“I’m looking for Member Ockham Saneer,” Martin called through the intercom.
The watchman of the house stayed inside, so only words met the intruder. “Is the world about to end?”
“No.”
“Then go away. I have eight hundred million lives to oversee.”
“Not possible.” The Mason’s tone, if not his words, apologized. “I’m here to investigate last night’s security breach.” Martin let the computer flash his credentials. “I have a warrant.”
“I sent for our own police, not a polylaw.”
“I know this is a Humanist bash’, and I will absolutely respect your Hive sovereignty, but as a globally essential property you fall under Romanova’s jurisdiction. They assigned me.”
“You think just because your bash’ ponces around the Sanctum Sanctorum you can waltz in here and improve on my security?”
I don’t believe Martin had ever before heard his bash’mates’ positions in the Masonic Hive’s most honored Guard used as an insult. He managed not to flinch. “Are you Member Ockham Saneer?”
“I am.” Ockham pronounced with relish, as if, with all the lives in history laid out before him, he would have chosen this one.
Martin gave a suitably respectful nod. “This isn’t a simple security breach. You’ve been framed for grand theft. We have your tracker ID logged entering the crime scene in Tokyo late last night, and five million euros appeared in your bank account this morning. I know it’s absurd to suggest that anyone in your bash’ would commit a theft for profit, but I need your cooperation to find out why someone would set up something so implausible. The fact that there was also a break-in here last night can’t be coincidence.”
The door relented at last, revealing a man of dark Indian stock to match his sister Thisbe, and a physique beyond common athleticism. His shirt and pants, once plain, were now a labyrinth of doodles: black spirals, cross-hatching, and hypnotic swirls, though he wore them as indifferently as if the cloth had never tasted ink. Only his Humanist boots mattered: veins of knife-bright steel framing a surface of pale, ice-gray leather, real leather which had once guarded the taut flanks of a living deer that Ockham slew himself. Like Martin, Ockham wore no sign of hobby or of nation-strat, nothing but his Hive boots and the overpowering self-confidence of a man who guards something so vital that the law will let him kill for it. Ancient civilizations, East and West, knew the special breath of power granted by the right to kill. That’s what made sword and fasces marks of dominion, lord over peasant, male over female, magistrate over petitioner. Our centuries of peace have so perfected nonlethal force that even police serve content without the right to kill. But we are not fools. To those who protect the commonwealth entire, the guards around the Olenek Virus Lab, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and to Ockham here we grant ‘any means necessary,’ a knife, a branch, even that deadly instrument the fist, to guard a million lives. Even if they never exercise this rarest right, still somehow every glance and gesture of such guardians still breathes the ancient force of knighthood. “I am Ockham Saneer. What is it that I’m supposed to have stolen?”
Martin nodded respect. “The unpublished Black Sakura Seven-Ten list.”
Scorn deepened on Ockham’s face. “Who’d pay five million for a vacuous editorial that goes to press in two days?”
“I could give you a nice long list. But I don’t know who’d pay five million to frame you. Did you visit the Black Sakura office yesterday? Have you ever dealt with them at all?”
Ockham still blocked the doorway, stubborn as a sculpture in its niche. “If I cared about newspapers I’d pick The Olympian or El País.”
“The paper’s absence was reported at seven o’clock P.M. Tokyo time, six A.M. your time. Any chance you might have taken your tracker off in the hours shortly before that?”
“Paper?”
“Yes. The stolen list was a handwritten manuscript on paper. Black Sakura is antiquarian that way.”
Ockham’s face grew harder. “That’s what my breach was, an intruder left a piece of paper in the house, with Japanese writing on it.”
Martin swallowed. “May I see it? I do have jurisdiction.” He let the warrant flicker across Ockham’s lenses.
The Humanist drew back with a mastiff’s reluctance. “Don’t touch anything without asking.”
“Understood.” The Mason crossed the threshold with the tiptoe reverence he usually reserves for his own capitol.
There was little in the entryway apart from an ankle-high security robot, which let itself be seen to remind the visitor of its myriad hidden kin. As loyal Humanists, the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ did try their best to line the entrance hall with the traditional relics of triumphs, but since most of them do little but their work, and their celebrity member keeps his home a secret, their tiny spattering of diplomas and pictures—Thisbe’s trophies, Cato’s book cover—drowned on the walls like an unfinished mural. Is that judgment in the eyes of this young Guildbreaker? Smugness as he surveys the poor showing of the Saneer-Weeksbooths, whose name rivals his own in the triumphant annals of the bash’ system? I researched which of the two is really older, since so many bash’es form and dissolve with every generation that any famous bash’ which lasts more than three will spawn the rumor of antiquity. I found what I must call a noble tie. Regan Makoto Cullen broke with her great teacher Adolf Richter Brill on November fourth, 2191. “Break with” is easy to say, but not so easy to do, to face the man who has been your patron, teacher, foster father for twenty-five years, the man all Earth hails as the great mind of the century, who mapped the psyche in undreamt-of detail, who revolutionized education, linguistics, justice, to face him down and say, “Sir, you are wrong. So wrong that I shall turn the world against you. It’s not the numbers, not these rare psyches you’re charting that stimulate great progress. It’s groups. I’ve studied the same inventors, authors, leaders that you have, and the thing that most reliably produces many at once—the effect you’ve worked so hard to replicate—is when people abandon the nuclear family to live in a collective household, four to twenty friends, rearing children and ideas together in a haven of mutual discourse and play. We don’t need to revolutionize the kindergartens, we need to revolutionize the family.” This heresy, this bash’, which Cullen shortened from i-basho (a Japanese word, like ‘home’ but stronger), this challenge to Brill’s great system Cullen did not dare present without extensive notes. In those notes—still held as relics in Brill’s Institute—you will find the test bash’es Cullen set up in the 2170s, including both Weeksbooth and Guildbreaker.