Endymion

52

I admit that I expected the Shrike to be gone when we reached the riverfront street of Mashhad on Qom-Riyadh just before dawn of that last, fateful day. It was not gone.

We all stopped in our tracks at the sight of the three-meter-tall chrome-and-blade sculpture on our little raft. The thing was standing just as I had last seen it the night before. I had backed away warily then, rifle raised, and now I took another wary step closer, rifle raised. “Easy,” said Aenea, her hand on my forearm. “What the hell does it want?” I said, slipping off the safety on the rifle. I levered the first plasma cartridge into the firing chamber.

“I don’t know,” said Aenea. “But your weapon won’t hurt it.”

I licked my lips and looked down at the child. I wanted to tell her that a plasma bolt would hurt anything not wrapped in twenty centimeters of Web-era impact armor. Aenea looked pale and drawn. There were dark circles under her eyes. I said nothing.

“Well,” I said, lowering the rifle a bit, “we can’t get on the raft while that thing’s there.”

Aenea squeezed my arm and released it. “We have to.” She started walking toward the concrete pier.

I looked at A. Bettik, who seemed no happier at this idea than I was; then we both jogged to keep up with the girl.

Close up, the Shrike was even more terrifying than when seen from a distance. I used the word “sculpture” earlier, and there was something sculpted about the creature—if one can imagine a sculpture done in chromed spikes, razor wire, blades, thorns, and smooth metal carapace. It was large—more than a meter taller than I, and I am not short. The actual form of the thing was complicated—solid legs with joints sheathed in thorn-studded bands; a flat foot with curved blades where the toes should be and a long spoon-shaped blade at the heel, which might be a perfect utensil for disemboweling; a complicated upper carapace of smooth chromed shell interspersed with bands of razor wire; arms that were too long, too jointed, and too many—there was an extra pair tucked under the longer, upper set of arms; and four huge bladed hands hanging limply by the thing’s side.

The skull was mostly smooth and strangely elongated, with a steam-shovel jaw set in with row upon row of metal teeth. There was a curved blade on the creature’s forehead and another high up on the armored skull. The eyes were large, deep-set, and dull red.

“You want to get on the raft with that… thing?” I whispered to Aenea as we stood four meters away on the pier. The Shrike had not turned its head to watch us as we approached, and its eyes seemed as dead as glass reflectors, but the urge to back away from the thing and then turn and run was very strong.

“We have to get on the raft,” the girl whispered back. “We have to get out of here today. Today is the last day.”

Without really taking my eye off the monster, I glanced at the sky and buildings behind us. With the night’s wild dust storm, one would have expected the sky to be pinker with more sand in the air, but the storm seemed to have cleared the air a bit. While reddish clouds still stirred on the last desert breeze, the sky above was bluer than it had been the day before. Sunlight was just touching the tops of the taller buildings now.

“Maybe we could find a working EMV and travel in style,” I whispered, the rifle raised. “Something without this type of hood ornament.” The joke sounded lame even to my ear, but it took most of the bravado I had that morning to attempt any joke at all.

“Come on,” whispered Aenea, and went down the iron ladder off the pier and onto the battered raft. I hurried to keep up with her, one hand keeping the rifle trained on the chrome nightmare, the other grasping the old ladder. A. Bettik followed us without a word.

I had not paid attention to how battered and flimsy the raft seemed. The abbreviated logs were torn and splintered in places, water came over the forward third and lapped around the Shrike’s huge feet, and the tent was filled with red sand from the night’s storm. The steering-oar assembly looked as if it would give way any second, and the gear we had left aboard had an abandoned look to it. We dropped our packs into the tent and stood indecisively, watching the back of the Shrike and waiting for movement—three mice who had crawled onto the sleeping cat’s carpet.

The Shrike did not turn. Its back was no more reassuring than its front, with the exception that its dull-red eyes no longer were watching us.

Aenea signed and walked up to the thing. She raised one small hand but did not actually touch that spiked and razor-wired shoulder. Turning back to us, she said, “It’s all right. Let’s go.”

“How can it be all right?” I whispered fiercely at her. I don’t know why I was whispering… but for some reason it was next to impossible to speak normally around that thing.

“If it was going to kill us today, we would be dead already,” the girl said flatly. She walked to the port side, her face still pale and shoulders drooping, and picked up one of the poles. “Cast off the lines, please,” she said to A. Bettik. “We have to go.”

The android did not flinch as he walked within monster-arm’s length of the Shrike to untie the forward line and curl it into a loop. I untied our stern line with one hand while holding the rifle with the other.

The raft rode lower with the mass of the creature on the front end, and water lapped across the boards almost back to the tent. Several of the front and port-side logs were hanging loose.

“We need to work on the raft,” I said, taking the steering oar in hand and laying the rifle at my feet.

“Not on this world,” said Aenea, still straining against the pole to move us out into the center current. “After we go through the portal.”

“Do you know where we’re headed?” I said.

She shook her head. Her hair seemed dull this morning. “I just know that this is the last day.”

She had said that a few minutes earlier, and I had felt the same stab of alarm then as I did now. “Are you sure, kiddo?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t know where we’re going?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“What do you know? I mean…”

She smiled wanly. “I know what you mean, Raul. I know that if we survive the next few hours, we hunt for the building I’ve seen in my dreams.”

“What does it look like?”

Aenea opened her mouth to speak but then just rested against the pole a moment. We were moving quickly now in the center of the river. The tall downtown buildings gave way to small parks and walkways on either bank. “I’ll know the building when I see it.” She laid the pole down and walked closer, pulling at my sleeve. I bent to hear her whisper. “Raul, if I don’t… make it… and you do… please get home to tell Uncle Martin about what I said. About the lions and tigers and bears… and what the Core is up to.”

I grabbed her by her thin shoulder. “Don’t talk like that. We’re all going to make it. You tell Martin when we see him.”

Aenea nodded without conviction and went back to the pole. The Shrike continued to stare ahead, water lapping at its feet and the morning light beginning to glint on its thorns and razor surfaces.

I had expected us to move into open desert beyond the city of Mashhad, but once again my expectations were mistaken. The riverside parks and walkways grew more luxuriant with trees—everblues, deciduous Old Earth varieties, and a proliferation of yellow and green palms. Soon the city buildings were behind us and the wide, straight river was passing through a rich forest. It was still early morning, but the heat of the rising sun was very powerful.

The steering oar was not really needed in the central current. I lashed it in place, took off my shirt, folded it on top of my pack, and took the port push-pole from the obviously exhausted girl. She looked at me with dark eyes but did not complain.

A. Bettik had collapsed the microtent and shaken out most of the accumulated sand. Now he sat near me as the current moved us around a wide bend and into an even thicker tropical rain forest. He was wearing the loose shirt and ragged shorts of yellow linen I had seen him in on Hebron and Mare Infinitus. The broad-brimmed straw hat was at his feet. Surprisingly, Aenea moved to the front of the raft to sit near the motionless Shrike as we drifted deeper into the heavy jungle.

“This can’t be native,” I said, straightening the raft as the current tried to swing it sideways. “There can’t be enough rainfall in this desert to support all this.”

“I believe it was an extensive garden area planted by the Shi’a religious pilgrims, M. Endymion,” said A. Bettik. “Listen.”

I listened. The rain forest was alive with the rustle of birds and wind. Beneath these sounds I could hear the hiss and rattle of sprinkler systems. “Incredible,” I said. “That they’d use precious water to maintain this ecosystem. It must stretch for kilometers.”

“Paradise,” said Aenea.

“What, kiddo?” I poled us back into the center current.

“The Muslims were primarily desert people on Old Earth,” she said softly. “Water and greenery was their idea of paradise. Mashhad was a religious center. Maybe this was to give the faithful a glimpse of what was to come if the teachings of Allah in the Qur’an were obeyed.”

“Expensive sneak preview,” I said, dragging the pole a bit as we turned again to the left as the river widened. “I wonder what happened to the people.”

“The Pax,” said Aenea.

“What?” I did not understand. “These worlds… Hebron, Qom-Riyadh… were under Ouster control when the population disappeared.”

“According to the Pax,” said Aenea.

I thought about this.

“What do the two worlds have in common, Raul?” she said.

It took no time to answer that. “They were both adamantly non-Christian,” I said. “They refused to accept the cross. Jew and Muslim.”

Aenea said nothing.

“That’s a terrible thought,” I said. My stomach hurt. “The Church may be misguided… the Pax can be arrogant with its power… but…” I wiped sweat out of my eyes. “My God…” I said, struggling to say the one word. “Genocide?”

Aenea shifted to look at me. Just behind her the Shrike’s bladed legs caught the light. “We don’t know that,” she said very quietly. “But there are elements of the Church and of the Pax that would do it, Raul. Remember, the Vatican depends almost totally on the Core to maintain its control of resurrection—and through that, its control of all the people on all the worlds.”

I was shaking my head. “But… genocide? I can’t believe it.” That concept belonged with the legends of Horace Glennon-Height and Adolf Hitler, not with people and institutions I had seen in my lifetime.

“Something terrible is going on,” said Aenea. “That has to be why we were routed this way… through Hebron and Qom-Riyadh.”

“You said that before,” I said, pushing hard on the pole. “Routed. But not by the Core. Then by whom?” I looked at the back of the Shrike. I was pouring sweat in the heat of the day. The looming creature was all cool blades and thorns.

“I don’t know,” said Aenea. She swiveled back around and rested her forearms on her knees. “There’s the farcaster.”

The portal rose, vine shrouded and rusted, from the overgrown jungle. If this was still Qom-Riyadh’s paradise park, it had grown out of control. Above the green canopy, the blue sky carried a hint of red dust clouds on the wind.

Steering for the center of the river, I laid the pole along the port side and went back to pick up my rifle. My stomach was still tight with the thought of genocide. Now it tightened further with the image of ice caves, waterfalls, ocean worlds, and of the Shrike coming to life as we passed into whatever waited.

“Hang on,” I said needlessly as we passed under the metal arch.

The view ahead of us faded and shifted as if a curtain of heat haze had begun to shimmer ahead of us and around us. Suddenly the light changed, the gravity changed, and our world changed.