“The human universe has changed forever,” mimicked the old poet in his synthesizer’s attempt at a sarcastic falsetto. “Did I fucking ask you… or the girl for that matter… to change the fucking universe for fucking ever?”
I thought back to our conversations here a standard decade earlier. “No,” I said at last.
“There you go,” snarled the old man. “Your brain cells are beginning to stir again. Jesus H. Christ, kid, I think that Schrödinger litter box made you stupider than you were.”
I stood and waited. Perhaps if I waited long enough he would just die quietly.
“What did I ask you to do before you left, boy wonder?” he demanded in the tone of a furious schoolmaster.
I tried to remember details other than his demand that Aenea and I destroy the Pax’s iron rule and topple a Church that controlled hundreds of worlds. The Shrike… well, that wasn’t what he meant. By touching the Void Which Binds rather than my own fallible memory, I finally retrieved his last words before I had flown off on the hawking mat to meet the girl.
“Get going,” the old poet had said. “Give my love to Aenea. Tell her that Uncle Martin is waiting to see Old Earth before he dies. Tell her that the old fart is eager to hear her expound the meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds.” The essence of things.
“Oh,” I said aloud. “I’m sorry that Aenea is not here to talk to you.”
“So am I, boy,” whispered the old man in his own voice. “So am I. And don’t bring up that thermos of ashes the priest is carrying. That isn’t what I meant when I said I wanted to see my niece again before I died.”
I could only nod, feeling the pain in my throat and chest.
“What about the rest?” he demanded. “You goin’ to carry out my final request, or just let me die while you stand there with your big disciple’s thumb up your stupid ass?”
“Final request?” I repeated. My IQ seemed to drop fifty points when I was in the presence of Martin Silenus.
The voice synthesizer sighed. “Give me your stylus ’scriber there if you want me to spell it out in big block letters for you, boy. I want to see Old Earth before I croak. I want to go back there. I want to go home.”
In the end, it was decided that we should not move him from his tower. The android medics conferred with the Ouster medics who finally were permitted to land who conferred with the autosurgeon aboard the Consul’s ship… which was parked just beyond the tower, exactly where A. Bettik had landed it some two months earlier after paying his time-debt for translation from Pacem System—which conferred electronically with the medical monitors surrounding the poet, as it had been constantly, and the verdict remained the same.
It would probably kill him to take him aboard either the Consul’s ship or the treeship by removing him from his tower and submitting him to even the most subtle changes of gravity or pressure.
So we brought the tower and a large chunk of Endymion with us.
Ket Rosteen and the Ousters handled the details, bringing down half a dozen ergs from their lair on the giant treeship. I estimated later that about ten hectares actually rose into the air during that lovely Hyperion sunrise, including the tower, the Consul’s parked spaceship, the pulsing Möbius cubes that had transported the ergs, the parked skimmer, the kitchen and laundry annexes next to the tower, part of the old chemistry building on the Endymion campus, several stone dwellings, precisely half of the bridge over the Pinion River, and a few million metric tons of rock and subsoil. The liftoff was undetectable—the containment fields and lift fields were handled so perfectly by the ergs and their Ouster and Templar handlers that there was no hint of movement whatsoever, except for the morning sky becoming an unblinking starfield in the circular opening of Uncle Martin’s tower above our heads, and the holos in the sickroom that showed our progress. Standing in that room, the stars burning and rotating overhead, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, a few other android nurses, and I watched those direct-feed holos as I held the old man’s hand.
Endymion, our world’s oldest city and the source of my indigenie family’s name, slid silently up through sunrise and atmosphere to be embraced by the ten kilometers of perfect treeship waiting for us in high orbit. The Sequoia Sempervirens had parted its branches to make a perfect berth for us, so we could walk from Hyperion soil to the great bridges and branches and walkways of the ship with no sense of transition. Then the treeship turned out toward the stars.
“You will have to do the next part, Raul,” said the Dorje Phamo. “M. Silenus will not survive a Hawking-drive shift or the fugue or the time-debt necessary.”
“This is a damned big treeship,” I said. “Lots of people and machines aboard. You’ll help, I hope?”
“Of course,” said the tall woman with the wild, gray hair.
“Yes,” said the Dalai Lama and George and Jigme.
“We’ll help,” said Rachel as she stood next to Theo. Both women looked older.
“We will also try,” said Father de Soya, speaking for Ket Rosteen and the others gathered near.
High on the bridge of the ship, while A. Bettik tended to his former master some hundred meters below, the Dorje Phamo, Rachel, Theo, the Dalai Lama, George, Jigme, Father de Soya, the Templar captain, and the others held hands. I completed the rough circle.
We closed our eyes and listened to the stars.
I had expected the sky-river of stars that was the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to hang above the treeship as we emerged from light, but it was obvious that we were still in the Milky Way, still in our arm of the Milky Way, not that many light-years from Hyperion System, if the familiar constellations were to be believed. We had gone somewhere. But the world that burned above the branches was not the sea blue and cloud white of Old Earth, or even an Earth-like planet, but was a red and oceanless desert world with scattered pocks of volcanic or impact-crater acne and a gleaming white polar cap.
“Mars,” said A. Bettik. “We have returned to Old Earth System near the star named Sol.”
All of us heard the Void-voice resonance of Fedmahn Kassad on that world. We freecast down, found him, explained the voyage—he did not need the explanation because he had heard us coming through his own listening—and brought him back to the Sequoia Sempervirens with us. Martin Silenus sent up word that he wanted to speak to his old pilgrimage partner, and I walked the stairways and bridges to the tower with the soldier.
“Old Earth System is secure, just as the One Who Teaches commanded me,” said Kassad as we stepped onto the Hyperion soil where the fragment of city nestled in the treeship’s branches. “No Pax ships have tested our defenses for ten months. No one in-system, not even our own warships, will be allowed to approach closer than twenty million kilometers to Old Earth.”
“To Old Earth?” I repeated. I stopped in my tracks. Kassad stopped and turned his thin, dark visage toward me.
“You don’t know?” he said. The soldier pointed skyward, straight up toward where the treeship was accelerating under smooth, erg-managed full thrust.
It looked like a double star, as all planets with one large moon look. But I could see the pale glow of Luna, smaller, colder. And the warm blue and white pulse of life that was Old Earth.
A. Bettik joined us at the entrance to the tower. “When was it… when did they… how… when did it return?” I said, still looking up at Old Earth as it grew into a true sphere.
“At the time of the Shared Moment,” said Kassad. He brushed red dust from his black uniform, preparing himself to see the old poet.
“Does everyone know?” I said. Poor dumb Raul Endymion. Always the last one to get the word.
“Now they do,” said Colonel Fedmahn Kassad.