Burning Violin

Cadence laughed. "Yeah, you love them when they're little, but the older they get the more you want to kill them." Janus twitched back as if struck and Cadence held a hand up to her mouth. "Oh Janus, I'm sorry. That was thoughtless of me."

Janus shook her off. "No, you meant nothing by it. I'm the one who is overly sensitive."

He turned to leave the lab anyway, struck by the notion that the discomfort enveloping the room would dissipate in his absence. "Janus, don't go." Cadence said quietly. Then more strongly she insisted. "Look, we need to finish running through Mickey's morning status. No sense blowing a data point because we're acting like teenagers."

They ran through everything and could find nothing. Mickey was as happy as a lab rat could be, not much of a statement for a group generally destined for gruesome fates. Mickey dined on the finest French cheeses since the cost to raise anything into orbit in the first place was so high that the difference between ten-cent grade D rat cheese, and handcrafted Roquefort that cost fifty dollars per pound was a meaningless expense. The crew ate equally as well, although their expertise was universally in branches of science and none could be trusted with the shuttle-loads of tenderloin stored in the station freezer.

Mickey had become something of an international celebrity, so much so that he had 24-7 cameras trained on him for a webcam and a weekly highlights show on CNN. Janus supposed it would pass as all such things did, but the rat sure seemed to know that he had it good. Something in that little stare suggested a grateful spark of intelligence, thankful he hadn't been in the group sent over to the dog food research institute instead.

"Would you care to have dinner some time, Cadence?" Janus asked her on the way out of the lab.

Cadence flushed. She was divorced, he knew, even denying his feelings, Janus could not help but have done his homework on that one, since everyone on the station tended to know everything about one another. She again pushed hair out of her eyes, this time more as a nervous habit than to improve vision.

"Oh I don't know Janus." Cadence started.

Janus nodded. "Very well." He said and turned to go the opposite way down the hall towards his quarters. "I did not mean to overstep my bounds." He said quietly without a touch of animosity.

"Well I didn't say no, did I you dolt?" Cadence flared.

Janus stopped and looked over his shoulder. "Is that a yes?"

"I don't know, it's sort of fun to make you dance around a bit. Keep you on your toes." Cadence said with mirth. "You're always so sure of everything, but now I've got you out of your comfort zone." She waved a finger at him like a stern English nanny.

Chapter Ten - Fractals

It was the irony of perfect memory that the absence of a certain memory could cast doubt on the perfection of the rest. The more perfect a memory, the more damning the lack of one since it was all the more unlikely. Janus could not remember his daughter's first word. He shared the dilemma with Charlie, leaving out any mention of the mysterious email, but trying to convey the sense of doubt that shook him to the very core.

"Janus, man, it's not the end of the world." Charlie said, not understanding. "Nobody remembers everything, and just cause you remembered that there's something you don't remember, doesn't mean you can't remember at all." He paused after that awkwardness and punctuated the sentence with the period by all those who are unsure if they conveyed their thoughts accurately. "You know what I mean?" The words slurred into one long syllable.

Janus would have been near tears if he had any to give. He felt monstrous then, feeling the way he had after waking in that hospital bed to find his body destroyed along with his family. It was terrible to not shed a tear for your children, even if it was a physical impossibility. He forced himself to stand up straight and shove the feelings down underneath. None of them can understand, it's something I'll have to figure out on my own. "Nothing Charlie. Nevermind at all."

But he did not leave it alone himself. In quiet moments, Janus obsessed over the missing memory. It was simply something he must remember in order to feel whole himself.

"Do you have children, Cadence?" Janus asked when they were alone in one of the laboratories, checking in on Mickey's health all these days later.

"Amy's twelve and Douglas is eight." Cadence said absently, stroking Mickey's soft white fur and scratching his pink nose. "It was hard to leave them for this, even if it was the chance of a lifetime."

"Do you remember their first words?" Janus asked. He felt nervous, like he was asking a girl to prom, silly at his age, sillier at his lack of a proper body. His feelings twinged at that last self deprecation. Loneliness has no connection with the genitals, he reminded himself, it has everything to do with the soul.

Cadence brushed hair back out of her eyes. It was a curious move in zero gravity since the locks of hair floated up like a small mohawk instead of settling against her scalp. Hair tended overtime to settle normally even in zero-g, something to do with minute electrostatic attraction, Janus supposed, that was why hair still got in eyes even when it was free to float away. A perturbed eyebrow raised at Janus. "Of course I do." She said with the irritation of a scientist, the kind of person not charmed by mystery but driven to explain it. "Why in the world do you ask?"

"No reason." Janus demurred. "Just thinking about my kids."

"Hello?" He answered.

"Crow?" Rebecca's voice, cold and fast.

"Yes. Is this about Green Eyes?" Crow asked, mind flashing to the profession of love.

"No. Alexander, hide him. I was told to tell you that they're coming for him." Rebecca said.

"Who's coming?" Crow stammered, anger rising. "Who the fuck told you this?"

"Not yet a friend, not yet an enemy." Rebecca said. "That's all."

"Why'd you call this line?" Crow asked, unable to resist the question.

"Because if you weren't there, there wouldn't be time enough for it to matter." Rebecca said and the line went dead.

Crow thought for a few seconds before slamming down the phone and running upstairs in a haze of urgency that made everything seem to happen slower by the second. Alexander was in his room of course, accompanied by Nan, going over some math lesson or another. Nan looked up with whatever amount of surprise that its limited facial range of synthetic rubber could manage. Alexander's face only betrayed a twinge of annoyance at the interruption. Crow scooped up Alexander and motioned Nan to follow. Brief thoughts of flooring it down the interstate flitted through his mind. Maybe to Canada, maybe to Mexico. Hell, why stop there, just keep plowing through the jungles and banana republics until they could stand on the Cape of Capricorn and watch the sun rise over the Atlantic and set below the Pacific. Crow shook it aside. They would be stopped a dozen times before the border, and even if they made it how would they survive? Waiting tables had been something left behind as an undergraduate.

Crow led them down into the basement, whispering instructions to both Nan and Alexander in turn. Sirens could be heard in the distance, closing in on and the house. Crow struggled for precious seconds to help shove Nan through the tunnel behind the painting, panicking for a moment when the senti's hips ground to a halt at the narrowest point of the channel through the bedrock before with a scrape of metal on rock it slipped by and tumbled onto its head in the workshop. Crow winced and helped the senti back to its feet, ignoring the quite abused look it cast from grossly artificial features. He took a moment he didn't have to snap a padlock shut on the cabinet that contained Trinan's facsimile. It wouldn't do for Alexander to find that, it wouldn't do at all. Crow bent, though not as far as he would have had to a month ago, hugged his son and kissed him on the forehead for good measure.

"Be good kid, I love you." Crow said, and without waiting for an answer dove back down the tunnel.

He snapped the painting back into place and spared a moment for a double check of the hidden latches. The sirens blared ever closer, almost sounding on top of him. Crow imagined he heard jackboots pounding down the stairs to catch him in the act. He tossed two random boxes in front of the painting, paused and added a third on top, with a slight adjustment of the angle to be a more calculatedly casual positioning. Crow darted for the stairs, but turned around at their foot for a second look. After what seemed like an eternal consideration, Crow removed the third box and tossed it aside. He bolted up the stairs and sat down in a chair in the rarely used living room. Time seemed to stop for the next few minutes as the sirens made their interminable progress up the dirt roads. Crow stared at the clock, wondering if they were actually coming to his house after all.

"Who was that on the phone?" Crow asked the slowly ticking clock as it hit the forty-five second mark just short of the hour. Then the more important question popped to mind. "Why are they coming for Alexander?" Another beat, ten seconds til the hour. "Who's they?"

A sledgehammer knocked the front door off of its hinges as all three hands clicked at once to mark the hour.

"Like what?"

"Things before his first birthday." Crow said. "Things from when he was an infant."

Father Thomas frowned. "What did the doctor find?"

"Nothing. Still waiting on some tests though." Crow said. "I guess they don't know what to look for when you go in and what's wrong is that you're healthier than you should be, huh?"

"The lord works in mysterious ways." Father Thomas said without a trace of irony.

"Amen." Crow whispered. He thought for a moment. "Do you believe that a senti can love, Father?"

"I don't think it's possible to love without a soul." Father Thomas said gravely.

"So if a senti could love, would you take that as proof that the soulless could love, or that the senti who can love does have a soul?" Crow asked.

Father Thomas stopped walking and stared at him with deliberative silence. He spoke after a few moments. "I take it you have found a senti who professes to be in love?"

"Not just any senti either." Crow said. "Green Eyes."

"And do you believe it?"

Crow considered the question carefully. "I don't disbelieve it, but I think that he might have the same concept of love as a teenager, something immature and half unformed."

"And yet powerful with passion." Father Thomas murmured and then smiled. "The young make up for lack of understanding with an unmatchable zeal for their passion, for the melodrama of it."

"Do you believe then?" Crow asked.

Father Thomas' lips fluttered almost smiling, almost laughing. "I believe that it can think it is in love, but I do not think it actually can have the capacity for love. It is only a machine, Crow."

Crow drove home in silence and muttered to himself about robotic drivers as he pulled up the driveway and parked the car in the garage, this time managing to not further damage the side-view mirror. The phone was ringing when Crow walked in the front door and tossed his keys in their usual place. Crow frowned, he hardly remembered owning a landline since it was a mostly superfluous with the existence of cell phones. He fumbled around in the living room and found it buried behind a pile of old science fiction paperbacks.

Next week marks the six month mark of writing Burning Violin, so I'm working on something a bit bigger than normal, you know, to make it special and such. So this week I'm being both lazy and shameless by posting one of my favorite scenes out of Katorga (my novel, available from Amazon in both paperback and for the Kindle). This scene captures a lot of the heart of the novel at once: it's brutal, terrifying, and yet darkly funny at the same time. There are few things more awkward than an author writing his own blurbs, so buy the book (or ten, don't be shy), and write your own awestruck blurbs for me to quote so that I don't sound like such a pompous twat typing about how awesome I am. Even though I am. Please enjoy...

A metal door was held open for Doug into a tiny room, no more than ten by ten, hardly the size of a decent bathroom.  A metal table with three chairs sat in the center of the room, and a broad mirror Doug recognized from old police shows covered one wall.  The room was otherwise bare concrete except for a drain at the center of the room right underneath the table.  The leader pointed to the single chair on the opposite side of the table from the other two.

"Please take a seat there, Dr. Bradley, someone will be right with you," the man said and then leaned close to talk in a low voice.  "These are desperate times, Doug, please do your best for the Republic."

Doug drew himself up straight and spoke as firmly as he could.  "I will do whatever I can, sir.  I'm a good party man, myself."

The man nodded and his lips touched on an enigmatic smile for a moment and then he left the room in a hurry, closing the door behind him with a loud click.  Doug walked slowly to the chair and sat down.  He looked idly over at the mirror and felt suddenly claustrophobic, the walls pulling in closer every moment.  Doug shivered and stared at those other two seats.  Some interminable amount of time later, it was impossible to sense time accurately surrounded by concrete and glaringly unnatural fluorescent lights, Doug nodded off, face lowering to the slick metal of the interrogation table.

..........

"Wake up you ignorant piece of shit fuck donkey," a voice screamed in Doug's ear.  A finger roughly ran up the side of his chin, covered in drool.  "You're slavering all over my goddamned table you drooling goat fucking cock monger."

Doug jerked up in the chair, almost falling over backwards before a hand caught him by his hair and steadied him.  He couldn't see, the fluorescents were so bright they were blinding him, burning his retinas.  Doug shouted out, and got a slap across his face for the trouble, cheek left stinging by a latex-gloved hand.

"What?  Who?  What?"  Doug exclaimed.  He blinked against the lights and began to see shapes.  Men in the two seats across from him, another towering over him, holding his head up.

"Three fucking stupid questions that only a slut slit licking terrorist taint sucking whore of a traitor would even think to ask!"  Another slap across his face.  "I've fucked sheep to death that made me less sick than you!"

"Now, now, Robert, why don't you go take a breather now that our friend has woken up," one of the men across the table said.  The voice sounded so kind that Doug almost whimpered.  The instinct made him feel ill, reminding him of dogs he had put down.

Robert shoved Doug so hard that he tumbled out of the chair and it landed on top of his head.  Doug cowered for a moment, expecting a kick or another tirade, but Robert only paused to spit in his face before exiting the room.  Doug lay there for a moment before standing on shaking legs, wiping the spittle from his face with the end of his silk tie as his stomach roiled in protest.  He picked up the chair with hands that hadn't shaken so badly since his wedding day and looked around for his bag, desperately needing a valium.  His bag was on the other side of the table, behind the two men.  Doug refused to ask for it, and sat down in his chair.  He took a deep breath and composed himself.

"There must have been a terrible mistake," he said.  "That man I came here with told me that the Republic needed me.  I came as quickly as I could and am at the government's service."

The two men exchanged a look.  They both wore the gray and red uniforms of the world police.  Doug thought that the three bars on each of their breasts meant that they were captains, but all he knew about such things were from television and movies, all of which were spinning nightmare scenarios before his eyes from memory.

"I am Lieutenant Thomas, and this is Lieutenant Allen," the man on the right said.  The man on the left said nothing, but stared at Doug through squinting eyes and lit a cigarette.  "I assure you that there has been no mistake.  We are quite aware of your activities and all we want to do is help you as best we can.  But make no mistake, we know absolutely everything, we just need to hear it from you."

"What are you talking about?"  Doug asked.  "I came here to help."

"And you can help," Thomas said gently.  "You can help by telling us the names and addresses of all of your co-conspirators."  He leaned forward and placed his hand on Doug's.  "It is essential to the security of the state that we know exactly what the plan is, in your own words.  We have to stop your friends before it is too late."

Doug opened and closed his mouth repeatedly.  "But I haven't done anything!"

Thomas sighed and rubbed his eyes with both hands.  Allen blew a long cloud of smoke at Doug.  "Was your wife in on it?"

Doug blinked.  "No, of course not."

"Then you admit you were?"  Allen asked.

"Were what?"  Doug asked.

"In on it."  Allen said.

"On what?"

"It."

"No."

Allen paused for a moment.  "What it weren't you in on?"

"It?"

"It."

"What?"

"Exactly."  Allen said and blew out another long cloud of smoke.  "How can you know your wife was not part of it, if you don't know what it is?"

"She wasn't in on anything!"  Doug said.

"So you must have inside information on the plan, if you do know for a fact that she was not involved.  And even if she is not involved, your involvement makes her an accessory and thus involved just as much as if she were involved."  Allen said, he leaned back and blew out another cloud of smoke, tapping the ashes off his cigarette onto the concrete floor with a look of satisfaction like a mathematician having finished a twenty page long geometric proof.

Thomas leaned forward again.  "Look Doug, I know you're protecting her.  Hell, if our positions were reversed, I'd try to protect my wife too, but you can't drag her down with you.  You have a chance to make things right here.  Take responsibility, turn in the guys in charge, I know you were just going along with it out of friendship, you weren't really a terrorist, right?  I mean, if you don't confess and tell us what we already know, then we're going to have to assume that Caroline was involved, and have Robert go bring her in and interrogate her.  And I don't think anyone wants that except for Robert."

"But I didn't do anything!"  Doug shouted.

Thomas shook his head.  "Come on man, it's over.  But don't drag Caroline down with you.  And little Alice, I mean if you're lucky she'd get put into foster care, but really with two parents classified as anti-social, there's not much of a chance of her not getting sent off-world to work off some of your debt."

"Quit saying their names!"  Doug yelled.  "You have no right, you don't even know them!"  He sobbed.

"Shhh, I know, I'm sorry."  Thomas said, and patted Doug's hand again.  "Just tell us what happened."

"You were part of a group plotting to smuggle a dirty nuke into the Los Angeles spaceport, weren't you?"  Allen asked.  He opened a folder and threw dozens of pictures of Doug talking to various people, passing them by on the street, looking at various public buildings.  "We've had you under surveillance for quite some time and have tracked down most of your associates, but we need your help to convict them."

Allen folded his hands in front of him.  "So should we talk about it, or should we have Robert go get your wife and daughter and get answers out of them?"

Father Thomas thought for a long moment and closed his book. He slipped it into a pocket inside his jacket. "What changed your mind?"

"I couldn't stop thinking about Trinan and David. How could something that did that be the right side? I mean, our side of the debate didn't do it, but we were culpable in a way. We designed and built them in the first place." Crow stared up at the wafting pollen and thought for a while before smiling. "Who am I kidding?" He said. "I did it because they fired me. No grand reasons, no real change of philosophy. Just getting even is all. And Da Vinci Law, well enemy of my enemy and all that." He gestured to Father Thomas' pocket. "Machiavelli has a chapter on that doesn't he?"

Father Thomas patted the book and pointed at Crow. "Machiavelli deals in what is effective, not what is right."

"Hair splitting." Crow retorted.

"It's a world of difference." Father Thomas said. "The moral path and the evil path may only be hairs apart, they may even be the same path but for the intent of the traveler, but they are different still. Da Vinci Law is not exactly my buddy, as you say, though."

Crow raised an eyebrow. "They share your goals. Eradication of the sentis."

Father Thomas shook his head. "John Osteryoung is a man full of hatred, not love. I have met him several times and felt like washing my hands afterwards." Father Thomas said with crackling dryness. "The Naturalist movement wants to celebrate and protect mankind, not strike revenge at its creations."

"But you both want the same thing." Crow protested.

Father Thomas shook his head. "If two men walk the same path, but one has murder in his heart, are they really going in the same direction?" Crow did not answer. "If your heart does not believe in what John Osteryoung wants you to do, then don't do it."

"I think he's doing the right thing." Crow said, although his heart was not in it. "He was like me once, he was an early roboticist, you know. He knows what I feel about these things."

"Knowing what you feel does not make that feeling right." Father Thomas said. His face softened and he motioned Crow to walk with him through the roses. "Enough about business, Crow, how is Alexander these days?"

Crow swallowed back more arguments and joined Father Thomas on the path back to the central buildings. "He's fine. He's growing really fast, really smart. I took him to the doctor a few days ago for a check up." Crow frowned. "Honestly I'm worried about him. He's maturing faster than kids should, and he remembers things that he shouldn't remember at all."

Stealing a spacecraft was difficult, but it was keeping it stolen that remained the challenge. The problem was that there wasn't really anywhere to hide in space, except in terms of distancing oneself far enough from Earth that visual telescopes could no longer pick up your orbit with ease. Crow loved the audacity of the proposal, but the details were left entirely to him and Hydane. Osteryoung admitted to knowing nothing particularly useful, although of course his connections and influence would be behind them one hundred percent. "I want that ship." Osteryoung had told Crow. "I want to take it, and use it to take men to Alpha Centauri. It'll be Neil Armstrong on a galactic scale. How about it Crow? Want to be the first man on a planet in another star system? If you pull this off, I'd say you earned it."

"Why me?" Crow asked. "Why do you want me for this job?"

"Because everything up there is controlled by sentis." Osteryoung said. "That's the strong point, the weak point, and the summation of everything else. One way or the other, this mission has to go through them to pull this off. No one in the world knows more about sentis than you. You invented them, when you really get down to it."

Crow left Da Vinci Law and managed to survive the drive home without too many scares. The traffic was lighter this time of day, and his reflexes were improved by four cups of coffee during his palaver with Osteryoung. For the first time since Trinan had died, Crow felt that enthusiastic high of having something bigger to work on, some point to getting up every morning, besides his son. It was the way a compass must feel when you took it out of a circle of magnets and let it get a bearing again on true north. Osteryoung was right, that spacecraft was meant for human travelers, but more importantly, the idea presented Crow with an impossible goal, which was exactly what he loved to have. "Let your reach exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for?" Crow asked himself as he pulled into the rose gardens outside of Stanford on a few acres that had been converted from strip malls into a compound of sorts for the Humanist movement.

He found Father Thomas wandering among the roses, holding a small book and reading as he paced along the narrow dirt paths. The perfume of roses and fragrant bushes hung redolent in the air, a visible taint of yellow pollen hanging in the air over head, swirling and sparkling the afternoon sun.

"Prayer book?" Crow asked, interrupting Father Thomas midstep.

The old Jesuit started and took a step back. He smiled after a moment, composing himself. "Actually, it's Machiavelli."

"Aw." Crow said in acknowledgement. "Number three on the Catholic's required reading list."

"What brings you here, Crow?" Father Thomas asked. "It's been a couple months."

 "Been on the road a bit." Crow admitted.

"The path less taken?"

"I don't think anyone's ever quite taken this path." Crow said. "How goes the movement?"

"Win some, lose some." Father Thomas said coolly. "And your side of the war?"

"I think I defected." Crow said. He laughed shortly, with an almost hysterical edge to the laughter. "First I helped your buddies take out International Robotics and now I'm working for Da Vinci Law on special projects."

Chapter Nine - The Truer Path

Contrary to popular belief, the name Centaurion was not a typo. It was a clever play on the fact that the spacecraft's destination was Alpha Centauri, the closest star to Earth. Actually, it was the closest star to Earth besides the Sun, but the only people who made that trite distinction were the same ones who thought it was astute to point out that people actually only had eight fingers - the other two were thumbs. It was a moot point anyway since three-fourths of the population did not notice that Centaurion was not spelled the same as Centurion.

The Centaurion hung in orbit at the first La Grange point, which guaranteed a stable position between the Earth and the moon which did not move relative to either. For various reasons of physics, this position greatly simplified the construction of an interstellar craft by providing simple access to the resources of both the moon and the Earth. Frequent shuttles ran between the two solar bodies and the construction site, where what had begun as a small space station had blossomed into a hodge-podge arrangement of tacked on modules and cobbled together technologies. When the sun tilted at the right angle, light glinted off the silvery cylinders like aluminum foil left in the afternoon glare.

Crow had paid passing attention to the building of the Centaurion, mainly fueled by his interest in anything technological. It had begun as the brainchild of one Lawrence Janus, an almost unknown engineer out of Embry-Riddle who had published a sudden paper three years ago that had in the passing years gained more and more comparison to Einstein's explosion onto the physics scene with the Theory of Relativity. Janus had simply not done anything particularly revolutionary up to the publication of Stable Particle Acceleration Beyond c within a Magnetic Matrix using Finite Energy Expenditures. In plain English, it was the theoretical design for a faster than light drive, something that could reach the stars within a sane amount of time.

The world after the Sentient revolt had needed some sort of symbol of progress to cling to, and Janus had given it to them. Governmental support had soon followed and a series of well-publicized launches had placed the pieces in orbit to build the construction site. Crow remembered the satisfaction of the rockets lifting off in their slow motion acceleration upwards, plowing up through the atmosphere from launch sites in a dozen countries. Step one. It had been called with the tingling electricity of anticipation for the second step, the step that had been far beyond the reach of humanity until one Lawrence Janus. It had contained that adrenaline soaked awe of your first kiss, or watching your team win the world series. That's what I should have been working on instead of artificial brains. Crow had thought to himself, but it was as impossible to choose your passion as it was to choose how many moons hung in the sky.

The controversy had begun in the last year when it was determined that after the billions spent on the Centaurion, it would be crewless. The reasoning was relatively valid, that mankind had simply never built life support systems that could last for the years needed in space.

"There are thousands who would take any risk, pay any price, to crew that ship." Osteryoung had said. "All exploration into the frontiers is fraught with danger, otherwise they wouldn't be frontiers. Humans deserve to be on that ship. We should not cede our species' greatest triumph to our creations."

"Then there is no middle ground for you?" Crow asked. "No way that peace can be made?" He didn't know if he asked to be difficult or because he actually saw the point as having validity.

"Peace? Peace with the thing that seeks your destruction can never be more than a temporary measure. That we do not strike immediately is a matter of tactics, not negotiation. Never negotiation. These are dark times Crow. In times such as these there can be no middle ground, no room for moderates."

"I think you'll find though that ninety percent of people are moderates." Crow said. "The numbers are against you."

"The numbers are always against the side in the right." Osteryoung said. "That's what keeps history interesting, the fact that lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for." Osteryoung stared out at the Golden Gate bridge, where traffic was back up into the hills above Sausalito. "The moderates do not matter. They never do in the grand scheme of things, revolution belongs to the extremist alone, and I think there is little doubt left that we live in a time of revolution."

Crow nodded, watched the traffic not move for a few seconds. "And what do you want from me?"

"Do you share our cause?" Osteryoung asked.

"In what sense?"

"The eradication of sentient machines in that they represent a threat to the human race." Osteryoung said without hesitation.

"Yes." Crow said. It was not a lie exactly, but what his father would have described as a ninety-truth. It was ninety percent true, but the ten percent of falseness would take an hour to explain whereas the ninety percent that was truth was self-evident. Crow thought of the half-made Trinan in his basement with some shame, the way it was hidden like a stash of pornography from puritan eyes. Yes, but that's different. Crow lied to himself. He thought also of Nan, taking so much a burden off of him that it approached surrogate parent status of sorts.

"The sentis killed Trinan." Crow said, feeling more explanation was due. "My own life's work exploded in my face, and I've waited too long to try to rectify that."

Osteryoung studied his face for a moment. "Good." He said. "You have obvious propaganda value to our cause, but I do not think that is the best use for your talents. We may of course issue some press releases, et cetera, but I think we will have you work with Hydane in particular."

Crow nodded and Osteryoung went on.

"I presume you have heard of the Centaurion being built in orbit?"

"Yes." Crow said. "Who hasn't heard of those breakthroughs?"

Osteryoung smiled. "Yes. It is an encouraging idea that in these days of thinking machines, one of the greatest inventions of history came out of nowhere from a human genius."

"And what do you want me to do?" Crow asked.

"Oh, nothing much." Osteryoung said with a transcendent smile. "We'd like you to steal the Centaurion."

"I woke up in between

a memory and a dream"

-Tom Petty

Nations are collective dreams, born when a critical mass of people believe in them, dying when that belief dissipates. In the late nineteenth century, Germany manufactured a thousand year national identity virtually overnight. For most of history, the story of the Germanic peoples of central Europe was one of indomitable unconquerability, swallowing the armies of would be overlords whole, ungovernable even by fellow Germans. Principalities allied in confederations, but retained sovereignty. They'd fight invaders, but also fight each other in endless confused wars. That was the story of Germany until Bismarck, and it was a story the rest of Europe was happy to hear, because a unified Germany was as powerful as the rest of Europe combined. Balance of power politics didn't work if a single state could counter the weight of everyone else.

The new story forged Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Hanseatics into Germans. It was a story told so well, so convincingly, that ten million Germans would give their lives for it in the following seventy years. It was so persistent that even forty years of occupation and partition did not dim the concept of a German nation among Germans. They were neither Eastern nor Western, but Germans all, these men whose grandfathers did not call their sons German.

Africa is a continent where the dreams do not match the landscape. Lines wander across the map, doodled two centuries previously by Europeans playing at emperor. Dozens of states stand as hollow shells, nothing but political entities, bodies without souls. The pattern repeats in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe. Broken little states without identities, civil wars and border massacres rage for decades with breathers when the peacemakers come for a few years to allay their consciences. People don't follow laws, they follow stories. When there is no story, when a state is just a state, mere anarchy is loosed and blood runs in the streets. Only a murderous will can maintain control and order in the face of utter chaos, that's why these democracies disintegrate even with perfect constitutions and the promise of a better life. The cycle of blood is never broken with institutions or foreign armies, it will churn forever until a leader comes who can tell the people who they are.

Rome lasted a thousand years after its state was gone, carried as a spark in the back of every western mind. The dreams of Rome live in every western capital, every fluted column and marble façade ripped straight from the Capitaline. We build Rome again and again because we still dream the same dream, tell and retell the same story of republic and empire.

America has its own myths and stories. Declarations, tea parties, cowboys and Indians. The Depression, defender of Democracy, vanguard of the Free World. We walked on the moon, played baseball, beat the commies and the Nazis. None of it's particularly accurate, but all of it is true. We are what we believe we are. Our dreams and myths define what we try to be, but they also mask the errors of our past. The belief in exceptionalism makes us exceptional, but it also enables our sins.

We don't like to remember that Jefferson owned slaves, that we had to be dragged against our wishes into the crusade for democracy, that JFK screwed everything with a skirt and got us closer to Armageddon than we've ever been, or that at one point or another we've invaded just about every country in the western hemisphere. We make the same mistakes over and over again because we really believe that we're doing it for the first time, that every evil is the exception to the rule. The myth of history is that we would do it differently if we got a chance, but the truth is that we do get the chance every day, and we rarely change a thing.

If Americans, or the citizens of any nation, ever saw their history in a perfect mirror, the intertwined horrors and heroism, the dream of the country would die. It might be replaced by something different, more honest, but it might just leave a void. Changing the dream without waking is a tricky proposition.

The greatest danger is that the dream fractures, especially along easy geographic lines, as it did once before. The problem does not arise when people disagree over what the country should be; that's the essence of politics. The danger lurks when people disagree over what the country was and is. When half the country believes in one story and dream, and the other half believes a mutually exclusive story and dream, the country as a whole is in grave danger.

"Real Americans", "godless liberals", "ignorant rednecks", "ivory tower intellectuals", "left coast", "socialist elites", "Jesus freaks". On the surface, it's just name calling, but underneath it's the opening salvos of a civil war, urged on by cable television. The story is falling apart, the people are awaking from their collective dream. A nation cannot survive as a schizophrenic, any more than a mind can dream two dreams at the same time.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand ... I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -  I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." -Abraham Lincoln