“Enough,” said Kenzo Isozaki. The broadcast flashed off, the bubble grew transparent, and sunlight flooded the room under a black sky. Anna Pelli Cognani smiled thinly. “The voting shouldn’t take too long.” Isozaki had returned to his chair. Now he steepled his fingers and tapped his lower lip. “Anna,” he said, “do you think that we—all of us in the chairmanship of the Mercantilus—have any real power?”
Cognani’s neutral expression showed her surprise. She said, “During the last fiscal year, Kenzo-san, my division showed a profit of thirty-six billion marks.”
Isozaki held his steepled fingers still. “M. Cognani,” he said, “would you be so kind as to remove your jacket and shirt?”
His protégé did not blink. In the twenty-eight standard years they had been colleagues—subordinate and master, actually—M. Isozaki had never done, said, or implied anything that might have been interpreted as a sexual overture. She hesitated only a second, then unsealed her jacket, slipped it off, set it on the chair she never sat in, and unsealed her shirt.
She folded it atop her jacket on the back of the chair. Isozaki rose and came around his desk, standing only a meter from her. “Your underthings as well,” he said, slipping off his own jacket and unbuttoning his own old-fashioned shirt. His chest was healthy, muscled, but hairless.
Cognani slipped off her chemise. Her breasts were small but perfectly formed, rosy at the tips.
Kenzo Isozaki lifted one hand as if he were going to touch her, pointed, and then returned the hand to his own chest and touched the double-barred cruciform that ran from his sternum to just above his navel. “This,” he said, “is power.” He turned away and began dressing. After a moment, Anna Pelli Cognani hugged her shoulders and then also began dressing.
When they were both dressed, Isozaki sat behind his desk again and gestured toward the other chair. To his quiet astonishment, M. Anna Pelli Cognani sat in it.
“What you are saying,” began Cognani, “is that no matter how successful we are in making ourselves indispensable to the new Pope—if there ever is a new pope—the Church will always have the ultimate leverage of resurrection.”
“Not quite,” said Isozaki, steepling his fingers again as if the previous interlude had not happened. “I am saying that the power controlling the cruciform controls the human universe.”
“The Church…” began Cognani and stopped. “Of course, the cruciform is just part of the power equation. The TechnoCore provides the Church with the secret of successful resurrection. But they’ve been in league with the Church for two hundred and eighty years…”
“For their own purposes,” said Isozaki softly. “What are those purposes, Anna?”
The office rotated into night. Stars exploded into existence. Cognani raised her face to the Milky Way to gain a moment to think. “No one knows,” she said at last. “Ohm’s Law.”
Isozaki smiled. “Very good. Following the path of least resistance here may not lead us through the Church, but via the Core.”
“But Councillor Albedo meets with no one except His Holiness and Lourdusamy.”
“No one that we know of,” amended Isozaki.
“But that is a matter of the Core coming to the human universe.” Cognani nodded. She understood the implicit suggestion: the illicit, Core-class AI’s that the Mercantilus was developing could find the datum-plane avenue and follow it to the Core.
For almost three hundred years, the prime commandment enforced by the Church and Pax had been—Thou shalt not build a thinking machine equal or superior to humankind. “AI’s” in use within the Pax were more “All-purpose Instruments” than “Artificial Intelligences” of the kind that had evolved away from humanity almost a millennium earlier: idiot thinking machines like Isozaki’s office AI or the cretinous ship computer on de Soya’s old ship, the Raphael. But in the past dozen years, secret research departments of the Pax Mercantilus had recreated the autonomous AI’s equal to or surpassing those in common use during the days of the Hegemony. The risk and benefits of this project were almost beyond measure—absolute domination of Pax trade and a breaking of the old balance of power stand-off between Pax Fleet and Pax Mercantilus if successful, excommunication, torture in the dungeons of the Holy Office, and execution if discovered by the Church. And now this prospect.
Anna Pelli Cognani stood. “My God,” she said softly, “that would be the ultimate end run.”
Isozaki nodded and smiled again. “Do you know where that term originated, Anna?”
“End run? No… some sport, I imagine.”
“A very ancient warfare-surrogate sport called football,” said Isozaki.
Cognani knew that this irrelevancy was anything but irrelevant. Sooner or later her master would explain why this datum was important.
She waited.
“The Church had something that the Core wanted… needed,” said Isozaki. “The taming of the cruciform was their part of the deal. The Church had to barter something of equal worth.”
Cognani thought, Equal in worth to the immortality of a trillion human beings? She said, “I had always assumed that when Lenar Hoyt and Lourdusamy contacted the surviving Core elements more than two centuries ago, that the Church’s bartering point was in secretly reestablishing the TechnoCore in human space.” Isozaki opened his hands. “To what ends, Anna? Where is the benefit to the Core?”
“When the Core was an integral part of the Hegemony,” she said, “running the WorldWeb and the fatline, they were using the neurons in the billions of human brains transiting the farcasters as a sort of neural net, part of their Ultimate Intelligence project.”
“Ah, yes,” said her mentor. “But there are no farcasters now. If they are using human beings… how? And where?”
Without meaning to, Anna Pelli Cognani raised one hand to her breastbone.
Isozaki smiled. “Irritating, isn’t it? Like a word that is on the tip of one’s tongue but will not come to mind. A puzzle with a missing piece. But there is one piece that was missing which has just been found.”
Cognani raised an eyebrow. “The girl?”
“Back in Pax space,” said the older CEO. “Our agents close to Lourdusamy have confirmed that the Core has revealed this. It happened after the death of His Holiness… only the Secretary of State, the Grand Inquisitor, and the top people in Pax Fleet know.”
“Where is she?”
Isozaki shook his head. “If the Core knows, they haven’t revealed it to the Church or any other human agency. But Pax Fleet has called up that ship’s captain—de Soya—because of the news.”
“The Core had predicted that he would be involved in the girl’s capture,” said Cognani. The beginnings of a smile were working at the corners of her mouth.
“Yes?” said Isozaki, proud of his student.
“Ohm’s Law,” said Cognani.
“Precisely.”
The woman stood and again touched her chest without being aware of doing so. “If we find the girl first, we have the leverage to open discussions with the Core. And the means—with the new abilities we will have on-line.” None of the CEO’s who knew of the secret AI project ever said the words or phrases aloud, despite their bugproof offices.
“If we have the girl and the means of negotiating,” continued Cognani, “we may have the leverage we need to supplant the Church in the Core’s arrangement with humanity.”
“If we can discover what the Core is getting from the Church in return for control of the cruciform,” murmured Isozaki. “And offer the same or better.”
Cognani nodded in a distracted manner. She was seeing how all of this related to her goals and efforts as CEO of Opus Dei. In every way, she realized at once. “In the meantime, we have to find the girl before the others do… Pax Fleet must be utilizing resources they would never reveal to the Vatican.”
“And vice versa,” said Isozaki. This kind of contest pleased him very much.
“And we will have to do the same,” said Cognani, turning toward the lift tube. “Every resource.”
She smiled at her mentor. “It’s the ultimate three-way, zero-sum game, isn’t it, Kenzosan?”
“Just so,” said Isozaki. “Everything to the winner—power, immortality, and wealth beyond human imagining. To the loser—destruction, the true death, and eternal slavery for one’s descendants.” He held up one finger. “But not a three-way game, Anna. Six.”
Cognani paused by the lift door. “I see the fourth,” she said. “The Core has its own imperative to find the girl first. But…”
Isozaki lowered his hand. “We must presume that the child has her own goals in this game, mustn’t we? And whoever or whatever has introduced her as a playing piece… well, that must be our sixth player.”
“Or one of the other five,” said Cognani, smiling. She also enjoyed a high-stakes game. Isozaki nodded and turned his chair to watch the next sunrise above the curving-away band of the Torus Mercantilus. He did not turn back when the lift door closed and Anna Pelli Cognani departed. Above the altar, Jesus Christ, his face stern and unrelenting, divided men into camps of the good and the bad—the rewarded and the damned. There was no third group.