Aenea’s farcaster had been built into an adobe house in a pueblo north of the empty city called Santa Fe. A. Bettik had farcast with her. I blinked in jealousy at this, but said nothing.

Her first farcast had brought her to a high-gravity world called Ixion. The Pax had a presence there, but it was concentrated primarily in the opposite hemisphere. Ixion had never recovered properly from the Fall, and the high, jungle plateau where Aenea and A. Bettik had emerged was a maze of overgrown ruins populated primarily by warring tribes of neo-Marxists and Native American resurgencists, this volatile mixture further destabilized by bands of renegade and roving ARN-ists who were attempting to bring back all recorded species of Old Earth dinosaur.

Aenea made the tale funny—hiding A. Bettik’s blue skin and obvious android status with great daubs of the decorative face paint the locals used, the audacity of a sixteen-year-old girl demanding money—or in this case, food and furs in barter—for heading up the reconstruction efforts in the old Ixion cities of Canbar, Iliumut, and Maoville. But it had worked. Not only had Aenea helped in the redesign and rebuilding of three of the old city centers and countless small homes, but she had started a series of “discussion circles” that brought listeners in from a dozen of the warring tribes.

Here Aenea was being circumspect, I knew, but I wanted to know what these “discussion circles” were all about.

“Just things,” she said. “They would raise the topic, I would suggest some things to think about, and people would talk.”

“Did you teach them?” I asked, thinking of the prophecy that the child of the John Keats cybrid would be the One Who Teaches.

“In the Socratic sense, I guess,” said Aenea.

“What’s that… oh, yeah.” I remembered the Plato she had steered me toward in the Taliesin library. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, had taught by questioning, drawing out truths that people already held within themselves.

I had thought that technique highly dubious, at best. She went on. Some of the members of her discussion group had become devoted listeners, returning every evening and following her when she moved from ruined city to ruined city on Ixion.

“You mean disciples,” I said.

Aenea frowned. “I don’t like that word much, Raul.”

I folded my arms and looked out at the alpenglow illuminating the cloudtops many kilometers below and the brilliant evening light on the northern peak. “You may not like it, but it sounds like the correct word to me, kiddo. Disciples follow their teacher wherever she travels, trying to glean one last bit of knowledge from her.”

“Students follow their teacher,” said Aenea.

“All right,” I said, not willing to derail the story by arguing. “Go on.”

There was not much more to tell about Ixion, she said.

She and A. Bettik were on the world about one local year, five months standard. Most of the building had been with stone blocks and her design had been ancient-classical, almost Greek.

“What about the Pax?” I said. “Did they ever come sniffing around?”

“Some of the missionaries took part in the discussions,” said Aenea. “One of them… a Father Clifford… became good friends with A. Bettik.”

“Didn’t he—they—turn you in? They must still be hunting for us.”

“I am sure that Father Clifford didn’t,” said Aenea. “But eventually some of the Pax troopers began looking for us in the western hemisphere where we were working. The tribes hid us for another month. Father Clifford was coming to evening discussions even when the skimmers were flying back and forth over the jungle looking for us.”

“What happened?” I felt like a two-year-old who would ask questions just to keep the other person talking. It had only been a few months of separation—including the dream-ridden cold sleep—but I had forgotten exactly how much I loved the sound of my young friend’s voice.

“Nothing, really,” she said. “I finished the last job—an old amphitheater for plays and town meetings, fittingly enough—and A. Bettik and I left. Some of the… students… left as well.”

I blinked. “With you?” Rachel had said that she had met Aenea on a world called Amritsar and traveled here with her. Perhaps Theo had come from Ixion.

“No, no one came with me from Ixion,” Aenea said softly. “They had other places to go. Things to teach to others.”

I looked at her for a moment. “You mean the Lions and Tigers and Bears are allowing others to farcast now? Or are all the old portals opening?”

“No,” answered Aenea, although to which question I was not sure. “No, the farcasters are as dead as ever. It’s just… well… a few special cases.” Again I did not press the issue. She went on.

After Ixion, she had ’cast to the world of Maui-Covenant.

“Siri’s world!” I said, remembering Grandam’s voice teaching me the cadences of the Hyperion Cantos. That had been the locale for one of the pilgrims’ tales.

Aenea nodded and continued. Maui-Covenant had been battered by revolution and Hegemony attacks way back during the Web, had recovered during the Fall interregnum, had been recolonized during the Pax expansion without the help of the locals who, in the best Siri tradition, had fought from their motile isles and alongside their dolphin companions until Pax Fleet and Swiss Guard had put their boots down hard. Now Maui-Covenant was being Christianized with a vengeance, the residents of the one large continent, the Equatorial Archipelago, and the thousands of migrating motile isles being sent to “Christian academies” for reeducation.

But Aenea and A. Bettik had stepped through to a motile isle still belonging to the rebels—groups of neo-pagans called Sirists who sailed at night, floated among the traveling archipelagoes of empty isles during the daylight, and who fought the Pax at every turn. “What did you build?” I asked. I thought that I remembered from the Cantos that the motile isles carried little except treehouses under their sail-trees.

“Treehouses,” said Aenea, grinning. “Lots of treehouses. Also some underwater domes. That’s where the pagans were spending most of their time.”

“So you designed treehouses.”

She shook her head. “Are you kidding? These are—next to the missing God’s Grove Templars—the best treehouse builders in human space. I studied how to build treehouses. They were gracious enough to let A. Bettik and me help.”

“Slave labor,” I said.

“Exactly.”

She had spent only some three standard months on Maui-Covenant. That is where she had met Theo Bernard.

“A pagan rebel?” I said.

“A runaway Christian,” corrected Aenea. “She had come to Maui-Covenant as a colonist. She fled the colonies and joined the Sirists.”

I was frowning without realizing it. “She carries a cruciform?” I said. Born-again Christians still made me nervous.

“Not anymore,” said Aenea.

“But how…” I knew of no way that a Christian with the cross could rid herself of a cruciform, short of the secret ritual of excommunication, which only the Church could perform.

“I’ll explain later,” said Aenea. Before her tale was done, this phrase would be used more than a few times.

After Maui-Covenant, she and A. Bettik and Theo Bernard had farcast to Renaissance Vector.

“Renaissance Vector!” I almost shouted. That was a Pax stronghold. We had almost been shot down on Renaissance Vector. It was a hyper-industrialized world, all cities and robot factories and Pax centers.

“Renaissance Vector.” Aenea smiled.

It had not been easy. They had been forced to disguise A. Bettik as a burn victim with a synflesh mask. It had been uncomfortable for him for the six months they were there.

“What jobs did you do there?” I asked, finding it hard to imagine my friend and her friends staying hidden in the thronging world-city that was Renaissance Vector.

“Just one job,” said Aenea. “We worked on the new cathedral in Da Vinci—St. Matthew’s.”