She had actually fashioned a bedroom for herself, again removed from the main room by two steps twisted at sixty-degree angles, the entire niche built into the gently rising slope and set back against a huge boulder she had found on the site. There was no water or plumbing out here—we all shared the communal showers and toilets in the compound annex—but Aenea had built a lovely little rock basin and bath next to her bed (a plywood platform with mattress and blankets), and several times a week she would heat water in the main kitchen and carry it to her shelter, bucket by bucket, for a hot bath.
The light through the canvas ceilings and walls was warm at sunrise, buttery at midday, and orange in the evening. In addition, Aenea had deliberately placed the shelter in careful relation to saguaros, prickly pear bushes, and staghorn cactus so that different shadows would fall on different planes of canvas at different times of day. It was a comfortable, pleasant place. And empty beyond description when my young friend was absent.
I mentioned that the apprentices and support staff were anxious after the Old Architect’s death. Distraught might be a better word. I spent most of those three days of Aenea’s absence listening to the concerned babble of almost ninety people—never together, since even the dinner shifts in the dining hall were spaced apart because Mr. Wright had not liked huge crowds at dinner—and the level of panic seemed to grow as the days and dust storms went by. Aenea’s absence was a big part of the hysteria: she was the youngest apprentice at Taliesin—the youngest person, actually—but the others had grown used to asking advice of her and of listening when she spoke. In one week, they had lost both their mentor and their guide. On the fourth morning after her birthday, the dust storms ended and Aenea returned. I happened to be out jogging just after sunrise and saw her coming across the desert from the direction of the McDowell Mountains: she was silhouetted in the morning light, a thin figure with short hair against the corona brilliance, and in that second I thought of the first time I had seen her in the Valley of the Time Tombs on Hyperion. She grinned when she saw me. “Hey, Boo,” she called. It was an old joke based on some book she had read as a very young child. “Hey, Scout,” I called back, answering in the same in-joke language. We stopped when we were five paces apart. My impulse was to hug her and hold her close and beg her not to disappear again. I did not do that.
The rich, low light of morning threw long shadows behind the cholla cacti, grease bushes, and sage, and bathed our all-sunburned skin in an orange glow. “How’re the troops doing?” asked Aenea. I could see that despite her promises to the contrary, she had been fasting during the past three days. She had always been thin, but now her ribs almost showed through her thin cotton shirt. Her lips were dry and cracked. “They upset?” she said.
“They’re shitting bricks,” I said. For years I’d avoided using my Home Guard vocabulary around the kid, but she was sixteen now.
Besides, she had always used a saltier vocabulary than I knew.
Aenea grinned. The brilliant light illuminated the sandy streaks in her short hair. “That’d be good for a bunch of architects, I guess.”
I rubbed my chin, feeling the rough stubble there.
“Seriously, kiddo. They’re pretty upset.”
Aenea nodded. “Yeah. They don’t know what to do or where to go now that Mr. Wright’s gone.” She squinted toward the Fellowship compound, which showed up as little more than asymmetrical bits of stone and canvas just visible above the cacti and scrub brush. Sunlight glinted off unseen windows and one of the fountains. “Let’s get everybody in the music pavilion and talk,” said Aenea, and began striding toward Taliesin.
And thus began our last full day together on Earth.
I am going to interrupt myself here. I hear my own voice on the ’scriber and remember the pause in the telling at this point. What I wanted to do here was tell all about the four years of exile on Old Earth—all about the apprentices and other people at the Taliesin Fellowship, all about the Old Architect and his whims and petty cruelties, as well as about his brilliance and childlike enthusiasms. I wanted to describe the many conversations with Aenea over those forty-eight local months (which—as I never got tired of being amazed by—corresponded perfectly to Hegemony/Pax standard months!) and my slow growth of understanding of her incredible insights and abilities. Finally, I wanted to tell of all my excursions during that time—my trip around the Earth in the dropship, the long driving adventures in North America, my fleeting contact with the other islands of humanity huddled around cybrid figures from the human past (the gathering in Israel and New Palestine around the cybrid Jesus of Nazareth was a memorable group to visit), but primarily, when I hear the brief silence on the ’scriber that took the place of these tales, I remember the reason for my omission.
As I said before, I ’scribed these words in the Schrödinger cat box orbiting Armaghast, while awaiting the simultaneous emission of an isotopic particle and the activation of the particle detector. When these two events coincided, the cyanide gas built into the static-energy field around the recycling equipment would be released.
Death would not be instantaneous, but near enough. While protesting earlier that I would take my time in telling our story—Aenea’s and mine—I realize now that there was some editing, some attempt to get to the important elements before the particle decayed and the gas flowed.
I will not double-guess that decision now, except to say that the four years on Earth would be worth telling about at some other point in time: the ninety people of the Fellowship were decent, complex, devious, and interesting in the way of all intelligent human beings, and their tales should be told. Similarly, my explorations across Earth, both in the dropship and in the 1948 “Woody” station wagon that the Old Architect loaned me, might support an epic poem of their own. But I am not a poet. But I was a tracker in my hunting-guide days, and my job here is to follow the path of Aenea’s growth to womanhood and messiahship without wandering down too many sidetracks. And so I shall. The Old Architect always referred to the Fellowship compound as “desert camp.” Most of the apprentices referred to it as “Taliesin”—which means “Shining Brow” in Welsh. (Mr. Wright was of Welsh distraction. I spent weeks trying to remember a Pax or Outback world named Welsh, before I remembered that the Old Architect had lived and died before spaceflight.) Aenea often referred to the place as “Taliesin West,” which suggested to even someone as dull as me that there had to be a Taliesin East. When I asked her three years earlier, Aenea had explained that the original Mr. Wright had built his first Taliesin Fellowship compound in the early 1930’s in Spring Green, Wisconsin—Wisconsin being one of the political and geographical sub-units of the ancient North American nation-state called the United States of America.When I asked Aenea if the first Taliesin was like this one, she had said, “Not really. There were a series of Wisconsin Taliesins—both homes and fellowship compounds—and most were destroyed by fire. That’s one of the reasons Mr. Wright installed so many pools and fountains here at this compound—sources of water to fight the inevitable fires.”
“And his first Taliesin was built in the 1930’s?” I said.
Aenea shook her head. “He opened his first Taliesin Fellowship in 1932,” she said. “But that was mostly a way to get slave labor from his apprentices—both for building his dream and raising food for him—during the Depression.”
“What was the Depression?”
“Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930’s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”