“This is wise patience, pater.” Jehovah’s voice felt like hope, not that His tone changed, but even His lifeless voice felt light beside the Emperor’s. “Three days may buy many.”

Three days may, in fact, buy one hundred and twenty-eight.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

The Temple of Janus

Written August 8–9, 2454

Events of May 2

Hobbestown, Burgos, Rome, Romanova

“I am glad we go to the Vatican today, Mycroft. Never before have I desired so acutely to speak with My Peer, nor about so specific an aspect of His Plan.”

These were the only Words spoken by He Who Visits in our flight the next morning from Hobbestown to the convent, where we were to join His mother, thence to fly together to the reservation. I had not slept that night, for, when my eyes closed, I could see nothing but black-clad MASON on his bloody throne, and when they opened, the cornucopia of Utopia’s wonders proved irresistible. Braced by an anti-sleeping dose, I wandered that night through Eldorado, through asteroid mines, through a giant’s house, through Thebes, through a dusky Venice whose seas were inky purple and whose sky was sliced by vast Saturn-like rings, and through strange trees whose hollows merged into a black hallway where only shadows stirred. I was not alone. All night the Delian’s black lion padded, soft and solid, at my side. The great beast’s somber gaze reassured all bystanders that the cannibal did not range their lands unchecked. The lion condescended too to catch me with its furred and muscled softness, whenever the beauties made me faint. Most beautiful were the superhuman denizens these halls made of their populace, the nymphs and ancients, wraiths and aliens, that watched me with inhuman vizored eyes. The nowheres changed unpredictably, a shopping district on a plum-red moon transforming into eighteenth-century Kyōto as the computer’s timer switched the Griffincloth from following one Utopian’s program to another. Blacklaws stirred here too, human monsters mixing comfortably with folklore monsters in a collegial, commercial chaos under the real night sky. A child gave me an orange in return for a recaptured ball, to the quiet approval of its accompanying ba’pas, one Blacklaw and one flame-clad Utopian. Fate even gifted me a glimpse of one of the great prides of our age: the Lóngsphinx, a body which fuses feline with undulating Asian dragon lined by luminous translucent wings, which holds within an A.I. so advanced that, like those chimps and dolphins that we rear among us, this U-beast wears a minor’s sash as proof that Romanova recognizes in it a sentience as precious as a human child. We made life, reader; we made a thinking thing. All this Utopia let me enjoy, as if they sensed that I would need a special kind of strength to face tomorrow. For hours at a time, I did not think of Bridger.

“I must have My sensayer.”