by Ada Palmer
MASON seized her arm, hard. “And you don’t care who gets hurt?”
“Steady on, Cornel,” Felix interceded.
“Not one word, Felix!” MASON thundered. “You knew your sister was doing experiments a thousand times more dangerous than rearing set-sets. You didn’t care who got hurt either!”
Madame tugged against Caesar’s grip, drawing his attention back. “Of course I care who gets hurt! Jehovah is the Alien raised free from conscience, I’m not. I’ve tried every perversion in Sade’s book, but I still feel bad when I hurt people.” She sighed. “And imagine my disappointment when Jehovah came out more horrified by homicide than anyone. Our poor young God; the war will be so hard on Him. I trust you’ll help us get it settled quickly.”
“Get it settled quickly?” Caesar’s grip tightened, threatening to snap her wrist like a doll’s thin porcelain. “And just how do you imagine we’ll fight this war? You’re obsessed with the Eighteenth Century, have you never looked at what came later? Wars get worse when people know less about them. What is war going to be like now that we don’t even have territory? A war of all against all fought in every single street!”
She winced at his grasp. “Technology changes between every war. People adapt.”
“The problem isn’t technology,” he seethed, “it’s ignorance! In the First World War the first commander of the Russian forces boasted that he hadn’t read a strategy book written in the past century. Germany’s attack plan was based on the Battle of Marathon—490 B.C.! Result: disaster. Well, everything’s Marathon to us now. There haven’t been strategy books written in three hundred years! How am I supposed to imagine sending people into battle? What will they do? How fast will they break? How long should they train? What’s a big enough force to feel confident enough to take on a mission? What’s a reasonable length of time to leave them in a combat zone before they go insane? War makes people into monsters. How do I keep them from shooting themselves? How do I keep them from raping and pillaging? Brussels is in flames—how long until that happens in the capital, and all over my Empire?”
She tried to pull away. “Caesar, please! The propaganda of the name aside, Romanova isn’t your capital, it’s Ancelet’s, or was. Romanova’s never really had an Emperor before, but if it’s anyone’s now it’s Jehovah’s, and if you can’t control yourself I’ll have Him tell you to pack off back to Alexandria where you belong.”
I do not believe Caesar is a violent man by nature; none of them were until we made them so, Madame and Dominic and I, creatures too terrible for words without violence to truly touch us. It was Caesar’s right hand which held Madame’s wrist, but his left rose, with its stark black sleeve, poised to strike. Before his fist could fall, a fiercer hand wrenched his fingers off the Lady and slammed him backwards with a fast strike to the thorax. Speed made Madame’s defender almost visible, as ripples betray a fish, the edges of sleeves and hood flagging like slices of displaced space as the Griffincloth’s computer failed to keep up with combat’s savage speed. “Apol…” Caesar’s awed voice hardened to iron even as he toppled, “… Saladin!”
Safe behind her invisible guardian, Madame pulled his hood back and patted the hairless scalp above the hairless face which the vizor still made seem half Apollo’s. “Good boy.”
Wrath more than combat winded Caesar. “You let that monster out of its cage?”
“Stay where you are, Papadelias,” Madame warned, her quick eye catching the Commissioner General as he leapt toward his quarry like a child toward a mound of birthday presents. “He’s legally my guard dog now, and you’re no dogcatcher.”
Papa stopped at Caesar’s side, the gel-cuffs hungry in his hands. “I think a judge can resolve the species issue easily enough.”
Madame shook her head, today’s modest wig shining in the hospital light. “If you push to have him declared a human being, before you can get a judge to issue an arrest warrant I’ll have him certified mentally incompetent, not responsible for his actions past or present, and remanded to my custody as guardian, beyond your reach. Alternatively we can leave him legally my dog, and if he ever hurts anyone you can force me to have him put down. Which do you prefer?”
The Commissioner General did not answer, but his slack face declared touché.
“Both of them?” Wrath’s quake hardened MASON’s fists. “You want me to let Saladin run free like Mycroft?”
“Not free, Caesar. In my custody.” Her voice grew syrup sweet. “Saladin’s a good dog, he won’t run off, will you?”
Saladin slid back behind Madame, the Utopian coat settling over him until only a trained eye could track him by the shadows between the hem and floor. “No, ma’am! Are you kidding? First time I’ve ever had a mentor I could actually learn from, I’m not quitting.”
“A mentor?” MASON repeated.
Saladin laughed. “All these years I thought the only thing for a Cynic to do when we realize all the social rules are crap was to go live free like an animal, but Madame’s learned better. They didn’t have to cut themself off from society to keep from getting tangled in the puppet strings. All they had to do was genuinely not care.” He prowled toward me around the circumference of Madame’s skirts. “I don’t get it, Mycroft. We thought Cornel MASON was a keen mind, but you and I can spot a predator at fifty yards—how come they can’t after sleeping with one for twenty years?”
My chest did not have strength enough to laugh, but the attempt gave anesthesia’s gradual withdrawal an opportunity to highlight my incision with lines of pain. Madame did it. One night, sitting by his cage with tender musings and philosophy, and she made a convert even of my Saladin. Diogenes the Cynic was our childhood mentor, Saladin’s and mine, the first of our wretched race to realize that honor, glory, ambition, wealth, success, all are artificial things, and that pursuing them only makes us miserable. True happiness is to live as Diogenes and Saladin dared, like a dog by the side of the road, eating when the urge comes, pissing when the urge comes, saving all one’s energy for the happy exercises of the mind, which no tyrant can deprive you of. Legend tells us that Alexander himself visited the wise old man, offering Diogenes anything in the world the Conqueror could grant; the Cynic asked only that the Great King stop blocking the sunlight so he could keep reading. Saladin never expected to find a living teacher closer to Diogenes’s model than himself, but Madame too drew kings to her silk-lined barrel with rumor’s allure. It is true that, unlike Diogenes, Madame took advantage of how much one can exploit a king’s offer when one doesn’t care if one actually gets anything, but she who could play the puppet web like harp strings was still undeniably closer to Diogenes’s ideal than Saladin, who dared not touch the strings for fear of being snared. When we first committed ourselves to the Cynic path, we had lamented that there was no master of the School to guide us eager novices. This was not a wish Saladin had expected Providence to grant.
The Father of Men and Gods faced the shadow cast by Apollo’s stolen armor. “I have long known what Madame is, monster. Do not presume to understand my thoughts.”
Madame perked. “Then you don’t mind if I keep him? I know you can’t stop me if Papa can’t, but I won’t keep him if it distresses you, Cornel. I want you to be comfortable around me.”
MASON faced her squarely. “I thank you for your honesty in answering my questions, Madame.”
She frowned. “What will you do now, Cornel? You’re the trickiest. Unlike the others, you can change any day the name sealed in the Successor’s Vault in Alexandria, and neither public opinion, nor law, nor I, can stop you.”
MASON: “The law forbids speculation about the Imperator Destinatus.”
Madame: “He needs omnipotence, Caesar. Yours is the largest Leviathan; you can take the biggest blindfold off him.”
MASON: “The law forbids speculation about the Imperator Destinatus.”
Madame: “He is your Son. He really is, more than anybody else’s, your Son.”
MASON: “You say that to a
lot of men.”
Madame: “I lie to a lot of men, but not to you.”
MASON: “What about Spain?”
Madame: “Nurture matters more than nature. Jehovah could be Kraye’s son but They’d still be yours.”
MASON: “And their mother? When Jehovah was born you promised Spain you’d marry them if the public ever learned who the child’s father was. Will you break that promise?”
Madame’s gaze fell away from Caesar’s. “I can’t deny that His Majesty has asked again that I marry him. And I’ve consented. With Crown Prince Leonor dead, Jehovah must be legitimated or the Spanish strat will fall apart, possibly Europe as well.”
MASON turned away. “We both know Spain’s views on monogamy. Things can’t continue as they have been between us if you are Spain’s Queen, it would eat them away inside, not to mention what the public would say.”
She took the Emperor’s hand. “I didn’t want it like this, Cornel, you know I didn’t.”
He pulled away again. “You’ve told the truth this far, don’t spoil it. If you didn’t want this, you would have arranged things differently.”
Madame’s hurt might have been genuine. “I told you I didn’t plan this, I just planned the creatures who could achieve it. You think everything went in line with my ideal? I loved Brussels. I was very proud of my Merion Kraye, I didn’t want him dead. I’ve lost my Ganymede to the law, poor Danaë is half dead from the shock, and Bryar and Ancelet will never forgive me. I loved them, Cornel. And I love you.”
I omit the next few exchanges, reader. MASON deserves some privacy, and what matter is it to history, the sentimental terms and gestures with which old lovers say goodbye?
“Jehovah!”
They wheeled him back to us now, lying on a gurney, not because of weakness, but in deference to the hospital habit of circumscribing patients in the geometric borders of a bed.
“My darling Boy! Are You all right?” Even Madame does not hug Jehovah anymore, not that her Son objected, but His black gaze chills even her too much. “How are You feeling? Does it hurt?”
He answered with a string of all tongues, interwoven like pointillist brush strokes, meaningless to untrained ears.
“What?”
The doctor was a tiny Utopian, trailing a coat of molten stone which made the room into the layers of a volcanic mountainside, hardening at a century per second. She shared Madame’s frown. “No one’s been able to understand much of what they’ve said since they arrived. Short exchanges make sense, but nothing long. But I understand that’s normal when Mike is stressed, yes?”
I smiled hearing the grandest yet humblest of His many names. “It is,” I answered, straining against the straps as I leaned forward far enough to see Jehovah’s eyes. “Usually I translate when He’s excited or upset.”
The doctor nodded. “What’re they saying now?”
Men say Jehovah’s tone never changes, that He stays equally cold before the Senate House and gentle Heloïse. It is almost true, but Felix Faust, whose expertise can read the temper of an earwig, tells me there is one exception, slight, an ease which tints the pitch of His voice in one circumstance only: when I arrive. The Brillist definition of a bash’mate adds to the legal one, not just that you live together, but that you speak the same language, ideally the same group of languages, though mixed-tongue bash’es birth their own pidgin, each member injecting favorite foreign phrases into English. Bash’ by this definition is not just a group of people, but that special group of people with whom one can communicate completely. Madame has never answered whether she was pleased or angry when her Great Experiment found another who could comingle English, Latin, French, Spanish, a little German, Japanese, and Greek.
“He’s happy,” I translated. “He says … He says proof that a God’s universe survives His death means … means…”—tears leaked from me even as I struggled to paraphrase—“it means He doesn’t have to worry anymore that, if all human beings are Gods like Him, then each death might destroy an entire universe. It reduces the possible tragedy of human history by a factor of infinity per human being that has ever died.”
Each in that room—MASON, Martin, Faust, Madame, the Utopian doctors who have studied Him since their surrender—believes in Jehovah’s divinity to some different degree, some not at all, some partly, some completely, but whatever their beliefs they all believe that He believes it. So all paused now to consider how this new revelation would affect Him, and through Him everyone. Martin wept a few tears, delight at seeing so dear a Master relieved of that cruel fear which had gnawed at Him as viciously as the eagle at Prometheus. I sobbed outright.
The Utopian nodded pensively. “How do they feel physically?”
Jehovah answered, metaphysics pouring around me like a waterfall which cleanses soul instead of flesh. “He says He finally understands why He had to be born in a physical body to communicate,” I interpreted. “He … He accepts it now. He says it was hard making contact, but He’s glad This Universe’s God gave Him a life here. They were both lonely.” Lonely … glad … I do not dare call it translation, this blasphemy, inadequate, unclean; I may as well be a sighted mole describing to my blind kin the wonders of Luna City. ‘Lonely’ was nothing to the phrase which captured all the longing and eternity of Dante’s Hell, and ‘glad’ not a thousandth part of the joy felt by this Sentience which had endured so long with nothing but toys and worms for company, but now heard at last the longed-for whisper through the dark, “I’m here.”
“He says,” I continued, “that when He died He left, and existed only in His universe for a few moments, but He still remembered this one. He understands now that in His universe He’s always had the memories of His life in this one as Jehovah Mason, but without being born and experiencing time He couldn’t understand before how to sort those memories linearly, they were just thoughts and opinions to Him, not a continuity. Now that He’s had a chance to pass in and out of this universe and time again, He recognizes the memories for what they are. He’s always had them … well, there is no ‘always’ without time, but they’re part of Him, His Personality, His Self. He says those memories helped form the judgments He used in making His Own Universe. He says living here is what taught Him how to make it different there, better, richer. He used to think it was cruel making Him live here, but He sees now it was the only way This Universe’s God could find to reach out and share the example of His Creation, so Jehovah could respond and grow. The beginning of their Great Conversation. He says … He…” I groped for words to do His feelings justice, but how could I? Imagine yourself a child born blind and deaf, who has spent all your life in pain, but you realize now that that pain, that burn, that stab in the dark that has never let up, was the only means a desperate kinsman could find to prove that you are not alone. I don’t understand why it must be so hard for Gods to reach Each Other. Perhaps because Each is omnipotent within the perimeter of Its Own Mind, and reaching Another requires conceiving something outside One’s Self, not easy when there are no senses, no external world, no hands driven by instinct to grope and reach out, and no ‘out.’ Whatever it takes for Utopia to make First Contact across the sea of stars, a thousand years’ research, a thousand years frozen in flight, a thousand thousand lives, it will still be an expansion of the infant’s first grope toward what lies beyond its reach; this was harder. “He says He’ll return the favor if He can.”
The Emperor did not have time for metaphysics. “What will you do now, Fili?”
This was, for once, easy. “He doesn’t know. While He was in His universe He remembered His whole life, before and after His first death, but here He remembers only the past.”
His father frowned. “I meant, what do you intend to do?”
“He says He will accept the powers offered Him,” I answered, “and face His enemy. He says Sniper must…” I choked. “Sniper must die.”
You will not be surprised, reader, to find His mother beaming with delight to hear her Masterpiece’s de
fect—His fear of killing—finally corrected. Are you surprised to learn that His Imperial father smiled too? You should not be. He who wears that black sleeve, he who limps still from the cruel testing enforced by his predecessor, knows that certain strengths are necessary in a ruler.
I continued my translation: “As leader of O.S., Sniper will never stop, or compromise. It must … it must die.” I stumbled here because I lied, though a lie is hardly a greater sin than the mockery of translation; He did not say in the abstract Sniper must die, he commanded that I, Mycroft Canner, must track it down and kill it. “Tully Mardi must … publicly submit … but not be killed, they would make too powerful a symbol dead. The truth, about Casimir Perry, Jehovah’s succession, Madame, Bridger, all of it must be revealed to the public, so people may make up their own minds which side to fight on in the…”
I froze, but the others knew what came next, for, of all Jehovah’s mingled tongues, English has the clearest, most concise word for ‘War.’
“No!” My voice cracked. “Ἄναξ, there doesn’t have to be a war now. You’ll stop it! We have Bridger. You’ll stop it, You and Bridger together, and You’ll make a new—”
He spoke again, and sobs wracked me until I was glad of the Cannergel that held me down.
“What is it, Mycroft? Mycroft?”
I would not translate, not even for Caesar, but for you I shall, my precious, distant reader. I was wrong. That’s how He began it: Mycroft, you are wrong. He sensed at once conviction in me, as out of place as a gun in Heloïse’s hand, or a healing salve in Dominic’s. I had believed that Providence sent Bridger and Jehovah to this Earth at the same moment, so they might meet, and Jehovah receive at last His greeting from This Universe’s God. This had proved true, but, fool that I was, I had assumed that one kindness dropped by Providence meant more would come. Yes, Bridger and Jehovah were placed on this Earth to meet each other, but meet they had. First Contact was done. For all we knew, Sniper would shoot Jehovah dead before Bridger could return, or it would spirit Bridger away to use his gifts for Sniper’s side and wreck Jehovah’s empire. Nothing was certain. Nothing under Providence is ever certain until an agent goes and tries and makes it so.