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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 theLatinatis 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 fordisco andcover girl —caberna discothecariaandterioris paginae puello.”
    “Don’t forgetpilamalleus 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?”
    “Asordidissimi 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