General O’Toole did not spend much time on the first level. He knelt and said a prayer in the chapel of St. Peter, and looked briefly at the famous wood sculpture of Buddha in the nook beside the entrance, but like most tourists he could not wait to see the incomparable frescoes on the second floor. O’Toole was overwhelmed by both the size and the beauty of the famous paintings the moment he stepped out of the elevator. Directly in front of him was a life-size portrait of a lovely girl of eighteen with long blond hair. She was bending down in an old church in Siena on Christmas Eve in 2115 and leaving behind a curly-haired baby, wrapped in a blanket and placed in a basket, on the cold church floor. This painting represented the night of St. Michael’s birth and was the first in a sequence of twelve panels of frescoes that completely circled the shrine and told the story of the saint’s life.

General O’Toole walked over to the small kiosk beside the elevator and rented a forty-five-minute audio tour cassette that was ten centimeters square and easily fit in his coat pocket. He picked up one of the tiny dispos­able receivers and clipped it into his ear. After choosing English as his language, he pushed the button marked introduction and listened as a lovely feminine British voice explained what he was about to see.

“Each of the twelve frescoes is six meters high,” the woman was saying as the general was studying the features of the baby Michael in the first panel. “The lighting in the room is a combination of natural light from the outside, coming through filtered skylights, and artificial illumination from the elec­tronic arrays in the dome. Automatic sensors determine the ambient condi­tions and mix the natural with the artificial light so that the viewing of the frescoes is always perfect.

“The twelve panels on this level correspond to the twelve alcoves on the floor below. The arrangement of the frescoes themselves, which follow the life of the saint in a chronological order, flows in a clockwise direction. Thus the final painting, commemorating Michael’s canonization ceremony at Rome in 2188, is right next to the painting of his birth in the Siena cathedral seventy-two years earlier.

“The frescoes were designed and implemented by a team of four artists, including the master Feng Yi from China, who appeared suddenly in the spring of 2190 without any prior notification. Despite the fact that very little was known outside China of his skill, the other three artists, Rosa da Silva from Portugal, Fernando Lopez from Mexico, and Hans Reichwein from Switzerland, immediately welcomed Feng Yi to their team on the strength of the superb sketches that he had brought with him.” O’Toole glanced around the circular room as he listened to the lyrical voice on the cassette. On this last day of 2199, there were more than two hundred people on the second floor of St. Michael’s shrine, including three tour groups. The American cosmonaut progressed slowly around the circle, stopping in front of each panel to study the artwork and listen to the discus­sion on the cassette.

The major events of St. Michael’s life were depicted in detail in the frescoes. The second through fifth panels featured his days as a Franciscan novitiate in Siena, his fact-finding tour around the world during The Great Chaos, the beginning of his religious activism when he returned to Italy, and Michael’s use of the church resources to feed the hungry and house the homeless. The sixth painting showed the tireless saint inside the television studio donated by a wealthy American admirer. Here Michael, who spoke eight languages, repeatedly proclaimed his message of the fundamental unity of all humanity and the requirement for the wealthy to care for the less fortunate.

The seventh fresco was Feng Yi’s portrait of the confrontation in Rome between Michael and the old and dying pope. It was a masterpiece of con­trast. Using color and light brilliantly, the painting conveyed the image of an energetic, vibrant, and vital young man being wrongly censured by a world-weary prelate anxious to live out his final days in peace and quiet. In Mi­chael’s facial expression could be seen two distinctly different reactions to what he was being told: obedience to the papacy and disgust that the church was more concerned with style and order than substance.

“Michael was sent to a monastery in Tuscany by the pope,” the audio guide continued, “and it was there that the final transformations in his character took place. The eighth panel depicts God’s appearances to Mi­chael during this period of solitude. According to the saint, God spoke to him twice, the first time in the middle of a thunderstorm and the second time when a magnificent rainbow filled the sky. It was during the long and violent storm that God shouted out, on the claps of thunder, the new “Laws of Life” which Michael later proclaimed at his Easter sunrise service at Bolsena. On His second visitation God informed the saint that his message would be spread to the ends of the rainbow and that He would give the faithful a sign during the Easter mass.

“That most famous miracle of Michael’s life, one that was watched on television by over a billion people, is shown in the ninth panel. The painting presents Michael preaching Easter mass to the multitudes gathered around the shores of Lake Bolsena. A vigorous spring shower is drenching the crowd, most of whom are dressed in the familiar blue robes that had become associ­ated with his following. But while the rain falls all around St. Michael, not a drop ever falls on the pulpit or on the sound equipment being used to amplify his voice. A perpetual radiant spotlight from the Sun bathes the young saint’s face as he announces God’s new laws to the world. It was this crossover from being a purely religious leader—”

General O’Toole switched off the cassette as he walked toward the tenth and eleventh paintings. He was familiar with the rest of the story. After the mass at Bolsena, Michael was beset by a flock of troubles. His life abruptly changed. Within two weeks most of his cable television licenses were re­scinded. Stories of corruption and immorality among his young devotees, whose numbers had grown into the hundreds of thousands in the Western world alone, were constantly in the press. There was an assassination at­tempt, which was foiled at the last minute by his staff. There were also baseless reports in the media that Michael had proclaimed himself the sec­ond Christ.

And so the leaders of the world became afraid of you. All of them. You were a threat to everyone with your Laws of Life. And they never understood what you meant by the final evolution. O’Toole stood in front of the tenth fresco. It was a scene he knew by heart. Almost every other educated person in the world would also recognize it instantly. The television replays of the last seconds before the terrorist bomb exploded were shown every year on June 28, the first day of the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul and the anniversary of the day that Michael and almost a million others had perished in Rome on a fateful early summer morning in 2138.

You had called them to come to Rome to join you, To show the world that everyone was united. And so they came. The tenth painting showed Michael in his blue robes, standing high on the steps of the Victor Emmanuel Monu­ment next to the Piazza Venezia. He was in the middle of a sermon. Around him in all directions, spilling over into the Roman fora along the jam-packed Via dei Fori Imperiali leading to the Colosseum, was a sea of blue. And faces. Eager, excited faces, mostly young, looking up and around the monu­ments of the ancient city to catch a glimpse of the boy-man who dared to suggest that he had a way, God’s way, out of the despair and hopelessness that had engulfed the world.

Michael Ryan O’Toole, a fifty-seven-year-old American Catholic from Boston, fell on his knees and wept, like thousands before him, when he looked at the eleventh panel in the sequence. This painting depicted the same scene as the previous panel, but the time was more than an hour later, an hour after the seventy-five-kiloton nuclear bomb hidden in a sound truck near Trajan’s Column had exploded and sent its hideous mushroom-shaped cloud into the skies above the city. Everything within two hundred meters of the epicenter had been instantly vaporized. There was no Michael, no Piazza Venezia, no huge Victor Emmanuel Monument. In the center of the fresco was nothing but a hole. And around the perimeter of that hole, where the vaporization had not been quite as complete, were scenes of agony and horror that would shatter the complacency of even the most self-protected individuals.