possible. Things couldn't be undiscovered. But if the change that he and Raul wrought on 
the evidence was thorough enough it was his belief that nobody would easily reconstruct 
the experiment he'd conducted here in the wilds of Baja California. He and the boy (it 
was still difficult to think of Raul as a boy) had to be like perfect thieves, rifling 
their own house to remove every last trace of themselves. When they'd burned all the 
research notes and trashed all the equipment it had to be as though the Nuncio had never 
been made. Only then could he take the boy, who was still busy feeding the fires in front 
of the Mission, to this cliff edge, so that hand in hand they could fling themselves off. 
The fall was steep, and the rocks below plenty sharp enough to kill them. The tide would 
wash their blood and bodies out into the Pacific. Then, between fire and water, the job 
would have been done.
  None of which would prevent some future investigator from finding the Nuncio all over 
again; but the combination of disciplines and circumstances which had made that possible 
were very particular. For humanity's sake Fletcher hoped they would not occur again for 
many years. There was good reason for such hope. Without Jaffe's strange, half-intuitive 
grasp of occult principles to marry with his own scientific methodology, the miracle 
would not have been made, and how often did men of science sit down with men of magic 
(the suit-mongers, as Jaffe called them) and attempt a mingling of crafts? It was good 
they didn't. There was too much dangerous stuff to discover. The occultists whose codes 
Jaffe had broken knew more about the nature of things than Fletcher would ever have 
suspected. Beneath their metaphors, their talk of the Bath of Rebirth, and of golden 
Progeny begotten by fathers of lead, they were ambitious for the same solutions he'd 
sought all his life. Artificial ways to advance the evolutionary urge: to take the human 
beyond itself. Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius, they advised. Let the 
obscure be explained by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown. They knew 
whereof they wrote. Between his science and theirs Fletcher had solved the problem. 
Synthesized a fluid that would carry evolution's glad tidings through any living system, 
pressing (so he believed) the humblest cell towards a higher condition. Nuncio he'd 
called it: the Messenger. Now he knew he'd misnamed it. It was not a messenger of the 
gods, but the god itself. It had a life of its own. It had energy, and ambition. He had 
to destroy it, before it began to rewrite Genesis, beginning with Randolph Jaffe as Adam.
  "Father?"
  Raul had appeared behind him. Once again the boy had stripped off his clothes. After 
years of going naked, he was still unable to get used to their constrictions. And once 
again he used that damn word.
  "I'm not your father," Fletcher reminded him. "I never was and never will be. Can't you 
get that into your head?"
  As ever, Raul listened. His eyes lacked whites, and were difficult to read, but his 
steady gaze never failed to mellow Fletcher.
  "What do you want?" he said more softly.
  "The fires," the boy replied.
  "What about them?"
  "The wind, father-" he began.
  It had got up in the last few minutes, coming straight off the ocean. When Fletcher 
followed Raul round to the front of the Mission, in the lee of which they'd built the 
Nuncio's pyres, he found the notes being scattered, many of them far from consumed.
  "Damn you," Fletcher said, as much irritated by his own lack of attention to the task 
as the boy's. "I told you: don't put too much paper on at the same time."
  He took hold of Raul's arm, which was covered in silky hair, as was his entire body. 
There was a distinct smell of singeing, where the flames had risen suddenly and caught 
the boy by surprise. It took, he knew, considerable courage on Raul's part to overcome 
his primal fear of fire. He was doing it for his father's sake. He'd have done it for no 
other. Contrite, Fletcher put his arm around Raul's shoulder. The boy dung, the way he'd 
clung in his previous incarnation, burying his face in the smell of the human.
  "We'd better just let them go," Fletcher said, watching as another gust of wind took 
leaves off the fire and scattered them like pages from a calendar, day after day of pain 
and inspiration. Even if one or two of them were to be found, and that was unlikely along 
such a barren stretch of coast, nobody should be able to make any sense of them. It was 
only his ob-sessiveness that made him want to wipe the slate completely clean, and 
shouldn't he know better, when that very obses-siveness had been one of the qualities 
that had brought this and tragedy about?
  The boy detached himself from around Fletcher and turned back to the fires.
  "No Raul..." he said, "...forget them...let them go..."
  The boy chose not to hear; a trick he'd always had, even before the changes the 
Nuncio's touch had brought about. How many times had Fletcher summoned the ape Raul had 
been only to have the wretched animal willfully ignore him? It was in no small measure 
that very perversity which had encouraged Fletcher to test the Great Work on him: a 
whisper of the human in the simian which the Nuncio turned into a shout.
  Raul wasn't making an attempt to collect the dispersed papers, however. His small, wide 
body was tensed, his head tilted up. He was sniffing the air.
  "What is it?" Fletcher said. "You can smell somebody?"
  "Yes."
  "Where?"
  "Coming up the hill."
  Fletcher knew better than to question Raul's observation. The fact that he, Fletcher, 
could hear and smell nothing was simply a testament to the decadence of his senses. Nor 
did he need to ask from which direction their visitor was coming. There was only one 
route up to the Mission. Forging a single road through such inhospitable terrain, then up 
a steep hill, must have taxed even the masochism of Jesuits. They'd built one road, and 
the Mission, and then, perhaps failing to find God up here, vacated the place. If their 
ghosts ever drifted through, they'd find a deity now, Fletcher thought, in three vials of 
blue fluid. So would the man coming up the hill. It could only be Jaffe. Nobody else knew 
of their presence here.
  "Damn him," Fletcher said. "Why now? Why now?"
  It was a foolish question. Jaffe had chosen to come now because he knew his Great Work 
was being conspired against. He had a way of maintaining a presence in a place where he 
wasn't; a spying echo of himself. Fletcher didn't know how. One of Jaffe's suits, no 
doubt. The kind of minor mind-tricks Fletcher would have dismissed as trickery once, as 
he would have dismissed so much else. It would take Jaffe several more minutes to get all 
the way up the hill, but that wasn't enough time, by any means, for Fletcher and the boy 
to finish their labors.
  There were two tasks only he might yet complete if he was efficient. Both were vital. 
First, the killing and disposal of Raul, from whose transformed system an educated 
enquirer might glean the nature of the Nuncio. Second, the destruction of the three vials 
inside the Mission.
  It was there he returned now, through the chaos he had gladly wreaked on the place. 
Raul followed, walking barefoot through the smashed instrumentation and splintered 
furniture, to the inner sanctum. This was the only room that had not been invaded by the 
clutter of the Great Work. A plain cell that boasted only a desk, a chair, and an 
antiquated stereo. The chair was set in front of the window which overlooked the ocean.