Then all my attention became fixed on the figure emerging from the larger of the two construction shacks.
It was Aenea. The bold, dark eyes, the unself-conscious grin, the sharp cheekbones and delicate hands, the blond-brown hair cut carelessly and blowing now in the strong wind along the cliff face. She was not that much taller than when I had seen her last—I could still have kissed her forehead without bending—but she was changed.
I took in a sudden breath. I had watched people grow and come of age, of course, but most of these had been my friends when I was also growing and coming of age. Obviously I had never had children, and my careful observation of someone maturing had only been during the four years and some months of my friendship with this child. In most ways, I realized, Aenea still looked much as she had on her sixteenth birthday, five of her years earlier, minus now the last of her baby fat, with sharper cheekbones and firmer features, wider hips and slightly more prominent breasts. She wore whip trousers, high boots, a green shirt I remembered from Taliesin West, and a khaki jacket that was blowing in the wind. I could see that her arms and legs were stronger, more muscled, than I remembered from Old Earth—but not that much was changed about her.
Everything was changed about her. The child I had known was gone. A woman stood in her place; a strange woman walking quickly toward me across the rough platform. It was not just strong features and perhaps a bit more firm flesh on her still-lean form, it was … a solidity. A presence. Aenea had always been the most alive, animated, and complete person I had ever known, even as a child. Now that the child was gone, or at least submerged in the adult, I could see the solidity within that animated aura.
“Raul!” She crossed the last few steps to me, stood close, and grasped my forearms in her strong hands.
For a second I thought that she was going to kiss me on the mouth the way she had … the way the child of sixteen had … during the last minutes we had been together on Old Earth. Instead, she raised one long-fingered hand and set it against my face, running fingers down the line of my cheek to my chin. Her dark eyes were alive with … what? Not amusement. Vitality, perhaps. Happiness, I hoped.
I felt tongue-tied. I started to speak, stopped, raised my right hand as if to touch her cheek, dropped it.
“Raul … damn … it is so good to see you!” She took her hand away from my face and hugged me with an intensity bordering on violence.
“It’s good to see you too, kiddo.” I patted her back, feeling the rough material of her jacket under my palm.
She stepped back, grinning very broadly now, and grabbed my upper arms. “Was the trip to get the ship terrible? Tell me.”
“Five years!” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me …”
“I did. I shouted it.”
“When? At Hannibal? When I was …”
“Yes. Then I shouted ‘I love you.’ Remember?”
“I remember that, but … if you knew … five years, I mean …”
We were both talking at once, almost babbling. I found myself trying to tell her all about the farcasters, the kidney stone on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people, the cloud world, the cuttlefish-squid thing—all while I was asking her questions and babbling on again before she could answer.
Aenea kept grinning. “You look the same, Raul. You look the same. But then, hell, I guess you should. It’s only been … what … a week or two of travel and a cold sleep on the ship for you.”
I felt a wash of anger amid the happy giddiness. “Goddammit, Aenea. You should have told me about the time-debt. And maybe about the farcast to a world with no river or solid ground too. I could have died.”
Aenea was nodding. “But I didn’t know for sure, Raul. There was no certainty, only the usual … possibilities. That’s why A. Bettik and I built the parasail into the kayak.” She grinned again. “I guess it worked.”
“But you knew it would be a long separation. Years for you.” I did not phrase it as a question.
“Yes.”
I started to speak, felt the anger wash away as quickly as it had surged, and took her by the arms. “It’s good to see you, kiddo.” She hugged me again, kissing me on the cheek this time the way she had as a kid when I had delighted her with some joke or comment.
“Come on,” she said. “The afternoon shift is over. I’ll show you our platform and introduce you to some of the people here.”
Our platform? I followed her down ladders and across bridges that I had not noticed while walking with Rachel.
“Have you been all right, Aenea? I mean … is everything all right?”
“Yes.” She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at me again. “Everything is good, Raul.” We crossed a terrace on the side of the topmost of three pagodas stacked one atop the other. I could feel the platform shaking a bit as we walked the narrow terrace, and when we stepped out onto the narrow platform between pagodas, the entire structure vibrated. I noticed that people were leaving the westernmost pagoda and following the narrow ledge trail back along the cliff face.
“Tills part feels shaky, but it’s sturdy enough,” said Aenea, noticing my apprehension. “Beams of tougher bonsai pine are driven into holes drilled into the rock. That supports the whole infrastructure.”
“They must rot away,” I said as I followed her onto a short suspension bridge. We swayed in the wind.
“They do,” said Aenea. “They’ve been replaced several times in the eight hundred-some years the Temple’s been here. No one is sure exactly how many times. Their records are shakier than the floors.”
“And you’ve been hired to add on to the place?” I said. We had come out onto a terrace of wine-colored wood. A ladder at the end rose to another platform and a narrower bridge running from it.
“Yeah,” said Aenea. “I’m sort of part architect, part construction boss. I’d supervised the construction pf a Taoist temple over near Potala when I first arrived, and the-Dalai Lama thought that I might be able to finish work on the Temple Hanging in Air. It’s frustrated a few would-be renovators over the past few decades.”
“When you arrived,” I repeated. We had come onto a high platform at the center of the structure. It was bound about with beautifully carved railings and held, two small pagodas perched right at the edge. Aenea stopped at the door of the first pagoda.
“A temple?” I said.
“My place.” She grinned, gesturing toward the interior. I peeked in. The square room was only three meters by three meters, its floor of polished wood with two small talami mats. The most striking thing about it was the far wall—which simply was not there. Shoji screens had folded back and the far end of the room ended in open air. One could sleepwalk into oblivion there. The breeze up the cliff face rustled the leaves on three willow-type branches set in a beautiful mustard-yellow vase that sat on a low wood dais against the west wall. It was the only ornamentation in the room.
“We kick off our shoes in the buildings—except for the transit corridors you came through earlier,” she said. She led the way to the other pagoda. It was almost identical to the first, except for the shoji screens being latched closed here and a futon on the floor near them. “A. Bettik’s stuff,” she said, pointing to a small, red-painted locker near the futon. “This is where we’ve set you up to bunk. Come on in.” She slipped her boots off, crossed to the tatami mat, slid the shoji back, and sat cross-legged on the mat.
I removed my boots, set the pack against the south wall, and went over to sit next to her.
“Well,” she said and gripped my forearms again. “Gosh.”
For a minute I could not speak. I wondered if the altitude or the rich atmosphere was making me so emotional. I concentrated on watching lines of people in bright chubas leaving the Temple and walking the narrow ledges and bridges west along the cliff face. Directly across from our open door here was the gleaming massif of Heng Shan, its icefields glowing in the late afternoon light. “Jesus,” I said softly. “It’s beautiful here, kiddo.”
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“Yes. And deadly if one is not careful. Tomorrow A. Bettik and I will take you up on the face and give you a refresher course on climbing gear and protocol.”
“Primer course is more like it,” I said. I could not stop looking at her face, her eyes. I was afraid that if I touched her bare skin again, visible voltage would leap between us. I remembered that electric shock whenever we had touched when she was a kid. I took a breath. “Okay,” I said. “When you got here, the Dalai Lama—whoever that is—said that you could work on the Temple here. So when did you get here? How did you get here? When did you meet Rachel and Theo? Who else do you know well here? What happened after we said good-bye in Hannibal? What happened to everyone else at Taliesin? Have the Pax troops been after you? Where did you learn all the architectural stuff? Do you still talk with the Lions and Tigers and Bears? How did you …”
Aenea held up one hand. She was laughing. “One thing at a time, Raul. I need to hear all about your trip too, you know.”
I looked into her eyes. “I dreamed that we were talking,” I said. “You told me about the four steps … learning the language of the dead … learning …”
“The language of the living,” she finished for me. “Yes. I had that dream too.”
My eyebrows must have arched.
Aenea smiled and set both her hands on mine. Her hands were larger, covering my oversized fist. I remembered, when both her hands would have disappeared in one of mine. “I do remember the dream, Raul. And I dreamed that you were in pain … your back …”
“Kidney stone,” I said, wincing at the memory.
“Yes. Well, I guess it shows that we’re still friends if we can share dreams while light-years apart.”
“Light-years,” I repeated. “All right, how did you get across them, Aenea? How did you get here? Where else have you been?”
She nodded and began speaking. The wind through the open wall screens rustled her hair. While she spoke, the evening light grew richer and higher on the great mountain to the north and across the cliff face to the east and west.
AENEA HAD BEEN THE LAST TO LEAVE TALIESIN West, but that was only four days after I had paddled down the Mississippi. The other apprentices had left by different farcasters, she said, and the dropship had used the last of its power to ferry them to the various portals—near the Golden Gate Bridge, at the edge of the Grand Canyon, atop the stone faces at Mount Rushmore, beneath the rusted girders of launch gantries at the Kennedy Spaceport Historical Park—all over the western hemisphere of Old Earth, it seemed. Aenea’s farcaster had been built into an adobe house in a pueblo north of the empty city called Santa Fe. A. Bettik had farcast with her. I blinked in jealousy at this, but said nothing.
Her first farcast had brought her to a high-gravity world called Ixion. The Pax had a presence there, but it was concentrated primarily in the opposite hemisphere. Ixion had never recovered properly from the Fall, and the high, jungle plateau where Aenea and A. Bettik had emerged was a maze of overgrown ruins populated primarily by warring tribes of neo-Marxists and Native American resurgencists, this volatile mixture further destabilized by bands of renegade and roving ARNists who were attempting to bring back all recorded species of Old Earth dinosaur.
Aenea made the tale funny—hiding A. Bettik’s blue skin and obvious android status with great daubs of the decorative face paint the locals used, the audacity of a sixteen-year-old girl demanding money—or in this case, food and furs in barter—for heading up the reconstruction efforts in the old Ixion cities of Canbar, Iliumut, and Maoville. But it had worked. Not only had Aenea helped in the redesign and rebuilding of three of the old city centers and countless small homes, but she had started a series of “discussion circles” that brought listeners in from a dozen of the warring tribes.
Here Aenea was being circumspect, I knew, but I wanted to know what these “discussion circles” were all about.
“Just things,” she said. “They would raise the topic, I would suggest some things to think about, and people would talk.”
“Did you teach them?” I asked, thinking of the prophecy that the child of the John Keats cybrid would be the One Who Teaches.
“In the Socratic sense, I guess,” said Aenea.
“What’s that … oh, yeah.” I remembered the Plato she had steered me toward in the Taliesin library. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, had taught by questioning, drawing out truths that people already held within themselves. I had thought that technique highly dubious, at best.
She went on. Some of the members of her discussion group had become devoted listeners, returning every evening and following her when she moved from ruined city to ruined city on Ixion.
“You mean disciples,” I said.
Aenea frowned. “I don’t like that word much, Raul.”
I folded my arms and looked out at the alpenglow illuminating the cloudtops many kilometers below and the brilliant evening light on the northern peak. “You may not like it, but it sounds like the correct word to me, kiddo. Disciples follow their teacher wherever she travels, trying to glean one last bit of knowledge from her.”
“Students follow their teacher,” said Aenea.
“All right,” I said, not willing to derail the story by arguing. “Go on.”
There was not much more to tell about Ixion, she said. She and A. Bettik were on the world about one local year, five months standard. Most of the building had been with stone blocks and her design had been ancient-classical, almost Greek.
“What about the Pax?” I said. “Did they ever come sniffing around?”
“Some of the missionaries took part in the discussions,” said Aenea. “One of them … a Father Clifford … became good friends with A. Bettik.”
“Didn’t he—they—turn you in? They must still be hunting for us.”
“I am sure that Father Clifford didn’t,” said Aenea. “But eventually some of the Pax troopers began looking for us in the western hemisphere where we were working. The tribes hid us for another month. Father Clifford was coming to evening discussions even when the skimmers were flying back and forth over the jungle looking for us.”
“What happened?” I felt like a two-year-old who would ask questions just to keep the other person talking. It had only been a few months of separation—including the dream-ridden cold sleep—but I had forgotten exactly how much I loved the sound of my young friend’s voice.
“Nothing, really,” she said. “I finished the last job—an old amphitheater for plays and town meetings, fittingly enough—and A. Bettik and I left. Some of the … students … left as well.”
I blinked. “With you?” Rachel had said that she had met Aenea on a world called Amritsar and traveled here with her. Perhaps Theo had come from Ixion.
“No, no one came with me from Ixion,” Aenea said softly. “They had other places to go. Things to teach to others.”
I looked at her for a moment. “You mean the Lions and Tigers and Bears are allowing others to farcast now? Or are all the old portals opening?”
“No,” answered Aenea, although to which question I was not sure. “No, the farcasters are as dead as ever. It’s just … well … a few special cases.”
Again I did not press the issue. She went on.
After Ixion, she had ’cast to the world of Maui-Covenant.
“Siri’s world!” I said, remembering Grandam’s voice teaching me the cadences of the Hyperion Cantos. That had been the locale for one of the pilgrims’ tales.
Aenea nodded and continued. Maui-Covenant had been battered by revolution and Hegemony attacks way back during the Web, had recovered during the Fall interregnum, had been recolonized during the Pax expansion without the help of the locals who, in the best Siri tradition, had fought from their motile isles and alongside their dolphin companions until Pax Fleet and Swiss Guard had put their boots down hard. Now Maui-Covenant was being Christianized with a vengeance, the residents of the one large continent, the Equatorial Archipelago, and the thousands of migrat
ing motile isles being sent to “Christian academies” for reeducation.
But Aenea and A. Bettik had stepped through to a motile isle still belonging to the rebels—groups of neo-pagans called Sirists who sailed at night, floated among the traveling archipelagoes of empty isles during the daylight, and who fought the Pax at every turn.
“What did you build?” I asked. I thought that I remembered from the Cantos that the motile isles carried little except treehouses under their sailtrees.
“Treehouses,” said Aenea, grinning. “Lots of treehouses. Also some underwater domes. That’s where the pagans were spending most of their time.”
“So you designed treehouses.”
She shook her head. “Are you kidding? These are—next to the missing God’s Grove Templars—the best treehouse builders in human space. I studied how to build treehouses. They were gracious enough to let A. Bettik and me help.”
“Slave labor,” I said.
“Exactly.”
She had spent only some three standard months on Maui-Covenant. That is where she had met Theo Bernard.
“A pagan rebel?” I said.
“A runaway Christian,” corrected Aenea. “She had come to Maui-Covenant as a colonist. She fled the colonies and joined the Sirists.”
I was frowning without realizing it. “She carries a cruciform?” I said. Born-again Christians still made me nervous.
“Not anymore,” said Aenea.
“But how …”I knew of no way that a Christian with the cross could rid herself of a cruciform, short of the secret ritual of excommunication, which only the Church could perform.
“I’ll explain later,” said Aenea. Before her tale was done, this phrase would be used more than a few times.
After Maui-Covenant, she and A. Bettik and Theo Bernard had farcast to Renaissance Vector.
“Renaissance Vector!” I almost shouted. That was a Pax stronghold. We had almost been shot down on Renaissance Vector. It was a hyperindustrialized world, all cities and robot factories and Pax centers.