Saladin moved as I spoke. Only I could see him, accustomed as I was to tracing the ripple-shadow which betrayed the Griffincloth. The Cannergel that held me was firm as adamant—but the same genius that had crafted it had filled Apollo’s coat with blades to slice through adamant like tissue. We didn’t need them. The Commissioner General and MASON together, on their authority as human beings more than as my custodians under the law, released me.

“Come back safe.”

Saladin helped me rise. “Should I c—”

I winded him with a blow before he could complete the offer. “Stay here,” I urged, apologizing with a kiss. “The world needs Ἄναξ Jehovah right now, and Jehovah needs a translator.”

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST

Hero

I left you before with too little of Diogenes. Madame’s heroes, the Patriarch, the Philosophe, de Sade, you now know well, but the one mind in history that young Saladin and I acknowledged as our role model, him you doubtless see as just another Greek among many, instead of what he was: the most successful man in history. The great breakthrough of our age is supposed to be that we measure success by happiness, admiring a man for how much he enjoyed his life, rather than how much wealth or fame he hoarded, that old race with no finish line. Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied. Diogenes is greater. Or does that past-tainted inner part of you—the part that still parses ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘he’ and ‘she’—still think that happiness alone is not achievement without legacy? Diogenes has a legacy. Diogenes ruled nothing, wrote nothing, taught nothing except by the example of his life to passersby, but, so impressed were those bypassers, that, after the better part of three millennia, we still know this about him. How many kings have three millennia erased? How many authors? How many books? I lied to the Utopians, reader. It is fitting that I confess before the end. I never intended to finish Apollo’s Iliad. There was a storybook in there among the war plans, Apollo’s giant robots, and Utopia expected me to finish what my victim started. It is ingrained in us, in them above all, this conviction that writing is the best immortality. They feared you would forget Apollo, as Alexander feared that he would fade away with no Homer to immortalize him. But Diogenes needed no Homer, so I do not think Apollo needed his Iliad. If his name survives three thousand years, that storybook will not be why. So I lied. This is the book I finished for Apollo, not his own. Still, it no longer matters. What do a few paper chapters matter when Bridger has already made so much so real?

<Major? Are you getting this?> My fingers labored at my tracker, testing different frequencies, hoping that the text function at least might have recovered from whatever blast Papadelias had used that scrambled Bridger’s electronics.