Terra Ignota
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Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Hence the little race of ‘Gag-genes,’ which does not mean, as rumor claims, genes whose story is so vile it makes you gag, but ‘Gag-order-genome,’ a court order which denies the child access to the testimony of its own blood, for its own happiness.
2022-10-22T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Does it distress you, reader, how I remind you of their sexes in each sentence? ‘Hers’ and ‘his’? Does it make you see them naked in each other’s arms, and fill even this plain scene with wanton sensuality? Linguists will tell you the ancients were less sensitive to gendered language than we are, that we react to it because it’s rare, but that in ages that heard ‘he’ and ‘she’ in every sentence they grew stale, as the glimpse of an ankle holds no sensuality when skirts grow short. I don’t believe it. I think gendered language was every bit as sensual to our predecessors as it is to us, but they admitted the place of sex in every thought and gesture, while our prudish era, hiding behind the neutered ‘they,’ pretends that we do not assume any two people who lock eyes may have fornicated in their minds if not their flesh.
2022-10-22T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Murder for profit is the crime most people think of when they see a Servicer’s uniform, a crime the convict has no reason to repeat now that law has stripped him of the right to property. Those with more imagination might envision a grand corporate theft, or a revenge killing, avenging some great evil beyond the reach of law, or a crime of passion, catching a lover in a rival’s arms and slaying both in a triumphant but passing madness. At the dawn of the Fifteenth Century, St. Sir Thomas More described a humane, though fictitious, Persian judicial system in which convicts were not chained in the plague-filled dark, but made slaves of the state, let loose to wander, without home or property, to serve at the command of any citizen who needed labor. Knowing what these convicts were, no citizen would give them food or rest except after a day’s work, and, with nothing to gain or lose, they served the community in ambitionless, lifelong peace. Tell me, when our Twenty-Second-Century forefathers created the Servicer Program, offering lifelong community service in lieu of prison for criminals judged harmless enough to walk among the free, were they progressive or retrogressive in implementing a seven-hundred-year-old system which had never actually existed?
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
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.
2022-10-22T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
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.
2022-10-22T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
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.
2022-10-22T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
In 2266, when the work week finally shortened to twenty hours, and crowds deserted those few professions which required more, the first Anonymous, Aurel Gallet, rushed to defend ‘vocation’ with a tract which is still mandatory reading for three Hive-entry programs. Why is a calling passive, he asked? Why is one called helplessly to one’s vocation, when surely it is an active thing? I find my calling, take it, seize that delight, that path before me, make it mine. I call it like a summoned magic, it does not call me. His new word ‘vocateur’ (one who calls) was born to remind us that a person with a strong vocation is not a victim driven helplessly to toil, but a lucky soul whose work is also pleasure, and to whom thirty, forty, fifty hours are welcome ones.
2022-10-22T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The office of Censor is just as paradoxical in our age as it was in ancient Rome: neither executive nor lawmaker, commander nor judge, yet more potent than any in its own way. As master of the census, charged with tracking changes in membership and wealth, the Censor judges when one of the seven Hives should gain or lose a Senator, and thereby holds the balance of the planet in his hands. Since he makes and unmakes lawmakers, we may call him a grandfather of laws, and, as the most prominent life appointment in the Alliance, he is the only officer in Romanova that the media can turn into a prince.
2022-10-23T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
When the death of Chairman Carlyle made it no longer possible to put off picking a world capital, three issues faced the committee: the design, the distribution of the real estate which would soon be the most desirable on Earth, and who would pay. Spreading the cost equally would hit the poor Hives hard, especially the Cousins and Olympians, who then sheltered most of Earth’s surviving poor, but divvying by wealth would take the lion’s share from tiny, patent-rich Utopia, which could then reasonably demand the biggest slice of the land all powers coveted.
2022-10-23T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
When those prophets men call economists predicted revolution or collapse in some weak corner of the globe where a subscriber had investments, Carlyle’s Gordian would fly in Mukta’s children and evacuate everything: factories, goods, workers, families, capital in all its forms all snatched to safety in a day, like good fruit from a rotting tree. As the tremors of the Church War grew, Gordian carried out the affluent of every nation, leaving governments and poor to slit each other’s throats. But Mukta worked as a sword back then only because those snarls were geographic. In our world all powers are global powers, and all snarls global snarls. That is why, while Thomas Carlyle could snip out the shape of a new world like topiary from the overgrowth of nations, today our Censor—with the same data at his disposal—laughs at those who put him on their Seven-Ten lists: Vivien Ancelet, the world’s accountant, maker of Senators but slave of numbers, helpless as the astronomer who watches the universe’s pool balls act out their predetermined dance.
2022-10-23T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The Blacklaw sash around this visitor’s waist proclaims his choice to renounce all protections of the Law—Hive laws and Romanova’s neutral Gray Laws—and to face the Earth with no protection but his own strength, and the restrictions others’ laws may place upon their use of force. A Mitsubishi or strict Cousin may not, by their own chosen laws, indulge in fists and brawling, but Humanist Law accommodates those who sometimes wish to settle things with fists. Lesley was considering her aim when her eye caught the line of the dueling rapier almost hidden in the pleating of the Blacklaw’s coat.
2022-10-23T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“What is a people?” the speech continues, the actor’s voice resonating through the dome. “It is a group of human beings united by a common bond, not of blood or geography, but of friendship and trust. What is a nation? It is a government formed by a people to protect that common bond with common laws, so its members may enjoy life, liberty, happiness, justice, and all those rights we love. Americans, America is no longer your nation. Your nation is the friends who live and work with you, in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, all of the Americas, and all the other corners of this Earth. Your nation is those who went to school with you, who cheered beside you at games, who grew up with you, traded intimacies with you over the internet, and still today break bread with you in your own house, on whatever continent it stands. Your nation is the organization which you chose to protect your family and property, in sickness and in health, as you traveled the globe to find your ideal home.
2022-10-23T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“Friends, I stand here today with the leaders of these organizations, to tell you that, once again, the time has come to found a new kind of nation, freer than any that has come before. We speak today for the Cousins, for the Olympians, and for Gordian, three groups which have the means to allow a human being, or a family, to live in this world without a country, without citizenship, without obligations to any power you have not chosen to join. For more than a generation we have not just been your travel agents but your banks, your lawyers, your hospitals, your schools. Now let us be your nations. I call on all Americans who do not support this war to renounce your citizenship and trust us—any one of us, you have your pick. Let us protect you and your families in this new, free world. I call on the citizens of all other countries of the world to respect our members, and accept the passports we will issue, just as you would the passports printed by a country which can boast a blotch of territory somewhere on the globe. Join us if you like, or remain loyal to those geographic nations which still merit loyalty, but either way acknowledge us, and in acknowledging us acknowledge the right of all human beings to choose a different nation if the nations of their birth betray their trust.”
2022-10-23T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“Friends, all this is not as sudden as it seems. These three are not rash radicals, or business tycoons drunk with their own power. They are taking an inevitable step. The European Union has long recognized that it is absurd to force someone with a father from one country, a mother from another, raised in a third, and working in a fourth to pledge allegiance to one arbitrary geographic nation. More than sixty years ago we instituted floating citizenship, so children of mixed parents would not be compelled to choose between several equal fatherlands. It was not the end of our countries. Almost everyone still prefers to have a homeland to love and return to, and the legal possibility of life without a homeland does not destroy the bonds of culture, language, and history which make a homeland home. What Chairman Carlyle proposes today is nothing more radical than extending that floating citizenship to the world.
2022-10-23T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“Neo-Epicureanism says that, whether there is an afterlife or not, people are healthier, more productive, and live longer if they’re happy, so the government—for us the Hive—should try to make sure people live in ways that make them happy. Living in a bash’ with a group of friends that you have fun with every day is one of the institutions the neo-Epicureans promoted to help people be happy. The original Epicureans probably would have liked the bash’, and their ideas helped it spread, but they didn’t come up with it, Regan Makoto Cullen came up with it, based on Brillism, which is another fairly recent philosophy.”
2022-10-24T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
You have seen Lifedolls before, but have you touched them? Each bone, tendon, and muscle of a human body is reproduced precisely, so a hand squeezed folds just as a friend’s hand folds, and ingenious systems even keep it warm. Lifedolls are the pinnacle of man’s long quest to craft synthetic love. A child with a Lifedoll cries less when ba’pas head out for an evening; a twentysomething with a life-sized Sniper stashed at home rebounds faster when love turns sour. You may call it sick when grown men and women hold these dolls as dear as bash’mates, or, with the fully anatomical Sniper-XX and Sniper-XY models, lovers. And you may be right to call it sick, but should a sickness be cured if makes its sufferers happier than healthy men? When the Lifedoll labs first decided to mass-produce a version of the vice director’s two-year-old, they thought no more of it than that the child was exceptionally cute, good therapy for lonely kids and childless couples, especially because his hybrid face, mixing Asia, Europe, and South America, let small changes in costume make him seem like almost any couple’s child. When it proved their best seller ten times over, they marketed the child again at age four, again at six, at eight, and it took only one fan to recognize the original on the street to open the doors to young Sniper, instant celebrity.
2022-10-26T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
I told you, reader, that Utopia does not give up on dreams. When a Utopian dies, of anything, the cause is marked and not forgotten until solved. A fall? They rebuild the site to make it safe. A criminal? They do not rest until he is rendered harmless. An illness? It is researched until cured, regardless of the time, the cost, over generations if need be. A car crash? They create their separate system, slower, less efficient, costing hours, but which has never cost a single life. Even for suicide they track the cause, and so, patiently, blade by blade, disarm Death. Death, of course, has many weapons, and, if they have deprived him of a hundred million, he still has enough at hand to keep them mortal. For now.
2022-10-26T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
That very night—I will not say ‘in my honor’—Cornel MASON created the Ordo Vitae Dialogorum, “the Order of the Life of Debate.” Membership is open to all Masons, and marked by one white sleeve, a permanent invitation to engage the wearer in debate over the Masonic life, not for a year, but lifelong. I wear it proudly. That night too, the title of Familiaris was promised to me upon my passing the Adulthood Competency Exam, since, by Alliance Law, a minor may not subject themself to Caesar’s Force.
2022-10-26T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
I see Martin has introduced the word ‘murder’ into our tale. Technology has eliminated that middle breed of criminal who thinks that, if they wash their hands and dump the body far from home, they can get away with it. Criminals now are either self-labeled geniuses who, through elaborate preparation, think they can outwit the trackers, DNA, and all the practice and experience of law, or else they are plain men with no delusions of escaping punishment. Of every five killers now, three turn themselves in right away, having acted in the grip of rage, or else in the calm confidence that the deed was worth the price. One out of five escapes by suicide. Only the last of the five attempts to hide, having schemed and toiled for months to form the perfect plan. He fails. There are professionals, of course, for the mob will always need its violence, but they too know that someday they must either flee the Alliance entirely, living out their lives in trackless hiding, or else be caught. Gone are the days when the police would gather evidence, conduct their interviews over a few days, and, in the end, discover the boyfriend, ex-wife, or business rival who had seen the opportunity and seized it. I asked Commissioner General Papadelias once which he preferred, the would-be mastermind who challenges the detective to a game of wits, or the honest criminal who waits red-handed at the scene. The former, he answered, was more stimulating, but usually only the latter commanded his respect. I understand it. The Prince of Murderers, said Papadelias, the Moriarty he waited for, would do both, accepting fully and philosophically his inevitable end, yet still fighting with all his strength and cunning to extend his freedom to the last breath. He needed, I think, to meet a soldier.
2022-10-26T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once? We all know the powers of Utopia. We see their living wonders fill the streets, cheer as they conquer syndromes, hire them to make the impossible possible for us job after job. We even trust them with this hunt for the dread Gyges Device. Yet we still think and plan for the world. One world. We never doubt that every individual shipment they send to Mars must be successful, that their science is sound, their effort proceeding, but somehow we do not believe the distant end will ever come. These Nine Directors don’t believe Utopians will really live on Mars in 2660. Utopians do.
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
We date the Hive to 2137, the war’s height, six years after Carlyle’s Great Renunciation shattered the nation-states. Those who did not share the uniting ethic of any early Hive—did not love Europe, Asia, sport, stage, kindness, Nature, profit, Brill—found themselves abandoned, their states dissolving, their Churches (first resort when states failed) swept up in the zealot flames. As war matured into chaos and plague, one false hope lay in the Masonic lodges peppering the towns, which fiction claimed were more than what they seemed. We say that Antoninus MASON just harnessed the myth, organized those who came to the lodges into a global force before people realized there was not one already there. “Power I am,” this master storyteller claimed, “the Secret Emperor, more ancient than the Pyramids, more far-reaching than Alexander, more long-lasting than Rome. While Ramses and Ozymandias built monuments that fade, I hid in shadow, and reveal myself only now that the fools I left to sub-govern in my place have failed so much. Come back to me, my people. My Empire has endured ten thousand years, and will not be shaken by this petty war.” That fiction birthed this Hive which swallowed up the remnants, as a gleaner picks fallen grain after the harvest. Much grain remained, more than enough to make the myth of Empire real. But something inside us can’t believe it’s all invention. It feels so ancient: the dread Imperial Guard, the awesome shadow of the Sanctum Sanctorum tower, the Imperial Palace with its clustered ziggurats, the laws unrolled on crackling papyrus, the cold, iron-gray throne. The language of myth slips from our tongues: ancient custom, ancient law, Imperium, millennium, Empire, Caesar. Perhaps it actually is true and false at once. Great institutions—Hive, strat, nation, kingdom, guild—all are built of consensus, willed into reality by we who love, obey, protect, and fear. If Will alone can make these powers real enough to reshape the globe and burn the heavens, perhaps Will can also make them have been real ten thousand years ago.
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
That she did, reader, and does still when she visits Blacklaw country on her days off, the wildernesses urban and natural which we cede to the bold minority who, on passing the Adulthood Competency Exam, would rather invite their fellows to prey on them like lions than accept a law that deprives them of any freedom, even murder. The Universal Laws still make it criminal for them to prey on children, take trackers away, or jeopardize the world with toxic chemicals, or fire, or religion, but they feel in their hearts that humans are a predator, and predators need the right to tear out each other’s throats. You must not think they rape and murder daily. Most rarely more than duel, and it is a strong deterrent knowing you have no armor in this wide world but the goodwill of peers who could kill you where you stand. It is liberty’s pride that puts the swagger in Chagatai’s steps, not bloodthirst, and had our Master not rescued her from vendetta’s execution, Chagatai would have accepted her end with grace—combat, but grace.
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“I said once you think about it a long time. The Utopians’ idea with modo mundo is that, if you killed a Utopian, you destroyed their world, their nowhere, their ideas, their fiction, since they all invent stuff even if they don’t all publish. You destroyed a potential other world, so you get banished to this one and don’t get to go to any other worlds anymore. I think what T.M. was trying to communicate was that destroying a manuscript is effectively the same thing, destroying somebody’s creation, the remnant of the world they created, even if they’ve been dead a thousand years.” She took a saucepan from the stove and drizzled a trail of honey-scented glaze over the strudel before pouring the rest across the roast. “I’d never thought so seriously about the manuscripts before, but I sure take good care of them now.”
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
All Hives are proud of their unique governments: Europe’s nation-strat Parliament, the Masons’ nonhereditary absolute monarchy, the Mitsubishi shareholder democracy, the Humanist flexible-constitution democratic aretocracy, the Gordian Brain’bash and corporate Board appointed by Brill’s Institute. And if those Hives have an irritant, it is that the Cousins can remain the perennially second-largest, second-strongest Hive with a system the others wish they could deride: suggestion box. The all-embracing Cousins never did update their structure, not since the earliest days of Mukta’s children, when they were just a volunteer group for women to help each other while traveling abroad. They had a volunteer committee with a Chair, some rules of conduct, a family-friendly atmosphere, and a suggestion box, no more. No one thought they could stick to it, not as their membership expanded: women, minors, sexual minorities, then kids of Members, friends of Members, friends of friends of friends, finally anyone willing to act like a distant “cousin” and offer smiling airport pickup and a sofa for the night to a stranger in return for knowing that the stranger would reciprocate. With just shy of two billion members, the modern Hive has fitted its “suggestion box” with an analytic Feedback Bureau streamlined to process a hundred million friendly notes a week, group the overlap, and send them on, every one of them, to the right volunteer to consider the suggestion: “This town needs a new school,” “This drug needs a sixty-million-dollar research grant,” “This intersection would be a great place for a mural.” They get it done, this vast, cooperative ‘family.’ It works. At least if outsiders have not infiltrated, and sunk their fangs into its living heart.
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Do you still believe in the Death of Majority, reader? The First Anonymous’s first essay, lauding what they saw as the promise of eternal peace. After the Church War there was no majority race, no majority religion, no majority language, no majority nationality. Mukta birthed a world so intermixed that no one anymore grew up among people mostly like themselves: the majority of Japanese people did not live in Japan, the majority of Greeks did not live in Greece, so too for every country in the world. Majority died with Church and Nation, the Anonymous proclaimed, and with it war and genocide died too, for they require a majority united, patriots, an ‘us’ and ‘them’ in which ‘us’ is normal, larger, more powerful, capable of overwhelming and defeating ‘them.’ I could ask any contemporary here, ‘Are you a majority?’ and I know what he or she would answer: Of course not, Mycroft. I have a Hive, a race, a second language, a vocation and an avocation, hobbies of my own; add up my many strats and you will soon reduce me to a minority of one, and hence my happiness. I am unique, and proud of my uniqueness, and prouder still that, by being no majority, I ensure eternal peace. You lie, reader. There is one majority still entrenched in our commingled world, a great ‘us’ against a smaller ‘them.’ You will see it in time. I shall give only one hint—the deadliest majority is not something most of my contemporaries are, reader, it is something they are not.
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
And proof too, reader, that our age has at least one enlightened aspect, for the Celebrity Youth Act, fierce as it is, could not safeguard these children of the spotlight without the help of a protective public, which has learned (from one too many tragedies) to grant its favorite wee ones what privacies they ask for, and will punish with boycotts—far fiercer than Law’s teeth—any journalist or paper which would violate the public prince(sse)s that every bash’ on Earth loves as our own.
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“The First Law bans religious discourse, or proselytizing more specifically, under the rubric of ‘action likely to cause extensive or uncontrolled loss of human life or suffering of human beings.’ I don’t know what comments you heard, but I am confident you will agree they were not proselytory, and they were done in the service of protecting the global transit system, which is a much more immediate threat of uncontrolled loss of life and suffering.”
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Too Like the Lightning: Book One of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Two hundred years ago, when the Eighth Law vote loomed, it was not the Humanists who battled it. Mycroft MASON fought it, certainly, but even more than him it was Utopia, those strangers behind their vizors who see the true Sun less often than Eureka. Utopia knew, when the case went to trial, that if this Eighth Law passed, if it was judged legal for Lindsay Graff to kidnap children from a set-set training bash’, that it would be the floodgate. Next, all as one, the mighty, angry Earth would descend upon Utopia, as Catholics used to descend on Protestants and vice versa to ‘save’ the others’ children. Terra the Moon Baby would be the excuse. The Utopians could protest all they liked that they did not anticipate the astronaut’s pregnancy, that early complications made the trip back to Earth too dangerous for mother and fetus, but in most minds Terra is still thought of as intentional, a lab rat, happy, indispensable, who taught us more about space adaptation than a thousand simulations, but still a lab rat, short-lived and crippled from gestating on the light and airless Moon. If Utopia was willing to do that to one child, Earth accused, what might they be doing to others beneath those vizors? How long until cyborg U-beasts, made from iguanas and dogs and horses, had human pieces too? Fear forced Utopia to act. They chose a gentle protest. When the Graff trial began they called in sick, “indefinite stasis,” as they put it, not one, not hundreds, but all four hundred million at once. The laboratories, factories, think tanks, presses closed. For three weeks the world tasted life without four hundred million vocateurs. Hate rose, and fear, all the arrows of complacent Earth against Utopia, and it was that threat which steeled Mycroft MASON to step onto the Senate floor and stop the Nurturists’ Eighth Law at any price.
2022-10-31T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
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.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
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.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
If the European Union enjoyed an easier birth than the other Hives, its apparatus a century old before the Great Renunciation, it pays the price whenever its nation-strats rehash their ancient grudges: you seized my borderlands, you executed my hero, you conquered me a thousand years ago and I remember. All Europeans are equally guilty, English, Flemish, Kurdish, myself no less, for I catch myself from time to time rejecting good sense just because it came from a Turk’s lips. The strat delegates who make up Europe’s Parliament, and the strat leaders—Presidents and Premiers, French, Belgian, Laotian, Canadian—who sit on her Executive Council, they all answer, not just to Now, but to the pride of Then, and every problem must consider the silent wishes of countless ancestors.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
No monarchy has ever had so suspenseful a succession. An impotent king may wait decades for an heir, but at least he can try aphrodisiacs, affairs, placebos. The Anonymous can only wait and hope for the day some bright young thing will reason him out and come to claim the apprenticeship, as he came to his predecessor, and she to hers, back through six generations.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The constellations of Utopians have, to my knowledge, no rank nor hierarchy, but if, like stars, they may be said to have magnitudes of brightness, then surely Mushi Mojave is one of those Crowns of Heaven that pierce even city smog. “Except ants” is Mushi’s motto. Humanity is forever boasting of its ‘unique’ achievements: “Humans are the only creatures who build cities, use agriculture, domesticate animals, have nations and alliances, practice slavery, make war, make peace; these wonders make us stand alone above all other creatures, in glory and in crime.” But then Mushi corrects, “Except ants.” How proud the day when Mushi rushed in to tell the young Apollo and the other Mojave ba’kids that even man’s greatest achievement, Space itself, was no longer a monopoly. The terraformers had found ants, stowaways in one of the nutrient shipments, which had escaped and built a colony in the new Mars soil, spiral tunnels woven like DNA around a leaking oxygen pipe. The first city on Mars was not built by humans, but under them.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Those who lived through it cannot forget the days after Apollo’s death, when across the globe the coats which should be windows to so many other worlds turned blank. When a Utopian dies before his time, the Hive mourns together, all the coats in the world turning to static for as many seconds as their kinsman lost years—thirty seconds for a centenarian, ninety for someone full of midlife’s promise, a full two minutes for a child. Apollo’s murder was different. For him their mourning would not stop. They left the static for hours, days, four hundred million walking holes in space, their vow that they would catch the killer and end this nightmare where all other Hives had failed. It was terrifying, wounds of static around every corner, everywhere and organized, reawakening a fear Earth had not tasted since the Set-Set Riots.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“A war that came after a long period of relative peace and smaller conflicts, combined with accelerating advancement. Earth had never seen anything like that before. Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the first four centuries of the Exponential Age, they had all seen frequent war, large-scale war compared to the population, but Nineteenth-Century Europe confined the conflicts to its colonies and border zones, while at home they engineered their long and rosy peace. Technology kept changing, made new, worse ways to kill, but military experts had no opportunity to realize how the new tools would change the face of war when the big powers finally fought each other directly. When the Twentieth Century saw total war again, soldiers didn’t have the dignity of dying at the enemy’s hands; they rotted in trenches, froze in winters, wandered in jungles, blew themselves up on kamikazi missions, drove themselves mad attempting genocides, as deluded commanders kept urging them onward to their noble deaths. The Church War may have killed more people, but at least then it was the zealot enemy that killed you, not your own side and stupid ignorance. The Mardis thought that three things make wars more or less terrible: the length of the peace before them, the amount of technological change, and how little the commanders know about war’s up-to-date realities. We’ve had three hundred years of peace now, Caesar. Can you imagine what the next war would be like? With the trackers? With the transit system? With every spot on Earth a two-hour hop from every other? With the Hives all scattered equally across the Earth? No homelands, no borders, and without a single tactician who’s ever taken the field in any kind of war? It will be Hell on Earth. Even the wonders Utopia has made will turn to war.”
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“It’s our job. The Sensayers’ Conclave cares for the well-being of the world. You’re one of the most vital bash’es to protect. Imagine if Cato flipped out one day and decided to end it by making all the cars crash at once! The world can’t take a disaster like that. The world needs your bash’ to have a sensayer you can talk to!”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The watching Fellows knew it too, students and instructors, researchers and researchees who leaked like fugitives from the bright pastoral ant farm of the Adolf Riktor Brill Institute of Psychotaxonomic Science. The Institute complex covered a series of artificial slopes above the festive city center, its dorms and classrooms, tiled in blue and white porcelain, nested among precisely measured hills and banks of flowers, still waiting for April to awaken them. Have you visited it, reader? The Cognitivist’s city? I remember well when Mercer Mardi first brought me, eight years old and still on crutches from the accident, to limp my way through these too-calculated gardens: paths precisely wide enough to fight off claustrophobia, banks of carefully chaotic flowers, so test subjects can say what shapes they see in the living Rorschach. As Headmaster Faust’s Heir Presumptive, Mercer Mardi had enjoyed the finest office with the finest view: three-quarters mathematical perfection, while in the corner of the window one could just see the Old City below, historic Ingolstadt, lurking like an archenemy with its one-horse-wide organic streets, its fort and cathedral towers alive with pigeons. Matter and antimatter must not meet, so, to separate the Institute from the Old Town, Brill conceived this Spectacle Strip between, where Faust and Sniper stand. Here the great sculptors and architects of each generation are invited to build ‘abstract self-portraits,’ anything they can dream, a rainbow tree, a singing obelisk, a warren of mirrored tunnels, a sausage stand in the shape of a chambered nautilus, anything so long as it is a reflection of themselves. Old Town, Spectacle Strip, and Institute; if only the most successful revolutionaries cease to fear their teachers, how better could Brill boast his conquest of Master Freud than to let his capital flaunt its Id, Ego, and Superego so conspicuously?
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“The CFB is the heart of the Cousins. All the other major Hives are run by political types, power brokers, from Mitsubishi directors to President Ganymede. They’re vokers, too. They like power, it’s their play as well as their work, and what they do in office is at least partly dictated by what will make the people keep them there. But the Cousins don’t have elections, don’t compete, they just get suggestions filtered by the CFB, and they put into office whatever generous soul is willing to take on something so onerous. That’s what makes the Cousins a family, instead of a corporation or an empire. If people start doubting the CFB, they’re doubting what makes the Cousins cousins.”
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Sniper could not help but follow Faust’s glance across to the observers. These now included several elite Fellows, their heads ostentatiously shaved to display the blotches of pressure spots, proof of their participation in the Institute’s eternal mind-machine interface experiments, which crawl toward digital immortality as slowly as Utopia toward worlds past Mars. Even to hold the gaze of such a specimen is a compliment.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The Clothing as Communication Movement began in the 2170s, that same stretch of postwar regeneration when Chairman Carlyle proclaimed the Death of Majority, when Utopia launched the first terraforming ships to Mars, and yes, when Cartesian set-sets took Earth’s bloody helm. As we left the Exponential Age behind us, the Clothes-as-Com leaders called for our new modern age to be an ‘honest’ one, where our clothing would proclaim Hive, work, hobbies, allegiance, a glance proclaiming what makes each stranger special. We tend to assume the Brillist sweaters sprang up in that same decade, along with Mason suits and season-changing Mitsubishi cloth, but it was actually earlier, 2162, when a freshly converted Thomas Carlyle was channeling half of Gordian’s budget to the Institute, that Fellows began to home-knit sweaters which spelled out their numbers, the first digit coded by the texture of the knit, the second by the waistline, the third by cuffs, etc. I myself have found the code impossible to master, too unintuitive, like Brillism itself, but I have picked up four things: shorter sleeves go with better skills at math, the patterns on the fabrics get less complicated as a kid grows up, quiet types wear turtlenecks, and a hood on any Brillist makes me feel fear.
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“I don’t mean the next Headmaster, I mean the Brain-bash’. You’re supposed to pick the most innovative and original bash’ you can find, with the rarest number combinations, and put them in charge of picking new political and intellectual directions for Gordian. ‘The guiding light must be one that has never burned before, the spirit of the age personified in its rarest newborn,’ isn’t that what Chairman Carlyle wrote in their memoirs?”
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“The last Brain-bash’ was assigned almost seventy years ago, and the position’s not hereditary. You must have your eyes on a replacement. Is it J.E.D.D. Mason’s bash’?”
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“We say war ended with the Exponential Age, that humanity matured after the Church War, developed peaceful means to settle conflicts: sports, debates, elections; that we’ve shed nations, armies, all the apparatus of warfare, but the French peasants didn’t have those either! They just had torches, and pitchforks, and very hungry children. It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark. You think there aren’t plenty of sparks today? What if this Seven-Ten list theft turns out to be a plot by one Hive to sabotage another? What if this mystery at the CFB turns out to be Mitsubishi set-sets taking revenge on the Cousins for sabotaging set-set training bash’es? Remember the Set-Set Riots? Riots turn to war in a heartbeat when the situation is ripe, and then what? Don’t think it would stop with fists and bricks and torches. What city in this world doesn’t have a factory that could switch production from stoves to guns in an instant? What kid can’t cobble together a rocket in chemistry class?”
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“I’m not a Brillist, and I can’t speak for anybody else’s psyche, but I love my Hive. I love my bash’. I love scanning the news each morning to see what great deeds my fellow Humanists have added to the sum total of human excellence. If something threatened to destroy that, I’d fight to stop it, kill to stop it, I know I could. And I can’t be the only one who feels this way.” The master crowd-pleaser slid slowly toward the podium. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from helping the President these past years, it’s that the balance between the Hives is a lot more fragile than people imagine. They say the geographic nations were the cause of past wars: borders, nationalism, that Hives are better. But I think Hives could be worse. Our fellow Members are our comrades, not by chance, but because we think alike. We choose them. If in the past people would kill or die for the field they happened to be born in, then I think most of us would fight ten times more fiercely for the Hive we chose. That doesn’t mean I hate the other Hives; of course I don’t.” Sniper spread its arms, its androgynous torso offering the world a broad embrace. “I love the other Hives too, all of them. They’re part of this. There have to be multiple Hives to make the choice meaningful. But if another Hive threatened my own, I’m sure I’d fight back, I’d fight anyone: a Mitsubishi, a Hiveless, a traitor Humanist, even my own President if they somehow threatened what makes us us.” Sniper’s clear, almost-black eyes disarmed even Tully’s guards, who stood frozen like caryatids as the celebrity, and hundreds of millions of viewers with it, stepped up onto the steps beside Tully’s soapbox. “Would I fight for my Hive?” Sniper continued. “Yes. And I’d kill for it, I know that. I think I’d die for it too, though there’s no way to know if I’d really be brave enough until the day comes.”
2022-11-09T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“The system is three hundred years old, Felix. Its creators are long dead.” The old Headmaster shook his head. “Not their ideas. The Humanists created this. No one else sees history as composed of individuals. On their own the Mitsubishi would target corporations, Masons governments, Europe nation-strats, me bash’es, the Anonymous ideas. Only the Humanists still think the world is made of individuals.”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“Apollo came to Luther and Aeneas, before the Mardi bash’ made up their minds, back when they were first convinced that the length of time that passes between wars was what determines how devastating the next one will be. The others were undecided, not sure whether they should try to start a war now to keep the next one from being so big it would wipe us out entirely, or whether they should believe that the peace was real, that humans could outgrow the violence as we outgrew the trees. They were uncertain, but Apollo was honest, and loved them, and told them point-blank that whatever the bash’ decided, Apollo would make their own war.”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Have you wondered, reader, what made Apollo special? Why his classmate Aeneas Mardi introduced him so eagerly to Cornel then-not-yet-MASON? Why MASON brought him to Andō, Kosala, Spain, to the Anonymous? Rewrote the definition of Familiaris for him? Why they all relied on him as sole ambassador from this strange Hive whose crisscrossed constellations reveal no leader? His gift was this: he could explain Utopian thought in words the rest of us could understand. The wall that makes them alien, the vizors, U-speak, their cold and separate plans, was lifted somehow with Apollo, so the light that guides the rest of them, for once, could touch us, too.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
In two hundred and fifty years the next stage of the Great Project will be complete. Do you think a greedy, selfish Earth will sit back and watch the minority they most distrust take sole possession of a whole new world? How many wars were fought over the Americas? Over Africa? Over expansion? In ten thousand years, maybe in one thousand years, humanity will have progressed enough to no longer feel envy or greed or hate the ‘other,’ but in two hundred and fifty? Utopia is optimistic but not blind. When the terraforming is complete there will be war, all the Hives of this complacent Earth united against Utopia. The conflict will consume one or both, unless by then we have had another war to change the character of the Hives, or, at the very least, to leave some veterans to teach us again how to wage wars, and how to survive them.”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
We no longer even vaccinate against the plagues which claimed the billions of the last war, but samples survive. Imagine if they were loosed on Mars, the new world uninhabitable for a century. Or imagine if they were let loose on Earth by those on Mars, fearing their own destruction. What if some new technology we’ve never tapped for war, Mitsubishi cloth or smelltracks, turns out to be able to wipe out a planet in a day?
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“Remember”—Caesar limped back a pace, gazing up at the statue’s mirrored vizor—“I was not yet Emperor, did not yet understand the real relationship between Utopia, the other Hives, and mine. You know how passionate Apollo was. All it took was some new discovery about fish or enzymes to move them to tears, but I’d never seen them hysterical like this. Eventually they made me understand. Humanity has everything now, everything: power, prosperity, stability, longevity, leisure, charity, peace. Vocateurs earn society’s respect doing the work they love, and those who aren’t vokers put in their twenty hours and spend the greater part of life at play. Happiness has taken the place of wealth as our prime measure of success, and envy no longer hungers for rare riches hoarded by the great, but for smiles and happy hours which all Earth has in infinite supply. This is what past civilizations wished for, worked for, what emperors and presidents and prime ministers and kings are supposed to try to give their people. We have. We’re done.”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
When our modern age began after the Chuch War, as the Hives rose and happiness with them, humanity slowed down. We started taking baby steps, not exponential ones, a few more cured diseases, new Olympic records, some new toys, but calling that enough. Too much change is dangerous. A happy world wanted progress to stop. Apollo understood in a way I couldn’t what it meant to be the Imperator Destinatus: I was going to take on the duty to maintain history’s greatest empire and protect my three billion citizens by not letting anything change. That conversation was the first time in my life I regretted being a Mason. The Humanists, Europe, the Mitsubishi, the Cousins, it’s the same for them. They vie with each other, get better at what they’re already best at, but change nothing. Even Gordian’s experiments rarely leave their Institute.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“Apollo asked me once if I would destroy a better world to save this one. That wasn’t the real question, the real question was if I would destroy this world to save a better one. Apollo didn’t just think the war was necessary to keep the next one from wiping us all out. They thought we had to make the world less perfect or no one would be willing to face the hardships of moving on. There are few people left anywhere who are willing to die for something, for their children maybe, but not for a cause, and certainly not for a patch of raw and barren Mars ground. Apollo thought that we need suffering to create people capable of enduring suffering. World Peace does not breed heroes.” My lips trembled. “The day you’re talking about, August twenty-second, 2426, the day Mushi was asked to go to Mars, that was the same day Apollo told the Mardis they had decided to make the war come, even if the others wouldn’t help.”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Mycroft Canner was—is—a monster, the same monster that’s forming mobs now in La Trimouille, and Brussels, and Tōgenkyō, that sacks, that pillages, that turned the world into Hell in 1914, and dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima, and Rome, and Washington, and laughed as it raped Ibis Mardi’s corpse, and bombed New York after it was evacuated, just to watch the famous skyline burn.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
No one would stop Him, not the Senate, not the Rostra Keepers, not while His armband, dense with insignia, bore the sigil of a Graylaw Hiveless Tribune, Tribunus Plebis, that inviolate office trusted with the mandate to veto any Senate motion which threatened the freedom of the Hiveless and, through them, everyman.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“The Hives are separate because they stand for separate things. I’m a Humanist. I’m not taking orders from any Mason, and I don’t think a Mason should take orders from a Humanist. Different Hives think differently, and need to be led by people who think differently. It doesn’t matter how wonderful or competent Jehovah Mason was, no one can think seven ways at once. The Hive system made monarchy popular again by eliminating the risk of tyranny, since if a bad Emperor came along, all the Masons would just switch Hives, but free choice requires options to choose from. Combining all Hives under a single ruler would leave this world no better than back when geographic nations gave people no choice.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The guards, ba’sibs of MASON or past MASONs, had already unsealed the vault chamber, a round sanctum, no more than ten paces across, which formed the hollow heart of the gilded pyramid. In this heart’s heart, a waist-high block of glass-smooth black technology held in its impenetrable womb the Masonic Oath of Office, and the name of the one who will be next to read it. Not a few of Earth’s other Powers prefer sharing the Emperor’s security to paying for their own. Earth’s other great secrets slept in a ring of vaults nested in the round wall like a columbarium: the list of Gag-genes rested here, the Registry of Sensayers’ Beliefs, logs of Censors’ Office predictions, the wills and marriage contracts of Earth’s remaining monarchs, and in Vault Four the true names of the Seventh Anonymous and their six predecessors.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“The CFB sorts the suggestion letters by which the Cousins are run. Since millions of letters arrive each week, sorting is done by a computer. Every letter is dealt with eventually, even unique ones, but the volume of letters in each folder after sorting is used as an indicator of how important the issue is, so, if the number of letters on a subject abruptly increases or decreases, that is when it receives the most immediate attention from the administration.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“In brief, this conspiracy’s effect has been to conceal and protect the Cousins from the fact that the feedback system does not work as a form of government. For many things it works well—local issues, disaster response, social protections, health and human services—but it does not work for political decisions, the quick but considered responses to actions by other Hives, or to global crises, that all governments need to be able to make. The feedback system cannot do it, and has only ever seemed to do it thanks to corrupt intervention.”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“Being a Cousin is all about gender. Specifically about the feminine. I don’t mean anything biological, I mean the old cultural construction. All the eclectic things we associate with Cousins—nurturing, helping, healing, child rearing, tenderness, charity, welcoming the lonely, comforting the sick, tempering the violent—they’re all things that, in olden days, were associated with the feminine. That’s what all the Cousinly activities have in common, but because we’re scared to say the words no one knows how to articulate it anymore. None of you can articulate what the Cousins are about, can you? Not without gender.” She turned to the benches, inviting answers, but remember, reader, how hard it is at the best of times to interrupt a nun. “The old concepts of masculine and feminine were huge,” she continued, “complicated, centuries in the making, and deeply rooted in people, consciously and unconsciously. They facilitated bigotry and oppression, yes, but they had a lot of other social functions too. People who identified as feminine were caretakers, peacemakers, hostesses, consciences to balance the aggressive masculine. In the last centuries of the Exponential Age gender began to be liberated from biology, but that process wasn’t nearly finished when the Church War came. The worst cults in the war were also associated with gender oppression, so after the war the nascent Hives tried to purge all gender differences so abruptly that there was no time to come up with substitutes for all the other social functions gender used to have. Imagine if an ancient surgeon, on seeing penicillin work for the first time, had renounced his scalpel, calling on all fellow surgeons to vow never again to cut into a patient when pills could cure without wounds, totally ignoring the fact that there were countless illnesses for which surgery, perfected over centuries, was still a more effective treatment than nascent pharmacy. That’s what happened when we suddenly silenced gender. The broad, vague, cultural concepts of masculine and feminine had served a lot of social functions beyond oppression. Back when half the race identified as feminine it meant that half the race was devoted in some way to nurturing, peace, and charity, and we never developed a substitute for that. Since masculine was the empowered gender, the rushed transition encouraged everyone to act masculine, and all at once humanity went from a race of half peacemakers to a race where those with instincts toward the feminine felt ashamed of the label, or ended up sheltering in its only acceptable modern form.”
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
Seven Surrenders: Book 2 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The Brillist definition of a bash’mate adds to the legal one, not just that you live together, but that you speak the same language, ideally the same group of languages, though mixed-tongue bash’es birth their own pidgin, each member injecting favorite foreign phrases into English. Bash’ by this definition is not just a group of people, but that special group of people with whom one can communicate completely.
2022-12-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The geographic nations had 3,934 years from Hammurabi to the Great Renunciation to map out the kingdoms of their law, while our Hive laws were breech-born in the hasty wilderness of war. The European Union had only to revise its constitution for the umpteenth time, and tradition claims that the Masons have not changed a letter of their law since law began, but the rest of the Hives have patchwork law codes, stitched in haste from those of corporations, clubs, families, custom, fiction, and, yes, relics of the geographic nations, too.
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The newborn Hives soon learned to handle crimes that tangled two of them, but what can our young law do when two Hives’ Members break a third’s law in a fourth’s house? Or when a beast like me tangles all seven and the Hiveless in one bloody spree? If Gordian law demands that all records must stand open to science, can the Cousins force them to conceal the background of a Gag-gene? If the Mitsubishi consider self-defense justifiable homicide, can the Utopian equation of homicide with libricide force the Mitsubishi to forgive lethal force if it is used to save, not a life, but a manuscript? For ordinary crimes, the criminal’s Hive pays reparation to the victim’s, then each Hive disciplines or compensates its Member as its own laws prescribe. When Hive preferences are incompatible, exchange of favors settles many tangles: I will fine my Members for discussing your Imperator Destinatus if you enforce my modo mundo on your Members when they kill Utopians. But as commixing genes forever find new ways to make the species stranger, so commixing Members ever conceive new ways to stray beyond the edges of the law. Hence the honest and necessary plea: terra ignota. I did the deed, but I do not myself know whether it was a crime. Arm thyself well for this trial, young polylaw; here at the law’s wild borders there be dragons.
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“It’s the political changes that worry me. Hives and strats are not nations, and that’s important. People are free to change and choose Hives, that’s the heart of all this, but a war will change that. In war you can’t change sides so easily. If this turns into a war as wars used to be, it’ll turn us into everything that was worst about the geographic nations. Europe is the most dangerous. The Masons are just mystique, but Europe was made of geographic nations once, and still is, sort of, the nation-strats. We’ve already seen riots involving nation-strat groups: Spaniards, Croats, Greeks. The rest of the world may not know how to make soldiers, but nation-strats still have their old uniforms, their flags, their anthems, leaders, even kings. If we let that set the tone for the war, it will drag it all back to the days of borders, and rip the Hives apart. The majority of most nation-strats are European Members, but nation-strats have members in every Hive, even Utopia and Gordian, and this could rip those pieces out by force. If there has to be war, we can’t let it be that kind of war.”
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
“If this resurrects the old nation-states, and destroys people’s freedom to choose their laws and governments, it will undo this world. You see that, right? Imagine how quickly the Masons would degenerate into tyranny if the Emperor didn’t have to worry about tyrannical action making Members leave. The Masons themselves are a political miracle. They’ve designed an absolute dictatorship where the ruler is still subject to the will of the people; Aristotle couldn’t wish for a more mixed government. This war puts all that at risk, and I fear Europe more than anything may turn it into the old kind of war. Worse, Europe may use you to turn it into the old kind of war, as it may use me. A king may be a ruler of men, but kings can also be dragged along by those they rule. Even us.”
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
All Hives are Frankenstein chimeras, stitched from mergered peoples: the Humanists were born from the Olympians and One Big Party, the Cousins absorbed Rainbow Bridge and Schools Without Borders, Europe swallowed Volemonde and IBN; so many names from the heady decades after the Great Renunciation, when dozens of newborn Hivelets vied for slices of mankind. The fittest survived, but with the conquered within them, as conquered bacteria became the mitochondria which feed the cells that crawl through volvox, trilobite, and coelacanth toward Mars. One suture is still fresh. To me it is history, but to Papadelias, Jin Im-Jin, Joyce and Felix Faust, sixty-four years ago is very living memory. Greenpeace, lean of members but fat with forests, farms, and mountains. In Greenpeace had gathered those who loved the land, the farmers, shepherds, seaherds, naturalists, Earth Mother’s self-appointed guards. Here too, as the geographic nations died, accumulated their parks, wilderness, sanctuaries, refuges, and reserves, adopted by guardians determined to ensure that the Church War’s carnage left the untouched untouched. India quickly became the Hive’s heart, that exquisite subcontinent whose many peoples have always been so prudently reluctant to subject the smallest parcel of their paradise to outsiders’ exploitation. Soon, in addition to owning most of India, Greenpeace guarded a quarter of the Earth, pristine, primordial lands, in business terms untappable. Untappable but real. How the Mitsubishi hungered for it, the land-crazed Mitsubishi who lust after the sweet curves of hills or the dusky laps of mountains just as much they do after rent-rich high-rises and commodity-plump factories.
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
Hobbestown is, after all, the safest place in the world. Are you surprised? Two Blacklaws might duel to the death by daylight in her streets, but one who would break a law in Hobbestown, or harm a visitor guarded by some foreign law, reaps punishment unmatched in any court. A Blacklaw who did so would face real and lethal tortures from his fierce Lawfellows, vengeance for angering the Leviathans, while a Hive Member who dared break the peace in Hobbestown would face, first the repercussions of his native law, and then the eternal hatred of posterity, who would never forget the criminal who turned all culture to hypocrisy by proving civilized man more barbaric than barbarians.
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
I have shown you lynch mobs, reader, or their bloody wakes at least. How many fewer—set-set and Servicer alike—might have died in Odessa if the Hives had shared the Blacklaw custom that one may not lynch anyone without first asking the best-informed person in town whether we’re being idiots?
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The terms of office allow, in fact command, each Emperor to take the Oath, but then to add or change three words of the text he himself received, though without violating the spirit of what stood before. Thus each MASON refines and guides, in those three potent words, the reigns of all successors. Thus, slowly, three atoms per generation, the Oath evolves to suit the changing needs of humankind. Emperors spend most of their reigns choosing their three new words. Cornel MASON would never expose the Oath, but in those first months after his initiation into this most ancient rite, I know he talked in abstracts with his dear Apollo, and Apollo told me once that MASON said that, if Apollo heard the Oath, he would be happy.
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
The Will to Battle: Book 3 of Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The Eleventh Hive, as Servicers sometimes jokingly call ourselves, is strangely familial and fulfilling. We travel the world, forage for work, make and fix things with our own hands, and labor’s exercise makes us sleep well in dorms full of equals. We aren’t fully real in the eyes of free people, like how two large birds fighting over a feeder barely register the little ones that hop around gathering seeds they drop. I quickly came to enjoy the simplicity of it, especially how it let me alternate between the catharsis of physical labor and signing up for brain work, impressing the snot out of whoever hadn’t realized what they were getting.
2023-01-06T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
“You see it,” Carlyle confirmed. “Without the cars, nobody can go to Reservations for holidays, so everyone who practices a ceremonial faith is going to be forced to risk outing themselves to everyone around them, and to break the First Law if the ceremony involves any kind of gathering, unless we handle things very carefully.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
“But we really, really have to do it right from the beginning. We’re too late for the equinox and the start of Mahalaya, but if we do really well with this set of Jewish holidays, and with Navaratri, then practitioners of all ceremonial faiths will calm down, but if we botch them, and everyone sees us botch them, and people get outed, then all people of ceremonial faith will get more and more scared as their own big holidays approach, and it’ll be a giant powder keg added to the war, and it’ll get worse, and worse, building up to December, when we’ll hit every single winter solstice–type holiday all at once, dozens of religions threatened, including Christmas, and also, Ramadan is likely to begin December twenty-first.”
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
The great Masonic capitals were rolling out their war roads, knitting together a geographic body as some undead beast might reknit its carcass from its bones and rise again: Tripoli, Cairo, Ankara, Istanbul, Baku, Samarkand. Connecting those dots mapped out a very specific region, MASON’s hollow Empire with the Levantine Reservation and its Inner Asian allies at its heart.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
We all presume that bloody Christianity hides divided, strongest perhaps among the Humanists, Europe, and Cousins, but divided, weakened, tame. But if, as many guess, its sibling Islam hides primarily among the Masons, now is the worst, worst moment to rip off the mask. Ramadan without the cars, and Christmas at the same time, outing both at once—imagine looking out over these rows of desks and knowing! I know the toxic strains of both religions died out in the Church War, that only the peaceful strains survived, innocents who suffered as much as anyone as the extremists poisoned the fringes of their faiths, but …
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
… and all Earth knows what not-so-secret faith soon-to-be-Emperor Isabel Carlos holds, and while it’s a milder strain of Christianity, a cowpox that inoculates against its deadly cousins, it still makes this feel too familiar: Europe’s Empire, MASON’s Empire, this won’t turn into faith on faith, will it? Will it? Even the fear that it could might spark a million acts of panicked rashness nothing can undo.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Also, Huxley brought us the remains of a mini-UFO. Grendel retrieved it—Grendel’s one of Huxley’s Utopian squadmates, who watches me while Huxley puts in their daily gaming hours as mandated by Utopia’s oath to take the leisure necessary for productivity, recognizing play and rest as tools without which they will never conquer death or reach the stars. Sometimes, I curse that Mycroft never took that oath, it’s the one thing that might have made them take care of themself—though likely Mycroft would’ve overworked themself just the same and only felt more guilt-gnawed as a daily oathbreaker. Mycroft would have made the worst Utopian. And the best.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
They also tell me that, now that we Servicers have all turned soldier or Red Crystal, people are using the peacewashed like Servicers, demanding odd jobs and petty labor as the price of mercy. If so, and if it’s staying civil, not cruel, then I guess it’s good in its way, proves the Servicer concept is a social habit now, society defaulting to service instead of prisons as our reflexive sentence. Perhaps the Servicer Program will survive. But in war it’s hard for things to not turn cruel.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
That’s what we’re afraid of really, that, in our information efforts, we’re going to poison this war like the free-speech-mongers poisoned the last centuries of the Exponential Age and vomited out the Church War. Free Speech, that old tool of plutocracy, the intoxicating, rosy blossom under whose petals parasite lies can breed and multiply until they devour all the garden. None of us wants that. I hope none of us wants that, but there are still Free Speech zealots in this day and age, and they’re just the type to have communications tech, to build a radio or study Morse code, and volunteer to join our network as a link and pass on … death.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Norax again held up their one-fingered salute. “One is Earthsphere, protecting humanity, for me Sardinia and Romanova. Guarding the Forum, the Censor, Pass-It-On, the Harbinger Peacebonding Constellation, all these are Earthsphere quests.”
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Grendel and star-shrouded Kuiper held up two-fingered salutes. “Two is Moonsphere, the Utopian Hive, our Members’ lives, plus off-world habitations, satellites, space stations, the elevators, Luna City. Us.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
“The third sphere is Mars.” It was Kuiper who continued, in their coat of distant stars. “Not just the Odyssey Base but the shipments from Earth, the tugs that bring the frozen nitrogen and water from the asteroids and outer planets, the relay stations, the command staff at the Gates of Nineveh, the Earthside planning teams, the Almagest, everything we need to call Mars home in 2660.”
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
“Spheres past Mars.” I’d never ever heard such drive, such warming fire, in Huxley’s voice before. “Mars is the third step, not the last. Some things are vital to our deeper future.” Their digital glance led mine to Mycroft on the ladder at the tunnel end, who raised their hand, that open-palmed salute. Huxley returned it. “I am Huxley Mojave of our First Contact Constellation. I can authorize a Faustpact because my quest—our quest”—a smile for me—“like very few quests, is worth giving up a step toward Mars. We know how to take that step again. But Micromegas, Bridger’s creations, First Contact, these we have no way to replicate.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Mariame Dembélé, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Standard-Bearer of the Great African Reservation, speaker for the geographic world. She gazes on Caesar as the head of a hospital gazes on a colleague wooed by giddy innovators to test out a new procedure which might work, might revolutionize treatment, first signs are good, but it takes many years to understand lifelong effects, and whether the new method works or no, the old-fashioned one still saves lives daily as we wait to learn whether this particular experiment is part of that slim percentage that succeeds. The Hive Experiment—they call us that, these Reservationers, like the American Experiment, like Terra smiling for reporters who all know no headline will sell like the ones they’ll write the day she finally dies. Or do some of them root for us to live? These geographic citizens who hear of Mukta’s sparkling promise to weave all Earth into one and say: No, thanks, I worked hard for this land I call my own, and I will keep it. Do they root for the Hive system? As we may root for sports we do not play? Some must. But their system has worked five thousand years, while ours—O.S., the transit system, Black Laws, C.F.B., judiciary, liver, senate, heart; is this the hour they fail?
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Here waves the bold banner: Sovereign Action, the great rift which has UNGAR and Mason on one side, and the Alliance on the other. When was the phrase born? It is rare in rhetoric of the 2140s as the Church War dwindled toward peace enough for Caracas to host its delayed Olympics. It grew more common in the 2150s as the Hive founders formalized their restrictions on religion. But it was everywhere by the 2170s as the struggling populations outside Mukta’s network faced this new Alliance’s well-intended invitation: join and prosper. Theocracies were not the only nos, for at the core of the Alliance were these so-called Universal Laws which thrilled some hearts but smacked to others of atrocity.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Reader of histories, you know as well as wise Dembélé does that claims of Universal Laws, of Reason and Enlightenment, these have so often brought the worst out of the strongest: first the Age of Empires when European powers raced to enlighten (conquer) and to civilize (enslave) their fellow men, disseminating Nature’s so-called Laws by yoke and bullet and the callous claim that it was better to serve in Reason’s Heaven than reign on in Tradition’s sovereign Hell. But as horrors made colony a dirty word, the Age of Empires gave way only to an Age of Excuses, when superpowers learned to rules-lawyer Justice, Democracy, even Freedom and Revolution into pliable excuses to meddle wheresover on the globe they smelled profit, but when less-profitable peoples begged for aid, poisoned by the superpowers’ fumes, and lies, and cruel investments, then the powers hid like children in the pillow-fort of their so-modern and so-rational directive not to interfere.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Remembering this, as newborn Hives invited nationers, “Join us! We’ll help rebuild!” stubborn religion was not the only reason to say no. These powers of Africa had seen too much evil advanced in Reason’s name to assent that any list of Laws—Hobbes’s or Thomas Carlyle’s—can dictate for all times and places when it is and is not right to interfere. Sovereign Action, the right of every human polity to decide in its own moment, for its own reasons, with its own principles whether or not to intervene in a neighbor’s slice of our shared world, UNGAR claims this, and claims as boldly that our (and any) Universal Laws are sure hypocrisy, if not on the part of the those who draft them, inevitably on the part of the clever successors who will (mis)use them. And we have misused them, our First and Second Laws invoked so broadly—mandating sensayers, advancing Nurturism, banning the words Imperator Destinatus—we overreach and underreach as cunningly as any Cold War I-am-not-an-Empire.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
Gordian has its own infinity which will not make us brave an airless sea, or weep upon a rock alone. Ever. They bypass grim Poseidon, leave the god who rings the Earth to stand mote-keeper of his black kingdom alone, and chance not to his mercy. Their branch is warm and easy, happy, without aspera, their frontier the Institute’s own motto Profundum et Fundamentum, the boundless deep and foundation: the mind. As progress husbanded by Gordian’s genius makes Earth yet happier, as these mind-trawlers dredge up treasure after treasure from a sea sailed in an armchair in the bosom of our friends, the souls ready to sweat as oarsmen on Apollo’s ships grow few.
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota Book 4) - Ada Palmer
‘Every day you step into my life, you make it brighter, and if you left the world, something in me would starve for you forever, as when some barrier rises to shade a plant, which still has light enough to grow some but will never again taste the unbroken sun.’
2023-03-17T00:00:00Z