Achilles scowled. “I’ve never really understood Fate, not in fiction or reality.”
“I understood it once.” I shuddered, gazing at my own tear-blurred hands which seemed (not only then but always) red with blood. “I understood it, after I killed Apollo—no, after I learned I hadn’t had to kill Apollo, when I met Jehovah and realized that, by letting me think I understood the way the Hives worked, Providence had tricked me into killing the best person in the world.” I choked. “I understood then, but these past years, seeing Bridger’s powers, I let myself fall into the delusion that Providence might be simple. It isn’t simple. It isn’t kind. It isn’t working toward some happy end where we’re all saved, and every bad thing that happens turns out to be for the best in ways we can’t yet see. It isn’t cruel either, though it often seems so.” I tried to meet his eyes, but faltered. “It’s not trying to destroy humanity, or torture us, or leave us in the dark alone. It’s something else. There is a guiding Principle, not Good, not Evil, not Justice, not even Progress, something else that we can’t understand or name yet, one of these God-sized concepts that even Jehovah can’t describe in all His languages. Providence planned this war. It’s going to let millions die, let cities burn, make us tear down the better part of the world we’ve built, but it’s not going to let us wipe ourselves out. That’s why it left you. A kind God would have left us Bridger. A cruel One would have left us nothing. This One left you. You know how to fight this war, Achilles. We have no idea what’s coming, but you do. You’ve fought this war before, a future war, with flying cars, and tracker computers, and new weapons made from Mukta fuel and U-beasts. You’ve already fought Apollo’s war. You can teach us.”
The veteran rubbed his hands, exploring their calluses, so many kinds, too thick to let the nerves beneath feel much anymore. “It won’t start with new weapons. It’ll start with bats, and kitchen knives, and scared people defending themselves against neighbors they can’t trust. Then Sniper’s hero delusions will spread, people imitating war movies with the guns and planes and missiles hobbyists have stashed in their basements. Innovation will take longer.”
I felt my own tears changing, hope diluting grief. “But you know the old weapons too. You fought at Troy with bronze and horses. You fought the World Wars with guns and planes. You know how to lead men into battle, what will break a soldier, and what won’t. You trained in the trenches, and with Chiron, and in Space. You know how to fight this war. You know how to fight every war ever, because you have.”
Achilles did not look at me. Long years of breaking bread together, and wiping Bridger’s tears, were not enough to make him ready to share sentiments more private than his rage, even with me. “Then we have work to do.” He rummaged in Bridger’s backpack, Hermes’s winged sandals fluttering in protest as he jumbled them among folds of cloak, and futuretech, and wands. “I’m keeping Excalibur, and a couple of these.” He pulled healing and resurrection potions from the depths. “Take the rest to your Utopians. They’ll use it right, analyze it, learn from it, maybe reproduce it someday.” He dropped the bag at my side, knowing my arms would be too weak to hold it. “You’re right, the gods didn’t leave us with nothing. We have these, and we have me. I’ll teach you and Jehovah how to fight your war. I know how, any war, all wars. It’s all I do know. The Mardis worried what would happen with no veterans left to teach the current generation what war was like. Their prayer at least was answered.” He paused as if to laugh. “Take me to Romanova. Have Jehovah call your allies in, the Emperor, Anonymous, Spain if you can, Kosala, I’ll brief them all at once. And call your Servicers. Thanks to you they’re closer to a ready army than anything else on Earth.” He frowned finding me immobile, weeping still. “Mycroft?” he tested.
“Yes?”
Achilles took a long breath, ready to move on. “Get up. I won’t win this war without you. You know that.”
The first lesson you will learn when war reaches you, reader, is that our limits in civilian life, the point at which we are too tired, too distraught, too weak to go on, are not really our limits. I rose and saluted.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND
Last Prayer
Now I have fulfilled the strict command to give you truth. I bared myself, my secrets, and Jehovah’s secrets, even those which will make you call Him mad. I exposed His mother, His fathers, and many sins and crimes which great and wary rulers would rather have silenced. I showed you Bridger. I showed you the resurrection that you witnessed, but cannot quite believe in. And I told you who this strange man is who now stands often at Jehovah’s side, small as a boy but hero-strong, and calls himself Achilles Mojave. I do not ask you to believe, just play-believe, since often things we play-believe in—superstitions, bedtime stories, luck—still make us feel a little better when hard choices come.
It has been three months since I began this history. In that time the sides have taken shape, the trials begun. MASON’s black hand is now outstretched, the Cousins are reborn as peacemakers, Dominic holds the Mitsubishi together by the skin of his fierce teeth, and more souls every day flock to the bull’s-eye flag of the “Hiveguard” who follow Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, thirteenth O.S. Kind ?ναξ Jehovah will not let the bull’s-eye be banned, or even discouraged, since for This blinded God (five senses are as blindness to One Who was omnivoyant) each morsel of communication is as precious as desert rain. Earth, while He helps rule it, He decrees, will have honesty, if we cannot have peace. Achilles fears that someday soon a brawl, or street scuffle, or hatemongering word, will be the spark that triggers open war. I pray this book is not that spark.
If you are my contemporary, reader, brought to this history to understand the days of transformation you are still living through, be patient, pray. Do not act rashly, spurred by your revulsion at the dark underbellies I have exposed here. Do not hate Cornel MASON, Ancelet, Kosala, Ockham, even Ganymede. So many on all sides of this are bloodstained, perverted, mad, but also noble, wise, untiring servants of your interests, who will give their days, their years, their deaths, to guard this world for you, or make a better one. I do not ask you to forgive them all, just to have reasons beyond rash grudges or affections when you choose to fight and kill for one side, or the other. As for ?ναξ Jehovah, if your theology cannot admit that He is more than a madman, at least believe that it is a madness which makes Him Good. By His command I may not ask you to fight for Him. His Wish is only that you look with love—as He does—upon this world, this human race, its many branches, and judge carefully which one you will fight to make the trunk.
If, on the other hand, you are a distant reader, and our coming war is, for you, just one more memorial, standing in some quiet park where you grew up, laughing and chasing beneath the strange skies of whatever world Utopia’s toil has earned for you as birthright, pray for us. Our war may have been a thousand years ago, more, but God our Maker hears all prayers, past and future, even if He rarely makes His answers visible. If Providence sent Achilles to guide us in our day of greatest need, if we survive this war, rebuild, and if in future days some blessed generation is judged worthy to receive a second chance at what God tried to give us when He first sent Bridger, it may be that He grants humanity all this because you, child of a nobler future, asked Him to.
HERE ENDS
Seven Surrenders, THE SECOND HALF OF
Mycroft Canner’s History
of these Days of Transformation.
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