The Pantheon is as solid as a mountain but airy too after the narrowness of Romanova’s streets, as when a narrow, crawling cave opens into a massive cavern which feels vaster somehow than the open sky. Pure sun streams in through the open hole in the center of the dome, wind too, and rain, since not even the elements are denied access to this universal sanctuary. The old Romans built their Pantheon for all the gods, but even in the age of geographic nations a more Earthly passion began to fill it with tombs of founders, saviors, artists, and in Paris’s copy even our Patriarch Voltaire. Our version in Romanova is well populated but far from fulclass="underline" our priests Mertice McKay and Fisher G. Gurai; our princes, Antonius MASON, Mycroft MASON, two Kings of Spain, the First Anonymous, the Third; our geniuses, Adolf Richter Brill and Regan Makoto Cullen; Terra the Moon Baby, of course; artists, humanitarians, celebrities, and, always with the most flowers wilting around him, the first Gordian Chairman, Thomas Carlyle.
Apollo Mojave is not with them. You should not have voted him down, reader. I know you could not understand why the Emperor and others wanted a hero’s burial for this young Utopian you had not heard of until his death, but you should have trusted them. You should have. You know what the Utopians have given you, yet you grant them only one grave in the temple which honors at least four from every other Hive. Your leaders meant it when they said he was the best of us. He should be there, ungrateful reader. You should at least have granted him Olympus, since he could not join his kin among the stars.
When we arrived, the actor who was to portray Chairman Carlyle today was already at the podium between the tombs, in costume in that signature green suit with its antiquated tapered necktie. Terry Lugli has made a career of playing our world’s hero in plays and films, even once playing Carlyle’s namesake, the Nineteenth-Century historian Thomas Carlyle, distant great-uncle to our world hero. The historian Carlyle argued that human progress is shaped and triggered primarily by Great Men which Nature sometimes drops into our midst. What would he not have given to be able to peek into the future and use his great descendant as an example?
“Mycroft, you made it!”
“I told you they wouldn’t miss it.”
“You just guessed, you didn’t know.”
At once my Servicer fellows were around me, a sea of smiles and beige-gray dappled uniforms. They had colonized four benches in the back left corner, by the bust and ashes of Sofia Kovács, who, inspired by St. Sir Thomas More, founded the Servicer program which keeps these guilty but benign offenders from rotting in prison with the malicious and insane.
“Mycroft, want some caramel crunch? A nice Cousin bought us some.”
“We saved you a seat, too.”
“Right here.”
They had, dead center, and I could sense the aftermath of some squabbling over who would get to sit beside me. Perhaps you cannot imagine life when you can no longer summon cars at will, when you are trapped within the reach of your own feet unless some benefactor calls you elsewhere. A benefactor too is needed to pay admission to a film, a play, a party, five euros to climb the scenic tower, one to ride the Ferris wheel. But public compassion has not left us with nothing. I count it among my few unequivocally good deeds that I petitioned to have the Renunciation Day speeches added to the short list of entertainments any Servicer may, at the kind Cousins’ expense, attend.
“No working over your tracker during the speeches, Mycroft,” the Censor warned me, his dark face warm and stern at once. “I want you resting. You need it.”
“Yes, Censor.”
The rest around me were staring fixedly at the Censor, who tried his best to be nonthreatening, slouching to diminish his physique, but that blood-purple uniform still raises and topples Hives. There was one sure way to heal the mood. “How many of you want ice cream when this is over?”
Four hands shot up, then eleven, then all.
“You got it.”
“Hurry, Vivien.” Su-Hyeon tugged his arm. “It’s beginning.”
Together Censor and Deputy raced to their reserved seats at the front, almost in time to avoid a smirk from Terry Lugli, who waited on the podium for Romanova’s highest officer to get his butt in his seat.
Those who introduce the speeches always ask you to imagine that it is the year 2131. You are terrified by the ever-climbing mortality figures of the latest attacks, more terrified at the backlash promised by the superpower, and most terrified of all by the means it has chosen to replenish its armies, thinned by long prosperity. You know that Chairman Carlyle has spent the last thirty hours cloistered with Cousins’ Program Director Sofia Kovács and Olympic Chairman Jean-Pierre Utarutu, the heads of the three great Mukta transit groups, which can evacuate members from continent to continent to evade a draft as easily as to watch a sports match. Now these three have called a press conference, and bring with them onto the dais Europe’s hero, King Juan Valentín of Spain. You cannot guess their plan, but you know it will set the shape of this new World War, and that they have most affluent third of the world’s population behind them. Fear is what the introducer asks you to imagine, the anxiety of living in a world the Bomb might end at any moment, and hope too, fragile, resting in this man. He speaks:
“ ‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate but equal station to which the Laws of Nature entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’ These words are as true today as they were three hundred and fifty years ago, when a group of idealists set out to found a new kind of nation freer than any that had come before. The nation they founded became great, and remained great even in our lifetimes, but it is not great today. No nation, whatever its power, can be called great when it imposes tyranny upon its citizens—worse, upon people it claims as its citizens, not because they have enjoyed the fruits of its soil, or benefitted from its protections, but because by chance their grandparents were born within that blotch of color on a map it calls its own. These free people—who have never spent more than an afternoon beneath its skies—these free people proud America now commands to surrender the fruits of their labors. Why? To finance a war—no, a campaign of destruction—waged, not between peoples, but between the members of governments, and justified in the name of two gods—two interpretations of God—in whom most of those who must now pay do not believe. Worse, this so-called nation dares, not merely to ask, but to compel these free people to send their children to fight and die for a group of men they do not call leaders, against a foe they do not call enemy, over a patch of ground they have never called home. Friends, an America who would impose these orders is no longer the champion of liberty its founders set out to create. It cannot command your loyalty.”
I must interrupt to ask, reader: did you spot Carlyle’s omission? Nature’s God. As it flowed from Jefferson’s pen it was the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God that entitled a people to separate but equal station among the Powers of the Earth, not Nature alone. Chairman Carlyle was no atheist. What you see here is the beginning of the silence. As the first bombs of the Church War rain down, those who consider themselves neutral are now afraid to mention the divinity.