Too Like the Lightning (11 page)

“You know I can't discuss too deeply.”

“You can. This isn't a session, Member … Carlyle. You're not my sensayer. I have a court-appointed sensayer.”

“If this isn't a session, it's borderline illegal.”

I rose; some things should not be said while on one's knees. “It's a law we have to break.” I met his gaze, and held it. “We have to. In the name of science, reason, all humanity. Something is happening with Bridger, something real, magical, metaphysical. We have to discuss it, test it. We have to figure out what to do. It could be the most important thing that's ever happened. Or things like this could have happened a hundred thousand times throughout history, but there's some deeper reason history hid them all. This isn't a question of us risking disrupting world peace by spreading some cult belief. This is a question of uncovering the deep truth about the provable reality humanity lives in, and someday sharing that.”

I want to say that Carlyle paused to steel himself, but his movements were all the signatures of weakness: huddling, hugging himself within the encircling looseness of his Cousin's wrap, like a child amid the covers. But I think, in his gentle way, that was his steel. “I could say many cults have thought the same. But you're right. The potential is too great, the immediate, human applications if we can understand this power. We can't investigate it fully without talking about the theological end as well.” He took a deep breath. “And on that note, I've been thinking, is it really right to wait and not show Bridger to anyone until they're an adult? What if something happens in the meantime? What if Bridger falls and breaks their neck? All that potential gone. And even without that, there's all the good this power could do that isn't being done in the meantime. Not raising the dead necessarily, that has a lot of other implications we have to look at, but smaller things. Bridger could cure Stereocox.”

“We have.”

“What?”

“I had Bridger make a cure eighteen months ago and sent it anonymously to Pele Chemical. Testing is underway.”

“You … you did…”

“Remember three years ago when they found a treatment for Waldfogel's Vein? That was Bridger too.”

He swallowed. “But Bridger can do more than just cure one disease. That healing potion can make wounds vanish instantly.”

“And if something like that turned up anonymously on a lab's doorstep, all the king's horses and all the king's men wouldn't rest until they'd traced it. We've tried to test it, but the potion transformed the microscope itself. It's beyond current science, or at least beyond equipment we can get at without leaving a paper trail. Hopefully science will explain it someday, even reproduce it, but they won't learn to really understand it without access to the source. For that, Bridger needs to be ready to face becoming the center of all the hope and envy of the world, and before that can happen they need to learn to talk to strangers.”

Carlyle nodded, but there was still an edge of huddle in his poise. “But every day…”

I stood my ground. “Moral calculus like that will drive you crazy. The people who die today or tomorrow because they don't have Bridger's potions aren't on your conscience, any more than the people who died yesterday, or a thousand years ago. We're doing what we can with Bridger. We're on the edge now of moving from baby steps to real steps. You're the first real step. If you do well, the second may come soon. That's all anyone could ask.”

He smiled. “Yes. You're right. And I can do it well, I know I ca—” The growl of his angry stomach cut him off.

I laughed aloud. “You forgot to feed yourself today, didn't you?”

“I guess I did.”

“There's a lunch box on the table,” I offered, “good and fresh. Eat.”

“Thank you.” He took it and had started on the dainty knot before he realized. “Wait, this … I can't take food from a Servicer. You earned this. I'm supposed to feed you.”

I almost snickered. “Bridger can make filet mignon out of cardboard. I'm not going to go hungry.”

He returned my smile. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” I mumbled it, distracted by remembering whose delicate fingers had prepared the plump little lunch that Fate and I had placed in the Gag-gene's hands. “I mean, you're welcome. It's the least I can offer after I tackled you before. Thank you for not reporting me.”

Carlyle smile grew richer. “You've offered a lot more than that. You did this very well, very gently. You answered a lot, and pushed me when I needed to be pushed. You're right that we have to talk about this, about what we think it means, that we have to use words like ‘miracle,' ‘metaphysics,' ‘fate,' as well as ‘magic' and ‘phenomenon.' But you haven't pushed me to actually do it yet.”

I knelt once more to my work. “It's easy to tell you're the one who's exhausted.”

“True enough.” He chuckled at himself. “Were you a sensayer?”

This was an unexpected stroke. Carlyle has absorbed a little of that art of cutting to the quick which the current Conclave teaches, but in him it is usually stifled by natural gentleness. I realize, reader, that I should apologize for my confusing language, since if my ‘he' and ‘she' mean anything then certainly this sweet and gentle Cousin in her flowing wrap should be ‘she.' In this case, alas, I am commanded by an outside power to give Carlyle the masculine, to remind you that this long-lost scion is a prince, not princess, a fact which matters in the eyes of some, and of the law. But I shall do my best to remind you often that a Cousin's maternal heart beats beneath Carlyle's broad chest, and I promise, reader, to be consistent in making other Cousins ‘she.'

“No, I was never a sensayer or anything,” I answered. “I committed my crimes too young.”

Pity touched his kind, too-keen blue eyes, willing to forgive any repentant convict, however great our unknown crimes. “Would you have been one? You have that feel when you talk.”

“I don't know. I never thought that far ahead. But if I were a sensayer, and if this were a session, I think I would say now that you've had enough new revelations for one day, and that you should take that lunch box home to rest and digest. All the universe and Bridger will still be here tomorrow, as will I.”

This may be the highest compliment Carlyle can pay: “You would have made a good one.”

H
ERE ENDS THE
F
IRST
D
AY OF THIS
H
ISTORY.

 

C
HAPTER THE
SIXTH

Rome Was Not Built in a Day …

… But it was built in a year, as the new saying goes; Romanova, a sparkling sea of marble and bright bronze, built up from nothing in three hundred days to be the capital of our new world of Hives. In 2198, Emperor Agrippa MASON was tasked to choose a plan for the Alliance capital. Among the endless submissions of grand grids and lavish Spectacle Cities, an unofficial entry surfaced, numbered 40½, containing nothing but a cheap tourist's poster of ancient Rome, which had been slipped into the mix by a bold young secretary named Mycroft Ragbinder (or Frustinexor, to give a Mason's name its rightful Latin). The smart-aleck even labeled the ancient buildings with suggested modern counterparts: the Alliance Senate in the Senate House, the Supreme Polylaw Court in the Basilica Julia, the Sensayers' Conclave in the House of the Vestal Virgins. Agrippa MASON saw genius in the plan, a message to the world that, despite how tattered war had left the continents, this age of honeybees could build, as easily as raise a tent, the capital of capitals whose legend had named every capital to follow. This would not be the simple reconstruction of Rome as she had stood before the Church War, though that too Agrippa MASON undertook. This was greatness ex nihilo, to raise from nothing on some blank corner of the Earth the city of marble as she had stood when she had ruled the first Empire to need no name beyond
the
Empire. The evening the Alliance accepted MASON's plan, the Emperor wrote to his oldest ba'sib that he expected, if he raised this young Mycroft Frustinexor to his full potential, then, as with Phillip and Alexander, Agrippa's name would endure in history only in the tales of his successor. (
Nomen meum sempiternum, si hunc juvenem ad totam potentiam tollo, permanebit, sed, sicut Phillipi Macedonis, tantum in biographis eius qui post me regnabit. 
—
Epistolae Agrippae MASONIS
, IV, iii.)

The drizzly morning of the twenty-fourth saw me with my fellow Servicers cleaning up what robots couldn't of a sewer rupture in Marseille. It was perfect work for us, work no one wants to do (especially not on Renunciation Day), the kind of work which makes free people glad that we exist to do it in their stead. And we prefer it too, since the absence of our betters frees us to enjoy the company of equals. Does it surprise you that there is camaraderie among the Servicers? Even pride? We are a strat of sorts, as united in our hearts as fishermen or Greeks or skiers are. We have ideas in common, experiences, we share stories in the dorms at night, folk music, tips about better patrons and bad, much as hoboes and beggars did in bygone days, though you must not imagine any hidden beggar cities in the sewer tunnels, nor any Beggar King.

A man leapt from a car into the midst of the mess, seized me by the collar, and shook me so violently that my hat flew off into the muck. “How many times, Mycroft?” he shouted in my face. “I've been calling for two hours! You're not allowed to waste yourself like this!”

“Hey!” One of my newer comrades (I am not permitted to include their names) shoved forward, fists raised in my defense. “What do you think you're doing?”

Another Servicer, who knew me better, held out a restraining arm. “Let it be.”

“But…”

“The Censor's in the right, let it be.”

“The Censor?”

Perhaps you share this new Servicer's shocked awe as she recognizes, beneath a gray raincoat, the porphyry blood-purple uniform of the Romanovan Censor. If the Alliance has a face it is Censor Vivien Ancelet, embarrassed now at being caught in an act so easy to misinterpret, but even in embarrassment he was intimidating, not with physicality, but with the weight of intellect behind it. The rain made the deep dye of his uniform almost scab-black, and brought out vividly the sparkle of its gold piping, and of the Olympic stripes which rimmed his shoes, proclaiming his youthful medals in mathematics and debate. There is France in the Censor's birth bash', in his vowels and his Rs, and Africa in his face, his dreadlocks, and the darkness of his skin, but he wears no strat insignia apart from the cuff pins of his math and puzzle clubs, investing all his pride in the Graylaw Hiveless sash about his hips, and the purple uniform across his shoulders. The office of Censor is just as paradoxical in our age as it was in ancient Rome: neither executive nor lawmaker, commander nor judge, yet more potent than any in its own way. As master of the census, charged with tracking changes in membership and wealth, the Censor judges when one of the seven Hives should gain or lose a Senator, and thereby holds the balance of the planet in his hands. Since he makes and unmakes lawmakers, we may call him a grandfather of laws, and, as the most prominent life appointment in the Alliance, he is the only officer in Romanova that the media can turn into a prince.

“You're alive today for a reason, Mycroft, and it isn't shoveling shit. Get in the car.”

“Yes, Censor. Just—”

“Now.” He seized me by the hair, and I could see from angry faces that some of my fellows read abuse in the gesture, but it was actually a tender grip, the roughness of familiarity, as when a mother lion lifts her cub in gentle, razor jaws. “We have five hours to rerun the entire Seven-Ten list impact. Humanity needs that a lot more than they need ten square feet of pavement anyone could clear.”

The truth stung. “Yes, Censor. Sorry.”

The Censor's guards fanned out around us, and he gestured to one to retrieve my fallen hat. The rest, strong bodies in bold Alliance blue, pushed back my muck-stained comrades, while tiny flitting robots scanned their faces, masks of wonder and concern.

One face still showed anger. “Just 'cause you're the Censor doesn't mean you can—”

“It's all right.” Again the comrade who had seen such scenes before restrained my bold defender with a soft hand. “The Censor knows what they're doing. Mycroft's a little … damaged in the head, and it takes some gentle roughness to get them … re-anchored in the present sometimes, but it's not the Censor's mind we have to change, it's Mycroft's.”

The Censor—who, through long acquaintance, permits me to call him Vivien—smiled to find on hand another who understood the burden of putting up with me. Do not misapprehend, reader: all that is wrong in this scene is indeed my fault. Violence, abuse, even unfreedom is abhorrent to our good Censor, who keeps violence's great adversary, our Patriarch Voltaire, forever with him, as a bust in his private office, and a model in his heart. If you see violence here, it is not Vivien's violence, rather I infect those around me with a shadow of my own.

“I'm sorry.” I let myself be hurried to the car, smiling reassurance at my fellows. “I'll be fine. See you later, everyone. Make sure you don't miss the speeches!”

“They won't but we might, thanks to you.” The Censor released me to a guard, who helped me strip off my muck smock. “It's not just my time you wasted. I had to call around looking for you, interrupting I don't know how many meetings.”

I winced. “I'm sorry you had to take the time to fetch me.” I stepped up onto the first step of the waiting car, and paused to let its hoses rinse the refuse from my feet.

“Have you heard what's happened?”

“The
Black Sakura
Seven-Ten list manuscript was stolen, then recovered.”