The cardinals and Councillor Albedo and the Core wanted her to escape. Everything was predicated upon her ’casting out of this intolerable situation: thus the holodrama coarseness of the torture, the melodramatic absurdity of the dungeon cell in Castel Sant’Angelo and the heavy-handed Inquisition. They would hurt her until she could not stand it any longer, and when she ’cast away, the Core instruments would measure everything to the billionth of a nanosecond, analyze her use of the Void, and come up with a way to replicate it. The Core would finally have their farcasters back—not in their crude wormhole or Gideon-drive manner, but instant and elegant and eternally theirs.
Aenea ignored the Grand Inquisitor, licked her dry, cracked lips, and said distinctly to Councillor Albedo, “I know where you live.”
The handsome gray man’s mouth twitched. “What do you mean?”
“I know where the Core—the physical elements of the Core—are,” said Aenea.
Albedo smiled but Aenea saw the quick glance toward the two cardinals and tall priest.
“Nonsense,” he said. “No human being has ever known the location of the Core.”
“In the beginning,” said Aenea, her voice slurred only slightly by pain and shock, “the Core was a transient entity floating in the crude datasphere on Old Earth known as the Internet. Then, even before the Hegira, you moved your bubble memories and servers and core storage nexus to a cluster of asteroids in long orbit around the sun, far from the Old Earth you planned to destroy…”
“Silence her,” snapped Albedo, turning back toward Lourdusamy, Mustafa, and Oddi. “She is trying to distract us from our questioning. This is not important.”
The expressions of the Mustafa, Lourdusamy, and Oddi holos suggested otherwise.
“During the days of the Hegemony,” continued Aenea, her good eyelid fluttering with the effort to focus her attention and steady her voice through the long, slow swells of pain, “the Core decided that it was prudent to diversify the physical Core components—bubble-memory matrices deep underground on the nine Labyrinthine worlds, fatline servers in the orbital industrial complexes around Tau Ceti Center, Core entity personae traveling along farcaster combands, and the megasphere connecting it all laced through the farcaster rifts in the Void Which Binds.”
Albedo folded his arms. “You’re raving.”
“But after the Fall,” continued Aenea, holding her good eyelid open and defying the gray man with her stare, “the Core got worried. Meina Gladstone’s attack on the farcaster medium gave you pause, even if the damage to your megasphere was repairable. You decided to diversify further. Multiply your personae, miniaturize essential Core memories, and make your parasitism on the human neural networks more direct…”
Albedo turned his back on her and gestured toward the nearest Nemes-thing. “She’s raving. Sew her lips shut.”
“No!” commanded Cardinal Lourdusamy. The fat man’s eyes were bright and attentive. “Don’t touch her until I command it.”
The Nemes on Aenea’s right had already picked up a needle and roll of heavy thread.
Now the pale-faced female paused and looked to Albedo for instructions.
“Wait,” said the Councillor.
“You wanted your neural parasitism to be more direct,” said Aenea. “So your billions of Core entities each formed its surrounding matrix in cruciform shape and attached themselves directly to your human hosts. Every one of your Core individuals now has a human host of its own to live in and destroy at will. You remain connected via the old dataspheres and new Gideon-drive megasphere nodes, but you enjoy dwelling so close to your food source…”
Albedo threw his head back and laughed, showing perfect teeth. He opened his arms and turned back to the three human holos. “This is marvelous entertainment,” he said, still chuckling. “You’ve arranged all this for her interrogation”—he flicked manicured nails in the general direction of the dungeon chamber, the skylight, the iron crossbeams upon which Aenea was clamped—“and the girl ends up playing with your minds. Pure nonsense. But wonderfully entertaining.”
Cardinal Mustafa, Cardinal Lourdusamy, and Monsignor Oddi were looking at Councillor Albedo most attentively, but their holographic fingers were touching their holographic chests.
The red-robed holo of Lourdusamy rose from its invisible chair and walked over to the edge of the grate. The holographic illusion was so perfect that Aenea could hear the slight rustling of the pectoral cross as it swung from its cord of red silk; the cord was intertwined with gold thread and ended in a large red and gold tuft. Aenea concentrated on watching the swinging cross and its clean silk cord rather than paying attention to the agony in her mutilated hands. She could feel the poison quietly spreading its way through her limbs and torso like the tumors and nematodes of a growing cruciform. She smiled. Whatever else they did to her, the cells of her body and blood would never accept the cruciform.
“This is interesting but irrelevant, my child,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy. “And this”—he flicked his short, fat fingers in the direction of her wounds and nakedness as if repulsed by it—“is most unpleasant.” The holo leaned closer and his intelligent little pig eyes bored into her. “And most unnec. Tell the Councillor what he wishes to know.”
Aenea raised her head to look into the big man’s eyes. “How to ’cast without a farcaster?”
Cardinal Lourdusamy licked his thin lips. “Yes, yes.”
Aenea smiled. “It is simple, Your Eminence. All you have to do is come to a few classes, learn about learning… the language of the dead, of the living, how to hear the music of the spheres… and then take communion with my blood or the blood of one of my followers who has drunk the wine.”
Lourdusamy backed away as if slapped.
He raised the pectoral cross and held it in front of him like a shield. “Blasphemy!” he bellowed. “Jesus Christus est primogenitus mortuorum; ipsi gloria et imperium in saecula saeculorum!”
“Jesus Christ was the first born of the dead,” Aenea said softly, the reflected light from the cross glaring in her good eye. “And you should offer him glory. And dominion, if you choose. But it was never his intention that human beings should be revived from death like laboratory mice at the whim of thinking machines…”
“Nemes,” snapped Councillor Albedo and this time there was no countermand. The Nemes female near the wall walked over to the grate, extended five-centimeter nails, and raked them down Aenea’s cheeks from just under each eye, slicing through muscle and exposing my dear friend’s cheekbones to the harsh light. Aenea let out a long, terrible sigh and slumped back against the girder. Nemes moved her face closer and showed her small, sharp teeth in a wide grin. Her breath was carrion.
“Chew off her nose and eyelids,” said Albedo. “Slowly.”
“No!” shouted Mustafa, leaping to his feet, hurrying forward and reaching out to stop Nemes. His holographic hands passed through Nemes’s all too solid flesh.
“A moment,” said Councillor Albedo, holding up one finger. Nemes paused with her mouth open above Aenea’s eyes.
“This is monstrous,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “As was your treatment of me.”
Albedo shrugged. “It was decided that you needed a lesson, Your Eminence.”
Mustafa was quivering with outrage. “Do you truly believe you are our masters?”
Councillor Albedo sighed. “We have always been your masters. You are rotting flesh wrapped around chimpanzee brains… gibbering primates decaying toward death from the moment of your birth. Your only role in the universe was as midwives to a higher form of self-awareness. A truly immortal life-form.”
“The Core…” said Cardinal Mustafa with great disdain.