The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  “Thank you, Tribune Natekari. Minister Luo has volunteered to speak in opposition.”

  I wondered briefly which quick-thinking genius had nominated the Minister of Public Safety to oppose the motion, with her spotless Whitelaw sash, her maternal, Venus-round build, and her voice of universal trusted calm. This tamer of floods and earthquakes tames crowds as easily.

  “Romanova does not kill. This Universal Free Alliance has never executed a human being, and should not begin now, and that is what this would mean if it passes, even if an independent Blacklaw carried out the deed. We did not execute the war criminals of the Church War, we did not execute the assassin of Mycroft MASON, we did not execute Mycroft Canner, and we should not execute Ojiro Cardigan Sniper. We are different from past governments, and our lack of capital punishment is a part of that difference, symbolic perhaps but still important. Every life on Earth will be fundamentally changed if this Alliance kills. I know many of you will object that this is Whitelaw thinking projecting itself into areas of Universal Law, and that I am thinking of the moral effect this will have on the character of our government and its people. If you think that, you’re right, I personally am thinking like a Whitelaw, but to you I propose three other important reasons to oppose this motion, that have nothing to do with the principles of Character Laws. First, we need Sniper alive. We need information only Sniper can give us about O.S. and this conspiracy, and the reasons for the attack on Tribune Mason. Without information to calm things, the present crisis could grow even more heated, endangering the security of this Alliance and the entire world. It would be irresponsible for this body to permit the destruction of such a vital tool for peace. Second, assassination is assassination, and it would be the deepest hypocrisy for us to authorize an assassination even as we put on trial those incriminated in the O.S. assassination system. We cannot justly and rationally examine the moral and legal questions raised by those who have claimed that Hives have the right to kill if we muddle that process by radically changing the Alliance’s own policies on killing at the same time. Last, and this may seem similar to my first but it is fundamentally different: there is a lot of talk these days of war. Some think we’re on the brink. I think we’re not, but I do think violence breeds violence. If Sniper is killed there will be violent repercussions, globally, which might claim many lives. Voting to kill Sniper would kill hundreds, probably thousands of others, and possibly start a war. We don’t need to do that. Justice will be done—no one doubts we’ll punish Sniper appropriately once they’re captured—but those other deaths won’t be justice, they’ll just be deaths.”

  “Thank you, Minister Luo. I call the vote.”

  Can you believe, reader, that I felt no envy? I had expected to, watching someone else attain the bloody prize my youthful planning had so hungered for: to make the Romanovan Senate—the greatest body of our united Earth—debate whether or not to kill a human being. But after I had shared so many meals and afternoons with Sniper, envy was not in my mind; friends’ deaths I fear.

  “Ninety-nine in favor, ninety-three against, with eight abstentions. The motion will go on the next session’s agenda.”

  Eight abstentions. This time my pacemaker’s alarm did not fade so soon. Murmur’s speculation filled the Senate seats as the Utopian island sat in conspicuous silence. I shuddered, and through the cameras I saw fresh strain in MASON’s brow as he tried to read the faces beneath those vizors. Clean hands, Utopia? The Europeans, Cousins, even Gordian’s Brillists glared as the eight of you sat there with your clean hands, reminding all with this haughty abstention—or so the others felt—that you and you alone are neither tainted nor injured by O.S. This wounded majority will not forgive that.

  “Next, the request from the Universal Free Court for a Senatorial Order instructing the Court whether to accept or reject Human Ockham Prospero Saneer’s petition for a trial with the plea of terra ignota. Human Carpenter has volunteered to speak in favor.”

  “Thank you Mem—”

  “Murderer!” Shouts rose at once.

  “You expect us to sit here listening to you defend your crimes!”

  “How many names did you put on the Wish List, Carpenter?”

  “Order!”

  “You shouldn’t even be here! You should all be on trial with Saneer!”

  “I don’t think we should admit into this chamber any Senators elected by a Hive which has picked nothing but mass murderers for two hundred years!”

  “Order!”

  “Everyone elected by the Humanists should be arrested!”

  “Drag them out!”

  “The Europeans, too!”

  “I wasn’t elected.”

  Wonder washed the hate and fear from all eyes as the Strangest Senator rose to her feet. Aesop Quarriman wears her Senatorial stripe dyed into an athletic jacket, where Romanova’s gold and blues thread carefully between the bright Olympic rings. If the Mitsubishi can assign their Senate seats by service exam, the Empire by Imperial fiat, Utopia by multiplex occlusion, then the Humanists are free to fill their twenty-two seats as they like: twenty-one by popular election, with the last reserved for a heroes’ hero, the Olympic Champion, chosen anew at every Summer Games. The achievements of a heroes’ hero cannot be briefly listed. One could count Quarriman’s personal golds and silvers, her world records, or the stunning total of five hundred and eight medals which the Humanist Gray Team claimed over the three Olympics for which she served as Team Training Leader. For those who value heroes more for heart than brawn, one could add that, at the Panama City Games of 2450, Quarriman—though she was front-runner and less than a mile from the finish line with its promise of another Olympic gold—was first to abandon the marathon when a sudden sinkhole swallowed up a group of spectators, and Quarriman’s too-good example would not let any of her fellow runners leave the site for the four hours it took to dig every last person free. But none of these is her true pride. That lies in Antarctica, her birthplace and her team’s birthplace, the Humanist Gray Team, created when the Esperanza City Winter Games of 2280 made Antarctica the sixth continent to host the Olympics, adding a sixth ring to the Olympic flag and a sixth team to the competition-hungry Humanists. The addition was much needed. While some Humanists compete for nation-strat teams, so many prefer the Hive to any strat that, even when the Humanists divided into five separate colored teams—Black, Red, Gold, Green, Blue—each of the five still outnumbered every other Hive or strat team two to one. The addition of the Gray Team made the balance saner. But Quarriman is no complacent Antarctican. In ages past merely surviving on the frozen wastes was achievement enough to mark a hero, but nowadays electric heat and flying cars make mere survival easy. But Quarriman wants to see her icy homeland truly inhabited, loved, played in, not just cowered from as children cower from Nature in a pillow fort. This coming August, peace and Providence permitting, the Olympic bid which Quarriman herself spearheaded will see its culmination as Esperanza City becomes the first Antarctic city to host the Summer Games. When she runs her next marathon across the ice of Earth’s harshest wild, Aesop Quarriman will at last merit her Champion’s title in her own eyes.

  “Can I say something?” Quarriman asked, raising her hand as if in school.

  “Please do,” Jin Im-Jin invited warmly, his face aglow with delight as the Strangest Senator broke her accustomed silence. “Human Quarriman has the floor.”

  “Thanks.”

  The athlete stretched as she rose, bouncing in her light, pliable Humanist boots, science’s finest polymers folded in elastic layers as natural as muscles around bone, protecting and padding while leaving the foot as mobile as if it were still bare. It was no easy task fitting the metallic bands of so many Olympic medals among her boots’ folds, while the short stripes of her shared team medals sparkled in a dense line from her heel well up the calf.

  “When I first heard about O.S.,” she began, “I was really upset. Like a lot of you are. Then, when I heard more, I started feeling worse. Because, eve
n though I didn’t know about it, it was done partly for me, for my Hive, by my Hive. Now they’re saying it wasn’t even for the Hive but for world peace, which means not just we Humanists, but everybody has to feel dirty. And it’s horrible to accept that this wonderful world we’ve made is made from killing people. But then I started thinking about what the geographic nations used to do. I’m no expert, but I read a bit about it this morning, and from what I can tell, even to the end, the geographic nations never had any consistent policy on what secret nasty things they were and weren’t allowed to do to each other, and each other’s people. Even when they made rules, they let each other get away with breaking them all the time, because they all wanted to be able to use those extreme means to protect their own. Now it turns out that the Hives have been doing the same sorts of things, with O.S., and the Canner Device the Mitsubishi made, and I wouldn’t frankly be surprised if we discover more things like that. It’s not exactly the same as the geographic nations, but it’s legally and morally confusing in the same way. The pretend-we-aren’t-doing-this strategy has failed. And frankly, this new blame-everything-on-the-Humanists strategy isn’t going to work either. Romanova needs to make an official policy about covert actions, one that admits that, if O.S. really did facilitate world peace, then Romanova needs to come up with a substitute for that, another way to make peace, before O.S.’s good effects wear off. Minister Luo was brave enough to use the word ‘war’ here where everyone else has been avoiding it. O.S. was a terrible means, no one will deny that, but when you pull the keystone out of the arch the rest falls down unless you do something. We need a real legal answer to what means Hives and Romanova itself can and can’t use in future to fill the gap left by O.S. Otherwise we don’t know what will happen except that it’ll probably be really bad. Now”—her face stayed frank—“maybe some of you are thinking I should shut up and keep out of this because I don’t have much experience in law and politics, but in this situation none of you do either. We’re in unknown lands. We should all admit it. A witch-hunt-type trial isn’t going to solve the real problems, but a real terra ignota, where experts give us advice, just might. That’s what I think.”

  The Speaker waited. “Thank you, Human Quarriman. So you are speaking in favor of the Senate accepting the terra ignota?”

  “Oh, uh, yes.”

  “And is that all you have to say?”

  Quarriman scratched at the red-brown cloud of hair around her ears, not organized enough to be called curls. “Is that enough?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Speaker Jin smiled. “Minister Cook has volunteered to speak in opposition, if there are no objections. Minister Cook.”

  Achilles fingered the invisible hem of his Utopian coat and whistled, low under his breath, asking in silence what we all did: What favors did you trade, Queen of Nurturists, to get the others to agree to let you be the opposition voice?

  Lorelei Cook rose, and I must admit that the cheery colors of her bright wrap in my lenses made my back relax a little after so much black and gray. “Thank you, Member Speaker, honored colleagues. While I appreciate Human Quarriman’s honest comments”—she smiled warmly—“by asking us to grant Ockham Saneer a terra ignota, the Humanists are asking the Senate to publicly declare that we believe the systematic murder of more than two thousand people might have been legal. The terra ignota plea is primarily intended to settle property disputes and social policy conflicts. Using it for a case of repeated and willful homicide is absolutely absurd. There is no doubt or blurriness about the law here. Gray Law and all Seven Hives’ law-codes, including Humanist law, clearly forbid homicide, except in a few cases like self-defense, and even that is recognized only by some Hives. Whatever the supposed social benefits of O.S. may be, calling it self-defense is like saying it’s self-defense for one job candidate to poison a rival to get the position. This motion is tantamount to a request that we let the guilty Hive governments keep on murdering people, since, if the trial found it legal, it would give them carte blanche to murder whoever they like in future in the name of a supposed greater good. Anyone who defends O.S. is asking the rest of us to walk around with bull’s-eyes on our chests while they strut around safe because they’ve cut a deal to be put on the do-not-target list. This is hypocrisy of the worst kind and … what … what?”

  Murmur, rising like locust song, made Cookie trail off. A change had come over all the faces in the Senate House, and it took the cameras some moments to track the Senators’ stares to their object: Olympic Champion Aesop Quarriman, who had ripped a paper form in half, drawn a bull’s-eye on its blank back, and pinned it to her jacket just over her heart. She said nothing, but smiled proudly as she dared Minister Cook to meet her eyes.

  Cook fortified her composure with a long breath. “Human Quarriman, this disruption is—”

  “If Ockham Saneer told me that my death would save ten thousand lives,” Quarriman interrupted flatly, “I’d let them kill me. Would you?”

  “There it is,” Achilles whispered.

  “What?”

  “A side.”

  No words now, not from Cookie, the Speaker, or the crowd as the rising clamor churned too much for ears to sort. As the cameras kept their lock on Quarriman, a Humanist colleague beside her took the other half of the torn paper and made himself a matching bull’s-eye. Others followed rapidly, Humanists, then one brave Mitsubishi, five, some Europeans, the Blacklaw Senators, and Tribune Natekari, who beamed as if she had just crossed the border back into her own wild country.

  As when a good dog, endearing and obsequious, when playing tug with bash’kids plays too rough, and the ancestral predator shows through for a moment in the good dog’s unintended snarl, just so the schoolteacher softness fell from Minister of Education Lorelei Cook as she fixed on Aesop Quarriman a glare of open war.

  “For and against O.S.?” I asked. “We had those sides before.”

  “Not recognizably,” Achilles answered as the cameras zoomed in on the spreading bull’s-eye. “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.”

  Hush fell on all we Servicers, memory’s hush, but not our own—inherited memories of shields and crests and bright, fluttering standards, passed down to us through history and fiction.

  “Shouldn’t we have a symbol too then, sir?” asked the young Servicer who sat behind us. “A clear way to tell friend from foe.”

  Godlike Achilles frowned, the blood-rush still bright in his face. “I haven’t forgotten.” He took the stack of battered papers and leafed through them, while I leaned close enough to peer over his shoulder. They were sketches, childlike figures fit for a world of boxy houses and lollipop trees, but the clothing, not the figures, was the artist’s focus, flat torsos and stiff arms sporting a variety of colored stripes and insignia, while the main part of the figures’ costumes, rendered in tea stains and thumb-smeared graphite, were recognizably the tan and gray mottling of a Servicer’s uniform.

  “These designs are terrible,” the great commander pronounced.

  The young Servicer gave a little whimper. “Sound in concept, I hope?”

  “No, not even sound in concept,” the veteran snapped, hotly. “Color-coded rank hats? Those are worse than wearing a bull’s-eye on your chest! 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.” The others peered, concerned, while Achilles shook his head, trying to shake off the heat rising within him as he scented war.

  Speaking of names, Mycroft, should we not have names for thy convict brethren? They were omitted in thy first book at Kosala’s insistence, to protect the Servicers, but this new chronicle is unce
nsored, made, not for thy contemporaries, but for me alone. I am not about to track down thy coconspirators by name and rat them out to Papadelias. Why not use names?

  “Well said, friend Reader!” Hobbes seconds heartily. “There is no harm in telling us, rather great good. Achilles’s former captains, Menestius, Eudorus, Pisandrus, Phoenix, Alcimedon, they will never leave men’s memory since Homer graced them with eternal fame. Do these brave Servicers deserve less?”

  Deserve less? If anything, those sitting with us here, who follow battle-hard Achilles not by birth but by choice, deserve fame’s elegy even more than the ancient Myrmidon captains. Yet still I hesitate to use real names. It is not you, my distant masters, whom I fear. It is hope. What if one of my friends survives to the war’s last day? And what if, in the war’s wake, the thrill-puffed victors think to beat the beaten further with purges and show-trials? Should our side be the losers in this war, and should this chronicle surface as the victors gloat, then I might have the survivors’ executions on my much-wounded conscience if I include their names. Better to guard them safe with anonymity, and let them write their own accounts at the war’s end, if they survive.

  Such caution is not unreasonable. But if thou wilt not use true names, Mycroft, at least use false ones, some contrivance to end this intolerable vagueness: “young one,” “another,” I shall never keep it straight.

  As you command, reader.

  “Sir, if the sides are taking shape now,” Eudorus braved, the most athletic of our little company, “and if you’re sure that Sniper is our enemy, does that mean we finally have a goal? A side of our own?”

  Achilles’s brows narrowed, like a javelin thrower’s fixing on his target. “Why do you want to die for me?”