With that, my roommate, the god, peeled off her samue and flopped down across her cot.
The prevalence of hereditary monarchies in the modern world was a quirk of history, a side effect of requiring national decision-makers to have children and putting those children under lethal threat. Even the most robust democracies of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries had never been far away from being dynasties. All it had taken was Talis’s thumb on the scale.
I didn’t actually mean for the hostage thing to create a whole bunch of hereditary monarchies, saith the Utterances. But, you know, whatever. Murdering princesses. I guess I can work with that.
Xie would be eighteen in the spring. Her country was utterly at peace. Here, in front of me, was one princess who was going to live. She folded her hands behind her head, watching the sky turn from lavender to silvered indigo, lying bare below the glass ceiling as if the light alone could wash her.
Da-Xia and I have been together for so long that there cannot be much modesty left between us, yet still I turned my eyes away, back to the paper. A letter had failed to write itself. Overhead, wind was picking up: a storm with no rain, just birds being pushed too far, too fast.
“Writing home?” Xie asked behind me. I heard the rustle of her pulling on her alb.
“Trying to.”
Early in the history of the Preceptures, hostage Children had been allowed real-time video uplink with their parents and friends, access to a full spectrum of media. It hadn’t worked out well. (Yeah, said the Utterances. In my considered opinion, riots are bad for morale.) Now we got our news from printed dispatches. And we wrote letters.
I looked at the smudged paper. “I can hardly tell her—ask her—” It was hard to code this. Tell me, Mother, if I’m going to die. “It turns out I have no idea what to say.”
“Most holy and beloved father,” said Xie, addressing an imaginary letter to her own father. “The weather is hot and dry. Today we harvested the early potatoes. A goat escaped and ate all the stone plums, and now we will have a bitter winter.”
“There are still peaches,” I said.
“Fortunately, there are still peaches,” Xie dictated, tracing the round characters of her own alphabet in the air, little dances of her hand. “And soon there will be apples. And all things will be well.”
We were speaking as much to the Panopticon as to each other. “All things will be well,” murmured Xie.
We both knew that wasn’t likely.
I leaned forward and pinched up the smudged and heavy paper. “Make a bird for me?”
“Of course.” Da-Xia’s quick fingers made the word “Mother” vanish into a fold. She made another fold, another, another, until the paper was a delicate crane.
“Make a wish,” said Xie.
Cranes traditionally represent a wish for peace. I closed my eyes and wished. Uselessly. Hard.
6
SPARTACUS
It was already hot when the prime bell woke us the next day. I had somehow failed to become less grimy in my sleep. Our Precepture practices appropriate use of technology—meaning, among other things, that we use nothing we can get by without. Normally that seems only wise, but on that day I thought an air conditioner or two probably wouldn’t ruin the world.
They had, though, once. One needed to remember that. Air conditioners and other thoughtlessly and broadly used technologies had ruined the world. After the War Storms, in the great pause of the Pax Talis, the modern world had made different choices. (Tell you what, said the Utterances, why don’t you all have a little think on what you’ve done to our planet and make some different choices.) So we chose. Yes to magnetically launched suborbitals and retroviruses that could rewrite a faulty gene. No to petroleum-driven personal transportation and chemical fertilizers. Yes to transcranial magnetic psychotherapy. No to robotic labor—except in an extreme case like the Precepture, where stakes are high and humans cannot be trusted. Yes to cargo zeppelins. No to imported food. Yes to horses. No to air conditioners.
Well. We might cool the odd palace.