There were good-byes as old friends, Templars, Ousters, and others left the soil of the city Endymion to watch from the treeship’s stairways and platforms. Rachel was the last to leave. To my surprise, she hugged me fiercely. “I hope to hell that you’re worth it,” she said in my ear.
I had no idea what the feisty brunette was talking about. She—and most women—had always been a mystery to me.
“All right,” I said after we had trooped up the stairs to Martin Silenus’s bedside. I could see Old Earth… Earth… above us. The view grew hazy and then disappeared as the containment fields merged, thickened, and then separated, the drive fields flowed, and the city pulled away from the treeship.
The Templar crew members and Ousters had rigged makeshift controls to the tower sickroom, which, with all of Martin Silenus’s medical machines hovering around, had become a very crowded space.
I also thought that this was as good a place as any to sit out the ergs’ attempt to land a mass of rock and grass, a city with a tower and a parked spaceship, and a half stump of bridge leading nowhere, on a world that was three-fifths water and that had no spaceports or traffic control. At least, I thought, if we were going to crash and die, I might get a hint of the impending catastrophe from watching Ket Rosteen’s impassive visage under his overhanging Templar hood in the seconds before impact.
We did not feel entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Only the gradual change of the circle of sky above us from starfields to blueness let us know that we had entered successfully. We did not feel the landing. One moment we were standing in silence, waiting, and then Ket Rosteen looked up from his displays and monitors, whispered something through the comlines to his beloved ergs, and said to us, “We’re down.”
“I forgot to tell you where we should land,” I said, thinking of the desert that had been Taliesin.
It must be the place where Aenea had been happiest; where she would want those ashes—which I knew but still could not believe were hers—scattered in the warm Arizona winds.
Ket Rosteen glanced toward the floating deathbed.
“I told him where to fucking land,” rasped the old poet’s voice synthesizer. “Where I was born. Where I plan to die. Now, will you all please pull your collective thumbs out and roll me out of here so that I can see the sky?”
A. Bettik unplugged all of Silenus’s monitors, everything except the most essential life-support equipment, and tied everything together within the same EM repulsor field. While we were on the treeship, the androids and the Ouster crew clones and the Templars had built a long, gradual ramp from the top tower room down to the ground, then paved an exit walk to the edge of the city slab and beyond. All of this had landed intact I noticed as we accompanied the floating sickbed out into the sunlight and down. As we passed the Consul’s ebony spacecraft, a speaker on the hull of the ship said, “Good-bye, Martin Silenus. It was an honor knowing you.”
The ancient figure in the bed managed to lift one skeletal arm in a rather jaunty wave.
“See you in hell, Ship.”
We left the city slab, stepped off the paved ramp, and looked out at grasslands and distant bluffs not so different from my childhood moors except for the line of forest to our right. The gravity and air pressure was as I remembered it from our four-year sojourn on Earth, although the air was much more humid here than in the desert.
“Where are we?” I asked of no one in particular. Ket Rosteen had stayed in the tower and only the android, the dying poet, Father de Soya, and I were outside now in what seemed to be morning sunlight in an early spring day in the northern hemisphere.
“Where my mother’s estate used to be,” whispered Martin Silenus’s synthesizer. “In the heart of the heart of the North American Preserve.”
A. Bettik looked up from checking the med-unit’s readouts. “I believe that this was called Illinois in the pre-Big Mistake days,” he said. “The center of that state, I believe. The prairies have returned, I see. Those trees are elms and chestnut… extinct by the twenty-first century here, if I am not mistaken. That river beyond the bluffs flows south-southwest into the Mississippi River. I believe you have… ah… traversed a portion of that river, M. Endymion.”
“Yes,” I said, remembering the flimsy little kayak and the farewell at Hannibal and Aenea’s first kiss.
We waited. The sun rose higher. Wind stirred the grasses. Somewhere beyond the line of trees, a bird protested something as only birds can. I looked at Martin Silenus.
“Boy,” said the old poet’s synthesizer, “if you expect me to die on cue just to save you from a sunburn, fucking forget it. I’m hanging on by my fingernails, but those nails are old and tough and long.”
I smiled and touched his bony shoulder.
“Boy?” whispered the poet.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You told me years ago that your old grannie—Grandam you called her—had made you memorize the Cantos till they were dribbling out your ears. Was that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you recollect the lines I wrote about this place… as it was back in my day?”
“I can try,” I said. I closed my eyes.
I was tempted to touch the Void, to seek the sound of those lessons in Grandam’s voice in place of this struggle to recall them from memory, but instead I did it the hard way, using the mnemonic devices she had taught me to recall distinct passages of verse. Standing there, eyes still closed, I spoke the passages I could recalclass="underline"
“Fragile twilights fading from fuchsia to purple above the crepe-paper silhouettes of trees beyond the southwest sweep of lawn. Skies as delicate as translucent china, unscarred by cloud or contrail. The presymphony hush of first light followed by the cymbal crash of sunrise. Oranges and russets igniting to gold, the long, cool descent to green: leaf shadow, shade, tendrils of cypress and weeping willow, the hushed green velvet of the glade.
“Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day.
Royal oak.
Giant elms.
Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai.
Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky.
Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.”
I stopped. The next part was hazy. I’d never enjoyed those fake-lyrical bits of the Cantos, preferring the battle scenes instead.
I had been touching the old poet’s shoulder as I recited and I had felt it relax as I spoke. I opened my eyes, expecting to see a dead man in the bed.
Martin Silenus gave me a satyr’s grin.
“Not bad, not bad,” he rasped. “Not bad for an old hack.” His video glasses turned toward the android and the priest. “See why I chose this boy to finish my Cantos for me? He can’t write worth shit, but he’s got a memory like an elephant’s.”
I was about to ask, What is an elephant, when I glanced over at A. Bettik for no special reason. For one instant, after all my years of knowing the gentle android, I actually saw him. My mouth dropped slack.
“What?” asked Father de Soya, his voice alarmed. Perhaps he thought I was having a heart attack.
“You,” I said to A. Bettik. “You’re the Observer.”
“Yes,” said the android.
“You’re one of them… from them… from the Lions and Tigers and Bears.”
The priest looked from me to A. Bettik to the grinning man in the bed and then back at the android.
“I have never appreciated that choice of phrase of M. Aenea’s,” A. Bettik said very quietly. “I have never seen a lion or tiger or bear in the flesh, but I understand that they share a certain fierceness which is alien to… ah… the alien race to which I belong.”