Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer

  His smile grew sheepish. “I do have a lot of questions. What are … what are the limits of this power? What exactly can Bridger do?”

  The big one first. “I have no idea what limits if any Bridger’s power has, I can only describe what I’ve seen them do. They can animate representations. Any representation real enough to feel real to them: a mud pie, a doll, a drawing. That may be all they can do, or there may be a thousand other things, but Bridger is a timid kid and understands play, and feels comfortable with toys, so that’s the only sort of thing they’ve done so far.”

  He nodded. “When they make things real, do they become what Bridger imagines, or what the maker of the thing imagines? You know how sometimes a kid might play with a doll that’s supposed to be some movie character, but the kid doesn’t know the character and invents a different one.”

  I nodded. “It seems to become something of a mixture. Bridger found a toy hot air balloon once, and burned themself on the fire inside. They knew what the balloon was but not how it worked, but when they miracled it it had fire anyway. And the soldiers’ guns and things have working, moving parts which Bridger couldn’t name or recognize. The soldiers speak modern English like a child would expect, but they don’t have modern attitudes, they have attitudes of hundreds of years ago when those ancient soldier toys were made. They use ‘he’ and ‘she,’ and swear by religious things in public, and remember a darker age.”

  “Do they…” Carlyle frowned. “This is a hard question to phrase, but do they remember real things? Real lives? A toy doll of a fairytale prince is pretend, but toy soldiers are representations of real soldiers who really lived. Has Bridger created pretend soldiers, or re-created real people who really lived and died?”

  “If they were real there’s no way to look them up, they don’t have real historical people’s names, they have the childish names Bridger gave them: Pointer, Croucher, Looker. But Bridger did miracle a real person once.”

  Wide eyes. “They did?”

  “A photograph from an old book, a friendly looking person they wanted to play with. Emma Platz was their name, Bridger didn’t make that one up. With flat pictures it works as if you were talking to each other through a screen. The person on the other side can see and hear you, but you can’t reach them.”

  Carlyle leaned toward me with such energy he almost toppled the little stool. “Is there a whole world in the image? Can other people show up? Does time pass?”

  I frowned. “We’ve only tried it the once. There’s a limit to how much you can experiment with creating life before it becomes too cruel, for Bridger as well as for the subject. You know how kids fall apart when a pet dies and it was their fault. It was much worse with Emma.”

  “What went wrong?”

  I felt myself wince at the memory. “Emma couldn’t stay in the portrait chair forever, not without food and drink, and having to go to the bathroom. They went out of the edge of the photo, and never came back. We don’t know why. Possibly they ceased to exist when they left the frame, but from their end they said they could see all the other rooms and places in the house just fine. We’ve considered animating another photograph, but it’s too hard on Bridger. When they’re grown and ready, then we can try more.”

  He nodded. “What did Emma remember? Was it their real life or an imaginary one?”

  “I couldn’t confirm. They remembered a whole lifetime up to death, but not a very traceable life; it was a very early photograph, from when unfamous people left few records, women more so. I found documents pointing to a couple different people who could have been our Emma Platz, but there wasn’t much to trace.”

  “Do you still have the photograph?”

  “Of course, but the miracle’s worn off. The daylight in the room isn’t changing anymore.”

  “It wears off?”

  “Yes, Mem—” I caught myself, “Carlyle. For inanimate objects it’s permanent, but it seems life is a special kind of miracle that doesn’t last so long. Bridger has to re-miracle the soldiers every month or so, and Boo.”

  “Life is special kind of miracle,” he repeated, half-whispered, like a prayer.

  I nodded. “That’s why Bridger can’t just raise the dead.”

  Carlyle froze. “Right. Right.” He paused. You and I cannot read minds, reader, but we both know the torrent of possibilities which were multiplying in Carlyle from that thought. “Did Emma Platz … no, it wouldn’t help.”

  “Did Emma Platz what?”

  I caught a tremor in his lips. “Did Emma Platz remember the afterlife?”

  I felt my heart thrill at the question too. A sensayer’s question. “No, but Pointer may tomorrow, when Bridger brings them back.”

  Pale skin went paler. “You’ve decided, then? To bring them back?”

  “Not yet, but Bridger will feel sad and guilty every day forever if they don’t do it. Could you resist, day in, day out, if you could resurrect a friend?”

  “No. No, I couldn’t. No one could.”

  I did not correct him. I waited for more questions, but four breaths passed and Carlyle was still mulling on the afterlife, fidgeting with his hair and watching me hazily as I crawled across the floor. I watched him in return, the curve of his little chin, the fierce blue of his eyes, almost unnatural. Many would say it is unnatural, since his mother’s perfection had been handcrafted trait by trait from the finest chromosomes French ancestry offered, but Aristotle—the Philosopher—reminds us that man is an animal, a part of nature just as much as fruit and vine, so Danaë’s too-blue eyes, too-practiced gestures, even her lotus blossom tower of glass and steel, all are as natural as peacock’s plumes, or beaver dams. “Why were you given this assignment?” I asked at last.

  Carlyle was still staring more through me than at me. “That is the question…”

  Nothing could have endeared the Cousin to me more. He thought I meant it metaphysically, that I meant to ask what Fate, what Hand, what meddling spirit or inexorable Clockmaker had placed him in Bridger’s path. That’s all he thought of. Even after Eureka’s questioning, it didn’t occur to him that I was suspicious of his assignment, that I smelled a rat behind this green, young Cousin who had been granted access to this most private Humanist bash’. If there was a motive, some enemy of the Humanists, or of Andō and Danaë moving in the dark, this sweet, sincere, true vocateur sensayer didn’t know.

  “When you started to doubt it was real,” I began softly, “was it because you thought it was impossible? Or was it because it’s something you’ve always wanted to be true so badly that, now that it is true, you’re worried you just deceived yourself into believing?”

  Something in the question made him hide behind his hair. “I’ve never wished to bring toys to life.”

  “Miracle. That is what you’re thinking, I know it is. You said you weren’t afraid of the word ‘miracle.’”

  “You know I can’t discuss too deeply.”

  “You can. This isn’t a session, Member … Carlyle. You’re not my sensayer. I have a court-appointed sensayer.”

  “If this isn’t a session, it’s borderline illegal.”

  I rose; some things should not be said while on one’s knees. “It’s a law we have to break.” I met his gaze, and held it. “We have to. In the name of science, reason, all humanity. Something is happening with Bridger, something real, magical, metaphysical. We have to discuss it, test it. We have to figure out what to do. It could be the most important thing that’s ever happened. Or things like this could have happened a hundred thousand times throughout history, but there’s some deeper reason history hid them all. This isn’t a question of us risking disrupting world peace by spreading some cult belief. This is a question of uncovering the deep truth about the provable reality humanity lives in, and someday sharing that.”

  I want to say that Carlyle paused to steel himself, but his movements were all the signatures of weakness: huddling, hugging himself within the encircling looseness of his Cousin’s wrap, like a chi
ld amid the covers. But I think, in his gentle way, that was his steel. “I could say many cults have thought the same. But you’re right. The potential is too great, the immediate, human applications if we can understand this power. We can’t investigate it fully without talking about the theological end as well.” He took a deep breath. “And on that note, I’ve been thinking, is it really right to wait and not show Bridger to anyone until they’re an adult? What if something happens in the meantime? What if Bridger falls and breaks their neck? All that potential gone. And even without that, there’s all the good this power could do that isn’t being done in the meantime. Not raising the dead necessarily, that has a lot of other implications we have to look at, but smaller things. Bridger could cure Stereocox.”

  “We have.”

  “What?”

  “I had Bridger make a cure eighteen months ago and sent it anonymously to Pele Chemical. Testing is underway.”

  “You … you did…”

  “Remember three years ago when they found a treatment for Waldfogel’s Vein? That was Bridger too.”

  He swallowed. “But Bridger can do more than just cure one disease. That healing potion can make wounds vanish instantly.”

  “And if something like that turned up anonymously on a lab’s doorstep, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t rest until they’d traced it. We’ve tried to test it, but the potion transformed the microscope itself. It’s beyond current science, or at least beyond equipment we can get at without leaving a paper trail. Hopefully science will explain it someday, even reproduce it, but they won’t learn to really understand it without access to the source. For that, Bridger needs to be ready to face becoming the center of all the hope and envy of the world, and before that can happen they need to learn to talk to strangers.”

  Carlyle nodded, but there was still an edge of huddle in his poise. “But every day…”

  I stood my ground. “Moral calculus like that will drive you crazy. The people who die today or tomorrow because they don’t have Bridger’s potions aren’t on your conscience, any more than the people who died yesterday, or a thousand years ago. We’re doing what we can with Bridger. We’re on the edge now of moving from baby steps to real steps. You’re the first real step. If you do well, the second may come soon. That’s all anyone could ask.”

  He smiled. “Yes. You’re right. And I can do it well, I know I ca—” The growl of his angry stomach cut him off.

  I laughed aloud. “You forgot to feed yourself today, didn’t you?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “There’s a lunch box on the table,” I offered, “good and fresh. Eat.”

  “Thank you.” He took it and had started on the dainty knot before he realized. “Wait, this … I can’t take food from a Servicer. You earned this. I’m supposed to feed you.”

  I almost snickered. “Bridger can make filet mignon out of cardboard. I’m not going to go hungry.”

  He returned my smile. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” I mumbled it, distracted by remembering whose delicate fingers had prepared the plump little lunch that Fate and I had placed in the Gag-gene’s hands. “I mean, you’re welcome. It’s the least I can offer after I tackled you before. Thank you for not reporting me.”

  Carlyle smile grew richer. “You’ve offered a lot more than that. You did this very well, very gently. You answered a lot, and pushed me when I needed to be pushed. You’re right that we have to talk about this, about what we think it means, that we have to use words like ‘miracle,’ ‘metaphysics,’ ‘fate,’ as well as ‘magic’ and ‘phenomenon.’ But you haven’t pushed me to actually do it yet.”

  I knelt once more to my work. “It’s easy to tell you’re the one who’s exhausted.”

  “True enough.” He chuckled at himself. “Were you a sensayer?”

  This was an unexpected stroke. Carlyle has absorbed a little of that art of cutting to the quick which the current Conclave teaches, but in him it is usually stifled by natural gentleness. I realize, reader, that I should apologize for my confusing language, since if my ‘he’ and ‘she’ mean anything then certainly this sweet and gentle Cousin in her flowing wrap should be ‘she.’ In this case, alas, I am commanded by an outside power to give Carlyle the masculine, to remind you that this long-lost scion is a prince, not princess, a fact which matters in the eyes of some, and of the law. But I shall do my best to remind you often that a Cousin’s maternal heart beats beneath Carlyle’s broad chest, and I promise, reader, to be consistent in making other Cousins ‘she.’

  “No, I was never a sensayer or anything,” I answered. “I committed my crimes too young.”

  Pity touched his kind, too-keen blue eyes, willing to forgive any repentant convict, however great our unknown crimes. “Would you have been one? You have that feel when you talk.”

  “I don’t know. I never thought that far ahead. But if I were a sensayer, and if this were a session, I think I would say now that you’ve had enough new revelations for one day, and that you should take that lunch box home to rest and digest. All the universe and Bridger will still be here tomorrow, as will I.”

  This may be the highest compliment Carlyle can pay: “You would have made a good one.”

  HERE ENDS THE FIRST DAY OF THIS HISTORY.

  CHAPTER THE SIXTH

  Rome Was Not Built in a Day …

  … But it was built in a year, as the new saying goes; Romanova, a sparkling sea of marble and bright bronze, built up from nothing in three hundred days to be the capital of our new world of Hives. In 2198, Emperor Agrippa MASON was tasked to choose a plan for the Alliance capital. Among the endless submissions of grand grids and lavish Spectacle Cities, an unofficial entry surfaced, numbered 40½, containing nothing but a cheap tourist’s poster of ancient Rome, which had been slipped into the mix by a bold young secretary named Mycroft Ragbinder (or Frustinexor, to give a Mason’s name its rightful Latin). The smart-aleck even labeled the ancient buildings with suggested modern counterparts: the Alliance Senate in the Senate House, the Supreme Polylaw Court in the Basilica Julia, the Sensayers’ Conclave in the House of the Vestal Virgins. Agrippa MASON saw genius in the plan, a message to the world that, despite how tattered war had left the continents, this age of honeybees could build, as easily as raise a tent, the capital of capitals whose legend had named every capital to follow. This would not be the simple reconstruction of Rome as she had stood before the Church War, though that too Agrippa MASON undertook. This was greatness ex nihilo, to raise from nothing on some blank corner of the Earth the city of marble as she had stood when she had ruled the first Empire to need no name beyond the Empire. The evening the Alliance accepted MASON’s plan, the Emperor wrote to his oldest ba’sib that he expected, if he raised this young Mycroft Frustinexor to his full potential, then, as with Phillip and Alexander, Agrippa’s name would endure in history only in the tales of his successor. (Nomen meum sempiternum, si hunc juvenem ad totam potentiam tollo, permanebit, sed, sicut Phillipi Macedonis, tantum in biographis eius qui post me regnabit. —Epistolae Agrippae MASONIS, IV, iii.)

  The drizzly morning of the twenty-fourth saw me with my fellow Servicers cleaning up what robots couldn’t of a sewer rupture in Marseille. It was perfect work for us, work no one wants to do (especially not on Renunciation Day), the kind of work which makes free people glad that we exist to do it in their stead. And we prefer it too, since the absence of our betters frees us to enjoy the company of equals. Does it surprise you that there is camaraderie among the Servicers? Even pride? We are a strat of sorts, as united in our hearts as fishermen or Greeks or skiers are. We have ideas in common, experiences, we share stories in the dorms at night, folk music, tips about better patrons and bad, much as hoboes and beggars did in bygone days, though you must not imagine any hidden beggar cities in the sewer tunnels, nor any Beggar King.

  A man leapt from a car into the midst of the mess, seized me by the collar, and shook me so violently that my hat flew o
ff into the muck. “How many times, Mycroft?” he shouted in my face. “I’ve been calling for two hours! You’re not allowed to waste yourself like this!”

  “Hey!” One of my newer comrades (I am not permitted to include their names) shoved forward, fists raised in my defense. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Another Servicer, who knew me better, held out a restraining arm. “Let it be.”

  “But…”

  “The Censor’s in the right, let it be.”

  “The Censor?”

  Perhaps you share this new Servicer’s shocked awe as she recognizes, beneath a gray raincoat, the porphyry blood-purple uniform of the Romanovan Censor. If the Alliance has a face it is Censor Vivien Ancelet, embarrassed now at being caught in an act so easy to misinterpret, but even in embarrassment he was intimidating, not with physicality, but with the weight of intellect behind it. The rain made the deep dye of his uniform almost scab-black, and brought out vividly the sparkle of its gold piping, and of the Olympic stripes which rimmed his shoes, proclaiming his youthful medals in mathematics and debate. There is France in the Censor’s birth bash’, in his vowels and his Rs, and Africa in his face, his dreadlocks, and the darkness of his skin, but he wears no strat insignia apart from the cuff pins of his math and puzzle clubs, investing all his pride in the Graylaw Hiveless sash about his hips, and the purple uniform across his shoulders. The office of Censor is just as paradoxical in our age as it was in ancient Rome: neither executive nor lawmaker, commander nor judge, yet more potent than any in its own way. As master of the census, charged with tracking changes in membership and wealth, the Censor judges when one of the seven Hives should gain or lose a Senator, and thereby holds the balance of the planet in his hands. Since he makes and unmakes lawmakers, we may call him a grandfather of laws, and, as the most prominent life appointment in the Alliance, he is the only officer in Romanova that the media can turn into a prince.