We climbed on. I thought that I could see something red at the top of this next flight of stairs. The South Gate of Heaven and entry to the summit slope? It was about time. “Wasn’t that beautiful though?” I said, speaking of the poem. “Isn’t continuity like that as important or more important in human institutions as diversity?”

“It’s important,” agreed Aenea. “But that’s almost all humanity has been doing for the last millennium, Raul… re-creating Old Earth institutions and ideas on different worlds. Look at the Hegemony. Look at the Church and the Pax. Look at this world…”

“T’ien Shan?” I said. “I think it’s wonderful…”

“So do I,” said Aenea. “But it’s all borrowed. The Buddhism has evolved a bit… at least away from idolatry and ritual back to the open-mindedness that was its earliest hallmark… but everything else is pretty much an attempt to recapture things lost with Old Earth.”

“Such as?” I said.

“Such as the language, dress, the names of the mountains, local customs… hell, Raul, even this pilgrimage trail and the Temple of the Jade Emperor, if we ever get there.”

“You mean there was a T’ai Shan mountain on Old Earth?” I said.

“Absolutely,” said Aenea. “With its own City of Peace and Heavenly Gates and Mouth of the Dragon. Confucius climbed it more than three thousand years ago. But the Old Earth stairway had just seven thousand steps.”

“I wish we’d climbed it instead,” I said, wondering if I could keep climbing. The steps were short, but there had been a hell of a lot of them.

“I see your point though.” Aenea nodded. “It’s wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves… culturally and physically.”

“Which brings us back to evolution,” I said. “What are the other directions, tendencies, goals, or whatever that you said had been ignored the last few centuries?”

“There are just a few more,” said Aenea. “One is an ever increasing number of individuals. Life likes gazillions of species, but it absolutely loves hypergazillions of individuals. In a sense, the universe is tooled up for individuals. There was a book in the Taliesin library called Evolving Hierarchical Systems by an Old Earth guy named Stanley Salthe. Did you see it?”

“No, I must have missed it when I was reading those early twenty-first-century holoporn novels.”

“Uh-huh,” said Aenea. “Well, Salthe put it sort of neatly—‘An indefinite number of unique individuals can exist in a finite material world if they are nested within each other and that world is expanding.’”

“Nested within each other,” I repeated, thinking about it. “Yeah, I get it. Like the Old Earth bacteria in our gut, and the paramecia we’ve dragged into space, and the other cells in our bodies… more worlds, more people… yeah.”

“The trick is more people,” said Aenea. “We have hundreds of billions, but between the Fall and the Pax, the actual human population in the galaxy—not counting Ousters—has leveled off in the last few hundred years.”

“Well, birth control is important,” I said, repeating what everyone on Hyperion had been taught. “I mean, especially with the cruciform capable of keeping people alive for centuries and centuries…”

“Exactly,” said Aenea. “With artificial immortality comes more stagnation… physical and cultural. It’s a given.”

I frowned. “But that’s not a reason to deny people the chance for extended life, is it?”

Aenea’s voice seemed remote, as if she were contemplating something much larger. “No,” she said at last, “not in itself.”

“What are the evolutionary directions?” I asked, seeing the red pagoda come closer above us and praying that the conversation would keep my mind off collapsing, rolling back down the twenty-some thousand steps we had climbed.

“Just three more worth mentioning,” said Aenea. “Increasing specialization, increasing codependency, and increasing evolvability. All of these are really important, but the last is most so.”

“How do you mean, kiddo?”

“I mean that evolution itself evolves. It has to. Evolvability is in itself an inherited survival trait. Systems—living and otherwise—have to learn how to evolve and, to some extent, control the direction and rate of their own evolution. We… I mean the human species… were on the verge of doing that a thousand years ago, and the Core took it away from us. At least from most of us.”

“What do you mean, ‘most of us’?”

“I promise that you’ll see in a few days, Raul.”

We reached the South Gate of Heaven and passed through its arched entry, a red arch under a golden pagoda roof. Beyond it was the Heavenly Way, a gentle slope that ran to the summit that was just visible. The Heavenly Way was nothing more than path on bare, black rock. We could have been walking on an airless moon like Old Earth’s—the conditions here were about as amenable to life. I started to say something to Aenea about this being a niche that life hadn’t stuck its foot into, when she led the way off the path to a small stone temple set in among the sharp crags and fissures a few hundred meters below the summit. There was an air lock that looked so ancient it appeared to have come out on one of the earliest seedships. Amazingly, it worked when she activated the press pad and the three of us stood in it until it cycled and the inner door opened. We stepped inside.

It was a small room and almost bare except for an ornate bronze pot holding fresh flowers, some sprigs of green on a low dais, and a beautiful statue—once gold—of a life-size woman in robes that appeared to be made of gold. The woman was fat-cheeked and of pleasant demeanor—a sort of female Buddha—and she looked to be wearing a gilded crown of leaves and had an oddly Christian halo of hammered gold behind her head.

A. Bettik pulled off his helmet and said, “The air is good. Air pressure more than adequate.”

Aenea and I folded back our skinsuit cowls. It was a pleasure to breathe regularly.

There were incense tapers and a box of matches at the statue’s foot. Aenea went to one knee and used a match to light one of the tapers. The smell of incense was very strong. “This is the Princess of the Azure Clouds,” she said, smiling up at the smiling gold face. “The goddess of the dawn. By lighting this, I’ve just made an offering for the birth of grandchildren.” I started to smile and then froze. She has a child. My beloved has already had a child. My throat tightened and I looked away, but Aenea walked over and took my arm.

“Shall we eat lunch?” she said.

I had forgotten about our brown bag lunch. It would have been difficult to eat it through our helmets and osmosis masks.

We sat in the dim light, in the windowless room, amid the floating smoke and scent of incense, and ate the sandwiches packed by the monks. “Where now?” I said as Aenea began recycling the inner lock.

“I have heard that there is a precipice on the eastern edge of the summit called Suicide Cliff,” said A. Bettik. “It used to be a place for serious sacrifice. Jumping from it is said to provide instant communion with the Jade Emperor and to insure that your offering request is honored. If you really want to guarantee grandchildren, you might jump from there.” I stared at the android. I was never sure if he had a sense of humor or simply a skewed personality.

Aenea laughed. “Let’s walk to the Temple of the Jade Emperor first,” she said. “See if anyone’s home.” Outside, I was struck first by the isolation of the skinsuit and the airless clarity of everything. The osmosis mask had gone almost opaque because of the unfiltered ferocity of the midday sun at this altitude. Shadows were harsh.