“Domine?” Martin was the first to dare call to the reconstructed corpse.
It was hard to spot vitality returning to a body so lifeless even in life, but even Jehovah’s Will could not keep His eyes from twitching to blink the blood away. “Permanebam.” That was the word His lips formed first, even before breath had quite moistened them again. ‘I continued,’ there’s a rough translation, ‘I remained, endured, persisted—though this flesh died, I and My universe lived on, as you and I had so long hoped.’ If English had a word for such an idea, Jehovah would have used that.
“Jehovah!”
For a few moments, the joy of His return drowned the shock of the miracle. Family crowded around Him, Censor and Kosala weeping freely as relief channeled their terror into happy tears. Caesar was quiet. He had understood what this miracle child was when he appeared, and, while joy for his Son’s restoration crusted his eyes with salt, his mind turned already to what the world must do now that the Truth was known.
The world was not slow to start. “Did you see that?”
“J.E.D.D. Mason’s okay!”
“Their brain, it was blown out! I saw!”
“It grew back.”
“What did they do?”
“Was it the Utopians?”
The universal skepticism of our time would not let the word ‘miracle’ crop up so soon. Over the next weeks a credulous minority would begin to admit that they believe, and who knows how many others believe in secret now, afraid of seeming irrational before their peers. But still the majority prefers its other explanations, a hoax, an optical illusion, or some hidden healing technology Utopia will not yet share. You may believe or not as you will, reader. Had This Universe’s God wished you to know Him without doubt, He would have worked His miracle before your eyes. Still, think, reader—whose side is Reason on? Her indispensable disciple John Locke, who freed a drowning Europe from the grip of Hobbes’s dark sea, argued that no one would knowingly lie and claim they saw a miracle if saying so gained nothing while maintaining the lie cost dear; Reason and self-interest are against it. Were Locke with us today, he would no doubt turn Ockham’s razor upon your disbelief too, and make you answer which is more plausible, that, as all of us who saw firsthand insist, God worked a miracle? Or that all Earth’s leaders are willing to be called insane because they can find no less embarrassing lie to conceal the fact that the Utopians are hiding some amazing technological healing serum which, despite their vendetta against Death, they refuse to share with anyone besides J.E.D.D. Mason?
“You’re Bridger, aren’t you?” Papadelias laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, though he admits he half expected the child to vanish like a dream before his touch. “Come on, kid, let’s get you inside somewhere safe.”
“Get away!” Thor’s strength in Bridger’s arm hurled Papa back hard enough to sprain his shoulder. “Don’t touch me! None of you! Stay back!” He brandished his magic wand, pregnant with spells more ominous than bullets.
Violence woke Kosala from her wonder. “What did you do?”
“I won’t let anybody have it, no one!” Bridger clutched the resurrection vial in his other hand, the potion’s residue glittering on the glass like a skin of sparks. “You’re not ready for it yet! You’re barely holding the world together with the people it has now. You think you can handle bringing everybody back?”
Jehovah’s hand, shaking from the agony of circulation returning to fingers recently dead, locked around Bridger’s thin wrist. 「“??Why tamdiu Me esperar nado to osshatta dixisti??”」
Bridger reeled, hurling himself back as if Jehovah’s black gaze burned.
“English, ?ναξ,” I urged. “Use English.”
Jehovah flinched, as if the task stung like peroxide on a wound. “Why did You make Me wait so long?”
“I’m not God!” Bridger screamed. “I don’t know what They’re doing! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”
If you had seen Jehovah’s face as He tried to simplify his thoughts, reader, you would have felt as if you watched the captain of a crowded life raft, threatened with sinking by the mass of those who try to claw their way aboard, whose destructive desperation forces the shaking captain to shoot them, one by one. “As if it were not cruelty enough that change in time cannot create without destroying, once again He makes the agent He sends to bring about His better world love this one.”
Bridger screamed. I never finished telling you the tale of Sadcat, did I? Years ago Bridger tried to heal a maimed cat by wrapping it in the plush fleece of an uninjured toy cat, but the healthy creature his miracle created had no sign of the personality of the original. ‘Sadcat’ we named it, a new creature inhabiting the stolen body of the old, while the original vanished, unmade, victim of a mistake Bridger seemed somehow unable to undo. The child screamed for hours when he realized he’d unmade a living thing, screams I can still hear, his small frame shaking in my arms. This scream surpassed that. Jehovah held fast to Bridger’s wrist, the first full-body effort I had ever seen Him make, but, even with the fire of absolute Will within it, His human hand could not match Bridger’s magic strength. The child pulled free.
“Bridger, wait!” I cried, but the weight of heart attack lead-dense across my chest twisted what should have been shout into dreamlike whisper.
“I don’t want to destroy the world! You don’t know I can really make a better one!”
“Wait!”
He vanished, pulling the invisibility hood over his head, so no eye, nor sensor, nor keen-nosed U-beast could find a trace of him. That did not mean he could not hear me.
“Come back, Bridger!” I shout-whispered. “Stay! There’s no point hiding when the world’s already seen you. You’re here for each other, don’t you see? Out of all the points in history This Universe’s God could have chosen to show Himself, He did it when you could meet Jehovah and Jehovah you!”
Jehovah hushed me with a soft, black glance, then, in five perfect words selected from the six languages both He and I commanded, He ordered me to fulfill the purpose for which This Universe’s God had forged me, by finding and protecting Asclepios son of Apollo, kindest of the gods, who, in his zeal to help mankind, would even break Zeus’s law and raise the dead. It was a far better name than the one the child had chosen for himself.
Caesar, the Censor, Bryar, Papa, even Aldrin seized me as I tried to rise. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I must find Bridger.”
“Not in your condition.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you’re having a heart attack.”
I tried to pull free. “It was just a little spasm, not a full attack. I know the difference.”
Their hands only grew tighter around me, and I could see the Censor’s face and Caesar’s darken with that concern mingled with rage which my constant self-neglect so often caused.
Papa frowned most gravely. “This happens every time you slip your tracker, doesn’t it?”
“Their tracker?” Caesar repeated.
“This is how they slip it. I figured it out this morning when we caught one of their accomplices. Mycroft rewired their pacemaker to let them synchronize their pulse to someone else’s, then they can slip their tracker off onto the other’s ear without missing a beat.” Papa reached down to the notch Saladin had bitten from my ear, the skin below sensitive where the tracker should have rested. “That’s what this is for. We caught one of the other Servicers today wearing Mycroft’s tracker in addition to their own, and they and half a dozen more of Mycroft’s little friends have a nick cut out of the ear they don’t wear their trackers on, so they can slip on Mycroft’s. Problem is, messing with Mycroft’s pulse like that damages their heart. Every time.”