Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer

  Julia stopped me with a soft hand on the back of my neck. “No need to fuss about cleaning up the mess, Dominic, really. If you’re in a rush, take Mycroft and go.”

  “Are you sure? This is partly my fault too. I haven’t had a chance to thank you properly yet.”

  “Go.” She handed him my tracker. “I have another regular coming in half an hour, I can have them clean it up.”

  He thanked her with a last kiss. “I’m going to pay you back for this, I mean it, and for giving me Carlyle Foster. Clear your schedule for … how much of tomorrow can you clear?”

  “From noon on if I have to.”

  “Clear it all. I’ll send you word where to meet me.”

  “What for?”

  “Your payment.” He kicked me in the side, gently for him. “Fetch thy hat, stray. We’re leaving.”

  I crawled to fetch it from the closet, not daring to rise until he took me by the collar and hauled me to my feet. It was Dominic who first taught me the art of hat-wearing, and gave me the round and shapeless cap that has shielded me from recognition so many times. It was thirteen years ago, almost to the day. I had come to petition his aid in trying to understand Ἄναξ Jehovah. He saw me, with my trembling and my suppliant eyes, and threw his head back, laughing. “Mycroft, thou must have a hat so thou mayest remove it in the presence of thy betters!” He was right. It is a comforting symbol, a way to gesture my submission without alarming people with the antiquated titles ‘master,’ ‘madam,’ ‘sir.’ It is a comfort to have something to fidget with as I stand in obedience before free men. A welcome gift. I thank Dominic for it still, from time to time.

  Dominic paused on the threshold, throwing his sword arm around my shoulders like a brother, close and ready to grasp my throat. “Oh, Julia, any advice on interrogating a prisoner you can’t touch?”

  Her eyebrows perked. “Can’t touch?”

  “I’d squish him.” Dominic’s eyes danced as he looked to me. “What’s a good comparison, Mycroft? Let’s say he has one of those bone diseases so he’ll shatter if you shake him too hard. Mentally he’s a toughie, though. Sleep deprivation’s getting me nowhere slowly.”

  Dominic had my tracker still, playing between his fingers like a toy. How long, my mind raced, how long since I had last counted all eleven tiny soldiers?

  “If you want fast results, threaten a loved one,” she suggested. “Otherwise theology as usual, or hot wax. Hot wax is almost too gentle.”

  He frowned. “Not gentle enough for this little one, but I’ll think of something. Thank you, Pontifex Maxima.” He turned to me. “Come, stray. I’ve a thousand questions for thee. I look forward to seeing thee struggle to get out of answering.”

  CHAPTER THE THIRTIETH

  DEO EREXIT SADE

  Things change here, reader. Or, more aptly, you change, while this world you visit stays the same. I promised I would show the wires beneath the cloth. Eureka smells them, tastes them, itches with them, whatever name we pick for her computer senses. She knows the flights of cars are wrong, that there is one extra pull of gravity, to make us realize Dark Matter is out there changing things. Now you are ready. Kohaku Mardi was always wrong. 33-67; 67-33; 29-71, it will not tip us into war, no matter what the numbers say. Sometimes the magician wheels a house of cards onto his stage, and he shakes, and blows, and threatens, pulls the tablecloth from under it, and it doesn’t fall. Because it never really was a house of cards. It was one long piece of paper, folded and disguised to feign fragility.

  “Felix, come away from there,” the Anonymous called. “You’re making Danaë uncomfortable.”

  Brillist Institute Headmaster Felix Faust lingered by his favorite feature of the Salon de Sade: a picture window, framed by damask curtains, looking down over the Flesh Pit. “There are two 9-3-3-11-10-4-3-10s topping each other down there,” he said. “That’s the third time I’ve seen that combo, I wonder why that set are so attracted to their own.”

  “Come away,” the Anonymous repeated. “You can do research on your own time.” Here the Anonymous, like Faust, wore the costume of the period, lace cuffs and styled wig, his coat a rich green-black over a waistcoat of burgundy-violet silk, almost imperial. He wore a mask, not grotesque or fancy, and certainly not enough to keep one who knew him from recognizing him, just a little black strip around the eyes, a symbol. Many imagine that all Madame’s clients would wear masks, but that badge of honor belongs to the Anonymous alone.

  Faust’s eyes, windows of the ever-churning brain which feeds upon his body like a parasite, rolled across to the Anonymous. “Closing the curtain isn’t going to get Bryar ready faster. Neither is you venting your impatience on the rest of us.”

  The Anonymous squeezed his cane, as if to strangle its heavy gilded head. “You’re the one who wanted Danaë at this meeting, Felix. The least you can do is be courteous now that they’re here.”

  Faust let the curtain fall and turned back to the salon with its ring of couches, amber velvet on ebony frames, perfect against the ivory-tinted rug. “I apologize, Princesse. It’s strange to think you’ve hardly ever been in this room, since you’re always so thoroughly with us in spirit.”

  “It’s all right, Felix,” Danaë answered, forcing a smile for the Brillist Institute Headmaster who reigns as teacher, steersman, and lawspeaker over Gordian. But the blush on Danaë’s unhappy cheeks showed that it was not all right, in fact, not until I pulled the curtain closed to seal away the spectacle below.

  Here the assembled Powers were as alone as Powers can be, no aides, no bodyguards, no secretaries, the constant watching plague of ‘personnel’ shut out beyond the door beyond the door beyond the door of Madame’s innermost sanctum. Only the most completely trusted servants may attend the nobles in the Salon de Sade: today that meant me. In the car en route to Paris I had … endured, rather than answered, Dominic’s first questions about Bridger. But Dominic knew I would be slow to succumb to either force or guile, so he had dropped me at Madame’s with instructions that I be held until he returned. Then he had vanished once again, like a black and heavy condor, content that no common vulture will dare touch its prey. Since I was on hand, they might as well make use of me.

  “Were you never brought in here before you married?” Faust asked.

  “Never,” Danaë answered. “The Salon de Sade was not judged proper for a maiden’s eyes. Besides”—she smiled at Andō seated beside her on their sofa—“until I was united with my husband, I had no contact with affairs of state. I still find this room rather overwhelming, which is why I do appreciate your kindness in exercising restraint when I attend.”

  “No trouble at all, my dear, no trouble at all.”

  It was a brash lie, of course, here in a room designed to fill the mind with two things of which politics was not the primary. This was not a room built for restraint. The picture window down to the lovemaking of the hoi polloi filled one wall with living pornography. Two more walls were covered with museum cases which preserved the relics of Great Men: portraits, busts, quills, locks of hair, manuscripts in the hands of Patriarch and Philosophe, Jean-Jacques and the Divine Marquis, glittering reliquaries of Madame’s favorite Catholic saints, and, when they have survived, tools of love from the boudoirs of history’s greatest. The last wall held the tools of love for this one.

  Faust’s eyes laughed as he settled onto the sofa. “Wearing a hole in the rug isn’t going to get Bryar ready faster either, Déguisé.”

  The Anonymous froze, embarrassed now by his own pacing. At Madame’s, in case any outside the inner circle might wander within earshot, the Anonymous answers to the slightly subtle title of the Comte Déguisé, the Count Disguised. Trust Europe to have a system of etiquette prepared even for the eventuality of royalty who must stay ‘in disguise’ amid a company all of whom know the truth.

  “Well put, dear Felix.” Madame’s laugh lit the room, as did the silver embroidery sparkling on her gown of powder blue. “The Headmaster is right. Come, My Lord, sit b
efore you make us all dizzy.” Madame was too far from the Anonymous to grab his sleeve, but she steered him toward an empty couch with a gesture.

  My Lord the Comte Déguisé obeyed, but sat only on the sofa’s edge, ready to spring up, like a loved one lurking outside a surgery, waiting for news.

  Madame’s smile pitied his tension, but she could do no more, so she stretched back in the embrace of the two gentleman who flanked her on her couch. To her left, his legs lost in the ocean of her skirts, sat His Imperial Majesty Cornel MASON. His costume was an adapted Eighteenth-Century military uniform, cording and rows of bright buttons, fashioned in Masonic Imperial Gray with the left sleeve dyed black. Their bodies as they sat—Madame’s and Caesar’s—were intertwined, his lips a neck stretch from her ear, her hand in his lap a light squeeze from excitement. Theirs is a comfortable, habitual closeness, enjoying the taste of a cheek or the tease-thrill of crotches brushing under cloth, all in the course of chat, as if they had forgotten one might sit upon a couch in any other way. See, even as Madame chuckles at the Anonymous’s impatience, the Emperor chuckles with her, not even noticing the sympathy of flesh and flesh. I had never seen Caesar unstiff, reader, until I saw him with Madame. On the same couch on the Lady’s other side, his costume barely more elegant than his everyday European suit, sat the King of Spain.

  “I hear the Outsider is calling the European Parliament again,” the Emperor remarked as he nuzzled his Lady’s ear. “Something about the land crisis.”

  Spain nodded. “It is also to approve funds for the distribution of that new anti-aging drug.”

  “I thought they passed that eight months ago.”

  “This is another new drug. Utopians work fast.”

  Caesar tickled something among Madame’s skirts. “I just found out about the new drug yesterday. The Outsider works fast too.”

  “They do,” Spain granted, “commendably so.” English, reader, they spoke English, despite the pull of Paris, for such a universal company can only speak the universal tongue.

  “Her Excellency,” an usher called now from the doorway, “Cousin Chairwoman Bryar Kosala.”

  “Sorry to make you wait, everyone!”

  Bryar Kosala entered in a rush of ruffles, her black hair mounded as elaborately as a wedding cake, her gold-trimmed gown of poppy-red satin making her deep Indian skin glow like amber.

  “Oh! My Lord!” she squealed as the Comte Déguisé pounced like a hunter, lifting her by her corseted waist and drowning her neck with kisses. Kosala laughed, the others too, delighted, even after so many repetitions, at a pair so very much in love.

  Why does Kosala not wear a sari? It is a fair question, reader, why this daughter of India does not wear the Eighteenth-Century costume of her own people, as Andō and Danaë do of old Japan. The Comte Déguisé’s tastes, conditioned by Madame, are part of the lady’s reason, but exoticism is more. Bryar Kosala is here to sample the strange, romantic mysteries of this exotic France; India is her everyday.

  “Now who’s making the Princesse uncomfortable, Déguisé?” Faust teased.

  It was true. Danaë had averted her modest eyes from the lovers’ kisses, filling her gaze instead with her husband, who sat beside her on their couch, and her brother, who lay sparkling across the couple’s laps, naked as God intended. Golden Ganymede was stretched out on his side, his head nestled against the pillow of his sister’s breasts, with his lower parts in Andō’s lap, so the Director’s idle hands could enjoy the Duke’s flawless buttocks. Ganymede’s back is his more dangerous side, I think, the golden mane trailing down his spine as soft as sunlight, since that back could be either a man’s or woman’s, so practically no spectator is immune. There is no incongruity, reader, in bashful Danaë averting her eyes from kisses to feast on her brother’s nakedness. Ganymede’s nude form is not licentiousness but art, a public service, no stranger than an Aphrodite in a fountain, and certainly nothing unfamiliar to his sister or the rest of this company. Besides, excepting myself, all the people present here have enjoyed the Duke to some degree, whether completely as Andō does, or the single night which the King of Spain will doubtless regret to his grave.

  “Our apologies, Princesse.” Kosala had to push the Anonymous away, prying his hands from her bodice and holding them in forced and modest friendship.

  “It’s quite all right,” Danaë answered, adjusting the front of her glittering kimono where the weight of her brother’s head threatened to bare too much of her chest. “I know how le Comte misses you between meetings.”

  Her Excellency Chair Kosala settled on her own sofa, and the Comte Déguisé squeezed as close beside her as the framework of her dress allowed. The lust in his eyes bordered on starvation, but, to spare Danaë, he confined himself to stroking Kosala’s fingers, where the wedding ring drowned amid more dazzling period jewels.

  Drop this farce, Mycroft. I know who thy Anonymous is, all the world knows. Save the trouble and call him by his name. Never, reader. The illustrious title of Anonymous has passed from virtuoso to apprentice virtuoso for seven generations, Earth’s most influential voice for so long that even Ganymede considers theirs a noble line. Tradition lets each Anonymous reveal the identity of their predecessor’s predecessor upon their death, so Earth may decide whether to honor the body in the Pantheon, but to reveal an Anonymous while still alive? Unforgivable. As you know, disaster forced the unmasking of this Anonymous, but I shall not strip the holder of his regal title in my history a moment sooner.

  “Well…” Madame’s delighted eyes counted the company in their circle, like a collector making inventory of her shelves: the Emperor, then Headmaster Felix Faust alone in his armchair, Andō and Danaë enjoying sparkling Ganymede, Chair Kosala and the hungry-eyed Anonymous, and last the somber King of Spain. It is a living Seven-Ten list, this vista, save that His Royal Highness is a more refined presence than Europe’s ‘Second-Choice Prime Minister’ Casimir Perry. “Now that our little company is complete,” Madame began, “Headmaster, would you care to begin the meeting? You called it.”

  “Thank you, Madame, and to the rest of you, thank you for coming, though I’ve a feeling Caesar would have called a meeting if I hadn’t.”

  MASON nodded. “What’s your business, Felix?”

  “Something I’ve been meaning to say to the Director and Princesse for some time, though I suspect it’s something some of the rest of you have been wanting get off your chests as well.” He paused for a smile, the wrinkles of his almost-eighty years lending him a jovial warmth. “Do you mind, dear Danaë, if I speak frankly?”

  “Of course you must speak frankly, Felix. We’re all as family here in Madame’s salon, we must keep nothing from each other.”

  “In that case, my dear,” he cleared his throat, “what I have to say is this: keep your revolting little monstrosities to yourself, bitch.”

  “Felix!”

  “Ten of the things you’ve picked up, and now you’re sending them out to fix on the rest of us like leeches: Masami at Black Sakura, Toshi in the Censor’s office, Hiroaki inside the CFB, Sora with the Humanist Praetor at Romanova, Michi with Casimir Perry, another one, Jun, applied to my Institute of all things, and I heard about another—Ran was it?—applying at the Duke’s offices. Even your brother had the good sense to send the creature packing.”

  Ganymede’s voice dripped poison. “No one speaks like this to my sister, Felix.”

  Faust almost laughed. “I note you didn’t deny it was good sense sending the creature packing. Even the Duke agrees. If the pair of you,” he nodded to Andō, “want to surround yourselves with bizarre, inhuman life-forms that’s your business, but don’t send them after the rest of us.”

  Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi’s black haori and hakama already made him grimmer than the rest in their French damasks; now his face did too. “I recommend, Headmaster, that you not speak of the Mitsubishi house’s ba’kids in such terms.”

  Headmaster Faust’s eyes traced the room. “The rest of you don’t r
ealize, do you? What those kids are? They’re set-sets, every one of them! Tank-reared, psycho-engineered, drug-enhanced living computers.”

  Fresh tears brightened the jewels of Danaë’s eyes. “No they aren’t!”

  “Oh, yes they are, you think I can’t trace a pedigree? Not that I need to, you went so far as to knit them all little Brillist code-sweaters so they can flaunt it. 1-2-16-17-2-2-20-20, does that sound like a set that would exist in nature?”

  “Felix, please…” Cousin Chair Kosala cut in with her most calming voice.

  “Don’t you start, Bryar, this is entirely your fault!”

  “My fault?”

  “You and Lorelei Cook, don’t think I don’t know about that, too. It’s admirable, Bryar, trying to sabotage set-set breeders.”

  “Felix, I don’t—”

  “Oh, yes you do. You may not have done it yourself, but you’re happy enough to leave Lorelei Cook in office, putting Nurturists in every position they can. We’re all here, Bryar. One word from you, ‘I don’t think the head of the Nurturist faction should be Romanova’s Minister of Education,’ and the lot of us together could oust them in a heartbeat. But you won’t ask for that, because you smile just as much as Cookie every time a set-set facility goes under. Don’t get me wrong, I smile too, but you have to be responsible about it, you can’t break up the nursery bash’es when the creatures are already eight years old and assume your fosterage programs will turn them into human beings.”