“Will we see you again, Architect?” said Jigme.
“I cannot promise that,” said Aenea. “But I do promise that if it is in my power, we will be in contact again.”
I followed her back to the empty hall in the dripping corridors of Dreg’s Hive, where our departure would not seem so miraculous as to add to the Shrike Cult’s already fertile canon.
ON TSINTAO-HSISHUANG PANNA, WE SAID GOOD-BYE to the Dalai Lama and his brother, Labsang Samten. Labsang wept. The boy Lama did not.
“The local people’s Mandarin dialect is atrocious,” said the Dalai Lama.
“But they will understand you, Your Holiness,” said Aenea. “And they will listen.”
“But you are my teacher,” said the boy, his voice near anger. “How can I teach them without your help?”
“I will help,” said Aenea. “I will try to help. And then it is your job. And theirs.”
“But we may share communion with them?” asked Lab-sang.
“If they ask for it,” said Aenea. To the boy she said, “Would you give me your blessing, Your Holiness?”
The child smiled. “It is I who should be asking for a blessing, Teacher.”
“Please,” said Aenea, and again I could hear the weariness in her voice.
The Dalai Lama bowed and, with his eyes closed, said:
“This is from the ‘Prayer of Kuntu Sangpo,’ as revealed to me through the vision of my terton in a previous life—
“HO! The phenomenal world and all existence, samsara and nirvana,
All has one foundation, but there are two paths and two results—
Displays of both ignorance and Knowledge.
Through Kuntu Sangpo’s aspiration,
In the Palace of the Primal Space of Emptiness
Let all beings attain perfect consummation and
Buddhahood.
“The universal foundation is unconditioned,
Spontaneously arising, a vast immanent expanse, beyond expression,
Where neither samsara nor nirvana exist.
Knowledge of this reality is Buddhahood,
While ignorant beings wander in samsara.
Let all sentient beings of the three realms
Attain Knowledge of the nature of the ineffable foundation.”
Aenea bowed toward the boy. “The Palace of the Primal Space of Emptiness,” she murmured. “How much more elegant than my clumsy description of the ‘Void Which Binds.’ Thank you, Your Holiness.”
The child bowed. “Thank you, Revered Teacher. May your death be more quick and less painful than we both expect.”
Aenea and I returned to the treeship. “What did he mean!” I demanded, both of my hands on her shoulders. “ ‘Death more quick and less painful’? What the hell does that mean? Are you planning to be crucified? Does this goddamned messiah impersonation have to go to the same bizarre end? Tell me, Aenea!” I realized that I was shaking her … shaking my dear friend, my beloved girl. I dropped my hands.
Aenea put her arms around me. “Just stay with me, Raul. Stay with me as long as you can.”
“I will,” I said, patting her back. “I swear to you I will.”
ON FUJI WE SAID GOOD-BYE TO KENSHIRO ENDO AND Haruyuki Otaki. On Deneb Drei it was a child whom I had never met—a ten-year-old girl named Katherine—who stayed behind, alone and seemingly unafraid. On Sol Draconi Septem, that world of frozen air and deadly wraiths where Father Glaucus and our Chitchatuk friends had been foully murdered, the sad and brooding scaffold rigger, Rimsi Kyipup, volunteered almost happily to be left behind. On Nevermore it was another man I had not had the privilege of meeting—a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman who seemed like Martin Silenus’s kindlier younger brother. On God’s Grove, where A. Bettik had lost part of his arm ten standard years earlier, the two Templar lieutenants of Het Masteen ’cast down with Aenea and me and did not return. On Hebron, empty now of its Jewish settlers but filled now with good Christian colonists sent there by the Pax, the Seneschai Aluit empaths, Lleeoonn and Ooeeaall ’cast down to say good-bye to us on an empty desert evening where the rocks still held the daytime’s glow.
On Parvati, the usually happy sisters Kuku Se and Kay Se wept and hugged the both of us good-bye. On Asquith, a family of two parents and their five golden-haired children stayed behind. Above the white cloud-swirl and blue ocean world of Mare Infinitus—a world whose mere name haunted me with memories of pain and friendship—Aenea asked Sergeant Gregorius if he would ’cast down with her to meet the rebels and support her cause.
“And leave the captain?” asked the giant, obviously shocked by the suggestion.
De Soya stepped forward. “There is no more captain, Sergeant. My dear friend. Only this priest without a Church. And I suspect that we would do more good now apart than together. Am I right; M. Aenea?”
My friend nodded. “I had hoped that Lhomo would be my representative on Mare Infinitus,” she said. “The smugglers and rebels and Lantern Mouth hunters on this world would respect a man of strength. But it will be difficult and dangerous … the rebellion still rages here and the Pax takes no prisoners.”
“ ’Tis not th’ danger I object to!” cried Gregorius. “I’m willin’ to die the true death a hundred times over for a good cause.”
“I know that, Sergeant,” said Aenea.
The giant looked at his former captain and then back to Aenea. “Lass, I know ye do not like to tell the future, even though we know you spy it now and then. But tell me this … is there a chance of reunion with my captain?”
“Yes,” said Aenea. “And with some you thought dead … such as Corporal Kee.”
“Then I’ll go. I’ll do your will. I may not be of the Corps Helvetica anymore, but the obedience they taught me runs deep.”
“It’s not obedience we ask now,” said Father de Soya. “It is something harder and deeper.”
Sergeant Gregorius thought a moment. “Aye,” he said at last and turned his back on everyone a moment. “Let’s go, lass,” he said, holding out his hand for Aenea’s touch.
We left him on an abandoned platform somewhere in the South Littoral, but Aenea told him that submersibles would put in there within a day.
ABOVE MADREDEDIOS, FATHER DE SOYA STEPPED forward, but Aenea held up her hand to stop him.
“Surely this is my world,” said the priest. “I was born here. My diocese was here. I imagine that I will die here.”
“Perhaps,” said Aenea, “but I need you for a more difficult place and a more dangerous job, Federico.”
“Where is that?” said the sad-eyed priest.
“Pacem,” said Aenea. “Our last stop.”
I stepped closer. “Wait, kiddo,” I said. “I’m going with you to Pacem if you insist on going there. You said that I could stay with you.” My voice sounded querulous and desperate even to me.
“Yes,” said Aenea, touching my wrist with her cool fingers. “But I would like Father de Soya to come with us when it is time.”
The Jesuit looked confused and a bit disappointed, but he bowed his head. Evidently obedience ran even deeper in the Society of Jesus than it did in the Corps Helvetica.
In the end, the T’ien Shan bamboo worker Voytek Majer and his new fiancée, the brickmaker Viki Groselj, volunteered to stay on MadredeDios.
On Freeholm, we said good-bye to Janusz Kurtyka. On Kas-trop-Rauxel, recently reterraformed and settled by the Pax, it was the soldier Jigme Paring who volunteered to find the rebel population. Above Parsimony, while Pax warships turned the containment field into a torrent of noise and light, a woman named Helen Dean O’Brian stepped forward and took Aenea’s hand. On Esperance, Aenea and I bid farewell to the former mayor of Jo-kung, Charles Chi-kyap Kempo. On Grass, standing shoulder high in the yellow world prairie, we waved goodbye to Isher Perpet, one of the bolder rebels once rescued from a Pax prison galley and gathered in by Father de Soya. On Qom-Riyadh, where the mosques were quickly being bulldozed or converted to cathedrals by the new Pax settlers, we ??
?cast down in the dead of night and whispered our farewells to a former refugee from that world named Merwin Muhammed Ali and to our former interpreter on T’ien Shan, the clever Perri Samdup.
Above Renaissance Minor, with a horde of in-system warships accelerating toward us with murderous intent, it was the silent ex-prisoner, Hoagan Liebler who stepped forward. “I was a spy,” said the pale man. He was speaking to Aenea but looking directly at Father de Soya. “I sold my allegiance for money, so that I could return to this world to renew my family’s lost lands and wealth. I betrayed my captain and my soul.”
“My son,” said Father de Soya, “you have long since been forgiven those sins, if sins they were … by both your captain and, more importantly, by God. No harm was done.”
Liebler nodded slowly. “The voices I have been listening to since I drank the wine with M. Aenea …”He trailed off. “I know many people on this world,” he said, his voice stronger. “I wish to return home to start this new life.”
“Yes,” said Aenea and offered her hand.
ON VITUS-GRAY-BALIANUS B, AENEA, THE DORJE Phamo, and I ’cast down to a desert wasteland, far from the river with its farm fields and brightly painted cottages lining the way where the kind people of the Amoiete Spectrum Helix had nursed me to health and helped me escape the Pax. Here there was only a tumble of boulders and dried fissures, mazes of tunnel entrances in the rock, and dust storms blowing in from the bloody sunset on the black-cloud horizon. It reminded me of Mars with warmer, thicker air and more of a stench of death and cordite to it.
The shrouded figures surrounded us almost immediately, flechette guns and hellwhips at the ready. I tried again to step between Aenea and the danger, but the figures in the blowing red wind surrounded us and raised their weapons.
“Wait!” cried a voice familiar to me, and one of the shrouded soldiers slid down a red dune to stand in front of us. “Wait!” she called again to those eager to shoot, and this time she unwrapped the bands of her cowl.
“Dem Loa!” I cried and stepped forward to hug the short woman in her bulky battle garb. I saw tears leaving muddy streaks on her cheeks.
“You have brought back your special one,” said the woman who had saved me. “Just as you promised.”
I introduced her to Aenea and then to the Dorje Phamo, feeling silly and happy at the same moment. Dem Loa and Aenea regarded one another for a moment, and then hugged.
I looked around at the other figures who still hung back in the red twilight. “Where is Dem Ria?” I asked. “Alem Mikail Dem Alem? And your children—Bin and Ces Ambre?”
“Dead,” said Dem Loa. “All dead, except Ces Ambre, who is missing after the last attack from the Bombasino Pax.”
I stood speechless, stunned.
“Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem died of his illness,” continued Dem Loa, “but the rest died in our war with the Pax.”
“War with the Pax,” I repeated. “I hope to God that I did not start it …”
Dem Loa raised her hand. “No, Raul Endymion. You did not start it. Those of us in the Amoiete Spectrum Helix who prized our own ways refused the cross … that is what started it. The rebellion had already begun when you were with us. After you left; we thought we had it won. The cowardly troops at Pax Base Bombasino sued for peace, ignored the orders from their commanders in space, and made treaties with us. More Pax ships arrived. They bombed their own base … then came after our villages. It has been war since then. When they land and try to occupy the land, we kill many of them. They send more.”
“Dem Loa,” I said, “I am so, so sorry.”
She set her hand on my chest and nodded. I saw the smile that I remembered from our hours together. She looked at Aenea again. “You are the one he spoke of in his delirium and his pain. You are the one whom he loved. Do you love him as well, child?”
“I do,” said Aenea.
“Good,” said Dem Loa. “It would be sad if a man who thought he was dying expressed such love for someone who did not feel the same about him.” Dem Loa looked at the Thunderbolt Sow, silent and regal. “You are a priestess?”
“Not a priestess,” said the Thunderbolt Sow, “but the abbess of the Samden Gompa monastery.”
Dem Loa showed her teeth. “You rule over monks? Over men?”
“I … instruct them,” said the Dorje Phamo. The wind ruffled her steel-gray hair.
“Just as good as ruling them.” Dem Loa laughed. “Welcome then, Dorje Phamo.” To Aenea she said, “And are you staying with us, child? Or just touching us and passing on as our prophecies predict?”
“I must go on,” said Aenea. “But I would like to leave the Dorje Phamo here as your ally and our … liaison.”
Dem Loa nodded. “It is dangerous here now,” she said to the Thunderbolt Sow.
The Dorje Phamo smiled at the shorter woman. The strength of the two was almost a palpable energy in the air around us.
“Good,” said Dem Loa. She hugged me. “Be kind to your love, Raul Endymion. Be good to her in the hours granted to you by the cycles of life and chaos.”
“I will,” I said.
To Aenea, Dem Loa said, “Thank you for coming, child. It was our wish. It was our hope.” The two women hugged again. I felt suddenly shy, as if I had brought Aenea home to meet my own mother or Grandam.
The Dorje Phamo touched both of us in benediction. “Kale pe a,” she said to Aenea.
We moved away in the twilight dust storm and ’cast through the burst of white light. On the quiet of the Yggdrasill’s bridge, I said to Aenea, “What was that she said?”
“Kale pe a,” repeated my friend. “It is an ancient Tibetan farewell when a caravan sets out to climb the high peaks. It means—go slowly if you wish to return.”
AND SO IT WENT FOR A HUNDRED OTHER WORLDS, each one visited only for moments, but each farewell moving and stirring in its own way. It is hard for me to say how many days and nights were spent on this final voyage with Aenea, because there was only the ’casting down and ’casting up, the treeship entering the light one place and emerging elsewhere, and when everyone was too tired to go on, the Yggdrasill was allowed to drift in empty space for a few hours while the ergs rested and the rest of us tried to sleep.
I remember at least three of these sleep periods, so perhaps we traveled for only three days and nights. Or perhaps we traveled for a week or more and slept only three times. But I remember that Aenea and I slept little and loved one another tenderly, as if each time we held each other it might be our last.
It was during one of these brief interludes alone that I whispered to her, “Why are you doing this, kiddo? Not just so we can all become like the Ousters and catch sunlight in our wings. I mean … it was beautiful … but I like planets. I like dirt under my boots. I like just being … human. Being a man.”
Aenea had chuckled and touched my cheek. I remember that the light was dim but that I could see the perspiration still beaded between her breasts. “I like your being a man too, Raul my love.”
“I mean …” I began awkwardly.
“I know what you mean,” whispered Aenea. “I like planets too. And I like being human … just being a woman. It’s not for some Utopian evolution of humankind into Ouster angels or Seneschai empaths that I’m doing … what I have to do.”
“What then?” I whispered into her hair.
“Just for the chance to choose,” she said softly. “Just for the opportunity to continue being human, whatever that means to each person who chooses.”
“To choose again?” I said.
“Yes,” said Aenea. “Even if that means choosing what one has had before. Even if it means choosing the Pax, the cruciform, and alliance with the Core.”
I did not understand, but at that moment I was more interested in holding her than in fully understanding.
After moments of silence, Aenea said, “Raul … I also love the dirt under my boots, the sound of the wind in the grass. Would you do something for me?”
“Anything,” I sa
id fiercely.
“If I die before you,” she whispered, “would you return my ashes to Old Earth and sprinkle them where we were happiest together?”
If she had stabbed me in the heart, it would not have hurt as much. “You said that I could stay with you,” I said at last, my voice thick and angry and lost. “That I could go anywhere you go:”
“And I meant it, my love,” whispered Aenea. “But if I go ahead of you into death, will you do that for me? Wait a few years, and then set my ashes free where we had been happiest on Old Earth?”
I felt like squeezing her until she cried out then. Until she renounced her request. Instead, I whispered, “How the goddamned hell am I supposed to get back to Old Earth? It’s in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, isn’t it? Some hundred-sixty thousand light-years away, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Aenea.
“Well, are you going to open the farcaster doors again so I can get back there?”
“No,” said Aenea. “Those doors are closed forever.”
“Then how the hell do you expect me to …”I closed my eyes. “Don’t ask me to do this, Aenea.”
“I’ve already asked you, my love.”
“Ask me to die with you instead.”
“No,” she said. “I’m asking you to live for me. To do this for me.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Does that mean yes, Raul?”
“It means shit,” I said. “I hate martyrs. I hate predestination. I hate love stories with sad endings.”
“So do I,” whispered Aenea. “Will you do this for me?”
I made a noise. “Where were we happiest on Old Earth?” I said at last. “You must mean Taliesin West, because we didn’t see much else of the planet together.”
“You’ll know,” whispered Aenea. “Let’s go to sleep.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said roughly.
She put her arms around me. It had been delightful sleeping together in zero gravity on the Startree. It was even more delightful sleeping together in our small bed in our private cubby in the slight gravity field of the Yggdrasill. I could not conceive of a time when I would have to sleep without her next to me.