orbit of the Earth. As long as was necessary to complete its purpose.
And so, his life –
… is as long as is necessary for its purpose. We face significant penalties for this malfunction, in fact. Our laws are intended to protect you, not us. But that is our problem, not yours. You will feel no pain. That is a comfort to me. Relax, now.
There was a fringe of darkness around his vision, like the mouth of a cave, receding from him. It was like the blue face of Earth, as he had seen it from orbit. And in that cave mouth he saw the faces of his wife and daughters turned up to him, diminishing. He tried to fix their faces in his minds, his daughters, his father, but it was as if his mind was a candle, his thoughts guttering, dissolving.
It seemed very rapid. It was not fair. His mission had been stolen from him!
He cried out, once, before the blackness closed around him.
… And now, it was as if the dream continued. Suddenly it was sunrise, and he was standing at the launch pad in his bright orange flight suit with its heavy white helmet, emblazoned ‘CCCP’ in bright red.
He breathed in the fresh air of a bright spring morning. Beyond the pad, the flat Kazakhstan steppe had erupted into its brief bloom, with evanescent flowers pushing through the hardy grass.
Yuri Gagarin felt his heart lift.
Technicians and engineers surrounded him. All around him he saw faces: faces turned to him, faces shining with awe. Even the zeks had been allowed to see him today, to see the past separate from the future.
Gagarin smiled on them all.
And they smiled back, as Poyekhali 3202 prepared to recite the familiar words for them.
She was flying.
She felt light, insubstantial, like a child in the arms of her father.
Looking back she could see the Earth, heavy and massive and unmoving, at the centre of everything, a ball of water folded over on itself.
Rising ever faster, she passed through a layer of glassy light, like an airliner climbing through cloud. She saw how the layer of light folded over the planet, shimmering like an immense soap bubble. Embedded in the membrane she could see a rocky ball, like a lumpy cloud, below them and receding.
It was the Moon.
Philmus woke, gasping, scared.
Another Dante dream.
… But was it just a dream? Or was it a glimpse of the thoughts of the deep chemical mind which – perhaps – shared her body?
She sat up in bed and reached for her tranqsat earpiece. It had been, she thought, one hell of a case.
It hadn’t been easy getting into the Vatican, even for a UN sentience cop.
The Swiss Guard who processed Philmus was dressed like something out of the sixteenth century, literally: a uniform of orange and blue with a giant plumed helmet. But he used a softscreen, and under his helmet he bore the small scars of tranqsat receiver implants.
It was eight in the morning. She saw that the thick clouds over the cobbled courtyards were beginning to break up to reveal patches of celestial blue. It was fake, of course, but the city Dome’s illusion was good.
Philmus was here to study the Virtual reconstruction of Eva Himmelfarb.
Himmelfarb was a young Jesuit scientist-priest who had caused a lot of trouble. Partly by coming up with – from nowhere, untrained – a whole new Theory of Everything. Partly by discovering a new form of intelligence, or by going crazy, depending on which fragmentary account Philmus chose to believe.
Mostly by committing suicide.
Sitting in this encrusted, ancient building, in the deep heart of Europe, pondering the death of a priest, Philmus felt a long way from San Francisco.
At last the guard was done with his paperwork. He led Philmus deeper into the Vatican, past huge and intimidating ramparts, and into the Apostolic Palace. Sited next to St Peter’s, this was a building which housed the quarters of the Pope himself, along with various branches of the Curia, the huge administrative organization of the Church.
The corridors were narrow and dark. Philmus caught glimpses of people working in humdrum-looking offices, with softscreens and coffee cups and pinned-up strip cartoons, mostly in Italian. The Vatican seemed to her like the headquarters of a modern multinational – Nanosoft, say – run by a medieval bureaucracy. That much she’d expected.
What she hadn’t anticipated was the great sense of age here. She was at the heart of a very large, very old, spider-web.
And somewhere in this complex of buildings was an ageing Nigerian who was held, by millions of people, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to be literally infallible. She shivered.
She was taken to the top floor, and left alone in a corridor.
The view from here, of Rome bathed in the city Dome’s golden, filtered dawn, was exhilarating. And the walls of the corridor were coated by paintings of dangling willow-like branches. Hidden in the leaves she saw bizarre images: disembodied heads being weighed in a balance, a ram being ridden by a monkey.
‘ … Officer Philmus. I hope you aren’t too disconcerted by our decor.’
She turned at the gravelly voice. A heavy-set, intense man of around fifty was walking towards her. He was dressed in subdued, plain black robes which swished a little as he moved. This was her contact: Monsignor Boyle, a high-up in the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science.
‘Monsignor.’
Boyle eyed the bizarre artwork. ‘The works here are five hundred years old. The artists, students of Raphael, were enthused by the rediscovery of part of Nero’s palace.’ He sounded British, his tones measured and even. ‘You must forgive the Vatican its eccentricities.’
‘Eccentric or not, the Holy See is a state which has signed up to the UN’s conventions on the creation, exploitation and control of artificial sentience –’
‘Which is why you are here.’ Boyle smiled. ‘Americans are always impatient. So. What do you know about Eva Himmelfarb?’
‘She was a priest. A Jesuit. An expert in organic computing, who –’
‘Eva Himmelfarb was a fine scholar, if undisciplined. She was pursuing her research – and, incidentally, working on a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy – and suddenly she produced a book, that book, which has been making such an impact in theoretical physics … And then, just as suddenly, she killed herself. Eva’s text begins as a translation of the last canto of the Paradiso –’
‘In
