by Дэн Симмонс
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 internal 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 Earth 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 QomRiyadh 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.
“It will be a dangerous trip,” said Aenea. “I believe that you can do it, Raul. I trust you to find the ship and then find us.”
I felt my shoulders slump. “All right,” I said. “Do we head back to where we came through the farcaster before?” We had come through from God’s Grove on a small stream near the Old Architect’s masterpiece building, Fallingwater. It was two thirds of a continent away.
“No,” said Aenea. “Closer. On the Mississippi River.”
“All right,” I said again. I had flown over the Mississippi. It was almost two thousand k
licks east of here. “When do I go? Tomorrow?”
Aenea touched my wrist. “No,” she said, tiredly but firmly. “Tonight. Right now.”
I did not protest. I did not argue. Without speaking, I took the bow of the kayak, A. Bettik took the stern, Aenea held the center steady, and we carried the damned thing back to the dropship in the deepening desert night.
3
The Grand Inquisitor was late. Vatican Air/space Traffic Control routed the Inquisitor’s EMV across normally closed airspace near the spaceport, shut down all airborne traffic on the east side of the Vatican, and held a thirty-thousand-ton robot freighter in orbital final approach until after the GI’s car had flown across the southeast corner of the landing grid.
Inside the specially armored EMV, the Grand Inquisitor—His Eminence John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa—did not glance out the window or at the video monitors at the lovely sight of the approaching Vatican, its walls rosy in the morning light, or at the busy, twenty-lane highway called the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele beneath them, glimmering like a sunlit river because of sunlight on windshields and bubbletops. The Grand Inquisitor’s attention was focused solely on the intelligence update scrolling by on his comlog template. When the last paragraph had scrolled past and was committed to memory and deleted to oblivion, the Grand Inquisitor said to his aide, Father Farrell, “And there have been no more meetings with the Mercantilus?”
Father Farrell, a thin man with flat gray eyes, never smiled, but a twitch of his cheek muscle conveyed the simulation of humor to the Cardinal. “None.”
“You’re certain?”
“Absolutely.”
The Grand Inquisitor sat back in the EMV’s cushions and allowed himself a brief smile. The Mercantilus had made only that one early, disastrous approach to any of the papal candidates—the sounding out of Lourdusamy—and the Inquisitor had heard the complete recording of that meeting. The Cardinal allowed himself another few seconds of smile: Lourdusamy had been right to think that his conference room was bugproof—absolutely resistant to taps, bugs, wires, and squirts. Any recording device in the room—even implanted in one of the participants—would have been detected and homed in on. Any attempt to tightbeam out would have been detected and blocked. It had been one of the Grand Inquisitor’s finest moments, getting the complete visual and auditory recording of that meeting.
Monsignor Lucas Oddi had gone in to the Vatican Hospital for a routine eyes, ears, and heart replacement two local years ago.
The surgeon had been approached by Father Farrell and the full weight of the Holy Office had been shown ready to descend upon the poor medico’s neck if he did not implant certain state-of-the-art devices in the Monsignor’s body. The surgeon did so and died the true death—no resurrection possible—in a car accident far out over the Big North Shallow shortly after that.
Monsignor Lucas Oddi had no electronic or mechanical bugs in his system, but connected to his optic nerve were seven fully biological nanorecorders. Four auditory nanorecorders were tapped into his auditory nerve system. These biorecorders did not transmit inside the body, but stored the data in chemical form and physically carried it through the bloodstream to the squirt transmitter—also fully organic—set into Monsignor Oddi’s left ventricle. Ten minutes after Oddi had left the secured area of Cardinal Lourdusamy’s office, the transmitter had squirted a compressed record of the meeting to one of the Grand Inquisitor’s nearby relay transponders. It was not real-time eavesdropping from Lourdusamy’s bugproof rooms—a fact that still worried Cardinal Mustafa—but it was as close to it as current technology and stealth could get.
“Isozaki is frightened,” said Father Farrell. “He thinks…”
The Grand Inquisitor raised one finger. Farrell stopped in mid-sentence. “You do not know that he is frightened,” said the Cardinal. “You do not know what he thinks. You can only know what he says and does and infer his thoughts and reactions from that. Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.”
Father Farrell bowed his head in agreement and submission.
The EMV touched down on the landing pad atop Castel Sant’Angelo. The Grand Inquisitor was out the hatch and down the ramp so quickly that Farrell had to trot to catch up to his master. Security commandos, dressed in Holy Office red armorcloth, fell into escort step ahead and behind, but the Grand Inquisitor waved them away. He wanted to finish his conversation with Father Farrell. He touched his aide’s left arm—not out of affection, but to close the bone-conduction circuits so that he could subvocalize—and said, “Isozaki and the Mercantilus leaders are not frightened. If Lourdusamy wanted them purged, they would be dead by now. Isozaki had to get his message of support to the Cardinal and he did. It’s the Pax military who are frightened.”
Farrell frowned and subvocalized on the bone circuit. “The military? But they haven’t played their card yet. They have done nothing disloyal.”
“Precisely,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “The Mercantilus has made its move and knows that Lourdusamy will turn to them when the time comes. Pax Fleet and the rest have been terrified for years that they’ll make the wrong choice. Now they’re terrified that they’ve waited too long.”
Farrell nodded. They had taken a dropshaft deep into the stone bowels of Castel Sant’Angelo, and now they moved past armed guards and through lethal forcefields down a dark corridor. At an unmarked door, two red-garbed commandos stood at attention, energy rifles raised.
“Leave us,” said the Grand Inquisitor and palmed the door’s identyplate. The steel panel slid up and out of sight. The corridor had been stone and shadows. Inside the room, everything was bright light, instruments, and sterile surfaces. Technicians looked up as the Grand Inquisitor and Farrell entered. One wall of the room was taken up by square doors, looking like nothing so much as the multitiered human file drawers of an ancient morgue. One of those doors was open and a naked man lay on a gurney that had been pulled from the cold storage drawer there.
The Grand Inquisitor and Farrell stopped on either side of the gurney.
“He is reviving well,” said the technician who stood at the console. “We’re holding him just beneath the surface. We can bring him up in seconds.”
Father Farrell said, “How long was his last cold sleep?”
“Sixteen local months,” said the technician. “Thirteen and a half standard.”
“Bring him up,” said the Grand Inquisitor.
The man’s eyelids began to flutter within seconds. He was a small man, muscular but compact, and there were no marks or bruises on his body. His wrists and ankles were bound by sticktite. A cortical shunt had been implanted just behind his left ear and an almost invisible bundle of microfibers ran from it to the console.
The man on the gurney moaned.
“Corporal Bassin Kee,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Can you hear me?”
Corporal Kee made an unintelligible sound.
The Grand Inquisitor nodded as if satisfied. “Corporal Kee,” he said pleasantly, conversationally, “shall we pick up where we left off?”
“How long… “mumbled Kee between dry, stiff lips. “How long have I been…”
Father Farrell had moved to the technician’s console. Now he nodded to the Grand Inquisitor.
Ignoring the corporal’s question, John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa said softly, “Why did you and Father Captain de Soya let the girl go?”
Corporal Kee had opened his eyes, blinking as if the light pained him, but now he closed them again. He did not speak. The Grand Inquisitor nodded to his aide. Father Farrell’s hand passed over icons on the console diskey, but did not yet activate any of them.
“Once again,” said the Grand Inquisitor.
“Why did you and de Soya allow the girl and her criminal allies to escape on God’s Grove? Who were you working for? What was your motivation?”
Corporal Kee lay on his back, his fists clenched and his eyes shut fast. He did not answer.
; The Grand Inquisitor tilted his head ever so slightly to the left and Father Farrell waved two fingers over one of the console icons. The icons were as abstract as hieroglyphics to the untutored eye, but Farrell knew them well. The one he had chosen would have translated as crushed testicles. On the gurney, Corporal Kee gasped and opened his mouth to scream, but the neural inhibitors blocked that reaction. The short man’s jaws opened as wide as they could and Father Farrell could hear the muscles and tendons stretching.
The Grand Inquisitor nodded and Farrell removed his fingers from the activation zone above the icon. Corporal Kee’s entire body convulsed on the gurney, his stomach muscles rippling in tension.
“It is only virtual pain, Corporal Kee,” whispered the Grand Inquisitor. “A neural illusion. Your body is not marked.”
On the slab, Kee was straining to raise his head to look down at his body, but the sticktite band held his head in place.
“Or perhaps not,” continued the Cardinal. “Perhaps this time we have resorted to older, less refined methods.” He took a step closer to the gurney so that the man could see his face. “Again… why did you and Father Captain de Soya let the girl go on God’s Grove? Why did you attack your crewmate, Rhadamanth Nemes?”
Corporal Kee’s mouth worked until his back teeth became visible. “From… from… fuck you,” he managed, his jaws tight against the shaking that was wracking him.
“Of course,” said the Grand Inquisitor and nodded to Father Farrell.
This time, the icon Farrell activated could be translated as hot wire behind the right eye. Corporal Kee opened his mouth in a silent scream.
“Again,” said the Grand Inquisitor softly. “Tell us.”
“Excuse me, Your Eminence,” said Father Farrell, glancing at his comlog, “but the Conclave Mass begins in forty-five minutes.”
The Grand Inquisitor waved his fingers. “We have time, Martin. We have time.” He touched Corporal Kee’s upper arm. “Tell us these few facts, Corporal, and you will be bathed, dressed, and released. You have sinned against your Church and your Lord by this betrayal, but the essence of the Church is forgiveness. Explain your betrayal, and all will be forgiven.”
