Endymion

31

“Fascinating,” said A. Bettik.

It would not have been my choice of words, but it sufficed for the time being. My first reaction was to begin cataloging our situation in negatives: we were not on the jungle world any longer; we were not on a river—the ocean stretched to the night sky in each direction; we were no longer in daylight; we were not sinking. The raft rode quite differently in these gentle but serious ocean swells, but my bargeman’s eye noted that while the waves tended to lap over the edges a bit more, the gymnosperm wood seemed even more buoyant here. I went to one knee near the rudder and gingerly lifted a palmful of sea to my mouth. I spit it out quickly and rinsed my mouth with fresh water from the canteen on my belt. This seawater was far more saline than even Hyperion’s undrinkable oceans.

“Wow,” Aenea said softly to herself. I guessed that she was talking about the rising moons. All three were huge and orange, but the center one was so large that even half of its diameter as it rose seemed to fill what I still thought of as the eastern sky. Aenea rose to her feet, and her standing silhouette still came less than halfway up the giant orange hemisphere. I lashed the rudder in place and joined the other two at the front of the raft. Because of the rocking as the gentle ocean swells rolled under us, all three of us were holding on to the upright post there, which still held A. Bettik’s shirt flapping in the night wind. The shirt glowed whitely in the moonlight and starlight.

I quit being a bargeman for a moment and scanned the sky with a shepherd’s eyes. The constellations that had been my favorites as a child—the Swan, the Geezer, the Twin Sisters, Seedships, and Home Plate—were not there or were so distorted that I could not recognize them. But the Milky Way was there: the meandering highway of our galaxy was visible from the wave-chopped horizon behind us until it faded in the glow around the rising moons. Normally, stars were much fainter with even an Old Earth-standard moon in the sky, much less these giants. I guessed that a dustless sky, no competing light sources of any sort, and thinner air offered this incredible show. I had trouble imagining the stars here on a moonless night.

Where is “here”? I wondered. I had a hunch. “Ship?” I said to my comlog. “Are you still there?”

I was surprised when the bracelet answered. “The downloaded sections are still here, M. Endymion. May I help you?”

The other two tore their gazes away from the rising moon giant and looked at the comlog. “You’re not the ship?” I said. “I mean…”

“If you mean are you in direct communication with the ship, no,” said the comlog. “The com bands were severed when you transited the last farcaster portal. This abbreviated version of the ship is, however, receiving video feed.”

I had forgotten that the comlog had light-sensitive pickups. “Can you tell us where we are?” I said.

“One minute, please,” said the comlog. “If you will hold the comlog up a bit—thank you—I will do a sky search and match it to navigational coordinates.”

While the comlog was searching, A. Bettik said, “I think I know where we are, M. Endymion.”

I thought I did as well, but I let the android speak. “This seems to fit the description of Mare Infinitus,” he said. “One of the old worlds in the Web and now part of the Pax.”

Aenea said nothing. She was still watching the rising moon, and her expression was rapt. I looked up at the orange sphere dominating the sky and realized that I could see rust-colored clouds moving above the dusty surface. Looking again, I realized that surface features were visible: brown blemishes that might be volcano flows, a long scar of a valley with tributaries, the hint of icefields at the north pole, and an indefinable radiation of lines connecting what might be mountain ranges. It looked a bit like holos I’d seen of Mars—before it had been terraformed—in Old Earth’s system.

“Mare Infinitus appears to have three moons,” A. Bettik was saying, “although in reality it is Mare Infinitus which is the satellite of a near Jovian-sized rocky world.”

I gestured toward the dusty moon. “Like that?”

“Precisely like that,” said the android. “I have seen pictures… It is uninhabited, but was heavily mined by robots during the Hegemony.”

“I think it’s Mare Infinitus as well,” I said. “I’ve heard some of my offworld Pax hunters talk about it. Great deep-sea fishing. They say that there’s some sort of antennaed cephalo-chordate thing in the ocean on Mare Infinitus that grows to be more than a hundred meters long… it swallows fishing ships whole unless it’s caught first.”

I shut up then. All three of us peered down into the wine-dark waters. Into the silence suddenly chirped my comlog, “I’ve got it! The starfields match perfectly with my navigational data banks. You are on a satellite surrounding a sub-Jovian world orbiting star Seventy Ophiuchi A twenty-seven-point-nine light-years from Hyperion, sixteen-point-four-oh-eight-two light-years from Old Earth System. The system is a binary, with Seventy Ophiuchi A your primary star at point-six-four AU, and Seventy Ophiuchi B your secondary at eight-nine AU. Since you appear to have atmosphere and water there, it would be safe to say that you are on the second moon from sub-Jovian DB Seventy Ophiuchi A-prime, known in Hegemony days as Mare Infinitus.”

“Thanks,” I said to the comlog.

“I have more astral navigational data…” chirped the bracelet.

“Later,” I said, and tapped the comlog off.

A. Bettik removed his shirt from the makeshift mast and pulled it on. The ocean breeze was strong, the air thin and chilly. I pulled my insulated overvest from my pack, and the other two retrieved jackets from their own packs. The incredible moon continued rising into the unbelievable starry sky.

The Mare Infinitus segment of the river is a pleasant, if brief, interlude between more recreation-oriented river passages, read the Traveler’s Guide to the WorldWeb. The three of us crouched by the stone hearth to read the page by the light of our last handlamp-lantern. The lamp was redundant, actually, since the moonlight was almost as bright as a cloudy day on Hyperion. The violet articulated seas are caused by a form of phytoplankton in the water and are not a result of the atmospheric scattering which grants the traveler such lovely sunsets. While the Mare Infinitus interlude is very short—five kilometers of such ocean travel is enough for most of the River’s wanderers—it does include the Web-famous Gus’s Oceanic Aquarium and Grill. Be sure to order the grilled sea giant, the hectapus soup, and the excellent yellowweed wine. Dine on one of the many terraces on Gus’s Oceanic platform so that you can enjoy one of Mare Infinitus’s exquisite sunsets and even more exquisite moonrises. While this world is noted for its empty ocean expanses (it has no continents or islands) and aggressive sea life (the “Lamp Mouth Leviathan” for example), please be assured that your Tethys Traveler’s ship will stay safely within the Mid-littoral Stream from portal to portal, and be escorted by several Mare Protectorate outrider ships—all so that your brief aquatic interval, set off by a fine dinner at Gus’s Oceanic Grill, will leave only pleasant memories. (NOTE: The Mare Infinitus segment of the Tethys will be omitted from the tour if inclement weather or dangerous sea-life conditions prevail. Be prepared to catch this world on a later tour!)

That was all. I gave the book back to A. Bettik, turned the lamp off, went to the front of the raft, and scanned the horizon with night-vision amplifiers. The goggles were not necessary in the brilliant light from the three moons. “The book lies,” I said. “We can see at least twenty-five klicks to the horizon. There’s no other portal.”

“Perhaps it moved,” said A. Bettik.

“Or sank,” said Aenea.

“Ha ha,” I said, tossing the goggles into my pack and sitting with the others near the glowing heating cube. The air was cold.

“It is possible,” said the android, “that—as with the other river segments—there is a longer and shorter version of this section.”

“Why do we always get the longer versions?” I said. We were cooking breakfast, each of us starved after the long night’s storm on the river, although the toast, cereal, and coffee seemed more like a midnight snack on the moonlit sea.

We soon got used to the pitching and rolling of the raft on the large swells and none of us showed any signs of seasickness. After my second cup of coffee, I felt better about it all. Something about the guidebook entry had piqued my sense of the absurd. I had to admit, though, that I didn’t like the “Lamp Mouth Leviathan” bit.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Aenea said to me as we sat in front of the tent. A. Bettik was behind us, at the steering rudder.

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess I am.”

“Why?” said the girl.

I raised my hands. “It’s an adventure,” I said. “But no one’s got hurt…”

“I think we came close in that storm,” said Aenea.

“Yes, well…”

“Why else do you like it?” There was real curiosity in the child’s voice.

“I’ve always liked the outdoors,” I said truthfully. “Camping. Being away from things. Something about nature makes me feel… I don’t know… connected to something larger.” I stopped before I began sounding like an Orthodox Zen Gnostic.

The girl leaned closer. “My father wrote a poem about that idea,” she said. “Actually, it was the ancient pre-Hegira poet my father’s cybrid was cloned from, of course, but my father’s sensibilities were in the poem.” Before I could ask a question, she continued, “He wasn’t a philosopher. He was young, younger than you, even, and his philosophical vocabulary was fairly primitive, but in this poem he tried to articulate the stages by which we approach fusion with the universe. In a letter he called these stages ’a kind of Pleasure Thermometer.’”

I admit that I was surprised and a little taken back by this short speech. I hadn’t heard Aenea talk this seriously about anything yet, or use such large words, and the “Pleasure Thermometer” part sounded vaguely dirty to me. But I listened as she went on:

“Father thought that the first stage of human happiness was a ’fellowship with essence,’” she said softly. I could see that A. Bettik was listening from his place at the steering pole. “By that,” she said, “Father meant an imaginative and sensuous response to nature… just the sort of feeling you were describing earlier.”

I rubbed my cheek, feeling the longer bristles there. A few more days without shaving and I would have a beard. I sipped my coffee.

“Father included poetry and music and art as part of that response to nature,” she said. “It’s a fallible but human way of resonating to the universe—nature creates that energy of creation in us. For Father imagination and truth were the same thing. He once wrote—’The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.’”

“I’m not quite sure I get that,” I said. “Does that mean that fiction is truer than… truth?”

Aenea shook her head. “No, I think he meant… well, in the same poem he has a hymn to Pan—

Aenea blew on her cup of hot tea to cool it. “To Father, Pan became a sort of symbol of imagination… especially romantic imagination.” She sipped her tea. “Did you know, Raul, that Pan was the allegorical precursor to Christ?”

I blinked. This was the same child who had been asking for ghost stories two nights ago. “Christ?” I said. I was enough a product of my time to flinch at any hint of blasphemy.

Aenea drank her tea and looked at the moons. Her left arm was wrapped around her raised knees as she sat. “Father thought that some people—not all—were moved by their response to nature to be stirred by that elemental, Pan-like imagination.

We were all silent a moment after this recitation. I had grown up listening to poetry—shepherds’ rough epics, the old poet’s Cantos, the Garden Epic of young Tycho and Glee and the centaur Raul—so I was used to rhymes under starry skies. Most of the poems I had heard and learned and loved were simpler to understand than this, however.

After a moment broken only by the lapping of waves against the raft and the wind against our tent, I said, “So this was your father’s idea of happiness?”

Aenea tossed her head back so that her hair moved in the wind. “Oh, no,” she said. “Just the first stage of happiness on his Pleasure Thermometer. There were two higher stages.”

“What were they?” said A. Bettik. The android’s soft voice almost made me jump; I had forgotten he was on the raft with us.

Aenea closed her eyes and spoke again, her voice soft, musical, and free from the singsong cant of those who ruin poetry.

I looked up at the dust storms and volcanic flashes on the giant moon. Sepia clouds moved across the orange-and-umber landscape up there. “So those are his other levels?” I said, a bit disappointed. “First nature, then love and friendship?”

“Not exactly,” said the girl. “Father thought that true friendship between humans was on an even higher level than our response to nature, but that the highest level attainable was love.”

I nodded. “Like the Church teaches,” I said. “The love of Christ… the love of our fellow humans.”

“Uh-uh,” said Aenea, sipping the last of her tea. “Father meant erotic love. Sex.” She closed her eyes again…

I admit that I did not know what to say to that. I shook the last of the coffee out of my cup, cleared my throat, studied the hurtling moons and still-visible Milky Way for a moment, and said, “So? Do you think he was onto something?” As soon as I said it, I wanted to kick myself. This was a child I was talking to. She might sprout old poetry, or old pornography for that matter, but there was no way she could understand it.

Aenea looked at me. The moonlight made her large eyes luminous. “I think there are more levels on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in my father’s philosophy.”

“I see,” I said, thinking, Who the hell is Horatio?

“My father was very young when he wrote that,” said Aenea. “It was his first poem and it was a flop. What he wanted—what he wanted his shepherd hero to learn—was how exalted these things could be—poetry, nature, wisdom, the voices of friends, brave deeds, the glory of strange places, the charm of the opposite sex. But he stopped before he got to the real essence.”

“What real essence?” I asked. Our raft rose and fell on the sea’s breathing.

“The meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds,” whispered the girl. “…all forms and substances/ Straight homeward to their symbol-essences…”

Why were those words so familiar? It took me a while to remember.

Our raft sailed on through the night and sea of Mare Infinitus.

We slept again before the suns rose, and after another breakfast I got up to sight in the weapons. Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.

I hadn’t had time to test the firearms aboard ship or after our crash on the jungle world, and carrying around unfired, unsighted weapons made me nervous. In my short time in the Home Guard and longer years as a hunting guide, I’d long since discovered that familiarity with a weapon was easily as important as—and probably more important than—having a fancy rifle.

The largest of the moons was still in the sky as the suns rose—first the smaller of the binaries, a brilliant mote in the morning sky, paling the Milky Way to invisibility and dulling the details on the large moon, and then the primary, smaller than Hyperion’s Sol-like sun, but very bright. The sky deepened to an ultramarine and then deepened further to a cobalt-blue, with the two stars blazing and the orange moon filling the sky behind us. Sunlight made the moon’s atmosphere a hazy disk and banished the surface features from our sight. Meanwhile, the day grew warm, then hot, then blazing.

The sea came up a bit, easy swells turning into regular two-meter waves that jostled the raft some but were far enough apart to let us ride them without undue discomfort. As the guidebook had promised, the sea was a disturbing violet, serrated by wave-top crests of a blue so dark as to be almost black, and occasionally broken by yellowkelp beds or foam of an even darker violet. The raft continued toward the horizon where the moons and suns had risen—we thought of it as east—and we could only hope that the strong current was carrying us somewhere. When we doubted that the current was moving us at all, we trailed a line or tossed some bit of debris overboard and watched the difference between wind and current tug at it. The waves were moving from what we perceived as south to north. We continued east.

I fired the .45 first, checking the magazine to make sure that the slugs were securely in place. I was afraid that the archaic quality of having ammunition separate from the structure of the magazine itself would make me forgetful of reloading at an awkward time. We did not have much to toss overboard for target practice, but I kept a few used ration containers at my feet, tossed one, and waited until it had floated about fifteen meters away before firing.

The automatic made an indecent roar when it went off. I knew that slug-throwers were loud—I had fired some in basic training, since the Ice Claw rebels often used them—but this blast almost made me drop the pistol into the violet sea. It scared Aenea, who had been staring off to the south and musing over something, right to her feet, and even made the unflappable android jump.

“Sorry,” I said, and braced the heavy weapon with both hands and fired again.

After using two clips’ worth of the precious ammunition, I was assured that I could hit something at fifteen meters. Beyond that—well, I hoped that whatever I was shooting at had ears and would be spooked by the noise the .45 made.

As I broke the weapon down after firing, I mentioned again that this ancient piece could have been Brawne Lamia’s.

Aenea looked at it. “As I said, I never saw Mother with a handgun.”

“She could have lent it to the Consul when he went back to the Web in the ship,” I said, cleaning the opened pistol.

“No,” said A. Bettik.

I turned to look at him as he leaned against the steering oar. “No?” I said.

“I saw M. Lamia’s weapon when she was on the Benares,” said the android. “It was an antiquated pistol—her father’s, I believe—but it had a pearl handle, a laser sight, and was adapted to hold flechette cartridges.”

“Oh,” I said. Well, the idea had been appealing. “At least this thing’s been well preserved and rebuilt,” I said. It must have been kept in some sort of stasis-box; a thousand-year-old handgun would not have worked otherwise. Or perhaps it was some sort of clever reproduction that the Consul had picked up on his travels. It did not matter, of course, but I had always been struck by the… sense of history, I guess you would call it… that old firearms seemed to emanate.

I fired the flechette pistol next. It took only one burst to see that it worked quite nicely, thank you. The floating ration pak was blown into a thousand flowfoam shards from thirty meters away. The entire wave top jumped and shimmered as if a steel rain were pelting it. Flechette weapons were messy, hard to miss with, and eminently unfair to the target, which is why I had chosen this. I set the safety on and put it back in my pack.

The plasma rifle was harder to sight in. The click-up optical sight allowed me to zero in on anything from the floating ration pak thirty meters away, to the horizon, twenty-five klicks or so away, but while I sank the ration pak in the first shot, it was hard to tell the effectiveness of the longer shots. There was nothing out there to shoot at. Theoretically, a pulse rifle could hit anything one could see—there was no allowance necessary for windage or ballistic arc—and I watched through the scope as the bolt kicked a hole in waves twenty klicks out, but it did not create the same confidence that firing at a distant target would have. I raised the rifle to the giant moon now setting behind us. Through the scope I could just make out a white-topped mountain there—probably frozen CO² rather than snow, I knew—and, just for the hell of it, squeezed off a round. The plasma rifle was essentially silent compared to the semiautomatic slug-thrower pistol: only the usual cat’s-cough when it fired. The scope was not powerful enough to show a hit, and at those distances, rotation of the two worlds would be a problem, but I would be surprised if I had not hit the mountain. Home Guard barracks were full of stories of Swiss Guard riflemen who had knocked down Ouster commandos after firing from thousands of klicks away on a neighboring asteroid or somesuch. The trick, as it had been for millennia, was seeing the enemy first.

Thinking of that after firing the shotgun once, cleaning it, and setting away all the weapons, I said, “We need to do some scouting today.”

“Do you doubt that the other portal will be there?” asked Aenea.

I shrugged. “The guide said five klicks between portals. We must have floated at least a hundred since last night. Probably more.”

“Are we going to take the hawking mat out?” asked the girl. The suns were burning her fair skin.

“I thought I’d use the flying belt,” I said. Less radar profile if anyone’s watching, I thought but did not say aloud. “And you’re not going, kiddo,” I did say aloud. “Just me.”

I pulled the belt from its place under the tent, cinched the harness tightly, pulled my plasma rifle out, and activated the hand controller. “Well, shit,” I said. The belt did not even try to lift me. For a second I was sure that we were on a Hyperion-like world with lousy EM fields, but then I looked at the charge indicator. Red. Empty. Flat out. “Shit,” I said again.

I unbuckled the harness, and the three of us gathered around the useless thing as I checked the leads, the battery pak, and the flight unit.

“It was charged right before we left the ship,” I said. “The same time we charged the hawking mat.”

A. Bettik tried running a diagnostic program, but with zero-power, even that would not run. “Your comlog should have the same subprogram,” said the android.

“It does?” I said stupidly.

“May I?” said A. Bettik, gesturing toward the comlog. I removed the bracelet and handed it to him.

A. Bettik opened a tiny compartment I had not even noticed on the trinket, removed a bead-sized lead on a microfilament, and plugged into the belt. Lights blinked. “The flying belt is broken,” announced the comlog in the ship’s voice. “The battery pak is depleted approximately twenty-seven hours prematurely. I believe it is a fault in the storage cells.”

“Great,” I said. “Can it be fixed? Will it hold a charge if we find one?”

“Not this battery unit,” said the comlog. “But there are three replacements in the ship’s EVA locker.”

“Great,” I said again. I lifted the belt with its bulky battery and harness and tossed it over the side of the raft. It sank beneath the violet waves without a trace.

“All set here,” said Aenea. She was sitting cross-legged on the hawking mat, which was floating twenty centimeters above the raft. “Want to look around with me?”

I did not argue, but sat behind her on the mat, folded my legs, and watched her tap the flight threads.

About five thousand meters up, gasping for air and leaning out over the edge of our little carpet, things seemed a lot scarier than they had on the raft. The violet sea was very big, very empty, and our raft only a speck below, a tiny black rectangle on the reticulated violet-and-black sea. From this altitude, the waves that had seemed so serious on the raft were invisible.

“I think I’ve found another level of that ’fellowship with essence’ response to nature that your father wrote about,” I said.

“What’s that?” Aenea was shivering in the cold air of the jet stream. She had worn just the undershirt and vest she had been wearing on the raft.

“Scared shitless,” I said.

Aenea laughed. I have to say here that I loved Aenea’s laugh then, and I warm at the thought of it now. It was a soft laugh, but full and unselfconscious and melodic to the extreme. I miss it.

“We should have let A. Bettik come up to scout instead of us,” I said.

“Why?”

“From what he said about his high-altitude scouting before,” I said, “evidently he doesn’t need to breathe air, and he’s impervious to little things like depressurization.”

Aenea leaned back against me. “He’s not impervious to anything,” she said softly. “They just designed his skin to be a little tougher than ours—it can act like a pressure suit for short periods, even in hard vacuum—and he can hold his breath a bit longer, that’s all.”

I looked at her. “Do you know a lot about androids?”

“No,” said Aenea, “I just asked him.” She scooted forward a bit and laid her hands on the control threads. We flew “east.”

I admit that I was terrified of the thought of losing contact with the raft, of flying around this ocean-planet until these flight threads lost their charge and we plummeted to the sea, probably to be eaten by a Lamp Mouth Leviathan. I’d programmed my inertial compass with the raft as a starting point, so unless I dropped the compass—which was unlikely because I now kept it on a lanyard around my neck—we would find our way back, all right. But still I worried.

“Let’s not go too far,” I said.

“All right.” Aenea was keeping the speed down, about sixty or seventy klicks, I guessed, and had swooped back down to where we could breathe more easily and the air was not so cold. Below us, the violet sea stayed empty in a great circle to the horizon.

“Your farcasters seem to be playing tricks on us,” I said.

“Why do you call them my farcasters, Raul?”

“Well, you’re the one they… recognize.”

She did not answer.

“Seriously,” I said, “do you think there’s some rhyme or reason to the worlds they’re sending us to?”

Aenea glanced over her shoulder at me. “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

I waited. The deflection fields were minimal at this speed, so the wind tossed the girl’s hair back toward my face.

“Do you know much about the Web?” she asked. “About farcasters?”

I shrugged, realized that she was not looking back at me now, and said aloud, “They were run by the AIs of the TechnoCore. According to both the Church and your Uncle Martin’s Cantos, the farcasters were some sort of plot by the AIs to use human brains—neurons—as a sort of giant DNA computer thingee. They were parasites on us each time a human transited the farcasters, right?”

“Right,” said Aenea.

“So every time we go through one of these portals, the AIs… wherever they are… are hanging on our brains like big, blood-filled ticks, right?” I said.

“Wrong,” said the girl. She swiveled toward me again. “Not all of the farcasters were built or put in place or maintained by the same elements of the Core,” she said. “Do Uncle Martin’s finished Cantos tell about the civil war in the Core that my father discovered?”

“Yeah,” I said. I closed my eyes in an effort to remember the actual stanzas of the oral tale I’d learned. It was my turn to recite: “In the Cantos it’s some sort of AI persona that the Keats cybrid talks to in the Core megasphere of dataspace,” I said.

“Ummon,” said the girl. “That was the AI’s name. My mother traveled there once with Father, but it was my… my uncle… the second Keats cybrid who had the final showdown with Ummon. Go on.”

“Why?” I said. “You must know the thing better than I do.”

“No,” she said. “Uncle Martin hadn’t gone back to work on the Cantos when I knew him… He said he didn’t want to finish them. Tell me how he described what Ummon said about the civil war in the Core.”

I closed my eyes again.

“That was two hundred seventy-some standard years ago for you,” said Aenea. “That was right before the Fall.”

“Yeah,” I said, opening my eyes and searching the sea for anything other than violet waves.

“Did Uncle Martin’s poem explain the motivations of the Stables, Volatiles, and Ultimates?”

“More or less,” I said. “It’s hard to follow—the poem has Ummon and the other Core AIs speaking in Zen koans.”

Aenea nodded. “That’s about right.”

“According to the Cantos,” I said, “the group of Core AIs known as the Stables wanted to keep being parasites on our human brains when we used the Web. The Volatiles wanted to wipe us out. And I guess the Ultimates didn’t give much of a damn as long as they could keep working on the evolution of their own machine god… what’d they call it?”

“The UI,” said Aenea, slowing the carpet and swooping lower. “The Ultimate Intelligence.”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretty esoteric stuff. How does it relate to our going through these farcaster portals… if we ever find another portal?” At that moment I doubted that we would: the world was too big, the ocean too large. Even if the current was bearing our little raft in the right direction, the odds that we would float within that hundred-meter-or-so hoop of the next portal seemed too small to consider.

“Not all of the farcaster portals were built or maintained by the Stables to be… how did you put it?… like big ticks on our brains.”

“All right,” I said. “Who else built the farcasters?”

“The River Tethys farcasters were designed by the Ultimates,” said Aenea. “They were an… experiment, I guess you’d say… with the Void Which Binds. That’s the Core phrase… did Martin use it in his Cantos?”

“Yeah,” I said. We were lower now, just a thousand or so meters above the waves, but there was no sight of the raft or anything else. “Let’s head back,” I said.

“All right.” We consulted the compass and set our course home… if a leaky raft can be called home.

“I never understood what the hell the ’Void Which Binds’ was supposed to be,” I said. “Some sort of hyperspace stuff that the farcasters used and where the Core was hiding while it preyed on us. I got that part. I thought it was destroyed when Meina Gladstone ordered bombs dropped into the farcasters.”

“You can’t destroy the Void Which Binds,” said Aenea, her voice remote, as if she were thinking about something else. “How did Martin describe it?”

“Planck time and Planck length,” I said. “I don’t remember exactly—something about combining the three fundamental constants of physics—gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. I remember it gave some tiny little units of length and time.”

“About 10^-35 of a meter for the length,” said the girl, accelerating the carpet a bit. “And 10^-43 of a second for time.”

“That doesn’t tell me much,” I said. “It’s just fucking small and short… pardon the language.”

“You’re absolved,” said the girl. We were gently gaining altitude. “But it wasn’t the time or length that was important, it was how they were woven into… the Void Which Binds. My father tried to explain it to me before I was born…”

I blinked at that phrase but continued listening.

“… you know about the planetary dataspheres.”

“Yes,” I said, and tapped the comlog. “This trinket says that Mare Infinitus doesn’t have one.”

“Right,” said Aenea. “But most of the Web worlds used to. And from the dataspheres, there was the megasphere.”

“The farcaster medium… the Void thing… linked dataspheres, right?” I said. “FORCE and the Hegemony electronic government, the All Thing, they used the megasphere as well as the fatline to stay connected.”

“Yep,” said Aenea. “The megasphere actually existed on a subplane of the fatline.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. The FTL medium had not existed in my lifetime.

“Do you remember what the last message on the fatline was before it went down during the Fall?” asked the child.

“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. The lines of the poem did not come to me this time. The ending of the Cantos had always been too vague to interest me enough to memorize all those stanzas, despite Grandam’s drilling. “Some cryptic message from the Core,” I said. “Something about—get off the line and quit tying it up.”

“The message,” said Aenea, “was—THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s in the Cantos. I think. And then the hyperstring medium just quit working. The Core sent that message and shut down the fatline.”

“The Core did not send that message,” said Aenea.

I remember the slow chill that spread through me then, despite the heat of the two suns. “It didn’t?” I said stupidly. “Who did?”

“Good question,” said the child. “When my father talked about the metasphere—the wider datumplane that was somehow connected to or by the Void Which Binds—he always used to say it was filled with lions and tigers and bears.”

“Lions and tigers and bears,” I repeated. Those were Old Earth animals. I don’t think that any of them made the Hegira. I don’t think any of them were still around to make the trip—not even their stored DNA—when Old Earth crumbled into its black hole after the Big Mistake of ’08.

“Hmm-hmm,” said Aenea. “I’d like to meet them someday. There we are.”

I looked over her shoulder. We were about a thousand meters above the sea now, and the raft looked tiny but was clearly visible. A. Bettik was standing—shirtless once again in the midday heat—at the steering oar. He waved a bare blue arm. We both waved back.

“I hope there’s something good for lunch,” said Aenea.

“If not,” I said, “we’ll just have to stop at Gus’s Oceanic Aquarium and Grill.”

Aenea laughed and set up our glide path to home.

It was just after dark and the moons had not risen when we saw the lights blinking on the eastern horizon. We rushed to the front of the raft and tried to make out what was out there—Aenea using the binoculars, A. Bettik the night goggles on full amplification, and me the rifle’s scope.

“It’s not the arch,” said Aenea. “It’s a platform in the ocean—big—on stilts of some sort.”

“I do see the arch, however,” said the android, who was looking several degrees north of the blinking light. The girl and I looked in that direction.

The arch was just visible, a chord of negative space cutting into the Milky Way just above the horizon. The platform, with its blinking navigation beacons for aircraft and lamplit windows just becoming visible, was several klicks closer. And between us and the farcaster.

“Damn,” I said. “I wonder what it is.”

“Gus’s?” said Aenea.

I sighed. “Well, if it is, I think it’s under new ownership. There’s been a dearth of River Tethys tourists the last couple of centuries.” I studied the large platform through the rifle scope. “It has a lot of levels,” I muttered. “There are several ships tied up… fishing boats is my bet. And a pad for skimmers and other aircraft. I think I see a couple of thopters tied down there.”

“What’s a thopter?” asked the girl, lowering the binoculars.

A. Bettik answered. “A form of aircraft utilizing movable wings, much like an insect, M. Aenea. They were quite popular during the Hegemony, although rare on Hyperion. I believe they were also called dragonflies.”

“They’re still called that,” I said. “The Pax had a few on Hyperion. I saw one down on the Ursus iceshelf.” Raising the scope again, I could see the eyelike blisters on the front of the dragonfly, illuminated by a lighted window. “They’re thopters,” I said.

“It seems that we will have some trouble passing that platform to get to the arch undetected,” said A. Bettik.

“Quick,” I said, turning away from the blinking lights, “let’s get the tent and mast down.”

We had rerigged the tent to provide a sort of shelter/wall on the starboard side of the raft near the back—for purposes of privacy and sanitation that I won’t go into here—but now we tumbled the microfiber down and folded it away into a packet the size of my palm. A. Bettik lowered the pole at the front. “The steering oar?” he said.

I looked at it a second. “Leave it. It doesn’t have much of a radar cross section, and it’s no higher than we are.”

Aenea was studying the platform again through the binoculars. “I don’t think they can see us now,” she said. “We’re between these swells most of the time. But when we get closer…”

“And when the moons rise,” I added.

A. Bettik sat near the hearth. “If we could just go around in a large arc to get to the portal…”

I scratched my cheek, hearing the stubble there. “Yeah. I thought of using the flying belt to tow us, but…”

“We have the mat,” said the girl, joining us near the heating cube. The low platform seemed empty without the tent above it.

“How do we connect a tow line?” I said. “Burn a hole in the hawking mat?”

“If we had a harness…” began the android.

“We had a nice harness on the flying belt,” I said. “I fed it to the Lamp Mouth Leviathan.”

“We could rig another harness,” continued A. Bettik, “and run the line to the person on the hawking mat.”

“Sure,” I said, “but as soon as we’re airborne, the mat offers a stronger radar return. If they land skimmers and thopters there, they almost certainly have some sort of traffic control, no matter how primitive.”

“We could stay low,” said Aenea. “Keep the mat just above the waves… no higher than we are.”

I scratched at my chin. “We can do that,” I said, “but if we make a big enough detour to stay out of the platform’s sight, it’ll be long after moonrise before we get to the portal. Hell… it will be if we head straight for it on this current. They’re bound to see us in that light. Besides, the portal’s only a klick or so from the platform. They’re high enough that they’d see us as soon as we get that close.”

“We don’t know that they’re looking for us,” said the girl.

I nodded. The image of that priest-captain who had been waiting for us in Parvati System and Renaissance never left my mind for long: his Roman collar on that black Pax Fleet uniform. Part of me expected him to be on that platform, waiting with Pax troops.

“It doesn’t matter too much if they’re looking for us,” I said. “Even if they just come out to rescue us, do we have a cover story that makes sense?”

Aenea smiled. “We went out for a moonlit cruise and got lost? You’re right, Raul. They’d ‘rescue’ us and we’d spend the next year trying to explain who we are to the Pax authorities. They may not be looking for us, but you say they’re on this world…”

“Yes,” said A. Bettik. “The Pax has extensive interests on Mare Infinitus. From what we gleaned while hiding in the university city, it was clear that the Pax stepped in long ago to restore order here, to create sea-farming conglomerates, and to convert the survivors of the Fall to born-again Christianity. Mare Infinitus had been a protectorate of the Hegemony; now it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Church.”

“Bad news,” said Aenea. She looked from the android to me. “Any ideas?”

“I think so,” I said, rising. We had been whispering all during the conversation, even though we were still at least fifteen klicks from the platform. “Instead of guessing about who’s out there or what they’re up to, why don’t I go take a look? Maybe it’s just Gus’s descendants and a few sleeping fishermen.”

Aenea made a rueful sound. “When we first saw the light, do you know what I thought it might be?”

“What?” I said.

“Uncle Martin’s toilet.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the android.

Aenea tapped her knees with her palms. “Really. Mother said that back when Martin Silenus was a big-name hack writer during the Web days, he had a multiworld house.”

I frowned. “Grandam told me about those. Farcasters instead of doors between the rooms. One house with rooms on more than one world.”

“Dozens of worlds for Uncle Martin’s house, if Mother was to be believed,” said Aenea. “And he had a bathroom on Mare Infinitus. Nothing else… just a floating dock with a toilet. Not even any walls or ceiling.”

I looked out at the ocean swells. “So much for oneness with nature,” I said. I slapped my leg. “All right, I’m going before I lose my nerve.”

No one argued with me or offered to take my place. I might have been persuaded if they had.

I changed into darker trousers and my darkest sweater, pulling my drab hunting vest over the sweater, feeling a little melodramatic as I did so. Commando Boy goes to war, muttered the cynical part of my brain. I told it to shut up. I kept on the belt with the pistol, added three detonators and a wad of plastic explosive from the flare pak to my belt pouch, slipped the night goggles over my head so they could hang unobtrusively within my vest collar when I wasn’t wearing them, and set one of the com-unit hearphones in my ear with the pickup mike pressed to my throat for subvocals. We tested the unit, Aenea wearing the other headset. I took the comlog off and handed it to A. Bettik. “This thing catches the starlight too easily,” I said. “And the ship’s voice might start squawking stellar navigation trivia at a bad time.”

The android nodded and set the bracelet in his shirt pocket. “Do you have a plan, M. Endymion?”

“I’ll make one up when I get there,” I said, raising the hawking mat just above the level of the raft. I touched Aenea’s shoulder—the contact suddenly feeling like an electric jolt. I had noticed that effect before, when our hands touched: not a sexual thing, of course, but electrical nonetheless. “You stay low, kiddo,” I whispered to her. “I’ll holler if I need help.”

Her eyes were serious in the brilliant starlight. “It won’t help, Raul. We can’t get to you.”

“I know, I was just kidding.”

“Don’t kid,” she whispered. “Remember, if you’re not with me on the raft when it goes through the portal, you’ll be left behind here.”

I nodded, but the thought sobered me more than the thought of getting shot had. “I’ll be back,” I whispered. “It looks to me like this current will take us by the platform in… what do you think, A. Bettik?”

“About an hour, M. Endymion.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think, too. The damn moon should be coming up about then. I’ll… think of something to distract them.” Patting Aenea’s shoulder again, nodding to A. Bettik, I took the mat out over the water.

Even with the incredible starlight and the night-vision goggles, it was difficult piloting the hawking mat for those few klicks to the platform. I had to keep between the ocean swells whenever possible, which meant that I was trying to fly lower than the wave tops. It was delicate work. I had no idea what would happen if I cut off the tops of one of those long, slow swells—perhaps nothing, perhaps the hawking mat’s flight threads would short out—but I also had no intention of finding out.

The platform seemed huge as I approached. After seeing nothing but the raft for two days on this sea, the platform was huge—some steel but mostly dark wood, from the looks of it, a score of pylons holding it fifteen meters or so above the waves… that gave me an idea of what the storms must be like on this sea, and made me feel all the luckier that we hadn’t encountered one—and the platform itself was multitiered: decks and docks lower down where at least five long fishing boats bobbed, stairways, lighted compartments beneath what looked like the main deck level, two towers that I could see—one of them with a small radar dish—and three aircraft landing pads, two of which had been invisible from the raft. There were at least half a dozen thopters that I could see now, their dragonfly wings tied down, and two larger skimmers on the circular pad near the radar tower.

I had figured out a perfect plan while flying the mat over here: create a diversion—the reason I had brought the detonators and plastique, small explosives but capable of starting a fire at least—steal one of the dragonflies, and either fly through the portal with it if we were being pursued, or just use it to drag the raft through at high speed.

It was a good plan except for one flaw: I had no idea how to fly a thopter. That never happened in the holodramas I’d watched in Port Romance theaters or in the Home Guard rec rooms. The heroes in those things could fly anything they could steal—skimmers, EMVs, thopters, copters, rigid airships, spaceships. Evidently I had missed Hero Basic Training; if I managed to get into one of those things, I’d probably still be chewing my thumbnail and staring at the controls when the Pax guards grabbed me. It must have been easier being a Hero back during Hegemony days—the machines were smarter then, which made up for hero stupidity. As it was—although I would hate to admit it to my traveling companions—there weren’t many vehicles that I could drive. A barge. A basic groundcar, if it was one of the truck models the Hyperion Home Guard had used. As for piloting something myself… well, I had been glad when the spaceship hadn’t had a control room.

I shook myself out of this reverie on my heroic shortcomings and concentrated on closing the last few hundred meters to the platform. I could see the lights quite clearly now: aircraft beacons on the towers near the landing decks, a flashing green light on each of the ship docks, and lighted windows. Lots of windows. I decided to try to land on the darkest part of the platform, directly under the radar tower on the east side, and took the mat around in a long, slow, wave-hugging arc to approach from that direction. Looking back over my shoulder, I half expected to see the raft closing on me, but it was still invisible out toward the horizon.

I hope it’s invisible to these guys. I could hear voices and laughter now: men’s voices, deep laughter. It sounded like a lot of the offworld hunters I’d guided, filled with booze and bonhomie. But it also sounded like the dolts I’d served with in the Guard. I concentrated on keeping the mat low and dry and sneaking up on the platform.

“I’m about there,” I subvocalized on the comlink.

“Okay,” was Aenea’s whispered reply in my ear. We had agreed that she would only reply to my calls unless there were an emergency on their end.

Hovering, I saw a maze of beams, girders, subdecks, and catwalks under the main platform on this side. Unlike the well-lighted stairs on the north and west sides, these were dark-inspection catwalks, maybe—and I chose the lowest and darkest of them to land the carpet on. I killed the flight threads, rolled the little rug up, and lashed it in place where two beams met, cutting the cord I’d brought with a sweep of my knife. Setting the blade back in its sheath and tugging my vest over it, I had the sudden image of having to stab someone with that knife. The thought made me shudder. Except for the accident when M. Herrig attacked me, I had never killed anyone in hand-to-hand combat. I prayed to God that I would never have to again.

The stairs made noises under my soft boots, but I hoped that the occasional squeak wouldn’t be heard over the sound of the waves against the pylons and the laughter from above. I crept up two flights of stairs, found a ladder, and followed it up to a trapdoor. It was not locked. I slowly raised it, half expecting to tumble an armed guard on his ass.

Raising my head slowly, I saw that this was part of the flight deck on the seaward side of the tower. Ten meters above, I could see the turning radar antenna slicing darkness out of the brilliant Milky Way with each revolution.

I pulled myself to the deck, defeated the urge to tiptoe, and walked to the corner of the tower. Two huge skimmers were tied down to the flight deck here, but they looked dark and empty. On the lower flight decks I could see starlight on the multiple insect-wings of the thopters. The light from our galaxy gleamed in their dark observation blisters. The flesh between my shoulder blades was crawling with the sense of being observed as I walked out on the upper deck, applied plastic explosive to the belly of the closest skimmer, set a detonator in place, which I could trigger with the appropriate frequency code from my com unit, went down the ladder to the closest thopter deck, and did the same there. I was sure that I was being observed from one of the lighted windows or ports on this side, but no outcry went up. As casually as I could, I went soundlessly up the catwalk from the lower thopter deck and peered around the corner of the tower.

Another stairway led down from the tower module to one of the main levels. The windows were very bright there and covered only with screens now, their storm shields up. I could hear more laughter, some singing, and the sound of pots and pans.

Taking a breath, I moved down the stairs and across the deck, following another catwalk to keep me away from the doorway. Ducking under lighted windows, I tried to catch my breath and slow my pounding heart. If someone came out of that first doorway now, they would be between me and the way back to the hawking mat. I touched the grip of the .45 under my vest and the flap of the holster and tried to think brave thoughts. Mostly I was thinking about wanting to be back on the raft. I had planted the diversion explosives… what else did I want? I realized that I was more than curious: if these were not Pax troops, I did not want to set off the plastique. The rebels I had signed up to fight on the Claw Iceshelf had used bombs as their weapon of choice—bombs in the villages, bombs in Home Guard barracks, masses of explosives in snowmobiles and small ships targeted against civilians as well as Guard troops—and I had always considered this cowardly and detestable. Bombs were totally nondiscriminating weapons, killing the innocent as surely as the enemy soldier. It was silly to moralize this way, I knew, but even though I hoped that the small charges would do no more than set empty aircraft ablaze here, I was not going to detonate those charges unless I absolutely had to. These men—and women, probably, and perhaps children—had done nothing to us.

Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, absurdly slowly, I raised my head and peered in the closest window. One glimpse and I ducked down out of sight. The pots-and-pans noises were coming from a well-lighted kitchen area—galley, I corrected myself, since this was a ship, sort of. At any rate, there had been half a dozen people there, all men, all of military age but not in uniform except for undershirts and aprons, cleaning, stacking, and washing dishes. Obviously I’d come too late for dinner.

Staying next to the wall, I duck-walked the length of this catwalk, slid down another stairway, and stopped at a longer bank of windows. Here, in the shadows of a corner where two modules came together, I could see in some of the windows along this west-facing wall without lifting my face to one. It was a mess hall—or a dining room of some sort. About thirty men—all men!—were sitting over cups of coffee. Some were smoking recom-cigarettes. At least one man appeared to be drinking whiskey: or at least amber fluid from a bottle. I would not have minded some of whatever it was.

Many of the men were in khaki, but I couldn’t tell if these were some sort of local uniform, or just the traditional garb of sports fishermen. I didn’t see any Pax uniforms, which was definitely good. Perhaps this was just a fishing platform now, a hotel for rich offworld jerks who didn’t mind paying years of time-debt—or having their friends and families back home pay it, actually—for the thrill of killing something big or exotic. Hell, I might know some of those guys: fishermen now, duck hunters when they visited Hyperion. I did not want to go in to find out.

Feeling more confident now, I moved down the long walkway, the light from the windows falling on me. There did not seem to be any guards. No sentries. Maybe we would not need a diversion—just sail the raft right past these guys, moonlight or no moonlight. They’d be sleeping, or drinking and laughing, and we’d just follow the current right into the farcaster portal that I could see less than two klicks to the northeast now, the faintest of dark arches against the starry sky. When we got to the portal, I would send a prearranged frequency shift that would not detonate the plastique I’d hidden but would disarm the detonators.

I was looking at the portal when I moved around the corner and literally bumped into a man leaning against the wall there. There were two others standing at the railing. One of them was holding night-vision binoculars and looking off to the north. Both of the men at the railing had weapons.

“Hey!” yelled the men I’d bumped into.

“Sorry,” I said. I definitely had never seen this scene in a holodrama.

The two men at the railing were carrying flechette miniguns on slings and were resting their forearms on them with that casual arrogance that military types had practiced for countless centuries. Now one of these two shifted the gun so that its barrel was aimed in my direction. The man I bumped into had been in the process of lighting a cigarette. Now he shook out the match flame, removed the lighted cigarette from his mouth, and glared at me.

“What are you doing out here?” he demanded. The man was younger than I—perhaps early twenties, standard—and I could see now that he was wearing a variation on the Pax Groundforces uniform with the lieutenant’s bar I’d learned to salute on Hyperion. His dialect was pronounced, but I couldn’t place it.

“Getting some air,” I said lamely. Part of me was thinking that a real Hero would have had his pistol out, blazing away. The smarter part of me did not even consider it.

The other Pax trooper also shifted the sling of his flechette auto. I heard the click of a safety. “You are with the Klingman group?” he asked in the same thick dialect. “Or the Otters?” I heard Oor dey autors? I didn’t know if he was saying “others” or “otters” or, perhaps, “authors.” Maybe this was a seaborne concentration camp for bad writers. Maybe I was trying too hard to be mentally flippant when my heart was pounding so fiercely that I was afraid I was going to have a heart attack right in front of these two.

“Klingman,” I said, trying to be as terse as possible. Whatever dialect I should have, I was sure I did not.

The Pax lieutenant jerked a thumb toward the doorway beyond him. “You know the rules. Curfew after dark.” Yewe knaw dey rues. Cufue affa dok.

I nodded, trying to look contrite. My overvest was hanging down over the top of the holster on my hip. Perhaps they hadn’t seen the pistol.

“Come,” said the lieutenant, jerking his thumb again but turning to lead the way. Comb! The two enlisted types still had their hands on the flechette guns. At that distance, if they fired, there wouldn’t be enough of me left intact to bury in a boot.

I followed the lieutenant down the catwalk, through the door, and into the brightest and most crowded room I had ever entered.