Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “I didn’t specify a ‘that.’ Whatever you’re doing, I don’t care what it is, move it, postpone it, end it. I do not want to see that sensayer back until someone who isn’t you has a session scheduled, and I do not want more trackless people in this room.”

  Carlyle and Thisbe traded frowns, but there was no good answer. “All right.”

  “Is that Mycroft in there with you?” He switched to English to remind me that I was an outsider.

  “Ye-es, it’s just me, Member Ockham,” I answered, happy at this chance to screen the others. “I’m sorry. I should have—”

  “Until this is over, Mycroft, you can’t visit anymore, not even for the investigation. Work elsewhere.”

  “You need me!” I cried. “I know these people. I know what you’re facing. I’m your best chance at stability.”

  “Your advice is welcome, but while so many eyes are on us you’re the biggest danger here. We tried our best, but dozens of people from today’s drill know enough to leak that something happened here. Normally I let you visit on condition that you’re no threat to our work, but if the media catches Mycroft Canner here you’ll be a bigger story than Sniper.”

  “Canner?” Carlyle repeated it, half-voiced. “Mycroft … Canner?”

  I turned. I turned white. We had tried so hard, reader. ‘Mycroft,’ ‘Mycroft,’ never the dreaded surname, not in front of this good innocent. Three days of purloined trust.

  “You’re … Mycroft Canner?” Carlyle burst out. “The Mycroft Canner?” He searched the shadow of my hat for the telltale chunk missing from my right ear. I let him find it. I know, reader, when the avalanche can no longer be stopped. “They made Mycroft Canner a Servicer!”

  “Shit, is the sensayer in there?” Ockham called through the door.

  “Yes.” Thisbe groaned. “Stay calm, Carlyle. Mycroft’s not dangerous anymore.”

  He was already shaking. “Not dangerous? Mycroft Canner!”

  I gave Bridger my kindest smile through the crack of the closet door, then backed to the far side of the room, keeping my empty hands where Carlyle could see them, and my eyes on the floor.

  “A Servicer!” Carlyle repeated. “Servicers are supposed to be … not … not…” He turned on me, more comfortable when he could point a finger. “You! You tortured seventeen people to death! You videoed yourself vivisecting Mercer Mardi! You crucified your foster ba’pa! You dismembered a thirteen-year-old child and left them a limbless torso to freeze to death in the Arctic! Ibis Mardi was in love with you, and you beat them until they begged for death, then raped them, and cooked and ate their arms and legs while they were still alive! Are you smiling?”

  “Sorry.” I try my best to remain expressionless during such outbursts. “Everyone has one among the seventeen they think was worst. I’d guessed that Ibis would be yours.”

  “You ripped out their still-beating heart and ate it!”

  “It stopped beating,” I corrected softly. “I tried it seven times, but I could never get the heart out fast enough. I think that art is lost now, in our peaceful age.”

  Carlyle’s breath sped as the passions of those days surged back. Carlyle would have been, what … fifteen back then? Preparing to move from his foster bash’ to a Campus, finding his vocation, that impressionable age when we first solidify our morals. I was formative for him, then, the primordial evil of his personal creation myth, my grim two weeks. My rampage. “Mycroft Canner!” He could not repeat the name without a shriek. “You’re the worst … the most…” Words failed but he did not need them; all Earth knows what I am. “You were supposed to be … gone! Locked away somewhere safe forever or … or…”

  “Executed?” I finished for him. There was a Mycroft Canner once who would have swelled with pride knowing he made a Cousin call for blood. “When the Hive leaders agreed to let MASON keep my sentence secret so the public could stop obsessing over the matter, you assumed I had been executed. Everybody did. It never occurred to you they would conceal mercy.”

  Carlyle had no more words, just horror and its siblings: panic, anger, fear.

  “Look, Carlyle.” Thisbe donned her gentlest smile. “I know it’s a shock, but there’s no danger. The Servicer Program handles criminals that aren’t dangerous anymore, to let them serve the public good. Sometimes that means serious criminals too.”

  “You knew!” Carlyle turned on her almost as fiercely as he had turned on me. “You knew and you didn’t warn me! You let Mycroft Canner into your … into … And near…”

  She gave a tired glare. “You were content enough to sit with a Servicer not knowing what they did. You knew they might have been a murderer.”

  “Mycroft Canner is not just a murderer!”

  Ockham opened the door now, but with Boo and Bridger safely in the closet there was no further danger. “Thiz, do you have the gag order file on hand?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll pull it up.” Her lenses flickered.

  The guardian of the house turned to Carlyle. “Cousin Foster,” he began, “we are not responsible for Mycroft Canner’s sentence, and have no more power to affect it than you do. Chair Kosala personally signed off on Mycroft’s admission to the Servicer Program. If you have doubts, Kosala will give you an appointment, just like they gave us when we discovered.”

  Carlyle’s eyes only grew wilder. “Kosala knows? That’s right, Kosala oversaw the trial to make sure it was humane.” In Carlyle’s face, one could see the horrors of those days awakening in phases. Some readers will remember my two weeks, the hush upon the streets, the fear, the dread-zeal with which you watched each morning for the news to bring you some fresh horror. Only the mildest pictures appeared at breakfast time: a stain, a shrouded body, but by lunch or dinner there would be leaked images, real gore, real red, real faces contorted by emotions only torture can awaken. For two weeks no one on Earth walked home alone. I know you remember. Even in old age, when names and precious faces start to fade, you will pass again a corner where your classmates huddled whispering of me, and you’ll remember.

  “Kosala always knew…,” Carlyle repeated, only half-believing.

  “Found it, Ockham,” Thisbe confirmed with a last lens flicker. “Sent.”

  Another flicker as it arrived in Carlyle’s lenses. “What … Servicer Protection order?”

  Ockham planted himself before the sensayer, his right hip tipped away so Carlyle would not be tempted to rip the gun from his holster and take the long-delayed revenge himself. “Mycroft’s sentence and identity are confidential. You can understand the high risk of retributive violence if the word got out. This file has details about the offices in charge, and under what circumstances Mycroft’s identity can be discussed. We’re under the same order, and it is not in my authority to change it.”

  “They don’t let you warn people? A Servicer, they could go anywhere! People need to know!”

  Ockham crossed his arms, his bronzed skin striped with Lesley’s fresh doodles. “That’s for the Servicer Program to judge, not us.”

  Carlyle backed away, as if the bedpost and nightstand would shield him from my evil. “I won’t believe for a second that that monster isn’t dangerous!”

  I heard (and Ockham may have too) the stir of Bridger in the closet, fighting to keep himself from leaping to my defense. Poor child. The Cousin’s rant was nothing new to me, but the thought of Bridger listening, his sweet heart longing to defend me, that stung. I know your thoughts, reader. Bridger is thirteen, he was an infant or unborn when thy victims appeared day after blood-filled day. He does not understand, so, foolish innocent, he trusts thee. Unforgiving reader, do you think you know me better than the child I raised?

  Carlyle thought he did. “Mycroft Canner is the worst criminal in a hundred years! Two hundred years!” My lost self might have called this flattery.

  Ockham stood so calmly through the outburst, watching hysteria drain the color from Carlyle’s pale face. It made me think of Alexander
, of his force, the human thunder of our Mediterranean sweeping through deserts, through empires, but India, calm, mighty India, fears nothing. “I am not authority over the Servicer Program, but I am authority within this house, and—”

  “The cars!” Carlyle cried. “This house! The cars! Can’t you see it? Mycroft Canner near the cars, they’re planning it again, mass murder on a grander scale!”

  I am not a mass murderer. I faced my victims personally, one by one. But this was not the moment to correct him.

  “I am authority within this house,” Ockham repeated, “and you will control yourself.”

  “Mycroft Canner is the most dangerous person in the world!”

  Thisbe reached for Carlyle’s shoulder. “You’re being hysterical.”

  “Don’t touch me!” he jumped back. “You let them into your bash’! It’s just the same! That’s what they do, Thisbe, they charmed their way into the Mardi bash’ and then…”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Seventeen people, Thisbe! They hacked pieces off of Luther Mardigras for five days before they burned them alive in a wicker man! Burned what was left of them!”

  It is fascinating which details people get wrong. To be fair, with Luther I had left the least behind for forensics.

  “I have to go,” I said without raising my eyes. “I have a call I cannot disobey.”

  “Not that excuse again!” Carlyle cried, then cried again, “The Censor’s office! Mycroft Canner was in the Censor’s office!”

  “Take a deep breath, Carlyle.”

  “Mycroft Canner forced the last Deputy Censor to disembowel themself with a piece of bamboo!”

  Forced? That isn’t right, is it, Kohaku? You were grateful for that dignity, that exit, the chance to smear your vital numbers on the wall for Vivien to find and someday understand. Was I a good second to you, in your makeshift seppuku?

  I kept my eyes on the floor, my voice soft. “I’m sorry, Cousin Foster. I have to go. I will return at my first liberty, if you request, to answer any questions.”

  “You shouldn’t be going anywhere except a prison with no key!”

  “I have a call I cannot disobey.”

  “Overridden,” Ockham ordered. “Mycroft, you’re staying put until we calm this down. Carlyle, sit. If you ask questions calmly we will answer them.”

  “I’m not going to sit in a room with Mycroft Canner!”

  “I can have them restrained for this briefing, if that would make you more comfortable. Shall I call the team?”

  I steeled myself. “I’m sorry, Member Ockham. I have a call I cannot disobey.”

  Ockham shook his head. “My house, my orders.”

  I had no choice. Slowly, so the motion would not further spook the Cousin, I pulled from my pocket the Imperial Gray armband with the Masonic Square & Compass in death black upon it, the mark of we Familiares who, by lawful contract, submit ourselves to suffer imprisonment, torture, or death at Caesar’s will. “I have a call I cannot disobey.”

  Even Ockham hushes at Death’s presence in a room.

  “The Emperor…” Carlyle gulped breaths, like a man about to battle for his life. “The Emperor did this!” A target for his blame at last. “You were under MASON’s Law! MASON was supposed to be your judge, jury, and … We trusted them! We trusted them to…”

  I waited for him to speak the dreaded word, but he wasn’t brave enough. Not like back then, when Earth cried in one voice for the sentence everybody wanted. They wanted it so much, reader, the wide world in a true blood frenzy, begging the gentle Hives to bring back the long-abandoned greatest punishment, just for me. You cheered when Caesar made it easy, Caesar with his one black sleeve, when he announced that Mycroft Canner was already under the Lex Familiaris, the last capital punishment left on our enlightened Earth. When Caesar faced the cameras, “Factum est (It is done),” nobody wondered what.

  “Go.” Ockham nodded his permission, and I bowed my gratitude. There are many masters, reader, many authorities I answer to, but only one can kill me with a word.

  Carlyle stared as I paced slowly to the door, and leapt out of my path as if sin were contagious. I hadn’t expected this pain. I had known Carlyle must learn someday who I was, but I had come to respect this proud and giving vocateur, to care. I wanted to say something as I left, to heal his wounded trust, not in me, but in the powers he had trusted to do justice, to put the mad dog down. Questions are commands in their way, “What…? How could you…? Why…?” and Carlyle was a free man and a good one, so I owed him the obedience of an answer. But what can Mycroft Canner say? I took a deep breath. “Death was judged too swift and light a punishment. I owe more.”

  Carlyle sobbed, that’s what I think the motion was, one quick, hiccupping twitch as the too-much of it overwhelmed his body.

  I left him there, reader, hot with his just hate. But I cannot leave you. You can leave me, if you wish, you who have followed me this far, but see now why you should hate me. I chopped pieces off of Luther Mardigras only for two days, reader, the first three days were teeth, and nails, and flaying him alive. If I repel you, you may set this book aside and turn to other histories of this transformation, there must be some. Or did you know already what I was? Perhaps you chose this history less for J.E.D.D. Mason than to taste the mind of Mycroft Canner? Would you rather I had set this thirteen years ago? Earlier? Do you want to hear my childhood trauma, what tragedy created the misguided creature I became? Would you have me tell you what a human heart tastes like? Or which was the most satisfying stage at which to rape Ibis Mardi, when she was beaten, limbless, half-cooked, or already dead? Reader, there is no autobiography of that Mycroft Canner. Nor should there be. This is a history of Bridger and our transformation, not of my lost self. Yes, you will learn more of me. Yes, I will bare details which not even the police have known until I write these words, but facts about me are servants to your understanding of far greater matters. Why did I do it? Is that what you wonder most, reader? I do not know. At seventeen I was so sure of my philosophy that I gave myself content over to my executioners, yet I now find myself alive at thirty-one, and in a universe I understand only enough to know that I am too small, too finite, too tiny a creation to understand why I was made the thing I was, to do the things I did. I have tasted Bridger’s mud pies. I, Mycroft Canner, so improbably alive, was the first human to stumble on this miracle. I am sure of only one thing, reader: there is Providence. There is a Plan at work behind this world, and a Mind behind that plan, Whose infinite workings I cannot hope to penetrate. I could tell you what my old self thought was the purpose of my crimes. I could tell you what I think now. But only our Creator truly understands the ends to which He turns His instruments: why He had me kill those seventeen people, not sixteen, not eighteen; why He sent Bridger this bloodstained guardian; or why He chose that night of March the twenty-fifth to reveal to His devoted priest Carlyle Foster that, in His strange Mercy, He had spared, of all men, Mycroft Canner.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST

  That Which Is Caesar’s

  I am grateful, so grateful, tolerant reader, that you read on despite learning of my crimes. With your trust so freshly shaken, this may be the worst moment to disappoint you, but, alas, I must. For, as the first black hour of March the twenty-sixth catches me arriving in MASON’s capital, what am I to do about the parts in Latin? Martin Guildbreaker, glaring over my shoulder as I write, insists Latin is only for Masons, and must not be translated. Yet what good is that when even Masons can barely understand? J.E.D.D. Mason does not speak Masons’ Latin, He speaks something closer to Classical Latin, as strange for Masons as Homer to a modern Greek. I have promised to treat you, reader, as if you were a brother of our Eighteenth Century, so I should assume you read Latin, else I insult you, though I realize that is probably untrue. Martin will not let me make the Latin into English, but I shall at least translate J.E.D.D. Mason’s Latin into modern Latin, so Masons may understand what Masons should.

  (I h
ave translated the Latin, but since I’m doing so in secret from both Martin and Mycroft, you’ll have to bear with my mediocre skills.—9A)

  I felt ease as the car set down in the Masonic capital, leaving at last the spectacle cities of Tōgenkyō and Cielo de Pájaros for a real city, organic and irrational. What city would you have chosen for your capital if you were the first MASON? You cannot have the oldest, Ur and Uruk, for most of Mesopotamia is still a Reservation after the Church War, and in the rest Nature’s war wounds will take another century or two to heal. In Greece you would have to choose between Athens and Sparta, wisdom and strength, two assets which no Emperor can afford to privilege one over the other. Rome herself has been through too much to head another empire, and, if you used her, your successors could not then make use of her design in Romanova to such great effect. Vienna and Cusco are too fragile, Chang’an and Paris occupied, Istanbul and Kiev overbalanced by their more recent histories. You have only one choice, young Emperor, one city as imperial as you pretend to be.

  “The Six-Hive Transit System welcomes you to Alexandria. Visitors are required to adhere to a minimum of the Masonic Lex Minor while in this zone. Visitors are reminded that Masonic Laws do not allow the ignorance plea. To review a list of local regulations not included in your customary law code, select ‘law.’”

  As I climbed the ziggurat steps to Caesar’s threshold, the guards saluted at the sight of my Familiaris armband. Why do I not wear the armband always visible, as Martin does? It would be too suspicious, reader. There are only so many Familiares in the world, and all but Mycroft Canner are accounted for.

  Caesar’s voice was only half thunder tonight. “Cur omnes agitati sunt? (Why is everyone agitated?)”

  I had not expected to encounter MASON right away. He was in the frontmost meeting room, gray marble with heavy chairs around the central table, and the freshly published Seven-Ten lists spread across the screen-walls like maps of active battlefields. There is no room in Alexandria that is not as grim and awe-filled as most throne rooms, no doorway without its heavy marble lintel, no floor without its labyrinth of patterned stone, no window that does not look out over the glittering gardens of absolute wealth, or the glittering city that is its source. But this was not among the grander rooms, a modest space, used usually by aids, Familiares, Masonic Senators on business from Romanova, Guildbreakers doing Caesar’s will. I know why he chose it. There is an awe that Cornel MASON holds for the Domus Masonicus, the same awe Martin holds, the same that young Cornel held before the throne was his. An awe like a priest’s for his temple. I think this Caesar does not wish to taint the rooms where his predecessors sat—Aeneas MASON, Marcel MASON—with the presence of Mycroft Canner.