A pause as we all considered.
“Couldn’t you just have the volunteers go to the ceremony too?” Im-Jin suggested. “I know tons of people go to Passover Seders when sensayer centers host them.”
“Rosh Hashanah involves praying out loud, in a group, in Hebrew, and even with a pronunciation guide it’s really obvious who’s spoken those words before and who hasn’t. With time, volunteers could train for particular ceremonies, but not so fast, and not without fail. Plus this system will work for ceremonies where non-practitioners aren’t supposed to be there, as well as for those where anyone can come.”
Im-Jin nodded along. “Right. So, four doors and lots of volunteers, that sounds very doable.”
“Great! I want to get it underway immediately, so the Conclave can set an example to guide people through doing the same in centers in every quarter of this city and every city, that’s why we need the big budget, since with transit so disrupted, big cities need peripheral centers everyone can reach.”
“And apples and honey are for the ceremony?”
“Mostly to make clear we intend to work hard to source things for ceremonies. Etrog and lulav for Sukkot will be the first tricky one. The Conclave has them growing already, but not everyone will, but a lot of basic kitchen trees actually have etrog and the rest if they have the default multifaith pack, and while there isn’t time to grow the whole fruit before Sukkot, we asked some rabbis, who say there’s time for the tree to grow the flower that would become an etrog, so you can pollinate that and use it so long as the lump at the flower base that will be the fruit has swelled enough to be visible to the eye, and happily there is time for a well-fed kitchen tree to do that and grow the other three plants too, since leaves are fast. If we solve the Sukkot problem it’ll set people at ease. And it would be great if some of you personally attended the first few ceremonies at the Conclave, both to endorse the program, and as cover in case any of you does practice a ceremonial faith, because it’s really important no one here who’s running Romanova now gets outed, it’ll cause panic if people think one faith is seizing power, and—are you going to announce rationing? Please announce rationing? I assume we’ll need rationing, because nobody can ship food anywhere anymore, and if we could announce that ceremony meals at Conclave centers are exempt from rationing, that would be an amazing excuse people can use to come, and participate, and pretend it’s just to get extra food, and nobody has to be suspicious of anybody!” This long meander poured out of Carlyle, frantic yet rehearsed, as if they’d lain awake all night in bed chewing it over. “But we really, really have to do it right from the beginning. We’re too late for the equinox and the start of Mahalaya, but if we do really well with this set of Jewish holidays, and with Navaratri, then practitioners of all ceremonial faiths will calm down, but if we botch them, and everyone sees us botch them, and people get outed, then all people of ceremonial faith will get more and more scared as their own big holidays approach, and it’ll be a giant powder keg added to the war, and it’ll get worse, and worse, building up to December, when we’ll hit every single winter solstice–type holiday all at once, dozens of religions threatened, including Christmas, and also, Ramadan is likely to begin December twenty-first.”
Breath left me. Christmas and Ramadan? The twin sleeping dragons whose tussles have so often drenched the Earth in blood! Had Islam’s flowing lunar calendar really landed Ramadan so close to Christmas? With cars it’s effortless to hide a month of fasting, restaurants reverse their hours, “Party Nights,” and everybody bips around the world to never eat in daylight just for fun. Now will they be all outed? Every Christian and Muslim in our world within five days? The public fear of that event alone could shatter screen and window both. We were all staring, I realized. Not at Carlyle—at Charlemagne Guildbreaker. It wasn’t just their Middle Eastern coloring that made us stare, so common in the Empire. It was geography. The great Masonic capitals were rolling out their war roads, knitting together a geographic body as some undead beast might reknit its carcass from its bones and rise again: Tripoli, Cairo, Ankara, Istanbul, Baku, Samarkand. Connecting those dots mapped out a very specific region, MASON’s hollow Empire with the Levantine Reservation and its Inner Asian allies at its heart. We all presume that bloody Christianity hides divided, strongest perhaps among the Humanists, Europe, and Cousins, but divided, weakened, tame. But if, as many guess, its sibling Islam hides primarily among the Masons, now is the worst, worst moment to rip off the mask. Ramadan without the cars, and Christmas at the same time, outing both at once—imagine looking out over these rows of desks and knowing! I know the toxic strains of both religions died out in the Church War, that only the peaceful strains survived, innocents who suffered as much as anyone as the extremists poisoned the fringes of their faiths, but . . . I was hugging myself. Charlemagne Guildbreaker . . . No, it wasn’t something outing sweet old Charlemagne I feared, it was the Empire. I know Cornel MASON isn’t Muslim, they helped Achilles sacrifice a bull to the Greek gods, but others don’t know that, and MASON fasts for lots of holidays, most leaders do, cover in case someday one of them really . . . and we know a lot of Masons actually are, so people could fear . . . and all Earth knows what not-so-secret faith soon-to-be-Emperor Isabel Carlos holds, and while it’s a milder strain of Christianity, a cowpox that inoculates against its deadly cousins, it still makes this feel too familiar: Europe’s Empire, MASON’s Empire, this won’t turn into faith on faith, will it? Will it? Even the fear that it could might spark a million acts of panicked rashness nothing can undo.
If I live past a hundred, will I gain the grace to smile in the face of history’s bloody cycles, as Charlemagne Guildbreaker and Speaker Jin Im-Jin did?
“I think that’s all very good thinking, Hiveless Foster,” Charlemagne concluded, as warmly and calmly as if Carlyle had invited them to the dedication of a new playground. “I fully support giving the Conclave every resource it needs to handle these issues, here and worldwide. We’ll back you every way we can. And I’d be delighted to join you for Rosh Hashanah.”
“We should also do ceremonies here!” This was Su-Hyeon’s quick addition. “Everyone in this office works extreme hours, it will be hard to go out for things, but if you made this one of your centers, we could host some of the easier holidays, not ones that might out people but the ones that anybody can attend. That way, we can announce to the public that everybody currently running the Alliance might be any faith or mix of faiths, and set a good example.”
“Perfection.” Ex-Cousin Carlyle beamed. “Let the logistics begin!”
Panic withdrew its fangs as I watched these three working with Carlyle, two age-grayed Senators flanking our bright young Censor. They were ready for this, for any challenge, ready to heal window and screen alike. Those first days, solving problems, that’s when it was born, our makeshift Triumvirate: Su-Hyeon, Jin Im-Jin, and Charlemagne Guildbreaker. They rule Romanova, and the Universal Free Alliance too, since most other remnants of the Senate are too fractious to speak civilly even on video. As Censor, Su-Hyeon has emergency Dictator powers, but they’ve never been used in the history of the Alliance, so I don’t think people would actually believe in them if the two great Senators weren’t constantly shadowing Su-Hyeon on broadcasts, looking wizened and approving. They’re the great-grandparent generation, I think that’s why we’ve fallen back on Jin Im-Jin and Charlemagne Guildbreaker. Not that they know more of war than we do, but they at least grew up in, knew, and even ruled a world before the generation Joyce Faust ensnared and spoiled. They remember how the Hives worked when there was no gender brothel, no secret insiders, when Spain’s king had a happy family life, and Humanists flip-flopped between congresses and decemvirs with every vote, and no secret puppeteer was reserving almost all Earth’s highest offices for gender addicts. They know how Earth has solved crises before. So, as we see war’s floodgates opened by the potentates whom Joyce Faust shaped for fifty years (I traced the docs, they left sensayer school and bought their first brothel in 2404), the other generations—older and younger—are the rocks Earth clings to: the oldest Senators, and fresh Su-Hyeon. And me.