28

he erg-folded magnetic fields were still standing but strangely scrambled. Instead of flying along and above the boulevard-wide swath of branch toward the Yggdrasill, the hawking mat wanted to align itself at right angles to the branch, so that our faces seemed to be pointing down as the mat rose like an elevator through shaking branches, dangling bridges, severed stemways, globes of flame, and hordes of Ousters leaping off into space to do battle and die. As long as we made progress toward the treeship, I let the hawking mat do what it wanted.

There were bubbles of containment-field atmosphere remaining, but most of the erg-fields had died along with the ergs who maintained them. Despite multiple redundancies, air was either leaking or explosively decompressing all along this region of the Startree. We had no suits. What I had remembered in the pod at the last moment was that the ancient hawking mat had its own low-level field for holding passengers or air in. It was never meant as a long-term pressurization device, but we had used it nine years ago on the unnamed jungle planet when we’d flown too high to breathe, and I hoped the systems were still working.

They still worked … at least after a fashion. As soon as we were out of the pod and rising like a parawing through the chaos, the hawking mat’s low-level field kicked in. I could almost feel the thin air leaking out, but I told myself that it should last us the length of time it would take to reach the Yggdrasill.

We almost did not reach the Yggdrasill.

It was not the first space battle I had witnessed—Aenea and I had sat on the high platform of the Temple Hanging in Air not that many standard days, eons, ago and watched the light show in cislunar space as the Pax task force had destroyed Father de Soya’s ship—but this was the first space battle I had seen where someone was trying to kill me.

Where there was air, the noise was deafening: explosions, implosions, shattering trunks and stemways, rupturing branches and dying squids, the howl of alarms and babble and squeal of comlogs and other communicators. Where there was vacuum, the silence was even more deafening: Ouster and Templar bodies being blown noiselessly into space—women and children, warriors unable to reach their weapons or battle stations, robed priests of the Muir tumbling toward the sun while wrapped in the ultimate indignity of violent death—flames with no crackling, screams with no sound, cyclones with no windrush warning.

Aenea was huddled over Siri’s ancient comlog as we rose through the maelstrom. I saw Systenj Coredwell shouting from the tiny holo display above the diskey, and then Kent Quinkent and Sian Quintana Ka’an speaking earnestly. I was too busy guiding the hawking mat to listen to their desperate conversations.

I could no longer see the fusion tails of the Pax Fleet archangels, only their lances cutting through gas clouds and debris fields, slicing the Startree like scalpels through living flesh. The great trunks and winding branches actually bled, their sap and other vital fluids mixing with the kilometers of fiber-optic vine and Ouster blood as they exploded into space or boiled away in vacuum. A ten-klick worker squid was sliced through and then sliced through again as I watched, its delicate tentacles spasming in a destructive dance as it died. Ouster angels took flight by the thousands and died by the thousands. A treeship tried to get under way and was lanced through in seconds, its rich oxygen atmosphere igniting within the containment field, its crew dying in the time it took for the energy globe to fill with swirling smoke.

“Not the Yggdrasill” shouted Aenea.

I nodded. The dying treeship had been coming from sphere north, but the Yggdrasill should be close now, a klick or less above us along the vibrating, splintering branch.

Unless I had taken a wrong turn. Or unless it had already been destroyed. Or unless it had left without us.

“I talked to Het Masteen,” Aenea shouted. We were in a globe of escaping air now and the din was terrible. “Only about three hundred of the thousand are aboard.”

“All right,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. What thousand? No time to ask. I caught a glimpse of the deeper green of a treeship a klick or more above us and to the left—on another branch helix altogether—and swept the hawking mat in that direction. If it was not the Yggdrasill we would have to seek shelter there anyway. The Startree EM fields were failing, the hawking mat losing energy and inertia.

The EM field failed. The hawking mat surged a final time and then began tumbling in the blackness between shattered branches, a kilometer or more from the nearest burning stem ways. Far below and behind us I could see the cluster of environment pods from which we had come: they were all shattered, leaking air and bodies, the podstems and connecting branches writhing in blind Newtonian response.

“That’s it,” I said, my voice low because there was no more air or noise outside our failing bubble of energy. The hawking mat had been designed seven centuries ago to seduce a teenage niece into loving an old man, not to keep its flyers alive in outer space. “We tried, kiddo.” I moved back from the flight threads and put my arm around Aenea.

“No,” said Aenea, rejecting not my hug but the death sentence. She gripped my arm so fiercely that her fingers sank into the flesh of my bicep. “No, no,” she said to herself and tapped the comlog diskey.

Het Masteen’s cowled face appeared against the tumbling starfield. “Yes,” he said. “I see you.”

The huge treeship now hung a thousand meters above us, a single great ceiling of branches and leaves green behind the flickering violet containment field, the bulk of it slowly separating from the burning Startree. There was a sudden, violent tug, and for a second I was sure that one of the archangel lances had found us.

“The ergs are pulling us in,” said Aenea, still grasping my arm.

“Ergs?” I said. “I thought a treeship only had one erg aboard to handle the drive and fields.”

“Usually they do,” said Aenea. “Sometimes two if it’s an extraordinary voyage … into the outer envelope of a star, for instance, or through the shock wave of a binary’s heliosphere.”

“So there are two aboard the Yggdrasill?” I said, watching the tree grow and fill the sky. Plasma explosions unfolded silently behind us.

“No,” said Aenea, “there are twenty-seven.”

The extended field pulled us in. Up rearranged itself and became down. We were lowered onto a high deck, just beneath the bridge platform near the crown of the treeship. Even before I tapped the flight threads to collapse our own puny containment field, Aenea was scooping up her comlog and backpack and was racing toward the stairway.

I rolled the hawking mat neatly, shoved it into its leather carrier, flung the tube on my back, and rushed to catch up.

ONLY THE TEMPLAR TREESHIP CAPTAIN HET MASTEEN and a few of his lieutenants were on the crown bridge, but the platforms and stairways beneath the bridge level were crowded with people I knew and did not know: Rachel, Theo, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Lhomo Dondrub, and the dozens of other familiar refugees from T’ien Shan, but there were also scores of other non-Ouster, non-Templar humans, men, women, and children whom I had not seen previously. “Refugees fleeing a hundred Pax worlds, picked up by Father Captain de Soya in the Raphael over the past few years,” said Aenea. “We’d expected hundreds more to arrive today before departure, but it’s too late now.”

I followed her up to the bridge level. Het Masteen stood at the locus of a circle of organic control diskeys—displays from the fiber-optic nerves running throughout the ship, holo displays from onboard, astern, and ahead of the treeship, a communicator nexus to put him in touch with the Templars standing duty with the ergs, in the singularity containment core, at the drive roots, and elsewhere, and the central holo-simulacrum of the treeship itself, which he could touch with his long fingers to call up interactives or change headings. The Templar looked up as Aenea walked quickly across the sacred bridge toward him. His countenance—shaped from Old Earth Asian stock—was calm beneath his cowl.

“I am pleased that you were not left behind, One Who Teaches,” he said dryly. “Where do you wish us to go?”

“Out-system,” said Aenea without hesitation.

Het Masteen nodded. “We will draw fire, of course. The Pax Fleet firepower is formidable.”

Aenea only nodded. I saw the treeship simulacrum turning slowly and looked up to see the starfield rotating above us. We had moved in-system only a few hundred kilometers and were now turning back toward the battered inner surface of the Biosphere Startree. Where our meeting and environment pods had been there was now a ragged hole in the braided branches. All across the thousands of square klicks of this region were gaping wounds and denuded branches. The Yggdrasill moved slowly through billions of tumbling leaves—those still in containment-field atmosphere burning brightly and painting the containment-field perimeter gray with ash—as the treeship returned to the sphere wall and carefully passed through.

Emerging from the far side and picking up speed as the erg-controlled fusion drive flared, we could see even more of the battle now. Space here was a myriad of winking pinpoints of light, fiery sparks appearing as defensive containment fields came alight under lance attack, countless thermonuclear and plasma explosions, the drive tails of missiles, hyperkinetic weapons, small attack craft, and archangels. The curving-away outer surface of the Startree looked like a fibrous volcano world erupting with flames and geysers of debris. Watering comets and shepherd asteroids, knocked from their perfect balancing act by Pax weapon blasts, tore through the Startree like cannon-balls through kindling. Het Masteen called up tactical holos and we stared at the image of the entire Biosphere, pocked now with ten thousand fires—many individual conflagrations as large as my homeworld of Hyperion—and a hundred thousand visible rents and tears in the sphere fabric that had taken almost a thousand years to weave. There were thousands of under-drive objects being plotted on the radar and deep distance sensors, but fewer each second as the powerful archangels picked off Ouster ramscouts, torchships, destroyers, and treeships with their lances at distances of several AUs. Millions of space-adapted Ousters threw themselves at the attackers, but they died like moths in a flamethrower.

Lhomo Dondrub strode onto the bridge. He was wearing an Ouster skinsuit and carrying a long, class-four assault weapon. “Aenea, where the goddamned hell are we going?”

“Away,” said my beloved. “We have to leave, Lhomo.”

The flyer shook his head. “No, we don’t. We have to stay and fight. We can’t just abandon our friends to these Pax carrion birds.”

“Lhomo,” said Aenea, “we can’t help the Startree. I have to leave here in order to fight the Pax.”

“Run again if you have to,” said Lhomo, his handsome features contorted by rage and frustration. He molded the silvery skinsuit cowl up over his head. “I am going to stay and fight.”

“They’ll kill you, my friend,” said Aenea. “You can’t fight archangel-class starships.”

“Watch me,” said Lhomo, the silvery suit covering everything but his face now. He shook my hand. “Good luck, Raul.”

“And to you,” I said, feeling my throat tighten and face flush as much from my own shame at fleeing as from bidding farewell to this brave man.

Aenea touched the powerful silver arm. “Lhomo, you can help the fight more if you come with us …”

Lhomo Dondrub shook his head and lowered the fluid cowl. The audio pickups sounded metallic as they spoke for him. “Good luck to you, Aenea. May God and the Buddha help you. May God and the Buddha help us all.” He stepped to the edge of the platform and looked back at Het Masteen. The Templar nodded, touched the control simulacrum near the crown of the tree, and whispered into one of the fiberthreads.

I felt gravity lessen. The outer field shimmered and shifted. Lhomo was lifted, turned, and catapulted out into space beyond our branches and air and lights. I saw his silver wings unfold, saw the light fill his wings, and watched him form up with a score of other Ouster angels carrying their puny weapons and riding sunlight toward the nearest archangel.

Others were coming onto the bridge now—Rachel, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, Father de Soya and his sergeant, A. Bettik, the Dalai Lama—but all held back, keeping a respectful distance from the busy Templar captain.

“They’ve acquired us,” said Het Masteen. “Firing.”

The containment field exploded red. I could hear the sizzling, it was as if we had fallen into the heart of a star.

Displays flickered. “Holding,” said the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. “Holding.”

He meant the defensive fields, but the Pax ships were also holding—maintaining their energy lance fire even as we accelerated out-system. Except for the display holos, there was no sign of our movement—no stars visible—only the crackling, hissing, boiling ovoid of destructive energy bubbling and slithering a few dozen meters above and around us.

“What is our course, please?” asked Het Masteen of Aenea.

My friend touched her forehead briefly as if tired or lost. “Just out where we can see the stars.”

“We will never reach a translation point while under this severity of attack,” said the Templar.

“I know,” said Aenea. “Just … out … where I can see the stars.”

Het Masteen looked up at the inferno above us. “We may never see the stars again.”

“We have to,” Aenea said simply.

There was a sudden flurry of shouts. I looked up at where the commotion was centered.

There were only a few small platforms above the control bridge—tiny structures looking like crow’s nests on a holodrama pirate ship or like a treehouse I had seen once in the Hyperion fens—and it was on one of these that the figure stood. Crew clones were shouting and pointing. Het Masteen peered up toward the tiny platform fifteen meters above us and turned to Aenea. “The Lord of Pain rides with us.”

I could see the colors from the inferno beyond the containment field reflecting on the Shrike’s forehead and chest carapace.

“I thought it died on T’ien Shan,” I said.

Aenea looked more weary than I had ever seen her. “The thing moves through time more easily than we move through space, Raul. It may have died on T’ien Shan … it may die a thousand years hence in a battle with Colonel Kassad … it may not be capable of dying … we will never know.”

As if her use of his name had summoned him, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad came up the stairs to the bridge platform. The Colonel was in archaic Hegemony-era battle dress and was carrying the assault rifle I had once seen in the Consul’s ship armory. He stared at the Shrike like a man possessed.

“Can I get up there?” Kassad asked the Templar captain.

Still absorbed with issuing commands and monitoring displays, Het Masteen pointed to some ratlines and rope ladders that rose to the highest platform.

“No shooting on this treeship,” Het Masteen called after the Colonel. Kassad nodded and began climbing.

The rest of us turned our attention back to the simulacra displays. There were at least three archangels directing some of their fire at us from distances of less than a million klicks. They would take turns lancing us, each then directing some of its fire at other targets. But our odd refusal to die seemed to increase their anger at us and the lances would return, creeping across the four to ten light-seconds and exploding on the containment field above us. One of the ships was about to pass around the curve of the blazing Startree, but the two others were still decelerating in-system toward us with clear fields of fire.

“Missiles launched against us,” said one of the captain’s Templar lieutenants in a voice no more excited than I would use to announce the arrival of dinner. “Two … four … nine. Sublight. Presumably plasma warheads.”

“Can we survive that?” asked Theo. Rachel had walked over to watch the Colonel climb toward the Shrike.

Het Masteen was too occupied to answer, so Aenea said, “We don’t know. It depends on the binders … the ergs.”

“Sixty seconds to missile impact,” said the same Templar lieutenant in the same flat tones.

Het Masteen touched a comwand. His voice sounded normal, but I realized that it was being amplified all over the klick-long treeship. “Everyone will please shield their eyes and avoid looking toward the field. The binders will polarize the flash as much as possible, but please do not look up. May the peace of the Muir be with us.”

I looked at Aenea. “Kiddo, does this treeship carry weapons?”

“No,” she said. Her eyes looked as weary as her voice had sounded.

“So we’re not going to fight … just run?”

“Yes, Raul.”

I ground my molars. “Then I agree with Lhomo,” I said. “We’ve run too much. It’s time to help our friends here. Time to …”

At least three of the missiles exploded. Later, I recall the light so blinding that I could see Aenea’s skull and vertebrae through her skin and flesh, but that must be impossible. There was a sense of falling … of the bottom falling out of everything … and then the one-sixth-g field was restored. A subsonic rumble made my teeth and bones hurt.

I blinked away retinal afterimages. Aenea’s face was still before me—her cheeks flushed and sweaty, her hair pulled back by a hastily tied band, her eyes tired but infinitely alive, her forearms bare and sunburned—and in a thick moment of sentimentality I thought that it would not have been unthinkable to die like that, with Aenea’s face seared into my soul and memory.

Two more plasma warheads made the treeship shudder. Then four more. “Holding,” said Het Masteen’s lieutenant. “All fields holding.”

“Lhomo and Raul are right, Aenea,” said the Dorje Phamo, stepping forward with regal elegance in her simple cotton robe. “You have run away from the Pax for years. It is time to fight them … time for all of us to fight them.”

I was staring at the old woman with something close to rude intensity. I had realized that there was an aura about her … no, wrong word, too mystical … but a feeling of strong color emanating from her, a deep carmine as strong as the Thunderbolt Sow’s personality. I also realized that I had been noticing that with everyone on the platform that evening—the bright blue of Lhomo’s courage, the golden confidence of Het Masteen’s command, the shimmering violet of Colonel Kassad’s shock at seeing the Shrike—and I wondered if this was some artifact of learning the language of the living. Or perhaps it was a result of the overload of light from the plasma explosions. Whatever it was, I knew that the colors were not real—I was not hallucinating and my vision was not clouded—but I also thought that I knew that my mind was making these connections, these shorthand glimpses into the true spirit of the person, on some level below and above sight.

And I knew that the colors surrounding Aenea covered the spectrum and beyond—a glow so pervasive that it filled the treeship as surely as the plasma explosions filled the world outside it.

Father de Soya spoke. “No, ma’am,” he said to the Dorje Phamo, his voice soft and respectful. “Lhomo and Raul are not correct. In spite of all of our anger and our wish to strike back, Aenea is correct. Lhomo may learn—if he lives—what we all will learn if we live. That is, after communion with Aenea, we share the pain of those we attack. Truly share it. Literally share it. Physically share it. Share it as part of having learned the language of the living.”

The Dorje Phamo looked down at the shorter priest. “I know this is true, Christian. But this does not mean that we cannot strike back when others hurt us.” She swept one arm upward to include the slowly clearing containment field and the starfield of fusion trails and burning embers beyond it. “These Pax … monsters … are destroying one of the greatest achievements of the human race. We must stop them!”

“Not now,” said Father de Soya. “Not by fighting them here. Trust Aenea.”

The giant named Sergeant Gregorius stepped into the circle. “Every fiber of my being, every moment of my training, every scar from my years of fighting … everything urges me to fight now,” he growled. “But I trusted my captain. Now I trust him as my priest. And if he says we must trust the young woman … then we must trust her.”

Het Masteen held up a hand. The group fell into silence. “This argument is a waste of time. As the One Who Teaches told you, the Yggdrasill has no weapons and the ergs are our only defense. But they cannot phase-shift the fusion drive while providing this level of shield. Effectively, we have no propulsion … we are drifting on our former course only a few light-minutes beyond our original position. And five of the archangels have changed course to intercept us.” The Templar turned to face us. “Please, everyone except the Revered One Who Teaches and her tall friend Raul, please leave the bridge platform and wait below.”

The others left without another word. I saw the direction of Rachel’s gaze before she turned away and I looked up. Colonel Kassad was at the top crow’s nest, standing next to the Shrike, the tall man still dwarfed by the three-meter sculpture of chrome and blades and thorns. Neither the Colonel nor the killing machine moved as they regarded one another from less than a meter’s distance.

I looked back at the simulacra display. The Pax ship embers were closing fast. Above us the containment field cleared.

“Take my hand, Raul,” said Aenea.

I took her hand, remembering all of the other times I had touched it in the last ten standard years.

“The stars,” she whispered. “Look up at the stars. And listen to them.”

• • •

THE TREESHIP YGGDRASILL HUNG IN LOW ORBIT around an orange-red world with white polar caps, ancient volcanoes larger than my world’s Pinion Plateau, and a river valley running for more than five thousand kilometers like an appendectomy scar around the world’s belly.

“This is Mars,” said Aenea. “Colonel Kassad will leave us here.”

The Colonel had come down from his close regard of the Shrike after the quantum-shift jump. There was no word or phrase for what we did: one moment the treeship was in the Biosphere System, coasting at low velocity, drives dead, under attack by a swarm of archangels, and the next instant we were in low and stable orbit around this dead world in Old Earth System.

“How did you do that?” I had asked Aenea a second after she had done it. I’d had no doubt whatsoever that she had … shifted … us there.

“I learned to hear the music of the spheres,” she said. “And then to take a step.”

I kept staring at her. I was still holding her hand. I had no plans to release it until she spoke to me in plain language.

“One can understand a place, Raul,” she said, knowing that so many others were undoubtedly listening at that moment, “and when you do, it is like hearing the music of it. Each world a different chord. Each star system a different sonata. Each specific place a clear and distinct note.”

I did not release her hand. “And the farcasting without a farcaster?” I said.

Aenea nodded. “Freecasting. A quantum leap in the real sense of the term,” she said. “Moving in the macro universe the way an electron moves in the infinitely micro. Taking a step with the help of the Void Which Binds.”

I was shaking my head. “Energy. Where does the energy come from, kiddo? Nothing comes from nothing.”

“But everything comes from everything.”

“What does that mean, Aenea?”

She pulled her fingers from mine but touched my cheek. “Remember our discussion long, long ago about the Newtonian physics of love?”

“Love is an emotion, kiddo. Not a form of energy.”

“It’s both, Raul. It truly is. And it is the only key to unlocking the universe’s greatest supply of energy.”

“Are you talking about religion?” I said, half furious at either her opacity or my denseness or both.

“No,” she said, “I’m talking about quasars deliberately ignited, about pulsars tamed, about the exploding cores of galaxies tapped for energy like steam turbines. I’m talking about an engineering project two and a half billion years old and barely begun.”

I could only stare.

She shook her head. “Later, my love. For now understand that farcasting without a farcaster really works. There were never any real farcasters … never any magical doors opening onto different worlds … only the TechnoCore’s perversion of this form of the Void’s second most wonderful gift.”

I should have said, What is the Void’s first most wonderful gift? but I assumed then that it was the learning-the-language-of-the-dead recording of sentient races’ memories … my mother’s voice, to be more precise. But what I did say then was, “So this is how you moved Rachel and Theo and you from world to world without time-debt.”

“Yes.”

“And took the Consul’s ship from T’ien Shan System to Biosphere with no Hawking drive.”

“Yes.”

I was about to say, And traveled to whatever world where you met your lover, were married, and had a child, but the words would not form.

“This is Mars,” she said next, filling the silence. “Colonel Kassad will leave us here.”

The tall warrior stepped to Aenea’s side. Rachel came closer, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed him.

“Someday you will be called Moneta,” Kassad said softly. “And we will be lovers.”

“Yes,” said Rachel and stepped back.

Aenea took the tall man’s hand. He was still in quaint battle garb, the assault rifle held comfortably in the crook of his arm. Smiling slightly, the Colonel looked up at the highest platform where the Shrike still stood, the blood light of Mars on his carapace.

“Raul,” said Aenea, “will you come as well?”

I took her other hand.

• • •

THE WIND WAS BLOWING SAND INTO MY EYES AND I could not breathe. Aenea handed me an osmosis mask and I slipped mine on as she set hers in place.

The sand was red, the rocks were red, and the sky was a stormy pink. We were standing in a dry river valley bounded by rocky cliffs. The riverbed was strewn with boulders—some as big as the Consul’s ship. Colonel Kassad pulled on the helmet cowl of his combat suit and static rasped in our comthread pickups. “Where I started,” he said. “In the Tharsis Relocation Slums a few hundred klicks that direction.” He gestured toward where the sun hung low and small above the cliffs. The suited figure, ominous in its size and bulk, the heavy assault weapon looking anything but obsolete here on the plain of Mars, turned toward Aenea. “What would you have me do, woman?”

Aenea spoke in the crisp, quick, sure syllables of command. “The Pax has retreated from Mars and Old Earth System temporarily because of the Palestinian uprising here and the resurgence of the Martian War Machine in space. There is nothing strategic enough to hold them here now while their resources are stretched so thin.”

Kassad nodded.

“But they’ll be back,” said Aenea. “Back in force. Not just to pacify Mars, but to occupy the entire system.” She paused to look around. I followed her gaze and saw the dark human figures moving down the boulder field toward us. They carried weapons.

“You must keep them out of the system, Colonel,” said my friend. “Do whatever you must … sacrifice whomever you must … but keep them out of Old Earth System for the next five standard years.”

I had never heard Aenea sound so adamant or ruthless.

“Five standard years,” said Colonel Kassad. I could see his thin smile behind the cowl visor. “No problem. If it was five Martian years, I might have to strain a bit.”

Aenea smiled. The figures were moving closer through the blowing sand. “You’ll have to take the leadership of the Martian resistance movement,” she said, her voice deadly serious. “Take it any way you can.”

“I will,” said Kassad and the firmness in his voice matched Aenea’s.

“Consolidate the various tribes and warrior factions,” said Aenea.

“I will.”

“Form a more permanent alliance with the War Machine spacers.”

Kassad nodded. The figures were less than a hundred meters away now. I could see weapons raised.

“Protect Old Earth,” said Aenea. “Keep the Pax away at all costs.”

I was shocked. Colonel Kassad must have been surprised as well. “You mean Old Earth System,” he said.

Aenea shook her head. “Old Earth, Fedmahn. Keep the Pax away. You have approximately a year to consolidate control of the entire system. Good luck.”

The two shook hands.

“Your mother was a fine, brave woman,” said the Colonel. “I valued her friendship.”

“And she valued yours.”

The dark figures were moving closer, keeping to the cover of boulders and dunes. Colonel Kassad walked toward them, his right hand high, the assault weapon still easy in his arm.

Aenea came closer and took my hand again. “It’s cold, isn’t it, Raul?”

It was. There was a flash of light like a painless blow to the back of one’s head and we were on the bridge platform of the Yggdrasill Our friends backed away at the sight of our appearance; the fear of magic dies hard in a species. Mars turned red and cold beyond our branches and containment field.

“What course, Revered One Who Teaches?” said Het Masteen.

“Just turn outward to where we can clearly see the stars,” said Aenea.