She said—
“You said that G—’s bomb went off first.”
“Yeah, it did,” he said impatiently. “Of course it did … Look—what does it matter? In the end, why the hell does it matter? Only one thing matters now.”
He smoothed over the holes—covered them up in a slight, leaden depression, a wave of his hand across the surface. Wet sand banked up on either side.
“I still have breath in my body,” he said. “They are still out there. There can be no forgiveness.”
“For whom?” she asked.
For a long time he did not answer.
Then he said, “Do you remember what happens now?”
Harrowhark Nonagesimus stood up. She brushed a few traces of sand off her trousers. She wiped tiny motes of rock from her eyes, and she heard the sea behind her, moaning soundlessly as it ate into the beach. She looked up to try to find the poisonous yellow fog; the degraded land; the torn-up buildings and flooded skeletons of towns; but there was nothing—just the beach, and some foothills below the beach.
“Yes,” she said. “Through her, I’ve seen it. You resurrect some of them. You wake up fewer still. You start out with a few thousand, then, later, some hundred thousand, then millions, but never more than millions. You teach them how to live all over again. You teach yourself. You work out how to repopulate the installations on each planet—or to finish the work begun before the bombs, or to improve on it. It’s easy. You’re God. Your energy is limitless and you can sustain your theorems without a thought—forget about them—because she is so enormous, and you and she are one. She understands at this point that she does not have to die—that she can never die, if you’re alive. And she’s scared to die. You’re afraid of so many things, but she’s only afraid to die. Then, when the disciples come to you and say the word Lyctor, she does not understand that they want the thing you did to her—she watches as you watch … watch them misunderstand the process.”
He looked up at her, squinting his eyes against the white and merciless sun. “God must be able to touch all of creation,” he said.
“I don’t—”
“You said it yourself. I can’t die if she’s alive; she can’t die if I’m alive. Why would you let something like that run around, Harrow? Why would you let someone go—away from you—untouchable—two people? I couldn’t—I loved them too much—I saw the face of Earth and choked the life out of it and ate it whole. Oh, I knew I was on the clock for the Resurrection Beasts. I pretended she was the only one, but I knew the others were coming. I needed my loved ones to be something I could touch … needed them to be my hands … my fingers.”
“But—”
“There can be no forgiveness for those who walked away,” he said. “Just as there can be no forgiveness for me—even though I rip the very fingers from my hands … throw them into the jaws of the monsters who hunt me … as I run from them across the universe, end to end. Something will satisfy them eventually, but nothing satisfies me. Nothing.”
He drew his gaze away from her—his black-and-white, chthonic stare—and looked out over the dunes. He said, “But that’s the grace of it, Harrow. If I’m God, I can start over. The flood, you know? You can wash things clean. That’s all the end of Earth was … making things clean. It gets dirty again, you clean it again. Like those old power-washing ads. Spray and walk away, right? Sometimes I think the only reason I haven’t done it already is that I can’t bear the idea that I wouldn’t be able to touch them—that they’d still be out there … maybe that’s why I made the Tomb, Harrow. It is the death of God … it is the apocalypse … because it’s my self-preservation in a box.”
She said, “Teacher, there’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“There’re multiple things I don’t,” he said.
She said— “I want to understand why she was angry—I want to understand the mathematics, now that I have seen them for myself. I want to know how many of the Resurrection are left, and how many you began with, and what the discrepancies are. I want to know where you put them. They didn’t go into the River. I want to know why she was angry … and why you were terrified.”
She looked away from him, and she said: “I want to journey to find God. Maybe, at the end of that road, I will find God in you, Teacher … the God who became man and the man who became God. Or, perhaps, the child of the Nine Houses will recognise a different divine. But I am the Reverend Daughter—I am the Reverend Mother, the Reverend Father—I must find God, or some aspect of God, and understand it for myself … even if she lies, right now, within the Tomb.”