“Move aside,” ordered Councillor Albedo. “Or…”
“Or what?” The Grand Inquisitor laughed. “Or you will torture me as you are torturing this deluded woman? Or will you have your monster beat me unto death again?” Mustafa swung his holographic arm back and forth through Nemes’s tensed torso, then through Albedo’s hard form. The Grand Inquisitor laughed and turned toward Aenea. “You are dead anyway, child. Tell this soulless creature what it needs to know and we will put you out of your misery in seconds with no…”
“Silence!” shouted Albedo and held up one hand like a curled claw.
The holo of Cardinal Mustafa screamed, clutched its chest, rolled across the grate through Aenea’s bleeding feet and the iron girder, rolled through one of the Nemeses’ legs, screamed again, and winked out of existence.
Cardinal Lourdusamy and Monsignor Oddi looked at Albedo. Their faces were expressionless. “Councillor,” said the Secretary of State in a soft, respectful tone, “could I interrogate her for a moment? If we are not successful, you can do what you wish with her.”
Albedo stared coolly at the Cardinal, but after a second he clapped Nemes on her shoulder and the killing thing stepped back three paces and closed her wide mouth.
Lourdusamy reached toward Aenea’s mutilated right hand as if to hold it. His holographic fingers seemed to sink into my darling’s torn flesh. “Quod petis?” whispered the Cardinal, and ten light-minutes away, screaming and writhing in my high-g tank, I understood him through Aenea: What do you seek? “Virtutes,” whispered Aenea. “Concede mihi virtutes, quibus indigeo, valeum impere.” And drowning in fury and sorrow and the sloshing fluids of my high-g tank, accelerating farther from Aenea every second, I understood—Strength. That I be given the strength I need to carry out this, my resolve.
“Desiderium tuum grave est,” whispered Cardinal Lourdusamy. Your desire is a serious one. “Quod ultra quaeris?” What else do you seek?
Aenea blinked blood out of her good eye so that she could see the Cardinal’s face. “Quaero togam pacem,” she said softly, her voice firm. I seek peace.
Councillor Albedo laughed again. “Your Eminence,” he said, his voice sarcastic, “do you think that I do not understand Latin?”
Lourdusamy looked in the direction of the gray man. “On the contrary, Councillor, I was sure that you did. She is near breaking, you know. I see it in her face. But it is the flames she fears most… not the animal to which you are feeding her.”
Albedo looked skeptical.
“Give me five minutes with the flames, Councillor,” said the Cardinal. “If that fails, turn your beast loose again.”
“Three minutes,” said Albedo, stepping back next to the Nemes that had raked furrows into Aenea’s face.
Lourdusamy stepped back several paces.
“Child,” he said, speaking Web English again, “this will hurt very much, I am afraid.” He moved his holographic hands and a jet of blue flame beneath the grate spurted into a column of flame that singed the bare soles of Aenea’s clamped feet. Skin burned, blackened, and curled. The stench of burning flesh filled the cell.
Aenea screamed and attempted to pull free of the clamps. They did not budge. The hanging bar of iron on which she was pinned began to glow at the bottom, sending pain up her bare calves and thighs. She felt her skin blister there as well. She screamed again. Cardinal Lourdusamy waved his hand again and the flame dropped back beneath the grate, becoming a pilot light watching like the blue eye of a hungry carnivore.
“That is just a taste of the pain you will feel,” murmured the Cardinal. “And, unfortunately, when one is seriously burned, the pain continues even after the flesh and nerves are irreparably burned away. They say that it is the most painful way to die.”
Aenea gritted her teeth to keep from screaming again. Blood dripped from her torn cheeks to her pale breasts… those breasts I had held and kissed and fallen asleep against. Imprisoned in my high-g créche, millions of kilometers away and preparing to spin up to C-plus and fugue oblivion, I screamed and raged into silence.
Albedo stepped onto the grate and said to my dear friend, “’Cast away from all this. ’Cast to the ship that is taking Raul to certain death and free him. ’Cast to the Consul’s ship. The autosurgeon there will heal you. You will live for years with the man you love. It is either that or a slow and terrible death here for you, and a slow and terrible death for Raul elsewhere. You will never see him again. Never hear his voice. ’Cast away, Aenea. Save yourself while there is still time. Save the one you love. In a minute, this man will burn the flesh from your legs and arms until your bones blacken. But we will not let you die. I will turn Nemes loose to feed on you. ’Cast away, Aenea. ’Cast away now.”
“Aenea,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy, “es igitur paratus?” Are you ready, therefore?
“In nomine Humanitus, ego paratus sum,” said Aenea, looking into the Cardinal’s eyes with her one good eye. In the name of Humanitus, I am ready.
Cardinal Lourdusamy waved his hand. All of the gas jets flamed high at once. Flame engulfed my darling and the Albedo cybrid.
Aenea stretched in agony as the heat engulfed her.
“No!” screamed Albedo from the midst of flames and walked from the burning grate, his synthetic flesh burning away from his false bones. His expensive gray clothes rose toward the distant ceiling in burning wads of cloth and his handsome features were melting onto his chest. “No, damn you!” he screamed again and reached for Lourdusamy’s throat with blazing fingers.
Albedo’s hands went through the hologram. The Cardinal was staring at Aenea’s face through the flames. He raised his right hand.
“Miserecordiam Dei… in nomine Patris, et Filia, et Spiritu Sanctus.”
These were the last words that Aenea ever heard as the flames closed on her ears and throat and face.
Her hair exploded in flame. Her vision burned a bright orange and faded as her eyes were fused with flames.
But I felt her pain in the few seconds of life left to her. And I heard her thoughts like a shout—no, like a whisper in my mind.
Raul, I love you.
Then the heat expanded, the pain expanded, her sense of life and love and mission expanded and lifted through the flames like smoke rising toward the unseen ceiling skylight, and my darling Aenea died.
I felt the second of her death like an implosion of all sight and sound and symbol essence. Everything in the universe worth loving and living for disappeared at that second.
I did not scream again. I quit pounding the walls of my high-g tank. I floated in weightlessness, feeling the tank drain, feeling the drugs and umbilicals for cryogenic fugue fall into me and onto me like worms at my flesh. I did not fight. I did not care.
Aenea was dead.
The torchship translated to quantum state.
When I awoke, I was in this Schrödinger cat box death cell.
It did not matter. Aenea was dead.
32
There was neither clock nor calendar in my cell. I do not know how many standard days, weeks, or months I was beyond the reach of sanity. I may have gone many days without sleeping or slept for weeks on end. It is difficult or impossible to tell.
But eventually, when the cyanide and the laws of quantum chance continued to spare me from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, I began this narrative. I do not know why my imprisoners provided me with a slate text ’scriber and stylus and the ability to print a few pages of recycled microvellum. Perhaps they saw the possibility of the condemned man writing his confession or using the ’scriber stylus as an impotent way to rage at his judges and jailers. Or perhaps they saw the condemned man’s writing of his sins and injuries, joys and losses of joy as an additional source of punishment. And perhaps in a way it was.