by Ada Palmer
A long breath and the Major’s fingers stopped crawling toward his weapons. “Let it be. Tonight. The black of the morning Paris time.” He raised his eyes to Bridger. “You’ll have your chance. But you will not leave this room until we’ve planned out every breath, every step, until you can recite it backwards. You understand me?”
Bridger’s grin displayed his bright teeth, like an open piano. “I won’t make a single move without discussing it with you first, and I won’t touch anything, or try anything hard, just words.”
“Words? Words will be the hardest part. Persuading the persuader. He’ll have a thousand reasons marshaled against every one of yours. You know who this is you’re arguing against?”
The child swallowed. “I know.”
The Major softened. “Well, perhaps words from you will mean more.”
“I hope so.” A brave smile.
“If things go wrong while you’re out there—”
“If things go wrong,” the boy took over, “just tell me what to do and I’ll do it in an instant, no questions, I promise. I’ll be like a new recruit on my first mission. I have to have one sometime, right?”
The veteran shook his head. “No, you don’t. You know how hard we worked to make you not be like us? Not be like a soldier? We want you to enjoy these days of peace.”
“It hasn’t seemed very much like peace lately.”
“I’m glad you think that.”
Here’s an expression a child’s face should have, wide eyes, a curiosity still willing to ask any question, never fearing answers. “Why?”
“It means you have no idea what war is.” The Major rose and hauled over a pack of gum to serve as table as he set to work. “We’ll watch Mycroft until he falls asleep. They’re unlikely to leave him unguarded. Crawler, you’ll head up a team to take out guards if necessary.”
“I should do that,” Lieutenant Aimer interrupted, smiling.
“What?”
“Head the team.” The Lieutenant rose, testing his hands, tender but nimble after the healing potion. “That’s usually my job.”
The Major’s fists slammed the pack of gum before him. “We just got you back! You’re not going to think about going near that house again or, by Hades, this time I’ll be the one who nails your feet to the gods-damned floor! Now sit down!”
The white-faced Lieutenant more fell than sat down as the Major’s words flew like blows.
“As for the rest of you,” the Major continued, “if any of you catches the Lieutenant anywhere near the teleporter, or the armory, you have standing orders to knock him out and strap him to the nearest immovable object, is that clear?”
Most of the men frowned apology at the Lieutenant as they answered. “Yes, Major.”
“Good. All three of you who just escaped the enemy’s abuse, I want you to think of nothing but rest today. Crawler will head the team, with Stander-G, Looker, and Nogun. I shall head the standby team in case of misfortune, with Medic and Croucher. You hear me, Croucher?”
A mumble rose from the puzzle pieces, so vague that it might as easily have been poetry as profanity.
“So I can hear you!”
“Yes, Major! Understood!”
“Good, now, equipment check. Bridger, you first.”
Bridger smiled as he held forth his sea-green backpack. “I’ve got everything, Major.”
“I believe you, but if we’re going to do this we’re doing it in baby steps. I won’t be satisfied until I watch you put on every item. You got the talaria?”
Hermes’s winged sandals gave a little flutter as Bridger drew them from the sack. “Yup.”
“Invisibility cloak?”
The old blanket shimmered as the child tied it across his shoulders. “Yup.”
“Force field armor generator?”
“Yup.”
“Thor’s belt of strength?”
“Yup.”
“Excalibur?”
The boy fondled the plastic hilt. “Yup.”
“Phaser?”
“Yup.”
“Teleporter?”
“Yup.”
“X-ray specs?”
“Yup.”
“Magic mirror?”
“Yup.”
“Magic wand?”
“Yup.”
“Spare magic wand?”
He tapped the pair of chopsticks in his pocket. “Yup.”
Has any potentate ever traveled with such protection?
“Healing potion?”
“Four of them.”
“Resurrection potion?”
“Two of them.”
“Paper and markers to make more?”
“Twenty sheets.”
“Scissors and tape?”
“Yup and yup.”
“Apollo’s Iliad?”
The boy’s nod was grave enough for an adult. “I won’t let anything happen to it ever again, I promise. I know it’s the most important thing in the world.”
The Major shook his head. “No, Bridger—you are.”
Normally the boy would smile at that. “Major?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to say anything, but I know you’re thinking it.”
“What?”
“That it’s getting too dangerous, that we might need to abandon Mycroft, not see them again. I want you to know, I don’t think I could cope if I lost Mycroft.”
The Major cracked his knuckles. “Listen, Bridger, Fate takes people sometimes. I have lost a lot of people, people I thought I couldn’t live without, whole worlds, but I’m still here.”
“I know, but you’re…”
“I’m what?” the veteran invited. “It’s all right, say what you’re thinking, I won’t snap at you.”
“You’re not somebody who should have my powers. The world needs me to be sane and stable, or I could wreck everything. I need to keep being me. And for that I need Mycroft back. If we can’t get them then I don’t … I just need Mycroft back.”
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
The Room Where Mycroft Canner Died
« Young Master Jehovah, Madame wants you to send Mycroft up to the Salon de Versailles. »
Before you see my next failure, reader, you must understand the power of the room we are about to enter. Here my trial took place. Here was the neutral ground the Powers chose to meet in secret and decide the monster’s fate, while the world outside called in unprecedented unison for blood. Madame had suggested it, hanging on the Emperor’s sleeve as she pleaded for a chance to see this rarest of human beasts before they put it down, and the excuse of satisfying her girlish whim had let all of them pretend the choice to hold my trial here was not political—in truth it could not have been more political, for where else than in her sanctum were the Seven free to help each other cheat their own laws?
When the police stormed my vivisection room and caught the murderer, still elbow-deep in Mercer Mardi, they dosed me with more drugs than even my preemptive antidotes could counter. I awoke in my coffin-cage, arms locked behind me in a gel, as gentle as water against my skin but inescapable as steel, which the Utopians, in their rage, had invented in those few days, just for me. Within the cage was silence, the walls clear from the outside but opaque to me, so I knew nothing of the crowds past which the police paraded me, though I could feel the gentle bumping of the box, and peace when I was set down in what I assumed must be my prison. I would guess I had two hours’ peace before a switch turned the speakers on and made the walls transparent, leaving me squinting at the sudden light and bare as a lab rat before the red-faced and panting Anonymous.
“This letter, is it yours?” Rarely have I heard words so urgent. “Tell me!” He slammed the tired green sheets against the glass, youth-arrogant scribbles dating from the days when Saladin and I, fourteen and giddy with the power of our intellects, had begun many ingenious little projects to show the adult world our brilliance.
“Yes. Yes, it’s mine,” I answered.
“Who
helped you?” he barked at once. “Was it Kohaku? Did Kohaku Mardi know I’m the Anonymous?”
“No one helped me,” I answered, almost too quickly. “Not Kohaku, not anyone. I figured it out myself.” If Saladin and I are one flesh then I spoke the truth, for we had deduced it together, and written this letter, addressed to the Anonymous’s true identity, to boast that we had guessed, but we never sent it. We realized mid-draft that such a stunt might endanger our greater project, so we left the letter in the negligible clutter of my adopted bash’house, scraps which only Papadelias would think to go through.
“They knew you’re the Anonymous?” It was the King of Spain who asked it, striding forward to frown beside the Anonymous like a teammate after a bad game, the blue and gold sash which marks Europe’s Prime Minister set aside for mourning black.
The Anonymous nodded, grave. “It even gives the reasoning they used. It’s brilliant.”
My eyes adjusted to the dazzle slowly. I took in the room: silk-paneled walls, sofas of gold and velvet, and figures lounging over brandy like friends drawn close by troubled times. I did not recognize most of them at first, but seeing the Anonymous answer to his secret title with eight people watching was enough to make me doubt the structure of the world. How many knew? How many people here were privy to what was supposed to be, after the name of MASON’s successor, Earth’s second-strictest secret?
“Canner figured it out?” It was Ganymede who asked, still the Humanist Co-Consul, not yet President. I knew him only slightly then, and it was a strange aesthetic privilege seeing Ganymede in his mourning clothes, that shade of midnight blue that chases the sun toward sunset, so the dark cloth made the translucence of his skin glow bright as moonlight. For mourning, should it not be black? It should, reader, but remember that, however deeply the others mourned the Mardi bash’, it is unlikely the Duke actually cared.
The Anonymous faced the others. “This is why the police have had me in protective custody the last four days. They found this letter in Mycroft’s things and thought I might be targeted as well.” He backed away from my cage, and, with a clearer view, I recognized Andō Mitsubishi on the couch beside Ganymede, his black hakama stark against the sumptuous hall.
“That’s why they wouldn’t let me see you?” The voice let me recognize Cousin Chair Bryar Kosala, hoarse with tears. She was huddled on a couch, resting against Gordian’s Headmaster Felix Faust, as a niece rests against an uncle. “That’s why you’ve been locked away?”
“I’m sorry, Bryar, they wouldn’t let me tell you.” The Anonymous went to her and lifted her into his embrace. “They didn’t want anyone to know that they knew Mycroft knew.”
The Anonymous still wore his outside clothes, tiger-striped with the wrinkles of his captivity, which Kosala ruined further as she pressed against him.
My mind raced as I counted: the Anonymous, the King of Spain for Europe, Chair Kosala for the Cousins, Headmaster Faust for Gordian, Duke Ganymede for the Humanists, Director Andō for the Mitsubishi … six of the seven pillars of the Earth stood before me here, in black together like a bash’ in mourning. It was wrong. I had been in the Twenty-Fifth Century that morning, yet here I found myself in a world of petticoats and incest. I was not some amateur. I was trained by the Mardi bash’, by Senator Aeneas Mardi, by Deputy Censor Kohaku Mardi, by Felix Faust’s prize pupil Mercer Mardi, by Apollo. I knew more of the world than the world did, its trends, its fears, the currents churning beneath the ripples of property and population. Yet, of these secret relationships between the Powers—Ganymede and Andō, Kosala and the Anonymous—I had no idea. My teachers, my great teachers, had known nothing. In another life, I mused, I would want to study this, to see what other secrets lie behind these frills and petticoats. But I was a dead man, and nothing would make me miss my appointment with the executioner who would carry out the General Will and make the whole world murderers.
With Kosala warm against him, the Anonymous relaxed enough to let his own tears fall. “You can’t kill Mycroft Canner. I know what they’ve done, I know the public wants it, but you can’t. I’ll take it to my Proxy if I have to.”
“When did they realize?” Spain asked, grave as a portrait on a coin. “When did Canner figure out your true identity, what year?”
The Anonymous swallowed hard. “The letter’s dated twenty-four thirty-five.”
Felix Faust let out a long, delighted whistle. “Before even our Donatien? Spectacular.”
Ganymede rolled his murder-blue eyes. “Please, Faust, in ’thirty-five Canner was what, fourteen years old? Much less impressive than the Prince’s six.”
The Anonymous shook his head. “First is first.”
“The next Anonymous?” Kosala held her lover’s eyes. “No! I know the rules of your succession, but you can’t make Mycroft the next Anonymous, they’re a monster!”
The Anonymous caught her hand, in those days not yet brightened by the sparkle of a wedding ring. I pitied him. No monarchy has ever had so suspenseful a succession. An impotent king may wait decades for an heir, but at least he can try aphrodisiacs, affairs, placebos. The Anonymous can only wait and hope for the day some bright young thing will reason him out and come to claim the apprenticeship, as he came to his predecessor, and she to hers, back through six generations. Such a helpless wait, and now the bright young thing had appeared before him, but I had already thrown my life away. Yes it’s true. I could have been the next Anonymous, the second most powerful political voice on Earth. But I gave that up to teach you, gentle reader, what violence the human beast can sow when we are free. It was hardly the greatest sacrifice I made—I sacrificed my life as well, and worse, I would die in a hangman’s arms, and not my Saladin’s.
“I know Mycroft can’t be the successor now,” the Anonymous answered, “but however sick they are there’s so much potential there! They’re seventeen, for goodness sake! A child! We all heard the hopes the Mardis had for Mycroft.” He turned from Power to Power, searching for one whose eyes would not shy away. “Andō, you were there when Kohaku and Chiasa first brought Mycroft to my office. Ten years as Deputy Censor and Kohaku was barely faster than Mycroft aged nine. We all know Aeneas was grooming them for the highest office, and Felix!” He turned to Headmaster Faust, on the couch behind. “You had Mycroft at the Institute. You know we can’t throw a mind like that away.” He choked. “Murderer or no, Mycroft’s all we have left of the Mardi bash’ now, and of Apollo. We—”
“Mycroft Canner will live.”
No stone on stone, no hammer on anvil, no thunderbolt striking the heart could fall so heavily as the Emperor’s words. I spotted him now too, the seventh of the Seven, sitting at the room’s end, his uniform of imperial gray like ash against the festival of silk and gold that played across the walls. He would spare me? MASON, who had glowed in Apollo’s presence like a dead coal brought to life, the one among the Powers I had trusted to crush my throat with his own hand if the others faltered—now he talks of sparing me? It was beyond my ability to even think it. That cage was my coffin. I had sacrificed my life eight days earlier when, hand in hand, my Saladin and I set the torch to the wicker prison which held the maimed but living remnants of Luther Mardigras. Luther was the fifth to die, but was the turning point, the moment that we knew I had left traces enough that the police would catch me, not right away, but someday, even if I stopped. For the week since I lit that torch, I had lived in the unique and absolute philosophic calm of one who has already drunk the hemlock, or already sees his heart’s blood streaming from the wound. A dead man’s philosophy. When Hope left she took Doubt with her, leaving only resolution, and a quiet curiosity about the larger nature of the universe. I mused, those seven nights, abstractly about what forces had conspired to put me in such a place, and make me such a person that I would choose this. I almost thought the dread word ‘Providence.’ But my path was set, and the possibility that I would be denied death was not hope to me now—it was betrayal. How dare the world make me do what I had d
one and then threaten to deny me my execution! I opened my mouth to object, to scream, to spit my curses at the Powers and demand death, but Caesar finished first:
“It is Apollo’s will.”
I had not imagined the Anonymous could tremble. I had not imagined I could anymore either. “Apollo’s?”
I recognized the page as Caesar raised it in his black-sleeved hand, the title page of Apollo’s Iliad, ripped out, with hasty lines scribed on the back in bloody red, so like Apollo. “I won’t know for certain who the killer is until I meet them,” Caesar read aloud, “but if it is Mycroft, be merciful. Keep them alive, and safe, and working. You need them. If you have lost me, you need them. There are things … there … there are … things…”
MASON’s throat froze, a tremor in his bronze cheeks threatening to prove that even Caesar can cry. I think he would have, there in front of everyone, in front of me, had not the Lady beside him on the sofa laid soft hands on his shoulders and kissed his temple. She wore a formal mourning gown, as I remember, black lace pooling across the arms which reached around the Emperor, like the wings of a black swan. She seemed strange, less like a person than a shell waiting to enwrap something, a haven whose gentle gestures promised to lift Caesar from his grief, if only he surrendered. That was the first time I laid eyes on Madame.
“There are things I leave undone,” a fresh voice finished where the Emperor failed, “that only Mycroft Canner can complete.”
It was Mushi Mojave who stepped forward from a corner which, in my bonds, I could not turn enough to see. The constellations of Utopians have, to my knowledge, no rank nor hierarchy, but if, like stars, they may be said to have magnitudes of brightness, then surely Mushi Mojave is one of those Crowns of Heaven that pierce even city smog. “Except ants” is Mushi’s motto. Humanity is forever boasting of its ‘unique’ achievements: “Humans are the only creatures who build cities, use agriculture, domesticate animals, have nations and alliances, practice slavery, make war, make peace; these wonders make us stand alone above all other creatures, in glory and in crime.” But then Mushi corrects, “Except ants.” How proud the day when Mushi rushed in to tell the young Apollo and the other Mojave ba’kids that even man’s greatest achievement, Space itself, was no longer a monopoly. The terraformers had found ants, stowaways in one of the nutrient shipments, which had escaped and built a colony in the new Mars soil, spiral tunnels woven like DNA around a leaking oxygen pipe. The first city on Mars was not built by humans, but under them. Science needed an expert, and Mushi Mojave leapt on the chance. First entomologist on Mars, now there’s a title for a hero.
