Seven Surrenders--A Novel

by Ada Palmer

  “Don’t move!” Guards too quick for Carlyle to count burst from the door and seized her before she had a chance to knock. They frisked her, practiced hands folding and squeezing every loose inch of her Cousin’s wrap, so not even a razor could have passed unnoticed.

  “Consorbin inermis est, Caesar.” (The Cousin is unarmed, Caesar.—9A)

  “Let them come in.”

  Inside, a lone carved chair, severe enough for a monastery, broke the rows of icons and relic shelves that crammed Jehovah’s hall. There sat MASON, fidgeting with the black cuff of his left sleeve as scenes of the world’s degeneration sparkled across his lenses. “Have you been taking care of yourself since last night, Cousin Foster?”

  Carlyle, like any sane woman, trembled. “MASON? Why are you…”

  “I am waiting to see my son. You were seen with us at Madame’s. The press will be after you soon, if they are not already. I can chase them off, if you like. I am firmer with them than Kosala is. Or if you prefer shelter, my Sanctum Sanctorum in Alexandria is open to you.”

  The sensayer floundered. In the madness at Madame’s, MASON had been one more of a bank of cardboard witnesses, while only Carlyle and her parents were true players. Only now, seeing the suit of imperial gray, the famous face without press light to hide the care lines, did it sink in that she had met the Emperor.

  “I haven’t had any trouble so far, but I haven’t been home yet. Do you think … is…” Carlyle choked.

  MASON is so accustomed to his presence striking others dumb that I think sometimes he is surprised to hear a stranger manage a complete sentence. “You are here to see Jehovah?” he asked gently.

  “Yes. Are they…”

  “Upstairs.” Between his spoken words, Caesar’s fingers fed others to the computer, which routed them across his Empire. “What do you think of the Prince of Asturias?”

  Carlyle frowned. “You mean the Crown Prince of Spain?”

  At such proximity Carlyle says she could see the gray in Caesar’s hair, not sophisticated frosting as photographs suggest, but streaks of real age, subtly heavier on the right side, spreading. “Their Majesty once told me that Crown Prince Leonor had done more good by being born than they have in their whole life since. The existence of a living heir stabilized Spain and Europe, promising a safe succession, and giving the Spanish strat the hope it needed to endure the queen’s suicide. Since then the Prince has run wild in bad company, aided their father’s political enemies, has probably literally slept with Casimir Perry, and has done far more to shame the royal house than even the public knows, but still the King is glad they have a son, however rotten. Would you call such a prince good because their existence aids the world, despite their deeds?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are not bad because of the evil which your birth has caused.”

  Kind words. Carlyle had not had kind words since Julia’s, before she felt truth’s poison arrow fly. “I don’t … I don’t…” I doubt there was a real full sentence in her mind.

  Chagatai poked her head around the corner now, friendly in her livery, like a mastiff trained as perfectly to charm children as to rip throats. “Carlyle Foster! Good of you to come again. Are you here for me or for TM?”

  It took Carlyle a moment to recognize Jehovah’s Hiveless nickname. “I was hoping for the Tribune, yes,” she confessed.

  The valet’s smile tried to ease the tremor in Carlyle’s voice. “No worries, you’re not intruding. TM said they hoped you’d come. I’ll show you upstairs now, if you’re ready.”

  “Now?” Carlyle frowned confusion. “But … I’ll wait until the Emperor’s finished, obviously.”

  Caesar shook his head. “I am the Emperor, Jehovah’s father, and ruler of one fifth of the world; I wait. You are a priest; you don’t.”

  “This way,” Chagatai coaxed. “Unless you’d like a bite to eat first, or the bathroom.”

  Carlyle’s feat dragged, leaden. “May … may I ask a question, MASON?”

  “You may ask anything,” Caesar invited. “Asking does not guarantee an answer.”

  “Why did you adopt Jehovah? Why let Madame’s son be so close to you?”

  “Because Madame is that close to me.” Caesar’s eyelids sagged, as if he longed to close his eyes in brief retreat. “I need a companion in this world who is neither my subject nor my enemy. My bash’, what friends survive from childhood, are all Masons, my servants now, and all my colleagues are my rivals. Madame is not.”

  “But Madame is horrible. Everything they do is totally manipulative and self-serving, surely somebody else—”

  “All motives are self-serving,” Caesar interrupted, “and all people are manipulators around an Emperor. Selfish or no, Madame D’Arouet has done more for me and for the world’s stability over the years than anyone, even Kosala or O.S., but Madame wields sex and gender instead of socially acceptable tools of politics. I cannot free them from that stigma, nor give them the office or recognition they deserve. Their child I can.”

  “Then you did it for Madame?”

  “I cannot say power was not a factor. We all fought over Jehovah, hoping Madame’s resources would go to whoever was named father, or had most influence with the child. Until the influenced reversed.” MASON’s brows narrowed, subtly, a mild anger but chilling, like thunder whose softest rumble still threatens a storm. “Stop dawdling, Cousin. Your answers are upstairs, not here. You must finish with my son before I can begin with them, and today of all days my patience is finite.”

  Fear more than Chagatai led Carlyle up the thin steps to the nave of the old church above. Its stone vault rose high, light and dim at once, like an overcast sky. Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason sat upon the front pew, facing the altarpiece where saints and angels crowded to watch as Christ in glory received His virgin Mother into Heaven with a crown of stars. Carlyle says that at first her eyes assumed Jehovah wore the same dark suit as always, but as she tiptoed along the center aisle she realized it was a bathrobe, black, barely enough to shield Jehovah’s body from the stone chill. Jehovah’s flesh was young, remember, just twenty-one, ten years younger even than young Carlyle, the structure of His face still smooth with childhood beneath His black hair—almost black, I should say, since it seemed as dull as graphite beside the true black of His eyes. Carlyle told me later of the thousand questions that schooled in her mind as she studied the impenetrable Figure who seemed more and more the center of this unraveling world, but somehow she could not fold her questions into words.

  Jehovah broke the silence. “Have you come to help Me?”

  The sensayer waited, uncertain whether the words were meant for her. “Help you how?” she asked.

  The stone-still Speaker did not turn. “To understand the God Who made this portrait of Himself.”

  Carlyle looked to the altarpiece, the choirs of Heaven shimmering in their concentric circles of cracking paint and gold. “People made that, human beings searching for their own understanding.”

  “If God made Man and Man made this, it is still a Self-portrait. And if, as some say, God made Man in His Image, and His Image then made this, it is a portrait’s portrait. And if Nature is the face of God, another Portrait, and Man is the spawn of Nature, it becomes a portrait’s portrait’s portrait. The Nature we see on Earth too is a microcosm, one might say a portrait of the Cosmos, and the Cosmos a portrait of the Laws of Nature, portraits spawning portraits like the spiral chambers of a nautilus repeating the face of God. Such a Creator seems desperate to show Himself to someone. And yet He hides Himself.” As sometimes in city parks clever sculptors create false merrymakers, a bronze person sitting on a bench or strolling by a lake, life-sized and eerie, just so Jehovah’s flesh sat frozen on the pew, the abstracted shape of a person without motion to make the person live. “Did you show proof of God’s existence to My Dominic, or did he show it to you?” He asked.

  Carlyle’s breath caught. “Dominic told you about Bridger?”

  �
�Bridger.” Jehovah repeated the name meticulously, sound by sound, not two syllables but a series of phonemes, segregated like steps in an equation. “I have not heard that as a name before. When you and I met four days ago you were a Deist. Nothing but your Clockmaker showing His Face could change you so fast, and Dominic would not stray from My side unless he has found That Which I most want in this universe, and seeks to hide from Me that he has found It.”

  “Dominic, Mycroft, and Heloïse, they speak of you as if you were a god.” The words just came out, Carlyle tells me, unplanned, as when you rub your eyes and only afterwards discover you were crying.

  “I Am.”

  They are words Carlyle thought she was prepared for. She had heard them before, not just in textbooks, but in the wild like this, from another parishioner. Her training should have sorted the statement like any other, identified its proper label: Calvinist, Hindu, megalomaniac, and selected appropriate next questions to help a parishioner explore himself. But this was different, Jehovah’s ‘I Am,’ subtly yet absolutely different, for such was the conviction with which He said it that Carlyle believed Him. Yet at the same time, Carlyle says, she could not believe that she believed, as if she were split somehow, watching from some dream bubble another version of herself who had gone mad. “I don’t understand,” was all she could answer.

  “Neither do I.” Jehovah moved at last, lowering His black eyes to look upon His hand, which He raised before Him with uneasy wonder. “I remember infancy,” He began. “My nurse often put My hand against hers, and I realized Mine was growing larger, deducing thus that these large beings that fed and lifted Me must be what I was going to become. I had known I was becoming more powerful, mastering how to grasp a thing, to turn it in My hand, to make it near and far. With no experience of the finite I had assumed My growth would be infinite. In her I saw its limit. Was that all? To see? To grasp what is within reach? To plunge forward in time, freefall, knowing only what lies behind, while what lies ahead remains invisible? Tu … Ya…” He stumbled now, one word then another falling stillborn as He realized it would not serve with monoglot Carlyle. “All things being right,” He tried at last, “I should have but to Will a thing for it to be, yet here I was reduced to these weak tools: hands, eyes, memory. Beyond these limits I would be forever powerless.”

  Carlyle felt pain imagining such thoughts. “They say no one can remember infancy.”

  “I make the most of what few tools I have.” Jehovah lowered His hand, and let His eyes lock on the sensayer trembling in the aisle beside Him. “Your flesh will drain your strength less if you sit.”

  “Thanks.” Carlyle sank onto the pew opposite.

  “As I grew I met words,” Jehovah continued. “These made sense. These one Willed into being, as is proper, and of them one could create anything, near or far or infinite or past or perfect. I thought I had discovered the real matter of this universe, but even words were too limited. Each person, I learned, could only perceive words made in their presence, and no new words could be made, only the same repeated that I heard from them, like atoms, diverse only when they recombine. Even these might have been building blocks enough, but, as I added more variety to my words, they affected the so-called adults less. Tutors told me each adult could only understand certain groups of words called ‘languages,’ that what had power over my nurse did not over Pater, or Papá, or Chichi-ue, or Monseigneur le Duc. Even now for you, Cousin, I must use only words in the set named ‘English,’ for the rest would pass intangible through the coarse net of your understanding, as they do through Aunt Kosala’s. The tutors promised that, with time, it would come naturally to Me, speaking only one language at a time, but how can it be natural to paint only with shades of red, or to build with atoms from only one column of His Periodic Table?”

  Carlyle’s breath caught. “You mean God’s?”

  “This Universe’s God,” Jehovah clarified. “I am not one small god among many, as you imagined Zeus, Anubis, and Apollo. I am the only God, the infinite, omnipotent creative Will, the source of all My universe, which is not this one.”

  “A different universe?” Carlyle supplied, understanding breaking in her eyes like dawn. “A different universe, with a different monotheistic God?”

  Jehovah does not nod. “In My own universe I Am all, complete, sufficient, the First and Final Cause, perfect in Myself. Yet, for some reason, I find Myself born here. In this universe I can perceive what is within the limit of My human body’s senses, remember what I have experienced, and wield the prostheses of human technology, but that is all. I have learned, I think, to eke out more from what this flesh can do than any human, but no finite thing can substitute for lost infinity.”

  The dream bubble burst here. Sensayer training awoke in Carlyle, ingrained doubt piercing the thin film of belief, so she fell back on routine questions. “How long have you known you were a God?”

  “My universe does not have time,” the foreign God replied. “I find it cruel, like death and distance and misunderstanding, barriers separating that which would rather be whole. I do not yet understand why This Universe’s God would make such things. Space. Time. I met Time at the moment of My birth, but since meeting it, and in My native infinity outside it, I have always known What I Am.”

  “What happened to your universe when you left and came to this one?”

  “I have not left,” He answered. “I cannot leave My universe any more than Being can leave this wood”—he looked to the pew, solid beneath them both—“or Space this place. I Am My universe, always, Creator, touching, making, enabling, and understanding every part of it, though I also sit here in this flesh.”

  “So you can still sense your universe even though you’re here?”

  Jehovah closed His eyes, the only sense we have the power, at our will, to shut off. “If Unity, which grants absolute understanding of all things, falls under the label ‘sense,’ then yes. It is all right that you struggle to believe.”

  “What?” Carlyle’s voice cracked, startled.

  “That I am What I say.”

  Carlyle looked at her hands. “I believe that you believe it.”

  “Most of My fathers tell themselves it does not matter whether I Am a God or not, so long as I do My duty by their Hives. But you know better.”

  The sensayer nodded. “If it were true, the existence of another God and another universe, it would be the most important fact in the history of science, as well as the history of religion and everything else.” She buried her fingers in her blond-tinged hair. “I’m trying to understand what you’re describing, but it’s a lot, and, for me personally, at least, belief can’t come before understanding.”

  “I likewise find Anselm difficult,” Jehovah answered.

  Carlyle smiled; they have read the same theologians, this priest and This God, equal in that at least. “It will take me time,” Carlyle continued, “to work through what it would mean for there to be two universes, and two monotheistic Gods. Until I explore all the implications, I’m not at the level where I can believe or disbelieve, since I can’t yet compare it to my current beliefs. In my experience I have to examine a belief system for at least a few weeks, sometimes a few years, before I know it well enough to believe or disbelieve.”

  “Yes,” Jehovah agreed, “here time does seem a constituent component of belief.”

  “Do you see time like matter, then?” Carlyle tested, growing eager. “Moments like atoms, so old things have more time matter? Or is it connected, like a string?”

  Jehovah spent several silent breaths in thought. “I am nowhere near understanding Time. It seems to be a direction in which sentience can only move one way and perceive the other, but it also destroys, and twists, and swallows, making legacies differ from, or even oppose, intent. It annihilates, repeats, erases. It is too alien to me.”

  Carlyle remembers a chill as she tried to read emotion in Jehovah’s eyes, and caught the full force of their starless, living black. “Sorry to ask so ma
ny questions.”

  “I welcome questions,” This Kind God replied. “Now that this universe has taught Me what ignorance is, I will never willfully inflict it on a sentient thing, as My Peer does.”

  “Your Peer, you mean This Universe’s God?”

  “Yes. I would wish you a kinder Maker, but it is impius to feel anything less than absolute gratitude for the absolute gift of having been created.”

  Carlyle smiled at Jehovah’s latinate pronunciation of the word, meant in its Roman sense, when piety was owed to states and parents as well as to religion. “It sounds like you don’t like Them. God, This Universe’s God I mean, you don’t like the way They run things.”

  Slowly, with difficulty, always with difficulty come His answers. “I do not dislike, rather I do not understand. I need to find Him. I need Him to answer why He made His Universe so full of barriers, and ignorance, and limited perspectives, which make His sentient creations suffer and see evil in His plan. I need to know why He invented Pain, and Time, and Distance. I need to know why He creates portrait after portrait of Himself, but stays so hidden. I need to know how He found Me, how He created this flesh men call Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason, how He bound Me into it, and why He brings Me here as His Unwilling Guest, and then, strange Host, He hides.”

  Carlyle smiled. “You’re not alone there. Everyone asks questions. Why am I here? Why is there Evil in the world? Why won’t the Creator show Themself? I know you must study as much philosophy as Dominic. That’s what it’s always been about. Everyone throughout history needed those answers.”