surface, and then the helicopter walks him on water toward me and over the cockpit, dropping him more or less in my lap.
“Nice of you to drop in, Your Eminence,” I say as I help us to our feet. Lame line for sure, but I can’t help it, and besides, neither of us can hear anything over the helicopter engine anyway.
He undoes the harness, flips off the helmet, waves off the helicopter, which slurps in the cable like a tasty strand of spaghetti, tilts its rotor to the east, and takes off climbing toward the Italian coast at a thirty-degree angle.
“You always like to make your entrance in that thing?” I asked when my eardrums stop ringing.
“I only fly under papal orders in circumstances of absolute necessity,” the Cardinal insisted, but I could see from the way the corners of his mouth were quivering that he knew right well he enjoyed it.
“Sure you do, Your Eminence. So why don’t we just get down to business?”
“Could we go inside?” he said, glancing at the sky nervously, like maybe a sea gull was about to shit on his head.
“Hey relax, Cardinal, the sun’s going down, and the stars will soon be out, and we don’t wantto miss this sunset….” I politely offered him the sacrament of the Herb, which he just as politely refused.
“We don’t have time to enjoy the sunset, Mr. Philippe, it may already be too late to retrieve the program….”
“So tell me all about it,” I said, leaning back on the rear bench of the cockpit, where I could puff my spliff and watch the twilight’s last gleaming.
That was enough to convince him he wasn’t going to drag me inside, so he hunkered down in the shadow of the cabin hatchway.
“We’ve lost an expert system program, or rather, we’re afraid that it’s been pirated, possibly for duplication, and it’s a very serious matter.”
“Program what, we who, by which, and what’s the big problem? Software disappears over the Line every day.”
“We are the Catholic Church, Mr. Philippe, the program was lifted off the internal Vatican network, which we have always been assured is quite secure, and we have no idea who did it, or how, or for what purpose.”
The Herb began to illumine. “We’re not talking about your accountancy system, are we?” I said. “You didn’t fly out here to get me to catch some industrial spooks, did you? You’re talking about an … entity, aren’t you?”
“An entity?”
“You know what I mean.”
Cardinal Silver sighed. He shrugged. “Yes, I know what you mean, but I’m not so sure we agree on what you mean by it, seeing as how the Church has failed to reach any reasonable consensus itself.”
I shrugged. “Loas, Flying Dutchmen of the Big Board, the software spirits of the dearly departed, I meet ’em all the time in my line of work, and I still don’t know be they alive or just the disneyworld version, and it’s a subject of some dispute on the Other Side too, it might surprise you to hear.”
“Perhaps God has chosen us the right man,” the Cardinal muttered enigmatically.
“God?”
“God, fate, destiny, a karmic attractor, call it what you will. You were the closest, ah, specialist to hand when we lost it, but I sense Divine Providence may have steered your course.”
Or your Devil made me do it, I refrained from saying, one man’s sacrament being another jurisdiction’s controlled substance.
“
It
, Your Eminence, or
him
?” I said instead. “You
did
say what you lost was the successor entity to a man?”
The Cardinal sighed. “It … him … whatever,” he muttered. “The consciousness hologram of a priest, one Pierre De Leone, and—”
“
A priest?
But doesn’t the Catholic Church believe that raising software zombies is some kind of mortal sin?”
“An unsettling and unsettled question, Mr. Philippe. If Father De Leone is right, all we have lost is an expert system model of his consciousness, but if he is wrong, we have sent a heroic soul to wander lost and alone into