by Ada Palmer
“But you know more than me! If we have different conclusions I’m bound to be the one who’s wrong.” He grabbed my sleeve. “I trust you, Mycroft, or I would if only you’d tell me things. I want to know.” His free hand crept toward the plastic scabbard at his side. “Don’t make me make you.”
I felt glad that he had grown strong enough to threaten me. “Listen, Bridger,” I began again, “I realized a few years ago that I believe Jehovah is a God, and—let me finish,” I warned as I saw him part his lips to speak. “I don’t believe it because I’ve seen proof, or because I was actively convinced, it’s just that He acts so consistently like a God, and I’ve spent so long around people who believe He’s a God, Himself and others, that I absorbed it, the way if you spend too long with Mommadoll you start thinking of everyone as children. Jehovah will say something and I’ll think to myself, ‘Oh, He thinks that because He’s a God.’ It’s the truth to me now, the way I think, and I can’t stop thinking that way. It’s like how you can’t stop thinking that up is up, even though you know there’s no real up in Space, or how the army men can’t stop thinking that Stander-Y is the enemy even though there never was an enemy, and how I can’t stop being sure that what you’re going to do with your powers is the most important thing that’s ever happened to the human race, even though I don’t know what that thing will be.”
Bridger hid behind his eyelids. “Do you think I’m a god too?”
Now I hid behind mine. “You could be. I’ve been considering that possibility. Just because the twelve Olympians are hiding on their mountain it doesn’t mean that newborn gods can’t walk the Earth. Assuming there really are Olympians, that is. I don’t know, Bridger.” I squeezed his hands again, both of them, the best embrace that I could offer through the cage. “The one thing I’m sure of in this world is that I don’t know anything for certain, not what you are, not why, not any of this. All I can do is trust the Plan, and while I can’t understand its ends, I have to trust that they make sense to Someone.”
I could feel him shivering. “But what if the ends are bad?”
“There’s nothing I can do about it if they are, so I have to trust they’re … if they’re not good or kind, at least they’re for something. Something real. Better some end than none.” Leaning close, I could almost pretend we were in the soft dark of Bridger’s cave. “The Greek Stoics said a human being is like a dog tied behind a moving cart. The dog can struggle, tug at the rope, dig its heels in, choke and suffer as it’s dragged, or it can trot along content and trust the Driver, though it still can’t understand the purpose of the journey, or its end.” I paused, watching distaste wrinkle his nose. “You don’t like the simile?”
“No.”
I nodded slowly. “Jehovah hates it too. He said any just Driver would let the dog sit with Him in the cart, and a just God would not create a creature incapable of understanding the journey.” My fingertip traced Bridger’s thumbnail, just starting to lose childhood’s softness. “You will learn about Jehovah, Bridger. You’ll meet Jehovah, it’s inevitable. I just wanted to wait until you’d grown up more, until you were mature and had a bash’, and solid grounding, and a plan. Until you were formed enough as a person that meeting him wouldn’t destroy and remake you the way it did me. But the crisis won’t wait. You need to learn about Jehovah now. Just not through me. Do it yourself. Spy. Scry. You have your crystal ball, your magic mirror, and your little army. You can watch Him from a distance, invade His house invisibly, read His notebooks, hack His tracker, see more than anyone can, without letting Him speak to you. Watch Him, judge Him, if you have questions for Him tell me and I’ll ask Him for you. When you understand enough about Him to be sure you can approach Him without being changed, then come to Him, and the two of you can figure out what must be done.”
The child’s fingers locked around mine. “I will if you come help me.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to tell me opinions, just tell me facts, like with Apollo.”
“No. I’m needed here.”
“Why?”
“Because Jehovah doesn’t have Mommadoll, or the army men, or Boo. Because everybody needs someone they can talk to freely about beliefs and doubts, and I’m the only one Jehovah has. Because Jehovah’s still young too, barely twenty-one, which may seem old to you but—”
“It doesn’t,” he interrupted. “I know twenty-one’s still young. With responsibilities like these fifty’s still young.”
“It is.” I smiled. “Most of all, I have to stay with Jehovah now because, if this crisis tears the world apart, Jehovah will be the One expected to make things right again.” I brushed back a spray of stray hair trapped by the sweat on Bridger’s forehead. “You’re right that you’ll need me, Bridger. When you’re ready to reshape the world you’ll need me to hook you up with the powerful people who can help you, but that’s the future, ten years or ten days from now, not tomorrow. Jehovah needs me tomorrow. It’s His time. He needs me to help Him keep the world on track, and to ensure that those powerful people I can call on are still here to help you when your time comes. That’s why I have to stay.” I squeezed his shoulders. “That’s why you have to go.”
The child swallowed hard. “How long will you stay?”
“Not long, I promise. Jehovah never keeps me for long stretches at a time. He knows a lot of people need me.”
“I won’t promise not to come back.” Bridger crossed his arms. “I’ll watch Jehovah, but I’m also watching you, and I’ll snatch you away if I decide I should. You know I can.”
I nodded acceptance. “I know you can, and I can’t stop you. But I trust you, Bridger. You’ve grown up a lot, and you’re ready to make hard choices like this. I trust you not to come back for me unless you’re sure you should.”
He smiled. “Do you want me to set your scary friend free?”
I stroked the underside of Saladin’s bruised arm. “You can’t, not anymore. The need to know will just bring them back. It’s all right,” I comforted quickly. “It’s not your fault this happened to them. It was inevitable.”
His frown did not believe me. “This is why kids grow up, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
His words grew timid, sensing goodbye’s approach. “It’s probably special for me, since I’m pretty sure if I don’t want to grow up I just won’t, I can decide that. But things like this, where you see what’s happening in the grown-up world and realize that you have to do something, you can’t keep out of it, this is what makes kids want to grow up, so we can become able to make a difference.”
I gave his fingers one last squeeze. “I don’t know, Bridger. I never really grew up, I was made into what I am now all at once. Don’t let that happen to you. I don’t have the right to pray for anything, but if I did pray it would be for that to never happen to you.”
He gathered the cloak’s invisible folds around him. “You don’t have to pray, Mycroft. I’m prepared. I’ve been prepared for years. I’ve had you as an example. I realized a long time ago it would be a disaster if something like that happened to me, transformed me into something bad, or unstable. I won’t let it happen.” Bridger curled against the bars, holding my arm around him. “Mycroft, can I lie here like this?” he asked softly. “Just for a little bit? I know I have to go, but—”
“Of course you can.” I drew my hat from my habit and offered it as a pillow as he snuggled against me. “Nap for now. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”
I tucked the cloak tighter around him, and tucked Apollo’s coat around Saladin and myself, so between the Griffincloth and the invisibility magic the two of them vanished, and I seemed to lie alone on the cage floor in the soldier’s uniform, sandy tan and gray, which Apollo’s coat made of my habit. Am I still alive then, Apollo, in your prediction? As we fall one by one in your computer’s simulated battles, so we vanish from your nowhere, and your coat, passing across a street, reduces crowds, half to soldiers, half to emptiness. Saladin has been dea
d to you these thirteen years, and profited well from a ghost’s invisibility, but how can I be still alive? You knew I would have been like you, a frontline soldier, doomed to fall in the first months of your young war. Has chance spared me in every calculated battle? Or, when you programmed the coat, had you somehow already recognized the conspiracy of Fate which dooms me to survive?
“Want me to kill the kid now?” Saladin whispered inches from my ear.
I laughed inside at myself. I had half known he must be awake, and half not cared. “No,” I answered. “I know Bridger could destroy everything, just like Apollo, but there’s too much to gain if it goes right. We have to gamble on this one, Saladin. We have to trust the Driver.”
CHAPTER THE TENTH
Stalin in One Weekend
Imagine, reader, the view that lucky stars enjoy as young worlds orbit, rich with life. The star catches brief glimpses as its children spin, of living oceans, lichen jungles spreading new dirt across still-cooling rock, and the first sentiences raising curious eyes to their bright parent. Such a view Martin Guildbreaker shared, seated in the main hall of the Utopian Transit Network as its technicians circled from computer to computer, their coats showing birdman cities, giant mushroom forests, seas of dark ghosts, anthropomorphized animals striding in armor through medieval castles, and a dozen other teeming worlds. Their creatures circled too: a fat, snoozing Techupine bristling with detachable tools, a Gilded Owl, a rambunctious two-headed dragon, Crystal Bats transparent as glassfish, and a rainbow cloud of Hummerlights, glowing hummingbirds as colorful as orchids, which schooled around the room like minnows in fast-forward. Did Martin ask himself, I wonder, as suns must: How long until these wonders launch to the heavens on their self-made wings, and do not need me anymore?
“Guildbreaker, the set-set you hired just attempted murder!”
“What?” Martin rose at once, too slow to intervene as the Utopians seized the set-set who sprawled on the floor at Martin’s feet and ripped the wires from their mesh of sensors. The set-set screamed. The Major once described to me a time he saw a man struck blind and deaf by a blow from a flying rock. He told me he had never heard so pitiful a scream, the soldier, still a boy, shaking more from terror than from pain, floundering helpless in a silent, death-black world with two of five senses lost; imagine then the set-set’s scream losing forty of forty-five.
“What are you doing?” Martin reached out a strong hand to the set-set, who latched on like a drowning man.
“They tried to make a car crash.” It was Aldrin who answered, seated on her unicorn whose panther-black skin merged with her coat of deep space to stream night and stars around the rider.
“That was live data!” Aldrin shouted. “Can’t you tell the difference?”
“You just tried to delete a data point from the set you were viewing.”
“Put it back? That data point was a fifty-nine-year-old Cousin named Harper Morrero. If we hadn’t parried, they’d be dead now.”
The set-set’s breath raced, enough to make their tracker bleep concern.
Aldrin’s fists clenched her unicorn’s ink-black mane. “You didn’t tell the set-set what data they’re sifting?”
Martin gave the set-set’s shoulders a comforting squeeze. “They didn’t need to know. They said they’d work better if they didn’t.”
Martin sighed at Aldrin. “Why did you give them access to live data? I told you to show them old records, not—”
“They asked for it,” Aldrin interrupted.
“Why did you try to kill that person?” Aldrin pressed. “What fallout did you prophesy?”
The set-set’s breath raced.
“It’s all right,” Martin consoled. “We know you didn’t know. I called you in here, you won’t be held responsible. You had no way to know.”
The Masonic iron of Martin’s face softened for a moment. “Just remember, it’s not your fault. I didn’t tell you what we were investigating. You aren’t responsible for what’s going to happen when we release this information, I am. I could have hired anyone. None of this was you.”
“They’ll just keep killing if we don’t.”
“How many did you find?”
“I had you look for deaths—deletions—that had a large global impact, and which only a Cartesian set-set would know how to predict. How many did you find?”
“You knew Sidney and Eureka well, didn’t you?” Martin asked softly. “You were sort of ba’sibs?”
How could Martin not wince? The whole world had read by now, not only Masami Mitsubishi’s original editorial about Romanovan Senator and Minister of Education Lorelei “Cookie” Cook, but the follow-up articles, penned by quick-striking journalists ever poised like mantises in search of prey: the nighttime raids which, increasingly of late, had been ripping infant set-sets from their pod-beds, smashing their computers, burning their bash’houses down, was this more than the sleeping dragon Nurturism releasing a scorching snore? Was this Nurturist surge deliberate? Traceable to Lorelei Cook, and through the Cousins’ most prominent Senator to the Cousins themselves? Perhaps this sigh from Martin wishes for a world where that had been the largest crisis.
“This isn’t the Six-Hive Transit Network,” Aldrin answered, cold. “It’s ours.”
Fresh fear spurred the set-set to finally lift the blinded interface hood from their eyes and look. The walls were the computer, a forest of rod-thin processors glittering within columns of sparkling coolant.
“It isn’t the Utopians.”
“I don’t care,” answered a new voice, tired and cracking as it rose from the depths of a thick grove of computers. “I’m not allowed to. Law and only law, that’s my job.”
“Police Commis
sioner General Ektor Carlyle Papadelias.” Papa strolled forward, flexing their work-stiffened shoulders, slim and ancient like a cliff-face tree that keeps its trunk pole-thin as it puts the growing strength of centuries into its roots. “The Mason and the Utopians are both working for me on this one, me and Romanova, and so are you. Now, start from the beginning and tell me what you found. Everything.”
The set-set paused to catch its breath.
“Good impact?”
“Guildbreaker showed me your initial report from earlier this morning.” Papa shooed a Salamanderfly out of his face. “You’d found eighty-one murders by then.”
“Hiding from the label won’t help. I’ve looked into those eighty-one. Half were killed in car crashes, some were suicides, the rest were the kinds of random incidents that look like accidents until you dig too deep, but they were murdered, every one of them. At my age, the nose knows.”
