A rear door slammed open and Bin slid into the hallway, his robe hiked up to show spindly legs covered with dust. I stared at him, thinking that the boy would not get his cruciform and would die of cancer. The adults might well spend the next standard decade in a Pax prison.

“I’m sorry…” I said, hunting for words.

I could hear the commotion in the street as troopers hurried through the evening rush of pedestrians.

“Raul Endymion,” said Dem Loa in her soft voice, handing me the rucksack they had brought from my kayak, “please shut up and follow us. At once.”

There was a tunnel entrance beneath the floor of the hallway. I had always thought that hidden passages were the stuff of holodramas, but I followed Dem Ria into the one willingly enough. We were a strange procession—Dem Ria and Dem Loa sweeping down the steep staircase ahead of me, then me carrying the flechette pistol and fumbling the rucksack on my back, then little Bin followed by his sister, Ces Ambre, then, carefully locking the trapdoor behind him, Alem Mikail Dem Alem. No one stayed behind. The house was empty except for the snoring Lusian trooper.

The stairway went deeper than a normal basement level, and at first I thought that the walls were adobe like the ones above. Then I realized that the passage was cut from a soft stone, perhaps sandstone.

Twenty-seven steps and we reached the bottom of the vertical shaft and Dem Ria led the way down a narrow passage illuminated by pale chemical glowglobes. I wondered why this average, working-class home would have an underground passage.

As if reading my mind, Dem Loa’s blue cowl turned and she whispered, “The Amoiete Spectrum Helix demands… ah… discreet entrances to one another’s homes. Especially during the Twice Darkness.”

“Twice Darkness?” I whispered back, ducking under one of the globes. We had already gone twenty or twenty-five meters—away from the canal-river, I thought—and the passage still curved out of sight to the right. “The slow, dual eclipse of the sun by this world’s two moons,” whispered Dem Loa. “It lasts precisely nineteen minutes. It is the primary reason that we chose this world… please excuse the pun.”

“Ahh,” I said. I did not understand, but it didn’t seem to matter at that moment. “Pax troops have sensors to find spider-holes like this,” I whispered to the women in front of me. “They have deep radar to search through rock. They have…”

“Yes, yes,” said Alem from behind me, “but they will be held up a few minutes by the Mayor and the others.”

“The Mayor?” I repeated rather stupidly.

My legs were still weak from the two days in bed and pain. My back and groin ached, but it was a minor pain—inconsequential—compared to what I had passed through (and what had passed through me) during the last couple of days.

“The Mayor is challenging the Pax’s right to search,” whispered Dem Ria. The passage widened and went straight for at least a hundred meters. We passed two branching tunnels. This wasn’t a bolt-hole; it was a bloody catacombs. “The Pax recognizes the Mayor’s authority in Lock Childe Lamonde,” she whispered. The silken robes of the five family members in blue were also whispering against the sandstone as we hurried down the passage. “We still have law and courts on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, so they are not allowed unlimited search and seizure rights.”

“But they’ll download permission from whatever authority they need,” I said, hurrying to keep up with the women. We came to another juncture and they turned right.

“Eventually,” said Dem Loa, “but the streets are now filled with all of the colors of the Lock Childe Lamonde strand of the Helix—reds, whites, greens, ebonies, yellows—thousands of people from our village. And many more are coming from nearby Locks. No one will volunteer which house is the one where you were kept. Father Clifton has been lured out of town on a ruse, so he can be of no help to the Pax troopers. Dr. Molina has been detained in Keroa Tambat by some of our people and is currently out of touch with her Pax superiors. And your guard will be sleeping for at least another hour. This way.”

We turned left into a wider passage, stopped at the first door we had seen, waited for Dem Ria to palmlock it open, and then stepped into a large, echoing space carved into the stone. We were standing on a metal stairway looking down on what appeared to be a subterranean garage: half a dozen long, slim vehicles with oversized wheels, stern wings, sails, and pedals clustered by primary colors. These things were like buckboards set on spidery suspensions, obviously powered by wind and muscle power, and covered over with wood, bright, silky polymer fabrics, and Perspex.

“Windcycles,” said Ces Ambre.

Several men and women in emerald-green robes and high boots were preparing three of the wagons for departure. Lashed in the back of one of the long wagonbeds was my kayak.

Everyone was moving down the clattering staircase, but I stopped at the head of the stairs. My balking was so sudden that poor Bin and Ces Ambre almost crashed into me.

“What is it?” said Alem Mikail.

I had tucked the flechette pistol in my belt and now I opened my hands. “Why are you doing this? Why is everyone helping? What’s going on?”

Dem Ria took a step back up the metal staircase and leaned on the railing. Her eyes were as bright as her daughter’s had been. “If they take you, Raul Endymion, they will kill you.”

“How do you know?” I said. My voice was soft but the acoustics of the underground garage were such that the men and women in green looked up from where they were working below.

“You spoke in your sleep,” said Dem Loa.

I cocked my head, not understanding. I had been dreaming of Aenea and our conversation. What would that have told these people? Dem Ria took another step upward and touched my wrist with her cool hand. “The Amoiete Spectrum Helix has foretold this woman, Raul Endymion. This one named Aenea. We call her the One Who Teaches.”

I felt goose bumps at that moment, in the chill glowglobe light of this buried place. The old poet—Uncle Martin—had spoken of my young friend as a messiah, but his cynicism leaked into everything he said or did. The people of Taliesin West had respected Aenea… but to believe that the energetic sixteen-year-old was actually a World Historical Figure? It seemed unlikely. And the girl and I had spoken of it in real life and in my ultramorph dreams, but… my God, I was on a world scores of light-years away from Hyperion and an eternal distance from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud where Old Earth was hidden. How had these people…

“Halpul Amoiete knew of the One Who Teaches when he composed the Helix Symphony,” said Dem Loa. “All of the people of the Spectrum were descended from empath stock. The Helix was and is a way to refine that empathic ability.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand…”

“Please understand this, Raul Endymion,” said Dem Ria, her fingers squeezing my wrist almost painfully. “If you do not escape this place, the Pax will have your soul and body. And the One Who Teaches needs both these things.”

I squinted at the woman, thinking that she was jesting. But her pleasant, unlined face was set and serious.

“Please,” said little Bin, setting his little hand in my free one and pulling. “Please hurry, Raul.”

I hurried down the stairs. One of the men in green handed me a red robe. Alem Mikail helped me fold and wrap it over my own clothes. He wrapped the red burnoose and cowl in a dozen quick strokes. I would never have been able to arrange it properly. I realized with a shock that the entire family—the two older women, teenaged Ces Ambre, and little Bin—had stripped naked from their blue robes and were arranging red ones around them. I saw then that I had been wrong thinking that they were like Lusians—for although their bodies were shorter than Pax-space average and heavily muscled, they were perfectly proportioned. None of the adults had any hair, either on their heads or elsewhere. Somehow this made their compact, perfectly toned bodies more attractive. I looked away, realizing that I was blushing.