by Дэн Симмонс
A woman in black armor clubbed my darling down, straddling her and pulling her arms behind her.
I used my forearm to swat the Pax security bitch five meters backward through the air. A Guardsman clubbed me in the stomach with his pike.
A flying security shape zapped me with a neural stunner. Stunners are supposed to work instantly, guaranteed to work instantly, but I had time to close my hands on the nearest Guardsman’s throat before they stunned me again, and then a third time. My body spasmed and fell and I pissed my pants as all voluntary functions ceased, my last conscious sensation being the cold flow of urine down my pant leg onto the perfect tiles of St. Peter’s Basilica.
I was not really aware of the dozen heavy forms landing on my back, pinning my arms, pulling me away. I did not really hear or feel the crack of my forehead striking tile or the rip it opened from my brow to hairline.
In the last three or four seconds of semiconsciousness, I saw black feet, combat boots, a fallen Swiss Guardsman’s cap, more feet. I knew that Aenea had fallen to my left but I could not turn my head to see her one last time.
They dragged me away, leaving a trail of blood, urine, and saliva as they did so. I was far beyond caring.
And so ends my tale.
I was conscious but restrained with neural locks during my “trial,” a ten-minute appearance before the black-robed judges of the Holy Office.
I was condemned to death. No human being would sully his or her soul by executing me; I was to be transferred to a Schrödinger cat box in orbit around the quarantined labyrinth world of Armaghast. The immutable laws of physics and quantum chance would execute the sentence. As soon as the trial ended they shipped me via a Hawking-drive, high-g, robot torchship to Armaghast System—a two-month time-debt. Wherever Aenea was, whatever had happened to her, I was already two months too late to help her when I awoke just as they finished sealing the fused-energy shell of my prison. And for uncounted days… perhaps months, I went insane. And then for more uncounted days, certainly more months, I have been using the ’scriber they included in my tiny egg of a cell to tell this tale.
They must have known that the ’scriber would be an additional punishment as I waited to die, writing my story on my few pages of recycled microvellum like the snake devouring its own tail, knowing that no one will ever access the story in the memory chip. I said at the beginning of all this that you, my impossible reader, were reading it for the wrong reason. I said at the beginning that if you were reading this to discover her fate, or my own, that you were reading the wrong document. I was not with her when her fate was played out, and my own is closer now to its final act than when I first wrote these words. I was not with her. I was not with her. Oh, Jesus God, God of Moses, Allah, dear Buddha, Zeus, Muir, Elvis, Christ… if any of you exist or ever existed or retain a shred of power in your dead gray hands… please let me die now. Now.
Let the particle be detected and the gas released.
Now.
I was not with her.
31
I lied to you.
I said at the beginning of this narrative that I was not with her when Aenea’s fate was played out—implying that I did not know what that fate might be—and I repeated it some sleep periods ago when I ’scribed what I was sure must be the last installment of that same narrative.
But I lied by omission, as some priest of the Church might say. I lied because I did not want to discuss it, to describe it, to relive it, to believe it. But I know now that I must do all of these things. I have relived it every hour of my incarceration here in this Schrödinger cat box prison. I have believed it since the moment I shared the experience with my dear friend, my dear Aenea.
I knew before they shipped me out of Pacem System what the fate of my dear girl had been. Having believed it and relived it, I owe it to the truth of this narrative and to the memory of our love to discuss it and describe it.
All this came to me while I was drugged and docile, tethered in a high-g tank aboard the robot shuttle an hour after my ten-minute trial in front of the Inquisition on a Pax base asteroid ten light-minutes from Pacem. I knew as soon as I heard and felt and saw these things that they were real, that they were happening at the moment I shared them, and that only my closeness to Aenea and my slow progress in learning the language of the living had allowed such a powerful sharing. When the sharing was over, I began screaming in my high-g tank, ripping at life-support umbilicals and banging the bulkhead with my head and fists, until the water-filled tank was swirling with my blood. I tried tearing at the osmosis mask that covered my face like some parasite sucking away my breath; it would not tear. For a full three hours I screamed and protested, battering myself into a state of semiconsciousness at best, reliving the shared moments with Aenea a thousand times and screaming in agony a thousand times, and then the robot ship injected sleep drugs through the leechlike umbilicals, the high-g tank drained, and I drifted away into cryogenic fugue as the torchship reached the translation point for the jump to nearby Armaghast System. 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 wastebasket. 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.<
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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 of 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.
