by Дэн Симмонс
Who could the father of her child be? The answer struck me like a thunderbolt. For a second there in the Schrödinger cat box, I was so shaken by the logic of it that I was sure that the particle detector clicking away periodically in the frozen-energy wall of my prison had detected the emitted particle at exactly the right time and the cyanide had been released. What irony to figure things out and to die in the same moment.
But it was not poison in the air, only the growing strength of my certainty on this matter and the even stronger impulse to some action.
There was one other player in the cosmic chess game Aenea and the others had been playing for three hundred standard years now: that near-mythical Observer from the alien sentient races whom Aenea had mentioned briefly in several different contexts. The Lions and Tigers and Bears, the beings so powerful that they could kidnap Old Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud rather than watch it be destroyed, had—according to Aenea—sent among us one or more Observers over the past few centuries, entities who had, according to my interpretation of what Aenea had said, taken on human form and walked among us for all this time. This would have been relatively easy during the Pax era with the virtual immortality of the cruciform so widespread. And there were certainly others who, like the ancient poet Martin Silenus, had stayed alive through a combination of WorldWeb-era medicine, Poulsen treatments, and sheer determination.
Martin Silenus was old, that was certain, perhaps the oldest human being in the galaxy—but he had not been the Observer, that was equally certain. The author of the Cantos was too opinionated, too active, too visible to the public at large, too obscene, and generally just too damned cantankerous to be a cool observer representing alien races so powerful that they could destroy us in an eye blink. Or so I hoped.
But somewhere—probably somewhere I had never visited and could not imagine—that Observer had been waiting and watching in human form. It made sense that Aenea might have been compelled—by both prophecy and the necessity of unhindered human evolution she had taught about and believed in—to ’cast away from her odyssey to that distant world where the Observer waited, meet him, mate with him, and bring that child into the universe.
Thus would be reconciled the Core, humanity, and the distant Others. The idea was unsettling, definitely disturbing to me, but also exciting in a way that nothing had been since Aenea’s death. I knew Aenea. Her child would be a human child—filled with life and laughter and a love of everything from nature to old holodramas. I had never understood how Aenea could have left her child behind, but now I realized that she would have had no choice. She knew the terrible fate that awaited her in the basement cell of Castel Sant’Angelo. She knew that she would die by fire and torture while surrounded by inhuman enemies and the Nemes monsters. She had known this since before she was born. The fact of this made my knees weak. How could my dear friend have laughed with me so often, gone optimistically into new days so happily, celebrated life so thoroughly, when she knew that every day passing was another day closer to such a terrible death? I shook my head at the strength of will this implied.
I did not have it—this I knew. Aenea had.
But she could not have kept the child with her, knowing when and how this terrible ending would take place. Presumably then, the father was raising the child. The Other in human form. The Observer. I found this even more upsetting than my earlier revelations. I was struck then with the additional certainty that Aenea would have wanted me to have some role in her child’s life if she had thought it possible. Her own glimpses into possible futures presumably ended with her own death.
Perhaps she did not know that I would not be executed at the same time. But then, she had asked me to scatter her ashes on Old Earth… which assumed my survival. Perhaps she had thought it too much of a request to make—for me to find her child and to help in any way I could as the boy or girl came of age, to help protect it in a universe of sharp edges.
I realized that I was weeping—not softly, but with great, ragged sobs. It was the first time I had wept like this since Aenea’s death, and—oddly enough—it was not primarily out of grief for Aenea’s absence, but at the thought of this second chance to hold a child’s hand as I had once held Aenea’s when she was still twelve standard, of protecting this child of my beloved’s as I had tried to protect my beloved.
And failed. The indictment was my own.
Yes, I had failed to protect Aenea in the end, but she knew that I would fail, that she would fail in her quest to bring down the Pax. She had loved me and loved life while knowing that we would fail.
There was no reason I had to fail with this other child. Perhaps the Observer would welcome my help, my sharing of the human experience with this almost certainly more-than-human little boy or girl. I felt it safe to say that no one had known Aenea better than I had. This would be important for the child’s—for the new messiah’s—upbringing. I would bring this narrative now sitting useless in my ’scriber and share bits and pieces of it with the boy or girl as he or she grew older, giving it all to him or her someday. I picked up the slate and ’scriber and paced back and forth in my Schrödinger cell. There was this small matter of my unavoidable execution.
No one was coming to rescue me. The explosive shell of the egg had decided that, and if there were a way around that problem, someone would have been here by now.
It was the most staggering improbability and good luck that I had survived this long when every few hours there was another crap shoot with death as the detector sniffed for the particle emission. I had beaten the laws of quantum chance for this long, but the luck could not hold.
I stopped in my pacing.
There had been four steps in Aenea’s teaching of our race’s new relationship with the Void Which Binds. Even before coming to my cell I had experienced, if not mastered, learning the language of the dead and of the living. I had shown in my writing of the narrative that I could gain access to the Void for at least old memories of those still living, even if the shell somehow interfered with my ability to sense what was happening now with friends such as Father de Soya or Rachel or Lhomo or Martin Silenus.
Or was there interference? Perhaps I had subconsciously refused to try to contact the world of the living—at least for anything beyond memories of Aenea—since I knew that I now inhabited the world of the dead.
No longer. I wanted out of here.
There were two other steps that Aenea had mentioned in her teaching but never fully explained—hearing the music of the spheres and taking the first step.
I now understood both these concepts. Without seeing Aenea ’cast, and without that great rush of gestalt understanding that had come with the terrible sharing of her death, I would not have understood. But I did now.
I had thought of hearing the music of the spheres as a sort of paranormal-radio-telescope trick—actually hearing the pop and crack and whistle of the stars as radio telescopes had for eleven centuries or more. But that had not been what Aenea had meant at all, I realized. It was not the stars she was listening to and for, but the resonance of those people—human and otherwise—who dwelt among and around those stars. She had been using the Void as a sort of directional beacon before farcasting herself.
Much of her personal ’casting had not made sense to me. The core-controlled farcaster doors had been rough holes torn through the Void—and thus through space-time—held open by the portals that were like crude clamps holding open the raw edges of a wound in the old days of scalpel surgery. Aenea’s farcasting, I now understood, was an infinitely more graceful device.
I had wondered in the busy time when Aenea and I were freecasting down to planet surfaces and from star system to star system in the Yggdrasill how she had avoided having us blink into existence inside a hill or fifty meters above the surface, or the treeship inside a star. It seemed to me that blind freecasting, like unplanned Hawking-drive jumps, would be haphazard and disastrous. But we had always emerged exactly where we had to be when Aenea ’cas
t us. Now I saw why.
Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to… to take the first step. To travel via the Void to where those voices waited.
Aenea had once said that the Void tapped into the energy of quasars, of the exploding centers of galaxies, of black holes and black matter.
Enough, perhaps, to move a few organic life-forms through space-time and deposit them in the proper place. Love was the prime mover in the universe, Aenea had once said to me. She had joked about being the Newton who someday explained the basic physics of that largely untapped energy source.
She had not lived to do so.
But I saw now what she had meant and how it worked. Much of the music of the spheres was created by the elegant harmonies and chord changes of love.
Freecasting to where one’s loved one waits.
Learning a place after having traveled there with the one or ones you love. Loving to see new places.
Suddenly I understood why our first months together had been what had seemed at the time like useless farcaster wanderings from world to world: Mare Infinitus, Qom-Riyadh, Hebron, Sol Draconi Septem, the unnamed world where we had left the ship, all of the others, even Old Earth. There had been no working farcaster portals. Aenea had swept A. Bettik and me with her to these places—touching them, sniffing their air, feeling their sunlight on her skin, seeing them all with friends—with someone she loved—learning the music of the spheres so that it could be played later.
And my own solo odyssey, I thought: the kayak farcasting from Old Earth to Lusus and the cloud planet and all the other places. Aenea had been the energy behind that ’casting. Sending me to places so that I could taste them and find them again someday on my own.
I had thought—even as I wrote the narrative in the ’scriber that I held under my arm there in the Schrödinger death cell—that I had been little more than a fellow traveler in a series of picaresque adventures. But it had all held a purpose. I had been a lover traveling with my love—or to my love—through a musical score of worlds. A score that I had to learn by heart so that I could play it again someday.
I closed my eyes in the Schrödinger cat box and concentrated, then went beyond concentration to the empty mind state I had learned in meditation on T’ien Shan. Every world had its purpose. Every minute had its purpose.
In that unhurried emptiness, I opened myself to the Void Which Binds and the universe to which it resonated. I could not do this, I realized, without communion with Aenea’s blood, without the nanotech tailored organisms that now dwelt in my cells and would dwell in my children’s cells.
No, I thought at once, not my children. But in the cells of those in the human race who escape the cruciform. In their children’s cells. I could not do this without having learned from Aenea. I could not have heard the voices I heard then—greater choruses than I had ever heard before—without having honed my own grammar and syntax of the language of the dead and living during the months I worked on the narrative while waiting to die.
I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.
As I stood there, listening to the swelling chords of the music of the spheres, able now to pick out separate star-voices in the chorus—Martin Silenus’s, still alive but failing on my homeworld of Hyperion, Theo’s on beautiful Maui-Covenant, Rachel’s on Barnard’s World, Colonel Kassad’s on red Mars, Father de Soya’s on Pacem—and even the lovely chords of the dead, Dem Ria’s on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, dear Father Glaucus’s on cold Sol Draconi Septem, my mother’s voice, again on distant Hyperion—I also heard John Keats’s words, in his voice, and in Martin Silenus’s, and in Aenea’s:
“But this is human life: the war, the deeds,
The disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves this good,
That they are still the air, the subtle food,
To make us feel existence, and to show
How quiet death is. Where soil is men grow,
Whether to weeds or flowers; but for me,
There is no depth to strike in…”
But the opposite was true of me at that moment—there was more than enough depth to strike in. The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven’s Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness.
The energy of quasars and exploding stellar nuclei filled me then. I was borne up on waves of energy more lovely and more lyrical even than the Ouster angels’ wings seen sliding along corridors of sunlight. The shell of deadly energy that was my prison and execution cell seemed laughable now, Schrödinger’s original joke, a child’s jump rope laid around me on the ground as restraining walls.
I stepped out of the Schrödinger cat box and out of Armaghast System. For a moment, feeling the confines of the Schrödinger prison fall away and behind me forever, existing nowhere and everywhere in space but remaining physically intact in my body and stylus and ’scriber, I felt a surge of sheer exhilaration as powerful as the dizzying effect of solo-farcasting itself.
Free! I was free! The wave of joy was so intense that it made me want to weep, to shout into the surrounding light of no-space, to join my voice with the chorus of voices of the living and dead, to sing along with the crystal-clear symphonies of the spheres rising and plunging like a solid, acoustic surf all around me. Free at last!
And then I remembered that the one reason to be free, the one person who would make such freedom worthwhile, was gone. Aenea was dead. The sheer joy of escape faded suddenly and absolutely, replaced by a simple but profound satisfaction at my release from so many months of imprisonment. The universe might have had the color drained out of it for me, but at least now I was free to go anywhere I wanted within that monotone realm. But where was I going? Floating on light, freecasting into the universe with my stylus and ’scriber tucked under my arm, I still had not decided.
Hyperion? I had promised to return to Martin Silenus. I could hear his voice resonating strong in the Void, past and present, but it would not be part of the current chorus for long.
His life remaining could now be counted in days or less. But not to Hyperion. Not yet.
The Biosphere Startree? I was shocked to hear that it still existed in some form, although Lhomo’s voice was absent from the choral symphony there.
The place had been important to Aenea and me, and I had to return someday. But not now.
Old Earth? Amazingly, I heard the music of that sphere quite clearly, in Aenea’s former voice and in mine, in the song of the friends at Taliesin with whom we had tallied there. Distance meant nothing in the Void Which Binds. Time there seasons but does not destroy. But not to Old Earth. Not now.
I heard scores of possibilities, more scores of voices I wanted to hear in person, people to hug and weep with, but the music I reacted to most strongly now was from the world where Aenea had been tortured and killed. Pacem. Home of the Church and nest of our enemies—not, I saw now, the same thing. Pacem. There was, I knew, nothing of Aenea for me on Pacem but ashes of the past.
But she had asked me to take her ashes and spread them on Old Earth. Spread them where we had laughed and loved most well. Pacem. In the vortex of Void energy, already stepping beyond the Schrödinger cell but existing nowhere else except as pure quantum probability, I made my decision and freecast for Pacem.
33
The Vatican is broken as surely as if the fis
t of God had smashed down from the sky in an anger beyond human understanding. The endless bureaucratic city around it is crushed.
The spaceport is destroyed. The grand boulevards are slagged and melted and rimmed with ruin. The Egyptian obelisk that had stood at the center of St. Peter’s Square has been snapped off at the base and the scores of colonnades around the oval space are tumbled like petrified logs. The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica is shattered and has fallen through the central loggia and grand facade to lie in pieces on the broken steps. The Vatican wall is tumbled down in a hundred places, completely missing for long stretches. The buildings once protected within its medieval confines—the Apostolic Palace, the Secret Archives, the barracks of the Swiss Guard, St. Mother Teresa’s Hospice, the papal apartments, the Sistine Chapel—are all exposed and smashed, scorched and tumbled and scattered.
Castel Sant’Angelo on this side of the river has been slagged. The towering cylinder—twenty meters of towering stone rising from its huge square base—has been melted to a mound of cooled lava.
I see all this while walking along the boulevard of broken slabs on the east side of the river. Ahead of me, the bridge, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, has been cracked into three sections and dropped into the river. Into the riverbed, I should say, for it looks as if the New Tiber has been boiled away, leaving glass where the sandy river bottom and riverbanks had been.
