Endymion

8

Evening came early in the ruined city of Endymion. I watched the last of the autumn light dim and die from my vantage point in the tower where I had awakened earlier on this endless day. A. Bettik had led me back, shown me to my room, where stylish but simple evening clothes—tan cotton trousers tightening just below the knees, white flax blouse with a hint of ruffled sleeves, black leather vest, black stockings, soft black leather boots, and a gold wristband—were still laid out on the bed. The android also showed me to the toilet and bathing facilities a floor below and told me that the thick cotton robe hanging on the door was for my use. I thanked him, bathed, dried my hair, dressed in everything that had been laid out except for the gold band, and waited at the window while the light grew more golden and horizontal and shadows crept down from the hills above the university. When the light had died to the point where shadows had fled and the brightest stars in the Swan were visible above the mountains to the east, A. Bettik returned.

“Is it time?” I asked.

“Not quite, sir,” replied the android. “Earlier you requested that I return so that we might talk.”

“Ahh, yes,” I said, and gestured toward the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room. “Have a seat.”

The blue-skinned man stood where he was by the door. “I am comfortable standing, sir.”

I folded my arms and leaned against the windowsill. The air coming in the open window was cool and smelled of chalma. “You don’t have to call me sir,” I said. “Raul will do.” I hesitated. “Unless you’re programmed to talk to… ah…” I was about to say “humans,” but did not want to make it seem as if I thought A. Bettik was not human. “… to talk to people that way,” I finished lamely.

A. Bettik smiled. “No, sir. I am not programmed at all… not like a machine. Except for several synthetic prostheses—to augment strength, for instance, or to provide resistance to radiation—I have no artificial parts. I was merely taught deference to fulfill my role. I could call you M. Endymion, if that would be preferable.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I’m so ignorant about androids.”

A. Bettik’s thin-lipped smile returned. “There is no need to apologize, M. Endymion. Very few human beings now alive have seen one of my race.”

My race. Interesting. “Tell me about your race,” I said. “Wasn’t the biofacture of androids illegal in the Hegemony?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. I noticed that he stood at parade rest, and wondered idly if he had ever served in a military capacity. “Biofacture of androids was illegal on Old Earth and many of the Hegemony homeworlds even before the Hegira, but the All Thing allowed biofacture of a certain number of androids for use in the Outback. Hyperion was part of the Outback in those days.”

“It still is,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“When were you biofactured? Which worlds did you live on? What were your duties?” I asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Not at all, M. Endymion,” he said softly. The android’s voice had the hint of a dialect that was new to me. Offworld. Ancient. “I was created in the year 26 A.D. c. by your calendar.”

“In the twenty-fifth century, A.D…” I said. “Six hundred ninety-four years ago.”

A. Bettik nodded and said nothing.

“So you were born… biofactured… after Old Earth was destroyed,” I said, more to myself than to the android.

“Yes, sir.”

“And was Hyperion your first… ah… work destination?”

“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “For the first half century of my existence, I worked on Asquith in the service of His Royal Highness, King Arthur the Eighth, sovereign lord of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile, and also in the service of his cousin, Prince Rupert of Monaco-in-Exile. When King Arthur died, he willed me to his son, His Royal Highness, King William the Twenty-third.”

“Sad King Billy,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And did you come to Hyperion when Sad King Billy fled Horace Glennon-Height’s rebellion?”

“Yes,” said A. Bettik. “Actually, my android brothers and I were sent ahead to Hyperion some thirty-two years before His Highness and the other colonists joined us. We were dispatched here after General Glennon-Height won the Battle of Fomalhaut. His Highness thought it wise if an alternate site for the kingdoms-in-exile were prepared.”

“And that’s when you met M. Silenus,” I prompted, pointing toward the ceiling, imagining the old poet up there within his web of life-support umbilicals.

“No,” said the android. “My duties did not bring me into contact with M. Silenus during the years when the Poet’s City was occupied. I had the pleasure of meeting M. Silenus later, during his pilgrimage to the Valley of the Time Tombs two and a half centuries after the death of His Highness.”

“And you’ve been on Hyperion since,” I said. “More than five hundred years on this world.”

“Yes, M. Endymion.”

“Are you immortal?” I asked, knowing the question was impertinent but wanting the answer.

A. Bettik showed his slight smile. “Not at all, sir. I will die from accident or injury that is too serious for me to be repaired. It is just that when I was biofactured, my cells and systems were nanoteched with an ongoing form of Poulsen treatments so that I am essentially resistant to aging and disease.”

“Is that why androids are blue?” I asked.

“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “We are blue because no known race of humankind was blue at the time of my biofacture, and my designers felt it imperative to keep us visually separate from humans.”

“You do not consider yourself human?” I asked.

“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “I consider myself android.”

I smiled at my own naivete. “You still act in a service capacity,” I said. “Yet use of slave android labor was outlawed throughout the Hegemony centuries ago.”

A. Bettik waited.

“Don’t you wish to be free?” I said at last. “To be an independent person in your own right?”

A. Bettik walked to the bed. I thought that he was going to sit down, but he only folded and stacked the shirt and trousers I had been wearing earlier. “M. Endymion,” he said, “I should point out that although the laws of the Hegemony died with the Hegemony, I have considered myself a free and independent person for some centuries now.”

“Yet you and the others work for M. Silenus here, in hiding,” I persisted.

“Yes, sir, but I have done so from my own free choice. I was designed to serve humanity. I do it well. I take pleasure in my work.”

“So you’ve stayed here by your own free will,” I perseverated.

A. Bettik nodded and smiled briefly. “Yes, for as much as any of us has a free will, sir.”

I sighed and pushed myself away from the window. It was full dark out now. I presumed that I would be summoned to the old poet’s dinner party before long. “And you will continue staying here and caring for the old man until he finally dies,” I said.

“No, sir,” said A. Bettik. “Not if I am consulted on the matter.”

I paused, my eyebrows lifting. “Really?” I said. “And where will you go if you are consulted on the matter?”

“If you choose to accept this mission which M. Silenus has offered you, sir,” said the blue-skinned man, “I would choose to go with you.”

When I was led upstairs, I discovered that the top floor was no longer a sickroom; it had been transformed into a dining room. The flowfoam hoverchair was gone, the medical monitors were gone, the communication consoles were absent, and the ceiling was open to the sky. I glanced up and located the constellations of the Swan and the Twin Sisters with the trained eye of a former shepherd. Braziers on tall tripods sat in front of each of the stained-glass windows, their flames adding both warmth and light to the room. In the center of the room, the com consoles had been replaced with a three-meter-long dining table. China, silver, and crystal glimmered in the light of candles flickering from two ornate candelabra. A place had been set at each end of the table. At the far end, Martin Silenus awaited, already seated in a tall chair.

The old poet was hardly recognizable. He seemed to have shed centuries in the hours since I had last seen him. From being a mummy with parchment skin and sunken eyes, he had transformed into just another old man at a dining table—a hungry old man from the look in his eyes. As I approached the table, I noticed the subtle IV drips and monitor filaments snaking under the table, but otherwise the illusion of someone restored to life from the dead was almost perfect.

Silenus chuckled at my expression. “You caught me at my worst this afternoon, Raul Endymion,” he rasped. The voice was still harsh with age, but much more forceful than before. “I was still recovering from my cold sleep.” He gestured me to my place at the other end of the table.

“Cryogenic fugue?” I said stupidly, unfurling the linen napkin and dropping it to my lap. It had been years since I had eaten at a table this fancy—the day that I had demobilized from the Home Guard, I had gone straight to the best restaurant in the port city of Gran Chaco on South Talon Peninsula and ordered the finest meal on the menu, blowing my last month’s pay in the process. It had been worth it.

“Of course cryogenic fucking fugue,” said the old poet. “How else do you think I pass these decades?” He chuckled again. “It merely takes me a few days to get up to speed again after defrosting. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

I took a breath. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” I said, “how old are you?”

The poet ignored me and beckoned to the waiting android—not A. Bettik—who nodded toward the stairwell. Other androids began carrying up the food in silence. My water glass was rilled. I watched as A. Bettik showed a bottle of wine to the poet, waited for the old man’s nod, and then went through the ritual, offering him the cork and a sample to taste. Martin Silenus sloshed the vintage wine around in his mouth, swallowed, and grunted. A. Bettik took this for assent and poured the wine for each of us.

The appetizers arrived, two for each of us. I recognized the charbroiled chicken yakitori and the tender Mane-raised beef carpaccio arugula. In addition, Silenus helped himself to the sauteed foie gras wrapped in mandrake leaves that had been set near his end of the table. I lifted the ornamented skewer and tried the yakitori. It was excellent.

Martin Silenus might be eight or nine hundred years old, perhaps the oldest human alive, but the codger had an appetite. I saw the gleam of perfect white teeth as he attacked the beef carpaccio, and I wondered if these new additions were dentures or ARNied substitutes. Probably the latter.

I realized that I was ravenous. Evidently either my pseudo-resurrection or the exercise involved in climbing to the ship had instilled an appetite in me. For several minutes there was no conversation, only the soft sound of the serving androids’ footsteps on stones, the crackle of flames in the braziers, an occasional hint of night breeze overhead, and the sounds of our chewing.

As the androids removed our appetizer plates and brought in bowls of steaming black mussel bisque, the poet said, “I understand that you met our ship today.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was the Consul’s private ship?”

“Of course.” Silenus gestured to an android, and bread was brought still hot from the oven. The smell of it mingled with the rising vapors from the bisque and the hint of autumn foliage on the breeze.

“And this is the ship you expect me to use to rescue the girl?” I said. I expected the poet to ask for my decision then.

Instead, he said, “What do you think of the Pax, M. Endymion?”

I blinked, the spoon of bisque halfway to my mouth. “The Pax?”

Silenus waited.

I set the spoon back and shrugged. “I don’t think much of it, I guess.”

“Not even after one of its courts sentenced you to death?”

Instead of sharing what I had been thinking earlier—how it had not been the Pax influence that sentenced me, but Hyperion’s brand of frontier justice—I said, “No. The Pax has been mostly irrelevant to my life.”

The old poet nodded and sipped his bisque. “And the Church?”

“What about it, sir?”

“Has it been largely irrelevant to your life?”

“I guess so.” I realized that I was sounding like a tongue-tied adolescent, but these questions seemed less important than the question he was supposed to ask me, and the decision I was supposed to give him.

“I remember the first time we heard of the Pax,” he said. “It was only a few months after Aenea disappeared. Church ships arrived in orbit, and troops seized Keats, Port Romance, Endymion, the university, all of the spaceports and important cities. Then they lifted off in combat skimmers, and we realized that they were after the cruciforms on the Pinion Plateau.”

I nodded. None of this was new information. The occupation of the Pinion Plateau and search for cruciforms had been the last great gamble of a dying Church, and the beginning of the Pax. It had been almost a century and a half before real Pax troops had arrived to occupy all of Hyperion and to order the evacuation of Endymion and other towns near the Plateau.

“But the ships which put in here during the expansion of the Pax,” continued the poet, “what tales they brought! The Church’s expansion from Pacem through the old Web worlds, then the Outback colonies…”

The androids removed the bisque bowls and returned with plates of carved fowl with pommery mustard sauce and a gratin of Kans River manta with caviar mousseline.

“Duck?” I said.

The poet showed his reconstituted teeth. “It seemed appropriate after your… ah… trouble of the last week.”

I sighed and touched the slice of fowl with my fork. Moist vapors rose to my cheek and eyes. I thought of Izzy’s eagerness as the ducks approached the open water. It seemed a lifetime ago. I looked at Martin Silenus and tried to imagine having centuries of memories to contend with. How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind? The old poet was grinning at me in that wild way of his, and once again I wondered if he was sane.

“So we heard about the Pax and wondered what it would be like when it truly arrived,” he continued, chewing while he spoke. “A theocracy… unthinkable during the centuries of the Hegemony. Religion then was, of course, purely personal choice—I belonged to a dozen religions and started more than one of my own during my days as a literary celebrity.” He looked at me with bright eyes. “But of course you know that, Raul Endymion. You know the Cantos.”

I tasted the manta and said nothing.

“Most people I knew were Zen Christians,” he continued. “More Zen than Christian, of course, but not too much of either, actually. Personal pilgrimages were fun. Places of power, finding one’s Baedecker point, all of that crap… “He chuckled. “The Hegemony would never have dreamed of getting involved with religion, of course. The very thought of mixing government and religious opinion was barbaric… something one found on Qom-Riyadh or somesuch Outback desert world. And then came the Pax, with its glove of velvet and its cruciform of hope…”

“The Pax doesn’t rule,” I said. “It advises.”

“Precisely,” agreed the old man, pointing his fork at me while A. Bettik refilled his wineglass. “The Pax advises. It does not rule. On hundreds of worlds the Church administers to the faithful and the Pax advises. But, of course, if you are a Christian who wishes to be born again, you will not ignore the advice of the Pax or the whispers of the Church, will you?”

I shrugged again. The influence of the Church had been a constant of life as long as I had been alive. There was nothing strange about it to me.

“But you are not a Christian who wishes to be born again, are you, M. Endymion?”

I looked at the old poet then, and a terrible suspicion formed in the back of my mind. He somehow finessed my fake execution and transported me here when I should have been buried at sea by the authorities. He has clout with the Port Romance authorities. Could he have dictated my conviction and sentencing? Was all this some sort of test?

“The question is,” he continued, ignoring my basilisk stare, “why are you not a Christian? Why do you not wish to be born again? Don’t you enjoy life, Raul Endymion?”

“I enjoy life,” I said tersely.

“But you have not accepted the cross,” he continued. “You have not accepted the gift of extended life.”

I put down my fork. An android servant interpreted that as a sign that I was finished and removed the plate of untouched duckling. “I have not accepted the cruciform,” I snapped. How to explain the suspicion bred into my nomadic clan through generations of being the expatriates, the outsiders, the unsettled indigenies? How to explain the fierce independence of people like Grandam and my mother? How to explain the legacy of philosophical rigor and inbred scepticism passed on to me by my education and upbringing? I did not try.

Martin Silenus nodded as if I had explained. “And you see the cruciform as something other than a miracle offered the faithful through the miraculous intercession of the Catholic Church?”

“I see the cruciform as a parasite,” I said, surprising myself by the vehemence in my voice.

“Perhaps you are afraid of losing… ah… your masculinity,” rasped the poet.

The androids brought in two swans sculpted of mocha chocolate and filled with highland branch-truffles and set them at our places. I ignored mine. In the Cantos the priest pilgrim—Paul Duré—tells his tale of discovering the lost tribe, the Bikura, and learning how they had survived centuries by a cruciform symbiote offered to them by the legendary Shrike. The cruciform resurrected them much as it did today, in the era of the Pax, only in the priest’s tale the side effects included irreversible brain damage after several resurrections and the disappearance of all sexual organs and impulses. The Bikura were retarded eunuchs—all of them.

“No,” I said. “I know that the Church has somehow solved that problem.”

Silenus smiled. He looked like a mummified satyr when he did that. “If one has taken Communion and if one is resurrected under the auspices of the Church,” he rasped. “Otherwise, even if one has somehow stolen a cruciform, his fate remains that of the Bikura.”

I nodded. Generations had attempted to steal immortality. Before the Pax sealed off the Plateau, adventurers smuggled out cruciforms. Other symbiotes had been stolen from the Church itself. The result had always been the same—idiocy and sexless-ness. Only the Church held the secret of successful resurrection.

“So?” I said.

“So why has allegiance to the Church and a tithing of every tenth year of service to the Church been too high a price for you, my boy? Billions have opted for life.”

I sat in silence for a moment. Finally I said, “Billions can do what they want. My life is important to me. I want to keep it… mine.”

This made no sense even to me, but the poet once again nodded as if I had explained matters to his satisfaction. He ate his chocolate swan while I watched. The androids removed our plates and filled our cups with coffee.

“All right,” the poet said, “have you thought about my proposition?”

The question was so absurd that I had to stifle the urge to laugh. “Yes,” I said at last. “I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

“And I have a few questions.”

Martin Silenus waited.

“What is in this for me?” I asked. “You talk about the difficulty of my going back to a life here on Hyperion—lack of papers and all that—but you know I’m comfortable in the wilderness. It would be a hell of a lot easier for me to take off for the fens and avoid the Pax authorities than it would be to chase across space with your kid-friend in tow. Besides, to the Pax, I’m dead. I could go home to the moors and stay with my clan with no problem.”

Martin Silenus nodded.

After another moment of silence I said, “So why should I even consider this nonsense?”

The old man smiled. “You want to be a hero, Raul Endymion.”

I blew out my breath in derision and set my hands on the tablecloth. My fingers looked blunt and clumsy there, out of place against the fine linen.

“You want to be a hero,” he repeated. “You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I did, of course, but there was no way he could know me that well.

“I do know you that well,” said Martin Silenus, seemingly responding to my thought rather than my last statement.

I should say here that I did not think for a second that the old man was telepathic. First of all, I do not believe in telepathy—or, rather, I did not at that time—and secondly, I was more intrigued by the potential of a human being who had lived almost a thousand standard years. Why, even if he were insane, I thought, it was possible that he had learned to read facial expressions and physical nuance to the point where the effect would be almost indistinguishable from telepathy!

Or perhaps it was just a lucky guess.

“I don’t want to be a hero,” I said flatly. “I saw what happens to heroes when my brigade was sent to fight the rebels on the southern continent.”

“Ahh, Ursus,” he muttered. “The south polar bear. Hyperion’s most useless mass of ice and mud. I remember some rumors of a disturbance there.”

The war there had lasted eight Hyperion years and killed thousands of us local boys who were stupid enough to enlist in the Home Guard to fight there. Perhaps the old poet wasn’t as astute as I was making him out to be.

“I don’t mean hero as in the fools who throw themselves on plasma grenades,” he continued, licking his thin lips with a lizard’s flick of tongue. “I mean hero as in he whose prowess and beneficence is so legendary that he comes to be honored as a divinity. I mean hero in the literary sense, as in central protagonist given to forceful action. I mean hero as in he whose tragic flaws will be his undoing.” The poet paused and looked expectantly at me, but I stared back in silence.

“No tragic flaws?” he said at last. “Or not given to forceful action?”

“I don’t want to be a hero,” I said again.

The old man hunched over his coffee. When he looked up, his eyes held a mischievous glint. “Where do you get your hair cut, boy?”

“Pardon me?”

He licked his lips again. “You heard me. Your hair is long, but not wild. Where do you get it cut?”

I sighed and said, “Sometimes, when I was in the fens for a long period, I’d cut it myself, but when I’m in Port Romance, I go to a little shop on Datoo Street.”

“Ahhhh,” said Silenus, settling back in his tall-backed chair. “I know Datoo Street. It’s in the Night District. More of an alley than a street. The open market there used to sell ferrets in gilded cages. There were street barbers, but the best barber-shop there belonged to an old man named Palani Woo. He had six sons, and as each came of age, he would add another chair to the shop.” The old eyes raised to look at me, and once again I was struck by the power of personality there. “That was a century ago,” he said.

“I get my hair cut at Woo’s,” I said. “Palani Woo’s great-grandson, Kalakaua, owns the shop now. There are still six chairs.”

“Yes,” said the poet, nodding to himself. “Not too much changes on our dear Hyperion, does it, Raul Endymion?”

“Is that your point?”

“Point?” he said, opening his hands as if showing that he had nothing so sinister as a point to hide. “No point. Conversation, my boy. It amuses me to think of World Historical Figures, much less heroes of future myths, paying to get their hair cut. I thought of this centuries ago, by the way… this strange disconnection between the stuff of myth and the stuff of life. Do you know what ‘datoo’ means?”

I blinked at this sudden change of direction. “No.”

“A wind out of Gibraltar. It carried a beautiful fragrance. Some of the artists and poets who founded Port Romance must have thought that the chalma and weirwood forests which covered the hills above the bog there must have smelled nice. Do you know what Gibraltar is, boy?”

“No.”

“A big rock on Earth,” rasped the old man. He showed his teeth again. “Notice that I didn’t say Old Earth.”

I had noticed.

“Earth is Earth, boy. I lived there before it disappeared, so I should know.”

The thought still made me dizzy.

“I want you to find it,” said the poet, his eyes gleaming.

“Find… it?” I repeated. “Old Earth? I thought you wanted me to travel with the girl… Aenea.”

His bony hands waved away my sentence. “You go with her and you’ll find Earth, Raul Endymion.”

I nodded, all the while pondering the wisdom of explaining to him that Old Earth had been swallowed by the black hole dropped into its guts during the Big Mistake of ’08. But, then, this ancient creature had fled from that shattered world. It made little sense to contradict his delusions. His Cantos had mentioned some plot by the warring AI TechnoCore to steal Old Earth—to spirit it away to either the Hercules Cluster or the Magellanic Clouds, the Cantos were inconsistent—but that was fantasy. The Magellanic Cloud was a separate galaxy… more than 160,000 light-years from the Milky Way, if I remembered correctly… and no ship, neither Pax nor Hegemony, had ever been sent farther than our small sphere in one spiral arm of our galaxy—and even with the Hawking-drive exclusion to Einsteinian realities, a trip to the Large Magellanic Cloud would take many centuries of shiptime and tens of thousands of years’ time-debt. Even the Ousters who savored the dark places between the stars would not undertake a voyage like that.

Besides, planets are not kidnapped.

“I want you to find Earth and bring it back,” continued the old poet. “I want to see it again before I die. Will you do that for me, Raul Endymion?”

I looked the old man in the eye. “Sure,” I said. “Save this child from the Swiss Guard and the Pax, keep her safe until she becomes the One Who Teaches, find Old Earth and bring it back so you can see it again. Easy. Anything else?”

“Yes,” said Martin Silenus with the tone of absolute solemnity that comes with dementia, “I want you to find out what the fuck the TechnoCore is up to and stop it.”

I nodded again. “Find the missing TechnoCore and stop the combined power of thousands of godlike AIs from doing whatever they’re planning to do,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my tongue. “Check. Will do. Anything else?”

“Yes. You are to talk with the Ousters and see if they can offer me immortality… true immortality, not this born-again Christian bullshit.”

I pretended to write this on an invisible notepad. “Ousters… immortality… not Christian bullshit. Can do. Check. Anything else?”

“Yes, Raul Endymion. I want the Pax destroyed and the Church’s power toppled.”

I nodded. Two or three hundred known worlds had willingly joined the Pax. Trillions of humans had willingly been baptized in the Church. The Pax military was stronger than anything Hegemony Force had ever dreamed of at the height of its power. “OK,” I said. “I’ll take care of that. Anything else?”

“Yes. I want you to stop the Shrike from hurting Aenea or wiping out humanity.”

I hesitated at this. According to the old man’s own epic poem, the Shrike had been destroyed by the soldier Fedmahn Kassad in some future era. Knowing the futility of projecting logic into a demented conversation, I still mentioned this.

“Yes!” snapped the old poet. “But that is then. Millennia from now. I want you to stop the Shrike now.”

“All right,” I said. Why argue?

Martin Silenus slumped back in his chair, his energy seemingly dissipated. I glimpsed the animated mummy again in the folds of skin, the sunken eyes, the bony fingers. But those eyes still blazed with intensity. I tried to imagine the force of this man’s personality when he’d been in his prime: I could not.

Silenus nodded and A. Bettik brought two glasses and poured champagne.

“Then you accept, Raul Endymion?” asked the poet, his voice strong and formal. “You accept this mission to save Aenea, travel with her, and accomplish these other things?”

“With one condition,” I said.

Silenus frowned and waited.

“I want to take A. Bettik with me,” I said. The android still stood by the table. The champagne bottle was in his hand. His gaze was aimed straight forward, and he did not turn to look at either of us or register any emotion.

The poet showed surprise. “My android? Are you serious?”

“I am serious.”

“A. Bettik has been with me since before your great-great-grandmother had tits,” rasped the poet. His bony hand slammed down on the table hard enough to make me worry about brittle bones. “A. Bettik,” he snapped. “You wish to go?”

The blue-skinned man nodded without turning his head.

“Fuck it,” said the poet. “Take him. Do you want anything else, Raul Endymion? My hoverchair, perhaps? My respirator? My teeth?”

“Nothing else,” I said.

“And so, Raul Endymion,” said the poet, his voice formal once again, “do you accept this mission? Will you save, serve, and protect the child Aenea until her destiny is fulfilled… or die trying?”

“I accept,” I said.

Martin Silenus lifted his wineglass and I matched the motion. Too late, I thought that the android should be drinking with us, but by then the old poet was giving his toast.

“To folly,” he said. “To divine madness. To insane quests and messiahs crying from the desert. To the death of tyrants. To confusion to our enemies.”

I started to raise the glass to my lips, but the old man was not done.

“To heroes,” he said. “To heroes who get their hair cut.” He drank the champagne in one gulp.

And so did I.