by Ada Palmer
It took more than a glance but less than an evening with Mycroft to realize they were something special. It was like a myth, a pool where village maidens go to skinny dip, and one day we realize a nymph has joined us, glowing like the Moon and not quite real. No one says anything, and we treat the nymph like one of us, for fear any acknowledgment might scare this marvel off forever. And if one day the nymph follows us back into the village to take a turn at weaving, we don’t dare refuse, we just take constant extra care with this visitor who lends the town a little touch of magic. That constant extra care became my job. “Did you eat today, Mycroft? How long since you last slept? How many hours?” Mycroft was a master of lies of omission, but not so good at direct lies, not to a friend. We were friends instantly, the instant Mycroft realized they could pour out all the mad convolutions of high politics to me, and in our native Greek, and I would understand. Even better, I was a junior Servicer, younger and newer to our ranks, the only type of person in the world who was not, by crazy Mycroft logic, their superior. Mycroft hadn’t realized how desperately they needed that, but the elders did. So I became Mycroft’s apprentice, and babysitter to the Beggar King. Mycroft was never really a ruler to the Servicers, not like Achilles is now. They were more a teacher and adviser, like a quiet, deposed king who labored modestly alongside us and solved our problems with masterful statecraft when we asked for aid, but had no heart for the bloody road back to the throne. No, king isn’t otherworldly enough. Nymph is still better, and when our little guest nymph disappeared on strange jobs, it didn’t take me long to discover it was Olympian gods who carried them away. So soon enough I met MASON, the King of Spain, President Ganymede, Bryar, and Vivien. I entered the netherworld that was Madame’s, and sometimes helped clean up a little cave under a bridge in Cielo de Pájaros, though I never knew for whom. And one day, I realized: “Mycroft, there’s no way you don’t know who the Anonymous is. In fact, I bet you weren’t secretly informed like Papa was, but you figured it out on your own. In fact, you’re the next Anonymous, aren’t you?” Of course they were, in line to be Eighth, so figuring that out made me the Ninth. Vivien glowed with joy like a new grandba’pa when Mycroft presented me, a successor to carry the precious title past the instability that was Mycroft Canner. That was when I started spending more nights than was strictly legal stretched on sofas in the Ancelet-Kosala bash’house, enjoying midnight chess and Bryar’s curry, training for my accession. It came soon. Mycroft was too overworked and broken to actually serve as Anonymous, and they wanted their history to expose their identity anyway, so I succeeded to the title of Ninth Anonymous the day the first book was released, June the twenty-eighth, 2454—ten weeks to the day before we lost them.
Mycroft had no time to write during the Olympics, so that’s where I’ll begin.
Sniper did come. They rode into the Opening Ceremony on a white horse that sparkled like diamond in the stage light, and the torch they lit blazed so brilliantly across the ice that they say you could see it from orbit. But even more important, Sniper turned up three days before that, the morning after Thisbe and Cato disappeared, and Sniper’s return let us all stop panicking. Lesley called us first to say Sniper was back. A couple hours later Sniper did an interview, a stirring speech about how proud they were that we had kept the peace so long, and an apology to fans for being so out of the limelight during their training for the Games. But Sniper wouldn’t say what had happened to them, not even to Lesley. I saw them the second day after they got back. On the training field they were lively, if a little out of practice, but exertion can block thought like clouds block sun. It was in the breaks between training that frightening new habits surfaced. Sniper lapsed into long quiet patches, speaking or moving only when prompted, and sometimes it took two or three repetitions to get any reaction. They flinched at bright light, fidgeted intensively for short periods, and sometimes got up suddenly and ran around and around whatever space we were in, sprinting until they couldn’t run anymore, which for a pentathlete is a very long time. They were still perfect, lively Sniper in front of fans or cameras, but it was all performance. Once I caught them on the floor curled up in Lesley’s arms, sobbing. They were missing four months. Sniper has a billion champions ready to beat the crap out of whoever did this to such a hero, but in me they have one more. That is assuming it was a person, and not a fall down a cave followed by a long fight out through a thousand savage mole-men or something, who knows. (Personally, I don’t think Perry-Kraye really knows where Sniper was, I think Perry-Kraye was just taunting Martin and Huxley.) But we had Sniper back in time, and Sniper had their family: the Humanist Black Team, all the teams. Every pentathlete and everyone from every relevant sport dropped everything to help Sniper get back into shape those last three days. Even Achilles.
If those Opening Ceremonies are the last pure thing our civilization ever does, they were worthy. The Milky Way turned out to watch, its long line of hypercrowded lights, more like city fog than stars, staring down at us through the black of the long Antarctic night. The stadium roof was open to the sky and darkness, and the spectators were darkness too, tens of thousands of silhouettes, since the stadium itself was the light source, glowing from beneath, now azure, now fire, now sunny white, to suit the evolving spectacle. It was all built of ice gels: soft and fluffy for the seat cushions, springy for the walkways, steel-strong for the base, and even the veins of light which branched like lightning through the clear blocks were some conductive form of ice that leaflets bragged about. Mycroft and I got to sit right behind Vivien, personal guests of an Olympic Committee member, so we had even better seats than MASON.
The spectacle portion started with ships, real creaking wood, which braved the choppy currents of a pool that filled the arena. Then the pool rose, a transparent cylinder of water as high as the highest seats. Swimmers danced through it in costumes of fantastic colors, inspired by the ancient microbes that were first to inhabit Antarctica, or anywhere. They trailed structures as they swam, lines of what seemed like glitter but hardened in their wakes into permanent trails, like jet smoke, or the shapes that ribbon dancers weave, but solid. It was ice. The water they swam through was far below freezing, kept liquid by some science, but at the top of the tank was a layer of some other water, warmer and quick to freeze, which the swimmers would splash in and then veer down, so it froze as they sucked it down with them through the sub-zero currents below. They wove the ice streams together like maypole dancers, constructing dive by dive a shape, which seemed a fan at first, then a flower, then the chalice-shaped cauldron which we realized must soon hold the flame. A parade arrived to ring the water column, people and creatures, and we gasped as the swimmers joined it by exiting through the sides of the pool, forcing their bodies through what was not solid glass but gel, which resealed around them, letting only the faintest glittering drips escape. Kipgel I think it’s called, and Mycroft gushed at me about how it can make a space suit that you can reach through to eat and scratch your nose. Horses came next, riders with long lances, who slashed the gel tank and released streams of water, which froze mid-air to form arches and stalagmites. Dancers climbed them and waved colorful things around, and there were huge sheets of cloth which they got wet and flapped so they snap-froze into stiff curved sheets, and they built structures out of them, and climbed up those and built other structures, and sliced up the now-empty tank, and used the gel pieces to build trampolines, and jumped everywhere, and flung colorful water which froze in the air, and then it all lit up and suddenly it looked exactly like a city, and we cheered and cheered and cheered.
They didn’t let us forget the war, but they did let us feel ready for it. Earth’s top musicians played old battle-marches, and they projected war art on the walls, and brought in great actors to read quotations: Homer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Korn, Faulkner, Gerribloom, Siegfried Sassoon, Osamu Tezuka, Euripides, Sun-tzu, and Victor Hugo. As they read, dancers in historical military costumes ripped down the ice-and-fabric city piece by piece. Then,
just as it was too much to take, the whole stadium turned from blood red to pure white in a flash as they passed out two hundred thousand Peacedoves. These, they announced, were newly commissioned from a U-beast designer, programmed to seek out humans, and had a compartment inside for emergency supplies. It would take them a few months to fly from Antarctica to the cities where they would be needed. We were each given one dove to fill with the supplies they handed out, and were asked to write a message to put inside, addressed to someone a few months in the future. We couldn’t know who our doves would find: Humanist or Mason; Hiveguard or Remaker; friend or foe. They gave us the whole Parade of Nations to think about what to write, and we needed it.
We also needed cheering up, and we got it with the parade of flags, and colors, and amazing ethnic hats. The Greek team marched first, the tiny figure of Achilles with them, but the hero wouldn’t take the honor of Flag Bearer away from Krathis Piteras, the first biological female to ever take gold in the open division javelin throw. The French team wore gold to declare support for Ganymede, and the Spanish team received a particularly enthusiastic roar of welcome, while in the stands the king and queen-to-be waved their support. The Hive teams either felt or faked high spirits. There were uncomfortably many Masons, and I couldn’t believe how many athletes marched stratless and unaligned, not just under the three Hiveless flags, but a big mass of them marching under the naked Olympic flag; I am used to two or three athletes going without a team due to some protest or transition, but forty-six stank of chaos.
Each of the six Humanist teams chose its Flag Bearer as brilliantly as ever: for the Gold Team’s dedication to the parallel honing of mind and body, poet-calligrapher-boxer Wence Courrier; for the Blue Team’s focus on record-breaking through advances in knowledge and science, Takeshi Dubois, whose research on joint structure had revolutionized racewalking; for the Red Team’s commitment to bringing each unique body’s strengths to peak perfection we saw a new face, Dara Hiketrail, the most promising young gymnast of the Games; for Red’s rival, Sniper’s Black Team with its obsession with all-body training and maintaining top form over a long career, six-Olympiad veteran sailor Claude Langlais; for the Green Team’s teaching-focused ethic, three-time debate medalist Ohlanga Coder; and for the Gray Team’s focus on team training, if it could not be Quarriman themself, it must be water beltball captains Tigris and Euphrates Webguard. It was strange having the host team be, not a nation-strat, but the Humanists’ own Gray Team, but Antarctica had more than earned it, and, as the Olympic Oaths were taken and Aesop Quarriman declared the Games of the One Hundred and Fortieth Olympiad officially open, their speech hammered home that we were all sitting outside in Antarctica in August. The fireworks that crowned the ceremony drowned out the Milky Way, and screens showed that at the same instant they set off matching fireworks in Olympia where the Games were born, in Athens where they were reborn, in the first city on each other continent that held the Games, and in Kanpur, which would host them next. As the thunder climaxed I saw Achilles twitch and curl up, and the other Greeks leaned over them to see what was wrong. I don’t think veterans can enjoy fireworks. I wonder how many of us will still be able to enjoy them in 2458.
It went dark then, the stadium dimming to leave just a hint of ocean-blue light deep within the frozen ground. A gaggle of children entered, and Kagera Marbank with a single lantern, who told the history of the Olympics with their famous hand shadow puppets. But suddenly the shadow puppet runner they projected on the wall was a real runner, and the instant they said ‘torch’ there it blazed in the hands of Avon McKenzie the wrestler, who represented the ancient Games by wearing nothing but a faux-classical loincloth. As Marbank’s hand shadows provided opponents to race against, McKenzie passed the torch to Robin Tapolin the cyclist, who was costumed like the 1894 revival Games, and cycled a stunningly fast loop of the stadium with the torch. Then, stopping before the box where the Olympic Committee had made their opening speech, Tapolin ignited a faceted ball of what the program insists is flammable ice (how?), which soared up on a wire until it dangled above the ice chalice. Ting Ting Foster came out and sang a song, but by then we were all a sea of craned necks, looking for Sniper.
We were looking in the wrong place. Sniper broke above us like the Moon, up on the top lip of the stadium, so their diamond-white horse was barely a point of light. They show jumped down, a spiral path on horseback, run and jump and run and jump, down the structure of the stadium. They stopped on a platform level with the flaming ball, and fired up the crowd with a wave of their perfect arms and their signature pistol-shot hand gesture. Then they raised a very real rifle. They took aim at the cable which held the flame above the waiting cauldron, and we all braced: Can they really do it? Can they hit that tiny cable from clear across the arena, and light the Olympic Cauldron with a single perfect shot?
A second platform lit up suddenly, level with Sniper’s on the opposite side of the arena. There stood the Prince, J.E.D.D. Mason. All through the opening They’d worn their six-colored Olympic Committee jacket (which looks absolutely wrong on Them), but now They wore Their customary black, with the new military cording, gold and gray and purple, that still makes Mycroft cringe. Made Mycroft cringe. Sniper looked up from their scope and nodded across at the Prince, and then the whole crowd cried out as we realized it was a clear shot, Sniper’s gun to the Prince, and that the angles were so close that, as Sniper leaned over the scope, it was impossible to tell whether they were aiming at the cable, or at their Opponent’s skull. Then the Prince raised something over Their head, the size of a small melon, and triggered it.
A flash. Crackling exploded around the device in the Prince’s hand, sparks raining down and skittering across the clear ice of the platform. The air darkened as a swarm of defensive robots lost their cloaking, then their motors, and tumbled to the floor around the Prince like apples. The lights in that half of the arena failed next, and we spent a few breaths in darkness, cut only by the firelight and the Milky Way above, which spanned the skyscape like a long scar. My seat was close enough to the Prince that my tracker rebooted, and I heard Mycroft’s pacemaker bleep beside me. That made me realize what it was: a Weeksbooth Counterbomb, like what Sniper used at the Forum to short out the Prince’s security and give themself a clear shot. This time the Prince had fired it Themself, on purpose, and now They were just standing there, calm and exposed among the twitching wreckage of Their defenses. Since I knew what I was looking for, I spotted the moment that Their suit flashed static, the rebooting of the Griffincloth: complex programs like Mushi’s and Huxley’s took a while to restart, but it took mere moments for “make everything black” to come online again. This wasn’t planned. I could tell it wasn’t when I heard guards racing, and Vivien murmuring predictions: “Not here, Sniper, think, stampede, backlash, it would be an even worse war…” I remember Sniper’s black hair sparkling as they bent over the rifle’s silver shaft. They fired. The cable snapped. The fireball plunged into the icy cauldron. The torch erupted, a cone of fire blazing through the translucent body of the chalice, so healthy that its snap cut through the crowd’s cries. Sniper and the Prince locked eyes again, and Mycroft squeezed my hand: “We pass the Test.”
If anyone in the world could take the podium and pretend not to be rattled right then, it was Aesop Quarriman. Then Hugo Sputnik joined them, the Hugo Sputnik! In the flesh! And in the coat which made everything into Hugo Sputnik worlds, and just this once the art team cheated and let Sputnik share their coat program with the spectators’ lenses, so you could turn it on and everybody was a Hugo Sputnik creature, and you could see yourself and which Clutch you were, and which your friends were, and the arena looked like the Gilderfield at Optimapolis, and even Spain and Andō Mitsubishi squealed like little kids. Fear faded, and Hugo Sputnik could make even the squirmiest crowd sit through another lecture about Antarctic tech, and how so much of it was developed on the Moon, though that part was mercifully short. We knew the gifts the Utopians had already give
n to Esperanza City and the Games. Sputnik was here to introduce a new one. A screen unfolded across the sky above us and showed more fireworks, not a tenth as lavish as the first round, but artful in their modesty, so each blast streaked its own lines of blue or red or glitter across the field of stars.
A voice: “Greetings! This is Bradbury Crick speaking from the Mars Odyssey Base. What you are seeing are the first fireworks ever set off on the planet Mars. We launched these fireworks at the same moment that you launched yours in Esperanza City, but it has taken almost eighteen minutes for the images to reach you on Earth. We created these fireworks with native chemicals harvested from the Martian surface, in order to celebrate the technology exchange between Esperanza and Odyssey that made these Olympics possible. On behalf of my fellow Martian residents, I am delighted to help initiate the Games of the One Hundred and Fortieth Olympiad, and to welcome Antarctica to the ever-expanding range of habitat where the human species can live and prosper.”