MASON took a deep breath. “You have raised many aliens: Dominic, Ganymede, one might add Perry.”
Lacking a fan to veil her mouth, Madame could not help but laugh in Caesar’s face. “I appreciate the compliment, Cornel, but the others are different, based on the realities of the Enlightenment, not its darkest dream. No. Even I only had the resources to do it once. Jehovah is it. The rest are either tools or practice, but Jehovah was raised with everything, all philosophers, all our languages, equal access to all the contradictory thinking of our Hives and of the past, so the many beliefs annihilated one another, leaving the canvas blank and ready. Those people our world respects most, emperors and kings, Jehovah saw fucking like animals since before He knew the difference between beast and man. No child could absorb social values after that. I birthed a Being Who believes in nothing He did not conceive Himself. I hadn’t realized Enlightened Man would turn out to be a God. Our Jehovah wants omnipotence, Cornel. He needs it, feels its absence as a depravation, just as much as you would with a blindfold. I can’t give Him omnipotence, but I can at least use this great change to help Him conquer more of the world than Xerxes or Alexander or any other God-King ever ruled. If being the head of the Leviathan is the closest to godhood a human being can achieve, then I will help Jehovah eat up all the Leviathans.”
Had you smelled Hobbes at work in Madame before, reader? He from whose brute shadow not even sun-bright John Locke could wholly free us? The Hive, the nation, multitudes united into one Leviathan with the Sovereign as its head, is, as Freud might put it, another of mankind’s prosthetic gods: deputies substitute for omnipresence, laws for Justice, welfare for Divine Love, the long reach of the military for the angel with the flaming sword. I had not until this moment imagined that Jehovah would consent to being Master of the world, but a lost God, stripped of His native omnipotence like an amputee of his rightful limbs, might take every prosthesis offered Him.
The Father of Men and Gods, to grant Caesar the most appropriate of Zeus’s titles, listened with patience to Madame’s words, as he always had, whether in the privacy of her boudoir, the philosophisexual climax of a debauch, or at their first meeting, when he was still a young Familiaris brought to Paris by Charlemagne Guildbreaker for some discreet recreation. “Did you know this would lead to war?” he asked at last.
Madame blinked. “War?”
“War,” he repeated, cold. “This ‘great change’ you say you felt was coming, you can’t be the only person who hasn’t realized it means war.”
She laughed. “Cornel, we’re sensible modern people, we’ve outgrown war.”
“Outgrown?” he snapped. “How can you still have no inkling of the warning signs? Kohaku Mardi’s numbers, the Censor’s predictions, O.S., Sniper, Tully Mardi; Apollo died for this, Aeneas—even the original Enlightenment ended in bloody revolution! What were you thinking, unleashing that?”
Madame concentrated for some moments, like a bloodhound sniffing for traces of something infinitely subtle. “Fine, yes, I suppose war did occur to me as a possible side effect, or bloody revolution at least, but that’s not a problem. War is useful. The names of warriors and conquerors last a lot longer than those of peacetime heroes. What better way for our Son to eclipse Alexander than to fight and win a true World War?”
MASON seized her arm, hard. “And you don’t care who gets hurt?”
“Steady on, Cornel,” Felix interceded.
“Not one word, Felix!” MASON thundered. “You knew your sister was doing experiments a thousand times more dangerous than rearing set-sets. You didn’t care who got hurt either!”
Madame tugged against Caesar’s grip, drawing his attention back. “Of course I care who gets hurt! Jehovah is the Alien raised free from conscience, I’m not. I’ve tried every perversion in Sade’s book, but I still feel bad when I hurt people.” She sighed. “And imagine my disappointment when Jehovah came out more horrified by homicide than anyone. Our poor young God; the war will be so hard on Him. I trust you’ll help us get it settled quickly.”
“Get it settled quickly?” Caesar’s grip tightened, threatening to snap her wrist like a doll’s thin porcelain. “And just how do you imagine we’ll fight this war? You’re obsessed with the Eighteenth Century, have you never looked at what came later? Wars get worse when people know less about them. What is war going to be like now that we don’t even have territory? A war of all against all fought in every single street!”
She winced at his grasp. “Technology changes between every war. People adapt.”
“The problem isn’t technology,” he seethed, “it’s ignorance! In the First World War the first commander of the Russian forces boasted that he hadn’t read a strategy book written in the past century. Germany’s attack plan was based on the Battle of Marathon—490 B.C.! Result: disaster. Well, everything’s Marathon to us now. There haven’t been strategy books written in three hundred years! How am I supposed to imagine sending people into battle? What will they do? How fast will they break? How long should they train? What’s a big enough force to feel confident enough to take on a mission? What’s a reasonable length of time to leave them in a combat zone before they go insane? War makes people into monsters. How do I keep them from shooting themselves? How do I keep them from raping and pillaging? Brussels is in flames—how long until that happens in the capital, and all over my Empire?”
She tried to pull away. “Caesar, please! The propaganda of the name aside, Romanova isn’t your capital, it’s Ancelet’s, or was. Romanova’s never really had an Emperor before, but if it’s anyone’s now it’s Jehovah’s, and if you can’t control yourself I’ll have Him tell you to pack off back to Alexandria where you belong.”
I do not believe Caesar is a violent man by nature; none of them were until we made them so, Madame and Dominic and I, creatures too terrible for words without violence to truly touch us. It was Caesar’s right hand which held Madame’s wrist, but his left rose, with its stark black sleeve, poised to strike. Before his fist could fall, a fiercer hand wrenched his fingers off the Lady and slammed him backwards with a fast strike to the thorax. Speed made Madame’s defender almost visible, as ripples betray a fish, the edges of sleeves and hood flagging like slices of displaced space as the Griffincloth’s computer failed to keep up with combat’s savage speed. “Apol…” Caesar’s awed voice hardened to iron even as he toppled, “… Saladin!”
Safe behind her invisible guardian, Madame pulled his hood back and patted the hairless scalp above the hairless face which the vizor still made seem half Apollo’s. “Good boy.”
Wrath more than combat winded Caesar. “You let that monster out of its cage?”
“Stay where you are, Papadelias,” Madame warned, her quick eye catching the Commissioner General as he leapt toward his quarry like a child toward a mound of birthday presents. “He’s legally my guard dog now, and you’re no dogcatcher.”
Papa stopped at Caesar’s side, the gel-cuffs hungry in his hands. “I think a judge can resolve the species issue easily enough.”
Madame shook her head, today’s modest wig shining in the hospital light. “If you push to have him declared a human being, before you can get a judge to issue an arrest warrant I’ll have him certified mentally incompetent, not responsible for his actions past or present, and remanded to my custody as guardian, beyond your reach. Alternatively we can leave him legally my dog, and if he ever hurts anyone you can force me to have him put down. Which do you prefer?”
The Commissioner General did not answer, but his slack face declared touché.
“Both of them?” Wrath’s quake hardened MASON’s fists. “You want me to let Saladin run free like Mycroft?”