We did talk. But not right away.

Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described—even the timing of our lovemaking seems absurd in the telling, with the sky literally falling and my lover having carried out a sort-of Last Supper convocation that night—but lovemaking is never absurd when you are making love to the person you truly love. And I was. If I had not realized that before the Last Supper night, I did then—completely, totally, and without reservation. It was perhaps two hours later when Aenea pulled on a kimono and I donned a yukata and we moved away from the sleeping mat to the open shoji screens. Aenea brewed tea on the small burner set in the tatami, and we took our cups and sat with our backs against the opposing shoji frames, our bare toes and legs touching, my right side and her left knee extending over the kilometers-long drop. The air was cool and smelled of rain, but the storm had moved north of us. The summit of Heng Shan was shrouded with clouds, but all the lower ridges were illuminated by a constant play of lightning. “Is Rachel really the Rachel from the Cantos?” I said.

It was not the question I most wanted to ask, but I was afraid to ask it. “Yes,” said Aenea. “She’s the daughter of Sol Weintraub—the woman who caught the Merlin Sickness on Hyperion and aged backward twenty-seven years to the infant whom Sol brought on the pilgrimage.”

“And she was also known as Moneta,” I said. “And Mnemosyne…”

“Admonisher,” murmured Aenea. “And Memory. Appropriate names for her role in that time.”

“That was two hundred and eighty years ago!” I said. “And scores of light-years away… on Hyperion. How did she get here?”

Aenea smiled. The warm tea breathed vapors that rose to her tousled hair. “I started life more than two hundred and eighty years ago,” she said. “And scores of light-years away… on Hyperion.”

“So did she get here the same way you did? Through the Time Tombs?”

“Yes and no,” said Aenea. She held up one hand to stop my protest. “I know that you want straight talk, Raul… no parables or similes or evasions. I agree. The time for plain talk is here. But the truth is that the Sphinx Time Tombs are only part of Rachel’s journey.”

I waited.

“You remember the Cantos,” she began.

“I remember that the pilgrim named Sol took his daughter… after the Keats persona somehow saved her from the Shrike and after she began aging normally… took her into the Sphinx into the future…” I stopped. “This future?”

“No,” said Aenea. “The infant Rachel grew into a child again, a young woman again, in a future beyond this one. Her father raised her a second time. Their story is… marvelous, Raul. Literally filled with marvels.”

I rubbed my forehead. The headache had gone, but now it threatened to return. “And she got here via the Time Tombs again?” I said. “Moving back in time with them?”

“Partially via the Time Tombs,” said Aenea. “She is also able to move through time on her own.”

I stared. This bordered on madness.

Aenea smiled as if reading my thoughts or just reading my expression. “I know it seems insane, Raul. Much of what we’ve yet to encounter is very strange.”

“That’s an understatement,” I said. Another mental tumbler clicked into place. “Theo Bernard!” I said.

“Yes?”

“There was a Theo in the Cantos, wasn’t there?” I said. “A man…” There were different versions of the oral tale, the poem to be sung, and many of these minor details were dropped in the short, popular versions. Grandam had made me learn most of the full poem, but the dull parts had never held my interest.

“Theo Lane,” said Aenea. “At one time the Consul’s aide on Hyperion, later our world’s first Governor-General for the Hegemony. I met him once when I was a girl. A decent man. Quiet. He wore archaic glasses…”

“This Theo,” I said, trying to figure it all out. Some sort of sex change?

Aenea shook her head. “Close, but no cigar, as Freud would have said.”

“Who?”

“Theo Bernard is the great-great-great-etcetera-granddaughter of Theo Lane,” said Aenea. “Her story is an adventure in itself. But she was born in this era… she did escape from the Pax colonies on Maui-Covenant and join the rebels… but she did so because of something I told the original Theo almost three hundred years ago. It had been passed down all those generations. Theo knew that I would be on Maui-Covenant when I was…”

“How?” I said.

“That’s what I told Theo Lane,” said my friend. “When I would be there. The knowledge was kept alive in his family… much as the Shrike Pilgrimage has been kept alive by the Cantos.”

“So you can see the future,” I said flatly.

“Futures,” corrected Aenea. “I’ve told you I can. And you heard me tonight.”

“You’ve seen your own death?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me what you’ve seen?”

“Not now, Raul. Please. When it’s time.”

“But if there are futures,” I said, hearing the growl of pain in my own voice, “why do you have to see one death for yourself? If you can see it, why can’t you avoid it?”

“I could avoid that particular death,” she said softly, “but it would be the wrong choice.”

“How can life over death ever be the wrong choice?” I said. I realized that I had shouted it. My hands were balled into fists.

She touched those fists with her warm hands, surrounding them with her slender fingers. “That’s what all this is about,” she said so softly that I had to lean forward to hear her. Lightning played on the shoulders of Heng Shan. “Death is never preferable to life, Raul, but sometimes it’s necessary.” I shook my head. I realized that I must look sullen at that moment, but I didn’t care.

“Will you tell me when I’m going to die?” I said.

She met my gaze. Her dark eyes held depths. “I don’t know,” she said simply.

I blinked. I felt vaguely hurt. Didn’t she care enough to look into my future?

“Of course I care,” she whispered. “I’ve just chosen not to look at those probability waves. Seeing my death is… difficult. Seeing yours would be…” She made a strange noise and I realized that she was weeping. I moved around on the tatami mat until I could put my arms around her. She leaned in against my chest.

“I’m sorry, kiddo,” I said into her hair, although I could not have said exactly what I was sorry about. It was strange to feel so happy and so miserable at the same time. The thought of losing her made me want to scream, to throw rocks at the mountainside. As if echoing my feelings, thunder rumbled from the peak to the north.

I kissed her tears away. Then we just kissed, the salt of her tears mingling with the warmth of her mouth. Then we made love again, and this time it was as slow, careful, and timeless as it had been urgent earlier.

When we were lying in the cool breeze again, our cheeks touching, her hand on my chest, she said, “You want to ask something. I can tell it. What?”

I thought of all the questions I had been filled with during her “discussion time” earlier—all of her talks I had missed that I needed to catch up on in order to understand why the communion ceremony was necessary: What is the cruciform really about? What is the Pax up to on those worlds with missing populations? What does the Core really hope to gain in all this? What the hell is the Shrike… is the thing a monster or a guardian? Where did it come from? What’s going to happen to us? What does she see in our future that I need to know in order for us to survive… in order for her to avoid the fate she has known about since before she was born? What’s the giant secret behind the Void Which Binds and why is it so important to connect with it? How are we going to get off this world if the Pax really slagged the only farcaster portal under molten rock and there are Pax warships between the Consul’s ship and us? Who are these “observers” she talked about who have been spying on humanity for centuries? What’s all this about learning the language of the dead and so forth? Why haven’t the Nemes-thing and her clone-siblings killed us yet? I asked, “You’ve been with someone else? Made love with someone before me?”