There was that brief pause that I had come to associate with the ship being embarrassed. “I am sorry, M. Aenea, but other than navigational information and orbital approach maps which are centuries out of date, I am afraid I have no information about the world.”
“I have been there,” said A. Bettik. “Also centuries ago, but we have been monitoring radio and television traffic that refers to the planet.”
“I’ve heard some of my offworld hunters talk,” I said. “Some of the richest are from Renaissance V.” I gestured to the android. “Why don’t you start?”
He nodded and folded his arms. “Renaissance Vector was one of the most important worlds of the Hegemony. Extremely Earth-like on the Solmev Scale, it was settled by early seedships and was completely urbanized by the time of the Fall. It was famous for its universities, its medical centers—most Poulsen treatments were administered there for the Web citizens who could afford it—its baroque architecture—especially beautiful in its mountain fortress, Keep Enable—and its industrial output. Most of the FORCE spacecraft were manufactured there. In fact, this spacecraft must have been built there—it was a product of the Mitsubishi-Havcek complex.”
“Really?” said the ship’s voice. “If I knew that, the data have been lost. How interesting.”
Aenea and I exchanged worried glances for the dozenth time on this voyage. A ship that couldn’t remember its past or point of origin did not inspire confidence during the complexities of interstellar flight. Oh, well, I thought for the dozenth time, it got us in and out of Parvati System all right.
“DaVinci is the capital of Renaissance Vector,” continued A. Bettik, “although the entire landmass and much of the single large sea are urbanized, so there is little distinction between one urban center and the other.”
“It’s a busy Pax world,” I added. “One of the earliest to join the Pax after the Fall. The military is there in spades … both Renaissance V. and Renaissance M. have orbital and lunar garrisons, as well as bases all over each planet.”
“What’s Renaissance M.?” asked Aenea.
“Renaissance Minor,” said A. Bettik. “The second world from the sun … Renaissance V. is the third. Minor is also inhabited, but much less so. It is a largely agricultural world—huge automated farms covering much of the planet—and it feeds Vector. After the Fall of the farcasters, both worlds benefitted from this arrangement; before regularly scheduled interstellar commerce was reinstated by the Pax, the Renaissance System was fairly self-contained. Renaissance Vector manufactured goods; Renaissance Minor provided the food for the five billion people on Renaissance Vector.”
“What’s the population on Renaissance V. now?” I asked.
“I believe it is about the same—five billion people, give or take a few hundred million,” said A. Bettik. “As I said, the Pax arrived early and offered both the cruciform and the birth-control regime that goes with it.”
“You said you’d been there,” I said to the android. “What’s the world like?”
“Ahh,” said A. Bettik with a rueful smile, “I was at the Renaissance Vector spaceport for less than thirty-six hours while being shipped from Asquith in preparation for our colonizing King William’s new land on Hyperion. They did rouse us from cryogenic sleep but did not allow us to leave the ship. My personal recollections of the world are not extensive.”
“Are they mostly born-again Christians there?” asked Aenea. The girl seemed thoughtful and somewhat withdrawn. I noticed that she had been chewing her nails again.
“Oh, yes,” said A. Bettik. “Almost all five billion of them, I’m afraid.”
“And I wasn’t kidding about the heavy Pax military presence,” I said. “The Pax troopers who trained us in the Hyperion Home Guard staged out of Renaissance V. It’s a major garrison world and transshipment point for the whole war against the Ousters.”
Aenea nodded but still seemed distracted.
I decided not to beat around the bush. “Why are we going there?” I asked.
She looked up at me. Her dark eyes were beautiful but remote that moment. “I want to see the River Tethys.”
I shook my head. “The River Tethys was a farcaster construct, you know. It didn’t exist outside the Web. Or, rather, it existed as a thousand small sections of other rivers.”
“I know,” she said. “But I want to see a river that was part of Tethys during the Web days. My mother told me about it. How it was like the Grand Concourse, only more leisurely. How one could ride a barge from world to world for weeks—months.”
I resisted the impulse to get angry. “You know there’s almost no chance we can get past their defenses to Renaissance Vector,” I said. “And if we get there, River Tethys won’t be there … just whatever portion used to be part of it. What’s so important about seeing that?”
The girl started to shrug, then caught herself. “Remember how I said that there’s an architect I need to … want to … study with?”
“Yes,” I said. “But you don’t know his name or what world he’s on. So why come to Renaissance Vector to start your search? Couldn’t we look on Renaissance Minor, at least? Or just skip this system and go somewhere empty, like Armaghast?”
Aenea shook her head. I noticed that she had brushed her hair especially well; the blond highlights were very visible. “In my dreams,” she said, “one of the architect’s buildings lies near the River Tethys.”
“There are hundreds of other old Tethys worlds,” I said, leaning closer to her so she could see that I was very serious. “Not all of them will get us caught or killed by the Pax. Do we have to start in Renaissance System?”
“I think so,” she said softly.
I dropped my large hands to my knees. Martin Silenus had not said that this trip would be easy or make sense—he had just said that it would make me a Hero. “All right,” I said again, hearing the weariness in my own voice, “what’s our plan this time, kiddo?”
“No plan,” said Aenea. “If they’re waiting for us, I’m just going to tell them the truth—that we’re going to land the ship on Renaissance Vector. I think they’ll let us land.”
“And if they do?” I said, trying to imagine the ship surrounded by thousands of Pax troopers.
“We’ll take it from there, I guess,” said the girl. She smiled at me. “Want to play one-sixth-g billiards, you two? For money this time?”
I started to say something sharp, then changed my tone. “You don’t have any money,” I said.
Aenea’s grin grew wider. “Then I can’t lose, can I?”
26
During the 142 days that Father Captain de Soya waits for the girl to enter Renaissance System, he dreams about her every night. He sees her clearly as she was when first encountered at the Sphinx on Hyperion—willow thin, eyes alert but not terrified despite the sandstorm and threatening figures before her, her small hands partially raised as if ready to cover her face or rush forward to hug him. Often in his dreams she is his daughter and they are walking the crowded canal-streets of Renaissance Vector, discussing de Soya’s older sister, Maria, who has been sent to the St. Jude Medical Center in DaVinci. In his dreams de Soya and the child walk hand in hand through the familiar canal-streets near the huge medical complex while he explains to her how he plans to save his sister’s life this time, how he will not allow Maria to die the way she had the first time.
In reality, Federico de Soya had been six standard years old when he and his family came to Renaissance Vector from their isolated region of Llano Estacado on their provincial world of MadredeDios. Almost everyone on the sparsely populated stone-and-desert world was Catholic, but not Pax born-again Catholic. The de Soya family had been part of the break-away Mariaist movement and had left Nuevo Madrid more than a century earlier when that world had voted to join the Pax and have all of its Christian churches submit to the Vatican. The Mariaists venerated the Holy Mother of Christ more than Vatican orthodoxy allowed, so young Federico had grown up on a marginal desert world wi
th its devout colony of sixty thousand heretical Catholics who, as a form of protest, refused to accept the cruciform.
Then twelve-year-old Maria had become sick with an offworld retrovirus that swept like a scythe through the colony ranching region. Most sufferers of the Red Death either died within thirty-two hours or recovered, but Maria had lingered, her once-beautiful features all but obscured by the terrible, crimson stigmata. The family had taken her to the hospital in Ciudad del Madre on the windswept southern reach of Llano Estacado, but Mariaist medics there could do nothing but pray. There was a new Pax born-again Christian mission in Ciudad del Madre, discriminated against but tolerated by the locals, and the priest there—a kindly man named Father Maher—begged Federico’s father to allow their dying child to accept the cruciform. Federico was too young to remember the details of his parents’ agonized discussions, but he did remember the entire family—his mother and father, his other two sisters and younger brother—all on their knees in the Mariaist church there, begging for the Holy Mother’s guidance and intercession.
It was the other ranchers of the Llano Estacado Mariaist Cooperative who raised the money to send the entire family offworld to one of the famous medical centers on Renaissance Vector. While his brother and other sisters were left behind with a neighboring ranch family, for some reason six-year-old Federico was chosen to accompany his parents and dying sister on the long voyage. It was everyone’s first experience with actual coldsleep—more dangerous but cheaper than cryogenic fugue—and de Soya later remembered the chill in his bones that seemed to last through their weeks on Renaissance Vector.
At first the Pax medics in DaVinci seemed to arrest the spread of the Red Death through Maria’s system, even banishing some of the bleeding stigmata, but after three local weeks, the retrovirus again gained the upper hand. Once again a Pax priest—in this case, several who were on the staff of the hospital—beseeched de Soya’s parents to bend their Mariaist principles and allow the dying child to accept the cruciform before it was too late. Later, as he entered adulthood, de Soya could better imagine the agonies of his parents’ decision—the death of one’s deepest beliefs, or the death of one’s child.
In his dream, where Aenea is his daughter and they are walking the canal-streets near the medical center, he describes to her how Maria had given him her most prized possession—a tiny porcelain sculpture of a unicorn—just hours before she had slipped into a coma. In his dream, he walks with the 12-year-old Hyperion girl’s small hand in his, and tells her how his father—a strong man in both body and belief—had finally surrendered and asked for the Pax priests to administer the sacrament of the cross to his daughter. The priests at the hospital agreed, but insisted that de Soya’s parents and Federico formally convert to universal Catholicism before Maria could receive her cruciform.
De Soya explains to his daughter, Aenea, how he remembers the brief rebaptism ceremony at the local cathedral—St. John the Divine—where he and his parents renounced the ascendancy of the Holy Mother, and accepted the sole dominion of Jesus Christ as well as the power of the Vatican over their religious lives. He remembers receiving both First Communion and the cruciform that same evening.
Maria’s Sacrament of the Cross was scheduled for ten p.m. She died suddenly at 8:45 p.m. By the rules of the Church and the laws of the Pax, someone who suffered braindeath before receiving the cross could not be revived artificially to receive it.
Instead of being furious or feeling betrayed by his new Church, Federico’s father took the tragedy as a sign that God—not the God he had grown up praying to, the gentle Son infused with the universal female principles of the Holy Mother, but the fiercer New and Old Testament God of the Universal Church—had punished him, his family, and the entire Mariaist world of Llano Estacado. Upon the return to their homeworld with their child’s body dressed in white for burial, the elder de Soya had become an unrelenting apostle for the Pax version of Catholicism. It came at a fertile time, as the ranching communities were being swept with the Red Death. Federico was sent to the Pax school in Ciudad del Madre at age seven, and his sisters were sent away to the convent in northern Llano. Within his father’s lifetime—indeed, before Federico was sent to New Madrid with Father Maher to attend St. Thomas’s Seminary there—the surviving Mariaists on MadredeDios had all converted to Pax Catholicism. Maria’s terrible death had led to a world being born again.
In his dreams Father Captain de Soya explains little of this to the child walking with him through the nightmare-familiar streets of DaVinci on Renaissance Vector. The girl, Aenea, seems to know all this.
In his dreams, repeated almost every night for 142 nights before the girl’s ship arrives, de Soya is explaining to the child how he has discovered the secret to curing the Red Death and saving his sister. The first morning that de Soya awakens, heart pounding and sheets soaked with sweat, he assumes that the secret to Maria’s rescue is the cruciform, but the next night’s dream proves him wrong.
The secret, it seems, is the return of Maria’s unicorn figure. All he has to do, he explains to his daughter, Aenea, is find the hospital through this maze of streets, and he knows that the return of the unicorn will save his sister. But he cannot find the hospital. The maze defeats him.
Almost five months later, on the eve of the arrival of the ship from Parvati System, in a variation on the same dream, de Soya does find the St. Jude Medical Center, where his sister is sleeping, but he realizes with growing horror that he has now lost the figurine.
In this dream Aenea speaks for the first time. Drawing the small porcelain statuette from the pocket of her blouse, the child says, “You see, we’ve had it with us the entire time.”
THE REALITY OF DE SOYA’S MONTHS IN RENAISsance System is literally and figuratively light-years away from the Parvati experience.
Unknown to de Soya, Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig—each a mangled corpse in the heart of Raphael’s resurrection creches—the ship is challenged within an hour of translating in-system. Two Pax ramscouts and a torchship come alongside after exchanging transponder codes and data with Raphael’s computer. It is decided to transfer the four bodies to a Pax resurrection center on Renaissance V.
Unlike their solitary awakening in Parvati System, de Soya and his Swiss Guard troopers return to consciousness with the proper ceremony and care. Indeed, the resurrection is a difficult one for the father-captain and Corporal Kee, and the two are returned to their creche for an additional three days. Later, de Soya can only speculate whether the ship’s automated resurrection facilities would have been up to the task.
As it is, the four are reunited after a week in-system, each man with his own chaplain/counselor. Sergeant Gregorius finds this unnecessary; he is eager and impatient to return to duty, but de Soya and the other two welcome their extra days of rest and recuperation from death.
The St. Anthony translates only hours after Raphael, and eventually de Soya is reunited with Captain Sati of the torchship and Captain Lempriere of the troopship St. Thomas Akira, which has returned to the Pax base in Renaissance System with more than eighteen hundred dead in cold storage and twenty-three hundred wounded men and women from the carnage in Hyperion System. The hospitals and cathedrals on Renaissance V. and in orbital Pax bases begin the surgeries and resurrections at once.
De Soya is present at her bedside when Commander Barnes-Avne regains life and consciousness. The small red-haired woman seems another person, diminished to the point that it makes de Soya’s heart ache with pity, with her head shaved, her skin red and slick with rebirth, and dressed only in a hospital gown. But her aggressiveness and demeanor have not been diminished. Almost at once she demands, “What the hell happened?”
De Soya tells her about the Shrike carnage. He fills her in on the seven months he has spent chasing the girl during the four months Barnes-Avne has spent in cold storage and transit from Hyperion.
“You’ve really screwed the pooch, haven’t you?” says the Commander.
De Soya
smiles. So far, the Groundforce Commander is the only one to speak honestly to him. He is all too aware that he has had metaphorical carnal relations with the proverbial pooch: twice he has been in charge of a major Pax operation with a single objective—take a child into custody—and twice he has failed miserably. De Soya expects, at the very least, to be relieved of duty; more likely to be court-martialed. To that end, when an archangel courier arrives in-system two months before the girl’s arrival, de Soya orders the couriers to return at once to Pacem, to report his failure, and to return with instructions from Pax Command. In the meantime, Father Captain de Soya concludes his courier message, he will continue arranging the details of preparation for the girl’s capture in Renaissance System until he is relieved.
The resources available to him this time are impressive. Besides more than two hundred thousand ground troops, including several thousand elite Pax Marines and the surviving Swiss Guard Brigades from Hyperion, de Soya finds extensive sea and space naval forces. Present in Renaissance System and subject to his papal diskey command, are 27 torchships—8 of them omega class—as well as 108 nesting ramscouts to probe ahead of the torchships, 6 C3 fleet command-and-control ships with their escort cloud of 36 fast-attack ALRs, the attack carrier St. Malo with more than 200 space/air Scorpion fighters and seven thousand crew aboard, the antiquated cruiser Pride of Bressia, now renamed the Jacob, 2 additional troop transports in addition to the St. Thomas Akira, an even score of Benediction-class destroyers, 58 perimeter defense pickets—any 3 of which would be capable of defending an entire world (or a mobile task force) from attack—and more than 100 lesser ships, including in-system frigates that carried a lethal punch for close-in fighting, minesweepers, in-system couriers, drones, and the Raphael.
Three days after he has dispatched the second archangel courier to Pacem and seven weeks before Aenea’s arrival, the MAGI Task Force arrives—the Melchior, the Gaspar, and Father Captain de Soya’s old ship, the Balthasar. At first de Soya is excited to see his old companions, but then he realizes that they will be present during his humiliation. Nonetheless, he goes out in Raphael to greet them while they are still six AUs from Renaissance V, and the first thing Mother Captain Stone does upon his stepping into the Balthasar is to hand him his duffel of personal possessions that he had been forced to leave behind. On top of his neatly folded clothes, carefully wrapped in foam, is his sister Maria’s gift of the porcelain unicorn.