The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (330 page)

“And she never mentioned what caused them?” I felt like a swine going behind my beloved’s back like this, but I knew that she would not talk to me about these things.

“No, M. Endymion,” said the android. “She never talked to me about the cause. I presumed it was some event or events she experienced during her absence.”

I took a deep breath. “Before she left … on the other worlds … Amritsar, Patawpha … any of the worlds before she left Groombridge Dyson D … had she … was she … had there been anyone?”

“I don’t understand, M. Endymion.”

“Was there a man in her life, A. Bettik? Someone she showed affection for? Someone who seemed especially close to her?”

“Ah,” said the android. “No, M. Endymion, there seemed to be no male who showed any special interest in M. Aenea … other than as a teacher and possible messiah, of course.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And no one came back with her after the one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours?”

“No, M. Endymion.”

I gripped A. Bettik’s shoulder. “Thank you, my friend. I’m sorry I’m asking these stupid questions. It’s just that … I don’t understand … somewhere there’s a … shit, it doesn’t matter. It’s just stupid human emotion.” I turned to go in to join the others.

A. Bettik stopped me with a hand on my wrist. “M. Endymion,” he said softly, “if love is the human emotion to which you refer, I feel that I have watched humankind long enough during my existence to know that love is never a stupid emotion. I feel that M. Aenea is correct when she teaches that it may well be the mainspring energy of the universe.”

I stood and watched, gaping, as the android left the balcony and went into the crowded library level.

•   •   •

They were close to making a decision.

“I think we should send the Gideon-drive courier drone with a message,” Aenea was saying as I came into the lounge. “Send it direct and within the hour.”

“They’ll confiscate the drone,” said Sian Quintana Ka’an in her musical contralto. “And it’s the only ship we have left with the instantaneous drive.”

“Good,” said Aenea. “They’re an abomination. Every time they are used, part of the Void is destroyed.”

“Still,” said Paul Uray, his thick Ouster dialect sounding like someone speaking through radio static, “there remains the option of using the drone as a delivery system.”

“To launch nuclear warheads, or plasma weapons, against the armada?” said Aenea. “I thought that we had dismissed that possibility.”

“It’s our only way of striking at them before they strike at us,” said Colonel Kassad.

“It would do no good,” said the Templar True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen. “The drones are not built for precise targeting. An archangel-class warship would destroy it light-minutes away from target. I agree with the One Who Teaches. Send the message.”

“But will the message stop their attack?” said Systenj Coredwell.

Aenea made the little gesture that I knew so well. “There are no guarantees … but if it puts them off balance, at least
they
will use their instantaneous drive drones to postpone the attack. It is worth a try, I think.”

“And what will the message say?” said Rachel.

“Please hand me that vellum and stylus,” said Aenea.

Theo brought the items and set them on the Steinway. Everyone—including me—crowded close as Aenea wrote:

“There,” said my young friend, handing the vellum to Navson Hamnim. “Please set this in the courier drone when we dock, set the transponder to ‘carrying hardcopy message,’ and launch it to Pacem System.”

The Ouster took the vellum. I had not yet developed the knack of reading the Ouster’s facial expressions, but I could tell
that something was giving him pause. Perhaps it was a lesser form of the same sort of panic and confusion that was filling my chest at the moment.

I am coming to Pacem
. What the goddamn hell did that mean? How could Aenea go to Pacem and survive? She could not. And wherever she was going, I was certain of only one thing … that I would be at her side. Which meant that she was going to kill me as well, if she was as good as her word. Which she always had been.
I am coming to Pacem
. Was it just a ploy to deter their fleet? An empty threat … a way of stalling them? I wanted to shake my beloved until her teeth fell out or until she explained everything to me.

“Raul,” she said, gesturing me closer.

I thought that perhaps this was the explanation I wanted, that she was reading my expression from across the room and saw the turmoil within me, but all she said was, “Palou Koror and Drivenj Nicaagat are going to show me what it means to fly like an angel, do you want to come with me? Lhomo’s coming.”

Fly like an angel?
For a moment I was sure that she was speaking gibberish.

“They have an extra skinsuit if you want to come,” Aenea was saying. “But we have to go now. We’re almost back to the Startree and the ship will be docking in a few minutes. Het Masteen has to get on with the loading and provisioning of the
Yggdrasill
and I have a hundred things to do before tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what I was agreeing to. “I’ll come along.” At the time I was feeling surly enough to think that this response was a wonderful metaphor for my entire ten-year Odyssey:
yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing or getting into, but count me in
.

One of the space-adapted Ousters, Palou Koror, handed us the skinsuits. I had used skinsuits before, of course—the last time being just a few weeks earlier when Aenea and I had climbed T’ai Shan, the Great Peak of the Middle Kingdom—although it seemed like months or years ago—but I had never seen or felt a skinsuit like these.

Skinsuits go back many centuries, the working concept being that the best way to keep from exploding in vacuum is not a bulky pressure suit as in the earliest days of spaceflight, but a covering so thin that it allows perspiration to pass even while it protects the skin from the terrible heat, cold, and vacuum of space. Skinsuits had not changed much in all those centuries, except to incorporate rebreathing filaments and osmosis panels.
Of course, my last skinsuit had been a Hegemony artifact, workable enough until Rhadamanth Nemes had clawed it to shreds.

But this was no ordinary skinsuit. Silver, malleable as mercury, the thing felt like a warm but weightless blob of protoplasm when Palou Koror dropped it in my hand. It
shifted
like mercury. No, it shifted and flowed like a living, fluid thing. I almost dropped it in my shock, catching it with my other hand only to watch it flow several centimeters up my wrist and arm like some flesh-eating alien.

I must have said something out loud, because Aenea said, “It
is
alive, Raul. The skinsuit’s an organism … gene-tailored and nanoteched … but only three molecules thick.”

“How do I put it on?” I said, watching it flow up my arm to the sleeve of my tunic, then retreat. I had the impression that the thing was more carnivore than garment. And the problem with any skinsuit was that they had to be worn next to the
skin:
one did not wear layers
under
a skinsuit. Anywhere.

“Uh-huh,” said Aenea. “It’s easy … none of the pulling and tugging we had to do with the old skinsuits. Just strip naked, stand very still, and drop the thing on your head. It’ll flow down over you. And we have to hurry.”

This inspired something less than great enthusiasm in me.

Aenea and I excused ourselves and jogged up the spiral stairs to the bedroom level at the apex of the ship. Once there we hurried out of our clothes. I looked at my beloved—standing naked next to the Consul’s ancient (and quite comfortable, as I remembered) bed—and was about to suggest a better use of our time before the treeship docked. But Aenea just waggled a finger at me, held the blob of silver protoplasm above her, and dropped it in her hair.

It was alarming watching the silver organism engulf her—flowing down over her brown-blond hair like liquid metal, covering her eyes and mouth and chin, flowing down her neck like reflective lava, then covering her shoulders, breasts, belly, hipbones, pubis, thighs, knees … finally she lifted first one foot and then the other and the engulfment was complete.

“Are you all right?” I said, my voice small, my own blob of silver still pulsing in my hand, eager to get at me.

Aenea—or the chrome statue that had been Aenea—gave me a thumbs-up and gestured to her throat. I understood: as with the Hegemony skinsuits, communication from now on would be via subvocalization pickups.

I lifted the pulsing mass in both hands, held my breath, closed my eyes, and dropped it on my head.

It took less than five seconds. For a terrible instant I was sure that I could not breathe, feeling the slick mass over my nose and mouth, but then I remembered to inhale and the oxygen came cool and fresh.

Can you hear me, Raul?
Her voice was much more distinct than the hearpatch pickups on the old suit.

I nodded, then subvocalized,
Yeah. Weird feeling
.

Are you ready, M. Aenea, M. Endymion?
It took me a second to realize that it was the other adapted Ouster, Drivenj Nicaagat on the suitline. I had heard his voice before, but translated via speech synthesizer. On the direct line, his voice was even more clear and melodious than the birdsong of Sian Quintana Ka’an.

Ready
, responded Aenea, and we went down the spiral stairs, through the throng, and out onto the balcony.

Good luck, M. Aenea, M. Endymion
. It was A. Bettik speaking to us through one of the ship’s comlinks. The android touched each of us on our respective silver shoulders as we stepped next to Koror and Nicaagat at the balcony railing.

Lhomo was also waiting, his silver skinsuit snowing every ridge of delineated muscle on his arms, thighs, and flat belly. I felt awkward for a moment, wishing either that I was wearing something over this micron-thin layer of silver fluid or that I worked harder at keeping in shape. Aenea looked beautiful, the body that I loved sculpted in chrome. I was glad that no one but the android had followed the five of us onto the balcony.

The ship was within a couple thousand klicks of the Startree and decelerating hard. Palou Koror made a motion and jumped easily onto the thin balcony rail, balancing against the one-sixth-g. Drivenj Nicaagat followed suit, and then Lhomo, then Aenea, and finally—much less gracefully—I joined them. The sense of height and exposure was all but overwhelming—the great green basin of the Startree beneath us, the leafy walls rising into the unblinking distance on all sides, the bulk of the ship curving away beneath us, balancing on the slim column of fusion fire like a building teetering on a fragile blue column. I realized with a sickening feeling that we were going to jump.

Do not worry, I will open the containment field at the precise instant you pass through and go to EM repulsors until you are clear of the drive exhaust
. I realized that it was the ship speaking. I had no idea of what we were doing.

The suits should give you a rough idea of our adaptation
,
Palou Koror was saying.
Of course, for those of us who have chosen full integration, it is not the semisentient suits and their molecular microprocessors that allow us to live and travel in space, but the adapted circuits in our skin, our blood, our vision, and brains
.

How do we …
I began, having some trouble subvocalizing, as if the dryness in my mouth would have any affect on my throat muscles.

Do not worry
, said Nicaagat.
We will not deploy our wings until proper separation is achieved. They will not collide … the fields would not allow it. Controls are quite intuitive. Your suit’s optical systems should interface with your nervous system and neurosensors, calling up data when required
.

Data? What data?
I had only meant to think that, but the suitcom sent it out.

Aenea took my silver hand in hers.
This will be fun, Raul. The only free minutes we’re going to have today, I think. Or for a while
.

At that moment, poised on the railing on the edge of a terrifying vertical drop through fusion flame and vacuum, I did not really focus on the meaning of her words.

Come
, said Palou Koror and leaped from the railing.

Still holding hands, Aenea and I jumped together.

She let go of my hand and we spun away from one another. The containment field parted and ejected us a safe distance, the fusion drive paused as the five of us spun away from the ship, then it relit—the ship seeming to hurtle upward and away from us as its deceleration outpaced our own—and we continued dropping, that sensation was overwhelming, five silver, spread-eagled forms, separating farther and farther from each other, all plummeting toward the Startree lattice still several thousand klicks beneath. Then our wings opened.

For our purposes today, the lightwings need only be a kilometer or so across
, came Palou Koror’s voice in my ears.
Were we traveling farther or faster, they would extend much farther … perhaps several hundred kilometers
.

When I raised my arms, the panels of energy extruding from my skinsuit unfurled like butterfly wings. I
felt
the sudden push of sunlight.

What we feel is more the current of the primary magnetic
field line we are following
, said Palou Koror.
If I may slave your suits for a second … there
.

Vision shifted. I looked to my left to where Aenea fell, already several klicks away—a shining silver chrysalis set within expanding gold wings. The others glowed beyond her. I could see the solar wind, see the charged particles and currents of plasma flowing and spiraling outward along the infinitely complex geometry of the heliosphere—red lines of twisting magnetic field coiling as if painted on the inner surfaces of an ever-shifting chambered nautilus, all this convoluted, multi-layered, multicolored writhing of plasma streams flowing back to a sun that no longer seemed a pale star but was the locus of millions of converging field lines, entire sheets of plasma being evicted at 400 kilometers a second and being drawn into these shapes by the pulsing magnetic fields in its north and south equators, I could see the violet streamers of the inward-rushing magnetic lines, weaving and interlacing with the crimson red of the outward-exploding sheets of field current, I could see the blue vortices of heliospheric shock wave around the outer edges of the Startree, the moons and comets cutting through plasma medium like ocean-going ships at night plowing through a glowing, phosphorescent sea, and could see our gold wings interacting with this plasma and magnetic medium, catching photons like billions of fireflies in our nets, sail surfaces surging to the plasma currents, our silver bodies accelerating out along the great shimmering folds and spiral magnetic geometries of the heliosphere matrix.