22

n Hyperion, several hundred light-years toward galactic center from the events and the people on T’ien Shan, a forgotten old man rose out of the dreamless sleep of long-term cryogenic fugue and slowly became aware of his surroundings. His surroundings were a no-touch suspension bed, a gaggle of life-support modules encircling him and nuzzling him like so many feeding raptors, and uncountable tubes, wires, and umbilicals finishing their work of feeding him, detoxifying his blood, stimulating his kidneys, carrying antibiotics to fight infection, monitoring his life signs, and generally invading his body and dignity in order to revive him and keep him alive.

“Ah, fuck,” rasped the old man. “Waking up is a fucking, goddamn, dung-eating, corpse-buggering, shit storm of a nightmare for the terminally old. I’d pay a million marks if I could just get out of bed and go piss.”

“And good morning to you, M. Silenus,” said the female android monitoring the old poet’s life signs on the floating biomonitor. “You seem to be in good spirits today.”

“Bugger all blue-skinned wenches,” mumbled Martin Silenus. “Where are my teeth?”

“You haven’t grown them back yet, M. Silenus,” said the android. She was named A. Raddik and was a little over three centuries old … less than one-third the age of the ancient human mummy floating in the suspension bed.

“No need to,” mumbled the old man. “Won’t fucking be awake long enough. How long was I under?”

“Two years, three months, eight days,” said A. Raddik.

Martin Silenus peered up at the open sky above his tower. The canvas roof on this highest level of his stone turret had been rolled back. Deep lapis blue. The low light of early morning or late evening. The shimmer and flit of radiant gossamers not yet illuminating their fragile half-meter butterfly wings.

“What season?” managed Silenus.

“Late spring,” said the female android. Other blue-skinned servants of the old poet moved in and out of the circular room, bent on obscure errands. Only A. Raddik monitored the last stages of the poet’s revival from fugue.

“How long since they left?” He did not have to specify who the “they” were. A. Raddik knew that the old poet meant not only Raul Endymion, the last visitor to their abandoned university city, but the girl Aenea—whom Silenus had known three centuries earlier—and whom he still hoped to see again someday.

“Nine years, eight months, one week, one day,” said A. Raddik. “All Earth standard, of course.”

“Hggrhh,” grunted the old poet. He continued peering at the sky. The sunlight was filtered through canvas rolled to the east, pouring light onto the south wall of the stone turret while not striking him directly, but the brightness still brought tears to his ancient eyes. “I’ve become a thing of darkness,” he mumbled. “Like Dracula. Rising from my fucking grave every few years to check on the world of the living.”

“Yes, M. Silenus,” agreed A. Raddik, changing several settings on the control panel.

“Shut up, wench,” said the poet.

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

The old man moaned. “How long until I can get into my hoverchair, Raddik?”

The hairless android pursed her lips. “Two more days, M. Silenus. Perhaps two and a half.”

“Aw, hell and damn,” muttered Martin Silenus. “Recovery gets slower each time. One of these times, I won’t wake at all … the fugue machinery won’t bring me back.”

“Yes, M. Silenus,” agreed the android. “Each cold sleep is harder on your system. The resuscitation and life-support equipment is quite old. It is true that you will not survive many more awakenings.”

“Oh, shut up,” growled Martin Silenus. “You are a morbid, gloomy old bitch.”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

“How long have you been with me, Raddik?”

“Two hundred forty-one years, eleven months, nineteen days,” said the android. “Standard.”

“And you still haven’t learned to make a decent cup of coffee.”

“No, M. Silenus.”

“But you have put a pot on, correct?”

“Yes, M. Silenus. As per your standing instructions.”

“Fucking aye,” said the poet.

“But you will not be able to ingest liquids orally for at least another twelve hours, M. Silenus,” said A. Raddik.

“Arrrggghhh!” said the poet.

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

After several minutes in which it looked like the old man had drifted back to sleep, Martin Silenus said, “Any word from the boy or child?”

“No, sir,” said A. Raddik. “But then, of course, we only have access to the in-system Pax com network these days. And most of their new encrypting is quite good.”

“Any gossip about them?”

“None that we are sure of, M. Silenus,” said the android. “Things are very troubled for the Pax … revolution in many systems, problems with their Outback Crusade against the Ousters, a constant movement of warships and troopships within the Pax boundaries … and there is talk of the viral contagion, highly coded and circumspect.”

“The contagion,” repeated Martin Silenus and smiled a toothless smile. “The child, I would guess.”

“Quite possibly, M. Silenus,” said A. Raddik, “although it is quite possible that there is a real viral plague on those worlds where …”

“No,” said the poet, shaking his head almost violently. “It’s Aenea. And her teachings. Spreading like the Beijing Flu. You don’t remember the Beijing Flu, do you, Raddik?”

“No, sir,” said the female, finishing her check of the readouts and setting the module to auto. “That was before my time. It was before anyone’s time. Anyone but you, sir.”

Normally there would have been some obscene outburst from the poet, but now he merely nodded. “I know. I’m a freak of nature. Pay your two bits and come into the sideshow … see the oldest man in the galaxy … see the mummy that walks and talks … sort of … see the disgusting thing that refuses to die. Bizarre, aren’t I, A. Raddik?”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

The poet grunted. “Well, don’t get your hopes up, blue thing. I’m not going to croak until I hear from Raul and Aenea. I have to finish the Cantos and I don’t know the ending until they create it for me. How do I know what I think until I see what they do?”

“Precisely, M. Silenus.”

“Don’t humor me, blue woman.”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

“The boy … Raul … asked me what his orders were almost ten years ago. I told him … save the child, Aenea … topple the Pax … destroy the Church’s power … and bring the Earth back from wherever the fuck it went. He said he’d do it. Of course, he was stinking drunk with me at the time.”

“Yes, M. Silenus.”

“Well?” said the poet.

“Well what, sir?” said A. Raddik.

“Well, any sign of him having done any of the things he’s promised, Raddik?”

“We know from the Pax transmissions nine years and eight months ago that he and the Consul’s ship escaped Hyperion,” said the android. “We can hope that the child Aenea is still safe and well.”

“Yes, yes,” muttered Silenus, waving his hand feebly, “but is the Pax toppled?”

“Not that we can notice, M. Silenus,” said Raddik. “There were the mild troubles I mentioned earlier, and offworld, born-again tourism here on Hyperion is down a bit, but …”

“And the sodding Church is still in the zombie business?” demanded the poet, his thin voice stronger now.

“The Church remains ascendant,” said A. Raddik. “More of the moor people and the mountain people accept the cruciform every year.”

“Bugger all,” said the poet. “And I don’t suppose that Earth has returned to its proper place.”

“We have not heard of that improbability occurring,” said A. Raddik. “Of course, as I mentioned, our electronic eavesdropping is restricted to in-system transmissions these days, and since the Consul’s ship left with M. Endymion and M. Aenea almost ten years ago, our decryption capabilities have not been …”

“All right, all right,” said the old man, sounding terribly tired again. “Get me into my hoverchair.”

“Not for another two days, at least, I am afraid,” repeated the android, her voice gentle.

“Piss up a rope,” said the ancient figure floating amid tubes and sensor wires. “Can you wheel me over to a window, Raddik? Please? I want to look at the spring chalma trees and the ruins of this old city.”

“Yes, M. Silenus,” said the android, sincerely pleased to be doing something for the old man besides keeping his body working.

Martin Silenus watched out the window for one full hour, fighting the tides of reawakening pain and the terrible sleepy urge to return to fugue state. It was morning light. His audio implants relayed the birdsong to him. The old poet thought of his adopted young niece, the child who had decided to call herself Aenea … he thought of his dear friend, Brawne Lamia, Aenea’s mother … how they had been enemies for so long, had hated each other during parts of that last great Shrike Pilgrimage so long ago … about the stories they had told one another and the things they had seen …the Shrike in the Valley of the Time Tombs, its red eyes blazing … the scholar … what was his name? … Sol … Sol and his little swaddled brat aging backward to nothing … and the soldier … Kassad … that was it … Colonel Kassad. The old poet had never given a shit about the military … idiots, all of them … but Kassad had told an interesting tale, lived an interesting life … the other priest, Lenar Hoyt, had been a prig and an asshole, but the first one … the one with the sad eyes and the leather journal … Paul Duré … there had been a man worth writing about …

Martin Silenus drifted back to sleep with the light of morning flooding in on him, illuminating his countless wrinkles and translucent, parchment flesh, his blue veins visible and pulsing weakly in the rich light. He did not dream … but part of his poet’s mind was already outlining the next sections of his never-finished Cantos.

• ••

SERGEANT GREGORIUS HAD NOT BEEN EXAGGERATING. Father Captain de Soya had been terribly battered and burned in the last battle of his ship, the Raphael and was near death.

The sergeant had led A. Bettik, Aenea, and me into the temple. The structure was as strange as this encounter—outside there was a large, blank stone tablet, a smooth-faced monolith—Aenea mentioned briefly that it had been brought from Old Earth, had stood outside the original Temple of the Jade Emperor, and had never been inscribed during its thousands of years on the pilgrims’ trail—while inside the sealed and pressurized courtyard of the echoing temple itself, a stone railing ran around a boulder that was actually the summit of T’ai Shan, the sacred Great Peak of the Middle Kingdom. There were small sleeping and eating rooms for pilgrims in the back of the huge temple, and it was in one of these that we found Father Captain de Soya and the other two survivors. Besides Gregorius and the dying de Soya, there were two other men—Carel Shan, a Weapons Systems Officer, now terribly burned and unconscious, and Hoagan Liebler, introduced by Sergeant Gregorius as the “former” Executive Officer of the Raphael. Liebler was the least injured of the four—his left forearm had been broken and was in a sling, but he had no burns or other impact bruises—but there was something quiet and withdrawn about the thin man, as if he were in shock or mulling something over.

Aenea’s attention went immediately to Captain Federico de Soya.

The priest-captain was on one of the uncomfortable pilgrim cots, either stripped to the waist by Gregorius or he had lost all of his upper uniform in the blast and reentry. His trousers were shredded. His feet were bare. The only place on his body where he had not been terribly burned was the parasite cruciform on his chest—it was a healthy, sickening pink. De Soya’s hair had been burned away and his face was splashed with liquid metal burns and radiation slashes, but I could see that he had been a striking man, mostly because of his liquid, troubled brown eyes, not dulled even by the pain that must be overwhelming him at this moment. Someone had applied burn cream, temporary dermheal, and liquid disinfectant all over the visible portions of the dying priest-captain’s body—and started a standard lifeboat medkit IV drip—but this would have little effect on the outcome. I had seen combat burns like this before, not all from starship encounters. Three friends of mine during the Iceshelf fighting had died within hours when we had not been able to medevac them out. Their screams had been horrible to the point of unendurable.

Father Captain de Soya was not screaming. I could see that he was straining not to cry out from the pain, but he remained silent, his eyes focused only on the terrible concentration to silence until Aenea knelt by his side.

At first he did not recognize her. “Bettz?” he mumbled. “VIRO Argyle? No … you died at your station. The others too … Pol Denish … Elijah trying to free the aft boat … the young troopers when the starboard hull failed … but you look … familiar.”

Aenea started to take his hand, saw that three of de Soya’s fingers were missing, and set her own hand on the stained blanket next to his. “Father Captain,” she said very softly.

“Aenea,” said de Soya, his dark eyes really looking at her for the first time. “You’re the child … so many months, chasing you … looked at you when you stepped out of the Sphinx. Incredible child. So glad you survived.” His gaze moved to me. “You are Raul Endymion. I saw your Home Guard dossier. Almost caught up to you on Mare Infinitus.” A wave of pain rolled over him and the priest-captain closed his eyes and bit into his burned and bloodied lower lip. After a moment, he opened his eyes and said to me, “I have something of yours. Personal gear on the Raphael. The Holy Office let me have it after they ended their investigation. Sergeant Gregorius will give it to you after I am dead.”

I nodded, having no idea what he was talking about.

“Father Captain de Soya,” whispered Aenea, “Federico … can you hear and understand me?”

“Yes,” murmured the priest-captain. “Painkillers … said no to Sergeant Gregorius … didn’t want to slip away forever in my sleep. Not go gently.” The pain returned. I saw that much of de Soya’s neck and chest had cracked and opened, like burned scales. Pus and fluid flowed down to the blankets beneath him. The man closed his eyes until the tide of agony receded; it took longer this time. I thought of how I had folded up under just the pain of a kidney stone and tried to imagine this man’s torment. I could not.

“Father Captain,” said Aenea, “there is a way for you to live …”

De Soya shook his head vigorously, despite the pain that must have caused. I noticed that his left ear was little more than carbon. Part of it flaked off on the pillow as I watched. “No!” he cried. “I told Gregorius … no partial resurrection … idiot, sexless idiot …” A cough that might have been a laugh from behind scorched teeth. “Had enough of that as a priest. Anyway … tired … tired of …” His blackened stubs of fingers on his right hand batted at the pink double cross on his flaked and oozing chest. “Let the thing die with me.”

Aenea nodded. “I didn’t mean be reborn, Father Captain. I meant live. Be healed.”

De Soya was trying to blink, but his eyelids were burned ragged. “Not a prisoner of the Pax …”he managed, finding the air to speak only each time he exhaled with a wracking gasp. “Will … execute … me. I deserve … it. Killed many innocent … men … women … in defense of … friends.”

Aenea leaned closer so that he could focus on her eyes. “Father Captain, the Pax is still after us as well. But we have a ship. It has an autosurgeon.”

Sergeant Gregorius stepped forward from where he had been leaning wearily against the wall. The man named Carel Shan remained unconscious. Hoag Liebler, apparently lost in some private misery, did not respond.

Aenea had to repeat it before de Soya understood.

“Ship?” said the priest-captain. “The ancient Hegemony ship you escaped in? Not armed, was it?”

“No,” said Aenea. “It never has been.”

De Soya shook his head again. “There must have been … fifty archangel-class … ships … jumped us. Got … a few … rest … still there. No chance … get … to … any translation point … before …” He closed his torn eyelids again while the pain washed over him. This time, it seemed, it almost carried him away. He returned as if from a far place.

“It’s all right,” whispered Aenea. “I’ll worry about that. You’ll be in the doc-in-the-box. But there’s something you would have to do.”

Father Captain de Soya seemed too tired to speak, but he shifted his head to listen.

“You have to renounce the cruciform,” said Aenea. “You have to surrender this type of immortality.”

The priest-captain’s blackened lips pulled back from his teeth. “Gladly …” he rasped. “But sorry … can’t … once accepted … cruciform … can’t be … surrendered.”

“Yes,” whispered Aenea, “it can. If you choose that, I can make it go away. Our autosurgeon is old. It would not be able to heal you with the cruciform parasite throughout your body. We have no resurrection crèche aboard the ship …”

De Soya reached for her then, his flaking and three-fingerless hand still gripping tightly the sleeve of her therm jacket. “Doesn’t matter … doesn’t matter if I die … get it off. Get it off. Will die a real … Catholic … again … if you … can help me … get it … OFF!” He almost shouted the final word.

Aenea turned to the sergeant. “Do you have a cup or glass?”

“There’s the mug in the medkit,” rumbled the giant, fumbling for it. “But we have no water …”

“I brought some,” said my friend and removed the insulated bottle from her belt.

I expected wine, but it was only the water we had bottled up before leaving the Temple Hanging in Air those endless hours ago. Aenea did not bother with alcohol swabs or sterile lancets; she beckoned me closer, removed the hunting knife from my belt, and drew the blade across three of her fingertips in a swift move that made me flinch. Her blood flowed red. Aenea dipped her fingers in the clear plastic drinking mug for just a second, but long enough to send currents of thick crimson spiraling and twisting in the water.

“Drink this,” she said to Father Captain de Soya, helping to lift the dying man’s head.

The priest-captain drank, coughed, drank again. His eyes closed when she eased him back onto the stained pillow.

“The cruciform will be gone within twenty-four hours,” whispered my friend.

Father Captain de Soya made that rough chuckling sound again. “I’ll be dead within an hour.”

“You’ll be in the autosurgeon within fifteen minutes,” said Aenea, touching his better hand. “Sleep now … but don’t die on me, Federico de Soya … don’t die on me. We have much to talk about. And you have one great service to perform for me … for us.”

Sergeant Gregorius was standing closer. “M. Aenea …” he said, halted, shuffled his feet, and tried again. “M. Aenea, may I partake of that … water?”

Aenea looked at him. “Yes, Sergeant … but once you drink, you can never again carry a cruciform. Never. There will be no resurrection. And there are other … side effects.”

Gregorius waved away any further discussion. “I have followed my captain for ten years. I will follow him now.” The giant drank deeply of the pinkish water.

De Soya’s eyes had been closed, and I had assumed that he was asleep or unconscious from the pain, but now he opened them and said to Gregorius, “Sergeant, would you please bring M. Endymion the parcel we dragged from the lifeboat?”

“Aye, Capt’n,” said the giant and rummaged through the litter of debris in one corner of the room. He handed me a sealed tube, a little over a meter high.

I looked at the priest-captain. De Soya seemed to be floating between delirium and shock. “I’ll open it when he’s better,” I said to the sergeant.

Gregorius nodded, carried the glass over to Carel Shan, and poured some water into the unconscious Weapons Officer’s gaping mouth. “Carel may die before your ship arrives,” said the sergeant. He looked up. “Or does the ship have two doc-in-the-boxes?”

“No,” said Aenea, “but the one we have has three compartments. You can heal your wounds as well.”

Gregorius shrugged. He went to the man named Liebler and offered the glass. The thin man with the broken arm only looked at it.

“Perhaps later,” said Aenea.

Gregorius nodded and handed the glass back to her. “The XO was a prisoner on our ship,” said the sergeant. “A spy. An enemy of the captain. Father-captain still risked his last life to get Liebler out of the brig … got his burns retrieving him. I don’t think Hoag quite understands what’s happened.”

Liebler looked up then. “I understand it,” he said softly. “I just don’t understand it.”

Aenea stood. “Raul, I hope you haven’t lost the ship communicator.”

I fumbled in my pockets only a few seconds before coming up with the com unit/diskey journal. “I’ll go outside and tightbeam visually,” I said. “Use the skinsuit jack. Any instructions for the ship?”

“Tell it to hurry,” said Aenea.

IT WAS TRICKY GETTING THE SEMICONSCIOUS DE Soya and the unconscious Carel Shan to the ship. They had no spacesuits and it was still near vacuum outside. Sergeant Gregorius told us that he had used an inflatable transfer ball to drag them from the lifeboat wreckage to the Temple of the Jade Emperor, but the ball itself had been damaged. I had about fifteen minutes to think about the problem before the ship became visible, descending on its EM repellors and blue fusion-flame tail, so when it arrived I ordered it to land directly in front of the temple air lock, to morph its escalator ramp to the airlock door, and to extend its containment field around the door and stairway. Then it was just a matter of getting the float litters from the medbay in the ship and transferring the men to them without hurting them too much. Shan remained unconscious, but some of de Soya’s skin peeled away as we moved him onto the litter. The priest-captain stirred and opened his eyes but did not cry out.

After months on T’ien Shan, the interior of the Consul’s ship was still familiar, but familiar like a recurring dream one has about a house one has lived in long ago. After de Soya and the Weapons Officer were tucked away in the autosurgeon, it was strange to stand on the carpeted holopit deck with its ancient Steinway piano with Aenea and A. Bettik there as always, but also with a burned giant still holding his assault weapon and the former XO brooding silently on he holopit stairs.

“Diagnostics completed on the autosurgeons,” said the ship. “The presence of the cross-shaped parasite nodes makes treatment impossible at this time. Shall I terminate treatment or commence cryogenic fugue?”

“Cryogenic fugue,” said Aenea. “The doc-in-the-box should be able to operate on them in twenty-four hours. Please keep them alive and in stasis until then.”

“Affirmative,” said the ship. And then, “M. Aenea? M. Endymion?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you aware that I was tracked by long-range sensors from the time I left the third moon? There are at least thirty-seven Pax warships heading this way as we speak. One is already in parking orbit around this planet and another has just committed the highly unusual tactic of jumping on Hawking drive within the system’s gravity well.”

“Okay,” said Aenea. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I believe they intend to intercept and destroy us,” said the ship. “And they can do this before we clear atmosphere.”

“We know,” sighed Aenea. “I repeat, don’t worry about it.”

“Affirmative,” said the ship in the most businesslike tone I had ever heard from it. “Destination?”

“The bonsai fissure six kilometers east of Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” said Aenea. “East of the Temple Hanging in Air. Quickly.” She glanced at her wrist chronometer. “But stay low, Ship. Within the cloud layers.”

“The phosgene clouds or the water particle clouds?” inquired the ship.

“The lowest possible,” said my friend. “Unless the phosgene clouds create a problem for you.”

“Of course not,” said the ship. “Would you like me to plot a course that would take us through the acid seas? It would make no difference to the Pax deep radar, but it could be done with only a small addition of time and …”

“No,” interrupted Aenea, “just the clouds.”

We watched on the holopit sphereview as the ship flung itself off Suicide Cliff and dived ten kilometers through gray cloud and then into green clouds. We would be at the fissure within minutes.

We all sat on the carpeted holopit steps then. I realized that I still had the sealed tube that de Soya had given me. I rotated it through my hands.

“Go ahead and open it,” said Sergeant Gregorius. The big man was slowly removing the outer layers of his scarred combat armor. Lance burns had melted the lower layers. I was afraid to see his chest and left arm.

I hesitated. I had said that I’d wait until the priest-captain had recovered.

“Go ahead,” Gregorius said again. “The Captain’s been waiting to give this back to you for nine years.”

I had no idea what it could be. How could this man have known he would see me someday? I owned nothing … how could he have something of mine to return?

I broke the seal on the tube and looked within. Some sort of tightly rolled fabric. With a slow realization, I pulled the thing out and unrolled it on the floor.

Aenea laughed delightedly. “My God,” she said. “In all my various dreams about this time, I never foresaw this. How wonderful.”

It was the hawking mat … the flying carpet that had carried Aenea and me from the Valley of the Time Tombs almost ten years earlier. I had lost it … it took me a second or two to remember. I had lost it on Mare Infinitus nine years ago when the Pax lieutenant I had been fighting had pulled a knife, cut me, pushed me off the mat into the sea. What had happened next? The lieutenant’s own men on the floating sea platform had mistakenly killed him with a cloud of flechette darts, the dead man had fallen into the violet sea, and the hawking mat had flown on … no, I remembered that someone on the platform had intercepted it.

“How did the father-captain get it?” I asked, knowing the answer as soon as I articulated the question. De Soya had been our relentless pursuer then.

Gregorius nodded. “The Father-Captain used it to find your blood and DNA samples. It’s how we got your Pax service record from Hyperion. If we’d had pressure suits, I would have used the damn thing to get us off that airless mountain.”

“You mean it works?” I tapped the flight threads. The hawking mat—more tattered than I remembered it—hovered ten centimeters off the floor. “I’ll be damned,” I said.

“We’re rising to the fissure at the coordinates you gave me,” came the ship’s voice.

The holopit view cleared and showed the Jo-kung ridge rushing past. We slowed and hovered a hundred meters out. We had returned to the same forested valley fissure where the ship had dropped me more than three months earlier. Only now the green valley was filled with people. I saw Theo, Lhomo, many of the others from the Temple Hanging in Air. The ship floated lower, hovered, and waited for directions.

“Lower the escalator,” said Aenea. “Let them all aboard.”

“May I remind you,” said the ship, “that I have fugue couches and life support for a maximum of six people for an extended interstellar jump? There are at least fifty people there on the …”

“Lower the escalator and let them all aboard,” commanded Aenea. “Immediately.”

The ship did as it was told without another word. Theo led the refugees up the ramp and the circular stairs to where we waited.

Most of those who had stayed behind at the Temple Hanging in Air were there: many of the temple monks, the Tromo Trochi of Dhornu, the ex-soldier Gyalo Thondup, Lhomo Dondrub—we were delighted to see that his paraglider had brought him safely back, and from his grins and hugs, the delight was reciprocated—Abbot Kempo Ngha Wang Tashi, Chim Din, Jigme Taring, Kuku and Kay, George and Jigme, the Dalai Lama’s brother Labsang, the brickworkers Viki and Kim, Overseer Tsipon Shakabpa, Rimsi Kyipup—less dour than I had ever seen him—and high riggers Haruyuki and Kenshiro, as well as the bamboo experts Voytek and Janusz, even the Mayor of Jo-kung, Charles Chi-kyap Kempo. But no Dalai Lama. And the Dorje Phamo was also missing.

“Rachel went back to fetch them,” said Theo, the last to come aboard. “The Dalai Lama insisted on being the last to leave and the Sow stayed behind to keep him company until it was time to go. But they should have been back by now. I was just ready to go back along the ledge to check …”

Aenea shook her head. “We’ll all go.”

There was no way to get everyone seated or situated. People milled on the stairways, stood around the library level, had wandered up to the bedroom at the apex of the ship to look outside via the viewing walls, while others were on the fugue cubby level and down in the engine room.

“Let’s go, Ship,” said Aenea. “The Temple Hanging in Air. Make a direct approach.”

For the ship, a direct approach was a burst of thruster fire, a lob fifteen klicks into the atmosphere, and then a vertical drop with repellors and main engine burning at the last second. The entire process took about thirty seconds, but while the internal containment field kept us from being smashed to jelly, the view through the clear apex walls must have been disorienting for those watching upstairs. Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, and I were watching the holopit and even that small view almost sent me to clutching the bulkheads- or clinging to the carpet. We dropped lower and hovered fifty meters above the temple complex.

“Ah, damn,” said Theo.

The view had shown us a man falling to his death in the clouds below. There was no possibility of swooping down to catch him. One second he was freefalling, the next he had been swallowed by the clouds.

“Who was it?” said Theo.

“Ship,” said Aenea. “Playback and enhance.”

Carl Linga William Eiheji, the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

A few seconds later several figures emerged from the Right Meditation pavilion onto the highest platform, the one I had helped build to Aenea’s plans less than a month ago.

“Shit,” I said aloud. The Nemes-thing was carrying the Dalai Lama in one hand, holding him over the edge of the platform. Behind her … behind it … came her male and female clone-siblings. Then Rachel and the Dorje Phamo stepped out of the shadows onto the platform.

Aenea gripped my arm. “Raul, do you want to come outside with me?”

She had activated the balcony beyond the Steinway, but I knew that this was not all that she meant. “Of course,” I said, thinking, Is this her death? Is this what she has foreseen since before birth? Is it my death? “Of course I’ll come,” I said.

A. Bettik and Theo started out onto the ship’s balcony with us. “No,” said Aenea. “Please.” She took the android’s hand for a second. “You can see everything from inside, my friend.”

“I would prefer to be with you, M. Aenea,” said A. Bettik.

Aenea nodded. “But this is for Raul and me alone.”

A. Bettik lowered his head a second and returned to the holopit image. None of the rest of the score of people in the library level and on the spiral stairs said a word. The ship was dead silent. I walked out onto the balcony with my friend.

Nemes still held the boy out over the drop. We were twenty meters above her and her siblings now. I wondered idly how high they could jump.

“Hey!” shouted Aenea.

Nemes looked up. I was reminded that the effect of her gaze was like being stared at by empty eye sockets. Nothing human lived there.

“Put him down,” said Aenea.

Nemes smiled and dropped the Dalai Lama, catching him with her left hand at the last second. “Be careful what you ask for, child,” said the pale woman.

“Let him and the other two go and I’ll come down,” said Aenea.

Nemes shrugged. “You won’t leave here anyway,” she said, her voice not raised but perfectly audible across the gap.

“Let them go and I’ll come down,” repeated Aenea.

Nemes shrugged but threw the Dalai Lama across the platform like an unwanted wad of paper.

Rachel ran to the boy, saw that he was hurt and bleeding but alive, lifted him, and turned back angrily toward Nemes and her siblings.

“NO!” shouted Aenea. I had never heard her use that tone before. It froze both Rachel and me in our tracks.

“Rachel,” said Aenea, her voice level again, “please bring His Holiness and the Dorje Phamo up to the ship now.” It was polite, but an imperative that I could not have resisted. Rachel did not.

Aenea gave the command and the ship dropped lower, morphing and extending a stairway from the balcony. Aenea started down. I hurried to follow her. We stepped onto the bonsai cedar platform … I had helped to place all of the planks … and Rachel led the child and old woman past us, up the stairway. Aenea touched Rachel’s head as the other woman went past. The stairway flowed uphill and shaped itself back into a balcony. Theo and A. Bettik joined Rachel and the Dorje Phamo on it. Someone had taken the bleeding child into the ship.

We stood two meters from Rhadamanth Nemes. Her siblings stepped up to the creature’s side.

“This is not quite complete,” said Nemes. “Where is your … ah, there.”

The Shrike flowed from the shadows of the pavilion. I say “flowed,” for although it moved, I had not seen it walk.

I was clenching and unclenching my hands. Everything was wrong for this showdown. I had peeled off my therm jacket in the ship, but still wore the stupid skinsuit and climbing harness, although most of the hardware had been left in the ship. The harness and multiple layers would still slow me down.

Slow me down from what? I thought. I had seen Nemes fight. Or rather, I had not seen her. When she and the Shrike had struggled on God’s Grove, there had been a blur, then explosions, then nothing. She could decapitate Aenea and have my guts for garters before I got my hands clenched into fists.

Fists. The ship was unarmed, but I had left it with Sergeant Gregorius’s Swiss Guard assault rifle still on the library level. The first thing they had taught us in the Home Guard was never to fight with fists when you could scrounge up a weapon.

I looked around. The platform was clean and bare, not even a railing I could wrench free to use as a club. This structure was too well built to rip anything loose.

I glanced at the cliff wall to our left. No loose rocks there. There were a few pitons and climbing bolts still imbedded in the fissures there, I knew—we had clipped on to them while building this level and pavilion and we hadn’t got around to clearing all of them—but they were driven in far too tight for me to pull out and use as a weapon, although Nemes could probably do so with one finger. And what good would a piton or chock nut do against this monster?

There were no weapons to find here. I would die barehanded. I hoped that I would get one blow in before she took me down … or at least one swing.

Aenea and Nemes were looking only at each other. Nemes did not spare more than a glance at the Shrike ten paces to her right. The female-thing said, “You know that I am not going to take you back to the Pax, don’t you, child bitch?”

“Yes,” said Aenea. She returned the creature’s stare with a solid intensity.

Nemes smiled. “But you believe that your spiked creature will save you again.”

“No,” said Aenea.

“Good,” said Nemes. “Because it will not.” She nodded to her clone-siblings.

I know their names now—Scylla and Briareus. And I know what I saw next.

I should not have been able to see it, for all three of the Nemes-things phase-shifted at that instant. There should have been the briefest glimpse of a chrome blur, then chaos, then nothing … but Aenea reached over and touched the back of my neck, there was the usual electric tingle I received whenever her skin touched mine, and suddenly the light was different—deeper, darker—and the air was as thick as water around us. I realized that my heart did not seem to be beating and that I did not blink or take a breath. As alarming as that sounds, it seemed irrelevant then.

Aenea’s voice whispered from the hearpatch on my folded-back skinsuit cowl … or perhaps it spoke directly through her touch on my neck. I could not tell. We cannot phase-shift with them or use it to fight them, she said. It is an abuse of the energy of the Void Which Binds. But I can help us watch this.

And what we watched was incredible enough.

At Nemes’s command, Scylla and Briareus threw themselves at the Shrike, while the Hyperion demon raised four arms and threw itself in the direction of Nemes—only to be intercepted by the siblings. Even with our altered vision—the ship hanging frozen in midair, our friends on the balcony frozen into unblinking statues, a bird above the cliff face locked in to the thick air like an insect in amber—the sudden movement of the Shrike and the two cloned creatures was almost too fast to follow.

There was a terrible impact justa meter short of Nemes, who had turned into a silver-surfaced effigy of herself, and who did not flinch. Briareus threw a blow that I am convinced would have split our ship in two. It reverberated off the Shrike’s thorned neck with a sound like an underwater earthquake played back in slow motion, and then Scylla kicked the Shrike’s legs out from under it. The Shrike went down, but not before two of its arms seized Scylla and two other razor-fingered claws sank deep into Briareus.

The Nemes siblings seemed to welcome the embrace, throwing themselves onto the tumbling Shrike with clacking teeth and flying nails. I could see that the hurtling edges of their rigid hands and forearms were razor-sharp, guillotine surfaces sharper than the Shrike’s blades and thorns.

The three beat and chewed on each other in a wild frenzy, rolling across the platform, throwing bonsai cedar chips three meters into the air, and slamming against the rock wall. In a second, all three were on their feet, the Shrike’s great jaws clamping on Briareus’s neck even as Scylla slashed at one of the creature’s four arms, bent it backward, and seemed to break it at a joint. Still holding Briareus in its jaws, the huge teeth chewing and scraping at the silver form’s head, the Shrike whirled to confront Scylla, but by then both clone-siblings had their hands on the blades and thorns on the Shrike’s skull, bending it backward until I waited to hear the neck snap and see its head roll away.

Instead, Nemes somehow communicated, Now! Do it! and without an instant’s hesitation, the two siblings threw themselves away from the cliff face, toward the railing at the abyss-end side of the platform. I saw what they were going to do—throw the Shrike into space, just as they had done to the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

Perhaps the Shrike saw this as well, for the tall creature slammed the two chrome bodies against it, its chest spikes and wrist thorns sinking deep into the forcefields around the struggling, clawing siblings. The trio whirled and tumbled and bounced up like some demented, three-part wind-up toy locked into hyperfast berserk mode, until finally the Shrike with its kicking, clawing, visibly impaled forms slammed into the sturdy cedar railing, tore through it as though it were wet cardboard, and went hurtling out over and into the drop, still fighting.

Aenea and I watched as the tall silver form with flashing spikes and the shorter silver forms with flailing limbs fell, fell, grew smaller and smaller, fell into clouds, and were swallowed. I knew that those watching from the ship would have seen nothing except a sudden disappearance of three of the figures on our platform, and then a broken railing and an emptier platform with just Nemes, Aenea, and me remaining. The silver thing that was Rhadamanth Nemes turned its featureless chrome face toward us.

The light changed. The breeze blew again. The air thinned. I felt my heart suddenly beating again … pounding loudly … and I blinked rapidly.

Nemes was in her human form again. “So,” she said to Aenea, “shall we finish this little farce?”

“Yes,” said Aenea.

Nemes smiled and went to phase-shift.

Nothing happened. The creature frowned and seemed to concentrate. Still nothing occurred.

“I can’t stop you from phase-shifting,” said Aenea. “But others can … and have.”

Nemes looked irritated for a second but then laughed. “Those who created me will attend to that in a second, but I do not wish to wait that long, and I do not need to shift up to kill you, bitch child.”

“That’s true,” said Aenea. She had stood her ground through all of this violence and confusion, her legs apart, feet firmly planted, arms easy at her sides.

Nemes showed her small teeth, but I saw that these teeth were elongating, growing sharper, as if being extruded farther from her gums and jawbone. There were at least three rows of them.

Nemes held up her hands and her fingernails—already pale and long—extended another ten centimeters, flowing into gleaming spikes.

Nemes reached down with those sharpened nails and peeled back the skin and flesh of her right forearm, revealing some sort of metallic endoskeleton that was the color of steel but which looked infinitely sharper.

“Now,” said Nemes. She stepped toward Aenea.

I stepped between them.

“No,” I said, and raised my fists like a boxer ready to start.

Nemes showed all of her rows of teeth.