“By freecasting?” I say.
All three of the men nod.
I shake my head again. It is hard to imagine the near future: billions … hundreds of billions … of people free to move from world to world without spacecraft or farcaster. Hundreds of billions able to contact each other by touching the Void with their hearts and minds. It will be like the height of the Hegemony WorldWeb days without the Core façade of farcaster portals and fatline transmitters. No, I realize at once, it will not be like the Hegemony days at all. It will be something completely different. Something unprecedented in human experience. Aenea has changed everything forever.
“Are you leaving today, Raul?” asks Father Duré in his soft French accent.
“As soon as I finish this fine coffee.” The sun is growing warm on my bare arms and neck.
“Where will you go?” asks Father de Soya.
I start to answer and then stop. I realize that I have no idea. Where do I look for Aenea’s child? What if the Observer has taken the boy or girl to some distant system that I cannot reach by ’casting? What if they have returned to Old Earth … can I actually freecast one hundred and sixty thousand light-years? Aenea did. But she may have had the help of the Lions and Tigers and Bears. Will I someday be able to hear those voices in the complex chorus of the Void? It all seems too large and vague and irrelevant to me.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” I hear myself saying in the voice of a lost boy. “I was going to Old Earth because of Aenea’s wish that I … her ashes … but …” Embarrassed at showing emotion again, I wave at the mountain of melted stone that had been Castel Sant’Angelo. “Maybe I’ll go back to Hyperion,” I say. “See Martin Silenus.” Before he dies, I add silently.
All of us stand on the boulder, pouring out the last drops of cold coffee from the mugs and brushing away the last crumbs from the delicious rolls. I am suddenly struck by an obvious thought. “Do any of you want to come with me?” I say. “Or go anywhere else, for that matter. I think that I will remember how to freecast … and Aenea took us with her just by holding the person’s hand. No, she freecast the entire Yggdrasill with her just by willing it.”
“If you are going to Hyperion,” says Father de Soya, “I may wish to accompany you. But first I have something to show you. Excuse us, Father Duré. Bassin.”
I follow the short priest back to the village and into his little church. In the tiny sacristy, barely large enough for a wooden wardrobe cupboard for vestments and the small secondary altar in which to store the sacramental hosts and wine, de Soya pushes back a curtain on a small alcove and removes a short metal cylinder, smaller than a coffee thermos. He holds it out to me and I am reaching for it, my fingers just centimeters away, when suddenly I freeze in midmotion, unable to touch it.
“Yes,” says the priest. “Aenea’s ashes. What we could recover. Not much, I am afraid.”
My fingers trembling, still unable to touch the dull metal cylinder, I stammer, “How? When?”
“Before the final Core attack,” de Soya says softly. “Some of us who liberated the prisoners thought it prudent to remove our young friend’s cremated remains. There are actually those who wanted to find them and hold them as holy relics … the start of another cult. I felt strongly that Aenea would not have wished that. Was I correct, Raul?”
“Yes,” I say, my hand shaking visibly now. I am still unable to touch the cylinder and almost unable to speak. “Yes, absolutely, completely,” I say vehemently. “She would have hated that. She would have cursed at the thought. I can’t tell you how many times she and I discussed the tragedy of Buddha’s followers treating him like a god and his remains as relics. The Buddha also asked that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered so that …”I have to stop there.
“Yes,” says de Soya. He pulls a black canvas shoulder bag from his cupboard and sets the cylinder in it. He shoulders the bag. “If you would like, I could bring this with us if we are to travel together.”
“Thank you,” is all I can say. I cannot reconcile the life and energy and skin and flashing eyes and clean, female scent of Aenea, her touch and laugh and voice and hair and ultimate physical presence with that small metal cylinder. I lower my hand before the priest can see how badly it is shaking.
“Are you ready to go?” I say at last.
De Soya nods. “Please allow me to tell a few of my village friends that I will be absent for a few days. Would it be possible for you to drop me off here later on your way … wherever you go?”
I blink at that. Of course it will be possible. I had thought of my leave-taking today as final, an interstellar voyage. But Pacem … as everywhere else in the known universe … will never be farther than a step away for me as long as I live. If I remember how to hear the music of the spheres and freecast again. If I can take someone with me. If it was not a onetime gift which I have lost without knowing it. Now my entire frame is shaking. I tell myself it is just too much coffee and say raggedly, “Yeah, no problem. I’ll go chat with Father Duré and Bassin until you’re ready.”
The old Jesuit and the young soldier are at the edge of a small cornfield, arguing about whether it is the optimum time to pick the ears. I can hear Paul Duré admitting that much of his opinion to pick immediately is swayed by his love of corn on the cob. They smile at me as I approach. “Father de Soya is accompanying you?” says Duré.
I nod.
“Please give my warmest regards to Martin Silenus,” says the Jesuit. “He and I shared some interesting experiences in a roundabout way, long ago and worlds away. I have heard of his so-called Cantos, but I confess that I am loath to read them.” Duré grins. “I understand that the Hegemony libel laws have lapsed.”
“I think he’s fought to stay alive this long to finish those Cantos,” I say softly. “Now he never will.”
Father Duré sighs. “No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”
“How so?” I ask, but before Duré can answer, Father de Soya and several of the villagers come up and there is a buzz of discussion and farewells and invitations for me to return. I look at the black shoulder bag and see that the priest has filled it with other things as well as the canister holding Aenea’s ashes.
“A fresh cassock,” says de Soya, seeing the direction of my glance. “Some clean underwear. Socks. A few peaches. My Bible and missal and the essentials for saying Mass. I am not sure when I will be back.” He gestures toward the others crowding in. “I forget exactly how this is done. Do we need more room?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “You and I should be in physical contact, maybe. At least for this first try.” I turn and shake hands with Kee and Duré. “Thank you,” I say.
Kee grins and steps back as if I’m going to rise on a rocket exhaust and he does not want to get burned. Father Duré clasps my shoulder a final time. “I think that we will see each other again, Raul Endymion,” he says. “Although perhaps not for two years or so.”
I do not understand. I’ve just promised to return Father de Soya within a few days. But I nod as if I do comprehend, shake the priest’s hand a second time, and move away from his touch.
“Shall we hold hands?” says de Soya.
I put my hand on the smaller priest’s shoulder much as Duré had gripped mine a second earlier and check to make sure that my ’scriber is secure on its strap. “This should do it,” I say.
“Homophobia?” says de Soya with a mischievous boy’s grin.
“A reluctance to look silly more often than I have to,” I say and close my eyes, quite certain that the music of the spheres will not be there this time, that I will have forgotten completely how to take that step through the Void. Well, I think, at least the coffee and conversation are good here if I have to stay forever.
The white light surrounds and subsumes us.
34
had assu
med that the priest and I would step out of the light into the abandoned city of Endymion, probably right next to the old poet’s tower, but when we blinked away the glare of the Void, it was quite dark and we were on a rolling plain with wind whistling through grass that came to my knees and to Father de Soya’s cassocked thighs.
“Did we do it?” asked the Jesuit in excited tones. “Are we on Hyperion? It doesn’t look familiar, but then I saw only portions of the northern continent more than eleven standard years ago. Is this right? The gravity feels as I remember it. The air is … sweeter.”
I let my eyes adapt to the night for a moment. Then I said, “This is right.” I pointed skyward. “Those constellations? That’s the Swan. Over there are the Twin Archers. That one is actually called the Water Bearer, but Grandam always used to kid that it was named Raul’s Caravan after a little cart I used to pull around.” I took a breath and looked at the rolling plain again. “This was one of our favorite camping spots,” I said. “Our nomad caravan’s. When I was a child.” I went to one knee to study the ground in the starlight. “Still rubber tire marks. A few weeks old. The caravans still come this way, I guess.”
De Soya’s cassock made rustling sounds in the grass as he strode back and forth, as restless as a penned night hunter. “Are we close?” he asked. “Can we walk to Martin Silenus’s place from here?”
“About four hundred klicks,” I said. “We’re on the eastern expanse of the moors, south of the Beak. Uncle Martin is in the foothills of the Pinion Plateau.” I winced inwardly when I realized that I had used Aenea’s pet name for the old poet.
“Whatever,” said the priest impatiently. “In which direction shall we set out?”
The Jesuit was actually ready to start walking, but I put my hand back on his shoulder to stop him. “I don’t think we’ll have to hike,” I said softly. Something was occluding the stars to the southeast and I picked up the high hum of turbofans above the wind whistle. A minute later we could see the blinking red and green navigation lights as the skimmer turned north across the grassland and obscured the Swan.
“Is this good?” asked de Soya, his shoulder tensing slightly under my palm.
I shrugged. “When I lived here it wouldn’t be,” I said. “Most of the skimmers belonged to the Pax. To Pax Security, to be exact.”
We waited only another moment. The skimmer landed, the fans hummed down and died, and the left bubble at the front hinged open. The interior lights came on. I saw the blue skin, the blue eyes, the missing left hand, the blue right hand raised in greeting.
“It’s good,” I said.
“HOW IS HE?” TASKED A. BETTIK AS WE FLEW southeast at three thousand meters. From the paling above the Pinions on the horizon, I guessed that it was about an hour before dawn.
“He’s dying,” said the android. For a moment then we flew in silence.
A. Bettik had seemed delighted to see me again, although he stood awkwardly when I hugged him. Androids were never comfortable with such shows of emotion between servants and the humans they had been biofactured to serve. I asked as many questions as I could in the short flight time we had.
He had immediately expressed his regrets about Aenea’s death, which gave me the opportunity to ask the question uppermost in my mind. “Did you feel the Shared Moment?”
“Not exactly, M. Endymion,” said the android, which did not serve to enlighten me at all. But then A. Bettik was catching us up with the last standard year and month on Hyperion since that Moment.
Martin Silenus had been, just as Aenea had known he would be, the beacon relay for the Shared Moment. Everyone on my homeworld had felt it. The majority of the born-again and Pax military had deserted outright, seeking out communion to rid themselves of the cruciform parasites and shunning the Pax loyalists. Uncle Martin had supplied the wine and blood, both out of his personal stock. He had been hoarding the wine for decades and drawing off blood since his communion with the 10-year-old Aenea 250 years earlier.
The few remaining Pax loyalists had fled in the three remaining starships and their last occupied city—Port Romance—had been liberated four months after the Moment. From his continued seclusion in the old university city of Endymion, Uncle Martin had begun broadcasting old holos of Aenea—Aenea as a youngster I had never met—explaining how to use their new access to the Void Which Binds and pleading for nonviolence. The millions of indigenies and ex-Pax faithful, who were just discovering the voices of their dead and the language of the living, did not disobey her wishes.
A. Bettik also informed me that there was a single, gigantic Templar treeship in orbit now—the Sequoia Sempervirens—and that it was captained by the True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen and was carrying several of our old friends, including Rachel, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, the Dalai Lama, and the Ousters Navson Hamnim and Sian Quintana Ka’an. George Tsarong and Jigme Norbu were also aboard. Rosteen had been radioing the old poet for permission to land for two days, said A. Bettik, but Silenus had refused—saying that he did not want to see them or anyone else until I arrived.
“Me?” I said. “Martin Silenus knew I was coming?”
“Of course,” said the android and left it at that.
“How did Rachel and the Dorje Phamo and the others get to the treeship?” I said. “Did the Sequoia Sempervirens stop by Barnard’s World and Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and the other systems to pick them up?”
“it is my understanding, M. Endymion, that the Ousters traveled with the treeship from what remains of the Biosphere Startree which we were fortunate enough to visit. The others, as I am given to understand from M. Rosteen’s increasingly frustrated transmissions to M. Silenus, freecast to the treeship much as you have ’cast here to us.”
I sat straight up in my seat. This was shocking news. For some reason, I had assumed that I was the only person clever enough, blessed enough, or whatever enough to have learned the freecasting trick. Now I learn that Rachel and Theo and the old abbot had done so, the young Dalai Lama, and … well, a Dalai Lama, maybe, and Rachel and Theo had been Aenea’s earliest disciples … but George and Jigme? I admit to feeling a bit deflated, yet also excited by the news. Thousands of others—perhaps those, at first, whom Aenea had known and touched and taught directly—must be on the verge of their first steps. And then … the mind again reeled at the thought of all those billions traveling freely wherever they wished.
We landed at the abandoned mountain city just as the sky was paling in earnest to the east of the peaks. I jumped out of the skimmer, holding the ’scriber against my side as I ran up the tower steps and leaving the android and the priest behind in my eagerness to see Martin Silenus. The old man had to be happy to see me and grateful that I had done so much to help meet all his impossible requests—Aenea rescued from the original Pax ambush in the Valley of the Time Tombs, now the Pax destroyed, the corrupt Church toppled, the Shrike evidently stopped from hurting Aenea or attacking humanity—just as the old poet had requested that last drunken evening we had spent together here more than a standard decade earlier. He would have to be happy and grateful.
“IT TOOK YOU GODDAMN FUCKING LONG ENOUGH to get your lazy ass here,” said the mummy in the web of life-support tubes and filaments. “I thought I’d have to go out and drag you back from wherever you were lazing around like some fucking twentieth-century welfare queen.”
The emaciated thing in the hoverbed at the locus of all the machines, monitors, respirators, and android nurses did not look much like the Poulsen-rejuvenated old man I had said good-bye to less than a decade of mine and only two waking years of his ago. This was a corpse that had neglected to be buried. Even his voice was an electronic restructuring of his subvocalized gasps and rattles.
“Are you finished fucking gawking, or do you want to buy another ticket for the freak show?” asked the voice synthesizer above the mummy’s head.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, feeling like a rude child caught staring.
“Sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog,” said the
old poet. “Are you going to report to me or just stand there like the indigenie hick you are?”
“Report?” I said, opening my hands and setting the ’scriber on a table tray. “I think you know the essential things.”
“Essential things?” roared the synthesizer, interpreting the torrent of chokes and rattles. “What the fuck do you know about essential things, boy?” The last of the android nurses had scurried out of sight.
I felt a flush of anger. Perhaps age had rotted the old bastard’s mind as well as his manners, if he ever had any manners. After a minute of silence broken only by the rasp of the mechanical bellows below the bed, bellows that moved air in and out of the dying man’s useless lungs, I said, “Report. All right. Most of the things you asked are done, M. Silenus. Aenea ended the rule of the Pax and the Church. The Shrike seems to have disappeared. The human universe has changed forever.”
“The human universe has changed forever,” mimicked the old poet in his synthesizer’s attempt at a sarcastic falsetto. “Did I fucking ask you … or the girl for that matter … to change the fucking universe for fucking ever?”
I thought back to our conversations here a standard decade earlier. “No,” I said at last.
“There you go,” snarled the old man. “Your brain cells are beginning to stir again. Jesus H. Christ, kid, I think that Schrödinger litter box made you stupider than you were.”
I stood and waited. Perhaps if I waited long enough he would just die quietly.
“What did I ask you to do before you left, boy wonder?” he demanded in the tone of a furious schoolmaster.
I tried to remember details other than his demand that Aenea and I destroy the Pax’s iron rule and topple a Church that controlled hundreds of worlds. The Shrike … well, that wasn’t what he meant. By touching the Void Which Binds rather than my own fallible memory, I finally retrieved his last words before I had flown off on the hawking mat to meet the girl.