by Дэн Симмонс
Strange things were happening then. Strange things have happened since. I will reserve judgment on whether those pages—and these—could ever have been, or ever will be, read. In the meantime, I will reintroduce myself. My name is Raul Endymion, my first name rhyming with tall—which I am—and my last name deriving from the “abandoned” university city of Endymion on the backwater world of Hyperion. I qualify the word “abandoned” because that quarantined city is where I met the old poet—Martin Silenus, the ancient author of the banned epic poem the Cantos—and that is where my adventure began.
I use the word “adventure” with some irony, and perhaps in the sense that all of life is an adventure. For it is true that while the voyage began as an adventure—an attempt to rescue twelve-year-old Aenea from the Pax and to escort her safely to the distant Old Earth—it has since become a full lifetime of love, loss, and wonder.
Anyway, at the time of this telling, during the week of the Pope’s death, the Old Architect’s death, and Aenea’s inauspicious sixteenth birthday in exile, I was thirty-two years old, still tall, still strong, still trained mostly in hunting, brawling, and watching others lead, still callow, and just teetering on the precipice of falling forever in love with the girl-child I had protected like a little sister and who—overnight, it seemed—had become a girl-woman whom I knew now as a friend. I should also say that the other things I write of here—the events in Pax space, the murder of Paul Duré, the retrieval of the female-thing named Rhadamanth Nemes, the thoughts of Father Federico de Soya—are not surmised or extrapolated or made-up in the way that the old fiction novels were in Martin Silenus’s day. I know these things, down to the level of Father de Soya’s thoughts and Councillor Albedo’s apparel that day, not because I am omniscient, but because of later events and revelations that gave access to such omniscience.
It will make sense later. At least I hope it will.
I apologize for this awkward reintroduction.
The template for Aenea’s cybrid father—a poet named John Keats—said in his last letter of farewell to his friends, “I have always made an awkward bow.” In truth, so have I—whether in departure or greeting or, as is perhaps the case here, in improbable reunion.
So I will return to my memories and ask your indulgence if they do not make perfect sense at my first attempt to share and shape them.
The wind howled and the dust blew for three days and three nights after Aenea’s sixteenth birthday. The girl was gone for all that time. Over the past four years I had grown used to her “time-outs,” as she called them, and I usually did not fret the way I had the first few times she had disappeared for days on end. This time, however, I was more concerned than usual: the death of the Old Architect had left the twenty-seven apprentices and the sixty-some support people at the desert camp—which is what the Old Architect called Taliesin West—anxious and uneasy. The dust storm added to that anxiety, as dust storms always do. Most of the families and support staff lived close by, in one of the desert-masonry dormitories Mr. Wright had his interns build south of the main buildings, and the camp complex itself was almost fortlike with its walls and courtyards and covered walkways—good for scuttling between buildings during a dust storm—but each successive day without either sunlight or Aenea made me increasingly nervous. Several times each day I went to her apprentice shelter: it was the farthest from the main compound, almost a quarter of a mile north toward the mountains. She was never there—she had left the door untethered and a note telling me not to worry, that it was just one of her excursions and that she was taking plenty of water—but every time I visited I appreciated her shelter more. Four years earlier, when she and I had first arrived with a dropship stolen from a Pax warship, both of us exhausted, battered, and burned, not to mention with an android healing in the ship’s autosurgeon, the Old Architect and the other apprentices had greeted us with warmth and acceptance. Mr. Wright had not seemed surprised that a twelve-year-old child had come across world after world via farcaster to find him and to ask to be his apprentice. I remember that first day when the Old Architect had asked her what she knew of architecture—“nothing,” Aenea had replied quietly, “except that you are the one I should learn from.”
Evidently this had been the correct response. Mr. Wright had told her that all of the apprentices who had arrived before her—all twenty-six others, as it turned out—had been asked to design and build their own shelters in the desert as a sort of entry exam. The Old Architect had offered some crude materials from the compound—canvas, stone, cement, a bit of cast-off lumber—but the design and effort were up to the girl.
Before she set to work (not being an apprentice, I made do with a tent close to the main compound), Aenea and I toured the other apprentice shelters. Most were variations on tent-shacks.
They were serviceable and some showed style—one particularly exhibited a nice design flare but, as Aenea pointed out to me, would not keep the sand or rain out with the slightest wind—but none was particularly memorable.
Aenea worked eleven days on her shelter. I helped her do some of the heavy lifting and a bit of the excavating (A. Bettik was still recovering at that time—first in the autosurgeon, then in the compound’s infirmary), but the girl did all of the planning and most of the work. The result was this wonderful shelter that I visited four times a day during this, her last hiatus in the desert. Aenea had excavated the main sections of the shelter so that most of it was below ground level. Then she had set flagstones in place, making sure that they fit tightly, to create a smooth floor. Over the stones she set colorful rugs and blankets she traded for at the Indian Market fifteen miles away. Around the excavated core of the home she set walls that were about a meter high, but with the sunken main room, they seemed taller. They were constructed of the same rough “desert masonry” that Mr. Wright had used in building the walls and superstructure of the main compound buildings and Aenea used the same technique, although she had never heard him describe it.
First, she gathered stones from the desert and the many arroyos and washes around the hilltop compound. The rocks were of every size and color—purple, black, rusty reds, and deep umbers—and some held petroglyphs or fossils. After gathering the stones, Aenea built wooden forms and set the larger rocks in with their flat sides against the inside face of the form. She then spent days in the broiling sun, shoveling sand from the washes and carting it back to her building site in wheelbarrows, mixing it there with cement to form the concrete that held the stones in place as the mixture hardened. It was a rough concrete/stone concoction—desert masonry, Mr. Wright called it—but it was strangely beautiful, the colorful rocks showing through the surface of the concrete, fissures and textures everywhere. Once in place, the walls were about a meter high and thick enough to hold out the desert heat in the daytime and hold in the inner heat at night. Her shelter was more complex than it first appeared to the eye—it was months before I appreciated the subtle tricks she had pulled in its design.
One ducked to enter the vestibule, a stone-and-canvas porte cochere with three broad steps leading one down and around to the wood and masonry portal that served as the entrance to the main room. This twisting, descending vestibule acted as a sort of air lock, sealing out the desert sand and harshness, and the way she had rigged the canvas—almost like overlapping jib sails—improved the air-lock effect. The “main room” was only three meters across and five long, but it seemed much larger. Aenea had used built-in benches around a raised stone table to create a dining and sitting area, and then placed more niches and stone seats near a hearth she had fashioned in the north wall of the shelter. There was an actual stone chimney built into the wall, and it did not touch the canvas or wood at any point. Between the stone walls and the canvas—at about eye height when seated—she had rigged screened windows that ran the length of the north and south sides of the shelter. These panoramic viewslits could be battened down by both canvas and sliding wood shutters, operated from the inside. Overhead, she had used o
ld fiberglass rods found in the compound junk heap to shape the canvas in smooth arches, sudden peaks, cathedral vaults, and odd, folded niches.
She had actually fashioned a bedroom for herself, again removed from the main room by two steps twisted at sixty-degree angles, the entire niche built into the gently rising slope and set back against a huge boulder she had found on the site. There was no water or plumbing out here—we all shared the communal showers and toilets in the compound annex—but Aenea had built a lovely little rock basin and bath next to her bed (a plywood platform with mattress and blankets), and several times a week she would heat water in the main kitchen and carry it to her shelter, bucket by bucket, for a hot bath.
The light through the canvas ceilings and walls was warm at sunrise, buttery at midday, and orange in the evening. In addition, Aenea had deliberately placed the shelter in careful relation to saguaros, prickly pear bushes, and staghorn cactus so that different shadows would fall on different planes of canvas at different times of day. It was a comfortable, pleasant place. And empty beyond description when my young friend was absent.
I mentioned that the apprentices and support staff were anxious after the Old Architect’s death. Distraught might be a better word. I spent most of those three days of Aenea’s absence listening to the concerned babble of almost ninety people—never together, since even the dinner shifts in the dining hall were spaced apart because Mr. Wright had not liked huge crowds at dinner—and the level of panic seemed to grow as the days and dust storms went by. Aenea’s absence was a big part of the hysteria: she was the youngest apprentice at Taliesin—the youngest person, actually—but the others had grown used to asking advice of her and of listening when she spoke. In one week, they had lost both their mentor and their guide. On the fourth morning after her birthday, the dust storms ended and Aenea returned. I happened to be out jogging just after sunrise and saw her coming across the desert from the direction of the McDowell Mountains: she was silhouetted in the morning light, a thin figure with short hair against the corona brilliance, and in that second I thought of the first time I had seen her in the Valley of the Time Tombs on Hyperion. She grinned when she saw me. “Hey, Boo,” she called. It was an old joke based on some book she had read as a very young child. “Hey, Scout,” I called back, answering in the same in-joke language. We stopped when we were five paces apart. My impulse was to hug her and hold her close and beg her not to disappear again. I did not do that.
The rich, low light of morning threw long shadows behind the cholla cacti, grease bushes, and sage, and bathed our all-sunburned skin in an orange glow. “How’re the troops doing?” asked Aenea. I could see that despite her promises to the contrary, she had been fasting during the past three days. She had always been thin, but now her ribs almost showed through her thin cotton shirt. Her lips were dry and cracked. “They upset?” she said.
“They’re shitting bricks,” I said. For years I’d avoided using my Home Guard vocabulary around the kid, but she was sixteen now.
Besides, she had always used a saltier vocabulary than I knew.
Aenea grinned. The brilliant light illuminated the sandy streaks in her short hair. “That’d be good for a bunch of architects, I guess.”
I rubbed my chin, feeling the rough stubble there.
“Seriously, kiddo. They’re pretty upset.”
Aenea nodded. “Yeah. They don’t know what to do or where to go now that Mr. Wright’s gone.” She squinted toward the Fellowship compound, which showed up as little more than asymmetrical bits of stone and canvas just visible above the cacti and scrub brush. Sunlight glinted off unseen windows and one of the fountains. “Let’s get everybody in the music pavilion and talk,” said Aenea, and began striding toward Taliesin.
And thus began our last full day together on Earth.
I am going to interrupt myself here. I hear my own voice on the ’scriber and remember the pause in the telling at this point. What I wanted to do here was tell all about the four years of exile on Old Earth—all about the apprentices and other people at the Taliesin Fellowship, all about the Old Architect and his whims and petty cruelties, as well as about his brilliance and childlike enthusiasms. I wanted to describe the many conversations with Aenea over those forty-eight local months (which—as I never got tired of being amazed by—corresponded perfectly to Hegemony/Pax standard months!) and my slow growth of understanding of her incredible insights and abilities. Finally, I wanted to tell of all my excursions during that time—my trip around the Earth in the dropship, the long driving adventures in North America, my fleeting contact with the other islands of humanity huddled around cybrid figures from the human past (the gathering in Israel and New Palestine around the cybrid Jesus of Nazareth was a memorable group to visit), but primarily, when I hear the brief silence on the ’scriber that took the place of these tales, I remember the reason for my omission.
As I said before, I ’scribed these words in the Schrödinger cat box orbiting Armaghast, while awaiting the simultaneous emission of an isotopic particle and the activation of the particle detector. When these two events coincided, the cyanide gas built into the static-energy field around the recycling equipment would be released.
Death would not be instantaneous, but near enough. While protesting earlier that I would take my time in telling our story—Aenea’s and mine—I realize now that there was some editing, some attempt to get to the important elements before the particle decayed and the gas flowed.
I will not double-guess that decision now, except to say that the four years on Earth would be worth telling about at some other point in time: the ninety people of the Fellowship were decent, complex, devious, and interesting in the way of all intelligent human beings, and their tales should be told. Similarly, my explorations across Earth, both in the dropship and in the 1948 “Woody” station wagon that the Old Architect loaned me, might support an epic poem of their own. But I am not a poet. But I was a tracker in my hunting-guide days, and my job here is to follow the path of Aenea’s growth to womanhood and messiahship without wandering down too many sidetracks. And so I shall. The Old Architect always referred to the Fellowship compound as “desert camp.” Most of the apprentices referred to it as “Taliesin”—which means “Shining Brow” in Welsh. (Mr. Wright was of Welsh distraction. I spent weeks trying to remember a Pax or Outback world named Welsh, before I remembered that the Old Architect had lived and died before spaceflight.) Aenea often referred to the place as “Taliesin West,” which suggested to even someone as dull as me that there had to be a Taliesin East. When I asked her three years earlier, Aenea had explained that the original Mr. Wright had built his first Taliesin Fellowship compound in the early 1930’s in Spring Green, Wisconsin—Wisconsin being one of the political and geographical sub-units of the ancient North American nation-state called the United States of America.When I asked Aenea if the first Taliesin was like this one, she had said, “Not really. There were a series of Wisconsin Taliesins—both homes and fellowship compounds—and most were destroyed by fire. That’s one of the reasons Mr. Wright installed so many pools and fountains here at this compound—sources of water to fight the inevitable fires.”
“And his first Taliesin was built in the 1930’s?” I said.
Aenea shook her head. “He opened his first Taliesin Fellowship in 1932,” she said. “But that was mostly a way to get slave labor from his apprentices—both for building his dream and raising food for him—during the Depression.”
“What was the Depression?”
“Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930’s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Precisely,” said Aenea. “Anyw
ay, long before that, in 1909 A.D… the middle-aged Mr. Wright abandoned his wife and six children and ran away to Europe with a married woman.”
I admit that I blinked at this news. The thought of the Old Architect—a man in his mid-eighties when we had met him four years ago—with a sex life, and a scandalous one at that, took some getting used to. I also wondered what all this had to do with my question about Taliesin East.
Aenea was getting to that. “When he returned with the other woman,” she said, smiling at my rapt attention, “he began building the first Taliesin—his home in Wisconsin—for Mamah…”
“His mother?” I said, totally confused.
“Mamah Borthwick,” said Aenea, spelling the first name for me. “Mrs. Cheney. The Other Woman.”
“Oh.”
The smile fading, she continued. “The scandal had destroyed his architectural practice and made him a branded man in the United States. But he built Taliesin and forged ahead, trying to find new patrons. His first wife, Catherine, would not give him a divorce. The newspapers—those were databanks printed on paper and distributed regularly—thrived on such gossip and fanned the flames of the scandal, not letting it die.”
We had been walking in the courtyard when I asked Aenea the simple question about Taliesin, and I remember pausing by the fountain during this part of her answer. I was always amazed at what this child knew.
