by Ada Palmer
“Not as I do,” Jehovah answered slowly. “My Mycroft put it best. No matter how many beast companions Adam encounters in the garden, he needs Eve. Before I met this universe I was complete, neither wanting nor imagining anything beyond Myself. Here, watching humans, I have learned what it means for a being to have equals, to speak with another, debate, learn, grow. Now that I learn of that, I need it. I have never before lacked anything in My existence, but knowing that I have a Counterpart, a Peer, I need Him.” His eyes turned to the painted portrait of that Counterpart on the altarpiece before Him. “You called Him ‘Bridger’?”
Carlyle froze, taking some moments to remember that it was she who had spoken the name in Jehovah’s hearing. “Bridger isn’t God,” she replied. “I think they’re more an avatar of God, a manifestation, a tool. Something through which God channels Miracles.”
“But He is here. Your Clockmaker has shown Himself.”
“Yes.” Carlyle felt doubt’s end here, the fear that these last days might be illusion, dream, over. She never doubted again. “Bridger is a child, thirteen years old. They have the power to make toys real, any toy, no matter how fantastic, even living things.”
“Idea to actuality,” Jehovah supplied. “By Will.”
“Mycroft raised Bridger. Mycroft Canner.” Carlyle swallowed hard, a part of her rebelling as she found herself trying to defend, of all men, me. “I know it may seem cruel that they never told you, but they wanted Bridger to grow up and become a full, strong person before meeting you. Maybe they figured it was inevitable that you would meet eventually. Fated.”
“My fideist has nothing left to believe in but Providence.”
For Carlyle, who knew both the theology and me, this sentence stripped me naked as a soul at Judgment. A fideist is a religious skeptic, one who believes that human reason, however lofty its ambition, cannot achieve real, indubitable Truth, and that the senses, however fertile science makes them, are likewise fallible and incomplete. Not to be trusted. Have all your calculations answered what the soul is made of, Science? Have all your electron microscopes found or disproved an afterlife? I, born to the think tank bash’es of Alba Longa, I, trained by the genius Mardi bash’, I, with the finest education in the world, I, Mycroft Canner, had been so wrong that I murdered the living light Apollo to stop a war which never would have come. My logic was not wrong, the data gathered by the engines of human science not wrong. Rather the human animal I was could do no better than to err so absolutely. Reason failed. Evidence failed. I failed. Conviction had died in me in that room at Madame’s where my strange trial took place. Absolute doubt permitted only one escape: to surrender to and trust the Providence, which had not only planned my sin, but guided me after, not to the death I expected, but to Ἄναξ Jehovah.
“If you have a criticism, speak it,” Jehovah invited, sensing a hotter tension in Carlyle’s silence than mere pensiveness. “You are human, far more adept at living in this universe than I. I err often.”
Carlyle tried her best to face Jehovah sternly, but no human can. “You shouldn’t expose people’s beliefs to others like that. You did it before, at the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house. I didn’t want to know that Mycroft is a fideist, and Mycroft wouldn’t want me to know. That’s private, intimate. That’s how our culture works.”
The God thought for a silent moment. “Thank you. I forget that humans often cannot see what is to me as transparent as the air between us. I will try harder.”
“You can sense it, can’t you? You can read people’s minds, their thoughts. That’s how you know people’s religions. That’s your power, isn’t it? A special power, like Bridger’s. People call it telepathy.”
“My Peer, That Host Who brings Me here as Guest, does not grant that.”
“What?”
Tired, that’s how Carlyle described Jehovah here, exhaustion like Felix Faust’s, whose brain saps its host flesh harder than brains were meant to. “I know the word ‘telepathy.’ It would be a precious sense, making the mind’s world visible, a world of words will-shaped, more giving than matter. With telepathy I would be a sense less blind. No, I have no such sense.”
“But you know things, see things about people, things no one could see from just a glance.”
“I work hard to understand this world, its thinking creatures most,” answered This tender Visitor to our rough world. “I make the most of the senses this flesh possesses. I see people with these eyes, hear with these ears, feel the temperature when a pulse races. I think of what that means. My Uncle Felix does no less. Is that a miracle?”
Carlyle opened her mouth, but thought caught her. “No. No, I guess, it doesn’t have to be. You could just be very strangely good at reading people.” She chuckled at herself. “After Bridger I was too … credulous.” Shame made her blush. “Aren’t you going to ask me where Bridger is?”
Jehovah spared the sensayer His gaze. “You do not know. If you did you would be agitated, debating inside whether or not to tell Me. Dominic too, right now, does not know. When I find Mycroft, I shall know if he knows. If he knows, then I shall discover whether I ask. If I ask I shall discover whether he answers. Blindly we move. That is how time works.”
Carlyle felt dizzy, a metaphysical vertigo, as if she were in freefall, plunging into the pit of an unseen future, but somehow she had not realized she was falling until Jehovah made her see. She hugged herself.
“We must stop this conversation now,” Jehovah judged, rising with a robot’s slow efficiency, a minimum of muscles.
“Why?”
“We are increasing the cumulative total of human pain. You need rest. I have duties. Patris patience is at its limit. Strangely, I have been born into this universe as the Child of the leaders of your world, and the eight living leviathans which comprise humanity today compete to place Me at their head. Perhaps This Universe’s God thinks it a kindness, power, to make Me as close to My customary omnipotence as possible, a soft bed laid for Me, His Guest. But, vast as Man’s prosthetic powers are, a finite thing, however grand, is nothing against a lost infinity.”
MASON arrived now, and it is possible that his footsteps, audible on the stairs, were what told Jehovah their conference was about to end. “Terminus est, Fili,” MASON pronounced. “Foster, are you satisfied?”
Carlyle swallowed hard. “Yes. Yes, I … Yes.”
Carlyle describes the Emperor’s stare as graphite dark, not pure black like his Son’s, but a darkness which threatens to spread its dark across the room. “Remember, Foster, the mad Roman Emperors had themselves proclaimed gods, and inflicted unspeakable horrors on their subjects, but the sane ones were proclaimed gods too, and they did fine.”
“Then … Caesar, you know what Jehovah thinks they are?”
MASON would acknowledge no more. “You are needed too, Foster. Had you forgotten?”
Carlyle had forgotten so completely that she had no idea what the Emperor might mean, so she flushed red with guilt as she saw, at MASON’s heels, the frantic and loving mob of her own bash’mates. They had dropped everything, the rest of the Foster bash’, to come at Caesar’s summons, routed through Kosala, the two guardians of Gag-genes quick to answer the pleas of these loved ones who had been listening madly to their trackers for any word from their stray sheep.
“Carlyle!”
“You idiot! Are you okay?”
“We’ve been going mad looking for you!”
“We saw you on the news.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Vanishing for three days when the world’s falling apart!”
“You’re coming home. No arguments!”
“We’ve made your favorite, salmon and ravioli.”
“You’re coming home!”
I do not know them, reader. I imagine a swirl of Cousin’s wraps cocooning Carlyle as they drag her door-wards under the gentlest arrest, but Carlyle rightly will not let me bring their names or details into this. The bash’ is our oasis, the one innovation of our golden age whic
h even O.S. does not make sour. In the coming dark do not, like Carlyle, forget to turn to yours.
Only one thing made Carlyle drag his feet. “J—” She caught herself. “Tribune Mason! Let me know if you find Bridger!” She strained against the net of loving arms. “I need to know! There’s so much no one’s been able to understand about Bridger, the source, the limit of their powers, why they exist at all, but with what you can tell just looking at people I’m sure you’ll be the one to solve it. Please, I need to know!”
What is the lag before Jehovah speaks? Is it just language? Complexity of thought? Or, as I suspect, is it some disconnect between His eternal timeless Psyche and His sentences, which are designed to convey human thoughts, forged in the cage of time? “I will tell everyone.”
Home would wait no more. Carlyle’s bash’mates hauled her bodily to the car, and the comforts beyond.
“Quid need, Pater?” Jehovah asked, mixing English and Latin freely in the company of a father long accustomed to Him.
“I need Mycroft Canner,” MASON answered. “We both do. The police are asking me fresh questions about Apollo’s Iliad, and—”
“You listened,” Jehovah interrupted.
Caesar will never feel at ease relying on Jehovah, as no ruler can rest whose cities thrive upon a riverbank, which could, at any moment, flood. “Yes,” he confessed. “Mycroft is mad. A child that can bring toys to life is mad, but…”
“Vero many Mycroftis operes make sudden sense si sit veritas.” (But many of Mycroft’s actions make sudden sense if it is true.—9A)
The Emperor sighed. “Mycroft is missing. They slipped their tracker, even Papadelias has no clues. Do you know where—”
“Romanova.”
“They contacted you?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
Jehovah’s gaze strayed to the filtered sky beyond the stained-glass windows, dimmed by the onset of subtle overcast. “Downpour est in Romanova. Posset Mycroftem (Mycroft can) visit Apollo’s grave unseen.”
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH
The Rape of Apollo
Has it occurred to you, reader, that these are the words of a dead man? All books will be someday, for authors die, and if by chance you read this while I live, then the second time you take up my history, the third, when your grandchildren read it, I shall surely have paid the ferryman what we all owe. I think all human beings, even I who have no right to ask more of the world, wish to see the future. I don’t mean the whole future; after a millennium history must progress beyond one’s ability to understand. What we want is to see the trajectories of those things we care about: our legacy, our Hive, our children. If we cannot watch the ship on its whole voyage, we can at least feel satisfaction seeing the white sails shrink toward the horizon. The Stoics said no man can be called happy until the end of time, for, if all his successes were undone after his death, he would be wretched in retrospect. I think, though, they were too demanding. No one can hope to follow the Utopians to the infinity they aim at, but if I dared ask anything more of Providence, it would be that I might live to know one thing. Will this cold Plan let them take that first step to the stars? Or will it make them, like the dandelion seed, catch in the nearby grasses, forced to take root beside their parents, though they aimed so high? If I lived long enough to see the seeds fly, reader, count me a happy man.
“Mycroft.”
Caesar found me as Ἄναξ Jehovah prophesied, hiding in the downpour before Apollo’s tomb. Even Romanova empties before walls of rain, the remnant citizens too hurried to peer past porches and umbrellas, let alone to spot a Servicer’s dull uniform as I knelt on the cobbles. Wind tossed the rain in waves, slapping the walls, the flanking awnings, and Apollo’s statue, whose stone coat seemed to soar with the gusting wind. There is a spot before the grave where nothing grows, no trace of those brave sprouts which elsewhere eke out their strangling existence in the pavement cracks. I cannot help but think that my tears made it barren, salt shed over decades of visits stolen whenever dark or downpour offered me concealment. If it was not my tears alone, it was half mine, half MASON’s.
“You broke your parole.” I could hardly see the Emperor behind me, a black pillar haloed by the runoff of the umbrella held by an imperial guard.
“I know I have no right to mourn Apollo, Caesar,” I answered, struggling to breathe between my sobs, “but that doesn’t keep me from needing to.”
In another place his black-sleeved fist would have threatened violence. Not here. “You lied, Mycroft.”
“I only slip my tracker when I have to, Caesar. Sometimes—”
“I don’t care about your tracker.” He spoke English, unwilling to exchange Latin with one who has no right to know it. “Apollo’s Iliad. You pretended all these years it was a storybook, a modern retelling of the Trojan War. I never asked to see it because you said Apollo wouldn’t want me to read it before you finished it, the more fool me.”
I shuddered. “It is a storybook, Caesar. Apollo’s unfinished novel.”
“The police know better. It’s a handbook for the Mardis’ war.”
“It’s not.”
His impatient hands grasped at the rain. “Give it to me. I should never have let you keep it.”
“I haven’t been trying to start the war, Caesar, I swear!” I answered. “I tried to stop it. Everything I did, I did to stop it. Do you think I could have done this to Apollo if there was any other way?”
I heard the Emperor’s knuckles crack despite the rain. “What you did to Apollo and the others was sick beyond imagining. If you had just been trying to stop the war, you could have made the murders quick and painless.”
“And what justice would there be in that?” I snapped, startled at my own heat. “The Mardis committed themselves to war and all its consequences: rape, torture, oppression, famine, flame, children half crushed by bombs crying to the dark as they wait for their broken limbs to bleed enough to let them die. What I gave them was a fraction of what they planned to give the world. Aeneas, Geneva, Kohaku, Chiasa, all of them would rather have killed themselves than live to see the future they were trying to create. Painless deaths would not have been just punishment for what they planned, and they knew it.”
“You call it justice?”
MASON stepped toward me, hands hungry for some justice of his own, but he stopped before the somber, staring vizor of Apollo’s statue. It had been a challenge for the sculptor, how to render recognizable in stone a figure so completely shrouded, the too-long sleeves leaving only fingertips peeking out, the mouth and nose barely visible between collar and vizor, hair showing only in moments when the hood fell back. The artist settled on two tricks. Reflections first, polishing the coat so the marble reflects the faces and colors of passersby, much like the Griffincloth reality. Motion was the second trick, a forward momentum in sculpted Apollo’s gait, so winds lift the coat and drive the hood back, as if he were about to leap down from a ship’s prow to make first footfall on a newfound shore, or into battle, to counter Caesar’s violence with his own.
“You’re right, Caesar,” I answered, “it wasn’t justice. A single body can only endure so much before it dies, and each of them deserved the suffering of hundreds of millions. The Mardis wanted to know what the war would be like. I gave them as much of a taste as one body can endure. Some of them—Mercer, Luther—they agreed it would have been more cruel to send them to death without a sample of the world they had dedicated their lives to studying, or at least they agreed before the pain began.” I could see Mercer’s face before me as I spoke, her eyes’ light growing more alien during the vivisection, as she dictated notes about her own psychological degeneration to the recorder I let her set up to preserve for Felix Faust the final discoveries of his lost heir. “Trauma and cruelty we still have today but war, the most extreme realm of human psychology, we know nothing about, now that there are no veterans left to teach us what it meant. The Mardis deserved to taste that.” My voice quaked. “
Release me from this, Caesar, please. I cannot defend the actions of a self long dead. The Mycroft Canner who carried out those murders—”
“Was you, Mycroft,” MASON interrupted, hard. “Don’t dare claim to me that Mycroft died when I’m the one who had to let you live.”
“I’m sorry, Caesar. I’m sorry.”
MASON strode closer yet, a dark splash within the storm. “Show me Apollo’s Iliad,” he ordered.
“You don’t want to see it, Caesar.”
“There are many things I don’t want to see. I had my guards search Aldrin and Voltaire. I didn’t want to find their coats like Apollo’s, filled with hidden weapons, weapon systems, targeting programs in their vizors. I keep telling myself it’s for defense, that Apollo didn’t want war, that they just wanted Utopia to be ready to defend itself. Utopia wouldn’t have developed secret weapons, and sheltered Tully Mardi all this time, in order to finish making the war the Mardi bash’ tried to begin. Utopia is hope for the future. They should have faith that human beings can improve with time, grow past war, achieve anything, even eternal peace.”
“They do, Caesar,” I answered through my tears.
“Then show me the book.” Earth’s sole Capital Power loomed close enough for the runoff from his umbrella to thunder at my heels. “Prove to me that all of this, the Seven-Ten lists and the CFB and Perry, are not the recipe Apollo left behind for making war.”
“I don’t have it, Caesar.”
“What?”
“The book. I gave it to … someone more worthy than myself.”
“To Bridger?” MASON leaned over me, sheltering me from the rain’s blows while threatening worse. “You gave it to this orphan who can supposedly bring toys to life?”
Terror gripped me. “How?”
“Thisbe Saneer told Papadelias, and Carlyle Foster told Jehovah. Even hearing it twice from separate sources on the same day, I’m still not sure that I believe.”
Papadelias knowing, Thisbe’s betrayal, Carlyle breaking his word, these should have frightened me, but I could not feel fear. Jehovah knew at last. He had heard, not from me, but from a priest, an agent of This Universe’s God. The world seemed repaired, as if I had looked under a tattered bandage to find an old wound finally healed.