by Dan Simmons
She pivoted and kicked, and I tried to follow, but made the mistake of flailing across the air bubble—my God, I hope that neither A. Bettik nor the child saw that pathetic spasm of arms and legs—and ended up at the edge of the sphere half a minute behind her. We treaded water there; the ship and balcony were out of sight beneath us, the surface of the water curved away to the left and right, dropping out of sight like waterfalls on all sides of us, while above us the crimson fractals expanded, exploded, contracted, and expanded again.
“I wish we could see the stars,” I said, and was surprised that I had spoken aloud.
“Me too,” said Aenea. Her face was raised to the disturbing light show, and I thought I saw a shadow of sadness flicker across her features. “I’m cold,” she said at last. I could see her clenched jaws now, sense her effort to keep her teeth from chattering. “Next time I tell the ship to build the pool, I’ll remind it not to use cold water.”
“You’d better get out,” I said. We swam down and around the curve of the sphere. The balcony seemed to be a wall rising to greet us, its only anomaly the form of A. Bettik standing sideways from it, holding out a large towel for Aenea.
“Close your eyes,” she said. I did and felt the heavy zero-g globules of splash-water strike my face as she flailed her way right through the surface tension of the sphere and floated beyond it. A second later I heard the slap of her bare feet as she landed on the balcony.
I waited a few more seconds and opened my eyes. A. Bettik had set the voluminous towel around her and she was huddled in it, teeth chattering now despite her efforts to stop them. “B-b-be care-f-ful,” she said. “Ro-ro-tate as s-s-soon as you get out of the w-w-w-water, or you’ll f-f-fall on your h-head and b-b-break your neck.”
“Thanks,” I said, having no intention of leaving the sphere before she and A. Bettik left the balcony. They did so a moment later and I paddled out, kicked arms and legs in a wild attempt to turn 180 degrees before gravity reasserted itself, pivoted too far, overcompensated, and landed heavily on my rear end.
I pulled down the extra towel that A. Bettik had thoughtfully left on the railing for me, mopped my face, and said, “Ship, you can collapse the zero-g microfield now.”
I realized my mistake an instant later, but before I could countermand the order, several hundred gallons of water collapsed onto the balcony—a massive waterfall of bone-chilling weight crashing down from a great height. If I had been directly under it, it might well have killed me—a mildly ironic end to a great adventure—but since I was sitting a couple of meters from the edge of the deluge, it merely smashed me against the balcony, caught me up in its vortex as it spilled up and over the railing, and threatened to fling me out into space and down past the stern of the ship fifteen meters below, down to the bottom of the ellipsoid bubble of containment field, where I would end up like a drowned insect in an ovoid beaker.
I grabbed at the railing and held on while the torrent roared by.
“Sorry,” said the ship, realizing its own error and reshaping the field around us to contain and collect the deluge. I noticed that none of it had washed through the open doorway into the holopit level.
When the microfield had lifted the water away in sloshing spheres, I found my sodden towel and walked through the doorway into the ship. As the hull irised shut behind me, the water presumably being returned to its holding tanks before being purified again for our use or as reaction mass, I stopped suddenly.
“Ship!” I demanded.
“Yes, M. Endymion?”
“That wasn’t your idea of a practical joke, was it?”
“Do you mean obeying your order to collapse the zero-g microfield, M. Endymion?”
“Yeah.”
“The consequences were the result of a minor oversight only, M. Endymion. I do not commit practical jokes. Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.”
“Hmmm,” I said, not totally convinced. Carrying my wet shoes and clothing with me, I squished upstairs to dry off and get dressed.
THE NEXT DAY I VISITED A. BETTIK DOWN IN WHAT he called the “engine room.” The place did have somewhat the sense of an engine room in an oceangoing ship—warm pipes, obscure but massive dynamo-shaped objects, catwalks and metal platforms—but A. Bettik showed me how the primary purpose of the space was to interface with the ship’s drives and field generators via various simstimlike connectors. I admit that I’ve never enjoyed computer-generated realities, and after sampling a few of the virtual views of the ship, I disconnected and sat by A. Bettik’s hammock while we talked. He told me about helping to service and refit this ship over the long decades, and how he had begun to believe it would never fly again. I sensed a relief that the voyage was under way.
“Had you always planned to go on the trip with whomever the old poet chose to go with the girl?” I asked.
The android looked steadily at me. “For the past century I have harbored the thought, M. Endymion. But I rarely considered it a potential reality. I thank you for making it so.”
His gratitude was so sincere that it embarrassed me for a moment. “You’d better not thank me until we escape the Pax,” I said to change the subject. “I suppose they’ll be waiting for us in Renaissance Vector space.”
“It seems likely.” The blue-skinned man did not seem especially concerned by the prospect.
“Do you think Aenea’s threat of opening the ship to space will work a second time?” I said.
A. Bettik shook his head. “They wish to capture the girl alive, but they will not be taken in by that bluff again.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do you really think she was bluffing? I had the impression that she was ready to open our level to vacuum.”
“I think not,” said A. Bettik. “I do not know this young person well, of course, but I had the pleasure of spending some days with her mother and the other pilgrims during their crossing of Hyperion. M. Lamia was a woman who loved life and respected the lives of others. I believe that M. Aenea might have carried out the threat if she had been alone, but I do not think that she is capable of choosing to hurt you or me.”
I had nothing to say to that, so we spoke of other things—the ship, our destination, how strange the Web worlds must be after all this time since the Fall.
“If we land on Renaissance Vector,” I said, “do you plan to leave us there?”
“Leave you?” said A. Bettik, showing surprise for the first time. “Why would I leave you there?”
I made a lame gesture with my hand. “Well … I guess … I mean, I always thought you wanted your freedom and would find it on the first civilized world we landed on.…”I stopped before I made more of an idiot of myself.
“My freedom is found by being allowed to come along on this voyage,” the android said softly. He smiled. “And, besides, M. Endymion, I could hardly blend in with the populace if I did want to stay on Renaissance Vector.”
This raised an issue I’d been thinking about. “You could change your skin color,” I said. “The ship’s autosurgeon could do that.…”I stopped again, seeing something subtle in his expression that I did not understand.
“As you know, M. Endymion,” began A. Bettik, “we androids are not programmed like machines … not even set with basic parameters and asimotivators like the early DNA AIs which evolved into the Core intelligences … but certain inhibitions were … ah … strongly urged on us when our instincts were being designed. One, of course, is to obey humans whenever reasonable and to keep them from coming to harm. This asimotivator is older than robotics or bioengineering, I am told. But another … instinct … is not to change my skin color.”
“You’re not capable of it?” I asked. “You couldn’t do it if our lives depended upon your concealing your blue skin?”
“Oh, yes,” said A. Bettik, “I am a creature of free will. I could do so, especially if the action was consistent with high-priority asimotivations, such as keeping you and M. Aenea safe from harm, but my choice would make me … uncomfo
rtable. Very uncomfortable.”
I nodded but did not really understand. We spoke of other things.
THIS WAS THE SAME DAY THAT I INVENTORIED THE contents of the weapons and EVA lockers on the main air-lock level. There was more there than I’d thought upon first inspection, and some of the objects were so archaic that I had to ask the ship their purpose. Most of the things in the EVA locker were obvious enough—spacesuits and hazardous-atmosphere suits, four flybikes cleverly folded into their storage niches under the spacesuit closet, heavy-duty handlamps, camping gear, osmosis masks and scuba gear with flippers and spearguns, one EM-flying belt, three boxes of tools, two well-equipped med-kits, six sets of night-vision and IR goggles, an equal number of lightweight headsets with mike-bead communicators and vid cameras, and comlogs. These last items caused me to query the ship: on a world without a datasphere, I had grown up with little use for the things. The comlogs ranged from antiquated—the thin silver band of jewelry type that was popular several decades ago—to absolutely ancient: massive things the size of a small book. All were capable of being used as communicators, of storing massive amounts of data, of tapping into the local datasphere, and—especially with the older ones—of actually hooking into planetary fatline relays via remote so that the megasphere could be accessed.
I held one of the bracelet pieces in my palm. It weighed much less than a gram. Useless. I understood from listening to offworld hunters that there were a few worlds with primitive dataspheres once again—Renaissance Vector was one of them, I thought—but the fatline relays had been useless for almost three centuries. The fatline—that common band of FTL communication upon which the Hegemony had depended—had been silent since the Fall. I started to put the comlog back in its velvet-lined case.
“You might find it useful to take with you if you leave me for any period of time,” said the ship.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Why?”
“Information,” said the ship. “I would be happy to download the bulk of my basic datalogs into one or more of those. You could access it at will.”
I chewed my lip, trying to imagine any value in having the ship’s confused mass of data on my wrist. Then I heard Grandam’s voice from my childhood—Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.
“Good idea,” I said, snapping the thin silver thread around my wrist. “When can you download the data banks?”
“I just did,” said the ship.
I had gone through the weapons locker carefully before we had reached Parvati space; there had been nothing there which could have slowed a Swiss Guardsman for a second. Now I studied the contents of the locker with different purposes in mind.
It is odd how old things look old. The spacesuits and flybikes and handlamps—almost everything aboard the ship—seemed antiquated, out of style. There were no skinsuits, for instance, and the bulk, design, and color of everything seemed like a holo from a history text. But the weapons were a slightly different story. They were old, yes, but very familiar to my eye and hand.
The Consul had obviously been a hunter. There were half a dozen shotguns on the rack: well oiled and stored properly. I could have taken any one of them and headed for the fens to bag ducks. They ranged from a petite .310 over-and-under to a massive 28-gauge double barrel. I chose an ancient but perfectly preserved 16-gauge pump with actual cartridges and set it in the corridor.
The rifles and energy weapons were beautiful. The Consul must have been a collector, because these specimens were works of art as well as killing devices—scrollwork on the stocks, blue steel, hand-fitted elements, perfect balance. In the millennium and more since the twentieth century, when personal weapons were mass-produced to be incredibly deadly, cheap, and ugly as metal doorstops, some of us—the Consul and I among the few—had learned to treasure beautiful handmade or limited-production guns. On the rack here were high-caliber hunting rifles, plasma rifles (not a misnomer, I had learned while in Home Guard basic training—the plasma cartridges were bolts of sheer energy, of course, when they emerged from the barrel, but the cartridges did benefit from the barrel’s rifling before they volatilized), two elaborately carved laser-based energy rifles (this was a misnomer, an artifact of language rather than design) not that different from the one M. Herrig had killed Izzy with not so many days earlier, a matte-black FORCE assault rifle that probably resembled the one Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had brought to Hyperion three centuries ago, a huge-bore plasma weapon that the Consul must have used for shooting dinosaurs on some world, and three handguns. There were no deathwands. I was glad; I hated the damned things.
I removed one of the plasma rifles, the FORCE assault weapon, and the handguns for further inspection.
The FORCE weapon was ugly, an exception to the Consul’s collecting scheme, but I saw why it had been useful. The thing was multipurpose—an 18-mm plasma rifle, a variable-beam coherent-energy weapon, grenade launcher, a bhee-keeper (beams of high-energy electrons), flechette launcher, a wideband blinder, heat-seeking dart flinger—hell, a FORCE assault weapon could do everything but cook the trooper’s meals. (And, when in the field, the variable-beam, set to low, could usually do that as well.)
Before entering Parvati System, I had toyed with greeting any Swiss Guard boarders with the FORCE weapon, but modern combat suits would have shrugged off everything it could dole out, and—to be honest—I had been afraid it would make the Pax troopers mad.
Now I studied it more carefully; something this flexible might be useful if we wandered too far from the ship and I had to take on a more primitive foe—say, a caveman, or a jet fighter, or some poor slob equipped as we had been in Hyperion’s Home Guard. In the end, I rejected taking it—it was prohibitively heavy if one weren’t in an old FORCE exopowered combat suit, the thing had no ammunition for the flechette, grenade, or bhee settings, 18-mm pulse cartridges were impossible to find anymore, and to use the energy-weapon options, I would have to be near the ship or some other serious power source. I set the assault gun back in place, realizing as I did so that it might well have been the legendary Colonel Kassad’s personal weapon. It did not fit the profile of the Consul’s personal collection, but he had known Kassad—perhaps he had kept the thing for sentimental reasons.
I asked the ship, but the ship did not remember. “Surprise, surprise,” I muttered.
The handguns were more ancient than the assault gun, but much more promising. Each was a collector’s item, but they used cartridge magazines that could still be purchased—at least on Hyperion. I couldn’t vouch for the worlds we would visit. The biggest weapon was a .60-caliber Steiner-Ginn full-auto Penetrator. It was a serious weapon, but heavy: the cartridge templates weighed almost as much as the handgun, and it was designed to use ammunition at a prodigious rate. I set it back. The other two were more promising: a small, light, eminently portable flechette pistol that might have been the great-grand-daddy of the weapon M. Herrig had tried to kill me with. It came with several hundred shiny little needle-eggs—the grip magazine held five at a time—and each of the eggs held several thousand of the flechettes. It was a good weapon for someone who was not necessarily a good shot.
The final handgun amazed me. It was in its own oiled leather holster. I removed the weapon with fingers that were slightly shaking. I knew it only from old books—a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun, actual cartridges—the kind that came in brass casings, not a magazine template that created them as the gun was fired—patterned grip, metal sights, blue steel. I turned the weapon over in my hands. This thing could date back more than a thousand years.
I looked in the case in which I had found it: five boxes of .45 cartridges, several hundred rounds. I thought that they must be ancient as well, but I found the manufacturer’s tag: Lusus. About three centuries ago.
Hadn’t Brawne Lamia carried an ancient .45, according to the Cantos? Later, when I asked Aenea, the child said that she had never seen her mother with a
handgun.
Still, it and the flechette pistol seemed like weapons we should have with us. I did not know if the .45 cartridges would still fire, so I carried one out on the balcony, warned the ship that the external field should stop the slug from ricocheting, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Then I remembered that these things had a manual safety. I found it, clicked it off, and tried again. My God, it was loud. But the bullets still worked. I set the weapon in its holster and clipped the holster to my utility belt. It felt right there. Of course, when the last .45 cartridge had been fired, that would be it forever unless I could find an antique gun club that manufactured them.
I don’t plan to have to fire several hundred bullets at anything, I thought wryly at the time. If only I had known.
Meeting with the girl and android later, I showed them the shotgun and plasma hunting rifle I’d chosen, the flechette pistol, and the .45. “If we go wandering through strange places—uninhabited strange places—we should go armed,” I said. I offered the flechette pistol to both of them, but they both refused. Aenea wanted no weapon; the android pointed out that he could not use one against a human being, and he trusted me to be around if a fierce animal was chasing him.
I grunted but set the rifle, shotgun, and flechette pistol aside. “I’ll wear this,” I said, touching the .45.
“It matches your outfit,” Aenea said with a slight smile.
THERE WAS NO LAST-MINUTE DESPERATE DISCUSSION of a plan this time. None of us believed that Aenea’s threat of self-destruction would work again if the Pax was waiting. Our most serious discussion of coming events came two days before we spun down into the Renaissance System. We had eaten well—A. Bettik had prepared a filet of river manta with a light sauce, and we had raided the ship’s wine cellar for a fine wine from the Beak’s vineyards—and after an hour of music with Aenea on the piano and the android playing a flute he had brought with him, talk turned to the future.
“Ship, what can you tell us about Renaissance Vector?” asked the girl.
