It took me a minute of staring before I could speak. “You worked on a cathedral? A Pax cathedral? A Christian church?”

“Of course,” said Aenea calmly. “I labored alongside some of the best stonemasons, glass workers, builders, and craftsmen in the business. I was an apprentice at first, but before we left I was assistant to the chief designer working on the nave.”

I could only shake my head. “And did you… have discussion circles?”

“Yes,” said Aenea. “More came on Renaissance Vector than on any of the other worlds. Thousands of students, before it was over.”

“I’m amazed that you weren’t betrayed.”

“I was,” she said. “But not by one of the students. One of the glass workers turned us in to the local Pax garrison. A. Bettik, Theo, and I barely made it out.”

“Via farcaster,” I said.

“By… ’casting, yes,” said Aenea.

It was only much later that I realized that there had been a slight hesitation in her voice there, an unspoken qualification. “And did others leave with you?”

“Not with me,” she said again. “But hundreds ’cast elsewhere.”

“Where?” I said, mystified. Aenea sighed.

“Do you remember our discussion, Raul, where I said that the Pax thought that I was a virus? And that they were right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, these students of mine are also carrying the virus,” she said. “They had places to go. People to infect.”

Her litany of worlds and jobs went on.

Patawpha for three months, where she had used her treehouse experience to build mansions in the interwoven branches and trunks growing from the endless swamps there.

Amritsar, where she had worked for four standard months in the desert building tent homes and meeting places for the nomad bands of Sikhs and Sufis who wandered the green sands there.

“That’s where you met Rachel,” I said.

“Correct.”

“What is Rachel’s last name?” I said. “She didn’t mention it to me.”

“She has never mentioned it to me, either,” said Aenea and went on with her tale.

From Amritsar, she and A. Bettik and her two female friends had ’cast to Groombridge Dyson D. This world had been a Hegemony terraforming failure, abandoned to its encroaching methane-ammonia glaciers and ice-crystal hurricanes, its dwindling number of colonists retreating to its biodomes and orbital construction shacks. But its people—mostly Suni Muslim engineers from the failed Trans-African Genetic Reclamation Project—stubbornly refused to die during the Fall, and ended up terraforming Groombridge Dyson D into a Laplandic tundra world with breathable air and adapted-Old Earth flora and fauna, including wooly mammoths wandering the equatorial highlands. The millions of hectares of grasslands were perfect for horses—Old Earth horses of the kind that had disappeared during the Tribulations before the homeworld fell into xf—so the gene-designers took their original seedship stock and bred horses by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands. Nomad bands wandered the greenways of the southern continent, living in a kind of symbiosis with the great herds, while the farmers and city folk moved into the high foothills along the equator.

There were violent predators there, evolved and unleashed during the centuries of accelerated and self-directed ARN-ying experimentation: mutant carrion-breed packs and burrowing night terrors, thirty-meter-long grass serpents descended from those from Hyperion’s Sea of Grass and Fuji rock tigers, smart wolves, and IQ-enhanced grizzlies.

The humans had the technology to hunt the adapted killers to extinction in a year or less, but the residents of the world chose a different path: the nomads would take their chances, one-on-one with the predators, protecting the great horse herds as long as the grass grows and the water flows, while the city types would begin work on a wall—a single wall eventually to be more than five thousand kilometers long that would separate the wilder sections of the savage highlands from the horse-herd savannahs and evolving cyclad forests to the south. And the wall was to be more than a wall, it was to become the great linear city of Groombridge Dyson D, thirty meters tall at its lowest, its ramparts resplendent with mosques and minarets, the travelway on top wide enough that three chariots could pass without rubbing wheels.

The colonists were too few and too busy with other projects to work full-time on such a wall, but they programmed robots and decanted androids from their seedship vaults to carry out the labor.

Aenea and her friends joined in this project, working for six standard months as the wall took shape and began its relentless march along the base of the highlands and the edge of the grasslands.

“A. Bettik found two of his siblings there,” said Aenea softly.

“My God,” I whispered. I had almost forgotten. When we were on Sol Draconi Septem some years ago, sitting by the warmth of a heating cube in Father Glaucus’s book-lined study inside a skyscraper that, in turn, was frozen within the eternal glacier of that world’s frozen atmosphere… A. Bettik had talked about one of his reasons for coming on the odyssey with the child, Aenea, and me: he was hoping against logic to find his four siblings—three brothers and a sister. They had been separated shortly after their training period as children—if an android’s accelerated early years could be called “childhood.”

“So he found them?” I said, marveling.

“Two of them,” repeated Aenea. “One of the other males in his growth créche—A. Antibbe—and his sister, A. Darria.”

“Were they like him?” I asked. The old poet had used androids in his empty city of Endymion, but I had not paid much attention to any of them except A. Bettik. Too much had been happening too fast.

“Much like him,” said Aenea. “But very different, as well. Perhaps he will tell you more.”

She wrapped up her story. After six standard months working on the linear city wall on Groombridge Dyson D, they had had to leave.

“Had to leave?” I said. “The Pax?”

“The Commission for Justice and Peace, to be precise,” said Aenea. “We did not want to leave, but we had no choice.”

“What is the Commission for Justice and Peace?” I said. Something about the way she had pronounced the words made the hairs on my arm stand up.

“I’ll explain later,” she said.

“All right,” I said, “but explain something else now.”

Aenea nodded and waited.

“You say you spent five standard months on Ixion,” I said. “Three months on Maui-Covenant, six months on Renaissance Vector, three months on Patawpha, four standard months on Amritsar, about six standard months on—what was it?—Groombridge Dyson D?”

Aenea nodded.

“And you’ve been here about a standard year you say?”

“Yes.”

“That’s only thirty-nine standard months,” I said. “Three standard years and three months.”

She waited. The corners of her mouth twitched slightly, but I realized that she was not going to smile… it looked more as if she was trying to avoid crying. Finally, she said, “You were always good at math, Raul.”

“My trip here took five years’ time-debt,” I said softly. “So that’s about sixty standard months for you, but you’ve only accounted for thirty-nine. Where are the missing twenty-one standard months, kiddo?”

I saw the tears in her eyes. Her mouth was quavering slightly, but she tried to speak in a light tone. “It was sixty-two standard months, one week, and six days for me,” she said. “Five years, two months, and one day time-debt on the ship, about four days accelerating and decelerating, and eight days’ travel time. You forgot your travel time.”

“All right, kiddo,” I said, seeing the emotion well in her. Her hands were shaking. “Do you want to talk about the missing… what was it?”

“Twenty-three months, one week, and six hours,” she said. Almost two standard years, I thought. And she doesn’t want to tell me what happened to her during that time. I had never seen her exercise such rigid control before; it was as if she were trying to hold herself together physically against some terrible centrifugal force.