‘No way,’ said a voice. And then it went harsh, street-smart and heavily Brooklyn. ‘Stop exactly where you are and no one else gets dead…’
Both bodyguards were spinning like tops, combat ready with left hands gripping right wrists, H&K .38s held at forty-five degrees to the upper body as they looked for the newcomer. And then they all realised it was the gun talking.
‘Black Jack Hot.’ The Cardinal sounded vaguely surprised.
‘Yeah. Episode one, opening sequence. Didn’t know you were a fan. Hey. . .’ That was to the two hovering bodyguards. ‘Any closer and I’ll blow your boss to meatballs.’
‘Moz’ll die if we don’t help him,’ said the Cardinal.
‘That’s what he wants,’ said the Colt. ‘Besides, he’s already dead as dogmeat. And it’s time you got over this resurrection shit.’
Both bodyguards looked at the Cardinal, who looked at the Colt lying on blood-splattered slabs where Moritz had dropped it, tiny diodes lighting in sequence along its exposed side, fast and rhythmic, like the click-track on some mixing deck.
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ The Colt sounded cross. ‘Death was what I promised him. You can patch him up, reload his brain, grow a new reverse to his skull. Fuck it, you could grow him a new head, couldn’t you? Or do a transplant…’
The Cardinal groaned. It had been the Vatican who did the first successful head transplant, back at the end of the twentieth century, and no one had ever let them forget it.
‘. . . but do you think he’ll thank you for it,’ demanded the Colt. ‘The fuck he will.’ The Colt was flipping lights faster now, opening dialogue not just with the houseAI but with the Villa’s titanium gate, persuading it to lock out the CCPD hovers that were tearing up the narrow blacktop towards it, demanding access.
The gate wasn’t making any decisions. That wasn’t its job. No matter what the CCPD reckoned they’d seen on satellite.
‘Chrysler Mark Three hovers, armoured and running in battle readiness,’ the Colt told the Cardinal. ‘You want to let them in?’
The Cardinal just looked at the gun.
‘It’s your Villa, your AI, your pet corpse ...' The Colt’s voice changed, becoming stentorian, overtly dramatic. To make the point he ran a chord crash ahead of the opening words. ‘Cardinal kills benefactor. Maximillia under pressure to act…
‘Or did the poor, muddled man try to kill you? After all, his fingerprints are all over the handle. I’ve got his neural patterns logged on file as owner. Fuck it, I’ll even go on oath in court if you want…’
The gun paused, its tone sardonic. ‘Oh, you lot don’t believe machines can take oaths, do you? A bit of a fucking pity really.’
‘Tell the house to let them in,’ the Cardinal told the gun. ‘And tell it to wipe any embarrassing vid-transcripts accidentally.’ His Excellency looked at the gun. ‘Presumably there’s a price for all this?’
‘Isn’t there always? But you can afford it.’
The Cardinal grunted. ‘You saw poor Father Moritz turn that gun on me?’
Both bodyguards nodded.
‘Good,’ said the Cardinal as he stood up and stretched, fingers interlinking above his head, thin lips pulling back over long yellow canines. CAT scans and lie detectors wouldn’t be involved. Hell, it wouldn’t even make the news. In fact, if the CCPD weren’t gone in thirty minutes leaving him to deal with the gun and the body, then he was losing his touch.
The Cardinal adjusted his tiny pebble glasses against the evening glare and glanced at the Colt, considering. He was the Cardinal. And the Cardinal could do what he wanted. That was what Mexico had always believed… Somehow these days it was the Cardinal who felt less certain of the fact.
Chapter Eighteen
Body, Speech, Mind, Diamond
Om Ah Hum Vajra ...
Out beyond Luna, out even beyond the Arc, the Wheel of God spun in space, telling off endless prayers. Around the 1500 or so miles of its outer rim were attached three million scraps of calligraphy, each gummed in place at the top right corner. They were the prayers of the faithful, written in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and woodblocked onto rice fabric by Buddhist monks. Each tiny script had been fixed in place by a hired gang of Deacon Blues, space dwelling salvage rats subcontracted by the Dalai Lama.
There were longer streamers—some of merely human height, others at least a mile long—weighted at the end with small lead seals. These were prayers too, convoluted mantras endlessly repeated on each ribbon and then repeated again as the wheel’s edge spun them in a vast circle. Further off, huge steel drums hurtled through space, seemingly unattached to the wheel, their long lengths of monofilament so fine as to be invisible. In each drum were more prayers. As well as simple steel drums there were elaborate canisters of beaten silver, chased around the sides with complex, swirling representations of demons and the Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhism’s great masters.
Inside the silver canisters were all the names of God, printed out onto silken ribbon. It had taken a bank of Cray3s at CalTek at least forty-seven years to track down all the names and ten minutes to spit them out.
This was Samsara, the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of God.
Here was Tibet reborn from the carnage of the Second Sino War. It was a place of duty and of prayer, but most of all it was a safe haven, recognised as such by the UN, WorldBank and the IMF. All ‘fugees had right of entry. They had to get there first, of course, but that didn’t lessen the principle no matter how much it limited the number.
Unlike the original Tibetan wheel, Samsara had no visible spokes and no hub; it rotated about itself, creating both surface pseudo-gravity and enough momentum to trap most of the new world’s atmosphere within the long central valley and the high, vertiginous mountains of its edges. What atmosphere bled away into space had to be replaced, but that was Tsongkhapa’s problem. And Samsara’s central AI didn’t trouble others with its problems.
Axl Borja knew none of this. He was asleep in his seat, knocked flat by melatonin and kept that way by a seriously cross stewardess. He knew the back-history, of course. How, as the giant bioCrays at CalTek were sourcing thirteen regional variants on the god Zoroaster, fifty-three years before the end of the leasing agreement, a Buddhist astronomer at MIT’s observatory on Darkside picked up the first sighting of the wheel.
Samsara wasn’t a world then, merely a hollow circle a thousand miles around its inner rim, like a huge bird’s egg with both ends cut off, if any bird could be so big that it might fly between the stars. And there were breakaway Navajo in Colorado who believed that Samsara was the remains of an egg, that there had been a bird which hatched. But then a Zen sect in Okinawa swore it was the birth sac of a vast cosmic carp and the sky was water.
The fractured stone bubble was not spinning around itself back then, merely tumbling end over end through space like a discarded tyre. And before the Navajo, the Carp cult—or the Enquirer’s insistence it was really all being staged in an SFX studio in Burbank, California—the Dalai Lama had known Samsara for more than that. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, logged into a vidgroup when he should have been sleeping, he’d opened a flash between Darkside and CalTek and known instantly that here was Samsara, Vajrayana, the indestructible vehicle. His destiny had arrived, if such a big word could be given to a shaven-headed, slightly podgy thirteen-year-old boy.
God-child creates world.
In private, Cardinal Santo Ducque maintained the story was so much shit, and he was right. MIT’s observatory on Darkside had been monitoring the ring for months, watching it come ever closer. And the Dalai Lama had known to the minute when the final name of God would be collated, cross-referenced and the entire list printed out.