by Ada Palmer
The suggestion struck like lightning. I had not thought of it. Perhaps you, wiser than I, had, reader, but it is far easier to doubt another’s existence than to doubt one’s own. My mind searched itself for proof, dredging up memories, actions, continuity, excuses. It couldn’t be true. “I’m not your invention, Bridger,” I answered, more for myself than him. “I have too many memories of things you don’t understand.”
“Stander-G remembers fighting at Lyrnessus. I don’t know where Lyrnessus is!”
I shook my head. “I have too many other loyalties. You wouldn’t have made a Mycroft that felt like I do about Ἄναξ Jehovah.”
“Maybe I only changed the surface, maybe I made you nice and kind and loyal like this, where you should be fierce and free and scary, like your friend!” He paused for breath. “I almost turned them into Apollo, when they first showed up, your scary friend. They looked so much like Apollo. Apollo would know how to fix everything, I thought. I almost did it. Think about how sad you would’ve been. Just like Sadcat, and as long as I exist I might do the same thing, accidentally, anytime, to anyone, to everyone!”
Alarm far worse than fear of Sniper’s bullets set on me like frost. “As long as you exist? What are you doing in there, Bridger? Bridger!”
“It’s like Croucher said, I can’t control my powers. I’m turning the whole world into a war story like Apollo’s Iliad. Just by being so scared of it, I’m making it be real. I can’t stop it! Can you imagine how much worse it’ll be if I go crazy? I can’t handle this power. No one can.”
“Jehovah can. That’s why you’re here together. Providence planned this. Jehovah has the experiences, the thinking of a God. You’re omnipotent, They know how to handle omnipotence. They’ll guide you. You each have half of what you need.”
Conviction’s heat made Bridger’s words strong, not fiery, but like a candle, just strong enough to hold its own. “If that was the plan then Providence would’ve given Jehovah my powers in the first place. They’re not for Jehovah. They’re not for anyone. No one should have them, especially not me!”
Major:
“Bridger?” I called. “What are you doing?”
“Mommadoll wouldn’t want to see this.” His voice broke, the sorts of sobs that usually come only with pain. “I’m done, can’t you see that? I brought Jehovah proof that God exists, that’s what my powers were for, you said so yourself, so did Jehovah. You don’t need me anymore. Everything else I do just makes things worse.”
“You’re not done, Bridger. We need you more than ever. You can stop the war, all of it, by working with Jehovah—”
“You know that’s not true! I can’t prevent the war, it’s already started! All I can do is pick a side.”
“You can do more than that. You can end it sooner, make it less bad. Win the war!”
“I don’t know how!” His words began to slur, the half-formed syllables of a child speaking more to himself than anyone. “You should’ve raised me as a soldier. That’s what you need now, a soldier, a replacement for Apollo, not someone like me. Then I can disappear.”
“Disappear?” I tugged at the door, remembering now the boxes of old clothes we had hauled from Bridger’s cave: coats, T-shirts, wigs. “Bridger, you’re not putting on a costume, are you?”
“I want the world to be safe. I’m not the one who can make it safe.”
“No! Bridger, we need you!” I slammed the door with my shoulder. “Not Apollo, you!”
“This power shouldn’t exist.”
Tears leaked from me, desperate, but how many more, reader, must have been streaming down his cheeks, a child with such thoughts.
“Apollo’s statue!” I cried. “You don’t have to transform yourself. You can animate Apollo’s statue! Apollo will guide you through it! Come, we’ll go to Romanova together!”
His words could barely break his sobs. “I don’t want to see any more like what’s happening at Brussels and Tōgenkyō. I don’t want to live through this.”
“You can’t, Bridger!” I hurled myself against the flat steel, feeling my shoulder pop, but if we do not care what bones we break when fighting for our lives, what could I care fighting for everyone’s? “You can’t destroy yourself! Everyone on Earth, everyone in history, we’ve been waiting for your power! Waiting for you!”
Aimer:
My blood spattered the steel as I pounded the door. “Bridger!” I screamed. I learned then that I had never truly screamed before, not to the desperate maximum a body can. “Don’t do it! We need you! I need you! I love you! Bridger!”
I am hardened to many kinds of pain, reader, of body and of mind, but I had no more armor against this new pain than if I had never held Apollo’s body in my arms. Desperation turned to prayer: Don’t take Bridger. Please. Don’t take this child whom I love, not as others before me have loved a son, a brother, a savior, a master, but whom I—strange creature that I am—love in all these ways at once, all rolled together into a new kind of love, abject and irrevocable, that has as yet no name. Do not take that from me too, after taking Apollo. Reader, whatever curses you have for me—worm, monstrosity, unholy brute—I deserve them all, I who, in the moment of humanity’s great loss, raised so selfish a prayer. To Whom? To Jehovah, Who has no powers here? Or to His Peer Who rules This Universe, my intractable Maker, Who had long since Judged that my evil requires more ingenious punishments than death? But my old crimes, weighed against this new one, were like the theft of an apple weighed against a patricide. It would be my fault. All the hopes of humankind lost—my fault. I saw it, even as my fists battered the door, as impassable as the barrier between today and thirteen years ago. I did this. I taught Bridger weakness. I taught him to tremble, flinch, hide, run. Providence made me our savior’s caretaker, and now he proved too weak because I made him so. A new, more fitting prayer bled through me: Don’t let my failure doom everyone. Don’t take away the hope, the better world, the wonders Bridger could conjure for Utopia, for all of us, because of me. Don’t make the living stay mortal and the dead stay dead because of me. Apollo, Seine Mardi, older heroes, Patriarch Voltaire, Diogenes, Odysseus, MASON who will die someday, Papa, good Spain, my Saladin, and every victim of the coming war, they all could walk the Earth another hundred years, five hundred, live to walk on Mars, on Titan, on the ship decks wrought of substances undreamt-of which will someday bear us to the Sea of Stars. If there are still colors in grief’s palette that I—orphan, parricide, traitor, wanderer, fool—have not yet had wrung out of my flesh, then let me suffer them, not all the world. Don’t take Bridger. Don’t leave us here alone to fight Apollo’s war because of me.
“We lost him.” A man’s voice came through the door, rough, where the child’s should have been. But not Apollo’s.
“Major?”
The door opened, easy from the other side. The veteran’s cheeks were wet, though whether with Bridger’s remnant tears or with his own I could not say. “We had him and we lost him, our one chance.” The fatigues hung slack around him, man-sized on a body that was still a boy’s in scale. Bridger had been thorough. He launched the Major into life with all his gear, his pack, his helmet, bedroll, ammunition, rifle on his shoulder, while Bridger’s own kid-bright backpack rested in his hands, personal effects packed neatly for the tearful loved ones. “I’ll kill it,” the Major announced. “Sniper. I’ll kill it.”
I slumped useless before him, grief’s convulsions too severe to let me stand. It was not despair. Despair is a numbing blackness, which offers at least the consolation that there is no next task to face; I had tasks still.
“Sniper did this!” the Major continued, his voice iron enough to make MASON’s seem weak. “We could have saved everyone, living and dead, and Sniper destroyed it, Sniper, with its petty duty, and its Hive System. I’ll kill
it. I’ll run it through, and feel its blood across my hands, and taste its last breath as it gasps away its life!”
I choked down breath enough to start my pleading, “Major, stop.”
“And then I’ll gather all its stupid dolls and burn them!” He kicked the one that lay beside me, his eyes taking pleasure as the neck flopped limp. “How far do you think the smoke would reach? A million toy corpses burning, but not the real one! Never the real one. No funeral rites for Sniper, no mourning fans and speeches. I’ll haul it to a field somewhere and watch the dogs and birds feast on its heart!”
“Stop, it won’t help.”
“And then the others, Ockham, Tully Mardi—there’s one you should’ve finished off long ago. They did this with their petty ambitions. I’ll make their bodies carrion, all of them!”
“Stop, Achilles. It isn’t Sniper’s fault, it’s ours.”
He turned, just enough to glance sidelong at me, while the helmet’s shadow veiled his expression. “So, you did know.”
I choked. “I felt like saying something would make it more true.”
He fidgeted with the rifle at his shoulder, where his shield should be. “How long have you known it was me?”
“I wasn’t positive until Lieutenant Aimer turned so conspicuously into Patroclus.”
“Have I always been … myself?”
“I don’t think so,” I answered, softly. “At first I think you were just an abstract soldier, but as Bridger matured, and their concepts of war and death matured, you matured with them. When they read the Iliad, it changed you. We both helped Bridger read it, over and over, Homer’s version and Apollo’s version too, so you became Achilles bit by bit.” I felt my breath grow steady, loss’s sorrow easing as a different sorrow took its place: pity. “I’ve always wondered which war you remember: the World Wars, or Apollo’s future war flying in your giant robot hero-god across the dark of Space, or Troy.”
I wasn’t sure that he would answer. The Major—Achilles—he was never one to open his heart, not in any version. He was my commander, and a king. He owed me nothing. Even if we had been friends, co-parents, I had lied to him these long years, pretending I did not hear his Greekisms, his invocations of Hades and the other deathless gods, his fear whenever his Lieutenant Aimer volunteered for some mission. I had lied by feigning ignorance; even if I said nothing, I had lied.
Achilles flexed his veteran shoulders beneath the pack and straps. “You know, even when it isn’t in my hand, I can always feel the rifle with me.” He stroked its stock, then reached out, grasping at something invisible in the air before him. “And the controllers”—his hand fell to his side now—“and the spear. I remember all three, not jumbled, three full lives. I remember growing up on the mountains with Chiron the centaur who taught me to hunt, and with Chiron the flight instructor who made me best pilot in the forces. I remember losing Patroclus three times. And Hector, I remember the feel of Hector’s blood, the stink of Hector’s corpse growing fouler day by day, three times, a different smell each time. I remember dying, too, Apollo’s arrow, Paris. Three times. More than three, so many versions.” He turned to me. “You know what else I remember? I remember the Odyssey. I remember when Odysseus came to see us in the Underworld, do you remember that part?” He paused. “We were all there, Tiresias who knew too much, and my Patroclus, and that blowhard Agamemnon. I said then that I would rather be the lowest man alive, breaking my back to plow another’s land for a starvation wage, rather than be what I was, the most honored of the dead. I meant it. Ten years I’ve been a tiny plastic toy babysitting a child in a gutter, and I’ve thanked the gods for every day. I think that’s why they picked me as guardian. I understood Bridger’s gift better than anyone. The dead want to live. Even those of us who never really existed in the first place, we want to live, not all of us, maybe, but most of us. We want it more than anything. Even if it means being a toy, or a slave, or suffering like you and I have, Mycroft, we want to live. That’s more important than the Hives and what might happen to this world, wonderful as this world is. Bridger would have given life to everybody, everyone who ever died, or will die, more, even to people who were half fictitious like me, everyone that anyone ever believed would want to live. We could have. They tested us, the Fates, the gods, your Providence, it has so many names. They gave us one chance to let everybody live. We failed.”
I had thought I’d mastered my tears, but Boo emerged now, sniffing for his absent master, his friendly, furry face confused but not yet sad. Halley came with him, Apollo’s long, green Pillarcat, abandoned at Romanova after Tully’s arrest. The U-beast had tracked us somehow, locked onto me perhaps or Bridger, seeking a familiar scent. I hardly had strength enough to speak as my tears flowed free. “You know Fate better than that, Achilles!” I had not intended the reproof to come out as a scream, but it did, sharp as the grief that spurred it. “Fate doesn’t taunt. This was all planned. Paris takes Helen. We lose Bridger and Apollo. The war begins. It’s all one Plan. You being here now in Bridger’s place, that’s the Plan too.”
Achilles scowled. “I’ve never really understood Fate, not in fiction or reality.”
“I understood it once.” I shuddered, gazing at my own tear-blurred hands which seemed (not only then but always) red with blood. “I understood it, after I killed Apollo—no, after I learned I hadn’t had to kill Apollo, when I met Jehovah and realized that, by letting me think I understood the way the Hives worked, Providence had tricked me into killing the best person in the world.” I choked. “I understood then, but these past years, seeing Bridger’s powers, I let myself fall into the delusion that Providence might be simple. It isn’t simple. It isn’t kind. It isn’t working toward some happy end where we’re all saved, and every bad thing that happens turns out to be for the best in ways we can’t yet see. It isn’t cruel either, though it often seems so.” I tried to meet his eyes, but faltered. “It’s not trying to destroy humanity, or torture us, or leave us in the dark alone. It’s something else. There is a guiding Principle, not Good, not Evil, not Justice, not even Progress, something else that we can’t understand or name yet, one of these God-sized concepts that even Jehovah can’t describe in all His languages. Providence planned this war. It’s going to let millions die, let cities burn, make us tear down the better part of the world we’ve built, but it’s not going to let us wipe ourselves out. That’s why it left you. A kind God would have left us Bridger. A cruel One would have left us nothing. This One left you. You know how to fight this war, Achilles. We have no idea what’s coming, but you do. You’ve fought this war before, a future war, with flying cars, and tracker computers, and new weapons made from Mukta fuel and U-beasts. You’ve already fought Apollo’s war. You can teach us.”
The veteran rubbed his hands, exploring their calluses, so many kinds, too thick to let the nerves beneath feel much anymore. “It won’t start with new weapons. It’ll start with bats, and kitchen knives, and scared people defending themselves against neighbors they can’t trust. Then Sniper’s hero delusions will spread, people imitating war movies with the guns and planes and missiles hobbyists have stashed in their basements. Innovation will take longer.”
I felt my own tears changing, hope diluting grief. “But you know the old weapons too. You fought at Troy with bronze and horses. You fought the World Wars with guns and planes. You know how to lead men into battle, what will break a soldier, and what won’t. You trained in the trenches, and with Chiron, and in Space. You know how to fight this war. You know how to fight every war ever, because you have.”
Achilles did not look at me. Long years of breaking bread together, and wiping Bridger’s tears, were not enough to make him ready to share sentiments more private than his rage, even with me. “Then we have work to do.” He rummaged in Bridger’s backpack, Hermes’s winged sandals fluttering in protest as he jumbled them among folds of cloak, and futuretech, and wands. “I’m keeping Excalibur, and a couple of these.” He pulled healing and resurrection p
otions from the depths. “Take the rest to your Utopians. They’ll use it right, analyze it, learn from it, maybe reproduce it someday.” He dropped the bag at my side, knowing my arms would be too weak to hold it. “You’re right, the gods didn’t leave us with nothing. We have these, and we have me. I’ll teach you and Jehovah how to fight your war. I know how, any war, all wars. It’s all I do know. The Mardis worried what would happen with no veterans left to teach the current generation what war was like. Their prayer at least was answered.” He paused as if to laugh. “Take me to Romanova. Have Jehovah call your allies in, the Emperor, Anonymous, Spain if you can, Kosala, I’ll brief them all at once. And call your Servicers. Thanks to you they’re closer to a ready army than anything else on Earth.” He frowned finding me immobile, weeping still. “Mycroft?” he tested.
“Yes?”
Achilles took a long breath, ready to move on. “Get up. I won’t win this war without you. You know that.”
The first lesson you will learn when war reaches you, reader, is that our limits in civilian life, the point at which we are too tired, too distraught, too weak to go on, are not really our limits. I rose and saluted.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND
Last Prayer
Now I have fulfilled the strict command to give you truth. I bared myself, my secrets, and Jehovah’s secrets, even those which will make you call Him mad. I exposed His mother, His fathers, and many sins and crimes which great and wary rulers would rather have silenced. I showed you Bridger. I showed you the resurrection that you witnessed, but cannot quite believe in. And I told you who this strange man is who now stands often at Jehovah’s side, small as a boy but hero-strong, and calls himself Achilles Mojave. I do not ask you to believe, just play-believe, since often things we play-believe in—superstitions, bedtime stories, luck—still make us feel a little better when hard choices come.
