by Дэн Симмонс
“Three hundred archangels,” said de Soya. He rubbed his cheeks. “If they are aware we know about them, they could make a Gideon jump this direction within days… hours. Assume two days’ resurrection time, we may have less than three days to prepare. Have defenses been improved since I left?”
Another Ouster whom I later knew as Systenj Coredwell opened his hands in a gesture that I would discover meant “in no way.” I noticed that there was webbing between the long fingers.
“Most of the fighting ships have had to jump to the Great Wall salient to hold off their Task Force HORSEHEAD. The fighting is very bitter there. Few of the ships are expected to return.”
“Does your intelligence say whether the Pax knows what you have here?” asked Aenea.
Navson Hamnim opened his hands in a subtle variation of Coredwell’s gesture.
“We think not. But they know now that this has been a major staging area for our recent defensive battles. I would venture that they think this is just another base—perhaps with a partial orbital forest ring.”
“Is there anything we can do to break up the Crusade before it jumps this way?” said Aenea, speaking to everyone in the room.
“No.” The flat syllable came from the tall man who had been introduced as Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. His Web English had a strange accent. He was a tall man, extremely thin but muscular, with an equally thin beard along his jawline and around his mouth. In the old poet’s Cantos, Kassad had been described as a reasonably young man, but this warrior was in his standard sixties, at least, with heavy lines around his thin mouth and small eyes, his dark complexion burned even darker by long exposure to desert-world sun or deep-space UV, the spiked hair on top of his head rising like short silver nails. Everyone looked at Kassad and waited.
“With de Soya’s ship destroyed,” said the Colonel, “our only chance at successful hit-and-run operations is gone. The few Hawking-drive warships we have left would take a time-debt of at least two months to jump to Lacaille 9352 and back. The Crusade archangels would almost certainly be here and gone by then… and we would be defenseless.”
Navson Hamnim kicked away from the pod wall and oriented himself right side up in relation to Kassad. “These few warships do not offer us a defense in any case,” he said softly, his own Web English more musical than accented. “Should we not consider dying while on the attack?”
Aenea floated between the two men. “I think that we should consider not dying at all,” she said. “Nor allowing the biosphere to be destroyed.”
A positive sentiment, a voice spoke in my head. But not all positive sentiments can be supported by updrafts of possible action.
“True,” said Aenea, looking at the platelets, “but perhaps in this case the updrafts will build.”
Good thermals to you all, said the voice in my head. The platelets moved toward the pod wall, which irised open for them. Then they were gone.
Aenea took a breath. “Shall we meet on the Yggdrasill to share the main meal in seven hours and continue this discussion? Perhaps someone will have an idea.”
There was no dissension. People, Ousters, and Seneschai exited by a score of openings that had not been there a moment before.
Aenea floated over and hugged me again. I patted her hair.
“My friend,” she said softly. “Come with me.”
It was her private living pod—our private living pod, she informed me—and it was much like the one in which I awoke, except that there were organic shelves, niches, writing surfaces, storage cubbies, and facilities for comlog interface. Some of my clothes from the ship were folded neatly in a cubby and my extra boots were in a fiberplastic drawer.
Aenea pulled food from a cold-box cubby and began making sandwiches. “You must be hungry, my dear,” she said, tearing off pieces of rough bread. I saw zygoat cheese on the sticktite zero-g work surface, some wrapped pieces of roast beef that must have come from the ship, bulbs of mustard, and several tankards of T’ien Shan rice beer. Suddenly I was starved.
The sandwiches were large and thick. She set them on catchplates made of some strong fiber, lifted her own meal and a beer bulb, and kicked toward the outer wall. A portal appeared and began to iris open.
“Uh…” I said alertly, meaning—Excuse me, Aenea, but that’s space out there. Aren’t we both going to explosively decompress and die horribly? She kicked out through the organic portal and I shrugged and followed.
There were catwalks, suspension bridges, sticktite stairways, balconies, and terraces out there—made of steel-hard plant fiber and winding around the pods, stalks, branches, and trunks like so much ivy. There was also air to breathe. It smelled of a forest after a rain.
“Containment field,” I said, thinking that I should have expected this. After all, if the Consul’s ancient starship could have a balcony…
I looked around. “What powers it?” I said. “Solar receptors?”
“Indirectly,” said Aenea, finding us a sticktite bench and mat. There were no railings on this tiny, intricately woven balcony. The huge branch—at least thirty meters across—ended in a profusion of leaves above us and the latticework web of the trunks and branches “beneath” us convinced my inner ear that we were many kilometers up on a wall made of crisscrossed, green girders. I resisted the urge to throw myself down on the sticktite mat and cling for dear life. A radiant gossamer fluttered by, followed by some type of small bird with a v-shaped tail.
“Indirectly?” I said, my mouth full as I took a huge bite of sandwich.
“The sunlight—for the most part—is converted to containment fields by ergs,” continued my friend, sipping her beer and looking out at the seemingly infinite expanse of leaves above us, below us, to all sides of us, their green faces all turned toward the brilliant star. There was not enough air to give us a blue sky, but the containment field polarized the view toward the sun just enough to keep us from being blinded when we glanced that direction.
I almost spit my food out, managed to swallow instead, and said, “Ergs? As in Aldebaren energy binders? You were serious? Ergs like the one taken on the last Hyperion pilgrimage?”
“Yes,” said Aenea. Her dark eyes were focused on me now.
“I thought they were extinct.”
“Nope,” said Aenea.
I took a long drink from the beer bulb and shook my head. “I’m confused.”
“You have a right to be, my dear friend,” Aenea said softly.
“This place…” I made a weak gesture toward the wall of branches and leaves trailing away so much farther than a planetary horizon, the infinitely distant curve of green and black far above us. “It’s impossible,” I said.
“Not quite,” said Aenea. “The Templars and Ousters have been working on it—and others like it—for a thousand years.”
I began chewing again. The cheese and roast beef were delicious. “So this is where the thousands and millions of trees went when they abandoned God’s Grove during the Fall.”
“Some of them,” said Aenea. “But the Templars had been working with the Ousters to develop orbital forest rings and biospheres long before that.”
I peered up. The distances made me dizzy. The sense of being on this small, leafy platform so many kilometers above nothing made me reel.
Far below us and to our right, something that looked like a tiny, green sprig moved slowly between the latticed branches. I saw the film of energy field around it and realized that I was looking at one of the fabled Templar treeships, almost certainly kilometers long. “Is this finished then?” I said. “A true Dyson sphere? A globe around a star?”
Aenea shook her head. “Far from it, although about twenty standard years ago, they made contact with all the primary trunk tendrils. Technically it’s a sphere, but most of it is comprised of holes at this point—some many millions of klicks across.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I said, realizing that I could have been more eloquent. I rubbed my cheeks, feeling the heavy growth of beard there.
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br /> “I’ve been out of it for two weeks?” I said.
“Fifteen standard days,” said Aenea.
“Usually the doc-in-the-box works more quickly than that,” I said. I finished the sandwich, stuck the catchplate to the table surface, and concentrated on the beer.
“Usually it does,” agreed Aenea. “Rachel must have told you that you spent a relatively short time in the autosurgeon. She did most of the initial surgery herself.”
“Why?” I said.
“The box was full,” said Aenea. “We defrosted you from fugue as soon as we got here, but the three in the doc ahead of you were in bad shape. De Soya was near death for a full week. The sergeant… Gregorius… was much more seriously injured than he had let on when we met him on the Great Peak. And the third officer—Carel Shan—died despite the box’s and the Ouster medics’ best efforts.”
“Shit,” I said, lowering the beer. “I’m sorry to hear that.” One got used to autosurgeons fixing almost anything.
Aenea looked at me with such intensity that I could feel her gaze warming my skin as surely as I could feel the powerful sunlight. “How are you, Raul?”
“Great,” I said. “I ache a bit. I can feel the healing ribs. The scars itch. And I feel like I overslept by two weeks… but I feel good.”
She took my hand. I realized that her eyes were moist. “I would have been really pissed if you’d died on me,” she said after a moment, her voice thick.
“Me too.” I squeezed her hand, looked up, and suddenly leaped to my feet, sending the beer bulb spiraling off into thin air and almost launching myself. Only the sticktite velcro soles on my soft shoes kept me anchored. “Holy shit!” I said, pointing.
From this distance, it looked like a squid, perhaps only a meter or two long. From experience and a growing sense of perspective here, I knew better.
“One of the zeplins,” said Aenea. “The Akerataeli have tens of thousands working on the Biosphere. They stay inside the CO2 and O2 envelopes.”
“It’s not going to eat me again, is it?” I said.
Aenea grinned. “I doubt it. The one that got a taste of you has probably spread the word.”
I looked for my beer, saw the bulb tumbling away a hundred meters below us, considered leaping after it, thought better of it, and sat down on the sticktite bench.
Aenea gave me her bulb. “Go ahead. I can never finish those things.” She watched me drink.
“Any other questions while we’re talking?”
I swallowed and made a dismissive gesture.
“Well, there happens to be a bunch of extinct, mythical, and dead people around. Care to explain that?”
“By extinct you mean the zeplins, Seneschai, and Templars?” she said.
“Yeah. And the ergs… although I haven’t seen one of those yet.”
“The Templars and Ousters have been working to preserve such hunted sentient species the way the colonists on Maui-Covenant tried to save the Old Earth dolphins,” she said. “From the early Hegira colonists, then the Hegemony, and now the Pax.”
“And the mythical and dead people?” I said.
“By that you mean Colonel Kassad?”
“And Het Masteen,” I said. “And, for that matter, Rachel. We seem to have the whole cast of the friggin’ Hyperion Cantos showing up here.”
“Not quite,” said Aenea, her voice soft and a bit sad. “The Consul is dead. Father Duré is never allowed to live. And my mother is gone.”
“Sorry, kiddo…”
She touched my hand again. “That’s all right. I know what you mean… it’s disconcerting.”
“Did you know Colonel Kassad or Het Masteen before this?” I said.
Aenea shook her head. “My mother told me about them, of course… and Uncle Martin had things to add to his poem’s description. But they were gone before I was born.”
“Gone,” I repeated. “Don’t you mean dead?” I worked to remember the Cantos stanzas. According to the old poet’s tale, Het Masteen, the tall Templar, the True Voice of the Tree, had disappeared on the windwagon trip across Hyperion’s Sea of Grass shortly after his treeship, the Yggdrasill, had burned in orbit. Blood in the Templar’s cabin suggested the Shrike. He had left behind the erg in a Möbius cube. Sometime later, they had found Masteen in the Valley of the Time Tombs.
He had not been able to explain his absence—had said only that the blood in the windwagon had not been his—had cried out that it was his job to be the Voice of the Tree of Pain—and had died.
Colonel Kassad had disappeared at about that same time—shortly after entering the Valley of the Time Tombs—but the FORCE Colonel had, according to Martin Silenus’s Cantos, followed his phantom lover, Moneta, into the far future where he was to die in combat with the Shrike. I closed my eyes and recited aloud:
“… Later, in the death carnage of the valley,
Moneta and a few of the Chosen Warriors,
Wounded all,
Torn and tossed themselves by the Shrike horde’s fury,
Found the body of Fedmahn Kassad
Still wrapped in death’s embrace with the Silent Shrike.
Lifting the warrior, carrying him, touching him
With reverence born of loss and battle,
They washed and tended his ravaged body,
And bore him to the Crystal Monolith.
Here the hero was laid on a bier of white marble,
Weapons were set at his feet.
In the valley beyond, a great bonfire filled
The air with light. Human men and women carried torches
Through the dark,
While others descended, wingsoft, through
Morning lapis lazuli,
And some others arrived in faery craft, bubbles of light,
While still others descended on wings of energy
Or wrapped in circles of green and gold.
Later, as the stars burned in place,
Moneta made her farewells to her future’s
Friends and entered the Sphinx. Multitudes sang.
Rat things poked among fallen pennants
In the field where heroes fell,
While the wind whispered among carapace
And blade, steel and thorn. And thus,
In the Valley, The great Tombs shimmered,
Faded from gold to bronze,
And started their long voyage back.”
“Impressive memory,” said Aenea.
“Grandam used to cuff me if I screwed it up,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. The Templar and the Colonel sound dead to me.”
“And so they will be,” said Aenea. “And so shall we all.”
I waited for her to shift out of her Delphic phase.
“The Cantos say that Het Masteen was carried away somewhere… some-when by the Shrike,” she said. “He later died in the Valley of the Time Tombs after returning. The poem did not say if he was gone an hour or thirty years. Uncle Martin did not know.”
I squinted at her. “What about Kassad, kiddo? The Cantos are fairly specific there… the Colonel follows Moneta into the far future, engages in a battle with the Shrike…”
“With legions of Shrikes, actually,” corrected my friend.
“Yeah,” I said. I had never really understood that. “But it seems continuous enough… he follows her, he fights, he dies, his body is put in the Crystal Monolith, and it and Moneta begin the long trip back through time.”
Aenea nodded and smiled. “With the Shrike,” she said.
I paused. The Shrike had emerged from the Tombs… Moneta had traveled with it somehow… so although the Cantos clearly said that Kassad had destroyed the Shrike in that great, final battle, the monster was somehow alive and traveling with Moneta and Kassad’s body back through… Damn. Did the poem ever actually say that Kassad was dead?
“Uncle Martin had to fake parts of the tale, you know,” said Aenea. “He had some descriptions from Rachel, but he took poetic license on the parts he did not underst
and.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Rachel. Moneta.
The Cantos had clearly suggested that the girl-child Rachel, who went forward with her father, Sol, to the future, would return as the woman Moneta. Colonel Kassad’s phantom lover. The woman he would follow into the future to his fate… And what had Rachel said to me a few hours earlier when I was suspicious that she and Aenea were lovers? “I happen to be involved with a certain soldier… male… whom you’ll meet today. Well, actually, I will be involved with him someday. I mean… shit, it’s complicated.”
Indeed. My head hurt. I set down the beer bulb and held my head in my hands.
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Aenea.
I peered up at her through my fingers. “Care to explain?”
“Yes, but…”
“I know,” I said. “At some other time.”
“Yes,” said Aenea, her hand on mine.
“Any reason why we can’t talk about it now?” I said.
Aenea nodded. “We have to go in our pod now and opaque the walls,” she said.
“We do?” I said.
“Yes.”
“And then what?” I said.
“Then,” said Aenea, floating free of the sticktite mat and pulling me with her, “we make love for hours.”
25
Zero-g. Weightlessness. I had never really appreciated those terms and that reality before. Our living pod was opaqued to the point that the rich evening light glowed as if through thick parchment.
Once again, I had the impression of being in a warm heart. Once again I realized how much Aenea was in my heart.
At first the encounter bordered on the clinical as Aenea carefully removed my clothes and inspected the healing surgical scars, gently touched my repaired ribs, and ran her palm down my back.
“I should shave,” I said, “and shower.”
“Nonsense,” whispered my friend. “I’ve given you sponge and sonic baths every day… including this morning. You’re perfectly clean, my dear. And I like the whiskers.” She moved her fingers across my cheek.
We floated above the soft and rounded cubby shelves. I helped Aenea out of her shirt, trousers, and underwear. As each piece came clear, she kicked it through the air into the cubby drawer, shutting the fiber panel with her bare foot when everything was inside. We both chuckled. My own clothes were still floating in the quiet air, the sleeves of my shirt gesturing in slow motion.