Endymion

48

As we floated through the desert world, blinking in the harsh light of the G2 sun and drinking water from the air/water wraith-gut pouches we had brought with us, our final couple of days on Sol Draconi Septem seemed like a quickly fading dream to me. Cuchiat and his band had paused fifty-some meters beneath the surface—we had noticed the air getting noticeably thinner in the tunnels—and there, in the jagged ice corridor, we had prepared for our expedition. To our amazement, the Chitchatuk stripped naked. Even while glancing away in embarrassment, we noticed how muscular and solid their bodies were—the women as well as the men—as if a bodybuilder on a one-g world had been flattened and compressed into a more compact specimen. Cuchiat and the female warrior Chatchia came over to supervise our own undressing and preparation for the surface, while Chiaku and the others pulled items from their hide packs.

We watched the Chitchatuk and followed their lead in dressing, with help from Cuchiat and Chatchia. For the few seconds that we were actually naked—standing on the wraith-robes we had been wearing so that our feet would not freeze—the cold burned at us. Then we pulled on a thin membrane material—an inner skin of the wraith, we later learned—that had been tailored for arms and legs and a head. But obviously for smaller arms and legs and heads. As it was, the membrane was tighter than skintight: the translucent skin hugged me so firmly that I must have looked like so many cannonball stuffed into a sausage skin. A. Bettik looked no better. I realized after a moment that these must be the Chitchatuk equivalent of pressure suits—perhaps even of the sophisticated skinsuits the Hegemony military once used in space. The membranes passed sweat and provided much of their own heating and cooling while serving well to keep the lungs from exploding in vacuum, the skin bruising, or the blood boiling. The membranes pulled low over our foreheads and up to our chins like a cowl, leaving our eyes, noses, and mouths uncovered.

Cuchiat and Chatchia removed membrane masks from the pack. The other Chitchatuk had already donned theirs. These were obviously created-things—the mask itself was made of the same inner skin as the pressure suit, with wraith-hide padding sewn in here and there. The eyepieces were made from the outer lense of the wraith-eyes, offering the same limited access to the infrared as our outer-robe eyes. From the snout of the mask ran a length of coiled wraith-intestine, the end of which Cuchiat carefully sewed into one of their water bags.

Not just a water bag, I realized as the Chitchatuk began breathing through their masks: the fuel-pellet brazier melted the glacier ice into both water and atmosphere gas. They had somehow filtered this atmosphere mix until they had adequate quantities of breathable air. I tried breathing through the mask—my eyes watered from the other compounds there, definitely a hint of methane and perhaps even of ammonia, but breathable. I guessed that there must be only a couple of hours of air in the bag.

With our g-suit skins on, we donned the outer layer of wraith-robes. Cuchiat pulled the heads of the robes lower than we had ever worn them before, locking the teeth shut so we were peering through the lenses, the head acting as a crude helmet above our pressure suit. We then donned an outer pair of wraith-hide bootees, which laced up our calves almost to the knee. The outer robe was then quickly stitched shut with a few bold strokes from Chiaku’s bone needle. The water bag and air bag hung from straps beneath our robes, near a flap that could be unstitched and opened quickly when the bags needed to be refilled. Chichticu, our fuel-pellet fire carrier, was constantly busy melting atmosphere into water and air, even as we hiked, and he handed the replacement skin bags out in precise order, from Cuchiat, first, to me, last. At least I now understood the band’s pecking order. I also understood why—when danger threatened on the surface—the band moved into a protective circle with Chichticu, the fire carrier, in the center. It was not just that he held religious and symbolic importance. His constant vigilance and labors kept us alive.

There was one final addition to our wardrobe as we emerged from the cave onto the whirling wind and surface ice. From a cache near the entrance, Chiaku and the others retrieved a store of long black skate blades, sharp as razors on the bottom, flat and broad on top where our booteed feet fit quite nicely. Once again wraith-hide thongs were used to lash us to the blades. The things were an effective combination of skates and cross-country skis, and I awkwardly skated ten meters across the patterned ice of the glacier before I realized that we were skiing on wraith-claws.

I admit that I had a great fear of falling in 1.7-g since every tumble felt like the equivalent of seven tenths of another Raul Endymion falling on top of me, but we soon got the hang of movement on the things and we were well padded for falls. I ended up using one of the cut-up logs from the raft as a plump ski pole when the surface got too rough, poling myself along as if I were a one-man raft.

I’ll confess here that I wish I had a holo-image or photograph of our party on that outing. With our wraith-hides, inner-skin g-suits, wraith-gut air bags, lower-intestine air hoses, bone spears, my plasma rifle, packs, and claw-skis, we must have looked like some Old Earth Paleolithic astronauts.

It all worked. We moved more quickly across the snow and ice-crystal sastrugi than we had in the ice tunnels. When the wind blew from the south, which it did during only a short part of our surface trek, we could spread our wraith-robed arms and be propelled across flat sections of the ice like sailing ships.

Walking the surface of Sol Draconi Septem’s frozen atmosphere had a harsh but memorable beauty to it. The sky was vacuum and moon-surface black when the sun was up, but an instant after sunset many thousands of stars seemed to explode into existence. Our robes and inner suits handled the near-space high and low temperatures well during the day, but it was obvious that even the Chitchatuk could not survive the cold at night. Luckily we moved quickly enough across the surface that we had only one six-hour darkness period to shelter from, and the Chitchatuk had planned our departure so that we got the benefit of a full day’s sunlight before that nightfall.

There were no mountains or other surface features larger than ice ridges or rills, except for our first few hours on the ice when the rising sun struck an icy object far to the south of us. This, I realized, was the tip of Father Glaucus’s skyscraper protruding from the ice many kilometers away. Other than that, the surface was so featureless that I wondered for a minute how the Chitchatuk were managing to navigate, but then I saw Cuchiat glancing at the sun and then at his own shadow. We continued skating north during the brief day.

The Chitchatuk moved in a tight defensive pattern as they skated/skied, with the fire-carrier and medicine man, who tended the fire and air/water bags in the center, warriors with ready spears on the wings, Cuchiat in the lead, and Chiaku—obviously second in command, we realized now—bringing up the rear and skating almost backward in his vigilance. Each Chitchatuk had a length of wraith-rope wrapped around his or her robe—they had wound some around the three of us when we were dressed—and I better understood the purpose of all that line after Cuchiat stopped abruptly and skated to the east to avoid several crevasses that had been invisible to my eye. I looked down in one of these—the rift seemed to drop into eternal darkness—and tried to imagine what that fall would be like. It was late the same afternoon that one of the outriders disappeared in a sudden, silent burst of ice crystals—only to reappear a moment later as Chiaku and Cuchiat were readying rescue ropes. The warrior had arrested his own fall and then pulled off his black claw-skates, and was now using them as climbing tools, hacking his way up the sheer wall of the crevasse like a technical climber on an icefall. I was learning not to underestimate the Chitchatuk.

We saw no wraiths that first day. As the sun set, we realized—through our exhaustion—that Cuchiat and the others had ceased skating north and were circling, peering down into the ice as if looking for something. All this while the thin winds lashed ice crystals against us. If we had been on the surface in spacesuits, I am convinced that the visor would have been scratched and marred. The wraith-robes and eye lenses showed no damage.

Finally Aichacut waved his arms from where he had skated far to our west—there was no verbal communication through masks and vacuum—and we all skated in that direction, finally stopping at a place that looked no different from all the rest of the pressure-rippled surface. Cuchiat waved us back, untied our gift of the ax from where he had lashed it onto his back, and began chopping at the ice. When the surface layer broke away, we could see that this was not another crevasse or rill, but the narrow entrance to an ice cave. Four of the warriors readied their spears, Chichticu joined them with his ember-lamp, and—with Cuchiat leading—the group crawled into the hole while the rest of us waited in a defensive circle.

A moment later Cuchiat’s robed head emerged and he waved us in. He still held the ax, and I could imagine him grinning broadly behind his wraith-teeth visor and membrane mask. The ax had been an important gift.

We spent the night in the wraith-den. I helped Chiaku caulk the entrance with snow and ice, we packed another meter of the entrance tunnel with loose ice crystal and larger fragments, and then we went in to watch Chichticu heat blocks of snow-ice until the ice den was filled with enough atmosphere to breathe. We slept bundled together, the twenty-three Indivisible People and the three Indivisible Travelers, still wearing our robes and pressure membranes but masks removed, breathing the welcome scent of each other’s sweat. Our huddled warmth kept us alive through the terrible night outside as the Coriolis and katabatik storms blasted ice crystals at nearly the speed of sound… had there been any sound in that near vacuum.

I remember one other detail about our last night with the Chitchatuk. The wraith-den was lined, completely lined, with human skulls and bones, each set into the circular ice wall of the den with what seemed to be an artist’s care.

We saw no wraiths-cubs or ice-boring adults—during our next day’s travel, and shortly before sunset we doffed and cached our skates, then entered the ice tunnels above the second farcaster. When we were deep enough to be in captured atmosphere again, we removed the masks and pressure-suit membranes, handing them back to Chatchia with something like reluctance. It was as if we were surrendering our membership badges to the Indivisible People.

Cuchiat spoke briefly. I could not follow the quick syllables, but Aenea translated—“We were lucky… something and something about how unusual it is not to have to fight wraiths when crossing the surface… but, he says, luck on one day almost always leads to bad luck the next.”

“Tell him that I hope he’s wrong,” I said.

The open river with its floating mist and ice ceiling was almost a shock to see. Even though everyone was exhausted, we set to work at once. Assembling the shortened raft was difficult with wraith-mittens on, but the Chitchatuk worked quickly to help, and within two hours we had a cut-down, awkward version of our earlier vessel—minus the foremast, tent, and hearthstone. But the steering oar was in place, and although the push-poles were shorter and clumsy-looking when lashed together, we thought they should work on this shallow stretch of the Tethys.

The leave-taking was sadder than I would have imagined. Everyone hugged everyone else at least twice. There was ice on Aenea’s long lashes, and I had to admit a strain of powerful emotion in my own throat.

Then we were shoving off into the current—it felt strange to be traveling while standing still, I still had the push-and-glide motion of the claw-skates echoing in my muscles and mind—the farcaster portal and ice wall approached, we ducked under the ever-lower ledge of ice, and suddenly we were… elsewhere.

We poled into sunrise. The river was wide and unruffled here, the current slow but steady. The riverbanks were of red rock, striated like wide, gradual steps climbing up from the water; the desert was red rock with small yellow shrubs; the distant slabs of hill and arch were also of smooth red stone. All this redness was ignited by the huge red sun rising to our left. The temperature was already a hundred degrees above what it had been in the ice cave. We shielded our eyes and pulled off our wraith-robes, setting them like thick white rugs near the stern of the shortened raft. Layers of ice on the logs first glistened and then melted in the morning sun.

We decided that we were on Qom-Riyadh even before consulting the comlog or Tethys guidebook. It was the red-rock desert that cued us—bridges of the bright-red sandstone, fluted columns of red rock rising against the pink sky, delicate red arches dwarfing the receding farcaster portal. The river ran through canyons overarched by these red stone parabolas, then curved into a wider valley where the hot wind blew the yellow sage and raised a red grit that caught in the long, tubular ’hairs’ of the wraith-robes and lodged in our mouths and eyes. By midday we were moving through a more fertile valley. Irrigation canals ran at right angles from our river, and short yellow palms and magenta bottlebrushes lined the waterways. Soon small buildings came into sight, and shortly after, an entire village of pink and ocher homes, but no people.

“It’s like Hebron,” whispered Aenea.

“We don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe they’re just working out of sight somewhere.”

But midday heated to midafternoon—Qom-Riyadh had a twenty-two-hour day, according to the guidebook—and although the canals proliferated, plants multiplied, and villages became more common, there was no hint of humans or their domestic animals. We poled the raft ashore twice—once to draw water from an artesian well and again to explore a small village from which sounds of hammering could be heard on the river. It was a broken awning banging in the desert wind.

Suddenly Aenea doubled over with a cry of pain. I dropped to one knee and swept the empty street with the plasma pistol as A. Bettik ran to her side. There was no one on the street. The windows were empty of movement.

“It’s all right,” the girl gasped as the android held her. “A sudden pain…”

I jogged to her, feeling foolish for having drawn the weapon. Setting it in my belt holster, I went to one knee and held her hand. “What’s the matter, kiddo?” She was sobbing.

“I… don’t… know,” she managed between sobs. “Something… terrible has… I don’t know.”

We carried her back to the raft. “Please,” whispered Aenea, her teeth chattering despite the heat, “let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”

A. Bettik set up the microtent, even though it now took up most of our abbreviated raft. We pulled the wraith-robes into the shade, laid the girl on them, and gave her water from one of the water bags.

“Is it this village?” I said. “Did something about it—”

“No,” said Aenea between dry sobs. I could see her fighting the waves of emotion that were crashing over her. “No… something awful… this world, but also… behind us.”

“Behind us?” I looked out the door of the tent and upriver, but there was nothing but the valley, the wide canal of a river, and the receding village with its wind-tossed yellow palms.

“Behind us on the ice world?” A. Bettik asked softly.

“Yes,” managed Aenea before doubling up with pain. “It… hurts.”

I laid my palm on her forehead and bare stomach. Her skin was hotter than it should have been, even accounting for the heat of the valley and the day’s sunburn on her face and arms. We pulled one of the medkits from my backpack and I set a diagnostic patch in place. It showed a high fever, pain in the 6.3 range of the dolorometer, muscle cramps, and an uneven EEG. It recommended water, ibuprofen, and contacting a doctor.

“There’s a city,” said the android as the river rounded a bluff.

I stepped out of the tent to see. The rose-red towers, domes, and minarets were still far away—perhaps fifteen kilometers across the widening valley floor—and the current on this river was in no hurry. “You stay with her,” I said, and moved to starboard side to pole. Our shortened raft was considerably lighter than the old one, and we moved quickly with the current.

A. Bettik and I consulted the water-warped guidebook and decided that the city was Mashhad, the capital of the southern continent and home of the Grand Mosque, whose minarets we could see clearly now as the river moved through thickening villages, suburbs, industrial areas, and into the city proper. Aenea was sleeping fitfully. Her temperature had risen, and the medkit diagnostic was blinking red lights to suggest a doctor’s intervention.

Mashhad was as eerily empty as New Jerusalem had been.

“I seem to remember rumor that the Qom-Riyadh System had fallen to the Ousters about the same time they took the Coal Sack,” I said. A. Bettik agreed, saying that they had monitored Pax radio traffic to that effect from the university city.

We tied the raft up at a low pier, and I carried the girl into the shade of the city streets. This was a replay of Hebron, only this time I was the healthy one and the girl unconscious. I made a mental note to avoid desert worlds from now on if I could help it.

The streets were less tidy than New Jerusalem had been: groundcars parked at odd angles and left abandoned on the sidewalks, detritus blowing in the streets, windows and doors open to the red sand, and strange little carpets lying on sidewalks, streets, and dying lawns. I paused at the first cluster of rugs we encountered, thinking that they might be hawking mats. They were only rugs. And they were all oriented in the same direction.

“Prayer mats,” said A. Bettik as we moved back into the shade of the city street. Even the tallest buildings were not overly tall here—none as high as the minarets, which looked out from a park area with tropical trees. “The population of Qom-Riyadh was almost one hundred percent Islamic,” he continued. “The Pax was said to have found no inroads here, even with the promise of resurrection. The people wanted nothing to do with the Protectorate.”

I turned the corner, still hunting for a hospital or any sign that might lead us to one. Aenea’s hot forehead was against my neck. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. “I think this place was in the Cantos,” I said. The child seemed to weigh nothing.

A. Bettik nodded. “M. Silenus wrote of Colonel Kassad’s victory over the so-called New Prophet here some three hundred years ago.”

“The Shi’ites took power again once the Web fell, didn’t they?” I said. We looked down another side street. I was looking for a red crescent rather than the universal red-cross sign of medical help.

“Yes,” said A. Bettik, “and they have been violently opposed to the Pax. The supposition was that they had welcomed the Ousters when the Pax Fleet retreated from this sector.”

I looked at the empty streets. “Well, it looks like the Ousters didn’t appreciate the welcome. This is like Hebron. Where do you think they’ve all gone? Could they have taken an entire planetary population hostage and—”

“Look, a caduceus,” interrupted A. Bettik.

The age-old symbol of a winged staff wrapped with two entwined serpents was on the window of a tall building. The interior was littered and tossed about, but it seemed more a standard office building than any sort of hospital I had been in. A. Bettik walked to a digital sign that was scrolling lines of text in Arabic. It was also muttering in a machine voice.

“Do you read Arabic?” I said.

“I do,” said the android. “I also understand some of the spoken language, which is Farsi. There is a private clinic on the tenth floor. I would think that it would have a full diagnostic center and perhaps an autosurgeon.”

I headed for the stairway with Aenea in my arms, but A. Bettik tried the elevator. The empty glass shaft hummed, and a levitation car floated to a stop at our level.

“Uncanny that the power’s still on,” I said.

We rode the lift to the tenth floor. Aenea was awakening and moaning as we walked down the tiled hallway, across an open terrace-garden where yellow and green palms rustled in the wind, and into an airy, glassed-in room with banks of autosurgeon beds and centralized diagnostic equipment. We chose the bed closest to the window, stripped the child to her underwear, and laid her between clean sheets. Replacing the medkit diagnostic patches with patch filaments, we waited for the diagnostic panels. The synthesized voice was in Arabic and Farsi, as was part of the display readout, but there was a Web English band and we switched to it.

The autosurgeon diagnosed exhaustion, dehydration, and an unusual EEG pattern, which might have resulted from a serious blow to the head. A. Bettik and I looked at each other. Aenea had received no blow to the head.

We authorized treatment for the exhaustion and dehydration and stepped back as flowfoam restrainers extruded from the bed panels, pseudo-fingers felt for Aenea’s vein, and an IV was started with a sedative and saline solution.

Within minutes the child was sleeping easily. The diagnostic panel spoke in Arabic, and A. Bettik translated before I could walk over to read the monitor. “It says that the patient should have a good night’s sleep and be better in the morning.”

I shifted the plasma rifle from where I had been carrying it on my back. Our dusty packs sat on one of the visiting chairs. Moving to the window, I said, “I’ll check out the city before it gets dark. Make sure we’re alone.”

A. Bettik folded his arms and watched the great red sun touch the tops of the buildings across the street. “I think that we are very much alone,” he said. “It took a little longer here, is all.”

“What took longer?”

“Whatever it was that stole the people. On Hebron there was no sign of panic or struggle. Here people had time to abandon their vehicles. But the prayer rugs are the surest sign.” I noticed for the first time that there were fine wrinkles in the blue skin of the android’s forehead and around his eyes and mouth.

“Surest sign of what?” I said.

“They knew that something was happening to them,” said A. Bettik, “and they spent their last minutes in prayer.”

I set the plasma rifle next to the visitor’s chair and undipped the flap over my holster. “I’m still going to take a look,” I said. “You watch her in case she wakes, okay?” I pulled the two com units out of my pack, tossed one to the android, and clipped the other onto my collar with the bead mike in place. “Leave the common frequency open. I’ll check in. Call me if there’s a problem.”

A. Bettik was standing by her bedside. His large hand gently touched the sleeping girl’s forehead. “I will be here when she wakes, M. Endymion.”

It is odd that I remember that evening’s walk through the abandoned city so clearly. A digital sign on a bank said that it was 40 degrees centigrade—104 Fahrenheit—but the dry wind from the red-rock desert quickly carried away any perspiration, and the pink-and-red sunset had a calming effect on me. Perhaps I remember that evening because it was the last night of our voyage before things changed forever.

Mashhad was a strange mixture of modern city and bazaar from The Thousand and One Nights, a wonderful series of stories Grandam used to tell me as we sat under Hyperion’s starry sky. This place had a musky hint of romance about it. On the corner there would be a news kiosk and automatic banking machine, and as soon as one turned the corner, there would be stalls in the middle of the street with brightly striped awnings and heaps of fruit rotting in bins. I could imagine the din and movement here—camels or horses or some other pre-Hegira beasts milling and stamping, dogs barking, sellers shouting and buyers haggling, women in black chadors and lacy burqas, or veils, gliding by, and on either side the baroque and inefficient groundcars growling and spewing out filthy carbon monoxide or ketones or whatever dirty stuff the old internal-combustion engines used to pour into the atmosphere…

I was shocked out of my reverie by a man’s voice calling musically, the words echoing down the stone-and-steel canyons of the city. It seemed to be coming from the park only a block or two to my left, and I ran in that direction, holding my hand on the grip of my pistol in the unbuttoned holster as I went.

“You hear this?” I said into the bead mike as I ran.

“Yes,” came A. Bettik’s voice in my hearplug. “I have the door to the terrace open and the sound is quite clear here.”

“It sounds Arabic. Can you translate?” I was panting only slightly as I finished the two-block sprint and came out into the open park area where the mosque dominated the entire block. A few minutes before, I had looked down one of the connecting streets and glimpsed the last of the red sunset painting the side of one of the minarets, but now the stone tower was a dull gray and only the highest wisps of cirrus caught the light.

“Yes,” said A. Bettik. “It is a muezzin call to evening prayer.”

I pulled the binoculars from my belt pouch and scanned the minarets. The man’s voice was coming from loudspeakers on a balcony encircling each tower. There was no sign of movement there. Suddenly the rhythmic cry ended and birds chattered within the branches of the forested square.

“It is most probably a recording,” said A. Bettik.

“I’ll check it out.” Setting away the binoculars, I followed a crushed-stone path through the extensive lawns and yellowish palm trees to the mosque’s entrance. I passed through a courtyard and paused at the entrance to the mosque proper. I could see the interior—it was filled with hundreds of the prayer mats. Elaborate arches of striped stone were supported by elegant pillars, and on the far wall a beautiful arch opened on a semicircular niche. To the right of this niche there was a flight of steps guarded by a lovingly carved stone railing, and a stone-canopied platform at the top. Not yet entering the large space, I described it to A. Bettik.

“The niche is the mihrab,” he responded. “It’s reserved for the prayer leader, the imam. The balcony to the right of it is the minbar, the pulpit. Is there anyone in either place?”

“No.” I could see the red dust on the prayer rugs and stone steps.

“Then there is no doubt that the call to prayer was a timed recording,” said A. Bettik.

I had the urge to enter the great stone space, but the urge was canceled by my reluctance to profane anyone’s sacred house. I had felt this as a child in the Catholic cathedral at Beak’s End, and as an adult when a friend in the Home Guard wanted to take me to one of the last Zen Gnostic temples on Hyperion. I had realized when I was a boy that I would always be an outsider when it came to holy places… never having one of my own, never feeling comfortable in another’s. I did not enter.

Walking back through the cooling and darkening streets, I found a palm-lined boulevard through an attractive section of town. Pushcarts held food and toys for sale. I paused by a cart selling fried dough and sniffed one of the bracelet-sized dough rings. It had gone bad days, not weeks or months, ago.

The boulevard came out by the river, and I turned to my left, taking the riverside esplanade back to the street that would lead me once again to the clinic. Occasionally I checked in with A. Bettik. Aenea was still sleeping soundly.

The stars were dimmed by dust in the atmosphere as night settled on the city. Only a few of the downtown buildings had lights on—whatever had stolen the populace must have happened in the daytime—but stately old streetlamps ran the length of the esplanade and they were glowing with gaslight. If it had not been for one of these lamps at the street end of the pier where we had tied the raft, I probably would have turned back toward the clinic without seeing it. As it was, the lamplight allowed me to spot it from more than a hundred meters away.

Someone was standing on our raft. The figure was motionless, very tall, and seemed to be wearing a silver suit. Lamplight gleamed from the figure’s surface as if it were wearing a chrome spacesuit.

Whispering to A. Bettik to guard the girl, that there was an intruder on the raft, I pulled my pistol from my holster and the binoculars from my belt. The second I focused the glasses, the gleaming silver shape turned its head in my direction.