Too Like the Lightning (59 page)

“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.

“Mycroft Canner!” he repeated. “It's them! They've come to finish the job! Get them!”

Nine people would not have been enough to become a mob, but there were ringleaders waiting, four of them, posted around Tully's podium like guards, with metal pipes and baseball bats hungry in their hands. “We knew you'd come! You're dead, Canner! You hear? You're dead!”

“Run.” I seized the nearest of my fellow Servicers and shoved them toward the alley behind us. “Run! All of you!”

A few obeyed, but most stayed, massing around me as if their brittle bodies could have done anything to block such rage. It didn't matter. Before they saw me spring I was past them, past my attackers, bounding along the street with a perfect synchrony of arms and legs that transformed the whole of my height to speed. My old self laughed seeing the others' faces as they watched, or tried to watch. Imagine, reader, in primordial days some vicious dinosaur, heavy with nightmare jaws, which chases a shimmering lizard up a slope, and the predator rejoices, already tasting the kill in its blood-starved mind, when, all at once, its slim prey spreads its feathered fins and takes to the air in a world that had not yet realized life could fly.

You dare try to catch me?

“Now! Play it now!”

They knew their enemy, my enemies. They had prepared the basest and best of traps for me: Canner Beat. I don't know where the speakers were, but they blasted it loud enough for the beats to vibrate through my bones. I lost this shadow world and was again in my two weeks, Ibis Mardi writhing beneath me, charred and already half-carcass as a red-hot crowbar punished blow by blow that brazen bitch who dared imagine she might claim the heart which belongs only to Saladin. I had speculated, when I decided to use my pacemaker to leave behind recordings of my heartbeat as I experienced the thrill of every kill, about what uses doctors and Brill's Institute would make of the tapes. But I so underestimated human genius that it never occurred to me that people might make art. Any rhythm can become a song. The accelerations, retards, and crescendos of my heartbeat, backed by fierce harmonics and suitably bloody lyrics, have spawned a genre and a culture of their own. I would like Canner Beat, I suspect, if I could hear it, but the rhythms strip me of all present tense and plunge my senses into replay. I tasted Ibis's meat again, felt hot blood spatter on my skin as she flailed at me with the shreds I had left of the hands which had too often clutched possessively at mine, and I saw Saladin's loving smile as we consummated our revenge. My opponents chose well. I tumbled blinded to the ground, barely awake as my attackers raised their bats around me.

I was rescued in that moment by a kind of U-beast called a Pillarcat. It is feline but long like a snake, with six pairs of legs all in a line, each a full cat's length apart, so it can wrap its purring coils around your ankles three times over, or nap on your belly wound in a spiral which overflows you like a living blanket. This one was green, a lively new-leaf green, with a golden underbelly and a constant purr which almost masked the hum of electronics underneath. It knew me. It climbed my back faster than anyone could block it, and draped itself around my shoulders like a sensayer's long scarf, just as it used to do around Apollo.

“Crap! Halley! Stupid cat! Get it off them!”

“Halley! Come here, kitty! Good kitty!”

Halley rooted its many, many claws into my clothes and released a hiss which would have made an anaconda proud.

“You stupid cat!” The attackers froze around me, bats and fists slack like wilted branches. “What are you doing? Mycroft Canner killed your maker! You were there! Don't you remember?”

Something killed the music now, and memory released me enough to see, if not to run. Hands seized me from behind, not violent but controlling, gloved in an electric tingling which leeched the strength from my muscles, as laughter does. Numbing gloves. I was steered backwards like a puppet and already safely bundled in a blanket before my invisible captors threw back their hoods of Griffincloth to reveal the glares on their vizors.

“This violence is forbidden.” The foremost of them stepped forward between me and Tully's warriors, and let his coat switch from invisibility mode to his Utopia, a storm-black sky where lightning cities appeared and disappeared fast as the pouring rain. “Disperse.”

“Fucking Utopians! Why are you protecting Mycroft Canner?”

It was one of the audience that shouted it, not the guards, for they instead stood in silent disbelief. I recognized them now, by their betrayed faces, European shirts and English strat bands, I recognized them as those pub regulars who had adopted Apollo back in Liverpool. I'm sorry; you did deserve revenge.

The rest of the mob was not so shocked. “Astroturds!”

“They've been hiding Mycroft Canner all this time!”

Flying stones and rubbish joined the words.

“Disperse!” The lead Utopian summoned a dragon now, black but lined with lightning, which spread its wings over the lot of us and glared down at the mob with compound eyes, each formed of a dozen bloodred laser sights which locked on clubs and fists. A second dragon joined it, whiskered, Asian style, long like a ribbon and glowing with rainbow flame. It slid in around us like a wall, purring with the force of fifty lions and dusting the mob with warm mist from the hundreds of tiny jets which helped it float. In truth, the two must have been there the whole time, invisible in their Griffincloth scales, but in the heat of almost-battle no one cared how the dragons functioned: there were dragons. The mob backed off. A moat of dead space opened between them and the U-beasts, and the warmonger himself stepped to the fore.

“Mycroft Canner!” Tully had another Utopian stalking behind him, though whether to protect him or restrain him I could not guess. “Why did you come here?”

Halley left me and ran back to Tully, content, I imagine, now that I was in trusted hands. “It was an accident,” I answered. “I didn't know you were here.”

Tully let the Pillarcat circle his legs. Its touch pulled his pants taut so I could see the contours of braces around his joints, unused to Earth's harsh gravity. “Give me Apollo's
Iliad.
”

“It isn't yours,” I answered.

A Utopian car descended over us, and my captor-saviors gave me no chance to resist as they bundled me inside.

“Give it to me!” Tully shouted after us. “I'm the one who's going to finish it. Finish everything! Everything we started!”

The Utopian behind him, wrapped in a coat of pale slow-motion birds, placed a restraining hand on Tully's shoulder. “Stop this, Tully. Canner's right, the book's not yours. Now calm the mob.”

He who had spent thirteen expensive years in the protection of Luna City could not disobey his benefactors, but he left me a last glare, defiant arrogance which promised to do all in his power to destroy me. “Everyone!” I heard him begin. “The Utopians haven't been hiding Mycroft Canner. They've been hiding me from Mycroft Canner, and what they did here they did to protect you, to keep you from becoming what Mycroft Canner wanted you to become: murderers…”

That was all I was allowed to hear, for the car's door closed and sealed me in its capsule as it spirited me to whatever haven the Utopians had chosen.

“We'll hush it up if possible.” One of them was with me in the car, hard to spot since their hooded coat (I could not guess the sex) made nothing of the car seat but a car seat. “There weren't too many witnesses.”

“You're helping Tully do this?” I asked. “You can't help Tully do this!”

“Apollo asked us to take care of Tully.”

My hands shook. “I saw Kohaku Mardi's numbers in the Censor's office, perfectly, as if someone engineered this
Black Sakura
affair to follow the Mardi's plan. Please tell me that wasn't you.”

Their answer was sweet as rescue to a drowning man. “We neither help nor hinder, only ward.”

“Even so, what Tully's doing isn't just warning people, they're riling them up, making it worse. They could start the avalanche and really make it happen! Millions could die!”

I heard the rustle of a U-beast but could not see where in the car it lurked. “Don't talk like other people, Mycroft.”

I shook my head. “That's not what I mean. You can't let people associate Utopia with Tully's message. Tully's a maniac. They'll make it seem like you're encouraging a war! The other six Hives will all ally against you, the worst combination. It won't go like Tully thinks. The Mardis' predictions were wrong. Kohaku's numbers have already happened. We're at the crisis point, past it, but it doesn't matter anymore. You know about Jehovah. War can't break out between the Masons and Mitsubishi while Caesar and Andō are both fathers of the same Son. But if you let Tully keep pushing for it like this, if you let yourselves be seen protecting Tully, then everyone will think you're warmongers too. I don't know if even Caesar can protect you then.”