“Shit,” I said, lowering the beer. “I’m sorry to hear that.” One got used to autosurgeons fixing almost anything.
Aenea looked at me with such intensity that I could feel her gaze warming my skin as surely as I could feel the powerful sunlight. “How are you, Raul?”
“Great,” I said. “I ache a bit. I can feel the healing ribs. The scars itch. And I feel like I overslept by two weeks… but I feel good.”
She took my hand. I realized that her eyes were moist. “I would have been really pissed if you’d died on me,” she said after a moment, her voice thick.
“Me too.” I squeezed her hand, looked up, and suddenly leaped to my feet, sending the beer bulb spiraling off into thin air and almost launching myself. Only the sticktite velcro soles on my soft shoes kept me anchored. “Holy shit!” I said, pointing.
From this distance, it looked like a squid, perhaps only a meter or two long. From experience and a growing sense of perspective here, I knew better.
“One of the zeplins,” said Aenea. “The Akerataeli have tens of thousands working on the Biosphere. They stay inside the CO2 and O2 envelopes.”
“It’s not going to eat me again, is it?” I said.
Aenea grinned. “I doubt it. The one that got a taste of you has probably spread the word.”
I looked for my beer, saw the bulb tumbling away a hundred meters below us, considered leaping after it, thought better of it, and sat down on the sticktite bench.
Aenea gave me her bulb. “Go ahead. I can never finish those things.” She watched me drink.
“Any other questions while we’re talking?”
I swallowed and made a dismissive gesture.
“Well, there happens to be a bunch of extinct, mythical, and dead people around. Care to explain that?”
“By extinct you mean the zeplins, Seneschai, and Templars?” she said.
“Yeah. And the ergs… although I haven’t seen one of those yet.”
“The Templars and Ousters have been working to preserve such hunted sentient species the way the colonists on Maui-Covenant tried to save the Old Earth dolphins,” she said. “From the early Hegira colonists, then the Hegemony, and now the Pax.”
“And the mythical and dead people?” I said.
“By that you mean Colonel Kassad?”
“And Het Masteen,” I said. “And, for that matter, Rachel. We seem to have the whole cast of the friggin’ Hyperion Cantos showing up here.”
“Not quite,” said Aenea, her voice soft and a bit sad. “The Consul is dead. Father Duré is never allowed to live. And my mother is gone.”
“Sorry, kiddo…”
She touched my hand again. “That’s all right. I know what you mean… it’s disconcerting.”
“Did you know Colonel Kassad or Het Masteen before this?” I said.
Aenea shook her head. “My mother told me about them, of course… and Uncle Martin had things to add to his poem’s description. But they were gone before I was born.”
“Gone,” I repeated. “Don’t you mean dead?” I worked to remember the Cantos stanzas. According to the old poet’s tale, Het Masteen, the tall Templar, the True Voice of the Tree, had disappeared on the windwagon trip across Hyperion’s Sea of Grass shortly after his treeship, the Yggdrasill, had burned in orbit. Blood in the Templar’s cabin suggested the Shrike. He had left behind the erg in a Möbius cube. Sometime later, they had found Masteen in the Valley of the Time Tombs.
He had not been able to explain his absence—had said only that the blood in the windwagon had not been his—had cried out that it was his job to be the Voice of the Tree of Pain—and had died.
Colonel Kassad had disappeared at about that same time—shortly after entering the Valley of the Time Tombs—but the FORCE Colonel had, according to Martin Silenus’s Cantos, followed his phantom lover, Moneta, into the far future where he was to die in combat with the Shrike. I closed my eyes and recited aloud:
“… Later, in the death carnage of the valley,
Moneta and a few of the Chosen Warriors,
Wounded all,
Torn and tossed themselves by the Shrike horde’s fury,
Found the body of Fedmahn Kassad
Still wrapped in death’s embrace with the Silent Shrike.
Lifting the warrior, carrying him, touching him
With reverence born of loss and battle,
They washed and tended his ravaged body,
And bore him to the Crystal Monolith.
Here the hero was laid on a bier of white marble,
Weapons were set at his feet.
In the valley beyond, a great bonfire filled
The air with light. Human men and women carried torches
Through the dark,
While others descended, wingsoft, through
Morning lapis lazuli,
And some others arrived in faery craft, bubbles of light,
While still others descended on wings of energy
Or wrapped in circles of green and gold.
Later, as the stars burned in place,
Moneta made her farewells to her future’s
Friends and entered the Sphinx. Multitudes sang.
Rat things poked among fallen pennants
In the field where heroes fell,
While the wind whispered among carapace
And blade, steel and thorn. And thus,
In the Valley, The great Tombs shimmered,
Faded from gold to bronze,
And started their long voyage back.”
“Impressive memory,” said Aenea.
“Grandam used to cuff me if I screwed it up,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. The Templar and the Colonel sound dead to me.”
“And so they will be,” said Aenea. “And so shall we all.”
I waited for her to shift out of her Delphic phase.
“The Cantos say that Het Masteen was carried away somewhere… some-when by the Shrike,” she said. “He later died in the Valley of the Time Tombs after returning. The poem did not say if he was gone an hour or thirty years. Uncle Martin did not know.”
I squinted at her. “What about Kassad, kiddo? The Cantos are fairly specific there… the Colonel follows Moneta into the far future, engages in a battle with the Shrike…”
“With legions of Shrikes, actually,” corrected my friend.
“Yeah,” I said. I had never really understood that. “But it seems continuous enough… he follows her, he fights, he dies, his body is put in the Crystal Monolith, and it and Moneta begin the long trip back through time.”
Aenea nodded and smiled. “With the Shrike,” she said.
I paused. The Shrike had emerged from the Tombs… Moneta had traveled with it somehow… so although the Cantos clearly said that Kassad had destroyed the Shrike in that great, final battle, the monster was somehow alive and traveling with Moneta and Kassad’s body back through… Damn. Did the poem ever actually say that Kassad was dead?
“Uncle Martin had to fake parts of the tale, you know,” said Aenea. “He had some descriptions from Rachel, but he took poetic license on the parts he did not understand.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Rachel. Moneta.
The Cantos had clearly suggested that the girl-child Rachel, who went forward with her father, Sol, to the future, would return as the woman Moneta. Colonel Kassad’s phantom lover. The woman he would follow into the future to his fate… And what had Rachel said to me a few hours earlier when I was suspicious that she and Aenea were lovers? “I happen to be involved with a certain soldier… male… whom you’ll meet today. Well, actually, I will be involved with him someday. I mean… shit, it’s complicated.”
Indeed. My head hurt. I set down the beer bulb and held my head in my hands.
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Aenea.
I peered up at her through my fingers. “Care to explain?”
“Yes, but…”
“I know,” I said. “At some other time.”
“Yes,” said Aenea, her hand on mine.
“Any reason why we can’t talk about it now?” I said.
Aenea nodded. “We have to go in our pod now and opaque the walls,” she said.
“We do?” I said.
“Yes.”
“And then what?” I said.