by Jack Yeovil
She refused to be distracted by the compliment, and stayed away from a file that felt wrong. Father O’Shaughnessy tapped her shoulder approvingly. She came across a cadre of lightly guarded PAGAN programs, defused the booby traps, and interfaced with them. It was a matter of dexterity. The APOSTLE latched onto each of the PAGANs in succession, scrambling their directives. It left CONVERTS in its wake.
She was nearly through the test. No faults.
With a flourish, she pulled herself out of the interface.
… and the screen filled with garbage. She had activated a deepsea tripwire, and her stats were printing out. Crudely computer-animated hellfire flickered on the screen. Father O’Shaughnessy looked at the paper, and tore it off.
“Humility, my child, humility. It is a lesson we must all learn.”
Returning to her place, Chantal heard one of the other students tittering.
“The Sin of Pride is grievous,” Father O’Shaughnessy told the class, “it can bring you low…”
Chantal’s face burned, and she bowed her head. Her wimple covered her neck, but she wished she had an oldstyle habit to draw down over her head.
“… but there are worse sins. Those who hide their lights behind a bushel, for instance, Brother Leon, or those whose industry does not match their ambitions, Sister Sarah.”
He held up the print-out.
“Let us examine Sister Chantal’s progress in detail, shall we? I hope your colleague may be able to teach you something where my poor efforts might have failed. Let us return to our APOSTLE. As you know, an APOSTLE is an independent program which, when fed into any given system can spread the Word of the Lord and convert selected PAGAN programs. Sister Chantal’s progress shows the hazards and dangers any given APOSTLE will face in the cybernet, not unlike the hazards and dangers faced by the original apostles when they first spread the news…”
V
Milan, Italy, 1992
“Chantal… come back?”
“No, Marcello.”
It was late afternoon. Mlle Fournier was out with Isabella, shopping. Chantal sat at her dressing table, looking at the room behind her in the mirror. Since she had taken down all the posters she had had up as a kid, the place looked empty, untenanted, like the bare cubicles she had lived in for three years at St Patrick’s. None of them had felt like home, and now home didn’t either. She combed her hair. When she was younger, she could spend hours at the mirror, dreaming, passing the comb through her long, long hair. Now, a few strokes of the brush would do. She had turned her back on a lot of things.
“Don’t you like me any more?” said Marcello from the bed, his head shadowed by the hanging curtains.
“It’s not that.”
She examined her face and neck minutely. Her skin was unmarked. Three weeks ago, in Dublin, she had fought for the school and been roundly beaten by a novice from St Brendan’s. Her face had been a mass of bruises. Now, there was nothing. Her mother, on an increasingly frequent basis, had Dr Zarathustra’s little operations, but all Chantal had was prayer, meditation and exercise. It was working well so far.
“Is it because of your vows?”
“You know it’s not that.”
Marcello sat up. He looked bitter. “No, of course. Your friend Papa Georgi says you can get laid as often as you want, just so long as you don’t marry anyone but Christ! Hell, Chantal, what kind of life is that!”
She promised herself that she wouldn’t get angry with Marcello and sorted through the jewellery she would never wear again. Isabella’s admirers always used to give her jewellery. She would give the more valuable pieces to the fund for Mother Theresa. The rest could go to her old friends.
“Do you want this ring?” she asked Marcello. “It’s fire opal. From Australia. Prince Bonfigliori gave it to me. See how it catches the light.”
Marcello stood over her. He wore only his jeans. His skinny torso shone. “What are you talking about, Chantal?” he said, anger in his eyes, “what the freak are you talking about? What’s happening here? I feel like a complete… like a complete dweeb.”
“Nothing is happening here, Marcello. Nothing has ever happened here.”
“Last summer, and the summer before that, something happened all right, something pretty damn…”
“Marcello, you used to call me ‘the scarecrow with no tits.’”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Not so long.”
Marcello stalked back to the shadows. He was shivering. He might be crying. Italian men were so emotional. By contrast, she supposed, she was so… so what? Swiss? She locked her jewel box and stood up.
This evening she wanted to use the house’s terminal. She could interface with Father O’Shaughnessy through a safe link in Singapore if she got the satellite window right. And she had been developing some of their theoretical work on Limited Artificial Intelligences. He had promised to name her as coauthor on his next paper, and she was keen to put in the background research to earn the credit.
“Marcello, would you go downstairs and make us some tea. I want to get changed now.”
He laughed nastily. “Changed? Chantal, you don’t need to get changed. You’re a completely different person. Since your father died…”
She slapped him. “Tea, Marcello. Ice, lemon, please.”
He bunched his fist, but thought better of it. Even as children, he had been the loser.
“Ciao, Chantal,” he said, taking his shirt and sandals from the floor. “Ciao forever.”
“Goodbye,” she said, in as many languages as she knew how, continuing long after her bedroom door had closed and she knew Marcello had left the house.
It was as near to tears as she had been since the day they buried her father.
She was at her terminal in good time, snaking her way through subsidiary corporation accounts, matching the cyberlabyrinth codeword for block. When she got through to Singapore, Father O’Shaughnessy was waiting for her.
VI
San Francisco, USA, 1993
“Chantal…”
She hadn’t been so tense since she had taken her final vows. She tried to find her centre. Her muscles remained tight.
“Chantal…?”
Mother Kazuko Hara bowed.
“Mother…” Chantal bowed, and backed away.
The first blow came high, striking her thigh.
The Japanese woman, a foot shorter than Chantal, kicked again, catching her waist this time. Chantal took Mother Kazuko’s ankle, and pushed back, hoping to unbalance her, but she twisted and was out of her grasp.
“Good,” Mother Kazuko said, striking with the flat of her hand at Chantal’s forehead.
Chantal ducked under the blow, and lashed out with her Fingertips, pushing into Mother Kazuko’s ribs above the heart.
“Very good,” the Mother said.
The fought on, matching each other skill for skill, switching fighting styles at whim. The two nuns went through Karate, Fisticuffs, Baritsu, Savate, all the major sub-groups of Wushu—The Five Animal Styles of the Shaolin Temple, Choy Li-Fut, Drunken Style, Eagle Claw, Hsing-I, Hung Gar, Mad Monkey Kung Fu, Phoenix Eye, Praying Mantis (an especial favourite), Shuai Chiao, Tan Tui, White Crane, Wing Chun, Jeet Kune-Do (The Way of the Intercepting Fist), Hapkido, Graeco-Roman Wrestling, Kickboxing, Aikido, Amis, Jujitsu, Ninjutsu, Streetfighting, Arm-Wrestling and Tae Kwon Do.
Chantal knew that if her opponent—whom the students called Mother Gadzooks O’Hara—didn’t pull her punches, she would have been dead within ten seconds of Mother Kazuko’s first bow.
Her weak spots were beginning to ache. It wasn’t necessary to win this bout—no one had bested Mother Kazuko since the St Matilda’s Dojo was opened—but Chantal had to keep in the fight for a full quarter of an hour.
It wasn’t an official examination. The fight was taking place in a private gymnasium, with no assessors in attendance. But Chantal knew that without Mother Kazuko’s say-so she wouldn’t be advanced within the Society
of Jesus.
The only thing she really had over her master was height, and so she used it as best she could, trying to keep the other woman at the end of her toe-points as she used balletic high kicks, and tapping her head with fingertip blows.
It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
At last, it was over. Chantal’s leotard was a shade darker with perspiration, but Mother Kazuko, who fought in loose white pajamas, was unaffected. She seemed never to sweat, like a lizard.
They bowed to each other, and Chantal wiped the sweat off her face into her hair and collapsed against the climbing frames on the wall. Mother Kazuko steadied her.
“It is all right to be tired, Sister,” she said, her English still thickly accented, “but it is sometimes necessary to conceal your fatigue.”
Chantal straightened out, and put her hands on her hips. She breathed deeply. Her pains went away, slowly.
Mother Kazuko smiled, exposing rabbit-teeth. “Good. Remember, the Calling of the Jesuit is much like the Path of Ninjutsu, the Way of Stealth.”
There was a sound like a gunshot. Chantal turned in its direction, assuming a fighter’s crouch, knee flexed to launch a kick.
The sound was repeated. It was a slow handclap, gradually building into applause. A priest came out of the shadows, clapping steadily.
Chantal recognized Father Daguerre, and ran to his arms.
“Sister, how you have grown.”
“Sanskrit.”
Father Daguerre tried to smile. “No, Sister Chantal. We are grown-up now. We must be wary of wasting our God-given abilities on show.”
“She is young,” Mother Kazuko said, “she is still learning.”
Father Daguerre kissed Mother Kazuko’s hand. “She has learned much already, Mother Superior. You have taught her well.”
“I have merely brought out what the Lord put inside her.”
They left the gymnasium. A troop of postulants were doing Tai Chi exercises in the courtyard. Two young priests in shirtsleeves and shorts were standing, checking instruments, by a helicopter whose blades were circling lazily. It was a sunny day. The choir were practicing. The dojo was giving the St Matthew Passion with the Philharmonic this commencement. Inside the PZ, San Francisco was a pleasant city.
“It’s been too long since you visited me, Father Daguerre. How is my mother?”
“As ever. She sends her regards.”
“How long are you staying?”
“Not long. This is not a visit in the proper sense. I’ve come from Papa Georgi.”
Chantal stopped walking. Since Georgi ascended the Throne of St Peter she had only seen him in public audiences. He had withdrawn to some extent from his old friends. She had thought he was avoiding her.
“I am to take you to the Vatican. A mission has been found, which requires your… special skills.”
A cloud passed over the sun. Suddenly, in her damp leotard, Chantal felt chilly.
“The helicopter will airlift you to SFX. I have a Vatican jet waiting there. Will it take you long to get packed?”
“I’ve been packed for five months, Father.”
“It is good.”
At last, Sister Chantal had a mission.
VII
Chantal’s first mission was a simple matter of plugging an infoleak from a church in Turin. It turned out that the Pan-Islamic Congress had a sleeper virus going around that was creating APOSTATE programs, and that the Ayatollah Bakhtiar was using the Turin hole to infiltrate the UEC. Several leading Greek Exiles, active in the Macedonian Liberation Movement, had been killed by “invisible” men, assassins who didn’t register on the datanet. She solved the systems breakdown simply, with some patchwork reprogramming, and traced the Ayatollah’s undercover man by his palimpsest computer signature. She had wanted to bring him in for questioning, but he had suicided rather than face the interrogators of the Opus Dei. In the ruins of his hotel room, she had read the last rites over the man, praying that his God would recognize her ritual.
This was not the contemplative life she had imagined nuns led when she was a little girl. Mother Kazuko had explained to her that many of the major forms of combat had been invented by members of religious orders. English monks on the crusades, under the influence of the Biblical prohibition against spilling blood, had come up with the Friar Tuck-style quarterstaff technique as a way of crushing the skulls of the infidel without making them bleed. In the Far East, many of the martial arts had been developed for the self-defence of itinerant monks and priests. If the way of the Cross and the Sword was peculiar, it was at least well-travelled.
Since Turin, she had been deployed on average five times a year, had seen action on every continent—including Antarctica—and won herself several papal decorations she could never wear openly. Father Daguerre, her first master, passed her over to Mother Edwina, the English nun who served as a control for the Jesuits’ covert activities, and to Cardinal Fabrizio DeAngelis, the Vatican’s top computer jock. She became a valued arm of the church.
In a back street in Edinburgh, while tracing a missing Vatican banker and a suitcase full of negotiable bonds, she had been faced with the hardest choice of all. An assailant she could not easily disable had come at her with a knife. She shot without a conscious thought, as she had been trained, read the last rites over his bleeding corpse, and did her self-imposed penance for months afterwards. It had not got easier, but it was part of her calling. Like her father, she was prepared to die for her beliefs. Unlike him, she had learned to kill for them.
Between assignments, she worked out of apartments within the walls of the Vatican itself. Officially, she was a computer programmer and a translator in the Vatican Library. She saw Pope Georgi frequently, but the old intimacy between them seemed to have evaporated with his elevation. She wondered if the Pope still visited her mother. When he had been a Cardinal, Georgi had frequently dined in secret with Isabella Juillerat, and Chantal wondered sometimes if their relationship had ever run deeper than it appeared to. The Camerlengo, Cardinal Brandreth, took an interest in her, and encouraged her to modernise the Vatican’s slightly archaic computer systems. She pursued her own researches, and published widely, either as a collaborator with Father O’Shaughnessy or as sole author. She taught a course in Dublin, filling in for the Father when he was indisposed, and found students hadn’t changed since her days at the Seminary. The novices still smoked dope, listened to prohibited Russian records and had thoughtless affairs.
Occasionally, she would try to use her contacts in the international intelligence community to dig into her father’s still-open case file. None of the bodies who had conducted official or unofficial inquiries into the assassination had come to any concrete conclusions. It was generally agreed that the assassin had been Snordlij Svensson, a freelance working out of Rekjavik, who was himself killed within six months in an entirely unsuspicious domestic accident. Extensive examinations of Svensson’s credit lines and accounting software had failed to isolate a specific employer for the Juillerat Sanction.
Having a daughter who was a sister had upset Isabella Juillerat for a while, but she had become reconciled to it. However, whenever Chantal saw her mother, Isabella would try to convince her to transfer to a more high-profile, glamorous branch of the church. With her qualifications, there was no reason Chantal should not rise to a cardinal’s hat. Sooner or later, thanks to Vatican LXXXV, there would be another woman Pope, and, as Isabella pointedly said, “it has to be someone…”
Chantal worked with Mother Kazuko in 1996, putting an end to a series of obscene desecrations that had been taking place in West Coast churches. The culprits turned out to be a gangcult of diabolists operating out of Venice, California, and they had some fairly nasty attendant demons in with them. A specialist in cyberexorcism was flown in from Mexico City, where his services were constantly in demand, and they put an end to the infestation. The cyberexorcist was killed, and Chantal had taken over the ritual. Mother Kazuko was badly wounded in the five-
day struggle, and had gone to a retreat to recoup her faculties.
Gradually, the hidden worlds were revealed to Chantal. First, the rational, expanding, exciting world of the international datanets. Then, the ancient, ritualistic, ever-changing, eternally constant world of the Church of Rome. And finally, the dark, barely-glimpsed, deeply disturbing world beyond. In the Vatican library, she was given clearance to access the forbidden books—the Liber Eibon, the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Al-Hazred, The King in Yellow, Errol Undercliffe’s Forgotten Byways of the Severn Valley, Julian Karswell’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Diabolical Genius, Edwin Winthrop’s Riddles of the Mythwrhn, Robert Anton Wilson’s UFOs From Atlantis—the Secret Exploded, John Sladek’s Arachne Rising—and had attended with Father O’Shaughnessy the Secret Conclave of Vienna, during which leading theologians, scientists and politicians discussed some of the more disturbing developments of the last decade. Father O’Shaughnessy presented a paper charting the increasing instance of physical anomalies and the apparent break-down of the laws of physics, and dropped a few dark hints about the eternal balances of space and time and their possible fragility.
Sometimes, she had dreams. A moonlike plain of white salt. A tall, dark man in a broad-brimmed hat, with ancient eyes burning behind his mirrorshades. A bridge in the desert, thronged with gargoyles straight from Notre Dame. The maw of Hell, opening up in an ocean of sand.
Her counsellor-confessor assured her that her dreams were entirely normal for a cleric in her profession.
Then, towards the end of 1998, she was summoned to an audience with Pope Georgi…
VIII
The Vatican, 1998
In the meeting room, Pope Georgi sat in front of an authentic, wall-covering Michelangelo. A white screen descended over the painting, and shutters rattled down over the windows. Chantal noticed how much older Georgi seemed now than when they first met. He wore a well-cut business suit and a skullcap. Only his ring of office betrayed his importance. Cardinals Brandreth and DeAngelis wore their red robes, and eyed each other with all the ferocity of Milanese society hostesses unwittingly arriving at a reception in identical “originals.” In the Vatican, DeAngelis was known for his dress sense, and could often be found at society receptions in violently red evening clothes. Mother Edwina, the sharp and elegant Englishwoman who usually debriefed Chantal after her missions, wore a demi-wimple, a cream blouse and slacks. Father O’Shaughnessy, whom Chantal had not expected to be present, was, for the first time in her memory, dressed in cassock, collar and pom-pom biretta. Chantal had also turned up in full habit, and Father O’Shaughnessy grinned at the sight, mouthing “snap!” at her.
