Colonel Kassad had disappeared at about that same time—shortly after entering the Valley of the Time Tombs—but the FORCE Colonel had, according to Martin Silenus’s Cantos, followed his phantom lover, Moneta, into the far future where he was to die in combat with the Shrike. I closed my eyes and recited aloud:
“… Later, in the death carnage of the valley,
Moneta and a few of the Chosen Warriors,
Wounded all,
Torn and tossed themselves by the Shrike horde’s fury,
Found the body of Fedmahn Kassad
Still wrapped in death’s embrace with the
Silent Shrike.
Lifting the warrior, carrying him, touching him
With reverence born of loss and battle,
They washed and tended his ravaged body,
And bore him to the Crystal Monolith.
Here the hero was laid on a bier of white marble,
Weapons were set at his feet.
In the valley beyond, a great bonfire filled
The air with light.
Human men and women carried torches
Through the dark,
While others descended, wingsoft, through
Morning lapis lazuli,
And some others arrived in faery craft, bubbles of light,
While still others descended on wings of energy
Or wrapped in circles of green and gold.
Later, as the stars burned in place,
Moneta made her farewells to her future’s
Friends and entered the Sphinx.
Multitudes sang.
Rat things poked among fallen pennants
In the field where heroes fell,
While the wind whispered among carapace
And blade, steel and thorn.
And thus,
In the Valley,
The great Tombs shimmered,
Faded from gold to bronze,
And started their long voyage back.”
“Impressive memory,” said Aenea.
“Grandam used to cuff me if I screwed it up,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. The Templar and the Colonel sound dead to me.”
“And so they will be,” said Aenea. “And so shall we all.”
I waited for her to shift out of her Delphic phase.
“The Cantos say that Het Masteen was carried away somewhere … some when by the Shrike,” she said. “He later died in the Valley of the Time Tombs after returning. The poem did not say if he was gone an hour or thirty years. Uncle Martin did not know.”
I squinted at her. “What about Kassad, kiddo? The Cantos are fairly specific there … the Colonel follows Moneta into the far future, engages in a battle with the Shrike …”
“With legions of Shrikes, actually,” corrected my friend.
“Yeah,” I said. I had never really understood that. “But it seems continuous enough … he follows her, he fights, he dies, his body is put in the Crystal Monolith, and it and Moneta begin the long trip back through time.”
Aenea nodded and smiled. “With the Shrike,” she said.
I paused. The Shrike had emerged from the Tombs … Moneta had traveled with it somehow … so although the Cantos clearly said that Kassad had destroyed the Shrike in that great, final battle, the monster was somehow alive and traveling with Moneta and Kassad’s body back through …
Damn. Did the poem ever actually say that Kassad was dead?
“Uncle Martin had to fake parts of the tale, you know,” said Aenea. “He had some descriptions from Rachel, but he took poetic license on the parts he did not understand.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Rachel. Moneta. The Cantos had clearly suggested that the girl-child Rachel, who went forward with her father, Sol, to the future, would return as the woman Moneta. Colonel Kassad’s phantom lover. The woman he would follow into the future to his fate … And what had Rachel said to me a few hours earlier when I was suspicious that she and Aenea were lovers? “I happen to be involved with a certain soldier … male … whom you’ll meet today. Well, actually, I will be involved with him someday. I mean … shit, it’s complicated.”
Indeed. My head hurt. I set down the beer bulb and held my head in my hands.
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Aenea.
I peered up at her through my fingers. “Care to explain?”
“Yes, but …”
“I know,” I said. “At some other time.”
“Yes,” said Aenea, her hand on mine.
“Any reason why we can’t talk about it now?” I said.
Aenea nodded. “We have to go in our pod now and opaque the walls,” she said.
“We do?” I said.
“Yes.”
“And then what?” I said.
“Then,” said Aenea, floating free of the sticktite mat and pulling me with her, “we make love for hours.”
25
ero-g. Weightlessness.
I had never really appreciated those terms and that reality before.
Our living pod was opaqued to the point that the rich evening light glowed as if through thick parchment. Once again, I had the impression of being in a warm heart. Once again I realized how much Aenea was in my heart.
At first the encounter bordered on the clinical as Aenea carefully removed my clothes and inspected the healing surgical scars, gently touched my repaired ribs, and ran her palm down my back.
“I should shave,” I said, “and shower.”
“Nonsense,” whispered my friend. “I’ve given you sponge and sonic baths every day … including this morning. You’re perfectly clean, my dear. And I like the whiskers.” She moved her fingers across my cheek.
We floated above the soft and rounded cubby shelves. I helped Aenea out of her shirt, trousers, and underwear. As each piece came clear, she kicked it through the air into the cubby drawer, shutting the fiber panel with her bare foot when everything was inside. We both chuckled. My own clothes were still floating in the quiet air, the sleeves of my shirt gesturing in slow motion.
“I’ll get the …”I began.
“No you won’t,” said Aenea and pulled me closer.
Even kissing demands new skills in zero-g. Aenea’s hair coiled around her head in a sunlit corona as I held her face in my hands and kissed her—her lips, eyes, cheeks, forehead, and lips again. We began tumbling slowly, brushing the smooth and glowing wall It was as warm as my dear friend’s flesh. One of us pushed off and we tumbled together into the middle of the oval pod space.
Our kissing became more urgent. Each time we moved to hold the other more tightly, we would begin to pivot around an invisible center of mass, arms and legs entangled as we pressed tighter and rotated more quickly. Without disentangling or interrupting our kiss, I held out one arm, waited for the flesh-warm walls to reach us, and stopped our tumble, The contact pushed us away from the curved, warmly glowing wall and sent us spinning very slowly toward the center again.
Aenea broke our kiss and moved her head back a moment, still holding my arms, regarding me from arm’s length. I had seen her smile ten thousand times in the last ten years of her life—had thought that I knew all of her smiles—but this one was deeper, older, more mysterious, and more mischievous than any I had seen before.
“Don’t move,” she whispered, and, pushing softly against my arm for leverage, rotated in space.
“Aenea …” was all I could say and then I could say nothing. I closed my eyes, oblivious of everything except sensation. I could feel my darling’s hands tight on the backs of my legs, pulling me closer to her.
After a moment, her knees came to rest against my shoulders, her thighs bumping softly against my chest. I reached out to the hollow of her back and pulled her closer, sliding my cheek along the strong muscle of her inner thigh. At Taliesin West, one of the cooks had owned a tabby cat. Many evenings, when I was sitting alone out on the western terrace watching the sunset and feeling the stones lose their day’s heat, waiting for the hour when Aenea a
nd I could sit in her shelter and talk about everything and nothing, I would watch the cat lap slowly from her bowl of cream. I visualized that cat now, but within minutes I could visualize nothing but the immediate and overpowering sense of my dear friend opening to me, of the subtle taste of the sea, of our movements like the tide rising, of all of my senses being centered in the slow but growing sensation at the core of me.
How long we floated this way, I have no idea. Such overwhelming excitement is like a fire that consumes time. Total intimacy is an exemption from the space/time demands of the universe. Only the growing prerogatives of our passion and the ineluctable need to be even closer than this penultimate closeness marked the minutes of our lovemaking.
Aenea opened her legs wider, moved away, released me with her mouth but not her hand. We pivoted again in the sepia light, her tight fingers and my excitement the center of our slow rotation. We kissed, lips moist, Aenea’s grasp tightening around me. “Now,” she whispered. I obeyed.
If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this … these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved. We kissed again, oblivious of our slow tumbling, the rich light taking on a heart warmth around us. I opened my eyes long enough to see Aenea’s hair swirling like Ophelia’s cloak in the wine-dark sea of air in which we floated. It was indeed like holding my beloved in deep, salty water—buoyed up and weightless, the warmth of her around me like the rising tide, our movements as regular as the surf against warm sand.
“Oops …” whispered Aenea after only a moment of this perfection.
I paused in my kissing long enough to assess what was separating us. “Newton’s Law,” I whispered against her cheek.
“For every action …” whispered Aenea, chuckling softly, holding my shoulders like a swimmer pausing to rest.
“… an equal and opposite reaction …” I said, smiling until she kissed me again.
“Solution,” whispered Aenea. Her legs closed tight around my hips. Her breasts floated between us, the nipples teasing my chest.
Then she lay back, again the swimmer, floating this time, her arms spread but her fingers still interlaced with mine. We continued to pivot slowly around our common center of gravity, a slow tumble, my head coming over and down and around like a rider on a porpoise doing slow cartwheels in the sunlit depths, but I was no longer interested or aware of the elegant ballistics of our lovemaking, but only in the lovemaking. We moved faster in the warm sea of air.
Some minutes later, Aenea released my hands, moved up right and forward as we tumbled together, still moving, sank her short nails into my back even while she kissed me with a wild urgency, and then moved her mouth away to gasp and cry out, once, softly. At the same instant as her cry, I felt the warm universe of her close around me with that short, tight throb, that intimate, shared pulse. A second later it was my turn to gasp, to cling to her as I throbbed within her, to whisper into her salty neck and floating hair—“Aenea … Aenea.” A prayer. My only prayer then. My only prayer now.
For a long time we floated together even after we had become two people again rather than one. Our legs were still intertwined, our fingers stroking and holding one another. I kissed her throat and felt her pulse like a memory echo against my lips. She ran her fingers through my sweaty hair.
I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.
Aenea kicked away to the pod cubby just long enough to return with a small, warm, and wet towel. We took turns wiping some of the sweat and slickness from us. My shirt floated by, the empty sleeves attempting to swim in the gentle air currents. Aenea laughed and lingered in her washing and drying, the simple act quickly turning into something else.
“Oops,” said Aenea, smiling at me. “How did that happen?”
“Newton’s Law?” I said.
“That makes sense,” she whispered. “Then what would be the reaction if I were to do … this?”
I think we were both surprised by the instant result of her experiment.
“We have hours until we have to meet the others on the treeship,” she said softly. She said something to the living pod and the curved wall went absolutely transparent, it was as if we were floating among these countless branches and sail-sized leaves, the sun’s warmth bathing us one moment and then being submerged in night and stars when we looked out the other side of the clear pod.
“Don’t worry,” said Aenea, “we can see out, but the exterior is opaque on the outside. Reflective.”
“How can you be sure?” I whispered, kissing her neck again, seeking the soft pulse.
Aenea sighed. “I guess we can’t without going out to look in. Sort of a David Hume problem.”
I tried to remember my philosophy readings at Taliesin, recalled our discussions of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and chuckled. “There’s another way we can check,” I said, rubbing my bare feet along her calves and the backs of her legs.
“How’s that?” murmured my friend, her eyes closed.
“If anyone can see in,” I said, floating behind her, rubbing her back without letting her float away, “there’s going to be a huge crowd of Ouster angels and Templar treeships and comet farmers hanging out there in about thirty minutes.”
“Really,” said Aenea, eyes still closed. “And why is that?”
I began to show her.
She opened her eyes. “Oh, my,” she said softly.
I was afraid that I was shocking her.
“Raul?” she whispered.
“Hmmm?” I said, not stopping what I was doing. I closed my eyes.
“Maybe you’re right about the pod being reflective on the outside,” she whispered and then sighed again, more deeply this time.
“Mmmhmm?” I said.
She grabbed my ears and floated around, pulled herself closer, and whispered, “Why don’t we leave the outside transparent and make the inside wall reflective?”
My eyes snapped open.
“Just kidding,” she whispered and pushed away from the pod wall, pulling me with her into the central sphere of warm air.
The stars blazed around us.
WE WORE FORMAL BLACK OUTFITS TO THE DINNER party and conference on the Yggdrasill. I was tense with excitement to be aboard one of the legendary treeships and it was a bit of an anticlimax when I realized that I had not noticed when we had crossed from the biosphere branches to the treeship trunk. It was only when hundreds of us were gathered on a series of platforms and opened pods, when the treeship had actually cast off and moved away from the encircling city-sized leaves, province-sized branches, and continent-sized trunks that I realized that we were aboard and moving.
The Yggdrasil! must have been a bit more than a kilometer in length, from the narrowed crown of the tree to the resplendent root system of boiling fusion energy at its base. A bit of gravity returned under drive—probably only a few percentage points of microgravity—but it was still disconcerting after so much zero-g. It did help with our orientation though, the scores of us able to sit at tables and look one another in the eyes rather than float for a polite position … I thought of Aenea and our last hours together and blushed at this thought. There were tables and chairs on the multitiered platforms and many who were not seated there thronged on the flimsy suspension bridges that connected platforms to more far-flung branches, or on the helixes of spiral stairways winding up through branches, leaves, and binding the central trunk like vines, or hung from swingvines and leafy bowers.
Aenea and I were seated at the round central table along with the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen, the Ouster leaders, and two score of other Templars, refugees from T’ien Shan, and others. I was on Aenea’s immediate left. The Templar dignitaries were seated to her right. Even now I can remember the names of most of the others present at th
e central table.
Besides the captain of the treeship, Het Masteen, there were half a dozen other Templars there, including Ket Rosteen—introduced as the True Voice of the Startree, High Priest of the Muir, and Spokesman of the Templar Brotherhood. The dozen Ousters at the main table included Systenj Coredwell and Navson Hamnim, but there were others who looked little like these tall, thin Ouster archetypes: Am Chipeta and Kent Quinkent, two shorter, darker Ousters—a married couple, I thought—with lively eyes and no webs between their fingers; Sian Quintana Ka’an, a female who was either wearing a resplendent robe of bright feathers or who had been born with them, and her blue-feathered partners Paul Uray and Morgan Bottoms. Two others better fit the Ouster image—Drivenj Nicaagat and Paiou Koror—for they were vacuum-adapted and wore their silvery skinsuits through the entire banquet.
There were four of the Hebronese Seneschai Aluit present—LLeeoonn and OOeeaall, whom I had met at the earlier gathering, as well as another pair of the willowy green figures introduced by Aenea as AAllooee and NNeelloo. I could only assume that the four were related or marriage-bound in some complex way.
The alien Akerataeli appeared to be missing until Aenea pointed to a place far out among the branches where the microgravity was even less, and there—between the gossamers and glowbirds—floated the platelet beings. Even the erg binders who were controlling the treeship’s containment field were present by proxy in the form of three Möbius cubes with translator discs embedded in their black matrices.
Father Captain Federico de Soya sat to my left and his aide, Sergeant Gregorius, sat to the left of him. Next to the sergeant sat Colonel Fedmahn Kassad in his formal FORCE black uniform, looking like a holo from the deep Hegemony past. Beyond Kassad sat the Thunderbolt Sow, as upright and proud as the old FORCE warrior to her right, while next to her—eyes bright and attentive—sat Getswang Ngwang Lobsang Tengin Gyapso Sisunwangyur Tshungpa Mapai Dhepal Sangpo, the boy Dalai Lama.