by Dan Simmons
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 unusual, 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 tomorrows.
Choose again. Yes. Yes.
27
y 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 Grabow, 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 comers.
“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.
“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 A1 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.
