A choice is all that you have: The Escapement, by K.J. Parker (Book 3 in The Engineer Trilogy)

 This morning, I will wrap up my discussion of K.J. Parker's Engineer Trilogy, with The Escapement.  It is perhaps appropriate that the final book is partially mechanical, both in its writing technique and plotting, making it the first K.J. Parker book I have read that was not a 100% success, if not precisely a disappointment.  The ever-expanding war between Mezentia, Eremia, the Vadani and the Aram Chantat of the Cure Hardy began, and snowballed because, as the characters never cease to remind us, they love.  Their circumstances, consequently, leave them no choice.  Of course, Parker (pen name for Tom Holt) does not intend to say that wars happen, nor that anything happens because we are clockwork automatons without choice, fulfilling the functions set by an engineer like Ziani Vaatzes who is, himself, acting without choice.  We have choice.  In the end, that is all that we have.

Refresher.  The series takes place on a non-magical alternate world.  The Vadani and the Eremians operate at a Middle Ages level of technology, while Mezentia, "the Perpetual Republic," has industrialized and built a society, law and moral code around engineering principles.  They do not have electricity or gunpowder, but they have mass production and clockwork engineering centuries beyond anyone else in precision.  Eremia stupidly attacks Mezentia, and gets its army demolished.  Fleeing home, they find an escaping prisoner-- Ziani Vaatzes-- who was to face the death penalty for deviating from prescribed design, making a toy for his daughter.  Eremia gives him sanctuary, he makes weapons for them to defend against Mezentine reprisal, but double-crosses Eremia as part of a Rube Goldberg plot to get back home, and get back his wife, no matter how much destruction he leaves in his wake.  In Book 2, he has left Eremia destroyed, and Civitas Vadanis is next.  They face a coming war with Mezentia, with Vaatzes working for the Vadani while going behind their backs to Mezentia, scheming for his ultimate end of getting back to his wife, but Civitas Vadanis is ultimately doomed as well.  Vaatzes forces the Vadani to cross the desert and latch onto the Aram Chantat, of the Cure Hardy.  They are like sophisticated Mongols.  The Aram Chantat need to expand to new land, and they have a massive army, which can wipe out Mezentia, a match made in hell, after (of course) mass death in the desert crossing.

And this brings us to The Escapement.  By now, the Aram Chantat have brought a massive army across the desert to attack Mezentia, with the novel focusing on the siege of their city.  Siege warfare is a brutal slog, and both Duke Valens, of the Vadani and Lucao Psellus, the new guy in charge of the Perpetual Republic are literally reading from the same book.  Psellus found an old book on siege warfare, which he started using to build defenses, and Valens recognized the designs because he had a copy of the same, damned book in his personal library.  A strategy game when both players have the same book is a bit of a problem, but there are a few wrinkles.  Most importantly, Vaatzes and Psellus are actually cutting a deal behind everyone's backs.

Vaatzes wants to present the Aram Chantat as the ultimate threat to everyone on this side of the desert, creating a clearly unsustainable alliance between the Vadani and the Aram Chantat, and an immediately existential threat to Mezentia in the form of a siege.  When he presents these facts to Duke Valens of the Vadani, and Lucao Psellus, they eventually have to turn collectively on the Aram Chantat and form a fragile peace.  There are mass casualties, but if one is very generous to Vaatzes, he does create some sort of peace, and uses the opportunity to reunite with his wife, albeit in the creepiest possible way because while he "loved" her, by some definition of the word, she did not care about him in the slightest.  Indeed, she was the one who set him up in the first place, but the end of the book/series is Vaatzes pressuring her in the creepiest way to leave the City with him for a new life, even though she clearly wants nothing to do with him.

Yeah, "love."  And because he "loved" his wife, he had no choice, as this was the only way he saw to reunite with her.

From the start of the series, characters spoke of love leading to the worst rather than the best in humanity.  They repeated lines like, "I have no choice."  It was occasionally reminiscent of Babylon 5, in which characters-- particularly but not limited to Londo Mollari-- would excuse their own worst behavior by insisting that they had no choice.  Yet of course, they always had choices.  They simply chose what was easiest, tempting or expedient rather than hard and right.  You always have a choice.  You have nothing else.  That is all that you have.

To the degree that there is a flaw in The Escapement, it is taking these ideas and beating the reader over the head with them rather than letting the ideas work on their own.  Show, don't tell.

Yes, Tom, we got the "love" point in Book 1.  Nice, but we do not need to be beaten over the head with it.  It is a nice twist to have "love" be the motivator, and hence "cause" of evil, but not entirely original.  One could make the same claim about The Iliad, with another understanding of love, no?  As I said, show, don't tell.  Throughout Books 1 and 2, Holt shows rather than tells, with only a few tellings.  There are just a few too many tellings in The Escapement, and "I have no choice," or some variation thereof appears on damn-near every page.  Yes, we got it.  Vaatzes started making the point at the start of the series, but there is a point at which repetition of the phrase gets in the way.

Yet let us consider.  Some of these characters have more sympathetic positions than others, and in the end, Vaatzes does create some kind of peace.  That is a typically K.J. Parker writing trick, where the vile protagonist manages to wrest something "good" out of horrific actions.

Yet Vaatzes had a choice.  At the start of the series, he escaped his execution, and one can judge if he was justified or not in killing to do so.  He believed that he did wrong by building the machine he built, because he believed in Mezentine principles.  Yet he escaped, and killed to do so.  Upon escaping, though, he could simply have accepted-- "assented"-- that he would never be able to live in Mezentia again, and indeed, he never would.  He could have assented to the loss of his family, and indeed, the terms under which he reunited with his wife were dishonest at best, and rather, horrifyingly manipulative, but then, his wife was actually quite vile, so make of that what you will.  Yet he did make choices.  He chose massive wars.  Thousands upon thousands dead.  A better peace in the end, by happenstance?  Perhaps, but how one judges that is a question for fundamental moral philosophy.

The Eremian and Vadani dukes, Orsea and Valens.  They had choices.  Orsea The Inept (my name for him) thought that he had no choice about whatever he deemed right, but he never got it really right, and certainly not in the matter of attacking Mezentia in the first place, which was the true spark of everything.  Valens brought the war to his doorstep by riding to the rescue of Orsea's wife, whom he loved, but that was a choice.  Love and choices.  Was it right?  He knew it was wrong in a bigger-picture sense.  A romantic gesture as a character he invented for himself, but he brought down his own nation in the process.

Daurenja.  I have not had anything to say about him.  He was introduced in Evil For Evil, as first a would-be assistant to Vaatzes, who actually had a much bigger agenda.  He was a creep, a nutjob, a genius, and he believed that he had a kind of mission that gave him no choice, turning everyone else into machine parts, or at least trying, and envying Vaatzes for being better at that aspect which we might call small-scale social engineering.  Daurenja thought that the invention of gunpowder would end war, bring down governments and create a kind of anarchist utopia because nobody would be stupid enough to do anything like fight with gunpowder in the mix, hence his almost religious zeal and belief that he had no choice but to do anything that he did, vile as any step might be.

The known wrongness of Daurenja's motivating belief brings into stark relief all claims about who does and does not have a choice.  Who has a choice?  Everyone.  At all times.  You have nothing else.  Vaatzes could have walked away, and then no trilogy.  Orsea could have skipped the initial attack on Mezentia, and then no trilogy.  Miel Ducas could have shirked duty or reinterpreted it time and again throughout the books, and same deal.  Valens could have left Veatriz to her fate, meaning Vaatzes probably would have died in the Mezentine siege of Civitas Eremiae, and then the series ends with the first book.  Everyone has a choice, at all times.

You have literally nothing else.  You may not like the consequences of your alternatives, but you have a choice.  If someone puts a gun to your head and demands that you do X, then even if you believe the threat, you have a choice.  You may die by saying no, but you know what?

You are not immortal.  Acceding to the threat will not make you immortal.  It will only make you a slave.  What you have at that point in time is a choice, and nothing else.

The man with the gun also has a choice.  I make my choice, and you make yours.  We all die, with the question being whether we die with a clear conscience or not.

In every circumstance in which a person or group denies the existence of a choice, that person or group is making a dishonest and disingenuous excuse for making a moral compromise or flat-out immoral choice.  The difference between those with clarity and those who obfuscate will be as follows.

Those who think and act with clarity will lay out their choices, explain how each choice will lead to outcomes A, B and C, compare those outcomes, compare the deontological properties of each choice, compare decision rules and explain their reasoning under constraint.

Whoever simply says, "I had no choice," without actually examining what the specific choices were?  That's your villain, right there.

Ain't no heroes.  There are just people, some better, some worse, some trying harder, some not, making choices in a shitty world.  But everyone has a choice, and whoever says otherwise is a shitbag trying to excuse a bad choice, and often an inexcusable one.

Richard Thompson, "Take Care The Road You Choose," live.  The studio version is on Sweet Warrior.