17

he evening A. Bettik and I bring the news of the Pax’s arrival, Aenea leaves her discussion group, comes to where we are standing at the door, and listens intently.

“Chim Din says that the Dalai Lama has allowed them to occupy the old gompa at Otter Lake,” I say, “in the shadow of the Shivling.”

Aenea says nothing.

“They won’t be allowed to use their flying machines,” I say, “but they’re free to walk anywhere in the province. Anywhere.”

Aenea nods.

I want to grab her and shake her. “That means they’ll hear about you soon, kiddo,” I say sharply. “There’ll be missionaries here within weeks—maybe days—spying around and sending word back to the Pax Enclave.” I let out a breath. “Shit, we’ll be lucky if it’s just missionaries and not troopers.”

Aenea is silent another minute. Then she says, “We’re already lucky that it’s not the Commission for Justice and Peace.”

“What’s that?” I say. She had mentioned them before.

She shakes her head. “Nothing that’s immediately relevant, Raul. They must have some business here other than … than stamping out unorthodoxy.”

During my first days here, Aenea had told me about the fighting going on in and around Pax space—a Palestinian revolt on Mars that had resulted in the Pax evacuating the planet and nuking it from orbit, free trader rebellions in the Lambert Ring Territories and on Mare Infinitus, continued fighting on Ixion and dozens of other worlds. Renaissance Vector, with its huge Pax Fleet bases and countless bars and bordellos, had been a hornets’ nest of rumors and inside intelligence. And because most of the ships of the line in Pax Fleet were now the Gideon-drive archangels, the news was usually only a few days old.

One of the most intriguing rumors that Aenea had heard before coming to T’ien Shan was that at least one of those archangel-class ships had gone rogue, escaped to Ouster space, and was now flashing into Pax space to attack convoys of Pax Mercantilus ships—disabling rather than destroying the crewed freighters—and to disrupt Pax Fleet task forces preparing to attack Ousters out beyond the Great Wall. There had been a rumor during Aenea’s and A. Bettik’s last weeks on Renaissance Vector that the fleet bases there were in danger. Other rumors suggested that large elements of the fleet were now being kept in Pacem System to defend the Vatican. Whatever else was true about the tales of the rogue ship Raphael, it was uncontestable that His Holiness’s Crusade against the Ousters had been set back years by the hit-and-run attacks.

But none of that seems important now as I stand waiting for Aenea’s response to this news of the Pax’s arrival on T’ien Shan. What do we do now, I wonder, farcast to her next world?

Instead of discussing flight, Aenea says, “The Dalai Lama will have a formal ceremony to welcome the Pax officials.”

“So?” I say after a moment.

“So we have to make sure that we get an invitation,” she says.

I doubt if my jaw is literally hanging slack, but it feels as if it is.

Aenea touches my shoulder. “I’ll take care of it,” she says. “I’ll talk to Charles Chi-kyap Kempo and Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi and make sure that they include us in any party invited to the ceremony.”

I am literally speechless as she goes back to her discussion group and the silent throng, their faces expectant and placid in the soft lantern light.

• • •

I READ THESE WORDS ON MICROVELLUM, REMEMBER writing them in my last days in the Schrödinger cat box in orbit around Armaghast, remember writing them in the haste of certainty that the laws of probability and quantum mechanics would soon be releasing cyanide into my closed-cycle universe, and I marvel at the present tense of the narrative. Then I remember the reason for this choice.

When I was sentenced to death in the Schrödinger box—egg-shaped, actually—I was allowed to bring very few of my own things into terminal exile. My clothes were my own. On a whim, they had given me a small rug for the floor of my Schrödinger cell—it was an ancient rug, a bit less than two meters long and a meter wide, frayed, with a small cut missing at one end. It was a replica of the Consul’s hawking mat. I had lost the real mat on Mare Infinitus many years before and the details of how it came back to me still lie ahead in my tale. I had given the actual hawking mat to A. Bettik, but it must have amused my torturers to furnish my final cell with this useless copy of a flying carpet.

So they had allowed me my clothes, the fake hawking mat and the palm-sized diskey journal I had taken from the ship on T’ien Shan. The corn-unit element of the journal had been disabled—not that it would broadcast through the energy shell of the Schrödinger box or that there was anyone for me to call—but the journal memory—after their careful study of it during my inquisition trial—had been left intact. It was on T’ien Shan that I had begun making notes and daily journal entries.

It was these notes that I had brought up onto the ’scriber screen in the Schrödinger cat box, reviewing them before writing this most personal of sections, and it was the immediacy in the notes, I believe, that led me to use the present-tense narrative. All of my memories of Aenea are vivid, but some of the memories brought back by these hurried entries at the end of a long day of work or adventure on T’ien Shan were so vital as to make me weep with renewed loss. I relived those moments as I wrote those words.

And some of her discussion groups were recorded verbatim on the diskey journal. I played those during my last days just to hear Aenea’s soft voice once again.

• • •

“TELL US ABOUT THE TECHNOCORE,” ONE OF THE monks requests during the discussion hour this night of the Pax’s arrival. “Please tell us about the Core.”

Aenea hesitates only an instant, bowing her head slightly as if ordering her thoughts.

“Once upon a time,” she begins. She always begins her long explanations this way.

“Once upon a time,” says Aenea, “more than a thousand standard years ago, before the Hegira … before the Big Mistake of ’08 … the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project … a great mass of silicon and ancient amplification, switching, and detection devices called transistors and chips and circuit boards … a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping—if you will pardon the expression—the human brain in form and function.

“Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

“You have to imagine now, an Old Earth before humankind had offworld colonies. No Hawking drive. No interplanetary flight to speak of. All of our eggs were literally in one carton, and that carton was the lovely blue and white water world of Old Earth.

“By the end of the twentieth century, Christian era, this little world had a crude datasphere. Basic planetary telecommunication had evolved into a decentralized swarm system of old silicon-based computers demanding no organization or hierarchy, demanding nothing beyond a common communications protocol. Creation of a distributed-memory hive mind was then inevitable.

“The earliest lineal ancestors to today’s Core personalities were not projects to create artificial intelligence, but incidental efforts to simulate artificial life. In the 1940s, the great-grandfather of the TechnoCore—a mathematician named John von Neumann—had done all the proofs of artificial self-replication. As soon as the early silicon-based computers became small enough for individuals to play with, curious amateurs began practicing synthetic biology within the confines of these machines’ CPU cycles. Hyperlife—self-reproducing, information-storing, interacting, metabolizing, evolving—came into existence in the 1960s. It escaped the tide pools of the individual machines in the last decade of that century, moving into the embryonic planetary datasphere that they called the Internet or the web.

“The earliest AIs were dumb as dirt. Or perhaps the better metaphor would be that they were as dumb as early cellular life that was in the dirt. Some of the earliest hypercritters floating in the warm medium of the datasphere—which was also evolving—were 80-byte organisms inserted into a block of RAM in a virtual computer—a computer simulated by a computer. One of the first humans to release such creatures into the datasphere ocean was named Tom Ray and he was not an AI expert or computer programmer or cyberpuke, which they called hackers then—but was a biologist, an insect collector, botanist, and bird-watcher, and someone who had spent years collecting ants in the jungle for a pre-Hegira scientist named E. O. Wilson. Watching ants, Tom Ray became interested in evolution, and wondered if he could not just simulate evolution in one of the early computers but create real evolution there. None of the cyberpukes he spoke with were interested in the idea, so he taught himself computer programming. The cyberpukes said that evolving and mutating code sequences happened all the time in computers—they were called bugs and screwed-up programs. They said that if his code sequences evolved into something else they would almost certainly be nonfunctional, nonviable, as most mutations are, and would just foul up the operation of the computer software. So Tom Ray created a virtual computer—a simulated computer within his real computer—for his code-sequenced creations. And then he created an actual 80-byte code-sequence creature that could reproduce, die, and evolve in his computer-within-a-computer.

“The 80-byte copied itself into more 80-bytes. These 80-byte proto-AI cell-things would have quickly filled their virtual universe, like pond scum on top of pond scum in an Elysium early Earth, but Tom Ray gave each 80-byte a date tag, gave them age in other words, and programmed in an executioner that he called the Reaper. The Reaper wandered through this virtual universe and harvested old 80-byte critters and nonviable mutants.

“But evolution, as it is wont to do, tried to outsmart the Reaper. A mutant 79-byte creature proved not only to be viable, but soon outbred and outpaced the 80-bytes. The hyperlifes, ancestors to our Core AIs, were just born but already they were optimizing their genomes. Soon a 45-byte organism had evolved and all but eliminated the earlier artificial life-forms. As their creator, Tom Ray found this odd. 45-bytes did not include enough code to allow for reproduction. More than that, the 45s were dying off as the 80s disappeared. He did an autopsy on one of the 45-creatures.

“It turned out that all of the 45-bytes were parasites. They borrowed needed reproductive code from the 80s to copy themselves. The 79s, it turned out, were immune to the 45-parasite. But as the 80s and 45s moved toward extinction in their coevolutionary downward spiral, a mutant of the 45s appeared. It was a 51-byte parasite and it could prey on the vital 79s. And so it went.

“I mention all this, because it is important to understand that from the very first appearance of human-created artificial life and intelligence, such life was parasitic. It was more than parasitic—it was hyperparasitic. Each new mutation led to parasites which could prey on earlier parasites. Within a few billion generations—that is to say, CPU cycles—this artificial life had become hyper-hyper-hyperparasitic. Within standard months of his creation of hyperlife, Tom Ray discovered 22-byte creatures flourishing in his virtual medium … creatures so algorithmi-cally efficient that when challenged by Tom Ray, human programmers could create nothing closer than a 31-byte version. Only months after their creation, hyperlife creatures had evolved an efficiency that their creators could not match!

“By the early twenty-first century, there was a thriving biosphere of artificial life on Old Earth, both in the quickly evolving datasphere and in the macrosphere of human life. Although the breakthroughs of DNA-computing, bubble memories, standing wave-front parallel processing, and hypernetworking were just being explored, human designers had created silicon-based entities of remarkable ingenuity. And they had created them by the billions. Microchips were in everything from chairs to cans of beans on store shelves to groundcars to artificial human body parts. The machines had grown smaller and smaller until the average human home or office was filled with tens of thousands of them. A worker’s chair would recognize her as soon as she sat, bring up the file she had been working on in her crude silicon computer, chat with another chip in a coffeemaker to heat up the coffee, enable the telecommunications grid to deal with calls and faxes and crude electronic mail arrivals so that the worker would not be disturbed, interact with the main house or office computer so that the temperature was optimal, and so forth. In their stores, microchips in the cans of beans on the shelves noted their own price and price changes, ordered more of themselves when they were running short, kept track of the consumers’ buying habits, and interacted with the store and the other commodities in it. This web of interaction became as complex and busy as the bubble and froth of Old Earth’s organic stew in its early oceans.

“Within forty years of Tom Ray’s 80-byte a-cell, humans were accustomed to talking to and otherwise interacting with the countless artificial life-forms in their cars, their offices, their elevators … even in their bodies, as medical monitors and proto-shunts moved toward true nanotechnology.

“The TechnoCore came into autonomous being sometime during this period. Humanity had understood—quite correctly as it turned out—that for artificial life and artificial intelligence to be effective, it must be autonomous. It must evolve and diversify much as organic life had on the planet. And it did so. As well as the biosphere surrounding the planet, hyperlife now wrapped the world in a living datasphere. The Core evolved not just as an abstract entity within the information flow of the web datasphere, but among the interactions of a billion tiny, autonomous, chip-driven micromachines carrying out their mundane tasks in the human macroworld.

“Humanity and the billion-faceted, evolving Core entity soon became as symbiotic as acacia plants and the marauding ants that protect, prune, and propagate the acacia as their sole food source. This is known as convolution, and humans understand the concept on a truly cellular level, since so much of organic life on Old Earth had been created and optimized by the reciprocal coevolutionary dance. But where human beings saw a comfortable symbiosis, the early AI entities saw—were capable of seeing—only new opportunities for parasitism.

“Computers might be turned off, software programs might be terminated, but the hive mind of the proto-Core had already moved into the emerging datasphere, and that could be turned off only by planetary catastrophe.

“The Core eventually provided that catastrophe in the Big Mistake of ’08, but not before it had diversified its own medium and moved beyond a mere planetary scale.

“Early experiments in the Hawking drive, conducted and understood only by advanced Core elements, had revealed the existence of the underlying Planck-space reality of the Void Which Binds. Core AIs of the day—DNA-based, wave-form in structure, driven by genetic algorithms, parallel in function-completed the construction of the early Hawking-drive ships and began design of the farcaster network.

“Human beings always saw the Hawking drive as a shortcut through time and space—a realization of their old hyperdrive dreams. They conceptualized farcaster portals as convenient holes punched through space/time. This was the human preconception, borne out by their own mathematical models, and confirmed by the most powerful Core computing AIs. It was all a lie.

“Planck space, the Void Which Binds, is a multidimensional medium with its own reality and—as the Core was soon to learn —its own topography. The Hawking drive was not and is not a drive at all, in the classic sense, but an entry device which touches on Planck-space topography just long enough to change coordinates in the four-dimensional space/time continuum. Farcaster portals, on the other hand, allow actual entry to the Void Which Binds medium.

“To humans, the reality was obvious—step through a hole in space/time here, exit instantaneously via another farcaster hole there. My Uncle Martin had a farcaster home with adjoining rooms on dozens of different worlds. Farcasters created the Hegemony’s WorldWeb. Another invention, the fatline—a faster-than-light communications medium—allowed for instantaneous communication between star systems. All the prerequisites for an interstellar society had been met.

“But the Core did not perfect the Hawking drive, the farcaster, and the fatline for human convenience. Indeed, the Core never perfected anything in their dealings with the Void Which Binds.

“The Core knew from the beginning that the Hawking drive was little more than a failed attempt to enter Planck space. Driving spacecraft via Hawking drive was comparable, they knew, to moving an oceangoing vessel by setting off a series of explosions at its stern and riding the waves. Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient. They knew that despite all appearances to the contrary and despite their claims of having created them, there were not millions of farcaster portals during the height of the World Web … only one. All farcaster portals were actually a single entry door to Planck space, manipulated across space/time to provide the functioning illusion of so many doors. If the Core had attempted to explain the truth to humanity, they might have used the analogy of a flashlight beam being rapidly flashed around a closed room. There were not many sources of light, only one in rapid transition. But they never bothered to explain this … in truth, they have kept the secret to this day.

“And the Core knew that the topography of the Void Which Binds could be modulated to transmit information instantaneously—via the fatline—but that this was a clumsy and destructive use of the medium of Planck space, rather like communicating across a continent by means of artificially produced earthquakes. But it offered this fatline service to humanity without ever explaining it because it served their purpose to do so. They had their own plans for the Planck-space medium.

“What the Core realized in their earliest experiments was that the Void Which Binds was the perfect medium for their own existence. No longer would they have to depend upon electromagnetic communication or tightbeam or even modulated neutrino broadcast for their datasphere networks. No longer would they need human beings or robot probes to travel to the stars to expand the physical parameters of that network. By simply moving the primary elements of the Core into the Void Which Binds, the AIs would have a safe hiding place from their organic rivals … a hiding place which was at once nowhere and everywhere.

“It was during this migration of the Core personae from human-based dataspheres to the Void Which Binds megasphere that the Core discovered that Planck space was not an empty universe. Behind its metadimensional hills and deep in its folded quantum-space arroyos lurked … something different. Someone different. There were intelligences there. The Core probed and then recoiled in awe and terror at the potential power of these Others. These were the Lions and Tigers and Bears spoken of by Ummon, the Core persona who claimed to have created and killed my father.

“The Core’s retreat had been so hasty, its reconnaissance into the Planck-space universe so incomplete, that it had no idea where in real space/time these Lions and Tigers and Bears dwell … or if they existed in real-time at all. Nor could the Core AIs identify the Others as having evolved from organic life as humanity had done or from artificial life as they had. But the briefest glimpse had shown them that these Others could manipulate time and space with the ease that human beings had once manipulated steel and iron. Such power was beyond comprehension. The Core’s reaction was pure panic and immediate retreat.

“This discovery and panic happened just as the Core had initiated the action of destroying Old Earth. My Uncle Martin’s poem sings of how it was the Core that arranged the Big Mistake of ’08, the Kiev Group’s ‘accidental’ dropping of a black hole into the guts of Old Earth, but his poem does not tell—because he did not know—of the Core’s panic at the discovery of the Lions and Tigers and Bears and how they rushed to stop their planned destruction of Old Earth. It was not easy to scoop a growing black hole out of the core of the collapsing planet, but the Core designed a means and set about doing it in haste.

“Then, the home planet disappeared … not destroyed as it seemed to the humans, not saved as the Core had hoped … just gone. The Core knew that the Lions and Tigers and Bears had to be the ones who took the Earth, but as to how … and to where … and for what reason … they had no clue. They computed the amount of energy necessary to farcast an entire planet away and again they began quaking in their hyperlife boots. Such intelligences could explode the core of an entire galaxy to use as an energy source as easily as humans could light a campfire on a cold night. The Core entities shit hyperlife bricks in their fear.

“I should back up here to explain the reasons for the Core’s decision to destroy Earth and their subsequent attempt to save it. The reasons go back to Tom Ray’s 80-byte RAM creatures. As I explained, the life and intelligence which evolved in the data-sphere medium knew no other form of evolution than parasitism, hyperparasitism, and hyper-hyper-hyper-hyperparasitism. But the Core was aware of the shortcomings of absolute parasitism and knew that the only way it could grow beyond parasite status and parasite psychology was to evolve in response to the physical universe—that is, to have physical bodies as well as abstract Core personae. The Core had multiple sensory inputs and could create neural networks, but what it required for nonparasitic evolution was a constant and coordinated system of neural feedback circuits—that is, eyes, ears, tongues, limbs, fingers, toes … bodies.

“The Core created cybrids for that purpose—bodies grown from human DNA but connected to their Core-based personae via fatline—but cybrids were difficult to monitor and became aliens when put down in a human landscape. Cybrids would never be comfortable on worlds inhabited by billions of organically evolved human beings. So the Core made its early plans to destroy Old Earth and thin out the human race by a factor of ninety percent.

“The Core did have plans for incorporating the surviving elements of the human race into their cybrid-inhabited universe after the death of Old Earth—using them as spare DNA stock and slave labor, much as we used androids—but the discovery of Lions and Tigers and Bears and the panicked retreat from Planck space complicated those plans. Until the threat of these Others was assessed and eliminated, the Core would have to continue its parasitic relationship with humanity. It devised the farcasters in the old WorldWeb just for that purpose. To humans, the trip through the farcaster medium was instantaneous. But in the timeless topography of Planck space, the subjective dwell-time there could be as long as the Core wished. The Core tapped into billions of human brains during that period, using human minds millions of times each standard day, to create a huge neural network for their own computing purposes. Every time a human stepped through a farcaster portal, it was as if the Core cut open that person’s skull, removed the gray matter, laid the brain out on a workbench, and hooked it up to billions of other brains in their giant, parallel-processing, organic computer. The humans completed their step from Planck space in a subjective instant of their time and never noticed the inconvenience.

“Ummon told my father, the John Keats cybrid, that the Core consisted of three warring camps—the Ultimates, obsessed with creating their own god, the Ultimate Intelligence; the Volatiles, who wished to eliminate humanity and get on with their own goals; and the Stables, who wished to maintain the status quo vis-à-vis humankind. This explanation was an absolute lie.

“There were not and are not three camps in the TechnoCore … there are billions. The Core is the ultimate exercise in anarchy—hyperparasitism carried to its highest power. Core elements vie for power in alliances which might last centuries or microseconds. Billions of the parasitic personae ebb and flow in unholy alliances built to control or predict events. You see, Core personae refuse to die unless they are forced to—Meina Gladstone’s deathbomb attack on the farcaster medium not only caused the Fall of the Farcasters, it killed billions of would-be immortal Core personae—but the individuals refuse to make way for others without a fight. Yet at the same time, the Core hyperlife needs death for its own evolution. But death, in the Core universe, has its own agenda.

“The Reaper program which Tom Ray created more than a thousand years ago still exists in the Core medium, mutated to a million alternate forms. Ummon never mentioned the Reapers as a Core faction, but they represent a far greater bloc than the Ultimates. It was the Reapers who created and first controlled the physical construct known as the Shrike.

“It’s an interesting footnote that those Core personae which survive the Reapers do so not just through parasitism, but through a necrophilic parasitism. This is the technique by which the original 22-byte artificial life-forms managed to evolve and survive in Tom Ray’s virtual evolution machine so many centuries ago—by stealing the scattered copy code of other byte creatures who were ‘reaped’ in the midst of reproducing. The Core parasites not only have sex, they have sex with the dead! This is how millions of the mutated Core personae survive today … by necrophilic hyperparasitism.

“What does the Core want from humankind now? Why has it revitalized the Catholic Church and allowed the Pax to come into existence? How do the cruciforms work and how do they serve the Core? How do the so-called Gideon-drive archangel ships really work and what is their effect on the Void Which Binds? And how is the Core dealing with the threat of the Lions and Tigers and Bears?

“These things we shall discuss another time.”

IT IS THE DAY AFTER WE LEARN OF THE COMING OF the Pax and I am working stone on the highest scaffolds.

During the first days after my arrival, I think that Rachel, Theo, Jigme Norbu, George Tsarong, and the others were doubtful if I could earn my keep on the construction site at Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. I admit that I had doubts of my own as I watched the hard work and skill on view here. But after a few days of literally learning the ropes of gear and climbing protocols on the rockfaces, ledges, cables, scaffolds, and slideways in the area, I volunteered for work duty and was given a chance to fail. I did not fail.

Aenea knew of my apprenticeship with Avrol Hume, not only landscaping the huge Beak estates but working stone and wood for follies and bridges, gazebos and towers. That work served me well here, and within two weeks I had graduated from the basic scaffolding crew to the select group of high riggers and stone workers laboring on the highest platforms. Aenea’s design allowed for the highest structures to rise to the great rock overhang and for various walkways and parapets actually to be incorporated into that stone. This is what we are working on now, chiseling stone and laying brick for the walkway along the edge of nothing, our scaffolds perilously canti levered far out over the drop. In the past three months my body has grown leaner and stronger, my reaction time quicker, and my judgment more careful as I work on sheer rock walls and slippery bonsai bamboo.

Lhomo Dondrub, the skilled flyer and climber, has volunteered to free-climb the end of the overhang here to set anchor points for the final meters of scaffolding and for the last hour Viki Groselj, Kim Byung-Soon, Haruyuki Otaki, Kenshiro Endo, Changchi Kenchung, Labsang Samten, a few of the other brickworkers, masons, high riggers, and I have been watching as Lhomo moves across the rock above the overhang without protection, moving like the proverbial Old Earth fly, his powerful arms and legs flexing under the thin material of his climbing garb, three points in touch with the slick, more-than-vertical stone at all times while his free hand or foot feels for the slightest rough spot on which to rest, the smallest fissure or crack in which to work a bolt for our anchor. It is terrifying to watch him, but also a privilege—as if we were able to go back in a time machine to watch Picasso paint or George Wu read poetry or Meina Gladstone give a speech. A dozen times I am sure that Lhomo is going to peel off and fall—it would take minutes for him to freefall into the poison clouds below—but each time he magically holds his place, or finds a friction point, or miraculously discovers a crack into which he can wedge a hand or finger to support his entire body.

Finally he is done, the lines are anchored and dangling, the cable points are secured, and Lhomo slides down to his early fixed point, traverses five meters laterally, drops into the stirrups of the overhang gear, and swings onto our work platform like some legendary superhero coming in for a landing. Labsang Samten hands him an icy mug of rice beer. Kenshiro and Viki pound him on the back. Changchi Kenchung, our master carpenter with the waxed mustaches, breaks into a bawdy song of praise. I shake my head and grin like an idiot. The day is exhilarating—a dome of blue sky, the Sacred Mountain of the North—Heng Shan—gleaming brightly across the cloud gap, and the winds moderate. Aenea tells me that the rainy season will descend on us within days—a monsoon from the south bringing months of rain, slick rock, and eventual snow—but that seems unlikely and distant on such a perfect day as this.

There is a touch at my elbow and Aenea is there. She has been out on the scaffolding most of the morning, or hanging from her harness on the worked rockface, supervising the stone and brick work on the walkway and parapets.

I am still grinning from the vicarious adrenaline rush of watching Lhomo. “Cables are ready to be rigged,” I say. “Three or four more good days and the wooden walkway will be done here. Then your final platform there”—I point to the ultimate edge of the overhang—“and voilà! Your project’s done except for the painting and polishing, kiddo.”

Aenea nods but it is obvious that her mind is not on the celebration around Lhomo or the imminent completion of her year of work. “Can you come walk with me a minute, Raul?”

I follow her down the scaffolding ladders, onto one of the permanent levels, and out a stone ledge. Small green birds take wing from a fissure as we pass.

From this angle, the Temple Hanging in Air is a work of art. The painted woodwork gleams rather than glows its dark red. The staircases and railings and fretwork are elegant and complex. Many of the pagodas have their shoji walls slid open and prayer flags and bedclothes flutter in the warm breeze. There are eight lovely shrines in the Temple, in ascending order along the rising walkways, each pagoda shrine representing a step in the Noble Eightfold Path as identified by the Buddha: the shrines line up on three axes relating to the three sections of the Path: Wisdom, Morality, and Meditation. On the ascending Wisdom axis of staircases and platforms are the meditation shrines for “Right Understanding” and “Right Thought.”

On the Morality axis are “Right Speech,” “Right Action,” “Right Livelihood,” and “Right Effort.” These last meditation shrines can be reached only by hard climbing on a ladder rather than staircase because—as Aenea and Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi explained to me one evening early in my stay—the Buddha had meant for his path to be one of strenuous and unremitting commitment.

The highest Meditation pagodas are given over to contemplation of the last two steps on the Noble Eightfold Path—“Right Mindfulness” and “Right Meditation.” This final pagoda, I had noticed immediately, looks out only onto the stone wall of the cliff face.

I also had noticed that there were no statues of Buddha in the Temple. The little that Grandam had explained to me about Buddhism when I’d asked as a child—having run across a reference in an old book from the Moors End library—was that Buddhists revered and prayed to statues in the likeness of the Buddha. Where were they? I had asked Aenea.

She had explained that on Old Earth Buddhist thought had been grouped into two major categories—Hinayana, an older school of thought given the pejorative term meaning “Lesser Vehicle”—as in salvation—by the more popular schools of the Mahayana, or the self-proclaimed “Greater Vehicle.” There had once been eighteen schools of Hinayana teaching—all of which had dealt with Buddha as a teacher and urged contemplation and study of his teachings rather than worship of him—but by the time of the Big Mistake, only one of those schools survived, the Theravada, and that only in remote sections of disease- and famine-ravaged Sri Lanka and Thailand, two political provinces of Old Earth. All the other Buddhist schools carried away on the Hegira had belonged to the Mahayana category, which focused on veneration of Buddhist statuary, meditation for salvation, saffron robes, and the other trappings that Grandam had described to me.

But, Aenea had explained, on T’ien Shan, the most Buddhist-influenced world in the Outback or old Hegemony, Buddhism had evolved backward toward rationality, contemplation, study, and careful, open-minded analysis of Buddha’s teaching. Thus there were no statues to the Buddha at Hsuan-k’ung Ssu.

We stop walking at the end of this stone ledge. Birds soar and circle below us, waiting for us to leave so that they can return to their fissure nests.

“What is it, kiddo?”

“The reception at the Winter Palace in Potala is tomorrow night,” she says. Her face is flushed and dusty from her morning’s work on the high scaffolds. I notice that she has scraped a rough line above her brow and that there are a few tiny crimson drops of blood. “Charles Chi-kyap Kempo is putting together an official party numbering no more than ten to attend,” she continues. “Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi will be in it, of course, as will Overseer Tsipon Shakabpa, the Dalai Lama’s cousin Gyalo, his brother Labsang, Lhomo Dondrub because the Dalai Lama’s heard of his feats and would like to meet him, Tromo Trochi of Dhomu as trade agent, and one of the foremen to represent the workers … either George or Jigme …”

“I can’t imagine one going without the other,” I say.

“I can’t either,” says Aenea. “But I think it will have to be George. He talks. Perhaps Jigme will walk there with us and wait outside the palace.”

“That’s eight,” I say.

Aenea takes my hand. Her fingers are roughened by work and abrasion, but are still, I think, the softest and most elegant human digits in the known universe. “I’m nine,” she says. “There’s going to be a huge crowd there—parties from all the towns and provinces in the hemisphere. The odds are that we won’t get within twenty meters of anyone from the Pax.”

“Or that we’ll be the first to be introduced,” I say. “Murphy’s Law and all that.”

“Yeah,” says Aenea and the smile I see is exactly the one I had seen on the face of my eleven-year-old friend when something mischievous and perhaps a bit dangerous was afoot. “Want to go as my date?”

I let out a breath. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I say.