by Дэн Симмонс
“Ready to see the ‘where’?” said Rachel.
“Yeah.”
“Pod,” said Rachel, “transparent surface, please.”
Suddenly there was nothing separating us from the outside. I almost shouted in terror. Instead, I flailed my arms and legs trying to find a solid surface to cling to until Rachel kicked closer and steadied me with a firm hand.
We were in space. The surrounding pod had simply disappeared. We were floating in space—seemed to be floating in space, except for the presence of air to breathe—and we were far out on a branch of a… Tree is not the right word. I had seen trees. This was not a tree.
I had heard much about the old Templar worldtrees, had seen the stump of the Worldtree on God’s Grove—and I’d heard about the kilometers-long shiptrees that had traveled between the star systems back in Martin Silenus’s pilgrim days.
This was not a worldtree or a shiptree.
I had heard wild legends—from Aenea actually, so they were probably not legends—of a tree-ring around a star, a fantastical braided ring of living material stretching all the way around an Old Earth System-like sun. I had once tried to calculate how much living material that would require, and decided that it had to be nonsense.
This was no tree-ring.
What stretched out on every side of me, curving inward across expanses too large for my planet-formed mind to take in, was a branched and interwoven sphere of living plant material—trunks tens or hundreds of kilometers across, branches klicks wide, leaves hundreds of meters across, trailing root systems stretching like God’s synapses for hundreds, no… thousands of kilometers into space—trellised and wrapped branches stretching out and inward in all directions, trunks the length of Old Earth’s Mississippi River looking like tiny twigs in the distance, tree shapes the size of my home continent of Aquila on Hyperion blending into thousands of other clumps and masses of greenery, all bending inward and away, on all sides, in every direction… there were many black gaps, holes into space, some gaps larger than the trunks and greenery lacing through them… but nowhere were the gaps complete… everywhere the trunks and branches and roots intertwined, opening uncounted billions of green leaves to the star blazing away in the locus of vacuum at the center of…
I closed my eyes.
“This can’t be real,” I said.
“It is,” said Rachel.
“The Ousters?” I said.
“Yes,” said Aenea’s friend, the child of the Cantos. “And the Templars. And the ergs. And… others. It’s alive but a construct… a minded thing.”
“Impossible,” I said. “It would take millions of years to grow this… sphere.”
“Biosphere,” said Rachel, smiling.
I shook my head again. “Biosphere is an old term. It’s just the closed vivisystem on and around a planet.”
“This is a biosphere,” Rachel said again. “Only there are no planets here. Comets, yes, but no planets.” She pointed.
In the far distance, perhaps hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where the interior of this living sphere began to fade to a green blur even in the unblinking vacuum, a long, white streak moved slowly through the black gap between trunks.
“A comet,” I repeated stupidly.
“For watering,” said Rachel. “They have to use millions of them. Luckily there are many billions in the Oört cloud. More billions in the Kuiper Belt.”
I stared. There were other white specks out there, each with a long, glowing tail. Some moved between the trunks and branches as I watched, giving me some idea of the scale of this biosphere. The comet trajectories were routed through the gaps in the plant material. If this is truly a sphere, the comets would have to pass back through the living globe on their way out-system. What kind of confidence does it take to do such a thing? “What is this thing we’re in?” I said.
“An environmental pod,” said Rachel. “Life bulb. This one is tailored for medical duty. It’s not only been monitoring your IV drip, vital signs, and tissue regeneration, it’s been growing and manufacturing many of the medicines and other chemicals.”
I reached out and touched the nearly transparent material. “How thick is it?”
“About a millimeter,” said Rachel. “But very strong. It can shield us from most micrometeorite impacts.”
“Where do the Ousters get such a material?”
“They biofacture the genes and it grows itself,” said Rachel. “Do you feel up to going out to see Aenea and meeting some people? Everyone’s been waiting for your awakening.”
“Yes,” I said, and then, quickly, “no! Rachel?”
She floated there, waiting. I saw how lustrous her dark eyes were in the amazing light. Much like my darling’s.
“Rachel…” I began awkwardly.
She waited, floating, reaching out to touch the transparent pod wall to orient herself heads-up in relation to me.
“Rachel, we haven’t really talked much…”
“You didn’t like me,” said the young woman with a slight smile.
“That’s not true… I mean, it was true, in a way… but it’s because I just didn’t understand things at first. It had been five years for Aenea that I’d been away… it was difficult… I guess that I was jealous.”
She arched a dark eyebrow. “Jealous, how, Raul? Did you think that Aenea and I were lovers all those standard years you were gone?”
“Well, no… I mean, I didn’t know…”
Rachel held up a hand, sparing me further flummoxing. “We aren’t,” she said. “We never were. Aenea would never have considered such a thing. Theo might have entertained the possibility, but she knew from the start that Aenea and I were destined to love certain men.”
I stared. Destined? Rachel smiled again. I could imagine that grin on the little girl Sol Weintraub had talked about in his Hyperion Canto. “Don’t worry, Raul. I happen to know for a fact that Aenea has never loved anyone but you. Even when she was a little girl. Even before she met you. You’ve always been her chosen one.” The young woman’s smile became rueful. “We should all be so lucky.”
I started to speak, hesitated.
Rachel’s smile faded. “Oh. She told you about the one-year eleven-month one-week six-hour interregnum?”
“Yes,” I said. “And about her having…”
I stopped. It would be foolish to choke up in front of this strong woman. She would never look at me the same again.
“A baby?” finished Rachel quickly.
I looked at her as if trying to find some answer in her handsome features. “Did Aenea tell you about it?” I said, feeling like I was betraying my dear friend somewhat by trying to get this information from someone else. But I could not stop.
“Did you know at the time what…”
“Where she was?” said Rachel, returning my intense gaze. “What was happening to her? That she was getting married?”
I could only nod.
“Yes,” said Rachel. “We knew.”
“Were you there with her?”
Rachel seemed to hesitate, as if weighing her answer. “No,” she said at last. “A. Bettik, Theo, and I waited for almost two years for her to return. We carried on her… ministry? Mission?… Whatever it is, we carried it on while she was gone… sharing some of her lessons, finding people who wished to partake of communion, letting them know when she would return.”
“So you knew when she would return?”
“Yes,” said Rachel. “To the day.”
“How?”
“That’s when she had to return,” said the dark-haired woman. “She had taken every possible minute that she could without jeopardizing her mission. The Pax was hunting for us the next day… they would have seized all of us if Aenea had not returned and farcast us away.”
I nodded, but was not thinking about close calls with the Pax. “Did you meet… him?” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep my tone neutral.
Rachel’s expression remained serious. “Father to their
child, you mean? Aenea’s husband?”
I felt that Rachel was not trying to be cruel, but the words tore at me far worse than had Nemes’s claws. “Yes,” I said. “Him.”
Rachel shook her head. “None of us had met him when she went away.”
“But you do know why she chose him to be the father of her child?” I persisted, feeling like the Grand Inquisitor we had left behind on T’ien Shan.
“Yes,” said Rachel, returning my gaze, giving me no more.
“Was it something to do with her… her mission?”
I said, feeling my throat growing tighter and tighter, my voice more strained. “Is it something she had to do… some reason the child had to be born to them? Can you tell me anything, Rachel?”
She took my wrist then, gripping it strongly. “Raul, you know that Aenea will explain this when it’s time to do so.”
I pulled away, making a rude noise. “When it’s time,” I growled. “Jesus H. Christ, I’m sick of hearing that phrase. And I’m sick of waiting.”
Rachel shrugged. “Confront her then. Threaten to beat her up if she doesn’t tell you. You clobbered that Nemes-thing… Aenea shouldn’t be a problem.”
I glowered at the woman.
“Seriously, Raul, this is between you and Aenea. All I can tell you is that you are the only man she has ever talked about, and—as far as I can tell—the only man she has ever loved.”
“How the hell can you…” I began angrily and then forced myself to shut up. I patted her arm awkwardly, the motion making me begin to pivot around the center of my own axis. It was hard to stay near someone in zero-g without touching them. “Thank you, Rachel,” I said.
“Ready to go see everyone?”
I took a breath. “Almost,” I said. “Can this pod surface be made reflective?”
“Pod,” said Rachel, “ninety percent translucence. High interior reflectivity.” To me she said, “Checking in the mirror before your big date?”
The surface had become about as reflective as a still puddle of water—not a perfect mirror, but clear enough and bright enough to show me a Raul Endymion with scars on his face and bare scalp, the skin on his skull a babyish pink, traces of bruise and swelling under and around his eyes, and thin… very thin. The bones and muscles of my face and upper body seemed to have been sketched in bold pencil strokes. My eyes looked different.
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said again.
Rachel made a motion with her hand. “The autosurgeon wanted you for another week, but Aenea couldn’t wait. The scars aren’t permanent… at least most of them. The pod medicine in the IV is taking care of the regeneration. Your hair will start growing back in two or three standard weeks.”
I touched my scalp. It was like patting the scarred and especially tender butt of an ugly newborn. “Two or three weeks,” I said. “Great. Fucking great.”
“Don’t sweat it,” said Rachel. “I think it looks rather dashing, actually. I’d keep that look if I were you, Raul. Besides, I hear that Aenea is a pushover for older men. And right now, you certainly look older.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
“You’re welcome,” said Rachel. “Pod. Open iris. Access to main pressurized stem connector.”
She led the way out, kicking and floating ahead of me through the irising wall.
Aenea hugged me so hard when I came into the room… pod… that I wondered if my broken ribs might have given way again. I hugged her back just as hard.
The trip through the pressurized stem connector had been commonplace enough, if one counted being shot down a flexible, translucent, two-meter-wide pipeline at speeds up to what I estimated as sixty klicks per hour—they used currents of oxygen flowing at high speeds in opposite directions to give a boost to one’s kicking and swimming through air—all the while other people, mostly very thin, hairless, and exceptionally tall other people, whizzed by silently in the opposite direction at closing speeds in excess of 120 klicks per hour, missing us by centimeters. Then there were the hub pods, into which Rachel and I were accelerated at high speed, like corpuscles being blasted into ventricles and auricles of a huge heart, and through which we tumbled, kicked, avoided other high-speed travelers, and exited via one of a dozen other stem connector openings. I was lost within minutes, but Rachel seemed to know her way—she pointed out that there were subtle colors embedded in the plant flesh over each exit—and soon we had entered a pod not much larger than mine, but crowded with cubbies, sticktite seating areas, and people. Some of the people—like Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, and Lhomo Dondrub—I knew well: other people there—Father Captain de Soya, obviously renewed and recovered from his terrible wounds and wearing a priest’s black trousers, tunic, and Roman collar, Sergeant Gregorius in his Swiss Guard combat fatigues—I had met recently and knew by sight; other people, like the long, thin, otherworldly Ousters and the hooded Templars were wondrous and strange, but well within my range of understanding; while still other individuals there—quickly introduced by Aenea as the Templar True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen and the former Hegemony FORCE Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, I knew of but did not actually believe I was meeting. More than Rachel or the fact of Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, these were figures not just from the old poet’s Cantos but archetypes from deep myth, long dead at the very least, and probably never real to begin with in the fixed, everyday, eat-sleep-and-use-the-toilet firmament of things.
And finally in this zero-gravity Ouster pod there were the other people who were not people at all, at least from my frame of reference: such as the willowy green beings who were introduced by Aenea as LL-EEOONN and OO-EEAALL, two of the few surviving Seneschai empaths from Hebron—alien and intelligent beings. I looked at these strange creatures—the palest cypress-green skin and eyes; bodies so thin that I could have encircled their torso with my fingers; symmetrical like us with two arms, two legs, a head, but, of course, not really like us at all; limbs articulated more like single, unbroken, fluid lines than evolved of hinged bone and gristle; splayed digits like toads’ hands; and heads more like a human fetus’s than a human adult’s. Their eyes were little more than shadowy spots on the green flesh of their faces.
The Seneschai had been reported to have died out during the early days of the Hegira… they were little more than legend, even less real than the tale of the soldier Kassad or the Templar Het Masteen.
One of these green legends brushed its three-fingered hand over my palm as we were introduced.
There were other non-human, non-Ouster, non-android entities in the pod. Floating near the translucent wall of the pod were what looked to be large, greenish-white platelets—soft, shuddering saucers of soft material—each almost two meters across. I had seen these life-forms before… on the cloud world where I had been eaten by the sky squid.
Not eaten, M. Endymion, came surges of language echoing in my head, only transported.
Telepathy? I thought, half directing the query to the platelets. I remembered the surge of language-thought on the cloud world, and how I had wondered where it had originated.
It was Aenea who answered. “It feels like telepathy,” she said softly, “but there’s nothing mystical about it. The Akerataeli learned our language the old-fashioned way—their zeplin symbiotes heard the sound vibrations and the Akerataeli broke it down and analyzed it. They control the zeplins by a form of long-distance, very tightly focused microwave pulses…”
“The zeplin was the thing that swallowed me on the cloud world,” I said.
“Yes,” said Aenea.
“Like the zeplins on Whirl?”
“Yes, and in Jupiter’s atmosphere as well.”
“I thought that they were hunted to extinction during the early Hegira years.”
“They were eradicated on Whirl,” said Aenea. “And even before the Hegira on Jupiter. But you weren’t paragliding your kayak on Jupiter or Whirl… but on another oxygen-rich gas giant six hundred light-years into the Outback.”
I nodded. “I
’m sorry I interrupted. You were saying… microwave impulses…”
Aenea made that graceful throwing-away gesture I’d known since she was a child. “Just that they control their zeplin symbiote partners’ actions by precise microwave stimulation of certain nerve and brain centers. We’ve given the Akerataeli permission to stimulate our speech centers so that we “hear” their messages. I take it that it’s rather like playing a complicated piano for them…”
I nodded but did not really understand.
“The Akerataeli are also a spacefaring race,” said Father Captain de Soya. “Over the eons, they have colonized more than ten thousand oxygen-rich gas giant worlds.”
“Ten thousand!” I said. I think that for a moment my jaw actually hung slack. In humankind’s more than twelve hundred years of traveling in space we had explored and settled on less than ten percent of that number of planets.
“The Akerataeli have been at it longer than we,” said de Soya softly.
I looked at the gently vibrating platelets. They had no eyes that I could see, certainly no ears. Were they hearing us? They must… one of them had responded to my thoughts. Could they read minds as well as stimulate language-thoughts? While I was staring at them, the conversation between the humans and Ousters in the room resumed.
“The intelligence is reliable,” said the pale Ouster whom I later learned was named Navson Hamnim. “There were at least three hundred archangel-class ships gathering at System Lacaille 9352. Each ship has a representative of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem or Malta. It is definitely a major Crusade.”
“Lacaille 9352,” mused de Soya. “Sibiatu’s Bitterness. I know the place. How old is this intelligence?”
“Twenty hours,” said Navson Hamnim. “The data was sent via the only Gideon-drive courier drone we have left… of the three drones captured during your raids, two have been destroyed. We are fairly sure that the scoutship which sent this drone was detected and destroyed seconds after launching the courier.”
