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Jehovah turned slow eyes upon his Imperial father. “Human beings.” “Why?” “World stability.” “You have proof?” “Yes.”
“This system is older than its current leadership,” Andō began, “remember that. We inherited this, one of the powers of our offices. We could no more abandon it than you could throw away that black sleeve, MASON.” Caesar’s eyes fell to his left hand. “Have you killed Masons?” “One thousand and twenty-one Masons,” Jehovah supplied, “seven hundred and eighty-two Cousins, two hundred and fifty-six Brillists, twenty-eight Hiveless, and one hundred and seventeen Europeans in the years before Europe joined the conspiracy.”
Never let it be said that the Mitsubishi Chief Director cannot meet Caesar’s iron gaze. “I have a duty to my Hive as you do, MASON. This is part of it.” “That’s right,” Perry chimed in. “It’s like the Emperor’s duty to torture their successor, or how the Déguisé inherited all the duties of the Anonymous, even the shady ones.” He avoided Bryar’s hot glance. “We didn’t create this system. You think we want the world to be dependent on murder?” I spotted tears in Spain’s eyes. “You knew, Prime Minister?”
“Because His Catholic Majesty goes to confession,” Madame supplied. Kosala could hardly keep herself from ripping the paper in her shaking hands. “You mean because Spain has a conscience, unlike some.”
“That’s what the self-correcting push is. I’d noticed it. I didn’t understand it until now, but the worst of the trends always reset, settle down just before the point of no return.
The Hives are not as friendly to each other as we like to think. It’s true. It has been stopping war.”
The old Headmaster shook his head. “Not their ideas. The Humanists created this. No one else sees history as composed of individuals. On their own the Mitsubishi would target corporations, Masons governments, Europe nation-strats, me bash’es, the Anonymous ideas. Only the Humanists still think the world is made of individuals.” He leaned forward. “Ganymede? You can’t pretend you aren’t the heart of this.”
It had to be asked, but all eyes, even Faust’s, flinched slightly in the silence before Jehovah’s slow and lifeless answer. “You are all murderers,” He pronounced, “you and your whole world. We had thought that, if humanity left the trees far enough behind, you could leave the war of all against all with them. We were wrong.”
MASON was stronger. “Mycroft, is Ganymede a murderer?”
“Yes, Caesar. Yes, he is.” Should I not have answered him?
and slipped into that kind of lifeless faint
“It’s true, isn’t it?” The aide’s hood fell back to reveal a red and seething face. “Danaë is my mother.” “Carlyle Foster!”
am the Praeses Maximus. I guard the list of Gag-genes in the Sanctum Sanctorum, and if anyone had told me Carlyle Foster had set foot in this house, I would have summoned them at once to warn them of the danger. It’s too late now.”
“Foster is in pain, Bryar, the greatest pain they’ve ever experienced.” He glanced at his Good Son, the Source of this strict kindness. “Nothing else is urgent enough to justify extending that.”
“And my father was some rival of Director Andō’s for Danaë’s hand, yes?” Carlyle continued, each word aimed at Ganymede like a dagger. “Some other young politician Madame was trying to corrupt?
“The two of you used the Saneer-Weeksbooth assassination system to eliminate my father, didn’t you?”
Merion Kraye was a villain and a coward and I needed no assassin to deal with a worm who would not even face me in an honorable duel!”
avenge the lady’s honor, but Kraye refused. When DNA proved the child was Kraye’s they went mad with rage, attacked the lady, and Madame, and others. Madame dismissed them forever from this house, and Kraye killed themself soon after.” Carlyle scowled. “That’s not an answer, it’s a penny dreadful.”
Carlyle glared, the true blue diamond sharpness of a scion de la Trémoïlle finally awakening in his eyes. Yes, reader ‘his’; this is the moment for which I was commanded to use ‘he’ for Carlyle. Such are the deplorable laws of aristocracy that a bastard niece might matter little to the Duke, but a nephew, with a nephew comes inheritance, and barbarian blood upon the ducal throne.
“What do I know?” Perry seethed. “I know the two of you conspired to ruin an innocent man. I know Hotaka Andō paid a king’s ransom for your services, bought you from Madame, set you up in the outside, built your mansion at La Trimouille, arranged your art contacts, your political career, all in return for what you did. I know that whore lying on the sofa over there is not the pure, virginal victim you all pretend. I know Madame knew it all, let it all happen, may even have planned it all themself. And I know that child is not my son!”
Faust moved first, smiling as he checked his gilded pocket watch. “Seventeen minutes, twenty-one seconds, Madame. I win the bet.”
Madame’s fan hid what must have been a smile. “You were doing so well, Merion. All you had to do was sit quietly through this and no one would have known. You’d finally made it back inside.”
Kraye’s eyes hopped from Chair to King to Emperor. “How can you not see it? I was framed! Ganymede got Danaë pregnant and lured me in to take the blame!” “Then my real father is Ganymede?” Stunned Carlyle barely had the strength to voice the words. “Yes!” Kraye snapped. “Yes, you’re the poison that started all this.” “No, Merion. This is our son.” Danaë stirred from her swoon at last, tresses spilling down about her shoulders, exquisite as when Helios pours gold across dawn waves from harbor to horizon.
Every day you smuggled in letters swearing to love only me forever, while every night you vented your impatient lust on my twin! You didn’t want me for myself, you just wanted my body, and you didn’t care what mind and personality were inside, mine or Ganymede’s!”
“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!”
“You stole the Seven-Ten list, didn’t you? You climbed the ranks enough to learn about O.S., and now you’ve exposed it because you want to see my husband and my brother burn, and you don’t care if you burn with them.”
Oniwaban set-sets?” Shock held them all, but I saw a different kind of shock and hurt on golden Ganymede. “O.S.…”
Madame’s, 18:00 UT, Sniper rescue me.’ The order came through with your executive code.” Sniper’s winded whisper dropped to an even lower whisper. “Same message that told us to go through with you-know-what.” Ganymede gasped. “¿You did the hit?” “We failed. The police and the Utopians were waiting. They knew we were going to strike. Cato says they must have hired a set-set.”
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.
Here I shall choose just one among Earth’s countless frightened houses in which to have you pass this night, the one in which the impact of the news was harshest: the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’.
“You know what really gets me? Hearing people call these three brave.”
“You’re thinking it takes some guts to plead guilty to mass murder, but if they had any guts they wouldn’t have gone along with it in the first place.
three members of Perry’s coalition came forward, but that dozens of others have not.”
As far as I’m concerned, every last person who’s sat on Europe’s Parliament in a generation is as complicit in these murders as President Ganymede!”
President Ganymede’s involvement is, of course, a great personal blow to me, both as Vice President and as a Humanist.
the Wish List, that old web ‘joke’ where Humanists could vote for names of people they ‘wished’ would meet with some unhappy end.
They need Ojiro Sniper as the next O.S., and you need Lesley to help you keep the bash’ alive.”
I CANNOT SAY THE SIXTH DAY EVER REALLY ENDED, BUT HERE, WITH DISASTER’S BREATH UPON THE WIND, THE SLEEPLESS EARTH SPUN ON TO THE SEVENTH AND LAST DAY OF MY HISTORY.
The Mason swallowed hard. “The Humanist backup facility by Salekhard was destroyed in an explosion late last night. There are two survivors of the backup crew, both in hospital.”
“I recognize that your preparations for my relief are sufficient, and your authority legitimate. As of 22:21 UT today I have been relieved. From this point I may do nothing without orders from my Hive.”
Papa nodded for his men to approach Thisbe, weapons primed. “I didn’t say anything about the transit system. You’re under arrest for the murders of Luca Cormor, Quinn Prichard, and Alex Limner.” Now the witch flinched. “What?” “Your ex-lovers. Three of them. You made them kill themselves, just like you did to Revere and almost did to Carlyle Foster. And you didn’t do it for O.S., either. I think you made them kill themsleves for fun. You like playing around with death, just like you like to play around with Mycroft Canner.”
Papa glowed, his hand still locked around Thisbe’s wrist, hungry to lock around mine. “Can’t you see it? Saladin Canner is alive!” “Who?” “Saladin!” Papa cried, a decade’s climax in his fortissimo. “Mycroft had a dog, a dog we never found.
That’s how Mycroft seemed to be in two places at once during the murders! Oh, very good, Mycroft! Very good!” His face glowed. “Hiding an entire second person for over twenty years! Hundreds of interrogations and not a hint, not one!”
The stone-still Speaker did not turn. “To understand the God Who made this portrait of Himself.”
“Dominic, Mycroft, and Heloïse, they speak of you as if you were a god.” The words just came out, Carlyle tells me, unplanned, as when you rub your eyes and only afterwards discover you were crying. “I Am.”
He tried at last, “I should have but to Will a thing for it to be, yet here I was reduced to these weak tools: hands, eyes, memory. Beyond these limits I would be forever powerless.”
“This Universe’s God,” Jehovah clarified. “I am not one small god among many, as you imagined Zeus, Anubis, and Apollo. I am the only God, the infinite, omnipotent creative Will, the source of all My universe, which is not this one.”
Jehovah does not nod. “In My own universe I Am all, complete, sufficient, the First and Final Cause, perfect in Myself. Yet, for some reason, I find Myself born here. In this universe I can perceive what is within the limit of My human body’s senses, remember what I have experienced, and wield the prostheses of human technology, but that is all.
“My universe does not have time,” the foreign God replied. “I find it cruel, like death and distance and misunderstanding, barriers separating that which would rather be whole. I do not yet understand why This Universe’s God would make such things. Space. Time. I met Time at the moment of My birth, but since meeting it, and in My native infinity outside it, I have always known What I Am.”
“I have not left,” He answered. “I cannot leave My universe any more than Being can leave this wood”—he looked to the pew, solid beneath them both—“or Space this place. I Am My universe, always, Creator, touching, making, enabling, and understanding every part of it, though I also sit here in this flesh.”
