“My darling Boy! Are You all right?” Even Madame does not hug Jehovah anymore, not that her Son objected, but His black gaze chills even her too much. “How are You feeling? Does it hurt?”

He answered with a string of all tongues, interwoven like pointillist brush strokes, meaningless to untrained ears.

“What?”

The doctor was a tiny Utopian, trailing a coat of molten stone which made the room into the layers of a volcanic mountainside, hardening at a century per second. She shared Madame’s frown. “No one’s been able to understand much of what they’ve said since they arrived. Short exchanges make sense, but nothing long. But I understand that’s normal when Mike is stressed, yes?”

I smiled hearing the grandest yet humblest of His many names. “It is,” I answered, straining against the straps as I leaned forward far enough to see Jehovah’s eyes. “Usually I translate when He’s excited or upset.”

The doctor nodded. “What’re they saying now?”

Men say Jehovah’s tone never changes, that He stays equally cold before the Senate House and gentle Heloïse. It is almost true, but Felix Faust, whose expertise can read the temper of an earwig, tells me there is one exception, slight, an ease which tints the pitch of His voice in one circumstance only: when I arrive. The Brillist definition of a bash’mate adds to the legal one, not just that you live together, but that you speak the same language, ideally the same group of languages, though mixed-tongue bash’es birth their own pidgin, each member injecting favorite foreign phrases into English. Bash’ by this definition is not just a group of people, but that special group of people with whom one can communicate completely. Madame has never answered whether she was pleased or angry when her Great Experiment found another who could comingle English, Latin, French, Spanish, a little German, Japanese, and Greek.

“He’s happy,” I translated. “He says… He says proof that a God’s universe survives His death means… means…”—tears leaked from me even as I struggled to paraphrase—“it means He doesn’t have to worry anymore that, if all human beings are Gods like Him, then each death might destroy an entire universe. It reduces the possible tragedy of human history by a factor of infinity per human being that has ever died.”

Each in that room—MASON, Martin, Faust, Madame, the Utopian doctors who have studied Him since their surrender—believes in Jehovah’s divinity to some different degree, some not at all, some partly, some completely, but whatever their beliefs they all believe that He believes it. So all paused now to consider how this new revelation would affect Him, and through Him everyone. Martin wept a few tears, delight at seeing so dear a Master relieved of that cruel fear which had gnawed at Him as viciously as the eagle at Prometheus. I sobbed outright.

The Utopian nodded pensively. “How do they feel physically?”

Jehovah answered, metaphysics pouring around me like a waterfall which cleanses soul instead of flesh. “He says He finally understands why He had to be born in a physical body to communicate,” I interpreted. “He… He accepts it now. He says it was hard making contact, but He’s glad This Universe’s God gave Him a life here. They were both lonely.” Lonely… glad… I do not dare call it translation, this blasphemy, inadequate, unclean; I may as well be a sighted mole describing to my blind kin the wonders of Luna City. ‘Lonely’ was nothing to the phrase which captured all the longing and eternity of Dante’s Hell, and ‘glad’ not a thousandth part of the joy felt by this Sentience which had endured so long with nothing but toys and worms for company, but now heard at last the longed-for whisper through the dark, “I’m here.”