He swallowed hard. “We were still students.”

“And what answer was Geneva fishing for?”

“The First World War.”

“A war…” I choked a moment as his fingers flexed. “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.”

MASON’s hand was trembling. “I can’t believe Geneva would want to start a war.”

“They thought it would be a mercy having the war now, that putting it off longer would only make it worse. If war is inevitable, and if every invention makes it that much more probable that mankind will wipe itself out when the next war comes, the best thing was to get the next war over sooner, while technology has changed less and while the Mardis were there, experts ready to predict and guide it. Better a smaller war now, when it might be contained, than an unplanned war in a hundred years, when Earth might destroy itself. Doesn’t that sound like something Geneva would say?”

“No.”

“Lies don’t suit you, Caesar. Think about it. The Mardis were brilliant scholars; why did they publish almost nothing? Why were all their files so carefully encrypted that even the police couldn’t unlock them after the murders? Why did they network so carefully into every Hive, getting close to all the leaders? Why did a bash’ of eleven adults have only three children among them? Most of them didn’t want kids to grow up in the world they planned to create. Tully’s still here trying to start the war all by themself, what kind of life is that?”