Written July 22–23, 2454
Events of April 14
Romanova
“I saw what I saw. J.E.D.D. Mason—Jehovah Mason—came back from the dead. It’s fact. The public can’t avoid discussing it, whatever the law may say. Here, play the tape again.”
“Yes, play it again.”
“We’ve played it twenty times.”
“Is it true that not even the Censor’s database can identify the child who flies in out of nowhere, with the flying sandals?”
“Hermes’s sandals.”
“Careful.”
“Yes, it’s true, no success identifying the child so far.”
“There! There’s a flicker on the tape for a couple seconds, surrounding J.E.D.D. Mason. You see it?”
“Yes, I’ve seen the glow.”
“It’s residue from whatever visual distortion they used to fake the injury. It has to be. The whole thing is an elaborate fake!”
“That’s one theory.”
“What do you think it is, then?”
“Do you want an honest answer?”
“Of course.”
“I think it’s God. Don’t all of you?”
The faces of the sensayers who crowded the benches turned as pale as the statues of past Heads of the Conclave, whose portraits lined the courtyard around them, just as long ago in true Rome monuments to past Head Vestal Virgins had stood eternal vigil around their sanctum. It was too beautiful a day for even secret councils to resist the call of April kissed by sun. The Conclave members, and the Minor Senators who had joined them for the day’s debate, had chosen the courtyard for this meeting, where spring’s first waterlilies graced the pond with crowns of color, while high above the winds chased skeins of cloud along the Tibernovus toward the sea.
“Starting without me?”
“J-Julia!”
It was she, Julia Doria-Pamphili, not yet a statue but the living imperatrix, who strode into the citadel whence her pseudopriestly legions govern the omnipresent, silent kingdom of theology. Today she wore not only her slim black-and-purple sensayer’s scarf of velvet and satin, which twined about her shoulders like a serpent, but her full robes, the puffed and rustling archaism of academia, which strikes our eye as mad, but made sense in the arcane days when universities were born, and the surest proof of membership in Earth’s elite was still that one could afford to waste two yards of cloth on sleeves. Julia did not close the robe, of course, but let it flutter open, baring at the front her suit of sheer black silk, its custom tailoring proclaiming her membership in Earth’s elite today.
“Julia, but … you were arrested!”
“You’ve never heard of bail?”
Julia’s dark eyes smiled, but she ran her fingers along the coil of her black hair too. I knew that gesture from times she has lost games, or learned of plans falling through. A bitter sign. He is neither fool nor green, our Papadelias, the unwilling but devoted Commissioner General of Romanova’s law. Papa knew Julia’s resources: her family fortune, her ties with Madame and Dominic, the web of craven parishioners Dominic taught her to snare. With zealots ready to throw their fortunes at her feet, her resources were infinitely grander than her wealth on paper, so any bail amount a judge would consider reasonable, Julia could raise and discard without a second thought: a million, ten. No financial tether, then, could keep deadly Julia from slipping away and making her next appearance in a broadcast at her beloved Sniper’s side. But Papa is Greek, and Greece knows Rome, and the Doria-Pamphili line could not be more Roman had they laid Julius Caesar on the pyre themselves. Papa had asked Sciarra Colonna, Duke-Prince of Paliano and Prince Assistant to the Papal Throne, to post Julia’s bail, a mere twenty grand—pocket change to a Colonna prince, but as iron a leash for Julia as one could wish for. They do not die easily, these ancient families. With centuries of intermarriages, rival cardinals, old feuds, and coats of arms with papal keys above them hanging side by side in palaces older than bail itself, Julia would not dishonor the Colonna bash’ for all the gold in Troy.
“Julia,” one of the braver Conclave members ventured, “with all that’s happened we haven’t started the process to remove you from office, but given the charges aga—”
“I took the liberty of inviting some guests,” she interrupted. “Jehovah, please, come in—no need to linger in the doorway.”
All froze upon seeing the Addressee. His head was bandaged, not from Sniper’s bullet but from Science, whose tests had cut His flesh deep, seeking the miracle’s residue. His suit of antique black had always been a mourning suit, His protest against His Peer’s creation Death, but it felt different now that concrete tragedies made so many wear black with Him. He Who Visits from Another Universe can never be said to change expression, nor is there much alteration to the bearing of the flesh that He inhabits so distantly, as a puppeteer inhabits his marionette. Yet somehow the flush of spring and sun awakened an energy in the limbs of His youthful earthly body—Jehovah’s Peer, Who governs Nature, bade her grant His Guest the full flower of the human form, however little He might use it.
“I hesitate to enter Another’s sanctum,” He said as He crossed the Conclave’s threshold, “but I am relevant.”
For three breaths, no one could do more than stare.
“Yes,” one sensayer found strength to answer. “Yes, you are relevant. Thank you for making the time to come.”
“What is more important?” No one could face His pure black stare and think the question was rhetorical.
“Nothing,” they agreed.
Julia smiled. “I asked Jehovah to come, in case some of you had questions. It should make certain decisions easier.”
The others nodded stunned thanks, and raised no protest as Julia took her seat as Conclave Head. Her smile was all victory as she fingered the new pin she wore upon her breast, Quarriman’s bull’s-eye O.S. sigil. Only a day had passed since Quarriman created it, but the sign was already common on the streets, and even two here in the Conclave wore it. But it felt different on Julia, pinned beside the temporary clip-on chest monitor which oversaw her new heart. Had you forgotten Sniper’s second shot? After it fled the Forum, with Dominic still clinging rabid to the car, the living doll stopped at the jail in Antwerp and fired a second bullet through the window and clear through Julia’s heart. She had a new heart now, fully artificial, thumping coldly on within her cold chest. I have seen many strange species of courage in my years, but one of the strangest was this, to pin above her still-raw wound the bull’s-eye invitation: shoot me again, my love, if your cause demands it.
“I will answer anything you ask,” Jehovah offered, “excepting matters on which one of My Earthly offices requires silence.”
Several of the sensayers blinked as they reviewed the imperial gray armband which held the insignia of His many offices. The crisis and its power vacuums had promoted Him: no longer merely a European Parliamentary Counsel but a European Council Counsel; no longer a Humanist Bailiff but Deputy to the Humanist Attorney General; no longer a Clerk of the Cousins’ Chief Counsel’s Office but an Advising Member of the Board. It takes a rare mind in such days to forget Jehovah’s part in earthly politics; here sat many who can.
“Come on, then,” Julia prompted. “Ask away.” She waited, smiling, to see who would dare speak first among her many … what would you say they are to her now, reader? Her peers? Enemies? Vassals? Rivals? Pawns? Rebels, perhaps, eager to expel and depose her, but willing still to let her buy her way back in, in return for bringing the priceless Answer to their questions?
“What really happened on the Rostra with Sniper?” The chief rival to the Chief Sensayer was Jess Tilden-Crowner, Austrian and Brillist-raised but now Mitsubishi in a mixed Brillist-Mitsubishi bash’ composed entirely of sensayers, except for one vocateur mechanic.
He Who Visits does not believe there is such a thing as too much truth at once. “Sniper’s bullet pierced this skull, destroyed this brain, and killed this body, whereupon I reverted to existing only in My universe, post quem this body was resurrected by a miracle worked by This Universe’s Maker through His agent, a child narratively resembling Asclepius here known as Bridger, whereupon My consciousness returned, both to this flesh and to this universe.”
The heartiest of the sensayers still took some seconds to process and recover. “Your universe?”
“The one I generate, sustain, and Am. It differs greatly from this one. I agree with your Maimonides that divine things are often more easily defined by what they are not than by what they are. My universe does not have time, space, limit, ignorance, discovery, exploration, hope, solitude, or death.”
Fear dashed among their glances, and a few hands wriggled as scholarly instinct drove them to bring Maimonides’s works up on their lenses. In saner days they might have slipped into debating Crescas and the old scholastics: Anselm, Abelard, Duns Scotus, medieval questions alive and evergreen. No time now. “You have a private universe?”
“Not private. There are many beings there. But I am its sole Author, so it is Mine. I am a God, and, there, I am the only God, omnipotent and all-creating. Your own Creator, the Maker of this universe, is My Peer. He made this flesh so that I might visit His universe and here perceive His works. It is a dialogue between Us. During My visit I have experienced some forms of human suffering, so I sympathize with what you endure for Our dialectic, but I know no other way for Us to communicate.”
In my wayward childhood I read as many forbidden things as I could lay my growing hands on, including Geneva Mardi’s sensayer training books. There are several formulae for handling a parishioner who says he is God, or who says he is a god, but none for one who claims to be another God. I wish there were more people in this world whose answers I could trust when I ask if they believe Him.
“Why are you having this dialogue with our Creator?” one sensayer asked, definitely not any formula’s next question.
“For the same reason you open your eyes,” He answered, “and engage in dialectic. I and My work are better because I respond to My Peer’s. I deich … I mostr … I show … oui, ‘show’ is English … I show also, or rather I will and do and have show showed Him works of Mine, equally alien to Him as His to Me. He made makes and will make you and all His creatures be what you are because He is, always has been, and always will be responding to what He knows of Me. If the human is by nature a social creature, then We Two—My Peer and I—though We Are Creators not creatures, Are social with Each Other.” He paused. “Apologies. My own sensayer Dominic Seneschal excels Me at expressing this in English, but he is occupied at present as proxy custodian of the Mitsubishi Hive.”
They could not fault the excuse.
“And your assassination and resurrection, what was the purpose of that?”
“Nescio. I don’t know.” He caught His own Latin slip. “My Peer your Maker Wills that I meet Him incrementally, as you do. I did not choose My death, but I am glad I died. It freed Me from several painful doubts, and greatly clarified the nature of Our dialogue. I am also glad He brought Me back to learn more of Him, and of His.” Jehovah rarely meets others’ eyes. “Ainiku I regret to inform you that I still do not know whether or non your Maker provides you an afterlife. I long to free you from that question, since I know its pain, but I experienced only My universe, not death in His.”
The thought of the Great Answer swept across them like winter’s frosty breeze.
The Great Answer? Surely, Mycroft, that title must be reserved for proof of Divinty’s existence, not merely of the afterlife.
Must it, reader? It has been so long now, I forget what life was like before He placed His Signature before my eyes. His Existence, for me, is an answered question, while the other still burns late at night when Pascal’s truths break through. Still, what portion of mankind, I wonder, truly worries more about whether this cosmos has a Mind and Maker than whether the fragile, priceless ego must someday fade?
Hobbes: “The lesser portion.”
Reader: “You think so, Thomas? Even when the scholastic ancestors of these sensayers, their Aquinas and Maimonides, strove page on hand-scribed page to prove their God’s existence and nature?”
Hobbes: “I know the depths of Man. The endless war to guard his life reminds him at each skirmish that someday he must make the great leap in the dark. Deep down, all fear is fear of that. Besides, there are many like Aquinas who find the old proofs of God convincing, and plenty like Mycroft who have seen the Pattern enough to believe they recognize the Author’s Hand, but far fewer to whom ghosts, angels, or logic have proved the afterlife with equal certainty. Don’t you agree?”
“The child who resurrected you, you called them Bridger?” The brave sensayer who pressed on fastest was Andalusia Whitewing, a pale and towering redhead, and the only Cousin in a primarily Humanist bash’ which boasted sensayers, an architect, a journalist, a seamstress-nanny, and a wall of awards and honors to rival any in Buenos Aires.
Jehovah turned. “My Mycroft knows more of Bridger than I.”
So fixed were their souls’ eyes on answers, reader, that, with the Addressee before them, they had not noticed the cannibal-parricide who lingered by the door.
“Mycroft Canner!”
“My Mycroft translates for Me when My English fails.”
I stayed on the threshold, pinned by my twin duties obey His summons and to guard this sanctum from any profane presence, including my own. This is the most sacrosanct of houses, reader, and I the most unclean of men.
“Gib Laut, Mycroft,” He commanded, “Bridger ni.” (Speak, Mycroft, of Bridger.)
“B-B-Bridger”—my own voice echoing off the hallowed marbles scared me—“was … a child of Providence, created without parents and, as proof of that, without a belly button. Bridger could bring toys and dolls to life by touch. A miracle. Inexorable Providence made me Bridger’s guardian. I was chosen to raise and protect them for thirteen years. Te-te-ten days ago Providence snatched Bridger back, now that their work was done. I … I have some proof, and can send for more. But, if I may dare advise you, h-honored Parents of the Conclave, I don’t think you have time for these questions now. Ἄναξ Jehovah will answer any question you pose Him instantly, honestly, and completely, since to Him ignorance and pain are indistinguishable, so refusing to answer a question is a form of torture, and He will never inflict torture upon a feeling thing. But that means He’s too kind to remind you that the purpose of this meeting was not to discuss the implications of His and Bridger’s existences, but to address the current Senatorial Order, and figure out a way to help the public cope with talking about the resurrection, to guard the First Law, and the peace.”
“Quite right,” Julia confirmed at once. “The question of Jehovah’s resurrection is an empirical one as well as a theological one, and I suggest we stress that dichotomy in our public strategy. We may be able to get people to calm down and reserve judgment if we say that science should get to answer first. We should have several independent, official scientific teams launch investigations, and we should post continual updates of their findings in a coordinated forum which we administer, so we can certify the phrasing and presentation as neutral and nonproselytory. People will wait for those answers, at least some people. We should also discuss the possibility of temporarily suspending the normal group approval process and letting all sensayers make their own decisions about permitting bash’ group sessions and other small group sessions. Practically every human being on the face of the Earth requested a sensayer session this week, and group sessions will ease that backlog fivefold if not more. Would you all support that?”
They were too saturated with questions to keep up with hers.
“Also,” she pressed, “there are some elements of public curiosity we can settle quickly. Jehovah, dear, would you support the release of a public statement saying that your experience—I think ‘experience’ is a safe label—has left you with no new information about the nature of death or the afterlife?”
“Ja … sí … oui … yoroshii … yes.”
She laughed again—Julia rarely laughs except at those she has good cause to fear. “Do the rest of you support that?” She waited, looked around, then sighed. “All still in the awe stage, are we? Jehovah, are you okay with letting scientists look at you?”
That delay, always that delay as His thoughts condense themselves from universe-broad currents into words. “Many already have, but more may, yes.”
“I-is there a scar?” It was our Minor Senator Xinxin Hopper who dared ask, sitting on a side bench with her fellow Minors.
The Addressee turned toward Hopper, clean motion without excess, as shadows turn away from sun. “There is a circle where the bullet entered, where the skin is white and no hair grows. You wish to see and touch it-ne?”
All eyes widened at the invitation.
“Yes, please!” Hopper answered with childhood’s eager ease.
“May I touch it too?” I did not know this sensayer, and I hesitate to reveal which of the Conclave was the bravest by so much, but Posterity will wonder. It was Gilliard Gerber, the tireless Swiss Graylaw and essayist, who has several volumes in every good sensayer’s library. Gerber is bash’mate of a former Graylaw Tribune, and personal sensayer to, among other notables, the new Censor Su-Hyeon, and most of the renowned Kosala bash’, to which the Ancelet bash’ was recently grafted.
“Then come.”
Jehovah reached, quickly but carefully, to pull back the opaque over-layers and reveal the transparent under-bandage. Gerber, drawing close, reached, just as quickly and carefully, for a gun.
The snap was not a gunshot, rather a mass of action everywhere, as when the force of a downpour is thunderous by itself without the help of bolts from Hephaestus’s forge. I had no chance to act. I was blinded by the Sun, not the star that warms us but a sigil which appeared before me, crisp and dazzling with arrow-sharp rays. This strange sun slammed me back against the wall beside the doorway, pressed me hard, and only as it pressed me did I recognize the strength of human flesh beneath the light. “Stand down, Mycroft. All’s clear.”
The sun released me slowly, still looming between me and the action like a bodyguard, backing away enough for me to see its full form. A stylized sun sigil blazed on the back of a long coat, the rest of which only now flickered into visibility, its hood and sleeves the angry black of shadow-clouds. I could just glimpse a vizor’s edge through the hood’s mouth. The sight of Utopia calmed me like clean wind as I peeked out around the looming Griffincloth. Gerber was on the ground, pinned by two dragons and a crystal cheetah in whose transparent jaws the gun sat stark. I could not see Jehovah, but near where He had stood a wall of clustered nowhere coats surrounded a column of golden-orange light, higher and broader than a man. The column sizzled as it repelled a trespassing leaf, much as magnets repel their kin. The other sensayers and Minor Senators were on their backs on the grass, fumbling as if winded, while a brace of Asian dragons snaked their ribbony patrol above them, rage-flared nostrils dusting the sensayers with jets of air. Robots patrolled above that, round like children’s tops, smaller than those that guarded MASON and Spain, but the same ingenious genus, peppering the courtyard with the dots of their laser sights. Amidst these wonders a car descended through the open courtyard, black but dazzling with lights. Well before the car touched down, Masons in the black-piped gray uniform of the Imperial Guard leapt from its open doors to ring the scene. It all felt like a dream.
“Let no man lay hand on My attacker.” Jehovah’s order rose clearly from within the protective circle of Utopians. “This Conclave and its members are sacrosanct.” I could see Him now, dark within the column of golden light. I could see too the darkly hovering U-beast—something between a turtle, a stingray, and a saucer—which floated above him and projected the protective field.
The lead Masonic guard approached. “Porphyrogene, te occidere conavit. (Porphyrogene, they tried to kill you.)”
“Let no man lay hand on My attacker,” He repeated. “Vestalis contingenda non est.” (A Vestal must not be [contaminated/touched]—NOTE: these are my rough translations since Mycroft, as usual, refused.—9A) He continued in English: “All here are sacrosanct, save yourselves and My Mycroft.”
A rainbow archaeopteryx scanned the winded sensayers with a buzzing light, omnichrome and piercing, then settled on one Utopian’s shoulder. “No other weapons found.”
The guard stood firm. “Me paenitet, Porphyrogene, sed auctoritas tua IMPERIUM MASONICUM non rescindit. (Apologies, Highness, but your orders don’t override MASON’s AUTHORITY.)”
Static flashed just then, the wall of coats around Jehovah turning to harsh white blankness as, across the rolling surface of the Earth, all the worlds Utopia dreamed of turned to emptiness. Four seconds, five, six Utopia mourned someone, and we all froze, and breathed, and thought of our mortality.
“You’ve ruined this, Gilliard.” Julia brushed grass from her crumpled robe. “Working with Jehovah, we could have calmed things down.”
“You mean we could have handed the Conclave over to them.” Gilliard Gerber wriggled in the dragons’ grip. “TM’s already ‘helped’ the Hives enough to plant themself and their lunatics deep in all seven, and now you want to give them Romanova!”
Julia spun, catching every eye in turn. “We need to keep this incident from getting out. The public needs stable sensayers right now. A disaster like this could be the last straw.”
The lead guard frowned. “If MASON consents.”
Julia had no time for fools. “This isn’t MASON’s jurisdiction.”
“I don’t care. Jehovah is my son.”
The voice came from above. None of us had noticed a second car’s arrival, but none could fail to spot the swarm of glittering defensive robots which schooled out around the Emperor as he descended from it. His personal guards followed, one with a freshly bloodied nose, and, if I know Cornel MASON at all, I know which fist it was which struck the guard who had dared tell Caesar it was too dangerous for him to come in person to retrieve his Son. MASON’s guards are all Familiares, and their lives are in his hands as much as his in theirs.
“MASON…” Even Julia took some seconds to blink away the shock. “If I call Papadelias—”
“Then it will be Papadelias I bully over this, instead of you.” Caesar had no more time for Julia. “Vulneratus esne, fili? (Are you injured, son?)” He waited. “Fili?”
Silence always lingers over Jehovah when He sees Utopia mourn, deep silence, as when, in childhood, He would demand a father who could not come just then, or grope for a book beyond His arm’s reach, or ask to meet an author long dead: our mortality stings humans hard, but impotence stings Gods hard too. “Incolumis, pater,” he answered at last. “De mortalité Mea Par Meus εὖ admonuit. (Unharmed, father. My Peer reminded Me of My mortality skillfully.)”
“Bonum. Fortasse Eo curabis. (Good. Maybe you’ll listen to Them.)” Robots and monsters traded electric hisses as Caesar advanced. “Egomet iam te admonui. Omnes te admonuerunt. Dimidium gentis humanis mortem tuam petit. In Sancto mane! (I already warned you myself. Everyone warned you. Half the human race wants you dead. Stay in the Sanctum!)”
“In sancto sum. (I am in a sanctum.)” Jehovah gestured at the marble walls, guarded by inviolable, iron-girded tradition, and nothing else.
I could not see Caesar’s face, but could imagine exasperation’s red flush deepening its bronze. “Take the Porphyrogene to the car.”
The English command obviously aimed to part the Utopian wall so the Masonic guards could reach their stubborn Quarry, but the battlements of seas and stars stood firm.
“In volantem, fili. Nunc. (In the car, son. Now.)”
The Visitor lingered. “Mother Gerber.” He knew well the names of all His Peer’s high priests. “Were you actively aware of Your Creator asking or commanding you to kill Me? Or did it seem to be your own initiative?” His voice is ever soft. “Please answer.”
We all needed to know.
“It was my initiative,” Gerber replied, clean words, clear. “The world can’t stabilize with you in it. You must see that. Now get out of here. MASON can carry me off and destroy me if they must, but leave the Conclave alone.”
“Thank you. I go.”
Now with the Alien’s consent, Utopia parted.
“Nobiscum si libet, Porphyrogene. (With us, please, Porphyrogene.)” Caesar chose his guards carefully, smaller than himself but larger than his Son, large enough to sweep Him with them as a flood sweeps timber toward the whirlpool’s mouth, or, here, the car’s. As MASON saw his Son settled into the waiting seats, with guards on either side to keep Him there, the human pillar that is Caesar eased at last from quaking fury to his customary stone.
“Wait, Cornel!” Julia’s rich alto called out as the Emperor turned to climb in beside his Son. “Are we all agreed that this incident should be hidden from the public?” She said ‘all,’ but it was MASON’s nod she waited for.
He gave it.
“Good. Valor, pull the fire alarm to give us a cover story. Andalusia, go outside to make sure no one’s out there spreading rumors. Utopians, am I right in guessing you’ve been blocking satellites and cameras and whatever else might record us since this started?”
Vizors exchanged quick glances. “Yes.”
“Good, then keep it up, and see if you can doctor some images to make things plausible, then you and your beasts vanish to wherever you came from, quickly as you can. As for you, MASON, it’s obvious you’re going to carry off Gilliard and whomever else you like, so just carry them off and go. The longer you stay, the more people will notice. Go! Get! Shoo!”
Only mildly fazed by the Chief Sensayer’s condescension toward their Imperial Master, the guards approached the would-be assassin, but had to stand back like any mortals while the dragons kept their prey. The Utopians who had ringed Jehovah had now fanned out around the courtyard, their long coats transforming the Masons’ uniforms, one making them into living calligraphy, another into trees shading a sun-swept lake whose lily pads supported toy-sized tenements and halls and clock towers, where prompt frog denizens hopped about in coats and hats. The Masons frowned as they waited for the dragons to withdraw. There was no obvious cause for the delay, but the twitch of silent Utopian lips and fingers showed they were consulting some broader constellation. At last the glassy cheetah dropped the confiscated gun into a Mason’s waiting bag. Then all at once there were no dragons, no cheetah, no archaeopteryx, no thrum of robots with their lazer lights, and no Utopians. The world felt dim.
“Wait! MASON!” It was the ex-Brillist Mitsubishi, Jess Tilden-Crowner, who was brave enough to call to the departing Emperor.
Caesar does not rise from his seat lightly. “What?”
“Tell us J.E.D.D. Mason isn’t your successor.”
His eyes grew dark. “Lex prohibit conloquium de Imperatore Destinato.” He translated himself: “The law forbids discussion of the Imperator Destinatus.”
Tilden-Crowner pressed on. “Sniper’s whole cause is fired by everyone thinking J.E.D.D. Mason’s going to take power in every Hive. Just announce they aren’t your successor and it’ll all die down.”
MASON’s words were stony as the obelisk in Alexandria, where the grim law stands inscribed in all the great languages of the ancient age when it was supposedly carved. “Lex prohibit discussion of the Imperator Destinatus. This is your second warning. There will not be a third.”
Tilden-Crowner has deep reserves of courage. “I know you want us to know it isn’t them. That’s why you adopted them in the first place, since it’s common knowledge that a porphyrogene never becomes Emperor. But people are paranoid. Just say it publicly, that they aren’t your successor. That’s all we need to end this!”
MASON nodded to the one among his guards who wore the gold and blue cording of a Romanovan deputy over his Masonic gray. The guard at once placed a heavy hand on the offender’s shoulder. “Jess Tilden-Crowner, I place you under arrest for public and repeated violation of the First Black Law, action likely to result in extensive or uncontrolled loss of human life, which, as clarified by Senatorial Consult 2147–129, covers public discussion of the Imperator Destinatus. You will come with me.”
I saw little more, nor did I have time then to wonder whether Julia had somehow planned this, too, the elegant removal of her most ambitious potential replacement.
Those who took Tilden-Crowner came for me, too. I do not resist MASON’s agents unless the need is dire, but I did cling to a railing long enough to grope and find by touch the now-invisible Utopian who had shielded and pinned me in the moments of crisis. I shouted my test. “Delian!”
They spun. They all spun, a heavy whish filling the courtyard as all the invisible Utopians turned as one. I was right. Someone else might have mistaken it for a trick of the coat’s stormy lightning, that sun sigil that had blinded me when the Utopian first appeared—but I knew that shape well, from the flyleaf of Apollo’s Iliad, and from a grimmer source. When Saladin patrols an alley in Apollo’s captured coat, its Griffincloth turns Hive Members’ customary dress to how Apollo imagined their wartime uniforms: Europeans to updated historic uniforms, Cousins’ wraps to nurses’ scrubs in azure and warm cream, Mason’s suits to gray-piped black and purple. From time to time Saladin passes a Utopian, nowhere overlaying nowhere. When he does, Apollo’s program does not replace his comrades’ coats, but instead stamps that blazing sun sigil onto each Utopian’s back. Delos is the sacred birthplace of Ἄναξ Apollo and his sister, deadly Artemis. Apollo’s Delians; Apollo’s army. I released the unseen figure, and said nothing more, not as MASON’s guards sat me beside my Master in the car, not as their medic checked us, not as we flew across the noon-bright sea toward Alexandria’s fortressed Sanctum. What could I have said? It was no accident if Utopia had flashed the Delian sigil before the eyes of the one person on Earth most likely to recognize it. They had their army. While Achilles struggled to turn servicers into soldiers, and Saladin to turn thugs into a commissariat, Utopia wanted me to know that they, at least, stood ready.
“I should not have come to the Conclave.”
Jehovah’s face and voice were still expressionless as He sat beside me, but I could feel His pain, as if my soul were its own sense, able to perceive anguish in another, or in Him at least. Which ancient was it who called the soul a sense? Aristotle?
“It wasn’t your fault, Ἄναξ,” I consoled. “You couldn’t have known what would happen.” I forced myself to use English with Him, playing my part in regenerating His ability to sort languages. “The Chief Sensayer summoned You to help Your Peer’s priests, You couldn’t refuse that. You shouldn’t refuse that.”
“Yet I did harm.”
“It had to happen.” I forced a smile. “You know that, Ἄναξ. There is Providence. All that happens serves the Plan, and Your ongoing Conversation. Or are You afraid that, because His Providence does not dictate Your actions, You might act against the Plan and thereby change or harm it?”
“That is not My fear. My Peer wants Me to change His Plan or else He would not invite Me.”
“What, then?”
“Thinkest thou that My Peer knows how terrible harm feels to His creations? Or is His experience too removed from theirs for empathy? And if the latter, is it so for Me? If I make My creatures suffer, as He makes His suffer, would I realize it?”
Never again, reader, let me call myself anxious when the great Anxieties of This Infinite Being so dwarf such petty spheres as Earth, and Time. A whole universe could be in torment and He might not know. “I’m sure that isn’t true, Ἄναξ. You care so much. I’m sure You’d know.”
“Yet how could I? If the mote cannot perceive the workings of the Whole, how can the Whole comprehend the anguish of the mote?”
He does not know how to weep, this kindly Visitor so unfluent in the subtleties of body. So I wept for Him. “I’m sure You can perceive suffering, Ἄναξ. You’re learning. You’re learning even now.”
SOURCE: Rosetta Forum, 4/14/2454, 5:30 PM UT
ARTICLE HEADLINE: CONCLAVE PROGRESS
TEXT: Spokesperson Andalusia Whitewing describes the Sensayers’ Conclave as “optimistic” about the plan they will present to the Senate tomorrow in response to the Senatorial Order that the Conclave address the theological questions raised by the attack on J.E.D.D. Mason sixteen days ago. The plan will address both private and public discourse, and proposes action to be taken both by the College of Sensayers and external bodies. An account of J.E.D.D. Mason’s own experience of the attack is also expected. Scientific investigation of the incident is under way, and Whitewing urges everyone to be patient and await the results. Despite reports of their arrest earlier this week, Conclave Head Julia Doria-Pamphili led the deliberations, which, according to Whitewing, focused on seeking a way to satisfy the safety requirements of the First Black Law without interfering with the course of science, or stifling individual dialogue. Deliberations took a turn for the dramatic when the fire alarm system was triggered by two type Yulóng-AI766 dragons, which strayed onto the Conclave roof in the course of removing the equipment Sniper used to escape the Forum after the attack. The dragons’ operator apologized for the error.