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accessed by …”
    He paused, almost seemed to be looking over his shoulder to see if anything was gaining on him, a sure sign according to the wise man that something probably is.
    “… hostile entities presently unknown.”
    “I’m not so sure that I want to do any conjuring with entities so hostile they’ve got you reaching for your holy water even though you’re not supposed to believe in them….”
    “The Church has never contended that electronic successor entities do not exist. Far from it, Church doctrine condemns them as satanic golems, the ultimate machineries of the Prince of Liars himself, and believe me, Mr. Philippe, the current situation does nothing to dissuade us from the belief that the Other Side of the Line, as you would call it, is in the hands of the Adversary.”
    “There are demons in these vasty deeps….”
    “And your file shows they come when you summon them, Mr. Philippe.”
    “Sometimes they do, Your Eminence, which is a real good reason not to conjure up something you don’t want to meet….”
    “Fear not on that account, Mr. Philippe. The … successor entity we wish you to … retrieve is that of a man who may one day be a saint.”

II
    Death comes to all men, and soon enough it was going
to come for me.
    That was the short of what the doctor told me. At the age of ninety-one, a generation beyond my biblically allotted span as such things were once measured, my body had reached the end of its ability to endure gravity, free radicals, solar bombardment, the folly of my fellow man, and well within the year would be rendered unto dust. My immune system had simply worn out, and I, who had faithfully fulfilled my lifelong vow of chastity, would expire in a clinical condition indistinguishable from that of a twentieth-century libertine.
    You would have to be an old dying priest to appreciate the humor.
    The long of what the doctor told me, and it seemed very long indeed as he insinuated and squirmed around the subject, was what in this benighted age they call my “Choice of a Successor.”
    Old-fashioned cloning techniques, I was given to believe, were
not
to be advised in cases where the cause of death would be an excess of noise in the genetic control mechanisms. There were, however, numerous possible solid-state matrices for my immortal software.
    It took so long for him to make his satanic suggestion because he knew full well he could not broach it openly to the likes of Father Pierre De Leone, yet in these last days the Hippocratic oath had been reinterpreted to constrain him to proffer “Transcorporeal Immortality,” the latest boon from the laboratory of kindly old Dr. Faust.
    Surely a dying old man should not be subjected to such tormentuous temptation, or at least it should be spit out rapidly in words of one syllable and be done with. Or so was my rationalization for my rudeness when at length, and I do mean at length, I concluded that such arch crypticism could render this conversation itself eternal.
    “You may consider your duty fulfilled, Doctor,” I told him finally. “You see before you a man who quite understands the many ways in which a model of his consciousness may run forever in silicon fields, and who rejects all of them as, to be quite frank and precise about it, instrumentalities of Satan.”
    When I was a youth, musical acts made casual theater out of dancing with the Devil, and satanic images were even used to sell breakfast cereal anddog food. Only a few mad cultists took Satan seriously as an object of worship, and even the Church was mealymouthed about the literal reality of his presence in the world.
    Now, of course, though the community of believers in a redemptive God of Love has dwindled even from what it was in that evil age, Satan has become a serious conversation stopper.
    Given the state of our dying planet, and given that we ourselves bear the responsibility for this sin so awesome its name cannot be pronounced, evidence of the presence of