“Mr. Philippe?”
“The one, my man, the only.”
“John Cardinal Silver,” he says, “I need to meet with you on a matter of great urgency.”
He’s got thinning black hair and a black spade beard streaked with white looks like they’ve been trimmed with a laser five minutes ago, urbane like they say, with hard brown eyes and a mouth that looks like it’s used to sniggering at sophisticated jokes, and the smooth powerful voice of a corporate dreadnought. Looks like the type who never sweats, oils his way through it all like a diplomat’s Siamese cat.
Only he don’t seem so supercooled now, and he’s not trying to hide it, and there’s something so strange about his persona, that I still don’t realize that I’m talking to a Prince of the Church.
“Your place or mine, Mr. Silver?” I tell him, reaching for my dreadcap.
“No, no, no!” he says. “This much is risky enough! I have to meet with you in person.”
“In person? You mean like in the flesh?”
“I mean here in Rome, Mr. Philippe, and I mean as soon as possible. The Church urgently needs your services immediately on a matter of extreme importance and delicacy and we are prepared to pay quite handsomely for speed and priority.”
“Who did you say you represent, Mr. Silver?”
“Cardinal Silver, or Your Eminence if you prefer,” he snaps back with a hauteur like a backhand slap to a peasant’s face. “I represent the Roman Catholic Church, Mr. Philippe, and in this matter I am speaking with the authority of the Pope. You must come to Rome at once!”
“Well, if I decide to take your contract, and if it calls for double my standard rate, and if the meter starts running right now, I could reach the closest port in about a week—”
“We’ll send a helicopter.”
“You’ll send a what?”
“We’ll have a helicopter overhead within three hours to pick you up.”
A helicopter! Sets your teeth on edge just to think about it! The big bad overseer chariot of the last century and the petrol-guzzling vampire bat of our Greenhouse Fall, a flying brick puffing and groaning just to stay aloft and farting out carbon dioxide and nitrides like the Devil’s own asshole!
I don’t like leaving my boat, except for occasional moorings in quiet little coastal towns, and I certainly have no desire to tour the behavioral sinks of the crumbling inland cities, and you don’t have to be a Flaming Green Warrior to cringe at the thought of flying in something that burns fossil fuel.
On the other hand, any organization capable of procuring such a piece of Space Age hardware, restoring it to working order, protecting it one way or another from authorities and lynch mobs, getting its hands on the petrol to fly the thing, and putting it in the air without apparent fear of terminal sanctions, was clearly an organization of resources, financial and otherwise.
“My rates just doubled again,” I told the Cardinal, in whose reality as an authentic Prince of the well-heeled Church I now found it expedient to believe. “But you’re not getting me on any helicopter, and I’m not leaving my boat. You want to talk business with me, you’d best do it now.”
“If you insist, I’ll fly out to you.”
“You’re serious?”
“Mohammed to the Mountain, Mr. Philippe….”
“Come on, Your Eminence, can’t you tell me what this deal is all about before you trot out your chopper? That’s a lot of carbon dioxide to add to your karma just to have a little chat. Truth be told, I find it immoral.”
“No more than I! But if you knew my reasons you too would accept the necessity. Suffice it to say that the nature of our problem itself makes it highly inadvisable to discuss it over channels or in media that might be accessed by …”
He paused, almost seemed to be looking over his shoulder to see if anything was gaining on him, a sure sign according to the wise man that something probably is.
“… hostile entities presently unknown.”
“I’m not so sure that I want to do any conjuring with entities so hostile they’ve got you reaching for your holy water even though you’re not supposed to believe in them….”
“The Church has never contended that electronic successor entities do not exist. Far from it, Church doctrine condemns them as satanic golems, the ultimate machineries of the Prince of Liars himself, and believe me, Mr. Philippe, the current situation does nothing to dissuade us from the belief that the Other Side of the Line, as you would call it, is in the hands of the Adversary.”
“There are demons in these vasty deeps….”
“And your file shows they come when you summon them, Mr. Philippe.”
“Sometimes they do, Your Eminence, which is a real good reason not to conjure up something you don’t want to meet….”
“Fear not on that account, Mr. Philippe. The … successor entity we wish you to … retrieve is that of a man who may one day be a saint.”
II
Death comes to all men, and soon enough it was going to come for me.
That was the short of what the doctor told me. At the age of ninety-one, a generation beyond my biblically allotted span as such things were once measured, my body had reached the end of its ability to endure gravity, free radicals, solar bombardment, the folly of my fellow man, and well within the year would be rendered unto dust. My immune system had simply worn out, and I, who had faithfully fulfilled my lifelong vow of chastity, would expire in a clinical condition indistinguishable from that of a twentieth-century libertine.
You would have to be an old dying priest to appreciate the humor.
The long of what the doctor told me, and it seemed very long indeed as he insinuated and squirmed around the subject, was what in this benighted age they call my “Choice of a Successor.”
Old-fashioned cloning techniques, I was given to believe, were not to be advised in cases where the cause of death would be an excess of noise in the genetic control mechanisms. There were, however, numerous possible solid-state matrices for my immortal software.
It took so long for him to make his satanic suggestion because he knew full well he could not broach it openly to the likes of Father Pierre De Leone, yet in these last days the Hippocratic oath had been reinterpreted to constrain him to proffer “Transcorporeal Immortality,” the latest boon from the laboratory of kindly old Dr. Faust.
Surely a dying old man should not be subjected to such tormentuous temptation, or at least it should be spit out rapidly in words of one syllable and be done with. Or so was my rationalization for my rudeness when at length, and I do mean at length, I concluded that such arch crypticism could render this conversation itself eternal.
“You may consider your duty fulfilled, Doctor,” I told him finally. “You see before you a man who quite understands the many ways in which a model of his consciousness may run forever in silicon fields, and who rejects all of them as, to be quite frank and precise about it, instrumentalities of Satan.”
When I was a youth, musical acts made casual theater out of dancing with the Devil, and satanic images were even used to sell breakfast cereal and dog food. Only a few mad cultists took Satan seriously as an object of worship, and even the Church was mealymouthed about the literal reality of his presence in the world.
Now, of course, though the community of believers in a redemptive God of Love has dwindled even from what it was in that evil age, Satan has become a serious conversation stopper.
Given the state of our dying planet, and given that we ourselves bear the responsibility for this sin so awesome its name cannot be pronounced, evidence of the presence of God can only be found in the believing heart, while the obtrusive presence of Satan in the world is a bit much for even the unbelieving to deny.
Or at any rate the invocation of Satan in the rejection of “Transcorporial Immortality” by a Catholic priest whose well-known conflict with several Popes on such matters has technically made a violation of his order of public silence on the subject enough to close it definitiv
ely.
We were then able to proceed to practical terminal matters. I had no intention of expiring in a hospital, and at least in these matters, medical science has evolved in a humane manner, and I was given an electronic override of my pain centers. Euthanetics were not mentioned, but a pile of them were left on the desk when the good doctor excused himself to the water closet.
This was in Rome, a city about which my feelings are at best mixed. It is the Holy City, after all, the millennial capital of the Church, the spiritual center of what I have made my world. How could a believing Catholic wish to spend his last days anywhere else?
In truth, all too easily enough. In fact, I must confess to the sin of detesting the place.
The ruins of Imperial Roman megalomania still dominate the city, dwarfing all that has succeeded, so that successive generations of ruined glory seem to nest inside them like a set of Russian matrioshka dolls, huge and hollow outward and backward, smaller and smaller as you approach the present, so that the Rome of today seems like a series of tawdry little warrens built into the feet of moldy pharaonic hubris.
Then too, when I first saw Rome, the city was still unsuccessfully coping with the forced loss of its beloved cars and scooters, the mad traffic that had long made it a nightmare for pedestrians, but had given the city its sharp-edged frenetic beat.
Now that music is gone, along with half of the city’s inhabitants, and it has acquired a final set of ruins, these of the blocks of ancient abandoned tenements that once teemed with the city’s brawling, squalling life. Today, bleaching stone and crumbling stucco groan under the searing Greenhouse sun, the fabled fountains are dry, and what desiccated vegetation remains, lingers, like myself, on the edge of final expiration.
The Romans, constrained to a feeble tram system, bicycles, and their own two feet, have degenerated to primeval villagers, huddling in their own neighborhoods, developing endlessly subdivided chauvinisms, suspicious of outsiders, while yet sourly rapacious for their share of what remains of the moribund tourist trade.
True, St. Peter’s still anchors the navel of the world to Rome. But if the sight of its dome seen from tawdry afar inspires thoughts of the eternal nature of the Church, the contrast between the City of God and the thanatologic urban landscape made by man inspires only dire meditations on our terminally fallen state. Here, in a city so long concerned with the consequences of Adam’s original sin, the weight of our second and apparently terminal fall presses upon the soul with a great stone hand.
I did not wish to spend my dying days in such environs, and indeed I had chosen Grunberg for my final retreat long years since, a village high up in the Tyrol where there are still alpine valleys that seem to have escaped the climatic catastrophe. The land remains verdant well into May, the air appears crystalline, and the temperature no more than balmy for most of the year.
The pristine purity of these pocket ecospheres is of course illusory. In point of fact, the ultraviolet count is brutal up there on even a winter’s day, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere deviates not from the catastrophic global norm. The quaint little villages are deserted between June and October, the remaining inhabitants having become migratory, fleeing down from the summer sun as once the mountain goats and deer descended before the lost winter snows.
It was April now, once deemed the cruelest of months, and by the time I reached my destination, the alpine villagers would already be making their annual retreat. From a fleshly viewpoint, it would be folly to pass my remaining months high up there in the ultraviolet glare. But then the ultimate somatic damage had already been done, further DNA damage held no terror for one who was already expiring from a long lifetime’s exposure.
And from a spiritual viewpoint, there was much to be said for going to meet my Maker high up in these lonely mountains, exposed to the consequences of the Sin We Do Not Name, to spend my final hours in contemplative surrender to divine justice, to die with the winter grasses under the pitiless glory of the deadly summer sun.
The trip up into the Tyrol was fully as arduous as any such final pilgrimage should be and then some. A railine took me up into the Italian foothills in a few short uncomfortable days, but from there on in, it was horsecarriages groaning along up the ill-paved remains of old autostradas and autobahns where once hordes of petrol-burning touring cars had roared and blared at mighty speeds. At length, even the carriage services gave out, and the last week of my journey was spent on the back of a spavined old mule, plodding against the bemused flow of villagers descending to the relative safety of the lowlands.
By the time I had reached Grunberg, the town was all but deserted, and I was able to rent a sturdy old modernized chalet for a relative song.
Once it had been a farmhouse—the ruins of a barn were still in subtle evidence—then a small ski resort, the pylons of whose lift still marched up the browning slope of the meadow toward the naked alpine crag that towered above it. After the snow’s final melting, it had apparently become the retreat of some rich eccentric. The wooden building had been enclosed in a geodesic dome against solar assault. In the end, its panes had succumbed to the ultraviolet, and subsequent inhabitants had knocked them out, or simply not bothered to mend time’s wear and tear, though fragments of blued plastic still clung here and there to the skeletal remains.
But the chalet’s machineries were still powered by efficient solar collectors, and they included a capacious cold pantry, running waterworks both hot and cold, and a highly sophisticated autochef running Italian, German, French, and Chinese expert system software. Though the place was far too large for my needs, it would care for my creature comforts to the end, leaving me free to pursue my final inward and upward journey.
At first, I gave thought and effort to attempting a final memoir, but all I really did was open and close a profusion of working files, until I finally gave up and wiped all copies of such embarrassing gibberish from memory.
In truth, I had said all I had to say long before, and much of that still lay under papal edict; why labor to produce some egoistic final testament whose voice would also be silenced?
Often I have been asked why I have allowed so much of my writing to go unpublished in obedience to papal writ with which I have been so manifestly at odds. I have no answer that follows any logic other than that of faith. Long ago, I made my vows and became a priest, and while expedience may have often enough caused me to regret them, surrender to such impulses is precisely what those vows were designed to prevent.
All I have ever been was a Catholic priest attempting to understand God’s will and serve His Church to the best of that understanding without committing Lucifer’s sin of intellectual pride. Mayhap some of those who have graced the Seat of Peter have been no more saintly than I, and I would dissemble if I denied that no few of them were my intellectual inferiors, but the Church itself is more than the sum of its human parts. Even the papal succession is God’s way of working His way with the imperfect clay of men. If we deny that, then what is the Church but a fraud?
Of course, in the eyes of most of the world the Church is indeed a fraud. If God sacrificed His only begotten Son to redeem us from our sins, then why have we not been saved? If it was a just and omnipotent God who entrusted the Earth to our stewardship, then why did He not intervene before we slew it?
To invoke the satanic answer is to provoke the sardonic secular response—“We have met the Devil, and he is Us.”
True, all too true, from a certain perspective. It was Man who failed his stewardship and crucified the biosphere upon an inverted cross of fossilized sulfur and brimstone. And it is Man, unable to escape the species consequences of what he has done, who seeks to escape from Judgment by hiding in the soulless software of a “transcorporeal successor.”
Who can deny that this is satanic behavior? Yet to deem ourselves the perfect satanic masters of the dark forces that move through us is more satanic still. For it denies what the Church still promises—redemption and salvation, if not for our plan
et, or yet our durance upon it, then for the light within even the most benighted of spirits at the end of life and time.
If we cannot believe in such salvation, then what are we? If I do not believe that the Author of such salvation is at work behind the imperfections of His Church, then I am no true priest. If I leave the discipline of the Church to follow my own imperfect conscience, then do I not in the end deprive the Church of my contribution as I deny myself its grace?
These are the thoughts that fill the mind of a dying old priest with nothing to do but feebly pace a withering meadow under the Greenhouse sun attempting to reconcile himself to the terminal future, or sit beneath the ghostly cathedral of a skeletal dome brooding upon the theological conflicts of the past.
I was born into the even-then-dwindling community of believers, to a family of dairy farmers still trying to survive in the Massif Central of France, and when my parents were finally forced to move down into Claremont-Ferrand to seek work, I found myself in a dismal urban landscape from which the seminary seemed a blissful escape. As a young priest, I was sent to the Amazon Blight, where I witnessed firsthand the futility of luring the fallen to the churchyard with bags of grain so as to preach salvation to their deaf ears.
The reports I sent back were the first of my writings to be sealed by the Church, but they brought me to the attention of a like-minded Cardinal, who advanced my career into the Church’s intellectual hierarchy, which I occasionally represented before the media.
This was shortly before Roberto I issued his bull granting continuity of spirit to single successor clones, and I was one of those whose arguments were to lose out to the infallibility of the Pope.
“Where will it end?” I demanded before cameras and microphones. “If a single copy of personality software contains the immortal soul of its fleshly template, then how can it be said to be absent from a second copy, or the third, or the thousandth? In truth, they must all be mere expert system simulations. For the soul, being indivisible, cannot be duplicated and, being immortal, cannot be captured in an impermanent physical matrix.”
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