by Dan Simmons
The Cardinal nodded but showed no agreement. “Your Holiness, I cannot see how God could envy poor mortal humankind. Certainly God is not capable of envy.”
The boy’s nearly invisible eyebrows shot up. “Yet, is not your Christian God, by definition, omnipotent? Certainly he, she, it must be capable of envy.”
“Ah, a paradox meant for children, Your Holiness. I confess I am trained in neither logical apologetics nor metaphysics. But as a prince of Christ’s Church, I know from my catechism and in my soul that God is not capable of envy … especially not envy of his flawed creations.”
“Flawed?” said the boy.
Cardinal Mustafa smiled condescendingly, his tone that of a learned priest speaking to a child. “Humanity is flawed because of its propensity for sin,” he said softly. “Our Lord could not be envious of a being capable of sin.”
The Dalai Lama nodded slowly. “One of our Zen masters, a man named Ikkyu, once wrote a poem to that effect—
“All the sins committed
In the Three Worlds
Will fade and disappear
Together with myself.”
Cardinal Mustafa waited a moment, but when no more poem was forthcoming, he said, “Which three worlds was he speaking of, Your Holiness?”
“This was before spaceflight,” said the boy, shifting slightly on his cushioned throne. “The Three Worlds are the past, present, and future.”
“Very nice,” said the Cardinal from the Holy Office. Behind him, his aide, Father Farrell, was staring at the boy with something like cold distaste. “But we Christians do not believe that sin—or the effects of sin—or the accountability for sin, for that matter—end with one’s life, Your Holiness.”
“Precisely.” The boy smiled. “It is for this reason that I am curious why you extend life so artificially through your cruciform creature,” he said. “We feel that the slate is washed clean with death. You feel that it brings judgment. Why defer this judgment?”
“We view the cruciform as a sacrament given to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ,” Cardinal Mustafa said softly. “This judgment was first deferred by Our Savior’s sacrifice on the cross, God Himself accepting the punishment for our sins, allowing us the option of everlasting life in heaven if we so choose it. The cruciform is another gift from Our Savior, perhaps allowing us time to set our houses in order before that final judgment.”
“Ahh, yes,” sighed the boy. “But perhaps Ikkyu meant that there are no sinners. That there is no sin. That ‘our’ lives do not belong to us …”
“Precisely, Your Holiness,” interrupted Cardinal Mustafa, as if praising a slow learner. I saw the Regent, the Lord Chamberlain, and others around the throne wince at this interruption. “Our lives do not belong to us, but to Our Lord and Savior … and to serve Him, to our Holy Mother Church.”
“… do not belong to us, but belong to the universe,” continued the boy. “And that our deeds—good and bad—also are property of the universe.”
Cardinal Mustafa frowned. “A pretty phrase, Your Holiness, but perhaps too abstract. Without God, the universe can only be a machine … unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling.”
“Why?” said the boy.
“I beg your pardon, Your Holiness?”
“Why must the universe be unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling without your definition of a God?” the child said softly. He closed his eyes.
“The morning dew
Flees away,
And is no more;
Who may remain
In this world of ours?”
Cardinal Mustafa steepled his fingers and touched his lips as if in prayer or mild frustration. “Very nice, Your Holiness. Ikkyu again?”
The Dalai Lama grinned broadly. “No. Me. I write a little Zen poetry when I can’t sleep.”
The priests chuckled. The Nemes creature stared at Aenea.
Cardinal Mustafa turned toward my friend. “M. Ananda,” he said, “do you have an opinion on these weighty matters?”
For a second I did not know whom he was addressing, but then I remembered the Dalai Lama’s introduction of Aenea as Ananda, foremost disciple of the Buddha.
“I know another little verse by Ikkyu which expresses my opinion,” she said.
“More frail and illusory
Than numbers written on water,
Our seeking from the Buddha
Felicity in the afterworld.”
Archbishop Breque cleared his throat and joined in the conversation. “That seems clear enough, young lady. You do not think that God will grant our prayers.”
Aenea shook her head. “I think that he meant two things, Your Eminence. First that the Buddha will not help us. It isn’t in his job definition, so to speak. Secondly, that planning for the afterworld is foolish because we are, by nature, timeless, eternal, unborn, undying, and omnipotent.”
The Archbishop’s face and neck reddened above his collar. “Those adjectives can be applied only to God, M. Ananda.” He felt Cardinal Mustafa’s glare on him and remembered his place as a diplomat. “Or so we believe,” he added lamely.
“For a young person and an architect, you seem to know your Zen and poetry, M. Ananda.” Cardinal Mustafa chuckled, obviously trying to lighten the tone. “Are there any other Ikkyu poems you feel might be relevant?”
Aenea nodded.
“We come into this world alone,
We depart alone,
This also is illusion.
I will teach you the way
Not to come, not to go!”
“That would be a good trick,” said Cardinal Mustafa with false joviality.
The Dalai Lama leaned forward. “Ikkyu taught us that it is possible to live at least part of our lives in a timeless, spaceless world where there is no birth and death, no coming and going,” he said softly. “A place where there is no separation in time, no distance in space, no barrier barring us from the ones we love, no glass wall between experience and our hearts.”
Cardinal Mustafa stared as if speechless.
“My friend … M. Ananda … also taught me this,” said the boy.
For a second, the Cardinal’s face was twisted by something like a sneer. He turned toward Aenea. “I would by pleased if the young lady would teach me … teach us all … this clever conjuror’s trick,” he said sharply.
“I hope to,” said Aenea.
Rhadamanth Nemes took a half step toward my friend. I set my hand in my cape, lightly touching the firing stud of the flashlight laser.
The Regent tapped a gong with a cloth-wrapped stick. The Lord Chamberlain hurried forward to escort us out. Aenea bowed to the Dalai Lama and I clumsily did likewise.
The audience was over.
I dance with Aenea in the great, echoing reception hall, to the music of a seventy-two-piece orchestra, with the lords and ladies, priests and plenipotentiaries of T’ien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven, all watching from the edges of the dance floor or wheeling around us in shared motion to the music. I remember dancing with Aenea, dining again before midnight at the long tables constantly restocked with food, and then dancing again. I remember holding her tight as we moved together around the dance floor. I do not remember ever having danced before—at least when I was sober—but I dance this night, holding Aenea close to me as the torchlight from the crackling braziers dims and the Oracle casts skylight shadows across the parquet floors.
It is in the wee hours of the morning and the older guests have retired, all the monks and mayors and elder statesmen—except for the Thunderbolt Sow, who has laughed and sung and clapped along with the orchestra for every raceme quadrille, tapping her slippered feet on the polished floors—and there are only four or five hundred determined celebrants remaining in the great, shadowy space, while the band plays slower and slower pieces as if their musical mainspring is wearing down.
I confess that I would have gone off to bed hours earlier if it were not for Aenea: she wants to dance. So dance we do, moving slowly, her small hand in my large one, m
y other hand flat on her back—feeling her spine and strong muscles under my palm through the thin silk of the dress—her hair against my cheek, her breasts soft against me, the curve of her skull against my neck and chin. She seems slightly sad, but still energetic, still celebrating.
Private audiences had ended many hours ago and word had spread that the Dalai Lama had gone to bed before midnight, but we last celebrants partied on—Lhomo Dondrub, our flyer friend, laughing and pouring champagne and rice beer for everyone, Labsang Samten, the Dalai Lama’s little brother, leaping over the ember-filled braziers at some point, the serious Tromo Trochi of Dhomu suddenly metamorphosing into a magician in one corner, doing tricks with fire and hoops and levitations, and then the Dorje Phamo singing one clear, slow a cappella solo in a voice so sweet that it haunts my dreams to this day, and finally the scores of others joining in the Oracle Song as the orchestra prepares to wrap up the evening’s celebration before the predawn begins to fade the night sky.
Suddenly the music ends in mid-bar. The dancers stop. Aenea and I lurch to a stop and look around.
There has been no sign of the Pax guests for hours, but suddenly one of them—Rhadamanth Nemes—emerges from the shadows of the Dalai Lama’s curtained alcove. She has changed her uniform and is now dressed all in red. There are two others with her, and for a moment I think they are the priests, but then I see that the two figures dressed in black are near-copies of the Nemes thing: another woman and a man, both in black combat suits, both with limp, black bangs hanging down on pale foreheads, both with eyes of dead amber.
The trio moves through the frozen dancers toward Aenea and me. Instinctively I put myself between my friend and the things, but the Nemes male and its other sibling begin to move around us, flanking us. I pull Aenea close behind me, but she steps to my side.
The frozen dancers make no noise. The orchestra remains silent. Even the moonlight seems stilled to solid shafts in the dusty air.
I remove the flashlight laser and hold it at my side. The primary Nemes thing shows small teeth. Cardinal Mustafa steps from the shadows and stands behind her. All four of the Pax creatures hold their gaze on Aenea. For a moment I think that the universe has stopped, that the dancers are literally frozen in time and space, that the music hangs above us like icy stalactites ready to shatter and fall, but then I hear the murmur through the crowd—fearful whispers, a hiss of anxiety.
There is no visible threat—only four Pax guests moving out across the ballroom floor with Aenea as the locus of their closing circle—but the sense of predators closing on their prey is too strong to ignore, as is the scent of fear through the perfume and powder and cologne.
“Why wait?” says Rhadamanth Nemes, looking at Aenea but speaking to someone else—her siblings perhaps, or the Cardinal.
“I think …” says Cardinal Mustafa and freezes.
Everyone freezes. The great horns near the entrance arch have blown with the bass rumble of continental crusts shifting. No one is there in the alcoves to blow them. The bone and brass trumpets bracket the endless one-note rumbling of the horns. The great gong vibrates on the bone conduction level.
There is a rustle and stifled outcry across the dance floor, in the direction of the escalators, the anteroom, and the curtained entrance arch. The thinning crowds there are parting wider, moving aside like furrowed soil ahead of a steel plow.
Something is moving behind the closed curtains of the anteroom. Now something has passed through the curtains, not so much parting them as severing them. Now something is glinting in Oracle light and gliding across the parquet floors, gliding as if floating centimeters above the floor, glinting in the dying light of the moon. Tatters of red curtain hang from an impossibly tall form—three meters at least—and there are too many arms emerging from the folds of that crimson robe. It looks as if the hands hold steel blades. The dancers move away more quickly and there is a general and audible intake of breath. Lightning silently supercedes the moonlight and strobes off polished floors, eclipsing the Oracle with retinal echoes. When the thunder arrives some long seconds later, it is indistinguishable from the low, bone-shaking rumble of the still-reverberating horns in the entrance hall.
The Shrike glides to a halt five paces from Aenea and me, five paces from the Nemes thing, ten paces from each of the Nemes siblings frozen in their act of circling us, eight paces from the Cardinal. It occurs to me that the Shrike shrouded in its dangling red curtain tatters resembles nothing so much as a chrome and bladed caricature of Cardinal Mustafa in his crimson robe. The Nemes clones in their black uniforms look like shadows of stilettos against the walls.
Somewhere in one of the shadowed corners of the great reception hall, a tall clock slowly strikes the hour … one … two … three … four. It is, of course, the number of inhuman killing machines standing before and behind us. It has been more than four years since I have seen the Shrike, but its presence is no less terrible and no more welcome despite its intercession here. The red eyes gleam like lasers under a thin film of water. The chrome-steel jaws are parted to show row upon row of razor teeth. The thing’s blades, barbs, and cutting edges emerge from the enfolding red curtain robe in scores of places. It does not blink. It does not appear to breathe. Now that the gliding has stopped, it is as motionless as a nightmare sculpture.
Rhadamanth Nemes is smiling at it.
Still holding the silly flashlight laser, I remember the confrontation on God’s Grove years ago. The Nemes thing had gone silver and blurry and simply disappeared, reappearing next to twelve-year-old Aenea without warning. It had planned to cut off my friend’s head and carry it away in a burlap bag, and it would have done so had not the Shrike appeared then. The Nemes thing could do so now without hope of my reacting in time. These things moved outside of time. I know the agony of a parent watching its child step into the path of a speeding groundcar, unable to move in time to protect her. Superimposed on this terror is the pain of a lover unable to protect his beloved. I would die in a second to protect Aenea from any of these things—including the Shrike—indeed, may die in a second, in less than a second—but my death will not protect her. I grind my molars in frustration.
Moving only my eyes, afraid that I will precipitate the slaughter if I move a hand or head or muscle, I see that the Shrike is not staring at Aenea or the primary Nemes thing—it is staring directly at John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa. The frogfaced priest must feel the weight of this bloodred gaze, for the Cardinal’s complexion has gone a pure white above the red of his robe.
Aenea moves now. Stepping to my left side, she slips her right hand in my empty left one and squeezes my fingers. It is not a child’s request for reassurance; it is a signal of reassurance to me.
“You know how it will end,” she says softly to the Cardinal, ignoring the Nemes things as they coil like cats ready to pounce.
The Grand Inquisitor licks his thick lips. “No, I do not. There are the three of …”
“You know how it will end,” interrupts Aenea, her voice still soft. “You were on Mars.”
Mars? I think. What the hell does Mars have to do with anything? Lightning flickers again through the skylight, throwing wild shadows. The faces of the hundreds of terror-frozen revelers are like white ovals painted on black velvet around us. I realize in a flash of insight as sudden and illuminating as the lightning that the metaphysical biosphere of this world—Zenevolved or not—is riddled with Tibetan myth-inspired demons and malevolent spirits: cancerous nyen earth spirits; sadag “lords of the soil” who haunt builders who disturb their realms; tsen red spirits who live in rocks; gyelpo spirits of dead kings who have failed their vows, dead, deadly, dressed all in pale armor; dud spirits who are so malevolent that they feed only on human flesh and wear black, beetle skin; mamo female deities as ferocious as unseen riptides; matrika sorceresses of charnel grounds and cremation platforms, first sensed by a whiff of their carrion breath; grahas planetary deities that cause epilepsy and other violent, thrashing illnesses; nodjin
guardians of wealth in the soil—death to diamond miners—and a score more of night things, teethed things, clawed things, and killing things. Lhomo and the others have told me the stories well and often. I look at the white faces staring in shock at the Shrike and the Nemes creatures and think—This night will not be so strange in the telling for these people.
“The demon cannot vanquish all three of them,” says Cardinal Mustafa, saying the word “demon” aloud even as I think the word. I realize that he is speaking about the Shrike.
Aenea ignores the comment. “It will harvest your cruciform first,” she says softly. “I cannot stop it from doing that.”
Cardinal Mustafa’s head jerks back as if he has been slapped. His pale countenance grows visibly paler. Taking their cue from Rhadamanth Nemes, the clone-siblings coil tighter as if building energy toward some terrible transformation. Nemes has returned her black gaze to Aenea and the creature is smiling so broadly now that her rearmost teeth are visible.
“Stop!” cries Cardinal Mustafa and his shout echoes from the skylight and floor. The great horns cease rumbling. Revelers clutch one another in a rustling of fingernails on silk. Nemes flashes the Cardinal a look of malevolent loathing and near defiance.
“Stop!” screams the Pax holy man again, and I realize that he is talking to his own creatures first and foremost. “I invoke the command of Albedo and the Core, by the authority of the Three Elements I command thee!” This last desperate scream has the cadence of a shouted exorcism, some profound ritual, but even I can tell that it is not Catholic or Christian. It is not the Shrike being invoked under an iron grip of talismanic control here; it is his own demons.
Nemes and her siblings slide backward on the parquet floor as if pulled by invisible strings. The clone male and clone female move around us until they join Nemes in front of Mustafa.
The Cardinal smiles but it is a tremulous gesture. “My pets will not be unleashed until we speak again. I give my word as a prince of the Church, unholy child. Do I have your word that this”—he gestures toward the bladed Shrike in its velvet tatters—“this demon will not stalk me until then?”
