If you are my contemporary, reader, brought to this history to understand the days of transformation you are still living through, be patient, pray. Do not act rashly, spurred by your revulsion at the dark underbellies I have exposed here. Do not hate Cornel MASON, Ancelet, Kosala, Ockham, even Ganymede. So many on all sides of this are bloodstained, perverted, mad, but also noble, wise, untiring servants of your interests, who will give their days, their years, their deaths, to guard this world for you, or make a better one. I do not ask you to forgive them all, just to have reasons beyond rash grudges or affections when you choose to fight and kill for one side, or the other. As for Ἄναξ Jehovah, if your theology cannot admit that He is more than a madman, at least believe that it is a madness which makes Him Good. By His command I may not ask you to fight for Him. His Wish is only that you look with love—as He does—upon this world, this human race, its many branches, and judge carefully which one you will fight to make the trunk.

If, on the other hand, you are a distant reader, and our coming war is, for you, just one more memorial, standing in some quiet park where you grew up, laughing and chasing beneath the strange skies of whatever world Utopia’s toil has earned for you as birthright, pray for us. Our war may have been a thousand years ago, more, but God our Maker hears all prayers, past and future, even if He rarely makes His answers visible. If Providence sent Achilles to guide us in our day of greatest need, if we survive this war, rebuild, and if in future days some blessed generation is judged worthy to receive a second chance at what God tried to give us when He first sent Bridger, it may be that He grants humanity all this because you, child of a nobler future, asked Him to.

HERE ENDS

Seven Surrenders,

THE SECOND HALF OF

Mycroft Canner’s History

of these Days of Transformation.

HERE BEGINS

THE CRISIS STILL UNFOLDING,

whose Chronicle,

freshly begun, he names

The Will to Battle.

AUTHOR’S Note AND Acknowledgments

ADA PALMER

Books by their nature require many people: editors, publishers, test readers, proofers, designers, publicists. But books also require interlocutors, the many voices, scattered in geography and time, to whom the author responds. I thanked many people in the first volume, but it felt strange acknowledging the contributions of the present when the true list of contributors reaches deep through time. Side by side I should thank Denis Diderot, Alan Charles Kors, Homer, James Hankins, Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Alfred Bester, Miriam Weinberg, the Marquis de Sade, Diana Griffin, Gene Wolfe, Patty Garcia, Arthur Conan Doyle, Liana Krissoff, Montaigne, Anita Okoye, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Heather Saunders, Aldous Huxley, Irene Gallo, Robert Graves, Tom Doherty, Samuel R. Delany, Victor Mosquera, Victor Hugo, Amy Boggs, Suetonius, Ed Misch, Peter Chung, Crystal Huff, Barbara Tuchman, Irina Greenman, Osamu Tezuka, Lauren Schiller, Thomas More, Lila Garrott, Robert Fagles, Jeremy Brett, Francis Bacon, Michael Mellas, Derek Jacobi, Jonathan Sneed, Jack Pulman, Carl Engle-Laird, Petrarch, Jo Walton, Pierre Bayle, Doug and Laura Palmer, Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yatate, and many, many more. And you. Because even this list is only two-thirds of the conversation, past and present. You are the third. As I write these words Too Like the Lightning has launched, and, around the globe, the diasporic conversation is beginning, responses, more of them and more enthusiastic than I had dared imagine. The intensity of it these past months has taught me how even happiness can be exhausting. But I am also holding my breath, much like Mycroft at the end here, not knowing how the wide world will react to this second half of his history, the hard half, where we lose the lightning before it lightens. Because the most important part of this, your part, the part that conquers time’s diaspora, comes next. So thank you in advance for being part of it, coequal with Homer and Diderot, in our long conversation.