I wonder how Sniper trained itself to cover fear so well. It laughed, naturally, delightedly, no hint in its warm dark eyes that Faust’s teasing had touched so close to home. It took a deep breath, ready to answer, but Faust hushed it, the Headmaster’s brows arching at new words, which floated toward them from the square ahead.
“We speak so smugly of economic determinism. We say the French Revolution was inevitable because an expanding population made it untenable for a miniscule nobility to keep monopolizing ninety-five percent of the wealth. We say fascism and Nazism were inevitable because the economic idiocies of 1919 made it impossible for peace to last. We say all this as if past peoples were not only locked into their choices, but were stupid not to realize that they were.” The voice was thin, tired but used to being tired, just audible over the breathy shifting of the gathered crowd that filled the square. “But what did it actually feel like? Did a French peasant wake up every morning thinking about the inequitable distribution of wealth? Or that the Old Regime was on its last legs? Or did they wake up thinking that they were hungry while their noble masters weren’t? They felt uneasy, unhappy, tense, they wanted things to improve, wanted them back the way they were, perhaps, in the imaginary idyllic past. But war? War wasn’t in their minds.”
Sniper craned its neck, even hopped with its Olympic grace, just high enough to see over the sea of heads. There he stood, Tully Mardi, perched on the steps of an old church. He was thin in his Hiveless gray, leaning on crutches as his legs—unused to Earth—threatened to fail despite their braces. The Enemy—as I shall always call him—had guards around his soapbox, Apollo’s bar friends, sledgehammers and metal pipes more frightening in sober hands than drunk as they waited for me. “Who is it?” Sniper whispered.
Faust held a finger to his lips. “It’s what has so many of my students playing hooky.”
“And what do you feel when you wake up in the morning?” Tully pressed, quick eyes flicking from face to face across the crowd. “When you make out fat rent checks to your Mitsubishi landlords? When you see more and more Mason suits on the streets? When you pay huge royalties to Utopian inventors, and watch them squander the profits lobbing expensive rocks at Mars? Do you feel uneasy? Unhappy? Tense? Do you want things to go back to the way you think they used to be? The Romanovan Censor publishes new numbers every month, and you worry about your savings shrinking, a rent hike, a recession, as if a salary cut is the limit of what horror humans can inflict. Why not war?”
The back fringe of the crowd was starting to recognize the new arrivals now, whispering Sniper’s name, and shying back from their Headmaster like guilty pups, but Faust just smiled, sliding his dry hands into the pockets of his sweater as he took his place as spectator.
“The restless French didn’t see war coming,” the Enemy continued, “but they had the excuse that back then economists didn’t yet know how to see which tensions lead to war. The survivors of 1918 even called the second half of their World War by a separate name, as if unable to see the connection as the tanks rolled out a second time. We’re being just as self-blinding. We have the evidence, but we refuse to believe, because it’s a matter of faith to us that war’s impossible. It isn’t. War is the human norm. We’ve had three hundred years of peace after thousands of years of war. How can you think that we’ll never do it again?” His pleading eyes hopped from face to face. “We say war ended with the Exponential Age, that humanity matured after the Church War, developed peaceful means to settle conflicts: sports, debates, elections; that we’ve shed nations, armies, all the apparatus of warfare, but the French peasants didn’t have those either! They just had torches, and pitchforks, and very hungry children. It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark. You think there aren’t plenty of sparks today? What if this Seven-Ten list theft turns out to be a plot by one Hive to sabotage another? What if this mystery at the CFB turns out to be Mitsubishi set-sets taking revenge on the Cousins for sabotaging set-set training bash’es? Remember the Set-Set Riots? Riots turn to war in a heartbeat when the situation is ripe, and then what? Don’t think it would stop with fists and bricks and torches. What city in this world doesn’t have a factory that could switch production from stoves to guns in an instant? What kid can’t cobble together a rocket in chemistry class?”
“Magnificent specimen,” Faust whispered, unable to stifle the delight in his eyes. “Preaching on a street-corner soapbox, when they could post it to the web and reach millions.”
Sniper nodded softly, eyeing the sea of captivated Brillists. “It’s a performance. One more nutcase on the web, no one would care.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Tully pressed, his voice edging to frantic. “Let me put it even more simply, then. I’m Tully Mardi, Mercer Mardi’s child, the only survivor of the Mycroft Canner massacre. Some of you must remember when Mercer used to bring me here as a child. You know what I lived through. I’ve just learned, as you have, that Cornel MASON and Bryar Kosala conspired to protect Mycroft Canner after the capture. Would you be surprised if I tried to assassinate MASON and Kosala? And if I did, and afterwards if people said the Utopians helped me do it, how long do you think it would take for that to turn violent? Days? Hours?” Tully’s gesture led the crowd’s eyes to his fifth guard, a Utopian who slouched against the church wall behind the soapbox, shadowed in a nowhere sea where derelict ships of every age from Babylon to Space drifted through ghost-mist like frozen leviathans. “The Utopians were protecting me all this time, out of charity. Apollo Mojave gave their life to save me, gave me their seat on the Moon shuttle so I could get safely out of Mycroft Canner’s reach, but, if I assassinated someone like Cornel MASON, how long would it take you to start wondering if it was a Utopian conspiracy? If they planned it? Did they cultivate me all these years on the Moon as part of a scheme to kill the Emperor? You’d think that, anybody would!”
I suspect Tully had never before faced a crowd so silent. Cousins will cheer politely, Europeans debate, Humanists cheer or heckle, but the expressionless Brillists just took notes in a dozen silent formats, or whispered technical terms in breath-soft German, as if safely separated from this fascinating subject by a mirrored wall.
“Obviously I’m not going to assassinate anyone,” Tully continued, “and I don’t really think set-sets are sabotaging the CFB, but is something similar possible? Could a spark like that really set the world at war?” He scanned the crowd, restless. “You tell me, you’re the experts. You from the Institute know the human psyche inside out, what we are, what we can become. Is the human animal still like it was hundreds of years ago: aggressive, territorial, competitive, ambitious? Do we still think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’? When drunks lash out at someone from another Hive, isn’t that really the iceberg tip of something bigger? Or have we changed? Is the human psyche really better, wiser, more peaceful now? Are we really, as we are required to believe, incapable of war?”
“No.”