I see all this while walking along the boulevard of broken slabs on the east side of the river. Ahead of me, the bridge, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, has been cracked into three sections and dropped into the river. Into the riverbed, I should say, for it looks as if the New Tiber has been boiled away, leaving glass where the sandy river bottom and riverbanks had been.
Someone has rigged a rope suspension bridge across the debris-filled gap between the banks.
This is Pacem; I do not doubt it. The thin, cool atmosphere feels and tastes the same as when Father de Soya, Aenea, and I came through here on the day before my dear girl died, although it was raining and gray then and now the sky is rich with a sunset that manages to make even the broken, fallen-away dome of St. Peter’s look beautiful.
It is almost overwhelming to be walking free under an open sky after my uncounted months of tight incarceration. I clutch my ’scriber to me like a shield, like some talisman, like a Bible, and walk the once-proud boulevard with shaky legs. For months my mind has been sharing memories of many places and many people, but my own eyes and lungs and legs and skin have forgotten the feeling of real freedom. Even in my sadness, there is an exultation.
Freecasting had been superficially the same as when Aenea had freecast us both, but on a deeper level it was profoundly different. The flash of white light had been the same, the ease of sudden transition, the slight shock of different air pressure or gravity or light. But this time I had heard the light rather than seen it. I had been carried up by the music of the stars and their myriad worlds and chosen the one to which I wanted to step. There had been no effort on my part, no great expenditure of energy, other than the need to focus and to choose carefully. And the music had not faded completely away—I guessed that it never would—but even now played in the background like musicians practicing just beyond the hill for a summer evening’s concert.
I can see signs of survivors in the city-wide wreckage. In the gold distance, two oxcarts move along the horizon with human silhouettes walking behind. On this side of the river, I can see huts, simple brick homes among the tumbles of old stone, a church, another small church. From somewhere far behind me comes the smell of meat cooking on an open fire and the unmistakable sound of children laughing. I am just turning toward that smell and sound when a man steps out from behind a mass of debris that may have once been a guard post at the entrance to Castel Sant’Angelo. He is a small man, quick of hand, his face half-hidden behind a beard and his hair combed back to a queue, but his eyes are alert. He carries a solid slug rifle of the sort once used for ceremony by the Swiss Guard.
We stare at each other for a moment—the unarmed, weakened man carrying nothing but a ’scriber and the sun-bronzed hunter with his ready weapon—and then each recognizes the other. I have never met this man, nor he me, but I have seen him through others’ memories via the Void Which Binds, although he was uniformed, armored, and clean-shaven the first time I saw him—naked and in the act of being tortured the last time. I do not know how he recognizes me, but I see that recognition in his eyes an instant before he sets the weapon aside and steps forward to seize my hand and forearm in both his hands.
“Raul Endymion!” he cries. “The day has come! Praise be. Welcome.” The bearded apparition actually hugs me before stepping back to look at me again and grin.
“You’re Corporal Kee,” I say stupidly. I remember the eyes most of all, seen from Father de Soya’s point of view as he and Kee and Sergeant Gregorius and Lancer Rettiq chased Aenea and me across this arm of the galaxy for years.
“Formerly Corporal Kee,” says the grinning man. “Now just Bassin Kee, citizen of New Rome, member of the diocese of St. Anne’s, hunter for tomorrow’s meal.” He shakes his head as he stares at me. “Raul Endymion. My God. Some thought you would never escape that cursed Schrödinger cat-thing.”
“You know about the Schrödinger egg?”
“Of course,” says Kee. “It was part of the Shared Moment. Aenea knew where they were taking you. So we all knew. And we’ve sensed your presence there through the Void, of course.”
I felt suddenly dizzy and a bit sick to my stomach. The light, the air, the great distance to the horizon… That horizon became unstable, as if I were looking at it from aboard a small ship in a rough sea, so I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Kee was holding my arm and helping me sit on a large, white stone that looked as if it had been blasted from the cathedral far across the glass river.
“My God, Raul,” he says, “have you just freecast from there? You’ve been nowhere else?”
“Yes,” I say. “No.” I take two slow breaths and say, “What is the Shared Moment?” I had heard the formal capital letters in his voice.
The small man studies me with his bright, intelligent gaze. His voice is soft.
“Aenea’s Shared Moment,” he says. “It is what we all call it, although of course it was more than a single moment. All the moments of her torture and death.”
“You felt that too?” I say. I suddenly feel a fist closing around my heart, although whether the emotion is joy or terrible sadness remains to be discovered.
“Everyone felt it,” says Kee. “Everyone shared it. Everyone, that is, except her torturers.”
“Everyone else on Pacem?” I ask.
“On Pacem,” says Kee. “On Lusus and Renaissance Vector. On Mars and Qom-Riyadh and Renaissance Minor and Tau Ceti Center. On Fuji and Ixion and Deneb Drei and Sibitu’s Bitterness. On Barnard’s World and God’s Grove and Mare Infinitus. On Tsingtao Hsishuang Panna and Patawpha and Groombridge Dyson D.” Kee pauses and smiles at the sound of his own litany. “On almost every world, Raul. And in places in between. We know that the Startree felt the Shared Moment… all the startree biospheres did.”
I blink. “There are other startrees?”
Kee nods.
“How did all these worlds… share that moment?”
I ask, seeing the answer even as I pose the question.
“Yes,” murmurs the former Corporal Kee. “All of the places Aenea visited, often with you. All of the worlds where she left disciples who had partaken of communion and renounced the cruciform. Her Shared Moment… the hour of her death… was like a signal broadcast and rebroadcast through all of these worlds.”
I rub my face. It feels numb. “So only those who had already taken communion or studied with Aenea shared in that moment?” I say.
Kee is shaking his head. “No… they were the transponders, the relay stations. They pulled the Shared Moment from the Void Which Binds and rebroadcast it to everyone.”
“Everyone?” I repeat stupidly. “Even those tens and hundreds of billions in the Pax who wear the cross?”
“Who wore the cross,” amends Bassin Kee. “Many of those faithful have since decided not to carry a Core parasite in their bodies.”
I begin to understand then. Aenea’s last shared moments had been more than words and torture and pain and horror—I had sensed her thoughts, shared her understanding of the Core’s motives, of the true parasitism of the cruciform, of the cynical use of human death to tweak their neural networks, of Lourdusamy’s lust for power and Mustafa’s confusion and Albedo’s absolute inhumanity… If everyone had shared the same Shared Moment that I had screamed and fought my way through in the high-g tank on the outward-bound robot prison torchship, then it had been a bright and terrible moment for the human race. And every living human being must have heard her final I love you, Raul as the flames swept high. The sun is setting. Rays of gold light shine through the ruins on the west side of the river and throw a maze of shadows across the east bank. The molten mass of Castel Sant’Angelo runs down toward us like a mountain of melted glass.