The Rise of Endymion

22

On Hyperion, several hundred light-years toward galactic center from the events and the people on T’ien Shan, a forgotten old man rose out of the dreamless sleep of long-term cryogenic fugue and slowly became aware of his surroundings. His surroundings were a no-touch suspension bed, a gaggle of life-support modules encircling him and nuzzling him like so many feeding raptors, and uncountable tubes, wires, and umbilicals finishing their work of feeding him, detoxifying his blood, stimulating his kidneys, carrying antibiotics to fight infection, monitoring his life signs, and generally invading his body and dignity in order to revive him and keep him alive. “Ah, fuck,” rasped the old man. “Waking up is a fucking, goddamn, dung-eating, corpse-buggering, shit storm of a nightmare for the terminally old. I’d pay a million marks if I could just get out of bed and go piss.”

“And good morning to you, M. Silenus,” said the female android monitoring the old poet’s life signs on the floating biomonitor. “You seem to be in good spirits today.”

“Bugger all blue-skinned wenches,” mumbled Martin Silenus. “Where are my teeth?”

“You haven’t grown them back yet, M. Silenus,” said the android. She was named A. Raddik and was a little over three centuries old… less than one-third the age of the ancient human mummy floating in the suspension bed.

“No need to,” mumbled the old man. “Won’t fucking be awake long enough. How long was I under?”

“Two years, three months, eight days,” said A. Raddik. Martin Silenus peered up at the open sky above his tower. The canvas roof on this highest level of his stone turret had been rolled back.

Deep lapis blue. The low light of early morning or late evening. The shimmer and flit of radiant gossamers not yet illuminating their fragile half-meter butterfly wings.

“What season?” managed Silenus.

“Late spring,” said the female android.

Other blue-skinned servants of the old poet moved in and out of the circular room, bent on obscure errands. Only A. Raddik monitored the last stages of the poet’s revival from fugue.

“How long since they left?” He did not have to specify who the “they” were. A. Raddik knew that the old poet meant not only Raul Endymion, the last visitor to their abandoned university city, but the girl Aenea—whom Silenus had known three centuries earlier—and whom he still hoped to see again someday.

“Nine years, eight months, one week, one day,” said A. Raddik. “All Earth standard, of course.”

“Hggrhh,” grunted the old poet. He continued peering at the sky. The sunlight was filtered through canvas rolled to the east, pouring light onto the south wall of the stone turret while not striking him directly, but the brightness still brought tears to his ancient eyes. “I’ve become a thing of darkness,” he mumbled. “Like Dracula. Rising from my fucking grave every few years to check on the world of the living.”

“Yes, M. Silenus,” agreed A. Raddik, changing several settings on the control panel.

“Shut up, wench,” said the poet.

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

The old man moaned. “How long until I can get into my hoverchair, Raddik?”

The hairless android pursed her lips. “Two more days, M. Silenus. Perhaps two and a half.”

“Aw, hell and damn,” muttered Martin Silenus. “Recovery gets slower each time. One of these times, I won’t wake at all… the fugue machinery won’t bring me back.”

“Yes, M. Silenus,” agreed the android. “Each cold sleep is harder on your system. The resuscitation and life-support equipment is quite old. It is true that you will not survive many more awakenings.”

“Oh, shut up,” growled Martin Silenus. “You are a morbid, gloomy old bitch.”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

“How long have you been with me, Raddik?”

“Two hundred forty-one years, eleven months, nineteen days,” said the android. “Standard.”

“And you still haven’t learned to make a decent cup of coffee.”

“No, M. Silenus.”

“But you have put a pot on, correct?”

“Yes, M. Silenus. As per your standing instructions.”

“Fucking aye,” said the poet.

“But you will not be able to ingest liquids orally for at least another twelve hours, M. Silenus,” said A. Raddik.

“Arrrggghhh!” said the poet.

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

After several minutes in which it looked like the old man had drifted back to sleep, Martin Silenus said, “Any word from the boy or child?”

“No, sir,” said A. Raddik. “But then, of course, we only have access to the in-system Pax com network these days. And most of their new encrypting is quite good.”

“Any gossip about them?”

“None that we are sure of, M. Silenus,” said the android. “Things are very troubled for the Pax… revolution in many systems, problems with their Outback Crusade against the Ousters, a constant movement of warships and troopships within the Pax boundaries… and there is talk of the viral contagion, highly coded and circumspect.”

“The contagion,” repeated Martin Silenus and smiled a toothless smile. “The child, I would guess.”

“Quite possibly, M. Silenus,” said A. Raddik, “although it is quite possible that there is a real viral plague on those worlds where…”

“No,” said the poet, shaking his head almost violently. “It’s Aenea. And her teachings. Spreading like the Beijing Flu. You don’t remember the Beijing Flu, do you, Raddik?”

“No, sir,” said the female, finishing her check of the readouts and setting the module to auto. “That was before my time. It was before anyone’s time. Anyone but you, sir.”

Normally there would have been some obscene outburst from the poet, but now he merely nodded. “I know. I’m a freak of nature. Pay your two bits and come into the sideshow… see the oldest man in the galaxy… see the mummy that walks and talks… sort of… see the disgusting thing that refuses to die. Bizarre, aren’t I, A. Raddik?”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

The poet grunted. “Well, don’t get your hopes up, blue thing. I’m not going to croak until I hear from Raul and Aenea. I have to finish the Cantos and I don’t know the ending until they create it for me. How do I know what I think until I see what they do?”

“Precisely, M. Silenus.”

“Don’t humor me, blue woman.”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

“The boy… Raul… asked me what his orders were almost ten years ago. I told him… save the child, Aenea… topple the Pax… destroy the Church’s power… and bring the Earth back from wherever the fuck it went. He said he’d do it. Of course, he was stinking drunk with me at the time.”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

“Well?” said the poet.

“Well what, sir?” said A. Raddik.

“Well, any sign of him having done any of the things he’s promised, Raddik?”

“We know from the Pax transmissions nine years and eight months ago that he and the Consul’s ship escaped Hyperion,” said the android. “We can hope that the child Aenea is still safe and well.”

“Yes, yes,” muttered Silenus, waving his hand feebly, “but is the Pax toppled?”

“Not that we can notice, M. Silenus,” said Raddik. “There were the mild troubles I mentioned earlier, and offworld, born-again tourism here on Hyperion is down a bit, but…”

“And the sodding Church is still in the zombie business?” demanded the poet, his thin voice stronger now.

“The Church remains ascendant,” said A. Raddik. “More of the moor people and the mountain people accept the cruciform every year.”

“Bugger all,” said the poet. “And I don’t suppose that Earth has returned to its proper place.”

“We have not heard of that improbability occurring,” said A. Raddik. “Of course, as I mentioned, our electronic eavesdropping is restricted to in-system transmissions these days, and since the Consul’s ship left with M. Endymion and M. Aenea almost ten years ago, our decryption capabilities have not been…”

“All right, all right,” said the old man, sounding terribly tired again. “Get me into my hoverchair.”

“Not for another two days, at least, I am afraid,” repeated the android, her voice gentle.

“Piss up a rope,” said the ancient figure floating amid tubes and sensor wires. “Can you wheel me over to a window, Raddik? Please? I want to look at the spring chalma trees and the ruins of this old city.”

“Yes, M. Silenus,” said the android, sincerely pleased to be doing something for the old man besides keeping his body working.

Martin Silenus watched out the window for one full hour, fighting the tides of reawakening pain and the terrible sleepy urge to return to fugue state. It was morning light. His audio implants relayed the birdsong to him. The old poet thought of his adopted young niece, the child who had decided to call herself Aenea… he thought of his dear friend, Brawne Lamia, Aenea’s mother… how they had been enemies for so long, had hated each other during parts of that last great Shrike Pilgrimage so long ago… about the stories they had told one another and the things they had seen… the Shrike in the Valley of the Time Tombs, its red eyes blazing… the scholar… what was his name?… Sol… Sol and his little swaddled brat aging backward to nothing… and the soldier… Kassad… that was it…

Colonel Kassad. The old poet had never given a shit about the military… idiots, all of them… but Kassad had told an interesting tale, lived an interesting life… the other priest, Lenar Hoyt, had been a prig and an asshole, but the first one… the one with the sad eyes and the leather journal… Paul Duré… there had been a man worth writing about…

Martin Silenus drifted back to sleep with the light of morning flooding in on him, illuminating his countless wrinkles and translucent, parchment flesh, his blue veins visible and pulsing weakly in the rich light. He did not dream… but part of his poet’s mind was already outlining the next sections of his never-finished Cantos.

Sergeant Gregorius had not been exaggerating. Father Captain de Soya had been terribly battered and burned in the last battle of his ship, the Raphael, and was near death.

The sergeant had led A. Bettik, Aenea, and me into the temple. The structure was as strange as this encounter—outside there was a large, blank stone tablet, a smooth-faced monolith—Aenea mentioned briefly that it had been brought from Old Earth, had stood outside the original Temple of the Jade Emperor, and had never been inscribed during its thousands of years on the pilgrims’ trail—while inside the sealed and pressurized courtyard of the echoing temple itself, a stone railing ran around a boulder that was actually the summit of T’ai Shan, the sacred Great Peak of the Middle Kingdom. There were small sleeping and eating rooms for pilgrims in the back of the huge temple, and it was in one of these that we found Father Captain de Soya and the other two survivors. Besides Gregorius and the dying de Soya, there were two other men—Carel Shan, a Weapons Systems Officer, now terribly burned and unconscious, and Hoagan Liebler, introduced by Sergeant Gregorius as the “former” Executive Officer of the Raphael. Liebler was the least injured of the four—his left forearm had been broken and was in a sling, but he had no burns or other impact bruises—but there was something quiet and withdrawn about the thin man, as if he were in shock or mulling something over.

Aenea’s attention went immediately to Captain Federico de Soya. The priest-captain was on one of the uncomfortable pilgrim cots, either stripped to the waist by Gregorius or he had lost all of his upper uniform in the blast and reentry. His trousers were shredded. His feet were bare. The only place on his body where he had not been terribly burned was the parasite cruciform on his chest—it was a healthy, sickening pink. De Soya’s hair had been burned away and his face was splashed with liquid metal burns and radiation slashes, but I could see that he had been a striking man, mostly because of his liquid, troubled brown eyes, not dulled even by the pain that must be overwhelming him at this moment. Someone had applied burn cream, temporary dermheal, and liquid disinfectant all over the visible portions of the dying priest-captain’s body—and started a standard lifeboat medkit IV drip—but this would have little effect on the outcome. I had seen combat burns like this before, not all from starship encounters.

Three friends of mine during the Iceshelf fighting had died within hours when we had not been able to medevac them out. Their screams had been horrible to the point of unendurable. Father Captain de Soya was not screaming. I could see that he was straining not to cry out from the pain, but he remained silent, his eyes focused only on the terrible concentration to silence until Aenea knelt by his side. At first he did not recognize her. “Bettz?” he mumbled. “VIRO Argyle? No… you died at your station. The others too… Pol Denish… Elijah trying to free the aft boat… the young troopers when the starboard hull failed… but you look… familiar.”

Aenea started to take his hand, saw that three of de Soya’s fingers were missing, and set her own hand on the stained blanket next to his. “Father Captain,” she said very softly.

“Aenea,” said de Soya, his dark eyes really looking at her for the first time. “You’re the child… so many months, chasing you… looked at you when you stepped out of the Sphinx. Incredible child. So glad you survived.” His gaze moved to me. “You are Raul Endymion. I saw your Home Guard dossier. Almost caught up to you on Mare Infinitus.” A wave of pain rolled over him and the priest-captain closed his eyes and bit into his burned and bloodied lower lip. After a moment, he opened his eyes and said to me, “I have something of yours. Personal gear on the Raphael. The Holy Office let me have it after they ended their investigation. Sergeant Gregorius will give it to you after I am dead.”

I nodded, having no idea what he was talking about.

“Father Captain de Soya,” whispered Aenea, “Federico… can you hear and understand me?”

“Yes,” murmured the priest-captain. “Painkillers… said no to Sergeant Gregorius… didn’t want to slip away forever in my sleep. Not go gently.” The pain returned. I saw that much of de Soya’s neck and chest had cracked and opened, like burned scales. Pus and fluid flowed down to the blankets beneath him. The man closed his eyes until the tide of agony receded; it took longer this time. I thought of how I had folded up under just the pain of a kidney stone and tried to imagine this man’s torment. I could not.

“Father Captain,” said Aenea, “there is a way for you to live…”

De Soya shook his head vigorously, despite the pain that must have caused.

I noticed that his left ear was little more than carbon. Part of it flaked off on the pillow as I watched. “No!” he cried. “I told Gregorius… no partial resurrection… idiot, sexless idiot…” A cough that might have been a laugh from behind scorched teeth. “Had enough of that as a priest. Anyway… tired… tired of…” His blackened stubs of fingers on his right hand batted at the pink double cross on his flaked and oozing chest. “Let the thing die with me.”

Aenea nodded. “I didn’t mean be reborn, Father Captain. I meant live. Be healed.”

De Soya was trying to blink, but his eyelids were burned ragged. “Not a prisoner of the Pax…” he managed, finding the air to speak only each time he exhaled with a wracking gasp. “Will… execute… me. I deserve… it. Killed many innocent… men… women… in defense of… friends.”

Aenea leaned closer so that he could focus on her eyes. “Father Captain, the Pax is still after us as well. But we have a ship. It has an autosurgeon.”

Sergeant Gregorius stepped forward from where he had been leaning wearily against the wall. The man named Carel Shan remained unconscious. Hoag Liebler, apparently lost in some private misery, did not respond.

Aenea had to repeat it before de Soya understood.

“Ship?” said the priest-captain. “The ancient Hegemony ship you escaped in? Not armed, was it?”

“No,” said Aenea. “It never has been.”

De Soya shook his head again. “There must have been… fifty archangel-class… ships… jumped us. Got… a few… rest… still there. No chance… get… to… any translation point… before…” He closed his torn eyelids again while the pain washed over him. This time, it seemed, it almost carried him away. He returned as if from a far place.

“It’s all right,” whispered Aenea. “I’ll worry about that. You’ll be in the doc-in-the-box. But there’s something you would have to do.”

Father Captain de Soya seemed too tired to speak, but he shifted his head to listen.

“You have to renounce the cruciform,” said Aenea. “You have to surrender this type of immortality.”

The priest-captain’s blackened lips pulled back from his teeth. “Gladly…” he rasped. “But sorry… can’t… once accepted… cruciform… can’t be… surrendered.”

“Yes,” whispered Aenea, “it can. If you choose that, I can make it go away. Our autosurgeon is old. It would not be able to heal you with the cruciform parasite throughout your body. We have no resurrection créche aboard the ship…”

De Soya reached for her then, his flaking and three-fingerless hand still gripping tightly the sleeve of her therm jacket. “Doesn’t matter… doesn’t matter if I die… get it off. Get it off. Will die a real… Catholic… again… if you… can help me… get it… OFF!” He almost shouted the final word. Aenea turned to the sergeant. “Do you have a cup or glass?”

“There’s the mug in the medkit,” rumbled the giant, fumbling for it. “But we have no water…”

“I brought some,” said my friend and removed the insulated bottle from her belt. I expected wine, but it was only the water we had bottled up before leaving the Temple Hanging in Air those endless hours ago. Aenea did not bother with alcohol swabs or sterile lancets; she beckoned me closer, removed the hunting knife from my belt, and drew the blade across three of her fingertips in a swift move that made me flinch. Her blood flowed red.

Aenea dipped her fingers in the clear plastic drinking mug for just a second, but long enough to send currents of thick crimson spiraling and twisting in the water.

“Drink this,” she said to Father Captain de Soya, helping to lift the dying man’s head.

The priest-captain drank, coughed, drank again. His eyes closed when she eased him back onto the stained pillow. “The cruciform will be gone within twenty-four hours,” whispered my friend. Father Captain de Soya made that rough chuckling sound again. “I’ll be dead within an hour.”

“You’ll be in the autosurgeon within fifteen minutes,” said Aenea, touching his better hand. “Sleep now… but don’t die on me, Federico de Soya… don’t die on me. We have much to talk about. And you have one great service to perform for me… for us.”

Sergeant Gregorius was standing closer. “M. Aenea…” he said, halted, shuffled his feet, and tried again. “M. Aenea, may I partake of that… water?”

Aenea looked at him. “Yes, Sergeant… but once you drink, you can never again carry a cruciform. Never. There will be no resurrection. And there are other… side effects.”

Gregorius waved away any further discussion. “I have followed my captain for ten years. I will follow him now.” The giant drank deeply of the pinkish water.

De Soya’s eyes had been closed, and I had assumed that he was asleep or unconscious from the pain, but now he opened them and said to Gregorius, “Sergeant, would you please bring M. Endymion the parcel we dragged from the lifeboat?”

“Aye, Capt’n,” said the giant and rummaged through the litter of debris in one corner of the room. He handed me a sealed tube, a little over a meter high. I looked at the priest-captain. De Soya seemed to be floating between delirium and shock. “I’ll open it when he’s better,” I said to the sergeant. Gregorius nodded, carried the glass over to Carel Shan, and poured some water into the unconscious Weapons Officer’s gaping mouth.

“Carel may die before your ship arrives,” said the sergeant. He looked up. “Or does the ship have two doc-in-the-boxes?”

“No,” said Aenea, “but the one we have has three compartments. You can heal your wounds as well.”

Gregorius shrugged. He went to the man named Liebler and offered the glass. The thin man with the broken arm only looked at it.

“Perhaps later,” said Aenea.

Gregorius nodded and handed the glass back to her. “The XO was a prisoner on our ship,” said the sergeant. “A spy. An enemy of the captain. Father-captain still risked his last life to get Liebler out of the brig… got his burns retrieving him. I don’t think Hoag quite understands what’s happened.”

Liebler looked up then. “I understand it,” he said softly. “I just don’t understand it.”

Aenea stood. “Raul, I hope you haven’t lost the ship communicator.”

I fumbled in my pockets only a few seconds before coming up with the com unit’s diskey journal. “I’ll go outside and tightbeam visually,” I said. “Use the skinsuit jack. Any instructions for the ship?”

“Tell it to hurry,” said Aenea.

It was tricky getting the semiconscious de Soya and the unconscious Carel Shan to the ship. They had no spacesuits and it was still near vacuum outside. Sergeant Gregorius told us that he had used an inflatable transfer ball to drag them from the lifeboat wreckage to the Temple of the Jade Emperor, but the ball itself had been damaged. I had about fifteen minutes to think about the problem before the ship became visible, descending on its EM repellors and blue fusion-flame tail, so when it arrived I ordered it to land directly in front of the temple air lock, to morph its escalator ramp to the air-lock door, and to extend its containment field around the door and stairway. Then it was just a matter of getting the float litters from the medbay in the ship and transferring the men to them without hurting them too much. Shan remained unconscious, but some of de Soya’s skin peeled away as we moved him onto the litter. The priest-captain stirred and opened his eyes but did not cry out.

After months on T’ien Shan, the interior of the Consul’s ship was still familiar, but familiar like a recurring dream one has about a house one has lived in long ago. After de Soya and the Weapons Officer were tucked away in the autosurgeon, it was strange to stand on the carpeted holopit deck with its ancient Steinway piano with Aenea and A. Bettik there as always, but also with a burned giant still holding his assault weapon and the former XO brooding silently on the holopit stairs.

“Diagnostics completed on the autosurgeons,” said the ship. “The presence of the cross-shaped parasite nodes makes treatment impossible at this time. Shall I terminate treatment or commence cryogenic fugue?”

“Cryogenic fugue,” said Aenea. “The doc-in-the-box should be able to operate on them in twenty-four hours. Please keep them alive and in stasis until then.”

“Affirmative,” said the ship. And then, “M. Aenea? M. Endymion?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you aware that I was tracked by long-range sensors from the time I left the third moon? There are at least thirty-seven Pax warships heading this way as we speak. One is already in parking orbit around this planet and another has just committed the highly unusual tactic of jumping on Hawking drive within the system’s gravity well.”

“Okay,” said Aenea. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I believe they intend to intercept and destroy us,” said the ship. “And they can do this before we clear atmosphere.”

“We know,” sighed Aenea. “I repeat, don’t worry about it.”

“Affirmative,” said the ship in the most businesslike tone I had ever heard from it. “Destination?”

“The bonsai fissure six kilometers east of Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” said Aenea. “East of the Temple Hanging in Air. Quickly.” She glanced at her wrist chronometer. “But stay low, Ship. Within the cloud layers.”

“The phosgene clouds or the water particle clouds?” inquired the ship.

“The lowest possible,” said my friend. “Unless the phosgene clouds create a problem for you.”

“Of course not,” said the ship. “Would you like me to plot a course that would take us through the acid seas? It would make no difference to the Pax deep radar, but it could be done with only a small addition of time and…”

“No,” interrupted Aenea, “just the clouds.”

We watched on the holopit sphereview as the ship flung itself off Suicide Cliff and dived ten kilometers through gray cloud and then into green clouds. We would be at the fissure within minutes.

We all sat on the carpeted holopit steps then. I realized that I still had the sealed tube that de Soya had given me. I rotated it through my hands.

“Go ahead and open it,” said Sergeant Gregorius. The big man was slowly removing the outer layers of his scarred combat armor. Lance burns had melted the lower layers. I was afraid to see his chest and left arm.

I hesitated. I had said that I’d wait until the priest-captain had recovered.

“Go ahead,” Gregorius said again. “The Captain’s been waiting to give this back to you for nine years.”

I had no idea what it could be. How could this man have known he would see me someday? I owned nothing… how could he have something of mine to return? I broke the seal on the tube and looked within.

Some sort of tightly rolled fabric. With a slow realization, I pulled the thing out and unrolled it on the floor. Aenea laughed delightedly. “My God,” she said. “In all my various dreams about this time, I never foresaw this. How wonderful.”

It was the hawking mat… the flying carpet that had carried Aenea and me from the Valley of the Time Tombs almost ten years earlier. I had lost it… it took me a second or two to remember. I had lost it on Mare Infinitus nine years ago when the Pax lieutenant I had been fighting had pulled a knife, cut me, pushed me off the mat into the sea. What had happened next? The lieutenant’s own men on the floating sea platform had mistakenly killed him with a cloud of flechette darts, the dead man had fallen into the violet sea, and the hawking mat had flown on… no, I remembered that someone on the platform had intercepted it.

“How did the father-captain get it?” I asked, knowing the answer as soon as I articulated the question. De Soya had been our relentless pursuer then.

Gregorius nodded. “The Father-Captain used it to find your blood and DNA samples. It’s how we got your Pax service record from Hyperion. If we’d had pressure suits, I would have used the damn thing to get us off that airless mountain.”

“You mean it works?” I tapped the flight threads. The hawking mat—more tattered than I remembered it—hovered ten centimeters off the floor. “I’ll be damned,” I said.

“We’re rising to the fissure at the coordinates you gave me,” came the ship’s voice. The holopit view cleared and showed the Jo-kung ridge rushing past. We slowed and hovered a hundred meters out. We had returned to the same forested valley fissure where the ship had dropped me more than three months earlier.

Only now the green valley was filled with people. I saw Theo, Lhomo, many of the others from the Temple Hanging in Air. The ship floated lower, hovered, and waited for directions.

“Lower the escalator,” said Aenea. “Let them all aboard.”

“May I remind you,” said the ship, “that I have fugue couches and life support for a maximum of six people for an extended interstellar jump? There are at least fifty people there on the…”

“Lower the escalator and let them all aboard,” commanded Aenea. “Immediately.”

The ship did as it was told without another word.

Theo led the refugees up the ramp and the circular stairs to where we waited.

Most of those who had stayed behind at the Temple Hanging in Air were there: many of the temple monks, the Tromo Trochi of Dhomu, the ex-soldier Gyalo Thondup, Lhomo Dondrub—we were delighted to see that his paraglider had brought him safely back, and from his grins and hugs, the delight was reciprocated—Abbot Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi, Chim Din, Jigme Taring, Kuku and Kay, George and Jigme, the Dalai Lama’s brother Labsang, the brickworkers Viki and Kim, Overseer Tsipon Shakabpa, Rimsi Kyipup—less dour than I had ever seen him—and high riggers Haruyuki and Kenshiro, as well as the bamboo experts Voytek and Janusz, even the Mayor of Jo-kung, Charles Chi-kyap Kempo. But no Dalai Lama. And the Dorje Phamo was also missing.

“Rachel went back to fetch them,” said Theo, the last to come aboard. “The Dalai Lama insisted on being the last to leave and the Sow stayed behind to keep him company until it was time to go. But they should have been back by now. I was just ready to go back along the ledge to check…”

Aenea shook her head. “We’ll all go.”

There was no way to get everyone seated or situated. People milled on the stairways, stood around the library level, had wandered up to the bedroom at the apex of the ship to look outside via the viewing walls, while others were on the fugue cubby level and down in the engine room.

“Let’s go, Ship,” said Aenea. “The Temple Hanging in Air. Make a direct approach.”

For the ship, a direct approach was a burst of thruster fire, a lob fifteen klicks into the atmosphere, and then a vertical drop with repellors and main engine burning at the last second. The entire process took about thirty seconds, but while the internal containment field kept us from being smashed to jelly, the view through the clear apex walls must have been disorienting for those watching upstairs. Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, and I were watching the holopit and even that small view almost sent me to clutching the bulkheads or clinging to the carpet. We dropped lower and hovered fifty meters above the temple complex.

“Ah, damn,” said Theo.

The view had shown us a man falling to his death in the clouds below. There was no possibility of swooping down to catch him. One second he was freefalling, the next he had been swallowed by the clouds.

“Who was it?” said Theo.

“Ship,” said Aenea. “Playback and enhance.”

Carl Linga William Eiheji, the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

A few seconds later several figures emerged from the Right Meditation pavilion onto the highest platform, the one I had helped build to Aenea’s plans less than a month ago. “Shit,” I said aloud. The Nemes-thing was carrying the Dalai Lama in one hand, holding him over the edge of the platform. Behind her… behind it… came her male and female clone-siblings.

Then Rachel and the Dorje Phamo stepped out of the shadows onto the platform.

Aenea gripped my arm. “Raul, do you want to come outside with me?”

She had activated the balcony beyond the Steinway, but I knew that this was not all that she meant. “Of course,” I said, thinking, Is this her death? Is this what she has foreseen since before birth? Is it my death? “Of course I’ll come,” I said.

A. Bettik and Theo started out onto the ship’s balcony with us.

“No,” said Aenea. “Please.” She took the android’s hand for a second. “You can see everything from inside, my friend.”

“I would prefer to be with you, M. Aenea,” said A. Bettik.

Aenea nodded. “But this is for Raul and me alone.”

A. Bettik lowered his head a second and returned to the holopit image. None of the rest of the score of people in the library level and on the spiral stairs said a word. The ship was dead silent. I walked out onto the balcony with my friend.

Nemes still held the boy out over the drop.

We were twenty meters above her and her siblings now. I wondered idly how high they could jump.

“Hey!” shouted Aenea.

Nemes looked up. I was reminded that the effect of her gaze was like being stared at by empty eye sockets. Nothing human lived there.

“Put him down,” said Aenea.

Nemes smiled and dropped the Dalai Lama, catching him with her left hand at the last second. “Be careful what you ask for, child,” said the pale woman.

“Let him and the other two go and I’ll come down,” said Aenea.

Nemes shrugged. “You won’t leave here anyway,” she said, her voice not raised but perfectly audible across the gap.

“Let them go and I’ll come down,” repeated Aenea.

Nemes shrugged but threw the Dalai Lama across the platform like an unwanted wad of paper.

Rachel ran to the boy, saw that he was hurt and bleeding but alive, lifted him, and turned back angrily toward Nemes and her siblings.

“NO!” shouted Aenea. I had never heard her use that tone before. It froze both Rachel and me in our tracks.

“Rachel,” said Aenea, her voice level again, “please bring His Holiness and the Dorje Phamo up to the ship now.” It was polite, but an imperative that I could not have resisted.

Rachel did not.

Aenea gave the command and the ship dropped lower, morphing and extending a stairway from the balcony. Aenea started down. I hurried to follow her. We stepped onto the bonsai cedar platform… I had helped to place all of the planks… and Rachel led the child and old woman past us, up the stairway. Aenea touched Rachel’s head as the other woman went past. The stairway flowed uphill and shaped itself back into a balcony. Theo and A. Bettik joined Rachel and the Dorje Phamo on it. Someone had taken the bleeding child into the ship.

We stood two meters from Rhadamanth Nemes. Her siblings stepped up to the creature’s side.

“This is not quite complete,” said Nemes. “Where is your… ah, there.”

The Shrike flowed from the shadows of the pavilion. I say “flowed,” for although it moved, I had not seen it walk.

I was clenching and unclenching my hands. Everything was wrong for this showdown. I had peeled off my therm jacket in the ship, but still wore the stupid skinsuit and climbing harness, although most of the hardware had been left in the ship. The harness and multiple layers would still slow me down.

Slow me down from what? I thought. I had seen Nemes fight. Or rather, I had not seen her. When she and the Shrike had struggled on God’s Grove, there had been a blur, then explosions, then nothing. She could decapitate Aenea and have my guts for garters before I got my hands clenched into fists.

Fists. The ship was unarmed, but I had left it with Sergeant Gregorius’s Swiss Guard assault rifle still on the library level. The first thing they had taught us in the Home Guard was never to fight with fists when you could scrounge up a weapon. I looked around. The platform was clean and bare, not even a railing I could wrench free to use as a club. This structure was too well built to rip anything loose.

I glanced at the cliff wall to our left. No loose rocks there. There were a few pitons and climbing bolts still imbedded in the fissures there, I knew—we had clipped on to them while building this level and pavilion and we hadn’t got around to clearing all of them—but they were driven in far too tight for me to pull out and use as a weapon, although Nemes could probably do so with one finger. And what good would a piton or chock nut do against this monster? There were no weapons to find here. I would die bare-handed. I hoped that I would get one blow in before she took me down… or at least one swing.

Aenea and Nemes were looking only at each other. Nemes did not spare more than a glance at the Shrike ten paces to her right. The female-thing said, “You know that I am not going to take you back to the Pax, don’t you, child bitch?”

“Yes,” said Aenea. She returned the creature’s stare with a solid intensity.

Nemes smiled. “But you believe that your spiked creature will save you again.”

“No,” said Aenea.

“Good,” said Nemes. “Because it will not.” She nodded to her clone-siblings.

I know their names now—Scylla and Briareus. And I know what I saw next. I should not have been able to see it, for all three of the Nemes-things phase-shifted at that instant.

There should have been the briefest glimpse of a chrome blur, then chaos, then nothing… but Aenea reached over and touched the back of my neck, there was the usual electric tingle I received whenever her skin touched mine, and suddenly the light was different—deeper, darker—and the air was as thick as water around us. I realized that my heart did not seem to be beating and that I did not blink or take a breath. As alarming as that sounds, it seemed irrelevant then.

Aenea’s voice whispered from the hearpatch on my folded-back skinsuit cowl… or perhaps it spoke directly through her touch on my neck. I could not tell. We cannot phase-shift with them or use it to fight them, she said. It is an abuse of the energy of the Void Which Binds. But I can help us watch this. And what we watched was incredible enough. At Nemes’s command, Scylla and Briareus threw themselves at the Shrike, while the Hyperion demon raised four arms and threw itself in the direction of Nemes—only to be intercepted by the siblings. Even with our altered vision—the ship hanging frozen in midair, our friends on the balcony frozen into unblinking statues, a bird above the cliff face locked in to the thick air like an insect in amber—the sudden movement of Shrike and the two cloned creatures was almost too fast to follow. There was a terrible impact just a meter short of Nemes, who had turned into a silver-surfaced effigy of herself, and who did not flinch. Briareus threw a blow that I am convinced would have split our ship in two. It reverberated off the Shrike’s thorned neck with a sound like an underwater earthquake played back in slow motion, and then Scylla kicked the Shrike’s legs out from under it. The Shrike went down, but not before two of its arms seized Scylla and two other razor-fingered claws sank deep into Briareus.

The Nemes siblings seemed to welcome the embrace, throwing themselves onto the tumbling Shrike with clacking teeth and flying nails. I could see that the hurtling edges of their rigid hands and forearms were razor-sharp, guillotine surfaces sharper than the Shrike’s blades and thorns.

The three beat and chewed on each other in a wild frenzy, rolling across the platform, throwing bonsai cedar chips three meters into the air, and slamming against the rock wall. In a second, all three were on their feet, the Shrike’s great jaws clamping on Briareus’s neck even as Scylla slashed at one of the creature’s four arms, bent it backward, and seemed to break it at a joint. Still holding Briareus in its jaws, the huge teeth chewing and scraping at the silver form’s head, the Shrike whirled to confront Scylla, but by then both clone-siblings had their hands on the blades and thorns on the Shrike’s skull, bending it backward until I waited to hear the neck snap and see its head roll away.

Instead, Nemes somehow communicated, Now! Do it! and without an instant’s hesitation, the two siblings threw themselves away from the cliff face, toward the railing at the abyss-end side of the platform. I saw what they were going to do—throw the Shrike into space, just as they had done to the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

Perhaps the Shrike saw this as well, for the tall creature slammed the two chrome bodies against it, its chest spikes and wrist thorns sinking deep into the forcefields around the struggling, clawing siblings. The trio whirled and tumbled and bounced up like some demented, three-part wind-up toy locked into hyperfast berserk mode, until finally the Shrike with its kicking, clawing, visibly impaled forms slammed into the sturdy cedar railing, tore through it as though it were wet cardboard, and went hurtling out over and into the drop, still fighting. Aenea and I watched as the tall silver form with flashing spikes and the shorter silver forms with flailing limbs fell, fell, grew smaller and smaller, fell into clouds, and were swallowed. I knew that those watching from the ship would have seen nothing except a sudden disappearance of three of the figures on our platform, and then a broken railing and an emptier platform with just Nemes, Aenea, and me remaining. The silver thing that was Rhadamanth Nemes turned its featureless chrome face toward us.

The light changed. The breeze blew again. The air thinned. I felt my heart suddenly beating again… pounding loudly… and I blinked rapidly.

Nemes was in her human form again. “So,” she said to Aenea, “shall we finish this little farce?”

“Yes,” said Aenea.

Nemes smiled and went to phase-shift.

Nothing happened. The creature frowned and seemed to concentrate. Still nothing occurred.

“I can’t stop you from phase-shifting,” said Aenea. “But others can… and have.”

Nemes looked irritated for a second but then laughed. “Those who created me will attend to that in a second, but I do not wish to wait that long, and I do not need to shift up to kill you, bitch child.”

“That’s true,” said Aenea. She had stood her ground through all of this violence and confusion, her legs apart, feet firmly planted, arms easy at her sides.

Nemes showed her small teeth, but I saw that these teeth were elongating, growing sharper, as if being extruded farther from her gums and jawbone. There were at least three rows of them.

Nemes held up her hands and her fingernails—already pale and long—extended another ten centimeters, flowing into gleaming spikes.

Nemes reached down with those sharpened nails and peeled back the skin and flesh of her right forearm, revealing some sort of metallic endoskeleton that was the color of steel but which looked infinitely sharper.

“Now,” said Nemes. She stepped toward Aenea.

I stepped between them.

“No,” I said, and raised my fists like a boxer ready to start.

Nemes showed all of her rows of teeth.

23

Time and motion seem to slow again, as if I can once again see in the phase-shift mode, but this time it is merely the effect of adrenaline and total concentration. My mind shifts into overdrive. My senses become preternaturally alert. I see, feel, and calculate every microsecond with uncanny clarity.

Nemes takes a step… more toward Aenea to my left than toward me.

This is a chess match more than a fight. I win if I kill the unfeeling bitch or fling her off the platform long enough for us to escape. She does not have to kill me to win… only neutralize me long enough to kill Aenea. Aenea is her target. Aenea has always been her target. This monster was created to kill Aenea.

Chess match. Nemes has just sacrificed two of her strongest pieces—her monster siblings—to neutralize our knight, the Shrike. Now all three pieces are off the board. Only Nemes—the dark queen—Aenea, humankind’s queen, and Aenea’s lowly pawn… me.

This pawn may have to sacrifice himself, but not without taking out the dark queen. Of that he is determined.

Nemes is smiling. Her teeth are sharp and redundant. Her arms are still at her sides, long nails gleaming, her right forearm exposed like some obscene surgical exhibit… the interior not human… no, not human at all.

The cutting edge of her forearm endoskeleton catches the afternoon sunlight. “Aenea,” I say softly, “step back, please.” This highest of platforms connects to the stone walkway and staircase we had cut to climb to the overhang walkway.

I want my friend off the platform. “Raul, I…”

“Do it now,” I say, not raising my voice but putting into it every bit of command I have learned and earned in my thirty-two standard years of life. Aenea takes four steps back onto the stone ledge. The ship continues to hover fifty meters out and above us. There are many faces peering from the balcony. I try to will Sergeant Gregorius to step out and use his assault rifle to blow this Nemes bitch-thing away, but I do not see his dark face among those staring. Perhaps he has been weakened by his wounds. Perhaps he feels that this should be a fair fight. Fuck that, I think. I do not want a fair fight. I want to kill this Nemes creature any way I can. I would gladly accept any help from anywhere right now.

Is the Shrike really dead? Can this be? Martin Silenus’s Cantos seemed to tell of the Shrike being defeated in some far-future battle with Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. But how did Silenus know this? And what does the future mean to a monster capable of traveling through time? If the Shrike was not dead, I would appreciate its return about now.

Nemes takes another step to her right, my left. I step left to block her access to Aenea. Under phase-shift, this thing has superhuman strength and can move so fast as to be literally invisible. She can’t phase-shift now. I hope to God. But she still may be faster and stronger than me… than any human. I have to assume that she is. And she has the teeth, claws, and cutting arm.

“Ready to die, Raul Endymion?” says Nemes, her lips sliding back from those rows of teeth.

Her strengths—probable speed, strength, and inhuman construction. She may be more robot or android than human. It is almost certain that she does not feel pain. She may have other built-in weapons that she has not revealed. I have no idea how to kill or disable her… her skeleton is metal, not bone… the muscles visible in her forearm look real enough, but may be made of plastic fibers or pink steel mesh. It is unlikely that normal fighting techniques will stop her. Her weaknesses—I do not know. Perhaps overconfidence. Perhaps she has become too used to phase-shifting—to killing her enemies when they cannot fight back. But she had taken on the Shrike and fought it to a draw nine and a half years ago—beaten it, actually, since she had gotten it out of the way to get to Aenea.

Only the intervention of Father Captain de Soya’s ship, lancing her with every gigavolt available on the starship, had prevented her from killing all of us.

Nemes raises her arms now and crouches, clawed fingers extended. How far can the thing jump? Can it jump over me to get to Aenea? My strengths—two years boxing for the regiment during my Home Guard tour—I hated it, lost about a third of my matches. The others in my regiment kept betting on me, though. Pain never stopped me. I certainly felt it, but it never stopped me. Blows to the face made me see red—early on, I would forget all of my training when someone hit me in the face, and when the red mist of fury cleared, if I was still standing, I tended to have won the match. But I know that blind fury will not help me now. If I lose focus for an instant, this thing will kill me.

I was fast when I boxed… but that was more than a decade ago. I was strong… but I have not formally trained or worked out in all the intervening years. I could take hard blows in the ring, which is different than giving in to pain… I’d never been knocked out in the ring, even when a better fighter had sent me down a dozen times before the fight was called. Besides boxing, I’d been a bouncer at one of the bigger Nine Tails casinos on Felix. But that was mostly psychology, knowing how to avoid fighting while moving the obnoxious drunk out the door. I had made sure that the few actual fights were over in a few seconds. I had been trained for hand-to-hand fighting in the Home Guard, taught to kill at close range, but that sort of business was about as rare as a bayonet charge.

While working as a bargeman, I had gotten into my most serious fights—once with a man ready and willing to carve me up with a long knife. I had survived that. But that other bargeman had knocked me out. As a hunting guide, I’d survived an offworlder coming at me with a flechette gun. But I had accidentally killed him, and he had testified against me after he was resurrected.

Come to think of it, that’s how all this started.

Of all my weaknesses, this was the most serious—I do not really want to hurt anyone. In all of my fights—with the possible exception of the bargemaster with the knife and the Christian hunter with his flechette gun—I had held something back, not wanting to hit them as hard as I could, not wanting to hurt them too badly.

I have to change that way of thinking immediately. This is no person… this is a killing machine, and if I do not disable or destroy it quickly, it will kill me even more quickly.

Nemes jumps at me, claws raking, her right arm pulling back and then slashing like a scythe.

I jump back, dodge the scythe, almost dodge all the claws, see the shirt on my left upper arm shred, see blood mist the air, and then I step in quickly and hit her—fast—hard—three times to the face.

Nemes jumps back as quickly as she came in. There is blood on the long nails of her left hand. My blood. Her nose has been smashed flat so that it lies sideways on her thin face. I have broken something—bone, cartilage, metal fiber—where her left brow was. There is no blood on her face. She does not seem to notice any of the damage. She is still grinning.

I glance at my left arm. It burns ferociously. Poison? Perhaps—it makes sense—but if she uses poison, I should be dead in seconds. No reason she would use long-acting agents.

Still here. Just burns because of the slashes.

Four, I think… deep, but not muscle deep. They don’t matter. Concentrate on her eyes. Guess what she’ll do next.

Never use your bare hands. Home Guard teaching. Always find a weapon for close-in fighting. If one’s personal weapon is destroyed or missing, find something else, improvise—a rock, a heavy branch, a torn piece of metal—even stones wrapped in one’s fist or keys between the fingers are preferable to one’s bare hands. Knuckles break more quickly than jawbones, the drill instructor always reminded us. If you absolutely have to use only hands, use the flat of your hand to chop. Use rigid fingers to impale. Use clawed fingers to go for the eyes and Adam’s apple.

No loose rocks here, no branches, no keys… no weapons at all. This thing has no Adam’s apple. I suspect that her eyes are as cool and hard as marbles. Nemes moves to the left again, glancing toward Aenea. “I’m coming, sweetheart,” hisses the thing to my friend.

I catch a glimpse of Aenea out of the corner of my eye. She is standing on the ledge just beyond the platform. She is not moving. Her face is impassive. This is unlike my beloved… normally she would be throwing stones, leaping on an enemy’s back… anything but allowing me to fight this thing alone. This is your moment, Raul, my darling. Her voice is as clear as a whisper in my mind. It is a whisper. Coming from the auditory pickups in my folded-back skinsuit cowl.

I am still wearing the damned thing, as well as my useless climbing harness. I start to subvocalize in response, but remember that I’d jacked into the ship’s communicator in my upper pocket when I called the ship from the summit of T’ien Shan and I will be broadcasting to the ship as well as Aenea if I use it now.

I move to my left, blocking the creature’s way again. Less room to maneuver now.

Nemes moves faster this time, feinting left and slashing in from my right, swinging her right arm backhand toward my ribs.

I leap back but the blade slices meat just below my lowest right rib. I duck, but her claws flash—her left claws go for my eyes—I duck again, but her fingers slice a section of my scalp away. For an instant the air is filled with atomized blood again.

I take one step and swing my own right arm backhand, chopping down as if I were swinging a sledgehammer, my fist connecting with the side of her neck just below her right jawline. Synthetic flesh pulps and tears. The metal and tubes beneath do not bend.

Nemes slashes backhand again with her scythe arm and claws with her left hand. I leap away.

She misses completely.

I step in quickly and kick the back of her knees, hoping to sweep her legs out from under her.

It is eight meters to the broken railing at the far edge. If I could get her rolling… even if we both go over…

It is like kicking a steel stanchion. My leg goes numb at the force of my kick, but she does not budge. Fluids and flesh collapse over her endoskeleton, but she does not lose her footing. She must weigh twice what I do.

She kicks back and breaks a left rib or two of mine. I hear them crack. The wind goes out of me suddenly, explosively.

I reel backward, half expecting a ring rope to be there, but there is only the cliff face, a wall of hard, slick, vertical rock. A piton bolt slams into my back, stunning me for an instant.

I know now what I will do.

The next breath is like breathing through fire, so I quickly take several more painful breaths, confirming that I can breathe, trying to get my wind back. I feel lucky—I don’t think the broken ribs have penetrated my left lung.

Nemes opens her arms to prevent my escape and moves in closer.

I step into her foul embrace, getting inside the killing sweep of the bladed forearm, and bring my fists together as hard as I can on either side of her head. Her ears pulp—this time there is a yellow fluid filling the air—but I feel the permasteel solidity of the skull under the bruised flesh. My hands rebound. I stagger backward, hands and arms and fists temporarily useless.

Nemes leaps.

I lean back on the rock, raise both legs, catch her on the chest as she descends, and kick out with all of the strength in my body.

She slashes as she flies backward, slicing through part of my harness, most of my jacket and skinsuit, and the muscle above my chest. It is on the right side of my chest. She has not cut through the comlink. Good.

She back flips and lands on her feet, still five meters from the edge. There is no way that I am going to get her to and over the platform edge.

She will not play the game under my rules.

I rush her, fists raised.

Nemes brings her left hand up, cupped and clawed, in a quick, disemboweling scoop. I have slid to a stop millimeters short of that death blow and now, as she pulls her right arm back in preparation to scythe me in two, I pivot on one foot and kick her in her flat chest with all the strength of my body. Nemes grunts and bites at my leg, her jaws snapping forward like a large dog’s.

Her teeth chew off the heel and sole of my boot, but miss flesh.

Catching my balance, I lunge forward again, gripping her right wrist with my left hand to keep the scythe arm from scraping my back clear of flesh down to my spine, and stepping in close to get a handful of her hair. She is snapping at my face, her rows of teeth directly in front of my eyes, the air between us filled with her yellow saliva or blood substitute. I am bending her head back as we pivot, two violent dancers straining against one another, but her lank, short hair is slippery with my blood and her lubricant and my fingers are slipping.

Lunging against her again to keep her off balance, I shift my fingers to her eye sockets and pull back with all of the strength in my arms and upper body.

Her head tilts back, thirty degrees—fifty—sixty—I should be hearing the snap of her spinal cord—eighty degrees—ninety. Her neck is bent backward at right angles to her torso, her marble eyes cold against my straining fingers, her wide lips stretching wider as the teeth snap at my forearm.

I release her.

She comes forward as if propelled by a giant spring. Her claws sink into my back, scrape bone at the right shoulder and left shoulder blade.

I crouch and swing short, hard blows, pounding her ribs and belly. Two—four—six fast shots, pivoting inside, the top of my head against her torn and oily chest, blood from my lacerated scalp flowing over both of us. Something in her chest or diaphragm snaps with a metallic twang and Nemes vomits yellow fluid over my neck and shoulders.

I stagger back and she grins at me, sharpened teeth gleaming through the bubbling yellow bile that drips from her chin onto the already slippery boards of the platform.

She screams—steam hissing from a dying boiler—and rushes again, scythe arm slicing through the air in an invisible arc.

I leap back. Three meters to the rock wall or ledge where Aenea stands.

Nemes swings backarm, her forearm a propeller, a whizzing pendulum of steel. She can herd me anywhere she wants me now.

She wants me dead or out of the way. She wants Aenea.

I jump back again, the blade cutting through the fabric just above belt line this time. I have jumped left this time, more toward the rock wall than the ledge.

Aenea is unprotected for this second. I am no longer between her and the creature.

Nemes’s weakness. I am betting everything… Aenea… on this: she is a born predator. This close to a kill, she cannot resist finishing me.

Nemes swings to her right, keeping the option open of leaping toward Aenea, but also pursuing me toward the cliff face. The scythe swings backhand at my head for a clean decapitation.

I trip and roll farther to my left, away from Aenea. I am on the boards now, legs flailing.

Nemes straddles me, yellow fluid spattering my face and chest. She raises the scythe arm, screams, and brings the arm down.

“Ship! Land on this platform. Immediately. No discussion!”

I gasp this into the comthread pickup as I roll against Nemes’s legs. Her bladed forearm slams into the tough bonsai cedar where my head was a second before.

I am under her. The blade of her arm is sunk deep into the dense wood. For just a few seconds, she is bent over to claw at me and does not have the leverage to free the cutting edge.

A shadow falls over both of us.

The nails of her left hand slash the right side of my head—almost severing my ear, slicing along the jawbone, and just missing my jugular.

My right hand is palm up under her jaw, trying to keep those teeth from opening and closing on my neck or face. She is stronger than I am.

My life depends upon getting out from under her.

Her forearm is still stuck in the platform floor, but this serves her purpose, anchoring her to me.

The shadow deepens. Ten seconds. No more.

Nemes claws my restraining hands away and wrenches the blade from the wood, staggering to her feet. Her eyes move left to where Aenea stands unguarded.

I roll away from Nemes… and away from Aenea… leaving my friend undefended. Claw cold rock to get to my feet. My right hand is useless—some tendon slashed in these final seconds—so I raise my left hand, pull the safety line from my harness—I can only hope it is still intact—and clip the carabiner onto the piton bolt with a metallic slap, like handcuffs slamming home.

Nemes pivots to her left, dismissing me now, black marble eyes on Aenea. My friend stands her ground.

The ship lands on the platform, turning off its EM repellors as ordered, allowing its full weight to rest on the wood, crushing the pavilion of Right Meditation with a terrible splintering, the ship’s archaic fins filling most of the space, just missing Nemes and me.

The creature glances once over her shoulder at the huge black ship looming above her, obviously dismisses it, and crouches to leap at Aenea.

For a second I think that the bonsai cedar will hold… that the platform is even stronger than Aenea’s calculations and my experience suggest… but then there is one horrendous, tearing, splintering sound, and the entire top Right Meditation platform and much of the stairway down to the Right Mindfulness pavilion tear away from the mountain.

I see the people watching from the ship’s balcony thrown back into the interior of the ship as it falls.

“Ship!” I gasp into the comthread pickup. “Hover!” Then I turn my attention back to Nemes.

The platform falls away beneath her. She leaps toward Aenea. My friend does not step back.

Only the platform falling out from beneath her keeps Nemes from completing her leap. She falls just short, but her claws strike the stone ledge, throw sparks, find a hold.

The platform rips and tears away, disintegrating as it tumbles into the abyss, some parts striking the main platform below, tearing it away in places, piling debris at other places.

Nemes is dangling from the rock, scrambling with her claws and feet, just a meter below where Aenea stands.

I have eight meters of safety line. Using my workable left arm, my blood making the rope dangerously slippery, I let out several meters and kick away from the cliff where I dangle.

Nemes pulls herself up to where she can get her clawed fingers over the top of the ledge. She finds a ridge or fissure and pulls herself up and out, an expert climber overcoming an overhang. Her body is arched like a bow as her feet scramble on the stone, pulling her higher so that she can throw herself up and over the ledge at Aenea, who has not moved. I swing back away from Nemes, bouncing across the rock—feeling the slick stone against my lacerated bare sole where Nemes has torn away my boot—seeing that the rope I am depending upon has been frayed in the struggle, not knowing if it will hold for another few seconds.

I put more stress on it, swinging high away from Nemes in a pendulum arc.

Nemes pulls herself up onto Aenea’s ledge, to her knees, getting to her feet a meter from my darling.

I swing high, rocks scraping my right shoulder, thinking for one sickening second that I do not have enough speed and line, but then feeling that I do—just enough—just barely enough—Nemes swivels just as I swing up behind her, my legs opening in embrace, then closing around her, ankles crossing.

She screams and raises her scythe arm.

My groin and belly are unprotected.

Ignoring that—ignoring the unraveling line and the pain everywhere—I cling tight as gravity and momentum swing us back—she is heavier than I—for another terrible second I hang connected and she does not budge—but she has not found her balance yet—she teeters on the edge—I arc backward, trying to move my center of gravity toward my bleeding shoulders—and Nemes comes off the ledge.

I open my legs immediately, releasing her.

She swings her scythe arm, missing my belly by millimeters as I swing back and out, but the motion sends her hurtling forward, farther away from the ledge and rock wall, out over the hole where the platform had been. I scrape out and back along the cliff wall, trying to arrest my momentum. The safety line breaks.

I spread-eagle across the rockface, begin sliding down. My right hand is useless. My left fingers find a narrow hold… lose it… I am sliding faster… my left foot finds a ledge a centimeter wide. That and friction hold me against the rock long enough for me to look over my left shoulder.

Nemes is twisting as she falls, trying to change her trajectory enough to sink claws or scythe into the remaining edges of the lowest platform.

She misses by four or five centimeters.

A hundred meters farther down, she strikes a rock outcropping and is propelled farther out above the clouds. Steps, posts, beams, and platform pillars are falling into cloud a kilometer below her.

Nemes screams—a shattered calliope scream of pure rage and frustration—and the echo bounces from rock to rock around me.

I can no longer hold on. I’ve lost too much blood and had too many muscles torn away. I feel the rock sliding away under my chest, cheek, palm, and straining left foot.

I look to my left to say goodbye to Aenea, if only with a gaze.

Her arm catches me as I begin to slide away. She has free-climbed out above me along the sheer face as I watched Nemes fall.

My heart pounds with the terror that my weight will pull both of us off. I feel myself slipping… feel Aenea’s strong hands slipping… I am covered in blood. She does not let go. “Raul,” she says and her voice is shaking, but with emotion, not fatigue or terror. With her foot on the ledge the only thing holding us against the cliff, she releases her left hand, sweeps it up, and clamps her safety line on to my dangling carabiner still attached to the piton.

We both slide off and away, scraping skin.

Aenea instantly hugs me with both arms, wraps both legs around me. It is a repeat of my tight embrace of Nemes, but fueled by love and the passion to survive this time, not hate and the urge to destroy. We fall eight meters to the end of her safety line. I think that my extra weight will pull the piton out or snap the line. We rebound, bounce three times, and hang above nothing. The piton holds. The safety line holds. Aenea’s grip holds. “Raul,” she says again. “My God, my God.” I think that she is patting my head, but realize that she is trying to pull my torn scalp back into place, trying to keep my torn ear from coming off.

“It’s all right,” I try to say, but find that my lips are bleeding and swollen. I can’t enunciate the words I need to say to the ship.

Aenea understands. She leans forward and whispers into the comthread pickup on my cowl. “Ship—hover and pick us up. Quickly.”

The shadow descends, moving in as if to crush us. The crowd is on the balcony again, eyes wide, as the giant ship floats to within three meters—gray cliffs on either side of us now—and extrudes a plank from the balcony. Friendly hands pull us in to safety.

Aenea does not release her grip with arms or legs until we are carried in off the balcony, into the carpeted interior, away from the drop.

I dimly hear the ship’s voice. “There are warships hurrying in-system toward us. Another is just above the atmosphere ten thousand kilometers to the west and closing…”

“Get us out of here,” orders Aenea.

“Straight up and out. I’ll give you the in-system coordinates in a minute. Go!” I feel dizzy and close my eyes to the sound of the fusion engines roaring. I have a faint impression of Aenea kissing me, holding me, kissing my eyelids and bloody forehead and cheek. My friend is crying.

“Rachel,” comes Aenea’s voice from a distance, “can you diagnose him?”

Fingers other than my beloved’s touch me briefly. There are stabs of pain, but these are increasingly remote. A coldness is descending.

I try to open my eyes but find both of them sealed shut by blood or swelling or both.

“What looks worse is the least threatening,” I hear Rachel say in her soft but no-nonsense voice. “The scalp wound, ear, broken leg, and so forth. But I think that there are internal injuries… not just the ribs, but internal bleeding. And the claw wounds on his back go to the spinal cord.”

Aenea is still crying, but her tone is still in command. “Some of you… Lhomo… A. Bettik… help me get him to the doc-in-the-box.”

“I’m sorry,” comes the ship’s voice, just at the edge of my consciousness, “but all three receptacles in the autosurgeon are in use. Sergeant Gregorius collapsed from his internal injuries and was brought to the third niche. All three patients are currently on full life support.”

“Damn,” I hear Aenea say under her breath. “Raul? My dear, can you hear me?”

I start to reply, to say that I’m fine, don’t worry about me, but all I hear from my own swollen lips and dislocated jaw is a garbled moan.

“Raul,” continues Aenea, “we’ve got to get away from these Pax ships. We’re going to carry you down to one of the cryogenic fugue cubbies, my dear. We’re going to let you sleep awhile until there’s a slot free in the doc-in-the-box. Can you hear me, Raul?”

I decide against speaking and manage to nod.

I feel something loose hanging down on my forehead, like a wet, displaced cap. My scalp.

“All right,” says Aenea. She leans close and whispers in my remaining ear. “I love you, my dear friend. You’re going to be all right. I know that.”

Hands lift me, carry me, eventually lay me on something hard and cool. The pain rages, but it is a distant thing and does not concern me.

Before they slide the lid closed on the cryogenic fugue cubby, I can distinctly hear the ship’s voice saying calmly, “Four Pax warships hailing us. They say that if we do not cut power in ten minutes, they will destroy us.

May I point out that we are at least eleven hours from any translation point? And all four Pax warships are within firing distance.”

I hear Aenea’s tired voice. “Continue on this heading toward the coordinates I gave you, Ship. No reply to Pax warships.”

I try to smile. We have done this before—trying to outrun Pax ships against great odds. But there is one thing that I am learning that I would love to explain to Aenea, if my mouth worked and if my mind would clear a bit—it’s just that however long one beats those odds, they catch up to you eventually. I consider this a minor revelation, overdue satori.

But now the cold is creeping over me, into me, through me—chilling my heart and mind and bones and belly. I can only hope that it is the cryogenic fugue coils cycling faster than I remember from my last trip. If it is death, then… well, it’s death. But I want to see Aenea again.

This is my last thought.

24

Falling! Heart pounding wildly, I awoke in what seemed to be a different universe.

I was floating, not falling. At first I thought that I was in an ocean, a salt ocean with positive buoyancy, floating like a fetus in a sepia-tinged salt sea, but then I realized that there was no gravity at all, no waves or currents, and that the medium was not water but thick sepia light. The ship? No, I was in a large, empty, darkened but light-circled space—an empty ovoid some fifteen meters or more across, with parchment walls through which I could see both the filtered light of a blazing sun and something more complicated, a vast organic structure curving away on all sides. I weakly moved my hands from their floating position to touch my face, head, body, and arms…

I was floating, tethered by only the lightest harness straps to some sort of sticktite strip on the curved inner wall. I was barefoot and wearing only a soft cotton tunic that I did not recognize—pajamas? hospital gown? My face was tender and I could feel new ridges that might be scars. My hair was gone, the flesh above my skull was raw and definitely scarred, and my ear was there but very tender. My arms had several faint scars that I could see in the dim light. I pulled up my trouser leg and looked at what had been a badly broken lower leg. Healed and firm. I felt my ribs—tender but intact. I had made it to the doc-in-the-box after all. I must have spoken aloud, for a dark figure floating nearby said, “Eventually you did, Raul Endymion. But some of the surgery was done the old-fashioned way… and by me.” I started—floating up against the sticktite strips. It had not been Aenea’s voice.

The dark form floated closer and I recognized the shape, the hair, and—finally—the voice. “Rachel,” I said. My tongue was dry, my lips cracked. I croaked the word rather than spoke it.

Rachel came closer and offered me a squeeze bottle. The first few drops came out as tumbling spheres—most of which splashed me on the face—but I soon got the knack of it and squeezed drops into my open mouth. The water tasted cool and wonderful.

“You’ve been getting liquids and sustenance via IV for two weeks,” said Rachel, “but it’s better if you drink directly.”

“Two weeks!” I said. I looked around. “Aenea? Is she… are they…”

“Everyone’s all right,” said Rachel.

“Aenea’s busy. She’s spent much of the last couple of weeks in here with you… watching over you… but when she had to go out with Minmun and the others, she had me stay with you.”

“Minmun?” I said. I peered through the translucent wall. One bright star—smaller than Hyperion’s sun. The incredible geometries of the structure spreading away, curving out, from this ovoid room.

“Where am I?” I said. “How did we get here?”

Rachel chuckled. “I’ll answer the second question first, let you see the answer to the first yourself in a few minutes. Aenea had the ship jump to this place. Father Captain de Soya, his Sergeant Gregorius, and the officer, Carel Shan, knew the coordinates for this star system. They were all unconscious, but the other survivor—their former prisoner, Hoag Liebler—knew where this place was hiding.”

I looked through the wall again. The structure seemed huge—a light and shadow latticework stretching out in all directions from this pod. How could they hide anything this large? And who hid it? “How did we get to a translation point in time?” I croaked, taking a few more globules of water. “I thought the Pax warships were closing in.”

“They were,” said Rachel. “They did. We could never have gotten to a Hawking-drive translation point before they destroyed us. Here—you don’t need to be stuck to the wall any longer.” She ripped off the sticktite strips and I floated free. Even in zero-g, I felt very weak.

Orienting myself so that I could still see Rachel’s face in the dim sepia light, I said, “So how did we do it?”

“We didn’t translate,” said the young woman. “Aenea directed the ship to a point in space where we farcasted directly to this system.”

“Farcast? There was an active space farcast portal? Like one of the kinds that the Hegemony FORCE ships used to transit? I didn’t think that any of those had survived the Fall.”

Rachel was shaking her head. “There was no farcaster portal. Nothing. Just an arbitrary point a few hundred thousand klicks from the second moon. It was quite a chase… the Pax ships kept hailing us and threatening to fire. Finally they did… lance beams leaping toward us from a dozen sources—we wouldn’t even have been a debris field, just gas on a widening trajectory—but then we reached the point Aenea had pointed us toward and suddenly we were… here.”

I did not say Where is here? again, but I floated to the curved wall and tried to peer through it.

The wall felt warm, spongy, organic, and it was filtering most of the sunlight. The resulting interior light was soft and beautiful, but it made it difficult to see out—just the one blazing star was visible and the hint of that incredible geometric structure beyond our pod.

“Ready to see the ‘where’?” said Rachel.

“Yeah.”

“Pod,” said Rachel, “transparent surface, please.”

Suddenly there was nothing separating us from the outside. I almost shouted in terror. Instead, I flailed my arms and legs trying to find a solid surface to cling to until Rachel kicked closer and steadied me with a firm hand.

We were in space. The surrounding pod had simply disappeared. We were floating in space—seemed to be floating in space, except for the presence of air to breathe—and we were far out on a branch of a… Tree is not the right word. I had seen trees. This was not a tree.

I had heard much about the old Templar worldtrees, had seen the stump of the Worldtree on God’s Grove—and I’d heard about the kilometers-long shiptrees that had traveled between the star systems back in Martin Silenus’s pilgrim days.

This was not a worldtree or a shiptree.

I had heard wild legends—from Aenea actually, so they were probably not legends—of a tree-ring around a star, a fantastical braided ring of living material stretching all the way around an Old Earth System-like sun. I had once tried to calculate how much living material that would require, and decided that it had to be nonsense.

This was no tree-ring.

What stretched out on every side of me, curving inward across expanses too large for my planet-formed mind to take in, was a branched and interwoven sphere of living plant material—trunks tens or hundreds of kilometers across, branches klicks wide, leaves hundreds of meters across, trailing root systems stretching like God’s synapses for hundreds, no… thousands of kilometers into space—trellised and wrapped branches stretching out and inward in all directions, trunks the length of Old Earth’s Mississippi River looking like tiny twigs in the distance, tree shapes the size of my home continent of Aquila on Hyperion blending into thousands of other clumps and masses of greenery, all bending inward and away, on all sides, in every direction… there were many black gaps, holes into space, some gaps larger than the trunks and greenery lacing through them… but nowhere were the gaps complete… everywhere the trunks and branches and roots intertwined, opening uncounted billions of green leaves to the star blazing away in the locus of vacuum at the center of…

I closed my eyes.

“This can’t be real,” I said.

“It is,” said Rachel.

“The Ousters?” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea’s friend, the child of the Cantos. “And the Templars. And the ergs. And… others. It’s alive but a construct… a minded thing.”

“Impossible,” I said. “It would take millions of years to grow this… sphere.”

“Biosphere,” said Rachel, smiling.

I shook my head again. “Biosphere is an old term. It’s just the closed vivisystem on and around a planet.”

“This is a biosphere,” Rachel said again. “Only there are no planets here. Comets, yes, but no planets.” She pointed.

In the far distance, perhaps hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where the interior of this living sphere began to fade to a green blur even in the unblinking vacuum, a long, white streak moved slowly through the black gap between trunks.

“A comet,” I repeated stupidly.

“For watering,” said Rachel. “They have to use millions of them. Luckily there are many billions in the Oört cloud. More billions in the Kuiper Belt.”

I stared. There were other white specks out there, each with a long, glowing tail. Some moved between the trunks and branches as I watched, giving me some idea of the scale of this biosphere. The comet trajectories were routed through the gaps in the plant material. If this is truly a sphere, the comets would have to pass back through the living globe on their way out-system. What kind of confidence does it take to do such a thing? “What is this thing we’re in?” I said.

“An environmental pod,” said Rachel. “Life bulb. This one is tailored for medical duty. It’s not only been monitoring your IV drip, vital signs, and tissue regeneration, it’s been growing and manufacturing many of the medicines and other chemicals.”

I reached out and touched the nearly transparent material. “How thick is it?”

“About a millimeter,” said Rachel. “But very strong. It can shield us from most micrometeorite impacts.”

“Where do the Ousters get such a material?”

“They biofacture the genes and it grows itself,” said Rachel. “Do you feel up to going out to see Aenea and meeting some people? Everyone’s been waiting for your awakening.”

“Yes,” I said, and then, quickly, “no! Rachel?”

She floated there, waiting. I saw how lustrous her dark eyes were in the amazing light. Much like my darling’s.

“Rachel…” I began awkwardly.

She waited, floating, reaching out to touch the transparent pod wall to orient herself heads-up in relation to me.

“Rachel, we haven’t really talked much…”

“You didn’t like me,” said the young woman with a slight smile.

“That’s not true… I mean, it was true, in a way… but it’s because I just didn’t understand things at first. It had been five years for Aenea that I’d been away… it was difficult… I guess that I was jealous.”

She arched a dark eyebrow. “Jealous, how, Raul? Did you think that Aenea and I were lovers all those standard years you were gone?”

“Well, no… I mean, I didn’t know…”

Rachel held up a hand, sparing me further flummoxing. “We aren’t,” she said. “We never were. Aenea would never have considered such a thing. Theo might have entertained the possibility, but she knew from the start that Aenea and I were destined to love certain men.”

I stared. Destined? Rachel smiled again. I could imagine that grin on the little girl Sol Weintraub had talked about in his Hyperion Canto. “Don’t worry, Raul. I happen to know for a fact that Aenea has never loved anyone but you. Even when she was a little girl. Even before she met you. You’ve always been her chosen one.” The young woman’s smile became rueful. “We should all be so lucky.”

I started to speak, hesitated.

Rachel’s smile faded. “Oh. She told you about the one-year eleven-month one-week six-hour interregnum?”

“Yes,” I said. “And about her having…”

I stopped. It would be foolish to choke up in front of this strong woman. She would never look at me the same again.

“A baby?” finished Rachel quickly.

I looked at her as if trying to find some answer in her handsome features. “Did Aenea tell you about it?” I said, feeling like I was betraying my dear friend somewhat by trying to get this information from someone else. But I could not stop.

“Did you know at the time what…”

“Where she was?” said Rachel, returning my intense gaze. “What was happening to her? That she was getting married?”

I could only nod.

“Yes,” said Rachel. “We knew.”

“Were you there with her?”

Rachel seemed to hesitate, as if weighing her answer. “No,” she said at last. “A. Bettik, Theo, and I waited for almost two years for her to return. We carried on her… ministry? Mission?… Whatever it is, we carried it on while she was gone… sharing some of her lessons, finding people who wished to partake of communion, letting them know when she would return.”

“So you knew when she would return?”

“Yes,” said Rachel. “To the day.”

“How?”

“That’s when she had to return,” said the dark-haired woman. “She had taken every possible minute that she could without jeopardizing her mission. The Pax was hunting for us the next day… they would have seized all of us if Aenea had not returned and farcast us away.”

I nodded, but was not thinking about close calls with the Pax. “Did you meet… him?” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep my tone neutral.

Rachel’s expression remained serious. “Father to their child, you mean? Aenea’s husband?”

I felt that Rachel was not trying to be cruel, but the words tore at me far worse than had Nemes’s claws. “Yes,” I said. “Him.”

Rachel shook her head. “None of us had met him when she went away.”

“But you do know why she chose him to be the father of her child?” I persisted, feeling like the Grand Inquisitor we had left behind on T’ien Shan.

“Yes,” said Rachel, returning my gaze, giving me no more.

“Was it something to do with her… her mission?”

I said, feeling my throat growing tighter and tighter, my voice more strained. “Is it something she had to do… some reason the child had to be born to them? Can you tell me anything, Rachel?”

She took my wrist then, gripping it strongly. “Raul, you know that Aenea will explain this when it’s time to do so.”

I pulled away, making a rude noise. “When it’s time,” I growled. “Jesus H. Christ, I’m sick of hearing that phrase. And I’m sick of waiting.”

Rachel shrugged. “Confront her then. Threaten to beat her up if she doesn’t tell you. You clobbered that Nemes-thing… Aenea shouldn’t be a problem.”

I glowered at the woman.

“Seriously, Raul, this is between you and Aenea. All I can tell you is that you are the only man she has ever talked about, and—as far as I can tell—the only man she has ever loved.”

“How the hell can you…” I began angrily and then forced myself to shut up. I patted her arm awkwardly, the motion making me begin to pivot around the center of my own axis. It was hard to stay near someone in zero-g without touching them. “Thank you, Rachel,” I said.

“Ready to go see everyone?”

I took a breath. “Almost,” I said. “Can this pod surface be made reflective?”

“Pod,” said Rachel, “ninety percent translucence. High interior reflectivity.” To me she said, “Checking in the mirror before your big date?”

The surface had become about as reflective as a still puddle of water—not a perfect mirror, but clear enough and bright enough to show me a Raul Endymion with scars on his face and bare scalp, the skin on his skull a babyish pink, traces of bruise and swelling under and around his eyes, and thin… very thin. The bones and muscles of my face and upper body seemed to have been sketched in bold pencil strokes. My eyes looked different.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said again.

Rachel made a motion with her hand. “The autosurgeon wanted you for another week, but Aenea couldn’t wait. The scars aren’t permanent… at least most of them. The pod medicine in the IV is taking care of the regeneration. Your hair will start growing back in two or three standard weeks.”

I touched my scalp. It was like patting the scarred and especially tender butt of an ugly newborn. “Two or three weeks,” I said. “Great. Fucking great.”

“Don’t sweat it,” said Rachel. “I think it looks rather dashing, actually. I’d keep that look if I were you, Raul. Besides, I hear that Aenea is a pushover for older men. And right now, you certainly look older.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“You’re welcome,” said Rachel. “Pod. Open iris. Access to main pressurized stem connector.”

She led the way out, kicking and floating ahead of me through the irising wall.

Aenea hugged me so hard when I came into the room… pod… that I wondered if my broken ribs might have given way again. I hugged her back just as hard.

The trip through the pressurized stem connector had been commonplace enough, if one counted being shot down a flexible, translucent, two-meter-wide pipeline at speeds up to what I estimated as sixty klicks per hour—they used currents of oxygen flowing at high speeds in opposite directions to give a boost to one’s kicking and swimming through air—all the while other people, mostly very thin, hairless, and exceptionally tall other people, whizzed by silently in the opposite direction at closing speeds in excess of 120 klicks per hour, missing us by centimeters. Then there were the hub pods, into which Rachel and I were accelerated at high speed, like corpuscles being blasted into ventricles and auricles of a huge heart, and through which we tumbled, kicked, avoided other high-speed travelers, and exited via one of a dozen other stem connector openings. I was lost within minutes, but Rachel seemed to know her way—she pointed out that there were subtle colors embedded in the plant flesh over each exit—and soon we had entered a pod not much larger than mine, but crowded with cubbies, sticktite seating areas, and people. Some of the people—like Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, and Lhomo Dondrub—I knew well: other people there—Father Captain de Soya, obviously renewed and recovered from his terrible wounds and wearing a priest’s black trousers, tunic, and Roman collar, Sergeant Gregorius in his Swiss Guard combat fatigues—I had met recently and knew by sight; other people, like the long, thin, otherworldly Ousters and the hooded Templars were wondrous and strange, but well within my range of understanding; while still other individuals there—quickly introduced by Aenea as the Templar True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen and the former Hegemony FORCE Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, I knew of but did not actually believe I was meeting. More than Rachel or the fact of Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, these were figures not just from the old poet’s Cantos but archetypes from deep myth, long dead at the very least, and probably never real to begin with in the fixed, everyday, eat-sleep-and-use-the-toilet firmament of things.

And finally in this zero-gravity Ouster pod there were the other people who were not people at all, at least from my frame of reference: such as the willowy green beings who were introduced by Aenea as LL-EEOONN and OO-EEAALL, two of the few surviving Seneschai empaths from Hebron—alien and intelligent beings. I looked at these strange creatures—the palest cypress-green skin and eyes; bodies so thin that I could have encircled their torso with my fingers; symmetrical like us with two arms, two legs, a head, but, of course, not really like us at all; limbs articulated more like single, unbroken, fluid lines than evolved of hinged bone and gristle; splayed digits like toads’ hands; and heads more like a human fetus’s than a human adult’s. Their eyes were little more than shadowy spots on the green flesh of their faces.

The Seneschai had been reported to have died out during the early days of the Hegira… they were little more than legend, even less real than the tale of the soldier Kassad or the Templar Het Masteen.

One of these green legends brushed its three-fingered hand over my palm as we were introduced.

There were other non-human, non-Ouster, non-android entities in the pod. Floating near the translucent wall of the pod were what looked to be large, greenish-white platelets—soft, shuddering saucers of soft material—each almost two meters across. I had seen these life-forms before… on the cloud world where I had been eaten by the sky squid.

Not eaten, M. Endymion, came surges of language echoing in my head, only transported.

Telepathy? I thought, half directing the query to the platelets. I remembered the surge of language-thought on the cloud world, and how I had wondered where it had originated.

It was Aenea who answered. “It feels like telepathy,” she said softly, “but there’s nothing mystical about it. The Akerataeli learned our language the old-fashioned way—their zeplin symbiotes heard the sound vibrations and the Akerataeli broke it down and analyzed it. They control the zeplins by a form of long-distance, very tightly focused microwave pulses…”

“The zeplin was the thing that swallowed me on the cloud world,” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea.

“Like the zeplins on Whirl?”

“Yes, and in Jupiter’s atmosphere as well.”

“I thought that they were hunted to extinction during the early Hegira years.”

“They were eradicated on Whirl,” said Aenea. “And even before the Hegira on Jupiter. But you weren’t paragliding your kayak on Jupiter or Whirl… but on another oxygen-rich gas giant six hundred light-years into the Outback.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry I interrupted. You were saying… microwave impulses…”

Aenea made that graceful throwing-away gesture I’d known since she was a child. “Just that they control their zeplin symbiote partners’ actions by precise microwave stimulation of certain nerve and brain centers. We’ve given the Akerataeli permission to stimulate our speech centers so that we “hear” their messages. I take it that it’s rather like playing a complicated piano for them…”

I nodded but did not really understand.

“The Akerataeli are also a spacefaring race,” said Father Captain de Soya. “Over the eons, they have colonized more than ten thousand oxygen-rich gas giant worlds.”

“Ten thousand!” I said. I think that for a moment my jaw actually hung slack. In humankind’s more than twelve hundred years of traveling in space we had explored and settled on less than ten percent of that number of planets.

“The Akerataeli have been at it longer than we,” said de Soya softly.

I looked at the gently vibrating platelets. They had no eyes that I could see, certainly no ears. Were they hearing us? They must… one of them had responded to my thoughts. Could they read minds as well as stimulate language-thoughts? While I was staring at them, the conversation between the humans and Ousters in the room resumed.

“The intelligence is reliable,” said the pale Ouster whom I later learned was named Navson Hamnim. “There were at least three hundred archangel-class ships gathering at System Lacaille 9352. Each ship has a representative of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem or Malta. It is definitely a major Crusade.”

“Lacaille 9352,” mused de Soya. “Sibiatu’s Bitterness. I know the place. How old is this intelligence?”

“Twenty hours,” said Navson Hamnim. “The data was sent via the only Gideon-drive courier drone we have left… of the three drones captured during your raids, two have been destroyed. We are fairly sure that the scoutship which sent this drone was detected and destroyed seconds after launching the courier.”

“Three hundred archangels,” said de Soya. He rubbed his cheeks. “If they are aware we know about them, they could make a Gideon jump this direction within days… hours. Assume two days’ resurrection time, we may have less than three days to prepare. Have defenses been improved since I left?”

Another Ouster whom I later knew as Systenj Coredwell opened his hands in a gesture that I would discover meant “in no way.” I noticed that there was webbing between the long fingers.

“Most of the fighting ships have had to jump to the Great Wall salient to hold off their Task Force HORSEHEAD. The fighting is very bitter there. Few of the ships are expected to return.”

“Does your intelligence say whether the Pax knows what you have here?” asked Aenea.

Navson Hamnim opened his hands in a subtle variation of Coredwell’s gesture.

“We think not. But they know now that this has been a major staging area for our recent defensive battles. I would venture that they think this is just another base—perhaps with a partial orbital forest ring.”

“Is there anything we can do to break up the Crusade before it jumps this way?” said Aenea, speaking to everyone in the room.

“No.” The flat syllable came from the tall man who had been introduced as Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. His Web English had a strange accent. He was a tall man, extremely thin but muscular, with an equally thin beard along his jawline and around his mouth. In the old poet’s Cantos, Kassad had been described as a reasonably young man, but this warrior was in his standard sixties, at least, with heavy lines around his thin mouth and small eyes, his dark complexion burned even darker by long exposure to desert-world sun or deep-space UV, the spiked hair on top of his head rising like short silver nails. Everyone looked at Kassad and waited.

“With de Soya’s ship destroyed,” said the Colonel, “our only chance at successful hit-and-run operations is gone. The few Hawking-drive warships we have left would take a time-debt of at least two months to jump to Lacaille 9352 and back. The Crusade archangels would almost certainly be here and gone by then… and we would be defenseless.”

Navson Hamnim kicked away from the pod wall and oriented himself right side up in relation to Kassad. “These few warships do not offer us a defense in any case,” he said softly, his own Web English more musical than accented. “Should we not consider dying while on the attack?”

Aenea floated between the two men. “I think that we should consider not dying at all,” she said. “Nor allowing the biosphere to be destroyed.”

A positive sentiment, a voice spoke in my head. But not all positive sentiments can be supported by updrafts of possible action.

“True,” said Aenea, looking at the platelets, “but perhaps in this case the updrafts will build.”

Good thermals to you all, said the voice in my head. The platelets moved toward the pod wall, which irised open for them. Then they were gone.

Aenea took a breath. “Shall we meet on the Yggdrasill to share the main meal in seven hours and continue this discussion? Perhaps someone will have an idea.”

There was no dissension. People, Ousters, and Seneschai exited by a score of openings that had not been there a moment before.

Aenea floated over and hugged me again. I patted her hair.

“My friend,” she said softly. “Come with me.”

It was her private living pod—our private living pod, she informed me—and it was much like the one in which I awoke, except that there were organic shelves, niches, writing surfaces, storage cubbies, and facilities for comlog interface. Some of my clothes from the ship were folded neatly in a cubby and my extra boots were in a fiberplastic drawer.

Aenea pulled food from a cold-box cubby and began making sandwiches. “You must be hungry, my dear,” she said, tearing off pieces of rough bread. I saw zygoat cheese on the sticktite zero-g work surface, some wrapped pieces of roast beef that must have come from the ship, bulbs of mustard, and several tankards of T’ien Shan rice beer. Suddenly I was starved.

The sandwiches were large and thick. She set them on catchplates made of some strong fiber, lifted her own meal and a beer bulb, and kicked toward the outer wall. A portal appeared and began to iris open.

“Uh…” I said alertly, meaning—Excuse me, Aenea, but that’s space out there. Aren’t we both going to explosively decompress and die horribly? She kicked out through the organic portal and I shrugged and followed.

There were catwalks, suspension bridges, sticktite stairways, balconies, and terraces out there—made of steel-hard plant fiber and winding around the pods, stalks, branches, and trunks like so much ivy. There was also air to breathe. It smelled of a forest after a rain.

“Containment field,” I said, thinking that I should have expected this. After all, if the Consul’s ancient starship could have a balcony…

I looked around. “What powers it?” I said. “Solar receptors?”

“Indirectly,” said Aenea, finding us a sticktite bench and mat. There were no railings on this tiny, intricately woven balcony. The huge branch—at least thirty meters across—ended in a profusion of leaves above us and the latticework web of the trunks and branches “beneath” us convinced my inner ear that we were many kilometers up on a wall made of crisscrossed, green girders. I resisted the urge to throw myself down on the sticktite mat and cling for dear life. A radiant gossamer fluttered by, followed by some type of small bird with a v-shaped tail.

“Indirectly?” I said, my mouth full as I took a huge bite of sandwich.

“The sunlight—for the most part—is converted to containment fields by ergs,” continued my friend, sipping her beer and looking out at the seemingly infinite expanse of leaves above us, below us, to all sides of us, their green faces all turned toward the brilliant star. There was not enough air to give us a blue sky, but the containment field polarized the view toward the sun just enough to keep us from being blinded when we glanced that direction.

I almost spit my food out, managed to swallow instead, and said, “Ergs? As in Aldebaren energy binders? You were serious? Ergs like the one taken on the last Hyperion pilgrimage?”

“Yes,” said Aenea. Her dark eyes were focused on me now.

“I thought they were extinct.”

“Nope,” said Aenea.

I took a long drink from the beer bulb and shook my head. “I’m confused.”

“You have a right to be, my dear friend,” Aenea said softly.

“This place…” I made a weak gesture toward the wall of branches and leaves trailing away so much farther than a planetary horizon, the infinitely distant curve of green and black far above us. “It’s impossible,” I said.

“Not quite,” said Aenea. “The Templars and Ousters have been working on it—and others like it—for a thousand years.”

I began chewing again. The cheese and roast beef were delicious. “So this is where the thousands and millions of trees went when they abandoned God’s Grove during the Fall.”

“Some of them,” said Aenea. “But the Templars had been working with the Ousters to develop orbital forest rings and biospheres long before that.”

I peered up. The distances made me dizzy. The sense of being on this small, leafy platform so many kilometers above nothing made me reel.

Far below us and to our right, something that looked like a tiny, green sprig moved slowly between the latticed branches. I saw the film of energy field around it and realized that I was looking at one of the fabled Templar treeships, almost certainly kilometers long. “Is this finished then?” I said. “A true Dyson sphere? A globe around a star?”

Aenea shook her head. “Far from it, although about twenty standard years ago, they made contact with all the primary trunk tendrils. Technically it’s a sphere, but most of it is comprised of holes at this point—some many millions of klicks across.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I said, realizing that I could have been more eloquent. I rubbed my cheeks, feeling the heavy growth of beard there.

“I’ve been out of it for two weeks?” I said.

“Fifteen standard days,” said Aenea.

“Usually the doc-in-the-box works more quickly than that,” I said. I finished the sandwich, stuck the catchplate to the table surface, and concentrated on the beer.

“Usually it does,” agreed Aenea. “Rachel must have told you that you spent a relatively short time in the autosurgeon. She did most of the initial surgery herself.”

“Why?” I said.

“The box was full,” said Aenea. “We defrosted you from fugue as soon as we got here, but the three in the doc ahead of you were in bad shape. De Soya was near death for a full week. The sergeant… Gregorius… was much more seriously injured than he had let on when we met him on the Great Peak. And the third officer—Carel Shan—died despite the box’s and the Ouster medics’ best efforts.”

“Shit,” I said, lowering the beer. “I’m sorry to hear that.” One got used to autosurgeons fixing almost anything.

Aenea looked at me with such intensity that I could feel her gaze warming my skin as surely as I could feel the powerful sunlight. “How are you, Raul?”

“Great,” I said. “I ache a bit. I can feel the healing ribs. The scars itch. And I feel like I overslept by two weeks… but I feel good.”

She took my hand. I realized that her eyes were moist. “I would have been really pissed if you’d died on me,” she said after a moment, her voice thick.

“Me too.” I squeezed her hand, looked up, and suddenly leaped to my feet, sending the beer bulb spiraling off into thin air and almost launching myself. Only the sticktite velcro soles on my soft shoes kept me anchored. “Holy shit!” I said, pointing.

From this distance, it looked like a squid, perhaps only a meter or two long. From experience and a growing sense of perspective here, I knew better.

“One of the zeplins,” said Aenea. “The Akerataeli have tens of thousands working on the Biosphere. They stay inside the CO₂ and O₂ envelopes.”

“It’s not going to eat me again, is it?” I said.

Aenea grinned. “I doubt it. The one that got a taste of you has probably spread the word.”

I looked for my beer, saw the bulb tumbling away a hundred meters below us, considered leaping after it, thought better of it, and sat down on the sticktite bench.

Aenea gave me her bulb. “Go ahead. I can never finish those things.” She watched me drink.

“Any other questions while we’re talking?”

I swallowed and made a dismissive gesture.

“Well, there happens to be a bunch of extinct, mythical, and dead people around. Care to explain that?”

“By extinct you mean the zeplins, Seneschai, and Templars?” she said.

“Yeah. And the ergs… although I haven’t seen one of those yet.”

“The Templars and Ousters have been working to preserve such hunted sentient species the way the colonists on Maui-Covenant tried to save the Old Earth dolphins,” she said. “From the early Hegira colonists, then the Hegemony, and now the Pax.”

“And the mythical and dead people?” I said.

“By that you mean Colonel Kassad?”

“And Het Masteen,” I said. “And, for that matter, Rachel. We seem to have the whole cast of the friggin’ Hyperion Cantos showing up here.”

“Not quite,” said Aenea, her voice soft and a bit sad. “The Consul is dead. Father Duré is never allowed to live. And my mother is gone.”

“Sorry, kiddo…”

She touched my hand again. “That’s all right. I know what you mean… it’s disconcerting.”

“Did you know Colonel Kassad or Het Masteen before this?” I said.

Aenea shook her head. “My mother told me about them, of course… and Uncle Martin had things to add to his poem’s description. But they were gone before I was born.”

“Gone,” I repeated. “Don’t you mean dead?” I worked to remember the Cantos stanzas. According to the old poet’s tale, Het Masteen, the tall Templar, the True Voice of the Tree, had disappeared on the windwagon trip across Hyperion’s Sea of Grass shortly after his treeship, the Yggdrasill, had burned in orbit. Blood in the Templar’s cabin suggested the Shrike. He had left behind the erg in a Möbius cube. Sometime later, they had found Masteen in the Valley of the Time Tombs.

He had not been able to explain his absence—had said only that the blood in the windwagon had not been his—had cried out that it was his job to be the Voice of the Tree of Pain—and had died.

Colonel Kassad had disappeared at about that same time—shortly after entering the Valley of the Time Tombs—but the FORCE Colonel had, according to Martin Silenus’s Cantos, followed his phantom lover, Moneta, into the far future where he was to die in combat with the Shrike. I closed my eyes and recited aloud:

“Impressive memory,” said Aenea.

“Grandam used to cuff me if I screwed it up,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. The Templar and the Colonel sound dead to me.”

“And so they will be,” said Aenea. “And so shall we all.”

I waited for her to shift out of her Delphic phase.

“The Cantos say that Het Masteen was carried away somewhere… some-when by the Shrike,” she said. “He later died in the Valley of the Time Tombs after returning. The poem did not say if he was gone an hour or thirty years. Uncle Martin did not know.”

I squinted at her. “What about Kassad, kiddo? The Cantos are fairly specific there… the Colonel follows Moneta into the far future, engages in a battle with the Shrike…”

“With legions of Shrikes, actually,” corrected my friend.

“Yeah,” I said. I had never really understood that. “But it seems continuous enough… he follows her, he fights, he dies, his body is put in the Crystal Monolith, and it and Moneta begin the long trip back through time.”

Aenea nodded and smiled. “With the Shrike,” she said.

I paused. The Shrike had emerged from the Tombs… Moneta had traveled with it somehow… so although the Cantos clearly said that Kassad had destroyed the Shrike in that great, final battle, the monster was somehow alive and traveling with Moneta and Kassad’s body back through… Damn. Did the poem ever actually say that Kassad was dead?

“Uncle Martin had to fake parts of the tale, you know,” said Aenea. “He had some descriptions from Rachel, but he took poetic license on the parts he did not understand.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Rachel. Moneta.

The Cantos had clearly suggested that the girl-child Rachel, who went forward with her father, Sol, to the future, would return as the woman Moneta. Colonel Kassad’s phantom lover. The woman he would follow into the future to his fate… And what had Rachel said to me a few hours earlier when I was suspicious that she and Aenea were lovers? “I happen to be involved with a certain soldier… male… whom you’ll meet today. Well, actually, I will be involved with him someday. I mean… shit, it’s complicated.”

Indeed. My head hurt. I set down the beer bulb and held my head in my hands.

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Aenea.

I peered up at her through my fingers. “Care to explain?”

“Yes, but…”

“I know,” I said. “At some other time.”

“Yes,” said Aenea, her hand on mine.

“Any reason why we can’t talk about it now?” I said.

Aenea nodded. “We have to go in our pod now and opaque the walls,” she said.

“We do?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And then what?” I said.

“Then,” said Aenea, floating free of the sticktite mat and pulling me with her, “we make love for hours.”

25

Zero-g. Weightlessness. I had never really appreciated those terms and that reality before. Our living pod was opaqued to the point that the rich evening light glowed as if through thick parchment.

Once again, I had the impression of being in a warm heart. Once again I realized how much Aenea was in my heart.

At first the encounter bordered on the clinical as Aenea carefully removed my clothes and inspected the healing surgical scars, gently touched my repaired ribs, and ran her palm down my back.

“I should shave,” I said, “and shower.”

“Nonsense,” whispered my friend. “I’ve given you sponge and sonic baths every day… including this morning. You’re perfectly clean, my dear. And I like the whiskers.” She moved her fingers across my cheek.

We floated above the soft and rounded cubby shelves. I helped Aenea out of her shirt, trousers, and underwear. As each piece came clear, she kicked it through the air into the cubby drawer, shutting the fiber panel with her bare foot when everything was inside. We both chuckled. My own clothes were still floating in the quiet air, the sleeves of my shirt gesturing in slow motion.

“I’ll get the…” I began.

“No you won’t,” said Aenea and pulled me closer.

Even kissing demands new skills in zero-g. Aenea’s hair coiled around her head in a sunlit corona as I held her face in my hands and kissed her—her lips, eyes, cheeks, forehead, and lips again. We began tumbling slowly, brushing the smooth and glowing wall. It was as warm as my dear friend’s flesh.

One of us pushed off and we tumbled together into the middle of the oval pod space.

Our kissing became more urgent. Each time we moved to hold the other more tightly, we would begin to pivot around an invisible center of mass, arms and legs entangled as we pressed tighter and rotated more quickly. Without disentangling or interrupting our kiss, I held out one arm, waited for the flesh-warm walls to reach us, and stopped our tumble. The contact pushed us away from the curved, warmly glowing wall and sent us spinning very slowly toward the center again.

Aenea broke our kiss and moved her head back a moment, still holding my arms, regarding me from arm’s length. I had seen her smile ten thousand times in the last ten years of her life—had thought that I knew all of her smiles—but this one was deeper, older, more mysterious, and more mischievous than any I had seen before.

“Don’t move,” she whispered, and, pushing softly against my arm for leverage, rotated in space.

“Aenea…” was all I could say and then I could say nothing. I closed my eyes, oblivious of everything except sensation. I could feel my darling’s hands tight on the backs of my legs, pulling me closer to her. After a moment, her knees came to rest against my shoulders, her thighs bumping softly against my chest. I reached out to the hollow of her back and pulled her closer, sliding my cheek along the strong muscle of her inner thigh. At Taliesin West, one of the cooks had owned a tabby cat. Many evenings, when I was sitting alone out on the western terrace watching the sunset and feeling the stones lose their day’s heat, waiting for the hour when Aenea and I could sit in her shelter and talk about everything and nothing, I would watch the cat lap slowly from her bowl of cream. I visualized that cat now, but within minutes I could visualize nothing but the immediate and overpowering sense of my dear friend opening to me, of the subtle taste of the sea, of our movements like the tide rising, of all of my senses being centered in the slow but growing sensation at the core of me.

How long we floated this way, I have no idea. Such overwhelming excitement is like a fire that consumes time. Total intimacy is an exemption from the space-time demands of the universe.

Only the growing prerogatives of our passion and the ineluctable need to be even closer than this penultimate closeness marked the minutes of our lovemaking.

Aenea opened her legs wider, moved away, released me with her mouth but not her hand. We pivoted again in the sepia light, her tight fingers and my excitement the center of our slow rotation. We kissed, lips moist, Aenea’s grasp tightening around me. “Now,” she whispered.

I obeyed.

If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this… these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved. We kissed again, oblivious of our slow tumbling, the rich light taking on a heart warmth around us. I opened my eyes long enough to see Aenea’s hair swirling like Ophelia’s cloak in the wine-dark sea of air in which we floated. It was indeed like holding my beloved in deep, salty water—buoyed up and weightless, the warmth of her around me like the rising tide, our movements as regular as the surf against warm sand.

“Oops…” whispered Aenea after only a moment of this perfection.

I paused in my kissing long enough to assess what was separating us. “Newton’s Law,” I whispered against her cheek.

“For every action…” whispered Aenea, chuckling softly, holding my shoulders like a swimmer pausing to rest.

“is… an equal and opposite reaction…” I said, smiling until she kissed me again.

“Solution,” whispered Aenea. Her legs closed tight around my hips. Her breasts floated between us, the nipples teasing my chest.

Then she lay back, again the swimmer, floating this time, her arms spread but her fingers still interlaced with mine. We continued to pivot slowly around our common center of gravity, a slow tumble, my head coming over and down and around like a rider on a porpoise doing slow cartwheels in the sunlit depths, but I was no longer interested or aware of the elegant ballistics of our lovemaking, but only in the lovemaking. We moved faster in the warm sea of air.

Some minutes later, Aenea released my hands, moved upright and forward as we tumbled together, still moving, sank her short nails into my back even while she kissed me with a wild urgency, and then moved her mouth away to gasp and cry out, once, softly. At the same instant as her cry, I felt the warm universe of her close around me with that short, tight throb, that intimate, shared pulse. A second later it was my turn to gasp, to cling to her as I throbbed within her, to whisper into her salty neck and floating hair—“Aenea… Aenea.” A prayer. My only prayer then. My only prayer now.

For a long time we floated together even after we had become two people again rather than one. Our legs were still intertwined, our fingers stroking and holding one another. I kissed her throat and felt her pulse like a memory echo against my lips. She ran her fingers through my sweaty hair.

I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered.

What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.

Aenea kicked away to the pod cubby just long enough to return with a small, warm, and wet towel.

We took turns wiping some of the sweat and slickness from us. My shirt floated by, the empty sleeves attempting to swim in the gentle air currents. Aenea laughed and lingered in her washing and drying, the simple act quickly turning into something else. “Oops,” said Aenea, smiling at me. “How did that happen?”

“Newton’s Law?” I said.

“That makes sense,” she whispered. “Then what would be the reaction if I were to do… this?” I think we were both surprised by the instant result of her experiment. “We have hours until we have to meet the others on the treeship,” she said softly. She said something to the living pod and the curved wall went absolutely transparent. It was as if we were floating among these countless branches and sail-sized leaves, the sun’s warmth bathing us one moment and then being submerged in night and stars when we looked out the other side of the clear pod.

“Don’t worry,” said Aenea, “we can see out, but the exterior is opaque on the outside. Reflective.”

“How can you be sure?” I whispered, kissing her neck again, seeking the soft pulse.

Aenea sighed. “I guess we can’t without going out to look in. Sort of a David Hume problem.” I tried to remember my philosophy readings at Taliesin, recalled our discussions of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and chuckled. “There’s another way we can check,” I said, rubbing my bare feet along her calves and the backs of her legs. “How’s that?” murmured my friend, her eyes closed.

“If anyone can see in,” I said, floating behind her, rubbing her back without letting her float away, “there’s going to be a huge crowd of Ouster angels and Templar treeships and comet farmers hanging out there in about thirty minutes.”

“Really,” said Aenea, eyes still closed. “And why is that?”

I began to show her.

She opened her eyes. “Oh, my,” she said softly.

I was afraid that I was shocking her.

“Raul?” she whispered.

“Hmmm?” I said, not stopping what I was doing. I closed my eyes.

“Maybe you’re right about the pod being reflective on the outside,” she whispered and then sighed again, more deeply this time. “Mmmhmm?” I said. She grabbed my ears and floated around, pulled herself closer, and whispered, “Why don’t we leave the outside transparent and make the inside wall reflective?”

My eyes snapped open.

“Just kidding,” she whispered and pushed away from the pod wall, pulling me with her into the central sphere of warm air.

The stars blazed around us.

We wore formal black outfits to the dinner party and conference on the Yggdrasill. I was tense with excitement to be aboard one of the legendary treeships and it was a bit of an anticlimax when I realized that I had not noticed when we had crossed from the biosphere branches to the treeship trunk. It was only when hundreds of us were gathered on a series of platforms and opened pods, when the treeship had actually cast off and moved away from the encircling city-sized leaves, province-sized branches, and continent-sized trunks that I realized that we were aboard and moving.

The Yggdrasill must have been a bit more than a kilometer in length, from the narrowed crown of the tree to the resplendent root system of boiling fusion energy at its base. A bit of gravity returned under drive—probably only a few percentage points of microgravity—but it was still disconcerting after so much zero-g. It did help with our orientation though, the scores of us able to sit at tables and look one another in the eyes rather than float for a polite position… I thought of Aenea and our last hours together and blushed at this thought. There were tables and chairs on the multitiered platforms and many who were not seated there thronged on the flimsy suspension bridges that connected platforms to more far-flung branches, or on the helixes of spiral stairways winding up through branches, leaves, and binding the central trunk like vines, or hung from swingvines and leafy bowers.

Aenea and I were seated at the round central table along with the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen, the Ouster leaders, and two score of other Templars, refugees from T’ien Shan, and others. I was on Aenea’s immediate left. The Templar dignitaries were seated to her right. Even now I can remember the names of most of the others present at the central table.

Besides the captain of the treeship, Het Masteen, there were half a dozen other Templars there, including Ket Rosteen—introduced as the True Voice of the Startree, High Priest of the Muir, and Spokesman of the Templar Brotherhood. The dozen Ousters at the main table included Systenj Coredwell and Navson Hamnim, but there were others who looked little like these tall, thin Ouster archetypes: Am Chipeta and Kent Quinkent, two shorter, darker Ousters—a married couple, I thought—with lively eyes and no webs between their fingers; Sian Quintana Ka’an, a female who was either wearing a resplendent robe of bright feathers or who had been born with them, and her blue-feathered partners Paul Uray and Morgan Bottoms. Two others better fit the Ouster image—Drivenj Nicaagat and Palou Koror—for they were vacuum-adapted and wore their silvery skinsuits through the entire banquet.

There were four of the Hebronese Seneschai Aluit present—LL-EEOONN and OO-EEAALL, whom I had met at the earlier gathering, as well as another pair of the willowy green figures introduced by Aenea as AA-LLOOEE and NN-EELLOO. I could only assume that the four were related or marriage-bound in some complex way.

The alien Akerataeli appeared to be missing until Aenea pointed to a place far out among the branches where the microgravity was even less, and there—between the gossamers and glowbirds—floated the platelet beings. Even the erg binders who were controlling the treeship’s containment field were present by proxy in the form of three Möbius cubes with translator discs embedded in their black matrices.

Father Captain Federico de Soya sat to my left and his aide, Sergeant Gregorius, sat to the left of him. Next to the sergeant sat Colonel Fedmahn Kassad in his formal FORCE black uniform, looking like a holo from the deep Hegemony past. Beyond Kassad sat the Thunderbolt Sow, as upright and proud as the old FORCE warrior to her right, while next to her—eyes bright and attentive—sat Getswang Ngwang Lobsang Tengin Gyapso Sisunwangyur Tshungpa Mapai Dhepal Sangpo, the boy Dalai Lama.

All of the other refugees from T’ien Shan were somewhere on the dining platform, and I saw Lhomo Dondrub, Labsang Samten, George and Jigme, Haruyuki, Kenshiro, Voytek, Viki, Kuku, Kay, and others present at the main table. Just beyond the Templars around the table from us were A. Bettik, Rachel, and Theo Bernard.

Rachel never took her eyes off Colonel Kassad, except to look at Aenea when she spoke. It was as if the rest of us were not there.

Tiny Templar servants whom Aenea whisperingly described as crew clones served water and stronger drinks and for a while there was the usual murmuring and polite, predinner conversation. Then there was a silence as thick as prayer. When Ket Rosteen, the True Voice of the Startree, stood to speak, everyone else rose as well.

“My friends,” said the small, hooded figure, “fellow Brothers in the Muir, honored Ouster allies, sentient sisters and brothers of the ultimate Lifetree, human refugees from the Pax, and”—the True Voice of the Startree bowed in Aenea’s direction—“the most revered One Who Teaches.

“As most of us gathered here know, what the Shrike Church once called the Days of Atonement—with us now for almost three centuries—are almost done. The True Voices of the Brotherhood of the Muir have followed the path of both prophecy and conservation, awaiting events as they came to pass, planting seeds as the soil of revelation has proved fertile.

“In these coming months and years, the future of many races—not just the human race—will be determined. Although there are those among us now who have been granted the gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are fluid. The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

“This day, on this treeship… on the reborn and rechristened Yggdrasill… we shall determine our own paths to our own futures. My own prayer to the Lifeforce glimpsed by the Muir is not just that the Startree Biosphere survives, not just that the Brotherhood survives, not just that our Ouster brethren survive, not just that our hunted and harried sentient cousins of the Seneschai and the Akerataeli and the erg and the zeplin survive, not just that the species known as humankind survives, but that our prophecies begin to be realized this day and that all species of beloved life—humanity no more than the soft-shelled turtle or Mare Infinitus Lantern Mouth, the jumping spider and the tesla tree, the Old Earth raccoon and the Maui-Covenant Thomas hawk—that all species beloved of life join in rebirth of respect as distinct partners in the universe’s growing cycle of life.”

The True Voice of the Startree turned to Aenea and bowed. “Revered One Who Teaches, we are gathered here today because of you. We know from our prophecies—from those in our Brotherhood and elsewhere who have touched the nexus known as the Void Which Binds—that you are the best, single hope of reconciliation between humanity and Core, between humankind and otherkind. We also know that time is short and that the immediate future holds the potential for both the beginnings of this reconciliation and our liberation… or for near total destruction. Before any decisions can be made, there are those among us who must ask their final questions. Will you join in discussion with us now? Is this the time to speak of those things which must be spoken of and understood before all the worlds and abodes of Ouster and Templar and Pax and disparate humankind join in the final battle for humanity’s soul?”

“Yes,” said Aenea.

The True Voice of the Startree sat down.

Aenea stood, waited. I slipped my ’scriber from my vest pocket.

Ouster Systenj Coredwell. M. Aenea, Most Respected One Who Teaches, can you tell us with any certainty whether the Biosphere, our Startree, will be spared destruction and the Pax assault?

Aenea. I cannot, Freeman Coredwell. And if I could, it would be wrong for me to speak of it. It is not my role to predict probabilities in the great epicycles of chaos which are the futures. I can say without doubt that the next few days and weeks will determine whether this amazing Biosphere shall survive or not. Our own actions will, to a great extent, determine this. But there is no single correct course of action. And if I may ask a question… there are friends of mine here new to the Startree and to Ouster space. It would help in our discussion if one of our hosts were to explain the background of the Ouster race, of the Biosphere and other projects, and of the Ouster and Templar philosophy.

Ouster Sian Quintana Ka’an. I would be pleased to speak to our new guests, Friend Aenea. It is important that all present in these deliberations understand our stake in the outcome. As all of our Ouster and Templar brethren here well know, the Ouster race was created more than eight hundred years ago in scores of star systems far-flung from one another. Human seedships with colonists trained in the genetic arts were sent out from Old Earth System in the great pre-Hegira expansions. These seedships were—for the most part—slower-than-light craft: fleets of crude Bussard ramjets, solar sailing ships, ion scoops, nuclear-pulse propulsion craft, gravity-launched Dyson spherelets, laser-driven containment sailing ships… only a few dozen of the later seedships were early Hawking-drive C-plus craft.

These colonists, our ancestors—most traveling in cold sleep deeper than cryogenic fugue—were among the best ARN-ists, nanotechs, and genetic engineers Old Earth System had to offer. Their missions were to find habitable worlds and—in the absence of terraforming technology—to bioengineer and nanotech the millions of Old Earth life-forms frozen aboard their ships into viable adaptations for those worlds.

As we know, a few of the seedships reached habitable worlds—New Earth, Tau Ceti, Barnard’s World. Most, however, reached worlds in systems where no life-forms could survive. The colonists had a choice—they could continue on, hoping that their ship life-support systems would sustain them for more long decades or centuries of travel—or they could use their gene-engineering skills to adapt themselves and their ark’s embryos to conditions far harsher than the original seedship planners had imagined.

And so they did. Using the most advanced methods of nanotechnology—methods quashed on Old Earth and the early Hegemony by the TechnoCore—these human beings adapted themselves to wildly inhospitable worlds and to the even less hospitable dark spaces between worlds and stars. Within centuries, the use of Hawking-drive had spread to most of these far-flung Swarms of Ouster colonists, but their urge to find other worlds had faded. What they now wanted was to continue to adapt—to allow all of Old Earth’s orphans to adapt—to whatever conditions the place and space offered them.

And with this new mission grew their philosophy… our philosophy, almost religious in fervor, of spreading life throughout the galaxy… throughout the universe. Not just human life… not just Old Earth life-forms… but life in all of its infinite and complex variations.

A few of our visitors here tonight may not know that the end goal of both us Ousters and our Templar brethren is not just the Biosphere Startree which we can see above us even as we speak… but a day in which air and water and life shall fill almost all of the space between the Startree and the yellow sun we see burning above us.

The Brotherhood of the Muir and our loose confederations of Ousters want nothing less than to turn the surface, seas, and atmosphere of every world around every star green with life. More than that, we work to see the galaxy grow green… tendrils reaching to nearby galaxies… superstrings of life.

One by-product of this philosophy, and the reason that the Church and the Pax seek to destroy us, is that for centuries we have been tailoring human evolution to fit the demands the environment gives us. So far, there are no distinct and separate species of humankind different than Homo sapiens—that is, all of us here could, if both parties were willing, interbreed with any Pax human or Templar human. But the differences are growing, the genetic separation widening. Already there are forms of Ouster humanity so different that we border on new human species… and those differences are passed along genetically to our offspring.

This the Church cannot abide. And so we are engaged in this terrible war, deciding whether humankind must remain one species forever, or whether our celebration of diversity in the universe can be allowed to continue.

Aenea. Thank you, Freewoman Sian Quintana Ka’an. I am sure that this has been helpful for my friends who are new to Ouster space, as well as important for the rest of us to remember as we make these momentous decisions. Does anyone else wish to speak?

Dalai Lama. Friend Aenea, I have a comment and a question of you. The Pax’s promise of immortality seduced even me in considering—for a few moments only—converting to their Christian faith. All here love life, it is the bright thread of our commonality. Can you tell us why the cruciform is bad for us? And I must say—the fact that it is a symbiote or parasite does not make it that unthinkable to me or many others. Our bodies have many life-forms—the bacteria in our gut, for instance—which feed off us yet allow us to live. Friend Aenea, what is the cruciform? And why should we shun it?

Aenea (closes her eyes for only a second, sighs, and opens them to face the boy). Your Holiness, the cruciform was born out of the TechnoCore’s desperation following Meina Gladstone’s attack on them in the hours before the Fall of the Farcasters. The TechnoCore, as I have discussed with all of you in different forums, lives and thinks only as a parasite. In that sense, humankind has long been a symbiotic partner of the Core. Our technology was created and limited by Core designs. Our societies have been created, altered, and destroyed by Core plans and Core fears. Our existence as human beings has largely been defined by the endless dance of fear and parasitism with the Core AI entities.

After the Fall, after the Core lost control of the Hegemony via its dataspheres and farcasters, after the Core lost its greatest computing engine—its direct parasitism on the billions of human brains as they transited the Void Which Binds via the so-called farcasters—the TechnoCore had to find a new way to exploit humankind. And it had to find it quickly. Thus the cruciform. This is nanotechnology at its most refined and most injurious.

Where our Ouster friends use advanced genetic engineering combined with nanotechnology to advance the cause of life in the universe, the TechnoCore uses it to advance the cause of Core hyperparasitism.

Each cruciform is made up of billions of Core-connected nanotech entities, each in contact with other cruciforms and the Core via a terrible misuse of the Void Which Binds medium. The TechnoCore has known of the Void for a millennium and used it—misused it—for almost as long. The so-called Hawking drive tore holes in the Void. Then farcasters ripped at the essential fabric of the Void. The Core-driven information meta-sphere and instantaneous fatline medium stole information from the Void Which Binds in ways that blinded entire races, destroyed millennia of memories. But it is the cruciform that is the Core’s most cynical and terrible misuse of the Void medium.

What makes the cruciform seem most miraculous to most of us is not its ability to restore some form of life—technology has offered variations of that for centuries—but its ability to restore the personality and memories of the deceased person. When one realizes that this demands information storage capabilities in excess of 6 by 10 to the 23rd power bytes for each human resurrected, the fact of cruciform seems truly miraculous. Those in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church who know the Core’s secret role in all resurrections ascribe this staggering—impossible—computing power to the Core’s megasphere storage potential.

But the Core has nowhere near that computing power. Indeed, even in the heyday of the Ultimates’ attempt to create the perfect artificial computing entity, the Ultimate Intelligence, the analyzer of all variables, no AI or series of AI’s in the Core had the ability to store sufficient bytes for even one human body-personality to be recorded and resurrected. In fact, even if the Core had such information storage capability, it would never have the energy necessary to re-form atoms and molecules into the precise living entity that is the body of a human being, much less reproduce the intricate waveform dance that is a human personality. Resurrection of a single person was and remains impossible for the Core.

That is, it was impossible unless they further ravaged the Void Which Binds—that transtemporal, interstellar medium for the memory and emotions of all sentient races. Which the Core did without a backward glance.

It is the Void Which Binds that records the individual wave-front personalities of those humans wearing cruciforms… the cruciform itself is little more than a Core-spawned nanotech data-transfer device.

But every time a person is resurrected, parts of thousands of personalities—human and otherwise—are erased from the more permanent record that is the Void Which Binds. Those of you who have taken communion with me, who have learned the language of the dead and of the living, who have attempted to hear the music of the spheres and have pondered the potential of taking that first step through the Void Which Binds, you understand the terrible savagery this vandalism represents. It must stop. I must stop it. (Aenea closes her eyes for a long moment, then opens them again and continues.) But this is not the only evil of the cruciform.

I say again, the Core AI entities are parasites. They cannot stop themselves from being parasites. Besides providing control of humanity via the Church—and, if all else fails, by administering pain to individuals via the cruciforms—there is another reason the AI’s have offered humanity resurrection via these cruciform parasites.

With the Fall of the Farcasters, the use of trillions of human neurons in the Core’s ultimate datasphere-connected Ultimate Intelligence effort was interrupted.

Without the ruse of the farcasters by which to attach themselves like leeches on human brains, to steal the very life energy of neurons and holistic wave fronts from their human hosts, to hook billions of human minds into parallel computing devices, the Ultimate Intelligence project had to stop. With the cruciforms, this parasitism on the human brain has been resumed.

But it is now more complex than mere dataspace connections of billions of human minds in parallel for the Core’s purposes. Centuries ago—as far back as the twentieth century A.D.—human researchers dealing with similar neural networks comprised of pre-AI silicon intelligences discovered that the best way to make a neural network creative was to kill it. In those dying seconds—even in the last nanoseconds of a sentient or near-sentient conscience’s existence—the linear, essentially binary processes of neural net computing jumped barriers, became wildly creative in the near-death liberation from off-on, binary-based processing.

War-game computer simulations as far back as the late twentieth century showed that dying neural nets made unexpected but highly creative decisions: a primitive, presentient AI controlling a battered seagoing fleet in a simulated war game, for instance, suddenly sank its own damaged ships so that the remnants of its fleet could escape. Such was the genius of dying, nonlinear, neural-net creativity.

The Core has always lacked such creativity. Essentially, it has the linear, serial architecture of the serial CPU’s from which it evolved, coupled with the obsessive, noncreative mentality of the ultimate parasite.

But with the cruciform, that great neural-networked Core computing device which is the Christian cruciformed part of the human race has found a source for almost unlimited creativity. All they need for a creativity catalyst is the death of large parts of the neural net. And humans provide that in abundance.

The Core AI’s hover like vampires, waiting to feed off the dying human brains, sucking the marrow of creativity from humankind’s mental bones. And when the deaths fall below the needed level or when their Core-computing demand for creative solutions rises… they orchestrate a few million more deaths.

Odd accidents occur. Humans’ health is not what it was a few centuries ago. Death from cancer, heart disease, and the like are on the rise. And there are more clever forms of arranged mortality. Even with the Pax imposition of peace within the human interstellar empire, the incidents of violent death are on the rise.

New forms of death are introduced. The archangel starships are such a beginning. Death is a cheap commodity for the born-again Christian. But it is a rich source of orchestrated creativity for the Core.

And thus the cruciform. And thus… I believe… at least one reason to eliminate the things from the human body and the human soul.

(when Aenea quits speaking, there is a long silence. Leaves on the treeship whisper in the breeze of circulating air. None of the hundreds of humans or hominids on the many platforms, branches, bridges, or stairways seem to blink, so intense are their gazes as they stare at my friend. Finally a single, strong voice speaks… )

Father Captain de Soya. I still wear the collar and carry the vows of a Catholic priest. Is there no hope for my Church… not the Church of the Pax, held under TechnoCore control and the conceit of greedy men and women… but the Church of Jesus Christ and the hundreds of millions who followed His word?

Aenea. Federico… Father de Soya… it is for you to answer this question. You and the faithful like you. But I can tell you that there are billions of men and women today… some who wear the cruciform, more who do not… who yearn to return to a Church which concerns itself with spiritual matters, with the teachings of Christ and the deepest matters of the heart, rather than with this obsession with false resurrection.

Templar Het Masteen. Revered One Who Teaches, if I may change the subject from the cosmic and theological to the most personal and petty…

Aenea. Nothing of which you speak could be petty, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.

Templar Het Masteen. I was on the Hyperion pilgrimage with your mother, Revered One Who Teaches…

Aenea. She spoke to me of you often, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.

Templar Het Masteen. Then you know that the Lord of Pain… the Shrike… came to me as the pilgrims were crossing Hyperion’s Sea of Grass on the windwagon, One Who Teaches. It came to me and carried me forward in time and across space… to this time, to this place.

Aenea. Yes.

Templar Het Masteen. And in my conversations with you and with my brethren in the Brotherhood of the Muir, I have come to understand that it is my fate to serve the Muir and the cause of Life in this age, as it was prophesied centuries ago by our own seers into the Void Which Binds. But in these days, and despite the best efforts of my Brothers and other kind friends among the Ousters, I have heard of Martin Silenus’s epic poem and found an edition of the Cantos…

Aenea. That is unfortunate, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. My Uncle Martin wrote that to the best of his knowledge, but his knowledge was incomplete.

Templar Het Masteen. But in the Cantos, Revered One Who Teaches, it says that the pilgrims in their day… and my friend Colonel Kassad has confirmed that this was the case… that they find me on Hyperion, in the Valley of the Time Tombs, and that I die shortly after they find me…

Aenea. This is true in the context of the Cantos, but…

Templar Het Masteen (holding up one hand to silence my friend). It is not the inevitability of my return through time to the pilgrimage on Hyperion nor my inevitable death that worries me, Revered One Who Teaches. I understand that this is just one possible future for me… however probable or desirable. But what I wish to clarify is the truth of my last words according to the old poet’s Cantos. Is it true that immediately before dying I will cry out, I am the True Chosen. I must guide the Tree of Pain during the time of Atonement.

Aenea. This is what is written in the Cantos, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.

Templar Het Masteen (smiling under his hood). And this time is near, Revered One Who Teaches? Will you be using this Yggdrasill as the Tree of Pain for our Atonement as the prophecies attest?

Aenea. I will, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. I will be leaving to carry out that Atonement within standard days. I formally ask that the Yggdrasill be the instrument of our voyage and the instrument of that Atonement. I will be inviting many among us here tonight to join me on that final voyage. And I formally ask you, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen, if you will captain the treeship Yggdrasill—forever after known as the Tree of Pain—on this voyage.

Templar Het Masteen. I formally accept your invitation and agree to captain the treeship Yggdrasill on this mission of Atonement, O Revered One Who Teaches.

(there are several minutes of silence.)

Foreman Jigme Norbu. Aenea, George and I have a question.

Aenea. Yes, Jigme.

Foreman Jigme Norbu. You have taught us about the TechnoCore’s quiet genocide on such worlds as Hebron, Qom-Riyadh, and others. Well… not genocide, exactly, because the populations have been put in a sort of sleeping death, but a terrible kidnapping.

Aenea. Yes.

Foreman Jigme Norbu. Has this happened to our beloved T’ien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven, since we left, Aenea? Have our friends and families been silenced with this Core deathwand and been carried away to some Labyrinthine world?

Aenea. Yes, Jigme, I am sad to say that it has happened. The bodies are being transported offworld even as we speak.

Kuku Se. Why? For what reason are these populations being kidnapped? The Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the atheists, the Marxists, and now our beautiful Buddhist world. Is the Pax intent on destroying all other faiths?

Aenea. That is the Pax and Church’s motivation, Kuku. For the TechnoCore it is a much more complicated matter. Without the cruciform parasite on these non-Christian populations, the Core cannot use these humans in its dying neural net. But by storing these billions of people in their false death, the Core can utilize their minds in its huge, parallel-processing neural network. It is a mutually beneficial deal—the Church, who carries out much of the removal work, is no longer threatened by nonbelievers—the Core, who brings the sleep death and carries out the storage in the Labyrinths, gains new circuits in its Ultimate Intelligence network.

Foreman George Tsarong. Is there no hope then? Can we do nothing to help our friends?

Ouster Navson Hamnim. Excuse me for interrupting, M. Tsarong, M. Aenea, but we should explain to our friends that when the time comes for our Ouster Swarms and Templar allies to take the offensive against the Pax, our first objective is to liberate the many Labyrinthine worlds where these populations are kept in silent storage and to attempt to revive them.

The Dorje Phamo (loudly). Revive them? How is this to happen? How can anyone revive them?

Aenea. By striking directly at the TechnoCore.

Lhomo Dondrub. And where is the TechnoCore, Aenea? Tell me and I will go there now and do battle with these AI cowards.

Aenea. The true location of the TechnoCore has been the AI’s best-kept secret since the entities left Old Earth a thousand standard years ago, Lhomo. Their actual, physical location has been hidden since then… their secrecy is their best defense against the hosts which might turn against their parasites.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. CEO Meina Gladstone was convinced that the Core dwelt in the interstices of the farcaster medium… like invisible spiders in an unseen web. It is the reason she authorized the deathbombing of the space-portal farcaster network… to strike at the Core. Was she wrong? Were the farcasters destroyed for nothing?

Aenea. She was wrong, Fedmahn. The physical location of the Core was not within the farcaster medium… which is the fabric of the Void Which Binds. But the destruction of the farcasters was not in vain… it deprived the Core of the parasite medium upon which they fed on human minds, while silencing part of their megasphere data network.

Lhomo Dondrub. But, Aenea, you know where the Core resides?

Aenea. I believe I do.

Lhomo Dondrub. Will you tell us so that we can attack them with our teeth and nails and bullets and plasma weapons?

Aenea. I will not say at this time, Lhomo. Not until I am certain. And the Core cannot be attacked with physical weapons, just as it cannot be entered by physical entities.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. So once again they are impervious to our attacks? Free from confrontation?

Aenea. No, neither impervious nor free from confrontation. If the fates allow, I will personally carry the attack to the physical Core. Indeed, that attack has already begun in ways that I hope to make clear later. And I promise you that I will confront the AI’s in their lair.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. M. Aenea, Brawne’s child, may I ask another question relating to my own fate and future?

Aenea. I will endeavor to answer, Colonel, while repeating my reluctance to discuss specifics of a topic as fluid as our future.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. Reluctant or no, child, I believe I deserve an answer to this question. I, too, have read these damned Cantos. In them, it says that I followed the apparition Moneta into the future while fighting the Shrike… trying to prevent it from slaughtering the other pilgrims. This was true… some months ago I arrived here. Moneta disappeared, but has reappeared in the younger version of this woman who calls herself Rachel Weintraub. But the Cantos also state that I will soon join in terrible battle with legions of Shrikes, will die, and will be entombed in the newly built Time Tomb called the Crystal Monolith on Hyperion, where my body travels back in time with Moneta as my companion. How can this be, M. Aenea? Have I come to the wrong time? The wrong place?

Aenea. Colonel Kassad, friend and protector of my mother and the other pilgrims, be assured that all proceeds according to whatever plan there is. Uncle Martin wrote the Cantos given what revelation there was granted to him. Not all details of your life… or mine… were available to him. Indeed, he was told precious little of what was to transpire outside of his presence. I can say this to you, Colonel Kassad… the battle with the Shrike is true, however metaphorically rendered. One possible future is for you to die in battle with the Shrike… with many Shrike-like warriors… and to be placed in the Crystal Monolith after a hero’s funeral. But if this were to come to pass, it would be after many years and many other battles. There is work for you to do in the days, months, years, and decades yet to come. I ask you now to accompany me on the Yggdrasill when I depart in three days… that will be the first step toward these battles.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad (smiling). But you deflect the question somewhat, M. Aenea. May I ask you… will the Shrike be on your Tree of Pain when it leaves in three standard days’ time?

Aenea. I believe it will, Colonel Kassad.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. You have not told us here tonight, M. Aenea, what the Shrike is… where it truly comes from… what its role in this centuries-old and centuries-to-come game is.

Aenea. That is correct, Colonel. I have not told anyone here tonight.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. Have you ever told anyone, child?

Aenea. No.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. But you know the origin of the Shrike.

Aenea. Yes.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. Will you tell us, Brawne Lamia’s child?

Aenea. I would prefer not to, Colonel.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. But you will if asked again, will you not? At least you will answer my direct questions on the matter?

Aenea (nods silently… I see tears in her eyes).

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. The Shrike first appears in that same far future in which I do battle with it as per the Cantos, is this not correct, M. Aenea? That future in which the Core is making its last-ditch stand against its enemies?

Aenea. Yes.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. And the Shrike is… will be… a construct, is it not? A created thing. A Core-created thing.

Aenea. This is accurate.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. It will be a strange amalgam of Core technological wizardry, Void Which Binds energy, and the cybrid-recycled personality of a real human being, won’t it, M. Aenea?

Aenea. Yes, Colonel. It will be all those things and more.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. And the Shrike will be created by the Core but will become a servant and Avatar of other… powers… entities, will it not?

Aenea. Yes.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. In truth, Aenea, would you agree that the Shrike will be a pawn of both sides… of all sides… in this war for the soul of humankind… this war that leaps back and forth across time like a four-dimensional chess game?

Aenea. Yes, Colonel… although not a pawn. A knight, perhaps.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. All right, a knight. And this cybrid, Void Which Binds—connected, ARN-ied, DNA-engineered, nanotech-enhanced, terribly mutated knight… it starts with the personality of a single warrior, does it not? Perhaps an opponent in this thousand-year game?

Aenea. Do you need to know this, Colonel? There is no greater hell than seeing the precise details of one’s…

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad (softly). Of one’s future? Of one’s own death? Of one’s fate? I know that, Aenea, daughter of my friend Brawne Lamia. I know that you have carried such terrible certitudes and visions with you since before you were born… since the days when your mother and I crossed the seas and mountains of Hyperion toward what we thought was our fate with the Shrike. I know that it has been very difficult for you, Aenea, my young friend… harder than any of us here could imagine. None of us could have borne up under such a burden. But still I want to know this part of my own fate. And I believe that my years of service in the cause of this battle… years past and years yet to be given… have earned me the right to an answer. Is the Shrike based on a single human warrior’s personality?

Aenea. Yes.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. Mine? After my death in battle, the Core elements… or some power… will incorporate my will, my soul, my persona into t… monster… and send it back in time through the Crystal Monolith?

Aenea. Yes, Colonel. Parts of your persona… but only parts of it… will be incorporated into the living construct called the Shrike.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad (laughing). But I can also live to beat it in battle?

Aenea. Yes.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad (laughing harder now, the laughter sounding sincere and unforced). By God… by the will of Allah… if the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony. I kill mine enemy, I eat his heart, and the enemy becomes me… and I become him.

(There are several more minutes of silence. I see that the treeship Yggdrasill has turned around and that we are approaching the great curve of the Biosphere Startree again.)

Rachel Weintraub. Friend Aenea, Beloved Teacher, in the years I have listened to you teach and learned from you, one great mystery has haunted me.

Aenea. What is that, Rachel?

Rachel Weintraub. Through the Void Which Binds, you have heard the voices of the Others… the sentient races beyond our space and time whose memories and personalities resonate in the Void medium. Through communion with your blood, some of us have learned to hear the whispers of the echoes of those voices… of the Lions and Tigers and Bears, as some call them.

Aenea. You are one of my best students, Rachel. You will someday hear these voices clearly. Just as you will learn to hear the music of the spheres and to take that first step.

Rachel Weintraub (shaking her head). That is not my question, friend Aenea. The mystery to me has been the presence in human space of an Observer or Observers sent by those… Others… those Lions and Tigers and Bears… to study humankind and report back to these distant races. Is the presence of this Observer… or these Observers… a literal fact?

Aenea. It is.

Rachael Weintraub. And they were able to take on the form of human or Ouster or Templar?

Aenea. The Observer or Observers are not shapeshifters, Rachel. They chose to come among us in some sort of mortal form, that is true… much as my father was mortal but cybrid born.

Rachael Weintraub. And this Observer or these Observers have been watching us for centuries?

Aenea. Yes.

Rachael Weintraub. Is that Observer… or one of these Observers… with us here today, on this treeship, or at this table?

Aenea (hesitates). Rachel, it is best that I say nothing more at this time. There are those who would kill such an Observer in an instant to protect the Pax or to defend what they think it means to be “human.” Even saying that such an Observer exists puts that entity at great risk. I am sorry… I promise you that this… this mystery… will be solved in the not-too-distant future and the Observer or Observers’ identity revealed. Not by me, but by the Observer or Observers themselves.

Templar True Voice Of The Startree Ket Rosteen. Brothers in the Muir, respected Ouster allies, honored human guests, beloved sentient friends, Revered One Who Teaches… we shall finish this discussion at another time and in another place. I take it as a consensus of those among us that M. Aenea’s request for the treeship Yggdrasill to depart for Pax space in three standard days is agreed to… and that, with luck and courage, thus shall be fulfilled the ancient Templar prophecies of the Tree of Pain and the time of Atonement for all children of Old Earth. Now we will finish our meal and speak of other things. This formal meeting is adjourned, and what remains of our short voyage must be friendly conversation, good food, and the sacrament of real coffee grown from beans harvested on Old Earth… our common home… the good Earth.

This meeting is adjourned. I have spoken.

Later that evening, in the warm light of our private cubby, Aenea and I made love, spoke of personal things, and had a late, second supper of wine and zygoat cheese and fresh bread. Aenea had gone off to the kitchen cubby for a moment and returned with two cystal bulbs of wine. Offering me one, she said, “Here, Raul, my beloved… take this and drink.”

“Thanks,” I said without thinking and started to raise the bulb to my lips. Then I froze.

“Is this… did you…”

“Yes,” said Aenea. “It is the communion that I have delayed so long for you. Now it is yours if you choose to drink. But you do not have to do this, my love. It will not change the way I feel about you if you choose not to.”

Still looking into her eyes, I drained the wine in the bulb. It tasted only of wine.

Aenea was weeping. She turned her head away, but I had already seen the tears in her lovely, dark eyes. I swept her up in my arms and we floated together in the warm womb light.

“Kiddo?” I whispered. “What’s wrong?” My heart ached as I wondered if she was thinking of the other man in her past, her marriage, the child… The wine had made me dizzy and a bit sick. Or perhaps it was not the wine.

She shook her head. “I love you, Raul.”

“I love you, Aenea.”

She kissed my neck and clung to me. “For what you have just done, for me, in my name, you will be hunted and persecuted…”

I forced a chuckle. “Hey, kiddo, I’ve been hunted and persecuted since the day we rode the hawking mat out of the Valley of the Time Tombs together. Nothing new there. I’d miss it if the Pax quit chasing us.”

She did not smile. I felt her tears against my throat and chest as she clung more tightly. “You will be the first among all those who follow me, Raul. You will be the leader in the decades and decades of struggle to come. You will be respected and hated, obeyed and despised… they will want to make a god of you, my darling.”

“Bullshit,” I whispered into my friend’s hair. “You know I’m no leader, kiddo. I haven’t done anything except follow in all the years we’ve known each other. Hell… I spend most of my time just trying to catch up.”

Aenea raised her face to mine. “You were my Chosen One before I was born, Raul Endymion. When I fall, you will continue on for us. Both of us must live through you…”

I put my heavy finger against her lips. I kissed the tears from her cheeks and lashes. “No talking of falling or living without the other,” I commanded her. “My plan is simple… to stay with you forever… through everything… to share everything. What happens to you, happens to me, kiddo. I love you, Aenea.” We floated in the warm air together. I was cradling her in my arms.

“Yes,” whispered my friend, hugging me fiercely, “I love you, Raul. Together. Time. Yes.”

We quit talking then. I tasted wine and the salt from her tears in our kisses. We made love for more hours, then drifted off to sleep together, floating entwined in the other’s embrace like two sea creatures, like one wonderfully complex sea creature, drifting on a warm and friendly tide.

26

The next day we took the Consul’s ship out toward the sun.

I had awakened expecting to be feeling some sort of enlightenment, overnight satori from the communion wine, a deeper understanding of the universe at the very least, omniscience and omnipotence at best. Instead, I awoke with a full bladder, a slight headache, but pleasant memories of the night before. Aenea was awake before me and by the time I came out of the toilet cubby, she had coffee hot in the brewing bulb, fruit in its serving globe, and fresh, warm rolls ready.

“Don’t expect this service every morning,” she said with a smile.

“Okay, kiddo. Tomorrow I’ll make breakfast.”

“Omelet?” she said, handing me a coffee bulb.

I broke the seal, inhaled the aroma, and squeezed out a drop, taking care not to burn my lips or to let the globule of hot coffee get away. “Sure,” I said. “Anything you like.”

“Good luck in finding the eggs,” she said, finishing her roll in two bites. “This Startree is neat, but short on chickens.”

“Pity,” I said, looking through the transparent pod wall. “And so many places to roost.” I changed tones to serious. “Kiddo, about the wine… I mean, it’s been about eight standard hours and…”

“You don’t feel any different,” said Aenea. “Hmm, I guess you’re one of those rare individuals on which the magic doesn’t work.”

“Really?” My voice must have sounded alarmed, or relieved, or both, because Aenea shook her head.

“Uh-uh, just kidding. About twenty-four standard hours. You’ll feel something. I guarantee it.”

“What if we’re… ah… busy when the time comes?” I said, wiggling my eyebrows for emphasis. The motion made me float free a bit from the sticktite table.

Aenea sighed. “Down, boy, before I staple those eyebrows in place.”

“Mmm,” I said, grinning at her over the coffee bulb. “I love it when you talk dirty.”

“Hurry,” said Aenea, setting her bulb in the sonic washer bin and recycling the eating mat. I was content to munch my roll and look at the incredible view through the wall.

“Hurry? Why? Are we going somewhere?”

“Meeting on the ship,” said Aenea. “Our ship. Then we have to get back and see to the last provisioning of the Yggdrasill for departure tomorrow evening.”

“Why on our ship?” I said. “Won’t it just be crowded compared to all these other places?”

“You’ll see,” said Aenea. She had slipped into soft blue zero-g trousers, pulled tight at the ankle, with a tucked-in white shirt with several sticktite-sealing pockets. She wore gray slippers. I had gotten used to going barefoot around the cubby and in the various stems and pods.

“Hurry,” she said again. “Ship’s leaving in ten minutes and it’s a long vine ride to the docking pod.”

It was crowded. And although the internal containment field held the gravity to one-sixth-g, it felt like a Jovian pull after sleeping in freefall. It seemed strange to be crowded in on one dimensional plane with everyone, letting all that airspace overhead go to waste. On the library deck of the Consul’s ship with us, seated at the piano, on benches, in overstuffed chairs, and along holopit ledges, were the Ousters Navson Hamnim, Systenj Coredwell, Sian Quintana Ka’an resplendent in her feathers, the two silver, vacuum-adapted Ousters Palou Koror and Drivenj Nicaagat, as well as Paul Uray, and Am Chipeta. Het Masteen was there, as was his superior, Ket Rosteen. Colonel Kassad was present—as tall as the towering Ousters—and so were the Dorje Phamo, looking ancient and regal in an ice-gray gown that billowed beautifully in the low gravity, as well as Lhomo, Rachel, Theo, A. Bettik, and the Dalai Lama.

None of the other sentient beings were there.

Several of us stepped out on the balcony to watch the inner surface of the Startree fall behind as the ship climbed toward the central star on its pillar of blue fusion flame.

“Welcome back, Colonel Kassad,” the ship said as we gathered on the library level.

I raised an eyebrow at Aenea, surprised that the ship had managed to remember his passenger from the old days.

“Thank you, Ship,” said the Colonel. The tall, dark man seemed distracted to the point of brooding.

Climbing away from the inner shell of the Biosphere Startree gave me a sense of vertigo quite distinct from watching the sphere of a planet grow smaller and fall behind. Here we were inside the orbital structure, and while the view from within the branches of the Startree had been one of open gaps between the leaves and trunks, glimpses of starfields on the side opposite the sun and everywhere great spaces, the view from a hundred thousand klicks and climbing was of a seemingly solid surface, the huge leaves reduced to a shimmering surface—looking for all the world like a great green, concave ocean—and the sense of being in some huge bowl and unable to escape was almost overwhelming.

The branches were glowing blue from the trapped atmosphere within the containment fields there, giving thousands of klicks of vinous wood and flickering leaves a sort of blue, electric glow, as if the entire inner surface were charged with voltage. And everywhere was life and motion: Ouster angels with hundred-klick wings not only flitted among the branches and beyond the leaves, but were hurled deeper into space—inward toward the sun, more quickly outward past the ten-thousand-klick root systems; a myriad of smaller life-forms shimmered in the blue envelope of atmosphere—radiant gossamers, faery chains, parrots, blue arboreals, Old Earth monkeys, vast schools of tropical fish swimming along in zero-g, seeking out the comet-misted regions, blue herons, flights of geese and Martian brandy fowl, Old Earth porpoises—we passed out of range before I could categorize a fraction of what I was seeing.

Farther out, the size of the largest life-forms and swarms of life-forms became apparent. From several thousand klicks “up,” I could see the shimmering herds of blue platelets, the sentient Akerataeli traveling together. After our first meeting here with the creatures from my cloud planet, I had asked Aenea if there were any more on the Biosphere Startree than the two in the conference.

“A few more,” my friend had said. “About six hundred million more.” Now I could see the Akerataeli moving effortlessly on the air currents from trunk to trunk—hundreds of kilometers apart—in swarms of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.

And with them came their obedient servants: the sky squids and zeplins and transparent medusae and vast, tendriled gas bags similar to the one that had eaten me on the cloud world. But larger. I had estimated that original monster as perhaps ten klicks long—these zeplinlike work beasts must have been several hundred klicks long, perhaps longer when one factored in the countless tentacles, tendrils, flagella, whips, tails, probes, and proboscises the things sported. I realized as I watched that all of the Akerataeli’s giant beasts of burden were busy with tasks—weaving branches and stems and pods into elaborate bio-designs, pruning dead branches and city-sized leaves from the Startree, wrestling Ouster-designed structures into place or hauling material from one part of the Biosphere to another.

“How many zeplin things are the Akerataeli controlling on the Startree?” I asked Aenea when she was free for a second.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s ask Navson.”

The Ouster said, “We have no idea. They breed as needed for tasks. The Akerataeli themselves are a perfect example of a swarm organism, a hive mind… none of the disc-entities alone is sentient… in parallel, they are brilliant. The sky squids and other ex-Jovian-world creatures have been reproducing as needed here for more than seven hundred standard years. I would venture that there are several hundred million working around the Biosphere… perhaps a billion at this point.”

I stared down at the tiny forms on the dwindling Biosphere surface. A billion creatures each the size of the Pinion Plateau on my homeworld.

Farther out and the gaps between the branches a million klicks overhead and a half million klicks underfoot became apparent enough. The section from which we had come was the oldest and densest, but far along the great inner curve of the Biosphere there were gaps and divisions—some planned, others yet to be filled in with living material. But even here space was busy and filled with motion—comets arcing between roots, branches, leaves, and trunks on precise trajectories, their gift of water being volatilized from the surface by Ouster-aimed and erg-powered heat beams from the trunks and from genetically adapted reflective leaves creating mirrors hundreds of klicks across. Once turned to water vapor, the great clouds drifted across the trailing roots and misted the billion square klicks of leaf surface.

Larger than the comets were the scores of carefully placed asteroids and shepherd moons moving a few thousand or tens of thousands of kilometers above the inner and outer surface of the living sphere—correcting for orbital drift, providing tides and tugs to help the branches grow correctly, throwing shadow on the Biosphere’s inner surface where shade was needed, and serving as observation bases and work shacks for the countless Ouster and Templar gardeners who watched over the project from decade to decade and century to century.

And now, a half a light-minute out and accelerating toward the sun as if the ship were searching for a Hawking-drive translation point, there appeared to be even more traffic in the vast hollow of the green sphere: Ouster warships, all obsolete by Pax standards, with Hawking-drive blisters or giant ramscoop containment fields, old-fashioned high-g destroyers and C³ ships from a long-gone era, elegant sunjammer cargo craft with great curved sails of gleaming monofilm—and everywhere the individual Ouster angels, wings flapping and shimmering as they tacked in toward the sun or hurtled back out toward the Biosphere.

Aenea and the others stepped back inside to continue their discussion. The topic was important—still trying to find a way to stall the Pax from attacking, some sort of feint or distraction that would keep the massing fleet from hurling itself this way—but I had more important things on my mind. As A. Bettik turned to leave the balcony, I touched the android’s right sleeve.

“Can you stay and talk a minute?”

“Of course, M. Endymion.” The blue-skinned man’s voice was as gentle as always.

I waited until we were alone on the balcony, the drone of conversation from within affording us privacy outside, and leaned on the railing.

“I’m sorry we haven’t had more chance to talk since arriving here at the Startree,” I said.

A. Bettik’s bald scalp gleamed in the rich sunlight. His blue-eyed gaze was calm and friendly. “That’s perfectly all right, M. Endymion. Events have proven quite hectic since our arrival. I do concur, however, that this artifact does cause one to find opportunities to discuss it.” He waved his remaining hand at the huge curve of the Startree to where it seemed to fade away near the central sun’s brilliance.

“It’s not the Startree or the Ousters I want to talk about,” I said softly, leaning a bit closer.

A. Bettik nodded and waited. “You were with Aenea on all of the worlds between Old Earth and T’ien Shan,” I said. “Ixion, Maui-Covenant, Renaissance Vector, and the others?”

“Yes, M. Endymion. I had the privilege to travel with her during all the time she allowed others to travel with her.”

I chewed my lip, realizing that I was about to make a fool of myself but having no choice.

“And what about the time when she did not allow you to travel with her,” I said.

“While M. Rachel, M. Theo, and the others remained with me on Groombridge Dyson D?” said A. Bettik. “We carried on with M. Aenea’s work, M. Endymion. I was especially busy working on the construction of…”

“No, no,” I interrupted, “I mean what do you know about her absence?”

A. Bettik paused. “Virtually nothing, M. Endymion. She had told us that she would be away for some time. She had made provisions for our employment and continued work with her… students. One day she was gone and she was to stay away for approximately two standard years…”

“One year, eleven months, one week, six hours,” I said.

“Yes, M. Endymion. That is precisely correct.”

“And after she returned, she never told you where she had been?”

“No, M. Endymion. As far as I know, she never mentioned it to any of us.”

I wanted to grab A. Bettik’s shoulders, to make him understand, to explain why this was of life and death importance to me. Would he have understood? I didn’t know. Instead, attempting to sound calm, almost disinterested—and failing miserably—I said, “Did you notice anything different about Aenea when she returned from that sabbatical, A. Bettik?”

My android friend paused, not, it seemed, out of hesitation to speak, but as if laboring to remember nuances of human emotion. “We left for T’ien Shan almost immediately after that, M. Endymion, but my best recollection is that M. Aenea was very emotional for some months—elated one minute, absolutely wracked with despair the next. By the time you arrived on T’ien Shan, these emotional swings had seemed to have abated.”

“And she never mentioned what caused them?” I felt like a swine going behind my beloved’s back like this, but I knew that she would not talk to me about these things.

“No, M. Endymion,” said the android. “She never talked to me about the cause. I presumed it was some event or events she experienced during her absence.”

I took a deep breath. “Before she left… on the other worlds… Amritsar, Patawpha… any of the worlds before she left Groombridge Dyson D… had she… was she… had there been anyone?”

“I don’t understand, M. Endymion.”

“Was there a man in her life, A. Bettik? Someone she showed affection for? Someone who seemed especially close to her?”

“Ah,” said the android. “No, M. Endymion, there seemed to be no male who showed any special interest in M. Aenea… other than as a teacher and possible messiah, of course.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And no one came back with her after the one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours?”

“No, M. Endymion.”

I gripped A. Bettik’s shoulder. “Thank you, my friend. I’m sorry I’m asking these stupid questions. It’s just that… I don’t understand… somewhere there’s a… shit, it doesn’t matter. It’s just stupid human emotion.” I turned to go in to join the others.

A. Bettik stopped me with a hand on my wrist. “M. Endymion,” he said softly, “if love is the human emotion to which you refer, I feel that I have watched humankind long enough during my existence to know that love is never a stupid emotion. I feel that M. Aenea is correct when she teaches that it may well be the mainspring energy of the universe.”

I stood and watched, gaping, as the android left the balcony and went into the crowded library level.

They were close to making a decision.

“I think we should send the Gideon-drive courier drone with a message,” Aenea was saying as I came into the lounge. “Send it direct and within the hour.”

“They’ll confiscate the drone,” said Sian Quintana Ka’an in her musical contralto.

“And it’s the only ship we have left with the instantaneous drive.”

“Good,” said Aenea. “They’re an abomination. Every time they are used, part of the Void is destroyed.”

“Still,” said Paul Uray, his thick Ouster dialect sounding like someone speaking through radio static, “there remains the option of using the drone as a delivery system.”

“To launch nuclear warheads, or plasma weapons, against the armada?” said Aenea. “I thought that we had dismissed that possibility.”

“It’s our only way of striking at them before they strike at us,” said Colonel Kassad.

“It would do no good,” said the Templar True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen. “The drones are not built for precise targeting. An archangel-class warship would destroy it light-minutes away from target. I agree with the One Who Teaches. Send the message.”

“But will the message stop their attack?” said Systenj Coredwell.

Aenea made the little gesture that I knew so well. “There are no guarantees… but if it puts them off balance, at least they will use their instantaneous drive drones to postpone the attack. It is worth a try, I think.”

“And what will the message say?” said Rachel.

“Please hand me that vellum and stylus,” said Aenea.

Theo brought the items and set them on the Steinway. Everyone—including me—crowded close as Aenea wrote:

“There,” said my young friend, handing the vellum to Navson Hamnim. “Please set this in the courier drone when we dock, set the transponder to “carrying hardcopy message,” and launch it to Pacem System.”

The Ouster took the vellum. I had not yet developed the knack of reading the Ouster’s facial expressions, but I could tell that something was giving him pause. Perhaps it was a lesser form of the same sort of panic and confusion that was filling my chest at the moment.

I am coming to Pacem. What the goddamn hell did that mean? How could Aenea go to Pacem and survive? She could not. And wherever she was going, I was certain of only one thing… that I would be at her side. Which meant that she was going to kill me as well, if she was as good as her word. Which she always had been. I am coming to Pacem. Was it just a ploy to deter their fleet? An empty threat… a way of stalling them? I wanted to shake my beloved until her teeth fell out or until she explained everything to me.

“Raul,” she said, gesturing me closer.

I thought that perhaps this was the explanation I wanted, that she was reading my expression from across the room and saw the turmoil within me, but all she said was, “Palou Koror and Drivenj Nicaagat are going to show me what it means to fly like an angel, do you want to come with me? Lhomo’s coming.”

Fly like an angel? For a moment I was sure that she was speaking gibberish.

“They have an extra skinsuit if you want to come,” Aenea was saying. “But we have to go now. We’re almost back to the Startree and the ship will be docking in a few minutes. Het Masteen has to get on with the loading and provisioning of the Yggdrasill and I have a hundred things to do before tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what I was agreeing to. “I’ll come along.” At the time I was feeling surly enough to think that this response was a wonderful metaphor for my entire ten-year odyssey: yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing or getting into, but count me in.

One of the space-adapted Ousters, Palou Koror, handed us the skinsuits. I had used skinsuits before, of course—the last time being just a few weeks earlier when Aenea and I had climbed T’ai Shan, the Great Peak of the Middle Kingdom—although it seemed like months or years ago—but I had never seen or felt a skinsuit like these.

Skinsuits go back many centuries, the working concept being that the best way to keep from exploding in vacuum is not a bulky pressure suit as in the earliest days of spaceflight, but a covering so thin that it allows perspiration to pass even while it protects the skin from the terrible heat, cold, and vacuum of space. Skinsuits had not changed much in all those centuries, except to incorporate rebreathing filaments and osmosis panels. Of course, my last skinsuit had been a Hegemony artifact, workable enough until Rhadamanth Nemes had clawed it to shreds.

But this was no ordinary skinsuit. Silver, malleable as mercury, the thing felt like a warm but weightless blob of protoplasm when Palou Koror dropped it in my hand. It shifted like mercury. No, it shifted and flowed like a living, fluid thing. I almost dropped it in my shock, catching it with my other hand only to watch it flow several centimeters up my wrist and arm like some flesh-eating alien.

I must have said something out loud, because Aenea said, “It is alive, Raul. The skinsuit’s an organism… gene-tailored and nanoteched… but only three molecules thick.”

“How do I put it on?” I said, watching it flow up my arm to the sleeve of my tunic, then retreat. I had the impression that the thing was more carnivore than garment. And the problem with any skinsuit was that they had to be worn next to the skin: one did not wear layers under a skinsuit. Anywhere.

“Uh-huh,” said Aenea. “It’s easy… none of the pulling and tugging we had to do with the old skinsuits. Just strip naked, stand very still, and drop the thing on your head. It’ll flow down over you. And we have to hurry.”

This inspired something less than great enthusiasm in me.

Aenea and I excused ourselves and jogged up the spiral stairs to the bedroom level at the apex of the ship. Once there we hurried out of our clothes. I looked at my beloved—standing naked next to the Consul’s ancient (and quite comfortable, as I remembered) bed—and was about to suggest a better use of our time before the treeship docked. But Aenea just waggled a finger at me, held the blob of silver protoplasm above her, and dropped it in her hair.

It was alarming watching the silver organism engulf her—flowing down over her brown-blond hair like liquid metal, covering her eyes and mouth and chin, flowing down her neck like reflective lava, then covering her shoulders, breasts, belly, hipbones, pubis, thighs, knees… finally she lifted first one foot and then the other and the engulfment was complete. “Are you all right?” I said, my voice small, my own blob of silver still pulsing in my hand, eager to get at me.

Aenea—or the chrome statue that had been Aenea—gave me a thumbs-up and gestured to her throat. I understood: as with the Hegemony skinsuits, communication from now on would be via subvocalization pickups.

I lifted the pulsing mass in both hands, held my breath, closed my eyes, and dropped it on my head.

It took less than five seconds. For a terrible instant I was sure that I could not breathe, feeling the slick mass over my nose and mouth, but then I remembered to inhale and the oxygen came cool and fresh.

Can you hear me, Raul? Her voice was much more distinct than the hearpatch pickups on the old suit.

I nodded, then subvocalized, Yeah. Weird feeling.

Are you ready, M. Aenea, M. Endymion? It took me a second to realize that it was the other adapted Ouster, Drivenj Nicaagat on the suitline. I had heard his voice before, but translated via speech synthesizer. On the direct line, his voice was even more clear and melodious than the birdsong of Sian Quintana Ka’an.

Ready, responded Aenea, and we went down the spiral stairs, through the throng, and out onto the balcony.

Good luck, M. Aenea, M. Endymion. It was A. Bettik speaking to us through one of the ship’s comlinks. The android touched each of us on our respective silver shoulders as we stepped next to Koror and Nicaagat at the balcony railing.

Lhomo was also waiting, his silver skinsuit showing every ridge of delineated muscle on his arms, thighs, and flat belly. I felt awkward for a moment, wishing either that I was wearing something over this micron-thin layer of silver fluid or that I worked harder at keeping in shape. Aenea looked beautiful, the body that I loved sculpted in chrome. I was glad that no one but the android had followed the five of us onto the balcony.

The ship was within a couple thousand klicks of the Startree and decelerating hard. Palou Koror made a motion and jumped easily onto the thin balcony rail, balancing against the one-sixth-g. Drivenj Nicaagat followed suit, and then Lhomo, then Aenea, and finally—much less gracefully—I joined them. The sense of height and exposure was all but overwhelming—the great green basin of the Startree beneath us, the leafy walls rising into the unblinking distance on all sides, the bulk of the ship curving away beneath us, balancing on the slim column of fusion fire like a building teetering on a fragile blue column. I realized with a sickening feeling that we were going to jump.

Do not worry, I will open the containment field at the precise instant you pass through and go to EM repulsors until you are clear of the drive exhaust. I realized that it was the ship speaking. I had no idea of what we were doing.

The suits should give you a rough idea of our adaptation, Palou Koror was saying. Of course, for those of us who have chosen full integration, it is not the semisentient suits and their molecular microprocessors that allow us to live and travel in space, but the adapted circuits in our skin, our blood, our vision, and brains.

How do we… I began, having some trouble subvocalizing, as if the dryness in my mouth would have any affect on my throat muscles.

Do not worry, said Nicaagat. We will not deploy our wings until proper separation is achieved. They will not collide… the fields would not allow it. Controls are quite intuitive. Your suit’s optical systems should interface with your nervous system and neurosensors, calling up data when required.

Data? What data? I had only meant to think that, but the suitcom sent it out.

Aenea took my silver hand in hers. This will be fun, Raul. The only free minutes we’re going to have today, I think. Or for a while.

At that moment, poised on the railing on the edge of a terrifying vertical drop through fusion flame and vacuum, I did not really focus on the meaning of her words.

Come, said Palou Koror and leaped from the railing.

Still holding hands, Aenea and I jumped together.

She let go of my hand and we spun away from one another. The containment field parted and ejected us a safe distance, the fusion drive paused as the five of us spun away from the ship, then it relit—the ship seeming to hurtle upward and away from us as its deceleration outpaced our own—and we continued dropping, that sensation was overwhelming, five silver, spread-eagled forms, separating farther and farther from each other, all plummeting toward the Startree lattice still several thousand klicks beneath. Then our wings opened.

For our purposes today, the lightwings need only be a kilometer or so across, came Palou Koror’s voice in my ears. Were we traveling farther or faster, they would extend much farther… perhaps several hundred kilometers.

When I raised my arms, the panels of energy extruding from my skinsuit unfurled like butterfly wings. I felt the sudden push of sunlight. What we feel is more the current of the primary magnetic field line we are following, said Palou Koror. If I may slave your suits for a second… there.

Vision shifted. I looked to my left to where Aenea fell, already several klicks away—a shining silver chrysalis set within expanding gold wings. The others glowed beyond her. I could see the solar wind, see the charged particles and currents of plasma flowing and spiraling outward along the infinitely complex geometry of the heliosphere—red lines of twisting magnetic field coiling as if painted on the inner surfaces of an ever-shifting chambered nautilus, all this convoluted, multilayered, multicolored writhing of plasma streams flowing back to a sun that no longer seemed a pale star but was the locus of millions of converging field lines, entire sheets of plasma being evicted at 400 kilometers a second and being drawn into the shapes by the pulsing magnetic fields in its north and south equators, I could see the violet streamers of the inward-rushing magnetic lines, weaving and interlacing with the crimson red of the outward-exploding sheets of field current, I could see the blue vortices of heliospheric shock wave around the outer edges of the Startree, the moons and comets cutting through plasma medium like ocean-going ships at night plowing through a glowing, phosphorescent sea, and could see our gold wings interacting with this plasma and magnetic medium, catching photons like billions of fireflies in our nets, sail surfaces surging to the plasma currents, our silver bodies accelerating out along the great shimmering folds and spiral magnetic geometries of the heliosphere matrix. In addition to this enhanced vision, the suit opticals were overlaying trajectory information and computational data that meant nothing to me, but must have meant life or death to these space-adapted Ousters. The equations and functions flashed by, seemingly floating in the distance at critical focus, and I remember only a sampling:…

Even without understanding any of these equations, I knew that we were approaching the Startree too fast. In addition to the ship’s velocity, we had picked up our own speed from the solar wind and the plasma stream. I began to see how these Ouster energy wings could move one out from a star—and at an impressive velocity—but how did one stop within what looked to be less than a thousand kilometers?

This is fantastic, came Lhomo’s voice. Amazing.

I rotated my head far enough to see our flyer friend from T’ien Shan far to our left and many kilometers below us. He had already entered the leaf zone and was swooping and soaring just above the blue blur of the containment field that surrounded the branches and spaces between the branches like an osmotic membrane.

How the hell did he do that? I wondered.

Again, I must have subvocalized the thought, for I heard Lhomo’s deep, distinctive laugh and he sent, USE the wings, Raul. And cooperate with the tree and the ergs!

Cooperate with the tree and the ergs? My friend must have lost his reason.

Then I saw Aenea extending her wings, manipulating them by both thought and the movement of her arms, I looked beyond her to the world of branches approaching us at horrifying velocity, and then I began to see the trick.

That’s good, came Drivenj Nicaagat’s voice. Catch the repelling wind. Good.

I watched the two adapted Ousters flutter like butterflies, saw the torrent of plasma energy rising from the Startree to surround them, and suddenly hurtled past them as if they had opened parachutes and I was still in freefall.

Panting against the skinsuit field, my heart pounding, I spread my arms and legs and willed the wings wider. The energy folds shimmered and expanded to at least two klicks. Beneath me, an expanse of leaves shifted, turned slowly and purposefully as if in a time-lapse nature holo of flowers seeking the light, folded over one another to form a smooth, parabolic dish at least five klicks across, and then went perfectly reflective.

Sunlight blazed against me. If I had been watching with unshielded eyes, I would have been instantly blinded. As it was, the suit optics polarized. I heard the sunlight striking my skinsuit and wings, like hard rain on a metal roof. I opened my wings wider to catch the blazing gust of light at the same instant the ergs on the Startree below folded the heliosphere matrix, bending the plasma stream back against Aenea and me, decelerating both of us rapidly but not painfully so. Wings flapping, we passed into the bowering outbranches of the Startree while the suit optics continued to flow data across my field of vision.

Which somehow assured me that the tree was providing the proper amount of the sun’s light based on its mass and luminosity, while the erg was providing just enough heliospheric plasma and magnetic feedback to bring us to near zero delta-v before we struck one of the huge main branches or interdicted the containment field.

Aenea and I followed the Ousters, using our wings in the same way they used theirs, soaring and then flapping, braking and then expanding to catch the true sun’s light to accelerate again, swooping in among the outer branches, soaring over the leafy outer layer of the Startree, then diving deep among the branches again, folding our wings to pass between pods or covered bridges out beyond the core containment fields, swooping around busily working space squids whose tentacles were ten times longer than the Consul’s ship now decelerating carefully through the leaf level, then opening our wings again to surge past floating schools of thousands of blue-pulsing Akerataeli platelets, which seemed to be waving at us as we passed.

There was a huge platform branch just below the containment field shimmer. I did not know if the wings would work through the field, but Palou Koror passed through with only a shimmer—like a graceful diver cutting through still water—followed by Drivenj Nicaagat, then by Lhomo, then Aenea, and finally I joined them, folding my wings to a dozen or so meters across as I crossed the energy barrier into air and sound and scent and cool breezes once again.

We landed on the platform.

“Very nice for a first flight,” said Palou Koror, her voice synthesized for the atmosphere. “We wanted to share just a moment of our lives with you.”

Aenea deactivated the skinsuit around her face, allowing it to flow into a collar of fluid mercury. Her eyes were bright, as alive as I had ever seen them. Her fair skin was flushed and her hair was damp with sweat. “Wonderful!” she cried and turned to squeeze my hand. “Wonderful… thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Freeman Nicaagat, Freewoman Koror.”

“It was our pleasure, Revered One Who Teaches,” said Nicaagat with a bow.

I looked up and realized that the Yggdrasill was docked with the Startree just above us, the treeship’s kilometer of branches and trunk mingling perfectly with the Biosphere branches.

Only the fact that the Consul’s ship had slowly docked and was being pulled into a storage pod by a worker squid allowed me to see the treeship.

Crew clones were visible, working feverishly, carrying provisions and Möbius cubes onto Het Masteen’s treeship, and I could see scores of plantstem life-support umbilicals and connector stems running from the Startree to the treeship.

Aenea had not released my hand. When I turned my gaze from the treeship hanging above us to my friend, she leaned closer and kissed me on the lips. “Can you imagine, Raul? Millions of the space-adapted Ousters living out there… seeing all that energy all the time… flying for weeks and months in the empty spaces… running the bowshock rapids of magnetospheres and vortexes around planets… riding the solar-wind plasma shock waves out ten AU’s or more, and then flying farther… to the heliopause termination-shock boundary seventy-five to a hundred and fifty AU’s from the star, out to where the solar wind ends and the interstellar medium begins. Hearing the hiss and whispers and surf-crash of the universe’s ocean? Can you imagine?”

“No,” I said. I could not. I did not know what she was talking about. Not then.

A. Bettik, Rachel, Theo, Kassad, and the others descended from a transit vine.

Rachel carried clothes for Aenea. A. Bettik brought my clothes.

Ousters and others surrounded my friend again, demanding answers to urgent questions, seeking clarifications of orders, reporting on the imminent launch of the Gideon-drive drone. We were swept apart by the press of other people.

Aenea looked back and waved. I raised my hand—still silver from the skinsuit—to wave back, but she was gone.

That evening several hundred of us took a transport pod pulled by a squid to a site many thousands of klicks to the northwest above the plane of the ecliptic along the inner shell of the Biosphere Startree, but the voyage lasted less than thirty minutes because the squid took a shortcut, cutting an arc through space from our section of the sphere to the new one.

The architecture of living pods and communal platforms, branch towers and connecting bridges on this section of the tree, while still so close to our region by any meaningful geography of this huge structure, looked different—larger, more baroque, alien—and the Ousters and Templars here spoke a slightly different dialect, while the space-adapted Ousters ornamented themselves with bands of shimmering color that I had not seen before. There were different birds and beasts in the atmosphere zones here—exotic fish swimming through misted air, great herds of something that looked like Old Earth killer whales with short arms and elegant hands. And this was only a few thousand klicks from the region I knew. I could not imagine the diversity of cultures and life-forms throughout this Biosphere.

For the first time I realized what Aenea and the others had been telling me over and over… there was more internal surface on the sections of the completed Biosphere than the total of all the planetary surfaces discovered by humankind in the past thousand years of interstellar flight. When the Startree was completed, the internal Biosphere quickened, the volume of habitable space would exceed all the inhabitable worlds in the Milky Way galaxy.

We were met by officials, feted for a few moments on crowded one-sixth-g platforms among hundreds of Ouster and Templar dignitaries, then taken into a pod so large that it might have been a small moon. A crowd of several hundred thousand Ousters and Templars waited, with a few hundred Seneschai Aluit and hovering crowds of Akerataeli near the central dais. Blinking, I realized that the ergs had set the internal containment field at a comfortable one-sixth-g, pulling everyone toward the surface of the sphere, but then I noticed that the seats continued up and over and around the full interior of the sphere. I revised my estimate of the crowd to well over a million.

Ouster Freeman Navson Hamnim and Templar True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen introduced Aenea, saying that she brought with her the message that their people had awaited for centuries.

My young friend walked to the podium, looking up and around and down, as if making eye contact with every person in the huge space. The sound system was so sophisticated that we could have heard her swallow or breathe. My beloved looked calm.

“Choose again,” said Aenea. And she turned, walked away from the podium, and went down to where the chalices lay on the long table.

Hundreds of us donated our blood, mere drops, as the chalices of wine were passed out to the waiting multitudes. I knew that there was no way that a million waiting Ouster and Templar communicants could be served by a few hundred of us who had already received communion from Aenea, but the aides drew a few drops with sterile lancets, the drops were transferred to the reservoir of wine, scores of helpers passed chalice bulbs under the spigots, and within the hour, those who wished communion with Aenea’s wine-blood had received it. The great sphere began emptying.

After her two words, nothing else had been said through the entire evening. For the first time on that long—endless—day, there was silence in the transport pod traveling home… home, back to our region of the Startree under the shadow of the Yggdrasill destined to depart within twenty hours.

I had felt like a fraud. I had drunk the wine almost twenty-four hours earlier, but I had felt nothing this day… nothing except my usual love for Aenea, which is to say, my absolutely un-usual, unique, totally without referent or equal love for Aenea.

The multitudes who wanted to drink had drunk. The great sphere had emptied, with even those who had not come to the communion silent—whether with disappointment at my beloved’s two-word speech, or pondering something beyond and beneath that, I did not know.

We took the transport pod back to our region of the Startree and we were silent except for the most necessary of communications. It was not an awkward or disappointed silence, more a silence of awe bordering on fear at the terminus of one part of one’s life and the beginning… the hope for a beginning… of another.

Choose again. Aenea and I made love in the darkened living pod, despite our fatigue and the late hour. Our lovemaking was slow and tender and almost unbearably sweet.

Choose again. They were the last words in my mind as I finally drifted… literally… off to sleep. Choose again. I understood. I chose Aenea and life with Aenea. And I believe that she had chosen me.

And I would choose her and she would choose me again tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, and in every hour during those times.

Choose again. Yes. Yes.

27

My name is Jacob Schulmann. I write this letter to my friends in Lodz:

My very dear friends, I waited to write to confirm what I’d heard. Alas, to our great grief, we now know it all. I spoke to an eyewitness who escaped. He told me everything.

They’re exterminated in Chelmno, near Dombie, and they’re all buried in Rzuszow forest. The Jews are killed in two ways: by shooting or gas. It’s just happened to thousands of Lodz Jews. Do not think that this is being written by a madman. Alas, it is the tragic, horrible truth.

“Horror, horror! Man, shed thy clothes, cover thy head with ashes, run in the streets and dance in thy madness.” I am so weary that my pen can no longer write. Creator of the universe, help us!

I write the letter on January 19, A.D. 1942. A few weeks later, during a February thaw when there is a false scent of spring to the woods around our city of Gradow, we—the men in the camp—are loaded into vans. Some of the vans have brightly painted pictures of tropical trees and jungle animals on them.

These are the children’s vans from last summer when they took the children from the camp. The paint has faded over this past winter, and the Germans have not bothered to retouch the images so that the gay pictures seem to be fading like last summer’s dreams.

They drive us fifteen kilometers to Chelmno, which the Germans call Kulmhof.

Here they order us out of the vans and demand that we relieve ourselves in the forest. I cannot do it… not with the guards and the other men looking on, but I pretend that I have urinated and button my pants again.

They put us back in the big vans and drive us to an old castle. Here they order us out again and we are marched through a courtyard littered with clothes and shoes and down into a cellar. On the wall of the cellar, in Yiddish, is written “No one leaves here alive.” There are hundreds of us in the cellar now, all men, all Poles, most of us from the nearby villages such as Gradow and Kolo, but many from Lodz. The air smells of dampness and rot and cold stone and mildew.

After several hours, as the light is waning, we do leave the cellar alive. More vans have arrived, larger vans, with double-leaf doors. These larger vans are green. They have no pictures painted on their sides. The guards open the van doors and I can see that most of these larger vans are almost full, each holding seventy to eighty men. I recognize none of the men in them. The Germans push and beat us to hurry us into the large vans. I hear many of the men I know crying out so I lead them in prayer as we are packed into the foul-smelling vans—Shema Israel, we are praying. We are still praying as the van doors are slammed shut.

Outside, the Germans are shouting at the Polish driver and his Polish helpers. I hear one of the helpers shout “Gas!” in Polish and there comes the sound of a pipe or hose being coupled somewhere under our truck. The engine starts again with a roar.

Some of those around me continue praying with me, but most of the men begin screaming. The van starts to move, very slowly. I know that we are taking the narrow, asphalted road that the Germans built from Chelmno into the forest. All of the villagers marveled at this, because the road goes nowhere… it stops in the forest where the road widens so that there is room for the vans to turn around. But there is nothing there but the forest and the ovens the Germans ordered built and the pits the Germans ordered dug. The Jews in the camp who worked on that road and who dug the pits out there and who worked to build the ovens in the forest have told us this. We had not believed them when they told us, and then they were gone… transported.

The air thickens. The screams rise. My head hurts. It is hard to breathe. My heart is pounding wildly. I am holding the hands of a young man—a boy—on my left, and an old man to my right. Both are praying with me.

Somewhere in our van, someone is singing above the screams, singing in Yiddish, singing in a baritone that has been trained for opera:

“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us? We have been thrust into the fire before, but we have never denied Thy Holy Law.”

Aenea! My God! What?

Shhh. It’s all right, my dear. I’m here.

I don’t… what?

My name is Kaltryn Cateyen Endymion and I am the wife of Trorbe Endymion, who died five local months ago in a hunting accident. I am also the mother of the child named Raul, now three Hyperion-years old, who is playing by the campfire in the caravan circle as aunts watch him.

I climb the grassy hill above the valley where the caravan wagons have circled for the night. There are a few triaspen along the stream in the valley, but otherwise the moors are empty of any landmarks except short grass, heather, sedge, rocks, boulders, and lichen. And sheep.

Hundreds of the caravan’s sheep are visible and audible on the hills to the east as they mill and surge to the sheepdogs’ herding.

Grandam is mending clothes on a rock outcropping with a grand view down the valley to the west. There is a haze over the western horizon that means open water, the sea, but the immediate world is bound about by the moors, the evening sky of deepening lapis, the meteor streaks silently crossing and crisscrossing that sky, and the sound of the wind in the grass.

I take a seat on a rock next to Grandam. She is my late mother’s mother, and her face is our face but older, with weathered skin, short white hair, firm bones in a strong face, a blade of a nose, and brown eyes with laugh lines at the corners.

“You’re back at last,” says the older woman. “Was the voyage home smooth?”

“Aye,” I say. “Tom took us along the coast from Port Romance and then up the Beak Highway rather than paying the ferry toll through the Fens. We stayed at the Benbroke Inn the first night, camped along the Suiss the second.” Grandam nods. Her fingers are busy with the sewing. There is a basket of clothes next to her on the rock. “And the doctors?”

“The clinic was large,” I say. “The Christians have added to it since last we were in Port Romance. The sisters… the nurses… were very kind during the tests.”

Grandam waits.

I look down the valley to where the sun is breaking free from the dark clouds. Light streaks the valley tops, throws subtle shadows behind the low boulders and rocky hilltops, and sets the heather aflame. “It is cancer,” I say. “The new strain.”

“We knew that from the Moor’s Edge doctor,” says Grandam. “What did they say the prognosis is?” I pick up a shirt—it is one of Trorbe’s, but belongs to his brother, Raul’s Uncle Ley. I pull my own needle and thread from my apron and begin to sew on the button that Trorbe had lost just before his last hunting trip north. My cheeks are hot at the thought that I gave this shirt to Ley with the button missing.

“They recommend that I accept the cross,” I say.

“There is no cure?” says Grandam. “With all their machines and serums?”

“There used to be,” I say. “But evidently it used the molecular technology…”

“Nanotech,” says Grandam.

“Yes. And the Church banned it some time ago. The more advanced worlds have other treatments.”

“But Hyperion does not,” says Grandam and sets the clothes in her lap aside.

“Correct.” As I speak, I feel very tired, still a little ill from the tests and the trip, and very calm. But also very sad. I can hear Raul and the other boys laughing on the breeze. “And they counsel accepting their cross,” says Grandam, the last word sounding short and sharp-edged.

“Yes. A very nice young priest talked to me for hours yesterday.” Grandam looks me in the eye. “And will you do it, Kaltryn?”

I return her gaze. “No.”

“You are sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Trorbe would be alive again and with us now if he had accepted the cruciform last spring as the missionary pleaded.”

“Not my Trorbe,” I say and turn away. For the first time since the pain began seven weeks ago, I am crying. Not for me, I know, but at the memory of Trorbe smiling and waving that last sunrise morn when he set out with his brothers to hunt salt ibson near the coast.

Grandam is holding my hand. “You’re thinking of Raul?”

I shake my head. “Not yet. In a few weeks, I’ll think of nothing else.”

“You do not have to worry about that, you know,” Grandam says softly. “I still remember how to raise a young one. I still have tales to tell and skills to teach. And I will keep your memory alive in him.”

“He will be so young when…” I say and stop.

Grandam is squeezing my hand. “The young remember most deeply,” she says softly. “When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.”

The sunset is brilliant but distorted by my tears. I keep my face half turned away from Grandam’s gaze. “I don’t want him remembering me only when he is old. I want to see him… every day… see him play and grow up.”

“Do you remember the verse of Ryokan that I taught you when you were barely older than Raul?” says Grandam.

I have to laugh. “You taught me dozens of Ryokan verses, Grandam.”

“The first one,” says the old woman. It takes me only a moment to recall it. I say the verse, avoiding the singsong quality to my voice just as Grandam taught me when I was little older than Raul is now: “How happy I am As I go hand in hand With the children, To gather young greens In the fields of spring!”

Grandam has closed her eyes. I can see how thin the parchment of her eyelids is. “You used to like that verse, Kaltryn.”

“I still do.”

“And does it say anything about the need to gather greens next week or next year or ten years from now in order to be happy now?”

I smile. “Easy for you to say, old woman,” I say, my voice soft and affectionate to temper the disrespect in the words. “You’ve been gathering greens for seventy-four springs and plan to do so for another seventy.”

“Not so many to come, I think.” She squeezes my hand a final time and releases it. “But the important thing is to walk with the children now, in this evening’s spring sunlight, and to gather the greens quickly, for tonight’s dinner. I am having your favorite meal.” I actually clap my hands at this. “The Northwind soup? But the leeks are not ripe.”

“They are in the south swards, where I sent Lee and his boys to search. And they have a pot full. Go now, get the spring greens to add to the mix. Take your child and be back before true dark.”

“I love you, Grandam.”

“I know. And Raul loves you, Little One. And I shall take care that the circle remains unbroken. Run on now.”

I come awake falling. I have been awake.

The leaves of the Startree have shaded the pods for night and the stars to the out-system side are blazing.

The voices do not diminish. The images do not fade. This is not like dreaming. This is a maelstrom of images and voices… thousands of voices in chorus, all clamoring to be heard.

I had not remembered my mother’s voice until this moment. When Rabbi Schulmann cried out in Old Earth Polish and prayed in Yiddish, I had understood not only his voice but his thoughts.

I am going mad.

“No, my dear, you are not going mad,” whispers Aenea. She is floating against the warm pod wall with me, holding me. The chronometer on my comlog says that the sleep period along this region of the Biosphere Startree is almost over, that the leaves will be shifting to allow the sunlight in within the hour. The voices whisper and murmur and argue and sob. The images flit at the back of my brain like colors after a terrible blow to the head. I realize that I am holding myself stiffly, fists clenched, teeth clenched, neck veins straining, as against a terrible wind or wave of pain.

“No, no,” Aenea is saying, her soft hands stroking my cheek and temples. Sweat floats around me like a sour nimbus. “No, Raul, relax. You are so sensitive to this, my dear, just as I thought. Relax and allow the voices to subside. You can control this, my darling. You can listen when you wish, quiet them when you must.”

“But they never go away?” I say.

“Not far away,” whispers Aenea. Ouster angels float in the sunlight beyond the leaf barrier sunward.

“And you have listened to this since you were an infant?” I say.

“Since before I was born,” says my darling.

“My God, my God,” I say, holding my fists against my eyes. “My God.”

My name is Amnye Machen Also Ata and I am eleven standard years old when the Pax comes to my village of Qom-Riyadh. Our village is far from the cities, far from the few highways and skyways, far, even, from the caravan routes that crisscross the rock desert and the Burning Plains.

For two days the evening skies have shown the Pax ships burning like embers as they pass from east to west in what my father says is a place above the air. Yesterday the village radio carried orders from the imam at Al-Ghazali who heard over the phone lines from Omar that everyone in the High Reaches and the Burning Plains Oasis Camps are to assemble outside their yurts and wait. Father has gone to the meeting of the men inside the mud-walled mosque in our village.

The rest of my family stands outside our yurt. The other thirty families also wait.

Our village poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, walks among us, trying to settle our nerves with verse, but even the adults are fearful.

My father has returned. He tells Mother that the mullah has decided that we cannot wait for the infidels to kill us. The village radio has not been able to raise the mosque at Al-Ghazali or Omar. Father thinks that the radio is broken again, but the mullah believes that the infidels have killed everyone west of the Burning Plains.

We hear the sound of shots from the front of the other yurts. Mother and my oldest sister want to run, but Father orders them to stay. There are screams. I watch the sky, waiting for the infidel Pax ships to reappear. When I look down again, the mullah’s enforcers are coming around the side of our yurt, setting new magazines in their rifles. Their faces are grim.

Father has us all hold hands. “God is great,” he says and we respond, “God is great.” Even I know that “Islam” means submission to the merciful will of Allah.

At the last second, I see the embers in the sky—the Pax ships floating east to west across the zenith so high above.

“God is great!” cries Father.

I hear the shots.

“Aenea, I don’t know what these things mean.”

“Raul, they do not mean, they are.”

“They are real?”

“As real as any memories can be, my love.”

“But how? I can hear the voices… so many voices… as soon as I… touch one with my mind… these are stronger than my own memories, clearer.”

“They are memories, nonetheless, my love.”

“Of the dead…”

“These are, yes.”

“Learning their language…”

“In many ways we must learn their language, Raul. Their actual tongues… English, Yiddish, Polish, Parsi, Tamal, Greek, Mandarin… but also their hearts. The soul of their memory.”

“Are these ghosts speaking, Aenea?”

“There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life… when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.”

“And these memories…”

“Resonate in the Void Which Binds.”

“How? All those billions of lives…”

“And thousands of races and billions of years, my love. Some of your mother’s memories are there… and my mother’s… but so are the life impressions of beings terribly far removed from us in space and time.”

“Can I touch those as well, Aenea?”

“Perhaps. With time and practice. It took me years to understand them. Even the sense impressions of life-forms so differently evolved are difficult to comprehend, much less their thoughts, memories, and emotions.”

“But you have done it?”

“I have tried.”

“Alien life-forms like the Seneschai Aluit or the Akerataeli?”

“Much more alien than that, Raul. The Seneschai lived hidden on Hebron near the human settlers for generations. And they are empaths—emotions were their primary language. The Akerataeli are quite different from us, but not so different from the Core entities whom my father visited.”

“My head hurts, kiddo. Can you help me stop these voices and images?”

“I can help you quiet them, my love. They will never really stop as long as we live. This is the blessing and burden of the communion with my blood. But before I show you how to quiet them, listen a few more minutes. It is almost leafturn and sunrise.”

My name was Lenar Hoyt, priest, but now I am Pope Urban XVI, and I am celebrating the Mass of Resurrection for John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa in St. Peter’s Basilica with more than five hundred of the Vatican’s most important faithful in attendance.

Standing at the altar, my hands outstretched, I read from the Prayer of the Faithful—

“Let us confidently call upon God our Almighty Father Who raised Christ His Son from the dead for the salvation of all.” Cardinal Lourdusamy, who serves as my deacon for this Mass, intones—

“That He may return into the perpetual company of the Faithful, this deceased Cardinal, John Domenico Mustafa, who once received the seed of eternal life through Baptism, we pray to the Lord.

“That he, who exercised the episcopal office in the Church and in the Holy Office while alive, may once again serve God in his renewed life, we pray to the Lord.

“That He may give to the souls of our brothers, sisters, relatives, and benefactors the reward of their labor, we pray to the Lord.

“That He may welcome into the light of His countenance all who sleep in the hope of the resurrection, and grant them that resurrection, that they may better serve Him, we pray to the Lord.

“That He may assist and graciously console our brothers and sisters who are suffering affliction from the assaults of the godless and the derision of the fallen away, we pray to the Lord.

“That He may one day call into His glorious kingdom, all who are assembled here in faith and devotion, and award unto us that same blessing of temporal resurrection in Christ’s name, we pray to the Lord.”

Now, as the choir sings the Offertory Antiphon and the congregation kneels in echoing silence in anticipation of the Holy Eucharist, I turn back from the altar and say—“Receive, Lord, these gifts which we offer You on behalf of Your servant, John Domenico Mustafa, Cardinal; You gave the reward of the high priesthood in this world; may he be briefly united with the company of Your Saints in the Kingdom of Heaven and return to us via Your Sacrament of Resurrection. Through Christ our Lord.”

The congregation responds in unison—“Amen.”

I walk to Cardinal Mustafa’s coffin and resurrection créche near the communion altar and sprinkle holy water on it, while praying—

“Father, all-powerful and ever-living God, we do well always and everywhere to give You thanks through Jesus Christ our Lord.

“In Him, Who rose from the dead, our hope of resurrection dawned. The sadness of death gives way to the bright promise of immortality.

“Lord, for your faithful people life is changed and renewed, not ended. When the body of our earthly dwelling lies in death we trust in Your mercy and Your miracle to renew it to us.

“And so, with all the choirs of angels in Heaven we proclaim Your glory and join in their unending hymn of praise:”

The great organ in the Basilica thunders while the choir immediately begins singing the Sanctus:

“Holy, holy, holy Lord God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.”

After Communion, after the Mass ends and the congregation departs, I walk slowly to the sacristy. I am sad and my heart hurts—literally. The heart disease has advanced once again, clogging my arteries and making every step and word painful. I think—I must not tell Lourdusamy.

That Cardinal appears as acolytes and altar boys help divest me of my garments.

“We have received a Gideon-drone courier, Your Holiness.”

“From which front?” I inquire.

“Not from the fleet, Holy Father,” says the Cardinal, frowning at a hardcopy message that he holds in his fat hands.

“From where then?” I say, holding out my hand impatiently. The message is written on thin vellum.

I look up at my Secretary of State. “Can you stop the fleet, Simon Augustino?”

His jowls seem to quiver. “No, Your Holiness. They made the jump more than twenty-four hours ago. They should be almost finished with their accelerated resurrection schedule and commencing the attack within moments. We cannot outfit a drone and send it in time to recall them.”

I realize that my hand is shaking. I give the message back to Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“Call in Marusyn and the other fleet commanders,” I say. “Tell them to bring every remaining capital fighting ship back to Pacem System. Immediately.”

“But Your Holiness,” says Lourdusamy, his voice urgent, “there are so many important task force missions under way at the present…”

“Immediately!” I snap.

Lourdusamy bows. “Immediately, Your Holiness.”

As I turn away, the pain in my chest and the shortness in my breath are like warnings from God that time is short.

“Aenea! The Pope…”

“Easy, my love. I’m here.”

“I was with the Pope… Lenar Hoyt… but he’s not dead, is he?”

“You are also learning the language of the living, Raul. Incredible that your first contact with another living person’s memories is with him. I think…”

“No time, Aenea! No time. His cardinal… Lourdusamy… brought your message. The Pope tried to recall the fleet, but Lourdusamy said that it was too late… that they jumped twenty-four hours ago and would be attacking any moment. That could be here, Aenea. It could be the fleet massing at Lacaille 9352…”

“No!” Aenea’s cry brings me out of the cacophony of images and voices, memories and sense overlays, not banishing them completely, but making them recede to something not unlike loud music in an adjoining room.

Aenea has summoned a comlog unit from the cubby shelf and is calling both our ship and Navson Hamnim at the same time.

I try to focus on my friend and the moment, pulling clothes on as I do so, but like a person emerging from a vivid dream, the murmur of voices and other memories is still with me.

Father Captain Federico de Soya kneeling in prayer in his private cubby pod on the treeship Yggdrasill, only de Soya no longer thinks of himself as “Father-Captain,” but simply as “Father.” And he is unsure of even this title as he kneels and prays, prays as he has for hours this night, and longer hours in the days and nights since the cruciform was removed from his chest and body by the communion with Aenea’s blood. Father de Soya prays for forgiveness of which—he knows beyond doubt—he is unworthy. He prays for forgiveness for his years as a Pax Fleet captain, his many battles, the lives he has taken, the beautiful works of man and God he has destroyed. Father Federico de Soya kneels in the one-sixth-g silence of his cubby and asks his Lord and Savior… the God of Mercy in which he had learned to believe and which he now doubts… to forgive him, not for his own sake, but so that his thoughts and actions in the months and years to come, or hours if his life is to be that short, might better serve his Lord… I pull away from this contact with the sudden revulsion of someone realizing that he is becoming a voyeur. I understand immediately that if Aenea has known this “language of the living” for years, for her entire life, that she has almost certainly spent more energy denying it—avoiding these unsolicited entries into other people’s lives—than mastering it.

Aenea has irised an opening in the pod wall and taken the comlog out to the organic tuft of balcony there. I float through and join her, floating down to the balcony’s surface under the gentle one-tenth-g pull of the containment field there. There are several faces floating above the diskey of the comlog—Het Masteen’s, Ket Rosteen’s, and Navson Hamnim’s—but all are looking away from the visual pickups, as is Aenea.

It takes me a second to look up at what she is seeing.

Blazing streaks are cutting through the Startree past beautiful rosettes of orange and red flame. For an instant I think that it is just leafturn sunrise along the inner curve of the Biosphere, squids and angels and watering comets catching the light the way Aenea and I had hours earlier when riding the heliosphere matrix, but then I realize what I am seeing.

Pax ships cutting through the Startree in a hundred places, their fusion tails slicing away branches and trunk like cold, bright knives.

Explosions of leaves and debris hundreds of thousands of kilometers away sending earthquake tremors through the branch and pod and balcony on which we stand.

Bright confusion. Energy lances leaping through space, visible because of the billions of particles of escaping atmosphere, pulverized organic matter, burning leaves, and Ouster and Templar blood. Lances cutting and burning everything they touch.

More explosions blossom outward within a few kilometers. The containment field still holds and sound pounds us back against the pod wall that ripples like the flesh of an injured beast.

Aenea’s comlog goes off at the same instant the Startree curve above us bursts into flame and explodes into silent space. There are shouts and screams and roars audible, but I know that within seconds the containment field must fail and Aenea and I will be sucked out into space with the other tons of debris flying past us.

I try to pull her back into the pod, which is sealing itself in a vain attempt to survive.

“No, Raul, look!”

I look to where she points. Above us, then beneath us, around us, the Startree is burning and exploding, vines and branches snapping, Ouster angels consumed in flame, ten-klick worker squids imploding, treeships burning as they attempt to get under way.

“They’re killing the ergs!” shouts Aenea above the wind roar and explosions. I pound on the pod wall, shouting commands. The door irises open for just a second, but long enough for me to pull my beloved inside.

There is no shelter here. The plasma blasts are visible through the polarized pod walls.

Aenea has pulled her pack out of the cubby and tugged it on. I grab mine, thrust my sheath knife in my belt as if it would help fight off the marauders.

“We have to get to the Yggdrasill!” cries Aenea.

We kick off to the stemway wall, but the pod will not let us out. There is a roaring through the pod hull.

“Stemway’s breached,” gasps Aenea. She still carries the comlog—I see that it is the ancient one from the Consul’s ship—and is calling up data from the Startree grid. “Bridges are out. We have to get to the treeship.”

I look through the wall. Orange blossoms of flame. The Yggdrasill is ten klicks up and inner surface—east of us. With the swaying bridges and stemways gone, it might as well be a thousand light-years away.

“Send the ship for us,” I say. “The Consul’s ship.”

Aenea shakes her head. “Het Masteen is getting the Yggdrasill under way now… no time to undock our ship. We have to be there in the next three or four minutes or… What about the Ouster skinsuits? We can fly over.”

It is my turn for headshaking. “They’re not here. When we got out of them at the landing platform, I had A. Bettik carry both of them to the treeship.”

The pod shakes wildly and Aenea turns away to look. The pod wall is a bright red, melting.

I pull open my storage cubby, throw clothes and gear aside, and pull out the one extraneous artifact I own, tugging it out of its leather storage tube. Father Captain de Soya’s gift.

I tap the activator threads. The hawking mat stiffens and hovers in zero-g. The EM field around this section of the Startree is still intact.

“Come on,” I shout as the wall melts. I pull my beloved onto the hawking mat.

We are swept out through the fissure, into vacuum and madness.

28

The erg-folded magnetic fields were still standing but strangely scrambled. Instead of flying along and above the boulevard-wide swath of branch toward the Yggdrasill, the hawking mat wanted to align itself at right angles to the branch, so that our faces seemed to be pointing down as the mat rose like an elevator through shaking branches, dangling bridges, severed stemways, globes of flame, and hordes of Ousters leaping off into space to do battle and die. As long as we made progress toward the treeship, I let the hawking mat do what it wanted.

There were bubbles of containment-field atmosphere remaining, but most of the erg-fields had died along with the ergs who maintained them. Despite multiple redundancies, air was either leaking or explosively decompressing all along this region of the Startree. We had no suits.

What I had remembered in the pod at the last moment was that the ancient hawking mat had its own low-level field for holding passengers or air in. It was never meant as a long-term pressurization device, but we had used it nine years ago on the unnamed jungle planet when we’d flown too high to breathe, and I hoped the systems were still working.

They still worked… at least after a fashion. As soon as we were out of the pod and rising like a parawing through the chaos, the hawking mat’s low-level field kicked in. I could almost feel the thin air leaking out, but I told myself that it should last us the length of time it would take to reach the Yggdrasill.

We almost did not reach the Yggdrasill.

It was not the first space battle I had witnessed—Aenea and I had sat on the high platform of the Temple Hanging in Air not that many standard days, eons, ago and watched the light show in cislunar space as the Pax task force had destroyed Father de Soya’s ship—but this was the first space battle I had seen where someone was trying to kill me.

Where there was air, the noise was deafening: explosions, implosions, shattering trunks and stemways, rupturing branches and dying squids, the howl of alarms and babble and squeal of comlogs and other communicators. Where there was vacuum, the silence was even more deafening: Ouster and Templar bodies being blown noiselessly into space—women and children, warriors unable to reach their weapons or battle stations, robed priests of the Muir tumbling toward the sun while wrapped in the ultimate indignity of violent death—flames with no crackling, screams with no sound, cyclones with no windrush warning.

Aenea was huddled over Siri’s ancient comlog as we rose through the maelstrom. I saw Systenj Coredwell shouting from the tiny holo display above the diskey, and then Kent Quinkent and Sian Quintana Ka’an speaking earnestly.

I was too busy guiding the hawking mat to listen to their desperate conversations.

I could no longer see the fusion tails of the Pax Fleet archangels, only their lances cutting through gas clouds and debris fields, slicing the Startree like scalpels through living flesh. The great trunks and winding branches actually bled, their sap and other vital fluids mixing with the kilometers of fiber-optic vine and Ouster blood as they exploded into space or boiled away in vacuum. A ten-klick worker squid was sliced through and then sliced through again as I watched, its delicate tentacles spasming in a destructive dance as it died. Ouster angels took flight by the thousands and died by the thousands. A treeship tried to get under way and was lanced through in seconds, its rich oxygen atmosphere igniting within the containment field, its crew dying in the time it took for the energy globe to fill with swirling smoke. “Not the Yggdrasill,” shouted Aenea. I nodded. The dying treeship had been coming from sphere north, but the Yggdrasill should be close now, a klick or less above us along the vibrating, splintering branch.

Unless I had taken a wrong turn. Or unless it had already been destroyed. Or unless it had left without us. “I talked to Het Masteen,” Aenea shouted. We were in a globe of escaping air now and the din was terrible. “Only about three hundred of the thousand are aboard.”

“All right,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. What thousand? No time to ask.

I caught a glimpse of the deeper green of a treeship a klick or more above us and to the left—on another branch helix alt—and swept the hawking mat in that direction. If it was not the Yggdrasill we would have to seek shelter there anyway. The Startree EM fields were failing, the hawking mat losing energy and inertia.

The EM field failed. The hawking mat surged a final time and then began tumbling in the blackness between shattered branches, a kilometer or more from the nearest burning stemways. Far below and behind us I could see the cluster of environment pods from which we had come: they were all shattered, leaking air and bodies, the podstems and connecting branches writhing in blind Newtonian response.

“That’s it,” I said, my voice low because there was no more air or noise outside our failing bubble of energy. The hawking mat had been designed seven centuries ago to seduce a teenage niece into loving an old man, not to keep its flyers alive in outer space. “We tried, kiddo.” I moved back from the flight threads and put my arm around Aenea.

“No,” said Aenea, rejecting not my hug but the death sentence. She gripped my arm so fiercely that her fingers sank into the flesh of my bicep. “No, no,” she said to herself and tapped the comlog diskey.

Het Masteen’s cowled face appeared against the tumbling starfield. “Yes,” he said. “I see you.”

The huge treeship now hung a thousand meters above us, a single great ceiling of branches and leaves green behind the flickering violet containment field, the bulk of it slowly separating from the burning Startree. There was a sudden, violent tug, and for a second I was sure that one of the archangel lances had found us.

“The ergs are pulling us in,” said Aenea, still grasping my arm.

“Ergs?” I said. “I thought a treeship only had one erg aboard to handle the drive and fields.”

“Usually they do,” said Aenea. “Sometimes two if it’s an extraordinary voyage… into the outer envelope of a star, for instance, or through the shock wave of a binary’s heliosphere.”

“So there are two aboard the Yggdrasill?” I said, watching the tree grow and fill the sky.

Plasma explosions unfolded silently behind us.

“No,” said Aenea, “there are twenty-seven.”

The extended field pulled us in. Up rearranged itself and became down. We were lowered onto a high deck, just beneath the bridge platform near the crown of the treeship. Even before I tapped the flight threads to collapse our own puny containment field, Aenea was scooping up her comlog and backpack and was racing toward the stairway.

I rolled the hawking mat neatly, shoved it into its leather carrier, flung the tube on my back, and rushed to catch up.

Only the Templar treeship captain Het Masteen and a few of his lieutenants were on the crown bridge, but the platforms and stairways beneath the bridge level were crowded with people I knew and did not know: Rachel, Theo, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Lhomo Dondrub, and the dozens of other familiar refugees from T’ien Shan, but there were also scores of other non-Ouster, non-Templar humans, men, women, and children whom I had not seen previously. “Refugees fleeing a hundred Pax worlds, picked up by Father Captain de Soya in the Raphael over the past few years,” said Aenea. “We’d expected hundreds more to arrive today before departure, but it’s too late now.”

I followed her up to the bridge level.

Het Masteen stood at the locus of a circle of organic control diskeys—displays from the fiber-optic nerves running throughout the ship, holo displays from onboard, astern, and ahead of the treeship, a communicator nexus to put him in touch with the Templars standing duty with the ergs, in the singularity containment core, at the drive roots, and elsewhere, and the central holo-simulacrum of the treeship itself, which he could touch with his long fingers to call up interactives or change headings. The Templar looked up as Aenea walked quickly across the sacred bridge toward him. His countenance—shaped from Old Earth Asian stock—calm beneath his cowl.

“I am pleased that you were not left behind, One Who Teaches,” he said dryly. “Where do you wish us to go?”

“Out-system,” said Aenea without hesitation.

Het Masteen nodded. “We will draw fire, of course. The Pax Fleet firepower is formidable.”

Aenea only nodded. I saw the treeship simulacrum turning slowly and looked up to see the starfield rotating above us. We had moved in-system only a few hundred kilometers and were now turning back toward the battered inner surface of the Biosphere Startree. Where our meeting and environment pods had been there was now a ragged hole in the braided branches. All across the thousands of square klicks of this region were gaping wounds and denuded branches. The Yggdrasill moved slowly through billions of tumbling leaves—those still in containment-field atmosphere burning brightly and painting the containment-field perimeter gray with ash—as the treeship returned to the sphere wall and carefully passed through.

Emerging from the far side and picking up speed as the erg-controlled fusion drive flared, we could see even more of the battle now. Space here was a myriad of winking pinpoints of light, fiery sparks appearing as defensive containment fields came alight under lance attack, countless thermonuclear and plasma explosions, the drive tails of missiles, hyperkinetic weapons, small attack craft, and archangels. The curving-away outer surface of the Startree looked like a fibrous volcano world erupting with flames and geysers of debris. Watering comets and shepherd asteroids, knocked from their perfect balancing act by Pax weapon blasts, tore through the Startree like cannonballs through kindling. Het Masteen called up tactical holos and we stared at the image of the entire Biosphere, pocked now with ten thousand fires—many individual conflagrations as large as my homeworld of Hyperion—and a hundred thousand visible rents and tears in the sphere fabric that had taken almost a thousand years to weave. There were thousands of under-drive objects being plotted on the radar and deep distance sensors, but fewer each second as the powerful archangels picked off Ouster ramscouts, torchships, destroyers, and treeships with their lances at distances of several AU’s. Millions of space-adapted Ousters threw themselves at the attackers, but they died like moths in a flame-thrower.

Lhomo Dondrub strode onto the bridge. He was wearing an Ouster skinsuit and carrying a long, class-four assault weapon. “Aenea, where the goddamned hell are we going?”

“Away,” said my beloved. “We have to leave, Lhomo.”

The flyer shook his head. “No, we don’t. We have to stay and fight. We can’t just abandon our friends to these Pax carrion birds.”

“Lhomo,” said Aenea, “we can’t help the Startree. I have to leave here in order to fight the Pax.”

“Run again if you have to,” said Lhomo, his handsome features contorted by rage and frustration. He molded the silvery skinsuit cowl up over his head. “I am going to stay and fight.”

“They’ll kill you, my friend,” said Aenea. “You can’t fight archangel-class starships.”

“Watch me,” said Lhomo, the silvery suit covering everything but his face now. He shook my hand. “Good luck, Raul.”

“And to you,” I said, feeling my throat tighten and face flush as much from my own shame at fleeing as from bidding farewell to this brave man.

Aenea touched the powerful silver arm. “Lhomo, you can help the fight more if you come with us…”

Lhomo Dondrub shook his head and lowered the fluid cowl. The audio pickups sounded metallic as they spoke for him. “Good luck to you, Aenea. May God and the Buddha help you. May God and the Buddha help us all.” He stepped to the edge of the platform and looked back at Het Masteen. The Templar nodded, touched the control simulacrum near the crown of the tree, and whispered into one of the fiberthreads.

I felt gravity lessen. The outer field shimmered and shifted. Lhomo was lifted, turned, and catapulted out into space beyond our branches and air and lights. I saw his silver wings unfold, saw the light fill his wings, and watched him form up with a score of other Ouster angels carrying their puny weapons and riding sunlight toward the nearest archangel.

Others were coming onto the bridge now—Rachel, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, Father de Soya and his sergeant, A. Bettik, the Dalai Lama—but all held back, keeping a respectful distance from the busy Templar captain.

“They’ve acquired us,” said Het Masteen. “Firing.”

The containment field exploded red. I could hear the sizzling. It was as if we had fallen into the heart of a star.

Displays flickered. “Holding,” said the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. “Holding.”

He meant the defensive fields, but the Pax ships were also holding—maintaining their energy lance fire even as we accelerated out-system.

Except for the display holos, there was no sign of our movement—no stars visible—only the crackling, hissing, boiling ovoid of destructive energy bubbling and slithering a few dozen meters above and around us.

“What is our course, please?” asked Het Masteen of Aenea.

My friend touched her forehead briefly as if tired or lost. “Just out where we can see the stars.”

“We will never reach a translation point while under this severity of attack,” said the Templar.

“I know,” said Aenea. “Just… out… where I can see the stars.”

Het Masteen looked up at the inferno above us. “We may never see the stars again.”

“We have to,” Aenea said simply.

There was a sudden flurry of shouts. I looked up at where the commotion was centered.

There were only a few small platforms above the control bridge—tiny structures looking like crow’s nests on a holodrama pirate ship or like a treehouse I had seen once in the Hyperion fens—and it was on one of these that the figure stood. Crew clones were shouting and pointing. Het Masteen peered up toward the tiny platform fifteen meters above us and turned to Aenea. “The Lord of Pain rides with us.” I could see the colors from the inferno beyond the containment field reflecting on the Shrike’s forehead and chest carapace.

“I thought it died on T’ien Shan,” I said.

Aenea looked more weary than I had ever seen her. “The thing moves through time more easily than we move through space, Raul. It may have died on T’ien Shan… it may die a thousand years hence in a battle with Colonel Kassad… it may not be capable of dying… we will never know.”

As if her use of his name had summoned him, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad came up the stairs to the bridge platform. The Colonel was in archaic Hegemony-era battle dress and was carrying the assault rifle I had once seen in the Consul’s ship armory. He stared at the Shrike like a man possessed.

“Can I get up there?” Kassad asked the Templar captain.

Still absorbed with issuing commands and monitoring displays, Het Masteen pointed to some ratlines and rope ladders that rose to the highest platform. “No shooting on this treeship,” Het Masteen called after the Colonel. Kassad nodded and began climbing. The rest of us turned our attention back to the simulacra displays. There were at least three archangels directing some of their fire at us from distances of less than a million klicks. They would take turns lancing us, each then directing some of its fire at other targets. But our odd refusal to die seemed to increase their anger at us and the lances would return, creeping across the four to ten light-seconds and exploding on the containment field above us. One of the ships was about to pass around the curve of the blazing Startree, but the two others were still decelerating in-system toward us with clear fields of fire.

“Missiles launched against us,” said one of the captain’s Templar lieutenants in a voice no more excited than I would use to announce the arrival of dinner. “Two… four… nine. Sublight. Presumably plasma warheads.”

“Can we survive that?” asked Theo. Rachel had walked over to watch the Colonel climb toward the Shrike.

Het Masteen was too occupied to answer, so Aenea said, “We don’t know. It depends on the binders… the ergs.”

“Sixty seconds to missile impact,” said the same Templar lieutenant in the same flat tones.

Het Masteen touched a comwand. His voice sounded normal, but I realized that it was being amplified all over the klick-long treeship.

“Everyone will please shield their eyes and avoid looking toward the field. The binders will polarize the flash as much as possible, but please do not look up. May the peace of the Muir be with us.”

I looked at Aenea. “Kiddo, does this treeship carry weapons?”

“No,” she said. Her eyes looked as weary as her voice had sounded.

“So we’re not going to fight… just run?”

“Yes, Raul.”

I ground my molars. “Then I agree with Lhomo,” I said. “We’ve run too much. It’s time to help our friends here. Time to…”

At least three of the missiles exploded.

Later, I recall the light so blinding that I could see Aenea’s skull and vertebrae through her skin and flesh, but that must be impossible. There was a sense of falling… of the bottom falling out of everything… and then the one-sixth-g field was restored. A subsonic rumble made my teeth and bones hurt. I blinked away retinal afterimages. Aenea’s face was still before me—her cheeks flushed and sweaty, her hair pulled back by a hastily tied band, her eyes tired but infinitely alive, her forearms bare and sunburned—and in a thick moment of sentimentality I thought that it would not have been unthinkable to die like that, with Aenea’s face seared into my soul and memory.

Two more plasma warheads made the treeship shudder. Then four more. “Holding,” said Het Masteen’s lieutenant. “All fields holding.”

“Lhomo and Raul are right, Aenea,” said the Dorje Phamo, stepping forward with regal elegance in her simple cotton robe. “You have run away from the Pax for years. It is time to fight them… time for all of us to fight them.” I was staring at the old woman with something close to rude intensity. I had realized that there was an aura about her… no, wrong word, too mystical… but a feeling of strong color emanating from her, a deep carmine as strong as the Thunderbolt Sow’s personality. I also realized that I had been noticing that with everyone on the platform that evening—the bright blue of Lhomo’s courage, the golden confidence of Het Masteen’s command, the shimmering violet of Colonel Kassad’s shock at seeing the Shrike—and I wondered if this was some artifact of learning the language of the living. Or perhaps it was a result of the overload of light from the plasma explosions. Whatever it was, I knew that the colors were not real—I was not hallucinating and my vision was not clouded—but I also thought that I knew that my mind was making these connections, these shorthand glimpses into the true spirit of the person, on some level below and above sight. And I knew that the colors surrounding Aenea covered the spectrum and beyond—a glow so pervasive that it filled the treeship as surely as the plasma explosions filled the world outside it.

Father de Soya spoke. “No, ma’am,” he said to the Dorje Phamo, his voice soft and respectful. “Lhomo and Raul are not correct. In spite of all of our anger and our wish to strike back, Aenea is correct. Lhomo may learn—if he lives—what we all will learn if we live. That is, after communion with Aenea, we share the pain of those we attack. Truly share it. Literally share it. Physically share it. Share it as part of having learned the language of the living.”

The Dorje Phamo looked down at the shorter priest. “I know this is true, Christian. But this does not mean that we cannot strike back when others hurt us.” She swept one arm upward to include the slowly clearing containment field and the starfield of fusion trails and burning embers beyond it. “These Pax… monsters… are destroying one of the greatest achievements of the human race. We must stop them!”

“Not now,” said Father de Soya. “Not by fighting them here. Trust Aenea.”

The giant named Sergeant Gregorius stepped into the circle. “Every fiber of my being, every moment of my training, every scar from my years of fighting… everything urges me to fight now,” he growled. “But I trusted my captain. Now I trust him as my priest. And if he says we must trust the young woman… then we must trust her.”

Het Masteen held up a hand. The group fell into silence. “This argument is a waste of time. As the One Who Teaches told you, the Yggdrasill has no weapons and the ergs are our only defense. But they cannot phase-shift the fusion drive while providing this level of shield. Effectively, we have no propulsion… we are drifting on our former course only a few light-minutes beyond our original position. And five of the archangels have changed course to intercept us.” The Templar turned to face us. “Please, everyone except the Revered One Who Teaches and her tall friend Raul, please leave the bridge platform and wait below.”

The others left without another word. I saw the direction of Rachel’s gaze before she turned away and I looked up. Colonel Kassad was at the top crow’s nest, standing next to the Shrike, the tall man still dwarfed by the three-meter sculpture of chrome and blades and thorns. Neither the Colonel nor the killing machine moved as they regarded one another from less than a meter’s distance. I looked back at the simulacra display.

The Pax ship embers were closing fast. Above us the containment field cleared.

“Take my hand, Raul,” said Aenea.

I took her hand, remembering all of the other times I had touched it in the last ten standard years.

“The stars,” she whispered. “Look up at the stars. And listen to them.”

The treeship Yggdrasill hung in low orbit around an orange-red world with white polar caps, ancient volcanoes larger than my world’s Pinion Plateau, and a river valley running for more than five thousand kilometers like an appendectomy scar around the world’s belly.

“This is Mars,” said Aenea. “Colonel Kassad will leave us here.”

The Colonel had come down from his close regard of the Shrike after the quantum-shift jump. There was no word or phrase for what we did: one moment the treeship was in the Biosphere System, coasting at low velocity, drives dead, under attack by a swarm of archangels, and the next instant we were in low and stable orbit around this dead world in Old Earth System.

“How did you do that?” I had asked Aenea a second after she had done it. I’d had no doubt whatsoever that she had… shifted… us there.

“I learned to hear the music of the spheres,” she said. “And then to take a step.”

I kept staring at her. I was still holding her hand. I had no plans to release it until she spoke to me in plain language.

“One can understand a place, Raul,” she said, knowing that so many others were undoubtedly listening at that moment, “and when you do, it is like hearing the music of it. Each world a different chord. Each star system a different sonata. Each specific place a clear and distinct note.”

I did not release her hand. “And the farcasting without a farcaster?” I said.

Aenea nodded. “Freecasting. A quantum leap in the real sense of the term,” she said. “Moving in the macro universe the way an electron moves in the infinitely micro. Taking a step with the help of the Void Which Binds.”

I was shaking my head. “Energy. Where does the energy come from, kiddo? Nothing comes from nothing.”

“But everything comes from everything.”

“What does that mean, Aenea?”

She pulled her fingers from mine but touched my cheek. “Remember our discussion long, long ago about the Newtonian physics of love?”

“Love is an emotion, kiddo. Not a form of energy.”

“It’s both, Raul. It truly is. And it is the only key to unlocking the universe’s greatest supply of energy.”

“Are you talking about religion?” I said, half furious at either her opacity or my denseness or both.

“No,” she said, “I’m talking about quasars deliberately ignited, about pulsars tamed, about the exploding cores of galaxies tapped for energy like steam turbines. I’m talking about an engineering project two and a half billion years old and barely begun.”

I could only stare.

She shook her head. “Later, my love. For now understand that farcasting without a farcaster really works. There were never any real farcasters… never any magical doors opening onto different worlds… only the TechnoCore’s perversion of this form of the Void’s second most wonderful gift.”

I should have said, What is the Void’s first most wonderful gift? but I assumed then that it was the learning-the-language-of-the-dead recording of sentient races’ memories… my mother’s voice, to be more precise. But what I did say then was, “So this is how you moved Rachel and Theo and you from world to world without time-debt.”

“Yes.”

“And took the Consul’s ship from T’ien Shan System to Biosphere with no Hawking drive.”

“Yes.”

I was about to say, And traveled to whatever world where you met your lover, were married, and had a child, but the words would not form. “This is Mars,” she said next, filling the silence. “Colonel Kassad will leave us here.”

The tall warrior stepped to Aenea’s side.

Rachel came closer, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed him.

“Someday you will be called Moneta,” Kassad said softly. “And we will be lovers.”

“Yes,” said Rachel and stepped back.

Aenea took the tall man’s hand. He was still in quaint battle garb, the assault rifle held comfortably in the crook of his arm. Smiling slightly, the Colonel looked up at the highest platform where the Shrike still stood, the blood light of Mars on his carapace.

“Raul,” said Aenea, “will you come as well?”

I took her other hand.

The wind was blowing sand into my eyes and I could not breathe. Aenea handed me an osmosis mask and I slipped mine on as she set hers in place.

The sand was red, the rocks were red, and the sky was a stormy pink. We were standing in a dry river valley bounded by rocky cliffs. The riverbed was strewn with boulders—some as big as the Consul’s ship. Colonel Kassad pulled on the helmet cowl of his combat suit and static rasped in our comthread pickups. “Where I started,” he said. “In the Tharsis Relocation Slums a few hundred klicks that direction.” He gestured toward where the sun hung low and small above the cliffs. The suited figure, ominous in its size and bulk, the heavy assault weapon looking anything but obsolete here on the plain of Mars, turned toward Aenea. “What would you have me do, woman?”

Aenea spoke in the crisp, quick, sure syllables of command. “The Pax has retreated from Mars and Old Earth System temporarily because of the Palestinian uprising here and the resurgence of the Martian War Machine in space. There is nothing strategic enough to hold them here now while their resources are stretched so thin.”

Kassad nodded.

“But they’ll be back,” said Aenea. “Back in force. Not just to pacify Mars, but to occupy the entire system.” She paused to look around. I followed her gaze and saw the dark human figures moving down the boulder field toward us.

They carried weapons.

“You must keep them out of the system, Colonel,” said my friend. “Do whatever you must… sacrifice whomever you must… but keep them out of Old Earth System for the next five standard years.”

I had never heard Aenea sound so adamant or ruthless.

“Five standard years,” said Colonel Kassad. I could see his thin smile behind the cowl visor. “No problem. If it was five Martian years, I might have to strain a bit.” Aenea smiled. The figures were moving closer through the blowing sand. “You’ll have to take the leadership of the Martian resistance movement,” she said, her voice deadly serious. “Take it any way you can.”

“I will,” said Kassad and the firmness in his voice matched Aenea’s.

“Consolidate the various tribes and warrior factions,” said Aenea.

“I will.”

“Form a more permanent alliance with the War Machine spacers.”

Kassad nodded. The figures were less than a hundred meters away now. I could see weapons raised.

“Protect Old Earth,” said Aenea. “Keep the Pax away at all costs.”

I was shocked. Colonel Kassad must have been surprised as well. “You mean Old Earth System,” he said.

Aenea shook her head. “Old Earth, Fedmahn. Keep the Pax away. You have approximately a year to consolidate control of the entire system. Good luck.”

The two shook hands.

“Your mother was a fine, brave woman,” said the Colonel. “I valued her friendship.”

“And she valued yours.”

The dark figures were moving closer, keeping to the cover of boulders and dunes. Colonel Kassad walked toward them, his right hand high, the assault weapon still easy in his arm.

Aenea came closer and took my hand again.

“It’s cold, isn’t it, Raul?”

It was. There was a flash of light like a painless blow to the back of one’s head and we were on the bridge platform of the Yggdrasill. Our friends backed away at the sight of our appearance; the fear of magic dies hard in a species.

Mars turned red and cold beyond our branches and containment field.

“What course, Revered One Who Teaches?” said Het Masteen.

“Just turn outward to where we can clearly see the stars,” said Aenea.

29

The Yggdrasill continued on. The Tree of Pain its captain, the Templar True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen, called it. I could not argue. Each jump took more energy from my Aenea, my love, my poor, tired Aenea, and each separation filled the depleting pool of energy with a growing reservoir of sadness. And through it all the Shrike stood useless and alone on its high platform, like a hideous bowsprit on a doomed ship or a macabre dark angel on the top of a mirthless Christmas tree.

After leaving Colonel Kassad on Mars, the treeship jumped to orbit around Maui-Covenant. The world was in rebellion but deep within Pax space and I expected hordes of Pax warships to rise up in challenge, but there was no attack during the few hours we were there.

“One of the benefits of the armada attack on the Biosphere Startree,” Aenea said with sad irony. “They’ve stripped the inner systems of fighting ships.” It was Theo whose hand Aenea took for the step down to Maui-Covenant. Again, I accompanied my friend and her friend. I blinked away the white light and we were on a motile isle, its treesails filling with warm tropical wind, the sky and sea a breathtaking blue. Other isles kept pace while dolphin outriders left white wakes on either side of the convoy.

There were people on the high platform and although they were mystified by our appearance, they were not alarmed. Theo hugged the tall blond man and his dark-haired wife who came forward to greet us.

“Aenea, Raul,” she said, “I am pleased to introduce Merin and Deneb Aspic-Coreau.”

“Merin?” I said, feeling the strength in the man’s handshake.

He smiled. “Ten generations removed from the Merin Aspic,” he said. “But a direct descendant. As Deneb is of our famed lady, Siri.” He put his hand on Aenea’s shoulder. “You have come back just as promised. And brought our fiercest fighter back with you.”

“I have,” said Aenea. “And you must keep her safe. For the next days and months, you must keep clear of contact with the Pax.”

Deneb Aspic-Coreau laughed. I noticed without a trace of desire that she might be the healthiest, most beautiful woman I had ever seen. “We’re running for our lives as it is, One Who Teaches. Thrice we’ve tried to destroy the oil platform complex at Three Currents, and thrice they have cut us down like Thomas hawks. Now we are just hoping to reach the Equatorial Archipelago and hide among the isle migration, eventually to regroup at the submersible base at Lat Zero.”

“Protect her at all costs,” repeated Aenea. She turned to Theo. “I will miss you, my friend.”

Theo Bernard visibly attempted to keep from weeping, failed, and hugged Aenea fiercely.

“All the time… was good,” Theo said and stood back. “I pray for your success. And I pray that you fail… for your own good.”

Aenea shook her head. “Pray for all of our success.” She held her hand up in farewell and walked back to the lower platform with me.

I could smell the intoxicating salt-and-fish scent of the sea. The sun was so fierce it made me squint, but the air temperature was perfect.

The water on the dolphins’ skin was as clear to me as the sweat on my own forearms. I could imagine staying in this place forever.

“We have to go,” said Aenea. She took my hand.

A torchship did appear on radar just as we climbed out of Maui-Covenant’s gravity well, but we ignored it as Aenea stood alone on the bridge platform, staring at the stars.

I went over to stand next to her.

“Can you hear them?” she whispered.

“The stars?” I said.

“The worlds,” she said. “The people on them. Their secrets and silences. So many heartbeats.”

I shook my head. “When I am not concentrating on something else,” I said, “I am still haunted by voices and images from elsewhere. Other times. My father hunting in the moors with his brothers. Father Glaucus being thrown to his death by Rhadamanth Nemes.”

She looked at me. “You saw that?”

“Yes. It was horrible. He could not see who it was who had attacked him. The fall… the darkness… the cold… the moments of pain before he died. He had refused to accept the cruciform. It was why the Church sent him to Sol Draconi Septem… exile in the ice.”

“Yes,” said Aenea. “I’ve touched those last memories of his many times in the past ten years. But there are other memories of Father Glaucus, Raul. Warm and beautiful memories… filled with light. I hope you find them.”

“I just want the voices to stop,” I said truthfully. “This…” I gestured around at the treeship, the people we knew, Het Masteen at his bridge controls. “This is all too important.” Aenea smiled. “It’s all too important. That’s the damned problem, isn’t it?” She turned her face back to the stars.

“No, Raul, what you have to hear before you take a step is not the resonance of the language of the dead… or even of the living. It is… the essence of things.”

I hesitated, not wanting to make a fool of myself, but went on: “… So A million times ocean must ebb and flow, And he oppressed. Yet he shall not die, These things accomplished. If he utterly…”

Aenea broke in: “… Scans all depths of magic, and expounds The meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds; If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die…”

She smiled again. “I wonder how Uncle Martin is. Is he cold-sleeping the years away? Railing at his poor android servants? Still working on his unfinished Cantos? In all my dreams, I never manage to see Uncle Martin.”

“He’s dying,” I said. Aenea blinked in shock.

“I dreamed of him… saw him… this morning,” I said. “He’s defrosted himself for the last time, he’s told his faithful servants. The machines are keeping him alive. The Poulsen treatments have finally worn off. He’s…” I stopped.

“Tell me,” said Aenea.

“He’s staying alive until he can see you again,” I said. “But he’s very frail.”

Aenea looked away. “It’s strange,” she said. “My mother fought with Uncle Martin during the entire pilgrimage. At times they could have killed one another. Before she died, he was her closest friend. Now…” She stopped, her voice thick.

“You’ll just have to stay alive, kiddo,” I said, my own voice strange. “Stay alive, stay healthy, and go back to see the old man. You owe him that.”

“Take my hand, Raul.” The ship farcast through light.

Around Tau Ceti Center we were immediately attacked, not only by Pax ships but by rebel torchships fighting for the planetary secession started by the ambitious female Archbishop Achilla Silvaski. The containment field flared like a nova.

“Surely you can’t ’cast through this,” I said to Aenea when she offered the Tromo Trochi of Dhomu and me her hands.

“One does not ’cast through anything,” said my friend, and took our hands, and we were on the surface of the former capital of the late and unlamented Hegemony.

The Tromo Trochi had never been to TC², indeed, had never been off the world of T’ien Shan, but his merchant interests were aroused by the tales of this onetime capitalist capital of the human universe.

“It is a pity that I have nothing to trade,” said the clever trader. “In six months on so fecund a world, I would have built a commercial empire.”

Aenea reached into the shoulder pack she had carried and lifted out a heavy bar of gold. “This should get you started,” she said. “But remember your true duties here.”

Holding the bar, the little man bowed. “I will never forget, One Who Teaches. I have not suffered to learn the language of the dead to no avail.”

“Just stay safe for the next few months,” said Aenea. “And then, I am confident, you will be able to afford transport to any world you choose.”

“I would come to wherever you are, M. Aenea,” said the trader with the only visible show of emotion I had ever seen from him. “And I would pay all of my wealth—past, future, and fantasized—to do so.”

I had to blink at this. It occurred to me for the first time that many of Aenea’s disciples might be—probably were—a little bit in love with her, as well as very much in awe of her. To hear it from this coin-obsessed merchant, though, was a shock. Aenea touched his arm. “Be safe and stay well.”

The Yggdrasill was still under attack when we returned. It was under attack when Aenea ’cast us away from the Tau Ceti System.

The inner city-world of Lusus was much as I remembered it from my brief sojourn there: a series of Hive towers above the vertical canyons of gray metal. George Tsarong and Jigme Norbu bade us farewell there. The stocky, heavily muscled George—weeping as he hugged Aenea—might have passed for an average Lusian in dim light, but the skeletal Jigme would stand out in the Hive-bound crowds. But Lusus was used to off-worlders and our two foremen would do well as long as they had money. But Lusus was one of the few Pax worlds to have returned to universal credit cards and Aenea did not have one of these in her backpack.

A few minutes after we stepped from the empty Dreg’s Hive corridors, however, seven figures in crimson cloaks approached. I stepped between Aenea and these ominous figures, but rather than attack, the seven men went to their knees on the greasy floor, bowed their heads, and chanted:

“The Shrike Cult,” I said stupidly. “I thought they were gone—wiped out during the Fall.”

“We prefer to be referred to as the Church of the Final Atonement,” said the first man, rising from his knees but still bowing in Aenea’s direction. “And no… we were not “wiped out” as you put it… merely driven underground. Welcome, Daughter of Light. Welcome, Bride of the Avatar.”

Aenea shook her head with visible impatience. “I am bride of no one, Bishop Duruyen. These are the two men I have brought to entrust to your protection for the next ten months.”

The Bishop in red bowed his bald head. “Just as your prophecies said, Daughter of Light.”

“Not prophecies,” said Aenea. “Promises.” She turned and hugged George and Jigme a final time.

“Will we see you again, Architect?” said Jigme.

“I cannot promise that,” said Aenea. “But I do promise that if it is in my power, we will be in contact again.”

I followed her back to the empty hall in the dripping corridors of Dreg’s Hive, where our departure would not seem so miraculous as to add to the Shrike Cult’s already fertile canon.

On Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna, we said good-bye to the Dalai Lama and his brother, Labsang Samten. Labsang wept. The boy Lama did not.

“The local people’s Mandarin dialect is atrocious,” said the Dalai Lama.

“But they will understand you, Your Holiness,” said Aenea. “And they will listen.”

“But you are my teacher,” said the boy, his voice near anger. “How can I teach them without your help?”

“I will help,” said Aenea. “I will try to help. And then it is your job. And theirs.”

“But we may share communion with them?” asked Labsang.

“If they ask for it,” said Aenea. To the boy she said, “Would you give me your blessing, Your Holiness?”

The child smiled. “It is I who should be asking for a blessing, Teacher.”

“Please,” said Aenea, and again I could hear the weariness in her voice.

The Dalai Lama bowed and, with his eyes closed, said: “This is from the “Prayer of Kuntu Sangpo,” as revealed to me through the vision of my terton in a previous life—

Aenea bowed toward the boy. “The Palace of the Primal Space of Emptiness,” she murmured. “How much more elegant than my clumsy description of the “Void Which Binds.” Thank you, Your Holiness.”

The child bowed. “Thank you, Revered Teacher. May your death be more quick and less painful than we both expect.”

Aenea and I returned to the treeship.

“What did he mean?” I demanded, both of my hands on her shoulders. “‘Death more quick and less painful’? What the hell does that mean? Are you planning to be crucified? Does this goddamned messiah impersonation have to go to the same bizarre end? Tell me, Aenea!” I realized that I was shaking her… shaking my dear friend, my beloved girl. I dropped my hands.

Aenea put her arms around me. “Just stay with me, Raul. Stay with me as long as you can.”

“I will,” I said, patting her back. “I swear to you I will.”

On Fuji we said good-bye to Kenshiro Endo and Haruyuki Otaki. On Deneb Drei it was a child whom I had never met—a ten-year-old girl named Katherine—who stayed behind, alone and seemingly unafraid. On Sol Draconi Septem, that world of frozen air and deadly wraiths where Father Glaucus and our Chitchatuk friends had been foully murdered, the sad and brooding scaffold rigger, Rimsi Kyipup, volunteered almost happily to be left behind. On Nevermore it was another man I had not had the privilege of meeting—a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman who seemed like Martin Silenus’s kindlier younger brother. On God’s Grove, where A. Bettik had lost part of his arm ten standard years earlier, the two Templar lieutenants of Het Masteen ’cast down with Aenea and me and did not return. On Hebron, empty now of its Jewish settlers but filled now with good Christian colonists sent there by the Pax, the Seneschai Aluit empaths, Lleeoonn and Ooeeaall ’cast down to say good-bye to us on an empty desert evening where the rocks still held the daytime’s glow.

On Parvati, the usually happy sisters Kuku Se and Kay Se wept and hugged the both of us good-bye. On Asquith, a family of two parents and their five golden-haired children stayed behind. Above the white cloud-swirl and blue ocean world of Mare Infinitus—a world whose mere name haunted me with memories of pain and friendship—Aenea asked Sergeant Gregorius if he would ’cast down with her to meet the rebels and support her cause.

“And leave the captain?” asked the giant, obviously shocked by the suggestion.

De Soya stepped forward. “There is no more captain, Sergeant. My dear friend. Only this priest without a Church. And I suspect that we would do more good now apart than together. Am I right, M. Aenea?”

My friend nodded. “I had hoped that Lhomo would be my representative on Mare Infinitus,” she said. “The smugglers and rebels and Lantern Mouth hunters on this world would respect a man of strength. But it will be difficult and dangerous… the rebellion still rages here and the Pax takes no prisoners.”

“’Tis not this danger I object to!” cried Gregorius. “I’m willin’ to die the true death a hundred times over for a good cause.”

“I know that, Sergeant,” said Aenea.

The giant looked at his former captain and then back to Aenea. “Lass, I know ye do not like to tell the future, even though we know you spy it now and then. But tell me this… is there a chance of reunion with my captain?”

“Yes,” said Aenea. “And with some you thought dead… such as Corporal Kee.”

“Then I’ll go. I’ll do your will. I may not be of the Corps Helvetica anymore, but the obedience they taught me runs deep.”

“It’s not obedience we ask now,” said Father de Soya. “It is something harder and deeper.”

Sergeant Gregorius thought a moment. “Aye,” he said at last and turned his back on everyone a moment. “Let’s go, lass,” he said, holding out his hand for Aenea’s touch.

We left him on an abandoned platform somewhere in the South Littoral, but Aenea told him that submersibles would put in there within a day.

Above Madre de Dios, Father de Soya stepped forward, but Aenea held up her hand to stop him.

“Surely this is my world,” said the priest. “I was born here. My diocese was here. I imagine that I will die here.”

“Perhaps,” said Aenea, “but I need you for a more difficult place and a more dangerous job, Federico.”

“Where is that?” said the sad-eyed priest.

“Pacem,” said Aenea. “Our last stop.”

I stepped closer. “Wait, kiddo,” I said. “I’m going with you to Pacem if you insist on going there. You said that I could stay with you.” My voice sounded querulous and desperate even to me.

“Yes,” said Aenea, touching my wrist with her cool fingers. “But I would like Father de Soya to come with us when it is time.”

The Jesuit looked confused and a bit disappointed, but he bowed his head. Evidently obedience ran even deeper in the Society of Jesus than it did in the Corps Helvetica.

In the end, the T’ien Shan bamboo worker Voytek Majer and his new fiancée, the brickmaker Viki Groselj, volunteered to stay on Madre de Dios.

On Freeholm, we said good-bye to Janusz Kurtyka. On Kastrop-Rauxel, recently reterraformed and settled by the Pax, it was the soldier Jigme Paring who volunteered to find the rebel population. Above Parsimony, while Pax warships turned the containment field into a torrent of noise and light, a woman named Helen Dean O’Brian stepped forward and took Aenea’s hand. On Esperance, Aenea and I bid farewell to the former mayor of Jo-kung, Charles Chi-kyap Kempo. On Grass, standing shoulder high in the yellow world prairie, we waved good-bye to Isher Perpet, one of the bolder rebels once rescued from a Pax prison galley and gathered in by Father de Soya. On Qom-Riyadh, where the mosques were quickly being bulldozed or converted to cathedrals by the new Pax settlers, we ’cast down in the dead of night and whispered our farewells to a former refugee from that world named Merwin Muhammed Ali and to our former interpreter on T’ien Shan, the clever Perri Samdup.

Above Renaissance Minor, with a horde of in-system warships accelerating toward us with murderous intent, it was the silent ex-prisoner, Hoagan Liebler who stepped forward. “I was a spy,” said the pale man. He was speaking to Aenea but looking directly at Father de Soya. “I sold my allegiance for money, so that I could return to this world to renew my family’s lost lands and wealth. I betrayed my captain and my soul.”

“My son,” said Father de Soya, “you have long since been forgiven those sins, if sins they were… by both your captain and, more importantly, by God. No harm was done.”

Liebler nodded slowly. “The voices I have been listening to since I drank the wine with M. Aenea…” He trailed off. “I know many people on this world,” he said, his voice stronger. “I wish to return home to start this new life.”

“Yes,” said Aenea and offered her hand.

On Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Aenea, the Dorje Phamo, and I ’cast down to a desert wasteland, far from the river with its farm fields and brightly painted cottages lining the way where the kind people of the Amoiete Spectrum Helix had nursed me to health and helped me escape the Pax. Here there was only a tumble of boulders and dried fissures, mazes of tunnel entrances in the rock, and dust storms blowing in from the bloody sunset on the black-cloud horizon. It reminded me of Mars with warmer, thicker air and more of a stench of death and cordite to it.

The shrouded figures surrounded us almost immediately, flechette guns and hellwhips at the ready. I tried again to step between Aenea and the danger, but the figures in the blowing red wind surrounded us and raised their weapons.

“Wait!” cried a voice familiar to me, and one of the shrouded soldiers slid down a red dune to stand in front of us. “Wait!” she called again to those eager to shoot, and this time she unwrapped the bands of her cowl.

“Dem Loa!” I cried and stepped forward to hug the short woman in her bulky battle garb. I saw tears leaving muddy streaks on her cheeks.

“You have brought back your special one,” said the woman who had saved me. “Just as you promised.”

I introduced her to Aenea and then to the Dorje Phamo, feeling silly and happy at the same moment. Dem Loa and Aenea regarded one another for a moment, and then hugged.

I looked around at the other figures who still hung back in the red twilight. “Where is Dem Ria?” I asked. “Alem Mikail Dem Alem? And your children—Bin and Ces Ambre?”

“Dead,” said Dem Loa. “All dead, except Ces Ambre, who is missing after the last attack from the Bombasino Pax.” I stood speechless, stunned. “Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem died of his illness,” continued Dem Loa, “but the rest died in our war with the Pax.”

“War with the Pax,” I repeated. “I hope to God that I did not start it…”

Dem Loa raised her hand. “No, Raul Endymion. You did not start it. Those of us in the Amoiete Spectrum Helix who prized our own ways refused the cross… that is what started it. The rebellion had already begun when you were with us. After you left, we thought we had it won. The cowardly troops at Pax Base Bombasino sued for peace, ignored the orders from their commanders in space, and made treaties with us. More Pax ships arrived. They bombed their own base… then came after our villages. It has been war since then. When they land and try to occupy the land, we kill many of them. They send more.”

“Dem Loa,” I said, “I am so, so sorry.”

She set her hand on my chest and nodded. I saw the smile that I remembered from our hours together. She looked at Aenea again. “You are the one he spoke of in his delirium and his pain. You are the one whom he loved. Do you love him as well, child?”

“I do,” said Aenea.

“Good,” said Dem Loa. “It would be sad if a man who thought he was dying expressed such love for someone who did not feel the same about him.”

Dem Loa looked at the Thunderbolt Sow, silent and regal. “You are a priestess?”

“Not a priestess,” said the Thunderbolt Sow, “but the abbess of the Samden Gompa monastery.”

Dem Loa showed her teeth. “You rule over monks? Over men?”

“I… instruct them,” said the Dorje Phamo. The wind ruffled her steel-gray hair.

“Just as good as ruling them.” Dem Loa laughed. “Welcome then, Dorje Phamo.” To Aenea she said, “And are you staying with us, child? Or just touching us and passing on as our prophecies predict?”

“I must go on,” said Aenea. “But I would like to leave the Dorje Phamo here as your ally and our… liaison.”

Dem Loa nodded. “It is dangerous here now,” she said to the Thunderbolt Sow.

The Dorje Phamo smiled at the shorter woman. The strength of the two was almost a palpable energy in the air around us.

“Good,” said Dem Loa. She hugged me.

“Be kind to your love, Raul Endymion. Be good to her in the hours granted to you by the cycles of life and chaos.”

“I will,” I said.

To Aenea, Dem Loa said, “Thank you for coming, child. It was our wish. It was our hope.” The two women hugged again. I felt suddenly shy, as if I had brought Aenea home to meet my own mother or Grandam.

The Dorje Phamo touched both of us in benediction. “Kale pe a,” she said to Aenea.

We moved away in the twilight dust storm and ’cast through the burst of white light. On the quiet of the Yggdrasill’s bridge, I said to Aenea, “What was that she said?”

“Kale pe a,” repeated my friend. “It is an ancient Tibetan farewell when a caravan sets out to climb the high peaks. It means—go slowly if you wish to return.”

And so it went for a hundred other worlds, each one visited only for moments, but each farewell moving and stirring in its own way. It is hard for me to say how many days and nights were spent on this final voyage with Aenea, because there was only the ’casting down and ’casting up, the treeship entering the light one place and emerging elsewhere, and when everyone was too tired to go on, the Yggdrasill was allowed to drift in empty space for a few hours while the ergs rested and the rest of us tried to sleep. I remember at least three of these sleep periods, so perhaps we traveled for only three days and nights. Or perhaps we traveled for a week or more and slept only three times. But I remember that Aenea and I slept little and loved one another tenderly, as if each time we held each other it might be our last. It was during one of these brief interludes alone that I whispered to her, “Why are you doing this, kiddo? Not just so we can all become like the Ousters and catch sunlight in our wings. I mean… it was beautiful… but I like planets. I like dirt under my boots. I like just being… human. Being a man.” Aenea had chuckled and touched my cheek.

I remember that the light was dim but that I could see the perspiration still beaded between her breasts. “I like your being a man too, Raul my love.”

“I mean…” I began awkwardly.

“I know what you mean,” whispered Aenea. “I like planets too. And I like being human… just being a woman. It’s not for some utopian evolution of humankind into Ouster angels or Seneschai empaths that I’m doing… what I have to do.”

“What then?” I whispered into her hair.

“Just for the chance to choose,” she said softly. “Just for the opportunity to continue being human, whatever that means to each person who chooses.”

“To choose again?” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea. “Even if that means choosing what one has had before. Even if it means choosing the Pax, the cruciform, and alliance with the Core.”

I did not understand, but at that moment I was more interested in holding her than in fully understanding.

After moments of silence, Aenea said, “Raul… I also love the dirt under my boots, the sound of the wind in the grass. Would you do something for me?”

“Anything,” I said fiercely.

“If I die before you,” she whispered, “would you return my ashes to Old Earth and sprinkle them where we were happiest together?”

If she had stabbed me in the heart, it would not have hurt as much. “You said that I could stay with you,” I said at last, my voice thick and angry and lost. “That I could go anywhere you go.”

“And I meant it, my love,” whispered Aenea. “But if I go ahead of you into death, will you do that for me? Wait a few years, and then set my ashes free where we had been happiest on Old Earth?”

I felt like squeezing her until she cried out then. Until she renounced her request.

Instead, I whispered, “How the goddamned hell am I supposed to get back to Old Earth? It’s in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, isn’t it? Some hundred-sixty thousand light-years away, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Aenea.

“Well, are you going to open the farcaster doors again so I can get back there?”

“No,” said Aenea. “Those doors are closed forever.”

“Then how the hell do you expect me to…” I closed my eyes. “Don’t ask me to do this, Aenea.”

“I’ve already asked you, my love.”

“Ask me to die with you instead.”

“No,” she said. “I’m asking you to live for me. To do this for me.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Does that mean yes, Raul?”

“It means shit,” I said. “I hate martyrs. I hate predestination. I hate love stories with sad endings.”

“So do I,” whispered Aenea. “Will you do this for me?”

I made a noise. “Where were we happiest on Old Earth?” I said at last. “You must mean Taliesin West, because we didn’t see much else of the planet together.”

“You’ll know,” whispered Aenea. “Let’s go to sleep.”

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said roughly. She put her arms around me. It had been delightful sleeping together in zero gravity on the Startree. It was even more delightful sleeping together in our small bed in our private cubby in the slight gravity field of the Yggdrasill. I could not conceive of a time when I would have to sleep without her next to me. “Sprinkle your ashes, eh?” I whispered eventually.

“Yes,” she murmured, more asleep than awake.

“Kiddo, my dear, my love,” I said, “you’re a morbid little bitch.”

“Yes,” murmured my Aenea. “But I’m your morbid little bitch.”

By and by, we did get to sleep.

On our last day, Aenea ’cast us to a star system with an M3 class red dwarf at its core and a sweet Earth-like world swinging in close orbit. “No,” said Rachel as our small group stood on Het Masteen’s bridge. The three hundred had left us one by one, Aenea’s many disciples left sprinkled among the Pax worlds like so many bottles cast into a great ocean but without their messages. Now Father de Soya remained, Rachel, Aenea, the captain Het Masteen, A. Bettik, a few crew clones, the ergs below, and me. And the Shrike, silent and motionless on its high platform.

“No,” Rachel said again. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to go on with you.”

Aenea stood with her arms folded. She had been especially quiet all this long morning of ’casting and bidding farewells to disciples. “As you will,” she said softly. “You know I would not demand that you do anything, Rache.”

“Damn you,” Rachel said softly.

“Yes,” said Aenea.

Rachel clenched her fists. “Is this ever going to fucking end?”

“What do you mean?” said Aenea.

“You know what I mean. My father… my mother… your mother… their lives filled with this. My life… lived twice now… always fighting this unseen enemy. Running and running and waiting and waiting. Backward and forward through time like some accursed, out-of-control dreidel… oh, damn.”

Aenea waited.

“One request,” said Rachel. She looked at me. “No offense, Raul. I’ve come to like you a lot. But could Aenea bring me down to Barnard’s World alone.”

I looked at Aenea. “It’s all right with me,” I said.

Rachel sighed. “Back to this backward world again… cornfields and sunsets and tiny little towns with big white houses and big wide porches. It bored me when I was eight.”

“You loved it when you were eight,” said Aenea.

“Yeah,” said Rachel. “I did.” She shook the priest’s hand, then Het Masteen’s, then mine.

On a whim, remembering the most obscure verses of the old poet’s Cantos, remembering laughing about them at the edge of the campfire’s light with Grandam having me repeat them line for line, wondering if people ever really said such things, I said to Rachel, “See you later, alligator.” The young woman looked at me strangely, her green eyes catching the light from the world hanging above us. “After a while, crocodile.” She took Aenea’s hand and they were gone. No flash of light when one was not traveling with Aenea. Just a sudden… absence. Aenea returned within five minutes. Het Masteen stepped back from the control circle and folded his hands in the sleeves of his robe. “One Who Teaches?”

“Pacem System, please, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.” The Templar did not move. “You know, dear friend and teacher, that by now the Pax will have recalled half of their fighting ships to the Vatican’s home system.” Aenea looked up and around at the gently rustling leaves of the beautiful tree on which we rode. A kilometer behind us, the glow of the fusion drive was pushing us slowly out of Barnard’s World’s gravity well. No Pax ships had challenged us here. “Will the ergs be able to hold the fields until we get close to Pacem?” she asked.

The captain’s small hands came out of the sleeves of his robe and gestured palms up. “It is doubtful. They are exhausted. The toll these attacks have taken on them…”

“I know,” Aenea said. “And I am very sorry. You need only be in-system for a minute or two. Perhaps if you accelerate now and are ready for full-drive maneuvers when we appear in Pacem System, the treeship can ’cast out before the fields are overwhelmed.”

“We will try,” said Het Masteen. “But be prepared to ’cast away immediately. The life of the treeship may be measured in seconds after we arrive.”

“First, we have to send the Consul’s ship away,” said Aenea. “We will have to do it now, here. Just a few moments, Het Masteen.”

The Templar nodded and went back to his displays and touch panels.

“Oh, no,” I said when she turned to me. “I’m not going to Hyperion in the ship.”

Aenea looked surprised. “You thought that I was sending you away after I said that you could accompany me?”

I folded my arms. “We’ve visited most of the Pax and Outback worlds… except Hyperion. Whatever you’re planning, I can’t believe that you’ll leave our homeworld out of it.”

“I’m not going to,” said Aenea. “But I’m also not ’casting us there.”

I did not understand.

“A. Bettik,” said Aenea, “the ship should be about ready to depart. Do you have the letter I wrote to Uncle Martin?”

“I do, M. Aenea,” said the android. The blue-skinned man did not look happy, but neither did he look distressed.

“Please give him my love,” said Aenea.

“Wait, wait,” I said. “A. Bettik is your… your envoy… to Hyperion?”

Aenea rubbed her cheek. I sensed that she was more exhausted than I could imagine, but saving her strength for something important yet to come. “My envoy?” she said. “You mean like Rachel and Theo and the Dorje Phamo and George and Jigme?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And the three hundred others.”

“No,” said Aenea, “A. Bettik will not be my envoy to Hyperion. Not in that sense. And the Consul’s ship has a deep time-debt to pay via Hawking drive. It… and A. Bettik… will not arrive for months of our time.”

“Then who is the envoy… the liaison on Hyperion?” I asked, certain that this world would not be exempted.

“Can’t you guess?” My friend smiled. “Dear Uncle Martin. The poet and critic once again becomes a player in this endless chess game with the Core.”

“But the others,” I said, “all took communion with you and…” I stopped.

“Yes,” said Aenea. “When I was still a child. Uncle Martin understood. He drank the wine. It was not hard for him to adapt… he has been hearing the language of the dead and of the living for centuries in his own poet’s way. It is how he came to write the Cantos in the first place. Why he thought the Shrike was his muse.”

“So why is A. Bettik taking the ship back there?” I said. “Just to bring your message?”

“More than that,” said Aenea. “If things work out, we will see.” She hugged the android and he awkwardly patted her back with his one hand.

A moment later, welling up with more emotion than I had imagined possible, I shook that blue hand. “I will miss you,” I said stupidly.

The android looked at me for a long moment, nodded, and turned toward the waiting ship.

“A. Bettik!” I called just as he was about to enter the ship.

He turned back and waited while I ran to my small pile of belongings on the lower platform, then jogged back up the steps. “Will you take this?” I said, handing him the leather tube.

“The hawking mat,” said A. Bettik. “Yes, of course, M. Endymion. I will be happy to keep this for you until I see you again.”

“And if we don’t see each other again,” I said and paused. I was about to say, Please give it to Martin Silenus, but I knew from my own waking visions that the old poet was near death.

“If we don’t happen to see each other again, A. Bettik,” I said, “please keep the mat as a memento of our trip together. And of our friendship.”

A. Bettik looked at me for another quiet moment, nodded again, and went into the Consul’s ship. I half expected the ship to say its good-byes, filled with malapropisms and misinformation, but it simply conferred with the treeship’s ergs, rose silently on repellors until it cleared the containment field, and then moved away on low thrusters until it was a safe distance from us. Its fusion tail was so bright that it made my eyes water as I watched it accelerate out and away from Barnard’s World and the Yggdrasill. I wished then with all of my heart and will that Aenea and I were going back to Hyperion with A. Bettik, ready to sleep for days on the large bed at the apex of the ship, then listen to music on the Steinway and swim in a zero-g pool above the balcony—“We have to go,” Aenea said to Het Masteen. “Could you please prepare the ergs for what we are about to encounter.”

“As you wish, Revered One Who Teaches,” said the True Voice of the Tree.

“And Het Masteen…” said Aenea.

The Templar turned and awaited further orders.

“Thank you, Het Masteen,” she said. “On behalf of all of those who traveled with you on this voyage and all those who will tell of your voyage for generations to come, thank you, Het Masteen.”

The Templar bowed and went back to his panels. “Full fusion drive to point nine-two. Prepare for evasive maneuvers. Prepare for Pacem System,” he said to his beloved ergs wrapped around the invisible singularity three quarters of a kilometer below us. “Prepare for Pacem System.”

Father de Soya had been standing quietly nearby, but now he took Aenea’s right hand in his left hand. With his right hand, he gave a quiet benediction in the direction of the Templar and the crew clones—“In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sanctus.”

“Amen,” I said, taking Aenea’s left hand.

“Amen,” said Aenea.

30

They hit us less than two seconds after we ’cast into the system, the torchships and archangels converging fire on us much as the rainbow sharks had once converged on me in the seas of Mare Infinitus.

“Go!” cried the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen above the torrent of field noise around us. “The ergs are dying! The containment field will drop in seconds. Go! May the Muir guide your thoughts. Go!”

Aenea had had only two seconds to glimpse the yellow star at the center of Pacem System and the smaller star that was Pacem proper, but it was enough. The three of us held hands as we ’cast through light and noise as if rising through the cauldron of lance fire boiling the ship’s fields, spirits rising from Hell’s burning lakes. The light faded and then resumed as diffuse sunlight. It was cloudy above the Vatican, chilly, almost wintry, and a light, cool rain fell on cobblestone streets. Aenea had dressed this day in a soft tan shirt, a brown leather vest, and more formal black trousers than I was used to seeing her wear. Her hair was brushed back and held in place by two tortoiseshell barrettes. Her skin looked fresh and clean and young and her eyes—so tired in recent days—were bright and calm. She still held my hand as the three of us turned to look at the streets and people around us.

We were at the edge of an alley looking onto a wide boulevard. Small groups of people—men and women in formal black, groups of priests, flocks of nuns, a row of children in tow behind two nuns, everywhere black and red umbrellas—moved to and fro on the pedestrian walkways while low, black groundcars glided silently down the streets. I caught a glimpse of bishops and archbishops in the backseats of the groundcars, their visages distorted by beads and rivulets of rain on the cars’ bubble tops. No one seemed to be taking any notice of us or our arrival.

Aenea was looking up toward the low clouds.

“The Yggdrasill just ’cast out of system. Did either of you feel it?”

I closed my eyes to concentrate on the dream flow of voices and images that were ever under the surface there now. There was… an absence. A vision of flame as the outer branches began to burn. “The fields collapsed just as they ’cast away,” I said. “How did they ’cast without you, Aenea?” I saw the answer as soon as I had verbalized the question. “The Shrike,” I said.

“Yes.” Aenea was still holding my hand. The rain was cold on us and I could hear it gurgling down gutters and drainpipes behind us. She spoke very quietly. “The Shrike will carry the Yggdrasill and the True Voice of the Tree away through space and time. To his… destiny.”

I remembered bits of the Cantos. The treeship burning as the pilgrims watched from the Sea of Grass shortly before Het Masteen had mysteriously disappeared with the Shrike during the windwagon crossing. Then the Templar reappearing in the presence of the Shrike some days later near the Valley of the Time Tombs, dying from his wounds shortly after that, his tale the only one of the seven pilgrims’ not to be told on the voyage. The Hyperion pilgrims: Colonel Kassad; the Hegemony Consul, Sol—Rachel’s father; Brawne Lamia—Aenea’s mother; the Templar Het Masteen; Martin Silenus; Father Hoyt—the current Pope; all at a loss to explain events at the time.

For me as a child, just old words from a myth. Verses about strangers. How they must have thought their efforts and adventures over, only to have to pick up their burdens again. How often, I realized now as an adult in my standard thirties, how often that is the case in all of our lives.

“See that church across the street?” said Father de Soya.

I had to shake my head to focus on the now and to ignore the thoughts and voices whispering to me.

“Yeah,” I said, wiping the rain from my brow. “Is that St. Peter’s Basilica?”

“No,” said the priest. “That is St. Anne’s Parish Church and the entrance to the Vatican next to it is the Porta Sant’Anna. The main entrance to St. Peter’s Square is down the boulevard there and around those colonnades.”

“Are we going to St. Peter’s Square?” I asked Aenea. “Into the Vatican?”

“Let’s see if we can,” she said.

We started down the pedestrian walkway, just a man and a younger woman walking with a priest on a cool, rainy day. Across the street from us was a sign indicating that the imposing, windowless structure there was the barracks for the Swiss Guard. Troopers from that barracks in formal, Renaissance-era black cloaks, white ruffled collars, and yellow-and-black leggings stood holding pikes at the Porta Sant’Anna and at the intersections while Pax security police in no-nonsense black impact armor manned roadblocks and floated overhead in black skimmers.

St. Peter’s Square was closed off to foot traffic except for several security gates where guards were carefully checking passes and chipcard ID’s.

“We won’t get through there,” said Father de Soya. It was dark enough that the lights had come on atop Bernini’s colonnade to illuminate statuary and the stone papal coats of arms there. The priest pointed to two windows glowing above the colonnade and to the right of St. Peter’s facade topped by statues of Christ, John the Baptist, and the Apostles. “Those are the Pope’s private offices.”

“Just a rifle shot away,” I said, although I had no thoughts of attacking the Pope.

Father de Soya shook his head. “Class-ten containment field.” He glanced around. Much of the pedestrian traffic had passed through the security gates into St. Peter’s Square and we were becoming more obvious on the street. “We’re going to get our ID checked if we don’t do something,” he said.

“Is this level of security common?” asked Aenea.

“No,” said Father de Soya. “It may be because of your message that you were coming but it is more probable that it is the usual security when His Holiness is saying a papal Mass. Those bells we heard were a call to an afternoon Mass at which he is presiding.”

“How do you know that?” I said, amazed that he could read so much from the sound of a few bells.

Father de Soya looked surprised. “I know that because it is Holy Thursday,” he said, looking shocked either because we did not know such an elementary fact or because he had managed to forget it until this moment. “This is Holy Week,” he went on, talking softly as if to himself. “All this week His Holiness must carry out both his papal and diocesan duties. Today… this afternoon… certainly at this Mass, he performs the ceremony of washing the feet of twelve priests who symbolize the twelve disciples whose feet Jesus washed at the Last Supper. The ceremony was always held at the Pope’s diocese church, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which used to be beyond the Vatican walls, but ever since the Vatican was moved to Pacem it’s been held in St. Peter’s Basilica. The Basilica of St. John Lateran was left behind during the Hegira because it had been destroyed during the Seven Nation Wars in the twenty-first century and…” De Soya stopped what I had thought was nervous chatter. His face had gone blank in that way common to mild epileptics or deeply thoughtful people.

Aenea and I waited. I admit that I was glancing with some anxiety toward the patrol of black-armored Pax security men moving toward us down the long boulevard.

“I know how we can get into the Vatican,” said Father de Soya and turned back toward an alley opposite the Vatican Boulevard.

“Good,” said Aenea, following quickly.

The Jesuit stopped suddenly. “I think that I can get us in,” he said. “But I have no idea how to get us out.”

“Just get us in, please,” said Aenea.

The steel door was at the rear of a ruined, windowless stone chapel three blocks from the Vatican. It was locked with a small padlock and a large chain. The sign on the sealed door said TOURS ON ALTERNATE SATURDAYS ONLY: Closed During Holy Week: CONTACT VATICAN TOUR OFFICE 3888 SQUARE OF THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MARTYRS.

“Can you break this chain?” Father de Soya asked me.

I felt the massive chain and the solid padlock. My only tool or weapon was the small hunting knife still in my belt sheath.

“No,” I said. “But maybe I can pick the lock. See if you can find some wire in that garbage module there… baling wire would do.”

We stood there in the drizzle for at least ten minutes, with the light fading around us and the sound of traffic on nearby boulevards seeming to grow louder, waiting every minute for the Swiss Guard or security people to swoop down on us. Everything I had learned about picking locks had come from an old riverboat gambler on the Kans who had turned to gambling after the Port Romance authorities had removed two of his fingers for thieving. As I worked, I thought of the ten years of odyssey for Aenea and me, of Father de Soya’s long voyage to this place, of the hundreds of light-years traveled and tens of thousands of hours of tension and pain and sacrifice and terror. And the goddamn ten-florin lock would not budge.

Finally the point of my knife broke. I cursed, threw the knife away, and slammed the stinking lousy cretinous piece-of-shit lock and chain against the grimy stone wall. The padlock clicked open.

It was dark inside. If there was a light switch, none of us could find it. If there was an idiot AI somewhere controlling the lights, it did not respond to our commands. None of us had brought a light. After carrying a flashlight laser for years, I had left mine behind in my backpack this day. When the time had come to leave the Yggdrasill, I had stepped forward and taken Aenea’s hand without a thought to weapons or other necessary items.

“Is this the Basilica of St. John Lateran?” whispered Aenea. It was impossible to speak in anything above a whisper in the oppressive darkness.

“No, no,” whispered Father de Soya. “Just a tiny memorial chapel built near the original basilica in the twenty-first…” He stopped and I could imagine his thoughtful expression returning. “It is a working chapel, I believe,” he said. “Wait here.”

Aenea and I stood with shoulders touching as we heard Father de Soya moving around the perimeter of the tiny building. Once something heavy fell with the sound of iron on stone and we all stood holding our breath. A minute later we heard the sound of his hands sliding along the inside walls again and the rustle of his cassock. There was a muffled “Ahhh… “and a second later light flared.

The Jesuit was standing less than ten meters from us, holding a lighted match. A box of matches was in his left hand. “A chapel,” he explained. “They still had the stand for votive candles.” I could see that the candles themselves had been melted to uselessness and never replaced, but the tapers and this one box of matches had remained for God knows how long in this dark, abandoned place. We joined him in the small circle of light, waited while he lighted a second match, and followed him to a heavy wooden door set behind rotting curtains. “Father Baggio, my resurrection chaplain, told me about this tour when I was under house arrest near here some years ago,” whispered Father de Soya. This door was not locked, but opened with a squeal of ancient, unoiled hinges. “I believe he thought it would appeal to my sense of the macabre,” went on Father de Soya, leading us down a narrow, spiraling stone stairway not much wider than my shoulders. Aenea followed the priest. I kept close to Aenea.

The stairway continued down, then down some more, and then more. I estimated that we were at least twenty meters beneath street level when the stairway ended and we passed through a series of narrow corridors into a wider, echoing hallway. The priest had gone through a half-dozen matches by this point, dropping each only after it had burned his fingers.

I did not ask him how many matches were left in the small matchbox.

“When the Church decided to move St. Peter’s and the Vatican during the Hegira,” said de Soya, his voice loud enough now to empty in the black space, “they brought it en masse to Pacem using heavy field lifters and tractor-field towers. Since mass was not a problem, they brought half of Rome with them, including the huge Castel Sant’Angelo and everything under the old city down to a depth of sixty meters. This was the twentieth-century subway system.”

Father de Soya began walking down what I realized was an abandoned railway platform. At places the ceiling tiles had fallen in and everywhere except on a narrow pathway there were centuries of dust, fallen rocks, broken plastic, unreadable signs lying in the grime, and shattered benches. We went down several corroded steel stairways—escalators halted more than a millennium ago, I realized—through a narrow corridor that continued downward along an echoing ramp, and then onto another platform. At the end of this platform, I could see a fiberplastic ladder leading down to where the tracks had been… where the tracks still were under the layers of dust, rubble, and rust.

We had just climbed down the ladder and stepped into the subway tunnel when the next match went out. But not before Aenea and I had seen what lay ahead.

Bones. Human bones. Bones and skulls stacked neatly almost two meters high on either side of a narrow passage between the rusted tracks.

Great heaps of bones, the socket ends out, skulls neatly placed at meter-intervals or arranged in geometric designs within the knobby walls of human bones.

Father de Soya lit the next match and began striding between the walls of skeletal human remains. The breeze of his motion flickered the tiny flame that he held aloft. “After the Seven Nations War in the early twenty-first century,” he said, his voice at a normal conversational volume now, “the cemeteries of Rome were overflowing. There had been mass graves dug all around the suburbs of the city and in the large parks. It became quite a health problem what with the global warming and constant flooding. All of the bio and chem warheads, you know. The subways had ceased to run anyway, so the powers-to-be authorized a removal of the remains and their reinterment in the old metro systems.”

This time when the match burned out, we were in a section where the bones were stacked five layers high, each layer marked by a row of skulls, their white brows reflecting the light but the sightless sockets indifferent to our passing. The neat walls of bones went back for at least six meters on either side and rose to the vaulted ceiling ten meters above us. In a few places, there had been a small avalanche of bones and skulls and we had to pick our way over them carefully. Still there was the crunching underfoot. We did not move during the interludes of darkness between matches, but waited quietly. There was no other noise… not the scurry of rats nor the drip of water. Only our breathing and soft words disturbed the silence here.

“Oddly enough,” said Father de Soya after we had gone another two hundred meters, “they did not get the idea from Rome’s ancient catacombs, which lie all about us here, but from the so-called catacombs of Paris… old quarry tunnels deep under that city. The Parisians had to move bones from their overflowing cemeteries to those tunnels between the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. They found that they could easily accommodate six million dead in just a few kilometers of corridors. Ahh… here we are…”

To our left, through an even narrower corridor of bones, was a path with a few boot marks in the dust, leading to another steel door, this one unlocked. It took all three of us to leverage the door open. The priest led the way down another set of rusting spiral stairs to a depth I estimated at being at least thirty-five meters beneath the street above. The match went out just as we stepped into another tunnel—much older than the subway vault, its edges and ceiling unfinished and tumbledown. I had caught a glimpse of side passages running off, of bones spilled haphazardly everywhere in these passages, of skulls upside down, of bits of rotted garments.

“According to Father Baggio,” whispered the priest, “this is where the real catacombs begin. The Christian catacombs which go back to the first century A.D.” A new match flared. I heard a rattle in the matchbox that sounded like very few matches indeed. “This way, I would guess,” said Father de Soya and led us to his right.

“We’re under the Vatican now?” whispered Aenea a few minutes later. I could feel her impatience. The match flared and died.

“Soon, soon,” said de Soya in the darkness. He lit another one. I heard no rattle in the box.

After another 150 meters or so, the corridor simply ended. There were no tumbled bones here, no skulls, only rough stone walls and a hint of masonry where the tunnel ended. The match went out. Aenea touched my hand as we waited in the darkness.

“I am sorry,” said the priest. “There are no more matches.”

I fought back the rise of panic in my chest.

I was sure that I heard noises now… distant rat feet scurrying at the least, boots on stairs at the worst. “Do we backtrack?” I said, my whisper sounding far too loud in the absolute darkness.

“I was sure that Father Baggio said that these catacombs to the north had once connected to the older ones under the Vatican,” whispered Father de Soya. “Under St. Peter’s Basilica, to be precise.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to…” I began and stopped. In the few seconds of light before the match had gone out, I had glimpsed the relative newness of the brick wall between stones… a few centuries old as opposed to the millennia since the stone had been cut away. I crawled forward, feeling ahead of me until my fingers found stone, brick, loose mortar.

“This was hastily done,” I said, speaking with only the authority I had gained as an assistant landscape worker on the Beak estates years and years before. “The mortar’s cracked and some of the bricks have crumbled,” I said, my fingers moving quickly. “Give me something to dig with. Damn, I wish I hadn’t thrown away my knife…”

Aenea handed me a sharp-edged stick or branch in the dark and I was digging away for several minutes before I realized that I was working with a thigh bone broken at one end. The two of them joined me, digging with bones, scrabbling at the cold brick with our fingernails until the nails broke and our fingers bled. After some time at this, we paused to pant and catch our breath. Our eyes had not adapted to the darkness. There was no light here. “The Mass will be over,” whispered Aenea. The tone in her voice made it sound like a tragic event.

“It is a High Mass,” whispered the priest. “A long ceremony.”

“Wait!” I said. My fingers had remembered a slight movement in the bricks—not in one or a few of them, but in the entire casement. “Get back,” I said aloud. “Crawl to the side of the tunnel.” I backed up myself, but straight back, raised my left shoulder, lowered my head, and charged forward in a crouch, half expecting to bash my head on the stone and knock myself out.

I hit the bricks with a mighty grunt and a shower of dust and small debris. The bricks had not fallen away. But I had felt them sag away from me. Aenea and de Soya joined me and in another minute we had pushed loose the center bricks, tumbled the entire mass away from us. There was the faintest glimmer of light on the other side of the passage, but enough to show us a ramp of debris leading to an even deeper tunnel.

We crawled down on our hands and knees, found room to stand, and moved through the earth-smelling corridor. Two more turns and we came into a catacomb as roughly hewn as the one above but illuminated by a narrow strip of glowtape running along the right wall at belt height. Another fifty meters of twisting and turning, always following the main passage illuminated by glowtape, and we came into a wider tunnel with modern glowglobes set every five meters. These globes were not lit, but the ancient glowtape continued on. “We’re under St. Peter’s,” whispered Father de Soya. “This area was first rediscovered in 1939, after they buried Pope Pius XI in a nearby grotto. The excavations were carried on for another twenty years or so before being abandoned. They have not been reopened to archaeologists.”

We came into an even wider corridor—wide enough for the three of us to walk side by side for the first time. Here the ancient rock and plastered walls with the occasional marble inset were covered with frescoes, early Christian mosaics, and broken statues set above grottoes in which bones and skulls were clearly visible. Someone had once placed plastic across many of these grottoes and the material had yellowed and opaqued to make the mortal remains within almost unviewable, but by bending and peering we could see empty eye sockets and pelvic ovals peering back at us.

The frescoes showed Christian images—doves carrying olive branches, women drawing water, the ubiquitous fish—but were next to older grottoes, cremation urns, and graves offering pre-Christian images of Isis and Apollo, Bacchus welcoming the dead to the afterlife with great, overflowing flagons of wine, a scene of oxen and rams cavorting, another with satyrs dancing—I immediately noticed the likeness to Martin Silenus and turned just in time to catch Aenea’s knowing glance—and still more with beings Father de Soya described as maenads, some rural scenes, partridges all in a row, a preening peacock with feathers of lapis chips that still caught the light in bright blue. Peering through the ancient, mottled plastic and plastiglass at these things made me think that we were passing through some terrestrial aquarium of death.

Finally we came to a red wall at right angles to a lower wall of faded, mottled blue with the remnants of graffiti in Latin still visible.

Here the sheet of plastic was newer, fresher, and the small container of bones within quite visible. The skull had been set atop the neat pile of bones and seemed to be regarding us with some interest.

Father de Soya went to his knees in the dust, crossed himself, and bent his head in prayer.

Aenea and I stood back and watched with the quiet embarrassment common to the unbeliever in the presence of any true faith.

When the priest arose, his eyes were moist.

“According to Church history and Father Baggio, the workers uncovered these poor bones in 1949 A.D. Later analysis showed that they belong to a robust man who died sometime in his sixties. We are directly under the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was built here because of the legend that St. Peter had been interred secretly at just this spot. In 1968 A.D… Pope Paul VI announced that the Vatican was convinced that these were indeed the bones of the fisherman, the same Peter who walked with Jesus and was the Rock upon which Christ built his Church.”

We looked at the silent heap of bones and then back at the priest.

“Federico, you know that I am not trying to bring down the Church,” Aenea said. “Only this current aberration of it.”

“Yes,” said Father de Soya, wiping his eyes roughly, leaving muddy streaks there. “I know that, Aenea.” He looked around, went to a door, opened it. A metal staircase led upward.

“There will be guards,” I whispered.

“I think not,” said Aenea. “The Vatican has spent eight hundred years fearing attack from space… from above. I do not believe they give much thought to their catacombs.” She stepped in front of the priest and started quickly but quietly up the metal steps. I hurried to follow her.

I saw Father de Soya glance back toward the dim grotto, cross himself a final time, and follow us up toward St. Peter’s Basilica.

The light in the main basilica, although softened by evening, stained glass, and candlelight, was all but blinding after the catacombs. We had climbed up through the subterranean shrine, up past a memorial basilica marked in stone as the Trophy of Gaius, through side corridors and service entrances, through the anteroom to the sacristy, past standing priests and craning altar boys, and out into the echoing expanse at the rear of the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica. Here were scores of dignitaries not important enough to have been awarded a place in the pews but still honored by being allowed to stand in the rear of the Basilica to witness this important celebration. It took only a glance to see that there were Swiss Guard and security people at all the entrances to the Basilica and in all the outer rooms with exits. Here at the back of the congregation, we were inconspicuous for the moment, just another priest and two somewhat underdressed parishioners allowed to crane their necks to see the Holy Father on Holy Thursday.

Mass was still being celebrated. The air smelled of incense and candlewax. Hundreds of brightly robed bishops and VIP’s lined the gleaming rows of pews. At the marble altar rail before the baroque splendor canopy of the Throne of St. Peter, the Holy Father himself knelt to finish his menial work of washing the feet of twelve seated priests—eight men and four women. An unseen but large choir was singing—

I hesitated then, wondering what we were doing here, why this endless battle of Aenea’s had brought us to the center of these people’s faith. I believed everything she had taught us, valued everything she had shared with us, but three thousand years of tradition and faith had formed the words of this beautiful song and had built the walls of this mighty cathedral. I could not help but remember the simple wooden platforms, the firm but inelegant bridges and stairways of Aenea’s rebuilt Temple Hanging in Air. What was it… what were we… compared to this splendor and humility? Aenea was an architect, largely self-trained except for her adolescent years with the cybrid Mr. Wright, building stone walls out of desert rock and mixing concrete by hand.

Michelangelo had helped to design this Basilica.

The Mass was almost over. Some of the standing crowd in the rear of the longitudinal nave were beginning to leave, walking lightly so as not to interrupt the end of the service with their footfalls, whispering only when they reached the stairs to the piazza outside. I saw that Aenea was whispering in Father de Soya’s ear and I leaned against them to hear, afraid that I might miss some vital instruction. “Will you do me one final great service, Father?” she asked. “Anything,” whispered the sad-eyed priest. “Please leave the Basilica now,” Aenea whispered in his ear. “Please go now, quietly, with these others. Leave now and lose yourself in Rome until the day comes to cease being lost.”

Father de Soya pulled his head back in shock, looking at Aenea from half a meter away with an expression of someone who has been abandoned. He leaned close to her ear. “Ask anything else of me, Teacher.”

“This is all I ask, Father. And I ask it with love and respect.”

The choir began singing another hymn. Above the heads in front of me, I could see the Holy Father completing the washing of the priests’ feet and moving back to the altar under the gilded canopy.

Everyone in the pews stood in anticipation of the closing litanies and final benediction.

Father de Soya gave his own benediction of my friend, turned, and left the Basilica with a group of monks whose beads rattled as they walked.

I stared at Aenea with enough intensity to set wood aflame, trying to send her the mental message DO NOT ASK ME TO LEAVE!

She beckoned me close and whispered in my ear, “Do one final thing for me, Raul, my love.”

I almost shouted “No, goddammit!” at the top of my lungs in the echoing nave of St. Peter’s Basilica during the holiest moments of Holy Thursday’s High Mass. Instead I waited.

Aenea fumbled in the pockets of her vest and came out with a small vial. The liquid in it was clear but somehow looked heavier than water. “Would you drink this?” she whispered and handed me the vial.

I thought of Romeo and Juliet, Caesar and Cleopatra, Abelard and Heloise, George Wu and Howard Sung. All star-crossed lovers. Suicide and poison. I drank down the potion in one gulp, setting the empty vial in my own shirt pocket, waiting for Aenea to take out and drink a similar potion.

She did not.

“What was it?” I whispered, not fearing any answer.

Aenea was watching the final moments of the Mass. She leaned very close to whisper.

“Antidote to the Pax’s birth control medication that you took when you joined the Home Guard.”

What the hell!!??!! I came close to shouting over the Holy Father’s closing words. You’re worried about family planning NOW?? Are you out of your goddamn MIND???

She leaned back, her breath warm on my neck as she whispered again. “Thank God, I’ve been carrying that for two days and almost forgot it. Don’t worry, it’ll take about three weeks to take effect. Then you’ll never be shooting blanks again.” I blinked at her. Was this blasphemy in St. Peter’s Basilica or just extraordinarily bad taste? Then my mind shifted into high gear—This is wonderful news… whatever happens next, Aenea sees a future for us… for herself… wants to have a child with me. But what about her first child? And why do I assume she’s doing this so that she and I can… why would she… perhaps it’s her idea of a farewell present… why would she… why…

“Kiss me, Raul,” she whispered, loud enough to make the elderly nun standing in front of us turn around with a severe expression.

I did not question her. I kissed her. Her lips were soft and slightly moist, just as they were the first time we had kissed standing on the bank of the Mississippi River at a place called Hannibal. The kiss seemed to last a long time. She touched the back of my neck with her cool fingers before our lips parted. The Pope was moving to the front of the apse, facing each of the two arms of the transept, then the short nave, and finally the longitudinal nave as he gave his final benediction.

Aenea walked out into the main aisle, pushing people gently aside until she was in the open space and striding toward the distant altar. “Lenar Hoyt!” she shouted, and her voice echoed the hundred meters to the dome above. It was more than 150 meters from where we had been standing to where the Pope now paused in his benediction, and I knew Aenea had no chance of making that distance before being intercepted, but I hurried to catch up to her.

“Lenar Hoyt!” she shouted again and hundreds of heads turned in her direction. I saw movement in the arched shadows along the sides of the nave as Swiss Guard leaped into action. “Lenar Hoyt, I am Aenea, daughter of Brawne Lamia who traveled to Hyperion with you to face the Shrike. I am the daughter of the John Keats cybrid whom your Core masters have twice killed in the flesh!”

The Pope stood as if transfixed, one bony finger raised in benediction a moment before now pointing, shaking as if palsied. His other hand clutched his vestments above his chest. His miter trembled as his head bobbed back and forth. “You!” he cried, his voice high, thin, and weak. “The Abomination!”

“You are the abomination,” shouted Aenea, she was running now, shrugging off dark-robed figures that rose from the pews to grab at her. I pulled two men from her back and she ran on. I leaped over a lunging figure and ran at her side, watching the Swiss Guard shoving through the crowd, energy pikes aimed but hesitant to fire with so many Vatican and Mercantilus dignitaries in the line of fire.

I knew that they would not hesitate if she got within ten meters of the Pope. “You are the abomination,” she shouted again, running hard now, dodging grasping hands and lunging arms. “You are the Judas of the Catholic Church, Lenar Hoyt, selling its sacred history to the…”

A heavy man in a Pax Fleet admiral’s uniform pulled a ceremonial sword from his scabbard and swung it at my beloved’s head. She ducked. I blocked the Admiral’s arm, broke it, kicked the sword aside, and threw him halfway down the length of the pew into his subordinates.

Colonel Kassad had said that after learning the language of the living, that he had felt the pain he administered to others. I experienced that now, feeling the torn nerves and muscle and shattered bone of my forearm and the collision of my body as the Admiral struck his men. But when I looked down, my forearm was firm and the only penalty was pain. I did not care about the pain.

A cordon of priests, monks, and bishops put themselves between Aenea and the Pope. I saw the Pontiff clutch his chest more tightly and fall, but several of the deacons standing near him caught him, carried him back under the canopy of Bernini’s throne. Swiss Guardsmen hurtled into the space at the end of the aisle, blocking Aenea’s way with their pikes and bodies. More filled the space behind us, roughly shoving away the onlookers with brutal swings of their pikes. Pax security in black armor and compact repulsor flying belts came hurtling in ten meters above the heads of the congregation. Laser dots danced on Aenea’s face and chest.

I threw myself between her and the imminent energy bolts and flechette clouds. The laser beam blinded my right eye as the target dot swept across it. I threw my arms wide and bellowed something… a challenge perhaps… defiance certainly.

“No! Keep them alive!” It was a huge cardinal shouting in a bass rumble like the voice of God.

A Swiss Guardsman rushed at Aenea with his pike raised to stun her with a blow to the head.

She threw herself down, slid across the tile, clipped him at his knees, and sent him sprawling toward me. I kicked him in the head and turned to wrestle the pike out of another Guardsman’s hands, knocking him backward into the crowd and swinging the long weapon at the five Guardsmen rushing us from the rear. They gave way.

A flying security trooper fired two darts into my left shoulder. I presumed they were tranquilizers, but I ripped them away, threw them at the flying form, and felt nothing. Two guards—a large man and a larger woman—grabbed my arms. I swung them through the air until their skulls collided and dropped them onto tile.

“Aenea!”

She was on her feet again, pulling free of one Guardsman only to have two forms in black armor block her way. The congregation was screaming. The great cathedral organ suddenly screamed like a woman in labor. A security man shot her at five-meter range. Aenea spun around.

A woman in black armor clubbed my darling down, straddling her and pulling her arms behind her.

I used my forearm to swat the Pax security bitch five meters backward through the air. A Guardsman clubbed me in the stomach with his pike.

A flying security shape zapped me with a neural stunner. Stunners are supposed to work instantly, guaranteed to work instantly, but I had time to close my hands on the nearest Guardsman’s throat before they stunned me again, and then a third time. My body spasmed and fell and I pissed my pants as all voluntary functions ceased, my last conscious sensation being the cold flow of urine down my pant leg onto the perfect tiles of St. Peter’s Basilica.

I was not really aware of the dozen heavy forms landing on my back, pinning my arms, pulling me away. I did not really hear or feel the crack of my forehead striking tile or the rip it opened from my brow to hairline.

In the last three or four seconds of semiconsciousness, I saw black feet, combat boots, a fallen Swiss Guardsman’s cap, more feet. I knew that Aenea had fallen to my left but I could not turn my head to see her one last time.

They dragged me away, leaving a trail of blood, urine, and saliva as they did so. I was far beyond caring.

And so ends my tale.

I was conscious but restrained with neural locks during my “trial,” a ten-minute appearance before the black-robed judges of the Holy Office.

I was condemned to death. No human being would sully his or her soul by executing me; I was to be transferred to a Schrödinger cat box in orbit around the quarantined labyrinth world of Armaghast. The immutable laws of physics and quantum chance would execute the sentence. As soon as the trial ended they shipped me via a Hawking-drive, high-g, robot torchship to Armaghast System—a two-month time-debt. Wherever Aenea was, whatever had happened to her, I was already two months too late to help her when I awoke just as they finished sealing the fused-energy shell of my prison. And for uncounted days… perhaps months, I went insane. And then for more uncounted days, certainly more months, I have been using the ’scriber they included in my tiny egg of a cell to tell this tale.

They must have known that the ’scriber would be an additional punishment as I waited to die, writing my story on my few pages of recycled microvellum like the snake devouring its own tail, knowing that no one will ever access the story in the memory chip. I said at the beginning of all this that you, my impossible reader, were reading it for the wrong reason. I said at the beginning that if you were reading this to discover her fate, or my own, that you were reading the wrong document. I was not with her when her fate was played out, and my own is closer now to its final act than when I first wrote these words. I was not with her. I was not with her. Oh, Jesus God, God of Moses, Allah, dear Buddha, Zeus, Muir, Elvis, Christ… if any of you exist or ever existed or retain a shred of power in your dead gray hands… please let me die now. Now.

Let the particle be detected and the gas released.

Now.

I was not with her.

31

I lied to you.

I said at the beginning of this narrative that I was not with her when Aenea’s fate was played out—implying that I did not know what that fate might be—and I repeated it some sleep periods ago when I ’scribed what I was sure must be the last installment of that same narrative.

But I lied by omission, as some priest of the Church might say. I lied because I did not want to discuss it, to describe it, to relive it, to believe it. But I know now that I must do all of these things. I have relived it every hour of my incarceration here in this Schrödinger cat box prison. I have believed it since the moment I shared the experience with my dear friend, my dear Aenea.

I knew before they shipped me out of Pacem System what the fate of my dear girl had been. Having believed it and relived it, I owe it to the truth of this narrative and to the memory of our love to discuss it and describe it.

All this came to me while I was drugged and docile, tethered in a high-g tank aboard the robot shuttle an hour after my ten-minute trial in front of the Inquisition on a Pax base asteroid ten light-minutes from Pacem. I knew as soon as I heard and felt and saw these things that they were real, that they were happening at the moment I shared them, and that only my closeness to Aenea and my slow progress in learning the language of the living had allowed such a powerful sharing. When the sharing was over, I began screaming in my high-g tank, ripping at life-support umbilicals and banging the bulkhead with my head and fists, until the water-filled tank was swirling with my blood. I tried tearing at the osmosis mask that covered my face like some parasite sucking away my breath; it would not tear. For a full three hours I screamed and protested, battering myself into a state of semiconsciousness at best, reliving the shared moments with Aenea a thousand times and screaming in agony a thousand times, and then the robot ship injected sleep drugs through the leechlike umbilicals, the high-g tank drained, and I drifted away into cryogenic fugue as the torchship reached the translation point for the jump to nearby Armaghast System. I awoke in the Schrödinger cat box. The robot ship had loaded me into the fused-energy satellite and launched it without human intervention. For a few moments I was disoriented, believing that the shared moments with Aenea had all been nightmare. Then the reality of those moments flooded back and I began screaming again. I believe that I was not sane again for some months.

Here is what drove me to madness.

Aenea had also been taken bleeding and unconscious from St. Peter’s Basilica, but unlike me she awoke the next day neither drugged nor shunted. She came to consciousness—and I shared this awakening more clearly than I have recalled any memory of mine, as sharp and real as a second set of sense impressions—in a huge stone room, round, some thirty meters across, with a ceiling fifty meters above the stone floor.

Set in the ceiling was a glowing frosted glass that gave the sense of a skylight, although Aenea guessed that this was an illusion and that the room was deep within a larger structure.

The medics had cleaned me up for my ten-minute trial while I was unconscious, but no one had touched Aenea’s wounds: the left side of her face was tender, swollen with bruises, her clothes had been torn away from her body and she was naked, her lips were swollen, her left eye was almost shut—she could see out of it only with effort and the vision from her right eye was blurred from concussion—and there were cuts and bruises on her chest, thighs, forearm, and belly. Some of these cuts had caked over, but a few were deep enough to require stitches that no one had provided.

They still bled.

She was strapped in what appeared to be a rusted iron skeleton of crossed metal that hung by chains from the high ceiling and that allowed her to lean back and rest her weight against it but still kept her almost standing, her arms held low along the rusted girders, a near-vertical asterisk of cold metal hanging in air with her wrists and ankles cruelly clamped and bolted to the frame. Her toes hung about ten centimeters above a grated floor. She could move her head. The round room was empty except for this and two other objects.

A broad wastebasket sat to the right of the chair.

There was a plastic liner in the wastebasket. Also next to the right arm of the asterisk was a rusted metal tray with various instruments on it: ancient dental picks and pliers, circular blades, scalpels, bone saws, a long forceps of some kind, pieces of wire with barbs at three-centimeter intervals, long-bladed shears, shorter, serrated shears, bottles of dark fluid, tubes of paste, needles, heavy thread, and a hammer. Even more disturbing was the round grate some two and a half meters across beneath her, through which she could see dozens of tiny, blue flames burning like pilot lights. There was the faint smell of natural gas. Aenea tried the restraints—they gave not at all—felt her bruised wrists and ankles throb at the attempts, and put her head back against the iron girder to wait. Her hair was matted there and she could feel a huge lump high on her scalp and another near the base of her skull. She felt nauseous and concentrated on not throwing up on herself.

After a few minutes, a hidden door in the stone wall opened and Rhadamanth Nemes came in and walked to a place just beyond the grate to the right side of Aenea. A second Rhadamanth Nemes came in and took her place on Aenea’s left side. Two more Nemeses came in and took up positions farther back.

They did not speak. Aenea did not speak to them.

A few minutes later, John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa shimmered into existence—his life-size holographic image taking on solidity directly in front of Aenea. The illusion of his physical presence was perfect except for the fact that the Cardinal was sitting on a chair not represented in the hologram, giving the illusion that he was floating in midair.

Mustafa looked younger and healthier than he had on T’ien Shan. A few seconds later he was joined by the holo of a more massive cardinal in a red robe, and then by the holo of a thin, tubercular-looking priest. A moment after that, a tall, handsome man dressed all in gray came through the physical door in the wall of the physical dungeon and stood with the holos.

Mustafa and the other Cardinal continued sitting on unseen chairs while the monsignor’s holo and the physically present man in gray stood behind the chairs like servants.

“M. Aenea,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “allow me to introduce the Vatican Secretary of State His Eminence Cardinal Lourdusamy, his aide Monsignor Lucas Oddi, and our esteemed Councillor Albedo.”

“Where am I?” asked Aenea. She had to attempt the sentence a second time because of her swollen lips and bruised jaw.

The Grand Inquisitor smiled. “We will answer all of your questions for the moment, my dear. And then you will answer all of ours. I guarantee this. To answer your first question, you are in the deepest… ah… interview room… in the Castel Sant’Angelo, on the right bank of the new Tiber, near the Ponte Sant’Angelo, quite near the Vatican, still on the world of Pacem.”

“Where is Raul?”

“Raul?” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Oh, you mean your rather useless bodyguard. At the moment, I believe he has completed his own meeting with the Holy Office and is aboard a ship preparing to leave our fair system. Is he important to you, my dear? We could make arrangements to return him to Castel Sant’Angelo.”

“He’s not important,” murmured Aenea, and after my first second of hurt and anguish at the words, I could feel her thoughts beneath them… concern for me, terror for me, hope that they would not threaten me as a means to coerce her.

“As you wish,” said Cardinal Mustafa. “It is you we want to interview today. How do you feel?”

Aenea stared at them through her good eye.

“Well,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “one should not hope to attack the Holy Father in St. Peter’s Basilica and come away with impunity.”

Aenea mumbled something.

“What was that, my dear? We could not make it out.” Mustafa was smiling slightly—a toad’s self-satisfied leer.

“I… did… not… attack… the… Pope.”

Mustafa opened his hands. “If you insist, M. Aenea… but your intentions did not seem friendly. What is it that you had in mind as you ran down the central aisle toward the Holy Father?”

“Warn him,” said Aenea. Part of her mind was assessing her injuries even as she listened to the Grand Inquisitor’s prattle: serious bruises but nothing broken, the sword cut on her thigh needed stitching, as did the cut on her upper chest. But something was wrong in her system—internal bleeding? She did not think so. Something alien had been administered to her via injection.

“Warn him of what?” said Cardinal Mustafa with butter smoothness.

Aenea moved her head to look with her good eye at Cardinal Lourdusamy and then at Councillor Albedo. She said nothing.

“Warn him of what?” asked Cardinal Mustafa again. When Aenea did not respond, the Grand Inquisitor nodded to the nearest Nemes clone. The pale woman walked slowly to the side of Aenea’s chair, took up the smaller of the two shears, seemed to think twice about it, set the instrument back on the tray, came closer, went to one knee on the grate next to Aenea’s right arm, bent back my darling’s little finger, and bit it off. Nemes smiled, stood, and spit the bloody finger into the wastebasket.

Aenea screamed with the shock and pain and half swooned against the headrest.

The Nemes-thing took tourniquet paste from the tube and smeared it on the stump of Aenea’s little finger.

The holo of Cardinal Mustafa looked sad. “We do not desire to administer pain, my dear, but we also shall not hesitate to do so. You shall answer our questions quickly and honestly, or more parts of you will end up in the basket. Your tongue will be the last to go.”

Aenea fought back the nausea. The pain from her mutilated hand was incredible—ten light-minutes away, I screamed with the secondhand shock of it. “I was going to warn the Pope… about… your coup,” gasped Aenea, still looking at Lourdusamy and Albedo. “Heart attack.”

Cardinal Mustafa blinked in surprise.

“You are a witch,” he said softly.

“And you’re a traitorous asshole,” Aenea said strongly and clearly. “All of you are. You sold out your Church. Now you’re selling out your puppet Lenar Hoyt.”

“Oh?” said Cardinal Lourdusamy. He looked mildly amused. “How are we doing that, child?”

Aenea jerked her head at Councillor Albedo. “The Core controls everyone’s life and death via the cruciforms. People die when it’s convenient for the Core to have them dead… neural networks in the process of dying are more creative than living ones. You’re going to kill the Pope again, but this time his resurrection won’t be successful, will it?”

“Very perceptive, my dear,” rumbled Cardinal Lourdusamy. He shrugged. “Perhaps it is time for a new pontiff.” He moved his hand in the air and a fifth hologram appeared behind them in the room: Pope Urban XVI comatose in a hospital bed, nursing nuns, human doctors, and medical machines hovering around him.

Lourdusamy waved his pudgy hand again and the image disappeared.

“Your turn to be pope?” said Aenea and closed her eyes. Red spots were dancing in her vision. When she opened her eyes again, Lourdusamy was making a modest shrug.

“Enough of this,” said Councillor Albedo.

He walked directly through the holos of the seated cardinals and stood at the edge of the grate, directly in front of Aenea. “How have you been manipulating the farcaster medium? How do you farcast without the portals?”

Aenea looked at the Core representative. “It scares you, doesn’t it, Councillor? In the same way that the cardinals are too frightened to be here with me in person.”

The gray man showed his perfect teeth. “Not at all, Aenea. But you have the ability to farcast yourself—and those near you—without portals. His Eminence Cardinal Lourdusamy and Cardinal Mustafa, as well as Monsignor Oddi, have no wish to suddenly vanish from Pacem with you. As for me… I would be delighted if you farcast us somewhere else.” He waited. Aenea said nothing.

She did not move. Councillor Albedo smiled again. “We know that you’re the only one who has learned how to do this type of farcasting,” he said softly. “None of your so-called disciples are close to learning the technique. But what is the technique? The only way we’ve managed to use the Void for farcasting is by wedging open permanent rifts in the medium… and that takes far too much energy.”

“And they don’t allow you to do that anymore,” muttered Aenea, blinking away the red dots so she could meet the gray man’s gaze. The pain from her hand rose and fell in and around her like long swells on an uneasy sea. Councillor Albedo’s eyebrow moved up a fraction. “They won’t allow us to? Who is they, child? Describe your masters to us.”

“No masters,” murmured Aenea. She had to concentrate in order to banish the dizziness. “Lions and Tigers and Bears,” she whispered.

“No more double talk,” rumbled Lourdusamy.

The fat man nodded to the second Nemes clone, who walked to the tray, removed the rusty pair of pliers, walked around to Aenea’s left hand, held it steady at the wrist, and pulled out all of my darling’s fingernails.

Aenea screamed, passed out briefly, awoke, tried to turn her head away in time but failed, vomited on herself, and moaned softly.

“There is no dignity in pain, my child,” said Cardinal Mustafa. “Tell us what the Councillor wishes to know and we will end this sad charade. You will be taken from here, your wounds will be attended to, your finger regrown, you will be cleaned and dressed and reunited with your bodyguard or disciple or whatever. This ugly episode will be over.”

At that moment, reeling in agony, Aenea’s body still was aware of the alien substance that had been injected into her while she was unconscious hours earlier. Her cells recognized it. Poison. A sure, slow, terminal poison with no antidote—it would activate in twenty-four hours no matter what anyone did. She knew then what they wanted her to do and why.

Aenea had always been in contact with the Core, even before she was born, via the Schrön Loop in her mother’s skull linked to her father’s cybrid persona. It allowed her to touch primitive dataspheres directly, and she did this now—sensing the solid array of exotic Core machinery that lined this subterranean cell: instruments within instruments, sensors beyond human understanding or description, devices working in four dimensions and more, waiting, sniffing, waiting.

The cardinals and Councillor Albedo and the Core wanted her to escape. Everything was predicated upon her ’casting out of this intolerable situation: thus the holodrama coarseness of the torture, the melodramatic absurdity of the dungeon cell in Castel Sant’Angelo and the heavy-handed Inquisition. They would hurt her until she could not stand it any longer, and when she ’cast away, the Core instruments would measure everything to the billionth of a nanosecond, analyze her use of the Void, and come up with a way to replicate it. The Core would finally have their farcasters back—not in their crude wormhole or Gideon-drive manner, but instant and elegant and eternally theirs.

Aenea ignored the Grand Inquisitor, licked her dry, cracked lips, and said distinctly to Councillor Albedo, “I know where you live.”

The handsome gray man’s mouth twitched. “What do you mean?”

“I know where the Core—the physical elements of the Core—are,” said Aenea.

Albedo smiled but Aenea saw the quick glance toward the two cardinals and tall priest.

“Nonsense,” he said. “No human being has ever known the location of the Core.”

“In the beginning,” said Aenea, her voice slurred only slightly by pain and shock, “the Core was a transient entity floating in the crude datasphere on Old Earth known as the Internet. Then, even before the Hegira, you moved your bubble memories and servers and core storage nexus to a cluster of asteroids in long orbit around the sun, far from the Old Earth you planned to destroy…”

“Silence her,” snapped Albedo, turning back toward Lourdusamy, Mustafa, and Oddi. “She is trying to distract us from our questioning. This is not important.”

The expressions of the Mustafa, Lourdusamy, and Oddi holos suggested otherwise.

“During the days of the Hegemony,” continued Aenea, her good eyelid fluttering with the effort to focus her attention and steady her voice through the long, slow swells of pain, “the Core decided that it was prudent to diversify the physical Core components—bubble-memory matrices deep underground on the nine Labyrinthine worlds, fatline servers in the orbital industrial complexes around Tau Ceti Center, Core entity personae traveling along farcaster combands, and the megasphere connecting it all laced through the farcaster rifts in the Void Which Binds.”

Albedo folded his arms. “You’re raving.”

“But after the Fall,” continued Aenea, holding her good eyelid open and defying the gray man with her stare, “the Core got worried. Meina Gladstone’s attack on the farcaster medium gave you pause, even if the damage to your megasphere was repairable. You decided to diversify further. Multiply your personae, miniaturize essential Core memories, and make your parasitism on the human neural networks more direct…”

Albedo turned his back on her and gestured toward the nearest Nemes-thing. “She’s raving. Sew her lips shut.”

“No!” commanded Cardinal Lourdusamy. The fat man’s eyes were bright and attentive. “Don’t touch her until I command it.”

The Nemes on Aenea’s right had already picked up a needle and roll of heavy thread.

Now the pale-faced female paused and looked to Albedo for instructions.

“Wait,” said the Councillor.

“You wanted your neural parasitism to be more direct,” said Aenea. “So your billions of Core entities each formed its surrounding matrix in cruciform shape and attached themselves directly to your human hosts. Every one of your Core individuals now has a human host of its own to live in and destroy at will. You remain connected via the old dataspheres and new Gideon-drive megasphere nodes, but you enjoy dwelling so close to your food source…”

Albedo threw his head back and laughed, showing perfect teeth. He opened his arms and turned back to the three human holos. “This is marvelous entertainment,” he said, still chuckling. “You’ve arranged all this for her interrogation”—he flicked manicured nails in the general direction of the dungeon chamber, the skylight, the iron crossbeams upon which Aenea was clamped—“and the girl ends up playing with your minds. Pure nonsense. But wonderfully entertaining.”

Cardinal Mustafa, Cardinal Lourdusamy, and Monsignor Oddi were looking at Councillor Albedo most attentively, but their holographic fingers were touching their holographic chests.

The red-robed holo of Lourdusamy rose from its invisible chair and walked over to the edge of the grate. The holographic illusion was so perfect that Aenea could hear the slight rustling of the pectoral cross as it swung from its cord of red silk; the cord was intertwined with gold thread and ended in a large red and gold tuft. Aenea concentrated on watching the swinging cross and its clean silk cord rather than paying attention to the agony in her mutilated hands. She could feel the poison quietly spreading its way through her limbs and torso like the tumors and nematodes of a growing cruciform. She smiled. Whatever else they did to her, the cells of her body and blood would never accept the cruciform.

“This is interesting but irrelevant, my child,” murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy. “And this”—he flicked his short, fat fingers in the direction of her wounds and nakedness as if repulsed by it—“is most unpleasant.” The holo leaned closer and his intelligent little pig eyes bored into her. “And most unnec. Tell the Councillor what he wishes to know.”

Aenea raised her head to look into the big man’s eyes. “How to ’cast without a farcaster?”

Cardinal Lourdusamy licked his thin lips. “Yes, yes.”

Aenea smiled. “It is simple, Your Eminence. All you have to do is come to a few classes, learn about learning… the language of the dead, of the living, how to hear the music of the spheres… and then take communion with my blood or the blood of one of my followers who has drunk the wine.”

Lourdusamy backed away as if slapped.

He raised the pectoral cross and held it in front of him like a shield. “Blasphemy!” he bellowed. “Jesus Christus est primogenitus mortuorum; ipsi gloria et imperium in saecula saeculorum!”

“Jesus Christ was the first born of the dead,” Aenea said softly, the reflected light from the cross glaring in her good eye. “And you should offer him glory. And dominion, if you choose. But it was never his intention that human beings should be revived from death like laboratory mice at the whim of thinking machines…”

“Nemes,” snapped Councillor Albedo and this time there was no countermand. The Nemes female near the wall walked over to the grate, extended five-centimeter nails, and raked them down Aenea’s cheeks from just under each eye, slicing through muscle and exposing my dear friend’s cheekbones to the harsh light. Aenea let out a long, terrible sigh and slumped back against the girder. Nemes moved her face closer and showed her small, sharp teeth in a wide grin. Her breath was carrion.

“Chew off her nose and eyelids,” said Albedo. “Slowly.”

“No!” shouted Mustafa, leaping to his feet, hurrying forward and reaching out to stop Nemes. His holographic hands passed through Nemes’s all too solid flesh.

“A moment,” said Councillor Albedo, holding up one finger. Nemes paused with her mouth open above Aenea’s eyes.

“This is monstrous,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “As was your treatment of me.”

Albedo shrugged. “It was decided that you needed a lesson, Your Eminence.”

Mustafa was quivering with outrage. “Do you truly believe you are our masters?”

Councillor Albedo sighed. “We have always been your masters. You are rotting flesh wrapped around chimpanzee brains… gibbering primates decaying toward death from the moment of your birth. Your only role in the universe was as midwives to a higher form of self-awareness. A truly immortal life-form.”

“The Core…” said Cardinal Mustafa with great disdain.

“Move aside,” ordered Councillor Albedo. “Or…”

“Or what?” The Grand Inquisitor laughed. “Or you will torture me as you are torturing this deluded woman? Or will you have your monster beat me unto death again?” Mustafa swung his holographic arm back and forth through Nemes’s tensed torso, then through Albedo’s hard form. The Grand Inquisitor laughed and turned toward Aenea. “You are dead anyway, child. Tell this soulless creature what it needs to know and we will put you out of your misery in seconds with no…”

“Silence!” shouted Albedo and held up one hand like a curled claw.

The holo of Cardinal Mustafa screamed, clutched its chest, rolled across the grate through Aenea’s bleeding feet and the iron girder, rolled through one of the Nemeses’ legs, screamed again, and winked out of existence.

Cardinal Lourdusamy and Monsignor Oddi looked at Albedo. Their faces were expressionless. “Councillor,” said the Secretary of State in a soft, respectful tone, “could I interrogate her for a moment? If we are not successful, you can do what you wish with her.”

Albedo stared coolly at the Cardinal, but after a second he clapped Nemes on her shoulder and the killing thing stepped back three paces and closed her wide mouth.

Lourdusamy reached toward Aenea’s mutilated right hand as if to hold it. His holographic fingers seemed to sink into my darling’s torn flesh. “Quod petis?” whispered the Cardinal, and ten light-minutes away, screaming and writhing in my high-g tank, I understood him through Aenea: What do you seek? “Virtutes,” whispered Aenea. “Concede mihi virtutes, quibus indigeo, valeum impere.” And drowning in fury and sorrow and the sloshing fluids of my high-g tank, accelerating farther from Aenea every second, I understood—Strength. That I be given the strength I need to carry out this, my resolve.

“Desiderium tuum grave est,” whispered Cardinal Lourdusamy. Your desire is a serious one. “Quod ultra quaeris?” What else do you seek?

Aenea blinked blood out of her good eye so that she could see the Cardinal’s face. “Quaero togam pacem,” she said softly, her voice firm. I seek peace.

Councillor Albedo laughed again. “Your Eminence,” he said, his voice sarcastic, “do you think that I do not understand Latin?”

Lourdusamy looked in the direction of the gray man. “On the contrary, Councillor, I was sure that you did. She is near breaking, you know. I see it in her face. But it is the flames she fears most… not the animal to which you are feeding her.”

Albedo looked skeptical.

“Give me five minutes with the flames, Councillor,” said the Cardinal. “If that fails, turn your beast loose again.”

“Three minutes,” said Albedo, stepping back next to the Nemes that had raked furrows into Aenea’s face.

Lourdusamy stepped back several paces.

“Child,” he said, speaking Web English again, “this will hurt very much, I am afraid.” He moved his holographic hands and a jet of blue flame beneath the grate spurted into a column of flame that singed the bare soles of Aenea’s clamped feet. Skin burned, blackened, and curled. The stench of burning flesh filled the cell.

Aenea screamed and attempted to pull free of the clamps. They did not budge. The hanging bar of iron on which she was pinned began to glow at the bottom, sending pain up her bare calves and thighs. She felt her skin blister there as well. She screamed again. Cardinal Lourdusamy waved his hand again and the flame dropped back beneath the grate, becoming a pilot light watching like the blue eye of a hungry carnivore.

“That is just a taste of the pain you will feel,” murmured the Cardinal. “And, unfortunately, when one is seriously burned, the pain continues even after the flesh and nerves are irreparably burned away. They say that it is the most painful way to die.”

Aenea gritted her teeth to keep from screaming again. Blood dripped from her torn cheeks to her pale breasts… those breasts I had held and kissed and fallen asleep against. Imprisoned in my high-g créche, millions of kilometers away and preparing to spin up to C-plus and fugue oblivion, I screamed and raged into silence.

Albedo stepped onto the grate and said to my dear friend, “’Cast away from all this. ’Cast to the ship that is taking Raul to certain death and free him. ’Cast to the Consul’s ship. The autosurgeon there will heal you. You will live for years with the man you love. It is either that or a slow and terrible death here for you, and a slow and terrible death for Raul elsewhere. You will never see him again. Never hear his voice. ’Cast away, Aenea. Save yourself while there is still time. Save the one you love. In a minute, this man will burn the flesh from your legs and arms until your bones blacken. But we will not let you die. I will turn Nemes loose to feed on you. ’Cast away, Aenea. ’Cast away now.”

“Aenea,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy, “es igitur paratus?” Are you ready, therefore?

“In nomine Humanitus, ego paratus sum,” said Aenea, looking into the Cardinal’s eyes with her one good eye. In the name of Humanitus, I am ready.

Cardinal Lourdusamy waved his hand. All of the gas jets flamed high at once. Flame engulfed my darling and the Albedo cybrid.

Aenea stretched in agony as the heat engulfed her.

“No!” screamed Albedo from the midst of flames and walked from the burning grate, his synthetic flesh burning away from his false bones. His expensive gray clothes rose toward the distant ceiling in burning wads of cloth and his handsome features were melting onto his chest. “No, damn you!” he screamed again and reached for Lourdusamy’s throat with blazing fingers.

Albedo’s hands went through the hologram. The Cardinal was staring at Aenea’s face through the flames. He raised his right hand.

“Miserecordiam Dei… in nomine Patris, et Filia, et Spiritu Sanctus.”

These were the last words that Aenea ever heard as the flames closed on her ears and throat and face.

Her hair exploded in flame. Her vision burned a bright orange and faded as her eyes were fused with flames.

But I felt her pain in the few seconds of life left to her. And I heard her thoughts like a shout—no, like a whisper in my mind.

Raul, I love you.

Then the heat expanded, the pain expanded, her sense of life and love and mission expanded and lifted through the flames like smoke rising toward the unseen ceiling skylight, and my darling Aenea died.

I felt the second of her death like an implosion of all sight and sound and symbol essence. Everything in the universe worth loving and living for disappeared at that second.

I did not scream again. I quit pounding the walls of my high-g tank. I floated in weightlessness, feeling the tank drain, feeling the drugs and umbilicals for cryogenic fugue fall into me and onto me like worms at my flesh. I did not fight. I did not care.

Aenea was dead.

The torchship translated to quantum state.

When I awoke, I was in this Schrödinger cat box death cell.

It did not matter. Aenea was dead.

32

There was neither clock nor calendar in my cell. I do not know how many standard days, weeks, or months I was beyond the reach of sanity. I may have gone many days without sleeping or slept for weeks on end. It is difficult or impossible to tell.

But eventually, when the cyanide and the laws of quantum chance continued to spare me from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, I began this narrative. I do not know why my imprisoners provided me with a slate text ’scriber and stylus and the ability to print a few pages of recycled microvellum. Perhaps they saw the possibility of the condemned man writing his confession or using the ’scriber stylus as an impotent way to rage at his judges and jailers. Or perhaps they saw the condemned man’s writing of his sins and injuries, joys and losses of joy as an additional source of punishment. And perhaps in a way it was.

But it was also my salvation. At first it saved me from the insanity and self-destruction of uncontrollable grief and remorse. Then it saved my memories of Aenea—pulling them from the quagmire of horror at her terrible death to the firmer ground of our days together, her joy of living, her mission, our travels, and her complex but terribly straightforward message to me and all humankind. Eventually it simply saved my life.

Soon after beginning the narrative, I discovered that I could share the thoughts and actions of any of the participants in our long odyssey and failed struggle. I knew that this was a function of what Aenea had taught me through discussion and communion—with learning the language of the dead and the language of the living. I still encountered the dead in my sleeping and waking dreams: my mother often spoke to me and I tasted the agony and wisdom of uncounted others who had lived and died long ago, but it was not these lost souls who obsessed me now—it was those with some parallel view of my own experiences in all my years of knowing Aenea.

Never during my time waiting for death in the Schrödinger cat box did I believe that I could hear the current thoughts of the living beyond my prison—I assumed that the fused-energy shell of the orbital egg somehow prevented that—but I soon learned how to shut out the clamor of all those countless older voices resonating in the Void Which Binds and concentrate on the memories of those—those dead as well as presumably still living—who had been part of Aenea’s story. Thus I entered into at least some of the thoughts and motives of human beings so different from my own way of thinking as to be literally alien creatures: Cardinals Simon Augustino Lourdusamy and John Domenico Mustafa, Lenar Hoyt in his incarnations as Pope Julius and Pope Urban XVI, Mercantilus traders such as Kenzo Isozaki and Anna Pelli Cognani, priests and warriors such as Father de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Captain Marget Wu, and Executive Officer Hoagan Liebler. Some of the characters in my tale are present in the Void Which Bind largely as scars, holes, vacancies—the Nemes creatures are such vacuums, as are Councillor Albedo and the other Core entities—but I was able to track some of the movements and actions of these beings simply by the movement of that vacancy through the matrix of sentient emotion that was the Void, much as one would see the outline of an invisible man in a hard rain. Thus, in combination with listening to the soft murmurings of the human dead, I could reconstruct Rhadamanth Nemes’s slaughter of the innocents on Sol Draconi Septem and hear the sibilant hissings and see the deadly actions of Scylla, Gyges, Briareus, and Nemes on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B.

But as distasteful and disorienting as these descents into moral vacuum and mental nightmare were to me, they were balanced by a taste again of the warmth of such friends as Dem Loa, Dem Ria, Father Glaucus, Het Masteen, A. Bettik, and all the rest. Many of these participants in the tale I sought out only through my own memory—wonderful people such as Lhomo Dondrub, last seen flying off on his wings of pure light in his gallant and hopeless battle against the Pax warships, and Rachel, living the second of several lives she was destined to fill with adventure, and the regal Dorje Phamo and the wise young Dalai Lama. In this way, I was using the Void Which Binds to hear my own voice, to clarify memory beyond the ability and clarity of memory, and in that sense I often saw myself as a minor character in my own tale, a not-too-intelligent follower, usually reacting rather than leading, often failing to ask questions when he should or accepting answers all too inadequate. But I also saw the lumbering Raul Endymion of the tale as a man discovering love with a person he had waited for all of his life, and in that sense his willingness to follow without question was often balanced by his willingness to give his life in an instant for his dear friend.

Although I know without doubt that Aenea is dead, I never sought her voice among the chorus of those speaking the language of the dead. Rather, I felt her presence throughout the Void Which Binds, felt her touch in the minds and hearts of all the good people who wandered through our odyssey or had their lives changed forever in our long struggle with the Pax. As I learned to dim the insensate clamor and pick out specific voices among the chorus of the dead, I realized that I often visualized these human resonances in the Void as stars—some dim but visible when one knew where to look, others blazing like supernovas, still others existing in binary combinations with other former living souls, or set forever in a constellation of love and relationship with specific individuals, others—like Mustafa and Lourdusamy and Hoyt—all but burned out and imploded by the terrible gravity of their ambition or greed or lust for power, their human radiance all but lost as they collapsed into black holes of the spirit.

But Aenea was not one of these stars. She was like the sunlight that had surrounded us during a walk on a warming spring day in the meadows above Taliesin West—constant, diffuse, flowing from a single source but warming everything and everyone around us, a source of life and energy. And as when winter comes or night falls, the absence of that sunlight brings the cold and darkness and we wait for spring and morning.

But I knew that there would be no morning for Aenea now, no resurrection for her and our love affair. The great power of her message is that the Pax version of resurrection was a lie—as sterile as the required birth-control injections administered by the Pax. In a finite universe of would-be immortals, there is almost no room for children. The Pax universe was ordered and static, unchanging and sterile. Children bring chaos and clutter and an infinite potential for the future that was anathema to the Pax.

As I thought of this and pondered Aenea’s last gift to me—the antidote to the Pax birth-control implant within me—I wondered if it had been a primarily metaphorical gesture. I hoped that Aenea had not been suggesting that I use it literally; that I find another love, a wife, have children with someone else.

In one of our many conversations, she and I had discussed that once—I remember it was while sitting in the vestibule of her shelter near Taliesin as the evening wind blew the scent of yucca and primrose to us—that strange elasticity of the human heart in finding new relationships, new people to share one’s life with, new potentials.

But I hope that Aenea’s gift of fertility in that last few minutes we were together in St. Peter’s Basilica was a metaphor for the wider gift she had already given humanity, the option for chaos and clutter and wonderful, unseen options. If it was a literal gift, a suggestion that I find a new love, have children with someone else, then Aenea had not known me at all. In my writing of this narrative, I had seen all too well through the eyes of too many others that Raul Endymion was a likable enough fellow, trustworthy, awkwardly valiant on occasion, but not known for his insight or intelligence. But I was smart enough and insightful enough—at least into my own soul—to know for certain that this one love had been enough for my lifetime, and while I grew to realize—as the days and weeks and then, almost certainly, months passed in my death cell with no arrival of death—that if I somehow miraculously returned to the universe of the living I would seek out joy and laughter and friendship again, but not a pale shadow of the love I had felt. Not children. No. For a few wonderful days while writing the text, I convinced myself that Aenea had returned from the dead… that some sort of miracle had been possible. I had just reached the part of my narrative where we had reached Old Earth—passing through the farcaster on God’s Grove after the terrible encounter with the first Nemes-thing—and had finished that section with a description of our arrival at Taliesin West.

The night after finishing that first chunk of our story, I dreamed that Aenea had come to me there—in the Schrödinger death cell—had called my name in the dark, touched my cheek, and whispered to me, “We’re leaving here, Raul, my darling. Not soon, but as soon as you finish your tale. As soon as you remember it all and understand it all.” When I awoke, I had found that the stylus ’scriber had been activated and on its pages, in Aenea’s distinctive handwriting, was a long note from her including some excerpts from her father’s poetry.

For days—weeks—I was convinced that this had been a real visitation, a miracle of the sort the later apostles had insisted was visited on the original disciples after Jesus’s execution—and I worked on the narrative at a fever pitch, desperate to see it all, record it all, and understand it all. But the process took me more months, and in that time I came to realize that the visit from Aenea must have been something else—my first experience of hearing a whisper of her among the voices of the dead in the Void, almost certainly, and possibly, somehow, an actual message from her stored in the memory of the ’scriber and set to be triggered when I wrote those pages. It was not beyond possibility. One thing that had been certain was my darling friend’s ability to catch glimpses of the future—futures, she always said, emphasizing the plural. It might have been possible for her to store that beautiful note in a ’scriber and somehow see to it that the instrument was included in my Schrödinger cat box cell. Or… and this is the explanation I have come to accept… I wrote that note myself while totally immersed, although “possessed” might be a better word, in Aenea’s persona as I pursued its essence through the Void and my own memories. This theory is the least pleasing to me, but it conforms with Aenea’s only expressed view of the afterlife, based as it was more or less on the Judaic tradition of believing that people live on after death only in the hearts and memories of those they loved and those they served and those they saved.

At any rate, I wrote for more months, began to see the true immensity—and futility—of Aenea’s brave quest and hopeless sacrifice, and then I finished the frenzied scribbling, found the courage to describe Aenea’s terrible death and my own helplessness as she died, wept as I printed out the last few pages of microvellum, read them, recycled them, ordered the ’scriber to keep the complete narrative in its memory, and shut the stylus off for what I thought was the final time.

Aenea did not appear. She did not lead me out of captivity. She was dead. I felt her absence from the universe as clearly as I had felt any resonance from the Void Which Binds since my communion.

So I lay in my Schrödinger cat box, tried to sleep, forgot to eat, and waited for death.

Some of my explorations among the voices of the dead had led to revelations that had no direct relevance to my narrative. Some were personal and private—waking dreams of my long-dead father hunting with his brothers, for instance, and an insight into the generosity of that quiet man I had never known, or chronicles of human cruelty that, like the memories of Jacob Schulmann from the forgotten twentieth century, acted only as subtext for my deeper understanding of today’s barbarisms.

But other voices…

So I had finished the narrative of my life with Aenea and was waiting to die, spending longer and longer sleep periods, hoping that the decisive quantum event would occur while I was asleep, aware of the text in the memory of my ’scriber and wondering vaguely if anyone would ever figure out a way through the fixed-to-explode-if-tampered-with shell of my Schrödinger box and find my narrative someday, perhaps centuries hence, when I fell asleep again and had this dream. I knew at once that this was not a regular dream—that wave-front dance of possibilities—but was a call from one of the voices of the dead.

In my dream, the Hegemony Consul was playing the Steinway on the balcony of his ebony spaceship—that spaceship that I knew so well—while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the nearby swamps. He was playing Schubert. I did not recognize the world beyond the balcony, but it was a place of huge, primitive plants, towering storm clouds, and frightening animal roars.

The Consul was a smaller man than I had always imagined. When he was finished with the piece, he sat quietly for a moment in the twilight until the ship spoke in a voice I did not recognize—a smarter, more human voice.

“Very nice,” said the ship. “Very nice indeed.”

“Thank you, John,” said the Consul, rising from the bench and bringing the balcony into the ship with him.

It was beginning to rain.

“Do you still insist on going hunting in the morning?” asked the disembodied voice that was not the ship’s as I knew it.

“Yes,” said the Consul. “It is something I do here upon occasion.”

“Do you like the taste of dinosaur meat?” asked the ship’s AI.

“Not at all,” said the Consul. “Almost inedible. It is the hunt I enjoy.”

“You mean the risk,” said the ship.

“That too.” The Consul chuckled. “Although I do take care.”

“But what if you don’t come back from your hunt tomorrow?” asked the ship. His voice was of a young man with an Old Earth British accent.

The Consul shrugged. “We’ve spent—what?—more than six years exploring the old Hegemony worlds. We know the pattern… chaos, civil war, starvation, fragmentation. We’ve seen the fruit of the Fall of the Farcaster system.”

“Do you think that Gladstone was wrong in ordering the attack?” asked the ship softly.

The Consul had poured himself a brandy at the sideboard and now carried it to the chess table set near the bookcase. He took a seat and looked at the game pieces already engaged in battle on the board in front of him. “Not at all,” he said. “She did the right thing. But the result is sad. It will be decades, perhaps centuries before the Web begins to weave itself together in a new form.”

He had been warming the brandy and sloshing it gently as he spoke, now he inhaled it and sipped.

Looking up, the Consul said, “Would you like to join me for the completion of our game, John?”

The holo of a young man appeared in the seat opposite. He was a striking young man with clear hazel-colored eyes, low brow, hollow cheeks, a compact nose and stubborn jaw, and a wide mouth that suggested both a calm masculinity and a hint of pugnaciousness. The young man was dressed in a loose blouse and high-cut breeches. His hair was auburn-colored, thick, and very curly. The Consul knew that his guest had once been described as having “a brisk, winning face,” and he put that down to the easy mobility of expression that came with the young man’s great intelligence and vitality. “Your move,” said John. The Consul studied his options for several moments and then moved a bishop.

John responded at once, pointing to a pawn that the Consul obediently moved one rank forward for him. The young man looked up with sincere curiosity in his eyes. “What if you don’t come back from the hunt tomorrow?” he said softly.

Startled out of his reverie, the Consul smiled.

“Then the ship is yours, which it obviously is anyway.” He moved his bishop back. “What will you do, John, if this should be the end of our travels together?”

John gestured to have his rook moved forward at the same lightning speed with which he replied. “Take it back to Hyperion,” he said. “Program it to return to Brawne if all is well. Or possibly to Martin Silenus, if the old man is still alive and working on his Cantos.”

“Program it?” said the Consul, frowning at the board. “You mean you’d leave the ship’s AI?”

He moved his bishop diagonally another square.

“Yes,” said John, pointing to have his pawn advanced again. “I will do that in the next few days, at any rate.”

His frown deepening, the Consul looked at the board, then at the hologram across from him, and then at the board again. “Where will you go?” he said and moved his queen to protect his king.

“Back into the Core,” said John, moving the rook two spaces.

“To confront your maker again?” asked the Consul, attacking again with his bishop.

John shook his head. His bearing was very upright and he had the habit of clearing his forehead of curls with an elegant, backward toss of his head.

“No,” he said softly, “to start raising hell with the Core entities. To accelerate their endless civil wars and internecine rivalries. To be what my template had been to the poetic community—an irritant.” He pointed to where he wanted his remaining knight moved.

The Consul considered that move, found it not a threat, and frowned at his own bishop. “For what reason?” he said at last.

John smiled again and pointed to the square where his rook should next appear. “My daughter will need the help in a few years,” he said. He chuckled. “Well, in two hundred and seventy-some years, actually. Checkmate.”

“What?” said the Consul, startled, and studied the board. “It can’t be…”

John waited.

“Damn,” said the Hegemony Consul at last, tipping over his king. “Goddamn and spit and hell.”

“Yes,” said John, extending his hand. “Thank you again for a pleasant game. And I do hope that tomorrow’s hunt turns out more agreeably for you.”

“Damn,” said the Consul and, without thinking, attempted to shake the hologram’s thin-fingered hand. For the hundredth time, his solid fingers went through the other’s insubstantial palm. “Damn,” he said again.

That night in the Schrödinger cell, I awoke with two words echoing in my mind. “The child!” The knowledge that Aenea had been married before our relationship had become a full-fledged love affair, the knowledge that she had given birth to a child, had burned in my soul and gut like a painful ember, but except for my almost obsessive curiosity about who and why—curiosity unsatisfied by my questioning of A. Bettik, Rachel, and the others who had seen her leave during her odyssey with them but who had no idea themselves where she had gone or with whom—I had not considered the reality of that child alive somewhere in the same universe I inhabited. Her child. The thought made me want to weep for several reasons.

“The child is nowhere I can find it now,” Aenea had said.

Where might that child be now? How old? I sat on my bunk in the Schrödinger cat box and pondered this. Aenea had just turned twenty-three standard years old when she died… correction: when she had been brutally murdered by the Core and its Pax puppets. She had disappeared from sight for the one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours when she had just turned twenty years old.

That would make the infant about three standard years old… plus the time I had spent here in the Schrödinger execution egg… eight months? Ten? I simply did not know, but if the child were still alive, he or she… my God, I had never asked Aenea whether her baby had been a boy or girl and she had not mentioned it the one time she had discussed the matter with me. I had been so involved with my own hurt and childish sense of injustice that I had not thought to ask her. What an idiot I had been. The child—Aenea’s son or Aenea’s daughter—would now be about four standard years old. Walking… certainly. Talking… yes. My God, I realized, her child would be a rational human being at this point, talking, asking questions… a lot of questions if my few experiences with young children were any indication… learning to hike and fish and to love nature…

I had never asked Aenea her child’s name. My eyes burned and my throat closed with the painful recognition of this fact. Again, she had shown no inclination to talk about that period in her life and I had not asked, telling myself in the weeks we had had together afterward that I did not want to upset her with questions or probings that would make her feel guilty and make me feel murderous. But Aenea had shown no guilt when she had briefly told me about her marriage and child. To be honest, that is part of the reason I’d felt so furious and helpless at the knowledge. But somehow, incredibly, it had not stopped us from being lovers… how had it been phrased on the note I had found on my stylus screen months ago, the note I was sure was from Aenea? “Lovers of whom the poets would sing.”

That was it. The knowledge of her brief marriage and the child had not stopped us from feeling toward one another like lovers who had never experienced such emotion with another person.

And perhaps she had not, I realized. I had always assumed that her marriage was one of sudden passion, almost impulse, but now I looked at it in another way. Who was the father? Aenea’s note had said that she loved me backward and forward in time, which is precisely the way I had discovered I felt about her—it was as if I had always loved her, had waited my entire life to discover the reality of that love. What if Aenea’s marriage had not been one of love or passion or impulse but… convenience? No, not the right word.

Necessity? It had been prophesied by the Templars, the Ousters, the Shrike Cult Church of the Final Atonement and others that Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, would bear a child—the One Who Teaches—Aenea, as it turned out. According to the old poet’s Cantos, on the day that the second John Keats cybrid had died a physical death and Brawne Lamia had fought her way to the Shrike Temple for refuge, the Shrike cultists had chanted—“Blessed be the Mother of Our Salvation—Blessed be the Instrument of Our Atonement”—the salvation being Aenea herself.

What if Aenea had been destined to have a child to continue this line of prophets… of messiahs? I had not heard any of these prophecies of another in Aenea’s line, but there was one thing I had discovered beyond argument during my months writing of Aenea’s life—Raul Endymion was slow and thick-witted, usually the last to understand anything. Perhaps there had been as many prophecies of another One Who Teaches as there had been preceding Aenea herself. Or perhaps this child would have completely different powers and insights that the universe and humanity had been awaiting. Obviously I would not be the father of such a second messiah. The union of the second John Keats cybrid and Brawne Lamia had been, by Aenea’s own accounts, the great reconciliation between the best elements of the TechnoCore and humanity itself. It had taken the abilities and perceptions of both AI’s and human beings to create the hybrid ability to see directly into the Void Which Binds… for humanity finally to learn the language of the dead and of the living. Empathy was another name for that ability, and Aenea had been the Child of Empathy, if any title suited her.

Who could the father of her child be? The answer struck me like a thunderbolt. For a second there in the Schrödinger cat box, I was so shaken by the logic of it that I was sure that the particle detector clicking away periodically in the frozen-energy wall of my prison had detected the emitted particle at exactly the right time and the cyanide had been released. What irony to figure things out and to die in the same moment.

But it was not poison in the air, only the growing strength of my certainty on this matter and the even stronger impulse to some action.

There was one other player in the cosmic chess game Aenea and the others had been playing for three hundred standard years now: that near-mythical Observer from the alien sentient races whom Aenea had mentioned briefly in several different contexts. The Lions and Tigers and Bears, the beings so powerful that they could kidnap Old Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud rather than watch it be destroyed, had—according to Aenea—sent among us one or more Observers over the past few centuries, entities who had, according to my interpretation of what Aenea had said, taken on human form and walked among us for all this time. This would have been relatively easy during the Pax era with the virtual immortality of the cruciform so widespread. And there were certainly others who, like the ancient poet Martin Silenus, had stayed alive through a combination of WorldWeb-era medicine, Poulsen treatments, and sheer determination.

Martin Silenus was old, that was certain, perhaps the oldest human being in the galaxy—but he had not been the Observer, that was equally certain. The author of the Cantos was too opinionated, too active, too visible to the public at large, too obscene, and generally just too damned cantankerous to be a cool observer representing alien races so powerful that they could destroy us in an eye blink. Or so I hoped.

But somewhere—probably somewhere I had never visited and could not imagine—that Observer had been waiting and watching in human form. It made sense that Aenea might have been compelled—by both prophecy and the necessity of unhindered human evolution she had taught about and believed in—to ’cast away from her odyssey to that distant world where the Observer waited, meet him, mate with him, and bring that child into the universe.

Thus would be reconciled the Core, humanity, and the distant Others. The idea was unsettling, definitely disturbing to me, but also exciting in a way that nothing had been since Aenea’s death. I knew Aenea. Her child would be a human child—filled with life and laughter and a love of everything from nature to old holodramas. I had never understood how Aenea could have left her child behind, but now I realized that she would have had no choice. She knew the terrible fate that awaited her in the basement cell of Castel Sant’Angelo. She knew that she would die by fire and torture while surrounded by inhuman enemies and the Nemes monsters. She had known this since before she was born. The fact of this made my knees weak. How could my dear friend have laughed with me so often, gone optimistically into new days so happily, celebrated life so thoroughly, when she knew that every day passing was another day closer to such a terrible death? I shook my head at the strength of will this implied.

I did not have it—this I knew. Aenea had.

But she could not have kept the child with her, knowing when and how this terrible ending would take place. Presumably then, the father was raising the child. The Other in human form. The Observer. I found this even more upsetting than my earlier revelations. I was struck then with the additional certainty that Aenea would have wanted me to have some role in her child’s life if she had thought it possible. Her own glimpses into possible futures presumably ended with her own death.

Perhaps she did not know that I would not be executed at the same time. But then, she had asked me to scatter her ashes on Old Earth… which assumed my survival. Perhaps she had thought it too much of a request to make—for me to find her child and to help in any way I could as the boy or girl came of age, to help protect it in a universe of sharp edges.

I realized that I was weeping—not softly, but with great, ragged sobs. It was the first time I had wept like this since Aenea’s death, and—oddly enough—it was not primarily out of grief for Aenea’s absence, but at the thought of this second chance to hold a child’s hand as I had once held Aenea’s when she was still twelve standard, of protecting this child of my beloved’s as I had tried to protect my beloved.

And failed. The indictment was my own.

Yes, I had failed to protect Aenea in the end, but she knew that I would fail, that she would fail in her quest to bring down the Pax. She had loved me and loved life while knowing that we would fail.

There was no reason I had to fail with this other child. Perhaps the Observer would welcome my help, my sharing of the human experience with this almost certainly more-than-human little boy or girl. I felt it safe to say that no one had known Aenea better than I had. This would be important for the child’s—for the new messiah’s—upbringing. I would bring this narrative now sitting useless in my ’scriber and share bits and pieces of it with the boy or girl as he or she grew older, giving it all to him or her someday. I picked up the slate and ’scriber and paced back and forth in my Schrödinger cell. There was this small matter of my unavoidable execution.

No one was coming to rescue me. The explosive shell of the egg had decided that, and if there were a way around that problem, someone would have been here by now.

It was the most staggering improbability and good luck that I had survived this long when every few hours there was another crap shoot with death as the detector sniffed for the particle emission. I had beaten the laws of quantum chance for this long, but the luck could not hold.

I stopped in my pacing.

There had been four steps in Aenea’s teaching of our race’s new relationship with the Void Which Binds. Even before coming to my cell I had experienced, if not mastered, learning the language of the dead and of the living. I had shown in my writing of the narrative that I could gain access to the Void for at least old memories of those still living, even if the shell somehow interfered with my ability to sense what was happening now with friends such as Father de Soya or Rachel or Lhomo or Martin Silenus.

Or was there interference? Perhaps I had subconsciously refused to try to contact the world of the living—at least for anything beyond memories of Aenea—since I knew that I now inhabited the world of the dead.

No longer. I wanted out of here.

There were two other steps that Aenea had mentioned in her teaching but never fully explained—hearing the music of the spheres and taking the first step.

I now understood both these concepts. Without seeing Aenea ’cast, and without that great rush of gestalt understanding that had come with the terrible sharing of her death, I would not have understood. But I did now.

I had thought of hearing the music of the spheres as a sort of paranormal-radio-telescope trick—actually hearing the pop and crack and whistle of the stars as radio telescopes had for eleven centuries or more. But that had not been what Aenea had meant at all, I realized. It was not the stars she was listening to and for, but the resonance of those people—human and otherwise—who dwelt among and around those stars. She had been using the Void as a sort of directional beacon before farcasting herself.

Much of her personal ’casting had not made sense to me. The core-controlled farcaster doors had been rough holes torn through the Void—and thus through space-time—held open by the portals that were like crude clamps holding open the raw edges of a wound in the old days of scalpel surgery. Aenea’s farcasting, I now understood, was an infinitely more graceful device.

I had wondered in the busy time when Aenea and I were freecasting down to planet surfaces and from star system to star system in the Yggdrasill how she had avoided having us blink into existence inside a hill or fifty meters above the surface, or the treeship inside a star. It seemed to me that blind freecasting, like unplanned Hawking-drive jumps, would be haphazard and disastrous. But we had always emerged exactly where we had to be when Aenea ’cast us. Now I saw why.

Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to… to take the first step. To travel via the Void to where those voices waited.

Aenea had once said that the Void tapped into the energy of quasars, of the exploding centers of galaxies, of black holes and black matter.

Enough, perhaps, to move a few organic life-forms through space-time and deposit them in the proper place. Love was the prime mover in the universe, Aenea had once said to me. She had joked about being the Newton who someday explained the basic physics of that largely untapped energy source.

She had not lived to do so.

But I saw now what she had meant and how it worked. Much of the music of the spheres was created by the elegant harmonies and chord changes of love.

Freecasting to where one’s loved one waits.

Learning a place after having traveled there with the one or ones you love. Loving to see new places.

Suddenly I understood why our first months together had been what had seemed at the time like useless farcaster wanderings from world to world: Mare Infinitus, Qom-Riyadh, Hebron, Sol Draconi Septem, the unnamed world where we had left the ship, all of the others, even Old Earth. There had been no working farcaster portals. Aenea had swept A. Bettik and me with her to these places—touching them, sniffing their air, feeling their sunlight on her skin, seeing them all with friends—with someone she loved—learning the music of the spheres so that it could be played later.

And my own solo odyssey, I thought: the kayak farcasting from Old Earth to Lusus and the cloud planet and all the other places. Aenea had been the energy behind that ’casting. Sending me to places so that I could taste them and find them again someday on my own.

I had thought—even as I wrote the narrative in the ’scriber that I held under my arm there in the Schrödinger death cell—that I had been little more than a fellow traveler in a series of picaresque adventures. But it had all held a purpose. I had been a lover traveling with my love—or to my love—through a musical score of worlds. A score that I had to learn by heart so that I could play it again someday.

I closed my eyes in the Schrödinger cat box and concentrated, then went beyond concentration to the empty mind state I had learned in meditation on T’ien Shan. Every world had its purpose. Every minute had its purpose.

In that unhurried emptiness, I opened myself to the Void Which Binds and the universe to which it resonated. I could not do this, I realized, without communion with Aenea’s blood, without the nanotech tailored organisms that now dwelt in my cells and would dwell in my children’s cells.

No, I thought at once, not my children. But in the cells of those in the human race who escape the cruciform. In their children’s cells. I could not do this without having learned from Aenea. I could not have heard the voices I heard then—greater choruses than I had ever heard before—without having honed my own grammar and syntax of the language of the dead and living during the months I worked on the narrative while waiting to die.

I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.

As I stood there, listening to the swelling chords of the music of the spheres, able now to pick out separate star-voices in the chorus—Martin Silenus’s, still alive but failing on my homeworld of Hyperion, Theo’s on beautiful Maui-Covenant, Rachel’s on Barnard’s World, Colonel Kassad’s on red Mars, Father de Soya’s on Pacem—and even the lovely chords of the dead, Dem Ria’s on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, dear Father Glaucus’s on cold Sol Draconi Septem, my mother’s voice, again on distant Hyperion—I also heard John Keats’s words, in his voice, and in Martin Silenus’s, and in Aenea’s:

But the opposite was true of me at that moment—there was more than enough depth to strike in. The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven’s Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness.

The energy of quasars and exploding stellar nuclei filled me then. I was borne up on waves of energy more lovely and more lyrical even than the Ouster angels’ wings seen sliding along corridors of sunlight. The shell of deadly energy that was my prison and execution cell seemed laughable now, Schrödinger’s original joke, a child’s jump rope laid around me on the ground as restraining walls.

I stepped out of the Schrödinger cat box and out of Armaghast System. For a moment, feeling the confines of the Schrödinger prison fall away and behind me forever, existing nowhere and everywhere in space but remaining physically intact in my body and stylus and ’scriber, I felt a surge of sheer exhilaration as powerful as the dizzying effect of solo-farcasting itself.

Free! I was free! The wave of joy was so intense that it made me want to weep, to shout into the surrounding light of no-space, to join my voice with the chorus of voices of the living and dead, to sing along with the crystal-clear symphonies of the spheres rising and plunging like a solid, acoustic surf all around me. Free at last!

And then I remembered that the one reason to be free, the one person who would make such freedom worthwhile, was gone. Aenea was dead. The sheer joy of escape faded suddenly and absolutely, replaced by a simple but profound satisfaction at my release from so many months of imprisonment. The universe might have had the color drained out of it for me, but at least now I was free to go anywhere I wanted within that monotone realm. But where was I going? Floating on light, freecasting into the universe with my stylus and ’scriber tucked under my arm, I still had not decided.

Hyperion? I had promised to return to Martin Silenus. I could hear his voice resonating strong in the Void, past and present, but it would not be part of the current chorus for long.

His life remaining could now be counted in days or less. But not to Hyperion. Not yet.

The Biosphere Startree? I was shocked to hear that it still existed in some form, although Lhomo’s voice was absent from the choral symphony there.

The place had been important to Aenea and me, and I had to return someday. But not now.

Old Earth? Amazingly, I heard the music of that sphere quite clearly, in Aenea’s former voice and in mine, in the song of the friends at Taliesin with whom we had tallied there. Distance meant nothing in the Void Which Binds. Time there seasons but does not destroy. But not to Old Earth. Not now.

I heard scores of possibilities, more scores of voices I wanted to hear in person, people to hug and weep with, but the music I reacted to most strongly now was from the world where Aenea had been tortured and killed. Pacem. Home of the Church and nest of our enemies—not, I saw now, the same thing. Pacem. There was, I knew, nothing of Aenea for me on Pacem but ashes of the past.

But she had asked me to take her ashes and spread them on Old Earth. Spread them where we had laughed and loved most well. Pacem. In the vortex of Void energy, already stepping beyond the Schrödinger cell but existing nowhere else except as pure quantum probability, I made my decision and freecast for Pacem.

33

The Vatican is broken as surely as if the fist of God had smashed down from the sky in an anger beyond human understanding. The endless bureaucratic city around it is crushed.

The spaceport is destroyed. The grand boulevards are slagged and melted and rimmed with ruin. The Egyptian obelisk that had stood at the center of St. Peter’s Square has been snapped off at the base and the scores of colonnades around the oval space are tumbled like petrified logs. The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica is shattered and has fallen through the central loggia and grand facade to lie in pieces on the broken steps. The Vatican wall is tumbled down in a hundred places, completely missing for long stretches. The buildings once protected within its medieval confines—the Apostolic Palace, the Secret Archives, the barracks of the Swiss Guard, St. Mother Teresa’s Hospice, the papal apartments, the Sistine Chapel—are all exposed and smashed, scorched and tumbled and scattered.

Castel Sant’Angelo on this side of the river has been slagged. The towering cylinder—twenty meters of towering stone rising from its huge square base—has been melted to a mound of cooled lava.

I see all this while walking along the boulevard of broken slabs on the east side of the river. Ahead of me, the bridge, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, has been cracked into three sections and dropped into the river. Into the riverbed, I should say, for it looks as if the New Tiber has been boiled away, leaving glass where the sandy river bottom and riverbanks had been.

Someone has rigged a rope suspension bridge across the debris-filled gap between the banks.

This is Pacem; I do not doubt it. The thin, cool atmosphere feels and tastes the same as when Father de Soya, Aenea, and I came through here on the day before my dear girl died, although it was raining and gray then and now the sky is rich with a sunset that manages to make even the broken, fallen-away dome of St. Peter’s look beautiful.

It is almost overwhelming to be walking free under an open sky after my uncounted months of tight incarceration. I clutch my ’scriber to me like a shield, like some talisman, like a Bible, and walk the once-proud boulevard with shaky legs. For months my mind has been sharing memories of many places and many people, but my own eyes and lungs and legs and skin have forgotten the feeling of real freedom. Even in my sadness, there is an exultation.

Freecasting had been superficially the same as when Aenea had freecast us both, but on a deeper level it was profoundly different. The flash of white light had been the same, the ease of sudden transition, the slight shock of different air pressure or gravity or light. But this time I had heard the light rather than seen it. I had been carried up by the music of the stars and their myriad worlds and chosen the one to which I wanted to step. There had been no effort on my part, no great expenditure of energy, other than the need to focus and to choose carefully. And the music had not faded completely away—I guessed that it never would—but even now played in the background like musicians practicing just beyond the hill for a summer evening’s concert.

I can see signs of survivors in the city-wide wreckage. In the gold distance, two oxcarts move along the horizon with human silhouettes walking behind. On this side of the river, I can see huts, simple brick homes among the tumbles of old stone, a church, another small church. From somewhere far behind me comes the smell of meat cooking on an open fire and the unmistakable sound of children laughing. I am just turning toward that smell and sound when a man steps out from behind a mass of debris that may have once been a guard post at the entrance to Castel Sant’Angelo. He is a small man, quick of hand, his face half-hidden behind a beard and his hair combed back to a queue, but his eyes are alert. He carries a solid slug rifle of the sort once used for ceremony by the Swiss Guard.

We stare at each other for a moment—the unarmed, weakened man carrying nothing but a ’scriber and the sun-bronzed hunter with his ready weapon—and then each recognizes the other. I have never met this man, nor he me, but I have seen him through others’ memories via the Void Which Binds, although he was uniformed, armored, and clean-shaven the first time I saw him—naked and in the act of being tortured the last time. I do not know how he recognizes me, but I see that recognition in his eyes an instant before he sets the weapon aside and steps forward to seize my hand and forearm in both his hands.

“Raul Endymion!” he cries. “The day has come! Praise be. Welcome.” The bearded apparition actually hugs me before stepping back to look at me again and grin.

“You’re Corporal Kee,” I say stupidly. I remember the eyes most of all, seen from Father de Soya’s point of view as he and Kee and Sergeant Gregorius and Lancer Rettiq chased Aenea and me across this arm of the galaxy for years.

“Formerly Corporal Kee,” says the grinning man. “Now just Bassin Kee, citizen of New Rome, member of the diocese of St. Anne’s, hunter for tomorrow’s meal.” He shakes his head as he stares at me. “Raul Endymion. My God. Some thought you would never escape that cursed Schrödinger cat-thing.”

“You know about the Schrödinger egg?”

“Of course,” says Kee. “It was part of the Shared Moment. Aenea knew where they were taking you. So we all knew. And we’ve sensed your presence there through the Void, of course.”

I felt suddenly dizzy and a bit sick to my stomach. The light, the air, the great distance to the horizon… That horizon became unstable, as if I were looking at it from aboard a small ship in a rough sea, so I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Kee was holding my arm and helping me sit on a large, white stone that looked as if it had been blasted from the cathedral far across the glass river.

“My God, Raul,” he says, “have you just freecast from there? You’ve been nowhere else?”

“Yes,” I say. “No.” I take two slow breaths and say, “What is the Shared Moment?” I had heard the formal capital letters in his voice.

The small man studies me with his bright, intelligent gaze. His voice is soft.

“Aenea’s Shared Moment,” he says. “It is what we all call it, although of course it was more than a single moment. All the moments of her torture and death.”

“You felt that too?” I say. I suddenly feel a fist closing around my heart, although whether the emotion is joy or terrible sadness remains to be discovered.

“Everyone felt it,” says Kee. “Everyone shared it. Everyone, that is, except her torturers.”

“Everyone else on Pacem?” I ask.

“On Pacem,” says Kee. “On Lusus and Renaissance Vector. On Mars and Qom-Riyadh and Renaissance Minor and Tau Ceti Center. On Fuji and Ixion and Deneb Drei and Sibitu’s Bitterness. On Barnard’s World and God’s Grove and Mare Infinitus. On Tsingtao Hsishuang Panna and Patawpha and Groombridge Dyson D.” Kee pauses and smiles at the sound of his own litany. “On almost every world, Raul. And in places in between. We know that the Startree felt the Shared Moment… all the startree biospheres did.”

I blink. “There are other startrees?”

Kee nods.

“How did all these worlds… share that moment?”

I ask, seeing the answer even as I pose the question.

“Yes,” murmurs the former Corporal Kee. “All of the places Aenea visited, often with you. All of the worlds where she left disciples who had partaken of communion and renounced the cruciform. Her Shared Moment… the hour of her death… was like a signal broadcast and rebroadcast through all of these worlds.”

I rub my face. It feels numb. “So only those who had already taken communion or studied with Aenea shared in that moment?” I say.

Kee is shaking his head. “No… they were the transponders, the relay stations. They pulled the Shared Moment from the Void Which Binds and rebroadcast it to everyone.”

“Everyone?” I repeat stupidly. “Even those tens and hundreds of billions in the Pax who wear the cross?”

“Who wore the cross,” amends Bassin Kee. “Many of those faithful have since decided not to carry a Core parasite in their bodies.”

I begin to understand then. Aenea’s last shared moments had been more than words and torture and pain and horror—I had sensed her thoughts, shared her understanding of the Core’s motives, of the true parasitism of the cruciform, of the cynical use of human death to tweak their neural networks, of Lourdusamy’s lust for power and Mustafa’s confusion and Albedo’s absolute inhumanity… If everyone had shared the same Shared Moment that I had screamed and fought my way through in the high-g tank on the outward-bound robot prison torchship, then it had been a bright and terrible moment for the human race. And every living human being must have heard her final I love you, Raul as the flames swept high. The sun is setting. Rays of gold light shine through the ruins on the west side of the river and throw a maze of shadows across the east bank. The molten mass of Castel Sant’Angelo runs down toward us like a mountain of melted glass.

She asked me to spread her ashes on Old Earth. And I can’t even do that for her. I fail her even in death.

I look up at Bassin Kee. “On Pacem?” I say. “She had no disciples on Pacem when… Oh.” She had sent Father de Soya away immediately before our doomed charge up the aisle in St. Peter’s Basilica, asking him to leave with the monks and blend into the city he knew so well, to avoid the Pax whatever else happened. When he had argued, Aenea’s words had been—“… This is all I ask, Father. And I ask it with love and respect.” And Father de Soya had gone out into the rain. And he had been the broadcast relay, carrying my darling girl’s last agony and insight to several billion people on Pacem. “Oh,” I say, still looking at Kee. “But the last time I saw you… through the Void… you were being kept captive in cryogenic fugue there in that…” I sweep my hand in disgust toward the melted heap of Castel Sant’Angelo.

Kee nods again. “I was in cryogenic fugue, Raul. I was stored like a sleeping slab of meat in a cold locker in a basement dungeon not far from where they murdered Aenea. But I felt the Shared Moment. Every human alive did—whether sleeping or drunk or dying or lost in madness.”

I can only stare at the man, my heart breaking again in understanding. Eventually I say, “How did you get out? Away from there?”

We are both looking at the ruins of the Holy Office headquarters now.

Kee sighs. “There was a revolution very soon after the Shared Moment. Many people—the majority here on Pacem—no longer wanted anything to do with the cruciforms and the betrayed Church which had implanted them. Some still were cynical enough to make that trade with the devil in exchange for physical resurrection, but millions… hundreds of millions… sought out communion and freedom from the Core cross just in the first week. The Pax loyalists attempted to stop them. There was fighting… revolution… civil war.”

“Again,” I say. “Just like the Fall of the Farcasters three centuries ago.”

“No,” says Kee. “Nothing that bad. Remember, once one has learned the language of the dead and the living, it’s painful to hurt someone else. The Pax loyalists did not have that restraint, but then, they were in the minority everywhere.”

I gesture toward the world of ruins. “You call this restraint? You call this not so bad?”

“The revolution against the Vatican and the Pax and the Holy Office did not do this,” says Kee grimly. “That was relatively bloodless. The loyalists fled in archangel starships. Their New Vatican is on a world called Madhya… a real shithole of a planet, guarded now by half the old fleet and several million loyalists.”

“Who then?” I say, still looking at the devastation everywhere around us.

“The Core did this,” says Kee. “The Nemes-things destroyed the city and then seized four archangel ships. Slagged us from space after the loyalists left. The Core was pissed off. Probably still is. We don’t care.”

I carefully set the ’scriber down on the white stone and look around. More men and women are coming out of the ruins, staying a respectful distance from us but watching with great interest. They are dressed in work clothes and hunting garb, but not in bearskins or rags. These are obviously people living in a rough place during a hard time, but not savages. A young blond boy waves at me shyly. I wave back.

“I never really answered your question,” says Kee. “The guards released me… released all of the prisoners… during the confusion in the week after the Shared Moment. A lot of prisoners around this arm of the galaxy found doors opening that week. After communion… well, it’s hard to imprison or torture someone else when you end up sharing half their pain through the Void Which Binds. And the Ousters have been busy since the Shared Moment reviving the billions of Jews and Muslims and others kidnapped by the Core… and ferrying them home from the Labyrinthine planets to their homeworlds.”

I think about this for a minute. Then I say, “Did Father de Soya survive?”

Kee grins even more broadly. “I guess you can say he survived. He’s our priest in the parish of St. Anne’s. Come on, I’ll take you to him. He knows you’re here by now. It’s only a five-minute walk.”

De Soya hugs me so fiercely that my ribs ache for an hour. The priest is wearing a plain black cassock and Roman collar. St. Anne’s is not the large parish church we had glimpsed in the Vatican, but a small brick and adobe chapel set in a cleared area on the east bank. It seems that the parish consists of about a hundred families who make their livelihood hunting and farming in what had been a large park on this side of the spaceport. I am introduced to most of these hundred families as we eat outside in the lighted space near the foyer of the church and it seems that they all know of me—they act as if they know me personally, and all seem sincerely grateful that I am alive and returned to the world of the living.

As night deepens, Kee, de Soya, and I adjourn to the priest’s private quarters: a spartan room adjoining the back of the church. Father de Soya brings out a bottle of wine and pours a full glass for each of us.

“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

Kee lifts his glass as if in toast and then hesitates. “To Aenea?” he suggests.

“To Aenea,” say Father de Soya and I.

We drain our glasses and the priest pours more.

“How long was I gone?” I ask. The wine makes my face flush, as it always does. Aenea used to kid me about it.

“It has been thirteen standard months since the Shared Moment,” says de Soya.

I shake my head. I must have spent the time writing the narrative and waiting to die in work sessions of thirty hours or more, interspersed with a few hours of sleep, then another thirty or forty hours straight. I had been doing what sleep scientists call free-running: losing all connection to circadian rhythm. “Do you have any contact with the other worlds?” I ask. I look at Kee and answer my own question. “You must. Bassin was telling me about the reaction to the Shared Moment on other worlds and the return of the kidnapped billions.”

“A few ships set in here,” says de Soya, “but with the archangel ships gone, travel takes time. The Templars and Ousters use their treeships to ferry the refugees home, but the rest of us hate to use the Hawking drive now that we realize how harmful it is to the Void medium. And as hard as everyone works to learn it, very few have learned how to hear the music of the spheres well enough to take that first step.”

“It is not so hard,” I say and chuckle to myself as I sip the smooth wine. “It’s goddamn hard,” I add. “Sorry, Father.”

De Soya nods his indulgence. “It is goddamn hard. I feel that I’ve come close a hundred times, but always lose the focus at the last moment.”

I look at the little priest. “You’ve stayed Catholic,” I say at last.

Father de Soya sips the wine out of an old glass. “I haven’t just stayed Catholic, Raul. I’ve rediscovered what it means to be Catholic. To be a Christian. To be a believer.”

“Even after Aenea’s Shared Moment?” I say. I am aware of Corporal Kee watching us from the end of the table. Shadows from the oil lights dance on the warm earth walls.

De Soya nods. “I already understood the corruption of the Church in its pact with the Core,” he says very softly. “Aenea’s shared insights only underlined what it meant for me to be human… and a child of Christ.” I am thinking about this a minute later when Father de Soya adds, “There is talk of making me a bishop, but I am quelling that. It is why I have stayed in this region of Pacem even though most of the viable communities are away from the old urban areas. One look at the ruins of our beautiful tradition across the river reminds me of the folly of staking too much on hierarchy.”

“So there’s no pope?” I say. “No holy father?”

De Soya shrugs and pours us all more wine.

After thirteen standard months of recycled food and no alcohol, the wine is going straight to my head. “Monsignor Lucas Oddi escaped both the revolution and the Core attack and has established the papacy in exile on Madhya,” the priest says with a sharp tone in his voice. “I don’t believe that anyone in the former Pax except his immediate defenders and followers in that system honor him as a real pope.” He sips his wine. “It is not the first time that the Mother Church has had an antipope.”

“What about Pope Urban XVI?” I say. “Did he die of his heart attack?”

“Yes,” says Kee, leaning forward and setting his strong forearms on the table.

“And was resurrected?” I say.

“Not exactly,” says Kee.

I look at the former corporal, waiting for an explanation, but none is forthcoming.

“I’ve sent word across the river,” says Father de Soya. “Bassin’s comment should be explained any minute.”

Indeed, a minute later the curtains at the entrance to de Soya’s comfortable little alcove are pulled back and a tall man in a black cassock enters. It is not Lenar Hoyt. It is a man I have never met but whom I feel that I know well—his elegant hands, long face, large, sad eyes, broad forehead, and thinning silver hair. I stand to shake his hand, to bow, to kiss his ring… something.

“Raul, my boy, my boy,” says Father Paul Duré. “What a pleasure to meet you. How thrilled we all are that you have returned.”

The older priest shakes my hand with a firm grip, hugs me for good measure, and then goes to de Soya’s cupboard as if he is familiar with it, finds a jar, pumps water into the sink, washes the jar, pours wine for himself, and sits in the chair opposite Kee at the end of the table. “We’re catching Raul up on what has happened in the past year and a month of his absence,” says Father de Soya.

“It feels like a century,” I say. My eyes are focused on something far beyond the table and this room.

“It was a century for me,” says the older Jesuit. His accent is quaint and somehow charming—a French-speaking Outback world, perhaps? “Almost three centuries, actually.”

“I saw what they did to you when you were resurrected,” I say with the brazenness of the wine in me. “Lourdusamy and Albedo murdered you so that Hoyt would be reborn again from your shared cruciforms.”

Father Duré has not actually tasted his wine, but he stares down into the glass as if waiting for it to transubstantiate. “Time and time again,” he says in a tone that seems more wistful than anything else. “It is a strange life, being born just to be murdered.”

“Aenea would agree,” I say, knowing that these men are friends and good men but not feeling especially friendly to the Church in general.

“Yes,” says Paul Duré and holds up his glass in a silent toast. He drinks.

Bassin Kee fills the vacuum of silence.

“Most of the faithful left on Pacem would have Father Duré as our true pope.”

I look at the elderly Jesuit. I have been through enough that it does not make me all tingly to be in the presence of a legend, someone who was central to the Cantos. As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth. In this case, it is the soft tufts of gray hair growing in the priest’s large ears.

“Teilhard the Second?” I say, remembering that the man had reportedly been a fine pope as Teilhard I 279 years ago—for a short period before he was murdered for the first time.

Duré accepts more wine from Father de Soya and shakes his head. I can see that the sadness behind those large eyes is the same as de Soya’s—earned and heartfelt, not assumed for character effect. “No more papacy for me,” he says. “I will spend the rest of my years attempting to learn from Aenea’s teachings—listening very hard for the voices of the dead and the living—while reacquainting myself with Our Lord’s lessons on humility. For years I played the archaeologist and intellectual. It is time to rediscover myself as a simple parish priest.”

“Amen,” says de Soya and hunts in his cup board for another bottle. The former Pax starship captain sounds a bit drunk.

“You don’t wear the cruciform any longer?” I say, addressing myself to all three men while looking at Duré.

All three of them look shocked. Duré says, “Only the fools and ultimately cynical still wear the parasite, Raul. Very few on Pacem. Very few on any of the worlds where Aenea’s Shared Moment was heard.” He touches his thin chest as if remembering. “It was not a choice for me, actually. I was reborn in one of the Vatican resurrection créches at the height of the fighting. I waited for Lourdusamy and Albedo to visit me as always… to murder me as always. Instead, this man…” He extends his long fingers toward Kee, who bows slightly and pours himself a bit more wine. “This man,” continues the former Pope Teilhard, “came crashing in with his rebels, all combat armor and ancient rifles. He brought me a chalice of wine. I knew what it was. I had shared in the Shared Moment.”

I stare at the old priest. Even dormant in the bubble-memory matrix of the extra cruciform, even while being resurrected? I thought.

As if reading my gaze, Father Duré nods.

“Even there,” he says. Looking directly at me, he says, “What will you do now, Raul Endymion?”

I hesitate only a second. “I came to Pacem to find Aenea’s ashes… she asked me… she once asked…”

“We know, my son,” says Father de Soya quietly.

“Anyway,” I go on when I can, “there’s no chance of that in what’s left of Castel Sant’Angelo, so I’ll continue with my other priority.”

“Which is?” says Father Duré with infinite gentleness. Suddenly, in this dim room with the rough table and the old wine and the male smell of clean sweat all around, I can see in the old Jesuit the powerful reality behind Uncle Martin’s mythic Cantos. I realize without doubt that this was indeed the man of faith who had crucified himself not once but repeated times on the lightning-filled tesla tree rather than submit to the false cross of the cruciform. This was a true defender of the faith. This was a man whom Aenea would have loved to have met and talked with and debated with. At that moment I feel her loss with such renewed pain that I have to look down into my wine to hide my eyes from Duré and the others. “Aenea once told me that she had given birth to a child,” I manage to say and then stop. I cannot remember if this fact had been in the gestalt of memories and thoughts that was transmitted in Aenea’s Shared Moment. If so, they know all about this. I glance at them, but both priests and the corporal are waiting politely. They had not known this. “I’m going to find that child,” I say. “Find it and help raise it, if I am allowed.”

The priests look at one another in something like wonderment. Kee is looking at me. “We did not know this,” says Federico de Soya. “I am amazed. I would have wagered everything I know about human nature to say that you were the only man in her life… the only love. I have never seen two young people so happy.”

“There was someone else,” I say, raising my glass almost violently to swig down the last of the wine only to find the glass empty. I set it carefully on the table. “There was someone else,” I say again, less miserably and emphatically this time. “But that’s not important. The baby… the child… is important. I want to find it if I can.”

“Do you have any idea where the child is?” says Kee.

I sigh and shake my head. “None. But I’ll ’cast to every world in the old Pax and Outback, to every world in the galaxy if I have to. Beyond the galaxy… “I stop. I am drunk and this is too important to talk about when drunk. “Anyway, that’s where I’ll be going in a few minutes.”

Father de Soya shakes his head. “You’re exhausted, Raul. Spend the night here. Bassin has an extra cot in his house next door. We will all sleep tonight and see you off in the morning.”

“Have to go now,” I say and start to rise, to show them my ability to think straight and act decisively. The room tilts as if the ground has subsided suddenly on the south side of Father de Soya’s little house. I grab the table for support, almost miss it, and hang on.

“Perhaps the morning would be best,” says Father Duré, standing and putting a strong hand on my shoulder.

“Yes,” I say, standing again and finding the ground tremors subsiding slightly. “T’morrow’s better.” I shake all of their hands again. Twice. I am desperately close to crying again, not from grief this time, although the grief is there, always in the background like the symphony of the spheres, but out of sheer relief at their company. I have been alone for so long now.

“Come, friend,” says former Corporal Bassin Kee of the Pax Marines and the Corps Helvetica, putting his hand on my other shoulder and walking with the former Pope Teilhard and me to his little room, where I collapse onto one of the two cots there. I am drifting away when I feel someone pulling off my boots. I think it is the former Pope.

I had forgotten that Pacem has only a nineteen-standard-hour day. The nights are too short. In the morning I am still suffused with the exhilaration of my freedom, but my head hurts, my back hurts, my stomach aches, my teeth hurt, my hair hurts, and I am sure that a pack of small, fuzzy creatures has taken up residence in the back of my mouth.

The village beyond the chapel is bustling with early morning activity. All of it too loud.

Cook fires simmer. Women and children go about chores while the men emerge from the simple homes with the same stubbled, red-eyed, roadkill expression that I know I am giving to the world.

The priests are in good form, however. I watch a dozen or so parishioners leave the chapel and realize that both de Soya and Duré have celebrated an early Mass while I was snoring. Bassin Kee comes by, greets me in much too loud a voice, and shows me a small structure that is the men’s washhouse. Plumbing consists of cold water pumped to an overhead reservoir that one can spill onto oneself in one quick, bone-marrow-freezing second of shower. The morning is Pacem-cool, much like mornings at the eight-thousand-meter altitude on T’ien Shan, and the shower wakes me up very quickly. Kee has brought clean new clothes for me—softened corduroy work trousers, a finely spun blue wool shirt, thick belt, and sturdy shoes that are infinitely more comfortable than the boots I have stubbornly worn for more than a standard year in the Schrödinger cat box. Shaven, clean, wearing different clothes, holding a steaming mug of coffee that Kee’s young bride has handed me, the ’scriber hanging from a strap over my shoulder, I feel like a new man. My first thought at this swell of well-being is, Aenea would love this fresh morning and the clouds obscure the sunlight for me again. Fathers Duré and de Soya join me on a large rock overlooking the absent river. The rubble of the Vatican looks like a ruin from ancient days. I see the windshields of moving groundcars glinting in the sharp morning light and catch a glimpse of the occasional EMV flying high above the wrecked city and realize again that this is not another Fall—even Pacem has not been dropped back into barbarism. Kee had explained that the morning coffee had been shipped in by transport from the largely untouched agricultural cities in the west. The Vatican and the ruins of the administrative cities here are more of a localized disaster area: rather like survivors choosing to rebuild in the wake of a regional earthquake or hurricane.

Kee joins us again with several warm breakfast rolls and the four of us eat in agreeable silence, occasionally brushing crumbs away and sipping our coffee as the sun rises higher behind us, catching the many columns of smoke from campfires and cookstoves. “I’m trying to understand this new way of looking at things,” I say at last. “You’re isolated here on Pacem compared to the days of the Pax empire, but you’re still aware of what’s going on elsewhere… on other worlds.”

Father de Soya nods. “Just as you can touch the Void to listen to the language of the living, so can we reach out to those we know and care for. For instance, this morning I touched the thoughts of Sergeant Gregorius on Mare Infinitus.”

I had also heard Gregorius’s distinctive thoughts while listening to the music of the spheres before freecasting, but I say, “Is he well?”

“He is well,” says de Soya. “The poachers and smugglers and deep-sea rebels on that world quickly isolated the few Pax loyalists, although the fighting between various Pax outposts did much damage to many of the civilian platforms.

Gregorius has become sort of a local mayor or governor for the mid-littoral region. Quite in opposition to his wishes, I might add. The sergeant was never interested in command… he would have been an officer many years ago if he had been.”

“Speaking of command,” I say, “who’s in charge of… all this?” I gesture at the ruins, the distant highway with its moving vehicles, the EMV transport coming in toward the east bank.

“Actually the entire Pacem System is under the temporary governorship of a former Pax Mercantilus CEO named Kenzo Isozaki,” says Father de Soya. “His headquarters is in the ruins of the old Torus Mercantilus, but he visits the planet frequently.”

I show my surprise at this. “Isozaki?” I say. “The last I saw of him in preparing my narrative, he was involved in the attack on the Startree Biosphere.”

“He was,” agrees de Soya. “But that attack was still under way when the Shared Moment occurred. There was much confusion. Elements of the Pax Fleet rallied to Lourdusamy and his ilk, while other elements—some led by Kenzo Isozaki who held the title of Commander of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem—fought to stop the carnage. The loyalists kept most of the archangel starships, since they could not be used without resurrection. Isozaki brought more than a hundred of the older Hawking-drive starships back to Pacem System and drove off the last of the Core attackers.”

“Is he a dictator?” I ask, not caring too much if he is. It is not my problem.

“Not at all,” says Kee. “Isozaki is running things temporarily with the help of elected governing councils from each of the Pacem cantons. He’s excellent at arranging logistics… which we need. In the meantime, the local areas are running things fairly well.

It’s the first time there has ever been a real democracy in this system. It’s sloppy, but it works. I think that Isozaki is helping to shape a sort of capitalist-with-a-conscience trading system for the days when we begin moving freely through old Pax space.”

“By freecasting?” I say.

All three of the men nod.

I shake my head again. It is hard to imagine the near future: billions… hundreds of billions… of people free to move from world to world without spacecraft or farcaster. Hundreds of billions able to contact each other by touching the Void with their hearts and minds. It will be like the height of the Hegemony WorldWeb days without the Core façade of farcaster portals and fatline transmitters. No, I realize at once, it will not be like the Hegemony days at all. It will be something completely different.

Something unprecedented in human experience.

Aenea has changed everything forever.

“Are you leaving today, Raul?” asks Father Duré in his soft French accent.

“As soon as I finish this fine coffee.” The sun is growing warm on my bare arms and neck.

“Where will you go?” asks Father de Soya.

I start to answer and then stop. I realize that I have no idea. Where do I look for Aenea’s child? What if the Observer has taken the boy or girl to some distant system that I cannot reach by ’casting? What if they have returned to Old Earth… can I actually freecast one hundred and sixty thousand light-years? Aenea did. But she may have had the help of the Lions and Tigers and Bears. Will I someday be able to hear those voices in the complex chorus of the Void? It all seems too large and vague and irrelevant to me.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” I hear myself saying in the voice of a lost boy. “I was going to Old Earth because of Aenea’s wish that I… her ashes… but…” Embarrassed at showing emotion again, I wave at the mountain of melted stone that had been Castel Sant’Angelo. “Maybe I’ll go back to Hyperion,” I say. “See Martin Silenus.” Before he dies, I add silently.

All of us stand on the boulder, pouring out the last drops of cold coffee from the mugs and brushing away the last crumbs from the delicious rolls.

I am suddenly struck by an obvious thought. “Do any of you want to come with me?” I say. “Or go anywhere else, for that matter. I think that I will remember how to freecast… and Aenea took us with her just by holding the person’s hand. No, she freecast the entire Yggdrasill with her just by willing it.”

“If you are going to Hyperion,” says Father de Soya, “I may wish to accompany you. But first I have something to show you. Excuse us, Father Duré. Bassin.”

I follow the short priest back to the village and into his little church. In the tiny sacristy, barely large enough for a wooden wardrobe cupboard for vestments and the small secondary altar in which to store the sacramental hosts and wine, de Soya pushes back a curtain on a small alcove and removes a short metal cylinder, smaller than a coffee thermos. He holds it out to me and I am reaching for it, my fingers just centimeters away, when suddenly I freeze in midmotion, unable to touch it.

“Yes,” says the priest. “Aenea’s ashes. What we could recover. Not much, I am afraid.”

My fingers trembling, still unable to touch the dull metal cylinder, I stammer, “How? When?”

“Before the final Core attack,” de Soya says softly. “Some of us who liberated the prisoners thought it prudent to remove our young friend’s cremated remains. There are actually those who wanted to find them and hold them as holy relics… the start of another cult. I felt strongly that Aenea would not have wished that. Was I correct, Raul?”

“Yes,” I say, my hand shaking visibly now. I am still unable to touch the cylinder and almost unable to speak. “Yes, absolutely, completely,” I say vehemently. “She would have hated that. She would have cursed at the thought. I can’t tell you how many times she and I discussed the tragedy of Buddha’s followers treating him like a god and his remains as relics. The Buddha also asked that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered so that…” I have to stop there.

“Yes,” says de Soya. He pulls a black canvas shoulder bag from his cupboard and sets the cylinder in it. He shoulders the bag.

“If you would like, I could bring this with us if we are to travel together.”

“Thank you,” is all I can say. I cannot reconcile the life and energy and skin and flashing eyes and clean, female scent of Aenea, her touch and laugh and voice and hair and ultimate physical presence with that small metal cylinder. I lower my hand before the priest can see how badly it is shaking.

“Are you ready to go?” I say at last.

De Soya nods. “Please allow me to tell a few of my village friends that I will be absent for a few days. Would it be possible for you to drop me off here later on your way… wherever you go?”

I blink at that. Of course it will be possible.

I had thought of my leave-taking today as final, an interstellar voyage. But Pacem… as everywhere else in the known universe… will never be farther than a step away for me as long as I live.

If I remember how to hear the music of the spheres and freecast again. If I can take someone with me. If it was not a onetime gift which I have lost without knowing it. Now my entire frame is shaking. I tell myself it is just too much coffee and say raggedly, “Yeah, no problem. I’ll go chat with Father Duré and Bassin until you’re ready.”

The old Jesuit and the young soldier are at the edge of a small cornfield, arguing about whether it is the optimum time to pick the ears. I can hear Paul Duré admitting that much of his opinion to pick immediately is swayed by his love of corn on the cob. They smile at me as I approach. “Father de Soya is accompanying you?” says Duré.

I nod.

“Please give my warmest regards to Martin Silenus,” says the Jesuit. “He and I shared some interesting experiences in a roundabout way, long ago and worlds away. I have heard of his so-called Cantos, but I confess that I am loath to read them.” Duré grins. “I understand that the Hegemony libel laws have lapsed.”

“I think he’s fought to stay alive this long to finish those Cantos,” I say softly. “Now he never will.”

Father Duré sighs. “No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”

“How so?” I ask, but before Duré can answer, Father de Soya and several of the villagers come up and there is a buzz of discussion and farewells and invitations for me to return. I look at the black shoulder bag and see that the priest has filled it with other things as well as the canister holding Aenea’s ashes.

“A fresh cassock,” says de Soya, seeing the direction of my glance. “Some clean underwear. Socks. A few peaches. My Bible and missal and the essentials for saying Mass. I am not sure when I will be back.” He gestures toward the others crowding in. “I forget exactly how this is done. Do we need more room?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “You and I should be in physical contact, maybe. At least for this first try.” I turn and shake hands with Kee and Duré. “Thank you,” I say.

Kee grins and steps back as if I’m going to rise on a rocket exhaust and he does not want to get burned. Father Duré clasps my shoulder a final time. “I think that we will see each other again, Raul Endymion,” he says. “Although perhaps not for two years or so.”

I do not understand. I’ve just promised to return Father de Soya within a few days. But I nod as if I do comprehend, shake the priest’s hand a second time, and move away from his touch.

“Shall we hold hands?” says de Soya.

I put my hand on the smaller priest’s shoulder much as Duré had gripped mine a second earlier and check to make sure that my ’scriber is secure on its strap. “This should do it,” I say.

“Homophobia?” says de Soya with a mischievous boy’s grin.

“A reluctance to look silly more often than I have to,” I say and close my eyes, quite certain that the music of the spheres will not be there this time, that I will have forgotten completely how to take that step through the Void. Well, I think, at least the coffee and conversation are good here if I have to stay forever.

The white light surrounds and subsumes us.

34

I had assumed that the priest and I would step out of the light into the abandoned city of Endymion, probably right next to the old poet’s tower, but when we blinked away the glare of the Void, it was quite dark and we were on a rolling plain with wind whistling through grass that came to my knees and to Father de Soya’s cassocked thighs. “Did we do it?” asked the Jesuit in excited tones. “Are we on Hyperion? It doesn’t look familiar, but then I saw only portions of the northern continent more than eleven standard years ago. Is this right? The gravity feels as I remember it. The air is… sweeter.”

I let my eyes adapt to the night for a moment. Then I said, “This is right.” I pointed skyward. “Those constellations? That’s the Swan. Over there are the Twin Archers. That one is actually called the Water Bearer, but Grandam always used to kid that it was named Raul’s Caravan after a little cart I used to pull around.” I took a breath and looked at the rolling plain again. “This was one of our favorite camping spots,” I said. “Our nomad caravan’s. When I was a child.” I went to one knee to study the ground in the starlight. “Still rubber tire marks. A few weeks old. The caravans still come this way, I guess.”

De Soya’s cassock made rustling sounds in the grass as he strode back and forth, as restless as a penned night hunter. “Are we close?” he asked. “Can we walk to Martin Silenus’s place from here?”

“About four hundred klicks,” I said.

“We’re on the eastern expanse of the moors, south of the Beak. Uncle Martin is in the foothills of the Pinion Plateau.” I winced inwardly when I realized that I had used Aenea’s pet name for the old poet.

“Whatever,” said the priest impatiently. “In which direction shall we set out?”

The Jesuit was actually ready to start walking, but I put my hand back on his shoulder to stop him. “I don’t think we’ll have to hike,” I said softly. Something was occluding the stars to the southeast and I picked up the high hum of turbofans above the wind whistle. A minute later we could see the blinking red and green navigation lights as the skimmer turned north across the grassland and obscured the Swan. “Is this good?” asked de Soya, his shoulder tensing slightly under my palm. I shrugged. “When I lived here it wouldn’t be,” I said. “Most of the skimmers belonged to the Pax. To Pax Security, to be exact.” We waited only another moment. The skimmer landed, the fans hummed down and died, and the left bubble at the front hinged open. The interior lights came on. I saw the blue skin, the blue eyes, the missing left hand, the blue right hand raised in greeting.

“It’s good,” I said. “How is he?” I asked A. Bettik as we flew southeast at three thousand meters. From the paling above the Pinions on the horizon, I guessed that it was about an hour before dawn.

“He’s dying,” said the android.

For a moment then we flew in silence. A. Bettik had seemed delighted to see me again, although he stood awkwardly when I hugged him. Androids were never comfortable with such shows of emotion between servants and the humans they had been biofactured to serve. I asked as many questions as I could in the short flight time we had. He had immediately expressed his regrets about Aenea’s death, which gave me the opportunity to ask the question uppermost in my mind.

“Did you feel the Shared Moment?”

“Not exactly, M. Endymion,” said the android, which did not serve to enlighten me at all. But then A. Bettik was catching us up with the last standard year and month on Hyperion since that Moment.

Martin Silenus had been, just as Aenea had known he would be, the beacon relay for the Shared Moment. Everyone on my homeworld had felt it.

The majority of the born-again and Pax military had deserted outright, seeking out communion to rid themselves of the cruciform parasites and shunning the Pax loyalists. Uncle Martin had supplied the wine and blood, both out of his personal stock.

He had been hoarding the wine for decades and drawing off blood since his communion with the 10-year-old Aenea 250 years earlier.

The few remaining Pax loyalists had fled in the three remaining starships and their last occupied city—Port Romance—had been liberated four months after the Moment. From his continued seclusion in the old university city of Endymion, Uncle Martin had begun broadcasting old holos of Aenea—Aenea as a youngster I had never met—explaining how to use their new access to the Void Which Binds and pleading for nonviolence.

The millions of indigenies and ex-Pax faithful, who were just discovering the voices of their dead and the language of the living, did not disobey her wishes.

A. Bettik also informed me that there was a single, gigantic Templar treeship in orbit now—the Sequoia Sempervirens—and that it was captained by the True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen and was carrying several of our old friends, including Rachel, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, the Dalai Lama, and the Ousters Navson Hamnim and Sian Quintana Ka’an. George Tsarong and Jigme Norbu were also aboard. Rosteen had been radioing the old poet for permission to land for two days, said A. Bettik, but Silenus had refused—saying that he did not want to see them or anyone else until I arrived.

“Me?” I said. “Martin Silenus knew I was coming?”

“Of course,” said the android and left it at that.

“How did Rachel and the Dorje Phamo and the others get to the treeship?” I said. “Did the Sequoia Sempervirens stop by Barnard’s World and Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and the other systems to pick them up?”

“It is my understanding, M. Endymion, that the Ousters traveled with the treeship from what remains of the Biosphere Startree which we were fortunate enough to visit. The others, as I am given to understand from M. Rosteen’s increasingly frustrated transmissions to M. Silenus, freecast to the treeship much as you have ’cast here to us.”

I sat straight up in my seat. This was shocking news. For some reason, I had assumed that I was the only person clever enough, blessed enough, or whatever enough to have learned the freecasting trick. Now I learn that Rachel and Theo and the old abbot had done so, the young Dalai Lama, and… well, a Dalai Lama, maybe, and Rachel and Theo had been Aenea’s earliest disciples… but George and Jigme? I admit to feeling a bit deflated, yet also excited by the news. Thousands of others—perhaps those, at first, whom Aenea had known and touched and taught directly—must be on the verge of their first steps. And then… the mind again reeled at the thought of all those billions traveling freely wherever they wished. We landed at the abandoned mountain city just as the sky was paling in earnest to the east of the peaks. I jumped out of the skimmer, holding the ’scriber against my side as I ran up the tower steps and leaving the android and the priest behind in my eagerness to see Martin Silenus. The old man had to be happy to see me and grateful that I had done so much to help meet all his impossible requests—Aenea rescued from the original Pax ambush in the Valley of the Time Tombs, now the Pax destroyed, the corrupt Church toppled, the Shrike evidently stopped from hurting Aenea or attacking humanity—just as the old poet had requested that last drunken evening we had spent together here more than a standard decade earlier. He would have to be happy and grateful.

“It took you goddamn fucking long enough to get your lazy ass here,” said the mummy in the web of life-support tubes and filaments. “I thought I’d have to go out and drag you back from wherever you were lazing around like some fucking twentieth-century welfare queen.”

The emaciated thing in the hoverbed at the locus of all the machines, monitors, respirators, and android nurses did not look much like the Poulsen-rejuvenated old man I had said good-bye to less than a decade of mine and only two waking years of his ago. This was a corpse that had neglected to be buried. Even his voice was an electronic restructuring of his subvocalized gasps and rattles.

“Are you finished fucking gawking, or do you want to buy another ticket for the freak show?” asked the voice synthesizer above the mummy’s head.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, feeling like a rude child caught staring.

“Sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog,” said the old poet. “Are you going to report to me or just stand there like the indigenie hick you are?”

“Report?” I said, opening my hands and setting the ’scriber on a table tray. “I think you know the essential things.”

“Essential things?” roared the synthesizer, interpreting the torrent of chokes and rattles. “What the fuck do you know about essential things, boy?” The last of the android nurses had scurried out of sight. I felt a flush of anger. Perhaps age had rotted the old bastard’s mind as well as his manners, if he ever had any manners. After a minute of silence broken only by the rasp of the mechanical bellows below the bed, bellows that moved air in and out of the dying man’s useless lungs, I said, “Report. All right. Most of the things you asked are done, M. Silenus. Aenea ended the rule of the Pax and the Church. The Shrike seems to have disappeared. The human universe has changed forever.”

“The human universe has changed forever,” mimicked the old poet in his synthesizer’s attempt at a sarcastic falsetto. “Did I fucking ask you… or the girl for that matter… to change the fucking universe for fucking ever?”

I thought back to our conversations here a standard decade earlier. “No,” I said at last.

“There you go,” snarled the old man. “Your brain cells are beginning to stir again. Jesus H. Christ, kid, I think that Schrödinger litter box made you stupider than you were.”

I stood and waited. Perhaps if I waited long enough he would just die quietly.

“What did I ask you to do before you left, boy wonder?” he demanded in the tone of a furious schoolmaster.

I tried to remember details other than his demand that Aenea and I destroy the Pax’s iron rule and topple a Church that controlled hundreds of worlds. The Shrike… well, that wasn’t what he meant. By touching the Void Which Binds rather than my own fallible memory, I finally retrieved his last words before I had flown off on the hawking mat to meet the girl.

“Get going,” the old poet had said. “Give my love to Aenea. Tell her that Uncle Martin is waiting to see Old Earth before he dies. Tell her that the old fart is eager to hear her expound the meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds.” The essence of things.

“Oh,” I said aloud. “I’m sorry that Aenea is not here to talk to you.”

“So am I, boy,” whispered the old man in his own voice. “So am I. And don’t bring up that thermos of ashes the priest is carrying. That isn’t what I meant when I said I wanted to see my niece again before I died.”

I could only nod, feeling the pain in my throat and chest.

“What about the rest?” he demanded. “You goin’ to carry out my final request, or just let me die while you stand there with your big disciple’s thumb up your stupid ass?”

“Final request?” I repeated. My IQ seemed to drop fifty points when I was in the presence of Martin Silenus.

The voice synthesizer sighed. “Give me your stylus ’scriber there if you want me to spell it out in big block letters for you, boy. I want to see Old Earth before I croak. I want to go back there. I want to go home.”

In the end, it was decided that we should not move him from his tower. The android medics conferred with the Ouster medics who finally were permitted to land who conferred with the autosurgeon aboard the Consul’s ship… which was parked just beyond the tower, exactly where A. Bettik had landed it some two months earlier after paying his time-debt for translation from Pacem System—which conferred electronically with the medical monitors surrounding the poet, as it had been constantly, and the verdict remained the same.

It would probably kill him to take him aboard either the Consul’s ship or the treeship by removing him from his tower and submitting him to even the most subtle changes of gravity or pressure.

So we brought the tower and a large chunk of Endymion with us.

Ket Rosteen and the Ousters handled the details, bringing down half a dozen ergs from their lair on the giant treeship. I estimated later that about ten hectares actually rose into the air during that lovely Hyperion sunrise, including the tower, the Consul’s parked spaceship, the pulsing Möbius cubes that had transported the ergs, the parked skimmer, the kitchen and laundry annexes next to the tower, part of the old chemistry building on the Endymion campus, several stone dwellings, precisely half of the bridge over the Pinion River, and a few million metric tons of rock and subsoil. The liftoff was undetectable—the containment fields and lift fields were handled so perfectly by the ergs and their Ouster and Templar handlers that there was no hint of movement whatsoever, except for the morning sky becoming an unblinking starfield in the circular opening of Uncle Martin’s tower above our heads, and the holos in the sickroom that showed our progress. Standing in that room, the stars burning and rotating overhead, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, a few other android nurses, and I watched those direct-feed holos as I held the old man’s hand.

Endymion, our world’s oldest city and the source of my indigenie family’s name, slid silently up through sunrise and atmosphere to be embraced by the ten kilometers of perfect treeship waiting for us in high orbit. The Sequoia Sempervirens had parted its branches to make a perfect berth for us, so we could walk from Hyperion soil to the great bridges and branches and walkways of the ship with no sense of transition. Then the treeship turned out toward the stars.

“You will have to do the next part, Raul,” said the Dorje Phamo. “M. Silenus will not survive a Hawking-drive shift or the fugue or the time-debt necessary.”

“This is a damned big treeship,” I said. “Lots of people and machines aboard. You’ll help, I hope?”

“Of course,” said the tall woman with the wild, gray hair.

“Yes,” said the Dalai Lama and George and Jigme.

“We’ll help,” said Rachel as she stood next to Theo. Both women looked older.

“We will also try,” said Father de Soya, speaking for Ket Rosteen and the others gathered near.

High on the bridge of the ship, while A. Bettik tended to his former master some hundred meters below, the Dorje Phamo, Rachel, Theo, the Dalai Lama, George, Jigme, Father de Soya, the Templar captain, and the others held hands. I completed the rough circle.

We closed our eyes and listened to the stars.

I had expected the sky-river of stars that was the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to hang above the treeship as we emerged from light, but it was obvious that we were still in the Milky Way, still in our arm of the Milky Way, not that many light-years from Hyperion System, if the familiar constellations were to be believed. We had gone somewhere. But the world that burned above the branches was not the sea blue and cloud white of Old Earth, or even an Earth-like planet, but was a red and oceanless desert world with scattered pocks of volcanic or impact-crater acne and a gleaming white polar cap.

“Mars,” said A. Bettik. “We have returned to Old Earth System near the star named Sol.”

All of us heard the Void-voice resonance of Fedmahn Kassad on that world. We freecast down, found him, explained the voyage—he did not need the explanation because he had heard us coming through his own listening—and brought him back to the Sequoia Sempervirens with us. Martin Silenus sent up word that he wanted to speak to his old pilgrimage partner, and I walked the stairways and bridges to the tower with the soldier.

“Old Earth System is secure, just as the One Who Teaches commanded me,” said Kassad as we stepped onto the Hyperion soil where the fragment of city nestled in the treeship’s branches. “No Pax ships have tested our defenses for ten months. No one in-system, not even our own warships, will be allowed to approach closer than twenty million kilometers to Old Earth.”

“To Old Earth?” I repeated. I stopped in my tracks. Kassad stopped and turned his thin, dark visage toward me.

“You don’t know?” he said. The soldier pointed skyward, straight up toward where the treeship was accelerating under smooth, erg-managed full thrust.

It looked like a double star, as all planets with one large moon look. But I could see the pale glow of Luna, smaller, colder. And the warm blue and white pulse of life that was Old Earth.

A. Bettik joined us at the entrance to the tower. “When was it… when did they… how… when did it return?” I said, still looking up at Old Earth as it grew into a true sphere.

“At the time of the Shared Moment,” said Kassad. He brushed red dust from his black uniform, preparing himself to see the old poet.

“Does everyone know?” I said. Poor dumb Raul Endymion. Always the last one to get the word.

“Now they do,” said Colonel Fedmahn Kassad.

The three of us went up to see the dying man.

Martin Silenus was in good humor upon meeting his old friend after almost 280 years of separation.

“So your black killer’s soul is going to become the seed crystal when they build the Shrike a millennium hence, heh?” cackled the old man through his laboring speech synthesizer. “Well, thanks a shitload, Kassad.”

The soldier frowned down at the grinning mummy. “Why aren’t you dead, Martin?” the Colonel said at last.

“I am, I am,” said Silenus, coughing. “I quit breathing ages and eons ago. They just haven’t been smart enough to push me over and bury me yet.” The synthesizer did not try to articulate the chokes and rattles that followed.

“Did you ever finish your worthless prose poem?” asked the soldier as the old man continued to cough, sending the web of tubes and wires shaking. “No,” I said, speaking for the coughing form in the bed. “He couldn’t.”

“Yes,” said Martin Silenus clearly through his throat mike. “I did.”

I just stood there.

“Actually,” cackled the poet, “he finished it for me.” The bony arm with its wrapping of parchment flesh rose slightly from the bed. A thumb distorted by arthritis jerked in my direction.

Colonel Kassad gave me a glance. I shook my head.

“Don’t be so fucking dense, boy,” said Martin Silenus with what translated as an affectionate tone over the speaker. “See your ’scriber anywhere?”

I whirled and looked at the bedside tray where I had left it earlier. It was gone.

“All printed out. About a billion backup memories cut. Sent it out on the datasphere before we ’cast here,” rasped Silenus.

“There is no datasphere,” I said.

Martin Silenus laughed himself into a coughing fit. Eventually the synthesizer translated some of those coughs as, “You aren’t just dumb, boy. You’re helpless. What do you think the Void is? It’s the goddamn universe’s goddamn datasphere, boy. I been listenin’ to it for centuries before the kid gave me communion to do it with nanotech bugs in me. That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.”

“You had no right to transmit my narrative,” I said. “It’s mine. I wrote it. It’s not part of your Cantos.” If I had known for sure which tube passing to him was his oxygen hose, I would have stepped on it till the rattling stopped.

“Bullshit, boy,” said Martin Silenus. “Why do you think I sent you on this eleven-year vacation?”

“To rescue Aenea,” I said.

The poet cackled and coughed. “She didn’t need rescuing, Raul. Hell, the way I saw it while it was happening, she pulled your worthless ass out of the fire more often than not. Even when the Shrike was doing the saving, it was only because that girl-child had tamed it for a bit.” The mummy’s white eyes with their video-pickup glasses turned toward Colonel Kassad. “Tamed you, I mean, you once and future killing machine.”

I stepped away from the bed and touched one of the biomonitors to steady myself. Overhead, in the wide circle that was the open top of the tower, Old Earth grew large and round. Martin Silenus’s voice called me back, almost taunting me.

“But you haven’t finished it yet, boy. The Cantos aren’t done.”

I stared at him across the few cold meters of distance. “What do you mean, old man?”

“You’ve got to take me down there so we can finish it, Raul. Together.”

We could not freecast down to Old Earth because there was no one there for me to use as a beacon for the ’casting, so we decided to use the ergs to land the entire slab of Endymion city. This might be fatal to the old poet, but the old poet had shouted at us to for God’s sake shut the fuck up and get on with it, so we were. The Sequoia Sempervirens had been in low orbit around Old Earth—or just plain “Earth” as Martin Silenus demanded we call it—for several hours.

The treeship’s optics, radar, and other sensors had shown a world empty of human life but healthy with animals, birds, fish, plants, and an atmosphere free of pollution.

I had planned to land at Taliesin West, but telescopes showed the buildings gone. Only high desert remained, probably just as it was in the final days before Earth was supposed to have fallen into the Big Mistake of ’08 black hole.

The Rome to which the second John Keats cybrid had returned was gone. All of the cities and structures which I thought of as the Lions’ and Tigers’ and Bears’ experimental reconstructions apparently were gone. The Earth had been scrubbed clean of cities and highways and signs of humankind. It throbbed with life and health as if awaiting our return. I was near the base of the Consul’s ship on Hyperion soil in the city-within-the-treeship, surrounded by Aenea’s old friends and speaking aloud about the trip down, wondering who wanted to go and who should accompany us, thinking all the time only of the small metal canister in Father de Soya’s shoulder bag, when A. Bettik stepped forward and cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, M. Endymion, I do not mean to interrupt.” My old android friend seemed apologetic to the point of blushing under his blue skin, as he always did when he had to contradict one of us. “But M. Aenea left specific instructions with me should you return to Old Earth, as you obviously have.”

We all waited. I had not heard her give the android instructions on the Yggdrasill. But then, things had been very loud and confused there toward the end.

A. Bettik cleared his throat. “M. Aenea specified that Ket Rosteen should pilot the landing, if there were a landing, with four other individuals to disembark once landed, and asked me to apologize to all of you who wish to go down to Old Earth immediately,” he said. “Apologize especially, she said, to dear friends such as M. Rachel, M. Theo, and others who would be especially eager to see the planet. M. Aenea asked me to assure you that you would be welcome there two weeks from the landing day—on the last day before the treeship would leave orbit. And, she asked me to say, that in two standard years… that is, two Earth years, of course… anyone who could ’cast here on their own would be welcome to visit Old Earth.”

“Two years?” I said. “Why a two-year quarantine?”

A. Bettik shook his bald head. “M. Aenea did not specify, M. Endymion. I am sorry.”

I held up my hands, palms up. “Well, who does get to go down now?” I asked. If my name was not on the list, I was going to go down anyway, Aenea’s last wishes or not. I’d use my fists to get aboard, if need be. Or hijack the Consul’s ship and land it. Or freecast alone.

“You, sir,” said A. Bettik. “She quite specifically mentioned you, M. Endymion. And M. Silenus, of course. Father de Soya. And…” The android hesitated as if embarrassed again.

“Go on,” I said more sharply than I had intended.

“Me,” said A. Bettik.

“You,” I repeated. In a second it made sense to me. The android had made our long trip out with us… had, in fact, spent more time with Aenea than I had over the years because of the time-debt involved in my solo odyssey. More than that, A. Bettik had risked his life for her, for us, and lost his arm in Nemes’s ambush on God’s Grove so many years ago. He had listened to Aenea’s teachings even before Rachel and Theo… or I… had signed on as disciples. Of course she would want her friend A. Bettik there when her few ashes were scattered in the breezes of Old Earth. I felt ashamed for acting surprised. “I am sorry,” I said aloud. “Of course you should come.”

A. Bettik nodded very slightly. “Two weeks,” I said to the others, most of whose disappointment was visible on their faces. “In two weeks we’ll all be down there to look around, see what surprises the Lions and Tigers and Bears have left for us.”

There were good-byes as old friends, Templars, Ousters, and others left the soil of the city Endymion to watch from the treeship’s stairways and platforms. Rachel was the last to leave. To my surprise, she hugged me fiercely. “I hope to hell that you’re worth it,” she said in my ear.

I had no idea what the feisty brunette was talking about. She—and most women—had always been a mystery to me.

“All right,” I said after we had trooped up the stairs to Martin Silenus’s bedside. I could see Old Earth… Earth… above us. The view grew hazy and then disappeared as the containment fields merged, thickened, and then separated, the drive fields flowed, and the city pulled away from the treeship.

The Templar crew members and Ousters had rigged makeshift controls to the tower sickroom, which, with all of Martin Silenus’s medical machines hovering around, had become a very crowded space.

I also thought that this was as good a place as any to sit out the ergs’ attempt to land a mass of rock and grass, a city with a tower and a parked spaceship, and a half stump of bridge leading nowhere, on a world that was three-fifths water and that had no spaceports or traffic control. At least, I thought, if we were going to crash and die, I might get a hint of the impending catastrophe from watching Ket Rosteen’s impassive visage under his overhanging Templar hood in the seconds before impact.

We did not feel entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Only the gradual change of the circle of sky above us from starfields to blueness let us know that we had entered successfully. We did not feel the landing. One moment we were standing in silence, waiting, and then Ket Rosteen looked up from his displays and monitors, whispered something through the comlines to his beloved ergs, and said to us, “We’re down.”

“I forgot to tell you where we should land,” I said, thinking of the desert that had been Taliesin.

It must be the place where Aenea had been happiest; where she would want those ashes—which I knew but still could not believe were hers—scattered in the warm Arizona winds.

Ket Rosteen glanced toward the floating deathbed.

“I told him where to fucking land,” rasped the old poet’s voice synthesizer. “Where I was born. Where I plan to die. Now, will you all please pull your collective thumbs out and roll me out of here so that I can see the sky?”

A. Bettik unplugged all of Silenus’s monitors, everything except the most essential life-support equipment, and tied everything together within the same EM repulsor field. While we were on the treeship, the androids and the Ouster crew clones and the Templars had built a long, gradual ramp from the top tower room down to the ground, then paved an exit walk to the edge of the city slab and beyond. All of this had landed intact I noticed as we accompanied the floating sickbed out into the sunlight and down. As we passed the Consul’s ebony spacecraft, a speaker on the hull of the ship said, “Good-bye, Martin Silenus. It was an honor knowing you.”

The ancient figure in the bed managed to lift one skeletal arm in a rather jaunty wave.

“See you in hell, Ship.”

We left the city slab, stepped off the paved ramp, and looked out at grasslands and distant bluffs not so different from my childhood moors except for the line of forest to our right. The gravity and air pressure was as I remembered it from our four-year sojourn on Earth, although the air was much more humid here than in the desert.

“Where are we?” I asked of no one in particular. Ket Rosteen had stayed in the tower and only the android, the dying poet, Father de Soya, and I were outside now in what seemed to be morning sunlight in an early spring day in the northern hemisphere.

“Where my mother’s estate used to be,” whispered Martin Silenus’s synthesizer. “In the heart of the heart of the North American Preserve.”

A. Bettik looked up from checking the med-unit’s readouts. “I believe that this was called Illinois in the pre-Big Mistake days,” he said. “The center of that state, I believe. The prairies have returned, I see. Those trees are elms and chestnut… extinct by the twenty-first century here, if I am not mistaken. That river beyond the bluffs flows south-southwest into the Mississippi River. I believe you have… ah… traversed a portion of that river, M. Endymion.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the flimsy little kayak and the farewell at Hannibal and Aenea’s first kiss.

We waited. The sun rose higher. Wind stirred the grasses. Somewhere beyond the line of trees, a bird protested something as only birds can. I looked at Martin Silenus.

“Boy,” said the old poet’s synthesizer, “if you expect me to die on cue just to save you from a sunburn, fucking forget it. I’m hanging on by my fingernails, but those nails are old and tough and long.”

I smiled and touched his bony shoulder.

“Boy?” whispered the poet.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You told me years ago that your old grannie—Grandam you called her—had made you memorize the Cantos till they were dribbling out your ears. Was that true?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you recollect the lines I wrote about this place… as it was back in my day?”

“I can try,” I said. I closed my eyes.

I was tempted to touch the Void, to seek the sound of those lessons in Grandam’s voice in place of this struggle to recall them from memory, but instead I did it the hard way, using the mnemonic devices she had taught me to recall distinct passages of verse. Standing there, eyes still closed, I spoke the passages I could recall:

I stopped. The next part was hazy. I’d never enjoyed those fake-lyrical bits of the Cantos, preferring the battle scenes instead.

I had been touching the old poet’s shoulder as I recited and I had felt it relax as I spoke. I opened my eyes, expecting to see a dead man in the bed.

Martin Silenus gave me a satyr’s grin.

“Not bad, not bad,” he rasped. “Not bad for an old hack.” His video glasses turned toward the android and the priest. “See why I chose this boy to finish my Cantos for me? He can’t write worth shit, but he’s got a memory like an elephant’s.”

I was about to ask, What is an elephant, when I glanced over at A. Bettik for no special reason. For one instant, after all my years of knowing the gentle android, I actually saw him. My mouth dropped slack.

“What?” asked Father de Soya, his voice alarmed. Perhaps he thought I was having a heart attack.

“You,” I said to A. Bettik. “You’re the Observer.”

“Yes,” said the android.

“You’re one of them… from them… from the Lions and Tigers and Bears.”

The priest looked from me to A. Bettik to the grinning man in the bed and then back at the android.

“I have never appreciated that choice of phrase of M. Aenea’s,” A. Bettik said very quietly. “I have never seen a lion or tiger or bear in the flesh, but I understand that they share a certain fierceness which is alien to… ah… the alien race to which I belong.”

“You took the form of an android centuries ago,” I said, still staring in a deepening understanding that was as sharp and painful as a blow to the head. “You were there for all the central events… the rise of the Hegemony, the discovery of the Time Tombs on Hyperion, the Fall of the Farcasters… good Christ, you were there for most of the last Shrike Pilgrimage.”

A. Bettik bowed his bald head slightly. “If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe.”

I leaned over Martin Silenus’s bed, ready to shake him alive for an answer if he had already died. “Did you know this, old man?”

“Not before he left with you, Raul,” said the poet. “Not until I read your narrative through the Void and realized…”

I took two steps back in the soft, high grass. “I was such an idiot,” I said. “I saw nothing. I understood nothing. I was a fool.”

“No,” said Father de Soya. “You were in love.”

I advanced on A. Bettik as if I was ready to throttle him if he did not answer immediately and honestly. Perhaps I would have. “You’re the father,” I said. “You lied about not knowing where Aenea disappeared to for almost two years. You’re the father of the child… of the next messiah.”

“No,” said the android calmly. The Observer. The Observer with one arm, the friend who almost died with us a score of times. “No,” he said again. “I am not Aenea’s husband. I am not the father.”

“Please,” I said, my hands shaking, “do not lie to me.” Knowing that he would not lie. Had never lied.

A. Bettik looked me in the eye. “I am not the father,” he said. “There is no father now. There was never another messiah. There is no child.”

Dead. They’re both dead… her child, her husband—whoever, whatever he was—Aenea herself.

My dear girl. My darling girl. Nothing left. Ashes. Somehow, even as I had dedicated myself to finding the child, to pleading with the Observer father to allow me to be this child’s friend and bodyguard and disciple as I had been Aenea’s, to using that newfound hope as a means of escaping the Schrödinger box, I had known deep in my heart that there was no child of my darling’s alive in the universe… I would have heard that soul’s music echoing across the Void like a Bach fugue… no child. Everything was ashes.

I turned to Father de Soya now, ready to touch the cylinder holding Aenea’s remains, ready to accept the fact of her being gone forever with the first touch of cold steel against my fingertips. I would go off alone to find a place to spread her ashes. Walk from Illinois to Arizona if I had to. Or perhaps just to where Hannibal had been… where we first kissed.

Perhaps that is where she was happiest while we were here.

“Where is the canister?” I said, my voice thick.

“I did not bring it,” said the priest.

“Where is it?” I said. I was not angry, just very, very tired. “I’ll walk back to the tower to get it.”

Father Federico de Soya took a breath and shook his head. “I left it in the treeship, Raul. I did not forget it. I left it there on purpose.”

I stared at him, more puzzled than angry.

Then I realized that he—and A. Bettik, and even the old poet in the bed—had turned their heads toward the bluffs above the river.

It was as if a cloud had passed over but then an especially bright ray of light had illuminated the grass for a moment. The two figures were motionless for long seconds, but then the shorter of the two forms began walking briskly toward us, breaking into a run.

The taller figure was more recognizable at this distance, of course—sunlight on its chrome carapace, the red eyes visibly glinting even at this distance, the gleam of thorns and spikes and razor fingers—but I had no time to waste looking at the motionless Shrike. It had done its job.

It had farcast itself and the person with it forward through time as easily as I had learned to ’cast through space.

Aenea ran the last thirty meters. She looked younger—less worn by worry and events—her hair was almost blond in the sun and had been hastily tied back. She was younger, I realized, frozen in my place as she ran up to our small party on the hill. She was twenty, four years older than when I had left her in Hannibal but almost three years younger than when I saw her last.

Aenea kissed A. Bettik, hugged Father de Soya, leaned into the bed to kiss the old poet with great gentleness, and then turned to me.

I was still frozen in place. Aenea walked closer and stood on tiptoe as she always had when she wanted to kiss me on the cheek.

She kissed me gently on the lips. “I’m sorry, Raul,” she whispered. “I’m sorry this had to be so hard on you. On everyone.”

So hard on me. She stood there with the full foresight of the torture to come in Castel Sant’Angelo, with the Nemes-things circling her naked body like carrion birds, with the images of the rising flames…

She touched my cheek again. “Raul, my dear. I’m here. This is me. For the next one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours, I’ll be with you. And I will never mention the amount of time again. We have infinite time. We’ll always be together. And our child will be there with you as well.”

Our child. Not a messiah born of necessity. Not a marriage with an Observer.

Our child. Our human, fallible, falling-down-and-crying child.

“Raul?” said Aenea, touching my cheek with her work-callused fingers.

“Hello, kiddo,” I said. And I took her in my arms.

35

Martin Silenus died late on the next day, several hours after Aenea and I were wed. Father de Soya performed the wedding service, of course, just as he later performed the funeral service just before sunset. The priest said that he was glad that he had brought along his vestments and missal.

We buried the old poet on one of the grassy bluffs above the river, where the view of the prairie and distant forests seemed most lovely. As far as we could tell, his mother’s house would have been set somewhere nearby. A. Bettik, Aenea, and I had dug the grave deep since there were wild animals about—we had heard wolves howl the night before—and then carried heavy stones to the site to cover the earth. On the simple headstone, Aenea marked the dates of the old poet’s birth and death—four months short of a full thousand years—carved his name in deep script, and in the space below, added only—OUR POET.

The Shrike had been standing on that grassy bluff where it had arrived with Aenea, and it had not moved during our wedding service that day, nor during the beautiful evening when the old poet died, nor during the sunset funeral service when we buried Martin Silenus not twenty meters from where the thing stood like a silver-spiked and thorn-shrouded sentinel, but as we moved away from the grave, the Shrike walked slowly forward until it stood over the grave, its head bowed, its four arms hanging limply, the last of the sky’s dying glow reflected in its smooth carapace and red-jeweled eyes. It did not move again.

Father de Soya and Ket Rosteen urged us to spend another night in one of the tower rooms, but Aenea and I had other plans. We had liberated some camping gear from the Consul’s ship, an inflatable raft, a hunting rifle, plenty of freeze-dried food if we were unsuccessful hunting, and managed to get it all in two very heavy backpacks. Now we stood at the edge of the city slab and looked out at the twilight world of grass and woods and deepening sky. The old poet’s cairn was clearly visible against the fading sunset.

“It will be dark soon,” fussed Father de Soya.

“We have a lantern.” Aenea grinned.

“There are wild animals out there,” said the priest. “That howl we heard last night… God knows what predators are just waking up.”

“This is Earth,” I said. “Anything short of a grizzly bear I can handle with the rifle.”

“What if there are grizzly bears?” persisted the Jesuit. “Besides, you’ll get lost out there. There are no roads or cities. No bridges. How will you cross the rivers…”

“Federico,” said Aenea, setting her hand firmly but gently on the priest’s forearm. “It’s our wedding night.”

“Oh,” said the priest. He hugged her quickly, shook my hand, and stepped back. “May I make a suggestion, M. Aenea, M. Endymion?” said A. Bettik diffidently.

I looked up from sliding the sheath knife onto my belt. “Are you going to tell us what you folks on the other side of the Void Which Binds have planned for Earth in the years to come?” I said. “Or for finally saying hello to the human race in person?”

The android looked embarrassed. “Ah… no,” he said. “The suggestion was actually more in the line of a modest wedding present.” He handed both of us the leather case.

I recognized it at once. So did Aenea. We got down on our hands and knees to take the hawking mat out and unroll it on the grass.

It activated at first tap, hovering a meter above the ground. We piled and lashed our packs on the back, set the rifle in place, and still had room for the both of us—if I sat cross-legged and Aenea sat in the cusp of my arms and legs, her back against my chest.

“This should get us across the rivers and above the beasties,” said Aenea. “And we’re not going far tonight to find a campsite. Just across the river there, just out of earshot.”

“Out of earshot?” said the Jesuit. “But why stay so close if we can’t hear you if you call? What if you cried out for help and… oh.” He reddened.

Aenea hugged him. She shook Ket Rosteen’s hand and said, “In two weeks, I would be obliged if you would let Rachel and the others ’cast down or take the Consul’s ship down if they want to look around. We’ll meet them at Uncle Martin’s grave at high noon. They’re welcome to stay until sunset. In two years, anyone who can ’cast here on his or her own is welcome to explore to their heart’s content,” she said. “But they can only stay one month, no longer. And no permanent structures allowed. No buildings. No cities. No roads. No fences. Two years…” She grinned at me. “Some years down the road, the Lions and Tigers and Bears and I have made some interesting plans for this world. But for these two years, it’s ours… Raul’s and mine. So please, True Voice of the Tree, please post a big KEEP OUT sign on your way up to your treeship, would you?”

“We will do so,” said the Templar. He went back into the tower to ready his ergs for takeoff.

We settled onto the mat. My arms were around Aenea. I had no intention of letting her go for a very long time. One Earth year, eleven months, one week, and six hours can be an eternity if you allow it to be so. A day can be so. An hour.

Father de Soya gave us his benediction and said, “Is there anything I can do for you in the coming months? Any supplies you want sent down to Old Earth?”

I shook my head. “No thanks, Father. With our camping gear, ship’s medkit, inflatable raft, and this rifle, we should be all set. I wasn’t a hunting guide on Hyperion for nothing.”

“There is one thing,” Aenea said and I caught the slight twitch of muscle at the corner of her mouth that had always warned me that mischief was imminent.

“Anything,” said Father de Soya.

“If you can come back in about a year,” said Aenea, “I may have use for a good midwife. That should give you time to read up on the subject.”

Father de Soya blanched, started to speak, thought better of it, and nodded grimly.

Aenea laughed and touched his hand. “Just kidding,” she said. “The Dorje Phamo and Dem Loa have already agreed to freecast here if needed.” She looked back at me. “And they will be needed.”

Father de Soya let out a breath, set his strong hand on Aenea’s head in a final benediction, and walked slowly up onto the city slab and then up the ramp to the tower. We watched him blend with the shadows. “What’s going to happen to his Church?” I said softly to Aenea. She shook her head. “Whatever happens, it has a chance at a fresh start… to rediscover its soul.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “And so do we.”

I felt my heart pounding with nervousness, but I spoke anyway. “Kiddo?”

Aenea turned her cheek against my chest and looked up at me.

“Boy or girl?” I said. “I never asked.”

“What?” said Aenea, confused.

“The reason you’ll need the Thunderbolt Sow and Dem Loa in a year or so?” I said, my voice thick. “Will it be a boy or girl?”

“Ahhh,” said Aenea, understanding me now. She turned her face away again, settled back against me, and set the curve of her skull under my jawline. I could feel the words through bone conduction as she spoke next. “I don’t know, Raul. I really don’t. This is one part of my life I’ve always avoided peeking at. Everything that happens next will be new. Oh… I know from glimpses of things beyond this that we will have a healthy child and that leaving the baby… and you… will be the hardest thing I ever do… much harder than when I have to let myself be caught in St. Peter’s Basilica and go to the Pax inquisitors. But I also know from those glimpses of myself after this period—when I am with you again on T’ien Shan, in my future and your past, and suffering because I am unable to tell you any of this—that I also will be consoled by the fact that in this future our baby is well and that you will be raising him or her. And I know that you will never let the child forget who I was or how much I loved the two of you.” She took a deep breath. “But as for knowing whether it will be a boy or girl, or what we name the baby… I have no clue, my darling. I have chosen not to look into the time, our time, but just to live it with you day to day. I am as blind to this future as you are.”

I lifted my arms across her chest and pulled her back tightly against me. There came an embarrassed cough and we looked up to realize that A. Bettik was still standing next to the hawking mat.

“Old friend,” said Aenea, gripping his hand while I still held her tight. “What words are there?”

The android shook his head, but then said, “Have you ever read your father’s sonnet “To Homer,” M. Aenea?”

My dear girl thought, frowned, and said, “I think I have, but I don’t remember it.”

“Perhaps part of it is relevant to M. Endymion’s query about the future of Father de Soya’s Church,” said the blue man. “And to other things as well. May I?”

“Please,” said Aenea. I could feel through the strong muscles in her back against me, and through the squeezing of her hand on my right thigh, that she was as eager as I to get away and find a camping spot. I hoped that A. Bettik’s recital would be short. The android quoted:

“Thank you,” said Aenea. “Thank you, dear friend.” She freed herself enough to kiss the android a final time.

“Hey,” I said, attempting the whine of an excluded child.

She kissed me a longer time. A much longer time. A very deep time.

We waved a final good-bye, I tapped the flight threads, and the centuries-old mat rose fifty meters, flew over the errant city slab and stone tower a final time, circled the Consul’s ebony spaceship, and carried us away westward. Already trusting the North Star as our guide, softly discussing a likely looking campsite on high ground some kilometers west, we passed over the old poet’s grave where the Shrike still stood silent guard, flew out over the river where the ripples and whirlpools caught the last glows of sunset, and gained altitude as we gazed down on the lush meadows and enticing forests of our new playground, our ancient world… our new world… our first and future and finest world.

THE END