We collapsed here into tears together, Cornel MASON and myself. I like to think that, for that moment, the labels left. I was not Apollo’s pupil, nor his killer; Cornel was not the avenger nor the unrequited lover; we were just two people who had lost the same friend.

“I can’t tell… who’s right… anymore…” I gasped out through my sobs. “I won, but, when I killed Apollo, God made Bridger, and now someone else is making the war, not Apollo, not Utopia, not me. I don’t know who. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. And it’ll be a worse war, much, much worse. But there is one mercy, Caesar. You and Utopia don’t have to be enemies. You should still try to stop the war, you have to, but if you fail, if it starts, both you and Utopia will have the same goal: making it as short as possible. You can be allies. Once the war has started we can even have Bridger bring Apollo back, and you two can be allies at last, and work together to make this the best… the least bad… war that it could ever be.” I swallowed hard. “This Universe’s God is not kind. If They were, They wouldn’t have made me kill Apollo in the first place. More than that, a kind God wouldn’t have made human nature such that achieving a happy golden age like this meant risking the whole human race getting too comfortable and scared, like Mirai Feynman, and giving up on setting out among the stars. But here at least, for whatever inscrutable reason, They have been kind. We can bring back Apollo. If the war is real, Caesar, and we can’t stop it, then at least we can finally use Bridger’s powers to give my body over to Apollo. The largest part of my debt will be paid at last, my guilty life traded for Apollo’s better one, and all will be as it should be.”

Silence gripped MASON, far too dark to interrupt. He was not looking at me but at the statue, and I saw in his rain-streaked face an expression I had felt many times myself but never seen on another. Now the statue was a seed to him, a chrysalis waiting to become the man, and, as he faced it he faced not Apollo’s dust, but an Apollo he might walk with again, and speak to, and hear answers. “You know Jehovah won’t let you kill yourself, or anyone,” he answered at last, “not until we can prove we aren’t all Gods.”

I nodded. It may be strange to you, but it is the most natural of fears to Good Ἄναξ Jehovah. If He was born a God, why not all of us? Perhaps every human being in this world was a visiting God like Him, trained by society not to realize what we are, to think that the universes to which only we have access are mere imagination, not Realities themselves. And if we are all Gods and mortal, do our universes die with Us? Does every human death take with it another cosmos, infinite, life-filled, and better than this one? I could not prove to Him it was not so—can you?