CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND

Last Prayer

Now I have fulfilled the strict command to give you truth. I bared myself, my secrets, and Jehovah’s secrets, even those which will make you call Him mad. I exposed His mother, His fathers, and many sins and crimes which great and wary rulers would rather have silenced. I showed you Bridger. I showed you the resurrection that you witnessed, but cannot quite believe in. And I told you who this strange man is who now stands often at Jehovah’s side, small as a boy but hero-strong, and calls himself Achilles Mojave. I do not ask you to believe, just play-believe, since often things we play-believe in—superstitions, bedtime stories, luck—still make us feel a little better when hard choices come.

It has been three months since I began this history. In that time the sides have taken shape, the trials begun. MASON’s black hand is now outstretched, the Cousins are reborn as peacemakers, Dominic holds the Mitsubishi together by the skin of his fierce teeth, and more souls every day flock to the bull’s-eye flag of the “Hiveguard” who follow Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, thirteenth O.S. Kind Ἄναξ Jehovah will not let the bull’s-eye be banned, or even discouraged, since for This blinded God (five senses are as blindness to One Who was omnivoyant) each morsel of communication is as precious as desert rain. Earth, while He helps rule it, He decrees, will have honesty, if we cannot have peace. Achilles fears that someday soon a brawl, or street scuffle, or hatemongering word, will be the spark that triggers open war. I pray this book is not that spark.

If you are my contemporary, reader, brought to this history to understand the days of transformation you are still living through, be patient, pray. Do not act rashly, spurred by your revulsion at the dark underbellies I have exposed here. Do not hate Cornel MASON, Ancelet, Kosala, Ockham, even Ganymede. So many on all sides of this are bloodstained, perverted, mad, but also noble, wise, untiring servants of your interests, who will give their days, their years, their deaths, to guard this world for you, or make a better one. I do not ask you to forgive them all, just to have reasons beyond rash grudges or affections when you choose to fight and kill for one side, or the other. As for Ἄναξ Jehovah, if your theology cannot admit that He is more than a madman, at least believe that it is a madness which makes Him Good. By His command I may not ask you to fight for Him. His Wish is only that you look with love—as He does—upon this world, this human race, its many branches, and judge carefully which one you will fight to make the trunk.

If, on the other hand, you are a distant reader, and our coming war is, for you, just one more memorial, standing in some quiet park where you grew up, laughing and chasing beneath the strange skies of whatever world Utopia’s toil has earned for you as birthright, pray for us. Our war may have been a thousand years ago, more, but God our Maker hears all prayers, past and future, even if He rarely makes His answers visible. If Providence sent Achilles to guide us in our day of greatest need, if we survive this war, rebuild, and if in future days some blessed generation is judged worthy to receive a second chance at what God tried to give us when He first sent Bridger, it may be that He grants humanity all this because you, child of a nobler future, asked Him to.

 

HERE ENDS

Seven Surrenders,

THE SECOND HALF OF

Mycroft Canner’s History

of these Days of Transformation.


HERE BEGINS

THE CRISIS STILL UNFOLDING,

whose Chronicle,

freshly begun, he names

The Will to Battle.