The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (194 page)

“Has A. Bettik seen this?” I said.

The pale shoulders shrugged. The fractal fireworks were pulsing and folding out beyond the balcony, casting incredible colors and reflections on the sphere of water. The sphere itself was a great blue blob with lighter patches on the surface and interior, where bubbles of air shifted. Actually, it reminded me of photos of Old Earth I had seen.

Aenea ducked her head under, was a pale form kicking through the water for a moment, and reemerged five meters up the curved surface. Smaller globules splashed free and curved
back to the surface of the larger sphere—herded there by the field differential, I assumed—splashing and sending complex, concentric circles rippling across the surface of the water globe.

“Come on in,” she said again. “I mean it!”

“I don’t have a suit.”

Aenea floated a second, kicked over onto her stomach, and dived again. When she emerged, head completely upside down from my perspective this time, she said, “Who has a suit? You don’t need one!”

I knew she was not joking because during her dive I had seen the pale vertebrae pressing against the skin of her back, her ribs, and her still-boylike butt reflecting the fractal light like two small white mushrooms poking up from a pond. All in all, the sight of our twelve-year-old messiah-to-be’s backside was about as sexually arousing as seeing holoslides of Aunt Merth’s new grandkiddies in the tub.

“Come on in, Raul!” she called again, and dived for the opposite side of the sphere.

I hesitated only a second before kicking off my robe and outer clothes. I kept on not only my undershorts, but the long undershirt I often wore as pajamas.

For a moment I stood on the balcony, not having the slightest clue as to how to get into the sphere several meters above me. Then I heard, “Jump, dummy!” from somewhere on the upper arc of the blob, and I jumped.

The transition to zero-g began about a meter and a half up. The water was damned cold.

I pivoted, shouted from the cold, felt everything contractable on my body contract, and began splashing around, trying to keep my head above the curved surface. I was not surprised when A. Bettik came out on the balcony to see what the shouting was all about. He folded his arms and leaned against the railing, crossing his legs at the ankles.

“The water’s warm!” I lied through chattering teeth. “C’mon in!”

The android smiled and shook his head like a patient parent. I shrugged and pivoted and dived.

It took me a second or two to remember that swimming is much like moving in zero-g; that floating in water in zero-g is much like ordinary swimming. Either way, the resistance of the water made the experience more swimlike than zero-g-like, although there was the added fun of coming across an air bubble
somewhere inside the sphere and pausing there to catch one’s breath before paddling around underwater again.

After a moment of cartwheeling disorientation, I came to a meter-wide bubble, stopped myself before tumbling out into the sphere, and looked directly above me to see Aenea’s head and shoulders emerging. She looked down at me and waved. The skin on her bare chest was goose-bumpy from either the cool water or cooler air.

“Some fun, huh?” she said, spluttering water out of her face and brushing back her hair with both hands. Her blond-brown hair looked much darker when wet. I looked at the girl and tried to see her mother in her, the dark-haired Lusian detective. It was no use—I had never seen an image of Brawne Lamia, only heard descriptions from the
Cantos
.

“The hard part’s keeping yourself from flying out of the water when you get to the edge,” said Aenea as our bubble shifted and contracted, the wall of water curving around and above us. “Race you to the outside!”

She pivoted and kicked, and I tried to follow, but made the mistake of flailing across the air bubble—my God, I hope that neither A. Bettik nor the child saw that pathetic spasm of arms and legs—and ended up at the edge of the sphere half a minute behind her. We treaded water there; the ship and balcony were out of sight beneath us, the surface of the water curved away to the left and right, dropping out of sight like waterfalls on all sides of us, while above us the crimson fractals expanded, exploded, contracted, and expanded again.

“I wish we could see the stars,” I said, and was surprised that I had spoken aloud.

“Me too,” said Aenea. Her face was raised to the disturbing light show, and I thought I saw a shadow of sadness flicker across her features. “I’m cold,” she said at last. I could see her clenched jaws now, sense her effort to keep her teeth from chattering. “Next time I tell the ship to build the pool, I’ll remind it not to use cold water.”

“You’d better get out,” I said. We swam down and around the curve of the sphere. The balcony seemed to be a wall rising to greet us, its only anomaly the form of A. Bettik standing sideways from it, holding out a large towel for Aenea.

“Close your eyes,” she said. I did and felt the heavy zero-g globules of splash-water strike my face as she flailed her way right through the surface tension of the sphere and floated beyond
it. A second later I heard the slap of her bare feet as she landed on the balcony.

I waited a few more seconds and opened my eyes. A. Bettik had set the voluminous towel around her and she was huddled in it, teeth chattering now despite her efforts to stop them. “B-b-be care-f-ful,” she said. “Ro-ro-tate as s-s-soon as you get out of the w-w-w-water, or you’ll f-f-fall on your h-head and b-b-break your neck.”

“Thanks,” I said, having no intention of leaving the sphere before she and A. Bettik left the balcony. They did so a moment later and I paddled out, kicked arms and legs in a wild attempt to turn 180 degrees before gravity reasserted itself, pivoted too far, overcompensated, and landed heavily on my rear end.

I pulled down the extra towel that A. Bettik had thoughtfully left on the railing for me, mopped my face, and said, “Ship, you can collapse the zero-g microfield now.”

I realized my mistake an instant later, but before I could countermand the order, several hundred gallons of water collapsed onto the balcony—a massive waterfall of bone-chilling weight crashing down from a great height. If I had been directly under it, it might well have killed me—a mildly ironic end to a great adventure—but since I was sitting a couple of meters from the edge of the deluge, it merely smashed me against the balcony, caught me up in its vortex as it spilled up and over the railing, and threatened to fling me out into space and down past the stern of the ship fifteen meters below, down to the bottom of the ellipsoid bubble of containment field, where I would end up like a drowned insect in an ovoid beaker.

I grabbed at the railing and held on while the torrent roared by.

“Sorry,” said the ship, realizing its own error and reshaping the field around us to contain and collect the deluge. I noticed that none of it had washed through the open doorway into the holopit level.

When the microfield had lifted the water away in sloshing spheres, I found my sodden towel and walked through the doorway into the ship. As the hull irised shut behind me, the water presumably being returned to its holding tanks before being purified again for our use or as reaction mass, I stopped suddenly.

“Ship!” I demanded.

“Yes, M. Endymion?”

“That wasn’t your idea of a practical joke, was it?”

“Do you mean obeying your order to collapse the zero-g microfield, M. Endymion?”

“Yeah.”

“The consequences were the result of a minor oversight only, M. Endymion. I do not commit practical jokes. Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.”

“Hmmm,” I said, not totally convinced. Carrying my wet shoes and clothing with me, I squished upstairs to dry off and get dressed.

The next day I visited A. Bettik down in what he called the “engine room.” The place did have somewhat the sense of an engine room in an oceangoing ship—warm pipes, obscure but massive dynamo-shaped objects, catwalks and metal platforms—but A. Bettik showed me how the primary purpose of the space was to interface with the ship’s drives and field generators via various simstimlike connectors. I admit that I’ve never enjoyed computer-generated realities, and after sampling a few of the virtual views of the ship, I disconnected and sat by A. Bettik’s hammock while we talked. He told me about helping to service and refit this ship over the long decades, and how he had begun to believe it would never fly again. I sensed a relief that the voyage was under way.

“Had you always planned to go on the trip with whomever the old poet chose to go with the girl?” I asked.

The android looked steadily at me. “For the past century I have harbored the thought, M. Endymion. But I rarely considered it a potential reality. I thank you for making it so.”

His gratitude was so sincere that it embarrassed me for a moment. “You’d better not thank me until we escape the Pax,” I said to change the subject. “I suppose they’ll be waiting for us in Renaissance Vector space.”

“It seems likely.” The blue-skinned man did not seem especially concerned by the prospect.

“Do you think Aenea’s threat of opening the ship to space will work a second time?” I said.

A. Bettik shook his head. “They wish to capture the girl alive, but they will not be taken in by that bluff again.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Do you really think she was bluffing?
I had the impression that she was ready to open our level to vacuum.”

“I think not,” said A. Bettik. “I do not know this young person well, of course, but I had the pleasure of spending some days with her mother and the other pilgrims during their crossing of Hyperion. M. Lamia was a woman who loved life and respected the lives of others. I believe that M. Aenea might have carried out the threat if she had been alone, but I do not think that she is capable of choosing to hurt you or me.”

I had nothing to say to that, so we spoke of other things—the ship, our destination, how strange the Web worlds must be after all this time since the Fall.

“If we land on Renaissance Vector,” I said, “do you plan to leave us there?”

“Leave you?” said A. Bettik, showing surprise for the first time. “Why would I leave you there?”

I made a lame gesture with my hand. “Well … I guess … I mean, I always thought you wanted your freedom and would find it on the first civilized world we landed on.…” I stopped before I made more of an idiot of myself.

“My freedom is found by being allowed to come along on this voyage,” the android said softly. He smiled. “And, besides, M. Endymion, I could hardly blend in with the populace if I did want to stay on Renaissance Vector.”

This raised an issue I’d been thinking about. “You could change your skin color,” I said. “The ship’s autosurgeon could do that.…” I stopped again, seeing something subtle in his expression that I did not understand.

“As you know, M. Endymion,” began A. Bettik, “we androids are not programmed like machines … not even set with basic parameters and asimotivators like the early DNA AIs which evolved into the Core intelligences … but certain inhibitions were … ah … strongly urged on us when our instincts were being designed. One, of course, is to obey humans whenever reasonable and to keep them from coming to harm. This asimotivator is older than robotics or bioengineering, I am told. But another … instinct … is not to change my skin color.”

“You’re not capable of it?” I asked. “You couldn’t do it if our lives depended upon your concealing your blue skin?”

“Oh, yes,” said A. Bettik, “I am a creature of free will. I could do so, especially if the action was consistent with high-priority
asimotivations, such as keeping you and M. Aenea safe from harm, but my choice would make me … uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.”

I nodded but did not really understand. We spoke of other things.

This was the same day that I inventoried the contents of the weapons and EVA lockers on the main air-lock level. There was more there than I’d thought upon first inspection, and some of the objects were so archaic that I had to ask the ship their purpose. Most of the things in the EVA locker were obvious enough—spacesuits and hazardous-atmosphere suits, four flybikes cleverly folded into their storage niches under the spacesuit closet, heavy-duty handlamps, camping gear, osmosis masks and scuba gear with flippers and spearguns, one EM-flying belt, three boxes of tools, two well-equipped med-kits, six sets of night-vision and IR goggles, an equal number of lightweight headsets with mike-bead communicators and vid cameras, and comlogs. These last items caused me to query the ship: on a world without a datasphere, I had grown up with little use for the things. The comlogs ranged from antiquated—the thin silver band of jewelry type that was popular several decades ago—to absolutely ancient: massive things the size of a small book. All were capable of being used as communicators, of storing massive amounts of data, of tapping into the local datasphere, and—especially with the older ones—of actually hooking into planetary fatline relays via remote so that the megasphere could be accessed.

I held one of the bracelet pieces in my palm. It weighed much less than a gram. Useless. I understood from listening to offworld hunters that there were a few worlds with primitive dataspheres once again—Renaissance Vector was one of them, I thought—but the fatline relays had been useless for almost three centuries. The fatline—that common band of FTL communication upon which the Hegemony had depended—had been silent since the Fall. I started to put the comlog back in its velvet-lined case.

“You might find it useful to take with you if you leave me for any period of time,” said the ship.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Why?”

“Information,” said the ship. “I would be happy to download the bulk of my basic datalogs into one or more of those. You could access it at will.”

I chewed my lip, trying to imagine any value in having the ship’s confused mass of data on my wrist. Then I heard Grandam’s voice from my childhood—
Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe
.

“Good idea,” I said, snapping the thin silver thread around my wrist. “When can you download the data banks?”