by Dan Simmons
“Missiles launched against us,” said one of the captain’s Templar lieutenants in a voice no more excited than I would use to announce the arrival of dinner. “Two … four … nine. Sublight. Presumably plasma warheads.”
“Can we survive that?” asked Theo. Rachel had walked over to watch the Colonel climb toward the Shrike.
Het Masteen was too occupied to answer, so Aenea said, “We don’t know. It depends on the binders … the ergs.”
“Sixty seconds to missile impact,” said the same Templar lieutenant in the same flat tones.
Het Masteen touched a comwand. His voice sounded normal, but I realized that it was being amplified all over the klick-long treeship. “Everyone will please shield their eyes and avoid looking toward the field. The binders will polarize the flash as much as possible, but please do not look up. May the peace of the Muir be with us.”
I looked at Aenea. “Kiddo, does this treeship carry weapons?”
“No,” she said. Her eyes looked as weary as her voice had sounded.
“So we’re not going to fight … just run?”
“Yes, Raul.”
I ground my molars. “Then I agree with Lhomo,” I said. “We’ve run too much. It’s time to help our friends here. Time to …”
At least three of the missiles exploded. Later, I recall the light so blinding that I could see Aenea’s skull and vertebrae through her skin and flesh, but that must be impossible. There was a sense of falling … of the bottom falling out of everything … and then the one-sixth-g field was restored. A subsonic rumble made my teeth and bones hurt.
I blinked away retinal afterimages. Aenea’s face was still before me—her cheeks flushed and sweaty, her hair pulled back by a hastily tied band, her eyes tired but infinitely alive, her forearms bare and sunburned—and in a thick moment of sentimentality I thought that it would not have been unthinkable to die like that, with Aenea’s face seared into my soul and memory.
Two more plasma warheads made the treeship shudder. Then four more. “Holding,” said Het Masteen’s lieutenant. “All fields holding.”
“Lhomo and Raul are right, Aenea,” said the Dorje Phamo, stepping forward with regal elegance in her simple cotton robe. “You have run away from the Pax for years. It is time to fight them … time for all of us to fight them.”
I was staring at the old woman with something close to rude intensity. I had realized that there was an aura about her … no, wrong word, too mystical … but a feeling of strong color emanating from her, a deep carmine as strong as the Thunderbolt Sow’s personality. I also realized that I had been noticing that with everyone on the platform that evening—the bright blue of Lhomo’s courage, the golden confidence of Het Masteen’s command, the shimmering violet of Colonel Kassad’s shock at seeing the Shrike—and I wondered if this was some artifact of learning the language of the living. Or perhaps it was a result of the overload of light from the plasma explosions. Whatever it was, I knew that the colors were not real—I was not hallucinating and my vision was not clouded—but I also thought that I knew that my mind was making these connections, these shorthand glimpses into the true spirit of the person, on some level below and above sight.
And I knew that the colors surrounding Aenea covered the spectrum and beyond—a glow so pervasive that it filled the treeship as surely as the plasma explosions filled the world outside it.
Father de Soya spoke. “No, ma’am,” he said to the Dorje Phamo, his voice soft and respectful. “Lhomo and Raul are not correct. In spite of all of our anger and our wish to strike back, Aenea is correct. Lhomo may learn—if he lives—what we all will learn if we live. That is, after communion with Aenea, we share the pain of those we attack. Truly share it. Literally share it. Physically share it. Share it as part of having learned the language of the living.”
The Dorje Phamo looked down at the shorter priest. “I know this is true, Christian. But this does not mean that we cannot strike back when others hurt us.” She swept one arm upward to include the slowly clearing containment field and the starfield of fusion trails and burning embers beyond it. “These Pax … monsters … are destroying one of the greatest achievements of the human race. We must stop them!”
“Not now,” said Father de Soya. “Not by fighting them here. Trust Aenea.”
The giant named Sergeant Gregorius stepped into the circle. “Every fiber of my being, every moment of my training, every scar from my years of fighting … everything urges me to fight now,” he growled. “But I trusted my captain. Now I trust him as my priest. And if he says we must trust the young woman … then we must trust her.”
Het Masteen held up a hand. The group fell into silence. “This argument is a waste of time. As the One Who Teaches told you, the Yggdrasill has no weapons and the ergs are our only defense. But they cannot phase-shift the fusion drive while providing this level of shield. Effectively, we have no propulsion … we are drifting on our former course only a few light-minutes beyond our original position. And five of the archangels have changed course to intercept us.” The Templar turned to face us. “Please, everyone except the Revered One Who Teaches and her tall friend Raul, please leave the bridge platform and wait below.”
The others left without another word. I saw the direction of Rachel’s gaze before she turned away and I looked up. Colonel Kassad was at the top crow’s nest, standing next to the Shrike, the tall man still dwarfed by the three-meter sculpture of chrome and blades and thorns. Neither the Colonel nor the killing machine moved as they regarded one another from less than a meter’s distance.
I looked back at the simulacra display. The Pax ship embers were closing fast. Above us the containment field cleared.
“Take my hand, Raul,” said Aenea.
I took her hand, remembering all of the other times I had touched it in the last ten standard years.
“The stars,” she whispered. “Look up at the stars. And listen to them.”
• • •
The treeship Yggdrasill hung in low orbit around an orange-red world with white polar caps, ancient volcanoes larger than my world’s Pinion Plateau, and a river valley running for more than five thousand kilometers like an appendectomy scar around the world’s belly.
“This is Mars,” said Aenea. “Colonel Kassad will leave us here.”
The Colonel had come down from his close regard of the Shrike after the quantum-shift jump. There was no word or phrase for what we did: one moment the treeship was in the Biosphere System, coasting at low velocity, drives dead, under attack by a swarm of archangels, and the next instant we were in low and stable orbit around this dead world in Old Earth System.
“How did you do that?” I had asked Aenea a second after she had done it. I’d had no doubt whatsoever that she had … shifted … us there.
“I learned to hear the music of the spheres,” she said. “And then to take a step.”
I kept staring at her. I was still holding her hand. I had no plans to release it until she spoke to me in plain language.
“One can understand a place, Raul,” she said, knowing that so many others were undoubtedly listening at that moment, “and when you do, it is like hearing the music of it. Each world a different chord. Each star system a different sonata. Each specific place a clear and distinct note.”
I did not release her hand. “And the farcasting without a farcaster?” I said.
Aenea nodded. “Freecasting. A quantum leap in the real sense of the term,” she said. “Moving in the macro universe the way an electron moves in the infinitely micro. Taking a step with the help of the Void Which Binds.”
I was shaking my head. “Energy. Where does the energy come from, kiddo? Nothing comes from nothing.”
“But everything comes from everything.”
“What does that mean, Aenea?”
She pulled her fingers from mine but touched my cheek. “Remember our discussion long, long ago about the Newtonian physics of love?”
“Love is an emotion, kid
do. Not a form of energy.”
“It’s both, Raul. It truly is. And it is the only key to unlocking the universe’s greatest supply of energy.”
“Are you talking about religion?” I said, half furious at either her opacity or my denseness or both.
“No,” she said, “I’m talking about quasars deliberately ignited, about pulsars tamed, about the exploding cores of galaxies tapped for energy like steam turbines. I’m talking about an engineering project two and a half billion years old and barely begun.”
I could only stare.
She shook her head. “Later, my love. For now understand that farcasting without a farcaster really works. There were never any real farcasters … never any magical doors opening onto different worlds … only the TechnoCore’s perversion of this form of the Void’s second most wonderful gift.”
I should have said, What is the Void’s first most wonderful gift? but I assumed then that it was the learning-the-language-of-the-dead recording of sentient races’ memories … my mother’s voice, to be more precise. But what I did say then was, “So this is how you moved Rachel and Theo and you from world to world without time-debt.”
“Yes.”
“And took the Consul’s ship from T’ien Shan System to Biosphere with no Hawking drive.”
“Yes.”
I was about to say, And traveled to whatever world where you met your lover, were married, and had a child, but the words would not form.
“This is Mars,” she said next, filling the silence. “Colonel Kassad will leave us here.”
The tall warrior stepped to Aenea’s side. Rachel came closer, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed him.
“Someday you will be called Moneta,” Kassad said softly. “And we will be lovers.”
“Yes,” said Rachel and stepped back.
Aenea took the tall man’s hand. He was still in quaint battle garb, the assault rifle held comfortably in the crook of his arm. Smiling slightly, the Colonel looked up at the highest platform where the Shrike still stood, the blood light of Mars on his carapace.
“Raul,” said Aenea, “will you come as well?”
I took her other hand.
• • •
The wind was blowing sand into my eyes and I could not breathe. Aenea handed me an osmosis mask and I slipped mine on as she set hers in place.
The sand was red, the rocks were red, and the sky was a stormy pink. We were standing in a dry river valley bounded by rocky cliffs. The riverbed was strewn with boulders—some as big as the Consul’s ship. Colonel Kassad pulled on the helmet cowl of his combat suit and static rasped in our comthread pickups. “Where I started,” he said. “In the Tharsis Relocation Slums a few hundred klicks that direction.” He gestured toward where the sun hung low and small above the cliffs. The suited figure, ominous in its size and bulk, the heavy assault weapon looking anything but obsolete here on the plain of Mars, turned toward Aenea. “What would you have me do, woman?”
Aenea spoke in the crisp, quick, sure syllables of command. “The Pax has retreated from Mars and Old Earth System temporarily because of the Palestinian uprising here and the resurgence of the Martian War Machine in space. There is nothing strategic enough to hold them here now while their resources are stretched so thin.”
Kassad nodded.
“But they’ll be back,” said Aenea. “Back in force. Not just to pacify Mars, but to occupy the entire system.” She paused to look around. I followed her gaze and saw the dark human figures moving down the boulder field toward us. They carried weapons.
“You must keep them out of the system, Colonel,” said my friend. “Do whatever you must … sacrifice whomever you must … but keep them out of Old Earth System for the next five standard years.”
I had never heard Aenea sound so adamant or ruthless.
“Five standard years,” said Colonel Kassad. I could see his thin smile behind the cowl visor. “No problem. If it was five Martian years, I might have to strain a bit.”
Aenea smiled. The figures were moving closer through the blowing sand. “You’ll have to take the leadership of the Martian resistance movement,” she said, her voice deadly serious. “Take it any way you can.”
“I will,” said Kassad and the firmness in his voice matched Aenea’s.
“Consolidate the various tribes and warrior factions,” said Aenea.
“I will.”
“Form a more permanent alliance with the War Machine spacers.”
Kassad nodded. The figures were less than a hundred meters away now. I could see weapons raised.
“Protect Old Earth,” said Aenea. “Keep the Pax away at all costs.”
I was shocked. Colonel Kassad must have been surprised as well. “You mean Old Earth System,” he said.
Aenea shook her head. “Old Earth, Fedmahn. Keep the Pax away. You have approximately a year to consolidate control of the entire system. Good luck.”
The two shook hands.
“Your mother was a fine, brave woman,” said the Colonel. “I valued her friendship.”
“And she valued yours.”
The dark figures were moving closer, keeping to the cover of boulders and dunes. Colonel Kassad walked toward them, his right hand high, the assault weapon still easy in his arm.
Aenea came closer and took my hand again. “It’s cold, isn’t it, Raul?”
It was. There was a flash of light like a painless blow to the back of one’s head and we were on the bridge platform of the Yggdrasill. Our friends backed away at the sight of our appearance; the fear of magic dies hard in a species. Mars turned red and cold beyond our branches and containment field.
“What course, Revered One Who Teaches?” said Het Masteen.
“Just turn outward to where we can clearly see the stars,” said Aenea.
29
The Yggdrasill continued on. The Tree of Pain its captain, the Templar True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen, called it. I could not argue. Each jump took more energy from my Aenea, my love, my poor, tired Aenea, and each separation filled the depleting pool of energy with a growing reservoir of sadness. And through it all the Shrike stood useless and alone on its high platform, like a hideous bowsprit on a doomed ship or a macabre dark angel on the top of a mirthless Christmas tree.
After leaving Colonel Kassad on Mars, the treeship jumped to orbit around Maui-Covenant. The world was in rebellion but deep within Pax space and I expected hordes of Pax warships to rise up in challenge, but there was no attack during the few hours we were there.
“One of the benefits of the armada attack on the Biosphere Startree,” Aenea said with sad irony. “They’ve stripped the inner systems of fighting ships.”
It was Theo whose hand Aenea took for the step down to Maui-Covenant. Again, I accompanied my friend and her friend.
I blinked away the white light and we were on a motile isle, its treesails filling with warm tropical wind, the sky and sea a breathtaking blue. Other isles kept pace while dolphin outriders left white wakes on either side of the convoy.
There were people on the high platform and although they were mystified by our appearance, they were not alarmed. Theo hugged the tall blond man and his dark-haired wife who came forward to greet us.
“Aenea, Raul,” she said, “I am pleased to introduce Merin and Deneb Aspic-Coreau.”
“Merin?” I said, feeling the strength in the man’s handshake.
He smiled. “Ten generations removed from the Merin Aspic,” he said. “But a direct descendant. As Deneb is of our famed lady, Siri.” He put his hand on Aenea’s shoulder. “You have come back just as promised. And brought our fiercest fighter back with you.”
“I have,” said Aenea. “And you must keep her safe. For the next days and months, you must keep clear of contact with the Pax.”
Deneb Aspic-Coreau laughed. I noticed without a trace of desire that she might be the healthiest, most beautiful woman I had ever seen. “We’re running for our lives as it is, One Who Teaches. Thrice we’ve t
ried to destroy the oil platform complex at Three Currents, and thrice they have cut us down like Thomas hawks. Now we are just hoping to reach the Equatorial Archipelago and hide among the isle migration, eventually to regroup at the submersible base at Lat Zero.”
“Protect her at all costs,” repeated Aenea. She turned to Theo. “I will miss you, my friend.”
Theo Bernard visibly attempted to keep from weeping, failed, and hugged Aenea fiercely. “All the time … was good,” Theo said and stood back. “I pray for your success. And I pray that you fail … for your own good.”
Aenea shook her head. “Pray for all of our success.” She held her hand up in farewell and walked back to the lower platform with me.
I could smell the intoxicating salt-and-fish scent of the sea. The sun was so fierce it made me squint, but the air temperature was perfect. The water on the dolphins’ skin was as clear to me as the sweat on my own forearms. I could imagine staying in this place forever.
“We have to go,” said Aenea. She took my hand.
A torchship did appear on radar just as we climbed out of Maui-Covenant’s gravity well, but we ignored it as Aenea stood alone on the bridge platform, staring at the stars.
I went over to stand next to her.
“Can you hear them?” she whispered.
“The stars?” I said.
“The worlds,” she said. “The people on them. Their secrets and silences. So many heartbeats.”
I shook my head. “When I am not concentrating on something else,” I said, “I am still haunted by voices and images from elsewhere. Other times. My father hunting in the moors with his brothers. Father Glaucus being thrown to his death by Rhadamanth Nemes.”
She looked at me. “You saw that?”
“Yes. It was horrible. He could not see who it was who had attacked him. The fall … the darkness … the cold … the moments of pain before he died. He had refused to accept the cruciform. It was why the Church sent him to Sol Draconi Septem … exile in the ice.”