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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 certaingeneralissimo ’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