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The Prime Minister seethed, hands twitching with the urge to seize and tear. “You’re angry because I slept with your brother? Your husband sleeps with your brother. Everyone sleeps with your brother. That’s what your brother’s for!” Ganymede ran out of syllables, but, sparkling like sun gold on angry water, writhed and screamed.
The crowd’s eyes migrated up now to the shattered window wall above, where MASON, Chair Kosala, Director Andō, Princesse Danaë, Headmaster Faust, the King of Spain still in Madame’s arms, Carlyle Foster–Kraye de la Trémoïlle, Martin, Dominic, Jehovah, and myself stood in our ruffled suits, and skirts, and habits, bare before the crowd, and before Sniper’s floating cameras, which transmitted the image instantly around the world.
And if due process says we don’t have enough evidence to bring them in yet, surely due process breaks down when it’s the very powers that designed due process who need to be taken down.
The eleventh O.S., Osten Saneer, realized, I think, what Lesley would become the moment young Ockham and Ojiro returned from informing the child of her ba’pas’ deaths. There were no tears back then, just the petition “Can we keep her?” as if she were some rain-soaked kitten, baring ready fangs.
“This isn’t what it’s for,” he whimpered. “It shouldn’t be. It should be for the future, for Space, and Mars, and medicine, and talking to dolphins, and finding what the universe is made of. That’s what I should have been, but I can’t look at a spool of tape without thinking how to hide poison in the glue, or plant a pathogen in the fibers. ¡You made me into this!”
When Bridger was little they had nightmares about drowning, and in their sleep the bed would actually turn to water. They don’t need to wish it consciously to transform things. Now that they’re big, they’ve started having nightmares about bombs and armies. It’s happening. This chaos, all around the world, the governments and leaders all unraveling at once impossibly fast, can’t you see? The world is falling apart just as Apollo scripted it.
Pet registration is automated, and the computer doesn’t have enough common sense to realize that a dog shouldn’t be bipedal and say ‘woof’ instead of barking.
“This is all very fascinating,” she began anew, “but significantly less important than a child with the powers of a god.” “That’s your opinion,” Papa snapped.
MASON is so accustomed to his presence striking others dumb that I think sometimes he is surprised to hear a stranger manage a complete sentence.
Would you call such a prince good because their existence aids the world, despite their deeds?” “No.” “Then you are not bad because of the evil which your birth has caused.”
“I am the Emperor, Jehovah’s father, and ruler of one fifth of the world; I wait. You are a priest; you don’t.”
“I welcome questions,” This Kind God replied. “Now that this universe has taught Me what ignorance is, I will never willfully inflict it on a sentient thing, as My Peer does.”
I need to know why He creates portrait after portrait of Himself, but stays so hidden. I need to know how He found Me, how He created this flesh men call Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason, how He bound Me into it, and why He brings Me here as His Unwilling Guest, and then, strange Host, He hides.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 destroyed his chance to join his kin among the stars. The autopsy and chemical tests left what remained of Apollo’s body too contaminated to be processed into that organic essence which, after the rocket journey, will become the soil of Mars. Year after year, those Utopians who could not live to see the terraforming done at least become a part of it, each ounce of powdered flesh another fertile plot of their new world. All his brief lifetime Apollo watched the launches, yet in death he could not even send his dust where dust is precious. That is my guilt.
Only Utopia thinks the future is more important than the present, that there are worlds that we could make which are worth destroying the one we have here.
Apollo didn’t just think the war was necessary to keep the next one from wiping us all out. They thought we had to make the world less perfect or no one would be willing to face the hardships of moving on. There are few people left anywhere who are willing to die for something, for their children maybe, but not for a cause, and certainly not for a patch of raw and barren Mars ground. Apollo thought that we need suffering to create people capable of enduring suffering. World Peace does not breed heroes.”
Silence gripped MASON, far too dark to interrupt. He was not looking at me but at the statue, and I saw in his rain-streaked face an expression I had felt many times myself but never seen on another. Now the statue was a seed to him, a chrysalis waiting to become the man, and, as he faced it he faced not Apollo’s dust, but an Apollo he might walk with again, and speak to, and hear answers.
Perhaps every human being in this world was a visiting God like Him, trained by society not to realize what we are, to think that the universes to which only we have access are mere imagination, not Realities themselves. And if we are all Gods and mortal, do our universes die with Us? Does every human death take with it another cosmos, infinite, life-filled, and better than this one?
History’s largest war is coming. In the middle of it, Bridger was born human with the powers of a God, and Jehovah was born a God with no more powers than a human.
“There’s nothing we can do, Major,” I answered. “If Bridger wanted us, if Fate wanted us to be with Bridger, we would be. They don’t. There’s absolutely nothing we can do.” The Major paused. “I’ll count to ten, shall I?” “What for?” “Till you admit you don’t believe that either.”
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?
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.
“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.
“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.”
