The comfort wasn’t comforting. “The plan for Jed’s interim constitution calls for the Cousins to elect our Transitional Congress next week, but if it’s an angry mob that does the voting it’ll be an angry mob that we elect. That’s why I need you to teach me what makes people into soldiers, both so we can fight for peace if we have to, and, more important, so I can do the opposite right now. I want our new Congress to make peace, not war. If we fight, I want us to fight for peace and only peace, not for vendetta, or Nurturism, or whatever else. I need a sane Congress. I need calm Cousins and I need them by next week—not in a month, next week. Teach me what makes people go from screaming in outrage to screaming for blood, so I can learn to stop it.”

The hero scratched at his hair, oily at its roots and likely itchy, but Achilles will not wash his hair in these days of mourning, nor can he crop it off to lay the offering beside the honored dead, since the child who was more than a son to both of us has left no corpse to set upon a funeral bier.

Here I dared interrupt. “The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”

Both stared at me.

“That’s what Thomas Hobbes says.”

Kosala frowned. “I don’t need grand philosophy, Mycroft, I need specifics. How do I talk down a billion-member angry mob?” She turned back to Achilles. “I need your help. I need your answer. Will you teach me? Will you help me make peace within the Cousins before the war starts, so we can make peace for everyone once it does?”

Achilles breathed deep. “My answer is that I need time to think, and to meet the other sides.”

“I’m not a side. I’m trying to not be a side, and I have less time than the others, only one week.”

“And the war may start tomorrow.”

The World’s Mom sighed, slumping like an oak bough, burdened with a child’s swing, when the child returns, grown up, and places the full weight of adulthood on the tired wood. “Just make sure it doesn’t drag us into yesterday.”

The Great Soldier’s voice is rarely soft. “I don’t understand.”