Endymion

50

“Raul!”

It was at least an hour before Qom-Riyadh’s sunrise. Both A. Bettik and I were sitting in chairs in the room where Aenea slept. I had been dozing. A. Bettik was awake—as he always seemed to be—but I reached the girl’s bedside first. The light from the biomonitor readouts over the bed was the only illumination. Outside, the dust storm had been howling for hours.

“Raul…” The readouts said that her fever was down, pain was gone, that only the erratic EEGs remained.

“Right here, kiddo.” I took her right hand in mine. Her fingers no longer felt feverish. “You saw the Shrike?”

This caught me by surprise, but I realized in a moment that it did not have to be prescience or telepathy at work here. I had radioed A. Bettik about the sighting. He must have had the com unit’s speakers on and Aenea had been awake enough to register it.

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s okay. It’s not here.”

“But you saw it.”

“Yes.”

She gripped my hand with both of hers and sat up in bed. I could see her dark eyes gleaming in the faint light. “Where, Raul? Where did you see it?”

“On the raft.” I used my free hand to push her back onto the pillows. The pillowcase and her undershirt were soaked with sweat. “It’s all right, kiddo. It didn’t do anything. It was there when I left.”

“Did it turn its head, Raul? Did it look at you?”

“Well, yes, but…” I stopped. She was moaning softly, her head thrashing back and forth on the pillow. “Kiddo… Aenea… it’s all right…”

“No, it’s not,” said the girl. “Ah, God, Raul. I asked him to come with me. That last night. Did you know that I asked him to come along? He said no—”

“Who said no?” I asked. “The Shrike?” A. Bettik came up behind me. Outside, the red sand chafed at the windows and sliding door.

“No, no, no,” said Aenea. Her cheeks were moist, although whether it was from tears or her fever breaking, I did not know. “Father Glaucus,” she said, her voice almost lost under the wind noise. “That last night… I asked Father Glaucus to come with us. I shouldn’t have asked him, Raul… it was not part of my… my dreams… but I did ask, and if I asked, I should have insisted…”

“It’s all right,” I said, pushing a damp tendril of hair off her brow. “Father Glaucus is all right.”

“No, he’s not,” said the girl, and moaned softly. “He’s dead. The thing that’s chasing us killed him. Him and all the Chitchatuk.”

I looked at the monitor board again. It still showed improvement from the fever, despite her ravings. I looked at A. Bettik, but the android was staring intently at the child.

“You mean the Shrike killed them?” I said.

“No, not the Shrike,” she said softly, and laid her wrist against her lips. “At least I don’t think so. No, it wasn’t the Shrike.” Suddenly she gripped my hand in both of hers. “Raul, do you love me?”

I could only stare a moment. Then, not withdrawing my hand, I said, “Sure, kiddo. I mean…”

Aenea seemed to really look at me then for the first time since she had come awake and called my name. “No, stop,” she said. She laughed softly. “I’m sorry. I came unglued in time for a minute. Of course you don’t love me. I forgot when we were… who we were to each other now.”

“No, it’s all right,” I said, not understanding. I patted her hand. “I do care for you, kiddo. So does A. Bettik, and we’re going to—”

“Hush,” said Aenea. She freed her hand and set one finger against my lips. “Hush. I was lost for a moment. I thought we were… us. The way we’re going to…” She lay back deeper in the pillows and sighed. “My God, it’s the night before God’s Grove. Our last night traveling…”

I was not sure if she was making sense yet. I waited.

A. Bettik said, “M. Aenea, is God’s Grove our next destination on the river?”

“I guess so,” said the girl, sounding more like the child I knew. “Yes. I don’t know. It all fades…” She sat up again. “It’s not the Shrike chasing us, you know. Nor the Pax.”

“Of course it’s the Pax,” I said, trying to get her to make contact with reality. “They’ve been after us since…”

Aenea was shaking her head adamantly. Her hair hung in damp tendrils. “No,” she said softly but very firmly. “The Pax is after us because the Core tells it we’re dangerous to them.”

“The Core?” I said. “But it’s… ever since the Fall it’s been…”

“Alive and dangerous,” said Aenea. “After Gladstone and the others destroyed the farcaster system that provided the Core with its neural net, it retreated… but it never went far, Raul. Can’t you see that?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t. Where has it been if it didn’t go far?”

“The Pax,” the girl said simply. “My father—his persona in Mother’s Schrön Loop—explained it to me before I was born. The Core waited until the Church began being revitalized under Paul Duré… Pope Teilhard I. Duré was a good man, Raul. My mother and Uncle Martin, knew him. He carried two cruciforms… his own and Father Lenar Hoyt’s. But Hoyt was… weak.”

I patted her wrist. “But what does this have to do with—”

“Listen!” said the girl, pulling her arm back. “Anything can happen tomorrow on God’s Grove. I can die. We can all die. The future is never written… only penciled in. If I die but you survive, I want you to explain to Uncle Martin… to whoever will listen…”

“You’re not going to die, Aenea—”

“Just listen!” pleaded the girl. There were tears in her eyes again.

I nodded and listened. Even the wind howl seemed to abate.

“Teilhard was murdered in his ninth year. My father predicted it. I don’t know if it was by TechnoCore agents… they use cybrids… or just Vatican politics, but when Lenar Hoyt was resurrected from their shared cruciforms, the Core acted. It was the Core that provided the technology of allowing the cruciform to revive humans without the sexlessness or idiocy visited on the Bikura tribe on Hyperion…”

“But how?” I said. “How could the TechnoCore AIs know how to tame the cruciform symbiote?” I saw the answer even before she spoke.

“They created the cruciforms,” said Aenea. “Not the current Core, but the UI they create in the future. It sent the things back in time on Hyperion just as it did the Time Tombs. Tested the parasites on the lost tribe… the Bikura… saw the problems…”

“Little problems,” I said, “like resurrection destroying reproductive organs and intelligence.”

“Yes,” said Aenea. She took my hand again. “The Core was able to correct those problems with their technology. Technology they gave the Church under its new Pope… Lenar Hoyt. Julius VI.”

I began to understand. “A Faustian bargain…” I said.

“The Faustian bargain,” said the girl. “All the Church had to do to gain the universe was sell its soul.”

“And thus the Pax Protectorate was born,” A. Bettik said softly. “Political power through the barrel of a parasite…”

“It’s the Core that’s after us… after me,” continued the child. “I’m a threat to them, not just to the Church.”

I shook my head slowly. “How are you a threat to the Core? You’re one child…”

“One child who was in touch with a renegade cybrid persona before I was born,” she whispered. “My father was loose, Raul. Not just in the datasphere or the megasphere… but in the metasphere. Loose in the wider psychocerbernet that even the Core was terrified of…”

“Lions and tigers and bears,” muttered A. Bettik.

“Exactly,” said Aenea. “When my father’s persona penetrated the Core megasphere, he asked the AI, Ummon, what the Core was afraid of. They said that they didn’t range farther in the metasphere because it was full of lions and tigers and bears.”

“I don’t get it, kiddo,” I said. “I’m lost.”

She leaned forward and squeezed my hand. Her breath on my cheek was warm and sweet. “Raul, you know Uncle Martin’s Cantos. What happened to the Earth?”

“Old Earth?” I said stupidly. “In the Cantos the AI Ummon said that the three elements of the TechnoCore were at war… We talked about this.”

“Tell me again.”

“Ummon told the Keats persona… your father… that the Volatiles wanted to destroy humanity. The Stables… his group… wanted to save it. They faked the black-hole destruction of Old Earth and spirited it away to either the Magellanic Clouds or the Hercules Cluster. The Ultimates, the third group, didn’t give a damn what happened to Old Earth or humanity as long as their Ultimate Intelligent project came to fruition.”

Aenea waited.

“And the Church agrees with what everyone else believes,” I continued somewhat lamely. “That Old Earth was swallowed by the black hole and died when it was supposed to have died.”

“Which version do you believe, Raul?”

I took a breath. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like Old Earth to still exist, I guess, but somehow it doesn’t seem that important.”

“What if there was a third possibility?” said Aenea.

The glass doors suddenly rattled and shook. I put my hand on the plasma pistol, half expecting the Shrike to be scratching at the glass. Only the desert wind howled there. “A third possibility?” I said.

“Ummon lied,” said Aenea. “The AI lied to my father. No element of the Core moved the Earth… not the Stables, not the Volatiles, not the Ultimates.”

“So it was destroyed,” I said.

“No,” said Aenea. “My father did not understand then. He did later. Old Earth was moved to the Magellanic Clouds, all right, but not by any element of the Core. They didn’t have the technology or the energy resources or that level of control of the Void Which Binds. The Core can’t even travel to the Magellanic Cloud. It’s too far… unimaginably distant.”

“Who, then?” I said. “Who stole Old Earth?”

Aenea laid back on the pillows. “I don’t know. I don’t think the Core knows, either. But they don’t want to know—and they’re terrified that we’ll find out.”

A. Bettik stepped closer. “So it is not the Core that is activating the farcasters on our voyage?”

“No,” said Aenea.

“Will we find out who is?” I said.

“If we live,” said Aenea. “If we live.” Her eyes looked tired now, not feverish. “They’ll be waiting for us tomorrow, Raul. And I don’t mean that priest-captain and his men. Someone… something from the Core will be waiting for us.”

“The thing that you think killed Father Glaucus, Cuchiat, and the others,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Is this some sort of vision?” I said. “To know about Father Glaucus, I mean.”

“Not a vision,” said the girl in an empty voice. “Just a memory from the future. A certain memory.”

I looked out at the diminishing storm. “We can stay here,” I said. “We can get a skimmer or EMV that works, fly to the northern hemisphere, and hide in Ali or one of the bigger cities that the guidebook talks about. We don’t have to play their game and go through that farcaster portal tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Aenea, “we do.”

I started to protest and then remained silent. After a while I said, “And where does the Shrike come in?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl. “It depends upon who sent it this time. Or it could be acting on its own. I don’t know.”

“On its own?” I said. “I thought it was just a machine.”

“Oh, no,” said Aenea. “Not just a machine.”

I rubbed my cheek. “I don’t understand. It could be a friend?”

“Never a friend,” said the girl. She sat up and put her hand on my cheek where I had rubbed it a second before. “I’m sorry, Raul, I don’t mean to talk in circles. It’s just that I don’t know. Nothing’s written. Everything’s fluid… And when I do get a glimpse of things shifting, it’s like watching a beautiful sand painting in the second before the wind gets it…”

The last of the desert storm rattled the windows as if to demonstrate her simile. She smiled at me. “I’m sorry I got unstuck in time a while ago…”

“Unstuck?” I said.

“That bit about your loving me,” she said with a rueful smile. “I forget where and when we are.”

After a moment I said, “It doesn’t matter, kiddo. I do love you. And I’ll die before I let anyone hurt you tomorrow—not the Church, not the Core, not anyone.”

“And I also will strive to prevent such an eventuality, M. Aenea,” said A. Bettik.

The girl smiled and touched both our hands. “The Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow,” she said. “I don’t deserve such friends.”

It was my turn to smile. Grandam had told me that old story. “Where’s the Cowardly Lion?” I said.

Aenea’s smile went away. “That’s me,” she said very quietly. “I’m the cowardly one.”

None of us slept any more that night. We loaded up and went down to the raft when the first hint of dawn touched the red hills beyond the city.