redRobe

‘Tell the house to let them in,’ the Cardinal told the gun. ‘And tell it to wipe any embarrassing vid-transcripts accidentally.’ His Excellency looked at the gun. ‘Presumably there’s a price for all this?’

‘Isn’t there always? But you can afford it.’

The Cardinal grunted. ‘You saw poor Father Moritz turn that gun on me?’

Both bodyguards nodded.

‘Good,’ said the Cardinal as he stood up and stretched, fingers interlinking above his head, thin lips pulling back over long yellow canines. CAT scans and lie detectors wouldn’t be involved. Hell, it wouldn’t even make the news. In fact, if the CCPD weren’t gone in thirty minutes leaving him to deal with the gun and the body, then he was losing his touch.

The Cardinal adjusted his tiny pebble glasses against the evening glare and glanced at the Colt, considering. He was the Cardinal. And the Cardinal could do what he wanted. That was what Mexico had always believed… Somehow these days it was the Cardinal who felt less certain of the fact.

Chapter Eighteen

Body, Speech, Mind, Diamond

Om Ah Hum Vajra ...

Out beyond Luna, out even beyond the Arc, the Wheel of God spun in space, telling off endless prayers. Around the 1500 or so miles of its outer rim were attached three million scraps of calligraphy, each gummed in place at the top right corner. They were the prayers of the faithful, written in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and woodblocked onto rice fabric by Buddhist monks. Each tiny script had been fixed in place by a hired gang of Deacon Blues, space dwelling salvage rats subcontracted by the Dalai Lama.

There were longer streamers—some of merely human height, others at least a mile long—weighted at the end with small lead seals. These were prayers too, convoluted mantras endlessly repeated on each ribbon and then repeated again as the wheel’s edge spun them in a vast circle. Further off, huge steel drums hurtled through space, seemingly unattached to the wheel, their long lengths of monofilament so fine as to be invisible. In each drum were more prayers. As well as simple steel drums there were elaborate canisters of beaten silver, chased around the sides with complex, swirling representations of demons and the Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhism’s great masters.

Inside the silver canisters were all the names of God, printed out onto silken ribbon. It had taken a bank of Cray3s at CalTek at least forty-seven years to track down all the names and ten minutes to spit them out.

This was Samsara, the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of God.

Here was Tibet reborn from the carnage of the Second Sino War. It was a place of duty and of prayer, but most of all it was a safe haven, recognised as such by the UN, WorldBank and the IMF. All ‘fugees had right of entry. They had to get there first, of course, but that didn’t lessen the principle no matter how much it limited the number.

Unlike the original Tibetan wheel, Samsara had no visible spokes and no hub; it rotated about itself, creating both surface pseudo-gravity and enough momentum to trap most of the new world’s atmosphere within the long central valley and the high, vertiginous mountains of its edges. What atmosphere bled away into space had to be replaced, but that was Tsongkhapa’s problem. And Samsara’s central AI didn’t trouble others with its problems.

Axl Borja knew none of this. He was asleep in his seat, knocked flat by melatonin and kept that way by a seriously cross stewardess. He knew the back-history, of course. How, as the giant bioCrays at CalTek were sourcing thirteen regional variants on the god Zoroaster, fifty-three years before the end of the leasing agreement, a Buddhist astronomer at MIT’s observatory on Darkside picked up the first sighting of the wheel.

Samsara wasn’t a world then, merely a hollow circle a thousand miles around its i

The fractured stone bubble was not spi

God-child creates world.

In private, Cardinal Santo Ducque maintained the story was so much shit, and he was right. MIT’s observatory on Darkside had been monitoring the ring for months, watching it come ever closer. And the Dalai Lama had known to the minute when the final name of God would be collated, cross-referenced and the entire list printed out.

But it was a good story and sometimes a fitting lie can do more good than a mundane truth. Particularly when used to raise funds.

Lars Arcsen, leader of the Deacon Blues, brought the ring to a halt, using tugs and endless miles of monofilament. He lost thirty ships. Six hundred men and five AIs lost their lives, and when the ring finally stopped it was 50,000 miles further out than Lars had predicted.

Which worried Lars not a fuck, since there had been thirty-six hours towards the end when Lars was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to halt the ring at all.

And once Samsara was in position, getting it spi

The comet ice was split into hydrogen and oxygen, mixed with nitrogen and fed back as atmosphere. Unbreathably thin at first, but getting thicker with each passing year.

But then, twenty-one years into creation, with the framework to this new landscape already grown, the project hit its biggest wall. Soil. Leaf litter. Loam. That broken-down biomass that gave Earth its actual name. Creating enough soil proved beyond the ingenuity of even Lars Arcsen.

Aged seven—sat in exile in a vast apartment on West 64th that had been sandblasted down to a stripped urban shell—the brand-new Dalai Lama flipped off the browband of his birthday Sony tri-D long enough to ask one question. ‘How many people die each year?’

Initially, WheelOfGod Enterprises expected resistance to their request for donated bodies. They ended up charging for the privilege. To start with, the whole of the West Coast America wanted to be recycled. Elderly models from Bel Air covenanted condos provided their dumb-fuck red setters could come too.

A Hollywood actress, three face transplants on from the v’Actor still making her hit movies, had her agent hold a press call at the Dome to a

At one time your a