“I likewise find Anselm difficult,” Jehovah answered.
Carlyle smiled; they have read the same theologians, this priest and This God, equal in that at least. “It will take me time,” Carlyle continued, “to work through what it would mean for there to be two universes, and two monotheistic Gods. Until I explore all the implications, I’m not at the level where I can believe or disbelieve, since I can’t yet compare it to my current beliefs. In my experience I have to examine a belief system for at least a few weeks, sometimes a few years, before I know it well enough to believe or disbelieve.”
“Yes,” Jehovah agreed, “here time does seem a constituent component of belief.”
“Do you see time like matter, then?” Carlyle tested, growing eager. “Moments like atoms, so old things have more time matter? Or is it connected, like a string?”
Jehovah spent several silent breaths in thought. “I am nowhere near understanding Time. It seems to be a direction in which sentience can only move one way and perceive the other, but it also destroys, and twists, and swallows, making legacies differ from, or even oppose, intent. It annihilates, repeats, erases. It is too alien to me.”
Carlyle remembers a chill as she tried to read emotion in Jehovah’s eyes, and caught the full force of their starless, living black. “Sorry to ask so many questions.”
“I welcome questions,” This Kind God replied. “Now that this universe has taught Me what ignorance is, I will never willfully inflict it on a sentient thing, as My Peer does.”
“Your Peer, you mean This Universe’s God?”
“Yes. I would wish you a kinder Maker, but it is impius to feel anything less than absolute gratitude for the absolute gift of having been created.”
Carlyle smiled at Jehovah’s latinate pronunciation of the word, meant in its Roman sense, when piety was owed to states and parents as well as to religion. “It sounds like you don’t like Them. God, This Universe’s God I mean, you don’t like the way They run things.”
Slowly, with difficulty, always with difficulty come His answers. “I do not dislike, rather I do not understand. I need to find Him. I need Him to answer why He made His Universe so full of barriers, and ignorance, and limited perspectives, which make His sentient creations suffer and see evil in His plan. I need to know why He invented Pain, and Time, and Distance. I need to know why He creates portrait after portrait of Himself, but stays so hidden. I need to know how He found Me, how He created this flesh men call Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason, how He bound Me into it, and why He brings Me here as His Unwilling Guest, and then, strange Host, He hides.”
Carlyle smiled. “You’re not alone there. Everyone asks questions. Why am I here? Why is there Evil in the world? Why won’t the Creator show Themself? I know you must study as much philosophy as Dominic. That’s what it’s always been about. Everyone throughout history needed those answers.”
“Not as I do,” Jehovah answered slowly. “My Mycroft put it best. No matter how many beast companions Adam encounters in the garden, he needs Eve. Before I met this universe I was complete, neither wanting nor imagining anything beyond Myself. Here, watching humans, I have learned what it means for a being to have equals, to speak with another, debate, learn, grow. Now that I learn of that, I need it. I have never before lacked anything in My existence, but knowing that I have a Counterpart, a Peer, I need Him.” His eyes turned to the painted portrait of that Counterpart on the altarpiece before Him. “You called Him ‘Bridger’?”
Carlyle froze, taking some moments to remember that it was she who had spoken the name in Jehovah’s hearing. “Bridger isn’t God,” she replied. “I think they’re more an avatar of God, a manifestation, a tool. Something through which God channels Miracles.”
“But He is here. Your Clockmaker has shown Himself.”
“Yes.” Carlyle felt doubt’s end here, the fear that these last days might be illusion, dream, over. She never doubted again. “Bridger is a child, thirteen years old. They have the power to make toys real, any toy, no matter how fantastic, even living things.”
“Idea to actuality,” Jehovah supplied. “By Will.”
“Mycroft raised Bridger. Mycroft Canner.” Carlyle swallowed hard, a part of her rebelling as she found herself trying to defend, of all men, me. “I know it may seem cruel that they never told you, but they wanted Bridger to grow up and become a full, strong person before meeting you. Maybe they figured it was inevitable that you would meet eventually. Fated.”
“My fideist has nothing left to believe in but Providence.”
For Carlyle, who knew both the theology and me, this sentence stripped me naked as a soul at Judgment. A fideist is a religious skeptic, one who believes that human reason, however lofty its ambition, cannot achieve real, indubitable Truth, and that the senses, however fertile science makes them, are likewise fallible and incomplete. Not to be trusted. Have all your calculations answered what the soul is made of, Science? Have all your electron microscopes found or disproved an afterlife? 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. Reason failed. Evidence failed. I failed. Conviction had died in me in that room at Madame’s where my strange trial took place. Absolute doubt permitted only one escape: to surrender to and trust the Providence, which had not only planned my sin, but guided me after, not to the death I expected, but to ?ναξ Jehovah.
“If you have a criticism, speak it,” Jehovah invited, sensing a hotter tension in Carlyle’s silence than mere pensiveness. “You are human, far more adept at living in this universe than I. I err often.”
Carlyle tried her best to face Jehovah sternly, but no human can. “You shouldn’t expose people’s beliefs to others like that. You did it before, at the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house. I didn’t want to know that Mycroft is a fideist, and Mycroft wouldn’t want me to know. That’s private, intimate. That’s how our culture works.”
The God thought for a silent moment. “Thank you. I forget that humans often cannot see what is to me as transparent as the air between us. I will try harder.”
“You can sense it, can’t you? You can read people’s minds, their thoughts. That’s how you know people’s religions. That’s your power, isn’t it? A special power, like Bridger’s. People call it telepathy.”
“My Peer, That Host Who brings Me here as Guest, does not grant that.”
“What?”
Tired, that’s how Carlyle described Jehovah here, exhaustion like Felix Faust’s, whose brain saps its host flesh harder than brains were meant to. “I know the word ‘telepathy.’ It would be a precious sense, making the mind’s world visible, a world of words will-shaped, more giving than matter. With telepathy I would be a sense less blind. No, I have no such sense.”
“But you know things, see things about people, things no one could see from just a glance.”
“I work hard to understand this world, its thinking creatures most,” answered This tender Visitor to our rough world. “I make the most of the senses this flesh possesses. I see people with these eyes, hear with these ears, feel the temperature when a pulse races. I think of what that means. My Uncle Felix does no less. Is that a miracle?”