Seven Surrenders--A Novel

by Ada Palmer

  Carlyle clutched her wrap, as if to assure herself it was intact. “We haven’t—”

  “You could do the registration for us, couldn’t you, Seldon?” Dominic asked, almost sweetly. “That would be much more convenient.”

  “I could…”

  “What do you say, Foster?” Dominic invited. “Wouldst thou like to let the Utopian handle thy registration, while we finish our session? There was another question thou wert about to ask, was there not?”

  Watching through Carlyle’s tracker I could see Voltaire gazing at her, intense eyes trying to advise in silence, but the vizor’s electric shimmer would not let them seem earnest.

  Carlyle took a deep breath. “I’ll stay.”

  I saw Dominic swallow down their surge of victory drool.

  Voltaire turned away. “As you prefer.”

  This is no rescue! Giving the monster everything he wanted! Thou hast mocked me, Mycroft, inviting me to pray when thou knewest what outcome waited.

  Ah, reader, I understand it is your kindness which fills you with this hubris, but it is hubris still. You presume, not only to advise your Maker, but to demand that He respond to your advice by revising the infinite and perfect Plan of His Creation precisely as you—with your flawed and finite wisdom—recommend?

  Thou, hypocrite, art the one who invited me to pray in the first place.

  True, reader, and I too succumbed at the time to that universal human hubris we call prayer. I prayed for a smaller thing, that Carlyle might find Dominic in some more kindly mood, a gentled doom; one tainted by parricide dares ask no more. But if I have encouraged you, reader—a nobler creature, worthier of our Maker’s ear—to raise your thoughts in prayer, it was not to deceive you, not to mockingly declare that our Creator is a deaf, unyielding Clockmaker after all. No. He hears, our Maker, all of our advice, I know He does, and Acts on it, as suits His Will. His Plan. Which is not our plan. I bade you pray because He answers sometimes, in His distant way, and when He doesn’t, it always means something to be heard—the prisoner shouting his last words from the gallows understands that. I will not offer you philosophy’s old comforts, what the theologians cramming Dominic’s shelves repeat so many times. I will not say that Providence requires trust, and patience, that what seems cruel from our limited perspective will turn out to be for the best in the end. I will not tell you that He left Carlyle to Dominic because it was somehow better for Carlyle, or the wider world, or you. There is a Will behind this universe, reader, that I know. There are miracles, and a Divinity behind those miracles, Who has a Plan, but have you ever, reader, heard me claim that that Plan is benevolent?

  “The Canner Device didn’t get switched on by accident, did it?” Carlyle asked the instant Voltaire closed the door behind him. “You switched it on before I got here, so we’d be interrupted and you could make me say you were my sensayer.”

  Dominic chuckled. “You’re a sharp one. I see why Julia likes you.”

  “Forcing me to say it won’t make me actually accept it.”

  “Forcing thee?” A laugh rose in Dominic’s throat, thick as honey. “And what force did I use? Did I threaten thee? Did I tie thee down and beat thee?”

  “No, but—”

  “What other sensayer, pray tell, is capable of handling thee now? Who else can talk to thee of Bridger, miracles, and of thy fall? Wouldst thou rather return to trading lies with Julia?”

  Carlyle again evaded Dominic’s eyes, gazing across the stacks of Theophrastus, St. Ignatius, and Chandrakirti. “No.”

  “I can grant thee access, to this house, to Madame, to Mycroft, even to Maître Jehovah.”

  Carlyle gulped. “What is Jehovah? They have a power too, like Bridger, don’t they? A second Intervention?”

  A long breath. “That privilege too, to know, to speak to Him, that may be thine in time, but only here. I can be thy patron, and together we can use all the resources gathered here to guide and protect Bridger until he fulfills his Maker’s purpose.”

  It was easier for Carlyle to feel strong with her eyes closed. “You know, I never expected to say this, but you’re right. I didn’t understand at first why God would show Themself to me, but you’re right, maybe we are stronger because we fell. God didn’t just show Bridger to me, They showed them to you, too. They chose us, us two.” Her cheeks relaxed, almost enough to smile. “I thought I was sent to keep Bridger away from you, but maybe not. Maybe the two of us are supposed to save Bridger from Mycroft Canner together.”

  Dominic paused and let his tongue play across the flavors of his mouth, his victory. “Then turn thy tracker off.”

  “What?” Carlyle clutched by instinct at the device at her ear.

  “We can’t plot to rescue Bridger with Mycroft Canner listening. Turn it off.”

  Carlyle hid behind her hair. “I don’t…”

  “Foster, I’m not going to rape thee. It’s not even in my mind. Bridger likes thee and thinks I’m a monster. Thou art the only person in the world who could possibly persuade the boy to work with me. Thou thinkest I would jeopardize my only window to This Universe’s God just for some quick sex? Turn it off.”

  “You said it again, ‘This Universe’s God.’” The Cousin wiped her cheeks at last, hoping, I imagine, that there would be no more tears.

  Dominic fingered the ends of his own sensayer’s scarf, coarse white cloth on one side and black on the other. “Thou shalt not ask thy sensayer about his religion. That is the law.”

  Carlyle sighed. “For a minute there you’d stopped being a hypocrite. You can’t just say it outright like that. You’re supposed to dodge around the question, not admit point-blank that I struck home, that tells me what you believe anyway. You think Jehovah is a god.”

  The monk’s eyes flickered. “Thou wishest me to use the formulaic dodges they teach us in sensayer training?” Dominic stretched, sleeves falling back to reveal red-speckled bandages fresh on his arms. “Thou knowest the same tricks, and can spot them if I use them. Isn’t it better that I volunteer to be the hypocrite, rather than making us both pretend?”

  Carlyle frowned at the bandages. “Are you all right?”

  Dominic’s glance barely acknowledged the injuries. “It’s nothing. Minor bites. I had set a … rat trap on our back stoop, and found instead a rather fierce stray dog.” He leaned toward her. “Thou canst not put it off forever, Carlyle Foster. Choose now: am I thy sensayer, patron, and ally in guiding Bridger’s miracles as thy God intended? Or am I thine enemy?”

  Carlyle raised a steady hand, and groped for her tracker’s off-switch.

  “Wait, Carlyle!” I cried through the tracker to her ears alone. “You’re asking the wrong question! I used to think the same way, that Bridger was an answer to my prayers, but if the miracle was meant for us, we would’ve been given what we prayed for directly, without a child as intermediary. Providence pays infinite attention to detail. Whatever God is doing requires Bridger’s specific power to make toys real, and it has to be wielded by the child Bridger, and the adult that Bridger will grow up to become. This Intervention isn’t for you, or me, or any one person, it’s for the whole world, the human race, the universe! The real question isn’t ‘Why me?’ it’s—”

  Carlyle cut me off, chopped off the monster Mycroft Canner’s words, half said. But I knew Carlyle Foster. She was a sensayer. She had read those volumes that lurk in Dominic’s cell, and hundreds like them, the thoughts and prayers of the dead, pious and impious, so many of whom had prayed as fervently as she to see a miracle. To see Proof. However desperately she did not want to hear it, a true sensayer could not keep herself from following my logic, and arriving at the question, that same question great Achilles asked when gray-eyed Athene appeared before him by the tearstained ships, when war had already swallowed ten bloody years: “Why now? Divinity, child of the thunder-wielding heavens? Why come now?”

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH

  If Anybody in the World Can

  Bridger closed Apollo’s Ilia
d and slid the time-grayed volume back into his pocket where it always lived. “Next I want to rescue Mycroft.”

  Should I not have given him the book? You say I have put a lighted torch in the hands of an infant, but what more do I know than a child of the infinity of the Universal Plan? I had no right to deny what was so obviously meant for him. The book was given to me and I to Bridger—what line of inheritance could be more clear? Thou hast lied to me, Mycroft. Thou claimedest thou wert raising Bridger to be a normal child, then a normal man, so he might grow up to wield his powers on behalf of all of us, but it was a lie: thou art raising him to be Apollo Mojave. No. Thou darest deny it? Thou speakest of the two of them with the same worship, steepest the boy in history and philosophy no average child needs, and now thou hast made him keeper of this little book whose import I can guess if not its precise contents. You are wrong, reader. If I had wanted Apollo back, there was a statue in Romanova waiting to be awakened by Bridger’s touch.

  “You want to rescue Mycroft?” the Major repeated in a flat, tired tone, neither approving nor criticizing, just listing one more fact in a world which has too many facts in it.

  “Yes,” the boy declared. “Mycroft’s always rescuing everybody else, it’s time somebody rescued them.”

  Some of these scenes are hard for me to re-create from interviews and stale research, but not this one. The safe house Saladin chose to hide the child from Dominic would be warm and snug, walls stacked high with the sorts of games and entertainments a thug would want when forced to lie low. Mommadoll would have set to work stripping the room of ‘inappropriate’ materials, while Boo nested in the cushions, and the army men pitched cautious camp on the bedside table, ready to leap to instant cover should my Saladin return. I’m happy to say the hostages were free once more; Privates Pointer and Nostand and Lieutenant Aimer, who were captured when Dominic had stolen Bridger’s clothes and backpack from the cave, had been successfully snatched back from that circle of Hell which is Dominic’s desk drawer. Operation Ariadne, as the Major called it, had been planned for three careful hours and executed in forty-seven seconds, a six-man extraction team guided by Looker scrying through the crystal ball, with Bridger at the teleport controls. Success. Medic was now treating the captives’ wounds with Bridger’s potions, their hands and feet where Dominic had pinned them to a slab of cork like butterflies. They bore it bravely, Lieutenant Aimer especially, determined not to cry out with the Major watching. The others ringed them, cheering on the rescued, hailing their endurance in the face of monster Dominic, a heroes’ praise from all except paranoid Croucher, who glared up from a bunker he had built from loose puzzle pieces on the far side of the table, and muttered to the walls.

  “You’ve searched it through and through?” the Major asked, nodding to the pocket of Bridger’s recovered wrap, where the lump of the Iliad showed through fabric long since warped to fit its corners.

  “Yup,” the boy answered, “it’s all there, no missing pages. The bad sensayer cracked the spine a bit, but nothing’s gone. And they didn’t bug it or anything, I used the crystal ball and everything. I know you’re mad I let it get stolen, and I know it’s really, really important, but it’s safe now, so it’s time to work on Mycroft. You can lecture me after we have them back, okay?” An unsettling resolution tensed the child’s tender brows, as when sculptors give Hermes or Dionysus a child’s face but a man’s expression. When Providence and the Major first granted me the undeserved blessing of Bridger’s friendship he was not yet six years old, that recipe of tiny hands and games and tantrums which awakens the instincts to protect and nurture, even in Mycroft Canner. At first the sheer wonder of helping a child grow was enough for me, but soon moments started cropping up, after a fight over clipping his nails, or when I stumbled reciting a favored bedtime story, when he would glare, and show me for an instant, not infancy, but personality, a flash of the person he would be when he grew up. With time, I began to see him less as a blossom swelling to its proper shape than as a buried statue, waiting for the sand around to fall away. I loved the child, but was waiting for the man to come and wield his power with this kind of confidence. We all were.

  The veteran shook his head. “Spiriting Mycroft away is no simple matter. Only Dominic will notice we took Aimer and the others, but Mycroft is part of a larger world, connected, watched. Many will notice if they vanish to the far side of the Earth.”

  The boy’s blond brows stayed locked. “But they do it all the time. If Mycroft disappears everyone’ll assume they did a clever Mycroft thing and got away. All we have to do is wait until no one’s looking.”

  “No.” The Major sighed, as ships sigh strained by tides too huge for eyes to spot beneath the petty waves. “If it were that simple, he would do a clever Mycroft thing and get away. You’ve seen it. Mycroft’s not trapped there by a cell, or a chain, he’s trapped by choice, his choice, something that’s keeping him from trying to leave.”

  “I know,” Bridger answered, though I suspect he did not like knowing. “Mycroft disappears a lot. That’s where they go isn’t it? That house in Paris where the bad sensayer took the others?”

  “‘Mycroft disappears a lot…’” the Major repeated. “They must say that in Paris, too, whenever he’s here with us.”

  “Unless they know exactly where he goes.” Croucher’s voice rose cold and thin, like the glitter of his teeth, the only part of his face visible beneath his helmet’s shadow as he peeked out from his puzzle-fort. “Mycroft Canner, he knows who all these enemies are, what they want, but will he tell us anything about them? No. He’s scheming behind our backs, I’ve always said that, and now the trap is springing shut. You know it, you just don’t want to admit you were wrong.”

  “Enough.”

  “The great hero duped for eight years by a clever slave!”

  The Major stretched back across the dominos that served him as a bench. “Don’t tempt me, Croucher! As for you, Bridger, Mycroft would take on every monster Hercules faced to get to you, but they won’t leave that house. That means whatever’s there is worse than monsters. It’s not somewhere you should even think about going. Leave it to Mycroft’s killer friend who dresses like Apollo.”

  Bridger leaned on his elbows, gazing down at the tiny soldiers like some Egyptian monolith. “Mycroft’s scary friend has been gone a long time.”

  The Major frowned. “It’s only been a few hours. Paris is an ocean away, and travel like that takes time, even today. Wait here and stay safe, that’s what Mycroft would want.”

  “Sometimes what Mycroft wants isn’t what’s best for Mycroft.”

  “True. Mycroft wants what’s best for the entire world, and most of all for you.”

  The boy breathed deep. “You and Mycroft always say you have to keep me away from people until I’m big enough to decide for myself how to use my power. Well, I’ve decided. I want to do this. I should do this. You always say someday I’ll be able to use my power to save everybody in the world. Right now I want to use it to save Mycroft.”

  I can see clearly in my mind the expressions of the others, Nostand, Medic, Lieutenant Aimer putting on a brave face after his ordeal. They watch raptly, hanging on every syllable of this quarrel between their absolute commander and their young creator. It is enough to make these brave men shake. But you are braver still, reader. Yes, you, who trust your life to distant leaders whom you cannot watch firsthand, and whose Creator decides your fate invisibly, without warning, explanation, or apology—and yet you rise to face each morning, head held high. Brave reader, these happy army men are here to hear their maker’s argument themselves, and will hear the verdict firsthand, instead of having to deduce it from a thousand years of experiment and guesswork. And, best of all, they know that both these beings, Bridger and the Major, love them. Benevolence, real, before their eyes. Do you not envy them? Does it not make you call This Universe’s God a little cruel? These are the sorts of questions Ἄναξ Jehovah calls me to His rooms to ask, that He was asking m
e at that very moment as I sat beside His desk, forgetting Carlyle downstairs, forgetting the investigation, forgetting even Bridger as His questions made the present seem just a drop of history. I rarely manage to offer Him any answer, but it is a comfort to Him that at least I understand.

  The Major shook his head. “Mycroft does not want to be saved. I know him, Bridger. If he lingers on as someone’s captive, it is because of some relationship he has to that someone, awe, honor, fear, something.”

  The boy wrinkled his nose. “Then I want to know why. I want to go and ask. I’m not going to let anybody see me. I just want to talk to them. The crystal ball isn’t good enough, I need to really see, and hear, and have Mycroft hear me. I want to try to talk them into leaving, that’s all. Just one try.”

  “It’s not like you can stop the kid, Major.” Trust Croucher to pounce on the truth nobody wants to hear. “He can just unmake you if you try to stop him.”

  “I wouldn’t do that!” Perhaps this kind maker blushes with guilt that the thought was in his mind. “I don’t want to do that. Major, I want you to help me. I want your advice, your planning. There has to be a first time I try going out and really doing something, so walk me through it, talk me through it, guide me, make it a surefire victory. If anybody in the world can, you can.”

  “‘If anybody in the world can, you can,’” Croucher repeated in a whine. “What’ll it be this time, Major? Give in? Or sit and sulk while the kid goes off and dies?”

  Quick as a striking carp, the Major hurled his pocket canteen at Croucher’s face. It flew true as a javelin, striking the cheekbone below the helmet’s rim hard enough to split the skin. Croucher vanished into his puzzle-fort like a seal beneath the waves, and closed the entrance with a last piece, which almost muffled his curses. These soldiers are made of fiction, reader—did you think they would coexist in boring harmony?

  Even Lieutenant Aimer required urging from his comrades before he dared address the red and glaring Major. “We could think about it for half an hour and then decide?” He smiled, trying to make the balance of sweet and sturdy in his young face tip toward sweet.