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.
<it’s not the same,> Eureka objected.
Kat or Robin snorted. “?No?”
<our ba’pas wanted the set-sets to start choosing targets for o.s. themselves instead of following the commanders-in-chief. this isn’t choosing a target, it’s refusing a hit for the defense of o.s. and the whole hive.>
“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?”
<and europe and sanling,> the set-set added, using the Chinese name for the Mitsubishi; perhaps this is Eureka after all.