“You can sense it, can’t you? You can read people’s minds, their thoughts. That’s how you know people’s religions. That’s your power, isn’t it? A special power, like Bridger’s. People call it telepathy.”

“My Peer, That Host Who brings Me here as Guest, does not grant that.”

“What?”

Tired, that’s how Carlyle described Jehovah here, exhaustion like Felix Faust’s, whose brain saps its host flesh harder than brains were meant to. “I know the word ‘telepathy.’ It would be a precious sense, making the mind’s world visible, a world of words will-shaped, more giving than matter. With telepathy I would be a sense less blind. No, I have no such sense.”

“But you know things, see things about people, things no one could see from just a glance.”

“I work hard to understand this world, its thinking creatures most,” answered This tender Visitor to our rough world. “I make the most of the senses this flesh possesses. I see people with these eyes, hear with these ears, feel the temperature when a pulse races. I think of what that means. My Uncle Felix does no less. Is that a miracle?”

Carlyle opened her mouth, but thought caught her. “No. No, I guess, it doesn’t have to be. You could just be very strangely good at reading people.” She chuckled at herself. “After Bridger I was too… credulous.” Shame made her blush. “Aren’t you going to ask me where Bridger is?”

Jehovah spared the sensayer His gaze. “You do not know. If you did you would be agitated, debating inside whether or not to tell Me. Dominic too, right now, does not know. When I find Mycroft, I shall know if he knows. If he knows, then I shall discover whether I ask. If I ask I shall discover whether he answers. Blindly we move. That is how time works.”

Carlyle felt dizzy, a metaphysical vertigo, as if she were in freefall, plunging into the pit of an unseen future, but somehow she had not realized she was falling until Jehovah made her see. She hugged herself.

“We must stop this conversation now,” Jehovah judged, rising with a robot’s slow efficiency, a minimum of muscles.

“Why?”

“We are increasing the cumulative total of human pain. You need rest. I have duties. Patris patience is at its limit. Strangely, I have been born into this universe as the Child of the leaders of your world, and the eight living leviathans which comprise humanity today compete to place Me at their head. Perhaps This Universe’s God thinks it a kindness, power, to make Me as close to My customary omnipotence as possible, a soft bed laid for Me, His Guest. But, vast as Man’s prosthetic powers are, a finite thing, however grand, is nothing against a lost infinity.”

MASON arrived now, and it is possible that his footsteps, audible on the stairs, were what told Jehovah their conference was about to end. “Terminus est, Fili,” MASON pronounced. “Foster, are you satisfied?”

Carlyle swallowed hard. “Yes. Yes, I… Yes.”