“So there’s no pope?” I say. “No holy father?”
De Soya shrugs and pours us all more wine.
After thirteen standard months of recycled food and no alcohol, the wine is going straight to my head. “Monsignor Lucas Oddi escaped both the revolution and the Core attack and has established the papacy in exile on Madhya,” the priest says with a sharp tone in his voice. “I don’t believe that anyone in the former Pax except his immediate defenders and followers in that system honor him as a real pope.” He sips his wine. “It is not the first time that the Mother Church has had an antipope.”
“What about Pope Urban XVI?” I say. “Did he die of his heart attack?”
“Yes,” says Kee, leaning forward and setting his strong forearms on the table.
“And was resurrected?” I say.
“Not exactly,” says Kee.
I look at the former corporal, waiting for an explanation, but none is forthcoming.
“I’ve sent word across the river,” says Father de Soya. “Bassin’s comment should be explained any minute.”
Indeed, a minute later the curtains at the entrance to de Soya’s comfortable little alcove are pulled back and a tall man in a black cassock enters. It is not Lenar Hoyt. It is a man I have never met but whom I feel that I know well—his elegant hands, long face, large, sad eyes, broad forehead, and thinning silver hair. I stand to shake his hand, to bow, to kiss his ring… something.
“Raul, my boy, my boy,” says Father Paul Duré. “What a pleasure to meet you. How thrilled we all are that you have returned.”
The older priest shakes my hand with a firm grip, hugs me for good measure, and then goes to de Soya’s cupboard as if he is familiar with it, finds a jar, pumps water into the sink, washes the jar, pours wine for himself, and sits in the chair opposite Kee at the end of the table. “We’re catching Raul up on what has happened in the past year and a month of his absence,” says Father de Soya.
“It feels like a century,” I say. My eyes are focused on something far beyond the table and this room.
“It was a century for me,” says the older Jesuit. His accent is quaint and somehow charming—a French-speaking Outback world, perhaps? “Almost three centuries, actually.”
“I saw what they did to you when you were resurrected,” I say with the brazenness of the wine in me. “Lourdusamy and Albedo murdered you so that Hoyt would be reborn again from your shared cruciforms.”
Father Duré has not actually tasted his wine, but he stares down into the glass as if waiting for it to transubstantiate. “Time and time again,” he says in a tone that seems more wistful than anything else. “It is a strange life, being born just to be murdered.”
“Aenea would agree,” I say, knowing that these men are friends and good men but not feeling especially friendly to the Church in general.
“Yes,” says Paul Duré and holds up his glass in a silent toast. He drinks.
Bassin Kee fills the vacuum of silence.
“Most of the faithful left on Pacem would have Father Duré as our true pope.”
I look at the elderly Jesuit. I have been through enough that it does not make me all tingly to be in the presence of a legend, someone who was central to the Cantos. As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth. In this case, it is the soft tufts of gray hair growing in the priest’s large ears.
“Teilhard the Second?” I say, remembering that the man had reportedly been a fine pope as Teilhard I 279 years ago—for a short period before he was murdered for the first time.
Duré accepts more wine from Father de Soya and shakes his head. I can see that the sadness behind those large eyes is the same as de Soya’s—earned and heartfelt, not assumed for character effect. “No more papacy for me,” he says. “I will spend the rest of my years attempting to learn from Aenea’s teachings—listening very hard for the voices of the dead and the living—while reacquainting myself with Our Lord’s lessons on humility. For years I played the archaeologist and intellectual. It is time to rediscover myself as a simple parish priest.”
“Amen,” says de Soya and hunts in his cup board for another bottle. The former Pax starship captain sounds a bit drunk.
“You don’t wear the cruciform any longer?” I say, addressing myself to all three men while looking at Duré.
All three of them look shocked. Duré says, “Only the fools and ultimately cynical still wear the parasite, Raul. Very few on Pacem. Very few on any of the worlds where Aenea’s Shared Moment was heard.” He touches his thin chest as if remembering. “It was not a choice for me, actually. I was reborn in one of the Vatican resurrection créches at the height of the fighting. I waited for Lourdusamy and Albedo to visit me as always… to murder me as always. Instead, this man…” He extends his long fingers toward Kee, who bows slightly and pours himself a bit more wine. “This man,” continues the former Pope Teilhard, “came crashing in with his rebels, all combat armor and ancient rifles. He brought me a chalice of wine. I knew what it was. I had shared in the Shared Moment.”
I stare at the old priest. Even dormant in the bubble-memory matrix of the extra cruciform, even while being resurrected? I thought.
As if reading my gaze, Father Duré nods.
“Even there,” he says. Looking directly at me, he says, “What will you do now, Raul Endymion?”
I hesitate only a second. “I came to Pacem to find Aenea’s ashes… she asked me… she once asked…”
“We know, my son,” says Father de Soya quietly.
“Anyway,” I go on when I can, “there’s no chance of that in what’s left of Castel Sant’Angelo, so I’ll continue with my other priority.”
“Which is?” says Father Duré with infinite gentleness. Suddenly, in this dim room with the rough table and the old wine and the male smell of clean sweat all around, I can see in the old Jesuit the powerful reality behind Uncle Martin’s mythic Cantos. I realize without doubt that this was indeed the man of faith who had crucified himself not once but repeated times on the lightning-filled tesla tree rather than submit to the false cross of the cruciform. This was a true defender of the faith. This was a man whom Aenea would have loved to have met and talked with and debated with. At that moment I feel her loss with such renewed pain that I have to look down into my wine to hide my eyes from Duré and the others. “Aenea once told me that she had given birth to a child,” I manage to say and then stop. I cannot remember if this fact had been in the gestalt of memories and thoughts that was transmitted in Aenea’s Shared Moment. If so, they know all about this. I glance at them, but both priests and the corporal are waiting politely. They had not known this. “I’m going to find that child,” I say. “Find it and help raise it, if I am allowed.”
The priests look at one another in something like wonderment. Kee is looking at me. “We did not know this,” says Federico de Soya. “I am amazed. I would have wagered everything I know about human nature to say that you were the only man in her life… the only love. I have never seen two young people so happy.”
“There was someone else,” I say, raising my glass almost violently to swig down the last of the wine only to find the glass empty. I set it carefully on the table. “There was someone else,” I say again, less miserably and emphatically this time. “But that’s not important. The baby… the child… is important. I want to find it if I can.”
“Do you have any idea where the child is?” says Kee.
I sigh and shake my head. “None. But I’ll ’cast to every world in the old Pax and Outback, to every world in the galaxy if I have to. Beyond the galaxy… “I stop. I am drunk and this is too important to talk about when drunk. “Anyway, that’s where I’ll be going in a few minutes.”