At the time that all these troop movements were under way, at the same time that great armadas of matte-black starships were tearing holes in the time and space continuum of the cosmos, at the precise moment when the Church’s Grand Inquisitor was sent packing to Shrike-ridden Mars and the CEO of the Pax Mercantilus was traveling alone to a secret rendezvous in deep space with a nonhuman interlocutor, I was lying helpless in bed with a tremendous pain in my back and belly.

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing.

Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

This pain was all-absorbing. I was amazed by the relentless, mind-controlling quality of it. During the hours of agony that I had already endured and was yet to endure, I attempted to concentrate on my surroundings, to think of other things, to interact with the people around me, even to do simple multiplication tables in my head, but the pain flowed into all the compartments of my consciousness like molten steel into the fissures on a cracked crucible.

These things I was dimly aware of at the time: that I had been on a world my comlog had identified as Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and in the process of dipping water from a well when the pain had felled me; that a woman swathed in a blue robe, her toenails visibly blue in her open sandals as I lay writhing in the dust, had called others in blue robes and gowns and these people had carried me to the adobe house where I continued battling the pain in a soft bed; that there were several other people in the house—another woman in a blue gown and head scarf, a younger man who wore a blue robe and turban, at least two children, also dressed in blue; and that these generous people not only put up with my moaned apologies and less articulate moans as I curled and uncurled in pain, but constantly spoke to me, patted me, placed wet compresses on my forehead, removed my boots and socks and vest, and generally continued whispering reassurances in their soft dialect as I tried to fight to keep my dignity against the onslaught of agony in my back and abdomen. It was several hours after they brought me to their home—the blue sky had faded to rose evening outside the window—when the woman who had found me near the well said, “Citizen, we have asked the local missionary priest for help and he has gone for the doctor at the Pax base at Bombasino. For some reason, the Pax skimmers and other aircraft are all busy now, so the priest and the doctor… if the doctor comes… must travel fifty pulls down the river, but with luck they should be here before sunrise.”

I did not know how long a pull was or how much time it would take to travel fifty, or even how long the night was on this world, but the thought that there might be an end point to my agony was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Nonetheless, I whispered, “Please, ma’am, no Pax doctor.”

The woman set cool fingers against my brow.

“We must. There is no longer a medic here in Lock Lamonde. We are afraid you might die without medical help.” I moaned and rolled away. The pain roiled through me like a hot wire being pulled through too-narrow capillaries. I realized that a Pax doctor would know immediately that I was from offworld, would report me to the Pax police or military—if the “missionary priest” had not already done so—and that I was all but certain to be interrogated and detained. My mission for Aenea was ending early and in failure. When the old poet, Martin Silenus, had sent me on this odyssey four and a half standard years earlier, he had drunk a champagne toast to me—“To heroes.” If only he had known how far from reality that toast had been. Perhaps he had.

The night passed with glacial slowness. Several times the two women looked in on me and at other times the children, in blue gowns that may have been sleeping apparel, peered in from the darkened hallway. They wore no headdress then and I saw that the girl had blond hair worn much the way Aenea had when we first met, when she was almost twelve and I twenty-eight standard. The little boy—younger than the girl I assumed to be his sister—looked especially pale; his head was shaved quite bald. Each time he looked in, his fingers fluttered at me in a shy wave. Between rolls of pain, I would feebly wave back, but each time I opened my eyes to look again, the child would be gone.

Sunrise came and went without a doctor. Hopelessness surged in me like an outgoing tide. I could not resist this terrible pain another hour.

I knew instinctively that if the kind people in this household had any painkiller, they would have long since given it to me. I had spent the night trying to think of anything I had brought with me in the kayak, but the only medicine in my stowed kit was disinfectant and some aspirin. I knew that the latter would do nothing against this tidal wave of pain. I decided that I could hold out another ten minutes. They had removed my comlog bracelet and set it within sight on an adobe ledge near the bed, but I had not thought to measure the hours of the night with it. Now I struggled to reach it, the pain twisting in me like a hot wire, and slipped the bracelet back on my wrist. I whispered to the ship’s AI in it: “Is the biomonitor function still activated?”

“Yes,” said the bracelet.

“Am I dying?”

“Life signs are not critical,” said the ship in its usual flat tones. “But you appear to be in shock. Blood pressure is…” It continued to rattle off technical information until I told it to shut up.

“Have you figured out what’s doing this to me?” I gasped. Waves of nausea followed the pain.

I had long since vomited anything in my stomach, but the retching doubled me over.

“It is not inconsistent with an appendicitis attack,” said the comlog.

“Appendicitis…” Those useless artifacts had long since been gene-tailored out of humanity. “Do I have an appendix?” I whispered to the bracelet. With the sunrise had come the rustle of robes in the quiet house and several visits from the women.

“Negative,” said the comlog. “It would be very unlikely, unless you are a genetic sport. The odds against that would be…”

“Silence,” I hissed. The two women in blue robes bustled in with another woman, taller, thinner, obviously offworld-born. She wore a dark jumpsuit with the cross-and-caduceus patch of the Pax Fleet Medical Corps on her left shoulder.

“I’m Dr. Molina,” said the woman, unpacking a small black valise. “All the base skimmers are on war-game maneuvers and I had to come by fitzboat with the young man who fetched me.” She set one sticky diagnostic patch on my bare chest and another on my belly. “And don’t flatter yourself that I came all this way for you… one of the base skimmers crashed near Keroa Tambat, eighty klicks south of here, and I have to tend to the injured Pax crew while they wait for medevac. Nothing serious, just bruises and a broken leg. They didn’t want to pull a skimmer out of the games just for that.” She removed a palm-sized device from the valise and checked to see that it was receiving from the patches. “And if you’re one of those Mercantilus spacers who jumped ship at the port a few weeks ago,” she continued, “don’t get any ideas about robbing me for drugs or money. I’m traveling with two security guards and they’re right outside.”

She slipped earphones on. “Now what’s wrong with you, young man?”

I shook my head, gritting my teeth against the surge of pain that was ripping through my back at that second. When I could, I said, “I don’t know, Doctor… my back… and nausea…”

She ignored me while checking the palm device. Suddenly she leaned over and probed my abdomen on the left side. “Does that hurt?”

I almost screamed. “Yes,” I said when I could speak.

She nodded and turned to the woman in blue who had saved me. “Tell the priest who fetched me to bring in the larger hag. This man is completely dehydrated. We need to set up an IV. I’ll administer the ultramorph after I get that going.”

I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it. I would have done anything for that rough-edged, talkative Pax Fleet doctor right then. “What is it?” I asked her as she was setting up a bottle and tubes. “Where is this pain coming from?” She had an old-fashioned needle syringe in her hand and was filling it from a small vial of ultramorph. If she told me that I had contracted a fatal disease and would be dead before nightfall, it would be all right as long as she gave me that shot of painkiller first.

“Kidney stone,” said Dr. Molina. I must have shown my incomprehension, because she went on, “A little rock in your kidney… too large to pass… probably made of calcium. Have you had trouble urinating in recent days?”

I thought back to the beginning of the trip and before. I had not been drinking enough water and had attributed the occasional pain and difficulty to that fact. “Yes, but…”

“Kidney stone,” she said, swabbing my left wrist. “Little sting here.” She inserted the intravenous needle and dermplasted it in place.

The sting of the needle was totally lost in the cacophony of pain from my back. There was a moment of fiddling with the intravenous tube and attaching the syringe to an offshoot of it. “This will take about a minute to act,” she said. “But it should eliminate the discomfort.”

Discomfort. I closed my eyes so that no one would see the tears of relief there. The woman who had found me by the well took my hand in hers.

A minute later the pain began to ebb. Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence. It was as if a great and terrible noise had finally been turned down so that I could think. I became me again as the agony dropped to the levels I had known from knife wounds and broken bones.

This I could handle and still retain my dignity and sense of self. The woman in blue was touching my wrist as the ultramorph took effect.

“Thank you,” I said through parched, cracked lips, squeezing the hand of the woman in blue. “And thank you, Dr. Molina,” I said to the Pax medic.

Dr. Molina leaned over me, tapping my cheeks softly. “You’re going to sleep for a while, but I need some answers first. Don’t sleep until you talk to me.”

I nodded groggily.

“What’s your name?”

“Raul Endymion.” I realized that I could not lie to her. She must have put Truthtell or another drug in the IV drip.

“Where are you from, Raul Endymion?” She was holding the palm-sized diagnostic device like a recorder.

“Hyperion. The continent of Aquila. My clan was…”

“How did you get to Lock Childe Lamonde on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Raul? Are you one of the spacers who jumped ship from the Mercantilus freighter last month?”

“Kayak,” I heard myself say as everything began to feel distant. A great warmth filled me, almost indistinguishable from the sense of relief that surged within me. “Paddled downriver in the kayak,” I babbled. “Through the farcaster. No, I’m not one of the spacers…”

“Farcaster?” I heard the doctor repeat, her voice puzzled. “What do you mean you came through the farcaster, Raul Endymion? Do you mean you paddled under it the way we did? Just passed by it on your trip downriver?”

“No,” I said. “I came through it. From offworld.”

The doctor glanced at the woman in blue and then turned back to me. “You came through the farcaster from offworld? You mean it… functioned? Farcast you here?”

“Yeah.”

“From where?” said the doctor, checking my pulse with her left hand.

“Old Earth,” I said. “I came from Earth.” For a moment I floated, blissfully free from pain, while the doctor stepped out into the hall to talk to the ladies. I heard snatches of conversation.

“… obviously mentally unbalanced,” the doctor’s voice was saying. “Could not have possibly come through the… delusions of Old Earth… possibly one of the spacers on drugs…”

“Happy to have him stay…” the woman in the blue robe was saying. “Take care of him until…”

“The priest and one of the guards will stay here…” the doctor’s voice said. “When the medevac skimmer comes to Keroa Tambat we’ll stop by here to fetch him on the way back to the base… tomorrow or the day after tomorrow… don’t let him leave… military police will probably want to…”

Buoyed up on the rising crest of bliss at the absence of pain, I quit fighting the current and allowed myself to drift downstream to the waiting arms of morphia.

I dreamed of a conversation Aenea and I had shared a few months earlier. It was a cool, high-desert summer night and we were sitting in the vestibule of her shelter, drinking mugs of tea and watching the stars come out. We had been discussing the Pax, but for everything negative I had said about it, Aenea had responded with something positive.

Finally I got angry.

“Look,” I said, “you’re talking about the Pax as if it hadn’t tried to capture you and kill you. As if Pax ships hadn’t chased us halfway across the spiral arm and shot us down on Renaissance Vector. If it hadn’t been for the farcaster there…”

“The Pax didn’t chase us and shoot at us and try to kill us,” the girl said softly. “Just elements of it. Men and women following orders from the Vatican or elsewhere.”

“Well,” I said, still exasperated and irritated, “it only takes elements of it to shoot us and kill…” I paused a second.

“What do you mean—‘the Vatican or elsewhere’? Do you think there are others giving orders? Other than the Vatican, I mean?”

Aenea shrugged. It was a graceful motion, but irritating in the extreme. One of the least endearing of her less-than-endearing teenaged traits.

“Are there others?” I demanded, more sharply than I was used to speaking to my young friend.

“There are always others,” Aenea said quietly. “They were right to try to capture me, Raul. Or kill me.”

In my dream as in reality, I set my mug of tea on the stone foundation of the vestibule and stared at her. “You’re saying that you… and I… should be captured or killed… like animals. That they have that right?”

“Of course not,” said the girl, crossing her arms in front of her chest, the tea steaming into the cool night air. “I’m saying that the Pax is correct—from its perspective—in using extraordinary measures to try to stop me.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t heard you say anything so subversive that they should send squadrons of starships after you, kiddo. In fact, the most subversive and heretical thing I’ve heard you say is that love is a basic force of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism. But that’s just…”

“Bullshit?” said Aenea.

“Double talk,” I said.

Aenea smiled and ran her fingers through her short hair. “Raul, my friend, it’s not what I say that’s a danger to them. It’s what I do. What I teach by doing… by touching.”

I looked at her. I had almost forgotten all that One Who Teaches stuff that her Uncle Martin Silenus had woven into his Cantos epic. Aenea was to be the messiah that the old poet had prophesied in his long, confused poem some two centuries earlier… or so he had told me. So far I had seen very little from the girl that suggested messiahhood, unless one counted her trip forward through the Sphinx Time Tomb and the obsession of the Pax to capture or kill her… and me, since I was her guardian during the rough trip out to Old Earth.

“I haven’t heard you teach much that’s heretical or dangerous,” I said again, my tone almost sullen. “Or seen you do anything that’s a threat to the Pax, either.” I gestured to the night, the desert, and to the distant, lighted buildings of the Taliesin Fellowship, and now—in my ultramorph dream that was more memory than dream—I watched myself make that gesture as if I were observing from the darkness outside the lighted shelter. Aenea shook her head and sipped her tea.

“You don’t see, Raul, but they do. Already they’ve referred to me as a virus. They’re right… that’s exactly what I could be to the Church. A virus, like the ancient HIV strain on Old Earth or the Red Death that raked through the Outback after the Fall… a virus that invades every cell of the organism and reprograms the DNA in those cells… or at least infects enough cells that the organism breaks down, fails… dies.”

In my dream, I swooped above Aenea’s canvas-and-stone shelter like a hawk in the night, whirling high among the alien stars above Old Earth, seeing us—the girl and the man—sitting in the kerosene lantern light of the vestibule like lost souls on a lost world. Which is precisely what we were. For the next two days I drifted in and out of pain and consciousness the way a skiff cut loose on the ocean would float through rain squalls and patches of sunlight. I drank great volumes of water that the women in blue brought me in glass goblets. I hobbled to the toilet cubby and urinated through a filter, trying to catch the stone that was causing my intermittent agony. No stone. Each time I would hobble back to the bed and wait for the pain to start up again. It never failed to do so.

Even at the time, I was aware that this was not the stuff of heroic adventure.

Before the doctor left to continue downriver to the site of the skimmer crash, I was made to understand that both the Pax guard and the local priest had com units and would radio the base if I caused any trouble whatsoever. Dr. Molina let me know exactly how bad it would be for me if the Pax Fleet commander had to pull a skimmer out of the war games just to fetch a prisoner prematurely. Meanwhile, she said, keep drinking lots of water and peeing every time I could.

If the stone didn’t pass, she would get me into the jail infirmary at the base and break it up with sound waves. She left four more shots of ultramorph with the woman in blue and left without a good-bye. The guard—a middle-aged Lusian twice my weight with a flechette pistol in his holster and a come-along neural prod on his belt—peered in, glowered at me, and went back outside to stand by the front door. I will stop referring to the head of the household as “the woman in blue.” For the first few hours of agony, that had been all she had been to me—other than my savior, of course—but by the afternoon of the first full day in her home, I knew that she was named Dem Ria; that her primary marriage partner was the other woman, Dem Loa; that the third member of their tripartite marriage was the much younger man, Alem Mikail Dem Alem; that the teenaged girl in the house was Ces Ambre, Alem’s daughter by a previous triune; that the pale boy with no hair—who looked to be about eight standard years old—named Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem, was the child of the current partnership—although the biological child of which woman, I never discovered—and that he was dying of cancer.

“Our village medic elder… he died last month and has not been replaced… sent Bin to our own hospital in Keroa Tambat last winter, but they could only administer radiation and chemotherapy and hope for the best,” said Dem Ria as she sat by my bedside that afternoon. Dem Loa sat nearby on another straight-backed chair. I had asked about the boy to shift the subject of conversation away from my own problems. The women’s elaborate robes glowed a deep cobalt blue even as the sunlight behind them lay as thick and red as blood on the interior adobe walls. Lace curtains cut the light and shadows in complex negative spaces. We were chatting in the intervals between the pain. My back hurt then as if someone had struck me there with a heavy club, but this was a dull ache compared to the hot agony when the stone moved. The doctor had said that the pain was a good sign—that the stone was moving when it hurt the most. And the agony did seem to be centered lower in my abdomen. But the doctor had also said that it might take months to pass the stone, if it was small enough to be passed naturally. Many stones, she said, had to be pulverized or removed surgically. I brought my mind back to the health of the child we were discussing. “Radiation and chemotherapy,” I repeated, mouthing the words with distaste. It was as if Dem Ria had said that the medic had prescribed leeches and drafts of mercury for the boy. The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall. And what had not been lost had been made too expensive to share with the masses after the WorldWeb went away forever: the Pax Mercantilus carried goods and commodities between the stars, but the process was slow, expensive, and limited. Medicine had slipped back several centuries. My own mother had died of cancer—after refusing radiation and chemotherapy after the diagnosis at the Pax Moors Clinic.

But why cure a fatal disease when one could recover from it by dying and being resurrected by the cruciform? Even some genetically derived diseases were “cured” by the cruciform during its restructuring of the body during resurrection. And death, as the Church was constantly pointing out, was as much a sacrament as resurrection itself. It could be offered up like a prayer. The average person could now transform the pain and hopelessness of disease and death into the glory of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. As long as the average person carried a cruciform.

I cleared my throat. “Ah… Bin hasn’t… I mean… “When the boy had waved at me in the night, his loose robe had shown a pale and crossless chest. Dem Loa shook her head. The blue cowl of her robe was made of a translucent, silklike fabric. “None of us have yet accepted the cross. But Father Clifton has been… convincing us.” I could only nod. The pain in my back and groin was returning like an electric current through my nerves. I should explain the different colored robes worn by the citizens of Lock Childe Lamonde on the world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Dem Ria had explained in her melodic whisper that a little over a century ago, most of the people now living along the long river had migrated here from the nearby star system Lacaille 9352. The world there, originally called Sibiatu’s Bitterness, had been recolonized by Pax religious zealots who had renamed it Inevitable Grace and begun proselytizing the indigenie cultures that had survived the Fall. Dem Ria’s culture—a gentle, philosophical one stressing cooperation—decided to migrate again rather than convert. Twenty-seven thousand of her people had expended their fortunes and risked their lives to refit an ancient Hegira seedship and transport everyone—men, women, children, pets, livestock—in a forty-nine-year cold-sleep voyage to nearby Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, where the WorldWeb-era inhabitants had died out after the Fall.

Dem Ria’s people called themselves the Amoiete Spectrum Helix, after the epic philosophical symphony-holo-poem by Halpul Amoiete. In his poem, Amoiete had used colors of the spectrum as a metaphor for the positive human values and shown the helical juxtapositions, interactions, synergies, and collisions created by these values.

The Amoiete Spectrum Helix Symphony was meant to be performed, with the symphony, the poetry, and the holoshow all representing the philosophical interplay. Dem Ria and Dem Loa explained how their culture had borrowed the color meanings from Amoiete—white for the purity of intellectual honesty and physical love; red for the passion of art, political conviction, and physical courage; blue for the introspective revelations of music, mathematics, personal therapy to help others and for the design of fabrics and textures; emerald green for resonance with nature, comfort with technology, and the preservation of threatened life-forms; ebony for the creation of human mysteries; and so forth. The triune marriages, nonviolence, and other cultural peculiarities grew partially from Amoiete’s philosophies and largely from the rich cooperative culture the Spectrum people had created on Sibiatu’s Bitterness.

“So Father Clifton is convincing you to join the Church?” I said as the pain subsided into a lull where I could think and speak once again.

“Yes,” said Dem Loa. Their tripartner, Alem Mikail Dem Alem, had come in to sit on the adobe windowsill. He listened to the conversation but rarely spoke.

“How do you feel about that?” I asked, shifting slightly to distribute the ache in my back. I had not asked for ultramorph for several hours. I was very aware of the desire to ask for it now.

Dem Ria lifted her hand in a complex motion that reminded me of Aenea’s favorite gesture. “If all of us accept the cross, little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem will be entitled to full medical care at the Pax base at Bombasino. Even if they do not cure the cancer, Bin will… return to us… after.” She lowered her gaze and hid her expressive hands in the folds of her robe.

“They won’t allow just Bin to accept the cross,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Dem Loa. “It is always their position that the entire family must convert. We see their point. Father Clifton is very sad about that, but very hopeful that we will accept Jesus Christ’s sacraments before it is too late for Bin.”

“How does your girl—Ces Ambre—feel about becoming a born-again Christian?” I asked, realizing how personal these questions were. But I was intrigued, and the thought of the painful decision they faced took my mind off my very real but much less important pain.

“Ces Ambre loves the idea of joining the Church and becoming a full citizen of the Pax,” said Dem Loa, raising her face under the cowl of her soft blue hood. “She would then be allowed to attend the Church academy in Bombasino or Keroa Tambat, and she thinks that the girls and boys there would make much more interesting marriage prospects.”

I started to speak, stopped myself, and then spoke anyway. “But the triune marriage wouldn’t be… I mean, would the Pax allow…”

“No,” said Alem from his place by the window.

He frowned and I could see the sadness behind his gray eyes. “The Church does not allow same-sex or multiple-partner marriages. Our family would be destroyed.”

I noticed the three exchange glances for a second and the love and sense of loss I saw in those looks would stay with me for years.

Dem Ria sighed. “But this is inevitable anyway. I think that Father Clifton is right… that we must do this now, for Bin, rather than wait until he dies the true death and is lost to us forever… and then join the Church. I would rather take our boy to Mass on Sunday and laugh with him in the sunlight after, than go to the cathedral to light a candle in his memory.”

“Why is it inevitable?” I asked softly.

Dem Loa made the graceful gesture once again. “Our Spectrum Helix society depends upon all members of it… all steps and components of the Helix must be in place for the interplay to work toward human progress and moral good. More and more of the Spectrum people are abandoning their colors and joining the Pax. The center will not hold.”

Dem Ria touched my forearm as if to emphasize her next words. “The Pax has not coerced us in any way,” she said softly, her lovely dialect rising and falling like the sound of the wind through the lace curtains behind her. “We respect the fact that they reserve their medicines and their miracle of resurrection for those who join them…” She stopped.

“But it is hard,” said Dem Loa, her smooth voice suddenly ragged.

Alem Mikail Dem Alem got up from the window ledge and came over to kneel between the two women. He touched Dem Loa’s wrist with infinite gentleness. He put his arm around Dem Ria. For a moment, the three were lost to the world and me, encircled by their own love and sorrow.

And then the pain came back like a fiery lance in my back and lower groin, searing through me like a laser. I moaned despite myself.

The three separated with graceful, purposeful movements. Dem Ria went to get the next ultramorph syringe.

The dream began the same as before—I was flying at night above the Arizona desert, looking down at Aenea and me as we drank tea and chatted in the vestibule of her shelter—but this time the talk went far beyond the memory of our real conversation that night. “How are you a virus?” I was asking the teenager next to me. “How could anything you teach be a threat to something as large and powerful as the Pax?”

Aenea was looking out into the desert night, breathing in the fragrance of night-blooming blossoms.

She did not look at me when she spoke. “Do you know the major error in Uncle Martin’s Cantos, Raul?”

“No,” I said. She had shown me several mistakes, omissions, or wrongheaded guesses in the past few years, and together we had discovered a few during our voyage to Old Earth.

“It was twofold,” she said softly. Somewhere in the desert night, a hawk called. “First, he believed what the TechnoCore told my father.”

“About how they were the ones who had hijacked Earth?” I said.

“About everything,” said Aenea. “Ummon was lying to the John Keats cybrid.”

“Why?” I said.

“They were just planning to destroy it.” The girl looked at me. “But my mother was there to record the conversation,” she said. “And the Core knew that she would tell the old poet.”

I nodded slowly. “And that he would put it as a fact in the epic poem he was writing,” I said. “But why would they want to lie about…”

“His second mistake was more subtle and serious,” she said, interrupting me without raising her voice. A pale glow still hung behind the mountains to the north and west. “Uncle Martin believed that the TechnoCore was humanity’s enemy,” she continued.

I set my mug of tea down on stone. “Why is that a mistake?” I said. “Aren’t they our enemy?”

When the girl did not answer I held up my hand, five fingers splayed. “One, according to the Cantos, the Core was the real force behind the attack on the Hegemony that led to the Fall of the Farcasters. Not the Ousters… the Core. The Church has denied that, made the Ousters responsible. Are you saying that the Church is right and the old poet was wrong?”

“No,” said Aenea. “It was the Core that orchestrated the attack.”

“Billions dead,” I said, almost spluttering in outrage. “The Hegemony toppled. The Web destroyed. The fatline cut…”

“The TechnoCore did not cut the fatline,” she said softly.

“All right,” I said, taking a breath. “That was some mysterious entity… your Lions and Tigers and Bears, say. But it was still the Core behind the attack.”

Aenea nodded and poured more tea for herself.

I folded my thumb against my palm and touched the first finger with my other hand. “Second, did or did not the TechnoCore use the farcasters as a sort of cosmic leech to suck up human neural networks for their damned Ultimate Intelligence project? Every time someone farcast, they were being… used… by those damned autonomous intelligences. Right or wrong?”

“Correct,” said Aenea.

“Three,” I said, folding the first finger away and tapping the next one in line, “the poem has Rachel—the pilgrim Sol Weintraub’s child who has come backward with the Time Tombs from the future—tell about a time to come when,” I shifted the tone of my voice as I quoted, “… the final war raged between the Core-spawned UI and the human spirit.” Was this a mistake?”

“No,” said Aenea.

“Four,” I said, beginning to feel foolish with my little finger exercise, but angry enough to continue, “didn’t the Core admit to your father that it created him… created the John Keats cybrid of him… just as a trap for the—what did they call it?—the empathy component of the human Ultimate Intelligence that’s supposed to come into existence sometime in the future?”

“That’s what they said,” agreed Aenea, sipping her tea. She looked almost amused. This made me angrier.

“Five,” I said, folding the last finger back so that my right hand was a fist. “Wasn’t it the Core as well as the Pax—hell, the Core ordering the Pax—that tried to have you caught and killed on Hyperion, on Renaissance Vector, on God’s Grove… halfway across the spiral arm?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“And wasn’t it the Core,” I continued angrily, forgetting my fingered checklist and the fact that we were talking about the old poet’s errors, “that created that female… thing… that arranged to have poor A. Bettik’s arm sliced off on God’s Grove and would have had your head in a bag if it hadn’t been for the Shrike’s intervention.” I actually shook my fist I was so angry. “Wasn’t it the fucking Core that’s been trying to kill me as well as you, and probably will kill us if we’re ever stupid enough to go back into Pax space?”

Aenea nodded.

I was close to panting, feeling as if I had run a fifty-meter dash. “So?” I said lamely, unclenching my fist.

Aenea touched my knee. As contact with her always did, I felt a thrill of electric shock run through me. “Raul, I didn’t say that the Core hadn’t been up to no good. I simply said that Uncle Martin had made a mistake in portraying them as humanity’s enemy.”

“But if all those facts are true…” I shook my head, befuddled.

“Elements of the Core attacked the Web before the Fall,” said Aenea. “We know from my father’s visit with Ummon that the Core was not in agreement about many of its decisions.”

“But…” I began.

Aenea held her hand up, palm out. I fell silent.

“They used our neural networks for their UI project,” she said, “but there’s no evidence that it did humans any harm.”

My jaw almost dropped open at that comment. The thought of those damned AI’s using human brains like neural bubbles in their fucking project made me want to throw up. “They had no right!” I began.

“Of course not,” said Aenea. “They should have asked permission. What would you have said?”

“I would have told them to go fuck themselves,” I said, realizing the absurdity of the phrase as applied to autonomous intelligences even as I uttered it.

Aenea smiled again. “And you might remember that we’ve been using their mental power for our own purposes for more than a thousand years. I don’t think that we asked permission of their ancestors when we created the first silicon AI’s… or the first magnetic bubble and DNA entities, for that matter.”

I made an angry gesture. “That’s different.”

“Of course,” said Aenea. “The group of AI’s called the Ultimates have created problems for humanity in the past and will in the future—including trying to kill you and me—but they’re only one part of the Core.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand, kiddo,” I said, my voice softer now. “Are you really saying that there are good AI’s and bad AI’s? Don’t you remember that they actually considered destroying the human race? And that they may do it yet if we get in their way? That would make them an enemy of humanity in my book.”

Aenea touched my knee again. Her dark eyes were serious. “Don’t forget, Raul, that humanity has also come close to destroying the human race. Capitalists and communists were ready to blow up Earth when that was the only planet we lived on. And for what?”

“Yeah,” I said lamely, “but…”

“And the Church is ready to destroy the Ousters even as we speak. Genocide… on a scale our race has never seen before.”

“The Church… and a lot of others… don’t consider the Ousters human beings,” I said.

“Nonsense,” snapped Aenea. “Of course they are. They evolved from common Earth-human origins, just as the AI TechnoCore did. All three races are orphans in the storm.”

“All three races…” I repeated. “Jesus Christ, Aenea, are you including the Core in your definition of humanity?”

“We created them,” she said softly. “Early on, we used human DNA to increase their computing power… their intelligence. We used to have robots. They created cybrids out of human DNA and AI personae. Right now, we have a human institution in power which gives all glory and demands all power because of its allegiance to and connection with God… the human Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps the Core has a similar situation with the Ultimates in control.”

I could only stare at the girl. I did not understand.

Aenea set her other hand on my knee. I could feel her strong fingers through the whipcord of my trousers. “Raul, do you remember what the AI Ummon said to the second Keats cybrid? That was recorded accurately in the Cantos. Ummon talked in sort-of Zen koans… or at least that’s the way Uncle Martin translated the conversation.”

I closed my eyes to remember that part of the epic poem. It had been a long time since Grandam and I took turns reciting the tale around the caravan campfire.

Aenea spoke the words even as they began to form in my memory. “Ummon said to the second Keats cybrid—

I rubbed my cheek and thought. The night wind stirred the canvas folds of Aenea’s shelter entrance and brought sweet scents from the desert.

Strange stars hung above Earth’s old mountains on the horizon.

“Empathy was supposedly the fleeing component of the human UI,” I said slowly as if working out a word puzzle. “Part of our evolved human consciousness in the future, come back in time.”

Aenea looked at me. “The hybrid was the John Keats cybrid,” I continued. “Son of Man and Machine.”

“No,” said Aenea softly. “That was Uncle Martin’s second misunderstanding. The Keats cybrids were not created to be the refuge for Empathy in this age. They were created to be the instrument of that fusion between the Core and humankind. To have a child, in other words.”

I looked at the teenaged girl’s hands on my leg. “So you’re the consciousness “… as near divine as humankind has offered in thirty generations”?”

Aenea shrugged.

“And you have “… an imagination which can span space and time”?”

“All human beings have that,” said Aenea. “It’s just that when I dream and imagine, I can see things that truly will be. Remember when I told you that I remember the future?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, right now I’m remembering that you will dream this conversation some months hence, while you’re lying in bed—in terrible pain, I’m afraid—on a world with a complicated name, in a home where people dress all in blue.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”

“Aenea,” I heard myself say as I flew in ever higher circles above the desert shelter, watching myself and the girl dwindle below, “tell me what your secret is… the secret that makes you this messiah, this ‘bond between two worlds’.”

“All right, Raul, my love,” she said, suddenly appearing as a grown woman in the instant before I circled too high to make out details or hear distinct words above the rush of the air on my dream wings, “I will tell you. Listen.”