Endymion

21

Have you ever noticed how on a trip—even a very long one—it is often the first week or so that stands out most clearly in your memory? Perhaps it is the enhanced perception that voyages bring, or perhaps it is an effect of orientation response on the senses, or perhaps it is simply that even the charm of newness soon wears off, but it has been my experience that the first days in a new place, or seeing new people, often set the tone for the rest of the trip. Or in this case, the rest of my life.

We spent the first day of our magnificent adventure sleeping. The child was exhausted and—I had to admit after waking from sixteen hours of uninterrupted sleep—so was I. I can’t vouch for what A. Bettik did during this first somnambulant day of the voyage—at that point I had not learned that androids do sleep, but require only a fraction of the time we humans spend comatose—but he had set his small backpack of possessions in the engine room, rigging a hammock to sleep in, and he spent much of his time down there. I had planned to give the girl the “master bedroom” at the apex of the ship, she had showered there in the adjoining bathroom cubby that first morning, but she staked out one of the sleep couches on the fugue deck and that soon became her space. I enjoyed the size and softness of the large bed in the center of the circular top room, and—after a while—even overcame my agoraphobia and allowed the hull to go translucent to watch the fractal light show in Hawking space outside. I never kept the hull transparent for long, however, for the pulsing geometries continued to disturb me in ways I could not describe.

The library level and the holopit level were, by unspoken agreement, common ground. The kitchen—A. Bettik called it the “galley”—was set into the wall on the holopit level, and we usually ate at the low table in the holopit or occasionally carried the food up to the round table near the navigation cubby. I admit that immediately after awakening and having “breakfast” (shiptime said that it was afternoon on Hyperion, but why abide by Hyperion time when I might never see that world again?), I headed for the library: the books were ancient, all published during the time of the Hegemony or earlier, and I was surprised to find a copy of an epic poem by Martin Silenus—the Dying Earth—as well as tomes by a dozen classical authors whom I had read as a boy, and often reread during my long days and nights at the fen cabin or while working on the river.

A. Bettik joined me that first day as I browsed, and pulled a small green volume from the shelves. “This might be of interest,” he said. The title was A Traveler’s Guide to the WorldWeb: With Special Sections on the Grand Concourse and River Tethys.

“It might be of great interest,” I said, opening the book with shaking fingers. The shaking, I believe, came from the reality that we were going there—actually traveling to the former Web worlds!

“These books are doubly interesting as artifacts,” said the android, “since they came from an age when all information was instantly available to anyone.”

I nodded. As a child, listening to Grandam’s tales of the old days, I had tried to imagine a world where everyone wore implants and could access the datasphere whenever they wanted. Of course, even then, Hyperion had no datasphere—and had never been part of the Web—but for most of the billions of members of the Hegemony, life must have been like an endless stimsim of visual, auditory, and printed information. No wonder a majority of humans had never learned to read during the old days. Literacy had been one of the first goals of the Church and its Pax administrators after interstellar society was stitched together long after the Fall.

That day, standing in the carpeted ship’s library, the polished teak and cherrywood walls gleaming in the light, I remember taking half a dozen books from the shelves and carrying them to the table to read.

Aenea raided the library that afternoon as well—immediately pulling The Dying Earth from the shelves. “There were no copies in Jacktown, and Uncle Martin refused to let me read it when I visited him,” she said. “He did say that it was the only thing he’d ever written—other than the Cantos that he hadn’t finished—that was worth reading.”

“What’s it about?” I asked, not looking up from the Delmore Deland novel I was skimming. Both the girl and I were munching on apples as we read and talked. A. Bettik had gone back down the spiral stairs.

“The last days of Old Earth,” said Aenea. “It’s really about Martin’s pampered childhood on his family’s big estate on the North American Preserve.”

I set my book down. “What do you think happened to Old Earth?”

The girl stopped munching. “In my day everyone thought that the Big Mistake of aught-eight black hole had eaten it. That it was gone. Kaput.”

I chewed and nodded. “Most people still believe that, but the old poet’s Cantos insist that the TechnoCore stole Old Earth and sent it somewhere…”

“The Hercules Cluster or the Magellanic Clouds,” said the girl, and took another bite of apple. “My mother discovered that when she and my father were investigating his murder.”

I leaned forward. “Do you mind talking about your father?”

Aenea smiled slightly. “No, why should I? I suppose I’m somewhat of a half-breed, the child of a Lusian woman and a cloned cybrid male, but that’s never bothered me.”

“You don’t look very Lusian,” I said. Residents of that high-g world were invariably short and very strong. Most were pale of skin and dark-haired; this child was small but of a height normal to one-g worlds, her brown hair was streaked with blond, and she was slender. Only her luminous brown eyes reminded me of the Cantos’ description of Brawne Lamia.

Aenea laughed. It was a pleasant sound. “I take after my dad,” she said. “John Keats was short, blond, and skinny.”

I hesitated a moment before saying, “You said that you spoke to your father…”

Aenea glanced at me from the corners of her eyes. “Yes, and you know that the Core killed his body before I was born. But did you also know that my mother carried his persona for months in a Schrön Loop embedded behind her ear?”

I nodded. It was in the Cantos.

The girl shrugged. “I remember talking to him.”

“But you weren’t…”

“Born,” said Aenea. “Right. What kind of conversation could a poet’s persona have with a fetus? But we talked. His persona was still connected to the TechnoCore. He showed me… well, it’s complicated, Raul. Believe me.”

“I believe you,” I said. I looked around the library. “Did you know that the Cantos say that when your father’s persona left the Schrön Loop, that it resided in this ship’s AI for a while?”

“Yeah,” said Aenea. She grinned. “Yesterday, before I went to sleep, I spent an hour or so talking to the ship. My dad was here, all right. The persona coexisted with the ship’s mind when the Consul flew back to check out what had happened to the Web after the Fall. But he’s not here now, and the ship can’t remember much about his residence here, and it doesn’t remember anything about what happened to him—whether he left after the Consul died, or what—so I don’t know if he still exists.”

“Well,” I said, trying to choose diplomatic words, “the Core doesn’t exist any longer, so I don’t quite see how a cybrid persona could either.”

“Who says the Core doesn’t exist?”

I admit that I was shocked by that statement. “The last act of Meina Gladstone and the Hegemony was to destroy the farcaster links, the dataspheres, the fatline, and the entire dimension that the Core existed in,” I said at last. “Even the Cantos agrees with that fact.”

The child was still smiling. “Oh, they blew the space-based farcasters to bits, and the others quit working, all right. And the dataspheres were gone in my time, too. But who says the Core is dead? That’s like saying that you swept away a couple of spiderwebs, so the spider has to be dead.”

I admit that I looked over my shoulder. “So you think the TechnoCore still exists? That those AIs are still plotting against us?”

“I don’t know about the plotting,” said Aenea, “but I know that the Core exists.”

“How?”

She held up a small finger. “First of all, my father’s cybrid persona still existed after the Fall, right? The basis for that persona was a Core AI they had fashioned. That shows that the Core was still… somewhere.”

I thought about that. As I mentioned earlier, cybrids—like androids—were essentially a mythical species to me. We might as well have been discussing the physical characteristics of leprechauns.

“Secondly,” she said, lifting a second finger to join the first, “I’ve communicated with the Core.”

I blinked at that statement. “Before you were born?” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea. “And when I lived with Mother in Jacktown. And after Mother died.” She lifted her books and stood. “And this morning.”

I could only stare.

“I’m hungry, Raul,” she said from the head of the stairs. “Want to go down and see what this old ship’s galley can whomp up for lunch?”

We soon settled into a schedule on the ship, adopting Hyperion’s day and night schedules roughly as waking and sleeping times. I began to see why the old Hegemony habit of keeping the twenty-four-hour Old Earth system as standard had been so important in the Web days: I’d read somewhere that almost ninety percent of the Earth-like or terraformed worlds of the Web had held days that fell within three hours of the Old Earth standard day.

Aenea still liked to extend the balcony and play the Steinway out under the Hawking-space sky, and I would sometimes stay out there and listen for a few minutes, but I preferred the sense of being surrounded that the interior of the ship gave me. None of us complained about the effects of the C-plus environment, although we felt it—the occasional lurching of emotion and balance, a constant sense that someone was watching us, and very strange dreams. My own dreams awakened me with the pounding heart, dry mouth, and sweat-soaked sheets that only the worst nightmares could cause. But I never remembered the dreams. I wanted to ask the others about their dreams, but A. Bettik never mentioned his—I did not know if androids could dream—and although Aenea acknowledged the strangeness of her dreams and said that she did remember them, she never discussed them.

On the second day, while we were sitting in the library, Aenea suggested that we “experience” space travel. When I asked her how we could experience it more than we were—I had the Hawking fractals in mind when I said that—she only laughed and asked the ship to cancel the internal containment field. Immediately, we were weightless.

As a boy, I had dreamed of zero-g. Swimming in the salty South Sea as a young soldier, I had closed my eyes, floated effortlessly, and wondered if this was what space travel in the olden days had been like.

I can tell you it is not.

Zero-g, especially sudden zero-g such as the ship granted upon Aenea’s request, is terrifying. It is, quite simply, falling.

Or so it first seems.

I gripped the chair, but the chair was also falling. It was precisely as if we had been sitting in one of the huge Bridle Range cable cars for the past two days, when suddenly the cable broke. My middle ear protested, trying to find a horizon line that was honest. None was.

A. Bettik kicked up from wherever he had been below and said calmly, “Is there a problem?”

“No,” laughed Aenea, “we’re just going to experience space for a while.”

A. Bettik nodded and then pulled himself headfirst down the stairway pit to get back to whatever he was working on.

Aenea followed him to the stairwell, kicking over to the central opening. “See?” she said. “This stairwell becomes a central dropshaft when the ship is in zero-g. Just like in the old spinships.”

“Isn’t this dangerous?” I asked, switching my grip from the back of a chair to a bookshelf. For the first time I noticed the elastic cords that held the books in place. Everything else that was not attached—the book I had set on the table, the chairs around the table, a sweater I’d left thrown over the back of another chair, pieces of the orange I had been eating—was floating.

“Not dangerous,” said Aenea. “Messy. Next time we get everything shipshape before we cancel the internal field.”

“But isn’t the field… important?”

Aenea was floating upside down, from my perspective. My inner ear liked this even less than the rest of the experience. “The field keeps us from being squashed and thrown around when we’re moving in normal space,” she said, pulling herself to the center of the twenty-meter drop by grabbing the stairway railing, “but we can’t speed up or slow down in C-plus space, so… here goes!” She grabbed a handhold along the rod that ran the length of the ship in the center of what had been the open stairwell and catapulted herself out of sight, headfirst.

“Jesus,” I whispered, pushed away from the bookcase, bouncing off the opposite bulkhead, and followed her down the central dropshaft.

For the next hour we played in zero-g: zero-g tag, zero-g hide-and-seek (finding that one could hide in the oddest places when gravity was not a restraint), zero-g soccer using one of the plastic space helmets from a locker on the storage/corridor deck, and even zero-g wrestling, which was harder than I would have imagined. My first attempt to grab the child sent both of us tumbling and crashing through the length, breadth, and height of fugue deck.

In the end, exhausted and sweaty (the perspiration hung in the air until one moved or a trickle of air from the ventilators moved it, I discovered), Aenea ordered the balcony opened again—I shouted in fear when she did so, but the ship quietly reminded me that the exterior field was quite intact—and we floated out above the bolted-down Steinway, floated to the railing and beyond, into that no-man’s-land between the ship and the field, floated ten meters out and looked back at the ship itself, surrounded by exploding fractals, glowing in the cold fireworks glory of it as Hawking space folded and contracted around us several billion times a second.

Finally we kicked and swam our way back in (a difficult and awkward feat, I discovered, when there was nothing to push against), warned A. Bettik over the intercom to find a floor, and brought back the one-g internal field. Both the child and I giggled as sweaters, sandwiches, chairs, books, and several spheres of water from a glass that had been left out came crashing down to the carpet.

It was that same day, night rather, for the ship had dimmed the lights for sleep period, that I padded down the spiral stairs to the holopit level to fix a midnight snack and heard soft sounds through the opening to the fugue deck below.

“Aenea?” I said, speaking softly. There was no answer. I went to the head of the stairs, looking at the dark drop in the center of the stairwell and smiling as I remembered our midair antics there a few hours before. “Aenea?”

There still came no answer, but the soft sounds continued. Wishing I had a flashlight, I padded down the metal stairs in my sock feet.

There was a soft glow from the fugue-sleep monitors above the couches tucked in their cubbies. The soft sound was coming from Aenea’s cubby. She had her back to me. The blanket was pulled to her shoulders, but I could see the collar of the Consul’s old shirt that she had appropriated for use as a nightshirt. I walked over, my sock feet making no noise on the soft floor, and knelt by the couch. “Aenea?” The girl was crying, obviously trying to muffle her sobs.

I touched her shoulder and she finally turned. Even in the dim instrument glow I could see that she had been weeping for some time; her eyes were red and puffy, her cheeks streaked with tears.

“What’s wrong, kiddo?” I whispered. We were two decks above where A. Bettik slept in his hammock in the engine room, but the stairwell was open.

For a moment Aenea did not respond, but eventually the sobs slowed, then stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said at last.

“It’s all right. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Give me a tissue and I will,” said the girl.

I rummaged in the pockets of the old robe the Consul had left. I had no tissue, but I had been using a napkin with the cake I’d been eating upstairs. I handed her the linen.

“Thanks.” She blew her nose. “I’m glad we’re not still in zero-g,” she said through the cloth. “There’d be snot floating everywhere.”

I smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “What’s wrong, Aenea?”

She made a soft noise that I realized was an attempt at a laugh. “Everything,” she said. “Everything’s wrong. I’m scared. Everything I know about the future scares the shit out of me. I don’t know how we’re going to get past the Pax guys that I know will be waiting for us in a few days. I’m homesick. I can never go back, and everybody I knew except Martin is gone forever. Mostly, though, I guess I just miss my mother.”

I squeezed her shoulder. Brawne Lamia, her mother, was the stuff of legend—a woman who had lived and died two and a half long centuries ago. A few of her bones had already turned to dust, wherever they were buried. For this child, her mother’s death was only two weeks in the past.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and squeezed her shoulder again, feeling the texture of the Consul’s old shirt. “It’ll be all right.”

Aenea nodded and took my hand. Hers was still moist. I noticed how tiny her palm and fingers were against my huge paw.

“Want to come up to the galley and have some chalmaroot cake and milk with me?” I whispered. “It’s good.”

She shook her head. “I think I’ll sleep now. Thanks, Raul.” She squeezed my hand again before relinquishing it, and in that second I realized the great truth: the One Who Teaches, the new messiah, whatever Brawne Lamia’s daughter would turn out to be, she was also a child—one who giggled in zero-gravity antics and who wept in the night.

I went softly up the stairs, stopping to look back at her before my head rose above the level of the next deck. She was huddled under her blanket, her face turned away again, her hair catching only a bit of the console glow from above her cubby. “Good night, Aenea,” I whispered, knowing that she would not hear me. “It will be all right.”