And he was juddering down a long flight of stone steps in a whine of synth and self-adjusting gyro, daylight blinding his eyes before he realised with shock that the monk had nodded to him.
The back of the Potala stood stark and quietly magnificent behind Axl. If not so awe-inspiring as when seen from the front then still impressive enough. But it was the sign to the airport that crashed chords and wrote a manic grin across Axl’s tired face.
-00.37.00. No one could say it wasn’t pushing the envelope, but as yet the envelope wasn’t ripped in two. Or the readout wouldn’t have been happening because the SS St Bernadotte would have gone. That was how Axl read things anyway.
At the cargo gates to the airport was a human guard. Not just a token human, but the kind that actually flicked switches to lower a section of sonic fence. And as Axl came racing up, the man hit the switch and waved. Without thinking, Axl flipped a return wave and then he was past the perimeter, racing towards a vast yurt, constructed from a single transparent vat-grown sheet of goat’s skin held taut by chromed metal guys as thick as a child’s wrist.
The yurt was Samsara’s Departure Hall and beyond it Axl saw the Nuncio’s cruiser, already cleared for take-off, a group of saffron-robed lamas standing around it and staring in his direction.
Whatever Axl had been expecting, this wasn’t it. One of the monks waved frantically and Axl realised that whatever the hell else was expected of him, neither sneaking or blasting his way aboard the austere, purple-lacquered cruiser was part of the menu. The Boeing had exclusive written all over it, from the near silence of its engines as they fired up to the elongated slow-glass bubble sat atop its nose like a freshwater pearl.
‘Borja,’ Axl said as he slid the Honda to a halt and dropped it where it stopped, back wheel still spinning. ‘Axl Borja.’ The Swiss Guard at the base of the moving walkway actually stepped back and saluted.
‘You brought the girl?’ The booming voice echoed from the cruiser’s doorway, where an obese Namibian dressed entirely in purple stood staring down at Axl.
Axl was already shaking his head before he wondered, which girl, the kid or Kate? And what had happened to wanting Father Sylvester? Synth-loops looped, feeding on themselves. Didn’t matter either way. He was into the signature tune.
‘No,’ Axl said, ‘No girl, just me.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
PoV Free
The first thing Axl noticed about the Nuncio’s cabin was the mahogany panelling. Second he spotted Bronzino’s painting ‘Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time’, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence in 1545, though Axl just saw a naked boy with wings cupping the breast of an older woman. Finally, he realised the sound track was gone. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset.
The Nuncio fed him while the engines finished firing up. Not nutrients, chelated vitamins or worse still, luke-warm plates of Tsampa and buttered tea, but a vast platter of beef, carved from the side of a huge joint that already sat steaming on a silver salver.
Maybe the Church really had streamlined itself into austerity but, if so, no one appeared to have told the Nuncio. Blood-dark Barolo came from a tall wine jug, hammered from silver and embossed with vine leaves that curled from its elegant base up through its round belly to a narrow fluted top which was closed by a single silver leaf that hinged at the stalk.
‘The Two Sicilies, nineteenth-century, pre-Risorgimento,’ the Nuncio told Axl, dropping crumbs from his mouth to his expansive lap. After the beef they ate syllabub and washed down slivers of basalt-like parmesan with a wine so sweet and thick it stuck to Axl’s teeth.
Outside they were preparing for the Boeing to take off, but that was still ten minutes away. Time enough, the Nuncio said, to eat parmesan properly. And as Axl sipped the wine while sucking the slivers of hard cheese to soften them, he could feel spiders crawling over his leg. At least he assumed the medicare box at his feet had got around to converting ants into spiders. The ants had gone in first, tiny metallic pincers stripping away dead flesh from the edge of the gash, then they’d excreted some kind of mite so small as to be invisible and so dedicated all it could do was repair cell walls and die. The spiders did the macro work, like stitching or spinning strips of new skin.
It was battlefield stuff, crude but reusable. Not what Axl would have expected the Nuncio to carry and undoubtedly not what he kept for his own use, assuming he paid as much attention to the Church’s dislike of nanetics as he did to its exhortations to poverty.
Food, wine and the smallest of talk about who was doing what at the Vatican filled the time, the gossip as unreal to Axl as any newsfeed half seen on a feed across a crowded bar. But the Nuncio said nothing about Joan, soulcatchers or any coming conclave. Nothing about the Cardinal, either. And the only thing the Nuncio didn’t offer Axl was new clothes or a shower.
Axl had a nasty feeling that lack of soundtrack and no shower fed back to a cryptic comment of the Nuncio’s when Axl first clambered on board. The Nuncio’s arm had gone round his shoulder, avuncular maybe, but still steering him away from the open doorway.
‘This is dead space,’ the Nuncio announced waving one arm at the ornate interior of his cruiser. ‘Looped out/PoV-free.’ Then he stopped, looked carefully at Axl.
‘You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
Axl didn’t, so he said he didn’t and the Nuncio nodded, black eyes glittering in a face round and black as a total eclipse.
‘Good.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
Hollow Rooms
Villa Carlotta looked as it had the last time Axl had seen it. Purple bougainvillea still smothered the walls of the gatehouse, softening the hard lines of the reinforced titanium gate now shutting behind him. Squat palms like over-large pineapples edged the gravelled drive, fat trunks curved under the weight of waxed leaves as sharp as blades and as big as surfboards. And lush curling ferns buried the crested, baroque gates to the courtyard beneath an explosion of nature’s pubic hair.
Arpeggios ran down his spine. The notes fuzzy, like a harpsichord sampled note for note and then damped. Perhaps that was because he couldn’t see the Villa properly. Maybe, if he hadn’t been squinting through the smoked glass windows of a vast Nexus stretch, the notes would have been clear as crystal.
Right back in Dey Effé, after the Nexus had asked him where he wanted to be taken, Axl told the stretch to wind down the window and it had suggested he use manual. So he’d hit the window’s button himself and the window had suggested he ask the car. They’d been going round in the same circle ever since, with increasing bad temper.
So instead of watching open countryside, Axl had been forced to spend the trip looking at himself, since the inside of every car window was mirrored. And everywhere Axl had looked he’d seen his own haggard reflection staring back.
‘We’re here,’ announced the Nexus, opening the door nearest Axl.
‘Really?’ Axl said, harpsichord and heartbeat syncopating.
It’s my own choice, Axl told himself. No one could take that away from him. Everything else maybe, including his life, but not that. He slammed the car door, without giving the Nexus time to shut itself. Guaranteed to irritate the car, but Axl didn’t care. Though no doubt it would whine to the Nuncio when it got back.
Grit crunching under his feet, Axl walked slowly across the huge courtyard towards the main doorway of the Villa Carlotta, watched silently by four guards. If they planned to arrest him now would be a good time.