“The child is nowhere I can find it now,” Aenea had said.

Where might that child be now? How old? I sat on my bunk in the Schrödinger cat box and pondered this. Aenea had just turned twenty-three standard years old when she died… correction: when she had been brutally murdered by the Core and its Pax puppets. She had disappeared from sight for the one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours when she had just turned twenty years old.

That would make the infant about three standard years old… plus the time I had spent here in the Schrödinger execution egg… eight months? Ten? I simply did not know, but if the child were still alive, he or she… my God, I had never asked Aenea whether her baby had been a boy or girl and she had not mentioned it the one time she had discussed the matter with me. I had been so involved with my own hurt and childish sense of injustice that I had not thought to ask her. What an idiot I had been. The child—Aenea’s son or Aenea’s daughter—would now be about four standard years old. Walking… certainly. Talking… yes. My God, I realized, her child would be a rational human being at this point, talking, asking questions… a lot of questions if my few experiences with young children were any indication… learning to hike and fish and to love nature…

I had never asked Aenea her child’s name. My eyes burned and my throat closed with the painful recognition of this fact. Again, she had shown no inclination to talk about that period in her life and I had not asked, telling myself in the weeks we had had together afterward that I did not want to upset her with questions or probings that would make her feel guilty and make me feel murderous. But Aenea had shown no guilt when she had briefly told me about her marriage and child. To be honest, that is part of the reason I’d felt so furious and helpless at the knowledge. But somehow, incredibly, it had not stopped us from being lovers… how had it been phrased on the note I had found on my stylus screen months ago, the note I was sure was from Aenea? “Lovers of whom the poets would sing.”

That was it. The knowledge of her brief marriage and the child had not stopped us from feeling toward one another like lovers who had never experienced such emotion with another person.

And perhaps she had not, I realized. I had always assumed that her marriage was one of sudden passion, almost impulse, but now I looked at it in another way. Who was the father? Aenea’s note had said that she loved me backward and forward in time, which is precisely the way I had discovered I felt about her—it was as if I had always loved her, had waited my entire life to discover the reality of that love. What if Aenea’s marriage had not been one of love or passion or impulse but… convenience? No, not the right word.

Necessity? It had been prophesied by the Templars, the Ousters, the Shrike Cult Church of the Final Atonement and others that Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, would bear a child—the One Who Teaches—Aenea, as it turned out. According to the old poet’s Cantos, on the day that the second John Keats cybrid had died a physical death and Brawne Lamia had fought her way to the Shrike Temple for refuge, the Shrike cultists had chanted—“Blessed be the Mother of Our Salvation—Blessed be the Instrument of Our Atonement”—the salvation being Aenea herself.

What if Aenea had been destined to have a child to continue this line of prophets… of messiahs? I had not heard any of these prophecies of another in Aenea’s line, but there was one thing I had discovered beyond argument during my months writing of Aenea’s life—Raul Endymion was slow and thick-witted, usually the last to understand anything. Perhaps there had been as many prophecies of another One Who Teaches as there had been preceding Aenea herself. Or perhaps this child would have completely different powers and insights that the universe and humanity had been awaiting. Obviously I would not be the father of such a second messiah. The union of the second John Keats cybrid and Brawne Lamia had been, by Aenea’s own accounts, the great reconciliation between the best elements of the TechnoCore and humanity itself. It had taken the abilities and perceptions of both AI’s and human beings to create the hybrid ability to see directly into the Void Which Binds… for humanity finally to learn the language of the dead and of the living. Empathy was another name for that ability, and Aenea had been the Child of Empathy, if any title suited her.

Who could the father of her child be? The answer struck me like a thunderbolt. For a second there in the Schrödinger cat box, I was so shaken by the logic of it that I was sure that the particle detector clicking away periodically in the frozen-energy wall of my prison had detected the emitted particle at exactly the right time and the cyanide had been released. What irony to figure things out and to die in the same moment.

But it was not poison in the air, only the growing strength of my certainty on this matter and the even stronger impulse to some action.

There was one other player in the cosmic chess game Aenea and the others had been playing for three hundred standard years now: that near-mythical Observer from the alien sentient races whom Aenea had mentioned briefly in several different contexts. The Lions and Tigers and Bears, the beings so powerful that they could kidnap Old Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud rather than watch it be destroyed, had—according to Aenea—sent among us one or more Observers over the past few centuries, entities who had, according to my interpretation of what Aenea had said, taken on human form and walked among us for all this time. This would have been relatively easy during the Pax era with the virtual immortality of the cruciform so widespread. And there were certainly others who, like the ancient poet Martin Silenus, had stayed alive through a combination of WorldWeb-era medicine, Poulsen treatments, and sheer determination.

Martin Silenus was old, that was certain, perhaps the oldest human being in the galaxy—but he had not been the Observer, that was equally certain. The author of the Cantos was too opinionated, too active, too visible to the public at large, too obscene, and generally just too damned cantankerous to be a cool observer representing alien races so powerful that they could destroy us in an eye blink. Or so I hoped.

But somewhere—probably somewhere I had never visited and could not imagine—that Observer had been waiting and watching in human form. It made sense that Aenea might have been compelled—by both prophecy and the necessity of unhindered human evolution she had taught about and believed in—to ’cast away from her odyssey to that distant world where the Observer waited, meet him, mate with him, and bring that child into the universe.

Thus would be reconciled the Core, humanity, and the distant Others. The idea was unsettling, definitely disturbing to me, but also exciting in a way that nothing had been since Aenea’s death. I knew Aenea. Her child would be a human child—filled with life and laughter and a love of everything from nature to old holodramas. I had never understood how Aenea could have left her child behind, but now I realized that she would have had no choice. She knew the terrible fate that awaited her in the basement cell of Castel Sant’Angelo. She knew that she would die by fire and torture while surrounded by inhuman enemies and the Nemes monsters. She had known this since before she was born. The fact of this made my knees weak. How could my dear friend have laughed with me so often, gone optimistically into new days so happily, celebrated life so thoroughly, when she knew that every day passing was another day closer to such a terrible death? I shook my head at the strength of will this implied.

I did not have it—this I knew. Aenea had.

But she could not have kept the child with her, knowing when and how this terrible ending would take place. Presumably then, the father was raising the child. The Other in human form. The Observer. I found this even more upsetting than my earlier revelations. I was struck then with the additional certainty that Aenea would have wanted me to have some role in her child’s life if she had thought it possible. Her own glimpses into possible futures presumably ended with her own death.