Endymion

30

Our hawking mat must have looked like a blur during our wild rush back to the ship. I asked if the ship could send us a real-time holo of the Shrike, but it said that most of its hull sensors were covered with mud and it had no clear view of the beach.

“It’s on the beach?” I said. “It was a moment ago, when I went up to carry another load out,” came A. Bettik’s voice.

“Then it was in the Hawking-drive accumulator ring,” said the ship.

“What?” I said. “There’s no entrance to that part of the ship—” I stopped before I made a total idiot of myself. “Where is it now?” I said.

“We are not sure,” said A. Bettik. “I am going out onto the hull now and will be taking one of the radios. The ship will relay my voice to you.”

“Wait…” I began.

“M. Endymion,” interrupted the android, “rather than urging you to rush back here, I called to suggest that you and M. Aenea… ah… extend your sight-seeing for a bit until the ship and I receive an indication of our… ah… visitor’s intentions.”

This made sense to me. Here I was charged with protecting this girl, and when what might well be the deadliest killing machine in the galaxy appears, what do I do but rush her toward the danger? I was being a bit of an asshole this long day. I reached for the flight threads to slow us and bank back to the east.

Aenea’s small hand intercepted mine. “No,” she said. “We’ll go back.”

I was shaking my head. “That thing is…”

“That thing can go anywhere it pleases,” said the girl. Her eyes and tone were deadly serious. “If it wanted me… or you… it would appear right here on the mat with us.”

The thought made me look around.

“Let’s go back,” said Aenea.

I sighed and turned back upriver, slowing the mat just a bit as I did so. Pulling the plasma rifle from my pack and swinging the stock out to lock it, I said, “I don’t get it. Is there any record of that monster ever leaving Hyperion?”

“I don’t think so,” said the girl. She was leaning so that her face was against my back trying to stay out of the windblast as the deflection field lessened.

“So… what’s happening? Is it following you?”

“That seems logical.” Her voice was muffled as she spoke into the cotton of my shirt.

“Why?” I said.

Aenea pushed away so strongly that I began to reach for her instinctively to keep her from tumbling off the back of the mat. She shrugged away from my hand. “Raul, I don’t really know the answers to these questions yet, all right? I didn’t know if the thing would leave Hyperion. I certainly didn’t want it to. Believe me.”

“I do,” I said. I lowered my hand to the mat, noticing how large it was next to her small hand, small knee, tiny foot.

She set her hand on mine. “Let’s get back.”

“Right.” I loaded the rifle with a plasma-cartridge magazine. The shell casings were not separate but were molded into the magazine until each fired. One magazine held fifty plasma bolts. When the last was fired, the magazine was gone. I slammed the magazine up and in with a slap of my hand as I’d been taught in the Guard, set the selector to single-shot, and made sure the safety was on. I laid the weapon across my knees as we flew.

Aenea touched my shoulders with her hands and said in my ear, “Do you think that thing will do any good against the Shrike?”

I swiveled my head to look at her. “No,” I said.

We flew into the setting sun.

A. Bettik was alone on the narrow beach when we arrived. He waved to reassure us that everything was all right, but I still circled once above the treetops before landing. The sun was a red globe balancing on the jungle canopy to the west.

I set the mat down next to the pile of crates and equipment on the beach, in the shadow of the great ship’s hull, and jumped to my feet, the plasma rifle’s safety set to off.

“It’s still gone,” said A. Bettik. He had radioed this fact to us upon his leaving the ship, but I was still tense with expectation. The android led us over to a clear place on the beach where there was a single pair of footprints—if one could call them footprints. It looked as if someone had pressed a very heavy piece of bladed farm equipment into the sand in two places.

I crouched next to the prints like the experienced tracker I was, then realized the silliness of that exercise. “He just appeared here, again in the ship, and then disappeared?”

“Yes,” said A. Bettik.

“Ship, did you ever get the thing on radar or visual?”

“Negative,” came the reply from the bracelet. “There are no video recorders in the Hawking-drive accumulator…”

“How did you know it was there?” I asked.

“I have a mass sensor in every compartment,” said the ship. “For flight purposes I must know precisely how much mass is displaced in every section of the ship.”

“How much mass did it displace?” I said.

“One-point-oh-six-three metric tons,” said the ship.

I froze in the act of straightening up. “What? Over a thousand kilos? That’s ridiculous.” I looked at the two footprints again. “No way.”

“Way,” said the ship. “During the creature’s stay in the Hawking-drive accumulator ring, I measured a precise displacement of one-point-oh-six-three-thousand kilos and…”

“Jesus wept,” I said, turning to A. Bettik. “I wonder if anyone’s ever weighed this bastard before.”

“The Shrike is almost three meters tall,” said the android. “And it may be very dense. It may also vary its mass as required.”

“Required for what?” I muttered, looking at the line of trees. It was very dark under there as the sun set. The gymnosperm feather fronds high above us caught the last of the light and faded. Clouds had rolled in during the last minutes of our flight back, and now they also glowed red and then grew dull as the sunset faded.

“You ready to get a star fix?” I said to the comlog.

“Quite ready,” said the ship, “although this cloud cover will have to clear. In the meantime, I have made one or two other calculations.”

“Such as?” said Aenea.

“Such as—based upon the movement of this world’s sun during the past few hours—this planet’s day is eighteen hours, six minutes, fifty-one seconds long. Units in Old Hegemony Standard, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. To A. Bettik, “Any of those River Tethys vacation worlds in your book show an eighteen-hour day?”

“None that I have come across, M. Endymion.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s decide about tonight. Do we camp out here, stay in the ship, or load this stuff on the flybikes and get downriver to the next portal as soon as possible? We can haul the inflatable raft with us. I vote we do that. I’m not real keen on staying on this world if the Shrike is around here.”

A. Bettik raised one finger like a child in a classroom. “I should have radioed you earlier…” he said as if embarrassed. “The EVA locker, as you know, suffered some damage from the attack. There was no sign of an inflatable raft, although the ship remembers one in the inventory, and three of the four bikes are inoperable.”

I frowned. “Totally?”

“Yes, sir,” said the android. “Quite. The fourth is repairable, the ship thinks, but it will take several days.”

“Shit,” I said to no one in particular.

“How much charge do those bikes have?” asked Aenea.

“One hundred hours under normal use,” piped up my comlog.

The girl made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t think they’d be that useful, anyway. One bike isn’t going to make that much difference, and we might never find a recharge source.”

I rubbed my cheek, feeling the stubble there. In the day’s excitement I had forgotten to shave. “I thought of that,” I said, “but if we take any gear at all, the hawking mat’s not big enough to haul the three of us plus weapons, plus what we need to take.”

I thought that the child would argue with us about needing the gear, but instead she said, “Let’s take it all, but let’s not fly.”

“Not fly?” I said. The idea of hacking our way through that jungle made me queasy. “Without an inflatable raft, it’s either fly or walk…”

“We can still have a raft,” said Aenea. “We could build a wooden raft and float it downstream… not only on this section of the river, but all of them.”

I rubbed my cheek again. “The waterfall…”

“We can ferry our stuff down there on the hawking mat in the morning,” she said. “Build the raft below the falls. Unless you don’t think we can construct a raft…”

I looked at the gymnosperms: tall, thin, tough, just about the right thickness. “We can build a raft,” I said. “We used to cobble them together on the Kans to haul extra junk downstream with the barges.”

“Good,” said Aenea. “We’ll camp here tonight… it shouldn’t be too long a night if the day is only eighteen standard hours. Then get moving at first light.”

I hesitated a moment. I didn’t want to get into the habit of letting a twelve-year-old kid make decisions for us all, but the idea seemed sensible.

“It’s too bad the ship’s kaput,” I said. “We could just go downriver on repulsors…”

Aenea laughed out loud. “I’d never considered going on the River Tethys in this ship,” she said, rubbing her nose. “It’d be just what we need—inconspicuous as a giant dachshund squeezing under croquet hoops.”

“What’s a dachshund?” I said.

“What’s a croquet hoop?” asked A. Bettik.

“Never mind,” said Aenea. “Do you guys agree about staying here tonight and building a raft tomorrow?”

I looked at the android. “It seems eminently sensible to me,” he said, “although a subset of an equally eminent nonsensical voyage.”

“I’ll take that as a yes vote,” said the girl. “Raul?”

“All right,” I said, “but where do we sleep tonight? Here on the beach, or in the ship, where it will be safer?”

The ship spoke. “I will endeavor to make my interior as safe and hospitable as possible tonight, given the circumstances. Two of the couches on the fugue deck will still serve as beds, and there are hammocks which might be strung…”

“I vote we camp on the beach,” said Aenea. “The ship’s no safer from the Shrike than out here.”

I looked at the darkening forest. “There might be other things we don’t want to meet in the dark,” I said. “The ship seems safer.”

A. Bettik touched a small crate. “I found some small perimeter alarms,” he said. “We could set those around our camp. I would be happy to stand watch through the night. I confess to some interest in sleeping outside after so many days aboard the ship.”

I sighed and surrendered. “We’ll trade off watches,” I said. “Let’s get this junk set up before it gets too dark.”

The “junk” included the camping gear I’d asked the android to dig out: a tent of microthin polymer, thin as the shadow of a spiderweb, but tough, rainproof, and light enough to carry in one’s pocket; the superconductor heating cube, cool on five sides and able to heat any meal on the sixth; the perimeter alarms A. Bettik had mentioned—actually a hunter’s version of old military motion detectors, three-centimeter disks that could be spiked into the ground in any-sized perimeter up to two klicks; sleeping bags, infinitely compressible foam pads, night goggles, the com units, mess kits, and utensils.

We set the alarms in place first, spiking them down in a half circle from just within the forest’s edge to the edge of the river.

“What if that big thing crawls out of the river and eats us?” said Aenea as we finished setting the perimeter. It was getting dark in earnest now, but the clouds hid any stars. Breezes rustled the fronds above with a more sinister sound than earlier.

“If that or anything else crawls out of the river and eats us,” I said, “you’re going to wish we’d stayed one more night in the ship.” I set the last detectors at the river’s edge.

We pitched the tent in the center of the beach, not far from the bow of the crippled ship. The microfabric did not need tent poles or stakes—all you had to do was double-crease the lines of the fabric you wanted rigid, and those folds would stay taut in a hurricane, but setting a microtent up was a bit of an art, and the other two watched while I expanded the fabric, creased the edges into an A-line with a dome center tall enough to stand in, and folded the suddenly rigid edges into the sand to stake it. I had left an expanse of microfabric as the floor of the tent, and by stretching it just so, we had mesh for the entrance. A. Bettik nodded his appreciation for the trick, and Aenea set the sleeping bags in place while I set a pan on the heating cube and opened a can of beef stew. At the last moment I remembered that Aenea was a vegetarian—she had eaten mostly salads during the two weeks aboard ship.

“That’s all right,” she said, poking her head out of the tent. “I’ll have some of the bread that A. Bettik’s heating up, and perhaps some of the cheese.”

A. Bettik was carrying fallen wood over and setting stones into a fire ring.

“We don’t need that,” I said, indicating the heating cube and the bubbling pot of stew.

“Yes,” said the android, “but I thought a fire might be pleasant. And the light welcome.”

The light, it turned out, was very welcome. We sat under the awning vestibule of my elaborately folded tent and watched the flames spit sparks toward the sky as a storm moved in. It was a strange storm, with bands of shifting lights in lieu of lightning. The pale bands of shimmering color danced from the bottoms of the hurrying clouds to points just meters above the gymnosperm fronds gyrating wildly in the rising wind. There was no thunder with the phenomenon, but a sort of subsonic rumble set my nerves on edge. Within the jungle itself, pale globes of red and yellow phosphorescence jiggled and danced—not gracefully like the radiant gossamers in Hyperion’s forests, but nervously, almost malevolently. Behind us, the river lapped at the beach with increasingly active waves. Sitting by the fire, my headset in place and tuned to the perimeter detectors’ frequency, the plasma rifle across my lap, the night goggles on my forehead ready to be flipped down at a second’s notice, I must have been a comical sight. It did not seem funny at the time: images of the Shrike’s footprints in the sand kept coming to mind.

“Did it act threatening?” I’d asked A. Bettik a few minutes earlier. I had been trying to get him to hold the 16-gauge shotgun—no weapon is easier for a weapon’s novice to use than a shotgun—but all he would do was keep it by him as he sat by the fire.

“It did not act anything at all,” he had replied. “It simply stood there on the beach—tall, spiked, dark but gleaming. Its eyes were very red.”

“Was it looking at you?”

“It was looking east, down the river,” A. Bettik had replied.

As if waiting for Aenea and me to return, I had thought.

So I sat by the flickering fire, watched the aurora dance and shimmer over the wind-tossed jungle, tracked the will-o’-the-wisps as they jiggled in the jungle darkness, listened to the subsonic thunder rumbling like some great, hungry beast, and passed the time wondering how the hell I’d got myself here. For all I knew, there were velociraptors and packs of carrion-breed kalidergas slinking through the jungle toward us even as we sat fat and stupid by the fire. Or perhaps the river would rise—a wall of water could be rushing downstream toward us at that very moment. Camping on a sand spit was not terribly bright. We should have slept in the ship with the air lock sealed tight.

Aenea lay on her stomach looking into the fire. “Do you know any stories?” she said.

“Stories!” I cried. A. Bettik looked up from where he sat hugging his knees beyond the fire.

“Yes,” said the girl. “Like ghost stories.”

I made a noise.

Aenea propped her chin on her palms. The fire painted her face in warm tones. “I just thought it might be fun,” she said. “I like ghost stories.”

I thought of four or five responses and held them back. “You’d better get to sleep,” I said at last. “If the ship’s right about the short day, we don’t have too much night…” Please, God, let that be true, I was thinking. Aloud, I said, “You’d better get some sleep while you can.”

“All right,” said Aenea, and took one last look across the fire at the wind-tossed jungle, the aurora, and the St. Elmo’s fire in the forest, and rolled into her sleeping bag and went to sleep.

A. Bettik and I sat in silence for a while. Occasionally I would converse with my bracelet comlog, asking the ship to inform me immediately if the river started rising, or if it detected some mass displacement, or if…

“I would be happy to take the first watch, M. Endymion,” said the android.

“No, go ahead and sleep,” I said, forgetting that the blue-skinned man required very little sleep.

“We will watch together, then,” he said softly. “But do feel free to doze when you need to, M. Endymion.”

Perhaps I did doze off sometime before the tropical dawn about six hours later. It was cloudy and stormy all night; the ship never got its star fix while we were there. No velociraptors or kalidergas ate us. The river did not rise. The storm aurora did not harm us, and the balls of swamp gas never came out of the swamp to burn us.

What I remember most about that night, besides my galloping paranoia and terrible tiredness, was the sight of Aenea sleeping with her brown-blond hair spilled out over the edge of her red sleeping bag, her fist raised to her cheek like an infant preparing to suck its thumb. I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me—of keeping this child safe from the sharp edges of a strange and indifferent universe.

I think that it was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent.

We got moving at first light, and I remember that morning mixture of bone-tiredness, gritty eyes, stubbled cheeks, aching back, and sheer joy that I usually felt after my first night on a camping trip. Aenea went down to the river to wash up, and I have to admit that she looked fresher and cleaner than she should have, given the circumstances.

A. Bettik had heated coffee over the cube, and he and I drank some while we watched the morning fog curl up from the quickly moving river. Aenea sipped from a water bottle she’d brought from the ship, and we all munched on dry cereal from a ration pak.

By the time the sun was shining over the jungle canopy, burning away the mists that rose from the river and forest, we were ferrying the gear downriver on the hawking mat. Since Aenea and I had done the fun part the previous evening, I let A. Bettik fly the gear while I dragged more stuff out of the ship and made sure we had what we needed.

Clothing was a problem. I had packed everything I thought I might need, but the girl had only the clothes she’d been wearing on Hyperion and carrying in her pack, and a few shirts we’d cut down from the Consul’s wardrobe. With more than 250 years to think about rescuing the child, one would think that the old poet would have thought to pack some clothes for her. Aenea seemed happy enough with what she had brought, but I was worried that it would not be enough if we ran into cold or rainy weather.

The EVA locker was a help there. There were several suit liners fitted out for the spacesuits, and the smallest of these came close to fitting the girl. I knew that the micropore material would keep her warm and dry in any but the most arctic conditions. I also appropriated a liner for the android and myself; it seemed absurd to be packing for winter in the rising tropical heat of that day, but one never knew. There was also an old outdoors vest of the Consul’s in the locker: long but fitted with more than a dozen pockets, clips, tie-on rings, secret zippered compartments. Aenea let out a squeal when I dug it out of the tumbled mess of the locker, put it on, and wore it almost constantly from then on.

We also found two EVA geology specimen bags with shoulder straps, which made excellent packs. Aenea hoisted one to her shoulder and loaded the extra clothes and bric-a-brac we were finding.

I still was convinced that there had to be a raft there, but no amount of digging and opening locker compartments revealed one.

“M. Endymion,” said the ship when I mentioned to the child what I was rooting around for, “I have a vague memory…”

Aenea and I stopped what we were doing and listened. There was something strange, almost pained, about the ship’s voice.

“I have a vague memory of the Consul taking the inflatable raft… of him waving good-bye to me from it.”

“Where was that?” I asked. “Which world?”

“I do not know,” said the ship in that same bemused, almost pained tone. “It may not have been a world at all… I remember stars shining below the river.”

“Below the river?” I said. I was worried about the ship’s mental integrity after the crash.

“The memory is fragmented,” said the ship in a brisker tone. “But I do remember the Consul departing in the raft. It was a large raft, quite comfortable for eight or ten people.”

“Great,” I said, slamming a compartment door. Aenea and I carried out the last load—we had rigged a metal folding ladder to hang down from the air lock, so climbing in and out was not the struggle it had been earlier.

A. Bettik swooped back after ferrying the camping gear and food cartons down to the waterfall, and now I looked at what remained: my backpack filled with my personal gear, Aenea’s backpack and shoulder bag, the extra com units and goggles, some of the food paks, and—lashed under the top of my pack—the folded plasma rifle and the machete A. Bettik had found yesterday. The long knife was awkward to carry, even in its leather sheath, but my few minutes in the jungle the day before had convinced me that we might need it. I had also dug out an ax and an even more compact tool—a folding shovel, actually, although for millennia we idiots who had joined the infantry had been trained to call it “an entrenching tool.” All of our cutlery was beginning to take up space.

I would have been happy to have skipped the ax and brought along a cutting laser to fell the trees for the raft—even an old chain saw would have been preferable—but my flashlight laser wasn’t up to that sort of work, and the weapons locker had been strangely devoid of cutting tools. For one long self-indulgent moment I considered bringing the old FORCE assault rifle and just blasting and burning those trees down, splitting them with pulse bolts if need be, but then I rejected the idea. It would be too loud, too messy, and too imprecise. I would just have to use the ax and sweat a bit. I did bring one of the tool kits with hammer, nails, screwdrivers, screws, pivot bolts—all the things I might need for raft building—as well as some rolls of waterproof plastalum that I thought might make crude but adequate flooring for the raft. On top of the tool kit were several hundred meters of nylon-sheathed climbing rope in three separate coils. In a red waterproof pouch, I’d found some flares and simple plastique, the kind that had been used for blasting stumps and rocks out of fields for countless centuries, as well as a dozen detonators. I included those, although they would be of doubtful use in felling trees for a raft. Also included in this pile for the next trip east were two medkits and a bottle-sized water purifier.

I had carried the EM-flying belt out, but the thing was bulky with its harness and power pak. I propped it against my pack anyway, thinking that we might need it. Also propped against my pack was the 16-gauge shotgun, which the android had not bothered taking with him during his flight east. Next to it were three boxes of shells. I had also insisted on bringing the flechette pistol, although neither A. Bettik nor Aenea would carry the thing.

On my belt was the holster holding the loaded .45, a pocket for an old-fashioned magnetic compass we’d found in the locker, my folded pair of night goggles and daytime binoculars, a water bottle, and two extra clips for the plasma rifle. “Bring on the velociraptors!” I muttered while taking inventory.

“What?” said Aenea, looking up from her packing.

“Nothing.”

Aenea had her things packed neatly in her new bag by the time A. Bettik touched down on the sand. She had also packed the android’s few personal items in the second shoulder bag.

I have always enjoyed breaking camp, even more than setting it up. I think it’s the neatness of packing everything away that I enjoy.

“What are we forgetting?” I said to the other two as we stood there on the narrow beach, looking at the packs and weapons.

“Me,” said the ship through the comlog on my wrist. The spacecraft’s voice did sound a bit plaintive.

Aenea walked across the sand to touch the curved metal of the beached ship. “How are you doing?”

“I have begun repairs, M. Aenea,” it said. “Thank you for inquiring.”

“Do you still project six months for repairs?” I asked. The last of the clouds were dissipating overhead, and the sky was that pale blue again. The green and white fronds moved against it.

“Approximately six standard months,” said the ship. “That is for my internal and external condition, of course. I do not have the macromanipulators to repair such things as your broken flybikes.”

“That’s all right,” said Aenea. “We’re leaving them all behind. We’ll fix them when we see you again.”

“When will that be?” said the ship. Its voice seemed smaller than usual coming from the comlog.

The child looked at A. Bettik and me. None of us spoke. Finally Aenea said, “We will need your services again, Ship. Can you conceal yourself here for months… or years… while you repair yourself and wait?”

“Yes,” said the ship. “Would the river bottom do?”

I looked out at the great gray mass of the ship rising from the water. The river was wide here, and probably deep, but the thought of the wounded ship backing itself into it seemed strange. “Won’t you… leak?” I said.

“M. Endymion,” said the ship in that tone that made me think it was acting haughty, “I am an interstellar spacecraft capable of penetrating nebulae and existing quite comfortably within the outer shell of a red giant star. I shall hardly—as you put it—leak because of being immersed in H₂O for a brief period of years.”

“Sorry,” I said, and then—refusing to have the ship’s rebuke as the last word—“Don’t forget to close your air lock when you go under.”

The ship did not comment.

“When we come back for you,” said the girl, “will we be able to call you?”

“Use the comlog bands or ninety-point-one on the general radio band,” said the ship. “I will keep a buggy-whip antenna above waterline to receive your call.”

“Buggy-whip antenna,” mused A. Bettik. “What a lovely phrase.”

“I am sorry that I do not recall the derivation of that term,” said the ship. “My memory is not what it used to be.”

“That’s all right,” said Aenea, patting the hull. “You’ve served us well. Now you get well… We want you in top shape when we return.”

“Yes, M. Aenea. I will be in contact and monitoring your progress until you transit the next farcaster portal.”

A. Bettik and Aenea sat on the hawking mat with their packs and our last boxes of gear taking up the rest of the space. I strapped the bulky flying belt on. It meant that I had to carry my own pack against my chest with a strap looped over my shoulder, the rifle in my free hand, but it worked all right. I knew how to operate the thing only from books—EM belts were useless on Hyperion—but the controls were simple and intuitive. The power indicator showed full charge, so I did not anticipate being dropped into the river for this short hop.

The mat was hovering about ten meters above the river when I squeezed the handheld controller, lurched into the air, almost clipped a gymnosperm, found my balance, and flew out to hover next to them. Hanging from this padded body harness was not as comfortable as sitting on a flying carpet, but the exhilaration of flying was even stronger. With the controller still held in my fist, I gave them the thumbs-up, and we flew east along the river, toward the rising sun.

There weren’t many other sand spits or beaches between the ship and the waterfall, but there was a good spot just below the waterfall, along the south side of the river where it widened into a lazy pool just beyond the rapids, and it was here that A. Bettik unpacked our camping gear and the first load of material. The noise from the falls was loud as we stacked the last of the small crates. I unlimbered the ax and looked at the nearest gymnosperms.

“I was thinking,” A. Bettik said so softly that I could hardly hear him over the noise of the waterfall.

I paused with the ax on my shoulder. The sunlight was very hot, and my shirt was already sticking to me.

“The River Tethys was meant to be a pleasure cruise,” he continued. “I wonder how the pleasure cruisers dealt with that.” He pointed a blue finger at the roaring falls.

“I know,” said Aenea. “I was thinking the same thing. They had levitation barges then, but not everyone going down the Tethys would have been in one. It would have been embarrassing to go for a romantic boat ride and find you and your sweetheart going over those.”

I stood looking at the rainbow-dappled spray of the falls and found myself wondering if I was as intelligent as I often assumed. This had not occurred to me. “The Tethys has been unused for almost three standard centuries,” I said. “Maybe the falls are new.”

“Perhaps,” said A. Bettik, “but I doubt it. These falls appear to have been formed by tectonic shelving that runs for many miles north and south through the jungle—do you see the difference in elevation there? And they have been eroding for a very long time. Note the size of the boulders in the rapids? I would think this has been here for as long as the river has run.”

“And it’s not in your Tethys guidebook?” I said.

“No,” said the android, holding the book out. Aenea took it.

“Maybe we’re not on the Tethys,” I said. Both of the others stared at me. “The ship didn’t get a starsighting,” I went on, “but what if this is some world not on the original Tethys tour?”

Aenea nodded. “I thought of that. The portals are the same as the ones along the remnants of the Tethys today, but who is to say that the TechnoCore did not have other portals… other farcaster-connected rivers?”

I set the head of the ax down and leaned on the shaft. “In which case, we’re in trouble,” I said. “You’ll never find your architect, and we’ll never find our way back to the ship and home.”

Aenea smiled. “It’s too early to worry about that. It has been three centuries. Maybe the river here just cut a new channel since the Tethys days. Or maybe there’s a canal and locks we missed because the jungle grew over it. We don’t have to worry about this now. We just have to get downriver to see if there’s another portal.”

I held up one finger. “Another thought,” I said, feeling a bit smarter than I had a moment before. “What if we go to all this trouble of building a raft here and find another waterfall between us and the portal? Or ten more? We didn’t spot the farcaster arch last night, so we don’t know how far it is.”

“I thought of that,” said Aenea.

I tapped my fingers on the ax handle. If that kid said that phrase one more time, I would seriously consider using the implement on her.

“M. Aenea asked me to reconnoiter,” said the android. “I did so during my last shuttle here.”

I was frowning. “Reconnoiter? You didn’t have time to fly that mat a hundred klicks or more downriver.”

“No,” agreed the android, “but I flew the mat very high and used the extra set of binoculars to search our path. The river appears to run straight and true for almost two hundred kilometers. It was difficult, to be sure, but I saw what may be the arch approximately a hundred thirty kilometers downriver. There appeared to be no waterfalls or other major obstacles between us and it.”

My frown must have deepened. “You saw all that?” I said. “How high were you?”

“The mat has no altimeter,” said A. Bettik, “but judging from the visible curvature of the planet and the darkening of the sky, I think I was about one hundred kilometers up.”

“Did you have one of the spacesuits on?” I asked. At that altitude a human being’s blood would boil in his veins and his lungs would burst from explosive decompression. “A respirator?” I looked around, but nothing like that was lying in our modest piles of goods.

“No,” said the android, turning to lift a crate, “I just held my breath.”

Shaking my head, I went off to cut some trees down. I figured that the exercise and solitude would do me good.

It was evening before the raft was finished, and I would have been working all night if A. Bettik had not taken turns with me on the tree cutting. The finished product was not beautiful, but it floated. Our little raft was about six meters long and four wide, with a long steering pole carved into a crude rudder set onto a forked support at the rear, a raised area just in front of the steering pole where Aenea molded the tent into a lean-to with openings front and rear, and crude oarlocks on each side with long oar-poles that would lie along the sides of the ship unless they were needed for rowing in dead water or emergency steering in rapids. I had been worried that the fern trees might soak up too much water and sink too low to be useful as a raft, but with only two layers of them wrapped together into a honeycomb with our climbing rope and bolted in strategic places, the logs rode very nicely and kept the top of the raft about fifteen centimeters above the water.

Aenea had shown a fascination with the microtent, and I had to admit that her sculpting of it was more skillful and efficient than anything I had shaped in all my years of using the things. Our lean-to could be ducked into from the steering position at the rudder, had a nice overhang in front to shield us from sun or rain while keeping the view intact, and had nice vestibules on either side to keep the extra crates of gear dry. She had already spread our foam pads and sleeping bags in various corners of the tent; the high sitting area in the center where we had the best view forward now boasted a meter-wide river stone, which she had set there as a hearth with the mess gear and heating cube on it; one of the handlamps was opened to lantern mode and was hanging from a centerloop—and, I had to admit, the overall effect was cozy.

The girl did not just spend her afternoon making cozy tents, however. I guess that I had expected her to stand by and watch while the two men sweated through the heavy work—I had stripped to the waist an hour into the heat of the day—but Aenea joined in almost immediately, dragging downed logs to the assembly point, lashing them, driving nails, setting bolts and pivot joints in place, and generally helping in the design. She pointed out why the standard way I’d been taught to jerry-rig a rudder was inefficient, and by moving the base of the support tripod lower and farther apart, I was able to move the long pole easier and to better effect. Twice she showed me different ways to tie the cross supports on the underside of the raft so that they would be tighter and sturdier. When we needed a log shaped, it was Aenea who set to with the machete, and all A. Bettik and I could do was stand back or be hit by flying chips.

Still, even with the three of us working hard, it was almost sundown before the raft was finished and our gear loaded.

“We could camp here tonight, get onto the river early in the morning,” I said. Even as I said it, I knew that I did not want to do that. Neither did the other two. We climbed aboard, and I pushed us away from the shore with the long pole I’d chosen as our main source of locomotion when the current failed. A. Bettik steered, and Aenea stood near the front of the raft, looking for shoals or hidden rocks.

For the first hour or so, the voyage seemed almost magical. After the sultry jungle heat and the tremendous exertion all day, it seemed like paradise to stand on the slowly moving raft, push against the river mud occasionally, and watch the darkening walls of jungle slip past. The sun set almost directly behind us, and for a few minutes the river was as red as molten lava, the undersides of the gymnosperms on either side aflame with reflected light. Then the grayness turned to darkness, and before we caught more than a glimpse of the night sky, the clouds moved in from the east just as they had the previous night.

“I wonder if the ship got a fix,” said Aenea.

“Let’s call and ask,” I said.

The ship had not been able to fix its position. “I was able to ascertain that we are not on Hyperion or Renaissance Vector,” said the small voice from my wrist comlog.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “Any other news?”

“I have moved to the river bottom,” said the ship. “It is quite comfortable, and I am preparing to…”

Suddenly the colored lightning rippled across the northern and western horizons, the wind whipped across the river so strongly that each of us had to rush to keep things from being blown away, the raft began moving toward the south shore with the whitecaps, and the comlog spit static. I thumbed the bracelet off and concentrated on poling while A. Bettik steered again. For several minutes I was afraid that the raft would come apart in the high waves and roaring wind; the bow was chopping, lifting, and dropping, and our only illumination came from the explosions of magenta and crimson lightning. The thunder was audible this night—great, pealing waves of sound, as if someone were rolling giant steel drums down stone stairs at us—and the aurora lightning tore at the sky rather than dancing, as it had the night before. Each of us froze for a second as one of those magenta bolts struck a gymnosperm on the north bank of the river, instantly causing the tree to explode in flame and colored sparks. As an ex-bargeman, I cursed my stupidity for letting us be out here in the middle of such a wide river—the Tethys had opened up to the better part of a klick wide again—without lightning rod or rubber mats. We hunkered down and grimaced when the colored bolts struck either shore or lit the eastern horizon in front of us.

Suddenly it was raining and the worst of the lightning was over. We ran for the tent—Aenea and A. Bettik crouched near the front opening, still hunting for sandbars or floating logs, me standing at the rear where the girl had rigged the tent to provide the person at the rudder shelter even while steering.

It had rained hard and often on the Kans River when I was a bargeman—I remember huddling in the leaky old barge fo’c’sle and wondering if the damned boat was going to go down just because of the weight of the rain on it—but I do not remember any rain like this one.

For a moment I thought that we had come up against another waterfall, a much larger one this time, and had unwittingly poled under the full force of it—but we were still moving downriver, and it was no waterfall descending on us, just the terrible force of the worst rainstorm I had ever experienced.

The wise course would have been to make for the riverbank and hold up until the deluge passed, but we could see nothing except colored lightning exploding behind this vertical wall of water, and I had no idea how far the banks were, or whether they held any chance of our landing and tying up. So I lashed the rudder in its highest position so that it would do little but keep our stern to the rear, abandoned my post, and huddled with the child and android as the heavens opened and dropped rivers, lakes, oceans of water on us.

It says something about the girl’s ability or luck in shaping and securing the tent that not once did it begin to fold or come loose from its cinchings to the raft. I say that I huddled with them, but in truth all three of us were busy holding down crates that had already been lashed in place as that raft pitched, tossed, swung around, and then brought its nose back around yet again. We had no idea which direction we were headed, whether the raft was safe in the middle of the river or was bearing down on boulders in a rapids, or was tearing hell-bent for cliffs as the river turned and we did not. None of us cared at that point: our goal was to keep our gear together, not be washed overboard, and to keep track of the other two as best we could.

At one point—with one arm around our stack of backpacks and my other hand clenched on the girl’s collar as she leaned out to retrieve some cookware headed out of the tent at high speed—I looked out from under our vestibule awning toward the front of the raft and realized that every part of the raft except for our little raised platform where the tent sat was underwater. The wind whipped whitecaps that glowed red or bright yellow depending upon the color of the curtain of the lightning aurora raging at that moment. I remembered something I had forgotten to search for in the ship: life vests—personal flotation devices.

Pulling Aenea back under the flapping cover of the tent, I screamed against the storm, “Can you swim when it’s not zero-g?”

“What?” I could see her lips form the word, but I could not actually hear it.

“Can… you… swim!?”

A. Bettik looked up from his position among the pitching crates. Water blew from his bald head and long nose. His blue eyes looked violet when the aurora crashed.

Aenea shook her head, although I was unsure whether she was answering my question in the negative or signifying she could not hear. I pulled her closer; her many-pocketed vest was soaked through and flapping like a wet sheet in a windstorm. “CAN… YOU… SWIM??” I was screaming literally at the top of my lungs. The effort took my breath away. I made frenzied swimming motions with both hands cupped in front of me. The raft pitched us apart, then tossed us back into close proximity.

I saw understanding light her dark eyes. The rain or spray whipped from the long strands of her hair. She smiled, the spray making her teeth look wet, and leaned closer to shout back into my ear.

“THANKS! I’D… LIKE TO… TAKE A… SWIM. BUT… MAYBE… LATER.”

We must have hit an eddy then, or perhaps the rising wind just caught the tent and used it as a sail to spin the raft on its axis, but that was when the raft went all the way around, seemed to hesitate, and then continued its spin. The three of us gave up trying to hold on to anything other than our lives and each other and just huddled together in the center of the raft platform. I realized that Aenea was shouting—a sort of happy “Yee-HAW”—and before I could scream at her to shut up, I echoed the cry. It felt good to scream against that spinning and the storm and the deluge, unable to be heard, but feeling your own shouts echoing in your skull and bones even as the thunder rumble echoed there as well. I looked to my right as a crimson bolt illuminated the entire river, saw a boulder sticking up at least five meters above the water and the raft twisting around and past it like a dreidel spinning by a cinder, and was more amazed by the sight of A. Bettik on his knees, his head thrown back, “Yee-HAWing” with us at the top of his android lungs.

The storm lasted all night. Toward dawn the rain let up until it was a mere downpour. The aurora lightning and sonic-boom thunder must have ended about then, but I cannot be certain of that—I was, as were both my young friend and my android friend, fast asleep and snoring.

We awoke to find the sun already high, no sign of clouds, the river wide and smooth and slow, the jungle moving by on either side like a seamless tapestry being unwound past us, and the sky gentle and blue.

For a while we could only sit in the sunlight, our elbows on our knees, our clothes still wet and dripping. We said nothing. I think the maelstrom of the night was still in our eyes, the blasts of color still popping in our retinas.

After a while Aenea stood up on wobbly legs. The surface of the raft was wet, but still above water. One log on the starboard side had broken free; there were a few tattered cords where knots should be; but all in all, our vessel was still seaworthy… riverworthy. Whatever. We checked fittings and took inventory for a while. The handlamp we had hung as a lantern was gone, as was one of the smaller cartons of rations, but everything else seemed in place.

“Well, you two can stand around,” said Aenea, “I’m going to make some breakfast.”

She turned the heating cube to maximum, had water boiling in a kettle within a minute, poured water for her tea and set it in the coffeepot for our coffee, and then shifted that aside to set a skillet frying with breakfast strips of jambon with tiny slices of potato she was cutting up.

I looked at the ham sizzling and said, “I thought you were a vegetarian.”

“I am,” said the girl. “I’m having wheat chips and some of that terrible reconstituted milk from the ship, but for this one and only time, I’m chef and you fellows are eating well.”

We ate well, sitting on the front edge of the tent platform where the sun could bathe our skins and dry our clothes. I pulled the crushed tricorn cap from one pocket of my wet vest, squeezed water out of it, and set it on my head for some shade. This started Aenea laughing again. I glanced over at A. Bettik, but the android was as observant and impassive as ever—as if his hour of “Yee-HAWing” with us had never occurred.

A. Bettik pulled a pole upright on the front of the raft—I had rigged it to swivel so we might hang a lantern there at night—but he pulled off his tattered white shirt and hung it there to dry instead. The sun glinted on his perfect blue skin.

“A flag!” cried Aenea. “It’s what this expedition has been needing.”

I laughed. “Not a white flag, though. That stands for…” I stopped in midsentence.

We had moved slowly with the current around a wide bend in the river. Now we each saw the huge and ancient farcaster portal arching for hundreds of meters above and to either side of us. Entire trees had grown on its wide back; vines fell many meters from its designs and indentations.

Each of us moved to our stations: me at the rudder this time, A. Bettik standing at the long pole as if ready to ward off rocks or boarders, and Aenea crouching at the front.

For a long minute I knew that this farcaster was a dud, that it would not work. I could see the familiar jungle and blue sky under it, watch the river go on beyond it. The view was normal right up to the point we reached the shadow of the giant arch. I could see a fish jump from the water ten meters in front of us. The wind ruffled Aenea’s hair and teased waves from the river. Above us, tons of ancient metal hung there like a child’s effort at drawing a bridge.

“Nothing happened—” I began.

The air filled with electricity in a manner more sudden and more terrifying than last night’s storm. It was as if a giant curtain had fallen from the arch directly onto our heads. I fell to one knee, feeling the weight and then the weightlessness of it. For an instant too short to measure, I felt as I had when the crash field had exploded around us in the tumbling spacecraft—like a fetus struggling against a clinging amniotic sac.

Then we were through. The sun was gone. The daylight was gone. The riverbanks and jungle were no longer there. Water stretched to the horizon on all sides. Stars in number and magnitude I had never imagined, much less observed, filled a sky that seemed too large.

Directly ahead of us, silhouetting Aenea like orange searchlights, rose three moons, each one the size of a full-fledged planet.