John Barnes by The Merchants of Souls

Author:The Merchants of Souls [Souls, The Merchants of]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-11T23:53:06+00:00

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Margaret always hated rough stuff, on any mission. She disapproved of even a simple riot, or a good wallop in the face with a bare fist, even when it was done for the best of reasons. So when Shan ordered me to start a brawl in public with a local religious bigot, I was really more worried about how Margaret would feel than how it would go. The man was twenty kg overweight, to begin with, and something about him smelled of coward; I did not fear him, but I worried about Margaret’s disapproval, especially if I enjoyed this as much as I thought I would.

My target’s name was Amberian Molyneux, and he was probably the last man in Trois-Orléans to wear, regularly, the huge cravats that had been popular a generation and a half before. We were to have dinner, at which he planned to lecture me on the idea that any art not made to serve his hobbyhorse—some sort of vague High Catholic estheticism—was by definition bad and should be fought and suppressed, and it was the job of every worthy critic (by which he meant his own circle in Trois-Orléans) to bombard all other artists everywhere with insulting messages telling them to start doing what mattered.

Since the colony ships had arrived in the early 25th century, there had been one full-blown civil war on Roosevelt, a couple of abortive restarts of the war since then, and dozens of scares. And although most of Roosevelt’s III cultures were in most ways homogenized into the Interstellar metaculture—after all, it was an Inner Sphere world—somehow, on that planet, a prickly tradition had evolved of defending a few selected aspects of one’s culture with punctilious passion.

Molyneux had been standing in a room full of these little buckets of cultural gasoline, lighting matches and throwing them around; it drew attention, and every critic I’ve ever known (Noupeitau crawls and seethes with them) had an unsatisfiable craving for that.

Molyneux had been shrewd enough to make it appear that his routine invitations to cultural affairs parties at the Embassy were endorsements from the Council of Humanity—or at least make it so appear to his more loyal allies and his more paranoid adversaries. We needed to dissociate ourselves from him. Furthermore, we needed to do it in a way that would humiliate him, reducing him quickly to the level of the maniacs who send their quaint historical and scientific ravings to everyone in the universe.

There’s a word in ki hara do, kuzushi, that applies to many other parts of life. Kuzushi is what you do when your opponent is extending himself off balance, and you push or pull him in the ways he is already moving.

Since Molyneux had begun to put forth the claim that we were endorsing him—subtly, admittedly, but strongly enough so that no one could mistake that was what he was doing—we had gently encouraged the notion that we were doing so. Slowly, we had won him away from many of his

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