Well, we had the grassy field. The ship continued hovering and morphed a stairway to the flower-bedecked lawn next to the gazebo. The young woman crossed the stream, hopping from stepping stone to stepping stone with perfect balance, and came grinning toward me up the grassy knoll.

She was in her early twenties. She had the physical grace and sense of presence I remembered from a thousand images of my young friend.

But I had never seen this woman before in my life.

Could Aenea have changed this much in five years? Could she have disguised herself to hide from the Pax? Had I simply forgotten what she looked like? The latter seemed improbable.

No, impossible. The ship had assured me that it had been five years and some months for Aenea if she was waiting on this world for me, but my entire trip—including the cryogenic fugue part—had taken only about four months. I had aged only a few weeks. I could not have forgotten her. I would never forget her.

“Hello, Raul,” said the young woman with dark hair.

“Hello?” I said.

She stepped closer and extended her hand. She had a firm handshake. “I’m Rachel. Aenea’s described you perfectly.” She laughed. “Of course, we haven’t been expecting anyone else to come calling in a starship looking like this…” She waved her hand in the general direction of the ship hanging there like a vertical balloon bobbing softly in the wind.

“How is Aenea?” I said, my voice sounding strange to me. “Where is she?”

“Oh, she is back at the Temple. She’s working. It’s the middle of the busiest work shift. She couldn’t get away. She asked me to come over and help you dispose of your ship.”

She couldn’t get away. What the hell was this? I’d come through literal hell—suffered kidney stones and broken legs, been chased by Pax troopers, dumped into a world with no land, eaten and regurgitated by an alien—and she couldn’t goddamn get away? I bit my lip, resisting the impulse to say what I was thinking.

I admit that emotion was surging rather high at that moment.

“What do you mean—dispose of my ship?” I said. I looked around. “There has to be someplace for it to land.”

“There isn’t really,” said the young woman named Rachel. Looking at her now in the bright sunlight, I realized that she was probably a little older than Aenea would be—mid-twenties perhaps. Her eyes were brown and intelligent, her brown hair was chopped off as carelessly as Aenea used to cut hers, her skin was tanned from long hours in the sun, her hands were callused with work, and there were laugh lines at the corners of her eyes.

“Why don’t we do this,” said Rachel. “Why don’t you get what you need from the ship, take a comlog or communicator so you can call the ship back when you need it, get two skinsuits and two rebreathers out of the storage locker, and then tell the ship to hop back up to the third moon—the second smallest captured asteroid. There’s a deep crater there for it to hide in, but that moon’s in a near geosynchronous orbit and it keeps one face toward this hemisphere all the time. You could tightbeam it and it could be back here in a few minutes.”

I looked suspiciously at her. “Why the skinsuits and rebreathers?” The ship had them. They were designed for benign hard-vacuum environments where true space armor was not required. “The air seems thick enough here,” I said.

“It is,” said Rachel. “There’s a surprisingly rich oxygen atmosphere at this altitude. But Aenea told me to ask you to bring the skinsuits and rebreathers.”

“Why?” I said.

“I don’t know, Raul,” said Rachel. Her eyes were placid, seemingly clear of deceit or guile.

“Why does the ship have to hide?” I said. “Is the Pax here?”

“Not yet,” said Rachel. “But we’ve been expecting them for the last six months or so. Right now, there are no spacecraft on or around Tien Shan… with the exception now of your ship. No aircraft either. No skimmers, no EMV’s, no thopters or copters… only paragliders… the flyers… and they would never be out that far.”

I nodded but hesitated.

“The Dugpas saw something they couldn’t explain today,” continued Rachel. “The speck of your ship against Chomo Lori, I mean. But eventually they explain everything in terms of tendrel, so that won’t be a problem.”

“What are tendrel?” I said. “And who are the Dugpas?”

“Tendrel are signs,” said Rachel. “Divinations within the shamanistic Buddhist tradition prevalent in this region of the Mountains of Heaven. Dugpas are the… well, the word translates literally as “highest.” The people who dwell at the upper altitudes. There are also the Drukpas, the valley people… that is, the lower fissures… and the Drungpas, the wooded valley people… mostly those who live in the great fern forests and bonsai-bamboo stands on the western reaches of Phari Ridge and beyond.”

“So Aenea’s at the Temple?” I said stubbornly, resisting following the young woman’s “suggestion” for hiding the ship.

“Yes.”

“When can I see her?”

“As soon as we walk over there.” Rachel smiled.

“How long have you known Aenea?”

“About four years, Raul.”

“Do you come from this world?”

She smiled again, patient with my interrogation.

“No. When you meet the Dugpas and the others, you’ll see that I’m not native. Most of the people in this region are from Chinese, Tibetan, and other Central Asian stock.”

“Where are you from?” I asked flatly, sounding rude in my own ears.

“I was born on Barnard’s World,” she said. “A backwater farming planet. Cornfields and woods and long evenings and a few good universities, but not much else.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said. It made me more suspicious. The “good universities” that had been Barnard’s World’s claim to fame during the Hegemony had long since been converted to Church academies and seminaries. I had the sudden wish that I could see the flesh of this young woman’s chest—see if there were a cruciform there, I mean. It would be all too easy for me to send the ship away and walk into a Pax trap. “Where did you meet Aenea?” I said. “Here?”

“No, not here. On Amritsar.”

“Amritsar?” I said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s not unusual. Amritsar is a Solmev-marginal world way out back of the Outback. It was only settled about a century ago—refugees from a civil war on Parvati. A few thousand Sikhs and a few thousand Sufi eke out a living there. Aenea was hired to design a desert community center there and I hired on to do the survey and ramrod the construction crew. I’ve been with her ever since.”

I nodded, still hesitating. I was filled with something not quite disappointment, surging like anger but not quite as clear, bordering on jealousy. But that was absurd. “A. Bettik?” I said, feeling a sudden intuition that the android had died in the past five years. “Is he…”

“He headed out yesterday for our biweekly provision trek to Phari Marketplace,” said the woman named Rachel. She touched my upper arm. “A. Bettik’s fine. He should be back by moonrise tonight. Come on. Get your stuff. Tell the ship about hiding on the third moon. You’d rather hear all this stuff from Aenea.”

I ended up taking little more than a change of clothes, good boots, my small binoculars, a small sheath knife, the skinsuits and rebreathers, and a palm-sized com unit-journal from the ship. I stuffed all this into a rucksack, hopped down the steps to the meadow, and told the ship what it should do. My anthropomorphizing had reached the point where I expected the ship to sulk at the idea of going back into hibernation mode—on an airless moon this time—but the ship acknowledged the order, suggested that it check in via tightbeam once daily to make sure that the com unit was functioning, and then it floated up and away, dwindling to a speck and then disappearing, like nothing so much as a balloon that has had its string cut.