Seven Surrenders--A Novel

by Ada Palmer

  The Emperor nodded, no surprise left now. “Apollo drew first blood, my blood. You drew second, theirs. After Apollo’s death, I tried to stay close to Utopia, invited other Utopian Familiares, protected them, even against Madame. I did everything I could to help them pursue their future in parallel to mine. I thought the Empire could sit unchanging and nurture them while they progress, separate but not enemies. That book, Apollo’s plan, it’s making us enemies. As MASON I can’t sit back and let Utopia destroy this world, not even to protect a dream I share.”

  “They aren’t doing it, Caesar.” It felt strange smiling here, but the thought of adding some salve to good Caesar’s wounds made me feel warm inside. “Utopia is innocent. This isn’t Apollo’s war.”

  “What?”

  “O.S., the Humanist-Mitsubishi-Europe alliance, the CFB threatening the Cousins, none of it matches what Apollo planned. Their war was to be the Masons against the Mitsubishi over land, with Europe taking your side and the Humanists taking theirs, while the Cousins and Gordian would have stayed neutral. The situation happening now isn’t remotely like Apollo’s war plans. Some of the tensions are the same, the economic balance Kohaku Mardi predicted, 33–67; 67–33; 29–71, but the events, the sides, are totally different. Utopia wouldn’t do it this way. They wouldn’t tear down the Cousins, the group we need to keep the others from getting too vicious. They wouldn’t expose O.S. and make the public call for blood, they wanted the smallest war possible, not a huge, angry one like this will be. This isn’t Apollo’s war. The weapons, Voltaire’s and Aldrin’s, they really are for self-defense. Utopia didn’t do this. The war they’re ready for is coming on its own.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve memorized Apollo’s war plans, every step, how to make the war midsized and brief, contingency after contingency for keeping it from getting vicious, and to keep it from dragging in every Hive. This O.S. mess is precisely the kind of war Apollo didn’t want.”

  His eyes grew narrow. “So there are war plans in Apollo’s Iliad?”

  I winced. “I can’t show them to you, Caesar. The plans include strategies Utopia can still use to help keep the war contained, and minimize the damage. If you know the plans you’ll react differently to events, then they won’t work. Trust—”

  “You lied about that book! You and Apollo, too many times for me to trust you now!”

  “Lied, Caesar?”

  “War plans are not a storybook.”

  Again the presence of truth where only more betrayal was expected let me smile. “I wasn’t lying, Caesar. There is a story in the book too, one I was supposed to finish. Apollo was rewriting the Iliad with giant robots.”

  He half laughed. “Giant robots?”

  “You know the old science fiction stories where the pilot rides inside a giant human-shaped robot. Apollo’s Iliad was set in the future, a space war where Troy is on the Moon, with Hector and Achilles facing off in giant robot suits and smashing asteroids. It was badly written, too. If you saw a chapter, Caesar, you would laugh.”

  MASON frowned, uncertain, as if believing me only because the claim was too stupid to be a lie. “Why would Apollo waste their time on such a thing?”

  A touch of lightness let my tears pause. “It was the only way Apollo could imagine a future war where one soldier still matters. Apollo hated war, could not forgive a universe where such horrible suffering was necessary to get to Mars. They desperately wanted to find something else worthwhile in war, something to make it more than an unforgivable but necessary evil. The Church War consisted of statistics, a hundred thousand dead here, a million there, mostly civilians, but even the majority of soldiers were killed by faceless bombs, and those who did see the whites of the enemy’s eyes did so only in waves of thousands. Apollo saw nothing worthwhile in such a war, no thought, no heroes, and whether one soldier thinks their side is right or wrong, changing sides would make no difference. In Homer’s Iliad, when Achilles refuses to join battle, the Argive armies fail without him, and when other heroes, Hector or Sarpedon, charge or fall back, the whole face of the war is different. Individual decisions matter when the heroes make them. Realistically no one soldier’s decision can matter like that in a war, but without that there is no human face to it, the war becomes a mere machine of death. Apollo wanted a war of meaning, two sides embodying two futures, who would fight with respect and honor, putting their lives on the line for their philosophies, as it was when Saladin and I faced Seine and Apollo. Homer’s heroes could have that, be that important to the course of the war, because they were part god. Apollo’s future version had cyborg pilots bonded to special giant robots that only they could use, which made them overwhelmingly powerful compared to common soldiers. In Apollo’s version the gods were powerful A.I. robots, so a human pilot in a giant robot suit was literally wearing a prosthetic god. There were only a handful of pilots who could do it, so when one left or entered battle, or switched sides, that individual decision could change the face of the war.”

  Caesar breathed deep. “Just like Homer’s heroes.”

  I nodded. “Freud said all technology is a prosthetic god, a set of tools we weak humans strap on to give ourselves the powers we crave: computers for omniscience; trackers for omnipresence; medicine for immortality; armor for invulnerability; guns for Heaven’s wrathful thunderbolts. Apollo just made that literal. Of course, Apollo didn’t really think the war over Mars in two hundred and fifty years would be fought with giant robots, it was just the only way they could describe a war that would be meaningful, conscionable, with space for human dignity. It was Apollo’s hope, the kind of soldier Apollo wished they could be, so they could die a hero, instead of faceless, one among a million. That’s why I had to face Apollo in battle head-on, not catch them by trickery as I did the others. It was foolish of me. Apollo could have won, killed me, and lived to make their war. I risked letting that happen, but I had to test myself, my future, against Apollo’s. Apollo deserved to fall like a hero.”

  I will not solve the mystery, reader. I will not tell you of Apollo’s death. You know the facts. The eighth day of my rampage Saladin and I convinced Seine Mardi that the police who had her in protective custody were complicit in the murders. She fled, and sent word to Apollo, who was about to embark for the safety of the Moon, but he gave up his seat to Tully, and returned. He knew it was a trap, but knew too that, if he did not come, his love would suffer all my tortures, alone. The police found Seine dead of cyanide, one bullet in her side, with residue across her brow proving that she had worn Apollo’s vizor for a time, though whether before, during, or after death science cannot tell. Apollo’s body they found dismembered, sexually violated, and dead from blood loss, since my imperfect tourniquets could not prevent all leakage from the stumps of thighs and shoulders. His coat, vizor, and U-beast were gone, but in his stomach they found a placebo capsule, shaped just like Seine’s cyanide, and well-chewed bites of his own cooked flesh, which he had volunteered to taste as we feasted with him, one last experience. A second pellet of real poison waited out of reach in the gutter beneath. These are forensic facts. As for the truth? Who died first? Whether Apollo mistook the placebo for poison, or whether he chose the placebo and the pain that followed? Did Apollo lend Seine his vizor to aid her in combat? Or perhaps, before the battle, he shared with her a glimpse of his Utopian vision? Or placed the vizor on her dead eyes to make her rest more peaceful? These answers neither torture nor you can wring from me, reader. At first I kept them secret because I felt no outsider could understand, but there have been such exquisite versions of our story since, the plays, movies, paintings, poems, imagining different Seines, different Apollos, different Mycrofts, different great conflicts of our times played out as artists reenvision the tragedy of the Utopian who died for love. For me to set out a script of cold facts now would only block what has become the font of something greater. You will accuse me justly of hubris as I make this comparison, reader, but, if some base historian proved once and
for all that there was no Achilles to drag Hector breaker of horses round and round the topless towers of Troy, the world would have lost something.

  “I wish you could have seen them, Caesar.” A whimper rose in me, and, judging by Caesar’s face the rain had eased enough to let him see how thickly the tears washed down my cheeks. “I saw through my periscope, just before they leapt into battle, the last kiss Seine and Apollo shared, with the weapons in their hands, and wind driving the tears sideways across their cheeks. I can still see them when I close my eyes. And it was equal. We shared a last kiss too, Saladin and I, I can still feel it, just like theirs, what would have been our last kiss in a world where they won the battle. I feel it, see it, taste it. I can’t feel anything else, just that moment forever.” My pacemaker kicked in, my heart racing as if the memory were draining all my blood to feed itself. “I had believed violence was better in the hands of individuals, one murderer expressing himself absolutely, not ordered by the state like soldiers are. But there, the four of us ready to die to test the futures we believed in, that was better. If we could only have one future, if one of our rival futures had to die, we could at least give each of ours a chance. I understood then what Apollo was trying to do in their Iliad. There is something a little good in war.” I laughed inside. “Trial by combat. Maybe I already believed a little bit in Providence even back then, but I had to think that whichever of us would win was somehow meant to. Whichever one of us would win had the right future. Apollo died for that.”

  “Apollo died for Seine Mardi.” Hers is the only name the Emperor pronounces with more hatred than my own.

  “We don’t know that. Maybe Apollo would have come anyway, to test their future against mine.”

  “They died for Seine.” One could taste the hate in MASON’s tone, Cornel’s tone rather, for it is the person, not the office, she offends: how dare she, this Humanist, this child, this person who, try as we might, we could not find anything special in, no wiser, keener, brighter, more creative, more ambitious than any other person, how dare she alone enjoy Apollo’s love? “I talked to Apollo’s bar friends,” Cornel continued, fists stiff as stone, “the ones who were with Tully, and attacked you. Apollo visited them in the bar the day they died. Apollo showed up all of a sudden, standing in the doorway with tears running down their cheeks, and when the others asked what was wrong Apollo said, ‘I don’t want to die. I want to drink with you, and live with Seine, and stand on Mars, and breathe the air we made, but I’d go mad, I know it, I’d go mad living on, knowing I left Seine to go through this alone. I don’t want to die. I just wanted someone to hear me say it.’”

  We collapsed here into tears together, Cornel MASON and myself. I like to think that, for that moment, the labels left. I was not Apollo’s pupil, nor his killer; Cornel was not the avenger nor the unrequited lover; we were just two people who had lost the same friend.

  “I can’t tell … who’s right … anymore…” I gasped out through my sobs. “I won, but, when I killed Apollo, God made Bridger, and now someone else is making the war, not Apollo, not Utopia, not me. I don’t know who. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. And it’ll be a worse war, much, much worse. But there is one mercy, Caesar. You and Utopia don’t have to be enemies. You should still try to stop the war, you have to, but if you fail, if it starts, both you and Utopia will have the same goal: making it as short as possible. You can be allies. Once the war has started we can even have Bridger bring Apollo back, and you two can be allies at last, and work together to make this the best … the least bad … war that it could ever be.” I swallowed hard. “This Universe’s God is not kind. If They were, They wouldn’t have made me kill Apollo in the first place. More than that, a kind God wouldn’t have made human nature such that achieving a happy golden age like this meant risking the whole human race getting too comfortable and scared, like Mirai Feynman, and giving up on setting out among the stars. But here at least, for whatever inscrutable reason, They have been kind. We can bring back Apollo. If the war is real, Caesar, and we can’t stop it, then at least we can finally use Bridger’s powers to give my body over to Apollo. The largest part of my debt will be paid at last, my guilty life traded for Apollo’s better one, and all will be as it should be.”

  Silence gripped MASON, far too dark to interrupt. He was not looking at me but at the statue, and I saw in his rain-streaked face an expression I had felt many times myself but never seen on another. Now the statue was a seed to him, a chrysalis waiting to become the man, and, as he faced it he faced not Apollo’s dust, but an Apollo he might walk with again, and speak to, and hear answers. “You know Jehovah won’t let you kill yourself, or anyone,” he answered at last, “not until we can prove we aren’t all Gods.”

  I nodded. It may be strange to you, but it is the most natural of fears to Good Ἄναξ Jehovah. If He was born a God, why not all of us? Perhaps every human being in this world was a visiting God like Him, trained by society not to realize what we are, to think that the universes to which only we have access are mere imagination, not Realities themselves. And if we are all Gods and mortal, do our universes die with Us? Does every human death take with it another cosmos, infinite, life-filled, and better than this one? I could not prove to Him it was not so—can you?

  The Emperor stumbled, his weak left foot giving way, but he concealed it by bending to lift my hat from where it lay, and pulling from within it the dripping gray Familiaris armband, which I carried always but so rarely wore. “I’m going to have them sew this to your sleeve. The world knows about you now, you need the visible protection of my law or the next angry mob may do worse than knock you down.”

  “Yes, Caesar.” I took it from him, wringing it out in my hands.

  “It’s too dangerous for you to walk the streets alone. Ever. Ever again. If I catch you out unguarded one more time, or even trying to get out, I’ll lock you in a cell in Alexandria, and the only time you’ll ever leave again is if I lend you out to someone who has their own cell ready for you. And I’ll have you hobbled. Surgically. I mean it, no second chance.”

  “Yes, Caesar. I understand.” A deep breath. “What now, Caesar? You have caught me, you must have more need for me than this.”

  “We need you at the Capitolium. The Censor has called an emergency session of the Senate to hear Jehovah present their findings on O.S., but we need you to help write their speech. Jehovah is still too distraught to make themself comprehensible to anyone but you.”

  I looked to the Capitolium on the hill behind us, the clouds now lightening over the temple which, in real Rome, would have held offerings to Jupiter, but here housed the constitutions which govern the many kingdoms of man—not much difference.

  “You have an idea of how Jehovah fits in all this, don’t you?” Caesar tested.

  I sighed slowly. “Not a clear one, Caesar. History’s largest war is coming. In the middle of it, Bridger was born human with the powers of a God, and Jehovah was born a God with no more powers than a human. When you first meet Bridger it’s instinct to ask: Why me? Why did God show this miracle to me, of all people, when so many better people throughout history prayed their whole lives for this and got nothing? It takes some time for the selfishness to wear off. The real question isn’t why me, it’s why now? Why, out of all the moments in history, would God show Their face now? It is not coincidence. I don’t know if Jehovah is here now because Bridger is necessary for the war, or if Bridger is here now because Jehovah is necessary for it, but I am sure they are here so they can meet, and meet at this moment of humanity’s greatest testing, the first true universal war. God, the God Who made us, is the only other member of Jehovah’s species. Deus Monotheistus one might say. Jehovah needs to meet Them more desperately than any Homo sapiens ever has. This Universe’s God is not so cruel as to deny Him that. That’s why Bridger is here.” I looked up into MASON’s uncertain eyes. “I’ve never been sure, Caesar, if … do you believe Jehovah is a God?”

  “Whether they are or n
ot, my duties are the same.” He handed me my tracker, kept safe and dry in the depths of his pocket. “If you slip that again without my permission I’ll kill Saladin.”

  I had not thought I had the strength left to shudder so. “Understood, Caesar.”

  “Papadelias has arrested the Servicers who helped you. Papa’s as eager to talk to you as I’ve seen anyone be eager for anything in my entire life. I can put them off for a few hours, until Jehovah is done with you, but no longer.”

  “Thank you, Caesar.”

  “Where is Bridger?” he asked.

  A sob leaked. “I don’t know.”

  I did not fully understand how true my words were until after I spoke them, when I set my tracker back into my ear and switched it on.

  “Mycroft!” It was the Major’s voice, harsh over the intercom the instant my signal went back on line. “Where in Hades have you been? Bridger’s gone! We went to the Sniper museum to get more equipment from the toy stash, but the police were waiting, your Papadelias, with men everywhere, and some kind of electropulse, it fried the teleporter, all our radios, everything. They captured Boo and Stander-G. Bridger turned invisible and flew off to who knows where. We’ve lost touch completely.”

  “Bridger’s alone?” I cried, unable to care whether Caesar or anyone could hear me.

  “They’ve got their nonelectrical equipment, but that’s it. It’s been two hours and no contact.”

  I cannot call this feeling fear. It is not fear after the dam breaks, when you watch the floodwaters wreaking their unalterable destruction. It is not fear as you watch the armies already locked in battle. It is not fear as you are dragged in your coffin-cage to the execution chamber where you know your justice waits. If I still doubted there was a God, I would have felt doubt here, but all I felt was resignation, Providence’s clockwork clicking on.