Deus X (4 page)

At first I could make no sense of it. It seemed like some enormous angry insect, beating its transparent wings with an unearthly fury, clawing its way through the air toward me.

Then I realized that it was made of plastic and metal, that the unearthly clatter was that of a combustion engine, and by the time it had set down before the chalet, steaming petrol fumes and chuffing carbon dioxide, to my amazement and horror, I knew all too well what it was.

Helicopters were not all that uncommon when I was a boy, and in the Amazon I had seen these technological carrion beetles buzzing about the boneyard of the rain forest. They were the sigils of power and privilege, of ranking military officers,
political potentates, and corporate captains, feared and loathed as such by those they surveyed.

Now, of course, like all combustion-powered vehicles, they are illegal in most of the world’s jurisdictions, or at any rate dispensation to possess or fly them is restricted to the true princes of this corrupt world.

Or, may God save us, it seemed, to Princes of the Church! For out of the canopy emerged just such a personage, his red cap covered by an enormous brimmed sunhelmet, his eyes hidden by impenetrable mirror glass, but with that beard and that bearing, not to mention the uncharacteristic red cloak he appeared to have donned for the occasion, unmistakably John Cardinal Silver, whom ecclesiastical rumor had it had forged the coalition that made Mary I Pope.

Cardinal Silver was a man I had met on several occasions, but someone with whom I had never really conversed, so I knew him mainly by reputation, which was more than enough.

Like the Pope, he was an American, something that, unlike many others, I have never held against either of them. It is highly popular, and even more convenient, for the rest of the world to blame the Americans, the prime petroleum guzzler and carbon dioxide emitters for over a century, for the biosphere’s imminent demise. But it is all too self-serving to fob off the blame for our species’ monstrous sin on the citizens of the nation
whom secular history’s chance happened to hand the executioner’s ax. Forgive them, Oh Lord, for they knew not what they did.

Cardinal Silver was also a political priest, a breed of which I have never been overweeningly fond, some sort of economic and public relations Richelieu muttering the balance sheet and the opinion poll results into the ear of the Pope.

The Church needs such prelates if it is to survive in the world, and judging from its present sorry standing, more not less, nor would I even go so far as to deem them an evil of necessity. They too serve, and more of them than not in a state of genuine belief.

But John Cardinal Silver had steered Mary Gonzalez’s election as Pope through the College of Cardinals like an accomplished Chicago party boss of yore, swapping favors, promising pork, and arguing theology like a campaign consultant.

The deliberations are supposed to be kept secret and no minutes are recorded, but believe me, Cardinals are not immune to the temptations of juicy gossip, nor are other priests reluctant to pass along choice tidbits from on high.

The College, like the Church, was deadlocked, and over the same issue, the one that has haunted it for most of my life.

The self-styled progressives contend that the falling away of the faithful is proof positive that the Church has failed to adapt to the times, that it is
entirely self-defeating to excommunicate the souls of those who would download their consciousness into successor entities, that perhaps we should even reach out for the lost souls of the unbelievers on the Other Side who surely must be in desperate need of salvation.

Traditionalists, among whom I stand, retort that the numbers on the membership rolls are no measure of the Church’s spiritual condition, still less if one were to pad them out with the Devil’s constructs.

Such were the polarities in the College of Cardinals. Between them was a broad middle who just wished the whole problem would go away and who were blocking all candidates on one side of it or the other.

Cardinal Silver did not play his hand until the College was nearing the point of exasperated exhaustion. When the moment came, he proposed Mary Cardinal Gonzalez.

Mary Cardinal Gonzalez may not have been among the first female priests, but she had been the first female everything else, Monsignor, Bishop, Cardinal, so why not the first female Pope?

The amazement and consternation that greeted this nomination need not be described, though I have often enough been subject to the gory details.

When the dust had settled, Cardinal Silver made his telling point. The mere suggestion of a female Pope had galvanized the conclave, which
a moment before had been paralyzed by the unresolved schism that was tearing the Church asunder, draining its energies, losing it all public credibility with its dwindling communicants, not to mention those it would seek to convert.

If we can’t resolve the issue, let’s put it aside, and let the public forget it, let’s show the world that the Church is capable of dynamic vision, let’s deny our phallocracy to half the world’s potential converts, let’s capture the headlines with something positive, let’s elect ourselves Mary Cardinal Gonzalez and create a papal superstar to rival John Paul II.

Or more subtle words to the same effect.

Had I been there, I probably would have been convinced too, had the choice of female Pope not been Mary Cardinal Gonzalez. Mary Gonzalez had grown up in the mean desert streets of dying Los Angeles during the Water Wars, had been some sort of eco-terrorist as a teenager, and had fled into a nunnery one step ahead of the law.

That was long decades ago, and those youthful follies have achieved the romantic status of the author’s wretched odd jobs on a cover biography. The mature Mary Cardinal Gonzalez was a shining example of the redemptive power of the Church, and indeed I believe it; from her public persona at least, Cardinal Gonzalez was a perfect secular image of priestly womanhood.

She was a stout supporter of feminine equality
and proof positive of the Church’s modern commitment to same. An American who made much of her third world ancestry, she supported the desperate against the comfortable, the poor against the rich, the oppressed against the oppressor, and, of course, the remains of the ecosphere against the further depredations of man.

Admirable. A paragon. Under other circumstances, perhaps even a useful and effective Pope.

But not what the Church and the world needed on the Throne of Peter now. On the single greatest spiritual issue confronting the Church, on the matter of the soul itself, as to whether it is the immortal creation of God or a mere software artifact subject to human replication, this most public of prelates, this talk-show personality, had always remained elusively silent.

Thus, while I have nothing against female Popes or political Cardinals, Cardinal Silver was quite high on the list of uninvited guests I did not care to entertain under the best of circumstances, let alone dropping out of the sky into my final spiritual meditations in a flagrant papal helicopter.

“To what do I owe this high honor, Your Eminence?” I asked by way of greeting as Cardinal Silver stood there, holding his sunhelmet on his head against the wind of the vanes, hunching reflexively at their overhead passage.

“Shall we discuss it inside, Father De Leone?” he said. I could all but see his eyes wince behind
their impenetrable lenses as he retreated with undisguised haste to the chalet.

“A few minutes’ exposure will not be statistically significant, Your Eminence,” I assured him, puffing to keep up.

“There is no sense in needless risk,” he rejoined without slackening his pace, a strange attitude, I thought, coming from a man who had just arrived in a helicopter.

Once safely inside, however, Cardinal Silver regained his princely composure. “You’re to return to Rome with me at once,” he said the moment he was safely under cover and had shed his hat and sunglasses.

“Your Eminence—”

“Yes, I know, Father De Leone, I know all about your condition, and if it were up to me, I would never disturb your final retreat, but I too am under direct papal order in this matter.”

“What matter?” I stammered, still struggling to keep up.

“I don’t know, she hasn’t told me,” Cardinal Silver said a good deal less authoritatively.

“The Pope has sent you all this way to drag a dying man back to Rome and you don’t know why?” I exclaimed, as much in befuddlement as anger. “I do find that hard to believe coming from you, Cardinal Silver.”

The Cardinal laughed an ironic little laugh that almost made him likable. “If you are among those
who believe that Mary Gonzalez was ever
my
creature, you have an interesting experience ahead of you, Father De Leone,” he said dryly. “This Pope has a mind of her own, and quite a mind it is.”

Up over the eastern horizon it came, over the reflected purple and crimson of a mid-ocean Greenhouse sunset, like something out of a classic twentieth-century television commercial, image of brute freedom and power bearing you off to your pelagic paradise to the travelin’ thrum of the rotors’ drum.

Only I was already there, my man, and it was coming toward me, all noise, and stink, and petrol fumes, as I squatted there in the cockpit glancing at my spliff like that was going to make it go away.

The mother just hung up there a few yards off my fantail and then it came right down like a rickety elevator until it was about ten feet off the deck, blasting my ears with heavy ecodeath metal, whipping up chop, pumping out gases so thick you could taste it. Then this dude drops out of the bottom in some kind of harness. He’s wearing
some fancy black business suit, shades, and a silver crash helmet. They lower him by cable until his feet are about a yard off the surface, and then the helicopter walks him on water toward me and over the cockpit, dropping him more or less in my lap.

“Nice of you to drop in, Your Eminence,” I say as I help us to our feet. Lame line for sure, but I can’t help it, and besides, neither of us can hear anything over the helicopter engine anyway.

He undoes the harness, flips off the helmet, waves off the helicopter, which slurps in the cable like a tasty strand of spaghetti, tilts its rotor to the east, and takes off climbing toward the Italian coast at a thirty-degree angle.

“You always like to make your entrance in that thing?” I asked when my eardrums stop ringing.

“I only fly under papal orders in circumstances of absolute necessity,” the Cardinal insisted, but I could see from the way the corners of his mouth were quivering that he knew right well he enjoyed it.

“Sure you do, Your Eminence. So why don’t we just get down to business?”

“Could we go inside?” he said, glancing at the sky nervously, like maybe a sea gull was about to shit on his head.

“Hey relax, Cardinal, the sun’s going down, and the stars will soon be out, and we don’t want
to miss this sunset….” I politely offered him the sacrament of the Herb, which he just as politely refused.

“We don’t have time to enjoy the sunset, Mr. Philippe, it may already be too late to retrieve the program….”

“So tell me all about it,” I said, leaning back on the rear bench of the cockpit, where I could puff my spliff and watch the twilight’s last gleaming.

That was enough to convince him he wasn’t going to drag me inside, so he hunkered down in the shadow of the cabin hatchway.

“We’ve lost an expert system program, or rather, we’re afraid that it’s been pirated, possibly for duplication, and it’s a very serious matter.”

“Program what, we who, by which, and what’s the big problem? Software disappears over the Line every day.”

“We are the Catholic Church, Mr. Philippe, the program was lifted off the internal Vatican network, which we have always been assured is quite secure, and we have no idea who did it, or how, or for what purpose.”

The Herb began to illumine. “We’re not talking about your accountancy system, are we?” I said. “You didn’t fly out here to get me to catch some industrial spooks, did you? You’re talking about an … entity, aren’t you?”

“An entity?”

“You know what I mean.”

Cardinal Silver sighed. He shrugged. “Yes, I know what you mean, but I’m not so sure we agree on what you mean by it, seeing as how the Church has failed to reach any reasonable consensus itself.”

I shrugged. “Loas, Flying Dutchmen of the Big Board, the software spirits of the dearly departed, I meet ’em all the time in my line of work, and I still don’t know be they alive or just the disneyworld version, and it’s a subject of some dispute on the Other Side too, it might surprise you to hear.”

“Perhaps God has chosen us the right man,” the Cardinal muttered enigmatically.

“God?”

“God, fate, destiny, a karmic attractor, call it what you will. You were the closest, ah, specialist to hand when we lost it, but I sense Divine Providence may have steered your course.”

Or your Devil made me do it, I refrained from saying, one man’s sacrament being another jurisdiction’s controlled substance.

“
It
, Your Eminence, or
him
?” I said instead. “You
did
say what you lost was the successor entity to a man?”

The Cardinal sighed. “It … him … whatever,” he muttered. “The consciousness hologram of a priest, one Pierre De Leone, and—”

“
A priest?
But doesn’t the Catholic Church believe that raising software zombies is some kind of mortal sin?”

“An unsettling and unsettled question, Mr. Philippe. If Father De Leone is right, all we have lost is an expert system model of his consciousness, but if he is wrong, we have sent a heroic soul to wander lost and alone into electronic limbo….”

“Getting kinda theological, Your Eminence, maybe beyond my professional need to know….”

“I’m afraid it’s the heart of the matter, Mr. Philippe. Father De Leone was adamantly opposed to the very concept of a successor entity, believing such to be satanic constructs, the collaboration in the creation of which is a grave sin. So by his lights, he risked his immortal soul in the Church’s service….”