Too Like the Lightning (16 page)

Martin:
“I believe the device might have been used in this
Black Sakura
theft.”

I:
“I saw your scan of the folded paper.”

Martin:
“What can you tell me about the device? Could it have penetrated the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' defenses?”

I:
“Are you asking me on behalf of Romanova and the law? Or privately?”

A pause proved that Martin understood the weight of my question. “Privately.”

I:
“It was never in my hands,
Nepos.
I only ever had the packaging, I just pretended that I had the device to confuse the police. Please keep it private. The Inspector General doesn't know, but yesterday Princesse Danaë forced it out of me in front of Chief Director Andō. I tried to resist, I swear! They're sure to use it against me. If Papadelias finds out they'll be all over me. It could wreck my parole! Worse! I don't know what to do. I'm sorry, I should have come straight to you!”

Martin:
“Calm, Mycroft, calm. The Chief Director is a friend. They don't want you locked up any more than I do.”

I:
“But the Princesse…”

Martin:
“Is also a friend. Relax. I'll speak to them both about this, if you like.”

I:
“You will?” The promise washed the tension from me, like a welcome summer rain.

Martin:
“I shall. But what I need now is for you to focus and tell me what you know about this Gyges Device. Do you know who has it? Or who made it? Reports from the original scandal blame organized crime, but when I read the report the Mitsubishi Police sent in to Romanova I found it … not without omissions.”

The clever insult in his Latin understatement (which my poor translation butchers) cheered me enough to smile. “I investigated at the time. I believe there never was any yakuza-run secret research center, like the report claims. I believe the device was produced in secret but funded and authorized by someone within the Japanese Mitsubishi leadership, and stolen from them by traitors within the same. But I have no proof. And also,
Nepos,
if the Chief Director and the Princesse are friendly now, they will not be friendly long if we start poking at this. If it was the Japanese bloc leadership which authorized research into tricking the tracker system, Andō would not want anyone to know, especially not Caesar.”

Martin:
“You say powers within the Mitsubishi faction. Not Andō themself?”

I:
“Not Andō,
Nepos.
I am certain of that. It was probably Andō's predecessor. But you know the Mitsubishi, that wouldn't lessen the demand that the current Japanese Director ‘take responsibility' in the grimmest sense, and there is a pit of vipers waiting for Andō to stumble on the tightrope.”

Martin:
“You faked having the device. Do you know enough about it to determine with certainty whether it was really used in this theft, or whether this is a hoax like yours?”

I:
“No,
Nepos
, I have no idea how the device really worked. Just that it affected trackers, swapping signals to make people hard to trace.”

Martin:
“I see.”

I:
“Chief Director Andō ordered me to try to track down the thieves from thirteen years ago, through the contacts I originally bought the packaging from.”

Martin:
“Yes, good idea. Report what you find to me. But not today. It's Independence Day. Give yourself a day to breathe, and work tomorrow.”

I:
“I … yes,
Nepos.
Thank you. You enjoy it too.”

I ended the call and turned with a smile to Su-Hyeon and Toshi, who had waited with me on the steps just outside the main gate of the Censors' office, as deaf to my Latin as I am to dolphin song.

Su-Hyeon whistled in his impatience. “Mycroft, how many more messages do you have?”

“Only one more.”

The last was text, in French: «Mycroft, we hear a certain thoughtless soul dragged you away from the Marseilles spill this morning before you received your breakfast. France owes you a meal; attend my party tonight. —La Trémoïlle.»

The Humanist President's order was consonant with Martin's, so I determined to obey.

“Sorry that took so long,” I apologized. “Shall we get back to work?”

“No.” The Censor himself intercepted us as we tried to remount his steps. He was much changed from an hour before, relaxed and energized by having mastered the data, as a musician is relaxed and energized by having instrument in hand. “The numbers are as good as we're going to get until we know more about how
Black Sakura
is going to go about announcing Masami's involvement.”

Toshi winced.

Su-Hyeon frowned. “You just want to make it to the speeches on time, don't you?”

The Censor clapped his deputy on the shoulder. “So do you. Toshi, you coming?”

She hesitated, tilting her face away until her dark frizz, fiery like a corona in the sunlight, hid her expression. “I'll go home to Tōgenkyō if you don't mind. My sibs always play basketball the afternoon before the party, and I'd like to be there for Masami today.”

The Censor's smile was all warmth. “Of course. Give them my best. Tell them not to worry too much. It shouldn't be hard to spin things right. I'll make some private calls.”

“Thank you.”

Vivien nodded in promise, then raced down the steps like a schoolchild at recess. Su-Hyeon and the Censor's Guards followed with no less energy. “Come along, Mycroft!”

Will you join us too, reader? You may object that you know the festival already, but have you ever really seen the speeches live in person? Or do you, like many, prefer your beach retreats and family dinners, and skip the history lecture? Thomas Carlyle and our other luminaries are like old candles, and can still shed new light if you pause to light them. And it will be good to glimpse the lights of our age one last time, before they fade like starlight as the sun glare of an elder era dawns once more.

We walked together along the Via Sacra, past the Rostra and the Senate House, empty for once, then around the Capitoline Hill to the teeming street which separates the Forum from the Pantheon. The stores were all flags, as if Athena had covered the city with her weavings, every strat from the Irish to the Dog Show Society adding its colors to the sea. Vendors' carts, bright balloons, candies, sausages, and paper lanterns lined the thronging street. Even the statues dressed for the holiday, vandals decking them with garlands and bedsheets, stuffing their hands with flowers and empty liquor bottles. Such defacement would have been criminal in old Rome, whose statues represented gods, but Romanova's human heroes have a sense of humor. Everyone we passed had smiles for the Censor, and good wishes, some drunk enough to be almost rude, but nothing could dim his smile, not even the teens who half-drenched him with a splash from one of his own fountains. “Hey, Ancelet! Happy Renunciation Day!”

The Pantheon is as solid as a mountain but airy too after the narrowness of Romanova's streets, as when a narrow, crawling cave opens into a massive cavern which feels vaster somehow than the open sky. Pure sun streams in through the open hole in the center of the dome, wind too, and rain, since not even the elements are denied access to this universal sanctuary. The old Romans built their Pantheon for all the gods, but even in the age of geographic nations a more Earthly passion began to fill it with tombs of founders, saviors, artists, and in Paris's copy even our Patriarch Voltaire. Our version in Romanova is well populated but far from full: our priests Mertice McKay and Fisher G. Gurai; our princes, Antonius MASON, Mycroft MASON, two Kings of Spain, the First Anonymous, the Third; our geniuses, Adolf Richter Brill and Regan Makoto Cullen; Terra the Moon Baby, of course; artists, humanitarians, celebrities, and, always with the most flowers wilting around him, the first Gordian Chairman, Thomas Carlyle.

Apollo Mojave is not with them. You should not have voted him down, reader. I know you could not understand why the Emperor and others wanted a hero's burial for this young Utopian you had not heard of until his death, but you should have trusted them. You should have. You know what the Utopians have given you, yet you grant them only one grave in the temple which honors at least four from every other Hive. Your leaders meant it when they said he was the best of us. He should be there, ungrateful reader. You should at least have granted him Olympus, since he could not join his kin among the stars.

When we arrived, the actor who was to portray Chairman Carlyle today was already at the podium between the tombs, in costume in that signature green suit with its antiquated tapered necktie. Terry Lugli has made a career of playing our world's hero in plays and films, even once playing Carlyle's namesake, the Nineteenth-Century historian Thomas Carlyle, distant great-uncle to our world hero. The historian Carlyle argued that human progress is shaped and triggered primarily by Great Men which Nature sometimes drops into our midst. What would he not have given to be able to peek into the future and use his great descendant as an example?

“Mycroft, you made it!”

“I told you they wouldn't miss it.”

“You just guessed, you didn't know.”

At once my Servicer fellows were around me, a sea of smiles and beige-gray dappled uniforms. They had colonized four benches in the back left corner, by the bust and ashes of Sofia Kovács, who, inspired by St. Sir Thomas More, founded the Servicer program which keeps these guilty but benign offenders from rotting in prison with the malicious and insane.

“Mycroft, want some caramel crunch? A nice Cousin bought us some.”

“We saved you a seat, too.”

“Right here.”

They had, dead center, and I could sense the aftermath of some squabbling over who would get to sit beside me. Perhaps you cannot imagine life when you can no longer summon cars at will, when you are trapped within the reach of your own feet unless some benefactor calls you elsewhere. A benefactor too is needed to pay admission to a film, a play, a party, five euros to climb the scenic tower, one to ride the Ferris wheel. But public compassion has not left us with nothing. I count it among my few unequivocally good deeds that I petitioned to have the Renunciation Day speeches added to the short list of entertainments any Servicer may, at the kind Cousins' expense, attend.

“No working over your tracker during the speeches, Mycroft,” the Censor warned me, his dark face warm and stern at once. “I want you resting. You need it.”

“Yes, Censor.”

The rest around me were staring fixedly at the Censor, who tried his best to be nonthreatening, slouching to diminish his physique, but that blood-purple uniform still raises and topples Hives. There was one sure way to heal the mood. “How many of you want ice cream when this is over?”

Four hands shot up, then eleven, then all.

“You got it.”

“Hurry, Vivien.” Su-Hyeon tugged his arm. “It's beginning.”

Together Censor and Deputy raced to their reserved seats at the front, almost in time to avoid a smirk from Terry Lugli, who waited on the podium for Romanova's highest officer to get his butt in his seat.

Those who introduce the speeches always ask you to imagine that it is the year 2131. You are terrified by the ever-climbing mortality figures of the latest attacks, more terrified at the backlash promised by the superpower, and most terrified of all by the means it has chosen to replenish its armies, thinned by long prosperity. You know that Chairman Carlyle has spent the last thirty hours cloistered with Cousins' Program Director Sofia Kovács and Olympic Chairman Jean-Pierre Utarutu, the heads of the three great
Mukta
transit groups, which can evacuate members from continent to continent to evade a draft as easily as to watch a sports match. Now these three have called a press conference, and bring with them onto the dais Europe's hero, King Juan Valentín of Spain. You cannot guess their plan, but you know it will set the shape of this new World War, and that they have most affluent third of the world's population behind them. Fear is what the introducer asks you to imagine, the anxiety of living in a world the Bomb might end at any moment, and hope too, fragile, resting in this man. He speaks:

“‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate but equal station to which the Laws of Nature entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.' These words are as true today as they were three hundred and fifty years ago, when a group of idealists set out to found a new kind of nation freer than any that had come before. The nation they founded became great, and remained great even in our lifetimes, but it is not great today. No nation, whatever its power, can be called great when it imposes tyranny upon its citizens—worse, upon people it claims as its citizens, not because they have enjoyed the fruits of its soil, or benefitted from its protections, but because by chance their grandparents were born within that blotch of color on a map it calls its own. These free people—who have never spent more than an afternoon beneath its skies—these free people proud America now commands to surrender the fruits of their labors. Why? To finance a war—no, a campaign of destruction—waged, not between peoples, but between the members of governments, and justified in the name of two gods—two interpretations of God—in whom most of those who must now pay do not believe. Worse, this so-called nation dares, not merely to ask, but to compel these free people to send their children to fight and die for a group of men they do not call leaders, against a foe they do not call enemy, over a patch of ground they have never called home. Friends, an America who would impose these orders is no longer the champion of liberty its founders set out to create. It cannot command your loyalty.”