“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.”
“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.