Дэн Симмонс: The Rise of Endymion

“He seemed to know,” Aenea said softly. “He’s been calling in each of his apprentices for the past month. Imparting some last bit of wisdom.”

“What last bit of wisdom did he share with you?” I asked. “I mean, if it’s not a secret or too personal.”

Aenea smiled over the steaming mug of tea.

“He reminded me that the patron will always agree to pay twice what the bid was if you send along the extra expenses bit by bit once construction has started and the structure is taking shape. He said that was beyond the point of no return, so the client was hooked like a trout on a six-pound line.”

Both A. Bettik and I laughed. It was not a disrespectful laugh—the Old Architect had been one of those rare creatures, a true genius combined with an overpowering personality—but even when thinking of him with sadness and affection, we could recognize the selfishness and deviousness that had also been part of his personality. And I don’t mean to be coy here by referring to him only as the Old Architect: the cybrid’s personality template had been reconstructed from a pre-Hegira human named Frank Lloyd Wright who had worked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, A.D. But while everyone at the Taliesin Fellowship had referred to him respectfully as Mr. Wright, including even those older apprentices who were his age, I had always thought of him as the Old Architect because of things Aenea had said about her future mentor before we came here to Old Earth.

As if thinking along these same lines, A. Bettik said, “It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?” said Aenea.

The android smiled and rubbed his left arm where it ended at a smooth stump just below the elbow. It is a habit he had developed over the past few years. The autosurgeon on the dropship that had carried us through the farcaster from God’s Grove had kept the android alive, but his chemistry had been sufficiently different to prevent the ship from growing him a new arm. “I mean,” he said, “that despite the ascendancy of the Church in the affairs of humankind, the question of whether human beings have a soul which leaves the body after death has yet to be definitely answered. Yet in Mr. Wright’s case, we know that his cybrid personality still exists separate from his body—or at least did for some time after the moment of his death.”

“Do we know that for sure?” I said. The tea was warm and good. Aenea and I bought it—traded for it actually—at the Indian market located in the desert where the city of Scottsdale should have been.

It was Aenea who answered my question. “Yes. My father’s cybrid personality survived the destruction of his body and was stored in the Schrön Loop in Mother’s skull. Even after that, we know that it had a separate existence in the megasphere and then resided in the Consul’s ship for a time. A cybrid’s personality survives as a sort of holistic wave front propagated along the matrices of the datumplane or megasphere until it returns to the AI source in the Core.”

I had known this but never understood it. “Okay,” I said, “but where did Mr. Wright’s AI-based personality wave front go? There can’t be any connections to the Core out here in the Magellanic Cloud. There are no dataspheres here.”

Aenea set down her empty mug. “There has to be a connection, or Mr. Wright and the other reconstructed cybrid personalities assembled here on Earth couldn’t have existed. Remember, the TechnoCore used the Planck space between the farcaster portals as their medium and hiding place before the dying Hegemony destroyed the farcaster openings to it.”

“The Void Which Binds,” I said, repeating the phrase from the old poet’s Cantos.

“Yeah,” said Aenea. “Although I always thought that was a dumb name.”

“Whatever it’s called,” I said, “I don’t understand how it can reach here… a different galaxy.”

“The medium the Core used for farcasters reaches everywhere,” said Aenea. “It permeates space and time.” My young friend frowned. “No, that’s not right, space and time are bound up in it… the Void Which Binds transcends space and time.”

I looked around. The lantern light was enough to fill the little tent structure, but outside it was dark and the wind howled. “Then the Core can reach here?”

Aenea shook her head. We had held this discussion before. I had not understood the concept then.

I did not understand it now.

“These cybrids are connected to AI’s which aren’t really part of the Core,” she said. “Mr. Wright’s persona wasn’t. My father… the second Keats cybrid… wasn’t.”

This was the part I had never understood. “The Cantos said that the Keats cybrids—including your father—were created by Ummon, a Core AI. Ummon told your father that the cybrids were a Core experiment.”

Aenea stood and walked to the opening of her apprentice shelter. The canvas on either side rippled with the wind, but kept its shape and held the sand outside. She had built it well.

“Uncle Martin wrote the Cantos,” she said. “He told the truth as best he could. But there were elements he did not understand.”

“Me too,” I said and dropped the matter.

I walked over and put my arm around Aenea, feeling the subtle changes in her back and shoulder and arm since the first time I had hugged her four years earlier. “Happy birthday, kiddo.”

She glanced up at me and then laid her head against my chest. “Thank you, Raul.”

There had been other changes in my youthful friend since first we met when she was just turning twelve, standard. I could say that she had grown to womanhood in the intervening years, but despite the rounding of her hips and obvious breasts beneath the old sweatshirt she wore, I still did not see her as a woman. No longer a child, of course, but not yet a woman. She was… Aenea. The luminous dark eyes were the same—intelligent, questioning, a bit sad with some secret knowledge—and the effect of being physically touched when she turned the attention of her gaze on you was as strong as ever.

Her brown hair had grown somewhat darker in the past few years, she had cut it the previous spring—now it was shorter than mine had been when I was in the Home Guard military on Hyperion a dozen years earlier, when I set my hand on her head the hair was barely long enough to rise between my fingers—but I could see some glints of the old blond streaks there, brought out by the long days she spent working in the Arizona sunlight. As we stood there listening to the blowing dust scraping canvas, A. Bettik a silent shadow behind us, Aenea took my hand in both of hers. She might have been sixteen that day, a young woman rather than a girl, but her hands were still tiny in my huge palm.

“Raul?” she said. I looked at her and waited. “Will you do something for me?” she said softly, very softly.

“Yes.” I did not hesitate.

She squeezed my hand and looked directly into me then. “Will you do something for me tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

Neither her gaze nor the pressure on my hand let up. “Will you do anything for me?” This time I did hesitate. I knew what such a vow might entail, even though this strange and wonderful child had never asked me to do anything for her—had not asked that I come with her on this mad odyssey. That had been a promise I had made to the old poet, Martin Silenus, before I had even met Aenea. I knew that there were things that I could not—in good conscience or bad—bring myself to do. But foremost among those things I was incapable of doing was denying Aenea.

“Yes,” I said, “I will do anything you ask.”

At that moment I knew that I was lost—and resurrected.

Aenea did not speak then, but only nodded, squeezed my hand a final time, and turned back to the light, the cake, and our waiting android friend. On the next day I was to learn what her request truly meant, and how difficult it would be to honor my vow.