by Дэн Симмонс
“What is your opinion of the Church, Raul?”
Under my eyelids, I rolled my eyes.
“The Church, Father?”
Father Clifton waited.
I shrugged. Or to be more precise, I tried to shrug—it’s not that easy when one wrist is handcuffed above your head and the other arm is on the receiving end of an intravenous drip.
Father Clifton must have understood my awkward motion. “You’re indifferent to it then?” he asked softly.
As indifferent as one can be to an organization that’s tried to capture or kill me, I thought.
“Not indifferent, Father,” I said. “It’s just that the Church… well, it hasn’t been relevant to my life in most ways.”
One of the missionary’s sandy eyebrows rose slightly. “Gosh, Raul… the Church is a lot of things… not all of them spotlessly good, I’m sure… but I hardly think that it could be accused of being irrelevant.”
I considered shrugging again, but decided one awkward spasm of that sort was enough. “I see what you mean,” I said, hoping that the conversation was over. Father Clifton leaned even closer, his elbows on his knees, his hands set together in front of him—but more in the aspect of persuasion and reason than prayer. “Raul, you know that they’re taking you back to Base Bombasino in the morning.” I nodded. My head was still free to move. “You know that the Pax Fleet and Mercantilus punishment for desertion is death.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but only after a fair trial.”
Father Clifton ignored my sarcasm. His brow was wrinkled with what could only be worry—although for my fate or for my eternal soul, I was not sure which. Perhaps for both. “For Christians,” he began and paused a moment. “For Christians, such an execution is punishment, some discomfort, perhaps even momentary terror, but then they mend their ways and go on with their lives. For you…”
“Nothingness,” I said, helping him end his sentence. “The Big Gulp. Eternal darkness. Nada-ness. I become a worm’s casserole.”
Father Clifton was not amused. “This does not have to be the case, my son.”
I sighed and looked out the window. It was early afternoon on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. The sunlight was different here than on worlds that I had known well—Hyperion, Old Earth, even Mare Infinitus and other places I had visited briefly but intensely—but the difference was so subtle that I would have found it hard to describe. But it was beautiful. There was no arguing that. I looked at the cobalt sky, streaked with violet clouds, at the butter-rich light falling on pink adobe and the wooden sill; I listened to the sound of children playing in the alley, to the soft conversation of Ces Ambre and her sick brother, Bin, to the sudden, soft laughter as something in the game they were playing amused them, and I thought—To lose all this forever? And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying, To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love. Father Clifton cleared his throat. “Have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager, Raul?”
“Yes.”
“You have?” Father Clifton sounded surprised.
I had the feeling that I had thrown him off stride in his prepared line of argument. “Then you know why it makes sense,” he said rather lamely.
I sighed again. The pain was steady now, not coming and going in the tidal surges that had overwhelmed me the past few days. I remembered first encountering Blaise Pascal in conversations with Grandam when I was a kid, then discussing him with Aenea in the Arizona twilight, and finally looking up his Pensées in the excellent library at Taliesin West.
“Pascal was a mathematician,” Father Clifton was saying, “pre-Hegira… mid-eighteenth century, I think…”
“Actually, he lived in the mid 1600’s,” I said, “1623 to 1662, I think.” Actually, I was bluffing a bit on the dates. The numbers seemed right, but I would not have bet my life on them. I remembered the era because Aenea and I had spent a couple of weeks one winter discussing the Enlightenment and its effect on people and institutions pre-Hegira, pre-Pax.
“Yes,” said Father Clifton, “but the time he lived isn’t as important as his so-called wager. Consider it, Raul—on one side, the chance of resurrection, immortality, an eternity in heaven and benefiting from Christ’s light. On the other side… how did you put it?”
“The Big Gulp,” I said. “Nada-ness.”
“Worse than that,” said the young priest, his voice thick with earnest conviction. “Nada means nothingness. Sleep without dreams. But Pascal realized that the absence of Christ’s redemption is worse than that. It’s eternal regret… longing… infinite sadness.”
“And hell?” I said. “Eternal punishment?”
Father Clifton squeezed his hands together, obviously uncomfortable at that side of the equation.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But even if hell were just eternal recognition of the chances one has lost… why risk that? Pascal realized that if the Church was wrong, nothing would be lost by embracing its hope. And if it was right…”
I smiled. “A bit cynical, isn’t it, Father?”
The priest’s pale eyes looked directly into mine. “Not as cynical as going to your death for no reason, Raul. Not when you can accept Christ as your Lord, do good works among other human beings, serve your community and your brothers and sisters in Christ, and save your physical life and your immortal soul in the process.”
I nodded. After a minute, I said, “Maybe the time he lived was important.”
Father Clifton blinked, not following me.
“Blaise Pascal, I mean,” I said. “He lived through an intellectual revolution the likes of which humanity has rarely seen. On top of that, Copernicus and Kepler and their ilk were opening up the universe a thousandfold. The Sun was becoming… well… just a sun, Father. Everything was being displaced, moved aside, shoved from the center. Pascal once said, ‘I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’.”
Father Clifton leaned closer. I could smell the soap and shaving cream scent on his smooth skin. “All the more reason to consider the wisdom of his wager, Raul.”
I blinked, wanting to move away from the pink and freshly scrubbed moon of a face. I was afraid that I smelled of sweat and pain and fear.
I had not brushed my teeth in twenty-four hours. “I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child,” I said.
Father Clifton pulled away as if slapped.
His fair skin flushed a deeper red. Then he stood and patted my arm. “You get some sleep. We’ll speak again before you leave tomorrow.”
But I did not have until tomorrow. If I had been outside at that moment, looking at just the precise quadrant of the late-afternoon sky, I would have seen the scratch of flame across the dome of cobalt as Nemes’s dropship entered the landing pattern for Pax Base Bombasino.
When Father Clifton left, I fell asleep.
I watched as Aenea and I sat in the vestibule of her shelter in the desert night and continued our conversation. “I’ve had this dream before,” I said, looking around and touching the stone beneath the canvas of her shelter. The rock still held some of the day’s heat.
“Yes,” said Aenea. She was sipping from a fresh cup of tea.
“You were going to tell me the secret that makes you the messiah,” I heard myself say. “The secret which makes you the “bond between two worlds” that the AI Ummon spoke of.”
“Yes,” said my young friend and nodded again, “but first tell me if you think that your reply to Father Clifton was adequate.”
“Adequate?” I shrugged. “I was angry.”
Aenea sipped tea. Steam rose from the cup and touched her lashes. “But you didn’t really respond to his question about Pascal’s Wager.”
“That was all the response I needed to give,” I said, somewhat irritated. “Little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem is dying of cancer. The Church uses their cruciform as leverage. That’s corrupt… fo
ul. I’ll have none of it.”
Aenea looked at me over the steaming cup.
“But if the Church were not corrupt, Raul… if it offered the cruciform without price or reservation. Would you accept it?”
“No.” The immediacy of my answer surprised me.
The girl smiled. “So it is not the corruption of the Church that is at the heart of your objection. You reject resurrection itself.”
I started to speak, hesitated, frowned, and then rephrased what I was thinking. “This kind of resurrection, I reject. Yes.”
Still smiling, Aenea said, “Is there another kind?”
“The Church used to think so,” I said. “For almost three thousand years, the resurrection it offered was of the soul, not the body.”
“And do you believe in that other kind of resurrection?”
“No,” I said again, as quickly as I had before. I shook my head. “Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically… shallow.”
“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.
“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.
“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’.”
“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
“Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”
I made a rude noise. “The Pax Church offers a more pragmatic certainty.”
Aenea nodded. “That may be its only recourse these days. Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.”
“Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,” I said sternly. “Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars… pogroms… resistance to logic and science and medicine… not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.”
“Is all religion superstition then, Raul? All faith then folly?”
I squinted at her. The dim light from inside the shelter and the dimmer starlight outside played on her sharp cheekbones and the gentle curve of her chin. “What do you mean?” I said, correctly expecting a trap.
“If you had faith in me, would that be folly?”
“Faith in you… how?” I said, hearing my voice sounding suspicious, almost sullen. “As a friend? Or as a messiah?”
“What’s the difference?” asked Aenea, smiling again in that way that usually meant a challenge was in the offing.
“Faith in a friend is… friendship,” I said. “Loyalty.” I hesitated. “Love.”
“And faith in a messiah?” said Aenea, her eyes catching the light.
I made a brusque, throwing-away gesture. “That’s religion.”
“But what if your friend is the messiah?” she said, smiling openly now.
“You mean—‘What if your friend thinks she’s the messiah?’” I said. I shrugged again. “I guess you stay loyal to her and try to keep her out of the asylum.”
Aenea’s smile faded, but I sensed that it was not because of my harsh comment. Her gaze had turned inward. “I wish it were that simple, my dear friend.”
Touched, filled with a wave of anxiety as real as surging nausea, I said, “You were going to tell me why you were chosen as this messiah, kiddo. What makes you the bond between two worlds.”
The girl—young woman, I realized—nodded solemnly. “I was chosen simply because I was that first child of the Core and humankind.”
She had said that earlier. I nodded this time. “So those are the two worlds which you connect… the Core and us?”
“Two of the worlds, yes,” said Aenea, looking up at me again. “Not the only two. That’s precisely what messiahs do, Raul… bridge different worlds. Different eras. Provide the bond between two irreconcilable concepts.”
“And your connection to both these worlds makes you the messiah?” I said again.
Aenea shook her head quickly, almost impatiently. Something like anger glinted in her eyes. “No,” she said sharply. “I’m the messiah because of what I can do.”
I blinked at her vehemence. “What can you do, kiddo?”
Aenea held out her hand and gently touched me with it. “Remember when I said that the Church and Pax were right about me, Raul? That I was a virus?”
“Uh-huh.”
She squeezed my wrist. “I can pass that virus, Raul. I can infect others. Geometric progression. A plague of carriers.”
“Carriers of what?” I said. “Messiahhood?”
She shook her head. Her expression was so sad that it made me want to console her, put my arms around her. Her grip remained firm on my wrist. “No,” she said. “Just the next step in what we are. What we can be.”
I took a breath. “You talked about teaching the physics of love,” I said. “Of understanding love as a basic force of the universe. Is that the virus?”
Still holding my wrist, she looked at me a long moment. “That’s the source of the virus,” she said softly. “What I teach is how to use that energy.”
“How?” I whispered.
Aenea blinked slowly, as if she were the one dreaming and about to awaken. “Let’s say there are four steps, she said. “Four stages. Four levels.”
I waited. Her fingers made a loop around my captured wrist.
“The first is learning the language of the dead,” she said.
“What does that…”
“Shhh!” Aenea had raised the first finger of her free hand to her lips to shush me.
“The second is learning the language of the living,” she said.
I nodded, not understanding either phrase.
“The third is hearing the music of the spheres,” she whispered.
In my reading at Taliesin West, I had run across this ancient phrase: it was all mixed up with astrology, the pre-Scientific Age on Old Earth, Kepler’s little wooden models of a solar system predicated on perfect shapes, shells of stars and planets being moved by angels… volumes of double-talk. I had no idea what my friend was talking about and how it could apply to an age when humanity moved faster than light through the spiral arm of the galaxy.
“The fourth step,” she said, her gaze turned inward again, “is learning to take the first step.”
“The first step,” I repeated, confused. “You mean the first step you mentioned… what was it? Learning the language of the dead?”
Aenea shook her head, slowly bringing me into focus. It was as if she had been elsewhere for a moment. “No,” she said, “I mean taking the first step.”
Almost holding my breath, I said, “All right. I’m ready, kiddo. Teach me.”
Aenea smiled again. “That’s the irony, Raul, my love. If I choose to do this, I’ll always be known as the One Who Teaches. But the silly thing is, I don’t have to teach it. I only have to share this virus to impart each of these stages to those who wish to learn.”
I looked down at where her slim fingers encircled a part of my wrist. “So you’ve already given me this… virus?” I said. I felt nothing except the usual electric tingle that her touch always created in me.
My friend laughed. “No, Raul. You’re not ready. And it takes communion to share the virus, not just contact. And I haven’t decided what to do… if I should do this.”
“To share with me?” I said, thinking, Communion?
“To share with everyone,” she whispered, serious again. “With everyone ready to learn.” She looked directly at me again. Somewhere in the desert, a coyote was yipping. “These… levels, stages… can’t coexist with a cruciform, Raul.”
“So the born-again can’t learn?” I said. This would rule out the vast majority of human beings.
She shook her head. “They can learn… they just can’t stay born-again. The cruciform has to go.”
I let out my breath. I did not understand most of this, but that’s because it seemed to be double-talk.
Don’t all would-be messiahs speak double-talk? asked the cynical part of me in Grandam’s level voice. Aloud, I said, “There’s no way to remove a cruciform without killing the person wearing it. The true death.” I had always wondered if this fact had been the main reason I had been unwilling to go under the cross. Or perhaps it was just my youthful belief in my own immortality.
Aenea did not respond directly. She said, “You like the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people, don’t you?” Blinking, I tried to understand this. Had I dreamed that phrase, those people, that pain? Wasn’t I dreaming now? Or was this a memory of a real conversation? But Aenea knew nothing of Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and the others. The night and stone-and-canvas shelter seemed to ripple like a shredding dreamscape. “I like them,” I said, feeling my friend remove her fingers from my wrist. Wasn’t my wrist shackled to the headboard? Aenea nodded and sipped her cooling tea.
“There’s hope for the Spectrum Helix people. And for all the thousands of other cultures which have reverted or sprung up since the Fall. The Hegemony meant homogeneity, Raul. The Pax means even more. The human genome… the human soul… distrusts homogeneity, Raul. It—they—are always ready to take a chance, to risk change and diversity.”
“Aenea,” I said, reaching for her. “I don’t… we can’t…” There was a terrible sense of falling and the dreamscape came apart like thin cardboard in a hard rain. I could not see my friend.
“Wake up, Raul. They are coming for you. The Pax is coming.”
I tried to awaken, groping toward consciousness like a sluggish machine crawling uphill, but the weight of fatigue and the painkillers kept dragging me down. I did not understand why Aenea wanted me awake. We were conversing so well in the dream. “Wake up, Raul Endymion.” Wek op, Rool Endmyun.
It was not Aenea. Even before I was fully awake and focused I recognized the soft voice and thick dialect of Dem Ria. I sat straight up. The woman was undressing me! I realized that she had pulled the loose nightshirt off and was tugging my undershirt on—cleaned and smelling of fresh breezes now, but unmistakably my undershirt. My undershorts were already on. My twill pants, overshirt, and vest were laid across the bottom of the bed. How had she done this with the handcuff on my… I stared at my wrist. The handcuffs were lying open on the bedclothes. My arm tingled painfully as circulation returned. I licked my lips and tried to speak without slurring. “The Pax? Coming?”
