Carlyle choked. “What?”
“The child Bridger has no navel, no belly button. He wasn’t born, not from a human mother anyway. There is your final proof. The child was created, with no placenta or umbilical, miraculously by thy God, whom thou canst no longer call Clockmaker.”
Hopefully, reader, you can remember some fond day when you laughed so hard it hurt. You emptied your lungs, sprained the smiling muscles of your cheeks, and still the laughter forced itself from you, though you had no breath left to give it wings. Here Carlyle cries that hard, and Dominic watches, patient as his victim’s strength dims sob by sob, like failing fire.
“Divine intervention.” Carlyle was the first to say the words. “Real, undeniable divine intervention. This changes everything, for the whole human race, forever.”
“Still hiding behind thinking of the human race?” Dominic clucked, like a chiding mother. “What of thyself? For whose sake dost thou truly want This Universe’s God to be a Clockmaker? For thine own? Thou art His priest. All thy life thou hast wanted desperately to see Him, to have Him set a miracle before thee and prove His presence. Why then didst thou imagine Him a Clockmaker who never shows His face? That wasn’t what thou wantedest.”
It took Carlyle some seconds to gulp enough air to speak. “The Clockmaker is most fair, most universal. It wouldn’t be right for God to be just one God, to reveal Themself to just one people and let the rest be wrong. A Deist God, Who answers to every name people call Them by, is … would have been … the only just God.”
“Exactly.” Victory fire surged in Dominic’s eyes. “It was for the others thou preferredest the Clockmaker, not for thyself. Thou dost not want the others to be wrong, dost not want their God not to exist, their universe to be unkind to them. They need the Clockmaker, not thee. Deep down thou hast always wanted to pray for a miracle, for proof, but thou couldst not ask for it. Thy God must be perfectly fair, and a fair Clockmaker would not violate His own rule to show Himself to an unworthy fallen priest. Am I right?”
“I don’t—”
“Am I right?”
“Yes!” Carlyle shrieked out. “Yes, of course I always wanted God to make an exception for me, to show Themself. I wanted it more than anything else in the world. But I couldn’t ask for God to be so unfair, to come to me when They didn’t to so many others. I didn’t deserve it, not after what I did. I still don’t.”
“Yes, thou dost.”
Every inch of Carlyle trembled. “What?”
“Thou thinkest thy fall makes thee unworthy? Just the opposite.” Dominic leaned close, his calm brows suddenly more grave than cruel. “Thou hast fallen from thy God and yet thou servest Him still, even though thou no longer considerest thyself ‘special,’ or ‘chosen,’ or worthy of His Love. Thou art willing to devote thyself to a God whom thou expectest to hate thee, and before His wrath thou declarest, ‘Damn me if Thou wilt, Lord, I shall love Thee still!’ That is a far stronger loyalty than the placid worship of the pure who expect Salvation or Enlightenment; they get a bribe, while thou, for all thou knowest, gettest Hellfire, and still thou lovest. It is not hubris to call such devotion special.”
“I … hadn’t thought about it like that.”
“Few do.”
Carlyle raised her eyes anew to her tormentor, who sat with his crossed arms buried in his habit sleeves, contemplative. It is strange to see Dominic’s face without aggression, passive, but it happens from time to time, as when, after feeding, a serpent knots itself up to sleep, and squirrels and monkeys play freely in the branches around it, sensing by instinct when the hunter is benign. Snakes sleep most of their lives, you know—they stir only to feed.
“Dominic,” Carlyle began with trembling lips, “have you also fallen?”
“We are talking of thy faith, not mine,” the monk interrupted quickly, “but it does seem that thou and I are both among the rare creatures that have recognized the necessity of hypocrisy. Thy fall saved someone’s life; surely thou believest thy God intended that. Thy God, like us, knows that oaths must sometimes be broken, but that doesn’t mean the oaths meant nothing; in fact, to we who agonize again and again over the choice of when to break and when to follow, oaths mean more.”
“I guess so.”
“Nothing in thy life has made thee think more about thy God than the time thou brokest His rule. If thou hadst chosen a God with more commandments, or made more vows to Him which thou wouldst then suffer to keep or suffer more by breaking, thy faith would have grown even stronger for it.”
The Cousin realized now that she was hugging herself, and felt strong enough to stop. “You really were a monk once, weren’t you, Dominic? A real monk?”
“I am thy sensayer, and may not speak to thee of my religion.”
Again Dominic’s hands stirred deep in his sleeves, but I recognized the gesture from when he does the same in his public costume, for even lace cuffs cannot conceal the fidgeting as he fingers on the skin around his wrists. There are no scars now, but there were when I first faced Dominic in that same cell. It was sincere, that session when I let you hear Dominic ‘confess’ to Julia his weekly sins, breaking his vow of chastity. Sincere too was young Dominic’s conviction when he took his monastic oath: obedience, poverty, chastity too, to seal away forever that appetite which Madame had raised him to wield as a master swordsman wields his blade. At fifteen Dominic could already break a man with ease, but he determined to sacrifice his pleasures to honor his Lord with a life of pious deprivation. Madame would not permit such wastage. After he took his vows, she granted Dominic one month of his new life, just enough to feel the habits taking hold, then she had him dragged from his cell, and sodomized, and tormented until he unleashed his wrath and now-forbidden appetites upon his tormenters. So, calculating mother, she taught Dominic how much more powerful he was now that his lust was charged with guilt, the fire of his flesh channeling the burn of his Master Jehovah’s disapproving gaze. You cannot call Madame’s order a ‘crime’—they were all Blacklaws. You can call it abuse, but Dominic would not wish away his past, and the powers it gives him, any more than would Eureka, Toshi Mitsubishi, or Voltaire.
“There is no need now, Foster,” Dominic continued, “to pretend that thou wishest thy God to be a Clockmaker. He has answered thy secret prayer, and proved that He is not. That was thy true prayer, was it not?” Dominic did wait, but Carlyle hid behind tears, and let her sensayer finish for her. “He gave thee Bridger. He has shown Himself to thee, to us, to we two fallen creatures out of all the priests and faithful of the Earth. A window to speak to our Maker is in our hands, not those of the untainted sensayers thou hast long envied. Ours.” Dominic’s eyes led Carlyle’s to the corner of the room, where Bridger’s No-No Box sat open on the table, with its crucifix, its Buddha statue, and its black rubber ball. “This Universe’s God has recognized the special fervor of thy devotion since thy fall, and He has heard thy prayers above all others.”
“This Universe’s God?” Carlyle repeated.
“What of Him?”
“You always say ‘This Universe’s God,’ as if there were some need to specify.”
In that instant, two fast knocks rang out against the door. “I’m coming in.”
At last, Mycroft! Thou and thy Providence are tardy rescuers indeed.
It is not I, reader. Providence chose a nobler instrument here to slide the bolts back and let freedom’s air into that cell: Voltaire Seldon, his bright Utopian coat breaking the cell’s dim blankness with its vista of ruins baked in sparkling sunset. “Where’s the Traceshifter Artifact?”
Dominic’s eyes twinkled. “French or English, please, I don’t speak Moonman.”
“Where’s the Canner Device?”