Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)

by Ada Palmer

“A sensayer is”—sobs punctuated his answer like hiccups—“somebody who—loves the universe so—so much they—spend their whole life—talking about—all the different—ways that it—could be.”

The Simile of the Three Insects was originally about knowledge, not wealth. Our age’s founding hero, Gordian Chairman Thomas Carlyle, stole the simile from Sir Francis Bacon,

Hive is a stolen name, born from a stolen simile, but the Three Insects which Carlyle stole from Bacon, Bacon had in turn stolen from Petrarch, Petrarch from Seneca, and Seneca perhaps from some more ancient ancient swallowed since by time. There is no more shame in reusing such a rich inheritance than in knowing other kings’ hands held this sword before you drew it from the stone.

Gyges Device—that’s what I call it in my mind, after the invisibility ring from Plato’s fable, which tempts even the most virtuous to crime.

Do you know the reference, reader? Or does your age, forgetful of its past, no longer know Le Patriarch by that worthy epithet? Have you forgotten the first pen stronger than swords? The firebrand who spread Reason’s light across the Earth, battled intolerance, religious persecution, torture, forced kings to bow before the Rights of Man, and introduced wit into philosophy again? Is Aristotle not still known by the honorable title of the Philosopher? Shakespeare the Bard? Brill the Cognitivist? How then can you forget the Patriarch?

It is hard for me to express what extraordinary praise Eureka’s reply carried: <voker.> Why do we shorten the words most precious to us? Ba’pa from bash’parent, ba’sib from bash’sibling, in old days mom from mother, Prince from princeps, Pope from papa, and here the hasty ‘voker,’ never the archaic ‘vocateur.’ In 2266, when the work week finally shortened to twenty hours, and crowds deserted those few professions which required more, the first Anonymous, Aurel Gallet, rushed to defend ‘vocation’ with a tract which is still mandatory reading for three Hive-entry programs.

Why is a calling passive, he asked? Why is one called helplessly to one’s vocation, when surely it is an active thing? I find my calling, take it, seize that delight, that path before me, make it mine. I call it like a summoned magic, it does not call me. His new word ‘vocateur’ (one who calls) was born to remind us that a person with a strong vocation is not a victim driven helplessly to toil, but a lucky soul whose work is also pleasure, and to whom thirty, forty, fifty hours are welcome ones.

I watched his face relax, as at the touch of dew.

which weave through the world economy, and which we search for snarls in the weft.

It takes Su-Hyeon or me twelve minutes to run the numbers once. Toshi, whose dark fingers play spreadsheets as fluently as harp-strings, can manage it in eight. The Censor would demand twenty-one revisions before Su-Hyeon couldn’t take it anymore. “I did factor in the increase in Humanists visiting the Moon this time! Cells HH26 and HN56, are you blind?”

Again, reader, do not wrestle with the numbers. Do not even read the chart unless you are an economic historian reconstructing this precarious time. Think instead of Vivien Ancelet, studying the data as a doctor listens to a child’s breath, or views an ultrasound and sees disaster where the others see only blobs. His hands clench, tendons stand erect. If you cannot imagine numbers have such power to move a man, imagine instead one of his historical counterparts: you are the tutor who has sensed something strange about this youth Caligula; you are the native who sees a second set of white sails on the horizon following the first; you are the hound who feels the tremors of the tsunami about to crash on Crete and erase the Minoan people, but you know no one will heed you, even if you bark.

Dominic throws his head back into a climactic thirsty gasp. Carlyle shivered when he described the experience to me, and compared it to how he imagines John Calvin might have laughed as he witnessed some atrocity, smug at finding proof that this fallen world was truly as despicable as his sermons taught.

“My guess is they’re a gadfly specialist. Some sensayers practice a special, aggressive style so you can do a one-time session with them if you really want to be pushed to the core, and then you and your usual sensayer work on the new questions it raises. The Blacklaw mystique would certainly work to enhance the feeling of danger.”

Together, armed with kitchen warmth and metaphysics, the two spent a good hour erasing the after-chill of their encounter.

When we arrived, the actor who was to portray Chairman Carlyle today was already at the podium between the tombs, in costume in that signature green suit with its antiquated tapered necktie. Terry Lugli has made a career of playing our world’s hero in plays and films, even once playing Carlyle’s namesake, the Nineteenth-Century historian Thomas Carlyle, distant great-uncle to our world hero. The historian Carlyle argued that human progress is shaped and triggered primarily by Great Men which Nature sometimes drops into our midst. What would he not have given to be able to peek into the future and use his great descendant as an example?

What we choose means more than what is handed to us by chance.

I will count every citizen who leaves and rejoins my country a more loyal Spaniard, a more sincere Spaniard, a truer Spaniard,

Carlyle tiptoed behind her, savoring the song of insects, the buffeting of grass fluff aglow with slanting sun. To an expert, his delight in the Book of Nature might betray something of Carlyle’s own beliefs, which his sensayer’s vows forbid him to discuss, but I will not strip him naked yet.

As when a mountain climber on some cloud-locked peak grows so weary that he forgets the world around him in the pain, and pull, and pain, and pull, aware of nothing but his muscles, fog, and stone, but then suddenly a bright wind sweeps the clouds aside, and there open the boundless blue heavens, the sentinel heads of mountains thrusting through the fog floor, and the climber gasps as he sees, sovereign up above, the terrible, all-giving Sun, so Carlyle gasped at the sight of Bridger. And so he should. So should we all.

Carlyle: “That’s right. Epicureanism is a philosophy from twenty-eight hundred years ago. Epicurus thought there was no afterlife, so the most important thing was to be happy in this life. But Epicureans didn’t like quick pleasures like food and alcohol and love affairs, because after you’ve been drunk you feel awful, or when the love affair ends you usually feel awful too. Epicureans focused on kinds of happiness that last a long time, like friendship, a beautiful garden, or thinking about philosophy.”

Child: “That doesn’t make up for it. I like me, and I like gardens, and my friends. I think everybody likes themselves and their friends. How could they think it’s not bad to lose all that? I think they’re stupid Epicureans.” Man: “I don’t think they’re stupid, but I do think you have a very reasonable objection. There are many answers to your question when you ask why they thought death without an afterlife could be good. One possible answer has to do with how different life was back then.”

Man: “That’s a positive definition, saying what it is, not what it isn’t. They used a negative definition instead.” Child: “Why?” Man: “A lot of people think it has to do with the difference between what life was like in ancient Greece and what life is like now. Nowadays life is pretty good, don’t you think?

I give you the Renunciation Day party of Ganymede Jean-Louis de la Trémoïlle, Duc de Thouars, Prince de Talmond, President of the Humanists. Versailles was not so gilded, Paris so chic, Hollywood so glamorous, nor Babylon so infamous as the town of La Trimouille since the Duke’s return. The French Nobility was officially disbanded on June the twenty-third 1790, but nostalgia is more powerful than any law. So, when this young stranger bought up a clump of lots unworthy of the name ‘estate’ and declared himself to be the Duke returning to his ancestral lands, the locals rejoiced at this opportunity for fame and tourism.

I believe there has never been, nor shall be again, a government as stable as the Humanists. Rome grew mighty under Kings, then stifled as they became tyrants, forcing the bloody revolution which birthed the Republic. When that Republic’s conquests outgrew the Senate’s power to govern, it took a second bloodbath to return to monarchy. How many bloodbaths has France endured? India? China? Florence and Athens, trapped in their constitutions, unable to switch to monarchy when crisis demanded one voice? The Humanists alone have escaped this cycle, trusting voters to choose not only governors, but governments. Humanist elections have no short list of candidates.

If you are not a Brillist, you must know the discomfort of feeling your inner self exposed by a method you can’t completely disbelieve in, as if you knocked the deck from a Tarot reader’s hand, and she gave a penetrating look at the fallen cards, and then at you.

A constellation is a group of distant objects which form a tight whole from our perspective, but may really be light-centuries apart, one a nearby dwarf, a second a giant a thousand times as distant, a third not a star at all but a galaxy, which to our distance-blinded eyes seems just another speck.

Imagine Empress Livia, waiting in the palace while Augustus forges treaties in the Senate house, content since her offices too throng with clients who spread her imperious touch from Spain to Syria.

How shall I describe these princes’ faces as they hear that news? Imagine the ancient Senate hearing word that Caesar has just crossed the Rubicon; they do not yet know how much destruction this will spell, but it cannot end in nothing.

Legend says that Emperor Constantine, converted on his deathbed, willed the Roman Empire to the Christian Church, and in one act both ensured that Church’s immortality and doomed Europe to nineteen centuries of wars for God;

What are humanity’s great dreams? To conquer the world? To split the atom? When Alexander spread his empire from the Mediterranean to India, we say he conquered the world, but he barely touched a quarter of it. We lie. We lie again when we say we split the atom. ‘Atom’ was supposed to be the smallest piece of matter—all we did is give that name to something we can split, knowing that there are quarks and tensors, other pieces smaller that we cannot touch, and only these deserve the title ‘atom.’

Man is more ambitious than patient. When we realize we cannot split a true atom, cannot conquer the whole Earth, we redefine the terms to fake our victory, check off our boxes and pretend the deed is done.

Such things are supposed to be extinct in our Enlightened age, but if civilization continues another millennium, another ten, drunk people will never become less stupid.

“Aimer was just reading more of Les Misérables with me!” His elbows jabbed my ribs as he climbed onto me, and his legs spilled out of the chair over mine, like a hermit crab in need of a new shell. “I think Jean Valjean would get along really well with Odysseus, don’t you? They could talk about what it’s like being on a really long journey with lots of different stages and never knowing if it’s almost over, and I bet Odysseus would have lots of clever suggestions for how Valjean could disguise themself and never be caught!”

The Major gazed darkly at me, reminding me of his objections when the mining bots had dragged Les Misérables from the dump, a real old paper copy, somehow still legible. I had not had the heart to forbid Bridger to read it, but at story time Bridger always used to turn on the waterworks even when the ‘bad guy’ died. Now we were watching the bookmark crawl millimeter by millimeter through the masterpiece which brings tears to the eyes of disillusioned adults. We all imagine happy endings to such books, pick out the page, the paragraph, in which we would step in and pluck the innocents to safety.

The sky was a vivid overcast, white as a canvas against which the endless flocks of Cielo de Pájaros soared tauntingly: you claim, humans, to have mastered the skies, but you race through them on your busy way, while we, we play.

Discipulosne mittere ut doceant et pro Sicario aliisque substituant? (Should I send students to learn and substitute for Sniper and the others?)