“Excuse me, M. Endymion were you speaking to me?” The voice almost made me lose my grip on the branch. Still clinging with my right hand, I lowered my left wrist and studied it in the dimming light. The comlog had a slight glow that had not been there the last time I had looked. “Well, I’ll be damned. I thought that you were broken, Ship.”

“This instrument is damaged, sir. The memory has been wiped. The neural circuits are quite dead. Only the com chips function under emergency power.”

I frowned at my wrist. “I don’t understand. If your memory has been wiped and your neural circuits are…”

The river pulled at my torn leg, seducing me into releasing my grip. For a moment I could not speak.

“Ship?” I said at last.

“Yes, M. Endymion?”

“You’re here.”

“Of course, M. Endymion. Just as you and M. Aenea instructed me to stay. I am pleased to say that all necessary repairs have been…”

“Show yourself,” I commanded. It was almost dark.

Tendrils of fog curled toward me across the black river.

The starship rose dripping, horizontal, its bow only twenty meters from me in the central current, blocking the current like a sudden boulder, hovering still half in the water, a black leviathan shedding river water in noisy rivulets. Navigation lights blinked on its bow and on the dripping black shark’s fin far behind it in the fog.

I laughed. Or wept. Or perhaps just moaned.

“Do you wish to swim to me, sir? Or should I come in to you?”

My fingers were slipping. “Come in to me,” I said, and gripped the branch with both hands.

There was a doc-in-the-box on the cryogenic fugue cubby-deck where Aenea used to sleep on the voyage out from Hyperion. The doc-in-the-box was ancient—hell, the whole ship was ancient—but its autorepair worked, it was well stocked, and—according to the garrulous ship on the way out four years earlier—the Ousters had tinkered with it back in the Consul’s day. It worked.

I lay in the ultraviolet warmth as soft appendages probed my skin, salved my bruises, sutured my deeper cuts, administered painkiller via IV drip, and finished diagnosing me.

“It is a compound fracture, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “Would you care to see the X rays and ultrasound?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “How do we fix it?”

“We’ve already begun,” said the ship. “The bone is being set as we speak. The bondplast and ultrasonic grafting will commence while you sleep. Because of the repair to damaged nerves and muscle tissue, the surgeon recommends at least ten hours’ sleep while it begins the procedure.”

“Soon enough,” I said.

“The diagnostic’s greatest concern is your fever, M. Endymion.”

“It’s a result of the break, isn’t it?”

“Negative,” said the ship. “It seems that you have a rather virulent kidney infection. Left untreated, it would have killed you before the ancillary effects of the broken femur.”

“Cheery thought,” I said.

“How so, sir?”

“Never mind,” I said. “You say that you’re totally repaired?”

“Totally, M. Endymion. Better than before the accident, if you don’t mind me bragging a bit. You see, because of the loss of some material, I was afraid that I would have to synthesize carbon-carbon templates from the rather dross rock substrata of this river, but I soon found that by recycling some of the unused components of the compression dampers made superfluous by the Ouster modifications that I could evince a thirty-two percent increase in autorepair efficiency if I…”

“Never mind, Ship,” I said. The absence of pain made me almost giddy. “How long did it take you to finish the repairs?”

“Five standard months,” said the ship. “Eight and one-half local months. This world has an odd lunar cycle with two highly irregular moons which I have postulated must be captured asteroids because of the…”

“Five months,” I said. “And you’ve just been waiting the other three and a half years?”

“Yes,” said the ship. “As instructed. I trust that all is well with A. Bettik and M. Aenea.”

“I trust that too, Ship. But we’ll find out soon enough. Are you ready to leave this place?”

“All ship’s systems are functional, M. Endymion. Awaiting your command.”

“Command is given,” I said. “Let’s go.”

The ship piped in the holo showing us rising above the river. It was dark out, but the night-vision lenses showed the swollen river and the farcaster arch only a few hundred meters upstream. I had not seen it in the fog. We rose above the river, above the swirling clouds.

“River’s up from the last time I was here,” I said.

“Yes,” said the ship. The curve of the planet became visible, the sun rising again above fleecy clouds. “It floods for a period of some three standard months every local orbital cycle, which equals approximately eleven standard months.”

“So you know what world this is now?” I said. “You weren’t sure when we left you.”

“I am quite confident that this planet was not among the two thousand eight hundred sixty-seven worlds in the General Catalogue Index,” said the ship. “My astronomical observations have shown that it is neither in Pax space nor in the realm of the former WorldWeb or Outback.”

“Not in the old WorldWeb or Outback,” I repeated. “Where is it then?”

“Approximately two hundred and eighty light-years galactic northwest of the Outback system known as NNGC 4645 Delta,” said the ship.

Feeling slightly groggy from the painkiller, I said, “A new world. Beyond the Outback. Why did it have farcasters then? Why was the river part of the Tethys?”

“I do not know, M. Endymion. But I should mention that there is a multitude of interesting life-forms which I observed by remotes while resting on the river bottom. Besides the river manta-ish creature which you and M. Aenea and A. Bettik observed downriver, there are more than three hundred observed species of avian variety and at least two species of humanoids.”

“Two species of humanoids? You mean humans.”

“Negative,” said the ship. “Humanoids. Definitely not Old Earth human. One variety is quite small—little more than a meter in height—with bilateral symmetry but quite variant skeletal structure and a definite reddish hue.”

A memory flitted by of a red-rock monolith Aenea and I had scouted on the lost hawking mat during our short stay here. Tiny steps carved in the smooth stone. I shook my head to clear it. “That’s interesting, Ship. But let’s set our destination.” The curve of the world had become pronounced and stars were gleaming unblinkingly. The ship continued to rise. We passed a potato-shaped moon and moved farther from orbit. The unnamed world became a blinding sphere of sunlit clouds. “Do you know the world known as T’ien Shan, or the ‘Mountains of Heaven’?”

“T’ien Shan,” repeated the ship. “Yes. As far as my memory serves, I have never been there, but I have the coordinates. A small world in the Outback, settled by refugees of the Third Chinese Civil War late in the Hegira.”

“You won’t have any trouble getting there?”

“None would be anticipated,” said the ship. “A simple Hawking-drive jump. Although I recommend that you use the autosurgeon as your cryogenic fugue cubby during the jump.”

I shook my head again. “I’ll stay awake, Ship. At least after the doc heals my leg.”

“I would recommend against that, M. Endymion.”

I frowned. “Why? Aenea and I stayed awake during the other jumps.”

“Yes, but those were relatively short voyages within the old WorldWeb,” said the ship. “What you now call Pax space. This will be a bit more extensive.”

“How extensive?” I said. My naked body felt a sudden chill. Our longest jump—to Renaissance Vector System—had taken ten days of ship travel time and five months of time-debt for the Pax Fleet waiting for us. “How extensive a trip?” I said again.

“Three standard months, eighteen days, six hours, and some minutes,” said the ship.