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Next, all as one, the mighty, angry Earth would descend upon Utopia, as Catholics used to descend on Protestants and vice versa to ‘save’ the others’ children.
When the Graff trial began they called in sick, “indefinite stasis,” as they put it, not one, not hundreds, but all four hundred million at once.
“Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason?” she recited. Carlyle looked to Thisbe. “Donatien is the given name of the Marquis de Sade.” Madame nodded confirmation. “All the Prince’s ba’pas picked out pieces of His name. As a sensayer, I don’t think you would want me to reveal to anyone who chose which.”
“That’s the child, no doubt,” Andō answered gravely. Ganymede nodded agreement. “Thisbe, that young sensayer of yours is a Gag-gene, and must be kept away from here at all costs, for his own sake more than anything. Children can leave this house, and he is proof. Will you watch him for me?”
knowing the Mitsubishi could raise the world’s rent at any time, double, triple, ten times, and no one could stop it. The majority fears the Mitsubishi, wants to stop them, to seize their land and redistribute it, by force if need be. This Black Sakura theft is someone lashing out, but everybody wants to.
How long until they start to defend themselves?” I remember when I was a young thing, two years orphaned and finally used to my reconstructed limbs.
think tank, and what inferiority complexes I might have picked up even before the accident as I grew up knowing all my playmates were genius children earmarked for greatness while I was not.
we had to squander some hours on the not-unpleasant task of gardening, it was the only way the Emperor could secure an undebated seat for the one bash’ for which he held the highest hopes.
“It’s happening already all around us. The property flows first, blood later. It’s going to happen! It is happening!” “Saladin, don’t let them say it!”
“Mycroft Canner!” Tully had another Utopian stalking behind him, though whether to protect him or restrain him I could not guess. “Why did you come here?”
Tully let the Pillarcat circle his legs. Its touch pulled his pants taut so I could see the contours of braces around his joints, unused to Earth’s harsh gravity. “Give me Apollo’s Iliad.” “It isn’t yours,” I answered. A Utopian car descended over us, and my captor-saviors gave me no chance to resist as they bundled me inside. “Give it to me!” Tully shouted after us. “I’m the one who’s going to finish it. Finish everything! Everything we started!”
“Everyone!” I heard him begin. “The Utopians haven’t been hiding Mycroft Canner. They’ve been hiding me from Mycroft Canner, and what they did here they did to protect you, to keep you from becoming what Mycroft Canner wanted you to become: murderers…”
My hands shook. “I saw Kohaku Mardi’s numbers in the Censor’s office, perfectly, as if someone engineered this Black Sakura affair to follow the Mardi’s plan. Please tell me that wasn’t you.” Their answer was sweet as rescue to a drowning man. “We neither help nor hinder, only ward.”
Sade’s public was unique in history, new radicals who lapped up forbidden pamphlets professing such scandalous suggestions as that, if he wished, a man might choose to examine his religion rationally, refuse taxation without representation, or stick his dick up a cow’s arse. Philosophy and pornography were both forbidden fruits, sold by one circuit of underground vendors. Even Diderot, le Philosophe, was jailed in younger days for writing porn—how better for our young arch-atheist to earn his daily baguette?
Sade warns that he who would use Reason as a key to open one door opens many, and he who would make Reason a scythe to fell injustices must beware what else the blade might cut.
We did not know that the threads sustaining the moral warp of our society were so interconnected until we pulled one. Since before man learned to count his summers, we had sown each generation’s seeds in tradition’s soil. Suddenly the Enlightenment would sow our seeds instead among the furrowed pages of the Encyclopedia, and water them with Reason. If the fruit grows black and strange, it will not matter that we have a philosophe willing to taste first and test for us whether we have raised manna or poison; as liberté and égalité grow universal, we have no other crop left on which to feed.
Carlyle de la Trémoïlle. Even has a dick between their legs to make them a legal heir. Does Ganymede have any other bastards?»
in slow motion. Imagine how impossible, to watch a movie or enjoy a conversation when it all seems like slow motion. Talk about ‘crippling a child’s ability to participate in and interface naturally and productively with the world at large.’” These last words, quoted from the Nurturist Eighth Law, made even touch-distracted Ganymede look up.
Jehovah presented proof after proof, and a century and a half of perfect secrecy was no match for Him. Madame silenced the lesser card players with bribes, but Caesar, Andō, and Ganymede, who frequented the middle level too for variety’s sake, saw at once the value of being able to negotiate in person with the Seventh Power.
“If you had something, something so wonderful that it seemed that it might … that, given the chance, it would make a better world, for everyone, forever, so much better, but first there was a danger, a terrible, terrible danger that it could rip everything we have apart … would you destroy that better world to save this one?” The wine fell as both MASON’s hands, black-sleeved and gray, seized me by the rough weave of my habit and hurled me to the floor. “Get out of my sight.” “What? Caesar, I—” “Never speak Apollo’s words again. Get out!”
will draw attention.” “I
Papadelias: “It’s too much. I expected a small conspiracy, a couple murders, not dozens over years, thirty-five using the cars themselves, as many by other means, but Cato knew … No wonder the others wouldn’t let Cato quit and become a Utopian.”
Guildbreaker: “Cato said, quote: ‘The Utopians aren’t dirty like the rest of us.’ From the point of view of someone who runs the cars, the thing which most distinguishes Utopians from everyone else is that they have their own separate system.
Papadelias: “While the rest of the world has been held together by shoestrings and assassination for the past seven years.”
Papadelias: “Fine. Since coming of age, the current generation of Saneer-Weeksbooth bash has been carrying out a series of systematic assassinations. The two Cartesian set-sets, Eureka Weeksbooth and Sidney Koons, can use the Transit System computers to figure out how to influence events by identifying low-profile people to assassinate, whose deaths won’t seem suspicious but will have the desired impact.
They’ve conspicuously avoided killing any Humanists, Mitsubishi, or Europeans, either because those Hives are backing them,
Papadelias: “It’s hard not to see it when you look. All it took was someone to point us at the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ and connect it with Sugiyama through Black Sakura. Someone wants this exposed.”
Plus, every member of that bash’ is insane to some degree. Being a mass murderer will do that to you. So will murdering your own ba’pas when they find out.”
Hive leaders involved in eighty assassinations over seven years will make Mycroft’s rampage look like a slow news day.”
But the Mardi murders were the most politically influential deaths in centuries.”
Why do you think Mycroft Canner can’t kill anymore?” Papadelias: “Can’t and won’t are very different things, Mason.” Guildbreaker: “I know. I said ‘can’t’ and I meant it.”
“Well, then, whatever impossible thing your J.E.D.D. Mason did to Mycroft Canner, let’s hope they can do it to ten billion more people before this news breaks. Eighty-five murders, it’ll be worse than the Set-Set Riots.”
