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.

“Starting without me?”

“J-Julia!”

It was she, Julia Doria-Pamphili, not yet a statue but the living imperatrix, who strode into the citadel whence her pseudopriestly legions govern the omnipresent, silent kingdom of theology. Today she wore not only her slim black-and-purple sensayer’s scarf of velvet and satin, which twined about her shoulders like a serpent, but her full robes, the puffed and rustling archaism of academia, which strikes our eye as mad, but made sense in the arcane days when universities were born, and the surest proof of membership in Earth’s elite was still that one could afford to waste two yards of cloth on sleeves. Julia did not close the robe, of course, but let it flutter open, baring at the front her suit of sheer black silk, its custom tailoring proclaiming her membership in Earth’s elite today.

“Julia, but… you were arrested!”

“You’ve never heard of bail?”