The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (292 page)

I increased the magnification of my binoculars, my heart pounding against my ribs, but there was drifting smoke from the construction work and I could not make out for sure if the tallest person there was Aenea. But through the veils of swirling smoke, I did catch a glimpse of blond-brown hair—just shorter than shoulder length—and for a moment I lowered the binoculars and just stared out at the distant wall, grinning like an idiot.

“They are signaling,” said the ship.

I looked through the glasses again. Another person—female, I think, but with much darker hair—was flashing two handheld semaphore flags.

“It is an ancient signal code,” said the ship. “It is called Morse. The first words are …”

“Quiet,” I said. We had learned Morse Code in the Home Guard and I had used it once with two bloody bandages to call in medevac skimmers on the Iceshelf.

GO … TO … THE … FISSURE … TEN KLICKS … TO … THE … NORTH … EAST.

HOVER … THERE.

AWAIT … INSTRUCTIONS.

“Got that, Ship?” I said.

“Yes.” The ship’s voice always sounded cold after I was rude to it.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I think I see a gap about ten klicks to the northeast. Let’s stay as far out as we can and come in from the east. I don’t think they’ll be able to see us from the Temple, and I don’t see any other structures along the cliff face in that direction.”

Without further comment, the ship brought us out and around and back along the sheer rock wall until we came to the fissure—a vertical cleft dropping several thousand meters from the ice and snow far above to a point where it converged about four hundred meters above the level of the Temple, which now was out of sight around the curve of rockface to the west.

The ship floated vertically until we were just fifty meters above the bottom of the fissure. I was surprised to see streams running down the steep rock walls of the sides of this gap, tumbling into the center of the fissure before pouring off into thin air as a waterfall. There were trees and mosses and lichens and flowering plants everywhere along this cleft, fields of them rising many hundreds of meters alongside the streams until finally becoming mere streaks of multicolored lichen rising toward the ice levels above. At first I was sure that there was no
sign of human intrusion here, but then I saw the chiseled ledges along the north wall—barely wide enough to stand on, I thought—and then the paths through the bright green moss, and the artfully placed stepping stones in the stream, and then I noticed the tiny, weathered little structure—too small to be a cabin, more like a gazebo with windows—which sat under wind-sculpted evergreens along the stream and near the high point of the fissure’s verdant pass.

I pointed and the ship moved up in that direction, hovering near the gazebo. I understood why it would be difficult, if not impossible, to land here. The Consul’s ship was not that large—it had been hidden in the stone tower in the old poet’s city of Endymion for centuries—but even if it landed vertically on its fins or extendable legs here, some trees, grass, moss, and flowering plants would be crushed. They seemed too rare in this vertical rock world to destroy that way.

So we hovered. And waited. And about thirty minutes after we arrived, a young woman came around the path from the direction of the rock ledges and waved heartily at us.

It was not Aenea.

I admit that I was disappointed. My desire to see my young friend again had reached the point of obsession; and I guess that I was having absurd fantasies of reunion—Aenea and I running toward one another across a flowered field, she the child of eleven again, I her protector, both of us laughing with the pleasure of seeing one another and me lifting her and swinging her around, tossing her up …

Well, we had the grassy field. The ship continued hovering and morphed a stairway to the flower-bedecked lawn next to the gazebo. The young woman crossed the stream, hopping from stepping stone to stepping stone with perfect balance, and came grinning toward me up the grassy knoll.

She was in her early twenties. She had the physical grace and sense of presence I remembered from a thousand images of my young friend. But I had never seen this woman before in my life.

Could Aenea have changed this much in five years? Could she have disguised herself to hide from the Pax? Had I simply forgotten what she looked like?
The latter seemed improbable. No, impossible. The ship had assured me that it had been five
years and some months for Aenea if she was waiting on this world for me, but my entire trip—including the cryogenic fugue part—had taken only about four months. I had aged only a few weeks. I could not have forgotten her. I would never forget her.

“Hello, Raul,” said the young woman with dark hair.

“Hello?” I said.

She stepped closer and extended her hand. She had a firm handshake. “I’m Rachel. Aenea’s described you perfectly.” She laughed. “Of course, we haven’t been expecting anyone else to come calling in a starship looking like this …” She waved her hand in the general direction of the ship hanging there like a vertical balloon bobbing softly in the wind.

“How is Aenea?” I said, my voice sounding strange to me. “
Where
is she?”

“Oh, she is back at the Temple. She’s working. It’s the middle of the busiest work shift. She couldn’t get away. She asked me to come over and help you dispose of your ship.”

She couldn’t get away
. What the hell was this? I’d come through literal hell—suffered kidney stones and broken legs, been chased by Pax troopers, dumped into a world with no land, eaten and regurgitated by an alien—and she couldn’t goddamn get away? I bit my lip, resisting the impulse to say what I was thinking. I admit that emotion was surging rather high at that moment.

“What do you mean—dispose of my ship?” I said. I looked around. “There has to be someplace for it to land.”

“There isn’t really,” said the young woman named Rachel. Looking at her now in the bright sunlight, I realized that she was probably a little older than Aenea would be—mid-twenties perhaps. Her eyes were brown and intelligent, her brown hair was chopped off as carelessly as Aenea used to cut hers, her skin was tanned from long hours in the sun, her hands were callused with work, and there were laugh lines at the corners of her eyes.

“Why don’t we do this,” said Rachel. “Why don’t you get what you need from the ship, take a comlog or communicator so you can call the ship back when you need it, get two skinsuits and two rebreathers out of the storage locker, and then tell the ship to hop back up to the third moon—the second smallest captured asteroid. There’s a deep crater there for it to hide in, but that moon’s in a near geosynchronous orbit and it keeps one face toward this hemisphere all the time. You could tightbeam it and it could be back here in a few minutes.”

I looked suspiciously at her. “Why the skinsuits and rebreathers?” The ship had them. They were designed for benign hard-vacuum environments where true space armor was not required. “The air seems thick enough here,” I said.

“It is,” said Rachel. “There’s a surprisingly rich oxygen atmosphere at this altitude. But Aenea told me to ask you to bring the skinsuits and rebreathers.”

“Why?” I said.

“I don’t know, Raul,” said Rachel. Her eyes were placid, seemingly clear of deceit or guile.

“Why does the ship have to hide?” I said. “Is the Pax here?”

“Not yet,” said Rachel. “But we’ve been expecting them for the last six months or so. Right now, there are no spacecraft on or around Tien Shan … with the exception now of your ship. No aircraft either. No skimmers, no EMVs, no thopters or copters … only paragliders … the flyers … and they would never be out that far.”

I nodded but hesitated.

“The Dugpas saw something they couldn’t explain today,” continued Rachel. “The speck of your ship against Chomo Lori, I mean. But eventually they explain everything in terms of
tendrel
, so that won’t be a problem.”

“What are
tendrel
?” I said. “And who are the Dugpas?”

“
Tendrel
are signs,” said Rachel. “Divinations within the shamanistic Buddhist tradition prevalent in this region of the Mountains of Heaven. Dugpas are the … well, the word translates literally as ‘highest.’ The people who dwell at the upper altitudes. There are also the Drukpas, the valley people … that is, the lower fissures … and the Drungpas, the wooded valley people … mostly those who live in the great fern forests and bonsai-bamboo stands on the western reaches of Phari Ridge and beyond.”

“So Aenea’s at the Temple?” I said stubbornly, resisting following the young woman’s “suggestion” for hiding the ship.

“Yes.”

“When can I see her?”

“As soon as we walk over there.” Rachel smiled.

“How long have you known Aenea?”

“About four years, Raul.”

“Do you come from this world?”

She smiled again, patient with my interrogation. “No. When you meet the Dugpas and the others, you’ll see that I’m not
native. Most of the people in this region are from Chinese, Tibetan, and other Central Asian stock.”

“Where are you from?” I asked flatly, sounding rude in my own ears.

“I was born on Barnard’s World,” she said. “A backwater farming planet. Cornfields and woods and long evenings and a few good universities, but not much else.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said. It made me more suspicious. The “good universities” that had been Barnard’s World’s claim to fame during the Hegemony had long since been converted to Church academies and seminaries. I had the sudden wish that I could see the flesh of this young woman’s chest—see if there were a cruciform there, I mean. It would be all too easy for me to send the ship away and walk into a Pax trap. “Where did you meet Aenea?” I said. “Here?”

“No, not here. On Amritsar.”

“Amritsar?” I said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s not unusual. Amritsar is a Solmev-marginal world way out back of the Outback. It was only settled about a century ago—refugees from a civil war on Parvati. A few thousand Sikhs and a few thousand Sufi eke out a living there. Aenea was hired to design a desert community center there and I hired on to do the survey and ramrod the construction crew. I’ve been with her ever since.”

I nodded, still hesitating. I was filled with something not quite disappointment, surging like anger but not quite as clear, bordering on jealousy. But that was absurd. “A. Bettik?” I said, feeling a sudden intuition that the android had died in the past five years. “Is he …”

“He headed out yesterday for our biweekly provision trek to Phari Marketplace,” said the woman named Rachel. She touched my upper arm. “A. Bettik’s fine. He should be back by moonrise tonight. Come on. Get your stuff. Tell the ship about hiding on the third moon. You’d rather hear all this stuff from Aenea.”

I ended up taking little more than a change of clothes, good boots, my small binoculars, a small sheath knife, the skinsuits and rebreathers, and a palm-sized com unit/journal from the ship. I stuffed all this into a rucksack, hopped down the steps to the meadow, and told the ship what it should
do. My anthropomorphizing had reached the point where I expected the ship to sulk at the idea of going back into hibernation mode—on an airless moon this time—but the ship acknowledged the order, suggested that it check in via tightbeam once daily to make sure that the com unit was functioning, and then it floated up and away, dwindling to a speck and then disappearing, like nothing so much as a balloon that has had its string cut.

Rachel gave me a wool
chuba
to pull on over my therm jacket. I noticed the nylon harness she wore over her jacket and trousers, the metal climbing equipment hanging on straps, and asked about it.

“Aenea has a harness for you at the temple site,” she said, rattling the hardware on the sling. “This is the most advanced technology on this world. The metalworkers at Potala demand and receive a king’s ransom for this stuff—crampons, cable pulleys, folding ice axes and ice hammers, chocks, ’biners, lost arrows, bongs, birdbeaks, you name it.”

“Will I need it?” I said dubiously. We had learned some basic ice-climbing techniques in the Home Guard—rappelling, crevasse work, that sort of thing—and I had done some roped-up quarry climbing when I worked with Avrol Hume on the Beak, but I wasn’t sure about real mountaineering. I didn’t like heights.

“You’ll need it but you’ll get used to it quickly,” assured Rachel and set off, hopping across the stepping stones and running lightly up the path toward the cliffs edge. The gear jangled softly on her harness, like steel chimes or the bells around some mountain goat’s neck.

The ten-klick walk south along the sheer rockface was easy enough once I got used to the narrow ledge, the dizzy-making sheer drop to our right, the bright glare from the incredible mountain to the north and from the churning clouds far below, and the heady surge of energy from the rich atmosphere.

“Yes,” said Rachel when I mentioned the air. “The oxygen-rich atmosphere here would be a problem if there were forests or savannahs to burn. You should see the monsoon lightning storms. But the bonsai forest back there at the fissure and the fern forests over on the rainy side of Phari is about all we have in terms of combustible materials. They’re all fire species. And the bonsai wood that we use in the building is almost too dense to burn.”

For a while we walked in single file and in silence. My attention was on the ledge. We had just come around a sharp
corner that required me to duck my head under the overhang when the ledge widened, the view opened up, and there was Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, the “Temple Hanging in Air.”

From this closer view, a bit below and to the east of the Temple, it still looked to be magically suspended in midair above nothing. Some of the lower, older buildings had stone or brick bases, but the majority were built out over air. These pagoda-style buildings were sheltered by the great rock overhang some seventy-five meters above the main structures, but ladders and platforms zigged and zagged up almost to the underside of that overhang.

We came in among people. The many-hued
chubas
and ubiquitous climbing slings were not the only common denominators here: most of the faces that peered at me with polite curiosity seemed to be of Old Earth Asian stock; the people were relatively short for a roughly standard-g world; they nodded and stepped aside respectfully as Rachel led the way through the crowds, up the ladders, through the incense-and-sandalwood-smelling interior halls of some of the buildings, out and across porches and swinging bridges and up delicate staircases. Soon we were in the upper levels of the Temple where construction proceeded at a rapid pace. The small figures I had seen through binoculars were now living, breathing human beings grunting under heavy baskets of stone, individual people smelling of sweat and honest labor. The silent efficiency I had watched from the ship’s terrace now became a clamorous mixture of hammers pounding, chisels ringing, pick-axes echoing, and workers shouting and gesturing amid the controlled chaos common to any construction site.