by Dan Simmons
I awoke in the Schrödinger cat box. The robot ship had loaded me into the fused-energy satellite and launched it without human intervention. For a few moments I was disoriented, believing that the shared moments with Aenea had all been nightmare. Then the reality of those moments flooded back and I began screaming again. I believe that I was not sane again for some months.
Here is what drove me to madness.
Aenea had also been taken bleeding and unconscious from St. Peter’s Basilica, but unlike me she awoke the next day neither drugged nor shunted. She came to consciousness—and I shared this awakening more clearly than I have recalled any memory of mine, as sharp and real as a second set of sense impressions—in a huge stone room, round, some thirty meters across, with a ceiling fifty meters above the stone floor. Set in the ceiling was a glowing frosted glass that gave the sense of a skylight, although Aenea guessed that this was an illusion and that the room was deep within a larger structure.
The medics had cleaned me up for my ten-minute trial while I was unconscious, but no one had touched Aenea’s wounds: the left side of her face was tender, swollen with bruises, her clothes had been torn away from her body and she was naked, her lips were swollen, her left eye was almost shut—she could see out of it only with effort and the vision from her right eye was blurred from concussion—and there were cuts and bruises on her chest, thighs, forearm, and belly. Some of these cuts had caked over, but a few were deep enough to require stitches that no one had provided. They still bled.
She was strapped in what appeared to be a rusted iron skeleton of crossed metal that hung by chains from the high ceiling and that allowed her to lean back and rest her weight against it but still kept her almost standing, her arms held low along the rusted girders, a near-vertical asterisk of cold metal hanging in air with her wrists and ankles cruelly clamped and bolted to the frame. Her toes hung about ten centimeters above a grated floor. She could move her head. The round room was empty except for this and two other objects. A broad wastebasket sat to the right of the chair. There was a plastic liner in the waste-basket. Also next to the right arm of the asterisk was a rusted metal tray with various instruments on it: ancient dental picks and pliers, circular blades, scalpels, bone saws, a long forceps of some kind, pieces of wire with barbs at three-centimeter intervals, long-bladed shears, shorter, serrated shears, bottles of dark fluid, tubes of paste, needles, heavy thread, and a hammer. Even more disturbing was the round grate some two and a half meters across beneath her, through which she could see dozens of tiny, blue flames burning like pilot lights. There was the faint smell of natural gas.
Aenea tried the restraints—they gave not at all—felt her bruised wrists and ankles throb at the attempts, and put her head back against the iron girder to wait. Her hair was matted there and she could feel a huge lump high on her scalp and another near the base of her skull. She felt nauseous and concentrated on not throwing up on herself.
After a few minutes, a hidden door in the stone wall opened and Rhadamanth Nemes came in and walked to a place just beyond the grate to the right side of Aenea. A second Rhadamanth Nemes came in and took her place on Aenea’s left side. Two more Nemeses came in and took up positions farther back. They did not speak. Aenea did not speak to them.
A few minutes later, John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa shimmered into existence—his life-size holographic image taking on solidity directly in front of Aenea. The illusion of his physical presence was perfect except for the fact that the Cardinal was sitting on a chair not represented in the hologram, giving the illusion that he was floating in midair. Mustafa looked younger and healthier than he had on T’ien Shan. A few seconds later he was joined by the holo of a more massive cardinal in a red robe, and then by the holo of a thin, tubercular-looking priest. A moment after that, a tall, handsome man dressed all in gray came through the physical door in the wall of the physical dungeon and stood with the holos. Mustafa and the other Cardinal continued sitting on unseen chairs while the monsignor’s holo and the physically present man in gray stood behind the chairs like servants.
“M. Aenea,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “allow me to introduce the Vatican Secretary of State His Eminence Cardinal Lourdusamy, his aide Monsignor Lucas Oddi, and our esteemed Councillor Albedo.”
“Where am I?” asked Aenea. She had to attempt the sentence a second time because of her swollen lips and bruised jaw.
The Grand Inquisitor smiled. “We will answer all of your questions for the moment, my dear. And then you will answer all of ours. I guarantee this. To answer your first question, you are in the deepest … ah … interview room … in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, on the right bank of the new Tiber, near the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, quite near the Vatican, still on the world of Pacem.”
“Where is Raul?”
“Raul?” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Oh, you mean your rather useless bodyguard. At the moment, I believe he has completed his own meeting with the Holy Office and is aboard a ship preparing to leave our fair system. Is he important to you, my dear? We could make arrangements to return him to Castel Sant’ Angelo.”
“He’s not important,” murmured Aenea, and after my first second of hurt and anguish at the words, I could feel her thoughts beneath them … concern for me, terror for me, hope that they would not threaten me as a means to coerce her.
“As you wish,” said Cardinal Mustafa. “It is you we want to interview today. How do you feel?”
Aenea stared at them through her good eye.
“Well,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “one should not hope to attack the Holy Father in St. Peter’s Basilica and come away with impunity.”
Aenea mumbled something.
“What was that, my dear? We could not make it out.” Mustafa was smiling slightly—a toad’s self-satisfied leer.
“I … did … not … attack … the … Pope.”
Mustafa opened his hands. “If you insist, M. Aenea … but your intentions did not seem friendly. What is it that you had in mind as you ran down the central aisle toward the Holy Father?”
“Warn him,” said Aenea. Part of her mind was assessing her injuries even as she listened to the Grand Inquisitor’s prattle: serious bruises but nothing broken, the sword cut on her thigh needed stitching, as did the cut on her upper chest. But something was wrong in her system—internal bleeding? She did not think so. Something alien had been administered to her via injection.
“Warn him of what?” said Cardinal Mustafa with butter smoothness.
Aenea moved her head to look with her good eye at Cardinal Lourdusamy and then at Councillor Albedo. She said nothing.
“Warn him of what?” asked Cardinal Mustafa again. When Aenea did not respond, the Grand Inquisitor nodded to the nearest Nemes clone. The pale woman walked slowly to the side of Aenea’s chair, took up the smaller of the two shears, seemed to think twice about it, set the instrument back on the tray, came closer, went to one knee on the grate next to Aenea’s right arm, bent back my darling’s little finger, and bit it off. Nemes smiled, stood, and spit the bloody finger into the wastebasket.
Aenea screamed with the shock and pain and half swooned against the headrest.
The Nemes-thing took tourniquet paste from the tube and smeared it on the stump of Aenea’s little finger.
The holo of Cardinal Mustafa looked sad. “We do not desire to administer pain, my dear, but we also shall not hesitate to do so. You shall answer our questions quickly and honestly, or more parts of you will end up in the basket. Your tongue will be the last to go.”
Aenea fought back the nausea. The pain from her mutilated hand was incredible—ten light-minutes away, I screamed with the secondhand shock of it.
“I was going to warn the Pope … about … your coup,” gasped Aenea, still looking at Lourdusamy and Albedo. “Heart attack.”
Cardinal Mustafa blinked in surprise. “You are a witch,” he said softly.
“And you’re a traitorous asshole,” Aenea said strongly and clearly. “All o
f you are. You sold out your Church. Now you’re selling out your puppet Lenar Hoyt.”
“Oh?” said Cardinal Lourdusamy. He looked mildly amused. “How are we doing that, child?”
Aenea jerked her head at Councillor Albedo. “The Core controls everyone’s life and death via the cruciforms. People die when it’s convenient for the Core to have them dead … neural networks in the process of dying are more creative than living ones. You’re going to kill the Pope again, but this time his resurrection won’t be successful, will it?”
“Very perceptive, my dear,” rumbled Cardinal Lourdusamy. He shrugged. “Perhaps it is time for a new pontiff.” He moved his hand in the air and a fifth hologram appeared behind them in the room: Pope Urban XVI comatose in a hospital bed, nursing nuns, human doctors, and medical machines hovering around him. Lourdusamy waved his pudgy hand again and the image disappeared.
“Your turn to be pope?” said Aenea and closed her eyes. Red spots were dancing in her vision. When she opened her eyes again, Lourdusamy was making a modest shrug.
“Enough of this,” said Councillor Albedo. He walked directly through the holos of the seated cardinals and stood at the edge of the grate, directly in front of Aenea. “How have you been manipulating the farcaster medium? How do you farcast without the portals?”
Aenea looked at the Core representative. “It scares you, doesn’t it, Councillor? In the same way that the cardinals are too frightened to be here with me in person.”
The gray man showed his perfect teeth. “Not at all, Aenea. But you have the ability to farcast yourself—and those near you—without portals. His Eminence Cardinal Lourdusamy and Cardinal Mustafa, as well as Monsignor Oddi, have no wish to suddenly vanish from Pacem with you. As for me … I would be delighted if you farcast us somewhere else.” He waited. Aenea said nothing. She did not move. Councillor Albedo smiled again. “We know that you’re the only one who has learned how to do this type of farcasting,” he said softly. “None of your so-called disciples are close to learning the technique. But what is the technique? The only way we’ve managed to use the Void for farcasting is by wedging open permanent rifts in the medium … and that takes far too much energy.”
“And they don’t allow you to do that anymore,” muttered Aenea, blinking away the red dots so she could meet the gray man’s gaze. The pain from her hand rose and fell in and around her like long swells on an uneasy sea.
Councillor Albedo’s eyebrow moved up a fraction. “They won’t allow us to? Who is they, child? Describe your masters to us.”
“No masters,” murmured Aenea. She had to concentrate in order to banish the dizziness. “Lions and Tigers and Bears,” she whispered.
“No more double talk,” rumbled Lourdusamy. The fat man nodded to the second Nemes clone, who walked to the tray, removed the rusty pair of pliers, walked around to Aenea’s left hand, held it steady at the wrist, and pulled out all of my darling’s fingernails.
Aenea screamed, passed out briefly, awoke, tried to turn her head away in time but failed, vomited on herself, and moaned softly.
“There is no dignity in pain, my child,” said Cardinal Mustafa. “Tell us what the Councillor wishes to know and we will end this sad charade. You will be taken from here, your wounds will be attended to, your finger regrown, you will be cleaned and dressed and reunited with your bodyguard or disciple or whatever. This ugly episode will be over.”
At that moment, reeling in agony, Aenea’s body still was aware of the alien substance that had been injected into her while she was unconscious hours earlier. Her cells recognized it. Poison. A sure, slow, terminal poison with no antidote—it would activate in twenty-four hours no matter what anyone did. She knew then what they wanted her to do and why.
Aenea had always been in contact with the Core, even before she was born, via the Schrön Loop in her mother’s skull linked to her father’s cybrid persona. It allowed her to touch primitive dataspheres directly, and she did this now—sensing the solid array of exotic Core machinery that lined this subterranean cell: instruments within instruments, sensors beyond human understanding or description, devices working in four dimensions and more, waiting, sniffing, waiting.
The cardinals and Councillor Albedo and the Core wanted her to escape. Everything was predicated upon her ‘casting out of this intolerable situation: thus the holodrama coarseness of the torture, the melodramatic absurdity of the dungeon cell in Castel Sant’ Angelo and the heavy-handed Inquisition. They would hurt her until she could not stand it any longer, and when she ’cast away, the Core instruments would measure everything to the billionth of a nanosecond, analyze her use of the Void, and come up with a way to replicate it. The Core would finally have their farcasters back—not in their crude wormhole or Gideon-drive manner, but instant and elegant and eternally theirs.
Aenea ignored the Grand Inquisitor, licked her dry, cracked lips, and said distinctly to Councillor Albedo, “I know where you live.”
The handsome gray man’s mouth twitched. “What do you mean?”
“I know where the Core—the physical elements of the Core—are,” said Aenea.
Albedo smiled but Aenea saw the quick glance toward the two cardinals and tall priest. “Nonsense,” he said. “No human being has ever known the location of the Core.”
“In the beginning,” said Aenea, her voice slurred only slightly by pain and shock, “the Core was a transient entity floating in the crude datasphere on Old Earth known as the Internet. Then, even before the Hegira, you moved your bubble memories and servers and core storage nexus to a cluster of asteroids in long orbit around the sun, far from the Old Earth you planned to destroy …”
“Silence her,” snapped Albedo, turning back toward Lourdusamy, Mustafa, and Oddi. “She is trying to distract us from our questioning. This is not important.”
The expressions of the Mustafa, Lourdusamy, and Oddi holos suggested otherwise.
“During the days of the Hegemony,” continued Aenea, her good eyelid fluttering with the effort to focus her attention and steady her voice through the long, slow swells of pain, “the Core decided that it was prudent to diversify the physical Core components—bubble-memory matrices deep underground on the nine Labyrinthine worlds, fatline servers in the orbital industrial complexes around Tau Ceti Center, Core entity personae traveling along farcaster combands, and the megasphere connecting it all laced through the farcaster rifts in the Void Which Binds.”
Albedo folded his arms. “You’re raving.”
“But after the Fall,” continued Aenea, holding her good eyelid open and defying the gray man with her stare, “the Core got worried. Meina Gladstone’s attack on the farcaster medium gave you pause, even if the damage to your megasphere was repairable. You decided to diversify further. Multiply your personae, miniaturize essential Core memories, and make your parasitism on the human neural networks more direct …”
Albedo turned his back on her and gestured toward the nearest Nemes-thing. “She’s raving. Sew her lips shut.”
“No!” commanded Cardinal Lourdusamy. The fat man’s eyes were bright and attentive. “Don’t touch her until I command it.”
The Nemes on Aenea’s right had already picked up a needle and roll of heavy thread. Now the pale-faced female paused and looked to Albedo for instructions.
“Wait,” said the Councillor.
“You wanted your neural parasitism to be more direct,” said Aenea. “So your billions of Core entities each formed its surrounding matrix in cruciform shape and attached themselves directly to your human hosts. Every one of your Core individuals now has a human host of its own to live in and destroy at will. You remain connected via the old dataspheres and new Gideon-drive megasphere nodes, but you enjoy dwelling so close to your food source …”
Albedo threw his head back and laughed, showing perfect teeth. He opened his arms and turned back to the three human holos. “This is marvelous entertainment,” he said, still chuckling. “You’ve arranged all this for her inte
rrogation”—he flicked manicured nails in the general direction of the dungeon chamber, the skylight, the iron crossbeams upon which Aenea was clamped—“and the girl ends up playing with your minds. Pure nonsense. But wonderfully entertaining.”
Cardinal Mustafa, Cardinal Lourdusamy, and Monsignor Oddi were looking at Councillor Albedo most attentively, but their holographic fingers were touching their holographic chests.
The red-robed holo of Lourdusamy rose from its invisible chair and walked over to the edge of the grate. The holographic illusion was so perfect that Aenea could hear the slight rustling of the pectoral cross as it swung from its cord of red silk; the cord was intertwined with gold thread and ended in a large red and gold tuft. Aenea concentrated on watching the swinging cross and its clean silk cord rather than paying attention to the agony in her mutilated hands. She could feel the poison quietly spreading its way through her limbs and torso like the tumors and nematodes of a growing cruciform. She smiled. Whatever else they did to her, the cells of her body and blood would never accept the cruciform.
“This is interesting but irrelevant, my child,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy. “And this”—he flicked his short, fat fingers in the direction of her wounds and nakedness as if repulsed by it—“is most unpleasant.” The holo leaned closer and his intelligent little pig eyes bored into her. “And most unnecessary. Tell the Councillor what he wishes to know.”
Aenea raised her head to look into the big man’s eyes. “How to ’cast without a farcaster?”
Cardinal Lourdusamy licked his thin lips. “Yes, yes.”
Aenea smiled. “It is simple, Your Eminence. All you have to do is come to a few classes, learn about learning … the language of the dead, of the living, how to hear the music of the spheres … and then take communion with my blood or the blood of one of my followers who has drunk the wine.”
