Prospero did not understand, but I did. Walking from the car to the prison yard an hour before had been my first taste of outside since the fatal day. Slivers of media had shown me crowds, small riots, speeches, police lines, Humanist clubs and sports bars besieged by outraged mobs, but images are not the taste and touch of our new world. I noticed the sky first. The customary streaks of cars were too slow, too low, obtrusive. It frightened even me, not so much because it meant the transit network was in timid and unstable hands, but because the sky had changed. The world had changed. As we had landed at the prison I could see no ground around it, only people, the near ranks packed tight as fans around an idol, while the farther reaches gave way to tents and chairs and umbrelounges. My instinct labeled it a ‘mob,’ but it was too quiet. A siege, as Ancelet so aptly called it, stagnant, patient, an aimless force waiting for an aimer. In that directionless week, when everyone wanted to act but no one had a plan, these people felt that standing close to the living linchpin Ockham Saneer would ready them to be the first to move when the time came. The besiegers around us did not even have sides, only clumps where Hive dress clustered, but even these blurred one into another, as if they were all too timid to tell each other what causes they served. I think they didn’t know.

“Ancelet! That’s President Ancelet!”

Walls of stone and science are no match for assaults of sound. Prospero and I heard the mob’s scream even here in the prison’s heart as the new president emerged from the gates outside. He could have left by the roof patch, but he chose to show himself to the besiegers for the few minutes it took for them to snap enough photographs to serve his purposes, before he dove into the car and thence the sky. For sixteen hours President Ancelet’s visit to the jail in Almoloya de Juáres eclipsed all other questions in the world’s eye. Why was he there? What did he say to Ockham Saneer? What role would the new president take in the coming trials? For those sixteen hours anyone but Ancelet could move invisible.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

Is This the Spark?

Written July 11–13, 2454

Events of April 8–9

Alexandria &c.