Vatican Ambassador (45 page)

The glances shoot between them once again.

“Don’t you even know what he looks like?” BC asks.

“We do,” the eldest of the Eldred tells BC. “We do not, however, have any sort of pictorial description to provide to you.”

“No picture?” BC asks. The Eldred shake their heads in near unison.

BC shakes his head.

“Could you describe him?” Anita asks.

“What?” BC and the Eldred ask in unison.

“We can get an artist,” she tells them. BC doesn’t know what she’s driving at and looks at her puzzled.

“What?” she protests. “We have artists here! They can draw a likeness based on the Eldred’s description.”

“That’s a great idea, Anita!” BC exclaims.

“A what? Description? Drawing? Can draw? What is this?” The Eldred asks.

“A drawing,” Anita tells the alien. “A likeness… a picture?” she tries. The Eldred look back at her blankly. “Are you unfamiliar with the concept of art?”

“Art?” the eldest of the Eldred sniffs. “We have heard the word. Seen the term.”

“Seen the term?” Anita asks, her chance to be incredulous. “It’s a form of creation,” she tells them.

“Creation?” the eldest of the Eldred asks her, clearly not understanding.
Maybe the Eldred have no means of original expression because they themselves are
creations. A created race.

“Look!” Anita says loudly, exasperated. “We can at least try it, right? I think it will be easier to just do it than it will be to explain the process to you.” She turns on a nearby com. “Do we have any artists on base right now?” she asks.

BC hears the low volume voice as it responds, “We’ve got at least one designer on base, if not an actual artist, Anita.”

“Can you have them join me here in meeting room one J?”

“I’ll get right on it,” the voice assures her and signs off.

“When the artist gets here,” Anita tells the Eldred, “you’ll tell him what features Dolomay has, what he looked like, and they’ll try to recreate his image on a piece of paper.

“We see,” the Eldred says.

A thin young woman with long dark hair enters the room carrying a sketchpad and a box of pastels.

“Hi! Oh wow,” she says, her eyes going wide at the sight of the Eldred.

“Hi Martha,” Anita greets her. “The Eldred here would like to describe a person to you, so that you can draw his picture. Can you do that?”

“I can try,” she says.

Martha spends about a half an hour trying to draw Dolomay. BC and Anita try to help by asking the Eldred questions.

“Tall or short?” BC asks.

“Tall,” the eldest of the Eldred answers.

“What color hair? How long was it?” Anita asks.

“Blonde, and short.”

“Fat or thin?”

“Thin.”

“Cheekbones high or low?”

“High.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“Blue. Light blue.”

The girl finishes her drawing and holds it up for all to see.

“How’s this?” she asks the eldest of the Eldred.

“That… that appears to look like him,” the alien confirms.

“Handsome devil,” BC says.

“He looks like a Nazi,” Anita says. “The chiseled jaw, the steely eyes, the blonde hair.”

The others in the room look at her blankly.

“Nazis? World War Two? Germany? Twentieth Century?” She asks, trying to prompt them. The rest just shake their heads.

“Doesn’t anyone follow history anymore?” Anita asks rhetorically.

“He won’t blend in too easily if he looks like that,” BC says, thinking out loud. “Guy like that’ll stand out in a crowd pretty much anywhere. He’s what? Six six?”

“Yes, six feet and six inches,” the eldest of the Eldred says.

“Tall,” Anita says, nodding.

BC winces.

A headache?

Now?

Here it comes, building, the hammering…

“Headache?” Anita asks.

BC nods.

“I’m going to have to cut this short. I’m sorry,” BC tells the eldest of the Eldred. “But I can meet with you again later.”

“If you must,” the eldest of the Eldred says.

“Yeah,” BC says, wincing again as the pressure builds at his temples. “I’m afraid I must. Please excuse me,” he asks them, and then ducks out of the room. He grabs a passing tech.

“Is there a lounge nearby? A place where I can lay down?” BC asks her.

“Are you okay?” she asks BC.

“Not really,” he tells her.

Do I look like I’m fucking okay?

Do I look like I want a conversation?

Why do you think I need a place to lie down?!

“Come on, this way,” she says. She leads him down the hall to a small employee lounge with a couch long enough for him to lie on.

“Thanks,” BC tells her.

“No problem. Hope you feel better,” she says, and then leaves him alone. He crashes onto the couch and passes out.

BC feels like he’s dreaming. He’s lying on the couch in the lounge, but the walls of the room fall away, leaving him surrounded by a blank grayness. He once again feels like he’s in the center of a vast quiet ocean of gray, and once again a loud voice “speaks” inside his mind, not in his ears.
AHA! SO, THERE YOU ARE!

What?

You? Who are…

I’VE BEEN HOPING TO FIND YOU AGAIN.

Now I know you can’t be God, because God is omniscient! He can see everywhere! And you,
obviously, can’t or you’d have found me sooner. What is this place?

IT IS WHERE WE SPEAK TO EACH OTHER LONG DISTANCE. IT IS NOWHERE AND

EVERYWHERE AT ONCE. IT IS THE SEA OF OURSELVES. YOU ARE NOT ALWAYS HERE,
YOUNG ONE. YOU COME AND GO. I CANNOT FIND WHAT IS NOT THERE. NOW, YOU ARE

HERE AGAIN.

Who are you?!

WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?

I don’t know, you’re not the same, not like that first time on Fortune Station.
HOW DO YOU KNOW I AM DIFFERENT?

There is no sound here, but somehow you sound different. I can’t put my finger on it, but
something is different.

You’re… smaller, somehow; somehow more closed off.

CLOSED OFF? INTERESTING. YOU SENSE THE DISCIPLINE. THAT’S GOOD.

I don’t feel closed like that.

NO. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE DISCIPLINE. YOU ARE WIDE OPEN TO ME.

When you can see me.

CLEVER. YOU DO NOT TRUST ME.

A statement.

A TRUTH.

You can see that?

What else can you see? I can feel something… slippery, oily, greasy… what are you doing in my
head!?

LEARNING YOUR LANGUAGE.

LEARNING WHO YOU ARE BERNARD CAMPION. LEARNING…

Get out of my HEAD!!

DO NOT SHUT ME OUT!

How are you closed? Let me see, it feels like this…

DO NOT! DO NOT DO….

Huh. That seems to have shut him out…

BC wakes up. The strange dream still with him. The headache is gone. BC tries to hold on to the memory of the dream. He doesn’t like what it implies.

Great! I’m arguing with myself inside my head. Or, the alternative: Some kind of creature got
inside my mind, but somehow I blocked them and pushed them out.

It felt real, not like a “vision” or fantasy. Nothing “holy” feeling about it. Just Holy Shit! Was it
real? What was it, if it was real?

Who can I talk to about this? “Hello, Anita? Yeah, I’m hearing voices and feeling greasy
presences inside my head. Wanna chat? How fast would the straightjacket and medication
appear? Time to drug Pope BC, he’s lost it!

BC sits up on the couch. One of the Vatican entourage, Reverend May, is sitting across the room in an easy chair, reading a book. She looks up as he rises.

“Hello, your holiness,” she says. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah, the headache seems to be gone,” he tells her.

“Maybe you shouted it out,” she says quixotically.

“What?”

“You yelled out in your sleep,” she informs him.

“What did I say?”

“I believe it was,” she clears her throat, and attempts to mimic BC. “’Get out of my head!’ you said, something like that.”

“Was that all I said?” he asks her.

“That was it. So, like I said, maybe you shouted it out of your head.” She closes her book and gets up. “I can show you to your apartments if you’d like to lay down on a bed and rest, instead of that cozy little couch,” she tells him.

BC stands up.

“Sure, let’s go,” he says.

Maybe get some real sleep, this time. No more invaded dreams!

May shows BC to his apartments, the old Van Kilner residence on the base. He’s pleased to see they’ve cut a quick passageway to Van Kilner’s old apartments for him, eliminating the long stroll down the endless corridors.

I’m not a fan of all that walking.

Back in a proper bed inside the quiet apartment, BC is able to embark upon a relatively eventless sleep for the rest of the night. He wakes up refreshed, but for a few seconds he can’t remember where he is.

Where am I?

What happened?

Oh yeah, the asteroids.

That fucked up dream last night in the lounge!

BC sits up in bed. Suddenly, the thrumming begins again behind both of his temples, the headache coming on once again.

Headache! Fuck. Just stop, okay… just STOP!

The headache stops.

It stopped! Finally!

BC sits in bed, waiting for the headache to return.

Nothing!

BC smiles. He closes his eyes.

All of a sudden, BC feels like he’s surrounded by a crowd of people, all yelling different things at him, all at once. He opens his eyes. No one else is in the room, but he can still hear the cacophonous choir of voices in his head.

This is worse than the headache! I can take one voice inside my head, but this? SHUT UP!

The noise inside his head stops.

Ah. Quiet.

The discipline?

Wonder why I just thought of that.

Shut up! Keep out!

I should put up signs.

Maybe I am losing my mind.

Maybe this is something the Eldred are doing to me. A mindfuck to go along with their plague.
Maybe this is it. I’ve lost my fucking mind!

A pleasant but insistent beeping interrupts BC’s train of thought, derailed as it may be.
An alarm? I don’t remember setting one. No, it’s the com. Nice tone. Must have been Van
Kilner’s choice.

“Hello?” BC says.

“BC?” It’s Anita.

“Hello, Anita,” BC says. “Sorry about yesterday’s quick exit there. One of my headaches came on pretty strong.”

“Bad?” she asks him.

“At first it was bad,” he tells her, “but then it got kind of weird.”

What should I say? I can’t tell her.

“Weird?”

“Yeah,” BC says, thinking fast. “It turned into a strange dream. I’m okay now.”

Hope she drops it.

“Okay? You know I’m, I mean, we’re all worried about you, BC. There are a lot of people depending on you, now.

“You’ve become an important person, whether you like it or not!”

That would be “not”.

I don’t like being on the news every time I sneeze.

“These headaches,” Anita starts, but trails off.

“What?”

“BC, you’ve become a symbol of hope for people, but these headaches… they’re… Here? Away from everything? We can keep them under wraps. I don’t think the Eldred are going to tell the media,” she says. BC can hear her chuckle on the other end. “But out in public? If people see you doubling over, it’s…” she tries to finish the thought. “It’s going to be bad. All I’m trying to say is be careful, people look up to you now.”

“I don’t want them to look up to me,” he says.

“You’re the pope! You’re the top CEO!” Anita exclaims. “Get used to it!” she tells him.

“It might not be an issue anymore,” BC tells her. “I think I might be getting these headaches under control.”

“Really?” she says. BC can hear the doubt in her voice over the com.

“I know it might sound crazy,” BC starts.

If she’ll go with me on this, maybe… MAYBE I can tell her more.

“But this morning, I felt one coming on… and I was able to make it stop and go away!”

“How?” she asks.

“I thought it away! Just thought for it to stop,” he says.

“That sounds pretty farfetched to me. You just thought it away?” she asks him skeptically.

“That’s how it felt to me,” he insists.

And that’s about all I’m gonna say about any of it to you, evidently.

“Well, if it works for you… I guess, go for it! I don’t want to discourage you if it makes you feel better,” she says in a patronizing tone of voice.

“Thanks,” BC manages, with sarcasm.

Let’s change the subject.

“When do the Eldred want to meet again?” he asks her.

“They’re gone, BC,” she informs him. “They left last night after you passed out.”

“They left? Already?” He can’t believe it.

“The eldest of the Eldred said they’d told us all we needed to know. He said they expected
us
to deal with the problem. Then they left,” she says.

“
Our
problem?
They
let an ancient, high-powered, warlike proto-human loose and it’s
our
problem?

They kept this guy on ice for centuries, and it’s our problem? Get them on the com for me, Anita. I want to talk to the eldest of the Eldred!”

“Um,” she says, pausing.

“What?”

“We can’t do that, BC. I’m sorry.”

“Can’t? Why not?”

“We don’t really have a way of contacting
them
. They always contact us. It’s a video and audio signal, but shot across such a distance… Well, we don’t have a fraction of the power it would take to establish that kind of signal. We don’t even know how it carries our response back to them, BC. It’s FTL.”

“Efftee what?” he asks.

“FTL – Faster than light,” she explains. “It’s nearly instantaneous. We’d love to know how they do it.”