by Dan Simmons
The acoustics were good in Mr. Wright’s music pavilion, but Aenea had always been able to project her voice without seeming to raise it. She spoke softly. “Thank you for gathering. I thought we should talk.”
Jaev Peters, one of the older apprentices, immediately stood up in the fifth row. “You were gone, Aenea. In the desert again.”
The girl on the stage nodded.
“Did you talk to the Lions and Tigers and Bears?”
No one in the audience tittered or giggled. The question was asked in deadly seriousness and the answer was awaited by ninety people just as seriously. I should explain.
It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago. That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony, the AI TechnoCore had used their secret farcaster and fatline technologies to weave hundreds of dataspheres into a single, secret, interstellar information medium called the megasphere. But, according to the Cantos, Aenea’s father—the cybrid John Keats—had traveled in disembodied datapersona form to the megasphere’s Core and discovered that there was a larger datumplane medium, perhaps larger than our galaxy, which even the Core AIs were afraid to explore because it was full of “lions and tigers and bears”—those were Ummon the AI’s words. These were the beings—or intelligences—or gods, for all we knew—who had kidnapped the Earth and brought it here before the Core could destroy it a millennium ago. These Lions and Tigers and Bears were the bugaboo guardians of our world. No one in the Fellowship had ever seen any of these entities, or spoken to them, or had any solid evidence of their existence. No one except Aenea.
“No,” said the girl on the stage, “I didn’t talk to them.” She looked down as if embarrassed. She was always reticent to talk about this. “But I think I heard them.”
“They spoke to you?” said Jaev Peters. The pavilion was hushed.
“No,” said Aenea. “I didn’t say that. I just … heard them. A bit like when you overhear someone else’s conversation through a dormitory wall.”
There was a rustle of amusement at this. For all the thick stone walls on the Fellowship property, the dorm partitions were notably thin.
“All right,” said Bets Kimbal from the first row. Bets was the chief cook and a large, sensible woman. “Tell us what they said.”
Aenea stepped up to the edge of the red-carpeted stage and looked out at her elders and colleagues. “I can tell you this,” she said softly. “There’ll be no more food and supplies from the Indian Market. That’s gone.”
It was as if she had set off a grenade in the music pavilion. When the babble began to subside, one of the biggest of the construction workers, a man named Hussan, shouted over the noise. “What do you mean it’s gone? Where do we get our food?”
There was good reason for the panic. In Mr. Wright’s day, way back in the twentieth century, his Fellowship desert camp had been about fifty kilometers from a large town called Phoenix. Unlike the Depression-era Wisconsin Taliesin, where apprentices raised crops in the rich soil even while they worked on Mr. Wright’s construction plans, this desert camp had never been able to grow its own food. So they drove to Phoenix and bartered or paid out their primitive coins and paper money for basic supplies. The Old Architect had always depended upon the largesse of patrons—large loans never to be paid back—for such month-to-month survival.
Here in our reassembled desert camp, there were no towns. The only road—two gravel ruts—led west into hundreds of miles of emptiness. I knew this because I had flown over the area in the dropship and driven it in the Old Architect’s ground-car. But about thirty klicks from the compound there was a weekly Indian market where we had bartered craft items for food and basic materials. It had been there for years before Aenea’s and my arrival; everyone had obviously expected it to be there forever.
“What do you mean it’s gone?” repeated Hussan in a hoarse shout. “Where’d the Indians go? Were they just cybrid illusions, like Mr. Wright?”
Aenea made a gesture with her hands that I had grown accustomed to over the years—a graceful setting-aside motion that I had come to see as a physical analog of the Zen expression “mu,” which, in the right context, can mean “unask the question.”
“The market’s gone because we won’t need it anymore,” said Aenea. “The Indians are real enough—Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni—but they have their own lives to live, their own experiments to conduct. Their trading with us has been … a favor.”
The crowd became angry at that, but eventually they settled down again. Bets Kimbal stood. “What do we do, child?”
Aenea sat on the edge of the stage as if trying to become one with the waiting, expectant audience. “The Fellowship is over,” she said. “That part of our lives has to end.”
One of the younger apprentices was shouting from the back of the pavilion. “No it doesn’t! Mr. Wright could still return! He was a cybrid, remember … a construct! The Core … or the Lions and Tigers and Bears … whoever shaped him can send him back to us …”
Aenea shook her head, sadly but firmly. “No. Mr. Wright is gone. The Fellowship is over. Without the food and materials the Indians brought from so far away, this desert camp can’t last a month. We have to go.”
It was a young female apprentice named Peret who spoke quietly into the silence. “Where, Aenea?”
Perhaps it was at this moment that I first realized how this entire group had given themselves over to the young woman I had known as a child. When the Old Architect was around, giving lectures, holding forth in seminars and drafting-room bull sessions, leading his flock on picnics and swimming outings in the mountains, demanding solicitude and the best food, the reality of Aenea’s leadership had been somewhat masked. But now it was evident.
“Yes,” someone else called from the center of the rising rows of seats, “where, Aenea?”
My friend opened her hands in another gesture I had learned. Rather than Unask the question, this one said, You must answer your own question. Aloud, she said, “There are two choices. Each of you traveled here either by farcaster or through the Time Tombs. You can go back by way of farcaster …”
“No!”
“How can we?”
“Never … I’d rather die!”
“No! The Pax will find us and kill us!”
The cries were immediate and from the heart. It was the sound of terror made verbal. I smelled fear in the room the way I used to smell it on animals caught in leg traps on the moors of Hyperion.
Aenea lifted a hand and the outcries faded. “You can return to Pax space by farcaster, or you can stay on Earth and try to fend for yourself.”
There were murmurs and I could hear relief at the option of not returning. I understood that feeling—the Pax had come to be a bogeyman to me, as well. The thought of returning there sent me gasping up out of sleep at least once a week.
“But if you stay here,” continued the girl seated on the edge of Mr. Wright’s music stage, “you will be outcasts. All of the groups of human beings here are involved in their own projects, their own experiments. You will not fit in there.”
People shouted questions about that, demanding answers to mysteries not understood during their long stay here. But Aenea continued with what she was saying. “If you stay here, you will waste what Mr. Wright has taught you and what you came to learn about yourself. The Earth does not need architects and builders. Not now. We have to go back.”
Jaev Peters spoke again. His voice was brittle, but not angry. “And does the Pax need builders and architects? To build its cross-damned churches?”
“Yes,” said Aenea.
Jaev pounded the back of the seat in front of him with his large fist. “But they’ll capture or kill us if they learn who we are … where we’ve been!”
“Yes,” said Aenea.
Bets Kimbal said, “Are you going back, c
hild?”
“Yes,” said Aenea and pushed herself away from the stage.
Everyone was standing now, shouting or talking to the people next to them. It was Jaev Peters who spoke the thoughts of the ninety Fellowship orphans. “Can we go with you, Aenea?”
The girl sighed. Her face, as sunburned and alert as it looked this morning, also looked tired. “No,” she said. “I think that leaving here is like dying or being born. We each have to do it alone.” She smiled. “Or in very small groups.”
The room fell silent then. When Aenea spoke, it was as if a single instrument were picking up where the orchestra had stopped. “Raul will leave first,” she said. “Tonight. One by one, each of you will find the right farcaster portal. I will help you. I will be the last to leave Earth. But leave I will, and within a few weeks. We all must go.”
People pushed forward then, still silent, but moving closer to the girl with the short-cropped hair. “But some of us will meet again,” said Aenea. “I feel certain that some of us will meet again.”
I heard the flip side of that reassuring prediction: some of us would not survive to meet again.
“Well,” boomed Bets Kimbal, standing with one broad arm around Aenea, “we have enough food in the kitchen for one last feast. Lunch today will be a meal you’ll remember for years! If you have to travel, as my mum used to say, never travel on an empty stomach. Who’s to help me in the kitchen then?”
The groups broke up then, families and friends in clusters, loners standing as if stunned, everyone moving closer to Aenea as we began filing out of the music pavilion. I wanted to grab her at that moment, shake her until her wisdom teeth fell out, and demand, What the hell do you mean—“Raul will leave first … tonight.” Who the hell are you to tell me to leave you behind? And how do you think you can make me? But she was too far away and too many people were pressing around her. The best I could do was stride along behind the crowd as it moved toward the kitchen and dining area, anger written in my face, fists, muscles, and walk.
Once I saw Aenea glance back, straining to find me over the heads of the crowd around her, and her eyes pleaded, Let me explain.
I stared back stonily, giving her nothing.
It was almost dusk when she joined me in the large garage Mr. Wright had ordered built half a klick east of the compound. The structure was open on the sides except for canvas curtains, but it had thick stone columns supporting a permanent redwood roof; it had been built to shelter the drop-ship in which Aenea, A. Bettik, and I had arrived.
I had pulled back the main canvas door and was standing in the open hatch of the dropship when I saw Aenea crossing the desert toward me. On my wrist was the comlog bracelet that I had not worn in more than a year: the thing held much of the memory of our former spaceship—the Consul’s ship from centuries ago—and it had been my liaison and tutor when I had learned to fly the dropship. I did not need it now—the comlog memory had been downloaded into the dropship and I had become rather good at piloting the dropship on my own—but it made me feel more secure. The comlog was also running a systems check on the ship: chatting with itself, you might say.
Aenea stood just within the folded canvas. The sunset threw long shadows behind her and painted the canvas red. “How’s the dropship?” she said.
I glanced at the comlog readings. “All right,” I grunted, not looking her way.
“Does it have enough fuel and charge for one more flight?”
Still not looking up, fiddling with touchplates on the arm of the pilot’s chair inside the hatch, I said, “Depends on where it’s flying to.”
Aenea walked to the dropship stairway and touched my leg. “Raul?”
This time I had to look at her.
“Don’t be angry,” she said. “We have to do these things.”
I pulled my leg away. “Goddammit, don’t keep telling me and everyone else what we have to do. You’re just a kid. Maybe there are things some of us don’t have to do. Maybe going off on my own and leaving you behind is one of those.” I stepped off the ladder and tapped the comlog. The stairs morphed back into the dropship hull. I left the garage and began walking toward my tent. On the horizon, the sun was a perfect red sphere. In the last low rays of light, the stones and canvas of the main compound looked as if they had caught fire—the Old Architect’s greatest fear.
“Raul, wait!” Aenea hurried to catch up to me. One glance in her direction told me how exhausted she was. All afternoon she had been meeting with people, talking to people, explaining to people, reassuring people, hugging people. I had come to think of the Fellowship as a nest of emotional vampires and Aenea as their only source of energy.
“You said that you would …” she began.
“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. I suddenly had the sense that she was the adult and that I was the petulant child. To hide my confusion, I turned away again and watched the last of the sunset. For a moment or two we were both silent, watching the light fade and the sky darken. I had decided that Earth sunsets were slower and more lovely than the Hyperion sunsets I had known as a child, and that desert sunsets were particularly fine. How many sunsets had this child and I shared in the past four years? How many lazy evenings of dinner and conversation under the brilliant desert stars? Could this really be the last sunset we would watch together? The idea made me sick and furious.
“Raul,” she said again when the shadows had grown together and the air was cooling, “will you come with me?”
I did not say yes, but I followed her across the rocky field, avoiding the bayonet spikes of yucca and the spines of low cacti in the gloom, until we came into the lighted area of the compound. How long, I wondered, until the fuel oil for the generators runs out? This answer I knew—it was part of my job to keep the generators maintained and fueled. We had six days’ supply in the main tanks and another ten days in the reserve tanks that were never to be touched except in emergency. With the Indian Market gone, there would be no resupply. Almost three weeks of electric lights and refrigeration and power equipment and then … what? Darkness, decay, and an end to the incessant construction, tearing down, and rebuilding that had been the background noise at Taliesin for the last four years.
I thought perhaps that we were going to the dining hall, but we walked past those lighted windows—groups of people still sitting at the tables, talking earnestly, glancing up with eyes only for Aenea as we passed—I was invisible to them in their hour of panic—and then we approached Mr. Wright’s private drafting studio and his office, but we did not stop there. Nor did we stop in the beautiful little conference room where a small group sat to watch a final movie—three weeks until the movie projectors did not run—nor did we turn into the main drafting room.
Our destination was a stone-and-canvas workshop set far down the driveway on the south side, a useful outbuilding for working with toxic chemicals or noisy equipment. I had worked here often in the first couple of years at the Fellowship, but not in recent months.
A. Bettik was waiting at the door. The android had a slight smile on his bland, blue face, rather like the one he had worn when carrying the birthday cake to Aenea’s surprise party.
“What?” I said, still irritated, looking from the girl’s tired face to the android’s smug expression.
Aenea stepped into the workshop and turned on the light.
On the worktable in the center of the little room sat a small boat, not much more than two meters in length. It was shaped rather like a seed sharpened on both ends, enclosed except for a single, round cockpit opening with a nylon skirt that could obviously be tightened around the occupant’s waist. A two-bladed paddle lay on the table next to the boat. I stepped closer and ran my hand over the hull: a polished fiberglass compound with interna] aluminum braces and fittings. Only one other person at the Fellowship could do such careful work. I looked at A. Bettik almost accusingly. He nodded.
“It’s called a kayak,” said Aenea, running her own hand over the polished hull. “It’s an old Ea
rth design.”
“I’ve seen variations on it,” I said, refusing to be impressed. “The Ice Claw Ursus rebels used small boats like this.”
Aenea was still stroking the hull, all of her attention there. It was as if I had not spoken. “I asked A. Bettik to make it for you,” she said. “He’s worked for weeks here.”
“For me,” I said dully. My stomach tightened at the realization of what was coming.
Aenea moved closer. She was standing directly under the hanging light, and the shadows under her eyes and cheekbones made her look much older than sixteen. “We don’t have the raft anymore, Raul.”
I knew the raft she meant. The one that had carried us across so many worlds until it was chopped up in the ambush that almost killed us on God’s Grove. The raft that had carried us down the river under the ice on Sol Draconi Septem and through the deserts of Hebron and Qom-Riyadh and across the world ocean of Mare Infinitus. I knew the raft she meant. And I knew what this boat meant.
“So I’m to take this back the way we came?” I raised a hand as if to touch the thing, but then did not.
“Not the way we came,” said Aenea. “But down the River Tethys. Across different worlds. Across as many worlds as it takes to find the ship.”
“The ship?” I said. We had left the Consul’s spaceship hiding under a river, repairing itself from damage sustained in our flight from the Pax, on a world whose name and location we did not know.
My young friend nodded and the shadows fled, then regrouped around her tired eyes. “We’ll need the ship, Raul. If you would, I’d like you to take this kayak down the River Tethys until you find the ship, then fly back with it to a world where A. Bettik and I will be waiting.”
“A world in Pax space?” I said, my stomach tightening another notch at the danger present in that simple sentence.
“Yes.”
“Why me?” I said, looking significantly at A. Bettik. I was ashamed at my thought then: Why send a human being … your best friend … when the android can go? I lowered my gaze.
