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“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.” “Your Peer, you mean This Universe’s God?” “Yes. I would wish you a kinder Maker, but it is impius to feel anything less than absolute gratitude for the absolute gift of having been created.”
brings Me here as His Unwilling Guest, and then, strange Host, He hides.”
My existence, but knowing that I have a Counterpart, a Peer, I need Him.” His eyes turned to the painted portrait of that Counterpart on the altarpiece before Him. “You called Him ‘Bridger’?”
“Bridger isn’t God,” she replied. “I think they’re more an avatar of God, a manifestation, a tool. Something through which God channels Miracles.” “But He is here. Your Clockmaker has shown Himself.”
fideist is a religious skeptic, one who believes that human reason, however lofty its ambition, cannot achieve real, indubitable Truth, and that the senses, however fertile science makes them, are likewise fallible and incomplete.
Mycroft Canner, had been so wrong that I murdered the living light Apollo to stop a war which never would have come.
Reason failed. Evidence failed. I failed. Conviction had died in me in that room at Madame’s where my strange trial took place.
I didn’t want to know that Mycroft is a fideist, and Mycroft wouldn’t want me to know. That’s private, intimate. That’s how our culture works.”
“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.”
They had dropped everything, the rest of the Foster bash’, to come at Caesar’s summons, routed through Kosala, the two guardians of Gag-genes quick to answer the pleas of these loved ones who had been listening madly to their trackers for any word from their stray sheep.
don’t care about your tracker.” He spoke English, unwilling to exchange Latin with one who has no right to know it. “Apollo’s Iliad. You
“I haven’t been trying to start the war, Caesar, I swear!” I answered. “I tried to stop it. Everything I did, I did to stop it. Do you think I could have done this to Apollo if there was any other way?”
“What you did to Apollo and the others was sick beyond imagining. If you had just been trying to stop the war, you could have made the murders quick and painless.”
could see Mercer’s face before me as I spoke, her eyes’ light growing more alien during the vivisection, as she dictated notes about her own psychological degeneration to the recorder I let her set up to preserve for Felix Faust the final discoveries of his lost heir.
“There are many things I don’t want to see. I had my guards search Aldrin and Voltaire. I didn’t want to find their coats like Apollo’s, filled with hidden weapons, weapon systems, targeting programs in their vizors.
“Prove to me that all of this, the Seven-Ten lists and the CFB and Perry, are not the recipe Apollo left behind for making war.”
“Mardi,” I answered. “War day. Mars day. In two hundred and fifty years the next stage of the Great Project will be complete.
a greedy, selfish Earth will sit back and watch the minority they most distrust take sole possession of a whole new world?
“Yes, Caesar,” I answered. “Apollo’s coat is a simulation, this world one year into Apollo’s predicted war. The people who don’t appear in it, the ones it makes invisible, those are people Apollo thought would not survive the first twelve months.”
“It was to save Earth and Mars together, Caesar! My attempt to let us vent our war rage without killing millions. I had to stop the Mardis, but if I could make people as outraged as a war would have, get Earth to vent its killing rage on me, instead of billions on billions, maybe it could’ve been a tiny war, we two, Saladin and I, against the Mardi nineteen, ending with all humanity, ten billion together, killing me. Apollo understood. Our battle might have been enough!”
“Apollo. Five years before my succession, they called me to meet them behind the Rostra. They had already realized I was Imperator Destinatus, that was easy, but it had never come between us, not before. I found them in tears, leaning against the Milliarium, and, in their coat,
Vocateurs earn society’s respect doing the work they love, and those who aren’t vokers put in their twenty hours and spend the greater part of life at play.
was going to take on the duty to maintain history’s greatest empire and protect my three billion citizens by not letting anything change.
but what is two thousand murders to what we’ve already given up? The future. Only Utopia thinks the future is more important than
the pleasures of Earth’s greatest Golden Age for the harsh life of a colonist. Then they stabbed me with a pocketknife.”
“Apollo asked me once if I would destroy a better world to save this one.
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.”
2426, the day Mushi was asked to go to Mars, that was the same day Apollo told the Mardis they had decided to make the war come...
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“Utopia is innocent. This isn’t Apollo’s war.”
“O.S., the Humanist-Mitsubishi-Europe alliance, the CFB threatening the Cousins, none of it matches what Apollo planned.
Their war was to be the Masons against the Mitsubishi over land, with Europe taking your side and the Humanists taking theirs,
They wouldn’t expose O.S. and make the public call for blood, they wanted the smallest war possible, not a huge, angry one like this will be. This isn’t Apollo’s war. The weapons, Voltaire’s and Aldrin’s, they really are for self-defense. Utopia didn’t do this. The war they’re ready for is coming on its own.”
“I’ve memorized Apollo’s war plans, every step, how to make the war midsized and brief, contingency after contingency for keeping it from getting vicious, and to keep it from dragging in every Hive. This O.S. mess is precisely the kind of war Apollo didn’t want.”
“Thirteen years ago the public asked the law to take a life in anger. Those who witnessed Mycroft Canner’s crimes could imagine no lesser punishment, but you also recognized the tragedy: there was genius in Canner, which could have achieved great things if set on a course to help, not harm. I asked MASON and Chair Kosala to make Mycroft Canner a Servicer.
“What Jed says is true,” Chair Kosala confirmed. “The Servicer Program—” “Get off the Rostra, puppet!” “Charlatan!” Shouts rippled through the crowd. “We all know what J.E.D.D. Mason’s about to report!” “The CFB is a lie!” “The Anonymous controls the CFB, and you, Kosala!” “Why don’t you send Brody DeLupa up here, have them tell us what the Cousins think they think!”
“I will not go, MASON, not while you’re still hiding the real reason Mycroft Canner targeted my bash’. We predicted that this war was coming all those years ago, and Canner tried to silence us so we couldn’t prepare the world for it, just like you’re trying to silence me now!”
The Anonymous has been secretly propping up the failing CFB for over a century.
Humanists have led Europe and the Mitsubishi in secret assassinations for two hundred and fifty
I saw red before I registered the sound, circus-bright red like finger paint against the marble, peppered with chunks of yellow-pink as Jehovah’s brain spilled across the platform,
Sniper, rising, smiled at the compliment. It had lain in wait six hours,
“Much better. Hello, friends and foes. I am Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, thirteenth O.S.” Its perfect doll’s face smiled softly to the cameras and the world. “I’m sorry. I know this is going to break a lot of hearts, but I swore an oath to protect the seven Hives, and my Hive most of all. That duty comes before all others, even my fans. I am the current leader of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ assassins, a position called by the title of O.S.
The real goal of the conspiracy was to expose us and the CFB in order to rip four of the seven Hives apart, and make J.E.D.D. Mason king of what remains!”
“Their pacemaker!” The Censor was the first to realize. “The blast shorted Mycroft’s pacemaker!”
“J.E.D.D. Mason’s real name is Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason.”
They call themself Madame D’Arouet these days, but their birth name is Joyce Faust, one of Felix Faust’s ba’sibs.
President Ganymede was also one of them, but broke away, and has been working secretly as much as they could to free the Humanists from Joyce Faust’s conspirators without them noticing, but they did notice.
why Joyce Faust decided to expose O.S. They’d rather destroy the Humanists than lose control of us. And here’s another of their creations!”
“This is Dominic Seneschal, one of Joyce Faust’s favorite creations. Look at them, look at him, wearing all the class and gender markers of the old days when people made slaves of each other.
whine that Sniper dishonored the sacred spirit of the games by staining its Olympic whites with blood that day, but that core of Humanists who still answer to ‘Olympian’ understood, and cheered.
