“War is a thing of the past, Achilles. You’re a thing of the past. This whole mess is a thing of the past, concocted out of books and nostalgia: Madame using past customs and seductions to create their power network, Merion Kraye’s storybook quest for revenge, Danaë, Andō, Ganymede, burning the world down over a love affair. O.S. is the past too, a system set up before our grandba’pas were born, and now the world is in convulsions over decisions no one living made. MASON is the past too.” I wish there were a name for that expression, part smirk, part sigh, part sniff, all irony, which we use when we acknowledge the sad, sardonic humor of our own unhappy state. “As fine a person as Cornel MASON is, their whole mystique is about empire, tradition, pretending ancient mysteries can somehow save us if we return to absolutism and ziggurats. The Mitsubishi are just as much about tradition, a rival tradition but still tradition. And now the King of Spain, just by being so reliable through all this, is making people feel as if the past is the best solution to the present, kings and emperors and coats of arms to stand firm now that the democracies are teetering. You Achilles, Mycroft, even Jed and Heloïse, helpful as they’ve been with this interim constitution, you’re all about the past. The Mardi bash’ was afraid we’d wipe ourselves out with our new technology, but I think humanity has proved itself wise enough not to push that button. My fear is that this war will drag us backward, undo this good world we’ve finally achieved, not by destroying it but by making people want to dismantle it. Look around you. This world is far from perfect, but people have never been happier, healthier, more productive, more free, more equal. We have a lot of improvements still to make, but we’ve come a long way compared to any older era.”

“No need to tell me,” the hero confirmed. “The poorest man today lives in greater comfort than King Priam ever did.”

“It’s the political changes that worry me. Hives and strats are not nations, and that’s important. People are free to change and choose Hives, that’s the heart of all this, but a war will change that. In war you can’t change sides so easily. If this turns into a war as wars used to be, it’ll turn us into everything that was worst about the geographic nations. Europe is the most dangerous. The Masons are just mystique, but Europe was made of geographic nations once, and still is, sort of, the nation-strats. We’ve already seen riots involving nation-strat groups: Spaniards, Croats, Greeks. The rest of the world may not know how to make soldiers, but nation-strats still have their old uniforms, their flags, their anthems, leaders, even kings. If we let that set the tone for the war, it will drag it all back to the days of borders, and rip the Hives apart. The majority of most nation-strats are European Members, but nation-strats have members in every Hive, even Utopia and Gordian, and this could rip those pieces out by force. If there has to be war, we can’t let it be that kind of war.”