“I’m the Canner survivor!” Tully declared at last; I had wondered how long it would take him to play that card. “I know better than anyone: humans are violent animals. In peacetime that violence gets vented in bar brawls, hate crimes, sports, and, yes, in murders, and the more and worse murderers there are the closer war is to surfacing. The last decades didn’t just produce Mycroft Canner, they produced hundreds of thousands of people who idolize Mycroft Canner, who celebrate them, photos, music, movies, plays. Cannerism is a symptom of war waiting to erupt! The Censor may measure it in statistics, but you can measure it yourself in how many people you’ve seen smile or joke about Mycroft Canner, or Jack the Ripper, or any of these human monsters that some fraction of the world inevitably loves. 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. We can’t delude ourselves into thinking the monster’s gone. This world is ready—overready—for war, and it will come, because we are the monsters! Violence, Mycroft Canner, all of it is part of human nature, and it cannot change!”

“But I rehabilitated Mycroft Canner.”

Death-soft Jehovah stepped up on the Rostra now at Tully’s side. 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. I would not call it hush, but the crowd’s tone eased as He appeared, His black figure healing them as darkness heals the closed eye after day’s long labor.

“See,” He gestured, “here they stand.”

Yes, reader, there I followed, at His command, behind Him. My wrists itched beneath the crowd’s stare, my ankles too, my flesh insisting I should be bound still in my coffin-cage, as when the world first watched proud Papadelias parade his captive monster—long years ago in your experience, reader, but always yesterday in mine. I could not conceive of a billion people watching. In my mind the thousands blurred into one great eye which pierced through me, like the Great Judge’s eye in those dreams I used to have, which others would call nightmares, recurrent the last year before my crime, when I previewed in my sleep the trial which would never come.

“Mycroft Canner…” Tully seems to lose the present as easily as I do. On that platform, as close to sacred as a secular thing can be, my presence was as horrific in his eye as his in mine. “Tribune Mason, you saved Mycroft Canner?”

Jehovah’s voice, soft always as if wary of waking some sleeping child, seemed weak and intimate over the sound system designed for rabble-rousers. “Thirteen years ago the public asked the law to take a life in anger. Those who witnessed Mycroft Canner’s crimes could imagine no lesser punishment, but you also recognized the tragedy: there was genius in Canner, which could have achieved great things if set on a course to help, not harm. I asked MASON and Chair Kosala to make Mycroft Canner a Servicer. Thanks to their mercy, that genius has helped the world, served others, even saved lives. Death is infinite loss and I will not cheapen it by saying whether Mycroft Canner has yet saved as many lives as they took, but, even if they saved only one, that is a life we would have thrown away if we had fallen back into the old lie that death can undo death.”