“Mycroft Canner will live.”
No stone on stone, no hammer on anvil, no thunderbolt striking the heart could fall so heavily as the Emperor’s words. I spotted him now too, the seventh of the Seven, sitting at the room’s end, his uniform of imperial gray like ash against the festival of silk and gold that played across the walls. He would spare me? MASON, who had glowed in Apollo’s presence like a dead coal brought to life, the one among the Powers I had trusted to crush my throat with his own hand if the others faltered—now he talks of sparing me? It was beyond my ability to even think it. That cage was my coffin. I had sacrificed my life eight days earlier when, hand in hand, my Saladin and I set the torch to the wicker prison which held the maimed but living remnants of Luther Mardigras. Luther was the fifth to die, but was the turning point, the moment that we knew I had left traces enough that the police would catch me, not right away, but someday, even if I stopped. For the week since I lit that torch, I had lived in the unique and absolute philosophic calm of one who has already drunk the hemlock, or already sees his heart’s blood streaming from the wound. A dead man’s philosophy. When Hope left she took Doubt with her, leaving only resolution, and a quiet curiosity about the larger nature of the universe. I mused, those seven nights, abstractly about what forces had conspired to put me in such a place, and make me such a person that I would choose this. I almost thought the dread word ‘Providence.’ But my path was set, and the possibility that I would be denied death was not hope to me now—it was betrayal. How dare the world make me do what I had done and then threaten to deny me my execution! I opened my mouth to object, to scream, to spit my curses at the Powers and demand death, but Caesar finished first:
“It is Apollo’s will.”
I had not imagined the Anonymous could tremble. I had not imagined I could anymore either. “Apollo’s?”
I recognized the page as Caesar raised it in his black-sleeved hand, the title page of Apollo’s Iliad, ripped out, with hasty lines scribed on the back in bloody red, so like Apollo. “I won’t know for certain who the killer is until I meet them,” Caesar read aloud, “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 … there … there are … things…”
MASON’s throat froze, a tremor in his bronze cheeks threatening to prove that even Caesar can cry. I think he would have, there in front of everyone, in front of me, had not the Lady beside him on the sofa laid soft hands on his shoulders and kissed his temple. She wore a formal mourning gown, as I remember, black lace pooling across the arms which reached around the Emperor, like the wings of a black swan. She seemed strange, less like a person than a shell waiting to enwrap something, a haven whose gentle gestures promised to lift Caesar from his grief, if only he surrendered. That was the first time I laid eyes on Madame.
“There are things I leave undone,” a fresh voice finished where the Emperor failed, “that only Mycroft Canner can complete.”
It was Mushi Mojave who stepped forward from a corner which, in my bonds, I could not turn enough to see. The constellations of Utopians have, to my knowledge, no rank nor hierarchy, but if, like stars, they may be said to have magnitudes of brightness, then surely Mushi Mojave is one of those Crowns of Heaven that pierce even city smog. “Except ants” is Mushi’s motto. Humanity is forever boasting of its ‘unique’ achievements: “Humans are the only creatures who build cities, use agriculture, domesticate animals, have nations and alliances, practice slavery, make war, make peace; these wonders make us stand alone above all other creatures, in glory and in crime.” But then Mushi corrects, “Except ants.” How proud the day when Mushi rushed in to tell the young Apollo and the other Mojave ba’kids that even man’s greatest achievement, Space itself, was no longer a monopoly. The terraformers had found ants, stowaways in one of the nutrient shipments, which had escaped and built a colony in the new Mars soil, spiral tunnels woven like DNA around a leaking oxygen pipe. The first city on Mars was not built by humans, but under them. Science needed an expert, and Mushi Mojave leapt on the chance. First entomologist on Mars, now there’s a title for a hero.
“Apollo knew?” The Anonymous looked to Mushi, then to Caesar. Then to me. “Apollo knew Mycroft was the killer?”
“They foreglimpsed, it seems,” Mushi answered. “We don’t know how early. We ask…” Mushi’s voice quavered, hard words for one of the ba’pas who raised this light of lights from infancy, “… we ask that you honor their request.”
The Anonymous peered hard at the Utopian, perhaps wondering whether grief’s red around the digital eyes was real. “You want us to spare Mycroft?”
“I don’t,” Mushi corrected at once. “Apollo did. Collectively Utopia sides with Apollo.”
The Utopian halted in the center of the room, a knife-stark silhouette wounding the salon’s veil of antiquity. Mushi’s Utopian coat fills the world with ants, billions upon billions, the incomparable colony that ants would erect if the whole world were given over to their intricate industry. A lesser imagination would leave it there, but Mushi reads deeper, for ants’ paths, as they weave about their work, may by chance trace the shapes of letters, and with time such letters may by chance form words. While fools wait infinitely for the monkeys at their typewriters to reproduce Shakespeare, Mushi’s coat collects and displays the new, alien poems ants write as they march. But the ants were dead now, the ant world switched off, leaving the coat a block of flickering static, flat and shapeless as if someone had sliced a hole in space. Those who lived through it cannot forget the days after Apollo’s death, when across the globe the coats which should be windows to so many other worlds turned blank. When a Utopian dies before his time, the Hive mourns together, all the coats in the world turning to static for as many seconds as their kinsman lost years—thirty seconds for a centenarian, ninety for someone full of midlife’s promise, a full two minutes for a child. Apollo’s murder was different. For him their mourning would not stop. They left the static for hours, days, four hundred million walking holes in space, their vow that they would catch the killer and end this nightmare where all other Hives had failed. It was terrifying, wounds of static around every corner, everywhere and organized, reawakening a fear Earth had not tasted since the Set-Set Riots. I saved Apollo for near the end of the seventeen because I knew I could not last long once I woke that sleeping dragon, but even I underestimated their speed. Four days is all it took. They caught me with my work unfinished, Mercer still breathing, Tully still free. Poor Papadelias will never stop cursing the fact that they, not he, took down his long-awaited Moriarty. The static stayed, though, for eleven hours after I was caught. The popular assumption has always been that they were waiting for Caesar to carry out my execution. It is half true: they were waiting.
“I side with Apollo too,” MASON pronounced, forcing the words out stiffly. His eyes fixed on me, my first taste of the rage which has not dimmed in thirteen years. “You will live, Mycroft.” I already knew him well, Cornel MASON. I knew his smiling eyes on soft afternoons when he came to see Aeneas, Geneva, or Apollo. I knew his rich bronze face aglow with pride as he showed his capital to me and the Mardi children, as if we and we alone were the posterity who would inherit this greatest of empires. This was a different man. “You will live. You will finish the Mardis’ work: Geneva’s, Aeneas’s, Mercer’s for Faust, Kohaku’s for the Censor, Jie’s for Andō, Leigh’s for Kosala, Apollo’s most of all. All of it.”