LUCERNE, SWITZERLAND. 1982.
"Chantal," snapped Mlle Fournier, her nanny, "Papa is busy. You mustn't bother him."
"No, no, that's all right," said her father. "Papa should never be too busy for his bon-bon. How are your classes, darling? How's the ballet coming?"
Chantal sucked her lips in, and wondered whether she should ask her questions. She was nearly eight. She shouldn't need to keep asking grown-ups things. She could read. She could use the villa's terminal and tap into the infonet. Her tutors said she was supposed to have an IQ in the upper 170s.
"Come here," said Thomas Juillerat, turning away from his paper-strewn desk and beckoning. She ran to his arms. "Do you want a consultation?"
Chantal nodded, trying not to cringe as papa ran his stubby fingers through her long, dark hair. He wasn't used to children, and he hurt her sometimes without meaning to.
"Do you know how much your Papa usually charges for a consultation?" asked Mlle Fournier, sternly, "fifty thousand Swiss francs. More in European Currency Units."
Papa was embarassed. He settled Chantal more comfortably in his lap.
"Mlle Fournier, could you get me some coffee, and lemonade for the little madame?"
Mlle Fournier's eyes narrowed in that way only Chantal seemed to notice, nodded, and left the room. It was late, nearly her bed-time, but Papa didn't know when she was supposed to go to bed. In the autumn, when she went back to Milan, Mama would be annoyed to find out how often she had been allowed to stay up late over the summer. When she was annoyed, Mama went into a huddle with Father Daguerre, her confessor, and sorted it out.
"Now, what is it you want to know, mon petit choux? Will I need my law books?"
Chantal wasn't sure. This might not be a good idea. She remembered how Father Daguerre had reacted when she asked him why Marcello, the boy next door, kept putting his hand in his shorts and moving his penis around. But she had gone too far to back down. She took a deep breath.
"Papa, what is it you do?"
Papa seemed bemused by the question. Like most grownups, he wasn't entirely comfortable around Chantal. The difference was that he was sorry for his feelings, and tried not to let them show.
"You know that, Chantal. I'm a lawyer. I work mainly for the Swiss Business Commission."
"Yes, yes, yes. But what do you do?”
Papa shifted Chantal off his lap and sat her on the desk. Papers scrunched under her bottom. He took off his thick glasses.
"I mainly investigate corporations who want to invest in Swiss-based industries."
"Invest? That means money?"
Papa smiled. "Yes, usually quite a lot of money. Sometimes, people with quite a lot of money have obtained it…unethically. You know what that means?"
"Yes, against the laws."
"Well, I'm afraid it often doesn't. Not every country has entirely just laws. Some things that are legal in, for example, Poland, wouldn't be allowed here. And some things, I'm sorry to say, that are allowed in Switzerland shouldn't be allowed anywhere in the world."
Chantal hit her Papa lightly, as she always did when he missed the point. "Silly, I didn't mean man's laws. I was talking about God's Laws."
Papa had that look again. The look that came when he was proud of Chantal and annoyed with her at the same time.
"Yes, God's laws. That's very well put, Chantal. Well, I try to stop people who've broken God's laws from using their money in this country."
"And is that why we have those telephone calls?"
"Who's been telling you about telephone calls?"
"Rudi and Inge were talking in the kitchen when I was helping Mlle Fournier make biscuits. They said people were calling up and not saying their names and saying bad things. And that they were coming in through your terminal too."
Papa's forehead went crinkly. "That's true. They're bad people."
"The other day when you were out at that meeting and Mlle Fournier was having her nap, I answered a telephone call from a bad person."
Papa was shocked by that. "What did he say?"
"That you were to stop doing something about something called the BioDiv something. He had a funny voice, like some of those government people you talk to on the phone."
"A scrambler. They'd have used a scrambler."
"That's right, so I'd never be able to recognize him even if he came up and tried to make friends with me on the playground at school."
Papa held her shoulders. "Did he say they'd do that? Come up to you on the playground?"
"No, but isn't that the sort of thing bad people do? Father Daguerre told me about bad people."
Papa was relieved, but tears were coming out of the crinkles in his forehead.
"Why do the scrambled people want to phone you up and not say their names?"
"Hmmn? Chantal, What I do doesn't make me very popular with some people. They want to stop me. They think that making threats will stop me objecting to their investments."
"You mean people like GenTech."
Papa definitely wasn't pleased now.. "You've got good ears, Chantal. That may not make you happy when you grow up. Yes. Just now, I'm checking into a multinat called GenTech. They want to take over a chain of hospitals, and I don't think they should be allowed to."
"What have they done. Papa? Why shouldn't they be allowed to?"
"They've done bad things."
"What bad things?"
"Very bad tilings."
"You don't want to tell me, do you?"
Papa's forehead went crinkly again. "No, it's just…it's complicated…"
"Too complicated for someone with an IQ in the high l70s?"
"Chantal, you're very clever. Really, you're cleverer than I am. Cleverer than almost everyone else you know. But you're still a little girl. You'll have to wait for some things."
"Rudi said you found out that GenTech was cutting arms and legs off poor people in China and sewing them on to rich people over here. Is that true?"
Papa sighed. "There's no keeping anything from you, is there? That's one of the bad things I think they've been doing."
"That's all I wanted to know."
"But you knew it already."
"Yes. But I wanted to know it from you, Papa."
Thomas Juillerat hugged his daughter, and kissed the top of her head. She wondered why he was shaking.
"When you grow up, Chantal, what do you want to be? What do you want to do with your IQ and your big ears?" Chantal pushed him back and looked into his face, smiling proudly. She had never told anybody this. "I want to be a spy."
LAKE GENEVA, SWITZERLAND. 1987
"Chantal," said her reminder-box, "your mother is here."
She sat up in the boat, and directed it towards the landing. She had just been floating, looking up at the skies, and listening to The Samovar Seven on her walkman sunglasses. Her bedroom in Milan was plastered with glossies of Russian musickies clipped from Europ-teen magazine. Her parents disapproved of her musical tastes. That was one of the rare things they agreed on.
She was wearing flip-flops, tight knee-shorts and a loose T-shirt printed with Cyrillic lettering. The T-shirt had appealed to her for its bright colours, but she was disappointed that the words were gibberish. Real Sove fashions always made a statement, even if it was just a snip from the lyric.
She had spent most of her summer on the lake—Lac Leman, they called it on the opposite shore—feeling as if she was floating in the centre of the world. This was the border between Switzerland and the United European Community. Important people had been thronging the Villa Diodati, come to talk with her father. Franz-Josef Strauss, president of the UEC, had stayed for three days, walking on the lakeshore with Papa, and they had dissolved a tariff barrier with a handshake. Currently, there was a party of middle-aged men in identical suits—some Iranian, some Turkish, some American—from powerful interests inside the Pan-Islamic Congress. They were arguing about import quotas from the electronics works taking advantage of cheap labour in Greece and Albania.
Her shades buzzed with the asexual voice of Petya Tcherkassoff as he sang of his lost love, "The Girl in Gorki Park." Petya was the coolest of the snazz that year. His dour face—he looked something like a girlier version of Franz Kafka—gloomed out of the tri-d glitterbadge on her hip pocket. Europ-teen said he was recovering nicely from his latest suicide attempt, during which he had walked naked into the Siberian wastes after an open-air gig in Turinskaya Kultbaza. "It's not easy being loved," he had claimed, quoting the tide of his latest single.
With no one her own age around, she had been on her own, reading, listening to music, thinking, shadow-fighting in the gym. One of the bodyguards assigned to her father tried to show her some Tae Kwon Do, but he wasn't as well up as her sifu in Milan. After she had put him on the carpet once or twice, he lost interest in sparring with her. As an experiment, she had tried not praying for a week—even when Mlle Fournier took her to mass—and God hadn't punished her. But she had fallen back into old habits. Just because she wasn't delighted with either of her parents much of the time was no reason to turn her back on Jesus Christ.
She had scrolled through The Lives of the Saints several times, and finally finished Proust, but her main reading had been computer sciences, as usual. Mlle Fournier told her that the villa was where Mary Shelley had been inspired, by conversations with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, to write Frankenstein; or: the Modem Prometheus, and she had read up on 1816 when the poets and their mistresses had passed a disagreeably showery summer in speculation. Byron's daughter, she was excited to learn, had later sponsored Charles Babbage, the inventor of the ancestor of today's computers. She wondered if the club-footed poet's ghost lumbered around the corridors. Probably not.
Just now, she was intrigued by the connections between higher mathematics, bio-engineering and the heuristic functions, and had read and reread Declan O'Shaughnessy SJ.'s Cybermind, Cybersoul, lying in her boat as the ideas shot around in her head like radio waves in deep space. The villa's terminals were mostly booked up by Papa's staff, even through the night, but she had accessed a datanet terminal in a neighbouring house—empty because the owners were summering in Greater Rhodesia—through a housekeeping program by linking her bedroom micro with the telephone, and was illegally—unethically, too—probing the extremes of the Swiss systems. She was already talking to hackers as far afield as Los Angeles, Moscow and Sakhalin, and feeling her way around the shadow world of the infonets.
The boat tied itself automatically at the jetty. Mlle Fournier was waiting there, with a party. Chantal pushed her musicshades up into her hair, which she had persuaded Papa to let her have cropped, and waved to her mother. It was time to go back to Milan.
"Chantal, whatever have you done to your hair?" asked Isabella Juillerat, the former Isabella di Modrone, kissing the air three inches away from her daughter's cheek. As usual, she was stunningly dressed, in a white sheath that curved from her chest to mid-thigh, one elbow-length glove with red talons, and a matching hat that circled her head like the rings of Saturn.
Chantal was told that she would grow up to look like her mother. But, this last year, she had gained about nine inches of height without developing any noticeable secondary sexual characteristics. In Milano, Marcello referred to her as "the scarecrow with no tits."
"Let me look at you," her mother said, arching a perfectly-plucked eyebrow. Her tan was even, but recently she had been developing visible orange patches on her neck and cleavage. That was, apparently, one of the side effects of the treatment. Father Daguerre had advised her to wait until Dr Zarathustra perfected his skincare system, but she had rushed into it as she rushed into everything else. She understood that GenTech's wizard had given her a rejuvenation on the house in the hope that she could exert some influence on her husband with regards to some multinat scheme.
"You have been to mass? Every week?"
“Twice a week, mama."
"Good. Your soul is safe, then. But your clothes! Why don't you wear the dresses I send you? You could wear only originals."
"I was boating, mama. It gets wet."
"Pah! You should always be fit to be seen, Chantal."
Father Daguerre, a wrestler in a cassock, stood a Little apart, with another priest. "Hello, Chantal," the French priest said, a sly look creeping over his face. '"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…'"
Chantal pouted a little, and put a hand on her bony hip. She was being invited to perform again. "Easy. The Epistle of St Paul to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, Verse 1."
Father Daguerre nodded, unsmiling. "And…?"
Chantal sighed, a Utile embarassed. '"For by it the elders obtained a good report. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.'"
"Excellent, excellent," said the priest. "Latin?"
Chantal switched languages. '"By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which…"'
"Hebrew?"
That was trickier. '"…by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and by it…'"
"Greek?"
"Ancient or modern?"
"Ancient, showoff."
'"…and by it he being dead yet speaketh. By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before…'"
"BASIC?"
"Not verbally. I could type it out for you. It's quite easy."
"English?"
"Kid's stuff, Father.'…for before his translation he had this testimony that he pleased God.'"
"And Russian?"
Chantal had to translate in her head. Greek to Russian was the easiest. '"…But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe…'"
The other priest, whose black suit was edged with red, cut in, speaking Russian like a native,'"…must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.'"
Chantal looked carefully at the new priest. He was pale, and had shoulder-length hair and a high forehead. In a strange way, he reminded her of Petya Tcherkassoff.
"This is Cardinal Grinko, Chantal," said her mother. "He's a friend of Father Daguerre's. He's come from the Vatican to talk with your father. He is a Special Envoy from Pope Mandela."
The Cardinal bowed. There was something about him that made him special, Chantal knew. She was having one of her insights. His mouth went up on one side, and their eyes met. The others didn't notice, and Chantal didn't really understand what had passed between them, but she realized that she had formed a bond with this stranger.
"Good afternoon, Cardinal," she said, doing her best to curtsey with only a T-shirt to lift.
"Please, Chantal, call me Georgi."
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND. 1988.
"Chantal, stand up straight."
"Yes, mother."
Isabella Juillerat adjusted her veil, and smoothed her floorlength glitterblack crinoline. When the news came through that she had been widowed, three top Milan couturiers had stayed up overnight to design a selection of mourning wear for her and made their competing presentations in rapid succession the next morning. She had, as usual, picked the most expensive range.
Chantal's heavy collar scratched. It didn't seem possible, but since the fittings she seemed at last—and at the worst imaginable time—to have developed breasts. She had been standing up for three hours now, and desperately needed to pee. She told her trained body to stand still and put up with it all. It was the least it could do.
The funeral cortege had slowly made its way to the cemetery. The streets were thick with people. Mother called them gawkers, but Chantal suspected much of their grief was genuine. Those not in black wore black armbands. Only the immediate family and VTPs—and the media, of course—were actually allowed into the cemetery. The Juillerat Monument, as it would now be called, was drowned in wreaths.
Jean-Marie LePen was speaking now, straying from the subject to harp on international unity or some such nebulous concept. In life, her father and LePen had fought an undeclared war for the seven months of the latter's presidency of the UEC, and Papa had referred to the President in private as "a freaking mad dog sonofabitch who should be put down." LePen's speech basically boiled down to an unconvincing declaration of "I didn't do it."
Maybe he didn't. Thomas Juillerat, without ever holding any elected or appointed national office, had made devoted friends and equally devoted enemies right and left. When the story was released, LePen wouldn't have been the only individual to leap for joy. The Japanese, Korean and Californian boardrooms of GenTech, the cabinet offices of Prime Minister Ian Paisley, the White House of President Charlton Heston, the mosques of Teheran and Ferdy and Imelda's Malacanang in Manila would be resounding with choruses of "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead."
Chantal had sworn not to cry. Her mother had delicately been leaking from her tearducts all morning, especially when there was a camera aimed in her direction. She had to be helped by Father Daguerre when it came to getting into the car.
It had happened on the steps of the International Courts in Brussels, after the ruling against organ-farming practices in the Third World had gone Papa's way. He had been giving an interview to a Russian newsnet when person or persons unknown had jostled him, slipping an electrostilletto into his neck. The device discharged for five minutes, but it was likely that he had died within seconds. He had had his first minor coronary three months earlier. The Belgian police had made no arrests and extensive examination of all the films of the event revealed only blurred, impossible-to-identify figures on the steps. The assassin would probably be wearing a different face—a different sex, even—now.
Isabella was fidgeting. Chantal supposed she was worrying over the seating arrangements at the memorial reception mis evening, and then chided herself for the uncharitable thought. She said a silent Hail Mary.
They could have ended their marriage, Chantal knew. Cardinal Gcorgi had explained to her that Pope Mandela had lifted the church's bar on divorce. But Isabella didn't necessarily approve of all the current Pope's doctrinal changes. And, come to think of it, Papa had never shown any real wish to change his situation. There had been women, from time to time, but they all drifted away as Isabella had done. It was impossible to compete with the cares of all the world. Chantal knew that.
Her cheeks were wet, she realized. Father Daguerre put a hand on her shoulder, and she laid her hand over it.
Georgi had come up from Rome for the funeral. He had been attending Mandela in what, it was feared, would be the Pope's last illness. He shook hands with Isabella and gave his condolences, and then stood before Chantal. He put his hand out, and delicately wiped her tears.
"Chantal, if there's ever anything I can do, you have my private numbers."
She bowed, and he was gone. The British Minister of War, Angus McGuinness, was in his place, giving out a clammy handshake and a mumbled inanity. Then, it was a corporate queen from some tax shelter, hoping for a Vogue lay-out with her flounced dress.
The funeral lasted all afternoon.
DUBLIN, REPUBLIC OF EIRE. 1991.
"Sister Chantal, show us what you can do."
She bowed her head as demurely as possible, and took a seat at the console. The computer rooms of the St Patrick's Seminary were in prefab huts in the centre of the campus. The class had to sit down on desks and tables when there weren't chairs to spare. Her fingers flew as she penetrated the blocks. The hard fingertips she had developed with endless hours of fingerbattering the gym wall connected with the keys. This was too simple a task for her, although it was beyond most of the other novices.
She was jacked in deep, probing the labyrinth, guiding her APOSTLE with a mouse. Her concentration was complete. She was totally in tune with the system. It was a complete communion.
It was like praying.
"Good," said Father O'Shaughnessy. "Very good."
She refused to be distracted by the compliment, and stayed away from a file that felt wrong. Father O'Shaughnessy tapped her shoulder approvingly. She came across a cadre of lightly guarded PAGAN programs, defused the booby traps, and interfaced with them. It was a matter of dexterity. The APOSTLE latched onto each of the PAGANs in succession, scrambling their directives. It left CONVERTS in its wake.
She was nearly through the test. No faults.
With a flourish, she pulled herself out of the interface.
…and the screen filled with garbage. She had activated a deepsea tripwire, and her stats were printing out. Crudely computer-animated hellfire flickered on the screen. Father O'Shaughnessy looked at the paper, and tore it off.
"Humility, my child, humility. It is a lesson we must all learn."
Returning to her place, Chantal heard one of the other students tittering.
"The Sin of Pride is greivous," Father O'Shaughnessy told the class, "it can bring you low…"
Chantal's face burned, and she bowed her head. Her wimple covered her neck, but she wished she had an oldstyle habit to draw down over her head.
"…but there are worse sins. Those who hide their lights behind a bushel, for instance, Brother Leon, or those whose industry does not match their ambitions, Sister Sarah."
He held up the print-out.
"Let us examine Sister Chantal's progress in detail, shall we? I hope your colleague may be able to teach you something where my poor efforts might have failed. Let us return to our APOSTLE. As you know, an APOSTLE is an independent program which, when fed into any given system can spread the Word of the Lord and convert selected PAGAN programs. Sister Chantal's progress shows the hazards and dangers any given APOSTLE will face in the cybernet, not unlike the hazards and dangers faced by the original apostles when they first spread the news…"
MILAN, ITALY. 1992.
"Chantal…come back?"
"No, Marcello."
It was late afternoon. Mlle Fournier was out with Isabella, shopping. Chantal sat at her dressing table, looking at the room behind her in the mirror. Since she had taken down all the posters she had had up as a kid, the place looked empty, untenanted, like the bare cubicles she had lived in for three years at St Patrick's. None of them had felt like home, and now home didn't either. She combed her hair. When she was younger, she could spend hours at the mirror, dreaming, passing the comb through her long, long hair. Now, a few strokes of the brush would do. She had turned her back on a lot of things.
"Don't you like me any more?" said Marcello from the bed, his head shadowed by the hanging curtains.
"It's not that."
She examined her face and neck minutely. Her skin was unmarked. Three weeks ago, in Dublin, she had fought for the school and been roundly beaten by a novice from St Brendan's. Her face had been a mass of bruises. Now, there was nothng. Her mother, on an increasingly frequent basis, had Dr Zarathustra's little operations, but all Chantal had was prayer, meditation and exercise. It was working well so far.
"Is it because of your vows?"
"You know it's not that."
Marcello sat up. He looked bitter. "No, of course. Your friend Papa Georgi says you can get laid as often as you want, just so long as you don't marry anyone but Christ! Hell, Chantal, what kind of life is that!"
She promised herself that she wouldn't get angry with Marcello and sorted through the jewellery she would never wear again. Isabella's admirers always used to give her jewellery. She would give the more valuable pieces to the fund for Mother Theresa. The rest could go to her old friends.
"Do you want this ring?" she asked Marcello. "It's fire opal. From Australia. Prince Bonfigliori gave it to me. See how it catches the light."
Marcello stood over her. He wore only his jeans. His skinny torso shone. "What are you talking about, Chantal?" he said, anger in his eyes, "what the freak are you talking about? What's happening here? I feel like a complete…like a complete dweeb."
"Nothing is happening here, Marcello. Nothing has ever happened here."
"Last summer, and the summer before that, something happened all right, something pretty damn…"
"Marcello, you used to call me 'the scarecrow with no tits.'"
"That was a long time ago."
"Not so long."
Marcello stalked back to the shadows. He was shivering. He might be crying. Italian men were so emotional. By contrast, she supposed, she was so…so what? Swiss? She locked her jewel box and stood up.
This evening she wanted to use the house's terminal. She could interface with Father O'Shaughnessy through a safe link in Singapore if she got the satellite window right. And she had been developing some of their theoretical work on Limited Artificial Intelligences. He had promised to name her as co-author on his next paper, and she was keen to put in the background research to earn the credit.
"Marcello, would you go downstairs and make us some tea. I want to get changed now."
He laughed nastily. "Changed? Chantal, you don't need to get changed. You're a completely different person. Since your father died…"
She slapped him. "Tea, Marcello. Ice, lemon, please."
He bunched his fist, but thought better of it. Even as children, he had been the loser.
"Ciao, Chantal," he said, taking his shirt and sandals from the floor. "Ciao forever."
"Goodbye," she said, in as many languages as she knew how, continuing long after her bedroom door had closed and she knew Marcello had left the house.
It was as near to tears as she had been since the day they buried her father.
She was at her terminal in good time, snaking her way through subsidiary corporation accounts, matching the cyberlabyrinth codeword for block. When she got through to Singapore, Father O'Shaughnessy was waiting for her.
SAN FRANCISCO, USA. 1993
"Chantal…"
She hadn't been so tense since she had taken her final vows. She tried to find her centre. Her muscles remained tight.
"Chantal…?"
Mother Kazuko Hara bowed.
"Mother…" Chantal bowed, and backed away.
The first blow came high, striking her thigh.
The Japanese woman, a foot shorter than Chantal, kicked again, catching her waist this time. Chantal took Mother Kazuko's ankle, and pushed back, hoping to unbalance her, but she twisted and was out of her grasp.
"Good," Mother Kazuko said, striking with the flat of her hand at Chantal's forehead.
Chantal ducked under the blow, and lashed out with her fingertips, pushing into Mother Kazuko's ribs above the heart.
"Very good," the Mother said.
The fought on, matching each other skill for skill, switching fighting styles at whim. The two nuns went through Karate, Fisticuffs, Baritsu, Savate, all the major sub-groups of Wushu—The Five Animal Styles of the Shaolin Temple, Choy Li-Fut, Drunken Style, Eagle Claw, Hsing-I, Hung Gar, Mad Monkey Kungfu, Phoenix Eye, Praying Mantis (an especial favourite), Shuai Chiao, Tan Tui, White Crane, Wing Chun— Jeet Kune-Do (The Way of the Intercepting Fist), Hapkido, Graeco-Roman Wrestling, Kickboxing, Aikido, Amis, Jujitsu, Ninjutsu, Streetfighting, Arm-Wrestling and Tae Kwon Do.
Chantal knew that if her opponent—whom the students called Mother Gadzooks O'Hara—didn't pull her punches, she would have been dead within ten seconds of Mother Kazuko's fust bow.
Her weak spots were beginning to ache. It wasn't necessary to win this bout—no one had bested Mother Kazuko since the St Matilda's Dojo was opened—but Chantal had to keep in the fight for a full quarter of an hour.
It wasn't an official examination. The fight was taking place in a private gymnasium, with no assessors in attendance. But Chantal knew that without Mother Kazuko's say-so she wouldn't be advanced within the Society of Jesus.
The only thing she really had over her master was height, and so she used it as best she could, trying to keep the other woman at the end of her toe-points as she used balletic high kicks, and tapping her head with fingertip blows.
It wasn't enough, but it was somedung.
At last, it was over. Chantal's leotard was a shade darker with perspiration, but Mother Kazuko, who fought in loose white pajamas, was unaffected. She seemed never to sweat, like a lizard.
They bowed to each other, and Chantal wiped the sweat off her face into her hair and collapsed against the climbing frames on the wall. Mother Kazuko steadied her.
"It is all right to be tired, Sister," she said, her English still thckly accented, "but it is sometimes necessary to conceal your fatigue."
Chantal straightened out, and put her hands on her hips. She breathed deeply. Her pains went away, slowly.
Mother Kazuko smiled, exposing rabbit-teeth. "Good. Remember, the Calling of the Jesuit is much like the Path of Ninjutsu, the Way of Stealth."
There was a sound like a gunshot. Chantal turned in its direction, assuming a fighter's crouch, knee flexed to launch a kick.
The sound was repeated. It was a slow handclap, gradually building into applause. A priest came out of the shadows, clapping steadily.
Chantal recognized Father Daguerre, and ran to his arms.
"Sister, how you have grown."
"Sanskrit."
Father Daguerre tried to smile. "No, Sister Chantal. We are grown-up now. We must be wary of wasting our God-given abilities on show."
"She is young," Mother Kazuko said, "she is still learning."
Father Daguerre kissed Mother Kazuko's hand. "She has learned much already, Mother Superior. You have taught her well."
"I have merely brought out what the Lord put inside her."
They left the gymnasium. A troop of postulants were doing Tai Chi exercises in the courtyard. Two young priests in shirtsleeves and shorts were standing, checking instruments, by a helicoptor whose blades were circling lazily.lt was a sunny day. The choir were practicing. The dojo was giving the St Matthew Passion with the Philharmonic this commencement.
Inside the PZ, Sao Francisco was a pleasant city.
"It's been too long since you visited me, Father Daguerre. How is my momma?"
"As ever. She sends her regards."
"How long are you staying?"
"Not long. This is not a visit in the proper sense. I've come from Papa Georgi."
Chantal stopped walking. Since Georgi ascended the Throne of St Peter she had only seen him in public audiences. He bad withdrawn to some extent from his old friends. She had thought he was avoiding her.
"I am to take you to the Vatican. A mission has been found, which requires your…special skills."
A cloud passed over the sun. Suddenly, in her damp leotard, Chantal felt chilly.
"The helicopter will airlift you to SFX. I have a Vatican jet waiting there. Will it take you long to get packed?"
"I've been packed for five months, Father."
"It is good."
At last, Sister Chantal had a mission.
Chantal's first mission was a simple matter of plugging an infoleak from a church in Turin. It turned out that the Pan-Islamic Congress had a sleeper virus going around that was creating APOSTATE programs, and that the Ayatollah Bakhtiar was using the Turin hole to infiltrate the UEC Several leading Greek Exiles, active in the Macedonian Liberation Movement, had been killed by "invisible" men, assassins who didn't register on the datanet. She solved the systems breakdown simply, with some patchwork reprogramming, and traced the Ayatollah's undercover man by his palimpsest computer signature. She had wanted to bring him in for questioning, but he had suicided rather than face the interrogators of the Opus Dei. In the ruins of his hotel room, she had read the last rites over the man, praying that his God would recognize her ritual.
This was not the contemplative life she had imagined nuns led when she was a little girl. Mother Kazuko had explained to her that many of the major forms of combat had been invented by members of religious orders. English monks on the crusades, under the influence of the Biblical prohibition against spilling blood, had come up with the Friar Tuck-style quarterstaff technique as a way of crushing the skulls of the infidel without making them bleed. In the Far East, many of the martial arts had been developed for the self-defence of itinerant monks and priests. If the way of the Cross and the Sword was peculiar, it was at least well-travelled.
Since Turin, she had been deployed on average five times a year, had seen action on every continent—including Antarctica—and won herself several papal decorations she could never wear openly. Fadier Daguerre, her first master, passed her over to Mother Edwina, the English nun who served as a control for the Jesuits' covert activities, and to Cardinal Fabrizio DeAngelis, the Vatican's top computer jock. She became a valued arm of the church.
In a back street in Edinburgh, while tracing a missing Vatican banker and a suitcase full of negotiable bonds, she had been faced with the hardest choice of all. An assailant she could not easily disable had come at her with a knife. She shot without a conscious thought, as she had been trained, read the last rites over his bleeding corpse, and did her self-imposed penance for months afterwards. It had not got easier, but it was part of her calling. Like her father, she was prepared to die for her beliefs. Unlike him, she had learned to kill for them.
Between assignments, she worked out of apartments within the walls of the Vatican itself. Officially, she was a computer programmer and a translator in the Vatican Library. She saw Pope Georgi frequently, but the old intimacy between them seemed to have evaporated with his elevation. She wondered if the Pope still visited her mother. When he had been a Cardinal, Georgi had frequently dined in secret with Isabella Juillerat, and Chantal wondered sometimes if their relationship had ever run deeper than it appeared to. The Camerlengo, Cardinal Brandrcth, took an interest in her, and encouraged her to modernise the Vatican's slightly archaic computer systems. She pursued her own researches, and published widely, either as a collaborator with Father O'Shaughnessy or as sole author. She taught a course in Dublin, filling in for the Father when he was indisposed, and found students hadn't changed since her days at the Seminary. The novices still smoked dope, listened to prohibited Russian records and had thoughtless affairs.
Occasionally, she would try to use her contacts in the international intelligence community to dig into her father's still-open case file. None of the bodies who had conducted official or unofficial inquiries into the assassination had come to any concrete conclusions. It was generally agreed that the assassin had been Snordlij Svensson, a freelance working out of Rekjavik, who was himself killed within six months in an entirely unsuspicious domestic accident. Extensive examinations of Svensson's credit lines and accounting software had failed to isolate a specific employer for the Juillerat Sanction.
Having a daughter who was a sister had upset Isabella Juillerat for a while, but she had become reconciled to it. However, whenever Chantal saw her mother, Isabella would try to convince her to transfer to a more high-profile, glamorous branch of the church. With her qualifications, there was no reason Chantal should not rise to a cardinal's hat. Sooner or later, thanks to Vatican LXXXV, there would be another woman Pope, and, as Isabella pointedly said, "it has to be someone…"
Chantal worked with Mother Kazuko in 1996, putting an end to a series of obscene desecrations that had been taking place in West Coast churches. The culprits turned out to be a gangcult of diabolists operating out of Venice, California, and they had some fairly nasty attendant demons in with them. A specialist in cyberexorcism was flown in from Mexico City, where his services were constantly in demand, and they put an end to the infestation. The cyberexorcist was killed, and Chantal had taken over the ritual. Mother Kazuko was badly wounded in the five-day struggle, and had gone to a retreat to recoup her faculties.
Gradually, the hidden worlds were revealed to Chantal. First, the rational, expanding, exciting world of the international datanets. Then, the ancient, ritualistic, ever-changing, eternally constant world of the Church of Rome. And finally, the dark, barely-glimpsed, deeply disturbing world beyond. In the Vatican library, she was given clearance to access the forbidden books—the Lieber Eibon, The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Al-Hazred, The King in Yellow, Errol Undercliffe's Forgotten Byways of the Severn Valley, Julian Karswell's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Diabolical Genius, Edwin Winthrop's Riddles of the Mythwrhn, Robert Anton Wilson' UFOs From Atlantis—the Secret Exploded, John Sladek's Arachne Rising— and had attended with Father O'Shaughnessy the Secret Conclave of Vienna, during which leading theologians, scientists and politicians discussed some of the more disturbing developments of the last decade. Father O'Shaughnessy presented a paper charting the increasing instance of physical anomalies and the apparent break-down of the laws of physics, and dropped a few dark hints about the eternal balances of space and time and their possible fragility.
Sometimes, she had dreams. A moonlike plain of white salt. A tall, dark man in a broad-brimmed hat, with ancient eyes burning behind his mirrorshades. A bridge in the desert, thronged with gargoyles straight from Notre Dame. The maw of Hell, opening up in an ocean of sand.
Her counsellor-confessor assured her that her dreams were entirely normal for a cleric in her profession.
Then, towards the end of 1998, she was summoned to an audience with Pope Georgi…
THE VATICAN. 1998.
In the meeting room, Pope Georgi sat in front of an authentic, wall-covering Michelangelo. A white screen descended over the painting, and shutters rattled down over the windows. Chantal noticed how much older Georgi seemed now man when they first met. He wore a well-cut business suit and a skullcap. Only his ring of office betrayed his importance. Cardinals Brandreth and DeAngelis wore their red robes, and eyed each other with all the ferocity of Milanese society hostesses unwittingly arriving at a reception in identical "originals." In the Vatican, DeAngelis was known for his dress sense, and could often be found at society receptions in violently red evening clothes. Mother Edwina, the sharp and elegant Englishwoman who usually debriefed Chantal after her missions, wore a demi-wimple, a cream blouse and slacks. Father O'Shaughnessy, whom Chantal had not expected to be present, was, for the first time in her memory, dressed in cassock, collar and pom-pom biretta. Chantal had also turned up in full habit, and Father O'Shaughnessy grinned at the sight, mouthing "snap!" at her.
"Holy Father," she said, kissing Georgi's ring.
He signed a cross in the air, and indicated a chair. They all sat down at a circular table. Cardinal DeAngelis had a console in front of him. He dimmed the lights, and punched buttons. He worked the keyboard with the precise movements of an epicure picking at a supremely artistic salad.
"Excuse me, but I'm double-checking the security. We must take precautions."
"Nothing that comes up at this meeting is to be discussed outside," said Mother Edwina, obviously meaning her words for Chantal.
"Of course," she said. She always picked up the impression that the older woman didn't quite like her.
"Done," said the Cardinal, "we're definitively debugged. This meeting is not being recorded. It will not exist on our records."
"Fabrizio," said Georgi, “this is your presentation.You may begin."
"Thank you, Holy Father…"
Cardinal DeAngelis stood up, and a map appeared on the screen. Chantal recognized an area covering the United States, Mexico and most of the Central American Confederacy. It was covered with little red crucifixes she supposed were churches, and the crucifixes were linked by a glowing spiderweb.
"As you can see, we have been attempting to bind our operations in the continental Americas into one supranational datanet. This leeches onto the local datanets, but is not entirely absorbed into them. There has, of course, been some difficulty in realizing this objective. While the hostility between Washington and Managua continues, neither the US nor the CAC are especially keen on our linkages, but I am now in a position to reveal that we have been successful. We are now fully integrated in the New World, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, even to the Antarctic…"
Cardinal Brandreth clapped leisurely. Chantal caught a feint trace of sarcasm on the camerlengo's elegantly curled lips.
"Thank you, but your congratulations are premature. There are problems. And, as it stands, our entire operation is jeopardized."
DeAngelis paused, allowing his aquiline profile to be silhouetted against the map. He passed a beringed hand through his leonine mane of coiffeured hair. Mother Edwina fidgeted. DeAngelis tapped a key. The map disappeared, and a blurry snapshot, blown up to gigantic size, appeared. A man in black, with sunglasses and a broad black hat, stood in the glaring light of the sun, his arms out in a benediction.
"This is Elder Nguyen Seth of the Church of Joseph."
"I've heard of him," Chantal said, starting for some reason at the blobbily reproduced face. "He's the man behind Deseret."
"That is correct. He successfully lobbied Washington a few years ago and was granted deed to the then-useless State of Utah, which he renamed Deseret and has raised from the dead. He has, by all accounts, made a garden in the desert."
Aerial views of wheatfields, rice paddies and greenhouses appeared behind the Pope. Ceorgi did not turn to look. His gaze, as it had been when she entered, was on Chantal. She felt slightly uncomfortable at this scrutiny. It was as if the joke had finally turned serious.
"Of course, we have notionally recognized the Church of Joseph along with all the other protestant sects since Vatican LXXXV, but we have not been overenthusiastic in its case. Like too many American fundamentalist churches, it combines some of the less attractive aspects of zealotry with a certain cracked quality that appears to sell well. It would be a negligible force if it weren't for Elder Seth."
Another snapshot enlargement appeared. A man in combat fatigues and sunglasses, carrying an assault rifle, was firing into a hut. There was jungle in the background, and soldiers were caught by the camera in action. Puffs of smoke and flame were coming out of rifles.
"This, you'll be surprised to learn, is Nguyen Seth in 1974, with a detachment of the Khmer Rouge. He is in the process of razing to the ground a village on the Vietnam-Kampuchea border. The blurred fellow behind him with the grenade launcher has been tentatively identified as a Frenchman, currently a highly in-demand international terrorist named Roger Duroc. During the Vietnam War, Nguyen Seth fought alongside the Russians against the Chinese, and switched sides several time. Whichever side he was on was usually the one committing the atrocities at the time. The Republic of Vietnam still has a price on his head for singularly revolting war crimes. Before going into battle, he would generally perform several human sacrifices to bless his military ventures."
"So," said O'Shaughnessy, "the Elder of Joseph is not a nice person?"
"He is considerably more than that. Father. As we now see." A new picture appeared. "This is a group portrait, taken in 1933 on the Isis at Oxford. The bald fellow is Aleister Crowley, the mountain-climber and magician. The one who looks furious with him is W.B. Yeats, the poet. This is Arthur Machen, a curious Welsh writer. This is Julian Karswell, a raving psychopath. This is a young lady who was found floating in the river the next day without her head. And this oriental gentleman is…"
"Nguyen Seth," said Brandreth.
"That can't be," said O'Shaughnessy. "Seth's father?"
"He doesn't seem to have had one," said DeAngelis. "Here, this is 1888. It's from the Illustrated London News"
It was an age-spotted magazine photograph, with the print showing through. Only the posed principles were in sharp focus. The background crowds were fuzzy, caught in motion.
"Inspector Lestrade of the Metropolitan Police examines the Whitechapel site of one of the Jack the Ripper murders. Looks like a blithering idiot, doesn't he? No wonder they never caught the murderer. But who do we find rubbernecking in the ghoulish crowd…”
In the amorphous mass, one man had stood still enough for his face to come out clear. Nguyen Seth.
"One more photograph, and we're back to paintings, I'm afraid." The photograph appeared. "This is Hendrik Shatner, brother of the founder of the Church of Joseph, modelling a pair of divinely-issued mirrored sunglasses. And, as you can see, he has an Indian friend…"
Hendrik was peering hawk-faced at the camera, leaning on a Springfield rifle, every inch the pioneer pilgrim. Nguyen Seth was dressed in buckskins and had long braids, but the face was the same.
"History calls Hendrik's Tonto 'The Ute,' but our ethnographers tell me no Ute wore necklaces like that. No Native American did, in fact. They're human fingerbones strung together."
Another picture appeared. "That was 1868. This is 1476. It's an engraving entitled 'The Death of Dragulya'. As you may know, Vlad the Impaler was killed by his own troops while disguised as a Turk, and his severed head was sent to Constantinople where the Sultan put it on display. Take a look at the features of the Moldavian hacking away at Vlad's neck. He is believed to be the traitor who gave the order to kill the prince and then spirited the head away."
The features were roughly carved, but unmistakable, realism was not usually a high priority with mediaeval artists, but this looked as if it had been done from life.
"He would have to be nearly six hundred years old," spat Brandreth.
"Um, older, actually. All the images—and we have literally hundreds more in the archive—show him to be about the same age, somewhere between forty and sixty but hale and hearty. We have no reason to believe that he was any younger ever. Our friend Elder Seth is well-titled by the Josephites. He is indeed, the Elder of us all. Even if you don't discount the legend of the Wandering Jew…"
"Which the church, incidentally, does not," put in the Pope.
"Quite so, Holy Father. Anyway, Ahasuerus aside, this individual, whatever his name, is probably the oldest person walking the earth."
"So, he's been a not-nice person for a very long time."
"Well put, Father O'Shaughnessy. And now, he is, we have reason to believe, planning a coup which will put the Catholic Church in the New World back in the position it had before the first Jesuits set out in the wake of Columbus and Vespucci…"
"And, incidentally," said O'Shaughnessy, "massacred entire civilizations."
"That was a previous papal administration," said Georgi, "for which we can take no responsibility."
"I don't see it," said Chantal. "Where's the threat?"
The map came back. DeAngelis tapped the State of Arizona.
"Here, somewhere. Tombstone would be my guess, based on Seth's nasty sense of humour, but it could be anywhere in the South-West. We've not established all the links as strongly as we might wish to. We've been getting reports of major disturbances on the edges of the Outer Darkness. All our spies in Deseret have disappeared, but we have reason to believe that Nguyen Seth has been invoking demonic powers on an unprecedented scale, and his only logical target is our datanet. Specifically, we think he's going to aim for the Central American Confederacy."
"President North will give him the Congressional Medal of Honour."
"Sadly, that is possible. The CAC represents the only successful synthesis of the Catholic Church and a governmental body outside the Vatican itself. If you weren't on the side of the angels, you wouldn't want it on the same landmass as you, even with the isthmus of Panama and the killing grounds of Mexico between you and it."
"Thank you, Fabrizio," said the Pope. "Father O'Shaughnessy, you have been monitoring the…uh…anomalies?"
O'Shaughnessy looked serious finally. "Chantal knows most of this. I'm pleased that you're at last taking notice. It's not a small, isolated thing. There have been temporal displacements all over the Western hemisphere. The epicentre, not coincidentally I should say, would seem to be Salt Lake City. Many of the anomalies have been observable only on a subatomic basis, but they're there all right. I assume Mother Edwina has been keeping up with the rash of disappearances in the international scientific community. They tie in too, I think. The disappearees have been a job-lot, with all kind of disciplines jumbled in, but they've all been at the cutting edge of dealing with this epidemic of impossibilities. As a footnote, my guess is that I would be next on anyone's list of to-be-vanished candidates."
"That has been taken into consideration," said Mother Edwina. "After this meeting, you will indeed disappear. But we'll take care of the disappearance ourselves. You'll be continuing your work under close guard in a secret location."
"That's a relief."
The map disappeared, and the lights came up. Chantal knew she had come a long way from Lausanne. No one was smoking, but this was nonetheless one of those fabled smoke-filled rooms in which the fate of the whole world was decided. Brandreth and Mother Edwina were in a huddle, and Fabrizio DeAngelis was sitting back waiting to be admired. Chantal wasn't too distracted to notice the young Cardinal taking an interest in her. The Pope leaned forwards, and came to life.
Since that day on the jetty by Lake Geneva, Chantal had been waiting for Georgi to ask her for something. This wasn't the request she had been expecting.
"Chantal," he said, looking straight into her eyes, "you must know what we want you to do. You'll have diplomatic privileges and a limited amount of cooperation from the local authorities. We can't tell them too much, so you'll be travelling on your Swiss passport. Of course, all our clergy and lay-people will be with you…but the projections suggest this is a one-person mission. And you, of course, are the only active operative at our disposal with the skills required. You'll take it?"
Chantal bowed. "Of course, Holy Father."
"Bless you, my child, We shall pray hourly for your success."
"Thank you. Holy Father."
She stood up and backed out of the room. Within the hour, she was in a private jet out of Rome for Phoenix, Arizona.
Underneath the plane, the world turned slowly.