by Ada Palmer
“At 14:01 UT,” Ockham began, “nine hours thirteen minutes ago, I met with our three Commanders. Prime Minister Perry said that the press investigations incited by the Black Sakura theft are now targeting the Cousins’ Feedback Bureau, and they think this will expose an important secret, whose nature they did not specify, but which is likely to result in the dissolution of the Cousins. The Prime Minister called for a hit—”
“¿Now?” Sniper interrupted. “You must be joking.”
“No joke. They want us to trigger the retirement of Bureau Chief Darcy Sok, to deflect the investigation away from whatever the CFB is hiding.”
“¿And what’s supposed to deflect the investigators that are after us? ¡A hit right now is insanity!”
Ockham’s sigh agreed. “Perry stated that they had violated protocol and already made direct contact with Sidney and Eureka, to have them pick a target.”
“¿Weird how?” Lesley pressed, bending to help Sniper retrieve a dropped ball. “¿How is the world weird lately?”
“Try me. Perry’s saying the Cousins are in danger. ¿Can you tell from what?”
<¿you see the sea?>
Lesley gazed out the window at the bird-speckled waves afire with sunset. “Yes.”
“¿How bad?” Lesley asked. “¿How bad compared to … what’s the worst we’ve had, when that Anti-Mitsubishi Land Bill went up in 2449?”
Fear rose on faces that rarely show it.
Not Ockham’s. “Then O.S. will steer it back again. The question is precisely how. The President and Chief Director indicated that they had intended this leak to occur so the Cousins would be dissolved, but both agreed with the Prime Minister that if this occurs now, while Mitsubishi and Humanist popularity is low, it could cause a disastrous swing toward the Masons. They talked about a real population majority. The President asked my advice, and I advised against O.S. taking any action while Martin Guildbreaker’s investigation is ongoing. The President—reluctantly—ordered that we prepare this hit, but said we are only to prepare, and to do nothing further without orders.”
So sweet is Lesley’s face that even her frown feels rosy. “¿Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“¿So, the order may not come?” she suggested.
“It may not, but it may. Before it does, I want votes from all five of you on whether or not we should obey it if it does.”
Five? Correct me if I err, Mycroft, but by my reckoning there are nine members of this bash’, not five. There are, reader, but nine members is not nine votes. Cato gets no vote—his abject terror has led to so many consecutive abstentions that no one bothers to ask him anymore. Only the attending Typer votes, and the set-sets share one vote between them, since they think so identically, as two rats in a lab respond to the same shocks and treats, that a council convened to poll diverse thinking does not give two votes to one opinion. Lesley votes, Thisbe, Sniper, one twin and one set-set, a good odd number to prevent a draw. Ockham does not vote; Ockham decides.
“¿You think we shouldn’t obey?” Lesley asked first.
Ockham steps forward into your view now, his back to Mukta’s windshield, as if he dares not speak such words while facing the Saneer birthright. “I think we must weigh this carefully. Making a hit now would greatly increase the danger of exposure. I am the twelfth O.S. I do not intend to be the last.”
“Before we weigh the sides, Ockham,” Kat or Robin Typer interrupted, “one of us should say what we’re all thinking. ¿Isn’t this sort of thing exactly why we killed our ba’pas?”
Thisbe nodded emphatically.
“I mean,” the twin continued, “it’s us on the couches this time and no kids yet to eavesdrop, but this is the same scene as five years ago. We all agreed back then that our ba’pas deciding to choose for themselves when to use O.S. instead of taking Presidential orders was reason enough to … ensure they wouldn’t be around to follow through on that decision.”
“What they intended was treason,” Ockham supplied at once, the word as heavy from him as from any Masonic Judge.
“Yeah,” Kat or Robin nodded, “and this is too.” One must say Kat or Robin since those present had no more way than you do, reader, to tell the twins apart.
You have not yet met the Typers, have you? Not surprising—if one is home on duty then the other has inevitably stormed out after their daily row. Their sameness goes beyond matching clothes and hair to matching body language, matching scars, and they switch trackers frequently, despite police complaints, for what can the police do when the twins have singed off those offending fingerprints that dared make them differentiable? Each twin watches through the other’s tracker at all times, so one cannot test them by mentioning some earlier encounter; both know all. Once at their birthday party I saw one get drenched with punch, and in a wordless second both ripped off their differentiating shirts. What are the differences between these intentionally identical archenemies who refuse to move to separate bedrooms after thirty years of constant war? Kat Typer I know is fascinated by the pseudoscientific spiritualism of the Nineteenth Century: meters to quantify ghostly presences, meticulously catalogued séances, ESP research, but it is not in the supernatural where Kat finds wonder. It is the late Nineteenth-Century mind that fascinates, these scientists who were simultaneously so rigorous and so poetic, so critical and so credulous, so expert and so wrong. It was a unique mind-state, Kat thinks, fleeting, a psychological mayfly possible only in the moment when science was rising quickly in respect and use, but lagging behind in power. Medicine was not yet competent, workweeks not yet humane, so these minds, trying to be modern, still faced premodern trauma levels, and channeled that into the most sophisticated double-think we have ever achieved. That is Kat’s current theory anyway. Robin Typer likes bikes. Each of these interests may extend to the other twin as well, but I have only once had a conversation with each twin when I was certain which it was, so that is all I know: Kat, spiritualist double-think; Robin, bikes.
Kat or Robin snorted. “¿No?”
“Yeah,” the twin agreed, “but the thinking is the same. They wanted to take O.S. into their own hands. ¿Why? Because five years ago the three Commanders-in-Chief were all crappy leaders. Perry’s Special Means Committee was so paranoid about P.M. Spain catching on that Perry hardly dared to come to meetings, Andō was having so much trouble with the Chinese blocs it took a month to get the Directorate to agree on anything, and Ganymede was flipping insane.”
“President Ganymede,” Ockham corrected firmly.
Kat or Robin frowned. “Regardless, O
.S. wasn’t getting any orders worth following; that’s what our parents said. Here we are five years later. Andō is on the verge of losing control again, Casimir Perry’s turned out to be a dickhead, and President Ganymede is still flipping insane. Fess up, Ockham. ¿Do you want to disobey this order because it’s stupid or do you want to disobey it because they’re stupid?”
“¡That’s too much!” Lesley scolded. “Ockham wants to disobey the order because it puts the entire Hive in danger, nothing else. ¿Can we check this off as the point in the meeting when you gripe again about Sniper not being President and move on?”
“Hear, hear,” the celebrity agreed.
“Wait.”
Lesley and Sniper looked up, startled to have Ockham rein them in. “¿What?”
“I don’t approve of Typer’s tone, nor do I agree with their opinions of the three Commanders-in-Chief, particularly the President, whom I might add Typer has never met in person, while I have, and I deem them competent. Nevertheless, Typer’s question is valid if rephrased. ¿Do the current leaders, competent or no, have the right to jeopardize, not just the generation that elected them, but all the past and future generations of Humanists?”
Ockham took a slow breath. “O.S. was created to serve the Humanists. If subsequent Humanist leaders judged that the Hive was best served by lending this power to two allied Hives, that does not add those Hives to our mandate. I want you to think only of our main Hive as you vote on this. ¿Do our leaders have the right to order O.S. to put itself in danger of exposure? ¿Lesley?”
“No.” She swallowed as she said it, bright eyes apologizing for voicing what her spouse would not want to hear. “In chess you’re not allowed to move the king into check, even if it’ll check the opponent, too. In a few days, maybe, if something makes Guildbreaker and Seneschal back off then sure, but not now, and”—she raised her voice as she saw Kat or Robin preparing to jump in—“I don’t think it’s a matter of disobeying the President. It doesn’t sound to me like the President wants us to do this. It was Perry’s idea. You said the President told us to prepare the hit but do nothing, probably because they didn’t want to refuse outright with Perry there. We can send Cardie to meet with the President tomorrow and verify, but my money says the President doesn’t want to give this order, not until the heat’s off.”
Ockham breathed deep, weighing all before he nodded. “¿Cardigan?”
“We serve the Humanist Membership,” Sniper stated simply. “They elected Ganymede.”
“Thank you. ¿[Sydney/Eureka]?”
The set-set stretched within their electrode mesh. <¿you’re asking if we should take a small risk to prevent the cousins crashing down? yes, we should. of course we should. you haven’t seen these numbers. the sky is falling. yes, we should catch it before it buries everyone alive.>
Again Ockham breathed deep. “That’s two for following the order, one against. ¿Thisbe?”
The witch Thisbe gazed down into her teacup. (Mycroft, must we have this fight again? No talk of witches.) “We should make the hit. We’re in no danger. Even if the investigation is looking at the cars, they can’t track my personal technique, and I’m sure Cato has a dozen fresh methods lined up. Martin Guildbreaker and Dominic Seneschal have no better chance now than ever of catching a one-time Cato concoction. If switching methods every time let an amateur like Mycroft Canner kill seventeen people in a week with the whole world chasing them, I think the nine best-trained killers on Earth can manage one hit without being caught by an uptight Mason and a perverted Blacklaw.”
“And Ἄναξ Jehovah,” I would have added had I been there, “He Who sees what cannot be seen, and judges all by His unknowable Law. He too is watching.” So I would have warned, but I was not there, reader, nor am I even listening with you in Mukta. I am at Madame’s still, nestled in the unmerited heaven of Saladin’s arms. It was irresponsible of me, I know, to let the world spin on without watching. I who owe you seventeen lifetimes of service have no excuse.
Eighteen lifetimes, Mycroft, don’t forget; thy victims’ and thine own.
“I’m right. ¿Aren’t I? ¿Cato?” Thisbe prompted, scraping one boot across the other so the squeal of the surfaces penetrated even Mukta’s vents. “There’s no way they’ll catch you, you’re too good at this.”
His demonstrations of static electricity, famous at the science museum, do not make Cato’s wiry hair stand more on end than Thisbe Saneer. “¿What? Um … yes. I mean, I’ve already picked out a method. It’s normal. As untraceable as normal, I mean, which means it could be traced only if you know what I don’t know … I mean, I don’t know how it could be traced, but nothing’s impossible. If somebody knows more than me maybe … except nobody … ¿is it hot in here?”
Thisbe tossed her head. “It was a yes or no question, Cato.”
“Yes,” he answered, quick as a kicked pup. “I mean, no. ¿What was the question again?”
“¿Do you think you can make the hit without danger of exposure?”
His answer came slowly, like a pulled tooth. “Ggggggyyyyyyes. Yes. It’ll be ready to go in a few hours, as safe as it ever has been, assuming they don’t have any resources we don’t know—”
“Et cetera, et cetera…”
His black brows furrowed. “Don’t ‘et cetera’ it away, Thisbe. This universe contains infinite possibilities, therefore it’s possible that we’ll be caught. It always is.” Cato had more conviction in his voice here than you have ever heard from him, strength, one might almost call it, hope, for it was hope to Cato, that tiny thousandth of a percent of a chance, each time they made him do this, that it might be the last time.
“Yes, yes,” Thisbe granted, “but no more probable now than ever, that’s what I’m saying. Frankly, I’m not worried about this little puppet investigation.”
“¿Puppet investigation?”
“If an independent party like Papadelias got involved,” she continued, “it might be a threat, but Seneschal and Guildbreaker both work for J.E.D.D. Mason. We’re in no danger there.”
<¿no danger? ¿have you forgotten what j.e.d.d. mason did here two days ago? ¡they’re a psycho cult leader!>
“I agree, Thiz,” Sniper added. “President Ganymede warned me emphatically to have the bash’ avoid contact with J.E.D.D. Mason at all costs. I’ve never heard the President sound genuinely scared before.”
She sniffed. “That’s as may be, but we have Andō Mitsubishi on our side, and if Andō asks J.E.D.D. Mason to call off the hounds they will.”
<¿why should they?>
Thisbe looked ready to laugh. “You know why.”
“It really is hot in here,” Cato interrupted.
Ockham frowned. “I asked the Chief Director and the President directly about J.E.D.D. Mason.”
Thisbe rolled her eyes. “You hardly have to ask. Andō’s J.E.D.D. Mason’s real father. Everybody knows.” She looked to Sniper. “Your whole nation-strat knows.”
Sniper always frowns, being lumped in with its Japanese mother’s nation-strat, whose insignia it never chose to wear. “¿You believe that stupid rumor? ¡It’s gibberish! A fantasy Mitsubishi made up to make themselves feel powerful, that J.E.D.D. Mason is really Andō’s son, and they spy on the Emperor and then sit in on Directorate meetings as the unofficial ‘Tenth Director,’ giving secret advice to help battle the Masons. ¿We’re supposed to believe the Emperor’s being duped by something billions of people know?”
Thisbe’s eyes have a special glitter when she knows something you don’t. “I heard it from Andō’s own mouth, that J.E.D.D. Mason is their child.”
Sniper’s child-wide eyes grew wider. “¿From Andō?”
“President Ganymede was there too.”
“¿Where?” Ockham asked quickly.
“At a place.”
“What place.”
“A place I was, th
at’s all.”
“Thisbe…”
<¿that’s the black hole right? ¿location 133-2720-0732?>
“¿Where?” Ockham does not like to repeat himself.
“¿Thisbe?”
Thisbe snuggled deeper among the cushions, enjoying the shock that spread across her bash’mates’ faces as one enjoys a winter fire spreading through dry logs. “I’m not allowed to repeat the details, I’m afraid.”
The twelfth O.S. loomed toward his sister. “You will repeat them to me.”
“No, I won’t,” she answered calmly. “The President told me not to. All I can say for now is that little Tribune Mason is like a living contract between the Masons and Mitsubishi not to screw each other over. With that in place—”