Endymion

29

When they shot us down several hundred meters short of the farcaster portal, I was sure we were dead this time. The internal containment field failed the second the generators were struck, the wall of the planet we were looking up at suddenly and inarguably became down, and the ship fell like an elevator with its cables cut.

The sensations that followed are hard for me to describe. I know now that the internal fields switched to what was known as a “crash field”—no misnomer, I can assure you—and for the next few minutes it felt precisely as if we were caught up in a giant vat of gelatin. In a sense, we were. The crash field expanded in a nanosecond to fill every square millimeter of the ship, cushioning us and keeping us absolutely immobile as the spacecraft plunged into the river, bounced off the bottom mud, fired its fusion engine—creating a giant plume of steam—and plowed ahead relentlessly through mud, steam, water, and debris from the imploding riverbanks until the ship fulfilled the last command given to it—pass through the farcaster portal. The fact that we did so three meters beneath the broiling river surface did not keep the portal from working. The ship later told us that while its stern was passing through the farcaster, the water above and behind it suddenly became superheated steam—as if one of the Pax ships or aircraft were lancing it with a CPB. Ironically, it was the steam that deflected the beam for the milliseconds necessary for the ship to complete its transition.

Meanwhile, knowing none of these details, I stared. My eyes were open—I could not close them against the cloying force of the crash field—and I was watching the external video monitors set along the foot of the bed as well as looking out through the still-transparent hull apex as the farcaster portal flickered to life amid the steam and sunlight poured over the river’s surface, until suddenly we were through the steam cloud and once again smashing against rock and river bottom, then hitting a beach beneath blue sky and sun.

Then the monitors went off and the hull went dull. For several minutes we were trapped in this cave blackness—I was floating in midair, or would have been had it not been for the gelatinous crash field—my arms were thrown wide, my right leg was half-bent in a running posture behind me, my mouth was open in a silent scream, and I could not blink. At first the fear of suffocation was very strong—the crash field was in my open mouth—but I soon realized that my nose and throat were receiving oxygen. The crash field, it turns out, worked much like the expensive osmosis masks used for deep-sea diving during the Hegemony days: air leached through the field mass pressing against one’s face and throat. It was not a pleasant experience—I’ve always detested the thought of choking—but my anxiety was manageable. More disturbing was the blackness and claustrophobic sense of being caught in a giant, sticky web. During those long minutes in the darkness, I had thoughts of the ship being stuck there forever, disabled, with no way to relax the crash fields, and the three of us starving to death in our undignified postures, until someday the ship’s energy banks would be depleted, the crash field would collapse, and our whitened skeletons would drop and rattle around the interior hull of the ship like so many bones being cast by an invisible fortune-teller.

As it was, the field slowly folded away less than five minutes later. The lights came on, flickered, and were replaced by red emergency lighting even as we were gently lowered to what had been the wall a short while before. The outer hull became transparent once again, but very little light filtered in through the mud and debris.

I had not been able to see A. Bettik and Aenea while stuck in place—they had been just out of my frozen field of sight—but now I saw them as the field lowered them to the hull with me. I was amazed to hear a scream issue from my throat and realized that it was the shout that had welled up in me the instant of the crash.

For a moment the three of us just sat on the curved hull wall, rubbing and testing our own arms, legs, and heads to make sure we weren’t injured. Then Aenea spoke for us all. “Holy shit,” she said, and stood up on the curving floor of the hull. Her legs were shaky.

“Ship!” called the android.

“Yes, A. Bettik.” The voice was as calm as ever.

“Are you damaged?”

“Yes, A. Bettik,” said the ship. “I have just completed a full damage assessment. Field coils, repulsors, and Hawking translators have suffered extensive damage, as have sections of the aft hull and two of the four landing fins.”

“Ship,” I said, struggling to my feet and looking out through the transparent nose of the hull. There was sunlight coming through the curved wall above us, but most of the exterior hull was opaque with mud, sand, and other debris. The dark river came two-thirds the way up the sides and was sloshing against us. It looked as if we had run aground on a sandy bank, but not before plowing through many meters of river bottom. “Ship,” I tried again, “are your sensors working?”

“Only radar and visual,” it replied.

“Is there any pursuit?” I said. “Did any Pax ships come through the farcaster with us?”

“Negative,” said the ship. “There are no inorganic ground or air targets within my radar range.”

Aenea walked to the vertical wall that had been the carpeted floor. “No troopers even?” she asked.

“No,” said the ship.

“Is the farcaster still operational?” asked A. Bettik.

“Negative,” said the ship. “The portal ceased functioning eighteen nanoseconds after we transited it.”

I relaxed a bit then and looked at the girl, trying to make sure just by staring that she hadn’t been injured. Except for wildly disarrayed hair and the excitement in her eyes, she looked normal enough. She grinned at me. “So how do we get out of here, Raul?”

I looked up and saw what she meant. The central stairwell was about three meters above our heads. “Ship?” I said. “Can you turn the internal fields back on long enough for us to get out of the ship?”

“I’m sorry,” said the ship. “The fields are down and will not be repaired for some time.”

“Can you morph an opening in the hull above us?” I said. The feeling of claustrophobia was coming back.

“I am afraid not,” said the ship. “I am functioning on battery power at the moment, and morphing would demand far more energy than I have available. The main air lock is functional. If you can get to that, I will open it.”

The three of us exchanged glances. “Great,” I said at last. “We get to crawl thirty meters back through the ship while everything’s catty wampus.”

Aenea was still looking up at the stairwell opening. “The gravity’s different here—feel it?”

I realized that I did. There was a lightness to everything. I must have been noticing it but putting it down to a variation in the internal field—but there was no more internal field. This was a different world, with different gravity! I found myself staring back at the child.

“So are you saying we can fly up there?” I said, pointing to the bed hanging on the wall above us and the stairwell next to it.

“No,” said Aenea, “but the gravity here seems a little less than Hyperion’s. You two boost me up there and I’ll drop something down to you and we’ll crawl back to the air lock.”

And that is precisely what we did. We made a stirrup with our hands and boosted Aenea to the bottom lip of the stairwell opening, where she balanced, reached out and plucked the loosely hanging blanket from the bed, tied it around the balustrade and dropped the other end down to us, and then, after A. Bettik and I pulled our way up, all three of us walked precariously on the central dropshaft post, hanging on to the circular stairs to the side and above to keep our balance, and gradually made our way through the red-lit mess of a ship—through the library, where books and cushions had fallen to the lower hull despite the cord restraints on the shelves, through the holopit area, where the Steinway was still in place because of its restraining locks, but where our loose personal belongings had tumbled to the bottom of the ship. Here we made a stop while I lowered myself to the cluttered hull bottom and retrieved the pack and weapons I had left on the couch. Strapping the pistol on my belt, tossing up the rope I had stored in the pack, I felt more prepared for the next eventuality than I had a moment before.

When we got to the corridor, we could see that whatever had damaged the drive area below had also played havoc with the storage lockers: parts of the corridor were blackened and buckled outward, the contents of the lockers were scattered along the torn walls. The inner air lock was open but was now several meters directly above us. I had to free-climb the last vertical expanse of corridor and toss the rope down to the others while I crouched just within the inner lock. Jumping up onto the outer hull and pulling myself out into the bright sunlight, I reached into the red-lit air lock, found Aenea’s wrist, and pulled her out. A second later I did the same for A. Bettik. Then we all took time to look around.

A strange new world! I will never be able to explain the thrill that jolted through me at that moment—despite our crash, despite our predicament, despite everything—I was looking at a new world! The effect on me was more profound than I had expected in all my anticipation of interworld travel. This planet was very Hyperion-like: breathable air, blue sky—although a much lighter blue than Hyperion’s lapis-wisps of clouds overhead, the river behind us—wider than the river had been on Renaissance Vector—and jungle on both banks, stretching as far away as I could see to the right, and back beyond the overgrown farcaster portal to our left. Ahead of us, the bow of the ship had indeed plowed up the river bottom and beached itself on a sandy spit, and then the jungle began again, hanging over everything like a tattered green curtain above a narrow stage.

But as familiar as this sounds, it was all strange: the scents in the air were alien, the gravity felt odd, the sunlight was a bit too bright, the “trees” in the jungle were unlike anything I had ever seen—feathery green gymnosperms was how I would have described them then—and overhead, flights of frail white birds of a sort I had never seen flapped away from the sound of our clumsy entrance to this world.

We walked up the hull toward the beach. Soft breezes ruffled Aenea’s hair and tugged at my shirt. The air smelled of subtle spices—traces of cinnamon and thyme, perhaps—although softer and richer than these. The bow of the ship was not transparent from the outside, although I did not know at the time whether the ship had opaqued its skin again or whether it never looked transparent from the outside. Even lying on its side, the hull would have been too high and too steep to slide from if it had not plowed such a deep furrow in the beach sand; I used my rope again to lower A. Bettik to the sand, then we lowered the girl, and finally I shouldered my pack—the plasma rifle folded and strapped atop it—and slid down on my own, rolling as I hit the tightly packed soil.

My first footstep on an alien world, and it was no footstep at all—just a mouth full of sand.

The girl and the android helped me to my feet. Aenea was squinting up at the hull. “How do we get back up?” she said.

“We can build a ladder, drag a fallen tree over, or”—I tapped my pack—“I brought the hawking mat.”

We turned our attention to the beach and jungle. The former was narrow—only a few meters across from the bow to the forest, the sand gleaming more red than sand-colored in the bright sunlight—and the latter was dense and dark. The breeze was cool here on the beach, but the heat was palpable under the thickly packed trees. Twenty meters above, the gymnosperm fronds rustled and quaked like the antennae of some great insects.

“Wait here a minute,” I said, and stepped under the cover of the trees. The underbrush was thick, a type of clinging fern for the most part, and the soil was made up of so much humus that it was more sponge than dirt. The jungle smelled of dampness and decay, but of a whole different scent than the fens and swamps of Hyperion. I thought of the dracula ticks and biting gar in my own little tame bit of wilderness, and watched where I stepped. Vines spiraled down from the gymnosperm trunks and created a ropey latticework ahead of me in the gloom. I realized that I should have added a machete to my list of basic gear.

I had not penetrated the woods ten meters when suddenly a tall shrub holding heavy red leaves a meter in front of my face exploded into motion and the “leaves” flapped away beneath the jungle canopy, the creatures’ leathery wings sounding much like the large fruit bats our Hyperion ancestors had brought on their seedships.

“Damn,” I whispered, and shoved and battered my way out of the dank tangle. My shirt was torn when I staggered onto the beach sand. Aenea and A. Bettik looked expectantly at me.

“It’s a jungle in there,” I said.

We walked to the water’s edge, sat on a partially submerged stump there, and looked at our spaceship. The poor thing looked like a great beached whale from some Old Earth wildlife holo.

“I wonder if it will ever fly again,” I mused, breaking a chocolate bar into pieces and handing one to the child and the other to the blue-skinned man.

“Oh, I think I will,” said a voice on my wrist.

I admit that I levitated a dozen or so centimeters. I’d forgotten about the comlog bracelet.

“Ship?” I said, raising my wrist and speaking directly into the bracelet the way I would have used a portable radio in the Home Guard.

“You don’t have to do that,” said the ship’s voice. “I can hear everything quite clearly, thank you. Your question was—would I ever fly again? The answer is—almost certainly. I had more complicated repairs to carry out upon my arrival in the city of Endymion after my return to Hyperion.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad you can… ah… repair yourself. Will you need raw materials? Replacement parts?”

“No, thank you, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “It is mostly a matter of reallocating existing materials and redesigning certain damaged units. The repairs should not take long.”

“How long is not long?” asked Aenea. She finished her chocolate bar and licked her fingers.

“Six standard months,” said the ship. “Unless I run into unforeseen difficulties.”

The three of us exchanged glances. I looked back at the jungle. The sun seemed lower now, its horizontal rays illuminating the tops of the gymnosperms and casting the shadows beneath into deeper gloom. “Six months?” I said.

“Unless I run into unforeseen difficulties,” repeated the ship.

“Ideas?” I said to my two comrades.

Aenea rinsed her fingers in the river’s edge, tossed some water onto her face, and brushed back her wet hair. “We’re on the River Tethys,” she said. “We’ll just go downstream until we find the next farcaster portal.”

“You can do that trick again?” I said.

She brushed water from her face and said, “What trick?”

I made a dismissive gesture with my hand. “Oh, nothing… making a machine work that’s been dead for three centuries. That trick.”

Her dark eyes were earnest. “I wasn’t sure that I could do that, Raul.” She looked at A. Bettik, who was watching us impassively. “Honest.”

“What would have happened if you hadn’t been able to do it?” I asked softly.

“They would have caught us,” said Aenea. “I think they would have let you two go. They would have brought me back to Pacem. That would have been the last you or anyone else would have heard of me.”

Something about the flat, emotionless way she said that gave me chills. “All right,” I said, “it worked. But how did you do it?”

She made that slight-movement-of-her-hand gesture with which I was becoming familiar. “I’m not… certain,” she said. “I knew from the dreams that the portal would probably let me through…”

“Let you through?” I said.

“Yes. I thought it would… recognize me… and it did.”

I set my hands on my knees and straightened my legs, the heels of my boots digging into the red sand. “You talk about the farcaster as if it’s an intelligent, living organism,” I said.

Aenea looked back at the arch half a klick behind us. “In a way it is,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“But you’re sure that the Pax troops can’t follow us through?”

“Oh, yes. The portal will not activate for anyone else.”

My eyebrows raised a bit. “Then how did A. Bettik and I… and the ship… get through?”

Aenea smiled. “You were with me.”

I stood up. “All right, we’ll hash this out later. First, I think we need a plan. Do we reconnoiter now, or get our stuff out of the ship first?”

Aenea looked down at the dark water of the river. “And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam out to his ship, filled his pockets with biscuits, and swam back to shore…”

“What?” I said, hefting my pack and frowning at the child.

“Nothing,” she said, getting to her feet. “Just an old pre-Hegira book that Uncle Martin used to read to me. He used to say that proofreaders have always been incompetent assholes—even fourteen hundred years ago.”

I looked at the android. “Do you understand her, A. Bettik?”

He showed that slight twitch of his thin lips that I was learning to take as a smile. “It is not my role to understand M. Aenea, M. Endymion.”

I sighed. “All right, back to the subject… Do we reconnoiter before it gets dark, or dig the stuff out of the ship?”

“I vote that we look around,” said Aenea. She looked at the darkening jungle. “But not through that stuff.”

“Uh-uh,” I agreed, pulling the hawking mat from its space atop my pack and unrolling it on the sand. “We’ll see if this works on this world.” I paused, raised the comlog closer. “What world is this, anyway? Ship?”

There was a second’s hesitation, as if the ship was busy mulling over its own problems. “I’m sorry, I can’t identify it given the state of my memory banks. My navigation systems could tell us, of course, but I will need a star sighting. I can tell you that there are no unnatural electromagnetic or microwave transmissions currently broadcasting on this area of the planet. Nor are there relay satellites or other man-made objects in synchronous orbit overhead.”

“All right,” I said, “but where are we?” I looked at the girl.

“How should I know?” said Aenea.

“You brought us here,” I said. I realized that I was being short-tempered with her, but I felt short-tempered right then.

Aenea shook her head. “I just activated the farcaster, Raul. My big plan was to get away from Father Captain Whats-his-name and all those ships. That was it.”

“And find your architect,” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea.

I looked around the jungle and river. “It doesn’t look like a promising place to find an architect. I guess you’re right… we’ll just have to keep moving down the river to the next world.” The vine-shrouded arch of the farcaster we’d passed through caught my eye. I saw now why we’d plowed ashore: the river took a bend to the right here, about half a kilometer from the portal. The ship had come through and just kept going straight, right up through the shallows and onto the beach.

“Wait,” I said, “couldn’t we just reprogram that portal and use it to go somewhere else? Why do we have to find another one?”

A. Bettik stepped away from the ship so he could get a better look at the farcaster arch. “The River Tethys portals did not work like the millions of personal farcasters,” he said softly. “Nor was it designed to function like the Grand Concourse portals, or the large spaceborne farcasters.” He reached into his pocket and removed a small book. I saw the title—A Traveler’s Guide to the WorldWeb. “It seems that the Tethys was designed primarily for wandering and relaxation,” he said. “The distance between the portals varied from a few kilometers to many hundreds of kilometers…”

“Hundreds of kilometers!” I said. I had been expecting to find the next portal just around the next bend in the river.

“Yes,” continued A. Bettik. “The concept, as I understand it, was to offer the traveler a wide variety of worlds, views, and experiences. To that end only the downstream portals would activate, and they programmed themselves randomly… that is, the sections of river on different worlds were shuffled constantly, like so many cards in a deck.”

I shook my head. “In the old poet’s Cantos it says that the rivers were sliced up after the Fall… that they dried up like water holes in the desert.”

Aenea made a noise. “Uncle Martin’s full of shit sometimes, Raul. He never saw what happened to the Tethys after the Fall… He was on Hyperion, remember? He’s never been back to the Web. He made stuff up.”

It was no way to talk about the greatest work of literature in the past three hundred years—or of the legendary old poet who had composed it—but I started laughing then and found it hard to stop. By the time I did, Aenea was looking at me strangely. “Are you all right, Raul?”

“Yep,” I said. “Just happy.” I turned and made a motion that encompassed the jungle, the river, the farcaster portal—even our beached whale of a ship. “For some reason, I’m just happy,” I said.

Aenea nodded as if she understood perfectly.

To the android I said, “Does the book say what world this is? Jungle, blue sky… it must be about a nine-point-five on the Solmev Scale. That must be fairly rare. Does it list this world?”

A. Bettik flipped through the pages. “I don’t remember a jungle world like this mentioned in the sections I read, M. Endymion. I will read more carefully later.”

“Well, I think we need to look around,” said Aenea, obviously impatient to explore.

“But we should salvage some important things from the ship first,” I said. “I made a list…”

“That could take hours,” said Aenea. “The sun could set before we’re finished.”

“Still,” I said, ready to argue, “we need to get organized here…”

“If I may suggest a course of action,” A. Bettik interrupted softly, “perhaps you and M. Aenea could… ah… reconnoiter, while I begin removing the necessary items you mentioned. Unless you think it wiser to sleep in the ship tonight.”

We all looked at the poor ship. The river swirled around it, and just above the water level I could see the bent and blackened stumps which had been the proud rear fins. I thought of sleeping in that tumble of stuff, in the red-lit emergency light or the absolute darkness of the central levels, and said, “Well, it would be safer in there, but let’s get the stuff out that we’ll need to move downriver, and then we’ll decide.”

The android and I discussed it for several minutes. I had the plasma rifle with me, as well as the .45 in its holster on my belt, but I wanted the 16-gauge shotgun I’d set aside, as well as camping gear I’d seen in the EVA locker closet. I wasn’t sure how we’d get downriver—the hawking mat would probably hold the three of us, but I couldn’t see it transporting us and our gear, so we decided to unpack three of the four flybikes from their niches under the spacesuit closet. There was also a flying belt in there that I thought might be handy, as well as some camping accessories such as a heating cube, sleeping bags, foam mats, flashlight lasers for each of us, and the headset communicators I’d noticed. “Oh, and a machete if you see one,” I added. “There were several boxes of knives and multi-use blades in the small EVA closet. I don’t remember a machete, but if there is one… let’s get it out.”

A. Bettik and I walked to the end of the narrow beach, found a fallen tree at the river’s edge, and dragged it—with me sweating and cursing—back to the side of the ship to act as a de facto ladder so that we could crawl back up on the curved hull. “Oh, yeah, see if there’s a rope ladder in that mess,” I said. “And an inflatable raft of some sort.”

“Anything else?” A. Bettik asked wryly.

“No… well, maybe a sauna if you find one. And a well-stocked bar. And maybe a twelve-piece band to play some music while we unpack.”

“I’ll do my best, sir,” said the android, and began climbing the tree-ladder back to the top of the hull.

I felt guilty leaving A. Bettik to do all the heavy lifting, but it seemed wise to know how far it was to the next farcaster portal, and I had no intention of allowing the girl to fly off on a scouting mission of her own. She sat behind me as I tapped the activator thread designs and the carpet stiffened and rose several centimeters from the wet sand.

“Wick,” she said.

“What?”

“It stands for ’wicked,’” said the girl. “Uncle Martin said that it was kid slang when he was a brat on Old Earth.”

I sighed again and tapped the flight threads. We spiraled up and around, soon rising above the treetop level. The sun was definitely lower now in the direction I assumed was west. “Ship?” I said to my comlog bracelet.

“Yes?” The ship’s tone always made me feel that I was interrupting it at some important task.

“Am I talking to you, or to the data bank you downloaded?”

“As long as you are within communicator range, M. Endymion,” it answered, “you are talking to me.”

“What’s the communicator range?” We leveled off thirty meters above the river. A. Bettik waved from where he stood next to the open air lock.

“Twenty thousand kilometers or the curve of the planet,” said the ship. “Whichever comes first. As I mentioned earlier, there are no relay satellites around this world that I can locate.”

I tapped the forward design and we began flying upriver, toward the overgrown arch there. “Can you talk to me through a farcaster portal?” I asked.

“An activated portal?” said the ship. “How could I do that, M. Endymion? You would be light-years away.”

This ship had a way of making me feel stupid and provincial. I usually enjoyed its company, but I admit that I wouldn’t mind too much when we left it behind.

Aenea leaned against my back and spoke directly into my ear so as to be heard over the wind noise as we accelerated. “The old portals used to have fiber-optic lines running through them. That worked… although not as well as the fatline.”

“So if we wanted to keep talking to the ship when we go downriver,” I said back over my shoulder, “we could string telephone wire?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her grinning. The silliness did give me a thought, however. “If we can’t go back upriver through the portals,” I said, “how do we find our way back to the ship?”

Aenea put her hand on my shoulder. The portal was approaching quickly now. “We just keep going down the line until we come back around,” she said over the wind noise. “The River Tethys was a big circle.”

I turned so that I could see her. “Are you serious, kiddo? There were—what?—a couple of hundred worlds connected by the Tethys.”

“At least a couple of hundred,” said Aenea. “That we know of.”

I did not understand that, but sighed again as we slowed near the portal. “If each section of the river ran for a hundred klicks… that’s twenty thousand kilometers of travel just to get back here.”

Aenea said nothing.

I hovered us near the portal, realizing for the first time just how massive these things were. The arch appeared to be made of metal with many designs, compartments, indentations—perhaps even cryptic writing—but the jungle had sent tendrils of vines and lichens up the top and sides of the thing. What I had first taken as rust on the complicated arch turned out to be more of the red “bat-wing leaves” hanging in clusters from the main tangle of vines. I gave them a wide berth.

“What if it activates?” I said as we hovered a meter or two short of the underside of the arch.

“Try it,” said the girl.

I sent the hawking mat forward slowly, almost stopping as the front of the carpet reached the invisible line directly under the arch.

Nothing happened. We flew through, I turned the mat around, and we came back from the south. The farcaster portal was just an ornate metal bridge arching high over the river.

“It’s dead,” I said. “As dead as Kelsey’s nuts.” It had been one of Grandam’s favorite phrases, used only when we kids weren’t supposed to be able to hear, but I realized that there was a kid in earshot. “Sorry,” I said over my shoulder, my face red. Perhaps I’d spent too many years in the army or working with river bargemen, or as a bouncer in the casinos. I’d turned into a jerk.

Aenea actually threw her head back, she was laughing so hard. “Raul,” she said, “I grew up visiting Uncle Martin, remember?”

We flew back over the ship and waved at A. Bettik as the android was lowering pallets of gear to the beach. He waved a blue hand in response.

“Shall we go on downriver to see how far it’ll be to the next portal?” I said.

“Absolutely,” said Aenea.

We flew downriver, seeing very few other beaches or breaks in the jungle: trees and vines came all the way to the river’s edge. It bothered me not to know which direction we were heading, so I removed the inertial guidance compass from my pack and activated it. The compass had been my guide on Hyperion, where the magnetic field was too treacherous to trust, but it was useless here. As with the ship’s guidance system, the compass would work perfectly if it knew its starting point, but that luxury had been lost the instant we transited the farcaster.

“Ship,” I said to the bracelet comlog, “can you get a magnetic compass reading on us?”

“Yes,” came the instant reply, “but without knowing precisely where magnetic north is on this world, the actual direction of travel would be a rough estimate.”

“Give me the rough estimate, please.” I banked the mat slightly as we rounded a wide bend. The river had broadened out again—it must have been almost a kilometer wide at this point. The current looked swift, but not especially treacherous. My barge work on the Kans had taught me to read the river for eddies, snags, sandbars, and the like. This river seemed easy enough to navigate.

“You are headed approximately east-southeast,” said the comlog. “Airspeed is sixty-eight kilometers per hour. Sensors indicate that your hawking-mat deflection field is at eight percent. Altitude is…”

“All right, all right,” I said. “East-southeast.” The sun was lowering behind us. This world revolved like Old Earth and Hyperion.

The river straightened out and I accelerated the mat a bit. In the labyrinths on Hyperion, I’d been scooting along at almost three hundred klicks per hour, but I wasn’t eager to fly that fast here unless I had to. The flight threads in this old mat held a charge for quite a while, but there was no need to run it out quicker than necessary. I made a mental note to recharge the threads from the ship’s leads before we left, even if we took the skybikes as transportation.

“Look,” said Aenea, pointing to our left.

Far to the north, illuminated by the now visibly setting sun, something like a mesa top or some very large man-made thing broke through the jungle canopy. “Can we go look?” she said.

I knew better. We had an objective, we had a time limit—the setting sun, for one—and we had a thousand reasons not to take chances by swooping around strange artifacts. For all we knew, this mesa or tower-thing was the Central Pax Headquarters for the planet.

“Sure,” I said, mentally kicking myself for being an idiot, and banked the hawking mat to the north.

The thing was farther north than it seemed. I kicked the mat up to two hundred klicks per hour, and we still spent a good ten minutes flying to it.

“Excuse me, M. Endymion,” came the ship’s voice on my wrist, “but you appear to have gone off course and are now headed north-northeast, approximately one hundred three degrees from your former heading.”

“We’re investigating a tower or butte or something poking up from the jungle almost due north of us,” I said. “Do you have it on your radar?”

“Negative,” said the ship, and I thought I heard a hint of dryness in its tone again. “My vantage point here stuck in the mud is not optimum. Anything below a twenty-eight-degree inclination from the horizon is lost in clutter. You are just within my angle of detection. Another twenty kilometers north, and I will lose you.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “We’re just going to check this out and get right back to the river.”

“Why?” said the ship. “Why investigate something which has nothing to do with your plans to travel downriver?”

Aenea leaned over and lifted my wrist. “We’re human,” she said.

The ship did not reply.

The thing, when we finally reached it, rose a sheer hundred meters above the jungle canopy. Its lower levels were surrounded so tightly by the giant gymnosperms that the tower looked like a weathered crag rising from a green sea.

It appeared to be both natural and man-made—or at least modified by some intelligence. The tower was about seventy meters across and appeared to be made of red rock, perhaps some type of sandstone. The setting sun—only ten degrees or so above the jungle-canopy horizon now—bathed the crag in a rich red light. Here and there along the east and west faces of the crag were openings that both Aenea and I first thought were natural—wind or water hewn—but we soon realized had been carved. Also on the east side were niches carved—niches about the right distance from one another to be steps and handholds for human feet and hands. But they were shallow, narrow niches, and the thought of free-climbing that hundred-plus-meter crag with nothing but such shallow toe-and fingerholds made my insides clench.

“Can we go closer?” asked Aenea.

I had been keeping the hawking mat about fifty meters out as we circled. “I don’t think we should,” I said. “We’re already within firearms range. I don’t want to tempt anyone or anything with a spear or a bow and arrows.”

“A bow could pick us off at this range,” she said, but did not insist on flying closer.

For a second I thought I saw a glimmer of something moving within one of the oval openings carved in the red rock, but an instant later I decided it was a trick of the evening light.

“Had enough?” I said.

“Not really,” said Aenea. Her small hands were holding on to my shoulders as we banked. The breeze ruffled my short hair, and when I looked back, I could see the girl’s hair streaming behind her.

“We need to get back to business, though,” I said, aiming the hawking mat south toward the river and accelerating again. The gymnosperm canopy looked soft, feathery, and deceptively continuous forty meters beneath us, as if we could land on it if we had to. A pang of tension filled me as I thought of the consequences if we had to. But A. Bettik has the flying belt and flybikes, I thought. He can come fetch us if he has to.

We intercepted the river again a klick or so southeast of where we had left it, and we could see the thirty klicks or so to the horizon. No farcaster portal.

“Which way?” I said.

“Let’s go a bit farther.”

I nodded and banked left, staying out over the river. We had seen no signs of animal life other than the occasional white bird and the red bat-plant things. I was thinking of the footsteps in the side of the red monolith when Aenea tugged at my sleeve and pointed almost straight downward.

Something very large was moving just under the surface of the river. The low sunlight reflecting from the water hid most of the details from us, but I could make out leathery skin, something that might have been a barbed tail, and fins or cilia on the side. The creature must have been eight to ten meters long. It dived and we were past before I could see any more detail.

“That was sort of like a river manta,” called Aenea over my shoulder. We were moving quickly again, and the sound of the wind against the rising deflection field made some noise.

“Bigger,” I said. I had harnessed and worked with river mantas, and I’d never seen one that long or broad. Suddenly the hawking mat seemed very frail and insubstantial. I brought us thirty meters lower—we were flying almost at tree level now—so that a fall would not necessarily be fatal if the ancient flying carpet decided to quit on us without warning.

We banked south around another bend, noticed the river narrowing rapidly, and soon were greeted with a roar and a wall of rising spray.

The waterfall was not overly spectacular—it fell only ten to fifteen meters—but a huge volume of water was dropping over it, the klick-wide river pressed between rock cliffs to a width of only a hundred meters or so, and the force expended there was impressive. Below, there was another rapids over the rocks of the tumbled falls, then a wide pool, and then the river grew wide and relatively placid again. For a second I wondered stupidly if the river critter we’d seen was prepared for this sudden drop.

“I don’t think we’re going to find the portal in time to get back before dark,” I said over my shoulder to the girl. “If there’s a portal downriver at all.”

“It’s there,” said Aenea.

“We’ve come at least a hundred klicks,” I said.

“A. Bettik said that the Tethys sections averaged that. This one might be two or three hundred kilometers between portals. Besides… there were numerous portals along the various rivers. The sections of the river varied in length even on the same world.”

“Who told you that?” I asked, twisting to look at her.

“My mother. She was a detective, you know. She once had a divorce case where she followed a married guy and his girlfriend for three weeks on the River Tethys.”

“What’s a divorce case?” I asked.

“Never mind.” Aenea scooted around so that she was facing backward, her legs still crossed. Her hair whipped around her face. “You’re right, let’s get back to A. Bettik and the ship. We’ll come this way tomorrow.”

I banked us around and accelerated toward the west. We crossed over the falls and laughed as the spray wet our faces and hands.

“M. Endymion?” said the comlog. It was not the ship’s voice, but A. Bettik’s.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re heading back. We’re about twenty-five, thirty minutes out.”

“I know,” came the android’s calm voice. “I was watching the tower, the waterfall, and all the rest in the holopit.”

Aenea and I looked at each other with what must have been comical expressions. “You mean this comlog thing sends back pictures?”

“Of course,” came the ship’s voice. “Holo or video. We have been monitoring on holo.”

“Although the viewing is a bit odd,” said A. Bettik, “since the holopit is now an indentation in the wall. But I was not calling to check your progress.”

“What, then?” I said.

“We appear to have a visitor,” said A. Bettik.

“A big river thing?” called Aenea. “Sort of like a manta, only bigger?”

“Not exactly,” came A. Bettik’s calm voice. “It is the Shrike.”