I will not double-guess that decision now, except to say that the four years on Earth would be worth telling about at some other point in time: the ninety people of the Fellowship were decent, complex, devious, and interesting in the way of all intelligent human beings, and their tales should be told. Similarly, my explorations across Earth, both in the dropship and in the 1948 “Woody” station wagon that the Old Architect loaned me, might support an epic poem of their own.
But I am not a poet. But I was a tracker in my hunting-guide days, and my job here is to follow the path of Aenea’s growth to womanhood and messiahship without wandering down too many sidetracks. And so I shall.
THE OLD ARCHITECT ALWAYS REFERRED TO THE FELLOWSHIP compound as “desert camp.” Most of the apprentices referred to it as “Taliesin”—which means “Shining Brow” in Welsh. (Mr. Wright was of Welsh distraction. I spent weeks trying to remember a Pax or Outback world named Welsh, before I remembered that the Old Architect had lived and died before spaceflight.) Aenea often referred to the place as “Taliesin West,” which suggested to even someone as dull as me that there had to be a Taliesin East.
When I asked her three years earlier, Aenea had explained that the original Mr. Wright had built his first Taliesin Fellowship compound in the early 1930s in Spring Green, Wisconsin—Wisconsin being one of the political and geographical subunits of the ancient North American nation-state called the United States of America. When I asked Aenea if the first Taliesin was like this one, she had said, “Not really. There were a series of Wisconsin Taliesins—both homes and fellowship compounds—and most were destroyed by fire. That’s one of the reasons Mr. Wright installed so many pools and fountains here at this compound—sources of water to fight the inevitable fires.”
“And his first Taliesin was built in the 1930s?” I said.
Aenea shook her head. “He opened his first Taliesin Fellowship in 1932,” she said. “But that was mostly a way to get slave labor from his apprentices—both for building his dream and raising food for him—during the Depression.”
“What was the Depression?”
“Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Precisely,” said Aenea. “Anyway, long before that, in 1909 A.D., the middle-aged Mr. Wright abandoned his wife and six children and ran away to Europe with a married woman.”
I admit that I blinked at this news. The thought of the Old Architect—a man in his mid-eighties when we had met him four years ago—with a sex life, and a scandalous one at that, took some getting used to. I also wondered what all this had to do with my question about Taliesin East.
Aenea was getting to that. “When he returned with the other woman,” she said, smiling at my rapt attention, “he began building the first Taliesin—his home in Wisconsin—for Mamah …”
“His mother?” I said, totally confused.
“Mamah Borthwick,” said Aenea, spelling the first name for me. “Mrs. Cheney. The Other Woman.”
“Oh.”
The smile fading, she continued. “The scandal had destroyed his architectural practice and made him a branded man in the United States. But he built Taliesin and forged ahead, trying to find new patrons. His first wife, Catherine, would not give him a divorce. The newspapers—those were databanks printed on paper and distributed regularly—thrived on such gossip and fanned the flames of the scandal, not letting it die.”
We had been walking in the courtyard when I asked Aenea the simple question about Taliesin, and I remember pausing by the fountain during this part of her answer. I was always amazed at what this child knew.
“Then,” she said, “on August 15, 1914, a worker at Taliesin went crazy, killed Mamah Borthwick and her son John and daughter Martha with a hatchet, burned their bodies, set fire to the compound, and then killed four of Mr. Wright’s friends and apprentices before swallowing acid himself. The entire place burned down.”
“My God,” I whispered, looking toward the dining hall where the cybrid Old Architect was having lunch with a few of his oldest apprentices even as we spoke.
“He never gave up,” said Aenea. “A few days later, on August 18, Mr. Wright was touring an artificial lake on the Taliesin property when the dam he was standing on gave way and he was swept into a rain-swollen creek. Against all odds, he swam out of the torrent. A few weeks later he started to rebuild.”
I thought that I understood then what she was telling me about the Old Architect. “Why aren’t we at that Taliesin?” I asked as we strolled away from the bubbling fountain in the desert courtyard.
Aenea shook her head. “Good question. I doubt if it even exists in this rebuilt version of Earth. It was important to Mr. Wright, though. He died here … near Taliesin West … on April 9, 1959, but he was buried back near the Wisconsin Taliesin.”
I stopped walking then. The thought of the Old Architect dying was a new and disturbing thought. Everything about our exile had been steady-state, calm and self-renewing, but now Aenea had reminded me that everything and everyone ends. Or had, before the Pax introduced the cruciform and physical resurrection to humanity. But no one at the Fellowship—perhaps no one on this kidnapped Earth—had submitted to a cruciform.
That conversation had been three years earlier. This morning, the week after the cybrid Old Architect’s death and incongruous burial in the small mausoleum he had built out in the desert, we were ready to face the consequences of death without resurrection and the end of things.
• • •
WHILE AENEA WENT OFF TO THE BATH AND LAUNDRY pavilion to wash up, I found A. Bettik and the two of us got busy with spreading the word of the meeting in the music pavilion. The blue-skinned android did not act surprised that Aenea, the youngest of us, was calling and leading the meeting. Both A. Bettik and I had watched silently over the past few years as the girl became the locus of the Fellowship.
I jogged from the fields to the dormitories, from the dormitories to the kitchen—where I rang the large bell set in the fanciful bell tower above the stairway to the guest deck. Those apprentices or workers whom I did not contact personally should hear the bell and come to investigate.
From the kitchen, where I left cooks and some of the apprentices taking their aprons off and wiping their hands, I announced the meeting to people having coffee in the large Fellowship dining room (the view from this beautiful room looked north toward the McDowell peaks, so some had watched Aenea and me return and knew that something was up), and then I poked my head in Mr. Wright’s smaller, private dining room—empty—and then jogged over to the drafting room. This was probably the most attractive room in the compound with its long rows of drafting tables and filing cabinets set under the sloping canvas roof, the morning light flooding in through the two rows of offset windows. The sun was high enough now to fall on the roof and the smell of heated canvas was as pleasant as the butter-rich light. Aenea had once told me that it was this sense of camping out—of working within the confines of light and canvas and stone—that had been the real reason for Mr. Wright coming west to the second Taliesin.
There were ten or twelve of the apprentices in the drafting room, all standing around—none working now that the Old Architect was no longer around to suggest projects—and I told them that Aenea would like us to gather in the music pavilion. None protested. None grumbled or made any comment about a sixteen-year-old telling ninety of her elders to come together in the middle of a workday. If anything, the apprentices looked relieved to hear that she was back and taking charge.
From the drafting room I went to the library where I had spent so many happy hours and then checked the conference room, lit o
nly by four glowing panels in the floor, and announced the meeting to the people I found in both places. Then I jogged down the concrete path under the covered walkway of desert masonry and peered in the cabaret theater where the Old Architect had loved to show movies on Saturday nights. This place had always tickled me—its thick stone walls and roof, the long descending space with plywood benches covered with red cushions, the well-worn red carpet on the floor, and the many hundreds of white Christmas lights running back and forth on the ceiling. When we first arrived, Aenea and I were amazed to find that the Old Architect demanded that his apprentices and their families “dress for dinner” on Saturdays—ancient tuxedoes and black ties, of the sort one sees in the oldest history holos. The women wore strange dresses out of antiquity. Mr. Wright provided the formal clothes for those who failed to bring them in their flight to Earth through Time Tombs or far-caster.
That first Saturday, Aenea had shown up dressed in a tuxedo, shirt, and black tie rather than one of the dresses provided. When I first saw the Old Architect’s shocked expression, I was sure that he was going to throw us out of the Fellowship and make us eke out a living in the desert, but then the old face creased into a smile and within seconds he was laughing. He never asked Aenea to dress in anything else.
After the formal Saturday dinners, we would either have a group musical event or assemble in the cabaret theater for a movie—one of the ancient, celluloid kinds that had to be projected by a machine. It was rather like learning to enjoy cave art. Both Aenea and I loved the films he chose—ancient twentieth-century flat things, many in black and white—and for some reason that he never explained, Mr. Wright preferred to watch them with the “sound track,” optical jiggles and wiggles, visible on the screen. Actually, we’d watched films there for a year before one of the other apprentices told us that they had been made to be watched without the sound track visible.
Today the cabaret theater was empty, the Christmas lights dark. I jogged on, moving from room to room, building to building, rounding up apprentices, workers, and family members until I met A. Bettik by the fountain and we joined the others in the large music pavilion.
The pavilion was a large space, with a broad stage and six rows of eighteen upholstered seats in each row. The walls were of redwood painted Cherokee Red (the Old Architect’s favorite color) and the usual thick desert masonry. A grand piano and a few potted plants were the only things on the red-carpeted stage. Overhead, stretched tight above a gridwork of wood and steel ribs, was the usual white canvas. Aenea had once told me that after the death of the first Mr. Wright, plastic had taken the place of canvas to relieve the necessity of replacing canvas every couple of years. But upon this Mr. Wright’s return, the plastic was ripped out—as was the glass above the main drafting room—so that pure light through white canvas would be the rule once again.
A. Bettik and I stood near the rear of the music pavilion as the murmuring apprentices and other workers took their seats, some of the construction workers standing on the aisle steps or at the back with the android and me, as if worried about tracking mud and dust onto the rich carpet and upholstery. When Aenea entered through the side curtains and jumped to the stage, all the conversation stopped.
The acoustics were good in Mr. Wright’s music pavilion, but Aenea had always been able to project her voice without seeming to raise it. She spoke softly. “Thank you for gathering. I thought we should talk.”
Jaev Peters, one of the older apprentices, immediately stood up in the fifth row. “You were gone, Aenea. In the desert again.”
The girl on the stage nodded.
“Did you talk to the Lions and Tigers and Bears?”
No one in the audience tittered or giggled. The question was asked in deadly seriousness and the answer was awaited by ninety people just as seriously. I should explain.
It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago. That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony, the AI TechnoCore had used their secret farcaster and fatline technologies to weave hundreds of dataspheres into a single, secret, interstellar information medium called the megasphere. But, according to the Cantos, Aenea’s father—the cybrid Jorm Keats-had traveled in disembodied datapersona form to the mega-sphere’s Core and discovered that there was a larger datumplane medium, perhaps larger than our galaxy, which even the Core AIs were afraid to explore because it was full of “lions and tigers and bears”—those were Ummon the AI’s words. These were the beings—or intelligences—or gods, for all we knew—who had kidnapped the Earth and brought it here before the Core could destroy it a millennium ago. These Lions and Tigers and Bears were the bugaboo guardians of our world. No one in the Fellowship had ever seen any of these entities, or spoken to them, or had any solid evidence of their existence. No one except Aenea.
“No,” said the girl on the stage, “I didn’t talk to them.” She looked down as if embarrassed. She was always reticent to talk about this. “But I think I heard them.”
“They spoke to you?” said Jaev Peters. The pavilion was hushed.
“No,” said Aenea. “I didn’t say that. I just … heard them. A bit like when you overhear someone else’s conversation through a dormitory wall.”
There was a rustle of amusement at this. For all the thick stone walls on the Fellowship property, the dorm partitions were notably thin.
“All right,” said Bets Kimbal from the first row. Bets was the chief cook and a large, sensible woman. “Tell us what they said.”
Aenea stepped up to the edge of the red-carpeted stage and looked out at her elders and colleagues. “I can tell you this,” she said softly. “There’ll be no more food and supplies from the Indian Market. That’s gone.”
It was as if she had set off a grenade in the music pavilion. When the babble began to subside, one of the biggest of the construction workers, a man named Hussan, shouted over the noise. “What do you mean it’s gone? Where do we get our food?”
There was good reason for the panic. In Mr. Wright’s day, way back in the twentieth century, his Fellowship desert camp had been about fifty kilometers from a large town called Phoenix. Unlike the Depression-era Wisconsin Taliesin, where apprentices raised crops in the rich soil even while they worked on Mr. Wright’s construction plans, this desert camp had never been able to grow its own food. So they drove to Phoenix and bartered or paid out their primitive coins and paper money for basic supplies. The Old Architect had always depended upon the largesse of patrons—large loans never to be paid back—for such month-to-month survival.
Here in our reassembled desert camp, there were no towns. The only road—two gravel ruts—led west into hundreds of miles of emptiness. I knew this because I had flown over the area in the dropship and driven it in the Old Architect’s ground-car. But about thirty klicks from the compound there was a weekly Indian market where we had bartered craft items for food and basic materials. It had been there for years before Aenea’s and my arrival; everyone had obviously expected it to be there forever.
“What do you mean it’s gone?” repeated Hussan in a hoarse shout. “Where’d the Indians go? Were they just cybrid illusions, like Mr. Wright?”
Aenea made a gesture with her hands that I had grown accustomed to over the years—a graceful setting-aside motion that I had come to see as a physical analog of the Zen expression “mu,” which, in the right context, can mean “unask the question.”
“The market’s gone because we won’t need it anymore,” said Aenea. “The Indians are real enough—Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni—but they have their own lives to live, their own experiments to conduct. Their trading with us has been … a favor.”
The crowd became angry at that, but eventually they settled down again. Bets Kimbal stood. “What do we do, child?”
Aenea sat on the edge of the stage as if trying to become one
with the waiting, expectant audience. “The Fellowship is over,” she said. “That part of our lives has to end.”
One of the younger apprentices was shouting from the back of the pavilion. “No it doesn’t! Mr. Wright could still return! He was a cybrid, remember … a construct! The Core … or the Lions and Tigers and Bears … whoever shaped him can send him back to us …”
Aenea shook her head, sadly but firmly. “No. Mr. Wright is gone. The Fellowship is over. Without the food and materials the Indians brought from so far away, this desert camp can’t last a month. We have to go.”
It was a young female apprentice named Peret who spoke quietly into the silence. “Where, Aenea?”
Perhaps it was at this moment that I first realized how this entire group had given themselves over to the young woman I had known as a child. When the Old Architect was around, giving lectures, holding forth in seminars and drafting-room bull sessions, leading his flock on picnics and swimming outings in the mountains, demanding solicitude and the best food, the reality of Aenea’s leadership had been somewhat masked. But now it was evident.
“Yes,” someone else called from the center of the rising rows of seats, “where, Aenea?”
My friend opened her hands in another gesture I had learned. Rather than Unask the question, this one said, You must answer your own question. Aloud, she said, “There are two choices. Each of you traveled here either by farcaster or through the Time Tombs. You can go back by way of farcaster …”
“No!”
“How can we?”