“Now violence is threatening again. If we lose the Cousins, Earth’s last humane, feminine, temperate voice will die, and we will have nothing left to intercede when other forces quarrel. Tribune Jehovah Mason understands this. He and I were raised with masculine and feminine. We had it in our minds when we drafted this interim constitution, assigning extra representatives to humanitarian groups, teachers, doctors, daycare workers, office managers, grandbash’parents, new parents, veterinarians, therapists, all the voices of nurturing that have always been the core of the Cousins. Trust us! Call for the Cousins to elect an Interim Assembly that will finally actually reflect the values that have always defined the Hive. Then, when the Cousins are remade, a revised form of the CFB can be a part of—”
Who would dare interrupt her righteous tirade? Only God, or rather His works, manifest in the mingled screams of men and women which burst in through the doors and windows in a universal shell of human grief. Order collapsed like sand castles before a flood. The agenda, Kosala’s announcement, even the rebuttals that had built up like battle-hungry legions during Helo?se’s speech, all were swept clean away as the reporters watching from the balcony, one eye on their newsfeed lenses, screamed:
“Brussels!”
“Parliament!”
“A bomb!”
“A missile! Three!”
“It’s burning!”
“Someone just blew up the European Parliament!”
I, still a prisoner of the operating table, was one of perhaps a thousand people in the world who did not watch. The Senators, like you, reader, or like your ancestors, tuned in and watched the flames which boiled around the columns of the Parliamentary Hall, like the bloody juices of some demon’s gut unleashed upon the stone. A mob had assembled in the streets of Brussels, with stones and Molotov cocktails hidden behind their signs and chants, but they scattered now like blasted sand before the inferno which, in their fervor, they might have created themselves, had someone not beaten them to it. Stone shards flew like hail. More missiles followed, sky-bolts trailing white smoke like celestial fingers pointing to the target of Providence’s wrath. Even riding the Space Elevators, children invited by Utopia to enjoy their first taste of humanity’s next destination froze to watch the trails bloom around Brussels like the starburst of a dandelion.
Commentary followed, the more resilient reporters struggling to narrate what they could understand of the barrage. Others, honest about their ignorance, resorted to film, replaying the impact of the first missile on the dome, or the last footage of the session within. Parliament had been full, every bench filled by the Prime Minister’s summons, wings crammed with judges, aides, and Europe’s Senators, who had accepted Perry’s invitation to share the security of the Parliament House, and so escape the Romanovan mob. Casimir Perry himself, bandaged and bloody from his fall at Madame’s the night before, had been at the podium at the final moment, railing at the assembly like a man possessed. ? I’m no more guilty than any of you! Everyone in this room consented to the O.S. murders, not once but a hundred times! It is impossible to deny! Every one of you voted for ‘special means’ more than thirty times since Spain was voted out! And you protected it with your silence for decades before! You are guilty, all of you! The world— ? The first blast knocked him to the ground, and buried a third of Parliament in stone and flame. ? You see! We all deserve judgment! The world knows it! The world will be our judge! ? Flame followed.
In Romanova, Helo?se was most prepared to break shock’s spell. “Aunt Bryar, come!” She tugged the Cousin Chair’s limp hand. “The world needs you! There are victims! Fires! Orphans! Burns! Europe is wounded! It needs your ambulances, your nurses, your councilors! It needs your Cousins! Come!”
Bryar Kosala paused, eyes locked on her husband the ex-Censor and ex-Anonymous—Hiveless and soon to be a Humanist, but with the French nation-strat band still bright around his wrist—who sat doubled over in his seat, winded by sobs as the heart of Europe burned. She followed Helo?se.
*
“Madame must marry me!” King Isabel Carlos II paced like a tormented lion in the too-small chamber outside Madame’s bedroom. “She must! There is no other solution!”
“Don’t talk nonsense.” Felix Faust never seems so exhausted as when he must repeat himself. “You’re the King of Spain. You can’t marry a prostitute. What would your friend the pope say?”
Spain jumped like a startled hare at every rustle from the bedroom, where a cloud of maids oversaw Madame’s convalescence after the latest tests to track the health of her impending Son. The obstetrician had shooed out all visitors, too many suitors competing to hold Madame’s hands and ask repetitious questions. When the images of the Fetus were ready for viewing, the gentlemen would be summoned to share the moment with the blushing mother-to-be, but until then they were banished to her little foyer, whose painted cherubs seemed to grin with glee at the discord sown among Earth’s leaders by the doctor’s confirmation of the father.
“I’ll abdicate if I have to!” The King fidgeted as he paced, fingering the hem of his blue Prime Minister’s sash, its row of gold stars perfect with his waistcoat of champagne silk. “I won’t leave my child to be raised in secret like some object of shame.”
“Your Majesty, why do we have to say it’s your child?” Twenty-two years ago Censor Ancelet looked more haggard than he does now, sleep-starved, scrawny, all the symptoms of self-neglect which would not be cured until marriage merged his tiny all-vocateur French Graylaw bash’ with Kosala’s huge and loving Indian Cousin one. “Without the test,” he pressed, “could anyone in this room say with certainty the child wasn’t ours?” His eyes tested them all, the King first, then Faust, Director Andō, and the Emperor.
Ganymede raised an idle alabaster hand. The young Duke lounged on the central sofa, the perfection of his flesh, still sparkling with youth, nude except for a translucent faux-Greek drape of the sort that only sculptures, nymphs, and gods can get away with. This was seven years after Dana?’s marriage, and the twins had succeeded in winning Andō the Chief Director’s seat at last, but Ganymede himself had not yet made the transition from objet d’art to President.
“That’s a fair point.” Andō’s voice brightened. “It could as easily be my son. Who’s to say it’s not?”
“It’s not,” His Majesty answered flatly. “Things would be simpler if it were.”
“Then why not let it be? What the public doesn’t know—”
“Is still fact.”
Andō made fists within his sleeves, the timed dyes of the Mitsubishi cloth just starting to ripen from summer green to autumn gold. “Isn’t who raises a child more important than—”
“You can’t be serious, Andō.” Ganymede did not lift his murder-blue eyes from a volume of la Fontaine, whose verses served as distraction from his irritation at the arrival of a Child who would irrevocably outrank him. “A royal prince given over to a common businessman to raise? Marrying my sister may give you the effective rank of Earl, but you’re only a Mitsubishi by adoption, and even the Mitsubishi are barely nobility.”
Andō spun, glaring less at the Duke than at the acquiescing silence of the King and Emperor.
“Eight minutes.” Headmaster Faust sighed at the ivory watch face embedded in the knob of his antique cane. “Eight minutes without a female chaperone and we’re already at each other’s throats.” He snickered at the problem. It was a marvel, really, that such a mixture rarely degenerated into duels: the Chief Director and King Prime Minister locked in a room with their foe the Emperor, an acerbic young Ganymede, and Faust’s gadfly sense of humor. Kosala (not yet Chair) was not there to add her maternal restraint, and even the authoritative calm of the Comte Déguisé was absent, for that glorified bureaucrat we call the Censor was weak in those days, barely important enough to visit this inner circle, since He Who six years later would unmask him as the Anonymous was still in the laborious process of gestating.
“Anyway, there’s no need for us to fight over this.” Faust tried his best to smile the tension away. “The child will stay with its mother, that’s the way kings usually dispose of their bastards, isn’t it? Unless Spain wants to go the other traditional route and pretend the child is their nephew by some convoluted logic.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Andō was fastest to accuse. “Giving the two of you equal claim as uncles?”