Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer

  I shook my head, though Eureka was not there to see it.

 

  A dog came by next, with a friendly owner who let it sport with us: bliss.

 

 

  <¿me? i’ve never put a name down, not once.>

 

  My companions debated the next turn now, left toward the park, right toward the steps and fountain, two equal goods like two colors of candy. Do you wish I would omit these details, reader? In a hundred years there will be nothing left of these Servicers, no descendants, no inventions, no laws they passed or records they broke, even their trials will no longer be current as precedent. Their names may be censored, but I will not deprive them of the chance to be remembered at least as those happy Servicers who walked with Mycroft Canner.

 

  <¿Was it you who gave Thisbe the location?>

 

 

  <¿why bother showing thisbe? ¿what could thisbe see? ¿a list of names? a list is nothing. thisbe can’t see how, when you move one ball on the grid, the others move. madame d’arouet is a ball that doesn’t move, but the others move around them, the whole structure orbiting the black hole. if you tried to see it with your silly senses it might look like the center of a web. we didn’t know there was a spider hiding there—they stayed still so long. ¿do you think they were hiding from us on purpose? ¿mycroft? ¡mycroft! ¿are you there? ¿hello? ¡HELLO! ¡EARTH TO MYCROFT!>

  Eureka could not reach me. Earth could not reach me. We had rounded a corner, and there were words there, words plain and hollow in the noisy street, those words which must not be. They overwhelmed me like the massed spears of a phalanx. I told you before how hard I fight to make myself believe in this drifting dream you call the present. Now I lost that fight.

  “The Death of Majority is a lie!” the words began, floating through … no, I was not aware of what they floated through, the crowd, the air, for none were real to me. “There are lots of majorities today, real and dangerous majorities. Who owns the bash’house where you live? The Mitsubishi! Who owns the shop where you do business? The farm that produces the food on your table? The Mitsubishi! They own two thirds of the Earth, and compared to them the majority is camping on a sliver. The majority! You say it doesn’t matter, but it makes everyone nervous, knowing the Mitsubishi could raise the world’s rent at any time, double, triple, ten times, and no one could stop it. The majority fears the Mitsubishi, wants to stop them, to seize their land and redistribute it, by force if need be. This Black Sakura theft is someone lashing out, but everybody wants to. How long until there is a second attack, and a third? How long until they start to defend themselves?”

  I remember when I was a young thing, two years orphaned and finally used to my reconstructed limbs. I was sitting in the garden with the Mardi children, talking to Geneva Mardi about sacrifice. The Senator sat us kids on the ground around him, while the grown-up with his stiff back monopolized the bench. He challenged us to come up with things we would do anything to save—a grim theme, but these were the sorts of games that Mardi children played.

  The gardens at Alba Longa belonged to the Roman Emperor Domitian first, then to the popes, then to the MASONs, as imperial as a spot of Earth can be, but it was Brill’s Institute that suggested to Emperor Aeneas MASON to make the Alba Longa site into a Denkergarten. The Emperor built five bash’houses around the grounds, and reviewed the world’s great Campuses, inviting the five most promising, unusual, and ambitious new bash’es to share that paradise, to foster children and ideas, with no payment asked beyond the promise of future greatness and corresponding gratitude. The committee picked one bash’ of ex-European Masons, one of Cousins who would later take me in, one mixed Brillists and Humanists, one Cousins and Masons, and, that rarest of treasures, the Mardi bash’, which boasted six Hives and a Hiveless, while Apollo’s constant visits almost granted it the seventh. Much has been written of my house, the fifth house, the service house, the groundskeepers and maintenance staff that served this think tank, and what inferiority complexes I might have picked up even before the accident as I grew up knowing all my playmates were genius children earmarked for greatness while I was not. It is somewhat unfair of me to contradict my biographers at this late point, but, for the record, I and, while they lived, my ba’sibs knew full well that a committee had chosen the other bash’es, while Aeneas MASON himself selected us. If we had to squander some hours on the not-unpleasant task of gardening, it was the only way the Emperor could secure an undebated seat for the one bash’ for which he held the highest hopes. He visited me in the hospital after the accident that claimed the others, and from how he wept I might have been the last chapter of a now-lost masterpiece.

  “What would you do anything to save, children?”

  Laurel suggested “Mama!” first. Laurel Mardi was seven then, the prince of the bash’, the Cousins’ and Masons’ golden boy before Jehovah eclipsed him, and famed for having left his toy cars in so many VIPs’ offices that a flippant reporter at The Romanov started a weekly column, “Laurel Mardi’s Road Trip,” half an excuse to show world leaders cuddling a cute kid, but also a chronicle of the rise of what would obviously be one of the next generation’s greats. “I’d do anything to save Mama!”

  Geneva smiled, as if he had been waiting for the boy’s reply. Geneva Mardi was kind-faced but merciless, as only a Mason reared by Cousins can be: “Would you kill your papa to save your mama?” A lesser man would have stopped there, seeing tears already threatening to wet the child’s cheeks. “Would you kill your papa and ba’pa Jules to save your mama?” he pressed. “Papa and Jules and me, would you kill me? And Ibis and Ken and Mycroft?” he nodded to the rest of us in the circle.

  “The whole bash’ then!” Ibis suggested, nine years old, crazy about animals and already loving me like more than family. “We’d do anything for the whole bash’!”

  “Would you kill a different bash’ to save this one?”

  “Yes!” Ken answered instantly. He was six years old, a sponge for history, and inseparable from the wooden training sword which dragged behind him like a teddy bear. “I would. I’d also die for it.”

  Easy to say, Ken Mardi, but not easy to do, was it? I left you your katana and one hand intact with which to wield it, a way to end your pain, and I even promised to end your parents’ suffering if you did the deed. Your mother was brave enough, Kohaku Mardi, when he felt the agonies of my poisons setting in, he slit his belly with a calm to make his ancestors proud, and, woman of iron, even wrote the messa
ge in his own blood, 33-67; 67-33; 29-71. You, though, who had boasted yourself a modern samurai, you watched the arctic around you turn the scattered pieces of your limbs to ice, and dropped your sword, and cried and suffered to the end. Hypocrite.

  Geneva’s lesson was not done. “How about two other bash’es?” he pressed. “Would you wipe out two bash’es to save ours?”

  “If I had to.”

  “How about three? Four? Ten bash’es? How many is too many? Or let’s count people. Five hundred people? A thousand people? A billion people?”

  “A billion is too many,” Laurel judged with his air of princely authority. “A thousand is too many too, even a hundred. One more than there are members in the bash’ is too many.”

  Ibis shook her head. “Killing anyone at all is too many. Killing one more than there are in the bash’ is when it turns from too many to too too many.” Have you ever heard, reader, such a nauseatingly Cousinly sentiment? She would have been one, never doubt that, had I let her live.

  “Then the bash’ still isn’t something you’d do anything to save, is it?” Geneva asked, eager to see what the children would try next. He never lost that calm, even when he hung dying on the cross, when I visited him to hear his last philosophy, which grew purer and more penetrating as sun and thirst helped him toward his God.

  It was Laurel, already thinking like a statesman, who thought of, “The World. To save the world, the human race. You’d have to do anything for that, anyone would.”

  Ken was duty-bound to criticize his rival. “That’s stupid. Of course you’d do anything to save the world, the world includes everything and you, so whatever you have to give up to save it would be destroyed anyway if you don’t, so there’s no real sacrifice. You have to do anything to save the world, there’s no choice.”

  “No choice?” Apollo was with us too, Apollo Mojave, twenty-five, the hood of his Utopian coat thrown back so the sun could lend gold to his hair, though it hardly needed more. I don’t know what Seine Mardi was doing that Apollo was with us and not with her, but I remember him stretched out on his back, his coat mimicking the grass beneath, so he seemed like a spirit only half-born out of the Earth, still wrapped in nature. “Would you destroy a better world to save this one?”

  We were children, reader. We did not have our answers yet, not even I, but I do not present this memory as a lesson. Rather it is a sample of what the Mardi children went through every day with Geneva and the others, Kohaku, Senator Aeneas, the historians Makenna, Jie, Chiasa, Jules, the Brillist Fellow Mercer, Leigh who could almost out-mother her old ba’sib Bryar Kosala. Tully was not with us, Tully who was then just born, an infant when we were already imbibing harshest ethics. Tully was eight years old when I killed the others, as I was eight when the explosion deprived me of a birth bash’ I hardly remember. Tully knows nothing, reader, and what he does know is more a secondhand reconstruction, built from interviews and old notes, than real memory. Still, even if it was just a shell of what the Mardis were, a feeble echo of the words which must not be which he poured out now into the streets of Barcelona, phalanx upon phalanx, I would have done anything to silence him.

  “But that’s just one majority!” Tully continued. I could see him, standing literally on a soapbox on the street corner, pleading with the passersby like an ancient doomsday preacher. “There’s another. The Masons are growing. You’ve seen the numbers: three billion Masons, three point one, three point two. If they grow the others shrink. One point seven billion Cousins, one point two billion Europeans, barely a billion Brillists. They’re sucking away the population, and everyone worries: how long until my Hive drops below a billion? Below half a billion? When my children grow up, will their Hive be as rare as Utopians? The majority fears the Masons, wants to strike back, to cut their numbers, see them shrink again. You get angry when you see a young person in the white suit of the Annus Dialogorum, don’t you? When you debate with them, you don’t try equitably to help them decide, you work actively to dissuade them. You think the Masons haven’t noticed? You think they don’t realize that, the larger they grow, the more hostile the majority becomes? How long until they start to defend themselves?”

  Tully at least my mind could recognize in this vague haze of the present. Thirteen years hiding on the Moon had left Tully Mardi tall and artificial, muscles cultivated by prescribed routines rather than play, sustained on a diet rationed milligram by milligram. Childhood’s departure had left his hair brown and his face lively and academic like his Brillist mother’s, but I saw nothing of his father there, nothing of the eternal grin of Luther Mardigras, a true Mardigras born and raised, professional party-thrower who could turn four people locked in an elevator into a festival and tempt even Utopians to stray. As if to mock his forefathers’ happy trade, Tully’s face was all urgency, lips which had tasted many vitamins but never candy. He was twenty-two now, old enough to imagine himself a man, but not a Utopian. That step he would not take. He wore no coat, no vizor, just a loose blue shirt and gray pants, neither sloppy nor formal, and a Graylaw Hiveless sash, calculated to make him seem as generic as possible. Everyone can listen to an everyman.

  “Don’t you see it can’t last?” He kept on preaching, words pouring out as from a broken dike. “Why did the French Revolution happen? Because a scattering of nobles took up all the land and oppressed the majority!”

  “Don’t say it,” I mouthed, silent, to myself, to God, to no one.

  “Why did the Roman Empire fall? It grew too big, too unwieldy, ignoring the strength and hate and envy of its majority neighbors!”

  “Don’t let them say it.”

  “It’s happening already all around us. The property flows first, blood later. It’s going to happen! It is happening!”

  “Saladin, don’t let them say it!”

  “War! I’m talking about war! Revolution! Blood! You think it can’t happen, that without nations, without armies there can’t be war? We have police! They’re forces enough. It can happen, and it will. You think violence has died out of our society? Look at Mycroft Canner! Look at all the followers that still worship Mycroft Canner! You think the world that made them can’t make war? It’s still in us, the death instinct, the willingness to kill, it’s … Mycroft Canner!” Shaking, Tully raised his hand to point at me. “That’s them! There! In the hat! That’s Mycroft Canner!”

  The first moment of a crisis is most precious, but I wasted it. I wasted it seeing. I could see now Tully’s audience: four Brillists, two Masons, two Humanists, and a Mitsubishi, stopped in their tracks by this peculiar scrawny Hiveless on his high-tech crutches. I think it was the soapbox that attracted them, mad in this world where text and video can reach a billion at once. The live performance was powerful, the realization that he was speaking not to masses, but to them, words with only one chance to persuade, or fail and perish. They listened, not millions skimming the net, but nine live witnesses as Tully raised his hand to point at me.

  “Mycroft Canner!” he repeated. “It’s them! They’ve come to finish the job! Get them!”

  Nine people would not have been enough to become a mob, but there were ringleaders waiting, four of them, posted around Tully’s podium like guards, with metal pipes and baseball bats hungry in their hands. “We knew you’d come! You’re dead, Canner! You hear? You’re dead!”

  “Run.” I seized the nearest of my fellow Servicers and shoved them toward the alley behind us. “Run! All of you!”

  A few obeyed, but most stayed, massing around me as if their brittle bodies could have done anything to block such rage. It didn’t matter. Before they saw me spring I was past them, past my attackers, bounding along the street with a perfect synchrony of arms and legs that transformed the whole of my height to speed. My old self laughed seeing the others’ faces as they watched, or tried to watch. Imagine, reader, in primordial days some vicious dinosaur, heavy with nightmare jaws, which chases a shimmering lizard up a slope, and the predator rejoices, already tasting the kill in its b
lood-starved mind, when, all at once, its slim prey spreads its feathered fins and takes to the air in a world that had not yet realized life could fly.

  You dare try to catch me?

  “Now! Play it now!”

  They knew their enemy, my enemies. They had prepared the basest and best of traps for me: Canner Beat. I don’t know where the speakers were, but they blasted it loud enough for the beats to vibrate through my bones. I lost this shadow world and was again in my two weeks, Ibis Mardi writhing beneath me, charred and already half-carcass as a red-hot crowbar punished blow by blow that brazen bitch who dared imagine she might claim the heart which belongs only to Saladin. I had speculated, when I decided to use my pacemaker to leave behind recordings of my heartbeat as I experienced the thrill of every kill, about what uses doctors and Brill’s Institute would make of the tapes. But I so underestimated human genius that it never occurred to me that people might make art. Any rhythm can become a song. The accelerations, retards, and crescendos of my heartbeat, backed by fierce harmonics and suitably bloody lyrics, have spawned a genre and a culture of their own. I would like Canner Beat, I suspect, if I could hear it, but the rhythms strip me of all present tense and plunge my senses into replay. I tasted Ibis’s meat again, felt hot blood spatter on my skin as she flailed at me with the shreds I had left of the hands which had too often clutched possessively at mine, and I saw Saladin’s loving smile as we consummated our revenge. My opponents chose well. I tumbled blinded to the ground, barely awake as my attackers raised their bats around me.

  I was rescued in that moment by a kind of U-beast called a Pillarcat. It is feline but long like a snake, with six pairs of legs all in a line, each a full cat’s length apart, so it can wrap its purring coils around your ankles three times over, or nap on your belly wound in a spiral which overflows you like a living blanket. This one was green, a lively new-leaf green, with a golden underbelly and a constant purr which almost masked the hum of electronics underneath. It knew me. It climbed my back faster than anyone could block it, and draped itself around my shoulders like a sensayer’s long scarf, just as it used to do around Apollo.