“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 feiger, 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 tous.”
“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.
Aenea ignored the Grand Inquisitor, licked her dry, cracked lips, and said distinctly to Councillor Albedo, “I know where you live.”
The handsome gray man’s mouth twitched. “What do you mean?”
“I know where the Core—the physical elements of the Core—are,” said Aenea.
Albedo smiled but Aenea saw the quick glance toward the two cardinals and tall priest. “Nonsense,” he said. “No human being has ever known the location of the Core.”
“In the beginning,” said Aenea, her voice slurred only slightly by pain and shock, “the Core was a transient entity floating in the crude datasphere on Old Earth known as the Internet. Then, even before the Hegira, you moved your bubble memories and servers and core storage nexus to a cluster of asteroids in long orbit around the sun, far from the Old Earth you planned to destroy …”
“Silence her,” snapped Albedo, turning back toward Lourdusamy, Mustafa, and Oddi. “She is trying to distract us from our questioning. This is not important.”
The expressions of the Mustafa, Lourdusamy, and Oddi holos suggested otherwise.
“During the days of the Hegemony,” continued Aenea, her good eyelid fluttering with the effort to focus her attention and steady her voi
ce through the long, slow swells of pain, “the Core decided that it was prudent to diversify the physical Core components—bubble-memory matrices deep underground on the nine Labyrinthine worlds, fatline servers in the orbital industrial complexes around Tau Ceti Center, Core entity personae traveling along farcaster combands, and the megasphere connecting it all laced through the farcaster rifts in the Void Which Binds.”
Albedo folded his arms. “You’re raving.”
“But after the Fall,” continued Aenea, holding her good eyelid open and defying the gray man with her stare, “the Core got worried. Meina Gladstone’s attack on the farcaster medium gave you pause, even if the damage to your megasphere was repairable. You decided to diversify further. Multiply your personae, miniaturize essential Core memories, and make your parasitism on the human neural networks more direct …”
Albedo turned his back on her and gestured toward the nearest Nemes-thing. “She’s raving. Sew her lips shut.”
“No!” commanded Cardinal Lourdusamy. The fat man’s eyes were bright and attentive. “Don’t touch her until I command it.”
The Nemes on Aenea’s right had already picked up a needle and roll of heavy thread. Now the pale-faced female paused and looked to Albedo for instructions.
“Wait,” said the Councillor.
“You wanted your neural parasitism to be more direct,” said Aenea. “So your billions of Core entities each formed its surrounding matrix in cruciform shape and attached themselves directly to your human hosts. Every one of your Core individuals now has a human host of its own to live in and destroy at will. You remain connected via the old dataspheres and new Gideon-drive megasphere nodes, but you enjoy dwelling so close to your food source …”
Albedo threw his head back and laughed, showing perfect teeth. He opened his arms and turned back to the three human holos. “This is marvelous entertainment,” he said, still chuckling. “You’ve arranged all this for her interrogation”—he flicked manicured nails in the general direction of the dungeon chamber, the skylight, the iron crossbeams upon which Aenea was clamped—“and the girl ends up playing with your minds. Pure nonsense. But wonderfully entertaining.”
Cardinal Mustafa, Cardinal Lourdusamy, and Monsignor Oddi were looking at Councillor Albedo most attentively, but their holographic fingers were touching their holographic chests.
The red-robed holo of Lourdusamy rose from its invisible chair and walked over to the edge of the grate. The holographic illusion was so perfect that Aenea could hear the slight rustling of the pectoral cross as it swung from its cord of red silk; the cord was intertwined with gold thread and ended in a large red and gold tuft. Aenea concentrated on watching the swinging cross and its clean silk cord rather than paying attention to the agony in her mutilated hands. She could feel the poison quietly spreading its way through her limbs and torso like the tumors and nematodes of a growing cruciform. She smiled. Whatever else they did to her, the cells of her body and blood would never accept the cruciform.
“This is interesting but irrelevant, my child,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy. “And this”—he flicked his short, fat fingers in the direction of her wounds and nakedness as if repulsed by it—“is most unpleasant.” The holo leaned closer and his intelligent little pig eyes bored into her. “And most unnecessary. Tell the Councillor what he wishes to know.”
Aenea raised her head to look into the big man’s eyes. “How to ’cast without a farcaster?”
Cardinal Lourdusamy licked his thin lips. “Yes, yes.”
Aenea smiled. “It is simple, Your Eminence. All you have to do is come to a few classes, learn about learning … the language of the dead, of the living, how to hear the music of the spheres … and then take communion with my blood or the blood of one of my followers who has drunk the wine.”
Lourdusamy backed away as if slapped. He raised the pectoral cross and held it in front of him like a shield. “Blasphemy!” he bellowed. “Jesus Christus est primogenitus mortuorum; ipsi gloria et imperium in saecula saeculorum!”
“Jesus Christ was the first born of the dead,” Aenea said softly, the reflected light from the cross glaring in her good eye. “And you should offer him glory. And dominion, if you choose. But it was never his intention that human beings should be revived from death like laboratory mice at the whim of thinking machines …”
“Nemes,” snapped Councillor Albedo and this time there was no countermand. The Nemes female near the wall walked over to the grate, extended five-centimeter nails, and raked them down Aenea’s cheeks from just under each eye, slicing through muscle and exposing my dear friend’s cheekbones to the harsh light. Aenea let out a long, terrible sigh and slumped back against the girder. Nemes moved her face closer and showed her small, sharp teeth in a wide grin. Her breath was carrion.
“Chew off her nose and eyelids,” said Albedo. “Slowly.”
“No!” shouted Mustafa, leaping to his feet, hurrying forward and reaching out to stop Nemes. His holographic hands passed through Nemes’s all too solid flesh.
“A moment,” said Councillor Albedo, holding up one finger. Nemes paused with her mouth open above Aenea’s eyes.
“This is monstrous,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “As was your treatment of me.”
Albedo shrugged. “It was decided that you needed a lesson, Your Eminence.”
Mustafa was quivering with outrage. “Do you truly believe you are our masters?”
Councillor Albedo sighed. “We have always been your masters. You are rotting flesh wrapped around chimpanzee brains … gibbering primates decaying toward death from the moment of your birth. Your only role in the universe was as midwives to a higher form of self-awareness. A truly immortal life-form.”
“The Core …” said Cardinal Mustafa with great disdain.
“Move aside,” ordered Councillor Albedo. “Or …”
“Or what?” The Grand Inquisitor laughed. “Or you will torture me as you are torturing this deluded woman? Or will you have your monster beat me unto death again?” Mustafa swung his holographic arm back and forth through Nemes’s tensed torso, then through Albedo’s hard form. The Grand Inquisitor laughed and turned toward Aenea. “You are dead anyway, child. Tell this soulless creature what it needs to know and we will put you out of your misery in seconds with no …”
“Silence!” shouted Albedo and held up one hand like a curled claw.
The holo of Cardinal Mustafa screamed, clutched its chest, rolled across the grate through Aenea’s bleeding feet and the iron girder, rolled through one of the Nemeses’ legs, screamed again, and winked out of existence.
Cardinal Lourdusamy and Monsignor Oddi looked at Albedo. Their faces were expressionless. “Councillor,” said the Secretary of State in a soft, respectful tone, “could I interrogate her for a moment? If we are not successful, you can do what you wish with her.”
Albedo stared coolly at the Cardinal, but after a second he clapped Nemes on her shoulder and the killing thing stepped back three paces and closed her wide mouth.
Lourdusamy reached toward Aenea’s mutilated right hand as if to hold it. His holographic fingers seemed to sink into my darling’s torn flesh. “Quod petis?” whispered the Cardinal, and ten light-minutes away, screaming and writhing in my high-g tank, I understood him through Aenea: What do you seek?
“Virtutes,” whispered Aenea. “Concede mihi virtutes, quibus indigeo, valeum impere.”
And drowning in fury and sorrow and the sloshing fluids of my high-g tank, accelerating farther from Aenea every second, I understood—Strength. That I be given the strength I need to carry out this, my resolve.
“Desiderium tuum grave est”, whispered Cardinal Lourdusamy. Your desire is a serious one. “Quod ultra quaeris?” What else do you seek?
Aenea blinked blood out of her good eye so that she could see the Cardinal’s face. “Quaero togam pacem,” she said softly, her voice firm. I seek peace.
Councillor Albedo laughed again. “Your Eminence,” he said, his voice
sarcastic, “do you think that I do not understand Latin?”
Lourdusamy looked in the direction of the gray man. “On the contrary, Councillor, I was sure that you did. She is near breaking, you know. I see it in her face. But it is the flames she fears most … not the animal to which you are feeding her.”
Albedo looked skeptical.
“Give me five minutes with the flames, Councillor,” said the Cardinal, “if that fails, turn your beast loose again.”
“Three minutes,” said Albedo, stepping back next to the Nemes that had raked furrows into Aenea’s face.
Lourdusamy stepped back several paces. “Child,” he said, speaking Web English again, “this will hurt very much, I am afraid.” He moved his holographic hands and a jet of blue flame beneath the grate spurted into a column of flame that singed the bare soles of Aenea’s clamped feet. Skin burned, blackened, and curled. The stench of burning flesh filled the cell.
Aenea screamed and attempted to pull free of the clamps. They did not budge. The hanging bar of iron on which she was pinned began to glow at the bottom, sending pain up her bare calves and thighs. She felt her skin blister there as well. She screamed again.
Cardinal Lourdusamy waved his hand again and the flame dropped back beneath the grate, becoming a pilot light watching like the blue eye of a hungry carnivore.
“That is just a taste of the pain you will feel,” murmured the Cardinal. “And, unfortunately, when one is seriously burned, the pain continues even after the flesh and nerves are irreparably burned away. They say that it is the most painful way to die.”
Aenea gritted her teeth to keep from screaming again. Blood dripped from her torn cheeks to her pale breasts … those breasts I had held and kissed and fallen asleep against. Imprisoned in my high-g creche, millions of kilometers away and preparing to spin up to C-plus and fugue oblivion, I screamed and raged into silence.
Albedo stepped onto the grate and said to my dear friend, “ ’Cast away from all this. ’Cast to the ship that is taking Raul to certain death and free him. Cast to the Consul’s ship. The autosurgeon there will heal you. You will live for years with the man you love. It is either that or a slow and terrible death here for you, and a slow and terrible death for Raul elsewhere. You will never see him again. Never hear his voice. ’Cast away, Aenea. Save yourself while there is still time. Save the one you love. In a minute, this man will burn the flesh from your legs and arms until your bones blacken. But we will not let you die. I will tura Nemes loose to feed on you. ’Cast away, Aenea. ’Cast away now.”