“And on yourself too, of course,” her brother interrupted.

“Of course, myself as well,” she conceded, smiling at tired Felix as she squeezed his arm, “but that’s a danger I’m prepared for. The world isn’t so prepared. Kraye as Perry proved the most talented at marshaling this little army of avengers, but I’m sure Papadelias will discover many co-conspirators who helped Perry create this chaos, so they could wreak revenge on whichever Director or Senator or Member of Parliament or whatever stole their love. The Eighteenth-Century aristocracy seduced, betrayed, and corrupted itself until its world self-destructed into revolution. I didn’t have to destroy you, Cornel. I just turned all of you into Eighteenth-Century aristocrats and let you do it yourselves.”

Whatever Madame’s tone, MASON had no more reason to believe this was the whole truth than you do, reader. “Why?” he asked. “Why do all that?”

“Because I realized I could.” She laughed even as she said it, as if hearing the childishness in her own tone. “Honestly, it was too tempting, all these fantastic weapons shut up in old etiquette manuals and romances, where no one but me recognized what they could do if someone brought them back into use. When you were a kid, did you never have the urge to build an atom bomb, just to prove with your own hands that people could?”

MASON shifted his stance, his weak foot weakening. “And you didn’t care what happened to the world? To my Empire?”

She gave the matter some quick moments’ thought. “I did care. I did, but this world already had all the signs of being on the brink of some great change, you’ve known that for years. Cataclysm was coming. I just thought I could shape the great change, make it my sort, the Eighteenth-Century sort. That way, instead of chaos, it would be a familiar kind of great change, something someone would know how to shape, and take in hand.”

“And conquer?” MASON supplied. “You saw the chance to seize power during the cataclysm, and rule through your son.”

“Rule through Jehovah?” She sighed. “No. Perhaps, a long time ago, when I was planning my pregnancy, I was setting things up to have you all pass power to my child so I could rule through them, but when the child was actually born, I didn’t want to raise a pawn, I couldn’t. You know I’m sincere, Caesar, in my way. I love the Eighteenth Century. I fell in love reading about it at Senseminary, that great moment when humanity realized experiments didn’t just have to be done with sciences, they could be done with morals and religion, too. I wanted to do that, run an experiment like the American Experiment, or greater. I couldn’t resist the chance to finish what my heroes started, not just the humanitarians like the Patriarch and the romantics like Jean-Jacques, but the underbelly, La Mettrie, Diderot, de Sade. The Enlightenment tried to remake society in Reason’s image: rational laws, rational religion; but the ones who really thought it through realized morality itself was just as artificial as the aristocracies and theocracies they were sweeping away. Diderot theorized that a new Enlightened Man could be raised with Reason in place of conscience, a cold calculator who would find nothing good or bad beyond what his own analysis decided. They had no way to achieve one back then, but I did it. I raised an Alien.”