And finally in this zero-gravity Ouster pod there were the other people who were not people at all, at least from my frame of reference: such as the willowy green beings who were introduced by Aenea as LLeeoonn and OOeeaall, two of the few surviving Seneschai empaths from Hebron—alien and intelligent beings. I looked at these strange creatures—the palest cypress-green skin and eyes; bodies so thin that I could have encircled their torso with my fingers; symmetrical like us with two arms, two legs, a head, but, of course, not really like us at all; limbs articulated more like single, unbroken, fluid lines than evolved of hinged bone and gristle; splayed digits like toads’ hands; and heads more like a human fetus’s than a human adult’s. Their eyes were little more than shadowy spots on the green flesh of their faces.
The Seneschai had been reported to have died out during the early days of the Hegira … they were little more than legend, even less real than the tale of the soldier Kassad or the Templar Het Masteen.
One of these green legends brushed its three-fingered hand over my palm as we were introduced.
There were other non-human, non-Ouster, non-android entities in the pod.
Floating near the translucent wall of the pod were what looked to be large, greenish-white platelets—soft, shuddering saucers of soft material—each almost two meters across. I had seen these life-forms before … on the cloud world where I had been eaten by the sky squid.
Not eaten, M. Endymion, came surges of language echoing in my head, only transported.
Telepathy? I thought, half directing the query to the platelets. I remembered the surge of language-thought on the cloud world, and how I had wondered where it had originated.
It was Aenea who answered. “It feels like telepathy,” she said softly, “but there’s nothing mystical about. The Akerataeli learned our language the old-fashioned way—their zeplin symbiotes heard the sound vibrations and the Akerataeli broke it down and analyzed it. They control the zeplins by a form of long-distance, very tightly focused microwave pulses …”
“The zeplin was the thing that swallowed me on the cloud world,” I said.
“Yes,” said Aenea.
“Like the zeplins on Whirl?”
“Yes, and in Jupiter’s atmosphere as well.”
“I thought that they were hunted to extinction during the early Hegira years.”
“They were eradicated on Whirl,” said Aenea. “And even before the Hegira on Jupiter. But you weren’t paragliding your kayak on Jupiter or Whirl … but on another oxygen-rich gas giant six hundred light-years into the Outback.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry I interrupted. You were saying … microwave impulses …”
Aenea made that graceful throwing-away gesture I’d known since she was a child. “Just that they control their zeplin symbiote partners’ actions by precise microwave stimulation of certain nerve and brain centers. We’ve given the Akerataeli permission to stimulate our speech centers so that we ‘hear’ their messages. I take it that it’s rather like playing a complicated piano for them …”
I nodded but did not really understand.
“The Akerataeli are also a spacefaring race,” said Father Captain de Soya. “Over the eons, they have colonized more than ten thousand oxygen-rich gas giant worlds.”
“Ten thousand!” I said. I think that for a moment my jaw actually hung slack. In humankind’s more than twelve hundred years of traveling in space we had explored and settled on less than ten percent of that number of planets.
“The Akerataeli have been at it longer than we,” said de Soya softly.
I looked at the gently vibrating platelets. They had no eyes that I could see, certainly no ears. Were they hearing us? They must … one of them had responded to my thoughts. Could they read minds as well as stimulate language-thoughts?
While I was staring at them, the conversation between the humans and Ousters in the room resumed.
“The intelligence is reliable,” said the pale Ouster whom I later learned was named Navson Hamnim. “There were at least three hundred archangel-class ships gathering at System Lacaille 9352. Each ship has a representative of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem or Malta. It is definitely a major Crusade.”
“Lacaille 9352,” mused de Soya. “Sibiatu’s Bitterness. I know the place. How old is this intelligence?”
“Twenty hours,” said Navson Hamnim. “The data was sent via the only Gideon-drive courier drone we have left … of the three drones captured during your raids, two have been destroyed. We are fairly sure that the scoutship which sent this drone was detected and destroyed seconds after launching the courier.”
“Three hundred archangels,” said de Soya. He rubbed his cheeks. “If they are aware we know about them, they could make a Gideon jump this direction within days … hours. Assume two days’ resurrection time, we may have less than three days to prepare. Have defenses been improved since I left?”
Another Ouster whom I later knew as Systenj Coredwell opened his hands in a gesture that I would discover meant “in no way.” I noticed that there was webbing between the long fingers. “Most of the fighting ships have had to jump to the Great Wall salient to hold off their Task Force HORSEHEAD. The fighting is very bitter there. Few of the ships are expected to return.”
“Does your intelligence say whether the Pax knows what you have here?” asked Aenea.
Navson Hamnim opened his hands in a subtle variation of Coredwell’s gesture. “We think not. But they know now that this has been a major staging area for our recent defensive battles. I would venture that they think this is just another base—perhaps with a partial orbital forest ring.”
“Is there anything we can do to break up the Crusade before it jumps this way?” said Aenea, speaking to everyone in the room.
“No.” The flat syllable came from the tall man who had been introduced as Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. His Web English had a strange accent. He was a tall man, extremely thin but muscular, with an equally thin beard along his jawline and around his mouth. In the old poet’s Cantos, Kassad had been described as a reasonably young man, but this warrior was in his standard sixties, at least, with heavy lines around his thin mouth and small eyes, his dark complexion burned even darker by long exposure to desert-world sun or deep-space UV, the spiked hair on top of his head rising like short silver nails.
Everyone looked at Kassad and waited.
“With de Soya’s ship destroyed,” said the Colonel, “our only chance at successful hit-and-run operations is gone. The few Hawking-drive warships we have left would take a time-debt of at least two months to jump to Lacaille 9352 and back. The Crusade archangels would almost certainly be here and gone by then … and we would be defenseless.”
Navson Hamnim kicked away from the pod wall and oriented himself right side up in relation to Kassad. “These few warships do not offer us a defense in any case,” he said softly, his own Web English more musical than accented. “Should we not consider dying while on the attack?”
Aenea floated between the two men. “I think that we should consider not dying at all,” she said. “Nor allowing the biosphere to be destroyed.”
A positive sentiment, a voice spoke in my head. But not all positive sentiments can be supported by updrafts of possible action.
“True,” said Aenea, looking at the platelets, “but perhaps in this case the updrafts will build.”
Good thermals to you all, said the voice in my head. The platelets moved toward the pod wall, which irised open for them. Then they were gone.
Aenea took a breath. “Shall we meet on the Yggdrasill to share the main meal in seven hours and continue this discussion? Perhaps someone will have an idea.”
There was no dissension. People, Ousters, and Seneschai exited by a score of openings that had not been there a moment before.
Aenea floated over and hugged me again. I patted her hair.
“My friend,” she said softly. “Come with me.”
IT WAS HER PRIVATE LIVING POD—OUR PRIVATE LI
VING pod, she informed me—and it was much like the one in which I awoke, except that there were organic shelves, niches, writing surfaces, storage cubbies, and facilities for comlog interface. Some of my clothes from the ship were folded neatly in a cubby and my extra boots were in a fiberplastic drawer.
Aenea pulled food from a cold-box cubby and began making sandwiches, “You must be hungry, my dear,” she said, tearing off pieces of rough bread. I saw zygoat cheese on the sticktite zero-g work surface, some wrapped pieces of roast beef that must have come from the ship, bulbs of mustard, and several tankards of T’ien Shan rice beer. Suddenly I was starved.
The sandwiches were large and thick. She set them on catch-plates made of some strong fiber, lifted her own meal and a beer bulb, and kicked toward the outer wall. A portal appeared and began to iris open.
“Uh …”I said alertly, meaning—Excuse me, Aenea, but that’s space out there. Aren’t we both going to explosively decompress and die horribly?
She kicked out through the organic portal and I shrugged and followed.
There were catwalks, suspension bridges, sticktite stairways, balconies, and terraces out there—made of steel-hard plant fiber and winding around the pods, stalks, branches, and trunks like so much ivy. There was also air to breathe. It smelled of a forest after a rain.
“Containment field,” I said, thinking that I should have expected this. After all, if the Consul’s ancient starship could have a balcony …
I looked around. “What powers it?” I said. “Solar receptors?”
“Indirectly,” said Aenea, finding us a sticktite bench and mat. There were no railings on this tiny, intricately woven balcony. The huge branch—at least thirty meters across—ended in a profusion of leaves above us and the latticework web of the trunks and branches “beneath” us convinced my inner ear that we were many kilometers up on a wall made of crisscrossed, green girders. I resisted the urge to throw myself down on the sticktite mat and cling for dear life. A radiant gossamer fluttered by, followed by some type of small bird with a v-shaped tail.
“Indirectly?” I said, my mouth full as I took a huge bite of sandwich.
“The sunlight—for the most part—is converted to containment fields by ergs,” continued my friend, sipping her beer and looking out at the seemingly infinite expanse of leaves above us, below us, to all sides of us, their green faces all turned toward the brilliant star. There was not enough air to give us a blue sky, but the containment field polarized the view toward the sun just enough to keep us from being blinded when we glanced that direction.
I almost spit my food out, managed to swallow instead, and said, “Ergs? As in Aldebaren energy binders? You were serious? Ergs like the one taken on the last Hyperion pilgrimage?”
“Yes,” said Aenea. Her dark eyes were focused on me now.
“I thought they were extinct.”
“Nope,” said Aenea.
I took a long drink from the beer bulb and shook my head. “I’m confused.”
“You have a right to be, my dear friend,” Aenea said softly.
“This place …”I made a weak gesture toward the wall of branches and leaves trailing away so much farther than a planetary horizon, the infinitely distant curve of green and black far above us. “It’s impossible,” I said.
“Not quite,” said Aenea. “The Templars and Ousters have been working on it—and others like it—for a thousand years.”
I began chewing again. The cheese and roast beef were delicious. “So this is where the thousands and millions of trees went when they abandoned God’s Grove during the Fall.”
“Some of them,” said Aenea. “But the Templars had been working with the Ousters to develop orbital forest rings and biospheres long before that.”
I peered up. The distances made me dizzy. The sense of being on this small, leafy platform so many kilometers above nothing made me reel. Far below us and to our right, something that looked like a tiny, green sprig moved slowly between the latticed branches. I saw the film of energy field around it and realized that I was looking at one of the fabled Templar tree-ships, almost certainly kilometers long. “Is this finished then?” I said. “A true Dyson sphere? A globe around a star?”
Aenea shook her head. “Far from it, although about twenty standard years ago, they made contact with all the primary trunk tendrils. Technically it’s a sphere, but most of it is comprised of holes at this point—some many millions of klicks across.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I said, realizing that I could have been more eloquent. I rubbed my cheeks, feeling the heavy growth of beard there. “I’ve been out of it for two weeks?” I said.
“Fifteen standard days,” said Aenea.
“Usually the doc-in-the-box works more quickly than that,” I said. I finished the sandwich, stuck the catchplate to the table surface, and concentrated on the beer.
“Usually it does,” agreed Aenea. “Rachel must have told you that you spent a relatively short time in the autosurgeon. She did most of the initial surgery herself.”
“Why?” I said.
“The box was full,” said Aenea. “We defrosted you from fugue as soon as we got here, but the three in the doc ahead of you were in bad shape. De Soya was near death for a full week. The sergeant … Gregorius … was much more seriously injured than he had let on when we met him on the Great Peak. And the third officer—Carel Shan—died despite the box’s and the Ouster medics’ best efforts.”
“Shit,” I said, lowering the beer. “I’m sorry to hear that.” One got used to autosurgeons fixing almost anything.
Aenea looked at me with such intensity that I could feel her gaze warming my skin as surely as I could feel the powerful sunlight. “How are you, Raul?”
“Great,” I said. “I ache a bit. I can feel the healing ribs. The scars itch. And I feel like I overslept by two weeks … but I feel good.”
She took my hand. I realized that her eyes were moist. “I would have been really pissed if you’d died on me,” she said after a moment, her voice thick.
“Me too.” I squeezed her hand, looked up, and suddenly leaped to my feet, sending the beer bulb spiraling off into thin air and almost launching myself. Only the sticktite velcro soles on my soft shoes kept me anchored. “Holy shit!” I said, pointing.
From this distance, it looked like a squid, perhaps only a meter or two long. From experience and a growing sense of perspective here, I knew better.
“One of the zeplins,” said Aenea. “The Akerataeli have tens of thousands working on the Biosphere. They stay inside the CO2 and O2 envelopes.”
“It’s not going to eat me again, is it?” I said.
Aenea grinned. “I doubt it. The one that got a taste of you has probably spread the word.”
I looked for my beer, saw the bulb tumbling away a hundred meters below us, considered leaping after it, thought better of it, and sat down on the sticktite bench.
Aenea gave me her bulb. “Go ahead. I can never finish those things.” She watched me drink. “Any other questions while we’re talking?”
I swallowed and made a dismissive gesture. “Well, there happens to be a bunch of extinct, mythical, and dead people around. Care to explain that?”
“By extinct you mean the zeplins, Seneschai, and Templars?” she said.
“Yeah. And the ergs … although I haven’t seen one of those yet.”
“The Templars and Ousters have been working to preserve such hunted sentient species the way the colonists on Maui-Covenant tried to save the Old Earth dolphins,” she said. “From the early Hegira colonists, then the Hegemony, and now the Pax.”
“And the mythical and dead people?” I said.
“By that you mean Colonel Kassad?”
“And Het Masteen,” I said. “And, for that matter, Rachel. We seem to have the whole cast of the friggin’ Hyperion Cantos showing up here.”
“Not quite,” said Aenea, her voice soft and a bit sad. “The Consul is dead. Father Duré is never allowed to l
ive. And my mother is gone.”
“Sorry, kiddo …”
She touched my hand again. “That’s all right. I know what you mean … it’s disconcerting.”
“Did you know Colonel Kassad or Het Masteen before this?” I said.
Aenea shook her head. “My mother told me about them, of course … and Uncle Martin had things to add to his poem’s description. But they were gone before I was born.”
“Gone,” I repeated. “Don’t you mean dead?” I worked to remember the Cantos stanzas. According to the old poet’s tale, Het Masteen, the tall Templar, the True Voice of the Tree, had disappeared on the windwagon trip across Hyperion’s Sea of Grass shortly after his treeship, the Yggdrasill, had burned in orbit. Blood in the Templar’s cabin suggested the Shrike. He had left behind the erg in a Mobius cube. Sometime later, they had found Masteen in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He had not been able to explain his absence—had said only that the blood in the windwagon had not been his—had cried out that it was his job to be the Voice of the Tree of Pain—and had died.