Endymion

19

I knew little about the principles of the Hawking drive when I first experienced it years ago; I know little more about it now. The fact that it was essentially (if accidentally) the brainchild of someone who lived in the twentieth century, Christian Era, boggled my mind then as it does now, but not nearly as much as the experience itself.

We met in the library—formally known as the navigation level, the ship informed us—a few minutes before translation to C-plus speeds. I was dressed in my spare set of clothes and my hair was wet, as was Aenea’s. The child wore only a thick robe, which she must have found in the Consul’s closet, because the garment was far too large for her. She looked even younger than her twelve years, swallowed as she was in all those yards of terry cloth.

“Shouldn’t we be getting to the cryogenic-fugue couches?” I asked.

“Why?” said Aenea. “Don’t you want to see the fun?” I frowned. All the offworld hunters and military instructors I had spoken to had spent their C-plus time in fugue. That’s the way humans had always spent their time between the stars. Something about the effect of the Hawking field on the body and mind. I had images of hallucinations, waking nightmares, and unspeakable pain. I said as much while trying to sound calm about it.

“Mother and Uncle Martin told me that C-plus can be endured,” said the girl. “Even enjoyed. It just takes some getting used to.”

“And this ship was modified by the Ousters to make it easier,” said A. Bettik. Aenea and I were sitting at the low glass table in the middle of the library area; the android stood to one side. Try as I might to treat him as an equal, A. Bettik insisted on acting like a servant. I resolved to quit being an egalitarian horse’s ass about it and to let him act any way he wanted.

“Indeed,” said the ship, “the modifications included an enhanced containment field capability, which makes the side effects of C-plus travel much less disagreeable.”

“What exactly are the side effects?” I asked, not willing to show the full extent of my naivete, but also not willing to suffer if I didn’t have to.

The android, the girl, and I looked at each other, “I have traveled between the stars in centuries past,” A. Bettik said at last, “but I was always in fugue. In storage, actually. We androids were shipped in cargo holds, stacked like frozen sides of beef, I am told.”

Now the girl and I looked at each other, embarrassed to meet the blue-skinned man’s gaze.

The ship made a noise that sounded remarkably like someone clearing his throat. “Actually,” it said, “from my observations of human passengers—which, I must say, is suspect because…”

“Because your memory is hazy,” the girl and I said in unison. We looked at each other again and laughed. “Sorry, Ship,” said Aenea. “Go on.”

“I was just going to say that from my observations, the primary effect of the C-plus environment on humans is some visual confusion, mental depression brought about by the field, and simple boredom. I believe that cryogenic fugue was developed for the long voyages, and is used as a convenience for shorter trips such as this.”

“And your… ah… Ouster modifications ameliorate these side effects?” I said.

“They are designed to,” replied the ship. “All except boredom, of course. That is a peculiarly human phenomenon, and I do not believe that a cure has been found.” There was a moment of silence, and then the ship said, “We will reach the translation point in two minutes ten seconds. All systems are functioning optimally. Still no pursuit, although the St. Anthony is tracking us on its long-range detectors.”

Aenea stood up. “Let’s go down and watch the shift to C-plus.”

“Go down and watch?” I said. “Where? The holopit?” “No,” called the girl from the stairway. “From outside.”

The spaceship had a balcony. I hadn’t known that. One could stand outside on it even while the ship was hurtling through space, preparing to translate to C-plus pseudo-velocities. I hadn’t known that—and if I had, I would not have believed it.

“Extend the balcony, please,” the girl had said to the ship, and the ship had extended the balcony—the Steinway moving out with it—and we’d walked through the open archway into space. Well, not really into space, of course; even I, the provincial shepherd, knew that our eardrums would have exploded, our eyes burst, and our blood boiled in our bodies if we had stepped into hard vacuum. But it looked as if we were walking out into hard vacuum.

“Is this safe?” I asked, leaning against the railing. Hyperion was a star-sized speck behind us, Hyperion’s star a blazing sun to port, but the plasma tail of our fusion drive—tens of klicks long—gave the impression that we were perched precariously on a tall blue pillar. The effect was a definite inducement to acrophobia, the illusion of standing unprotected in space created something akin to agoraphobia. I had not known until that instant that I was susceptible to any phobia.

“If the containment field fails for a second,” said A. Bettik, “under this g-load and velocity, we will die immediately. It matters little if we are inside or outside the ship.”

“Radiation?” I said.

“The field deflects cosmic and harmful solar radiation, of course,” said the android, “and opaques the view of Hyperion’s sun so that we do not go blind when we stare at it. Other than that, it allows the visible spectrum through quite nicely.”

“Yes,” I said, not convinced. I stepped back from the railing.

“Thirty seconds to translation,” said the ship. Even out here, its voice seemed to emanate from midair.

Aenea sat at the piano bench and began playing. I did not recognize the tune, but it sounded classical… something from the twenty-sixth century, perhaps.

I guess that I had expected the ship to speak again prior to the actual moment of translation—intone a final countdown or something—but there was no announcement. Suddenly the Hawking drive took over from the fusion drive; there was a momentary hum, which seemed to come from my bones; a terrible vertigo flooded over me and through me—it felt as if I were being turned inside out, painlessly but relentlessly; and then the sensation was gone before I could really comprehend it.

Space was also gone. By space, I mean the scene that I had been viewing less than a second earlier—Hyperion’s brilliant sun, the receding disk of the planet itself, the bright glare along the hull of the ship, the few bright stars visible through that glare, even the pillar of blue flame upon which we had been perched—all gone. In its place was… It is hard to describe.

The ship was still there, looming “above and below” us—the balcony upon which we stood still seemed substantial—but there seemed to be no light striking any part of it. I realize how absurd that sounds even as I write the words—there must be reflected light for anything to be seen—but the effect was truly as if part of my eyes had ceased working, and while they registered the shape and mass of the ship, light seemed to be missing.

Beyond the ship, the universe had contracted into a blue sphere near the bow and a red sphere behind the fins at the stern. I knew enough basic science to have expected a Doppler effect, but this was a false effect, since we had not been anywhere near the speed of light until translation to C-plus and were now far beyond it within the Hawking fold. Nonetheless, the blue and red circles of light—I could make out stars clustered in both spheres if I stared hard enough—now migrated farther to the bow and stern, shrinking to tiny dots of color. In between, filling the vast field of vision, there was… nothing. By that, I do not mean blackness or darkness. I mean void. I mean the sense of sickening nonsight one has when trying to look into a blind spot. I mean a nothing so intense that the vertigo it induced almost immediately changed to nausea within me, racking my system as violently as the transitory sense of being pulled inside out had seconds before.

“My God!” I managed to say, gripping the rail tightly and squeezing my eyes shut. It did not help. The void was there as well. I understood at that second why interstellar voyagers always opted for cryogenic fugue.

Incredibly, unbelievably, Aenea continued playing the piano. The notes were clear, crystalline, as if unmodified by any connecting medium. Even with my eyes closed I could see A. Bettik standing by the door, blue face raised to the void. No, I realized, he was no longer blue… colors did not exist here. Nor did black, white, or gray. I wondered if humans who had been blind since birth dreamed of light and colors in this mad way.

“Compensating,” said the ship, and its voice had the same crystalline quality as Aenea’s piano notes.

Suddenly the void collapsed in on itself, vision returned, and the spheres of red and blue returned fore and aft. Within seconds the blue sphere from the stern migrated along the ship like a doughnut passing over a writing stylus, it merged with the red sphere at the bow, and colored geometries burst without warning from the forward sphere like flying creatures emerging from an egg. I say “colored geometries,” but this does nothing to share the complex reality: fractal-generated shapes pulsed and coiled and twisted through what had been the void. Spiral forms, spiked with their own subgeometries, curled in on themselves, spitting smaller forms of the same cobalt and blood-red brilliance. Yellow ovoids became pulsar-precise explosions of light. Mauve and indigo helixes, looking like the universe’s DNA, spiraled past us. I could hear these colors like distant thunder, like the pounding of surf just beyond the horizon.

I realized that my jaw was hanging slack. I turned away from the railing and tried to concentrate on the girl and android. The colors of the fractal universe played across them. Aenea still played softly, her fingers moving across keys even as she looked up at me and at the fractal heavens beyond me.

“Maybe we should go inside,” I said, hearing each word in my own voice hanging separately in the air like icicles along a branch.

“Fascinating,” said A. Bettik, arms still folded, his gaze on the tunnel of forms surrounding us. His skin was blue again.

Aenea stopped playing. Perhaps sensing my vertigo and terror for the first time, she rose, took my hand, and led me inside the ship. The balcony followed us in. The hull re-formed. I was able to breathe again.

“We have six days,” the girl said. We were sitting in the holopit because the cushions were comfortable there. We had eaten, and A. Bettik had fetched us cold fruit drinks from the refrigerator drawers. My hand shook only slightly as we sat and talked.

“Six days, nine hours, and twenty-seven minutes,” said the ship.

Aenea looked up at the bulkhead. “Ship, you can stay quiet for a while unless there’s something vital you have to say or we have a question for you.”

“Yes, M… Aenea,” said the ship.

“Six days,” repeated the girl. “We have to get ready.”

I sipped my drink. “Ready for what?”

“I think they’ll be there waiting for us. We have to come up with a way to get through Parvati System and on to Renaissance Vector without their stopping us.”

I considered the child. She looked tired. Her hair was still straggly from the shower. With all of the Cantos talk of the One Who Teaches, I had expected someone extraordinary—a young messiah in toga, a prodigy delivering cryptic utterances—but the only thing extraordinary about this young person was the powerful clarity of her dark eyes. “How could they be waiting for us?” I said. “The fatline hasn’t worked for centuries. The Pax ships behind us can’t call ahead as they could in your time.”

Aenea shook her head. “No, the fatline had fallen before I was born. Remember, my mother was pregnant with me during the Fall.” She looked at A. Bettik. The android was drinking juice, but he had not chosen to sit down. “I’m sorry I don’t remember you. As I said, I used to visit the Poet’s City and thought I knew all of the androids.”

He bowed his head slightly. “No reason for you to remember me, M. Aenea. I had left the Poet’s City even before your mother’s pilgrimage. My siblings and I were working along the Hoolie River and on the Sea of Grass then. After the Fall, we… left service… and lived alone in different places.”

“I see,” she said. “There was a lot of craziness after the Fall. I remember. Androids would have been in danger west of the Bridle Range.”

I caught her gaze. “No, seriously, how could someone be waiting for us at Parvati? They can’t outrun us—we got to quantum velocity first—so the best they can do is translate into Parvati space an hour or two after us.”

“I know,” said Aenea, “but I still think that, somehow, they’ll be waiting. We have to come up with a way this unarmed ship can outrun or outmaneuver a warship.”

We talked for several more minutes, but none of us—not even the ship when queried—had a clever idea. All the time we were talking, I was observing the girl—the way her lips turned up slightly in a smile when she was thinking, the slight furrow in her brow when she spoke earnestly, how soft her voice was. I understood why Martin Silenus wanted her protected from harm.

“I wonder why the old poet didn’t call us before we left the system,” I mused aloud. “He must have wanted to talk to you.”

Aenea ran her fingers through her hair like a comb. “Uncle Martin would never greet me via tightbeam or holo. We were agreed that we would speak after this trip was over.”

I looked at her. “So you two planned the whole thing? I mean—your getaway, the hawking mat—everything?”

She smiled again at the thought. “My mother and I planned the essential details. After she died, Uncle Martin and I discussed the plan. He saw me off to the Sphinx this morning…”

“This morning?” I said, confused. Then I understood.

“It’s been a long day for me,” the girl said ruefully. “I took a few steps this morning and covered half the time that humans have been on Hyperion. Everyone I knew—except Uncle Martin—must be dead.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “The Pax arrived not long after you disappeared, so many of your friends and family could have accepted the cross. They would still be here.”

“’Accepted the cross,’” repeated the girl, and shivered slightly. “I don’t have any family—my mother was my only real family—and I sort of doubt that many of my friends or my mother’s friends would have… accepted the cross.”

We stared at each other in silence for a moment, and I realized how exotic this young creature was; most of the historical events on Hyperion I was familiar with had not yet occurred when this girl had taken her step into the Sphinx “this morning.”

“So, anyway,” she said, “we didn’t plan things down to the detail of the hawking mat—we didn’t know if the Consul’s ship would return with it, of course—but Mother and I did plan to use the Labyrinth if the Valley of the Tombs was off-limits. That worked out all right. And we hoped that the Consul’s ship would be here to get me offplanet.”

“Tell me about your time,” I said.

Aenea shook her head. “I will,” she said, “but not now. You know about my era. It’s history and legend to you. I don’t know anything about your time—except for my dreams—so tell me about the present. How wide is it? How deep is it? How much is mine to keep?”

I did not recognize the allusion of the last questions, but I began telling her about the Pax—about the great cathedral in St. Joseph and the…

“St. Joseph?” she said. “Where’s that?”

“You used to call it Keats,” I said. “The capital. It was also called Jacktown.”

“Ah,” she said, settling back in the cushions, the glass of fruit juice balanced in her slender fingers, “they changed the heathen name. Well, my father wouldn’t mind.”

It was the second time she had mentioned her father—I assumed she was speaking of the Keats cybrid—but I did not stop to ask her about that.

“Yes,” I said, “many of the old cities and landmarks were renamed when Hyperion joined the Pax two centuries ago. There was talk of renaming the world itself, but the old name stuck. Anyway, the Pax does not govern directly, but the military brought order to…” I went on for some time, filling her in on details of technology, culture, language, and government. I described what I had heard, read, and watched of life on more advanced Pax worlds, including the glories of Pacem.

“Gee,” she said when I paused, “things really haven’t changed that much. It sounds as if technology is sort of stuck… still not caught up to Hegemony days.”

“Well,” I said, “the Pax is partly responsible for that. The Church prohibits thinking machines—true AIs—and its emphasis is on human and spiritual development rather than technological advancement.”

Aenea nodded. “Sure, but you’d think that they would have caught up to WorldWeb levels in two and a half centuries. I mean, it’s like the Dark Ages or something.”

I smiled as I realized that I was taking offense—being annoyed at criticism of the Pax society I had chosen not to join. “Not really,” I said. “Remember, the largest change has been the granting of virtual immortality. Because of that, the population growth is regulated carefully and there is less incentive to change exterior things. Most born-again Christians consider themselves to be in this life for the long haul—many centuries, at least, and millennia with luck—so they aren’t in a hurry to change things.”

Aenea regarded me carefully. “So the cruciform resurrection stuff really works?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then why haven’t you… accepted the cross?”

For the third time in recent days, I was at a loss to explain. I shrugged. “Perversity, I guess. I’m stubborn. Also, a lot of people like me stay away from it when we’re young—we all plan to live forever, right?—and then convert when age starts setting in.”

“Will you?” Her dark eyes were piercing.

I stopped myself from shrugging again, but the gesture of my hand was the equivalent. “I don’t know,” I said. I had not told her yet about my “execution” and subsequent resurrection with Martin Silenus. “I don’t know,” I said again.

A. Bettik stepped into the holopit circle. “I thought that I might mention that we have stocked the ship with an ample supply of ice cream. In several flavors. Could I interest either of you in some?”

I formed a phrase reminding the android that he was not a servant on this voyage, but before I could speak, Aenea cried, “Yes! Chocolate!”

A. Bettik nodded, smiled, and turned in my direction. “M. Endymion?”

It had been a long day: hawking-mat voyages through the Labyrinth, dust storms, carnage—she said it was the Shrike!—and my first offworld trip. Quite a day.

“Chocolate,” I said. “Yes. Definitely chocolate.”