Navson Hamnim kicked away from the pod wall and oriented himself right side up in relation to Kassad. “These few warships do not offer us a defense in any case,” he said softly, his own Web English more musical than accented. “Should we not consider dying while on the attack?”
Aenea floated between the two men. “I think that we should consider not dying at all,” she said. “Nor allowing the biosphere to be destroyed.”
A positive sentiment, a voice spoke in my head. But not all positive sentiments can be supported by updrafts of possible action.
“True,” said Aenea, looking at the platelets, “but perhaps in this case the updrafts will build.”
Good thermals to you all, said the voice in my head. The platelets moved toward the pod wall, which irised open for them. Then they were gone.
Aenea took a breath. “Shall we meet on the Yggdrasill to share the main meal in seven hours and continue this discussion? Perhaps someone will have an idea.”
There was no dissension. People, Ousters, and Seneschai exited by a score of openings that had not been there a moment before.
Aenea floated over and hugged me again. I patted her hair.
“My friend,” she said softly. “Come with me.”
It was her private living pod—our private living pod, she informed me—and it was much like the one in which I awoke, except that there were organic shelves, niches, writing surfaces, storage cubbies, and facilities for comlog interface. Some of my clothes from the ship were folded neatly in a cubby and my extra boots were in a fiberplastic drawer.
Aenea pulled food from a cold-box cubby and began making sandwiches. “You must be hungry, my dear,” she said, tearing off pieces of rough bread. I saw zygoat cheese on the sticktite zero-g work surface, some wrapped pieces of roast beef that must have come from the ship, bulbs of mustard, and several tankards of T’ien Shan rice beer. Suddenly I was starved.
The sandwiches were large and thick. She set them on catchplates made of some strong fiber, lifted her own meal and a beer bulb, and kicked toward the outer wall. A portal appeared and began to iris open.
“Uh…” I said alertly, meaning—Excuse me, Aenea, but that’s space out there. Aren’t we both going to explosively decompress and die horribly? She kicked out through the organic portal and I shrugged and followed.
There were catwalks, suspension bridges, sticktite stairways, balconies, and terraces out there—made of steel-hard plant fiber and winding around the pods, stalks, branches, and trunks like so much ivy. There was also air to breathe. It smelled of a forest after a rain.
“Containment field,” I said, thinking that I should have expected this. After all, if the Consul’s ancient starship could have a balcony…
I looked around. “What powers it?” I said. “Solar receptors?”
“Indirectly,” said Aenea, finding us a sticktite bench and mat. There were no railings on this tiny, intricately woven balcony. The huge branch—at least thirty meters across—ended in a profusion of leaves above us and the latticework web of the trunks and branches “beneath” us convinced my inner ear that we were many kilometers up on a wall made of crisscrossed, green girders. I resisted the urge to throw myself down on the sticktite mat and cling for dear life. A radiant gossamer fluttered by, followed by some type of small bird with a v-shaped tail.
“Indirectly?” I said, my mouth full as I took a huge bite of sandwich.
“The sunlight—for the most part—is converted to containment fields by ergs,” continued my friend, sipping her beer and looking out at the seemingly infinite expanse of leaves above us, below us, to all sides of us, their green faces all turned toward the brilliant star. There was not enough air to give us a blue sky, but the containment field polarized the view toward the sun just enough to keep us from being blinded when we glanced that direction.
I almost spit my food out, managed to swallow instead, and said, “Ergs? As in Aldebaren energy binders? You were serious? Ergs like the one taken on the last Hyperion pilgrimage?”
“Yes,” said Aenea. Her dark eyes were focused on me now.
“I thought they were extinct.”
“Nope,” said Aenea.
I took a long drink from the beer bulb and shook my head. “I’m confused.”
“You have a right to be, my dear friend,” Aenea said softly.
“This place…” I made a weak gesture toward the wall of branches and leaves trailing away so much farther than a planetary horizon, the infinitely distant curve of green and black far above us. “It’s impossible,” I said.
“Not quite,” said Aenea. “The Templars and Ousters have been working on it—and others like it—for a thousand years.”
I began chewing again. The cheese and roast beef were delicious. “So this is where the thousands and millions of trees went when they abandoned God’s Grove during the Fall.”
“Some of them,” said Aenea. “But the Templars had been working with the Ousters to develop orbital forest rings and biospheres long before that.”
I peered up. The distances made me dizzy. The sense of being on this small, leafy platform so many kilometers above nothing made me reel.
Far below us and to our right, something that looked like a tiny, green sprig moved slowly between the latticed branches. I saw the film of energy field around it and realized that I was looking at one of the fabled Templar treeships, almost certainly kilometers long. “Is this finished then?” I said. “A true Dyson sphere? A globe around a star?”
Aenea shook her head. “Far from it, although about twenty standard years ago, they made contact with all the primary trunk tendrils. Technically it’s a sphere, but most of it is comprised of holes at this point—some many millions of klicks across.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I said, realizing that I could have been more eloquent. I rubbed my cheeks, feeling the heavy growth of beard there.
“I’ve been out of it for two weeks?” I said.
“Fifteen standard days,” said Aenea.
“Usually the doc-in-the-box works more quickly than that,” I said. I finished the sandwich, stuck the catchplate to the table surface, and concentrated on the beer.
“Usually it does,” agreed Aenea. “Rachel must have told you that you spent a relatively short time in the autosurgeon. She did most of the initial surgery herself.”
“Why?” I said.
“The box was full,” said Aenea. “We defrosted you from fugue as soon as we got here, but the three in the doc ahead of you were in bad shape. De Soya was near death for a full week. The sergeant… Gregorius… was much more seriously injured than he had let on when we met him on the Great Peak. And the third officer—Carel Shan—died despite the box’s and the Ouster medics’ best efforts.”
“Shit,” I said, lowering the beer. “I’m sorry to hear that.” One got used to autosurgeons fixing almost anything.
Aenea looked at me with such intensity that I could feel her gaze warming my skin as surely as I could feel the powerful sunlight. “How are you, Raul?”
“Great,” I said. “I ache a bit. I can feel the healing ribs. The scars itch. And I feel like I overslept by two weeks… but I feel good.”
She took my hand. I realized that her eyes were moist. “I would have been really pissed if you’d died on me,” she said after a moment, her voice thick.
“Me too.” I squeezed her hand, looked up, and suddenly leaped to my feet, sending the beer bulb spiraling off into thin air and almost launching myself. Only the sticktite velcro soles on my soft shoes kept me anchored. “Holy shit!” I said, pointing.
From this distance, it looked like a squid, perhaps only a meter or two long. From experience and a growing sense of perspective here, I knew better.