“For the same reason you open your eyes,” He answered, “and engage in dialectic. I and My work are better because I respond to My Peer’s. I deich… I mostr… I show… oui, ‘show’ is English… I show also, or rather I will and do and have show showed Him works of Mine, equally alien to Him as His to Me. He made makes and will make you and all His creatures be what you are because He is, always has been, and always will be responding to what He knows of Me. If the human is by nature a social creature, then We Two—My Peer and I—though We Are Creators not creatures, Are social with Each Other.” He paused. “Apologies. My own sensayer Dominic Seneschal excels Me at expressing this in English, but he is occupied at present as proxy custodian of the Mitsubishi Hive.”

They could not fault the excuse.

“And your assassination and resurrection, what was the purpose of that?”

“Nescio. I don’t know.” He caught His own Latin slip. “My Peer your Maker Wills that I meet Him incrementally, as you do. I did not choose My death, but I am glad I died. It freed Me from several painful doubts, and greatly clarified the nature of Our dialogue. I am also glad He brought Me back to learn more of Him, and of His.” Jehovah rarely meets others’ eyes. “Ainiku I regret to inform you that I still do not know whether or non your Maker provides you an afterlife. I long to free you from that question, since I know its pain, but I experienced only My universe, not death in His.”

The thought of the Great Answer swept across them like winter’s frosty breeze.

The Great Answer? Surely, Mycroft, that title must be reserved for proof of Divinty’s existence, not merely of the afterlife.

Must it, reader? It has been so long now, I forget what life was like before He placed His Signature before my eyes. His Existence, for me, is an answered question, while the other still burns late at night when Pascal’s truths break through. Still, what portion of mankind, I wonder, truly worries more about whether this cosmos has a Mind and Maker than whether the fragile, priceless ego must someday fade?

Hobbes: “The lesser portion.”

Reader: “You think so, Thomas? Even when the scholastic ancestors of these sensayers, their Aquinas and Maimonides, strove page on hand-scribed page to prove their God’s existence and nature?”