Carlyle froze, taking some moments to remember that it was she who had spoken the name in Jehovah’s hearing. “Bridger isn’t God,” she replied. “I think they’re more an avatar of God, a manifestation, a tool. Something through which God channels Miracles.”

“But He is here. Your Clockmaker has shown Himself.”

“Yes.” Carlyle felt doubt’s end here, the fear that these last days might be illusion, dream, over. She never doubted again. “Bridger is a child, thirteen years old. They have the power to make toys real, any toy, no matter how fantastic, even living things.”

“Idea to actuality,” Jehovah supplied. “By Will.”

“Mycroft raised Bridger. Mycroft Canner.” Carlyle swallowed hard, a part of her rebelling as she found herself trying to defend, of all men, me. “I know it may seem cruel that they never told you, but they wanted Bridger to grow up and become a full, strong person before meeting you. Maybe they figured it was inevitable that you would meet eventually. Fated.”

“My fideist has nothing left to believe in but Providence.”

For Carlyle, who knew both the theology and me, this sentence stripped me naked as a soul at Judgment. A fideist is a religious skeptic, one who believes that human reason, however lofty its ambition, cannot achieve real, indubitable Truth, and that the senses, however fertile science makes them, are likewise fallible and incomplete. Not to be trusted. Have all your calculations answered what the soul is made of, Science? Have all your electron microscopes found or disproved an afterlife? I, born to the think tank bash’es of Alba Longa, I, trained by the genius Mardi bash’, I, with the finest education in the world, I, Mycroft Canner, had been so wrong that I murdered the living light Apollo to stop a war which never would have come. My logic was not wrong, the data gathered by the engines of human science not wrong. Rather the human animal I was could do no better than to err so absolutely. Reason failed. Evidence failed. I failed. Conviction had died in me in that room at Madame’s where my strange trial took place. Absolute doubt permitted only one escape: to surrender to and trust the Providence, which had not only planned my sin, but guided me after, not to the death I expected, but to Ἄναξ Jehovah.

“If you have a criticism, speak it,” Jehovah invited, sensing a hotter tension in Carlyle’s silence than mere pensiveness. “You are human, far more adept at living in this universe than I. I err often.”

Carlyle tried her best to face Jehovah sternly, but no human can. “You shouldn’t expose people’s beliefs to others like that. You did it before, at the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house. I didn’t want to know that Mycroft is a fideist, and Mycroft wouldn’t want me to know. That’s private, intimate. That’s how our culture works.”

The God thought for a silent moment. “Thank you. I forget that humans often cannot see what is to me as transparent as the air between us. I will try harder.”