24

ailing! Heart pounding wildly, I awoke in what seemed to be a different universe.

I was floating, not falling. At first I thought that I was in an ocean, a salt ocean with positive buoyancy, floating like a fetus in a sepia-tinged salt sea, but then I realized that there was no gravity at all, no waves or currents, and that the medium was not water but thick sepia light. The ship? No, I was in a large, empty, darkened but light-circled space—an empty ovoid some fifteen meters or more across, with parchment walls through which I could see both the filtered light of a blazing sun and something more complicated, a vast organic structure curving away on all sides. I weakly moved my hands from their floating position to touch my face, head, body, and arms …

I was floating, tethered by only the lightest harness straps to some sort of sticktite strip on the curved inner wall. I was barefoot and wearing only a soft cotton tunic that I did not recognize—pajamas? hospital gown?

My face was tender and I could feel new ridges that might be scars. My hair was gone, the flesh above my skull was raw and definitely scarred, and my ear was there but very tender. My arms had several faint scars that I could see in the dim light. I pulled up my trouser leg and looked at what had been a badly broken lower leg. Healed and firm. I felt my ribs—tender but intact. I had made it to the doc-in-the-box after all.

I must have spoken aloud, for a dark figure floating nearby said, “Eventually you did, Raul Endymion. But some of the surgery was done the old-fashioned way … and by me.”

I started—floating up against the sticktite strips. It had not been Aenea’s voice.

The dark form floated closer and I recognized the shape, the hair, and—finally—the voice. “Rachel,” I said. My tongue was dry, my lips cracked. I croaked the word rather than spoke it.

Rachel came closer and offered me a squeeze bottle. The first few drops came out as tumbling spheres—most of which splashed me on the face—but I soon got the knack of it and squeezed drops into my open mouth. The water tasted cool and wonderful.

“You’ve been getting liquids and sustenance via IV for two weeks,” said Rachel, “but it’s better if you drink directly.”

“Two weeks!” I said. I looked around. “Aenea? Is she … are they …”

“Everyone’s all right,” said Rachel. “Aenea’s busy. She’s spent much of the last couple of weeks in here with you … watching over you … but when she had to go out with Minmun and the others, she had me stay with you.”

“Minmun?” I said. I peered through the translucent wall. One bright star—smaller than Hyperion’s sun. The incredible geometries of the structure spreading away, curving out, from this ovoid room. “Where am I?” I said. “How did we get here?”

Rachel chuckled. “I’ll answer the second question first, let you see the answer to the first yourself in a few minutes. Aenea had the ship jump to this place. Father Captain de Soya, his Sergeant Gregorius, and the officer, Carel Shan, knew the coordinates for this star system. They were all unconscious, but the other survivor—their former prisoner, Hoag Liebler—knew where this place was hiding.”

I looked through the wall again. The structure seemed huge—a light and shadow latticework stretching out in all directions from this pod. How could they hide anything this large? And who hid it?

“How did we get to a translation point in time?” I croaked, taking a few more globules of water. “I thought the Pax warships were closing in.”

“They were,” said Rachel. “They did. We could never have gotten to a Hawking-drive translation point before they destroyed us. Here—you don’t need to be stuck to the wall any longer.” She ripped off the sticktite strips and I floated free. Even in zero-g, I felt very weak.

Orienting myself so that I could still see Rachel’s face in the dim sepia light, I said, “So how did we do it?”

“We didn’t translate,” said the young woman. “Aenea directed the ship to a point in space where we farcasted directly to this system.”

“Farcast? There was an active space farcast portal? Like one of the kinds that the Hegemony FORCE ships used to transit? I didn’t think that any of those had survived the Fall.”

Rachel was shaking her head. “There was no farcaster portal. Nothing. Just an arbitrary point a few hundred thousand klicks from the second moon. It was quite a chase … the Pax ships kept hailing us and threatening to fire. Finally they did … lance beams leaping toward us from a dozen sources—we wouldn’t even have been a debris field, just gas on a widening trajectory—but then we reached the point Aenea had pointed us toward and suddenly we were … here.”

I did not say Where is here? again, but I floated to the curved wall and tried to peer through it. The wall felt warm, spongy, organic, and it was filtering most of the sunlight. The resulting interior light was soft and beautiful, but it made it difficult to see out—just the one blazing star was visible and the hint of that incredible geometric structure beyond our pod.

“Ready to see the ‘where’?” said Rachel.

“Yeah.”

“Pod,” said Rachel, “transparent surface, please.”

Suddenly there was nothing separating us from the outside. I almost shouted in terror. Instead, I flailed my arms and legs trying to find a solid surface to cling to until Rachel kicked closer and steadied me with a firm hand.

We were in space. The surrounding pod had simply disappeared. We were floating in space—seemed to be floating in space, except for the presence of air to breathe—and we were far out on a branch of a …

Tree is not the right word. I had seen trees. This was not a tree.

I had heard much about the old Templar worldtrees, had seen the stump of the Worldtree on God’s Grove—and I’d heard about the kilometers-long shiptrees that had traveled between the star systems back in Martin Silenus’s pilgrim days.

This was not a worldtree or a shiptree.

I had heard wild legends—from Aenea actually, so they were probably not legends—of a tree-ring around a star, a fantastical braided ring of living material stretching all the way around an Old Earth System-like sun. I had once tried to calculate how much living material that would require, and decided that it had to be nonsense.

This was no tree-ring.

What stretched out on every side of me, curving inward across expanses too large for my planet-formed mind to take in, was a branched and interwoven sphere of living plant material—trunks tens or hundreds of kilometers across, branches klicks wide, leaves hundreds of meters across, trailing root systems stretching like God’s synapses for hundreds, no … thousands of kilometers into space—trellised and wrapped branches stretching out and inward in all directions, trunks the length of Old Earth’s Mississippi River looking like tiny twigs in the distance, tree shapes the size of my home continent of Aquila on Hyperion blending into thousands of other clumps and masses of greenery, all bending inward and away, on all sides, in every direction … there were many black gaps, holes into space, some gaps larger than the trunks and greenery lacing through them … but nowhere were the gaps complete … everywhere the trunks and branches and roots intertwined, opening uncounted billions of green leaves to the star blazing away in the locus of vacuum at the center of …

I closed my eyes.

“This can’t be real,” I said.

“It is,” said Rachel.

“The Ousters?” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea’s friend, the child of the Cantos. “And the Templars. And the ergs. And … others. It’s alive but a construct … a minded thing.”

“Impossible,” I said. “It would take millions of years to grow this … sphere.”

“Biosphere,” said Rachel, smiling.

I shook my head again. “Biosphere is an old term. It’s just the closed vivisystem on and around a planet.”

“This is a biosphere,” Rachel said again. “Only there are no planets here. Comets, yes, but no planets.” She pointed.

In the far distance, perhaps hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where the interior of this living sphere began to fade to a green blur even in the unblinking vacuum, a long, white streak moved slowly through the black gap between trunks.

“A comet,” I repeated stupidly.

“For watering,” said Rachel. “They have to use millions of them. Luckily there are many billions in the Oört cloud. More billions in the Kuiper Belt.”

I stared. There were other white specks out there, each with a long, glowing tail. Some moved between the trunks and branches as I watched, giving me some idea of the scale of this biosphere. The comet trajectories were routed through the gaps in the plant material. If this is truly a sphere, the comets would have to pass back through the living globe on their way out-system. What kind of confidence does it take to do such a thing?

“What is this thing we’re in?” I said.

“An environmental pod,” said Rachel. “Life bulb. This one is tailored for medical duty. It’s not only been monitoring your IV drip, vital signs, and tissue regeneration, it’s been growing and manufacturing many of the medicines and other chemicals.”

I reached out and touched the nearly transparent material. “How thick is it?”

“About a millimeter,” said Rachel. “But very strong. It can shield us from most micrometeorite impacts.”

“Where do the Ousters get such a material?”

“They biofacture the genes and it grows itself,” said Rachel. “Do you feel up to going out to see Aenea and meeting some people? Everyone’s been waiting for your awakening.”

“Yes,” I said, and then, quickly, “no! Rachel?”

She floated there, waiting. I saw how lustrous her dark eyes were in the amazing light. Much like my darling’s.

“Rachel …”I began awkwardly.

She waited, floating, reaching out to touch the transparent pod wall to orient herself heads-up in relation to me.

“Rachel, we haven’t really talked much …”

“You didn’t like me,” said the young woman with a slight smile.

“That’s not true … I mean, it was true, in a way … but it’s because I just didn’t understand things at first. It had been five years for Aenea that I’d been away … it was difficult … I guess that I was jealous.”

She arched a dark eyebrow. “Jealous, how, Raul? Did you think that Aenea and I were lovers all those standard years you were gone?”

“Well, no … I mean, I didn’t know …”

Rachel held up a hand, sparing me further flummoxing. “We aren’t,” she said. “We never were. Aenea would never have considered such a thing. Theo might have entertained the possibility, but she knew from the start that Aenea and I were destined to love certain men.”

I stared. Destined?

Rachel smiled again. I could imagine that grin on the little girl Sol Weintraub had talked about in his Hyperion Canto. “Don’t worry, Raul. I happen to know for a fact that Aenea has never loved anyone but you. Even when she was a little girl. Even before she met you. You’ve always been her chosen one.” The young woman’s smile became rueful. “We should all be so lucky.”

I started to speak, hesitated.

Rachel’s smile faded. “Oh. She told you about the one-year eleven-month one-week six-hour interregnum?”

“Yes,” I said. “And about her having …” I stopped. It would be foolish to choke up in front of this strong woman. She would never look at me the same again.

“A baby?” finished Rachel quickly.

I looked at her as if trying to find some answer in her handsome features. “Did Aenea tell you about it?” I said, feeling like I was betraying my dear friend somewhat by trying to get this information from someone else. But I could not stop. “Did you know at the time what …”

“Where she was?” said Rachel, returning my intense gaze. “What was happening to her? That she was getting married?”

I could only nod.

“Yes,” said Rachel. “We knew.”

“Were you there with her?”

Rachel seemed to hesitate, as if weighing her answer. “No,” she said at last. “A. Bettik, Theo, and I waited for almost two years for her to return. We carried on her … ministry? Mission? … Whatever it is, we carried it on while she was gone … sharing some of her lessons, finding people who wished to partake of communion, letting them know when she would return.”

“So you knew when she would return?”

“Yes,” said Rachel. “To the day.”

“How?”

“That’s when she had to return,” said the dark-haired woman. “She had taken every possible minute that she could without jeopardizing her mission. The Pax was hunting for us the next day … they would have seized all of us if Aenea had not returned and farcast us away.”

I nodded, but was not thinking about close calls with the Pax. “Did you meet … him?” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep my tone neutral.

Rachel’s expression remained serious. “Father to their child, you mean? Aenea’s husband?”

I felt that Rachel was not trying to be cruel, but the words tore at me far worse than had Nemes’s claws. “Yes,” I said. “Him.”

Rachel shook her head. “None of us had met him when she went away.”

“But you do know why she chose him to be the father of her child?” I persisted, feeling like the Grand Inquisitor we had left behind on T’ien Shan.

“Yes,” said Rachel, returning my gaze, giving me no more.

“Was it something to do with her … her mission?” I said, feeling my throat growing tighter and tighter, my voice more strained. “Is it something she had to do … some reason the child had to be born to them? Can you tell me anything, Rachel?”

She took my wrist then, gripping it strongly. “Raul, you know that Aenea will explain this when it’s time to do so.”

I pulled away, making a rude noise. “When it’s time,” I growled. “Jesus H. Christ, I’m sick of hearing that phrase. And I’m sick of waiting.”

Rachel shrugged. “Confront her then. Threaten to beat her up if she doesn’t tell you. You clobbered that Nemes-thing … Aenea shouldn’t be a problem.”

I glowered at the woman.

“Seriously, Raul, this is between you and Aenea. All I can tell you is that you are the only man she has ever talked about, and—as far as I can tell—the only man she has ever loved.”

“How the hell can you …” I began angrily and then forced myself to shut up. I patted her arm awkwardly, the motion making me begin to pivot around the center of my own axis. It was hard to stay near someone in zero-g without touching them. “Thank you, Rachel,” I said.

“Ready to go see everyone?”

I took a breath. “Almost,” I said. “Can this pod surface be made reflective?”

“Pod,” said Rachel, “ninety percent translucence. High in tenor reflectivity.” To me she said, “Checking in the mirror before your big date?”

The surface had become about as reflective as a still puddle of water—not a perfect mirror, but clear enough and bright enough to show me a Raul Endymion with scars on his face and bare scalp, the skin on his skull a babyish pink, traces of bruise and swelling under and around his eyes, and thin … very thin. The bones and muscles of my face and upper body seemed to have been sketched in bold pencil strokes. My eyes looked different.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said again.

Rachel made a motion with her hand. “The autosurgeon wanted you for another week, but Aenea couldn’t wait. The scars aren’t permanent … at least most of them. The pod medicine in the IV is taking care of the regeneration. Your hair will start growing back in two or three standard weeks.”

I touched my scalp. It was like patting the scarred and especially tender butt of an ugly newborn. “Two or three weeks,” I said. “Great. Fucking great.”

“Don’t sweat it,” said Rachel. “I think it looks rather dashing, actually. I’d keep that look if I were you, Raul. Besides, I hear that Aenea is a pushover for older men. And right now, you certainly look older.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“You’re welcome,” said Rachel. “Pod. Open iris. Access to main pressurized stem connector.”

She led the way out, kicking and floating ahead of me through the irising wall.

AENEA HUGGED ME SO HARD WHEN I CAME INTO THE room … pod … that I wondered if my broken ribs might have given way again. I hugged her back just as hard.

The trip through the pressurized stem connector had been commonplace enough, if one counted being shot down a flexible, translucent, two-meter-wide pipeline at speeds up to what I estimated as sixty klicks per hour—they used currents of oxygen flowing at high speeds in opposite directions to give a boost to one’s kicking and swimming through air—all the while other people, mostly very thin, hairless, and exceptionally tall other people, whizzed by silently in the opposite direction at closing speeds in excess of 120 klicks per hour, missing us by centimeters. Then there were the hub pods, into which Rachel and I were accelerated at high speed, like corpuscles being blasted into ventricles and auricles of a huge heart, and through which we tumbled, kicked, avoided other high speed travelers, and exited via one of a dozen other stem connector openings. I was lost within minutes, but Rachel seemed to know her way—she pointed out that there were subtle colors embedded in the plant flesh over each exit—and soon we had entered a pod not much larger than mine, but crowded with cubbies, sticktite seating areas, and people. Some of the people—like Aenea, A. Bettik, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, and Lhomo Dondrub—I knew well: other people there—Father Captain de Soya, obviously renewed and recovered from his terrible wounds and wearing a priest’s black trousers, tunic, and Roman collar, Sergeant Gregorius in his Swiss Guard combat fatigues—I had met recently and knew by sight; other people, like the long, thin, otherworldly Ousters and the hooded Templars were wondrous and strange, but well within my range of understanding; while still other individuals there—quickly introduced by Aenea as the Templar True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen and the former Hegemony FORCE Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, I knew of but did not actually believe I was meeting. More than Rachel or the fact of Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia, these were figures not just from the old poet’s Cantos but archetypes from deep myth, long dead at the very least, and probably never real to begin with in the fixed, everyday, eat-sleep-and-use-the-toilet firmament of things.

And finally in this zero-gravity Ouster pod there were the other people who were not people at all, at least from my frame of reference: such as the willowy green beings who were introduced by Aenea as LLeeoonn and OOeeaall, two of the few surviving Seneschai empaths from Hebron—alien and intelligent beings. I looked at these strange creatures—the palest cypress-green skin and eyes; bodies so thin that I could have encircled their torso with my fingers; symmetrical like us with two arms, two legs, a head, but, of course, not really like us at all; limbs articulated more like single, unbroken, fluid lines than evolved of hinged bone and gristle; splayed digits like toads’ hands; and heads more like a human fetus’s than a human adult’s. Their eyes were little more than shadowy spots on the green flesh of their faces.

The Seneschai had been reported to have died out during the early days of the Hegira … they were little more than legend, even less real than the tale of the soldier Kassad or the Templar Het Masteen.

One of these green legends brushed its three-fingered hand over my palm as we were introduced.

There were other non-human, non-Ouster, non-android entities in the pod.

Floating near the translucent wall of the pod were what looked to be large, greenish-white platelets—soft, shuddering saucers of soft material—each almost two meters across. I had seen these life-forms before … on the cloud world where I had been eaten by the sky squid.

Not eaten, M. Endymion, came surges of language echoing in my head, only transported.

Telepathy? I thought, half directing the query to the platelets. I remembered the surge of language-thought on the cloud world, and how I had wondered where it had originated.

It was Aenea who answered. “It feels like telepathy,” she said softly, “but there’s nothing mystical about. The Akerataeli learned our language the old-fashioned way—their zeplin symbiotes heard the sound vibrations and the Akerataeli broke it down and analyzed it. They control the zeplins by a form of long-distance, very tightly focused microwave pulses …”

“The zeplin was the thing that swallowed me on the cloud world,” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea.

“Like the zeplins on Whirl?”

“Yes, and in Jupiter’s atmosphere as well.”

“I thought that they were hunted to extinction during the early Hegira years.”

“They were eradicated on Whirl,” said Aenea. “And even before the Hegira on Jupiter. But you weren’t paragliding your kayak on Jupiter or Whirl … but on another oxygen-rich gas giant six hundred light-years into the Outback.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry I interrupted. You were saying … microwave impulses …”

Aenea made that graceful throwing-away gesture I’d known since she was a child. “Just that they control their zeplin symbiote partners’ actions by precise microwave stimulation of certain nerve and brain centers. We’ve given the Akerataeli permission to stimulate our speech centers so that we ‘hear’ their messages. I take it that it’s rather like playing a complicated piano for them …”

I nodded but did not really understand.

“The Akerataeli are also a spacefaring race,” said Father Captain de Soya. “Over the eons, they have colonized more than ten thousand oxygen-rich gas giant worlds.”

“Ten thousand!” I said. I think that for a moment my jaw actually hung slack. In humankind’s more than twelve hundred years of traveling in space we had explored and settled on less than ten percent of that number of planets.

“The Akerataeli have been at it longer than we,” said de Soya softly.

I looked at the gently vibrating platelets. They had no eyes that I could see, certainly no ears. Were they hearing us? They must … one of them had responded to my thoughts. Could they read minds as well as stimulate language-thoughts?

While I was staring at them, the conversation between the humans and Ousters in the room resumed.

“The intelligence is reliable,” said the pale Ouster whom I later learned was named Navson Hamnim. “There were at least three hundred archangel-class ships gathering at System Lacaille 9352. Each ship has a representative of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem or Malta. It is definitely a major Crusade.”

“Lacaille 9352,” mused de Soya. “Sibiatu’s Bitterness. I know the place. How old is this intelligence?”

“Twenty hours,” said Navson Hamnim. “The data was sent via the only Gideon-drive courier drone we have left … of the three drones captured during your raids, two have been destroyed. We are fairly sure that the scoutship which sent this drone was detected and destroyed seconds after launching the courier.”

“Three hundred archangels,” said de Soya. He rubbed his cheeks. “If they are aware we know about them, they could make a Gideon jump this direction within days … hours. Assume two days’ resurrection time, we may have less than three days to prepare. Have defenses been improved since I left?”

Another Ouster whom I later knew as Systenj Coredwell opened his hands in a gesture that I would discover meant “in no way.” I noticed that there was webbing between the long fingers. “Most of the fighting ships have had to jump to the Great Wall salient to hold off their Task Force HORSEHEAD. The fighting is very bitter there. Few of the ships are expected to return.”

“Does your intelligence say whether the Pax knows what you have here?” asked Aenea.

Navson Hamnim opened his hands in a subtle variation of Coredwell’s gesture. “We think not. But they know now that this has been a major staging area for our recent defensive battles. I would venture that they think this is just another base—perhaps with a partial orbital forest ring.”

“Is there anything we can do to break up the Crusade before it jumps this way?” said Aenea, speaking to everyone in the room.

“No.” The flat syllable came from the tall man who had been introduced as Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. His Web English had a strange accent. He was a tall man, extremely thin but muscular, with an equally thin beard along his jawline and around his mouth. In the old poet’s Cantos, Kassad had been described as a reasonably young man, but this warrior was in his standard sixties, at least, with heavy lines around his thin mouth and small eyes, his dark complexion burned even darker by long exposure to desert-world sun or deep-space UV, the spiked hair on top of his head rising like short silver nails.

Everyone looked at Kassad and waited.

“With de Soya’s ship destroyed,” said the Colonel, “our only chance at successful hit-and-run operations is gone. The few Hawking-drive warships we have left would take a time-debt of at least two months to jump to Lacaille 9352 and back. The Crusade archangels would almost certainly be here and gone by then … and we would be defenseless.”

Navson Hamnim kicked away from the pod wall and oriented himself right side up in relation to Kassad. “These few warships do not offer us a defense in any case,” he said softly, his own Web English more musical than accented. “Should we not consider dying while on the attack?”

Aenea floated between the two men. “I think that we should consider not dying at all,” she said. “Nor allowing the biosphere to be destroyed.”

A positive sentiment, a voice spoke in my head. But not all positive sentiments can be supported by updrafts of possible action.

“True,” said Aenea, looking at the platelets, “but perhaps in this case the updrafts will build.”

Good thermals to you all, said the voice in my head. The platelets moved toward the pod wall, which irised open for them. Then they were gone.

Aenea took a breath. “Shall we meet on the Yggdrasill to share the main meal in seven hours and continue this discussion? Perhaps someone will have an idea.”

There was no dissension. People, Ousters, and Seneschai exited by a score of openings that had not been there a moment before.

Aenea floated over and hugged me again. I patted her hair.

“My friend,” she said softly. “Come with me.”

IT WAS HER PRIVATE LIVING POD—OUR PRIVATE LIVING pod, she informed me—and it was much like the one in which I awoke, except that there were organic shelves, niches, writing surfaces, storage cubbies, and facilities for comlog interface. Some of my clothes from the ship were folded neatly in a cubby and my extra boots were in a fiberplastic drawer.

Aenea pulled food from a cold-box cubby and began making sandwiches, “You must be hungry, my dear,” she said, tearing off pieces of rough bread. I saw zygoat cheese on the sticktite zero-g work surface, some wrapped pieces of roast beef that must have come from the ship, bulbs of mustard, and several tankards of T’ien Shan rice beer. Suddenly I was starved.

The sandwiches were large and thick. She set them on catch-plates made of some strong fiber, lifted her own meal and a beer bulb, and kicked toward the outer wall. A portal appeared and began to iris open.

“Uh …”I said alertly, meaning—Excuse me, Aenea, but that’s space out there. Aren’t we both going to explosively decompress and die horribly?

She kicked out through the organic portal and I shrugged and followed.

There were catwalks, suspension bridges, sticktite stairways, balconies, and terraces out there—made of steel-hard plant fiber and winding around the pods, stalks, branches, and trunks like so much ivy. There was also air to breathe. It smelled of a forest after a rain.

“Containment field,” I said, thinking that I should have expected this. After all, if the Consul’s ancient starship could have a balcony …

I looked around. “What powers it?” I said. “Solar receptors?”

“Indirectly,” said Aenea, finding us a sticktite bench and mat. There were no railings on this tiny, intricately woven balcony. The huge branch—at least thirty meters across—ended in a profusion of leaves above us and the latticework web of the trunks and branches “beneath” us convinced my inner ear that we were many kilometers up on a wall made of crisscrossed, green girders. I resisted the urge to throw myself down on the sticktite mat and cling for dear life. A radiant gossamer fluttered by, followed by some type of small bird with a v-shaped tail.

“Indirectly?” I said, my mouth full as I took a huge bite of sandwich.

“The sunlight—for the most part—is converted to containment fields by ergs,” continued my friend, sipping her beer and looking out at the seemingly infinite expanse of leaves above us, below us, to all sides of us, their green faces all turned toward the brilliant star. There was not enough air to give us a blue sky, but the containment field polarized the view toward the sun just enough to keep us from being blinded when we glanced that direction.

I almost spit my food out, managed to swallow instead, and said, “Ergs? As in Aldebaren energy binders? You were serious? Ergs like the one taken on the last Hyperion pilgrimage?”

“Yes,” said Aenea. Her dark eyes were focused on me now.

“I thought they were extinct.”

“Nope,” said Aenea.

I took a long drink from the beer bulb and shook my head. “I’m confused.”

“You have a right to be, my dear friend,” Aenea said softly.

“This place …”I made a weak gesture toward the wall of branches and leaves trailing away so much farther than a planetary horizon, the infinitely distant curve of green and black far above us. “It’s impossible,” I said.

“Not quite,” said Aenea. “The Templars and Ousters have been working on it—and others like it—for a thousand years.”

I began chewing again. The cheese and roast beef were delicious. “So this is where the thousands and millions of trees went when they abandoned God’s Grove during the Fall.”

“Some of them,” said Aenea. “But the Templars had been working with the Ousters to develop orbital forest rings and biospheres long before that.”

I peered up. The distances made me dizzy. The sense of being on this small, leafy platform so many kilometers above nothing made me reel. Far below us and to our right, something that looked like a tiny, green sprig moved slowly between the latticed branches. I saw the film of energy field around it and realized that I was looking at one of the fabled Templar tree-ships, almost certainly kilometers long. “Is this finished then?” I said. “A true Dyson sphere? A globe around a star?”

Aenea shook her head. “Far from it, although about twenty standard years ago, they made contact with all the primary trunk tendrils. Technically it’s a sphere, but most of it is comprised of holes at this point—some many millions of klicks across.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I said, realizing that I could have been more eloquent. I rubbed my cheeks, feeling the heavy growth of beard there. “I’ve been out of it for two weeks?” I said.

“Fifteen standard days,” said Aenea.

“Usually the doc-in-the-box works more quickly than that,” I said. I finished the sandwich, stuck the catchplate to the table surface, and concentrated on the beer.

“Usually it does,” agreed Aenea. “Rachel must have told you that you spent a relatively short time in the autosurgeon. She did most of the initial surgery herself.”

“Why?” I said.

“The box was full,” said Aenea. “We defrosted you from fugue as soon as we got here, but the three in the doc ahead of you were in bad shape. De Soya was near death for a full week. The sergeant … Gregorius … was much more seriously injured than he had let on when we met him on the Great Peak. And the third officer—Carel Shan—died despite the box’s and the Ouster medics’ best efforts.”

“Shit,” I said, lowering the beer. “I’m sorry to hear that.” One got used to autosurgeons fixing almost anything.

Aenea looked at me with such intensity that I could feel her gaze warming my skin as surely as I could feel the powerful sunlight. “How are you, Raul?”

“Great,” I said. “I ache a bit. I can feel the healing ribs. The scars itch. And I feel like I overslept by two weeks … but I feel good.”

She took my hand. I realized that her eyes were moist. “I would have been really pissed if you’d died on me,” she said after a moment, her voice thick.

“Me too.” I squeezed her hand, looked up, and suddenly leaped to my feet, sending the beer bulb spiraling off into thin air and almost launching myself. Only the sticktite velcro soles on my soft shoes kept me anchored. “Holy shit!” I said, pointing.

From this distance, it looked like a squid, perhaps only a meter or two long. From experience and a growing sense of perspective here, I knew better.

“One of the zeplins,” said Aenea. “The Akerataeli have tens of thousands working on the Biosphere. They stay inside the CO₂ and O₂ envelopes.”

“It’s not going to eat me again, is it?” I said.

Aenea grinned. “I doubt it. The one that got a taste of you has probably spread the word.”

I looked for my beer, saw the bulb tumbling away a hundred meters below us, considered leaping after it, thought better of it, and sat down on the sticktite bench.

Aenea gave me her bulb. “Go ahead. I can never finish those things.” She watched me drink. “Any other questions while we’re talking?”

I swallowed and made a dismissive gesture. “Well, there happens to be a bunch of extinct, mythical, and dead people around. Care to explain that?”

“By extinct you mean the zeplins, Seneschai, and Templars?” she said.

“Yeah. And the ergs … although I haven’t seen one of those yet.”

“The Templars and Ousters have been working to preserve such hunted sentient species the way the colonists on Maui-Covenant tried to save the Old Earth dolphins,” she said. “From the early Hegira colonists, then the Hegemony, and now the Pax.”

“And the mythical and dead people?” I said.

“By that you mean Colonel Kassad?”

“And Het Masteen,” I said. “And, for that matter, Rachel. We seem to have the whole cast of the friggin’ Hyperion Cantos showing up here.”

“Not quite,” said Aenea, her voice soft and a bit sad. “The Consul is dead. Father Duré is never allowed to live. And my mother is gone.”

“Sorry, kiddo …”

She touched my hand again. “That’s all right. I know what you mean … it’s disconcerting.”

“Did you know Colonel Kassad or Het Masteen before this?” I said.

Aenea shook her head. “My mother told me about them, of course … and Uncle Martin had things to add to his poem’s description. But they were gone before I was born.”

“Gone,” I repeated. “Don’t you mean dead?” I worked to remember the Cantos stanzas. According to the old poet’s tale, Het Masteen, the tall Templar, the True Voice of the Tree, had disappeared on the windwagon trip across Hyperion’s Sea of Grass shortly after his treeship, the Yggdrasill, had burned in orbit. Blood in the Templar’s cabin suggested the Shrike. He had left behind the erg in a Mobius cube. Sometime later, they had found Masteen in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He had not been able to explain his absence—had said only that the blood in the windwagon had not been his—had cried out that it was his job to be the Voice of the Tree of Pain—and had died.

Colonel Kassad had disappeared at about that same time—shortly after entering the Valley of the Time Tombs—but the FORCE Colonel had, according to Martin Silenus’s Cantos, followed his phantom lover, Moneta, into the far future where he was to die in combat with the Shrike. I closed my eyes and recited aloud:

“Impressive memory,” said Aenea.

“Grandam used to cuff me if I screwed it up,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. The Templar and the Colonel sound dead to me.”

“And so they will be,” said Aenea. “And so shall we all.”

I waited for her to shift out of her Delphic phase.

“The Cantos say that Het Masteen was carried away somewhere … some when by the Shrike,” she said. “He later died in the Valley of the Time Tombs after returning. The poem did not say if he was gone an hour or thirty years. Uncle Martin did not know.”

I squinted at her. “What about Kassad, kiddo? The Cantos are fairly specific there … the Colonel follows Moneta into the far future, engages in a battle with the Shrike …”

“With legions of Shrikes, actually,” corrected my friend.

“Yeah,” I said. I had never really understood that. “But it seems continuous enough … he follows her, he fights, he dies, his body is put in the Crystal Monolith, and it and Moneta begin the long trip back through time.”

Aenea nodded and smiled. “With the Shrike,” she said.

I paused. The Shrike had emerged from the Tombs … Moneta had traveled with it somehow … so although the Cantos clearly said that Kassad had destroyed the Shrike in that great, final battle, the monster was somehow alive and traveling with Moneta and Kassad’s body back through …

Damn. Did the poem ever actually say that Kassad was dead?

“Uncle Martin had to fake parts of the tale, you know,” said Aenea. “He had some descriptions from Rachel, but he took poetic license on the parts he did not understand.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Rachel. Moneta. The Cantos had clearly suggested that the girl-child Rachel, who went forward with her father, Sol, to the future, would return as the woman Moneta. Colonel Kassad’s phantom lover. The woman he would follow into the future to his fate … And what had Rachel said to me a few hours earlier when I was suspicious that she and Aenea were lovers? “I happen to be involved with a certain soldier … male … whom you’ll meet today. Well, actually, I will be involved with him someday. I mean … shit, it’s complicated.”

Indeed. My head hurt. I set down the beer bulb and held my head in my hands.

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Aenea.

I peered up at her through my fingers. “Care to explain?”

“Yes, but …”

“I know,” I said. “At some other time.”

“Yes,” said Aenea, her hand on mine.

“Any reason why we can’t talk about it now?” I said.

Aenea nodded. “We have to go in our pod now and opaque the walls,” she said.

“We do?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And then what?” I said.

“Then,” said Aenea, floating free of the sticktite mat and pulling me with her, “we make love for hours.”