I glanced back briefly at the Emperor’s guards, his childhood ba’sibs for the most part, or Guildbreakers, reliable as caryatids in the face of secrets, dumb as stone.
“Yes, Caesar,” I answered. “Apollo’s coat is a simulation, this world one year into Apollo’s predicted war. The people who don’t appear in it, the ones it makes invisible, those are people Apollo thought would not survive the first twelve months.”
“Including themself,” he supplied.
I nodded. “Apollo would have died on the front lines. It’s not a fate they wanted, but it’s what they expected, and when we faced one another in battle—”
“What you did wasn’t a battle, Mycroft,” he interrupted, grim. “It was a murder.”
“It was to save Earth and Mars together, Caesar! My attempt to let us vent our war rage without killing millions. I had to stop the Mardis, but if I could make people as outraged as a war would have, get Earth to vent its killing rage on me, instead of billions on billions, maybe it could’ve been a tiny war, we two, Saladin and I, against the Mardi nineteen, ending with all humanity, ten billion together, killing me. Apollo understood. Our battle might have been enough!”
“Not battle. Murder.”
Something in me dared glare back at him. “What is a battle if not a confrontation between two enemies, armed and prepared to kill or perish in a struggle whose outcome will determine the fates of many? It was a battle, Caesar! Saladin and I against Seine and Apollo. We were soldiers. The first soldiers in three hundred years! The other Mardis’ deaths, those I admit were murders, but Apollo was a battle, the first and only battle of Apollo’s aborted war.”
He choked. “Second.”
“Caesar?”
“It was the second battle.” He released me, turning to peer up through the alley toward the Capitoline Hill behind us, its columns bright as a lighthouse through the rain. “You think you shed first blood in this, monster? You were years too late.”
“Caesar, who—”
“Apollo. Five years before my succession, they called me to meet them behind the Rostra. They had already realized I was Imperator Destinatus, that was easy, but it had never come between us, not before. I found them in tears, leaning against the Milliarium, and, in their coat, the column was defaced, singed, the inscriptions gouged or burned away. It was horrible.”
I could well imagine it. I passed it almost daily on my way through the Forum to the Censor’s office or Julia’s, the Milliarium Aureum, the column by the Rostra on which are inscribed in gold the distances to the great metropolises of the world empire: to Brussels, Tōgenkyō, Alexandria, to Ingolstadt, to Casablanca, to Buenos Aires, soon to be the Humanist capital again after the fall of Ganymede and La Trimouille, and the mechanical device implanted in the stone which tracks the ever-changing distance to Luna City.
“Apollo said,” Caesar continued, “that Mushi Mojave had been selected to go to study the ant colony they found on Mars. I didn’t understand, I congratulated them on their ba’pa’s good fortune, said it was wonderful, but that just made them cry more. I asked why. They said Mushi was the number-two ant expert in the Hive.”
I nodded. “After Mirai Feynman.”
“They said Feynman was offered the position first, but turned it down because they had a bash’, a family, and going to Mars is dangerous. A Utopian said going to Mars was too dangerous.”
I too remembered well Apollo’s tears, hysterical, hearing that news.
“Then Apollo asked me which the world thought was more important,” MASON continued, “the present or the future. I didn’t understand. I kept trying to be a friend, but Apollo didn’t want a friend, they wanted the Imperator Destinatus.”
Is this not, reader, the strangest of titles? Imperator Destinatus, the future Emperor. The successor’s name is sealed in the Sanctum Sanctorum, never to be revealed until Succession Day on pain of the harshest penalties that justice can inflict, and even speculation is forbidden under Romanova’s First Law. The title, then, exists only so it may not be used, like a god’s forbidden name, which cannot be pronounced without invoking his wrath.
“Remember”—Caesar limped back a pace, gazing up at the statue’s mirrored vizor—“I was not yet Emperor, did not yet understand the real relationship between Utopia, the other Hives, and mine. You know how passionate Apollo was. All it took was some new discovery about fish or enzymes to move them to tears, but I’d never seen them hysterical like this. Eventually they made me understand. Humanity has everything now, everything: power, prosperity, stability, longevity, leisure, charity, peace. Vocateurs earn society’s respect doing the work they love, and those who aren’t vokers put in their twenty hours and spend the greater part of life at play. Happiness has taken the place of wealth as our prime measure of success, and envy no longer hungers for rare riches hoarded by the great, but for smiles and happy hours which all Earth has in infinite supply. This is what past civilizations wished for, worked for, what emperors and presidents and prime ministers and kings are supposed to try to give their people. We have. We’re done.” He gave a little hiccup, my first proof that the water on Caesar’s cheeks was more than rain. “Every life has the potential to be a good one, for the first time in history. And everyone’s secretly afraid that it’s fragile, that if we try to make it better, change something, if the Hive proportions shift too much, if science raises the life expectancy too fast, or Brill’s Institute finally figures out how to upload our brains into computers, or make us all into impossible geniuses, it will fall apart. Golden Ages always end with Dark ones. The Exponential Age, from the Black Death to the World Wars, was all about growth, acceleration, future-building, change, recovery first, then progress, advancement, exploration, interconnection, every generation experiencing a new world, different, more advanced than the generation before, a state of constant change, mixed but usually more for good than bad. When our modern age began after the Chuch War, as the Hives rose and happiness with them, humanity slowed down. We started taking baby steps, not exponential ones, a few more cured diseases, new Olympic records, some new toys, but calling that enough. Too much change is dangerous. A happy world wanted progress to stop. Apollo understood in a way I couldn’t what it meant to be the Imperator Destinatus: I was going to take on the duty to maintain history’s greatest empire and protect my three billion citizens by not letting anything change. That conversation was the first time in my life I regretted being a Mason. The Humanists, Europe, the Mitsubishi, the Cousins, it’s the same for them. They vie with each other, get better at what they’re already best at, but change nothing. Even Gordian’s experiments rarely leave their Institute. Now we’ve discovered O.S., the dark side of our paradise, and it’s horrible, unforgivable, but what is two thousand murders to what we’ve already given up? The future. Only Utopia thinks the future is more important than the present, that there are worlds that we could make which are worth destroying the one we have here. Or, at least, they used to think that, but if Mirai Feynman would rather stay home with their bash’ and kids than study the first ants on Mars, maybe even Utopia is vulnerable to too much peace. Our happy world has made complacency contagious. Apollo asked me then if, in two hundred and fifty years when Mars is ready, there would be anyone left, even among Utopians, willing to give up all the pleasures of Earth’s greatest Golden Age for the harsh life of a colonist. Then they stabbed me with a pocketknife.”
I choked. “Apollo attacked you, Caesar?”