by Ada Palmer
“Now violence is threatening again. If we lose the Cousins, Earth’s last humane, feminine, temperate voice will die, and we will have nothing left to intercede when other forces quarrel. Tribune Jehovah Mason understands this. He and I were raised with masculine and feminine. We had it in our minds when we drafted this interim constitution, assigning extra representatives to humanitarian groups, teachers, doctors, daycare workers, office managers, grandbash’parents, new parents, veterinarians, therapists, all the voices of nurturing that have always been the core of the Cousins. Trust us! Call for the Cousins to elect an Interim Assembly that will finally actually reflect the values that have always defined the Hive. Then, when the Cousins are remade, a revised form of the CFB can be a part of—”
Who would dare interrupt her righteous tirade? Only God, or rather His works, manifest in the mingled screams of men and women which burst in through the doors and windows in a universal shell of human grief. Order collapsed like sand castles before a flood. The agenda, Kosala’s announcement, even the rebuttals that had built up like battle-hungry legions during Heloïse’s speech, all were swept clean away as the reporters watching from the balcony, one eye on their newsfeed lenses, screamed:
“Brussels!”
“Parliament!”
“A bomb!”
“A missile! Three!”
“It’s burning!”
“Someone just blew up the European Parliament!”
I, still a prisoner of the operating table, was one of perhaps a thousand people in the world who did not watch. The Senators, like you, reader, or like your ancestors, tuned in and watched the flames which boiled around the columns of the Parliamentary Hall, like the bloody juices of some demon’s gut unleashed upon the stone. A mob had assembled in the streets of Brussels, with stones and Molotov cocktails hidden behind their signs and chants, but they scattered now like blasted sand before the inferno which, in their fervor, they might have created themselves, had someone not beaten them to it. Stone shards flew like hail. More missiles followed, sky-bolts trailing white smoke like celestial fingers pointing to the target of Providence’s wrath. Even riding the Space Elevators, children invited by Utopia to enjoy their first taste of humanity’s next destination froze to watch the trails bloom around Brussels like the starburst of a dandelion.
Commentary followed, the more resilient reporters struggling to narrate what they could understand of the barrage. Others, honest about their ignorance, resorted to film, replaying the impact of the first missile on the dome, or the last footage of the session within. Parliament had been full, every bench filled by the Prime Minister’s summons, wings crammed with judges, aides, and Europe’s Senators, who had accepted Perry’s invitation to share the security of the Parliament House, and so escape the Romanovan mob. Casimir Perry himself, bandaged and bloody from his fall at Madame’s the night before, had been at the podium at the final moment, railing at the assembly like a man possessed. « I’m no more guilty than any of you! Everyone in this room consented to the O.S. murders, not once but a hundred times! It is impossible to deny! Every one of you voted for ‘special means’ more than thirty times since Spain was voted out! And you protected it with your silence for decades before! You are guilty, all of you! The world— » The first blast knocked him to the ground, and buried a third of Parliament in stone and flame. « You see! We all deserve judgment! The world knows it! The world will be our judge! » Flame followed.
In Romanova, Heloïse was most prepared to break shock’s spell. “Aunt Bryar, come!” She tugged the Cousin Chair’s limp hand. “The world needs you! There are victims! Fires! Orphans! Burns! Europe is wounded! It needs your ambulances, your nurses, your councilors! It needs your Cousins! Come!”
Bryar Kosala paused, eyes locked on her husband the ex-Censor and ex-Anonymous—Hiveless and soon to be a Humanist, but with the French nation-strat band still bright around his wrist—who sat doubled over in his seat, winded by sobs as the heart of Europe burned. She followed Heloïse.
* * *
“Madame must marry me!” King Isabel Carlos II paced like a tormented lion in the too-small chamber outside Madame’s bedroom. “She must! There is no other solution!”
“Don’t talk nonsense.” Felix Faust never seems so exhausted as when he must repeat himself. “You’re the King of Spain. You can’t marry a prostitute. What would your friend the pope say?”
Spain jumped like a startled hare at every rustle from the bedroom, where a cloud of maids oversaw Madame’s convalescence after the latest tests to track the health of her impending Son. The obstetrician had shooed out all visitors, too many suitors competing to hold Madame’s hands and ask repetitious questions. When the images of the Fetus were ready for viewing, the gentlemen would be summoned to share the moment with the blushing mother-to-be, but until then they were banished to her little foyer, whose painted cherubs seemed to grin with glee at the discord sown among Earth’s leaders by the doctor’s confirmation of the father.
“I’ll abdicate if I have to!” The King fidgeted as he paced, fingering the hem of his blue Prime Minister’s sash, its row of gold stars perfect with his waistcoat of champagne silk. “I won’t leave my child to be raised in secret like some object of shame.”
“Your Majesty, why do we have to say it’s your child?” Twenty-two years ago Censor Ancelet looked more haggard than he does now, sleep-starved, scrawny, all the symptoms of self-neglect which would not be cured until marriage merged his tiny all-vocateur French Graylaw bash’ with Kosala’s huge and loving Indian Cousin one. “Without the test,” he pressed, “could anyone in this room say with certainty the child wasn’t ours?” His eyes tested them all, the King first, then Faust, Director Andō, and the Emperor.
Ganymede raised an idle alabaster hand. The young Duke lounged on the central sofa, the perfection of his flesh, still sparkling with youth, nude except for a translucent faux-Greek drape of the sort that only sculptures, nymphs, and gods can get away with. This was seven years after Danaë’s marriage, and the twins had succeeded in winning Andō the Chief Director’s seat at last, but Ganymede himself had not yet made the transition from objet d’art to President.
“That’s a fair point.” Andō’s voice brightened. “It could as easily be my son. Who’s to say it’s not?”
“It’s not,” His Majesty answered flatly. “Things would be simpler if it were.”
“Then why not let it be? What the public doesn’t know—”
“Is still fact.”
Andō made fists within his sleeves, the timed dyes of the Mitsubishi cloth just starting to ripen from summer green to autumn gold. “Isn’t who raises a child more important than—”
“You can’t be serious, Andō.” Ganymede did not lift his murder-blue eyes from a volume of la Fontaine, whose verses served as distraction from his irritation at the arrival of a Child who would irrevocably outrank him. “A royal prince given over to a common businessman to raise? Marrying my sister may give you the effective rank of Earl, but you’re only a Mitsubishi by adoption, and even the Mitsubishi are barely nobility.”
Andō spun, glaring less at the Duke than at the acquiescing silence of the King and Emperor.
“Eight minutes.” Headmaster Faust sighed at the ivory watch face embedded in the knob of his antique cane. “Eight minutes without a female chaperone and we’re already at each other’s throats.” He snickered at the problem. It was a marvel, really, that such a mixture rarely degenerated into duels: the Chief Director and King Prime Minister locked in a room with their foe the Emperor, an acerbic young Ganymede, and Faust’s gadfly sense of humor. Kosala (not yet Chair) was not there to add her maternal restraint, and even the authoritative calm of the Comte Déguisé was absent, for that glorified bureaucrat we call the Censor was weak in those days, barely important enough to visit this inner circle, since He Who six years later would unmask him as the Anonymous was still in the laborious process of gestating.
“Anyway, there’s no ne
ed for us to fight over this.” Faust tried his best to smile the tension away. “The child will stay with its mother, that’s the way kings usually dispose of their bastards, isn’t it? Unless Spain wants to go the other traditional route and pretend the child is their nephew by some convoluted logic.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Andō was fastest to accuse. “Giving the two of you equal claim as uncles?”
Faust snorted. “I don’t think much can be done to keep me from being the child’s uncle.”
“I won’t have it raised a Brillist, Felix.” The Chief Director slammed the wall. “I won’t!”
Faust’s smile died. “You’d prefer a set-set?”
“Stop, both of you.” Stress made His Majesty’s voice kinder, like a nurse trying to soften a diagnosis. “It’s not what we want that matters, it’s what the child needs. They will be second in line to the throne of Spain. If the Crown Prince proves unpopular, there may be a faction that tries to make this child King, or Prime Minister. They need to grow up prepared for that, to have support, a bash’, a family, ready to help the child refuse if others try to exploit them for their power games.”
“That’s what I’m offering,” Andō answered, harsh. “Myself, a father, family, I can give the child that, you can’t. Let me raise the baby as my own and, whatever its parentage, no Spaniard will want it on the throne, and no European will want to make it Prime Minister. It’s the right solution.” He searched the others’ faces for signs of softening. “You think I’m basing this on nothing? Madame came to me. They said—”
“They said they think of you as the child’s true father,” MASON interrupted, slouching on his bench like a storm-tired tree. “They said they don’t care what the DNA test says. They even said they planned to name the child after your favorite philosopher as a tribute. Which one was yours, Andō? Epicurus?”
The Chief Director’s fists trembled with the desire to contradict.
“The Emperor’s right, Chief Director,” the Censor ventured, tense and formal, knowing himself a mere clerk among kings. “This was no accident on Madame’s part: twenty-nine years running a brothel without a single pregnancy, then suddenly, at a moment that all of us are poised to think ourselves the father, a bouncing baby boy. It’s not coincidence, and it’s also not coincidence that the actual father is the only one of us for whom the bloodline really matters.” His tone stayed calm, but passion and his left fist spilled his whisky. “With the exception of Their Majesty, none of us has children of our own. None of us is likely to, not while the only women that can excite us are the ones Madame controls. This right here, this is Madame’s goal, all of us squabbling for a chance to raise their child, when this whole stunt was obviously planned to give Madame a stronger hold over us.”
His Majesty Isabel Carlos II faced the Censor with a soft sigh. “No one here will deny that this is a scheme on Madame’s part, but in my case, scheme or not, it worked. A father has a duty to their child, and to the mother of that child, which no political circumstances can negate.”
The Emperor fingered the crystal facets of his own glass. “You’re seriously ready to destroy yourself over this, aren’t you?”
His Majesty remained majestic. “I will not let my indiscretion harm my people, or my son.”
“He’s precocious!” Madame’s cry burst out with a bugle’s bright enthusiasm as her maids opened the door to admit her gentlemen. She lay on top of the sheets, her vast yellow gown embroidered with a blushing maiden’s birds and daisies. A wig was impractical in bed, but her hair remained concealed by a modest ruffled bonnet. “Come in! You must see! The doctor says she’s never seen so much brain activity at twenty weeks. He’s wriggling around like a little athlete, opening his eyes already, and she says if she didn’t know better she’d swear he was trying to propel himself around by grabbing the umbilical cord!”
“Is something wrong with the child?” Spain asked at once.
All looked to the doctor, a graying Utopian, who sat in the corner reviewing the 3D model of the womb projected by her otter, while her coat showed the voyage of a microsubmarine exploring the rose-warm labyrinth of someone’s bronchia. She shrugged. “We don’t think so.” I omit her technical monologue, since none of the prospective fathers followed it well enough to summarize. “Its development is strangely accelerated, but probably fine.”
“He’s more than fine,” Madame insisted, beaming. “He’s perfect!” She loosed one of the ties of her gown and bared the warm bulge of her belly. “Come feel.”
However many millions of generations may be born upon this Earth, I think life’s miracle will still inspire awe enough to freeze us, as a schoolchild freezes, afraid the dream will end when he dares stamp his first footprint on the lunar dust.
The mother waited, blinking impatience. “No one?”
The first who did dare place a palm on her bare orb was a child who lurked among the servants, nine years old, already silent as a hunter, uniformed in the deep blood-crimson which was his favorite color before Jehovah grew old enough to choose black.
Madame smiled at her young creation. “Dominic at least is a brave boy.” She touched his shoulder. “Canst thou feel thy master?”
The child did not answer, but stood, eyes shut, lost in the depths of touch. I asked Dominic once if he remembered what thoughts passed through him as his short fingers felt the taut warmth of the life which would so dominate his own; he struck me for my audacity.
“Madame,” the King Prime Minister began in his delicate tenor, “we have been discussing the child’s future.”
“I will not marry Your Majesty.” She blinked to prove her sigh was tearful. “I will not so damage Your Majesty’s reputation, nor will I have my child caught up in a power struggle with your late Queen’s surviving son.”
“Madame—”
“It would hurt all of us.” She took the royal father’s hand, gazing up into the face that adorned so many coins and portraits. “I know you want to do right by our child, but the honorable thing in this case is not the kind thing, not to our child, or to me, or to yourself. Tell him, Caesar.”
Madame looked to the Emperor, who drew close on her other side. Together, reader, we have seen Cornel MASON’s black-sleeved left hand quake many times with rage, sometimes with prudent fear, his instincts scenting something rotten on the edges of his Empire, but his steady right hand, that I find hard to imagine trembling. They say it happened when he entered the Sanctum Sanctorum to take the MASONIC Oath of Office, which even the successor may not read until the moment he must take it. They say it happened when Apollo had Mushi let him touch a Mars ant. They say it happened as he set his palm against Madame’s bare skin and felt the Baby kick.
Caesar’s words were firm as a portcullus slamming down: “I will adopt our child as Porphyrogene.”
All turned. All gasped.
“Caesar?” The mask of makeup on Madame’s portrait face was too thick to show whether she blushed.
As the steel cage of a splint is gentle to the millimeter toward the limb it heals yet also hard as armor, so the Emperor’s hand stayed stiff but gentle on her belly. “For a royal prince to be raised as an imperial prince instead is surely neither deprivation nor dishonor.”
Spain’s tears flowed freely now. “You would do this for me?”
“For themself,” Director Andō cut in, flushing with passion. “For control.”
“No, the opposite: for all of us.” Not harshness but warmth rose in Caesar’s eyes, in his face, a human warmth which caught Andō off guard. “This is our child.” He looked to Andō first, then Spain, Faust, the Duke, the staring Censor, “I’m sure you feel it too, all of our child, the child of our … connections, to each other and Madame, as much as if this were a real bash’.” Even brooding Andō could not resist the word, the smile it coaxed. “We can’t be a real bash’,” Caesar added quickly, “but this child should be raised among us, all of us, or as close to among us as we can make possible. As Po
rphyrogene the child will grow up at the center of world politics, and the public will think it perfectly natural if my peers and collagues come to know them, and spend time with them. That way you will all be able to help raise them, not only here, but out in the public world, as ba’pas should.”
Warm feelings rose in all their faces, longing, friendship, many different things named love, even the primordial tenderness called parenthood, except in Ganymede de la Trémoïlle.
“Do you propose to raise the Prince away from here, Caesar? In Alexandria? Not at Madame’s?” Here the Duke-Consul’s impossibly blue eyes show his reflexive fear, Madame’s creation remembering how hard he fought to break from her, to seize even the tiny hint of freedom he now enjoyed having his own houshold at La Tremouille. A childhood in Alexandria could spare this child that fight, but, on the other hand, to be raised outside this house in Paris is to be raised a sexless, cultureless barbarian; can the noble Duke wish that upon a babe who shares the blood of Charlemagne?
“Oh, he must stay here with me!” came the Lady’s sweet but absolute reply. “He must have the proper tutors and attendants”—she smiled down at little Dominic—“and here he can spend time with His Majesty”—a nod to Spain—“and all of you, freely, outside the public eye. But I do think it would be a great thing for him to learn outside ways as well, and to see Alexandria, and Tōgenkyō.” A smile for Andō. “And, yes, Felix, you may take Him to the Institute.” A more teasing smile for her brother. “And I trust Your Grace too will be at His little Highness’s service, to tutor him in what you have learned dallying among the Humanists?”
