Carlyle froze, too shaken even to tremble. “Why did you just tell me that?”

“When you start playing grown-up games, there are grown-up consequences.”

“Danaë Mitsubishi?” Carlyle repeated. “Then I was…”

“Carlyle, don’t…” Papa tried to intervene, but knows when done is done.

Still Julia smiled. “I’ve enjoyed sparring with Danaë all these years, but really, the two of us are just scrabbling over leftovers. Thanks to you, someone else already finished conquering the world.”

The Gag-gene teetered as if to fall. “Thanks to me? Then, my mother… and my father? Who is my father?”

“Mmm. Well, now that you know your real birth-bash’, you can go home and ask. I doubt your step-ba’sibs in Tōgenkyō know much, but you can try Paris. Dominic’s an upstanding ba’sib, I’m sure they’ll help.”

Speech abandoned Carlyle, strength too, as she fumbled like one crippled by laughter or fever.

“Foster, don’t!” Papa made a halfhearted grab as the sensayer crashed past him toward the exit, like a hound mad with the hunt’s scent.

“Should we stop them, Papa?” The Commissioner General’s men prepared to follow.

“No.” Papa frowned at still-smiling Julia. “Too late.”

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

Rose-Tinted Daydream

Sometimes Madame compares her revolution to the Renaissance. As she has made the Enlightenment her weapon today, so, starting in the Fourteenth Century, Italy, tired of the yoke of northern chivalry, dredged the legacies of Greece and Rome from the dust, and redefined art, learning, and nobility on their ‘classical’ model, half ancient, half invention, in which Italy was the automatic leader. Petrarch was their spearhead, whom you may know as the subject of the First Anonymous’s third essay, which argues that Petrarch’s scholarly group who planned to live and work together might have instituted the bash’ system eight centuries early if the Black Death had not claimed all but him. It also claimed Laura, the beauty whom Petrarch’s poems apotheosized into one of those immortal goddesses of Love, like Juliet, Helen, Cleopatra, Lesbia, Dante’s Beatrice, Abelard’s Heloïse, and perhaps now Seine Mardi, for the paintings, poems, plays, and films keep flowing, the world’s imagination hungry for portraits of this young Humanist who shone so brightly that the Prince of Utopians would give up bash’ and Hive and life for her. Will her cult endure the centuries, I wonder, as Laura’s has? It is Petrarch’s poem 205 that I remember best, where he sorrows for the men centuries later who will read his verses and curse Fortune that they were born too late to see Laura’s beauty while she lived. Laura had children, though, living shadows of her beauty, including one famous descendant, whose path you may curse or praise Fortune for not permitting you to cross: De Sade.

“Casimir, you must let me pour you a drink.” Felix Faust lifted a decanter from the sideboard, cut crystal of an expense to match the aged nectar within. “I never expected you to get this far. What a wonderful world we live in where even I can be surprised.”