by Ada Palmer
“You know I’ve always obeyed the gods,” the son of Peleus answered. “The gods that rule the world, command the storms, gods that made me, gods that hear my prayers. The impius Alien you worship, though brilliant, and wise, and even kind, does none of this.”
“But He isn’t impius. You know Ἄναξ Jehovah values filial piety above … above…”
“Above what?” There was sharpness in the matchless runner’s tone. “Above what? Above fleeting turns of politics, perhaps, but not above His own ambitions. Not above this Great Conversation you both value so much, which, however grand, is also entirely selfish. In His inhuman way He honors His parents, but not as humans do. He honors the past, but not as people do who know they will someday join the ranks of the dead. He thinks as an outsider.” Achilles’s fingers dug into the armband in his hand. “He will never honor the ancients as we wanted to be honored, the way MASON does.”
My fast breaths made the unicorn beneath me shift its nervous hoofs. “You must fight on Jehovah’s side!” I cried. “With me. You must!”
Achilles took a long breath. “I want to. I would not choose to call either of you enemies, but if He would betray such a father…” A grim smile for Cornel before his eyes caught mine again. “What would His world look like? Tell me that. You don’t know, do you? Not even you?”
I found the strength at least to sit up as I faced Achilles. “He does not yet know, so how could I? All I know is that the Will of Providence is inexorable, and that same Providence gave me to Him.”
“And brought me back,” headstrong Achilles answered, hot words, quick, “and while I still draw breath and feel the touch of suns, I’ll follow my own will, not yours, or what you guess of Fate’s. I agree I’m here for a reason, as you are, but if you’re too broken to raise your voice and try to turn things toward a future you desire, I’m not. I say the ancients who died to lay the first foundations of this world deserve some say in what their works become. The living of this age are too accustomed to forgetting the dead, but we won’t sit silent anymore, not while I’m here to speak and act. And in the name of the dead, who spent our lives and labors to give humanity what it has now, I say we will not choose a future built by someone who would betray and destroy such a father, such an Emperor, and such an Empire.” The words boomed as the hero spoke them, rumbling like battle’s distant thunder, and startled a flock of birds whose sharp silhouettes rose in a cloud behind him, schooling in their panic like so many flying blades.
“Then we must make sure Jehovah does not betray me.” MASON stepped between us. “We must make sure they change their mind.”
“How?”
“By being perfect in this war,” the Emperor announced. “By achieving every goal. By crushing our enemies, supporting our allies, protecting our people, enforcing our justice, guarding our patrimony, and achieving our will. Jehovah wants to be powerful, efficacious, just. We will prove we are precisely that.”
Achilles breaker of battle lines frowned across at me. “War is not that easy, nor that kind.”
“I am aware that many kings and many empires have made such boasts and failed, but I am not any empire. I am the Empire, the dream of empires, constant since the first time a heart wished to call the space between horizon and horizon ‘mine.’ And you, Achilles, are the Soldier. Fight with me. We are both human and imperfect, so we will not achieve everything, but together we will come much closer than anyone else ever has or ever could. We will prove to Jehovah that this Empire is something they want to preserve—not just to preserve, but to become. Then they will join us, and let themself be reshaped by the ideals you and I share, and together we will make a future you will be proud to live in.”
“I won’t live in it.” The hero’s words fell gently, but with force, as a boulder shifts just an inch, and all in earshot tremble at the whisper-creak that could so easily have been avalanche’s thunder. “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 did, and choked some moments as again the shades of Ajax and Agamemnon rose before my eyes. “The Masons aren’t the future, Achilles. You know that.”
No one said anything. No one would, but glances crisscrossed among us all, Achilles, Aldrin, pale Apollo, Death, cautious glances, edged with suspicion, and with something lighter.
“MASON, why do you oppose the Set-Set Law?” Achilles asked at last.
Death spoke warily now, “Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t think you care about set-sets. I think you care about the right of parents to rear strange children, and not just your own son.” Achilles’s gaze strayed to Aldrin’s false digital eyes. “Am I right?”
MASON nodded. “I will die for it if I must, as Mycroft MASON did before me.”
“Why?”
Caesar drew strength as Apollo, still beside him, squeezed his hand. “An Emperor may use their power how they will.”
“Not you.” Achilles shook his head. “Not you. You want me to think it’s for the memory of your Apollo. I do believe, as Mycroft paints it, that Eros’s arrow pierced you as absolutely as it may pierce any man, but I still think duty rules love in your heart.”
The Emperor stood tall. “This is my duty. The Utopians are one of the wonders of the human race, and since that race is mine to guard and guide, I will protect its wonders. Utopia will strike out and found new colonies, new worlds, as many have before them, and MASONS will link those colonies into our Empire.”
Achilles’s glance, at once playful and accusing, passed across me to silent Aldrin. “Have you had a secret alliance with each of us,” he pointed to himself and Caesar, “all this time without telling the other?”
Aldrin’s lips parted, but Caesar cut in too fast. “My arrangement with them is not an alliance.”
“What, then?”
“My own policy, unilateral and unreciprocated.”
Utopia’s nod confirmed.
“Then what do you intend the Utopians to do in the war?” Achilles asked.
“Nothing,” Caesar answered at once. “They’re uninvolved, neither guilty nor victim in the O.S. scandal, the assassination plot, the land mess, the set-set mania, any of it. Let them stay uninvolved.”
“Even though they’d make such valuable allies?” Achilles tested.
“I’d rather see them home safe than beside me on a battlefield,” MASON replied.
“Do you really mean that? You’ll really let them stay out of the war?” I knew why Achilles doubted. He himself had tried so hard to stay away from Troy, donning women’s robes to hide among the maidens, but the Achaean chieftains would not let this best of fighters live in peace, and sent crafty Odysseus to expose him.
Death scowled. “If they ask for aid it will be theirs, but I think it will be enough if I make sure everyone in the war realizes, as I do, how much more terrible it would be if Utopia, and what Utopia can unleash, got involved. Let them help Kosala if they wish, with food and doctors, but no more.”
Achilles nodded. “Like priests, then. In the wilds of war, a wise man will hurl even an infant from a parapet to keep it from growing up to seek revenge, but, if he hopes for any future worth living in, he still honors the gods and spares their priests.”
Utopia stepped forward at last, taking a friendly equidistance between the two commanders. “This is a dangerous time for us to be thought of as priests.”
Goddess-born Achilles drew a long breath. “True.”
“It is a dangerous time for you to be thought of at all,” Death added. “I saw pictures from Esperanza City, when Jehovah’s Utopian guards uncloaked. I know Esperanza is half yours, but still, I’d rather no one saw you siding with Jehovah. Or with me. Or with anyone. I’ve seen both flags in most Hive’s colors but not mine, and not yet yours. Make sure it stays that way.”
I did not understand
then what Caesar meant by “both flags,” but I would soon: Sniper’s bull’s-eye had inspired an opposite. The first one I saw was ragged, in Alexandria, rendered in rough paint on a cut-up shirt, but within a few days shops would dye real ones. The flag of the Alliance, the one which flutters over Romanova’s Senate and her offices, has on it a ring of eight abstracted, bird-like Vs which circle the Earth’s blue orb (the number eight was fixed by Kovács and Thomas Carlyle back when dozens of fledgling Hives threatened to drown the flag in Vs if they made one V per Hive; our founders never dreamed someday the flock would dwindle to our meager seven). But now the Alliance flag had birthed a sequel, improvised in the heat of pre-war, with seven birdlike Vs flying, not in a ring, but in a flock, like geese, one great V formed of lesser Vs, united. A V of Vs. The first time I saw it I did not have to ask, only marvel at the clarity of the sigil which now flutters over many houses, and in many colors: gray Vs on purple over a Masonic theatre, azure Vs on white over a Cousins’ library, red and green Vs on white (plus one Korean blue) over a Mitsubishi farm. Many lintels boast both the Olympic rings and this new V of Vs flag. Anyone can use it, and each who raises the banner can imagine that his own Hive is the leader of the flock, that J.E.D.D. Mason is truly a [insert Hive here] at heart. I weep so often that it must mean little to you by now, but perhaps this moment may move you. There are so many flags. Thousands upon thousands, brave, brave bash’es who have learned of O.S., of the corruption in the CFB, of the Mitsubishi’s Canner Device, of Madame, of the Hives’ shame, of Romanova’s shame, and want change, and trust He who now proposes it, vague as His newborn plan still is. Unite the Hives, the flocking Vs urge. I want a better world badly enough to smash this one to make it, and to risk my life alongside yours, J.E.D.D. Mason, by raising your banner and letting the whole world know I side with you. When the Olympics end, and Sniper’s brazen faction rises to strike down both you and the new world you stand for, you will not face them alone.
“Can you answer my question now, Achilles?” Caesar asked as we waited for our summoned cars. “Which side will you take if, after we crush O.S., we fail to make my son accept my terms?”
Achilles sighed, glancing again at silent Aldrin. “You have both the past and the future on your side, MASON.”
The Emperor’s smile did not feel like Death’s now, but like a living man’s. “I thought Utopia might be the last thing making you hesitate.”
“Second-to-last. You still don’t have Mycroft Canner.”
Caesar frowned. “Is that really enough to make us enemies?”
Homer’s Great Soldier took a long time to answer, “No.”
“Achilles!” I cried.
He turned to me. “It’s not enough. He’s right. I never, ever want to be on the opposite side of a war from you, but I won’t fight against everything in this world that makes sense to me. I’m with MASON, even if you aren’t.”
“But—”
Achilles cut me off. “You love the Masons. You can’t pretend you don’t. You owe MASON your life and your obedience, and you love Utopia, and owe Utopia the same. But I know you love and owe Jehovah, too. If you don’t want this to rip them apart, and rip you and me apart, then you’ll have to help us make Jehovah choose the Empire.”
“It’s not my place to—”
Achilles’s glare struck me silent before his words did. “You could talk the riddle out of a sphinx, and you’re the one person on this Earth who speaks the private, hybrid language of Jehovah’s thoughts. If any creature can do this you can. If Jehovah joins MASON then every cause you serve remains united. If He won’t, we shatter. Do it.”
“Do it.” MASON repeated the command.
“Do it,” urged Apollo.
“Do it,” Achilles ordered one more time. “The side that has the two of us on it will win, and you know it. Make it a side we can respect.”
I could not answer them. I could not answer even myself as duty, hubris, awe, and terror wrestled to stalemate in my mind. In dumb stupor I watched Achilles don the gray Familiaris armband. In dumb stupor I watched brave Aldrin and my salt-sweet Saladin go back inside to the captivity of Madame’s. In dumb stupor, as we rode toward Alexandria, I endured Caesar’s and Achilles’s stares.
“Build me jeeps,” Achilles said at last, as the capital drew close beneath us.
“What?” Caesar answered.
“Build me jeeps. Build me twenty, no, fifty thousand jeeps.”
“You mean the old land cars?”
“You can build jeeps faster than you can breed horses, though horses are good too. We’ll also need some sort of fuel, and trucks, sturdy ones that can cope with the fact that you don’t have roads anymore.”
“The world has moved past land cars. We have better.”
“Do you have better that will still work when the world breaks down?”
MASON’s brows narrowed. “You think someone will destroy the transit system?”
“If our enemies get control of it, I will. If we do, they will.”
A slow nod. “We can develop something autonomous that will still work much better than a land car.”
“Good. Do. But it’ll take you a month or two to design it, especially if you’re not going to ask the Utopians to design it for you. Jeeps, you can get the plans from a museum and start building them tomorrow. Build me fifty thousand jeeps, and when you have something better build me fifty thousand of that, but we’ll still use the jeeps, just like we’ll use wagons, and horses, and wheelbarrows, and sticks and stones. This is war. Better a spear than a rock, but better a rock than nothing.”
MASON took a long breath. “Very well. I’ll build jeeps.”
“Weapons are a more complicated question. We’ll look together at what the history of warfare has to offer that still makes any kind of sense.”
We had landed now, and guards and Martin waited with salutes and reports. MASON ignored them. “Anything else?”
Stag-light Achilles leapt down to the waiting stone. “I’ve found a bull.”
“A bull?”
“A fine bull, yearling, fed right, reared close to Parnassus. I’m going to sacrifice it to father Zeus and the other deathless gods, to ask them for victory.” The ancient King of the Myrmidons offered Caesar his hand to help him down. “Would you like to join me?”
Emperor he may be, reader, heir to Alexander and Augustus, but there is a modern person beneath the death-black uniform, and that person took some moments to wrap his mind around the notion of actually, in real life, not in metaphor, drawing a knife across a living creature’s throat and watching the red blood flow. “Yes,” he answered. “Yes, I’d be honored to join you.”
It was done, and done well, a satisfying ceremony, as I understood from the new vigor which armored both of them against the next chaotic weeks. I was glad. They are both men who need friends. I did not attend. I could not. I am a parricide. My unclean presence would make the sacrifice unfit, the prayers unheeded. Nothing in any universe can wash the blood of my adopted parents from my hands. These days that fact grows harder to forget.
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH
Some Notes of Martin Guildbreaker on the Simultaneous Advancement of Four Investigations
(Abridged and translated from the Latin by Martin themself.—9A)
Cumulative through June 10, 2454
Events of April, May, and June
Written at Alexandria
OVERALL THOUGHTS (written May 9, 2454):
Prioritizing is impossible when one faces two different tasks, each of which has claim to be the most important problem in the world. I face three.
First, no Mason will know rest until we have justice for the violation of the Sanctum Sanctorum. As the Familiaris customarily tasked with investigating crimes, and as companion to the Porphyrogene, I hold the problem to be my personal responsibility. And the exposure of my own name as vicarius of the IMPERIUM MASONICUM, should dominus Jehovah delay their ascension, makes the problem more irrevocably mine. Never a
gain will I be able to stroll through empty alleys without a wall of guards between myself and my fellow human beings; nor meet another’s eyes and not read in their thoughts: “Martin may someday be Emperor.” I support the ancient custom that the throne should generally not pass to a porphyrogene, and the wise law which prohibits discussion of the Imperator Destinatus. Public knowledge of the succession leads to envy, plots, defamation, sycophancy, murder, and, most dangerous, to the successor knowing they are the successor. As Machiavelli observed, Rome showed, tyrant after tyrant, how those reared in palatine luxury, expecting to be master of the world, basely abused the godlike authority that fell to them unearned, while those promoted through merit—Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—made judicious use of the Imperium of which they considered themselves, not owners, but custodians. It is not power that corrupts, but the belief that it is yours. I think I will never believe that any privilege I enjoy—whether Caesar’s trust or the Throne—is mine—yet, when I face a mirror now, I see the shadows of Caligula and Commodus, and doubt myself. Do I, tasting IMPERIUM before me, have the strength to still commit myself to making dominus Jehovah to take the Throne from me? Or will I forget the purpose which Cornel MASON laid upon me those many years ago, commanding that, while my bas’sibs might pursue the Guildbreakers’ customary paths in the Senate and high politics, I would instead dedicate myself to a single more important task: “Make my son a Mason,” which I now understand as “Make my son a MASON.” I must not fail, but if I do fail, it must not be because I let myself desire the power which never should be mine, more so now that the corrupting knowledge that I might receive it throws my fitness in doubt. I do not doubt dominus Jehovah’s fitness. They are incorruptible. I know therefore that MASON is right to suspend custom and pass the IMPERIUM to this Porphyrogene. But if I did not know dominus Jehovah so personally, I too would likely doubt, and in my heart of hearts think hard on the words of Ojiro Cardigan Sniper. This doubt of the successor’s fitness, sown in our Empire by these vandals, is food for chaos. And the Sanctum’s violators have not only harmed the present generation. The past suffers as well, for MASON’s vaults contained codices, papyri, tablets in stone and clay, preserved since the births of writing and the Empire; the flammable are ashes now, the enduring scarred. And the future suffers too, for with the Sanctum’s fall, henceforth, until a stronger age devises one, there is now no safe place in this world. I must bring justice.