MASON took a deep breath. “You have raised many aliens: Dominic, Ganymede, one might add Perry.”

Lacking a fan to veil her mouth, Madame could not help but laugh in Caesar’s face. “I appreciate the compliment, Cornel, but the others are different, based on the realities of the Enlightenment, not its darkest dream. No. Even I only had the resources to do it once. Jehovah is it. The rest are either tools or practice, but Jehovah was raised with everything, all philosophers, all our languages, equal access to all the contradictory thinking of our Hives and of the past, so the many beliefs annihilated one another, leaving the canvas blank and ready. Those people our world respects most, emperors and kings, Jehovah saw fucking like animals since before He knew the difference between beast and man. No child could absorb social values after that. I birthed a Being Who believes in nothing He did not conceive Himself. I hadn’t realized Enlightened Man would turn out to be a God. Our Jehovah wants omnipotence, Cornel. He needs it, feels its absence as a depravation, just as much as you would with a blindfold. I can’t give Him omnipotence, but I can at least use this great change to help Him conquer more of the world than Xerxes or Alexander or any other God-King ever ruled. If being the head of the Leviathan is the closest to godhood a human being can achieve, then I will help Jehovah eat up all the Leviathans.”

Had you smelled Hobbes at work in Madame before, reader? He from whose brute shadow not even sun-bright John Locke could wholly free us? The Hive, the nation, multitudes united into one Leviathan with the Sovereign as its head, is, as Freud might put it, another of mankind’s prosthetic gods: deputies substitute for omnipresence, laws for Justice, welfare for Divine Love, the long reach of the military for the angel with the flaming sword. I had not until this moment imagined that Jehovah would consent to being Master of the world, but a lost God, stripped of His native omnipotence like an amputee of his rightful limbs, might take every prosthesis offered Him.

The Father of Men and Gods, to grant Caesar the most appropriate of Zeus’s titles, listened with patience to Madame’s words, as he always had, whether in the privacy of her boudoir, the philosophisexual climax of a debauch, or at their first meeting, when he was still a young Familiaris brought to Paris by Charlemagne Guildbreaker for some discreet recreation. “Did you know this would lead to war?” he asked at last.

Madame blinked. “War?”

“War,” he repeated, cold. “This ‘great change’ you say you felt was coming, you can’t be the only person who hasn’t realized it means war.”

She laughed. “Cornel, we’re sensible modern people, we’ve outgrown war.”

“Outgrown?” he snapped. “How can you still have no inkling of the warning signs? Kohaku Mardi’s numbers, the Censor’s predictions, O.S., Sniper, Tully Mardi; Apollo died for this, Aeneas—even the original Enlightenment ended in bloody revolution! What were you thinking, unleashing that?”