“Then who…”

Child-bright wonder lit the Servicers’ faces as Prince Patroclus clambered from Achilles’s pocket.

So, as my companions asked eager questions of Earth’s second-greatest soldier, I settled back to watch the last emergency vote of the now-calming Senate. Greenpeace Mitsubishi Madhur Mudali’s motion passed, again one-forty-nine to fifty-one, and proud Jin Im-Jin handed down the Senatorial Consult to the Seven Hive Council, giving the Humanists, the European Union, the Mitsubishi, and the teetering Cousins one month to prepare proposals for reforming their governments, or else face the Senate’s wrath. A firm date. What would our makeshift army not have given for a firm date for the war? To know how fast to train, when to move our goods and weapons, how much quality to sacrifice for speed? One certain prophecy in wartime is worth a thousand times the treasures haughty Agamemnon laid so long ago at great Achilles’ feet.

And now we have that prophecy. My chronicle will reach it soon, the day of resolution when my first, best Master, in His Inhuman Wisdom, ended, in one blow, the storm of doubt and hope that had assailed us, planting in their place the certainty of war. As I write these words we have forty-four days until the Will to Battle turns to Battle. No doubt, no constant watch for smoke on the horizon. Forty-four days.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Lex Prohibit—The Law Forbids

Written July 22–23, 2454

Events of April 14

Romanova

“I saw what I saw. J.E.D.D. Mason—Jehovah Mason—came back from the dead. It’s fact. The public can’t avoid discussing it, whatever the law may say. Here, play the tape again.”

“Yes, play it again.”

“We’ve played it twenty times.”

“Is it true that not even the Censor’s database can identify the child who flies in out of nowhere, with the flying sandals?”

“Hermes’s sandals.”

“Careful.”

“Yes, it’s true, no success identifying the child so far.”

“There! There’s a flicker on the tape for a couple seconds, surrounding J.E.D.D. Mason. You see it?”

“Yes, I’ve seen the glow.”

“It’s residue from whatever visual distortion they used to fake the injury. It has to be. The whole thing is an elaborate fake!”

“That’s one theory.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

“Do you want an honest answer?”

“Of course.”

“I think it’s God. Don’t all of you?”

The faces of the sensayers who crowded the benches turned as pale as the statues of past Heads of the Conclave, whose portraits lined the courtyard around them, just as long ago in true Rome monuments to past Head Vestal Virgins had stood eternal vigil around their sanctum. It was too beautiful a day for even secret councils to resist the call of April kissed by sun. The Conclave members, and the Minor Senators who had joined them for the day’s debate, had chosen the courtyard for this meeting, where spring’s first waterlilies graced the pond with crowns of color, while high above the winds chased skeins of cloud along the Tibernovus toward the sea.