<¿What’s the Curse List?>
<¿you don’t know?>
<No.>
<¡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. <They don’t think the list is real. That many people wouldn’t be willing to put names down on it if they really thought of it as endorsing murder.>
<but they also wouldn’t bother if they thought it was nothing. that’s why it’s wonderful. it’s like a superstition. at least nine hundred million humanists have put names on that wish list over the years, and they don’t really think there’s some assassin out there watching who’ll kill off the people with the highest scores, but they must vaguely hope something bad might happen if enough death wishes pile on the same person, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. it’s like knocking wood, the death wish list.>
A dog came by next, with a friendly owner who let it sport with us: bliss.
<you’re on the curse list too, you know, mycroft. 9,231 times. you still have fans.>
<You shouldn’t encourage the Wish List, Eureka.>
<¿me? i’ve never put a name down, not once.>
<True, but I know you’re the one who starts it up again when it stops circulating. You read it incessantly, and I’ve seen you lurk around online and mention it to Humanists who haven’t heard of it yet. You need to be careful—it may have started as a joke, but in the wrong hands it could make the whole Hive look like murderers.>
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.
<we’re working on lists of who goes to madame’s, me and sidney. sometimes they try to hide it, riding with somebody else with trackers off, trixy trixy. but now that we know what’s there we can look at whose trackers are off, and who has patterns that don’t add up. the black hole causes so much, but now we have the missing puzzle piece.>
<¿Was it you who gave Thisbe the location?>
<they asked.>
<Please don’t show Thisbe the list of who goes there. Thisbe needs to stay away from that place. You all do, for the bash’s safety.>
<¿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.