She shifted in her leather seat. It felt hard and uncomfortable. “Redeem me from what, Your Holiness?”
“I was acquainted with your father, you know.”
She knew.
“Indeed,” the pope went on, “I was the bishop to whom he came for advice upon learning that your mother was pregnant.”
This Serena did not know.
“He wanted your mother to have an abortion.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said, scarcely able to contain the bitterness in her voice. “So I take it you advised him not to?”
“I told him that God can make something beautiful even out of the ugliest of circumstances.”
“I see.”
Serena didn’t know if the pope expected her to thank him for saving her life or was simply relating historical events. He was studying her, she could tell. Not with judgment, nor pity. He simply looked curious.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, Serena,” the pope said, and Serena leaned forward. “Considering the circumstances of your birth, how can you love Jesus?”
“Because of the circumstances surrounding his birth,” she replied. “If Jesus was not the one, true Son of God, then he was a bastard and his mother, Mary, a whore. He could have given in to hatred. Instead he chose love, and today the Church calls him Savior.”
The pope nodded. “At least you agree the job is taken.”
“Indeed, Your Holiness,” she replied. “He gave you a pretty good job too.”
He smiled. “A job which I’m told you once said you’d like to have someday.”
Serena shrugged. “It’s overrated.”
“True,” the pope replied and eyed her keenly, “and rather unattainable for former nuns who have repeated the sins of their fathers.”
Suddenly her camera-ready facade crumbled and she felt naked. With this pope, a private audience was more like a therapy session than an inquisition, and she had run out of righteous indignation to prop herself up.
“I’m not sure I understand what His Holiness is getting at,” she stammered, wondering just how much the pope knew. Then, remembering the fate of those who so often underestimated him, she decided it was best to come clean before she further embarrassed herself. “There was one close call, Your Holiness,” she said. “But you forget I’m no longer a nun nor bound by my vows. You’ll be happy to know, however, that I plan to remain celibate until I marry, which I suspect will be never.”
The pope said, “But why then did—”
“Just because we did not physically consummate our relationship did not mean we did not emotionally,” Serena explained. “And my feelings left me no room for doubt that I could not be a bride of Christ in this life and burn with passion for a man. Not without being a hypocrite like my father. So if you’re thinking of using this issue to undermine my credibility—”
“Nonsense,” said the pontiff. “Doctor Yeats’s name came up in an intelligence report, that’s all.”
“Conrad?” she asked, awed by the Vatican’s operatives.
“Yes,” said the pope. “I understand you met him in Bolivia during your former life as our most promising linguist.”
She leaned back in her chair. Perhaps a manuscript had turned up that required translation. Perhaps His Holiness had a job for her. She began to breathe easier. She was relieved to escape the subject of her celibacy, but the pope’s reference to Conrad had aroused her curiosity.
“That’s right. I was working with the Aymara tribe of the Andes.”
“An understatement,” the pope said. “You used the Aymara language to develop translation software for the Earth Summit at the United Nations. This you accomplished with a personal laptop computer after experts at a dozen European universities using supercomputers failed.”
“I wasn’t the first,” she explained. “A Bolivian mathematician, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, did it in the 1980s. Aymara can be used as an intermediate language for simultaneously translating English into several other languages.”
“Six languages only,” the pope said. “But you’ve apparently unlocked a more universal application.”
“The only secret to my system is the rigid, logical structure of Aymara itself,” she said, her confidence returning in force. “It’s ideal for transformation into computer algorithm. Its syntactical rules can be spelled out in the kind of algebraic shorthand that computers understand.”
“I find this all quite fascinating,” he told her. “As close to hearing the whisperings of God as man may likely get in this life. Whyever did you give it up?”
“I still make a contribution now and then, Your Holiness.”
“Indeed, you are quite the freelancer. Not only are you Mother Earth and an official goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, but I see you worked on the
Latinatis Nova et Vetera,”
he said, referring to the Vatican’s “new look” Latin dictionary designed by traditionalists to catapult the ancient tongue of Virgil into the new millennium.
“That’s right, Your Holiness.”
“So we have you to thank for coining the Latin terms for
disco
and
cover girl
—
caberna discothecaria
and
terioris paginae puello.”
“Don’t forget
pilamalleus super glaciem.”
The pope had to pause to make the mental translation. “Ice hockey?”
“Very good, Your Holiness.”
The pope smiled in spite of himself before growing very serious. “And what do you call a man like Doctor Yeats?”
“A
sordidissimi hominess,”
she said, not skipping a beat. “One of the dregs of society.”
The pope nodded sadly. “Is this man the reason why you chose to suppress your gifts, leave the Church, and run off to become Mother Earth?”
“Conrad had nothing to do with my decision to devote my energies to protecting the environment,” she said, sounding more defensive than she intended.
The pope nodded. “But you met him while working with the Aymara tribe in Bolivia, shortly before you left the Church. What do you know about him?”
She paused. There was so much she could say. But she would stick with the essentials. “He’s a thief and a liar and the greatest, most dangerous archaeologist I’ve ever met.”
“Dangerous?”
“He has no respect for antiquity,” she said. “He believes the information gleaned from a discovery is more important than the discovery itself. Consequently, in his haste to uncover a virgin find he will often destroy the integrity of the site, future generations be damned.”
The pope nodded. “That would explain why the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities has forbidden him from ever setting foot in Luxor again.”
“Actually, the council’s director general lost some money to Conrad in a card game when they were consulting on the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas,” Serena said. “The way I heard it was that he paid Conrad off with a Nineteenth Dynasty statuette and that Conrad’s been trying to unload it on the black market ever since. He needs the money, badly I understand, in order to keep going. It would make a wonderful addition to our collection here if you’re interested.”
The pope frowned to show he did not appreciate her dry sense of humor. “And I take it the story is the same in Bolivia, where Doctor Yeats was barred a year after your encounter with him?”
Serena shrugged. “Let’s just say that he found a certain
generalissimo
’s daughter to be more interesting than the ruins.”
“Do I detect a note of jealousy?”
Serena laughed. “There will always be another woman for a schemer like Conrad. The treasures of antiquity, on the other hand, belong to all of us.”
“I’m getting a clear picture. Whatever did you see in him, Sister Serghetti, if I may ask?”
“He’s the most honest soul I’ve ever met.”
“You said he was a liar.”
“That’s part of his honesty. What does he have to do with all this?”
“Nothing, really, beyond his effect on you,” the pope said, but Serena felt there was more to it than that.
“But what am I to you, Your Holiness, if you’ll forgive my asking? I’m no longer a Catholic nun or Vatican linguist or any other official appendage of the Church.”
“Be it as a nun or lay specialist we contract with, Serena, you’ll always be part of the Church and the Church will always be part of you. Whether you or I like it or not. Right now, our chief interest is in
how the Aymara came up with their language. It’s so pure that some of your colleagues suspect it didn’t just evolve like other languages but was actually constructed from scratch.”
She nodded. “An intellectual achievement you’d hardly expect from simple farmers.”
“Exactly,” said the pope. “Tell me, Sister Serghetti, where did the Aymara come from?”
“The earliest Aymara myth tells of strange events at Lake Titicaca after the Great Flood,” she explained. “Strangers attempted to build a city on the lake.”
“Tiahuanaco,” said the pope, “with its great Temple of the Sun.”
“Your Holiness is well informed,” Serena said. “The abandoned city is said to have originally been populated by people from ‘Aztlan,’ the lost island paradise of the Aztecs.”
“A lost island paradise. Interesting.”
“A common pre-Flood myth, Your Holiness. Many myths speak of the lost island paradise and have a deluge motif. There’s the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s account of Atlantis, of course. And the Haida and Sumerian, too, share a similar story of their origins.”
The pope nodded. “And yet it’s hard to imagine two more different cultures than the Haida and Sumerian, one in the rainy Pacific Northwest of America and the other in the arid desert of Iraq.”
“That a common myth of some event is shared by disparate cultures isn’t evidence that such an event took place,” she said dryly, the academic in her taking over. “Fossil records and geology, for example, tell us there was a flood, an ice age, and the like. But whether there was a Noah who built an ark, and whether he was Asian, African, or Caucasian, is pure speculation. And there’s certainly no proof of any island paradise.”
“Then what do you make of these similar stories?”
“I’ve always considered them to be indicators of the universality of the human intellect.”
“So to you Genesis is nothing more than a metaphor?”
She had forgotten the pope’s habit of turning their every conversation back to her faith. She slowly nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“You don’t seem so sure.”
“Yes, definitely.” There, she said it. He had forced her to say it.
“And the Church itself? Just a good idea gone bad?”
“Like all human institutions, the Church on earth is corrupt,” she said. “But it’s given us hospitals, orphanages, and hope for the human race. Without it civilization would sink into a moral abyss.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.” There was tenderness in the pope’s eyes and a tone of disbelief in his voice as he asked her, of all people: “Sister Serghetti, I want you to pause and consider whether the Spirit is prompting you in your heart to take on a holy mission that may truly make you worthy of your calling as Mother Earth.”
The only thing the Spirit was telling her was that something wasn’t right here. She had rebuked the Vatican and left the Church. Now the pope was asking her to be his official emissary. “What sort of mission?”
“I understand you are an official observer and adviser to the implementation of the international Antarctic Treaty.”
“I’m an adviser for the Treaty’s Committee for Environmental Protection,” she explained. “But I represent Australia, Your Holiness, not the Church.”
The pope nodded and tapped his fingers on his armrest. “You know those recent news reports about seismic activity in Antarctica?”
“Of course, Your Holiness. A glacier the size of Delaware was sliced off last month after the most recent temblor. And another one the size of Rhode Island broke away before that. In short order it may all add up to the equivalent of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.”
“What if I told you that our intelligence sources have located a secret and illegal American military expedition in Antarctica, in land claimed by your own homeland, Australia?”
“I’d say the Americans are violating the Madrid Protocol of 1991, which established Antarctica as a zone of peace reserved exclusively for scientific research purposes. All military activities are banned from the continent.” Serena leaned forward. “How do you know this?”
“Three U.S. spy satellites recently disappeared from orbit,” he explained.
She blinked. How long had the Vatican been in the business of tracking foreign spy satellites? “Perhaps they stopped working or were deliberately destroyed,” she suggested.
“Dead U.S. satellites are usually left in orbit,” the pope explained as easily as if he were discussing New Testament hermeneutics. “And if one satellite, let alone three, had died, congressional overseers would have made more noise than Vatican II. That did not happen.”
“I’m afraid we’ve stepped beyond my area of expertise, Your Holiness,” Serena said. “What are you suggesting happened?”
“The satellites were placed into orbits that would move more slowly across the skies than other high-altitude spy cameras, giving them more time to photograph targets.”
“Targets?”
“Military strikes are usually mounted immediately before a spy satellite passes overhead, so they can record the damage before the enemy has time to cover it up. But after the latest seismic activity in Antarctica, no known spy satellites would have passed over the affected area. That suggests that one or more of the missing satellites may be watching.”
“Are you suggesting the U.S. military is actually causing those seismic shock waves?” she asked.
“That’s what I want you to find out.”
She sat back in her chair. The pope had no reason to lie to her. But there must be more to this than what he was telling her. Why else would the Holy See take such profound interest in an empty continent populated by more penguins than Catholics?
“Is there something more you want to tell me?” she asked. “Does it involve Doctor Yeats?”
The pope nodded. “He apparently has joined the American expedition in Antarctica.”
So it did involve Conrad, she realized, but in an altogether unexpected scenario. “Why would the American military need an archaeologist?”