“What are they like?” Sniper pressed as it led the Headmaster across rain-scented cobbles toward an open square. “J.E.D.D. Mason?”

Faust frowned. “Surely you two have met.”

“Actually, they’re a Humanist Balloting Officer just like me, but, funny thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them at a Balloting Officers’ meeting. Whenever I arrive they’ve had to leave or vice versa, ships in the night.”

“Is that so? How improbable. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy by the bash’ that runs the transit computers to keep you two apart—you should look into that.” Faust’s chuckle invited Sniper to feign laughter with him. “No, couldn’t be. You ride standard cars but I hear young J.E.D.D. Mason only rides Utopian cars.” Faust met Sniper’s eyes at last, and held them. “Why is that, do you suppose?”

I wonder how Sniper trained itself to cover fear so well. It laughed, naturally, delightedly, no hint in its warm dark eyes that Faust’s teasing had touched so close to home. It took a deep breath, ready to answer, but Faust hushed it, the Headmaster’s brows arching at new words, which floated toward them from the square ahead.

“We speak so smugly of economic determinism. We say the French Revolution was inevitable because an expanding population made it untenable for a miniscule nobility to keep monopolizing ninety-five percent of the wealth. We say fascism and Nazism were inevitable because the economic idiocies of 1919 made it impossible for peace to last. We say all this as if past peoples were not only locked into their choices, but were stupid not to realize that they were.” The voice was thin, tired but used to being tired, just audible over the breathy shifting of the gathered crowd that filled the square. “But what did it actually feel like? Did a French peasant wake up every morning thinking about the inequitable distribution of wealth? Or that the Old Regime was on its last legs? Or did they wake up thinking that they were hungry while their noble masters weren’t? They felt uneasy, unhappy, tense, they wanted things to improve, wanted them back the way they were, perhaps, in the imaginary idyllic past. But war? War wasn’t in their minds.”

Sniper craned its neck, even hopped with its Olympic grace, just high enough to see over the sea of heads. There he stood, Tully Mardi, perched on the steps of an old church. He was thin in his Hiveless gray, leaning on crutches as his legs—unused to Earth—threatened to fail despite their braces. The Enemy—as I shall always call him—had guards around his soapbox, Apollo’s bar friends, sledgehammers and metal pipes more frightening in sober hands than drunk as they waited for me. “Who is it?” Sniper whispered.

Faust held a finger to his lips. “It’s what has so many of my students playing hooky.”

“And what do you feel when you wake up in the morning?” Tully pressed, quick eyes flicking from face to face across the crowd. “When you make out fat rent checks to your Mitsubishi landlords? When you see more and more Mason suits on the streets? When you pay huge royalties to Utopian inventors, and watch them squander the profits lobbing expensive rocks at Mars? Do you feel uneasy? Unhappy? Tense? Do you want things to go back to the way you think they used to be? The Romanovan Censor publishes new numbers every month, and you worry about your savings shrinking, a rent hike, a recession, as if a salary cut is the limit of what horror humans can inflict. Why not war?”