The back fringe of the crowd was starting to recognize the new arrivals now, whispering Sniper’s name, and shying back from their Headmaster like guilty pups, but Faust just smiled, sliding his dry hands into the pockets of his sweater as he took his place as spectator.

“The restless French didn’t see war coming,” the Enemy continued, “but they had the excuse that back then economists didn’t yet know how to see which tensions lead to war. The survivors of 1918 even called the second half of their World War by a separate name, as if unable to see the connection as the tanks rolled out a second time. We’re being just as self-blinding. We have the evidence, but we refuse to believe, because it’s a matter of faith to us that war’s impossible. It isn’t. War is the human norm. We’ve had three hundred years of peace after thousands of years of war. How can you think that we’ll never do it again?” His pleading eyes hopped from face to face. “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?”

“Magnificent specimen,” Faust whispered, unable to stifle the delight in his eyes. “Preaching on a street-corner soapbox, when they could post it to the web and reach millions.”

Sniper nodded softly, eyeing the sea of captivated Brillists. “It’s a performance. One more nutcase on the web, no one would care.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Tully pressed, his voice edging to frantic. “Let me put it even more simply, then. I’m Tully Mardi, Mercer Mardi’s child, the only survivor of the Mycroft Canner massacre. Some of you must remember when Mercer used to bring me here as a child. You know what I lived through. I’ve just learned, as you have, that Cornel MASON and Bryar Kosala conspired to protect Mycroft Canner after the capture. Would you be surprised if I tried to assassinate MASON and Kosala? And if I did, and afterwards if people said the Utopians helped me do it, how long do you think it would take for that to turn violent? Days? Hours?” Tully’s gesture led the crowd’s eyes to his fifth guard, a Utopian who slouched against the church wall behind the soapbox, shadowed in a nowhere sea where derelict ships of every age from Babylon to Space drifted through ghost-mist like frozen leviathans. “The Utopians were protecting me all this time, out of charity. Apollo Mojave gave their life to save me, gave me their seat on the Moon shuttle so I could get safely out of Mycroft Canner’s reach, but, if I assassinated someone like Cornel MASON, how long would it take you to start wondering if it was a Utopian conspiracy? If they planned it? Did they cultivate me all these years on the Moon as part of a scheme to kill the Emperor? You’d think that, anybody would!”