Дэн Симмонс: Endymion

I touched her shoulder. She turned and smiled at me, not mechanically or dreamily, but with an almost radiant vitality.

“Where are we, Aenea?”

“Fallingwater,” she said. “Bear Run. In western Pennsylvania.”

“Is that a nation?” I said.

“Province,” said Aenea. “State, I mean. In the former United States of America. North American continent. Planet Earth.”

“Earth,” I repeated. I looked around. “Where is everybody? Where’s your architect?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know. We should know soon.”

“How long are we going to stay here, kiddo?” I had thoughts of laying in food, weapons, and other equipment while A. Bettik recovered and before we headed off again.

“A few years,” said Aenea. “No more than six or seven, I think.”

“Years?” I had stopped on the upper terrace where we had stepped out at the head of the flight of stairs. “Years?”

“I have to study under this man, Raul. I have to learn something.”

“About architecture?”

“Yes, and about myself.”

“And what will I be doing while you’re… learning about yourself?”

Instead of making a joke, Aenea nodded seriously. “I know. It doesn’t seem fair. But there will be a few things for you to do while I’m… growing up.”

I waited.

“The Earth needs to be explored,” she said. “My mother and father visited here. It was Mother’s idea that the… lions and tigers and bears—the forces that stole the Earth away before the TechnoCore could destroy it… it was Mother’s idea that they were running experiments here.”

“Experiments?” I said. “What kind of experiments?”

“Experiments in genius, mostly,” said Aenea. “Although perhaps experiments in humanity would be a better phrase.”

“Explain.”

Aenea gestured toward the house around us. “This place was completed in 1937.”

“A.D. ?” I said.

“Yes. I’m sure it was destroyed in the twenty-first-century North American class riots, if not before. Whoever brought the Earth here rebuilt it somehow. Just as they rebuilt nineteenth-century Rome for my father.”

“Rome?” I felt that I was standing around with my thumb in my ear repeating everything the child said. It was one of those days.

“The Rome where John Keats spent his last days,” said Aenea. “But that’s another story.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I read it in your Uncle Martin’s Cantos. And I didn’t understand it then, either.”

Aenea made the gesture with her hands that I was growing used to. “I don’t understand it, Raul. But whoever brought the Earth here brings back people as well as old cities and buildings. They create… dynamics.”

“Through resurrection?” My voice was doubtful.

“No… more like… well, my father was a cybrid. His persona resided in an AI matrix, his body was human.”

“But you’re not a cybrid.”

Aenea shook her head. “You know I’m not.” She led me farther out on the terrace. Below us, the stream rushed over the little waterfall. “There will be other things for you to do while I’m… in school.”

“Such as?”

“Besides exploring all of the Earth and figuring out just what these… entities… are up to here, you’ll need to leave before I do and go back to fetch our ship.”

“Our ship?” I resolved to pull my metaphorical thumb out of my ear. “You mean travel by farcaster to get the Consul’s ship.”

“Yep.”

“And bring it here?”

She shook her head. “That would take a few centuries. We’ll agree to meet somewhere in the former Web.”

I rubbed my cheek, feeling the whiskers scratch. “Anything else? Any other little ten-year odysseys to keep me occupied?”

“Just the trip to the Outback to see the Ousters,” she said. “But I’ll be going with you on that trip.”

“Good,” I said. “I hope that’s all the adventures that we’ll have waiting for us. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know.”

I was trying to be light about all this, but Aenea’s eyes were deep and serious. She put her fingers in my palm. “No, Raul,” she said. “That’s just the beginning.”

The comlog beeped and tapped. “What?” I said with a spasm of concern about A. Bettik.

“I’ve just received coordinates on the common band,” came the comlog/ship’s voice. It sounded puzzled.

“Any voice or visual transmissions?” I said.

“No, just travel coordinates and optimum cruise altitudes. It’s a flight plan.”

“To where?” I said.

“A point on this continent some three thousand kilometers to the southwest of our current position,” said the ship.

I looked at Aenea. She shook her head.

“No idea?” I said.

“An idea,” she said. “Not a certainty. Let’s go be surprised.”

Her small hand was still in mine. I did not release it as we walked back through the yellow leaves and morning sunlight to the waiting dropship.

I once said to you that you were reading this for the wrong reason. What I should have said was that I was writing this for the wrong reason.

I have filled these seamless days and nights and smooth pages of microvellum with memories of Aenea, of Aenea as a child, with not one word of her life as the messiah whom you must know and perhaps whom you mistakenly worship. But I have not written these pages for you, I discover, nor have I written them for myself. I have brought Aenea the child alive in my writing because I want Aenea the woman to be alive—despite logic, despite fact, despite all loss of hope.

Each morning—each self-programmed brightening of the lights, I should say—I awaken in this three-by-six-meter Schrödinger cat box and find myself amazed to be alive. There has been no scent of bitter almonds in the night.

Each morning I fight despair and terror by writing these memories on my text slate, stacking the microvellum pages as they accumulate. But the recycler in this little world is limited; it can produce only a dozen or so pages at a time. So as I finish each dozen or so pages of memory, I feed the oldest pages into the recycler to have them come out fresh and empty so as to have new pages upon which to write. It is the snake swallowing its own tail. It is insanity. Or the absolute essence of sanity.

It is possible that the chip in the text slate has the full memory of what I have written here… what I shall write in the coming days if fate grants me those days… but the truth is, I do not really care. Only the dozen pages of microvellum are of interest to me each day—pristine, empty pages in the morning, crowded, ink-splashed pages filled with my small and spidery script each evening.

Aenea comes alive for me then.

But last night—when the lights in my Schrödinger cat box were off and nothing separated me from the universe but the static-dynamic shell of frozen energy around me with its little vial of cyanide, its ticking timer, and its foolproof radiation detector—last night I heard Aenea calling my name. I sat up in the absolute blackness, too startled and hopeful even to command the lights on, certain that I was still dreaming, when I felt her fingers touch my cheek. They were her fingers. I knew them when she was a child. I kissed them when she was a woman. I touched them with my lips when they took her away for the final time.

Her fingers touched my cheek. Her breath was warm and sweet against my face. Her lips were warm against the corner of my mouth.

“We’re leaving here, Raul, my darling,” she whispered in the darkness last night. “Not soon, but as soon as you finish our tale. As soon as you remember it all and understand it all.”

I reached for her then, but her warmth was receding. When the lights came on, my egg-shaped world was empty.