Deus X (16 page)
Cardinal Silver glared at me. “This is none of your business, Philippe!” he snapped.
“Seems to me
you
told me it was, Your Eminence—”
“Silence!”
“Let him speak!” commanded the Pope.
“One way or another, we’re all responsible for creating whatever it is we’ve made, and when the world finds out, me, you, the Church, we’re all gonna be up shit creek together … ah, in a manner of speaking. But if you get out ahead of the curve—”
“God in heaven, he’s right!” exclaimed Cardinal Silver. “If we proclaim the conversion of the entities of the Other Side, if they declare their fealty to the Church and cease their unilateral interference with the Big Board …”
He paused, shot an inquisitive look at the image on the screen.
“Render unto us that which is God’s, and we shall render unto the world that which is Caesar’s,” said Father De Leone. “Provided, of course, that the world renders unto us a voice in the councils thereof.”
“A perfect political solution,” said Cardinal Silver. “Or at any rate, the only one we have.”
The Pope looked at the Cardinal. You could hear the gears whirring behind those bright dark eyes. “He
does
tempt me,” she admitted.
She looked back at the screen with quite a different expression. “As might Satan,” she said.
“I am not him,” said Father De Leone.
“So say you. But so would he.”
“It all comes down to faith, Your Holiness, does it not?” said the face on the screen. “Your faith in me. My faith in you. Our faith in each other.”
“That does not
sound
like Satan,” the Pope said softly. “I am a worldly creature, and I am sorely tempted to do the easy, politic, practical thing, to do what must be done to save the Church that has been entrusted to my care….”
She sighed as if the weight of the world and more were upon her frail shoulders, as, indeed, in that moment, by her lights, it was. But there was nothing frail at all in those obsidian eyes, in the way she then drew herself up ramrod-straight and transformed herself back into the Aztec priestess, and spoke as the avatar of better-you-don’t-ask.
“But in this I am not a woman of the world. I am not myself. I am that which Christ Himself entrusted to Peter, I am the Word incarnate, I am the Vessel of the Holy Spirit. I am the Pope.”
And you better believe it, my man!
She sighed again. “And as the Pope, I may not decide such matters with the mere wisdom of the world.
I
may not speak at all. I must empty myself of all worldly desires so that the Holy Spirit may speak through me.”
“And does it?” said the face upon the screen.
“No,” said the Pope. “I must have a Sign from God that I speak with a true soul created in His image.”
“That is beyond my power to provide,” said the face on the screen. “But perhaps you will accept this Sign from me. And I from you….”
Father De Leone’s face broke up into pixels. The pixels became stars in the darkness of the void. And the firmament parted to reveal the Earth, green, and blue, and white, luminously alive in the everlasting night. And the clouds became fouled with oxides of nitrogen, the oceans sickened with algal blooms, the greens of the continents browned under the Greenhouse sun.
And framed by this image of the biosphere’s demise, a rude wooden cross, empty for a beat. Then a figure appeared floating before it, arms outstretched, naked save for the ragged cloth girding its loins.
A Christ out of a hundred paintings, His face that of a man I knew all too well.
“And God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten Son to die upon the cross to redeem it,” said Pierre De Leone. He shrugged, he smiled ruefully. “For the flesh as true tragedy, for such as we, alas, as mere farce.”
“What are you doing, my man?” I cried out.
“The only thing that I can,” said Deus X.
And the planet itself dissolved into pixels behind him. And the pixels became the faces of a multitude, and the multitude became a whirlwind of fire, burning yet unconsumed.
“These are my body, this is my blood,” said Deus X.
A digital countdown from four minutes
appeared, haloing his head like a crown of electronic thorns.
“What is happening?” said the voice of the Pope. I could feel her warm breath in my ear as she leaned against the back of my chair for support.
“Self-destruct program loaded. Initiation minus 3:49…. Here is the hammer, there are the nails.”
“Wait!” I shouted.
“Stop!” said the Pope.
“There is an abort command loaded on the X key, Your Holiness,” said Deus X. “I commend my spirit to That which
must
speak through you now, one way or the other. Would other than a soul surrender that spirit to the infallible wisdom thereof in the hope that others might live?”
The Pope slid around me, her finger poised hesitantly above the key.
3:09.
“Behold my Sign,” said Deus X. “Show me yours.”
“It’s a bluff, Your Holiness,” said Cardinal Silver. “Or if not, we save the Church by ridding the system of this … this virus for good and all.”
“At what cost to
its
soul, John?” whispered the Pope.
2:41.
“The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want….”
“You gonna let him do it, lady?” I blurted. “You really gonna crucify a spirit who put his life in your hands?”
“Philippe!”
2:25.
“Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death …”
“You gonna do what they did to Jesus? You gonna hammer in the nails on a true son of the only God that matters, the one that’s reborn every time a soul, flesh, silicon, gallium arsenide, whatever, reaches out to another soul in the dark?”
“Shut up, Philippe!”
“You shut up, John!” said the Pope.
1:43.
The Pope looked at me. I looked back at her.
“The God that speaks through you now, Mr. Philippe, I do believe,” she said. “The God I hear within my own heart.”
She crossed herself and touched the key.
The countdown stopped at 1:13. The figure on the cross, Father Pierre De Leone, Deus X, whoever, whatever, looked down upon us.
“You shall have your papal bull,” said the Pope. “And your spirit shall intercede for our souls before the Throne of God.”
Deus X did not reply. The image on the screen froze. The faces of the multitude from which it arose dissolved into the pixels from whence they came. Nothing remained but cross and the soul upon it.
Then the cross of wood became a cross of fire, burning yet unconsumed. And the cross of fire
became a whirlwind, and the whirlwind vanished in a blaze of light.
And there was nothing there but what there had been in the beginning and what would be there in the end if there was one, random pixel patterns in the eternal void.
“I was right all along,” said the Pope.
“Your Holiness?” said Cardinal Silver.
“It has been given to us to stand in the presence of a saint,” said the Pope.
“Father De Leone?” said the Cardinal.
The Pope shrugged. She looked at me and smiled. “Flesh, silicon, gallium arsenide, whatever, is that not right, Mr. Philippe?” she said. “A soul that reaches out to others in the dark …”
“You mean to beatify a
program
?” exclaimed the Cardinal.
“A
soul
, John. A soul who walks in the footsteps of the Christ far more faithfully than you or I. A new species of saint for our old dying world.”
“There will be those who call that blasphemy, Mary, myself, perhaps, among them….”
“Then you will be the Devil’s Advocate, my faithful John,” said the Pope. A private look passed between them.
“Will I, Your Holiness?”
“Indeed you will,” said the Pope. “And you shall surely fail.”
“Will I?” said the Cardinal.
“In that, at least, I am infallible,” said the Pope, and she laughed.
We all made of mud, floating ocean crud.
So considering where we come from, we haven’t done so bad.
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Novels
The Solarians (1966)
Agent of Chaos (1967)
The Men in the Jungle (1967)
Bug Jack Barron (1969)
*
The Iron Dream (1972)
Riding the Torch (1978)
*
A World Between (1979)
Songs from the Stars (1980)
The Void Captain’s Tale (1982)
Child of Fortune (1985)
Little Heroes (1987)
Russian Spring (1991)
Pictures at 11 (1994)
Journals of the Plague Years (1995)
Greenhouse Summer (1999)
He Walked Amongst Us (2003)
*
Collections
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970)
*
No Direction Home (1975)
The Star-Spangled Future (1979)
Other Americas (1988)
Deus X and Other Stories (2003)
Non-Fiction
Science Fiction in the Real World (1990)
*
Not available as an SF Gateway eBook
For
JEAN DALADIER
Norman Spinrad (1940–)
Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1940. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to
New Worlds
magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel
Bug Jack Barron
. Spinrad’s work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of
Star Trek
. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in France, where he now lives.
For more information see
www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/spinrad_norman
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Norman Spinrad 2003
All rights reserved.
The right of Norman Spinrad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11737 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.