Deus X (6 page)

“You ask a great deal, Your Holiness,” I said weakly.

But although that seemed the understatement
of the millennium, although my heart cried out against it, the woman’s relentless logic, demonic or otherwise, was beginning to ensnare me against my will.

Who would I better trust than myself to argue the soul’s nonexistence from the Other Side? Both fear and humility compelled me to try to think of someone to whom I with a clear conscience could pass this burden, but pragmatic reality came up dry. Indeed, anyone who would take it up gladly automatically disqualified himself in my eyes.

As the Pope knew all too well.

“I am asking you to risk your immortal soul in the service of the Church, trusting only in the Church’s moral authority to bless that soul’s questionable venture in the eyes of God,” she admitted forthrightly. “That is why I cannot invoke your vow of obedience. Not even the Pope can command a man to become a saint. I can only ask you to obey the Voice of God in your own heart. No blame if you refuse.”

The Pontiff shrugged. “No impasse either,” she said airily. “I have already prepared a list of secondary choices not as likely to be troubled by your moral qualms.”

Even with that unsubtle threat behind them, the Pope’s words touched a true chord in my spirit. How could I reject this call to champion my own deepest belief from the other side of the Line out of egoistic concern for my own salvation?

By demonic logic, or by inspired vision, or by some arcane synergy of both, in that moment, she had me. I could not let this burden pass from me.

But even Jesus had not quaffed such a cup on the first offering.

“I need time, Your Holiness, I must meditate, pray, one cannot summon up divine wisdom like a pot of coffee,” I prevaricated, but when our eyes met we both knew full well that it was not entirely the truth. She could, and she had, and she knew it.

“Take all the time that you want, within reason, Father De Leone,” the Pope said with a little secret smile. “We both know you will do what God tells you is right.”

“He took quite a while to accede to the Pontiff’s desires, Mr. Philippe,” Cardinal Silver said a spliff and half a bottle of wine later, “but in the end, well in the end, Mary I usually gets what she wants.”

The night was clear, the sea was calm, the
Mellow Yellow
rocked gently, there was nothing to
be heard but the Cardinal’s voice spinning out his peculiarly cynical ghost story.

“It was much the same with the hierarchy. I myself was quite appalled when the Pope finally took me into her full confidence. The whole scheme seemed so paradoxically self-defeating. If De Leone’s successor entity successfully argued its own soul’s nonexistence, the progressives would claim the program had modeled the template’s disbelief. If it declared itself a spiritual being capable of the Church’s salvation, the conservatives would simply call it Satan’s liar.”

He paused, refilled his glass, shook his head ruefully. “I told her that a bull based on such logical absurdities would never be accepted as credibly infallible, and after the media stopped laughing, if it ever did, neither would she.”

The Cardinal took a fortifying sip, more like a gulp. “And you know what she told me?” he said.

“You’re telling the story, Your Eminence….”

“What the Church needs is a moral miracle, she said. Our image is that of an irrelevant Don Quixote tilting at theological windmills in the last days of the world. But if we resolve the moral mystery of this Final Age, then we prove our right in all the opinion polls to declare our message the true Word of God. And in this day and age, my infallible wisdom tells me that no miracle is going to be accepted without scientific proof, or at least a good expert system model of same.”

He shrugged. “To my surprise, when I ran it through our demographic opinion models, it played. To be seen wrestling successfully with central profundities would enhance the Church’s image, no matter what the results. That was enough to convince me and to secure the cooperative attitude of both factions, though I doubt any of that had any effect on Father De Leone.”

Maybe it was the Herb, maybe it was the story, but I could feel leviathans stirring deep in the waters upon whose still surface we floated like bits of chum, even though I knew there had been no whales in this sea in my lifetime.

“I was in his shoes, it wouldn’t convince me either, if you’ll pardon my saying so, Cardinal Silver,” I told him. “Seems to me I was him, I wouldn’t have cared to dance with Dr. D to optimize your opinion models on the say-so of even your super-star Pope.”

I nodded at the depths of the sea, at the stars, at what I knew was out there beneath the interface, above it you might say, from their point of view.

“More things in heaven or hell than are dreamt of in your catechism, Yorick.”

The Cardinal looked up at me sharply, but lèsemajesté wasn’t on his mind. “Now you’re beginning to sound like De Leone,” he groaned.

“What a ghastly charade! The man fought against the inevitable almost to the end but of course he was only convincing himself to do what he had
decided to do already, and extracting concessions in the bargain, like an old miser tormenting his heirs with his will. I do believe he was rather enjoying his deathbed drama. Is that a strange thing to say?”

“Stranger things are being said every day….”

“It wasn’t a tormentuous passage. One day he simply took to his bed and never arose. He lay there day after day, week after week, feeling no pain, getting weaker and weaker, but not quite ready to relent as he gently faded away, playing out the drama to the very last. Even the Pope was beginning to nibble her fingernails….”

Oh, yes, they think I’m playing cruel games with them
as I linger coyly at death’s door, and I do believe that in other circumstances Cardinal Silver for one would be telling me to make up my mind while I still could.

But one does not say such things to a dying man. A dying man has his privileges and compensations. And when a dying man grows vexed at the
impatience of the potential heirs to his treasure, he can always pretend to decline further, and they will dutifully slink away.

Cruel games? My only treasure was my soul, and my only comfort the continued belief in its immortality, and all they were asking was that I will it to the Church to do with as they will, while placing me in a moral position where I could not refuse.

Pope Mary I had told me to obey the Voice of God in my own heart, but thus far that Voice had not spoken, and all I had was her puissant but ultimately worldly logic upon which to rely.

So a dying man prays. He prays a lot. He prays with more sincere intensity than he ever has in his life. And then, perhaps, his prayers are answered.

One day I awoke from my endless intermittent sleep to find the Pope in my room. She was leaning over my bed staring down at my sleeping face with all the world’s care on her own, a Madonna in that moment, but a worldly one, an old battle-scarred Madonna for an old battle-scarred world, a Madonna willing and able to do necessary evil in the service of good, but not without personal cost.

“You’re awake, now, I see, Father De Leone,” she said. “You’re scaring me, you know that?”

“You’re afraid that I’ll die before I make up my mind….”

“Mea culpa,” said the Pope, “mea maxima culpa. I am guilty of the sin of coveting your spirit.”

“My spirit, Your Holiness, or rather just my software?”

“Surely we are now beyond all that,” said Mary, and a golden nimbus seemed to bloom about her, and all at once, another Voice seemed to be speaking through her, a Voice of pitiless love and compassionate ruthlessness, a Voice from which all illusion was gone.

“These are Creation’s last days, and these are your last hours,” that Voice said. “We all face the unknown at the end of our earthly time. You have served the Church as God gave you to understand, but now you are called upon to serve the Church on the other side of that understanding, to trust your immortal soul to faith alone. If there is a God of Love, Pierre De Leone, He must surely love such a soul and preserve it from harm. And if there is not, then just as surely we are all lost.”

The Pope smiled ruefully, became merely human once more. “I am a frailer vessel than it is politic to admit,” she said, “but in this I am infallible.”

And in that moment, I believed she was. I believed that the Holy Spirit spoke through this woman in ways that neither she nor I could fathom, that she in her worldly sophistication was a creature of spiritual innocence, moved, like all of us, by the hand of greater subtlety than any of us can ever know toward ends that must indeed, in the end, be taken on faith alone.

In that she was indeed infallible, in that she was Our True Lady of the Second Fall, in that she was indeed the Church Incarnate, the Vicar of Christ on Earth, a true female Pope.

“Forgive a dying man his boldness, Your Holiness, but what do you really believe? That the soul can live on in the software? That you will be consigning mine to hell or eternal electronic limbo? That when the biosphere is finally gone, we can live on as patterns of pure spirit in a dead world?”

Then it was that she said the words that resigned my spirit to what had been inevitable all along.

“I don’t know,” said the Pope. “Yes, it’s an experiment, and a perilous one for both our souls, Father De Leone, for I have no assurance that I am not Dr. Faust. But unless we perform it, the Church, like the species, will go to its grave gibbering ignorantly in the dark.”

“Even at the cost of our immortal souls?”

“Yes,” said the Pope. “For speaking as a woman, any God who would consign His creatures to the fire for seeking to understand His will would surely be unworthy of our faith. Speaking as the Pope, of course, I deny I ever said such a thing.”

I laughed aloud. I could not help myself. My heart filled up with love for this Mother of the Church, this Borgia Madonna of our wicked old world.

“If I were not a priest, Your Holiness …”

“If I were not the Pope …”

We laughed, and in that harmless laughter, our pact was sealed.

“You may bring on the hunchbacks with the electrodes, Your Holiness,” I at long last told her. “There will never be a better moment to model my state of mind in software than this.”

“Whatever passed between him and the Pope, Mary once more had her way,” Cardinal Silver said, “but that was not the end of it. He let us record his personality software at last, but only on condition that we not create backups or duplicates, that the program not be run until after his death, and that we wipe it from memory within ninety days.”

Cardinal Silver shook his head slowly. “He said that he wanted to give his soul a chance to stand before Judgment before the Devil could get his hands on the software, but that he wanted to be sure it would be rescued from electronic limbo within a reasonable time if he did.”

The Cardinal sighed. “Does that make any sense to you, Mr. Philippe?”

I thought about it. In most ways, the good Father, at least to hear the Cardinal tell it, was not the sort of man I could warm to, a tight white asshole, as my great-granddaddy might have said. But now I was almost beginning to like him, going out like a hero, but not too far gone to hedge both sides of his Cartesian bet.

I lit a fresh spliff and pondered the smoke as it rose into the darkness. “Strange to say, Your Eminence, I do believe it does,” I told him. “That’s why they let you place side bets on the roll of the dice.”

His Eminence smiled, a crooked little smile. “You believe God shoots craps with the universe, Mr. Philippe?”

“I believe what the Herb tells me, Cardinal, and the Herb tells me something different on every backbeat. The Herb it gives you Heisenberg’s eyes. And if God doesn’t shoot craps with the universe,
something
sure must be shuffling the deck on us before it deals the cards.”

I offered him the spliff. He took it, looked at it, but didn’t smoke.

“I’m surrounded by mystics,” he groaned.

“I would’ve thought you’d meet all kinds in your line of work.”

“And so I do,” Cardinal Silver said. “But I must confess that the Father De Leones of the world are
not entirely within my comprehension. Maybe I envy such mystics their vision. Certainly I shall at the hour of my death.”

Now he did take a long drought of the Herb. “Father De Leone lingered on for weeks after we recorded that consciousness hologram, but he refused to let us update it. He said he wanted his dybbuk to model him at the height of his powers, and to die with his final thoughts unrecorded save in the mind of God.”

Cardinal Silver arose and stretched himself. “And that’s what he did. When he felt the end at hand, he accepted the Pope’s absolution, and allowed her to confess him and perform the rites of supreme unction herself, and then insisted on being flown back up into the mountains to die alone with God.”

He stared up at the stars, and it almost seemed as if he saw someone or something looking back. “Wrongheaded or not, I do believe he was a saint,” the Cardinal said. “If he was right, may that preserve him from our folly, may his soul have gone on to its just reward.”

Cardinal Silver stared down into the briny depths for a long moment, and when he looked up at me, his eyes had hardened.

“But if he was wrong, and his true spirit still lives on the Other Side of the Line, then we must rescue it from whoever or whatever has stolen it away!”

He handed me back the Herb. “Are you with me in this, Mr. Philippe?” he said. “Will you take the job? Will you not intercede with the entities of the Other Side to save such a soul? What does your sacrament tell you about that?”

I puffed lightly, just for the taste, for the Herb had already spoken through him loud and clear. “Well, when you put it that way …”

“Is there another, Mr. Philippe?”

I shrugged. I got up. “Guess we’d better go inside and see what we can conjure out of the bits and bytes.”