by Dan Simmons
“I believe that the Pax warships were here since their first ship arrived, Your Holiness,” said Aenea. “But I do not think that they are fighting Ousters.”
“Who then?” said the boy.
Aenea turned her face back to the sky. “One of their own,” she said.
Suddenly there came a series of explosions quite different than the others … a closer, brighter series of explosions, followed by three blazing meteor trails. One exploded quickly in the upper atmosphere, trailing a score of minor debris trails that quickly died out. The second shot to the west, blazing from yellow to red to pure white, breaking up twenty degrees above the horizon and spilling a hundred lesser trails across the cloudy western horizon. The third screeched across the sky from west of the zenith to the eastern horizon—and I say “screeched” deliberately because we could hear the noise, at first a teakettle whistle, then a howl, then a terrible tornadic roar, diminishing as quickly as it came—finally to break up into three or four large, blazing masses in the east, all but one of which died out before reaching the horizon. This last burning fragment of star-ship seemed to wiggle in its flight at the last moment, with yellow bursts of light preceding it, slowing it, before it was lost to sight.
We waited another half hour on the upper platform, but except for dozens of fusion-flame streaks for the first few minutes—starships accelerating away from T’ien Shan, I knew—there was nothing left to see. Eventually the stars were once again the brightest things in the sky and everyone moved off—the Dalai Lama to sleep in the monks’ quarters here, others to permanent or temporary quarters on the lower levels.
Aenea bid a few of us to stay—Rachel and Theo, A. Bettik and Lhomo Dondrub, and me.
“That is the sign I’ve been waiting for,” she said very softly when all the others had left the platform. “We must leave tomorrow.”
“Leave?” I said. “To where? Why?”
Aenea touched my forearm. I interpreted this as saying, I will explain later. I shut up as the others spoke.
“The wings are ready, Teacher,” said Lhomo.
“I have taken the liberty of checking over the skinsuits and rebreathers in M. Endymion’s quarters while you were all away,” said A. Bettik. “They are all serviceable.”
“We’ll finish up the work and organize the ceremony tomorrow,” said Theo.
“I wish I were going,” said Rachel.
“Going where?” I said again, despite my best efforts to shut up and listen.
“You’re invited,” said Aenea, still touching my arm. That did not really answer my question. “Lhomo, and A. Bettik … if you’re both still game.”
Lhomo Dondrub gave his broad grin. The android nodded. I began to think that I was the only one in the temple compound that didn’t understand what was going on.
“Good night, all,” said Aenea. “We’ll be off at first light. You don’t need to see us off.”
“To hell with that,” said Rachel. Theo nodded agreement. “We’ll be there to say good-bye,” continued Rachel.
Aenea nodded and touched their arms. Everyone clambered down ladders or slid down cables.
Aenea and I were alone on the top platform. The skies seemed dark after the battle. I realized that clouds had risen above the ridgeline and were wiping the stars away like a wet towel drawn across a black slateboard. Aenea opened the door to her sleeping room, went in, lit the lantern, and returned to stand in the entrance. “Coming, Raul?”
WE DID TALK. BUT NOT RIGHT AWAY.
Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described—even the timing of our lovemaking seems absurd in the telling, with the sky literally falling and my lover having carried out a sort-of Last Supper convocation that night—but lovemaking is never absurd when you are making love to the person you truly love. And I was. If I had not realized that before the Last Supper night, I did then—completely, totally, and without reservation.
It was perhaps two hours later when Aenea pulled on a kimono and I donned a yukata and we moved away from the sleeping mat to the open shoji screens. Aenea brewed tea on the small burner set in the tatami, and we took our cups and sat with our backs against the opposing shoji frames, our bare toes and legs touching, my right side and her left knee extending over the kilometers-long drop. The air was cool and smelled of rain, but the storm had moved north of us. The summit of Heng Shan was shrouded with clouds, but all the lower ridges were illuminated by a constant play of lightning.
“Is Rachel really the Rachel from the Cantos?” I said. It was not the question I most wanted to ask, but I was afraid to ask it.
“Yes,” said Aenea. “She’s the daughter of Sol Weintraub—the woman who caught the Merlin Sickness on Hyperion and aged backward twenty-seven years to the infant whom Sol brought on the pilgrimage.”
“And she was also known as Moneta,” I said. “And Memnosyne …”
“Admonisher,” murmured Aenea. “And Memory. Appropriate names for her role in that time.”
“That was two hundred and eighty years ago!” I said. “And scores of light-years away … on Hyperion. How did she get here?”
Aenea smiled. The warm tea breathed vapors that rose to her tousled hair. “I started life more than two hundred and eighty years ago,” she said. “And scores of light-years away … on Hyperion.”
“So did she get here the same way you did? Through the Time Tombs?”
“Yes and no,” said Aenea. She held up one hand to stop my protest. “I know that you want straight talk, Raul … no parables or similes or evasions. I agree. The time for plain talk is here. But the truth is that the Sphinx Time Tombs are only part of Rachel’s journey.”
I waited.
“You remember the Cantos,” she began.
“I remember that the pilgrim named Sol took his daughter … after the Keats persona somehow saved her from the Shrike and after she began aging normally … took her into the Sphinx into the future …”I stopped. “This future?”
“No,” said Aenea. “The infant Rachel grew into a child again, a young woman again, in a future beyond this one. Her father raised her a second time. Their story is … marvelous, Raul. Literally filled with marvels.”
I rubbed my forehead. The headache had gone, but now it threatened to return. “And she got here via the Time Tombs again?” I said. “Moving back in time with them?”
“Partially via the Time Tombs,” said Aenea. “She is also able to move through time on her own.”
I stared. This bordered on madness.
Aenea smiled as if reading my thoughts or just reading my expression. “I know it seems insane, Raul. Much of what we’ve yet to encounter is very strange.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said. Another mental tumbler clicked into place. “Theo Bernard!” I said.
“Yes?”
“There was a Theo in the Cantos, wasn’t there?” I said. “A man …” There were different versions of the oral tale, the poem to be sung, and many of these minor details were dropped in the short, popular versions. Grandam had made me learn most of the foil poem, but the dull parts had never held my interest.
“Theo Lane,” said Aenea. “At one time the Consul’s aide on Hyperion, later our world’s first Governor-General for the Hegemony, I met him once when I was a girl. A decent man. Quiet. He wore archaic glasses …”
“This Theo,” I said, trying to figure it all out. Some sort of sex change?
Aenea shook her head. “Close, but no cigar, as Freud would have said.”
“Who?”
“Theo Bernard is the great-great-great-etcetera-granddaughter of Theo Lane,” said Aenea. “Her story is an adventure in itself. But she was bom in this era … she did escape from the Pax colonies on Maui-Covenant and join the rebels … but she did so because of something I told the original Theo almost three hundred years ago. it had been passed down all those generations. Theo knew that I would be on Maui-Covenant when I was …”
“How?” I said.
“That’s what
I told Theo Lane,” said my friend. “When I would be there. The knowledge was kept alive in his family … much as the Shrike Pilgrimage, has been kept alive by the Cantos”
“So you can see the future,” I said flatly.
“Futures,” corrected Aenea. “I’ve told you I can. And you heard me tonight.”
“You’ve seen your own death?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me what you’ve seen?”
“Not now, Raul. Please. When it’s time.”
“But if there are futures” I said, hearing the growl of pain in my own voice, “why do you have to see one death for yourself? If you can see it, why can’t you avoid it?”
“I could avoid that particular death,” she said softly, “but it would be the wrong choice.”
“How can life over death ever be the wrong choice?” I said. I realized that I had shouted it. My hands were balled into fists.
She touched those fists with her warm hands, surrounding them with her slender fingers. “That’s what all this is about,” she said so softly that I had to lean forward to hear her. Lightning played on the shoulders of Heng Shan. “Death is never preferable to life, Raul, but sometimes it’s necessary.”
I shook my head. I realized that I must look sullen at that moment, but I didn’t care. “Will you tell me when I’m going to die?” I said.
She met my gaze. Her dark eyes held depths. “I don’t know,” she said simply.
I blinked. I felt vaguely hurt. Didn’t she care enough to look into my future?
“Of course I care,” she whispered. “I’ve just chosen not to look at those probability waves. Seeing my death is … difficult. Seeing yours would be …” She made a strange noise and I realized that she was weeping. I moved around on the tatami mat until I could put my arms around her. She leaned in against my chest.
“I’m sorry, kiddo,” I said into her hair, although I could not have said exactly what I was sorry about. It was strange to feel so happy and so miserable at the same time. The thought of losing her made me want to scream, to throw rocks at the mountainside. As if echoing my feelings, thunder rumbled from the peak to the north.
I kissed her tears away. Then we just kissed, the salt of her tears mingling with the warmth of her mouth. Then we made love again, and this time it was as slow, careful, and timeless as it had been urgent earlier.
When we were lying in the cool breeze again, our cheeks touching, her hand on my chest, she said, “You want to ask something. I can tell it. What?”
I thought of all the questions I had been filled with during her “discussion time” earlier—all of her talks I had missed that I needed to catch up on in order to understand why the communion ceremony was necessary: What is the cruciform really about? What is the Pax up to on those worlds with missing populations? What does the Core really hope to gain in all this? What the hell is the Shrike … is the thing a monster or a guardian? Where did it come from? What’s going to happen to us? What does she see in our future that I need to know in order for us to survive … in order for her to avoid the fate she has known about since before she was born? What’s the giant secret behind the Void Which Binds and why is it so important to connect with it? How are we going to get off this world if the Pax really slagged the only farcaster portal under molten rock and there are Pax warships between the Consul’s ship and us? Who are these “observers” she talked about who have been spying on humanity for centuries? What’s all this about learning the language of the dead and so forth? Why haven’t the Nemes-thing and her clone-siblings killed us yet?
I asked, “You’ve been with someone else? Made love with someone before me?”
This was insanity. It was none of my business. She was almost twenty-two standard years old. I’d slept with women before—I could not remember any of their last names, but in the Home Guard, while working in the Nine Tails Casino—why should I care if—what difference did it make if—I had to know.
She hesitated only a second. “Our first time together was not my … first,” she said.
I nodded, feeling like a swine and a voyeur for asking. There was an actual pain in my chest, much as I had imagined angina from hearing about it. I could not stop. “Did you love … him?” How did I know it was a he? Theo … Rachel … she surrounds herself with women. My own thoughts made me sick of myself.
“I love you, Raul,” she whispered.
It was only the second time she had said this, the first being when we had said good-bye on Old Earth more than five and a half years earlier. My heart should have soared at the words. But it hurt too much. There was something important here that I did not understand.
“But there was a man,” I said, the words like pebbles in my mouth. “You loved him …” Only one? How many? I wanted to scream at my thoughts to shut up.
Aenea put her finger on my lips. “I love you, Raul, remember that as I tell you these things. Everything is … complicated. By who I am. By what I must do. But I love you … I have loved you since the first time I saw you in the dreams of my future. I loved you when we met in the dust storm on Hyperion, with the confusion and shooting and the Shrike and the hawking mat. Do you remember how I squeezed my arms around you when we were flying on the mat, trying to escape? I loved you then …”
I waited in silence. Aenea’s finger moved from my lips to my cheek. She sighed as if the weight of the worlds were on her shoulders. “All right,” she said softly. “There was someone. I’ve made love before. We …”
“Was it serious?” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, like the ship’s artificial tones.
“We were married,” said Aenea.
Once, on the River Kans on Hyperion, I’d gotten into a fistfight with an older bargeman who was half again my weight with infinitely more experience in fighting. With no warning he had clipped me under the jaw with a single blow that had blacked out my vision, buckled my knees, and sent me reeling back over the barge railing into the river. The man had held no grudge and had personally dived in to fish me out. I’d regained consciousness in a minute or two, but it was hours before I could shake the ringing out of my head and truly focus my eyes.
This was worse than that. I could only lie there and look at her, at my beloved Aenea, and feel her fingers against my cheek as strange and cold and alien as a stranger’s touch. She moved her hand away.
There was something worse.
“The twenty-three months, one week, and six hours that were unaccounted for,” she said.
“With him?” I could not remember forming the two words but I heard them spoken in my voice.
“Yes.”
“Married …”I said and could not go on.
Aenea actually smiled, but it was the saddest smile I think I had ever seen. “By a priest,” she said. “The marriage will be legal in the eyes of the Pax and the Church.”
“Will be?”
“Is.”
“You are still married?” I wanted to get up then and be sick over the edge of the platform, but I could not move.
For a second Aenea seemed confused, unable to answer. “Yes …”she said, her eyes gleaming with tears. “I mean, no … I’m not married now … you … dammit, if I could only …”
“But the man’s still alive?” I interrupted, my voice as flat and emotionless as a Holy Office Inquisition interrogator’s.
“Yes.” She put her hand on her own cheek. Her fingers were trembling.
“Do you love him, kiddo?”
“I love you, Raul.”
I pulled away slightly, not consciously, not deliberately, but I could not stay in physical contact with her while we had this discussion.
“There’s something else …”she said.
I waited.
“We had … I’ll … I had a child, a baby.” She looked at me as if trying to force understanding of all this through her gaze directly into my mind. It did not work.
“A child,” I repeated stupidly. My dear friend … my child friend tur
ned woman turned lover … my beloved had a child. “How old is it?” I said, hearing the banality like the thunder rumbling closer.
Again she seemed confused, as if uncertain of facts. Finally she said, “The child is … nowhere I can find it now.”
“Oh, kiddo,” I said, forgetting everything but her pain. I folded her against me as she wept. “I’m so sorry, kiddo … I’m so sorry,” I said as I patted her head.
She pulled back, wiping away tears. “No, Raul, you don’t understand. It’s all right … it’s not … that part’s all right …”
I pulled away from her and stared. She was distraught, sobbing. “I understand,” I lied.
“Raul …” Her hand felt for mine.
I patted her hand but got out of the bedclothes, pulled on my clothes, and grabbed my climbing harness and pack from their place by the door.
“Raul …”
“I’ll be back before dawn,” I said, facing in her general direction but not looking at her. “I’m just going for a walk.”
“Let me go with you,” she said, standing with the sheet around her. Lightning flashed behind her. Another storm was coming in.
“I’ll be back before dawn,” I said and went out the door before she could dress or join me.
It was raining—a cold, sleety rain. The platforms were quickly coated and made slick. I hurtled down ladders and jogged down the vibrating staircases, seeing my way by the occasional lightning flash, not slowing until I was several hundred meters down the east ledge walk headed toward the fissure where I had first landed in the ship. I did not want to go there.
Half a klick from the Temple were fixed lines rising to the top of the ridge. The sleet was pounding on the cliff face now, the red and black lines were coated with a layer of ice. I clipped carabiners onto the line and harness, pulling the powered ascenders from the pack and attaching them without double-checking the connections, then began jumaring up the icy ropes.
The wind came up, whipping my jacket and pushing me away from the rock wall. Sleet pounded at my face and hands. I ignored it and ascended, sometimes sliding back three or four meters as the jumar clamps failed on the icy line, then recovering and climbing again. Ten meters below the razor’s-edge summit of the ridgeline, I emerged from the clouds like a swimmer coming up out of the water. The stars still burned coldly up there, but the billowing cloud masses were piling against the north wall of the ridge and rising like a white tide around me.
