Too Like the Lightning (58 page)

<¿Eureka?> I replied in text over my tracker, so the other Servicers could not hear.

<¿Where?>

I tried to hide my sigh, but the others spotted it, seeing my step grow distracted as we strolled through the shopping streets alive with urban buzz. They've learned to watch me now, to spot the moments when the calls come in and tear me from them. They threaten sometimes to defend me, to make a tally of how many hours I work and shove it in Kosala's face and call it cruel. I do not let them.

“You okay, Mycroft?” one asked. (Protective Kosala will not let me print their names.)

“It's not a job,” I reassured. “Just questions.”

<¿well?>

I replied,

<¡i know! ¡never! ¡not once in their whole life! ¡and there are others! this chevalier, more. ¿how many, mycroft? you've been there. ¿how many secret people are they hiding? i have to know.>

I followed my Servicer fellows still, through backstreets of the city, shops and crowds who took no more notice of us as we passed than of the resting gulls.

<¿you know how many you have now? 989,408,013 and counting. that leaves only 110,634,255 humanists who haven't wished you dead yet.>

We had a storyteller with us, my little band with our hard-earned lunches, and, even in my distraction, I enjoyed seeing the light she brought to their faces. I cannot name her, but I can paint her for you at least, a rambunctious young ex-Humanist, built for play-acting, with huge, expressive hands, eyes that changed color more with her stories than the light, and a versatile androgyny, for she was (as Sniper might be) an Amazon, who, aiming early at the Olympic open divisions, chose to grow no breasts. If Servicer life is a banishment from the surrounding world, one might compare it to the natural prison of a snowed-in winter in the olden days, when the villagers forgot their buried farms to gather around the fire where the storyteller is, for six months, king.

<¿Sounds like the Wish List is circulating more widely than ever?> I asked.

<¿want to know how many times you're on the curse list?>

<¿What's the Curse List?>

<¿you don't know?>

<¡it's so clever! it's the opposite of the wish list. you put somebody's name on the curse list if you like them and want to protect them, as if a curse on there is supposed to cancel out a wish on the other. someone must have started it because they saw someone they liked on the wish list and wanted to protect them. that means some people think the wish list is real.>

I shook my head, though Eureka was not there to see it.

A dog came by next, with a friendly owner who let it sport with us: bliss.

<¿me? i've never put a name down, not once.>

My companions debated the next turn now, left toward the park, right toward the steps and fountain, two equal goods like two colors of candy. Do you wish I would omit these details, reader? In a hundred years there will be nothing left of these Servicers, no descendants, no inventions, no laws they passed or records they broke, even their trials will no longer be current as precedent. Their names may be censored, but I will not deprive them of the chance to be remembered at least as those happy Servicers who walked with Mycroft Canner.

<¿Was it you who gave Thisbe the location?>

<¿why bother showing thisbe? ¿what could thisbe see? ¿a list of names? a list is nothing. thisbe can't see how, when you move one ball on the grid, the others move. madame d'arouet is a ball that doesn't move, but the others move around them, the whole structure orbiting the black hole. if you tried to see it with your silly senses it might look like the center of a web. we didn't know there was a spider hiding there—they stayed still so long. ¿do you think they were hiding from us on purpose? ¿mycroft? ¡mycroft! ¿are you there? ¿hello? ¡HELLO! ¡EARTH TO MYCROFT!>

Eureka could not reach me. Earth could not reach me. We had rounded a corner, and there were words there, words plain and hollow in the noisy street, those
words which must not be.
They overwhelmed me like the massed spears of a phalanx. I told you before how hard I fight to make myself believe in this drifting dream you call the present. Now I lost that fight.

“The Death of Majority is a lie!” the words began, floating through … no, I was not aware of what they floated through, the crowd, the air, for none were real to me. “There are lots of majorities today, real and dangerous majorities. Who owns the bash'house where you live? The Mitsubishi! Who owns the shop where you do business? The farm that produces the food on your table? The Mitsubishi! They own two thirds of the Earth, and compared to them the majority is camping on a sliver. The majority! You say it doesn't matter, but it makes everyone nervous, knowing the Mitsubishi could raise the world's rent at any time, double, triple, ten times, and no one could stop it. The majority fears the Mitsubishi, wants to stop them, to seize their land and redistribute it, by force if need be. This
Black Sakura
theft is someone lashing out, but everybody wants to. How long until there is a second attack, and a third? How long until they start to defend themselves?”

I remember when I was a young thing, two years orphaned and finally used to my reconstructed limbs. I was sitting in the garden with the Mardi children, talking to Geneva Mardi about sacrifice. The Senator sat us kids on the ground around him, while the grown-up with his stiff back monopolized the bench. He challenged us to come up with things we would do
anything
to save—a grim theme, but these were the sorts of games that Mardi children played.

The gardens at Alba Longa belonged to the Roman Emperor Domitian first, then to the popes, then to the MASONs, as imperial as a spot of Earth can be, but it was Brill's Institute that suggested to Emperor Aeneas MASON to make the Alba Longa site into a Denkergarten. The Emperor built five bash'houses around the grounds, and reviewed the world's great Campuses, inviting the five most promising, unusual, and ambitious new bash'es to share that paradise, to foster children and ideas, with no payment asked beyond the promise of future greatness and corresponding gratitude. The committee picked one bash' of ex-European Masons, one of Cousins who would later take me in, one mixed Brillists and Humanists, one Cousins and Masons, and, that rarest of treasures, the Mardi bash', which boasted six Hives and a Hiveless, while Apollo's constant visits almost granted it the seventh. Much has been written of my house, the fifth house, the service house, the groundskeepers and maintenance staff that served this think tank, and what inferiority complexes I might have picked up even before the accident as I grew up knowing all my playmates were genius children earmarked for greatness while I was not. It is somewhat unfair of me to contradict my biographers at this late point, but, for the record, I and, while they lived, my ba'sibs knew full well that a committee had chosen the other bash'es, while Aeneas MASON himself selected us. If we had to squander some hours on the not-unpleasant task of gardening, it was the only way the Emperor could secure an undebated seat for the one bash' for which he held the highest hopes. He visited me in the hospital after the accident that claimed the others, and from how he wept I might have been the last chapter of a now-lost masterpiece.

“What would you do
anything
to save, children?”

Laurel suggested “Mama!” first. Laurel Mardi was seven then, the prince of the bash', the Cousins' and Masons' golden boy before Jehovah eclipsed him, and famed for having left his toy cars in so many VIPs' offices that a flippant reporter at
The Romanov
started a weekly column, “Laurel Mardi's Road Trip,” half an excuse to show world leaders cuddling a cute kid, but also a chronicle of the rise of what would obviously be one of the next generation's greats. “I'd do anything to save Mama!”

Geneva smiled, as if he had been waiting for the boy's reply. Geneva Mardi was kind-faced but merciless, as only a Mason reared by Cousins can be: “Would you kill your papa to save your mama?” A lesser man would have stopped there, seeing tears already threatening to wet the child's cheeks. “Would you kill your papa and ba'pa Jules to save your mama?” he pressed. “Papa and Jules and me, would you kill me? And Ibis and Ken and Mycroft?” he nodded to the rest of us in the circle.

“The whole bash' then!” Ibis suggested, nine years old, crazy about animals and already loving me like more than family. “We'd do
anything
for the whole bash'!”

“Would you kill a different bash' to save this one?”

“Yes!” Ken answered instantly. He was six years old, a sponge for history, and inseparable from the wooden training sword which dragged behind him like a teddy bear. “I would. I'd also die for it.”

Easy to say, Ken Mardi, but not easy to do, was it? I left you your katana and one hand intact with which to wield it, a way to end your pain, and I even promised to end your parents' suffering if you did the deed. Your mother was brave enough, Kohaku Mardi, when he felt the agonies of my poisons setting in, he slit his belly with a calm to make his ancestors proud, and, woman of iron, even wrote the message in his own blood, 33-67; 67-33; 29-71. You, though, who had boasted yourself a modern samurai, you watched the arctic around you turn the scattered pieces of your limbs to ice, and dropped your sword, and cried and suffered to the end. Hypocrite.

Geneva's lesson was not done. “How about two other bash'es?” he pressed. “Would you wipe out two bash'es to save ours?”

“If I had to.”

“How about three? Four? Ten bash'es? How many is too many? Or let's count people. Five hundred people? A thousand people? A billion people?”

“A billion is too many,” Laurel judged with his air of princely authority. “A thousand is too many too, even a hundred. One more than there are members in the bash' is too many.”

Ibis shook her head. “Killing anyone at all is too many. Killing one more than there are in the bash' is when it turns from too many to too too many.” Have you ever heard, reader, such a nauseatingly Cousinly sentiment? She would have been one, never doubt that, had I let her live.

“Then the bash' still isn't something you'd do anything to save, is it?” Geneva asked, eager to see what the children would try next. He never lost that calm, even when he hung dying on the cross, when I visited him to hear his last philosophy, which grew purer and more penetrating as sun and thirst helped him toward his God.

It was Laurel, already thinking like a statesman, who thought of, “The World. To save the world, the human race. You'd have to do anything for that, anyone would.”

Ken was duty-bound to criticize his rival. “That's stupid. Of course you'd do anything to save the world, the world includes everything and you, so whatever you have to give up to save it would be destroyed anyway if you don't, so there's no real sacrifice. You have to do anything to save the world, there's no choice.”