by Dan Simmons
The android and I discussed it for several minutes. I had the plasma rifle with me, as well as the .45 in its holster on my belt, but I wanted the 16-gauge shotgun I’d set aside, as well as camping gear I’d seen in the EVA locker closet. I wasn’t sure how we’d get downriver—the hawking mat would probably hold the three of us, but I couldn’t see it transporting us and our gear, so we decided to unpack three of the four flybikes from their niches under the spacesuit closet. There was also a flying belt in there that I thought might be handy, as well as some camping accessories such as a heating cube, sleeping bags, foam mats, flashlight lasers for each of us, and the headset communicators I’d noticed. “Oh, and a machete if you see one,” I added. “There were several boxes of knives and multiuse blades in the small EVA closet. I don’t remember a machete, but if there is one … let’s get it out.”
A. Bettik and I walked to the end of the narrow beach, found a fallen tree at the river’s edge, and dragged it—with me sweating and cursing—back to the side of the ship to act as a de facto ladder so that we could crawl back up on the curved hull. “Oh, yeah, see if there’s a rope ladder in that mess,” I said. “And an inflatable raft of some sort.”
“Anything else?” A. Bettik asked wryly.
“No … well, maybe a sauna if you find one. And a well-stocked bar. And maybe a twelve-piece band to play some music while we unpack.”
“I’ll do my best, sir,” said the android, and began climbing the tree-ladder back to the top of the hull.
I felt guilty leaving A. Bettik to do all the heavy lifting, but it seemed wise to know how far it was to the next farcaster portal, and I had no intention of allowing the girl to fly off on a scouting mission of her own. She sat behind me as I tapped the activator thread designs and the carpet stiffened and rose several centimeters from the wet sand.
“Wick,” she said.
“What?”
“It stands for ‘wicked,’ “ said the girl. “Uncle Martin said that it was kid slang when he was a brat on Old Earth.”
I sighed again and tapped the flight threads. We spiraled up and around, soon rising above the treetop level. The sun was definitely lower now in the direction I assumed was west. “Ship?” I said to my comlog bracelet.
“Yes?” The ship’s tone always made me feel that I was interrupting it at some important task.
“Am I talking to you, or to the data bank you downloaded?”
“As long as you are within communicator range, M. Endymion,” it answered, “you are talking to me.”
“What’s the communicator range?” We leveled off thirty meters above the river. A. Bettik waved from where he stood next to the open air lock.
“Twenty thousand kilometers or the curve of the planet,” said the ship. “Whichever comes first. As I mentioned earlier, there are no relay satellites around this world that I can locate.”
I tapped the forward design and we began flying upriver, toward the overgrown arch there. “Can you talk to me through a farcaster portal?” I asked.
“An activated portal?” said the ship. “How could I do that, M. Endymion? You would be light-years away.”
This ship had a way of making me feel stupid and provincial. I usually enjoyed its company, but I admit that I wouldn’t mind too much when we left it behind.
Aenea leaned against my back and spoke directly into my ear so as to be heard over the wind noise as we accelerated. “The old portals used to have fiber-optic lines running through them. That worked … although not as well as the fatline.”
“So if we wanted to keep talking to the ship when we go downriver,” I said back over my shoulder, “we could string telephone wire?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her grinning. The silliness did give me a thought, however. “If we can’t go back upriver through the portals,” I said, “how do we find our way back to the ship?”
Aenea put her hand on my shoulder. The portal was approaching quickly now. “We just keep going down the line until we come back around,” she said over the wind noise. “The River Tethys was a big circle.”
I turned so that I could see her. “Are you serious, kiddo? There were—what?—a couple of hundred worlds connected by the Tethys.”
“At least a couple of hundred,” said Aenea. “That we know of.”
I did not understand that, but sighed again as we slowed near the portal. “If each section of the river ran for a hundred klicks … that’s twenty thousand kilometers of travel just to get back here.”
Aenea said nothing.
I hovered us near the portal, realizing for the first time just how massive these things were. The arch appeared to be made of metal with many designs, compartments, indentations—perhaps even cryptic writing—but the jungle had sent tendrils of vines and lichens up the top and sides of the thing. What I had first taken as rust on the complicated arch turned out to be more of the red “bat-wing leaves” hanging in clusters from the main tangle of vines. I gave them a wide berth.
“What if it activates?” I said as we hovered a meter or two short of the underside of the arch.
“Try it,” said the girl.
I sent the hawking mat forward slowly, almost stopping as the front of the carpet reached the invisible line directly under the arch.
Nothing happened. We flew through, I turned the mat around, and we came back from the south. The farcaster portal was just an ornate metal bridge arching high over the river.
“It’s dead,” I said. “As dead as Kelsey’s nuts.” It had been one of Grandam’s favorite phrases, used only when we kids weren’t supposed to be able to hear, but I realized that there was a kid in earshot. “Sorry,” I said over my shoulder, my face red. Perhaps I’d spent too many years in the army or working with river bargemen, or as a bouncer in the casinos. I’d turned into a jerk.
Aenea actually threw her head back, she was laughing so hard. “Raul,” she said, “I grew up visiting Uncle Martin, remember?”
We flew back over the ship and waved at A. Bettik as the android was lowering pallets of gear to the beach. He waved a blue hand in response.
“Shall we go on downriver to see how far it’ll be to the next portal?” I said.
“Absolutely,” said Aenea.
WE FLEW DOWNRIVER, SEEING VERY FEW OTHER beaches or breaks in the jungle: trees and vines came all the way to the river’s edge. It bothered me not to know which direction we were heading, so I removed the inertial guidance compass from my pack and activated it. The compass had been my guide on Hyperion, where the magnetic field was too treacherous to trust, but it was useless here. As with the ship’s guidance system, the compass would work perfectly if it knew its starting point, but that luxury had been lost the instant we transited the farcaster.
“Ship,” I said to the bracelet comlog, “can you get a magnetic compass reading on us?”
“Yes,” came the instant reply, “but without knowing precisely where magnetic north is on this world, the actual direction of travel would be a rough estimate.”
“Give me the rough estimate, please.” I banked the mat slightly as we rounded a wide bend. The river had broadened out again—it must have been almost a kilometer wide at this point. The current looked swift, but not especially treacherous. My barge work on the Kans had taught me to read the river for eddies, snags, sandbars, and the like. This river seemed easy enough to navigate.
“You are headed approximately east-southeast,” said the comlog. “Airspeed is sixty-eight kilometers per hour. Sensors indicate that your hawking-mat deflection field is at eight percent. Altitude is …”
“All right, all right,” I said. “East-southeast.” The sun was lowering behind us. This world revolved like Old Earth and Hyperion.
The river straightened out and I accelerated the mat a bit. In the labyrinths on Hyperion, I’d been scooting along at almost three hundred klicks per hour, but I wasn’t eager to fly that fast here unless I had to. The flight threads in this old mat held a charge for quite a
while, but there was no need to run it out quicker than necessary. I made a mental note to recharge the threads from the ship’s leads before we left, even if we took the skybikes as transportation.
“Look,” said Aenea, pointing to our left.
Far to the north, illuminated by the now visibly setting sun, something like a mesa top or some very large man-made thing broke through the jungle canopy. “Can we go look?” she said.
I knew better. We had an objective, we had a time limit—the setting sun, for one—and we had a thousand reasons not to take chances by swooping around strange artifacts. For all we knew, this mesa or tower-thing was the Central Pax Headquarters for the planet.
“Sure,” I said, mentally kicking myself for being an idiot, and banked the hawking mat to the north.
The thing was farther north than it seemed. I kicked the mat up to two hundred klicks per hour, and we still spent a good ten minutes flying to it.
“Excuse me, M. Endymion,” came the ship’s voice on my wrist, “but you appear to have gone off course and are now headed north-northeast, approximately one hundred three degrees from your former heading.”
“We’re investigating a tower or butte or something poking up from the jungle almost due north of us,” I said. “Do you have it on your radar?”
“Negative,” said the ship, and I thought I heard a hint of dryness in its tone again. “My vantage point here stuck in the mud is not optimum. Anything below a twenty-eight-degree inclination from the horizon is lost in clutter. You are just within my angle of detection. Another twenty kilometers north, and I will lose you.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “We’re just going to check this out and get right back to the river.”
“Why?” said the ship. “Why investigate something which has nothing to do with your plans to travel downriver?”
Aenea leaned over and lifted my wrist. “We’re human,” she said.
The ship did not reply.
The thing, when we finally reached it, rose a sheer hundred meters above the jungle canopy. Its lower levels were surrounded so tightly by the giant gymnosperms that the tower looked like a weathered crag rising from a green sea.
It appeared to be both natural and man-made—or at least modified by some intelligence. The tower was about seventy meters across and appeared to be made of red rock, perhaps some type of sandstone. The setting sun—only ten degrees or so above the jungle-canopy horizon now—bathed the crag in a rich red light. Here and there along the east and west faces of the crag were openings that both Aenea and I first thought were natural—wind or water hewn—but we soon realized had been carved. Also on the east side were niches carved—niches about the right distance from one another to be steps and handholds for human feet and hands. But they were shallow, narrow niches, and the thought of free-climbing that hundred-plus-meter crag with nothing but such shallow toe- and fingerholds made my insides clench.
“Can we go closer?” asked Aenea.
I had been keeping the hawking mat about fifty meters out as we circled. “I don’t think we should,” I said. “We’re already within firearms range. I don’t want to tempt anyone or anything with a spear or a bow and arrows.”
“A bow could pick us off at this range,” she said, but did not insist on flying closer.
For a second I thought I saw a glimmer of something moving within one of the oval openings carved in the red rock, but an instant later I decided it was a trick of the evening light.
“Had enough?” I said.
“Not really,” said Aenea. Her small hands were holding on to my shoulders as we banked. The breeze ruffled my short hair, and when I looked back, I could see the girl’s hair streaming behind her.
“We need to get back to business, though,” I said, aiming the hawking mat south toward the river and accelerating again. The gymnosperm canopy looked soft, feathery, and deceptively continuous forty meters beneath us, as if we could land on it if we had to. A pang of tension filled me as I thought of the consequences if we had to. But A. Bettik has the flying belt and flybikes, I thought. He can come fetch us if he has to.
We intercepted the river again a klick or so southeast of where we had left it, and we could see the thirty klicks or so to the horizon. No farcaster portal.
“Which way?” I said.
“Let’s go a bit farther.”
I nodded and banked left, staying out over the river. We had seen no signs of animal life other than the occasional white bird and the red bat-plant things. I was thinking of the footsteps in the side of the red monolith when Aenea tugged at my sleeve and pointed almost straight downward.
Something very large was moving just under the surface of the river. The low sunlight reflecting from the water hid most of the details from us, but I could make out leathery skin, something that might have been a barbed tail, and fins or cilia on the side. The creature must have been eight to ten meters long. It dived and we were past before I could see any more detail.
“That was sort of like a river manta,” called Aenea over my shoulder. We were moving quickly again, and the sound of the wind against the rising deflection field made some noise.
“Bigger,” I said. I had harnessed and worked with river mantas, and I’d never seen one that long or broad. Suddenly the hawking mat seemed very frail and insubstantial. I brought us thirty meters lower—we were flying almost at tree level now—so that a fall would not necessarily be fatal if the ancient flying carpet decided to quit on us without warning.
We banked south around another bend, noticed the river narrowing rapidly, and soon were greeted with a roar and a wall of rising spray.
The waterfall was not overly spectacular—it fell only ten to fifteen meters—but a huge volume of water was dropping over it, the klick-wide river pressed between rock cliffs to a width of only a hundred meters or so, and the force expended there was impressive. Below, there was another rapids over the rocks of the tumbled falls, then a wide pool, and then the river grew wide and relatively placid again. For a second I wondered stupidly if the river critter we’d seen was prepared for this sudden drop.
“I don’t think we’re going to find the portal in time to get back before dark,” I said over my shoulder to the girl. “If there’s a portal downriver at all.”
“It’s there,” said Aenea.
“We’ve come at least a hundred klicks,” I said.
“A. Bettik said that the Tethys sections averaged that. This one might be two or three hundred kilometers between portals. Besides … there were numerous portals along the various rivers. The sections of the river varied in length even on the same world.”
“Who told you that?” I asked, twisting to look at her.
“My mother. She was a detective, you know. She once had a divorce case where she followed a married guy and his girlfriend for three weeks on the River Tethys.”
“What’s a divorce case?” I asked.
“Never mind.” Aenea scooted around so that she was facing backward, her legs still crossed. Her hair whipped around her face. “You’re right, let’s get back to A. Bettik and the ship. We’ll come this way tomorrow.”
I banked us around and accelerated toward the west. We crossed over the falls and laughed as the spray wet our faces and hands.
“M. Endymion?” said the comlog. It was not the ship’s voice, but A. Bettik’s.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re heading back. We’re about twenty-five, thirty minutes out.”
“I know,” came the android’s calm voice. “I was watching the tower, the waterfall, and all the rest in the holopit.”
Aenea and I looked at each other with what must have been comical expressions. “You mean this comlog thing sends back pictures?”
“Of course,” came the ship’s voice. “Holo or video. We have been monitoring on holo.”
“Although the viewing is a bit odd,” said A. Bettik, “since the holopit is now an indentation in the wall. But I was not calling to check your progress.”
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br /> “What, then?” I said.
“We appear to have a visitor,” said A. Bettik.
“A big river thing?” called Aenea. “Sort of like a manta, only bigger?”
“Not exactly,” came A. Bettik’s calm voice. “It is the Shrike.”
30
Our hawking mat must have looked like a blur during our wild rush back to the ship. I asked if the ship could send us a real-time holo of the Shrike, but it said that most of its hull sensors were covered with mud and it had no clear view of the beach.
“It’s on the beach?” I said.
“It was a moment ago, when I went up to carry another load out,” came A. Bettik’s voice.
“Then it was in the Hawking-drive accumulator ring,” said the ship.
“What?” I said. “There’s no entrance to that part of the ship—” I stopped before I made a total idiot of myself. “Where is it now?” I said.
“We are not sure,” said A. Bettik. “I am going out onto the hull now and will be taking one of the radios. The ship will relay my voice to you.”
“Wait …,” I began.
“M. Endymion,” interrupted the android, “rather than urging you to rush back here, I called to suggest that you and M. Aenea … ah … extend your sight-seeing for a bit until the ship and I receive an indication of our … ah … visitor’s intentions.”
This made sense to me. Here I was charged with protecting this girl, and when what might well be the deadliest killing machine in the galaxy appears, what do I do but rush her toward the danger? I was being a bit of an asshole this long day. I reached for the flight threads to slow us and bank back to the east.
Aenea’s small hand intercepted mine. “No,” she said. “We’ll go back.”
I was shaking my head. “That thing is …”
“That thing can go anywhere it pleases,” said the girl. Her eyes and tone were deadly serious. “If it wanted me … or you … it would appear right here on the mat with us.”
The thought made me look around.
“Let’s go back,” said Aenea.