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“J.E.D.D. Mason likes the truth,” Ancelet and I answered in unplanned unison.
How does it feel, I wonder, to bear the sins, not of a father, but of a semiparent, half forgotten? Before your dynasty was founded, noble king, some maternal grandfather, with far too many “greats” before his name, was a murderer. Before your forefathers made the small fortune you used to make your large one, they bought their tickets to the New World with corpse-loot. Before there was a Humanist President there was an Olympian President, whose successors merged with O.B.P. to form the Humanists, and it was that Olympian President who brought O.S.’s curse on both your houses.
What a privilege for Prospero to have passed the absolute test: love, Nature, and nurture all on one side and only loyalty upon the other.
Ockham Prospero Saneer does not flinch at monsters, be they flesh or words, but I do. Terra Ignota, our young law’s Unknown Lands. The geographic nations had 3,934 years from Hammurabi to the Great Renunciation to map out the kingdoms of their law, while our Hive laws were breech-born in the hasty wilderness of war.
Hence the honest and necessary plea: terra ignota. I did the deed, but I do not myself know whether it was a crime. Arm thyself well for this trial, young polylaw; here at the law’s wild borders there be dragons.
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.
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.”
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Faust: “Think of an enormous number. Lots and lots.” Achilles: “A thousand.” Faust: “Exquisite.”
William Cline liked this
I lived through the Senate Meeting of April the thirteenth, 2454, but I could no more touch those marble benches than you could stop the arrow that deprived Achilles of his first Patroclus back in Troy, or he, wading knee-deep through the mud-blood of the Scamander plane, could reach forward to save your life, or Bridger’s.
representing Graylaws came Jay Sparhawk, master gambler, sailor, marine ecologist, and longtime first mate of the flagship Ahab’s Folly, around whose salt-white sails the flotilla city Neverland assembles whenever the Seaborn nation-strat requires a capital;
“Here, on the Twentieth day of January, 2239, Senator Mycroft MASON filibustered six hours and sixteen minutes against the passage of a new Black Law and was assassinated.”
“Now there’s a symbol, and not an ignoble one: kill me if it will serve the human race. Many have worn lesser sigils proudly. Many will wear this one. When you can tell friend from foe, you can make battle lines.” Flush rose in the great commander’s cheeks, flush of anticipation, anger, readiness. “With this you can make war.”
If you want your commanders to survive a week, you want no difference in uniform visible from more than a few meters away. Marking them out like this is madness! Think, child, the enemy’s name is Archer!… I mean, Sniper.”
Had you forgotten Sniper’s second shot?
Yes
His agent, a child narratively resembling Asclepius here known as Bridger,
Even Tully. I would have called them poison incantations, the videos which leaked from my coward enemy, fertilizing the thorny weeds of war. The king called them instead « the prayers of one who, despairing of peace, hopes at least to warm the war with meaning.
“Tully, while it’s true I’ll never rest in peace until I’ve killed you, you’re low on the list of reasons I will never rest in peace.”
She would be mourning too for the child we reared together, we strange godparents, the Major, Mommadoll, myself, and she. Duke Ganymede had nearly died in the jail where Earth’s forgetfulness had left him; what of Thisbe?
But even if you don’t think truth helps in wartime, tell me, Tully, what would the rest of the Mardi bash’ have answered to this: 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 we made that started it, so posterity can study them, and avoid making the same mistakes again?”
“Hobbes? Why Hobbes? I thought Voltaire was Patriarch of that strange age which Mycroft claims has so infected his.” I: “In peacetime you do want Voltaire, reader, in days of growth, reform, and progress when we may cultivate our gardens; not when the light grows weak.”
I am lying to you, reader. I just realized. Reading back these last few paragraphs I recognize my fantasy, not memory, taking control. It should have been me who served my masters well and talked these rebel leaders into prolonging peace. I failed. I lay there sobbing, useless. It was my Enemy who made these arguments. It was Tully Mardi who saved the world.
“I … who is this?” “I Am Jehovah Mason.” I blushed at my mistake, but panic and autopilot had overridden Tully’s instruction of which Master I should call.
Martin, the world’s most trusted man. He is trusted of Caesar, of Papadelias, of our dear Master, of the Senate, of the Senate’s grandmother his own grandparent Charlemagne Guildbreaker Senior, trusted of Ancelet and Faust who read men well, and of Andō and Spain who watched this young Mason grow up at their Son’s side. In my delirium, Martin later told me, I started listing aloud his many trusts and merits, as if drafting in my head some brief biography which might have made it into my first history had sleep not claimed the memory.
Mycroft is making a lot of lists in this one -- part of the general tonal shift.
O.S.: A pause. A sigh. “You’re one of these impossibly good people, aren’t you? So the longer I talk to you the more I’m going to regret having to kill you?” The Addressee: “I am thus far omnibenevolent.
Looting had been everywhere. I can hear our Master Hobbes whispering over your shoulder, reader, saying this proves again that we are selfish, wicked beasts, but I think goods left unguarded breed forethought, not greed, a hunter-gatherer’s rational defensive fear of future chaos: If law and trade break down, will my fight for survival need this loaf? This coat? This spoon?
I retched again, and lost myself in a maze of insane solutions. Have Spain annex the whole Earth? Replace Jehovah’s bone marrow to purge him of the blood of kings? Travel back in time and murder Charlemagne before he could bear children?
“Jehovah isn’t actually infallible, Martin, appropriate as your devotion is.” “No, Madame, nor are they omniscient, but still I believe no one in the history of the human race has ever erred less. It is not hubris when I say that I am myself reasonably wise, yet observation has proved to me that I am wrong much more often than Dominus. I know therefore that I choose the right thing more often when guided by Domine than when I choose on my own. To ignore or avoid their council, as you have done, Madame, is both irrational and immoral.”
All Hives are Frankenstein chimeras, stitched from mergered peoples: the Humanists were born from the Olympians and One Big Party, the Cousins absorbed Rainbow Bridge and Schools Without Borders, Europe swallowed Volemonde and IBN; so many names from the heady decades after the Great Renunciation, when dozens of newborn Hivelets vied for slices of mankind.
constant Martin, Ἄναξ Jehovah, Xiaoliu Guildbreaker, my Saladin, Mercer, Kohaku, sometimes playful Faust, exhausted Ancelet, or calm Geneva.
interesting to note who gets adjectives and who doesn't
My Leviathan aimed to describe and strengthen government, to remind ungrateful citizens why we so need it. Hobbestown is furthest from what I recommend of any place in history, and yet these Blacklaws call it by my name? 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.”
“The Sniper who now lives bears the skill that killed Me, and the intent to have killed Me, but not the finger that sped the bullet home. Bridger was real.”
No humanlike being in this world’s history has been handed as much power as I have, and there is about to be the greatest war. Providence admits no coincidence. My Peer arms Me because He wishes Me to act. Now. He cannot lend Me omnipotence, but he can lend Me all the substitutes humanity has forged, and He must intend that I use them.”
“This is Achilles. The … the actual ancient Greek hero from the Iliad, Achilles. Brought to life. Except they’re dressed like they’re from the age of World Wars because they were created out of an old plastic toy soldier, by a child named Bridger, who was miraculously conceived without parents, and had no belly button, and could make toy things real, and was the kid you saw in the video, with the flying winged sandals who came to the Rostra and resurrected Ἄναξ Jehovah, Who was killed, actually completely totally really dead killed, by Sniper, and was actually really genuinely resurrected and
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Proud of you, Mycroft
There may be seven Hives when I finish, or six, three, twenty, none, but whatever world I remake this world into will not include O.S. or the kind of moral compromise that birthed it. Humanity must outgrow such compromise. If you desire this change, My unknown new order, support Me. If you prefer the current bloodstained partial-paradise, support Sniper.” He paused. “There. Now both sides mean something.”
Just when I was thinking nothing in this book had been heavy...
I buried my face in the breakfast-scented darkness of Papa’s uniform and sobbed.
can someone please talk about my breakfast-scented darkness just once.
Abi Walton liked this
He let me lie like that, and sob against his breasts, whose soft sacks, once plumped by suckling children,
I though papa was male, so frustrating
“I am Achilles. I don’t win the war, I die in it.” He turned to me. “You’re not asking me to live in a world shaped by someone who doesn’t honor the ancients. You’re asking me to be dead in it. You know why I care what shape it takes.”
“I’d rather see them home safe than beside me on a battlefield,” MASON replied.
The knife was a single-bladed kitchen knife, recently in contact with olive oil and used to cut onions, potatoes, orange bell peppers, and parsley (DNA traceable to a Broadland Model GG700 kitchen tree), as well as sausage.
dude i just went back to this note after i know who did it. wow.
Mycroft’s degenerating mental condition
again -- from hindsight there's a lot to be learned about the tonal shift from seven surrenders to this one. i should have trusted that palmer doesn't do things on accident.
tell you this, reader: across the Earth on a thousand campuses that day, the students learned at last why, at seventeen, raised in a bash’ that saw this crisis looming, I chose to face my rampage and my execution rather than choose a Hive.
Same.
“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.”
WITCH
and so would Sniper!”
i don't remember why i highlighted this.
We are Hives, our ever-changing members voluntarily united by shared ideology. This is not the place for such geographic concepts as homeland, foreignness, citizen, subject, nation, patrimony, birthright, birth-debt, or territory, nor is it the place for language or thought which privileges those Hives which do have geographic nations as part of their background. You will not find one case from the geographic era which treats the justness of government-ordered assassination without relying on several of these concepts. We are Hives. We will not import to this true terra ignota the junk we left
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“This world is so good, Apollo. It’s far from perfect but it’s so good. How can you expect them to forgive you for—” “Worlds,” his instant answer. “Maybe they won’t be better. Maybe no time in human history will be as comfortable as this one. Or maybe they’ll be better someday, but for a long time they’ll be hard, scraped out with plow and sweat and stuffy rockets. But there will be more than one. There will be Mars, Europa, Titan, more and more, safeguarded by this war. You must let those who are about to die know that, have that. You must tell them what I did, and tried to do.”
I love you Apollo.
Days blurred as I wrote, and nights thanks to a tube of anti-sleeping meds a good servicer friend had helped me steal.
You know, my master, what story was in the mind that conceived this war, whether you blame Bridger or Apollo. The side that gives the first offense, the one that breaks trust and hospitality, that steals Helen and all her treasures, that side unites all the Greek forces against it. That is Troy. That side will fall. We cannot afford for it to be their towers that topple when their towers touch the stars. Don’t be Troy. Someone, I beg you, make them not be Troy.
