The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

I wondered briefly whether Prospero understood the full depth of the compliment, coming from the one man in the world who could see the impact rippling through the past perhaps better than set-sets could. No matter. His president had praised him. A spearman’s joy as he receives praise from Athena’s lips does not depend on how well he understands the goddess’s mastery of one particular technique.

Perhaps no mind has ever so united all the spearpoints of philosophy in one phalanx against him, but the Beast of Malmesbury—Hobbes’s title, as saturated with dread as the Patriarch’s with honor—used Reason’s highest arts to paint portraits of Nature, God, and Man so perfect that not one brushstroke could be criticized, yet so abominable that they left the reader unable to respect humanity. So desperately Hobbes’s readers cried, “We are not brutes! We do not hate and fear each other so! Humanity is a fair race! Noble! Good!” But they could not prove it, not against Hobbes’s flawless descriptions of the realities of human malice. All the land’s horses and all the land’s men could not cure the Hobbesian infection, not for the twenty years it took John Locke to develop his Blank Slate, the only antitoxin. And even with that antitoxin in our reading list, Leviathan looms still from time to time, when some new dreadful deed of humankind reminds us how well Hobbes’s cold, aggressive war of all on all describes our state.

“National rivalries are not a problem I know how to solve,” Achilles answered flatly. “I’m more a product of nation and geography than any man living. It’s also not Europe’s biggest problem as I see it.” “No? What is, then?” “Rage,” Achilles son of Peleus replied. “That will be your problem, Europe’s cry for revenge, likely unstoppable.” He paused. “Or rather, you might be able to stop it but you won’t like the price.”

one must take whatever opportunities one can regarding set-sets. That’s not even a question. Not to hurt the set-sets themselves, of course, they’re just clockwork tombstones testifying to past infanticide, no, it’s the abominable fools that make them that must be stopped. If convenient. If inconvenient, it can be postponed. The number of children unmade by set-set training is not large compared to the number who might be killed in riots if the issue is badly handled.”

Achilles: “You believe I am what I am, then? You didn’t even ask to see Patroclus.” Faust: “Dear boy, I believed you the instant you stepped through the doorway. You walk like a horse, and continued straight three paces as if to let your hind-quarters pass the doorpost before turning toward me. I know no one else who was raised by centaurs. There are other signs.”

Charlemagne was no longer Minister of Labor, nor even technically the leading Mason in the Senate, but had passed those honors on in order to graduate to the more essential office of assisting the Speaker as the Unofficial Nonpartisan Resolver of Unnecessary Bickering.

And for Achilles they are even stranger, this mad claim that laws are not handed down by kings, fathers, or even Father Zeus, but excavated from Nature herself by the philosopher’s spade.

It is an intolerable crime to break a legal contract which one has made voluntarily without duress or pressure, and with full understanding of its terms, conditions, and consequences, unless an unforeseen change in circumstances renders the contract’s terms destructive, absurd, or cruel, in which case a settlement must be found which is as fair as possible to all parties who have acted in good faith throughout.

This is a much higher weight on contract than the common law legal systems have -- all sorts of things are unenforceable blessings without being destructive, absurd, or cruel -- penalty clauses, for instance, are unenforceable.

agree with your Maimonides that divine things are often more easily defined by what they are not than by what they are. My universe does not have time, space, limit, ignorance, discovery, exploration, hope, solitude, or death.”

If the mote cannot perceive the workings of the Whole, how can the Whole comprehend the anguish of the mote?”

never forget how many of history’s kings have waged wars to avoid acknowledging a bastard.

I can't think of such a war...

The child of such a pair should have ridden on sphinx-back across an Earth that did not deserve to touch his feet, while on his coat the avatars of human intellect should war like angels through the cityscape of man’s cyclopean unconscious. Instead he whined.

“Stop being such a grown-up, Tully,” Sniper snapped back. “Mycroft and I can be enemies in five minutes or tomorrow. Now is pretend time. We all need that sometimes.” “We can’t all have it! [We treated Mycroft like family, and they ripped out seven of our bash’members’ hearts and ate them. Ripped them out and ate them!]”

So fierce were the Christian counterarguments that later generations used the Manichean heresy for target practice, re-proving its folly in theology exams to demonstrate their syllogisms.

I love this phrase.

How many fewer—set-set and Servicer alike—might have died in Odessa if the Hives had shared the Blacklaw custom that one may not lynch anyone without first asking the best-informed person in town whether we’re being idiots?

Some acts are too cruel, reader, even for philosophers. If William of Ockham’s art we dub a razor, and if Nietzsche subtitled his Twilight of the Idols “How to Philosophize with a Hammer,” then Pascal’s is surely a flaying knife, petal-thin and cruel, that peels the victim’s skin back inch by inch, leaving no shield between the tender soul and the infinite dark mirror. And he does more, Pascal, he bares our race’s flaws as well, civilization’s cowardly underbelly.

“Now there’s some top-quality despair. If you won’t give me a number, look at these forty-eight pictures of things eating bananas.” Faust held out a tablet, since the ancient room contained no screens. Absurdity awoke what charm could not. “Why?” Faust stiffened. “I am Headmaster of Brill’s Institute and Steward of Gordian, the First Hive, which birthed the best age this planet has ever known. When I tell you to look at forty-eight pictures of things eating bananas, you do not ask why.” Carlyle swallowed. “Sorry.” Forty-eight pictures of things eating bananas later: “Well?” Faust prompted. “What do you think?” “I … I think sharks look really weird eating bananas.”

But can I be called good if I merely desire their happiness, but do not attempt to achieve it? Achieving it would require Me to endeavor to twist My Peer’s Plan toward kind and human things, toward compromise, away from war, yet He has laid out war before Me, and such rich questions to be tested by it, meat for Our Conversation. I am invited here by Him, not them, and am a poor Guest if I shun My Host’s table to aid the garden ants.

They’re all noble creatures, Thisbe, except you, you’re a…” Her eyes dared me to finish. “You’re a tick.” She snorted. “A tick? That’s the best you have?” “You’re a tick, Thisbe,” I spat it this time, spat it like a curse. “A tick, and you feed, and you bloat, and you crawl, and you think it makes you something poetic and exciting, like a vampire, and you’re so wrong.”

Thisbe: “That isn’t funny. Come on, who sent you?” Achilles: “Rage.”

Snerk.

They asked whether he would take one life to save ten. He answered that each of the sixty-six lives he had personally taken had, he believed, saved millions; if there were a vaccine that would save tens of millions of lives, but sixty-six people would die from allergic complications, then Romanova, any Hive, any power that had authority to say yes would say yes.

They were more a teacher and adviser, like a quiet, deposed king who labored modestly alongside us and solved our problems with masterful statecraft when we asked for aid, but had no heart for the bloody road back to the throne.