by Ada Palmer
“The Six-Hive Transit System welcomes you to Esperanza City. Visitors are required to adhere to some requirements of both Humanist Law and Utopian Law while in this zone. Due to its unique climate, Esperanza City also has important safety regulations, including the mandatory use of thermal skin. Since our records indicate that local regulations differ considerably from your customary law code, it is recommended that you review a list of differences by selecting ‘law.’”
“What! Who are you? How do … oh … talking computer…” Achilles’s exclamations had started as soon as the cheery voice began its greeting, and his hand shot to his ear, already red from his fiddling with the unaccustomed tracker. “Will it say that every time I go anywhere?”
“Unless you customize the setting,” I answered. “Sorry, I didn’t think to warn you.”
Since he could not scowl at the side of his own head, Achilles scowled instead at the Blacklaw sash which now hung around his hips, still smelling of the gyro shop beside the tailors’ shop where we had bought it. In deference to the public eye, the hero had consented to new clothes, still army green but no longer patched from thirteen years of wear. It made him feel more real. He had the tools of existence now: Law insignia, modern clothing, the ubiquitous tracker. He could walk into a bar without seeming an alien. He was still out of scale, a man’s frame compressed to a boy’s height, yet that suited him somehow. In a museum, a pharaoh’s tiny coffin is still magisterial, as is our lithe Achilles.
“You can hit skip once the recording starts,” I answered, “but only when going to places you’ve already been in the past year. You can also set it to text mode.”
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.
Kosala: “Get Jed to talk to me, Mycroft. Now. They will if you ask them.”
The Cousin Chair called over my tracker, her voice raw after many hours of conferencing; certain calls a Servicer does not have the legal right to decline.
I: “I don’t think this is an appropriate use of your call override as head of the Servicer Program.”
Kosala: “I know you’re trying to turn my Servicers into your own private army.”
I: “They … they need to be able to defend themselves. Uniformed scapegoats walking the str—”
Kosala: “That isn’t why you did it, and you know it. I never should’ve left you free to mix with them. I should’ve locked you in a box to never see the sun again, and I still could.”
I: “Servicers are supposed to be at the service of humanity. Right now humanity needs—”
Kosala: “Everything but soldiers.”
I: “I’m sorry, Chair Kosala, but you’re wrong. There will be war. Ἄναξ Jehovah won’t retract their declaration.”
Kosala: “I wouldn’t ask them to. This is the chance we needed.”
I: “When the Olympics end—”
Kosala: “I’m happy right now. I know I may sound as pissed as you’ve ever heard me—and you should be scared of me right now, Mycroft, you personally should, because you are not making soldiers of my Servicers, and there will be consequences for you, big ones—but under all that I’m happy. You know why? You know that fantasy, where you get to go back in time to the beginning of one of the World Wars and change things to stop it? Or make it a well-organized quick war without any atrocities? That’s the chance Jed’s given me right now, and I’m not throwing it away.”
I: “Providence—”
Kosala: “Is your sensayer’s business, Mycroft, not mine. I’m preparing for the war, don’t doubt that. I’ll build ten thousand hospitals before the Olympics start, but war ends when the sides agree on the terms of the peace, and now that Jed’s made sides for me to work with, it’s my turn to negotiate the terms. I don’t know whether I’ll succeed on the hundredth day of the war, the thousandth, or the negative-twentieth, but I will make peace. I’m already making it. Now get Jed to call me back. I don’t care what else you’re doing. They have to convince Cornel to offer amnesty if those who attacked Alexandria surrender. This can’t wait.”
I: “I’ll try, as soon as we’re done here, but—”
Kosala: “Succeed. Don’t make me send Heloïse.”
I: “Y-es, Chair Kosala.”
Kosala: “And keep Achilles away from my Servicers. It’s bad enough Achilles lied to me, but—”
I: “Lied to you? How?”
Kosala: “They said they’d help me work for peace, while all the time the two of you were training your private army.”
I: “That was no lie, Chair Kosala. Achilles wants to help peace, more than anything.”
Kosala: “You both believe the peace movement is doomed.”
I: “All mortal things are doomed: you, me, this peace, the Empire, this planet. Achilles doesn’t choose sides based on how likely things are to succeed, only whether they’re worth dying for.” I waited. “Chair Kosala?”
Kosala: “I heard you. If you mean it then tell Achilles too that, more than anything, I need Jed to talk to me.”
I: “I will.” I meant the pledge, but did not do it then, not yet, not with the gates before us.
Which would you choose, reader, of the five gates of Esperanza City? Which you, Master Hobbes? I have not had the liberty to choose my gate at Esperanza since the earliest bloom of childhood, when, like all kids, I chose the Sport Gate, with its perfected slope, half snow, half ice, whose custodians invite arrivals to complete the journey into the city by sled, skate, sleigh, ski, every apparatus our playful race has conceived to turn freeze into fun. But you, who have the maturation of philosophy, may choose otherwise. The Nature Gate, perhaps? Whose long, camouflaged tunnel lets all spy at leisure on the reserve where horde on horde of ambling, hardy penguins glut themselves on the bounty Oceanus brings even to the lifeless ice? Or the wonder-garden of the subsurface Water Gate? Where the generators trail and throb like giant jellyfish, turning the sea’s vast motions into energy, while the plankton nurtured on their tendrils feed the fish shoals, meat vats, and glittering krill on which the native penguins, immigrant humans, and itinerant great whales feast as equals.
Reader: “I do not need to choose only one, Mycroft; all thy world and gates stand equally open to me, who commands history’s pages.”
Hobbes: “As for myself, I know nothing of these gates. But since you do, friend Reader, please choose for me. You are sovereign here, and know what I would choose as well as I do.”
Reader: “True, Thomas, and it takes little deliberation to assign you the City Gate, built aloft for cars that docked high on the central spire, beneath whose transparent parapet the whole metropolis, with its streets and lives and treasures, stretched naked before the analyst’s eye. As for this time-stranger Achilles Mojave, do I guess right, Mycroft, that thou broughtest him by the History Gate?”
Of course I did, reader. Homer’s hero has leapt across millennia, farther, returning from the shores of gloomy Acheron. It is little to him to step down on something so domestic as the icy crusting of the far side of the world, but at the History Gate, here we have a wonder to thrill the hero’s breast if any can, carried here at the greatest expense humanity has ever committed to a single object. The great red stone is smooth now, worn to a mirror by the pilgrim multitudes who come to set foot on our collective triumph: a patch of Mars. And at this gate too I hoped that the familiar sight of a camp pitched stubbornly against the hostile elements might make this living ancient smile. To the right of the great stone, in the shadow of the slopes and city, stand the preserved (and restored) cramped huts of the old Esperanza Base, where humankind first learne
d to huddle through the dread Antarctic Summer. To the left, a wall of Griffincloth shows not-quite-live (data, like light, lags on the orbit-to-orbit jog) the huts and hydroponics where our Martian terraformers huddle through a more alien cold. Burnished letters frame the Mars rock with the ancient motto of the Esperanza Base: Permanencia, un acto de sacrificio (Permanence, an act of sacrifice). Yes, even Achilles pauses.
“Thank you so much for making time to come in person. I know half the Earth must want to talk to you right now.” Strangest Senator, Olympic Champion Aesop Quarriman, offered her strong handshake as we climbed down from the car. “The committee’s received thousands of letters. Every athlete and every coach from every team is with us, all the way.” Her stance had an energy here that never showed in the Senate, as if Romanova’s benches were mere stables, and this the open track where racehorses are most themselves. Quarriman wore a different bull’s-eye patch now, stitched over the breast of her Gray Team track suit, and so new that the snipped threads of its predecessor still showed around its edges. Her old one had been gray and white, but the new one was formed of concentric circles in the colors of the Olympic rings. Her companions, committee members and aides alike, wore the bull’s-eye in Olympic colors too, improvised in cloth and marker within hours of Sniper’s call-to-non-arms appearing in The Olympian.
That bull’s-eye’s Target took Quarriman’s hand as He stepped down onto the red Mars stone. “The athletes’ approval gladdens Me.”
Wait, Jehovah is with thee? Mycroft, thou shouldst tell me when Jehovah Mason is present in a scene.
Oh. Apologies. He is so absent when silent that I forget others equate His presence with His flesh. We were His escort here, and this His plan, a trip south to the world’s end to see where the world’s stage was being built to host these brave Summer Olympics in Antarctica. It took almost two hours to reach it, while all the time a thousand voices begged us over text and tracker: “Bring Him back! The Senate needs to speak to Him! The Seven-Hive Council! The Mitsubishi Directorate! The Censor! Every newspaper! The Law!” He did not answer. So, the cries which could not make Him halt rebound on me through the tracker which I can no longer remove.
MASON: “Cum praesentiam instantem fili heredisque posco, non spero vos abisse narrari in Antarcticam. (When I demand the immediate presence of my son and heir, I do not expect to be told you have gone to Antarctica.)” Rarely is MASON so angered that he forgets I am not worthy of Latin.
I: “Caesar, potestatem non hab—(Caesar, I had no power—)”
MASON: “Persuasio sola potestas necessaria; illa tibi semper. (Persuasion was the only power needed; that you always have.)”
I: “Prohibere Eius denuntiationem non possem. Me habuit captivum. (I couldn’t have stopped His announcement. He had me imprisoned.)”
MASON: “Quod scio. Nisi verum, acriorem verbis accitum habuisses. Filium mi duc. Nunc. (That I know. Were that not true, you would by now have had a harsher summons than my words. Bring my son to me. Now.)”
I: “Moxmox. Tibi iuro, tu primus post hoc eris, sed populo videndus est hos Ludos ante omnia habens. Responsum Eius Sicario est. (Soon. You’ll be first after this, I swear, but the public must see Him putting these Games above all else. It is His answer to Sniper.)”
MASON: “Non est bellum Sicari quod postposuit, sed meum. Numquam post homines torrere argillam in lateres didicerunt murosque Orchoes sustulerunt Imperator Destinatus cognoscens et cognitus terram perambulavit, ut nunc Jehovah. Periculum summum, ita vindicta. (It is not Sniper’s war that this postponed, it is mine. Never since humanity learned to bake clay into brick and raised the walls of Uruk has an Imperator Destinatus walked the Earth known and knowing, as Jehovah now does. The danger is absolute, and so will be my retaliation.)”
I: “Sed nunc tutus est. Tutus usque ad Augustum. Nonne maxime interest? Iam tempus ad parandum habes. (But He’s safe now. Safe until August! Isn’t that the important thing? Now you have time to prepare.)”
MASON: “Etsi consultor militaris et imminitus filius heredisque mecum adessent, pararem. Nec Jehovah, nec Achillem, nec temet, Mycroftem, oportet has horas terere—horas meas—ante vulgus Humanistarum fanaticorum ostentare. Quattuor menses vestris Ludis comparavistis, sed quoad super Ritus Inceptionis aurora oritur, quos praesentia mea etiam honorabit, spero illos qui titulum Familiaris ferant, itaque meorum laborum confisos comites esse postulent, illam fidem observare. Illos memorato. (And were my military advisor and my endangered son and heir here with me, I would be preparing. Neither Jehovah, nor Achilles, nor you, Mycroft, has any business wasting these hours—my hours—parading before a pack of sport-crazed Humanists. You have bought four months with your Games, but until dawn rises over the Opening Ceremony, which I too will honor by attending, I expect those who bear the title of Familiaris, and claim thereby to be the trusted partners of my labors, to honor that trust. Remind them.)”
“Here, Senator.” Jehovah, still before me, lingered with His hand in Senator Quarriman’s; He is always awkward ending handshakes, easily distracted by the question of how much souls touch when hands do. “I introduce to you Achilles Mojave,” He recited stiffly. “Achilles, I introduce to you Senator and Chair of the Esperanza City Games Aesop Quarriman.”
The strange Senator smiled, eyes bright with wonder’s fire as they feasted on the time-perfected body of the hero. “Delighted to meet you, Achilles. Thanks so much for coming. Everyone here is in a tizzy over the evidence they just released about you, and, well”—a frank wince—“seeing is the next step in believing.”
Quarriman waited for Achilles to accept her offered hand, but he had paused on the car’s edge, wary, looking at the sky, the tufts of ice upon the wind. I understood his distrust. Was it real? Was it safe? Was the ice wind about to bite as ice wind should? He, like me, could feel the subtle cobweb cling of the thermal skins which we all wore, but that protection does not feel quite real. Our senses quarreled. Eyes told us of impossible cold, flesh of comfortable heat, and lips and fingertips of the gossamer brush of something dreamlike. Reason knew we were safe, but another part of reason did not trust invisible science, not when iceberg mountains still promised so many ways to die.
“Time continues,” Jehovah prompted.
With that last spur, Achilles’s wind-swift feet touched Mars rock, and his hand took Quarriman’s. “Thank you for the welcome, Senator. I prefer when people are honest about their doubts.”
Awe warmed her smile as she felt his tiny fingers, and his lightness as he alighted on the stone, two heads shorter than she. “Oh, I believe the genetics they published, and the bone development and diet tests, you’re an ancient Greek, medically speaking, it’s just the part about how you came into existence that makes no sense.”
“In most senses I agree,” Achilles granted. “Though my return here makes narrative sense, and narrative is a powerful force in the world, at least for me.”
Now feet, and claws, and paws, and swirling nowheres touched down on Mars. The Visitor’s Utopian guards uncloaked as they arrived, and paused as they stepped down to stare at their feet, or weep, or bend to touch the Mars rock, the end of stealth an act of piety, not Reason. Piety too moved them to let me ride the soft black lion’s back until I reached safe ice. I will not defile that stone, reader, not with the footsteps of he who deprived Mars of ever feeling Apollo’s.
Quarriman clapped her hands. “Now, I’ve got the Artistic Director and the Security Director waiting for us inside, and I thought we’d head straight to the Opening Ceremony site.” Her sport-fast feet led almost at a jog between the tents and Mars-worthy domes. “There’s still plenty of time to change the torch design. We were thinking…”
I beg forgiveness, reader, if I fail to report the planning details, but I myself missed many of them, as the calls kept coming through my tracker.
Kohaku Mardi: 「You should be in the Censor’s office now.」
I: 「I’m sorry.」
Kohaku: 「You’ve never seen numbers like these
. All the grand dance we were raised on were the ripples of a tame pond; this is ocean.」
I: 「I’ve seen it.」
Kohaku: 「Says the owl, mistaking Moon for Sun.」 Remarks like that are Kohaku’s signature, his rare union of poetry and concision that won, in one three-hour seminar, the heart and hand of Faust’s prized Mercer.
I: 「You left your numbers. I’ve run projections beyond them before.」
Kohaku: 「Silhouettes, devoid of texture and reality.」
I: 「I have other duties.」