Endymion

17

Now, writing this so many years later, I had thought it would be difficult to remember Aenea as a child. It is not. My memories are so full of later years, later images—rich sunlight on the woman’s body as we floated among the branches of the orbital forest, the first time we made love in zero-gravity, strolling with her along the hangway walkways of Hsuan-k’ung Su with the rose-red cliffs of Hua Shan catching the rich light above us—that I had worried that those earlier memories would be too insubstantial. They are not. Nor have I given in to the impulse to leap ahead to the later years, despite my fear that this narrative will be interrupted at any second with the quantum-mechanical hiss of Schrödinger’s poison gas. I will write what I can write. Fate will determine the ending point of this narrative.

A. Bettik led the way up the spiral staircase to the room with a piano as we roared up into space. The containment field kept the gravity constant, despite the wild acceleration, but still there was a wild sense of exhilaration in me—although perhaps it was just the aftermath of so much adrenaline in so little time. The child was dirty, disheveled, and still upset.

“I want to see where we are,” she said. “Please.” The ship complied by turning the wall beyond the holopit into a window. The continent of Equus receded below, the face of the horse obscured by red dust cloud. To the north, where clouds covered the pole, the limb of Hyperion arced into a distinct curve. Within a minute the entire world was a globe, two of the three continents visible beneath scattered cloud, the Great South Sea a breathtaking blue while the Nine Tails archipelago was surrounded by the green of shallows, and then the world shrank, became a blue-and-red-and-white sphere, and fell behind. We were leaving in a hurry.

“Where are the torchships?” I asked the android. “They should have challenged us by now. Or blown us to bits.”

“The ship and I were monitoring their wideband channels,” said A. Bettik. “They were… preoccupied.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, pacing the rim of the holopit, too agitated to sit in the deep cushions. “That battle… who…”

“The Shrike,” said Aenea, and really looked at me for the first time. “Mother and I hoped it would not happen like that, but it did. I am so sorry. So terribly sorry.”

Realizing that the girl probably had not heard me in the storm, I paused in my pacing, dropped to the arm of the couch, and said, “We didn’t have much of an introduction. I’m Raul Endymion.”

The girl’s eyes were bright. Despite the mud and grit on her cheek, I could see the fairness of her complexion. “I remember,” she said. “Endymion, like the poem.”

“Poem?” I said. “I don’t know about a poem. It’s Endymion like the old city.”

She smiled. “I only know the poem because my father wrote it. How fitting of Uncle Martin to choose a hero with such a name.”

I squirmed at hearing the word “hero.” This whole endeavor was turning out to be absurd enough without that.

The girl held out her small hand. “Aenea,” she said. “But you know that.”

Her fingers were cool in my palm. “The old poet said that you had changed your name a few times.”

Her smile lingered. “And will again, I wager.” She withdrew her hand and then offered it to the android. “Aenea. Orphan of time.”

A. Bettik shook her hand more gracefully than I had, bowed deeply, and introduced himself. “I am at your service, M. Lamia,” he said.

She shook her head. “My mother is… was… M. Lamia. I’m just Aenea.” She noticed my change in expression. “You know of my mother?”

“She is famous,” I said, blushing slightly for some reason. “All of the Hyperion pilgrims are. Legendary, actually. There is this poem, epic oral tale, actually…”

Aenea laughed. “Oh, God, Uncle Martin finished his damn Cantos.”

I admit that I was shocked. My face must have shown it. I’m glad I was not playing poker this particular morning.

“Sorry,” said Aenea. “Obviously the old satyr’s scribblings have become some sort of priceless cultural heritage. He’s still alive? Uncle Martin, I mean.”

“Yes, M… yes, M. Aenea,” said A. Bettik. “I have had the privilege of serving your uncle for over a century.”

The girl made a face. “You must be a saint, M. Bettik.”

“A. Bettik, M. Aenea,” he said. “And no, I am no saint. Merely an admirer and long acquaintance of your uncle.”

Aenea nodded. “I met a few androids when we would fly up from Jacktown to visit Uncle Martin in the Poet’s City, but not you. More than a century, you say. What year is it?”

I told her.

“Well, we got that part right, at least,” she said, and fell silent, staring at the holo of the receding world. Hyperion was only a spark now.

“You’ve really come from the past?” I said. It was a stupid question, but I wasn’t feeling especially bright that morning.

Aenea nodded. “Uncle Martin must have told you.”

“Yes. You’re fleeing the Pax.”

She looked up. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “The Pax? Is that what they call it?”

I blinked at that. The thought of someone being unfamiliar with the concept of the Pax shook me. This was real. “Yes,” I said.

“So the Church does run everything now?”

“Well, in a way,” I said. I explained the role of the Church in the complex entity that was the Pax.

“They run everything,” concluded Aenea. “We thought it might go that way. My dreams got that right, too.”

“Your dreams?”

“Never mind,” said Aenea. She stood, looked around the room, and walked to the Steinway. Her fingers picked out a few notes on the keyboard. “And this is the Consul’s ship.”

“Yes,” said the ship, “although I have only vague memories of the gentleman. Did you know him?”

Aenea smiled, her fingers still trailing across the keys. “No. My mother did. She gave him a present of that—” She pointed to the sand-covered hawking mat where it lay near the staircase. “When he left Hyperion after the Fall. He was going back to the Web. He didn’t return during my time.”

“He never did,” said the ship. “As I say, my memories have been damaged, but I am sure that he died somewhere there.” The ship’s soft voice changed, became more businesslike. “We were hailed upon leaving the atmosphere, but have not been challenged or pursued since then. We have cleared cislunar space and will be out of Hyperion’s critical gravity well within ten minutes. I need to set course for spinup. Instructions, please.”

I looked at the girl. “The Ousters? That’s where the old poet said you’d want to go.”

“I changed my mind,” said Aenea. “What’s the nearest inhabited world, Ship?”

“Parvati. One-point-two-eight parsecs. Six and a half days shiptime transit. Three months time-debt.”

“Was Parvati part of the Web?” asked the girl.

A. Bettik answered. “No. Not at the time of the Fall.”

“What’s the nearest old Web world, traveling from Parvati?” said Aenea.

“Renaissance Vector,” said the ship immediately. “It is an additional ten days shiptime, five months time-debt.”

I was frowning. “I don’t know,” I said. “The hunters… I mean, offworlders I used to work for usually came from Renaissance Vector. It’s a big Pax world. Busy. Lots of ships and troops there, I think.”

“But it’s the closest Web world?” said Aenea. “It used to have farcasters.”

“Yes,” said the ship and A. Bettik at the same moment.

“Set course for Renaissance Vector by way of Parvati System,” said Aenea.

“It would be a shiptime day and two weeks of time-debt quicker to jump directly to Renaissance Vector, if that is our destination,” advised the ship.

“I know,” said Aenea, “but I want to go by way of Parvati System.” She must have seen the question in my eyes, for she said, “They’ll be following us, and I don’t want them to know the real destination when we spin up out of this system.”

“They are not in pursuit now,” said A. Bettik.

“I know,” said Aenea. “But they will be in a few hours. Then and for the rest of my life.” She looked back at the holopit as if the ship’s persona resided there. “Carry out the command, please.”

The stars shifted on the holodisplay as the ship obeyed. “Twenty-seven minutes to translation point for Parvati System,” it said. “Still no challenge or pursuit, although the torch-ship St. Anthony is under way, as is the troopship.”

“What about the other torchship?” I said. “The… what was it? The St. Bonaventure.”

“Common band communications traffic and sensors show that it is open to space and emitting distress signals,” said the ship. “The St. Anthony is responding.”

“My God,” I whispered. “What was it, an Ouster attack?”

The girl shook her head and walked away from the piano. “Just the Shrike. My father warned me…” She fell silent.

“The Shrike?” It was the android who spoke. “To my knowledge, in legend and the old records, the creature called the Shrike never left Hyperion—usually staying in the area within a few hundred kilometers around the Time Tombs.”

Aenea dropped back into the cushions. Her eyes were still red and she looked tired. “Yeah, well, he’s wandering farther afield now, I’m afraid. And if Father is right, it’s just the beginning.”

“The Shrike hasn’t been seen or heard from for almost three hundred years,” I said.

The girl nodded, distracted. “I know. Not since the tombs opened right before the Fall.” She looked up at the android. “Gosh, I’m starved. And filthy.”

“I will help the ship prepare lunch,” said A. Bettik. “There are showers upstairs in the master bedroom and on the fugue deck below us,” he said. “Also a bath in the master bedroom.”

“That’s where I’m headed,” said the girl. “I’ll be down before we make the quantum jump. See you in twenty minutes.” On her way to the stairs she stopped and took my hand again. “Raul Endymion, I’m sorry if I seem ungrateful. Thank you for risking your life for me. Thank you for coming with me on this trip. Thank you for getting into something so big and complicated that neither one of us can imagine where we’re going to end up.”

“You’re welcome,” I said stupidly.

The child grinned at me. “You need a shower, too, friend. Someday we’ll take it together, but right now I think you should use the one on the fugue deck.”

Blinking, not knowing what to think, I watched her bounce up the stairs.