Air Nowhere certainly knew its business. They walked over a huge amount of driftwood piled up in back of the beach and then up an almost overgrown trail to a small turnout near a two-lane road. A small camper truck was parked there, but it didn’t seem to bother the pilots, and Romeriz went up, selected a key off his key ring, and unlocked the thing. They waited for some general traffic to pass, then got Angelique and the others inside.
“This we will not sink or blow up,” Corwin told them. “It was rented fair and square in Astoria for a week and it’s going back there when we’re through. Settle back—we’ve still got quite a drive. Either of you want to take the wheel, you’re welcome to do it. After we drop you off, this gets turned over to an innocent and unsuspecting family that wants to drive north along the coast road in a camper, and they’ll check it back in. It’s rented in their name, so anybody who wants to trace this will have one hell of a time proving anybody was ever in it that they want.” And that was how they got Angelique to San Francisco.
“Outside of theaters and espionage circles I don’t think there’d be much of a call for this stuff, eh?” MacDonald commented, applying another batch of a seemingly clear liquid to his hair and beard and then showering it off. It had the effect, over a period of time, of turning dark hair gray and doing so convincingly. Applied to both hair and beard, it had the effect of adding twenty years to his apparent age.
“Rather simple stuff, old boy,” replied a tall, distinguished-looking man in his sixties or early seventies. He wore an aloha shirt and brown slacks, but somehow he still looked quite the British civil servant which he used to be.
Lord Clarence Frawley, who insisted on being called “Pip” by everyone unless under formal circumstances, had quite a lot of experience in that end, being, for some eleven years, the real-life counterpart of James Bond’s legendary “Q”, the master of gadgetry for spies. His own Ph.D. was in chemistry, but he knew an incredible amount about almost everything in the sciences. He had not, of course, been the one man show of the cinema, but rather the administrative head of a research-and-development wing that employed only the best and the brightest and the most secure. A staunch materialist and top scientist, he’d been one of Sir Reginald’s bosses at one time when the renegade computer genius had worked for the British government and he was also familiar, as a prior Fellow of the Institute, with the actual layout of Allenby Island.
For that reason, he was Queen’s Rook.
The house itself was quite large and set back from the ocean, but also set apart from any other houses atop a large hill about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. The place itself was actually owned by a Hollywood writer who leased it out for the six months of the year when he had to be in Los Angeles. None of them had ever heard of the writer, who apparently wrote television spy shows for some series or other and had gotten his start as the author of a series of spectacularly successful low-budget hack and slash horror movies, and none knew how the house had been secured, except that it had been done by agents of the King.
Pip fixed himself a whiskey and soda and sank down on the couch. “We’ve got the tests back on her, and they’re quite amazing,” he said simply.
Greg MacDonald, equally relaxed but in a bath robe, joined him. “How’s that?”
“Well, the fingerprints are certainly hers, and I think it’s pretty certain that she is indeed Angelique Montagne.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that. Otherwise this was all one hell of a waste.”
“The bone structure, cellular structure, and the like though, is simply amazing. They didn’t merely give her a disguise. As near as we can tell, she is genetically what you see. That, and our mysteriously youthful nurse, tell us a lot.”
“Such as?”
“Well, they can really do it, that’s what. Someone, sitting up there, using that marvelous computer, found a tremendous breakthrough. The implications are enormous!”
“And scary.”
“Well, yes, that too.” he agreed, accepting the idea almost as an afterthought. “I can’t see any other way to do it but to somehow encode a human body inside a computer, every little bit of it—and then introducing whatever physiological changes the programmer desires and then recreating the person with the changes. It’s energy into matter with the most complex organism we know—and it’s alive!”
“Well, maybe,” MacDonald responded. “But if that’s the way they do it, why keep the fingerprints? And why worry about Angelique at all? They could just take one of their own, change her into Angelique so absolutely that nobody could prove any difference, and go on from there. All this makes no sense if you’re right.”
“Exactly so, my boy,” came another, deep, melodious British voice behind them. Into the room walked Lord Alfred Whitely, retired Bishop of Burham at Yorkminster, professor emeritus of theology and philosophy at Christ’s College, Oxford. “One can never trust a Cambridge man to think things through.”
The Bishop was about the same age as Lord Frawley, but round-faced and hawk-nosed with thick white hair and a ruddy complexion. The Bishop was also wearing very unclerical red plaid Bermuda shorts and a tee shirt which read, “I left my cash in San Francisco.”
“And I suppose you have a better idea?” Pip asked sarcastically.
“Why of course! Researchers on my end have come up with wonders. But do go on. I would like to hear what you’ve found—excluding the speculation, of course, on miraculous and vaporous gadgets that don’t exist and don’t make sense.”
The look the Bishop got would have fried an egg.
“Well,” Pip went on, “we also discovered a legitimate physiological cause for this aversion to most materials. It’s a definite series of allergies, far too severe to be treated without long hospitalization and lots of experimentation, but we tested a number of things after wondering why she didn’t come down with problems using the straw and the like. That suggested that there were things she could tolerate, and we found one that works.”
“Oh, really?” Greg was very interested. “What?”
“Silk. Real silk, not the synthetic variety. We also discovered a range of non-alkaloid dyes that could be used, and even now we’ve got folks working on things. We’ve taken many fittings, and perhaps we can have something this afternoon. The real problem is that we must tailor with silk thread as well. Do you know how bloody difficult it is to get that much natural silk these days?”
“The facial tattoos, I fear, are permanent. We can’t figure out even now how they were done. Those long rectangular stripes are actually set into the skin, for example, as if the face was actually molded around them. They’re thick and solid, although pliant. They’d have to be removed surgically and the face would be a mess. The scars would never color, either. Still, it’s a small price to pay if we can get her dressed and allow her some mobility.”
“What about the language? Anything on that?” MacDon-ald wanted to know.
“Well, whatever hypnotic conditioning techniques they use, they’re quite sophisticated and quite probably drug reinforced. All the information, all that she’s ever been or known, is still there in her head, but it can’t be fully accessed and the conditioning is so deep that she is convinced that nothing can be done about it. It’s like the old voodoo thing in Haiti where someone makes a doll of you with some clippings of your hair and the like. Do what you will with the doll and nothing happens. But show the victim the doll and do something, and it happens to the victim. Pain, crippling, even death—because the victim knows and believes in the power. She believes. She had a religious, somewhat mystical outlook in her upbringing to begin with, I believe. Raised in a convent and all that. It’ll be hell to shake her out of that belief. Best we leave it alone and let it come to the fore in social situations. Once she inadvertently reads a sign or understands a comment in English or French, such as a danger warning or somesuch, it’ll all come back.”
“Perhaps,” Bishop Whiteley commented. “If, indeed, that’s all it is. I feel very sorry for the poor child, though. Still, she’s better off as she is and with us than with them, that’s certain.”
“So how has your God Squad been coming along?” Pip asked him. “Any results as yet?”
“Well, the plane with the latest information arrived this morning. Damned nuisance, having to do all this direct and without using long distance lines or direct computer terminals, but it’s necessary. We don’t wish to tip our hand.”
Greg looked at him quizzically. “Just what have you been up to, Lord Bishop?”
“Pip calls them my God Squad. Actually, they’re some very talented young people working on a continuing project for me at Oxford. Let us face it, my boy—if they have a computer, then we must have one, and one which can be cut off, in whole or part, from the international telenet. This project’s been ongoing for years, and it’s finally starting to pay off.”
“Oh?” Greg was curious. This was, after all, the man Sir Robert was told was the greatest expert on cults and mysticism in the world. That was why, although Sir Robert had never lived to meet him, much less recruit him, he was now Queen’s Bishop.
“In many ways, it’s the counterpart to Sir Reginald’s little project. Urn—do you know why I was made Bishop of Durham? And why I was so quickly and somewhat forcibly retired?”
“I admit I don’t. I’m afraid the Anglican Church isn’t my strong point.”
“Indeed. I don’t think it’s mine any more, either. You see, lad, it’s a state religion, so it must accommodate a tremendous range of religious views. The Durham seat has always gone to an academic, and most of the academics have been, shall we say, on the radical left of theology. Our brothers here, the Episcopals, are called radicals because they ordain women and in some cases even homosexuals of both sexes and because they go all out for radical causes, but they’re mild compared to the old mother church. Not one of my three predecessors believed in the virgin birth or the divinity of Christ. My immediate predecessor, in fact, saw religion as an ethical guidance system and believed that whether or not God existed, He was irrelevant.”
“Eminently sensible,” remarked Lord Frawley.
The Bishop gave him a frown. “Pay no attention to him. He was Labour, of all things.”
Greg decided to say nothing. His own political affiliation was with a party at least as leftist as British Labour.
“At any rate,” continued the Bishop, “God may install vacuous clerics, but He keeps hold where it counts, with the parishioners. There was finally such a hue and cry and actual mass walkouts from services that the Archbishop finally decided to fill the next Durham bishopric with me. Now, I’m the true radical in the Church. I believe in the holy Catholic-Church, in the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection and the existence of both heaven and hell. But, most importantly, I believe in the existence of evil and the reality of sin.”
“In other words,” Pip injected, “the Bishop isn’t Tory, unless you count one who would be at home most in the court of Henry the Seventh a Tory.”
“No, no, Henry the Eighth,” Whitely retorted. “I picked the correct church. But, you see, they couldn’t keep me shut up and on track any more than they could keep those social reformers’ mouths shut. I began to speak from the pulpit against the way many of the Church leadership had strayed, and had the temerity to suggest that anyone who professed not to accept the trinity and the resurrection should be excommunicated and told to join the Unitarians. I drew quite a following, and enormous pressure to resign. I did so, not because I was wrong to do it and say it, but because I couldn’t get any of it through their thick skulls. They feared I was starting a revolt, a cult within the church, to gain personal power. Never once did they even consider my actual arguments! Their minds were so small and so limited that they simply couldn’t believe that someone would act out of Christian faith and devotion; they could only interpret all my actions in the same way they thought—as petty power politics. I certainly knew how Henry and Martin Luther both felt in their day. One does not leave the church out of faith. One turns around one day and realizes that the church has left him.”
“All this is well and good,” Lord Frawley said sourly, “and I’m sure we will all buy and avidly read your autobiography, Alfred. But what is the point?” –
“The point, dear boy, is the whimsically named God Squad project at Oxford. There we have our own computer— not as good or as fancy as the one on Allenby, I daresay, but adequate—and some really bright young programmers who are also solid Christians. We’ve been pouring in, and classifying, and doing comparative analysis, on a tremendous mass of religious writings through the ages—and not just Christian, either. We ask questions, and if the question is valid and the information is sufficient and the program is good enough, we occasionally get an answer. Well, with the de-briefings and other information provided us, and what theology we can glean from what we’ve seen them about on Allenby, we have some answers, including a couple I suspected the moment I first saw that photograph of the Institute.”
Both Greg and Pip were interested now. “Go on,” MacDonald urged him.