“What?”
I did not look behind me, but even the hiss of rain against the statue made the old pain worse. “You built this statue, Caesar. Look at Apollo, ready to leap down off the pedestal and tell us about some great new future they’ve imagined. Every day, every hour of every day, I could have brought Bridger here to bring Apollo back, just one touch. Providence didn’t just make me kill Apollo once, I killed them over, and over, and over, and over. I kept them dead, every day, still, every day I choose to keep them dead.” I let myself look up into the Emperor’s eyes. “Do I deserve to endure this? Even me? Living knowing every day that I could give my life to bring Apollo back?”
“What?”
I shook. “Bridger can’t make permanent life from nothing. If they didn’t keep recharging it, the statue would only live a few days before turning back to stone, but we tried it on a cat once: with a costume Bridger can turn one living thing into another living thing, forever. We have Apollo’s coat, Apollo’s clothes. I could die as I deserve, and give this lump of meat over to the person in the world we both most want to live. These hands!” I raised my hands before me, seeing blood upon them even without Apollo’s coat to stain them so. “I can’t look at these hands without wanting to hack them off and give them to Apollo, but I can’t! We can’t bring Apollo back, Caesar! They would just do it again.”
“Do what? Make war?”
I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood, measuring in my mind how hard I would have to bite to cut it off and choke and end my life, if I had had the right to.
Caesar seized my hand and pressed it against the statue’s stone base. “Swear.”
“What?”
“Here, with your hand upon Apollo’s tomb, swear to me there are no war plans hidden in that Iliad. It’s just a storybook, the Utopian weapons are just defensive, this chaos a coincidence. Swear!”
Strength left me, drained by that stone where his slim bones make their slow return to dust. It is half your fault he lies here, reader, and half mine. You denied him the Pantheon. I destroyed his chance to join his kin among the stars. The autopsy and chemical tests left what remained of Apollo’s body too contaminated to be processed into that organic essence which, after the rocket journey, will become the soil of Mars. Year after year, those Utopians who could not live to see the terraforming done at least become a part of it, each ounce of powdered flesh another fertile plot of their new world. All his brief lifetime Apollo watched the launches, yet in death he could not even send his dust where dust is precious. That is my guilt. As for yours, only a handful of Apollo’s kind have been buried on this Earth in the two and a half centuries since the Mars Project began, yet, for all Utopia has given you, you would not give this orphan shelter in your Pantheon.
“It’s not the Mardis’ war plans, Caesar. It’s Apollo’s. Apollo was trying to start their own war.” The truth leaked from me slowly, like an infected wound milked of its pus. “Apollo came to Luther and Aeneas, before the Mardi bash’ made up their minds, back when they were first convinced that the length of time that passes between wars was what determines how devastating the next one will be. The others were undecided, not sure whether they should try to start a war now to keep the next one from being so big it would wipe us out entirely, or whether they should believe that the peace was real, that humans could outgrow the violence as we outgrew the trees. They were uncertain, but Apollo was honest, and loved them, and told them point-blank that whatever the bash’ decided, Apollo would make their own war.”
“Why?” Caesar cried, his arm convulsing as he held me. “Apollo moved me to tears dozens of times, their future, their vision of the infinity of human potential. Now you’re telling me that was a lie? That even Apollo believed we’re doomed to eternal war? That the instinct to violence is so ingrained it can’t be overcome?”
We both shook, I and Caesar, weak as leaves. We heard Apollo’s words again, his certainty, his vision of our bold posterity which will stamp footprints onto worlds too distant for us to yet imagine how to find them, but find we will, he knew we will, as the boundary of human knowledge, art, and hope expands like a parabola sweeping ever closer to infinity. Have you wondered, reader, what made Apollo special? Why his classmate Aeneas Mardi introduced him so eagerly to Cornel then-not-yet-MASON? Why MASON brought him to Andō, Kosala, Spain, to the Anonymous? Rewrote the definition of Familiaris for him? Why they all relied on him as sole ambassador from this strange Hive whose crisscrossed constellations reveal no leader? His gift was this: he could explain Utopian thought in words the rest of us could understand. The wall that makes them alien, the vizors, U-speak, their cold and separate plans, was lifted somehow with Apollo, so the light that guides the rest of them, for once, could touch us, too. Perhaps it was because he burned brightest, enough to pierce the veil, or perhaps he alone among them tried to pierce it, not believing with the others that long peace and the desire to maintain this happy present had bred all ambition out of the rest of us. Some men are built to love many times, some once, and MASON used his once, not on Madame, not even on his Empire, but on Apollo.
“Apollo never lied to you, Caesar,” I replied, gasping as my lungs lurched with the power of my tears. “How can you even think that? Apollo believed there was no limit to humanity, no world, no transformation, no dream beyond our power to make real, that with reason and ambition in our blood we can achieve anything, become anything! Just not in time.”
He gripped me harder. “In time for what?”
“Mardi,” I answered. “War day. Mars day. In two hundred and fifty years the next stage of the Great Project will be complete. Do you think a greedy, selfish Earth will sit back and watch the minority they most distrust take sole possession of a whole new world? How many wars were fought over the Americas? Over Africa? Over expansion? In ten thousand years, maybe in one thousand years, humanity will have progressed enough to no longer feel envy or greed or hate the ‘other,’ but in two hundred and fifty? Utopia is optimistic but not blind. When the terraforming is complete there will be war, all the Hives of this complacent Earth united against Utopia. The conflict will consume one or both, unless by then we have had another war to change the character of the Hives, or, at the very least, to leave some veterans to teach us again how to wage wars, and how to survive them.”
“War now to prevent war later?”
“Not to prevent, Caesar. To soften. We no longer even vaccinate against the plagues which claimed the billions of the last war, but samples survive. Imagine if they were loosed on Mars, the new world uninhabitable for a century. Or imagine if they were let loose on Earth by those on Mars, fearing their own destruction. What if some new technology we’ve never tapped for war, Mitsubishi cloth or smelltracks, turns out to be able to wipe out a planet in a day? We need to find that out now, in a gentler war, one where no one is willing yet to go all the way. That was Apollo’s project. They designed their special coat, the weapons inside, trained, wrote up plans for how the war would probably begin, how to proceed. Later the Mardis chose to join them, but Apollo would have done it on their own.”
As a storm’s first tremors in the still-sleeping deep shake a slim ship, not yet in danger but helpless against the tempest that must come, so Caesar’s trembling shook me. “Apollo’s coat showed ruins, soldiers, even myself uniformed for war.”