The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (244 page)

“Yeah?” I said tiredly. I tried to remember where I had seen it last. Flying toward the platform station on Mare Infinitus. “Small universe,” I said as if it did not matter. Inwardly, I would have given anything to have that little flying carpet right now. Aenea clung to the ladder and listened. From time to time, we both glanced over to make sure the autosurgeon had not given up.

“Yes,” said the voice of Father Captain de Soya, “and I have begun to understand a little of how you think, my friends. Perhaps someday you will understand how I think.”

“Perhaps,” I said. I did not know it then, but that would be literally true someday.

His voice became businesslike, almost brusque. “We believe that Corporal Nemes defeated the remote autopilot with some program override, but we won’t try to convince you of that. Feel free to use the dropship to continue your voyage without fear of our trying to capture Aenea.”

“How do we do that?” I said. The burns were beginning to hurt. In a minute I would find the energy to go through the bins above the autosurgeon and find out if the ship had its own medkit. I was sure it would.

“We will leave the system,” said Father Captain de Soya.

I perked up. “How can we be sure of that?”

The comlog chuckled. “A ship climbing out of a planet’s gravity well on fusion power is rather obvious,” he said. “Our telescope shows that you have only scattered clouds above you at the moment. You will see us.”

“See you leaving near orbit,” I said. “How can we know you’ve translated out of system?”

Aenea pulled my wrist down and spoke into the comlog. “Father? Where are you going?”

There was a hiss of silence. “Back to Pacem,” de Soya said eventually. “We have one of the three fastest ships in the universe, and my corporal friend and I have each silently considered heading … elsewhere … but when it comes down to it, we are both soldiers. In the Pax Fleet and in the Army of Christ. We will return to Pacem and answer questions … face whatever we must face.”

Even on Hyperion the Holy Office of the Inquisition had cast its cold shadow. I shivered, and it was not just the cold wind from the ash heap of the Worldtree that made me cold.

“Besides,” continued de Soya, “we have a third comrade here who did not come through resurrection successfully. We must return to Pacem for medical care.”

I looked at the humming autosurgeon and—for the first time that endless day—believed that the priest above us was not an enemy.

“Father de Soya,” said Aenea, still holding my hand so that the comlog was near her, “what will they do to you? To all of you?”

Again came the sound of a chuckle above the static. “If we’re lucky, they will execute us and then excommunicate us. If unlucky, they will reverse the order of those two events.”

I could see that Aenea was not amused. “Father Captain de Soya … Corporal Kee … come down and join us. Send the ship back with your friend, and join us to go through the next portal.”

This time the silence stretched long enough that I feared the tightbeam connection had broken. Then came de Soya’s soft voice. “I am tempted, my young friend. Both of us are tempted. I would love to travel by farcaster someday, and even more, I would love to get to know you. But we are faithful servants of the Church, my dear, and our duties are clear. It is my hope that this … aberration … that was Corporal Nemes was a mistake. We must return if we are ever to know.”

Suddenly there was a burst of light. I leaned out of the air lock, and we both watched the blue-white fusion tail cross between the scattered clouds.

“Besides that,” came de Soya’s voice, strained now as if under a g-load, “we really do not have any way down to you
without the dropship. The Nemes thing slashed the troopers’ combat suits, so even that desperate attempt is not an option.”

Aenea and I were both sitting on the edge of the open air lock now, watching the fusion tail grow longer and brighter. It seemed a lifetime since we had flown in our own ship. A thought struck me like a blow to the stomach, and I lifted the comlog. “Father Captain, is this … Nemes … dead? I mean, we saw her buried in molten lava … but could she be burrowing out even as we speak?”

“We have no idea,” said Father Captain de Soya over the tightbeam hiss. “My recommendation would be to get out of there as soon as possible. The dropship is our parting gift to you. Use it in good health.”

I looked out at the black lava landscape for a minute. Every time the wind rustled dead branches or scraped ash on ash, I was sure it was the hell-woman gliding toward us.

“Aenea,” came the priest-captain’s voice.

“Yes, Father Captain?”

“We’re going to shut off the tightbeam in a second … we’ll be passing out of line-of-sight anyway … but I have to tell you one thing.”

“What’s that, Father?”

“My child, if they order me back to find you … not to hurt you, but to find you … well, I am an obedient servant of the Church and a Pax Fleet officer.…”

“I understand, Father,” said Aenea. Her eyes were still on the sky where the fusion tail was fading near the eastern horizon. “Good-bye, Father. Good-bye, Corporal Kee. Thank you.”

“Good-bye, my daughter,” said Father Captain de Soya. “God bless you.” We could both hear the sound of a benediction. Then the tightbeam snapped off and there was only silence.

“Come on in,” I said to Aenea. “We’re leaving. Now.”

Closing the inner and outer air-lock doors was a simple enough task. We checked on the autosurgeon a final time—all of the lights were amber but steady—and then strapped ourselves into the heavy acceleration couches. There were shields to cover the windscreen, but they were raised, and we could see across the dark lava fields. A few stars were visible in the east.

“Okay,” I said, looking at the myriad switches, diskeys, touchplates, holopads, monitors, flatscreens, buttons, and gewgaws. There was a low console between us and two omnicontrollers
there, each with finger insets and more diskey patterns. I could see half a dozen places where one could jack in directly. “Okay,” I said again, looking at the pale girl dwarfed by her padded chair, “any ideas?”

“Get out and walk?” she said.

I sighed. “That might be the best plan except for—” I jerked my thumb back toward the humming autosurgeon.

“I know,” said Aenea. She sagged in the heavy straps. “I was joking.”

I touched her hand on the console. As always, there was a jolt of electricity there—a sort of physical déjà vu. Pulling my hand away, I said, “Goddammit, the more advanced a technology’s supposed to be, the simpler it’s supposed to be. This looks like something out of an eighteenth-century Old Earth fighter-plane cockpit.”

“It’s built for professionals to fly,” said Aenea. “We just need a professional pilot.”

“You have one,” chirped the comlog. It was speaking in its own voice.

“You know how to fly a ship?” I said suspiciously.

“In essence, I
am
a ship,” the comlog said primly. The clasp panel clicked open. “Please connect the red filament jack to any red interface port.”

I connected it to the console. Immediately the panel came alive, monitors glowed, instruments checked in, the dropship’s ventilators hummed, and the omnicontroller twitched. A flat-screen monitor in the center of the dash glowed yellow, and the comlog’s voice said, “Where do you wish to go, M. Edymion? M. Aenea?”

The girl spoke first. “The next farcaster,” she said softly. “The last farcaster.”

It was daylight on the other side. We hovered above the stream and moved forward slowly. The comlog had shown us how to use the controllers while it ran all the rest of the ship’s systems and kept us from making stupid mistakes. Aenea and I glanced at each other and inched the dropship over the treetops. Unless the hell-woman could transit a farcaster portal, we were safe.

It felt strange making our last farcaster shift without the raft, but the raft would not have worked here anyway. The River Tethys had become little more than a trickling stream between deep banks—the creek could not have been more than eight or ten centimeters deep and only three or four meters wide. It meandered through heavily wooded countryside. The trees were strange, but familiar at the same time … mostly deciduous like champa or weirwood, but broadleafed and expansive like halfoak. The leaves were bright yellow and brilliant red, and carpets of them lined the banks of the streambed.

The sky was a pleasant blue—not as deep blue as Hyperion’s, but deeper than most earthlike worlds we had seen on this trip. The sun was large and bright but not overpowering. Sunlight came through the windscreen and fell across our laps.

“I wonder what it’s like out there,” I said.

The comlog … ship … whatever it was now, must
have thought I was talking to it. The central monitor pulsed and data began to flow down it.

“That’s strange,” said the ship. “An improbable coincidence.”

“What?” I said, already knowing.

“These planetary data match almost perfectly with my database for Old Earth,” said the ship. “It is very unusual for any world to match so closely with—”

“Stop!” screamed Aenea, pointing out the windscreen. “Land! Please, now.”

I would have smashed into trees on the way down, but the ship took over, found us a flat, rocky spot within twenty meters of the tree-lined streambed, and set us down without a bump. Aenea was punching the air-lock combination while I was still staring out the windscreen at the flat roof of the house beyond the trees.

She was down the ladder before I could talk to her. I paused to check the autosurgeon, was pleased to see several of the lights switched to green, and said to the ship, “Watch over him. Keep everything ready for a quick getaway.”

“I shall, M. Endymion.”

We came at the house from downstream and across the stream from it. The building is hard to describe, but I will try.

The house itself was built out over a modest waterfall that spilled only three or four meters to a small natural pool beneath. Yellow leaves floated in the pool before being whisked away downstream on the quickening current. The most noticeable features of the house were the thin roofs and rectangular terraces that seemed to hang out over the stream and waterfall as if defying gravity. The house appeared to be built of stone and glass, concrete and some steel. To the left of the slabs of terrace, a stone wall rose three floors with a glass-cornered window rising in it almost the entire height. The metal framework around those windows was painted a gentle orange.

“Cantilevered,” said Aenea.

“What?”

“That’s what the architect calls those overhanging terraces,” she said. “Cantilevered. They echo the limestone ledges that have been here for millions of years.”

I paused in our walk to look at her. The dropship was out of sight beyond the trees behind us. “This is your house,” I said. “The one you dreamed of before you were born.”

“Yes.” Her lips were trembling slightly. “I even know its name now, Raul. Fallingwater.”

I nodded and sniffed the air. The scent was rich with decaying leaves, living plants, rich soil, water, and a certain tang to the air. It was very different from Hyperion’s air, but it somehow smelled like home. “Old Earth,” I whispered. “Can it be?”

“Just … Earth,” said Aenea. She touched my hand. “Let’s go in.”

We crossed the stream on a small bridge upstream from the house, crunched our way up a gravel drive, and entered through a loggia and narrow entranceway. It was like coming into a comfortable cave.

Pausing in the large living room, we called, but no one answered. Aenea walked across the open space as if in a trance, running her fingers over wood and stone surfaces, exclaiming at small discoveries.

The floor was carpeted in places, bare stone in others. Books filled low shelves in at least one alcove, but I did not take time to check the titles. Metal shelves ran under the low ceiling, but these were empty—perhaps just a design element. The far wall was taken up by a huge fireplace. The hearth was of rough stone—perhaps
the top of the boulder upon which the house seemed to balance—and ran out two meters or so from the fireplace.

A large fire was crackling in the fireplace, despite the warmth of the sunny autumn day. I called again, but the silence was heavy. “They were expecting us,” I said, making a weak joke. The only weapon I had now was the flashlight laser in my pocket.

“Yes, they were,” said Aenea. She went over to the left of the fireplace and placed her small hands on a metal sphere that was set into its own hemispherical niche in the stone wall. The sphere was a meter and a half or so in diameter and was painted a rich, rusty red.

“The architect meant this as a kettle to heat wine in,” Aenea said softly. “It was only used once … and the wine was heated in the kitchen and brought here. It’s too big. And the paint is probably toxic.”

“This is the architect you’re looking for?” I said. “The one you plan to study with?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he was a genius. Why would he make a wine kettle too big and too toxic to use?”

Aenea turned and smiled. No—she
grinned
. “Geniuses screw up, Raul. Look at our trip if you need proof. Come on, let’s look around.”

The terraces were lovely, the view from above the little waterfall pleasant. Inside, the ceilings and overhangs were low, but that just gave one more of a sense of peering out of a cave into the green world of the forest through all that glass. In the living room again, a glass-and-metal hatchway folded back to steps—supported by bars from the floor above—which led down only to a larger cement platform over a pool in the stream above the waterfall.