I sighed and turned back upriver, slowing the mat just a bit as I did so. Pulling the plasma rifle from my pack and swinging the stock out to lock it, I said, “I don’t get it. Is there any record of that monster ever leaving Hyperion?”
“I don’t think so,” said the girl. She was leaning so that her face was against my back trying to stay out of the windblast as the deflection field lessened.
“So … what’s happening? Is it following you?”
“That seems logical.” Her voice was muffled as she spoke into the cotton of my shirt.
“Why?” I said.
Aenea pushed away so strongly that I began to reach for her instinctively to keep her from tumbling off the back of the mat. She shrugged away from my hand. “Raul, I don’t really know the answers to these questions yet, all right? I didn’t know if the thing would leave Hyperion. I certainly didn’t want it to. Believe me.”
“I do,” I said. I lowered my hand to the mat, noticing how large it was next to her small hand, small knee, tiny foot.
She set her hand on mine. “Let’s get back.”
“Right.” I loaded the rifle with a plasma-cartridge magazine. The shell casings were not separate but were molded into the magazine until each fired. One magazine held fifty plasma bolts. When the last was fired, the magazine was gone. I slammed the magazine up and in with a slap of my hand as I’d been taught in the Guard, set the selector to single-shot, and made sure the safety was on. I laid the weapon across my knees as we flew.
Aenea touched my shoulders with her hands and said in my ear, “Do you think that thing will do any good against the Shrike?”
I swiveled my head to look at her. “No,” I said.
We flew into the setting sun.
A. BETTIK WAS ALONE ON THE NARROW BEACH when we arrived. He waved to reassure us that everything was all right, but I still circled once above the treetops before landing. The sun was a red globe balancing on the jungle canopy to the west.
I set the mat down next to the pile of crates and equipment on the beach, in the shadow of the great ship’s hull, and jumped to my feet, the plasma rifle’s safety set to off.
“It’s still gone,” said A. Bettik. He had radioed this fact to us upon his leaving the ship, but I was still tense with expectation. The android led us over to a clear place on the beach where there was a single pair of footprints—if one could call them footprints. It looked as if someone had pressed a very heavy piece of bladed farm equipment into the sand in two places.
I crouched next to the prints like the experienced tracker I was, then realized the silliness of that exercise. “He just appeared here, again in the ship, and then disappeared?”
“Yes,” said A. Bettik.
“Ship, did you ever get the thing on radar or visual?”
“Negative,” came the reply from the bracelet. “There are no video recorders in the Hawking-drive accumulator.…”
“How did you know it was there?” I asked.
“I have a mass sensor in every compartment,” said the ship. “For flight purposes I must know precisely how much mass is displaced in every section of the ship.”
“How much mass did it displace?” I said.
“One-point-oh-six-three metric tons,” said the ship.
I froze in the act of straightening up. “What? Over a thousand kilos? That’s ridiculous.” I looked at the two footprints again. “No way.”
“Way,” said the ship. “During the creature’s stay in the Hawking-drive accumulator ring, I measured a precise displacement of one-point-oh-six-three-thousand kilos and …”
“Jesus wept,” I said, turning to A. Bettik. “I wonder if anyone’s ever weighed this bastard before.”
“The Shrike is almost three meters tall,” said the android. “And it may be very dense. It may also vary its mass as required.”
“Required for what?” I muttered, looking at the line of trees. It was very dark under there as the sun set. The gymnosperm feather fronds high above us caught the last of the light and faded. Clouds had rolled in during the last minutes of our flight back, and now they also glowed red and then grew dull as the sunset faded.
“You ready to get a star fix?” I said to the comlog.
“Quite ready,” said the ship, “although this cloud cover will have to clear. In the meantime, I have made one or two other calculations.”
“Such as?” said Aenea.
“Such as—based upon the movement of this world’s sun during the past few hours—this planet’s day is eighteen hours, six minutes, fifty-one seconds long. Units in Old Hegemony Standard, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. To A. Bettik, “Any of those River Tethys vacation worlds in your book show an eighteen-hour day?”
“None that I have come across, M. Endymion.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s decide about tonight. Do we camp out here, stay in the ship, or load this stuff on the flybikes and get downriver to the next portal as soon as possible? We can haul the inflatable raft with us. I vote we do that. I’m not real keen on staying on this world if the Shrike is around here.”
A. Bettik raised one finger like a child in a classroom. “I should have radioed you earlier …,” he said as if embarrassed. “The EVA locker, as you know, suffered some damage from the attack. There was no sign of an inflatable raft, although the ship remembers one in the inventory, and three of the four bikes are inoperable.”
I frowned. “Totally?”
“Yes, sir,” said the android. “Quite. The fourth is repairable, the ship thinks, but it will take several days.”
“Shit,” I said to no one in particular.
“How much charge do those bikes have?” asked Aenea.
“One hundred hours under normal use,” piped up my comlog.
The girl made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t think they’d be that useful, anyway. One bike isn’t going to make that much difference, and we might never find a recharge source.”
I rubbed my cheek, feeling the stubble there. In the day’s excitement I had forgotten to shave. “I thought of that,” I said, “but if we take any gear at all, the hawking mat’s not big enough to haul the three of us plus weapons, plus what we need to take.”
I thought that the child would argue with us about needing the gear, but instead she said, “Let’s take it all, but let’s not fly.”
“Not fly?” I said. The idea of hacking our way through that jungle made me queasy. “Without an inflatable rail, it’s either fly or walk.…”
“We can still have a raft,” said Aenea. “We could build a wooden raft and float it downstream … not only on this section of the river, but all of them.”
I rubbed my cheek again. “The waterfall …”
“We can ferry our stuff down there on the hawking mat in the morning,” she said. “Build the raft below the falls. Unless you don’t think we can construct a raft …”
I looked at the gymnosperms: tall, thin, tough, just about the right thickness. “We can build a raft,” I said. “We used to cobble them together on the Kans to haul extra junk downstream with the barges.”
“Good,” said Aenea. “We’ll camp here tonight … it shouldn’t be too long a night if the day is only eighteen standard hours. Then get moving at first light.”
I hesitated a moment. I didn’t want to get into the habit of letting a twelve-year-old kid make decisions for us all, but the idea seemed sensible.
“It’s too bad the ship’s kaput,” I said. “We could just go downriver on repulsors.…”
Aenea laughed out loud. “I’d never considered going on the River Tethys in this ship,” she said, rubbing her nose. “It’d be just what we need—inconspicuous as a giant dachshund squeezing under croquet hoops.”
“What’s a dachshund?” I said.
“What’s a croquet hoop?” asked A. Bettik.
“Never mind,” said Aenea. “Do you guys agree about staying here tonight and building a raft tomorrow?”
&nb
sp; I looked at the android. “It seems eminently sensible to me,” he said, “although a subset of an equally eminent nonsensical voyage.”
“I’ll take that as a yes vote,” said the girl. “Raul?”
“All right,” I said, “but where do we sleep tonight? Here on the beach, or in the ship, where it will be safer?”
The ship spoke. “I will endeavor to make my interior as safe and hospitable as possible tonight, given the circumstances. Two of the couches on the fugue deck will still serve as beds, and there are hammocks which might be strung.…”
“I vote we camp on the beach,” said Aenea. “The ship’s no safer from the Shrike than out here.”
I looked at the darkening forest. “There might be other things we don’t want to meet in the dark,” I said. “The ship seems safer.”
A. Bettik touched a small crate. “I found some small perimeter alarms,” he said. “We could set those around our camp. I would be happy to stand watch through the night. I confess to some interest in sleeping outside after so many days aboard the ship.”
I sighed and surrendered. “We’ll trade off watches,” I said. “Let’s get this junk set up before it gets too dark.”
The “junk” included the camping gear I’d asked the android to dig out: a tent of microthin polymer, thin as the shadow of a spiderweb, but tough, rainproof, and light enough to carry in one’s pocket; the superconductor heating cube, cool on five sides and able to heat any meal on the sixth; the perimeter alarms A. Bettik had mentioned—actually a hunter’s version of old military motion detectors, three-centimeter disks that could be spiked into the ground in any-sized perimeter up to two klicks; sleeping bags, infinitely compressible foam pads, night goggles, the com units, mess kits, and utensils.
We set the alarms in place first, spiking them down in a half circle from just within the forest’s edge to the edge of the river.
“What if that big thing crawls out of the river and eats us?” said Aenea as we finished setting the perimeter. It was getting dark in earnest now, but the clouds hid any stars. Breezes rustled the fronds above with a more sinister sound than earlier.
“If that or anything else crawls out of the river and eats us,” I said, “you’re going to wish we’d stayed one more night in the ship.” I set the last detectors at the river’s edge.
We pitched the tent in the center of the beach, not far from the bow of the crippled ship. The microfabric did not need tent poles or stakes—all you had to do was double-crease the lines of the fabric you wanted rigid, and those folds would stay taut in a hurricane, but setting a microtent up was a bit of an art, and the other two watched while I expanded the fabric, creased the edges into an A-line with a dome center tall enough to stand in, and folded the suddenly rigid edges into the sand to stake it. I had left an expanse of microfabric as the floor of the tent, and by stretching it just so, we had mesh for the entrance. A. Bettik nodded his appreciation for the trick, and Aenea set the sleeping bags in place while I set a pan on the heating cube and opened a can of beef stew. At the last moment I remembered that Aenea was a vegetarian—she had eaten mostly salads during the two weeks aboard ship.
“That’s all right,” she said, poking her head out of the tent. “I’ll have some of the bread that A. Bettik’s heating up, and perhaps some of the cheese.”
A. Bettik was carrying fallen wood over and setting stones into a fire ring.
“We don’t need that,” I said, indicating the heating cube and the bubbling pot of stew.
“Yes,” said the android, “but I thought a fire might be pleasant. And the light welcome.”
The light, it turned out, was very welcome. We sat under the awning vestibule of my elaborately folded tent and watched the flames spit sparks toward the sky as a storm moved in. It was a strange storm, with bands of shifting lights in lieu of lightning. The pale bands of shimmering color danced from the bottoms of the hurrying clouds to points just meters above the gymnosperm fronds gyrating wildly in the rising wind. There was no thunder with the phenomenon, but a sort of subsonic rumble set my nerves on edge. Within the jungle itself, pale globes of red and yellow phosphorescence jiggled and danced—not gracefully like the radiant gossamers in Hyperion’s forests, but nervously, almost malevolently. Behind us, the river lapped at the beach with increasingly active waves. Sitting by the fire, my headset in place and tuned to the perimeter detectors’ frequency, the plasma rifle across my lap, the night goggles on my forehead ready to be flipped down at a second’s notice, I must have been a comical sight. It did not seem funny at the time: images of the Shrike’s footprints in the sand kept coming to mind.
“Did it act threatening?” I’d asked A. Bettik a few minutes earlier. I had been trying to get him to hold the 16-gauge shotgun—no weapon is easier for a weapon’s novice to use than a shotgun—but all he would do was keep it by him as he sat by the fire.
“It did not act anything at all,” he had replied. “It simply stood there on the beach—tall, spiked, dark but gleaming. Its eyes were very red.”
“Was it looking at you?”
“It was looking east, down the river,” A. Bettik had replied.
As if waiting for Aenea and me to return, I had thought.
So I sat by the flickering fire, watched the aurora dance and shimmer over the wind-tossed jungle, tracked the will-o’-the-wisps as they jiggled in the jungle darkness, listened to the subsonic thunder rumbling like some great, hungry beast, and passed the time wondering how the hell I’d got myself here. For all I knew, there were velociraptors and packs of carrion-breed kalidergas slinking through the jungle toward us even as we sat fat and stupid by the fire. Or perhaps the river would rise—a wall of water could be rushing downstream toward us at that very moment. Camping on a sand spit was not terribly bright. We should have slept in the ship with the air lock sealed tight.
Aenea lay on her stomach looking into the fire. “Do you know any stories?” she said.
“Stories!” I cried. A. Bettik looked up from where he sat hugging his knees beyond the fire.
“Yes,” said the girl. “Like ghost stories.”
I made a noise.
Aenea propped her chin on her palms. The fire painted her face in warm tones. “I just thought it might be fun,” she said. “I like ghost stories.”
I thought of four or five responses and held them back. “You’d better get to sleep,” I said at last. “If the ship’s right about the short day, we don’t have too much night.…” Please, God, let that be true, I was thinking. Aloud, I said, “You’d better get some sleep while you can.”
“All right,” said Aenea, and took one last look across the fire at the wind-tossed jungle, the aurora, and the St. Elmo’s fire in the forest, and rolled into her sleeping bag and went to sleep.
A. Bettik and I sat in silence for a while. Occasionally I would converse with my bracelet comlog, asking the ship to inform me immediately if the river started rising, or if it detected some mass displacement, or if …
“I would be happy to take the first watch, M. Endymion,” said the android.
“No, go ahead and sleep,” I said, forgetting that the blue-skinned man required very little sleep.
“We will watch together, then,” he said softly. “But do feel free to doze when you need to, M. Endymion.”
Perhaps I did doze off sometime before the tropical dawn about six hours later. It was cloudy and stormy all night; the ship never got its star fix while we were there. No velociraptors or kalidergas ate us. The river did not rise. The storm aurora did not harm us, and the balls of swamp gas never came out of the swamp to burn us.
What I remember most about that night, besides my galloping paranoia and terrible tiredness, was the sight of Aenea sleeping with her brown-blond hair spilled out over the edge of her red sleeping bag, her fist raised to her cheek like an infant preparing to suck its thumb. I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me—of keeping this child safe from the sha
rp edges of a strange and indifferent universe.
I think that it was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent.
WE GOT MOVING AT FIRST LIGHT, AND I REMEMBER that morning mixture of bone-tiredness, gritty eyes, stubbled cheeks, aching back, and sheer joy that I usually felt after my first night on a camping trip. Aenea went down to the river to wash up, and I have to admit that she looked fresher and cleaner than she should have, given the circumstances.
A. Bettik had heated coffee over the cube, and he and I drank some while we watched the morning fog curl up from the quickly moving river. Aenea sipped from a water bottle she’d brought from the ship, and we all munched on dry cereal from a ration pak.
By the time the sun was shining over the jungle canopy, burning away the mists that rose from the river and forest, we were ferrying the gear downriver on the hawking mat. Since Aenea and I had done the fun part the previous evening, I let A. Bettik fly the gear while I dragged more stuff out of the ship and made sure we had what we needed.
Clothing was a problem. I had packed everything I thought I might need, but the girl had only the clothes she’d been wearing on Hyperion and carrying in her pack, and a few shirts we’d cut down from the Consul’s wardrobe. With more than 250 years to think about rescuing the child, one would think that the old poet would have thought to pack some clothes for her. Aenea seemed happy enough with what she had brought, but I was worried that it would not be enough if we ran into cold or rainy weather.
The EVA locker was a help there. There were several suit liners fitted out for the spacesuits, and the smallest of these came close to fitting the girl. I knew that the micropore material would keep her warm and dry in any but the most arctic conditions. I also appropriated a liner for the android and myself; it seemed absurd to be packing for winter in the rising tropical heat of that day, but one never knew. There was also an old outdoors vest of the Consul’s in the locker: long but fitted with more than a dozen pockets, clips, tie-on rings, secret zippered compartments. Aenea let out a squeal when I dug it out of the tumbled mess of the locker, put it on, and wore it almost constantly from then on.