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missed the klieg lights and chafed against my vows. But while the Church presents a monolithic facade, dissident factions are permitted, indeed even encouraged, to exist within its internal intellectual discourse, so long as such intellectual laundry is not displayed on the public clothesline, and I soon enough adapted, in the end with a sense of relief, to a lifelong role as a minority viewpoint within the mind of the Church.
    Not that I did not wish to see my viewpoint prevail, not that I have not watched in dismay as the mind of the Church proceeded to grant communion to uniclones, to sleaze along toward questioning the immateriality of the soul itself.
    As for papal infallibility, one must take it in a corporate sense. The Church requires that in the manifest absence of direct divine intervention,
someone
must be infallible in order to render just such deep spiritual disputes resolvable, so why not the Pope? Formerly infallible papal decisions have always been infallibly altered when God vouchsafed that such was required for the evolution of His Church.
    But up there in the mountains, the meaning of it all, like my life, began to slip away, honing itself down to some final epiphany. Day after day, I would venture forth into the lethal white light, andevery day I seemed closer to some elusive divine grace. I was ready to meet my Maker, indeed, I had become eager for it, for the Final Revelation of His Countenance to sweep me away.
    But God, as it turned out, had a final mission for me to perform.
    One clear twilit evening when the sun was disappearing behind the mountain crag and I was returning to the chalet, a far-off thunder crackled through the alpine stillness, a strange thunder, staccato yet continuous, that quickly resolved itself into a monstrous dragonfly drone that grew louder and louder, more and more mechanical, until all at once a demonic apparition popped up over the far ridge line.
    At first I could make no sense of it. It seemed like some enormous angry insect, beating its transparent wings with an unearthly fury, clawing its way through the air toward me.
    Then I realized that it was made of plastic and metal, that the unearthly clatter was that of a combustion engine, and by the time it had set down before the chalet, steaming petrol fumes and chuffing carbon dioxide, to my amazement and horror, I knew all too well what it was.
    Helicopters were not all that uncommon when I was a boy, and in the Amazon I had seen these technological carrion beetles buzzing about the boneyard of the rain forest. They were the sigils of power and privilege, of ranking military officers,political potentates, and corporate captains, feared and loathed as such by those they surveyed.
    Now, of course, like all combustion-powered vehicles, they are illegal in most of the world’s jurisdictions, or at any rate dispensation to possess or fly them is restricted to the true princes of this corrupt world.
    Or, may God save us, it seemed, to Princes of the Church! For out of the canopy emerged just such a personage, his red cap covered by an enormous brimmed sunhelmet, his eyes hidden by impenetrable mirror glass, but with that beard and that bearing, not to mention the uncharacteristic red cloak he appeared to have donned for the occasion, unmistakably John Cardinal Silver, whom ecclesiastical rumor had it had forged the coalition that made Mary I Pope.
    Cardinal Silver was a man I had met on several occasions, but someone with whom I had never really conversed, so I knew him mainly by reputation, which was more than enough.
    Like the Pope, he was an American, something that, unlike many others, I have never held against either of them. It is highly popular, and even more convenient, for the rest of the world to blame the Americans, the prime petroleum guzzler and carbon dioxide emitters for over a century, for the biosphere’s imminent demise. But it is all too self-serving to fob off the blame for our species’ monstrous sin on