by Ada Palmer
Bridger reeled, hurling himself back as if Jehovah’s black gaze burned.
“English, Ἄναξ,” I urged. “Use English.”
Jehovah flinched, as if the task stung like peroxide on a wound. “Why did You make Me wait so long?”
“I’m not God!” Bridger screamed. “I don’t know what They’re doing! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”
If you had seen Jehovah’s face as He tried to simplify his thoughts, reader, you would have felt as if you watched the captain of a crowded life raft, threatened with sinking by the mass of those who try to claw their way aboard, whose destructive desperation forces the shaking captain to shoot them, one by one. “As if it were not cruelty enough that change in time cannot create without destroying, once again He makes the agent He sends to bring about His better world love this one.”
Bridger screamed. I never finished telling you the tale of Sadcat, did I? Years ago Bridger tried to heal a maimed cat by wrapping it in the plush fleece of an uninjured toy cat, but the healthy creature his miracle created had no sign of the personality of the original. ‘Sadcat’ we named it, a new creature inhabiting the stolen body of the old, while the original vanished, unmade, victim of a mistake Bridger seemed somehow unable to undo. The child screamed for hours when he realized he’d unmade a living thing, screams I can still hear, his small frame shaking in my arms. This scream surpassed that. Jehovah held fast to Bridger’s wrist, the first full-body effort I had ever seen Him make, but, even with the fire of absolute Will within it, His human hand could not match Bridger’s magic strength. The child pulled free.
“Bridger, wait!” I cried, but the weight of heart attack lead-dense across my chest twisted what should have been shout into dreamlike whisper.
“I don’t want to destroy the world! You don’t know I can really make a better one!”
“Wait!”
He vanished, pulling the invisibility hood over his head, so no eye, nor sensor, nor keen-nosed U-beast could find a trace of him. That did not mean he could not hear me.
“Come back, Bridger!” I shout-whispered. “Stay! There’s no point hiding when the world’s already seen you. You’re here for each other, don’t you see? Out of all the points in history This Universe’s God could have chosen to show Himself, He did it when you could meet Jehovah and Jehovah you!”
Jehovah hushed me with a soft, black glance, then, in five perfect words selected from the six languages both He and I commanded, He ordered me to fulfill the purpose for which This Universe’s God had forged me, by finding and protecting Asclepios son of Apollo, kindest of the gods, who, in his zeal to help mankind, would even break Zeus’s law and raise the dead. It was a far better name than the one the child had chosen for himself.
Caesar, the Censor, Bryar, Papa, even Aldrin seized me as I tried to rise. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I must find Bridger.”
“Not in your condition.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you’re having a heart attack.”
I tried to pull free. “It was just a little spasm, not a full attack. I know the difference.”
Their hands only grew tighter around me, and I could see the Censor’s face and Caesar’s darken with that concern mingled with rage which my constant self-neglect so often caused.
Papa frowned most gravely. “This happens every time you slip your tracker, doesn’t it?”
“Their tracker?” Caesar repeated.
“This is how they slip it. I figured it out this morning when we caught one of their accomplices. Mycroft rewired their pacemaker to let them synchronize their pulse to someone else’s, then they can slip their tracker off onto the other’s ear without missing a beat.” Papa reached down to the notch Saladin had bitten from my ear, the skin below sensitive where the tracker should have rested. “That’s what this is for. We caught one of the other Servicers today wearing Mycroft’s tracker in addition to their own, and they and half a dozen more of Mycroft’s little friends have a nick cut out of the ear they don’t wear their trackers on, so they can slip on Mycroft’s. Problem is, messing with Mycroft’s pulse like that damages their heart. Every time.”
I forced them to let me sit up at least, eager to prove that I was ready for my task. “It doesn’t spasm every time, Papa. Just sometimes. I’m okay, really. This is important. Let me go!”
Bryar Kosala’s swift restraining hand was strongest. “We’re taking you to a hospital, Mycroft,” she announced with the unimpeachable authority of Mom. “You too, Jed, no objections. You were shot through the head. We won’t believe you’re okay until at least three doctors say so.”
The Utopians closed possessively around the most promising medical miracle in history. “Our hospital is close.”
She who oversaw forty-four of the hospitals in the city frowned at the mention of the forty-fifth, but knew when not to argue. Utopia’s Nowhere Princes already crowded around Jehovah, scanning Him and the gore on the ground around with every instrument they carried, but snakes and sprites and Pterascanadons were nothing to the infinity of electric senses possessed by that block-long golem of distilled science we call a Utopian hospital. Kosala had to yield. “Fine. Papa, is it safe to move?”
The Commissioner General checked his tracker, still functional, since he had stood far from the discharge of the devices we have sinced named Weeksbooth Counterbombs. “Sniper’s long gone, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “They had a getaway car hidden in the river, flew off to who knows where, and with the cars still haywire we can’t pursue.”
I would smile later thinking on it: the athlete in Sniper, who had shot, fenced, run, and ridden its way to victory today, could not resist completing this last pentathlon with a swim. At that moment, though, I had no spare thoughts for Sniper, or anything besides the mandate which, for once, came equally from This Universe’s God and from Mine. “I must return Bridger to Jehovah.”
The Censor’s soft hands caught me as I tried to rise once more. “Soon, Mycroft, as soon as the doctors say—”
I pinned him in a choke hold, my right elbow crushing his throat while the heel of my left hand stood ready to smash his nose up into his skull. “I’m sorry. I must go at all costs, and if Jehovah’s universe continued safe even while His mortal flesh was dead, then, even if one of you also happens to be a God, I no longer need to fear that I’ll destroy a universe by killing you.”
I felt the bite, though not the snake. Voltaire must have planted it on me, one of his Swissnakes, its syringe-fangs loaded with something which made me limp at once, and summoned sleep’s darkness soon after. I would not waken for five hours, but they were not wasted. Magnanimous Apollo sat with me, as he often does in fever dreams, rambling about his giant robots, and striding across Mars’s soil, and his war, and when I woke I knew, as surely as I knew the task before me, in what hiding place I would find Bridger.
CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH
Seven Surrenders
While I slept, the world spent these five hours trying to make sense of how one woman could have twisted all seven Hives into passing power to a single Youth. Sniper’s evidence flooded the net, even as its horse still thundered through Romanova, with Dominic hot on its heels. I will not give you what Sniper did: birth certificates, bank statements, DNA tests, wills—any truffle pig loosed in the archives can uproot such tedium. I was chosen as historian not least because my presumptive madness makes my testimony inadmissible in any court, so there are deeds that I alone may publicize without endangering those I describe. In evidence’s place, then (and with the facts as purged of sentiment as I can make them), I offer you these seven scenes, scattered in space and time, which seem to me to be the moments at which each Hive fell.
* * *
Humanists first. It took the sweat-drenched Humanist Vice President and Proxy for the Anonymous Brody DeLupa only two hours to set himself up on the Senate steps, a stone’s throw from the police barricade around the Rostra, still wet w
ith Jehovah Mason’s blood. “Murder on top of murder!” he raged, sputtering as he felt the mob hang on his words. “And when we finally expose the truth, they choose as their next victim Tribune Mason, the one good person responsible for trying to end their string of murders!”
The crowd around the Rostra had not so much thinned as changed, those who had endured the chaos firsthand wandering home to huddle with their bash’es, while, from the capital’s depths, the morbid and the starstruck arrived in wide-eyed droves. The skies at least were clear. The Utopians had worked their magic, forty-seven minutes to cleanse the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers and restore that flying bloodstream which makes our modern world one living thing. At the Censor’s urging, the Romanovan City Prefect had closed the capital to anyone without a diplomatic, legal, or bash’ reason to enter, but that could not exclude the press, nor parasite DeLupa, thirsty for a stage.
“It’s unthinkable!” the Vice President railed. “Sniper, who we thought was our brightest star, not just defending mass murder, not just committing mass murder, but crowning it with this attempt on the life of a Romanovan Tribune! Never in my life did I expect to feel ashamed to be a Humanist, but how can I not? We’re the guilty ones! Europe and the Mitsubishi were complicit, but Humanists conceived this, Humanists controlled this, Humanists did this. Other politicians may be trying to sugarcoat it, but the Anonymous serves truth, and the truth is that our Hive’s most prized conviction, our love of human excellence, has degenerated into a cult of celebrity which hands power to the most charming, regardless of how rotten they are inside. President Ganymede is a mass murderer. Whether they committed the crimes before or after taking office doesn’t matter: we elected someone willing to commit mass murder.”
DeLupa’s hand rose by instinct to the tracker at his ear, reviewing the Anonymous’s instructions, perhaps, or the newsfeeds hot with babble as every capital from Brussels to Tōgenkyō swelled with mobs.
“I know how self-serving this must seem,” DeLupa continued, “the Vice President calling for the President’s arrest, but it isn’t what you think. The Anonymous doesn’t want you to make me President. The Anonymous doesn’t want you to make anyone President. In two hundred and fifty years, the Humanist Hive has not elected a single leader who refused to commit mass murder. Not one in two hundred and fifty years! Europe has had exceptions, the King of Spain, other good people who refused, that’s why the so-called Special Means Committee had to run the murders secretly around them. The Mitsubishi hid it from their Greenpeace Directors, knowing Greenpeace has a conscience if the others don’t, and the other Directors are chosen through patronage and family ties, so while it’s sick that they’ve all been murderers for centuries, it makes sense, at least, since each murderer gets to groom a murderous successor, it doesn’t mean everyone in the Hive is guilty. The Humanists don’t have that excuse. We have open elections, the most open in history, and still we elect nothing but murderers! Worse, I…” He paused again, perhaps receiving fresh instructions from the Anonymous over the line. “Worse, I know why it’s happened, and it’s not corruption, or election fraud, or even ignorance. The Humanists elect nothing but murderers because the voters who elect them are all murderers themselves!”
DeLupa hurled a roll of paper down the steps with theatrical gusto, holding the end so the scroll billowed like a streamer in the post-storm wind.
“This has been circulating among the Humanists for decades now,” he cried. “It’s called the Wish List. If you want someone dead, you put their name on the list. If someone else wants them dead, they add a second vote. The rumor claimed that somewhere out there someone was watching the list and secretly granting these ‘wishes.’ The Anonymous and I, like many others, always thought this was a sick joke, but now we know it wasn’t. The police just found the master Wish List, updated hourly, kept in the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ computers. This … This is…” Again he touched his tracker, scowling as if the Anonymous’s instructions came over the line too fast for him to follow. “This is not a government scheming to enrich itself, this is private individuals picking victims, and not a few. Each Hive Member can only vote for each name once, so if one name has a hundred votes that means a hundred different would-be murderers have added that victim to the list. The highest ranked name has nine hundred and eighty-nine million, four hundred and eight thousand and sixty-one votes. That’s nine hundred and eighty-nine million individual Humanists who have willed to commit murder, at least ninety percent of the Humanist Membership, and we must assume … there must … be more since … since…” The red-faced Proxy ripped the tracker from his ear and hurled it on the steps. “Little wonder a nation of murderers would elect a willing murderer to lead them! Even now they’re trying to stop me from saying what must be said”—he gestured at his tracker on the ground—“but I won’t let them! I’m not directing this appeal to the Humanists, I’m talking to everyone else. Arrest Ganymede, yes, but don’t make me President! You trust the Anonymous, I trust the Anonymous. If I became President, the Anonymous through me would lead the Humanists wisely until the next election, but the system wouldn’t change! A system that reliably picks murderers, because the Hive members are murderers themselves! The Hive is the problem, this Hive which breeds competition, and glory-seeking, and backstabbing, and idol worship, and will keep producing murderers as long as it exists!”
The crowd on the steps below DeLupa began to churn, and murmur terms of fear.
“I’m not speaking as Vice President anymore!” The Proxy’s cheeks puffed like an arriving wind. “I’m repeating the Anonymous’s plea: Dissolve the Humanists! Dissolve the Hive! Make all current Humanists into Graylaw Hiveless, at least until they join a new Hive which will give them something better to believe in. They won’t keep thinking like murderers without the poisonous Humanist atmosphere to twist them. They need to be split up, offered something better, new ideals, new guidelines. Let them—let us—become Cousins and Masons, and learn from their good models. Dissolve the Humanists! That’s the only real way to make the murders stop!”
“Stop this, DeLupa.” The bronze Senate doors behind him opened, revealing a wall of Senatorial guards, so polished, so ready, and so adrenalized by the day’s danger that one might almost call them soldiers. Ektor Carlyle Papadelias stood at their head. “You don’t have the authority to—”
“No one does!” the Proxy shrieked up at the Commissioner General. “Only the crawling, tiresome Senate has the authority to expel a Hive, but it has to be done fast! Now! And if the Anonymous is the only person in the world who dares to try, then—”
“You know the Anonymous has nothing to do with this.” Papa scowled. “This isn’t their idea, it’s yours.”
“What are you—”
Papa used his own tracker now to play aloud to the crowd a rough voice, garbled by computer modulation to sound more inhuman than not. “Friends, do not be deceived. I am the Anonymous. DeLupa has been my Proxy in the past, but I did not write the speech they just delivered, nor do I support their call to disband the Humanists. DeLupa is exploiting my name to trick you.”
DeLupa sputtered like a rabid thing. “Don’t listen! It’s a trick!”
Papadelias sighed through his wrinkles like an old birch. “Don’t try it, DeLupa. I’m Commissioner General. Everyone knows I know who the real Anonymous is; I have to for security reasons. Just give it up.”
The Proxy stumbled as he turned toward his accuser. “Ridiculous! I’m the one who speaks the Anonymous’s words! You’re just abusing your office so you can prop up a fake Anonymous for your own ends!”
“I will stop you, DeLupa,” the digital voice warned, “at all costs. If that requires me to reveal myself, so be it.”
“You wouldn’t.” The Proxy’s eyes sought the crowd’s support. “Did you hear that? The real Anonymous would never—”
“You think I’m bluffing?” the computer warned. “I won’t protect the office of Anonymous at the expense of shattering a Hive. You know there i
s a protocol if I need to reveal myself. I have already called MASON.”
Papa’s face reflected the black tone which the Anonymous’s distorted words could not convey. “It’s true,” Papa confirmed, “MASON’s in place in Alexandria, at the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to open the vault, and furious that your antics have dragged them away from the hospital where their child may still be dying. I don’t think the Anonymous is bluffing. If you push this they’ll come out here, slap you across the face, and call you a liar in front of the entire world. Back off, or it’s not the Humanists you’re going to destroy, it’s the office of Anonymous.”
One of Papa’s men held out a screen which showed the lighthouse tower of gray stone rising in the harbor of Alexandria. A gilded ziggurat crowned the tower, small but flashing angry in the overcast as sunset fired the bellies of the clouds. The guards, ba’sibs of MASON or past MASONs, had already unsealed the vault chamber, a round sanctum, no more than ten paces across, which formed the hollow heart of the gilded pyramid. In this heart’s heart, a waist-high block of glass-smooth black technology held in its impenetrable womb the Masonic Oath of Office, and the name of the one who will be next to read it. Not a few of Earth’s other Powers prefer sharing the Emperor’s security to paying for their own. Earth’s other great secrets slept in a ring of vaults nested in the round wall like a columbarium: the list of Gag-genes rested here, the Registry of Sensayers’ Beliefs, logs of Censors’ Office predictions, the wills and marriage contracts of Earth’s remaining monarchs, and in Vault Four the true names of the Seventh Anonymous and their six predecessors. Here, with Jehovah’s blood crusting his black left sleeve with brown, the Emperor waited.
“Last chance, DeLupa.”
Brody DeLupa refuses absolutely to be interviewed. I do not know why he attempted what he did, whether he was a simple traitor, or whether deep down he believed that the Anonymous would want the Humanists dissolved. Beneath that grotesque shell he might be any kind of man, an innocent appalled to find himself surrounded by murderers, or a viper of Madame’s positioned to backstab Ganymede should the Duke President turn rebel. It hurts not knowing, but you feel this all the time, do you not, reader? Frustration’s itch as you boil with questions which I and my peers, distant or dead, cannot be made to answer. For your sake I did manage, at least, to ask the Anonymous why he picked DeLupa as his Proxy in the first place. He answered that, of the ambitious young Humanists he had found flocking Buenos Aires, DeLupa had seemed the emptiest.