“Majority,” His uncle repeated slowly, playing with the word like caramel.
“Histories say scared Majorities hurt Minorities. That’s why you hide. Utopia pretends ut because they’re openly giving Implants to U-beasts they aren’t secretly giving them to humans too, and you pretend ut because you don’t make Set-Sets anymore you aren’t making other, stranger Things. They make U-Beast Jokes to make Others forget Mars will be real; you make Number Puzzles to make Others forget your Machine-Brain-Copy will be real too.” The Child reached up to touch His uncle’s head above the ear, where thinning hair left visible the reddened pressure marks left from the Headmaster’s last session with the mind-to-machine experiments that every Fellow at the Institute will claim are nothing. “Gordian isn’t in Danger now,” the Child continued, “because Utopia is so conspicuous that all the Afraid target them. You don’t seem alien because they are more so. You need that. There has to be an Outsider or the next strangest will be named Outsider. If Caesar Apollonem condit in Pantheon, si plus Utopianes in Pantheon qu—” He caught Himself. “If there are more Utopianes in Pantheon than Brillists, you will be in Danger.”
The Headmaster nodded, a slow commixture of agreement and praise. “Perfect. I’d never have phrased it as Branches and Trunk, but you’re right, we do depend on the Utopians to focus Paranoia on themselves.”
“How will you stop it?”
The Headmaster sighed. “I don’t dare mess with the Pantheon Vote. Cornel MASON is a good Person in most ways, but if they found out I deliberately blocked Apollo from the Pantheon they’d destroy me.”
The Child looked at His uncle. “People must not kill, we don’t know the full Consequences.”
“‘Destroy’ does not always mean ‘kill,’” Faust corrected. “Do you want to help protect us, Donatien? To help protect me and my Hive?”
Jehovah took nine silent seconds to think. “You want me to keep my Fathers friendly ad you?”
“That would help, yes, but what I need most isn’t that, it’s this.” Faust tapped the Child lightly on the temple, then eased Him forward on his lap, pointing through the window. “Look at that Pair there, in the Cleopatra Room, third on the left, the 3-5-10-9-3-10-3-10 and the 4-3-5-9-3-8-3-9. What do you think of them?”
Jehovah’s black eyes took some seconds to digest the pair. “The recent Death of a Parent has made the one on top consider Reincarnation. The other I can’t see well from here.”
Faust held his Nephew close, and remembers wondering whether he did it because children build connections through touch, or to comfort himself. “Your Mother made a Bet with me when we built this Place, that they could combine de Sade’s and Diderot’s Techniques with Brill’s to raise a Human-Creature more alien and ‘Enlightened’ than anything anyone had imagined Humans could become. I still say you’re not too many Steps past Diderot’s Rameau and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, but on the other hand you exist, which is a real Plus. I need you.” He turned the Child to face him. “You’re eight Years old and you can understand the secret Dynamics between the Hives, but not the Rules of Tag, or Grammar. You’re what I need. Things are bad, Donatien. Something is brewing; your mother’s smug Smiles are Proof enough. Gordian is vulnerable. Our old Brain-bash’ is running dry, and, with the Mardis dead, there’s no one else I know of with a Psyche novel enough to keep us fueled with Innovations through what’s coming. You know what I mean, don’t you? The Utopians fuel their Spaceships with whatever they can mine from the Space Rocks they’ve already reached, and the Resources on those Space Rocks limit how much further they can go. You’re the only Outpost left on my Frontier with enough Resources to let me go further. I don’t like to let your Mother’s Fangs sink into Gordian, but we need a Brain-bash’, and at this point, Donatien, it’s you or no one.”
*
“Thank you for inviting me to address you, Senators.”
Bryar Kosala had refused to change her wrap, so faced the concentric tiers of Senators with her sleeves still speckled with Jehovah’s blood and brains. The luminous egg-white marble of the hall around her crackled with the fabric hiss of Senators fidgeting in their seats, pretending not to be prisoners as the restoration of the transit network made the mob in the Forum outside swell and swell. The Senate ranks had never been so thin, patches of different Hives, who in peaceful days comingled happily, clumping with rows of No Man’s Land between them. The Masons were in good attendance, the Cousins also, Brillists, the eight Utopian Senators clustered in the back row, and the four Hiveless Senators in the front near the Hiveless Tribunes, but the guilty Hives had deserted. The Europeans used the meeting of their own Parliament as an excuse, while the Humanists were simply AWOL, and the Mitsubishi sent only two Greenpeace Members and one lone Korean to make a savvy quorum call; without a two-thirds majority, even the Senate of the Universal Free Alliance could do nothing more dangerous than talk.
“Two weeks ago,” Bryar continued, “O.S. used their assassination system to force Black Sakura reporter Tsuneo Sugiyama to retire and let Masami Mitsubishi write this year’s Seven-Ten list. That’s the same list that was later stolen and left in the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’. This stunt was engineered to bring more attention to the list, and to one name on it: Cousins’ Feedback Bureau Chief Darcy Sok. The resulting investigation of the CFB released a report last night, and conflicting versions have been circulating ever since. Jed Mason was to present a full report to you today, but Sniper’s attack has made that impossible. I am grateful, therefore, that you have invited me to present the truth myself.
“The CFB sorts the suggestion letters by which the Cousins are run. Since millions of letters arrive each week, sorting is done by a computer. Every letter is dealt with eventually, even unique ones, but the volume of letters in each folder after sorting is used as an indicator of how important the issue is, so, if the number of letters on a subject abruptly increases or decreases, that is when it receives the most immediate attention from the administration. We now know that the CFB staff has been altering this data by changing the computer’s search terms. For example, the terms ‘land grab’ and ‘turf slurp’ are both slang for the Mitsubishi effort to buy up land, so letters using those phrases are usually sorted into the same folder. On January twelfth of this year, CFB staff intentionally altered the program to route these into separate folders, making it seem as if the number of letters concerning Mitsubishi land policy had suddenly dropped, whereas it had, in fact, increased. This prevented the Cousins’ Board from taking action to place more blocks on Cousins selling land to Mitsubishi. That’s just one example. The records I have uncovered reveal hundreds of such alterations made every year, which have controlled the flow of information, and effectively dictated much of the Hive’s policy for decades. No records survive from the beginning of this system, but it seems to go back over a century. The common belief within the CFB is that they invented the trick in the twenty-three forties, but the Anonymous quickly realized what they were doing and blackmailed them into allowing the Anonymous to dictate the alterations they made.”