She asked me to spread her ashes on Old Earth. And I can’t even do that for her. I fail her even in death.
I look up at Bassin Kee. “On Pacem?” I say. “She had no disciples on Pacem when… Oh.” She had sent Father de Soya away immediately before our doomed charge up the aisle in St. Peter’s Basilica, asking him to leave with the monks and blend into the city he knew so well, to avoid the Pax whatever else happened. When he had argued, Aenea’s words had been—“… This is all I ask, Father. And I ask it with love and respect.” And Father de Soya had gone out into the rain. And he had been the broadcast relay, carrying my darling girl’s last agony and insight to several billion people on Pacem. “Oh,” I say, still looking at Kee. “But the last time I saw you… through the Void… you were being kept captive in cryogenic fugue there in that…” I sweep my hand in disgust toward the melted heap of Castel Sant’Angelo.
Kee nods again. “I was in cryogenic fugue, Raul. I was stored like a sleeping slab of meat in a cold locker in a basement dungeon not far from where they murdered Aenea. But I felt the Shared Moment. Every human alive did—whether sleeping or drunk or dying or lost in madness.”
I can only stare at the man, my heart breaking again in understanding. Eventually I say, “How did you get out? Away from there?”
We are both looking at the ruins of the Holy Office headquarters now.
Kee sighs. “There was a revolution very soon after the Shared Moment. Many people—the majority here on Pacem—no longer wanted anything to do with the cruciforms and the betrayed Church which had implanted them. Some still were cynical enough to make that trade with the devil in exchange for physical resurrection, but millions… hundreds of millions… sought out communion and freedom from the Core cross just in the first week. The Pax loyalists attempted to stop them. There was fighting… revolution… civil war.”
“Again,” I say. “Just like the Fall of the Farcasters three centuries ago.”
“No,” says Kee. “Nothing that bad. Remember, once one has learned the language of the dead and the living, it’s painful to hurt someone else. The Pax loyalists did not have that restraint, but then, they were in the minority everywhere.”
I gesture toward the world of ruins. “You call this restraint? You call this not so bad?”
“The revolution against the Vatican and the Pax and the Holy Office did not do this,” says Kee grimly. “That was relatively bloodless. The loyalists fled in archangel starships. Their New Vatican is on a world called Madhya… a real shithole of a planet, guarded now by half the old fleet and several million loyalists.”
“Who then?” I say, still looking at the devastation everywhere around us.
“The Core did this,” says Kee. “The Nemes-things destroyed the city and then seized four archangel ships. Slagged us from space after the loyalists left. The Core was pissed off. Probably still is. We don’t care.”
I carefully set the ’scriber down on the white stone and look around. More men and women are coming out of the ruins, staying a respectful distance from us but watching with great interest. They are dressed in work clothes and hunting garb, but not in bearskins or rags. These are obviously people living in a rough place during a hard time, but not savages. A young blond boy waves at me shyly. I wave back.
“I never really answered your question,” says Kee. “The guards released me… released all of the prisoners… during the confusion in the week after the Shared Moment. A lot of prisoners around this arm of the galaxy found doors opening that week. After communion… well, it’s hard to imprison or torture someone else when you end up sharing half their pain through the Void Which Binds. And the Ousters have been busy since the Shared Moment reviving the billions of Jews and Muslims and others kidnapped by the Core… and ferrying them home from the Labyrinthine planets to their homeworlds.”
I think about this for a minute. Then I say, “Did Father de Soya survive?”
Kee grins even more broadly. “I guess you can say he survived. He’s our priest in the parish of St. Anne’s. Come on, I’ll take you to him. He knows you’re here by now. It’s only a five-minute walk.”
De Soya hugs me so fiercely that my ribs ache for an hour. The priest is wearing a plain black cassock and Roman collar. St. Anne’s is not the large parish church we had glimpsed in the Vatican, but a small brick and adobe chapel set in a cleared area on the east bank. It seems that the parish consists of about a hundred families who make their livelihood hunting and farming in what had been a large park on this side of the spaceport. I am introduced to most of these hundred families as we eat outside in the lighted space near the foyer of the church and it seems that they all know of me—they act as if they know me personally, and all seem sincerely grateful that I am alive and returned to the world of the living.
As night deepens, Kee, de Soya, and I adjourn to the priest’s private quarters: a spartan room adjoining the back of the church. Father de Soya brings out a bottle of wine and pours a full glass for each of us.
“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”
Kee lifts his glass as if in toast and then hesitates. “To Aenea?” he suggests.
“To Aenea,” say Father de Soya and I.
We drain our glasses and the priest pours more.
“How long was I gone?” I ask. The wine makes my face flush, as it always does. Aenea used to kid me about it.
“It has been thirteen standard months since the Shared Moment,” says de Soya.
I shake my head. I must have spent the time writing the narrative and waiting to die in work sessions of thirty hours or more, interspersed with a few hours of sleep, then another thirty or forty hours straight. I had been doing what sleep scientists call free-running: losing all connection to circadian rhythm. “Do you have any contact with the other worlds?” I ask. I look at Kee and answer my own question. “You must. Bassin was telling me about the reaction to the Shared Moment on other worlds and the return of the kidnapped billions.”
“A few ships set in here,” says de Soya, “but with the archangel ships gone, travel takes time. The Templars and Ousters use their treeships to ferry the refugees home, but the rest of us hate to use the Hawking drive now that we realize how harmful it is to the Void medium. And as hard as everyone works to learn it, very few have learned how to hear the music of the spheres well enough to take that first step.”
“It is not so hard,” I say and chuckle to myself as I sip the smooth wine. “It’s goddamn hard,” I add. “Sorry, Father.”
De Soya nods his indulgence. “It is goddamn hard. I feel that I’ve come close a hundred times, but always lose the focus at the last moment.”
I look at the little priest. “You’ve stayed Catholic,” I say at last.
Father de Soya sips the wine out of an old glass. “I haven’t just stayed Catholic, Raul. I’ve rediscovered what it means to be Catholic. To be a Christian. To be a believer.”
“Even after Aenea’s Shared Moment?” I say. I am aware of Corporal Kee watching us from the end of the table. Shadows from the oil lights dance on the warm earth walls.
De Soya nods. “I already understood the corruption of the Church in its pact with the Core,” he says very softly. “Aenea’s shared insights only underlined what it meant for me to be human… and a child of Christ.” I am thinking about this a minute later when Father de Soya adds, “There is talk of making me a bishop, but I am quelling that. It is why I have stayed in this region of Pacem even though most of the viable communities are away from the old urban areas. One look at the ruins of our beautiful tradition across the river reminds me of the folly of staking too much on hierarchy.”