Free Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer Page A

all the happiness in the world. Your son seemed to me half a philosopher, but still half happy.»
    Do you know the reference, reader? Or does your age, forgetful of its past, no longer know Le Patriarch by that worthy epithet? Have you forgotten the first pen stronger than swords? The firebrand who spread Reason’s light across the Earth, battled intolerance, religious persecution, torture, forced kings to bow before the Rights of Man, and introduced wit into philosophy again? Is Aristotle not still known by the honorable title of the Philosopher? Shakespeare the Bard? Brill the Cognitivist? How then can you forget the Patriarch? Perhaps you protest, Thou accusest me unjustly, Mycroft. History has not swallowed this great man, rather he has swallowed history. I do not know who created the first government, or built the first wheel—it is so ubiquitous that I do not need to. Just so, my better era does not teach me who first fought for these good heresies you list, for they are now Truths, and the blind age that doubted them is well forgotten. Perhaps you are right, reader, it is honor, not dishonor, if you forget the Patriarch. We now doubt Aristotle, understand Shakespeare only with footnotes, poke holes in Brill, but the Patriarch, whom all Earth follows without thinking there could be another way, he has indeed swallowed us up. But he has not so swallowed Danaë, reared, as she was, as if in his own age, when he—her Patriarch—needed defending. Voltaire, reader, the Patriarch of the Eighteenth Century, the era which has just remade your own, it was Voltaire.
    A Lady of Danaë’s education knows the corpus of the Patriarch by heart. «A good answer, Mycroft.» Heartache’s remnants gave her French a somber tint. «Thank you. If he has been drawn into this by some cruel manipulator, I know you will protect him.»
    I had meant to trade blackmail for blackmail here, but instead found myself drawn into pity, for Danaë, and for young Carlyle, too. My mind buzzed with measures to protect them, the lady from the enemies of Mitsubishi and Japan, the sensayer from the stern Major, from overcautious Thisbe, from himself, mistakes he might make in the first giddy hours after meeting Bridger. That thought warmed me, the strange, sideways kindness of Providence, which had stripped the Gag-gene of bash’ and past and family, only to give him a treasure which was, to any sensayer, a thousand times more precious: a miracle. «Actually, Princesse, I think he has both much knowledge and much happiness, at least where it matters.»
    If some brave painter captured her smile on canvas it would draw crowds down the centuries. «Thank you.» Then again in Japanese, for all to hear, 「 Thank you, Mycroft. And we must thank my dear brother for calling you and Martin in to solve this. I know all feel safer in your hands. 」
    Director Andō nodded my dismissal, and Princesse Danaë passed me my Servicer’s reward at last, a round lunch box, tied and too heavy to be anything but sushi. My many masters don’t always remember they must feed me, that their toil-earned handouts are the only sustenance permitted to we the unfree. But Danaë—this monster from a more barbaric time—always remembers the protocols of servitude.

 
    C HAPTER THE FIFTH
    Aristotle’s House
    I muse sometimes about where else in history I might have picked to be a slave, if I had had my choice. I could have been a slave in Aristotle’s house, when he reared Alexander. I could have midwifed at the birth of Caesar. As a slave-convict I might have added my sweat-drenched kilometer to the railroads that saddled the great continents, my heaven-bound cable to the first Space Elevator, or sweated in the rigging of the Santa Maria as she erased the dragons at the world’s end and knit the whole sphere closed. If we count apprenticeship as an unfreedom, I might have been the typesetter who