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… foul. 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?”