The Rise of Endymion Part 2

On the fourth morning after her birthday, the dust storms ended and Aenea returned. I happened to be out jogging just after sunrise and saw her coming across the desert from the direction of the McDowell Mountains: she was silhouetted in the morning light, a thin figure with short hair against the corona brilliance, and in that second I thought of the first time I had seen her in the Valley of the Time Tombs on Hyperion.

She grinned when she saw me. "Hey, Boo," she called. It was an old joke based on some book she had read as a very young child.

"Hey, Scout," I called back, answering in the same in-joke language.

We stopped when we were five paces apart. My impulse was to hug her and hold her close and beg her not to disappear again. I did not do that. The rich, low light of morning threw long shadows behind the cholla cacti, greasebushes, and sage, and bathed our already-sunburned skin in an orange glow.

"How're the troops doing?" asked Aenea. I could see that despite her promises to the contrary, she had been fasting during the past three days. She had always been thin, but now her ribs almost showed through her thin cotton s.h.i.+rt. Her lips were dry and cracked. "They upset?" she said.

"They're s.h.i.+tting bricks," I said. For years I'd avoided using my Home Guard vocabulary around the kid, but she was sixteen now. Besides, she had always used a saltier vocabulary than I knew.

Aenea grinned. The brilliant light illuminated the sandy streaks in her short hair. "That'd be good for a bunch of architects, I guess."

I rubbed my chin, feeling the rough stubble there. "Seriously, kiddo. They're pretty upset."

Aenea nodded. "Yeah. They don't know what to do or where to go now that Mr. Wright's gone." She squinted toward the Fellows.h.i.+p compound, which showed up as little more than asymmetrical bits of stone and canvas just visible above the cacti and scrub brush. Sunlight glinted off unseen windows and one of the fountains. "Let's get everybody in the music pavilion and talk," said Aenea, and began striding toward Taliesin.

And thus began our last full day together on Earth.

I AM GOING TO INTERRUPT MYSELF HERE. I HEAR MY own voice on the 'scriber and remember the pause in the telling at this point. What I wanted wanted to do here was tell all about the four years of exile on Old Earth-all about the apprentices and other people at the Taliesin Fellows.h.i.+p, all about the Old Architect and his whims and petty cruelties, as well as about his brilliance and childlike enthusiasms. I wanted to describe the many conversations with Aenea over those forty-eight local months (which-as I never got tired of being amazed by-corresponded perfectly to Hegemony/Pax to do here was tell all about the four years of exile on Old Earth-all about the apprentices and other people at the Taliesin Fellows.h.i.+p, all about the Old Architect and his whims and petty cruelties, as well as about his brilliance and childlike enthusiasms. I wanted to describe the many conversations with Aenea over those forty-eight local months (which-as I never got tired of being amazed by-corresponded perfectly to Hegemony/Pax standard standard months!) and my slow growth of understanding of her incredible insights and abilities. Finally, I wanted to tell of all my excursions during that time-my trip around the Earth in the drops.h.i.+p, the long driving adventures in North America, my fleeting contact with the other islands of humanity huddled around cybrid figures from the human past (the gathering in Israel and New Palestine around the cybrid Jesus of Nazareth was a memorable group to visit), but primarily, when I hear the brief silence on the 'scriber that took the place of these tales, I remember the reason for my omission. months!) and my slow growth of understanding of her incredible insights and abilities. Finally, I wanted to tell of all my excursions during that time-my trip around the Earth in the drops.h.i.+p, the long driving adventures in North America, my fleeting contact with the other islands of humanity huddled around cybrid figures from the human past (the gathering in Israel and New Palestine around the cybrid Jesus of Nazareth was a memorable group to visit), but primarily, when I hear the brief silence on the 'scriber that took the place of these tales, I remember the reason for my omission.

As I said before, I 'scribed these words in the Schrodinger cat box orbiting Armaghast, while awaiting the simultaneous emission of an isotopic particle and the activation of the particle detector. When these two events coincided, the cyanide gas built into the static-energy field around the recycling equipment would be released. Death would not be instantaneous, but near enough. While protesting earlier that I would take my time in telling our story-Aenea's and mine-I realize now that there was some editing, some attempt to get to the important elements before the particle decayed and the gas flowed.

I will not double-guess that decision now, except to say that the four years on Earth would be worth telling about at some other point in time: the ninety people of the Fellows.h.i.+p were decent, complex, devious, and interesting in the way of all intelligent human beings, and their tales should be told. Similarly, my explorations across Earth, both in the drops.h.i.+p and in the 1948 "Woody" station wagon that the Old Architect loaned me, might support an epic poem of their own.

But I am not a poet. But I was a tracker in my hunting-guide days, and my job here is to follow the path of Aenea's growth to womanhood and messiahs.h.i.+p without wandering down too many sidetracks. And so I shall.

THE OLD ARCHITECT ALWAYS REFERRED TO THE FELLOWs.h.i.+P compound as "desert camp." Most of the apprentices referred to it as "Taliesin"-which means "s.h.i.+ning Brow" in Welsh. (Mr. Wright was of Welsh distraction. I spent weeks trying to remember a Pax or Outback world named Welsh, before I remembered that the Old Architect had lived and died before s.p.a.ceflight.) Aenea often referred to the place as "Taliesin West," which suggested to even someone as dull as me that there had to be a Taliesin East.

When I asked her three years earlier, Aenea had explained that the original Mr. Wright had built his first Taliesin Fellows.h.i.+p compound in the early 1930s in Spring Green, Wisconsin-Wisconsin being one of the political and geographical subunits of the ancient North American nation-state called the United States of America. When I asked Aenea if the first Taliesin was like this one, she had said, "Not really. There were a series of Wisconsin Taliesins-both homes and fellows.h.i.+p compounds-and most were destroyed by fire. That's one of the reasons Mr. Wright installed so many pools and fountains here at this compound-sources of water to fight the inevitable fires."

"And his first Taliesin was built in the 1930s?" I said.

Aenea shook her head. "He opened his first Taliesin Fellows.h.i.+p Fellows.h.i.+p in 1932," she said. "But that was mostly a way to get slave labor from his apprentices-both for building his dream and raising food for him-during the Depression." in 1932," she said. "But that was mostly a way to get slave labor from his apprentices-both for building his dream and raising food for him-during the Depression."

"What was the Depression?"

"Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state," Aenea said. "Remember, the economy wasn't really global then, and it depended upon private money inst.i.tutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money-actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare."

"Jesus," I said.

"Precisely," said Aenea. "Anyway, long before that, in 1909 A.D A.D., the middle-aged Mr. Wright abandoned his wife and six children and ran away to Europe with a married woman."

I admit that I blinked at this news. The thought of the Old Architect-a man in his mid-eighties when we had met him four years ago-with a s.e.x life, and a scandalous one at that, took some getting used to. I also wondered what all this had to do with my question about Taliesin East.

Aenea was getting to that. "When he returned with the other woman," she said, smiling at my rapt attention, "he began building the first Taliesin-his home in Wisconsin-for Mamah..."

"His mother?" I said, totally confused.

"Mamah Borthwick," said Aenea, spelling the first name for me. "Mrs. Cheney. The Other Woman."

"Oh."

The smile fading, she continued. "The scandal had destroyed his architectural practice and made him a branded man in the United States. But he built Taliesin and forged ahead, trying to find new patrons. His first wife, Catherine, would not give him a divorce. The newspapers-those were databanks printed on paper and distributed regularly-thrived on such gossip and fanned the flames of the scandal, not letting it die."

We had been walking in the courtyard when I asked Aenea the simple question about Taliesin, and I remember pausing by the fountain during this part of her answer. I was always amazed at what this child knew.

"Then," she said, "on August 15, 1914, a worker at Taliesin went crazy, killed Mamah Borthwick and her son John and daughter Martha with a hatchet, burned their bodies, set fire to the compound, and then killed four of Mr. Wright's friends and apprentices before swallowing acid himself. The entire place burned down."

"My G.o.d," I whispered, looking toward the dining hall where the cybrid Old Architect was having lunch with a few of his oldest apprentices even as we spoke.

"He never gave up," said Aenea. "A few days later, on August 18, Mr. Wright was touring an artificial lake on the Taliesin property when the dam he was standing on gave way and he was swept into a rain-swollen creek. Against all odds, he swam out of the torrent. A few weeks later he started to rebuild."

I thought that I understood then what she was telling me about the Old Architect. "Why aren't we at that that Taliesin?" I asked as we strolled away from the bubbling fountain in the desert courtyard. Taliesin?" I asked as we strolled away from the bubbling fountain in the desert courtyard.

Aenea shook her head. "Good question. I doubt if it even exists in this rebuilt version of Earth. It was important to Mr. Wright, though. He died here...near Taliesin West...on April 9, 1959, but he was buried back near the Wisconsin Taliesin."

I stopped walking then. The thought of the Old Architect dying was a new and disturbing thought. Everything about our exile had been steady-state, calm and self-renewing, but now Aenea had reminded me that everything and everyone ends. Or had, before the Pax introduced the cruciform and physical resurrection to humanity. But no one at the Fellows.h.i.+p-perhaps no one on this kidnapped Earth-had submitted to a cruciform.

That conversation had been three years earlier. This morning, the week after the cybrid Old Architect's death and incongruous burial in the small mausoleum he had built out in the desert, we were ready to face the consequences of death without resurrection and the end of things.

WHILE AENEA WENT OFF TO THE BATH AND LAUNDRY pavilion to wash up, I found A. Bettik and the two of us got busy with spreading the word of the meeting in the music pavilion. The blue-skinned android did not act surprised that Aenea, the youngest of us, was calling and leading the meeting. Both A. Bettik and I had watched silently over the past few years as the girl became the locus of the Fellows.h.i.+p.

I jogged from the fields to the dormitories, from the dormitories to the kitchen-where I rang the large bell set in the fanciful bell tower above the stairway to the guest deck. Those apprentices or workers whom I did not contact personally should hear the bell and come to investigate.

From the kitchen, where I left cooks and some of the apprentices taking their ap.r.o.ns off and wiping their hands, I announced the meeting to people having coffee in the large Fellows.h.i.+p dining room (the view from this beautiful room looked north toward the McDowell peaks, so some had watched Aenea and me return and knew that something was up), and then I poked my head in Mr. Wright's smaller, private dining room-empty-and then jogged over to the drafting room. This was probably the most attractive room in the compound with its long rows of drafting tables and filing cabinets set under the sloping canvas roof, the morning light flooding in through the two rows of offset windows. The sun was high enough now to fall on the roof and the smell of heated canvas was as pleasant as the b.u.t.ter-rich light. Aenea had once told me that it was this sense of camping out-of working within the confines of light and canvas and stone-that had been the real reason for Mr. Wright coming west to the second Taliesin.

There were ten or twelve of the apprentices in the drafting room, all standing around-none working now that the Old Architect was no longer around to suggest projects-and I told them that Aenea would like us to gather in the music pavilion. None protested. None grumbled or made any comment about a sixteen-year-old telling ninety of her elders to come together in the middle of a workday. If anything, the apprentices looked relieved to hear that she was back and taking charge.

From the drafting room I went to the library where I had spent so many happy hours and then checked the conference room, lit only by four glowing panels in the floor, and announced the meeting to the people I found in both places. Then I jogged jogged down the concrete path under the covered walkway of desert masonry and peered in the cabaret theater where the Old Architect had loved to show movies on Sat.u.r.day nights. This place had always tickled me-its thick stone walls and roof, the long descending s.p.a.ce with plywood benches covered with red cus.h.i.+ons, the well-worn red carpet on the floor, and the many hundreds of white Christmas lights running back and forth on the ceiling. When we first arrived, Aenea and I were amazed to find that the Old Architect demanded that his apprentices and their families "dress for dinner" on Sat.u.r.days-ancient tuxedoes and black ties, of the sort one sees in the oldest history holos. The women wore strange dresses out of antiquity. Mr. Wright provided the formal clothes for those who failed to bring them in their flight to Earth through Time Tombs or far-caster. down the concrete path under the covered walkway of desert masonry and peered in the cabaret theater where the Old Architect had loved to show movies on Sat.u.r.day nights. This place had always tickled me-its thick stone walls and roof, the long descending s.p.a.ce with plywood benches covered with red cus.h.i.+ons, the well-worn red carpet on the floor, and the many hundreds of white Christmas lights running back and forth on the ceiling. When we first arrived, Aenea and I were amazed to find that the Old Architect demanded that his apprentices and their families "dress for dinner" on Sat.u.r.days-ancient tuxedoes and black ties, of the sort one sees in the oldest history holos. The women wore strange dresses out of antiquity. Mr. Wright provided the formal clothes for those who failed to bring them in their flight to Earth through Time Tombs or far-caster.

That first Sat.u.r.day, Aenea had shown up dressed in a tuxedo, s.h.i.+rt, and black tie rather than one of the dresses provided. When I first saw the Old Architect's shocked expression, I was sure that he was going to throw us out of the Fellows.h.i.+p and make us eke out a living in the desert, but then the old face creased into a smile and within seconds he was laughing. He never asked Aenea to dress in anything else.

After the formal Sat.u.r.day dinners, we would either have a group musical event or a.s.semble in the cabaret theater for a movie-one of the ancient, celluloid kinds that had to be projected by a machine. It was rather like learning to enjoy cave art. Both Aenea and I loved the films he chose-ancient twentieth-century flat things, many in black and white-and for some reason that he never explained, Mr. Wright preferred to watch them with the "sound track," optical jiggles and wiggles, visible on the screen. Actually, we'd watched films there for a year before one of the other apprentices told us that they had been made to be watched without without the sound track visible. the sound track visible.

Today the cabaret theater was empty, the Christmas lights dark. I jogged on, moving from room to room, building to building, rounding up apprentices, workers, and family members until I met A. Bettik by the fountain and we joined the others in the large music pavilion.

The pavilion was a large s.p.a.ce, with a broad stage and six rows of eighteen upholstered seats in each row. The walls were of redwood painted Cherokee Red (the Old Architect's favorite color) and the usual thick desert masonry. A grand piano and a few potted plants were the only things on the red-carpeted stage. Overhead, stretched tight above a gridwork of wood and steel ribs, was the usual white canvas. Aenea had once told me that after the death of the first Mr. Wright, plastic had taken the place of canvas to relieve the necessity of replacing canvas every couple of years. But upon this this Mr. Wright's return, the plastic was ripped out-as was the gla.s.s above the main drafting room-so that pure light through white canvas would be the rule once again. Mr. Wright's return, the plastic was ripped out-as was the gla.s.s above the main drafting room-so that pure light through white canvas would be the rule once again.

A. Bettik and I stood near the rear of the music pavilion as the murmuring apprentices and other workers took their seats, some of the construction workers standing on the aisle steps or at the back with the android and me, as if worried about tracking mud and dust onto the rich carpet and upholstery. When Aenea entered through the side curtains and jumped to the stage, all the conversation stopped.

The acoustics were good in Mr. Wright's music pavilion, but Aenea had always been able to project her voice without seeming to raise it. She spoke softly. "Thank you for gathering. I thought we should talk."

Jaev Peters, one of the older apprentices, immediately stood up in the fifth row. "You were gone, Aenea. In the desert again."

The girl on the stage nodded.

"Did you talk to the Lions and Tigers and Bears?"

No one in the audience t.i.ttered or giggled. The question was asked in deadly seriousness and the answer was awaited by ninety people just as seriously. I should explain.

It all began in the Cantos Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago. That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cybers.p.a.ce webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony, the AI TechnoCore had used their secret farcaster and fatline technologies to weave hundreds of dataspheres into a single, secret, interstellar information medium called the megasphere. But, according to the Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago. That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cybers.p.a.ce webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony, the AI TechnoCore had used their secret farcaster and fatline technologies to weave hundreds of dataspheres into a single, secret, interstellar information medium called the megasphere. But, according to the Cantos Cantos, Aenea's father-the cybrid Jorm Keats-had traveled in disembodied datapersona form to the mega-sphere's Core and discovered that there was a larger datumplane medium, perhaps larger than our galaxy, which even the Core AIs were afraid to explore because it was full of "lions and tigers and bears"-those were Ummon the AI's words. These were the beings-or intelligences-or G.o.ds, for all we knew-who had kidnapped the Earth and brought it here before the Core could destroy it a millennium ago. These Lions and Tigers and Bears were the bugaboo guardians of our world. No one in the Fellows.h.i.+p had ever seen any of these ent.i.ties, or spoken to them, or had any solid evidence of their existence. No one except Aenea.

"No," said the girl on the stage, "I didn't talk to them." She looked down as if embarra.s.sed. She was always reticent to talk about this. "But I think I heard them."

"They spoke to you?" said Jaev Peters. The pavilion was hushed.

"No," said Aenea. "I didn't say that. I just...heard them. A bit like when you overhear someone else's conversation through a dormitory wall."

There was a rustle of amus.e.m.e.nt at this. For all the thick stone walls on the Fellows.h.i.+p property, the dorm part.i.tions were notably thin.

"All right," said Bets Kimbal from the first row. Bets was the chief cook and a large, sensible woman. "Tell us what they said."

Aenea stepped up to the edge of the red-carpeted stage and looked out at her elders and colleagues. "I can tell you this," she said softly. "There'll be no more food and supplies from the Indian Market. That's gone."

It was as if she had set off a grenade in the music pavilion. When the babble began to subside, one of the biggest of the construction workers, a man named Hussan, shouted over the noise. "What do you mean it's gone? Where do we get our food?"

There was good reason for the panic. In Mr. Wright's day, way back in the twentieth century, his Fellows.h.i.+p desert camp had been about fifty kilometers from a large town called Phoenix. Unlike the Depression-era Wisconsin Taliesin, where apprentices raised crops in the rich soil even while they worked on Mr. Wright's construction plans, this desert camp had never been able to grow its own food. So they drove to Phoenix and bartered or paid out their primitive coins and paper money for basic supplies. The Old Architect had always depended upon the largesse of patrons-large loans never to be paid back-for such month-to-month survival.

Here in our rea.s.sembled desert camp, there were no towns. The only road-two gravel ruts-led west into hundreds of miles of emptiness. I knew this because I had flown over the area in the drops.h.i.+p and driven it in the Old Architect's ground-car. But about thirty klicks from the compound there was a weekly Indian market where we had bartered craft items for food and basic materials. It had been there for years before Aenea's and my arrival; everyone had obviously expected it to be there forever.

"What do you mean it's gone?" repeated Hussan in a hoa.r.s.e shout. "Where'd the Indians go? Were they just cybrid illusions, like Mr. Wright?"

Aenea made a gesture with her hands that I had grown accustomed to over the years-a graceful setting-aside motion that I had come to see as a physical a.n.a.log of the Zen expression "mu," which, in the right context, can mean "unask the question."

"The market's gone because we won't need it anymore," said Aenea. "The Indians are real enough-Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni-but they have their own lives to live, their own experiments to conduct. Their trading with us has been...a favor."

The crowd became angry at that, but eventually they settled down again. Bets Kimbal stood. "What do we do, child?"

Aenea sat on the edge of the stage as if trying to become one with the waiting, expectant audience. "The Fellows.h.i.+p is over," she said. "That part of our lives has to end."

One of the younger apprentices was shouting from the back of the pavilion. "No it doesn't! Mr. Wright could still return! He was a cybrid, remember...a construct! The Core...or the Lions and Tigers and Bears...whoever shaped him can send him back to us..."

Aenea shook her head, sadly but firmly. "No. Mr. Wright is gone. The Fellows.h.i.+p is over. Without the food and materials the Indians brought from so far away, this desert camp can't last a month. We have to go."

It was a young female apprentice named Peret who spoke quietly into the silence. "Where, Aenea?"

Perhaps it was at this moment that I first realized how this entire group had given themselves over to the young woman I had known as a child. When the Old Architect was around, giving lectures, holding forth in seminars and drafting-room bull sessions, leading his flock on picnics and swimming outings in the mountains, demanding solicitude and the best food, the reality of Aenea's leaders.h.i.+p had been somewhat masked. But now it was evident.

"Yes," someone else called from the center of the rising rows of seats, "where, Aenea?"

My friend opened her hands in another gesture I had learned. Rather than Unask the question Unask the question, this one said, You must answer your own question You must answer your own question. Aloud, she said, "There are two choices. Each of you traveled here either by farcaster or through the Time Tombs. You can go back by way of farcaster..."

"No!"

"How can we?"

"Never...I'd rather die!"

"No! The Pax will find us and kill us!"

The cries were immediate and from the heart. It was the sound of terror made verbal. I smelled fear in the room the way I used to smell it on animals caught in leg traps on the moors of Hyperion.

Aenea lifted a hand and the outcries faded. "You can return to Pax s.p.a.ce by farcaster, or you can stay on Earth and try to fend for yourself."

There were murmurs and I could hear relief at the option of not returning. I understood that feeling-the Pax had come to be a bogeyman to me, as well. The thought of returning there sent me gasping up out of sleep at least once a week.

"But if you stay here," continued the girl seated on the edge of Mr. Wright's music stage, "you will be outcasts. All of the groups of human beings here are involved in their own projects, their own experiments. You will not fit in there."

People shouted questions about that, demanding answers to mysteries not understood during their long stay here. But Aenea continued with what she was saying. "If you stay here, you will waste what Mr. Wright has taught you and what you came to learn about yourself. The Earth does not need architects and builders. Not now. We have to go back."

Jaev Peters spoke again. His voice was brittle, but not angry. "And does the Pax need builders and architects? To build its cross-d.a.m.ned churches?"

"Yes," said Aenea.

Jaev pounded the back of the seat in front of him with his large fist. "But they'll capture or kill us if they learn who we are...where we've been!"

"Yes," said Aenea.

Bets Kimbal said, "Are you going back, child?"

"Yes," said Aenea and pushed herself away from the stage.

Everyone was standing now, shouting or talking to the people next to them. It was Jaev Peters who spoke the thoughts of the ninety Fellows.h.i.+p orphans. "Can we go with you, Aenea?"

The girl sighed. Her face, as sunburned and alert as it looked this morning, also looked tired. "No," she said. "I think that leaving here is like dying or being born. We each have to do it alone." She smiled. "Or in very small groups."

The room fell silent then. When Aenea spoke, it was as if a single instrument were picking up where the orchestra had stopped. "Raul will leave first," she said. "Tonight. One by one, each of you will find the right farcaster portal. I will help you. I will be the last to leave Earth. But leave I will, and within a few weeks. We all must go."

People pushed forward then, still silent, but moving closer to the girl with the short-cropped hair. "But some of us will meet again," said Aenea. "I feel certain that some of us will meet again."

I heard the flip side of that rea.s.suring prediction: some of us would not survive to meet again.

"Well," boomed Bets Kimbal, standing with one broad arm around Aenea, "we have enough food in the kitchen for one last feast. Lunch today will be a meal you'll remember for years! If you have to travel, as my mum used to say, never travel on an empty stomach. Who's to help me in the kitchen then?"

The groups broke up then, families and friends in cl.u.s.ters, loners standing as if stunned, everyone moving closer to Aenea as we began filing out of the music pavilion. I wanted to grab her at that moment, shake her until her wisdom teeth fell out, and demand, What the h.e.l.l do you mean-"Raul will leave first...tonight." Who the h.e.l.l are you to tell me to leave you behind? And how do you think you can make me? What the h.e.l.l do you mean-"Raul will leave first...tonight." Who the h.e.l.l are you to tell me to leave you behind? And how do you think you can make me? But she was too far away and too many people were pressing around her. The best I could do was stride along behind the crowd as it moved toward the kitchen and dining area, anger written in my face, fists, muscles, and walk. But she was too far away and too many people were pressing around her. The best I could do was stride along behind the crowd as it moved toward the kitchen and dining area, anger written in my face, fists, muscles, and walk.

Once I saw Aenea glance back, straining to find me over the heads of the crowd around her, and her eyes pleaded, Let me explain Let me explain.

I stared back stonily, giving her nothing.

IT WAS ALMOST DUSK WHEN SHE JOINED ME IN THE large garage Mr. Wright had ordered built half a klick east of the compound. The structure was open on the sides except for canvas curtains, but it had thick stone columns supporting a permanent redwood roof; it had been built to shelter the drop-s.h.i.+p in which Aenea, A. Bettik, and I had arrived.

I had pulled back the main canvas door and was standing in the open hatch of the drops.h.i.+p when I saw Aenea crossing the desert toward me. On my wrist was the comlog bracelet that I had not worn in more than a year: the thing held much of the memory of our former s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p-the Consul's s.h.i.+p front centuries ago-and it had been my liaison and tutor when I had learned to fly the drops.h.i.+p. I did not need it now-the comlog memory had been downloaded into the drops.h.i.+p and I had become rather good at piloting the drops.h.i.+p on my own-but it made me feel more secure. The comlog was also running a systems check on the s.h.i.+p: chatting with itself, you might say.

Aenea stood just within the folded canvas. The sunset threw long shadows behind her and painted the canvas red. "How's the drops.h.i.+p?" she said.