I nodded. “Freud said all technology is a prosthetic god, a set of tools we weak humans strap on to give ourselves the powers we crave: computers for omniscience; trackers for omnipresence; medicine for immortality; armor for invulnerability; guns for Heaven’s wrathful thunderbolts. Apollo just made that literal. Of course, Apollo didn’t really think the war over Mars in two hundred and fifty years would be fought with giant robots, it was just the only way they could describe a war that would be meaningful, conscionable, with space for human dignity. It was Apollo’s hope, the kind of soldier Apollo wished they could be, so they could die a hero, instead of faceless, one among a million. That’s why I had to face Apollo in battle head-on, not catch them by trickery as I did the others. It was foolish of me. Apollo could have won, killed me, and lived to make their war. I risked letting that happen, but I had to test myself, my future, against Apollo’s. Apollo deserved to fall like a hero.”
I will not solve the mystery, reader. I will not tell you of Apollo’s death. You know the facts. The eighth day of my rampage Saladin and I convinced Seine Mardi that the police who had her in protective custody were complicit in the murders. She fled, and sent word to Apollo, who was about to embark for the safety of the Moon, but he gave up his seat to Tully, and returned. He knew it was a trap, but knew too that, if he did not come, his love would suffer all my tortures, alone. The police found Seine dead of cyanide, one bullet in her side, with residue across her brow proving that she had worn Apollo’s vizor for a time, though whether before, during, or after death science cannot tell. Apollo’s body they found dismembered, sexually violated, and dead from blood loss, since my imperfect tourniquets could not prevent all leakage from the stumps of thighs and shoulders. His coat, vizor, and U-beast were gone, but in his stomach they found a placebo capsule, shaped just like Seine’s cyanide, and well-chewed bites of his own cooked flesh, which he had volunteered to taste as we feasted with him, one last experience. A second pellet of real poison waited out of reach in the gutter beneath. These are forensic facts. As for the truth? Who died first? Whether Apollo mistook the placebo for poison, or whether he chose the placebo and the pain that followed? Did Apollo lend Seine his vizor to aid her in combat? Or perhaps, before the battle, he shared with her a glimpse of his Utopian vision? Or placed the vizor on her dead eyes to make her rest more peaceful? These answers neither torture nor you can wring from me, reader. At first I kept them secret because I felt no outsider could understand, but there have been such exquisite versions of our story since, the plays, movies, paintings, poems, imagining different Seines, different Apollos, different Mycrofts, different great conflicts of our times played out as artists reenvision the tragedy of the Utopian who died for love. For me to set out a script of cold facts now would only block what has become the font of something greater. You will accuse me justly of hubris as I make this comparison, reader, but, if some base historian proved once and for all that there was no Achilles to drag Hector breaker of horses round and round the topless towers of Troy, the world would have lost something.
“I wish you could have seen them, Caesar.” A whimper rose in me, and, judging by Caesar’s face the rain had eased enough to let him see how thickly the tears washed down my cheeks. “I saw through my periscope, just before they leapt into battle, the last kiss Seine and Apollo shared, with the weapons in their hands, and wind driving the tears sideways across their cheeks. I can still see them when I close my eyes. And it was equal. We shared a last kiss too, Saladin and I, I can still feel it, just like theirs, what would have been our last kiss in a world where they won the battle. I feel it, see it, taste it. I can’t feel anything else, just that moment forever.” My pacemaker kicked in, my heart racing as if the memory were draining all my blood to feed itself. “I had believed violence was better in the hands of individuals, one murderer expressing himself absolutely, not ordered by the state like soldiers are. But there, the four of us ready to die to test the futures we believed in, that was better. If we could only have one future, if one of our rival futures had to die, we could at least give each of ours a chance. I understood then what Apollo was trying to do in their Iliad. There is something a little good in war.” I laughed inside. “Trial by combat. Maybe I already believed a little bit in Providence even back then, but I had to think that whichever of us would win was somehow meant to. Whichever one of us would win had the right future. Apollo died for that.”
“Apollo died for Seine Mardi.” Hers is the only name the Emperor pronounces with more hatred than my own.
“We don’t know that. Maybe Apollo would have come anyway, to test their future against mine.”
“They died for Seine.” One could taste the hate in MASON’s tone, Cornel’s tone rather, for it is the person, not the office, she offends: how dare she, this Humanist, this child, this person who, try as we might, we could not find anything special in, no wiser, keener, brighter, more creative, more ambitious than any other person, how dare she alone enjoy Apollo’s love? “I talked to Apollo’s bar friends,” Cornel continued, fists stiff as stone, “the ones who were with Tully, and attacked you. Apollo visited them in the bar the day they died. Apollo showed up all of a sudden, standing in the doorway with tears running down their cheeks, and when the others asked what was wrong Apollo said, ‘I don’t want to die. I want to drink with you, and live with Seine, and stand on Mars, and breathe the air we made, but I’d go mad, I know it, I’d go mad living on, knowing I left Seine to go through this alone. I don’t want to die. I just wanted someone to hear me say it.’”
We collapsed here into tears together, Cornel MASON and myself. I like to think that, for that moment, the labels left. I was not Apollo’s pupil, nor his killer; Cornel was not the avenger nor the unrequited lover; we were just two people who had lost the same friend.
“I can’t tell … who’s right … anymore…” I gasped out through my sobs. “I won, but, when I killed Apollo, God made Bridger, and now someone else is making the war, not Apollo, not Utopia, not me. I don’t know who. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. And it’ll be a worse war, much, much worse. But there is one mercy, Caesar. You and Utopia don’t have to be enemies. You should still try to stop the war, you have to, but if you fail, if it starts, both you and Utopia will have the same goal: making it as short as possible. You can be allies. Once the war has started we can even have Bridger bring Apollo back, and you two can be allies at last, and work together to make this the best … the least bad … war that it could ever be.” I swallowed hard. “This Universe’s God is not kind. If They were, They wouldn’t have made me kill Apollo in the first place. More than that, a kind God wouldn’t have made human nature such that achieving a happy golden age like this meant risking the whole human race getting too comfortable and scared, like Mirai Feynman, and giving up on setting out among the stars. But here at least, for whatever inscrutable reason, They have been kind. We can bring back Apollo. If the war is real, Caesar, and we can’t stop it, then at least we can finally use Bridger’s powers to give my body over to Apollo. The largest part of my debt will be paid at last, my guilty life traded for Apollo’s better one, and all will be as it should be.”
Silence gripped MASON, far too dark to interrupt. He was not looking at me but at the statue, and I saw in his rain-streaked face an expression I had felt many times myself but never seen on another. Now the statue was a seed to him, a chrysalis waiting to become the man, and, as he faced it he faced not Apollo’s dust, but an Apollo he might walk with again, and speak to, and hear answers. “You know Jehovah won’t let you kill yourself, or anyone,” he answered at last, “not until we can prove we aren’t all Gods.”