No one liked to say so, but the fact was: mortality was back.
The maggot, once a guarantee of immortality, had become a lottery. Their ranks were being depleted. Maggots were dropping everywhere.
Giacomo turned to Paolo: “O’Hara’s finished eating. Why not show him round?”
Paolo wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Absolutely.” Then, turning to O’Hara: “Come on, let’s go.”
The two clerics set off arm in arm, looking like two friends reminiscing about the good old days.
Two discreet guards accompanied them.
“Don’t try anything,” said Paolo. “I’ll blade-bugger you if so much as fart without my say-so.”
“So this is it, is it?” O’Hara said, looking at Paolo. “You’ll suck my innards out and dump my head in a coffin for five hundred years.”
“Well, not yet we won’t. You haven’t blossomed yet.”
“But once I have?”
“What have you really done to deserve the light? There are others competing for the same privilege, most of them far worthier than you. Particularly now that people are actually dying, we have to weigh up who we should keep. And of course we won’t keep people who make a nuisance of themselves,” said Paolo. “You know what Giacomo’s like. He likes a quiet life, so he can concentrate on recipe research and eating.”
The two men made their way down a long corridor that reached far into the gloom. O’Hara was doing his best not to look too impressed by the scale of the caverns, which he’d never seen firsthand although of course he’d heard all about them. Instead he took refuge in disapproval. “Who paid for all this?” he said. “It must have swallowed up huge resources over the years.”
“Oh, we constructed it all with our own hands, and with faith, of course; nothing can be done without that,” said Paolo smugly, although he knew very well how enormous the bills had been since the expansion program.
“So what’s next? Are you going to frog-march me to the gutting rooms?”
“I can show them to you,” Paolo offered. “We have time. I was going to check on our protégés, Michael and Ariel, but we can do it afterwards. They’re undergoing self-purification in readiness for enshrinement.”
“You do have some lovely words to describe disgusting things.”
33
Shadowed by two clinking bodyguards, the two men came down a long concrete corridor more or less like an underground military complex, lit by sodium lights.
Brother Paolo was still holding his old enemy firmly by the arm.
“If you’d be kind enough to accompany me this way,” he said, eagerly turning off into an ultra-modern passage, the walls of which were decorated with silver fish moving in highly decorative shoals towards a gilded arch lit by shimmering lights, a sort of imitation of sunlight passing through water: “We commissioned this installation; it was done by a Dane. You know, they really are the best at design — of course she had to be maggotized afterwards to keep her quiet.” Paolo’s grip tightened. “Come on, I’ll show you the new processing center. We’re very proud of it.”
As they entered an expansive, brightly lit complex, O’Hara felt he had entered a world of fiction — an industrialized, genocidal facility of the spirit.
There was a good deal of machinery in there: tracks ran beneath the ceiling, with hooks sliding along, locking onto and picking up tubular aluminum chairs lowered by an automated crane.
A group of naked maggot people on what looked like a train platform were preparing for their imminent retirement. Some were smoking, others embracing or talking emotionally to friends who had come to wave them goodbye from an auditorium to one side. One, probably an Englishman, was calmly leafing through a newspaper while taking long thoughtful swigs from a bottle and puffing on a pipe. Beside him, a woman was undressing and carefully folding her clothes and some other personal effects into a regulation-size case. An orderly behind a counter, having presented her with various documents to sign, attached these to the case and then threw it onto a slow-moving conveyor belt; it passed through a scanning device before exiting through a small gate hung with undulating plastic strips.
“Now watch,” said Paolo, as the Englishman folded up his newspaper and left it on a table, then eased himself into a vacant chair like a traveler getting into his seat.
A young priest adjusted his armrests, fixed his head in a clamp, and unceremoniously sprayed his buttocks with a lubricating unction — then joined him in a quick prayer before sending him on his way.
O’Hara stared with mounting horror.
The chair drew level with an industrial robot, which swung into action, inserting its long snout through an opening at the base of the chair into the rear end of the passenger, then made a whining sound. As the machine sucked, the man collapsed like a balloon — only the head was unaffected, held in place by rubberized prongs at the top.
Once extraction was finished — a procedure that took no more than three or four seconds — the robot withdrew its nuzzle. There was another short interval before a green light flashed and an all-clear signal rang out. The machinery jerked into motion again with much clattering of metal.
At the other end of the production line, the chair slid onto a secondary track. Workers in white overalls unceremoniously unhooked the body-skin and transferred it to what can only be described as wheeled clothes-horse.
There was one final stage in the operation. The head was tagged through its left ear with a bar-code, then scanned using a small handheld device. Once the wheeled units were fully loaded, they were slowly pushed through vats of heavy-duty moisturizer, then left in a drying room, from where O’Hara heard the whirring of giant fans.
“This is monstrous,” he whispered, feeling his legs almost giving way beneath him. “I thought I was beyond forgiveness; I see now that I am nowhere near as wicked as…”
“We can handle up to about two hundred and forty extractions per hour,” said Paolo, a certain pride and professionalism in his voice as he watched the system in action. “We got the top people at Fiat to help us design the process. For now we’re focusing more on extraction than refills — we haven’t re-modernized that stage yet, but eventually we’ll use that cavern over there for it.” He waved his arm towards a large, uneven opening in the rock wall at the far end. “The capital outlay is incredibly costly, so we thought we’d leave it for now. As we won’t be doing much refilling for the next hundred years or so, it wouldn’t be prudent to shell out all that money now. At this stage it’s all about safe storage. We have space for about a million sleepers, and that should do us for now.”
“And you expect me to go through this. To sit on one of those things and…” O’Hara said.
Paolo gave him a little pat on the arm. “Don’t worry, you’ll go through it all right,” he said. “We all will. It will be done hygienically and safely and we’ll be brought back when the time is right. See it as a blessing, if you can. Every person who enters this room is one of the chosen.” He sighed, and threw an envious look at the people waiting on the platform. “I’ll have to wait at least a hundred years before I can retire… That’s a day I’m looking forward to enormously.” Then, with a glance at his watch: “We must press on.”
They returned to the corridor — O’Hara still feeling his legs rather wobbly — and descended a few levels into far gloomier parts of the catacombs, where dungeons were still dungeons, with all the usual attributes such as cobwebs, Gothic columns, and oak doors. They reached the massive doors leading to Michael and Ariel’s cell.