Of course they used the same words. Removing more than a billion people from the world’s workforce might threaten the economy, as a storm on the horizon threatens to deprive a village of a day’s catch by trapping the fragile fishing boats in port, but those two words, ‘indefinite stasis,’ were a different danger, an armada’s black sails sighted across the blade-gray waves. Does the phrase retain its horror in your day, distant reader? ‘Indefinite stasis,’ charged with death like ‘Off with his head,’ or ‘Carthage must be destroyed’? For us the terror is two centuries old but keen as new steel. 2239. For three days, as the Senate’s consultation over the proposed new Set-Set Law stretched on, Utopia had called in sick, depriving Earth en masse of its crafts and wonders. Then, when the motion failed, they recovered as one from their ‘illness’ and refused to acknowledge any mass action had taken place. A trembling Earth wondered what Utopia united might have done had the law passed, and wondered most of all why Utopia cared so much, why, with Cousins and Masons screaming at one another in the street over the set-set issue, it was not Father or Mother but the family’s strangest child that had made so hazardous a stand. Utopia does not use set-sets. Utopia’s separate car network has never needed set-sets, nor with their varied U-beasts do they need the other types of set-sets with their many special powers. Yet the Set-Set Law moved the Utopians to the first mass action they had ever taken, and they never told us why. Danger unknown and unrealized—what a Hive united in anger might have done—that is what the phrase ‘indefinite stasis’ invokes in us. In you, reader, I imagine the phrase must either be a detail quite forgotten, or else be rank with blood.

Achilles spoke first. “At least this time we know what they’re striking for.”

“Do we?” Spain asked, gently. “Is it about the land law in Odessa? Or the arrest of Andō and the other Executive Directors? Or O.S.? They’re not quite the same thing. If the Mitsubishi just want Odessa settled that’s one thing, but if they want Ockham and Andō and the others freed, that may not be possible.” He closed his eyes. “This is it, isn’t it? This will start the war?”

The Great Soldier thought a long time before he shook his head. “I still don’t know. I wish I could recognize war’s spark by instinct, but I can’t. All things feel like war to me.”