The Rise of Endymion hc-4

by Дэн Симмонс

  Do not worry, I will open the containment field at the precise instant you pass through and go to EM repulsors until you are clear of the drive exhaust. I realized that it was the ship speaking. I had no idea of what we were doing.

  The suits should give you a rough idea of our adaptation, Palou Koror was saying. Of course, for those of us who have chosen full integration, it is not the semisentient suits and their molecular microprocessors that allow us to live and travel in space, but the adapted circuits in our skin, our blood, our vision, and brains.

  How do we… I began, having some trouble subvocalizing, as if the dryness in my mouth would have any affect on my throat muscles.

  Do not worry, said Nicaagat. We will not deploy our wings until proper separation is achieved. They will not collide… the fields would not allow it. Controls are quite intuitive. Your suit’s optical systems should interface with your nervous system and neurosensors, calling up data when required.

  Data? What data? I had only meant to think that, but the suitcom sent it out.

  Aenea took my silver hand in hers. This will be fun, Raul. The only free minutes we’re going to have today, I think. Or for a while.

  At that moment, poised on the railing on the edge of a terrifying vertical drop through fusion flame and vacuum, I did not really focus on the meaning of her words.

  Come, said Palou Koror and leaped from the railing.

  Still holding hands, Aenea and I jumped together.

  She let go of my hand and we spun away from one another. The containment field parted and ejected us a safe distance, the fusion drive paused as the five of us spun away from the ship, then it relit—the ship seeming to hurtle upward and away from us as its deceleration outpaced our own—and we continued dropping, that sensation was overwhelming, five silver, spread-eagled forms, separating farther and farther from each other, all plummeting toward the Startree lattice still several thousand klicks beneath. Then our wings opened.

  For our purposes today, the lightwings need only be a kilometer or so across, came Palou Koror’s voice in my ears. Were we traveling farther or faster, they would extend much farther… perhaps several hundred kilometers.

  When I raised my arms, the panels of energy extruding from my skinsuit unfurled like butterfly wings. I felt the sudden push of sunlight. What we feel is more the current of the primary magnetic field line we are following, said Palou Koror. If I may slave your suits for a second… there.

  Vision shifted. I looked to my left to where Aenea fell, already several klicks away—a shining silver chrysalis set within expanding gold wings. The others glowed beyond her. I could see the solar wind, see the charged particles and currents of plasma flowing and spiraling outward along the infinitely complex geometry of the heliosphere—red lines of twisting magnetic field coiling as if painted on the inner surfaces of an ever-shifting chambered nautilus, all this convoluted, multilayered, multicolored writhing of plasma streams flowing back to a sun that no longer seemed a pale star but was the locus of millions of converging field lines, entire sheets of plasma being evicted at 400 kilometers a second and being drawn into the shapes by the pulsing magnetic fields in its north and south equators, I could see the violet streamers of the inward-rushing magnetic lines, weaving and interlacing with the crimson red of the outward-exploding sheets of field current, I could see the blue vortices of heliospheric shock wave around the outer edges of the Startree, the moons and comets cutting through plasma medium like ocean-going ships at night plowing through a glowing, phosphorescent sea, and could see our gold wings interacting with this plasma and magnetic medium, catching photons like billions of fireflies in our nets, sail surfaces surging to the plasma currents, our silver bodies accelerating out along the great shimmering folds and spiral magnetic geometries of the heliosphere matrix. In addition to this enhanced vision, the suit opticals were overlaying trajectory information and computational data that meant nothing to me, but must have meant life or death to these space-adapted Ousters. The equations and functions flashed by, seemingly floating in the distance at critical focus, and I remember only a sampling:…

  G MbMc / r2 = Mc Vcir2 / r

  pr = (l + k) Sr / c

  k = Ra / (Ra + A)…

  Even without understanding any of these equations, I knew that we were approaching the Startree too fast. In addition to the ship’s velocity, we had picked up our own speed from the solar wind and the plasma stream. I began to see how these Ouster energy wings could move one out from a star—and at an impressive velocity—but how did one stop within what looked to be less than a thousand kilometers?

  This is fantastic, came Lhomo’s voice. Amazing.

  I rotated my head far enough to see our flyer friend from T’ien Shan far to our left and many kilometers below us. He had already entered the leaf zone and was swooping and soaring just above the blue blur of the containment field that surrounded the branches and spaces between the branches like an osmotic membrane.

  How the hell did he do that? I wondered.

  Again, I must have subvocalized the thought, for I heard Lhomo’s deep, distinctive laugh and he sent, USE the wings, Raul. And cooperate with the tree and the ergs!

  Cooperate with the tree and the ergs? My friend must have lost his reason.

  Then I saw Aenea extending her wings, manipulating them by both thought and the movement of her arms, I looked beyond her to the world of branches approaching us at horrifying velocity, and then I began to see the trick.

  That’s good, came Drivenj Nicaagat’s voice. Catch the repelling wind. Good.

  I watched the two adapted Ousters flutter like butterflies, saw the torrent of plasma energy rising from the Startree to surround them, and suddenly hurtled past them as if they had opened parachutes and I was still in freefall.

  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 skinsuit 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.

  Vf = V Vc2 = 2 (J-G MstarMc) / riMc

  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 th
rough 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, Freewoman Koror.”

  “It was our pleasure, Revered One Who Teaches,” said Nicaagat with a bow.

  I looked up and realized that the Yggdrasill 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 Möbius cubes onto Het Masteen’s treeship, 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 AU’s or more, and then flying farther… to the heliopause termination-shock boundary seventy-five to a hundred and fifty AU’s 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 un-usual, 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 times.

  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 Gradow, 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.