A moment later Cuchiat’s robed head emerged and he waved us in. He still held the ax, and I could imagine him grinning broadly behind his wraith-teeth visor and membrane mask. The ax had been an important gift.
We spent the night in the wraith-den. I helped Chiaku caulk the entrance with snow and ice, we packed another meter of the entrance tunnel with loose ice crystal and larger fragments, and then we went in to watch Chichticu heat blocks of snow-ice until the ice den was filled with enough atmosphere to breathe. We slept bundled together, the twenty-three Indivisible People and the three Indivisible Travelers, still wearing our robes and pressure membranes but masks removed, breathing the welcome scent of each other’s sweat. Our huddled warmth kept us alive through the terrible night outside as the Coriolis and katabatik storms blasted ice crystals at nearly the speed of sound … had there been any sound in that near vacuum.
I remember one other detail about our last night with the Chitchatuk. The wraith-den was lined, completely lined, with human skulls and bones, each set into the circular ice wall of the den with what seemed to be an artist’s care.
WE SAW NO WRAITHS—CUBS OR ICE-BORING adults—during our next day’s travel, and shortly before sunset we doffed and cached our skates, then entered the ice tunnels above the second farcaster. When we were deep enough to be in captured atmosphere again, we removed the masks and prèssure-suit membranes, handing them back to Chatchia with something like reluctance. It was as if we were surrendering our membership badges to the Indivisible People.
Cuchiat spoke briefly. I could not follow the quick syllables, but Aenea translated—“We were lucky … something and something about how unusual it is not to have to fight wraiths when crossing the surface … but, he says, luck on one day almost always leads to bad luck the next.”
“Tell him that I hope he’s wrong,” I said.
The open river with its floating mist and ice ceiling was almost a shock to see. Even though everyone was exhausted, we set to work at once. Assembling the shortened raft was difficult with wraith-mittens on, but the Chitchatuk worked quickly to help, and within two hours we had a cut-down, awkward version of our earlier vessel—minus the foremast, tent, and hearthstone. But the steering oar was in place, and although the push-poles were shorter and clumsy-looking when lashed together, we thought they should work on this shallow stretch of the Tethys.
The leave-taking was sadder than I would have imagined. Everyone hugged everyone else at least twice. There was ice on Aenea’s long lashes, and I had to admit a strain of powerful emotion in my own throat.
Then we were shoving off into the current—it felt strange to be traveling while standing still, I still had the push-and-glide motion of the claw-skates echoing in my muscles and mind—the farcaster portal and ice wall approached, we ducked under the ever-lower ledge of ice, and suddenly we were … elsewhere.
WE POLED INTO SUNRISE. THE RIVER WAS WIDE AND unruffled here, the current slow but steady. The riverbanks were of red rock, striated like wide, gradual steps climbing up from the water; the desert was red rock with small yellow shrubs; the distant slabs of hill and arch were also of smooth red stone. All this redness was ignited by the huge red sun rising to our left. The temperature was already a hundred degrees above what it had been in the ice cave. We shielded our eyes and pulled off our wraith-robes, setting them like thick white rugs near the stern of the shortened raft. Layers of ice on the logs first glistened and then melted in the morning sun.
We decided that we were on Qom-Riyadh even before consulting the comlog or Tethys guidebook. It was the red-rock desert that cued us—bridges of the bright-red sandstone, fluted columns of red rock rising against the pink sky, delicate red arches dwarfing the receding farcaster portal. The river ran through canyons overarched by these red stone parabolas, then curved into a wider valley where the hot wind blew the yellow sage and raised a red grit that caught in the long, tubular ‘hairs’ of the wraith-robes and lodged in our mouths and eyes. By midday we were moving through a more fertile valley. Irrigation canals ran at right angles from our river, and short yellow palms and magenta bottlebrushes lined the waterways. Soon small buildings came into sight, and shortly after, an entire village of pink and ocher homes, but no people.
“It’s like Hebron,” whispered Aenea.
“We don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe they’re just working out of sight somewhere.”
But midday heated to midafternoon—Qom-Riyadh had a twenty-two-hour day, according to the guidebook—and although the canals proliferated, plants multiplied, and villages became more common, there was no hint of humans or their domestic animals. We poled the raft ashore twice—once to draw water from an artesian well and again to explore a small village from which sounds of hammering could be heard on the river. It was a broken awning banging in the desert wind.
Suddenly Aenea doubled over with a cry of pain. I dropped to one knee and swept the empty street with the plasma pistol as A. Bettik ran to her side. There was no one on the street. The windows were empty of movement.
“It’s all right,” the girl gasped as the android held her. “A sudden pain …”
I jogged to her, feeling foolish for having drawn the weapon. Setting it in my belt holster, I went to one knee and held her hand. “What’s the matter, kiddo?” She was sobbing.
“I … don’t … know,” she managed between sobs. “Something … terrible has … I don’t know.”
We carried her back to the raft. “Please,” whispered Aenea, her teeth chattering despite the heat, “let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
A. Bettik set up the microtent, even though it now took up most of our abbreviated raft. We pulled the wraith-robes into the shade, laid the girl on them, and gave her water from one of the water bags.
“Is it this village?” I said. “Did something about it—”
“No,” said Aenea between dry sobs. I could see her fighting the waves of emotion that were crashing over her. “No … something awful … this world, but also … behind us.”
“Behind us?” I looked out the door of the tent and upriver, but there was nothing but the valley, the wide canal of a river, and the receding village with its wind-tossed yellow palms.
“Behind us on the ice world?” A. Bettik asked softly.
“Yes,” managed Aenea before doubling up with pain. “It … hurts.”
I laid my palm on her forehead and bare stomach. Her skin was hotter than it should have been, even accounting for the heat of the valley and the day’s sunburn on her face and arms. We pulled one of the medkits from my backpack and I set a diagnostic patch in place. It showed a high fever, pain in the 6.3 range of the dolorometer, muscle cramps, and an uneven EEG. It recommended water, ibuprofen, and contacting a doctor.
“There’s a city,” said the android as the river rounded a bluff.
I stepped out of the tent to see. The rose-red towers, domes, and minarets were still far away—perhaps fifteen kilometers across the widening valley floor—and the current on this river was in no hurry. “You stay with her,” I said, and moved to starboard side to pole. Our shortened raft was considerably lighter than the old one, and we moved quickly with the current.
A. BETTIK AND I CONSULTED THE WATER-WARPED guidebook and decided that the city was Mashhad, the capital of the southern continent and home of the Grand Mosque, whose minarets we could see clearly now as the river moved through thickening villages, suburbs, industrial areas, and into the city proper. Aenea was sleeping fitfully. Her temperature had risen, and the medkit diagnostic was blinking red lights to suggest a doctor’s intervention.
Mashhad was as eerily empty as New Jerusalem had been.
“I seem to remember rumor that the Qom-Riyadh System had fallen to the Ousters about the same time they took the Coal Sack,” I said. A. Bettik agreed, saying that they had monitored Pax radio traffic to that effect from the university city.
We tied the raft up at a low pier, and I carried the girl into the shade of the ci
ty streets. This was a replay of Hebron, only this time I was the healthy one and the girl unconscious. I made a mental note to avoid desert worlds from now on if I could help it.
The streets were less tidy than New Jerusalem had been: groundcars parked at odd angles and left abandoned on the sidewalks, detritus blowing in the streets, windows and doors open to the red sand, and strange little carpets lying on sidewalks, streets, and dying lawns. I paused at the first cluster of rugs we encountered, thinking that they might be hawking mats. They were only rugs. And they were all oriented in the same direction.
“Prayer mats,” said A. Bettik as we moved back into the shade of the city street. Even the tallest buildings were not overly tall here—none as high as the minarets, which looked out from a park area with tropical trees. “The population of Qom-Riyadh was almost one hundred percent Islamic,” he continued. “The Pax was said to have found no inroads here, even with the promise of resurrection. The people wanted nothing to do with the Protectorate.”
I turned the corner, still hunting for a hospital or any sign that might lead us to one. Aenea’s hot forehead was against my neck. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. “I think this place was in the Cantos,” I said. The child seemed to weigh nothing.
A. Bettik nodded. “M. Silenus wrote of Colonel Kassad’s victory over the so-called New Prophet here some three hundred years ago.”
“The Shi’ites took power again once the Web fell, didn’t they?” I said. We looked down another side street. I was looking for a red crescent rather than the universal red-cross sign of medical help.
“Yes,” said A. Bettik, “and they have been violently opposed to the Pax. The supposition was that they had welcomed the Ousters when the Pax Fleet retreated from this sector.”
I looked at the empty streets. “Well, it looks like the Ousters didn’t appreciate the welcome. This is like Hebron. Where do you think they’ve all gone? Could they have taken an entire planetary population hostage and—”
“Look, a caduceus,” interrupted A. Bettik.
The age-old symbol of a winged staff wrapped with two entwined serpents was on the window of a tall building. The interior was littered and tossed about, but it seemed more a standard office building than any sort of hospital I had been in. A. Bettik walked to a digital sign that was scrolling lines of text in Arabic. It was also muttering in a machine voice.
“Do you read Arabic?” I said.
“I do,” said the android. “I also understand some of the spoken language, which is Farsi. There is a private clinic on the tenth floor. I would think that it would have a full diagnostic center and perhaps an autosurgeon.”
I headed for the stairway with Aenea in my arms, but A. Bettik tried the elevator. The empty glass shaft hummed, and a levitation car floated to a stop at our level.
“Uncanny that the power’s still on,” I said.
We rode the lift to the tenth floor. Aenea was awakening and moaning as we walked down the tiled hallway, across an open terrace-garden where yellow and green palms rustled in the wind, and into an airy, glassed-in room with banks of autosurgeon beds and centralized diagnostic equipment. We chose the bed closest to the window, stripped the child to her underwear, and laid her between clean sheets. Replacing the medkit diagnostic patches with patch filaments, we waited for the diagnostic panels. The synthesized voice was in Arabic and Farsi, as was part of the display readout, but there was a Web English band and we switched to it.
The autosurgeon diagnosed exhaustion, dehydration, and an unusual EEG pattern, which might have resulted from a serious blow to the head. A. Bettik and I looked at each other. Aenea had received no blow to the head.
We authorized treatment for the exhaustion and dehydration and stepped back as flowfoam restrainers extruded from the bed panels, pseudo-fingers felt for Aenea’s vein, and an IV was started with a sedative and saline solution.
Within minutes the child was sleeping easily. The diagnostic panel spoke in Arabic, and A. Bettik translated before I could walk over to read the monitor. “It says that the patient should have a good night’s sleep and be better in the morning.”
I shifted the plasma rifle from where I had been carrying it on my back. Our dusty packs sat on one of the visiting chairs. Moving to the window, I said, “I’ll check out the city before it gets dark. Make sure we’re alone.”
A. Bettik folded his arms and watched the great red sun touch the tops of the buildings across the street. “I think that we are very much alone,” he said. “It took a little longer here, is all.”
“What took longer?”
“Whatever it was that stole the people. On Hebron there was no sign of panic or struggle. Here people had time to abandon their vehicles. But the prayer rugs are the surest sign.” I noticed for the first time that there were fine wrinkles in the blue skin of the android’s forehead and around his eyes and mouth.
“Surest sign of what?” I said.
“They knew that something was happening to them,” said A. Bettik, “and they spent their last minutes in prayer.”
I set the plasma rifle next to the visitor’s chair and undipped the flap over my holster. “I’m still going to take a look,” I said. “You watch her in case she wakes, okay?” I pulled the two com units out of my pack, tossed one to the android, and clipped the other onto my collar with the bead mike in place. “Leave the common frequency open. I’ll check in. Call me if there’s a problem.”
A. Bettik was standing by her bedside. His large hand gently touched the sleeping girl’s forehead. “I will be here when she wakes, M. Endymion.”
IT IS ODD THAT I REMEMBER THAT EVENING’S WALK through the abandoned city so clearly. A digital sign on a bank said that it was 40 degrees centigrade—104 Fahrenheit—but the dry wind from the red-rock desert quickly carried away any perspiration, and the pink-and-red sunset had a calming effect on me. Perhaps I remember that evening because it was the last night of our voyage before things changed forever.
Mashhad was a strange mixture of modern city and bazaar from The Thousand and One Nights, a wonderful series of stories Grandam used to tell me as we sat under Hyperion’s starry sky. This place had a musky hint of romance about it. On the corner there would be a news kiosk and automatic banking machine, and as soon as one turned the corner, there would be stalls in the middle of the street with brightly striped awnings and heaps of fruit rotting in bins. I could imagine the din and movement here—camels or horses or some other pre-Hegira beasts milling and stamping, dogs barking, sellers shouting and buyers haggling, women in black chadors and lacy burqas, or veils, gliding by, and on either side the baroque and inefficient groundcars growling and spewing out filthy carbon monoxide or ketones or whatever dirty stuff the old internal-combustion engines used to pour into the atmosphere.…
I was shocked out of my reverie by a man’s voice calling musically, the words echoing down the stone-and-steel canyons of the city. It seemed to be coming from the park only a block or two to my left, and I ran in that direction, holding my hand on the grip of my pistol in the unbuttoned holster as I went.
“You hear this?” I said into the bead mike as I ran.
“Yes,” came A. Bettik’s voice in my hearplug. “I have the door to the terrace open and the sound is quite clear here.”
“It sounds Arabic. Can you translate?” I was panting only slightly as I finished the two-block sprint and came out into the open park area where the mosque dominated the entire block. A few minutes before, I had looked down one of the connecting streets and glimpsed the last of the red sunset painting the side of one of the minarets, but now the stone tower was a dull gray and only the highest wisps of cirrus caught the light.
“Yes,” said A. Bettik. “It is a muezzin call to evening prayer.”
I pulled the binoculars from my belt pouch and scanned the minarets. The man’s voice was coming from loudspeakers on a balcony encircling each tower. There was no sign of movement there. Suddenly the rhythmic cry ended and birds chat
tered within the branches of the forested square.
“It is most probably a recording,” said A. Bettik.
“I’ll check it out.” Setting away the binoculars, I followed a crushed-stone path through the extensive lawns and yellowish palm trees to the mosque’s entrance. I passed through a courtyard and paused at the entrance to the mosque proper. I could see the interior—it was filled with hundreds of the prayer mats. Elaborate arches of striped stone were supported by elegant pillars, and on the far wall a beautiful arch opened on a semicircular niche. To the right of this niche there was a flight of steps guarded by a lovingly carved stone railing, and a stone-canopied platform at the top. Not yet entering the large space, I described it to A. Bettik.
“The niche is the mihrab,” he responded. “It’s reserved for the prayer leader, the imam. The balcony to the right of it is the minbar, the pulpit. Is there anyone in either place?”
“No.” I could see the red dust on the prayer rugs and stone steps.
“Then there is no doubt that the call to prayer was a timed recording,” said A. Bettik.
I had the urge to enter the great stone space, but the urge was canceled by my reluctance to profane anyone’s sacred house. I had felt this as a child in the Catholic cathedral at Beak’s End, and as an adult when a friend in the Home Guard wanted to take me to one of the last Zen Gnostic temples on Hyperion. I had realized when I was a boy that I would always be an outsider when it came to holy places … never having one of my own, never feeling comfortable in another’s. I did not enter.
Walking back through the cooling and darkening streets, I found a palm-lined boulevard through an attractive section of town. Pushcarts held food and toys for sale. I paused by a cart selling fried dough and sniffed one of the bracelet-sized dough rings. It had gone bad days, not weeks or months, ago.