scariest thing of all was that it was obvious to him that she wasn’t even trying. This was just what Hannah Conquest needed, to earn what she believed would be a life of quiet contemplation. To get everyone off her back for good.
Jethro glanced across at Nandi and the commodore. Of course, the young academic had been right. None of them could tell Hannah what they had discovered in the Pericurian embassy, not before she’d sat the exam. There was no telling how Hannah would react, and she needed her head clear and focused right now. Able to conjure up, as she was at the moment, a formula to prove how allocation of food to female children during a time of famine would prove the optimum stabilising force within a democracy – with a sidebar question on how the allocation would need to change for a classic autocracy.
Jethro winced. He remembered that question from his own examination. So, the priests administering the Entick test had reached the nineteenth book of synthetic morality, Saint Solomon and the Questions of Functional Savagery. There were no easy answers in that book, and the trick was often to reply with the heart as much as the head. Sometimes the wrong answer was the right answer, and sometimes it was better not to ask the question at all.
‘And every so often, it’s time for you to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions.’
Jethro’s eyes darted around the testing room. That voice. The stench of sulphur and wet animal hide in the room. Was that a glimpse of fur he saw slipping behind Boxiron? The people around him to seemed to slow down, as if moving through treacle, as the exotic presence forced its way into their world.
‘I take responsibility for my own actions!’
‘But do you?’ hissed the voice of Badger-headed Joseph from somewhere on the other side of the room. ‘All that death and misery in your little kingdom, and now the Jackelians can’t even be bothered to pray to us to make it better. What have you done of late to make the world a better place?’
‘Life is lived by the one and one.’
‘Oh, that’s pat,’ laughed the voice. ‘And all of your trite Circlist excuses appear to be made the same way. You know what your people created here on Jago now, you must know what you could do with the god-formula. The good that you could achieve.’
‘What Bel Bessant was creating was wrong,’ insisted Jethro. ‘No mortal mind is meant to have that level of understanding of the universe. Not without going insane.’
‘Oh, but that’s the twist: the world’s already insane. If you understood it a little better, maybe you could do something about it. Put your world towards the mend, instead of hiding yourself away from life with the all distractions of your investigations and the smugness of your false humanist cleverness. Maybe you could stop and pull your cowardly head out of the sand just the once.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Time is just a tree to be pruned, all the infinite possibilities branching out. The whisper of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the world and a good king takes the throne rather than his evil uncle. Plenty rather than famine. Health rather than plague. A little push here, a little nudge there. It’s so very easy to do. You could do it, you could use the god-formula to remake your world as a paradise.’
‘No one has that right.’
‘One branch of potential, another branch next door, you’re going to have to travel down one of them in the end anyway. The tree’s always growing, even we can’t stop that. All the branches look much the same from a higher perspective. Why not pick the road that leads to a nice warm bed rather than a swamp? A comfortable parsonage back in the Kingdom, the cosy fire stoked by Alice Gray. Isn’t that the world you always wanted?’
‘Those are words of temptation. I refuse you.’
‘Refuse us? I expect you to join us, fiddle-faddle man. Time to step up. Time to be like your funny half-steamman friend – time for you to go all the way up to top gear!’
Time lurched forward again and Jethro felt Boxiron’s metal fingers on his shoulder. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Jethro softbody? Hannah Conquest has finished her tests. It is time.’
‘Yes,’ coughed Jethro, ‘that it most certainly is, old steamer.’
Jethro stepped over to the table where the priest was storing away the pile of