“Are you afraid of the word ‘miracle’?” I asked.
“No.” He was looking at me now, and I turned my head to hide the chunk that is missing from my right ear, lest he match that to the name ‘Mycroft’ and realize who I was. He gave no sign of guessing. “In fact it’s one of my favorite words.”
I raised my eyes and looked directly at the Cousin at last, happy to find few insignia at all beyond his Hive wrap and vocational scarf: he wore a red-brown mystery reader’s bracelet, a tea enthusiast’s green striped socks, and a cyclist’s clip on one shoe, but nothing political, no nation-strat, not even a campus ring. I smiled my approval, and on the table the Major nodded his. Thisbe still held us, a dark stare which forbade any interruption of her silent self-debate. When she did soften into a smile, the whole room seemed to soften with her, the pulse-hot current of threat and force swept away by the easing of her stance, like smoke by a healing breeze.
Thisbe knelt beside the table, summoning her softest voice. “Bridger? Would you like to come out and meet this sensayer, Carlyle Foster?”
The boy beneath the table rocked within the cradle of his knees, voiceless crying making his breaths staccato. “Pointer’s dead.”
I apologized silently inside, to Pointer, to the boy, the soldiers, for letting the crisis of intrusion disrupt the necessity of mourning. Taking care still to tilt my mangled ear away from Carlyle, I crawled under the table and wrapped as much of my warmth around Bridger as I could. I stroked his hair, gold-blond now, losing the white-blond of childhood. It was hard to believe he had turned thirteen. “You know what a sensayer is, right?” I coaxed. “You remember what I told you?”
“A sensayer is”—sobs punctuated his answer like hiccups—“somebody who—loves the universe so—so much they—spend their whole life—talking about—all the different—ways that it—could be.”
I smiled at my own definition parroted in child-speak. “Sensayers help people think about where the world came from, and whether there’s a plan or somebody in charge or just chaos, and what happens when people die. Carlyle here is a sensayer. They can help you think about those things. Especially death.”
Armored in my arms, Bridger found the strength to raise tear-crusted eyes and face the stranger. “Can I bring Pointer back? Is that okay? I can make a potion that’ll bring Pointer back from the dead, but I don’t know if that’s bad ’cause I don’t know where they went now that they’re dead, and maybe it’s somewhere good, so maybe it’s bad to bring them back here, but maybe it’s bad where they went, or maybe they didn’t go anywhere at all and they’re just gone. Do you know?”
Carlyle smiled, a perfect, calm, real smile, and I admired his recovery, bouncing back in less than two minutes from violent chokehold to being the only really calm one in the room. A sensayer indeed. “No, I don’t know,” he answered, “not for sure. People have made a lot of different suggestions, and there are good arguments for many different versions. We can talk about them, if you want. But what do you think? Do you think Pointer went somewhere?”
Master, do you believe that Chance alone, without Providence behind it, would have sent this child, in this moment, so suitable a guide?
“I don’t think Pointer just went away.” Bridger wiped his nose on his sleeve, and his sleeve on mine. “It wouldn’t be fair if they just went away.”
Carlyle’s smile was practiced enough to betray nothing. “A lot of people agree with that.”
“And it wouldn’t be fair if they went somewhere bad.”
“A lot of people agree with that, too. There are lots of good places they might have gone. Some people would say Pointer has been reborn as someone else. Some would say they’ve returned to being one with the whole universe, the way they were before they were born. Some would say they went to an afterlife.”
Bridger’s fingers dug into my arm. “Like Hades or Heaven. And then you get to see all the dead people you knew, like your mom and dad.”
“That’s something some people think might happen after death, yes.”
“Except Pointer’s mom and dad never existed, because they’re made up. I made them up. Pointer remembered them like Pointer remembered the country their army was from and the war they fought, but none of it ever happened because it’s all made up. Do made-up dead people go to the afterlife?”
Carlyle’s five years at in training and four in practice could not supply an answer. I was deeper into Carlyle’s records now, past honors transcripts, parishioners’ endorsements, bios of bash’mates—a safe, unfamous bash’, all Cousins, mostly teachers plus a masseur, two mural painters and an oboist. I had even found his orphanage records, expected from the surname Foster. I had not expected the word ‘Gag-gene.’
Perhaps in your age, gentle reader, the human race is better, good enough that you no longer need so dark a tool? The universal catalogue of DNA, our greatest guard against disease and crime, also ended anonymity for foundlings, whose parents leave signatures in every cell. Courts called it a triumph at first, the empowering of the abandoned, and it took the Cooper scandal and the Chaucer-King triple suicide to force law to admit that one foundling in a thousand carries in its genes a past too hard to bear. Hence the little race of ‘Gag-genes,’ which does not mean, as rumor claims, genes whose story is so vile it makes you gag, but ‘Gag-order-genome,’ a court order which denies the child access to the testimony of its own blood, for its own happiness. Law leaves it to the courts, not parents, to decide what case merits Gag-gene status, though parents may plead (and bribe) if need be. Rape is not enough. Incest-rape is likely in your mind, and it is sometimes incest-rape, but it is usually a longer, stranger tale than that. If Troy’s Queen Hecuba, impossibly mother of fifty sons, had borne a fifty-first, not in the topless towers of Ilium, but in the slave tents after the city’s fall, where the Trojan women clasped their captors’ knees with hands still white with the ashes of their husbands, if in such an hour vindictive Fate, judging the queen’s defilement not yet absolute, let rape plant one last seed in the womb which had borne so many unto death, and chose no hero’s seed, not Menelaus, or an Ajax, or some other king, but gave her royal body over to the pleasures of bow-legged Thersites, the ugliest and lowest creature who ever came to Troy, a son conceived thus would have been a Gag-gene. I smiled now at the name Carlyle. I had thought at first it was lack of originality which made the orphanage choose what has become Earth’s most common baby name now that I plunged Mycroft off the list. But you must admit a Gag-gene, denied any inheritance, even his parents’ story (which might at least have offered him that patrimony named revenge), deserves at least a hero’s name.
“Problem?” Thisbe crouched closed to me and mouthed it, likely spotting my flinch at the word ‘Gag-gene.’
“Maybe,” I mouthed back. “Best get Bridger out.” I mussed the boy’s hair. “You want to go home, Bridger?” I coaxed. “You don’t have to talk to Carlyle right now. You can go home, have Mommadoll make cookies, and decide later whether or not to resurrect Pointer.”
“But…”
I squeezed his shoulder. “Pointer’s already dead, nothing will change for now. You can take your time and then make up your mind.”
“What if they’re in a bad place? Like Hell?”
I squeezed him tighter, choking up myself before that word.
The Major faced it better. “Pointer was a soldier, Bridger. They were ready for death, no matter what death is.”
The little dam of courage broke inside the boy now, releasing sobs, half-muffled by his efforts to be strong.
“Come on.” I scooped Bridger forward, my arms forgetting he was no longer so easy to lift.