The three of us went up to see the dying man.
Martin Silenus was in good humor upon meeting his old friend after almost 280 years of separation.
“So your black killer’s soul is going to become the seed crystal when they build the Shrike a millennium hence, heh?” cackled the old man through his laboring speech synthesizer. “Well, thanks a shitload, Kassad.”
The soldier frowned down at the grinning mummy. “Why aren’t you dead, Martin?” the Colonel said at last.
“I am, I am,” said Silenus, coughing. “I quit breathing ages and eons ago. They just haven’t been smart enough to push me over and bury me yet.” The synthesizer did not try to articulate the chokes and rattles that followed.
“Did you ever finish your worthless prose poem?” asked the soldier as the old man continued to cough, sending the web of tubes and wires shaking. “No,” I said, speaking for the coughing form in the bed. “He couldn’t.”
“Yes,” said Martin Silenus clearly through his throat mike. “I did.”
I just stood there.
“Actually,” cackled the poet, “he finished it for me.” The bony arm with its wrapping of parchment flesh rose slightly from the bed. A thumb distorted by arthritis jerked in my direction.
Colonel Kassad gave me a glance. I shook my head.
“Don’t be so fucking dense, boy,” said Martin Silenus with what translated as an affectionate tone over the speaker. “See your ’scriber anywhere?”
I whirled and looked at the bedside tray where I had left it earlier. It was gone.
“All printed out. About a billion backup memories cut. Sent it out on the datasphere before we ’cast here,” rasped Silenus.
“There is no datasphere,” I said.
Martin Silenus laughed himself into a coughing fit. Eventually the synthesizer translated some of those coughs as, “You aren’t just dumb, boy. You’re helpless. What do you think the Void is? It’s the goddamn universe’s goddamn datasphere, boy. I been listenin’ to it for centuries before the kid gave me communion to do it with nanotech bugs in me. That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.”
“You had no right to transmit my narrative,” I said. “It’s mine. I wrote it. It’s not part of your Cantos.” If I had known for sure which tube passing to him was his oxygen hose, I would have stepped on it till the rattling stopped.
“Bullshit, boy,” said Martin Silenus. “Why do you think I sent you on this eleven-year vacation?”
“To rescue Aenea,” I said.
The poet cackled and coughed. “She didn’t need rescuing, Raul. Hell, the way I saw it while it was happening, she pulled your worthless ass out of the fire more often than not. Even when the Shrike was doing the saving, it was only because that girl-child had tamed it for a bit.” The mummy’s white eyes with their video-pickup glasses turned toward Colonel Kassad. “Tamed you, I mean, you once and future killing machine.”
I stepped away from the bed and touched one of the biomonitors to steady myself. Overhead, in the wide circle that was the open top of the tower, Old Earth grew large and round. Martin Silenus’s voice called me back, almost taunting me.
“But you haven’t finished it yet, boy. The Cantos aren’t done.”
I stared at him across the few cold meters of distance. “What do you mean, old man?”
“You’ve got to take me down there so we can finish it, Raul. Together.”
We could not freecast down to Old Earth because there was no one there for me to use as a beacon for the ’casting, so we decided to use the ergs to land the entire slab of Endymion city. This might be fatal to the old poet, but the old poet had shouted at us to for God’s sake shut the fuck up and get on with it, so we were. The Sequoia Sempervirens had been in low orbit around Old Earth—or just plain “Earth” as Martin Silenus demanded we call it—for several hours.
The treeship’s optics, radar, and other sensors had shown a world empty of human life but healthy with animals, birds, fish, plants, and an atmosphere free of pollution.
I had planned to land at Taliesin West, but telescopes showed the buildings gone. Only high desert remained, probably just as it was in the final days before Earth was supposed to have fallen into the Big Mistake of ’08 black hole.
The Rome to which the second John Keats cybrid had returned was gone. All of the cities and structures which I thought of as the Lions’ and Tigers’ and Bears’ experimental reconstructions apparently were gone. The Earth had been scrubbed clean of cities and highways and signs of humankind. It throbbed with life and health as if awaiting our return. I was near the base of the Consul’s ship on Hyperion soil in the city-within-the-treeship, surrounded by Aenea’s old friends and speaking aloud about the trip down, wondering who wanted to go and who should accompany us, thinking all the time only of the small metal canister in Father de Soya’s shoulder bag, when A. Bettik stepped forward and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, M. Endymion, I do not mean to interrupt.” My old android friend seemed apologetic to the point of blushing under his blue skin, as he always did when he had to contradict one of us. “But M. Aenea left specific instructions with me should you return to Old Earth, as you obviously have.”
We all waited. I had not heard her give the android instructions on the Yggdrasill. But then, things had been very loud and confused there toward the end.
A. Bettik cleared his throat. “M. Aenea specified that Ket Rosteen should pilot the landing, if there were a landing, with four other individuals to disembark once landed, and asked me to apologize to all of you who wish to go down to Old Earth immediately,” he said. “Apologize especially, she said, to dear friends such as M. Rachel, M. Theo, and others who would be especially eager to see the planet. M. Aenea asked me to assure you that you would be welcome there two weeks from the landing day—on the last day before the treeship would leave orbit. And, she asked me to say, that in two standard years… that is, two Earth years, of course… anyone who could ’cast here on their own would be welcome to visit Old Earth.”
“Two years?” I said. “Why a two-year quarantine?”
A. Bettik shook his bald head. “M. Aenea did not specify, M. Endymion. I am sorry.”
I held up my hands, palms up. “Well, who does get to go down now?” I asked. If my name was not on the list, I was going to go down anyway, Aenea’s last wishes or not. I’d use my fists to get aboard, if need be. Or hijack the Consul’s ship and land it. Or freecast alone.
“You, sir,” said A. Bettik. “She quite specifically mentioned you, M. Endymion. And M. Silenus, of course. Father de Soya. And…” The android hesitated as if embarrassed again.
“Go on,” I said more sharply than I had intended.
“Me,” said A. Bettik.
“You,” I repeated. In a second it made sense to me. The android had made our long trip out with us… had, in fact, spent more time with Aenea than I had over the years because of the time-debt involved in my solo odyssey. More than that, A. Bettik had risked his life for her, for us, and lost his arm in Nemes’s ambush on God’s Grove so many years ago. He had listened to Aenea’s teachings even before Rachel and Theo… or I… had signed on as disciples. Of course she would want her friend A. Bettik there when her few ashes were scattered in the breezes of Old Earth. I felt ashamed for acting surprised. “I am sorry,” I said aloud. “Of course you should come.”
A. Bettik nodded very slightly. “Two weeks,” I said to the others, most of whose disappointment was visible on their faces. “In two weeks we’ll all be down there to look around, see what surprises the Lions and Tigers and Bears have left for us.”