Aenea shook her head with visible impatience. “I am bride of no one, Bishop Duruyen. These are the two men I have brought to entrust to your protection for the next ten months.”
The Bishop in red bowed his bald head. “Just as your prophecies said, Daughter of Light.”
“Not prophecies,” said Aenea. “Promises.” She turned and hugged George and Jigme a final time.
“Will we see you again, Architect?” said Jigme.
“I cannot promise that,” said Aenea. “But I do promise that if it is in my power, we will be in contact again.”
I followed her back to the empty hall in the dripping corridors of Dreg’s Hive, where our departure would not seem so miraculous as to add to the Shrike Cult’s already fertile canon.
On Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna, we said good-bye to the Dalai Lama and his brother, Labsang Samten. Labsang wept. The boy Lama did not.
“The local people’s Mandarin dialect is atrocious,” said the Dalai Lama.
“But they will understand you, Your Holiness,” said Aenea. “And they will listen.”
“But you are my teacher,” said the boy, his voice near anger. “How can I teach them without your help?”
“I will help,” said Aenea. “I will try to help. And then it is your job. And theirs.”
“But we may share communion with them?” asked Labsang.
“If they ask for it,” said Aenea. To the boy she said, “Would you give me your blessing, Your Holiness?”
The child smiled. “It is I who should be asking for a blessing, Teacher.”
“Please,” said Aenea, and again I could hear the weariness in her voice.
The Dalai Lama bowed and, with his eyes closed, said: “This is from the “Prayer of Kuntu Sangpo,” as revealed to me through the vision of my terton in a previous life—
“HO! The phenomenal world and all existence, samsara and nirvana,
All has one foundation, but there are two paths and two results—
Displays of both ignorance and Knowledge.
Through Kuntu Sangpo’s aspiration,
In the Palace of the Primal Space of Emptiness
Let all beings attain perfect consummation and Buddhahood.
“The universal foundation is unconditioned,
Spontaneously arising, a vast immanent expanse, beyond expression,
Where neither samsara nor nirvana exist.
Knowledge of this reality is Buddhahood,
While ignorant beings wander in samsara.
Let all sentient beings of the three realms
Attain Knowledge of the nature of the ineffable foundation.”
Aenea bowed toward the boy. “The Palace of the Primal Space of Emptiness,” she murmured. “How much more elegant than my clumsy description of the “Void Which Binds.” Thank you, Your Holiness.”
The child bowed. “Thank you, Revered Teacher. May your death be more quick and less painful than we both expect.”
Aenea and I returned to the treeship.
“What did he mean?” I demanded, both of my hands on her shoulders. “‘Death more quick and less painful’? What the hell does that mean? Are you planning to be crucified? Does this goddamned messiah impersonation have to go to the same bizarre end? Tell me, Aenea!” I realized that I was shaking her… shaking my dear friend, my beloved girl. I dropped my hands.
Aenea put her arms around me. “Just stay with me, Raul. Stay with me as long as you can.”
“I will,” I said, patting her back. “I swear to you I will.”
On Fuji we said good-bye to Kenshiro Endo and Haruyuki Otaki. On Deneb Drei it was a child whom I had never met—a ten-year-old girl named Katherine—who stayed behind, alone and seemingly unafraid. On Sol Draconi Septem, that world of frozen air and deadly wraiths where Father Glaucus and our Chitchatuk friends had been foully murdered, the sad and brooding scaffold rigger, Rimsi Kyipup, volunteered almost happily to be left behind. On Nevermore it was another man I had not had the privilege of meeting—a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman who seemed like Martin Silenus’s kindlier younger brother. On God’s Grove, where A. Bettik had lost part of his arm ten standard years earlier, the two Templar lieutenants of Het Masteen ’cast down with Aenea and me and did not return. On Hebron, empty now of its Jewish settlers but filled now with good Christian colonists sent there by the Pax, the Seneschai Aluit empaths, Lleeoonn and Ooeeaall ’cast down to say good-bye to us on an empty desert evening where the rocks still held the daytime’s glow.
On Parvati, the usually happy sisters Kuku Se and Kay Se wept and hugged the both of us good-bye. On Asquith, a family of two parents and their five golden-haired children stayed behind. Above the white cloud-swirl and blue ocean world of Mare Infinitus—a world whose mere name haunted me with memories of pain and friendship—Aenea asked Sergeant Gregorius if he would ’cast down with her to meet the rebels and support her cause.
“And leave the captain?” asked the giant, obviously shocked by the suggestion.
De Soya stepped forward. “There is no more captain, Sergeant. My dear friend. Only this priest without a Church. And I suspect that we would do more good now apart than together. Am I right, M. Aenea?”
My friend nodded. “I had hoped that Lhomo would be my representative on Mare Infinitus,” she said. “The smugglers and rebels and Lantern Mouth hunters on this world would respect a man of strength. But it will be difficult and dangerous… the rebellion still rages here and the Pax takes no prisoners.”
“’Tis not this danger I object to!” cried Gregorius. “I’m willin’ to die the true death a hundred times over for a good cause.”
“I know that, Sergeant,” said Aenea.
The giant looked at his former captain and then back to Aenea. “Lass, I know ye do not like to tell the future, even though we know you spy it now and then. But tell me this… is there a chance of reunion with my captain?”
“Yes,” said Aenea. “And with some you thought dead… such as Corporal Kee.”
“Then I’ll go. I’ll do your will. I may not be of the Corps Helvetica anymore, but the obedience they taught me runs deep.”
“It’s not obedience we ask now,” said Father de Soya. “It is something harder and deeper.”
Sergeant Gregorius thought a moment. “Aye,” he said at last and turned his back on everyone a moment. “Let’s go, lass,” he said, holding out his hand for Aenea’s touch.
We left him on an abandoned platform somewhere in the South Littoral, but Aenea told him that submersibles would put in there within a day.
Above Madre de Dios, Father de Soya stepped forward, but Aenea held up her hand to stop him.
“Surely this is my world,” said the priest. “I was born here. My diocese was here. I imagine that I will die here.”
“Perhaps,” said Aenea, “but I need you for a more difficult place and a more dangerous job, Federico.”
“Where is that?” said the sad-eyed priest.
“Pacem,” said Aenea. “Our last stop.”
I stepped closer. “Wait, kiddo,” I said. “I’m going with you to Pacem if you insist on going there. You said that I could stay with you.” My voice sounded querulous and desperate even to me.
“Yes,” said Aenea, touching my wrist with her cool fingers. “But I would like Father de Soya to come with us when it is time.”
The Jesuit looked confused and a bit disappointed, but he bowed his head. Evidently obedience ran even deeper in the Society of Jesus than it did in the Corps Helvetica.
In the end, the T’ien Shan bamboo worker Voytek Majer and his new fiancée, the brickmaker Viki Groselj, volunteered to stay on Madre de Dios.
On Freeholm, we said good-bye to Janusz Kurtyka. On Kastrop-Rauxel, recently reterraformed and settled by the Pax, it was the soldier Jigme Paring who volunteered to find the rebel population. Above Parsimony, while Pax warships turned the containment field into a torrent of noise and light, a woman named Helen Dean O’Brian stepped forward and took Aenea’s hand. On Esperance, Aenea and I bid farewell to the former mayor of Jo-kung, Charles Chi-kyap Kempo. On Grass, standing shoulder high in the yellow world prairie, we waved good-bye to Isher Perpet, one of the bolder rebels once rescued from a Pax prison galley and gathered in by Father de Soya. On Qom-Riyadh, where the mosques were quickly being bulldozed or converted to cathedrals by the new Pax settlers, we ’cast down in the dead of night and whispered our farewells to a former refugee from that world named Merwin Muhammed Ali and to our former interpreter on T’ien Shan, the clever Perri Samdup.