by Eric Flint
It was a pretty quick trip. Soon we pulled up at a subway station with velvet walls and tile floors, and an escalator that took us up to the pope-house. It was like being at the mall excepting there wasn't hardly any people.
Things happened pretty fast after that. We were all tuckered out from the trip, but Carlino, he up and dragged us out to this balcony overlooking the front yard. And boy was it full of people, let me tell you. They put up a yell when they saw us, just like as if we were football heroes, and I looked to see if they were going to do the wave. But then a chimney nearby let out this plume of white smoke, and they gave a yell that put the first one to shame. Just as they're letting up, Carlino he sneaked up behind me and put a mile-high pope-hat on my head, and that made 'em bust out all over again.
* * *
"White smoke," I say. "Smoke signal, more like. Sounds like that's their sign that you're the new Pope."
"Got that right." Reb is in profile to my left, the setting sun outlines him in light so's I can't hardly look at him. He turns toward the light, tapping a nervous few times on the bar, then looks back down. Then Slow Jack turns on the fluorescents, which come on in ones and twos, buzzing like spring somewhere where there's flowers. "Got that right," Reb mutters again into his beer. "At first . . ."
* * *
At first it was a cake walk. Maybelle she found out about the shopping in Italy, and faster'n you can say Jack Robinson she was off to the stores with some Swiss guards. I had thought they were there as real soldiers, but Carlino said they were trained but really mostly for show. If a Catholic hurt me he'd be excommunicated—thrown right out of the church. They keep better watch when the Pope's away from the Vatican. At any rate, soon enough Maybelle was bringing back leather coats and shoes and purses and I-don't-know-what-all, enough to outfit an army of wives.
Dallas and his girl, all they needed was a room, if you know what I mean. My dog Blue, well, he got the biggest thigh bone around. Wouldn't surprise me to hear it was from some kind of dinosaur.
That just left me. The first couple of days I was sitting in a red throne of a chair while people come up to kiss my ring. I hope to tell you, I never seen so much hand-kissing in all my born days. The first few times I fixed to slug whoever it was planting their lips on my hand, but after a while I got sorta used to it.
And I was signing stuff I couldn't read. Sure, Carlino would tell me what they were. Investitures, renewals of treaties, encyclicals—he said those are just letters that go to a bunch of people, like pizza place flyers, I guess—things like that. Who woulda thought I shoulda taken Italian back in high school, instead of Shop?
That put me in a stew. I like to know what it is I'm signing. For all I knew they were trying to put one over on me, like that time the Devil came to Anthem. If I'm going to do a job I like to do it right, so I asked Carlino if all them documents could be put into English. He squealed about it a little, saying it'd take time to do and that's not how things were done, and how if anybody was to write anything anti-Catholic I'd never see it anyway because they'd be excommunicated so fast it'd make your head spin. Seems their answer for everything was to throw a guy out of the Church. Finally he came around when I told him right then and there to translate one of them suckers out loud. I expect he knew I'd just ask him to read every single one of them for me.
From then on they were in English, but of course it was all still lawyerese to me. I pondered my way around each of 'em as best I could, signing maybe five things a day and not doing much of nothing else. The in-box turned into an in-crate mighty fast, but I just don't like doing things halfway. It didn't take much of that for me to remember I hadn't asked Carlino what the job paid. Boy did I slap my head over that one.
* * *
"Don't tell me," I say. "Let me guess: they expected you to work for nothing." Reb and I had done community service that time when we were teenagers and got caught stealing unicorn horns from the five and dime. I figured that's how this job worked too.
"Naw, it was worse than that," he says. "You're right that there wasn't a paycheck, but we had room and board and could have just about anything we asked for. Remember what I told you about Maybelle's shopping for clothes? Whenever she'd pick out a new pair of shoes the store owner would just give them to her. When I had a hankering for one of Shorty's barbecue sandwiches, they flew him on over to Italy. If Dallas wanted a chocolate-covered Labrador Retriever, he just had to ask and it'd be there inside of an hour."
I look at him.
"Not that he ever asked for such a thing," Reb adds, studying the new beer closely. "That's just a for instance."
"I don't see what's so bad about getting whatever you want," I say. "Sounds pretty cushy."
"It didn't bother me so much at first, either. It took Maybelle to point out the problem." He turns to face me. "How do you know if your stories for the Sun are any good?"
"Well, the paper pays me."
"Exactly. If they just gave you a paycheck because of who you are instead of how good you can write, would you feel so good about what you'd written?"
I go, "Hmm."
* * *
Exactly. I got to thinking that made this job a lot like welfare, where they give you money just for being poor. Now Maybelle brings in enough at the Save-a-Lot to keep the wolf away from the door. How do you think she'd feel if we had to go on welfare? Pretty bad, I reckon. We worked hard to get where we are. I could have lived with that, but it did kind of eat at me.
And then there was, well, the sermon. For my first one Carlino suggested I preach from a text they'd worked up for me, and I said okay. He delivered it so fast I figured it was a standard speech. That, or they had a habit of providing such things to popes. I practiced it up in front of a mirror a dozen times, then delivered it to the family who said I did okay by it. A couple of weeks after we got there, my usual clerk Tomas rousted me out of bed on Sunday and dressed me up in my pope-robes. When I got up in front of those thousands of people, though, I just lost it. My mind went blank and the notes in my hand looked like they were written in Martian. That's when I winged it.
* * *
"Winged it?" I ask all innocent-like, and if there's a grin on my face it's all on the inside, where Reb can't see it.
"Yeah, I stared out at all those people, and it got to looking like when I was little and my dad made me stand up near the pulpit and announce the next hymn. All I could think of was his hellfire and damnation sermons, so that's what I gave them. Unfortunately I didn't really remember everything just the way he put it, so I might have added a few things from The X-Files and The Terminator and The Weekly World News. I can't say for sure; it's all a bit hazy."
"How'd they take it?"
"I wasn't sure at first that most of them understood me. The translator gave up a minute or two in. Everybody—everybody looked pretty dazed when I was done, though; they just kinda sat there." Reb looks toward the window. The sun's gone down outside, and I figure he's going to want to go home to Maybelle before long. She sets a great table when she gets home early enough. Then he sighs.
* * *
Monday rolled around. We'd made pretty good friends with the guards and the folks who served up the grub, so usually we'd be joking and making faces at each other because most of them didn't speak English. That's not how it was on Monday, no sirree.
You'd think I'd turned into Johnny Cash the way they looked at me. Everybody tiptoed around like I was gonna burst into song or punch somebody out at any moment. Now it doesn't take much of that to rile me, so I up and ordered everybody out of the room. There was a television there that we got American TV on. They'd piped it through a couple of Vatican satellites. Patricia switched on CNN, and we found out right away what was up.
Wolf Blitzer was talking about "the astounding pronouncements of Pope Rebel the First." All about how I'd said that aliens from the future were after our embryos, or something like that. They had a picture of me and Blue; the one where I'd put the pope-hat on the dog. Dallas he
laughed at that until Patricia kicked him.
Tomas came in to tell me it was time to get to signing paperwork. At first he was quiet like the rest of them had been. He's usually chatty, though, and I guess that's a pretty hard thing to recover from, so we were only a few steps down the hall when he up and asked me what to do about the aliens.
"What aliens?" I said, then I said, "Oh, those aliens. Well, I reckon you'll just have to build some anti-time machine rockets."
"Oh," he said. "I suppose we'll need to talk to the Americans about that," and I agreed, just to play along.
When we got to the office, everybody else was still pussyfooting around, except for Carlino. Him? Well, he was just looking thoroughly pissed. "Let me show you something," he said, and led me to the office next door.
This it turns out was where I answer my mail. And by "me" I mean a bunch of clerks were sitting there typing letters into computers. Carlino told me the Vatican gets a couple thousand letters and emails a day addressed to the Pope. Only the most important ones are passed on to the man himself, the rest are up to these guys to answer. "Care to know how many email messages we received today?" he asked.
That's not the kind of question somebody asks when they're looking for a wild guess, so I kept quiet. "Four hundred thousand," he said. "And counting. I can only imagine how much we'll be seeing from the mail and Federal Express this week."
I allowed as how that was a pretty big number.
"Half of them will be cranks of one stripe or another," he said, "and the other half will want to know what to do about the aliens from the future."
I didn't get it for all of ten seconds. Then I did, although he helped by spelling it out for me.
Turns out I couldn't make a mistake. Or wasn't allowed to, same thing. It's called "papal infallibility," in case you want to write that down. It means most Catholics take everything the Pope says like it comes from God's own mouth, and those that don't keep mum about it. I asked him if we couldn't send out a newsletter cyclical-thing that said I was only joking, and he said it's hard for a Pope to unsay something. Wars are started over things like that.
Still, it did seem pretty unfair to let everybody think what I'd said was gospel. I wanted to make it right. I would've taken to that job a lot more if I hadn't taken it so damn seriously.
I decided it was a good time for a family meeting. When we were all together I started out by asking how everybody felt about this whole Pope hoo-ha. Maybelle, she looked like she wanted to say something, but Dallas spoke up first and allowed as how he was just fine with it. He'd fattened up a bit on that Italian food and wasn't in no hurry to give up the good life.
Maybelle spoke up then. She was of two minds. She loved the free clothes, and how she could make them Swiss guards jump just by saying boo. But she was missing her pea patch and her hellhounds and the other checkers at the Save-a-Lot.
I told them about my morning with Carlino, and that sobered them up some.
Patricia was the one that surprised me. I'd expected her to go along with Dallas, but she up and said she was planning on college and wanted to make something of herself and she was going back to Arizona, fianc or no fianc. Dallas he looked stricken at that, and changed his tune pretty damn quick. He said he was just kidding before and he thought living in Tucson sounded like a fine deal.
Once we'd all agreed that I needed to give up the Pope gig, it was time to talk to Cardinal Carlino. I didn't expect him to be too broken up about it. I'd only been signing a few things a day, and my sermon had not been what you call a rousing success. Plus there was that whole papal infallibility thing.
Sure enough, he was ready to be rid of me. He said he expected there wouldn't be a problem getting the rest of the cardinals to agree to my successor, now they'd experienced the alternative. We talked over ways for me to get shed of my popedom. I figured it was just a case of me saying I was quitting, no harm no foul. But he said that wasn't something a pope had done before, and it might not work, infallibility or no infallibility. When I asked him what he meant he said that whole other churches had sprung up like weeds when there was more than one person claiming to be Pope, and there might be a lot of people who wouldn't accept my quitting just like that. It would have to be something more drastic than that, he said.
"Drastic" didn't sound so good. I asked him if he was talking about my committing suicide. I thought that'd bring him up short, but he just laughed and said if I were to wait a few days I wouldn't have to kill myself. Somebody else would do it for me.
Now I didn't like that line any better than I had suicide, so I asked him if he was planning something. I kinda loomed over him when I said that. If he was bothered he didn't show it—he just said that he knew there were a couple dozen would-be assassins on their way to Rome already.
That did kinda bring me up short. From his expression, Carlino might just open all the doors between them and me.
He said it would've been better if I'd never gotten to be Pope. Then he said it would've been better if I'd never been born. I was about to let him know that was mighty unmannerly of him when what he said rang a bell. I knew then what to do.
It was the easiest thing in the world, once I though of it. There was a way I could get the church to say I didn't exist. All I had to do was excommunicate myself.
* * *
"Didn't that cause more problems than it solved?" I ask.
"How's that?"
"Well, if you were unfoolable, then you were right when you decided to kick yourself out of the Church for telling a whopper about aliens from the future. But if you were Pope, nobody ought to be able to kick you out, 'cause you're unfoolable." I pull a few shelled peanuts out of the bowl Slow Jack keeps on the bar, and pop one into my mouth. I suck the salt off of it and then crunch up the stale nut.
"Infallible," he says, "not 'unfoolable.' Oh, I didn't excommunicate myself for telling a lie or even for making a mistake."
"No? Well then what did you do?"
"Remember the guards? How they were just for show because nobody would dare hurt the Pope for fear of getting thrown out of the Church? Except for assassins, evidently. All I did was bang my fist really hard against the wall. It hurt like hell, so after I got it looked at, I excommunicated myself for hurting the Pope, and we all came on home."
I give him that look I save for city councilmen who think they're putting one over on their constituents by lowering one tax and raising three others. "How come I never heard about any of this?"
"Well, hell, Buddy," he says. "You were in Oklahoma." He takes a last pull off his bottle of Coors. "They let me keep the ring. See?" And he pulls his hand off of his bottle to show me. Boy howdy, what a sparkler. His finger's welled up around both sides of it like a cheap radiator hose around a clamp.
"I thought sure they'd of kept that," I say, scribbling furiously in the notebook.
"Nah," says Reb. "Usually they break the old one up and melt it down to make a new one for the next Pope. But this one wouldn't come off my finger, on account of my fingers being so thick and swelling up so much when I punched that wall. They lemme keep it." He raps the ring against the counter. "Better'n what you usually get in a box of Cracker Jack, any old day."
Slow Jack, he takes the sound for Rebel calling for another round, so he brings 'em over. That reminds me that Reb's usually home eating by now, so I ask him why he's still at the Place so late.
"I had dinner already," he says. "Maybelle brought home Chinese food from the deli at the Save-a-Lot." It's long after dark, but I see a halo around his head like the one when the sun is coming through the Place's lone window, and I lean back to look past him. Several reporters are jockeying with a rabbi and a monk, all trying to get through the door at once. Camera lights are blazing and people are yelling Reb's name.
He shakes his head. "I should never have opened that fortune cookie."
* * *
Edd Vick is the author of many short stories.
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Pawn's Gambit
Written by Carol Hightshoe
Illustrated by Kelley Hensing
1
Malei watched the images in her mirror as the guests began to arrive at the palace. The King had invited everyone of any position from within the kingdom and the neighboring lands, as well as the fairy council, to attend the christening of his first-born child. That is; everyone but her. True, she had been exiled to this remote castle in the high mountains after she had argued against the King's coronation in favor of herself as the older sibling and had failed. But she was still his sister and she held the same power as the members of the fairy council and should have been included. However, that did not matter. She had planned for this day for several years.
She concentrated for a moment on the Queen's image, frowning at the paleness of the woman's skin and the lines still etched in her face. The princess had been born six months ago, yet the Queen looked as if she had only risen from the birthing bed a few hours prior. Malei doubted she would ever have another child.