“Those things tend to… preoccupy the person first encountering them,” she said softly. “I need your full attention right now. I need your help.”

That made sense to me. I reached over and touched her back through the thermal jacket and skinsuit material. A. Bettik looked across at us and nodded, as if approving of our contact. I reminded myself that he could not have heard our skinsuit transmissions.

“Aenea,” I said softly, “are you the new messiah?”

I could hear her sigh. “No, Raul. I never said I was a messiah. I never wanted to be a messiah. I’m just a tired young woman right now… I’ve got a pounding headache… and cramps… it’s the first day of my period…” She must have seen me blink in surprise or shock. Well, hell, I thought, it’s not every day that you get to confront the messiah only to hear that she’s suffering from what the ancients used to call PMS. Aenea chuckled. “I’m not the messiah, Raul. I was just chosen to be the One Who Teaches. And I’m trying to do it while… while I can.”

Something about her last sentence made my stomach knot in anxiety. “Okay,” I said. We reached the three hundredth step and paused together, wheezing more heavily now. I looked up. Still no South Gate of Heaven visible. Even though it was midday, the sky was space black. A thousand stars burned. They barely twinkled. I realized that the hiss and roar of the jet stream had gone away. T’ai Shan was the highest peak on T’ien Shan, extending into the highest fringes of the atmosphere. If it had not been for our skinsuits, our eyes, eardrums, and lungs would have exploded like overinflated balloons. Our blood would be boiling. Our…

I tried to shift my thoughts onto something else.

“All right,” I said, “but if you were the messiah, what would your message to humanity be?”

Aenea chuckled again, but I noticed that it was a reflective chuckle, not a derisive one. “If you were a messiah,” she said between breaths, “what would your message be?”

I laughed out loud. A. Bettik could not have heard the sound through the near vacuum separating us, but he must have seen me throw my head back, for he looked over quizzically. I waved at him and said to Aenea, “I have no fucking clue.”

“Exactly,” said Aenea. “When I was a kid… I mean a little kid, before I met you… and I knew that I’d have to go through some of this stuff… I was always wondering what message I was going to give humankind. Beyond the things I knew I’d have to teach, I mean. Something profound. Sort of a Sermon on the Mount.”

I looked around. There was no ice or snow at this terrible altitude. The clear, white steps rose through shelves of steep, black rock.

“Well,” I said, “here’s the mount.”

“Yeah,” said Aenea, and I could hear the fatigue once again.

“So what message did you come up with?” I said, more to keep her talking and distracted than to hear the answer. It had been a while since she and I had just talked.

I could see her smile. “I kept working on it,” she said at last, “trying to get it as short and important as the Sermon on the Mount. Then I realized that was no good—like Uncle Martin in his manic-poet period trying to outwrite Shakespeare—so I decided that my message would just be shorter.”

“How short?”

“I got my message down to thirty-five words. Too long. Then down to twenty-seven. Still too long. After a few years I had it down to ten. Still too long. Eventually I boiled it down to two words.”

“Two words?” I said. “Which two?”

We had reached the next resting point… the seventieth or eightieth three hundredth step. We stopped gratefully and panted. I bent over to rest my skinsuit-gloved hands on my skinsuit-sheathed knees and concentrated on not throwing up. It was bad form to vomit in an osmosis mask. “Which two?” I said again when I got some wind back and could hear the answer over my pounding heart and rasping lungs.

“Choose again,” said Aenea.

I considered that for a wheezing, panting moment.

“Choose again?” I said finally.

Aenea smiled. She had caught her wind and was actually looking down at the vertical view that I was afraid even to glance toward. She seemed to be enjoying it. I had the friendly urge to toss her off the mountain right then. Youth. It’s intolerable sometimes.

“Choose again,” she said firmly.

“Care to elaborate on that?”

“No,” said Aenea. “That’s the whole idea. Keep it simple. But name a category and you get the idea.”

“Religion,” I said.

“Choose again,” said Aenea.

I laughed. “I’m not being totally facetious here, Raul,” she said. We began climbing again. A. Bettik seemed lost in thought. “I know, kiddo,” I said, although I had not been sure. “Categories… ah… political systems.”

“Choose again.”

“You don’t think that the Pax is the ultimate evolution of human society? It’s brought interstellar peace, fairly good government, and… oh, yeah… immortality to its citizens.”

“It’s time to choose again,” said Aenea. “And speaking of our views of evolution…”

“What?”

“Choose again.”

“Choose what again?” I said. “The direction of evolution?”

“No,” said Aenea, “I mean our ideas about whether evolution has a direction. Most of our theories about evolution, for that matter.”

“So, do you or don’t you agree with Pope Teilhard… the Hyperion pilgrim, Father Duré… when he said three centuries ago that Teilhard de Chardin had been right, that the universe was evolving toward consciousness and a conjunction with the Godhead? What he called the Omega Point?”

Aenea looked at me. “You did do a lot of reading in the Taliesin library, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I don’t agree with Teilhard… either the original Jesuit or the short-lived Pope. My mother knew both Father Duré and the current pretender, Father Hoyt, you know.”

I blinked. I guess I had known that, but being reminded of the reality of that… of my friend’s connections across the last three centuries… set me back a bit.

“Anyway,” continued Aenea, “evolutionary science has really taken a bite in the butt over the last millennium. First the Core actively opposed investigation into it because of their fear of rapid human-designed genetic engineering—an explosion of our species into variant forms upon which the Core could not be parasitic. Then evolution and the biosciences were ignored by the Hegemony for centuries because of the Core’s influence, and now the Pax is terrified of it.”

“Why?” I said.

“Why is the Pax terrified of biological and genetic research?”

“No,” I said, “I think I understand that. The Core wants to keep human beings in the form and shape they’re comfortable with and so does the Church. They define being human largely by counting arms, legs, and so forth. But I mean why redefine evolution? Why open up the argument about direction or nondirection and so forth? Doesn’t the ancient theory hold up pretty well?”

“No,” said Aenea. We climbed several minutes in silence. Then she said, “Except for mystics such as the original Teilhard, most early evolution scientists were very careful not to think of evolution in terms of “goals” or “purposes.” That was religion, not science. Even the idea of a direction was anathema to the pre-Hegira scientists. They could only speak in terms of “tendencies” in evolution, sort of statistical quirks that kept recurring.”

“So?”

“So that was their shortsighted bias, just as Teilhard de Chardin’s was his faith. There are directions in evolution.”

“How do you know?” I said softly, wondering if she would answer.

She answered quickly. “Some of the data I saw before I was born,” she said, “through my cybrid father’s connections to the Core. The autonomous intelligences there have understood human evolution for many centuries, even while humans stayed ignorant. As hyper-hyperparasites, the AI’s evolve only toward greater parasitism. They can only look at living things and their evolutionary curve and watch it… or try to stop it.”