16

admit that I was confused and a bit depressed when I first arrived on the Mountains of Heaven.

I slept in cryogenic fugue for three months and two weeks. I had thought that cryogenic fugue was dreamless, but I was wrong. I had nightmares for most of the way and awoke disoriented and apprehensive.

The translation point in our outbound system had been only seventeen hours away, but in the T’ien Shan System we had to translate from C-plus out beyond the last icy planet and decelerate in-system for three full days. I jogged the various decks, up and down the spiral staircase, and even out onto the little balcony I’d had the ship extrude. I told myself that I was trying to get my leg back into shape—it still hurt despite the ship’s pronouncement that the doc-in-the-box had healed it and that there should be no pain—but in truth, I knew, I was trying to work off nervous energy. I’m not sure that I remembered ever being so anxious before.

The ship wanted to tell me all about this star system in excruciating detail—G-type yellow star, blah, blah, blah—well, I could see that … eleven worlds, three gas giants, two asteroid belts, a high percentage of comets in the inner system, blah, blah, blah. I was interested only in T’ien Shan, and I sat in the carpeted holopit and watched it grow. The world was amazingly bright. Blindingly brighi. A brilliant pearl set against the black of space.

“What you are seeing is the lower, permanent cloud layer,” droned the ship. “The albedo is impressive. There are higher clouds—see those storm swirls in the lower right of the illuminated hemisphere? Those high cirrus causing shadows near the north polar cap? Those are the clouds that would bring weather to the human inhabitants.”

“Where are the mountains?” I asked.

“There,” said the ship, circling a gray shadow in the north-em hemisphere. “According to my old charts, this is a great peak in the northern reaches of the eastern hemisphere—Chomo Lori, ‘Queen of Snow’—and you see these striations running south from it? See how they stay close together until they pass the equator and then spread farther and farther apart until they disappear into the south polar cloud masses? These are the two great spine ridges, Phari Ridge and K’un Lun Ridge. They were the first inhabited rock lines on the planet and are excellent examples of the equivalent early Cretaceous Dakotan violent upthrust resulting in …”

Blah, blah, blah. And all I could think of was Aenea, and Aenea, and Aenea.

It was strange entering a system with no Pax Fleet ships to challenge us, no orbital defenses, no lunar bases … not even a base on the giant bull’s-eye of a moon that looked as if someone had fired a single bullet into a smooth orange sphere—no register of Hawking-drive wakes or neutrino emissions or gravitational lenses or cleared swaths of Bussard-jet drones—no sign of any higher technologies. The ship said that there was a trickle of microwave broadcasting emanating from certain areas of the planet, but when I had them piped in, they turned out to be in pre-Hegira Chinese. This was a shock. I had never been on a world where the majority of humans spoke anything but a version of Web English.

The ship entered geosynchronous orbit above the eastern hemisphere. “Your directions were to find the peak called Heng Shan, which should be approximately six hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of Chorno Lori … there!” The telescopic view in the holopit zoomed in on a beautiful fang of snow and ice leaping through at least three layers of cloud until the summit gleamed clear and bright above most of the atmosphere.

“Jesus,” I whispered. “And where is Hsuan-k’ung Ssu? The Temple Hanging in Air?”

“It should be … there” said the ship triumphantly.

We were looking straight down at a vertical ridge of ice, snow, and gray rock. Clouds broiled at the base of this incredible slab. Even looking at this through the holo viewer made me grab couch cushions and reel in vertigo.

“Where?” I said. There were no structures in sight.

“That dark triangle,” said the ship, circling what I thought was a shadow on one gray slab of rock. “And this line … here.”

“What’s the magnification?” I asked.

“The triangle is approximately one-point-two meters along the longest edge,” came the voice I’d grown to know so well from my comlog.

“Pretty small building for people to live in,” I pointed out.

“No, no,” said the ship. “This is just a bit of a human-made structure protuding from under what must be a rock overhang. I would surmise that the entire so-called Temple Hanging in Air is under this overhang. The rock is more than vertical at this point … it pitches back some sixty or eighty meters.”

“Can you get us a side view? So that I can see the Temple?”

“I could,” said the ship. “It would require repositioning us in a more northerly orbit so that I can use the telescope to look south over the peak of Heng Shan, and go to infrared to look through the cloud mass at eight thousand meters which is passing between the peak and the ridge spur on which the Temple is built, I would also have to …”

“Skip it,” I said. “Just tightbeam that temple area … hell, the whole ridge … and see if Aenea is waiting for us.”

“Which frequency?” said the ship.

Aenea had not mentioned any frequency. She had just said something about not being able to land in a true sense, but to come down to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu anyway. Looking at this vertical and worse-than-vertical wall of snow and ice, I began to understand what she meant.

“Broadcast on whatever common frequency we would have used if you were calling a comlog extension,” I said. “If there’s no answer, dial through all the frequencies you have. You might try the frequencies that you picked up earlier.”

“They were coming from the southernmost quadrant of the western hemisphere,” said the ship in a patient voice. “I picked up no microwave emanations from this hemisphere.”

“Just do it, please,” I said.

We hung there for half an hour, sweeping the ridge with tightbeam, then broadcasting general radio signals toward all the peaks in the area, then flooding the hemisphere with short queries. There was no response.

“Can there actually be an inhabited world where no one uses radio?” I said.

“Of course,” said the ship. “On Ixion, it is against local law and custom to use microwave communication of any sort. On New Earth there was a group which …”

“Okay, Okay,” I said. For the thousandth time, I wondered if there were a way to reprogram this autonomous intelligence so that it wasn’t such a pain in the ass. “Take us down,” I said.

“To which location?” said the ship. “There are extensive inhabited areas on the high peak to the east—T’ai Shan it is called on my map—and another city south on the K’un Lun Ridge, it is called Hsi wang-mu, I believe, and other habitations along the Phari Ridge and west of there in an area marked as Koko Nor. Also …”

“Take us down to the Temple Hanging in Air,” I said.

LUCKILY, THE PLANET’S MAGNETIC FIELD WAS COMPLETELY adequate for the ship’s EM repulsors, so we floated down through the sky rather than having to descend on a tail of fusion flame. I went out to the balcony to watch, although the holopit or screens in the top bedroom would have been more practical.

It seemed to take hours, but actually within minutes we were floating gently at eight thousand-some meters, drifting between the fantastic peak to the north—Heng Shan—and the ridge holding Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. I had seen the terminator rushing from the east as we descended, and according to the ship, it was late afternoon here now. I carried a pair of binoculars out to the balcony and stared. I could see the Temple clearly. I could see it, but I could not quite believe it.

What had seemed a mere play of light and shadow beneath the huge, striated, overhanging slabs of gray granite was a series of structures extending east and west for many hundreds of meters. I could see the Asian influence at once: pagoda-shaped buildings with pitched tile roofs and curling eaves, their elaborately tiled surfaces gilded and glowing in the bright sunlight; round windows and moon gates in the lower brick sections of the superstructure, airy wooden porches with elaborately carved railings; delicate wooden pillars painted the color of dried blood; red and yellow banners draped from eaves and doorways and railings; complicated carvings on the roof beams and tower ridges; and suspension bridges and stairways festooned with what I would later learn were prayer wheels and prayer flags, each offering a prayer to Buddha every time a human hand spun it or the wind fluttered it.

The Temple was still being built. I could see raw wood being carried up to high platforms, saw human figures chiseling away at the stone face of the ridge, could see scaffolding, rude ladders, crude bridges consisting of little more than some sort of woven plant material with climbing ropes for handrails, and upright figures hauling empty baskets up these ladders and bridges and more stooped figures carrying the baskets full of stone back down to a broad slab where most of the baskets were dumped into space. We were close enough that I could see that many of these human figures wore colorful robes hanging almost to their ankles—some blowing in the stiff wind that blew across the rockface here—and that these robes looked thick and lined against the cold. I would later learn that these were the ubiquitous chuba, and that they could be made of thick, waterproof zygoat wool or of ceremonial silk or even of cotton, although this last material was rare and much prized.

I had been nervous about showing our ship to the locals—afraid it might cause a panic or a laser lance attack or something—but did not know what else to do. We were still several kilometers away, so at most we would be an unusual glint of sunlight on dark metal floating against the white backdrop of the northern peak. I had hoped that they would think us just another bird—the ship and I had seen many birds through the viewer, many of them with wingspans several meters across—but that hope was dashed as I saw first a few of the workers at the Temple pause in their labors and stare out in our direction, then more, and more. No one panicked. There was no rush for shelter or to retrieve weapons—I saw no weapons in sight anywhere—but we had obviously been seen. I watched two women in robes run up through the ascending series of temple buildings, hanging bridges, stairways, steep ladders, and penultimate construction scaffolding to the easternmost platform where the work seemed to consist of cutting holes in the rock wall. There was some sort of construction shack there, and one of the women disappeared into it, coming out a moment later with several taller forms in robes.

I increased the magnification of my binoculars, my heart pounding against my ribs, but there was drifting smoke from the construction work and I could not make out for sure if the tallest person there was Aenea. But through the veils of swirling smoke, I did catch a glimpse of blond-brown hair—just shorter than shoulder length—and for a moment I lowered the binoculars and just stared out at the distant wall, grinning like an idiot.

“They are signaling,” said the ship.

I looked through the glasses again. Another person—female, I think, but with much darker hair—was flashing two handheld semaphore flags.

“It is an ancient signal code,” said the ship. “It is called Morse. The first words are …”

“Quiet,” I said. We had learned Morse Code in the Home Guard and I had used it once with two bloody bandages to call in medevac skimmers on the Iceshelf.

GO … TO … THE … FISSURE … TEN KLICKS … TO … THE … NORTH … EAST.

HOVER … THERE.

AWAIT … INSTRUCTIONS.

“Got that, Ship?” I said.

“Yes.” The ship’s voice always sounded cold after I was rude to it.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I think I see a gap about ten klicks to the northeast. Let’s stay as far out as we can and come in from the east. I don’t think they’ll be able to see us from the Temple, and I don’t see any other structures along the cliff face in that direction.”

Without further comment, the ship brought us out and around and back along the sheer rock wall until we came to the fissure—a vertical cleft dropping several thousand meters from the ice and snow far above to a point where it converged about four hundred meters above the level of the Temple, which now was out of sight around the curve of rockface to the west.

The ship floated vertically until we were just fifty meters above the bottom of the fissure. I was surprised to see streams running down the steep rock walls of the sides of this gap, tumbling into the center of the fissure before pouring off into thin air as a waterfall. There were trees and mosses and lichens and flowering plants everywhere along this cleft, fields of them rising many hundreds of meters alongside the streams until finally becoming mere streaks of multicolored lichen rising toward the ice levels above. At first I was sure that there was no sign of human intrusion here, but then I saw the chiseled ledges along the north wall—barely wide enough to stand on, I thought—and then the paths through the bright green moss, and the artfully placed stepping stones in the stream, and then I noticed the tiny, weathered little structure—too small to be a cabin, more like a gazebo with windows—which sat under wind-sculpted evergreens along the stream and near the high point of the fissure’s verdant pass.

I pointed and the ship moved up in that direction, hovering near the gazebo. I understood why it would be difficult, if not impossible, to land here. The Consul’s ship was not that large-it had been hidden in the stone tower in the old poet’s city of Endymion for centuries—but even if it landed vertically on its fins or extendable legs here, some trees, grass, moss, and flowering plants would be crushed. They seemed too rare in this vertical rock world to destroy that way.

So we hovered. And waited. And about thirty minutes after we arrived, a young woman came around the path from the direction of the rock ledges and waved heartily at us.

IT WAS NOT AENEA.

I admit that I was disappointed. My desire to see my young friend again had reached the point of obsession, and I guess that I was having absurd fantasies of reunion—Aenea and I running toward one another across a flowered field, she the child of eleven again, I her protector, both of us laughing with the pleasure of seeing one another and me lifting her and swinging her around, tossing her up …

Well, we had the grassy field. The ship continued hovering and morphed a stairway to the flower-bedecked lawn next to the gazebo. The young woman crossed the stream, hopping from stepping stone to stepping stone with perfect balance, and came grinning toward me up the grassy knoll.

She was in her early twenties. She had the physical grace and sense of presence I remembered from a thousand images of my young friend. But I had never seen this woman before in my life.

Could Aenea have changed this much in five years? Could she have disguised herself to hide from the Pax? Had I simply forgotten what she looked like? The latter seemed improbable. No, impossible. The ship had assured me that it had been five years and some months for Aenea if she was waiting on this world for me, but my entire trip—including the cryogenic fugue part—had taken only about four months. I had aged only a few weeks. I could not have forgotten her. I would never forget her.

“Hello, Raul,” said the young woman with dark hair.

“Hello?” I said.

She stepped closer and extended her hand. She had a firm handshake. “I’m Rachel. Aenea’s described you perfectly.” She laughed. “Of course, we haven’t been expecting anyone else to come calling in a starship looking like this …” She waved her hand in the general direction of the ship hanging there like a vertical balloon bobbing softly in the wind.

“How is Aenea?” I said, my voice sounding strange to me. “Where is she?”

“Oh, she is back at the Temple. She’s working. It’s the middle of the busiest work shift. She couldn’t get away. She asked me to come over and help you dispose of your ship.”

She couldn’t get away. What the hell was this? I’d come through literal hell—suffered kidney stones and broken legs, been chased by Pax troopers, dumped into a world with no land, eaten and regurgitated by an alien—and she couldn’t goddamn get away? I bit my lip, resisting the impulse to say what I was thinking. I admit that emotion was surging rather high at that moment.

“What do you mean—dispose of my ship?” I said. I looked around. “There has to be someplace for it to land.”

“There isn’t really,” said the young woman named Rachel. Looking at her now in the bright sunlight, I realized that she was probably a little older than Aenea would be—mid-twenties perhaps. Her eyes were brown and intelligent, her brown hair was chopped off as carelessly as Aenea used to cut hers, her skin was tanned from long hours in the sun, her hands were callused with work, and there were laugh lines at the corners of her eyes.

“Why don’t we do this,” said Rachel. “Why don’t you get what you need from the ship, take a comlog or communicator so you can call the ship back when you need it, get two skinsuits and two rebreathers out of the storage locker, and then tell the ship to hop back up to the third moon—the second smallest captured asteroid. There’s a deep crater there for it to hide in, but that moon’s in a near geosynchronous orbit and it keeps one face toward this hemisphere all the time. You could tightbeam it and it could be back here in a few minutes.”

I looked suspiciously at her. “Why the skinsuits and rebreathers?” The ship had them. They were designed for benign hard-vacuum environments where true space armor was not required. “The air seems thick enough here,” I said.

“It is,” said Rachel. “There’s a surprisingly rich oxygen atmosphere at this altitude. But Aenea told me to ask you to bring the skinsuits and rebreathers.”

“Why?” I said.

“I don’t know, Raul,” said Rachel. Her eyes were placid, seemingly clear of deceit or guile.

“Why does the ship have to hide?” I said “Is the Pax here?”

“Not yet,” said Rachel. “But we’ve been expecting them for the last six months or so. Right now, there are no spacecraft on or around Tien Shan … with the exception now of your ship. No aircraft either. No skimmers, no EMVs, no thopters or copters … only paragliders … the flyers … and they would never be out that far.”

I nodded but hesitated.

“The Dugpas saw something they couldn’t explain today,” continued Rachel. “The speck of your ship against Chorno Lori, I mean. But eventually they explain everything in terms of tendrel, so that won’t be a problem.”

“What are tendrel?” I said. “And who are the Dugpas?”

“Tendrel are signs,” said Rachel. “Divinations within the shamanistic Buddhist tradition prevalent in this region of the Mountains of Heaven. Dugpas are the … well, the word translates literally as ‘highest.’ The people who dwell at the upper altitudes. There are also the Drukpas, the valley people … that is, the lower Assures … and the Drungpas, the wooded valley people … mostly those who live in the great fern forests and bonsai-bamboo stands on the western reaches of Phari Ridge and beyond.”

“So Aenea’s at the Temple?” I said stubbornly, resisting following the young woman’s “suggestion” for hiding the ship.

“Yes.”

“When can I see her?”

“As soon as we walk over there.” Rachel smiled.

“How long have you known Aenea?”

“About four years, Raul.”

“Do you come from this world?”

She smiled again, patient with my interrogation. “No. When you meet the Dugpas and the others, you’ll see that I’m not native. Most of the people in this region are from Chinese, Tibetan, and other Central Asian stock.”

“Where are you from?” I asked flatly, sounding rude in my own ears.

“I was born on Barnard’s World,” she said. “A backwater farming planet. Cornfields and woods and long evenings and a few good universities, but not much else.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said. It made me more suspicious. The “good universities” that had been Barnard’s World’s claim to fame during the Hegemony had long since been converted to Church academies and seminaries. I had the sudden wish that I could see the flesh of this young woman’s chest—see if there were a cruciform there, I mean. It would be all too easy for me to send the ship away and walk into a Pax trap. “Where did you meet Aenea?” I said. “Here?”

“No, not here. On Amritsar.”

“Amritsar?” I said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s not unusual. Amritsar is a Solmev-marginal world way out back of the Outback. It was only settled about a century ago—refugees from a civil war on Parvati. A few thousand Sikhs and a few thousand Sufi eke out a living there. Aenea was hired to design a desert community center there and I hired on to do the survey and ramrod the construction crew. I’ve been with her ever since.”

I nodded, still hesitating. I was filled with something not quite disappointment, surging like anger but not quite as clear, bordering on jealousy. But that was absurd. “A. Bettik?” I said, feeling a sudden intuition that the android had died in the past five years. “Is he …”

“He headed out yesterday for our biweekly provision trek to Phari Marketplace,” said the woman named Rachel. She touched my upper arm. “A. Bettik’s fine. He should be back by moonrise tonight. Come on. Get your stuff. Tell the ship about hiding on the third moon. You’d rather hear all this stuff from Aenea.”

I ENDED UP TAKING LITTLE MORE THAN A CHANGE of clothes, good boots, my small binoculars, a small sheath knife, the skinsuits and rebreathers, and a palm-sized com unit/ journal from the ship. I stuffed all this into a rucksack, hopped down the steps to the meadow, and told the ship what it should do. My anthropomorphizing had reached the point where I expected the ship to sulk at the idea of going back into hibernation mode—on an airless moon this time—but the ship acknowledged the order, suggested that it check in via tightbeam once daily to make sure that the com unit was functioning, and then it floated up and away, dwindling to a speck and then disappearing, like nothing so much as a balloon that has had its string cut.

Rachel gave me a wool chuba to pull on over my therm jacket. I noticed the nylon harness she wore over her jacket and trousers, the metal climbing equipment hanging on straps, and asked about it.

“Aenea has a harness for you at the temple site,” she said, rattling the hardware on the sling. “This is the most advanced technology on this world. The metalworkers at Potala demand and receive a king’s ransom for this stuff—crampons, cable pulleys, folding ice axes and ice hammers, chocks, ’biners, lost arrows, bongs, birdbeaks, you name it.”

“Will I need it?” I said dubiously. We had learned some basic ice-climbing techniques in the Home Guard—rappelling, crevasse work, that sort of thing—and I had done some roped-up quarry climbing when I worked with Avrol Hume on the Beak, but I wasn’t sure about real mountaineering. I didn’t like heights.

“You’ll need it but you’ll get used to it quickly,” assured Rachel and set off, hopping across the stepping stones and running lightly up the path toward the cliffs edge. The gear jangled softly on her harness, like steel chimes or the bells around some mountain goat’s neck.

The ten-klick walk south along the sheer rockface was easy enough once I got used to the narrow ledge, the dizzy-making sheer drop to our right, the bright glare from the incredible mountain to the north and from the churning clouds far below, and the heady surge of energy from the rich atmosphere.

“Yes,” said Rachel when I mentioned the air. “The oxygen-rich atmosphere here would be a problem if there were forests or savannahs to bum. You should see the monsoon lightning storms. But the bonsai forest back there at the fissure and the fern forests over on the rainy side of Phari is about all we have in terms of combustible materials. They’re all fire species. And the bonsai wood that we use in the building is almost too dense to burn.”

For a while we walked in single file and in silence. My attention was on the ledge. We had just come around a sharp corner that required me to duck my head under the overhang when the ledge widened, the view opened up, and there was Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, the “Temple Hanging in Air.”

From this closer view, a bit below and to the east of the Temple, it still looked to be magically suspended in midair above nothing. Some of the lower, older buildings had stone or brick bases, but the majority were built out over air. These pagoda-style buildings were sheltered by the great rock overhang some seventy-five meters above the main structures, but ladders and platforms zigged and zagged up almost to the underside of that overhang.

We came in among people. The many-hued chubas and ubiquitous climbing slings were not the only common denominators here: most of the faces that peered at me with polite curiosity seemed to be of Old Earth Asian stock; the people were relatively short for a roughly standard-g world; they nodded and stepped aside respectfully as Rachel led the way through the crowds, up the ladders, through the incense-and-sandalwood-smelling interior halls of some of the buildings, out and across porches and swinging bridges and up delicate staircases. Soon we were in the upper levels of the Temple where construction proceeded at a rapid pace. The small figures I had seen through binoculars were now living, breathing human beings grunting under heavy baskets of stone, individual people smelling of sweat and honest labor. The silent efficiency I had watched from the ship’s terrace now became a clamorous mixture of hammers pounding, chisels ringing, pick-axes echoing, and workers shouting and gesturing amid the controlled chaos common to any construction site.

After several staircases and three long ladders rising to the highest platform, I paused to catch my breath before climbing the last ladder. Rich oxygen atmosphere or no, this climbing was hard work. I noticed Rachel watching me with the equanimity that could easily be mistaken for indifference.

I looked up to see a young woman stepping over the edge of the high platform and descending gracefully. For the briefest of seconds I felt my heart pound with nervousness—Aenea!—but then I saw how the woman moved, saw the short-cropped dark hair from the back, and knew that it was not my friend.

Rachel and I stepped back from the base of the ladder as the woman jumped down the last few rungs. She was large and solid—as tall as I was—with strong features and amazing violet eyes. She looked to be in her forties or early fifties, standard, was deeply tanned and very fit, and from the white wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, it seemed that she also enjoyed laughing. “Raul Endymion,” she said, thrusting out her hand. “I’m Theo Bernard. I help build things.”

I nodded. Her handshake was as firm as Rachel’s.

“Aenea’s just finishin’ up.” Theo Bernard gestured toward the ladder.

I glanced at Rachel.

“You go on up,” she said. “We’ve got things to do.”

I went up hand over hand. There were probably sixty rungs on the bamboo ladder, and I was aware as I climbed that the platform below was very narrow if one fell, the drop beyond it endless.

Stepping onto the platform, I saw the rough construction shacks and areas of chiseled stone where the last temple building would be. I was aware of the countless tons of stone starting just ten meters above me where the overhang angled up and out like a granite ceiling. Small birds with v-shaped tails darted and swooped among the cracks and fissures there.

Then all my attention became fixed on the figure emerging from the larger of the two construction shacks.

It was Aenea. The bold, dark eyes, the unself-conscious grin, the sharp cheekbones and delicate hands, the blond-brown hair cut carelessly and blowing now in the strong wind along the cliff face. She was not that much taller than when I had seen her last—I could still have kissed her forehead without bending—but she was changed.

I took in a sudden breath. I had watched people grow and come of age, of course, but most of these had been my friends when I was also growing and coming of age. Obviously I had never had children, and my careful observation of someone maturing had only been during the four years and some months of my friendship with this child. In most ways, I realized, Aenea still looked much as she had on her sixteenth birthday, five of her years earlier, minus now the last of her baby fat, with sharper cheekbones and firmer features, wider hips and slightly more prominent breasts. She wore whip trousers, high boots, a green shirt I remembered from Taliesin West, and a khaki jacket that was blowing in the wind. I could see that her arms and legs were stronger, more muscled, than I remembered from Old Earth—but not that much was changed about her.

Everything was changed about her. The child I had known was gone. A woman stood in her place; a strange woman walking quickly toward me across the rough platform. It was not just strong features and perhaps a bit more firm flesh on her still-lean form, it was … a solidity. A presence. Aenea had always been the most alive, animated, and complete person I had ever known, even as a child. Now that the child was gone, or at least submerged in the adult, I could see the solidity within that animated aura.

“Raul!” She crossed the last few steps to me, stood close, and grasped my forearms in her strong hands.

For a second I thought that she was going to kiss me on the mouth the way she had … the way the child of sixteen had … during the last minutes we had been together on Old Earth. Instead, she raised one long-fingered hand and set it against my face, running fingers down the line of my cheek to my chin. Her dark eyes were alive with … what? Not amusement. Vitality, perhaps. Happiness, I hoped.

I felt tongue-tied. I started to speak, stopped, raised my right hand as if to touch her cheek, dropped it.

“Raul … damn … it is so good to see you!” She took her hand away from my face and hugged me with an intensity bordering on violence.

“It’s good to see you too, kiddo.” I patted her back, feeling the rough material of her jacket under my palm.

She stepped back, grinning very broadly now, and grabbed my upper arms. “Was the trip to get the ship terrible? Tell me.”

“Five years!” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me …”

“I did. I shouted it.”

“When? At Hannibal? When I was …”

“Yes. Then I shouted ‘I love you.’ Remember?”

“I remember that, but … if you knew … five years, I mean …”

We were both talking at once, almost babbling. I found myself trying to tell her all about the farcasters, the kidney stone on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people, the cloud world, the cuttlefish-squid thing—all while I was asking her questions and babbling on again before she could answer.

Aenea kept grinning. “You look the same, Raul. You look the same. But then, hell, I guess you should. It’s only been … what … a week or two of travel and a cold sleep on the ship for you.”

I felt a wash of anger amid the happy giddiness. “Goddammit, Aenea. You should have told me about the time-debt. And maybe about the farcast to a world with no river or solid ground too. I could have died.”

Aenea was nodding. “But I didn’t know for sure, Raul. There was no certainty, only the usual … possibilities. That’s why A. Bettik and I built the parasail into the kayak.” She grinned again. “I guess it worked.”

“But you knew it would be a long separation. Years for you.” I did not phrase it as a question.

“Yes.”

I started to speak, felt the anger wash away as quickly as it had surged, and took her by the arms. “It’s good to see you, kiddo.” She hugged me again, kissing me on the cheek this time the way she had as a kid when I had delighted her with some joke or comment.

“Come on,” she said. “The afternoon shift is over. I’ll show you our platform and introduce you to some of the people here.”

Our platform? I followed her down ladders and across bridges that I had not noticed while walking with Rachel.

“Have you been all right, Aenea? I mean … is everything all right?”

“Yes.” She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at me again. “Everything is good, Raul.” We crossed a terrace on the side of the topmost of three pagodas stacked one atop the other. I could feel the platform shaking a bit as we walked the narrow terrace, and when we stepped out onto the narrow platform between pagodas, the entire structure vibrated. I noticed that people were leaving the westernmost pagoda and following the narrow ledge trail back along the cliff face.

“Tills part feels shaky, but it’s sturdy enough,” said Aenea, noticing my apprehension. “Beams of tougher bonsai pine are driven into holes drilled into the rock. That supports the whole infrastructure.”

“They must rot away,” I said as I followed her onto a short suspension bridge. We swayed in the wind.

“They do,” said Aenea. “They’ve been replaced several times in the eight hundred-some years the Temple’s been here. No one is sure exactly how many times. Their records are shakier than the floors.”

“And you’ve been hired to add on to the place?” I said. We had come out onto a terrace of wine-colored wood. A ladder at the end rose to another platform and a narrower bridge running from it.

“Yeah,” said Aenea. “I’m sort of part architect, part construction boss. I’d supervised the construction pf a Taoist temple over near Potala when I first arrived, and the-Dalai Lama thought that I might be able to finish work on the Temple Hanging in Air. It’s frustrated a few would-be renovators over the past few decades.”

“When you arrived,” I repeated. We had come onto a high platform at the center of the structure. It was bound about with beautifully carved railings and held, two small pagodas perched right at the edge. Aenea stopped at the door of the first pagoda.

“A temple?” I said.

“My place.” She grinned, gesturing toward the interior. I peeked in. The square room was only three meters by three meters, its floor of polished wood with two small talami mats. The most striking thing about it was the far wall—which simply was not there. Shoji screens had folded back and the far end of the room ended in open air. One could sleepwalk into oblivion there. The breeze up the cliff face rustled the leaves on three willow-type branches set in a beautiful mustard-yellow vase that sat on a low wood dais against the west wall. It was the only ornamentation in the room.

“We kick off our shoes in the buildings—except for the transit corridors you came through earlier,” she said. She led the way to the other pagoda. It was almost identical to the first, except for the shoji screens being latched closed here and a futon on the floor near them. “A. Bettik’s stuff,” she said, pointing to a small, red-painted locker near the futon. “This is where we’ve set you up to bunk. Come on in.” She slipped her boots off, crossed to the tatami mat, slid the shoji back, and sat cross-legged on the mat.

I removed my boots, set the pack against the south wall, and went over to sit next to her.

“Well,” she said and gripped my forearms again. “Gosh.”

For a minute I could not speak. I wondered if the altitude or the rich atmosphere was making me so emotional. I concentrated on watching lines of people in bright chubas leaving the Temple and walking the narrow ledges and bridges west along the cliff face. Directly across from our open door here was the gleaming massif of Heng Shan, its icefields glowing in the late afternoon light. “Jesus,” I said softly. “It’s beautiful here, kiddo.”

“Yes. And deadly if one is not careful. Tomorrow A. Bettik and I will take you up on the face and give you a refresher course on climbing gear and protocol.”

“Primer course is more like it,” I said. I could not stop looking at her face, her eyes. I was afraid that if I touched her bare skin again, visible voltage would leap between us. I remembered that electric shock whenever we had touched when she was a kid. I took a breath. “Okay,” I said. “When you got here, the Dalai Lama—whoever that is—said that you could work on the Temple here. So when did you get here? How did you get here? When did you meet Rachel and Theo? Who else do you know well here? What happened after we said good-bye in Hannibal? What happened to everyone else at Taliesin? Have the Pax troops been after you? Where did you learn all the architectural stuff? Do you still talk with the Lions and Tigers and Bears? How did you …”

Aenea held up one hand. She was laughing. “One thing at a time, Raul. I need to hear all about your trip too, you know.”

I looked into her eyes. “I dreamed that we were talking,” I said. “You told me about the four steps … learning the language of the dead … learning …”

“The language of the living,” she finished for me. “Yes. I had that dream too.”

My eyebrows must have arched.

Aenea smiled and set both her hands on mine. Her hands were larger, covering my oversized fist. I remembered, when both her hands would have disappeared in one of mine. “I do remember the dream, Raul. And I dreamed that you were in pain … your back …”

“Kidney stone,” I said, wincing at the memory.

“Yes. Well, I guess it shows that we’re still friends if we can share dreams while light-years apart.”

“Light-years,” I repeated. “All right, how did you get across them, Aenea? How did you get here? Where else have you been?”

She nodded and began speaking. The wind through the open wall screens rustled her hair. While she spoke, the evening light grew richer and higher on the great mountain to the north and across the cliff face to the east and west.

AENEA HAD BEEN THE LAST TO LEAVE TALIESIN West, but that was only four days after I had paddled down the Mississippi. The other apprentices had left by different farcasters, she said, and the dropship had used the last of its power to ferry them to the various portals—near the Golden Gate Bridge, at the edge of the Grand Canyon, atop the stone faces at Mount Rushmore, beneath the rusted girders of launch gantries at the Kennedy Spaceport Historical Park—all over the western hemisphere of Old Earth, it seemed. Aenea’s farcaster had been built into an adobe house in a pueblo north of the empty city called Santa Fe. A. Bettik had farcast with her. I blinked in jealousy at this, but said nothing.

Her first farcast had brought her to a high-gravity world called Ixion. The Pax had a presence there, but it was concentrated primarily in the opposite hemisphere. Ixion had never recovered properly from the Fall, and the high, jungle plateau where Aenea and A. Bettik had emerged was a maze of overgrown ruins populated primarily by warring tribes of neo-Marxists and Native American resurgencists, this volatile mixture further destabilized by bands of renegade and roving ARNists who were attempting to bring back all recorded species of Old Earth dinosaur.

Aenea made the tale funny—hiding A. Bettik’s blue skin and obvious android status with great daubs of the decorative face paint the locals used, the audacity of a sixteen-year-old girl demanding money—or in this case, food and furs in barter—for heading up the reconstruction efforts in the old Ixion cities of Canbar, Iliumut, and Maoville. But it had worked. Not only had Aenea helped in the redesign and rebuilding of three of the old city centers and countless small homes, but she had started a series of “discussion circles” that brought listeners in from a dozen of the warring tribes.

Here Aenea was being circumspect, I knew, but I wanted to know what these “discussion circles” were all about.

“Just things,” she said. “They would raise the topic, I would suggest some things to think about, and people would talk.”

“Did you teach them?” I asked, thinking of the prophecy that the child of the John Keats cybrid would be the One Who Teaches.

“In the Socratic sense, I guess,” said Aenea.

“What’s that … oh, yeah.” I remembered the Plato she had steered me toward in the Taliesin library. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, had taught by questioning, drawing out truths that people already held within themselves. I had thought that technique highly dubious, at best.

She went on. Some of the members of her discussion group had become devoted listeners, returning every evening and following her when she moved from ruined city to ruined city on Ixion.

“You mean disciples,” I said.

Aenea frowned. “I don’t like that word much, Raul.”

I folded my arms and looked out at the alpenglow illuminating the cloudtops many kilometers below and the brilliant evening light on the northern peak. “You may not like it, but it sounds like the correct word to me, kiddo. Disciples follow their teacher wherever she travels, trying to glean one last bit of knowledge from her.”

“Students follow their teacher,” said Aenea.

“All right,” I said, not willing to derail the story by arguing. “Go on.”

There was not much more to tell about Ixion, she said. She and A. Bettik were on the world about one local year, five months standard. Most of the building had been with stone blocks and her design had been ancient-classical, almost Greek.

“What about the Pax?” I said. “Did they ever come sniffing around?”

“Some of the missionaries took part in the discussions,” said Aenea. “One of them … a Father Clifford … became good friends with A. Bettik.”

“Didn’t he—they—turn you in? They must still be hunting for us.”

“I am sure that Father Clifford didn’t,” said Aenea. “But eventually some of the Pax troopers began looking for us in the western hemisphere where we were working. The tribes hid us for another month. Father Clifford was coming to evening discussions even when the skimmers were flying back and forth over the jungle looking for us.”

“What happened?” I felt like a two-year-old who would ask questions just to keep the other person talking. It had only been a few months of separation—including the dream-ridden cold sleep—but I had forgotten exactly how much I loved the sound of my young friend’s voice.

“Nothing, really,” she said. “I finished the last job—an old amphitheater for plays and town meetings, fittingly enough—and A. Bettik and I left. Some of the … students … left as well.”

I blinked. “With you?” Rachel had said that she had met Aenea on a world called Amritsar and traveled here with her. Perhaps Theo had come from Ixion.

“No, no one came with me from Ixion,” Aenea said softly. “They had other places to go. Things to teach to others.”

I looked at her for a moment. “You mean the Lions and Tigers and Bears are allowing others to farcast now? Or are all the old portals opening?”

“No,” answered Aenea, although to which question I was not sure. “No, the farcasters are as dead as ever. It’s just … well … a few special cases.”

Again I did not press the issue. She went on.

After Ixion, she had ’cast to the world of Maui-Covenant.

“Siri’s world!” I said, remembering Grandam’s voice teaching me the cadences of the Hyperion Cantos. That had been the locale for one of the pilgrims’ tales.

Aenea nodded and continued. Maui-Covenant had been battered by revolution and Hegemony attacks way back during the Web, had recovered during the Fall interregnum, had been recolonized during the Pax expansion without the help of the locals who, in the best Siri tradition, had fought from their motile isles and alongside their dolphin companions until Pax Fleet and Swiss Guard had put their boots down hard. Now Maui-Covenant was being Christianized with a vengeance, the residents of the one large continent, the Equatorial Archipelago, and the thousands of migrating motile isles being sent to “Christian academies” for reeducation.

But Aenea and A. Bettik had stepped through to a motile isle still belonging to the rebels—groups of neo-pagans called Sirists who sailed at night, floated among the traveling archipelagoes of empty isles during the daylight, and who fought the Pax at every turn.

“What did you build?” I asked. I thought that I remembered from the Cantos that the motile isles carried little except treehouses under their sailtrees.

“Treehouses,” said Aenea, grinning. “Lots of treehouses. Also some underwater domes. That’s where the pagans were spending most of their time.”

“So you designed treehouses.”

She shook her head. “Are you kidding? These are—next to the missing God’s Grove Templars—the best treehouse builders in human space. I studied how to build treehouses. They were gracious enough to let A. Bettik and me help.”

“Slave labor,” I said.

“Exactly.”

She had spent only some three standard months on Maui-Covenant. That is where she had met Theo Bernard.

“A pagan rebel?” I said.

“A runaway Christian,” corrected Aenea. “She had come to Maui-Covenant as a colonist. She fled the colonies and joined the Sirists.”

I was frowning without realizing it. “She carries a cruciform?” I said. Born-again Christians still made me nervous.

“Not anymore,” said Aenea.

“But how …”I knew of no way that a Christian with the cross could rid herself of a cruciform, short of the secret ritual of excommunication, which only the Church could perform.

“I’ll explain later,” said Aenea. Before her tale was done, this phrase would be used more than a few times.

After Maui-Covenant, she and A. Bettik and Theo Bernard had farcast to Renaissance Vector.

“Renaissance Vector!” I almost shouted. That was a Pax stronghold. We had almost been shot down on Renaissance Vector. It was a hyperindustrialized world, all cities and robot factories and Pax centers.

“Renaissance Vector.” Aenea smiled. It had not been easy. They had been forced to disguise A. Bettik as a burn victim with a synflesh mask. It had been uncomfortable for him for the six months they were there.

“What jobs did you do there?” I asked, finding it hard to imagine my friend and her friends staying hidden in the thronging world-city that was Renaissance Vector.

“Just one job,” said Aenea. “We worked on the new cathedral in Da Vinci—St. Matthew’s.”

It took me a minute of staring before I could speak. “You worked on a cathedral? A Pax cathedral? A Christian church?”

“Of course,” said Aenea calmly. “I labored alongside some of the best stonemasons, glass workers, builders, and craftsmen in the business. I was an apprentice at first, but before we left I was assistant to the chief designer working on the nave.”

I could only shake my head. “And did you … have discussion circles?”

“Yes,” said Aenea. “More came on Renaissance Vector than on any of the other worlds. Thousands of students, before it was over.”

“I’m amazed that you weren’t betrayed.”

“I was,” she said. “But not by one of the students. One of the glass workers turned us in to the local Pax garrison. A. Bettik, Theo, and I barely made it out.”

“Via farcaster,” I said.

“By … ’casting, yes,” said Aenea. It was only much later that I realized that there had been a slight hesitation in her voice there, an unspoken qualification.

“And did others leave with you?”

“Not with me,” she said again. “But hundreds ’cast elsewhere.”

“Where?” I said, mystified.

Aenea sighed. “Do you remember our discussion, Raul, where I said that the Pax thought that I was a virus? And that they were right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, these students of mine are also carrying the virus.” she said. “They had places to go. People to infect.”

Her litany of worlds and jobs went on. Patawpha for three months, where she had used her treehouse experience to build mansions in the interwoven branches and trunks growing from the endless swamps there.

Amritsar, where she had worked for four standard months in the desert building tent homes and meeting places for the nomad bands of Sikhs and Sufis who wandered the green sands there.

“That’s where you met Rachel,” I said.

“Correct.”

“What is Rachel’s last name?” I said. “She didn’t mention it to me.”

“She has never mentioned it to me, either,” said Aenea and went on with her tale.

From Amritsar, she and A. Bettik and her two female friends had ’cast to Groombridge Dyson D. This world had been a Hegemony terraforming failure, abandoned to its encroaching methane-ammonia glaciers and ice-crystal hurricanes, its dwindling number of colonists retreating to its biodomes and orbital construction shacks. But its people—mostly Suni Muslim engineers from the failed Trans-African Genetic Reclamation Project—stubbornly refused to die during the Fall, and ended up terraforming Groombridge Dyson D into a Laplandic tundra world with breathable air and adapted-Old Earth flora and fauna, including wooly mammoths wandering the equatorial highlands. The millions of hectares of grasslands were perfect for horses—Old Earth horses of the kind that had disappeared during the Tribulations before the homeworld fell into itself—so the gene-designers took their original seedship stock and bred horses by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands. Nomad bands wandered the greenways of the southern continent, living in a kind of symbiosis with the great herds, while the farmers and city folk moved into the high foothills along the equator. There were violent predators there, evolved and unleashed during the centuries of accelerated and self-directed ARNying experimentation: mutant carrion-breed packs’ and burrowing night terrors, thirty-meter-long grass serpents descended from those from Hyperion’s Sea of Grass and Fuji rock tigers, smart wolves, and IQ-enhanced grizzlies.

The humans had the technology to hunt the adapted killers to extinction in a year or less, but the residents of the world chose a different path: the nomads would take their chances, one-on-one with the predators, protecting the great horse herds as long as the grass grows and the water flows, while the city types would begin work on a wall—a single wall eventually to be more than five thousand kilometers long that would separate the wilder sections of the savage highlands from the horse-herd savannahs and evolving eye lad forests to the south. And the wall was to be more than a wall, it was to become the great linear city of Groombridge Dyson D, thirty meters tall at its lowest, its ramparts resplendent with mosques and minarets, the travelway on top wide enough that three chariots could pass without rubbing wheels.

The colonists were too few and too busy with other projects to work full-time on such a wall, but they programmed robots and decanted androids from their seedship vaults to carry out the labor. Aenea and her friends joined in this project, working for six standard months as the wall took shape and began its relentless march along the base of the highlands and the edge of the grasslands.

“A. Bettik found two of his siblings there,” said Aenea softly.

“My God,” I whispered. I had almost forgotten. When we were on Sol Draconi Septem some years ago, sitting by the warmth of a heating cube in Father Glaucus’s book-lined study inside a skyscraper that, in turn, was frozen within the eternal glacier of that world’s frozen atmosphere … A. Bettik had talked about one of his reasons for coming on the Odyssey with the child, Aenea, and me: he was hoping against logic to find his four siblings—three brothers and a sister. They had been separated shortly after their training period as children—if an android’s accelerated early years could be called “childhood.”

“So he found them?” I said, marveling.

“Two of them,” repeated Aenea. “One of the other males in his growth crèche—A. Antibbe—and his sister, A. Darria.”

“Were they like him?” I asked. The old poet had used androids in his empty city of Endymion, but I had not paid much attention to any of them except A. Bettik. Too much had been happening too fast.

“Much like him,” said Aenea. “But very different, as well. Perhaps he will tell you more.”

She wrapped up her story. After six standard months working on the linear city wall on Groombridge Dyson D, they had had to leave.

“Had to leave?” I said. “The Pax?”

“The Commission for Justice and Peace, to be precise,” said Aenea. “We did not want to leave, but we had no choice.”

“What is the Commission for Justice and Peace?” I said. Something about the way she had pronounced the words made the hairs on my arm stand up.

“I’ll explain later,” she said.

“All right,” I said, “but explain something else now.”

Aenea nodded and waited.

“You say you spent five standard months on Ixion,” I said. “Three months on Maui-Covenant, six months on Renaissance Vector, three months on Patawpha, four standard months on Amritsar, about six standard months on—what was it?— Groombridge Dyson D?”

Aenea nodded.

“And you’ve been here about a standard year you say?”

“Yes.”

“That’s only thirty-nine standard months,” I said. “Three standard years and three months.”

She waited. The corners of her mouth twitched slightly, but I realized that she was not going to smile … it looked more as if she was trying to avoid crying. Finally, she said, “You were always good at math, Raul.”

“My trip here took five years’ time-debt,” I said softly. “So that’s about sixty standard months for you, but you’ve only accounted for thirty-nine. Where are the missing twenty-one standard months, kiddo?”

I saw the tears in her eyes. Her mouth was quavering slightly, but she tried to speak in a light tone. “It was sixty-two standard months, one week, and six days for me,” she said. “Five years, two months, and one day time-debt on the ship, about four days accelerating and decelerating, and eight days’ travel time. You forgot your travel time.”

“All right, kiddo,” I said, seeing the emotion well in her. Her hands were shaking. “Do you want to talk about the missing … what was it?”

“Twenty-three months, one week, and six hours,” she said.

Almost two standard years, I thought. And she doesn’t want to tell me what happened to her during that time. I had never seen her exercise such rigid control before; it was as if she were trying to hold herself together physically against some terrible centrifugal force.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, pointing out the open doorway at the cliff face to the west of the Temple. “Look.”

I could just make out figures—two-legged and four-legged—on the narrow ledge. They were still several klicks away along the cliff face. I walked over to my pack, retrieved my binoculars, and studied the forms.

“The pack animals are zygoats,” said Aenea. “The porters are hired in Phari Marketplace and will be returning in the morning. See anyone familiar?”

I did. The blue face in the hooded chuba looked much the way it had five of his years earlier. I turned back to Aenea, but she was obviously finished talking about her missing two years. I allowed her to change the subject again.

Aenea began asking me questions then and we were still talking when A. Bettik arrived. The women—Rachel and Theo—wandered in a few minutes later. One of the tatami mats folded back to reveal a cooking brazier in the floor near the open wall, and Aenea and A. Bettik began cooking for everyone. Others wandered in and were introduced—the foremen George Tsarong and Jigme Norbu, two sisters who were in charge of much of the decorative railing work—Kuku and Kay Se, Gyalo Thondup in his formal silken robes and Jigme Taring in soldier’s garb, the teaching monk Chim Din and his master, Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi, abbot of the gompa at the Temple Hanging in Air, a female monk named Donka Nyapso, a traveling trade agent named Tromo Trochi of Dhomu, Tsipon Shakabpa who was the Dalai Lama’s overseer of construction here at the Temple, and the famed climber and paraglide flyer Lhomo Dondrub, who was perhaps the most striking man I had ever seen and—I later discovered—one of the few flyers who would drink beer or break bread with Dugpas, Drukpas, or Drungpas.

The food was tsampa and momo—a roasted barley mixed into zygoat-buttered tea, forming a paste that one rolled into balls and ate with other balls of steamed dough holding mushrooms, cold zygoat tongue, sugared bacon, and bits of pears that A. Bettik told me were from the fabled gardens of Hsi wang-mu. More people came in as the bowls were being handed out—Labsang Samten—who, A. Bettik whispered, was the older brother of the current Dalai Lama and was now in his third year of monkhood here at the Temple, and various Drungpas from the wooded clefts—including master carpenter Changchi Kenchung with his long, waxed mustaches, Perri Samdup, an interpreter, and Rimsi Kyipup, a brooding and unhappy young scaffold-rigger. Not all of the monks who dropped in that night were descended from the Chinese/Tibetan Old Earth seedship colonists. Laughing and lifting their rough mugs of beer with us were the fearless high riggers Haruyuki Otaki and Kenshiro Endo, the master bamboo workers Voytek Majer and Janusz Kurtyka, and the brickmakers Kim Byung-Soon and Viki Groselj. The mayor of Jo-kung, the nearest cliff city, was there—Charles Chi-kyap Kempo—who also served as Lord Chamberlain of all the Temple’s priest officials and was an appointed member of both the Tsongdu, the regional assembly of elders, and advisor to Yik-Tshang, literally the “Nest of Letters,” the secret four-person body that reviewed the monks’ progress and appointed all priests. Charles Chi-kyap Kempo was the first member of our party to drink enough to pass out. Chim Din and several of the other monks dragged the snoring man away from the edge of the platform and left him sleeping in the corner.

There were others—at least forty people must have filled the little pagoda as the last of the sunlight ebbed away and the moonlight from the Oracle and three of her siblings lit the cloudtops below—but I forgot their names that night as we ate tsampa and momo, drank beer in great quantities, and made the torches burn bright in Hsuan-k’ung Ssu.

SOME HOURS LATER THAT EVENING, I WENT OUT TO relieve myself. A. Bettik showed me the way to the toilets. I had assumed that one would just use the edge of platforms, but he assured me that on a world where dwelling structures had many levels—most of them above or below others—this was considered bad form. The toilets were built into the side of the cliff, enclosed by bamboo partitions, and the sanitary arrangements consisted of cleverly engineered pipes and sluices leading into fissures running deep into the cliff as well as washbasins cut in stone counters. There was even a shower area and solar-heated water for washing.

When I had rinsed my hands and face and stepped back out onto the platform—the chill breeze helping to sober me a bit—I stood next to A. Bettik in the moonlight and looked into the glowing pagoda where the crowd had arranged itself in concentric circles with my young friend as the locus. The laughter and chaos had disappeared. One by one, the monks and holy men and riggers and carpenters and stonemasons and gompa abbots and mayors and bricklayers were asking soft questions of the young woman, and she was answering.

The scene reminded me of something—some recent image—and it took me only a minute to recall it: the forty-AU deceleration into this star system, with the ship offering up holo representations of the G-type sun with its eleven orbiting planets, two asteroid belts, and countless comets. Aenea was definitely the sun in this system, and all of the men and women in that room were orbiting around her as surely as had the worlds, asteroids, and comets in the ship’s projection.

I leaned on a bamboo post and looked at A. Bettik in the moonlight. “She’d better be careful,” I said softly to the android, enunciating each word carefully, “or they’ll begin treating her like a god.”

A. Bettik nodded ever so slightly. “They do not think that M. Aenea is a god, M. Endymion,” he murmured.

“Good.” I put my arm around the android’s shoulder. “Good.”

“However,” he said, “many of them are becoming convinced, despite her best efforts to assure them otherwise, that she is God.”