MASON’s black-sleeved left hand locked around my throat, and Saladin’s hands about his wrist, a stalemate which left me pinned against the bars.
“You think I’m deaf?” Caesar spat. “That you’re the only one watching dark corners?” He tapped his tracker with his free hand, and the speakers played back Tully Mardi’s voice: “How would you defend yourself if it did come to war? Do you know? Armed Masons and Mitsubishi flying through every street, exchanging bombs? Can your waste converter be turned into a weapon? Can your child’s toy? You can’t just flee the combat zones like they did in the Church War, there will be no centers, no neutral ground, not with all Hives spread across every city in the world. If you want to defend your bash’ you need to become a soldier, but how can you learn when there aren’t any left to teach you? Weapons change as—” MASON silenced the recording there, his own words worse. “What were the Mardis doing?”
“They were … economists,” I choked out, “historians.”
He squeezed me harder, ignoring Saladin’s claws as they tore at his wrist. “What were Apollo and the Mardis doing?”
Death, reader, Death was in Caesar’s grip around my throat, the only terror that could have ripped from me the word: “War!” The force of my cry left me wheezing. “They were war historians. They were all war historians, whatever else they pretended to be, it was always war. Why else would they shorten Mardigras to Mardi, Mars-day, War-day? You dined with us dozens of times, did we ever once not talk about war?”
His hand stopped tightening. “Kohaku Mardi’s numbers, 33–67; 67–33; 29–71. You told the Censor they were when Kohaku predicted a recession, but that wasn’t it, was it? They predicted war.”
I wondered for a moment whether MASON had had a spy in the Censor’s office, or whether the Censor had leaked the facts himself. “War between the Masons and Mitsubishi,” I confirmed. “Apollo went so far as to start experimenting with weapons, preparations to defend Utopia if war broke out. They were all preparing, Aeneas running for the Senate, Kohaku working for the Censor, they were all trying to influence you and the other leaders, get ready for the war.”
“To stop it,” he tried to finish for me.
“No, Caesar,” I corrected, “to start it. 33–67; 67–33; 29–71, those numbers don’t make war inevitable. They make it possible. The landgrab, Nurturism, those were potential fuel. They needed a spark. They were pushing to make that happen.”
Madame came to the Emperor’s side, and her touch on his elbow made his grip ease on my neck. “You’re saying the Mardi bash’ wanted to start a war?” A fold of Apollo’s coat fell across her too, replacing antique silks with the bleached white of a nurse’s uniform.
“They thought war was inevitable,” I answered, “locked in by human nature, that there will always be another war, now or two hundred years from now, sometime. How long ago was it, Caesar, that Geneva Mardi first asked you their favorite question? ‘What was the nastiest war in history?’”
He swallowed hard. “We were still students.”
“And what answer was Geneva fishing for?”
“The First World War.”
“A war…” I choked a moment as his fingers flexed. “A war that came after a long period of relative peace and smaller conflicts, combined with accelerating advancement. Earth had never seen anything like that before. Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the first four centuries of the Exponential Age, they had all seen frequent war, large-scale war compared to the population, but Nineteenth-Century Europe confined the conflicts to its colonies and border zones, while at home they engineered their long and rosy peace. Technology kept changing, made new, worse ways to kill, but military experts had no opportunity to realize how the new tools would change the face of war when the big powers finally fought each other directly. When the Twentieth Century saw total war again, soldiers didn’t have the dignity of dying at the enemy’s hands; they rotted in trenches, froze in winters, wandered in jungles, blew themselves up on kamikazi missions, drove themselves mad attempting genocides, as deluded commanders kept urging them onward to their noble deaths. The Church War may have killed more people, but at least then it was the zealot enemy that killed you, not your own side and stupid ignorance. The Mardis thought that three things make wars more or less terrible: the length of the peace before them, the amount of technological change, and how little the commanders know about war’s up-to-date realities. We’ve had three hundred years of peace now, Caesar. Can you imagine what the next war would be like? With the trackers? With the transit system? With every spot on Earth a two-hour hop from every other? With the Hives all scattered equally across the Earth? No homelands, no borders, and without a single tactician who’s ever taken the field in any kind of war? It will be Hell on Earth. Even the wonders Utopia has made will turn to war.”
MASON’s hand was trembling. “I can’t believe Geneva would want to start a war.”
“They thought it would be a mercy having the war now, that putting it off longer would only make it worse. If war is inevitable, and if every invention makes it that much more probable that mankind will wipe itself out when the next war comes, the best thing was to get the next war over sooner, while technology has changed less and while the Mardis were there, experts ready to predict and guide it. Better a smaller war now, when it might be contained, than an unplanned war in a hundred years, when Earth might destroy itself. Doesn’t that sound like something Geneva would say?”
“No.”
“Lies don’t suit you, Caesar. Think about it. The Mardis were brilliant scholars; why did they publish almost nothing? Why were all their files so carefully encrypted that even the police couldn’t unlock them after the murders? Why did they network so carefully into every Hive, getting close to all the leaders? Why did a bash’ of eleven adults have only three children among them? Most of them didn’t want kids to grow up in the world they planned to create. Tully’s still here trying to start the war all by themself, what kind of life is that?”
“Dear, modest Mycroft!” Madame cried, hiding her expression with her fan. “All these years thou hast pretended to be evil, when really thou didst it to prevent another World War! Our secret hero.”
It burned hearing so much of the truth at once. Jehovah had sensed a hidden good behind my actions, but He was merciful enough not to voice it. “Don’t praise me, Madame,” I pleaded. “I did it to keep violence in the hands of individuals. My solution was for us all to turn back into beasts and kill each other one-on-one instead of en masse. I wanted…” Even in His absence I could feel Jehovah’s eyes forbidding me to lie within His house. “I also wanted to prevent the war. But it doesn’t matter, I was wrong, and the Mardis were wrong too. This place, Madame, ?ναξ Jehovah, He’s a tie between Caesar and Andō, between all the leaders, too strong for war to break out between any of the Hives. Kohaku’s numbers mean nothing. As long as this place exists, and He exists, the war the Mardis were afraid of can’t begin.”
Madame dared chuckle. “Flatterer—now I’m the one preventing the next World War?”
“And Apollo?” The Emperor had to release me now, for fear he really would forget himself and strangle me. “What about Apollo?”
I looked at the coat in Caesar’s arms, Dominic showing through it, his monk’s habit replaced by another modern uniform of black and blue. “Apollo’s only concern was that Utopia survive. War now, war later, the important thing was to prepare. That special Utopian coat and those weapons were developed for defense.”
“They work, too, the weapons. The rest of the Mardis were sitting ducks, but Seine and Apollo very nearly killed us instead.” I thought for a moment that my dead past self had risen to speak this boast, but it was Saladin’s voice from behind me, dark and proud.
MASON turned cold eyes on the caged beast. “You were Mycroft’s partner in this?”