Kill The Monster, Chapter 23

XXI. THE GREEN FAIRY

"Be seeing you."

"In a mirror, sooner than you think."

The young man walked out of the café into a barrage of camera flashes and loud questions in English from members of the Press, thrusting microphones in his face like a furry pike phalanx. Sean pitied his retreating back. He had forgotten how thoroughly unpleasant a free press had been.

He drained his last - or at least his current - absinthe and slammed it down on the bartop.

"Time gentlemen please. Stephanie, I believe my transport awaits."

Stephanie nodded. "The Gate to Twenty-Twenty-Five is back, Holiness. My successor awaits you on the other side."

Sean raised an eyebrow. "Your successor?"

Stephanie nodded again curtly. "I die in 2024. An assassination attempt by antiecumenicals."

He was appalled. "Stephanie."

"I am sorry, Pastor. I would have served you longer."

"I would have been served by you longer." He considered his next statement carefully. "Few have ever served me better."

"Pastor."

He took her hand, kissed it with a dignity he had thought he had lost a decade ago, then rose to his feet with difficulty despite all the physiotherapy. The bullet had struck deep. Any of the hundred million Church soldiers fighting their way across China back home in five years' time would have died from such a wound. The standard of medical care accorded the Pastor, however, had magically turned a fatal injury into mere constant agonizing pain.

The back of the bar should have contained a kitchen, a yard, a boat landing. Instead, the room it opened into was huge, containing armed guards, scurrying technicians, watchful supervisors. The focus of the room was an medusa's coiffe of electronics coiled around a slender metal walkway which crossed it like a bridge in an ornamental garden.

"Coordinate t plus five", said a voice into an intercom. The friendly light of the portal, the rainbow that told God's people he would never again make war upon the world, burgeoned in the middle of the ring of electronics, grew to touch its sides. A blast of superheated air raged down the ramp in Sean's face. On the other side of the portal, a second downramp, identical to the first, abutted the Gate interface. The light from up-time, as well as the Future Wind, was fierce; the Gateon the other side was mounted in the open, seeing no need to hide from prying eyes. He heard a soothing female voice, almost certainly automated, over a second intercom speaker, saying ATTENTION. GATE ACTIVATION. INCOMING CONNECTION FROM TWENTY-THIRTEEN C.E. THIS IS AN UNSCHEDULED PASTORAL CONNECTION AND STATION PATRONS ARE REQUESTED TO COOPERATE WITH GATE SECURITY IN ENSURING HIS HOLINESS AN UNDISTURBED ONWARD JOURNEY. SCHEDULED CONNECTION TWELVE IS CANCELLED WITHOUT WARNING; STATION SECURITY APOLOGIZES FOR THE UNAVOIDABLE INCONVENIENCE -

He was ushered up the ramp by pairs of hands from twenty-thirteen, and passed to pairs of hands from twenty-twenty-five. He was suddenly aware that he was having difficulty in walking. Crossing the Interface, as it always did, felt like breaking through a soap bubble, or an afterbirth.

"Welcome home, Pastor."

"Come with us."

"We are behind schedule."

"Your ongoing flight is waiting."

"I need a drink."

"We have prepared the stewards on your flight."

The uniforms were more obvious now, more obtrusive. Back in the day, in twenty-thirteen, Committee members had to resort to secret signs and ultraviolet tattoos, recognize each other by codes invisible to local-yokel law enforcement agencies and national intelligence networks. Here, the Church owned half the world and was working on the other half. It was eighteen years old and could wear what it liked.

Rain - warm rain - lashed his face, so hard that it was painful. The sky was grey, marbled with lightning. This Gate was on a rubber-paved steel platform surrounded by a raging sea that threatened to swamp it, rise higher than it, engulf it, digest it like an angry grey amoeba. Many of the technicians, he could see, were tethered to the deck with lifelines. The platform was bathed with that intensely beautiful yellow light born of storm struggling against sunshine; up above, a clear blue sky was holding its own against a solid mass of cumulonimbus, a dark roof closing across Heaven.

"GOOD JOB YOU CAME THROUGH WHEN YOU DID, PASTOR", yelled a technician. "THE AMPHIBIAN MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO TAKE OFF IF THE WIND HAD PICKED UP ANY HARDER."

Another platform held an Alsin Fischer - a later, handier model, keeping its floats well out of the treacherous waves, secured to the deck with cables. The weather had grown serious enough for the ekranoplan's pilot to have already started his engines. Metal underneath the machine's belly strakes was glowing cherry red from its exhaust.

"I need a drink", he heard himself say again.

"Later, Holiness", replied reassuring voices. "We promise."

He was being ushered towards the screaming steel delta as it strained at its leashes on the frail outlying platform. A ladder led to the single passenger seat. Nowadays, he had a dread of ladders. His legs no longer did the vertical climbing thing. This ladder also moved about as he held it, trying to get away.

With two or three Committee men helping him up the ladder from both above and below, he was in the cabin in under a minute, buckled in by helpful hands. The small glade of umbrellas he hadn't even noticed going up over his head went down, and a weatherproof, bulletproof canopy took their place. The engines shrieked in the wings, and the ekranoplan finally rose off the platform, turning nose-on to the wind.

A storm fit to drown mountains was coming out of Africa. Nowadays, one usually was. Below him, he could see neat Venetian reefs where the walls of palaces once had been. The Chinese warhead had drowned the city; now the Mediterranean's few remaining uncaught fish flickered in meagre shoals above the ruined reliquary of St. Mark. The bronze quadriga had been salvaged and returned finally to Constantinople. The angels and lions now adorned the homes of High Primates in the Cornish Riviera. He knew a Primate who had had his bathroom retiled in gold mosaic salvaged from the inside of St. Mark's sunken dome. To the south and east, the storm formed a wall across the world.

To the north and west, however, even when faced with climatic cataclysm, Italy still continued to breed. Mestre and Padova had become multi-storey cities. Roads had been roofed over, people re-housed in massive urban blocks, eating government food, drinking government water, their lives made tolerable by government electricity. Helotone addiction had reduced the unnecessary consumption of capitalism and softened the climatic impact of overpopulation, but crops were still failing in the fields, most species of fish familiar to the table had been overtrawled, pursed, reefed and seined to extinction, and ozone holes at the Poles were marching on the equator to meet bands of dustbowl from the tropics. In those bands, meteorologists warned, the heat had grown so great that carbonates were being released from the rocks. The Sahara was becoming a second Venus; and still the Pastor of all the world refused to countenance constraints on global population, claiming that this countermanded instructions in Torah, Koran, and Bible combined.

I'm only obeying orders.

"We like flying with you, Pastor", said the pilot through his earphones. "Flying out of Venice is getting risky nowadays, but we know if we're up with the Pastor, we're coming back. God won't kill the Pastor."

From up here, he could see the gigantic set created for the Miracle of the Angel, built on massive concrete piles sunk into the muck that had once been the Ponte Dell'Accademia. He could see little off-duty angels walking, talking, smoking amid the single-sided porticoes, minarets, and campaniles of some High Primate miracle director's drug-induced wank fantasy of Heaven. A façade that had only ever had to fool a gaggle of old Venetian women and Giustiniano. He could even see the heavily disguised Gate assembly that led into 2013; inoperative now, of course.

"God", he said, "kills everyone in the end."

This shut the pilot up.

The trees in the fields bordering the hypersonic terminal were all dead; not dead-for-the-winter, but genuinely dead, dry white skeletons eliminated by the advancing heat. He could see a baobab growing amid the terminal buildings. As the amphibian gently settled to a halt in a cloud of dust, huge spiders the size of saucers scuttled out of burrows away from the noise.

The engines whined to a stop in the wings. An armed guard took up position around the plane. The canopy hissed open, and he was extracted from the passenger seat like meat out of an oyster. Gentle but firm hands walked him down the ladder across a sea of dust lined with soldiers - dust that would soon be mud when the oncoming storm hit it. Whether dust or mud, when it drifted in from the dead fields, it was a problem. Aircraft designed to land on flat dry surfaces went into three-wheel drifts when trying to land on powder.

The main runway, two full kilometres long, was the only one working, always the case wherever the Pastor travelled. The hypersonic transport, a surgically clean needle of ceramic and alloy composites, was waiting obediently, already in takeoff position, for her only passenger. Pastoral emblems glittered on her wings, swept out to either side for takeoff.

The inside of the plane was warm and comforting, round and pink as a womb. Now that homosexuality had been officially excised from society, pink had been reclaimed for the use of heterosexual men. An absinthe was pressed into his hand. He was helped into a chair larger than he was.

Then, abruptly, the chair was turned to the wall and a hated face filled the forward bulkhead. He had no idea flat screen TVcould be so unobtrusive.

This time, the face was dressed down, in what looked like a Russian Army tunic. Where there should have been red stars, he saw the busy Committee logo, incorporating stars, moons, crosses, and the symbols of whatever new religions were being amalgamated right now.

"You can't take your drink, Agnello. You are behind schedule. Your first ever meeting with Our Holiness, and you have to combine it with the first time you've taken a drink in years. I have to allow it, because I know it happened, but you're a mess, a shower, and you'll be thoroughly punished in the morning."

Sean raised the absinthe glass to the screen and grinned moronically. "Cheers." The man in the screen glowered at him in disgust.

"I would very much like to know", he said, "what our mother told you in her second note."

Sean nodded ponderously. "Yeah, I bet you would. But you ain't gunna."

"It's our mother, Sean", said the General.

"Should have remembered that before you buried her alive." The engines were warming in preparation for takeoff. Hands were buckling safety straps across him.

"I was acting under orders. You're insufferable when you're drunk."

"Drinking dulls the effects of turannone." Sean made a funnel of his lips and squirted out a green fountain of louche at the screen.

The screen blanked out, leaving no sign that the wall had ever been used for the purpose.

"Modern technology", marvelled Sean.

The engines roared, much louder than they should. A hand took the absinthe from him, like candy from a baby. The aircraft took off like a theme park ride. He felt an anti-nausea injection hissing into his wrist. The world moved around him like a tumbling kaleidoscope - the aircraft's nose rolling, tilting up, racing to get out of the confines of the atmosphere as rapidly as possible, wasting tonnes of fossil fuel every second. Toppling into a ballistic trajectory, fighting the Earth's rotation, control surfaces outside the prism-thick windows glowing a deep blood red. Stars were now visible as faint glimmers; soon they would be solid drops of colour, Betelgeuse glowing like a coal, Sirius dog fang yellow. Even here, on the dayside of the Earth,they were visible - independent cells of polarization in the window had excised the sun from the sky.

He was in danger of becoming sober. He had to drink fast. He flailed his hands uselessly until unseen hands placed a fresh absinthe in them in an astronaut-style drinking tube.

"Is it safe for him to be drinking so heavily on the anti-emetics?"

"To be quite honest, we really have no idea. His metabolism, by now, is going where no human body's ever gone before."

The seat was very comfortable, though when he felt beneath it, his hands found no lifejacket. The louche was going down with hardly a taste of wormwood now, and the flight was nearly over. Hypersonic trips were more like roller coaster rides than air travel. He could remember when air travel had meant baggage check, and metal detectors, and queueing.

"Pastor!"

He looked round. He attempted to look all round himself through three hundred and sixty degrees, like an owl, but succeeded only in hurting his neck; he could see only startled medical attendants and flight security.

"Over here, Pastor! Stealthy does it and furtive, no-one knows I'm here but you."

A tiny little voice, coming from the gap between the windowpanes. The windows were made of a layer of lead anti-radiation glass, also acting as a micrometeoroid screen, giving way to a double layer of smart polymer. In between these last two layers, she was standing, tiny as an absinthe bottle, with crème-de-menthe lips, lime-twisted eyes, fluttering diaphanous wings, squeaking in a tiny ginger whine:

"Act completely normally, or they will suspect."

"I fully understand." He bent down elaborately to the window, trying to make the movement appear perfectly natural.

"Are all our preparations complete?"

He nodded his head like an oil wellhead. "They are."

"They understand nothing. We are too clever for them."

Again he nodded sagely, taking a slurp of absinthe that leaked from the corner of his mouth. He noticed that his plastic accordion glass was empty, held it up to the light, examined it, amazed at this impossibility. Unseen hands took the glass from him and refilled it. He accepted the glass again without questioning where it had come from.

"They think to weaken you, but they only make you stronger."

He nodded. "What does not fill me only takes me longer."

"Do you still have it? Do not pad your pocket, or refer to It, or you will alert them."

He assumed an expression of extreme cunning. "Mum is the word. That is the word. Three letters. I will name that tune in Mum."

Hands stole the absinthe glass away from him. He heard safety belts being buckled round him. His stomach vaulted into his throat as the plane hit something hard, airbrakes screaming on the frontiers of his consciousness.

"Only one more little jolt, from the -"

- the entire plane jerked backwards on the runway, and the whole cabin skewed wildly -

"- parachute, Pastor."

The wings were ticking as they cooled. Outside, he could see skyscrapers. Shattered-windowed, mouldering skyscrapers, scavenged for glass and steel and anything else of value that could be squeezed from their skeletons; but still, even today, among the tallest buildings on Earth. The tidemarks of the thermonuclear tsunamic of 2020 reached forty metres up some of the larger buildings. New York had been built too well. Even after the Chinese had let off a water bomb in Hudson Bay, it had refused to die, and still presented an annoying obstacle to shortwave radio traffic.

The hypersonic terminal had been built in what had once been Central Park; its construction had been hampered by the sheer number of high buildings, snipers' playgrounds, overlooking the site. Committee troops had had to occupy a ring of skyscrapers all around it. Wild animals, too, ran amok in the city, descendants of breeding pairs escaped from the Central Park zoo, thriving in the warming climate. The clouds of radioisotopes in the air had caused mutations in those creatures with low gestation periods and high litter sizes, leading to varieties of scorpion that were not only immune to nerve gas, but actually retained it in their venom sacs; blind species of shrew that saw by sonar and lived in pitch darkness; a neonate dragonfly the length of a man's arm that lived all its life as a nymph underwater, lurking in storm drains to drag mice and cats underwater. There were also the rather more pedestrian lions and tigers and bears.

He looked out at the terminal fence, twenty metres of slotted polymer ribbons, sharp as a continuous razorblade; a razorblade conducting twenty thousand volts at intervals along its surface. There were also automated gun pods, tunnelling sensors, and trapdoor spider mines that scuttled out of burrows up to their intended victim before exploding. But still the city was inhabited. Some people had exhibited a natural immunity to helotonovirus, exhibiting 'failure to take up'. They were exterminated whenever possible; but Manhattan was a three-dimensional rabbit warren, impossible to clear out with finality.

Here. This is where the last human beings on Earth live. This is man's Madagascar.

The crack split the window in half as if hot water had been poured on a frozen windscreen. He sat back automatically in surprise. An attendant moved between him and the window.

"Nothing to worry about, Pastor, probably an old police sniper rifle -"

"Had to be a rifle bullet, or it wouldn't even have marked the glass -"

"It hasn't even broken through to the second and third panes, look -"

He was steered gently away from the window. Outside, he could now hear a single continuous roar of small arms fire. The human ear had long ago lost the ability to distinguish the sound of one automatic bullet from another. These days, rates of fire were far too high for that.

"Come on, Pastor. There's a boarding tunnel here. It's, uh, very well-armoured."

The tunnel appeared to have been made to the same specifications as the orbital docking modules the hypersonic transports connected to in space. Built-in protection against micrometeoroids coming in at several miles a second would serve it well in this environment. The terminal beyond the tunnel was, despitethe fact that it had nominally been built exclusively for Sean's own use, basic. It was clinically clean, but there was a distinct absence of majestic fountains, endlessly repeating holographic sculptures, and thirty-metre statues of himself.

There was, however, a massive amount of personal security, each man standing to attention, half crazed with turannone, loyalty and overtraining, draped with enough weaponry to take down a tank.

"The Gate is this way, Pastor."

"I am the Gate", he heard himself reprove his escort. The walls of the terminal, like those of most buildings he had lived in for the last five years, were made of concrete thick enough to withstand anything less than a direct hit from a nuclear blast. There could be no French windows, no open sunkissed balconies, no lying in bed gazing through a skylight at the stars here.

The Gate room was small, purpose-built, oppressively functional. It smelt of overheated insulation and superconductor fluid. Sean remembered reading reports that a cocktail of the two was carcinogenic.

The Future Wind was a gentle breeze on his face when the Gate activated. He felt the hair writhe on his scalp like an electric medusa. Technicians touched earthing rods to his skin to prevent painful voltages from building; committees had been set up to discuss and avert the possibility of Spontaneous Pastoral Combustion.

He paused between the worlds, as he often did, atoms of his body swapping back and forth between decades. Thoughts his frontal lobes were having in 2035 would reach his back brain ten years earlier.

On the other side of the Gate, the terminal was gigantic.

A massive expanse of perfectly-fitted floor swept away into the distance, flanked by hundreds of similar Gates, rank upon tier upon file of them, each with a queue of patient travellers waiting to walk through into another world. Smiling uniformed staff shepherded the long lines into the rainbow glow of the Gates. There were lines of Brazilian favelanos, moms and dads wearing bizarre quantities of cold weather clothing, every single child wearing a Brazilian soccer shirt. There were lines of Africans, dressed more starchily and severely in their Sunday finest than any Westerner ever could. There were lines of Inuits, invaluable in the fight to tame umpteen worlds which the Exploitation Office had put under cobalt-nuclear winters - they certainly had nowhere left to go on Earth. There was a queue of young Faithful dressed in blinding white for Haj, questioned by stern-looking station security staff taking a close interest in their bicycles. There were even lines of Americans, dressed in T-shirts proclaiming that He Was Coming Again above bad screen prints of Sean's face.

Sean walked out of the Gate and slapped a hand on a fat midwesterner's back.

"Hi", he said. "I've Come Again. I'm not staying long. Have a nice day."

He wandered off in the direction of his handlers as the midwesterner spluttered, affected simultaneously by the combined forces of disrespect, irony and extreme religious anticlimax, topped off with a potentially lethal cocktail of turannone. Sean wondered if he would survive the experience.

The Ellis Island Departure Terminal was huge. It had only been a dream in Sean's time; the Church's supreme achievement, the main triumphal portal for the evacuation of Earth. So we can slope off and screw up a million more planets just the same as this.

The translation, he judged, must actually have moved him in space a few miles south, if the Terminal had been built in the same place as projected. The idea had been symbolic - Ellis Island, once the gateway to the New World for the Old, was now the gateway to as many new planets as this worn-out one had huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The Terminal had been decorated with all New York's landmarks, dominated by the stern green chaperone of Dame Liberty. The statue stood at the apex of a dome large enough to require internal weather control to prevent the water from a million sweating backs a day from forming rainclouds.

2035's Committee men were much the same as 2025's; many, of course, were the same men and women with a few more lines around the eyes, a few more pounds around the waist. Committee men, however, never gained too many pounds, all having that spare, hungry, starved-attack-dog look, so crazy that even their owner feared them. One of the group that moved out to surround and welcome Sean was hanging back kneeling on his heels on the departure lounge floor, head bowed, being beaten soundly by an identical colleague with an extensible aluminium cane that looked expressly made and carried for the purpose. With every blow he took, he repeated a single phrase like a mantra:

"I will remember my Pastor's dietary requirements
I will remember my Pastor's dietary requirements
I will remember my Pastor's dietary requirements
I will remember my Pastor's dietary requirements -"

The leader of the Committee greeting party, Stephanie's successor, smiled and extended a hand that Sean knew to be capable of punching through thin steel plate.

"Holiness."

Sean kidded himself he managed to show no outward sign of wishing to scream uncontrollably.

"Bram?"

"It's crazy, isn't it? I must admit, I still can't believe it myself. Holiness, being your head of security is an honour for which I can never greatly enough thank you."

"Uh, don't mention it." Another man was approaching holding a silver platter. On the platter rested a crystal glass of green absinthe.

"Pre-ban Pernod Fils", said Bram proudly. "We had a special pastoral batch produced in 1896. It's really fascinating material. You know the reason why it existed in the first place?"

"Phylloxera", said Sean. "An aphid which destroyed all the world's grapevines in the mid-nineteenth century, so that where twentieth-century historians read about Homer's wine-dark sea, they really had no clue what that wine might have tasted like. Today's wines are either produced from hybrids of the original vitis vinifera grape with American varieties, or from vitis vinifera grafted on to a phylloxera-resistant rootstock. For a good few decades, the French had no wine to drink, so they drowned their sorrows in absinthe instead."

Bram bowed in assent. "We are even now producing wines from unadulterated vitis vinifera on certain secret colony worlds, Pastor." He grinned. "You may be interested to know that wine critics hate them."

Sean drained the glass in one gulp. "I dislike wine critics. Have them all exterminated."

"At once, Pastor." Bram nodded to a subordinate, who started away.

"It was a joke, Bram."

Bram smiled. "Of course, Holiness. Very amusing." He nodded again to the subordinate, who returned to the group.

"You await your arrival", said Bram, "at the Pastoral Suite."

Sean replaced the glass on the platter giddily. "I was under the impression", he grinned, "that that suite was a Symphony." He realized he was drooling. Someone wiped the drool from his mouth.

"Ha-ha, Pastor. The Pastoral Suite is of course a physical and temporal location. Please be so kind." He waved a hand towards what, resting on the concourse floor between him and the great green feet of Dame Liberty, was clearly a helicopter.

"It's a helicopter", said Sean.

"We have dispensation to fly indoors", said Bram. Sean began to lurch in the direction of the helicopter, and found himself suddenly and gently dropped into a huge moving wheelchair. A plastic table was clipped onto one arm of the chair as it moved. A voice whispered in his left ear: "Will you require catheterization, Holiness?"

An absinthe glass dropped onto the table. He stared at the glass; a tiny voice spoke out of it to him. It may be necessary. To play the part to the full.

"I'll let you know."

He thought further on the subject.

"My successor, the man with the big military uniform - does he require catheterization?"

"Every time he comes here, Holiness."

I'll throw that one in his face. "Thank you for your assistance, ah -"

"Blair, Holiness. One of my ancestors was Prime Minister of England, you might remember him."

"Of course. The work you're doing now is even more valuable."

"I like to think so, Pastor."

The helicopter was all angles, a stealth machine. There were two rotors, one higher than the other - probably counterrotating, thought Sean. A stealth chopper can't have a vertical countertorque rotor on the back. It'd reflect radar. Inside, it was a mixture of executive lounge and geriatric care suite. Nurses wore fake stewardesses' outfits and horribly genuine smiles, and served drinks. His chair docked with the wall of the passenger compartment, and was clipped into devices that monitored his vital functions. The sound of the rotors winding up was almost inaudible,and it was a surprise when the rear rotor booted the chopper off the ground to rise, nose down, over the crowds streaming across the concourse from Earth, haemorrhaging humanity to cold worlds on the expanding frontier. In front of the helicopter, a door the size of football fields opened in the dome, a massive expenditure of energy to admit one man.

Bram was still standing next to him.

"The stewardesses", said Sean, having difficulty with the repeated s. "They're not human." He had difficulty with the h, u, m, a, and n in human.

Bram shook his head. "A new and improved species, Pastor. Your researches bore fruit. We've taken mankind back to the Garden. Of Eden, that is." He indicated a nearby stewardess like a professor pointing out the mating parts of an insect. "Eva here is a Batch Three, as incapable of telling a lie as she is of accepting an apple from a serpent. She is also capable of picking you up and lifting you clear over her head, and running ten miles without breaking a sweat. She is also immune to tooth decay." He nodded to Eva. "Curtsey for the Professor, Eva."

Eva did a bunny dip. "It is a great honour, Holiness."

Sean stared in drunken horror. "You've genetically modified a human being to be incapable of sin."

"Certainly have." Bram took Eva in one arm. "And she's the finest wife a man could have."

"I bet she is." He was having difficulty getting the words out now, but sudden eloquence seized him. "I'll bet she always has dinner on the table in time and your clothes pressed and ironed and the kids dressed ready for school like a good little wifey."

Bram was puzzled rather than offended. "Well - yes, Pastor."

"But it doesn't occur to you that that might be a bad thing, does it? Because you're pretty much like that already, aren't you, Bram? You'll always be there to tuck the, the offspring in at night, to read them stories, turn up to the school ball game. Spend your weekends digging the garden, making sure the house is just the way she wants it. It never even crossed your mind that everyone isn't like you, did it?"

It was horrible to have to do it, like kicking a puppy. But it needed to be done. The smile dropped off Bram's face. However, it was replaced, not by an expression of aghast desolation, but by one of earnest calcuation.

"Actually, Pastor, we did think of it. At your direction, in fact."

Sean slurped at a green column of absinthe. "Go on."

"Once we had created a genotype that seemed impeccable, it had been our original intention to create a viral delivery system for it and to spread it worldwide. However, you wisely intervened to prevent this."

"I did? Why?" The alcohol was clouding his understanding.

"It was your reasoning", said Bram, "that, should the human race become entirely capable of sin, and hence incapable of violent struggle, it would be open to attack by less scrupulous races from beyond the stars."

Sean gawped. "I thought that?" He reconsidered a moment, for perhaps ten times as many moments as he would have done if sober. "Yes, actually, that does sound like one of mine. Uh, have we discovered any, uh, races beyond the stars?"

Bram shook his head. "None. Multiple false alarms, I'm afraid - now that mankind is capable of travelling in both time and space unrestrictedly, we frequently run across the remains of old Resistance settlements, or even of old installations of our own that we've forgotten. Thousand-year human empires have sprung up on planets orbiting distant stars and been totally obliterated, leaving only a few worn stones to be discovered after the ice has retreated from the land and the world officially becomes ready for colonization. Many of the resultant life forms have been far more colourful and bizarre than any imagined xenobiont could ever be."

"So what did you - did I - do instead?"

"You decided, Holiness, that the majority of humanity would be infected with the new genome, thereby becoming immaculate, whilst a small remainder would be voluntarily immunized against it, and would act as humanity's protectors against any potential cosmic invader."

Sean laughed out loud, expelling a mouthful of absinthe. A stewardess diligently wiped his mouth.

"Mahar. Goddammit, the poor bastard was right. Kshatriyas. The warrior caste of India. You've divided humanity into castes. The workers provide food, hew wood, draw water both for themselves and for the warriors, who only exist in order to stave off some supposed, in this case invented threat. Kshatriyas, or protection racketeers, whatever you want to call them."

Bram cleared his throat. "You yourself said this, Pastor, and I quote you directly - 'If a flood does not come for a thousand years, this does not mean building a sea wall was unjustified.'"

"It depends", said Sean, "on whether you're building your sea-wall in Switzerland. Congratulations, you've taken humanity back a thousand years, back to the days when peasants tilled the land and were ruled over by illiterate louts with swords and horses. And this is all on top of the weight of helotone- and turannone-synthetic complexes you've been heaping the human genome with for so many years. It's a wonder any of them haven't grown vestigial tails and burrowed underground -"

Bram looked down hurriedly. "We don't talk about what happened in Arkansas", he said. Looking up again, he added, "but the helotone and turannone markers are being removed. They have to be to provide a safe foundation for the new impeccable genetic material. It was this incompatibility which previously led to the project's production of nothing but drooling idiots who proved useful for little else but careers in movie acting. The new genetic template has two components - first, the inoculation to remove helotone and/or turannone synthesis, after which the subject is kept under sedation and close supervision for two weeks in case of unpredictable sociopathic activity; then, a second inoculation with what we term the Redemptorvirus, the remover of original sin. The Redemptorvirus also has the unusual side-effect of instilling vegetarianism in ninety-nine per cent of cases, which greatly increases agricultural efficiency in these overpopulated times. We have both the Alpha and Beta inoculations ready to go right at this moment." Bram placed a hand on his wife's shoulder. "Eva is one of a prototype batch of one thousand. She is the perfect wife in every detail, Pastor; a fine cook, a devoted mother to our children, and an athletic sexual partner, as you yourself will testify -"

Sean's eyes opened wide in alarm. "I sleep with your wife?"

"At your request I am glad to provide her as a service, Pastor. Contraceptives are used, of course, in order to prevent turannone miscegenation. My only regret is that she can never be the mother of your child."

Sean swallowed with difficulty. Lord God, what am I become. The helicopter was descending now among ruined buildings, skyscrapers which appeared deserted, but at a second glance bristled with chameleon netting and as many target acquisition arrays as he counted gunbarrels. Below, if he craned his neck, he could see an entire six-lane four-way intersection, heaped with ruined cars, sun-bleached corpses and dried seaweed, sliding aside to allow the craft to land below the roadway and a carpet of cloud which would prevent satellite surveillance. In ten minutes' time, the intersection would be back in place, and any enemy none the wiser. An admirable precaution, had the Pastor still had any enemies.

The helicopter pad fitted precisely into an elevator shaft, which descended some twenty or thirty metres before smoothly decelerating to a stop at subway level. He could, in fact, see a cleanly-sliced cross-section of a subway train that had evidently formerly intersected with the shelf, left severed and concreted into the walls as an artistic footnote. A giant Greek letter Alpha was painted on one wall, doubtless for some air-headed Christian symbological purpose.

The bottom of the shaft opened out onto the inevitable underground railway. As he boarded and was helped into yet another spacious chair, the onboard stewardess smiled and said: "Good afternoon, Holiness. You asked me to apologize to yourself for the fact that this is not a monorail hollowed from the core of an extinct volcano."