They did suit him, the president’s new Humanist boots, and betrayed too that he had long been mulling over what boots he might choose should he give up his Hiveless sash for the Humanists, instead of for his bash’native Europe. The boots’ surfaces were palimpsests, the dull tan of old parchment covered with hand-inked text in antique brown, but with a different script beneath, faint but still legible, the tightly crammed script of an earlier century. Around the soles, the bronze and gold Olympic stripes of Ancelet’s medals in mathematics and oratory sparkled against the tricoleur of the French nation-strat, while on the sole the treads were crammed with letters like the type in a printing press, locked in loosely, so they shifted chaotically with every step and stamped out different almost-words.

Ancelet knocked for the guard, frowning as the bolts began their clicks and groans. “Prospero, are they treating you alright?” he asked. “Any harassment?”

“None, Excellency. Their courtesy has been conspicuous.”

“Yes, well… siege makes people careful.”

“Siege?”

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!”