“Renaissance Vector.” Aenea smiled. It had not been easy. They had been forced to disguise A. Bettik as a burn victim with a synflesh mask. It had been uncomfortable for him for the six months they were there.
“What jobs did you do there?” I asked, finding it hard to imagine my friend and her friends staying hidden in the thronging world-city that was Renaissance Vector.
“Just one job,” said Aenea. “We worked on the new cathedral in Da Vinci—St. Matthew’s.”
It took me a minute of staring before I could speak. “You worked on a cathedral? A Pax cathedral? A Christian church?”
“Of course,” said Aenea calmly. “I labored alongside some of the best stonemasons, glass workers, builders, and craftsmen in the business. I was an apprentice at first, but before we left I was assistant to the chief designer working on the nave.”
I could only shake my head. “And did you … have discussion circles?”
“Yes,” said Aenea. “More came on Renaissance Vector than on any of the other worlds. Thousands of students, before it was over.”
“I’m amazed that you weren’t betrayed.”
“I was,” she said. “But not by one of the students. One of the glass workers turned us in to the local Pax garrison. A. Bettik, Theo, and I barely made it out.”
“Via farcaster,” I said.
“By … ’casting, yes,” said Aenea. It was only much later that I realized that there had been a slight hesitation in her voice there, an unspoken qualification.
“And did others leave with you?”
“Not with me,” she said again. “But hundreds ’cast elsewhere.”
“Where?” I said, mystified.
Aenea sighed. “Do you remember our discussion, Raul, where I said that the Pax thought that I was a virus? And that they were right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, these students of mine are also carrying the virus.” she said. “They had places to go. People to infect.”
Her litany of worlds and jobs went on. Patawpha for three months, where she had used her treehouse experience to build mansions in the interwoven branches and trunks growing from the endless swamps there.
Amritsar, where she had worked for four standard months in the desert building tent homes and meeting places for the nomad bands of Sikhs and Sufis who wandered the green sands there.
“That’s where you met Rachel,” I said.
“Correct.”
“What is Rachel’s last name?” I said. “She didn’t mention it to me.”
“She has never mentioned it to me, either,” said Aenea and went on with her tale.
From Amritsar, she and A. Bettik and her two female friends had ’cast to Groombridge Dyson D. This world had been a Hegemony terraforming failure, abandoned to its encroaching methane-ammonia glaciers and ice-crystal hurricanes, its dwindling number of colonists retreating to its biodomes and orbital construction shacks. But its people—mostly Suni Muslim engineers from the failed Trans-African Genetic Reclamation Project—stubbornly refused to die during the Fall, and ended up terraforming Groombridge Dyson D into a Laplandic tundra world with breathable air and adapted-Old Earth flora and fauna, including wooly mammoths wandering the equatorial highlands. The millions of hectares of grasslands were perfect for horses—Old Earth horses of the kind that had disappeared during the Tribulations before the homeworld fell into itself—so the gene-designers took their original seedship stock and bred horses by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands. Nomad bands wandered the greenways of the southern continent, living in a kind of symbiosis with the great herds, while the farmers and city folk moved into the high foothills along the equator. There were violent predators there, evolved and unleashed during the centuries of accelerated and self-directed ARNying experimentation: mutant carrion-breed packs’ and burrowing night terrors, thirty-meter-long grass serpents descended from those from Hyperion’s Sea of Grass and Fuji rock tigers, smart wolves, and IQ-enhanced grizzlies.
The humans had the technology to hunt the adapted killers to extinction in a year or less, but the residents of the world chose a different path: the nomads would take their chances, one-on-one with the predators, protecting the great horse herds as long as the grass grows and the water flows, while the city types would begin work on a wall—a single wall eventually to be more than five thousand kilometers long that would separate the wilder sections of the savage highlands from the horse-herd savannahs and evolving eye lad forests to the south. And the wall was to be more than a wall, it was to become the great linear city of Groombridge Dyson D, thirty meters tall at its lowest, its ramparts resplendent with mosques and minarets, the travelway on top wide enough that three chariots could pass without rubbing wheels.
The colonists were too few and too busy with other projects to work full-time on such a wall, but they programmed robots and decanted androids from their seedship vaults to carry out the labor. Aenea and her friends joined in this project, working for six standard months as the wall took shape and began its relentless march along the base of the highlands and the edge of the grasslands.
“A. Bettik found two of his siblings there,” said Aenea softly.
“My God,” I whispered. I had almost forgotten. When we were on Sol Draconi Septem some years ago, sitting by the warmth of a heating cube in Father Glaucus’s book-lined study inside a skyscraper that, in turn, was frozen within the eternal glacier of that world’s frozen atmosphere … A. Bettik had talked about one of his reasons for coming on the Odyssey with the child, Aenea, and me: he was hoping against logic to find his four siblings—three brothers and a sister. They had been separated shortly after their training period as children—if an android’s accelerated early years could be called “childhood.”
“So he found them?” I said, marveling.
“Two of them,” repeated Aenea. “One of the other males in his growth crèche—A. Antibbe—and his sister, A. Darria.”
“Were they like him?” I asked. The old poet had used androids in his empty city of Endymion, but I had not paid much attention to any of them except A. Bettik. Too much had been happening too fast.
“Much like him,” said Aenea. “But very different, as well. Perhaps he will tell you more.”
She wrapped up her story. After six standard months working on the linear city wall on Groombridge Dyson D, they had had to leave.
“Had to leave?” I said. “The Pax?”
“The Commission for Justice and Peace, to be precise,” said Aenea. “We did not want to leave, but we had no choice.”
“What is the Commission for Justice and Peace?” I said. Something about the way she had pronounced the words made the hairs on my arm stand up.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
“All right,” I said, “but explain something else now.”
Aenea nodded and waited.
“You say you spent five standard months on Ixion,” I said. “Three months on Maui-Covenant, six months on Renaissance Vector, three months on Patawpha, four standard months on Amritsar, about six standard months on—what was it?— Groombridge Dyson D?”
Aenea nodded.
“And you’ve been here about a standard year you say?”
“Yes.”
“That’s only thirty-nine standard months,” I said. “Three standard years and three months.”
She waited. The corners of her mouth twitched slightly, but I realized that she was not going to smile … it looked more as if she was trying to avoid crying. Finally, she said, “You were always good at math, Raul.”
“My trip here took five years’ time-debt,” I said softly. “So that’s about sixty standard months for you, but you’ve only accounted for thirty-nine. Where are the missing twenty-one standard months, kiddo?”
I saw the tears in her eyes. Her mouth was quavering slightly, but she tried to speak in a light tone. “It was sixty-two standard months, one week, and six days for me,” she said. “Five years, two months, and one day t
ime-debt on the ship, about four days accelerating and decelerating, and eight days’ travel time. You forgot your travel time.”
“All right, kiddo,” I said, seeing the emotion well in her. Her hands were shaking. “Do you want to talk about the missing … what was it?”
“Twenty-three months, one week, and six hours,” she said.
Almost two standard years, I thought. And she doesn’t want to tell me what happened to her during that time. I had never seen her exercise such rigid control before; it was as if she were trying to hold herself together physically against some terrible centrifugal force.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, pointing out the open doorway at the cliff face to the west of the Temple. “Look.”
I could just make out figures—two-legged and four-legged—on the narrow ledge. They were still several klicks away along the cliff face. I walked over to my pack, retrieved my binoculars, and studied the forms.
“The pack animals are zygoats,” said Aenea. “The porters are hired in Phari Marketplace and will be returning in the morning. See anyone familiar?”
I did. The blue face in the hooded chuba looked much the way it had five of his years earlier. I turned back to Aenea, but she was obviously finished talking about her missing two years. I allowed her to change the subject again.
Aenea began asking me questions then and we were still talking when A. Bettik arrived. The women—Rachel and Theo—wandered in a few minutes later. One of the tatami mats folded back to reveal a cooking brazier in the floor near the open wall, and Aenea and A. Bettik began cooking for everyone. Others wandered in and were introduced—the foremen George Tsarong and Jigme Norbu, two sisters who were in charge of much of the decorative railing work—Kuku and Kay Se, Gyalo Thondup in his formal silken robes and Jigme Taring in soldier’s garb, the teaching monk Chim Din and his master, Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi, abbot of the gompa at the Temple Hanging in Air, a female monk named Donka Nyapso, a traveling trade agent named Tromo Trochi of Dhomu, Tsipon Shakabpa who was the Dalai Lama’s overseer of construction here at the Temple, and the famed climber and paraglide flyer Lhomo Dondrub, who was perhaps the most striking man I had ever seen and—I later discovered—one of the few flyers who would drink beer or break bread with Dugpas, Drukpas, or Drungpas.
The food was tsampa and momo—a roasted barley mixed into zygoat-buttered tea, forming a paste that one rolled into balls and ate with other balls of steamed dough holding mushrooms, cold zygoat tongue, sugared bacon, and bits of pears that A. Bettik told me were from the fabled gardens of Hsi wang-mu. More people came in as the bowls were being handed out—Labsang Samten—who, A. Bettik whispered, was the older brother of the current Dalai Lama and was now in his third year of monkhood here at the Temple, and various Drungpas from the wooded clefts—including master carpenter Changchi Kenchung with his long, waxed mustaches, Perri Samdup, an interpreter, and Rimsi Kyipup, a brooding and unhappy young scaffold-rigger. Not all of the monks who dropped in that night were descended from the Chinese/Tibetan Old Earth seedship colonists. Laughing and lifting their rough mugs of beer with us were the fearless high riggers Haruyuki Otaki and Kenshiro Endo, the master bamboo workers Voytek Majer and Janusz Kurtyka, and the brickmakers Kim Byung-Soon and Viki Groselj. The mayor of Jo-kung, the nearest cliff city, was there—Charles Chi-kyap Kempo—who also served as Lord Chamberlain of all the Temple’s priest officials and was an appointed member of both the Tsongdu, the regional assembly of elders, and advisor to Yik-Tshang, literally the “Nest of Letters,” the secret four-person body that reviewed the monks’ progress and appointed all priests. Charles Chi-kyap Kempo was the first member of our party to drink enough to pass out. Chim Din and several of the other monks dragged the snoring man away from the edge of the platform and left him sleeping in the corner.
There were others—at least forty people must have filled the little pagoda as the last of the sunlight ebbed away and the moonlight from the Oracle and three of her siblings lit the cloudtops below—but I forgot their names that night as we ate tsampa and momo, drank beer in great quantities, and made the torches burn bright in Hsuan-k’ung Ssu.
SOME HOURS LATER THAT EVENING, I WENT OUT TO relieve myself. A. Bettik showed me the way to the toilets. I had assumed that one would just use the edge of platforms, but he assured me that on a world where dwelling structures had many levels—most of them above or below others—this was considered bad form. The toilets were built into the side of the cliff, enclosed by bamboo partitions, and the sanitary arrangements consisted of cleverly engineered pipes and sluices leading into fissures running deep into the cliff as well as washbasins cut in stone counters. There was even a shower area and solar-heated water for washing.
When I had rinsed my hands and face and stepped back out onto the platform—the chill breeze helping to sober me a bit—I stood next to A. Bettik in the moonlight and looked into the glowing pagoda where the crowd had arranged itself in concentric circles with my young friend as the locus. The laughter and chaos had disappeared. One by one, the monks and holy men and riggers and carpenters and stonemasons and gompa abbots and mayors and bricklayers were asking soft questions of the young woman, and she was answering.
The scene reminded me of something—some recent image—and it took me only a minute to recall it: the forty-AU deceleration into this star system, with the ship offering up holo representations of the G-type sun with its eleven orbiting planets, two asteroid belts, and countless comets. Aenea was definitely the sun in this system, and all of the men and women in that room were orbiting around her as surely as had the worlds, asteroids, and comets in the ship’s projection.
I leaned on a bamboo post and looked at A. Bettik in the moonlight. “She’d better be careful,” I said softly to the android, enunciating each word carefully, “or they’ll begin treating her like a god.”
A. Bettik nodded ever so slightly. “They do not think that M. Aenea is a god, M. Endymion,” he murmured.
“Good.” I put my arm around the android’s shoulder. “Good.”
“However,” he said, “many of them are becoming convinced, despite her best efforts to assure them otherwise, that she is God.”
17
he evening A. Bettik and I bring the news of the Pax’s arrival, Aenea leaves her discussion group, comes to where we are standing at the door, and listens intently.
“Chim Din says that the Dalai Lama has allowed them to occupy the old gompa at Otter Lake,” I say, “in the shadow of the Shivling.”
Aenea says nothing.
“They won’t be allowed to use their flying machines,” I say, “but they’re free to walk anywhere in the province. Anywhere.”
Aenea nods.
I want to grab her and shake her. “That means they’ll hear about you soon, kiddo,” I say sharply. “There’ll be missionaries here within weeks—maybe days—spying around and sending word back to the Pax Enclave.” I let out a breath. “Shit, we’ll be lucky if it’s just missionaries and not troopers.”
Aenea is silent another minute. Then she says, “We’re already lucky that it’s not the Commission for Justice and Peace.”
“What’s that?” I say. She had mentioned them before.
She shakes her head. “Nothing that’s immediately relevant, Raul. They must have some business here other than … than stamping out unorthodoxy.”
During my first days here, Aenea had told me about the fighting going on in and around Pax space—a Palestinian revolt on Mars that had resulted in the Pax evacuating the planet and nuking it from orbit, free trader rebellions in the Lambert Ring Territories and on Mare Infinitus, continued fighting on Ixion and dozens of other worlds. Renaissance Vector, with its huge Pax Fleet bases and countless bars and bordellos, had been a hornets’ nest of rumors and inside intelligence. And because most of the ships of the line in Pax Fleet were now the Gideon-drive archangels, the news was usually only a few days old.
One of the most intriguing rumors that Aenea had hea
rd before coming to T’ien Shan was that at least one of those archangel-class ships had gone rogue, escaped to Ouster space, and was now flashing into Pax space to attack convoys of Pax Mercantilus ships—disabling rather than destroying the crewed freighters—and to disrupt Pax Fleet task forces preparing to attack Ousters out beyond the Great Wall. There had been a rumor during Aenea’s and A. Bettik’s last weeks on Renaissance Vector that the fleet bases there were in danger. Other rumors suggested that large elements of the fleet were now being kept in Pacem System to defend the Vatican. Whatever else was true about the tales of the rogue ship Raphael, it was uncontestable that His Holiness’s Crusade against the Ousters had been set back years by the hit-and-run attacks.
But none of that seems important now as I stand waiting for Aenea’s response to this news of the Pax’s arrival on T’ien Shan. What do we do now, I wonder, farcast to her next world?
Instead of discussing flight, Aenea says, “The Dalai Lama will have a formal ceremony to welcome the Pax officials.”
“So?” I say after a moment.
“So we have to make sure that we get an invitation,” she says.
I doubt if my jaw is literally hanging slack, but it feels as if it is.
Aenea touches my shoulder. “I’ll take care of it,” she says. “I’ll talk to Charles Chi-kyap Kempo and Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi and make sure that they include us in any party invited to the ceremony.”
I am literally speechless as she goes back to her discussion group and the silent throng, their faces expectant and placid in the soft lantern light.
• • •
I READ THESE WORDS ON MICROVELLUM, REMEMBER writing them in my last days in the Schrödinger cat box in orbit around Armaghast, remember writing them in the haste of certainty that the laws of probability and quantum mechanics would soon be releasing cyanide into my closed-cycle universe, and I marvel at the present tense of the narrative. Then I remember the reason for this choice.
When I was sentenced to death in the Schrödinger box—egg-shaped, actually—I was allowed to bring very few of my own things into terminal exile. My clothes were my own. On a whim, they had given me a small rug for the floor of my Schrödinger cell—it was an ancient rug, a bit less than two meters long and a meter wide, frayed, with a small cut missing at one end. It was a replica of the Consul’s hawking mat. I had lost the real mat on Mare Infinitus many years before and the details of how it came back to me still lie ahead in my tale. I had given the actual hawking mat to A. Bettik, but it must have amused my torturers to furnish my final cell with this useless copy of a flying carpet.