“No!” Bryar cried. “You’re talking like they can all be replaced!”
“Of course they can’t!” Caesar bellowed, his full power, which before that time no man had ever heard. Even the World’s Mom fell silent.
“Caesar, please,” cooed the dark Lady whom I did not yet know to call Madame. “My salon is not the place for harshness.” She stroked his black hair, her touch dispelling the electric anger in the Emperor’s stance.
“Apologies, Madame.”
She kissed him again upon the cheek, as if the tender courtesy were her apology for having to be strict.
“And you, Déguisé,” she continued, holding out a slim black mask to the Anonymous, “one must observe the forms.”
“Sorry, Madame.” He donned the mask, and seemed at once more confident and comfortable, more like himself than his fake outside persona. Madame’s quick eye caught mine, saw that I was watching, and she had a smile for me, sweet as a mouse, before she locked the crosshairs of her attentions back on the Emperor. My mind, honed by so many leaders, caught more and more the scent of something rotten.
“Of course they can’t be replaced,” Caesar began again, more calmly, “but the pieces that remain must be picked up. They were all Mycroft’s teachers. Apollo especially spent hours with Mycroft every week, telling them everything from research ideas to what’s supposed to happen in the unfinished chapters of their ridiculous science fiction Iliad.” His eyes locked again on me. “You’ll finish writing that book for Apollo, Mycroft. You’ll finish everything. You’ll work until you die.”
“I refuse.” In those days I was headstrong enough to match Caesar glare for glare. “You think I killed Apollo and the others just to become them? I’m not some psycho lashing out for revenge or lust or fame. I loved the Mardis more than any of you! I know perfectly well what great things they would have accomplished if they’d lived. If there had been better people in this world I would have killed them instead. I’ve destroyed something wonderful just for destruction’s sake, proving once and for all that the human animal can do evil for the sake of evil. I’m not about to undermine that by replacing what I’ve destroyed.”
“You have no choice,” the Emperor countered, Madame’s hands reminding his fist not to slam her gilded chair. Who was this Lady who could chide and temper MASON and Anonymous?
“You’re the ones with no choice,” my young self shot back. “The world won’t rest until it sees me dead. That’s how it ends. They’ll keep chanting my name until I’ve had my day in court, and there the world will see that it’s possible to choose evil over good, over happiness, over family, over love, over the future potential of the human race, and over life itself. When the axe falls, or the electricity turns on, or whatever you decide to use on me, the world will taste again the base satisfaction of getting its hands dirty, as the human animal was meant to do. You can’t avoid it. The world won’t let you, and neither shall I!”
Does it sound rehearsed, reader? It was. I felt giddy in my cage, drunk on the idea of that supreme moment when all men would become killers again, and my Saladin watching, proud. Saladin would live, and hide, and watch what humanity became after we taught it that, with the death of Nations, the supreme predator on Earth was once again Man. That I would be the one to die and Saladin to live had been determined by Providence—which in those days I still called Chance—nine years earlier, when the rescue workers found me after the explosion, but left Saladin for dead. He was out there at this very moment, waiting to see his Mycroft hold his head high in the court, and recite to the world these speeches we had practiced a thousand times. I would not betray him by surviving.
The Emperor did not lighten. “I do what I will.”
“To Masons maybe.” I was tempted to spit, but did not want to smear the precious window of my cage. “I’m no Mason.”
“Silence that monster, would you, [Name]?” Caesar spoke the true name of the Anonymous, which, though you know it, I refuse to use before the desperate day.
“Happily,” the Anonymous answered, though it was Mushi Mojave’s hand which worked the controls, which means it was Mushi’s choice to set the cage so I could still see and hear, though not bark back.
“But I’m afraid Mycroft’s right, Cornel,” the Anonymous continued. “The world wants them dead. I suspect most of the people in this room do too, am I right?”
Mute in my cage I trembled—first names, reader. MASON and Anonymous were supposed to be strangers, two lords in distant citadels who keep a cold and distant eye on one another like Light and Dark Manichean gods, and here they call each other by first names? Curiosity matured to a fearlike itch as it became clearer and clearer that this was not the same political landscape I had studied with Aeneas and Apollo.
“Well, I’m against killing Mycroft Canner,” Headmaster Felix Faust volunteered first. “I’d never have so rare a specimen put down. Spain? Thumbs up or down?”
The King stroked his temples, already graying at forty-six despite science’s efforts; he had been on the throne eleven years now and a widower ten, long enough to begin to gain those character lines which give portraits of older men more interiority than those of youths. “I think, as world leaders, we should not set a precedent by reviving the death penalty when our personal friends are killed. Andō?”
The Chief Director took a long breath. “Mycroft would be useful if rehabilitated. Ganymede?”
The Duke Consul shrugged. “What I’m worried about is how to justify it to the public. We can’t exactly say we spared Canner because they were going to be the next Anonymous, and saying we’re doing it because a Utopian wrote a note on a scrap of paper isn’t going to fly, not with a victim from every Hive involved.”
Headmaster Faust sniffed. “Why bother justifying it? We just have to refuse to suspend our own laws, no justification needed.”
Ganymede sniffed back. “It may not matter to you, Felix, but some of us have to get reelected. Right, Spain?” The Duke-Consul seemed happy that the King–Prime Minister had no good answer. “We have to give the mob a trial, and we have to let Mycroft speak at the trial or we’ll have lawhounds on our backs. Mycroft was tutored in oratory by two Senators; if they want the crowd screaming for blood, it will.”
Andō shook his head. “No trial. We can’t allow a trial. The more the world thinks about this business the more harm it does. There hasn’t been an incident of global trauma like this since the Set-Set Riots. No trial or the world will go mad.”
Ganymede frowned. “What if we get an actor to impersonate Mycroft in court and play penitent? That’ll calm the mob, then we can accept whatever the judges decide, fake an execution if need be, and Caesar can do what they like with the genuine article.”
Prime Minister Spain shook his head. “I will not so abuse the law.”
“Besides,” Andō continued, “even a false trial will have devastating effects on the world.”
Upon your Hive you mean, Mitsubishi, as the police probe your Canner Device.
“It must be stopped,” the Director pressed, “at all costs.”
The Duke scowled. “Does anyone have a better solution?”
“No, but we all agree we—”
Kosala’s voice, though soft among men, was still strong enough to interrupt the King. “I haven’t agreed.”
“Bryar?”
“I haven’t agreed to letting Mycroft live.” She shuddered, tempting the Anonymous to tighten his embrace. “Oh, I’ll go along with it, I’ll even supply a justification for you, but I don’t agree.”