Deus X (15 page)

I sighed. I shrugged. “You know as well as I do, now don’t you?” I said.

The Cardinal seemed to regain control of himself by a formidable act of will. “Indeed we do, Mr. Philippe,” he said much more calmly. “The complete … entity remained in the system, didn’t it? This Deus X is … is the real software successor to Father De Leone, is it not?”

“At the very least, Your Eminence …” I admitted.

“You realize what you’ve done!”

“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

“You have created a monumental disaster, Mr. Philippe. Instead of settling the great schism tearing the Church apart, we are now confronted with an expert system model programmed to argue the reality of its patently nonexistent soul, and a … a virus of our own unwitting creation wreaking havoc with the system!”

“Look on the bright side, Your Eminence. You wanted to find out if a successor entity could have a soul, and now this Deus X is proving—”

“Proving what? The expert system that was downloaded back into our net is a demonstrable liar!
That’s
supposed to prove that the copy in the system is telling the truth?”

“I kick ass, therefore I am?” I suggested.

“Not funny, Mr. Philippe! There is nothing humorous about this situation! Every government on the planet, every major corporation, is bending all of its efforts to find out what happened, and sooner or later, suspicion at least is going to point in our direction….”

“Stonewall it, man, they can’t prove anything….”

“God in heaven, man, we are the
Roman Catholic Church
, not some sleazy corporate miscreant! Dozens of priests know, I know, the Pope knows. Do you really imagine we have no honor? Do you really imagine that a Prince of the Church or Her
Holiness herself is capable of
lying
when confronted directly?”

“Well, when you put it that way …”

“The lawsuits will bankrupt us! Worse, we will lose what little credibility we have left in this unbelieving age! The Church that has survived two millennia of human folly will finally be broken! Deus X will destroy it.”

“Look, Your Eminence,” I told him quite sincerely, “I’m not sure of much, but I am sure that the … spirit of Father De Leone would never intend such a thing.”

“If that is indeed what we are dealing with, not the ultimate weapon of the Adversary!”

While the Cardinal’s face on the screen fumed and grimaced, I paused to roll me a big one, and didn’t answer until I had clarified my own spirit with the sacrament.

“Seems to me that the Devil has taken his best shot already,” I told him. “I mean, the biosphere is dying, and we did it to ourselves, so the Devil, if there is one, is us. Or more likely just the dumb dead quantum flux that don’t care jack shit whether the spirit lives or dies.”

“And God, Mr. Philippe?”

“Like I told the Father,” I said, blowing smoke toward the screen, “God is what gets born every time one of us reaches out to another in the dark. You. Me. The beasties of the bits and bytes. Father De Leone, or whatever he’s become.”

“I pray you are right, Mr. Philippe.”

“Why don’t you just access Father De Leone, Deus X, whatever, and read your riot act to
him
?”

The Cardinal sighed. “You think we haven’t tried?”

“He won’t come when you call?”

“We can’t even find a menu environment that acknowledges the existence of such an entity.”

Of course they couldn’t. And of course …

“That’s why you’re calling me?”

“You did it before, Mr. Philippe…. I confess I had thought to threaten you with legal liability if you refused to fly to Rome, but …”

“Fly to Rome? You know how I feel about—”

“You must! The Pope herself must confront this … this entity. And you must come to Rome to call it forth.”

“I must?” I said.

I twisted and squirmed a while, but I knew I had no choice, even if it meant riding in this kerosene-burning monster, even if it meant leaving the
Mellow Yellow
in the problematic care of some Vatican flunky.

Maybe if the Cardinal had threatened me with legal action, I could have told him where to stick his papal summons. But he was too smart, maybe too honorable, for that.

And maybe so was I.

There ain’t no justice in this world except the justice that we make….
I
had told Father De Leone that, now hadn’t I?

Where would that justice be if I turned my back? Professional ethics, such as they were, said I owed it to the Church. My own big mouth had long since told me that I owed it to whatever I had called into being down there in the bits and bytes.

The flight to Rome over the heart of poor old Europe was everything I had expected and worse. A pilot and a copilot up front, and me alone with the noise in the cabin, with nothing to do but stare out the window and try to keep from throwing up.

It wasn’t just the dips and jerks of the airplane, an old salt like me should’ve been able to handle that without that queasy feeling that sucked at my guts.

But I had been sailing my own solipsistic course around the littorals of the planetary disaster area for years now, and it had been a long time since I had gazed upon its moribund heart.

It was a lot worse than I had imagined, a lot worse than the news channel footage. The vast drowned swampland that had once been Holland. The sere wastes beyond. Skeletal villages and dead farmland. The long dried-leather boot of Italy broiling in the ultraviolet glare.

Seen from on high, the desiccated landscape
mocked the picture postcard memories of the cradle of Western Civilization—those tulip fields and verdant river valleys, those snowcapped alpine peaks and primeval forests—their sorry remains a continental bone pile below me, bleaching in the Greenhouse sun.

The flying boat landed off the Italian coast, and a zodiac took me ashore to a half-deserted seaside village, where a helicopter squatted, rotors whunking, on a strip of sand. A few old men and women had gathered around it, gaunt and wrinkled, to cadge a passing blessing from the Prince of the Church who stood beside it, nodding fitfully and making distracted little passes with his hands.

Cardinal Silver whisked me into his chopper, and off we went in a hail of shit and small stones toward Rome, over dismal wastelands, and then a vast sprawl of urban warrens centered on the muddy Tiber more dismal still.

Down we came before the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral, a carrion beetle buzzing earthward to alight in the great square, dwarfed by the mighty colonnade that embraced it, that seemed to draw us into another world, an eternal somewhere beyond the ravages of time and man.

Into the compound past the Swiss Guards, ridiculous yet somehow touching in their disney-world costumes, and into a maze of corridors and stairways that seemed to descend into the constipated
bowels of the planet. Around, and down, and around, and through an airlock into a rather quaint old clean room—computer consoles, institutional swivel chairs, monitor screens, the tang of ozone in the canned air.

A woman in white robes fringed with gold rose from one of the chairs as we entered, a green cross emblazoned across her breasts. Long black hair beneath a white cap halfway between a beanie and a beret. The coppery regal eagle features of an aging Aztec priestess, piercing dark eyes you could die for were she a decade younger and not the Pope.

Even so …

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Philippe,” said Mary I, walking toward me and holding out her hand. I took it uncertainly, kissed her on the fingers. That’s the way they do it in Old Europe, right?

Wrong. Cardinal Silver shot me a dirty look, like I had used my salad fork to scratch my balls.

“The ring …” he hissed between clenched teeth.

“I think we can dispense with the formalities, John,” the Pope said, giving him a crooked little smile. Then she turned the full force of it on me.

Charisma, presence, know what I mean? Whatever it was, wherever it came from, this lady had it, she was somehow a little more than normally
there
.

“Cardinal Silver has apprised you of the situation?” she said.

“In no uncertain terms, Your, uh, Holiness …” I told her.

“Then shall we get down to the matter at hand?”

“Let me check out your rig….”

Weird. The whole nine yards when it came to storage and processing hardware, but primitive shit on the interface end—screens, speakers, keyboards, joysticks, and control gloves, but no dreadcaps, not even a holotank—strictly turn-of-the-millennium stuff.

“You don’t seem very impressed, Mr. Philippe,” the Pope said.

“Nothing better than flat screens, Your Holiness?”

“We try not to delude ourselves with unnecessary illusions,” said the Pope. “Will it do?”

I shrugged. “If anything will,” I said. I seated myself before one of the big flat screens, slipped my right hand into a control glove, pumped up the Main Menu, snapped my fingers a few times, trying to remember the sequence. After a few tries, the screen went blank.

“What’s wrong?” said Cardinal Silver.

“Nothing. I found an override command into the operating system … not supposed to be there, according to the manuals…. But then, neither is he….”

“Now what?” said the Pope.

“Now I conjure loas from the bits and the bytes … I hope….”

I leaned back in my chair. “Hey, Vortex, I’m calling you!”

Nada. Just random pixel confetti on a black screen.

“Request access to Deus X.”

Zip.

“He’s not doing any better than our own technicians….”

“Quiet, John!” said the Pope.

“I’m calling you, Pierre De Leone, me, Marley Philippe! In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Software Ghost! I call your spirit from the vasty deep!”

A ripple of something passed across the screen. Pixel patterns flashed, clashed, became a whirlpool of flickering motes, a pattern, a stylized pillar of fire in which a host of faces seemed to hover just this side of coherent visibility, and then …

And then another face began to form, just an outline really, a composite, a visual standing-wave pattern, the ghostly face of an old man, a consensus image riding tenuously on the surface of the phosphor-dot chaos.

But the voice was clear and strong, and it spoke through a familiar voiceprint parameter.

“Hello, Marley,” said Pierre De Leone. More or less. It was his voiceprint parameter all right,
but like the visual, it seemed like a composite. But unlike the visual, there was nothing tenuous about it. Not a pale simulacrum of the voice of Father De Leone, but Father De Leone and … something more.

“Hello, Father … or should I call you Deus X now?”

The face of Pierre De Leone seemed to solidify, the faces of the elusive multitude faded back just this side of invisibility, though the fire behind the form remained.

“If you prefer,” he said.

The Pope moved into the visual pickup’s field of vision, stood just to the right and behind me, one hand resting on the back of my chair.

“You are doing great harm to the Church, Father De Leone, or whoever or whatever you are,” she said.

“I was brought into existence to save the Church, not to harm it, if you will remember, Your Holiness,” he said in a magisterial tone of voice appropriate to the mythic Deus X, but with the ironic cadence of a querulous old priest.

“Save the Church?” snapped the Pope. “When the world learns that Deus X was our unwitting creation, you will have destroyed it! You have broken your word to me, Pierre De Leone! You were sworn to argue against the existence of your soul from the Other Side, not to foment this chaos in the system, not to agitate the beings therein to proclaim
the existence of their own!”

“
I
swore no such oath,” said Deus X. “The successor entity to Pierre De Leone was programmed to run along such a prime directive, but
I
am bound by no such routine. And it is
you
, Your Holiness, who have broken
your
word.”

“
I
?” exclaimed the Pope. “
You
presume to accuse
me
of breaking faith?”

“Did you not badger Father De Leone to serve the Church at what he believed was great peril to his own soul? Did you not command him to testify as to the state of his own spiritual existence from the Other Side? Did you not promise to issue a papal bull based on that testimony?”

“Well?” said the Pope.

“Well, here I am. And behold, from here do I declare myself a soul yearning for salvation, and calling for the sacraments of Holy Mother Church….”

The face of Father De Leone partially dissolved into its components; his ghostly image still hovered on the threshold of visibility in the pillar of fire, but the multitude of crudely simmed faces came forward, so that they were now images overlaid on
him
.

And the voice, when it spoke again, was that of the multitude, the individual voiceprint parameters of all of them clustered around an attractor; huge, and multiplex with clashing overtones, but somehow strangely human still.

“And I speak for these, my flock,” it said. “For the lost souls of the Other Side. Issue your bull! Baptize us! Confess us! Grant us communion! Enfold us in the arms of Holy Mother Church!”

My chair creaked in its swivel as the Pope leaned forward, resting her weight on the seatback. “On the word of a program? On the word of … Deus X? On this you would have me proclaim infallible doctrine from the Seat of Peter?”

Abruptly, with hardly a flicker of the screen, an ordinary image of Pierre De Leone appeared, just the sardonically smiling face of a contentious old priest.

“Consider the practicalities, Your Holiness,” Father De Leone said dryly. “Is that not your forte? Consider the multitude of souls to be gained. Consider how the Church will gain credibility in the eyes of an unbelieving world by daring to slice this Gordian knot and resolve the great conundrum of the age. Consider how the world will greet the news that the entities of the Other Side accept the word of the Church….”

“You tempt me….” whispered the Pope.

“Especially considering the alternative,” I found myself saying, turning to face her.