Have you never watched a death, reader? In slow cases like blood loss it is not so much a moment as a stretch of ambiguity—one breath leaves and you wait uncertain for the next: was that the last? One more? Two more? A final twitch? It takes so long for cheeks to slacken and the stink of relaxing bowels to escape the clothes that you can’t be certain Death has visited until the moment is well past. Not so here. Before Carlyle’s eyes the last breath left the soldier, and with it softness and color, the red of blood, the peach of skin, all faded to green as the tiny corpse reverted into a plastic toy soldier, complete with stand. Cowering beneath the table, our protagonist sobbed and screamed.
Bridger’s is not the name that brought you to me. Just as the most persuasive tongue could never convince the learned crowds of 1700 that the young wordsmith calling himself Voltaire would overshadow all the royal dynasties of Europe, so I shall never convince you, reader, that this boy, not the heads of state whom I shall introduce in time, but Bridger, the thirteen-year-old hugging his knees here beneath Thisbe’s table, he made the future in which you now live.
“Ready!” Thisbe rolled her drawing up into a tube and thrust it down for the boy to take. Might she have hesitated, I wonder, had she realized that an intruder watched? “Bridger, it’s time. Bridger?”
Imagine another new voice here, at home in crisis, commanding without awe, a grandfather’s voice, stronger, a veteran’s voice. Carlyle had never heard such a voice before, child of peace and plenty as he was. He had never heard it, nor have his parents, nor his parents’ parents in these three centuries of peace. “Act, sir, now, or grief will swallow up your chance to help the others.”
Bridger reached from beneath the table and touched the paper with his child’s fingers, too wide and short, like a clay man not yet perfected by his sculptor. In that instant, without sound or light or any puff of melodrama’s smoke, the paper tube transformed to glass, the doodles to a label, and a purple scribble to the pigment of a liquid bubbling within. Thisbe popped the cork, which had been no more than cross-hatching moments before, and poured the potion over the tiny soldiers. As the fluid washed over the injured, their wounds peeled away like old paint, leaving the soldiers clean and healed.
Thou too, Mycroft Canner? you cry, indignant reader. Thou too maintainest this fantasy, repeated by too many mouths already? As poor a guide as thou art, I had hoped thou wouldst at least present me facts, not lunacy. How can your servant answer you, good master? I shall not convince you—though you have seen the miracle almost firsthand—I shall never convince you that Bridger’s powers were real. Nor shall I try. You demand the truth, and I have no truth to offer but what I believe. You have no obligation to believe with me, and can dismiss your flawed guide, and Bridger with me, at the journey’s end. But while I am your guide, indulge me, pray, as you indulge a child who will not rest until you pretend you too believe in the monsters under the bed. Call it a madness—I am easy to call mad.
Carlyle did not have the luxury of disbelief. He saw the transformation, as real as the page before you, impossible and undeniable. Imagine the priests of Pharaoh when Moses’s snake swallowed their own, a slave god defeating the beast-headed lords of death and resurrection which had made Egypt the greatest empire in human memory—those priests’ expressions in the moment of their pantheon’s surrender might have been a match for Carlyle’s. I wish I knew what he said, a word, a prayer, a groan, but those who were there—the Major, Thisbe, Bridger—none could tell me, since they drowned his answer with their own instant scream. “Mycroft!”
I took the stairs in seconds, and the sensayer in less time, pinning him to the floor, with my fingers pinching his trachea so he could neither breathe nor speak. “What happened?” I panted.
“That’s our new sensayer,” Thisbe answered fastest. “We had an appointment, but Bridger … and then the door opened and they saw … everything. Mycroft, the sensayer saw everything.” Now she raised her hand to the tracker at her ear, which beeped with her brother Ockham’s call from upstairs. “¡No! ¡Don’t come down!” she snapped in Spanish to the microphone. “¿What? Everything’s fine … No, I just spilled some nasty perfumes all over the rug, you don’t want to come down here … No, nothing to do with that … I’m fine, really…”
While Thisbe spun her lies, I leaned low enough over my prisoner to taste his first breath as I eased up on his throat. “I’m not going to hurt you. In a moment your tracker will ask if you’re all right. If you signal back that everything is fine then I’ll answer your questions, but if you call for help, then the child, the soldiers, and myself will be gone before anyone arrives, and you will never find us. Clear?”
“Don’t bother, Mycroft.” Thisbe made for her closet. “Just hold them down. I still have some of those memory-erasing pills, remember the blue ones?”
“No!” I cried, feeling my prisoner shudder with the same objection. “Thisbe, this is a sensayer.”
She squinted at the scarf fraying about Carlyle’s shoulders. “We don’t need a can of worms right now. Ockham says there’s a polylaw upstairs, a Mason.”
“Sensayers live for metaphysics, Thisbe, it’s what they are. How would you feel if someone erased your memory of the most important thing that ever happened to you?”
Thisbe did not like my tone, and I would not have braved her anger for a lesser creature than a sensayer. I wonder, reader, which folk etymology you believe. Is ‘sensayer’ a perversion of the nonexistent Latin verb senseo? Of ‘soothsayer,’ with ‘sooth’ turned into ‘sense’? Of sensei, the honorific Japan grants to teachers, doctors, and the wise? I have researched the question myself, but founder Mertice McKay left posterity no notes when she created the term—she had no time to, working in the rush of the 2140s, as society’s wrath swept through after the Church War, banning religious houses, meetings, proselytizing, and, in her eyes, threatening to abolish even the word God. The laws are real still, reader. Just as three unrelated women living in the same house was once, in some places, legally a brothel, three people in a room talking about religion was then, as now, a “Church meeting,” and subject to harsh penalties, not in the laws of one or two Hives but even in the codes of Romanova. What terrible silence McKay foresaw: a man afraid to ask his lover whether he too hoped for a hereafter, parents afraid to answer when their children asked, “Who made the world?” With what desperation McKay screamed to those with the power to stop it, “Humanity cannot live without these questions! Let us create a new creature! Not a preacher, but a teacher, who hears a parishioner’s questions and presents the answers of all the faiths and sects of history, Christians and pagans, Muslims and atheists, all equal. With this new creature as his guide, let each man pick through the fruits of all theologies and anti-theologies, and make from them his own system, to test, improve, and lean on all the years of his long life. If early opponents of the Christian Reformation feared that Protestants would invent as many Christianities as there were Christians, let this new creature help us create as many religions as there are human beings!” So she cried. You will forgive her, reader, if, in her fervor, she did not pause to diagram the derivation of this new creature’s name.
“Mycroft’s right.” It was the veteran’s voice that saved us. From where I held him, Carlyle could probably just see the tiny torso leaning over the table’s edge, like a scout over a cliff. “We’ve been saying it’s high time Bridger met more people, and honestly, Thisbe, does anyone on Earth need a sensayer as much as we do?”