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electronic limbo….”
    “Getting kinda theological, Your Eminence, maybe beyond my professional need to know….”
    “I’m afraid it’s the heart of the matter, Mr. Philippe. Father De Leone was adamantly opposed to the very concept of a successor entity, believing such to be satanic constructs, the collaboration in the creation of which is a grave sin. So by his lights, he risked his immortal soul in the Church’s service….”
    “I don’t get it. Why would a man like that allow himself to be chipped? Why would he want a dybbuk of himself haunting the bits and bytes? Why would you?”
    “In order that the successor entity conclusively prove or disprove the existence of its own soul, and thereby resolve the dilemma at the heart of the Church.”
    “Say what?”
    I took another measure of Herb. The sun had gone down, and the stars were coming out, and a cooling breeze danced over the surface of the sea, and the waters beneath seemed like those of Uranus, fathomless and formless clear down to the void at the core. Just the right cozy setting for cosmic ghost stories.
    “The point of this unfortunate experiment, according to Mary, was not
how
the schism be resolved, but that it
be
resolved, and now.”
    “You’ll pardon the cross-communion metaphor, Your Eminence, but all this is getting a little too Byzantine for me.”
    Cardinal Silver sighed. “But not for the Pope, Mr. Philippe,” he said. “She is at her most infallible when she seeks to be inscrutable, and in this particular instance, she has succeeded entirely. When God speaks through Mary, to use another cross-communion metaphor, Mr. Philippe, He tends to speak in tongues.”
    “Sounds like quite a witchy woman….”
    John Cardinal Silver looked at me for a good long beat. “You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment,” he said, with a flash of eye and a sudden sardonic little smirk. He regarded the Herb with this new persona, then reached out for my spliff.
    “On second thought, perhaps I’d better,” he said. “And a dry white Bordeaux would not be amiss if you have one.”

IV
    About my journey to Rome by helicopter, the less said
, the better. For four hours, I clung to my seat in terror in the wretched contraption while Cardinal Silver babbled along happily with the pilot over flyboy arcana, pausing now and again to direct my attention to the scenery below.
    I for my part had no intention of looking down from up here at anything, and I would have kept my eyes closed for the duration, had not the petrol fumes and jouncing of the helicopter in its droning clattering battle to remain aloft against all natural law induced instant nausea whenever I tried.
    Suffice it to say that I vomited but once. Suffice it to say I was far too terrified and discombobulated to ponder deeply what on this sorry Earth this Pope wanted from me.
    Surely she wanted
something
. I could hardly believe that she was dragooning me into her presence by helicopter simply to receive a lugubriously premature supreme unction this far before the fact.
    After a careening eternity, the helicopter finallylanded in St. Peter’s Square, and before I could purge the ringing from my ears, or the petrol fumes from my nostrils, or stiffen my spongy old knees, I was forthwith whisked inside by Cardinal Silver, and ushered into the papal presence.
    The Pope had chosen to receive us in the Vatican version of an informal sitting room. A round mahogany table whose pedestal was carved into dragon’s legs sat not quite dining-room high on some murky oriental rug beneath a gilded Renaissance ceiling featuring a second-rate version of Madonna and Child. The walls, though, were a cunning confabulation of wooden bookcases and plant stands, evoking ecological sensibility, intellectual enjoyment, and a bit of the Earth Mother mystique.
    I realized that the room was familiar, as well it should be, for Pope Mary had used it often for interviews and media pronouncements.
    And there she