Father de Soya gave his own benediction of my friend, turned, arid left the Basilica with a group of monks whose beads rattled as they walked.
I stared at Aenea with enough intensity to set wood aflame, trying to send her the mental message DO NOT ASK ME TO LEAVE!
She beckoned me close and whispered in my ear, “Do one final thing for me, Raul, my love.”
I almost shouted “No, goddammit!” at the top of my lungs in the echoing nave of St. Peter’s Basilica during the holiest moments of Holy Thursday’s High Mass. Instead I waited.
Aenea fumbled in the pockets of her vest and came out with a small vial. The liquid in it was clear but somehow looked heavier than water. “Would you drink this?” she whispered and handed me the vial.
I thought of Romeo and Juliet, Caesar and Cleopatra, Abe-lard and Heloise, George Wu and Howard Sung. All star-crossed lovers. Suicide and poison. I drank down the potion in one gulp, setting the empty vial in my own shirt pocket, waiting for Aenea to take out and drink a similar potion. She did not.
“What was it?” I whispered, not fearing any answer.
Aenea was watching the final moments of the Mass. She leaned very close to whisper. “Antidote to the Pax’s birth control medication that you took when you joined the Home Guard.”
What the hell!!??!! I came close to shouting over the Holy Father’s closing words. You’re worried about family planning NOW?? Are you out of your goddamn MIND???
She leaned back, her breath warm on my neck as she whispered again. “Thank God, I’ve been carrying that for two days and almost forgot it. Don’t worry, it’ll take about three weeks to take effect. Then you’ll never be shooting blanks again.”
I blinked at her. Was this blasphemy in St. Peter’s Basilica or just extraordinarily bad taste? Then my mind shifted into high gear—This is wonderful news … whatever happens next, Aenea sees a future for us … for herself … wants to have a child with me. But what about her first child? And why do I assume she’s doing this so that she and I can … why would she … perhaps it’s her idea of a farewell present … why would she … why …
“Kiss me, Raul,” she whispered, loud enough to make the elderly nun standing in front of us turn around with a severe expression.
I did not question her. I kissed her. Her lips were soft and slightly moist, just as they were the first time we had kissed standing on the bank of the Mississippi River at a place called Hannibal. The kiss seemed to last a long time. She touched the back of my neck with her cool fingers before our lips parted.
The Pope was moving to the front of the apse, facing each of the two arms of the transept, then the short nave, and finally the longitudinal nave as he gave his final benediction.
Aenea walked out into the main aisle, pushing people gently aside until she was in the open space and striding toward the distant altar. “Lenar Hoyt!” she shouted, and her voice echoed the hundred meters to the dome above. It was more than ISO meters from where we had been standing to where the Pope now paused in his benediction, and I knew Aenea had no chance of making that distance before being intercepted, but I hurried to catch up to her.
“Lenar Hoyt!” she shouted again and hundreds of heads turned in her direction. I saw movement in the arched shadows along the sides of the nave as Swiss Guard leaped into action. “Lenar Hoyt, I am Aenea, daughter of Brawne Lamia who traveled to Hyperion with you to face the Shrike. I am the daughter of the John Keats cybrid whom your Core masters have twice killed in the flesh!”
The Pope stood as if transfixed, one bony finger raised in benediction a moment before now pointing, shaking as if palsied. His other hand clutched his vestments above his chest. His miter trembled as his head bobbed back and forth. “You!” he cried, his voice high, thin, and weak. “The Abomination!”
“You are the abomination,” shouted Aenea, she was funning now, shrugging off dark-robed figures that rose from the pews to grab at her. I pulled two men from her back and she ran on. I leaped over a lunging figure and ran at her side, watching the Swiss Guard shoving through the crowd, energy pikes aimed but hesitant to fire with so many Vatican and Mercantilus dignitaries in the line of fire. I knew that they would not hesitate if she got within ten meters of the Pope. “You are the abomination,” she shouted again, running hard now, dodging grasping hands and lunging arms. “You are the Judas of the Catholic Church, Lenar Hoyt, selling its sacred history to the …”
A heavy man in a Pax Fleet admiral’s uniform pulled a ceremonial sword from his scabbard and swung it at my beloved’s head. She ducked. I blocked the Admiral’s arm, broke it, kicked the sword aside, and threw him halfway down the length of the pew into his subordinates.
Colonel Kassad had said that after learning the language of the living, that he had felt the pain he administered to others. I experienced that now, feeling the torn nerves and muscle and shattered bone of my forearm and the collision of my body as the Admiral struck his men. But when I looked down, my forearm was firm and the only penalty was pain. I did not care about the pain.
A cordon of priests, monks, and bishops put themselves between Aenea and the Pope. I saw the Pontiff clutch his chest more tightly and fall, but several of the deacons standing near him caught him, carried him back under the canopy of Bernini’s throne. Swiss Guardsmen hurtled into the space at the end of the aisle, blocking Aenea’s way with their pikes and bodies. More filled the space behind us, roughly shoving away the onlookers with brutal swings of their pikes. Pax security in black armor and compact repulsor flying belts came hurtling in ten meters above the heads of the congregation. Laser dots danced on Aenea’s face and chest.
I threw myself between her and the imminent energy bolts and flechette clouds. The laser beam blinded my right eye as the target dot swept across it. I threw my arms wide and bellowed something … a challenge perhaps … defiance certainly.
“No! Keep them alive!” It was a huge cardinal shouting in a bass rumble like the voice of God.
A Swiss Guardsman rushed at Aenea with his pike raised to stun her with a blow to the head. She threw herself down, slid across the tile, clipped him at his knees, and sent him sprawling toward me. I kicked him in the head and turned to wrestle the pike out of another Guardsman’s hands, knocking him backward into the crowd and swinging the long weapon at the five Guardsmen rushing us from the rear. They gave way.
A flying security trooper fired two darts into my left shoulder. I presumed they were tranquilizers, but I ripped them away, threw them at the flying form, and felt nothing. Two guards—a large man and a larger woman—grabbed my arms. I swung them through the air until their skulls collided and dropped them onto tile. “Aenea!”
She was on her feet again, pulling free of one Guardsman only to have two forms in black armor block her way. The congregation was screaming. The great cathedral organ suddenly screamed like a woman in labor. A security man shot her at five-meter range. Aenea spun around. 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
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 torch-ship 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 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 physical
ly 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?”