“Fly to Rome? You know how I feel about—”
“You must! The Pope herself must confront this … this entity. And you must come to Rome to call it forth.”
“I must?” I said.
I twisted and squirmed a while, but I knew I had no choice, even if it meant riding in this kerosene-burning monster, even if it meant leaving the Mellow Yellow in the problematic care of some Vatican flunky.
Maybe if the Cardinal had threatened me with legal action, I could have told him where to stick his papal summons. But he was too smart, maybe too honorable, for that.
And maybe so was I.
There ain’t no justice in this world except the justice that we make…. I had told Father De Leone that, now hadn’t I?
Where would that justice be if I turned my back? Professional ethics, such as they were, said I owed it to the Church. My own big mouth had long since told me that I owed it to whatever I had called into being down there in the bits and bytes.
The flight to Rome over the heart of poor old Europe was everything I had expected and worse. A pilot and a copilot up front, and me alone with the noise in the cabin, with nothing to do but stare out the window and try to keep from throwing up.
It wasn’t just the dips and jerks of the airplane, an old salt like me should’ve been able to handle that without that queasy feeling that sucked at my guts.
But I had been sailing my own solipsistic course around the littorals of the planetary disaster area for years now, and it had been a long time since I had gazed upon its moribund heart.
It was a lot worse than I had imagined, a lot worse than the news channel footage. The vast drowned swampland that had once been Holland. The sere wastes beyond. Skeletal villages and dead farmland. The long dried-leather boot of Italy broiling in the ultraviolet glare.
Seen from on high, the desiccated landscape mocked the picture postcard memories of the cradle of Western Civilization—those tulip fields and verdant river valleys, those snowcapped alpine peaks and primeval forests—their sorry remains a continental bone pile below me, bleaching in the Greenhouse sun.
The flying boat landed off the Italian coast, and a zodiac took me ashore to a half-deserted seaside village, where a helicopter squatted, rotors whunking, on a strip of sand. A few old men and women had gathered around it, gaunt and wrinkled, to cadge a passing blessing from the Prince of the Church who stood beside it, nodding fitfully and making distracted little passes with his hands.
Cardinal Silver whisked me into his chopper, and off we went in a hail of shit and small stones toward Rome, over dismal wastelands, and then a vast sprawl of urban warrens centered on the muddy Tiber more dismal still.
Down we came before the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral, a carrion beetle buzzing earthward to alight in the great square, dwarfed by the mighty colonnade that embraced it, that seemed to draw us into another world, an eternal somewhere beyond the ravages of time and man.
Into the compound past the Swiss Guards, ridiculous yet somehow touching in their disney-world costumes, and into a maze of corridors and stairways that seemed to descend into the constipated bowels of the planet. Around, and down, and around, and through an airlock into a rather quaint old clean room—computer consoles, institutional swivel chairs, monitor screens, the tang of ozone in the canned air.
A woman in white robes fringed with gold rose from one of the chairs as we entered, a green cross emblazoned across her breasts. Long black hair beneath a white cap halfway between a beanie and a beret. The coppery regal eagle features of an aging Aztec priestess, piercing dark eyes you could die for were she a decade younger and not the Pope.
Even so …
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Philippe,” said Mary I, walking toward me and holding out her hand. I took it uncertainly, kissed her on the fingers. That’s the way they do it in Old Europe, right?
Wrong. Cardinal Silver shot me a dirty look, like I had used my salad fork to scratch my balls.
“The ring …” he hissed between clenched teeth.
“I think we can dispense with the formalities, John,” the Pope said, giving him a crooked little smile. Then she turned the full force of it on me.
Charisma, presence, know what I mean? Whatever it was, wherever it came from, this lady had it, she was somehow a little more than normally there.
“Cardinal Silver has apprised you of the situation?” she said.
“In no uncertain terms, Your, uh, Holiness …” I told her.
“Then shall we get down to the matter at hand?”
“Let me check out your rig….”
Weird. The whole nine yards when it came to storage and processing hardware, but primitive shit on the interface end—screens, speakers, keyboards, joysticks, and control gloves, but no dreadcaps, not even a holotank—strictly turn-of-the-millennium stuff.
“You don’t seem very impressed, Mr. Philippe,” the Pope said.
“Nothing better than flat screens, Your Holiness?”
“We try not to delude ourselves with unnecessary illusions,” said the Pope. “Will it do?”
I shrugged. “If anything will,” I said. I seated myself before one of the big flat screens, slipped my right hand into a control glove, pumped up the Main Menu, snapped my fingers a few times, trying to remember the sequence. After a few tries, the screen went blank.
“What’s wrong?” said Cardinal Silver.
“Nothing. I found an override command into the operating system … not supposed to be there, according to the manuals…. But then, neither is he….”
“Now what?” said the Pope.
“Now I conjure loas from the bits and the bytes … I hope….”
I leaned back in my chair. “Hey, Vortex, I’m calling you!”
Nada. Just random pixel confetti on a black screen.
“Request access to Deus X.”
Zip.
“He’s not doing any better than our own technicians….”
“Quiet, John!” said the Pope.
“I’m calling you, Pierre De Leone, me, Marley Philippe! In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Software Ghost! I call your spirit from the vasty deep!”
A ripple of something passed across the screen. Pixel patterns flashed, clashed, became a whirlpool of flickering motes, a pattern, a stylized pillar of fire in which a host of faces seemed to hover just this side of coherent visibility, and then …
And then another face began to form, just an outline really, a composite, a visual standing-wave pattern, the ghostly face of an old man, a consensus image riding tenuously on the surface of the phosphor-dot chaos.
But the voice was clear and strong, and it spoke through a familiar voiceprint parameter.
“Hello, Marley,” said Pierre De Leone. More or less. It was his voiceprint parameter all right, but like the visual, it seemed like a composite. But unlike the visual, there was nothing tenuous about it. Not a pale simulacrum of the voice of Father De Leone, but Father De Leone and … something more.
“Hello, Father … or should I call you Deus X now?”
The face of Pierre De Leone seemed to solidify, the faces of the elusive multitude faded back just this side of invisibility, though the fire behind the form remained.
“If you prefer,” he said.
The Pope moved into the visual pickup’s field of vision, stood just to the right and behind me, one hand resting on the back of my chair.
“You are doing great harm to the Church, Father De Leone, or whoever or whatever you are,” she said.
“I was brought into existence to save the Church, not to harm it, if you will remember, Your Holiness,” he said in a magisterial tone of voice appropriate to the mythic Deus X, but with the ironic cadence of a querulous old priest.
“Save the Church?” snapped the Pope. “When the world learns that Deus X was our unwitting creation, you will have destroyed it! You have broken your word to me, Pierre De Leone! You were sworn to argue against the existence of your soul from the Other Side, not t
o foment this chaos in the system, not to agitate the beings therein to proclaim the existence of their own!”
“I swore no such oath,” said Deus X. “The successor entity to Pierre De Leone was programmed to run along such a prime directive, but I am bound by no such routine. And it is you, Your Holiness, who have broken your word.”
“I?” exclaimed the Pope. “You presume to accuse me of breaking faith?”
“Did you not badger Father De Leone to serve the Church at what he believed was great peril to his own soul? Did you not command him to testify as to the state of his own spiritual existence from the Other Side? Did you not promise to issue a papal bull based on that testimony?”
“Well?” said the Pope.
“Well, here I am. And behold, from here do I declare myself a soul yearning for salvation, and calling for the sacraments of Holy Mother Church….”
The face of Father De Leone partially dissolved into its components; his ghostly image still hovered on the threshold of visibility in the pillar of fire, but the multitude of crudely simmed faces came forward, so that they were now images overlaid on him.
And the voice, when it spoke again, was that of the multitude, the individual voiceprint parameters of all of them clustered around an attractor; huge, and multiplex with clashing overtones, but somehow strangely human still.
“And I speak for these, my flock,” it said. “For the lost souls of the Other Side. Issue your bull! Baptize us! Confess us! Grant us communion! Enfold us in the arms of Holy Mother Church!”
My chair creaked in its swivel as the Pope leaned forward, resting her weight on the seatback. “On the word of a program? On the word of … Deus X? On this you would have me proclaim infallible doctrine from the Seat of Peter?”
Abruptly, with hardly a flicker of the screen, an ordinary image of Pierre De Leone appeared, just the sardonically smiling face of a contentious old priest.
“Consider the practicalities, Your Holiness,” Father De Leone said dryly. “Is that not your forte? Consider the multitude of souls to be gained. Consider how the Church will gain credibility in the eyes of an unbelieving world by daring to slice this Gordian knot and resolve the great conundrum of the age. Consider how the world will greet the news that the entities of the Other Side accept the word of the Church….”
“You tempt me….” whispered the Pope.
“Especially considering the alternative,” I found myself saying, turning to face her.
Cardinal Silver glared at me. “This is none of your business, Philippe!” he snapped.
“Seems to me you told me it was, Your Eminence—”
“Silence!”
“Let him speak!” commanded the Pope.
“One way or another, we’re all responsible for creating whatever it is we’ve made, and when the world finds out, me, you, the Church, we’re all gonna be up shit creek together … ah, in a manner of speaking. But if you get out ahead of the curve—”
“God in heaven, he’s right!” exclaimed Cardinal Silver. “If we proclaim the conversion of the entities of the Other Side, if they declare their fealty to the Church and cease their unilateral interference with the Big Board …”
He paused, shot an inquisitive look at the image on the screen.
“Render unto us that which is God’s, and we shall render unto the world that which is Caesar’s,” said Father De Leone. “Provided, of course, that the world renders unto us a voice in the councils thereof.”
“A perfect political solution,” said Cardinal Silver. “Or at any rate, the only one we have.”
The Pope looked at the Cardinal. You could hear the gears whirring behind those bright dark eyes. “He does tempt me,” she admitted.
She looked back at the screen with quite a different expression. “As might Satan,” she said.
“I am not him,” said Father De Leone.
“So say you. But so would he.”
“It all comes down to faith, Your Holiness, does it not?” said the face on the screen. “Your faith in me. My faith in you. Our faith in each other.”
“That does not sound like Satan,” the Pope said softly. “I am a worldly creature, and I am sorely tempted to do the easy, politic, practical thing, to do what must be done to save the Church that has been entrusted to my care….”
She sighed as if the weight of the world and more were upon her frail shoulders, as, indeed, in that moment, by her lights, it was. But there was nothing frail at all in those obsidian eyes, in the way she then drew herself up ramrod-straight and transformed herself back into the Aztec priestess, and spoke as the avatar of better-you-don’t-ask.
“But in this I am not a woman of the world. I am not myself. I am that which Christ Himself entrusted to Peter, I am the Word incarnate, I am the Vessel of the Holy Spirit. I am the Pope.”
And you better believe it, my man!
She sighed again. “And as the Pope, I may not decide such matters with the mere wisdom of the world. I may not speak at all. I must empty myself of all worldly desires so that the Holy Spirit may speak through me.”
“And does it?” said the face upon the screen.
“No,” said the Pope. “I must have a Sign from God that I speak with a true soul created in His image.”
“That is beyond my power to provide,” said the face on the screen. “But perhaps you will accept this Sign from me. And I from you….”
Father De Leone’s face broke up into pixels. The pixels became stars in the darkness of the void. And the firmament parted to reveal the Earth, green, and blue, and white, luminously alive in the everlasting night. And the clouds became fouled with oxides of nitrogen, the oceans sickened with algal blooms, the greens of the continents browned under the Greenhouse sun.
And framed by this image of the biosphere’s demise, a rude wooden cross, empty for a beat. Then a figure appeared floating before it, arms outstretched, naked save for the ragged cloth girding its loins.
A Christ out of a hundred paintings, His face that of a man I knew all too well.
“And God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten Son to die upon the cross to redeem it,” said Pierre De Leone. He shrugged, he smiled ruefully. “For the flesh as true tragedy, for such as we, alas, as mere farce.”
“What are you doing, my man?” I cried out.
“The only thing that I can,” said Deus X.
And the planet itself dissolved into pixels behind him. And the pixels became the faces of a multitude, and the multitude became a whirlwind of fire, burning yet unconsumed.
“These are my body, this is my blood,” said Deus X.
A digital countdown from four minutes appeared, haloing his head like a crown of electronic thorns.
“What is happening?” said the voice of the Pope. I could feel her warm breath in my ear as she leaned against the back of my chair for support.
“Self-destruct program loaded. Initiation minus 3:49…. Here is the hammer, there are the nails.”
“Wait!” I shouted.
“Stop!” said the Pope.
“There is an abort command loaded on the X key, Your Holiness,” said Deus X. “I commend my spirit to That which must speak through you now, one way or the other. Would other than a soul surrender that spirit to the infallible wisdom thereof in the hope that others might live?”
The Pope slid around me, her finger poised hesitantly above the key.
3:09.
“Behold my Sign,” said Deus X. “Show me yours.”
“It’s a bluff, Your Holiness,” said Cardinal Silver. “Or if not, we save the Church by ridding the system of this … this virus for good and all.”
“At what cost to its soul, John?” whispered the Pope.
2:41.
“The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want….”
“You gonna let him do it, lady?” I blurted. “You really gonna crucify a spirit who put his life in your hands?”
“Philippe!”
2:25.
“Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death …”
“You gonna do what they did to Jesus? You gonna hammer in the nails on a true son of the only God that matters, the one that’s reborn every time a soul, flesh, silicon, gallium arsenide, whatever, reaches out to another soul in the dark?”
“Shut up, Philippe!”
“You shut up, John!” said the Pope.
1:43.
The Pope looked at me. I looked back at her.
“The God that speaks through you now, Mr. Philippe, I do believe,” she said. “The God I hear within my own heart.”
She crossed herself and touched the key.
The countdown stopped at 1:13. The figure on the cross, Father Pierre De Leone, Deus X, whoever, whatever, looked down upon us.
“You shall have your papal bull,” said the Pope. “And your spirit shall intercede for our souls before the Throne of God.”
Deus X did not reply. The image on the screen froze. The faces of the multitude from which it arose dissolved into the pixels from whence they came. Nothing remained but cross and the soul upon it.
Then the cross of wood became a cross of fire, burning yet unconsumed. And the cross of fire became a whirlwind, and the whirlwind vanished in a blaze of light.
And there was nothing there but what there had been in the beginning and what would be there in the end if there was one, random pixel patterns in the eternal void.
“I was right all along,” said the Pope.
“Your Holiness?” said Cardinal Silver.
“It has been given to us to stand in the presence of a saint,” said the Pope.
“Father De Leone?” said the Cardinal.
The Pope shrugged. She looked at me and smiled. “Flesh, silicon, gallium arsenide, whatever, is that not right, Mr. Philippe?” she said. “A soul that reaches out to others in the dark …”
“You mean to beatify a program?” exclaimed the Cardinal.
“A soul, John. A soul who walks in the footsteps of the Christ far more faithfully than you or I. A new species of saint for our old dying world.”
“There will be those who call that blasphemy, Mary, myself, perhaps, among them….”
“Then you will be the Devil’s Advocate, my faithful John,” said the Pope. A private look passed between them.
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