by Дэн Симмонс
Well, we had the grassy field. The ship continued hovering and morphed a stairway to the flower-bedecked lawn next to the gazebo. The young woman crossed the stream, hopping from stepping stone to stepping stone with perfect balance, and came grinning toward me up the grassy knoll.
She was in her early twenties. She had the physical grace and sense of presence I remembered from a thousand images of my young friend.
But I had never seen this woman before in my life.
Could Aenea have changed this much in five years? Could she have disguised herself to hide from the Pax? Had I simply forgotten what she looked like? The latter seemed improbable.
No, impossible. The ship had assured me that it had been five years and some months for Aenea if she was waiting on this world for me, but my entire trip—including the cryogenic fugue part—had taken only about four months. I had aged only a few weeks. I could not have forgotten her. I would never forget her.
“Hello, Raul,” said the young woman with dark hair.
“Hello?” I said.
She stepped closer and extended her hand. She had a firm handshake. “I’m Rachel. Aenea’s described you perfectly.” She laughed. “Of course, we haven’t been expecting anyone else to come calling in a starship looking like this…” She waved her hand in the general direction of the ship hanging there like a vertical balloon bobbing softly in the wind.
“How is Aenea?” I said, my voice sounding strange to me. “Where is she?”
“Oh, she is back at the Temple. She’s working. It’s the middle of the busiest work shift. She couldn’t get away. She asked me to come over and help you dispose of your ship.”
She couldn’t get away. What the hell was this? I’d come through literal hell—suffered kidney stones and broken legs, been chased by Pax troopers, dumped into a world with no land, eaten and regurgitated by an alien—and she couldn’t goddamn get away? I bit my lip, resisting the impulse to say what I was thinking.
I admit that emotion was surging rather high at that moment.
“What do you mean—dispose of my ship?” I said. I looked around. “There has to be someplace for it to land.”
“There isn’t really,” said the young woman named Rachel. Looking at her now in the bright sunlight, I realized that she was probably a little older than Aenea would be—mid-twenties perhaps. Her eyes were brown and intelligent, her brown hair was chopped off as carelessly as Aenea used to cut hers, her skin was tanned from long hours in the sun, her hands were callused with work, and there were laugh lines at the corners of her eyes.
“Why don’t we do this,” said Rachel. “Why don’t you get what you need from the ship, take a comlog or communicator so you can call the ship back when you need it, get two skinsuits and two rebreathers out of the storage locker, and then tell the ship to hop back up to the third moon—the second smallest captured asteroid. There’s a deep crater there for it to hide in, but that moon’s in a near geosynchronous orbit and it keeps one face toward this hemisphere all the time. You could tightbeam it and it could be back here in a few minutes.”
I looked suspiciously at her. “Why the skinsuits and rebreathers?” The ship had them. They were designed for benign hard-vacuum environments where true space armor was not required. “The air seems thick enough here,” I said.
“It is,” said Rachel. “There’s a surprisingly rich oxygen atmosphere at this altitude. But Aenea told me to ask you to bring the skinsuits and rebreathers.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know, Raul,” said Rachel. Her eyes were placid, seemingly clear of deceit or guile.
“Why does the ship have to hide?” I said. “Is the Pax here?”
“Not yet,” said Rachel. “But we’ve been expecting them for the last six months or so. Right now, there are no spacecraft on or around Tien Shan… with the exception now of your ship. No aircraft either. No skimmers, no EMV’s, no thopters or copters… only paragliders… the flyers… and they would never be out that far.”
I nodded but hesitated.
“The Dugpas saw something they couldn’t explain today,” continued Rachel. “The speck of your ship against Chomo Lori, I mean. But eventually they explain everything in terms of tendrel, so that won’t be a problem.”
“What are tendrel?” I said. “And who are the Dugpas?”
“Tendrel are signs,” said Rachel. “Divinations within the shamanistic Buddhist tradition prevalent in this region of the Mountains of Heaven. Dugpas are the… well, the word translates literally as “highest.” The people who dwell at the upper altitudes. There are also the Drukpas, the valley people… that is, the lower fissures… and the Drungpas, the wooded valley people… mostly those who live in the great fern forests and bonsai-bamboo stands on the western reaches of Phari Ridge and beyond.”
“So Aenea’s at the Temple?” I said stubbornly, resisting following the young woman’s “suggestion” for hiding the ship.
“Yes.”
“When can I see her?”
“As soon as we walk over there.” Rachel smiled.
“How long have you known Aenea?”
“About four years, Raul.”
“Do you come from this world?”
She smiled again, patient with my interrogation.
“No. When you meet the Dugpas and the others, you’ll see that I’m not native. Most of the people in this region are from Chinese, Tibetan, and other Central Asian stock.”
“Where are you from?” I asked flatly, sounding rude in my own ears.
“I was born on Barnard’s World,” she said. “A backwater farming planet. Cornfields and woods and long evenings and a few good universities, but not much else.”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. It made me more suspicious. The “good universities” that had been Barnard’s World’s claim to fame during the Hegemony had long since been converted to Church academies and seminaries. I had the sudden wish that I could see the flesh of this young woman’s chest—see if there were a cruciform there, I mean. It would be all too easy for me to send the ship away and walk into a Pax trap. “Where did you meet Aenea?” I said. “Here?”
“No, not here. On Amritsar.”
“Amritsar?” I said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s not unusual. Amritsar is a Solmev-marginal world way out back of the Outback. It was only settled about a century ago—refugees from a civil war on Parvati. A few thousand Sikhs and a few thousand Sufi eke out a living there. Aenea was hired to design a desert community center there and I hired on to do the survey and ramrod the construction crew. I’ve been with her ever since.”
I nodded, still hesitating. I was filled with something not quite disappointment, surging like anger but not quite as clear, bordering on jealousy. But that was absurd. “A. Bettik?” I said, feeling a sudden intuition that the android had died in the past five years. “Is he…”
“He headed out yesterday for our biweekly provision trek to Phari Marketplace,” said the woman named Rachel. She touched my upper arm. “A. Bettik’s fine. He should be back by moonrise tonight. Come on. Get your stuff. Tell the ship about hiding on the third moon. You’d rather hear all this stuff from Aenea.”
I ended up taking little more than a change of clothes, good boots, my small binoculars, a small sheath knife, the skinsuits and rebreathers, and a palm-sized com unit-journal from the ship. I stuffed all this into a rucksack, hopped down the steps to the meadow, and told the ship what it should do. My anthropomorphizing had reached the point where I expected the ship to sulk at the idea of going back into hibernation mode—on an airless moon this time—but the ship acknowledged the order, suggested that it check in via tightbeam once daily to make sure that the com unit was functioning, and then it floated up and away, dwindling to a speck and then disappearing, like nothing so much as a balloon that has had its string cut.
Rachel gave me a wool chuba to pull on over my therm jacket. I noticed the nylon harness she wore over her jacket an
d trousers, the metal climbing equipment hanging on straps, and asked about it.
“Aenea has a harness for you at the temple site,” she said, rattling the hardware on the sling. “This is the most advanced technology on this world. The metalworkers at Potala demand and receive a king’s ransom for this stuff—crampons, cable pulleys, folding ice axes and ice hammers, chocks, ’biners, lost arrows, bongs, birdbeaks, you name it.”
“Will I need it?” I said dubiously. We had learned some basic ice-climbing techniques in the Home Guard—rappelling, crevasse work, that sort of thing—and I had done some roped-up quarry climbing when I worked with Avrol Hume on the Beak, but I wasn’t sure about real mountaineering. I didn’t like heights.
“You’ll need it but you’ll get used to it quickly,” assured Rachel and set off, hopping across the stepping stones and running lightly up the path toward the cliff’s edge. The gear jangled softly on her harness, like steel chimes or the bells around some mountain goat’s neck.
The ten-klick walk south along the sheer rockface was easy enough once I got used to the narrow ledge, the dizzy-making sheer drop to our right, the bright glare from the incredible mountain to the north and from the churning clouds far below, and the heady surge of energy from the rich atmosphere.
“Yes,” said Rachel when I mentioned the air. “The oxygen-rich atmosphere here would be a problem if there were forests or savannahs to burn. You should see the monsoon lightning storms. But the bonsai forest back there at the fissure and the fern forests over on the rainy side of Phari is about all we have in terms of combustible materials. They’re all fire species. And the bonsai wood that we use in the building is almost too dense to burn.”
For a while we walked in single file and in silence. My attention was on the ledge. We had just come around a sharp corner that required me to duck my head under the overhang when the ledge widened, the view opened up, and there was Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, the “Temple Hanging in Air.”
From this closer view, a bit below and to the east of the Temple, it still looked to be magically suspended in midair above nothing. Some of the lower, older buildings had stone or brick bases, but the majority were built out over air. These pagoda-style buildings were sheltered by the great rock overhang some seventy-five meters above the main structures, but ladders and platforms zigged and zagged up almost to the underside of that overhang.
We came in among people. The many-hued chubas and ubiquitous climbing slings were not the only common denominators here: most of the faces that peered at me with polite curiosity seemed to be of Old Earth Asian stock; the people were relatively short for a roughly standard-g world; they nodded and stepped aside respectfully as Rachel led the way through the crowds, up the ladders, through the incense-and-sandalwood-smelling interior halls of some of the buildings, out and across porches and swinging bridges and up delicate staircases. Soon we were in the upper levels of the Temple where construction proceeded at a rapid pace. The small figures I had seen through binoculars were now living, breathing human beings grunting under heavy baskets of stone, individual people smelling of sweat and honest labor. The silent efficiency I had watched from the ship’s terrace now became a clamorous mixture of hammers pounding, chisels ringing, pick-axes echoing, and workers shouting and gesturing amid the controlled chaos common to any construction site.
After several staircases and three long ladders rising to the highest platform, I paused to catch my breath before climbing the last ladder. Rich oxygen atmosphere or no, this climbing was hard work. I noticed Rachel watching me with the equanimity that could easily be mistaken for indifference.
I looked up to see a young woman stepping over the edge of the high platform and descending gracefully. For the briefest of seconds I felt my heart pound with nervousness—Aenea!—but then I saw how the woman moved, saw the short-cropped dark hair from the back, and knew that it was not my friend.
Rachel and I stepped back from the base of the ladder as the woman jumped down the last few rungs. She was large and solid—as tall as I was—with strong features and amazing violet eyes. She looked to be in her forties or early fifties, standard, was deeply tanned and very fit, and from the white wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, it seemed that she also enjoyed laughing. “Raul Endymion,” she said, thrusting out her hand. “I’m Theo Bernard. I help build things.”
I nodded. Her handshake was as firm as Rachel’s.
“Aenea’s just finishin’ up.” Theo Bernard gestured toward the ladder.
I glanced at Rachel.
“You go on up,” she said. “We’ve got things to do.”
I went up hand over hand. There were probably sixty rungs on the bamboo ladder, and I was aware as I climbed that the platform below was very narrow if one fell, the drop beyond it endless.
Stepping onto the platform, I saw the rough construction shacks and areas of chiseled stone where the last temple building would be. I was aware of the countless tons of stone starting just ten meters above me where the overhang angled up and out like a granite ceiling. Small birds with v-shaped tails darted and swooped among the cracks and fissures there.
Then all my attention became fixed on the figure emerging from the larger of the two construction shacks.
It was Aenea. The bold, dark eyes, the unself-conscious grin, the sharp cheekbones and delicate hands, the blond-brown hair cut carelessly and blowing now in the strong wind along the cliff face. She was not that much taller than when I had seen her last—I could still have kissed her forehead without bending—but she was changed.
I took in a sudden breath. I had watched people grow and come of age, of course, but most of these had been my friends when I was also growing and coming of age.
Obviously I had never had children, and my careful observation of someone maturing had only been during the four years and some months of my friendship with this child. In most ways, I realized, Aenea still looked much as she had on her sixteenth birthday, five of her years earlier, minus now the last of her baby fat, with sharper cheekbones and firmer features, wider hips and slightly more prominent breasts. She wore whip trousers, high boots, a green shirt I remembered from Taliesin West, and a khaki jacket that was blowing in the wind. I could see that her arms and legs were stronger, more muscled, than I remembered from Old Earth—but not that much was changed about her.
Everything was changed about her. The child I had known was gone. A woman stood in her place; a strange woman walking quickly toward me across the rough platform. It was not just strong features and perhaps a bit more firm flesh on her lean form, it was… a solidity. A presence. Aenea had always been the most alive, animated, and complete person I had ever known, even as a child.
Now that the child was gone, or at least submerged in the adult, I could see the solidity within that animated aura.
“Raul!” She crossed the last few steps to me, stood close, and grasped my forearms in her strong hands.
For a second I thought that she was going to kiss me on the mouth the way she had… the way the child of sixteen had… during the last minutes we had been together on Old Earth. Instead, she raised one long-fingered hand and set it against my face, running fingers down the line of my cheek to my chin. Her dark eyes were alive with… what? Not amusement. Vitality, perhaps.
Happiness, I hoped.
I felt tongue-tied. I started to speak, stopped, raised my right hand as if to touch her cheek, dropped it.
“Raul… damn… it is so good to see you!” She took her hand away from my face and hugged me with an intensity bordering on violence.
“It’s good to see you too, kiddo.” I patted her back, feeling the rough material of her jacket under my palm.
She stepped back, grinning very broadly now, and grabbed my upper arms. “Was the trip to get the ship terrible? Tell me.”
“Five years!” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me…”
“I did. I shouted it.”
“When? At Hannibal? When I was…”
&nb
sp; “Yes. Then I shouted “I love you.” Remember?”
“I remember that, but… if you knew… five years, I mean…”
We were both talking at once, almost babbling.
I found myself trying to tell her all about the farcasters, the kidney stone on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people, the cloud world, the cuttlefish-squid thing—all while I was asking her questions and babbling on again before she could answer.
Aenea kept grinning. “You look the same, Raul. You look the same. But then, hell, I guess you should. It’s only been… what… a week or two of travel and a cold sleep on the ship for you.”
I felt a wash of anger amid the happy giddiness. “Goddammit, Aenea. You should have told me about the time-debt. And maybe about the farcast to a world with no river or solid ground too. I could have died.”
Aenea was nodding. “But I didn’t know for sure, Raul. There was no certainty, only the usual… possibilities. That’s why A. Bettik and I built the parasail into the kayak.” She grinned again. “I guess it worked.”
“But you knew it would be a long separation. Years for you.” I did not phrase it as a question.
“Yes.”
I started to speak, felt the anger wash away as quickly as it had surged, and took her by the arms. “It’s good to see you, kiddo.”
She hugged me again, kissing me on the cheek this time the way she had as a kid when I had delighted her with some joke or comment. “Come on,” she said. “The afternoon shift is over. I’ll show you our platform and introduce you to some of the people here.”
Our platform? I followed her down ladders and across bridges that I had not noticed while walking with Rachel. “Have you been all right, Aenea? I mean… is everything all right?”
“Yes.” She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at me again. “Everything is good, Raul.” We crossed a terrace on the side of the topmost of three pagodas stacked one atop the other. I could feel the platform shaking a bit as we walked the narrow terrace, and when we stepped out onto the narrow platform between pagodas, the entire structure vibrated. I noticed that people were leaving the westernmost pagoda and following the narrow ledge trail back along the cliff face.
