Cardinal Anderson prayed that God would guide him.
Twenty million people, human and nonhuman, swarmed the sprawling metropolis of Godwin, the largest city on the planet Bakunin. On any other world, it would have been the capital city, but on Bakunin, where any form of State was anathema, the only thing that distinguished Godwin was sheer unwieldy size.
Late in the evening, an elderly gentleman who currently called himself Mr. Antonio walked on the street under the crumbling multilayered walkways of East Godwin. There were no outward signs that distinguished him from the other twenty million residents of the city, or for that matter, any of the five hundred million other inhabitants of Bakunin. Even the most sophisticated medical imaging technology could scan him without registering anything out of place.
Not that he would ever give anyone reason to look for something.
Mr. Antonio walked into the cheap hotel where he had been living for the past six months. The place was a dark, modular hive of windowless rooms that barely fit together. Parts of the composite skin had crumbled with age and had sloughed off, and half the rooms were permanently sealed because of problems with the environmental systems.
Mr. Antonio’s room was unremarkable; a single nine-square-meter room that had amenities more appropriate to a tach-ship than a hotel, including the fold-down toilet. The room smelled faintly of mildew.
He sat down on the cot that attached to the wall and checked his watch. At exactly 28:00 local time the comm in his room rang. He picked it up without saying anything.
“It is time,” the voice on the comm said. Mr. Antonio did not respond because he knew that this call was one- way. The speaker was light-years away, and had sent a tach-comm to a receiver Mr. Antonio had left in orbit amid all the less distinguished debris that littered Bakunin’s sky. That receiver then placed a simpler encrypted transmission to Mr. Antonio that bounced though so many nodes in the patchwork net of Bakunin’s communications infrastructure so as to be effectively untraceable.
“The Church is acting on the transmission, and our friend will perceive this, if he hasn’t already. I will need our mole ready when he makes the inevitable move to investigate.”
Mr. Antonio switched off the comm and smiled. The groundwork had already been laid. Nickolai would be ready when the time came.
PART ONE
Original Sins
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
CHAPTER FOUR
Stigmata
We serve most those beliefs that we first reject.
[Animals] do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
Nickolai Rajasthan slowly woke from a drugged slumber. For a few brief, precious moments, he didn’t remember the past year. His subconscious still refused to accept his punishment, or his exile. For an instant he was ready to find himself in his own bed in the southern palace, to smell the scent of his siblings, his sisters . . .
Then he remembered.
He wasn’t in the southern palace, and he wasn’t on Grimalkin. The priests hadn’t been able, politically, to have a
