Too Like the Lightning (25 page)

He crossed his arms, the black sleeve darker as it fell in shadow. “Yes.”

“Are you rich?”

“My Empire is.”

“Can we have a new atomic oven for our science club? We picked out the one we want. It only costs two million euros and it can split the atom!”

The Emperor sighed down at his tiny petitioner. “Write up a grant proposal and send it to Xiaoliv Guildbreaker.”

What stifled pain that sigh! What weight for those of us who have enjoyed the gloomy privilege of hearing MASON voice his thoughts! He will not say it to this child so full of aspirations, but he thinks it when he hears her boast, “It can split the atom!” No, it can't. Cornel MASON is the world's most undeluded man. What are humanity's great dreams? To conquer the world? To split the atom? When Alexander spread his empire from the Mediterranean to India, we say he conquered the world, but he barely touched a quarter of it. We lie. We lie again when we say we split the atom. ‘Atom' was supposed to be the smallest piece of matter—all we did is give that name to something we can split, knowing that there are quarks and tensors, other pieces smaller that we cannot touch, and only these deserve the title ‘atom.' Man is more ambitious than patient. When we realize we cannot split a true atom, cannot conquer the whole Earth, we redefine the terms to fake our victory, check off our boxes and pretend the deed is done. Alexander conquered Earth, we tell ourselves, Rutherford split the atom, no need to try again. Lies. Cornel MASON is the unquestioned master of more than three billion voluntary subjects, a hundred times the ruler Alexander was, but knows he has not conquered the Earth, and never will. If all humanity were so unwilling to lie to ourselves, we might not have given up on our great dreams. Complacent reader, we no longer aim for Earth nor atom, but …

 

C
HAPTER THE
THIRTEENTH

 … Perhaps the Stars

There is one race in whom ambition flows still. I do not mean the Humanists' lust for fame, Masons' for power, or the driving need of Europeans and Mitsubishi to prove their nation-strats superior to one another—those ambitions are appetite or envy by finer names. What I speak of is the primordial ambition which brought us from the trees, which launched the first ships across then-infinite oceans, and drove one brave ape to approach the heavenly destroyer ‘fire' and make it ours. Reader, we no longer aim for Earth nor atom, but, so long as the Utopians still live and breathe, they will not give up on our last great dream: the stars.

“I said on your knees, bitch! Now!”

“Stay calm, friend. Think. You don't want to do this.”

“Oh, I do want to do this. In fact, I think we're all gonna take turns doing this, what do you all think, everyone?”

“¡Si, ya vamos a coger este puto!”

Laughter pregnant with threat followed the words up through a kitchen window behind me. There were five or six drunks by the sound of it, close by the back wall of this low wing of the palace, where the lights of Ganymede's party did not reach.

“That's right, we're all gonna have a turn, though whether we take turns getting a blow or kicking the shit out of you astroturds is your choice.”

The chefs around me froze, none wanting to acknowledge the atrocity transpiring below. Such things are supposed to be extinct in our Enlightened age, but if civilization continues another millennium, another ten, drunk people will never become less stupid.

“We're going to walk away now,” said a second victim, sober if afraid. “Think where we are and how fast security will jaunt in if something happens. You can walk away too.”

“¡Chinga la policía! You try to get away and we'll ditch your trackers in the trash and haul you up them hunting grounds, nobody'll find you out there, not for days. Now down on your knees and suck it, U-bitch, before I go Mycroft Canner on your ass!”

By now you are urging me to intervene. I did, but in return we sacrifice listening to the rest of the party upstairs. All I know is that Perry consented.

I leapt out the open window, and a controlled swing from the scalloped railing landed me in the gravel between the marauders and their prey. My fall was almost silent, and I landed on all fours like an animal, so with my dappled uniform of gray and beige I must have seemed a beast.

“¡Carajo! ¿Qué es esto?” the attackers shrieked, though their panic faded fast.

“It's just a Servicer.”

I rose, neither threatening nor shying back, just set to spring. “These two were summoned by the Emperor themself. Shall I call Caesar? Or would you prefer I call Police Commissioner General Ektor Papadelias?”

I could see the aggressors now, five Humanists, their jackets bright with sailors' stripes and sport team patches, reeking from a long day's revels. We watched each other silently, as stags face off across a clearing, debating with eyes alone whether or not to break the woodland peace with war.

“It's not worth it,” their leader judged, a sinewy young thing who probably deserved the champion colors on his wrestler's cap. “Come on, let's go get seats for the fireworks.”

In my place, reader, would you have offered your silent thanks to Chance or God?

“Are you injured?” I asked as I turned to the pair behind me.

“Untouched, thanks, Mycroft.”

In the darkness of the alley, the long contours of their Utopian coats glowed timidly, like ghosts threatening to vanish if I glanced away. Confess, reader, you too rush to the window to see when they walk by, and point them out to eager friends, “Look at the Utopian!” Do I assume too much? Perhaps you have never seen one. You may not be my contemporary, but a distant biographer, culling my faded history for data on one of our Great Men. Utopians are common now, but by history's standards they must be ephemeral, winged ants born to pioneer new colonies, who cannot linger long among the workers. How shall I describe these aliens of the past to one whose world is no longer so colorful? Their coats were more than Hive markers, they were windows to another world. Griffincloth was developed for camouflage, a flexible, fabric-like surface which could display in real time the video feed of objects on the other side, making an object properly equipped with Griffincloth invisible. A tent of Griffincloth need not blemish the landscape, and a cop in Griffincloth need not fear being shot on the approach, but these wondersmiths would not leave it at that. Utopian coats are dream visions, created by covering a long trench coat with Griffincloth and programming the computer to process the real image before projecting it, substituting gold for gray, marble for brick, fish for birds, whatever the Utopian imagines. Of the pair who stood before me in the alley, one's coat showed a City of Tomorrow built in Space, so the palace behind us floated in a star sea, the plants fitted with oxygen collectors and the cars with solar sails like flying fish. The other coat showed the palace as a ruin overgrown by swamp, the same stones aged a thousand years, with fantastic creatures sunning themselves on the wreck, like dragons of the Middle Ages, the oddest pieces of a dozen beasts assembled into one furred, scaled, and feathered alien. The coats are not mere games, nor decoration, like the Mitsubishi cloth which blooms and fades with the aesthetic progress of the seasons. Utopia means ‘nowhere,' so all Utopians drape themselves in their most precious nowheres.

“Thank you for letting them go peacefully.” I nodded toward the retreating drunks.

The coat of ruins shrugged. “We're used to it.”

You may not believe me, but I wept. The Anonymous calls these crimes of stupidity, people drunk on rage, power, or chemicals, who realize when sober just how much their fleeting folly threw away. I think of them more as crimes of the Stifled Predator, for Nature built her greatest ape to hunt as well as gather, and if a zoo lion goes mad eating only vat-grown steak, then so can you. Servicers are common targets—that I can forgive. Even when the victims are young friends, who crawl back to the dorms and spend nights shaking in my arms, I can forgive, for Servicers are guilty. What penance, though, must this tainted world perform to purge this instinct to attack Utopians, whose only crime is thinking too much of tomorrow?

“We heard you were here, Mycroft. Which Alpha called you?” Though the voice was brave, the speaker drew her coat of stars tightly about herself, and even the digital blackness could not hide her shivers. Her name is Aldrin Bester, a fine Utopian name lifted from their canon, as in the olden days Europe took its names from lists of saints.

“The Duc de la Trémoïlle called me,” I answered, lapsing in my distraction from Ganymede's public name to his proper one, which few non-Frenchmen use. “The six Hive leaders are all at the party. Which shall I inform of your arrival?”

“We're not here for the Alphas. We're here for you.” The second Utopian, in his coat of ruins, was taller than Aldrin, his short hair French brown to her Eastern black. He bears the honorable name Voltaire Seldon. The Patriarch deserves to be honored for a hundred reasons, but he owes his elevation to the Utopian canon to the novella
Micromegas,
which makes him a candidate for the title of world's first science-fiction author. “Martin called us about these break-ins,
Black Sakura
and Saneer-Weeksbooth. We have questions, and I expect you to use none of the glamours you use on centrics.”

“No deceptions,” I promised, translating their Utopian slang. “Never with you.”

Voltaire's face switched for a moment from the sternness of business to a more personal sternness. “Have you been using your days well, Mycroft?”

“I've been trying. Chair Kosala has me drafting a proposal for improving the Servicer Program, and the Emperor had me teach a private seminar for their Lictors on the history of violence.”

“Are you writing?”

I looked at my feet. “I haven't had time. I've had a lot of assignments lately, and I'm only allowed anti-sleeps twice a week.”

Voltaire frowned. “Those are common excuses. You don't get to use common excuses.”

“I know. I'm sorry. I'll do more.”

“Do less,” Aldrin cut in. “I know you. You're filling your hours with nano-charities and calling it productivity. Do less and you'll output more.”

“Yes,” I confessed. “You're right. I'll do better.”

“Good.” The illusion of her eyes seemed sad, but even I cannot trust the expressions on a Utopian's transparent-seeming visor. The lenses the rest of us wear display our tracker data perfectly, so in theory there is no need for the heavy visors Utopians prefer, which cover the face from brows to cheekbones, so their eyes never see true sun. Rumor insists that Utopians only wear the visors to deceive us. The Griffincloth surfaces make them seem transparent, so projected eyes meet ours, and seem to smile and squint as real eyes do, but, if the coats can transform day to night or earth to stars, surely the visors can replace their true expressions with what they want us to see.

“Shall we move inside?” I gestured to the door behind me. “There's an empty storeroom nearby.”

I let them enter first, so I, selfish creature, could delight in the coats which filled the hall before me with their fantasies. In Voltaire's nowhere the palace walls teemed with cracks, and the cracks with tiny lizard-ants whose micro-civilization assembled the crumbs of marble into knee-high palaces. In Aldrin's nowhere the floor became a shimmering force field between us and empty space, on whose translucence I could see Voltaire striding beyond her, fitted with a space suit, solar panels folded at his sides like veil-light wings.

Aldrin began the interrogation. “Martin told us what you said about the Traceshifter Artifact.”

I sighed my gratitude that one Hive at least did not say ‘Canner Device.' “I haven't had a chance yet to start tracking down the people I bought the packaging from. The Censor needed me today.”

“Were they Japanese by nation-strat?”

The question made me frown. “I believe so. We spoke Japanese, but these were underground meetings, no one wore insignia.”

Aldrin nodded. “We scanned the tracker records from the hours around this theft. The artifact's hex left afterpaths. We are beginning to map its movement. It makes tracker IDs jump from victim to victim as people pass close by each other, so yours might jump to mine, then mine to Voltaire's, Voltaire's to another, bumping signal after signal, sometimes swapping back when people cross paths a second time, folding back on itself to make the threads harder to trace. The wielder can cast the hex kilometers from the target, then wait for the desired signal to drift out on the tide of exchanges. The effect entered the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash'house on a guest of Thisbe Saneer, then swapped the signals of everyone in the bash' several times over, and Ockham's signal traveled out on Cato Weeksbooth. From there it was easy enough for the caster to acquire it. We are still combing the records to see how many trackers were affected. Hundreds.”

I nodded. “And anyone affected is a suspect. No, anyone near anyone who was near anyone affected?”

“More,” Aldrin corrected. “We found this chain by examining Ockham Saneer, but if the caster also traceshifted themself separately, that will take us much more time to track. The chain we've found is just the mask. Until we trace the effects more completely, no one on Earth has a true alibi, nor anyone in orbit. Cielo de Pájaros is close to the Esmeraldas Elevator.”

Voltaire nodded, the visor showing me grim eyes. “Meanwhile we must hunt by motive, Mycroft. What motive do you smell?”

I flinched. “There are too many.”

“You told Martin that you believe occult powers within the Japanese Mitsubishi forged this artifact?”

“I … I have no proof.”

“You have instincts. Voice them.”

I took a deep breath. “I think … I think it was the Japanese Mitsubishi bloc originally. After news of the theft broke, when I was hunting for the thieves, everything I found, everyone involved, makers, smugglers, whatever the continent, they were always Japanese. It's hard to believe a criminal group wealthy enough to develop something so expensive would be that homogenous. And it didn't seem like something a criminal group would want to put together anyway. Why spend so much on research and development when you have veteran killers who drop their trackers for hits all the time?”