by Ada Palmer
Sniper paid back the taunt by scoring the first touch, its blade sipping blood from Dominic’s elbow. “I cracked Gordian’s files. Felix Faust has already assigned ‘J. E. Donatien Mason and associates’ as Gordian’s new Brain-bash’. That includes you, doesn’t it, Dominic? Is it fun being in Gordian’s controlling think tank?”
The injury did not slow Dominic, or speed him, his rage already the maximum flesh can conjure. “Violating Romanova alone is not enough for thee, is it? Thou’rt set on wounding every Hive before thou goest down, just like thy beloved Mycroft Canner!”
No taunt could divert Sniper’s momentum. “The Humanists and Cousins are too democratic to be controlled, so Madame’s trying to destroy us outright. Utopia’s too small to stand alone when all the other dominoes go down, and, as for Europe, I thought you were planning to tear Europe down too, until I snagged a hair sample.”
Dominic’s lunge grazed Sniper’s arm. “Enough, worm!”
“With Casimir Perry and the whole of Parliament hauled off as criminals, Europe will be left traumatized, leaderless, hungry for a savior. Madame expects they’ll come to heel as soon it comes out…”
“Enough!”
“… that Jehovah’s real father is the King of Spain!”
Dominic flailed, not caring if the epée pierced his shoulder so long as his rapier bit back at the blasphemer. It was not Sniper tipping Madame’s hand which spurred this rage, I think, but seeing damage done to the honor of one of the few men Dominic had been conditioned to respect. No one imagined that His Majesty Isabel Carlos II had lived a widower these many years without some company, but to have his indiscretion exposed so basely, a mistress of ill repute, a bastard Son already come of age, the King’s intimate secrets shouted across Romanova’s rooftops like some schoolyard scandal, that made the courtier within Dominic burn. Doubtless you, progressive reader, see little crime in His Majesty’s transgression. To the contrary, you admire the King’s steadfastness in refusing to marry any other woman while Jehovah’s mother lived, and admire too the care he took to see the Son he could not rear at least be raised as another monarch’s Son. So thought the crowd, the world, looking, not at the shattered corpse, but at the photo archives, videos, the shape of Jehovah’s lips, His hair not quite black, the royal resemblance, unthinkable before, now obvious. Chaos feeds that species of love we call nostalgia, nostalgia for trust in this case, for honor, for good leaders who were also good men: Thomas Carlyle, Mycroft MASON, and the many Spanish Kings and Queens who had served and protected the Hive system since its beginning. How proud would that proud ancestry have been to see a Prince of their blood, even a Bastard, deliver to the Senate the long-overdue truth about the assassinations, and so end centuries of murder. Now He would not. Across the Forum, fear’s quick breathing, which had kept the cowering crowd mute, gave way to tears for the King He would have made.
“Where’s the ambulance?” the Censor screamed, half to the guards, half to the heavens. “Where are the police?”
The ring of guards, clustered like cypress roots around the Rostra, wondered the same, trying trick after trick to awaken their dead trackers and contact the cars which should have come by now to spirit their charges to safety.
“Look at the sky!” someone cried. “The cars!”
Even in my state I saw them, hundreds, thousands, wild, round, pregnant like bombs, too chaotic in their courses for the eye to distinguish flight from falling. The lowest of the mad cars nearly grazed the Romanovan rooftops, stripping flags from flagpoles with their winds, while higher swarms sliced the clouds into grids. The sky was full, not a layer of steady traffic, not flocks of cars dispersing after a game, but full of cars, from the ground to the highest fringes where atmosphere gives way to dark.
“It’s the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers!” Papadelias arrived at last, charging on foot down from his office at the best sprint his century-old bones could muster. “Sniper must have set the program before fleeing the house. They’ve launched the whole reserve, a billion cars flying wild, blocking everything, emergency zones, Utopian airspace, everything. We don’t dare launch an ambulance, it would be hit in seconds. We tried calling a civilian car, but the network is rejecting new calls, not just here, everywhere. Cars already in flight won’t land, and new ones aren’t accepting passengers. The world’s shut down.”
Panic followed, cities not yet strangling but feeling the threat of strangulation, as when the heart has just failed and the body cramps by instinct knowing it will soon starve. That sky, streaked with heedless blurs, is now the most common nightmare image of our time. Everyone saw it, in the street, through windows, the last ignorant remnants startled from play or sleep by half reports: “The cars have stopped!” “They shot Tribune J.E.D.D. Mason on the Rostra!” “There’s chaos in Romanova!” Experts tell us it was not those first minutes’ freeze that did the real economic damage, but the panic as the whole world dropped its work, huddled in corners, jammed the network with calls to friends and bash’mates, as a population of ten billion all at once needed to find their loved ones safe. One billion had watched Tully on the Rostra—eight billion now found the channels that showed Sniper.
“I wish there had been another way to end this, but there wasn’t.” Sniper smiled as decades of training left it breath enough to preach, while its opponent panted. “As long as Jehovah Mason lived, the Hive leaders would have kept trying to make them their heir, and Joyce Faust’s army of client-spies would have kept trying to destroy any Hive that didn’t capitulate. Jehovah Mason would either inherit or destroy all seven, that was the plan. Tomorrow I’m sure leaders and experts will line up to question my evidence and motives, but don’t let anyone persuade you that the global coup I stopped today would have been anything less than the total destruction of the Hive system. They’ll say it’s not a coup if everyone was willing to give Jehovah Mason power. They’ll say Jehovah Mason was a good person, wise, competent, the best leader we could have had. They’ll say most of the Hives would still have existed, even flourished, even if they all had one leader. They’re wrong.” An angelic calm dawned on Sniper’s face. “The Hives are separate because they stand for separate things. I’m a Humanist. I’m not taking orders from any Mason, and I don’t think a Mason should take orders from a Humanist. Different Hives think differently, and need to be led by people who think differently. It doesn’t matter how wonderful or competent Jehovah Mason was, no one can think seven ways at once. The Hive system made monarchy popular again by eliminating the risk of tyranny, since if a bad Emperor came along, all the Masons would just switch Hives, but free choice requires options to choose from. Combining all Hives under a single ruler would leave this world no better than back when geographic nations gave people no choice. That’s why my bash’ has spent the last twelve generations killing people whose existence, whether they intended to or not, threatened to destroy the freest civilization—no, the only free civilization—that’s ever existed. That’s why Jehovah Mason had to die.”
Dominic’s blows grew fierce and faster, the rounded guard of Sniper’s sword ringing like a bell in a child’s abusing hand. Rage is an asset in the kind of rough, animal combat Saladin and I perfected, but fencing is an art, and Dominic’s rage contaminated his stance as roughness muddies paint. Sniper lunged, a deep strike which skewered Dominic’s wrist. The rapier fell from fingers no longer properly connected to the muscles which give grip its strength, but that would not stop Dominic. He hurled the weapon as it fell, and, as Sniper blocked the throw, Dominic flailed with his remaining hand and seized the blade of his opponent’s sword. Sniper gave the hilt a twist, but pain could not dislodge the zealot. Sensing bloody fists dangerously close, Sniper released its sword and leapt off the rooftop onto nothing. The crowd screamed, then screamed more as the expected plummet turned instead to flight. Sniper ran across the empty air, as if that eternal inner flame which fires each new generation’s athletes to break record after record had at last defeated gravity. Watch the footag
e in slow motion if you can, see how, like a dolphin chasing currents invisible within the sea, the practiced symmetry of Sniper’s footfalls chased the wind. That wind turned out, in fact, to be a plank covered in Griffincloth, laid invisibly between the rooftops to enable Sniper’s swift escape. I must point out, reader, the inhuman confidence it takes to sprint unflinching at Olympic speed along a walkway less than a meter wide and completely invisible, with only precipice below. I could not do it, nor could Dominic, who groped after his prey, marking the invisible path with his own blood as he lumbered forward over the heads of the crowd and stunned police. Even without cars, the cops had come, and they had almost finished surrounding the law courts, prepared to storm the roof. Now they could only watch their quarry soar over their heads to safety like some destructive angel, which does Providence’s dirty work, then retreats to heaven beyond the reach of Earthly law.
Papadelias cursed fiercely, brightly, rich colloquial Greek burbling from him as this crisis-of-a-century fired his old bones with a vigor almost as fresh as youth. “Third squad stay on the ground,” he ordered, “follow Sniper close as you can on foot. Ripper, Stark, and Bolenge, take Tully Mardi into custody. Everyone else, get the VIPs into the Censor’s office, then lock it down. The Senate’s already sealed.”
Kosala seized Jehovah’s limp arms and mine. “We can’t move them without stretchers!”
Papa nodded to his men to drag her off by force. “Mycroft, can you hear me?”
I had heard all, and seen, but only now grew strong enough to speak. “Bridger.”
I did not summon him. Rather, I named him when I saw him before me, the hood of the invisibility cloak falling back from eyes too tear-red any longer to look blue. He was above us, wracked with sobs, Hermes’s winged sandals fluttering in protest as he made them descend toward the blood-smeared stone. “It’s my fault!”
The guards drew their nightsticks at once.
“Let them through!” I cried, and mercifully Caesar cried it also, for my voice was too weak to reach even the nearest ear. “That’s Bridger! Let them through!”
I wonder what the others must have thought, Martin, Bryar, Vivien, our Utopian guardians who found themselves hurled out of the way by Caesar’s hands as this strange child descended with his play-stained child’s wrap, and winged feet, and tears.
“It’s my fault!” Bridger cried again. I doubt I could have understood words so twisted by sobs if I had not known his voice better than any other. “Mycroft, it’s my … I shouldn’t have … I didn’t know…”
He had the vial already in his hand, potion bubbling like the part of flame that is more liquid than destruction. It had no scent as he uncorked it, but, as he poured it over the wreckage of Jehovah, the air’s taste brightened, as when the Sun, emerging from cloud, makes spring grass tint the air with freshness. The Censor yelped feeling His dead hand awaken, fingers wriggling as the nerves which commanded them rethreaded themselves. The core of the brain regenerated first, blooming within the gore like an ugly orchid. All the nearby cameras were fried, but several spectators on balconies managed to record the restoration, and, with enhancement, one can see individual little arteries branching through the yellow-gray brain mass which swelled like rising dough. The miracle did not rewind the wound, did not draw the blood and shards of shattered skull back in, but grew replacements, the skull reknitting even as it rested blood-drenched on the pillow of its own discarded gore. It was not fast, Jehovah’s resurrection. God can create a cosmos in an instant, but to let us understand, Caesar, Censor, Papa, Kosala, Tully, to etch His miracle into all our memories beyond the possibility of doubt, that took time.
“I’m sorry!” Bridger’s words were shrill, like a cheap flute. “I shouldn’t have let it happen! I just wanted everyone to be okay, but everything I do just wrecks things!” His nose was running, the parent in me noticed that.
I was not strong enough to reach his hand, but managed to brush his knee with feeble fingers. “Don’t let Sniper see.”
Papa understood my warning faster than the boy. He ordered the wall of bodies closed around us, the static curtains of Utopian Coats overlapping to shroud the scene from the assassin, still retreating from a foe it thought well slain.
The rooftops of the Forum were Sniper’s playground now, path after invisible path tying building to building as it zigzagged an escape too tangled for the police to follow. Dominic plowed on, gaining ground as he grew used to the invisible paths, as if the blood he lost with every step just made him lighter. The world’s eyes followed them, not us, missing the miracle as their darling-turned-villain raced for its life. Sniper ran out of roofs in the end, the Cousins’ offices in the Temple of Venus & Rome marking the back limit of the Forum. Here Sniper vaulted down, not to the ground, but onto the back of Almirante, Sniper’s favorite practice steed, a tall, gray Hanoverian gelding, and now the fastest vehicle in Romanova. Some have criticized the lapse in security that let Sniper set this up, but after decades of Sniper’s state-sanctioned antics in the public and private sanctums of every VIP, what guard on Earth would find it strange if Sniper asked to park a horse even in the Emperor’s bedroom?
Settled in Almirante’s saddle, Sniper paused to flash its pursuer a salute, its own signature mock-pistol hand gesture, half courtesy, half taunt. “Go home, Dominic. We’re both done. It’s up to the Censor, the Senate, and the world now.” It sighed, its doll’s face sweet, even here. “It had to be done. Like Tully said, we were at the edge of war already. Even a well-meaning tyrant would have pushed us over. You knew that, but you didn’t care.”
“Aldrin!” Dominic screamed.
The Utopian needed no more instruction. She dispatched her unicorn, the slender black U-beast flowing dart-swift up the center of the Forum like the shadow of a crashing plane. Dominic mounted roughly, seeming too heavy for the doe-thin skeleton to bear, but whatever clever engineer had given the unicorn its processing power also made its frame stronger than Nature could. Sniper smiled at the sound of hoofs behind it, and led the chase, leaping rails and food carts and giving the young capital its first taste of the thunder of cavalry. The cameras and the crowd’s eye joined the chase, or half the crowd’s at least, for by now not a few of you had noticed something happening upon the Rostra.
“Domine?” Martin was the first to dare call to the reconstructed corpse.
It was hard to spot vitality returning to a body so lifeless even in life, but even Jehovah’s Will could not keep His eyes from twitching to blink the blood away. “Permanebam.” That was the word His lips formed first, even before breath had quite moistened them again. ‘I continued,’ there’s a rough translation, ‘I remained, endured, persisted—though this flesh died, I and My universe lived on, as you and I had so long hoped.’ If English had a word for such an idea, Jehovah would have used that.
“Jehovah!”
For a few moments, the joy of His return drowned the shock of the miracle. Family crowded around Him, Censor and Kosala weeping freely as relief channeled their terror into happy tears. Caesar was quiet. He had understood what this miracle child was when he appeared, and, while joy for his Son’s restoration crusted his eyes with salt, his mind turned already to what the world must do now that the Truth was known.
The world was not slow to start. “Did you see that?”
“J.E.D.D. Mason’s okay!”
“Their brain, it was blown out! I saw!”
“It grew back.”
“What did they do?”
“Was it the Utopians?”
The universal skepticism of our time would not let the word ‘miracle’ crop up so soon. Over the next weeks a credulous minority would begin to admit that they believe, and who knows how many others believe in secret now, afraid of seeming irrational before their peers. But still the majority prefers its other explanations, a hoax, an optical illusion, or some hidden healing technology Utopia will not yet share. You may believe or not as you will, reader. Had This Universe’s God wished you to
know Him without doubt, He would have worked His miracle before your eyes. Still, think, reader—whose side is Reason on? Her indispensable disciple John Locke, who freed a drowning Europe from the grip of Hobbes’s dark sea, argued that no one would knowingly lie and claim they saw a miracle if saying so gained nothing while maintaining the lie cost dear; Reason and self-interest are against it. Were Locke with us today, he would no doubt turn Ockham’s razor upon your disbelief too, and make you answer which is more plausible, that, as all of us who saw firsthand insist, God worked a miracle? Or that all Earth’s leaders are willing to be called insane because they can find no less embarrassing lie to conceal the fact that the Utopians are hiding some amazing technological healing serum which, despite their vendetta against Death, they refuse to share with anyone besides J.E.D.D. Mason?
“You’re Bridger, aren’t you?” Papadelias laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, though he admits he half expected the child to vanish like a dream before his touch. “Come on, kid, let’s get you inside somewhere safe.”
“Get away!” Thor’s strength in Bridger’s arm hurled Papa back hard enough to sprain his shoulder. “Don’t touch me! None of you! Stay back!” He brandished his magic wand, pregnant with spells more ominous than bullets.
Violence woke Kosala from her wonder. “What did you do?”
“I won’t let anybody have it, no one!” Bridger clutched the resurrection vial in his other hand, the potion’s residue glittering on the glass like a skin of sparks. “You’re not ready for it yet! You’re barely holding the world together with the people it has now. You think you can handle bringing everybody back?”
Jehovah’s hand, shaking from the agony of circulation returning to fingers recently dead, locked around Bridger’s thin wrist. 「“«¿Why tamdiu Me esperar nado to osshatta dixisti?»”」