by Dan Simmons
Panting against the skinsuit field, my heart pounding, I spread my arms and legs and willed the wings wider. The energy folds shimmered and expanded to at least two klicks. Beneath me, an expanse of leaves shifted, turned slowly and purposefully as if in a time-lapse nature holo of flowers seeking the light, folded over one another to form a smooth, parabolic dish at least five klicks across, and then went perfectly reflective.
Sunlight blazed against me. If I had been watching with unshielded eyes, I would have been instantly blinded. As it was, the suit optics polarized. I heard the sunlight striking my skin-suit and wings, like hard rain on a metal roof. I opened my wings wider to catch the blazing gust of light at the same instant the ergs on the Startree below folded the heliosphere matrix, bending the plasma stream back against Aenea and me, decelerating both of us rapidly but not painfully so. Wings flapping, we passed into the bowering outbranches of the Startree while the suit optics continued to flow data across my field of vision.
Which somehow assured me that the tree was providing the proper amount of the sun’s light based on its mass and luminosity, while the erg was providing just enough heliospheric plasma and magnetic feedback to bring us to near zero delta-v before we struck one of the huge main branches or interdicted the containment field.
Aenea and I followed the Ousters, using our wings in the same way they used theirs, soaring and then flapping, braking and then expanding to catch the true sun’s light to accelerate again, swooping in among the outer branches, soaring over the leafy outer layer of the Startree, then diving deep among the branches again, folding our wings to pass between pods or covered bridges out beyond the core containment fields, swooping around busily working space squids whose tentacles were ten times longer than the Consul’s ship now decelerating carefully through the leaf level, then opening our wings again to surge past floating schools of thousands of blue-pulsing Akerataeli platelets, which seemed to be waving at us as we passed.
There was a huge platform branch just below the containment field shimmer. I did not know if the wings would work through the field, but Palou Koror passed through with only a shimmer—like a graceful diver cutting through still water—followed by Drivenj Nicaagat, then by Lhomo, then Aenea, and finally I joined them, folding my wings to a dozen or so meters across as I crossed the energy barrier into air and sound and scent and cool breezes once again.
We landed on the platform.
“Very nice for a first flight,” said Palou Koror, her voice synthesized for the atmosphere. “We wanted to share just a moment of our lives with you.”
Aenea deactivated the skinsuit around her face, allowing it to flow into a collar of fluid mercury. Her eyes were bright, as alive as I had ever seen them. Her fair skin was flushed and her hair was damp with sweat. “Wonderful!” she cried and turned to squeeze my hand. “Wonderful … thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Freeman Nicaagat, Free-woman Koror.”
“It was our pleasure, Revered One Who Teaches,” said Nicaagat with a bow.
I looked up and realized that the Yggdrasil I was docked with the Startree just above us, the treeship’s kilometer of branches and trunk mingling perfectly with the Biosphere branches. Only the fact that the Consul’s ship had slowly docked and was being pulled into a storage pod by a worker squid allowed me to see the treeship. Crew clones were visible, working feverishly, carrying provisions and Mobius cubes onto Het Masteen’s tree-ship, and I could see scores of plantstem life-support umbilicals and connector stems running from the Startree to the treeship.
Aenea had not released my hand. When I turned my gaze from the treeship hanging above us to my friend, she leaned closer and kissed me on the lips. “Can you imagine, Raul? Millions of the space-adapted Ousters living out there … seeing all that energy all the time … flying for weeks and months in the empty spaces … running the bowshock rapids of magnetospheres and vortexes around planets … riding the solar-wind plasma shock waves out ten AUs or more, and then flying farther … to the heliopause termination-shock boundary seventy-five to a hundred and fifty AUs from the star, out to where the solar wind ends and the interstellar medium begins. Hearing the hiss and whispers and surf-crash of the universe’s ocean? Can you imagine?”
“No,” I said. I could not. I did not know what she was talking about. Not then.
A. Bettik, Rachel, Theo, Kassad, and the others descended from a transit vine. Rachel carried clothes for Aenea. A. Bettik brought my clothes.
Ousters and others surrounded my friend again, demanding answers to urgent questions, seeking clarifications of orders, reporting on the imminent launch of the Gideon-drive drone. We were swept apart by the press of other people.
Aenea looked back and waved. I raised my hand—still silver from the skinsuit—to wave back, but she was gone.
That evening several hundred of us took a transport pod pulled by a squid to a site many thousands of klicks to the northwest above the plane of the ecliptic along the inner shell of the Biosphere Startree, but the voyage lasted less than thirty minutes because the squid took a shortcut, cutting an arc through space from our section of the sphere to the new one.
The architecture of living pods and communal platforms, branch towers and connecting bridges on this section of the tree, while still so close to our region by any meaningful geography of this huge structure, looked different—larger, more baroque, alien—and the Ousters and Templars here spoke a slightly different dialect, while the space-adapted Ousters ornamented themselves with bands of shimmering color that I had not seen before. There were different birds and beasts in the atmosphere zones here—exotic fish swimming through misted air, great herds of something that looked like Old Earth killer whales with short arms and elegant hands. And this was only a few thousand klicks from the region I knew. I could not imagine the diversity of cultures and life-forms throughout this Biosphere. For the first time I realized what Aenea and the others had been telling me over and over … there was more internal surface on the sections of the completed Biosphere than the total of all the planetary surfaces discovered by humankind in the past thousand years of interstellar flight. When the Startree was completed, the internal Biosphere quickened, the volume of habitable space would exceed all the inhabitable worlds in the Milky Way galaxy.
We were met by officials, feted for a few moments on crowded one-sixth-g platforms among hundreds of Ouster and Templar dignitaries, then taken into a pod so large that it might have been a small moon.
A crowd of several hundred thousand Ousters and Templars waited, with a few hundred Seneschai Aluit and hovering crowds of Akerataeli near the central dais. Blinking, I realized that the ergs had set the internal containment field at a comfortable one-sixth-g, pulling everyone toward the surface of the sphere, but then I noticed that the seats continued up and over and around the full interior of the sphere. I revised my estimate of the crowd to well over a million.
Ouster Freeman Navson Hamnim and Templar True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen introduced Aenea, saying that she brought with her the message that their people had awaited for centuries.
My young friend walked to the podium, looking up and around and down, as if making eye contact with every person in the huge space. The sound system was so sophisticated that we could have heard her swallow or breathe. My beloved looked calm.
“Choose again,” said Aenea. And she turned, walked away from the podium, and went down to where the chalices lay on the long table.
Hundreds of us donated our blood, mere drops, as the chalices of wine were passed out to the waiting multitudes. I knew that there was no way that a million waiting Ouster and Templar communicants could be served by a few hundred of us who had already received communion from Aenea, but the aides drew a few drops with sterile lancets, the drops were transferred to the reservoir of wine, scores of helpers passed chalice bulbs under the spigots, and within the hour, those who wished communion with Aenea’s wine-blood had received it. The great sphere began emptying.
/> After her two words, nothing else had been said through the entire evening. For the first time on that long—endless—day, there was silence in the transport pod traveling home … home, back to our region of the Startree under the shadow of the Yggdrasill destined to depart within twenty hours.
I had felt like a fraud. I had drunk the wine almost twenty-four hours earlier, but I had felt nothing this day … nothing except my usual love for Aenea, which is to say, my absolutely unusual, unique, totally without referent or equal love for Aenea.
The multitudes who wanted to drink had drunk. The great sphere had emptied, with even those who had not come to the communion silent—whether with disappointment at my beloved’s two-word speech, or pondering something beyond and beneath that, I did not know.
We took the transport pod back to our region of the Startree and we were silent except for the most necessary of communications. It was not an awkward or disappointed silence, more a silence of awe bordering on fear at the terminus of one part of one’s life and the beginning … the hope for a beginning … of another.
Choose again. Aenea and I made love in the darkened living pod, despite our fatigue and the late hour. Our lovemaking was slow and tender and almost unbearably sweet.
Choose again. They were the last words in my mind as I finally drifted … literally … off to sleep. Choose again. I understood. I chose Aenea and life with Aenea. And I believe that she had chosen me.
And I would choose her and she would choose me again tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, and in every hour during those tomorrows.
Choose again. Yes. Yes.
27
My name is Jacob Schulmann. I write this letter to my friends in Lodz:
My very dear friends, I waited to write to confirm what I’d heard. Alas, to our great grief, we now know it all. I spoke to an eyewitness who escaped. He told me everything. They’re exterminated in Chelmno, near Dombie, and they’re all buried in Rzuszow forest. The Jews are killed in two ways: by shooting or gas. It’s just happened to thousands of Lodz Jews. Do not think that this is being written by a madman. Alas, it is the tragic, horrible truth.
“Horror, horror! Man, shed thy clothes, cover thy head with ashes, run in the streets and dance in thy madness.” I am so weary that my pen can no longer write. Creator of the universe, help us!
I write the letter on January 19, A.D. 1942. A few weeks later, during a February thaw when there is a false scent of spring to the woods around our city of Grabow, we—the men in the camp—are loaded into vans. Some of the vans have brightly painted pictures of tropical trees and jungle animals on them. These are the children’s vans from last summer when they took the children from the camp. The paint has faded over this past winter, and the Germans have not bothered to retouch the images so that the gay pictures seem to be fading like last summer’s dreams.
They drive us fifteen kilometers to Chelmno, which the Germans call Kulmhof. Here they order us out of the vans and demand that we relieve ourselves in the forest. I cannot do it … not with the guards and the other men looking on, but I pretend that I have urinated and button my pants again.
They put us back in the big vans and drive us to an old castle. Here they order us out again and we are marched through a courtyard littered with clothes and shoes and down into a cellar. On the wall of the cellar, in Yiddish, is written “No one leaves here alive.” There are hundreds of us in the cellar now, all men, all Poles, most of us from the nearby villages such as Gradow and Kolo, but many from Lodz. The air smells of dampness and rot and cold stone and mildew.
After several hours, as the light is waning, we do leave the cellar alive. More vans have arrived, larger vans, with double-leaf doors. These larger vans are green. They have no pictures painted on their sides. The guards open the van doors and I can see that most of these larger vans are almost full, each holding seventy to eighty men. I recognize none of the men in them.
The Germans push and beat us to hurry us into the large vans. I hear many of the men I know crying out so I lead them in prayer as we are packed into the foul-smelling vans—Shema Israel, we are praying. We are still praying as the van doors are slammed shut.
Outside, the Germans are shouting at the Polish driver and his Polish helpers. I hear one of the helpers shout “Gas!” in Polish and there comes the sound of a pipe or hose being coupled somewhere under our truck. The engine starts again with a roar.
Some of those around me continue praying with me, but most of the men begin screaming. The van starts to move, very slowly. I know that we are taking the narrow, asphalted road that the Germans built from Chelmno into the forest. All of the villagers marveled at this, because the road goes nowhere … it stops in the forest where the road widens so that there is room for the vans to turn around. But there is nothing there but the forest and the ovens the Germans ordered built and the pits the Germans ordered dug. The Jews in the camp who worked on that road and who dug the pits out there and who worked to build the ovens in the forest have told us this. We had not believed them when they told us, and then they were gone … transported.
The air thickens. The screams rise. My head hurts. It is hard to breathe. My heart is pounding wildly. I am holding the hands of a young man—a boy—on my left, and an old man to my right. Both are praying with me.
Somewhere in our van, someone is singing above the screams, singing in Yiddish, singing in a baritone that has been trained for opera:
“My God, my God,
why hast Thou forsaken us?
We have been thrust into the fire before,
but we have never denied Thy Holy Law.”
Aenea! My God! What?
Shhh. It’s all right, my dear. I’m here.
I don’t … what?
My name is Kaltryn Cateyen Endymion and I am the wife of Trorbe Endymion, who died five local months ago in a hunting accident. I am also the mother of the child named Raul, now three Hyperion-years old, who is playing by the campfire in the caravan circle as aunts watch him.
I climb the grassy hill above the valley where the caravan wagons have circled for the night. There are a few triaspen along the stream in the valley, but otherwise the moors are empty of any landmarks except short grass, heather, sedge, rocks, boulders, and lichen. And sheep. Hundreds of the caravan’s sheep are visible and audible on the hills to the east as they mill and surge to the sheepdogs’ herding.
Grandam is mending clothes on a rock outcropping with a grand view down the valley to the west. There is a haze over the western horizon that means open water, the sea, but the immediate world is bound about by the moors, the evening sky of deepening lapis, the meteor streaks silently crossing and crisscrossing that sky, and the sound of the wind in the grass.
I take a seat on a rock next to Grandam. She is my late mother’s mother, and her face is our face but older, with weathered skin, short white hair, firm bones in a strong face, a blade of a nose, and brown eyes with laugh lines at the corners.
“You’re back at last,” says the older woman. “Was the voyage home smooth?”
“Aye,” I say. “Tom took us along the coast from Port Romance and then up the Beak Highway rather than paying the ferry toll through the Fens. We stayed at the Benbroke Inn the first night, camped along the Suiss the second.”
Grandam nods. Her fingers are busy with the sewing. There is a basket of clothes next to her on the rock. “And the doctors?”
“The clinic was large,” I say. “The Christians have added to it since last we were in Port Romance. The sisters … the nurses … were very kind during the tests.”
Grandam waits.
I look down the valley to where the sun is breaking free from the dark clouds. Light streaks the valley tops, throws subtle shadows behind the low boulders and rocky hilltops, and sets the heather aflame. “It is cancer,” I say. “The new strain.”
“We knew that from the Moor’s Edge doctor,” says Grandam. “What did they say the prognosis is?”
I pic
k up a shirt—it is one of Trorbe’s, but belongs to his brother, Raul’s Uncle Ley. I pull my own needle and thread from my apron and begin to sew on the button that Trorbe had lost just before his last hunting trip north. My cheeks are hot at the thought that I gave this shirt to Ley with the button missing. “They recommend that I accept the cross,” I say.
“There is no cure?” says Grandam. “With all their machines and serums?”
“There used to be,” I say. “But evidently it used the molecular technology …”
“Nanotech,” says Grandam.
“Yes. And the Church banned it some time ago. The more advanced worlds have other treatments.”
“But Hyperion does not,” says Grandam and sets the clothes in her lap aside.
“Correct.” As I speak, I feel very tired, still a little ill from the tests and the trip, and very calm. But also very sad. I can hear Raul and the other boys laughing on the breeze.
“And they counsel accepting their cross,” says Grandam, the last word sounding short and sharp-edged.
“Yes. A very nice young priest talked to me for hours yesterday.”
Grandam looks me in the eye. “And will you do it, Kaltryn?”
I return her gaze. “No.”
“You are sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Trorbe would be alive again and with us now if he had accepted the cruciform last spring as the missionary pleaded.”
“Not my Trorbe,” I say and turn away. For the first time since the pain began seven weeks ago, I am crying. Not for me, I know, but at the memory of Trorbe smiling and waving that last sunrise morn when he set out with his brothers to hunt salt ibson near the coast.
Grandam is holding my hand. “You’re thinking of Raul?”
I shake my head. “Not yet. In a few weeks, I’ll think of nothing else.”