I started to speak, stopped myself, and then spoke anyway. “But the triune marriage wouldn’t be… I mean, would the Pax allow…”
“No,” said Alem from his place by the window.
He frowned and I could see the sadness behind his gray eyes. “The Church does not allow same-sex or multiple-partner marriages. Our family would be destroyed.”
I noticed the three exchange glances for a second and the love and sense of loss I saw in those looks would stay with me for years.
Dem Ria sighed. “But this is inevitable anyway. I think that Father Clifton is right… that we must do this now, for Bin, rather than wait until he dies the true death and is lost to us forever… and then join the Church. I would rather take our boy to Mass on Sunday and laugh with him in the sunlight after, than go to the cathedral to light a candle in his memory.”
“Why is it inevitable?” I asked softly.
Dem Loa made the graceful gesture once again. “Our Spectrum Helix society depends upon all members of it… all steps and components of the Helix must be in place for the interplay to work toward human progress and moral good. More and more of the Spectrum people are abandoning their colors and joining the Pax. The center will not hold.”
Dem Ria touched my forearm as if to emphasize her next words. “The Pax has not coerced us in any way,” she said softly, her lovely dialect rising and falling like the sound of the wind through the lace curtains behind her. “We respect the fact that they reserve their medicines and their miracle of resurrection for those who join them…” She stopped.
“But it is hard,” said Dem Loa, her smooth voice suddenly ragged.
Alem Mikail Dem Alem got up from the window ledge and came over to kneel between the two women. He touched Dem Loa’s wrist with infinite gentleness. He put his arm around Dem Ria. For a moment, the three were lost to the world and me, encircled by their own love and sorrow.
And then the pain came back like a fiery lance in my back and lower groin, searing through me like a laser. I moaned despite myself.
The three separated with graceful, purposeful movements. Dem Ria went to get the next ultramorph syringe.
The dream began the same as before—I was flying at night above the Arizona desert, looking down at Aenea and me as we drank tea and chatted in the vestibule of her shelter—but this time the talk went far beyond the memory of our real conversation that night. “How are you a virus?” I was asking the teenager next to me. “How could anything you teach be a threat to something as large and powerful as the Pax?”
Aenea was looking out into the desert night, breathing in the fragrance of night-blooming blossoms.
She did not look at me when she spoke. “Do you know the major error in Uncle Martin’s Cantos, Raul?”
“No,” I said. She had shown me several mistakes, omissions, or wrongheaded guesses in the past few years, and together we had discovered a few during our voyage to Old Earth.
“It was twofold,” she said softly. Somewhere in the desert night, a hawk called. “First, he believed what the TechnoCore told my father.”
“About how they were the ones who had hijacked Earth?” I said.
“About everything,” said Aenea. “Ummon was lying to the John Keats cybrid.”
“Why?” I said.
“They were just planning to destroy it.” The girl looked at me. “But my mother was there to record the conversation,” she said. “And the Core knew that she would tell the old poet.”
I nodded slowly. “And that he would put it as a fact in the epic poem he was writing,” I said. “But why would they want to lie about…”
“His second mistake was more subtle and serious,” she said, interrupting me without raising her voice. A pale glow still hung behind the mountains to the north and west. “Uncle Martin believed that the TechnoCore was humanity’s enemy,” she continued.
I set my mug of tea down on stone. “Why is that a mistake?” I said. “Aren’t they our enemy?”
When the girl did not answer I held up my hand, five fingers splayed. “One, according to the Cantos, the Core was the real force behind the attack on the Hegemony that led to the Fall of the Farcasters. Not the Ousters… the Core. The Church has denied that, made the Ousters responsible. Are you saying that the Church is right and the old poet was wrong?”
“No,” said Aenea. “It was the Core that orchestrated the attack.”
“Billions dead,” I said, almost spluttering in outrage. “The Hegemony toppled. The Web destroyed. The fatline cut…”
“The TechnoCore did not cut the fatline,” she said softly.
“All right,” I said, taking a breath. “That was some mysterious entity… your Lions and Tigers and Bears, say. But it was still the Core behind the attack.”
Aenea nodded and poured more tea for herself.
I folded my thumb against my palm and touched the first finger with my other hand. “Second, did or did not the TechnoCore use the farcasters as a sort of cosmic leech to suck up human neural networks for their damned Ultimate Intelligence project? Every time someone farcast, they were being… used… by those damned autonomous intelligences. Right or wrong?”
“Correct,” said Aenea.
“Three,” I said, folding the first finger away and tapping the next one in line, “the poem has Rachel—the pilgrim Sol Weintraub’s child who has come backward with the Time Tombs from the future—tell about a time to come when,” I shifted the tone of my voice as I quoted, “… the final war raged between the Core-spawned UI and the human spirit.” Was this a mistake?”
“No,” said Aenea.
“Four,” I said, beginning to feel foolish with my little finger exercise, but angry enough to continue, “didn’t the Core admit to your father that it created him… created the John Keats cybrid of him… just as a trap for the—what did they call it?—the empathy component of the human Ultimate Intelligence that’s supposed to come into existence sometime in the future?”
“That’s what they said,” agreed Aenea, sipping her tea. She looked almost amused. This made me angrier.
“Five,” I said, folding the last finger back so that my right hand was a fist. “Wasn’t it the Core as well as the Pax—hell, the Core ordering the Pax—that tried to have you caught and killed on Hyperion, on Renaissance Vector, on God’s Grove… halfway across the spiral arm?”
“Yes,” she said softly.
“And wasn’t it the Core,” I continued angrily, forgetting my fingered checklist and the fact that we were talking about the old poet’s errors, “that created that female… thing… that arranged to have poor A. Bettik’s arm sliced off on God’s Grove and would have had your head in a bag if it hadn’t been for the Shrike’s intervention.” I actually shook my fist I was so angry. “Wasn’t it the fucking Core that’s been trying to kill me as well as you, and probably will kill us if we’re ever stupid enough to go back into Pax space?”
Aenea nodded.
I was close to panting, feeling as if I had run a fifty-meter dash. “So?” I said lamely, unclenching my fist.
Aenea touched my knee. As contact with her always did, I felt a thrill of electric shock run through me. “Raul, I didn’t say that the Core hadn’t been up to no good. I simply said that Uncle Martin had made a mistake in portraying them as humanity’s enemy.”
“But if all those facts are true…” I shook my head, befuddled.
“Elements of the Core attacked the Web before the Fall,” said Aenea. “We know from my father’s visit with Ummon that the Core was not in agreement about many of its decisions.”
“But…” I began.
Aenea held her hand up, palm out. I fell silent.
“They used our neural networks for their UI project,” she said, “but there’s no evidence that it did humans any harm.”