“If Ockham Saneer told me that my death would save ten thousand lives,” Quarriman interrupted flatly, “I’d let them kill me. Would you?”

“There it is,” Achilles whispered.

“What?”

“A side.”

No words now, not from Cookie, the Speaker, or the crowd as the rising clamor churned too much for ears to sort. As the cameras kept their lock on Quarriman, a Humanist colleague beside her took the other half of the torn paper and made himself a matching bull’s-eye. Others followed rapidly, Humanists, then one brave Mitsubishi, five, some Europeans, the Blacklaw Senators, and Tribune Natekari, who beamed as if she had just crossed the border back into her own wild country.

As when a good dog, endearing and obsequious, when playing tug with bash’kids plays too rough, and the ancestral predator shows through for a moment in the good dog’s unintended snarl, just so the schoolteacher softness fell from Minister of Education Lorelei Cook as she fixed on Aesop Quarriman a glare of open war.

“For and against O.S.?” I asked. “We had those sides before.”

“Not recognizably,” Achilles answered as the cameras zoomed in on the spreading bull’s-eye. “Now there’s a symbol, and not an ignoble one: kill me if it will serve the human race. Many have worn lesser sigils proudly. Many will wear this one. When you can tell friend from foe, you can make battle lines.” Flush rose in the great commander’s cheeks, flush of anticipation, anger, readiness. “With this you can make war.”

Hush fell on all we Servicers, memory’s hush, but not our own—inherited memories of shields and crests and bright, fluttering standards, passed down to us through history and fiction.

“Shouldn’t we have a symbol too then, sir?” asked the young Servicer who sat behind us. “A clear way to tell friend from foe.”

Godlike Achilles frowned, the blood-rush still bright in his face. “I haven’t forgotten.” He took the stack of battered papers and leafed through them, while I leaned close enough to peer over his shoulder. They were sketches, childlike figures fit for a world of boxy houses and lollipop trees, but the clothing, not the figures, was the artist’s focus, flat torsos and stiff arms sporting a variety of colored stripes and insignia, while the main part of the figures’ costumes, rendered in tea stains and thumb-smeared graphite, were recognizably the tan and gray mottling of a Servicer’s uniform.

“These designs are terrible,” the great commander pronounced.

The young Servicer gave a little whimper. “Sound in concept, I hope?”