The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

Hubris it is, reader, to call one’s self the most anything in history: the most powerful, the most mistreated, the most alone.

War has not yet come, but the waters have withdrawn to form the tidal wave, leaving the beaches and their secrets bare. Hobbes tells us that war consists not in Battle only, but in that tract of time wherein the Will to Battle is so manifest that, scenting bloodlust in his fellows and himself, Man can no longer trust civilization’s pledge to keep the peace. If so, we are at war.

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.

There are more illiteracies than script, reader: Ancelet can read numbers, Headmaster Faust the subtleties of face and phrasing, Madame blushes, Eureka Weeksbooth her ten billion balls of light, while others read stones, DNA, star streaks, the flights of birds—all hen scratch to the untrained. I think all humans feel rage at our finitude when we see others read what we cannot. In some eras fire was the solution, to burn, like infected sheets, the witches and heretic philosophers who read too well the signs and stars. But wiser eras hold such prophets dear.

Wars end when somebody makes peace. I’m going to start making that peace right now.

If you remain neutral, then there will be a corner of this world that’s separate, inviolable, safe. There will be someone who can negotiate with all sides—what priests and women used to be in wartime.

“The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”

The World’s Mom sighed, slumping like an oak bough, burdened with a child’s swing, when the child returns, grown up, and places the full weight of adulthood on the tired wood.

desperate to prove their innocence by punishing the guilty,

I wouldn’t put it past Fate’s whimsy to make me real but leave my gods a pack of empty superstition.

made living tissue of the deep, turning invisible currents to visible tendrils, and granting the Mediterranean vast eyes to stare back at we who imagined ourselves safe on her shore.

Each death is an infinite waste, but infinity still has degrees. If a new Dark Age tears the Great Project down again, we lose more than current lives, we lose the past ones that were sacrificed for it.

Humor, mankind’s survival strategy, brought absurd images before my mind here, mobs in blasted wastelands, raising impossibly honest banners: “Financial stability! Self-determination! Xenophobia!” We do need pretexts for our wars. A man may leap into the fray in the name of Liberty, Homeland, Human Rights, Justice, but never Economics.

I cursed the weakness which made me, not only unworthy, but unable to serve the cause as purely as I loved it.

April the twelfth is a High Holiday, the highest, Yuri’s Night, the day mankind first broke Earth’s eggshell and touched our rightful Space—a day for hope, for thanks, for recommitment to the Great Project.

It drips, meat on the bone, in a way no meatmaker steak does, the living juices of the animal still quick inside the tissues, as if seeking a heart to give them life again.

「What assurance can you give that we’ll really be protected?」 Saladin smiles. 「The assurance the gardener gives the insect; we will try not to step on you so long as you destroy more weeds than crops.」

“Good. Have the Minor Senators any motions or recommendations?” The ten Minor Senators were all in attendance, youthful voices without the culpability of votes, who sit in the front row and speak for the millions who are old enough to realize that they live under a law, but have not yet passed the Adulthood Competency Exam and earned the right and burden of making said law.

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

most callous about Providence is not when millions die, but when a child lies dying in a gutter, and the child’s death does serve some higher Purpose, but the child can’t understand, and dies thinking the suffering is meaningless.

Gravity does not grant wishes.

Reason itself in crisis, as when tedious arithmetic reveals slowly to Galileo a different Plan and Maker than the ancients knew,

“Separation and confusion cause pain, a form of evil, and prevent the joy and creativity which are the fruits of human contact. I do not wish you pain, nor to decrease the sum of human happiness and achievement.”

existence is truth; lies unmake truth and so unmake existence; that is evil.”

“I wish to restore to you that familiar company which understands your thoughts and language as no other can, and so reaches through the darkness of miscommunication which isolates every human soul; your shortest name for this concept is bash’. I wish too to give you Truth, and the means to share what Truth you have with Earth now and Posterity beyond. These things I freely give. It proves again your Author’s love of symmetry that you have the means to give the same to Me.”

a library’s solemn walls force tirades to couch themselves in whispers.

blood salt dissolved the present as sun dissolves sleep.

The middle voice, that is how I often think of Martin. There was a third option in Homer’s Greek between active and passive verbs, the middle voice, a subtle space between the doer who creates or kills and the recipient who is created or is killed. Between these opposites lies he who causes but does not do the deed himself. The patron touches no stone, yet builds the cathedral; the judge wields no sword, yet strikes off the traitor’s head.

The ancient Manichean cult believed the universe was a great war between a force of Good and one of Evil. In such a world there is true right, true wrong, and Evil was not mere imperfection necessitated by our Maker’s Plan but a Maker in itself, which schemes and undoes while the other loves and gives. This Manichean sentiment leaked quickly into other cults, especially those veins of Christianity which imagined the universe as a struggle between God and Satan, instead of a play where God the Author scripts out rebel Lucifer and loyal Michael with equal absoluteness. The Manicheans had vocal enemies, the Platonists, Saint Augustine, many who argued that light is something, shadow its mere absence, so Good is Real but Evil merely a diluted good, like fabric with too many holes to hold. 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. Soon the Manichees became Europe’s stock stupid heresy, something only an idiot would fall for. But then she breaks, the Dawn of Reason with her rosy fingers, and brings us Montaigne, Descartes, and Pierre Bayle. Bayle raised the problem first, the ambidextrous Bayle, as Voltaire called him, forever seeming to write one thing with his right hand and another in a footnote with his left, confounding censors by hiding his arguments in pieces, as prisoners hide their tools. In his dictionary entry on the Maniche...

Love. If social mores have one purpose, it is to armor us against the instincts that Hobbes knows made wild life so brutish, and so short.

She did this to them, reader, planned it and enjoyed it. I dared pray in that moment that, if these two great men must fall, they will not fall for her.

The fittest survived, but with the conquered within them, as conquered bacteria became the mitochondria which feed the cells that crawl through volvox, trilobite, and coelacanth toward Mars.

Land is real. Immortal, as the fruits of lifetimes’ labors cannot be on Time’s grand scale. Just as the ancient bronzesmith leaves no fingerprint on our towers of steel, so today’s great achievements will someday be invisible within the great machines that are to us the future, and to distant generations trash. Yet after a million sunsets there will still be acres, dirt, and dawn. The Earth is real, and one who owns a sliver of her owns something eternal.

twelve acres of olive groves and grazing land where young goats frisk after their dams, it would take a harsher threat than politics to pry that property from me. If it were Greek, that is. My Greece I know, and love, and understand. Twelve acres near Detroit or Halifax are to me as interchangeable as empty euros. But perhaps the Mitsubishi truly are wiser than Europe, and truly can love all Earth the same.

There was no malice in Martin’s face as he ended the call, just mild efficiency, as when rain moves in to work its life-giving duty, parade or no.

I feel like I’ve spent my life training young architects, but been thanked only by the ones who gave it up to become tent-dwelling nomads.”

Such Laws are immutable and eternal. To forget any of them leads inevitably to war. It can never change that peace is endangered if one man tries to reserve to himself some Right which he will not share with everyone else, or if, in cases of revenge, men dwell on the greatness of the evil past, instead of thinking of the greatness of the good to follow, and so let private vendetta grow into public ruin.

Apollo’s sigil on their backs, grim enough to remind us that the Sun is merely our nearest taste of violent starfire.

It felt like Olympus inside, reader, a hall of gods arrayed on creaking theatre seats which seemed to me like thrones. I do not mean universal Gods like Jehovah and His Peer, nor immortal gods like Zeus. I mean what you, Master Hobbes, named with reverence a ‘mortal god,’ that earthly power, charged to keep peace and defend its own, which answers to nothing between itself and the Immortal God above.

I have shown you lynch mobs, reader, or their bloody wakes at least. 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?

these Blacklaw madmen are philosophers enough to still care about grand questions in the midst of petty ones.

“I struggle to understand the reason for this question. All things are possible. Why must I specify que a specific thing is possible when all things are?”

I learned from him that all the activities of my life, all my duty, my penitence, my love, all these are mere diversions to distract me from thinking about the only certainty: someday I will die. We all will. All human achievement, our empires, good deeds, art, the Great Project itself, all are distractions, invented by a race so weak we cannot sit still in a chair for five minutes and face our finitude. What is Caesar but a man so rich in power that he can afford to be distracted every instant of every day?

What will this next war claim: Athens? On the Acropolis at least the tears we shed are still tears of connection: where I stand Socrates stood. In the Blackframe Roman Forum, by the Blackframe Coliseum or the Blackframe Pantheon, they are regret tears. Replicas cannot touch. That is what we all want, to touch what someone touched, a special someone, different for each of us, whose story reached forward through history and touched us. We want to reciprocate that touch as friends do. Who touches you, reader? Whose touch do you want to reciprocate, thwarting the walls of time? Raphael? Socrates? Machiavelli? Caesar? Homer? Hobbes?

“Making war.” He Who Visits paused to wrestle words. “A strange verb phrase. War consists in unmaking: lives, creations, peace.”

There is no treasure in any bank vault to match the presumption of honesty, the willingness to believe that what we said—even what I said—was what we truly believed. They all presumed our honesty, every priest and rabbi and shaman and sensayer, throughout the hours of those talks. Not everyone thought everyone else was right—this was a conference of doctrinal adversaries—but everyone believed that what each person said was what that person honestly believed.

I have never understood Janus. He is one of those few gods the Romans didn’t borrow from us: their two-faced god of beginnings, changes, doorways, enterprise, and many other vague, liminal concepts that are difficult for my mind to pry off the domains of more familiar deities like Hermes.

The graffiti knew it was a show.

We set off for Antarctica at once. The edge of the world. Here chaos was sculptress, castles of nature-hewn ice, ice walls, ice towers, serving nothing except the infinite glare of sun and frozen surface. We forget, I think, how the countryside we think of as “wild” has been reshaped so many times by life, how the jungle’s false chaos is really a scripted mesh of symmetry, leaf matching leaf, child parent, every life-form acting out its role as strictly as the dancer spinning on a music box. Life’s symmetry has had no hand in this Antarctic, nor adaptation, cycle, food chain. All there is as random as the Moon, and when a … shape of ice which has no name, as big as … itself, for it was the biggest thing that I had ever tried to label with a size, loomed before me, I tasted the terror that stands twin to the romance of touching a new world. Death. It was Death, beautiful and certain. We are a coddled species, reared in soft soil where we have but to cast seed to the earth for food to grow. Outside that cradle waits only freezing and starvation. Yet, like the first green sprout that raises brave leaves against the bare volcanic rock of some new island, so, bright with hope, here rose the domes of Esperanza City.

The Great Soldier snorted, impatient as a bull. “Talking car. There’s good reason horses don’t talk.” Did you chuckle, reader? A guard beside us did, but I could not, for fear has long since made me memorize my Homer. One of Achilles’s horses spoke once, granted speech by white-armed Hera, and prophesied the hero’s coming doom, before the beast was struck mute by those same Furies who will claim me when my own turn comes to face the famous horseman Death. It was no joke to us.