He couldn’t trust them not to talk.
The screen cleared and a tiny smiling bot asked Brother Michael if he wanted to create a new visual of himself or use the vActor file already in memory. He chose the file. An ex-MGM/UA programmer in Burbank had coded it for him — and it had to be one of the few vActors around that showed its proprietor as less attractive than he really was.
Early on, Brother Michael had discovered that while Central Asian zaibatsu khans liked ostentation, most Chinese zaibatsu grandees considered the West’s obsession with mere surface to be shallow, which it was. (Bizarre as it seemed, face was actually about what went on under the skin.) He’d also realized that many West Coast Americans were only happy if they were physically the most attractive party in any deal. And so Brother Michael looked less good on screen than he did in life.
It saved him millions. For a start it meant the Californians he went up against weren’t trying to screw him because of his good looks, and the Japanese and East Coast Chinese regarded him as more than a mere lightweight.
Which was good policy. At least, Brother Michael thought so. Not least because it had given rise to the myth of his personal magnetism. Every C3N journalist, every CySat power suit he’d come into direct contact with had gone away to spread stories about how magnetic, attractive and spiritually powerful Brother Michael was when you met him face to face.
Excellent surgery, a basic knowledge of the human psyche, Sister Aaron’s side interest in pheromones and an understanding that to err might be human but that most people wanted someone to admire had taken Brother Michael from a forty-three-second picture grab to a role as the new Messiah.
Whether or not Sister Aaron and he would actually go with The Arc to act as angels was a question exercising every station from CySat’s award-winning MyGod to the pirate evangelists of Mongolia. And Brother Michael had to say, quite honestly, that the real answer was — he hadn’t the faintest... What he did know was that Sister Aaron was determined to travel with The Arc and letting her leave would be like losing part of himself. Besides, part of him wanted to leave behind the corrupted cities and launch into the cleansing vastness of space.
The priest smiled, watching his reflection in the screen like an overlay on the more homely vActor beneath. Corrupted cities, the cleansing vastness of space... He couldn’t help it. The simple sentence constructions, the dramatic cadences of speech he’d once found so difficult now came to him like second nature.
There’d been a voice coach in Des Moines, but he was dead now. Come to that, so was the MGM coder who’d constructed the vActor. The guards who’d held him in lock-down at Rikers were also gone, those who’d survived the riot. Doing the Lord’s work was sometimes a bloody and frightening business, but then, even the simplest reading of the Old Testament told you that.
Brother Michael couldn’t say he liked the new girl. There was a darkness behind her violet eyes and she held her body awkwardly, as if she was unhappy with who she was. The way she hunched forward suggested her changing body made her uncomfortable, and not just physically. And as for that hand she kept folded across her stomach... There was a violence about her too, an ungodliness.
All in all, decided Brother Michael, she’d be difficult to integrate with the other handmaidens. Which left him with two choices: to drop her quietly into space, or return her to a sender who might or might not be pleased to get her back.
The bracelet was real enough, though. The five-clawed celestial dragon circling a poppy mon had been on the battle flags of the General’s army. And now the bracelet circled Brother Michael’s wrist, dark and ancient. It was too big, too heavy and it hit against the keyboard when Brother Michael tried to key in instructions, but he was still reluctant to take it off.
He would have to, though, and sooner than he wanted. Sister Aaron had woken up from one of her periodic beauty-enhancing naps in cryo and found out about the bracelet from The Arc’s AI. Now she wanted it for herself. He’d give it to Sister Aaron, too. At a price... And the price would be her. It always was.
Brother Michael pulled the heavy silver circle off his wrist and put it by the keyboard. He might be tired, but he was never too tired to take what Sister Aaron only ever offered reluctantly. All the same, he made a mental note to swallow L’Argenine, sildenafil citrate and yohimbe before taking Sister Aaron the silver bracelet.
On Brother Michael’s screen was a grab of Anchee Que’s father, dressed in khaki uniform and staring hard at the cameraman, an Ishie probably. No one else would be insane enough to go after General Que. Brother Michael stared at the man’s face but there was nothing there to indicate anything but fury at being caught on camera. Still, contacting him had to be worth a try.
Brother Michael would keep the mutant boy, though. It hadn’t escaped Brother Michael’s notice how well Lars handled the animals and how much better natured Rachel was when the boy was around. Rachel and a sandrat... Sweet Jesus, it hurt just to imagine what their offspring would look like. So much so, it was almost worth breeding them to find out.
In the end, Brother Michael cancelled his vActor and sent the message as ASCII text, pure and simple, tagging on a videograb of himself as a file attachment. He didn’t bother to crypt the message, since there was no need to disguise where it came from. And he didn’t bother to make himself less attractive. Let the old bastard realize the temptations his precious daughter faced. From what Brother Michael had heard about the grand Shanghai families he’d feel obliged to have her returned, even if he then stripped the skin off her back with a whip.
Brother Michael would have liked to have kept the girl himself. But she was too big, too dangerous a prize even for him. This way was better.
Besides, it wasn’t a kidnapping and Brother Michael wasn’t demanding a ransom for her return, merely suggesting a donation to the Brotherhood might be in order for the trouble they’d taken to ensure the girl’s well-being.
It didn’t reach the desk of Anchee’s father, not at first and not for a while. Nothing did without first being filtered. And the semiTuring that plucked Brother Michael’s message from the in-basket would tie up its not-too-sophisticated MS OfficeSoft neural net for half a day, trying to balance the contents of Brother Michael’s message against St Lucius’s weekly update that reported Anchee happy and healthy. At the end of twelve hours it passed the problem up one Turing level to Mencius, the General’s house AI, and promptly forgot about the problem. The AI put out an all-points call for the General’s pet ballerina and then promptly did the same.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nerves of Steel
Jude stank of dried sweat. Mind you, Fixx probably smelt too, the erstwhile media star reminded himself. Ghost certainly did, of God knew what but Fixx could smell the kitten from where he stood at a half-shuttered window, staring intently through its gap into the narrow dusty street beyond. On the house opposite a fat iridescent gecko was glued to the whitewashed wall, half in daylight, half hidden in shade. Every so often the lizard leant forward and tongue-whipped a fly stupid enough to get too close.
The kitten wanted the gecko: it just couldn’t work out how to spring the trap.