Papadelias: “What?”
Foster: “If there are to be limits to what secrets a sensayer will keep, then everyone should know them. We’ve decided this is acceptable, that the recording isn’t covered by sensayer confidentiality, so let everyone know who made the recording, and how, and why. Let them judge for themselves whether or not to trust us after this.”
Papadelias: “You really want your name mixed up in this? We’re not talking about twenty minutes of fame here, we’re talking about your whole life. Even being a sensayer can’t be the same after everyone in the world knows you as that sensayer.”
Foster: “So be it.”
Papadelias: “Even though you’re a Gag-gene? Even twenty minutes of fame is long enough to bring out all kinds of old bad.”
Foster: “I don’t care about myself in this.”
Papadelias: “And what about Julia Doria-Pamphili? It won’t be easy keeping that name out of things if you do full disclosure on the recording and why you made it.”
Foster: “Then let Julia’s name be out there too. Julia and I have both been making too many judgment calls for other people. I think I’ve done right, and to some extent I think Julia has too. Time to see if the world agrees.”
Papadelias: “It’s four in the morning, Foster. Go to bed. After a night’s sleep and a solid breakfast, if you still feel like destroying yourself and your mentor, then we’ll talk.”
Foster: “I’m not going to change my mind.”
Papadelias: “Good night, Foster.”
Foster: “I’m not! Believe me, I know when I’m sure about something.”
Papadelias: “Listen, Foster, conviction is a virtue, but sometimes doubt is too. You’ve known Mycroft Canner almost a week, you should have picked that up by now. Go to bed, and make sure you sleep, okay? Come to me rested, calm and sensible and maybe, just maybe, I’ll let you throw yourself to the media wolves tomorrow.”
Foster: “All right. Tomorrow.”
Call ended 04:02 UT 03/28/2454
HERE AT LAST THEN, WITH CARLYLE DOZING, UTOPIA BUSTLING, JEHOVAH COMFORTING HELO?SE, 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.
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
Providence Chooses Left
“Sniper!”
The cry rose from one throat first, then many. It is a researcher’s duty to stand objective before birth and death and all between, but the sight of Sniper, still sparkling damp from morning swim practice, swinging on a Tarzan rope through the spiraling, hypnotic architectural experiments which lined the Spectacle City heart of Ingolstadt would dumbfound even Felix Faust. In fact, it did. The Headmaster had been strolling with a patriarch’s dawdling dignity along the grass beside a footpath whose electric keyboard stepping stones turned his students’ hijinks into harmonies, but he stopped now, slumping against a crystal Spinosaurus sculpture, as if his frame had not the strength to simultaneously stand and study such a specimen.
“Sniper, my dear,” Faust greeted. “Nice pants.”
What else could one say? The living doll wore nothing else: gray riding britches which made the Olympic striping on its boots seem like the rank marks of an army, but from the waist up it wore nothing. If Sniper is, as many speculate, an Amazon, female by birth, then the surgeon who nipped in the bud the breasts which might have slowed the athlete down in sports, left no blemish on this matchless human canvas. The mist of nearby fountains served as polish for its skin, hairless and pale across the muscles which so many vitamins, exercises, and coaches have trained into the most perfect in the world. 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.
Sniper’s smile glittered. “I let my fans vote on how I should repay them for playing hooky most of yesterday. They voted for ‘no shirt.’” The living doll turned, displaying every angle to the cameras which hovered about like flying saucers. “I was hoping for a chat, Headmaster, but you look like you’re on your way somewhere. Am I interrupting?”
Faust laughed, not at Sniper’s words but at its gesture, posture, the angle of its stance, which, to the old voyeur, betrayed more than a diary. “Not at all, my dear, your company is one of life’s more fascinating pleasures. I was just strolling up to the Old City to discipline some absentees.” He nodded toward the river, where sharp Bavarian towers still pined for knights and dukes and Charlemagne. “There is much hooky being played of late, not just by you.”
Sniper was obliged to laugh.
“What did happen to you yesterday?” Faust asked. “I hear no one could find you for fifteen hours.”
“Bash’ business.” Sniper winked. “We all have bash’ business sometimes, even me.” Its smile apologized for the half answer.
“Naturally. Well, walk with me. I’m eager to hear what’s brought you to Ingolstadt, and to hear your comments on the question of the day.”
The old gentleman offered Sniper his arm, and the hermaphrodite took it gingerly, like a falcon which settles on a high branch, only deigning to land where it is easiest to leap free. “What ‘question of the day’?” it asked.
“Now I’m actually worried,” Felix fussed. “Sniper a day behind on the news! The Earth will shake.” The Headmaster is not one to exaggerate, and Sniper knew it.
The watching Fellows knew it too, students and instructors, researchers and researchees who leaked like fugitives from the bright pastoral ant farm of the Adolf Riktor Brill Institute of Psychotaxonomic Science. The Institute complex covered a series of artificial slopes above the festive city center, its dorms and classrooms, tiled in blue and white porcelain, nested among precisely measured hills and banks of flowers, still waiting for April to awaken them. Have you visited it, reader? The Cognitivist’s city? I remember well when Mercer Mardi first brought me, eight years old and still on crutches from the accident, to limp my way through these too-calculated gardens: paths precisely wide enough to fight off claustrophobia, banks of carefully chaotic flowers, so test subjects can say what shapes they see in the living Rorschach. As Headmaster Faust’s Heir Presumptive, Mercer Mardi had enjoyed the finest office with the finest view: three-quarters mathematical perfection, while in the corner of the window one could just see the Old City below, historic Ingolstadt, lurking like an archenemy with its one-horse-wide organic streets, its fort and cathedral towers alive with pigeons. Matter and antimatter must not meet, so, to separate the Institute from the Old Town, Brill conceived this Spectacle Strip between, where Faust and Sniper stand. Here the great sculptors and architects of each generation are invited to build ‘abstract self-portraits,’ anything they can dream, a rainbow tree, a singing obelisk, a warren of mirrored tunnels, a sausage stand in the shape of a chambered nautilus, anything so long as it is a reflection of themselves. Old Town, Spectacle Strip, and Institute; if only the most successful revolutionaries cease to fear their teachers, how better could Brill boast his conquest of Master Freud than to let his capital flaunt its Id, Ego, and Superego so conspicuously?
“So, what’s the question of the day?” Sniper asked.
“The Cousins’ Feedback Bureau.”
The hermaphrodite did not flinch, but in the videos you can see Faust smile, spotting something. “You mean Masami Mitsubishi’s Black Sakura Seven-Ten list article about CFB Chief Darcy Sok?” Sniper supplied. “Never let it be said that I’m completely out of touch.”