Ockham cocked his head. “I thought the big money was people betting on the order of the big seven.”
“That’s the bulk of the money, yes, but the three unpredictable names at the bottom, numbers eight, nine, and ten, are about to skyrocket in celebrity, so if investments can be made, interviews or contracts set up in advance, five million is nothing against the potential profit.”
“Yes, Cardie does get a rush of calls whenever their name makes a list.”
Martin frowned. “Cardie?”
“Sniper,” Ockham answered. “Ojiro Cardigan Sniper.”
I don’t know that I’d ever seen Martin snicker before, but everyone snickers the first time they learn that the legendary Sniper answers to ‘Cardigan’ at home.
“Read it, Mycroft.”
I cannot unlearn the skills of my youth. I may let them rot, as a retired boxer sets aside his gloves, but I cannot unsee the words couched in the strokes of languages I have no right to know. I feel guilt, if that consoles you, reader, when I eavesdrop unwillingly on Masons, or Humanists, or Japanese Mitsubishi chatting in their private tongues. I can at least do some penance by sharing my skills on those occasions when translation is a benefit to all.
“It is a Seven-Ten list,” I confirmed. “Just names, no notes. The top seven are the standard seven. The final three are”—I wrestled with the less familiar transliterations—“Darcy Sok, Crown Prince Leonor of Spain, and Deputy Censor Jung Su-Hyeon Ancelet-Kosala.”
“Crown Prince Leonor?” Ockham repeated. “Not the king? That’ll ruffle feathers.”
Martin was still leaning close. “This has been crumpled around something, but there’s nothing inside.”
His scan was at work, re-creating the paper fiber by fiber on our screens, but whatever beginning of a shape the crumpled paper might have traced was erased for me by the scream, three voices at once, which came through my earpiece at the same moment that it echoed up the stairs from the lower floor. “Mycroft!”
I knew those voices. I would have charged headlong across a battlefield to answer them.
Now comes my confession, reader: in the crisis with Carlyle and Bridger I forgot Martin completely, and did not think to check in with him until I was already in the car soaring my way across the broad Pacific toward Tōgenkyō. My pretend affair with Thisbe was the only thing which saved me from questions I could not have answered. Martin was still at the house, combing the room for every hair and flake of skin that might identify the intruder, but finding nothing. After apologies I asked Martin for fresh orders. I had not felt fear yet, reader, not upstairs, not when I found the suspicious stolen paper, not when Martin came. Now, though, the command he gave made two vaguenesses congeal into one threat, distant, amorphous, but unmistakable, as when, against a background of city dawn and back alley clatter, one click and one clack come together into the telltale click-clack of a ready gun, and echo won’t tell you whether the enemy’s perch is left, or right, or high, or low, only that it is near. “Go to Tōgenkyō.”
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
A Thing Long Thought Extinct
The Simile of the Three Insects was originally about knowledge, not wealth. Our age’s founding hero, Gordian Chairman Thomas Carlyle, stole the simile from Sir Francis Bacon, the founding hero of another age five hundred years before. In Bacon’s 1620 version the ant was not yet the corporation, stripping land and people to hoard wealth within its vaults, but the encyclopedist, heaping knowledge into useless piles, adding nothing new. The spider was not yet the geographic nation, snaring wealth and helpless citizens within the net of its self-spun borders, but the dogmatist spinning webs of philosophy out of the stuff of his own mind, without examining empirical reality. Bacon’s ideal, his scientist, was then the honeybee, which harvests the fruits of nature and, processing them with its inborn powers, produces something good and useful for the world. Our Thomas Carlyle, genius thief, co-opted the simile in 2130 when he named the Hive, our modern union, its members united, not by any accident of birth, but by shared culture, philosophy, and, most of all, by choice. Pundits may whine that Hives were birthed by technology rather than Carlyle, an inevitable change ever since 2073 when Mukta circled the globe in four-point-two hours, bringing the whole planet within comfortable commuting range and sounding the death knell of that old spider, the geographic nation. There is some truth to their claims, since it does not take a firebrand leader to make someone who lives in Maui, works in Myanmar, and lunches in Syracuse realize the absurdity of owing allegiance to the patch of dirt where babe first parted from placenta. But there is also a kind of truth the heart knows, and that is why our Age of Hives will not strip Thomas Carlyle of the founder’s crown. Nor do I mean him any dishonor by calling him a thief. Hive is a stolen name, born from a stolen simile, but the Three Insects which Carlyle stole from Bacon, Bacon had in turn stolen from Petrarch, Petrarch from Seneca, and Seneca perhaps from some more ancient ancient swallowed since by time. There is no more shame in reusing such a rich inheritance than in knowing other kings’ hands held this sword before you drew it from the stone.
Night overtook me on my flight from Chile’s coast to Indonesia, or rather I overtook the night, racing in two hours so far around the planet’s curve that I half caught up with tomorrow. Tōgenkyō’s lights skitter far across the night-locked ocean, boats like sparks schooling among the lines of reflected brightness which calligraph the waves for a kilometer around the island. Here seven perfect lotus blossoms rise against the sea, glowing from within with clean, warm light like happy ghosts and dusting the ground around their roots with shimmer. Only as the car curves down to land does the eye realize each petal is a skyscraper blazing with commerce’s neon fire, while the shimmer around their roots is the pulsing streetscape of a metropolis. It is a double compromise, this Mitsubishi capitaclass="underline" a compromise between the twin aesthetic loves of Eastern Asia, towers of glass and steel and tranquil nature; and a compromise among the Hive’s three dominant nation-strats, since China, Japan, and Korea all feared to let another host the capital, so the three agreed on neutral Indonesia as the Hive’s heart.
The summons gave my car clearance to touch down on the eastmost tower of the westmost blossom, where the Mitsubishi Executive Directorate enjoys the best view of city and sea. My drab Servicer uniform felt drabber in these hallways. As March became ever more a lamb, the Mitsubishi were showing their spring colors, time-sensitive dyes within the fabrics of suits, haori, cheogori, and sherwani changing, so winter’s deep hues brightened to cyans and yellows, while leaves and floral patterns bloomed through simple stripes like morning glories through their trellises. Perhaps you too have felt the itch of rebirth and festivity the Mitsubishi carry to every corner of the earth. Even in islands without seasons, or in Cielo de Pájaros, where March means summer’s end, still we all liven with anticipation as the Eastern cherries bloom. And why not? Maybe Earth’s oldest living poetic tradition, the Asian cycle of plants and seasons, cannot be truly translated, but the cunning of fashion surpasses even language. It is spring in China, Korea, and Japan, so spring everywhere.
“Not the Executive Chamber, Mycroft. This way.”
I followed a soft-footed clerk, feeling fear’s prickle on my neck as we passed the meeting rooms and the computer lab where I was sometimes put to work, entering instead a bash’apartment which sat above the chambers like the control room above a factory.
“The Servicer you summoned has arrived, Director.”