Startled out of his reverie, the Consul smiled. “Then the ship is yours, which it obviously is anyway.” He moved his bishop back. “What will you do, John, if this should be the end of our travels together?”
John gestured to have his rook moved forward at the same lightning speed with which he replied. “Take it back to Hyperion,” he said. “Program it to return to Brawne if all is well. Or possibly to Martin Silenus, if the old man is still alive and working on his Cantos.”
“Program it?” said the Consul, frowning at the board. “You mean you’d leave the ship’s AI?” He moved his bishop diagonally another square.
“Yes,” said John, pointing to have his pawn advanced again. “I will do that in the next few days, at any rate.”
His frown deepening, the Consul looked at the board, then at the hologram across from him, and then at the board again. “Where will you go?” he said and moved his queen to protect his king.
“Back into the Core,” said John, moving the rook two spaces.
“To confront your maker again?” asked the Consul, attacking again with his bishop.
John shook his head. His bearing was very upright and he had the habit of clearing his forehead of curls with an elegant, backward toss of his head. “No,” he said softly, “to start raising hell with the Core entities. To accelerate their endless civil wars and internecine rivalries. To be what my template had been to the poetic community—an irritant.” He pointed to where he wanted his remaining knight moved.
The Consul considered that move, found it not a threat, and frowned at his own bishop. “For what reason?” he said at last.
John smiled again and pointed to the square where his rook should next appear. “My daughter will need the help in a few years,” he said. He chuckled. “Well, in two hundred and seventy-some years, actually. Checkmate.”
“What?” said the Consul, startled, and studied the board. “It can’t be …”
John waited.
“Damn,” said the Hegemony Consul at last, tipping over his king. “Goddamn and spit and hell.”
“Yes,” said John, extending his hand. “Thank you again for a pleasant game. And I do hope that tomorrow’s hunt turns out more agreeably for you.”
“Damn,” said the Consul and, without thinking, attempted to shake the hologram’s thin-fingered hand. For the hundredth time, his solid fingers went through the other’s insubstantial palm. “Damn,” he said again.
THAT NIGHT IN THE SCHRÖDINGER CELL, I AWOKE with two words echoing in my mind. “The child!”
The knowledge that Aenea had been married before our relationship had become a full-fledged love affair, the knowledge that she had given birth to a child, had burned in my soul and gut like a painful ember, but except for my almost obsessive curiosity about who and why—curiosity unsatisfied by my questioning of A. Bettik, Rachel, and the others who had seen her leave during her Odyssey with them but who had no idea themselves where she had gone or with whom—I had not considered the reality of that child alive somewhere in the same universe I inhabited. Her child. The thought made me want to weep for several reasons.
“The child is nowhere I can find it now,” Aenea had said.
Where might that child be now? How old? I sat on my bunk in the Schrödinger cat box and pondered this. Aenea had just turned twenty-three standard years old when she died … correction: when she had been brutally murdered by the Core and its Pax puppets. She had disappeared from sight for the one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours when she had just turned twenty years old. That would make the infant about three standard years old … plus the time I had spent here in the Schrödinger execution egg … eight months? Ten? I simply did not know, but if the child were still alive, he or she … my God, I had never asked Aenea whether her baby had been a boy or girl and she had not mentioned it the one time she had discussed the matter with me. I had been so involved with my own hurt and childish sense of injustice that I had not thought to ask her. What an idiot I had been. The child—Aenea’s son or Aenea’s daughter—would now be about four Standard years old. Walking … certainly. Talking … yes. My God, I realized, her child would be a rational human being at this point, talking, asking questions … a lot of questions if my few experiences with young children were any indication … learning to hike and fish and to love nature …
I had never asked Aenea her child’s name. My eyes burned and my throat closed with the painful recognition of this fact. Again, she had shown no inclination to talk about that period in her life and I had not asked, telling myself in the weeks we had had together afterward that I did not want to upset her with questions or probings that would make her feel guilty and make me feel murderous. But Aenea had shown no guilt when she had briefly told me about her marriage and child. To be honest, that is part of the reason I’d felt so furious and helpless at the knowledge. But somehow, incredibly, it had not stopped us from being lovers … how had it been phrased on the note I had found on my stylus screen months ago, the note I was sure was from Aenea? “Lovers of whom the poets would sing.” That was it. The knowledge of her brief marriage and the child had not stopped us from feeling toward one another like lovers who had never experienced such emotion with another person.
And perhaps she had not, I realized. I had always assumed that her marriage was one of sudden passion, almost impulse, but now I looked at it in another way. Who was the father? Aenea’s note had said that she loved me backward and forward in time, which is precisely the way I had discovered I felt about her—it was as if I had always loved her, had waited my entire life to discover the reality of that love. What if Aenea’s marriage had not been one of love or passion or impulse but … convenience? No, not the right word. Necessity?
It had been prophesied by the Templars, the Ousters, the Shrike Cult Church of the Final Atonement and others that Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, would bear a child—the One Who Teaches—Aenea, as it turned out. According to the old poet’s Cantos, on the day that the second John Keats cybrid had died a physical death and Brawne Lamia had fought her way to the Shrike Temple for refuge, the Shrike cultists had chanted—“Blessed be the Mother of Our Salvation—Blessed be the Instrument of Our Atonement”—the salvation being Aenea herself.
What if Aenea had been destined to have a child to continue this line of prophets … of messiahs? I had not heard any of these prophecies of another in Aenea’s line, but there was one thing I had discovered beyond argument during my months writing of Aenea’s life—Raul Endymion was slow and thick-witted, usually the last to understand anything. Perhaps there had been as many prophecies of another One Who Teaches as there had been preceding Aenea herself. Or perhaps this child would have completely different powers and insights that the universe and humanity had been awaiting.
Obviously I would not be the father of such a second messiah. The union of the second John Keats cybrid and Brawne Lamia had been, by Aenea’s own accounts, the great reconciliation between the best elements of the TechnoCore and humanity itself. It had taken the abilities and perceptions of both AIs and human beings to create the hybrid ability to see directly into the Void Which Binds … for humanity finally to learn the language of the dead and of the living. Empathy was another name for that ability, and Aenea had been the Child of Empathy, if any title suited her.
Who could the father of her child be?
The answer struck me like a thunderbolt. For a second there in the Schrödinger cat box, I was so shaken by the logic of it that I was sure that the particle detector clicking away periodically in the frozen-energy wall of my prison had detected the emitted particle at exactly the right time and the cyanide had been released. What irony to figure things out and to die in the same moment.
But it was not poison in the air, only the growing strength of my certainty on this matter and the even stronger impulse to some action.
There was one other player in the cosmic chess game Aenea and the others had been playing for three hundred standard year
s now: that near-mythical Observer from the alien sentient races whom Aenea had mentioned briefly in several different contexts. The Lions and Tigers and Bears, the beings so powerful that they could kidnap Old Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud rather than watch it be destroyed, had—according to Aenea—sent among us one or more Observers over the past few centuries, entities who had, according to my interpretation of what Aenea had said, taken on human form and walked among us for all this time. This would have been relatively easy during the Pax era with the virtual immortality of the cruciform so widespread. And there were certainly others who, like the ancient poet Martin Silenus, had stayed alive through a combination of WorldWeb-era medicine, Poulsen treatments, and sheer determination.
Martin Silenus was old, that was certain, perhaps the oldest human being in the galaxy—but he had not been the Observer, that was equally certain. The author of the Cantos was too opinionated, too active, too visible to the public at large, too obscene, and generally just too damned cantankerous to be a cool observer representing alien races so powerful that they could destroy us in an eye blink. Or so I hoped.
But somewhere—probably somewhere I had never visited and could not imagine—that Observer had been waiting and watching in human form. It made sense that Aenea might have been compelled—by both prophecy and the necessity of unhindered human evolution she had taught about and believed in—to ’cast away from her Odyssey to that distant world where the Observer waited, meet him, mate with him, and bring that child into the universe. Thus would be reconciled the Core, humanity, and the distant Others.
The idea was unsettling, definitely disturbing to me, but also exciting in a way that nothing had been since Aenea’s death.
I knew Aenea. Her child would be a human child—filled with life and laughter and a love of everything from nature to old holodramas. I had never understood how Aenea could have left her child behind, but now I realized that she would have had no choice. She knew the terrible fate that awaited her in the basement cell of Castel Sant’Angelo. She knew that she would die by fire and torture while surrounded by inhuman enemies and the Nemes monsters. She had known this since before she was born.
The fact of this made my knees weak. How could my dear friend have laughed with me so often, gone optimistically into new days so happily, celebrated life so thoroughly, when she knew that every day passing was another day closer to such a terrible death? I shook my head at the strength of will this implied. I did not have it—this I knew. Aenea had.
But she could not have kept the child with her, knowing when and how this terrible ending would take place. Presumably then, the father was raising the child. The Other in human form. The Observer.
I found this even more upsetting than my earlier revelations. I was struck then with the additional certainty that Aenea would have wanted me to have some role in her child’s life if she had thought it possible. Her own glimpses into possible futures presumably ended with her own death. Perhaps she did not know that I would not be executed at the same time. But then, she had asked me to scatter her ashes on Old Earth … which assumed my survival. Perhaps she had thought it too much of a request to make—for me to find her child and to help in any way I could as the boy or girl came of age, to help protect it in a universe of sharp edges.
I realized that I was weeping—not softly, but with great, ragged sobs, it was the first time I had wept like this since Aenea’s death, and—oddly enough—it was not primarily out of grief for Aenea’s absence, but at the thought of this second chance to hold a child’s hand as I had once held Aenea’s when she was still twelve standard, of protecting this child of my beloved’s as I had tried to protect my beloved.
And failed. The indictment was my own.
Yes, I had failed to protect Aenea in the end, but she knew that I would fail, that she would fail in her quest to bring down the Pax. She had loved me and loved life while knowing that we would fail.
There was no reason I had to fail with this other child. Perhaps the Observer would welcome my help, my sharing of the human experience with this almost certainly more-than-human little boy or girl. I felt it safe to say that no one had known Aenea better than I had. This would be important for the child’s—for the new messiah’s—upbringing. I would bring this narrative now sitting useless in my ’scriber and share bits and pieces of it with the boy or girl as he or she grew older, giving it all to him or her someday.
I picked up the slate and ’scriber and paced back and forth in my Schrödinger cell. There was this small matter of my unavoidable execution. No one was coming to rescue me. The explosive shell of the egg had decided that, and if there were a way around that problem, someone would have been here by now. It was the most staggering improbability and good luck that I had survived this long when every few hours there was another crap shoot with death as the detector sniffed for the particle emission. I had beaten the laws of quantum chance for this long, but the luck could not hold.
I stopped in my pacing.
There had been four steps in Aenea’s teaching of our race’s new relationship with the Void Which Binds. Even before coming to my cell I had experienced, if not mastered, learning the language of the dead and of the living. I had shown in my writing of the narrative that I could gain access to the Void for at least old memories of those still living, even if the shell somehow interfered with my ability to sense what was happening now with friends such as Father de Soya or Rachel or Lhomo or Martin Silenus.
Or was there interference? Perhaps I had subconsciously refused to try to contact the world of the living—at least for anything beyond memories of Aenea—since I knew that I now inhabited the world of the dead.
No longer. I wanted out of here.
There were two other steps that Aenea had mentioned in her teaching but never fully explained—hearing the music of the spheres and taking the first step.
I now understood both these concepts. Without seeing Aenea ’cast, and without that great rush of gestalt understanding that had come with the terrible sharing of her death, I would not have understood. But I did now.
I had thought of hearing the music of the spheres as a sort of paranormal-radio-telescope trick—actually hearing the pop and crack and whistle of the stars as radio telescopes had for eleven centuries or more. But that had not been what Aenea had meant at all, I realized. It was not the stars she was listening to and for, but the resonance of those people—human and otherwise—who dwelt among and around those stars. She had been using the Void as a sort of directional beacon before farcasting herself.
Much of her personal ’casting had not made sense to me. The core-controlled farcaster doors had been rough holes torn through the Void—and thus through space/time—held open by the portals that were like crude clamps holding open the raw edges of a wound in the old days of scalpel surgery. Aenea’s farcasting, I now understood, was an infinitely more graceful device.
I had wondered in the busy time when Aenea and I were freecasting down to planet surfaces and from star system to star system in the Yggdrasill how she had avoided having us blink into existence inside a hill or fifty meters above the surface, or the treeship inside a star. It seemed to me that blind freecasting, like unplanned Hawking-drive jumps, would be haphazard and disastrous. But we had always emerged exactly where we had to be when Aenea ’cast us. Now I saw why.
Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to … to take the first step. To travel via the Void to where those voices waited. Aenea had once said that the Void tapped into the energy of quasars, of the exploding centers of galaxies, of black holes and black matter. Enough, perhaps, to move a few organic life-forms through space/time and deposit them in the proper place.
Love was the prime mover in the universe, Aenea had once said to me. She had joked about being the Newton who someday explained the basic physics of that largely
untapped energy source. She had not lived to do so.
But I saw now what she had meant and how it worked. Much of the music of the spheres was created by the elegant harmonies and chord changes of love. Freecasting to where one’s loved one waits. Learning a place after having traveled there with the one or ones you love. Loving to see new places.
Suddenly I understood why our first months together had been what had seemed at the time like useless farcaster wanderings from world to world: Mare Infinitus, Qom-Riyadh, Hebron, Sol Draconi Septem, the unnamed world where we had left the ship, all of the others, even Old Earth. There had been no working farcaster portals. Aenea had swept A. Bettik and me with her to these places—touching them, sniffing their air, feeling their sunlight on her skin, seeing them all with friends—with someone she loved—learning the music of the spheres so that it could be played later.
And my own solo Odyssey, I thought: the kayak farcasting from Old Earth to Lusus and the cloud planet and all the other places. Aenea had been the energy behind that ’casting. Sending me to places so that I could taste them and find them again someday on my own.
I had thought—even as I wrote the narrative in the ’scriber that I held under my arm there in the Schrödinger death cell—that I had been little more than a fellow traveler in a series of picaresque adventures. But it had all held a purpose. I had been a lover traveling with my love—or to my love—through a musical score of worlds. A score that I had to learn by heart so that I could play it again someday.
I CLOSED MY EYES IN THE SCHRÖDINGER CAT BOX and concentrated, then went beyond concentration to the empty mind state I had learned in meditation on T’ien Shan. Every world had its purpose. Every minute had its purpose.
In that unhurried emptiness, I opened myself to the Void Which Binds and the universe to which it resonated. I could not do this, I realized, without communion with Aenea’s blood, without the nanotech tailored organisms that now dwelt in my cells and would dwell in my children’s cells. No, I thought at once, not my children. But in the cells of those in the human race who escape the cruciform. In their children’s cells. I could not do this without having learned from Aenea. I could not have heard the voices I heard then—greater choruses than I had ever heard before—without having honed my own grammar and syntax of the language of the dead and living during the months I worked on the narrative while waiting to die.