Perhaps the Stars
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Terra Ignota is dedicated to the first human
who thought to hollow out a log to make a boat,
and his or her successors.
PERHAPS THE STARS
A CHRONICLE OF EVENTS, begun in July of the year 2454
CONTINUING THE ONE
undertaken by MYCROFT CANNER.
There is no one left to tell you not to read this.
I am on my own.
When the war ends, I’m sure whatever authorities survive will reward anyone who used this to help them, and brand traitor anyone who used it against them. So, if the war’s still going when you read this, read on at your own risk. Though there is always risk in reading history. Even if you live a thousand years after me, you’re gambling by reading, gambling your respect for your species, your ancestors, yourself. I can’t advise you. Here at the beginning, I don’t know what I will chronicle—atrocities, our finest hour, our last—just that it is my best attempt at the truth.
–ANONYMOUS.
THE SIDES SO FAR
[Dramatis Personae]
(NOTE TO SELF: This list isn’t sorting as clearly as I expected, must update later.—9A)
Confirmed Remakers (support the Prince remaking the world):
1. Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason (Minor), the Prince. Also Romanovan Tribune, Porphyrogene, Cousins’ Board Member, (was Their Humanist office canceled?), Heir [Presumptive/Apparent?] to the Throne of Spain, European Imperial Crown Prince, Gordian’s Rising Brain-bash’ Stem, Alien, Commander-In-Chief of the Remakers i.e. everyone who sided with Them when They declared war on the whole world
2. Joyce Faust D’Arouet (Blacklaw), soon to be Queen of Spain & Empress of Europe, the Prince’s mother, also raised Ganymede, Danaë, Heloïse, Dominic, etc.
3. Is that really it??
Confirmed Hiveguard (oppose the Prince remaking the world):
1. Ojiro Cardigan Sniper (Humanist), Thirteenth leader of the assassination bash’ called “O.S.”
2. Lesley Juniper Sniper Saneer (Humanist), Sniper’s ba’sib & fellow (former?) assassin
3. Aesop Quarriman (Humanist), Romanovan Senator, Olympic Champion
4. Tons of people all over the place
Probably Remakers?
1. Dominic Seneschal (Blacklaw), Acting Mitsubishi Chief Director, the Prince’s ba’sib/dog
2. “Martin” Mycroft Guildbreaker (Mason), minister to the Porphyrogene (i.e. to the Prince)
3. Heloïse (Cousin), Cousins’ Board Member, the Prince’s ba’sib & fiancée/nun
4. Gibraltar Chagatai (Blacklaw), the Prince’s housekeeper
5. Cornel MASON (Mason), Masonic Emperor, the Prince’s legal adopted father
6. Xiaoliu Guildbreaker (Mason), Masonic Familiaris Regni, Martin’s spouse
7. Achilles Mojave (Blacklaw), commander of the Myrmidons (militarized Servicers)
8. Patroclus Aimer (n/a), animated plastic toy soldier, still having tests run on the Moon
9. Felix Faust (Gordian), Headmaster of Brill’s Institute for Psychotaxonomic Science, Madame’s sibling, one of the Prince’s quasi-bash’parents
10. Carlyle Foster-Kraye de La Trémoïlle (ex-Cousin Blacklaw), Sensayers’ Conclave Adviser
11. Huxley Mojave (Utopian), Mycroft’s keeper, some kind of military rank? police?
12. Mushi Mojave (Utopian), entomologist, what official title: ambassador?
Probably Hiveguard?
1. Ockham Prospero Saneer (Humanist), Twelfth leader of O.S. assassin bash’, in Alliance custody
2. Eureka Weeksbooth (Humanist), Cartesian set-set, O.S. assassin bash’member, on the run
3. Thisbe Ottila Saneer (Humanist), smelltrack artist, O.S. bash’member, out there somewhere?
4. Sidney Koons (Humanist), Cartesian set-set, O.S. bash’member, in Alliance custody
5. Kat and Robin Typer (Humanists), O.S. assassin bash’members, probably one still in custody?
6. Tully Mardi (Graylaw), warmonger, only survivor of Mycroft’s spree, raised on the Moon
7. Ganymede Jean-Louis de la Trémoïlle (Humanist), ex-Humanist President, the Prince’s ba’sib, Danaë’s twin, in custody?
8. Vivien Ancelet (Humanist), Humanist President, ex-Censor, Seventh Anonymous, Bryar’s spouse, Su-Hyeon’s bash’parent, one of the Prince’s quasi-bash’parents
9. Julia Doria-Pamphili (European), still!! Head of the Sensayers’ Conclave, Sniper’s stalker, (wearing Hiveguard’s bull’s-eye badge these days)
Neutral or Probably Neutral
1. Bryar Kosala (Cousin), Cousin Chair, Vivien Ancelet’s spouse, Su-Hyeon’s bash’parent, one of the Prince’s quasi-bash’parents, working with Red Crystal
2. Ektor Carlyle Papadelias (European), Romanovan Police Commissioner General (required to be neutral)
3. Jin Im-Jin (Gordian), Speaker of the Romanovan Senate (required to be neutral)
4. Charlemagne Guildbreaker Senior (Mason), Romanovan Senator, Martin’s grandbash’parent (ordered by MASON to be neutral while working in Romanova)
5. Jung Su-Hyeon Ancelet Kosala (Graylaw), Vivien’s successor as the new Romanovan Censor, Vivien & Bryar’s bash’child, my vaguely-quasi-ba’sib-ish-friend (required to be neutral)
6. Me (Servicer), Vivien’s successor as Ninth Anonymous, Mycroft’s successor as chronicler, Censor’s office staffer, Su-Hyeon’s vaguely-quasi-ba’sib-ish-friend (required to be neutral)
7. Cato Weeksbooth (Utopian), mad science teacher, (ex-)O.S. assassin bash’member, free!
Not sure what side they’re on yet if any:
1. Isabel Carlos II of Spain (European), King of Spain, European Emperor-Elect, the Prince’s biological father
2. Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi (Mitsubishi), former Mitsubishi Chief Director, one of the Prince’s quasi-bash’parents, in custody?
3. Mitsubishi Board of Directors: (plus Dominic as Acting Chief Director, and leading Andō’s bloc)
a. Jyothi Bandyopadhyay, Greenpeace Director (still)
b. Lu Biaoji, Lu Yong’s replacement, Shanghai bloc
c. Ma Yimin, Wang Baobao’s replacement, junior for the Shanghai bloc
d. Chen Chengguo, aka Lao Chen, Wang Laojing’s replacement, Beijing bloc
e. Kim Gyeong-Ju, Kim Yeong-Uk’s replacement, Korean bloc
f. Hajime Yoshida, Kunie Kimura’s replacement, junior for the Japanese bloc
g. Ouyang Fan, Huang Enlai’s replacement, Dongbei bloc
h. Andromeda Ng aka Wu Anmei, Chen Zhongren’s replacement, Wenzhou bloc
4. Danaë Marie-Anne de la Trémoïlle Mitsubishi (Mitsubishi), Ganymede’s twin, the Prince’s ba’sib, Andō’s spouse
5. Mitsubishi ‘semi-set-set’ adopted bash’children:
a. Toshi Mitsubishi (Graylaw), still officially Censor’s staff?
b. Masami (Mitsubishi), reporter at Black Sakura newspaper
c. Hiroaki (Cousin), former/still? CFB staff
d. Sora (Humanist), Humanist Praetor Secretary
e. Ran (Humanist), sacked by Ganymede, still unemployed?
f. Michi (Minor, leaning European), student at Amsterdam Campus
g. Jun (Minor, likely Brillist), student at Brill’s Institute in Ingolstadt
6. Casimir Perry aka Merion Kraye (European), ex-Prime Minister of Europe, leader of anti-Madame conspiracy, vengeful mass-murdering dickhead
7. Private Croucher (n/a), animated plastic toy soldier, deserter, still with Perry-Kraye?
8. Lorelei “Cookie” Cook (Cousin), Romanovan Minister of Education, Nurturist (anti-set-set) faction leader, Cousins’ Board Member, Bryar’s main rival on the Board
9. Castel Natekari (Blacklaw), Romanovan Tribune, Rumormonger of Hobbestown
10. Bo Chowdhury (Whitelaw), Deputy Commissioner General, totally corrupt
In Memoriam:
1. Mycroft Canner (Servicer), the Eighth Anonymous, former chronicler, my friend
2. Bridger (Minor), real
3. Apollo Mojave (Utopian), title?
4. Basically the whole European government
5. The city of Atlantis
6. Peace.
“Brothers,” I said, “who have braved a hundred
Thousand perils to reach these sunset lands,
Now that so little waking life remains us,
Do not deny yourselves the chance to reach
That world beyond the Sun, untouched by humankind.”
—Dante, Inferno, XXVI 112–117
CHAPTER ONE
World Civil War
Written September 15, 2454
Romanova
IT HAS TO BE A SHORT WAR. We all keep saying it. The Utopians bought us six months before real Hell sets in, six months no one has nukes, or supergerms, or CNCs, or their many equally apocalyptic cousins lumped under the title ‘harbingers.’ For these six months we can’t destroy the world. They sacrificed their immortality for that, the aloof neutrality that used to guard Utopia, the only Hive neither complicit in nor injured by the multi-century assassination system called O.S. No, it was stronger than that: the aloof neutrality of literal worldly detachment. Six Hive capitals are on this planet, but theirs on the serene, chill Moon. They could have watched in peace. Even if Luna City can’t hold them all, the others could have hidden in Earth’s empty, inhospitable corners, where their space tech would let them alone survive. Perhaps it’s fantasy to think that even they have that much tech, but it isn’t fantasy to say that they alone were sure that some—enough—of them would have survived to make the better world that’s supposed to rise from our ashes. Now no one knows if war will spare any of the small and alien minority that struck first, during the pre-Olympic truce, and so made itself an even easier scapegoat than O.S. Apollo was willing to destroy this world to save a better one, but not so the Utopian majority who voted to risk the Great Project itself to peacebond our harbingers for six months. So it has to be a short war, short enough to use that sacrifice, to end before the sticks and swords and triggers in our hands evolve again into the Big Red Button.
Yet how can it be over in six months? This is World Civil War: every city, every street divided, with no sovereign soil to retreat to, no ‘my side’ and ‘your side’ to form a truce around. If history proves anything of World Wars, or of Civil Wars, it’s that their broad, complex vendettas are protracted. The Church War took fifteen years to scour the Nation-States from Earth with fire and blood, and while fractious historians may debate whether the First World War ended in 1945 or 1989, it was long enough to make Orwell envision how deadlocked dystopias might actually achieve Eternal War. I look back further: the Wars of the Roses, China’s Warring States, the Hundred Years’ War, endless revolutions sparked by 1789; even Athens facing Sparta counted the war in decades, not in months. Optimism says I simply haven’t heard of history’s littler wars, but this war will not be little. Common sense, and Su-Hyeon’s bloodless face when they come from the Censor’s office daily, are all the oracles I need.
Mycroft would have made all this seem smaller. Or bigger. Both. They would have given this the smallness of warring ants, of pieces on a chessboard, puppets acting out a script, while the bigness lies in the Authors, Providence, the Great Conversation Mycroft believed in with such precious certainty. I don’t quite have that. I believe most of the time; there was a zeal in Mycroft, an astute and persuasive intelligence that, together on our bunk beds in clandestine hours, taught me to believe. But doubt still shakes me. I’ve eaten Bridger’s feasts, smelled the brain-blood at the Prince’s resurrection, seen Achilles throw a javelin, but I’ve also tasted Moondust, seen rainbow dragons take flight from the stunned and mourning Forum, and, with nothing but human limbs to launch them, I’ve seen Mycroft fly. Humans have done things I thought impossible without Bridger. When sleep is slow in coming, my skeptical imagination keeps weaving alternatives to explain away the miracles and Plan and Interference which would make my past self call my current self crazy. Achilles, Boo, Patroclus Aimer, what if they’re all U-beasts? What if it’s all just us?
One thing I’m always sure of, though: it’s my doubt that’s crazy, not my belief. It’s paranoia’s doubt, like when you meet some impossibly amazing person, who, against all hope, seems to accept you as a bosom friend, and they give you smiles, hours, years, but you know the rot and failure inside yourself and can’t believe those smiles, that person’s smiles, can really be for you. In just that way, I can’t believe this war is nobler than it seems. That we are nobler. I blame us, blame Tully Mardi, Perry-Kraye, Joyce Faust, myself, imagine us the authors of our own bumbling calamity. Something stubborn in the blackest waters of my mind refuses to accept that we deserve to be more. But we are more. I know it. We are the instruments that carve the path from cave walls to the stars. We are what built this world and will build better ones. We are the message which ended the literal infinity of loneliness which so long held so Good and True and Real a Being as That Which Visits Through the Flesh We Named Jehovah Mason. It used to be easier to see it. With Mycroft as interpreter, I used to find greatness in every human syllable, but, without Mycroft, now logic, evidence, experience, none of these can pierce doubt’s dark hours anymore. Only one thing can: They Love us. That’s what I cling to. A Kinder, Better Being than Our Maker has reached across the blind black from another Universe to Love us with Their infinity of Love. When I believe that, I can still see us among the stars.
CHAPTER TWO
The Battle of Cielo De Pájaros
Written September 15–17, 2454
Events of September 7
Romanova
I WASN’T GOING TO BOTHER DESCRIBING my experience of the war’s second day, since it was all muddle, but I’ve realized muddle was the authentic first assault—not of proper factions, not Remakers on Hiveguard, tenants on Mitsubishi landlords, wronged Hives on those complicit in O.S., or Nurturist bigots on whoever they’re calling ‘set-sets’ these days—no, it was a raw assault of chaos on order, of war on Earth. It began within hours after the Olympic Closing Ceremony, but there was no reality for me then, not outside the shock of the Atlantis Strike, and what it claimed. Who it claimed. In the black hours of the morning, grief h
ad given way to sleep, but sleep in turn gave way to the Prince’s voice in the tracker at my ear: “Humanity needs Anonymous advice.”
Jehovah Mason’s light, dead voice makes me instinctively snap to, not out of obligation, but because every word I’ve ever heard Them say has been true and important. They’re not just well-reasoned words like Vivien’s, or right-minded like Bryar’s, but uncomplex, clean-cutting truth, like two plus two is four, like the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time, like suffering is bad. If They said humanity needed something, They meant all of humanity, from Cro-Magnon to Mars. I fired up my lenses before I even registered the difference between sleep and waking.
The feed brought my eyes at once to Chile. It was daylight there, and lines of violet, coral-pink, and charcoal soared up like airy streamers from the glittering glass roofs of Cielo de Pájaros: smoke. A different feed showed the fires, and people, random clips: in one, two Humanists in Gold Team jackets hurled things which burst into strangely monochrome orange flame; in another, a cluster of people huddled in one of the flower trenches between the rows of flashing glass roofs; elsewhere, guards fired stun guns. Some of those in defensive clusters wore blue Romanovan Alliance police uniforms, and others were in Cousin wraps, presumably inspectors, there to prevent the abuse of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house and computers while they were in Alliance hands. But some Cousins were helping the attacking Humanists, which made no sense until I found a feed whose software highlighted the Hiveguard sigil—Sniper’s bull’s-eye—on the breasts of all of the aggressors. Hiveguard was trying to take control of the cars. They could not advance across the surface, since the Spectacle City’s terraced rows made every flower trench a fortress, and every raised path a no-man’s-land. Instead the attackers burrowed up the slope, entering houses by basement doors like Thisbe’s, and advancing from trench to trench one household at a time. I looked for signs of resistance from the residents, broken doors, singed grasses, but the Hiveguard aggressors seemed to meet no hostility from the residents—no surprise when Cielo de Pájaros was 71 percent Humanist.