The Man of Bronze by James Alan Gardner Page A

was good at sour looks. But he was astute enough to realize I wouldn’t commit myself further until he’d told me the truth.
    He pulled his arm away from the doctors and stood up. “Follow me, Ms. Croft. I’ll take you to the head of our Order.”
    We went back into the night. The temperature was falling . . . or perhaps I was just more sensitive to the cold.
    Reuben was dead. I felt tired.
    We crossed the courtyard toward the darkened entrance of the chapel. Father Emil stopped at the door. “Before we go in,” he said, “let me ask you, Ms. Croft, have you heard of Roger Bacon?”
    “An English scholar,” I said. “One of the early lecturers at Oxford, back in the twelve hundreds. Some people consider him the first true scientist. He insisted you shouldn’t believe anything till you tested it experimentally.”
    “He was also a Franciscan monk,” Father Emil said. “And a member of the Order of Bronze.”
    “Really,” I said, “how interesting.” But in my head, I muttered,
Dear, oh dear, oh dear.
If Father Emil was telling the truth, his precious Order dated back to the Middle Ages . . . and my past dealings with medieval secret societies had never turned out well. Then again, the good father might simply be wrong. The Order of Bronze wouldn’t be the first quasireligious organization to claim deep historic roots when it was actually whipped together by poseurs pretending to represent ancient mystic traditions.
    “And have you heard,” Father Emil continued, “about Roger Bacon’s bronze head?”
    I nodded. “Supposedly, Bacon built a man’s head of bronze. Stories claim it could talk and predict the future.”
    “And what do you think of that?”
    I hesitated. In a profession like mine, one can never be sure when odd tales are mere empty folklore or the gospel truth. As it happens, however, I’d done a little research into Bacon and his bronze head. With a start, I realized I’d done so after a conversation with Reuben several months earlier. He’d casually mentioned the head, and I’d been interested enough to look it up in a few reference books.
    Father Emil was still waiting for an answer. I decided to be wary. “Bacon might have made a simple clockwork,” I said. “A windup head that could open and close its mouth . . . maybe blink its eyes. More likely, it’s just an old wives’ tale. Talking bronze heads were common in medieval superstitions—like UFOs and scrawny gray aliens are today. Pope Sylvester II reportedly kept a bronze head in a back room of his basilica. So did St. Thomas Aquinas. Further back, bronze heads were associated with the Greek philosopher Agrippa, the Roman poet Virgil . . .”
    “You don’t believe such stories?” Father Emil asked.
    “Considering all the bizarre things I’ve seen in my life, I never rule anything out. But when bronze heads show up all over, one suspects they’re just a standard fictional motif—as if medieval historians felt they had to invent stories about bronze heads whenever they were writing about clever men.
He was a bright fellow, so of course he must have owned a talking bronze head.
”
    “It never occurred to you that all those people might have owned the same head?”
    My mouth opened for a sarcastic retort . . . but a dire suspicion struck me and I stopped myself. Father Emil waited for me to speak; when I didn’t, he nodded to himself and opened the chapel door.
    Lights blazed into life a moment after the door opened. The sanctuary was full, not with religious paraphernalia but with electronic equipment: computers, printers, big-screen monitors showing everything from satellite photos to fingerprints, and dozens of humming black boxes whose purpose I couldn’t identify.
    In the middle of this high-tech array sat a single manlike figure on a chair that looked like a steel throne. The man himself was also metal: a gleaming figure of rich copper-bronze.
    For a moment, I thought the figure was just a statue—a brazen idol