Too Like the Lightning (2 page)

Thou too, Mycroft Canner?
you cry, indignant reader.
Thou too maintainest this fantasy, repeated by too many mouths already? As poor a guide as thou art, I had hoped thou wouldst at least present me facts, not lunacy.
How can your servant answer you, good master? I shall not convince you—though you have seen the miracle almost firsthand—I shall never convince you that Bridger's powers were real. Nor shall I try. You demand the truth, and I have no truth to offer but what I believe. You have no obligation to believe with me, and can dismiss your flawed guide, and Bridger with me, at the journey's end. But while I am your guide, indulge me, pray, as you indulge a child who will not rest until you pretend you too believe in the monsters under the bed. Call it a madness—I am easy to call mad.

Carlyle did not have the luxury of disbelief. He saw the transformation, as real as the page before you, impossible and undeniable. Imagine the priests of Pharaoh when Moses's snake swallowed their own, a slave god defeating the beast-headed lords of death and resurrection which had made Egypt the greatest empire in human memory—those priests' expressions in the moment of their pantheon's surrender might have been a match for Carlyle's. I wish I knew what he said, a word, a prayer, a groan, but those who were there—the Major, Thisbe, Bridger—none could tell me, since they drowned his answer with their own instant scream. “Mycroft!”

I took the stairs in seconds, and the sensayer in less time, pinning him to the floor, with my fingers pinching his trachea so he could neither breathe nor speak. “What happened?” I panted.

“That's our new sensayer,” Thisbe answered fastest. “We had an appointment, but Bridger … and then the door opened and they saw … everything. Mycroft, the sensayer saw everything.” Now she raised her hand to the tracker at her ear, which beeped with her brother Ockham's call from upstairs. “¡No! ¡Don't come down!” she snapped in Spanish to the microphone. “¿What? Everything's fine … No, I just spilled some nasty perfumes all over the rug, you don't want to come down here … No, nothing to do with that … I'm fine, really…”

While Thisbe spun her lies, I leaned low enough over my prisoner to taste his first breath as I eased up on his throat. “I'm not going to hurt you. In a moment your tracker will ask if you're all right. If you signal back that everything is fine then I'll answer your questions, but if you call for help, then the child, the soldiers, and myself will be gone before anyone arrives, and you will never find us. Clear?”

“Don't bother, Mycroft.” Thisbe made for her closet. “Just hold them down. I still have some of those memory-erasing pills, remember the blue ones?”

“No!” I cried, feeling my prisoner shudder with the same objection. “Thisbe, this is a sensayer.”

She squinted at the scarf fraying about Carlyle's shoulders. “We don't need a can of worms right now. Ockham says there's a polylaw upstairs, a Mason.”

“Sensayers live for metaphysics, Thisbe, it's what they are. How would you feel if someone erased your memory of the most important thing that ever happened to you?”

Thisbe did not like my tone, and I would not have braved her anger for a lesser creature than a sensayer. I wonder, reader, which folk etymology you believe. Is ‘sensayer' a perversion of the nonexistent Latin verb
senseo
? Of ‘soothsayer,' with ‘sooth' turned into ‘sense'? Of
sensei,
the honorific Japan grants to teachers, doctors, and the wise? I have researched the question myself, but founder Mertice McKay left posterity no notes when she created the term—she had no time to, working in the rush of the 2140s, as society's wrath swept through after the Church War, banning religious houses, meetings, proselytizing, and, in her eyes, threatening to abolish even the word God. The laws are real still, reader. Just as three unrelated women living in the same house was once, in some places, legally a brothel, three people in a room talking about religion was then, as now, a “Church meeting,” and subject to harsh penalties, not in the laws of one or two Hives but even in the codes of Romanova. What terrible silence McKay foresaw: a man afraid to ask his lover whether he too hoped for a hereafter, parents afraid to answer when their children asked, “Who made the world?” With what desperation McKay screamed to those with the power to stop it, “Humanity cannot live without these questions! Let us create a new creature! Not a preacher, but a teacher, who hears a parishioner's questions and presents the answers of all the faiths and sects of history, Christians and pagans, Muslims and atheists, all equal. With this new creature as his guide, let each man pick through the fruits of all theologies and anti-theologies, and make from them his own system, to test, improve, and lean on all the years of his long life. If early opponents of the Christian Reformation feared that Protestants would invent as many Christianities as there were Christians, let this new creature help us create as many religions as there are human beings!” So she cried. You will forgive her, reader, if, in her fervor, she did not pause to diagram the derivation of this new creature's name.

“Mycroft's right.” It was the veteran's voice that saved us. From where I held him, Carlyle could probably just see the tiny torso leaning over the table's edge, like a scout over a cliff. “We've been saying it's high time Bridger met more people, and honestly, Thisbe, does anyone on Earth need a sensayer as much as we do?”

Cheers rose from the other soldiers on the tabletop.

“The Major's right!”

“About time we found ourselves some kind of damned priest.”

“Past time!”

I leaned closer to my prisoner. “Cancel the help signal, or we do this Thisbe's way.”

The police insist that I add a disclaimer, reminding you not to do what Carlyle did. When your tracker earpiece detects a sudden jump in heartbeat or adrenaline it calls help automatically unless you signal all clear, so if there is danger, an assailant, even if you're immobilized, help will still come. Last year there were a hundred and eighteen slayings and nearly a thousand sexual assaults enabled by victims being convinced to cancel the help signal for one reason or another. Carlyle made the right choice canceling his call because God matters more to him than life or chastity, and because I meant him no real harm. The same will likely not be true for you.

“Done,” he mouthed.

I released my prisoner and backed away, my hands where he could see them, my posture slack, my eyes subserviently on the floor. I dared not even glance up to examine him for insignia beyond his Cousin's wrap and sensayer's scarf, since, in that moment when he could have called anew for the police, the only thing that mattered was convincing him I posed no threat.

“What's your name, priest?” It was the Major who called down to the sensayer from the tabletop, his tiny voice warm as a grandfather's.

“Carlyle Foster.”

“A good name,” the soldier answered. “People call me the Major. These men are called Aimer, Looker, Crawler, Medic, Stander Yellow, Stander Green, Croucher, Nogun, Nostand, and back there the late Private Pointer.” He nodded over his shoulder at the plastic toy which now lay stiffly on its side.

Carlyle was too sane not to gape. “Plastic.”

“Yes. We're plastic toy soldiers. Bridger fished us from the trash and brought us to life, but we had a run-in with a cat today, and at our scale any cat may as well be the Nemean Lion. Pointer fought like a hero, but heroes die.”

Now the other nine soldiers gathered around the Major at the table's edge. All but the paranoid Croucher had long since stopped bothering to wear their heavy helmets, but their uniforms remained, fatigues and pouches more intricate than any human hand could sew, with rifles frail as toothpicks slung across their backs.

Doubt had its moment now in Carlyle: “Some kind of U-beast? An A.I.?”

“Wouldn't that be a relief?” The Major laughed at it himself. “No, Bridger's power is not so explicable. One touch makes toy things real. You saw it just now with the Healing Potion vial Thisbe drew.”

“Healing potion,” Carlyle repeated.

“Mycroft,” the Major called, “hand Carlyle the empty tube so they can feel it's real.”

I did so, and Carlyle's fingers trembled, as if he expected the glass to pop like a soap bubble. It didn't.

“It works on anything,” the Major continued, “any representation: statues, dolls, origami animals. We have paper, if you want to test it you can make a frog, just no cranes—frogs can be full-scale, but cranes weren't meant to be a finger tall, it's too unkind, ends badly.”

Carlyle peered under the table, where an interposing chair half-concealed the figure huddled in a child's wrap, once blue and white, now blue and well-loved gray. “You're Bridger?”

Huddled knees huddled tighter.

“And you're Cousin Carlyle Foster?” Thisbe's voice and posture took command as she stepped forward. She had freed the sea of her black hair from the wad which had kept it dry through her morning shower, and donned her boots too, tall, taut Humanist boots patterned with a flowing brush-pen landscape, the kind with winding banks and misty mountains that the eye gets lost in. Any Humanist transforms, grows stronger, prouder, when they don the Hive boots which stamp each Member's signature into the dust of history, but if others change from house cat to regal tiger, Thisbe becomes something more extreme, some lost primordial predator known in our soft present only through its bones. She stared down at the intruder, her posture all power: squared shoulders, her dark neck straight, the indignity of her slept-in shirt forgotten. I believe there is some Mestizo blood deep in the Saneer line, but the rest of Thisbe is all India, large eyes larger for their long black lashes, so her harsh glance did not pierce so much as envelop its unhappy target as she repeated the sensayer's name. I was the target of her eyes this time, the too-slow syllables repeated for my sake, “Cousin Carlyle Foster.” I gave the subtlest nod I could, confirming that, with hidden motions, I had already entered the name into my search, and that the data flicker on my lenses was me racing through police, employment, and Cousin Member records, my clearances slicing through security like a dissection-knife through flesh. In minutes I would know more about the sensayer than he knew about himself. You would be no less careful guarding Bridger.

“I'm sorry.” The sensayer too squirmed before Thisbe. “I didn't mean to barge in, it just sounded…”

Her gaze alone was enough to hush him. “Convince me that I should trust you with the most important and dangerous power in the world.”

“Dangerous?”

“I could have written ‘Deadly Super-Plague' on that vial.”

Carlyle's pale cheeks grew paler. “You should because I … can … offer … context? And comparison, and scenarios, and ‘-ism' names for things!” His pauses convinced me more than his conclusion, pauses in which the sensayer wrestled against the gag order, forbidden by anti-proselytory laws and Conclave vows from letting slip whether his beliefs labeled this encounter Chance, Providence, Fate, or the whimsy of pool ball atoms. But Carlyle was good. He didn't slip, even in extremis.

“Names, scenarios,” Thisbe repeated coldly. “And then suggestions? This thing or that thing Bridger should make? Gold? Diamonds? And then introductions, one friend, then another, then the rich and powerful?”

Carlyle's brow knit, his youthful skin forming taut, delicate wrinkles. “Money? Why would … This is infinitely more important than money. This is theology!”

I saw Thisbe's face shift from the kind of sternness that hides anger to the kind that hides a laugh.

“You can trust me,” Carlyle continued. “The Conclave picked carefully assigning a new sensayer for your bash' of all bash'es, of course they did. If I were going to abuse my position, all I need is the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash's door key to wreck the world.”

“Very true.” I doubt Carlyle meant the reference to Thisbe's work as flattery, but it won a smile. Thisbe touched the wall to taste anew the vibrations of the computer system hiding in the depths, safeguarded by her bash', their ba'parents, their grandba'parents, back almost four centuries to Gulshan and Orion Saneer and Tungsten Weeksbooth, who made this house in Cielo de Pájaros a pillar of our world.

Carlyle was gaining steam. “If I'm here, it's because the Conclave knows I'd never exploit my position. Ever.”

Thisbe raised her chin to make her glare the more commanding. “You'll keep this absolutely secret. Everything you see here. Bridger's whole existence.”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Swear.” I interrupted, softly. Thisbe would not have thought to ask.

“I swear.”

“By
something
?” I pressed.

“By
something,
yes.” A smile warmed Carlyle's cheeks here, pride, I think, in the firmness of his faith in the
Something
he had faith in. “I can help you. I'm trained for this. I'm not afraid of the word ‘supernatural.' I'm not afraid to explore this, not by pushing anyone to do anything, but with hypotheticals, thought experiments, listening and talking.”

“Are you afraid of the word ‘miracle'?” I asked.

“No.” He was looking at me now, and I turned my head to hide the chunk that is missing from my right ear, lest he match that to the name ‘Mycroft' and realize who I was. He gave no sign of guessing. “In fact it's one of my favorite words.”

I raised my eyes and looked directly at the Cousin at last, happy to find few insignia at all beyond his Hive wrap and vocational scarf: he wore a red-brown mystery reader's bracelet, a tea enthusiast's green striped socks, and a cyclist's clip on one shoe, but nothing political, no nation-strat, not even a campus ring. I smiled my approval, and on the table the Major nodded his. Thisbe still held us, a dark stare which forbade any interruption of her silent self-debate. When she did soften into a smile, the whole room seemed to soften with her, the pulse-hot current of threat and force swept away by the easing of her stance, like smoke by a healing breeze.