On our previous river adventure, I had carried night-vision goggles, an assortment of weapons, and a raft full of fancy gadgets. This night I had the flashlight laser that was our only memento of the trip out to Earth—set to its weakest, most energy-conserving setting, it illuminated about two meters of rain-slick street—a Navajo hunting knife in my backpack, and some sandwiches and dried fruit packed away. I was ready to take on the Pax.
“What is this place?” I said.
“Hannibal,” said Aenea, struggling to hold the slick kayak as we stumbled down the street.
By this point I had to shift the slim flashlight laser in my teeth, keeping both hands on the bow of the stupid little boat. When we reached the point where the street became a loading ramp, running into the black torrent of the Mississippi, I set the kayak down, removed the flashlight, and said, “St. Petersburg.” I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading in the Fellowship compound’s rich library of print books.
I saw Aenea’s hooded figure nod in the reflected glow of the flashlight beam. “This is crazy,” I said, swinging the flashlight beam around the empty street, against the wall of the brick warehouses, out to the dark river.
The rush of dark water was frightening. Any thought of setting off on that was insane.
“Yes,” said Aenea. “Crazy.” The cold rain beat on the hood of her poncho.
I went around the kayak and took her by the arm. “You see the future,” I said. “When are we going to see each other again?”
Her head was bowed. I could make it out only the barest gleam of her pale cheek in the reflected beam. The arm I gripped through the sleeve of the poncho might as well have been the branch of a dead tree for all the life I felt there. She said something too softly for me to make it out over the sound of the rain and the river. “What?” I said.
“I said I don’t see the future,” she said. “I remember parts of it.”
“What’s the difference?”
Aenea sighed and stepped closer. It was cold enough that our breaths actually mingled in the air. I felt the adrenaline rush from anxiety, fear, and anticipation.
“The difference is,” she said, “that seeing is a form of clarity, remembering is… something else.”
I shook my head. Rain dripped in my eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“Raul, do you remember Bets Kimbal’s birthday party? When Jaev played the piano and Kikki got falling-down drunk?”
“Yeah,” I said, irritated at this discussion in the middle of the night, in the middle of the storm, in the middle of our departure.
“When was it?”
“What?”
“When was it?” she repeated. Behind us, the Mississippi flowed out of the darkness and back into darkness with the speed of a maglev train.
“April,” I said. “Early May. I don’t know.”
The hooded figure before me nodded. “And what did Mr. Wright wear that night?”
I had never had the impulse to hit or spank or scream at Aenea. Not until this minute. “How should I know? Why should I remember that?”
“Try to.”
I let out my breath and looked away at the dark hills in the black night. “Shit, I don’t know… his gray wool suit. Yeah, I remember him standing by the piano in it. That gray suit with the big buttons.”
Aenea nodded again. “Bets’s birthday party was in mid-March,” she said over the patter of rain on our hoods. “Mr. Wright didn’t come because he had a cold.”
“So?” I said, knowing very well what point she had just made.
“So I remember bits of the future,” she said again, her voice sounding close to tears. “I’m afraid to trust those memories. If I say when we will see each other again, it may be like Mr. Wright’s gray suit.”
For a long minute I said nothing. Rain pounded like tiny fists on closed coffins. Finally I said, “Yeah.”
Aenea took two steps and put her arms around me. Our ponchos crinkled against each other.
I could feel the tightness of her back and the new softness of her chest as we hugged clumsily. She stepped back. “Can I have the flashlight a moment?” I handed it to her. She pulled back the nylon apron in the tiny cockpit of the kayak and shined the light on the narrow strip of polished wood there beneath the fiberglass. A single red button, under its clear, protective panel, gleamed in the rain. “See that?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t touch it, whatever you do.”
I admit that I barked a laugh at that. Among the things I had read in the Taliesin library were plays of the absurd like Waiting for Godot. I had the feeling that we had flown into some latitude of the absurd and surreal here.
“I’m serious,” said Aenea.
“Why put a button in if it’s not to be touched?” I said, wiping the dripping moisture out of my face.
The hooded figure shook its head. “I mean, don’t touch it until you absolutely have to.”
“How will I know when I absolutely have to, kiddo?”
“You’ll know,” she said and gave me another hug. “We’d better get this into the river.”
I bent to kiss her forehead then. I had done this dozens of times over the past few years—wishing her well before one of her retreats, tucking her in, kissing her clammy forehead when she was sick with fever or half-dead from fatigue. But as I bent to kiss her, Aenea raised her face, and for the first time since we had met in the midst of dust and confusion in the Valley of the Time Tombs, I kissed her on the lips.
I believe that I have mentioned before how Aenea’s gaze is more powerful and intimate than most people’s physical touches… how her touch is like a jolt of electricity. This kiss was… beyond all that. I was thirty-two years old that night in Hannibal, on the west bank of the river known as the Mississippi, on the world once known as Earth, lost now somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, in the dark and rain, and I had never experienced a jolt of sensation like that first kiss.
I pulled back in shock. The flashlight laser had tilted up between us and I could see the glint of her dark eyes… looking mischievous, perhaps, relieved, perhaps, as if a long wait had ended, and… something else.
“Good-bye, Raul,” she said, and lifted her end of the kayak.
My mind reeling, I placed the bow in the dark water at the bottom of the ramp and leveraged myself down and into the cockpit. A. Bettik had fashioned it for me like a well-tailored suit of clothes. I made sure not to depress the red button in my flailing around. Aenea shoved and the kayak was floating in twenty centimeters of water. She handed me the double-bladed paddle, then my backpack, and then the flashlight laser. I aimed the beam at the dark water between us.
“Where’s the farcaster portal?” I said. I heard the words from a distance, as if some third party had spoken. My mind and emotions were still dealing with the kiss. I was thirty-two years old. This child had just turned sixteen. My job was to protect her and to keep her alive until we could return to Hyperion and the old poet someday. This was madness.
“You’ll see it,” she said. “Sometime after daylight.”
Hours away then. This was theater of the absurd. “And what do I do after I find the ship?” I said. “Where do we meet?”
“There is a world named T’ien Shan,” said Aenea. “It means “Mountains of Heaven.” The ship will know how to find it.”
“It’s in the Pax?” I said.
“Just barely,” she said, her breath hanging in the cold air. “It was in the Hegemony Outback. The Pax has incorporated it into the Protectorate and promised to send missionaries, but it hasn’t been tamed yet.”
“T’ien Shan,” I repeated. “All right. How do I find you? Planets are big things.”
I could see her dark eyes in the bouncing flashlight beam. They were moist with rain or tears, or both. “Find a mountain called Heng Shan… the Sacred Mountain of the North. Near it there will be a place called Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” she said. “It means ’Temple Hanging in Air.’ I should be there.”