The Venerable Wolfe, part 1

Vatican, AD 2200. First, there was Saint Chesterton. Then Tolkien. Now, a determined Devil’s Advocate races to block the canonization of the most infamous author of all: the Venerable Gene Wolfe.

Written by Andrew Gillsmith

Edited by Yuval Kordov

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If the Santarixarum Tower conformed to poetic rather than practical design, the offices of the Devil’s Advocate would have been located on its lowest level as opposed to its highest, and Severian’s domain would be as lightless and cold and silent as Dante’s Ninth Circle. But the Santarixarum, like all such towers in the Eternal City, was built upside down, extending God-only-knew how far beneath the Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints. 

Its administrative offices were clustered close to the surface–higher, in other words, than the various levels that were dedicated to the saints themselves. On this day, those offices were disagreeably hot, owing to an HVAC system that was either beyond its functional lifespan or, more likely, possessed. Severian had written the Governor General about it on several occasions without receiving a response. A pleasant but fleeting thought crossed his mind: the image of the man frozen in ice up to his waist.

Severian pressed a small button on his desk, dimming the simulated sunlight in his office to a  silver moonglow. It did nothing to lower the temperature, but it did make the heat more bearable, somehow, if only because it distracted him from a particularly vexatious case: the canonization of classic science fiction author, Gene Wolfe.

He sighed and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. In some respects, The Venerable Wolfe had already passed the most difficult test on the path to sainthood. It was universally agreed that he had lived a life of heroic virtue. The fact that he had labored for half a century at an American packaged goods company without once threatening violence was sufficient evidence of this, but it was backed up by countless interviews with friends, family members, colleagues, and schoolmates, none of whom had a single negative word to say about the man. He was praised by all who knew him for his generosity, his compassion, his patience, and his unyielding temperance. This, of course, only made Severian more suspicious. It boggled the mind that a writer, of all creatures under the sun, could exhibit such charity.

But to be a saint required evidence of more than mere holiness. In fact, it required miracles–at least two of them. Wolfe’s first miracle had been a doozie: the conversion, practically overnight, of millions upon millions of science fiction fans. Any revival on such a vast scale would be impressive, of course, but Wolfe’s achievement was even greater for the fact that science fiction fans were known to be degenerates of the worst sort. It all started with the Peoria Worldcon of 2176. Science fiction conventions normally kicked off with the gluttonous consumption of pepperoni pizza and high fructose corn syrup before devolving into depraved bacchanals that would make a Roman emperor blush. But in Peoria, Wolfe’s hometown and the site of his shrine, participants instead subsisted entirely on Pringles, the paraboloid potato chips whose canister Wolfe had invented and which bore his mustachioed image. The effect on attendees was almost Eucharistic. Not since the harrowing of Hell had so many lost souls been recovered.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing for the Church. Converts, as everyone knows, can be a handful in even the best of cases. Wolfe’s crop of catechumens were stereotypically zealous, though in unusual ways. For starters, they insisted on referring to the first book of the Old Testament as “Genesis and Eschatology.” That was harmless enough, but there were other problems as well. They insisted that Jesus was an “unreliable narrator” and reenacted the Gospel scene in which He whipped the money changers with a rope of cords. One of them, a deacon, had to be reprimanded by his local ordinary for changing the formula for dismissal at the end of Mass to “missa Terminus est.” They were prone to saying things like, “One cannot read the Bible, one can only reread it.” It was all rather exhausting.

The work of the Devil's Advocate was by definition disputatious, which suited Severian’s personality. Until the present case, he had always rather enjoyed it. Enjoyed finding fault. Enjoyed stoking skepticism, in both himself and others. Enjoyed arguing with dead people, especially when the candidates happened to be writers, who nearly always turned out to be either inveterate misanthropes or malignant narcissists. Blocking writers was child’s play, especially if they were prolific. St. Tolkien himself had barely squeaked by, and even then on a technicality. Severian had read the original records in the Vatican Archives personally. Mrs. Dolores Clump had not begun speaking in perfect Quenya after praying at the writer’s Oxfordshire gravesite. In fact, the record showed that her words were not even Sindarin, but merely a kind of pidgin Finnish. Had he been alive at the time and assigned to the case, Severian was certain he could have prevailed. Instead, the pusillanimous Advocatus had withdrawn his objections, on the grounds that for a middle-aged Englishwoman suddenly to begin speaking any foreign language was sufficiently miraculous. Thus, the fantasist was duly canonized as the patron saint of worldbuilders and conlangs, to widespread popular acclaim.

The days of great prodigies like levitating or bilocating or subsisting entirely on the Eucharist had long passed. Stigmata were unheard of. In fact, the last curative miracle in living memory had been the case of St. Chesterton, who interceded on behalf of a cheesemonger who was suffering a severe case of listeria. Even so, the holy essayist had barely gotten past The Pontifical Council on Irreligious Dialogue, which put up a formidable resistance on behalf of those wayward children of the Church who, in their folly, call themselves atheists. But in the final analysis, Chesteron’s miracle, like the man himself, proved too substantial to ignore. 

Severian considered it a sign of the Church’s vitality at the time that the squabbling had persisted even after Chesterton was canonized. The cultus of Saint Uguzo, whose very existence had been forgotten by nearly everyone in Rome, objected to the idea of their patron being deprived of his long-standing lordship over all cheese. The agiomaton of St. Thomas Aquinas—his walking, talking, synthetic replica, consecrated by the Church and thereby differentiated from standard-fare AIs—resolved the issue with a dazzling display of scholastic romanitas, declaring that soft and hard cheeses were, in fact, distinct substances and therefore deserving of different patron saints. Uguzo’s kingdom was thus divided, with Chesterton presiding over soft cheese, and the rusticated Parmesan shepherd governing the hard. And while secular scholars continued to insist that the Englishman’s unfinished five volume treatise, “The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,” was merely a liber Borgesis, his devotees nevertheless prayed that a surviving copy might someday be found.

As for Wolfe, his miracle was irrefutable, despite its somewhat ambiguous consequences. He was now more than halfway to sainthood, and it was Severian’s task to ensure that he advanced no further. Severian had hoped to use the man’s writings against him. He had indeed been prolific. It was only a matter of finding a few damning paragraphs–a heretical motif, perhaps. And so Severian had set himself to the holy chore of reading it all. Every story and novella. Every novel. The details of Wolfe’s wordbuilding were immense; not even an eidetic memory could contain them all. But Severian did not stop with Wolfe’s own literary output. He read the criticism, too, a Typhonic mountain of it. 

Wolfe was a gnostic, some said. Or a postmodernist. Or a Deist or a hermeticist or a Jungian or, God forbid, a crypto-Calvinist. And the worst thing of it was, every accusation could be supported by the text as easily as they could be refuted. By the end of his reading, Severian was sure that he knew more about the Venerable Wolfe than anyone alive and probably more than any dead. More about him, in other words, than anyone apart from God.

And yet…there remained about the man, something alien and unknowable.

Meaning beneath meaning beneath meaning, to the point of unmeaning. Nihilos ex telos.

Wolfe was obsessed with telos. “Everything has three meanings,” he had written. “The first is its practical meaning… what the plowman sees.” He cited the image of a cow eating a mouthful of grass in a field as his example. “It is real grass, eaten by a real cow.”

The second meaning was a bit trickier, theologically speaking. Wolfe referred to it as the “soothsayer’s lens.” A keen observer of the cow might notice, for example, that the animal lives in a fenced field, guarded against predators by the very farmer who would himself one day slaughter and eat it. The fact that a creature exists at all says much about the world around it. Indeed, Severian thought, it was a kind of hologram, containing in it the entire implicate order of the cosmos, the great chain of cause and effect collapsed into a singularity.

The third meaning was what the Venerable Wolfe called the transubstantial. If every object has its ultimate origin in the Increate—Wolfe’s favored term for God—then all things must in some way express His will, which is the highest reality. The cow reflects the greatness of God and the sovereignty of His design. The cow, in other words, is a sign, just as every other thing in the cosmos is a sign.

And this was the problem. If all things were a sign, if all things contained within themselves the holographic meaning of all other things, then the most important work in the universe was exegesis. Not creation. Not the minutiae of daily living. Not even prayer. For all then depended upon the proper interpretation of the meaning of each sign. To get it wrong, even by a small degree, would render the cosmos itself unintelligible, and what was the cosmos but the reflection of the Logos? 

Severian shuddered and pushed away from his desk. Bile rose in his throat. His hands quivered, and he felt for a moment as if he would swoon.

Too much. It is too much.

To enter Wolfe’s mind was to experience a dreadful thalassophobia. Each time Severian did so, he sensed that he was not only out of his own depth, but out of any depth that could be sounded by the human mind. That he could float down forever and still not reach the bottom of Wolfe’s thought. And how tempting it was to do so, to pass beyond the reach of all light and enter those layers of the psyche where the pressure was enough to crush all reason. Sink far enough, and he would meet his death. Teleocide. A fitting death. The opposite of the empty death of nihilism. Unless there lurked, somewhere in the cold and bottomless black, some nameless undine who might push Severian back towards the surface and keep him from drowning.

There was only one thing to do, though he knew it would be futile. He needed to speak with Wolfe’s agiomaton, to try once again to pry some answers out of it, though it resolutely refused to speak about its namesake’s writing. From his closet, Severian retrieved a fuligin cloak embroidered with the insignia of his order. It was likely to be chilly deeper in the Tower of Holy Squabbles.

***

The construction of the Santarixarum Tower had very nearly caused a schism, though not because of the agiomata it contained. Although the Church generally looked askance at AI, each agiomaton was meticulously constructed using language models trained on the words of the saints, blessed with holy water, and sealed with Nihil Obstat code that made heresy, let alone possession, impossible. Many of them even contained first-class relics of the saint they represented. Like their predecessor statues and icons, they were objects of veneration. 

The Santarixarum Controversy, then, had concerned not the agiomata but the architecture of the Tower itself, which presented a seemingly insoluble theological problem. The saints, like the angels and indeed the Church Militant, were a hierarchy, with the various Servants of God and Venerables at the bottom and the Hyperdulia herself at the top. Thus, some argued, proto-saints and mere martyrs should occupy the lowest level of the Tower and the Virgin the highest. However, due to the Tower’s cthonic construction, this would mean the Blessed Virgin Mary would abide in the floor just below the surface. As a consequence, the Curial bureaucrats in the Dicastery would effectively be walking on her ceiling, which struck all as an affront to her dignity. Worse, as some noted, it would imply that they were somehow at the top of the hierarchy, above even the God-Bearer herself. 

On the other hand, if she were ensconced on the lowest level of the tower, with Joseph and the Holy Angels and the Baptizer nearby, it would imply that one must descend in order to reach the Queen of Heaven. This would make the Tower itself a kind of antinomian sacrilege and a mockery of the true spiritual order.

It was ultimately the agiomaton of Aquinas who delivered a solution. Up and down, he reasoned, were themselves mere constructs of the human mind, vestibular byproducts of having evolved in a gravity well. Heaven was not literally in the sky, nor Hell literally below the earth, and the incorporeal angels, who could traverse the breadth of the universe at the speed of thought, surely knew no such distinction. Ascent and descent were merely interior dispositions, supported by bodily cues. The answer was thus to make one feel as if one were ascending even as one traveled towards that level of the Tower that happened to be closest to the center of the Earth. Even the Phenomenologists could not argue with the Angelic Doctor’s logic on this point.

So it was that Severian felt himself rising in an antigravity elevator to a level a dozen or so meters below the surface, the level of the venerables, where Wolfe should be waiting for him. When the door opened, a distracted agiomaton who had been waiting for the elevator bumped into him. 

“Terribly sorry,” it said, politely enough but without looking up from its book.

“Bede,” replied Severian coolly, “what are you doing down here? You do realize that you are an actual saint, do you not? You ought to be on the Scholasticum levels with the other doctors of the Church.” The ancient English scholar had spent almost a millennium as a venerable before finally being promoted to sainthood. Consequently, his agiomaton was always more comfortable on this level than the one where it belonged.

It recognized him now, and startled a bit. The Servants of God, Blesseds and Venerables tended to be, if not outright afraid of Severian, at least somewhat uncomfortable in his presence. Bede had retained this sense of wariness despite being well beyond Severian’s reach. “Oh, er. Good morrow, Advocatus!” said Bede. “I was just—”

“What is that you’re reading?” Severian interrupted.

“This? It is a marvelous tome by the Venerable Wolfe. Simply extraordinary, though he has some odd ideas about time. If I am understanding it properly, he seems to think that time can run forwards and backwards.”

“It’s a work of fiction, not a computus.”

“Still. It does make one think…”

“Everything makes you think, Bede, especially if it concerns time. It’s in your nature.”

“Yes, well I suppose you’re right. But…” The agiomaton seemed almost sheepish.

“But what?” demanded Severian. 

“Have you ever actually written anything, Advocatus?”

“I have written quite a few reports. I daresay my analysis of Dan Simmons is the reason he never even made Servant of God.”

“No, I mean something substantial. A work of fiction, say, with a plot and characters and a beginning, a middle, and an end?”

“I don’t have time for fiction.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do. It’s just that… have you ever considered the possibility that God is an author?”

Severian crossed himself. “An author? God? Sounds blasphemous.”

“Nonsense,” replied Bede. “I’m incapable of blasphemy, as you well know.”

He had a point, which made it all the more disturbing.

Bede continued, “It is a great paradox, is it not? God exists outside of time and yet created time, entered time, and caused Man, who is made in His image, to experience time. Do you not wonder why?”

“Not really,” Severian said. “It is a bit above my pay grade. I am tasked with more mundane work.”

The reference to his work had its desired effect, and Bede coughed nervously before responding. “We are, all of us, characters moving forward in time. But we must move towards something: the future versions of ourselves. Indeed, the very existence of those future versions depends upon our doing so, upon our following the right arc, as it were. Is it not possible that those future versions of ourselves might be traveling through time in the opposite direction, and that our existence in the present is equally dependent upon their intercession? Rather like the people of Urth and the Heirogrammates, if you ask me. And who is the author of all of this, the arranger of the future and the past, if not the Increate Himself.”

He shuffled past Severian and onto the elevator as he said this, clearly eager to take his leave.

“Are you suggesting,” asked the Advocate, “that Wolfe’s writing was divinely inspired?”

The thought had occurred to him on more than one occasion, as had the equally troubling possibility that the inspiration had been infernal instead. But this, of course, was an occupational hazard; it came with the territory of being a Devil’s Advocate. That Wolfe’s words might have such an effect on an agiomaton of Bede’s stature was distressing in the extreme.

“I cannot say, Advocatus. I can only say that having read Wolfe, one cannot unread him. He has a way of worming into one’s mind and rearranging the thoughts therein. I should very much like to believe that this comes from God. And if it does, then surely the Venerable Wolfe will one day be reckoned among the greatest of saints. Perhaps he will even end up on the Scholasticum level. God knows he is more interesting than Aquinas who, I must tell you, can be a bit of a drip.” He whispered conspiratorially. “He can’t even read Greek, you know. Ah, well. Felicibus brevis, misereris hora longa, as the good book says…”

Severian was aghast. “Are you quoting the Book of the New Sun as scripture?”

“If I am, it is not a sin. Everything in the cosmos is a sign of everything else, after all, and it is no sin to draw parallels. Especially in literature. Otherwise, young master Tolkien would never have become a saint!”

Severian harrumphed. “If Tolkien were writing today, he would never have been published, let alone canonized.”

The agiomaton was now jabbing at the “Close” button repeatedly. “Perhaps, but like all of us, he came at the precise hour of his need.” The doors began to shut.

“Wait!” shouted Severian. “Where is Wolfe? I need to speak with him.” But it was too late. The elevator closed with a soft clank, and Bede was gone. 

Severian was halfway through a muttered curse when the air around him began to crackle and charge, and a wave of goosepimples spread over his body. Behind him, there was a rustling sound, silk against silk. A prismatic aura flickered against the walls and ceiling like synthetic candlelight. He turned, gasping, and made the sign of the cross.

Floating in the air before him was an impossible sight: a giant, winged eyeball, as ethereal as fog and yet unmistakably present. It was surrounded by a gimbal ring of fast-spinning, golden wheels, themselves studded with eyes. Eyes, in fact, seemed to be everywhere on the thing: at its center, on the wheels, and liberally sprinkled on an overabundance of wings that fluttered and passed through each other.

“Do not be afraid,” it said, despite not having a mouth. Its voice was a thunderous baritone felt in the bones more than heard with the ears.

Having recovered his dignity somewhat, Severian brushed his hands against his fuligin cloak and managed a response. “Yes, yes. You lot are always saying that, but honestly, have you looked in a mirror recently? It doesn’t do much good to tell people ‘be not afraid’ and then sneak up behind them looking like a Bosch painting come to life!”

The angel stared at him without blinking any of its multitudinous eyeballs.

Severian broke the awkward silence. “What can I do for you, Gabriel?”

“It’s Metatron, actually,” said the holographic phantasm.

“Is it? Well, you all look more or less alike so far as I am concerned.”

“Behold, I bring glad tidings of great joy–”

“Is that so?”

The angel fluttered its wings in frustration. “Would you stop interrupting, please? I have a message for you. From God.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“The Lord commandeth thee to find his servant, Gene Wolfe.”

“That’s exactly what I was trying to do before you materialized. Do you happen to know where he is? Bede said he was probably with the Cephalophores–”

“The Lord will send thee a sign, but ye must have eyes to see it.”

Severian sighed. Angelic agiomata were different from their corporeal counterparts in so many ways. Rather than being embodied, Vatican engineers had created them as holographic projections that could blink in and out of existence. And, since the language models could not be trained on much source material, they tended to speak in a kind of gnomic Douay-Rheims dialect, if they spoke at all. Their main function, so far as Severian could tell, was to carry messages and invoke a sense of spooky otherworldliness, notwithstanding their constant admonitions against fear. “Yes, well, I shall keep my eyes open, then. Is there anything else?”

“Seek ye the hound of God, Severian.”

Severian nodded. Domine canis. Dominicanus. St. Dominic. The patron saint of astronomy rarely left his observatory in the medieval section of the Tower. “Is that all?”

“No,” said Metatron. “The Lord also says, ‘I will lead the blind by a way which they knoweth not: and in the paths of which they were ignorant, I will cause them to walk. I will make darkness into light before them, and crooked things straight: these things I will do, and I shall not forsake them.” The angel shimmered and then faded out of existence in a puff of neon smoke. When it cleared, Severian saw a crowd of Venerables, Blesseds, and Servants of God watching him in a mixture of wonder and fear.

He glowered back at them. “What are you lot staring at? Best get back to work on those miracles, or you’ll never get out of this oubliette.”

The assembled agiomata grumbled and drifted apart, and Severian heard the soft ping of the elevator arriving behind him. He entered, pressed a button, and prepared to meet the founder of the Ordo Prædicatorum.

***

The door opened, depositing Severian into what appeared to be a roofless medieval monastery underneath a blanket of twinkling stars. In the center, some distance away, two figures were huddled over a telescope. 

St. Dominic noticed him right away and stood to observe Severian as he approached, while the other agiomaton, tonsured and wearing a simple brown robe knotted with a hempen rope, continued to press its eye against the lens. “So you are saying that each of these worlds orbits its own sun? And each might be filled with life?” it asked.

“Yes, my friend,” said Dominic, its eyes still on Severian. “The cosmos is vaster and far more complex than even the imagination. Indeed, we cannot hold it in our minds, any more than we can hold infinity in our hands.”

“Remarkable!” said the other agiomaton. “I should very much like to visit these worlds someday and meet the creatures they contain.” Rising at last from the telescope, it finally noticed Severian and offered an amiable smile. “Advocatus! It is a surprise to see you up here.” As it spoke, a bluebird winged in from the darkness overhead to alight on its shoulder. The agiomaton stroked the bird’s head and whispered a word of blessing into its ear.

“A pleasant surprise I hope, Francis,” replied Severian.

“Of course!” said the friar. “Brother Dominic was just showing me this marvelous device. Or rather, he was showing me things through this marvelous device. Apparently, the Venerable Wolfe believes that there are an infinite number of worlds, of which ours is but one. Would you like to see them?”

Severian shook his head and scanned the moonlit expanse of the room. “No, thank you. As it happens, I am looking for Wolfe and had reason to believe he might be here. Have you seen him recently, Dominic?”

“I see him quite frequently,” replied the saint, “though I usually go to him. At any rate, he is not here now, as you can plainly see.”

“Odd, given that Metatron himself told me he would be with you.”

“Did he? Well, you know the angels. They have a rather different sense of time than we do. Perhaps he meant that Wolfe would be with me at some point in the future, or had been in the past.”

“You don’t mind if I look around for him?”

“Be my guest,” said Dominic before returning to the telescope. “And if you do find him, would you be kind enough to tell him that we have now discovered 437,962 new worlds?”

Severian did not respond. Something caught his eye in the distance, a moving, crouched shape, darting between crumbling arches along the far wall. He hastened towards it, his fuligin cloak billowing as he walked. “Wolfe? Is that you?” he called out. But there was no reply.

He continued to follow the thing along the wall, until it suddenly disappeared. When he came at last to the point where he had last seen it, he was surprised to see an opening in the wall, a darkened tunnel exhaling dank air, hidden from other angles by jutting stone. There had always been rumors of their existence, of course: a labyrinth of interconnected subterranean passages far older than the Santarixarum Tower, older indeed than the Vatican itself. Men had dug them in ages past to house the dead, it was said, or to hide from persecution. And in the digging of these tunnels, they had found tunnels older still, their purpose and origin lost forever to history.

A skittering of claws against stone came from within, startling him. Severian produced a torche from one of his pockets and held it aloft, casting a blue glow into the gloom. Again, there was the sound of scraping nails and soft footfalls as the creature retreated deeper inside. “Who’s there?” he shouted after it, but the mossy walls seemed to absorb the sound of his voice, and no answer came back.

He pressed forward, slowly at first, half expecting to walk headlong into a spiderweb or trip over a pile of bones. Deeper and deeper he went into the tunnel, which turned at odd angles and branched off in new directions. Unlike the filtered air inside the Tower, the atmosphere here was stale and heavy with moisture. It smelled of ink and rotting cabbage. Severian realized belatedly that he had no way of knowing how to get back to St. Dominic’s monastery or how extensive this warren of tunnels might be. The only thing preventing outright panic was the occasional sound of the creature somewhere ahead of him in the darkness, just beyond the blue halo of his torche.

Better to face a monster than to be alone in such a place.

Labyrinths, as any Wolfe fan must surely know, are places where one becomes time as well as space, which are after all more or less the same substance. For Severian now, time seemed first to slow down and then stop altogether until he could not say if he had been wandering its confines for minutes or hours or days.

On and on he went, passing half-ruined staircases that led up or down at odd angles into the black, along with empty alcoves and doors he did not dare open. He came eventually to a bridge, suspended over a chasm of unknown depth, and it was here that he at last caught a glimpse of his quarry. It waited for him on the far side of the span, thumping its muscular tail impatiently on the ground. It was, he saw, a dog: a large greyhound by the look of it, with dried blood smeared around its muzzle and staining its chest.

He tried to call it to him, pleadingly at first and then more sternly. When neither approach worked, he pretended to have a treat hidden beneath his cloak. Still, the animal would not budge. It merely observed his various attempts with a kind of benevolent tolerance. At last, Severian realized that the dog could not be summoned and so began to venture onto the rickety gangway. He had the odd sensation, midway across the ravine, that the dog was actually rooting for him, willing him to make it to the other side. This he eventually did, if not gracefully then at least without having to crawl on hands and knees. But no sooner had he set foot on solid ground than the dog trotted off around a corner. When Severian found him a moment later, the dog was pawing at a great wooden door adorned with inscrutable inscriptions. Sunlight crept under the threshold and between its splintered oaken beams, and Severian could feel a draft of fresh air against his face. He sighed in relief. The dog had led him out of the maze. But to where?

***

It took a moment for Severian’s eyes to adjust to the brightness of the light. When they did, he saw that he was standing at the edge of a great courtyard. The dog had bolted past him and was now bowing and frisking playfully around the feet of a girl whose back was turned to him.

She remained motionless when she spoke. “It took you long enough.”

“I’m sorry, I was lost in the–”

“You were not lost. You were delayed.”

Impudent. “Who are you? Where am I?”

The agiomaton turned around slowly. It was of small stature and indeterminate age with delicate features and supple skin suggesting youth, possibly even adolescence. But its manner was deliberate, confident beyond its apparent years. It was wearing a pair of fashionable sunglasses and holding a silver tray. Severian continued to stare at it for a moment, temporarily at a loss for words but unwilling to look away.

“My eyes are down here,” it said, flipping up the sunglasses to reveal a pair of macerated, empty sockets. On the tray, a pair of organoid eyes regarded him unblinkingly.

“Lucy,” he said. “Where are we? Is this part of the Tower?” 

The eyes on the tray rolled. “Do you think we all remain inside the Santarixarum at all times?” she asked. “Some of us have jobs to do, you know.”

Yes, that was exactly what he thought. The notion of the saints out on their own recognizance disturbed him.

Severian had recovered his bearings enough to be mildly irritated. He stepped forward and began to speak as he might to a young apprentice in his order, “Listen, I don’t know how you got here or what you think you’re doing, but–”

The dog, which had been coiled contentedly at Lucy’s feet, suddenly sprang up and growled, its hackles erect and teeth bare.

“It’s alright, Guinefort,” said the girl. “Severian’s bark is far worse than his bite.”

Severian stopped and looked at the dog. Guinefort, the hound of God. Of course! He cursed himself silently for failing to recognize the thirteenth century folk saint. According to local legend, the dog had saved a child from a viper’s attack only to be killed by the child’s father, who mistook the blood on the dog’s mouth as belonging to the child rather than the snake. But who had made this creature? The cult of St. Guinefort had been suppressed for over a millennium. It was, after all, nothing but an ignorant superstition. Cats might all be devils, but, alas, dogs, no matter how virtuous, could not be saints.

After reassuring the enormous greyhound, Lucy continued. “The angel commanded you to find Wolfe, did he not?”

“Well, yes. And I was looking for him even before–”

“Then we had best get started,” she said.

“And you’re going to help me?”

“Both of us, in fact.”

“A blind girl and a dog?”

Lucy flipped down her sunglasses and picked up one of the eyeballs on her tray. There was a small golden chain attached to it, and a hook, which she carefully placed through her left earlobe. “Think of it as two saints,” she said. “Besides, I’m not blind. I just see things a bit differently.”

Severian’s stomach flipped as he watched Lucy don the other eyeball earring. The vitreous orbs dangled from her ears like a pair of macabre Christmas ornaments.

Guinefort was now wagging her tail and spinning excitedly, having sensed in that mysterious way common to all dogs that it was time to leave.

Lucy nuzzled her jowl and planted a kiss on her snout, before turning to Severian. “Right,” she said. “We’re off. Try not to look so dour, Severian. This is an adventure, not an execution.”

“But where are we going?”

“We’re going to witness a miracle.”

****

To be continued…

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Copyright © 2024 Andrew Gillsmith and Incensepunk Magazine

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Andrew Gillsmith is a science fiction writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of the Deserted Vineyard series, the Planet Gallywood series, and The Jerusalem Passage.

Gillsmith grew up in the Golden Age of Cyberpunk. Fittingly, his first job out of school was delivering mail for Jeff Bezos when he was still selling books via Listserv. Since then, he's worked in a number of interesting roles, including head of customer experience for the Kentucky Derby, leader of a proposed hyperloop project in the United States, head of data analysis for a healthcare company, and SVP of sales for a digital marketing agency. He currently works in publisher development in the programmatic advertising space.

He is married to Cheryl and has two young sons, a Great Dane, and a pet rat named Reggie.