Or at least the truth as I knew it then. Or at least I tried to tell the truth. Mostly. After having recycled the microvellum pages of that first attempt to tell the story of Aenea, and because the ’scriber has never been out of my sight, I have to assume that no one has read them. The fact that they were written in a Schrödinger cat box execution egg in exile orbit around the barren world of Armaghast—the cat box being little more than a fixed-position energy shell holding my atmosphere, air and food recycling equipment, bed, table, ’scriber, and a vial of cyanide gas waiting to be released by a random isotope emission—would seem to have insured that you have not read those pages. But I am not sure.

Strange things were happening then. Strange things have happened since. I will reserve judgment on whether those pages—and these—could ever have been, or ever will be, read. In the meantime, I will reintroduce myself. My name is Raul Endymion, my first name rhyming with tall—which I am—and my last name deriving from the “abandoned” university city of Endymion on the backwater world of Hyperion. I qualify the word “abandoned” because that quarantined city is where I met the old poet—Martin Silenus, the ancient author of the banned epic poem the Cantos—and that is where my adventure began.

I use the word “adventure” with some irony, and perhaps in the sense that all of life is an adventure. For it is true that while the voyage began as an adventure—an attempt to rescue twelve-year-old Aenea from the Pax and to escort her safely to the distant Old Earth—it has since become a full lifetime of love, loss, and wonder.

Anyway, at the time of this telling, during the week of the Pope’s death, the Old Architect’s death, and Aenea’s inauspicious sixteenth birthday in exile, I was thirty-two years old, still tall, still strong, still trained mostly in hunting, brawling, and watching others lead, still callow, and just teetering on the precipice of falling forever in love with the girl-child I had protected like a little sister and who—overnight, it seemed—had become a girl-woman whom I knew now as a friend. I should also say that the other things I write of here—the events in Pax space, the murder of Paul Duré, the retrieval of the female-thing named Rhadamanth Nemes, the thoughts of Father Federico de Soya—are not surmised or extrapolated or made-up in the way that the old fiction novels were in Martin Silenus’s day. I know these things, down to the level of Father de Soya’s thoughts and Councillor Albedo’s apparel that day, not because I am omniscient, but because of later events and revelations that gave access to such omniscience.

It will make sense later. At least I hope it will.

I apologize for this awkward reintroduction.

The template for Aenea’s cybrid father—a poet named John Keats—said in his last letter of farewell to his friends, “I have always made an awkward bow.” In truth, so have I—whether in departure or greeting or, as is perhaps the case here, in improbable reunion.

So I will return to my memories and ask your indulgence if they do not make perfect sense at my first attempt to share and shape them.

The wind howled and the dust blew for three days and three nights after Aenea’s sixteenth birthday. The girl was gone for all that time. Over the past four years I had grown used to her “time-outs,” as she called them, and I usually did not fret the way I had the first few times she had disappeared for days on end. This time, however, I was more concerned than usual: the death of the Old Architect had left the twenty-seven apprentices and the sixty-some support people at the desert camp—which is what the Old Architect called Taliesin West—anxious and uneasy. The dust storm added to that anxiety, as dust storms always do. Most of the families and support staff lived close by, in one of the desert-masonry dormitories Mr. Wright had his interns build south of the main buildings, and the camp complex itself was almost fortlike with its walls and courtyards and covered walkways—good for scuttling between buildings during a dust storm—but each successive day without either sunlight or Aenea made me increasingly nervous. Several times each day I went to her apprentice shelter: it was the farthest from the main compound, almost a quarter of a mile north toward the mountains. She was never there—she had left the door untethered and a note telling me not to worry, that it was just one of her excursions and that she was taking plenty of water—but every time I visited I appreciated her shelter more. Four years earlier, when she and I had first arrived with a dropship stolen from a Pax warship, both of us exhausted, battered, and burned, not to mention with an android healing in the ship’s autosurgeon, the Old Architect and the other apprentices had greeted us with warmth and acceptance. Mr. Wright had not seemed surprised that a twelve-year-old child had come across world after world via farcaster to find him and to ask to be his apprentice. I remember that first day when the Old Architect had asked her what she knew of architecture—“nothing,” Aenea had replied quietly, “except that you are the one I should learn from.”

Evidently this had been the correct response. Mr. Wright had told her that all of the apprentices who had arrived before her—all twenty-six others, as it turned out—had been asked to design and build their own shelters in the desert as a sort of entry exam. The Old Architect had offered some crude materials from the compound—canvas, stone, cement, a bit of cast-off lumber—but the design and effort were up to the girl.

Before she set to work (not being an apprentice, I made do with a tent close to the main compound), Aenea and I toured the other apprentice shelters. Most were variations on tent-shacks.

They were serviceable and some showed style—one particularly exhibited a nice design flare but, as Aenea pointed out to me, would not keep the sand or rain out with the slightest wind—but none was particularly memorable.

Aenea worked eleven days on her shelter. I helped her do some of the heavy lifting and a bit of the excavating (A. Bettik was still recovering at that time—first in the autosurgeon, then in the compound’s infirmary), but the girl did all of the planning and most of the work. The result was this wonderful shelter that I visited four times a day during this, her last hiatus in the desert. Aenea had excavated the main sections of the shelter so that most of it was below ground level. Then she had set flagstones in place, making sure that they fit tightly, to create a smooth floor. Over the stones she set colorful rugs and blankets she traded for at the Indian Market fifteen miles away. Around the excavated core of the home she set walls that were about a meter high, but with the sunken main room, they seemed taller. They were constructed of the same rough “desert masonry” that Mr. Wright had used in building the walls and superstructure of the main compound buildings and Aenea used the same technique, although she had never heard him describe it.

First, she gathered stones from the desert and the many arroyos and washes around the hilltop compound. The rocks were of every size and color—purple, black, rusty reds, and deep umbers—and some held petroglyphs or fossils. After gathering the stones, Aenea built wooden forms and set the larger rocks in with their flat sides against the inside face of the form. She then spent days in the broiling sun, shoveling sand from the washes and carting it back to her building site in wheelbarrows, mixing it there with cement to form the concrete that held the stones in place as the mixture hardened. It was a rough concrete/stone concoction—desert masonry, Mr. Wright called it—but it was strangely beautiful, the colorful rocks showing through the surface of the concrete, fissures and textures everywhere. Once in place, the walls were about a meter high and thick enough to hold out the desert heat in the daytime and hold in the inner heat at night. Her shelter was more complex than it first appeared to the eye—it was months before I appreciated the subtle tricks she had pulled in its design.