redRobe

Chapter Fifteen Looking For A Little Human Understanding

‘Okay,’ said the Colt finally. ‘That covers what I want. Now what about you?’

Both gun and fat little priest were in a tiny, windowless office behind the main altar, little more than a recessed doorway tilled with a simple wooden table and two ordinary-looking chairs. Blocking off the entrance was a heavy velvet curtain through which the little priest had carried the gun a couple of days earlier.

Sábado was long since gone, glad to get away from the glances of the tourists and the worried scowls of the security guards. On the way out he stopped only once, to take a handful of white candles from a box below the wrought-iron racks. He figured the cathedral could afford it.

‘What do I want?’ Father Moritz turned the Colt over in his fingers and thought about the question. It made a change from thinking about the gun itself, which was what he’d been doing every waking hour.

The barrel was warm, exactly blood temperature. But the man didn’t know if that was intentional, to stop the gun showing up during heat scans, or just because he’d been holding the weapon for so long.

He’d owned a Colt like this once, not quite this modern, but close enough. And he knew just how much that had cost. Enough to feed a favela family for a year, two families, five families… Maybe even feed the whole district. His Colt hadn’t even been fully aware, only semiTuring but even back then the price could have paid to pipe in fresh water for a whole street.

Father Moritz was struggling hard to be upset and disgusted, to be appalled at the waste and horror, at the destruction inherent in such an overworked bit of machinery, but that wasn’t his nature. And besides, no one could tell him about waste. As the sole inheritor of three genome patents he’d spent most of his early life trying to throw money away. And he’d grown up around beautiful, overpriced objets d’art. It would be a falsehood to deny that the Colt was stunning in its functional simplicity and the elegance of its design. That was why he’d spent forty-eight hours polishing up the tiny, understated, jewel-like diodes that constantly lit in sequence down the gun’s side.

For a second Father Moritz wondered if the Colt was running some kind of empathy routine on him. If so, it was doing a good job.

‘It’s not my fault.’ The small priest’s lips twisted into a sad smile. ‘The serpent made me do it. . .’

No, he wasn’t a child. Resting the Colt on the pine table in front of him Father Moritz quite literally sat on his hands to stop himself reaching for it again.

‘Well,’ said the Colt, sounding amused. ‘I want to see His Eminence. Why don’t you tell me what you want?’

So the small priest did.

Even the hiPower was surprised. And this was a model that prided itself on how well it understood humans.