by Ada Palmer
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.
Thisbe knelt beside the table, summoning her softest voice. “Bridger? Would you like to come out and meet this sensayer, Carlyle Foster?”
The boy beneath the table rocked within the cradle of his knees, voiceless crying making his breaths staccato. “Pointer’s dead.”
I apologized silently inside, to Pointer, to the boy, the soldiers, for letting the crisis of intrusion disrupt the necessity of mourning. Taking care still to tilt my mangled ear away from Carlyle, I crawled under the table and wrapped as much of my warmth around Bridger as I could. I stroked his hair, gold-blond now, losing the white-blond of childhood. It was hard to believe he had turned thirteen. “You know what a sensayer is, right?” I coaxed. “You remember what I told you?”
“A sensayer is”—sobs punctuated his answer like hiccups—“somebody who—loves the universe so—so much they—spend their whole life—talking about—all the different—ways that it—could be.”
I smiled at my own definition parroted in child-speak. “Sensayers help people think about where the world came from, and whether there’s a plan or somebody in charge or just chaos, and what happens when people die.
Carlyle here is a sensayer. They can help you think about those things. Especially death.”
Armored in my arms, Bridger found the strength to raise tear-crusted eyes and face the stranger. “Can I bring Pointer back? Is that okay? I can make a potion that’ll bring Pointer back from the dead, but I don’t know if that’s bad ’cause I don’t know where they went now that they’re dead, and maybe it’s somewhere good, so maybe it’s bad to bring them back here, but maybe it’s bad where they went, or maybe they didn’t go anywhere at all and they’re just gone. Do you know?”
Carlyle smiled, a perfect, calm, real smile, and I admired his recovery, bouncing back in less than two minutes from violent chokehold to being the only really calm one in the room. A sensayer indeed. “No, I don’t know,” he answered, “not for sure. People have made a lot of different suggestions, and there are good arguments for many different versions. We can talk about them, if you want. But what do you think? Do you think Pointer went somewhere?”
Master, do you believe that Chance alone, without Providence behind it, would have sent this child, in this moment, so suitable a guide?
“I don’t think Pointer just went away.” Bridger wiped his nose on his sleeve, and his sleeve on mine. “It wouldn’t be fair if they just went away.”
Carlyle’s smile was practiced enough to betray nothing. “A lot of people agree with that.”
“And it wouldn’t be fair if they went somewhere bad.”
“A lot of people agree with that, too. There are lots of good places they might have gone. Some people would say Pointer has been reborn as someone else. Some would say they’ve returned to being one with the whole universe, the way they were before they were born. Some would say they went to an afterlife.”
Bridger’s fingers dug into my arm. “Like Hades or Heaven. And then you get to see all the dead people you knew, like your mom and dad.”
“That’s something some people think might happen after death, yes.”
“Except Pointer’s mom and dad never existed, because they’re made up. I made them up. Pointer remembered them like Pointer remembered the country their army was from and the war they fought, but none of it ever happened because it’s all made up. Do made-up dead people go to the afterlife?”
Carlyle’s five years at in training and four in practice could not supply an answer. I was deeper into Carlyle’s records now, past honors transcripts, parishioners’ endorsements, bios of bash’mates—a safe, unfamous bash’, all Cousins, mostly teachers plus a masseur, two mural painters and an oboist. I had even found his orphanage records, expected from the surname Foster. I had not expected the word ‘Gag-gene.’
Perhaps in your age, gentle reader, the human race is better, good enough that you no longer need so dark a tool? The universal catalogue of DNA, our greatest guard against disease and crime, also ended anonymity for foundlings, whose parents leave signatures in every cell. Courts called it a triumph at first, the empowering of the abandoned, and it took the Cooper scandal and the Chaucer-King triple suicide to force law to admit that one foundling in a thousand carries in its genes a past too hard to bear. Hence the little race of ‘Gag-genes,’ which does not mean, as rumor claims, genes whose story is so vile it makes you gag, but ‘Gag-order-genome,’ a court order which denies the child access to the testimony of its own blood, for its own happiness. Law leaves it to the courts, not parents, to decide what case merits Gag-gene status, though parents may plead (and bribe) if need be. Rape is not enough. Incest-rape is likely in your mind, and it is sometimes incest-rape, but it is usually a longer, stranger tale than that. If Troy’s Queen Hecuba, impossibly mother of fifty sons, had borne a fifty-first, not in the topless towers of Ilium, but in the slave tents after the city’s fall, where the Trojan women clasped their captors’ knees with hands still white with the ashes of their husbands, if in such an hour vindictive Fate, judging the queen’s defilement not yet absolute, let rape plant one last seed in the womb which had borne so many unto death, and chose no hero’s seed, not Menelaus, or an Ajax, or some other king, but gave her royal body over to the pleasures of bow-legged Thersites, the ugliest and lowest creature who ever came to Troy, a son conceived thus would have been a Gag-gene. I smiled now at the name Carlyle. I had thought at first it was lack of originality which made the orphanage choose what has become Earth’s most common baby name now that I plunged Mycroft off the list. But you must admit a Gag-gene, denied any inheritance, even his parents’ story (which might at least have offered him that patrimony named revenge), deserves at least a hero’s name.
“Problem?” Thisbe crouched closed to me and mouthed it, likely spotting my flinch at the word ‘Gag-gene.’
“Maybe,” I mouthed back. “Best get Bridger out.” I mussed the boy’s hair. “You want to go home, Bridger?” I coaxed. “You don’t have to talk to Carlyle right now. You can go home, have Mommadoll make cookies, and decide later whether or not to resurrect Pointer.”
“But…”
I squeezed his shoulder. “Pointer’s already dead, nothing will change for now. You can take your time and then make up your mind.”
“What if they’re in a bad place? Like Hell?”
I squeezed him tighter, choking up myself before that word.
The Major faced it better. “Pointer was a soldier, Bridger. They were ready for death, no matter what death is.”
The little dam of courage broke inside the boy now, releasing sobs, half-muffled by his efforts to be strong.
“Come on.” I scooped Bridger forward, my arms forgetting he was no longer so easy to lift.
“Shou—udn’t I—talk—to the—sensay—er?”
His bravery brought wetness to my eye. “They can come another time to talk,” I suggested, “tomorrow, anytime you want. Right, Carlyle?”
Rarely have I heard so passionate a “Yes.”
Timid as a hatchling, Bridger crawled out from beneath the table. Beside him came Boo, his bright blue dog, three feet long and whining now in sympathetic worry, just as real dogs do. Even on close inspection Boo can be taken for a U-beast or some other high-end robot or genetically engineered companion, since Bridger’s touch erases all hint of seams and stitching. It was Boo who first betrayed Bridger to me ten years ago, but I would never have realized what the toy dog was had Fate not placed him in my path in the moment one of Bridger’s miracles ran out, so the living beast reverted to plush and stuffing before my eyes.
Bridger leaned forward and pressed his shoulder against the table’s edge. “All a—” One more sob. “All aboard.”
Murmuring layered words of kindness, the tiny soldiers climbed the warp of Bridger’s wrap like a cargo net, and settled in like sailors into rigging.
“What about Pointer’s body?” Bridger asked.
“I’ll take care of Pointer,” Thisbe volunteered. “You rest up, and eat. I’m sure Mommadoll has a big lunch ready.”
Bridger rubbed his eyes, smearing the salty wet across red cheeks. “Okay.”
I moved to follow the boy out from under the table, but Thisbe stepped close, caging me beneath the table with the firm bars of her legs. Bridger started to move, but froze as I failed to follow. “Mycroft isn’t coming?” he asked.
Thisbe excels at making smiles not feel forced. “Mycroft will follow soon, sweetheart, but they have to stay and help me here a little first, all right?”
“All right,” Bridger answered. His face showed it wasn’t all right at all, but still, brave boy, he tried.
“Hold a second, Bridger,” the Major called as the boy opened the door. “Carlyle Foster.”
Awe held the sensayer as Bridger paused before him, offering a first close look at these impossibly perfect human figures shorter than a finger. “Yes?”
“Word of warning: we’re small, but we’re soldiers. Real soldiers. We’re no strangers to handing out death.” He paused to give the word its due. “We’ll be watching you. If you betray us, if you even start to, if you endanger Bridger in any way at
all, we’ll kill you. No second chances. We don’t gamble with this power, we will just kill you. Understood?”
“You have my oath. I won’t break it.”
I couldn’t see the Major’s expression from across the room, whether he smiled at the passion in the sensayer’s conviction, or frowned at his face, so bright, so buoyant, so obviously unable to believe the threat was real. “Then you’ll be welcome tomorrow, Carlyle Foster. We do need a priest, or a sensayer, whatever you call yourself, the boy most, but the rest of my men too. We’ve missed that. We’ll be grateful, when you come.”
Hush held Carlyle, the Major’s spell, that tiny voice too seasoned, that tiny face too care-lined, beyond what can be found in all the faces of our kindly age. Even had the Major stood full-size, I think, Carlyle might still have sensed the stranger in our midst.
“Bye-bye, Major. Bye-bye, Bridger. Bye-bye, men.” Thisbe killed the moment with a strategic, shrill singsong which spurred the boy away. Her smile lingered only until the door closed tight. “Now the serious part.” She faced Carlyle, her stance still trapping me under the table’s cage. “The Major meant it that he’ll kill you if you mess this up, so listen carefully. Rule one: you tell no one about Bridger. No one. Not your bash’mates, not your boss, not the police, not your lover—”
“Not your mentor at the Sensayers’ Conclave,” I added.
“Right,” she confirmed, “not your own sensayer, no one.”
“I understand,” he answered.
“You think so? Keeping secrets is harder than it sounds.” Thisbe scooched up to sit on the table, so her landscaped boots dangled before my face.
Carlyle met her dark, enveloping eyes and held them. “I am a sensayer. I keep my vows, and I keep intimate secrets, every day and always.”
“Rule two: you don’t take samples of things Bridger has created to run tests on them. We’re all in favor of exploring this with science, but we have our own access to labs, people we know and trust, who can keep secrets. If you want to run a test you can suggest it, we’re eager for new ideas, but we’ll run it ourselves.”
