Endymion

46

Our days with Father Glaucus were memorable for their comfort, their slowed pace after so many weeks of hurrying to and fro, and their conversations. Mostly, I think, I remember the conversations.

It was shortly before the Chitchatuk returned that I learned one of the reasons for A. Bettik’s having taken this voyage with me.

“Do you have siblings, M. Bettik?” Father Glaucus asked, still refusing to use the android honorific.

To my amazement A. Bettik said, “Yes.” How could this be? Androids were designed and biofactured, assembled out of component genetic elements and grown in vats… like organs grown for transplants, I had always thought.

“During our biofacture,” A. Bettik went on after the old priest prompted, “androids were traditionally cloned in growth colonies of five—usually four males and one female.”

“Quintuplets,” said Father Glaucus from his rocking chair. “You have three brothers and a sister.” “Yes,” said the blue-skinned man.

“But surely you weren’t…” I began, and stopped. I rubbed my chin. I had shaved there at Father Glaucus’s strange home—it had seemed the civilized thing to do—and the feel of smooth skin almost startled me. “But surely you didn’t grow up together,” I said. “I mean, weren’t androids…”

“Biofactured as adults?” said A. Bettik with the same slight smile. “No. Our growth process was accelerated—we reached maturity at approximately eight standard years—but there was a period of infancy and childhood. This delay was one of the reasons that android biofacture was almost prohibitively expensive.”

“What are your brothers’ and sister’s names?” asked Father Glaucus.

A. Bettik closed the book he had been leafing through. “The tradition was to name each member of the quint group in alphabetic order,” he said. “My siblings included A. Anttibe, A. Corresson, A. Darria, and A. Evvik.”

“Which was your sister?” asked Aenea. “Darria?”

“Yes.”

“What was your childhood like?” said the girl.

“Primarily one of being educated, trained for duties, and having service parameters defined,” said A. Bettik.

Aenea was lying on the carpet, cupping her chin in her hands. “Did you go to school? Did you play?”

“We were tutored at the factory, although the bulk of our knowledge came through RNA transfer.” The bald man looked at Aenea. “And if by ’play’ you mean to find time to relax with my siblings, the answer is yes.”

“What happened to your siblings?” asked Aenea.

A. Bettik slowly shook his head. “We were initially transferred to service together, but we were separated shortly thereafter. I was purchased by the Kingdom of Monaco-in-Exile and shipped to Asquith. It was my understanding at the time that each of us would render service in different parts of the Web or Outback.”

“And you never heard from any of them again?” I said.

“No,” said A. Bettik. “Although there were a large number of android laborers imported for the construction of the Poet’s City during the transfer of King William the Twenty-third’s colony to that world, most had been in service on Asquith before my time, and none had encountered one of my siblings during their transshipment periods.”

“During the Web days,” I said, “it should have been easy to search the other worlds by farcaster and datasphere.”

“Yes,” said A. Bettik, “except for the fact that androids were forbidden by law and RNA inhibitors to travel by farcasters or access the datasphere directly. And, of course, it became illegal to biofacture or own androids within the Hegemony shortly after my own creation.”

“So you were used in the Outback,” I said. “On distant worlds like Hyperion.”

“Precisely, M. Endymion.”

I took a breath. “And is that why you wished to make this trip? To find one of your siblings… one of your brothers or your sister?”

A. Bettik smiled. “The odds against running across one of my clone siblings would be truly astronomical, M. Endymion. Net only would the coincidence be unlikely, but the chance that any of them would have survived the wholesale destruction of androids following the Fall would be very slight. But—” A. Bettik stopped and opened his hands as if explaining foolishness.

It was that last evening before the band returned that I heard Aenea discuss her theory of love for the first time. It began with her questioning us about Martin Silenus’s Cantos.

“All right,” she said, “I understand that it was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books as soon as the Pax took over anywhere, but what about those worlds not yet swallowed by the Pax when it came out? Did he receive the critical acclaim he had been hungry for?”

“I remember arguing the Cantos in seminary,” chuckled Father Glaucus. “We knew it was prohibited, but that just made the allure all the greater. We resisted reading Virgil, but waited our turn to read that dog-eared copy of doggerel that was the Cantos.”

“Was it doggerel?” asked Aenea. “I always thought of Uncle Martin as a great poet, but that’s only because he told me he was. My mother always told me that he was a pain in the ass.”

“Poets can be both,” said Father Glaucus. He chuckled again. “In fact, it seems they often are both. As I remember it, most of the critics dismissed the Cantos in what few literary circles existed before the Church absorbed them. Some took him seriously… as a poet, not as a chronicler of what actually happened on Hyperion just before the Fall. But most made fun of his apotheosis of love toward the end of his second volume…”

“I remember that,” I said. “The character of Sol—the old scholar whose daughter has been aging backward—he discovers that love was the answer to what he had called The Abraham Dilemma.”

“I remember one nasty critic who reviewed the poem in our capital city,” chuckled Father Glaucus, “who quoted some graffiti found on a wall of an excavated Old Earth city before the Hegira—‘If love is the answer, what was the question?’”

Aenea looked at me for an explanation.

“In the Cantos,” I said, “the scholar character seems to discover that the thing the AI Core had called the Void Which Binds is love. That love is a basic force of the universe, like gravity and electromagnetism, like strong and weak nuclear force. In the poem Sol sees that the Core Ultimate Intelligence will never be capable of understanding that empathy is inseparable from that source… from love. The old poet described love as ’the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon… ’”

“Teilhard would not have disagreed,” said Father Glaucus, “although he would have phrased it differently.”

“Anyway,” I said, “the almost universal reaction to the poem—according to Grandam—was that it was weakened by this sentimentality.”

Aenea was shaking her head. “Uncle Martin was right,” she said. “Love is one of the basic forces of the universe. I know that Sol Weintraub really believed he had discovered that. He said as much to Mother before he and his daughter disappeared in the Sphinx, riding it to the child’s future.”

The blind priest quit rocking and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his bony knees. His padded cassock would have looked comical on a less dignified man. “Is this more complicated than saying that God is love?” he said.

“Yes!” said Aenea, standing in front of the fire now. She seemed older to me at that moment, as if she had grown and matured during our months together. “The Greeks saw gravity at work, but explained it as one of the four elements—earth—’rushing back to its family.’ What Sol Weintraub glimpsed was a bit of the physics of love… where it resides, how it works, how one can understand and harness it. The difference between ’God is love’ and what Sol Weintraub saw—and what Uncle Martin tried to explain—is the difference between the Greek explanation of gravity and Isaac Newton’s equations. One is a clever phrase. The other sees the thing itself.”

Father Glaucus shook his head. “You make it sound quantifiable and mechanical, my dear.”

“No,” said Aenea, and her voice was about as strong as I had ever heard it. “Just as you explained how Teilhard knew that the universe evolving toward greater consciousness could never be purely mechanical… that the forces were not dispassionate, as science had always assumed, but derived from the absolute passion of divinity… well, so an understanding of love’s part of the Void Which Binds can never be mechanical. In a sense, it’s the essence of humanity.”

I stifled the urge to laugh. “So you’re saying that there needs to be another Isaac Newton to explain the physics of love?” I said. “To give us its laws of thermodynamics, its rules of entropy? To show us the calculus of love?”

“Yes!” said the girl, her dark eyes very bright.

Father Glaucus was still leaning forward, his hands now gripping his knees very tightly. “Are you that person, young Aenea from Hyperion?”

Aenea turned away quickly, walking almost out of the light toward the darkness and ice beyond the smart glass before turning and slowly stepping back into the circle of warmth. Her face was downcast. Her lashes were wet with tears. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost tremulous. “Yes,” she said. “I am afraid I am. I do not want to be. But I am. Or could be… if I survive.”

This sent chills down my back. I was sorry we had started this conversation.

“Will you tell us now?” said Father Glaucus. His voice held the simple entreaty of a child.

Aenea raised her face and then slowly shook her head. “I cannot. I am not ready. I’m sorry, Father.”

The blind priest sat back in his chair and suddenly looked very old. “It is all right, my child. I have met you. That is something.”

Aenea went over to the old man in his rocking chair and hugged him for a long minute.

Cuchiat and his band returned before we had awakened and got out of our beds and sleeping robes the next morning. During our days with the Chitchatuk, we had almost become accustomed to sleeping a few hours at a time and then resuming the march in the eternal ice gloom, but here with Father Glaucus we followed his system-dimming the lights a bit in the innermost rooms for a full eight hours of “night.” It was my observation that one was always weary in a one-point-seven-g environment.

The Chitchatuk disliked coming very far into the building, so they stood in the open window, which was more ice tunnel than interior, and made a variation of their soft ululation until we hurriedly dressed and came running.

The band was back up to the healthy prime of twenty-three, although where they had found their new member—a woman—Father Glaucus did not ask and the rest of us were never to learn. When I came into the room, the image struck me then and it has stayed with me ever since—the powerful, wraith-robed Chitchatuk squatting in their most typical posture, Father Glaucus squatting and chatting with Cuchiat, the old priest’s quilted and heavily patched cassock spreading out on the ice like a black flower, the glow of the fuel-pellet lanterns prisming light from the crystals at the entrance to the ice cave, and—beyond the smart glass—that terrible sense of ice and weight and darkness pressing… pressing.

We had long since asked Father Glaucus to be our interpreter in making—remaking, actually—our request of help to the indigenies, and now the old man broached the subject, asking the white-robed figures if they would indeed like to help us get our raft downriver. The Chitchatuk responded in turn, each waiting to address Father Glaucus and the rest of us individually, and each saying essentially the same thing—they were ready to make the voyage.

It was not to be a simple voyage. Cuchiat confirmed that there were tunnels descending all the way to the river at the second arch, almost two hundred meters lower than where we now sat, and that there was a stretch of open water where the river passed beneath this second farcaster, but…

There were no connecting tunnels between here and the second arch some twenty-eight kilometers to the north.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Aenea. “Where do these tunnels come from, anyway? They’re too round and regular to be crevasses or fissures. Did the Chitchatuk make them at some time in the past?”

Father Glaucus looked at the child with an expression of bearded incredulity. “You mean you don’t know?” he said. He turned his head and rattled syllables at the Chitchatuk. Their reaction was almost explosive—excited chatter, the near barking that we associated with laughter.

“I hope I didn’t offend you, my dear,” said the old priest. He was smiling, his blind eyes turned in Aenea’s direction. “It is just such a given of our existence here, that it struck me—and the Indivisible People—as strangely humorous that someone could move through the ice and not know.”

“The Indivisible People?” said A. Bettik.

“Chitchatuk,” said Father Glaucus. “It means ’indivisible’—or perhaps closer to the actual shading of the word—’incapable of being made more perfect.’”

Aenea was smiling. “I’m not offended. I’d just like in on the joke. What did make the tunnels?”

“The wraiths,” I guessed before the priest could speak.

His smile turned in my direction. “Precisely, my friend Raul. Precisely.”

Aenea frowned. “Their claws are formidable, but even on the adults they couldn’t carve tunnels that extensive through such solid ice… could they?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think we’ve really seen the adult form.”

“Precisely, precisely.” The old man was nodding deeply as he tended to do. “Raul is correct, my dear. The Chitchatuk hunt the youngest cubs when possible. The older cubs hunt the Chitchatuk when possible. But the wraith cub-form you see is the larval stage of the creature. It feeds and moves about the surface during that stage, but within three of Sol Draconi Septem’s orbits—”

“That would be twenty-nine years, standard,” murmured A. Bettik.

“Precisely, precisely,” nodded the priest. “Within three local years, twenty-nine standard, the immature wraith—the “cub,” although that word is usually used with mammals—passes through metamorphosis and becomes the true wraith, which bores through the ice at approximately twenty kilometers per hour. It is approximately fifteen meters long and… well, you may well encounter one on your trip north.”

I cleared my throat. “I believe Cuchiat and Chiaku were explaining that there were no tunnels connecting this area to the farcaster tunnels some twenty-eight klicks north…”

“Ah, yes,” said Father Glaucus, and resumed his conversation in the clattering Chitchatuk language. When Cuchiat had responded, the blind man said, “Approximately twenty-five kilometers across the surface, which is more than the Indivisible People like to do at one spell. And Aichacut kindly points out that this area is thick with wraiths-both cub and adult—that the Indivisible People who lived there for centuries have all been turned into skull necklaces for the wraiths. He points out that the summer storms are battering the surface this month. But for you, my friends, they are willing to make the voyage.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. The surface is essentially airless, isn’t it? I mean…”

“They have all the materials you will need for the trip, Raul, my son,” said Father Glaucus.

Aichacut snarled something. Cuchiat added something in a more tempered tone.

“They are ready to depart when you are, my friends. Cuchiat says that it will take two sleeps and three marches to return to your raft. And then they will head north until the burrows run out…” The old priest paused and turned his face away for a moment.

“What is it?” asked Aenea, concern in her voice.

Father Glaucus turned back. His smile was forced. He ran bony fingers through his beard. “I will miss you. It has been a long time since… hah! I am getting senile. Come, we will help you pack, have a fast breakfast, and see if we can round out your provisions with a few things from the storeroom.”

The leave-taking was painful. The thought of the old man alone there in the ice once again, fending off wraiths and the planetary glacier with nothing more than a few lighted lamps… it made my chest hurt to think of it. Aenea wept. When A. Bettik went to shake the old priest’s hand, Father Glaucus fiercely hugged the startled android. “Your day is yet to come, my friend M. Bettik. I feel this. I feel this strongly.”

A. Bettik did not respond, but later, as we followed the Chitchatuk into the deep glacier, I saw the blue man glancing back toward the tall silhouette against the light before we rounded another corner in the tunnel and lost sight of the building, the light, and the old priest.

It did take us three marches and two sleeps before we slid and scraped our way down the final steep incline of ice, twisted right through a narrow break in the ice, and came out where the raft was tied up. I saw no way that the logs could be transported around the bends and turns of these endless tunnels, but this time the Chitchatuk wasted not a minute admiring the ice-laden craft, but immediately went to work unlashing it and separating log from log.

The entire band had marveled most visibly at our ax during the first visit, and now I was able to show them how it worked as I chopped each log into shorter segments, each segment only a meter and a half in length. Using my fading flashlight laser, A. Bettik and Aenea were doing the same thing on our impromptu assembly line—the Chitchatuk scraping ice off the almost-sinking craft, cutting or untying knots, and handing the long segments up where we cut and stacked. When we were done, the stone hearth, extra lanterns, and ice were on the iceshelf and the wood was piled up the long tunnel like next year’s firewood.

The thought amused me at first, but then I realized how welcome a store of combustible material such as this might have been to the Chitchatuk—heat, light to drive the wraiths away. I looked at our dismantled raft in a different way. Well, if we failed to get through the second portal…

Using Aenea as our translator now, we communicated to Cuchiat that we would like to leave the ax, the hearth, and the other odds and ends with them. It is fair to say that the faces behind the wraith-teeth visors looked stunned. The Chitchatuk milled around, hugging and patting us on the back with enough strength to knock the wind out of each of us. Even angry Aichacut patted and shoved us with something like rough affection.

Each member of the band lashed three or four of the log segments to his or her back; A. Bettik, Aenea, and I did the same—they were as heavy as concrete in this g-field—and we began the long trek uphill toward the surface, vacuum, storm, and wraiths.