Kosala lingered to give Vivien’s hand a farewell squeeze.
“I’m here! I’m here!” Brillist Institute Headmaster Felix Faust arrived, huffing and wheezing like an old wolf, no longer big nor bad. His usual Gordian sweater was not formal enough to be worn on such a night, but the weave of his green suit coat was textured to mimic its markings, so passing Brillists could still read him as 2-5-5-5-11-11-10-1. Faust’s flesh always seems to be decaying, pallid European skin and a wasted, hairless body as if the brain which lurks beneath that bare skull were a parasite, sucking the life and moisture from its host. “You must let me come!” he gasped out. “I saw Perry heading toward the Miniatures Room. Who else is coming?” His eyes shot from face to face, keen as microscopes. “Andō and MASON, fine choices. The Duke and King joining Bryar on crowd duty, good.” A deep breath and a smile. “Isn’t this whole affair magnificent? I just called J.E.D.D. Mason, do you know what they said? ‘Excuse me, Headmaster, something important is happening.’ I haven’t heard our J.E.D.D. call anything important since Spain here fell from Politics! Isn’t it wonderful? No offense, Your Majesty.”
How shall I describe these princes’ faces as they hear that news? Imagine the ancient Senate hearing word that Caesar has just crossed the Rubicon; they do not yet know how much destruction this will spell, but it cannot end in nothing.
“Come, come, I’m eager to hear what you tell Perry!” Faust herded MASON and Mitsubishi toward the side door, like a teacher counting students on a field trip. The old Headmaster has a privileged ease in dealing with the other Powers, since he is last among equals, resting content in seventh place on Seven-Ten lists. Many say the only bad choice Thomas Carlyle ever made was his last, decreeing that henceforth the leadership of Gordian would be selected by Brill’s Institute. The Institute chose well, unfailingly, but Members who were not Brillists felt uncomfortable under their sway, and, as Gordian and Brillist became synonyms, so Gordian dwindled from the largest Hive to second-smallest. Legend says that Emperor Constantine, converted on his deathbed, willed the Roman Empire to the Christian Church, and in one act both ensured that Church’s immortality and doomed Europe to nineteen centuries of wars for God; just so, Carlyle’s deathbed embrace of Adolf Richter Brill strengthened and crippled Gordian. Others may call it a mistake, but I call it the wisest move Carlyle ever made, for, if Gordian’s growth had not been checked, by now its matchless popularity would have doomed us to that dread death-knell of peace: majority.
“The rest of you enjoy the party!” old Faust called to the others. “Ganymede, Sniper’s outside preparing to catapult themself over your East Wing using a motor which I think was part of your drawbridge until a few minutes ago. You may want to go voice an opinion.”
The Duke broke into such poetic French profanity that those who understood could not help but gaze in awe.
As the others returned to the grand hall, Headmaster Faust, a human tugboat, shoved the Emperor and Mitsubishi Chief Director out the side door to a quieter gallery, and onward toward the salon where the Outsider waited. Here only quiet souls clustered, pretending to browse the Duke’s collection of Busts of Unknown Persons while they watched the news over their trackers. The three Hive leaders might have traversed the hall in safety if not for a tiny, brave impediment, nine years old and child-plump beneath her Junior Scientist Squad uniform, who planted herself in MASON’s path like Lancelot upon the bridge. “Are you the Emperor?” she asked.
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 …
CHAPTER 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!”