Audiobook: Pandora's Sisters - Michael Stephen Fuchs
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
British (General)Transcript
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Pandora's Sisters. MacMillan New Writing Written by Michael Steven Fuchs, Narrated by Virginia Thorn Electronic Edition, released by Pan Books, a division of MacMillan for Snafu, Buddy and tiny Chapter one. I'm kneeling before the 100 ft alter in the centre of ST Peter's Cathedral in Rome. My hands pressed together before me, as if in prayer only between my two hands. I'm clutching to whole other hands a second pair with very slim fingers and cool to the touch. This is because they are made out of bronze, also a Swiss guard, and I'm in a really burly, no nonsense son of a *****. Despite the Bavarian school girl outfit, he's holding a halbert to my neck. This is not a playtime, Halbert. This is a no ****. Take you off your horse. Send your head on its merry way, sort of Halbert, and I've got an unshakeable feeling the next few minutes are going to suck on the upside. My friend Helen has an extremely large calibre hand gun trained on the Swiss guys melon. It is getting toward midnight. So even though we're smack in the middle of Easter week, ST Pete's is not doing any business the whole Vatican is asleep, including, presumably His Holiness, who sacked out. Probably not 300 yards from where I'm kneeling, she dies, you die, says Helen. The Swiss guy ratchets his scowl in response. I'd take that at face value, I say, without moving my head. She's a behavioural geneticist. She knows what a worthless pile of pre programmed amino acids you are. I'm perceiving a deep and fundamental irony about where this is all coming to a head. You want to know who gave you your soul. You want a personal relationship with God? Well, we found God. We're all up in God. We've got God's private number, and so do you imprinted something in the order of 100 trillion times, once in every cell in your big dripping corpus. Of course, you can't tell the religionists this kind of thing. They'll have your head on a Halbert. Evidently, did I mention the religionists? The cabal of Kabbalah lists the horde of Hindu naggar cultists. They're all here to in Christendom's grandest church, flitting furtively around all the ornate pillars, the statues of the saints and the shadows. Shadows like you wouldn't believe the Jewish and Hindu kids are on the home turf of the papists, and so they're a little edgy, right? But you know what? In my book, the God guys are all reading from the same script, the wrong one. As it happens, only Helen and her very close friends get to look at the real holy text. Electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, shotgun gene sequences, God's infinite grace in a double helix word. Yet somehow Helen has ended up wielding a very different sort of tool. On this night, I can see the hammer of her nickel plated 44 hauled back like a snake strike that's all over. But the nervous system shut down, and she is distributing her gaze coolly around the room. This makes a stark contrast to the night I met her when she was tearing up a nightclub in San Francisco, drunk, flirting with everyone, including with me and including with my monkey. That was three weeks ago. Back up