Too Like the Lightning Read online

  He nodded. “That makes good sense. I’m glad you’re running tests.”

  “Rule three,” she pressed, “you don’t bring Bridger new toys or pictures or storybooks or anything like that without running them by us first.”

  He arched his brows. “May I ask why?”

  “Attachment,” she answered. “Bridger knows they can’t fill the world with living toys, but sometimes they get upset when they get attached to a character they shouldn’t bring to life.”

  He nodded.

  She nodded back.

  Does it distress you, reader, how I remind you of their sexes in each sentence? ‘Hers’ and ‘his’? Does it make you see them naked in each other’s arms, and fill even this plain scene with wanton sensuality? Linguists will tell you the ancients were less sensitive to gendered language than we are, that we react to it because it’s rare, but that in ages that heard ‘he’ and ‘she’ in every sentence they grew stale, as the glimpse of an ankle holds no sensuality when skirts grow short. I don’t believe it. I think gendered language was every bit as sensual to our predecessors as it is to us, but they admitted the place of sex in every thought and gesture, while our prudish era, hiding behind the neutered ‘they,’ pretends that we do not assume any two people who lock eyes may have fornicated in their minds if not their flesh. You protest: My mind is not as dirty as thine, Mycroft. My distress is at the strangeness of applying ‘he’ and ‘she’ to thy 2450s, where they have no place. Would that you were right, good reader. Would that ‘he’ and ‘she’ and their electric power were unknown in my day. Alas, it is from these very words that the transformation came which I am commanded to describe, so I must use them to describe it. I am sorry, reader. I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.

  Carlyle smiled now. “Those are good rules, good precautions.”

  I think he meant the words as praise, but Thisbe gave an irritated kick, nearly catching my nose with her heel under the table. Of course they were good precautions. She was Thisbe Saneer of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’, custodian since birth of one of the most powerful engines of our civilization. Who was this little Cousin to pronounce judgment—good or bad—on her precautions? “Then follow them.”

  “I will.” Carlyle licked his lips, the thousand questions in his mind struggling to choose a vanguard. “Where did Bridger come from?”

  She breathed deep. “We don’t know. They were a toddler when they animated the soldiers, we don’t know anything before that. We’ve been raising them here in secret ever since, and it’s going to remain secret until Bridger is mature enough to fully understand the implications of their powers, and decide for themself who, if anyone, to show them to.”

  “You’ve raised them in this bash’?”

  “In the flower trench outside,” she corrected. “There are hiding places.”

  “Does the rest of your bash’ know?”

  “No.”

  I spoke up, “Cato.”

  “Right.” Thisbe laughed, possibly at herself, or possibly at having a bash’mate so harmless she could forget. “Cato sort of knows.”

  “That’s Cato Weeksbooth?” I saw the flicker in Carlyle’s lenses as he brought up the file. “I don’t have an appointment with them yet, but I called to make one.”

  Thisbe frowned. “Cato doesn’t know about Bridger’s powers, or the soldiers, or even that Bridger lives here in the trench, but we take Bridger to a kids’ science club Cato runs, to meet other children, so Cato knows Bridger as a kid Mycroft and I are mentoring. But nothing more.”

  “Mycroft…” At last Carlyle’s scrutiny fell fully on me. On my knees beneath the table, I tried again to look as nonthreatening as a man could who had just tackled Carlyle with bestial speed. Should I describe myself here? What Carlyle saw? I am nothing much, perhaps as tall as Thisbe had I not learned to stoop, my skin a little dark, with dark hair always overgrown, and a thinness to my face which makes some worry that I eat too little. My hands have acquired something of a laborer’s roughness, and my Servicer uniform of dappled beige and gray hangs on me loose enough to sleep in. On a street you would not give me a second glance, and, even with old photographs before you, you would not know me now without the telltale ear. Mercifully it was my uniform that caught Carlyle’s eye, and I recognized the familiar judgmental half-step back which free men take around the guilty.

  Murder for profit is the crime most people think of when they see a Servicer’s uniform, a crime the convict has no reason to repeat now that law has stripped him of the right to property. Those with more imagination might envision a grand corporate theft, or a revenge killing, avenging some great evil beyond the reach of law, or a crime of passion, catching a lover in a rival’s arms and slaying both in a triumphant but passing madness. At the dawn of the Fifteenth Century, St. Sir Thomas More described a humane, though fictitious, Persian judicial system in which convicts were not chained in the plague-filled dark, but made slaves of the state, let loose to wander, without home or property, to serve at the command of any citizen who needed labor. Knowing what these convicts were, no citizen would give them food or rest except after a day’s work, and, with nothing to gain or lose, they served the community in ambitionless, lifelong peace. Tell me, when our Twenty-Second-Century forefathers created the Servicer Program, offering lifelong community service in lieu of prison for criminals judged harmless enough to walk among the free, were they progressive or retrogressive in implementing a seven-hundred-year-old system which had never actually existed?

  “You’ve been helping to raise Bridger too?” Carlyle asked.

  Thisbe answered, “Mycroft stumbled on Bridger much like you did. I admit it’s a bit of a fudge putting ‘cleaning services’ instead of ‘childcare’ when I log Mycroft’s hours, but it’s no violation of the spirit of the law.”

  I held my breath for this moment, when Carlyle held my fragile future in his power. He could have reported me: my false work logs, my too-close relationship with this bash’, almost familial, all things forbidden to we who forfeited home, bash’, and rest when we committed crimes so severe that a lifetime’s labor can never balance out what we destroyed. But Carlyle is a kind creature, and smiled even for me. “Nice to meet you, Mycroft. You must have a court-appointed sensayer?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Who doesn’t know about Bridger?”

  “Correct.”

  “And Thisbe, you’ve never had a sensayer who knew?”

  “No.”

  “Then neither of you has never been able to talk to a sensayer before about the implications of it?”

  Thisbe paused. “I suppose not.”

  “Would you like to? We do have an appointment, if you’re up to it.”

  She gawked. “You’re up to it?”

  “Always.” I liked Carlyle’s ‘always,’ his firm tone, as if some energy in him were awakened by this whiff of his true calling. “And, Mycroft, if you’d like me to arrange a session for you sometime, I’m sure I could get it cleared.”

  “I’ll consider it,” I answered, crawling my way out between the table’s legs and Thisbe’s at last.

  She frowned. “Mycroft, you don’t have to leave just because—”

  “I have a job.” It was no lie: a summons from the Mitsubishi Executive Directorate had been buzzing in my ear for some time. I had lingered, since Bridger took priority, but now I had a reason of my own to visit Tōgenkyō. My searches had sliced deep. There were not many Gag-genes born in precisely 2426, not many parents who would produce a child with eyes that shade of blue, hair edged with that tint of gold, and not many hospitals whose records would not open before the security codes I had the privilege of borrowing. That led me to Tōgenkyō.

  Thisbe knows she will not learn about my work by asking. “Will I see you tonight?” She leaned toward me, and touched my back, her palm and slow fingers tasting the contours of my flesh. Instantly, I could read it in his face, Carlyle succumbed to the vision of me naked in Thisb
e’s arms. That was the great service Thisbe did me. Even without lying outright, the practiced femininity beneath her lazy posture could convince anyone, even the ba’sibs she grew up with, that my constant visits were no more than a mundane, forbidden fling. Carlyle had seen Bridger already, so there was no real need for us to deceive him, but someone who thinks he knows a man’s dirty secret will usually stop looking deeper.

  I returned Thisbe’s stroke with my own across her cheek, just as practiced. “Hopefully.”

  She leaned close to my ear, trusting our pantomime to make it seem natural. “Is this Cousin trouble?”

  “I’ll know in a few hours,” I whispered back. “Meanwhile, use the session, get to know them, test them.”

  Thisbe gave a warm, wide smile.

  I was full of fears as I left. Not fears of Carlyle, or fears for Carlyle, but fears of what Tōgenkyō might reveal about who sent Carlyle. Skilled as he was, and perfect for our needs, I could not believe this Gag-gene of all the sensayers on Earth would be assigned by chance. And I shall bear you with me to Tōgenkyō, reader, but not yet. First I must show you what was happening upstairs in this same bash’house before I was summoned down by Thisbe’s cry. I pray your patience. After all, if you choose not to believe in Bridger, then it is upstairs where begins the half of all this that you will admit reshaped our world.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  The Most Important People in the World

  Another car had touched down that same morning, March the twenty-third, before the same bash’house. Cielo de Pájaros blazes like a glacier on such mornings, white sun reflecting off the long rows of glass roofs which descend toward the Pacific in giant steps, like Dante’s Purgatory. The city is named for the birds, they say over a million, wild but cultivated, hatched and fed in the flower trenches that separate the tiers, so the flocks constantly splash up out of hiding and fall away again into the trench depths, like the wave crests of a flying sea. Cielo de Pájaros is one of Krepolsky’s earliest Spectacle Cities, much criticized for its homogeny, row upon row of homes with no downtown or shopping districts, but it has never lacked for residents. Critics claim that people tolerate living without a downtown in return for Chile’s perfect ocean views, or even that residents choose the city largely out of Hive pride, Humanist Members excited to think the great Saneer-Weeksbooth computers are humming away beneath their boots. But Humanists are not the only residents; one finds Cousins here, Mitsubishi, clusters of Gordian. I think Cielo de Pájaros is a success because it was the first city designed for those who don’t like city centers, whose perfect evening is spent by a window, watching gulls and black waves crashing down. What need is there for bustle in a city built for bash’es who prefer to be alone?

  Martin Guildbreaker alighted from the car and crossed the gleaming footbridge over the flower trench to ring the main door’s bell. What could those inside see as he approached? A square-breasted Mason’s suit, light marble gray, and crisp with that time-consuming perfection only seen in those who perfect their appearances for another’s sake, a butler for his master, a bride for her beloved, or Martin for his Emperor. A darker armband, black-edged Imperial Gray with the Square & Compass on it, declares him a Familiaris Regni, an intimate of the Masonic throne, who walks the corridors of power at the price of subjecting himself by law and contract to the absolute dictum of Caesar’s will. Martin wears no strat insignia, not even for a hobby, nothing beyond his one white sleeve announcing permanent participation in that most Masonic rite the Annus Dialogorum. His hair is black, his skin a healthy, vaguely Persian brown, but I will not bore you with the genetics of a line that has not worn a nation-strat insignia these ten generations. There is no allegiance for a Guildbreaker but the Empire, nor a more unwelcome presence on this doorstep than a Guildbreaker.

  “I’m looking for Member Ockham Saneer,” Martin called through the intercom.

  The watchman of the house stayed inside, so only words met the intruder. “Is the world about to end?”

  “No.”

  “Then go away. I have eight hundred million lives to oversee.”

  “Not possible.” The Mason’s tone, if not his words, apologized. “I’m here to investigate last night’s security breach.” Martin let the computer flash his credentials. “I have a warrant.”

  “I sent for our own police, not a polylaw.”

  “I know this is a Humanist bash’, and I will absolutely respect your Hive sovereignty, but as a globally essential property you fall under Romanova’s jurisdiction. They assigned me.”

  “You think just because your bash’ ponces around the Sanctum Sanctorum you can waltz in here and improve on my security?”

  I don’t believe Martin had ever before heard his bash’mates’ positions in the Masonic Hive’s most honored Guard used as an insult. He managed not to flinch. “Are you Member Ockham Saneer?”

  “I am.” Ockham pronounced with relish, as if, with all the lives in history laid out before him, he would have chosen this one.

  Martin gave a suitably respectful nod. “This isn’t a simple security breach. You’ve been framed for grand theft. We have your tracker ID logged entering the crime scene in Tokyo late last night, and five million euros appeared in your bank account this morning. I know it’s absurd to suggest that anyone in your bash’ would commit a theft for profit, but I need your cooperation to find out why someone would set up something so implausible. The fact that there was also a break-in here last night can’t be coincidence.”

  The door relented at last, revealing a man of dark Indian stock to match his sister Thisbe, and a physique beyond common athleticism. His shirt and pants, once plain, were now a labyrinth of doodles: black spirals, cross-hatching, and hypnotic swirls, though he wore them as indifferently as if the cloth had never tasted ink. Only his Humanist boots mattered: veins of knife-bright steel framing a surface of pale, ice-gray leather, real leather which had once guarded the taut flanks of a living deer that Ockham slew himself. Like Martin, Ockham wore no sign of hobby or of nation-strat, nothing but his Hive boots and the overpowering self-confidence of a man who guards something so vital that the law will let him kill for it. Ancient civilizations, East and West, knew the special breath of power granted by the right to kill. That’s what made sword and fasces marks of dominion, lord over peasant, male over female, magistrate over petitioner. Our centuries of peace have so perfected nonlethal force that even police serve content without the right to kill. But we are not fools. To those who protect the commonwealth entire, the guards around the Olenek Virus Lab, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and to Ockham here we grant ‘any means necessary,’ a knife, a branch, even that deadly instrument the fist, to guard a million lives. Even if they never exercise this rarest right, still somehow every glance and gesture of such guardians still breathes the ancient force of knighthood. “I am Ockham Saneer. What is it that I’m supposed to have stolen?”

  Martin nodded respect. “The unpublished Black Sakura Seven-Ten list.”

  Scorn deepened on Ockham’s face. “Who’d pay five million for a vacuous editorial that goes to press in two days?”

  “I could give you a nice long list. But I don’t know who’d pay five million to frame you. Did you visit the Black Sakura office yesterday? Have you ever dealt with them at all?”

  Ockham still blocked the doorway, stubborn as a sculpture in its niche. “If I cared about newspapers I’d pick The Olympian or El País.”

  “The paper’s absence was reported at seven o’clock P.M. Tokyo time, six A.M. your time. Any chance you might have taken your tracker off in the hours shortly before that?”

  “Paper?”

  “Yes. The stolen list was a handwritten manuscript on paper. Black Sakura is antiquarian that way.”

  Ockham’s face grew harder. “That’s what my breach was, an intruder left a piece of paper in the house, with Japanese writing on it.”

  Martin swallowed. “May I see it? I do have jurisdiction.” He let the warrant flicker across Ockham�
��s lenses.

  The Humanist drew back with a mastiff’s reluctance. “Don’t touch anything without asking.”

  “Understood.” The Mason crossed the threshold with the tiptoe reverence he usually reserves for his own capitol.

  There was little in the entryway apart from an ankle-high security robot, which let itself be seen to remind the visitor of its myriad hidden kin. As loyal Humanists, the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ did try their best to line the entrance hall with the traditional relics of triumphs, but since most of them do little but their work, and their celebrity member keeps his home a secret, their tiny spattering of diplomas and pictures—Thisbe’s trophies, Cato’s book cover—drowned on the walls like an unfinished mural. Is that judgment in the eyes of this young Guildbreaker? Smugness as he surveys the poor showing of the Saneer-Weeksbooths, whose name rivals his own in the triumphant annals of the bash’ system? I researched which of the two is really older, since so many bash’es form and dissolve with every generation that any famous bash’ which lasts more than three will spawn the rumor of antiquity. I found what I must call a noble tie. Regan Makoto Cullen broke with her great teacher Adolf Richter Brill on November fourth, 2191. “Break with” is easy to say, but not so easy to do, to face the man who has been your patron, teacher, foster father for twenty-five years, the man all Earth hails as the great mind of the century, who mapped the psyche in undreamt-of detail, who revolutionized education, linguistics, justice, to face him down and say, “Sir, you are wrong. So wrong that I shall turn the world against you. It’s not the numbers, not these rare psyches you’re charting that stimulate great progress. It’s groups. I’ve studied the same inventors, authors, leaders that you have, and the thing that most reliably produces many at once—the effect you’ve worked so hard to replicate—is when people abandon the nuclear family to live in a collective household, four to twenty friends, rearing children and ideas together in a haven of mutual discourse and play. We don’t need to revolutionize the kindergartens, we need to revolutionize the family.” This heresy, this bash’, which Cullen shortened from i-basho (a Japanese word, like ‘home’ but stronger), this challenge to Brill’s great system Cullen did not dare present without extensive notes. In those notes—still held as relics in Brill’s Institute—you will find the test bash’es Cullen set up in the 2170s, including both Weeksbooth and Guildbreaker.