Runaway Nun (Misbegotten) (5 page)

9

Father Elano entered the Pope’s office without knocking.

The massive door barely left a rustle
as it closed behind him. He treaded toward the far wall of the long, spectral
chamber with vaulted ceiling and a string of arched stained-glass windows to
one side. Hardwood floors and unadorned walls added to the overall austere
feel, the Papal study possessing the simplicity of a monastery cell rather than
the pomp of a throne room. Way in the distance, a large crucifix towered on the
back wall. Two candles burned agonizingly slow on either side of the Savior’s
pierced wrists, casting their flickering glow over a man hunkered down at a
large oak desk. The scent of melting wax lingered in the air, blending in with
the sour tang of polished wood. The desk was littered with writing utensils,
stacks upon stacks of papers, and thick, dusty tomes. The man was engrossed in
writing, the quill in his hand scraping the paper mercilessly.

Angry ribbons of rain slammed the
windows facing the crater outside, their muffled crash covering the drumming of
Elano’s boots on the wooden floors. When he finally heard the approaching
footsteps, Inocentis III bolted from his chair, dashed around the cluttered
desk, and raced to meet Elano. The Pontiff was a man past his prime by many
years, and yet, whatever fountain of eternal youth he’d found, it helped him
conceal his age
graciously. A pair of intense dark
eyes never still for more than a second, an upright posture, and a lively step
made him look decades younger than what anyone would’ve dared to guess. He was
decked in a plain grey cassock with no cape; he wore a simple, milk-white
skullcap. A crucifix hung at the end of a golden chain around his neck.

Elano cast a furtive glance at the
Pope’s feet. A pair of high-heeled cowboy boots poked their silver toecaps from
under the brim of his robe. Snakeskin and wine-colored, the boots were the
Pontiff’s famous signature article of clothing. During his tenure as the
Archbishop of the Galveston-Huston archdiocese, his extensive collection of
boots was a running joke inside the College of Cardinals. His colleagues had
nicknamed him the Rodeo Cardinal. Once appointed as the first Pope to lead the
Church in the aftermath of the Blessed Collisions, he had kept only a few
pairs—his favorite ones—and had given up on wearing the spurs,
which was something he considered a glorious personal victory in his epic
struggle with the double-headed demon of pride and vanity.

He met Elano with his arms wide
open.

“Elano, dear! Son—”

Elano got down on one knee, bowed
his head, and searched for the Pontiff’s right hand for the traditional
obedience kiss.

“Holy Father,” Elano said, “My
soul finds joy in thy—”

“Oh, to hell with the protocol!”
the Pope said and pulled him up. He hugged Elano quickly, took him by the
elbow, and led him right away toward a drape-covered side door.

“I heard the Western tribes have
developed a… how should I say…
heightened
awareness of the fear of the Lord?” Inocentis III said, winking at Elano.

“The cross or the sword, Father.”

“Aha! Never a third choice! That’s
what I like about my Marines—God’s Marines—on the shield or under
the shield!
Never
a third choice,”
the Pope continued as he pulled the drape to the side, pushed down on the
doorknob, and opened the door for Elano.

“I have a surprise for my youngest
Cardinal,” he said, beaming with excitement. “No Jesuit ever shies away from a
theologically loaded surprise, am I correct?”

Elano forced himself to smile.

“You bet your soul I am, son!” the
Pope said, and he patted Elano on his back.

They both stepped inside the
hidden antechamber.

The
antechamber was meant to serve as the Pontiff’s prayer room, but, in the good
old fashion of ecclesiastic tradition, it was used mostly for hosting private
conversations between Inocentis III and his close confidants. In a corner, a
large-print Bible rested open on top of a small lectern, with a knee stool at
its base.

Across from it, an entire wall was
occupied with a life-size Resurrection tapestry. Shrouded in a corona of
blinding light, Jesus was bursting through the gates of a crude sepulcher,
while the Roman centurions crawled away on all fours, shielding their faces in
the crook of their arms, further and further away from the light. Yet, from
behind a nearby rolled stone, three veiled women apparently had no problem with
the radiant explosion; enrapt in pure adoration, faces drenched in unending
streams of tears, the women kept their eyes on the Resurrected One.

Inocentis III and Elano passed in
front of the tapestry as they strolled inside.

“I mean, isn’t the Gospel itself
the ultimate surprise? Sunday morning comes and voila: the Lord’s missing!” the
Pope said, and giggled.

The two men stopped in front of
the female replika seated in a chair. She was still in her nun robe; the fallen
hood allowed her blonde curls to fall freely around the perfect oval of her
face. Her large eyes panned immediately from the Swiss Guard frozen at her side
to the two newcomers.

The Pope dismissed the Guard with
a short hand gesture,
then
waited for the soldier to
exit the room before pointing at the replika:

“Behold the woman!” Inocentis III
said. “Not born of the flesh, but of the tube. That monster named her…
Double-M
! How fitting.”

Conflicted yet strangely
fascinated at the sight of Double-M, Elano sized her up for a few long seconds.
He’d heard more than one story about the inhabitants of Harlequin
Island—mostly from the nuns and monks who’d served on
Domus Mariae
—but he’d never met a
replika face to face before.

“Anybody famous?” he said at last,
glancing back at the Pope.

“Oh, the whore of Babylon from
back in the day. They all fornicated with her—actors, writers,
presidents—the Devil himself, if you ask me!”

“I didn’t screw the Devil!”
Double-M
blurted, glaring at Inocentis III.

“Well, my dear, I’m thrilled to
hear that,” the Pope said. “No need to get feisty, though. I was just simply
reminiscing about the one… in whose image you were made. So, please, nothing to
be taken personally.” And he smiled.

Elano took a step back and leaned
against the wall, to the side of the Resurrection tapestry. He stared at
Double-M. Facing a replika for the first time, he felt defeated. She was indeed
a puppet, but he couldn’t have told her apart from any other real woman out
there. She looked strikingly… human. There was no discernible feature by which
one could tell she’d been grown from a clump of cells trapped inside a
glass-covered sarcophagus. The only thing that set her apart was her beauty:
she was flawless and fragile, with eyes always wide open as if the whole world
was nothing but an excuse to wonder.

Elano turned to Inocentis III.
“How did she get on land?”

“She gave her heart to the Lord,
like all the other runaways—no offense to Micon, the old man’s a saint,
we both know that,” the Pope said. “Then she seduced this novice monk, a pilot
on one of the supply helicopters, who couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants.
Lord have mercy on his soul, I grounded the son of a—it doesn’t matter,
my son, really. God bless the custom nuns; nothing slips by the sisters.
They’ll find a needle in a haystack, and a… harlot hiding on a helicopter.”

The Pope grinned at Double-M. Her
lips opened for a brief moment, but no words left her mouth. Her eyes squinted
as she held the Pope’s stare.

“So, my dear, would you be so kind
to share with us the… good news?”

She turned to Elano, smiled, and
nodded at the painting on the wall.

“I saw Jesus,” she said.

The Pope glanced at Elano, then
back at Double-M.

“You had a vision, my dear?” the
Pope asked again.

“No. I saw him in person,” she
replied.

“You met the Lord?” Elano said, a
slight frown taking over his face.

Double-M’s lips arched seductively;
her eyes glistened as she panned them over the tapestry on the wall. The
Savior’s face was serene and triumphant; his hands still bore the marks of the
Holy Friday ordeal, scars meant to last an eternity.

Finally, she turned her eyes on
Elano.

“‘Met him’ ain’t sayin’ the whole
damn truth, handsome,” she said.

“Blessed Mother of God!” Inocentis
III said.

Holding back a rush of sudden
outrage, Elano locked eyes with those of the replika seated before him. Her
skewed simper was loaded with hidden meanings reeking of blasphemy, obscene
words never to be spoken in any human tongue, images of bodies mashed into each
other, of groping hands and drooling mouths and muscles covered in thin layers
of sweat, cursed pictures that once penetrating the mind would condemn the soul
to the eternal pits of Hell itself.

“Who are you?” Elano demanded,
each word barely escaping his clenched jaw.

She nodded at the picture on the
wall.

“I’m the one Jesus loves,”
Double-M said. “Now, that boy’s a real lover, swear to God.”

Elano turned to the Pope, his eyes
desperately seeking for an answer.

The Pope shook his head in dismay.

“The bastard finally did it!”
Inocentis III said and crossed himself.

10

The GEPPETTO INDUSTRIES logo glowed incandescent as shafts
of sunrays crashed into the parabolic mirrors of the solar furnaces that lined
the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, then bounced back into the polarized
glass facade of the skyrise.

Ten stories below, the vista of
Harlequin Island opened up to view: a megalopolis on stilts, like a mammoth
offshore oilrig but without the derricks, cranes, and drilling installations.
Instead, pagoda-like buildings, solar farms, and wind turbines decked a giant
base platform that covered an area about the size of Manhattan. As the sun
chased the morning fog away, the artificial island’s contour slowly dissolved
into a collection of blue pastels splattering the surface of the surrounding
ocean.

The island was shaped like an
infinity sign with two unequal loops, one roughly twice the size of the other.
A three-mile-wide forest covered the island’s narrowest strip: the area where
the two loops intersected. The thick patch of dark underbrush and giant trees
completely segregated the smallest loop—the Replika Ghetto, with its
warehouse-like buildings cluttered around a jumble of narrow streets—from
the biggest loop hosting the island’s main residential area: the downtown. At
the heart of the downtown lied the Koliseum: an imposing, circular arena the
size of a football field, surrounded by scores of tiered low-rise buildings.
The Geppetto Industries pagoda soared over all of them, with ten stories of
nothing but glass, steel, and ornate balustrades.

A
heavily powdered, short rococo wig adorned Sir Gottfrey’s head. Layers upon
layers of cylindrical curls fell on either side of his effeminate face, while a
thin layer of lotion added a much-needed gloss to an otherwise ashen
complexion. Reclining in a nongrav armchair hovering motionless on the terrace
of his executive suite, the man was enjoying the morning sun caressing the skin
of his face.

He was not alone; his organs kept
him company.

Scattered all around him, his
heart, liver, lungs, stomach, and kidneys levitated three feet in the air, each
organ encased in a bulletproof glass box—an ideal germ-and-virus-free
bio-enhancing environment tailored to ensure molecular regeneration at a rate
twice as fast as that of a mere mortal. An array of ducts, hoses, and tubes
connected the encased organs to their original host organism, the appendages
coiling back into Sir Gottfrey’s hollow body through hook-ups rigged into his
vest like the life-support valves on an astronaut’s spacesuit.

To kill time, he was fumbling with
the edges of his blood-red bowtie, trying to tighten its hold around his
scrawny neck. His closed eyelids quivered now and then, but he endured the
celestial body’s radiant touch stoically, determined to let the sun do its
rejuvenating work. The man knew that his bet with eternity depended on his
partnership with the light the heavenly bodies emanated, the gentle ropes of
their gravity, the unerring rhythm of day and night, the sublime harmony of the
opposites—the Yin and the bloody Yang. The Taoists had it right: you’re
either in sync or out of sync; you either swim against the current, or flow
down the stream. Hence, never, under any circumstances, piss against the bloody
wind!

That was the extent of Sir
Gottfrey’s consent to perennial religious verities. But then again, he’d never
thought of Taoism as a religion. He viewed it more like a natural philosophy
steeped in myths populated by fire-spitting dragons, chopstick-wielding sages,
and bowls dripping with maggoty noodles, and maybe a Kung Fu champ kicking and
screaming, and breaking bloody boards with his skull bone.

Lovely…

The man always started the day
with a prelude to his longevity regimen—he called it “Vitamin D at
Daybreak,” and loved the alliteration. The rejuvenation of his facial membrane
was something he still preferred doing the old-fashioned way, a leftover from a
previous era. He wouldn’t have gone so far as to slap slices of cucumber on his
face, but he had grown infatuated with algae-based facial cream Yoshiro and his
lads had developed it from scratch—it sped up the bloodstream absorption
of the solar gift, while eliminating 99.7 percent of the side effects of harmful
radiation.

He let the breeze wash over the
pores of his well-moisturized derma for a few more seconds, then inhaled deeply
and opened his eyes. Blinking rapidly, he turned his sterile irises away from
the sun. He picked up a pair of round eyeglasses from his lap and set them on
the bridge of his nose—they were vintage spectacles that belonged to no
one but John Lennon himself.

The man had paid a fortune for
them at the end of a long auction night at Sotheby’s. It had happened the same
November day Oxford University had named him head of their most-trumpeted
Bioengineering Advanced Research Initiative, and he felt quite entitled to blow
through a little over a million pounds on a well-deserved gift to himself. He
was also drunk out of his mind, and hence ten times more prone to make a
statement concerning the lack of intrinsic value of the English currency as
opposed to the inherent worth of prehistoric Rock ‘n’ Roll memorabilia. I mean,
bloody hell, the Egyptians had wrapped all their kings and queens in rolls of gauze
for thousands of years and stored them inside man-built caverns—at the
very least, someone should collect Beatles paraphernalia in our age! Yes, here
comes the sun, little darling; it’s been a long cold lonely winter, little
darling. Here comes the bloody sun.

Humming, Sir Gottfrey fiddled with
the small knob at the end of one of the armrests, and the nongrav armchair spun
in place. Hovering three feet above ground, he glided the armchair across the
terrace and back inside the building through the sliding doors that parted with
a hiss as he approached them.

Towing behind their
once-upon-a-time host organism, his organs bounced happily at the end of their
hoses, like the deformed tentacles of an octopus.

Half
museum and half antique shop, Sir Gottfrey’s executive suite was littered with
the statuettes of the past’s famous and infamous, all washed in the morning sun
that poured freely through the glass wall facing the ocean. The other walls
were covered in posters and paintings depicting iconic figures of
long-forgotten centuries—military leaders, kings and queens, musicians
and artists, politicians, and religious zealots—dozens of faces drowned
in anonymity under the ban of the Church, but whose memory was kept alive
inside Sir Gottfrey’s history-buff den. Like a mouse negotiating the twists,
turns, and dead-ends of a maze, the man guided his nongrav armchair around the
cluttered artifacts, sailing gently between Martin Luther King’s outstretched
arms and Billy Idol’s diamond-covered guitar.

“Today is another glorious bloody
Sunday, miladies. And Sunday is a day of rest,” Sir Gottfrey said, words dipped
in Cockney all the way to their neck, as he approached the door of his
executive suite. “No exception, miladies. Ol’ chap Moses had it right for
once—six days thou shalt work, and the seventh day thou shalt have some
bloody fun. Ha-ha!”

Flanking the exit door,
four identical Joan of Arcs
focused their digitally enhanced
pupils on their master. The four cyborgs sported the same pixie cut and wore elaborate
fraises around their necks. The fluffy ruffs separated their cute, innocent
heads from the rest of their bodies built like those of track athletes. Thin
layers of titanium alloy covered their vital parts, like patches of gladiator
armor. Whatever was left to view—which was plenty—was nothing but
synthetic muscle, chiseled to perfection to serve its martial purpose. The kind
of women you don’t want to bloody fock with—that had been Sir Gottfrey’s
tagline when he’d commissioned them.

“Protocol Cheap Butterfly Broken
Katana activated,” a Joan of Arc said. “Shall we proceed to the party, milord”?

“We shall, miladies, we shall,”
Sir Gottfrey said.

The paneled doors parted and loud
organ music poured in from the corridor that opened to view. Sir Gottfrey glided
through.

“Ah,
Beethoven, that bloody jerk-off! Ta-ta-ta-ta! If only I could get my hands on a
strand of his hair or one of his rotten molars!”

Green fluorescent light seeped
from the ceiling, casting an eerie glow over the man and his entourage of organs
and cyborgs as they all made their way toward the elevator doors at the end of
the corridor.

“The Monkey Who Covers Its Ears is
the Sister of the Monkey Who Covers Its Mouth,” a Joan of Arc said, and her
eyes blinked a few times scanning the corridor ahead. A string of tiny digits
flashed in her irises as laser sensors assessed distances and open lines of
fire.

“Fockin’ bloody monkey,” Gottfrey
said. “So I guess all we have for today are leftovers, am I correct, miladies?”

“The Templars against the Lions,
milord,” a second Joan of Arc replied. “An encore.”

From behind the glass walls on
either side, Sigmund Freud, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi,
and Muammar Gaddafi kept staring into a void not of their own choosing,
resigned and serene. The prized trophies of a hundred years of genetic
engineering, the five frozen replika specimens—the grandbabies of Dolly
the Sheep—paid no mind or homage to their Maker as he glided by with his
organs in tow. Behind him, his four bodyguards walked in sync, the heels of
their boots marking the seconds on the granite tiles, while the Ninth Symphony
poured from the ceiling in relentless waves.

“Encore my arse! Nothing but
bloody leftovers,” Sir Gottfrey said, and he grimaced.

He grabbed the duct connected to
his heart, pulled his organ in, set it on his lap, and started to drum
nervously with his fingers on its glass box.

“But we do have a show coming,
don’t we, miladies?”

The four bodyguards stopped. The
organs bounced to a halt.

“Oh, yes, we sure do,” Sir
Gottfrey
said. He grinned, a macabre squint in his eyes.
“One week, miladies—seven days, seven resolutions of old planet Earth
around the fockin’ sun, and we shall have one hell of a bloody show on our
hands, make no mistake about it.”

A bell rang. The doors to the
elevator parted with a torturous squeak.

“Bada Bing, Bada Boom—Calvary,
here I come!” Sir Gottfrey said, and he glided inside the elevator.

His five encased organs and four
bodyguards followed him.