“The Censor’s doing their best,” Tully continued. “They’ve called this emergency Senate session, so at least we’ll get it over with, and get the story from neutral investigators instead of all the Hives accusing each other at once, but that’s not enough. Nothing’s enough. When that door opens tonight,” he pointed, “and the Senate session ends, the worst won’t be over, it’ll be beginning!”
The crowd’s eyes followed Tully’s gesture to the bronze doors of the Senate House, a stone’s throw to his left, where the Senate Guard in Romanovan gold, white, and blue stood pale with awareness that they were no longer ceremonial. How did this day come, reader? This nightmare day, when the Enemy, the Mardis’ spokesboy, stands, not on his soapbox in some mildewed alley, but on the Rostra! That high, wide, marble-covered podium in Romanova’s Forum, where Tribunes and Senators announce the conquests of science, the triumphs of Olympians, the births of laws, and the deaths of heroes, and where now Tully harangues the thronging thousands, while floating cameras feed his words and gestures over the tracker network to another billion souls. The Forum had not been so packed in living memory. Downpour had ended, and drizzle had no power to deter the curious swarm, who filled the nooks and streets as plaster fills a mold. The marble porches of the law courts, the Hive embassies, the secular temples where Quaestors and secretaries trembled at their desks, even the Sensayer’s Conclave, silent with panic after Julia’s arrest, all were solid crowd. A pack of daring students had even climbed the triumphal arch which framed the steep steps of the Capitolium at Tully’s back, hanging off the reliefs where our stone heroes—Thomas Carlyle, Jean-Pierre Utarutu, Sofia Kovács, and King Juan Valentín—turned forests of rifles into plowshares, and poured cornucopias of aid over what the world’s mistakes had left of her poorer regions. Papadelias’s Alliance Officers, more used to desks than mob scenes, joined the City Prefect’s outnumbered force to carve out lifelines through the crowd, standing as living dikes around the landing patch for the arriving Senators. The elected representatives of Earth did not march into today’s session, but dribbled from their cars, clumping in groups, Cousins clinging to Cousins, Japanese Mitsubishi to Japanese and Korean to Korean, most silently cursing the day they had been selected by the stockholders, suggested to the CFB, appointed by the Emperor, elected by the mob, whatever means each Hive preferred to fill those seats reserved for it in the illustrious body which oversees the Universal Free Alliance.
“I know!” the Enemy pressed on, fired with confidence that this day, this hour, was why Fate had spared him. “Many of you still don’t believe in the assassination conspiracy, but I have proof. That’s why Sniper arranged for me to speak here today. This is what the Mardi bash’ studied, what I study, the tensions and forces that make society erupt into violence. I’m certain, and if you read the data I’ve released then you’ll be certain too. Over the past two hundred and fifty years the world has come within a knife’s edge of war a dozen times, and certain convenient deaths are the only thing that nudged us back from that edge. It was a system. We can trace it. It’s real. And it’s over.”
I do not know Tully Mardi. I babysat him as a child, pulled his hair, but of that stage of his life when he became a person I know nothing. To my eye the Graylaw Hiveless sash around his waist was pure pretense, a way to seem a friend to everyone, while in his heart he encourages atrocities which would make the darkest Blacklaw sick, but that is my hatred talking. Perhaps he means it. Perhaps he has his own reasons for continuing his murdered parents’ path. Entrenched as I am on the side which must forever call him Enemy, I cannot know.
“We’re still on that knife’s edge now.” Even Tully sighed before continuing. “We have been for a few years. Peace isn’t natural, not in a world where the Mitsubishi are squatting on all the land, where a half billion Utopians spend a giant chunk of the world’s income on what everyone else sees as their crackpot Mars obsession, and where a growing third of the human race has pledged allegiance to a dictator who every day acts less like the Emperor of Alexandria and more like the Emperor of Romanova! Only the Saneer-Weeksbooth assassinations have kept us from degenerating into war already. Now we’ve lost that, and not quietly, we’ve lost it in a way that leaves us all pointing angry fingers. There have already been deaths: the Salekhard transit system backup crew, some Servicer lynchings; less than an hour ago a guard outside the Mitsubishi Executive Headquarters was killed by a mob throwing stones at the Chief Director’s window. This is my last chance to convince you. You shouldn’t spend the next few hours glued to the newscast from the Senate hearing, you should spend it barricading your doors, checking your fire extinguishers, teaching yourself basic first aid, and thinking about what side you and your family will be on, because there will be sides! Soon! There will be sides, and war!”
At the Rostra’s edge, one could see its keepers exchanging hushed hisses with three Hiveless Senators. What a painful moment for those entrusted with the scheduling of this spotlight of spotlights. The public never stops complaining about how politicians monopolize the Rostra, dooming common citizens to an eternal waiting list. Now that Sniper’s influence had handed the stage to a private citizen for once, the mob would not forgive these guardians if they silenced him, yet instinct urged them, and Senator after frightened Senator as well, to cut off Tully’s stream of words, which seemed less a speech than a shaman’s conjuration, drawing in some waiting doom.
“I’m the Canner survivor!” Tully declared at last; I had wondered how long it would take him to play that card. “I know better than anyone: humans are violent animals. In peacetime that violence gets vented in bar brawls, hate crimes, sports, and, yes, in murders, and the more and worse murderers there are the closer war is to surfacing. The last decades didn’t just produce Mycroft Canner, they produced hundreds of thousands of people who idolize Mycroft Canner, who celebrate them, photos, music, movies, plays. Cannerism is a symptom of war waiting to erupt! The Censor may measure it in statistics, but you can measure it yourself in how many people you’ve seen smile or joke about Mycroft Canner, or Jack the Ripper, or any of these human monsters that some fraction of the world inevitably loves. Mycroft Canner was—is—a monster, the same monster that’s forming mobs now in La Trimouille, and Brussels, and Tōgenkyō, that sacks, that pillages, that turned the world into Hell in 1914, and dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima, and Rome, and Washington, and laughed as it raped Ibis Mardi’s corpse, and bombed New York after it was evacuated, just to watch the famous skyline burn. We can’t delude ourselves into thinking the monster’s gone. This world is ready—overready—for war, and it will come, because we are the monsters! Violence, Mycroft Canner, all of it is part of human nature, and it cannot change!”
“But I rehabilitated Mycroft Canner.”
Death-soft Jehovah stepped up on the Rostra now at Tully’s side. No one would stop Him, not the Senate, not the Rostra Keepers, not while His armband, dense with insignia, bore the sigil of a Graylaw Hiveless Tribune, Tribunus Plebis, that inviolate office trusted with the mandate to veto any Senate motion which threatened the freedom of the Hiveless and, through them, everyman. I would not call it hush, but the crowd’s tone eased as He appeared, His black figure healing them as darkness heals the closed eye after day’s long labor.