4

t has been my experience that late-night departures and farewells are the hardest on the spirit.

The military was especially good at beginning major voyages in the middle of the night. During my time in the Hyperion Home Guard, it seemed that all important troop movements began in the wee hours. I began to associate that odd blend of fear and excitement, dread and anticipation, with predawn darkness and the smell of lateness. Aenea had said that I would be leaving that night of her announcement to the Fellowship, but it took time to load the kayak, for me to pack my gear and decide what to leave behind forever, and to close up my tent and work area in the compound, so we weren’t airborne in the dropship until after two A.M. and it was almost sunrise before we reached our destination.

I admit that I felt rushed and ordered about by the girl’s preemptive announcement. Many people had come to look to Aenea for leadership and advice during the four years we spent at Taliesin West, but I wasn’t one of those people. I was thirty-two years old. Aenea was sixteen. It was my job to watch out for her, to protect her, and—if it came to that—to tell her what to do and when to do it. I didn’t like this turn of events one bit.

I’d assumed that A. Bettik would be flying with us to wherever I was supposed to shove off, but Aenea said that the android would be staying behind at the compound, so I wasted another twenty minutes tracking him down and saying goodbye.

“M. Aenea says that we will meet up again in due course,” said the blue man, “so I am confident that we shall, M. Endymion.”

“Raul,” I said for the five hundredth time. “Call me Raul.”

“Of course,” said A. Bettik with that slight smile that suggested insubordination.

“Fuck it,” I said eloquently and stuck out my hand. A. Bettik shook it. I had the urge then to hug our old traveling companion, but I knew that it would embarrass him. Androids were not literally programmed to be stiff and subservient—they were, after all, living, organic beings, not machines—but between RNA-training and long practice, they were hopelessly formal creatures. At least this one was.

And then we were away, Aenea and I, taxiing the dropship out of its hangar into the desert night and lifting off with as little noise as possible. I had said good-bye to as many of the other Fellowship apprentices and workers as I had found, but the hour was late and the people were scattered to their dorm cubbies, tents, and apprentice shelters. I hoped that I would run into some of them again—especially some of the construction crewmen and women with whom I’d worked for four years—but I had little real belief that I would.

The dropship could have flown itself to our destination—just a series of coordinates Aenea had given it—but I left the controls on semimanual so I could pretend I had something to do during the flight. I knew from the coordinates that we would be traveling about fifteen hundred klicks. Somewhere along the Mississippi River, Aenea had said. The dropship could have done that distance in ten suborbital minutes, but we had been conserving its dwindling energy and fuel reserves, so once we had extended the wings to maximum, we kept our velocity subsonic, our altitude set at a comfortable ten thousand meters, and avoided morphing the ship again until landing. We ordered the Consul’s starship’s persona—which I’d long ago loaded from my comlog into the dropship’s AI core—to keep quiet unless it had something important to tell us, and then we settled back in the red instrument glow to talk and watch the dark continent pass beneath us.

“Kiddo,” I said, “why this galloping hurry?”

Aenea made the self-conscious, throwing-away gesture I had first seen her use almost five years earlier. “It seemed important to get things going.” Her voice was soft, almost lifeless, drained of the vitality and energy that had moved the entire Fellowship to her will. Perhaps I was the only living person who could identify the tone, but she sounded close to tears.

“It can’t be that important,” I said. “To make me leave in the middle of the night …”

Aenea shook her head and looked out the dark windscreen for a moment. I realized that she was crying. When she finally turned back, the glow from the instruments made her eyes look very moist and red. “If you don’t leave tonight, I’ll lose my nerve and ask you not to go. If you don’t go, I’ll lose my nerve again and stay on Earth … never go back.”

I had the urge to take her hand then, but I kept my big paw on the omnicontroller instead. “Hey,” I said, “we can go back together. This doesn’t make any sense for me to go off one way and you another.”

“Yes it does,” said Aenea so quietly that I had to lean to my right to hear her.

“A. Bettik could go fetch the ship,” I said. “You and I can stay on Earth until we’re ready to return …”

Aenea shook her head. “I’ll never be ready to go back, Raul. The thought scares me to death.”

I thought of the wild chase that had sent us fleeing through Pax space from Hyperion, barely eluding Pax starships, torch-ships, fighter aircraft, Marines, Swiss Guard, and God knows what else—including that bitch-thing from hell that had almost killed us on God’s Grove—and I said, “I feel the same way, kiddo. Maybe we should stay on Earth. They can’t reach us here.”

Aenea looked at me and I recognized the expression: it was not mere stubbornness, it was a closing of all discussion on a matter that was settled.

“All right,” I said, “but I still haven’t heard why A. Bettik couldn’t take this kayak and go get the ship while I farcast back with you.”

“Yes, you have,” said Aenea. “You weren’t listening.” She shifted sideways in the big seat. “Raul, if you leave and we agree to meet at a certain time in a certain place in Pax space, I have to go through the farcaster and do what I have to do. And what I have to do next, I have to do on my own.”

“Aenea,” I said.

“Yes?”

“That’s really stupid. Do you know that?”

The sixteen-year-old said nothing. Below and to the left, somewhere in western Kansas, a circle of campfires became visible. I looked out at the lights amid all that darkness. “Any idea what experiment your alien friends are doing down there?” I said.

“No,” said Aenea. “And they aren’t my alien friends.”

“Which aren’t they?” I said. “Aliens? Or friends?”

“Neither,” said Aenea. I realized that this was the most specific she had ever been about the godlike intelligences that had kidnapped Old Earth—and us, it seemed to me at times, as if we had been harried and driven through the farcasters like cattle.

“Care to tell me anything else about these nonalien non-friends?” I said. “After all, something could go wrong … I might not make it to our rendezvous. I’d like to know the secret of our hosts before I go.”

I regretted saying that as soon as the words were out. Aenea pulled back as if I had slapped her.

“Sorry, kiddo,” I said. This time I did put my hand on hers. “I didn’t mean that. I’m just angry.”

Aenea nodded and I could see the tears in her eyes again.

Still mentally kicking myself, I said, “Everyone in the Fellowship was sure that the aliens were benevolent, godlike creatures. People said ‘Lions and Tigers and Bears’ but what they were thinking was ‘Jesus and Yahweh and E.T.’ from that old flat film that Mr. W. showed us. Everyone was sure that when it came time to fold up the Fellowship, the aliens would appear and lead us back to the Pax in a big mothership. No danger. No muss. No fuss.”

Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened. “Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E.T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business … our fight … and we have to take care of it ourselves.”

“Ourselves being you and me and A. Bettik against eight hundred billion or so of the born-again faithful?” I said softly.

Aenea made the graceful gesture with her hand again. “Yeah,” she said. “For now.”

• • •

WHEN WE ARRIVED IT WAS NOT ONLY STILL DARK, but raining hard—a cold, sleety, end-of-autumn rain. The Mississippi was a big river—one of Old Earth’s largest—and the dropship circled over it once before landing in a small town on the west bank. I saw all this on the viewscreen under image enhancement: the view out the actual windscreen was blackness and rain.

We came in over a high hill covered with bare trees, crossed an empty highway that spanned the Mississippi on a narrow bridge, and landed in an open, paved area about fifty meters from the river. The town ran back from the river here in a valley between wooded hills and on the viewscreen I could make out small, wooden buildings, larger brick warehouses, and a few taller structures near the river that might have been grain silos. Those kind of structures had been common in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in this part of Old Earth: I had no idea why this city had been spared the earthquakes and fires of the Tribulations, or why the Lions and Tigers and Bears had rebuilt it, if they had. There had been no sign of people in the narrow streets, nor of heat signatures on the infrared bands—neither living creatures nor groundcars with their overheated, internal combustion drive systems—but then again, it was almost four-thirty in the morning on a cold, rainy night. No one with an ounce of sense would be out in that lousy, stinking weather.

We both pulled on ponchos, I hefted my small backpack and said, “So long, Ship. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and we were down the morphed stairs and into the rain.

Aenea helped me tug the kayak out of the storage area in the belly of the dropship and we headed down the slick street toward the river. On our previous river adventure, I had carried night-vision goggles, an assortment of weapons, and a raft full of fancy gadgets. This night I had the flashlight laser that was our only memento of the trip out to Earth—set to its weakest, most energy-conserving setting, it illuminated about two meters of rain-slick street—a Navajo hunting knife in my backpack, and some sandwiches and dried fruit packed away. I was ready to take on the Pax.

“What is this place?” I said.

“Hannibal,” said Aenea, struggling to hold the slick kayak as we stumbled down the street.

By this point I had to shift the slim flashlight laser in my teeth, keeping both hands on the bow of the stupid little boat. When we reached the point where the street became a loading ramp, running into the black torrent of the Mississippi, I set the kayak down, removed the flashlight, and said, “St, Petersburg.” I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading in the Fellowship compound’s rich library of print books.

I saw Aenea’s hooded figure nod in the reflected glow of the flashlight beam.

“This is crazy,” I said, swinging the flashlight beam around the empty street, against the wall of the brick warehouses, out to the dark river. The rush of dark water was frightening. Any thought of setting off on that was insane.

“Yes,” said Aenea. “Crazy.” The cold rain beat on the hood of her poncho.

I went around the kayak and took her by the arm. “You see the future,” I said. “When are we going to see each other again?”

Her head was bowed. I could make out only the barest gleam of her pale cheek in the reflected beam. The arm I gripped through the sleeve of the poncho might as well have been the branch of a dead tree for all the life I felt there. She said something too softly for me to make it out over the sound of the rain and the river.

“What?” I said.

“I said I don’t see the future,” she said. “I remember parts of it.”

“What’s the difference?”

Aenea sighed and stepped closer. It was cold enough that our breaths actually mingled in the air. I felt the adrenaline rush from anxiety, fear, and anticipation.

“The difference is,” she said, “that seeing is a form of clarity, remembering is … something else.”

I shook my head. Rain dripped in my eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“Raul, do you remember Bets Kimbal’s birthday party? When Jaev played the piano and Kikki got falling-down drunk?”

“Yeah,” I said, irritated at this discussion in the middle of the night, in the middle of the storm, in the middle of our departure.

“When was it?”

“What?”

“When was it?” she repeated. Behind us, the Mississippi flowed out of the darkness and back into darkness with the speed of a maglev train.

“April,” I said. “Early May. I don’t know.”

The hooded figure before me nodded. “And what did Mr. Wright wear that night?”

I had never had the impulse to hit or spank or scream at Aenea. Not until this minute. “How should I know? Why should I remember that?”

“Try to.”

I let out my breath and looked away at the dark hills in the black night. “Shit, I don’t know … his gray wool suit. Yeah, I remember him standing by the piano in it. That gray suit with the big buttons.”

Aenea nodded again. “Bets’s birthday party was in mid-March,” she said over the patter of rain on our hoods. “Mr. Wright didn’t come because he had a cold.”

“So?” I said, knowing very well what point she had just made.

“So I remember bits of the future,” she said again, her voice sounding close to tears. “I’m afraid to trust those memories. If I say when we will see each other again, it may be like Mr. Wright’s gray suit.”

For a long minute I said nothing. Rain pounded like tiny fists on closed coffins. Finally I said, “Yeah.”

Aenea took two steps and put her arms around me. Our ponchos crinkled against each other. I could feel the tightness of her back and the new softness of her chest as we hugged clumsily.

She stepped back. “Can I have the flashlight a moment?”

I handed it to her. She pulled back the nylon apron in the tiny cockpit of the kayak and shined the light on the narrow strip of polished wood there beneath the fiberglass. A single red button, under its clear, protective panel, gleamed in the rain. “See that?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t touch it, whatever you do.”

I admit that I barked a laugh at that. Among the things I had read in the Taliesin library were plays of the absurd like Waiting for Godot. I had the feeling that we had flown into some latitude of the absurd and surreal here.

“I’m serious,” said Aenea.

“Why put a button in if it’s not to be touched?” I said, wiping the dripping moisture out of my face.

The hooded figure shook its head. “I mean, don’t touch it until you absolutely have to.”

“How will I know when I absolutely have to, kiddo?”

“You’ll know,” she said and gave me another hug. “We’d better get this into the river.”

I bent to kiss her forehead then. I had done this dozens of times over the past few years—wishing her well before one of her retreats, tucking her in, kissing her clammy forehead when she was sick with fever or half-dead from fatigue. But as I bent to kiss her, Aenea raised her face, and for the first time since we had met in the midst of dust and confusion in the Valley of the Time Tombs, I kissed her on the lips.

I believe that I have mentioned before how Aenea’s gaze is more powerful and intimate than most people’s physical touches … how her touch is like a jolt of electricity. This kiss was … beyond all that. I was thirty-two years old that night in Hannibal, on the west bank of the river known as the Mississippi, on the world once known as Earth, lost now somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, in the dark and rain, and I had never experienced a jolt of sensation like that first kiss.

I pulled back in shock. The flashlight laser had tilted up between us and I could see the glint of her dark eyes … looking mischievous, perhaps, relieved, perhaps, as if a long wait had ended, and … something else.

“Good-bye, Raul,” she said, and lifted her end of the kayak.

My mind reeling, I placed the bow in the dark water at the bottom of the ramp and leveraged myself down and into the cockpit. A. Bettik had fashioned it for me like a well-tailored suit of clothes. I made sure not to depress the red button in my flailing around. Aenea shoved and the kayak was floating in twenty centimeters of water. She handed me the double-bladed paddle, then my backpack, and then the flashlight laser.

I aimed the beam at the dark water between us. “Where’s the farcaster portal?” I said. I heard the words from a distance, as if some third party had spoken. My mind and emotions were still dealing with the kiss. I was thirty-two years old. This child had just turned sixteen. My job was to protect her and to keep her alive until we could return to Hyperion and the old poet someday. This was madness.

“You’ll see it,” she said. “Sometime after daylight.”

Hours away then. This was theater of the absurd. “And what do I do after I find the ship?” I said. “Where do we meet?”

“There is a world named T’ien Shan,” said Aenea. “It means ‘Mountains of Heaven.’ The ship will know how to find it.”

“It’s in the Pax?” I said.

“Just barely,” she said, her breath hanging in the cold air. “It was in the Hegemony Outback. The Pax has incorporated it into the Protectorate and promised to send missionaries, but it hasn’t been tamed yet.”

“T’ien Shan,” I repeated. “All right. How do I find you? Planets are big things.”

I could see her dark eyes in the bouncing flashlight beam. They were moist with rain or tears, or both. “Find a mountain called Heng Shan … the Sacred Mountain of the North. Near it there will be a place called Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” she said. “It means ‘Temple Hanging in Air.’ I should be there.”

I made a rude gesture with my fist. “Great, so all I have to do is stop at a local Pax garrison and ask directions to the Temple Hanging in Air, and you’ll be hanging there waiting for me.”

“There are only a few thousand mountains on T’ien Shan,” she said, her voice flat and unhappy. “And only a few … cities. The ship can find Heng Shan and Hsuan-k’ung Ssu from orbit. You won’t be able to land there, but you’ll be able to disembark.”

“Why won’t I be able to land there?” I said, irritated by all of these puzzles within enigmas within codes.

“You’ll see, Raul,” she said, her voice as filled with tears as her eyes had been. “Please, go.”

The current was trying to carry me away, but I paddled the buoyant little kayak back into place. Aenea walked along the river’s edge to keep pace with me. The sky seemed to be lightening a bit in the east.

“Are you certain we’ll see each other there?” I shouted through the thinning rain.

“I’m not certain of anything, Raul.”

“Not even that we’ll survive this?” I’m not sure what I meant by “this.” I’m not even sure what I meant when I said “survive.”

“Especially not of that,” said the girl, and I saw the old smile, full of mischief and anticipation and something like sadness mixed with involuntary wisdom.

The current was pulling me away. “How long will it take me to get to the ship?”

“I think only a few days,” she called. We were several meters apart now, and the current was pulling me out into the Mississippi.

“And when I find the ship, how long to get to … T’ien Shan?” I called.

Aenea shouted back the answer but it was lost in the lapping of waves against the hull of my little kayak.

“What?” I yelled. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“I love you,” called Aenea, and her voice was clear and bright across the dark water.

The river pulled me out into it. I could not speak. My arms did not work when I thought to paddle against the powerful current. “Aenea?” I aimed the flashlight toward the shore, caught a glimpse of her poncho gleaming in the light, the pale oval of her face in the shadow of the hood. “Aenea!”

She shouted something, waved. I waved back.

The current was very strong for a moment. I paddled violently to avoid being pulled into an entire tree that had snagged on a sandbar, and then Î was out in the central current and hurtling south. I looked back but walls of the last buildings in Hannibal hid my dear girl from view.

A minute later I heard a hum like the dropship’s EM repulsore, but when I looked up I saw only shadow. It could have been her circling. It could have been a low cloud in the night.

The river pulled me south.