by Dan Simmons
“I’ve always liked the outdoors,” I said truthfully. “Camping. Being away from things. Something about nature makes me feel … I don’t know … connected to something larger.” I stopped before I began sounding like an Orthodox Zen Gnostic.
The girl leaned closer. “My father wrote a poem about that idea,” she said. “Actually, it was the ancient pre-Hegira poet my father’s cybrid was cloned from, of course, but my father’s sensibilities were, in the poem.” Before I could ask a question, she continued, “He wasn’t a philosopher. He was young, younger than you, even, and his philosophical vocabulary was fairly primitive, but in this poem he tried to articulate the stages by which we approach fusion with the universe. In a letter he called these stages ‘a kind of Pleasure Thermometer.’ “
I admit that I was surprised and a little taken back by this short speech. I hadn’t heard Aenea talk this seriously about anything yet, or use such large words, and the “Pleasure Thermometer” part sounded vaguely dirty to me. But I listened as she went on:
“Father thought that the first stage of human happiness was a ‘fellowship with essence,’ “ she said softly. I could see that A. Bettik was listening from his place at the steering pole. “By that,” she said, “Father meant an imaginative and sensuous response to nature … just the sort of feeling you were describing earlier.”
I rubbed my cheek, feeling the longer bristles there. A few more days without shaving and I would have a beard. I sipped my coffee.
“Father included poetry and music and art as part of that response to nature,” she said. “It’s a fallible but human way of resonating to the universe—nature creates that energy of creation in us. For Father imagination and truth were the same thing. He once wrote—‘The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.’ ”
“I’m not quite sure I get that,” I said. “Does that mean that fiction is truer than … truth?”
Aenea shook her head. “No, I think he meant … well, in the same poem he has a hymn to Pan—
“Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge.”
Aenea blew on her cup of hot tea to cool it. “To Father, Pan became a sort of symbol of imagination … especially romantic imagination.” She sipped her tea. “Did you know, Raul, that Pan was the allegorical precursor to Christ?”
I blinked. This was the same child who had been asking for ghost stories two nights ago. “Christ?” I said. I was enough a product of my time to flinch at any hint of blasphemy.
Aenea drank her tea and looked at the moons. Her left arm was wrapped around her raised knees as she sat. “Father thought that some people—not all—were moved by their response to nature to be stirred by that elemental, Pan-like imagination.
“Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown … ”
We were all silent a moment after this recitation. I had grown up listening to poetry—shepherds’ rough epics, the old poet’s Cantos, the Garden Epic of young Tycho and Glee and the centaur Raul—so I was used to rhymes under starry skies. Most of the poems I had heard and learned and loved were simpler to understand than this, however.
After a moment broken only by the lapping of waves against the raft and the wind against our tent, I said, “So this was your father’s idea of happiness?”
Aenea tossed her head back so that her hair moved in the wind. “Oh, no,” she said. “Just the first stage of happiness on his Pleasure Thermometer. There were two higher stages.”
“What were they?” said A. Bettik. The android’s soft voice almost made me jump; I had forgotten he was on the raft with us.
Aenea closed her eyes and spoke again, her voice soft, musical, and free from the singsong cant of those who ruin poetry.
“But there are
Richer entanglements far
More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
To the chief intensity: the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.”
I looked up at the dust storms and volcanic flashes on the giant moon. Sepia clouds moved across the orange-and-umber landscape up there. “So those are his other levels?” I said, a bit disappointed. “First nature, then love and friendship?”
“Not exactly,” said the girl. “Father thought that true friendship between humans was on an even higher level than our response to nature, but that the highest level attainable was love.”
I nodded. “Like the Church teaches,” I said. “The love of Christ … the love of our fellow humans.”
“Uh-uh,” said Aenea, sipping the last of her tea. “Father meant erotic love. Sex.” She closed her eyes again …
“Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core
All other depths are shallow: essences,
Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,
Meant but to fertilize my earthly root,
And make my branches lift a golden fruit
Into the bloom of heaven.”
I admit that I did not know what to say to that. I shook the last of the coffee out of my cup, cleared my throat, studied the hurtling moons and still-visible Milky Way for a moment, and said, “So? Do you think he was onto something?” As soon as I said it, I wanted to kick myself. This was a child I was talking to. She might sprout old poetry, or old pornography for that matter, but there was no way she could understand it.
Aenea looked at me. The moonlight made her large eyes luminous. “I think there are more levels on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in my father’s philosophy.”
“I see,” I said, thinking, Who the hell is Horatio?
“My father was very young when he wrote that,” said Aenea. “It was his first poem and it was a flop. What he wanted—what he wanted his shepherd hero to learn—was how exalted these things could be—poetry, nature, wisdom, the voices of friends, brave deeds, the glory of strange places, the charm of the opposite sex. But he stopped before he got to the real essence.”
“What real essence?” I asked. Our raft rose and fell on the sea’s breathing.
“The meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds,” whispered the girl. “… all forms and substances/Straight homeward to their symbol-essences …”
Why were those words so familiar? It took me a while to remember.
Our raft sailed on through the night and sea of Mare Infinitus.
WE SLEPT AGAIN BEFORE THE SUNS ROSE, AND AFTER another breakfast I got up to sight in the weapons. Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.
I hadn’t had time to test the firearms aboard ship or after our crash on the jungle world, and carrying around unfired, unsighted weapons made me nervous. In my short time in the Home Guard and longer years as a hunting guide, I’d long since discovered that familiarity with a weapon was easily as important as—and probably more important than—having a fancy rifle.
The largest of the moons was still in the sky as the suns rose—first the smaller of the binaries, a brilliant mote in the morning sky, paling the Milky Way to invisibility and dulling the details on the large moon, and then the primary, smaller than Hyperion’s Sol-like sun, but very bright. The sky deepened to an ultramarine and then deepened further to a cobalt-blue, with the two stars blazing and the orange moon filling the sky behind us. Sunlight made the moon’s atmosphere a hazy disk and banished the surface features from our sight. Meanwhile, the day grew warm, then hot, then blazing.
The sea came up a bit, easy sw
ells turning into regular two-meter waves that jostled the raft some but were far enough apart to let us ride them without undue discomfort. As the guidebook had promised, the sea was a disturbing violet, serrated by wave-top crests of a blue so dark as to be almost black, and occasionally broken by yellowkelp beds or foam of an even darker violet. The raft continued toward the horizon where the moons and suns had risen—we thought of it as east—and we could only hope that the strong current was carrying us somewhere. When we doubted that the current was moving us at all, we trailed a line or tossed some bit of debris overboard and watched the difference between wind and current tug at it. The waves were moving from what we perceived as south to north. We continued east.
I fired the .45 first, checking the magazine to make sure that the slugs were securely in place. I was afraid that the archaic quality of having ammunition separate from the structure of the magazine itself would make me forgetful of reloading at an awkward time. We did not have much to toss overboard for target practice, but I kept a few used ration containers at my feet, tossed one, and waited until it had floated about fifteen meters away before firing.
The automatic made an indecent roar when it went off. I knew that slug-throwers were loud—I had fired some in basic training, since the Ice Claw rebels often used them—but this blast almost made me drop the pistol into the violet sea. It scared Aenea, who had been staring off to the south and musing over something, right to her feet, and even made the unflappable android jump.
“Sorry,” I said, and braced the heavy weapon with both hands and fired again.
After using two clips’ worth of the precious ammunition, I was assured that I could hit something at fifteen meters. Beyond that—well, I hoped that whatever I was shooting at had ears and would be spooked by the noise the .45 made.
As I broke the weapon down after firing, I mentioned again that this ancient piece could have been Brawne Lamia’s.
Aenea looked at it. “As I said, I never saw Mother with a handgun.”
“She could have lent it to the Consul when he went back to the Web in the ship,” I said, cleaning the opened pistol.
“No,” said A. Bettik.
I turned to look at him as he leaned against the steering oar. “No?” I said.
“I saw M. Lamia’s weapon when she was on the Benares,” said the android. “It was an antiquated pistol—her father’s, I believe—but it had a pearl handle, a laser sight, and was adapted to hold flechette cartridges.”
“Oh,” I said. Well, the idea had been appealing. “At least this thing’s been well preserved and rebuilt,” I said. It must have been kept in some sort of stasis-box; a thousand-year-old handgun would not have worked otherwise. Or perhaps it was some sort of clever reproduction that the Consul had picked up on his travels. It did not matter, of course, but I had always been struck by the … sense of history, I guess you would call it … that old firearms seemed to emanate.
I fired the flechette pistol next. It took only one burst to see that it worked quite nicely, thank you. The floating ration pak was blown into a thousand flowfoam shards from thirty meters away. The entire wave top jumped and shimmered as if a steel rain were pelting it. Flechette weapons were messy, hard to miss with, and eminently unfair to the target, which is why I had chosen this. I set the safety on and put it back in my pack.
The plasma rifle was harder to sight in. The click-up optical sight allowed me to zero in on anything from the floating ration pak thirty meters away, to the horizon, twenty-five klicks or so away, but while I sank the ration pak in the first shot, it was hard to tell the effectiveness of the longer shots. There was nothing out there to shoot at. Theoretically, a pulse rifle could hit anything one could see—there was no allowance necessary for windage or ballistic arc—and I watched through the scope as the bolt kicked a hole in waves twenty klicks out, but it did not create the same confidence that firing at a distant target would have. I raised the rifle to the giant moon now setting behind us. Through the scope I could just make out a white-topped mountain there—probably frozen C02 rather than snow, I knew—and, just for the hell of it, squeezed off a round. The plasma rifle was essentially silent compared to the semiautomatic slug-thrower pistol: only the usual cat’s-cough when it fired. The scope was not powerful enough to show a hit, and at those distances, rotation of the two worlds would be a problem, but I would be surprised if I had not hit the mountain. Home Guard barracks were full of stories of Swiss Guard riflemen who had knocked down Ouster commandos after firing from thousands of klicks away on a neighboring asteroid or somesuch. The trick, as it had been for millennia, was seeing the enemy first.
Thinking of that after firing the shotgun once, cleaning it, and setting away all the weapons, I said, “We need to do some scouting today.”
“Do you doubt that the other portal will be there?” asked Aenea.
I shrugged. “The guide said five klicks between portals. We must have floated at least a hundred since last night. Probably more.”
“Are we going to take the hawking mat out?” asked the girl. The suns were burning her fair skin.
“I thought I’d use the flying belt,” I said. Less radar profile if anyone’s watching, I thought but did not say aloud. “And you’re not going, kiddo,” I did say aloud. “Just me.”
I pulled the belt from its place under the tent, cinched the harness tightly, pulled my plasma rifle out, and activated the hand controller. “Well, shit,” I said. The belt did not even try to lift me. For a second I was sure that we were on a Hyperion-like world with lousy EM fields, but then I looked at the charge indicator. Red. Empty. Flat out. “Shit,” I said again.
I unbuckled the harness, and the three of us gathered around the useless thing as I checked the leads, the battery pak, and the flight unit.
“It was charged right before we left the ship,” I said. “The same time we charged the hawking mat.”
A. Bettik tried running a diagnostic program, but with zero-power, even that would not run. “Your comlog should have the same subprogram,” said the android.
“It does?” I said stupidly.
“May I?” said A. Bettik, gesturing toward the comlog. I removed the bracelet and handed it to him.
A. Bettik opened a tiny compartment I had not even noticed on the trinket, removed a bead-sized lead on a microfilament, and plugged into the belt. Lights blinked. “The flying belt is broken,” announced the comlog in the ship’s voice. “The battery pak is depleted approximately twenty-seven hours prematurely. I believe it is a fault in the storage cells.”
“Great,” I said. “Can it be fixed? Will it hold a charge if we find one?”
“Not this battery unit,” said the comlog. “But there are three replacements in the ship’s EVA locker.”
“Great,” I said again. I lifted the belt with its bulky battery and harness and tossed it over the side of the raft. It sank beneath the violet waves without a trace.
“All set here,” said Aenea. She was sitting cross-legged on the hawking mat, which was floating twenty centimeters above the raft. “Want to look around with me?”
I did not argue, but sat behind her on the mat, folded my legs, and watched her tap the flight threads.
ABOUT FIVE THOUSAND METERS UP, GASPING FOR air and leaning out over the edge of our little carpet, things seemed a lot scarier than they had on the raft. The violet sea was very big, very empty, and our raft only a speck below, a tiny black rectangle on the reticulated violet-and-black sea. From this altitude, the waves that had seemed so serious on the raft were invisible.
“I think I’ve found another level of that ‘fellowship with essence’ response to nature that your father wrote about,” I said.
“What’s that?” Aenea was shivering in the cold air of the jet stream. She had worn just the undershirt and vest she had been wearing on the raft.
“Scared shitless,” I said.
Aenea laughed. I have to say here that I loved Aenea’s laugh then, and I warm at the thought
of it now. It was a soft laugh, but full and unselfconscious and melodic to the extreme. I miss it.
“We should have let A. Bettik come up to scout instead of us,” I said.
“Why?”
“From what he said about his high-altitude scouting before,” I said, “evidently he doesn’t need to breathe air, and he’s impervious to little things like depressurization.”
Aenea leaned back against me. “He’s not impervious to anything,” she said softly. “They just designed his skin to be a little tougher than ours—it can act like a pressure suit for short periods, even in hard vacuum—and he can hold his breath a bit longer, that’s all.”
I looked at her. “Do you know a lot about androids?”
“No,” said Aenea, “I just asked him.” She scooted forward a bit and laid her hands on the control threads. We flew “east.”
I admit that I was terrified of the thought of losing contact with the raft, of flying around this ocean-planet until these flight threads lost their charge and we plummeted to the sea, probably to be eaten by a Lamp Mouth Leviathan. I’d programmed my inertial compass with the raft as a starting point, so unless I dropped the compass—which was unlikely because I now kept it on a lanyard around my neck—we would find our way back, all right. But still I worried.
“Let’s not go too far,” I said.
“All right.” Aenea was keeping the speed down, about sixty or seventy klicks, I guessed, and had swooped back down to where we could breathe more easily and the air was not so cold. Below us, the violet sea stayed empty in a great circle to the horizon.
“Your farcasters seem to be playing tricks on us,” I said.
“Why do you call them my farcasters, Raul?”
“Well, you’re the one they … recognize.”
She did not answer.
“Seriously,” I said, “do you think there’s some rhyme or reason to the worlds they’re sending us to?”
Aenea glanced over her shoulder at me. “Yes,” she said, “I do.”
