by Ada Palmer
Martin and Dominic climbed up to flank Jehovah on the platform now, uncomfortable with how His stillness let Tully draw close.
“There does not have to be a war.” Jehovah’s voice seemed hollow next to Tully’s, as a play’s printed script reads hollowly without the actor’s passion to ignite it. “You are right that history has been one long string of violence, and that this three-hundred-year peace was bought only through blood. That does not mean we cannot make real peace now. When I let Mycroft Canner walk the streets again, they could have tracked you down, Tully, and killed you. They chose not to. When I give my report today, every person in the world will have the choice to hurl hate and stones at whomever they blame, or to refrain. They may refrain.”
I suspect Tully had not truly considered Jehovah his enemy until this moment. How dare He make the world think that my redemption proved mankind could be redeemed! How dare He make the world root for me! “Tribune,” Tully replied, cold, “only you and the Commissioner General know the full content of what you’re about to present to the Senate, so I’ll ask plainly: do you honestly believe anyone in the world will be able to take it calmly? Let alone everyone in the world?”
Jehovah’s gaze floated somewhere between Tully and the crowd, as if addressing an abstraction. “I would be a poor bailiff for the Humanists if I believed we have already seen the maximum of what a human being can achieve. What I will present today are proofs of what has already been said. Prime Minister Casimir Perry is actually the criminal Merion Kraye. The Anonymous has been secretly propping up the failing CFB for over a century. The Humanists have led Europe and the Mitsubishi in secret assassinations for two hundred and fifty years. These are facts we can endure—whether we will endure them we shall see. This is not the end of peace, it is the first chance we have ever had to make a real peace. In seeing how humanity comports itse—”
I saw red before I registered the sound, circus-bright red like finger paint against the marble, peppered with chunks of yellow-pink as Jehovah’s brain spilled across the platform, Martin, Caesar, and myself. A gunshot. I had not heard a proper gunshot since Saladin had knocked the last weapon from Seine Mardi’s hand, though the quick shocks of our handguns then were nothing to this blast, which thundered from all sides like God snapping his fingers. Jehovah fell, not dying but dead. His limbs, lifeless in life, convulsed as the nerves’ last tangled signals filled his hands and legs with madness, then stillness. Martin and I caught Him between us, the warmth of His blood flowing across our knees. Everyone screamed. Thousands, the Emperor, myself. What mattered, where the microphones were strong enough to pick it up, was what we screamed.
“Jehovah!” That came from the Emperor.
“Jehovah!” from Censor Ancelet as well.
“Jed!” from Kosala.
“Domine!” and tears from loving Martin, faster than the rest of us to move past shock to grief.
Tully screamed, no words, just scream, and I likewise lost my many languages as adrenaline and blood-wind flooded my mind with fever.
The crowd too screamed, erupting into stampede as the Forum drained like a fractured water drum.
“Tai-kun!” This last scream rose from Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi, who had not been with the others on the Rostra, but now gave away his hiding place watching from the doorway of the Mitsubishi embassy. “Let me go!” he shouted as his own guards dragged him back into the safety of the doors. “My son is dying! Let me go!”
Guards covered the Rostra, human shields pressing us down beneath a wall of uniforms, Masonic gray, Romanovan blue, Senatorial gold, Utopians too, Aldrin, Voltaire, Tully’s nameless escorts suddenly visible as they leapt into motion. Only Dominic escaped the defensive prison, hurling his would-be protectors bodily aside as he leapt up onto the Rostra’s railing to face the assassin. « Blasphémateuse! »
Sniper, rising, smiled at the compliment. It had lain in wait six hours, motionless beneath a camouflaged tarp on the roof of the law courts which stood to the other side of the Rostra, opposite the bustling Senate House. The proud assassin let its cameras rise around it now, broadcasting to all the world the clean pride on its face, and the twitch of its delicate nose as it scented gunpowder rising from the rifle, enormous in its arms. Sniper’s Olympic medals are in pentathlon and pistol, not rifle, but I have watched it train in rifle too, freezing dead for the instant of the shot, even its heartbeat kept on hold for that immeasurable fraction when the weapon fires. With that skill in Sniper’s arms, eighty meters’ distance, and screaming innocents crowded on a balcony just below Sniper’s rooftop perch, little wonder the guards hesitated before firing back. That vital half-second let Sniper slide from its exposed vantage on the roof’s center peak down to the cover of the flat portico roof.
“The danger’s over, friends, stay calm!” it called, lowering its weapon and relaxing in the cover of the portico’s statue-studded gutter rail. “Sorry to startle everyone. I am— Hey!” Sniper jumped at the gray-purple flash of a phasing stun-rifle, fired by one of Caesar’s guards, a modern marvel capable of passing clean through stone, but useless if it cannot find its mark. “I said stay calm!” the assassin snapped, its nose wrinkling like a child teaching a smaller child how the game is played. Too fast for us to see the means, it activated one of Cato’s masterpieces, six devices hidden around the Rostra, each no larger than a grapefruit, whose activation filled the air with electric sting, and fried all the electronics around the Rostra: the cameras, microphones, trackers, and all the elegant, nonlethal weapons carried by the guards.
Sniper waited for its own cameras to take over the severed video circuits and route its voice and image to the watching world. The portico was a perfect stage, packed below with crowds and columns, but flat and open on roof level, enough like a sports track to make our athlete feel at home. “Much better. Hello, friends and foes. I am Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, thirteenth O.S.” Its perfect doll’s face smiled softly to the cameras and the world. “I’m sorry. I know this is going to break a lot of hearts, but I swore an oath to protect the seven Hives, and my Hive most of all. That duty comes before all others, even my fans. I am the current leader of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ assassins, a position called by the title of O.S. Many of you don’t agree with what we’ve done in the past, killing unknowing individuals to protect unknowing masses, but that’s over. Today is different. You may not like it, but Tully Mardi’s right, even the best parts of history have had a little violence. All free peoples in every age and every continent have agreed that assassins are necessary for one purpose above all others: to kill tyrants. That’s what I’ve done today. You’ve all been deceived. There was a conspiracy in this Seven-Ten list mess, a much darker one than my bash’ and Hive committing homicides to protect the world. The real goal of the conspiracy was to expose us and the CFB in order to rip four of the seven Hives apart, and make J.E.D.D. Mason king of what remains!”
It is only thanks to the recordings that I can include these words, reader, for I heard none of them. Sniper had chosen its bullet well, explosive, scattering Jehovah’s skull and its precious contents across the stone like storm’s detritus abandoned on a beach. Ἄναξ Jehovah’s warm blood drenched me, pouring like rain from the wreckage of His head as His heart kept up its duty, pointless now. My own body failed, wracked by pain and panic more physical than mental as I felt the vital core within me stop. As a long run makes even simple breathing a challenge, now an unimaginable pressure made everything impossibly hard: seeing, hearing, sorting touch from pain, supporting Jehovah’s lifeless weight, supporting my own. I collapsed on the stone, my vision fading into neither bright nor dark, just fading. All I could think was that my fears were true. The Will Which Rules This Universe had sentenced me to death thirteen years ago, but Jehovah pitied me and made me His, and from that moment it was He, not This Universe’s God, Who gave me life. Now He was dead, and all He made would die with Him, including me. His universe must be dying too, somewhere unreachable, those marvels He
had half explained to me in shards of failing language: gradients of complexity, sentiences reveling in themselves without the impediments of Distance or of Time, a better universe, infinity of Good and Kindnness such as we will never know, lost. He had been so careful all His life, no sports, no unhealthy food, no rough play, riding only Utopian cars, not out of knowledge of the assassins, but fear that an accident, however improbable, in claiming Him might claim all His Creation. I wanted to pray that it not be so, that the true Jehovah might continue in His own world, He and His creations, separate and safe despite the death of flesh, but only This Universe’s God remained to hear, and what could He do for us?
“Mycroft!” Martin did his best to catch me as I fell, and I remember wondering why the motion of his face was pale and slow.
“Their pacemaker!” The Censor was the first to realize. “The blast shorted Mycroft’s pacemaker!” Strong hands caught me from all sides, good Vivien’s strongest, like sun-warmed wood among reeds. “Lay them side by side.” I saw him lean over me, angry, and I remember thinking he must want numbers from me, that I was late for my shift, or dozing in the Censor’s office, drifting off halfway through an article. “Stay with me, Mycroft!” he cried. “I won’t lose both of you, not in one day!”
“Then get out of the way!” Bryar Kosala shoved her husband aside, the arts of first aid ready in her hands. Flocking Utopians supplied all she needed, drawing medicine’s clean tools from their coats, their many nowheres reduced to static, short-circuited by Cato’s genius devices which Sniper had used to cripple MASON’s guards, the Rostra’s guards, and me.
“Utopian!” Dominic seized the nearest of them, Aldrin, by her coat of living static and pointed to Sniper’s rooftop. “Give me a gun!”
Aldrin froze, the others too, feeling the world’s eye on them. Gunpowder, of course, was unaffected by Cato’s invention, as perhaps were new technologies: electron guns, magnetic pistols, inventions which a peaceful Hive should not have had concealed beneath their Griffincloth.
“Don’t,” MASON ordered, cold. His guards had dragged him to shelter behind the Rostra but could not shift him further, the sight of Jehovah’s body filling his iron frame with a frenzy his six guards could barely match. “Not here.”
Dominic turned a fraction of his red-hot hate on Caesar. “You choose them over Him?” He did not wait for a reply, but leapt from the Rostra, clawing his wild way across the backs and shoulders of those too fascinated by the blood to run. Does it surprise you that the bloodhound leaves Jehovah’s side? That he does not stay, like Martin, clutching his Master’s lifeless hand, or sobbing on his knees? You think perhaps that he has given up on his Master, turned to revenge now that fact has stripped hope. Not so. Dominic saw no damage or danger in Jehovah’s assassination, only blasphemy. His mind had never recognized, even imagined, any Power other than Jehovah, so it could not register the concept that his God might die. His fingers, which did not care if they were scraped or broken, made a quick climb of the double porch of the basilica, using bystanders as footholds as he scrambled toward the infidel.
“J.E.D.D. Mason’s real name is Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet Mason.” Sniper still faced the floating cameras and, as rumor spread across the Earth like an electric plague, he reached the largest audience a single person had commanded since Emperor Mycroft MASON during the Set-Set Filibuster two hundred years before. “The mother who gave their child a name like that,” it continued, “is the leader of the conspiracy. They call themself Madame D’Arouet these days, but their birth name is Joyce Faust, one of Felix Faust’s ba’sibs. Joyce Faust left Brill’s Institute at nineteen and studied to be a sensayer, but instead of getting licensed they became a Blacklaw, moved to Paris, and founded the brothel where you saw all your leaders meeting in secret yesterday.” At Sniper’s cue the cameras split screened, showing again Ganymede and savage Perry-Kraye toppling through the shattered window at Madame’s. “I’m glad now that I brought my cameras there, since now we can show you the truth. Madame has a network of clients—spies—in every Hive, in Romanova too, thousands of them, many in high positions in the government. Madame controls them using a horde of ba’kids, if you can call them that, children they engineered and trained at their brothel like set-sets, teaching them sensayer techniques and antiquated gendered sex tricks to make them experts at manipulating people using seduction and religion. Danaë Mitsubishi is one of them. Danaë helped make Hotaka Andō Chief Director. President Ganymede was also one of them, but broke away, and has been working secretly as much as they could to free the Humanists from Joyce Faust’s conspirators without them noticing, but they did notice. That’s why Joyce Faust decided to expose O.S. They’d rather destroy the Humanists than lose control of us. And here’s another of their creations!”
Sniper pointed as Dominic hauled himself onto the roof, like a monster from the sea’s depths hauling its black bulk on deck.
“See!” Sniper continued. “This is Dominic Seneschal, one of Joyce Faust’s favorite creations. Look at them, look at him, wearing all the class and gender markers of the old days when people made slaves of each other. This Dominic was sent by Joyce Faust to corrupt the Conclave Head, Julia Doria-Pamphili, got them to do all the sick things you heard about in the arrest reports, and twisted them into manipulating their parishioners and the Conclave itself for Joyce Faust too. And now they’ve come to kill me rather than let me finish telling you the truth!”
Dominic did not answer the charge with words, but with his rapier, which has killed four Humanists and two Mitsubishi in legal duels, and I know not how many Blacklaw Hiveless in the war of all on all they so enjoy. There was no joy in Dominic’s thrust today, though, none of the elegance which makes a master duelist an artist rather than a thug, just thirst to see the infidel destroyed. Sniper parried. The sportsman in it would not counter blade with bullets, but brought out its epée, that same hilt which had won it the silver in 2450, though this time with a razor combat blade. Sniper had dressed for the occasion, wearing the jacket portion of its fencing whites from the Olympics, with its riding pants below, and the light runner’s shoes which had carried it the final three thousand meters to Olympic silver. Detractors claim that Sniper chose the Modern Pentathlon as its Olympic event out of weakness, that, lacking the natural talent or physique to excel at any one sport, the celebrity took advantage of its wealth to train in five; other critics, more vicious, say greed was its motive, since having multiple uniforms lets it sell more dolls and posters. Not so. I doubt if anyone since the baron who invented the event has viewed the pentathlon so sincerely as a test of military excellence: fencing, shooting, riding, swimming, running—the skills an old-fashioned soldier trapped behind enemy lines needed to fight for life, escape, and country. Others may whine that Sniper dishonored the sacred spirit of the games by staining its Olympic whites with blood that day, but that core of Humanists who still answer to ‘Olympian’ understood, and cheered.
“Joyce Faust’s conspiracy had only one real goal,” Sniper continued, jabbing with blade and words together, “to make Jehovah Mason ruler of the world by ripping down those Hives that can’t be controlled, and tricking the remaining Hive leaders into choosing Jehovah as their successor before they realized the others intend to do the same!”
Dominic snarled, striking for Sniper’s head, but the athlete had not sparred a decade and learned nothing. It ducked and, with a quick foot, flipped up the bulk of its discarded rifle, so the weapon tumbled against Dominic’s shins. Dominic fell to his knees but kept his blade, a brief defeat, but enough for Sniper to flit out of range and loose another barrage of truth.
“It’s an elegant way to conquer the world, I’ll give Joyce Faust that.” Sniper glared over at its enemy, half smiling. “Tell me, Dominic, I’m sure you of all people know: how did Joyce Faust convince Cornel MASON to adopt their child? Precedent says the Emperor can’t pass power to a Porphyrogene, but one look down there’s enough for anyone to tell whose name is really in th
e Sanctum Sanctorum in Alexandria.” Sniper pointed with its blade at MASON behind the Rostra, his face slick with tears. “Is Joyce Faust still sleeping with the Emperor? Or did they only do it back around when Jehovah was born? Nothing like sex to make a man consider a child theirs, whatever DNA says.”
“Blasphemy!” Dominic lunged like a mantis. “Thou, worm, hast put Tully Warmonger on the Rostra, risking World War, to lure Maître Jehovah to thy trap! He came today to bring peace to mankind, and thou interruptest that gift and assaultest His flesh, for what? To distract the masses from the exposure of thine own crimes! Villainy! Treason! A thousand times treason!”
Treason was a strange choice. Technically assault on a Romanovan Tribune was High Treason, but I suspect Dominic had in mind the more basic treason of a creation attacking the God Who had adopted it and its world, abandoned, as it seemed, by its own Maker.
“You’re the one trying to distract the masses,” Sniper shot back. “We all just heard Hotaka Andō say they think Jehovah—Tai-kun—is their child.” Sniper retreated around the square track of the porch roof, teasing Dominic’s blade with swift taps too irregular for its opponent to guess which might become a deadly thrust. “Madame even had Danaë make sure Andō wouldn’t sire any other heir. Your Jehovah Mason would have inherited all Andō’s shares and clients, and Andō even let them sit on the Directorate, the unofficial Tenth Director, poised to take control of the Mitsubishi when the other nine are arrested for their involvement in the assassinations.”
Dominic slashed hard, taking advantage of his rapier’s weight, which threatened to knock the light sport epée from Sniper’s hand. “That has always burned thee, hasn’t it, blasphemer? That there was an extra voice in the Directorate which would never accept murder as a means. How many more problems wouldst thou and thy base masters have tried to solve through blood if Maître Jehovah’s Love for humankind had not restrained thee?”
