“Sprinkle your ashes, eh?” I whispered eventually.
“Yes,” she murmured, more asleep than awake.
“Kiddo, my dear, my love,” I said, “you’re a morbid little bitch.”
“Yes,” murmured my Aenea. “But I’m your morbid little bitch.”
By and by, we did get to sleep.
ON OUR LAST DAY, AENEA ’CAST US TO A STAR SYSTEM with an M3 class red dwarf at its core and a sweet Earthlike world swinging in close orbit.
“No,” said Rachel as our small group stood on Het Masteen’s bridge. The three hundred had left us one by one, Aenea’s many disciples left sprinkled among the Pax worlds like so many bottles cast into a great ocean but without their messages. Now Father de Soya remained, Rachel, Aenea, the captain Het Masteen, A. Bettik, a few crew clones, the ergs below, and me. And the Shrike, silent and motionless on its high platform.
“No,” Rachel said again. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to go on with you.”
Aenea stood with her arms folded. She had been especially quiet all this long morning of ’casting and bidding farewells to disciples. “As you will,” she said softly. “You know I would not demand that you do anything, Rache.”
“Damn you,” Rachel said softly.
“Yes,” said Aenea.
Rachel clenched her fists. “Is this ever going to fucking end?”
“What do you mean?” said Aenea.
“You know what I mean. My father … my mother … your mother … their lives filled with this. My life … lived twice now … always fighting this unseen enemy. Running and running and waiting and waiting. Backward and forward through time like some accursed, out-of-control dreidel … oh, damn.”
Aenea waited.
“One request,” said Rachel. She looked at me. “No offense, Raul. I’ve come to like you a lot. But could Aenea bring me down to Barnard’s World alone.”
I looked at Aenea. “It’s all right with me,” I said.
Rachel sighed. “Back to this backward world again … cornfields and sunsets and tiny little towns with big white houses and big wide porches. It bored me when I was eight.”
“You loved it when you were eight,” said Aenea.
“Yeah,” said Rachel. “I did.” She shook the priest’s hand, then Het Masteen’s, then mine.
On a whim, remembering the most obscure verses of the old poet’s Cantos, remembering laughing about them at the edge of the campfire’s light with Grandam having me repeat them line for line, wondering if people ever really said such things, I said to Rachel, “See you later, alligator.”
The young woman looked at me strangely, her green eyes catching the light from the world hanging above us. “After a while, crocodile.”
She took Aenea’s hand and they were gone. No flash of light when one was not traveling with Aenea. Just a sudden … absence.
Aenea returned within five minutes. Het Masteen stepped back from the control circle and folded his hands in the sleeves of his robe. “One Who Teaches?”
“Pacem System, please, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.”
The Templar did not move. “You know, dear friend and teacher, that by now the Pax will have recalled half of their fighting ships to the Vatican’s home system.”
Aenea looked up and around at the gently rustling leaves of the beautiful tree on which we rode. A kilometer behind us, the glow of the fusion drive was pushing us slowly out of Barnard’s World’s gravity well. No Pax ships had challenged us here. “Will the ergs be able to hold the fields until we get close to Pacem?” she asked.
The captain’s small hands came out of the sleeves of his robe and gestured palms up. “It is doubtful. They are exhausted. The toll these attacks have taken on them …”
“I know,” Aenea said. “And I am very sorry. You need only be in-system for a minute or two. Perhaps if you accelerate now and are ready for full-drive maneuvers when we appear in Pacem System, the treeship can ’cast out before the fields are overwhelmed.”
“We will try,” said Het Masteen. “But be prepared to ’cast away immediately. The life of the treeship may be measured in seconds after we arrive.”
“First, we have to send the Consul’s ship away,” said Aenea. “We will have to do it now, here. Just a few moments, Het Masteen.”
The Templar nodded and went back to his displays and touch panels.
“Oh, no,” I said when she turned to me. “I’m not going to Hyperion in the ship.”
Aenea looked surprised. “You thought that I was sending you away after I said that you could accompany me?”
I folded my arms. “We’ve visited most of the Pax and Outback worlds … except Hyperion. Whatever you’re planning, I can’t believe that you’ll leave our homeworld out of it.”
“I’m not going to,” said Aenea. “But I’m also not ’casting us there.”
I did not understand.
“A. Bettik,” said Aenea, “the ship should be about ready to depart. Do you have the letter I wrote to Uncle Martin?”
“I do, M. Aenea,” said the android. The blue-skinned man did not look happy, but neither did he look distressed.
“Please give him my love,” said Aenea.
“Wait, wait,” I said. “A. Bettik is your … your envoy … to Hyperion?”
Aenea rubbed her cheek. I sensed that she was more exhausted than I could imagine, but saving her strength for something important yet to come. “My envoy?” she said. “You mean like Rachel and Theo and the Dorje Phamo and George and Jigme?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And the three hundred others.”
“No,” said Aenea, “A. Bettik will not be my envoy to Hyperion. Not in that sense. And the Consul’s ship has a deep time-debt to pay via Hawking drive. It … and A. Bettik … will not arrive for months of our time.”
“Then who is the envoy … the liaison on Hyperion?” I asked, certain that this world would not be exempted.
“Can’t you guess?” My friend smiled. “Dear Uncle Martin. The poet and critic once again becomes a player in this endless chess game with the Core.”
“But the others,” I said, “all took communion with you and …”I stopped.
“Yes,” said Aenea. “When I was still a child. Uncle Martin understood. He drank the wine. It was not hard for him to adapt … he has been hearing the language of the dead and of the living for centuries in his own poet’s way. It is how he came to write the Cantos in the first place. Why he thought the Shrike was his muse.”
“So why is A. Bettik taking the ship back there?” I said. “Just to bring your message?”
“More than that,” said Aenea. “If things work out, we will see.” She hugged the android and he awkwardly patted her back with his one hand.
A moment later, welling up with more emotion than I had imagined possible, I shook that blue hand. “I will miss you,” I said stupidly.
The android looked at me for a long moment, nodded, and turned toward the waiting ship.
“A. Bettik!” I called just as he was about to enter the ship.
He turned back and waited while I ran to my small pile of belongings on the lower platform, then jogged back up the steps. “Will you take this?” I said, handing him the leather tube.
“The hawking mat,” said A. Bettik. “Yes, of course, M. Endymion. I will be happy to keep this for you until I see you again.”
“And if we don’t see each other again,” I said and paused. I was about to say, Please give it to Martin Silenus, but I knew from my own waking visions that the old poet was near death. “If we don’t happen to see each other again, A. Bettik,” I said, “please keep the mat as a memento of our trip together. And of our friendship.”
A. Bettik looked at me for another quiet moment, nodded again, and went into the Consul’s ship. I half expected the ship to say its good-byes, filled with malapropisms and misinformation, but it simply conferred with the treeship’s ergs, rose silently on repellors until it cleared the containment field, and then mo
ved away on low thrusters until it was a safe distance from us. Its fusion tail was so bright that it made my eyes water as I watched it accelerate out and away from Barnard’s World and the Yggdrasill. I wished then with all of my heart and will that Aenea and I were going back to Hyperion with A. Bettik, ready to sleep for days on the large bed at the apex of the ship, then listen to music on the Steinway and swim in a zero-g pool above the balcony—
“We have to go,” Aenea said to Het Masteen. “Could you please prepare the ergs for what we are about to encounter.”
“As you wish, Revered One Who Teaches,” said the True Voice of the Tree.
“And Het Masteen …” said Aenea.
The Templar turned and awaited further orders.
“Thank you, Het Masteen,” she said. “On behalf of all of those who traveled with you on this voyage and all those who will tell of your voyage for generations to come, thank you, Het Masteen.”
The Templar bowed and went back to his panels. “Full fusion drive to point nine-two. Prepare for evasive maneuvers. Prepare for Pacem System,” he said to his beloved ergs wrapped around the invisible singularity three quarters of a kilometer below us. “Prepare for Pacem System.”
Father de Soya had been standing quietly nearby, but now he took Aenea’s right hand in his left hand. With his right hand, he gave a quiet benediction in the direction of the Templar and the crew clones—“In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sanctus.”
“Amen,” I said, taking Aenea’s left hand.
“Amen,” said Aenea.
30
hey hit us less than two seconds after we ’cast into the system, the torchships and archangels converging fire on us much as the rainbow sharks had once converged on me in the seas of Mare Infinitus.
“Go!” cried the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen above the torrent of field noise around us. “The ergs are dying! The containment field will drop in seconds. Go! May the Muir guide your thoughts. Go!”
Aenea had had only two seconds to glimpse the yellow star at the center of Pacem System and the smaller star that was Pacem proper, but it was enough. The three of us held hands as we ’cast through light and noise as if rising through the cauldron of lance fire boiling the ship’s fields, spirits rising from Hell’s burning lakes.
The light faded and then resumed as diffuse sunlight. It was cloudy above the Vatican, chilly, almost wintry, and a light, cool rain fell on cobblestone streets. Aenea had dressed this day in a soft tan shirt, a brown leather vest, and more formal black trousers than I was used to seeing her wear. Her hair was brushed back and held in place by two tortoiseshell barrettes. Her skin looked fresh and clean and young and her eyes—so tired in recent days—were bright and calm. She still held my hand as the three of us turned to look at the streets and people around us.
We were at the edge of an alley looking onto a wide boulevard. Small groups of people—men and women in formal black, groups of priests, flocks of nuns, a row of children in tow behind two nuns, everywhere black and red umbrellas-moved to and fro on the pedestrian walkways while low, black groundcars glided silently down the streets. I caught a glimpse of bishops and archbishops in the backseats of the groundcars, their visages distorted by beads and rivulets of rain on the cars’ bubble tops. No one seemed to be taking any notice of us or our arrival.
Aenea was looking up toward the low clouds. “The Yggdrasill just ’cast out of system. Did either of you feel it?”
I closed my eyes to concentrate on the dream flow of voices and images that were ever under the surface there now. There was … an absence. A vision of flame as the outer branches began to burn. “The fields collapsed just as they ’cast away,” I said. “How did they ’cast without you, Aenea?” I saw the answer as soon as I had verbalized the question. “The Shrike,” I said.
“Yes.” Aenea was still holding my hand. The rain was cold on us and I could hear it gurgling down gutters and drainpipes behind us. She spoke very quietly. “The Shrike will carry the Yggdrasill and the True Voice of the Tree away through space and time. To his … destiny.”
I remembered bits of the Cantos. The treeship burning as the pilgrims watched from the Sea of Grass shortly before Het Masteen had mysteriously disappeared with the Shrike during the windwagon crossing. Then the Templar reappearing in the presence of the Shrike some days later near the Valley of the Time Tombs, dying from his wounds shortly after that, his tale the only one of the seven pilgrims’ not to be told on the voyage. The Hyperion pilgrims: Colonel Kassad; the Hegemony Consul, Sol—Rachel’s father; Brawne Lamia—Aenea’s mother; the Templar Het Masteen; Martin Silenus; Father Hoyt—the current Pope; all at a loss to explain events at the time. For me as a child, just old words from a myth. Verses about strangers. How they must have thought their efforts and adventures over, only to have to pick up their burdens again. How often, I realized now as an adult in my standard thirties, how often that is the case in all of our lives.
“See that church across the street?” said Father de Soya.
I had to shake my head to focus on the now and to ignore the thoughts and voices whispering to me. “Yeah,” I said, wiping the rain from my brow. “Is that St. Peter’s Basilica?”
“No,” said the priest. “That is St. Anne’s Parish Church and the entrance to the Vatican next to it is the Porta Sant’Anna. The main entrance to St. Peter’s Square is down the boulevard there and around those colonnades.”
“Are we going to St. Peter’s Square?” I asked Aenea. “Into the Vatican?”
“Let’s see if we can,” she said.
We started down the pedestrian walkway, just a man and a younger woman walking with a priest on a cool, rainy day. Across the street from us was a sign indicating that the imposing, windowless structure there was the barracks for the Swiss Guard. Troopers from that barracks in formal, Renaissance-era black cloaks, white ruffled collars, and yellow-and-black leggings stood holding pikes at the Porta Sant’Anna and at the intersections while Pax security police in no-nonsense black impact armor manned roadblocks and floated overhead in black skimmers.
St. Peter’s Square was closed off to foot traffic except for several security gates where guards were carefully checking passes and chipcard IDs.
“We won’t get through there,” said Father de Soya. It was dark enough that the lights had come on atop Bernini’s colonnade to illuminate statuary and the stone papal coats of arms there. The priest pointed to two windows glowing above the colonnade and to the right of St. Peter’s facade topped by statues of Christ, John the Baptist, and the Apostles. “Those are the Pope’s private offices.”
“Just a rifle shot away,” I said, although I had no thoughts of attacking the Pope.
Father de Soya shook his head. “Class-ten containment field.” He glanced around. Much of the pedestrian traffic had passed through the security gates into St. Peter’s Square and we were becoming more obvious on the street. “We’re going to get our ID checked if we don’t do something,” he said.
“Is this level of security common?” asked Aenea.
“No,” said Father de Soya. “It may be because of your message that you were coming but it is more probable that it is the usual security when His Holiness is saying a papal Mass. Those bells we heard were a call to an afternoon Mass at which he is presiding.”
“How do you know that?” I said, amazed that he could read so much from the sound of a few bells.
Father de Soya looked surprised, “I know that because it is Holy Thursday,” he said, looking shocked either because we did not know such an elementary fact or because he had managed to forget it until this moment. “This is Holy Week,” he went on, talking softly as if to himself. “All this week His Holiness must carry out both his papal and diocesan duties. Today … this afternoon … certainly at this Mass, he performs the ceremony of washing the feet of twelve priests who symbolize the twelve disciples whose feet Jesus washed at the Last Supper. The ceremony was always held at the Pope’s diocese church, the Ba
silica of St. John Lateran, which used to be beyond the Vatican walls, but ever since the Vatican was moved to Pacem it’s been held in St. Peter’s Basilica. The Basilica of St. John Lateran was left behind during the Hegira because it had been destroyed during the Seven Nation Wars in the twenty-first century and …” De Soya stopped what I had thought was nervous chatter. His face had gone blank in that way common to mild epileptics or deeply thoughtful people.
Aenea and I waited. I admit that I was glancing with some anxiety toward the patrol of black-armored Pax security men moving toward us down the long boulevard.
“I know how we can get into the Vatican,” said Father de Soya and turned back toward an alley opposite the Vatican Boulevard.
“Good,” said Aenea, following quickly.
The Jesuit stopped suddenly. “I think that I can get us in,” he said. “But I have no idea how to get us out.”
“Just get us in, please,” said Aenea.
THE STEEL DOOR WAS AT THE REAR OF A RUINED, windowless stone chapel three blocks from the Vatican. It was locked with a small padlock and a large chain. The sign on the sealed door said TOURS ON ALTERNATE SATURDAYS ONLY: Closed During Holy Week: CONTACT VATICAN TOUR OFFICE 3888 SQUARE OF THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MARTYRS.
“Can you break this chain?” Father de Soya asked me.
I felt the massive chain and the solid padlock. My only tool or weapon was the small hunting knife still in my belt sheath. “No,” I said. “But maybe I can pick the lock. See if you can find some wire in that garbage module there … baling wire would do.”
We stood there in the drizzle for at least ten minutes, with the light fading around us and the sound of traffic on nearby boulevards seeming to grow louder, waiting every minute for the Swiss Guard or security people to swoop down on us. Everything I had learned about picking locks had come from an old riverboat gambler on the Kans who had turned to gambling after the Port Romance authorities had removed two of his fingers for thieving. As I worked, I thought the ten years of Odyssey for Aenea and me, of Father de Soya’s long voyage to this place, of the hundreds of light-years traveled and tens of thousands of hours of tension and pain and sacrifice and terror.