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least, Cardinal Gonzalez was a perfect secular image of priestly womanhood.
    She was a stout supporter of feminine equalityand proof positive of the Church’s modern commitment to same. An American who made much of her third world ancestry, she supported the desperate against the comfortable, the poor against the rich, the oppressed against the oppressor, and, of course, the remains of the ecosphere against the further depredations of man.
    Admirable. A paragon. Under other circumstances, perhaps even a useful and effective Pope.
    But not what the Church and the world needed on the Throne of Peter now. On the single greatest spiritual issue confronting the Church, on the matter of the soul itself, as to whether it is the immortal creation of God or a mere software artifact subject to human replication, this most public of prelates, this talk-show personality, had always remained elusively silent.
    Thus, while I have nothing against female Popes or political Cardinals, Cardinal Silver was quite high on the list of uninvited guests I did not care to entertain under the best of circumstances, let alone dropping out of the sky into my final spiritual meditations in a flagrant papal helicopter.
    “To what do I owe this high honor, Your Eminence?” I asked by way of greeting as Cardinal Silver stood there, holding his sunhelmet on his head against the wind of the vanes, hunching reflexively at their overhead passage.
    “Shall we discuss it inside, Father De Leone?” he said. I could all but see his eyes wince behindtheir impenetrable lenses as he retreated with undisguised haste to the chalet.
    “A few minutes’ exposure will not be statistically significant, Your Eminence,” I assured him, puffing to keep up.
    “There is no sense in needless risk,” he rejoined without slackening his pace, a strange attitude, I thought, coming from a man who had just arrived in a helicopter.
    Once safely inside, however, Cardinal Silver regained his princely composure. “You’re to return to Rome with me at once,” he said the moment he was safely under cover and had shed his hat and sunglasses.
    “Your Eminence—”
    “Yes, I know, Father De Leone, I know all about your condition, and if it were up to me, I would never disturb your final retreat, but I too am under direct papal order in this matter.”
    “What matter?” I stammered, still struggling to keep up.
    “I don’t know, she hasn’t told me,” Cardinal Silver said a good deal less authoritatively.
    “The Pope has sent you all this way to drag a dying man back to Rome and you don’t know why?” I exclaimed, as much in befuddlement as anger. “I do find that hard to believe coming from you, Cardinal Silver.”
    The Cardinal laughed an ironic little laugh that almost made him likable. “If you are among thosewho believe that Mary Gonzalez was ever
my
creature, you have an interesting experience ahead of you, Father De Leone,” he said dryly. “This Pope has a mind of her own, and quite a mind it is.”

3
    Up over the eastern horizon it came, over the reflected purple and crimson of a mid-ocean Greenhouse sunset, like something out of a classic twentieth-century television commercial, image of brute freedom and power bearing you off to your pelagic paradise to the travelin’ thrum of the rotors’ drum.
    Only I was already there, my man, and it was coming toward me, all noise, and stink, and petrol fumes, as I squatted there in the cockpit glancing at my spliff like that was going to make it go away.
    The mother just hung up there a few yards off my fantail and then it came right down like a rickety elevator until it was about ten feet off the deck, blasting my ears with heavy ecodeath metal, whipping up chop, pumping out gases so thick you could taste it. Then this dude drops out of the bottom in some kind of harness. He’s wearingsome fancy black business suit, shades, and a silver crash helmet. They lower him by cable until his feet are about a yard off the