Discomfort. I closed my eyes so that no one would see the tears of relief there. The woman who had found me by the well took my hand in hers.
A minute later the pain began to ebb. Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence. It was as if a great and terrible noise had finally been turned down so that I could think. I became me again as the agony dropped to the levels I had known from knife wounds and broken bones.
This I could handle and still retain my dignity and sense of self. The woman in blue was touching my wrist as the ultramorph took effect.
“Thank you,” I said through parched, cracked lips, squeezing the hand of the woman in blue. “And thank you, Dr. Molina,” I said to the Pax medic.
Dr. Molina leaned over me, tapping my cheeks softly. “You’re going to sleep for a while, but I need some answers first. Don’t sleep until you talk to me.”
I nodded groggily.
“What’s your name?”
“Raul Endymion.” I realized that I could not lie to her. She must have put Truthtell or another drug in the IV drip.
“Where are you from, Raul Endymion?” She was holding the palm-sized diagnostic device like a recorder.
“Hyperion. The continent of Aquila. My clan was…”
“How did you get to Lock Childe Lamonde on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Raul? Are you one of the spacers who jumped ship from the Mercantilus freighter last month?”
“Kayak,” I heard myself say as everything began to feel distant. A great warmth filled me, almost indistinguishable from the sense of relief that surged within me. “Paddled downriver in the kayak,” I babbled. “Through the farcaster. No, I’m not one of the spacers…”
“Farcaster?” I heard the doctor repeat, her voice puzzled. “What do you mean you came through the farcaster, Raul Endymion? Do you mean you paddled under it the way we did? Just passed by it on your trip downriver?”
“No,” I said. “I came through it. From offworld.”
The doctor glanced at the woman in blue and then turned back to me. “You came through the farcaster from offworld? You mean it… functioned? Farcast you here?”
“Yeah.”
“From where?” said the doctor, checking my pulse with her left hand.
“Old Earth,” I said. “I came from Earth.” For a moment I floated, blissfully free from pain, while the doctor stepped out into the hall to talk to the ladies. I heard snatches of conversation.
“… obviously mentally unbalanced,” the doctor’s voice was saying. “Could not have possibly come through the… delusions of Old Earth… possibly one of the spacers on drugs…”
“Happy to have him stay…” the woman in the blue robe was saying. “Take care of him until…”
“The priest and one of the guards will stay here…” the doctor’s voice said. “When the medevac skimmer comes to Keroa Tambat we’ll stop by here to fetch him on the way back to the base… tomorrow or the day after tomorrow… don’t let him leave… military police will probably want to…”
Buoyed up on the rising crest of bliss at the absence of pain, I quit fighting the current and allowed myself to drift downstream to the waiting arms of morphia.
I dreamed of a conversation Aenea and I had shared a few months earlier. It was a cool, high-desert summer night and we were sitting in the vestibule of her shelter, drinking mugs of tea and watching the stars come out. We had been discussing the Pax, but for everything negative I had said about it, Aenea had responded with something positive.
Finally I got angry.
“Look,” I said, “you’re talking about the Pax as if it hadn’t tried to capture you and kill you. As if Pax ships hadn’t chased us halfway across the spiral arm and shot us down on Renaissance Vector. If it hadn’t been for the farcaster there…”
“The Pax didn’t chase us and shoot at us and try to kill us,” the girl said softly. “Just elements of it. Men and women following orders from the Vatican or elsewhere.”
“Well,” I said, still exasperated and irritated, “it only takes elements of it to shoot us and kill…” I paused a second.
“What do you mean—‘the Vatican or elsewhere’? Do you think there are others giving orders? Other than the Vatican, I mean?”
Aenea shrugged. It was a graceful motion, but irritating in the extreme. One of the least endearing of her less-than-endearing teenaged traits.
“Are there others?” I demanded, more sharply than I was used to speaking to my young friend.
“There are always others,” Aenea said quietly. “They were right to try to capture me, Raul. Or kill me.”
In my dream as in reality, I set my mug of tea on the stone foundation of the vestibule and stared at her. “You’re saying that you… and I… should be captured or killed… like animals. That they have that right?”
“Of course not,” said the girl, crossing her arms in front of her chest, the tea steaming into the cool night air. “I’m saying that the Pax is correct—from its perspective—in using extraordinary measures to try to stop me.”
I shook my head. “I haven’t heard you say anything so subversive that they should send squadrons of starships after you, kiddo. In fact, the most subversive and heretical thing I’ve heard you say is that love is a basic force of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism. But that’s just…”
“Bullshit?” said Aenea.
“Double talk,” I said.
Aenea smiled and ran her fingers through her short hair. “Raul, my friend, it’s not what I say that’s a danger to them. It’s what I do. What I teach by doing… by touching.”
I looked at her. I had almost forgotten all that One Who Teaches stuff that her Uncle Martin Silenus had woven into his Cantos epic. Aenea was to be the messiah that the old poet had prophesied in his long, confused poem some two centuries earlier… or so he had told me. So far I had seen very little from the girl that suggested messiahhood, unless one counted her trip forward through the Sphinx Time Tomb and the obsession of the Pax to capture or kill her… and me, since I was her guardian during the rough trip out to Old Earth.
“I haven’t heard you teach much that’s heretical or dangerous,” I said again, my tone almost sullen. “Or seen you do anything that’s a threat to the Pax, either.” I gestured to the night, the desert, and to the distant, lighted buildings of the Taliesin Fellowship, and now—in my ultramorph dream that was more memory than dream—I watched myself make that gesture as if I were observing from the darkness outside the lighted shelter. Aenea shook her head and sipped her tea.
“You don’t see, Raul, but they do. Already they’ve referred to me as a virus. They’re right… that’s exactly what I could be to the Church. A virus, like the ancient HIV strain on Old Earth or the Red Death that raked through the Outback after the Fall… a virus that invades every cell of the organism and reprograms the DNA in those cells… or at least infects enough cells that the organism breaks down, fails… dies.”
In my dream, I swooped above Aenea’s canvas-and-stone shelter like a hawk in the night, whirling high among the alien stars above Old Earth, seeing us—the girl and the man—sitting in the kerosene lantern light of the vestibule like lost souls on a lost world. Which is precisely what we were. For the next two days I drifted in and out of pain and consciousness the way a skiff cut loose on the ocean would float through rain squalls and patches of sunlight. I drank great volumes of water that the women in blue brought me in glass goblets. I hobbled to the toilet cubby and urinated through a filter, trying to catch the stone that was causing my intermittent agony. No stone. Each time I would hobble back to the bed and wait for the pain to start up again. It never failed to do so.
Even at the time, I was aware that this was not the stuff of heroic adventure.
Before the doctor left to continue downriver to the site of the skimmer crash, I was made to understand that both the Pax guard and the local priest had com units and would radio the base if I caused any trouble whatsoever. Dr. Molina let me know exactly how bad it would be for me if the Pax Fleet commander had to pull a skimmer out of the war games just to fetch a prisoner prematurely. Meanwhile, she said, keep drinking lots of water and peeing every time I could.