by Ada Palmer
Papa nodded. «I didn’t see that one coming. No telling yet if Dominic will live to take the post, though.»
I peered at the bandages, mounded thick like snow. «What did Sniper do to them?»
Papa almost smiled. «They did it to themself. Dominic grabbed on to the outside of the car when Sniper took off out of the river, and managed to stay on all the way to Antwerp. They should be dead.»
«They rode on the outside of the car?»
«Full speed, wedged themself on somehow. The engineers always said it was impossible, but now they have a dozen explanations, something about a wind pocket in the inner angle, or back drafts, or something.»
Oh, miraculous chameleon, Science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you? «Will they be okay?» I asked.
Papa frowned. «The doctors say there’s all kinds of damage: skin stripped off, windburns, freezing, oxygen deprivation, and they’re still assessing the internal consequences. Actually, I think they’re just curious to find out how Dominic did it without blacking out.»
My eyes widened. «They stayed conscious?»
«They were conscious at the end, at least, yes. Sniper stopped the car above a jail outside Antwerp, where Julia Doria-Pamphili was being held, and shot them through the window.»
«Julia?» I cried, straps straining as my startled shoulders twitched.
«Easy, there. Julia’s fine, the bullet went through their heart but there was a hospital right by the jail.» He frowned. «If you can shed any light on Sniper’s motives I’d be obliged, Mycroft. Had those two ever even met?»
I searched sincerely for an answer, but knew nothing then of the kidnapping and day of passion that had been in payment for giving Carlyle Foster–Kraye de la Trémoïlle to Dominic. «If Sniper wanted Julia dead they’d aim for the head,» I answered, «not the heart. That’s all I know.»
Papa shrugged. «Before Sniper could take off again, Dominic jumped them from the car roof and held on hard enough to strangle.»
«Sniper’s dead?»
With decades, even the unzipping of a body bag grows routine. «This is what Dominic caught.» Papa eased the bag open, baring the familiar face with open eyes still lifelike. «Sniper’s cameras never left it for a second, it can’t be a substitution. This is what shot J.E.D.D. Mason.» He aimed a light, highlighting the crinkling of synthetic skin, and shards of plastic vertebrae which poked out through the crushed gel of the poseable neck. «There’s no robotics or modifications inside. Serial number checks out and everything. For all science can tell me it’s a normal Sniper Doll.» He held my eyes. «Thisbe introduced me to Private Croucher.»
A sob gave my chest and shoulder their first taste of the incision’s pain breaking through the anesthesia. «Then it was Bridger’s fault. Bridger said it was, I thought they just felt guilty that they couldn’t stop it.»
«Bridger brought this to life?»
I almost laughed. «It’s your fault too, Papa. You fried Bridger’s electronics when you tried to corner them at the Sniper Doll museum. They lost contact with their little soldiers, and must have animated a Sniper Doll to help protect them. Bridger always said Sniper looked fun and friendly.»
Papa’s voice darkened. «Then you agree the real Sniper was never at Romanova?»
I nodded. «They’re out there somewhere, watching, and, knowing Sniper, they won’t rest until they’ve killed Jehovah again. They’ll try again, soon.»
Papa almost smiled. «Sniper’s ahead of you.» He reached to my tracker and set it to mimic his as he flicked through pictures of Sniper standing beside images of burning Brussels and other fresh events to prove that it still lived. Papa’s sigh was not an easy one. «They’re transmitting manifestos in all directions, swearing they won’t stop until they’ve liberated the world from Madame and Epicurus Mason, and calling on all free people who still love their Hives to join them.»
I expected to see Sniper smug in the photos, the showman’s glint in its eye as it paraded costumes tailored for its new Rogue Assassin persona, but there was no play now. It wore its Humanist boots, a practical shirt, almost Hiveless gray, and its dark eyes were alight with a grave, steady fire, almost a grown-up’s. Such a face even those who no longer play with dolls might follow.
«Go back,» I snapped, «two images ago, was that Tully Mardi with Sniper?»
«Yes.» Papa scrolled back to a still shot of Sniper and the Enemy, shaking hands before a wall-sized world map like two freshly allied heads of state. «We’d detained Tully for inciting riot, but Sniper’s people busted them out, and Tully went, the fool. I would have dropped the charges if they’d cooperated, but now they’ve got resisting arrest and conspiracy and all sorts of crimes on their record. Sniper’s no fool, though. Tully’s stuck with Sniper now, on the run together, and Tully’s making speeches at Sniper’s side about how the war they’ve been predicting all this time is this one, Sniper against Epicurus Mason, independent Hives against unifying the Hives. By implication it’s also Tully against you, with those who like you on Jehovah’s side and those who don’t on Sniper’s. How many Humanists was it who put you on the Wish List again? Nine hundred million?»
I let my head fall back against the pillow, feeling the strange ease of one about to die, who sees the headsman’s axe halted midair by royal pardon. «It doesn’t matter anymore. We have Bridger.»
«So?»
I smiled. «So no one will care about Sniper’s rebellion when Jehovah starts handing out immortality. That’s why They’ve come to power now, don’t you see? It’s Providence. For the first time in history all the governments of the Earth will be united, not one common ruler right away but one Heir binding all rulers together. Ἄναξ Jehovah will make sure Bridger’s gifts are distributed evenly to all, with no Hive privileged and none left out. They’ll save everyone.»
The old man could not help but cock an eyebrow. «Bridger can really do that?»
«Bridger can do literally anything, they just need protection and support to do it. With Jehovah to oversee the transition they’ll save everyone, even the dead. You think Tully Mardi will keep preaching when Bridger resurrects their parents? And Apollo?»
“Where is he? Where is my Son!” It was Madame’s voice, shrill with love, which trumpeted down the hall outside in flagrant violation of a patient’s right to hush.
Utopia: “We’re running tests. They’ll be back shortly. Please wait in here.”
Madame: “What tests? Is there a problem?”
Utopia: “We’re just gathering data. Please wait inside.”
Madame: “No! Enough waiting! I must see my Son!”
Felix Faust: “Let it be, Joyce, you’re scaring them enough already.”
Caesar and Martin rose as the lady entered, Papa too. She wore a sleeved traveling cloak, black velvet and long enough to cover the full circumference of her skirts, like the outer leaf of a head of lettuce. She had shed nothing of her home costume, not the mask of makeup, not the quaint block-heeled shoes that made speed impossible; even the wig stayed, silvery beneath her hood, though far less monumental than her usual.
Caesar spoke first. “You came?”
“Of course I came!” she cried. “It’s been a nightmare, Cornel! I haven’t ridden in a car in fifty years! I had Utopia take me, but Romanova has all these ridiculous emergency restrictions. They kept asking questions, said I needed ‘known Members’ to vouch for me. Flagrant Blacklaw discrimination!”
The scowl on Felix Faust told the other half of her story: his sister, monstrous in her skirts and corset, clinging to his arm, while he, still in the Brillist sweater of his public office, drew stares like a magnet.
“But what’s happening, Cornel?” Madame pressed, seizing Caesar’s arm too without relinquishing her brother’s. “Is there any news?”
“Jehovah’s fine,” MASON answered.
“Is it true what I saw on the news? They came back from the dead!
”
“As next of kin, Madame, I’m sure you’ll be the first to hear when anything is certain. For now, we wait.”
Her eyes, wrath-hot and hungry for a culprit, locked on Martin. “You’ve some nerve, sitting here cozy when your master nearly died. Why didn’t you throw yourself in front of the bullet? That’s what you’re for, isn’t it?”
No words have power over Martin in Caesar’s presence save Caesar’s own. “No, Madame, it’s not.”
Her wrath would not fade easily. “Even Dominic was some use. I hear he pursued the assassin. Was he victorious?”
“Best leave that issue to me, Madame,” Papa interceded. “The less you say about revenge, the less likely Dominic here is to wake up to charges of unauthorized use of lethal force.” Papadelias had already closed the body bag again and drawn a curtain to hide it, but the bandage cocoon that held the wreck of Dominic lay bare.
“Oh! Dominic!” Madame cried, drawing Faust and Caesar close across her like doors, as if she feared the gore might leap out and contaminate her. « My poor pup! »
“The doctors have done all they can.” MASON pried her off, and closed the door. “I have a question for you, Madame.”
She frowned at his tone, a different kind of serious. “What is it, Cornel?”
“I know there is nothing to keep you from lying to me, but I must ask, and if our long friendship is not enough to entitle me to the truth, I hope you understand that I am much better able to tolerate wrongs honestly revealed than lies uncovered later.”
She blinked prettily. “What lies? What has you so concerned?”
“Did you plan this?”
“Of course I didn’t plan it!” she shrieked, seizing his arm again. “You think I’d try to kill our Son?”
MASON tried, but failed, to pull his hand away. “Not that, the rest. You knew Casimir Perry was Merion Kraye. Did you know the rest? The Seven-Ten list theft, DeLupa betraying the Anonymous, the exposure of O.S. Did you plan it? Did you know?”
With only a brief frown at MASON’s coldness, Madame shifted onto her brother’s arm. “No, but it is my doing nonetheless.”
“Explain,” Caesar demanded.
“I shall be honest,” she announced, her voice light with surprise, as if she had expected herself to decide the contrary. “You’re right, I do owe it to you, Cornel, for our long friendship, which I hope will not end here,”—her smile beamed frankness—“and I know you will deal more kindly with me if I am frank with you. Besides,”—she glanced at Papa—“I have done nothing prosecutable, or even malicious. But nonetheless, I take responsibility. I did not plan this.” Her voice was lovely, giddy, as if elated by the catharsis of confession. “I simply resurrected the weapons with which it was done. I made Danaë the sort of woman a man would burn the world for. I made Merion Kraye and Andō and my Ganymede the sort of men who would betray each other, and nurse vengeance for decades, and not just them. Ancelet, and Spain, and even you had jealous days in your youth, remember, Cornel? And you in the inner circle are hardly my only clients. I have dozens of girls and boys, each with dozens of suitors who have been seducing, betraying, dueling, and stalking each other for fifty years. The losers are banished from my house and, finding they can no longer take satisfaction elsewhere, they channel their appetites into grudges against the victors who still enjoy my favor, and high offices. There are many hundreds of talented young things like Kraye out there who, thanks to my children, have no goal in this world beyond revenge on some rival I exalted over them.”
“And on yourself too, of course,” her brother interrupted.
“Of course, myself as well,” she conceded, smiling at tired Felix as she squeezed his arm, “but that’s a danger I’m prepared for. The world isn’t so prepared. Kraye as Perry proved the most talented at marshaling this little army of avengers, but I’m sure Papadelias will discover many co-conspirators who helped Perry create this chaos, so they could wreak revenge on whichever Director or Senator or Member of Parliament or whatever stole their love. The Eighteenth-Century aristocracy seduced, betrayed, and corrupted itself until its world self-destructed into revolution. I didn’t have to destroy you, Cornel. I just turned all of you into Eighteenth-Century aristocrats and let you do it yourselves.”
Whatever Madame’s tone, MASON had no more reason to believe this was the whole truth than you do, reader. “Why?” he asked. “Why do all that?”
“Because I realized I could.” She laughed even as she said it, as if hearing the childishness in her own tone. “Honestly, it was too tempting, all these fantastic weapons shut up in old etiquette manuals and romances, where no one but me recognized what they could do if someone brought them back into use. When you were a kid, did you never have the urge to build an atom bomb, just to prove with your own hands that people could?”
MASON shifted his stance, his weak foot weakening. “And you didn’t care what happened to the world? To my Empire?”
She gave the matter some quick moments’ thought. “I did care. I did, but this world already had all the signs of being on the brink of some great change, you’ve known that for years. Cataclysm was coming. I just thought I could shape the great change, make it my sort, the Eighteenth-Century sort. That way, instead of chaos, it would be a familiar kind of great change, something someone would know how to shape, and take in hand.”
“And conquer?” MASON supplied. “You saw the chance to seize power during the cataclysm, and rule through your son.”
“Rule through Jehovah?” She sighed. “No. Perhaps, a long time ago, when I was planning my pregnancy, I was setting things up to have you all pass power to my child so I could rule through them, but when the child was actually born, I didn’t want to raise a pawn, I couldn’t. You know I’m sincere, Caesar, in my way. I love the Eighteenth Century. I fell in love reading about it at Senseminary, that great moment when humanity realized experiments didn’t just have to be done with sciences, they could be done with morals and religion, too. I wanted to do that, run an experiment like the American Experiment, or greater. I couldn’t resist the chance to finish what my heroes started, not just the humanitarians like the Patriarch and the romantics like Jean-Jacques, but the underbelly, La Mettrie, Diderot, de Sade. The Enlightenment tried to remake society in Reason’s image: rational laws, rational religion; but the ones who really thought it through realized morality itself was just as artificial as the aristocracies and theocracies they were sweeping away. Diderot theorized that a new Enlightened Man could be raised with Reason in place of conscience, a cold calculator who would find nothing good or bad beyond what his own analysis decided. They had no way to achieve one back then, but I did it. I raised an Alien.”
MASON took a deep breath. “You have raised many aliens: Dominic, Ganymede, one might add Perry.”
Lacking a fan to veil her mouth, Madame could not help but laugh in Caesar’s face. “I appreciate the compliment, Cornel, but the others are different, based on the realities of the Enlightenment, not its darkest dream. No. Even I only had the resources to do it once. Jehovah is it. The rest are either tools or practice, but Jehovah was raised with everything, all philosophers, all our languages, equal access to all the contradictory thinking of our Hives and of the past, so the many beliefs annihilated one another, leaving the canvas blank and ready. Those people our world respects most, emperors and kings, Jehovah saw fucking like animals since before He knew the difference between beast and man. No child could absorb social values after that. I birthed a Being Who believes in nothing He did not conceive Himself. I hadn’t realized Enlightened Man would turn out to be a God. Our Jehovah wants omnipotence, Cornel. He needs it, feels its absence as a depravation, just as much as you would with a blindfold. I can’t give Him omnipotence, but I can at least use this great change to help Him conquer more of the world than Xerxes or Alexander or any other God-King ever ruled. If being the head of the Leviathan is the closest to godhood a human being can achieve, then I will help Jehovah eat up all the Levi
athans.”
Had you smelled Hobbes at work in Madame before, reader? He from whose brute shadow not even sun-bright John Locke could wholly free us? The Hive, the nation, multitudes united into one Leviathan with the Sovereign as its head, is, as Freud might put it, another of mankind’s prosthetic gods: deputies substitute for omnipresence, laws for Justice, welfare for Divine Love, the long reach of the military for the angel with the flaming sword. I had not until this moment imagined that Jehovah would consent to being Master of the world, but a lost God, stripped of His native omnipotence like an amputee of his rightful limbs, might take every prosthesis offered Him.
The Father of Men and Gods, to grant Caesar the most appropriate of Zeus’s titles, listened with patience to Madame’s words, as he always had, whether in the privacy of her boudoir, the philosophisexual climax of a debauch, or at their first meeting, when he was still a young Familiaris brought to Paris by Charlemagne Guildbreaker for some discreet recreation. “Did you know this would lead to war?” he asked at last.
Madame blinked. “War?”
“War,” he repeated, cold. “This ‘great change’ you say you felt was coming, you can’t be the only person who hasn’t realized it means war.”
She laughed. “Cornel, we’re sensible modern people, we’ve outgrown war.”
“Outgrown?” he snapped. “How can you still have no inkling of the warning signs? Kohaku Mardi’s numbers, the Censor’s predictions, O.S., Sniper, Tully Mardi; Apollo died for this, Aeneas—even the original Enlightenment ended in bloody revolution! What were you thinking, unleashing that?”
Madame concentrated for some moments, like a bloodhound sniffing for traces of something infinitely subtle. “Fine, yes, I suppose war did occur to me as a possible side effect, or bloody revolution at least, but that’s not a problem. War is useful. The names of warriors and conquerors last a lot longer than those of peacetime heroes. What better way for our Son to eclipse Alexander than to fight and win a true World War?”