“I need a break from power, Sniper. It sometimes feels like I’ve been playing the manipulation game forever, and once you’re in you can’t stop. I enjoy it, I wouldn’t give it up for anything, but my rival is also very good, and I have to turn everyone around me into a pawn on my side to keep them from becoming a pawn on theirs. I need a break, just once in a while, like this. It’s different with you. You can’t try to use me, and I don’t want to use you even though I could. You’re off-limits to my rival, so I can safely make you off-limits to me, too. I can relax. There’s no power with the two of us like this, just fun. I’m sure you need a break too. It’s a very hard game you play keeping Ganymede in power. It must be exhausting, all the training, and competitions, and stunts to keep voters from thinking about anyone but you and Ganymede. But there’s no spotlight here. With me you can stop performing, and you don’t need to worry about your obligations when there’s absolutely nothing you can do about them. You can relax. Isn’t that what you really want, Sniper? A life where you can finally relax?”
I could have tried to answer somehow, give a long blink, a distinct breath, but that would have spoiled it, undone these hours which truly were the pinnacle of my avocation. There’s a word to chew on, ‘avocation’: a second great occupation that takes you away from your vocation, like a musician sidetracked by acting, a teacher by politics, Thisbe by making movies, or my ba’pa designing dolls, all important tasks but secondary still. I don’t blame the parents who made me and Ockham rivals for O.S. (it made us stronger), but when Lesley entered the picture it was clear there would be a winner and a loser when we grew up, no ties. When the fuss over being a Lifedoll model made me a child star, I saw a second path before me, a surer shot than the fight for bash’ leadership, which was always fifty-fifty. The rest agreed a celebrity in the house would be a good addition to our arsenal, so I worked like a maniac to secure my fame: studying for the press, keeping informed, full of jokes, always the most fun to interview, then finding a sport at which my small body (neither exceptionally strong nor fast) could excel, and working to remain competition-worthy through three Olympiads and counting. I loved my avocation, suffered for it, and I took very seriously the duty of belonging to everyone who loved me. But that still came second, and my bash’ vocation first. I do apologize to all who were in love with what I was. I miss you too, and if you contact my underground and host me for a night I’ll do my best to be your Sniper again, but that comes second. My Hive, all Hives, come first. I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world. If you aren’t a Humanist it’s because you think something different. That difference matters. I will not let Jehovah Mason undo the system which (as Mycroft sacrificed so much to prove) gives us the right at last to be proud of what we choose to be. The Hives must be defended. Never before has one tyrant been in a position to truly threaten the whole world, so never in history has my true vocation been so necessary. I will kill Jehovah Mason for you; please accept that as my apology.
I’m over my five-thousand-word limit already. What else should I cram in before I go? The Bridger parts are true. There’s proof. Unlike Mycroft, I won’t let you get away with pretending it’s madness. Don’t trust the gendered pronouns Mycroft gives people, they all come from Madame. The coup is happening, don’t let anybody tell you different. As for the resistance, I’m not expecting most of you to volunteer to fight and die, but if you support my side, all it means is that you love your Hive, and that you’ll cheer for us when the deed is done. The First World War was the moment humanity learned to count its casualties in millions, but as a Humanist I must ask, as my bash’ founders asked: which changed the world more? The loss of millions or of that handful who would have been the next generation’s heroes? Wilfred Owen left behind a tiny collection of poems, not enough to even make a book, but still the most upsetting things I’ve ever read; if Owen had lived they might have revolutionized literature, spurred presses and politics away from the guilt-laden bravado which would light war’s fire again, or driven countless readers to suicide. Karl Schwarzschild corresponded with Einstein from the trenches and deduced the existence of black holes while rotting knee-deep in muck; if Schwarzschild had lived they might have accelerated physics by fifty years, enabled Mukta two generations earlier, or given the Nazis nukes. Owen and Schwarzschild; calculate carefully which firebrands to snuff and one death can redirect history better than any battle. That was the foundation of O.S.
—Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, Thirteenth O.S., May 23rd, 2454
*
END OF RESTRICTED SECTION. PUBLIC ACCOUNT RESUMES.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
O.S.
“Your Grace President Ganymede, O.S. is here.”
“Send them in.”
This fifth day of my history plunges us into a sea of scenes I did not witness. I was a prisoner, trapped at Madame’s by Dominic’s orders, and by the certainty I would be lynched if I ventured on the streets, where murmurs of the Seven-Ten list theft, corruption at Black Sakura, the dread Canner Device, all had been swept away by the shockwave revelation unleashed by warmonger Tully Mardi: Mycroft Canner hides among the Servicers. Dominic Seneschal now carried my tracker in his pocket like a trophy, deactivated ‘for my mandatory rest’ by order of my court-appointed sensayer Julia Doria-Pamphili. I was blinded, mute, trapped without even the lifeline of a newsfeed. But I am not cut out for objectivity. I fill in: an expression I did not see, words I heard only in paraphrase, a gesture I know was there, though no witness can prove it. Why do I do this? Because, imaginative reader, you are human. You will fill in for me, invent faces and personality as you invent your own Alexander, your own Jack the Ripper, and your own Thomas Carlyle. You have never met the people I describe, so your imaginings will be less accurate than those of someone who has toiled beside them in these rooms, and seen them sweat. Caught between two lies I give you mine, which has more truth immixed.
Ockham Saneer owns only one suit which their spouse Lesley may not doodle on, and it is used only for trips to La Trimouille. They met in the most secure room of the Humanist Presidential Mansion, the Treasure Cabinet: hexagonal, walled with a honeycomb of glass-faced cases containing carved stones, signet rings, miniature portraits, and curiosities both animal and mineral. Duke President Ganymede Jean-Louis de la Trémo?lle outdid the treasures, his mane as glaring as gold in sunlight, his eyes as biting as blue diamond. The ice-pale Duke expressed his displeasure by today’s choice of silks, a deep pearl color almost dark enough to be called silver, which is as grim on him as black on any other man. Ockham, beside him, with his warm Indian skin and black hair like the fertile ash after a forest fire, seemed a real, organic human being beside some icy idol.
“Member President,” Ockham greeted his Hive leader with a stiff but awkward nod, which wanted to be something more formal, but the customs of our peaceful era will not permit the honesty of a salute.
The Duke President gestured Ockham to the bench opposite his. “Why is Sniper not with you?”
“Cardigan is AWOL, Member President.”
In the crisis, the Duke did not even pause to smirk at Sniper’s middle name. “AWOL?”
“They disappeared from their gym this morning sometime between 11:14 and 11:40 UT. We believe it was a kidnapping.”
“What?”
Ockham would not have showed his fear. “Lesley has our Humanist Special Guard investigating, but I thought it best not to report the incident to Romanova yet. It may turn out to be one of Cardigan’s fans, unrelated to the Black Sakura affair.”
“How could you let this happen now?” The accusation came from Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi. He paced the tiny room, agitated steps making his spring-patterned Mitsubishi suit rustle, as if a fox were stalking through its pattern of night-darkened bamboo.
“My apologies, Chief Director,” Ockham answered crisply. “There were holes in my security.”
“That’s clear.” These cold words came from a fourth man, who sat tensely on a seat’s edge at the far side of the little room. “Holes named Cato Weeksbooth and Ojiro Cardigan Sniper.”