Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer

  “I’m sorry.” You will not blame Carlyle for having a one-track mind. “Look, I can’t explain why, but I really, really need to see Bridger. There’s never been anything so important.”

  The Captain’s smile beamed condescension. “Is the world going to end in the next couple hours if you don’t?”

  “It might.”

  “I’m sorry,” she answered, “but I genuinely don’t know where Bridger is, just that it’s a safe house. I’d help you if I could. Look, nobody can trap Mycroft for long. Stick with us and we’ll get a visit, or another message, soon I’ll bet, and then you can ask Mycroft to take you to Bridger. Meanwhile, relax and have a…” The Captain frowned, lifting a green striped ball from the picnic blankets. “Do you know what kind of fruit this is? We’ve been trying to guess at some of them for an hour. The inside has pink and orange blotches and tastes like raspberry, but none of us has ever seen one before.”

  Carlyle stared at the fantasy which Bridger calls a ‘razzalope.’ “I don’t know. It…” His eye caught on another Servicer passing by with a crate of time-darkened Barbies. “Are these boxes all toys?”

  “Yeah, the second cave’s full of them. Want to see the collection before we box the rest? It’s an amazing sight.”

  Snatching a ‘strawberanna’ en route, the Captain led Carlyle toward the second cave.

  “Where are you taking it all?” Carlyle asked as more crates trudged past. “To the safe house? Won’t that leave much more of a trail than just taking me?”

  “It’s going to Sniper’s Doll Museum.”

  Carlyle’s breath caught. “Sniper’s?”

  “Mycroft arranged it. Leave it to Mycroft to know everyone who’s anyone.”

  The Cousin frowned. “I thought they only had Sniper Dolls at the Sniper Doll Museum.”

  “Until now they did. Apparently Mycroft convinced Sniper to make a new wing for this, a special exhibit on the pathos of the discarded toy. It should be really something.”

  It was already ‘really something’ even arrayed in the semi-dark of Bridger’s second cave. The toys stood in phalanxes, row upon ten rows upon a hundred rows. As a library overstocked with relics crams shelves together to the maximum, hardly leaving room for scrunched shoulders to pass, so Bridger had crammed this cave, ten times the size of the other, with shelves, and then crammed every shelf with toys. It was a labor of love: children set with mommies and daddies, colts with mares, warriors with rivals, villains with heroes ready to stop them if they stirred, all with accessories, not the ones they came with but the sorts of things they would want to have on hand if wakened. They were lovingly posed: teachers at plastic blackboards, families at dinner tables, whole bash’es fishing together, making breakfast, dancing, moments in which one would not mind being trapped forever. Those with missing limbs were bandaged and placed in doctors’ office play-sets, though the mobs of wounded outnumbered the doll-faced nurses like war victims. There were toy soldiers too, hundreds, who could not set down their plastic arms, but were posed as if in training, shooting targets, ducking obstacle courses, no combat, no casualties, the Green team carefully segregated from enemy Yellow. Can you picture Bridger, reader, picking these orphans from the garbage one by one? Can you see him scrubbing the centuries’ muck from painted faces and calling each one ‘friend’? It was the Major who volunteered to teach him that you can’t save everyone. “Take your time,” was how he started. “Your powers prove you’re fated to be one of the special ones. Maybe someday, gods willing, you’ll find a way to bring them all to life, and overthrow death’s tyranny forever, but not today. Today we’re scouts, learning about this world, and making plans. You don’t bring in the army until you have the tents and grain to house them too.”

  “I’ve seen this before,” Carlyle whispered. The Message doesn’t have to be a burning bush, reader. From the Maker of planets, atoms, and electrons, the Message can be a thought.

  “You have?” The Servicer Captain scanned the plastic hordes.

  “Not this exactly, but I’ve had this feeling before, looking at something just like this. It was recent … What was it?” Carlyle chewed his thumbnail, struggling, atoms bouncing in their scripted paths. “Where did these come from?”

  “The trash, apparently. There’s a trash mine here. They’re Twentieth to Twenty-Second Century mostly, all carefully cleaned up and fixed. It’s going to be a really moving display, the idea of this many things that people used to love, abandoned.”

  Carlyle wandered through the shelves, not studying individual objects but vistas, the long stretch of close-crammed clutter that had been so much more than clutter to someone once. The atom strikes. “Jehovah…”

  The Captain was not close enough to hear. “What?”

  “Avignon. The icons collected at their house, that’s where I’ve seen this! It’s the same! Discarded things that people used to love, all crowded together by someone who can’t stand to see them rot. An icon collection—a giant No-No Box.” Carlyle rushed from row to row, unpacking his thoughts less to his companion than to the toys themselves, or to himself. “Why didn’t I see it before? Mycroft wouldn’t divide their time between the two of them unless they were equally important. And Bridger being what Bridger is, the other must also be … not toys necessarily but, like Bridger, they must have … That’s why the Emperor would pick them, out of all the children in the world, and that’s why Heloïse would talk like they’re a god. If people raised at Madame’s found something like Bridger they’d worship it.”

  The Servicer rushed to catch Carlyle among the cramped aisles. “Sorry, what? I can’t hear you when you’re rushing around like this.”

  Carlyle’s eyes came into focus on the Servicer at last. “I’m sorry, you’re totally the wrong person for me to discuss this with.”

  A frown of sympathy. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Short of taking me to Bridger, no,” Carlyle answered. “I can call a car myself.”

  “Whoa, slow down.” The Captain caught Carlyle by the shoulder as he started to bolt. “A car? Sorry, I can’t let you go.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I told you, that evil sensayer Dominic is after you. I’m under orders to keep you here with us until the threat blows over.”

  “Under orders?”

  “It’s just an expression,” the Captain claimed, though her dark eyes said different. “You’re in real danger. Whatever you’re doing, it can wait.”

  “That’s my decision,” Carlyle countered, “not yours.”

  “For the last time, this is serious.” The Captain seized Carlyle by the coils of his scarf, dragging him back toward the picnic. “You’re being offered food and hospitality by people for whom a little food is a big deal. Now sit down!”

  Carlyle found himself shoved into a group gathered within the bridge’s shadow, where a pair of Servicers had stripped the trash-smeared shirts from their backs to dance. It was beautiful, not one of society’s formulaic, social dances, but the primitive enjoyment of the body, reaching, kicking, leaping, ducking, close as daredevils, always a hair’s breadth from scraping one another’s cheeks, or sharing sweat. It wasn’t until one, thrusting with knife-straight fingers, scored a touch upon the other that Carlyle realized they were sparring.

  The sensayer’s voice grew cold. “Servicers aren’t allowed to practice combat sports.”

  The Servicer Captain stared. “You say that with the public finding out that Mycroft Canner is a Servicer? That’s reason enough to study self-defense if we didn’t have others!”

  A long frown. “I should go.”

  “No.” Strong hands seized the scarf which looped around Carlyle like a harness. “I said, I’m under orders. You’re staying here, safe.”

  “I have someone indescribably, incomparably important to find.”

  “You’re staying here.”

  “Against my will?” Even as kind a soul as Carlyle can become nasty when the friendly face before him is less real t
han his mission. “I could message the Servicer Program about your little combat practice, have your paroles revoked. I will if you keep getting in my way. No, better yet, I know who to message.”

  “Stop!” The Captain seized Carlyle’s arms with practiced speed, but tracker messages are fast as twitching. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing that will hurt you. I just accepted an invitation I was offered to meet someone called Heloïse in Paris in an hour. It’s an hour from here, so if I don’t leave immediately, a lot of important people will start asking why.”

  I will not subject you, gentle reader, to the full breadth of this Servicer’s knowledge of profanity. “Mycroft didn’t warn me you were too stupid to live. You do realize I meant ‘kidnap and rape’ literally, right? We’re talking about Dominic Seneschal.”

  “I know the kinds of threats that Mycroft makes. I’ve been to Paris, I know more than you.”

  The Servicer Captain frowned. “I also know the kinds of threats that Mycroft makes, and I’ve known Mycroft years longer than you have. This was a real threat.”

  Hush fell as the two competed, stare for stare. They both think they know me. They both think they know me so well.

  “It’s on again!” A young Servicer broke the silence. “Channel 1113.”

  As when a cloud consumes the sun and makes an afternoon’s bright colors dim at once, so the Servicer Captain grew instantly cold. “Last chance, sensayer. I know Mycroft. I know the threat is real. I want to help you. But I won’t let you endanger all the others if this person in Paris really will get us in trouble if you don’t go now. Decide. Cancel the signal or go.”

  Carlyle smelled a rat. “What’s on again? 1113, that’s a tracker channel?”

  “Crap is what’s on, crap only we care about. Now, choose: safety or Paris?”

  It was no choice, reader, not for a sensayer. Not now that the thought had come: that there are Two.

  But Carlyle did make another choice, in the car en route to Paris, those sixty minutes. He tuned his tracker in to Channel 1113. It turned out to be a minor news station broadcasting from a square in Ankara, where Tully stood again upon his soapbox: “What do you think caused the great wars of the past?” he ranted, this time to a larger sliver of the listening world. “Economic instability? We have that, the economic giants, Masons, Mitsubishi, desperate to tear one another down. Was it prejudice? One group hating another? Walk down a street and hear the way angry people use ‘Mason,’ ‘Cousin,’ ‘Utopian,’ as if they were insults. If we magically plucked a war expert from the past and showed them the present, they’d say in an instant that we’re on the verge of war. The only reason our current experts haven’t said it is that we don’t have any. We believe so blindly that war’s impossible that we hardly study it anymore. You think the Hives are too friendly, too closely allied, too civilized to make war? The nation-states thought the same thing about each other in 1914, right before the First World War broke out. All it takes is one spark. That time it was the assassination of an Emperor’s nephew. What will it be this time?”

  CHAPTER THE THIRTY-THIRD

  Martin Guildbreaker’s Last Interlude: “The Utopians Aren’t Dirty like the Rest of Us”

  NOTE of Martin Guildbreaker, 03/27/2454: Caesar, do not read this. Nor you, Domine, not yet. All that I have and all that I am are open before the pair of you, always, but these are the raw notes of something not yet quite transparent. They would hurt you. They would hurt you, Caesar, by making you unable to continue as you have. You could not trust, could not endure, but at the same time you could not act, not on the little that is here. I would not see you so paralyzed. As soon as there are answers, enough for your awakened rage to know its foe, I will tell you. Until then, mighty Caesar, I trust you to trust me. As for you, Domine, read not this transcript yet. For you the price is grief. I would not have you suffer until I can, at least, bring with that suffering the consolation of understanding.

  * * *

  08:38 UT, 03/27/2454, Universal Free Alliance Police Headquarters, Romanova.

  Commissioner General Ektor Carlyle Papadelias: “Well, well, if it isn’t Martin Guildbreaker! What brings you to my office at this hour of the night? Or is it not night anymore? Nine-thirty A.M.! Where does the time go?”

  Guildbreaker: “I want an unbiased second opinion.”

  Papadelias: “Don’t set those down here, this is my Mycroft Canner desk, you don’t want to get your files mixed up in these. Use that desk, my Everything Else desk. Don’t mind the mess. This is about Black Sakura, I assume?”

  Guildbreaker: “I want an unbiased second opinion.”

  Papadelias: “About time. I’ve been telling you from the start this wasn’t a matter to be handled without me. Now, I know better than anyone how tangled poly-Hive law can get, and I agree sometimes the world is better off when you and your team lubricate these things, but I have seventy years’ experience at this and you have six, so when I send you a message that I need to see you about something ASAP, it shouldn’t take you four days to turn up here.”

  Guildbreaker: “I want an unbiased second opinion.”

  Papadelias: “Quite a mountain of files you’ve got here: flight plans, autopsy reports, sensayer session schedules, old Sniper magazines … What’s brewing? Something big, I could’ve told you that four days ago.”

  Guildbreaker: “I want an unbiased second opinion.”

  Papadelias: “What’s happened?”

  Guildbreaker: “I want an unbiased second opinion.”

  Papadelias: “Understood. Shannon, cancel whatever I have scheduled in the next five hours, and make sure nobody not nobody comes in here unless the Emperor’s on fire.”

  Guildbreaker: “Thank you, Commissioner. I’ll lock the door.”

  Papadelias: “I’m going to shuffle these files so I read them in a random order without influence from how you arranged them.”

  Guildbreaker: “I organized them alphabetically by the ninth word in each document.”

  Papadelias: “Random enough. I’ll ask you yes/no or fact questions from time to time as I read, but no opinion questions, sound good?”

  Guildbreaker: “Yes. I’m recording this conversation for the record. I’ll have it reviewed by an independent party to verify that I didn’t suggest any conclusions to you.”

  Eight minutes of reading in silence.

  Papadelias: “So, one engineer’s report says the damage Aki Sugiyama’s fiancé’s ‘suicide kit’ did to the car shouldn’t have been enough to make it crash, but the other two didn’t find anything suspicious.”

  Guildbreaker: “I’ve ordered another three engineers to review the wreck. I expect their reports by the end of today.”

  Papadelias: “The engineer who was suspicious was the same one who said the flight plan was fishy?”

  Guildbreaker: “Yes. There are 162 standard flight paths from the origin to the destination city, of which only two guarantee that the car would not hit any habitations if it crashed. It was on one of those two. The likelihood of that is one point two percent, and the passenger could not control which flight path the car took.”

  Papadelias: “This is sketchy. I see the hints, but this is nowhere near enough to make an accusation of complicity, not in court. Not when we have this call between Aki Sugiyama and O’Beirne in which O’Beirne explicitly states suicidal intent.”

  Ten minutes of reading in silence.

  Papadelias: “Esmerald Revere’s notes on Cato Weeksbooth classify these ‘episodes’ into two types.”

  Guildbreaker: “In Type A Cato demands an emergency sensayer session and appears in a state of extreme distress. In Type B Cato doesn’t see Revere, but puts in twice the normal number of hours at the museum that week, and museum colleagues report Cato skipping meals and displaying other signs of agitation.”

  Papadelias: “Twenty-seven out of forty-seven car crashes in the past five years were immediately preceded by one of these episodes. That’s roughly half of all crashes.�
��

  Guildbreaker: “I’m still working on the preceding five years, but I’ve had to get the crash reports through back channels, since the standard channel is to call Ockham Saneer.”

  Papadelias: “One episode preceded Revere’s death, and got worse right before the O’Beirne crash.”

  Guildbreaker: “Yes.”

  Papadelias: “Before, not after.”

  Guildbreaker: “Yes.”

  Two minutes of reading in silence.

  Papadelias: “This says Cato has eight to eleven episodes per year, and half of them don’t precede car crashes.”

  Guildbreaker: “Yes, almost exactly half.”

  Papadelias: “But the other half do.”

  Guildbreaker: “Very precisely half.”

  Twenty-one minutes of reading in silence.

  Papadelias: “This is sketchy.”

  Guildbreaker: “What?”

  Papadelias: “The death of Yangtze Dekker in a car crash 11/22/2453 resulted in their widow appealing to their brother on the news, which probably ended the Six Lakes Hostage Crisis. The death of retired Romanov editor Anlevine Gorz-Marmalade in a car crash 08/08/2452 drastically weakened the Nurturist faction in the European elections. The death of Madden Manila in a car crash 05/15/2451 made Mycroft Gao drop out of the anti-Mitsubishi-land-grab movement. The death of Kirkegard Ranker may have passed the Reservation Welfare Act. The death of Jay Daiko may have saved Rongcorp & Subsidiaries. The death of Herrera Lee may have eased the Greenpeace Mitsubishi factionalism. But none of this is direct influence, these are all friends, cousins, ex-roommates, sometimes with four or five degrees of rather sketchy separation from the effect they’re supposed to have had.”

  Guildbreaker: “Yes.”

  Papadelias: “Connections no one would spot unless they were already looking for something suspicious, just like with Sugiyama’s grandba’kid’s fiancé.”

  Guildbreaker: “Exactly.”

  Papadelias: “How many of these did you find? These politically consequential crashes.”

  Guildbreaker: “Thirty-four so far, roughly five per year or fifty percent of all car crashes over the last seven years.”