What of Ganymede? They love him. They always loved him. The Humanists could have voted for anyone, for Aesop Quarriman, for heroes. They chose him. He staggered up the aisle martyr-frail, with French silks in Olympic colors and a bull’s-eye on his heart, but he was the marksman, irresistible Eros, and they remembered why they always loved him.

What did he do?

He showed Earth what nobility should be. He said he had no greater pride in life than the knowledge that, as President of the Humanists, he had done such great good with O.S. The majority of people living owed their lives to Ockham Prospero Saneer or to his bash’parents. If a Hive had not the right to defend the world by taking lives, then doctors had no right to quarantine a plague, nor did the guards of the Olmek Virus Lab or Sanctum Sanctorum have the right to defend their wards with deadly force. Numbers, he declared, did not lie. Since 2441, before the duke became president or young Ockham O.S., the set-sets’ data proved Earth was past the tipping point at which only O.S. could stave off war. To have abandoned O.S. would have caused extensive loss of life and suffering, breaking the First Law. This trumped all Hive Law, and if Romanova’s Alliance demanded that a Hive renounce the right to safeguard World Peace by a means which cost so little and preserved so much, such an Alliance could command neither the duke’s respect nor his obedience. The next day there were twice as many bull’s-eyes on the streets, and I hear Ganymede’s name now as often as Ancelet’s.

A means which cost so little and preserved so much… Today’s means preserved all, reader: lives and trees and Bach and baby elephants, and took not a single life, yet now they scream vendetta in the streets. Such cost.

Stay with me, Mycroft. You may describe that next, but, quickly, first, the trial.

Oh, the trial. Ockham goes free.