by Дэн Симмонс
“Does everyone know?” I said. Poor dumb Raul Endymion. Always the last one to get the word.
“Now they do,” said Colonel Fedmahn Kassad.
The three of us went up to see the dying man.
Martin Silenus was in good humor upon meeting his old friend after almost 280 years of separation.
“So your black killer’s soul is going to become the seed crystal when they build the Shrike a millennium hence, heh?” cackled the old man through his laboring speech synthesizer. “Well, thanks a shitload, Kassad.”
The soldier frowned down at the grinning mummy. “Why aren’t you dead, Martin?” the Colonel said at last.
“I am, I am,” said Silenus, coughing. “I quit breathing ages and eons ago. They just haven’t been smart enough to push me over and bury me yet.” The synthesizer did not try to articulate the chokes and rattles that followed.
“Did you ever finish your worthless prose poem?” asked the soldier as the old man continued to cough, sending the web of tubes and wires shaking. “No,” I said, speaking for the coughing form in the bed. “He couldn’t.”
“Yes,” said Martin Silenus clearly through his throat mike. “I did.”
I just stood there.
“Actually,” cackled the poet, “he finished it for me.” The bony arm with its wrapping of parchment flesh rose slightly from the bed. A thumb distorted by arthritis jerked in my direction.
Colonel Kassad gave me a glance. I shook my head.
“Don’t be so fucking dense, boy,” said Martin Silenus with what translated as an affectionate tone over the speaker. “See your ’scriber anywhere?”
I whirled and looked at the bedside tray where I had left it earlier. It was gone.
“All printed out. About a billion backup memories cut. Sent it out on the datasphere before we ’cast here,” rasped Silenus.
“There is no datasphere,” I said.
Martin Silenus laughed himself into a coughing fit. Eventually the synthesizer translated some of those coughs as, “You aren’t just dumb, boy. You’re helpless. What do you think the Void is? It’s the goddamn universe’s goddamn datasphere, boy. I been listenin’ to it for centuries before the kid gave me communion to do it with nanotech bugs in me. That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.”
“You had no right to transmit my narrative,” I said. “It’s mine. I wrote it. It’s not part of your Cantos.” If I had known for sure which tube passing to him was his oxygen hose, I would have stepped on it till the rattling stopped.
“Bullshit, boy,” said Martin Silenus. “Why do you think I sent you on this eleven-year vacation?”
“To rescue Aenea,” I said.
The poet cackled and coughed. “She didn’t need rescuing, Raul. Hell, the way I saw it while it was happening, she pulled your worthless ass out of the fire more often than not. Even when the Shrike was doing the saving, it was only because that girl-child had tamed it for a bit.” The mummy’s white eyes with their video-pickup glasses turned toward Colonel Kassad. “Tamed you, I mean, you once and future killing machine.”
I stepped away from the bed and touched one of the biomonitors to steady myself. Overhead, in the wide circle that was the open top of the tower, Old Earth grew large and round. Martin Silenus’s voice called me back, almost taunting me.
“But you haven’t finished it yet, boy. The Cantos aren’t done.”
I stared at him across the few cold meters of distance. “What do you mean, old man?”
“You’ve got to take me down there so we can finish it, Raul. Together.”
We could not freecast down to Old Earth because there was no one there for me to use as a beacon for the ’casting, so we decided to use the ergs to land the entire slab of Endymion city. This might be fatal to the old poet, but the old poet had shouted at us to for God’s sake shut the fuck up and get on with it, so we were. The Sequoia Sempervirens had been in low orbit around Old Earth—or just plain “Earth” as Martin Silenus demanded we call it—for several hours.
The treeship’s optics, radar, and other sensors had shown a world empty of human life but healthy with animals, birds, fish, plants, and an atmosphere free of pollution.
I had planned to land at Taliesin West, but telescopes showed the buildings gone. Only high desert remained, probably just as it was in the final days before Earth was supposed to have fallen into the Big Mistake of ’08 black hole.
The Rome to which the second John Keats cybrid had returned was gone. All of the cities and structures which I thought of as the Lions’ and Tigers’ and Bears’ experimental reconstructions apparently were gone. The Earth had been scrubbed clean of cities and highways and signs of humankind. It throbbed with life and health as if awaiting our return. I was near the base of the Consul’s ship on Hyperion soil in the city-within-the-treeship, surrounded by Aenea’s old friends and speaking aloud about the trip down, wondering who wanted to go and who should accompany us, thinking all the time only of the small metal canister in Father de Soya’s shoulder bag, when A. Bettik stepped forward and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, M. Endymion, I do not mean to interrupt.” My old android friend seemed apologetic to the point of blushing under his blue skin, as he always did when he had to contradict one of us. “But M. Aenea left specific instructions with me should you return to Old Earth, as you obviously have.”
We all waited. I had not heard her give the android instructions on the Yggdrasill. But then, things had been very loud and confused there toward the end.
A. Bettik cleared his throat. “M. Aenea specified that Ket Rosteen should pilot the landing, if there were a landing, with four other individuals to disembark once landed, and asked me to apologize to all of you who wish to go down to Old Earth immediately,” he said. “Apologize especially, she said, to dear friends such as M. Rachel, M. Theo, and others who would be especially eager to see the planet. M. Aenea asked me to assure you that you would be welcome there two weeks from the landing day—on the last day before the treeship would leave orbit. And, she asked me to say, that in two standard years… that is, two Earth years, of course… anyone who could ’cast here on their own would be welcome to visit Old Earth.”
“Two years?” I said. “Why a two-year quarantine?”
A. Bettik shook his bald head. “M. Aenea did not specify, M. Endymion. I am sorry.”
I held up my hands, palms up. “Well, who does get to go down now?” I asked. If my name was not on the list, I was going to go down anyway, Aenea’s last wishes or not. I’d use my fists to get aboard, if need be. Or hijack the Consul’s ship and land it. Or freecast alone.
“You, sir,” said A. Bettik. “She quite specifically mentioned you, M. Endymion. And M. Silenus, of course. Father de Soya. And…” The android hesitated as if embarrassed again.
“Go on,” I said more sharply than I had intended.
“Me,” said A. Bettik.
“You,” I repeated. In a second it made sense to me. The android had made our long trip out with us… had, in fact, spent more time with Aenea than I had over the years because of the time-debt involved in my solo odyssey. More than that, A. Bettik had risked his life for her, for us, and lost his arm in Nemes’s ambush on God’s Grove so many years ago. He had listened to Aenea’s teachings even before Rachel and Theo… or I… had signed on as disciples. Of course she would want her friend A. Bettik there when her few ashes were scattered in the breezes of Old Earth. I felt ashamed for acting surprised. “I am sorry,” I said aloud. “Of course you should come.”
A. Bettik nodded very slightly. “Two weeks,” I said to the others, most of whose disappointment was visible on their faces. “In two weeks we’ll all be down there to look around, see what surprises the Lions and Tigers an
d Bears have left for us.”
There were good-byes as old friends, Templars, Ousters, and others left the soil of the city Endymion to watch from the treeship’s stairways and platforms. Rachel was the last to leave. To my surprise, she hugged me fiercely. “I hope to hell that you’re worth it,” she said in my ear.
I had no idea what the feisty brunette was talking about. She—and most women—had always been a mystery to me.
“All right,” I said after we had trooped up the stairs to Martin Silenus’s bedside. I could see Old Earth… Earth… above us. The view grew hazy and then disappeared as the containment fields merged, thickened, and then separated, the drive fields flowed, and the city pulled away from the treeship.
The Templar crew members and Ousters had rigged makeshift controls to the tower sickroom, which, with all of Martin Silenus’s medical machines hovering around, had become a very crowded space.
I also thought that this was as good a place as any to sit out the ergs’ attempt to land a mass of rock and grass, a city with a tower and a parked spaceship, and a half stump of bridge leading nowhere, on a world that was three-fifths water and that had no spaceports or traffic control. At least, I thought, if we were going to crash and die, I might get a hint of the impending catastrophe from watching Ket Rosteen’s impassive visage under his overhanging Templar hood in the seconds before impact.
We did not feel entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Only the gradual change of the circle of sky above us from starfields to blueness let us know that we had entered successfully. We did not feel the landing. One moment we were standing in silence, waiting, and then Ket Rosteen looked up from his displays and monitors, whispered something through the comlines to his beloved ergs, and said to us, “We’re down.”
“I forgot to tell you where we should land,” I said, thinking of the desert that had been Taliesin.
It must be the place where Aenea had been happiest; where she would want those ashes—which I knew but still could not believe were hers—scattered in the warm Arizona winds.
Ket Rosteen glanced toward the floating deathbed.
“I told him where to fucking land,” rasped the old poet’s voice synthesizer. “Where I was born. Where I plan to die. Now, will you all please pull your collective thumbs out and roll me out of here so that I can see the sky?”
A. Bettik unplugged all of Silenus’s monitors, everything except the most essential life-support equipment, and tied everything together within the same EM repulsor field. While we were on the treeship, the androids and the Ouster crew clones and the Templars had built a long, gradual ramp from the top tower room down to the ground, then paved an exit walk to the edge of the city slab and beyond. All of this had landed intact I noticed as we accompanied the floating sickbed out into the sunlight and down. As we passed the Consul’s ebony spacecraft, a speaker on the hull of the ship said, “Good-bye, Martin Silenus. It was an honor knowing you.”
The ancient figure in the bed managed to lift one skeletal arm in a rather jaunty wave.
“See you in hell, Ship.”
We left the city slab, stepped off the paved ramp, and looked out at grasslands and distant bluffs not so different from my childhood moors except for the line of forest to our right. The gravity and air pressure was as I remembered it from our four-year sojourn on Earth, although the air was much more humid here than in the desert.
“Where are we?” I asked of no one in particular. Ket Rosteen had stayed in the tower and only the android, the dying poet, Father de Soya, and I were outside now in what seemed to be morning sunlight in an early spring day in the northern hemisphere.
“Where my mother’s estate used to be,” whispered Martin Silenus’s synthesizer. “In the heart of the heart of the North American Preserve.”
A. Bettik looked up from checking the med-unit’s readouts. “I believe that this was called Illinois in the pre-Big Mistake days,” he said. “The center of that state, I believe. The prairies have returned, I see. Those trees are elms and chestnut… extinct by the twenty-first century here, if I am not mistaken. That river beyond the bluffs flows south-southwest into the Mississippi River. I believe you have… ah… traversed a portion of that river, M. Endymion.”
“Yes,” I said, remembering the flimsy little kayak and the farewell at Hannibal and Aenea’s first kiss.
We waited. The sun rose higher. Wind stirred the grasses. Somewhere beyond the line of trees, a bird protested something as only birds can. I looked at Martin Silenus.
“Boy,” said the old poet’s synthesizer, “if you expect me to die on cue just to save you from a sunburn, fucking forget it. I’m hanging on by my fingernails, but those nails are old and tough and long.”
I smiled and touched his bony shoulder.
“Boy?” whispered the poet.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You told me years ago that your old grannie—Grandam you called her—had made you memorize the Cantos till they were dribbling out your ears. Was that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you recollect the lines I wrote about this place… as it was back in my day?”
“I can try,” I said. I closed my eyes.
I was tempted to touch the Void, to seek the sound of those lessons in Grandam’s voice in place of this struggle to recall them from memory, but instead I did it the hard way, using the mnemonic devices she had taught me to recall distinct passages of verse. Standing there, eyes still closed, I spoke the passages I could recall:
“Fragile twilights fading from fuchsia to purple above the crepe-paper silhouettes of trees beyond the southwest sweep of lawn. Skies as delicate as translucent china, unscarred by cloud or contrail. The presymphony hush of first light followed by the cymbal crash of sunrise. Oranges and russets igniting to gold, the long, cool descent to green: leaf shadow, shade, tendrils of cypress and weeping willow, the hushed green velvet of the glade.
“Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day.
Royal oak.
Giant elms.
Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai.
Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky.
Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.”
I stopped. The next part was hazy. I’d never enjoyed those fake-lyrical bits of the Cantos, preferring the battle scenes instead.
I had been touching the old poet’s shoulder as I recited and I had felt it relax as I spoke. I opened my eyes, expecting to see a dead man in the bed.
Martin Silenus gave me a satyr’s grin.
“Not bad, not bad,” he rasped. “Not bad for an old hack.” His video glasses turned toward the android and the priest. “See why I chose this boy to finish my Cantos for me? He can’t write worth shit, but he’s got a memory like an elephant’s.”
I was about to ask, What is an elephant, when I glanced over at A. Bettik for no special reason. For one instant, after all my years of knowing the gentle android, I actually saw him. My mouth dropped slack.
“What?” asked Father de Soya, his voice alarmed. Perhaps he thought I was having a heart attack.
“You,” I said to A. Bettik. “You’re the Observer.”
“Yes,” said the android.
“You’re one of them… from them… from the Lions and Tigers and Bears.”
The priest looked from me to A. Bettik to the grinning man in the bed and then back at the android.
“I have never appreciated that choice of phrase of M. Aenea’s,” A. Bettik said very quietly. “I have never seen a lion or tiger or bear in the flesh, but I understand that they s
hare a certain fierceness which is alien to… ah… the alien race to which I belong.”
“You took the form of an android centuries ago,” I said, still staring in a deepening understanding that was as sharp and painful as a blow to the head. “You were there for all the central events… the rise of the Hegemony, the discovery of the Time Tombs on Hyperion, the Fall of the Farcasters… good Christ, you were there for most of the last Shrike Pilgrimage.”
A. Bettik bowed his bald head slightly. “If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe.”
I leaned over Martin Silenus’s bed, ready to shake him alive for an answer if he had already died. “Did you know this, old man?”
“Not before he left with you, Raul,” said the poet. “Not until I read your narrative through the Void and realized…”
I took two steps back in the soft, high grass. “I was such an idiot,” I said. “I saw nothing. I understood nothing. I was a fool.”
“No,” said Father de Soya. “You were in love.”
I advanced on A. Bettik as if I was ready to throttle him if he did not answer immediately and honestly. Perhaps I would have. “You’re the father,” I said. “You lied about not knowing where Aenea disappeared to for almost two years. You’re the father of the child… of the next messiah.”
“No,” said the android calmly. The Observer. The Observer with one arm, the friend who almost died with us a score of times. “No,” he said again. “I am not Aenea’s husband. I am not the father.”
“Please,” I said, my hands shaking, “do not lie to me.” Knowing that he would not lie. Had never lied.
A. Bettik looked me in the eye. “I am not the father,” he said. “There is no father now. There was never another messiah. There is no child.”
Dead. They’re both dead… her child, her husband—whoever, whatever he was—Aenea herself.
My dear girl. My darling girl. Nothing left. Ashes. Somehow, even as I had dedicated myself to finding the child, to pleading with the Observer father to allow me to be this child’s friend and bodyguard and disciple as I had been Aenea’s, to using that newfound hope as a means of escaping the Schrödinger box, I had known deep in my heart that there was no child of my darling’s alive in the universe… I would have heard that soul’s music echoing across the Void like a Bach fugue… no child. Everything was ashes.