Home > Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota #4)

Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota #4)
Author: Ada Palmer

 


CHAPTER ONE


 

 

World Civil War


Written September 15, 2454

Romanova

IT HAS TO BE A SHORT WAR. We all keep saying it. The Utopians bought us six months before real Hell sets in, six months no one has nukes, or supergerms, or CNCs, or their many equally apocalyptic cousins lumped under the title ‘harbingers.’ For these six months we can’t destroy the world. They sacrificed their immortality for that, the aloof neutrality that used to guard Utopia, the only Hive neither complicit in nor injured by the multi-century assassination system called O.S. No, it was stronger than that: the aloof neutrality of literal worldly detachment. Six Hive capitals are on this planet, but theirs on the serene, chill Moon. They could have watched in peace. Even if Luna City can’t hold them all, the others could have hidden in Earth’s empty, inhospitable corners, where their space tech would let them alone survive. Perhaps it’s fantasy to think that even they have that much tech, but it isn’t fantasy to say that they alone were sure that some—enough—of them would have survived to make the better world that’s supposed to rise from our ashes. Now no one knows if war will spare any of the small and alien minority that struck first, during the pre-Olympic truce, and so made itself an even easier scapegoat than O.S. Apollo was willing to destroy this world to save a better one, but not so the Utopian majority who voted to risk the Great Project itself to peacebond our harbingers for six months. So it has to be a short war, short enough to use that sacrifice, to end before the sticks and swords and triggers in our hands evolve again into the Big Red Button.

Yet how can it be over in six months? This is World Civil War: every city, every street divided, with no sovereign soil to retreat to, no ‘my side’ and ‘your side’ to form a truce around. If history proves anything of World Wars, or of Civil Wars, it’s that their broad, complex vendettas are protracted. The Church War took fifteen years to scour the Nation-States from Earth with fire and blood, and while fractious historians may debate whether the First World War ended in 1945 or 1989, it was long enough to make Orwell envision how deadlocked dystopias might actually achieve Eternal War. I look back further: the Wars of the Roses, China’s Warring States, the Hundred Years’ War, endless revolutions sparked by 1789; even Athens facing Sparta counted the war in decades, not in months. Optimism says I simply haven’t heard of history’s littler wars, but this war will not be little. Common sense, and Su-Hyeon’s bloodless face when they come from the Censor’s office daily, are all the oracles I need.

Mycroft would have made all this seem smaller. Or bigger. Both. They would have given this the smallness of warring ants, of pieces on a chessboard, puppets acting out a script, while the bigness lies in the Authors, Providence, the Great Conversation Mycroft believed in with such precious certainty. I don’t quite have that. I believe most of the time; there was a zeal in Mycroft, an astute and persuasive intelligence that, together on our bunk beds in clandestine hours, taught me to believe. But doubt still shakes me. I’ve eaten Bridger’s feasts, smelled the brain-blood at the Prince’s resurrection, seen Achilles throw a javelin, but I’ve also tasted Moondust, seen rainbow dragons take flight from the stunned and mourning Forum, and, with nothing but human limbs to launch them, I’ve seen Mycroft fly. Humans have done things I thought impossible without Bridger. When sleep is slow in coming, my skeptical imagination keeps weaving alternatives to explain away the miracles and Plan and Interference which would make my past self call my current self crazy. Achilles, Boo, Patroclus Aimer, what if they’re all U-beasts? What if it’s all just us?

One thing I’m always sure of, though: it’s my doubt that’s crazy, not my belief. It’s paranoia’s doubt, like when you meet some impossibly amazing person, who, against all hope, seems to accept you as a bosom friend, and they give you smiles, hours, years, but you know the rot and failure inside yourself and can’t believe those smiles, that person’s smiles, can really be for you. In just that way, I can’t believe this war is nobler than it seems. That we are nobler. I blame us, blame Tully Mardi, Perry-Kraye, Joyce Faust, myself, imagine us the authors of our own bumbling calamity. Something stubborn in the blackest waters of my mind refuses to accept that we deserve to be more. But we are more. I know it. We are the instruments that carve the path from cave walls to the stars. We are what built this world and will build better ones. We are the message which ended the literal infinity of loneliness which so long held so Good and True and Real a Being as That Which Visits Through the Flesh We Named Jehovah Mason. It used to be easier to see it. With Mycroft as interpreter, I used to find greatness in every human syllable, but, without Mycroft, now logic, evidence, experience, none of these can pierce doubt’s dark hours anymore. Only one thing can: They Love us. That’s what I cling to. A Kinder, Better Being than Our Maker has reached across the blind black from another Universe to Love us with Their infinity of Love. When I believe that, I can still see us among the stars.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO


 

 

The Battle of Cielo De Pájaros


Written September 15–17, 2454

Events of September 7

Romanova

I WASN’T GOING TO BOTHER DESCRIBING my experience of the war’s second day, since it was all muddle, but I’ve realized muddle was the authentic first assault—not of proper factions, not Remakers on Hiveguard, tenants on Mitsubishi landlords, wronged Hives on those complicit in O.S., or Nurturist bigots on whoever they’re calling ‘set-sets’ these days—no, it was a raw assault of chaos on order, of war on Earth. It began within hours after the Olympic Closing Ceremony, but there was no reality for me then, not outside the shock of the Atlantis Strike, and what it claimed. Who it claimed. In the black hours of the morning, grief had given way to sleep, but sleep in turn gave way to the Prince’s voice in the tracker at my ear: “Humanity needs Anonymous advice.”

Jehovah Mason’s light, dead voice makes me instinctively snap to, not out of obligation, but because every word I’ve ever heard Them say has been true and important. They’re not just well-reasoned words like Vivien’s, or right-minded like Bryar’s, but uncomplex, clean-cutting truth, like two plus two is four, like the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time, like suffering is bad. If They said humanity needed something, They meant all of humanity, from Cro-Magnon to Mars. I fired up my lenses before I even registered the difference between sleep and waking.

The feed brought my eyes at once to Chile. It was daylight there, and lines of violet, coral-pink, and charcoal soared up like airy streamers from the glittering glass roofs of Cielo de Pájaros: smoke. A different feed showed the fires, and people, random clips: in one, two Humanists in Gold Team jackets hurled things which burst into strangely monochrome orange flame; in another, a cluster of people huddled in one of the flower trenches between the rows of flashing glass roofs; elsewhere, guards fired stun guns. Some of those in defensive clusters wore blue Romanovan Alliance police uniforms, and others were in Cousin wraps, presumably inspectors, there to prevent the abuse of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house and computers while they were in Alliance hands. But some Cousins were helping the attacking Humanists, which made no sense until I found a feed whose software highlighted the Hiveguard sigil—Sniper’s bull’s-eye—on the breasts of all of the aggressors. Hiveguard was trying to take control of the cars. They could not advance across the surface, since the Spectacle City’s terraced rows made every flower trench a fortress, and every raised path a no-man’s-land. Instead the attackers burrowed up the slope, entering houses by basement doors like Thisbe’s, and advancing from trench to trench one household at a time. I looked for signs of resistance from the residents, broken doors, singed grasses, but the Hiveguard aggressors seemed to meet no hostility from the residents—no surprise when Cielo de Pájaros was 71 percent Humanist.

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