“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.”
“No choice?” Apollo was with us too, Apollo Mojave, twenty-five, the hood of his Utopian coat thrown back so the sun could lend gold to his hair, though it hardly needed more. I don’t know what Seine Mardi was doing that Apollo was with us and not with her, but I remember him stretched out on his back, his coat mimicking the grass beneath, so he seemed like a spirit only half-born out of the Earth, still wrapped in nature. “Would you destroy a better world to save this one?”
We were children, reader. We did not have our answers yet, not even I, but I do not present this memory as a lesson. Rather it is a sample of what the Mardi children went through every day with Geneva and the others, Kohaku, Senator Aeneas, the historians Makenna, Jie, Chiasa, Jules, the Brillist Fellow Mercer, Leigh who could almost out-mother her old ba’sib Bryar Kosala. Tully was not with us, Tully who was then just born, an infant when we were already imbibing harshest ethics. Tully was eight years old when I killed the others, as I was eight when the explosion deprived me of a birth bash’ I hardly remember. Tully knows nothing, reader, and what he does know is more a secondhand reconstruction, built from interviews and old notes, than real memory. Still, even if it was just a shell of what the Mardis were, a feeble echo of the words which must not be which he poured out now into the streets of Barcelona, phalanx upon phalanx, I would have done anything to silence him.
“But that’s just one majority!” Tully continued. I could see him, standing literally on a soapbox on the street corner, pleading with the passersby like an ancient doomsday preacher. “There’s another. The Masons are growing. You’ve seen the numbers: three billion Masons, three point one, three point two. If they grow the others shrink. One point seven billion Cousins, one point two billion Europeans, barely a billion Brillists. They’re sucking away the population, and everyone worries: how long until my Hive drops below a billion? Below half a billion? When my children grow up, will their Hive be as rare as Utopians? The majority fears the Masons, wants to strike back, to cut their numbers, see them shrink again. You get angry when you see a young person in the white suit of the Annus Dialogorum, don’t you? When you debate with them, you don’t try equitably to help them decide, you work actively to dissuade them. You think the Masons haven’t noticed? You think they don’t realize that, the larger they grow, the more hostile the majority becomes? How long until they start to defend themselves?”
Tully at least my mind could recognize in this vague haze of the present. Thirteen years hiding on the Moon had left Tully Mardi tall and artificial, muscles cultivated by prescribed routines rather than play, sustained on a diet rationed milligram by milligram. Childhood’s departure had left his hair brown and his face lively and academic like his Brillist mother’s, but I saw nothing of his father there, nothing of the eternal grin of Luther Mardigras, a true Mardigras born and raised, professional party-thrower who could turn four people locked in an elevator into a festival and tempt even Utopians to stray. As if to mock his forefathers’ happy trade, Tully’s face was all urgency, lips which had tasted many vitamins but never candy. He was twenty-two now, old enough to imagine himself a man, but not a Utopian. That step he would not take. He wore no coat, no vizor, just a loose blue shirt and gray pants, neither sloppy nor formal, and a Graylaw Hiveless sash, calculated to make him seem as generic as possible. Everyone can listen to an everyman.
“Don’t you see it can’t last?” He kept on preaching, words pouring out as from a broken dike. “Why did the French Revolution happen? Because a scattering of nobles took up all the land and oppressed the majority!”
“Don’t say it,” I mouthed, silent, to myself, to God, to no one.
“Why did the Roman Empire fall? It grew too big, too unwieldy, ignoring the strength and hate and envy of its majority neighbors!”
“Don’t let them say it.”
“It’s happening already all around us. The property flows first, blood later. It’s going to happen! It is happening!”
“Saladin, don’t let them say it!”
“War! I’m talking about war! Revolution! Blood! You think it can’t happen, that without nations, without armies there can’t be war? We have police! They’re forces enough. It can happen, and it will. You think violence has died out of our society? Look at Mycroft Canner! Look at all the followers that still worship Mycroft Canner! You think the world that made them can’t make war? It’s still in us, the death instinct, the willingness to kill, it’s … Mycroft Canner!” Shaking, Tully raised his hand to point at me. “That’s them! There! In the hat! That’s Mycroft Canner!”
The first moment of a crisis is most precious, but I wasted it. I wasted it seeing. I could see now Tully’s audience: four Brillists, two Masons, two Humanists, and a Mitsubishi, stopped in their tracks by this peculiar scrawny Hiveless on his high-tech crutches. I think it was the soapbox that attracted them, mad in this world where text and video can reach a billion at once. The live performance was powerful, the realization that he was speaking not to masses, but to them, words with only one chance to persuade, or fail and perish. They listened, not millions skimming the net, but nine live witnesses as Tully raised his hand to point at me.