More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I frowned. “Sniper, did your bash’ actually consult the Wish List when you planned hits and crashes? I know Eureka read it, but did you ever act on it?”
“Why? Nine hundred and eighty-nine million humanists, almost nine-tenths of the Hive, added votes to a list of people they wanted dead.
I’m certified insane, so my testimony can’t be used in court.
Which will matter more to the human race in two thousand years, an old war starting one month earlier or later, or a record of the mistakes
This was April the fifteenth, reader, a day the world will wear black if we live to see another April. It was Tully who found the news first. “They just indicted all of you.” “My whole bash’?” Sniper asked. “No, your whole Hive.” Tully’s war-wraiths twitched like the tails of self-satisfied cats. “They just indicted every living Humanist as accessories to the last sixteen hits O.S. made, plus two hundred and fifty thousand counts of conspiracy to commit murder.”
“That’s how many names are on the Wish List.”
Codefendants. A codefendant may not fill any office in a trial. Now no Humanist could get near Prospero’s trial, or Ganymede’s, not as investigator, polylaw, expert witness, nor as judge. Nor as judge, reader.
Alliance which is more precious, all one’s worldly goods, or one’s right to have one of one’s Hivefellows—or for the Hiveless Lawfellows—among one’s judges, even the most gilded miser would hesitate.
Tribunal requires three judges from three different Hives—or Laws for Hiveless—one chosen by the prosecution and two by the defendant, and we always choose one fro...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
will now have O.S. tried by outraged Cousins, vengeful Masons, clinical Brillists, terrified Europeans, suspect Mitsubishi, distant Hiveless, more distant Utopians, and not a single Human.
What are your projections? What are we looking at?” We have so many oracles: Sidney, Eureka, Ancelet, Su-Hyeon—I should have known Tully would be one too. In thirteen years, he had not lived up to a twentieth part of his parents’ legacy, but neither had he ignored the training notes left by
Those garage-built missiles, which had reduced Brussels’s Parliament to ash,
“Hard, but you’re hardy,” Tully answered. “You’ll endure. Six months into this war the Humanists will still be a central, fighting power.” He frowned as Sniper’s stare asked for more. “Anyone who thinks they can see reliably more than six months into this war is as mad as Mycroft.”
or the Mars War in 2650 will end the human race, forever. Apollo showed you that.”
am lying to you, reader. I just realized. Reading back these last few paragraphs I recognize my fantasy, not memory, taking control.
useless. It was my Enemy who made these arguments. It was Tully Mardi who saved the world.
Addressee: “There is a Purpose; that is not the same as Good.” O.S.: “What purpose?” The Addressee: “It seems I have not given enough attention to that question. I thank you, My adversary, for reminding Me. You are wise. I grieve that you too will so likely die in this.”
did not tattletale, reader, but Martin Guildbreaker is no fool. With a scrap of paper and an offhand remark by Cato Weeksbooth it had taken him and Papa four days to expose O.S.
“They won’t have to, they’ll use Dominic, and Ganymede and Danaë, and Heloïse, don’t forget Heloïse ran into the Senate in a nun’s habit, and that’s not the worst of it. When people put it together that a Blacklaw started all this—” “Merion Kraye started all this.”
“Then you don’t intend to abdicate?” MASON’s tone grew night dark, almost urgent. “You told me a King of Spain can’t marry a prostitute. You promised me!”
Madame cocked her head. “We’re going to Rome next week. Didn’t Jehovah tell you?”
“I trust you mean you’re going to Romanova,” MASON pronounced. “No, real Rome. The Vatican Reservation.” Sunlight on Madame’s painted face made her smile too bright. “His Catholic Majesty and I have much to arrange.”
Law’s sting made Isabel Carlos II rise at once. “I will not have this conversation without a sensayer present.” « Majesté … » Madame purred. “No. Playing around in Paris as we have was crime enough, but I will not break the First Law while standing in my family’s ancestral nunnery.” “Are you going to have Jehovah legitimated?” The question broke from Caesar like storm over a mountain peak.
MASON blocked the exit. “Are you going to Rome to get papal dispensation to marry a prostitute? Or are you going to legitimate your bastard?” I could not see the king’s face, but I could see the tremor in his jaw. “I’m sorry. I know it’s against our arrangement.” “I will not let you make Jehovah your heir.” “Prince Leonor is dead.” “There are others in line for your throne.” “It has to be my child.” “You have cousins.” “I had cousins; death by Merion Kraye.” A different, blacker anger joined the rage already rumbling through MASON. “Kraye killed your entire family?”
“I will not let you make Jehovah your heir,” MASON pronounced. “They are my heir.” “I will not let you make Jehovah take the Crown Prince’s oath of loyalty to you and the Spanish people.”
way—but Joyce actively wants to live up to the old archetype and be a filthy, treacherous, honor-destroying whore. Right now you’re the only evidence the world has that there can be a morally pure leader anymore. Joyce will tear that all down. For fun. To prove they can.”
Martin the Manichean. Mycroft ‘Martin’ Guildbreaker had borne the nickname, and its cultish stigma, patiently since he was sixteen and the Master Who renamed him six.
Martin the Manichean, the character from Voltaire’s Candide.
All Hives are Frankenstein chimeras, stitched from mergered peoples: the Humanists were born from the Olympians and One Big Party,
after the Great Renunciation, when dozens of newborn Hivelets vied for slices of mankind.
Greenpeace, lean of members but fat with forests, farms, and mountains. In Greenpeace had gathered those who loved the land, the farmers, shepherds, seaherds, naturalists,
the Church War’s carnage
While for a European or a Humanist one life is one vote, every unit of property a Mitsubishi Member owns is one extra share in the corporation, an extra vote.
Greenpeace’s property brought two billion new votes into the Mitsubishi Hive, one billion to raise a Greenpeace Director, the other billion to be wooed by the dominant voting blocs which vie eternally for the other eight seats.
“We want Romanova to officially declare that engaging in combat in designated nature reserves, or transporting or storing war materials there, legally constitutes ‘action likely to result in extensive or uncontrolled destruction of Nature,’ and is thus banned by the Second Black Law|We have a list of about two hundred and fifty thousand individual areas we think are justified in being declared off-limits to the war|”
“You’re asking me to create borders|
“I’m asking you to create borders around rainforests, and orangutans, and baby elephants|We need these borders|”
That same day, April fifteenth, the Sensayers’ Conclave presented to the Senate their plan for stabilizing public discourse about the resurrection. The plan reeked of Julia, and gave unprecedented liberty for small-group in-bash’ religious discourse, enough so that some wise and bitter critics warned it would turn the world from ten billion independent minds into a billion bash’-sized churches.
“I think Martin’s right, Papa,” I said. “I think the Mitsubishi see all their land as homeland, regardless of location. We have to imagine they’re all going to be as stubborn as we’d be giving up Delphi or Mycenae.
Up for debate first came Minister Cook’s hateful reintroduction of the Set-Set Law, which heightened the fervor around the Mitsubishi strike.
the world remembers the Set-Set Riots, and knows that the entrepreneurial Mitsubishi train and employ the lion’s share of set-sets.
MASON: “I support land redistribution.”
MASON: “The landgrab is an economic bottleneck, not to mention poison for the Mitsubishi themselves. Land monopoly turns tenants into lynch mobs.”
Utopia will strike, just like they did in the days of Son Majesté Impérial Mycroft MASON. That’s when it turns nasty.”
I do not know what answer MASON gave in the end. The Emperor did publicly condemn hasty land laws like Odessa’s, and the Mitsubishi strike did end.
triumphed one hundred thirty-two against a bitter sixty-eight, casting Cook’s resurrected Set-Set Law back into the dust of history.
A Whitelaw Tribune vetoed at once,
Meanwhile, Dominic’s hastily appointed Acting Mitsubishi Senators can say with honesty: “I don’t support O.S. Look, I even voted to kill Sniper.” Nicely played, Dominic. You make Madame proud.
but he who would visit Blacklaw lands consents to witness murder in the street and place no blame.
Hobbestown’s Eight Customs, also Called Natural Laws, enforced by nothing more than mob retribution, and crowned here by the Blacklaws’ brave commandment:
