This was insanity. It was none of my business. She was almost twenty-two standard years old.

I’d slept with women before—I could not remember any of their last names, but in the Home Guard, while working in the Nine Tails Casino—why should I care if—what difference did it make if—I had to know.

She hesitated only a second. “Our first time together was not my… first,” she said.

I nodded, feeling like a swine and a voyeur for asking. There was an actual pain in my chest, much as I had imagined angina from hearing about it. I could not stop. “Did you love… him?” How did I know it was a he? Theo… Rachel… she surrounds herself with women. My own thoughts made me sick of myself.

“I love you, Raul,” she whispered.

It was only the second time she had said this, the first being when we had said good-bye on Old Earth more than five and a half years earlier. My heart should have soared at the words. But it hurt too much. There was something important here that I did not understand.

“But there was a man,” I said, the words like pebbles in my mouth. “You loved him…”

Only one? How many? I wanted to scream at my thoughts to shut up.

Aenea put her finger on my lips. “I love you, Raul, remember that as I tell you these things. Everything is… complicated. By who I am. By what I must do. But I love you… I have loved you since the first time I saw you in the dreams of my future. I loved you when we met in the dust storm on Hyperion, with the confusion and shooting and the Shrike and the hawking mat. Do you remember how I squeezed my arms around you when we were flying on the mat, trying to escape? I loved you then…”

I waited in silence. Aenea’s finger moved from my lips to my cheek. She sighed as if the weight of the worlds were on her shoulders. “All right,” she said softly. “There was someone. I’ve made love before. We…”

“Was it serious?” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, like the ship’s artificial tones.

“We were married,” said Aenea.

Once, on the River Kans on Hyperion, I’d gotten into a fistfight with an older bargeman who was half again my weight with infinitely more experience in fighting. With no warning he had clipped me under the jaw with a single blow that had blacked out my vision, buckled my knees, and sent me reeling back over the barge railing into the river. The man had held no grudge and had personally dived in to fish me out. I’d regained consciousness in a minute or two, but it was hours before I could shake the ringing out of my head and truly focus my eyes.

This was worse than that. I could only lie there and look at her, at my beloved Aenea, and feel her fingers against my cheek as strange and cold and alien as a stranger’s touch. She moved her hand away.

There was something worse.

“The twenty-three months, one week, and six hours that were unaccounted for,” she said.

“With him?” I could not remember forming the two words but I heard them spoken in my voice.

“Yes…”

“Married…” I said and could not go on.

Aenea actually smiled, but it was the saddest smile I think I had ever seen. “By a priest,” she said. “The marriage will be legal in the eyes of the Pax and the Church.”

“Will be?”

“Is.”

“You are still married?” I wanted to get up then and be sick over the edge of the platform, but I could not move.

For a second Aenea seemed confused, unable to answer. “Yes…” she said, her eyes gleaming with tears. “I mean, no… I’m not married now… you… dammit, if I could only…”

“But the man’s still alive?” I interrupted, my voice as flat and emotionless as a Holy Office Inquisition interrogator’s.

“Yes.” She put her hand on her own cheek.

Her fingers were trembling.

“Do you love him, kiddo?”

“I love you, Raul.”

I pulled away slightly, not consciously, not deliberately, but I could not stay in physical contact with her while we had this discussion. “There’s something else…” she said. I waited. “We had… I’ll… I had a child, a baby.” She looked at me as if trying to force understanding of all this through her gaze directly into my mind. It did not work.

“A child,” I repeated stupidly. My dear friend… my child friend turned woman turned lover… my beloved had a child. “How old is it?” I said, hearing the banality like the thunder rumbling closer.

Again she seemed confused, as if uncertain of facts. Finally she said, “The child is… nowhere I can find it now.”

“Oh, kiddo,” I said, forgetting everything but her pain. I folded her against me as she wept. “I’m so sorry, kiddo… I’m so sorry,” I said as I patted her head.

She pulled back, wiping away tears. “No, Raul, you don’t understand. It’s all right… it’s not… that part’s all right…”

I pulled away from her and stared. She was distraught, sobbing. “I understand,” I lied.

“Raul…” Her hand felt for mine. I patted her hand but got out of the bedclothes, pulled on my clothes, and grabbed my climbing harness and pack from their place by the door.

“Raul…”

“I’ll be back before dawn,” I said, facing in her general direction but not looking at her.

“I’m just going for a walk.”

“Let me go with you,” she said, standing with the sheet around her. Lightning flashed behind her. Another storm was coming in.

“I’ll be back before dawn,” I said and went out the door before she could dress or join me. It was raining—a cold, sleety rain. The platforms were quickly coated and made slick. I hurtled down ladders and jogged down the vibrating staircases, seeing my way by the occasional lightning flash, not slowing until I was several hundred meters down the east ledge walk headed toward the fissure where I had first landed in the ship. I did not want to go there.

Half a klick from the Temple were fixed lines rising to the top of the ridge. The sleet was pounding on the cliff face now, the red and black lines were coated with a layer of ice. I clipped carabiners onto the line and harness, pulling the powered ascenders from the pack and attaching them without double-checking the connections, then began jumaring up the icy ropes.

The wind came up, whipping my jacket and pushing me away from the rock wall. Sleet pounded at my face and hands. I ignored it and ascended, sometimes sliding back three or four meters as the jumar clamps failed on the icy line, then recovering and climbing again. Ten meters below the razor’s-edge summit of the ridgeline, I emerged from the clouds like a swimmer coming up out of the water. The stars still burned coldly up there, but the billowing cloud masses were piling against the north wall of the ridge and rising like a white tide around me.

I slid the ascenders higher and jumared until I reached the relatively flat area where the fixed lines were attached. Only then did I notice that I had not tied on the safety line.

“Fuck it,” I said and began walking northeast along the fifteen-centimeter-wide ridgeline. The storm was rising around me to the north. The drop to the south was kilometers of empty, black air. There were patches of ice here and it was beginning to snow.

I broke into a trot, running east, jumping icy spots and fissures, not giving a good goddamn about anything.

While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.

On Hyperion, when I was a boy, news filtered slowly from the interstellar Pax to our moving caravans on the moors: an important event on Pacem or Renaissance Vector or wherever would, of necessity, be many weeks or months old from Hawking-drive time-debt, with additional weeks of transit from Port Romance or another major city to our provincial region. I was used to not paying attention to events elsewhere. The lag in news had lessened, of course, when I was guiding offworld hunters in the Fens and elsewhere, but it was still old news and of little importance to me. The Pax held no fascination for me, although offworld travel certainly had. Then there had been almost ten years of disconnection during our Old Earth hiatus and my five years of time-debt odyssey. I was not used to thinking of events elsewhere except where they affected me, such as the Pax’s obsession with finding us.