I forced them to let me sit up at least, eager to prove that I was ready for my task. “It doesn’t spasm every time, Papa. Just sometimes. I’m okay, really. This is important. Let me go!”
Bryar Kosala’s swift restraining hand was strongest. “We’re taking you to a hospital, Mycroft,” she announced with the unimpeachable authority of Mom. “You too, Jed, no objections. You were shot through the head. We won’t believe you’re okay until at least three doctors say so.”
The Utopians closed possessively around the most promising medical miracle in history. “Our hospital is close.”
She who oversaw forty-four of the hospitals in the city frowned at the mention of the forty-fifth, but knew when not to argue. Utopia’s Nowhere Princes already crowded around Jehovah, scanning Him and the gore on the ground around with every instrument they carried, but snakes and sprites and Pterascanadons were nothing to the infinity of electric senses possessed by that block-long golem of distilled science we call a Utopian hospital. Kosala had to yield. “Fine. Papa, is it safe to move?”
The Commissioner General checked his tracker, still functional, since he had stood far from the discharge of the devices we have sinced named Weeksbooth Counterbombs. “Sniper’s long gone, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “They had a getaway car hidden in the river, flew off to who knows where, and with the cars still haywire we can’t pursue.”
I would smile later thinking on it: the athlete in Sniper, who had shot, fenced, run, and ridden its way to victory today, could not resist completing this last pentathlon with a swim. At that moment, though, I had no spare thoughts for Sniper, or anything besides the mandate which, for once, came equally from This Universe’s God and from Mine. “I must return Bridger to Jehovah.”
The Censor’s soft hands caught me as I tried to rise once more. “Soon, Mycroft, as soon as the doctors say—”
I pinned him in a choke hold, my right elbow crushing his throat while the heel of my left hand stood ready to smash his nose up into his skull. “I’m sorry. I must go at all costs, and if Jehovah’s universe continued safe even while His mortal flesh was dead, then, even if one of you also happens to be a God, I no longer need to fear that I’ll destroy a universe by killing you.”
I felt the bite, though not the snake. Voltaire must have planted it on me, one of his Swissnakes, its syringe-fangs loaded with something which made me limp at once, and summoned sleep’s darkness soon after. I would not waken for five hours, but they were not wasted. Magnanimous Apollo sat with me, as he often does in fever dreams, rambling about his giant robots, and striding across Mars’s soil, and his war, and when I woke I knew, as surely as I knew the task before me, in what hiding place I would find Bridger.
CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH
Seven Surrenders
While I slept, the world spent these five hours trying to make sense of how one woman could have twisted all seven Hives into passing power to a single Youth. Sniper’s evidence flooded the net, even as its horse still thundered through Romanova, with Dominic hot on its heels. I will not give you what Sniper did: birth certificates, bank statements, DNA tests, wills—any truffle pig loosed in the archives can uproot such tedium. I was chosen as historian not least because my presumptive madness makes my testimony inadmissible in any court, so there are deeds that I alone may publicize without endangering those I describe. In evidence’s place, then (and with the facts as purged of sentiment as I can make them), I offer you these seven scenes, scattered in space and time, which seem to me to be the moments at which each Hive fell.
*
Humanists first. It took the sweat-drenched Humanist Vice President and Proxy for the Anonymous Brody DeLupa only two hours to set himself up on the Senate steps, a stone’s throw from the police barricade around the Rostra, still wet with Jehovah Mason’s blood. “Murder on top of murder!” he raged, sputtering as he felt the mob hang on his words. “And when we finally expose the truth, they choose as their next victim Tribune Mason, the one good person responsible for trying to end their string of murders!”
The crowd around the Rostra had not so much thinned as changed, those who had endured the chaos firsthand wandering home to huddle with their bash’es, while, from the capital’s depths, the morbid and the starstruck arrived in wide-eyed droves. The skies at least were clear. The Utopians had worked their magic, forty-seven minutes to cleanse the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers and restore that flying bloodstream which makes our modern world one living thing. At the Censor’s urging, the Romanovan City Prefect had closed the capital to anyone without a diplomatic, legal, or bash’ reason to enter, but that could not exclude the press, nor parasite DeLupa, thirsty for a stage.
“It’s unthinkable!” the Vice President railed. “Sniper, who we thought was our brightest star, not just defending mass murder, not just committing mass murder, but crowning it with this attempt on the life of a Romanovan Tribune! Never in my life did I expect to feel ashamed to be a Humanist, but how can I not? We’re the guilty ones! Europe and the Mitsubishi were complicit, but Humanists conceived this, Humanists controlled this, Humanists did this. Other politicians may be trying to sugarcoat it, but the Anonymous serves truth, and the truth is that our Hive’s most prized conviction, our love of human excellence, has degenerated into a cult of celebrity which hands power to the most charming, regardless of how rotten they are inside. President Ganymede is a mass murderer. Whether they committed the crimes before or after taking office doesn’t matter: we elected someone willing to commit mass murder.”
DeLupa’s hand rose by instinct to the tracker at his ear, reviewing the Anonymous’s instructions, perhaps, or the newsfeeds hot with babble as every capital from Brussels to Tōgenkyō swelled with mobs.
“I know how self-serving this must seem,” DeLupa continued, “the Vice President calling for the President’s arrest, but it isn’t what you think. The Anonymous doesn’t want you to make me President. The Anonymous doesn’t want you to make anyone President. In two hundred and fifty years, the Humanist Hive has not elected a single leader who refused to commit mass murder. Not one in two hundred and fifty years! Europe has had exceptions, the King of Spain, other good people who refused, that’s why the so-called Special Means Committee had to run the murders secretly around them. The Mitsubishi hid it from their Greenpeace Directors, knowing Greenpeace has a conscience if the others don’t, and the other Directors are chosen through patronage and family ties, so while it’s sick that they’ve all been murderers for centuries, it makes sense, at least, since each murderer gets to groom a murderous successor, it doesn’t mean everyone in the Hive is guilty. The Humanists don’t have that excuse. We have open elections, the most open in history, and still we elect nothing but murderers! Worse, I…” He paused again, perhaps receiving fresh instructions from the Anonymous over the line. “Worse, I know why it’s happened, and it’s not corruption, or election fraud, or even ignorance. The Humanists elect nothing but murderers because the voters who elect them are all murderers themselves!”