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."
III
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.