De Soya’s cassock made rustling sounds in the grass as he strode back and forth, as restless as a penned night hunter. “Are we close?” he asked. “Can we walk to Martin Silenus’s place from here?”
“About four hundred klicks,” I said.
“We’re on the eastern expanse of the moors, south of the Beak. Uncle Martin is in the foothills of the Pinion Plateau.” I winced inwardly when I realized that I had used Aenea’s pet name for the old poet.
“Whatever,” said the priest impatiently. “In which direction shall we set out?”
The Jesuit was actually ready to start walking, but I put my hand back on his shoulder to stop him. “I don’t think we’ll have to hike,” I said softly. Something was occluding the stars to the southeast and I picked up the high hum of turbofans above the wind whistle. A minute later we could see the blinking red and green navigation lights as the skimmer turned north across the grassland and obscured the Swan. “Is this good?” asked de Soya, his shoulder tensing slightly under my palm. I shrugged. “When I lived here it wouldn’t be,” I said. “Most of the skimmers belonged to the Pax. To Pax Security, to be exact.” We waited only another moment. The skimmer landed, the fans hummed down and died, and the left bubble at the front hinged open. The interior lights came on. I saw the blue skin, the blue eyes, the missing left hand, the blue right hand raised in greeting.
“It’s good,” I said. “How is he?” I asked A. Bettik as we flew southeast at three thousand meters. From the paling above the Pinions on the horizon, I guessed that it was about an hour before dawn.
“He’s dying,” said the android.
For a moment then we flew in silence. A. Bettik had seemed delighted to see me again, although he stood awkwardly when I hugged him. Androids were never comfortable with such shows of emotion between servants and the humans they had been biofactured to serve. I asked as many questions as I could in the short flight time we had. He had immediately expressed his regrets about Aenea’s death, which gave me the opportunity to ask the question uppermost in my mind.
“Did you feel the Shared Moment?”
“Not exactly, M. Endymion,” said the android, which did not serve to enlighten me at all. But then A. Bettik was catching us up with the last standard year and month on Hyperion since that Moment.
Martin Silenus had been, just as Aenea had known he would be, the beacon relay for the Shared Moment. Everyone on my homeworld had felt it.
The majority of the born-again and Pax military had deserted outright, seeking out communion to rid themselves of the cruciform parasites and shunning the Pax loyalists. Uncle Martin had supplied the wine and blood, both out of his personal stock.
He had been hoarding the wine for decades and drawing off blood since his communion with the 10-year-old Aenea 250 years earlier.
The few remaining Pax loyalists had fled in the three remaining starships and their last occupied city—Port Romance—had been liberated four months after the Moment. From his continued seclusion in the old university city of Endymion, Uncle Martin had begun broadcasting old holos of Aenea—Aenea as a youngster I had never met—explaining how to use their new access to the Void Which Binds and pleading for nonviolence.
The millions of indigenies and ex-Pax faithful, who were just discovering the voices of their dead and the language of the living, did not disobey her wishes.
A. Bettik also informed me that there was a single, gigantic Templar treeship in orbit now—the Sequoia Sempervirens—and that it was captained by the True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen and was carrying several of our old friends, including Rachel, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, the Dalai Lama, and the Ousters Navson Hamnim and Sian Quintana Ka’an. George Tsarong and Jigme Norbu were also aboard. Rosteen had been radioing the old poet for permission to land for two days, said A. Bettik, but Silenus had refused—saying that he did not want to see them or anyone else until I arrived.
“Me?” I said. “Martin Silenus knew I was coming?”
“Of course,” said the android and left it at that.
“How did Rachel and the Dorje Phamo and the others get to the treeship?” I said. “Did the Sequoia Sempervirens stop by Barnard’s World and Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and the other systems to pick them up?”
“It is my understanding, M. Endymion, that the Ousters traveled with the treeship from what remains of the Biosphere Startree which we were fortunate enough to visit. The others, as I am given to understand from M. Rosteen’s increasingly frustrated transmissions to M. Silenus, freecast to the treeship much as you have ’cast here to us.”
I sat straight up in my seat. This was shocking news. For some reason, I had assumed that I was the only person clever enough, blessed enough, or whatever enough to have learned the freecasting trick. Now I learn that Rachel and Theo and the old abbot had done so, the young Dalai Lama, and… well, a Dalai Lama, maybe, and Rachel and Theo had been Aenea’s earliest disciples… but George and Jigme? I admit to feeling a bit deflated, yet also excited by the news. Thousands of others—perhaps those, at first, whom Aenea had known and touched and taught directly—must be on the verge of their first steps. And then… the mind again reeled at the thought of all those billions traveling freely wherever they wished. We landed at the abandoned mountain city just as the sky was paling in earnest to the east of the peaks. I jumped out of the skimmer, holding the ’scriber against my side as I ran up the tower steps and leaving the android and the priest behind in my eagerness to see Martin Silenus. The old man had to be happy to see me and grateful that I had done so much to help meet all his impossible requests—Aenea rescued from the original Pax ambush in the Valley of the Time Tombs, now the Pax destroyed, the corrupt Church toppled, the Shrike evidently stopped from hurting Aenea or attacking humanity—just as the old poet had requested that last drunken evening we had spent together here more than a standard decade earlier. He would have to be happy and grateful.
“It took you goddamn fucking long enough to get your lazy ass here,” said the mummy in the web of life-support tubes and filaments. “I thought I’d have to go out and drag you back from wherever you were lazing around like some fucking twentieth-century welfare queen.”
The emaciated thing in the hoverbed at the locus of all the machines, monitors, respirators, and android nurses did not look much like the Poulsen-rejuvenated old man I had said good-bye to less than a decade of mine and only two waking years of his ago. This was a corpse that had neglected to be buried. Even his voice was an electronic restructuring of his subvocalized gasps and rattles.
“Are you finished fucking gawking, or do you want to buy another ticket for the freak show?” asked the voice synthesizer above the mummy’s head.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, feeling like a rude child caught staring.
“Sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog,” said the old poet. “Are you going to report to me or just stand there like the indigenie hick you are?”
“Report?” I said, opening my hands and setting the ’scriber on a table tray. “I think you know the essential things.”
“Essential things?” roared the synthesizer, interpreting the torrent of chokes and rattles. “What the fuck do you know about essential things, boy?” The last of the android nurses had scurried out of sight. I felt a flush of anger. Perhaps age had rotted the old bastard’s mind as well as his manners, if he ever had any manners. After a minute of silence broken only by the rasp of the mechanical bellows below the bed, bellows that moved air in and out of the dying man’s useless lungs, I said, “Report. All right. Most of the things you asked are done, M. Silenus. Aenea ended the rule of the Pax and the Church. The Shrike seems to have disappeared. The human universe has changed forever.”