He entered the gray room from one of its two doors, sat down in one of its two chairs. Momentarily, the man he had come to speak to entered.
Only a man, Palestrina thought.
The man sat opposite him, silently, hands folded in his lap.
How ordinary he looked. A shabby old man in a shabby gray suit, a gray slouch hat on his head. In Rome, Palestrina thought, he would have attracted no attention. He would have been taken for one of the less successful bourgeoisie, an alcoholic shopkeeper or a retired subaltern from the cavernous bureaucracy of the Tribunals. Palestrina, scanning for omens of bad faith, found nothing more sinister here than a certain shiftiness about the man’s eyes. But his own gaze was hardly fixed. The temptation to look away—somehow, to look away from oneself—-was nearly overwhelming.
He said, “Do you have a name?”
“ Walker,” said the man in the gray suit.
The voice was odd: resonant but somehow toneless.
“Walker—?”
“Walker, stalker, hunter, finder.” His grin was vulpine. ” Walker is my family name.”
Palestrina said, “Did you know your parents?”
“No, sir. I was creched here.”
Then it was true, Palestrina thought, what the Secretariat had told him before he left, what Neumann had implied. Men and women had been bred like cattle in this building. Surgical interventions: female ova plucked from living tissue and fertilized in vitro. Clonings practiced in sterile laboratories under fertility spells. The thought of it sickened him.
Walker added, “But I know who you are… you’re the Papist.”
“They call me that?”
“No one much talks to me. But I hear them say things.”
“Then, do you understand why I’m here?” “Something to do with war.” “Something to do, I profoundly hope, with peace.”
Walker shrugged, as if to say, It’s all the same to me. He said, “You’re a judge.”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking. Do you know what it is I have to judge?”
“Me,” Walker said. The grin was persistent, childlike in a horrible way.
“Your usefulness,” Palestrina said. “Whether you can help us, whether what you’re doing can help us, in Europe.”
“What I’m good for,” Walker interpreted.
No, Palestrina thought. Not what you’re good for, but whether you’re good. Or worse: whether you are a purchase our moral budget can afford.
But he said, “In a way.”
“Oh, I’m not good for much. They made me that way.” He tapped his head. “But I can do a few tricks.” “Tell me about it.”
“Spells. Binding and finding. It’s slow work but I’m talented at it. And I can do the other thing, I guess you know about that.”
“Traveling between worlds,” Palestrina said. It still strained credulity. But here, in this room, this building…
“Across the plenum,” Walker said, “yes.” “Could you do it now—if you wanted to?” “Yes.”
“You could go”—Palestrina held out his hands palms up—“anywhere?”
“Only certain places,” Walker said. “What places?” “Where they’ve been.” The heart of the matter.
“My understanding,” Cardinal Palestrina said, “is that you were a family.”
“A long time ago,” Walker said, and a shadow seemed to cross his face: not an emotion, Palestrina thought, so much as the shade of an emotion.
He said, “Would you like to talk about it?”
“They told me to answer your questions.”
“Do you have to do what the people here tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, then,” Cardinal Palestrina said.
Walker closed his eyes and seemed to regard the memory directly.
“There were three of us,” he said. “We were the best they could make. We had the talent. Very strongly. So they closed us in, of course… caged us with sorcels and spells. And it worked for a time.”
He knitted his hands in his lap. Palestrina could not look away as the fingers laced and unlaced: old, bony fingers.
“They gave us one name apiece. Walker and Julia and William. We all had different parents, or no parents, but we used to think of ourselves as brothers and sister. William was the oldest. I admired him a lot. He was always surprising the doctors and nurses, doing things they didn’t think he could do. I think William carried the whole plenum around inside him: he was that big, that powerful. He was like a god.”
Walker’s eyes shone with ancient feeling.
Cardinal Palestrina remained silent.
“Julia was very beautiful. Tell you the truth, Father, I felt kind of lost between them. William was big and powerful, Julia was beautiful and smart. Me, I was just Walker. Ordinary Walker. Oh, I could do the tricks, too. But not like they could. But that was all right… we had each other.”
“Until they left,” Palestrina said gently.
Walker’s expression hardened. “They talked about it sometimes. I thought it was bad. A mistake. No good could come of it. But they included me. I appreciated that. ‘They can’t hold us,’ William used to say. ‘Not all their spells can keep us here.’ And in the end, you know, he was right.”
“But you stayed behind,” Palestrina pressed.
“I couldn’t go! Or I didn’t want to go. Or I wasn’t strong enough to go…”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember them begging me. We were all older then. By then I knew that Julia and William loved each other, that they loved me but in a different way. A lesser way. So we battered down the sorcels and we were going to go where no one could find us, worlds and worlds away from this place. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t and finally I told them to go while there was still time, just go and leave me… and they did…”
“They left you?”
“Yes.”
“You resented that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Why don’t you remember?”
“Because the proctors took me. They took me to the surgeons.” He regarded Palestrina with his head cocked, an expression that was at once sly and pathetic. He said, “They operated on me.”
Cardinal Palestrina experienced a twinge of abhorrence. “Operated—?”
Walker lifted his battered gray hat.
The scar was prominent, all these years later. It ran in a ragged circle from the tip of Walker’s left ear past the orbit of his eye socket and up into the hairline. Walker traced it with his finger. “They opened up my skull,” he said. “They took things out.”
“Things,” Palestrina whispered.
“Love and hate. Caring and not caring.”
“And left—?”
“Obedience. Loyalty. They call it loyalty.”
“My God… and you don’t despise them for it?”
Shockingly, Walker smiled. “I don’t think I can.”
No, Cardinal Palestrina thought. No, this is too much: too much cruelty, too much obscenity. It recalled a kind of torture the Tribunals had not practiced for centuries.
They had cauterized a part of this man’s soul, Palestrina thought… and how much could be murdered of conscience or outrage before a man was, essentially, dead?
So perhaps he was talking to a dead man.
The thought was chilling and unwelcome.
“You followed them,” Palestrina said. “That’s what you were trained for.”
“Followed them for years.” Again that distant look, Walker’s old eyes gone diffuse. “It’s hard work, you know. But I can smell them out. They leave trails.”
“Julia and William? You found them?”
“Eventually.”
“Brought them back?”
“Killed them.”
Cardinal Palestrina blinked.
Walker said, “It was unavoidable.”
His face was bland, affectless, smiling. Palestrina thought, He is dead. “But then it’s over, surely? Your work is finished… the project is finished?”