The Rise of Endymion

1

“The Pope is dead! Long live the Pope!”

The cry reverberated in and around the Vatican courtyard of San Damaso where the body of Pope Julius XIV had just been discovered in his papal apartments. The Holy Father had died in his sleep. Within minutes the word spread through the mismatched cluster of buildings still referred to as the Vatican Palace, and then moved out through the Vatican State with the speed of a circuit fire in a pure-oxygen environment. The rumor of the Pope’s death burned through the Vatican’s office complex, leaped through the crowded St. Anne’s Gate to the Apostolic Palace and the adjacent Government Palace, found waiting ears among the faithful in the sacristy of St. Peter’s Basilica to the point that the archbishop saying Mass actually turned to look over his shoulder at the unprecedented hiss and whispering of the congregation, and then moved out of the Basilica with the departing worshipers into the larger crowds of St. Peter’s Square where eighty to a hundred thousand tourists and visiting Pax functionaries received the rumor like a critical mass of plutonium being slammed inward to full fission.

Once out through the main vehicle gate of the Arch of Bells, the news accelerated to the speed of electrons, then leaped to the speed of light, and finally hurtled out and away from the planet Pacem at Hawking-drive velocities thousands of times faster than light. Closer, just beyond the ancient walls of the Vatican, phones and comlogs chimed throughout the hulking, sweating Castel Sant’Angelo where the offices of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were buried deep in the mountain of stone originally built to be Hadrian’s mausoleum. All that morning there was the rattle of beads and rustle of starched cassocks as Vatican functionaries rushed back to their offices to monitor their encrypted net lines and to wait for memos from above.

Personal communicators rang, chimed, and vibrated in the uniforms and implants of thousands of Pax administrators, military commanders, politicians, and Mercantilus officials. Within thirty minutes of the discovery of the Pope’s lifeless body, news organizations around the world of Pacem were cued to the story: they readied their robotic holocams, brought their full panoply of in-system relay sats on-line, sent their best human reporters to the Vatican press office, and waited. In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.

Two hours and ten minutes after the discovery of Pope Julius XIV’s body, the Church confirmed his death via an announcement through the office of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Lourdusamy. Within seconds, the recorded announcement was tightcast to every radio and holovision on the teeming world of Pacem.

With its population of one and a half billion souls, all born-again Christians carrying the cruciform, most employed by the Vatican or the huge civilian, military, or mercantile bureaucracy of the Pax state, the planet Pacem paused to listen with some interest. Even before the formal announcement, a dozen of the new archangel-class starships had left their orbital bases and translated across the small human sphere of the galaxy arm, their near-instantaneous drives instantly killing their crews but carrying their message of the Pope’s death secure in computers and coded transponders for the sixty-some most important archdiocese worlds and star systems. These archangel courier ships would carry a few of the voting cardinals back to Pacem in time for the election, but most of the electors would choose to remain on their homeworlds—foregoing death even with its sure promise of resurrection—sending instead their encrypted, interactive holo wafers with their eligo for the next Supreme Pontiff.

Another eighty-five Hawking-class Pax ships, mostly high-acceleration torchships, made ready to spin up to relativistic velocities and then into jump configurations, their voyage time to be measured in days to months, their relative time-debt ranging from weeks to years. These ships would wait in Pacem space the fifteen to twenty standard days until the election of the new Pope and then bring the word to the 130-some less critical Pax systems where archbishops tended to billions more of the faithful. Those archdiocese worlds, in turn, would be charged with sending the word of the Pope’s death, resurrection, and reelection on to lesser systems, distant worlds, and to the myriad colonies in the Outback.

A final fleet of more than two hundred unmanned courier drones was taken out of storage at the huge Pax asteroid base in Pacem System, their message chips waiting only for the official announcement of Pope Julius’s rebirth and reelection before being accelerated into Hawking space to carry the news to elements of the Pax Fleet engaged in patrol or combat with the Ousters along the so-called Great Wall defensive sphere far beyond the boundaries of Pax space.

Pope Julius had died eight times before. The Pontiff’s heart was weak, and he would allow no repair of it—either by surgery or nanoplasty.

It was his contention that a pope should live his natural life span and—upon his death—that a new pope should be elected. The fact that this same Pope had been reelected eight times did not dissuade him from his opinion. Even now, as Pope Julius’s body was being readied for a formal evening of lying in state before being carried to the private resurrection chapel behind St. Peter’s, cardinals and their surrogates were making preparations for the election.

The Sistine Chapel was closed to tourists and made ready for the voting that would occur in less than three weeks. Ancient, canopied stalls were brought in for the eighty-three cardinals who would be present in the flesh while holographic projectors and interactive datumplane connections were set in place for the cardinals who would vote by proxy. The table for the Scrutineers was set in front of the Chapel’s high altar.

Small cards, needles, thread, a receptacle, a plate, linen cloths, and other objects were carefully placed on the table of the Scrutineers and then covered with a larger linen cloth. The table for the Infirmarii and the Revisors was set to one side of the altar. The main doors of the Sistine Chapel were closed, bolted, and sealed. Swiss Guard commandos in full battle armor and state-of-the-art energy weapons took their place outside the Chapel doors and at the blastproof portals of St. Peter’s papal resurrection annex.

Following ancient protocol, the election was scheduled to occur in no fewer than fifteen days and no more than twenty. Those cardinals who made their permanent home on Pacem or within three weeks’ time-debt travel canceled their regular agendas and prepared for the enclave. Everything else was in readiness.

Some fat men carry their weight like a weakness, a sign of self-indulgence and sloth. Other fat men absorb mass regally, an outward sign of their growing power. Simon Augustino Cardinal Lourdusamy was of the latter category. A huge man, a veritable mountain of scarlet in his formal cardinal robes, Lourdusamy looked to be in his late fifties, standard, and had appeared thus for more than two centuries of active life and successful resurrection.

Jowled, quite bald, and given to speaking in a soft bass rumble that could rise to a God-roar capable of filling St. Peter’s Basilica without the use of a speaker system, Lourdusamy remained the epitome of health and vitality in the Vatican. Many in the inner circles of the Church’s hierarchy credited Lourdusamy—then a young, minor functionary in the Vatican diplomatic machine—with guiding the anguished and pain-ridden ex-Hyperion pilgrim, Father Lenar Hoyt, to finding the secret that tamed the cruciform to an instrument of resurrection. They credited him as much as the newly deceased Pope with bringing the Church back from the brink of extinction.

Whatever the truth of that legend, Lourdusamy was in fine form this first day after the Holy Father’s ninth death in office and five days before His Holiness’s resurrection. As Cardinal-Secretary of State, president of the committee overseeing the twelve Sacred Congregations, and prefect of that most feared and misunderstood of those agencies—the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now officially known once again after more than a thousand-year interregnum as the Holy Office of the Universal Inquisition—Lourdusamy was the most powerful human being in the Curia. At that moment, with His Holiness, Pope Julius XIV, lying in state in St. Peter’s Basilica, the body awaiting removal to the resurrection annex as soon as night should fall, Simon Augustino Cardinal Lourdusamy was arguably the most powerful human being in the galaxy.

The fact was not lost on the Cardinal that morning.

“Are they here yet, Lucas?” he rumbled at the man who had been his aide and factotum for more than two hundred busy years. Monsignor Lucas Oddi was as thin, bony, aged-looking, and urgent in his movements as Cardinal Lourdusamy was huge, fleshy, ageless, and languid.

Oddi’s full title as under-secretary of state for the Vatican was Substitute and Secretary of the Cypher, but he was usually known as the Substitute. “Cypher” might have been an equally apt nickname for the tall, angular Benedictine administrator, for in the twenty-two decades of smooth service he had given his master, no one—not even Lourdusamy himself—knew the man’s private opinions or emotions. Father Lucas Oddi had been Lourdusamy’s strong right arm for so long that the Secretary-Cardinal had long since ceased to think of him as anything but an extension of his own will.

“They have just been seated in the innermost waiting room,” answered Monsignor Oddi.

Cardinal Lourdusamy nodded. For more than a thousand years—since long before the Hegira that had sent humankind fleeing the dying Earth and colonizing the stars—it had been a custom of the Vatican to hold important meetings in the waiting rooms of important officials rather than in their private offices. Secretary of State Cardinal Lourdusamy’s innermost waiting room was small—no more than five meters square—and unadorned except for a round marble table with no inset com units, a single window that, if it had not been polarized to opaqueness, would have looked out onto a marvelously frescoed external loggia, and two paintings by the thirtieth-century genius Karotan—one showing Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, the other showing Pope Julius (in his pre-papal identity of Father Lenar Hoyt) receiving the first cruciform from a powerful but androgynous-looking archangel while Satan (in the form of the Shrike) looked on powerlessly.

The four people in the waiting room—three men and a woman—represented the Executive Council of the Pancapitalist League of Independent Catholic Transstellar Trade Organizations, more commonly known as the Pax Mercantilus. Two of the men might have been father and son—M. Helvig Aron and M. Kennet Hay-Modhino—alike even to their subtle, expensive capesuits, expensive, conservative haircuts, subtly bio-sculpted Old Earth Northeuro features, and to the even more subtle red pins showing their membership in the Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta—the ancient society popularly known as the Knights of Malta. The third man was of Asian descent and wore a simple cotton robe. His name was Kenzo Isozaki and he was this day—after Simon Augustino Cardinal Lourdusamy—arguably the second most powerful human in the Pax. The final Pax Mercantilus representative, a woman in her fifties, standard, with carelessly cropped dark hair and a pinched face, wearing an inexpensive work suit of combed fiberplastic, was M. Anna Pelli Cognani, reputedly Isozaki’s heir apparent and rumored for years to be the lover of the female Archbishop of Renaissance Vector.

The four rose and bowed slightly as Cardinal Lourdusamy entered and took his place at the table. Monsignor Lucas Oddi was the only bystander and he stood away from the table, his bony hands clasped in front of his cassock, the tortured eyes of Karotan’s Christ in Gethsemane peering over his black-frocked shoulder at the small assembly.

M.’s Aron and Hay-Modhino moved forward to genuflect and kiss the Cardinal’s beveled sapphire ring, but Lourdusamy waved away further protocol before Kenzo Isozaki or the woman could approach. When the four Pax Mercantilus representatives were seated once again, the Cardinal said, “We are all old friends. You know that while I represent the Holy See in this discussion during the Holy Father’s temporary absence, any and all things discussed this day shall remain within these walls.” Lourdusamy smiled. “And these walls, my friends, are the most secure and bugproof in the Pax.”

Aron and Hay-Modhino smiled tightly. M. Isozaki’s pleasant expression did not change. M. Anna Pelli Cognani’s frown deepened. “Your Eminence,” she said. “May I speak freely?”

Lourdusamy extended a pudgy palm. He had always distrusted people who asked to speak freely or who vowed to speak candidly or who used the expression “frankly.” He said, “Of course, my dear friend. I regret that the pressing circumstances of the day allow us so little time.”

Anna Pelli Cognani nodded tersely.

She had understood the command to be precise. “Your Eminence,” she said, “we asked for this conference so that we could speak to you not only as loyal members of His Holiness’s Pancapitalist League, but as friends of the Holy See and of yourself.”

Lourdusamy nodded affably. His thin lips between the jowls were curled in a slight smile. “Of course.”

M. Helvig Aron cleared his throat. “Your Eminence, the Mercantilus has an understandable interest in the coming papal election.”

The Cardinal waited.

“Our goal today,” continued M. Hay-Modhino, “is to reassure Your Eminence—both as Secretary of State and as a potential candidate for the papacy—that the League will continue to carry out the Vatican’s policy with the utmost loyalty after the coming election.”

Cardinal Lourdusamy nodded ever so slightly. He understood perfectly. Somehow the Pax Mercantilus—Isozaki’s intelligence network—had sniffed out a possible insurrection in the Vatican hierarchy. Somehow they had overheard the most silent of whispers in whisperproof rooms such as this: that it had come time to replace Pope Julius with a new pontiff. And Isozaki knew that Simon Augustino Lourdusamy would be that man.

“In this sad interregnum,” M. Cognani was continuing, “we felt it our duty to offer private as well as public assurances that the League will continue serving the interests of the Holy See and the Holy Mother Church, just as it has for more than two standard centuries.”

Cardinal Lourdusamy nodded again and waited, but nothing else was forthcoming from the four Mercantilus leaders. For a moment he allowed himself to speculate on why Isozaki had come in person. To see my reaction rather than trust the reports of his subordinates, he thought. The old man trusts his senses and insights over anyone and anything else. Lourdusamy smiled. Good policy. He let another minute of silence stretch before speaking. “My friends,” he rumbled at last, “you cannot know how it warms my heart to have four such busy and important people visit this poor priest in our time of shared sorrow.”

Isozaki and Cognani remained expressionless, as inert as argon, but the Cardinal could see the poorly hidden glint of anticipation in the eyes of the other two Mercantilus men.

If Lourdusamy welcomed their support at this juncture, however subtly, it put the Mercantilus on an even level with the Vatican conspirators—made the Mercantilus a welcomed conspirator and de facto co-equal to the next Pope.

Lourdusamy leaned closer to the table. The Cardinal noticed that M. Kenzo Isozaki had not blinked during the entire exchange. “My friends,” he continued, “as good born-again Christians”—he nodded toward M.’s Aron and Hay-Modhino—“Knights Hospitaller, you undoubtedly know the procedure for the election of our next Pope. But let me refresh your memory. Once the cardinals and their interactive counterparts are gathered and sealed in the Sistine Chapel, there are three ways in which we can elect a pope—by acclamation, by delegation, or by scrutiny. Through acclamation, all of the cardinal electors are moved by the Holy Spirit to proclaim one person as Supreme Pontiff. We each cry eligo—“I elect”—and the name of the person we unanimously select. Through delegation, we choose a few of those among us—say a dozen cardinals—to make the choice for all. Through scrutiny, the cardinal electors vote secretly until a candidate receives two-thirds majority plus one. Then the new pope is elected and the waiting billions see the fumata—the puffs of white smoke—which means that the family of the Church once again has a Holy Father.”

The four representatives of the Pax Mercantilus sat in silence. Each of them was intimately aware of the procedure for electing a pope—not only of the antiquated mechanisms, of course, but of the politicking, pressuring, deal-making, bluffing, and outright blackmail that had often accompanied the process over the centuries. And they began to understand why Cardinal Lourdusamy was emphasizing the obvious now.

“For the last nine elections,” continued the huge Cardinal, his voice a heavy rumble, “the Pope has been elected by acclamation… by the direct intercession of the Holy Spirit.” Lourdusamy paused for a long, thick moment. Behind him, Monsignor Oddi stood watching, as motionless as the painted Christ behind him, as unblinking as Kenzo Isozaki.

“I have no reason to believe,” continued Lourdusamy at last, “that this election will be any different.”

The Pax Mercantilus executives did not move. Finally M. Isozaki bowed his head ever so slightly. The message had been heard and understood. There would be no insurrection within the Vatican walls. Or if there were, Lourdusamy had it well in hand and did not need the support of the Pax Mercantilus. If the former were the case and Cardinal Lourdusamy’s time had not yet come, Pope Julius would once again oversee the Church and Pax. Isozaki’s group had taken a terrible risk because of the incalculable rewards and power that would be theirs if they had succeeded in allying themselves with the future Pontiff. Now they faced only the consequences of the terrible risk. A century earlier, Pope Julius had excommunicated Kenzo Isozaki’s predecessor for a lesser miscalculation, revoking the sacrament of the cruciform and condemning the Mercantilus leader to a life of separation from the Catholic community—which, of course, was every man, woman, and child on Pacem and on a majority of the Pax worlds—followed by the true death.

“Now, I regret that pressing duties must take me from your kind company,” rumbled the Cardinal.

Before he could rise and contrary to standard protocol for leaving the presence of a prince of the Church, M. Isozaki came forward quickly, genuflected, and kissed the Cardinal’s ring.

“Eminence,” murmured the old Pax Mercantilus billionaire.

This time, Lourdusamy did not rise or leave until each of the powerful CEO’s had come forward to show his or her respect.

An archangel-class starship translated into God’s Grove space the day after Pope Julius’s death. This was the only archangel not assigned to courier duty; it was smaller than the new ships and it was called the Raphael.

Minutes after the archangel established orbit around the ash-colored world, a dropship separated and streamed into atmosphere. Two men and a woman were aboard. The three looked like siblings, united by their lean forms, pale complexions, dark, limp, short-cropped hair, hooded gazes, and thin lips. They wore unadorned shipsuits of red and black with elaborate wristband comlogs.

Their presence in the dropship was a curiosity—the archangel-class starships invariably killed human beings during their violent translation through Planck space and the onboard resurrection créches usually took three days to revive the human crew.

These three were not human.

Morphing wings and smoothing all surfaces into an aerodynamic shell, the dropship crossed the terminator into daylight at Mach 3. Beneath it turned the former Templar world of God’s Grove—a mass of burn scars, ash fields, mudflows, retreating glaciers, and green sequoias struggling to reseed themselves in the shattered landscape. Slowing now to subsonic speeds, the dropship flew above the narrow band of temperate climate and viable vegetation near the planet’s equator and followed a river to the stump of the former Worldtree. Eighty-three kilometers across, still a kilometer high even in its devastated form, the stump rose above the southern horizon like a black mesa. The dropship avoided the Worldstump and continued to follow the river west, continuing to descend until it landed on a boulder near the point where the river entered a narrow gorge. The two men and the woman came down the extruded stairs and reviewed the scene. It was midmorning on this part of God’s Grove, the river made a rushing noise as it entered the rapids, birds and unseen arboreals chittered in the thick trees farther downriver. The air smelled of pine needles, unclassifiable alien scents, wet soil, and ash. More than two and a half centuries earlier, this world had been smashed and slashed from orbit. Those two-hundred-meter-high Templar trees that did not flee to space had burned in a conflagration that continued to rage for the better part of a century, extinguished at last only by a nuclear winter.

“Careful,” said one of the men as the three walked downhill to the river. “The monofilaments she webbed here should still be in place.”

The thin woman nodded and removed a weapon laser from the flowfoam pak she carried. Setting the beam to widest dispersal, she fanned it over the river. Invisible filaments glowed like a spider’s web in morning dew, crisscrossing the river and wrapping around boulders, submerging and reemerging from the white-frothed river.

“None where we have to work,” said the woman as she shut off the laser. The three crossed a low area by the river and climbed a rocky slope. Here the granite had been melted and flowed downhill like lava during the slagging of God’s Grove, but on one of the terraced rockfaces there were even more recent signs of catastrophe. Near the top of a boulder ten meters above the river, a crater had been burned into solid rock. Perfectly circular, indented half a meter below the level of the boulder, the crater was five meters across.

On the southeast side, where a waterfall of molten rock had run and splattered and fountained to the river below, a natural staircase of black stone had formed. The rock filling the circular cavity on top of the boulder was darker and smoother than the rest of the stone, looking like polished onyx set in a granite crucible.

One of the men stepped into the concavity, lay full length on the smooth stone, and set his ear to the rock. A second later he rose and nodded to the other two.

“Stand back,” said the woman. She touched her wristband comlog.

The three had taken five steps back when the lance of pure energy burned from space. Birds and arboreals fled in loud panic through the screening trees. The air ionized and became superheated in seconds, rolling a shock wave in all directions. Branches and leaves burst into flame fifty meters from the beam’s point of contact. The cone of pure brilliance exactly matched the diameter of the circular depression in the boulder, turning the smooth stone to a lake of molten fire.

The two men and the woman did not flinch. Their shipsuits smoldered in the open hearth-furnace heat, but the special fabric did not burn. Neither did their flesh.

“Time,” said the woman over the roar of the energy beam and widening firestorm. The golden beam ceased to exist. Hot air rushed in at gale-force winds to fill the vacuum. The depression in the rock was a circle of bubbling lava.

One of the men went to one knee and seemed to be listening. Then he nodded to the others and phase-shifted. One second he was flesh and bone and blood and skin and hair, the next he was a chrome-silver sculpture in the form of a man.

The blue sky, burning forest, and lake of molten fire reflected perfectly on his shifting silver skin. He plunged one arm into the molten pool, crouched lower, reached deeper, and then pulled back. The silver form of his hand looked as if it had melted onto the surface of another silver human form—this one a woman. The male chrome sculpture pulled the female chrome sculpture out of the hissing, spitting cauldron of lava and carried it fifty meters to a point where the grass was not burning and the stone was cool enough to hold their weight. The other man and woman followed. The man shifted out of his chrome-silver form and a second later the female he had carried did the same. The woman who emerged from the quicksilver looked like a twin of the short-haired woman in the shipsuit.

“Where is the bitch child?” asked the rescued female. She had once been known as Rhadamanth Nemes.

“Gone,” said the man who rescued her. He and his male sibling could be her brothers or male clones. “They made the final farcaster.”

Rhadamanth Nemes grimaced slightly. She was flexing her fingers and moving her arms as if recovering from cramps in her limbs. “At least I killed the damned android.”

“No,” said the other woman, her twin. She had no name. “They left in the Raphael’s dropship. The android lost an arm, but the autosurgeon kept him alive.”

Nemes nodded and looked back at the rocky hillside where lava still ran. The glow from the fire showed the glistening web of the monofilament over the river. Behind them, the forest burned. “That was not… pleasant… in there. I couldn’t move with the full force of the ship’s lance burning down on me, and then I could not phase-shift with the rock around me. It took immense concentration to power down and still maintain an active phase-shift interface. How long was I buried there?”

“Four Earth years,” said the man who had not spoken until now.

Rhadamanth Nemes raised a thin eyebrow, more in question than surprise. “Yet the Core knew where I was…”

“The Core knew where you were,” said the other woman. Her voice and facial expressions were identical to those of the rescued woman. “And the Core knew that you had failed.”

Nemes smiled very thinly. “So the four years were a punishment.”

“A reminder,” said the man who had pulled her from the rock.

Rhadamanth Nemes took two steps, as if testing her balance. Her voice was flat.

“So why have you come for me now?”

“The girl,” said the other woman. “She is coming back. We are to resume your mission.”

Nemes nodded.

The man who rescued her set his hand on her thin shoulder. “And please consider,” he said, “that four years entombed in fire and stone will be nothing to what you may expect if you fail again.”

Nemes stared at him for a long moment without answering. Then, turning away from the lava and flames in a precisely choreographed motion, matching stride for stride, all four of them moved in perfect unison toward the dropship.

On the desert world of Madre de Dios, on the high plateau called the Llano Estacado because of the atmosphere generator pylons crisscrossing the desert in neat ten-kilometer grid intervals, Father Federico de Soya prepared for early morning Mass.

The little desert town of Nuevo Atlan held fewer than three hundred residents—mostly Pax boxite miners waiting to die before traveling home, mixed with a few of the converted Mariaists who scratched out livings as corgor herders in the toxic wastelands—and Father de Soya knew precisely how many would be in chapel for early Mass: four—old M. Sanchez, the ancient widow who was rumored to have murdered her husband in a dust storm sixty-two years before, the Perell twins who—for unknown reasons—preferred the old run-down church to the spotless and air-conditioned company chapel on the mining reservation, and the mysterious old man with the radiation-scarred face who knelt in the rearmost pew and never took Communion.

There was a dust storm blowing—there was always a dust storm blowing—and Father de Soya had to run the last thirty meters from his adobe parish house to the church sacristy, a transparent fiberplastic hood over his head and shoulders to protect his cassock and biretta, his breviary tucked deep in his cassock pocket to keep it clean. It did not work. Every evening when he removed his cassock or hung his biretta on a hook, the sand fell out in a red cascade, like dried blood from a broken hourglass. And every morning when he opened his breviary, sand gritted between the pages and soiled his fingers.

“Good morning, Father,” said Pablo as the priest hurried into the sacristy and slid the cracked weather seals around the door frame.

“Good morning, Pablo, my most faithful altar boy,” said Father de Soya. Actually, the priest silently corrected himself, Pablo was his only altar boy. A simple child—simple in the ancient sense of the word as mentally slow as well as in the sense of being honest, sincere, loyal, and friendly—Pablo was there to help de Soya serve Mass every weekday morning at 0630 hours and twice on Sunday—although only the same four people came to the early morning Sunday Mass and half a dozen of the boxite miners to the later Mass.

The boy nodded his head and grinned again, the smile disappearing for a moment as he pulled on his clean, starched surplice over his altar-boy robes.

Father de Soya walked past the child, ruffling his dark hair as he did so, and opened the tall vestment chest. The morning had grown as dark as the high-desert night as the dust storm swallowed the sunrise, and the only illumination in the cold, bare room was from the fluttering sacristy lamp.

De Soya genuflected, prayed earnestly for a moment, and began donning the vestments of his profession.

For two decades, as Father Captain de Soya of the Pax Fleet, commander of torchships such as the Balthasar, Federico de Soya had dressed himself in uniforms where the cross and collar were the only signs of his priesthood.

He had worn plaskev battle armor, spacesuits, tactical com implants, datumplane goggles, godgloves—all of the paraphernalia of a torchship captain—but none of those items touched him and moved him as much as these simple vestments of a parish priest. In the four years since Father Captain de Soya had been stripped of his rank of captain and removed from Fleet service, he had rediscovered his original vocation.

De Soya pulled on the amice that slipped over his head like a gown and fell to his ankles.

The amice was white linen and immaculate despite the incessant dust storms, as was the alb that slid on next. He set the cincture around his waist, whispering a prayer as he did so.

Then he raised the white stole from the vestment chest, held it reverently a moment in both hands, and then placed it around his neck, crossing the two strips of silk. Behind him, Pablo was bustling around the little room, putting away his filthy outside boots and pulling on the cheap fiberplastic running shoes his mother had told him to keep here just for Mass.

Father de Soya set his tunicle in place, the outer garment showing a T-cross in front. It was white with a subtle purple piping: he would be saying a Mass of Benediction this morning while quietly administering the sacrament of penance for the presumed widow and murderer in the front pew and the radiation-scarred cypher in the last pew.

Pablo bustled up to him. The boy was grinning and out of breath. Father de Soya set his hand on the boy’s head, trying to flatten the thatch of flyaway hair while also calming and reassuring the lad. De Soya lifted the chalice, removed his right hand from the boy’s head to hold it over the veiled cup, and said softly, “All right.” Pablo’s grin disappeared as the gravity of the moment swept over him, and then the boy led the procession of two out of the sacristy door toward the altar.

De Soya noticed at once that there were five figures in the chapel, not four. The usual worshipers were there—all kneeling and standing and then kneeling again in their usual places—but there was someone else, someone tall and silent standing in the deepest shadows where the little foyer entered the nave.

All during the Renewed Mass, the presence of the stranger pulled at Father de Soya’s consciousness, try as he might to block out all but the sacred mystery of which he was part.

“Dominus vobiscum,” said Father de Soya. For more than three thousand years, he believed, the Lord had been with them… with all of them.

“Et cum spiritu tuo,” said Father de Soya, and as Pablo echoed the words, the priest turned his head slightly to see if the light had illuminated the tall, thin form in the dark recess at the front of the nave. It had not.

During the Canon, Father de Soya forgot the mysterious figure and succeeded in focusing all of his attention on the Host that he raised in his blunt fingers. “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” the Jesuit pronounced distinctly, feeling the power of those words and praying for the ten-thousandth time that his sins of violence while a Fleet captain might be washed away by the blood and mercy of this Savior. At the Communion rail, only the Perell twins came forward. As always. De Soya said the words and offered the Host to the young men. He resisted the urge to glance up at the figure in the shadows at the back of the church.

The Mass ended almost in darkness. The howl of wind drowned out the last prayers and responses.

This little church had no electricity—it never had—and the ten flickering candles on the wall did little to pierce the gloom. Father de Soya gave the final benediction and then carried the chalice into the dark sacristy, setting it on the smaller altar there. Pablo hurried to shrug out of his surplice and pull on his storm anorak.

“See you tomorrow, Father!”

“Yes, thank you, Pablo. Don’t forget…” Too late. The boy was out the door and running for the spice mill where he worked with his father and uncles. Red dust filled the air around the faulty weather-stripped door.

Normally, Father de Soya would have been pulling off his vestments now, setting them back in the vestment chest. Later in the day, he would take them to the parish house to clean them. But this morning he stayed in the tunicle and stole, the alb and cincture and amice. For some reason he felt he needed them, much as he had needed the plaskev battle armor during boarding operations in the Coal Sack campaign. The tall figure, still in shadows, stood in the sacristy doorway. Father de Soya waited and watched, resisting the urge to cross himself or to hold the remaining Communion wafer up as if to shield against vampires or the Devil.

Outside, the wind went from a howl to a banshee scream.

The figure took a step into the ruby light cast by the sacristy lamp. De Soya recognized Captain Marget Wu, personal aide and liaison for Admiral Marusyn, commanding officer of Pax Fleet. For the second time that morning, de Soya corrected himself—it was Admiral Marget Wu now, the pips on her collar just visible in the red light. “Father Captain de Soya?” said the Admiral. The Jesuit slowly shook his head. It was only 0730 hours on this twenty-three-hour world, but already he felt tired.

“Just Father de Soya,” he said.

“Father Captain de Soya,” repeated Admiral Wu, and this time there was no question in her voice. “You are hereby recalled to active service. You will take ten minutes to gather your belongings and then come with me. The recall is effective now.”

Federico de Soya sighed and closed his eyes. He felt like crying. Please, dear Lord, let this cup passeth from me. When he opened his eyes, the chalice was still on the altar and Admiral Marget Wu was still waiting.

“Yes,” he said softly, and slowly, carefully, he began removing his sacred vestments.

On the third day after the death and entombment of Pope Julius XIV, there was movement in his resurrection créche. The slender umbilicals and subtle machine probes slid back and out of sight. The corpse on the slab at first lay inanimate except for the rise and fall of a bare chest, then visibly twitched, then moaned, and—after many long minutes—raised itself to one elbow, and eventually sat up, the richly embroidered silk and linen shroud sliding around the naked man’s waist.

For several minutes the man sat on the edge of the marble slab, his head in his shaking hands. Then he looked up as a secret panel in the resurrection chapel wall slid back with less than a hiss. A cardinal in formal red moved across the dimly lit space with a rustle of silk and a rattle of beads. Next to him walked a tall, handsome man with gray hair and gray eyes. This man was dressed in a simple but elegant one-piece suit of gray flannel.

Three steps behind the Cardinal and the man in gray came two Swiss Guard troopers in medieval orange and black. They carried no weapons.

The naked man on the slab blinked as if his eyes were unaccustomed to even the muted light in the dim chapel. Finally the eyes focused.

“Lourdusamy,” said the resurrected man. “Father Duré,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy.

He was carrying an oversized silver chalice.

The naked man moved his mouth and tongue as if he had awakened with a vile taste in his mouth. He was an older man with a thin, ascetic face, sad eyes, and old scars across his newly resurrected body. On his chest, two cruciforms glowed red and tumescent. “What year is it?” he asked at last.

“The Year of Our Lord 3131,” said the Cardinal, still standing next to the seated man.

Father Paul Duré closed his eyes.

“Fifty-seven years after my last resurrection. Two hundred and seventy-nine years since the Fall of the Farcasters.” He opened his eyes and looked at the Cardinal. “Two hundred and seventy years since you poisoned me, killing Pope Teilhard the First.”

Cardinal Lourdusamy rumbled a laugh. “You recover quickly from resurrection disorientation if you can do your arithmetic so well.”

Father Duré moved his gaze from the Cardinal to the tall man in gray. “Albedo. You come to witness? Or do you have to give courage to your tame Judas?”

The tall man said nothing. Cardinal Lourdusamy’s already thin lips tightened to the point of disappearance between florid jowls. “Do you have anything else to say before you return to hell, Antipope?”

“Not to you,” murmured Father Duré and closed his eyes in prayer.

The two Swiss Guard troopers seized Father Duré’s thin arms. The Jesuit did not resist. One of the troopers grabbed the resurrected man by the brow and pulled his head back, stretching the thin neck in a bow.

Cardinal Lourdusamy took a graceful half step closer. From the folds of his silken sleeve snicked a knife blade with a horn handle. While the troopers held the still passive Duré, whose Adam’s apple seemed to grow more prominent as his head was forced back, Lourdusamy swept his arm up and around in a fluid, casting-away gesture. Blood spurted from Duré’s severed carotid artery.

Stepping back to avoid staining his robes, Lourdusamy slid the blade back into his sleeve, raised the broad-mouthed chalice, and caught the pulsing stream of blood. When the chalice was almost filled and the blood had ceased spurting, he nodded to the Swiss Guard trooper, who immediately released Father Duré’s head.

The resurrected man was a corpse once again, head lolling, eyes still shut, mouth open, the slashed throat gapping like painted lips on a terrible, ragged grin. The two Swiss Guard troopers arranged the body on the slab and lifted the shroud away. The naked dead man looked pale and vulnerable—torn throat, scarred chest, long, white fingers, pale belly, flaccid genitals, scrawny legs. Death—even in an age of resurrection—leaves little or no dignity even to those who have lived lives of sustained self-control.

While the troopers held the beautiful shroud out of harm’s way, Cardinal Lourdusamy poured the heavy chalice’s blood onto the dead man’s eyes, into his gaping mouth, into the raw knife wound, and down the chest, belly, and groin of the corpse, the spreading scarlet matching and surpassing the intensity of color in the Cardinal’s robes.

“Sie aber seid nicht fleischlich, sondern geistlich,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy. “You are not made of flesh, but of spirit.”

The tall man raised an eyebrow. “Bach, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” said the Cardinal, setting the now-empty chalice next to the corpse. He nodded to the Swiss Guard troopers and they covered the body with the two-layered shroud. Blood immediately soaked the beautiful fabrics.

“Jesu, meine Freunde,” added Lourdusamy.

“I thought so,” said the taller man. He gave the Cardinal a questioning look.

“Yes,” agreed Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“Now.”

The man in gray walked around the bier and stood behind the two troopers, who were completing their tucking-in of the blood-soaked shroud. When the troopers straightened and stepped back from the marble slab, the man in gray lifted his large hands to the back of each man’s neck. The troopers’ eyes and mouths opened wide, but they had no time to cry out: within a second their open eyes and mouths blazed with an incandescent light, their skin became translucent to the orange flame within their bodies, and then they were gone—volatilized, scattered to particles finer than ash. The man in gray brushed his hands together to rid them of the thin layer of micro-ash. “A pity, Councillor Albedo,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy in his thick rumble of a voice.

The man in gray looked at the suggestion of airborne dust settling in the dim light and then back at the Cardinal. His eyebrow rose once again in query.

“No, no, no,” rumbled Lourdusamy, “I mean the shroud. The stains will never come out. We have to weave a new one after every resurrection.” He turned and started toward the secret panel, his robes rustling. “Come, Albedo. We need to talk and I still have a Mass of Thanksgiving to say before noon.”

After the panel slid shut behind the two, the resurrection chamber lay silent and empty except for the shrouded corpse and the slightest hint of gray fog in the dim light, a shifting, fading mist suggestive of the departing souls of the more recent dead.

2

On the week that Pope Julius died for the ninth time and Father Duré was murdered for the fifth time, Aenea and I were 160,000 light-years away on the kidnapped planet Earth—Old Earth, the real Earth—circling a G-type star that was not the sun in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy that was not the Earth’s home galaxy.

It had been a strange week for us. We did not know that the Pope had died, of course, since there was no contact between this relocated Earth and Pax space except for the dormant farcaster portals. Actually, I know now, Aenea was aware of the Pope’s demise through means we did not suspect then, but she did not mention events in Pax space to us and no one thought to ask her. Our lives on Earth during those years of exile were simple and peaceful and profound in ways that are now hard to fathom and almost painful to recall. At any rate, that particular week had been profound but not simple or peaceful for us: the Old Architect with whom Aenea had been studying for the last four years had died on Monday, and his funeral had been a sad and hasty affair out on the desert that wintry Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, Aenea had turned sixteen, but the event was overshadowed by the pall of grief and confusion at the Taliesin Fellowship and only A. Bettik and I had tried to celebrate the day with her.

The android had baked a chocolate cake, Aenea’s favorite, and I had worked for days to whittle an elaborately carved walking stick out of a sturdy branch we had found during one of the Old Architect’s compulsory picnic expeditions to the nearby mountains. That evening we ate the cake and drank some champagne in Aenea’s beautiful little apprentice shelter in the desert, but she was subdued and distracted by the old man’s death and the Fellowship’s panic. I realize now that much of her distraction must have come from her awareness of the Pope’s death, of the violent events that were gathering on the future’s horizon, and of the end of what would be the most peaceful four years we would ever know together.

I remember the conversation that evening of Aenea’s sixteenth birthday. It had grown dark early and the air was chill. Outside the comfortable stone-and-canvas home she had built four years earlier for her apprenticeship challenge, the dust was blowing and the sagebrush and yucca plants rasped and contorted in the wind’s grip. We sat by the hissing lantern, traded our champagne glasses for mugs of warm tea, and talked softly beneath the hiss of sand on canvas.

“It’s strange,” I said. “We knew he was old and ill, but no one seemed to believe that he would die.” I was speaking of the Old Architect, of course, not of the distant Pope who meant so little to us. And, like all of us on the exiled Earth, Aenea’s mentor had not carried the cruciform. His death was final in the way the Pope’s could not be.

“He seemed to know,” Aenea said softly. “He’s been calling in each of his apprentices for the past month. Imparting some last bit of wisdom.”

“What last bit of wisdom did he share with you?” I asked. “I mean, if it’s not a secret or too personal.”

Aenea smiled over the steaming mug of tea.

“He reminded me that the patron will always agree to pay twice what the bid was if you send along the extra expenses bit by bit once construction has started and the structure is taking shape. He said that was beyond the point of no return, so the client was hooked like a trout on a six-pound line.”

Both A. Bettik and I laughed. It was not a disrespectful laugh—the Old Architect had been one of those rare creatures, a true genius combined with an overpowering personality—but even when thinking of him with sadness and affection, we could recognize the selfishness and deviousness that had also been part of his personality. And I don’t mean to be coy here by referring to him only as the Old Architect: the cybrid’s personality template had been reconstructed from a pre-Hegira human named Frank Lloyd Wright who had worked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, A.D. But while everyone at the Taliesin Fellowship had referred to him respectfully as Mr. Wright, including even those older apprentices who were his age, I had always thought of him as the Old Architect because of things Aenea had said about her future mentor before we came here to Old Earth.

As if thinking along these same lines, A. Bettik said, “It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?” said Aenea.

The android smiled and rubbed his left arm where it ended at a smooth stump just below the elbow. It is a habit he had developed over the past few years. The autosurgeon on the dropship that had carried us through the farcaster from God’s Grove had kept the android alive, but his chemistry had been sufficiently different to prevent the ship from growing him a new arm. “I mean,” he said, “that despite the ascendancy of the Church in the affairs of humankind, the question of whether human beings have a soul which leaves the body after death has yet to be definitely answered. Yet in Mr. Wright’s case, we know that his cybrid personality still exists separate from his body—or at least did for some time after the moment of his death.”

“Do we know that for sure?” I said. The tea was warm and good. Aenea and I bought it—traded for it actually—at the Indian market located in the desert where the city of Scottsdale should have been.

It was Aenea who answered my question. “Yes. My father’s cybrid personality survived the destruction of his body and was stored in the Schrön Loop in Mother’s skull. Even after that, we know that it had a separate existence in the megasphere and then resided in the Consul’s ship for a time. A cybrid’s personality survives as a sort of holistic wave front propagated along the matrices of the datumplane or megasphere until it returns to the AI source in the Core.”

I had known this but never understood it. “Okay,” I said, “but where did Mr. Wright’s AI-based personality wave front go? There can’t be any connections to the Core out here in the Magellanic Cloud. There are no dataspheres here.”

Aenea set down her empty mug. “There has to be a connection, or Mr. Wright and the other reconstructed cybrid personalities assembled here on Earth couldn’t have existed. Remember, the TechnoCore used the Planck space between the farcaster portals as their medium and hiding place before the dying Hegemony destroyed the farcaster openings to it.”

“The Void Which Binds,” I said, repeating the phrase from the old poet’s Cantos.

“Yeah,” said Aenea. “Although I always thought that was a dumb name.”

“Whatever it’s called,” I said, “I don’t understand how it can reach here… a different galaxy.”

“The medium the Core used for farcasters reaches everywhere,” said Aenea. “It permeates space and time.” My young friend frowned. “No, that’s not right, space and time are bound up in it… the Void Which Binds transcends space and time.”

I looked around. The lantern light was enough to fill the little tent structure, but outside it was dark and the wind howled. “Then the Core can reach here?”

Aenea shook her head. We had held this discussion before. I had not understood the concept then.

I did not understand it now.

“These cybrids are connected to AI’s which aren’t really part of the Core,” she said. “Mr. Wright’s persona wasn’t. My father… the second Keats cybrid… wasn’t.”

This was the part I had never understood. “The Cantos said that the Keats cybrids—including your father—were created by Ummon, a Core AI. Ummon told your father that the cybrids were a Core experiment.”

Aenea stood and walked to the opening of her apprentice shelter. The canvas on either side rippled with the wind, but kept its shape and held the sand outside. She had built it well.

“Uncle Martin wrote the Cantos,” she said. “He told the truth as best he could. But there were elements he did not understand.”

“Me too,” I said and dropped the matter.

I walked over and put my arm around Aenea, feeling the subtle changes in her back and shoulder and arm since the first time I had hugged her four years earlier. “Happy birthday, kiddo.”

She glanced up at me and then laid her head against my chest. “Thank you, Raul.”

There had been other changes in my youthful friend since first we met when she was just turning twelve, standard. I could say that she had grown to womanhood in the intervening years, but despite the rounding of her hips and obvious breasts beneath the old sweatshirt she wore, I still did not see her as a woman. No longer a child, of course, but not yet a woman. She was… Aenea. The luminous dark eyes were the same—intelligent, questioning, a bit sad with some secret knowledge—and the effect of being physically touched when she turned the attention of her gaze on you was as strong as ever.

Her brown hair had grown somewhat darker in the past few years, she had cut it the previous spring—now it was shorter than mine had been when I was in the Home Guard military on Hyperion a dozen years earlier, when I set my hand on her head the hair was barely long enough to rise between my fingers—but I could see some glints of the old blond streaks there, brought out by the long days she spent working in the Arizona sunlight. As we stood there listening to the blowing dust scraping canvas, A. Bettik a silent shadow behind us, Aenea took my hand in both of hers. She might have been sixteen that day, a young woman rather than a girl, but her hands were still tiny in my huge palm.

“Raul?” she said. I looked at her and waited. “Will you do something for me?” she said softly, very softly.

“Yes.” I did not hesitate.

She squeezed my hand and looked directly into me then. “Will you do something for me tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

Neither her gaze nor the pressure on my hand let up. “Will you do anything for me?” This time I did hesitate. I knew what such a vow might entail, even though this strange and wonderful child had never asked me to do anything for her—had not asked that I come with her on this mad odyssey. That had been a promise I had made to the old poet, Martin Silenus, before I had even met Aenea. I knew that there were things that I could not—in good conscience or bad—bring myself to do. But foremost among those things I was incapable of doing was denying Aenea.

“Yes,” I said, “I will do anything you ask.”

At that moment I knew that I was lost—and resurrected.

Aenea did not speak then, but only nodded, squeezed my hand a final time, and turned back to the light, the cake, and our waiting android friend. On the next day I was to learn what her request truly meant, and how difficult it would be to honor my vow.

I will stop for a moment. I realize that you might not know about me unless you have read the first few hundred pages of my tale, which, because I had to recycle the microvellum upon which I wrote them, no longer exist except in the memory of this ’scriber. I told the truth in those lost pages.

Or at least the truth as I knew it then. Or at least I tried to tell the truth. Mostly. After having recycled the microvellum pages of that first attempt to tell the story of Aenea, and because the ’scriber has never been out of my sight, I have to assume that no one has read them. The fact that they were written in a Schrödinger cat box execution egg in exile orbit around the barren world of Armaghast—the cat box being little more than a fixed-position energy shell holding my atmosphere, air and food recycling equipment, bed, table, ’scriber, and a vial of cyanide gas waiting to be released by a random isotope emission—would seem to have insured that you have not read those pages. But I am not sure.

Strange things were happening then. Strange things have happened since. I will reserve judgment on whether those pages—and these—could ever have been, or ever will be, read. In the meantime, I will reintroduce myself. My name is Raul Endymion, my first name rhyming with tall—which I am—and my last name deriving from the “abandoned” university city of Endymion on the backwater world of Hyperion. I qualify the word “abandoned” because that quarantined city is where I met the old poet—Martin Silenus, the ancient author of the banned epic poem the Cantos—and that is where my adventure began.

I use the word “adventure” with some irony, and perhaps in the sense that all of life is an adventure. For it is true that while the voyage began as an adventure—an attempt to rescue twelve-year-old Aenea from the Pax and to escort her safely to the distant Old Earth—it has since become a full lifetime of love, loss, and wonder.

Anyway, at the time of this telling, during the week of the Pope’s death, the Old Architect’s death, and Aenea’s inauspicious sixteenth birthday in exile, I was thirty-two years old, still tall, still strong, still trained mostly in hunting, brawling, and watching others lead, still callow, and just teetering on the precipice of falling forever in love with the girl-child I had protected like a little sister and who—overnight, it seemed—had become a girl-woman whom I knew now as a friend. I should also say that the other things I write of here—the events in Pax space, the murder of Paul Duré, the retrieval of the female-thing named Rhadamanth Nemes, the thoughts of Father Federico de Soya—are not surmised or extrapolated or made-up in the way that the old fiction novels were in Martin Silenus’s day. I know these things, down to the level of Father de Soya’s thoughts and Councillor Albedo’s apparel that day, not because I am omniscient, but because of later events and revelations that gave access to such omniscience.

It will make sense later. At least I hope it will.

I apologize for this awkward reintroduction.

The template for Aenea’s cybrid father—a poet named John Keats—said in his last letter of farewell to his friends, “I have always made an awkward bow.” In truth, so have I—whether in departure or greeting or, as is perhaps the case here, in improbable reunion.

So I will return to my memories and ask your indulgence if they do not make perfect sense at my first attempt to share and shape them.

The wind howled and the dust blew for three days and three nights after Aenea’s sixteenth birthday. The girl was gone for all that time. Over the past four years I had grown used to her “time-outs,” as she called them, and I usually did not fret the way I had the first few times she had disappeared for days on end. This time, however, I was more concerned than usual: the death of the Old Architect had left the twenty-seven apprentices and the sixty-some support people at the desert camp—which is what the Old Architect called Taliesin West—anxious and uneasy. The dust storm added to that anxiety, as dust storms always do. Most of the families and support staff lived close by, in one of the desert-masonry dormitories Mr. Wright had his interns build south of the main buildings, and the camp complex itself was almost fortlike with its walls and courtyards and covered walkways—good for scuttling between buildings during a dust storm—but each successive day without either sunlight or Aenea made me increasingly nervous. Several times each day I went to her apprentice shelter: it was the farthest from the main compound, almost a quarter of a mile north toward the mountains. She was never there—she had left the door untethered and a note telling me not to worry, that it was just one of her excursions and that she was taking plenty of water—but every time I visited I appreciated her shelter more. Four years earlier, when she and I had first arrived with a dropship stolen from a Pax warship, both of us exhausted, battered, and burned, not to mention with an android healing in the ship’s autosurgeon, the Old Architect and the other apprentices had greeted us with warmth and acceptance. Mr. Wright had not seemed surprised that a twelve-year-old child had come across world after world via farcaster to find him and to ask to be his apprentice. I remember that first day when the Old Architect had asked her what she knew of architecture—“nothing,” Aenea had replied quietly, “except that you are the one I should learn from.”

Evidently this had been the correct response. Mr. Wright had told her that all of the apprentices who had arrived before her—all twenty-six others, as it turned out—had been asked to design and build their own shelters in the desert as a sort of entry exam. The Old Architect had offered some crude materials from the compound—canvas, stone, cement, a bit of cast-off lumber—but the design and effort were up to the girl.

Before she set to work (not being an apprentice, I made do with a tent close to the main compound), Aenea and I toured the other apprentice shelters. Most were variations on tent-shacks.

They were serviceable and some showed style—one particularly exhibited a nice design flare but, as Aenea pointed out to me, would not keep the sand or rain out with the slightest wind—but none was particularly memorable.

Aenea worked eleven days on her shelter. I helped her do some of the heavy lifting and a bit of the excavating (A. Bettik was still recovering at that time—first in the autosurgeon, then in the compound’s infirmary), but the girl did all of the planning and most of the work. The result was this wonderful shelter that I visited four times a day during this, her last hiatus in the desert. Aenea had excavated the main sections of the shelter so that most of it was below ground level. Then she had set flagstones in place, making sure that they fit tightly, to create a smooth floor. Over the stones she set colorful rugs and blankets she traded for at the Indian Market fifteen miles away. Around the excavated core of the home she set walls that were about a meter high, but with the sunken main room, they seemed taller. They were constructed of the same rough “desert masonry” that Mr. Wright had used in building the walls and superstructure of the main compound buildings and Aenea used the same technique, although she had never heard him describe it.

First, she gathered stones from the desert and the many arroyos and washes around the hilltop compound. The rocks were of every size and color—purple, black, rusty reds, and deep umbers—and some held petroglyphs or fossils. After gathering the stones, Aenea built wooden forms and set the larger rocks in with their flat sides against the inside face of the form. She then spent days in the broiling sun, shoveling sand from the washes and carting it back to her building site in wheelbarrows, mixing it there with cement to form the concrete that held the stones in place as the mixture hardened. It was a rough concrete/stone concoction—desert masonry, Mr. Wright called it—but it was strangely beautiful, the colorful rocks showing through the surface of the concrete, fissures and textures everywhere. Once in place, the walls were about a meter high and thick enough to hold out the desert heat in the daytime and hold in the inner heat at night. Her shelter was more complex than it first appeared to the eye—it was months before I appreciated the subtle tricks she had pulled in its design.

One ducked to enter the vestibule, a stone-and-canvas porte cochere with three broad steps leading one down and around to the wood and masonry portal that served as the entrance to the main room. This twisting, descending vestibule acted as a sort of air lock, sealing out the desert sand and harshness, and the way she had rigged the canvas—almost like overlapping jib sails—improved the air-lock effect. The “main room” was only three meters across and five long, but it seemed much larger. Aenea had used built-in benches around a raised stone table to create a dining and sitting area, and then placed more niches and stone seats near a hearth she had fashioned in the north wall of the shelter. There was an actual stone chimney built into the wall, and it did not touch the canvas or wood at any point. Between the stone walls and the canvas—at about eye height when seated—she had rigged screened windows that ran the length of the north and south sides of the shelter. These panoramic viewslits could be battened down by both canvas and sliding wood shutters, operated from the inside. Overhead, she had used old fiberglass rods found in the compound junk heap to shape the canvas in smooth arches, sudden peaks, cathedral vaults, and odd, folded niches.

She had actually fashioned a bedroom for herself, again removed from the main room by two steps twisted at sixty-degree angles, the entire niche built into the gently rising slope and set back against a huge boulder she had found on the site. There was no water or plumbing out here—we all shared the communal showers and toilets in the compound annex—but Aenea had built a lovely little rock basin and bath next to her bed (a plywood platform with mattress and blankets), and several times a week she would heat water in the main kitchen and carry it to her shelter, bucket by bucket, for a hot bath.

The light through the canvas ceilings and walls was warm at sunrise, buttery at midday, and orange in the evening. In addition, Aenea had deliberately placed the shelter in careful relation to saguaros, prickly pear bushes, and staghorn cactus so that different shadows would fall on different planes of canvas at different times of day. It was a comfortable, pleasant place. And empty beyond description when my young friend was absent.

I mentioned that the apprentices and support staff were anxious after the Old Architect’s death. Distraught might be a better word. I spent most of those three days of Aenea’s absence listening to the concerned babble of almost ninety people—never together, since even the dinner shifts in the dining hall were spaced apart because Mr. Wright had not liked huge crowds at dinner—and the level of panic seemed to grow as the days and dust storms went by. Aenea’s absence was a big part of the hysteria: she was the youngest apprentice at Taliesin—the youngest person, actually—but the others had grown used to asking advice of her and of listening when she spoke. In one week, they had lost both their mentor and their guide. On the fourth morning after her birthday, the dust storms ended and Aenea returned. I happened to be out jogging just after sunrise and saw her coming across the desert from the direction of the McDowell Mountains: she was silhouetted in the morning light, a thin figure with short hair against the corona brilliance, and in that second I thought of the first time I had seen her in the Valley of the Time Tombs on Hyperion. She grinned when she saw me. “Hey, Boo,” she called. It was an old joke based on some book she had read as a very young child. “Hey, Scout,” I called back, answering in the same in-joke language. We stopped when we were five paces apart. My impulse was to hug her and hold her close and beg her not to disappear again. I did not do that.

The rich, low light of morning threw long shadows behind the cholla cacti, grease bushes, and sage, and bathed our all-sunburned skin in an orange glow. “How’re the troops doing?” asked Aenea. I could see that despite her promises to the contrary, she had been fasting during the past three days. She had always been thin, but now her ribs almost showed through her thin cotton shirt. Her lips were dry and cracked. “They upset?” she said.

“They’re shitting bricks,” I said. For years I’d avoided using my Home Guard vocabulary around the kid, but she was sixteen now.

Besides, she had always used a saltier vocabulary than I knew.

Aenea grinned. The brilliant light illuminated the sandy streaks in her short hair. “That’d be good for a bunch of architects, I guess.”

I rubbed my chin, feeling the rough stubble there.

“Seriously, kiddo. They’re pretty upset.”

Aenea nodded. “Yeah. They don’t know what to do or where to go now that Mr. Wright’s gone.” She squinted toward the Fellowship compound, which showed up as little more than asymmetrical bits of stone and canvas just visible above the cacti and scrub brush. Sunlight glinted off unseen windows and one of the fountains. “Let’s get everybody in the music pavilion and talk,” said Aenea, and began striding toward Taliesin.

And thus began our last full day together on Earth.

I am going to interrupt myself here. I hear my own voice on the ’scriber and remember the pause in the telling at this point. What I wanted to do here was tell all about the four years of exile on Old Earth—all about the apprentices and other people at the Taliesin Fellowship, all about the Old Architect and his whims and petty cruelties, as well as about his brilliance and childlike enthusiasms. I wanted to describe the many conversations with Aenea over those forty-eight local months (which—as I never got tired of being amazed by—corresponded perfectly to Hegemony/Pax standard months!) and my slow growth of understanding of her incredible insights and abilities. Finally, I wanted to tell of all my excursions during that time—my trip around the Earth in the dropship, the long driving adventures in North America, my fleeting contact with the other islands of humanity huddled around cybrid figures from the human past (the gathering in Israel and New Palestine around the cybrid Jesus of Nazareth was a memorable group to visit), but primarily, when I hear the brief silence on the ’scriber that took the place of these tales, I remember the reason for my omission.

As I said before, I ’scribed these words in the Schrödinger cat box orbiting Armaghast, while awaiting the simultaneous emission of an isotopic particle and the activation of the particle detector. When these two events coincided, the cyanide gas built into the static-energy field around the recycling equipment would be released.

Death would not be instantaneous, but near enough. While protesting earlier that I would take my time in telling our story—Aenea’s and mine—I realize now that there was some editing, some attempt to get to the important elements before the particle decayed and the gas flowed.

I will not double-guess that decision now, except to say that the four years on Earth would be worth telling about at some other point in time: the ninety people of the Fellowship were decent, complex, devious, and interesting in the way of all intelligent human beings, and their tales should be told. Similarly, my explorations across Earth, both in the dropship and in the 1948 “Woody” station wagon that the Old Architect loaned me, might support an epic poem of their own. But I am not a poet. But I was a tracker in my hunting-guide days, and my job here is to follow the path of Aenea’s growth to womanhood and messiahship without wandering down too many sidetracks. And so I shall. The Old Architect always referred to the Fellowship compound as “desert camp.” Most of the apprentices referred to it as “Taliesin”—which means “Shining Brow” in Welsh. (Mr. Wright was of Welsh distraction. I spent weeks trying to remember a Pax or Outback world named Welsh, before I remembered that the Old Architect had lived and died before spaceflight.) Aenea often referred to the place as “Taliesin West,” which suggested to even someone as dull as me that there had to be a Taliesin East. When I asked her three years earlier, Aenea had explained that the original Mr. Wright had built his first Taliesin Fellowship compound in the early 1930’s in Spring Green, Wisconsin—Wisconsin being one of the political and geographical sub-units of the ancient North American nation-state called the United States of America.When I asked Aenea if the first Taliesin was like this one, she had said, “Not really. There were a series of Wisconsin Taliesins—both homes and fellowship compounds—and most were destroyed by fire. That’s one of the reasons Mr. Wright installed so many pools and fountains here at this compound—sources of water to fight the inevitable fires.”

“And his first Taliesin was built in the 1930’s?” I said.

Aenea shook her head. “He opened his first Taliesin Fellowship in 1932,” she said. “But that was mostly a way to get slave labor from his apprentices—both for building his dream and raising food for him—during the Depression.”

“What was the Depression?”

“Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930’s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Aenea. “Anyway, long before that, in 1909 A.D… the middle-aged Mr. Wright abandoned his wife and six children and ran away to Europe with a married woman.”

I admit that I blinked at this news. The thought of the Old Architect—a man in his mid-eighties when we had met him four years ago—with a sex life, and a scandalous one at that, took some getting used to. I also wondered what all this had to do with my question about Taliesin East.

Aenea was getting to that. “When he returned with the other woman,” she said, smiling at my rapt attention, “he began building the first Taliesin—his home in Wisconsin—for Mamah…”

“His mother?” I said, totally confused.

“Mamah Borthwick,” said Aenea, spelling the first name for me. “Mrs. Cheney. The Other Woman.”

“Oh.”

The smile fading, she continued. “The scandal had destroyed his architectural practice and made him a branded man in the United States. But he built Taliesin and forged ahead, trying to find new patrons. His first wife, Catherine, would not give him a divorce. The newspapers—those were databanks printed on paper and distributed regularly—thrived on such gossip and fanned the flames of the scandal, not letting it die.”

We had been walking in the courtyard when I asked Aenea the simple question about Taliesin, and I remember pausing by the fountain during this part of her answer. I was always amazed at what this child knew.

“Then,” she said, “on August 15, 1914, a worker at Taliesin went crazy, killed Mamah Borthwick and her son John and daughter Martha with a hatchet, burned their bodies, set fire to the compound, and then killed four of Mr. Wright’s friends and apprentices before swallowing acid himself. The entire place burned down.”

“My God,” I whispered, looking toward the dining hall where the cybrid Old Architect was having lunch with a few of his oldest apprentices even as we spoke.

“He never gave up,” said Aenea. “A few days later, on August 18, Mr. Wright was touring an artificial lake on the Taliesin property when the dam he was standing on gave way and he was swept into a rain-swollen creek. Against all odds, he swam out of the torrent. A few weeks later he started to rebuild.”

I thought that I understood then what she was telling me about the Old Architect. “Why aren’t we at that Taliesin?” I asked as we strolled away from the bubbling fountain in the desert courtyard.

Aenea shook her head. “Good question. I doubt if it even exists in this rebuilt version of Earth. It was important to Mr. Wright, though. He died here… near Taliesin West… on April 9, 1959, but he was buried back near the Wisconsin Taliesin.”

I stopped walking then. The thought of the Old Architect dying was a new and disturbing thought.

Everything about our exile had been steady-state, calm and self-renewing, but now Aenea had reminded me that everything and everyone ends. Or had, before the Pax introduced the cruciform and physical resurrection to humanity. But no one at the Fellowship—perhaps no one on this kidnapped Earth—had submitted to a cruciform.

That conversation had been three years earlier. This morning, the week after the cybrid Old Architect’s death and incongruous burial in the small mausoleum he had built out in the desert, we were ready to face the consequences of death without resurrection and the end of things.

While Aenea went off to the bath and laundry pavilion to wash up, I found A. Bettik and the two of us got busy with spreading the word of the meeting in the music pavilion. The blue-skinned android did not act surprised that Aenea, the youngest of us, was calling and leading the meeting. Both A. Bettik and I had watched silently over the past few years as the girl became the locus of the Fellowship.

I jogged from the fields to the dormitories, from the dormitories to the kitchen—where I rang the large bell set in the fanciful bell tower above the stairway to the guest deck. Those apprentices or workers whom I did not contact personally should hear the bell and come to investigate.

From the kitchen, where I left cooks and some of the apprentices taking their aprons off and wiping their hands, I announced the meeting to people having coffee in the large Fellowship dining room (the view from this beautiful room looked north toward the McDowell peaks, so some had watched Aenea and me return and knew that something was up), and then I poked my head in Mr. Wright’s smaller, private dining room—empty—and then jogged over to the drafting room. This was probably the most attractive room in the compound with its long rows of drafting tables and filing cabinets set under the sloping canvas roof, the morning light flooding in through the two rows of offset windows. The sun was high enough now to fall on the roof and the smell of heated canvas was as pleasant as the butter-rich light. Aenea had once told me that it was this sense of camping out—of working within the confines of light and canvas and stone—that had been the real reason for Mr. Wright coming west to the second Taliesin. There were ten or twelve of the apprentices in the drafting room, all standing around—none working now that the Old Architect was no longer around to suggest projects—and I told them that Aenea would like us to gather in the music pavilion. None protested. None grumbled or made any comment about a sixteen-year-old telling ninety of her elders to come together in the middle of a workday. If anything, the apprentices looked relieved to hear that she was back and taking charge.

From the drafting room I went to the library where I had spent so many happy hours and then checked the conference room, lit only by four glowing panels in the floor, and announced the meeting to the people I found in both places. Then I jogged down the concrete path under the covered walkway of desert masonry and peered in the cabaret theater where the Old Architect had loved to show movies on Saturday nights. This place had always tickled me—its thick stone walls and roof, the long descending space with plywood benches covered with red cushions, the well-worn red carpet on the floor, and the many hundreds of white Christmas lights running back and forth on the ceiling. When we first arrived, Aenea and I were amazed to find that the Old Architect demanded that his apprentices and their families “dress for dinner” on Saturdays—ancient tuxedoes and black ties, of the sort one sees in the oldest history holos. The women wore strange dresses out of antiquity. Mr. Wright provided the formal clothes for those who failed to bring them in their flight to Earth through Time Tombs or farcaster.

That first Saturday, Aenea had shown up dressed in a tuxedo, shirt, and black tie rather than one of the dresses provided. When I first saw the Old Architect’s shocked expression, I was sure that he was going to throw us out of the Fellowship and make us eke out a living in the desert, but then the old face creased into a smile and within seconds he was laughing. He never asked Aenea to dress in anything else. After the formal Saturday dinners, we would either have a group musical event or assemble in the cabaret theater for a movie—one of the ancient, celluloid kinds that had to be projected by a machine. It was rather like learning to enjoy cave art.

Both Aenea and I loved the films he chose—ancient twentieth-century flat things, many in black and white—and for some reason that he never explained, Mr. Wright preferred to watch them with the “sound track,” optical jiggles and wiggles, visible on the screen. Actually, we’d watched films there for a year before one of the other apprentices told us that they had been made to be watched without the sound track visible.

Today the cabaret theater was empty, the Christmas lights dark. I jogged on, moving from room to room, building to building, rounding up apprentices, workers, and family members until I met A. Bettik by the fountain and we joined the others in the large music pavilion.

The pavilion was a large space, with a broad stage and six rows of eighteen upholstered seats in each row. The walls were of redwood painted Cherokee Red (the Old Architect’s favorite color) and the usual thick desert masonry. A grand piano and a few potted plants were the only things on the red-carpeted stage. Overhead, stretched tight above a gridwork of wood and steel ribs, was the usual white canvas. Aenea had once told me that after the death of the first Mr. Wright, plastic had taken the place of canvas to relieve the necessity of replacing canvas every couple of years. But upon this Mr. Wright’s return, the plastic was ripped out—as was the glass above the main drafting room—so that pure light through white canvas would be the rule once again. A. Bettik and I stood near the rear of the music pavilion as the murmuring apprentices and other workers took their seats, some of the construction workers standing on the aisle steps or at the back with the android and me, as if worried about tracking mud and dust onto the rich carpet and upholstery.

When Aenea entered through the side curtains and jumped to the stage, all the conversation stopped.

The acoustics were good in Mr. Wright’s music pavilion, but Aenea had always been able to project her voice without seeming to raise it.

She spoke softly. “Thank you for gathering. I thought we should talk.”

Jaev Peters, one of the older apprentices, immediately stood up in the fifth row. “You were gone, Aenea. In the desert again.”

The girl on the stage nodded.

“Did you talk to the Lions and Tigers and Bears?”

No one in the audience tittered or giggled.

The question was asked in deadly seriousness and the answer was awaited by ninety people just as seriously. I should explain.

It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago.

That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony, the AI TechnoCore had used their secret farcaster and fatline technologies to weave hundreds of dataspheres into a single, secret, interstellar information medium called the megasphere. But, according to the Cantos, Aenea’s father—the cybrid John Keats—had traveled in disembodied datapersona form to the megasphere’s Core and discovered that there was a larger datumplane medium, perhaps larger than our galaxy, which even the Core AI’s were afraid to explore because it was full of “lions and tigers and bears”—those were Ummon the AI’s words. These were the beings—or intelligences—or gods, for all we knew—who had kidnapped the Earth and brought it here before the Core could destroy it a millennium ago. These Lions and Tigers and Bears were the bugaboo guardians of our world.

No one in the Fellowship had ever seen any of these entities, or spoken to them, or had any solid evidence of their existence. No one except Aenea.

“No,” said the girl on the stage, “I didn’t talk to them.” She looked down as if embarrassed. She was always reticent to talk about this. “But I think I heard them.”

“They spoke to you?” said Jaev Peters. The pavilion was hushed.

“No,” said Aenea. “I didn’t say that. I just… heard them. A bit like when you overhear someone else’s conversation through a dormitory wall.”

There was a rustle of amusement at this. For all the thick stone walls on the Fellowship property, the dorm partitions were notably thin.

“All right,” said Bets Kimbal from the first row. Bets was the chief cook and a large, sensible woman. “Tell us what they said.”

Aenea stepped up to the edge of the red-carpeted stage and looked out at her elders and colleagues. “I can tell you this,” she said softly. “There’ll be no more food and supplies from the Indian Market. That’s gone.”

It was as if she had set off a grenade in the music pavilion. When the babble began to subside, one of the biggest of the construction workers, a man named Hussan, shouted over the noise.

“What do you mean it’s gone? Where do we get our food?”

There was good reason for the panic. In Mr. Wright’s day, way back in the twentieth century, his Fellowship desert camp had been about fifty kilometers from a large town called Phoenix. Unlike the Depression-era Wisconsin Taliesin, where apprentices raised crops in the rich soil even while they worked on Mr. Wright’s construction plans, this desert camp had never been able to grow its own food. So they drove to Phoenix and bartered or paid out their primitive coins and paper money for basic supplies. The Old Architect had always depended upon the largesse of patrons—large loans never to be paid back—for such month-to-month survival.

Here in our reassembled desert camp, there were no towns. The only road—two gravel ruts—led west into hundreds of miles of emptiness.

I knew this because I had flown over the area in the dropship and driven it in the Old Architect’s groundcar. But about thirty klicks from the compound there was a weekly Indian market where we had bartered craft items for food and basic materials.

It had been there for years before Aenea’s and my arrival; everyone had obviously expected it to be there forever.

“What do you mean it’s gone?” repeated Hussan in a hoarse shout. “Where’d the Indians go? Were they just cybrid illusions, like Mr. Wright?”

Aenea made a gesture with her hands that I had grown accustomed to over the years—a graceful setting-aside motion that I had come to see as a physical analog of the Zen expression “mu,” which, in the right context, can mean “unask the question.”

“The market’s gone because we won’t need it anymore,” said Aenea. “The Indians are real enough—Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni—but they have their own lives to live, their own experiments to conduct. Their trading with us has been… a favor.”

The crowd became angry at that, but eventually they settled down again. Bets Kimbal stood. “What do we do, child?”

Aenea sat on the edge of the stage as if trying to become one with the waiting, expectant audience. “The Fellowship is over,” she said. “That part of our lives has to end.”

One of the younger apprentices was shouting from the back of the pavilion. “No it doesn’t! Mr. Wright could still return! He was a cybrid, remember… a construct! The Core… or the Lions and Tigers and Bears… whoever shaped him can send him back to us…”

Aenea shook her head, sadly but firmly. “No. Mr. Wright is gone. The Fellowship is over. Without the food and materials the Indians brought from so far away, this desert camp can’t last a month. We have to go.”

It was a young female apprentice named Peret who spoke quietly into the silence. “Where, Aenea?”

Perhaps it was at this moment that I first realized how this entire group had given themselves over to the young woman I had known as a child. When the Old Architect was around, giving lectures, holding forth in seminars and drafting-room bull sessions, leading his flock on picnics and swimming outings in the mountains, demanding solicitude and the best food, the reality of Aenea’s leadership had been somewhat masked. But now it was evident.

“Yes,” someone else called from the center of the rising rows of seats, “where, Aenea?”

My friend opened her hands in another gesture I had learned. Rather than Unask the question, this one said, You must answer your own question. Aloud, she said, “There are two choices. Each of you traveled here either by farcaster or through the Time Tombs. You can go back by way of farcaster…”

“No!”

“How can we?”

“Never… I’d rather die!”

“No! The Pax will find us and kill us!”

The cries were immediate and from the heart. It was the sound of terror made verbal. I smelled fear in the room the way I used to smell it on animals caught in leg traps on the moors of Hyperion. Aenea lifted a hand and the outcries faded.

“You can return to Pax space by farcaster, or you can stay on Earth and try to fend for yourself.”

There were murmurs and I could hear relief at the option of not returning. I understood that feeling—the Pax had come to be a bogeyman to me, as well. The thought of returning there sent me gasping up out of sleep at least once a week.

“But if you stay here,” continued the girl seated on the edge of Mr. Wright’s music stage, “you will be outcasts. All of the groups of human beings here are involved in their own projects, their own experiments. You will not fit in there.”

People shouted questions about that, demanding answers to mysteries not understood during their long stay here.

But Aenea continued with what she was saying. “If you stay here, you will waste what Mr. Wright has taught you and what you came to learn about yourself. The Earth does not need architects and builders. Not now. We have to go back.”

Jaev Peters spoke again. His voice was brittle, but not angry. “And does the Pax need builders and architects? To build its cross-damned churches?”

“Yes,” said Aenea.

Jaev pounded the back of the seat in front of him with his large fist. “But they’ll capture or kill us if they learn who we are… where we’ve been!”

“Yes,” said Aenea.

Bets Kimbal said, “Are you going back, child?”

“Yes,” said Aenea and pushed herself away from the stage.

Everyone was standing now, shouting or talking to the people next to them. It was Jaev Peters who spoke the thoughts of the ninety Fellowship orphans. “Can we go with you, Aenea?”

The girl sighed. Her face, as sunburned and alert as it looked this morning, also looked tired.

“No,” she said. “I think that leaving here is like dying or being born. We each have to do it alone.” She smiled. “Or in very small groups.” The room fell silent then. When Aenea spoke, it was as if a single instrument were picking up where the orchestra had stopped. “Raul will leave first,” she said. “Tonight. One by one, each of you will find the right farcaster portal. I will help you. I will be the last to leave Earth. But leave I will, and within a few weeks. We all must go.”

People pushed forward then, still silent, but moving closer to the girl with the short-cropped hair. “But some of us will meet again,” said Aenea. “I feel certain that some of us will meet again.”

I heard the flip side of that reassuring prediction: some of us would not survive to meet again.

“Well,” boomed Bets Kimbal, standing with one broad arm around Aenea, “we have enough food in the kitchen for one last feast. Lunch today will be a meal you’ll remember for years! If you have to travel, as my mum used to say, never travel on an empty stomach. Who’s to help me in the kitchen then?”

The groups broke up then, families and friends in clusters, loners standing as if stunned, everyone moving closer to Aenea as we began filing out of the music pavilion. I wanted to grab her at that moment, shake her until her wisdom teeth fell out, and demand, What the hell do you mean? “Raul will leave first… tonight.” Who the hell are you to tell me to leave you behind? And how do you think you can make me? But she was too far away and too many people were pressing around her. The best I could do was stride along behind the crowd as it moved toward the kitchen and dining area, anger written in my face, fists, muscles, and walk.

Once I saw Aenea glance back, straining to find me over the heads of the crowd around her, and her eyes pleaded, Let me explain.

I stared back stonily, giving her nothing.

It was almost dusk when she joined me in the large garage Mr. Wright had ordered built half a klick east of the compound. The structure was open on the sides except for canvas curtains, but it had thick stone columns supporting a permanent redwood roof; it had been built to shelter the dropship in which Aenea, A. Bettik, and I had arrived.

I had pulled back the main canvas door and was standing in the open hatch of the dropship when I saw Aenea crossing the desert toward me.

On my wrist was the comlog bracelet that I had not worn in more than a year: the thing held much of the memory of our former spaceship—the Consul’s ship from centuries ago—and it had been my liaison and tutor when I had learned to fly the dropship. I did not need it now—the comlog memory had been downloaded into the dropship and I had become rather good at piloting the dropship on my own—but it made me feel more secure.

The comlog was also running a systems check on the ship: chatting with itself, you might say. Aenea stood just within the folded canvas. The sunset threw long shadows behind her and painted the canvas red.

“How’s the dropship?” she said. I glanced at the comlog readings.

“All right,” I grunted, not looking her way.

“Does it have enough fuel and charge for one more flight?” Still not looking up, fiddling with touchplates on the arm of the pilot’s chair inside the hatch, I said, “Depends on where it’s flying to.”

Aenea walked to the dropship stairway and touched my leg. “Raul?”

This time I had to look at her.

“Don’t be angry,” she said. “We have to do these things.”

I pulled my leg away. “Goddammit, don’t keep telling me and everyone else what we have to do. You’re just a kid. Maybe there are things some of us don’t have to do. Maybe going off on my own and leaving you behind is one of those.” I stepped off the ladder and tapped the comlog. The stairs morphed back into the dropship hull. I left the garage and began walking toward my tent.

On the horizon, the sun was a perfect red sphere. In the last low rays of light, the stones and canvas of the main compound looked as if they had caught fire—the Old Architect’s greatest fear.

“Raul, wait!” Aenea hurried to catch up to me. One glance in her direction told me how exhausted she was. All afternoon she had been meeting with people, talking to people, explaining to people, reassuring people, hugging people. I had come to think of the Fellowship as a nest of emotional vampires and Aenea as their only source of energy.

“You said that you would…” she began.

“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. I suddenly had the sense that she was the adult and that I was the petulant child. To hide my confusion, I turned away again and watched the last of the sunset.

For a moment or two we were both silent, watching the light fade and the sky darken. I had decided that Earth sunsets were slower and more lovely than the Hyperion sunsets I had known as a child, and that desert sunsets were particularly fine. How many sunsets had this child and I shared in the past four years? How many lazy evenings of dinner and conversation under the brilliant desert stars? Could this really be the last sunset we would watch together? The idea made me sick and furious.

“Raul,” she said again when the shadows had grown together and the air was cooling, “will you come with me?”

I did not say yes, but I followed her across the rocky field, avoiding the bayonet spikes of yucca and the spines of low cacti in the gloom, until we came into the lighted area of the compound.

How long, I wondered, until the fuel oil for the generators runs out? This answer I knew—it was part of my job to keep the generators maintained and fueled. We had six days’ supply in the main tanks and another ten days in the reserve tanks that were never to be touched except in emergency. With the Indian Market gone, there would be no resupply. Almost three weeks of electric lights and refrigeration and power equipment and then… what? Darkness, decay, and an end to the incessant construction, tearing down, and rebuilding that had been the background noise at Taliesin for the last four years.

I thought perhaps that we were going to the dining hall, but we walked past those lighted windows—groups of people still sitting at the tables, talking earnestly, glancing up with eyes only for Aenea as we passed—I was invisible to them in their hour of panic—and then we approached Mr. Wright’s private drafting studio and his office, but we did not stop there. Nor did we stop in the beautiful little conference room where a small group sat to watch a final movie—three weeks until the movie projectors did not run—nor did we turn into the main drafting room.

Our destination was a stone-and-canvas workshop set far down the driveway on the south side, a useful outbuilding for working with toxic chemicals or noisy equipment. I had worked here often in the first couple of years at the Fellowship, but not in recent months.

A. Bettik was waiting at the door. The android had a slight smile on his bland, blue face, rather like the one he had worn when carrying the birthday cake to Aenea’s surprise party.

“What?” I said, still irritated, looking from the girl’s tired face to the android’s smug expression.

Aenea stepped into the workshop and turned on the light. On the worktable in the center of the little room sat a small boat, not much more than two meters in length. It was shaped rather like a seed sharpened on both ends, enclosed except for a single, round cockpit opening with a nylon skirt that could obviously be tightened around the occupant’s waist. A two-bladed paddle lay on the table next to the boat. I stepped closer and ran my hand over the hull: a polished fiberglass compound with internal aluminum braces and fittings.

Only one other person at the Fellowship could do such careful work. I looked at A. Bettik almost accusingly. He nodded.

“It’s called a kayak,” said Aenea, running her own hand over the polished hull.

“It’s an old Earth design.”

“I’ve seen variations on it,” I said, refusing to be impressed. “The Ice Claw Ursus rebels used small boats like this.”

Aenea was still stroking the hull, all of her attention there. It was as if I had not spoken.

“I asked A. Bettik to make it for you,” she said. “He’s worked for weeks here.”

“For me,” I said dully. My stomach tightened at the realization of what was coming. Aenea moved closer. She was standing directly under the hanging light, and the shadows under her eyes and cheekbones made her look much older than sixteen. “We don’t have the raft anymore, Raul.” I knew the raft she meant. The one that had carried us across so many worlds until it was chopped up in the ambush that almost killed us on God’s Grove. The raft that had carried us down the river under the ice on Sol Draconi Septem and through the deserts of Hebron and QomRiyadh and across the world ocean of Mare Infinitus. I knew the raft she meant. And I knew what this boat meant.

“So I’m to take this back the way we came?” I raised a hand as if to touch the thing, but then did not.

“Not the way we came,” said Aenea. “But down the River Tethys. Across different worlds. Across as many worlds as it takes to find the ship.”

“The ship?” I said. We had left the Consul’s spaceship hiding under a river, repairing itself from damage sustained in our flight from the Pax, on a world whose name and location we did not know. My young friend nodded and the shadows fled, then regrouped around her tired eyes. “We’ll need the ship, Raul. If you would, I’d like you to take this kayak down the River Tethys until you find the ship, then fly back with it to a world where A. Bettik and I will be waiting.”

“A world in Pax space?” I said, my stomach tightening another notch at the danger present in that simple sentence.

“Yes.”

“Why me?” I said, looking significantly at A. Bettik. I was ashamed at my thought then: Why send a human being… your best friend… when the android can go? I lowered my gaze.

“It will be a dangerous trip,” said Aenea. “I believe that you can do it, Raul. I trust you to find the ship and then find us.”

I felt my shoulders slump. “All right,” I said. “Do we head back to where we came through the farcaster before?” We had come through from God’s Grove on a small stream near the Old Architect’s masterpiece building, Fallingwater. It was two thirds of a continent away.

“No,” said Aenea. “Closer. On the Mississippi River.”

“All right,” I said again. I had flown over the Mississippi. It was almost two thousand klicks east of here. “When do I go? Tomorrow?”

Aenea touched my wrist. “No,” she said, tiredly but firmly. “Tonight. Right now.”

I did not protest. I did not argue. Without speaking, I took the bow of the kayak, A. Bettik took the stern, Aenea held the center steady, and we carried the damned thing back to the dropship in the deepening desert night.

3

The Grand Inquisitor was late. Vatican Air/space Traffic Control routed the Inquisitor’s EMV across normally closed airspace near the spaceport, shut down all airborne traffic on the east side of the Vatican, and held a thirty-thousand-ton robot freighter in orbital final approach until after the GI’s car had flown across the southeast corner of the landing grid.

Inside the specially armored EMV, the Grand Inquisitor—His Eminence John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa—did not glance out the window or at the video monitors at the lovely sight of the approaching Vatican, its walls rosy in the morning light, or at the busy, twenty-lane highway called the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele beneath them, glimmering like a sunlit river because of sunlight on windshields and bubbletops. The Grand Inquisitor’s attention was focused solely on the intelligence update scrolling by on his comlog template. When the last paragraph had scrolled past and was committed to memory and deleted to oblivion, the Grand Inquisitor said to his aide, Father Farrell, “And there have been no more meetings with the Mercantilus?”

Father Farrell, a thin man with flat gray eyes, never smiled, but a twitch of his cheek muscle conveyed the simulation of humor to the Cardinal. “None.”

“You’re certain?”

“Absolutely.”

The Grand Inquisitor sat back in the EMV’s cushions and allowed himself a brief smile. The Mercantilus had made only that one early, disastrous approach to any of the papal candidates—the sounding out of Lourdusamy—and the Inquisitor had heard the complete recording of that meeting. The Cardinal allowed himself another few seconds of smile: Lourdusamy had been right to think that his conference room was bugproof—absolutely resistant to taps, bugs, wires, and squirts. Any recording device in the room—even implanted in one of the participants—would have been detected and homed in on. Any attempt to tightbeam out would have been detected and blocked. It had been one of the Grand Inquisitor’s finest moments, getting the complete visual and auditory recording of that meeting.

Monsignor Lucas Oddi had gone in to the Vatican Hospital for a routine eyes, ears, and heart replacement two local years ago.

The surgeon had been approached by Father Farrell and the full weight of the Holy Office had been shown ready to descend upon the poor medico’s neck if he did not implant certain state-of-the-art devices in the Monsignor’s body. The surgeon did so and died the true death—no resurrection possible—in a car accident far out over the Big North Shallow shortly after that.

Monsignor Lucas Oddi had no electronic or mechanical bugs in his system, but connected to his optic nerve were seven fully biological nanorecorders. Four auditory nanorecorders were tapped into his auditory nerve system. These biorecorders did not transmit inside the body, but stored the data in chemical form and physically carried it through the bloodstream to the squirt transmitter—also fully organic—set into Monsignor Oddi’s left ventricle. Ten minutes after Oddi had left the secured area of Cardinal Lourdusamy’s office, the transmitter had squirted a compressed record of the meeting to one of the Grand Inquisitor’s nearby relay transponders. It was not real-time eavesdropping from Lourdusamy’s bugproof rooms—a fact that still worried Cardinal Mustafa—but it was as close to it as current technology and stealth could get.

“Isozaki is frightened,” said Father Farrell. “He thinks…”

The Grand Inquisitor raised one finger. Farrell stopped in mid-sentence. “You do not know that he is frightened,” said the Cardinal. “You do not know what he thinks. You can only know what he says and does and infer his thoughts and reactions from that. Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.”

Father Farrell bowed his head in agreement and submission.

The EMV touched down on the landing pad atop Castel Sant’Angelo. The Grand Inquisitor was out the hatch and down the ramp so quickly that Farrell had to trot to catch up to his master. Security commandos, dressed in Holy Office red armorcloth, fell into escort step ahead and behind, but the Grand Inquisitor waved them away. He wanted to finish his conversation with Father Farrell. He touched his aide’s left arm—not out of affection, but to close the bone-conduction circuits so that he could subvocalize—and said, “Isozaki and the Mercantilus leaders are not frightened. If Lourdusamy wanted them purged, they would be dead by now. Isozaki had to get his message of support to the Cardinal and he did. It’s the Pax military who are frightened.”

Farrell frowned and subvocalized on the bone circuit. “The military? But they haven’t played their card yet. They have done nothing disloyal.”

“Precisely,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “The Mercantilus has made its move and knows that Lourdusamy will turn to them when the time comes. Pax Fleet and the rest have been terrified for years that they’ll make the wrong choice. Now they’re terrified that they’ve waited too long.”

Farrell nodded. They had taken a dropshaft deep into the stone bowels of Castel Sant’Angelo, and now they moved past armed guards and through lethal forcefields down a dark corridor. At an unmarked door, two red-garbed commandos stood at attention, energy rifles raised.

“Leave us,” said the Grand Inquisitor and palmed the door’s identyplate. The steel panel slid up and out of sight. The corridor had been stone and shadows. Inside the room, everything was bright light, instruments, and sterile surfaces. Technicians looked up as the Grand Inquisitor and Farrell entered. One wall of the room was taken up by square doors, looking like nothing so much as the multitiered human file drawers of an ancient morgue. One of those doors was open and a naked man lay on a gurney that had been pulled from the cold storage drawer there.

The Grand Inquisitor and Farrell stopped on either side of the gurney.

“He is reviving well,” said the technician who stood at the console. “We’re holding him just beneath the surface. We can bring him up in seconds.”

Father Farrell said, “How long was his last cold sleep?”

“Sixteen local months,” said the technician. “Thirteen and a half standard.”

“Bring him up,” said the Grand Inquisitor.

The man’s eyelids began to flutter within seconds. He was a small man, muscular but compact, and there were no marks or bruises on his body. His wrists and ankles were bound by sticktite. A cortical shunt had been implanted just behind his left ear and an almost invisible bundle of microfibers ran from it to the console.

The man on the gurney moaned.

“Corporal Bassin Kee,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Can you hear me?”

Corporal Kee made an unintelligible sound.

The Grand Inquisitor nodded as if satisfied. “Corporal Kee,” he said pleasantly, conversationally, “shall we pick up where we left off?”

“How long… “mumbled Kee between dry, stiff lips. “How long have I been…”

Father Farrell had moved to the technician’s console. Now he nodded to the Grand Inquisitor.

Ignoring the corporal’s question, John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa said softly, “Why did you and Father Captain de Soya let the girl go?”

Corporal Kee had opened his eyes, blinking as if the light pained him, but now he closed them again. He did not speak. The Grand Inquisitor nodded to his aide. Father Farrell’s hand passed over icons on the console diskey, but did not yet activate any of them.

“Once again,” said the Grand Inquisitor.

“Why did you and de Soya allow the girl and her criminal allies to escape on God’s Grove? Who were you working for? What was your motivation?”

Corporal Kee lay on his back, his fists clenched and his eyes shut fast. He did not answer.

The Grand Inquisitor tilted his head ever so slightly to the left and Father Farrell waved two fingers over one of the console icons. The icons were as abstract as hieroglyphics to the untutored eye, but Farrell knew them well. The one he had chosen would have translated as crushed testicles. On the gurney, Corporal Kee gasped and opened his mouth to scream, but the neural inhibitors blocked that reaction. The short man’s jaws opened as wide as they could and Father Farrell could hear the muscles and tendons stretching.

The Grand Inquisitor nodded and Farrell removed his fingers from the activation zone above the icon. Corporal Kee’s entire body convulsed on the gurney, his stomach muscles rippling in tension.

“It is only virtual pain, Corporal Kee,” whispered the Grand Inquisitor. “A neural illusion. Your body is not marked.”

On the slab, Kee was straining to raise his head to look down at his body, but the sticktite band held his head in place.

“Or perhaps not,” continued the Cardinal. “Perhaps this time we have resorted to older, less refined methods.” He took a step closer to the gurney so that the man could see his face. “Again… why did you and Father Captain de Soya let the girl go on God’s Grove? Why did you attack your crewmate, Rhadamanth Nemes?”

Corporal Kee’s mouth worked until his back teeth became visible. “From… from… fuck you,” he managed, his jaws tight against the shaking that was wracking him.

“Of course,” said the Grand Inquisitor and nodded to Father Farrell.

This time, the icon Farrell activated could be translated as hot wire behind the right eye. Corporal Kee opened his mouth in a silent scream.

“Again,” said the Grand Inquisitor softly. “Tell us.”

“Excuse me, Your Eminence,” said Father Farrell, glancing at his comlog, “but the Conclave Mass begins in forty-five minutes.”

The Grand Inquisitor waved his fingers. “We have time, Martin. We have time.” He touched Corporal Kee’s upper arm. “Tell us these few facts, Corporal, and you will be bathed, dressed, and released. You have sinned against your Church and your Lord by this betrayal, but the essence of the Church is forgiveness. Explain your betrayal, and all will be forgiven.”

Amazingly, muscles still rippling with shock, Corporal Kee laughed. “Fuck you,” he said. “You’ve already made me tell you everything I know under Truthtell. You know why we killed that bitch-thing and let the child go. And you’ll never let me go. Fuck you.”

The Grand Inquisitor shrugged and stepped back. Glancing at his own gold comlog, he said softly, “We have time. Much time.” He nodded to Father Farrell.

The icon that looked like a double parentheses on the virtual pain console stood for broad and heated blade down esophagus. With a graceful motion of his fingers, Father Farrell activated it.

Father Captain Federico de Soya was returned to life on Pacem and had spent two weeks as a de facto prisoner in the Vatican Rectory of the Legionaries of Christ. The rectory was comfortable and tranquil.

The plump little resurrection chaplain who attended to his needs—Father Baggio—as kindly and solicitous as ever. De Soya hated the place and the priest.

No one told Father Captain de Soya that he could not leave the Legionaries rectory, but he was made to understand that he should stay there until called. After a week of gaining strength and orientation after his resurrection, he was called to Pax Fleet headquarters, where he met with Admiral Wu and her boss, Admiral Marusyn.

Father Captain de Soya did little during the meeting except salute, stand at ease, and listen. Admiral Marusyn explained that a review of the Father Captain de Soya’s court-martial of four years earlier had shown several irregularities and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case. Further review of the situation had warranted a reversal of the court-martial board’s decision: Father Captain de Soya was to be reinstated immediately at his former rank of captain in Pax Fleet.

Arrangements were being made to find him a ship for combat duty.

“Your old torchship the Balthasar is in drydock for a year,” said Admiral Marusyn. “A complete refitting—being brought up to archangel-escort standards. Your replacement, Mother Captain Stone, did an excellent job as skipper.”

“Yes, sir,” said de Soya. “Stone was an excellent exec. I’m sure she’s been a good boss.”

Admiral Marusyn nodded absently as he thumbed through vellum sheets in his notebook. “Yes, yes,” he said. “So good, in fact, that we’ve recommended her as skipper for one of the new planet-class archangels. We have an archangel in mind for you as well, Father Captain.”

De Soya blinked and tried not to react. “The Raphael, sir?”

The Admiral looked up, his tanned and creased face set in a slight smile. “Yes, the Raphael, but not the one you skippered before. We’ve retired that prototype to courier duty and renamed her. The new archangel Raphael is… well, you’ve heard about the planet-class archangels, Father Captain?”

“No, sir. Not really.” He had heard rumors on his desert world when boxite miners had talked loudly in the one cantina in town.

“Four standard years,” muttered the Admiral, shaking his head. His white hair was combed back behind his ears. “Bring Federico up to speed here, Admiral.”

Marget Wu nodded and touched the diskey on a standard tactical console set into Admiral Marusyn’s wall. A holo of a starship came into existence between her and de Soya. The father-captain could see at once that this ship was larger, sleeker, more refined, and deadlier than his old Raphael.

“His Holiness has asked each industrial world in the Pax to build—or at least to bankroll—one of these planet-class archangel battlecruisers, Father Captain,” said Admiral Wu in her briefing voice.

“In the past four years, twenty-one of them have been completed and have entered active service. Another sixty are nearing completion.” The holo began to rotate and enlarge until suddenly the main deck was shown in cutaway. It was as if a laser lance had sliced the ship in half. “As you see,” continued Wu, “the living areas, command decks, and C-three tactical centers are much roomier than on the earlier Raphael… roomier even than your old torchship. The drives—both the classified C-plus instantaneous Gideon drive and the in-system fusion plant—have been reduced in size by one-third while gaining in efficiency and ease of maintenance. The new Raphael carries three atmospheric dropships and a high-speed scout. There are automated resurrection créches aboard to serve a crew of twenty-eight and up to twenty-two Marines or passengers.”

“Defenses?” asked Father Captain de Soya, still standing at-ease, his hands clasped behind him.

“Class-ten containment fields,” said Wu crisply. “The newest stealth technology. Omega-class ECM and jamming ability. As well as the usual assortment of close-in hyperkinetic and energy defenses.”

“Attack capabilities?” said de Soya.

He could tell from the apertures and arrays visible on the holo, but he wanted to hear it.

Admiral Marusyn answered with a tone of pride, as if showing off a new grandchild. “The whole nine meters,” he said. “CPB’s, of course, but feeding off the C-plus drive core rather than the fusion drive. Slag anything within half an AU. New Hawking hyperkinetic missiles—miniaturized—about half the mass and size of the ones you carried on Balthasar. Plasma needles with almost twice the yield of the warheads of five years ago. Deathbeams…”

Father Captain de Soya tried not to react. Deathbeams had been prohibited in Pax Fleet.

Marusyn saw something in the other man’s face. “Things have changed, Federico. This fight is to the finish. The Ousters are breeding like fruit flies out there in the dark, and unless we stop them, they’ll be slagging Pacem in a year or two.”

Father Captain de Soya nodded. “Do you mind if I ask which world paid for the building of this new Raphael, sir?”

Marusyn smiled and gestured toward the holo. The hull of the ship seemed to hurtle toward de Soya as the magnification increased. The view cut through the hull and closed on the tactical bridge, moving to the edge of the tactical center holopit until the father-captain could make out a small bronze plaque with the name—H.H.S. RAPHAEL—and beneath that, in smaller script: BUILT AND COMMISSIONED BY THE PEOPLE OF HEAVEN’s GATE FOR THE DEFENSE OF ALL HUMANITY.

“Why are you smiling, Father Captain?” asked Admiral Marusyn.

“Well, sir, it’s just… well, I’ve been to the world of Heaven’s Gate, sir. It was, of course, more than four standard years ago, but the planet was empty except for a dozen or so prospectors and a Pax garrison in orbit. There’s been no real population there since the Ouster invasion three hundred years ago, sir. I just couldn’t imagine that world financing one of these ships. It seems to me that it would take a planetary GNP of a society like Renaissance Vector’s to pay for a single archangel.”

Marusyn’s smile had not faltered. “Precisely, Father Captain. Heaven’s Gate is a hellhole—poison atmosphere, acid rain, endless mud, and sulfur flats—it’s never recovered from the Ouster attack. But His Holiness thought that the Pax’s stewardship of that world might be better transferred to private enterprise. The planet still holds a fortune in heavy metals and chemicals. So we have sold it.”

This time de Soya blinked. “Sold it, sir? An entire world?”

While Marusyn openly grinned, Admiral Wu said, “To the Opus Dei, Father Captain.”

De Soya did not speak, but neither did he show comprehension.

“The Work of God” used to be a minor religious organization,” said Wu. “It’s… ah, I believe… about twelve hundred years old. Founded in 1920 A.D. In the past few years, it has become not only a great ally of the Holy See, but a worthy competitor of the Pax Mercantilus.”

“Ah, yes,” said Father Captain de Soya.

He could imagine the Mercantilus buying up entire worlds, but he could not imagine the trading group allowing a rival to gain such power in the few years he had been out of Pax news. It did not matter. He turned to Admiral Marusyn.

“One last question, sir.”

The Admiral glanced at his comlog chronometer and nodded curtly.

“I have been out of Fleet service for four years,” de Soya said softly. “I have not worn a uniform or received a tech update in all that time. The world where I served as a priest was so far out of the mainstream that I might as well have been in cryogenic fugue the whole time. How could I possibly take command of a new-generation archangel-class starship, sir?”

Marusyn frowned. “We’ll bring you up to speed, Father Captain. Pax Fleet knows what it’s doing. Are you saying no to this commission?”

Father Captain de Soya hesitated a visible second. “No, sir,” he said. “I appreciate the confidence in me that you and Pax Fleet are showing. I’ll do my best, Admiral.” De Soya had been trained to discipline twice—once as a priest and Jesuit, again as an officer in His Holiness’s fleet.

Marusyn’s stone face softened. “Of course you will, Federico. We’re pleased to have you back. We’d like you to stay at the Legionaries rectory here on Pacem until we’re ready to send you to your ship, if that would be all right.”

Dammit, thought de Soya. Still a prisoner with those damned Legionaries. He said, “Of course, sir. It’s a pleasant place.”

Marusyn glanced at his comlog again. The interview was obviously at an end. “Any requests before the assignment becomes official, Father Captain?”

De Soya hesitated again. He knew that making a request would be bad form. He spoke anyway. “Yes, sir… one. There were three men who served with me on the old Raphael. Swiss Guard commandos whom I brought from Hyperion… Lancer Rettig, well, he died, sir… but Sergeant Gregorius and Corporal Kee were with me until the end, and I wondered…”

Marusyn nodded impatiently. “You want them on new Raphael with you. It sounds reasonable. I used to have a cook that I dragged from ship to ship… poor bugger was killed during the Second Coal Sack engagement. I don’t know about these men…” The Admiral looked at Marget Wu.

“By great coincidence,” said Admiral Wu, “I ran across their files while reviewing your reinstatement papers, Father Captain. Sergeant Gregorius is currently serving in the Ring Territories. I am sure that a transfer can be arranged. Corporal Kee, I am afraid…” De Soya’s stomach muscles tightened. Kee had been with him around God’s Grove—Gregorius had been returned to the créche after an unsuccessful resurrection—and the last he had seen of the lively little corporal had been after their return to Pacem space, when the MP’s had taken them away to separate holding cells after their arrest. De Soya had shaken the corporal’s hand and assured him that they would see each other again.

“I am afraid that Corporal Kee died two standard years ago,” finished Wu. “He was killed during an Ouster attack on the Sagittarius Salient. I understand that he received the Silver Star of St. Michael’s… posthumously, of course.”

De Soya nodded tersely. “Thank you,” he said.

Admiral Marusyn gave his paternal politician’s smile and extended his hand across the desk to de Soya. “Good luck, Federico. Give them hell from the Raphael.”

The headquarters for the Pax Mercantilus was not on Pacem proper, but was located—fittingly—on the L5 Trojan point trailing behind the planet by some sixty orbital degrees. Between the Vatican world and the huge, hollow Torus Mercantilus—a carbon-carbon doughnut 270 meters thick, a full klick wide, and 26 kilometers in diameter, its interior webbed with spidery drydocks, com antennae, and loading bays—floated half of Pax Fleet’s total orbital-based firepower. Kenzo Isozaki once calculated that a coup attempt launched from Torus Mercantilus would last 12.06 nanoseconds before being vaporized. Isozaki’s office was in a clear bulb on a whiskered-carbon flower stem raised some four hundred meters above the outer rim of the torus.

The bulb’s curved hullskin could be opaqued or left transparent according to the whim of the CEO inside it. Today it was transparent except for the section polarized to dim the glare of Pacem’s yellow sun. Space seemed black at the moment, but as the torus rotated, the bulb would come into the ring’s shadow and Isozaki could glance up to see stars instantly appear as if a heavy black curtain had been pulled aside to reveal thousands of brilliant, unflickering candles. Or the myriad campfires of my enemies, thought Isozaki as the darkness fell for the twentieth time on this working day.

With the walls absolutely transparent, his oval office with its modest desk, chairs, and soft lamps seemed to become a carpeted platform standing alone in the immensity of space, individual stars blazing and the long swath of the Milky Way lighting the interior. But it was not this familiar spectacle that made the Mercantilus CEO look up: set amid the starfield, three fusion tails of incoming freighters could be picked out, looking like smudges on an astronomical holo. Isozaki was so adept at gauging distances and delta-V’s from fusion tails that he could tell at a glance how long it would be before these freighters docked… and even which ships they were. The P.M. Moldahar Effectuator had refueled by skimming a gas giant in the Epsilon Eridani System and was burning redder than usual. The H.H.M.S. Emma Constant’s skipper was in her usual rush to get her cargo of Pegasus 51 reaction metals to the torus and was decelerating inbound a good fifteen percent above Mercantilus recommendations. Finally, the smallest smudge could only be the H.H.M.S. Elemosineria Apostolica just passing spindown from its C-plus translation point from Renaissance System: Isozaki knew this from a glance, just as he knew the three hundred-some other optimal translation points visible in his part of the Pacem System sky.

The lift tube rose from the floor and became a transparent cylinder, its passenger lit by starlight. Isozaki knew that the cylinder was transparent only from the outside: in it, the occupants stood in a mirrored interior, seeing nothing of the CEO’s office, staring at their own reflection until Isozaki keyed their door open.

Anna Pelli Cognani was the only person in the tube. Isozaki nodded and his personal AI rotated the cube door open. His fellow CEO and protégé did not even glance up at the moving starfield as she crossed the carpet toward him. “Good afternoon, Kenzosan.”

“Good afternoon, Anna.” He waved her toward the most comfortable chair, but Cognani shook her head and remained standing. She never took a seat in Isozaki’s office. Isozaki never ceased offering her one.

“The Conclave Mass is almost over,” said Cognani.

Isozaki nodded. At that second his office AI darkened the bubble walls and projected the Vatican’s tightbeam broadcast. St. Peter’s Basilica was awash in scarlet and purple and black and white this morning as the eighty-three cardinals soon to be sealed in the Conclave bowed, prayed, genuflected, knelt, stood, and sang. Behind this terna, or herd of theoretically possible candidates for the papacy, were the hundreds of bishops and archbishops, deacons and members of the Curia, Pax military officials and Pax civil administrators, Pax planetary governors and high elected officials who happened to be on Pacem at the time of the Pope’s death or who were within three weeks’ time-debt, delegates from the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Benedictines, the Legionaries of Christ, the Mariaists, the Salesians, and a single delegate standing for the few remaining Franciscans. Finally there were the “valued guests” in the back rows—honorary delegates from the Pax Mercantilus, the Opus Dei, the Istituto per Opere di Religione—also known as the Vatican Bank, delegates from the Vatican administrative wings of the Prefettura, the Servizio Assistenziale del Santo Padre—the Holy Father’s Welfare Service, from the APSA—The Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, as well as from Cardinal Camerlengo’s own Apostolic Chamber. Also in the rear pews were honored guests from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Papal Commission on Interstellar Peace and Justice, many papal academies such as the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, and other quasi-theological organizations necessary to the running of the vast Pax state. Finally there were the bright uniforms of the Corps Helvetica—the Swiss Guard—as well as commanders of the Palatine Guard reconstituted by Pope Julius, and the first appearance of the commander of the hitherto secret Noble Guard—a pale, dark-haired man in a solid red uniform. Isozaki and Cognani watched this pageant with knowledgeable eyes. Each of them had been invited to the Mass, but it had become a tradition in recent centuries for the Pax Mercantilus CEO’s to honor major Church ceremonies by their absence—sending only their official Vatican delegates. Both watched Cardinal Couesnongle celebrate this Mass of the Holy Spirit and saw Cardinal Camerlengo as the powerless figurehead he was; their eyes were on Cardinal Lourdusamy, Cardinal Mustafa, and half a dozen other power brokers in the front pews.

With the final benediction, the Mass ended and the voting cardinals filed out in solemn procession to the Sistine Chapel, where the holocams lingered while the doors were sealed, the entrance to the Conclave was closed and that door bolted on the inside and padlocked on the outside, and the sealing of the Conclave pronounced official by the Commandant of the Swiss Guards and the Prefect of the Pontifical Household. The Vatican coverage then shifted to commentary and speculation while the image remained of the sealed door.

“Enough,” said Kenzo Isozaki. The broadcast flashed off, the bubble grew transparent, and sunlight flooded the room under a black sky. Anna Pelli Cognani smiled thinly. “The voting shouldn’t take too long.” Isozaki had returned to his chair. Now he steepled his fingers and tapped his lower lip. “Anna,” he said, “do you think that we—all of us in the chairmanship of the Mercantilus—have any real power?”

Cognani’s neutral expression showed her surprise. She said, “During the last fiscal year, Kenzo-san, my division showed a profit of thirty-six billion marks.”

Isozaki held his steepled fingers still. “M. Cognani,” he said, “would you be so kind as to remove your jacket and shirt?”

His protégé did not blink. In the twenty-eight standard years they had been colleagues—subordinate and master, actually—M. Isozaki had never done, said, or implied anything that might have been interpreted as a sexual overture. She hesitated only a second, then unsealed her jacket, slipped it off, set it on the chair she never sat in, and unsealed her shirt.

She folded it atop her jacket on the back of the chair. Isozaki rose and came around his desk, standing only a meter from her. “Your underthings as well,” he said, slipping off his own jacket and unbuttoning his own old-fashioned shirt. His chest was healthy, muscled, but hairless.

Cognani slipped off her chemise. Her breasts were small but perfectly formed, rosy at the tips.

Kenzo Isozaki lifted one hand as if he were going to touch her, pointed, and then returned the hand to his own chest and touched the double-barred cruciform that ran from his sternum to just above his navel. “This,” he said, “is power.” He turned away and began dressing. After a moment, Anna Pelli Cognani hugged her shoulders and then also began dressing.

When they were both dressed, Isozaki sat behind his desk again and gestured toward the other chair. To his quiet astonishment, M. Anna Pelli Cognani sat in it.

“What you are saying,” began Cognani, “is that no matter how successful we are in making ourselves indispensable to the new Pope—if there ever is a new pope—the Church will always have the ultimate leverage of resurrection.”

“Not quite,” said Isozaki, steepling his fingers again as if the previous interlude had not happened. “I am saying that the power controlling the cruciform controls the human universe.”

“The Church…” began Cognani and stopped. “Of course, the cruciform is just part of the power equation. The TechnoCore provides the Church with the secret of successful resurrection. But they’ve been in league with the Church for two hundred and eighty years…”

“For their own purposes,” said Isozaki softly. “What are those purposes, Anna?”

The office rotated into night. Stars exploded into existence. Cognani raised her face to the Milky Way to gain a moment to think. “No one knows,” she said at last. “Ohm’s Law.”

Isozaki smiled. “Very good. Following the path of least resistance here may not lead us through the Church, but via the Core.”

“But Councillor Albedo meets with no one except His Holiness and Lourdusamy.”

“No one that we know of,” amended Isozaki.

“But that is a matter of the Core coming to the human universe.” Cognani nodded. She understood the implicit suggestion: the illicit, Core-class AI’s that the Mercantilus was developing could find the datum-plane avenue and follow it to the Core.

For almost three hundred years, the prime commandment enforced by the Church and Pax had been—Thou shalt not build a thinking machine equal or superior to humankind. “AI’s” in use within the Pax were more “All-purpose Instruments” than “Artificial Intelligences” of the kind that had evolved away from humanity almost a millennium earlier: idiot thinking machines like Isozaki’s office AI or the cretinous ship computer on de Soya’s old ship, the Raphael. But in the past dozen years, secret research departments of the Pax Mercantilus had recreated the autonomous AI’s equal to or surpassing those in common use during the days of the Hegemony. The risk and benefits of this project were almost beyond measure—absolute domination of Pax trade and a breaking of the old balance of power stand-off between Pax Fleet and Pax Mercantilus if successful, excommunication, torture in the dungeons of the Holy Office, and execution if discovered by the Church. And now this prospect.

Anna Pelli Cognani stood. “My God,” she said softly, “that would be the ultimate end run.”

Isozaki nodded and smiled again. “Do you know where that term originated, Anna?”

“End run? No… some sport, I imagine.”

“A very ancient warfare-surrogate sport called football,” said Isozaki.

Cognani knew that this irrelevancy was anything but irrelevant. Sooner or later her master would explain why this datum was important.

She waited.

“The Church had something that the Core wanted… needed,” said Isozaki. “The taming of the cruciform was their part of the deal. The Church had to barter something of equal worth.”

Cognani thought, Equal in worth to the immortality of a trillion human beings? She said, “I had always assumed that when Lenar Hoyt and Lourdusamy contacted the surviving Core elements more than two centuries ago, that the Church’s bartering point was in secretly reestablishing the TechnoCore in human space.” Isozaki opened his hands. “To what ends, Anna? Where is the benefit to the Core?”

“When the Core was an integral part of the Hegemony,” she said, “running the WorldWeb and the fatline, they were using the neurons in the billions of human brains transiting the farcasters as a sort of neural net, part of their Ultimate Intelligence project.”

“Ah, yes,” said her mentor. “But there are no farcasters now. If they are using human beings… how? And where?”

Without meaning to, Anna Pelli Cognani raised one hand to her breastbone.

Isozaki smiled. “Irritating, isn’t it? Like a word that is on the tip of one’s tongue but will not come to mind. A puzzle with a missing piece. But there is one piece that was missing which has just been found.”

Cognani raised an eyebrow. “The girl?”

“Back in Pax space,” said the older CEO. “Our agents close to Lourdusamy have confirmed that the Core has revealed this. It happened after the death of His Holiness… only the Secretary of State, the Grand Inquisitor, and the top people in Pax Fleet know.”

“Where is she?”

Isozaki shook his head. “If the Core knows, they haven’t revealed it to the Church or any other human agency. But Pax Fleet has called up that ship’s captain—de Soya—because of the news.”

“The Core had predicted that he would be involved in the girl’s capture,” said Cognani. The beginnings of a smile were working at the corners of her mouth.

“Yes?” said Isozaki, proud of his student.

“Ohm’s Law,” said Cognani.

“Precisely.”

The woman stood and again touched her chest without being aware of doing so. “If we find the girl first, we have the leverage to open discussions with the Core. And the means—with the new abilities we will have on-line.” None of the CEO’s who knew of the secret AI project ever said the words or phrases aloud, despite their bugproof offices.

“If we have the girl and the means of negotiating,” continued Cognani, “we may have the leverage we need to supplant the Church in the Core’s arrangement with humanity.”

“If we can discover what the Core is getting from the Church in return for control of the cruciform,” murmured Isozaki. “And offer the same or better.”

Cognani nodded in a distracted manner. She was seeing how all of this related to her goals and efforts as CEO of Opus Dei. In every way, she realized at once. “In the meantime, we have to find the girl before the others do… Pax Fleet must be utilizing resources they would never reveal to the Vatican.”

“And vice versa,” said Isozaki. This kind of contest pleased him very much.

“And we will have to do the same,” said Cognani, turning toward the lift tube. “Every resource.”

She smiled at her mentor. “It’s the ultimate three-way, zero-sum game, isn’t it, Kenzosan?”

“Just so,” said Isozaki. “Everything to the winner—power, immortality, and wealth beyond human imagining. To the loser—destruction, the true death, and eternal slavery for one’s descendants.” He held up one finger. “But not a three-way game, Anna. Six.”

Cognani paused by the lift door. “I see the fourth,” she said. “The Core has its own imperative to find the girl first. But…”

Isozaki lowered his hand. “We must presume that the child has her own goals in this game, mustn’t we? And whoever or whatever has introduced her as a playing piece… well, that must be our sixth player.”

“Or one of the other five,” said Cognani, smiling. She also enjoyed a high-stakes game. Isozaki nodded and turned his chair to watch the next sunrise above the curving-away band of the Torus Mercantilus. He did not turn back when the lift door closed and Anna Pelli Cognani departed. Above the altar, Jesus Christ, his face stern and unrelenting, divided men into camps of the good and the bad—the rewarded and the damned. There was no third group.

Cardinal Lourdusamy sat in his canopied stall inside the Sistine Chapel and looked at Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment. Lourdusamy had always thought that this Christ was a bullying, authoritarian, merciless figure—perhaps an icon perfectly suited to oversee this choice of a new Vicar of Christ.

The little chapel was crowded with the eighty-three canopied stalls seating the eighty-three cardinals present in the flesh. An empty space allowed for activation of the holos representing the missing thirty-seven cardinals—one holo of a canopied stall at a time.

This was the first morning after the cardinals had been “nailed up” in the Vatican Palace.

Lourdusamy had slept and eaten well—his bedroom a cot in his Vatican office, his repast a simple meal cooked by the nuns of the Vatican guest house: simple food and a cheap white wine served in the glorious Borgia Apartments. Now all were gathered in the Sistine Chapel, their stall-thrones in place, their canopies raised. Lourdusamy knew that this splendid sight had been missing from the Conclave for many centuries—ever since the number of cardinals had grown too large to accommodate the stalls in the small chapel, sometime pre-Hegira, the nineteenth or twentieth century A.D… he thought—but the Church had grown so small by the end of the Fall of the Farcasters that the forty-some cardinals could once again easily fit. Pope Julius had kept the number small—never more than 120 cardinals, despite the growth of the Pax. And with almost forty of them unable to travel in time to the Conclave, the Sistine Chapel could hold the stalls of those cardinals permanently based on Pacem.

The moment had come. All of the cardinal-electors in the chapel stood as one.

In the empty space near the Scrutineers’ table near the altar, the holos of the thirty-seven absent cardinal-electors shimmered into existence.

Because the space was small, the holos were small—little more than doll-sized human figures in doll-sized wooden stalls—all of them floating in midair like ghosts of Conclave-electors past. Lourdusamy smiled, as he always did, at how appropriate the reduced size of these absent electors seemed. Pope Julius had always been elected by acclamation. One of the three cardinals acting as Scrutineers raised his hand: the Holy Spirit may have been prepared to move these men and women, but some coordination was required. When the Scrutineer’s hand dropped, the eighty-three cardinals and thirty-seven holos were to speak as one.

“Eligo Father Lenar Hoyt!” cried Cardinal Lourdusamy and saw Cardinal Mustafa shouting the same words from beneath the canopy of his stall.

The Scrutineer in front of the altar paused.

The acclamation had been loud and clear, but obviously not unanimous. This was a new wrinkle. For 270 years, the acclamation had been immediate.

Lourdusamy was careful not to smile or look around. He knew which of the newer cardinals had not cried out Pope Julius’s name for reelection.

He knew the wealth it had taken to bribe these men and women. He knew the terrible risk they were running and would almost certainly suffer for.

Lourdusamy knew all this because he had helped to orchestrate it.

After a moment of consultation among the Scrutineers, the one who had called for acclamation now said, “We shall proceed by Scrutiny.”

There was excited talk among the cardinals as the ballots were prepared and handed out. This had never happened before in the lifetime of most of these princes of the Church. Immediately the acclamation holos of the missing cardinal-electors had become irrelevant. Although a few of the absent cardinals had prepared their interactive chips for scrutiny, most had not bothered.

The Masters of Ceremonies moved among the stalls, distributing voting cards—three to each cardinal-elector. The Scrutineers moved among the forest of stalls to make sure that each of the cardinals had a pen. When all was in readiness, the Cardinal Deacon among the Scrutineers raised his hand again, this time to signify the moment of voting.

Lourdusamy looked at his ballot. On the upper left, the words “Eligo in Summum Pontificem” appeared in print. There was room for one name beneath it. Simon Augustino Cardinal Lourdusamy wrote in Lenar Hoyt and folded the card and held it up so that it could be seen. Within a minute, all eighty-three of the cardinals were holding a card aloft, as were half a dozen of the interactive holos.

The Scrutineer began calling the cardinals forward in order of precedence. Cardinal Lourdusamy went first, leaving his stall and walking to the Scrutineers’ table next to the altar beneath the gaze of the terrible Christ of the fresco. Genuflecting and then kneeling at the altar, Lourdusamy bowed his head in silent prayer. Rising, he said aloud, “I call to witness Christ the Lord who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one who before God I consider should be elected.” Lourdusamy solemnly set his folded card on the silver plate that sat atop the vote receptacle.

Lifting the plate, he dropped his vote into the receptacle. The Cardinal Deacon among the Scrutineers nodded; Lourdusamy bowed toward the altar and returned to his stall.

Cardinal Mustafa, the Grand Inquisitor, moved majestically toward the altar to cast the second vote.

It was more than an hour later that the votes were tallied. The first Scrutineer shook the receptacle to mix the votes. The second Scrutineer counted them—including the six votes copied from the interactive holos—depositing each in a second receptacle. The count equaled the number of voting cardinals in the Conclave. The Scrutiny proceeded.

The first Scrutineer unfolded a card, wrote down the name on it, and passed the card to the second Scrutineer, who made a note and passed it to the third and final Scrutineer. This man—Cardinal Couesnongle as it turned out—said the name aloud before making a note of it.

In each of the stalls, a cardinal jotted the name on a ’scriber pad provided by the Scrutineers. At the end of the Conclave, the ’scribers would be scrambled, their files deleted so that no record of the voting would remain.

And so the voting proceeded. For Lourdusamy as for the rest of the living cardinals present, the only suspense was whether the dissident cardinal-electors from the Acclamation would actually put someone else’s name into play.

As each card was read, the last Scrutineer ran a threaded needle through the word “Eligo” and slid the card down the thread. When all of the ballots had been read aloud, knots were tied in each end of the thread. The winning candidate was admitted to the Chapel.

Standing before the altar in a simple black cassock, the man looked humble and a bit overwhelmed. Standing before him, the senior Deacon Cardinal said, “Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?”

“I do so accept it,” said the priest.

At this point, a stall was brought out and set behind the priest. The Cardinal Deacon raised his hands and intoned, “Thus accepting your canonical election, this gathering does—in the sight of God Almighty—acknowledge you as Bishop of the Church of Rome, true Pope, and Head of the College of Bishops. May God advise you well as He grants you full and absolute power over the Church of Jesus Christ.”

“Amen,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy and pulled the cord that lowered the canopy over his stall. All eighty-three physical canopies and thirty-seven holographic ones lowered at the same time, until only the new Pope’s remained raised. The priest—now pontiff—sat back in the seat beneath the papal canopy. “What name do you choose as Supreme Pontiff?” asked the Deacon Cardinal.

“I choose the name Urban the Sixteenth,” said the seated priest.

There was a murmuring and hum from the cardinals’ stalls. The Cardinal Deacon held out his hand and he and the other Scrutineers led the priest from the Chapel. The murmuring and whispering rose in volume.

Cardinal Mustafa leaned out of his stall and said to Lourdusamy, “He must be thinking of Urban the Second. Urban the Fifteenth was a sniveling little coward in the twenty-ninth century who did little but read detective novels and write love letters to his former mistress.”

“Urban the Second,” mused Lourdusamy. “Yes, of course.”

After several minutes, the Scrutineers returned with the priest—now the Pope dressed in pure white—a white-caped cassock, a white zuchetto or skullcap, a pectoral cross, and a white fascia sash. Cardinal Lourdusamy went to his knees on the stone floor of the Chapel, as did all the other cardinals real and holographic, as the new Pontiff gave his first benediction.

Then the Scrutineers and the attending cardinals went to the stove to burn the votes now tethered on black thread, adding enough bianco chemical to make sure that the fumata would indeed be white smoke.

The cardinals filed out of the Sistine Chapel and walked the ancient paths and corridors to St. Peter’s, where the senior Cardinal Deacon went alone onto the balcony to announce the name of the new Pontiff to the waiting multitudes.

Among the five hundred thousand waiting individuals in the multitude squeezed into, out of, and around St. Peter’s Square that morning was Father Captain Federico de Soya. He had been released from his de facto imprisonment at the Legionaries rectory only hours before.

He was to report to Pax Fleet’s spaceport later that afternoon for shuttle to his new command.

Walking through the Vatican, de Soya had followed the crowds—then had been engulfed by them—as men, women, and children had flowed like a great river toward the Square.

A great cheer had gone up when the puffs of white smoke first became visible from the stovepipe. The impossibly thick throng beneath the balcony of St. Peter’s somehow became thicker as tens of thousands more flowed around the colonnades and past the statuary. Hundreds of Swiss Guard troopers held the crowd back from the entrance to the Basilica and away from private areas.

When the Senior Deacon emerged and announced that the new Pope was to be called His Holiness Urban the XVI, a great gasp went up from the crowd. De Soya found himself gaping in surprise and shock. Everyone had expected Julius XV. The thought of anyone else as Pope was… well, unthinkable.

Then the new Pontiff stepped onto the balcony and the gasps turned to cheers that went on and on and on.

It was Pope Julius—the familiar face, the high forehead, the sad eyes. Father Lenar Hoyt, the savior of the Church, had once again been elected. His Holiness raised his hand in the familiar benediction and waited for the crowd to stop cheering so that he could speak, but the crowd would not stop cheering. The roar rose from half a million throats and went on and on.

Why Urban XVI? wondered Father Captain de Soya. He had read and studied enough history of the Church in his years as a Jesuit. Quickly he thumbed back through his mental notes on the Urban popes… most were forgettable or worse. Why…

“Damn,” Father Captain de Soya said aloud, the soft curse lost under the continuing roar of the faithful filling St. Peter’s Square.

“Damn,” he said again.

Even before the crowd quieted enough for the new-old Pontiff to speak, to explain his choice of names, to announce what de Soya knew had to be announced, the father-captain understood. And his heart sank with that understanding.

Urban II had served from A.D. 1088 to 1099. At the synod the Pope had called in Clermont in… November, in the year 1095, de Soya thought… Urban II had made his call for holy war against the Muslims in the Near East, for the rescue of Byzantium, and for the liberation of all eastern Christian holy places from Muslim domination. That call had led to the First Crusade… the first of many bloody campaigns.

The crowd finally quieted. Pope Urban XVI began to speak, the familiar but newly energized voice rising and falling over the heads of the half-million faithful listening in person and the billions listening via live broadcast.

Father Captain de Soya turned away even before the new Pope began to speak. He pushed and elbowed his way back through the unmoving crowd, trying to escape the suddenly claustrophobic confines of St. Peter’s Square.

It was no use. The crowd was rapt and joyous and de Soya was trapped in the mob. The words from the new Pontiff were also joyous and impassioned.

Father Captain de Soya stood, unable to escape, and bowed his head. As the crowd began cheering and crying “Deus le volt!”—God wills it—de Soya began to weep.

Crusade. Glory. A final resolution of the Ouster Problem. Death beyond imagining.

Destruction beyond imagining. Father Captain de Soya squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, but the vision of charged particle beams flaring against the blackness of space, of entire worlds burning, of oceans turning to steam and continents into molten rivers of lava, visions of orbital forests exploding into smoke, of charred bodies tumbling in zero-g, of fragile, winged creatures flaring and charring and expanding into ash…

De Soya wept while billions cheered.

4

It has been my experience that late-night departures and farewells are the hardest on the spirit.

The military was especially good at beginning major voyages in the middle of the night. During my time in the Hyperion Home Guard, it seemed that all important troop movements began in the wee hours. I began to associate that odd blend of fear and excitement, dread and anticipation, with predawn darkness and the smell of lateness. Aenea had said that I would be leaving that night of her announcement to the Fellowship, but it took time to load the kayak, for me to pack my gear and decide what to leave behind forever, and to close up my tent and work area in the compound, so we weren’t airborne in the dropship until after two A.M. and it was almost sunrise before we reached our destination.

I admit that I felt rushed and ordered about by the girl’s preemptive announcement. Many people had come to look to Aenea for leadership and advice during the four years we spent at Taliesin West, but I wasn’t one of those people. I was thirty-two years old. Aenea was sixteen.

It was my job to watch out for her, to protect her, and—if it came to that—to tell her what to do and when to do it. I didn’t like this turn of events one bit.

I’d assumed that A. Bettik would be flying with us to wherever I was supposed to shove off, but Aenea said that the android would be staying behind at the compound, so I wasted another twenty minutes tracking him down and saying goodbye.

“M. Aenea says that we will meet up again in due course,” said the blue man, “so I am confident that we shall, M. Endymion.”

“Raul,” I said for the five hundredth time. “Call me Raul.”

“Of course,” said A. Bettik with that slight smile that suggested insubordination.

“Fuck it,” I said eloquently and stuck out my hand. A. Bettik shook it. I had the urge then to hug our old traveling companion, but I knew that it would embarrass him. Androids were not literally programmed to be stiff and subservient—they were, after all, living, organic beings, not machines—but between RNA-training and long practice, they were hopelessly formal creatures. At least this one was.

And then we were away, Aenea and I, taxiing the dropship out of its hangar into the desert night and lifting off with as little noise as possible. I had said good-bye to as many of the other Fellowship apprentices and workers as I had found, but the hour was late and the people were scattered to their dorm cubbies, tents, and apprentice shelters. I hoped that I would run into some of them again—especially some of the construction crewmen and women with whom I’d worked for four years—but I had little real belief that I would.

The dropship could have flown itself to our destination—just a series of coordinates Aenea had given it—but I left the controls on semimanual so I could pretend I had something to do during the flight. I knew from the coordinates that we would be traveling about fifteen hundred klicks.

Somewhere along the Mississippi River, Aenea had said. The dropship could have done that distance in ten suborbital minutes, but we had been conserving its dwindling energy and fuel reserves, so once we had extended the wings to maximum, we kept our velocity subsonic, our altitude set at a comfortable ten thousand meters, and avoided morphing the ship again until landing. We ordered the Consul’s starship’s persona—which I’d long ago loaded from my comlog into the dropship’s AI core—to keep quiet unless it had something important to tell us, and then we settled back in the red instrument glow to talk and watch the dark continent pass beneath us.

“Kiddo,” I said, “why this galloping hurry?”

Aenea made the self-conscious, throwing-away gesture I had first seen her use almost five years earlier. “It seemed important to get things going.” Her voice was soft, almost lifeless, drained of the vitality and energy that had moved the entire Fellowship to her will. Perhaps I was the only living person who could identify the tone, but she sounded close to tears.

“It can’t be that important,” I said. “To make me leave in the middle of the night…”

Aenea shook her head and looked out the dark windscreen for a moment. I realized that she was crying. When she finally turned back, the glow from the instruments made her eyes look very moist and red. “If you don’t leave tonight, I’ll lose my nerve and ask you not to go. If you don’t go, I’ll lose my nerve again and stay on Earth… never go back.”

I had the urge to take her hand then, but I kept my big paw on the omnicontroller instead. “Hey,” I said, “we can go back together. This doesn’t make any sense for me to go off one way and you another.”

“Yes it does,” said Aenea so quietly that I had to lean to my right to hear her.

“A. Bettik could go fetch the ship,” I said. “You and I can stay on Earth until we’re ready to return…”

Aenea shook her head. “I’ll never be ready to go back, Raul. The thought scares me to death.”

I thought of the wild chase that had sent us fleeing through Pax space from Hyperion, barely eluding Pax starships, torchships, fighter aircraft, Marines, Swiss Guard, and God knows what else—including that bitch-thing from hell that had almost killed us on God’s Grove—and I said, “I feel the same way, kiddo. Maybe we should stay on Earth. They can’t reach us here.”

Aenea looked at me and I recognized the expression: it was not mere stubbornness, it was a closing of all discussion on a matter that was settled.

“All right,” I said, “but I still haven’t heard why A. Bettik couldn’t take this kayak and go get the ship while I farcast back with you.”

“Yes, you have,” said Aenea. “You weren’t listening.” She shifted sideways in the big seat. “Raul, if you leave and we agree to meet at a certain time in a certain place in Pax space, I have to go through the farcaster and do what I have to do. And what I have to do next, I have to do on my own.”

“Aenea,” I said.

“Yes?”

“That’s really stupid. Do you know that?”

The sixteen-year-old said nothing. Below and to the left, somewhere in western Kansas, a circle of campfires became visible. I looked out at the lights amid all that darkness. “Any idea what experiment your alien friends are doing down there?” I said.

“No,” said Aenea. “And they aren’t my alien friends.”

“Which aren’t they?” I said. “Aliens? Or friends?”

“Neither,” said Aenea. I realized that this was the most specific she had ever been about the godlike intelligences that had kidnapped Old Earth—and us, it seemed to me at times, as if we had been harried and driven through the farcasters like cattle.

“Care to tell me anything else about these nonalien nonfriends?” I said. “After all, something could go wrong… I might not make it to our rendezvous. I’d like to know the secret of our hosts before I go.” I regretted saying that as soon as the words were out. Aenea pulled back as if I had slapped her. “Sorry, kiddo,” I said. This time I did put my hand on hers. “I didn’t mean that. I’m just angry.”

Aenea nodded and I could see the tears in her eyes again.

Still mentally kicking myself, I said, “Everyone in the Fellowship was sure that the aliens were benevolent, godlike creatures. People said “Lions and Tigers and Bears” but what they were thinking was “Jesus and Yahweh and E.T.” from that old flat film that Mr. W. showed us. Everyone was sure that when it came time to fold up the Fellowship, the aliens would appear and lead us back to the Pax in a big mothership. No danger. No muss. No fuss.”

Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened.

“Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E.T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business… our fight… and we have to take care of it ourselves.”

“Ourselves being you and me and A. Bettik against eight hundred billion or so of the born-again faithful?” I said softly.

Aenea made the graceful gesture with her hand again. “Yeah,” she said. “For now.”

When we arrived it was not only still dark, but raining hard—a cold, sleety, end-of-autumn rain. The Mississippi was a big river—one of Old Earth’s largest—and the dropship circled over it once before landing in a small town on the west bank. I saw all this on the viewscreen under image enhancement: the view out the actual windscreen was blackness and rain.

We came in over a high hill covered with bare trees, crossed an empty highway that spanned the Mississippi on a narrow bridge, and landed in an open, paved area about fifty meters from the river. The town ran back from the river here in a valley between wooded hills and on the viewscreen I could make out small, wooden buildings, larger brick warehouses, and a few taller structures near the river that might have been grain silos. Those kind of structures had been common in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in this part of Old Earth: I had no idea why this city had been spared the earthquakes and fires of the Tribulations, or why the Lions and Tigers and Bears had rebuilt it, if they had. There had been no sign of people in the narrow streets, nor of heat signatures on the infrared bands—neither living creatures nor groundcars with their overheated, internal combustion drive systems—but then again, it was almost four-thirty in the morning on a cold, rainy night. No one with an ounce of sense would be out in that lousy, stinking weather. We both pulled on ponchos, I hefted my small backpack and said, “So long, Ship. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and we were down the morphed stairs and into the rain. Aenea helped me tug the kayak out of the storage area in the belly of the dropship and we headed down the slick street toward the river.

On our previous river adventure, I had carried night-vision goggles, an assortment of weapons, and a raft full of fancy gadgets. This night I had the flashlight laser that was our only memento of the trip out to Earth—set to its weakest, most energy-conserving setting, it illuminated about two meters of rain-slick street—a Navajo hunting knife in my backpack, and some sandwiches and dried fruit packed away. I was ready to take on the Pax.

“What is this place?” I said.

“Hannibal,” said Aenea, struggling to hold the slick kayak as we stumbled down the street.

By this point I had to shift the slim flashlight laser in my teeth, keeping both hands on the bow of the stupid little boat. When we reached the point where the street became a loading ramp, running into the black torrent of the Mississippi, I set the kayak down, removed the flashlight, and said, “St. Petersburg.” I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading in the Fellowship compound’s rich library of print books.

I saw Aenea’s hooded figure nod in the reflected glow of the flashlight beam. “This is crazy,” I said, swinging the flashlight beam around the empty street, against the wall of the brick warehouses, out to the dark river.

The rush of dark water was frightening. Any thought of setting off on that was insane.

“Yes,” said Aenea. “Crazy.” The cold rain beat on the hood of her poncho.

I went around the kayak and took her by the arm. “You see the future,” I said. “When are we going to see each other again?”

Her head was bowed. I could make it out only the barest gleam of her pale cheek in the reflected beam. The arm I gripped through the sleeve of the poncho might as well have been the branch of a dead tree for all the life I felt there. She said something too softly for me to make it out over the sound of the rain and the river. “What?” I said.

“I said I don’t see the future,” she said. “I remember parts of it.”

“What’s the difference?”

Aenea sighed and stepped closer. It was cold enough that our breaths actually mingled in the air. I felt the adrenaline rush from anxiety, fear, and anticipation.

“The difference is,” she said, “that seeing is a form of clarity, remembering is… something else.”

I shook my head. Rain dripped in my eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“Raul, do you remember Bets Kimbal’s birthday party? When Jaev played the piano and Kikki got falling-down drunk?”

“Yeah,” I said, irritated at this discussion in the middle of the night, in the middle of the storm, in the middle of our departure.

“When was it?”

“What?”

“When was it?” she repeated. Behind us, the Mississippi flowed out of the darkness and back into darkness with the speed of a maglev train.

“April,” I said. “Early May. I don’t know.”

The hooded figure before me nodded. “And what did Mr. Wright wear that night?”

I had never had the impulse to hit or spank or scream at Aenea. Not until this minute. “How should I know? Why should I remember that?”

“Try to.”

I let out my breath and looked away at the dark hills in the black night. “Shit, I don’t know… his gray wool suit. Yeah, I remember him standing by the piano in it. That gray suit with the big buttons.”

Aenea nodded again. “Bets’s birthday party was in mid-March,” she said over the patter of rain on our hoods. “Mr. Wright didn’t come because he had a cold.”

“So?” I said, knowing very well what point she had just made.

“So I remember bits of the future,” she said again, her voice sounding close to tears. “I’m afraid to trust those memories. If I say when we will see each other again, it may be like Mr. Wright’s gray suit.”

For a long minute I said nothing. Rain pounded like tiny fists on closed coffins. Finally I said, “Yeah.”

Aenea took two steps and put her arms around me. Our ponchos crinkled against each other.

I could feel the tightness of her back and the new softness of her chest as we hugged clumsily. She stepped back. “Can I have the flashlight a moment?” I handed it to her. She pulled back the nylon apron in the tiny cockpit of the kayak and shined the light on the narrow strip of polished wood there beneath the fiberglass. A single red button, under its clear, protective panel, gleamed in the rain. “See that?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t touch it, whatever you do.”

I admit that I barked a laugh at that. Among the things I had read in the Taliesin library were plays of the absurd like Waiting for Godot. I had the feeling that we had flown into some latitude of the absurd and surreal here.

“I’m serious,” said Aenea.

“Why put a button in if it’s not to be touched?” I said, wiping the dripping moisture out of my face.

The hooded figure shook its head. “I mean, don’t touch it until you absolutely have to.”

“How will I know when I absolutely have to, kiddo?”

“You’ll know,” she said and gave me another hug. “We’d better get this into the river.”

I bent to kiss her forehead then. I had done this dozens of times over the past few years—wishing her well before one of her retreats, tucking her in, kissing her clammy forehead when she was sick with fever or half-dead from fatigue. But as I bent to kiss her, Aenea raised her face, and for the first time since we had met in the midst of dust and confusion in the Valley of the Time Tombs, I kissed her on the lips.

I believe that I have mentioned before how Aenea’s gaze is more powerful and intimate than most people’s physical touches… how her touch is like a jolt of electricity. This kiss was… beyond all that. I was thirty-two years old that night in Hannibal, on the west bank of the river known as the Mississippi, on the world once known as Earth, lost now somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, in the dark and rain, and I had never experienced a jolt of sensation like that first kiss.

I pulled back in shock. The flashlight laser had tilted up between us and I could see the glint of her dark eyes… looking mischievous, perhaps, relieved, perhaps, as if a long wait had ended, and… something else.

“Good-bye, Raul,” she said, and lifted her end of the kayak.

My mind reeling, I placed the bow in the dark water at the bottom of the ramp and leveraged myself down and into the cockpit. A. Bettik had fashioned it for me like a well-tailored suit of clothes. I made sure not to depress the red button in my flailing around. Aenea shoved and the kayak was floating in twenty centimeters of water. She handed me the double-bladed paddle, then my backpack, and then the flashlight laser. I aimed the beam at the dark water between us.

“Where’s the farcaster portal?” I said. I heard the words from a distance, as if some third party had spoken. My mind and emotions were still dealing with the kiss. I was thirty-two years old. This child had just turned sixteen. My job was to protect her and to keep her alive until we could return to Hyperion and the old poet someday. This was madness.

“You’ll see it,” she said. “Sometime after daylight.”

Hours away then. This was theater of the absurd. “And what do I do after I find the ship?” I said. “Where do we meet?”

“There is a world named T’ien Shan,” said Aenea. “It means “Mountains of Heaven.” The ship will know how to find it.”

“It’s in the Pax?” I said.

“Just barely,” she said, her breath hanging in the cold air. “It was in the Hegemony Outback. The Pax has incorporated it into the Protectorate and promised to send missionaries, but it hasn’t been tamed yet.”

“T’ien Shan,” I repeated. “All right. How do I find you? Planets are big things.”

I could see her dark eyes in the bouncing flashlight beam. They were moist with rain or tears, or both. “Find a mountain called Heng Shan… the Sacred Mountain of the North. Near it there will be a place called Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” she said. “It means ’Temple Hanging in Air.’ I should be there.”

I made a rude gesture with my fist.

“Great, so all I have to do is stop at a local Pax garrison and ask directions to the Temple Hanging in Air, and you’ll be hanging there waiting for me.”

“There are only a few thousand mountains on T’ien Shan,” she said, her voice flat and unhappy. “And only a few… cities. The ship can find Heng Shan and Hsuan-k’ung Ssu from orbit. You won’t be able to land there, but you’ll be able to disembark.”

“Why won’t I be able to land there?” I said, irritated by all of these puzzles within enigmas within codes.

“You’ll see, Raul,” she said, her voice as filled with tears as her eyes had been. “Please, go.”

The current was trying to carry me away, but I paddled the buoyant little kayak back into place.

Aenea walked along the river’s edge to keep pace with me. The sky seemed to be lightening a bit in the east. “Are you certain we’ll see each other there?” I shouted through the thinning rain.

“I’m not certain of anything, Raul.”

“Not even that we’ll survive this?” I’m not sure what I meant by “this.” I’m not even sure what I meant when I said “survive.”

“Especially not of that,” said the girl, and I saw the old smile, full of mischief and anticipation and something like sadness mixed with involuntary wisdom.

The current was pulling me away. “How long will it take me to get to the ship?”

“I think only a few days,” she called.

We were several meters apart now, and the current was pulling me out into the Mississippi.

“And when I find the ship, how long to get to… T’ien Shan?” I called.

Aenea shouted back the answer but it was lost in the lapping of waves against the hull of my little kayak.

“What?” I yelled. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“I love you,” called Aenea, and her voice was clear and bright across the dark water.

The river pulled me out into it. I could not speak. My arms did not work when I thought to paddle against the powerful current. “Aenea?”

I aimed the flashlight toward the shore, caught a glimpse of her poncho gleaming in the light, the pale oval of her face in the shadow of the hood. “Aenea!” She shouted something, waved. I waved back. The current was very strong for a moment. I paddled violently to avoid being pulled into an entire tree that had snagged on a sandbar, and then I was out in the central current and hurtling south. I looked back but walls of the last buildings in Hannibal hid my dear girl from view.

A minute later I heard a hum like the dropship’s EM repulsors, but when I looked up I saw only shadow. It could have been her circling. It could have been a low cloud in the night. The river pulled me south.

5

Father Captain de Soya deadheaded from Pacem System on the H.H.S. Raguel, an archangel-class cruiser similar to the ship he had been ordered to command. Killed by the terrible vortex of the classified instantaneous drive, known to Pax Fleet now as the Gideon drive, de Soya was resurrected in two days rather than the usual three—the resurrection chaplains taking the added risk of unsuccessful resurrection because of the urgency of the father-captain’s orders—and found himself at the Omicron₂-Epsilon₃ Pax Fleet Strategic Positioning Station orbiting a lifeless, rocky world spinning in the darkness beyond Epsilon Eridani in the Old Neighborhood, only a handful of light-years from where Old Earth had once existed.

De Soya was given one day to recover his faculties and was then shuttled to the Omicron₂-Epsilon₃ fleet staging area, a hundred thousand klicks out from the military base. The midshipman piloting the wasp-shuttle went out of his way to give Father Captain de Soya a good look at his new command, and—despite himself—de Soya was thrilled with what he saw.

The H.H.S. Raphael was obviously state-of-the-art technology, no longer derivative—as all of the previous Pax ships de Soya had seen had been—of rediscovered Hegemony designs from before the Fall. The overall design seemed too lean for practical vacuum work and too complicated for atmosphere, but the overall effect was one of streamlined lethality. The hull was a composite of morphable alloys and areas of pure fixed energy, allowing rapid shape and function changes that would have been impossible a few years before. As the shuttle passed the Raphael in a long, slow ballistic arc, de Soya watched the exterior of the long ship go from chrome silver to a stealth matte black, essentially disappearing from view.

At the same time, several of the instrument booms and living cubbies were swallowed by the smooth central hull, until only weapons’ blisters and containment field probes remained. Either the ship was preparing for out-system translation checks, or the officers aboard knew very well that the passing wasp carried their new commander and they were showing off a bit.

De Soya knew that both assumptions were almost certainly true.

Before the cruiser blacked into oblivion, de Soya noticed how the fusion drive spheres had been clustered like pearls around the central ship’s axis rather than concentrated in a single swelling such as on his old torchship, the Balthasar. He also noticed how much smaller the hexagonal Gideon-drive array was on this ship than on the prototype Raphael. His last glimpse before the ship became invisible was of the lights glowing from the retracted, translucent living cubbies and the clear dome of the command deck.

During combat, de Soya knew from his reading on Pacem and the RNA-instructional injections he had received at Pax Fleet headquarters that these clear areas would morph thicker, armored epidermises, but de Soya had always enjoyed a view and would appreciate the window into space.

“Coming up on the Uriel, sir,” said the midshipman pilot.

De Soya nodded. The H.H.S. Uriel seemed a near-clone of the new Raphael, but as the wasp-shuttle decelerated closer, the father-captain could pick out the extra omega-knife generators, the added, glowing conference cubbies, and the more elaborate com antennae that made this vessel the flagship of the task force.

“Docking warning, sir,” said the midshipman.

De Soya nodded and took his seat on the number-two acceleration couch. The mating was smooth enough that he felt no jolt whatsoever as the connection clamps closed and the ship’s skin and umbilicals morphed around the shuttle. De Soya was tempted to praise the young midshipman, but old habits of command reasserted themselves.

“Next time,” he said, “try the final approach without the last-second flare. It’s showing off and the brass on a flagship frown on it.”

The young pilot’s face fell.

De Soya set his hand on her shoulder.

“Other than that, good job. I’d have you aboard my ship as a dropship pilot anyday.”

The crestfallen midshipman brightened. “I could only wish, sir. This station duty…” She stopped, realizing that she had gone too far.

“I know,” said de Soya, standing by the cycling lock. “I know. But for now, be glad that you’re not part of this Crusade.”

The lock cycled open and an honor guard whistled him aboard the H.H.S. Uriel—the archangel, if Father Captain de Soya remembered correctly, that the Old Testament had described as the leader of the heavenly hosts of angels. Ninety light-years away, in a star system only three light-years from Pacem, the original Raphael translated into real space with a violence that would have spit marrow from human bones, sliced through human cells like a hot blade through radiant gossamers, and scrambled human neurons like loose marbles on a steep hillside. Rhadamanth Nemes and her clone-siblings did not enjoy the sensation, but neither did they cry out nor grimace.

“Where is this place?” said Nemes, watching a brown planet grow in the viewscreen.

Raphael was decelerating under 230 gravities. Nemes did not sit in the acceleration couch, but she did hang on to a stanchion with the casual ease of a commuter on her way to work in a crowded groundbus.

“Svoboda,” said one of her two male siblings.

Nemes nodded. None of the four spoke again until the archangel was in orbit and the dropship detached and howling through thin air.

“He’ll be here?” asked Nemes.

Microfilaments ran from her temples directly into the dropship console.

“Oh, yes,” said Nemes’s twin sister.

A few humans lived on Svoboda, but since the Fall they had huddled in forcefield domes in the twilight zone and did not have the technology to track the archangel or its dropship. There were no Pax bases in this system. Meanwhile, the sunward side of the rocky world boiled until lead ran like water, and on the dark side the thin atmosphere hovered on the edge of freezing. Beneath the useless planet, however, ran more than eight hundred thousand kilometers of tunnels, each corridor a perfect thirty meters square. Svoboda was one of nine Labyrinthine worlds discovered in the early days of the Hegira and explored during the Hegemony. Hyperion had been another of the nine worlds. No human—alive or dead—knew the secret of the Labyrinths or their creators.

Nemes piloted the dropship through a pelting ammonia storm on the dark side, hovered an instant before an ice cliff visible only on infrared and amplification screens, and then folded the ship’s wings in and guided it forward into the square opening of the Labyrinth entrance. This tunnel turned once and then stretched straight on for kilometers. Deep radar showed a honeycomb of other passages beneath it. Nemes flew forward three klicks, turned left at the first junction of tunnels, dropped half a kilometer from the surface while traveling five klicks south, and then landed the ship.

Here the infrared showed only trace heat from lava vents and the amplifiers showed nothing on the viewscreen. Frowning at the return on the radar displays, Nemes flipped on the dropship’s exterior lights. For as far as she could see down the infinitely straight corridor, the walls of the tunnel had been carved into a row of horizontal stone slabs. On each slab was a naked human body. The slabs and bodies continued on and on into darkness. Nemes glanced at the deep radar display: the lower levels were also striated with slabs and bodies.

“Outside,” said the male sibling who had pulled Nemes from the lava on God’s Grove.

Nemes did not bother with the air lock. Atmosphere rushed out of the dropship with a dying roar. There was a hint of pressure in the cavern—enough that she would not have to phase-shift to survive—but the air was thinner than Mars had been before it was terraformed. Nemes’s personal sensors indicated that the temperature was steady at minus 162 degrees centigrade.

A human figure was outside waiting in the dropship’s floodlights. “Good evening,” said Councillor Albedo. The tall man was impeccably dressed in a gray suit tailored to Pacem tastes. He communicated directly on the 75-megahertz band. Albedo’s mouth did not move, but his perfect teeth were visible in a smile. Nemes and her siblings waited. She knew that there would be no further reprimands or punishment. The Three Sectors wanted her alive and functioning. “The girl, Aenea, has returned to Pax space,” said Albedo.

“Where?” said Nemes’s female sibling. There was something like eagerness between the flat tones of her voice. Councillor Albedo opened his hands.

“The portal…” began Nemes.

“Tells us nothing this time,” said Councillor Albedo. His smile had not wavered. Nemes frowned at this.

During all the centuries of the Hegemony’s WorldWeb, the Three Sectors of Consciousness of the Core had not found a way to use the Void portal—that instantaneous interface that humans had known as farcasters—without leaving a record of modulated neutrinos in the fold matrix. “The Something Else…” she said.

“Of course,” said Albedo. He flicked his hand as if discarding the useless segment of this conversation. “But we can still register the connection. We feel sure that the girl is among those returning from Old Earth via the old farcaster network.”

“There are others?” said one of the males.

Albedo nodded. “A few at first. More now. At least fifty activations at last count.”

Nemes folded her arms. “Do you think the Something Else is terminating the Old Earth experiment?”

“No,” said Albedo. He walked over to the nearest slab and looked down at the naked human body on it. It had been a young woman, no more than seventeen or eighteen standard years old.

She had red hair. White frost lay on her pale skin and open eyes. “No,” he said again.

“The Sectors agree that it is just Aenea’s group returning.”

“How do we find her?” said Nemes’s female sibling, obviously musing aloud on the 75-megahertz band.

“We can translate to every world that had a farcaster during the Hegemony and interrogate the farcaster portals in person.”

Albedo nodded. “The Something Else can conceal the farcast destinations,” he said, “but the Core is almost certain that it cannot hide the fact of the matrix fold itself.”

Almost certain. Nemes noted that unusual modifier of TechnoCore perceptions.

“We want you…” began Albedo, pointing at the female sibling. “The Stable Sector did not give you a name, did it?”

“No,” said Nemes’s twin. Limp, dark bangs fell over the pale forehead. No smile touched the thin lips.

Albedo chuckled on the 75-megahertz band.

“Rhadamanth Nemes needed a name to pass as a human crewmate on the Raphael. I think that the rest of you should be named, if just for my convenience.” He pointed at the female. “Scylla.” Stabbing his finger at each of the males in turn, he said, “Gyges. Briareus.”

None of the three responded to their christenings, but Nemes folded her arms and said, “Does this amuse you, Councillor?”

“Yes,” said Albedo.

Around them, the atmosphere vented from the dropship curled and broiled like a wicked fog.

The male now named Briareus said, “We’ll keep this archangel for transport and begin searching all the old Web worlds, beginning, I assume, with the River Tethys planets.”

“Yes,” said Albedo.

Scylla tapped her nails on the frozen fabric of her jumpsuit. “Four ships, the search would go four times as fast.”

“Obviously,” said Albedo. “There are several reasons we have decided against that—the first being that the Pax has few of these archangel ships free to loan.”

Nemes raised an eyebrow. “And when has the Core asked the Pax for loans?”

“Since we need their money and their factories and their human resources to build the ships,” said Albedo without emphasis. “The second—and final—reason is that we want the four of you together in case you encounter someone or something impossible for one of you to handle.”

Nemes’s eyebrow stayed up. She expected some reference to her failure on God’s Grove, but it was Gyges who spoke. “What in the Pax could we not handle, Councillor?”

Again the man in gray opened his hands. Behind him, the curling vapors of fog first obscured and then revealed the pale bodies on slabs. “The Shrike,” he said.

Nemes made a rude noise on the 75-megahertz band. “I beat the thing single-handedly,” she said.

Albedo shook his head. The maddening smile stayed fixed. “No,” he said. “You did not. You used the hyperentropic device with which we supplied you to send it five minutes into the future. That is not the same as beating it.”

Briareus said, “The Shrike is no longer under the control of the UI?”

Albedo opened his hands a final time. “The gods of the future no longer whisper to us, my expensive friend. They war among themselves and the clamor of their battle echoes back through time. If our god’s work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.” He looked at the four clone-siblings. “Are we clear on instructions?”

“Find the girl,” said Scylla.

“And?” said the Councillor.

“Kill her at once,” said Gyges. “No hesitation.”

“And if her disciples intervene?” said Albedo, smiling more broadly now, his voice the caricature of a human schoolteacher’s.

“Kill them,” said Briareus.

“And if the Shrike appears?” he said, the smile suddenly fading.

“Destroy it,” said Nemes.

Albedo nodded. “Any final questions before we go our separate ways?”

Scylla said, “How many humans are here?” She gestured toward the slabs and bodies.

Councillor Albedo touched his chin. “A few tens of millions on this Labyrinthine world, in this section of tunnels. But there are many more tunnels here.” He smiled again. “And eight more Labyrinth worlds.” Nemes slowly turned her head, viewing the swirling fog and receding line of stone slabs on various levels of the spectrum. None of the bodies showed any sign of heat above the ambient temperature of the tunnel.

“And this is the Pax’s work,” she said.

Albedo chuckled on the 75-megahertz band. “Of course,” he said. “Why would the Three Sectors of Consciousness or our future UI want to stockpile human bodies?” He walked over to the body of the young woman and tapped her frozen breast. The air in the cavern was far too thin to carry sound, but Nemes imagined the noise of cold marble being tapped by fingernails.

“Any more questions?” said Albedo. “I have an important meeting.”

Without a word on the 75-megahertz band—or any other band—the four siblings turned and reentered the dropship.

Gathered on the circular tactical conference center blister of the H.H.S. Uriel were twenty Pax Fleet officers, including all of the captains and executive officers of Task Force GIDEON. Among those executive officers was Commander Hoagan “Hoag” Liebler. Thirty-six standard years old, born-again since his baptism on Renaissance Minor, the scion of the once-great Liebler Freehold family whose estate covered some two million hectares—and whose current debt ran to almost five marks per hectare—Liebler had dedicated his private life to serving the Church and given his professional life to Pax Fleet. He was also a spy and a potential assassin. Liebler had looked up with interest as his new commanding officer was piped aboard the Uriel.

Everyone in the task force—almost everyone in Pax Fleet—had heard of Father Captain de Soya. The former torchship CO had been granted a papal diskey—meaning almost unlimited authority—for some secret project five standard years earlier, and then had failed at his mission. No one was sure what that mission had been, but de Soya’s use of that diskey had made enemies among Fleet officers across the Pax. The father-captain’s subsequent failure and disappearance had been cause for more rumor in the wardrooms and Fleet staff rooms: the most accepted theory was that de Soya had been turned over to the Holy Office, had been quietly excommunicated, and probably executed.

But now here he was, given command of one of the most treasured assets in Pax Fleet’s arsenal: one of the twenty-one operational archangel cruisers.

Liebler was surprised at de Soya’s appearance: the father-captain was short, dark-haired, with large, sad eyes more appropriate to the icon of a martyred saint than to the skipper of a battlecruiser. Introductions were made quickly by Admiral Aldikacti, the stocky Lusian in charge of both this meeting and the task force.

“Father Captain de Soya,” said Aldikacti as de Soya took his place at the gray, circular table within the gray, circular room, “I believe you know some of these officers.”

The Admiral was famous for her lack of tact as well as for her ferocity in battle.

“Mother Captain Stone is an old friend,” said de Soya, nodding toward his former executive officer. “Captain Hearn was a member of my last task force, and I have met Captain Sati and Captain Lempriere. I have also had the privilege of working with Commanders Uchikawa and Barnes-Avne.”

Admiral Aldikacti grunted. “Commander Barnes-Avne is here representing the Marine and Swiss Guard presence on Task Force GIDEON,” she said. “Have you met your exec, Father Captain de Soya?”

The priest-captain shook his head and Aldikacti introduced Liebler. The commander was surprised at the firmness in the diminutive father-captain’s grip and the authority in the other man’s gaze. Eyes of a martyr or no, thought Hoag Liebler, this man is used to command.

“All right,” growled Admiral Aldikacti, “let’s get started. Captain Sati will present the briefing.”

For the next twenty minutes, the conference blister was fogged with holos and trajectory overlays.

Comlogs and ’scribers filled with data and scribbled notes. Sati’s soft voice was the only sound except for the rare question or request for clarification.

Liebler jotted his own notes, surprised at the scope of Task Force GIDEON’s mission, and busy at the work of any executive officer—getting down all the salient facts and details that the captain might want to review later. GIDEON was the first task force made up completely of archangel-class cruisers.

Seven of the archangels had been tasked to this mission. Conventional Hawking-class torchships had been dispatched months earlier to rendezvous with them at their first sally point in the Outback some twenty light-years beyond the Great Wall defensive sphere so as to participate in a mock battle, but after that first jump, the task force of seven ships would be operating independently.

“A good metaphor would be General Sherman’s march through Georgia in the pre-Hegira North American Civil War in the nineteenth century,” said Captain Sati, sending half the officers at the table tapping at their comlog diskeys to bring up that arcane bit of military history.

“Previously,” continued Sati, “our battles with the Ousters have either been in the Great Wall no-man’s-land, or on the fringes of either Pax or Ouster space. There have been very few deep-penetration raids into Ouster territory.” Sati paused in his briefing.

“Father Captain de Soya’s Task Force MAGI some five standard years ago was one of the deepest of those raids.”

“Any comments about it, Father Captain?” said Admiral Aldikacti.

De Soya hesitated a moment. “We burned an orbital forest ring,” he said at last. “There was no resistance.”

Hoag Liebler thought that the father-captain’s voice sounded vaguely ashamed.

Sati nodded as if satisfied. “That’s what we hope will be the case for this entire mission. Our intelligence suggests that the Ousters have deployed the vast bulk of their defensive forces along the sphere of the Great Wall, leaving very little in the way of armed resistance through the heart of their colonized areas beyond the Pax. For almost three centuries they have positioned their forces, their bases, and their home systems with the limitations of Hawking-drive technology as the primary determining factor.”

Tactical holos filled the conference blister.

“The grand cliché,” continued Sati, “is that the Pax has had the advantage of interior lines of transport and communication, while the Ousters have had the defensive strength of concealment and distance. Penetration deep into Ouster space has been all but impossible due to the vulnerability of our supply lines and their willingness to cut and run before our superior strength, attacking later—often with devastating effect—when our task forces venture too far from the Great Wall.”

Sati paused and looked at the officers around the table. “Gentlemen and ladies, those days are over.” More holos misted into solidity, the red line of Task Force GIDEON’s trajectory out from and back to the Pax sphere slicing between suns like a laser knife.

“Our mission is to destroy every in-system Ouster supply base and deep-space colony we encounter,” said Sati, his soft voice taking on strength. “Comet farms, can cities, boondoggles, torus bases, L-point clusters, orbital forest rings, birthing asteroids, bubble hives… everything.”

“Including civilian angels?” asked Father Captain de Soya. Hoag Liebler blinked at his CO’s question.

Pax Fleet informally referred to the space-tailored DNA-altered mutants as “Lucifer’s angels,” usually shortened to “angels” in an irony bordering on blasphemy, but the phrase was rarely used before the high brass.

Admiral Aldikacti answered. “Especially angels, Father Captain. His Holiness, Pope Urban, has declared this a Crusade against the inhuman travesties the Ousters are breeding out there in the darkness. His Holiness has stated in his Crusade Encyclical that these unholy mutations are to be eliminated from God’s universe. There are no civilian Ousters. Do you have a problem understanding this directive, Father Captain de Soya?”

Officers around the table seemed to hold their breaths until de Soya finally answered.

“No, Admiral Aldikacti. I understand His Holiness’s encyclical.”

The briefing continued. “These archangel-class cruisers will be involved,” said Sati. “His Holiness’s Ship Uriel as flagship, the Raphael, the Michael, the Gabriel, the Raguel, the Remiel, and the Sariel. In each case, the ships will use their Gideon drives to make the instantaneous jump to the next system, will take two days or more to decelerate in-system, thus allowing time for crew resurrection. His Holiness has granted us dispensation to use the new two-day resurrection-cycle créches… which offer a ninety-two percent probability of resurrection. After regrouping the attack force, we will do maximum damage to all Ouster forces and installations before translating to the next system. Any Pax ship damaged beyond repair will be abandoned, the crew transferred to other ships in the task force, and the cruiser destroyed. No chances will be taken with the Ousters capturing Gideon-drive technology, even though it would be useless to them without the Sacrament of Resurrection. The mission should extend some three standard months. Any questions?”

Father Captain de Soya raised his hand. “I have to apologize,” he said, “I’ve been out of touch for several standard years, but I notice that this task force is made up of archangel-class ships named after archangels referred to by name in the Old Testament.”

“Yes, Father Captain?” prompted Admiral Aldikacti. “Your question?”

“Just this, Admiral. I seem to remember that there were only seven archangels referred to by name in the Bible. What about the rest of the archangel-class ships that have come online?”

There was chuckling around the long table and de Soya could see that he had cut the tension much as he had planned.

Smiling, Admiral Aldikacti said, “We welcome our prodigal captain back and inform him that the Vatican theologians have searched the Book of Enoch and the rest of the pseudepigrapha to find these other angels which might be promoted to “honorary archangel,” and the Holy Office itself has authorized dispensation in Pax Fleet’s use of their names. We found it… ah… appropriate… that the first seven planet-class archangels built be named after those listed in the Bible and should carry their sacred fire to the enemy.”

The chuckling turned to sounds of approval and finally to soft applause among the commanders and their execs.

There were no other questions. Admiral Aldikacti said, “Oh, one other detail, if you see this ship…” A holo of a strange-looking starship floated above the center of the table. The thing was small by Pax Fleet standards, was streamlined as if built to enter atmosphere, and had fins near the fusion ports.

“What is it?” said Mother Captain Stone, still smiling from the good feeling in the room. “Some Ouster joke?”

“No,” said Father Captain de Soya in a soft monotone, “it’s Web-era technology. A private starship… owned by an individual.”

A few executive officers chuckled again. Admiral Aldikacti stopped the laughter by waving her thick hand through the holo. “The father-captain is correct,” rumbled the Lusian admiral. “It’s an old Web-era ship, once owned by a diplomat of the Hegemony.” She shook her head. “They had the wealth to make such gestures then. Anyway, it has a Hawking drive modified by Ouster technicians, may well be armed, and must be considered as dangerous.”

“What do we do if we encounter it?” asked Mother Captain Stone. “Take it as a prize?”

“No,” said Admiral Aldikacti. “Destroy it on sight. Slag it to vapor. Any questions?”

There were none. The officers dispersed to their ships to prepare for the initial translation. On the wasp-shuttle ride back to the Raphael, XO Hoag Liebler chatted pleasantly with his new captain about the ship’s readiness and crew’s high morale, all the while thinking, I hope I don’t have to kill this man.

6

It has been my experience that immediately after certain traumatic separations—leaving one’s family to go to war, for instance, or upon the death of a family member, or after parting from one’s beloved with no assurances of reunion—there is a strange calmness, almost a sense of relief, as if the worst has happened and nothing else need be dreaded. So it was with the rainy, predawn morning on which I left Aenea on Old Earth.

The kayak that I paddled was small and the Mississippi River was large. At first, in the darkness, I paddled with an intense alertness that was close to fear, adrenaline-driven, eyes straining to make out snags and sandbars and drifting flotsam on the raging current. The river was very wide there, the better part of a mile, I guessed—the Old Architect had used the archaic English units of length and distance, feet, yards, miles, and most of us at Taliesin had fallen into the habit of imitating him—and the banks of the river looked flooded, with dead trees showing where the waters had risen hundreds of meters from the original banks, pushing the river to high bluffs on both sides.

An hour or so after I had parted from my friend, the light came up slowly, first showing the separation of gray cloud and black-gray bluff to my left, then casting a flat, cold light on the surface of the river itself. I had been right to be afraid in the dark: the river was snarled with snags and long fingers of sandbars; large, waterlogged trees with hydra heads of roots raged past me on the center currents, smashing anything in their way with the force of giant battering rams. I selected what I hoped was the most forgiving current, paddled strongly to stay out of the way of floating debris, and tried to enjoy the sunrise.

All that morning I paddled south, seeing no sign of human habitation on either bank except for a single parting glimpse of ancient, once-white buildings drowned amid the dead trees and brackish waters in what had once been the western bank and was now a swamp at the base of the bluffs there. Twice I put ashore on islands: once to relieve myself and the second time to store away the small backpack that was my only luggage. During this second stop—late in the morning with the sun warming the river and me—I sat on a log on the sandy bank and ate one of the cold meat and mustard sandwiches that Aenea had made for me during the night. I had brought two water bottles—one to fit on my belt, the other to stay in my pack—and I drank with moderation, not knowing if the water of the Mississippi was fit to drink and also not knowing when I would find a safe supply. It was afternoon when I saw the city and the arch ahead of me.

Sometime before, a second river had joined the Mississippi on my right, widening the channel significantly. I was sure that it must be the Missouri, and when I queried the comlog, the ship’s memory confirmed my hunch. It was not long after that when I saw the arch.

This farcaster portal looked different than the ones we had transited during our trip out to Old Earth: larger, older, duller, more rust-streaked. It may have once been high and dry on the west bank of the river, but now the metal of the arch rose out of waters hundreds of meters from shore. Skeletal remnants of drowned buildings—low “skyscrapers” from pre-Hegira days according to my newly informed architectural sensibilities—also rose from the sluggish waters.

“St. Louis,” said the comlog bracelet when I queried the ship’s AI. “Destroyed even before the Tribulations. Abandoned before the Big Mistake of ’08.”

“Destroyed?” I said, aiming the kayak toward the giant hoop of the arch and seeing for the first time how the west bank behind it curved around in a perfect semicircle, forming a shallow lake. Ancient trees lined the sharp arc of the shore. An impact crater, I thought, although meteor crater or bomb crater or power-source meltdown or some other variety of violent event, I could not tell. “How destroyed?” I said to the comlog.

“No information,” said the bracelet. “However I do have a data entry which correlates with the arch ahead of us.”

“It’s a farcaster portal, isn’t it?” I said, fighting the strong current here on the west side of the main channel to aim the kayak at the east-facing arch.

“Not originally,” said the soft voice on my wrist. “The size and orientation of the artifact coincide with position and dimensions of the so-called Gateway Arch, an architectural oddity built in the city of St. Louis during the time of the United States of America nation-state in the mid-twentieth century A.D. It was meant to symbolize western expansion of the hegemonic, Euro-descended proto-nationalist pioneers who migrated through here in their effort to displace the original, pre-Preserve, NorthAm indigenies.”

“The Indians,” I said, panting as I paddled the bobbing kayak through the last conflicting current and got us lined up with the huge arch. There had been an hour or two of rich sunlight, but now the cold wind and gray clouds had returned.

Raindrops pattered on the fiberglass of the kayak and rippled the wavetops on either side. The current now carried the kayak toward the center of the arch, and I rested the paddle a moment, making sure not to hit the mysterious red button by accident. “So this farcaster portal was built to honor the people who killed the Indians,” I said, leaning forward on my elbows.

“The original Gateway Arch had no farcaster function,” the ship’s voice said primly.

“Did it survive the disaster that… did this?” I said, pointing the paddle at the impact-crater lake and its assortment of flooded buildings.

“No information,” said the comlog.

“And you don’t know if it’s a farcaster?” I said, panting again as I paddled hard. The arch loomed high above us now, at least a hundred meters to its apex. The winterish sunlight glinted dully on its rusted sides.

“No,” said the ship’s memory. “There is no record of any farcaster on Old Earth.”

Of course there would be no such record. Old Earth had collapsed into the Big Mistake black hole—or been kidnapped by the Lions and Tigers and Bears—at least a century and a half before the TechnoCore had given the old Hegemony farcaster technology.

But there had been a small but very functional farcaster arch over that river—creek, actually—in western Pennsylvania where Aenea and I had ’cast from God’s Grove four years earlier. And I had seen others in my travels.

“Well,” I said, more to myself than to the idiot comlog AI, “if this isn’t it, we’ll just continue on downriver. Aenea had a reason for launching us where she did.”

I was not so sure. There was no telltale farcaster shimmer under this arch—no glimpse of sunlight or starlight beyond. Just the darkening sky and the black band of forest on the shoreline beyond the lake.

I leaned back and looked up at the arch, shocked to see panels missing, steel ribs showing. The kayak had already passed beneath it and there was no transition, no sudden shift of light and gravity and alien scents. This thing was nothing more than a broken-down old architectural freak that just happened to resemble a…

Everything changed.

One second the kayak and I were bobbing on the windswept Mississippi, heading into the shallow crater lake that had been the city of St. Louis, and the next instant it was night and the little fiberglass boat and I were sliding along a narrow canal between canyons of lighted buildings under a dark skylight half a kilometer or more above my head. “Jesus,” I whispered.

“An ancient messiah figure,” said the comlog. “Religions based on his purported teachings include Christianity, Zen-Christianity, ancient and modern Catholicism, and such Protestant sects as…”

“Shut up,” I said. “Good child mode.” This command had the comlog speak only when spoken to. There were other people boating on this canal, if canal it was. Scores of rowboats and tiny sailboats and other kayaks moved upriver and down. Close by, on riverwalks and esplanades, on skyways crisscrossing above the well-lighted waters, hundreds more walked in pairs and small groups. Stocky individuals in bright garments jogged alone.

I felt the gravity weigh my arms as I tried to lift the kayak paddle—at least half-again Earth’s was my immediate impression—and I slowly lifted my face to the view of those hundreds—thousands—of lighted windows and turrets, walkways and balconies and landing pads, of more lights as chrome-silver trains hummed softly through clear tubes above the river, as EMV’s sliced through the air overhead, as levitation platforms and sky ferries carried people back and forth across this incredible canyon… and I knew.

Lusus. This had to be Lusus.

I had met Lusians before: rich hunters come to Hyperion to shoot ducks or demi-gyres, richer offworld gamblers slumming in the Nine Tails casinos where I had worked as a bouncer, even a few expatriates in our Home Guard unit, felons fleeing Pax justice most likely. They all had the high-g, low-profile look of these short, stocky, prominently muscled joggers who chugged by on the riverwalks and esplanades like some primitive but powerful steam machines. No one seemed to be paying any attention to my kayak or me. This surprised me: from these natives’ perspectives, I must have appeared from nowhere, materializing under the farcaster portal behind me.

I looked back and understood why my appearance might have gone unnoticed. The farcaster portal was old, of course, part of the fallen Hegemony and of the former River Tethys, and the arch had been built into the Hive city walls—platforms and walkways studding and overhanging the slender portal—so that the segment of canal or river directly under the arch was the only visible section of this indoor city that lay in deep shadow. Even as I glanced back, a small motorboat glided out of that shadow, caught the glow of the sodium-vapor lights that overhung the river walkway, and seemed to pop into existence just as I had half a moment earlier.

Bulked up as I was in sweater and jacket, tightly tucked into the nylon skirt of my little kayak cockpit, I probably looked as stocky as the Lusians I saw on either side of me. A man and woman on jet skis waved as they hissed past.

I waved back. “Jesus,” I whispered again, more in prayer than blasphemy. This time the comlog made no comment. I will interrupt myself here. My temptation at this point in the telling, despite the hurry-up incentive of cyanide gas hissing into the Schrödinger cat box at any moment, was to describe my interworld odyssey in great detail. It was, in truth, as close as I had come to true adventure since Aenea and I had arrived at the safety of Old Earth four standard years earlier.

In the thirty-some standard hours since Aenea had peremptorily announced my imminent departure by farcaster, I had naturally assumed that the voyage would be similar to our former trip—from Renaissance Vector to Old Earth, our voyage had been through empty or abandoned landscapes via worlds such as Hebron, New Mecca, God’s Grove, and unnamed worlds such as the jungle planet on which we had left the Consul’s ship in hiding. On one of the few planets where we had encountered inhabitants—ironically on Mare Infinitus, the sparsely settled ocean world—the contact had been catastrophic for everyone involved: I had blown up most of their floating platform; they had captured me, stabbed me, shot me, and almost drowned me. In the process, I had lost some of the most valuable things we had taken on the trip, including the ancient hawking mat that had been handed down since the days of the Siri and Merin legend and the equally ancient .45 caliber handgun that I had wanted to believe once belonged to Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia.

But for the majority of our voyage, the River Tethys had carried Aenea, A. Bettik, and me through empty landscapes—ominously empty on Hebron and New Mecca, as if some terror had carried away the populations—and we had been left alone.

Not here. Lusus was alive and seething. For the first time, I understood why these planetary honeycombs were called Hives.

Traveling together through unpopulated regions, the girl, the android, and I had been left to our own devices. Now, alone and essentially unarmed in my little kayak, I found myself waving to Pax police and born-again Lusian priests who strolled by. The canal was no more than thirty meters wide here, concrete and plastic-lined, with no tributaries or hiding places. There were shadows under the bridges and overpasses, just as under the farcaster portal upriver, but river traffic moved through these shadowy places in a constant flow. No place to hide.

For the first time I considered the insanity of farcaster travel. My clothes would be out of place, drawing immediate attention as soon as I stepped out of the kayak. My body type was wrong. My Hyperion-bred dialect would be strange. I had no money, no identity chip, no EMV license or credit cards, no Pax parish papers or place of residence. Stopping the kayak for a minute by a riverside bar—the smell of grilled steak or similar fare wafting out on fans and making me salivate with hunger, the yeast tang hinting of brewery vats and cold beer on the same breeze—I realized that I would almost certainly be arrested two minutes after going into such a place.

People traveled between worlds in the Pax—millionaires mostly, businesspeople and adventurers willing to spend months in cryogenic sleep and years of time-debt traveling by Mercantilus transport between the stars, smug in their cruciform certainty that job and home and family would be waiting in their steady-state Christian universe when they returned—but it was rare, and no one traveled between worlds without money and Pax permission. Two minutes after I sauntered into the café or bar or restaurant or whatever it was, someone would probably call the local police or the Pax military. Their first search would show me crossless—a heathen in a born-again Christian universe.

Licking my lips, my stomach growling, arms weary from fatigue and the extra gravity there, eyes tearing from lack of sleep and deep frustration, I paddled away from the riverside café and continued downriver, hoping that the next farcaster would be nearer rather than far.

And here I resist the temptation to tell of all the marvelous sights and sounds, the strange people glimpsed and close encounters chanced. I had never been on a world as settled, as crowded, as interior as Lusus, and I could have easily spent a month exploring the bustling Hive I glimpsed from the concrete-channeled river. After six hours traveling downstream in the canal on Lusus, I paddled under the welcomed arch and emerged on Freude, a bustling, heavily populated world that I knew little about and could not even have identified if it had not been for the comlog’s navigational files. Here I finally slept, the kayak hidden in a five-meter-high sewer pipe, me curled up under tendrils of industrial fiberplastic caught in a wire fence. I slept a full standard day and night around on Freude, but there the days were thirty-nine standard hours long and it was only evening of the day I arrived when I found the next arch, less than five klicks downriver, and translated again.

From sunny Freude, populated by Pax citizens in elaborate harlequin fabrics and bright capes, the river took me to Nevermore with its brooding villages carved into rock and its stone castles perched on canyon sides under perpetually gloomy skies. At night on Nevermore, comets streaked the heavens and crowlike flying creatures—more giant bats than birds—flapped leathery wings low above the river and blotted out the comets’ glow with their black bodies. I was hailed by commercial rafters there, and hailed them back, all the while paddling away toward a stretch of white water that almost flipped my kayak and certainly taxed all of my fledgling kayaker’s skills. Sirens were hooting from the gimlet-eyed castles on Nevermore when I paddled furiously under the next farcaster portal and found myself sweltering in the desert sunshine of a busy little world the comlog told me was called Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. I had never heard of it, not even in the old Hegemony-era atlases that Grandam had kept in her travel caravan, and which I had crept in to study by glow wand whenever I could.

The River Tethys had taken Aenea, A. Bettik, and me through desert planets on the way out to Old Earth, but these had been the oddly empty worlds of Hebron and New Mecca—their deserts devoid of life, their cities abandoned. But here on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, adobe-style houses huddled by the river’s edge, and every klick or so I would encounter a levy or lock where most of the water was being siphoned away for irrigation to the green fields that followed the river’s course. Luckily the river served as the main street and central highway here, and I had emerged from the ancient farcaster arch’s shadow in the lee of a massive barge, so I continued paddling blandly on in the midst of bustling river traffic—skiffs, rafts, barges, tugs, electric powerboats, house boats, and even the occasional EM levitation barge moving three or four meters above the river’s surface.

The gravity was light here, probably less than two thirds of Old Earth’s or Hyperion’s, and at times I thought that my paddle strokes were going to lift the kayak and me right out of the water. But if the gravity was light, the light—sunlight—as heavy on me as a giant, sweaty palm. Within half an hour of paddling, I had depleted the last of my second water bottle and knew that I would have to set in to find a drink. One would think on a world of lesser gravity that the denizens would be beanpoles—the vertical antithesis of the Lusian barrel shape—but most of the men, women, and children I saw in the busy lanes and towpaths along the river were almost as short and stocky as Lusians. Their clothing was as bright as the harlequin motley on the residents of Freude, but here each person wore a single brilliant hue—tight bodysuits of head-to-toe crimson, cloaks and capes of intense cerulean, gowns and suits of eye-piercing emerald with elaborate emerald hats and scarves, flowing trains of yellow chiffon and bright amber turbans. I realized that the doors and shutters of the adobe homes, shops, and inns were also painted in these distinctive colors and wondered what the significance might be—caste? Political preference? Social or economic status? Some sort of kinship signal? Whatever it was, I would not blend in when I went ashore to find a drink, dressed as I was all in dull khaki and weathered cotton. But it was either put ashore or die of thirst. Just past one of the many self-serve locks, I paddled to a pier, tied my bobbing kayak in place as a heavy barge exited the lock behind me, and walked toward a circular wood-and-adobe structure that I hoped was an artesian well. I had seen several of the women in saffron robes carrying what may have been water jugs from the thing, so I felt fairly safe in my guess as to function. What I had no confidence in was the odds that I could draw water there myself without violating some law, coda, caste rule, religious commandment, or local custom.

I had seen no visible Pax presence on the towpath or lanes—neither the black of priest nor the red and black of the standardized Pax police uniform—but that meant little. There were very few worlds, even in the Outback where the comlog informed me that Vitus-Gray-Balianus B lay, where the Pax did not have some definitive presence. I had covertly slipped the scabbard with my hunting knife from pack to back pocket under my vest, and my only plan was to use the blade to bluster an exit back to my boat if a mob formed. If Pax police arrived, with stunners or flechette pistols, my journey would be over.

It would soon be over—at least for a while—for vastly different reasons, but I had no warning—except for a backache that had been with me since before leaving Lusus—of that as I diffidently approached the well, if well it was.

It was a well.

No one reacted to my tall build or drab colors. No one—not even the children dressed in brilliant red and bright blue who paused in their game to give me a glance and then look away—interfered or seemed to notice the obvious stranger in their midst. As I drank deeply and then refilled both water bottles, I had the impression—from what source I do not know—that the inhabitants of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, or at least of this village along this stretch of the long-abandoned River Tethys farcaster-way, were simply too polite to point and stare or ask me my business. My feeling at that moment, as I capped the second bottle and turned to return to my kayak, was that a three-headed mutant alien or—to speak in the realm of the more real bizarre—that the Shrike itself could have drunk from that artesian well on that pleasant desert afternoon and not have been accosted or questioned by the citizens.

I had taken three steps on the dusty lane when the pain struck. First I doubled over, gasping in pain, unable to take a breath, and then I went to one knee, then onto my side. I curled up in agony. I would have screamed if the terrible pain had allowed me the breath and energy.

It did not. Gasping like a river fish tossed to this dusty bank, I curled tighter in a fetal position and rode waves of agony. I should say here that I was not a total stranger to pain and discomfort. When I was in the Home Guard, a study by the Hyperion military showed that most of the conscripts sent south to fight the Ice Claw rebels had little stomach for pain.

The city folks of the northern Aquila cities and the fancier Nine Tails towns had rarely, if ever, experienced any pain that they couldn’t banish by popping a pill or dialing up an autosurgeon or driving to their nearest doc-in-the-box.

As a shepherd and country boy, I had a bit more experience with tolerating pain: accidental knife cuts, a broken foot from a pakbrid stepping on me, bruises and contusions from falls far out in rock country, a concussion once while wrestling in the caravan rendezvous, boils from riding, even the fat lips and black eyes from campfire brawls during the Men’s Convocation.

And on the Iceshelf I had been hurt three times—twice cut from shrapnel after white mines had killed buddies, once lanced from a long-range sniper—that final wound serious enough to bring in a priest who all but demanded that I accept the cruciform before it was too late.

But I had never experienced pain like this.

Moaning, gasping, the polite citizenry finally falling back from this flopping apparition and being forced to take notice of the stranger, I lifted my wrist and demanded that the comlog tell me what was happening to me. It did not answer. Between waves of unbearable pain, I asked again. Still no answer. Then I remembered that I had the damn thing in good child mode. I called it by name and repeated the query.

“May I activate the dormant biosensor function, M. Endymion?” asked the idiot AI.

I had not known that the device had a biosensor function, dormant or otherwise. I made a rude noise of assent and doubled into a tighter fetal curl. It felt as if someone had stabbed me in the upper back and was twisting the hooked blade. Pain poured through me like current through a hot wire. I vomited into the dust. A beautiful woman in pure white robes took another step back and lifted one white sandal. “What is it?” I gasped again in the briefest of intervals between the stabbing pains. “What’s happening?” I demanded of the comlog. With my other hand, I felt my back, seeking out blood or an entrance wound. I expected to find an arrow or spear, but there was nothing.

“You are going into shock, M. Endymion,” said the lobotomized bit of the Consul ship’s AI. “Blood pressure, skin resistance, heart rate, and atropin count all support this.”

“Why?” I said again and drew the single syllable out into a long moan as the pain rolled from my back out and through my entire body. I retched again. My stomach was empty but the vomiting continued. The brightly clad citizens stayed their distance, never drawing into a curious crowd, never showing the bad manners of staring or murmuring, but obviously tarrying in their rounds.

“What’s wrong?” I gasped again, trying to whisper to the comlog bracelet. “What would cause this?”

“Gunshot,” returned the tiny, tinny voice. “Stab wound. Spear, knife, arrow, throwing dart. Energy weapon wound. Lance, laser, omega knife, pulse blade. Concentrated flechette strike. Perhaps a long, thin needle inserted through the upper kidney, liver, and spleen.”

Writhing in pain, I felt my back again, pulling my own knife scabbard out and casting it away. The outer vest and shirt under it felt unburned or blasted. No sharp objects protruded from my flesh.

The pain burned its way through me again and I moaned aloud. I had not done that when the sniper had lanced me on the Iceshelf or when Uncle Vanya’s ’brid had broken my foot.

I found it difficult to form complete thoughts, but the direction of my thinking was… the Vitus-Gray-Balianus B natives… somehow… mind power… poison… the water… invisible rays… punishing me… for…

I gave up the effort and moaned again. Someone in a bright blue skirt or toga and immaculate sandals, toenails painted blue, stepped closer. “Excuse me, sir,” said a soft voice in thickly accented old Web English. “But are you in difficulty?” Er ye en defficoolte? “Aaarrrgghhhggghuhh,” I said in response, punctuating the noise with more dry retching. “May I then be of assistance?” said the same soft voice from above the blue toga. Ez-sest-e? “Oh… ahhrrgghah… nnnrrehhakk,” I said and half swooned from the agony. Black dots danced in my vision until I could no longer see the sandals or blue toenails, but the terrible pain would not let go of me…

I could not escape into unconsciousness. Robes and togas rustled around me. I smelled perfume, cologne, soap… felt strong hands on my arms and legs and sides. Their attempt to lift me made the heated wire rip through my back and into the base of my skull.

7

The Grand Inquisitor had been ordered to appear with his aide for a papal audience at 0800 hours Vatican time. At 0752 hours, his black EMV arrived at the Via del Belvedere checkpoint entrance to the papal apartments. The Inquisitor and his aide, Father Farrell, were passed through detector portals and handheld sensors—first at the Swiss Guard checkpoint, then at the Palatine Guard station, and finally at the new Noble Guard post.

John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa, the Grand Inquisitor, gave the most subtle of looks to his aide as they were passed by this final checkpoint. The Noble Guard at this point seemed to consist of cloned twins—all thin men and women with lank hair, sallow complexions, and dead gazes. A millennium ago, Mustafa knew, the Swiss Guard had been the paid mercenary force for the Pope, the Palatine Guard had consisted of trusted locals, always of Roman birth, who provided an honor guard for His Holiness’s public appearances, and the Noble Guard had been chosen from aristocracy as a form of papal reward for loyalty. Today the Swiss Guard was the most elite of Pax Fleet’s regular forces, the Palatines had been reinstated only a year earlier by Pope Julius XIV, and now Pope Urban appeared to be relying upon this strange brotherhood of the new Noble Guard for his personal safety.

The Grand Inquisitor knew that the Noble Guard twins were indeed clones, early prototypes of the secret Legion in building, and vanguards of a new fighting force requested by the Pope and his Secretary of State and designed by the Core. The Inquisitor had paid dearly for this information, and he knew that his position—if not his life—might be forfeit if Lourdusamy or His Holiness discovered that he knew of it. Past the lower guard posts, with Father Farrell straightening his cassock after the search, Cardinal Mustafa waved away the papal assistant who offered to guide them upstairs. The Cardinal personally opened the door to the ancient lift that would take them to the papal apartments.

This private way to the Pope’s quarters actually began in the basement, since the reconstructed Vatican was built on a hill with the Via del Belvedere entrance beneath the usual ground floor. Rising in the creaking cage, Father Farrell nervously fidgeting with his ’scriber and folder of papers, the Grand Inquisitor relaxed as they passed the ground-floor courtyard of San Damaso. They passed the second floor with the fantastic Borgia Apartments and the Sistine Chapel. They creaked and groaned their way past the second floor with the papal state apartments, the Consistorial Hall, the library, the audience suite, and the beautiful Raphael Rooms. On the third floor they stopped and the cage doors slammed open.

Cardinal Lourdusamy and his aide, Monsignor Lucas Oddi, nodded and smiled. “Domenico,” said Lourdusamy, taking the Grand Inquisitor’s hand and squeezing it tightly.

“Simon Augustino,” said the Grand Inquisitor with a bow. So the Secretary of State was to be in this meeting. Mustafa had suspected and feared as much. Stepping out of the lift and walking with the others toward the papal private apartments, the Grand Inquisitor glanced down the hallway toward the offices of the Secretariat of State and—for the ten-thousandth time—envied this man’s access to the Pope.

The Pope met the party in the wide, brilliantly lit gallery that connected the Secretariat of State offices with the two stories of rooms that were the private domain of His Holiness. The usually serious Pontiff was smiling. This day he was dressed in a white-caped cassock with a white zucchetto on his head and a white fascia tied around his waist. His white shoes made only the slightest of whispering noises on the tiled floors. “Ah, Domenico,” said Pope Urban XVI as he extended his ring hand to be kissed. “Simon. How good of you to come.” Father Farrell and Monsignor Oddi waited on one knee for the Holy Father to turn to them so that they could kiss the Ring of St. Peter.

His Holiness looked well, thought the Grand Inquisitor, definitely younger and more rested than before his most recent death. The high forehead and burning eyes were the same, but Mustafa thought that there was something simultaneously more urgent and satisfied-looking about the resurrected Pope’s appearance this morning.

“We were just about to take our morning stroll in the garden,” said His Holiness. “Would you care to join us?”

The four men nodded and fell in with the Pope’s quick pace as he walked the length of the gallery and then climbed smooth, broad stairs to the roof.

His Holiness’s personal aides kept their distance, the Swiss Guard troopers at the entrance to the garden stood at rigid attention while staring straight ahead, Lourdusamy and the Grand Inquisitor walked only a pace behind the Holy Father, while Monsignor Oddi and Father Farrell kept pace two steps back.

The papal gardens consisted of a maze of flowered trellises, trickling fountains, perfectly trimmed hedges and topiaried trees from three hundred Pax worlds, stone walkways, and fantastic flowering shrubs. Above all this, a force-ten containment field—transparent from this side, opaqued to outside observers—provided both privacy and protection. Pacem’s sky was a brilliant, unclouded blue this morning.

“Do either of you remember,” began His Holiness, his cassock rustling as they walked briskly down the garden path, “when our sky here was yellow?”

Cardinal Lourdusamy produced the deep rumble that passed for a chuckle with him. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I remember when the sky was a sick yellow, the air was all but unbreathable, it was cold all the time, and the rain never ended. A marginal world then, Pacem. The only reason the old Hegemony ever allowed the Church to settle here.”

Pope Urban XVI smiled thinly and gestured toward the blue sky and warm sunlight. “So there has been some improvement during our time of service here, eh, Simon Augustino?” Both cardinals laughed softly. They had made a quick circuit of the rooftop, and now His Holiness took another route through the center of the garden. Stepping from stone to stone on the narrow path, the two cardinals and their aides followed the white-cassocked Pontiff in single file.

Suddenly His Holiness stopped and turned. A fountain burbled softly behind him. “You have heard,” he said, all jesting gone from his tone, “that Admiral Aldikacti’s task force has translated beyond the Great Wall?”

Both cardinals nodded.

“It is but the first of what will be many such incursions,” said the Holy Father. “We do not hope this… we do not predict this… we know this.”

The head of the Holy Office and the Secretary of State and their aides waited.

The Pope looked at each man in turn.

“This afternoon, my friends, we plan to travel to Castel Gandolfo…”

The Grand Inquisitor stopped himself from glancing upward, knowing that the papal asteroid could not be seen during the daytime. He knew that the Pontiff was speaking in the royal “we” and not inviting Lourdusamy and him to come along.

“… where we will pray and meditate for several days while composing our next encyclical,” continued the Pope. “It will be entitled Redemptor Hominis and it will be the most important document of our tenure as shepherd of our Holy Mother Church.”

The Grand Inquisitor bowed his head. The Redeemer of Mankind, he thought. It could be about anything.

When Cardinal Mustafa looked up, His Holiness was smiling as if reading his thoughts. “It will be about our sacred obligation to keep humanity human, Domenico,” said the Pope. “It will extend, clarify, and broaden what has become known as our Crusade Encyclical. It will define Our Lord’s wish… nay, commandment… that mankind remain in the form and visage of mankind, and not be defiled by deliberate mutation and mutilation.”

“The final solution to the Ouster problem,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy.

His Holiness nodded impatiently. “That and more. Redemptor Hominis will look at the Church’s role in defining the future, dear friends. In a sense, it will lay out a blueprint for the next thousand years.”

Mother of Mercy, thought the Grand Inquisitor.

“The Pax has been a useful instrument,” continued the Holy Father, “but in the days and months and years ahead, we will be laying the groundwork for the way in which the Church shall become more active in the daily lives of all Christians.”

Bringing the Pax worlds more closely under control, interpreted the Grand Inquisitor, his eyes still lowered in thoughtful attention to the Pope’s words. But how… with what mechanism? Pope Urban XVI smiled again. Cardinal Mustafa noticed, not for the first time, that the Holy Father’s smiles never reached his pained and wary eyes. “Upon the release of the encyclical,” said His Holiness, “you may more clearly perceive the role we see for the Holy Office, for our diplomatic service, and for such underused entities and institutions as Opus Dei, the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, and Cor Unum.”

The Grand Inquisitor tried to conceal his surprise. Cor Unum? The Pontifical Commission, officially known as Pontificum Consilium “Cor Unum” de Humana et Christiana Progressione Fovenda, had been little more than a powerless committee for centuries.

Mustafa had to think to remember its president… Cardinal Du Noyer, he believed. A minor Vatican bureaucrat. An old woman who had never figured in Vatican politics before. What in hell is going on here?

“It is an exciting time,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“Indeed,” said the Grand Inquisitor, recalling the ancient Chinese curse to that effect.

The Pope began walking again and the four hurried to keep up. A breeze came through the containment field and fluttered the golden blossoms on a sculpted holyoak.

“Our new encyclical shall also deal with the growing problem of usury in our new age,” said His Holiness.

The Grand Inquisitor almost stopped in his tracks. As it was, he had to take a quick half step to keep pace. It was a greater effort to keep his expression neutral. He could all but feel the shock of Father Farrell behind him.

Usury? thought the Grand Inquisitor. The Church has been strict in regulating Pax and Pax Mercantilus trade for three centuries… no return to the days of pure capitalism was desired or allowed… but the hand of control has been light. Is this a move to consolidate all political and economic life directly under Church control? Would Julius… Urban… make the move to abolish Pax civil autonomy and Mercantilus trade freedoms at this late date? And where does the military stand in all this?

His Holiness paused by a beautiful shrub of white blossoms and bright blue leaves. “Our Illyrian gentian is doing well here,” he said softly. “It was a present from Archbishop Poske on Galabia Pescassus.”

Usury! thought the Grand Inquisitor in wild confusion. A penalty of excommunication… losing the cruciform… upon violation of strict trade and profit controls. Direct intervention from the Vatican. Mother of Christ…

“But that is not why we asked you here,” said Pope Urban XVI. “Simon Augustino, would you be so kind as to share with Cardinal Mustafa the disturbing intelligence you received yesterday?”

They know about our biospies, thought Mustafa in panic. His heart was pounding. They know about the agents in place… about the Holy Office’s attempt to contact the Core directly… about sounding out the cardinals before the election… everything! He kept his expression appropriate—alert, interested, alarmed only in a professional sense at the Holy Father’s use of the word “disturbing.”

The great mass of Cardinal Lourdusamy seemed to draw itself up. The heavy rumble of words seemed to come from the man’s chest or belly more than from his mouth. Behind him, the figure of Monsignor Oddi reminded Mustafa of the scarecrows in the fields of his youth on the agricultural world of Renaissance Minor.

“The Shrike has reappeared,” began the Cardinal.

The Shrike? What does that have to do with… Mustafa’s usually sharp mind was reeling, unable to catch up with all of the shifts and revelations.

He still suspected a trap. Realizing that the Secretary of State had paused for response, the Grand Inquisitor said softly, “Can the military authorities on Hyperion deal with it, Simon Augustino?”

Cardinal Lourdusamy’s jowls vibrated as the great head moved back and forth. “It is not on Hyperion that the demon has reappeared, Domenico.”

Mustafa registered appropriate shock.

I know through the interrogation of Corporal Kee that the monster appeared on God’s Grove four standard years ago, apparently in an attempt to foil the murder of the child named Aenea. To get that, I had to arrange for the false death and kidnapping of Kee after his reassignment to Pax Fleet. Do they know? And why tell me now? The Grand Inquisitor was still waiting for the metaphorical blade to drop on his very real neck.

“Eight standard days ago,” continued Lourdusamy, “a monstrous creature which could only be the Shrike appeared on Mars. The death toll… true death, for the creature takes the cruciforms from its victims’ bodies… has been very high.”

“Mars,” Cardinal Mustafa repeated stupidly. He looked to the Holy Father for an explanation, guidance, even the condemnation he feared, but the Pontiff was examining buds on a rose bush. Behind him, Father Farrell took a step forward but the Grand Inquisitor waved his aide back. “Mars?” he said again. He had not felt so stupid and ill-informed for decades, perhaps centuries.

Lourdusamy smiled. “Yes… one of the terraformed worlds in Old Earth’s system. FORCE used to have its command center there before the Fall, but the world is of little use or importance in the Pax. Too far away. There is no reason for you to know about it, Domenico.”

“I know where Mars is,” said the Grand Inquisitor, his tone more sharp than he had meant it to be. “I simply do not understand how the Shrike creature could be there.” And what in Dante’s hell does it have to do with me? he mentally added.

Lourdusamy was nodding. “It is true that to our knowledge, the Shrike demon has never left the world of Hyperion before this. But there can be no doubt. This terror on Mars… the Governor has declared a state of emergency and Archbishop Robeson has personally petitioned His Holiness for help.”

The Grand Inquisitor rubbed his cheek and nodded in concern. “Pax Fleet…”

“Elements of the Fleet already positioned in the Old Neighborhood have been dispatched, of course,” said the Secretary of State. The Supreme Pontiff was bent over a bonsai tree, his hand over the tiny, twisted branch as if he were bestowing a blessing. He seemed not to be listening.

“The ships will have a complement of Marines and Swiss Guard,” continued Lourdusamy. “We hope that they will subdue and/or destroy the creature…”

My mother taught me never to trust anyone who uses the expression “and/or,” thought Mustafa. “Of course,” he said aloud. “I shall say a Mass with that prayer in mind.” Lourdusamy smiled.

The Holy Father glanced up from where he was bent over the stunted little tree. “Precisely,” said Lourdusamy, and in those three syllables, Mustafa heard the sound of the overfed cat pouncing on the hapless mouse of the Grand Inquisitor. “We agree that it is more a matter of faith than of the Fleet. The Shrike—as it was revealed to the Holy Father more than two centuries ago—is truly a demon, perhaps the principal agent of the Dark One.”

Mustafa could only nod.

“We feel that only the Holy Office is properly trained, equipped, and prepared—both spiritually and materially—to investigate this appearance properly… and to save the hapless men, women, and children of Mars.”

Well fuck me, thought John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa, Grand Inquisitor and Prefect for the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, otherwise known as the Supreme Congregation for the Holy Inquisition of Heretical Error. He automatically offered up a mental Act of Contrition for his obscenity.

“I see,” the Grand Inquisitor said aloud, not seeing at all but almost smiling at the ingenuity of his enemies. “I will immediately appoint a commission…”

“No, no, Domenico,” said His Holiness, moving close to touch the Grand Inquisitor’s arm. “You must go at once. This… materialization… of the demon threatens the entire Body of Christ.”

“Go…” said Mustafa stupidly.

“An archangel-class starship, one of our newest, has been requisitioned from Pax Fleet,” Lourdusamy said briskly. “It will have a crew of twenty-eight, but you may still bring up to twenty-one members of your own staff and security service… twenty-one and yourself, of course.”

“Of course,” said Cardinal Mustafa and he did smile. “Of course.”

“Pax Fleet is doing battle with the corporeal agents of Satan… the Ousters… even as we speak,” rumbled Lourdusamy.

“But this demonic threat must be confronted—and defeated—by the sacred power of the Church itself.”

“Of course,” said the Grand Inquisitor.

Mars, he thought. The most distant pimple on the ass-end of the civilized universe. Three centuries ago, I could have called on the fatline, but now I will be out of touch as long as they keep me there. No intelligence. No way to direct my people. And the Shrike… if the monster is still controlled by the Core’s blasphemous Ultimate Intelligence, it may well be programmed to kill me as soon as I arrive. Brilliant. “Of course,” he said again. “Holy Father, when do I leave? If there could be a few days or weeks to set the current affairs of the Holy Office in proper…”

The Pope smiled and squeezed Mustafa’s upper arm. “The archangel is waiting to transport you and your chosen contingent within the day, Domenico. Six hours from now would be optimum, they tell us.”

“Of course,” said Cardinal Mustafa a final time. He went to one knee to kiss the papal ring.

“God go with you and protect you always,” said the Holy Father, touching the Cardinal’s bowed head as he pronounced the more formal benediction in Latin.

Kissing the ring, tasting the sour cold of stone and metal in his mouth, the Grand Inquisitor mentally smiled again at the cleverness of those whom he had thought to outsmart and outmaneuver.

Father Captain de Soya did not get a chance to talk to Sergeant Gregorius until the last minutes of Raphael’s first beyond-the-Outback jump.

This first jump was a practice hop to an uncharted system twenty light-years beyond the Great Wall. Like Epsilon Eridani, the star in this system was a K-type sun; unlike the Eridani orange-dwarf, this K-type was an Arcturus-like giant. Task Force GIDEON translated without incident, the new two-day automated resurrection créches functioned without glitch, and the third day found the seven archangels decelerating into the giant’s system, playing tactical cat-and-mouse with the nine Hawking-class torchships that had preceded them after months of time-debt travel. The torchships had been ordered to hide within the system. The archangels’ task was to sniff them out and destroy them.

Three of the torchships were far out in the Oört cloud, floating amid the proto-comets there, their drives off, their coms silenced, their internal systems at lowest ebb. The Uriel picked them up at a distance of 0.86 light-years and launched three virtual Hawking hyperkinetics. De Soya stood with the other six captains in tactical space, the system’s sun at their belt level, the two-hundred-kilometer flame tails of seven archangel fusion drives like chest-high diamond scratches on black glass, and he watched as holos misted, formed, and dematerialized in the Oört cloud, tracking the theoretical hyperkinetic seeker missiles as they shifted out of Hawking space, sought out the dormant torchships, and registered two virtual kills and one “severe damage certain—high probability of a kill” on the tactical tote board.

This system had no planets as such, but four of the remaining torchships were found lurking in ambush within the planetary accretion disc along the plane of the ecliptic. The Remiel, the Gabriel, and the Raphael engaged at long distance and registered kills before the torchships’ sensors could register the presence of the archangel intruders.

The final two torchships were hiding in the heliosphere of the giant K-type star, shielding themselves with class-ten containment fields and venting heat via trailing monofilaments half a million kilometers long. Pax Fleet more than frowned on this sort of maneuver during simulated engagements, but de Soya had to smile at the audacity of the two ship’s commanders: it was the sort of thing he might have done a standard decade earlier.

These final torchships came ripping out of the K-star at high boost, their fields venting heat on the visible spectrum, two blazing, white-hot proto-stars spit out from their massive parent, both ships trying to close on the task force that even now was ripping through the system at three-quarters light-speed. The closest archangel—Sariel—killed them both without diverting an erg of power from the class-thirty bussfield the archangel had to maintain a hundred klicks beyond its bow just to clear a path through the molecule-cluttered system. Such terrible velocities demanded a terrible price if the fields failed for an instant.

Then, with Admiral Aldikacti grumbling about the “probable” in the Oört cloud, the task force decelerated hard in one great arc around the K-type giant so that all of the commanders and execs could meet in tactical space to discuss the simulation before the GIDEON ships translated into Ouster space.

De Soya always found these conferences hubris-making: thirty-some men and women in Pax uniforms standing like giants—or in this case sitting like giants, since they used the plane of the ecliptic as a virtual tabletop—discussing kills and strategies and equipment failures and acquisition rates while the K-type sun burned brightly in the center of the space and the magnified ships moved in their slow, Newtonian ellipses like embers burning through black velvet.

During the three-hour conference, it was decided that the “probable kill” was unacceptable and that they should have fired a spread of at least five AI-piloted hyper-k’s at such difficult targets, retrieving any unused missiles after all three kills were certain. There followed a discussion of expendables, fire-rates, and the kill/reserve equations on a mission such as this where there could be no resupply. A strategy was decided whereupon one of the archangels would enter each system thirty light-minutes ahead of the others, serving as “point” to draw all sensor and ECM queries, while another would trail half a light-hour behind, mopping up any “probables.” After a twenty-two-hour day spent mostly at battle stations, and with all hands fighting post-resurrection emotional jags, jump coordinates for a system known to be Ouster-infested came over the tightbeam from the Uriel, the seven archangels accelerated toward their translation point, and Father Captain de Soya made the rounds to chat with his new crew and to “tuck everyone in.” He saved Sergeant Gregorius and his five Swiss Guard troopers for last.

Once, during their long chase across the spiral arm after the girl-child named Aenea and after spending months together on the old Raphael, Father Captain de Soya had decided that he was tired of calling Sergeant Gregorius “Sergeant Gregorius” and called up the man’s records to discover his first name. To his surprise, de Soya discovered that the sergeant had no first name.

The huge noncom had come of age on the northern continent of the swamp world of Patawpha in a warrior culture where everyone was born with eight names—seven of them “weakness names”—and where only survivors of the “seven trials” were privileged to discard the weakness names and be known by only their strength name. The ship’s AI had told the father-captain that only one warrior out of approximately three thousand attempting the “seven trials” survived and succeeded in discarding all weakness names. The computer had no information as to the nature of the trials. In addition, the records had shown, Gregorius had been the first Patawphan Scot-Maori to become a decorated Marine and then be chosen to join the elite Swiss Guard. De Soya had always meant to ask the sergeant what the “seven trials” were, but had never worked up the nerve.

This day, when de Soya kicked down the dropshaft in zero-g and passed through the irising wardroom soft spot, Sergeant Gregorius appeared so happy to see him that he looked as if he were about to give the father-captain a bear hug.

Instead, the sergeant hooked his bare feet under a bar, snapped to attention, and shouted, “TEN-HUT in the wardroom!” His five troopers dropped what they were doing—reading, cleaning, or field-stripping—and tried to put bulkhead under their toes. For a moment the wardroom was littered with floating ’scribers, magazines, pulse knives, impact armor, and stripped-down energy lances.

Father Captain de Soya nodded to the sergeant and inspected the five commandos—three men, two women, all terribly, terribly young. They were also lean, muscular, perfectly adapted to zero-g, and obviously honed for battle. All of them were combat veterans. Each of them had distinguished himself or herself adequately to be chosen for this mission. De Soya saw their eagerness for combat and was saddened by it.

After a few minutes of inspection, introductions, and commander-to-commando chatting, de Soya beckoned for Gregorius to follow and kicked off through the aft soft spot into the launch-tube room. When they were alone, Father Captain de Soya extended his hand. “Damned good to see you, Sergeant.”

Gregorius shook hands and grinned. The big man’s square, scarred face and short-cropped hair were the same, and his grin was as broad and bright as de Soya remembered. “Damned good that’ see you, Father Captain. And when did the priesty side o’ ya begin usin’ profanity, sir?”

“When I was promoted to commanding this ship, Sergeant,” said de Soya. “How have you been?”

“Fair, sir. Fair an’ better.”

“You saw action in the St. Anthony Incursion and the Sagittarius Salient,” said de Soya. “Were you with Corporal Kee before he died?”

Sergeant Gregorius rubbed his chin.

“Negative, sir. I was at the Salient two years ago, but I never saw Kee. Heard about his transport bein’ slagged, but never saw him. Had a couple of other friends aboard it, too, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” said de Soya. The two were floating awkwardly near one of the hyper-k storage nacelles. The father-captain grabbed a holdtite and oriented himself so that he could look Gregorius in the eye. “Did you get through the interrogation all right, Sergeant?”

Gregorius shrugged. “They kept me on Pacem a few weeks, sir. Kept askin’ the same questions in different ways. Didn’t seem to believe me about what happened on God’s Grove—the woman devil, the Shrikethingee. Eventually they seemed that’ get tired o’ askin’ me things and busted me back down to corporal and shipped me out.”

De Soya sighed. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. I had recommended you for a promotion and commendation.” He chuckled ruefully. “A lot of good that did you. We’re lucky we weren’t both excommunicated and then executed.”

“Aye, sir,” said Gregorius, glancing out the port at the shifting starfield. “They weren’t happy with us, that’s a’ sure.” He looked at de Soya. “And you, sir. I heard they took away your commission and all.”

Father Captain de Soya smiled. “Busted me back to parish priest.”

“On a dirty, desert, no-water world, I heard tell, sir. A place where piss sells for ten marks a bootful.”

“That was true,” said de Soya, still smiling. “Madre de Dios. It was my homeworld.”

“Aw, shit, sir,” said Sergeant Gregorius, his huge hands clenching in embarrassment. “No disrespect meant, sir. I mean… I didn’t… I wouldn’t…”

De Soya touched the big man’s shoulder.

“No disrespect taken, Sergeant. You’re right. Piss does sell there… only for fifteen marks a bootful, not ten.”

“Aye, sir,” said Gregorius, his dark skin darker with flush.

“And, Sergeant…”

“Aye, sir?”

“That will be fifteen Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers for the scatological outburst. I’m still your confessor, you know.”

“Aye, sir.”

De Soya’s implant tingled at the same instant chimes came over the ship’s communicators. “Thirty minutes until translation,” said the father-captain. “Get your chicks tucked in their créches, Sergeant. This next jump is for real.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” The sergeant kicked for the soft spot but stopped just as the circle irised open. “Father Captain?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“It’s just a feelin’, sir,” said the Swiss Guardsman, his brow furrowed. “But I’ve learned to trust my feelin’s, sir.”

“I’ve learned to trust your feelings as well, Sergeant. What is it?”

“Watch your back, sir,” said Gregorius. “I mean… nothin’ definite, sir. But watch your back.”

“Aye, aye,” said Father Captain de Soya. He waited until Gregorius was back in his wardroom and the soft spot sealed before he kicked off for the main dropshaft and his own death couch and resurrection créche.

Pacem System was crowded with Mercantilus traffic, Pax Fleet warships, large-array habitats such as the Torus Mercantilus, Pax military bases and listening posts, herded and terraformed asteroids such as Castel Gandolfo, low-rent orbital can cities for the millions eager to be close to humanity’s center of power but too poor to pay Pacem’s exorbitant rates, and the highest concentration of private in-system spacecraft in the known universe. Thus it was that when M. Kenzo Isozaki, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Pancapitalist League of Independent Catholic Transstellar Trade Organizations, wished to be absolutely alone, he had to commandeer a private ship and burn high-g for thirty-two hours into the outer ring of darkness far from Pacem’s star.

Even choosing a ship had been a problem. The Pax Mercantilus maintained a small fleet of expensive in-system executive shuttles, but Isozaki had to assume that despite their best attempts to debug the ships, they were all compromised. For this rendezvous, he had considered rerouting one of the Mercantilus freighters that plied the trade lanes between orbital clusters, but he did not put it past his enemies—the Vatican, the Holy Office, Pax Fleet Intelligence Services, Opus Dei, rivals within the Mercantilus, countless others—to bug every ship in the Mercantilus’s vast trade fleet. In the end, Kenzo Isozaki had disguised himself, gone to the Torus public docks, bought an ancient asteroid hopper on the spot, and ordered his illegal comlog AI to pilot the thing out beyond the campfire zone of the ecliptic. On the trip out, his ship was challenged six times by Pax security patrols and stations, but the hopper was licensed, there were rocks where he was headed—mined and remined, to be sure, but still legitimate destinations for a desperate prospector—and he was passed on without personal interrogation. Isozaki found all this melodramatic and a waste of his valuable time. He would have met his contact in his office on the Torus if the contact had agreed. The contact had not agreed, and Isozaki had to admit that he would have crawled to Aldebaren for this meeting. Thirty-two hours after leaving the Torus, the hopper dropped his internal containment field, drained his high-g tank, and brought him up out of sleep. The ship’s computer was too stupid to do anything but give him coordinates and readouts on the local rocks, but the illicit AI comlog interface scanned the entire region for ships—powered down or active—and pronounced this sphere of Pacem System space empty. “So how does he get here if there is no ship?” muttered Isozaki.

“There is no way other than by ship, sir,” said the AI. “Unless he is here already, which seems unlikely since…”

“Silence,” ordered Kenzo Isozaki. He sat in the lubricant-smelling dimness of the hopper command blister and watched the asteroid half a klick distant. Hopper and rock had matched tumble rates, so it was the familiar Pacem System starfield beyond the heavily mined and cratered stone that seemed to be spinning. Other than the asteroid, there was nothing out there except hard vacuum, hard radiation, and cold silence.

Suddenly there was a knock on the outer air-lock door.

8

At the time that all these troop movements were under way, at the same time that great armadas of matte-black starships were tearing holes in the time and space continuum of the cosmos, at the precise moment when the Church’s Grand Inquisitor was sent packing to Shrike-ridden Mars and the CEO of the Pax Mercantilus was traveling alone to a secret rendezvous in deep space with a nonhuman interlocutor, I was lying helpless in bed with a tremendous pain in my back and belly.

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing.

Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

This pain was all-absorbing. I was amazed by the relentless, mind-controlling quality of it. During the hours of agony that I had already endured and was yet to endure, I attempted to concentrate on my surroundings, to think of other things, to interact with the people around me, even to do simple multiplication tables in my head, but the pain flowed into all the compartments of my consciousness like molten steel into the fissures on a cracked crucible.

These things I was dimly aware of at the time: that I had been on a world my comlog had identified as Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and in the process of dipping water from a well when the pain had felled me; that a woman swathed in a blue robe, her toenails visibly blue in her open sandals as I lay writhing in the dust, had called others in blue robes and gowns and these people had carried me to the adobe house where I continued battling the pain in a soft bed; that there were several other people in the house—another woman in a blue gown and head scarf, a younger man who wore a blue robe and turban, at least two children, also dressed in blue; and that these generous people not only put up with my moaned apologies and less articulate moans as I curled and uncurled in pain, but constantly spoke to me, patted me, placed wet compresses on my forehead, removed my boots and socks and vest, and generally continued whispering reassurances in their soft dialect as I tried to fight to keep my dignity against the onslaught of agony in my back and abdomen. It was several hours after they brought me to their home—the blue sky had faded to rose evening outside the window—when the woman who had found me near the well said, “Citizen, we have asked the local missionary priest for help and he has gone for the doctor at the Pax base at Bombasino. For some reason, the Pax skimmers and other aircraft are all busy now, so the priest and the doctor… if the doctor comes… must travel fifty pulls down the river, but with luck they should be here before sunrise.”

I did not know how long a pull was or how much time it would take to travel fifty, or even how long the night was on this world, but the thought that there might be an end point to my agony was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Nonetheless, I whispered, “Please, ma’am, no Pax doctor.”

The woman set cool fingers against my brow.

“We must. There is no longer a medic here in Lock Lamonde. We are afraid you might die without medical help.” I moaned and rolled away. The pain roiled through me like a hot wire being pulled through too-narrow capillaries. I realized that a Pax doctor would know immediately that I was from offworld, would report me to the Pax police or military—if the “missionary priest” had not already done so—and that I was all but certain to be interrogated and detained. My mission for Aenea was ending early and in failure. When the old poet, Martin Silenus, had sent me on this odyssey four and a half standard years earlier, he had drunk a champagne toast to me—“To heroes.” If only he had known how far from reality that toast had been. Perhaps he had.

The night passed with glacial slowness. Several times the two women looked in on me and at other times the children, in blue gowns that may have been sleeping apparel, peered in from the darkened hallway. They wore no headdress then and I saw that the girl had blond hair worn much the way Aenea had when we first met, when she was almost twelve and I twenty-eight standard. The little boy—younger than the girl I assumed to be his sister—looked especially pale; his head was shaved quite bald. Each time he looked in, his fingers fluttered at me in a shy wave. Between rolls of pain, I would feebly wave back, but each time I opened my eyes to look again, the child would be gone.

Sunrise came and went without a doctor. Hopelessness surged in me like an outgoing tide. I could not resist this terrible pain another hour.

I knew instinctively that if the kind people in this household had any painkiller, they would have long since given it to me. I had spent the night trying to think of anything I had brought with me in the kayak, but the only medicine in my stowed kit was disinfectant and some aspirin. I knew that the latter would do nothing against this tidal wave of pain. I decided that I could hold out another ten minutes. They had removed my comlog bracelet and set it within sight on an adobe ledge near the bed, but I had not thought to measure the hours of the night with it. Now I struggled to reach it, the pain twisting in me like a hot wire, and slipped the bracelet back on my wrist. I whispered to the ship’s AI in it: “Is the biomonitor function still activated?”

“Yes,” said the bracelet.

“Am I dying?”

“Life signs are not critical,” said the ship in its usual flat tones. “But you appear to be in shock. Blood pressure is…” It continued to rattle off technical information until I told it to shut up.

“Have you figured out what’s doing this to me?” I gasped. Waves of nausea followed the pain.

I had long since vomited anything in my stomach, but the retching doubled me over.

“It is not inconsistent with an appendicitis attack,” said the comlog.

“Appendicitis…” Those useless artifacts had long since been gene-tailored out of humanity. “Do I have an appendix?” I whispered to the bracelet. With the sunrise had come the rustle of robes in the quiet house and several visits from the women.

“Negative,” said the comlog. “It would be very unlikely, unless you are a genetic sport. The odds against that would be…”

“Silence,” I hissed. The two women in blue robes bustled in with another woman, taller, thinner, obviously offworld-born. She wore a dark jumpsuit with the cross-and-caduceus patch of the Pax Fleet Medical Corps on her left shoulder.

“I’m Dr. Molina,” said the woman, unpacking a small black valise. “All the base skimmers are on war-game maneuvers and I had to come by fitzboat with the young man who fetched me.” She set one sticky diagnostic patch on my bare chest and another on my belly. “And don’t flatter yourself that I came all this way for you… one of the base skimmers crashed near Keroa Tambat, eighty klicks south of here, and I have to tend to the injured Pax crew while they wait for medevac. Nothing serious, just bruises and a broken leg. They didn’t want to pull a skimmer out of the games just for that.” She removed a palm-sized device from the valise and checked to see that it was receiving from the patches. “And if you’re one of those Mercantilus spacers who jumped ship at the port a few weeks ago,” she continued, “don’t get any ideas about robbing me for drugs or money. I’m traveling with two security guards and they’re right outside.”

She slipped earphones on. “Now what’s wrong with you, young man?”

I shook my head, gritting my teeth against the surge of pain that was ripping through my back at that second. When I could, I said, “I don’t know, Doctor… my back… and nausea…”

She ignored me while checking the palm device. Suddenly she leaned over and probed my abdomen on the left side. “Does that hurt?”

I almost screamed. “Yes,” I said when I could speak.

She nodded and turned to the woman in blue who had saved me. “Tell the priest who fetched me to bring in the larger hag. This man is completely dehydrated. We need to set up an IV. I’ll administer the ultramorph after I get that going.”

I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it. I would have done anything for that rough-edged, talkative Pax Fleet doctor right then. “What is it?” I asked her as she was setting up a bottle and tubes. “Where is this pain coming from?” She had an old-fashioned needle syringe in her hand and was filling it from a small vial of ultramorph. If she told me that I had contracted a fatal disease and would be dead before nightfall, it would be all right as long as she gave me that shot of painkiller first.

“Kidney stone,” said Dr. Molina. I must have shown my incomprehension, because she went on, “A little rock in your kidney… too large to pass… probably made of calcium. Have you had trouble urinating in recent days?”

I thought back to the beginning of the trip and before. I had not been drinking enough water and had attributed the occasional pain and difficulty to that fact. “Yes, but…”

“Kidney stone,” she said, swabbing my left wrist. “Little sting here.” She inserted the intravenous needle and dermplasted it in place.

The sting of the needle was totally lost in the cacophony of pain from my back. There was a moment of fiddling with the intravenous tube and attaching the syringe to an offshoot of it. “This will take about a minute to act,” she said. “But it should eliminate the discomfort.”

Discomfort. I closed my eyes so that no one would see the tears of relief there. The woman who had found me by the well took my hand in hers.

A minute later the pain began to ebb. Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence. It was as if a great and terrible noise had finally been turned down so that I could think. I became me again as the agony dropped to the levels I had known from knife wounds and broken bones.

This I could handle and still retain my dignity and sense of self. The woman in blue was touching my wrist as the ultramorph took effect.

“Thank you,” I said through parched, cracked lips, squeezing the hand of the woman in blue. “And thank you, Dr. Molina,” I said to the Pax medic.

Dr. Molina leaned over me, tapping my cheeks softly. “You’re going to sleep for a while, but I need some answers first. Don’t sleep until you talk to me.”

I nodded groggily.

“What’s your name?”

“Raul Endymion.” I realized that I could not lie to her. She must have put Truthtell or another drug in the IV drip.

“Where are you from, Raul Endymion?” She was holding the palm-sized diagnostic device like a recorder.

“Hyperion. The continent of Aquila. My clan was…”

“How did you get to Lock Childe Lamonde on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Raul? Are you one of the spacers who jumped ship from the Mercantilus freighter last month?”

“Kayak,” I heard myself say as everything began to feel distant. A great warmth filled me, almost indistinguishable from the sense of relief that surged within me. “Paddled downriver in the kayak,” I babbled. “Through the farcaster. No, I’m not one of the spacers…”

“Farcaster?” I heard the doctor repeat, her voice puzzled. “What do you mean you came through the farcaster, Raul Endymion? Do you mean you paddled under it the way we did? Just passed by it on your trip downriver?”

“No,” I said. “I came through it. From offworld.”

The doctor glanced at the woman in blue and then turned back to me. “You came through the farcaster from offworld? You mean it… functioned? Farcast you here?”

“Yeah.”

“From where?” said the doctor, checking my pulse with her left hand.

“Old Earth,” I said. “I came from Earth.” For a moment I floated, blissfully free from pain, while the doctor stepped out into the hall to talk to the ladies. I heard snatches of conversation.

“… obviously mentally unbalanced,” the doctor’s voice was saying. “Could not have possibly come through the… delusions of Old Earth… possibly one of the spacers on drugs…”

“Happy to have him stay…” the woman in the blue robe was saying. “Take care of him until…”

“The priest and one of the guards will stay here…” the doctor’s voice said. “When the medevac skimmer comes to Keroa Tambat we’ll stop by here to fetch him on the way back to the base… tomorrow or the day after tomorrow… don’t let him leave… military police will probably want to…”

Buoyed up on the rising crest of bliss at the absence of pain, I quit fighting the current and allowed myself to drift downstream to the waiting arms of morphia.

I dreamed of a conversation Aenea and I had shared a few months earlier. It was a cool, high-desert summer night and we were sitting in the vestibule of her shelter, drinking mugs of tea and watching the stars come out. We had been discussing the Pax, but for everything negative I had said about it, Aenea had responded with something positive.

Finally I got angry.

“Look,” I said, “you’re talking about the Pax as if it hadn’t tried to capture you and kill you. As if Pax ships hadn’t chased us halfway across the spiral arm and shot us down on Renaissance Vector. If it hadn’t been for the farcaster there…”

“The Pax didn’t chase us and shoot at us and try to kill us,” the girl said softly. “Just elements of it. Men and women following orders from the Vatican or elsewhere.”

“Well,” I said, still exasperated and irritated, “it only takes elements of it to shoot us and kill…” I paused a second.

“What do you mean—‘the Vatican or elsewhere’? Do you think there are others giving orders? Other than the Vatican, I mean?”

Aenea shrugged. It was a graceful motion, but irritating in the extreme. One of the least endearing of her less-than-endearing teenaged traits.

“Are there others?” I demanded, more sharply than I was used to speaking to my young friend.

“There are always others,” Aenea said quietly. “They were right to try to capture me, Raul. Or kill me.”

In my dream as in reality, I set my mug of tea on the stone foundation of the vestibule and stared at her. “You’re saying that you… and I… should be captured or killed… like animals. That they have that right?”

“Of course not,” said the girl, crossing her arms in front of her chest, the tea steaming into the cool night air. “I’m saying that the Pax is correct—from its perspective—in using extraordinary measures to try to stop me.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t heard you say anything so subversive that they should send squadrons of starships after you, kiddo. In fact, the most subversive and heretical thing I’ve heard you say is that love is a basic force of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism. But that’s just…”

“Bullshit?” said Aenea.

“Double talk,” I said.

Aenea smiled and ran her fingers through her short hair. “Raul, my friend, it’s not what I say that’s a danger to them. It’s what I do. What I teach by doing… by touching.”

I looked at her. I had almost forgotten all that One Who Teaches stuff that her Uncle Martin Silenus had woven into his Cantos epic. Aenea was to be the messiah that the old poet had prophesied in his long, confused poem some two centuries earlier… or so he had told me. So far I had seen very little from the girl that suggested messiahhood, unless one counted her trip forward through the Sphinx Time Tomb and the obsession of the Pax to capture or kill her… and me, since I was her guardian during the rough trip out to Old Earth.

“I haven’t heard you teach much that’s heretical or dangerous,” I said again, my tone almost sullen. “Or seen you do anything that’s a threat to the Pax, either.” I gestured to the night, the desert, and to the distant, lighted buildings of the Taliesin Fellowship, and now—in my ultramorph dream that was more memory than dream—I watched myself make that gesture as if I were observing from the darkness outside the lighted shelter. Aenea shook her head and sipped her tea.

“You don’t see, Raul, but they do. Already they’ve referred to me as a virus. They’re right… that’s exactly what I could be to the Church. A virus, like the ancient HIV strain on Old Earth or the Red Death that raked through the Outback after the Fall… a virus that invades every cell of the organism and reprograms the DNA in those cells… or at least infects enough cells that the organism breaks down, fails… dies.”

In my dream, I swooped above Aenea’s canvas-and-stone shelter like a hawk in the night, whirling high among the alien stars above Old Earth, seeing us—the girl and the man—sitting in the kerosene lantern light of the vestibule like lost souls on a lost world. Which is precisely what we were. For the next two days I drifted in and out of pain and consciousness the way a skiff cut loose on the ocean would float through rain squalls and patches of sunlight. I drank great volumes of water that the women in blue brought me in glass goblets. I hobbled to the toilet cubby and urinated through a filter, trying to catch the stone that was causing my intermittent agony. No stone. Each time I would hobble back to the bed and wait for the pain to start up again. It never failed to do so.

Even at the time, I was aware that this was not the stuff of heroic adventure.

Before the doctor left to continue downriver to the site of the skimmer crash, I was made to understand that both the Pax guard and the local priest had com units and would radio the base if I caused any trouble whatsoever. Dr. Molina let me know exactly how bad it would be for me if the Pax Fleet commander had to pull a skimmer out of the war games just to fetch a prisoner prematurely. Meanwhile, she said, keep drinking lots of water and peeing every time I could.

If the stone didn’t pass, she would get me into the jail infirmary at the base and break it up with sound waves. She left four more shots of ultramorph with the woman in blue and left without a good-bye. The guard—a middle-aged Lusian twice my weight with a flechette pistol in his holster and a come-along neural prod on his belt—peered in, glowered at me, and went back outside to stand by the front door. I will stop referring to the head of the household as “the woman in blue.” For the first few hours of agony, that had been all she had been to me—other than my savior, of course—but by the afternoon of the first full day in her home, I knew that she was named Dem Ria; that her primary marriage partner was the other woman, Dem Loa; that the third member of their tripartite marriage was the much younger man, Alem Mikail Dem Alem; that the teenaged girl in the house was Ces Ambre, Alem’s daughter by a previous triune; that the pale boy with no hair—who looked to be about eight standard years old—named Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem, was the child of the current partnership—although the biological child of which woman, I never discovered—and that he was dying of cancer.

“Our village medic elder… he died last month and has not been replaced… sent Bin to our own hospital in Keroa Tambat last winter, but they could only administer radiation and chemotherapy and hope for the best,” said Dem Ria as she sat by my bedside that afternoon. Dem Loa sat nearby on another straight-backed chair. I had asked about the boy to shift the subject of conversation away from my own problems. The women’s elaborate robes glowed a deep cobalt blue even as the sunlight behind them lay as thick and red as blood on the interior adobe walls. Lace curtains cut the light and shadows in complex negative spaces. We were chatting in the intervals between the pain. My back hurt then as if someone had struck me there with a heavy club, but this was a dull ache compared to the hot agony when the stone moved. The doctor had said that the pain was a good sign—that the stone was moving when it hurt the most. And the agony did seem to be centered lower in my abdomen. But the doctor had also said that it might take months to pass the stone, if it was small enough to be passed naturally. Many stones, she said, had to be pulverized or removed surgically. I brought my mind back to the health of the child we were discussing. “Radiation and chemotherapy,” I repeated, mouthing the words with distaste. It was as if Dem Ria had said that the medic had prescribed leeches and drafts of mercury for the boy. The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall. And what had not been lost had been made too expensive to share with the masses after the WorldWeb went away forever: the Pax Mercantilus carried goods and commodities between the stars, but the process was slow, expensive, and limited. Medicine had slipped back several centuries. My own mother had died of cancer—after refusing radiation and chemotherapy after the diagnosis at the Pax Moors Clinic.

But why cure a fatal disease when one could recover from it by dying and being resurrected by the cruciform? Even some genetically derived diseases were “cured” by the cruciform during its restructuring of the body during resurrection. And death, as the Church was constantly pointing out, was as much a sacrament as resurrection itself. It could be offered up like a prayer. The average person could now transform the pain and hopelessness of disease and death into the glory of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. As long as the average person carried a cruciform.

I cleared my throat. “Ah… Bin hasn’t… I mean… “When the boy had waved at me in the night, his loose robe had shown a pale and crossless chest. Dem Loa shook her head. The blue cowl of her robe was made of a translucent, silklike fabric. “None of us have yet accepted the cross. But Father Clifton has been… convincing us.” I could only nod. The pain in my back and groin was returning like an electric current through my nerves. I should explain the different colored robes worn by the citizens of Lock Childe Lamonde on the world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Dem Ria had explained in her melodic whisper that a little over a century ago, most of the people now living along the long river had migrated here from the nearby star system Lacaille 9352. The world there, originally called Sibiatu’s Bitterness, had been recolonized by Pax religious zealots who had renamed it Inevitable Grace and begun proselytizing the indigenie cultures that had survived the Fall. Dem Ria’s culture—a gentle, philosophical one stressing cooperation—decided to migrate again rather than convert. Twenty-seven thousand of her people had expended their fortunes and risked their lives to refit an ancient Hegira seedship and transport everyone—men, women, children, pets, livestock—in a forty-nine-year cold-sleep voyage to nearby Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, where the WorldWeb-era inhabitants had died out after the Fall.

Dem Ria’s people called themselves the Amoiete Spectrum Helix, after the epic philosophical symphony-holo-poem by Halpul Amoiete. In his poem, Amoiete had used colors of the spectrum as a metaphor for the positive human values and shown the helical juxtapositions, interactions, synergies, and collisions created by these values.

The Amoiete Spectrum Helix Symphony was meant to be performed, with the symphony, the poetry, and the holoshow all representing the philosophical interplay. Dem Ria and Dem Loa explained how their culture had borrowed the color meanings from Amoiete—white for the purity of intellectual honesty and physical love; red for the passion of art, political conviction, and physical courage; blue for the introspective revelations of music, mathematics, personal therapy to help others and for the design of fabrics and textures; emerald green for resonance with nature, comfort with technology, and the preservation of threatened life-forms; ebony for the creation of human mysteries; and so forth. The triune marriages, nonviolence, and other cultural peculiarities grew partially from Amoiete’s philosophies and largely from the rich cooperative culture the Spectrum people had created on Sibiatu’s Bitterness.

“So Father Clifton is convincing you to join the Church?” I said as the pain subsided into a lull where I could think and speak once again.

“Yes,” said Dem Loa. Their tripartner, Alem Mikail Dem Alem, had come in to sit on the adobe windowsill. He listened to the conversation but rarely spoke.

“How do you feel about that?” I asked, shifting slightly to distribute the ache in my back. I had not asked for ultramorph for several hours. I was very aware of the desire to ask for it now.

Dem Ria lifted her hand in a complex motion that reminded me of Aenea’s favorite gesture. “If all of us accept the cross, little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem will be entitled to full medical care at the Pax base at Bombasino. Even if they do not cure the cancer, Bin will… return to us… after.” She lowered her gaze and hid her expressive hands in the folds of her robe.

“They won’t allow just Bin to accept the cross,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Dem Loa. “It is always their position that the entire family must convert. We see their point. Father Clifton is very sad about that, but very hopeful that we will accept Jesus Christ’s sacraments before it is too late for Bin.”

“How does your girl—Ces Ambre—feel about becoming a born-again Christian?” I asked, realizing how personal these questions were. But I was intrigued, and the thought of the painful decision they faced took my mind off my very real but much less important pain.

“Ces Ambre loves the idea of joining the Church and becoming a full citizen of the Pax,” said Dem Loa, raising her face under the cowl of her soft blue hood. “She would then be allowed to attend the Church academy in Bombasino or Keroa Tambat, and she thinks that the girls and boys there would make much more interesting marriage prospects.”

I started to speak, stopped myself, and then spoke anyway. “But the triune marriage wouldn’t be… I mean, would the Pax allow…”

“No,” said Alem from his place by the window.

He frowned and I could see the sadness behind his gray eyes. “The Church does not allow same-sex or multiple-partner marriages. Our family would be destroyed.”

I noticed the three exchange glances for a second and the love and sense of loss I saw in those looks would stay with me for years.

Dem Ria sighed. “But this is inevitable anyway. I think that Father Clifton is right… that we must do this now, for Bin, rather than wait until he dies the true death and is lost to us forever… and then join the Church. I would rather take our boy to Mass on Sunday and laugh with him in the sunlight after, than go to the cathedral to light a candle in his memory.”

“Why is it inevitable?” I asked softly.

Dem Loa made the graceful gesture once again. “Our Spectrum Helix society depends upon all members of it… all steps and components of the Helix must be in place for the interplay to work toward human progress and moral good. More and more of the Spectrum people are abandoning their colors and joining the Pax. The center will not hold.”

Dem Ria touched my forearm as if to emphasize her next words. “The Pax has not coerced us in any way,” she said softly, her lovely dialect rising and falling like the sound of the wind through the lace curtains behind her. “We respect the fact that they reserve their medicines and their miracle of resurrection for those who join them…” She stopped.

“But it is hard,” said Dem Loa, her smooth voice suddenly ragged.

Alem Mikail Dem Alem got up from the window ledge and came over to kneel between the two women. He touched Dem Loa’s wrist with infinite gentleness. He put his arm around Dem Ria. For a moment, the three were lost to the world and me, encircled by their own love and sorrow.

And then the pain came back like a fiery lance in my back and lower groin, searing through me like a laser. I moaned despite myself.

The three separated with graceful, purposeful movements. Dem Ria went to get the next ultramorph syringe.

The dream began the same as before—I was flying at night above the Arizona desert, looking down at Aenea and me as we drank tea and chatted in the vestibule of her shelter—but this time the talk went far beyond the memory of our real conversation that night. “How are you a virus?” I was asking the teenager next to me. “How could anything you teach be a threat to something as large and powerful as the Pax?”

Aenea was looking out into the desert night, breathing in the fragrance of night-blooming blossoms.

She did not look at me when she spoke. “Do you know the major error in Uncle Martin’s Cantos, Raul?”

“No,” I said. She had shown me several mistakes, omissions, or wrongheaded guesses in the past few years, and together we had discovered a few during our voyage to Old Earth.

“It was twofold,” she said softly. Somewhere in the desert night, a hawk called. “First, he believed what the TechnoCore told my father.”

“About how they were the ones who had hijacked Earth?” I said.

“About everything,” said Aenea. “Ummon was lying to the John Keats cybrid.”

“Why?” I said.

“They were just planning to destroy it.” The girl looked at me. “But my mother was there to record the conversation,” she said. “And the Core knew that she would tell the old poet.”

I nodded slowly. “And that he would put it as a fact in the epic poem he was writing,” I said. “But why would they want to lie about…”

“His second mistake was more subtle and serious,” she said, interrupting me without raising her voice. A pale glow still hung behind the mountains to the north and west. “Uncle Martin believed that the TechnoCore was humanity’s enemy,” she continued.

I set my mug of tea down on stone. “Why is that a mistake?” I said. “Aren’t they our enemy?”

When the girl did not answer I held up my hand, five fingers splayed. “One, according to the Cantos, the Core was the real force behind the attack on the Hegemony that led to the Fall of the Farcasters. Not the Ousters… the Core. The Church has denied that, made the Ousters responsible. Are you saying that the Church is right and the old poet was wrong?”

“No,” said Aenea. “It was the Core that orchestrated the attack.”

“Billions dead,” I said, almost spluttering in outrage. “The Hegemony toppled. The Web destroyed. The fatline cut…”

“The TechnoCore did not cut the fatline,” she said softly.

“All right,” I said, taking a breath. “That was some mysterious entity… your Lions and Tigers and Bears, say. But it was still the Core behind the attack.”

Aenea nodded and poured more tea for herself.

I folded my thumb against my palm and touched the first finger with my other hand. “Second, did or did not the TechnoCore use the farcasters as a sort of cosmic leech to suck up human neural networks for their damned Ultimate Intelligence project? Every time someone farcast, they were being… used… by those damned autonomous intelligences. Right or wrong?”

“Correct,” said Aenea.

“Three,” I said, folding the first finger away and tapping the next one in line, “the poem has Rachel—the pilgrim Sol Weintraub’s child who has come backward with the Time Tombs from the future—tell about a time to come when,” I shifted the tone of my voice as I quoted, “… the final war raged between the Core-spawned UI and the human spirit.” Was this a mistake?”

“No,” said Aenea.

“Four,” I said, beginning to feel foolish with my little finger exercise, but angry enough to continue, “didn’t the Core admit to your father that it created him… created the John Keats cybrid of him… just as a trap for the—what did they call it?—the empathy component of the human Ultimate Intelligence that’s supposed to come into existence sometime in the future?”

“That’s what they said,” agreed Aenea, sipping her tea. She looked almost amused. This made me angrier.

“Five,” I said, folding the last finger back so that my right hand was a fist. “Wasn’t it the Core as well as the Pax—hell, the Core ordering the Pax—that tried to have you caught and killed on Hyperion, on Renaissance Vector, on God’s Grove… halfway across the spiral arm?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“And wasn’t it the Core,” I continued angrily, forgetting my fingered checklist and the fact that we were talking about the old poet’s errors, “that created that female… thing… that arranged to have poor A. Bettik’s arm sliced off on God’s Grove and would have had your head in a bag if it hadn’t been for the Shrike’s intervention.” I actually shook my fist I was so angry. “Wasn’t it the fucking Core that’s been trying to kill me as well as you, and probably will kill us if we’re ever stupid enough to go back into Pax space?”

Aenea nodded.

I was close to panting, feeling as if I had run a fifty-meter dash. “So?” I said lamely, unclenching my fist.

Aenea touched my knee. As contact with her always did, I felt a thrill of electric shock run through me. “Raul, I didn’t say that the Core hadn’t been up to no good. I simply said that Uncle Martin had made a mistake in portraying them as humanity’s enemy.”

“But if all those facts are true…” I shook my head, befuddled.

“Elements of the Core attacked the Web before the Fall,” said Aenea. “We know from my father’s visit with Ummon that the Core was not in agreement about many of its decisions.”

“But…” I began.

Aenea held her hand up, palm out. I fell silent.

“They used our neural networks for their UI project,” she said, “but there’s no evidence that it did humans any harm.”

My jaw almost dropped open at that comment. The thought of those damned AI’s using human brains like neural bubbles in their fucking project made me want to throw up. “They had no right!” I began.

“Of course not,” said Aenea. “They should have asked permission. What would you have said?”

“I would have told them to go fuck themselves,” I said, realizing the absurdity of the phrase as applied to autonomous intelligences even as I uttered it.

Aenea smiled again. “And you might remember that we’ve been using their mental power for our own purposes for more than a thousand years. I don’t think that we asked permission of their ancestors when we created the first silicon AI’s… or the first magnetic bubble and DNA entities, for that matter.”

I made an angry gesture. “That’s different.”

“Of course,” said Aenea. “The group of AI’s called the Ultimates have created problems for humanity in the past and will in the future—including trying to kill you and me—but they’re only one part of the Core.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand, kiddo,” I said, my voice softer now. “Are you really saying that there are good AI’s and bad AI’s? Don’t you remember that they actually considered destroying the human race? And that they may do it yet if we get in their way? That would make them an enemy of humanity in my book.”

Aenea touched my knee again. Her dark eyes were serious. “Don’t forget, Raul, that humanity has also come close to destroying the human race. Capitalists and communists were ready to blow up Earth when that was the only planet we lived on. And for what?”

“Yeah,” I said lamely, “but…”

“And the Church is ready to destroy the Ousters even as we speak. Genocide… on a scale our race has never seen before.”

“The Church… and a lot of others… don’t consider the Ousters human beings,” I said.

“Nonsense,” snapped Aenea. “Of course they are. They evolved from common Earth-human origins, just as the AI TechnoCore did. All three races are orphans in the storm.”

“All three races…” I repeated. “Jesus Christ, Aenea, are you including the Core in your definition of humanity?”

“We created them,” she said softly. “Early on, we used human DNA to increase their computing power… their intelligence. We used to have robots. They created cybrids out of human DNA and AI personae. Right now, we have a human institution in power which gives all glory and demands all power because of its allegiance to and connection with God… the human Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps the Core has a similar situation with the Ultimates in control.”

I could only stare at the girl. I did not understand.

Aenea set her other hand on my knee. I could feel her strong fingers through the whipcord of my trousers. “Raul, do you remember what the AI Ummon said to the second Keats cybrid? That was recorded accurately in the Cantos. Ummon talked in sort-of Zen koans… or at least that’s the way Uncle Martin translated the conversation.”

I closed my eyes to remember that part of the epic poem. It had been a long time since Grandam and I took turns reciting the tale around the caravan campfire.

Aenea spoke the words even as they began to form in my memory. “Ummon said to the second Keats cybrid—

I rubbed my cheek and thought. The night wind stirred the canvas folds of Aenea’s shelter entrance and brought sweet scents from the desert.

Strange stars hung above Earth’s old mountains on the horizon.

“Empathy was supposedly the fleeing component of the human UI,” I said slowly as if working out a word puzzle. “Part of our evolved human consciousness in the future, come back in time.”

Aenea looked at me. “The hybrid was the John Keats cybrid,” I continued. “Son of Man and Machine.”

“No,” said Aenea softly. “That was Uncle Martin’s second misunderstanding. The Keats cybrids were not created to be the refuge for Empathy in this age. They were created to be the instrument of that fusion between the Core and humankind. To have a child, in other words.”

I looked at the teenaged girl’s hands on my leg. “So you’re the consciousness “… as near divine as humankind has offered in thirty generations”?”

Aenea shrugged.

“And you have “… an imagination which can span space and time”?”

“All human beings have that,” said Aenea. “It’s just that when I dream and imagine, I can see things that truly will be. Remember when I told you that I remember the future?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, right now I’m remembering that you will dream this conversation some months hence, while you’re lying in bed—in terrible pain, I’m afraid—on a world with a complicated name, in a home where people dress all in blue.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”

“Aenea,” I heard myself say as I flew in ever higher circles above the desert shelter, watching myself and the girl dwindle below, “tell me what your secret is… the secret that makes you this messiah, this ‘bond between two worlds’.”

“All right, Raul, my love,” she said, suddenly appearing as a grown woman in the instant before I circled too high to make out details or hear distinct words above the rush of the air on my dream wings, “I will tell you. Listen.”

9

By the time they translated into their fifth Ouster system, Task Force GIDEON had slaughter down to a science. Father Captain de Soya knew from his courses in military history at Pax Fleet Command School that almost all space engagements fought more than half an AU from a planet, moon, asteroid, or strategic point-source in space were entered in mutual agreement. He remembered that the same had been true of primitive ocean navies on pre-Hegira Old Earth, where most great naval battles had been fought in sight of land in the same aquatic killing grounds, with only the technology of the surface ships changing slowly—Greek trireme to steel-hulled battleship. Aircraft carriers with their long-range attack planes had changed that forever—allowing armadas to strike at each other far out to sea and at great distances—but these battles were far different from the legendary naval engagements where capital ships had slugged it out within visible range of one another. Even before cruise missiles, tactical nuclear warheads, and crude charged particle weapons had forever ended the era of the ocean-going surface combatant, the sea navies of Old Earth had grown nostalgic for the days of blazing broadsides and “crossing the T.”

Space war had brought a return to such mutually agreed upon engagements. The great battles of the Hegemony days—whether the ancient internecine wars with General Horace Glennon-Height and his ilk, or the centuries of warfare between Web worlds and Ouster Swarms—had usually been waged close to a planet or spaceborne farcaster portal. And distances between the combatants were absurdly short—hundreds of thousands of klicks, often tens of thousands, frequently less than that—given the light-years and parsecs traveled by the warring parties. But this closing on the enemy was necessary given the time it took a fusion-powered laser lance, a CPB, or ordinary attack missiles to cross even one AU—SEVEN minutes for light to crawl the distance between would-be killer and target, much longer for even the highest-boost missile, where the hunt, chase, and kill could take days of seek and countermeasure, attack and parry.

Ships with C-plus capability had no incentive to hang around in enemy space waiting for these seeker missiles, and the Church-sponsored restriction on AI’s in warheads made the effectiveness of these weapons problematic at best. So the shape of space battles over the centuries of the Hegemony had been simple—fleets translating into space and finding other translating fleets or more static in-system defenses, a quick closing to more lethal distances, a brief but terrible exchange of energies, and the inevitable retreat of the more savaged forces—or total destruction if the defending forces had nowhere to retreat—followed by consolidation of gains by the winning fleet.

Technically, the slower ships de Soya had served in previously had a powerful tactical advantage over the instantaneous-drive archangel cruisers. Revival from cryogenic fugue state took only hours at worst, minutes at best, so the captain and crew of a Hawking-drive ship could be ready to fight shortly after translating from C-plus. With the archangels, and even with papal dispensation for the accelerated and risky two-day resurrection cycles, it was fifty standard hours or more before the human elements of the ships were ready to do battle.

Theoretically, this gave a great advantage to the defenders. Theoretically, the Pax could have optimized the use of Gideon-drive ships by having uncrewed craft piloted by AI’s flick into enemy space, wreak havoc, and flick out again before the defenders knew that they were under attack.

But such theory did not apply here.

Autonomous intelligences capable of such advanced fuzzy logic would never be allowed by the Church. More importantly, Pax Fleet had designed attack strategies to meet the requirements of resurrection so that no advantage would be surrendered to defenders.

Simply put, no battles were to be fought by mutual agreement. The seven archangels had been designed to descend upon the enemy like the mailed fist of God, and that was precisely what they were doing now.

In the first three Task Force GIDEON incursions into Ouster space, Mother Captain Stone’s ship, the Gabriel, translated first and decelerated hard in-system, drawing all long-range electromagnetic, neutrino, and other sensor probes. The restricted AI’s aboard Gabriel were sufficient to catalogue the position and identity of all defensive positions and population centers in the system, while simultaneously monitoring the sluggish in-system movement of all Ouster attack and merchant vehicles.

Thirty minutes later, the Uriel, Raphael, Remiel, Sariel, Michael, and Raguel would translate in-system. Dropping to only three-quarters light-speed, the task force would be moving like bullets compared to the tortoise velocities of the accelerating Ouster torchships. Receiving Gabriel’s intelligence and targeting data via tight beam burst, the task force would open fire with weaponry that held no respect for the limitations of light-speed. The improved Hawking-drive hyper-k missiles would wink into existence among enemy ships and above population centers, some using velocity and precise aiming to destroy targets, others detonating in carefully shaped but promiscuous plasma or thermonuclear blasts. At the same instant, recoverable Hawking-drive high-velocity probes would jump to target points and translate into real space, radiating conventional lance beams and CPB’s like so many lethal sea urchins, destroying anything and everything within a hundred-thousand-klick radius.

Most terribly, the ship borne deathbeams would slice outward from the task force archangels like invisible scythes, propagating along the Hawking-drive wakes of probes and missiles and translating into real space as surely as the terrible swift sword of God.

Countless trillions of synapses were fried and scrambled in an instant. Tens of thousands of Ousters died without knowing that they were under attack.

And then the GIDEON Task Force would come back in-system on thousand-kilometer tails of flame, closing in for the final kill.

Each of the seven star systems to be attacked had been probed by instantaneous-drive drones, the presence of Ousters confirmed, preliminary targets assigned. Each of the seven star systems had a name—usually just a New Revised General Catalogue alpha-numerical designation—but the command team aboard H.H.S. Uriel had given the seven systems target names coded after the seven archdemons mentioned in the Old Testament.

Father Captain de Soya thought it a bit much, all this cabalistic numerology—seven archangels, seven target systems, seven archdemons, seven deadly sins. But he soon fell into the habit of talking about the targets in this shorthand.

The target systems were—Belphegor (sloth), Leviathan (envy), Beelzebub (gluttony), Satan (anger), Asmodeus (lechery), Mammon (avarice), and Lucifer (pride).

Belphegor had been a red-dwarf system that reminded de Soya of Barnard’s Star system, but instead of the lovely, fully terraformed Barnard’s World floating close to the sun, Belphegor’s only planet was a gas giant resembling Barnard’s Star’s forgotten child, Whirl. There were true military targets around this unnamed gas giant: refueling stations for the Ouster Swarm torchships en route to attack the Pax’s Great Wall, gigantic dipships that shuttled the gases from the world to orbit, repair docks and orbital shipyards by the dozen. De Soya had Raphael attack these without hesitation, slagging them to orbital lava.

GIDEON found most of the true Ouster population centers floating in the Trojan points beyond the gas giant, scores of small orbital forests filled with tens of thousands of space-adapted “angels,” most opening their forcefield wings to the weak, red sunlight in panic at the task force’s approach. The seven archangels laid waste to these delicate ecostructures, destroying all of the forests and shepherd asteroids and watering comets, burning the fleeing space-adapted Ouster angels like putting so many moths to a flame, and all without slowing significantly between entrance and exit translation points.

The second system, Leviathan, despite its impressive name, had been a Sirius B-type white dwarf with only a dozen or so Ouster asteroids huddled close to its pale fire. Here there were none of the obvious military targets that de Soya had attacked so willingly in the Belphegor System: the asteroids were undefended, probably birthing rocks and hollowed-out pressurized environments for Ousters who had not chosen to adapt to vacuum and hard radiation. Task Force GIDEON swept them with deathbeams and passed on.

The third system, Beelzebub, was an Alpha Centauri C-like red dwarf, devoid of worlds or colonies, with only a single Ouster military base swinging in the darkness some thirty AU’s out and fifty-seven Swarm ships caught in the act of refueling or refitting. Thirty-nine of these warships, ranging in size and armament from tiny ramscouts to an Orion-class attack carrier, were fit to fight and flung themselves at Task Force GIDEON. The battle lasted two minutes and eighteen seconds. All fifty-seven Ouster ships and the base complex were turned to gas molecules or lifeless sarcophagi. No archangels were damaged in the exchange. The task force moved on.

The fourth system, Satan, held no ships, only breeding colonies scattered as far out as the Oört cloud. GIDEON spent eleven days in this system, putting Lucifer’s angels to the torch.

The fifth system, Asmodeus, centered by a pleasant little K-type orange dwarf not unlike Epsilon Eridani, sent waves of in-system torchships to the defense of its populated asteroid belt. The waves were burned and blasted away with an economy born of practice. The Gabriel reported eighty-two inhabited rocks in the belt, harboring a population estimated at a million and a half adapted and unadapted Ousters.

Eighty-one of the asteroids were destroyed or deathbeamed from a great distance. Then Admiral Aldikacti ordered prisoners taken. Task Force GIDEON decelerated in a long, four-day ellipse that brought them back to the belt and its sole remaining inhabited rock—a potato-shaped asteroid less than four klicks long and a klick across at its widest, cratered point. Doppler radar showed that it was orbiting and tumbling in random patterns understood only by the gods of chaos, but that it was turning on its axis in a carefully orchestrated one-tenth-g rotisserie mode. Deep radar showed that it was hollow. Probes told that it was inhabited by as many as ten thousand Ousters.

Analysis suggested that it was a birthing rock.

Six unarmed rock hoppers flung themselves at the task force. Uriel turned them into plasma at a distance of eighty-six thousand klicks. A thousand Ouster angels, some of them armed with low-yield energy weapons or recoilless rifles, opened forcefield wings and flew toward the distant Pax ships in long, tacking ellipses along the crest of the solar wind. Their velocity was so slow that it would have taken days to cover the distance. The Gabriel was given the task of burning them away with a thousand winks of coherent light. Tightbeams flicked on between the archangels.

Raphael and Gabriel acknowledged orders and closed to within a thousand klicks of the silent asteroid. Sally ports opened and twelve tiny figures—six from each ship—caught the light from the orange-dwarf star as Swiss Guard commandos, Marines, and troopers jetted toward the rock.

There was no resistance. The troopers found two shielded air-lock portals. With precise timing, they blasted the outer doors open and entered in teams of three.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two standard months since my last confession.”

“Go ahead.”

“Father, today’s action… it bothers me, Father.”

“Yes?”

“It feels… wrong.”

Father Captain de Soya was silent. He had watched Sergeant Gregorius’s attack on the virtual tactical channels. He had debriefed the men after the mission. Now he knew he was going to hear it again in the darkness of the confessional. “Go ahead, Sergeant,” he said softly.

“Aye, sir,” said the sergeant on the other side of the partition. “I mean, aye, Father.”

Father Captain de Soya heard the big man take a breath.

“We came onto the rock with no opposition,” began Sergeant Gregorius. “Me an’ the five young ones, I mean. We were in tightbeam contact with Sergeant Kluge’s squad from the Gabriel. And of course, with Commanders Barnes-Avne and Uchikawa.”

De Soya remained silent in his part of the confessional booth. The booth was sectional, meant to be stored away when the Raphael was under boost or combat stations, which was most of the time, but now it smelled of wood and sweat and velvet and sin, as all real confessionals did. The father-captain had found this half hour during the last stage of their climb toward translation point for the sixth Ouster system, Mammon, and offered the crew time for confession, but only Sergeant Gregorius had come forward.

“So when we landed, sir… Father, I had the laddies in my squad take the south polar air lock, just like in the sims. We blew the doors as easily as you please, Father, and then activated our own fields for the tunnel fighting.” De Soya nodded. Swiss Guard fighting suits had always been the best in the human universe—capable of surviving, moving, and fighting in air, water, hard vacuum, hard radiation, slug assault, energy lance assault, and high explosive environment up to the kiloton-yield range, but the new commando suits carried their own class-four containment fields and were able to piggyback on the ships’ more formidable fields.

“The Ousters hit us in there, Father, fighting in the dark maze of the access tunnels. Some o’ them were space-adapted creatures, sir… angels without their wings extended. But most of them were just low-g adepts in skinsuits… hardly any armor to speak of a’tall, Father. They tried using lance and rifle and ray on us, but they were using basic night goggles to amplify the dim glow from the rocks, sir, and we saw ’em first with our filters. Saw ’em first and shot ’em first.” Sergeant Gregorius took another breath. “It only took us a few minutes to fight our way to the inner locks, Father. All the Ousters who tried to stop us in the tunnels ended up floatin’ there…” Father Captain de Soya waited. “Inside, Father… well…”

Gregorius cleared his throat. “Both squads blew the inner doors at the same instant, sir… north and south poles at once. The repeater globes we left behind in the tunnels relayed the tightbeam transmissions just fine, so we were never out of touch with Kluge’s squad… nor with the ships, as ye know, Father. There were fail-safes on the inner doors, just as we figured, but those we blew as well, and the emergency membranes a second later. The inside of the rock was all hollow, Father… well, we knew that, of course… but I’d never been inside a birthin’ asteroid before, Father. Many a military rock, aye, but never a pregnancy one…”

De Soya waited.

“It was about one klick across with lots o’ their spidery low-g bamboo towers takin’ up much of the center space, Father. The inner shell wasn’t spherical or smooth, but more or less followed the shape of the outside of the rock, you know.”

“Potato,” said Father Captain de Soya.

“Yessir. And all pitted and cratered on the inside, too, Father. Lots of caves and grottoes everywhere… like dens for the pregnant Ousters, I suppose.”

De Soya nodded in the darkness and glanced at his chronometer, wondering if the usually concise sergeant was going to get to the perceived sins in this account before they had to stow the confessional for C-plus translation.

“It mst’ve been pure chaos for the Ousters, Father… what with the cyclone howlin’ as the place depressurized, all the atmosphere flowin’ out o’ the two blasted air locks like water out of a bathtub drain, the air all full of dirt and debris and Ousters blowin’ away like so many leaves in the storm. We had our external suit phones on, Father, and the noise was unbelievable ’til the air got too thin to carry it—wind roarin’, Ousters screamin’, their lances and our lances cracklin’ like so many lightning rods, plasma grenades goin’ off and the sound bouncin’ back at us in that big rock cavern, the echoes goin’ on for minutes—it was loud, Father.”

“Yes,” said Father Captain de Soya in the darkness.

Sergeant Gregorius took another breath.

“Anyway, Father, the orders’d been to bring in two samples of everything… adult males, space-adapted, unadapted; adult females, pregnant and not pregnant; a couple of Ouster kids, pre-puberty, and infants… both sexes. So Kluge’s team and ours got busy, stunning and bagging ’em. There was just enough gravity on the inner surface of the rock… one-tenth-g… to keep the bags in place where we left ’em.”

There was a moment of silence. Father Captain de Soya was just about to speak, to bring this confession to a close, when Sergeant Gregorius whispered through the screen and darkness separating them.

“Sorry, Father, I know you know all this. I just… it’s hard to… anyway, this was the bad part, Father. Most of the Ousters who weren’t modified… space-adapted… were dead or dying at this point. From decompression or lance fire or grenades. We didn’t use the deathbeam wands issued to us. Neither Kluge nor I said anything to the lads… just none of us used the things.

“Now those adapted Ousters went angel, their bodies turnin’ all shiny as they activated their personal forcefields. They couldn’t fully extend their wings in there, of course, and it wouldn’t have done any good if they had… no sunlight to catch, and the one-tenth-g was too much for them to overcome if there had been any solar wind… but they went angel anyway. Some of them tried to use their wings as weapons against us.”

Sergeant Gregorius made a rough sound that might have been a parody of a chuckle. “We had class-four fields, Father, and they were batting at us with those gossamer wings… Anyway, we burned them away, sent three from each squad out with the bagged specimens, and Kluge and I each took our remain’ two lads to clear out the caverns as ordered…”

De Soya waited. There was less than a minute before he would have to end confession.

“We knew it was a birthin’ rock, Father. We knew… everybody knows… that the Ousters, even the ones who’ve turned the machines loose in their cells and blood and who don’t look anythin’ like human… they haven’t learned how to have their females carry and bear children in pure zero-g and hard radiation, Father. We knew it was a birthin’ rock when we went in the goddamned asteroid… I’m sorry, Father…”

De Soya stayed silent.

“But even so, Father… those caverns were like homes… beds and cubbies and flatscreen vid sets and kitchens… not things we’re used to thinkin’ Ousters have, Father. But most of those caves were…”

“Nurseries,” said Father Captain de Soya.

“Aye, sir. Nurseries. Wee beds with wee babies in ’em… not Ouster monsters, Father, not those pale, shiny things we fight against, not those damned Lucifer’s angels with wings a hundred klicks across in the starlight… just… babies. By the hundreds, Father. By the thousands. Cavern after cavern. Most o’ the rooms there had depressurized already, killing the little ones where they lay. Some o’ the little bodies had been blown out in the depressurization, but most o’ them were tucked in tight. Some o’ the rooms were still airtight, though, Father. We blew our way in. Mothers… women in robes, pregnant women with wild hair flying in the one-tenth-g… they attacked us with their fingernails and teeth, Father. We ignored them until the windstorms blew them out or they died a-choking, but some of the infants… scores of them, Father… were in those little plastic respirator cases…”

“Incubators,” said Father Captain de Soya.

“Aye,” whispered Sergeant Gregorius, his voice tiring at last. “And we tightbeamed back, what did they want us to do with ’em? With all the scores and scores of baby Ousters in these incubators. And Commander Barnes-Avne beamed back…”

“To continue on,” whispered Father Captain de Soya.

“Aye, Father… so we…”

“Followed orders, Sergeant.”

“So we used the last of our grenades in those nurseries, Father. And when the plasma grenades were gone, we lanced those incubators. Room after room, cavern after cavern. The plastic melted around the babes, covered ’em. Blankets ignited. The boxes mst’ve been fed with pure oxygen, Father, because a lot o’ them went up like grenades themselves… we had to activate our suit fields, Father, and even so… it took me two hours to clean my combat armor… but most of the incubators didn’t explode, Father, they just burned like dry tinder, burned like torches, everythin’ in ’em burnin’ bright like little furnaces. And by now all the rooms and caverns were in vacuum, but the boxes… the little incubators… they still had atmosphere while they burned… and we turned off our outside phones, sir. All of us did. But somehow we could still hear the crying and the screams through the containment fields and our helmets. I can still hear them, Father…”

“Sergeant,” said de Soya, his voice hard and flat with command.

“Aye, sir?”

“You were following orders, Sergeant. We were all following orders. His Holiness has long since decreed that Ousters have surrendered their humanity to nanodevices they release in their blood, to the changes they have made with their chromosomes…”

“But the screams, Father…”

“Sergeant… the Vatican Council and the Holy Father have decreed that this Crusade is necessary if the human family is to be saved from the Ouster threat. You were given orders. You obeyed them. We are soldiers.”

“Aye, sir,” whispered the sergeant in the darkness.

“We have no more time, Sergeant. We will talk about this at a later time. For now, I want you to do penance… not for being a soldier and following orders, but for doubting those orders. Fifty Hail Marys, Sergeant, and a hundred Our Fathers. And I want you to pray about this… pray very hard for understanding.”

“Aye, Father.”

“Now say a sincere Act of Contrition… quickly now…”

When the whispered words began to come through the screen, Father Captain de Soya lifted his hand in benediction as he gave absolution. “Ego te absolvo…”

Eight minutes later, the father-captain and his crew all lay back in their acceleration couches/resurrection créches as Raphael’s Gideon drive activated, carrying them instantaneously to Target System Mammon by way of terrible death and slow, painful rebirth.

The Grand Inquisitor had died and gone to Hell.

It was only his second death and resurrection and he had enjoyed neither experience. And Mars was Hell.

John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa and his contingent of twenty-one Holy Office administrators and security people—including his indispensable aide Father Farrell—had traveled to Old Earth System in the new archangel starship Jibril and had been given a generous four days after resurrection to recover and regroup mentally before beginning their work on the surface of Mars itself. The Grand Inquisitor had read and been briefed enough on the red planet to form an unassailable opinion—Mars was Hell.

“Actually,” Father Farrell responded the first time the Grand Inquisitor had mentioned his conclusion aloud about Mars being hell, “one of the other planets in this system… Venus… better fits that description, Your Excellency. Boiling temperatures, crushing pressures, lakes of liquid metal, winds like rocket exhausts…”

“Shut up,” the Grand Inquisitor said with a tired turn of his hand.

Mars: the first world ever colonized by the human race despite its low rating of 2.5 on the old Solmev Scale, the first attempted terraforming, the first failed terraforming—a world bypassed after the black-hole death of Old Earth because of the Hawking drive, because of the imperatives of the Hegira, because no one wanted to live on the rusty sphere of permafrost when the galaxy offered a near-infinite number of prettier, healthier, more viable worlds.

For centuries after the death of Old Earth, Mars had been such a backwater planet that the WorldWeb had not established farcaster portals there—a desert planet of interest only to the orphans of New Palestine (the legendary Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had been born in the Palestinian relocation camps there, Mustafa was surprised to learn) and to Zen Christians returning to Hellas Basin to reenact Master Schrauder’s enlightenment at the Zen Massif. For a century or so it had looked as if the huge terraforming project would work—seas filled giant impact basins and cycladferns proliferated along River Marineris—but then the setbacks came, there were no funds to fight the entropy, and the next sixty-thousand-year-long ice age arrived.

At the height of the WorldWeb civilization, the Hegemony’s military wing, FORCE, had brought Farcasters to the red world and honeycombed habitats into much of the huge volcano, Mons Olympus, for their Olympic Command School. Mars’s isolation from Web trade and culture served FORCE well and the planet had remained a military base until the Fall of the Farcasters. In the century after the Fall, remnants of FORCE had formed a vicious military dictatorship—the so-called Martian War Machine—which extended its rule as far as the Centauri and Tau Ceti systems and might well have become the seed crystal for a second interstellar empire if the Pax had not arrived, quickly subduing the Martian fleets, driving the War Machine back to Old Earth System, sending the dispossessed warlords into hiding among the ruins of FORCE orbital bases and in the old tunnels under Mons Olympus, replacing the War Machine’s presence in Old Earth System with Pax Fleet bases in the asteroid belt and among the Jovian moons, and finally sending missionaries and Pax governors to pacified Mars.

There was little left on the rust world for the missionaries to convert or the Pax administrators to govern. The air had grown thin and cold; the large cities had been plundered and abandoned; the great simoom pole-to-pole dust storms had reappeared; plague and pestilence stalked the icy deserts, decimating—or worse—the last bands of nomads descended from the once noble race of Martians; and little more than spindly brandy cactus now grew where the great apple orchards and fields of bradberries had long ago flourished.

Oddly, it was the downtrodden and much-abused Palestinians on the frozen Tharsis Plateau whose society had survived and thrived. The orphans of the ancient Nuclear Diaspora of A.D. 2038 had adapted to Mars’s rough ways and extended their Islamic culture to many of the planet’s surviving nomad tribes and free city-states by the time the Pax missionaries arrived. Refusing to submit to the ruthless Martian War Machine for more than a century, the New Palestinians showed no interest now in surrendering autonomy to the Church.

It was precisely in the Palestinian capital of Arafat-kaffiyeh that the Shrike had appeared and slaughtered hundreds… perhaps thousands… of people. The Grand Inquisitor conferred with his aides, met with Pax Fleet commanders in orbit, and landed in force. The main spaceport in the capital of St. Malachy was shut down to all but military traffic—no great loss, since no merchant or passenger dropships were scheduled in for a Martian week. Six assault boats preceded the Grand Inquisitor’s dropship, and by the time Cardinal Mustafa set foot to Martian soil—or Pax tarmac, to be precise—a hundred Swiss Guard and Holy Office commandos had ringed the spaceport. The official Martian welcoming delegation, including Archbishop Robeson and Governor Clare Palo, were searched and sonic-probed before being allowed clearance.

From the spaceport, the Holy Office group was whisked via groundcar shuttles through decaying streets to the new Pax-built Governor’s Palace on the outskirts of St. Malachy.

Security was heavy. Besides the Grand Inquisitor’s personal security force, the Pax Fleet Marines, the Governor’s troopers, and the Archbishop’s contingent of Swiss Guards, there was a battle regiment of Home Guard armored infantry encamped around the palace. There the Grand Inquisitor was shown evidence of the Shrike’s presence two standard weeks earlier on the Tharsis Plateau.

“This is absurd,” said the Grand Inquisitor on the night before flying to the scene of the Shrike attack. “All these holos and vid images are two standard weeks old or taken from high altitude. I see these few holos of what must be the Shrike and some blurred scenes of carnage. I see photos of the Pax bodies the militia men found when first entering the town. But where are the local people? Where are the eyewitnesses? Where are the twenty-seven hundred citizens of Arafat-kaffiyeh?”

“We don’t know,” said Governor Cre Palo.

“We reported to the Vatican via archangel drone and when the drone returned, we were told not to tamper with the evidence,” said Archbishop Robeson. “We were told to await your arrival.”

The Grand Inquisitor shook his head and held up a flat photo image. “And what is this?” he said. “A Pax Fleet base on the outskirts of Arafat-kaffiyeh? This spaceport is newer than St. Malachy’s.”

“It is not Pax Fleet,” said Captain Wolmak, captain of the Jibril and new commander of the Old Earth System task force. “Although we estimate that thirty to fifty dropships a day were using this facility during the week previous to the Shrike’s appearance.”

“Thirty to fifty dropships a day,” repeated the Grand Inquisitor. “And not Pax Fleet. Who then?” He scowled at Archbishop Robeson and the Governor.

“Mercantilus?” pressed the Grand Inquisitor when no one spoke.

“No,” said the Archbishop after another moment.

“Not Mercantilus.”

The Grand Inquisitor folded his arms and waited.

“The dropships were chartered by Opus Dei,” said Governor Palo in a tiny voice.

“For what purpose?” demanded the Grand Inquisitor. Only Holy Office guards were allowed in this suite of the palace, and they stood at six-meter intervals along the stone wall.

The Governor opened her hands. “We do not know, Your Excellency.”

“Domenico,” said the Archbishop, his voice quavering slightly, “we were told not to inquire.” The Grand Inquisitor took an angry step forward.

“Told not to… by whom? Who has the authority to order the presiding Archbishop and the Pax Governor of a world ‘not to interfere’?” His anger boiled through. “In the name of Christ! Who has such power?”

The Archbishop raised pained but defiant eyes toward Cardinal Mustafa. “In the name of Christ… precisely, Your Excellency. Those representing Opus Dei held official diskeys from the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace,” he said. “We were told that it was a security matter in Arafat-kaffiyeh. We were told that it was not our business. We were told not to interfere.”

The Grand Inquisitor felt his face flushing with barely subdued rage. “Security matters on Mars or anywhere else in the Pax are the responsibility of the Holy Office!” he said flatly. “The Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace has no charter here! Where are the representatives of the Commission? Why aren’t they here for this meeting?”

Governor Clare Palo raised a thin hand and pointed at the flat photo in the Grand Inquisitor’s hand. “There, Your Excellency. There are the Commission authorities.”

Cardinal Mustafa looked down at the glossy photograph. Forms of white-clad bodies could be seen in the dusty red streets of Arafat-kaffiyeh. Even through the grain of the images, it was obvious that the bodies were mauled into grotesque forms and swollen from decomposition. The Grand Inquisitor spoke softly, fighting the urge to scream and then order these imbeciles tortured and shot. “Why,” he asked softly, “haven’t these people been resurrected and questioned?”

Archbishop Robeson actually attempted a smile. “You will see that tomorrow, Your Excellency. It will be abundantly clear tomorrow.”

EMV’s were useless on Mars. They used armored Pax Security skimmers for their flight to Tharsis Plateau. Torchships and the Jibril monitored their progress. Scorpion fighters flew spacestair combat patrol. Two hundred klicks from the plateau, five squads of Marines dropped from the skimmers and flew ahead at low altitude, raking the area with acoustic probes and setting up firing positions. Nothing but the shifting sand moved in Arafat-kaffiyeh.

The Holy Office security skimmers set down first, their landing legs settling into sand where grass had once grown on the oval city commons, the outer ships establishing and linking a class-six containment field that made the buildings around the plaza seem to shimmer in heat haze. The Marines had dropped into a defensive circle with the commons as their locus. Now the Governor’s Pax and Home Guard troops moved out to establish a second perimeter in the streets and alleys around the plaza. The Archbishop’s eight Swiss Guardsmen secured the circle just outside the containment field. Finally the Grand Inquisitor’s Holy Office security force exploded down the skimmer ramps and established the inner perimeter of kneeling figures in black combat armor.

“Clear,” came the leading Marine sergeant’s voice on the tactical channel.

“Nothing moving or alive within a kilometer of Site One,” rasped the lieutenant of the Home Guard. “Bodies in the street.”

“Clear here,” said the captain of the Swiss Guard.

“Confirm nothing moving in Arafat-kaffiyeh except your people,” came the voice of the captain of the Jibril.

“Affirmative,” said Holy Office Security Commander Browning.

Feeling foolish and disgruntled, the Grand Inquisitor swept down the ramp and across the sandy commons. His mood was not lifted by the silly osmosis mask he had to wear, its circular boostirator slung over his shoulder like a loose medallion.

Father Farrell, Archbishop Robeson, Governor Palo, and a host of functionaries ran to keep up as Cardinal Mustafa strode by the kneeling security forms and, with an imperious wave of his hand, ordered a portal cut in the containment field. He passed through over the protests of Commander Browning and the other forms in black armor who were scuttling to catch up.

“Where is the first of…” began the Grand Inquisitor as he bounced down the narrow alley opposite the commons. He still was not used to the light gravity here.

“Right around this corner…” panted the Archbishop.

“We should really wait for the outer fields to be…” said Governor Palo.

“Here,” said Father Farrell, pointing down the street onto which they had emerged.

The group of fifteen stopped so quickly that those aides and security people in the rear had to catch themselves before bumping into the VIP’s in front.

“Dear Lord,” whispered Archbishop Robeson and crossed himself. Through the clear osmosis mask, his face was visibly white.

“Christ!” muttered Governor Clare Palo. “I’ve seen the holos and photos for two weeks, but… Christ.”

“Ahh,” said Father Farrell, taking a step closer to the first body.

The Grand Inquisitor joined him. He went to one knee in the red sand. The contorted form in the dirt looked as if someone had fashioned an abstract sculpture out of flesh, bone, and gristle. It would not have been recognizably human had it not been for the teeth gleaming in the wide-stretched mouth and one hand lying nearby in the shifting Martian dust.

After a moment the Grand Inquisitor said, “Did scavengers do some or most of this? Carrion birds, perhaps? Rats?”

“Negative,” said Major Piet, the Governor’s Pax Fleet groundforce commander. “No birds on the Tharsis Plateau since the atmosphere started thinning two centuries ago. No rats… or any other moving thing… have been picked up by motion detectors since this happened.”

“The Shrike did this,” said the Grand Inquisitor. He did not sound convinced. He stood and moved to the second body. It might have been a woman. It looked as if it had been turned inside out and shredded. “And this?”

“We think so,” said Governor Palo. “The militia that found all this brought out the security camera which had that thirty-eight-second holo we’ve shown you.”

“That looked like a dozen Shrikes killing a dozen people,” said Father Farrell. “It was hazy.”

“There was a sandstorm,” said Major Piet. “And there was only one Shrike… we’ve studied the individual images. It simply moved through the crowd so quickly that it appeared to be multiple creatures.”

“Moved through the crowd,” murmured the Grand Inquisitor. He stepped over a third body that might have been a child or small female. “Doing this.”

“Doing this,” said Governor Palo. She glanced at Archbishop Robeson, who had moved to a wall for support. There were twenty to thirty bodies in this section of the street. Father Farrell knelt and ran his gloved hand across the chest and into the chest cavity of the first cadaver. The flesh was frozen, as was the blood that fell in a black icefall. “And there was no sign of the cruciform?” he said softly.

Governor Palo shook her head. “Not in the two bodies the militia returned for resurrection. No sign of the cruciform whatsoever. If there had been any remnant at all… even a millimeter of node or bit of fiber in the brain stem or…”

“We know that,” snapped the Grand Inquisitor, ending the explanation.

“Very strange,” said Bishop Erdle, the Holy Office’s expert on resurrection technique. “To my knowledge there has never been an instance where the body was left so intact where we could not find remnant of the cruciform in the corpse. Governor Palo is correct, of course. Even the slightest bit of cruciform is all that is necessary for the Sacrament of Resurrection.”

The Grand Inquisitor stopped to inspect a body that had been thrown against an iron railing hard enough to impale it at a dozen points. “It looks as if the Shrike was after the cruciforms. It tore every shred of them out of the bodies.”

“Not possible,” said Bishop Erdle. “Simply not possible. There are over five hundred meters of microfiber in the cellular node extensions of…”

“Not possible,” agreed the Grand Inquisitor. “But when we ship these bodies back, I’ll wager that none are recoverable. The Shrike may have torn their hearts and lungs and throats out, but it was after their cruciforms.”

Security Commander Browning came around the corner with five troopers in black armor.

“Your Excellency,” he said on the tactical channel only the Grand Inquisitor could hear. “The worst is a block over… this way.”

The entourage followed the man in black armor, but slowly, reluctantly.

They catalogued 362 bodies. Many were in the streets, but the majority were in buildings in the city or inside the sheds, hangars, and spacecraft at the new spaceport on the edge of Arafat-kaffiyeh. Holos were taken and the Holy Office forensic teams took over, recording each site before taking the bodies back to the Pax base morgue outside of St. Malachy. It was determined that all of the bodies were offworlders—i.e… there were no local Palestinians or native Martians among them. The spaceport intrigued the Pax Fleet experts the most.

“Eight dropships serving the field itself,” said Major Piet. “That’s a serious number. St. Malachy’s spaceport uses only two.” He glanced up at the purple Martian sky.

“Assuming that the ships they were shuttling to and from had their own dropships—at least two each, if they were freighters—then we’re talking about serious logistics here.” The Grand Inquisitor looked at Mars’s archbishop, but Robeson merely held his hands up.

“We knew nothing of these operations,” said the little man. “As I explained before, it was an Opus Dei project.”

“Well,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “as far as we can tell, all of the Opus Dei personnel are dead… truly, irrecoverably dead… so now it’s a responsibility of the Holy Office. You don’t have any idea what they built this port for? Heavy metals, perhaps? Some sort of mineral mining operation?”

Governor Palo shook her head. “This world has been mined for over a thousand years. There are no heavy metals left worth shipping. No minerals worth a local salvage operation’s time, much less Opus Dei’s.”

Major Piet slipped his visor up and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Something was being shipped in quantity here, Your Excellencies. Eight dropships… a sophisticated grid system… automated security.”

“If the Shrike… or whatever it was… had not destroyed the computers and record systems…” began Commander Browning.

Major Piet shook his head. “It wasn’t the Shrike. The computers had already been destroyed by shaped charges and tailored DNA viruses.”

He looked around the empty administrative building. Red sand had already found its way in through portals and seams. “It’s my guess that these people destroyed their own records before the Shrike arrived. I think they were on the verge of clearing out. That’s why the dropships were all in prelaunch mode… their onboard computers set to go.”

Father Farrell nodded. “But all we have are the orbital coordinates. No records of who or what they were going to rendezvous with there.”

Major Piet looked out the window at the dust storm blowing there. “There are twenty groundcar buses in that lot,” he murmured as if speaking to himself. “Each one can transport up to eighty people. A bit of logistical overkill if the Opus Dei contingent here amounted to just the three hundred sixty-some people whose bodies we’ve found.”

Governor Palo frowned and crossed her arms. “We don’t know how many Opus Dei personnel were here, Major. As you pointed out, the records were destroyed. Perhaps there were thousands…”

Commander Browning stepped into the circle of VIP’s. “Begging your pardon, Governor, but the barracks within the field perimeter here could house about four hundred people. I think that the Major may be right… all of the Opus Dei personnel may be accounted for in the bodies we’ve found.”

“You can’t be sure of that, Commander,” said Governor Palo, her voice sounding displeased.

“No, ma’am.”

She gestured toward the dust storm that had all but obscured the parked buses. “And we have evidence that they needed transport for many more people.”

“Perhaps they were an advance contingent,” said Commander Browning. “Preparing the way for a much larger population.”

“Then why destroy the records and limited AI’s?” said Major Piet. “Why does it look like they were preparing to move out for good?”

The Grand Inquisitor stepped into the circle and held up one black-gloved hand. “We’ll end the speculation for now. The Holy Office will begin taking depositions and carrying out interrogations tomorrow. Governor, may we use your office at the palace?”

“Of course, Your Excellency.” Palo lowered her face, either to show deference or to hide her eyes, or both.

“Very good,” said the Grand Inquisitor.

“Commander, Major, call the skimmers. We’ll leave the forensic teams and the morgue workers out here.” Cardinal Mustafa peered out at the worsening storm. Its howl could be heard through the ten layers of window plastic now. “What’s the local word for this dust storm?”

“Simoom,” said Governor Palo. “The storms used to cover the entire world. They’re growing in intensity every Martian year.”

“The locals say that it’s the old Martian gods,” whispered Archbishop Robeson. “They’re reclaiming their own.”

Less than fourteen light-years out from Old Earth System, above the world called Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, a starship that had once been named Raphael but which now held no name, finished its braking run into geosynchronous orbit. The four living things on board floated in zero-g, their gazes fixed on the image of the desert world on the plotboard.

“How reliable is our reading on perturbations in the farcaster field these days?” said the female called Scylla.

“More reliable than most other clues,” said her seeming twin, Rhadamanth Nemes. “We’ll check it out.”

“Shall we start with one of the Pax bases?” said the male named Gyges.

“The largest,” said Nemes.

“That would be Pax Base Bombasino,” said Briareus, checking the code on the plotboard. “Northern hemisphere. Along the central canal route. Population of…”

“It doesn’t matter what the population is,” interrupted Rhadamanth Nemes. “It just matters whether the child Aenea and the android and that bastard Endymion have come that way.”

“Dropship’s prepped,” said Scylla.

They screeched into atmosphere, extended wings just as they crossed the terminator, used the Vatican diskey code via transponder to clear the way for their landing, and set down amid Scorpions, troopship skimmers, and armored EMV’s. A flustered lieutenant greeted them and escorted them to the Base Commander’s office.

“You say that you’re members of the Noble Guard?” said Commander Solznykov, studying their faces and the readout on the diskey interphase at the same time.

“We have said it,” Rhadamanth Nemes replied tonelessly. “Our papers, order chips, and diskey have said it. How many repetitions do you require, Commander?”

Solznykov’s face and neck reddened above the high collar of his tunic. He looked down at the interphase holo instead of replying.

Technically, these Noble Guard officers—members of one of the Pope’s exotic new units—could pull rank on him. Technically, they could have him shot or excommunicated, since their ranks of Cohort Leaders in the Noble Guard combined the powers of both Pax Fleet and the Vatican. Technically—according to the wording and priority encryption of the diskey—they could pull rank on a planetary governor or dictate Church policy to a world’s presiding archbishop. Technically, Solznykov wished these pale freaks had never shown up on his backwater world.

The Commander forced a smile. “Our forces here are at your disposal. What can I do for you?”

The thin, pale woman named Nemes held a holocard over the Commander’s desk and activated it. Suddenly the life-size heads of three people floated in the space between them—or, rather, two people, since the third face was obviously that of a blue-skinned android.

“I didn’t think that there were any androids left in the Pax,” said Solznykov.

“Have you had reports of any of these three in your territory, Commander?” said Nemes, ignoring his question. “It is probable they would have been reported along the major river which runs from your north pole to the equator.”

“It’s actually a canal…” began Solznykov and stopped. None of the four looked as if they had any interest in small talk or extraneous information. He called his aide, Colonel Vinara, into the office.

“Their names?” said Solznykov as Vinara stood poised with his comlog ready.

Nemes gave three names that meant nothing to the Commander. “Those aren’t local names,” he said as Colonel Vinara checked records. “Members of the indigenous culture—it’s called the Amoiete Spectrum Helix—tend to accumulate names the way my hunting dog back on Patawpha collected ticks. You see, they have this triune marriage arrangement where…”

“These are not locals,” interrupted Nemes.

Her thin lips looked as bloodless as the rest of her pale face above the red uniform collar.

“They’re offworlders.”

“Ahh, well,” said Solznykov, relieved that he would not be dealing with these Noble Guard freaks for more than a minute or two more, “then we can’t help you. You see, Bombasino’s the only working spaceport on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B now that we closed down the indigenie operation at Keroa Tambat, and except for a few spacers who end up in our brig, there’s no immigration at all here. The locals are all Spectrum Helix… and, well… they like colors, they surely do, but an android would stand out like a… well, Colonel?”

Colonel Vinara looked up from his database search. “Neither the images nor names match anything in our records except for an all-points bulletin sent through via Pax Fleet about four and a half standard years ago.” He looked questioningly at the Noble Guardsmen.

Nemes and her siblings stared back without comment.

Commander Solznykov spread his hands. “I’m sorry. We’ve been busy for the last local two weeks on a major training exercise I had running here, but if anyone’d come through here who matched these descriptions…”

“Sir,” said Colonel Vinara, “there were those four runaway spacers.”

Goddammit! thought Solznykov. To the Noble Guardsmen he said, “Four Mercantilus spacers who jumped ship rather than face charges for use of illegal drugs. As I remember it, they were all men, all in their sixties, and”—he turned significantly to Colonel Vinara, trying to tell him to shut the fuck up with his gaze and tone—“and we found their bodies in the Big Greasy, didn’t we, Colonel?”

“Three bodies, sir,” said Colonel Vinara, oblivious to his commander’s signals.

He was checking the database again. “One of our skimmers went down near Keroa Tam bat and Med dispatched… ah… Dr. Abne Molina… to go down-canal with a missionary to care for the injured crew.”

“What the hell does this have to do with anything, Colonel?” snapped Solznykov. “These officers are searching for a teenager, a man in his thirties, and an android.”

“Yes, sir,” said Vinara, looking up, startled, from his comlog. “But Dr. Molina radioed in that she had treated a sick offworlder in Lock Childe Lamonde. We assumed that it was the fourth spacer…”

Rhadamanth Nemes took a step forward so quickly that Commander Solznykov flinched involuntarily. There was something about the slim woman’s movements that was not quite human.

“Where is Lock Childe Lamonde?” demanded Nemes.

“It’s just a village along the canal about eighty klicks south of here,” said Solznykov. He turned to Colonel Vinara as if all this commotion were his aide’s fault. “When are they flying the prisoner back?”

“Tomorrow morning, sir. We have a med-skimmer scheduled to pick up the crew in Keroa Tambat at oh-six-hundred hours and they’ll stop in…” The Colonel stopped speaking as the four Noble Guard officers spun on their heels and made for the door.

Nemes paused just long enough to say, “Commander, clear our flight path between here and this Lock Childe Lamonde. We’ll be taking the dropship.”

“Ah, that’s not necessary!” said the Commander, checking the screen on his desk. “This spacer is under arrest and will be delivered… hey!”

The four Noble Guard officers had clattered down the steps outside his office and were crossing the tarmac. Solznykov rushed out onto the landing and shouted after them. “Dropships aren’t allowed to operate in atmosphere here except to land at Bombasino. Hey! We’ll send a skimmer. Hey! This spacer’s almost certainly not one of your… he’s under guard… hey!”

The four did not look back as they reached their ship, ordered an escalator to morph down to them, and disappeared through the dropship hull.

Sirens went off across the base and personnel ran for shelter as the heavy dropship lifted on thrusters, shifted to EM, and accelerated south across the port perimeter.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” whispered Commander Solznykov.

“Pardon me, sir?” said Colonel Vinara.

Solznykov gave him a glare that would have melted lead. “Dispatch two combat skimmers immediately… no, make that three. I want a squad of Marines aboard each skimmer. This is our turf, and I don’t want these anemic Noble Guard pissants doing so much as littering without our say-so. I want the skimmers there first and that fucking spacer taken into custody… our custody… if it means harelipping every Spectrum Helix indigenie between here and Lock Childe Lamonde. Savvy, Colonel?”

Vinara could only stare at his commander.

“Move!” shouted Commander Solznykov.

Colonel Vinara moved.

10

I was awake all that long night and the next day, writhing in pain, shuttling to the bathroom while carrying my IV-drip apparatus, trying painfully to urinate, and then checking the absurd filter I had to urinate through for any sign of the kidney stone that was killing me. Sometime in late morning I passed the thing.

For a minute I couldn’t believe it. The pain had been less for the past half hour or so, just the echo of pain in my back and groin, actually, but as I stared at the tiny, reddish thing in the filter cone—something larger than a grain of sand but much smaller than a pebble—I couldn’t believe that it could have caused such agony for so many hours.

“Believe it,” Aenea said as she sat on the edge of the counter and watched me pull my pajama shirt back in place. “It’s often the smallest things in life that cause us the greatest pain.”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew, vaguely, that Aenea was not there—that I would never have urinated in front of anyone like that, much less in front of this girl. I had been hallucinating her presence ever since the first ultramorph injection.

“Congratulations,” said the Aenea hallucination. Her smile seemed real enough—that slightly mischievous, slightly teasing turning up of the right side of her mouth that I’d grown accustomed to—and I could see that she was wearing the green denim slacks and white cotton shirt she often wore when working in the desert heat. But I could also see the sink basin and soft towels through her.

“Thanks,” I said and shuffled back to collapse in the bed. I could not believe that the pain would not return. In fact, Dr. Molina had said that there might be several stones. Aenea was gone when Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and the trooper on guard came into the room.

“Oh, it’s wonderful!” said Dem Ria.

“We’re so glad,” said Dem Loa. “We hoped that you would not have to go to the Pax infirmary for surgery.”

“Put your right hand up here,” said the trooper.

He handcuffed me to the brass headboard.

“I’m a prisoner?” I said groggily.

“You always have been,” grunted the trooper. His dark skin was sweaty under his helmet visor. “The skimmer’ll be by tomorrow morning to pick you up. Wouldn’t want you missing the ride.” He went back out to the shade of the barrel tree out front.

“Ah,” said Dem Loa, touching my handcuffed wrist with her cool fingers. “We are sorry, Raul Endymion.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, feeling so tired and drugged that my tongue did not want to work right. “You’ve been nothing but kind. So kind.” The fading pain kept me from sleeping.

“Father Clifton would like to come in and speak with you. Would that be all right?”

At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest. I said, “Sure. Why not?”

Father Clifton was younger than I, short—but not as short as Dem Ria or Dem Loa or her race—and pudgy, with thinning, sandy hair receding from his friendly, flushed face. I thought that I knew his type. There had been a chaplain in the Home Guard a bit like Father Clifton—earnest, mostly inoffensive, a bit of a momma’s boy who may have gone into the priesthood so that he would never have to grow up and become really responsible for himself. It was Grandam who had pointed out to me how the parish priests in the various moor-end villages on Hyperion tended to remain somewhat childlike: treated with deference by their parishioners, fussed over by housekeepers and women of all ages, never in real competition with other adult males. I don’t think that Grandam was actively anti-clerical in spite of her refusal to accept the cross, just amused by this tendency of parish priests in the great and powerful Pax empire.

Father Clifton wanted to discuss theology.

I think that I moaned then, but it must have been taken for a reaction to the kidney stone, for the good priest merely leaned closer, patted my arm, and murmured, “There, there, my son.”

Did I mention that he was at least five or six years younger than me? “Raul… may I call you Raul?”

“Sure, Father.” I closed my eyes as if falling asleep.

“What is your opinion of the Church, Raul?”

Under my eyelids, I rolled my eyes.

“The Church, Father?”

Father Clifton waited.

I shrugged. Or to be more precise, I tried to shrug—it’s not that easy when one wrist is handcuffed above your head and the other arm is on the receiving end of an intravenous drip.

Father Clifton must have understood my awkward motion. “You’re indifferent to it then?” he asked softly.

As indifferent as one can be to an organization that’s tried to capture or kill me, I thought.

“Not indifferent, Father,” I said. “It’s just that the Church… well, it hasn’t been relevant to my life in most ways.”

One of the missionary’s sandy eyebrows rose slightly. “Gosh, Raul… the Church is a lot of things… not all of them spotlessly good, I’m sure… but I hardly think that it could be accused of being irrelevant.”

I considered shrugging again, but decided one awkward spasm of that sort was enough. “I see what you mean,” I said, hoping that the conversation was over. Father Clifton leaned even closer, his elbows on his knees, his hands set together in front of him—but more in the aspect of persuasion and reason than prayer. “Raul, you know that they’re taking you back to Base Bombasino in the morning.” I nodded. My head was still free to move. “You know that the Pax Fleet and Mercantilus punishment for desertion is death.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but only after a fair trial.”

Father Clifton ignored my sarcasm. His brow was wrinkled with what could only be worry—although for my fate or for my eternal soul, I was not sure which. Perhaps for both. “For Christians,” he began and paused a moment. “For Christians, such an execution is punishment, some discomfort, perhaps even momentary terror, but then they mend their ways and go on with their lives. For you…”

“Nothingness,” I said, helping him end his sentence. “The Big Gulp. Eternal darkness. Nada-ness. I become a worm’s casserole.”

Father Clifton was not amused. “This does not have to be the case, my son.”

I sighed and looked out the window. It was early afternoon on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. The sunlight was different here than on worlds that I had known well—Hyperion, Old Earth, even Mare Infinitus and other places I had visited briefly but intensely—but the difference was so subtle that I would have found it hard to describe. But it was beautiful. There was no arguing that. I looked at the cobalt sky, streaked with violet clouds, at the butter-rich light falling on pink adobe and the wooden sill; I listened to the sound of children playing in the alley, to the soft conversation of Ces Ambre and her sick brother, Bin, to the sudden, soft laughter as something in the game they were playing amused them, and I thought—To lose all this forever? And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying, To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love. Father Clifton cleared his throat. “Have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager, Raul?”

“Yes.”

“You have?” Father Clifton sounded surprised.

I had the feeling that I had thrown him off stride in his prepared line of argument. “Then you know why it makes sense,” he said rather lamely.

I sighed again. The pain was steady now, not coming and going in the tidal surges that had overwhelmed me the past few days. I remembered first encountering Blaise Pascal in conversations with Grandam when I was a kid, then discussing him with Aenea in the Arizona twilight, and finally looking up his Pensées in the excellent library at Taliesin West.

“Pascal was a mathematician,” Father Clifton was saying, “pre-Hegira… mid-eighteenth century, I think…”

“Actually, he lived in the mid 1600’s,” I said, “1623 to 1662, I think.” Actually, I was bluffing a bit on the dates. The numbers seemed right, but I would not have bet my life on them. I remembered the era because Aenea and I had spent a couple of weeks one winter discussing the Enlightenment and its effect on people and institutions pre-Hegira, pre-Pax.

“Yes,” said Father Clifton, “but the time he lived isn’t as important as his so-called wager. Consider it, Raul—on one side, the chance of resurrection, immortality, an eternity in heaven and benefiting from Christ’s light. On the other side… how did you put it?”

“The Big Gulp,” I said. “Nada-ness.”

“Worse than that,” said the young priest, his voice thick with earnest conviction. “Nada means nothingness. Sleep without dreams. But Pascal realized that the absence of Christ’s redemption is worse than that. It’s eternal regret… longing… infinite sadness.”

“And hell?” I said. “Eternal punishment?”

Father Clifton squeezed his hands together, obviously uncomfortable at that side of the equation.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But even if hell were just eternal recognition of the chances one has lost… why risk that? Pascal realized that if the Church was wrong, nothing would be lost by embracing its hope. And if it was right…”

I smiled. “A bit cynical, isn’t it, Father?”

The priest’s pale eyes looked directly into mine. “Not as cynical as going to your death for no reason, Raul. Not when you can accept Christ as your Lord, do good works among other human beings, serve your community and your brothers and sisters in Christ, and save your physical life and your immortal soul in the process.”

I nodded. After a minute, I said, “Maybe the time he lived was important.”

Father Clifton blinked, not following me.

“Blaise Pascal, I mean,” I said. “He lived through an intellectual revolution the likes of which humanity has rarely seen. On top of that, Copernicus and Kepler and their ilk were opening up the universe a thousandfold. The Sun was becoming… well… just a sun, Father. Everything was being displaced, moved aside, shoved from the center. Pascal once said, ‘I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’.”

Father Clifton leaned closer. I could smell the soap and shaving cream scent on his smooth skin. “All the more reason to consider the wisdom of his wager, Raul.”

I blinked, wanting to move away from the pink and freshly scrubbed moon of a face. I was afraid that I smelled of sweat and pain and fear.

I had not brushed my teeth in twenty-four hours. “I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child,” I said.

Father Clifton pulled away as if slapped.

His fair skin flushed a deeper red. Then he stood and patted my arm. “You get some sleep. We’ll speak again before you leave tomorrow.”

But I did not have until tomorrow. If I had been outside at that moment, looking at just the precise quadrant of the late-afternoon sky, I would have seen the scratch of flame across the dome of cobalt as Nemes’s dropship entered the landing pattern for Pax Base Bombasino.

When Father Clifton left, I fell asleep.

I watched as Aenea and I sat in the vestibule of her shelter in the desert night and continued our conversation. “I’ve had this dream before,” I said, looking around and touching the stone beneath the canvas of her shelter. The rock still held some of the day’s heat.

“Yes,” said Aenea. She was sipping from a fresh cup of tea.

“You were going to tell me the secret that makes you the messiah,” I heard myself say. “The secret which makes you the “bond between two worlds” that the AI Ummon spoke of.”

“Yes,” said my young friend and nodded again, “but first tell me if you think that your reply to Father Clifton was adequate.”

“Adequate?” I shrugged. “I was angry.”

Aenea sipped tea. Steam rose from the cup and touched her lashes. “But you didn’t really respond to his question about Pascal’s Wager.”

“That was all the response I needed to give,” I said, somewhat irritated. “Little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem is dying of cancer. The Church uses their cruciform as leverage. That’s corrupt… foul. I’ll have none of it.”

Aenea looked at me over the steaming cup.

“But if the Church were not corrupt, Raul… if it offered the cruciform without price or reservation. Would you accept it?”

“No.” The immediacy of my answer surprised me.

The girl smiled. “So it is not the corruption of the Church that is at the heart of your objection. You reject resurrection itself.”

I started to speak, hesitated, frowned, and then rephrased what I was thinking. “This kind of resurrection, I reject. Yes.”

Still smiling, Aenea said, “Is there another kind?”

“The Church used to think so,” I said. “For almost three thousand years, the resurrection it offered was of the soul, not the body.”

“And do you believe in that other kind of resurrection?”

“No,” I said again, as quickly as I had before. I shook my head. “Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically… shallow.”

“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.

“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.

“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’.”

“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.

Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.

“Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”

I made a rude noise. “The Pax Church offers a more pragmatic certainty.”

Aenea nodded. “That may be its only recourse these days. Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.”

“Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,” I said sternly. “Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars… pogroms… resistance to logic and science and medicine… not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.”

“Is all religion superstition then, Raul? All faith then folly?”

I squinted at her. The dim light from inside the shelter and the dimmer starlight outside played on her sharp cheekbones and the gentle curve of her chin. “What do you mean?” I said, correctly expecting a trap.

“If you had faith in me, would that be folly?”

“Faith in you… how?” I said, hearing my voice sounding suspicious, almost sullen. “As a friend? Or as a messiah?”

“What’s the difference?” asked Aenea, smiling again in that way that usually meant a challenge was in the offing.

“Faith in a friend is… friendship,” I said. “Loyalty.” I hesitated. “Love.”

“And faith in a messiah?” said Aenea, her eyes catching the light.

I made a brusque, throwing-away gesture. “That’s religion.”

“But what if your friend is the messiah?” she said, smiling openly now.

“You mean—‘What if your friend thinks she’s the messiah?’” I said. I shrugged again. “I guess you stay loyal to her and try to keep her out of the asylum.”

Aenea’s smile faded, but I sensed that it was not because of my harsh comment. Her gaze had turned inward. “I wish it were that simple, my dear friend.”

Touched, filled with a wave of anxiety as real as surging nausea, I said, “You were going to tell me why you were chosen as this messiah, kiddo. What makes you the bond between two worlds.”

The girl—young woman, I realized—nodded solemnly. “I was chosen simply because I was that first child of the Core and humankind.”

She had said that earlier. I nodded this time. “So those are the two worlds which you connect… the Core and us?”

“Two of the worlds, yes,” said Aenea, looking up at me again. “Not the only two. That’s precisely what messiahs do, Raul… bridge different worlds. Different eras. Provide the bond between two irreconcilable concepts.”

“And your connection to both these worlds makes you the messiah?” I said again.

Aenea shook her head quickly, almost impatiently. Something like anger glinted in her eyes. “No,” she said sharply. “I’m the messiah because of what I can do.”

I blinked at her vehemence. “What can you do, kiddo?”

Aenea held out her hand and gently touched me with it. “Remember when I said that the Church and Pax were right about me, Raul? That I was a virus?”

“Uh-huh.”

She squeezed my wrist. “I can pass that virus, Raul. I can infect others. Geometric progression. A plague of carriers.”

“Carriers of what?” I said. “Messiahhood?”

She shook her head. Her expression was so sad that it made me want to console her, put my arms around her. Her grip remained firm on my wrist. “No,” she said. “Just the next step in what we are. What we can be.”

I took a breath. “You talked about teaching the physics of love,” I said. “Of understanding love as a basic force of the universe. Is that the virus?”

Still holding my wrist, she looked at me a long moment. “That’s the source of the virus,” she said softly. “What I teach is how to use that energy.”

“How?” I whispered.

Aenea blinked slowly, as if she were the one dreaming and about to awaken. “Let’s say there are four steps, she said. “Four stages. Four levels.”

I waited. Her fingers made a loop around my captured wrist.

“The first is learning the language of the dead,” she said.

“What does that…”

“Shhh!” Aenea had raised the first finger of her free hand to her lips to shush me.

“The second is learning the language of the living,” she said.

I nodded, not understanding either phrase.

“The third is hearing the music of the spheres,” she whispered.

In my reading at Taliesin West, I had run across this ancient phrase: it was all mixed up with astrology, the pre-Scientific Age on Old Earth, Kepler’s little wooden models of a solar system predicated on perfect shapes, shells of stars and planets being moved by angels… volumes of double-talk. I had no idea what my friend was talking about and how it could apply to an age when humanity moved faster than light through the spiral arm of the galaxy.

“The fourth step,” she said, her gaze turned inward again, “is learning to take the first step.”

“The first step,” I repeated, confused. “You mean the first step you mentioned… what was it? Learning the language of the dead?”

Aenea shook her head, slowly bringing me into focus. It was as if she had been elsewhere for a moment. “No,” she said, “I mean taking the first step.”

Almost holding my breath, I said, “All right. I’m ready, kiddo. Teach me.”

Aenea smiled again. “That’s the irony, Raul, my love. If I choose to do this, I’ll always be known as the One Who Teaches. But the silly thing is, I don’t have to teach it. I only have to share this virus to impart each of these stages to those who wish to learn.”

I looked down at where her slim fingers encircled a part of my wrist. “So you’ve already given me this… virus?” I said. I felt nothing except the usual electric tingle that her touch always created in me.

My friend laughed. “No, Raul. You’re not ready. And it takes communion to share the virus, not just contact. And I haven’t decided what to do… if I should do this.”

“To share with me?” I said, thinking, Communion?

“To share with everyone,” she whispered, serious again. “With everyone ready to learn.” She looked directly at me again. Somewhere in the desert, a coyote was yipping. “These… levels, stages… can’t coexist with a cruciform, Raul.”

“So the born-again can’t learn?” I said. This would rule out the vast majority of human beings.

She shook her head. “They can learn… they just can’t stay born-again. The cruciform has to go.”

I let out my breath. I did not understand most of this, but that’s because it seemed to be double-talk.

Don’t all would-be messiahs speak double-talk? asked the cynical part of me in Grandam’s level voice. Aloud, I said, “There’s no way to remove a cruciform without killing the person wearing it. The true death.” I had always wondered if this fact had been the main reason I had been unwilling to go under the cross. Or perhaps it was just my youthful belief in my own immortality.

Aenea did not respond directly. She said, “You like the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people, don’t you?” Blinking, I tried to understand this. Had I dreamed that phrase, those people, that pain? Wasn’t I dreaming now? Or was this a memory of a real conversation? But Aenea knew nothing of Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and the others. The night and stone-and-canvas shelter seemed to ripple like a shredding dreamscape. “I like them,” I said, feeling my friend remove her fingers from my wrist. Wasn’t my wrist shackled to the headboard? Aenea nodded and sipped her cooling tea.

“There’s hope for the Spectrum Helix people. And for all the thousands of other cultures which have reverted or sprung up since the Fall. The Hegemony meant homogeneity, Raul. The Pax means even more. The human genome… the human soul… distrusts homogeneity, Raul. It—they—are always ready to take a chance, to risk change and diversity.”

“Aenea,” I said, reaching for her. “I don’t… we can’t…” There was a terrible sense of falling and the dreamscape came apart like thin cardboard in a hard rain. I could not see my friend.

“Wake up, Raul. They are coming for you. The Pax is coming.”

I tried to awaken, groping toward consciousness like a sluggish machine crawling uphill, but the weight of fatigue and the painkillers kept dragging me down. I did not understand why Aenea wanted me awake. We were conversing so well in the dream. “Wake up, Raul Endymion.” Wek op, Rool Endmyun.

It was not Aenea. Even before I was fully awake and focused I recognized the soft voice and thick dialect of Dem Ria. I sat straight up. The woman was undressing me! I realized that she had pulled the loose nightshirt off and was tugging my undershirt on—cleaned and smelling of fresh breezes now, but unmistakably my undershirt. My undershorts were already on. My twill pants, overshirt, and vest were laid across the bottom of the bed. How had she done this with the handcuff on my… I stared at my wrist. The handcuffs were lying open on the bedclothes. My arm tingled painfully as circulation returned. I licked my lips and tried to speak without slurring. “The Pax? Coming?”

Dem Ria pulled my shirt on as if I were her child, Bin… or younger. I motioned her hands away and tried to close the buttons with suddenly awkward fingers. They had used buttons rather than sealtabs at Taliesin West on Old Earth.

I thought I had grown used to them, but this was taking forever. “… and we heard on the radio that a dropship had landed at Bombasino. There are four people in unknown uniforms—two men, two women. They were asking the Commandant about you. They just lifted off—the dropship and three skimmers. They will be here in four minutes. Perhaps less.”

“Radio?” I said stupidly. “I thought you said that the radio didn’t work. Isn’t that why the priest went to the base to get the doctor?”

“Father Clifton’s radio was not working,” whispered Dem Ria, pulling me to my feet. She held me steady as I stepped into my trousers. “We have radios… tightbeam transmitters… satellite relays… all of which the Pax knows nothing about. And spies in place. One has warned us… hurry, Raul Endymion. The ships will be here in a minute.”

I came fully awake then, literally flushed with a surge of anger and hopelessness that threatened to wash me away. Why won’t these bastards leave me alone? Four people in unknown uniforms.

Pax, obviously. Evidently their search for Aenea, A. Bettik, and me had not ended when the priest-captain—de Soya—had let us escape the trap on God’s Grove more than four years earlier.

I looked at the chronometer readout on my comlog. The ships would be landing in a minute or so.

There was nowhere I could run in that time where Pax troopers would not find me. “Let me go,” I said, pulling away from the short woman in the blue robe. The window was open, the afternoon breeze coming through the curtains. I imagined that I could hear the near-ultrasonic hum of skimmers. “I have to get away from your house…” I had images of the Pax torching the home with young Ces Ambre and Bin still in it. Dem Ria pulled me back from the window.

At that moment, the man of the household—young Alem Mikail Dem Alem—came in with Dem Loa. They were carrying the Lusian bulk of the Pax trooper who had been left to guard me. Ces Ambre, her dark eyes bright, was lifting the guard’s feet while Bin struggled to pull one of the man’s huge boots off. The Lusian was fast asleep, mouth open, drool moistening the high collar of his combat fatigues.

I looked at Dem Ria.

“Dem Loa brought him some tea about fifteen minutes ago,” she said softly. She made a graceful gesture that caused the blue sleeve of her robe to billow. “I am afraid that we used the rest of your ultramorph prescription, Raul Endymion.”

“I have to go…” I began. The ache in my back was bearable, but my legs were shaky.

“No,” said Dem Ria. “They will catch you within minutes.” She pointed to the window. From outside there came the unmistakable subsonic rumble of a dropship on EM drive, followed by the thud and bark of its thrusters. The thing must be hovering right above the village, seeking a landing site. A second later the window vibrated to a triple sonic boom and two black skimmers banked above the adobe buildings next door.

Alem Mikail had stripped the Lusian to his thermal-weave underwear and had laid him out on the bed. Now he snapped the man’s massive right wrist into the handcuffs and snicked the other cuff around the headboard bar. Dem Loa and Ces Ambre were sweeping up the layers of fatigue clothing, body armor, and huge boots and stuffing them in a laundry bag. Little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem tossed the guard’s helmet in the bag. The thin boy was carrying the heavy flechette pistol. I started at the sight—children and weapons was a mix I learned to avoid even when I was a child myself, learning to handle power weapons while our caravan rumbled its way across the Hyperion moors—but Alem smiled and took the pistol from the boy, patting him on the back. It was obvious from the way Bin had held the weapon—fingers away from the trigger guard, pointing the muzzle away from himself and his father, checking the safety indicator even as he gave the pistol up—that he had handled such a device before.

Bin smiled at me, took the heavy bag with the guard’s clothing in it, and ran out of the room. The noise outside rose to a crescendo and I turned to look out the window.

A black skimmer kicked up dust less than thirty meters down the street that ran along the canal. I could see it through a gap between the houses. The larger dropship lowered itself out of sight to the south, probably landing in the grassy open area near the well where I had collapsed in pain from the kidney stone.

I had just finished wiggling into my boots and securing my vest when Alem handed me the flechette pistol. I checked the safety and propellant charge indicators out of habit, but then shook my head. “No,” I said. “It would be suicide to attack Pax troopers with just this. Their armor…” I was not actually thinking about their armor at that moment, but, rather, about the return fire from assault weapons that would level this house in an instant. I thought of the boy outside with the laundry bag of trooper’s armor. “Bin…” I said. “If they catch him…”

“We know, we know,” said Dem Ria, pulling me away from the bed and into the narrow hallway. I did not remember this part of the house. My universe for the past forty-some hours had been the bedroom and adjoining lavatory. “Come, come,” she said.

I pulled away again, handing the pistol to Alem. “Just let me run,” I said, my heart pounding. I gestured toward the snoring Lusian. “They won’t think that’s me for a second. They can tightbeam the doctor—if she’s not already in one of those skimmers—to ID me. Just tell them”—I looked at the friendly faces in their blue robes—“tell them that I overpowered the guard and held you at gunpoint…” I stopped then, realizing that the guard would destroy that cover story as soon as he awoke.

The family’s complicity in my escape would be self-evident. I looked at the flechette pistol again, half-ready to reach for it. One burst of steel needles and the sleeping trooper would never awaken to destroy the cover-up and endanger these good people.

Only I could never do it. I might shoot a Pax trooper in a fair fight—indeed, the adrenaline rush of anger that was burning through my weakness and terror told me that it would be a welcome relief to have that opportunity—but I could never shoot this sleeping man. But there would be no fair fight. Pax troopers in combat armor, much less these mysterious four in the dropship—Swiss Guard?—would be immune to flechettes and anything else short of Pax assault weapons. And the Swiss Guard would be immune to those. I was screwed. These good people who had shown me such kindness were screwed.

A rear door slammed open and Bin slid into the hallway, his robe hiked up to show spindly legs covered with dust. I stared at him, thinking that the boy would not get his cruciform and would die of cancer. The adults might well spend the next standard decade in a Pax prison.

“I’m sorry…” I said, hunting for words.

I could hear the commotion in the street as troopers hurried through the evening rush of pedestrians.

“Raul Endymion,” said Dem Loa in her soft voice, handing me the rucksack they had brought from my kayak, “please shut up and follow us. At once.”

There was a tunnel entrance beneath the floor of the hallway. I had always thought that hidden passages were the stuff of holodramas, but I followed Dem Ria into the one willingly enough. We were a strange procession—Dem Ria and Dem Loa sweeping down the steep staircase ahead of me, then me carrying the flechette pistol and fumbling the rucksack on my back, then little Bin followed by his sister, Ces Ambre, then, carefully locking the trapdoor behind him, Alem Mikail Dem Alem. No one stayed behind. The house was empty except for the snoring Lusian trooper.

The stairway went deeper than a normal basement level, and at first I thought that the walls were adobe like the ones above. Then I realized that the passage was cut from a soft stone, perhaps sandstone.

Twenty-seven steps and we reached the bottom of the vertical shaft and Dem Ria led the way down a narrow passage illuminated by pale chemical glowglobes. I wondered why this average, working-class home would have an underground passage.

As if reading my mind, Dem Loa’s blue cowl turned and she whispered, “The Amoiete Spectrum Helix demands… ah… discreet entrances to one another’s homes. Especially during the Twice Darkness.”

“Twice Darkness?” I whispered back, ducking under one of the globes. We had already gone twenty or twenty-five meters—away from the canal-river, I thought—and the passage still curved out of sight to the right. “The slow, dual eclipse of the sun by this world’s two moons,” whispered Dem Loa. “It lasts precisely nineteen minutes. It is the primary reason that we chose this world… please excuse the pun.”

“Ahh,” I said. I did not understand, but it didn’t seem to matter at that moment. “Pax troops have sensors to find spider-holes like this,” I whispered to the women in front of me. “They have deep radar to search through rock. They have…”

“Yes, yes,” said Alem from behind me, “but they will be held up a few minutes by the Mayor and the others.”

“The Mayor?” I repeated rather stupidly.

My legs were still weak from the two days in bed and pain. My back and groin ached, but it was a minor pain—inconsequential—compared to what I had passed through (and what had passed through me) during the last couple of days.

“The Mayor is challenging the Pax’s right to search,” whispered Dem Ria. The passage widened and went straight for at least a hundred meters. We passed two branching tunnels. This wasn’t a bolt-hole; it was a bloody catacombs. “The Pax recognizes the Mayor’s authority in Lock Childe Lamonde,” she whispered. The silken robes of the five family members in blue were also whispering against the sandstone as we hurried down the passage. “We still have law and courts on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, so they are not allowed unlimited search and seizure rights.”

“But they’ll download permission from whatever authority they need,” I said, hurrying to keep up with the women. We came to another juncture and they turned right.

“Eventually,” said Dem Loa, “but the streets are now filled with all of the colors of the Lock Childe Lamonde strand of the Helix—reds, whites, greens, ebonies, yellows—thousands of people from our village. And many more are coming from nearby Locks. No one will volunteer which house is the one where you were kept. Father Clifton has been lured out of town on a ruse, so he can be of no help to the Pax troopers. Dr. Molina has been detained in Keroa Tambat by some of our people and is currently out of touch with her Pax superiors. And your guard will be sleeping for at least another hour. This way.”

We turned left into a wider passage, stopped at the first door we had seen, waited for Dem Ria to palmlock it open, and then stepped into a large, echoing space carved into the stone. We were standing on a metal stairway looking down on what appeared to be a subterranean garage: half a dozen long, slim vehicles with oversized wheels, stern wings, sails, and pedals clustered by primary colors. These things were like buckboards set on spidery suspensions, obviously powered by wind and muscle power, and covered over with wood, bright, silky polymer fabrics, and Perspex.

“Windcycles,” said Ces Ambre.

Several men and women in emerald-green robes and high boots were preparing three of the wagons for departure. Lashed in the back of one of the long wagonbeds was my kayak.

Everyone was moving down the clattering staircase, but I stopped at the head of the stairs. My balking was so sudden that poor Bin and Ces Ambre almost crashed into me.

“What is it?” said Alem Mikail.

I had tucked the flechette pistol in my belt and now I opened my hands. “Why are you doing this? Why is everyone helping? What’s going on?”

Dem Ria took a step back up the metal staircase and leaned on the railing. Her eyes were as bright as her daughter’s had been. “If they take you, Raul Endymion, they will kill you.”

“How do you know?” I said. My voice was soft but the acoustics of the underground garage were such that the men and women in green looked up from where they were working below.

“You spoke in your sleep,” said Dem Loa.

I cocked my head, not understanding. I had been dreaming of Aenea and our conversation. What would that have told these people? Dem Ria took another step upward and touched my wrist with her cool hand. “The Amoiete Spectrum Helix has foretold this woman, Raul Endymion. This one named Aenea. We call her the One Who Teaches.”

I felt goose bumps at that moment, in the chill glowglobe light of this buried place. The old poet—Uncle Martin—had spoken of my young friend as a messiah, but his cynicism leaked into everything he said or did. The people of Taliesin West had respected Aenea… but to believe that the energetic sixteen-year-old was actually a World Historical Figure? It seemed unlikely. And the girl and I had spoken of it in real life and in my ultramorph dreams, but… my God, I was on a world scores of light-years away from Hyperion and an eternal distance from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud where Old Earth was hidden. How had these people…

“Halpul Amoiete knew of the One Who Teaches when he composed the Helix Symphony,” said Dem Loa. “All of the people of the Spectrum were descended from empath stock. The Helix was and is a way to refine that empathic ability.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand…”

“Please understand this, Raul Endymion,” said Dem Ria, her fingers squeezing my wrist almost painfully. “If you do not escape this place, the Pax will have your soul and body. And the One Who Teaches needs both these things.”

I squinted at the woman, thinking that she was jesting. But her pleasant, unlined face was set and serious.

“Please,” said little Bin, setting his little hand in my free one and pulling. “Please hurry, Raul.”

I hurried down the stairs. One of the men in green handed me a red robe. Alem Mikail helped me fold and wrap it over my own clothes. He wrapped the red burnoose and cowl in a dozen quick strokes. I would never have been able to arrange it properly. I realized with a shock that the entire family—the two older women, teenaged Ces Ambre, and little Bin—had stripped naked from their blue robes and were arranging red ones around them. I saw then that I had been wrong thinking that they were like Lusians—for although their bodies were shorter than Pax-space average and heavily muscled, they were perfectly proportioned. None of the adults had any hair, either on their heads or elsewhere. Somehow this made their compact, perfectly toned bodies more attractive. I looked away, realizing that I was blushing.

Ces Ambre laughed and jostled my arm. We were all in red robes now, Alem Mikail being the last to pull his on. One glance at his heavily muscled upper torso told me that I would not last fifteen seconds in a fight with the shorter man. But then, I realized, I probably would not last more than thirty seconds with Dem Loa or Dem Ria either. I offered the flechette pistol to Alem but he gestured for me to keep it and showed me how to tuck it in one of the multiple sashes of the long, crimson robe. I thought of my lack of weapons in the little backpack—a Navajo hunting knife and the little flashlight laser—and nodded my gratitude. The women and children and I were hurried into the back of the windcycle wagon that held my kayak and red fabric was pulled tight over the stays above us. We had to crouch low as a second layer of fabric, some wooden planks, and various crates and barrels were set in around and above us.

I could just make out a glimpse of light between the tailgate and the wagon cover. I listened to footsteps on stone as Alem went up front and crawled onto one of the two pedaling saddles. I listened as one of the other men—also now in a red robe—joined him on the cycling seat on the other side of the central yoke. With the masts still lowered above us, fabric sails reefed, we began rolling up a long ramp out of the garage.

“Where are we going?” I whispered to Dem Ria, who was lying almost next to me. The wood smelled like cedar.

“The downstream farcaster arch,” she whispered back.

I blinked. “You know about that?”

“They gave you Truthtell,” whispered Dem Loa from the other side of a crate. “And you did speak in your sleep.”

Bin was lying right next to me in the darkness.

“We know the One Who Teaches has sent you on a mission,” he said almost happily. “We know you have to get to the next arch.” He patted the kayak that curved next to us. “I wish I could go with you.”

“This is too dangerous,” I hissed, feeling the wagon roll out of the tunnel and into open air.

Low sunlight illuminated the fabric above us. The windcycle wagon stopped for a second as the two men cranked the mast erect and unfurled the sail. “Too dangerous.” I meant them taking me to the farcaster, of course, not the mission that Aenea had sent me on.

“If they know who I am,” I whispered to Dem Ria, “they’ll be watching the arch.”

I could see the silhouette of her cowl as she nodded. “They will be watching, Raul Endymion. And it is dangerous. But darkness is almost here. In fourteen minutes.”

I glanced at my comlog. It would be another ninety minutes or more until twilight according to what I had observed the previous two days. And then almost another full hour until true nightfall. “It is only six kilometers to the downstream arch,” whispered Ces Ambre from her place on the other side of the kayak. “The villages will be filled with the Spectrum celebrating.”

I understood then. “The Twice Darkness?” I whispered.

“Yes,” said Dem Ria. She patted my hand. “We must be silent now. We will be moving into traffic along the saltway.”

“Too dangerous,” I whispered one last time as the wagon began creaking and groaning its way into traffic. I could hear the chain drive rumbling beneath the buckboard floor and feel the wind catch the sail. Too dangerous, I said only to myself.

If I had known what was happening a few hundred meters away, I would have realized how truly dangerous this moment was.

I peered out through the gap between wagon wood and fabric as we rumbled along the saltway. This vehicle thoroughfare appeared to be a strip of rock-hard salt between the villages clustered along the raised canal and the reticulated desert stretching as far north as I could see. “Waste Wahhabi,” whispered Dem Ria as we picked up speed and headed south along the saltway.

Other windcycle wagons roared past heading south, their sails fully engaged, their two pedalers working madly. Even more brightly canvased wagons tacked north, their sails set differently, the pedalers leaning far out for balance as the creaking wagons teetered on two wheels, the other two spinning uselessly in the air.

We covered the six kilometers in ten minutes and turned off the saltway onto a paved ramp that led through a cluster of homes—white stone this time, not adobe—and then Alem and the other man furled the sail and pedaled the windcycle slowly along the cobblestone street that ran between the homes and the canal-river. High, wispy ferns grew along the canal banks there between elaborately fashioned piers, gazebos, and multitiered docks to which were tied ornate houseboats. The city seemed to end here where the canal widened into a waterway much more riverlike than artificial, and I raised my head enough to see the huge farcaster arch a few hundred meters downstream. Through and beyond the rusted arch, I could see only fern forest on the riverbanks and desert waste to the east and west. Alem guided the windcycle onto a brick loading ramp and pulled under the cover of a copse of tall ferns.

I glanced at my comlog. Less than two minutes until the Twice Darkness.

At that instant there was a rush of warm air and a shadow passed over us. We all crouched lower as the black Pax skimmer flew out over the river at an altitude of less than a hundred meters; the aerodynamic, figure-eight shape of the thing clearly visible as it banked more steeply and then swooped low above the ships headed north and south through the arch. River traffic was brisk here where the river widened: sleek racing sculls with rowing teams of four to twelve, gleaming powerboats throwing up glistening wakes, sailboats ranging from single-person jitabs to wallowing, square-sailed junks, canoes and rowboats, some stately houseboats churning against the current, a handful of silent electric hovercraft moving within their haloes of spray, and even some rafts that reminded me of my earlier voyage with Aenea and A. Bettik.

The skimmer flew low over these ships, passed over the farcaster arch headed south, flew back under it headed north, and disappeared in the direction of Lock Childe Lamonde.

“Come,” said Alem Mikail, folding back the fabric tarp above us and pulling at the kayak. “We must hurry.”

Suddenly there was a rush of warm air, followed by a cooler breeze that kicked dust off the riverbank, the fernheads rustled and shook above us, and the sky grew purple and then black. Stars came out. I glanced upward just long enough to see a beaded corona around one of the moons and the burning disc of the second, lower satellite as it moved into place behind the first.

From north along the river, back in the direction of the linear city that included Lock Childe Lamonde, there came the most haunting and mournful sound I had ever heard: a long wailing, more human-throated than siren-caused, followed by a sustained note that grew deeper and deeper until it fell into the subsonic. I realized that I had heard hundreds—perhaps thousands—of horns played at the same instant that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of human voices had joined in chorus.

The darkness around us grew deeper. The stars blazed. The disc of the lower moon was like some great backlit dome that threatened to drop on the darkened world at any moment. Suddenly the many ships on the river to the south and the canal-river to the north began wailing with their own sirens and horns—a cacophonous howl, this, nothing like the descending harmony of the opening chorus—and then began firing off flares and fireworks: multicolored starshells, roaring St. Catherine’s Wheels, red parachute flares, braided strands of yellow, blue, green, red, and white fire—the Spectrum Helix?—and countless aerial bombs. The noise and light were all but overwhelming. “Hurry,” repeated Alem, pulling the kayak from the wagon bed. I jumped out to help him and pulled off my concealing robe, tossing it into the back of the wagon. The next minute was a flurry of coordinated motion as Dem Ria, Dem Loa, Ces Ambre, Bin, and I helped Alem and the unnamed man carry the kayak down to the river’s edge and set it afloat. I went into the warm water up to my knees, stowed my backpack and the flechette pistol inside the little cockpit, held the kayak steady against the current, and looked at the two women, two young people, and two men in their billowing robes.

“What is to happen to you?” I asked. My back ached from the aftermath of the kidney stone, but at the moment the tightening of my throat was the more painful distraction. Dem Ria shook her head.

“Nothing bad will happen to us, Raul Endymion. If the Pax authorities attempt to make trouble, we will simply disappear into the tunnels beneath Waste Wahhabi until it is time to rejoin the Spectrum elsewhere.” She smiled and adjusted her robe on her shoulder. “But make us one promise, Raul Endymion.”

“Anything,” I said. “If I can do it, I will.”

“If it is possible, ask the One Who Teaches to return with you to Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and the people of the Amoiete Spectrum Helix. We shall try not to convert to the Pax’s Christianity until she comes to speak to us.”

I nodded, looking at Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem’s shaven skull, his red cowl flapping around him in the breeze, his cheeks gaunt with chemotherapy, his eyes gleaming more with excitement than reflected fireworks. “Yes,” I said. “If it is at all possible, I will do that.”

They all touched me then—not to shake hands, but merely to touch, fingers against my vest or arm or face or back. I touched them back, turned the bow of the kayak into the current, and stepped into the cockpit. The paddle was in the hullclamp where I had left it. I tightened the cockpit skirt around me as if there were white water ahead, bumped my hand against the clear plastic cover over the red “panic button” that Aenea had shown me as I set the pistol on the cockpit skirt—if this interlude had not caused me to panic, I was not sure what could—held the paddle in my left hand, and waved farewell with my right. The six robed figures blended into the shadows beneath the ferns as the kayak swept out into the middle current.

The farcaster arch grew larger. Overhead, the first moon began to move beyond the disc of the sun but the second, larger moon moved to cover both with its bulk. The fireworks and siren sounds continued, even grew in ferocity. I paddled closer to the right bank as I came close to the farcaster, trying to stay in the small-boat traffic headed downstream but not too close to anyone.

If they are going to intercept me, I thought, they will do it here. Without thinking, I raised the flechette pistol onto the curve of hull in front of me. The swift current had me now, and I set the paddle in its bracket and waited to pass under the farcaster. No other ships or small boats would be under the farcaster when it activated. Above me, the arch was a curve of blackness against the starry sky.

Suddenly there was violent commotion on the riverbank not twenty meters to my right.

I raised the pistol and stared, not understanding what I was seeing and hearing.

Two explosions like sonic booms. Strobe flashes of white light. More fireworks? No, these flashes were much brighter. Energy weapons fire? Too bright. Too unfocused. It was more like small plasma explosives going off. Then I saw something in a blink of an eye, more a retinal echo than a true vision: two figures locked in a violent embrace, images reversed like a negative of an ancient photograph, sudden, violent motion, another sonic boom, a flash of white that blinded me even before the image had registered in my brain—spikes, thorns, two heads butting together, six arms flailing, sparks flying, a human form and something larger, the sound of metal rending, the sound of something or someone screaming with a voice louder than the sirens wailing on the river behind me. The shock wave from whatever was happening on the bank rippled out across the river, almost tumbled my kayak, and proceeded across the water like a curtain of white spray.

Then I was under the farcaster arch, there was the flash and instant of vertigo I had known before, a bright light surrounded me through the flashbulb blindness, and the kayak and I were falling. Truly falling. Tumbling into space. A section of water that had been farcast under me fell away into a brief waterfall, but then the kayak was falling free from the water, spinning as it fell, and in my panic I dropped the flechette pistol into the cockpit and grabbed the hull of the kayak, setting it spinning more wildly as it fell.

I blinked through the flash echoes and tried to see how far I had to fall, even as the kayak went bow down and picked up speed.

Blue sky above. Clouds all around—huge clouds, stratocumulus rising thousands of meters above and falling more thousands of meters below, cirrus many kilometers above me, black thunderstorms many more kilometers below.

There was nothing but sky and I was falling into it.

Beneath me, the brief waterfall from the river had separated into giant teardrops of moisture, as if someone had taken a hundred buckets of water and hurled them into a bottomless chasm.

The kayak spun and threatened to go stern over bow. I shifted forward in the little kayak and almost tumbled out, with only my crossed legs and the lashing of the little moisture skirt holding me in.

I grabbed the rim of the cockpit in a white-knuckled, hopeless grip. Cold air whipped and roared around me as the kayak and I picked up speed, hurtling toward terminal velocity. Thousands and thousands of meters of empty, open air lay between me and the lightning-darted clouds so far below. The two-bladed paddle ripped from its bracket and tumbled away in freefall.

I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I opened my mouth and screamed.

11

Kenzo Isozaki could say honestly that he had never been afraid before in his life. Raised as a business-samurai in the fern islands of Fuji, he had been taught and trained since infancy to be disdainful of fear and contemptuous of anyone who felt it. Caution he allowed—it had become an indispensable business tool for him—but fear was alien to his nature and his carefully constructed personality.

Until this moment.

M. Isozaki stood back while the inner door of the air lock cycled open. Whatever awaited within had been on the surface of an airless, tumbling asteroid a minute earlier. And it was not wearing a spacesuit.

Isozaki had chosen not to bring a weapon on the little asteroid hopper: neither he nor the ship was armed. At this moment, as ice crystals billowed like fog from the opening air lock and a humanoid figure stepped through, Kenzo Isozaki wondered if that had been a wise choice.

The humanoid figure was human… or at least human in appearance. Tan skin, neatly cut gray hair, a perfectly tailored gray suit, gray eyes under lashes still rimmed with frost, and a white smile.

“M. Isozaki,” said Councillor Albedo.

Isozaki bowed. He had brought his heart rate and breathing under his control, and now he concentrated on keeping his voice flat, level, and emotionless. “It is kind of you to respond to my invitation.” Albedo crossed his arms. The smile remained on the tanned, handsome face, but Isozaki was not fooled by it. The seas around the fern islands of Fuji were thick with sharks descended from the DNA recipes and frozen embryos of the early Bussard seedships.

“Invitation?” said Councillor Albedo in a rich voice. “Or summons?”

Isozaki’s head remained slightly bowed. His hands hung loosely at his sides. “Never a summons, M…”

“You know my name, I think,” said Albedo.

“The rumors say that you are the same Councillor Albedo who advised Meina Gladstone almost three centuries ago, sir,” said the CEO of the Pax Mercantilus.

“I was more hologram than substance then,” said Albedo, uncrossing his arms. “But the… personality… is the same. And you need not call me sir.”

Isozaki bowed slightly. Councillor Albedo stepped deeper into the little hopper. He ran his powerful fingers over consoles and the single pilot’s couch and the rim of its empty high-g tank.

“A modest ship for such a powerful person, M. Isozaki.”

“I thought it best to exercise discretion, Councillor. May I call you that?” Instead of answering, Albedo took an aggressive step closer to the CEO. Isozaki did not flinch.

“Did you feel it an act of discretion to release an AI viral telotaxis into Pacem’s crude datasphere so that it could go looking for TechnoCore nodes?” Albedo’s voice filled the hopper cabin. Kenzo Isozaki raised his eyes to meet the gray glare of the taller man. “Yes, Councillor. If the Core still existed, it was imperative that I… that the Mercantilus… make personal contact. The telotaxis was programmed to self-destruct if detected by Pax antiviral programs, and to inoculate only if it received an unmistakable Core response.”

Councillor Albedo laughed. “Your AI telotaxis was about as subtle as the metaphorical turd in the proverbial punchbowl, Isozaki-san.” The Mercantilus CEO blinked in surprise at the crudity.

Albedo dropped into the acceleration couch, stretched, and said, “Sit down, my friend. You went to all that trouble to find us. You risked torture, excommunication, real execution, and the loss of your parking privileges in the Vatican skimmer park. You want to talk… talk.”

Temporarily off balance, Isozaki looked for another surface on which to sit. He settled on a clear section of the plotting board. He disliked zero-g, so the crude internal containment field kept up a differential simulating one gravity, but the effect was inconsistent enough to keep Isozaki teetering on the edge of vertigo. He took a breath and gathered his thoughts.

“You are serving the Vatican…” he began.

Albedo interrupted at once. “The Core serves no one, Mercantilus man.”

Isozaki took another breath and began again.

“Your interests and the Vatican’s have overlapped to the point that the TechnoCore provides counsel and technology vital to the survival of the Pax…”

Councillor Albedo smiled and waited.

Thinking for what I will say next, His Holiness will feed me to the Grand Inquisitor. I will be on the pain machine for a hundred lifetimes, Isozaki said, “Some of us within the Executive Council of the Pancapitalist League of Independent Catholic Transstellar Trade Organizations feel that the interests of the League and the interests of the TechnoCore may well hold more in common than those of the Core and the Vatican. We feel that an… ah… investigation of those common goals and interests would be beneficial to both parties.”

Councillor Albedo showed more of his perfect teeth. He said nothing.

Feeling the hemplike texture of the noose he was placing around his own neck, Isozaki said, “For two and three-quarters centuries, the Church and the Pax civil authorities have held as official policy that the TechnoCore was destroyed in the Fall of the Farcasters. Millions of those close to power on worlds across Pax space know the rumors of the Core’s survival…”

“The rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” said Councillor Albedo. “So?”

“So,” continued Isozaki, “with the full understanding that this alliance between Core personalities and the Vatican has been beneficial to both parties, Councillor, the League would like to suggest ways in which a similar direct alliance with our trading organization would bring more immediate and tangible benefits to your… ah… society.”

“Suggest away, Isozaki-san,” said Councillor Albedo, leaning farther back in the pilot’s chair.

“One,” said Isozaki, his voice growing firmer, “the Pax Mercantilus is expanding in ways which no religious organization can hope to do, however hierarchical or universally accepted it might be. Capitalism is regaining power throughout the Pax. It is the true glue that holds the hundreds of worlds together.

“Two, the Church continues to carry on its endless war with the Ousters and with rebellious elements within the Pax sphere of influence. The Pax Mercantilus views all such conflicts as a waste of energy and precious human and material resources. More importantly, it involves the TechnoCore in human squabbles that can neither further Core interests nor advance Core goals.

“Three, while the Church and the Pax utilize such obviously Core-derived technologies as the instantaneous Gideon drive and the resurrection créches, the Church gives the TechnoCore no credit for these inventions. Indeed, the Church still holds the Core up as an enemy to its billions of faithful, portraying the Core entities as having been destroyed because they were in league with the Devil. The Pax Mercantilus has no need for such prejudice and artifice. If the Core were to choose continued concealment when allied with us, we should honor that policy, always willing to present the Core as visible and appreciated partners when and if you should so decide. In the meantime, however, the League would move to end, for now and forever, the demonization of the TechnoCore in history, lore, and the minds of human beings everywhere.”

Councillor Albedo looked thoughtful. After a moment of gazing out the port at the tumbling asteroid beyond, he said, “So you will make us rich and respectable?”

Kenzo Isozaki said nothing. He felt that his future and the balance of power in human space was teetering on a knife’s edge. He could not read Albedo: the cybrid’s sarcasm could well be a prelude to negotiation.

“What would we do with the Church?” asked Albedo. “More than two and a half human centuries of silent partnership?”

Isozaki willed his heart rate to slow again.

“We do not wish to interrupt any relationship which the Core has found useful or profitable,” he said softly. “As businesspeople, we in the League are trained to see the limitations of any religion-based interstellar society. Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures… indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy. As businesspeople dedicated to the mutual profit of ourselves and our business associates, we see ways in which a second level of Core-human cooperation, however secretive or limited, should and would be beneficial to both parties.”

Councillor Albedo nodded again.

“Isozaki-san, do you remember in your private office in the Torus when you had your associate, Anna Pelli Cognani, remove her clothes?”

Isozaki retained a neutral expression but only by the utmost effort of will. The fact that the Core was looking into his private office, recording every transaction, made his blood literally chill.

“You asked then,” continued Albedo, “why we had helped the Church refine the cruciform. “To what ends?” I believe you said ‘Where is the benefit to the Core?’”

Isozaki watched the man in gray, but more than ever he felt that he was locked in the little asteroid hopper with a cobra that had reared up and opened its hood.

“Have you ever owned a dog, Isozaki-san?” asked Albedo.

Still thinking about cobras, the Mercantilus CEO could only stare. “A dog?” he said after a moment. “No. Not personally. Dogs were not common on my homeworld.”

“Ah, that’s right,” said Albedo, showing his white teeth again. “Sharks were the pet of choice on your island. I believe that you had a baby shark which you tried to tame when you were about six standard years old. You named it Keigo, if I am not mistaken.” Isozaki could not have spoken if his life had depended upon it at that second. “And how did you keep your growing baby shark from eating you when you swam together in the Shioko Lagoon, Isozaki-san?”

After a moment of trying, Isozaki managed, “Collar.”

“I beg your pardon?” Councillor Albedo leaned closer.

“Collar,” said the CEO. Small, perfectly black spots were dancing in the periphery of his vision. “Shock collar. We had to carry the transmitter palmkeys. The same devices our fishermen used.”

“Ah, yes,” said Albedo, still smiling. “If your pet did something naughty, you brought it back into line. With just a touch of your finger.”

He held his hand out, cupping it as if he were cradling an invisible palmkey. His tanned finger came down on an invisible button.

It was not so much like an electrical shock passing through Kenzo Isozaki’s body, more like radiating waves of pure, unadultered agony beginning in his chest, beginning in the cruciform embedded under his skin and flesh and bone—and radiating out like telegraph signals of pain flowing through the hundreds of meters of fibers and nematodes and clustered nodes of cruciform tissue metastasized through his body like rooted tumors. Isozaki screamed and doubled over in pain.

He collapsed to the floor of the hopper. “I believe that your palmkeys could give old Keigo increasing jolts if he got aggressive,” mused Councillor Albedo. “Wasn’t that the case, Isozaki-san?” His fingers tapped at empty air again, as if cueing a palmkey. The pain grew worse.

Isozaki urinated in his shipsuit and would have voided his bowels if they had not been already empty. He tried to scream again but his jaws clamped tight, as if from violent tetanus. Enamel on his teeth cracked and chipped away. He tasted blood as he bit through a corner of his tongue. “On a scale of ten, that would have been about a two for old Keigo, I think,” said Councillor Albedo. He stood and walked to the air lock, tapping the cycling combination in. Writhing on the floor, his body and brain useless appendages to a cruciform of horrific pain radiating through his body, Isozaki tried to scream through his locked jaws. His eyes were swelling out of their sockets. Blood ran from his nose and ears.

Finished with cycling the air-lock combination, Councillor Albedo tapped at the invisible key in his palm once again.

The pain vanished. Isozaki vomited across the deckplates. Every muscle in his body twitched randomly while his nerves seemed to misfire.

“I will bring your proposal to the Three Elements of the TechnoCore,” Councillor Albedo said formally. “The proposition will be discussed and considered most seriously. In the meantime, my friend, your discretion will be counted upon.”

Isozaki tried to make an intelligible noise, but he could only curl up and retch on the metal floor. To his horror, his spasming bowels were passing wind in a ripple of flatulence.

“And there will be no more AI viral telotaxes released in anyone’s datasphere, will there, Isozaki-san?” Albedo stepped into the air lock and cycled the door shut.

Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics.

It took Rhadamanth Nemes and her three siblings only a few minutes to fly the dropship from Pax Base Bombasino to the village of Lock Childe Lamonde on the slate-dry world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, but the trip was complicated by the presence of three military skimmers that that meddling fool Commander Solznykov had sent along in escort.

Nemes knew from the “secure” tightbeam traffic between the base and the skimmers that the Base Commander had sent his aide, the bumbling Colonel Vinara, to take personal charge of the expedition.

More than that, Nemes knew that the Colonel would be in charge of nothing—that is, Vinara would be so wired with real-time holosim pickups and tightbeam squirters that Solznykov would be in actual command of the Pax troopers without showing his jowled face again. By the time they were hovering over the proper village—although “village” seemed too formal a term for the four-tiered strip of adobe houses that ran along the west side of the river just as hundreds of other homes had for almost the entire way between the base and here—the skimmers had caught up and were spiraling in for a landing while Nemes looked for a site large enough and firm enough to hold the dropship.

The doors of the adobe homes were painted bright primary colors. People on the street wore robes of the same hue. Nemes knew the reason for this display of color: she had accessed both their ship’s memory and the encrypted Bombasino files on the Spectrum Helix people. The data was interesting only in that it suggested that these human oddities were slow to convert to the cross, slower still to submit to Pax control. Likely, in other words, to help a rebellious child, man, and one-armed android hide from the authorities.

The skimmers landed on the dike road bordering the canal. Nemes brought the dropship down in a park, partially destroying an artesian well.

Gyges shifted in his copilot’s seat and raised an eyebrow.

“Scylla and Briareus will go out to make the formal search,” Nemes said aloud. “You stay here with me.” She had noted with no pride or vanity that her clone-siblings had long since submitted to her authority, despite the death threat they had brought from the Three Elements and the certainty of it being carried out if she were to fail again.

The other female and male went down the ramp and through the crowd of brightly robed people. Troopers in combat armor, visors sealed, jogged to meet them.

Watching on the common optic channel, not via tightbeam or vid pickup, Nemes recognized Colonel Vinara’s voice through his helmet speaker. “The Mayor—a woman named Ses Gia—refuses permission for us to search the houses.”

Nemes could see Briareus’s contemptuous smile reflected on the Colonel’s polished visor. It was like looking at a reflection of herself with slightly stronger bone structure. “And you allow this… Mayor… to dictate to you?” said Briareus.

Colonel Vinara raised a gauntleted hand. “The Pax recognizes the indigenous authorities until they have become… part of the Pax Protectorate.”

Scylla said, “You said that Dr. Molina left a Pax trooper as guard…” Vinara nodded. His breathing was amplified through the morphic, amber helmet. “There is no sign of that trooper. We have attempted to establish communication since we left Bombasino.”

“Doesn’t this trooper have a trace chip surgically implanted?” said Scylla.

“No, it is woven into his impact armor.”

“And?”

“We found the armor in a well several streets over,” said Colonel Vinara.

Scylla’s voice remained level. “I presume the trooper was not in the armor.”

“No,” said the Colonel, “just the armor and helmet. There was no body in the well.”

“Pity,” said Scylla. She started to turn away but then looked back at the Pax Colonel. “Just armor, you say. No weapon?”

“No.” Vinara’s voice was gloomy. “I’ve ordered a search of the streets and we will question the citizens until someone volunteers the location of the house where the missing spacer was put under arrest by Dr. Molina. Then we will surround it and demand the surrender of all inside. I have… ah… requested the civil courts in Bombasino consider our request for a search warrant.”

Briareus said, “Good plan, Colonel. If the glaciers don’t arrive first and cover the village before the warrant is issued.”

“Glaciers?” said Colonel Vinara.

“Never mind,” said Scylla. “If it is acceptable to you, we shall help you search the adjoining streets and await proper authorization for a house-to-house search.” To Nemes, she broadcast on the internal band, Now what?

Stay with him and do just what you offered, sent Nemes. Be courteous and law-abiding. We don’t want to find Endymion or the girl with these idiots around. Gyges and I will go to fast time.

Good hunting, sent Briareus.

Gyges was already waiting at the dropship lock. Nemes said, “I’ll take the town, you move downriver to the farcaster arch and make sure that nothing gets through—going upriver or down—without your checking it out. Phase down to send a squirt message and I’ll shift periodically to check the band. If you find him or the girl, ping me.” It was possible to communicate via common band while phase-shifted, but the energy expenditure was so horribly high—above and beyond the unimaginable energy needed just for the phase-shift—that it was infinitely more economical to shift down at intervals to check the common band. Even a ping alarm would use the equivalent of this world’s entire energy budget for a year.

Gyges nodded and the two phase-shifted in unison, becoming chrome sculptures of a naked male and female. Outside the lock, the air seemed to thicken and the light deepen. Sound ceased. Movement stopped. Human figures became slightly out-of-focus statues with their wind-rippled robes stiff and frozen like the trappings on bronze sculptures.

Nemes did not understand the physics of phase shifting. She did not have to understand it in order to use it. She knew that it was neither the antientropic nor hyperentropic manipulation of time—although the future UI had both of those seemingly magical technologies at its command—nor some sort of “speeding up” that would have had sonic booms crashing and the air temperature boiling in their wake, but that phase shifting was a sort of sidestepping into the hollowed-out boundaries of space-time. “You will become—in the nicest sense—rats scurrying in the walls of the rooms of time,” had said the Core entity most responsible for her creation.

Nemes was not offended by the comparison. She knew the unimaginable amounts of energy that had to be transferred from the Core via the Void Which Binds to her or her siblings when they phase-shifted. The Elements had to respect even their own instruments to divert so much energy in their direction.

The two reflective figures jogged down the ramp and went opposite directions—Gyges south toward the farcaster, Nemes past her frozen siblings and the sculptures of Pax troopers and Spectrum citizens, into the adobe city.

It took her literally no time at all to find the house with the handcuffed Pax trooper asleep in the corner bedroom facing the canal. She rummaged through the downloaded Pax Base Bombasino files to identify the sleeping trooper—a Lusian named Gerrin Pawtz, thirty-eight standard years old, a lazy, initiative-free alcohol addict, two years away from retirement, six demotions and three sentences to brigtime in his file, assignments relegated to garrison duty and the most mundane base tasks—and then she deleted the file. The trooper was of no interest to her.

Checking once to make sure that the house was empty, Rhadamanth Nemes dropped out of phase shift and stood a moment in the bedroom.

Sound and movement returned: the snoring of the handcuffed trooper, movement of pedestrians along the canal walk, a soft breeze stirring white curtains, the rumble of distant traffic, and even the samurai-armor rustles of the Pax troopers jogging through adjoining streets and alleys in their useless search.

Standing over the Pax trooper, Nemes extended her hand and first finger as if pointing at the man’s neck. A needle emerged from under her fingernail and extended the ten centimeters to the sleeping man’s neck, sliding under the skin and flesh with only the slightest speck of blood to show the intrusion. The trooper did not wake. Nemes withdrew the needle and examined the blood within: dangerous levels of C-H-OH—Lusians frequently were at risk from high cholesterol—as well as a low platelet count suggesting the presence of incipient immune thrombocytopenic purpura, probably brought about by the trooper’s early years in hard-radiation environments on any of several garrison worlds, a blood alcohol level of 122 mg/100 ml—the trooper was drunk, although his alcoholic past probably allowed him to hide most of the effects—and—voilá!—the presence of the artificial opiate called ultramorph mixed with heightened levels of caffeine. Nemes smiled. Someone had drugged the trooper with sleep-inducing amounts of ultramorph mixed with tea or coffee—but had done so while taking care to keep the levels below a dangerous overdose.

She sniffed the air. Nemes’s ability to detect and identify distinct airborne organic molecules—that is, her sense of smell—about three times more sensitive than a typical gas chromatograph mass spectrometer’s: in other words, somewhere above that of the Old Earth canine called a bloodhound.

The room was filled with the distinctive scents of many people. Some of the smells were old; a few were very recent. She identified the Lusian trooper’s alcoholic stink, several subtle, musky female scents, the molecular imprint of at least two children—one deeply into puberty and the other younger but afflicted with some cancer requiring chemotherapy—and two adult males, one bearing the distinct sweat impressions of the diet of this planet, the other being at once familiar and alien. Alien because the man still carried the scent of a world Nemes had never visited, familiar because it was the distinctive human smell she had filed away: Raul Endymion still carrying the scent of Old Earth with him.

Nemes walked from room to room, but there was no hint of the peculiar scent she had encountered four years earlier of the girl named Aenea, nor the antiseptic android smell of the servant called A. Bettik. Only Raul Endymion had been here. But he had been here only moments before.

Nemes followed the scent trail to the trapdoor beneath the hall flooring. Ripping the door open despite its multiple locks, she paused before descending the ladder. She squirted the information on the common band, not receiving a responding ping from Gyges, who was probably phase-shifted. It had been only ninety seconds since they had left the ship. Nemes smiled. She could ping Gyges, and he would be here before Raul Endymion and the others in the tunnel below had taken another ten heartbeats.

But Rhadamanth Nemes would like to settle this score alone. Still smiling, she jumped into the hole and dropped eight meters to the tunnel floor below. The tunnel was lighted. Nemes sniffed the cool air, separating the adrenaline-rich scent of Raul Endymion from the other human odors.

The Hyperion-born fugitive was nervous. And he had been ill or injured—Nemes picked up the underlying smell of sweat tinged with ultramorph. Endymion had certainly been the offworlder treated by Dr. Molina and someone had used painkillers prescribed for him on the hapless Lusian trooper.

Nemes phase-shifted and began jogging down a tunnel now filled with thickened light. No matter how much of a head start Endymion and his allies had on her, she would catch them now. It would have pleased Nemes to slice the troublemaker’s head off while she was still phase-shifted—the decapitation seeming supernatural to the realtime onlookers, performed by an invisible executioner—but she needed information from Raul Endymion. She did not need him conscious, however. The simplest plan would be to pluck him away from his Spectrum Helix friends, surrounding him with the same phased field that protected Nemes, drive a needle into his brain to immobilize him, return him to the dropship, stow him in the resurrection créche there, and then go through the charade of thanking Colonel Vinara and Commander Solznykov for their help. They could “interrogate” Raul Endymion once their ship had left orbit: Nemes would run microfibers into the man’s brain, extracting RNA and memories at will. Endymion would never regain consciousness: when she and her siblings had learned what they needed from his memories, she would terminate him and dump the body into space. The goal was to find the child named Aenea.

Suddenly the lights went out. While I am phase-shifted, thought Nemes. Impossible. Nothing could happen that quickly. She skidded to a halt. There was no light at all in the tunnel, nothing she could amplify. She switched to infrared, scanning the passageway ahead and behind her. Empty. She opened her mouth and emitted a sonar scream, turning quickly to do the same behind her. Emptiness, the ultrasound shriek echoing back off the ends of the tunnel. She modified the field around her to blast a deep radar pulse in both directions. The tunnel was empty, but the deep radar recorded mazes of similar tunnels for kilometers in all directions. Thirty meters ahead, beyond a thick metal door, there was an underground garage with an assortment of vehicles and human forms in it.

Still suspicious, Nemes dropped out of phase shift for an instant to see how the lights could have gone out in a microsecond. The form was directly in front of her. Nemes had less than a ten thousandth of a second to phase-shift again as four bladed fists struck her with the force of a hundred thousand pile drivers. She was driven back the length of the tunnel, through the splintering ladder, through the tunnel wall of solid rock, and deep into the stone itself. The lights stayed out.

In the twenty standard days during which the Grand Inquisitor stayed on Mars, he learned to hate it far more than he thought he could ever hate Hell itself.

The simoom planetary dust storm blew every day he was there. Despite the fact that he and his twenty-one-person team had taken over the Governor’s Palace on the outskirts of the city of St. Malachy, and despite the fact that the palace was theoretically as hermetically sealed as a Pax spaceship, its air filtered and boosted and refiltered, its windows consisting of fifty-two layers of high-impact plastic, its entrances more air-lock seals than doors, the Martian dust got in.

When John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa took his needle shower in the morning, the dust he had accumulated in the night ran in red rivulets of mud into the shower drain. When the Grand Inquisitor’s valet helped him pull on his cassock and robes in the morning—all of the clothing fresh-cleaned during the night—there were already traces of red grit in the silken folds. As Mustafa ate breakfast—alone in the Governor’s dining room—grit ground between his molars. During the Holy Office interviews and interrogations held in the echoing great ballroom of the palace, the Grand Inquisitor could feel the dust building up in his ankle hose and collar and hair and under his perfectly manicured fingernails.

Outside, it was ridiculous. Skimmers and Scorpions were grounded. The spaceport operated only a few hours of the day, during the rare lulls in the simoom. Parked ground vehicles soon became humps and drifts of red sand, and even Pax-quality filters could not keep the red particles out of the engines and motors and solid-state modules. A few ancient crawlers and rovers and fusion rocket shuttles kept food and information flowing to and from the capital, but to all intents and purposes, the Pax government and military on Mars had come to a standstill.

It was on the fifth day of the simoom that reports came in of Palestinian attacks on Pax bases on the Tharsis Plateau. Major Piet, the Governor’s laconic groundforce commander, took a company of mixed Pax and Home Guard troopers and set out in crawlers and tracked APC’s. They were ambushed a hundred klicks short of the plateau approach and only Piet and half his command returned to St. Malachy.

By the second week, reports came in of Palestinian attacks on a dozen garrison posts in both hemispheres. All contact was lost with the Hellas contingent and the south polar station radioed the Jibril that it was preparing to surrender to the attacking forces.

Governor Clare Palo—working out of a small office that had belonged to one of her aides—conferred with Archbishop Robeson and the Grand Inquisitor and released tactical fusion and plasma weapons to the beleaguered garrisons. Cardinal Mustafa agreed to the use of the Jibril as a weapons’ platform in the struggle against the Palestinians, and South Polar One was slagged from orbit. The Home Guard, Pax, Fleet Marines, Swiss Guard, and Holy Office commands concentrated on making sure that the capital of St. Malachy, its cathedral, and the Governor’s Palace were secure from attack. In the relentless dust storm, any indigenie that approached within eight klicks of the city perimeter and who was not wearing a Pax-issued transponder was lanced and the bodies recovered later. A few were Palestinian guerrillas.

“The simoom can’t last forever,” grumbled Commander Browning, the head of the Holy Office security forces.

“It can last another three to four standard months,” said Major Piet, his upper torso bulky in a burncast. “Perhaps longer.”

The work of the Holy Office Inquisition was going nowhere: the militia troopers who had first discovered the massacre in Arafat-kaffiyeh were interviewed again under Truthtell and neuroprobe, but their stories remained the same; the Holy Office forensic experts worked with the coroners at St. Malachy’s Infirmary only to confirm that none of the 362 corpses could be resurrected—the Shrike had ripped out every node and millifiber of their cruciforms; queries were sent back to Pacem via instantaneous-drive drone regarding the identities of the victims and—more importantly—the nature of the Opus Dei operations on Mars and the reasons for the advanced spaceport, but when a drone returned after fourteen local days, it brought only the ID’s of the murdered and no explanation of their connection to Opus Dei or the motives for that organization’s efforts on Mars.

After fifteen days of dust storm, more reports of continued Palestinian attacks on convoys and garrisons, and long days of interrogation and evidence sifting that led nowhere, the Grand Inquisitor was happy to hear Captain Wolmak call on secure tightbeam from the Jibril to announce that there was an emergency that would require the Grand Inquisitor and his entourage to return to orbit as soon as possible. The Jibril was one of the newest archangel-class starships, and it looked functional and deadly to Cardinal Mustafa as their dropships closed the last few kilometers to rendezvous. The Grand Inquisitor knew little about Pax warships, but even he could see that Captain Wolmak had morphed the starship to battle readiness: the various booms and sensor arrays had been drawn in beneath the starship’s skin, the bulge of the Gideon drive had sprouted laser-reflective armor, and the various weapons’ portals were cleared for action. Behind the archangel, Mars turned—a dust-shrouded disc the color of dried blood. Cardinal Mustafa hoped that this would be his last view of the place.

Father Farrell pointed out that all eight of the Mars System Task Force’s torchships were within five hundred klicks of the Jibril—a tight, defensive grouping by space-going standards—and the Grand Inquisitor realized that something serious was in the offing.

Mustafa’s dropship was the first to dock and Wolmak met them in the air-lock antechamber.

The interior containment field gave them gravity.

“My apologies for interrupting your Inquisition, Your Excellency…” began the captain.

“Never mind that,” said Cardinal Mustafa, shaking sand from the folds of his robe. “What is so important, Captain?”

Wolmak blinked at the entourage emerging from the air lock behind the Grand Inquisitor: Father Farrell, of course, followed by Security Commander Browning, three Holy Office aides, Marine Sergeant Nell Kasner, the resurrection chaplain Bishop Erdle, and Major Piet, the former groundforce commander whom Cardinal Mustafa had liberated from Governor Palo’s service.

The Grand Inquisitor saw the captain’s hesitation. “You can speak freely, Captain. All in this group have been cleared by the Holy Office.”

Wolmak nodded. “Your Excellency, we have found the ship.”

Cardinal Mustafa must have stared his incomprehension.

“The heavy-duty freighter that must have left Mars orbit the day of the massacre, Your Excellency,” continued the captain. “We knew that their dropships had rendezvoused with some ship that day.”

“Yes,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “but we assumed that it would be long gone—translated to whatever star system it was bound for.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wolmak, “but on the off chance that the ship had never spun up to C-plus, I had the dropships do an in-system search. We found the freighter in the system’s asteroid belt.”

“Was that its destination?” asked Mustafa.

The captain was shaking his head. “I think not, Excellency. The freighter is cold and dead. It’s tumbling. Our instruments show no life on board, no systems powered up… not even the fusion drive.”

“But it is a starship freighter?” questioned Father Farrell.

Captain Wolmak turned toward the tall, thin man. “Yes, Father. The H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru. A three-million-ton ore and bulk freighter that’s seen service since the days of the Hegemony.”

“Mercantilus,” the Grand Inquisitor said softly.

Wolmak looked grim. “Originally, Your Excellency. But our records show that the Saigon Maru was decommissioned from the Mercantilus fleet and rendered into scrap metal eight standard years ago.”

Cardinal Mustafa and Father Farrell exchanged glances.

“Have you boarded the ship yet, Captain?” asked Commander Browning.

“No,” said Wolmak. “Because of the political implications, I thought it best if His Excellency were aboard and authorized such a search.”

“Very good,” said the Grand Inquisitor.

“Also,” said Captain Wolmak, “I wanted the full complement of Marines and Swiss Guard troopers aboard first.”

“Why is that, sir?” asked Major Piet. His uniform looked bulky over his burncast.

“Something’s not right,” said the captain, looking at the Major and then at the Grand Inquisitor. “Something’s very much not right.”

More than two hundred light-years from Mars System, Task Force GIDEON was completing its task of destroying Lucifer.

The seventh and final Ouster system in their punitive expedition was the hardest to finish off.

A yellow G-type star with six worlds, two of them inhabitable without terraforming, the system was crawling with Ousters: military bases out beyond the asteroids, birthing rocks in the asteroid belt, angel environments around the innermost water world, refueling depots in low orbit around the gas giant, and an orbital forest being grown between what would have been the orbits of Venus and Old Earth in the Old Sol System. It took GIDEON ten standard days to search out and kill a majority of these nodes of Ouster life.

When they were done, Admiral Aldikacti called for a physical conference of the seven captains aboard His Holiness’s Ship Uriel and revealed that the plans had been changed: the expedition had been so successful that they would seek out new targets and continue the attack. Aldikacti had dispatched a Gideon-drive drone to Pacem System and received permission to extend the mission. The seven archangels would translate to the nearest Pax base, Tau Ceti System, where they would be rearmed, refitted, refueled, and joined by five new archangels. Probes had already targeted a dozen new Ouster systems, none of which had yet received news of the massacre along Task Force GIDEON’s swath of destruction. Counting resurrection time, they would be attacking again within ten standard days.

The seven captains returned to their seven ships and prepared for the translation from Target System Lucifer to Tau Ceti Center Base.

Aboard H.H.S. Raphael, Commander Hoagan “Hoag” Liebler was uneasy.

Besides his official capacity as executive officer of the starship, second in command to Father Captain de Soya, Liebler was paid to spy on the father-captain and to report any suspicious behavior—first to the chief of Holy Office Security aboard Admiral Aldikacti’s flagship, the Uriel, and then—as far as the Executive Officer could tell—all the way up the chain of command to the legendary Cardinal Lourdusamy. Liebler’s problem at the moment was that he was suspicious but could not articulate the cause for his suspicions.

The spy could hardly tightbeam the Uriel with the dangerous news that the crew of Father Captain de Soya’s Raphael had been going to confession too frequently, but that was precisely one of the causes of Liebler’s concern. Of course, Hoag Liebler was not a spy by training or inclination: he was a gentleman of reduced circumstances, forced first by financial constraints to exercise a Renaissance Minor gentleman’s option of joining the military, and then constrained further—by loyalty to his Pax and Church, he convinced himself, more than by the constant need for money to reclaim and restore his estates—into spying on his captain.

The confessions were not all that out of the ordinary—the crew was made up of faithful, Church- and confession-going born-again Christian soldiers, of course, and the circumstances in which they found themselves, the possibility of a true and eternal death if one of the Ouster fusion weapons or k-beams made it through defensive containment fields, certainly added to the urgency of that faith—but Liebler sensed some extra factor at work in all these confessions since Target System Mammon. During the lulls in the vicious fighting here in Target System Lucifer, the entire crew and Swiss Guard complement of the Raphael—some twenty-seven hands in all, not counting the bewildered Executive Officer—had been cycling through the confessional like spacers at an Outback port whorehouse.

And the confessional was the one place at which even the ship’s Executive Officer could not linger and eavesdrop. Liebler could not imagine what conspiracy could possibly be afoot. Mutiny made no sense. First, it was unthinkable—no crew in the nearly three centuries of Pax Fleet had ever mutinied nor come close to mutiny.

Second, it was absurd—mutineers did not flock to the confessional to discuss the sin of a planned mutiny with the captain of the ship.

Perhaps Father Captain de Soya was recruiting these men and women for some nefarious deed, but Hoag Liebler could not imagine anything the priest-captain could offer that would suborn these loyal Pax spacers and Swiss Guard troopers. The crew did not like Hoag Liebler—he was used to being disliked by classmates and shipmates, it was the curse of his natural-born aristocracy, he knew—but he could not imagine them banding together to plan some evil deed directed his way. If Father Captain de Soya had somehow seduced this crew into treason, the worst they could do was attempt to steal the archangel—Liebler suspected that this remote possibility was the reason he had been placed aboard as a spy—but to what end? Raphael was never out of touch with the other archangels in the GIDEON Task Force, except for the instant of C-plus translation and the two days of hurried resurrection, so if the crew turned traitor and attempted to steal the ship, the other six archangels would cut them down in an instant.

The thought made Hoag Liebler physically queasy. He disliked dying, and did not wish to do so more than necessary. Moreover, it would not help his career as a restored Lord of the Manor on Renaissance Minor if his service duty was remembered as being a part of the Crew That Turned Treasonous. It was possible, he realized, that Cardinal Lourdusamy—or whoever was at the apex of his espionage food chain—might have him tortured, excommunicated, and executed to the true death along with the rest of the crew just to conceal the fact that the Vatican had put a spy aboard.

This thought made Hoag Liebler more than queasy.

He consoled himself with the thought that such an act of treason was not just unlikely, it was insane. It was not like the old days on Old Earth or some other water world that Liebler had read about where an ocean going warship goes rogue and turns pirate, preying on merchant ships and terrorizing ports.

There was nowhere for a stolen archangel to run to, nowhere to hide, and nowhere to rearm and refit the ship. Pax Fleet would have their guts for garters.

Commander Hoag Liebler continued to feel queasy and uneasy despite all this forced logic.

He was on the flight deck four hours into their spinup to the translation point to Tau Ceti System when the priority squirt came in from Uriel: five Ouster torchship-class destroyers had been hiding in the charged-particle dust torus of the inner moon of the outer gas giant and were now making a run toward their own translation points, using the G-type sun as a shield between them and the GIDEON Task Force. The Gabriel and the Raphael were to deviate from their translation arcs enough to find a firing trajectory for their remaining C-plus hyperkinetic missiles, destroy the torchships, and then to resume their exits from Lucifer System.

Uriel estimated that the two archangels could spin up to translation about eight hours after the other five ships had departed. Father Captain de Soya acknowledged the squirt and ordered a change of course, and Commander Liebler monitored the tightbeam traffic as Mother Captain Stone aboard Gabriel did likewise. The Admiral isn’t leaving Raphael behind alone, thought the Executive Officer. My masters aren’t the only ones that don’t trust de Soya.

It was not an exciting chase—not actually a chase at all, when it came down to it. Given the gravitational dynamics of this system, it would take the old Hawking-drive Ouster torchships about fourteen hours to reach relativistic velocities prior to spinup. The two archangels would be in firing position within four hours. The Ousters had no weapons that could reach all the way across this system to hurt the archangels: both Gabriel and Raphael had enough weaponry in their depleted stock to destroy the torchships a dozen times over. If all else failed, they would use the hated deathbeams.

Commander Liebler had the con—the priest-captain had gone to his cubby to catch a few hours of sleep—when the two archangels cleared the sun for a firing solution. The rest of Task Force GIDEON had long since translated. Liebler turned in his acceleration chair to buzz the captain when suddenly the blast portal irised and Father Captain de Soya and several others stepped in. For a moment Liebler forgot his suspicions—forgot even that he had been paid to be suspicious—as he goggled at the unlikely group. Besides the captain, there was that Swiss Guard sergeant—Gregorius—and two of his troopers. Also in attendance were Weapons Systems Officer (WHIZZO) Commander Carel Shan, Energy Systems Officer (ESSO) Lieutenant Pol Denish, Environmental Systems Officer (VIRO) Commander Bettz Argyle, and Propulsion Systems Engineer (GOPRO) Lieutenant Elijah Hussein Meier.

“What in the hell…” began Executive Officer (XO) Liebler and then stopped. The Swiss Guard sergeant was holding a neural stunner and it was aimed at Liebler’s face.

Hoag Liebler had been carrying a concealed flechette pistol in his boot for weeks, but he forgot about it completely at this moment. He had never had a weapon aimed at him before—not even a stunner—and the effect of it made him want to urinate down his own pant leg. He concentrated on not doing that. This left little room to concentrate on anything else.

One of the female troopers came over and lifted the pistol out of his boot. Liebler stared at it as if he had never seen it before.

“Hoag,” said Father Captain de Soya, “I’m sorry about this. We took a vote and decided that there was no time to try to convince you to join us. You’re going to have to go away for a while.”

Summoning up all the dialogue he had ever heard from holodramas, Liebler began blustering.

“You’ll never get away with this. The Gabriel will destroy you. You’ll all be tortured and hanged. They’ll rip your cruciforms right out of your…”

The stunner in the giant sergeant’s hand hummed. Hoag Liebler would have gone facedown onto the deck if the female trooper had not caught him and lowered him carefully to the deckplates.

Father Captain de Soya took his place in the command chair. “Break away from this course,” he said to Lieutenant Meier at the helm. “Set in our translation coordinates. Full emergency acceleration. Go to full combat readiness.” The priest-captain glanced down at Liebler. “Put him in his resurrection créche and set it to ‘store.’” The troopers carried out the sleeping man.

Even before Father Captain de Soya ordered the ship’s internal containment field set to zero-g for battle stations, the priest-captain had that brief but exhilarating sense of flying one feels in the instant after having jumped off a cliff before gravity reasserts its absolute imperatives. In truth, their ship was now groaning under more than six hundred gravities of fusion acceleration, almost 180 percent of normal high boost. Any interruption in the containment field would kill them in less than an instant.

But the translation point was now less than forty minutes away.

De Soya was not sure what he was doing was right. The thought of being a traitor to his Church and Pax Fleet was the most terrible thing in the world to him. But he knew that if he did indeed have an immortal soul, he had no other choice in the matter.

Actually, what made Father Captain de Soya think that a miracle might be involved—or at least that a very improbable stroke of luck had occurred—the fact that seven others had agreed to come along with him in this doomed mutiny.

Eight, including himself, out of a crew of twenty-eight. The other twenty were sleeping off neural stuns in their resurrection créches. De Soya knew that the eight of them could handle Raphael’s systems and tasks under most circumstances: he was lucky—or blessed—that several of the essential flight officers had come along. In the beginning, he thought it was going to be Gregorius, his two young troopers, and himself. The first suggestion of mutiny had come from the three Swiss Guard soldiers after their “cleansing” of the second birthing asteroid in Lucifer System.

Despite their oaths to the Pax, the Church, and the Swiss Guard, the slaughter of infants had been too much like murder for them. Lancers Dona Foo and Enos Delrino had first gone to their sergeant, and then come with Gregorius to Father Captain de Soya’s confessional with their plan to defect. Originally, they had asked for absolution if they decided to jump ship in the Ouster system. De Soya had asked them to consider an alternate plan.

The Propulsion Systems Engineer Lieutenant Meier had come to confession with the same concerns.

The wholesale slaughter of the beautiful forcefield angels—which he had watched in tactical space—had sickened the young man and made him want to return to his ancestral religions of Judaism and Islam. Instead, he had gone to confession to admit his spiritual weakening. Father Captain de Soya had amazed Meier by telling him that his concerns were not in conflict with true Christianity. In the days that followed, Environmental Systems Officer Commander Bettz Argyle and Energy Systems Officer Lieutenant Pol Denish followed their consciences to the confessional.

Denish was among the hardest to convince, but long, whispered conversations with his cubby-mate, Lieutenant Meier, brought him along.

WHIZZO Commander Carel Shan was the last to join: the Weapons Systems Officer could no longer authorize deathbeam attacks. He had not slept in three weeks.

De Soya had realized during their last day in Lucifer System that none of the other officers was about to defect. They saw their work as distasteful but necessary. When push came to shove, he realized, the majority of flight officers and the remaining three Swiss Guard troopers would have sided with XO Hoag Liebler. Father Captain de Soya and Sergeant Gregorius decided not to give them the chance.

“The Gabriel is hailing us, Father Captain,” said Lieutenant Denish. The ESSO was plugged intact as well as into his energy systems console.

De Soya nodded. “Everyone make sure your couch créches are active.” It was an unnec order, he knew. Every crew member went into battle stations or C-plus translation in his or her acceleration couch, each rigged as an automated resurrection créche.

Before jacking into tactical, de Soya checked their trajectory on the center pit display. They were pulling away from Gabriel, although the other archangel had gone to three hundred gravities of boost and had altered course to parallel Raphael’s. Across Lucifer’s solar system, the five Ouster torchships were still crawling toward their own translation points. De Soya wished them well, knowing all the while that the only reason the ships still existed was the momentary distraction Raphael’s puzzling course change had caused for Gabriel. He plugged in tactsim.

Instantly he was a giant standing in space.

The six worlds and countless moons and nascent, burning orbital forests of Lucifer spread out at his belt level. Far beyond the burning sun, the six Ouster motes balanced on tiny fusion tails. Gabriel’s tail was much longer; Raphael’s the longest yet, its brilliance rivaling the central star’s. Mother Captain Stone stood waiting a few giant’s paces from de Soya.

“Federico,” she said, “what in Christ’s name are you doing?”

De Soya had considered not answering Gabriel’s hail. If it would have offered them a few more minutes, he would have stayed silent. But he knew Stone. She would not hesitate. On a separate tactical channel, he glanced at the translation plot. Thirty-six minutes to shift point.

Captain! Four missile launches detected! Translating… now! It was WHIZZO Commander Shan on the secure conduction line.

Father Captain de Soya felt sure that he had not visibly jumped or reacted in front of Mother Captain Stone in tactical. On his own bone line, he subvocalized, It’s all right, Carel. I can see them on tac. They’ve translated toward the Ouster ships. To Stone, he said on tactical, “You’ve launched against the Ousters.”

Stone’s face was tight even in simlight. “Of course. Why haven’t you, Federico?” Rather than answer, de Soya stepped closer to the central sun and watched the missiles emerge from Hawking drive immediately in front of the six Ouster torchships. They detonated within seconds: two fusion, followed by two broader plasma. All of the Ousters had their defensive containment fields to maximum—an orange glow in tactical sim—but the close-range bursts overloaded all of them. The images went from orange to red to white and then three of the ships simply ceased to exist as material objects. Two became scattered fragments tumbling toward the now infinitely distant translation points.

One torchship remained intact, but its containment field dropped away and its fusion tail disappeared. If anyone aboard had survived the blast effects, they were now dead of the sleet storm of undeflected radiation that was tearing through the ship.

“What are you doing, Federico?” repeated Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya knew that Stone’s first name was Halen. He chose not to make his part of the conversation personal. “Following orders, Mother Captain.”

Even in tactsim, Stone’s expression was dubious. “What are you talking about, Father Captain de Soya?” Both knew that the conversation was being recorded. Whoever survived the next few minutes would have a record of the exchange.

De Soya kept his voice steady.

“Admiral Aldikacti’s flagship tightbeamed us with a change of orders ten minutes before the flagship translated. We are carrying out those orders.”

Stone’s expression was impassive, but de Soya knew that she was subvocalizing her XO to confirm that there had been a tightbeam transmission between Uriel and Raphael at that time.

There had been. But the substance of it had been trivial: updating rendezvous coordinates for the Tau Ceti System.

“What were the orders, Father Captain de Soya?”

“They were eyes-only, Mother Captain Stone. They do not concern the Gabriel.” On the bone circuit, he said to WHIZZO Shan, Lock on death beam coordinates and give me the actuator as discussed. A second later he felt the tactsim weight of an energy weapon in his right hand. The gun was invisible to Stone, but perfectly tactile to de Soya.

He tried to make his hand on the butt of the weapon look relaxed as his finger curled around the invisible trigger. De Soya could tell from the casual way that Mother Captain Stone’s arm hung free from her body that she was also carrying a virtual weapon. They stood about three meters apart in tactsim space. Between them, Raphael’s long fusion tail and Gabriel’s shorter pillar of flame climbed toward chest height from the plane of the ecliptic. “Father Captain de Soya, your new translation point will not take you to Tau Ceti System as ordered.”

“Those orders were superseded, Mother Captain.” De Soya was watching his former first officer’s eyes. Halen was always good at concealing her emotions and intentions. He had lost to her in poker on more than one occasion on their old torchship, Balthasar.

“What is your new destination, Father Captain?”

Thirty-three minutes to shift point.

“Classified, Mother Captain. I can tell you this—Raphael will be rejoining the task force in Tau Ceti System after our mission is completed.”

With her left hand, Stone rubbed her cheek.

De Soya watched the curled finger of her right hand. She would not have to raise the invisible handgun to trigger the death beam, but it was human instinct to aim the firearm at one’s opponent.

De Soya hated deathbeams and he knew that Stone did as well. They were cowardly weapons: banned by Pax Fleet and the Church until this expeditionary force incursion. Unlike the old Hegemony-era deathwands that actually cast a scythelike beam of neural disruption, no coherent projection was involved in the ship-to-target deathbeam. Essentially, the powerful Gideon-drive accumulators extended a C-plus distortion of space-time within a finite cone. The result was a subtle twisting of the real-time matrix—similar to a failed translation into the old Hawking-drive space—but more than enough to destroy the delicate energy dance that was a human brain.

But however much Stone held the Pax Fleet officer’s hatred of deathbeams, it made sense for her to use it now. The Raphael represented a staggering investment of Pax funds: her first goal would be to stop the crew from stealing it without damaging the ship. Her problem, however, was that killing the crew with deathbeams probably would not stop Raphael from translating, depending upon how much of the spinup had been preprogrammed by her crew. It was traditional for a captain to make the actual translation manually—or at least to be ready to override the ship’s computer with a deadman switch—but Stone had no assurance that de Soya would follow tradition.

“Please let me speak to Commander Liebler,” said Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya smiled. “My executive officer is attending to duties.” He thought, So Hoag was the spy. This is the confirmation we needed.

Gabriel could not catch them now, not even by accelerating to six hundred gravities herself.

Raphael would have reached translation requirements before the other ship could get within tow range. No, to stop them, Stone would have to kill the crew and then disable the ship by using the last of her physical arsenal to overload Raphael’s external containment fields. If she was wrong—if de Soya was acting under last-minute orders—she would almost certainly be court-martialed and expelled from Pax Fleet.

If she did nothing, and de Soya was stealing one of the Pax’s archangels, Stone would be court-martialed, expelled, excommunicated, and almost certainly executed.

“Federico,” she said softly, “please reduce thrust so that we can match velocities. You can still follow orders and spin up to your secret coordinates. I ask only that I board the Raphael, and confirm that everything is all right before you translate.”

De Soya hesitated. He could not use the guise of orders for his precipitous departure under six hundred gravities, since wherever Raphael ended up, there would be two days of slow resurrection for the crew before the mission could continue. He watched Stone’s eyes while also checking the tiny image of Gabriel on its three-hundred-gravity pillar of white fire.

She might try overloading his fields with a salvo of her remaining conventional weaponry. De Soya had no wish to return missile or lance fire: a vaporized Gabriel was not acceptable. He was now a traitor to Church and state, but he had no intention of becoming a true-death murderer. The deathbeams it had to be then. “All right, Halen,” he said easily. “I’ll tell Hoag to drop to two-hundred-g’s long enough for you to come alongside.” He turned his head as if concentrating on issuing bone-channel orders. His hand must have twitched. Stone’s did as well, the invisible handgun rising a bit as her finger tightened on the trigger.

In the split second before the disruption struck, Father Captain de Soya saw the eight sparks leaving the simtact Gabriel: Stone was taking no chances—she would vaporize Raphael rather than have it escape.

The mother-captain’s virtual image flew backward and evaporated as the deathbeam tore into her ship, severing all com connections as the humans aboard died.

Less than a second later, Father Captain de Soya felt himself jerked out of simspace as the neurons in his brain literally fried. Blood flew from his eyes, mouth, and ears, but the priest-captain was already dead, as was every conscious entity on the Raphael—Sergeant Gregorius and his two troopers on C deck, GOPRO Meier, VIRO Argyle, ESSO Denish, and WHIZZO Shan on the flight deck. Sixteen seconds later, the eight Hawking-drive missiles flashed into real space and detonated on every side of the silent Raphael.

Gyges watched in real-time as Raul Endymion said good-bye to the family in red robes and paddled his kayak toward the farcaster arch. The world was in dual lunar eclipse.

Fireworks exploded above the canal-river and strange ululations came from thousands of throats back in the linear city. Gyges stood and prepared to walk out across the water to pluck the man from his kayak. It had been agreed that if Raul Endymion was alone, that he needed to be kept alive for interrogation in the starship waiting above—finding the girl Aenea’s whereabouts was the goal of this mission—but no one said anything about not making it more difficult for the man to fight or escape. While still phase-shifted, Gyges planned to hamstring Endymion and sever the tendons in his forearms. He could do that instantly, surgically, so that there would be no danger of the human bleeding to death before being stored in the ship’s doc-in-the-box before interrogation.

Gyges had jogged the six klicks to the farcaster arch in no time, checking out pedestrians and the strange windcarts as he passed the frozen forms and figures. Once at the arch and concealed in a patch of willows on the canal’s high bank, he shifted back to slow time. His job was to guard the back door. Nemes would ping him when she found the missing spacer.

During the twenty minutes of waiting, Gyges communicated with Scylla and Briareus on the internal common band but heard nothing from Nemes.

This was surprising. They had all assumed that she would find the missing man within the first few seconds of real-time after she had shifted up. Gyges was not worried—he was not actually capable of worry in the true sense of the word—but he assumed that Nemes had been searching in widening arcs, using up real-time by frequently shifting down and then back up. He assumed that his common-band queries had been made while she was phase-shifted. Added to that was his understanding that while Nemes was a clone-sibling, she had been the first to be devatted. She was less used to common-band sharing than Scylla, Briareus, and he. To be truthful, Gyges would not have minded if their orders had been simply to pull Nemes out of the rock on God’s Grove and terminate her then and there.

The river was busy. Each time a ship approached the farcaster arch from either the east or west, Gyges shifted up and walked across the spongy surface of the river to search it and check on its passengers. Some he had to disrobe to ascertain that it was not Endymion or the android, A. Bettik, or the girl, Aenea, in disguise. To be sure, he sniffed them and took needle biopsies of the robed ones’ DNA to make sure that they were natives of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. All were.

After each inspection, he would walk back to the bank and resume his watch. Eighteen minutes after he had left the ship, a Pax skimmer flew around and through the farcaster arch. It would have been tiring for Gyges to have to board it in fast time, but Scylla was already aboard with the searching Pax troopers so he was spared the effort.

This is tiresome, she said on the common band.

Yes, agreed Gyges.

Where is Nemes? It was Briareus back in the city. The clumsy troopers had received their radioed search warrant and were going from house to house.

Haven’t heard from her, said Gyges.

It was during the eclipse and the accompanying ceremonial nonsense that he watched the windcycle wagon pull to a halt and Raul Endymion emerge. Gyges was sure that it was Endymion. Not only did the visuals match perfectly, but he picked up the personal scent that Nemes had downloaded to them. Gyges could have phase-shifted immediately, walked over to the frozen tableau, and taken a DNA needle biopsy, but he did not have to. This was their man.

Instead of broadcasting on the common band or pinging Nemes, Gyges waited another minute.

This anticipation was pleasurable to him. He did not want to dilute it by sharing it. Besides, he reasoned, it would be better to abduct Endymion after he had separated from the Spectrum Helix family who even now were waving good-bye to the man in the kayak.

Gyges watched while Raul Endymion paddled the absurd little boat out into the current of the widening canal-river. He realized that it would be best to take the kayak as well as Endymion: the watching Spectrum Helix people would be expecting him to disappear if they knew that he was trying to escape via farcaster. From their point of view, there would be a flash and Endymion would have farcast out of sight. In reality, Gyges would still be phase-shifted, now carrying the man and kayak within the expanded phase-shift field. The kayak might also be useful in revealing where the girl Aenea was hiding: telltale planetary scents, methods of manufacture.

Along the riverbanks to the north, people cheered and sang. The lunar eclipse was complete.

Fireworks exploded above the river and cast baroque shadows on the rusted farcaster arch.

Endymion turned his attention away from the waving Spectrum Helix family and concentrated on staying in the strongest current as he paddled toward the farcaster.

Gyges stood, stretched languidly, and prepared to phase-shift.

Suddenly the thing was next to him, centimeters away, at least three meters tall, towering over him.

Impossible, thought Gyges. I would have sensed the phase-shift distortions.

Exploding skyrockets spilled bloodred light on the chrome carapace. Metal teeth and chrome spikes twisted the expanding flowers of yellow, white, and red across quicksilver planes.

Gyges caught an instant’s look at his own reflection, distorted and startled, and then he phase-shifted.

It took less than a microsecond for the shift. Somehow one of the creature’s four clawed hands made it into the field before it completely formed. Bladed fingers dug through synflesh and muscle, seeking one of Gyges’s hearts.

Gyges paid no heed to the attack but attacked in return, swinging his silvered, phase-shifted arm like a horizontal guillotine. It could have cut through whiskered carbon alloy as if it were wet cardboard. It did not cut through the tall form in front of him. Sparks and thunder exploded as his arm bounced away, fingers numbed, metal radius and ulna shattered. The clawed hand within him pulled out ropes of intestine, kilometers of microfiber optics.

Gyges realized that he had been opened from navel to breastbone. It did not matter. He could still function.

Gyges clenched his right hand into a sharpened bludgeon and thrust it forward into gleaming red eyes. It was a killing blow. But the great steam-shovel jaws opened, closed, faster than phase-shifting, and Gyges’s right arm suddenly ended above the wrist.

Gyges threw himself at the apparition, trying to merge fields, attempting to get his own teeth within tearing distance. Two huge hands seized him, the bladed fingers sinking through shift field and flesh to hold him tight. The chrome skull in front of him slashed forward: needle-spikes pierced Gyges’s right eye and penetrated the right frontal lobe of his brain.

Gyges screamed then—not out of pain, although he felt something similar for the first time in his short life—but out of pure, relentless rage. His teeth snapped and clacked like steel rendering blades as he sought the creature’s throat, but he continued being held at three-arms’ length.

Then the monster ripped out both of Gyges’s hearts and threw them far out over the water. A nanosecond later, it lunged forward, biting through Gyges’s throat and severing his carbon-alloy spinal cord with a single snap of long teeth.

Gyges’s head was severed from his body. He tried to shift to telemetric control of the fighting body, peering through blood and fluid out of his remaining eye and broadcasting over the common band, but the transmitter in his skull had been pierced and the receiver in his spleen had been ripped away. The world spun—first the corona of the emerging sun around the second moon, then skyrockets, then the color-dappled surface of the river, then the sky again, then darkness. With fading coherence, Gyges realized that his head had been thrown far out into the river. His last retinal image before being submerged in darkness was of his own headless and uselessly spasming body being hugged to the carapace of the creature and being impaled there on spikes and thorns. Then, with a flash, the Shrike phase-shifted out of even fast-time existence and Gyges’s head struck the water and sank beneath the dark waves.

Rhadamanth Nemes arrived five minutes later. She shifted down. The riverbank was empty except for the headless corpse of her sibling. The windcycle wagon and its red-robed family were gone. No boats were visible on this section of river. The sun was beginning to emerge from behind the second moon.

Gyges is here, she sent on the common band. Briareus and Scylla were still with the troops in the city. The sleeping Pax trooper had been found and released from his handcuffs. None of the citizens queried would say whose home it was.

Scylla was urging Colonel Vinara to drop the matter.

Nemes felt the discomfort as she left the shift field. All of her ribs—bone and permasteel—were either fractured or bent.

Several of her internal organs had been pulped. Her left hand would not function. She had been unconscious for almost twenty standard minutes. Unconscious! She had not lost consciousness for one second in the four years she had lain in the solidified rock of God’s Grove. And all this damage had been done through the impenetrable shift field.

It did not matter. She would allow her body to repair itself during the days of inactivity after leaving this Core-forsaken world. Nemes knelt next to her sibling’s corpse. It had been clawed, decapitated, and eviscerated—almost deboned. It was still twitching, the broken fingers struggling to get a grip on an absent enemy.

Nemes shuddered—not out of sympathy for Gyges or revulsion at the damage done, she was professionally evaluating the Shrike’s attack pattern and felt admiration if anything—but out of sheer frustration that she had missed this confrontation. The attack in the tunnel had been too fast for her to react—she had been in mid-phase shift—which she would have thought impossible.

I’ll find him, she sent and shifted up.

The air grew thick and sludgelike. Nemes went down the bank, forced her way through the thick resistance of the water’s surface, and walked out along the riverbed, calling on the common band and probing with deep radar.

She found Gyges’s head almost a klick downstream. The current was strong here.

Freshwater crustaceans had already eaten the lips and the remaining eye and were probing in the eye sockets. Nemes brushed them away and took the head back to the bank of the canal-river.

Gyges’s common-band transmitter was smashed and his vocal cords were gone. Nemes extruded a fiber-optic filament and made the connection directly to his memory center. His skull had been smashed on the left side and brain matter and bits of DNA-processing gel were spilling out.

She did not ask him questions. She phased down and downloaded the memory, squirting it to her remaining two siblings as she received it.

Shrike, sent Scylla.

No shit, Sherlock, sent Briareus.

Silence, ordered Nemes. Finish up with those idiots. I’ll clean things up here and be waiting in the dropship.

The Gyges head—blind, leaking—trying to speak, using what remained of its tongue to shape sibilant and glottal syllables. Nemes held it close to her ear.

“Ss—pp-le-ssss.” Please. “Ss—he—puh.” Help. “Ssssttp—m-eh” Me.

Nemes lowered the head and studied the body on the splattered bank. Many organs were missing.

Scores of meters of microfiber were spilled in the weeds and mud, some trailing away in the current. Gray intestines and neural gelpaks were split and scattered. Bits of bone caught the growing light as the sun emerged from Twice Darkness. Neither the dropship nor the old archangel’s doc-in-the-boxes could help the vatborn. And Gyges might take standard months to heal himself.

Nemes set the head down while she wrapped the body in its own microfilaments, weighting it outside and in with stones. Making sure that the river was still free of ships, she tossed the headless corpse far out into the current. She had seen that the river was alive with tough and indiscriminate scavengers. Even so, there were parts of her sibling that they would not find appetizing.

She lifted Gyges’s head. The tongue was still clucking. Using the eye sockets as grips for her thumb and forefinger, she threw the head far out over the river in an easy underhand toss. It went under with barely a ripple.

Nemes jogged to the farcaster arch, ripped a hidden access plate free from the rusting and supposedly impenetrable exterior, and extruded a filament from her wrist. She jacked in.

I don’t understand, came Briareus’s code on the common band. It opened to nowhere.

Not to nowhere, sent Nemes, reeling in the filament. Just to nowhere in the old Web. Nowhere the Core has built a farcaster.

That’s impossible, sent Scylla. There are no farcasters except for those the Core has built.

Nemes sighed. Her siblings were idiots. Shut up and return to the dropship, she sent. We have to report this in person. Councillor Albedo will want to download personally. Nemes phase-shifted and jogged back to the dropship through air gone thick and sepia with slow-stirred time.

12

I did not forget that there was a panic button. The problem is simple—when there is real panic, one does not immediately think of buttons. The kayak was falling into an endless depth of air broken only by clouds that rose tens of thousands of meters from the bruise-purple depths to the milky ceiling of more clouds thousands of meters above me. I had dropped my paddle and watched it tumble away in freefall. The kayak and I were dropping faster than the paddle for reasons of aerodynamics and terminal velocity that were beyond my powers to calculate at that particular moment.

Great oval surges of water from the river I had left behind were falling ahead and behind me, separating and shaping themselves into ovoid spheres I had seen in zero-g, but then being whipped apart by the wind. It was as if I were falling in my own localized rainstorm. The flechette pistol I had liberated from the sleeping trooper in Dem Loa’s bedroom was wedged between the outside of my thigh and the curved inner seal of the cockpit skirt.

My arms were raised as if I were a bird preparing to take flight. My fists were clenched in terror. After my original scream, I found my jaws locked shut, my molars grinding.

The fall went on and on.

I had caught a glimpse of the farcaster arch above and behind me, although “arch” was no longer the proper word: the huge device floating unsupported was a metal ring, a torus, a rusty doughnut. For a fleeting second I saw the sky of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B through the glowing ring, and then the image faded and only clouds showed through the receding hoop. It was the only substantial thing in the entire skyscape of clouds and I had already fallen more than a thousand meters below it. In a giddy, panicked moment of fantasy, I imagined that if I were a bird I could fly back up to the farcaster ring, perch on its broad lower arc, and wait for…

Wait for what? I gripped the sides of the kayak as it rotated, turning me almost upside down as it plummeted bow first toward the purple depths klicks and klicks below.

That is when I remembered the panic button.

Don’t touch it, whatever you do, Aenea had said when we floated the kayak in Hannibal. I mean, don’t touch it until you absolutely have to.

The kayak spun on its longitudinal axis again, almost shaking me out. My butt was no longer touching the padded cushion on the bottom of the hull. I was floating free inside the cramped cockpit, within a freefalling constellation of water, tumbling paddle, and plunging kayak. I decided that this qualified as an “absolutely have to” time. I flipped up the plastic cover and depressed the red button with my thumb.

Panels popped open in front of the cockpit, near the bow, and behind me. I ducked as lines and masses of fabric billowed out. The kayak righted itself and then braked so hard that I was almost thrown out. I clung fiercely to the sides of the fiberglass boat as it rocked wildly. The shapeless mass over my head seemed to be forming itself into something more complicated than a parachute.

Even in the middle of my adrenaline rush and molar-grinding panic, I recognized the fabric: memory cloth that A. Bettik and I had bought at the Indian Market near Taliesin West. The solar-powered, piezoelectric material was almost transparent, ultralight, ultrastrong, and could remember up to a dozen preset configurations; we had considered buying more and using it to replace the canvas over the main architects’ studio since the old cover sagged, rotted, and had to be repaired and replaced regularly. But Mr. Wright had insisted on keeping the old canvas. He preferred the buttery light. A. Bettik had taken the dozen or so meters of memory cloth down to his workshop and I had thought no more of it. Until now. The fall was stopped. Now the kayak hung under a delta-shaped parasail, supported by a dozen nylon risers that rose from strategic positions along the upper hull. The boat and I were still descending, but in a gradual swoop now rather than a headlong fall. I looked up—the memory cloth was clear enough to see through—but the farcaster ring was too far behind me and hidden by clouds. The winds and air currents were carrying me away from the farcaster.

I suppose that I should have been grateful to my friends, the girl and the android, for somehow foreseeing this and preparing the kayak appropriately, but my first thought was an overwhelming Goddamn you! This was too much. Being dropped into a world of clouds and air, with no ground, was too damned much. If Aenea had known that I was being ’cast here, why didn’t she…

No ground? I leaned over the edge of the kayak and looked below. Perhaps the plan was for me to float gently down to some unseen surface.

No. There were kilometers of empty air beneath me, and below that, the lower layers were purple and black, a darkness relieved only by fierce slashes of lightning. The pressure down there must be terrible. Which brought up another point: if this was a Jovian world—Whirl or Jupiter or one of the others—how was it that I was breathing oxygen? As far as I knew, all of the gas giants that humanity had encountered were made up of unfriendly gases—methane, ammonia, helium, carbon monoxide, phosphine, hydrogen cyanide, other nasties, with trace amounts of water. I had never heard of a gas giant with breathable oxygen-nitrogen mix, but I was breathing. The air was thinner here than on the other worlds I had traveled through, and it stank a bit of ammonia, but I was definitely breathing air. Then it must not be a gas giant. Where the hell was I? I lifted my wrist and spoke to the comlog, “Where the hell am I?” There was a hesitation and for a moment I thought the thing had been broken on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Then it spoke in the ship’s supercilious voice, “Unknown, M. Endymion. I have some data, but it is incomplete.”

“Tell me.”

There followed a rapid-fire listing of temperatures in Kelvin, atmospheric pressure in millibars, estimated mean density in grams per centimeter cubed, probable escape velocity in kilometers per second, and perceived magnetic field in gauss, followed by a long list of atmospheric gases and element ratios.

“Escape velocity of fifty-four point two klicks per second,” I said. “That’s gas-giant territory, isn’t it?”

“Most assuredly,” said the ship’s voice.

“Jovian baseline is fifty-nine point five kilometers per second.”

“But the atmosphere isn’t like a gas giant’s?” I could see the stratocumulus ahead of me building, like a nature holo run at accelerated speeds. The towering cloud must have reached ten klicks above me, its base disappearing in the purple depths below. Lightning flickered at its base. The sunlight on its far side seemed rich and low: evening light. “The atmosphere is unlike anything in my records,” said the comlog. “Carbon monoxide, ethane, acetylene, and other hydrocarbons violating Solmev equilibrium values can be easily explained by Jovian-style molecular kinetic energy and solar radiation breaking down methane, and the presence of carbon monoxide is a standard result of methane and water vapor mixing at deep layers where the temperature exceeds twelve hundred degrees Kelvin, but the oxygen and nitrogen levels…”

“Yes?” I prompted.

“Indicate life,” said the comlog.

I turned completely around, inspecting the clouds and sky as if something were sneaking up on me. “Life on the surface?” I said.

“Doubtful,” came the flat voice. “If this world follows Jovian-Whirl norms, the pressure at the so-called surface would be under seventy million Old Earth atmospheres with a temperature of some twenty-five thousand degrees Kelvin.”

“How high are we?” I said.

“Uncertain,” said the instrument, “but with the current atmospheric pressure of point seven six Old Earth standard, on a standard Jovian world I would estimate that we were above the troposphere and tropopause, actually in the lower reaches of the stratosphere.”

“Wouldn’t it be colder that high? That’s almost outer space.”

“Not on a gas giant,” said the comlog in its insufferable professorial voice. “The greenhouse effect creates a thermal inversion layer, heating layers of the stratosphere to almost human-optimum temperatures. Although the difference of a few thousand meters may show pronounced temperature increases or drops.”

“A few thousand meters,” I said softly. “How much air is above and below us?”

“Unknown,” said the comlog again, “but extrapolation would suggest that equatorial radius from the center of this world to its upper atmosphere would be approximately seventy thousand kilometers with this oxygen-nitrogen-carbon-dioxide layer extending for some three to eight thousand kilometers approximately two thirds of the distance from the planet’s hypothetical center.”

“A three- to eight-thousand-klick layer,” I repeated stupidly. “Some fifty thousand klicks above the surface…”

“Approximately,” said the comlog, “although it should be noted that at near-core pressures, molecular hydrogen becomes a metal…”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s enough for now.” I felt like I was going to be sick over the side of the kayak.

“I should point out the anomaly that the interesting coloration in the nearby stratocumulus suggests the presence of ammonium monosulfide or polysulfides, although at apotropospheric altitudes, one would assume only the presence of ammonia cirrus clouds with true water clouds not forming until depths reach some ten standard atmospheres because of…”

“Enough,” I said.

“I only point this out because of the interesting atmospheric paradox involving…”

“Shut up,” I said.

It got cold after the sun went down. The sunset itself I shall remember until I die.

High, high above me, glimpses of what might be blue sky had darkened to a Hyperion-like deep lapis and then deepened further to dark purple. The clouds all around me grew brighter as the sky far above and the depths far below both grew darker. I say clouds, but the generic term is laughably unequal to conveying the power and grandeur of what I watched. I grew up in a nomadic shepherd caravan on the treeless moors between Hyperion’s Great South Sea and the Pinion Plateau: I know clouds.

Far above me, feathered cirrus and rippled cirrocumulus caught the twilight in a pastel riot of soft pinks, rose glows, violet tinges, and golden backlighting. It was as if I were in a temple with a high, rosy ceiling supported by thousands of irregular columns and pillars. The columns and pillars were towering mountains of cumulus and cumulonimbus, their anvil-shaped bases disappearing in the darkening depths hundreds or thousands of kilometers below my floating kayak, their rounded summits billowing high into the halo-tinged cirrostratus hundreds or thousands of kilometers above me.

Each column of cloud caught the low, rich light passing through openings in the cloud many thousands of klicks to the west, and the light seemed to ignite the clouds as if their surfaces were made of wildly flammable material.

“Monosulfide or polysulfides,” the comlog had said: well, whatever constituted these tawny cumulus in the diffuse daylight, sunset set them afire with rust-red light, brilliant crimson streaks, bloody tractus streaming away from the main cloud masses like crimson pennants, rose-colored fibratus weaving together the cirrus ceiling like muscle strands under the flesh of a living body, billowing masses of cumulus so white that they made me blink as if snowblinded, golden, striated cirroform spilling out from the boiling cumulonimbus towers like masses of blond hair blowing back from pale, upturned faces. The light deepened, richened, became so intense that it brought tears to my eyes, and then it became even more brilliant. Great, nearly horizontal shafts of Godlight burned between the columns, illuminating some here, casting others into shadow there, passing through ice clouds and bands of vertical rain on their way, spilling hundreds of simple rainbows and a thousand multiple rainbows. Then shadows moved up from the bruise-black depths, shading more and more of the writhing billows of cumulus and nimbus, finally climbing into the high cirrus and pond-rippled altocumulus, but at first the shadows brought not grayness or darkness, but an infinite palette of subtleties: gleaming gold dimming to bronze, pure white becoming cream and then dimming to sepia and shade, crimson with the boldness of spilled blood slowly darkening to the rust-red of dried blood, then fading to an autumnal tawny russet.

The hull of my kayak lost its glint and the parasail above me quit catching the light as this vertical terminator moved past and above me. Slowly these shadows crept higher—it must have taken at least thirty minutes, although I was too absorbed in watching to check my comlog—and when they reached the cirrus ceiling, it was as if someone had dimmed all the lights in the temple. It was one hell of a sunset. I remember blinking then, overwhelmed by the interplay of light and cloud shadow and the oddly disturbing kinetic restlessness of all those broiling cloud masses, ready to rest my eyes while true darkness fell and to gather my thoughts. And that is when the lightning and aurora began playing. There had been no aurora borealis on Hyperion—or if there had been, I had never seen it. But I had seen an example of Old Earth’s northern lights on a peninsula that had once been the Scandinavian Republic while on my round-the-world dropship tour of that planet: they had been shimmering and gooseflesh-producing, rippling and dancing along the northern horizon like the filmy gown of a ghost dancer. This world’s aurora held none of that subtlety. Bands of light, solid striations of light—as discrete and discernible as the keys of a vertical piano—began dancing high in the sky in the direction I thought of as south. Other curtains of green, gold, red, and cobalt began shimmering against the dark world of air beneath me.

These grew longer, broader, taller, stretching to meet and blend with other curtains of leaping electrons. It was as if the planet were cutting paper dolls out of shimmering light. Within minutes, every part of the sky was alive and dancing with vertical, slanted, and near-horizontal ribbons of banded color. The cloud towers became visible again, billows and pennants reflecting the strobe of thousands of these cold lights. I could almost hear the hiss and rasp of solar particles being driven along the terrifying lines of magnetic force banding this giant world.

I could hear them: crashes, rumbles, snappings, loud pops, long chains of cracking sounds. I swiveled in my little cockpit and leaned over the hull to look straight down. The lightning and thunder had begun. I had seen enough lightning storms as a child on the moors. On Old Earth, Aenea, A. Bettik, and I regularly used to sit outside her shelter in the evening and watch the great electrical storms move over the mountains to the north. Nothing had prepared me for this.

The depths, as I had called them, had been little more than a dark floor so far below me as to be laughable, a broiling promise of terrible pressures and more terrible heat. But now those depths were alive with light, leaping with lightning storms that moved from one visible horizon to the rest like a chain of nuclear bombs going off. I could imagine entire hemispheres of cities being destroyed in one of those rumbling chain reactions of light. I gripped the side of the kayak and reassured myself that the storms were hundreds of klicks below me. The lightning moved up the towers of cumulonimbus. Flashes of internal white light vied with the shimmers of colored light from the connecting auroras. The thunder-noise was subsonic, then sonic, subtly terrifying at first, then not subtle, but even more terrifying. The kayak and its parasail bucked and rocked in sudden downdrafts and elevator-quick lifts of thermals. I gripped the sides with mad strength and wished to God that I were on any other world but this. Then the lightning discharges began flashing from cloud tower to cloud tower.

The comlog and my own reasoning had evaluated the scale of this place—an atmosphere tens of thousands of klicks deep, a horizon so far away that I could have dropped scores of Old Earths or Hyperions between me and the sunset—but the lightning bolts finally convinced me that this was a world made for giants and gods, not for humankind. The electrical discharges were wider than the Mississippi and longer than the Amazon. I had seen those rivers and I could see these bolts.

I knew.

I hunkered down in my little cockpit as if that would help me when one of these bolts caught my little flying kayak. The hairs on my forearms were standing straight up and I realized that the crawling sensation I felt on my neck and scalp was precisely that—the hair on my head was writhing like a nest of snakes. The comlog was flashing overload alarms on its diskey plate. It was probably shouting at me as well, but I could not have heard a laser cannon firing ten centimeters from my ear in that maelstrom. The parasail rippled and tore at the risers as heated air and imploding vacuums battered us. At one point, riding the wake of a bolt that blinded me, the kayak swung above horizontal, higher than the parasail. I was sure that the risers were going to collapse, the kayak and I were going to fall into the parasail shroud, and we would fall for minutes—hours—until pressure and heat ended my screaming.

The kayak rocked back, then back again, then continued swinging like a maddened pendulum—but under the sail.

In addition to the storm of lightning beneath me, in addition to the rising chain of explosions in every tower of cumulus, in addition to the searing bolts that now laced the towers like a web of firing neurons in a brain gone berserk, bundles of ball lightning and chain lightning suddenly began breaking loose from the clouds and floating in the dark spaces where my kayak flew.

I watched one of these rippling, surging spheres of electricity drift not a hundred meters beneath me: it was the size of a small, round asteroid—an electric moonlet. The noise it made was beyond description, but memories surged unbidden of being caught in a forest fire in the Aquila fens, of the tornado that skipped over our caravan on the moors when I was five years old, of plasma grenades detonating against the great blue glacier on the Claw Iceshelf.

No combination of these memories could match the energy violence tumbling along beneath the kayak like some runaway boulder made of blue and gold light. The storm lasted more than eight hours. Darkness lasted another eight. I survived the first. I slept through the last. When I awoke, shaken and thirsty, filled with dreams of light and noise, still partially deafened, badly needing to urinate and worried about falling out of the cockpit while I knelt to do so, I saw that morning light was painting the opposite side of the cloud pillars that had replaced the temple columns from the night before. Sunrise was simpler than sunset: the brilliant white and gold crawled down from the cirrus ceiling, along the roiling sides of the cumulus and nimbus, down to my layer where I sat shaking from the cold. My skin and clothes and hair were wet. Sometime during that night’s bedlam, it had rained on me and rained hard.

I got to my knees on the padded floor of the hull, held tight to the cockpit rim with my left hand, made sure that the kayak’s swaying had steadied somewhat, and attended to business. The thin, gold stream glinted in morning light as it dropped into infinity. The depths were black, purple, and inscrutable once again. My lower back hurt and I remembered the kidney stone nightmare of the previous few days. That seemed like another life to me now, long ago and far away.

Well, I thought, if there’s another tiny stone being passed, I’m not going to catch it today.

I was buttoning up and settling back into the cockpit, trying to stretch my aching legs without actually falling out, thinking about the impossibility of finding another farcaster ring anywhere in this endless sky after that night of being blown off course—as if I had ever had a course—when I suddenly realized that I was not alone. Living things were rising from the depths and circling around me.

At first I saw only one creature and had no scale with which to judge the size of the visitor.

The thing could have been a few centimeters across and only meters from my floating kayak, or many kilometers across and far, far away. Then the organism swam between a distant cloud pillar and a more distant cumulus tower, and I realized that kilometers was a more reasonable guess of size.

As it came closer, I saw the myriad of smaller forms accompanying it through the morning sky.

Before I attempt to describe the things, I have to say that little in the history of humankind’s expansion in this arm of the galaxy had prepared us to describe large alien organisms. On the hundreds of worlds explored and colonized during and after the Hegira, most of the indigenous life discovered had been plants and a few very simple organisms, such as the radiant gossamers on Hyperion. The few large, evolved animal forms—the Lantern Mouths on Mare Infinitus, say, or the zeplins of Whirl—tended to be hunted to extinction. The more common result was a world filled with a few indigenous life-forms and a myriad of human-adapted species. Humanity had terraformed all these worlds, bringing its bacteria and earthworms and fish and birds and land animals in raw DNA form, defrosting embryos in the early seedships, building birthing factories in the later expansions. The result had been much as on Hyperion—vital indigenous plants such as the tesla trees and chalma and weirwood and some surviving local insects coexisting with thriving Old Earth transplants and biotailored adapts such as triaspen, ever blues, oak trees, mallards, sharks, hummingbirds, and deer. We were not used to alien animals.

And these were definitely alien animals rising to meet me.

The largest one reminded me of the cuttlefish—again, one of Old Earth’s adapts—that thrived in the warm shallows of the Great South Sea on Hyperion. This creature was squidlike but almost transparent, its internal organs quite visible, although I admit that it was difficult to determine its exterior from its interior as it pulsed and throbbed and changed shape from second to second, almost like a starship morphing for battle. The thing had no head as such, not even a flattened, squidlike extension that might be considered a head, but I could make out a variety of tentacles, although fronds or filaments might be better words for the constantly swaying, retracting, extending, and quivering appendages. But these filaments were inside the pale, clear body as much as outside, and I was not sure if the creature’s movement through the clear air was a result of the swimming motion of the filaments or because of gases expelled as the giant cuttlefish expanded and contracted.

As far as I could recall from old books and Grandam’s explanations, the zeplins on Whirl were much simpler in appearance—blimp-shaped gasbags, mere medusalike cells to hold their mix of hydrogen and methane, storing and metabolizing helium in their crude liftsacs, giant jellyfish floating in the hydrogen-ammonia-methane atmosphere of Whirl. As best I could remember, the zeplins ate a sort of atmospheric phytoplankton that floated in the noxious atmosphere like so much airborne manna. There were no predators on Whirl… until humans arrived in their floating bathyscaphes to harvest the rarer gases.

As the cuttlefish creature grew closer, I saw the complexity of its innards: pale, pulsing outlines of organs and intestine-looking coils and what might be feeding filaments and tubes that might be for reproduction or elimination, and there were some appendages that might be sex organs, or perhaps eyes. And all the while it folded in on itself, retracted its curling filaments, then pulsed forward, tentacles extended fully, like a squid swimming through clear water. It was five or six hundred meters long.

I began to notice the other things. Around the cuttlefish swarmed hundreds or thousands of golden, disc-shaped creatures, ranging in size from tiny ones perhaps as large as my hand to others larger than the heavy river mantas used to pull barges on Hyperion’s rivers. These things were also nearly transparent, although their insides were clouded by a sort of greenish glow that might have been an inert gas excited to luminescence by the animal’s own bio-electrical field.

These things swarmed around the cuttlefish, at times appearing to be swallowed or absorbed by some orifice or another, only to reappear outside again. I could not swear that I saw the cuttlefish eating any of the swarming discs, but at one point I thought that I could see a cloud of the green-glowing things moving along the inside of the cuttlefish’s gut like ghostly platelets in a clear vein.

The monster and its cloud of companions floated closer, rising until the sunlight passed through its body on its way to light my kayak and parasail. I revised its size upward—it must be at least a klick long and a third that in width when it expanded to its widest. The living discs floated to each side of me now. I could see that they were spinning as well as curling like mantas.

I tugged out the flechette pistol Alem had given me and clicked off its safety. If the monster attacked, I would fire half the magazine of slivers into its pale side, hoping that it was as thin as it was transparent. Maybe there was a chance that I could spill whatever lift gases allowed it to float in this band of oxygen atmosphere.

At that moment, the thing’s hydralike filaments flashed out in all directions, some missing my parasail by mere meters, and I realized that I could never kill or sink the monster before it destroyed my sail with one thrash of one tentacle. I waited, half expecting to be pulled into the cuttlefish’s maw—if it had a maw—at any second.

Nothing happened. My kayak floated in the direction I thought of as westward, the parasail rising on thermals and descending on colder downdrafts, the clouds towering around me, and the cuttlefish and its companions—I thought of them as parasites for no good reason—stood off a few hundred meters to the “north” and a hundred meters or so above me. I wondered if the thing was following me out of curiosity or hunger. I wondered if the green platelets drifting around me might attack at any moment. Capable of doing nothing else, I laid the useless flechette pistol on my lap, nibbled on the last of my biscuits from my pack, and sipped from my water bottle. I had less than another day’s supply of water. I cursed myself for not trying to catch rainwater during the night’s terrible storm, although I had no idea if this world’s water was potable. The long morning grew into a long afternoon. Several times the drifting parasail took me into a cloud tower and I raised my face to the dripping fog, licking droplets from my lips and chin. The water tasted like water. Each time I emerged from the fog, I expected the cuttlefish to have departed, but each time it remained on station to my right and above me. Once, just after the halo that was the sun above had passed the zenith, the kayak was blown into a particularly rough patch of climbing cloud, and the parasail almost folded in the violent updraft. But it stabilized itself and when I emerged from the cloud that time, I was some kilometers higher. The air was thinner and colder. The cuttlefish had followed me up. Perhaps it’s not hungry yet. Perhaps it feeds after dark. I reassured myself with a series of these thoughts.

I kept scanning the empty sky between clouds for another farcaster ring, but none appeared. It seemed folly to expect to find one—the air currents blew me generally westward but the vagaries of the jet stream sent me klicks north and south. How could I thread such a small needle after a day and night and day of blowing around like this? It did not seem likely. But still I searched the sky.

In midafn I realized that there were other living things visible far below to the south. More cuttlefish moving about the base of an immense cloud tower, the sunlight piercing the depths enough to illuminate their clear bodies against the black of the broiling depths beneath them. There must be scores—no, hundreds—of the pulsing, swimming things along the base of that one cloud. I was too far away to make out the platelet parasites around them, but a sense of diffused light there—like dust floating—suggested their presence by the thousands or millions. I wondered if the monsters usually kept to the lower atmospheric levels and this one—still keeping pace with me within feeding-filament range—had ventured up out of curiosity. My muscles were cramping. I pulled myself out of the cockpit and tried stretching along the top of the kayak’s hull, hanging on to the parasail risers to keep my balance. It was dangerous, but I had to stretch. I lay on my back and pedaled an imaginary bicycle with my raised legs. I did push-ups, clinging to the rim of the cockpit for balance. When I had worked most of the cramps out, I crawled back into the cockpit and half dozed.

Perhaps it is odd to admit, but my mind wandered all that afternoon, even while the alien cuttlefish swam alongside within swallowing range and alien platelet creatures danced and hovered within meters of the kayak and parasail. The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.

I began thinking about the past few days and the past months and the past years. I thought of Aenea—of leaving her behind—and of all the other people I had left behind: A. Bettik and the others at Taliesin West, the old poet on Hyperion, Dem Loa and Dem Ria and their family on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Father Glaucus in the frozen air tunnels of Sol Draconi Septem, Cuchiat and Chiaku and Cuchtu and Chichticu and the other Chitchatuk on that same world—Aenea had been sure that Father Glaucus and our Chitchatuk friends had been murdered after we left that world, although she had never explained how she could know that—and I thought about others I had left behind, working my way back to my last sight of Grandam and the Clan members waving as I left for Home Guard service many years ago. And always my thoughts returned to leaving Aenea.

I’ve left too many people. And let too many people do my work and fighting for me. From now on I will fight for myself. If I ever find the girl again, I will stay with Aenea forever. The resolution burned like anger through me, fueled by the hopelessness of finding another farcaster ring in this endless cloudscape.

YOU KNOW THE ONE WHO TEACHES SHE HAS TOUCHED YOU !?!?

The words were not carried by sound nor heard by my ears. Rather, they were like blows to the inside of my skull. I literally reeled, gripping the sides of the kayak to keep from falling out.

HAVE YOU BEEN TOUCHED/CHANGED LEARNING TO HEAR/SEE/WALK FROM THE ONE WHO TEACHES ????

Every word was a migraine blow. Each struck with the force of brain hemorrhage. The words were shouted inside my skull in my own voice. Perhaps I was going mad.

Wiping away tears, I peered at the giant cuttlefish and its swarm of green-platelet parasites. The larger organism pulsed, contracted, extended coiling filaments, and swam through the chilly air. I could not believe that these words were coming from that creature. It was too biological. And I did not believe in telepathy. I looked at the swarming discs, but their behavior showed no more sense of higher consciousness than dust motes in a shaft of light—less than the synchronized shifting of a school of fish or the flocking of bats. Feeling foolish, I shouted, “Who are you? Who is speaking?”

I squinted in preparation for the blast of words against my brain, but there was no response from the giant organism or its companions.

“Who spoke?” I shouted into a rising wind.

There was no answering sound except for the slap of the risers against the canvas of the parasail.

The kayak slewed to the right, righted itself, and slewed again. I swiveled to my left, half expecting to see another cuttlefish monster attacking me, but instead saw something infinitely more malevolent approaching.

While I had been focusing on the alien creature to the north, a billowing, black cumulus had all but surrounded me to the south.

Wind-tattered streamers of black whirled out from the heat-driven storm cloud and roiled under me like ebony rivers. I could see lightning flashing in the depths below and surging spheres of ball lightning being spit from the black column of storm. Closer, much closer, hanging from the river of black cloud flowing above me, curled a dozen or more tornadoes, their funnel clouds striking toward me like scorpion tails. Each funnel was the size of the cuttlefish monster or larger—vertical kilometers of whirling madness—and each was spawning its own cluster of smaller tornadoes. There was no way that my flimsy parasail could withstand even a close miss by one of these vortexes—and there was no way that the funnels were going to miss me.

I stood up in the pitching, rolling cockpit, holding my place in the boat only by grasping a riser with my left hand. With my right hand I made a fist, raised it, and shook it toward the tornadoes, toward the roiling storm beyond them, and toward the invisible sky beyond. “Well, goddamn you then!” I shouted. My words were lost in the wind howl. My vest flapped around me. A gust nearly blew me into the maelstrom. Leaning far out over the hull of the kayak, bracing myself into the wind like a ski jumper I had seen once on the Iceshelf caught in a moment of mad, poised balance before the inevitable descent, I shook my fist again and screamed, “Do your worst, goddamn you. I defy you gods!” As if in answer, one of the tornado funnels came sidewinding closer, the lowest tip of its whirling cone stabbing downward as if seeking a hard surface to destroy. It missed me by a distance of hundreds of meters, but the vacuum of its passing whirled the kayak and parasail around like a toy boat in a draining bathtub. Relieved of the opposition of the wind, I fell forward onto the slippery kayak hull and would have slid into oblivion if my scrabbling hands had not found a riser to grip. My feet were fully out of the cockpit at that moment.

There was a hailstorm traveling with the passing funnel. Ice pellets—some the size of my fist—smashed through the parasail, pounded the kayak with a noise like flechette clouds slamming home, and hit me in the leg, shoulder, and lower back.

The pain almost made me release my grip. That mattered little, I realized as I clung to the pitching, dipping kayak, because the sail had been torn in a hundred places. Only its canopy had saved me from being shot to bits by the hail, but now the delta-shaped foil had been riddled. It lost lift as suddenly as it had first gained it and the kayak pitched forward toward the darkness so many thousands of klicks below.

Tornadoes filled the sky around me. I gripped the now-useless riser where it entered the battered hull and hung on, determined to complete that one act—hanging on—until the boat, furled sail, and I were all crushed by pressure or shredded by the winds. I realized that I was screaming again, but the sound was different in my ears—almost gleeful.

I had fallen less than a kilometer, the kayak and me gaining speed far beyond Hyperion’s or Old Earth’s terminal velocity, when the cuttlefish—forgotten behind and above me—made its lunge. It must have moved with blinding speed, propelling itself through the air like a squid jetting after its prey. The first I knew that it was hungry and determined not to lose its dinner was when the long feeding tendrils surged around me like so many huge tentacles coiling and probing and wrapping.

If the thing had tugged me to an immediate stop at the speeds the boat and I were falling, both kayak and I would have been snapped into small pieces. But the cuttlefish fell with us, surrounding the boat, sail, risers, and me with the smallest of its tendrils—each still two to five meters thick—and then it braked itself against the fall, jetting ammonia-smelling gases like a dropship on final approach. Then it began ascending again, up toward the storm where tornadoes still raged and the central stratocumulus rotated with its own black intensity. Only half-conscious, I realized that the cuttlefish was flying into the roiling cloud even as it reeled the bashed kayak and me toward an opening in its immense transparent body.

Well, I thought groggily, I’ve found its mouth.

Risers and shreds of parasail lay around me and over me like an oversized shroud. The kayak seemed to be draped in drab bunting as the cuttlefish pulled us in closer. I tried to turn, thought of crawling back toward the cockpit and finding the flechette gun, of cutting my way out of the thing.

The flechette gun was gone, of course, shaken out of the cockpit in all the violent tumbling and the fall. Also gone were the cockpit cushions and my backpack with the clothes, food, water, and flashlight laser. Everything was gone. I tried to chuckle but the sound was not quite successful as the tendrils pulled the kayak and its clinging passenger the last fifty meters to the gaping orifice on the underside of the cuttlefish’s body. I could see the internal organs more clearly now—pulsing and absorbing, moving in peristaltic waves, some of them filled with the green platelet creatures. As I was pulled closer, there came an almost overwhelming stench of cleaning fluid—ammonia, I realized—that made my eyes water and throat burn.

I thought of Aenea. It was not a prolonged or eloquent thought—just a mental glimpse of how she had looked on her sixteenth birthday, all short hair, sweat, and sunburn from her desert meditations—and I formed the single message, Sorry, kiddo. I did my best to get to the ship and bring it to you. Sorry.

Then the long feeding tendrils curled and folded and pulled the boat and me up into a lipless mouth that I realized must be thirty or forty meters across.

I thought of the fiberglass and ultranylon parasail fabric and the carbon-fiber risers that were entering with me and had time for a last thought—I hope some of this gives you a bellyache.

And then I was pulled into the ammonia and fish smell, was vaguely aware that the air here in the creature’s gut was not really breathable, decided to jump from the kayak rather than be digested, but lost consciousness before I could act or frame another coherent thought.

Without my knowledge or observation, the cuttlefish continued to rise through cloud blacker than a moonless night, its lipless mouth closing and disappearing on its seamless flesh, the kayak and sail and me nothing more than a shadow in the fluid contents of its lower tract.

13

Kenzo Isozaki was not surprised when the Swiss Guard came for him.

The Corps Helvetica colonel and eight troopers in full orange-and-blue dress uniforms with energy lances and deathwands arrived at the Torus Mercantilus unannounced, demanded to see CEO Isozaki in his private office, and presented him with an encrypted diskey ordering him to dress formally and appear before His Holiness, Pope Urban XVI. Immediately.

The colonel stayed in sight of Isozaki as the CEO stepped into his personal apartment, quickly showered, and dressed in his most formal white shirt, gray vest, red cravat, the double-breasted black demisuit with the gold buttons on the side, and black velvet cape. “May I phone my associates and issue business instructions in case I should miss meetings scheduled for later today?” he asked the colonel as they stepped out of the lift into the main reception hall where the troopers made a sort of gold and blue corridor between the workstations. “No,” said the Swiss Guard officer.

A Pax Fleet ramscout was docked where Isozaki’s personal ship was usually berthed.

The Pax crew gave the Mercantilus CEO the briefest of nods, instructed him to strap into his acceleration couch, and then they were boosting in-system with two torchships visible on the tactical holo display as they dropped into escort position.

They are treating me as a prisoner, not an honored guest, thought Isozaki. His face revealed nothing, of course, but a wave of something like relief followed the pulse of fear and dread in him. He had been expecting this since his illicit meeting with Councillor Albedo. And he had slept almost not at all since that painful and traumatic rendezvous. Isozaki knew that there was no reason for Albedo not to reveal the fact of the Mercantilus’s attempts to contact the TechnoCore, but he hoped that they would believe that it was his attempt and his alone. Silently, Isozaki gave thanks to whatever gods that wanted to listen that his friend and associate, Anna Pelli Cognani, was out of Pacem’s system, visiting Renaissance Vector for a major trade fair there.

From his couch between the Swiss Guard colonel and one of the troopers, Isozaki could see the tactical holo in front of the pilot’s position. The sphere of moving light and color with its solid bars of code was highly technical, but Isozaki had been a pilot before these boys were born. He could see that they were not accelerating toward the world of Pacem, but toward a destination near the trailing Trojan point, directly in the middle of the swarm of Pax Fleet asteroid bases and system-defense forts.

A Holy Office orbital prison, thought Isozaki. Worse than Castel Sant’Angelo where the virtual pain machines were said to run all hours of the day and night. In one of the orbital dungeons, no one could hear you scream. He was sure that the command to attend a papal audience was mere irony, a way to get him out of the Pax Mercantilus without protest.

Isozaki would have bet anything that within days—perhaps hours—his formal suit and cape would be bloody, sweat-soaked rags.

He was wrong on all counts. The ramscout decelerated above the plane of the ecliptic and he realized their destination: Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s “summer retreat.”

The diskey viewer in the CEO’s couch worked and he called up an exterior view as the ramscout left its escorting torchships and dropped toward the massive, potato-shaped asteroid. More than forty klicks long and twenty-five across, Castel Gandolfo was a little world of its own, its sky blue, its oxygen-rich atmosphere held in by class-twenty containment fields wrapped with infinite redundancies, the hillsides and terraces green with grass and crops, the sculpted mountains forested and running with streams and small animals. Isozaki saw the ancient Italian village pass below and knew that the peaceful vision was deceptive: surrounding Pax bases could destroy any ship or fleet in existence, while the interior of asteroid Castel Gandolfo was honeycombed with garrisons holding more than ten thousand Swiss Guard and elite Pax troopers.

The ramscout morphed wings and flew the final ten kilometers on silent electric pulse jets. Isozaki saw the Swiss Guard troopers in full battle dress rise to escort the ship the final five klicks. Rich sunlight glinted off their dynamic-flow armor and transparent face shields as they encircled the ramscout and approached the castle at dead-slow speeds. Isozaki saw several of the troopers aim probes at the ship: confirming with deep radar and infrared what the encrypted manifest readouts had told them about the number and identity of passengers and crew.

A door opened in the side of one of the castle’s stone towers and the ramscout floated in, pulse jets cool, the Swiss Guard troopers tugging the aircraft into place with the blue glow of their liftpacs.

The air lock cycled. The eight Swiss Guard troopers went down the ramp first, taking up their two lines as the colonel escorted Kenzo Isozaki out and down. The CEO was looking for a lift door or stairway, but the entire berthing level of the tower began to descend.

The motors and gears were silent. Only the passing stone walls of the tower told of their movement downward and then sideways into the subterranean guts of Castel Gandolfo.

They stopped. A door appeared in the wall of cold stone. Lights illuminated a corridor of polished steel with floating, fiberplastic lens pods keeping watch at ten-meter intervals. The colonel gestured and Isozaki led the procession down the echoing tunnel. At the end, blue light washed over them all as other probes and sensors searched them inside and out. A chime rang and another portal appeared and irised open. This was a more formal waiting room. Three people stood when Isozaki and his escort entered.

Damn, thought the Pax Mercantilus CEO. Anna Pelli Cognani was there, dressed in her finest fresilk robes, as were CEO’s Helvig Aron and Kennet Hay-Modhino, Isozaki’s other counterparts on the Executive Council of the Pancapitalist League of Independent Catholic Transstellar Trade Organizations.

Damn, thought Kenzo Isozaki again, his face staying absolutely impassive while he nodded silently to his associates. They are going to hold all of us accountable for my actions. We will all be excommunicated and executed.

“This way,” said the Swiss Guard colonel and opened an elaborately carved door. The room beyond was darker. Isozaki smelled candles, incense, and sweating stone. He realized that the Swiss Guardsmen were not going with them through that door. Whatever waited there, waited for his party alone.

“Thank you, Colonel,” said CEO Isozaki in a pleasant voice. With firm strides, he led the way into the incense-filled darkness.

It was a small chapel, dark except for red votive candles flickering in a wrought-iron stand against one stone wall and two arched, stained-glass windows behind the simple altar at the far end.

Six more candles burned on the bare altar while flames in braziers on the far side of the windows cast more ruddy light into the long, narrow room.

There was only one chair, tall, straight-backed, velvet-cushioned, and placed to the left of the altar. In the back of the chair was embossed what at first appeared to be a cruciform, but what, upon second glance, was revealed to be the triple cross of the Pope. The altar and chair were set upon a low stone dais.

The rest of the chapel was without chairs or pews, but red velvet cushions had been set on the dark stone on either side of the aisle down which M.’s Isozaki, Cognani, Hay-Modhino, and Aron walked. There were four cushions—two on either side of the aisle—that were not in use. The Mercantilus CEO’s dipped fingers in the stone font holding holy water, crossed themselves, genuflected toward the altar, and went to their knees on the cushions. Before lowering his head in prayer, Kenzo Isozaki glanced around the tiny chapel.

Nearest the altar dais knelt Vatican Secretary of State Simon Augustino Cardinal Lourdusamy—a mountain of red and black in the ruddy light, his jowls and chins hiding his clerical collar as he bowed his head in prayer—and behind him knelt the scarecrow figure of his aide, Monsignor Lucas Oddi. Across the aisle from Lourdusamy, the Holy Office’s Grand Inquisitor, John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa, knelt in prayer, his eyes closed. Next to him was the infamous intelligence agent and torturer, Father Farrell.

On Lourdusamy’s side of the aisle, three Pax Fleet officers were on their knees: Admiral Marusyn—his silver hair glinting in the red light—and his aide, Admiral Marget Wu, and someone whose face it took Isozaki a moment to recall—Admiral Aldikacti. On the Grand Inquisitor’s side of the aisle knelt Cardinal Du Noyer, prefect and president of Cor Unum. Du Noyer was a woman in her healthy seventies, standard, with a strong jaw and short-cropped gray hair. Her eyes were the color of flint. Isozaki did not recognize the middle-aged man in monsignoral robes who knelt behind the Cardinal.

The final four kneeling figures were the Mercantilus CEO’s—Aron and Hay-Modhino on the Grand Inquisitor’s side of the aisle, Isozaki and Pelli Cognani on the Secretary of State’s side. Isozaki counted a total of thirteen people in the chapel. Not an auspicious number, he thought.

At that moment, a hidden door in the wall to the right of the altar opened silently and the Pope entered with four men in attendance. The thirteen people in the chapel rose quickly from their knees and stood with their heads bowed. Kenzo Isozaki had time to recognize two of the men with the Pope as aides and the third as head of papal security—faceless functionaries—but the fourth man, the man in gray, was Councillor Albedo. Only Albedo stayed with the Pope as His Holiness walked into the room, allowing the kissing of his ring and touching the heads of the gathered men and women as they knelt again. Finally His Holiness, Pope Urban XVI, took his seat in the straight-backed throne with Albedo standing behind him. The thirteen dignitaries in the room immediately stood. Isozaki lowered his eyes, his face remaining a study in calm, but his heart pounded at his ribs. Will Albedo expose us all? Have all these groups attempted secret contact with the Core? Are we to be confronted by His Holiness and then taken from here, our cruciforms removed, and then executed? Isozaki thought it likely.

“Brothers and sisters in Christ,” began His Holiness, “we are pleased that you have agreed to join us here this day. What we must say in this secret and silent place has remained a secret for centuries and must remain within this circle until formal permission to share it with others is granted from the Holy See. We so abjure and command you, upon the pain of excommunication and the loss of your souls to the light of Christ.” The thirteen men and women murmured prayers and acquiescence. “In the recent months and years,” continued His Holiness, “there have occurred events both strange and terrible. We have witnessed these from afar—some of these we have foreseen with the help of Our Lord, Jesus Christ—and many we have prayed would pass from us, sparing our people, our Pax, and our Church from a test of wills, faith, and fortitude. But events occur as the Lord wills them to occur. It is not possible for even His most faithful servant to understand all events and portents, only to trust in His mercy when those events seem most threatening and perplexing.”

The thirteen dignitaries kept their eyes carefully downcast.

“Rather than relate these events from our perspective,” His Holiness said softly, “we shall ask some of those who participated in them to report in full. Then we shall endeavor to explain the connections between such seemingly disparate occurrences. Admiral Marusyn?”

The silver-haired Admiral shifted slightly to face the others as well as His Holiness. He cleared his throat. “Reports from a world called Vitus-Gray-Balianus B suggest that we came close to capturing the Hyperion-born man named Raul Endymion who eluded us—with our primary subject, the girl named Aenea—almost five standard years ago. Elements of a special force of the Noble Guard…” The Admiral nodded toward Pope Urban XVI, who lowered his gaze in agreement. “Elements of this special force,” continued Marusyn, “tipped our commander on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B to the possible presence of this person. Although he escaped before our search of the area was completed, we did turn up definite DNA and micron-tag evidence that this was the same Raul Endymion who had been briefly incarcerated on the world of Mare Infinitus more than four years ago.”

Cardinal Lourdusamy cleared his throat.

“It might be helpful, Admiral, if you described how the suspect, Raul Endymion, escaped from this world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B.”

Kenzo Isozaki did not blink, but he registered the fact that Lourdusamy was speaking for His Holiness in this conference.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” said Admiral Marusyn. “Yes, it appears that this Endymion both appeared on and escaped the planet via one of the ancient farcasters.”

There was no audible buzz in the room, but Isozaki sensed the psychic hum of interest and shock. There had been rumors for the past four years centering on Pax Fleet forces chasing some heretic who had managed to activate the dormant farcasters.

“And was this farcaster active when your men inspected it?” questioned Lourdusamy.

“Negative, Your Excellency,” said Admiral Marusyn. “There was no sign of activity on either farcaster… the one upriver which must have granted the fugitive access to Vitus-Gray-Balianus B… nor the one downriver from the settlements.”

“But you are certain that this… Endymion… had not arrived on planet by some more conventional means? And equally certain that he is not hiding there now?”

“Yes, Your Excellency. This Pax world has excellent traffic control and orbital defenses. Any spacecraft approaching Vitus-Gray-Balianus B would have been detected light-hours from the planet. And we have turned the world upside down searching… administered Truthtell to tens of thousands of the inhabitants. The man named Endymion is not there. Witnesses did describe, however, a flash of light at the downstream farcaster at the precise moment that our sensors in and above that hemisphere registered a major energy surge consistent with old records of farcaster displacement fields.”

His Holiness raised his face and made a subtle gesture to Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“And I believe you have one other bit of unsettling news, Admiral Marusyn,” rumbled Lourdusamy.

The Admiral’s countenance grew grimmer as he nodded. “Aye, Your Excellency… Your Holiness. This involves the first mutiny in the history of Pax Fleet.”

Isozaki again sensed the unspoken murmur of shock. He showed no emotion or reaction, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Anna Pelli Cognani glancing at him.

“I will have Admiral Aldikacti brief us on this matter,” said Marusyn. He stepped back and folded his hands in front of him.

Isozaki noted that Aldikacti was one of those stocky Lusian women who seemed almost too androgynous to label with gender. She was as solid and blocky as a brick in a dress uniform.

Aldikacti did not waste time clearing her throat. She launched into an immediate briefing involving Task Force GIDEON, its mission to attack Ouster strongholds in seven systems far in the Outback, the successful outcome of that mission in all seven systems, and then the surprise in the final system, code-named Lucifer.

“To this point, the task force had performed beyond expectations and simulations,” barked Admiral Aldikacti. “As a result, while completing operations in Ouster System Lucifer, I authorized a Gideon-drive drone to carry a message to Pacem… to His Holiness and Admiral Marusyn… requesting permission to refuel and refit in Tau Ceti System and then extend Task Force GIDEON’s mission—attacking new Ouster systems before the alarm of our attack spread through the Outback. I received Gideon-drone permission to do this, and proceeded to take the bulk of my task force to Tau Ceti System for refueling, rearming, and rendezvous with five additional archangel starships which had come on-line since our task force had left Pax space.”

“You took the bulk of your task force?” queried Cardinal Lourdusamy in his soft rumble.

“Yes, Your Excellency.” There was no apology or quavering in Aldikacti’s flat Lusian voice. “Five Ouster torchships had escaped our detection and were accelerating toward a Hawking-drive translation point which would have presumably brought them out in another Ouster system. They would have spread the alarm of our task force’s presence and lethality. Rather than divert the entire Task Force GIDEON, which was approaching our own translation point to Tau Ceti System, I authorized H.H.S. Gabriel and H.H.S. Raphael to remain in Lucifer System just long enough to intercept and destroy the Ouster torchships.”

Lourdusamy folded his pudgy hands in his robe. His voice was a deep purr. “And you then translated your flagship, the Uriel, and four other archangels to Tau Ceti System?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Leaving the Gabriel and Raphael in Lucifer System?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“And you were aware, Admiral, that the Raphael was commanded by Father Captain de Soya… the same captain who had been reprimanded some years earlier for not succeeding in his mission of finding and detaining the child, Aenea?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“And you were aware, Admiral, that Pax Fleet and the Holy See were concerned enough about Father Captain de Soya’s… ah… stability, that the Holy Office had assigned an undercover agent aboard the Raphael to observe and transmit observations on Father Captain de Soya’s behavior and reliability?”

“A spy,” said Admiral Aldikacti. “Commander Liebler. Yes, Your Excellency. I was aware that Holy Office agents aboard my flagship were receiving encoded tightbeam broadcasts from Commander Liebler aboard the Raphael.”

“And did these agents share any concerns or data from these broadcasts, Admiral Aldikacti?”

“Negative, Your Excellency. I was not made aware of the nature of the Holy Office’s concerns related to Father Captain de Soya’s loyalty or sanity.”

Cardinal Mustafa cleared his throat and raised one finger.

Lourdusamy, who had been in charge of what Isozaki and the others had quickly recognized as an inquisition, glanced at the Pope.

His Holiness nodded in the direction of the Grand Inquisitor.

“I feel it necessary to point out to His Holiness and the other worthies in this room that observation of Father Captain de Soya had been approved… directed… from the Office of the Holy See, with verbal authorization from the Secretary of State and Pax Fleet Command… specifically from Admiral Marusyn.”

There was a brief silence.

Finally Lourdusamy said, “And can you tell us, Cardinal Mustafa, what the source of this shared concern had been?”

Mustafa licked his lips. “Yes, Your Excellency. Our… ah… intelligence reports indicated that there might have been some chance of contamination during Father Captain de Soya’s chase and rare contact with the subject named Aenea.”

“Contamination?” queried Lourdusamy.

“Yes, Your Excellency. It was our assessment that the girl named Aenea had the power to affect both the physical and psychological makeup of those Pax citizens with whom she came in contact. Our concern in this instance was for the absolute loyalty and obedience of one of Pax Fleet’s starship commanders.”

“And how was this intelligence assessment made, Cardinal Mustafa?” continued Lourdusamy.

The Grand Inquisitor paused. “A variety of intelligence sources and methods were used, Your Excellency.”

Lourdusamy did not pause. “Among these were the fact that you have detained and… ah… interrogated one of Father Captain de Soya’s fellow shipmen from the aforementioned abortive chase of subject Aenea, is that not correct, Cardinal Mustafa? A… ah… Corporal Kee, I believe?”

Mustafa blinked. “That is correct, Your Excellency.” The Grand Inquisitor turned slightly so as to speak to the others in the room as well as the Pope and the Secretary of State.

“Such detention is unusual, but called for in a situation which appears to affect the security of the Church and the Pax.”

“Of course, Your Excellency,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy. “Admiral Aldikacti, you may continue with the briefing.”

“Some hours after my five archangels jumped to Tau Ceti System,” said Aldikacti, “and before any of us had completed our two-day resurrection cycle, a Gideon drone translated into Tau Ceti space. It had been launched by Mother Captain Stone…”

“Captain of the H.H.S. Gabriel,” said Lourdusamy.

“Affirmative, Your Excellency. The drone’s encrypted message… encrypted in a code for my eyes only… said that the Ouster torchships had been destroyed, but that the Raphael had gone rogue, was accelerating toward an unauthorized translation point, and would not respond to Mother Captain Stone’s orders to stop.”

“In other words,” purred Lourdusamy, “one of His Holiness’s Pax Fleet ships had suffered a mutiny.”

“It appeared so, Your Excellency. Although in this case, the mutiny seemed to have been led by the ship’s captain.”

“Father Captain de Soya.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“And were there attempts made to contact the Holy Office agent aboard the Raphael?”

“Yes, Your Excellency. Father Captain de Soya said that Commander Liebler was attending to duties. Mother Captain Stone thought this unlikely.”

“And when challenged about the changed translation point?” queried Lourdusamy.

“Father Captain de Soya answered that I had tightbeamed changed orders to the Raphael prior to our task force’s translation,” said Admiral Aldikacti.

“Did Mother Captain Stone accept this explanation?”

“Negative, Your Excellency. Mother Captain Stone closed the distance between the two archangels and engaged the Raphael.”

“What was the outcome of that engagement, Admiral?”

Aldikacti hesitated only a heartbeat. “Your Excellency… Your Holiness… because Mother Captain Stone had used an eyes-only encryption for her drone message, it was a full day in Tau Ceti System—the time it took for my emergency resurrection—before I read the message and authorized an immediate return to Lucifer System.”

“How many ships did you take with you, Admiral?”

“Three, Your Excellency. My own flagship, the Uriel, with a fresh crew, and two of the archangels that had rendezvoused with us in Tau Ceti System… the Mikal and the Izrail. I felt that the risk of accelerating resurrection of the Task Force GIDEON crews was too great.”

“Although you accepted that risk yourself, Admiral,” said Lourdusamy.

Aldikacti said nothing.

“What happened then, Admiral?”

“We jumped immediately to Lucifer System, Your Excellency. There we recycled under twelve-hour automated resurrection. Many of the resurrections were unsuccessful. By combining the successfully resurrected crew members from all three ships, I was able to crew the Uriel. I left the other two starships in passive but automated defensive trajectories while I commenced searching for the Gabriel and the Raphael. I found neither. But a final beacon drone was soon discovered on the far side of Lucifer’s yellow sun.”

“And the beacon was from…” prompted Lourdusamy.

“Mother Captain Stone. The beacon held the downloaded history of the Gabriel’s combat recorder. It showed the battle that had taken place less than two days before. Stone had attempted to destroy the Raphael by plasma and fusion weapons. The attempts failed. The Gabriel then engaged Father Captain de Soya’s ship by deathbeam.”

There was silence in the tiny chapel. Isozaki watched the red light of the flickering votive candles painting the pained face of His Holiness, Pope Urban XVI. “The outcome of that engagement?” said Lourdusamy.

“Both crews died,” said Aldikacti. “According to automated instruments aboard the Gabriel, the Raphael completed automated translation. Mother Captain Stone had ordered her crew to resurrection créche battle stations. She had programmed the Gabriel’s ship computers to resurrect her and several of the essential crew members on an emergency, eight-hour cycle. Only she and one of her officers survived the resurrection. Mother Captain Stone encoded the beacon and accelerated to the Raphael’s former translation point. She was determined to seek out and destroy the ship, preferably before de Soya and his crew completed resurrection… if they were in their créches at the time of the deathbeaming.”

“Did Mother Captain Stone know which system this translation point would open upon, Admiral?”

“Negative, Your Excellency. There were too many variables involved.”

“And what was your response to the beacon’s data, Admiral?”

“I waited twelve hours for a working complement of the crews on the Mikal and the Izrail to complete resurrection, Your Excellency. I then translated all three of my ships through the jump point indicated by the Raphael and Gabriel. I left a second beacon for the archangels I was sure would be following from Tau Ceti System within hours.”

“You did not find it necessary to wait for these ships?”

“No, Your Excellency. I thought it important to translate as soon as all three of my ships were combat-ready.”

“But you did find it expedient to wait for the crews of these two ships, Admiral. Why did you not give chase immediately with only the Uriel?”

Aldikacti did not hesitate. “It was a command combat decision, Your Excellency. I felt that the probabilities were very high that Father Captain de Soya had taken the Raphael to an Ouster system… quite possibly one more heavily armed than any Task Force GIDEON had encountered. I also felt it probable that Mother Captain Stone’s ship, the Gabriel, had been destroyed by either the Raphael or Ouster ships within the unknown system. I felt that three ships of the line were the minimum force I could take into the unknown situation.”

“And was it an Ouster system, Admiral?”

“Negative, Your Excellency. Or at least, no sign of Ousters were discovered in the two weeks of investigation following this incident.”

“Where did the translation point take you, Admiral?”

“Into the outer shell of a red giant star,” said Admiral Aldikacti. “Our containment fields were, of course, activated, but it was a very close thing.”

“Did all three of your ships make it, Admiral?”

“Negative, Your Excellency. The Uriel and Izrail survived exit from the star and containment field cooling procedures. The Mikal was lost with all hands.”

“And did you find the Gabriel and the Raphael, Admiral?”

“Only the Gabriel, Your Excellency. It was discovered floating free some two AU’s from the red giant. All systems were inoperative. There had been a breach of the containment field and the interior of the ship had melted into a single molten mass.”

“Were Mother Captain Stone and the other crew members found and resurrected, Admiral?”

“Unfortunately, no, Your Excellency. There was not enough discrete organic material remaining to pursue resurrection.”

“Was the slagging due to emergence in the red giant or attack from the Raphael or Ouster unknowns, Admiral?”

“It is still being determined by our materials experts, Your Excellency, but the preliminary report suggests an overload due to both natural and combat causes. The weapons used would have been consistent with the Raphael’s armament.”

“So you are saying that the Gabriel fought an automated engagement near this red giant sun, Admiral?”

“Within the star, Your Excellency. It seems that the Raphael turned about, reentered the star, and attacked the Gabriel within seconds of its emergence from Hawking space.”

“And is there a chance that the Raphael was also destroyed in this second engagement? The ship incinerated deep in the star?”

“A chance, Your Excellency, but we are not operating upon that assumption. It is our best guess that Father Captain de Soya then translated out of system to an unknown destination in the Outback.”

Lourdusamy nodded, his heavy jowls quivering slightly. “Admiral Marusyn,” he rumbled, “could you give us an assessment of this threat if the Raphael did indeed survive?”

The older Admiral stepped forward. “Your Excellency, we have to assume that Father Captain de Soya and the other mutineers are hostile to the Pax and that this theft of a Pax archangel-class starship was premeditated. We also have to assume the worst-case scenario that this theft of our most secret and lethal weapons system was carried out in coordination with the Ousters.” The Admiral took a breath. “Your Excellencies… Your Holiness… with the Gideon drive, any point in this arm of the galaxy is only an instant away from any other. The Raphael could translate into any Pax system—even Pacem’s—without the Hawking-drive wake warnings of the earlier, and current, Ouster spacecraft. The Raphael could ravage our Mercantilus transport lanes, attack undefended worlds and colonies, and generally wreak havoc before a Pax task force could respond.”

The Pope raised one finger. “Admiral Marusyn, are we to understand that this most prized of Gideon-drive technologies may fall into the hands of the Ousters… be duplicated… and thus power many of the Enemy’s ships?”

Marusyn’s already florid face and neck flushed more deeply. “Your Holiness… that is unlikely, Your Holiness… extremely unlikely. The steps of manufacture of a Gideon archangel are so complex, the cost so prohibitive, the secret elements so guarded…”

“But it is possible,” interrupted the Pope.

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

The Pope raised his hand like a blade cutting through the air. “We believe that we have heard all we need to hear from our friends in Pax Fleet. You are excused, Admiral Marusyn, Admiral Aldikacti, Admiral Wu.”

The three officers genuflected, bowed their heads, stood, and backed away from His Holiness. The door whispered shut behind them.

There were now ten dignitaries present, in addition to the silent papal aides and Councillor Albedo.

The Pope inclined his head toward Secretary of State Cardinal Lourdusamy. “Disposition, Simon Augustino?”

“Admiral Marusyn is to receive a letter of rebuke and will be transferred to general staff,” said Lourdusamy softly. “Admiral Wu will take his place as temporary Pax Fleet commander in chief until a suitable replacement is found. Admiral Aldikacti has been recommended for excommunication and execution by firing squad.”

The Pope nodded sadly. “We shall now hear from Cardinal Mustafa, Cardinal Du Noyer, CEO Isozaki, and Councillor Albedo before concluding this business.”

“… and thus ended the official inquiry by the Holy Office pertaining to the events on the Pax world of Mars,” concluded Cardinal Mustafa. He glanced at Cardinal Lourdusamy. “It was at this time that Captain Wolmak suggested that it was imperative that my entourage and I return to the archangel Jibril still in orbit around that planet.”

“Please continue, Excellency,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy. “Can you tell us the nature of the emergency which Captain Wolmak felt required your imperative return?”

“Yes,” said Mustafa, rubbing his lower lip. “Captain Wolmak had found the interstellar freighter that had uploaded cargo from the unlisted base near the Martian city of Arafat-kaffiyeh. The ship had been discovered floating powerless in Old Earth System’s asteroid belt.”

“Can you tell us the name of that ship, Excellency?” prompted Lourdusamy.

“The H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru.”

CEO Kenzo Isozaki’s lips twitched despite his iron control. He remembered the ship. His oldest son had crewed on it during the early years of the boy’s apprenticeship. The Saigon Maru had been an ancient ore and bulk freighter… about a three-million-ton ion sledge carrier, as he recalled.

“CEO Isozaki?” snapped Lourdusamy.

“Yes, Your Excellency?” Isozaki’s voice was smooth and emotionless.

“The ship’s designation suggests that it is of Mercantilus registry. Is this correct, M. Isozaki?”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” said the CEO. “But it is my recollection that the H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru was sold for scrap along with sixty-some other obsolete freighters about… eight standard years ago, if memory serves.”

“Your Excellencies?” said Anna Pelli Cognani. “Your Holiness? If I might?” The other CEO had whispered to her wafer-thin comlog and now touched her hearring.

“CEO Pelli Cognani,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“Our records show that the Saigon Maru was indeed sold to independent scrap contractors some eight years, three months, and two days ago, standard. Later transmissions confirmed that the ships had been scrapped and recycled at the Armaghast orbital automated foundries.”

“Thank you, CEO Pelli Cognani,” said Lourdusamy. “Cardinal Mustafa, you may continue.”

The Grand Inquisitor nodded and continued his briefing, covering only the most necessary details.

And while he spoke he thought of the images he was not describing in detail: The Jibril and its accompanying torchships slowing to silent, synchronized tumbling, matching velocities with the dark freighter. Cardinal Mustafa had always imagined asteroid belts as tightly packed clusters of moonlets, but despite the multiple images on the tactical plot, there were no rocks in sight: just the matte-black freighter, as ugly and functional as a rusted mass of pipes and cylinders, half a klick long. Matched as they were in velocity and trajectory, hanging only three klicks away with the yellow sun of humankind’s birth burning beyond their sterns, Jibril and the Saigon Maru appeared motionless with only the stars wheeling slowly around them.

Mustafa remembered—and regretted—his decision to inspect the ship with the troopers who were going aboard. The indignities of suiting up in Swiss Guard combat armor: a monomol skinsuit layer, followed by an AI neural mesh, then the spacesuit itself—bulkier than civilian skinsuits with its polymered sheath of impact armor—and finally the web belts of gear and the morphable reaction pak. The Jibril had deep-radared the hulk a dozen times and was certain that nothing moved or breathed on board, but the archangel still backed off to thirty klicks’ attack distance as soon as the Grand Inquisitor, Security Commander Browning, Marine Sergeant Nell Kasner, former groundforce commander Major Piet, and ten Swiss Guard/marine commandos had jumped from the sally port.

Mustafa remembered his pounding pulse as they jetted closer to the dead freighter, two commandos ferrying him across the abyss as if he were another parcel to carry. He remembered the sunlight glinting off gold blast visors as the troopers communicated with tightbeam squirts and hand signals, taking up positions on either side of the open air lock. Two troopers went in first, their reaction paks throbbing silently, assault weapons raised. Then Commander Browning and Sergeant Kasner went in fast behind them. A minute later there was a coded squirt on the tactical channel and Mustafa’s handlers guided him into the waiting black hole of the air lock. Corpses floating in the beams of flashlight lasers. Meat-locker images.

Frozen carcasses, red-striped ribs, gutted abdominal cavities. Jaws locked open in eternally silent screams. Frozen streamers of blood from the gaping jaws and hemorrhaged, protruding eyes. Viscera drifting in tumbling trajectories amid the stabbing beams of light.

“Crew,” tightbeamed Commander Browning.

“Shrike?” queried Cardinal Mustafa. He was mentally saying the rosary in rapid monotone, not for spiritual reassurance but to keep his mind away from the images floating in hellish light before him. He had been warned not to vomit in his helmet.

Filters and scrubbers would clean the mess before he strangled on it, but they were not foolproof.

“Probably the Shrike,” answered Major Piet, extending his gauntlet into the shattered chest cavity of one of the drifting corpses.

“See how the cruciform has been ripped out. Just as in Arafat-kaffiyeh.”

“Commander!” came a tightbeamed voice of one of the troopers who had moved aft from the air lock.

“Sergeant! Here! In the first cargo hold!”

Browning and Piet had gone ahead of the Grand Inquisitor into the long, cylindrical space.

Flashlight lasers were lost in this huge space. These corpses had not been slashed and shattered.

They were stacked neatly on carbon slabs extruding from the hull on each side, held in place by nylon mesh bands. The slabs came out from all sides of the hull, leaving only a zero-g corridor down the center. Mustafa and his guides and keepers floated the length of this black space, flashlight lasers stabbing left, right, down, and up. Frozen flesh, pale flesh, bar codes on the soles of their feet, pubic hair, closed eyes, hands pale against black carbon by hipbones, flaccid penises, breasts frozen in zero-g weightlessness, hair tight on pale skulls or floating in frozen nimbuses. Children with smooth, cold skin, extended bellies, and translucent eyelids. Infants with bar coded soles.

There were tens of thousands of bodies in the four long cargo holds. All were human. All were naked. All were lifeless.

“And did you complete your inspection of the H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru, Grand Inquisitor?” prompted Cardinal Lourdusamy.

Mustafa realized that he had fallen silent for a long moment, possessed by the demon of that terrible memory. “We did complete it, Your Excellency,” he answered, his voice thick.

“And your conclusions?”

“There were sixty-seven thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven human beings aboard the bulk freighter H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Fifty-one of them were crew members. All of the crew members’ bodies were accounted for. All had been slashed and rent in the same fashion as the victims at Arafat-kaffiyeh.”

“There were no survivors? None could be resurrected?”

“None.”

“In your opinion, Cardinal Mustafa, was the demon-creature called the Shrike responsible for the death of the crew members of the H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru?”

“In my opinion, it was, Your Excellency.”

“And in your opinion, Cardinal Mustafa, was the Shrike responsible for the deaths of the sixty-seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-six other bodies discovered on the Saigon Maru?”

Mustafa hesitated only a second. “In my opinion, Your Excellency”—he turned his head and bowed in the direction of the man in the chair—“Your Holiness… the cause of death of the sixty-seven thousand-some men, women, and children found on the H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru was not consistent with the wounds discovered on Mars’s victims, or consistent with prior tales of Shrike attack.”

Cardinal Lourdusamy took a rustling step forward. “And, according to your Holy Office forensic experts, Cardinal Mustafa, what was the cause of death for the human beings found aboard this freighter?” Cardinal Mustafa’s eyes were lowered as he spoke. “Your Excellency, neither the Holy Office nor Pax Fleet forensic specialists could specify any cause of death for these people. In fact…” Mustafa stopped.

“In fact,” Lourdusamy continued for him, “the bodies found aboard the Saigon Maru… exclusive of the crew… showed neither clear cause of death nor the attributes of death, is that not correct?”

“That is correct, Your Excellency.”

Mustafa’s eyes roamed to the faces of the other dignitaries in the chapel. “They were not living, but they… showed no signs of decomposition, postmortem lividity, brain decay… none of the usual signs of physical death.”

“Yet they were not alive?” prompted Lourdusamy.

Cardinal Mustafa rubbed his cheek. “Not within our capacity to revive, Your Excellency. Nor within our ability to detect signs of brain or cellular activity. They were… stopped.”

“And what was the disposition of the bulk freighter, H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru, Cardinal Mustafa?”

“Captain Wolmak put a prize crew aboard from the Jibril,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “We returned immediately to Pacem to report the matter. The Saigon Maru was traveling via traditional Hawking drive, escorted by four Hawking-drive torchships, and is scheduled to arrive in the nearest Pax system with a Pax Fleet base… Barnard’s System, I believe… in… ah… three standard weeks.”

Lourdusamy nodded slowly. “Thank you, Grand Inquisitor.” The Secretary of State walked to a place near the Pope’s chair, genuflected toward the altar, and crossed himself as he crossed the aisle. “Your Holiness, I would ask that we hear from Her Excellency, Cardinal Du Noyer.”

Pope Urban raised one hand as if in benediction. “We would be pleased to listen to Cardinal Du Noyer.”

Kenzo Isozaki’s mind was reeling. Why were they being told these things? What possible purpose could it serve for the CEO’s of the Pax Mercantilus to hear these things? Isozaki’s blood had chilled at the summary death sentence of Admiral Aldikacti. Was that to be the fate of all of them? No, he realized. Aldikacti had received a sentence of excommunication and execution for simple incompetence. If Mustafa, Pelli Cognani, himself, and the others were to be charged with some variety of treason… quick, simple execution would be the furthest thing from their fates. The pain machines in Castel Sant’Angelo would be humming and grating for centuries.

Cardinal Du Noyer obviously had chosen to be resurrected as an old woman. As with most older people, she looked in perfect health—all of her teeth, wrinkles at a minimum, dark eyes clear and bright—but she also preferred to be seen with her white hair—cut almost to the scalp—and skin tight across her sharp cheekbones.

She began without preliminaries.

“Your Holiness, Excellencies, other worthies… I appear here today as prefect and president of Cor Unum and de facto spokesperson for the private agency known as Opus Dei. For reasons which shall become apparent, the administrators of Opus Dei could not and should not be present here this day.”

“Continue, Your Excellency,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“The bulk freighter the H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru was purchased by Cor Unum for Opus Dei, diverted from scrap recycling, and delivered to that agency seven years ago.”

“For what purpose, Your Excellency?” queried Lourdusamy. Cardinal Du Noyer’s gaze moved from face to face in the small chapel, ending at His Holiness and looking down in respect. “For the purpose of transporting the lifeless bodies of millions of people such as were found on this interrupted voyage, Excellencies, Your Holiness.”

The four Mercantilus CEO’s made a noise somewhere short of a gasp, but louder than a mere intake of breath.

“Lifeless bodies…” repeated Cardinal Lourdusamy, but with the calm tone of a prosecuting attorney who knows in advance what the answers to all questions will be. “Lifeless bodies from where, Cardinal Du Noyer?”

“From whatever world Opus Dei designates, Your Excellency,” said Du Noyer. “In the past five years, these worlds have included Hebron, Qom-Riyadh, Fuji, Nevermore, Sol Draconi Septem, Parvati, Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna, New Mecca, Mao Four, Ixion, the Lambert Ring Territories, Sibiatu’s Bitterness, Mare Infinitus North Littoral, Renaissance Minor’s terraformed moon, New Harmony, New Earth, and Mars.”

All non-Pax worlds, thought Kenzo Isozaki. Or worlds where the Pax has only a foothold.

“And how many bodies have these Opus Dei and Cor Unum freighters transported, Cardinal Du Noyer?” Lourdusamy asked in his low rumble.

“Approximately seven billion, Your Excellency,” said the old woman.

Kenzo Isozaki concentrated on keeping his balance. Seven billion bodies. A bulk freighter like the Saigon Maru could haul perhaps a hundred thousand corpses if they were stacked like cordwood. It would take the Saigon Maru some seventy thousand trips to haul seven billion people from star system to star system. Absurd. Unless there were scores of bulk freighters… many of them the newer nova class… on hundreds or thousands of shuttle trips.

Each of the worlds that Du Noyer had mentioned had been closed to the Pax Mercantilus for all or some of the past four years—quarantined because of trade or diplomatic disputes with the Pax.

“These are all non-Christian worlds.” Isozaki realized that he had spoken aloud. It was the greatest breach of discipline he had ever suffered. The men and women in the chapel turned their heads in his direction.

“All non-Christian worlds,” Isozaki said again, omitting even the honorifics in addressing the others. “Or Christian worlds with large populations of non-Christians, such as Mars or Fuji or Nevermore. Cor Unum and Opus Dei have been exterminating non-Christians. But why transport their bodies? Why not just leave them to rot on their homeworlds and then bring in the Pax colonists?”

His Holiness held up one hand. Isozaki fell silent. The Pope nodded in the direction of Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“Cardinal Du Noyer,” said the Secretary of State, as if Isozaki had not spoken, “what is the destination of these freighters?”

“I do not know, Your Excellency.”

Lourdusamy nodded. “And who authorized this project, Cardinal Du Noyer?”

“The Peace and Justice Commission, Your Excellency.”

Isozaki’s head snapped around. The Cardinal had just laid the blame for this atrocity… this unprecedented mass murder… directly at the feet of one man. The Peace and Justice Commission had one prefect and only one prefect… Pope Urban XVI, formerly Pope Julius XIV. Isozaki lowered his gaze to the shoes of the fisherman and contemplated rushing the fiend, attempting to get his fingers around the Pope’s scrawny throat. He knew that the silent guards in the corner would cut him down halfway there. He was still tempted to try.

“And do you know, Cardinal Du Noyer,” continued Lourdusamy as if nothing terrible had been revealed, nothing unspeakable had been spoken, “how these people… these non-Christians… are rendered… lifeless?”

Rendered lifeless, thought Isozaki, who had always hated euphemisms. Murdered, you motherfucker!

“No,” said Cardinal Du Noyer. “My job as prefect of Cor Unum is merely to provide Opus Dei with the transport necessary to carry out their duties. The destinations of the ships and what happened before my freighters are needed is not… has never been… my concern.”

Isozaki went to one knee on the stone floor, not to pray, but just because he could no longer stand. How many centuries, gods of my ancestors, have accomplices to mass murder answered in this way? Since Horace Glennon-Height. Since the legendary Hitler. Since… forever.

“Thank you, Cardinal Du Noyer,” said Lourdusamy.

The old woman stepped back.

Incredibly, it was the Pope who was rising, moving forward, his white slippers making soft sounds on the stone. His Holiness walked between the staring people—past Cardinal Mustafa and Father Farrell, past Cardinal Lourdusamy and Monsignor Oddi, past Cardinal Du Noyer and the unnamed monsignor behind her, past the empty pillows where the Pax Fleet officers had been, past CEO Aron and CEO Hay-Modhino and CEO Anna Pelli Cognani, to where Isozaki knelt, close to vomiting, black dots dancing in his vision.

His Holiness laid a hand on the head of the man who was even at that moment contemplating killing him.

“Rise, our son,” said the mass murderer of billions. “Stand and listen. We command you.”

Isozaki rose, legs apart, teetering. His arms and hands tingled as if someone had zapped him with a neural stunner, but he knew it was his own body betraying him. He could not have closed his fingers around anyone’s throat at that moment. It was difficult enough just to stand alone.

Pope Urban XVI extended a hand, set it on the CEO’s shoulder, and steadied him. “Listen, brother in Christ. Listen.” His Holiness turned his head and dipped his miter forward.

Councillor Albedo stepped to the edge of the low dais and began to speak. “Your Holiness, Your Excellencies, Honorable Chief Executive Officers,” said the man in gray. Albedo’s voice was as smooth as his hair, as smooth as his gray gaze, as smooth as the silk of his gray cape.

Kenzo Isozaki trembled at the sound of it. He remembered the agony and embarrassment of the moment when Albedo had turned the CEO’s cruciform into a crucible of pain.

“Tell us who you are, please,” rumbled Lourdusamy in his most congenial tone.

Personal advisor to His Holiness, Pope Urban XVI, Kenzo Isozaki was prepared to hear. Albedo’s gray presence had been glimpsed and rumored for decades and decades. He was never identified other than personal advisor to His Holiness.

“I am an artificial construct, a cybrid, created by elements of the AI TechnoCore,” said Councillor Albedo. “I am here as a representative of those elements of the Core.”

Everyone in the room except for His Holiness and Cardinal Lourdusamy took a step away from Albedo. No one spoke, no one gasped or cried out, but the animal scent of terror and revulsion in the little chapel could not have been stronger if the Shrike had suddenly materialized among them. Kenzo Isozaki felt the Pope’s fingers still tight on his shoulder. He wondered if His Holiness could feel the pounding of his pulse through flesh and bone.

“The human beings transported from the worlds listed by Cardinal Du Noyer were… rendered lifeless… by Core technology, using Core robot spacecraft, and are being stored using Core techniques,” continued Albedo. “As Cardinal Du Noyer reported, approximately seven billion non-Christians have been processed in this manner over the past seven years. Another forty to fifty billion must be similarly processed in the next standard decade. It is time to explain the reason for this project and to enlist your direct aid in it.”

Kenzo Isozaki was thinking—It is possible to wire the human skeletal structure with a powerful protein-based explosive so subtle that even the Swiss Guard sniffers would not have detected it. Would to the gods I had done that before coming here.

The Pope released Isozaki’s shoulder and walked softly to the dais, touching the sleeve of Councillor Albedo’s robe as he passed.

His Holiness sat in his straight-backed chair. His thin face was peaceful. “We wish you all to listen carefully,” said His Holiness. “Councillor Albedo speaks with our authorization and approval. Continue, please.”

Albedo bowed his head slightly and turned back toward the staring dignitaries. Even the Pope’s security guards had moved back to the wall.

“You have been told, largely through myth and legend, but also through Church history,” began Albedo, “that the TechnoCore was destroyed in the Fall of the Farcasters. That is not true.

“You have been told—primarily through the banned Hyperion Cantos—that the Core consisted of Three Elements—the Stables, who wished to preserve the status quo between humanity and the Core, the Volatiles, who viewed humanity as a threat and plotted to destroy it—primarily through the destruction of the Earth via the Big Mistake of ’08, and the Ultimates, who thought only of creating an AI-based Ultimate Intelligence, a sort of silicon God which could predict and rule over the universe… or at least this galaxy.

“All these truths are lies.”

Isozaki realized that Anna Pelli Cognani had gripped his wrist with her cool fingers and was squeezing very hard.

“The TechnoCore was never grouped into three warring elements,” said Albedo, pacing in front of the altar and dais. “From its evolution in consciousness a thousand years ago, the Core was made up of thousands of distinct elements and factions—often warring, more often cooperating, but always struggling to achieve a synthesis of agreement toward the direction autonomous intelligence and artificial life should evolve. That agreement has never crystallized.

“Almost at the same time that the TechnoCore was evolving into true autonomy, while most of humankind lived on the surface of and in near orbit around one world—Old Earth—humanity had developed the capacity to change its own genetic programming… that is, to determine its own evolution. This breakthrough came partially through developments in the early twenty-first century A.D. in genetic manipulation, but was made possible most directly through the refinement of advanced nanotechnology. At first under the direction and control of early Core AI’s working in conjunction with human researchers, nanotech life-forms… autonomous beings, some intelligent, much smaller than a cell, some molecular in size… soon developed their own raison d’étre and raison d’état. Nanomachines, many in the form of viruses, invaded and reshaped humanity like a terrible viral plague. Luckily for both the human race and the race of autonomous intelligences now known as the Core, the primary vector for that plague was in the early seedships and other slower-than-light colony ships launched in the years just preceding the human Hegira.

“At that time, early elements of what would become the Human Hegemony and the forecasting elements of the TechnoCore realized that the goal of the evolving nanotech communities developed on those seedships was nothing less than the destruction of humankind and the creation of a new race of nanotech-controlled biologic adapts in a thousand distant star systems. The Hegemony and the Core responded by banning advanced nanotech research and by declaring war on the nanotech seedship colonies—the groups now known as the Ousters.

“But other events overshadowed this struggle.

“Elements of the emergent Core which favored alliance with the nanotech universes—and this was more than a small faction—discovered something that terrified all elements of the Core.

“As you know, our early research into Hawking-drive physics and faster-than-light communication led to the discovery of the Planck-space medium, what some have called the Void Which Binds. Evolving knowledge about this underlying and unifying substructure to the universe led to our creation of the FTL communication—the so-called fatline—as well as to the refined Hawking drive, the farcasters that united the Hegemonic WorldWeb, the planetary dataspheres evolving into megaspheres of Core-directed data, today’s instantaneous Gideon drive, and even experiments into antientropic bubbles within this universe—what we believe will become the Time Tombs on Hyperion.

“But these gifts to humanity were not without price. It is true that certain Ultimate factions within the Core used the farcasters as a way to tap into human brains so as to create a neural net for their own purposes. This use was harmless… the neural nets were created in the nontime and nonspace of farcaster Planck-space transit and humans need never have learned of the experiments if other elements of the Core had not revealed this fact to the first John Keats cybrid persona four centuries ago—but I agree with those humans and those Core elements who consider this act as unethical, a violation of privacy.

“But those earliest neural net experiments revealed an amazing fact. There were other Cores in the universe… perhaps in our home galaxy. The discovery of this fact led to a civil war within our TechnoCore which still rages. Certain elements—not merely the Volatiles—decided that it was time to end the biological experiment that was the human race. Plans were made to “accidentally” drop the ’08 Kiev black hole into the center of Old Earth before Hawking drives allowed for a general exodus. Other elements of the Core delayed these plans until the mechanisms for escape were given to the human race.

“In the end, neither extreme faction triumphed… Old Earth was not destroyed. It was kidnapped—by means which our TechnoCore cannot understand to this day—by one or more of these alien Ultimate Intelligences.”

The CEO’s began babbling among themselves.

Cardinal Mustafa went to both knees on his cushion and began praying. Cardinal Du Noyer looked so ill that her aide, the monsignor, whispered concerned entreaties. Even Monsignor Lucas Oddi looked as if he might faint. His Holiness, Pope Urban XVI, held up three fingers. The chapel became silent.

“This is, of course, only background,” continued Councillor Albedo. “What we wish to share with you today is the urgent reason for shared action.

“Three centuries ago, extreme factions of the Core—a society of autonomous intelligences ravaged and torn by eight centuries of violent debate and conflict—tried a new tack. They devised the cybrid creature known as John Keats—a human personality imbedded in an AI persona carried in a human body connected to the Core via Planck-space interface. The Keats persona had many purposes—as a sort of trap for what the UI’s considered the “empathy” element of an emerging human species UI, as a prime mover to set the events in motion which eventually led to the last Hyperion pilgrimage and the opening of the Time Tombs there, to flush the Shrike out of hiding, and as a catalyst to the Fall of the Farcasters. To serve this final purpose, elements of the Core—elements to which I owe my creation and allegiance—leaked the information to CEO Meina Gladstone and others in the Hegemony that other Core elements were using the Farcasters to prey upon human neurons like some sort of neural vampires.

“Those elements of the Core, under the guise of an Ouster attack, launched a final, physical assault on the WorldWeb. Despairing of destroying the scattered human race in one stroke, these elements hoped to destroy the advanced WorldWeb society. By attacking the Core directly via destroying the farcaster medium, Gladstone and the other Hegemony leaders ended the neural-net experiments and caused a great setback to the so-called Volatiles and Ultimates in the Core civil war.

“Our elements of the Core—elements devoted to preserving not only the human race but some sort of alliance with your species—destroyed one iteration of the John Keats cybrid, but a second was created and succeeded in its primary mission.

“And that mission was—to reproduce with a specific human female and create a “messiah” with connections to both the Core and humanity.

“That “messiah” lives now in the form of the child named Aenea.

“Born on Hyperion more than three centuries ago, that child fled through the Time Tombs to our age. She did so not out of fear—we would not have harmed her—but because her mission is to destroy the Church, destroy the Pax civilization, and to end the human race as you have known it.

“We believe that she is not aware of her true purpose or function.

“Three centuries ago, remnants of my element of the Core—a group you might think of as the Humanists—made contact with human survivors of the Fall of the Farcasters and the chaos which followed this fall.” Albedo nodded in the direction of His Holiness. The Pope lowered his head in acknowledgment.

“Father Lenar Hoyt was a survivor of the last Shrike Pilgrimage,” continued Councillor Albedo, pacing back and forth in front of the altar once again. Candle flames flickered slightly at his passing. “He had seen firsthand the manipulations of the Ultimate Intelligence Core elements and the depredations of their monster sent back through time, the Shrike. When we first made contact—the Humanists and Father Hoyt and a few other members of a dying Church—we resolved to protect the human race from further assaults while restoring civilization. The cruciform was our instrument of salvation—literally.

“You all know that the cruciform had been a failure. Prior to the Fall, humans resurrected by this symbiote’s actions were retarded and sexual neuters. The cruciform—a sort of organic computer in which is stored the neurological and physiological data of a living human being—restored the body but not the full intellect or personality. It resurrected the corpse but stole the soul.

“The origins of the cruciform lie shrouded in mystery, but we Humanist elements of the Core believe that it was developed in our future and brought back through time via the Hyperion Time Tombs. In a sense, it was sent to be discovered by young Father Lenar Hoyt.

“The failure of the symbiote was due to the simple demands of information storage and retrieval. In a human mind, there are neurons. In a human body, there are approximately 10 to the 28th power atoms.

The cruciform, in order to restore the mind and body of a human being, must not only keep track of these atoms and neurons, but remember the precise configuration of the standing holistic wave front which comprises the human memory and personality. It also must provide the energy to restructure these atoms, molecules, cells, bones, muscles, and memories so that the organism is reborn as the individual who lived in that shell before. The cruciform alone cannot do that successfully. At best, the biomachine can reproduce a crude copy of the original.

“But the Core had the computing capacity to store, retrieve, reshape, and re-form this information into a resurrected human being. And we have done so for three centuries.”

Here Kenzo Isozaki saw the panic in the exchanged glances between Cardinal Du Noyer and Cardinal Mustafa, between Father Farrell and the monsignor who was Du Noyer’s aide. This was heresy. It was blasphemy. It was the end of the Sacrament of Resurrection and the beginning of the reign of the physical and mechanical once again.

Isozaki himself felt sick. He glanced at Hay-Modhino and Pelli Cognani and saw that the CEO’s were praying. CEO Aron looked as if he were in shock.

“Beloved,” said His Holiness. “Do not doubt. Do not surrender faith. Your thoughts now are a betrayal of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and of His Church. The miracle of resurrection is no less a miracle because these friends in what was once known as the TechnoCore help us realize the miracle. It was the work of Jesus Christ Almighty who led these other children of God—these creations of Our Lord through His most unworthy instruments, the human race—to find their own souls and salvation. Continue, M. Albedo.” Albedo looked mildly amused at the expressions of shock in the room. But his smooth features settled into quiet amiability as he began speaking again. “We have given the human race immortality. In exchange, we have asked for nothing but a silent alliance with humanity. We want only peace with our creators.

“In the past three centuries, our quiet alliance has benefited both AI and humanity. We have, as His Holiness said, found our souls. Humanity has found a peace and stability missing from history for millennia… perhaps forever. And I admit, the alliance has been good for my element of the Core, the group known as the Humanists. We have gone from being one of the smaller, more despised factions to becoming the—not ruling party, for no element rules in the Core—the major element of consensus. Our philosophy is accepted by almost all former warring groups.

“But not by all.”

Here Councillor Albedo quit pacing and stood directly in front of the altar. He looked from face to face and his gray eyes were grim.

“The Core element which had hoped to dispose of humanity… the element composed of some former Ultimates and some pro-nanotech evolutionists—has played its trump card in the child named Aenea. She is, literally, the virus released into the body of humanity.”

Cardinal Lourdusamy stepped forward. The huge man’s face was flushed and serious. His small eyes gleamed. His voice was sharp.

“Tell us, Councillor Albedo, what is the purpose of the child Aenea?”

“Her purpose,” said the man in gray, “is threefold.”

“What is the first purpose?”

“To destroy humanity’s chance at physical immortality.”

“And how can one child do that?” asked Lourdusamy.

“She is not a child, nor even human,” said Albedo. “She is the spawn of a tailored cybrid. The persona of her cybrid father interfaced with her when she was in her mother’s womb. Her mind and body have been interwoven with rogue elements of the Core since before birth.”

“But how can she steal humanity’s gift of immortality?” insisted Lourdusamy.

“Her blood,” said Albedo. “She can spread a virus that destroys the cruciform.”

“A literal virus?”

“Yes. But not a natural one. It was tailored by the rogue elements of the Core. The virus is a form of nanotech pestilence.”

“But there are hundreds of billions of born-again Christians in the Pax,” said Lourdusamy, his tone that of a lawyer leading his witness. “How could one child pose a threat to so many? Does the virus spread from victim to victim?”

Albedo sighed. “As far as we can tell, the virus becomes contagious once the cruciform has died. Those who have been denied resurrection through contact with Aenea will spread the virus to others. Also, those who have never carried a cruciform can be vectors for this virus.”

“Is there any cure? Any immunization?” queried Lourdusamy.

“None,” said Albedo. “The Humanists have attempted for three centuries to create countermeasures. But because the Aenea virus is a form of autonomous nanotech, it designs its own optimum mutation vector. Our defenses can never catch up to it. Perhaps with our own legions of nanotech colonies released within humanity we could someday catch up with the Aenea virus and defeat it, but we Humanists abhor nanotechnology. And the sad fact is that all nanotech life is out of our control—out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life-form.”

“Humanity, you mean,” said Lourdusamy.

“Precisely.”

“Aenea’s first goal,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy, “or to be more precise—the first goal of her Core rogue element creators—is to destroy all cruciforms and thus destroy human resurrection.”

“Yes.”

“You mentioned three goals. What are the other two?”

“The second goal is to destroy the Church and the Pax… that is, all current human civilization,” said Albedo. “When the Aenea virus spreads, when resurrection is denied… with farcasters still not functional and the Gideon drive impractical for single life-span humans… that second goal will be accomplished. Humanity will return to the balkanized tribalism which followed the Fall.”

“And the third goal?” said Lourdusamy.

“The final goal is actually this Core element’s original goal,” said Councillor Albedo. “The destruction of the human species.”

It was CEO Anna Pelli Cognani who shouted. “That’s impossible! Even the destruction… kidnapping… of Old Earth or the Fall of the Farcasters did not wipe out humanity. Our species is too far-flung for such extinction. Too many worlds. Too many cultures.”

Albedo was nodding, but sadly. “That was true. Was. But the Aenea Plague will spread almost everywhere. The cruciform-killing viruses will have mutated to new stages. Human DNA will have been invaded everywhere. With the fall of the Pax, the Ousters will invade again… this time successfully. They have long since succumbed to nanotech mutation. They are no longer human. With no Church or Pax or Pax Fleet to protect humanity, the Ousters will seek out those pockets of surviving human DNA and infect them with the nanotech plague. The human species… as we have known it and as the Church has sought to protect it… will cease to exist within a few standard years.”

“And what will succeed it?” asked Cardinal Lourdusamy in a low rumble.

“No one knows,” said Albedo softly. “Not even Aenea or the Ousters or the rogue elements of the Core who have released this final plague. The nanotech life-form colonies will evolve according to their own agenda, fashioning the human form to their own whims, and only they will be in control of their destiny. But that destiny will no longer be human.”

“My God, my God,” said Kenzo Isozaki, amazed that he was speaking aloud. “What can we do? What can I do?”

Amazingly, it was His Holiness who answered.

“We have dreaded and fought this threatened plague for three hundred years,” His Holiness said softly, his sad eyes expressing more pain than his own. “Our first effort was to capture the child, Aenea, before she could spread the infection. We knew that she fled her era to ours not out of fear—we wished her no harm—but so that she could spread the virus across the Pax.

“Actually,” amended His Holiness, “we suspect that the child Aenea does not truly know the full effect her contagion will have on humanity. In some ways, she is the unknowing pawn of these rogue elements of the Core.”

It was CEO Hay-Modhino who suddenly spoke with vehemence. “We should have plasma-bombed Hyperion to cinders on the day she was scheduled to emerge from the Time Tombs. Sterilized the entire planet. Taken no chances.”

His Holiness took no umbrage at the unpardonable interruption. “Yes, our son, there are those who urged that. But the Church could no more be the cause of taking so many innocent lives than we could have authorized the death of the single girl. We conferred with the predictive elements of the Core… they saw that a Jesuit named Father Captain de Soya would be instrumental in her final capture… but none of our peaceful attempts to seize the child succeeded. Pax Fleet could have vaporized her ship four years ago, but it was under orders not to unless all else failed. So we continue to strive for containment of her viral invasion. What you must do, M. Isozaki—what you must all do—is continue to support the Church’s efforts, even as we intensify those efforts. M. Albedo?”

The gray man spoke again. “Imagine the coming plague as a forest fire on an oxygen-rich world. It will sweep everything before it unless we can contain it and then extinguish it. Our first effort is to remove the dead wood and brush—the inflammable elements—not necessary to the living forest.”

“The non-Christians,” murmured CEO Pelli Cognani.

“Precisely,” said Councillor Albedo.

“That is why they had to be terminated,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “All those thousands on the Saigon Maru. All those millions. All those billions.”

Pope Urban XVI raised his hand, in a command to silence rather than benediction this time. “Not terminated!” he said sternly. “Not a single life, not Christian, not non-Christian, has been taken.”

The dignitaries looked at one another in confusion.

“This is true,” said Councillor Albedo.

“But they were lifeless…” began the Grand Inquisitor and then stopped abruptly. “My profound apologies, Holy Father,” he said to the Pope.

His Holiness shook his mitered head. “No apology is required, John Domenico. These are emotional topics. Please explain, M. Albedo.”

“Yes, Your Holiness,” said the man in gray. “Those aboard the Saigon Maru were lifeless, Your Excellency, but not dead. The Core… the Humanist elements in the Core… have perfected a method of putting human beings in temporary stasis, neither alive nor dead…”

“Like cryogenic fugue?” said CEO Aron, who had traveled much by Hawking drive before his conversion.

Albedo shook his head. “Much more sophisticated. And less harmful.” He gestured with well-manicured fingers. “During the past seven years, we have processed seven billion human beings. In the next standard decade—or sooner—we must process more than forty-two billion more. There are many worlds in the Outback, and many even within Pax space, where non-Christians are in the majority.”

“Processed?” said CEO Pelli Cognani.

Albedo smiled grimly. “Pax Fleet declares a world quarantined without knowing the real reason for their actions. Core robot ships arrive in orbit and sweep the inhabited sections with our stasis equipment. Cor Unum provides the ships and funding and training. Opus Dei uses freighters to remove the bodies in stasis…”

“Why remove them?” asked the Grand Inquisitor. “Why not leave them on their homeworlds?”

His Holiness answered. “They must be hidden in a place where the Aenea Plague cannot find them, John Domenico. They must be carefully… lovingly… put out of harm’s way until the danger is past.”

The Grand Inquisitor bowed his head in understanding and compliance.

“There is more,” said Councillor Albedo. “My element of the Core has created a… breed of soldier… whose sole job is to find and capture this Aenea before she can spread the deadly contamination. The first one was activated four years ago and was called Rhadamanth Nemes. There are only a few others of these hunter-seekers, but they are equipped to deal with whatever obstacles the rogue elements of the Core throw at them… even the Shrike.”

“The Shrike is controlled by the Ultimates and other rogue elements of the Core?” asked Father Farrell. It was the first time the man had spoken.

“We think so,” answered Cardinal Lourdusamy. “The demon seems to be in league with the Aenea… helping her spread the contagion. In the same way, the Ultimates appear to have found a way to open certain farcaster portals for her. The Devil has found a name… and allies… in our age, I fear.”

Albedo held up one finger. “I should stress that even Nemes and our other hunter-seekers are dangerous… as are any constructs so terribly single-minded. Once the child is captured, these cybrid beings will be terminated. Only the terrible danger posed by the Aenea Plague justifies their existence.”

“Holy Father,” said Kenzo Isozaki, his hands pressed together in prayer, “what else can we do?”

“Pray,” said His Holiness. His dark eyes were wells of pain and responsibility. “Pray and support our Holy Mother Church in her effort to save humankind.”

“The Crusade against the Ousters will continue,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy. “We will hold them at bay as long as we can.”

“To that end,” said Councillor Albedo, “the Core has developed the Gideon drive and is working on new technologies for humanity’s defense.”

“We shall continue our search for the girl… young woman, now, I believe,” added Lourdusamy.

“And if she is apprehended, she will be isolated.”

“And if she is not apprehended, Your Excellency?” asked Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Mustafa.

Lourdusamy did not answer.

“We must pray,” said His Holiness. “We must ask for Christ’s help at this time of maximum danger for our Church and our human race. We must each do everything we can and then ask more of ourselves. And we must pray for the souls of all of our brothers and sisters in Christ—even for, especially for, the soul of the child Aenea who unwittingly leads her species into such peril.”

“Amen,” said Monsignor Lucas Oddi.

Then, while all the others in the small chapel knelt and bowed their heads, His Holiness, Pope Urban XVI, stood, moved to the altar, and began to say a Mass of Thanksgiving.

14

Aenea.

Her name came before any other conscious thought.

I thought of her before I thought to think of myself.

Aenea.

And then came the pain and noise and onslaught of wetness and buffeting. Mostly it was the pain that roused me. I opened one eye. The other appeared to be gummed shut with caked blood or other matter.

Before I remembered who or where I was, I felt the pain from innumerable bruises and cuts, but also from something far worse in my right leg. Then I remembered who I was. And then I remembered where I had been.

I laughed. Or more precisely, I tried to laugh. My lips were split and swollen and there was more blood or goo sealing one corner of my mouth. The laugh emerged as a sort of demented moan. I had been swallowed by some sort of aerial squid on a world all atmosphere and clouds and lightning.

Even now I was being digested in the noisy belly of the beast. It was noisy. Explosively so.

Rumbles, blasts, and a pounding, slapping noise. Like rain on a tropical forest canopy. I squinted through my one eye. Darkness… then a strobe of white light… darkness with red retinal echoes… more white strobes.

I remembered the tornadoes and planet-sized storm that had been coming toward me as I floated along in my kayak under the parasail before the beast swallowed me. But this was not that storm.

This was rain on a jungle canopy. The material batting at my face and chest was tattered nylon, the remains of the parasail, wet palm fronds, and pieces of shattered fiberglass. I squinted downward and waited for the next lightning flash. The kayak was there, but splintered and shattered. My legs were there… still partially ensconced in the kayak shell… the left leg intact and movable, but the right…

I cried out in pain. The right leg was definitely broken. I could see no bone breaking through the flesh, but I was sure that there was a fracture in the lower thigh. Otherwise I seemed intact. I was bruised and scratched. There was dried blood on my face and hands. My trousers were little more than rags. My shirt and vest were in tatters. But as I turned and arched my back, stretched my arms and flexed my fingers, wiggled the toes on my left foot and tried to wiggle those on my right, I thought that I was more or less in one piece… no broken back, no shattered ribs, no nerve damage except for possibly in my right leg where the agony was like barbed wire dragged through veins.

When the next flashes of lightning exploded, I tried to assess my surroundings. The broken kayak and I seemed to be stuck in a jungle canopy, wedged between splintered limbs, wrapped around with the tattered parasail and clinging shroud lines, being battered with palm fronds in a tropical storm, in a darkness broken only by lightning flashes, hanging some indeterminate distance above solid ground. Trees? Solid ground? The world I had been flying on had no solid ground… or at least none reachable without being compressed by pressure to something the size of my fist. And it seemed unlikely that there would be trees in the core of that Jovian world where hydrogen was squeezed to metal form. So I was not on that world. Nor was I still in the belly of the beast. Where was I? Thunder blasted around me like plasma grenades.

The wind came up, tossing the kayak in its precarious perch and making me scream aloud from the pain. I may have lost consciousness for a few moments, for when I opened my eyes again, the wind had died down and the rain was pummeling me like a thousand cold fists. I wiped the rain and matted blood from my eyes and realized that I was feverish, that my skin was burning even in that cold rain. How long have I been here? What vicious microbes have found my open wounds? What bacteria shared the gut of that airborne squid-thing with me? Logic would have dictated that the entire memory of flying on the Jovian cloud world and being taken in by a tentacled squid-thing had been a fever dream—that I had farcast here… wherever here was… after escaping Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and all the rest was dreamscape. But there were the remnants of the deployed parasail all around me in the wet night. And there was the vividness of my memories. And there was the logical fact that logic did not work on this odyssey. The wind shook the tree. The broken kayak slid along the precarious nest of shattered fronds and branches. My broken leg sent stabs of agony through me.

I realized that I had better apply some logic to this situation. At any moment the kayak was going to slide, or the branches would break, and the entire mass of shattered fiberglass, clinging nylon risers, and wet memory-canvas parasail tatters was going to crash down into the darkness, dragging me and my broken leg with it.

Despite the flashes of lightning… which came with less regularity now, leaving me in the pitching, wet darkness… I could see nothing below me except more branches, gaps of darkness, and the thick, gray-green trunks of trees that wound around themselves in a tight spiral. I did not recognize that sort of tree. Where am I? Aenea… where have you sent me now? I stopped that sort of thing. It was almost a form of prayer, and I was not going to get into the habit of praying to the girl I had traveled with and protected and eaten dinner with and argued with for four years. Still and all, I thought, you might have sent me to some less difficult places, kiddo. If you had a choice in the matter, I mean. Thunder rumbled but no lightning flashed to light the scene.

The kayak shifted and sagged, the broken bow tilting suddenly. I reached behind me and flailed around for the thick branch I had seen there during the earlier flashes of lightning. There were broken branches galore, razor-sharp splintered frond stems, and the sawtooth edges of the fronds themselves. I grabbed and pulled, trying to leverage my broken leg out of the broken cockpit of the kayak, but the branches were loose and I came only halfway out, reeling in nausea from the pain. I imagined that black dots were dancing in my vision, but the night was so dark that it made no difference. I retched over the side of the rocking kayak and tried again to find a firm handhold in the maze of splintered branches.

How the hell did I get in these treetops, anyway? It did not matter. Nothing mattered at the moment except getting out of this mess of broken fiberglass and tangled shroud lines.

Get my knife, cut my way out of this clinging tangle.

My knife was gone. My belt was gone. The pockets of my vest had been ripped away and then the vest torn to a few tatters. My shirt was mostly gone. The flechette pistol I’d held like a talisman against the airborne cuttlefish-squid thing was gone… I dimly remembered it and my backpack dropping out when the passing tornado had ripped the parasail to shreds. Clothes, flashlight laser, ration pak… everything gone. Lightning flashed, although the thunder-rumble had moved farther away. My wrist glinted in the downpour. Comlog. That goddamn band must be indestructible.

What good would the comlog do me? I wasn’t sure, but it was better than nothing. Raising my left wrist close to my mouth in the drumming rain, I shouted, “Ship! Comlog on… Ship! Hey!”

No response. I remembered the device flashing overload warnings during the electrical storm on the Jovian world. Inexplicably, I felt a sense of loss. The ship’s memory in the comlog had been an idiot savant, at best, but it had been with me for a long time. I had grown used to its presence. And it had helped me fly the dropship that had carried us from Fallingwater to Taliesin West. And…

I shook away the nostalgia and thrashed around for a handhold again, finally clinging to the shroud lines that hung around me like thin vines. This worked. The parasail streamers must have caught firmly in the upper branches, and some of the shroud lines bore my weight as I scrabbled with my left foot on slick fiberglass to pull my dead leg from the wreckage. The pain made me black out again for a few moments… this was as bad as the kidney stone at its worst, only coming at me in jagged waves… but when my mind came back into focus, I was clinging to the spiral-wrapped trunk of the palm tree rather than lying in the wreckage. A few minutes later a microburst of wind bulled through the jungle canopy and the kayak fell away in pieces, some being arrested by the intact shroud lines, others tumbling and crashing into darkness.

What now? Wait for dawn, I guess.

What if there’s no dawn on this world? Wait for the pain to die down then.

Why would it die down? The fractured femur is obviously tearing at nerve and muscle. You have a wild fever. God knows how long you were lying here in the rain and torn plant material, unconscious, wounds open to every killer microbe that wants to get in. Gangrene could be settling in. That rotting vegetation stink you smell could be you.

Gangrene doesn’t happen that quickly, does it? No answer.

I tried hanging on to the tree trunk with my left arm and feeling along my injured thigh with my right hand, but the slightest touch made me moan and sway. If I passed out again, I could easily pitch off this branch. I settled on testing my lower right leg: it was numb in most places, but felt intact. Perhaps just a simple break in the lower thighbone. Just a simple break, Raul? On a jungle world in a storm that might be permanent for all we know. With no medkit, no way to make a fire, no tools, no weapons. Just a shattered leg and a high fever. Oh, well… as long as it’s just a simple fracture. Shut the fuck up. I weighed alternatives as the rain pounded on me. I could cling here for the rest of the night… which might be ten minutes or another thirty hours… or I could try to lower myself to the jungle floor. Where the predators are waiting? Good plan.

I said shut up. The jungle floor might give me a place to shelter from the rain, find a soft place to rest my leg, offer branches and vines to make a splint. “All right,” I said aloud, and groped around in the dark to find a shroud line or vine or branch so that I could start my descent.

My guess is that it took me between two and three hours to lower myself. It might have been twice that or half that. The lightning part of the storm had passed and it would have been almost impossible to find handholds in the near absolute darkness, but a strange, faint, almost invisible reddish glow began above the thick jungle canopy and allowed my eyes to adapt enough to find a line here, a vine there, a solid branch here.

Sunrise? I thought not. The glow seemed too diffuse, too faint, almost chemical.

I guessed that I had been about twenty-five meters up in the canopy. The thick branches continued all the way down, but the density of razor-edged palm fronds diminished as I neared the bottom. There was no ground. Resting in the crotch of two branches, recovering from the pain and dizziness, I began lowering myself again only to find surging water beneath me. I pulled my left leg up quickly. The reddish glow was just bright enough to show me water all around, torrents of water flowing between the spiraled tree trunks, eddies of black water washing by like a torrent of oil.

“Shit,” I said. I wasn’t going any farther this night. I had held vague notions of building a raft. I was on a different world, so there must be a farcaster upstream and another downstream. I’d gotten here somehow. I had built a raft before.

Yeah, when you were healthy, well fed, with two legs and tools… like an axe and a flashlight laser. Now you don’t even have two legs. Please shut up. Please. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The fever was making me shake from chills now. I ignored it all and tried to think of the stories I would tell Aenea when we saw each other next. You don’t really believe that you’ll ever see her again, do you? “Shut the fuck up,” I said again, my voice lost in the sound of rain on jungle foliage and against the swirl of raging water half a meter beneath me. I realized that I should climb a couple of meters up the branches I had just lowered myself on through such pain and effort. The water might rise. Probably would rise again. Ironic to go to all that trouble just to make it easier to be swept away. Three or four meters up would be better. Would start in a minute. Just catch my breath first and let the waves of pain steady a bit. Two minutes at the most.

I awoke to a thin gruel of sunlight. I was sprawled across several sagging branches, just centimeters above the swirling, gray surface of a flood that moved between the spiraled trunks with a visible current. It was still as dim as a deep twilight. For all I knew I had slept away the day and was ready to enter another endless night. It was still raining, but this was little more than a drizzle. The temperature was tropical warm, although my fever made it hard to judge, and the humidity was near absolute.

I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure.

Next time you need an errand run, kiddo, send A. Bettik.

The light did not fade, but neither did it grow brighter. I shifted position and studied the water moving by: gray, ripped by eddies, carrying detritus of palm fronds and dead vegetation.

I looked up, but could see no sign of the kayak or parasail. Any fiberglass or fabric that had dropped down here during the long night had long since been swept away. It looked like a flood, like the spring runoff through the Fens above Toschahi Bay on Hyperion where the silt was deposited for another full year, a temporary inundation, but I knew that this drowned forest, this endless everglades of a watery jungle, could just as easily be the permanent state of affairs here. Wherever here is.

I studied the water. It was opaque, murky as gray milk, and could have been a few centimeters or many meters deep. The drowned trunks gave no clue. The current was quick, but not so quick as to carry me away if I kept a good grip on the branches that hung low above the roiling surface of the water. With luck, with no local equivalent of the Fens’ mud cysts or dracula ticks or biting garr, I might be able to wade toward… something.

Wading takes two legs, Raul, m’boy. Hopping through the mud is more like it for you.

All right then, hopping through the mud. I gripped the branch above me with both hands and lowered my left leg into the current while keeping my injured leg propped on the wide branch where I lay. This led to new agonies, but I persisted, lowering my foot in the clotted water, then my ankle and calf, then my knee, then shifting to see if I could stand… my forearms and biceps straining, my injured leg sliding off the branch with a rending surge of agony that made me gasp.

The water was less than a meter and a half deep. I could stand on my good leg while water surged about my waist and splashed my chest. It was warm and seemed to lessen the pain in my broken leg.

All those nice, juicy microbes in this warm broth, many of them mutated from seedship days. They’re licking their chops, Raul, old boy.

“Shut up,” I said dully, looking around.

My left eye was swollen and crusted with scab, but I could see out of it. My head hurt.

Endless trunks of trees rising from the gray water to the gray drizzle on all sides, the dripping fronds and branches so dark a gray-green that they appeared almost black. It seemed a slight bit brighter to my left. And the mud underfoot seemed a little firmer in that direction. I began moving that way, shifting my left foot forward as I changed handholds from branch to branch, sometimes ducking beneath hanging fronds, sometimes shifting aside like a slow-motion toreador to allow floating branches or other debris to swirl past. The move toward brightness took hours more. But I had nothing better to do.

The flooded jungle ended in a river. I clung to the last branch, felt the current trying to pull my good leg out from under me, and stared out at the endless expanse of gray water. I could not see the other side—not because the water was endless, I could see from the current and eddies moving from right to left that it was a river and not some lake or ocean, but because the fog or low clouds roiled almost to the surface, blotting out everything more than a hundred meters away. Gray water, gray-green dripping trees, dark gray clouds. It seemed to be getting dimmer. Night was coming on. I had gone as far as I could on this leg.

Fever raged. Despite the jungle heat of the place, my teeth were chattering and my hands were shaking almost uncontrollably. Somewhere in my awkward progress through the flooded jungle, I had aggravated the fracture to the point where I wanted to scream. No, I admit, I had been screaming. Softly at first, but as the hours went by and the pain deepened and the situation worsened, I screamed out lyrics to old Home Guard marching songs, then bawdy limericks I had learned as a bargeman on the Kans River, then merely screams.

So much for the building the raft scenario.

I was getting used to the caustic voice in my head. It and I had made a peace when I realized that it wasn’t urging me to lie down and die, just critiquing my inadequate efforts to stay alive.

There goes your best chance for a raft, Raul, old boy.

The river was carrying by an entire tree, its braided trunk rolling over and over again in the deep water. I was standing shoulder-deep here, and I was ten meters from the edge of the real current.

“Yeah,” I said aloud. My fingers slipped on the smooth bark of the branch to which I was clinging.

I shifted position and pulled myself up a bit.

Something grated in my leg and this time I was sure that black spots dulled my vision. “Yeah,” I said again. What are the odds that I’ll stay conscious, or that it will stay light, or that I’ll stay alive, long enough to catch one of those commuter trees? Swimming for one was out of the question. My right leg was useless and my other three limbs were shaking as if palsied. I had just enough strength to cling to this branch for another few minutes. “Yeah,” I said again. “Shit.”

“Excuse me, M. Endymion were you speaking to me?” The voice almost made me lose my grip on the branch. Still clinging with my right hand, I lowered my left wrist and studied it in the dimming light. The comlog had a slight glow that had not been there the last time I had looked. “Well, I’ll be damned. I thought that you were broken, Ship.”

“This instrument is damaged, sir. The memory has been wiped. The neural circuits are quite dead. Only the com chips function under emergency power.”

I frowned at my wrist. “I don’t understand. If your memory has been wiped and your neural circuits are…”

The river pulled at my torn leg, seducing me into releasing my grip. For a moment I could not speak.

“Ship?” I said at last.

“Yes, M. Endymion?”

“You’re here.”

“Of course, M. Endymion. Just as you and M. Aenea instructed me to stay. I am pleased to say that all necessary repairs have been…”

“Show yourself,” I commanded. It was almost dark.

Tendrils of fog curled toward me across the black river.

The starship rose dripping, horizontal, its bow only twenty meters from me in the central current, blocking the current like a sudden boulder, hovering still half in the water, a black leviathan shedding river water in noisy rivulets. Navigation lights blinked on its bow and on the dripping black shark’s fin far behind it in the fog.

I laughed. Or wept. Or perhaps just moaned.

“Do you wish to swim to me, sir? Or should I come in to you?”

My fingers were slipping. “Come in to me,” I said, and gripped the branch with both hands.

There was a doc-in-the-box on the cryogenic fugue cubby-deck where Aenea used to sleep on the voyage out from Hyperion. The doc-in-the-box was ancient—hell, the whole ship was ancient—but its autorepair worked, it was well stocked, and—according to the garrulous ship on the way out four years earlier—the Ousters had tinkered with it back in the Consul’s day. It worked.

I lay in the ultraviolet warmth as soft appendages probed my skin, salved my bruises, sutured my deeper cuts, administered painkiller via IV drip, and finished diagnosing me.

“It is a compound fracture, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “Would you care to see the X rays and ultrasound?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “How do we fix it?”

“We’ve already begun,” said the ship. “The bone is being set as we speak. The bondplast and ultrasonic grafting will commence while you sleep. Because of the repair to damaged nerves and muscle tissue, the surgeon recommends at least ten hours’ sleep while it begins the procedure.”

“Soon enough,” I said.

“The diagnostic’s greatest concern is your fever, M. Endymion.”

“It’s a result of the break, isn’t it?”

“Negative,” said the ship. “It seems that you have a rather virulent kidney infection. Left untreated, it would have killed you before the ancillary effects of the broken femur.”

“Cheery thought,” I said.

“How so, sir?”

“Never mind,” I said. “You say that you’re totally repaired?”

“Totally, M. Endymion. Better than before the accident, if you don’t mind me bragging a bit. You see, because of the loss of some material, I was afraid that I would have to synthesize carbon-carbon templates from the rather dross rock substrata of this river, but I soon found that by recycling some of the unused components of the compression dampers made superfluous by the Ouster modifications that I could evince a thirty-two percent increase in autorepair efficiency if I…”

“Never mind, Ship,” I said. The absence of pain made me almost giddy. “How long did it take you to finish the repairs?”

“Five standard months,” said the ship. “Eight and one-half local months. This world has an odd lunar cycle with two highly irregular moons which I have postulated must be captured asteroids because of the…”

“Five months,” I said. “And you’ve just been waiting the other three and a half years?”

“Yes,” said the ship. “As instructed. I trust that all is well with A. Bettik and M. Aenea.”

“I trust that too, Ship. But we’ll find out soon enough. Are you ready to leave this place?”

“All ship’s systems are functional, M. Endymion. Awaiting your command.”

“Command is given,” I said. “Let’s go.”

The ship piped in the holo showing us rising above the river. It was dark out, but the night-vision lenses showed the swollen river and the farcaster arch only a few hundred meters upstream. I had not seen it in the fog. We rose above the river, above the swirling clouds.

“River’s up from the last time I was here,” I said.

“Yes,” said the ship. The curve of the planet became visible, the sun rising again above fleecy clouds. “It floods for a period of some three standard months every local orbital cycle, which equals approximately eleven standard months.”

“So you know what world this is now?” I said. “You weren’t sure when we left you.”

“I am quite confident that this planet was not among the two thousand eight hundred sixty-seven worlds in the General Catalogue Index,” said the ship. “My astronomical observations have shown that it is neither in Pax space nor in the realm of the former WorldWeb or Outback.”

“Not in the old WorldWeb or Outback,” I repeated. “Where is it then?”

“Approximately two hundred and eighty light-years galactic northwest of the Outback system known as NNGC 4645 Delta,” said the ship.

Feeling slightly groggy from the painkiller, I said, “A new world. Beyond the Outback. Why did it have farcasters then? Why was the river part of the Tethys?”

“I do not know, M. Endymion. But I should mention that there is a multitude of interesting life-forms which I observed by remotes while resting on the river bottom. Besides the river manta-ish creature which you and M. Aenea and A. Bettik observed downriver, there are more than three hundred observed species of avian variety and at least two species of humanoids.”

“Two species of humanoids? You mean humans.”

“Negative,” said the ship. “Humanoids. Definitely not Old Earth human. One variety is quite small—little more than a meter in height—with bilateral symmetry but quite variant skeletal structure and a definite reddish hue.”

A memory flitted by of a red-rock monolith Aenea and I had scouted on the lost hawking mat during our short stay here. Tiny steps carved in the smooth stone. I shook my head to clear it. “That’s interesting, Ship. But let’s set our destination.” The curve of the world had become pronounced and stars were gleaming unblinkingly. The ship continued to rise. We passed a potato-shaped moon and moved farther from orbit. The unnamed world became a blinding sphere of sunlit clouds. “Do you know the world known as T’ien Shan, or the ‘Mountains of Heaven’?”

“T’ien Shan,” repeated the ship. “Yes. As far as my memory serves, I have never been there, but I have the coordinates. A small world in the Outback, settled by refugees of the Third Chinese Civil War late in the Hegira.”

“You won’t have any trouble getting there?”

“None would be anticipated,” said the ship. “A simple Hawking-drive jump. Although I recommend that you use the autosurgeon as your cryogenic fugue cubby during the jump.”

I shook my head again. “I’ll stay awake, Ship. At least after the doc heals my leg.”

“I would recommend against that, M. Endymion.”

I frowned. “Why? Aenea and I stayed awake during the other jumps.”

“Yes, but those were relatively short voyages within the old WorldWeb,” said the ship. “What you now call Pax space. This will be a bit more extensive.”

“How extensive?” I said. My naked body felt a sudden chill. Our longest jump—to Renaissance Vector System—had taken ten days of ship travel time and five months of time-debt for the Pax Fleet waiting for us. “How extensive a trip?” I said again.

“Three standard months, eighteen days, six hours, and some minutes,” said the ship.

“That’s not too bad a time-debt,” I said. I last saw Aenea just after her sixteenth birthday. She would gain a few months on me. Her hair might be longer. “We had a greater time-debt jumping to Renaissance System.”

“That is not time-debt, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “That is shiptime.” This time the chill along the length of my body was real. My tongue seemed thick.

“Three months’ shiptime… how much time-debt?”

“For someone waiting on T’ien Shan?” said the ship. The jungle world was a speck behind us now as we accelerated toward a translation point.

“Five years, two months, and one day,” said the ship. “As you are aware, the time-debt algorithm is not a linear function of C-plus duration, but includes such factors as…”

“Ah, Jesus,” I said, raising my wrist to my clammy forehead in the autosurgeon coffin. “Ah, damn.”

“Are you in pain, M. Endymion? The dolorometer suggests you are not, but your pulse has become erratic. We can increase the level of painkiller…”

“No!” I snapped. “No, it’s all right. I just… five years… damn.”

Did Aenea know this? Had she known that our separation would cover years of her life? Perhaps I should have brought the ship through the downriver farcaster. No, Aenea had said to fetch the ship and fly it to T’ien Shan. The farcaster had brought us to Mare Infinitus last time. Who knows where it would have taken me this time.

“Five years,” I muttered. “Ah, damn. She’ll be… damn, Ship… she’ll be twenty-one years old. A grown woman. I’ll have missed… I won’t see… she won’t remember…”

“Are you sure you are not in pain, M. Endymion? Your vital signs are turbulent.”

“Ignore that, Ship.”

“Shall I prepare the autosurgeon for cryogenic fugue?”

“Soon enough, Ship. Tell it to put me under while it heals my leg tonight and deals with the fever. I want at least ten hours’ sleep. How long until translation point?”

“Only seventeen hours. It is well inside this system.”

“Good,” I said. “Wake me in ten hours. Have a full breakfast ready. What I used to have when we celebrated “Sunday” on our voyage out.”

“Very good. Anything else?”

“Yeah, do you have any record holos of… of Aenea… on our last trip?”

“I have stored several hours of such records, M. Endymion. The time you were swimming in the zero-g bubble on the outer balcony. The discussion you had about religion versus rationality. The flying lessons down the central dropshaft when…”

“Good,” I said. “Cue those up. I’ll look through them over breakfast.”

“I will prepare the autosurgeon for three months of cryogenic sleep after your seven-hour interlude tomorrow,” said the ship.

I took a breath. “All right.”

“The surgeon wishes to commence repairing nerve damage and injecting antibiotics now, M. Endymion. Do you wish to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“With dreams or without? The medication may be tailored for either neurological state.”

“No dreams,” I said. “No dreams now. There’ll be time enough for those later.”

“Very good, M. Endymion. Sleep well.”