Too Like the Lightning (33 page)

“Be careful with this bash', Carlyle Foster. I exit now, because I Love Truth, so I perceive I am a danger to this bash', and it to Me. That is clear, as clear to Me as it was clear which of those loyal soldiers inside feared karma and which sin. You too seem to love Good, and Dialectic at least, if not raw Truth. I advise you to part from this bash' before you harm each other. But I recognize your right to incur risk in service of your vocation”—He lowered His voice—“and your Maker.”

Carlyle screamed inside at this last and deepest violation of that special privacy which is the last thing in the world our cautious public still calls ‘sacrosanct.' It was no easy thing to distill his objections into words, so he watched in silence as this famous Stranger—as strange as He was famous—made His soft retreat. The Tribunary Guards followed Him closely, and one paused, turning back with a frown and gentle gesture of apology for her Ward's strangeness. Moments later the Utopian car took off, and J.E.D.D. Mason had vanished as abruptly as He had come.

What then? It was too much, His strangeness, much too much. They needed answers, all of them. Once the drill troops were dismissed and the house secure once more, each bash'member turned to his favorite oracle: Ockham and Sniper to their prisoners and their President, Cato and Eureka to their computers and their surveillance tapes, while Carlyle and Thisbe raced down the flower trench, to me.

 

C
HAPTER THE
SEVENTEENTH

Tocqueville's Valet

Thisbe's summary had far less detail than my reconstruction of the scene, but it was enough. “He can't find Dominic?” I cried.

“‘He'?” Thisbe repeated, scowling. “What's up with you and J.E.D.D. Mason, Mycroft? No lies!”

I had not heard myself slip. “Martin and Dominic work for Them.”

“That isn't what I asked.” I feared Thisbe more as she hid behind the black curtain of her thick Indian hair, leaving me no chance to read her face. “They talked about you very familiarly. You know this person well, you knew the investigation was in their hands, you knew they might come here, but you didn't give us any warning they were…” Adjectives failed her. “… like that!”

Bridger, still in my lap, winced at Thisbe's harshness. He had heard her summary, the Major too, still seated on the rooftop of the dollhouse beside us, with the fascinated soldiers in the plastic rooms below.

“Are you okay, Mycroft?” Bridger asked, furrowing his smooth, young brow. “You're shaking.”

“I'm fine.” I mussed his hair, using the gesture to disguise the moment when I whispered in his ear. “Start packing as soon as this is done.”

His eyes went wide, but, good boy, he nodded.

I met Thisbe's glare. “I see you've made the unilateral decision that Carlyle Foster is allowed to know where Bridger lives.”

That mistake stilled her a moment, and she looked around, as if only now seeing the dollhouses and books and playthings piled in the secret cave. She turned to the veteran beside me. “Sorry, Major. I forgot. But I think we've all decided we can trust Carlyle now.”

I let my voice stay dark. “That's not your call, Thisbe.”

The Major shifted in his doll chair. “Done is done. You are the bigger question at the moment, Mycroft. What is there between you and this … we're talking about a Hiveless Tribune?”

“Among many, many other offices.” Thisbe loomed over me. “Including that they're Cornel MASON's child.”

“Bash'child or real child?” the Major asked.

Thisbe glared at his un-modern denial that the bond between ba'kid and ba'pa is as ‘real' as blood.

I supplied the truth. “Adopted son.”

“And heir?” the Major asked.

Thisbe indulged in a chuckle. “No. Can't blame you, Major, it's a modern thing, but Masonic Emperors aren't dynastic. They're never succeeded by their children, it's a rule. A
porphyrogene
is usually a
Familiaris,
but they're the only
Familiaris
who can't become Masonic Emperor.”

The Major frowned pensively as he wrapped his head around that one. “So, adopting a child makes them ineligible. Interesting choice. Now I want to know even more about this boy an Emperor would choose to hold so close, but block from the succession.”

Thisbe would not give an inch. “It's not just the Masons. I knew vaguely about J.E.D.D. Mason, everybody does, but I read more on the way here. I knew they were Romanova's youngest Tribune but—”

“Second youngest,” I corrected. “In 2299 Cahya Rattlewatch was elected Blacklaw Tribune at the age of fifteen. It doesn't even require passing the Adulthood Competency Exam.”

Thisbe punished my derailment by firing up the screen that sat beside the Major and loading J.E.D.D. Mason's profile from last year's
Romanov
Seven-Ten list. “They have some kind of insider advisor or legal position in five Hives besides the Masons! Europe, the Cousins, Brill's Institute, the Mitsubishi, and us too.”

I avoided her gaze. “All the Hive leaders have known J.E.D.D. Mason since They were a small Child, and all the Hive leaders are impressed by Them, rely on Them, and trust Their council. That's why everybody gives Them offices, and that's why They were trusted with investigating this crime that threatens all six.”

“Why? Why does everybody trust them when they act like that? Confession? Karma? And their assistants, Dominic and Martin, how cultish can you get?”

I knew better than to meet her eyes. “Martin's real name is Mycroft Guildbreaker.”

“So what, J.E.D.D. Mason changed Mycroft to Martin in order to fit in with these other crazy cult things?”

“Are they bash'mates?” Carlyle interjected gently.

Thisbe turned. “What?”

“Dominic, Martin, and J.E.D.D. Mason, are they bash'mates? Ba'sibs? A bash' interested in theology?” The sensayer tried his best to smile Thisbe's wrath away. “It wouldn't have to be a cult. We see this sometimes, a bash' interested in theology, who like to debate religion in secret, and try their best to do so safely.”

“Like Mycroft likes to,” Bridger piped up, eager as a bird. “Except I know we're not supposed to.”

Carlyle smiled sweet forgiveness. “Yes, like with Mycroft and you. It's okay when it's just two people, though. Sometimes it can turn cultlike with larger groups, which is why the First Law bans unchaperoned discussions with three or more, but it usually starts as innocent exploration like you and Mycroft do. That's all this is, right, Mycroft? Dominic Seneschal is even a sensayer, they may be doing officially sanctioned group sessions.”

I looked to the floor. “You may not believe me, but I've had an urgent call. I need to go.”

Thisbe summoned a too-sweet, too-false smile, perfect to lure us to her candy house. “Bridger, honey, get up off Mycroft for a minute, will you?”

“Why?”

“So I can pin them to the ground until they answer straight.”

“Thisbe!” Bridger settled more squarely in my lap, my brave defender. “Why are you suddenly acting like you don't trust Mycroft? You know we can trust Mycroft. We can trust Mycroft more than anybody in the world! Mycroft's busy all the time with jobs, but they've been working as hard as they can to take care of all of us, for years and years. Harder than you work, Thisbe!”

A new expression surfaced on Thisbe, a smile far more terrifying than her glare.

Mommadoll intruded now, gentle, and irresistible. “Yelly people don't get cookies.”

Bridger crossed his arms as if to shield me. “It isn't Mycroft's fault bad things are happening at your bash'house! If Mycroft says we can trust J.E.D.D. Mason, and all the Hive leaders say we can trust J.E.D.D. Mason, and everybody else in the world says we can trust J.E.D.D. Mason, then I'll trust J.E.D.D. Mason. Why won't you?”

The witch crossed her arms too. “You didn't meet them. There's something unnatural about them.”

‘Witch' again, Mycroft? I told thee I dislike that term.

Apologies, reader; the memories of my thoughts and fears in this scene are rather over-vivid.

“So what if there's something unnatural about them?” the child shot back. “Mycroft is weird. I'm weird. You're weird. The army men are weird. That's not important. I'm willing to go to J.E.D.D. Mason right now if Mycroft says I should.”

“Not yet!” I cried at once, surprised by the panic in my own voice. “In the end we'll go to J.E.D.D. Mason, but we need to put that off as long as possible.”

“Why put it off, if you trust them?” On Bridger's lips the question was timid; glaring in Thisbe's eyes it was an accusation.

“Because there are dangerous people around J.E.D.D. Mason,” I began. “No. No, that's not the reason. It's because if we go to J.E.D.D. Mason it'll be Them who decides what happens to your future, Bridger, not you.” I turned to the child, stroked his hair. “It's best if you grow up a little more, have more ideas about what you want to do with your powers. In a few years you'll be strong enough to decide things on your own. Even to contradict J.E.D.D. Mason when you want to. But not yet. Best for now that you stay free.”

You may not have thought about it, reader, but ‘free' is not a word one hears much anymore, not in its pure denotation. Almost everyone is so free these days, just as everyone is so healthy, happy, sentient, and alive, that one only mentions the quality if it is threatened: unhealthy, unfree.

The Major sighed his heavy, veteran's sigh. “Mycroft, is J.E.D.D. Mason your Tocqueville?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“I see.”

“Tocqueville?” Thisbe repeated, frowning.

A voice rose shrill from a lower floor of the dollhouse. “I knew it! Haha! I knew it! See? I told you so!”

The Major stomped the plastic roof beneath him, shouting down. “Shut up, Croucher!”

“I predicted it, didn't I? You all heard me! We never could trust them!”

A rumble like a lion's surfaced in the Major's voice. “You don't want me to come down there, Croucher!”

Prompt silence proved the Major right.

I'm glad it was Bridger who asked. “What's Tocqueville?”

The Major smiled at the boy's confusion. “It's our nickname for Mycroft's mysterious other obligation. Do you remember when you first met Mycroft?”

The golden smile on Bridger's face healed me, like sun upon a starving field. “Of course. Mycroft was fixing the trash bots and saw Boo run out of juice, and Mycroft's smart so they knew it wasn't just a U-beast, so they came to investigate. That's when you got them.”

I almost laughed. ‘You got them.' Such injustice to the army men, their months of strategy, of gathering the tools, grenades as frail as firecrackers, darts of paralyzing chemicals, cannon-sized to them. They had spent months practicing, tackling cats, and squirrels, and dummies. An army of Lilliputians might tackle Gulliver in his sleep, but for eleven plastic army men to be ready at any moment to defend this boy against a full-sized human strained the limits of Earth's greatest military strategist. Strained, but did not exceed. They bested me, me, Mycroft Canner. They spooked me with explosions, snared me with wires, blinded and deafened me with flash and smoke. It was hard, they said. I beat all seven practiced plans and forced the Major to improvise an eighth, and then a ninth, right there, but in the end I fell.

“Then you remember how hard it was deciding what to do with Mycroft afterwards?” the veteran continued.

Bridger's face contorted, furrows unnatural on that angelic brow, not yet spoiled by time. “I remember Mycroft was very big.”

The Major chuckled. “You were only five years old then, you can't expect to remember too much.”

“Mycroft kept asking you to let them go just for ten minutes. I remember them saying that, over and over: just ten minutes, just ten minutes.”

The Major nodded, impressed that the words had stayed in Bridger's mind, but humans remember best what is most intense, no matter how long ago it happened. I myself have few memories from the past decade which seem remotely real compared with the memories of my two weeks, thirteen years ago. It may sound mad, but how do you distinguish between memory and reality if not by choosing the more vivid? The smells and faces of those two weeks are burned into my mind, more colored, more alive than the commonplace sensations of this room, this floor, this half-written page before me. Daily—no, every time I close my eyes and open them again—I am surprised to find myself in this strange present. This is not where I am, back then is where I am. This pressure is a weapon in my hand, this itch enemy skin beneath my nails, this taste blood. Whose? What is this at my back? A rock? A wall? Surely if I step out, I will step onto my battlefield. I find it hard to make myself believe it is a chair.

“The army men's attack knocked off my tracker,” I explained for Carlyle's sake. “The police always check on me when that happens. It would've been a disaster if they'd found me here.”

The Major nodded. “Yes, it was lucky Mycroft managed convince us to let them go for those ten minutes. They were barely out of the trench before the cops were on them, full force.”

It was not just luck, reader. I recall that day, full color, full intensity, one of few solid features in the long haze since my crimes. I remember the tiny soldiers staring up, piano wires striping my skin with red as they bound me to a scavenged chair. That memory is salient, not because of the pain or the blood, I think, for I have many scars whose stories are forgotten, but for the sensation of the bonds around my arms and ankles as I felt myself a prisoner. You must not think that bondage is one of my perversions—I have many, but not that. Rather it linked that memory to another even more potent. The hours after my first capture thirteen years ago, when I sat helpless as an insect in my plastic cage, were among the most intense I have ever experienced, so, when I found myself captured and bound again, that same helplessness awoke me. That, I am certain, was what cleared my mind so quickly. I suffered no shock, no disbelief seeing the soldiers, tiny and alive before my eyes. I absorbed all in an instant, pure acceptance of the miracle, and found my resolution just as quickly: I am here now to protect and guide this boy. Such salience made me persuasive as I pleaded for the gift of ten minutes.