Too Like the Lightning (14 page)

«You're saying we can stop it from escalating.»

«You have your emergency powers. You can pull things back. But you may not have to. The strings already working in the world will pull it back themselves. The Hives are closer than Kohaku imagined. That will save us.»

The Censor backed away, passions still warring in his face: fear, anger, grief. Grief most of all, perhaps, for I caught his eye straying to the well-worn sofa spot where Su-Hyeon wasn't—no, where someone else more potently wasn't. Kohaku Mardi, dear, keen, brilliant Kohaku Mardi, a match for Toshi in speed, for Su-Hyeon in excitement. He would have been here with us, in the purple, puzzling out the warp of math beneath the warp of life, if that warp had a kinder Weaver.

«Who else knew about these numbers?»

«No one living that I know of.»

«So whoever's behind this break-in, it can't be intentional, they can't know this prediction.»

«No.» I sighed relief, even as I said it. «I think it's just some enemy of Chief Director Andō.»

«Mitsubishi strat politics, dragging the whole world down.» Vivien caught himself scowling and shrugged. «Makes Europe look almost functional.»

Here we sighed together, he the Frenchman, I the Greek. Neither of us were Members of the European Hive, or even formal members of our nation-strats, but I think having some distance just made us more aware of our emotional complicity in the past messes whipped up by Europe's fractious Parliament, and in the future messes which would rise in turn, like high tides, and seem as absurd to non-Europeans as the feuds of China's factions did to us.

Vivien flexed his shoulders and shook his head, letting the weight of remembered mourning fall away with the resettling of his dreadlocks. « Until we have proof that we're past danger, we will take Kohaku's prediction absolutely seriously. Both of us. We'll draw up a list of countermeasures today, and carry out as many of them as we can, backups upon backups.» He made me meet his gaze. «I know you always have many tasks on hand, but, since this literally impacts everyone on the planet, I expect you to prioritize it.»

«Understood, sir. I'll give it priority, believe me, I'm as scared as you are. But do you intend that we tackle this with the powers of the Censor's office? Or our private means?»

«Both. All. Any.»

I nodded. «What will you tell Su-Hyeon and Toshi? There is a limit to how many emergency measures we can propose before they'll wonder why we're so scared.»

Again he breathed that slow, deflating sigh, his thinking sigh. «Nothing to Toshi about Kohaku's numbers. Toshi will be happy enough to put in extra measures to protect Andō.»

«You don't trust Toshi yet?»

His brows narrowed. «I'd trust Toshi to keep a secret with their life, or under torture, but not under Danaë.»

I hope I managed to conceal my wince.

«Su-Hyeon…,» he continued, «Su-Hyeon I'll tell at home tonight. Filling a dead person's boots is always scary, but if I'm asking Su-Hyeon to do that, they deserve to know. From me.»

The canned air of the sanctum felt warmer as we both returned to work. It was the comfort of having a plan—no, less than that—the comfort of having a plan to have a plan, of facing the looming darkness of the labyrinth but feeling prepared because we had a ball of twine in hand. It was not a map, not light to expose the monster in the dark, not even armor, but it was enough to make the task feel possible. Kohaku Mardi had been a prophet, like any good statistician, but he was not a Cassandra. We were listening, I and the greatest puzzle-solver in the world, braced back to back as the math before our eyes bled warning after warning. But we had a ball of twine.

Our comrades would return soon with baguettes and messages, but before I tell of them we must leave Romanova for a time. While you have sheltered with me in the blind seclusion of the Censor's compound, a monster penetrated Thisbe's sanctuary, so close to Bridger's door. Thus we return, briefly, to Cielo de Pájaros, where you shall see another of the wires hidden in the cloth that conspired to keep much-mourned Kohaku Mardi from realizing the rabbit was long gone.

 

C
HAPTER THE
SEVENTH

Canis Domini

“The Six-Hive Transit System welcomes you to Cielo de Pájaros. Visitors are required to adhere to a minimum of Humanist Law while in this zone. Since our records indicate that this is considerably more restrictive than your customary law code, it is recommended that you review a list of local regulations not included in your code by selecting ‘law.'”

Dominic Seneschal stepped from the car as if dismounting an unworthy horse. He did not ring the bell, but struck the front door with a practiced fist. How will those inside interpret this creature? His suit is neither Mason nor Mitsubishi. He wears no Utopian coat, no Cousin's loose wrap, no Brillist sweater. His boots have no personalized design as a Humanist's would, but are generic, high, and black, as one might find on a museum dummy, the plastic coachman waiting on his plastic queen. His clothes are European, but too European to be the Hive marker, not tidbits of fashion like a cravat or double-breasted vest combined with common clothes, but true period costume: tight hose and britches showing off the thigh and calf, a tricorn hat, silk waistcoat which has squandered countless human hours on hand-embroidery, a coat short at the front to display the curves of hip and pelvis, but with ample skirting hanging in the back, down to the knee, pleated and full enough to drape dramatically the over the horse he should be riding. The outfit is all black, black embroidery on black cuffs and waistcoat, blurring into shadow. His dark brown ponytail is curled too perfectly, like a wig, tied in the back with a crisp black ribbon. This stranger would seem at home at Versailles, or with the Jacobins scheming revolution in their basements, but nothing anchors him to our society except for the tracker at his ear, and the black Hiveless sash which swishes lush around his hips, its warning stark as a poison label: here stands a Blacklaw.

Art thou certain, Mycroft, that thou appliest thine own formula correctly
?
Here thou describest silks and embroidery, curls and ribbons, pleats and skirting, and appliest ‘he'? I know the name Dominic Seneschal, and know too there are breasts beneath that taut waistcoat, that the thigh and pelvis which the coat's high cut displays are very much a woman's. If thou must have thy fetishizing pronouns, shouldst thou not write ‘she,' when ‘she' is so garishly proclaimed?

Innocent reader, I take comfort in your confusion, for it is a sign of healthy days if you are illiterate in the signal-flags of segregation humanity has worked so hard to leave behind. In certain centuries these high, tight boots, these pleats and ponytail might indeed have coded female, but I warned you, reader, that it was the Eighteenth Century which forced this change upon us, and here it stands before you. You saw already Princesse Danaë, with the costume of Edo period Japan, and its comportment, too: modest, coquettish, fragile, and proficient at making the stronger sex risk death for her. Can you not recognize the male of that species? Though French this time, rather than Japanese. Perhaps you argue that a gentle‘man' of that enlightened age is effeminate, his curls and silks, his poetry and dances, and you are right if we apply the standards of a Goth or other proud barbarian. But would you then oblige me to call all such gentlemen ‘she'? The Patriarch? George Washington? Rousseau? De Sade? Shall I call the Divine Marquis ‘she'? No, good master. To understand what follows, you must anchor yourself in this truth, that, by the standards of the era which sculpted him from childhood, the woman Dominic Seneschal is the boldest and most masculine of men.

Unfortunately, knocking instead of ringing was the signal kids from the science museum used when they came to visit Cato Weeksbooth. He answered eagerly, only to find instead this monster out of time, fierce-eyed, inexplicable, with the Blacklaw sash ominous around his hips, and a black sensayer's scarf draped around his shoulders like a snake's old skin. Poor Cato—who could not face even Cousin Foster, gentlest of sensayers—our Cato screamed and ran.

“Cato, what on Earth?” A woman's voice called down the stairs, accompanied by fast descending feet. “Did you start another fire?”

Cato gave no answer but the slam and lock click of his lab door.

«Quel instinct superbe!» Dominic murmured in French to himself.

“What?”

I confess that some of the dialogue in this chapter is invented, reader, for I did not see this scene, and have only incomplete testimony, but I know both of them well enough to impersonate.

“Your bash'mate is perceptive, if cowardly.” Dominic smiled, though on his mask-smooth face all smiles feel cold. “I'll let myself in, shall I?”

It was Lesley who intercepted the intruder in the entrance hall. “What are you supposed to be?”

He swept off his tricorn as he bowed. “I am Dominic Seneschal. I was dispatched by Tribune J.E.D.D. Mason to investigate your break-in. Did Martin Guildbreaker not warn you I would inevitably follow?”

Lesley frowned distress, though anyone would frown distress if a ‘Dominic' followed a ‘Martin' into your home. “I got a notice someone would be coming.” She checked the credentials with her tracker, and the security systems confirmed, robots retreating meekly before Romanova's Tribunary codes. “I would have appreciated knowing when.”

“I wonder whose oversight that was.” He smiled. “No need to take pains, you may go back to work. I shall sniff about the house first, I can interrogate bash'members later.” Dominic has an accent, stronger than any you have likely heard, not a strat marker tinting vowel shape, but genuinely struggling with short
i
's, initial
h
's, the
th
on his ‘the,' lifelong stumbling blocks for one who did not learn English in his first years. “Of course I recognize the famous Lesley Juniper Sniper Saneer.”

Dominic knew Lesley as we all did, from the broadcast seventeen years earlier, a plump-cheeked little angel eleven years of age, with tear-bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a largely Chinese face but enough African ancestry in the mix to shape her black hair into a halo of corkscrew curls. In the film footage, Lesley stands before a row of solemn adults, with Ockham on her right, as confident at thirteen as at thirty, and, on her left, the elusive Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, half shrouded by a hooded wrap, whom you will not find in any other bash' picture, no matter how hard you hunt. Together they tell the press that the five other members of Lesley's tiny bash'—three ba'pas and two ba'sibs—have been killed simultaneously, as their two independent cars hit one another, at a likelihood of some fourteen trillion to one. As the eldest of the Saneer-Weeksbooth children, Ockham and Ojiro volunteered to break the news to the orphan, and, with that resilient purity only children possess, the three kids have conceived a plan. Lesley will be adopted by the bash' responsible for the tragedy, and together with her new bash'mates she will dedicate herself to running and improving the system whose failures are so few, and yet so fatal. “Maybe it may be the safest way to travel ever,” she declares in her childlike ineloquence, “but everything good can get even better if you try.” Watching the little power trio side by side, you can see they bonded instantly, and you can see too why, when the Saneer-Weeksbooth elders watched the scene, they understood at once that, when childhood ended, Lesley's choice of which of these two princes of the bash' to take as spouse would break the tie and determine the new master of the house. Lesley, née Juniper, adopted Sniper, wedded Saneer, is today the living image of her childhood self, just as bright, round-cheeked, and energetic, and her clothing just as matted with the doodles which, then as now, flow from her like babble from a man possessed.

“Yes, I'm Lesley Saneer.” Lesley planted her feet to block the corridor, her stone-solid aggression exaggerated by her heavy Humanist boots, screen cloth, so she can load a different doodle every day. “You'll—”

She gasped as, quick as a thief, the Blacklaw raised her hand and kissed it. “
Mon plaisir,
Madame Saneer. This way I think?” Grasping her waist like a dancing partner, Dominic vaulted past Lesley with a practiced leap, and trotted on down the corridor. “Martin's scans don't do justice to the tension of the room, the hum. Exhilarating.”

“Wait!” She chased him. “I still have to verify your clearance personally.”

He flexed his shoulders, basking in the windows' slant of sun. “You're welcome to call His Grace President Ganymede, if you want a personal reference.”

Lesley testifies that, given the speed of Dominic's speech and the thickness of his accent, it took her some time to realize he was using ‘he' and ‘she.' “You know the President?”

“Intimately. Have you any enemies?”

The question made her frown. “Are you a sensayer? Or a polylaw?”

“Both,” he pronounced with relish. “I serve at the pleasure of J.E.D.D. Mason.” That he pronounced with greater relish, though, for her sake, he contracted it ‘Jed Mason,' as so many do. “No enemies? I'll ask again later. Now, is there any part of the house which it would be inconvenient for me to search first?”

She planted herself in front of him. “Slow down, Blacklaw. I'm the officer in charge right now.”

“In charge of keeping the lifeblood of the world speeding on its course, I understand.” He gave a nod—almost a bow—to
Mukta
.

That eased Lesley's frown a notch. “Indeed.”

“And I keep the peace among the gods. I believe we are both officers in charge.”

At this point Lesley strongly considered exercising her legal right to kick an obnoxious Blacklaw in the (there were no nuts) stomach. It was a reasonable impulse. The Blacklaw sash around this visitor's waist proclaims his choice to renounce all protections of the Law—Hive laws and Romanova's neutral Gray Laws—and to face the Earth with no protection but his own strength, and the restrictions others' laws may place upon their use of force. A Mitsubishi or strict Cousin may not, by their own chosen laws, indulge in fists and brawling, but Humanist Law accommodates those who sometimes wish to settle things with fists. Lesley was considering her aim when her eye caught the line of the dueling rapier almost hidden in the pleating of the Blacklaw's coat.