“Caesar, who—”

“Apollo. Five years before my succession, they called me to meet them behind the Rostra. They had already realized I was Imperator Destinatus, that was easy, but it had never come between us, not before. I found them in tears, leaning against the Milliarium, and, in their coat, the column was defaced, singed, the inscriptions gouged or burned away. It was horrible.”

I could well imagine it. I passed it almost daily on my way through the Forum to the Censor’s office or Julia’s, the Milliarium Aureum, the column by the Rostra on which are inscribed in gold the distances to the great metropolises of the world empire: to Brussels, Tōgenkyō, Alexandria, to Ingolstadt, to Casablanca, to Buenos Aires, soon to be the Humanist capital again after the fall of Ganymede and La Trimouille, and the mechanical device implanted in the stone which tracks the ever-changing distance to Luna City.

“Apollo said,” Caesar continued, “that Mushi Mojave had been selected to go to study the ant colony they found on Mars. I didn’t understand, I congratulated them on their ba’pa’s good fortune, said it was wonderful, but that just made them cry more. I asked why. They said Mushi was the number-two ant expert in the Hive.”

I nodded. “After Mirai Feynman.”

“They said Feynman was offered the position first, but turned it down because they had a bash’, a family, and going to Mars is dangerous. A Utopian said going to Mars was too dangerous.”

I too remembered well Apollo’s tears, hysterical, hearing that news.

“Then Apollo asked me which the world thought was more important,” MASON continued, “the present or the future. I didn’t understand. I kept trying to be a friend, but Apollo didn’t want a friend, they wanted the Imperator Destinatus.”

Is this not, reader, the strangest of titles? Imperator Destinatus, the future Emperor. The successor’s name is sealed in the Sanctum Sanctorum, never to be revealed until Succession Day on pain of the harshest penalties that justice can inflict, and even speculation is forbidden under Romanova’s First Law. The title, then, exists only so it may not be used, like a god’s forbidden name, which cannot be pronounced without invoking his wrath.