Carlyle opened her mouth, but thought caught her. “No. No, I guess, it doesn’t have to be. You could just be very strangely good at reading people.” She chuckled at herself. “After Bridger I was too … credulous.” Shame made her blush. “Aren’t you going to ask me where Bridger is?”
Jehovah spared the sensayer His gaze. “You do not know. If you did you would be agitated, debating inside whether or not to tell Me. Dominic too, right now, does not know. When I find Mycroft, I shall know if he knows. If he knows, then I shall discover whether I ask. If I ask I shall discover whether he answers. Blindly we move. That is how time works.”
Carlyle felt dizzy, a metaphysical vertigo, as if she were in freefall, plunging into the pit of an unseen future, but somehow she had not realized she was falling until Jehovah made her see. She hugged herself.
“We must stop this conversation now,” Jehovah judged, rising with a robot’s slow efficiency, a minimum of muscles.
“Why?”
“We are increasing the cumulative total of human pain. You need rest. I have duties. Patris patience is at its limit. Strangely, I have been born into this universe as the Child of the leaders of your world, and the eight living leviathans which comprise humanity today compete to place Me at their head. Perhaps This Universe’s God thinks it a kindness, power, to make Me as close to My customary omnipotence as possible, a soft bed laid for Me, His Guest. But, vast as Man’s prosthetic powers are, a finite thing, however grand, is nothing against a lost infinity.”
MASON arrived now, and it is possible that his footsteps, audible on the stairs, were what told Jehovah their conference was about to end. “Terminus est, Fili,” MASON pronounced. “Foster, are you satisfied?”
Carlyle swallowed hard. “Yes. Yes, I … Yes.”
Carlyle describes the Emperor’s stare as graphite dark, not pure black like his Son’s, but a darkness which threatens to spread its dark across the room. “Remember, Foster, the mad Roman Emperors had themselves proclaimed gods, and inflicted unspeakable horrors on their subjects, but the sane ones were proclaimed gods too, and they did fine.”
“Then … Caesar, you know what Jehovah thinks they are?”
MASON would acknowledge no more. “You are needed too, Foster. Had you forgotten?”
Carlyle had forgotten so completely that she had no idea what the Emperor might mean, so she flushed red with guilt as she saw, at MASON’s heels, the frantic and loving mob of her own bash’mates. They had dropped everything, the rest of the Foster bash’, to come at Caesar’s summons, routed through Kosala, the two guardians of Gag-genes quick to answer the pleas of these loved ones who had been listening madly to their trackers for any word from their stray sheep.
“Carlyle!”
“You idiot! Are you okay?”
“We’ve been going mad looking for you!”
“We saw you on the news.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Vanishing for three days when the world’s falling apart!”
“You’re coming home. No arguments!”
“We’ve made your favorite, salmon and ravioli.”
“You’re coming home!”
I do not know them, reader. I imagine a swirl of Cousin’s wraps cocooning Carlyle as they drag her door-wards under the gentlest arrest, but Carlyle rightly will not let me bring their names or details into this. The bash’ is our oasis, the one innovation of our golden age which even O.S. does not make sour. In the coming dark do not, like Carlyle, forget to turn to yours.
Only one thing made Carlyle drag his feet. “J—” She caught herself. “Tribune Mason! Let me know if you find Bridger!” She strained against the net of loving arms. “I need to know! There’s so much no one’s been able to understand about Bridger, the source, the limit of their powers, why they exist at all, but with what you can tell just looking at people I’m sure you’ll be the one to solve it. Please, I need to know!”
What is the lag before Jehovah speaks? Is it just language? Complexity of thought? Or, as I suspect, is it some disconnect between His eternal timeless Psyche and His sentences, which are designed to convey human thoughts, forged in the cage of time? “I will tell everyone.”
Home would wait no more. Carlyle’s bash’mates hauled her bodily to the car, and the comforts beyond.
“Quid need, Pater?” Jehovah asked, mixing English and Latin freely in the company of a father long accustomed to Him.
“I need Mycroft Canner,” MASON answered. “We both do. The police are asking me fresh questions about Apollo’s Iliad, and—”
“You listened,” Jehovah interrupted.
Caesar will never feel at ease relying on Jehovah, as no ruler can rest whose cities thrive upon a riverbank, which could, at any moment, flood. “Yes,” he confessed. “Mycroft is mad. A child that can bring toys to life is mad, but…”
“Vero many Mycroftis operes make sudden sense si sit veritas.” (But many of Mycroft’s actions make sudden sense if it is true.—9A)
The Emperor sighed. “Mycroft is missing. They slipped their tracker, even Papadelias has no clues. Do you know where—”
“Romanova.”
“They contacted you?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
Jehovah’s gaze strayed to the filtered sky beyond the stained-glass windows, dimmed by the onset of subtle overcast. “Downpour est in Romanova. Posset Mycroftem (Mycroft can) visit Apollo’s grave unseen.”
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH
The Rape of Apollo
Has it occurred to you, reader, that these are the words of a dead man? All books will be someday, for authors die, and if by chance you read this while I live, then the second time you take up my history, the third, when your grandchildren read it, I shall surely have paid the ferryman what we all owe. I think all human beings, even I who have no right to ask more of the world, wish to see the future. I don’t mean the whole future; after a millennium history must progress beyond one’s ability to understand. What we want is to see the trajectories of those things we care about: our legacy, our Hive, our children. If we cannot watch the ship on its whole voyage, we can at least feel satisfaction seeing the white sails shrink toward the horizon. The Stoics said no man can be called happy until the end of time, for, if all his successes were undone after his death, he would be wretched in retrospect. I think, though, they were too demanding. No one can hope to follow the Utopians to the infinity they aim at, but if I dared ask anything more of Providence, it would be that I might live to know one thing. Will this cold Plan let them take that first step to the stars? Or will it make them, like the dandelion seed, catch in the nearby grasses, forced to take root beside their parents, though they aimed so high? If I lived long enough to see the seeds fly, reader, count me a happy man.
“Mycroft.”
Caesar found me as ?ναξ Jehovah prophesied, hiding in the downpour before Apollo’s tomb. Even Romanova empties before walls of rain, the remnant citizens too hurried to peer past porches and umbrellas, let alone to spot a Servicer’s dull uniform as I knelt on the cobbles. Wind tossed the rain in waves, slapping the walls, the flanking awnings, and Apollo’s statue, whose stone coat seemed to soar with the gusting wind. There is a spot before the grave where nothing grows, no trace of those brave sprouts which elsewhere eke out their strangling existence in the pavement cracks. I cannot help but think that my tears made it barren, salt shed over decades of visits stolen whenever dark or downpour offered me concealment. If it was not my tears alone, it was half mine, half MASON’s.
“You broke your parole.” I could hardly see the Emperor behind me, a black pillar haloed by the runoff of the umbrella held by an imperial guard.
“I know I have no right to mourn Apollo, Caesar,” I answered, struggling to breathe between my sobs, “but that doesn’t keep me from needing to.”
In another place his black-sleeved fist would have threatened violence. Not here. “You lied, Mycroft.”