“I only slip my tracker when I have to, Caesar. Sometimes—”
“I don’t care about your tracker.” He spoke English, unwilling to exchange Latin with one who has no right to know it. “Apollo’s Iliad. You pretended all these years it was a storybook, a modern retelling of the Trojan War. I never asked to see it because you said Apollo wouldn’t want me to read it before you finished it, the more fool me.”
I shuddered. “It is a storybook, Caesar. Apollo’s unfinished novel.”
“The police know better. It’s a handbook for the Mardis’ war.”
“It’s not.”
His impatient hands grasped at the rain. “Give it to me. I should never have let you keep it.”
“I haven’t been trying to start the war, Caesar, I swear!” I answered. “I tried to stop it. Everything I did, I did to stop it. Do you think I could have done this to Apollo if there was any other way?”
I heard the Emperor’s knuckles crack despite the rain. “What you did to Apollo and the others was sick beyond imagining. If you had just been trying to stop the war, you could have made the murders quick and painless.”
“And what justice would there be in that?” I snapped, startled at my own heat. “The Mardis committed themselves to war and all its consequences: rape, torture, oppression, famine, flame, children half crushed by bombs crying to the dark as they wait for their broken limbs to bleed enough to let them die. What I gave them was a fraction of what they planned to give the world. Aeneas, Geneva, Kohaku, Chiasa, all of them would rather have killed themselves than live to see the future they were trying to create. Painless deaths would not have been just punishment for what they planned, and they knew it.”
“You call it justice?”
MASON stepped toward me, hands hungry for some justice of his own, but he stopped before the somber, staring vizor of Apollo’s statue. It had been a challenge for the sculptor, how to render recognizable in stone a figure so completely shrouded, the too-long sleeves leaving only fingertips peeking out, the mouth and nose barely visible between collar and vizor, hair showing only in moments when the hood fell back. The artist settled on two tricks. Reflections first, polishing the coat so the marble reflects the faces and colors of passersby, much like the Griffincloth reality. Motion was the second trick, a forward momentum in sculpted Apollo’s gait, so winds lift the coat and drive the hood back, as if he were about to leap down from a ship’s prow to make first footfall on a newfound shore, or into battle, to counter Caesar’s violence with his own.
“You’re right, Caesar,” I answered, “it wasn’t justice. A single body can only endure so much before it dies, and each of them deserved the suffering of hundreds of millions. The Mardis wanted to know what the war would be like. I gave them as much of a taste as one body can endure. Some of them—Mercer, Luther—they agreed it would have been more cruel to send them to death without a sample of the world they had dedicated their lives to studying, or at least they agreed before the pain began.” I could see Mercer’s face before me as I spoke, her eyes’ light growing more alien during the vivisection, as she dictated notes about her own psychological degeneration to the recorder I let her set up to preserve for Felix Faust the final discoveries of his lost heir. “Trauma and cruelty we still have today but war, the most extreme realm of human psychology, we know nothing about, now that there are no veterans left to teach us what it meant. The Mardis deserved to taste that.” My voice quaked. “Release me from this, Caesar, please. I cannot defend the actions of a self long dead. The Mycroft Canner who carried out those murders—”
“Was you, Mycroft,” MASON interrupted, hard. “Don’t dare claim to me that Mycroft died when I’m the one who had to let you live.”
“I’m sorry, Caesar. I’m sorry.”
MASON strode closer yet, a dark splash within the storm. “Show me Apollo’s Iliad,” he ordered.
“You don’t want to see it, Caesar.”
“There are many things I don’t want to see. I had my guards search Aldrin and Voltaire. I didn’t want to find their coats like Apollo’s, filled with hidden weapons, weapon systems, targeting programs in their vizors. I keep telling myself it’s for defense, that Apollo didn’t want war, that they just wanted Utopia to be ready to defend itself. Utopia wouldn’t have developed secret weapons, and sheltered Tully Mardi all this time, in order to finish making the war the Mardi bash’ tried to begin. Utopia is hope for the future. They should have faith that human beings can improve with time, grow past war, achieve anything, even eternal peace.”
“They do, Caesar,” I answered through my tears.
“Then show me the book.” Earth’s sole Capital Power loomed close enough for the runoff from his umbrella to thunder at my heels. “Prove to me that all of this, the Seven-Ten lists and the CFB and Perry, are not the recipe Apollo left behind for making war.”
“I don’t have it, Caesar.”
“What?”
“The book. I gave it to … someone more worthy than myself.”
“To Bridger?” MASON leaned over me, sheltering me from the rain’s blows while threatening worse. “You gave it to this orphan who can supposedly bring toys to life?”
Terror gripped me. “How?”
“Thisbe Saneer told Papadelias, and Carlyle Foster told Jehovah. Even hearing it twice from separate sources on the same day, I’m still not sure that I believe.”
Papadelias knowing, Thisbe’s betrayal, Carlyle breaking his word, these should have frightened me, but I could not feel fear. Jehovah knew at last. He had heard, not from me, but from a priest, an agent of This Universe’s God. The world seemed repaired, as if I had looked under a tattered bandage to find an old wound finally healed.
“It’s true, Caesar,” I affirmed. “I have no way to prove it to you here and now, but it’s all true.”
He seized the back of my collar, hauling me up until I had to face him. “I don’t care if they can bring toys to life or not, you had no right to give that book to anyone.”
“It was for them!” I cried. “Nothing in history has ever been so clearly meant for someone. Providence had me find Bridger, me of all human beings, this impossible child, no origin, no bash’, no parents, no explanation except … If you saw them, Caesar, you would think Apollo had come back to you: their eyes, their hair, precisely the right age to have been born at the moment of Apollo’s death.” I could not meet his gaze. “It is not strange for the deaths of saints to be accompanied by miracles.”
Caesar shook me, anger commixed with disbelief, as if he had not imagined this madman was quite so mad. “You think Apollo came back from the dead as this Bridger?”
In the downpour I could no longer tell if I was crying. “Bridger isn’t Apollo, Caesar. I hoped at first they would become Apollo, but they’re a different person, timid, kind. They want to use their miracles to create a perfect world, to save everyone, the living and the dead. But they’re also terrified. So many times leaders and governments have tried to use reason or science to remake the world, and so many of them, the first French revolution, Stalin’s Russia, they were disasters, killed thousands, millions. The risks here are infinitely greater, even one mistake!”
He shook me hard. “And with that excuse, you kept the power for yourself.”
“For myself?” I grasped Caesar’s wrists to steady myself. “How can you say that when you know what selfish miracle I would choose in an instant if I were to let myself abuse the power? I haven’t.”