Endymion

15

Since I was a boy on the moors, standing apart to watch smoke from the peat fires rise from within the protective ring of circled caravans, waiting for the stars to appear, then seeing them cold and indifferent in the deepening lapis sky and wondering about my future while waiting for the call that would bring me in to warmth and dinner, I have had a sense of the irony of things. So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd. I saw this as a child. I have seen it throughout my life since then.

Flying toward the fading orange light of the explosion, I suddenly came across the child, Aenea. My first glimpse had been of two figures, the small one attacking the huge one, but when I arrived a moment later, sand howling and rasping around the bobbing hawking mat, there was only the girl.

This is the way we looked to each other at that moment: the girl with an expression of shock and anger, eyes red and narrowed against the sand or from her fury at something, her small fists clenched, her shirt and loose sweater flapping like wild banners in the wind, her shoulder-length hair—brown but with blond streaks that I would notice later—matted and blowing, her cheeks streaked with the muddy path of tears and snot, her rubber-soled, canvas kid’s shoes totally inappropriate to the adventure upon which she’d embarked, and her cheap backpack hanging from one shoulder; I must have been a wilder, less sane sight—a bulky, muscled, not-very-bright-looking twenty-seven-year-old lying flat on my belly on a flying carpet, my face largely obscured by the bandanna and dark glasses, my short hair filthy and spiked in the wind, my pack also lashed over one shoulder, my vest and trousers filthy with sand and grime.

The girl’s eyes widened in recognition, but it took only a second for me to realize that she was recognizing the hawking mat, not me.

“Get on!” I shouted. Armored forms ran by, firing as they went. Other shadows loomed in the storm.

The girl ignored me, turning away as if to find the shape she had been attacking. I noticed then that her fists were bleeding. “Goddamn him,” she was shouting, almost weeping. “Goddamn him.”

These were the first words I heard our messiah utter.

“Get on!” I shouted again, and began to dismount from the hawking mat to seize her.

Aenea turned, looked at me for the first time, and—somehow clearly over the rasping sandstorm—said, “Take that mask off.”

I remembered the bandanna. Lowering it, I spit sand as red mud.

As if satisfied, the girl stepped closer and jumped onto the mat. Now we were both sitting on the hovering, bobbing carpet—the girl behind me, our backpacks squeezed between us. I tugged the bandanna back up and shouted, “Hang on to me!”

She ignored me and gripped the edges of the mat.

I hesitated a moment, tugging my sleeve back to study my wrist chronometer. Less than two minutes remained before the ship was scheduled to perform its touch-and-go at Chronos Keep. I couldn’t even find the entrance to the Third Cave Tomb in that time—perhaps I could never find it in this carnage. As if to underline that point, a tracked scarab suddenly plowed over a dune, almost grinding us under its treads before it wheeled left, guns firing at something out of sight to the east.

“Hang on!” I shouted again, and keyed the mat to full acceleration, gaining altitude as I went, watching my compass and concentration on flying north until we left the Valley. This was no time to crash into a cliff wall.

A great stone wing passed under us. “Sphinx!” I shouted back to the girl huddling behind me. I realized in an instant how stupid this comment was—she had just come from that tomb.

Guessing our altitude to be several hundred meters, I leveled off and increased our speed. The deflection shield came on, but sand still whirled around us within the nacelle of trapped air. “We shouldn’t hit anything at this altitu—” I began, shouting over my shoulder again, but was interrupted by the looming shape of a skimmer flying directly at us in the storm cloud. I did not have time to react, but somehow I did, diving the mat so quickly that only the containment field held us in place, the shape of the skimmer passing over us with less than a meter to spare. The little hawking mat tumbled and twisted in the monster machine’s lift-wake.

“Heck and spit,” said Aenea behind me. “Hell and shit.”

It was the second utterance I heard from our messiah-to-be.

Leveling off again, I peered over the edge of the mat, trying to make out anything on the ground. It was folly to be flying so high—certainly every tactical sensor, detector, radar, and targeting imager in the area was tracking us. Except for the taste of chaos we had left behind, I had no idea why they hadn’t fired at us yet. Unless… I looked over my shoulder again. The girl was leaning close to my back, shielding her face from the stinging sand.

“Are you all right?” I called.

She nodded, her forehead touching my back. I had the sense that she was crying, but I could not be sure.

“I’m Raul Endymion,” I shouted.

“Endymion,” she said, pulling her head back. Her eyes were red, but dry. “Yes.”

“You’re Aenea…” I stopped. I could not think of anything intelligent to say. Checking the compass, I adjusted our direction of flight and hoped that our altitude was sufficient to clear the dunes here beyond the Valley. Without much hope, I looked up, wondering if the plasma trail of the ship would be visible through the storm. I saw nothing.

“Uncle Martin sent you,” said the girl. It was not a question.

“Yes,” I shouted back. “We’re going… well, the ship… I’d arranged for it to meet us at Chronos Keep, but we’re late…”

A bolt of lightning ripped the clouds not thirty meters to our right. Both the child and I flinched and ducked. To this day I do not know if it was a lightning discharge or someone shooting at us. For the hundredth time on this endless day, I cursed the crudeness of this ancient flying device—no speed indicators, no altimeter. The wind roar beyond the deflection field suggested that we were traveling at full speed, but with no guidepoints except the shifting curtains of cloud, it was impossible to tell. It was as bad as hurtling through the Labyrinth, but at least there the autopilot program had been dependable. Here, even with the entire Swiss Guard after us, I would have to decelerate soon: the Bridle Range of mountains with their vertical cliffs lay somewhere dead ahead. At almost three hundred klicks per hour, we should reach the mountains and the Keep within six minutes. I had checked my chronometer when we accelerated, now I glanced at it again. Four and a half minutes. According to maps I had studied, the desert ended abruptly at the Bridle Cliffs. I would give it another minute…

Things happened simultaneously then.

Suddenly we were out of the dust storm; it did not taper off, we just flew out of it the way one would emerge from under a blanket. At that second I saw that we were pitched slightly down—or the ground here was rising—and that we were going to strike some huge boulders within seconds.

Aenea shouted. I ignored her, tweaked the control designs with both hands, we lifted over the boulders with enough g-force to press us heavily against the hawking mat, and at that instant both the child and I saw that we were twenty meters from the cliff face and flying into it. There was no time to stop.

Theoretically, I knew, Sholokov’s design for the hawking mat allowed it to fly vertically, the incipient containment field keeping the passenger—theoretically, his beloved niece—from tumbling off backward. Theoretically.

It was time to test the theory.

Aenea’s arms came around my midsection as we accelerated into a ninety-degree climb. The mat took all of the twenty meters of free space to initiate the climb, and by the time we were vertical, the granite of the rock face was centimeters “beneath” us. Instinctively, I leaned full forward and grabbed the rigid front of the carpet, trying not to lean on the flight-control designs as I did so. Equally instinctively, Aenea leaned forward and increased her bear hug on my midsection. The effect was that I could not breathe for the minute or so it took the carpet to clear the top of the cliffs. I tried not to look back over my shoulder during the duration of the climb. A thousand or more meters of open space directly beneath me might have been more than my overworked nerves could stand.

We reached the top of the cliffs—suddenly there were stairs carved there, stone terraces, gargoyles—and I leveled the carpet.

The Swiss Guard had set up observation posts, detector stations, and antiaircraft batteries here along the terraces and balconies on the east side of Chronos Keep. The castle itself—carved out of the stone of the mountain—loomed more than a hundred meters above us, its overhanging turrets and higher balconies directly above us. There were more Swiss Guard on these flat areas.

All of them were dead. Their bodies, still clad in impermeable impact armor, were sprawled in the unmistakable attitudes of death. Some were grouped together, their lacerated forms looking as if a plasma bomb had exploded in their midst.

But Pax body armor could withstand a plasma grenade at that distance. These corpses had been shredded.

“Don’t look,” I called over my shoulder, slowing the mat as we banked around the south end of the Keep. It was too late. Aenea stared with wide eyes.

“Damn him!” she cried again.

“Damn who?” I asked, but at that moment we flew out over the garden area on the south end of the Keep and saw what was there. Burning scarabs and an overturned skimmer littered the landscape. More bodies lay thrown like toys scattered by a vicious child. A CPB lancet, its beams capable of reaching to low orbit, lay shattered and burning by an ornamental hedge.

The Consul’s ship hovered on a tail of blue plasma sixty meters above the central fountain. Steam billowed up and around it. A. Bettik stood at the open air-lock door and beckoned us on.

I flew us directly into the air lock, so quickly that the android had to leap aside and we actually skittered down the polished corridor.

“Go!” I shouted, but either A. Bettik had already given the command or the ship did not require it. Inertial compensators kept us from being smashed to jelly as the ship accelerated, but we could hear the fusion reaction-drive roar, hear the scream of atmosphere from beyond the hull, as the Consul’s spaceship climbed away from Hyperion and entered space again for the first time in two centuries.