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the time I reached my destination, the alpine villagers would already be making their annual retreat. From a fleshly viewpoint, it would be folly to pass my remaining months high up there in the ultraviolet glare. But then the ultimate somatic damage had already been done, further DNA damage held no terror for one who was already expiring from a long lifetime’s exposure.
    And from a spiritual viewpoint, there was much to be said for going to meet my Maker high up in these lonely mountains, exposed to the consequences of the Sin We Do Not Name, to spend my final hours in contemplative surrender to divine justice, to die with the winter grasses under the pitiless glory of the deadly summer sun.
    The trip up into the Tyrol was fully as arduous as any such final pilgrimage should be and then some. A railine took me up into the Italian foothills in a few short uncomfortable days, but from there on in, it was horsecarriages groaning along up the ill-paved remains of old autostradas and autobahns where once hordes of petrol-burning touring carshad roared and blared at mighty speeds. At length, even the carriage services gave out, and the last week of my journey was spent on the back of a spavined old mule, plodding against the bemused flow of villagers descending to the relative safety of the lowlands.
    By the time I had reached Grunberg, the town was all but deserted, and I was able to rent a sturdy old modernized chalet for a relative song.
    Once it had been a farmhouse—the ruins of a barn were still in subtle evidence—then a small ski resort, the pylons of whose lift still marched up the browning slope of the meadow toward the naked alpine crag that towered above it. After the snow’s final melting, it had apparently become the retreat of some rich eccentric. The wooden building had been enclosed in a geodesic dome against solar assault. In the end, its panes had succumbed to the ultraviolet, and subsequent inhabitants had knocked them out, or simply not bothered to mend time’s wear and tear, though fragments of blued plastic still clung here and there to the skeletal remains.
    But the chalet’s machineries were still powered by efficient solar collectors, and they included a capacious cold pantry, running waterworks both hot and cold, and a highly sophisticated autochef running Italian, German, French, and Chinese expert system software. Though the place was far too large for my needs, it would care for my creature comfortsto the end, leaving me free to pursue my final inward and upward journey.
    At first, I gave thought and effort to attempting a final memoir, but all I really did was open and close a profusion of working files, until I finally gave up and wiped all copies of such embarrassing gibberish from memory.
    In truth, I had said all I had to say long before, and much of that still lay under papal edict; why labor to produce some egoistic final testament whose voice would also be silenced?
    Often I have been asked why I have allowed so much of my writing to go unpublished in obedience to papal writ with which I have been so manifestly at odds. I have no answer that follows any logic other than that of faith. Long ago, I made my vows and became a priest, and while expedience may have often enough caused me to regret them, surrender to such impulses is precisely what those vows were designed to prevent.
    All I have ever been was a Catholic priest attempting to understand God’s will and serve His Church to the best of that understanding without committing Lucifer’s sin of intellectual pride. Mayhap some of those who have graced the Seat of Peter have been no more saintly than I, and I would dissemble if I denied that no few of them were my intellectual inferiors, but the Church itself is more than the sum of its human parts. Even the papal succession is God’s way of working His waywith the imperfect clay of men. If we deny that, then what is the Church but a fraud?
    Of course, in the eyes of most of the