“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.