by Dan Simmons
“Never … I’d rather die!”
“No! The Pax will find us and kill us!”
The cries were immediate and from the heart. It was the sound of terror made verbal. I smelled fear in the room the way I used to smell it on animals caught in leg traps on the moors of Hyperion.
Aenea lifted a hand and the outcries faded. “You can return to Pax space by farcaster, or you can stay on Earth and try to fend for yourself.”
There were murmurs and I could hear relief at the option of not returning. I understood that feeling—the Pax had come to be a bogeyman to me, as well. The thought of returning there sent me gasping up out of sleep at least once a week.
“But if you stay here,” continued the girl seated on the edge of Mr. Wright’s music stage, “you will be outcasts. All of the groups of human beings here are involved in their own projects, their own experiments. You will not fit in there.”
People shouted questions about that, demanding answers to mysteries not understood during their long stay here. But Aenea continued with what she was saying. “If you stay here, you will waste what Mr. Wright has taught you and what you came to learn about yourself. The Earth does not need architects and builders. Not now. We have to go back.”
Jaev Peters spoke again. His voice was brittle, but not angry. “And does the Pax need builders and architects? To build its cross-damned churches?”
“Yes,” said Aenea.
Jaev pounded the back of the seat in front of him with his large fist. “But they’ll capture or kill us if they learn who we are … where we’ve been!”
“Yes,” said Aenea.
Bets Kimbal said, “Are you going back, child?”
“Yes,” said Aenea and pushed herself away from the stage.
Everyone was standing now, shouting or talking to the people next to them. It was Jaev Peters who spoke the thoughts of the ninety Fellowship orphans. “Can we go with you, Aenea?”
The girl sighed. Her face, as sunburned and alert as it looked this morning, also looked tired. “No,” she said. “I think that leaving here is like dying or being born. We each have to do it alone.” She smiled. “Or in very small groups.”
The room fell silent then. When Aenea spoke, it was as if a single instrument were picking up where the orchestra had stopped. “Raul will leave first,” she said. “Tonight. One by one, each of you will find the right farcaster portal. I will help you. I will be the last to leave Earth. But leave I will, and within a few weeks. We all must go.”
People pushed forward then, still silent, but moving closer to the girl with the short-cropped hair. “But some of us will meet again,” said Aenea. “I feel certain that some of us will meet again.”
I heard the flip side of that reassuring prediction: some of us would not survive to meet again.
“Well,” boomed Bets Kimbal, standing with one broad arm around Aenea, “we have enough food in the kitchen for one last feast. Lunch today will be a meal you’ll remember for years! If you have to travel, as my mum used to say, never travel on an empty stomach. Who’s to help me in the kitchen then?”
The groups broke up then, families and friends in clusters, loners standing as if stunned, everyone moving closer to Aenea as we began filing out of the music pavilion. I wanted to grab her at that moment, shake her until her wisdom teeth fell out, and demand, What the hell do you mean—“Raul will leave first … tonight.” Who the hell are you to tell me to leave you behind? And how do you think you can make me? But she was too far away and too many people were pressing around her. The best I could do was stride along behind the crowd as it moved toward the kitchen and dining area, anger written in my face, fists, muscles, and walk.
Once I saw Aenea glance back, straining to find me over the heads of the crowd around her, and her eyes pleaded, Let me explain.
I stared back stonily, giving her nothing.
IT WAS ALMOST DUSK WHEN SHE JOINED ME IN THE large garage Mr. Wright had ordered built half a klick east of the compound. The structure was open on the sides except for canvas curtains, but it had thick stone columns supporting a permanent redwood roof; it had been built to shelter the drop-ship in which Aenea, A. Bettik, and I had arrived.
I had pulled back the main canvas door and was standing in the open hatch of the dropship when I saw Aenea crossing the desert toward me. 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 front 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 Qom-Riyadh 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 klicks 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
he 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 nano recorders. 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 realtime 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 midsentence. “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 armor-cloth, 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 ideyplate. 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.
