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BEING A CONTINUATION OF Too Like the Lightning, A NARRATIVE OF EVENTS of the year 2454 Written by MYCROFT CANNER, at the REQUEST OF CERTAIN PARTIES.
I won’t be certain who the killer is until I meet them, but if it is Mycroft, be merciful. Keep them alive, and safe, and working. You need them. If you have lost me, you need them. There are things I leave undone that only Mycroft Canner can complete. —APOLLO MOJAVE.
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say, ‘It lightens.’ –William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, act II, scene ii
So I pray: Let nothing obstruct this book and the Good it aims at. If there is benevolence in You, strange Creator, nihil obstet.
I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world.
Free and righteous as you probably are, you may pray for any intervention you imagine: a timely call from a bash’mate, Kosala wandering by, a house fire. For myself, low creature that I am, I dared not ask so much: only that Fate might be so kind as to let Carlyle find Dominic in a gentle mood, as I had found him thirteen years ago, the first time I begged my way back into that house.
Perhaps your better age is finally past it, reader, but my society—despite our neuter efforts—still shoves gender down our throats, imbibed in toddlerhood when a child whom the adults label ‘girl’ gets chided just a little more for getting her nice clothes muddy than a child we see as ‘boy’ and associate with snails and muddy puppy tails.
But I was a dead man, and nothing would make me miss my appointment with the executioner who would carry out the General Will and make the whole world murderers.
“You’ll finish writing that book for Apollo, Mycroft. You’ll finish everything. You’ll work until you die.”
They’ll keep chanting my name until I’ve had my day in court, and there the world will see that it’s possible to choose evil over good, over happiness, over family, over love, over the future potential of the human race, and over life itself.
I felt like an old astronomer, who had spent a lifetime plotting the courses of a flock of distant stars, only to discover on my deathbed that there was a great black something out there pulling all astray—what doom did this spell for the rocket I had launched, loaded with hopes and false calculations? Curiosity is a dangerous thing for a dead man; it tempts one to want to live.
“You disappoint me, Master Canner. I thought to see the Liberated Man, but you still hid behind a cause.”
That present had been a lie, the rivalries, the enmity between Mason and Mitsubishi, the competition among Hives, all lies. Was I wrong, then? Had they not had to die, Luther, Geneva, Kohaku, Laurel, Seine? Apollo? I suffered many injuries during my capture, but only this wound bled.
The Mardis thought that three things make wars more or less terrible: the length of the peace before them, the amount of technological change, and how little the commanders know about war’s up-to-date realities.
Lesley first, sketching invisible doodles across Sniper with her fingertips as it shelters in her lap. The hermaphrodite has rubber exercise balls in its hands, exertion freeing its muscles fiber by fiber, while its face tries to show nothing.
Lap dog?
Robin Typer likes bikes. Each of these interests may extend to the other twin as well, but I have only once had a conversation with each twin when I was certain which it was, so that is all I know: Kat, spiritualist double-think; Robin, bikes.
His answer came slowly, like a pulled tooth. “Ggggggyyyyyyes. Yes. It’ll be ready to go in a few hours,
“You say there are important people in this house who you’re working with, who need you, well, I need them. I need you to get them on my side. I need the Emperor’s power, the Utopians’ skills. I need Chair Kosala to organize hospitals and aid workers to distribute the stuff that I create. I need Felix Faust to pick the right people to put in charge of things. I need the Censor to track the impact I’m having, and predict disasters. I need the Anonymous to convince everyone to cooperate. I need the Humanists to get excited about it as a big achievement and work for it, and the Europeans and the
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“You can’t masquerade here. You recognized this data. Ten billion points in seven groups with two percent floating,
“Tell me,” Aldrin pressed, “when you tried to delete a point yourself just now, were you trying to save the whole, or the Mitsubishi?”
<you haven’t seen the data. if we don’t stop it, it’ll rip the hive apart, everything. i can’t explain it in your terms, it’s just obvious, painful even to experience. that’s why i had to do something, had to delete that point. it wasn’t even a choice, i had to, like a compulsion. it’s like coming home finding a friend with a knife sticking out of their guts, you can’t just leave it there, you have to pull it out and help.> Papa gave a shallow sigh. “If you pull the knife out it’ll hemorrhage and get worse.”
Noah had assurances from God that he and his would live: infallible, omnipotent protection. Utopia does not. Imagine what fear Noah would have felt without that promise, seeing the waters rising, countless neighbors turning greedy eyes on his small ship.
HERE AT LAST THEN, WITH CARLYLE DOZING, UTOPIA BUSTLING, JEHOVAH COMFORTING HELOÏSE, BRIDGER SNEAKING OFF SOFTLY WHILE I SLEEP, AND DAWN’S ROSE FINGERS ALREADY TICKLING THE EDGE OF NIGHT, ENDS THE LONG FIFTH DAY OF MY HISTORY.
Or second-most perfect. I have seen the Major strip to tend a wound, his musculature sculpted by experiences so much more raw, more real, than Sniper’s in the gym. Perhaps the Major shouldn’t count.
Chagatai,
Second Son of Ghengis Khan
Whenever I arrive they’ve had to leave or vice versa, ships in the night.” “Is that so? How improbable. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy by the bash’ that runs the transit computers to keep you two apart—you should look into that.”
Utopian who slouched against the church wall behind the soapbox, shadowed in a nowhere sea where derelict ships of every age from Babylon to Space drifted through ghost-mist like frozen leviathans.
“I prefer Tully Mojave.” In a kinder world, Saladin and I would have awakened trembling, breathless at this moment, sensing in our bones as the doom that we had sacrificed so much to fight became a certainty. But in a kinder world Sniper would have turned right.
Frankly, Julia, if Darcy really thinks you’re the lesser of two evils they need to reread Faust.”
Julia gave … patronizing isn’t the right word, a matronizing smile.
Oniwaban
Ninja guards
Perry nodded stiffly, his nub of ponytail hissing against his velvet collar like a drummer’s brush. “It is all right, Madame. I did not join this company for the company. Go on.”
Smiling her silent thanks, Danaë reached for the list, then screamed like a rabbit ripped in twain by hounds hot in the hunt, and slipped into that kind of lifeless faint which made Homer call Sleep and Death twin brothers.
“After the scandal I thought I was ruined, never to wed. Hotaka came to me. He said he did not care whether I was a virgin on our wedding night. He did not want a bride, he wanted a wife.
In childhood all names were ‘-er’ for him, Stander, Looker, Aimer, Croucher, Canner, even Saneer, so, dwelling as he did beneath a bridge, Bridger. It is a name which, like all good names, means nothing. I hope you will keep calling Jehovah ‘Jed Mason,’ reader. An empty name is healthier.
Sniper?
“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.”
I, born to the think tank bash’es of Alba Longa, I, trained by the genius Mardi bash’, I, with the finest education in the world, I, Mycroft Canner, had been so wrong that I murdered the living light Apollo to stop a war which never would have come. My logic was not wrong, the data gathered by the engines of human science not wrong. Rather the human animal I was could do no better than to err so absolutely.
“And what justice would there be in that?” I snapped, startled at my own heat. “The Mardis committed themselves to war and all its consequences: rape, torture, oppression, famine, flame, children half crushed by bombs crying to the dark as they wait for their broken limbs to bleed enough to let them die. What I gave them was a fraction of what they planned to give the world.
If you saw them, Caesar, you would think Apollo had come back to you: their eyes, their hair, precisely the right age to have been born at the moment of Apollo’s death.” I could not meet his gaze. “It is not strange for the deaths of saints to be accompanied by miracles.”
His hair not quite black,
Oh shit they did mention that. Lighter than his black eyes.
That sky, streaked with heedless blurs, is now the most common nightmare image of our time.
Bridger screamed. I never finished telling you the tale of Sadcat, did I?
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.
In other words, the Anonymous and the team at the CFB have been altering the letter sorting to prevent Cousin policy from being dictated by short-term, emotional reactions to Masonic policies or the Anonymous’s own editorials.”
In the last centuries of the Exponential Age gender began to be liberated from biology, but that process wasn’t nearly finished when the Church War came.
Warm feelings rose in all their faces, longing, friendship, many different things named love, even the primordial tenderness called parenthood, except in Ganymede de la Trémoïlle.
I am asking you to exceed your duties, not your capacities. This crisis is a horror beyond what anyone should have to face, but it is not beyond what the human race has faced in the past, and overcome. We are not weaker than our ancestors. We will do this.
all of a sudden i'm a huge fan of the King of Spain?
