«They’re waiting for You through here, Sweet.» Madame took her Son’s elbow, and, as a speedy valet held the door, plunged out into the hallway with a cheery whistle. «Saladin! Mycroft! Heel!»

We frisked after.

The royal nunnery’s hallways had never anticipated the architectural breadth of the hooped pannier which mounded Madame’s skirts to three times human width. The hiss of silk against the stone passage as she passed was so organic that what little of the real creature ‘snake’ remains within Voltaire’s swissnakes hissed in answer.

Madame flashed a sharp glance back. “Do hush thy infestation, Seldon”—she refuses to grant the Patriarch’s name to Utopia’s creature—“or must I have their numbers culled again?”

“Apologies, Madame.” Voltaire gave a stiff, respectful, bow. Hostage is a hard state, reader, even in a seat of comfort. Madame’s Utopian hostages may not, like my Saladin, have literal collars to tether them to Madame’s side, but for the hostages to stray across the threshold without her permission or her Son’s would be a rebellion Utopia dares not attempt, not now. Whatever Madame fancies Utopia still supplies: servants, agents, clothes, synthetic queenly jewels, walls of Griffincloth to simulate her lost salons. And so they must, for fear has nocked a billion arrows, some aimed by fearmongers—Cookie at the set-sets, Tully at the Mitsubishi, Sniper at Ἄναξ Jehovah—but most aimless still. Only a fool forgets the virtuoso puppetrix who sits by, ready for her encore. The billion arrows of complacent Earth against Utopia: don’t doubt she could.

All were on their feet as we entered the square hall. Faust, comically modern in his Brillist sweater, was pouring a glass of brandy. Dominic, beside him, seemed uncommonly himself, his suit of Enlightenment black freed here from the Mitsubishi jacket which his new office required. On the screen between them, Kosala had the overperfect hair and fresh-pressed wrap of someone trapped between Important Meetings, and the kitelike shifting colors behind her showed she was still at her capitol in Casablanca. MASON was not with them. Nothing beneath the inconstant Moon is perfect, reader, not the crumbling slopes of Olympus, nor the fractal structure of the water-flea, so even here, as Earth teeters between a New World Order and Apocalypse, this Emperor, who guards more lives than any sovereign in Earth’s throne-rich history, still had to use the bathroom.

Faust’s eyes nearly vanished into the smile-folds of his cheeks as he caught sight of his Nephew. “Dominic, brace yourself.”

The warning came too late. As the bloodhound set eyes upon his Maître—color! color on his Maître’s shoulders!—the blood vanished from his cheeks. His eyes rolled back. A staggered pace buckled under him, and Dominic collapsed to his knees, further as even knees gave out, and he toppled forward onto his forearms, groveling on the stone floor like a man too starved to crawl.