Endymion

32

They grow weary of death. After eight star systems in sixty-three days, eight terrible deaths and eight painful resurrections for each of the four men, Father Captain de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Corporal Kee, and Lancer Rettig are weary of death and rebirth.

Each time now upon his resurrection, de Soya stands naked in front of a mirror, seeing his skin raw and glistening like someone who has been flayed alive, gingerly touching the now-livid, now-crimson cruciform under the flesh of his chest. In the days following each resurrection, de Soya is distracted, his hands shaking a bit more each time. Voices come to him from afar, he cannot seem to concentrate totally, whether his interlocutor is a Pax Admiral or a planetary Governor or a parish priest.

De Soya begins dressing like a parish priest, trading his trim Pax priest-captain uniform for the cassock and collar. He has a rosary on his belt-thong and says it almost constantly, working it like Arabic worry beads: prayer calms him, brings his thoughts to order. Father Captain de Soya no longer dreams of Aenea as his daughter; he no longer dreams of Renaissance Vector and his sister Maria. He dreams of Armageddon—terrible dreams of burning orbital forests, of worlds aflame, of deathbeams walking over fertile farming valleys and leaving only corpses.

He knows after their first River Tethys world that he has miscalculated. Two standard years to cover two hundred worlds, he had said in Renaissance System, figuring three days’ resurrection in each system, a warning, and then translation to the next. It does not work that way.

His first world is Tau Ceti Center, former administrative capital of the far-flung Hegemony WorldWeb. Home to tens of billions during the days of the Web, surrounded by an actual ring of orbital cities and habitats, served by space elevators, farcasters, the River Tethys, the Grand Concourse, the fatline, and more—center to the Hegemonic datumplane megasphere and home of Government House, site of Meina Gladstone’s death by infuriated mobs after the destruction of the Web farcasters by FORCE ships on her command, TC² was hard hit by the Fall. Floating buildings crashed as the power grid went down. Other urban spires, some many hundreds of stories tall, were served only by farcasters and lacked stairs or elevators. Tens of thousands starved or perished from falls before they could be lifted out by skimmer. The world had no agriculture of its own, bringing in its food from a thousand worlds via planet-based farcasters and great orbital spaceborne portals. The Starvation Riots lasted fifty local years on TC², over thirty standard, and when they were finished, billions had died from human hands, to add to the total of billions dead from hunger.

Tau Ceti Center had been a sophisticated, wanton world during the days of the Web. Few religions had taken hold there except the most self-indulgent or violent ones—the Church of the Final Atonement—the Shrike Cult—had been popular among the bored sophisticates. But during the centuries of Hegemony expansion, the only true object of worship on TC² had been power: the pursuit of power, the proximity to power, the preservation of power. Power had been the god of billions, and when that god failed—and pulled down billions of its worshipers in its failure—the survivors cursed the memories of power amid their urban ruins, scratching out a peasant’s living in the shadows of the rotting skyscrapers, pulling their own plows through weeded lots between the abandoned highways and fly-ways and the skeleton of old Grand Concourse malls, fishing for carp where the River Tethys had carried thousands of elaborate yachts and pleasure-barges each day.

Tau Ceti Center had been ripe for born-again Christianity, for the New Catholicism, and when the Church missionaries and Pax police had arrived sixty standard years after the Fall, conversion of the few billion planet’s survivors was sincere and universal. The tall, ruined, but still-white spires of business and government during the Web were finally torn down, their stone and smart glass and plasteel recycled into massive cathedrals, raised by the hands of the new Tau Ceti born-again, filled each day of the week by the thankful and faithful.

The Archbishop of Tau Ceti Center became one of the most important and—yes—powerful humans in the reemerging human domain now known as Pax Space, rivaling His Holiness on Pacem in influence. This power grew, found boundaries that could not be overstepped without incurring papal wrath—the excommunication of His Excellency, Klaus Cardinal Kronenberg in the Year of Our Lord 2978, or 126 After the Fall, helped settle those boundaries—and it continued to grow within those bounds.

So Father Captain de Soya discovers on his first jump from Renaissance space. Two years, he had anticipated, approximately six hundred days and two hundred self-imposed deaths to cover all of the former River Tethys worlds.

He and his Swiss Guard troopers are on Tau Ceti Center for eight days. The Raphael enters the system with its automatic beacon pulsing in code; Pax ships respond and rendezvous within fourteen hours. It takes another eight hours to decelerate into TC² orbital traffic, and another four to transfer the bodies to a formal resurrection créche in the planetary capital of St. Paul. One full day is thus lost.

After three days of formal resurrection and another day of enforced rest, de Soya meets with the Archbishop of TC², Her Excellency Achilla Silvaski, and must endure another full day of formalities. De Soya carries the papal diskey, an almost unheard of delegation of power, and the court of the Archbishop must sniff out the reason and projected results of that power like hunting dogs on a scent. Within hours de Soya gets the slightest hint of the layers of intrigue and complexity within this struggle for provincial power: Archbishop Silvaski can not aspire to become Cardinal, for after the Kronenberg excommunication, no spiritual leader of TC² can rise to a rank higher than Archbishop without transfer to Pacem and the Vatican, but her current power in this sector of the Pax far outweighs that of most cardinals and the temporal subset of that power puts Pax Fleet admirals in their place. She must understand this delegation of papal authority that de Soya carries, and render it harmless to her ends.

Father Captain de Soya does not give a damn about Archbishop Silvaski’s paranoia or the Church politics on TC². He cares only about stopping up the escape route of the farcaster portals there. On the fifth day after his translation to Tau Ceti space, he makes the five hundred meters from St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Archbishop’s palace to the river—just part of a minor tributary channeled into a canal flowing through the city, but once part of the Tethys.

The huge farcaster portals, still extant because any attempt to dismantle them had promised a thermonuclear explosion according to engineers, have long since been draped over by Church banners, but they are close together here—the Tethys had meandered only two kilometers from portal to portal, past the busy Government House and the formal Deer Park gardens. Now Father Captain de Soya, his three troopers, and the scores of watchful Pax troops loyal to Archbishop Silvaski who accompany them, can stand at the first portal and look down the grassy banks at a thirty-meter-long tapestry—showing the martyrdom of St. Paul—hanging from the second portal, clearly visible beyond the blooming peach trees of the bishopric palace gardens.

Because this section of the former Tethys is now within Her Excellency’s private gardens, guards are posted along the length of the canal and on all bridges crossing it. While there is no special attention to the ancient artifacts that were once farcaster portals, the officers of the palace guard assure de Soya that no vessels or unauthorized individuals have passed through those portals, nor been seen along the banks of the canal.

De Soya insists that a permanent guard be placed upon the portals. He wants cameras erected for twenty-nine-hour-a-day surveillance there. He wants sensors, alarms, and trip wires. The local Pax troops confer with their Archbishop and grudgingly comply with this perceived slight to their sovereignty. De Soya all but despairs at this useless politics.

On their sixth day Corporal Kee falls ill to a mysterious fever and is hospitalized. De Soya believes it is a result of their resurrection: each of them has privately suffered the shakes, emotional swings, and minor ailments. On the seventh day Kee is able to walk and implores de Soya to get him out of the infirmary and off this world, but now the Archbishop insists that de Soya help celebrate a High Mass that evening in honor of His Holiness, Pope Julius. De Soya can hardly refuse, so that night—amid scepters and pink-buttoned monsignore, beneath the giant insignia of His Holiness’s Triple Crown and Crossed Keys (which also appears on the papal diskey that de Soya now wears around his neck), amid the smoke of incense, white miters and the tinkle of bells, under the solemn singing of a six-hundred-member children’s choir, the simple priest-warrior from MadredeDios and the elegant Archbishop celebrate the mystery of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Sergeant Gregorius takes Communion that evening from de Soya’s hand—which he does every day of their quest—as do a few dozen others also chosen to receive the Host, secret to the success of their cruciform immortality in this life, while three thousand of the faithful pray and watch in the dim cathedral light.

On the eighth day they leave the system, and for the first time Father Captain de Soya welcomes the coming death as a means of escape.

They are resurrected in a créche on Heaven’s Gate, a once-miserable world terraformed to shade trees and comfort in the days of the Web, now largely fallen back to boiling mud, pestilent swamps, unbreathable atmosphere, and the blazing radiation source of Vega Prime in the sky. Raphael’s idiot computer has chosen this series of old River Tethys worlds, finding the most efficient order to visit them in since there were no clues on Renaissance V. to show where the portal there might have led, but de Soya is interested that they are coming closer and closer to Old Earth System—less than twelve light-years from TC², now just a little more than eight from Heaven’s Gate. De Soya realizes that he would like to visit Old Earth System—even without Old Earth—despite the fact that Mars and the other inhabited worlds, moons, and asteroids there have become provincial backwaters, of no more interest to the Pax than MadredeDios had been.

But the Tethys never flowed through Old Earth System, so de Soya must swallow his curiosity and be satisfied that the next few worlds will be even closer to Old Earth’s former home.

Heaven’s Gate takes eight days as well, but not because of intra-Church politics. There is a small Pax garrison in orbit around the planet, but they rarely go down to the ruined world. Heaven’s Gate’s population of four hundred million residents had been reduced to eight or ten crazy prospectors wandering its mudflat surface in the 274 standard years since the Fall: the Ouster Swarms had swept by this Vegan world even before Gladstone had ordered the farcasters destroyed—slagging the orbital containment sphere, lancing the capital of Mudflat City, with its lovely Promenade gardens, plasma bombing the atmosphere-generating stations it had taken centuries to build—and generally plowed the world under before the loss of farcaster connections salted the earth so that nothing would grow there again.

So now the Pax garrison guards the broiling planet for its rumored raw materials, but has little reason to go down there. De Soya must convince the garrison commander—Pax Major Leem—that an expedition has to be mounted. On the fifth day after Raphael’s entry into Vega System, de Soya, Gregorius, Kee, Rettig, a Lieutenant Bristol, and a dozen Pax garrison troops fitted out in environmental hazard suits, take a dropship to the mudflats where the River Tethys had once flowed. The farcaster portals are not there.

“I thought it was impossible to destroy them,” says de Soya. “The TechnoCore built them to last and booby-trapped them so that destruction is impossible.”

“They’re not here,” says Lieutenant Bristol, and gives the order to return to orbit.

De Soya stops him. Using his papal diskey as authority, de Soya insists that a full-sensor search be made. The farcasters are found—sixteen klicks apart and buried under almost a hundred meters of mud.

“That solves your mystery,” says Major Leem on tightbeam. “Either the Ouster attack or later mudslides buried the portals and what had been the river. This world has literally gone to hell.”

“Perhaps,” says de Soya, “but I want the farcasters excavated, temporary environmental bubbles erected around them so that someone coming through would survive, and a permanent guard mounted at each portal.”

“Are you out of your crossdamned mind!” Major Leem explodes, and then-remembering the papal diskey—he adds, “Sir.”

“Not yet,” says de Soya, glowering into the camera. “I want this done within seventy-two hours, Major, or you will be serving the next three standard years on the planetary detail down here.”

It takes seventy hours to excavate, construct the domes, and post the guard. Someone traveling the River Tethys will find no river here, of course, only the boiling mud, noxious, unbreathable atmosphere, and waiting troopers in full battle armor. De Soya goes to his knees on the Raphael that last night in orbit around Heaven’s Gate and prays that Aenea has not already come this way. Her bones were not found in the excavated mud and sulfur, but the Pax engineer in charge of the excavation tells de Soya that the soil is so toxic here in its natural form that the child’s bones could already have been eaten away by acid.

De Soya does not believe this to be the case. On the ninth day he translates out of system with a warning to Major Leem to keep the guards vigilant, the domes livable, and his mouth more civil to future visitors.

No one waits to resurrect them in the third system Raphael brings them to. The archangel ship enters System NGCes 2629 with its cargo of dead men and its beacons flashing Pax Fleet code. There is no response. There are eight planets in NGCes 2629, but only one of them, known by the prosaic name of NGCes 2629-4BIV, can support life. From the records still available to the Raphael, it seems likely that the Hegemony and TechnoCore had gone to the effort and expense of extending the River Tethys here as a form of self-indulgence, an aesthetic statement. The planet has never been seriously colonized or terraformed except for random RNA seeding during the early days of the Hegira, and appears to have been part of the River Tethys tour strictly for scenic and animal-viewing purposes.

That is not to say that there are not human beings on the world now, as the Raphael sniffs them out in parking orbit during the last days of its passengers’ automated resurrections. As best the limited resources of the Raphael’s near-AI computers can reconstruct and understand, NGCes 2629-4BIV’s minimum population of visiting biologists, zoologists, tourists, and support teams had been stranded after the Fall and had gone native. Despite prodigious breeding over almost three centuries, however, only a few thousand human beings still populated the jungles and highlands of the primitive world: the RNA-seeded beasties there were capable of eating human beings, and they did so with gusto.

Raphael runs to the edge of its limits in the simple task of finding the farcaster portals. Available Web records in its memory say simply that the portals are set at varying intervals along a six-thousand-kilometer river in the northern hemisphere. Raphael modifies its orbit to a roughly synchronous point above the massive continent which dominates that hemisphere and begins photographing and radar-mapping the river. Unfortunately, there are three massive rivers on that continent, two flowing to the east, one to the west, and Raphael is unable to prioritize probabilities. It decides to map all three—a task of analyzing more than twenty thousand kilometers of data.

When the four men’s hearts begin to beat at the end of the third day of the resurrection cycle, Raphael feels some silicon equivalent of relief.

Listening to the computer’s description of the task ahead while he stands naked in front of the mirror in his tiny cubby, Federico de Soya feels no relief. In truth, he feels like weeping. He thinks of Mother Captain Stone, Mother Captain Boulez, and Captain Hearn, on the Great Wall frontier by now and quite possibly engaging the Ouster enemy in fierce combat. De Soya envies them the simplicity and honesty of their task.

After conferring with Sergeant Gregorius and his two men, de Soya reviews the data, immediately rejects the western-flowing river as too unscenic for the River Tethys, since it flows primarily through deep canyons, away from the life-infested jungles and marshes; the second river he rejects because of the obvious number of waterfalls and rapids—too rough for River Tethys traffic—and so he begins a simple, fast radar-mapping of the longest river with its long, gentle stretches. The map will show up dozens, perhaps hundreds, of natural obstacles resembling farcaster portals—rocky waterfalls, natural bridges, boulder fields in rapids—but these can be scanned by the human eye in a few hours.

On their fifth day the portals are located—improbably far apart, but inarguably artificial. De Soya personally flies the dropship, leaving Corporal Kee in the Raphael as backup in case of emergency.

This is the scenario de Soya has dreaded—no way to tell if the girl has come this way, with or without her ship. The stretch between the inert farcasters is the longest yet—almost two hundred kilometers—and although they fly the dropship back and forth over the jungle and river’s edge, there is no telling if anyone has passed this way, no witnesses to interview, no Pax troops to leave on guard here.

They land on an island not far from the upper farcaster, and de Soya, Gregorius, and Rettig discuss their options.

“It’s been three standard weeks since the ship passed through the farcaster on Renaissance V…” says Gregorius. The interior of their dropship is cramped and utilitarian: they discuss things from their flight chairs. Gregorius’s and Rettig’s combat armor hang in the EVA closet like metal second skins.

“If they came through to a world like this,” says Rettig, “they probably just took off in the ship. There’s no reason they have to keep going down the river.”

“True,” says de Soya. “But there is a good chance the ship was damaged.”

“Aye,” says the sergeant, “but how badly? Could it have flown? Patched itself as it went? Perhaps made it to an Ouster repair base? We’re not that far from the Outback here.”

“Or the girl could have sent the ship off and gone on through the next farcaster,” says Rettig.

“Assuming any of the other portals work,” says de Soya tiredly. “That the one on Renaissance V. was not just a fluke.”

Gregorius sets his huge hands on his knees. “Aye, sir, this is ridiculous. Finding a needle in a haystack, as they used to say… that would be child’s play compared to this.”

Father Captain de Soya looks out through the dropship windows. The high ferns here are blowing in a silent wind. “I have a feeling she’s going down the old river. I think she’ll use the farcasters. I don’t know how—the flying machine that someone used to get her out of the Valley of the Time Tombs, maybe, an inflatable raft, a stolen boat—I just think she’s using the Tethys.”

“What can we do here?” asks Rettig. “If she’s already come through, we’ve missed her. If she’s not yet arrived… well, we could wait forever. If we had a hundred archangel ships so that we could bring troops to each of these worlds…”

De Soya nods. In his hours of prayer his mind often slips away to the thought of how much simpler this task would be if the archangel couriers were simple robotic craft, translating into Pax systems, broadcasting the papal-diskey authority and ordering the search, then jumping out of system without even decelerating. As far as he knows, the Pax is building no robot ships—the Church’s hatred of AIs and dependence upon human contact all but forbids it. And as far as he knows, there are only three archangel-class courier ships in existence—the Michael, the Gabriel, which had first brought him the message, and his own Raphael. In Renaissance System, he had wanted to send the other courier ship out in search, but the Michael had pressing Vatican duties. Intellectually, de Soya understood why this search was his and his alone. But here they have spent almost three weeks and searched two worlds. A robot archangel could leap into two hundred systems and broadcast the alert in less than ten standard days… at this rate, it will take de Soya and the Raphael four or five standard years. The exhausted father-captain has the urge to laugh.

“There’s still her ship,” he says briskly. “If they go on without it, they have two options—send the ship somewhere else, or leave it behind on one of the Tethys worlds.”

“You say ’they,’ sir,” Gregorius says softly. “Are you sure there are others?”

“Someone lifted her from our trap on Hyperion,” says de Soya. “There are others.”

“It could be an entire Ouster crew,” says Rettig. “They could be halfway back to their Swarm by now… after leaving the girl on any of these worlds. Or they could be taking her with them.”

De Soya lifts a hand to shut off conversation. They have been around and around this before. “I think the ship was hit and damaged,” he says. “We look for it and it may lead us to the girl.”

Gregorius points to the jungle. It is raining there. “We’ve flown this entire stretch of river between the portals. No sign of a ship. When we get to the next Pax system, we can send back garrison troops to watch these portals.”

“Yes,” says Father Captain de Soya, “but they’ll have a time-debt of eight or nine months.” He looks at the rain streaking the windshield and side ports. “We’ll search the river.”

“What?” says Lancer Rettig.

“If you had a damaged ship and had to leave it behind, wouldn’t you hide it?” asks de Soya.

The two Swiss Guard troopers stare at their commander. De Soya sees that the men’s fingers are trembling. Resurrection is affecting them as well.

“We’ll deep-radar the river and as much of the jungle as we can,” says the father-captain.

“It’ll take another day, at least,” begins Rettig.

De Soya nods. “We’ll have Corporal Kee instruct Raphael to deep-radar the jungle on a two-hundred-klick swatch on either side of the river. We’ll use the dropship to search the river… We have a cruder system on board, but less to cover.”

The exhausted troopers can only nod their obedience.

They find something on the second sweep of the river. The object is metal, large, and in a deep pool only a few kilometers downriver from the first portal. The dropship hovers while de Soya tightbeams the Raphael. “Corporal, we’re going to investigate. I want the ship ready to lance this thing within three seconds of my command… but only on my command.”

“I understand, sir,” tightbeams Kee.

De Soya holds the dropship in hover while Gregorius and Rettig suit up, prepare the proper tools, and stand in the open air lock. “Go,” says de Soya.

Sergeant Gregorius drops out of the lock, the suit’s EM system kicking in just before the armored man strikes water. Both sergeant and lancer swoop above the surface, weapons ready.

“We have the deep-radar lock on tactical,” Gregorius acknowledges on tightbeam.

“Your video feeds are nominal,” says de Soya from his command chair. “Commence dive.”

Both men drop, strike the surface, and disappear beneath it. De Soya banks the dropship so he can see out the port blister: the river is a dark green, but two bright headlamps can be seen gleaming through the water. “About eight meters beneath the surface,” he begins.

“Got it,” says the sergeant.

De Soya looks up at the monitor. He sees swirling silt, a many-gilled fish hurrying out of the light, a curved metal hull.

“There’s a hatch or air lock open,” reports Gregorius. “Most of the thing’s buried in the mud here, but I can see enough of the hull to say it’s about the right size. Rettig will stay out here. I’m going in.”

De Soya has the urge to say “Good luck,” but keeps his silence. The men have been together long enough to know what is appropriate with each other. He trims the dropship, readying the crude plasma gun that is the tiny ship’s only armament.

The video feed stops as soon as Gregorius enters the open hatch. A minute passes. Then two. Two minutes beyond that, and de Soya is all but squirming in the command chair. He half expects to see the spaceship leap out of the water, clawing for space in a desperate attempt to escape.

“Lancer?” he says.

“Yes, sir,” comes Rettig’s voice.

“No word or video from the sergeant?”

“No, sir. I think the hull’s blocking tightbeam. I’ll wait another five minutes and… Hold it, sir. I see something.”

De Soya sees it too, the feed from the lancer’s video murky in the thick water, but clear enough to show Sergeant Gregorius’s armored helmet, shoulders, and arms rising from the open air-lock hatch. The sergeant’s headlamp illuminates silt and riverweed, the light swinging to blind Rettig’s camera for an instant.

“Father Captain de Soya,” comes Gregorius’s bass rumble, only slightly out of breath, “this ain’t it, sir. I think it’s one of those old go-anywhere yachts that rich folks had back in the Web days, sir. You know, sir, the kind that was submersible—could even fly a bit, I think.”

De Soya lets out his breath. “What happened to it, Sergeant?”

The suited figure on the video gives a thumbs-up to Rettig, and the two men rise toward the surface. “I think they scuttled it, sir,” says Gregorius. “There are at least ten skeletons on board… maybe a dozen. Two of ’em are kids. As I say, sir, this thing was rigged to float on any ocean—go under it if they wanted—so there’s no way all the hatches opened by accident, sir.”

De Soya watches out the window as the two figures in combat armor break the surface of the river and hover five meters above it, water pouring from their suits.

“I think they must’ve been stranded here after the Fall, sir,” Gregorius is saying, “and just decided to end it all there, sir. It’s only a guess, Father Captain, but I have a hunch…”

“I have a hunch you’re right, Sergeant,” says de Soya. “Come on back.” He opens the dropship hatch as the suited figures fly toward it.

Before they arrive, while he is still alone, de Soya raises his hand and mouths a blessing of the river, the sunken craft, and those entombed there. The Church does not sanctify suicides, but the Church knows that little is certain in life or death. Or, at least, de Soya knows this, even if the Church does not.

They leave motion detectors sending beams across each of the portals—they will not catch the girl and her allies, but they will tell the troops de Soya will send back whether anyone has passed that way in the interim—and then they lift the dropship from NGCes 2629-4BIV, tuck the stubby dropship into the ugly mass of Raphael above the gleaming limb of the cloud-swirled planet, and accelerate out of the world’s gravity well so that they can translate to their next stop, Barnard’s World.

This is as close as de Soya’s pursuit itinerary will come to Old Earth System—a mere six light-years—and since this was one of the earliest interstellar colonies of the pre-Hegira era, the priest-captain likes to think that he will be getting a glimpse back in time of Old Earth itself. Upon resurrection in the Pax base some six AUs from Barnard’s World, however, de Soya immediately notes the differences. Barnard’s Star is a red dwarf, only about one fifth the mass of Old Earth’s G-type star, and less than 1/2500 the luminosity. Only the proximity of Barnard’s World, 0.126 AU, and the centuries spent terraforming the planet have produced a world high on the adaptive Solmev Scale. But, as de Soya and his men discover upon being ferried to the planet by their Pax escort, the terraforming has been very successful indeed.

Barnard’s World had suffered very much from the Ouster Swarm invasion preceding the Fall, and very little—relatively speaking—from the Fall itself. The world had been a pleasant contradiction in terms in Web days: overwhelmingly agricultural, growing mostly Old Earth imports such as corn, wheat, soybeans, and the like, but also profoundly intellectual-boasting hundreds of the finest small colleges in the Web. The combination of agricultural backwater-life on Barnard’s World tended to imitate small-town life in North America, circa 1900—and intellectual hot spot had brought some of the Hegemony’s finest scholars, writers, and thinkers there.

After the Fall, Barnard’s World relied more upon its agricultural heritage than its intellectual prowess. When the Pax arrived in force some five decades after the Fall, its brand of born-again Christianity and Pacem-based government was resisted for some years. Barnard’s World had been self-sufficient and wished to remain that way. It was not formally accepted into the Pax until the Year of Our Lord 3061, some 212 years after the Fall, and then only after bloody civil war between the Catholics and partisan bands loosely grouped under the name The Free Believers.

Now, as de Soya learns during his brief tour with Archbishop Herbert Stern, the many colleges lie empty or have been converted to seminaries for the young men and women of Barnard’s World. The partisans have all but disappeared, although there is still some resistance in the wild forest-and-canyon areas along the river known as Turkey Run.

Turkey Run had been part of the River Tethys, and it is precisely there that de Soya and his men wish to go. On their fifth day in-system, they travel there with a protective guard of sixty Pax troopers and some of the Archbishop’s own elite guard.

They meet no partisans. This bit of the Tethys runs through broad valleys, under high shale cliffs, through deciduous forests of Old Earth-transplanted trees, and emerges into what has long since become tilled land—mostly cornfields sprinkled with the occasional white farmhouse and outbuildings. It does not look like a place of violence to de Soya, and he encounters none there.

The Pax skimmers search the forest well for any sign of the girl’s ship, but they find none. The river of Turkey Run is too shallow to hide a ship—Major Andy Ford, the Pax officer in charge of their search, calls it “the sweetest canoeing river this side of Sugar Creek”—and the section of River Tethys had been only a few klicks long here. Barnard’s World has modern atmosphere and orbital traffic control, and no ship could have left the area without being tracked. Interviews with farmers in the Turkey Run area produce no talk of strangers. In the end, Pax military, the Archbishop’s diocesan council, and local civil authorities pledge constant surveillance of the area, despite any threat of Free Believer harassment.

On their eighth day de Soya and his men take leave of scores of people who can only be referred to as newfound friends, rise to orbit, transfer to a Pax torchship, and are escorted back to the deep-orbit Barnard’s Star garrison and their archangel ship. The last sight de Soya glimpses of the bucolic world is the twin spires of the giant cathedral rising in the capital of St. Thomas, formerly known as Bussard City.

Swinging away from the direction of old Earth System now, de Soya, Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig awaken in System Lacaille 9352, about as far from Old Earth as Tau Ceti had been to the early seedships. Here the delay is neither bureaucratic nor military, but environmental. The Web world here, known as Sibiatu’s Bitterness then and renamed Inevitable Grace by its current population of a few thousand Pax colonists, had been environmentally marginal then and is far below that now. The River Tethys had run under twelve kilometers of Perspex tunnel, holding in breathable air and pressure. Those tunnels had fallen into decay more than two centuries ago, the water boiling away in the low pressure, the thin methane-ammonia atmosphere of the planet rushing in to fill the empty riverbanks and shattered Perspex tubes.

De Soya has no idea why the Web would have included this rock in its River Tethys. There is no Pax military garrison here, nor serious Church presence other than chaplains living with the highly religious colonists eking out a living with their boxite mines and sulfur pits, but de Soya and his men convince some of these colonists to take them to the former river.

“If she come this way, she died,” says Gregorius as he inspects the huge portals hanging over a straight line of ruined Perspex and dry riverbeds. The methane wind blows, and grains of ever-shifting dust try to find their way through the men’s atmosphere suits.

“Not if she stayed in the ship,” says de Soya, turning ponderously in his suit to look up at the orange-yellow sky. “The colonists wouldn’t have noticed the ship leaving… it’s too far from the colony.”

The grizzled man with them, a bent figure even in his worn and sandblasted suit, grunts behind his visor. “Zat bey true, Fadder. We-en denna gay outsed a star-gazen’ too offen, bey true.”

De Soya and his men discuss the futility of ordering Pax troops to this sort of world to watch for the girl in the months and years to come.

“It’s a fact that it’ll be god-awful, miserable, ass-end-of-nowhere duty, sir,” says Gregorius. “Pardon the language, Father.”

De Soya nods distractedly. They have left the last of the motion-sensor beacons there: five worlds explored out of two hundred, and he is running out of material. The thought of sending troops back here depresses him as well, but he can see little alternative. Besides the resurrection ache and emotional confusion coursing through him constantly now, there is growing depression and doubt. He feels like an ancient, blind cat sent to catch a mouse, but unable to watch and guard two hundred mouseholes simultaneously. Not for the first time does he wish he were in the Outback, fighting Ousters.

As if reading the father-captain’s thoughts, Gregorius says, “Sir, have ye really looked at the itinerary Raphael’s set for us?”

“Yes, Sergeant. Why?”

“Some o’ the places we’re headed ain’t ours anymore, Captain. It’s not till the later part of the trip… worlds way in the Outback… but the ship wants to take us to planets’ve been overrun by the Ousters long ago, sir.”

De Soya nods tiredly. “I know, Sergeant. I didn’t specify battle areas or the Great Wall defensive zones when I told the ship’s computer to plan the trip.”

“There’s eighteen worlds that would be a bit dicey to visit,” says Gregorius with the hint of a grin. “Seeing as how the Ousters own ’em now.”

De Soya nods again but says nothing.

It is Corporal Kee who says softly, “If you want to go look there, sir, we’ll be more than happy to go with you.”

The priest-captain looks up at the faces of the three men. He has taken their loyalty and presence too much for granted, he thinks. “Thank you,” he says simply. “We’ll decide when we get to that part of the… tour.”

“Which may be about a hundred standard years from now at this rate,” says Rettig.

“It may indeed,” says de Soya. “Let’s strap in and get the hell out of here.”

They translate out of the system.

Still in the old neighborhood, hardly out of Old Earth’s pre-Hegira backyard, they jump to two heavily terraformed worlds spinning through their complicated choreography in the half-light-year space between Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi.

The Omicron²-Epsilon³ Eurasian Habitation Experiment had been a bold pre-Hegira Utopian effort to achieve against-all-odds terraforming and political perfection—primarily neo-Marxist—on hostile worlds while fleeing from hostile forces. It had failed miserably. The Hegemony had replaced the Utopians with FORCE:space bases and automated refueling stations, but the press of Outback-bound seedships and then spinships passing through the Old Neighborhood region during the Hegira had led to successful terraforming of these two dark worlds spinning between the dim Epsilon Eridani sun and the dimmer Epsilon Indi star. Then the famous defeat of Glennon-Height’s fleet there had sealed the twin-system’s fame and military importance. The Pax has rebuilt the abandoned FORCE bases, regenerated the failing terraform systems.

De Soya’s searching of these two River sections is dry and businesslike in a military way. Each of the Tethys segments is so deep in military reservation area that it soon becomes obvious there is no chance that the girl—much less the ship—could have passed through in the past two months without being detected and run to ground. De Soya had surmised this from knowing about the Epsilon System—he has passed through there several times himself on his travels to the Great Wall and beyond—but had decided that he needed to see the portals for himself.

It is good that they encounter this garrison system at this time in their travels, however, for both Kee and Rettig are hospitalized. Engineers and Church resurrection specialists examine Raphael in dry dock and determine that there are minute but serious errors in the automated resurrection créche. Three standard days are spent in making repairs.

When they translate out of system this time, with only one more stop in the Old Neighborhood before moving into the post-Hegira reaches of the old Web, it is with the earnest hope that their health, depression, and emotional instability will be improved if they have to undergo automated resurrection again.

“Where are you headed now?” asks Father Dimitrius, the resurrection specialist who has helped them over the past days.

De Soya hesitates only a second before answering. It cannot compromise his mission if he tells the elderly priest this one fact.

“Mare Infinitus,” he says. “It’s a water world some three parsecs outward bound and two light-years above the plane of—”

“Ah, yes,” says the old priest. “I had a mission there decades ago, weaning the indigenie fisherfolk from their paganism and bringing them into Christ’s light.” The white-haired priest raises his hand in a benediction. “Whatever you seek, Father Captain de Soya, it is my sincere prayer that you find it there.”

De Soya almost leaves Mare Infinitus before sheer chance brings him the clue he has been seeking.

It is their sixty-third day of seeking, only the second day since resurrection in their créches aboard the orbital Pax station, and the beginning of what should be their last day on the planet.

A talkative young man named Lieutenant Baryn Alan Sproul is de Soya’s liaison from Pax Seventy Ophiuchi A Fleet Command, and like tour guides throughout history, the youngster gives de Soya and his troopers more background than they want to hear. But he is a good thopter pilot, and on this ocean world in a flying machine that is relatively unfamiliar to him, de Soya is pleased to be passenger rather than pilot, and he relaxes some while Sproul takes them south, away from the extensive floating city of St. Therese, and into the empty fishing areas where the farcasters still float.

“Why are the portals so far apart here?” asks Gregorius.

“Ah, well,” says Lieutenant Sproul, “there’s a story to that.”

De Soya catches his sergeant’s eye. Gregorius almost never smiles unless combat is imminent, but de Soya has grown familiar with a certain glint in the big man’s eye that is the sergeant’s equivalent of riotous laughter.

“… so the Hegemony wanted to build its River Tethys portals out here in addition to the orbital sphere they had and all the little farcasters they set up everywhere… sort of a silly idea, isn’t it, sir? Putting part of a river through the ocean here?… anyway, they wanted it out in the Mid-littoral Current, which makes some sense because it’s where the leviathans and some of the more interesting ’canths are, if the Web tourists wanted to see fish, that is… but the problem is, well, it’s pretty obvious…”

De Soya looks over to where Corporal Kee is dozing in the warm sunlight coming through his thopter blister.

“It’s pretty obvious that there’s nothing permanent to build something big like those portals on… and you’ll see ’em in a minute, sir, they’re big. Well, I mean, there are the coral rings—but they’re not secured to anything, they float, and the yellowkelp islands, but they’re not… I mean, you put a foot on them, it goes right through, if you know what I mean, sir… There, to the starboard side, sir. That’s yellowkelp. Don’t get too much of it this far south. Anyway, what the old Hegemony engineers did is, they rigged the portals sort of like we’ve been doing with the platforms and cities for the last five hundred years, sir. That is, they run these foundation bases a couple of hundred fathoms—big, heavy things they’ve got to be, sir—and then run big, bladed drag anchors out on cables beneath that. But the bottom of the ocean here is sort of a problematic thing… usually ten thousand fathoms, at least… that’s where the big granddaddies of our surface ’canths like Lamp Mouth live, sir… monsters down that deep, sir… klicks long…”

“Lieutenant,” says de Soya, “what does this have to do with why the portals are so far apart?” The high, almost ultrasonic hum of the thopter’s dragonfly wings are threatening to put the priest-captain to sleep. Kee is now snoring, and Rettig has his feet up and his eyes closed. It has been a long flight.

Sproul grins. “Getting to that, sir. You see, with those keel-weights and twenty klicks of cable trailing to rock, our cities and platforms don’t go very far, even in the Big Tide season, no, sir. But these portals… well, we have lots of submarine volcanic activity on Mare-Eye, sir. Whole different ’cology down there, believe me. Some of them tube worms’d give those gigacanths a battle, honestly, sir. Anyway, the old Webdays’ engineers fixed those portals so that if their keelweights and cables sensed volcanic activity under them, they’d just… well, migrate, sir, is the best word I can think of.”

“So,” says de Soya, “the distance between the River Tethys portals has widened because of volcanic activity on the ocean floor?”

“Yes, sir,” says Lieutenant Sproul with a wide grin that seems to suggest both pleasure and amazement that a Fleet officer can comprehend such a thing. “And there’s one of them now, sir,” says the liaison officer with a flourish, banking the thopter into a descending spiral. He brings the machine into a hover just a few meters above the ancient arch. Twenty meters below that, the violet sea churns and splashes against the rusted metal at the portal’s base.

De Soya rubs his face. None of them can throw off the fatigue any longer. Perhaps if they had a few more days between resurrection and death.

“Can we see the other portal now, please?” he says.

“Yes, sir!” The thopter buzzes just meters above the waves as it covers the two hundred klicks to the next arch. De Soya does doze, and when he wakes to the lieutenant’s gentle nudging, the second portal arch is visible against the sea. It is late afternoon, and the low sun throws a long shadow on the violet sea.

“Very good,” says de Soya. “And the deep-radar searches are still being carried out?”

“Yes, sir,” says the young pilot. “They’re widening the search radius, but so far they haven’t seen anything but some hellacious big Lamp Mouths. That gets the sports-fishing guys worked up, I can tell you.”

“That’s a major industry here, I take it, sir,” rumbles Gregorius from his place on the jump seat behind the pilot.

“Yes, Sergeant,” says Sproul, craning his long neck around to look at the bigger man. “With kelp harvesting way down, it’s our biggest offworld source of income.”

De Soya points to a platform only a few kilometers away. “Another fishing and refueling platform?” The priest-captain has spent a day with the Pax commanders, going over reports from small outposts like this all over the world. None have reported any contact with a ship, or sight of a child. During this long flight south to the portals, they have passed dozens of similar platforms.

“Yes, sir,” says Sproul. “Shall I hover for a while, or have you seen enough?”

De Soya looks at the portal—arching high above them now as the thopter hovers meters above the sea—and says, “We can get back, Lieutenant. We have a formal dinner with Bishop Melandriano tonight.”

Sproul’s eyebrows rise toward his crew cut. “Yes, sir,” he says, bringing the thopter up and around in a final circle before heading back north.

“That platform looks as if it’s been damaged recently,” says de Soya, leaning farther to his right to look down from the blister port.

“Yes, sir,” agrees the lieutenant. “I have a friend who just rotated in from that plat… Station Three-twenty-six Mid-littoral, it’s called sir… and he told me about it. They had a poacher try to blow the place up a few tides ago.”

“Sabotage?” says de Soya, watching the platform recede.

“Guerrilla war,” says the lieutenant. “The poachers are the indigenies from back before the Pax got here, sir. That’s why we’ve got troopers on each of the plats, and regular patrol ships during the height of the fishing season. We have to keep the fishing ships sort of herded there, sir, so the poachers don’t attack them. You saw those boats tied up, sir… well, it’s almost time for them to go fishing. Our Pax ships will escort them out. The Lamp Mouth, well, sir, he rises up just when the moons are just so… you see the big one rising there, sir. So the legal fishing ships… they have these bright lights they shine when the moons are down, luring the big ’canths up. But the poachers do that too, sir.”

De Soya looks out at the empty expanse of ocean between the thopter and the northern horizon. “Doesn’t seem like too many places for rebels to hide,” he says.

“No, sir,” says the lieutenant. “I mean, yes, sir. Actually, they’ve got fishing boats camouflaged to look like yellowkelp isles, submersibles, even one big submarine harvester that was rigged up like a Lamp Mouth, believe it or not, sir.”

“And that platform was damaged by a poacher attack?” says de Soya, speaking to stay awake now. The drone of the thopter wings is deadly.

“Right, sir,” says Lieutenant Sproul. “About eight Big Tides ago. One man… which is unusual, the poachers generally come in groups. He blew up some skimmers and thopters—common tactics, although they usually go for the boats.”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant,” says de Soya, “you say this was eight Big Tides ago. Could you translate that into standard?”

Sproul chews his lip. “Ah, yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I grew up on Mare-Eye, and… well, eight Big Tides is about two standard months ago, sir.”

“Was the poacher apprehended?”

“Yes, sir,” says Sproul with his youthful grin. “Well, actually there’s a story there, sir…” The lieutenant glances at the priest-captain to see if he should go on. “Well, to make it short, sir, this poacher got apprehended first, then he blew his charges and tried to get away, and then he was shot and killed by the guards.”

De Soya nods and closes his eyes. In the last day he has reviewed over a hundred reports on “poacher incidents” spread over the past two standard months. Blowing up platforms and killing poachers seems to be the second most popular sport—after fishing—on Mare Infinitus.

“The funny thing about this guy,” says the lieutenant, finishing his story, “is how he tried to get away. Some sort of old flying carpet from the Hegemony days.”

De Soya snaps awake. He glances at the sergeant and his men. All three are sitting up, staring at him.

“Turn around,” snaps Father Captain de Soya. “Take us back to that platform.”

“And then what happened?” says De Soya for the fifth time. He and his Swiss Guard are in the platform director’s office on the highest point of the platform, just beneath the radar dish. Outside the long window, three unbelievable moons are rising.

The director—a Pax captain in the Ocean Command named C. Dobbs Powl—is overweight, florid, and sweating heavily. “When it became apparent that this man was not in either of the fishing groups we had on board that night, Lieutenant Belius took him aside for further questioning. Standard procedure, Father Captain.”

De Soya stares at the man. “And then?”

The director licks his lips. “And then the man managed to escape temporarily, Father Captain. There was a struggle on the upper walkway. He pushed Lieutenant Belius into the sea.”

“Was the lieutenant recovered?”

“No, Father Captain. He almost certainly drowned, although there was quite a bit of rainbow shark activity that night—”

“Describe the man you had in custody before you lost him,” interrupts de Soya, emphasizing the word “lost.”

“Young, Father Captain, maybe twenty-five or so standard. And tall, sir. Real big young guy.”

“You saw him yourself?”

“Oh, yes, Father Captain. I was out on the walkway with Lieutenant Belius and Sea Lancer Ament when the fellow started the fight and pushed Belius through the railing.”

“And then got away from you and the lance private,” says de Soya flatly. “With both of you armed and this man… Did you say he was handcuffed?”

“Yes, Father Captain.” Captain Fowl mops his forehead with a moist handkerchief.

“Did you notice anything unusual about this young man? Anything else that did not make it into your… ah… extremely brief action report to Command Headquarters?”

The director puts the handkerchief away, then pulls it out again to mop his neck. “No, Father Captain… I mean, well, during the struggle, the man’s sweater was torn a bit in front. Enough for me to notice that he wasn’t like you and me, Father Captain…”

De Soya raises an eyebrow.

“I mean he wasn’t of the cross,” Fowl hurries on. “No cruciform. ’Course, I didn’t think much of that at the time. Most of these indigenie poachers’ve never been baptized. Wouldn’t be poachers if they had, now, would they?”

De Soya ignores the question. Pacing closer to the seated, sweating captain, he says, “So the man swung down under the main catwalk and escaped that way?”

“Didn’t escape, sir,” says Fowl. “Just got to this flying dingus that he must’ve hidden there. I’d set off the alarm, of course. The whole garrison turned out, just like they was drilled to do.”

“But this man got the… dingus… flying? And off the platform?”

“Yes,” says the platform director, mopping his brow again and obviously thinking of his future… or lack of it. “But just for a minute. We saw him on radar and then we saw him with our night goggles. That… rug… could fly, all right, but when we opened up on it, it come swinging back around toward the platform—”

“How high was it then, Captain Fowl?”

“High?” The director furrows his sweaty brow. “I guess about twenty-five, thirty meters above the water then. About level with our main deck. He was comin’ right at us, Father Captain. Like he was going to bomb the platform from a flyin’ rug. Of course, in a way, he did… I mean the charges he’d planted went off right then. Scared the shit out of me… excuse me, Father.”

“Go on,” says de Soya. He looks at Gregorius where the big man is standing at parade rest behind the director. From the expression on the sergeant’s face, it appears that he would be happy to garrote the sweating captain in a second.

“Well, it was quite an explosion, sir. Fire-control teams started running toward the blast, but Sea Lancer Ament and some of the other sentries and I stayed at our post there at the north catwalk…”

“Very commendable,” mutters de Soya, the irony audible in his voice. “Go on.”

“Well, Father Captain, there’s not much more,” the sweating man says lamely.

“You gave the order to fire at the flying man?”

“Yes… yes, sir.”

“And all of the sentries fired at once… upon your order?”

“Yeah,” says the director, his eyes glazed with the effort to remember. “I think they all fired. There were six of them there besides Ament ’n’ me.”

“And you also fired?” pressed de Soya.

“Well, yeah… the station was under attack. The flight deck was a burning mess. And this terrorist was flyin’ at us, carrying God knows what.”

De Soya nods as if unconvinced. “Did you see anything or anyone on the flying mat other than the one man?”

“Well, no,” says Fowl. “But it was dark.”

De Soya looks out the window at the rising moons. Brilliant orange light floods through the panes. “Were the moons up that night, Captain?”

Fowl licks his lips again as if tempted to lie. He knows that de Soya and his men have interviewed Sea Lancer Ament and the others, and de Soya knows he knows. “They’d just risen,” he mumbles.

“So the amount of light was comparable to this?” says de Soya.

“Yeah.”

“Did you see anyone or anything else on that flying device, Captain? A package? A backpack? Anything that might be construed to be a bomb?”

“No,” says Fowl, anger moving under the surface of his fear now, “but it only took a handful of plastique to blow up two of our patrol skimmers and three thopters, Father Captain.”

“Very true,” says de Soya. Pacing to the brilliantly lit window, he says, “Your seven sentries, Sea Lancer Ament included—were they all carrying flechette guns, Captain?”

“Yes.”

“And you yourself carried a flechette pistol. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And did all of these flechette charges strike the suspect?”

Fowl hesitates, then shrugs. “I think most of them did.”

“And did you see the result?” de Soya asks softly.

“It shredded the bastard… sir,” says Fowl, anger winning over fear for the time being. “I saw bits of him fly apart like gull shit hitting a fan… sir. Then he dropped… naw, he flew backward off that stupid carpet like someone being yanked by a cable. Fell into the sea right next to pylon L-3. Rainbow sharks, they came up and started feeding within ten seconds.”

“So you did not recover the body?” says de Soya.

Fowl looks up with defiance in his eyes. “Oh, no… we recovered it, Father Captain. I had Ament and Kilmer sweep up what was left with boat hooks, gaffes, and a hand net. That was after we’d put the fire out and I’d made sure there was no further danger to the platform.” Captain Fowl was beginning to sound confident of his own correctness.

De Soya nods. “And where is that body now, Captain?”

The director steeples his pudgy fingers. They are shaking only slightly. “We buried it. At sea… of course. Off the south dock that next morning. Brought up a whole school of rainbow sharks, and we shot some for dinner.”

“But you are satisfied that the body was that of the suspect you had put under arrest earlier?”

Fowl’s tiny eyes become even smaller as he squints at de Soya. “Yeah… what was left of him. Just a poacher. This kind of shit happens all the time out here on the big violet, Father Captain.”

“And do poachers fly ancient EM-flying carpets out here all the time on the big violet, Captain Fowl?”

The director’s face freezes. “Is that what that dingus was?”

“You did not mention the carpet in your report, Captain.”

Fowl shrugs. “It didn’t seem important.”

De Soya nods. “And you say now that the… dingus… just kept going? That it overflew the deck and catwalk and disappeared out at sea? Empty?”

“Yes,” says Captain Fowl, pulling himself erect in the chair and straightening his wilted uniform.

De Soya whirls around. “Sea Lancer Ament says otherwise, Captain. Lancer Ament says that the carpet was recovered, that it was deactivated, and that it was last seen in your custody. Is this true?”

“No,” says the director, looking from de Soya to Gregorius to Sproul to Kee to Rettig and then back to de Soya. “No, I never saw it after it flew past us. Ament’s a fucking liar.”

De Soya nods to Sergeant Gregorius. To Fowl he says, “Such an ancient artifact, in working order, would be worth quite a bit of money, even on Mare Infinitus, would it not, Captain?”

“I don’t know,” manages Fowl, who is watching Gregorius. The sergeant has walked over to the director’s private cabinet. It is made of heavy steel and it is locked. “I didn’t even know what the damned thing was,” adds Fowl.

De Soya is standing at the window now. The largest moon fills the entire eastern sky. The farcaster arch is quite visible, silhouetted against the moon. “It is called a hawking mat,” he says softly, almost in a whisper. “In a place called the Valley of the Time Tombs, it would have made just the right sort of radar signature.” He nods at Sergeant Gregorius.

The Swiss Guard noncom smashes open the steel cabinet with one blow of his gauntleted hand. Reaching in, he brushes aside boxes, papers, stacks of currency, and comes out with a rug, carefully folded. He carries it over to the director’s desk.

“Arrest this man and get him out of my sight,” Father Captain de Soya says softly. Lieutenant Sproul and Corporal Kee lead the protesting director from the office.

De Soya and Gregorius unroll the hawking mat on the long desktop. The carpet’s ancient flight threads still glow gold in the moonlight. De Soya touches the forward edge of the artifact, feeling the cuts and torn places there where flechettes have ripped the fabric. There is blood everywhere, obscuring the ornate designs, dulling the glow of the threads of superconducting monofilament. Shreds of what might be human flesh are caught in the short tassels in the back of the carpet.

De Soya looks up at Gregorius. “Have you ever read the long poem called the Cantos, Sergeant?”

“The Cantos, sir? No… I’m not much for reading. Besides, ain’t that on the list of forbidden books, sir?”

“I believe it is, Sergeant,” says Father Captain de Soya. He moves away from the bloodied hawking mat and looks out at the rising moons and the silhouetted arch. This is a piece of the puzzle, he is thinking. And when the puzzle is complete, I will have you, child.

“I believe it is on the forbidden list, Sergeant,” he says again. He turns quickly and heads for the door, gesturing for Rettig to roll the hawking mat and bring it along. “Come,” he says, putting more energy in his voice than he has had for weeks. “We have work to do.”