordian.
Martin Guildbreaker
A darker armband, black-edged Imperial Gray with the Square & Compass on it, declares him a Familiaris Regni, an intimate of the Masonic throne, who walks the corridors of power at the price of subjecting himself by law and contract to the absolute dictum of Caesar’s will.
one white sleeve announcing permanent participation in that most Masonic rite the Annus Dialogorum.
There is no allegiance for a Guildbreaker but the Empire, nor a more unwelcome presence on this doorstep than a Guildbreaker.
Humanist bash’, and I will absolutely respect your Hive sovereignty, but as a globally essential property you fall under Romanova’s jurisdiction.
Only his Humanist boots
Martin nodded respect. “The unpublished Black Sakura Seven-Ten list.”
Regan Makoto Cullen broke with her great teacher Adolf Richter Brill on November fourth, 2191. “Break with” is easy to say, but not so easy to do, to face the man who has been your patron, teacher, foster father for twenty-five years, the man all Earth hails as the great mind of the century, who mapped the psyche in undreamt-of detail, who revolutionized education, linguistics, justice, to face him down and say, “Sir, you are wrong.
This heresy, this bash’, which Cullen shortened from i-basho (a Japanese word, like ‘home’ but stronger), this challenge to Brill’s great system Cullen did
as I crawled across the floor.
rose; some things should not be said while on one’s knees.
Not raising the dead necessarily, that has a lot of other implications we have to look at, but smaller things. Bridger could cure Stereocox.” “We have.” “What?” “I had Bridger make a cure eighteen months ago and sent it anonymously to Pele Chemical. Testing is underway.” “You … you did…” “Remember three years ago when they found a treatment for Waldfogel’s Vein? That was Bridger too.”
this sweet and gentle Cousin in her flowing wrap should be ‘she.’ In this case, alas, I am commanded by an outside power to give Carlyle the masculine, to remind you that this long-lost scion is a prince, not princess, a fact which matters in the eyes of some, and of the law. But I shall do my best to remind you often that a Cousin’s maternal heart beats beneath Carlyle’s broad chest, and I promise, reader, to be consistent in making other Cousins ‘she.’
Romanova, a sparkling sea of marble and bright bronze, built up from nothing in three hundred days to be the capital of our new world of Hives. In 2198, Emperor Agrippa MASON was tasked to choose a plan for the Alliance capital.
This would not be the simple reconstruction of Rome as she had stood before the Church War,
“The Censor’s in the right, let it be.” “The Censor?”
the porphyry blood-purple uniform of the Romanovan Censor.
clubs, investing all his pride in the Graylaw Hiveless sash about his hips, and the purple uniform across his shoulders.
charged with tracking changes in membership and wealth, the Censor judges when one of the seven Hives should gain or lose a Senator, and thereby holds the balance of the planet in his hands.
“We have five hours to rerun the entire Seven-Ten list impact. Humanity needs that a lot more than they need ten square feet of pavement anyone could clear.”
“Now the seventh-most-popular list shoots up to number one in everyone’s attention, and
Mitsubishi red, green and white up on the Quirinal, Gordian red, black and gold on the Caelian, European blue and gold mingling with Cousin white and azure in the valleys, Masonic gray and purple on the Esquiline, while across the Tibernov river the bright Olympic rainbow made the Humanist district even more exuberant.
of the seven Hives
the Cousins and Olympians,
then sheltered most of Earth’s surviving poor,
“The Six-Hive Transit System welcomes you to Romanova.”
felt some smugness in having guessed correctly that, despite the honorable Mitsubishi surname, she would exchange her minor’s sash for Graylaw Hiveless. She could have worked for the Censor even as a Mitsubishi Member, but the gray sash is almost a uniform in the office,
Shanghai Daily is the only paper so courteous to the future as to list the Hive names beside their leaders.
Gordian would fly in Mukta’s children and evacuate everything: factories, goods, workers, families, capital in all its forms all snatched to safety in a day, like good fruit from a rotting tree. As the tremors of the Church War grew, Gordian carried out the affluent of every nation, leaving governments and poor to slit each other’s throats.
Whitelaws side with Cousins as often as with Graylaws,
«Twice, in fact. They were in your letter thirteen years ago, doodled in the margin with no explanation. These precise numbers.» «I wrote that letter sixteen years ago. You just saw it thirteen years ago.» My correction made him raise his voice. «They were Kohaku Mardi’s last message. Written in Kohaku’s own blood, those exact numbers, not the killer’s name, not a farewell to their bash’ or me, just 33-67; 67-33; 29-71.» He rose, turned toward me. Suddenly his hands seemed large. «You tried to smear it out.»
With that threat I could, in good conscience, surrender. «It’s the point of no return, sir. It’s the numbers Kohaku and Aeneas calculated were the point of no return. You know they were economic theorists as well as historians. If the Masons get up to 33 percent of the world population, they predicted
nothing can stop them from growing to a monopoly, over 50 percent, within twenty years.
The Mitsubishi will see it coming and try to fight back by raising rents, and if they have 67 percent of the land they’ll wind up crippling t...
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Here we sighed together, he the Frenchman, I the Greek. Neither of us were Members of the European Hive, or even formal members of our nation-strats,
and the black Hiveless sash which swishes lush around his hips, its warning stark as a poison label: here stands a Blacklaw.
I know the name Dominic Seneschal, and know too there are breasts beneath that taut waistcoat, that the thigh and pelvis which the coat’s high cut displays are very much a woman’s. If thou must have thy fetishizing pronouns, shouldst thou not write ‘she,’ when ‘she’ is so garishly proclaimed?
