The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (201 page)

A strange new world! I will never be able to explain the thrill that jolted through me at that moment—despite our crash, despite our predicament, despite everything—
I was looking at a new world!
The effect on me was more profound than I had expected in all my anticipation of interworld travel. This planet was very Hyperion-like: breathable air, blue sky—although a much lighter blue than Hyperion’s lapis—wisps of clouds overhead, the river behind us—wider than the river had been on Renaissance Vector—and jungle on both banks, stretching as far away as I could see to the right, and back beyond the overgrown farcaster portal to our left. Ahead of us, the bow of the ship had indeed plowed up the river bottom and beached itself on a sandy spit, and then the jungle began again, hanging over everything like a tattered green curtain above a narrow stage.

But as familiar as this sounds, it was all strange: the scents in the air were alien, the gravity felt odd, the sunlight was a bit too bright, the “trees” in the jungle were unlike anything I had ever seen—feathery green gymnosperms was how I would have described them then—and overhead, flights of frail white birds of a sort I had never seen flapped away from the sound of our clumsy entrance to this world.

We walked up the hull toward the beach. Soft breezes ruffled Aenea’s hair and tugged at my shirt. The air smelled of subtle spices—traces of cinnamon and thyme, perhaps—although softer and richer than these. The bow of the ship was not transparent from the outside, although I did not know at the time whether the ship had opaqued its skin again or whether it never looked transparent from the outside. Even lying on its side, the
hull would have been too high and too steep to slide from if it had not plowed such a deep furrow in the beach sand; I used my rope again to lower A. Bettik to the sand, then we lowered the girl, and finally I shouldered my pack—the plasma rifle folded and strapped atop it—and slid down on my own, rolling as I hit the tightly packed soil.

My first footstep on an alien world, and it was no footstep at all—just a mouth full of sand.

The girl and the android helped me to my feet. Aenea was squinting up at the hull. “How do we get back up?” she said.

“We can build a ladder, drag a fallen tree over, or”—I tapped my pack—“I brought the hawking mat.”

We turned our attention to the beach and jungle. The former was narrow—only a few meters across from the bow to the forest, the sand gleaming more red than sand-colored in the bright sunlight—and the latter was dense and dark. The breeze was cool here on the beach, but the heat was palpable under the thickly packed trees. Twenty meters above, the gymnosperm fronds rustled and quaked like the antennae of some great insects.

“Wait here a minute,” I said, and stepped under the cover of the trees. The underbrush was thick, a type of clinging fern for the most part, and the soil was made up of so much humus that it was more sponge than dirt. The jungle smelled of dampness and decay, but of a whole different scent than the fens and swamps of Hyperion. I thought of the dracula ticks and biting gar in my own little tame bit of wilderness, and watched where I stepped. Vines spiraled down from the gymnosperm trunks and created a ropey latticework ahead of me in the gloom. I realized that I should have added a machete to my list of basic gear.

I had not penetrated the woods ten meters when suddenly a tall shrub holding heavy red leaves a meter in front of my face exploded into motion and the “leaves” flapped away beneath the jungle canopy, the creatures’ leathery wings sounding much like the large fruit bats our Hyperion ancestors had brought on their seedships.

“Damn,” I whispered, and shoved and battered my way out of the dank tangle. My shirt was torn when I staggered onto the beach sand. Aenea and A. Bettik looked expectantly at me.

“It’s a jungle in there,” I said.

We walked to the water’s edge, sat on a partially submerged
stump there, and looked at our spaceship. The poor thing looked like a great beached whale from some Old Earth wildlife holo.

“I wonder if it will ever fly again,” I mused, breaking a chocolate bar into pieces and handing one to the child and the other to the blue-skinned man.

“Oh, I think I will,” said a voice on my wrist.

I admit that I levitated a dozen or so centimeters. I’d forgotten about the comlog bracelet.

“Ship?” I said, raising my wrist and speaking directly into the bracelet the way I would have used a portable radio in the Home Guard.

“You don’t have to do that,” said the ship’s voice. “I can hear everything quite clearly, thank you. Your question was—would I ever fly again? The answer is—almost certainly. I had more complicated repairs to carry out upon my arrival in the city of Endymion after my return to Hyperion.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad you can … ah … repair yourself. Will you need raw materials? Replacement parts?”

“No, thank you, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “It is mostly a matter of reallocating existing materials and redesigning certain damaged units. The repairs should not take long.”

“How long is not long?” asked Aenea. She finished her chocolate bar and licked her fingers.

“Six standard months,” said the ship. “Unless I run into unforeseen difficulties.”

The three of us exchanged glances. I looked back at the jungle. The sun seemed lower now, its horizontal rays illuminating the tops of the gymnosperms and casting the shadows beneath into deeper gloom. “Six months?” I said.

“Unless I run into unforeseen difficulties,” repeated the ship.

“Ideas?” I said to my two comrades.

Aenea rinsed her fingers in the river’s edge, tossed some water onto her face, and brushed back her wet hair. “We’re on the River Tethys,” she said. “We’ll just go downstream until we find the next farcaster portal.”

“You can do that trick again?” I said.

She brushed water from her face and said, “What trick?”

I made a dismissive gesture with my hand. “Oh, nothing … making a machine work that’s been dead for three centuries. That trick.”

Her dark eyes were earnest. “I wasn’t sure that I could do
that, Raul.” She looked at A. Bettik, who was watching us impassively. “Honest.”

“What would have happened if you hadn’t been able to do it?” I asked softly.

“They would have caught us,” said Aenea. “I think they would have let you two go. They would have brought me back to Pacem. That would have been the last you or anyone else would have heard of me.”

Something about the flat, emotionless way she said that gave me chills. “All right,” I said, “it worked. But
how
did you do it?”

She made that slight-movement-of-her-hand gesture with which I was becoming familiar. “I’m not … certain,” she said. “I knew from the dreams that the portal would probably let me through.…”

“
Let
you through?” I said.

“Yes. I thought it would … recognize me … and it did.”

I set my hands on my knees and straightened my legs, the heels of my boots digging into the red sand. “You talk about the farcaster as if it’s an intelligent, living organism,” I said.

Aenea looked back at the arch half a klick behind us. “In a way it is,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“But you’re sure that the Pax troops can’t follow us through?”

“Oh, yes. The portal will not activate for anyone else.”

My eyebrows raised a bit. “Then how did A. Bettik and I … and the ship … get through?”

Aenea smiled. “You were with me.”

I stood up. “All right, we’ll hash this out later. First, I think we need a plan. Do we reconnoiter now, or get our stuff out of the ship first?”

Aenea looked down at the dark water of the river. “And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam out to his ship, filled his pockets with biscuits, and swam back to shore.…”

“What?” I said, hefting my pack and frowning at the child.

“Nothing,” she said, getting to her feet. “Just an old pre-Hegira book that Uncle Martin used to read to me. He used to say that proofreaders have always been incompetent assholes—even fourteen hundred years ago.”

I looked at the android. “Do you understand her, A. Bettik?”

He showed that slight twitch of his thin lips that I was learning to take as a smile. “It is not my role to understand M. Aenea, M. Endymion.”

I sighed. “All right, back to the subject.… Do we reconnoiter before it gets dark, or dig the stuff out of the ship?”

“I vote that we look around,” said Aenea. She looked at the darkening jungle. “But not through that stuff.”

“Uh-uh,” I agreed, pulling the hawking mat from its space atop my pack and unrolling it on the sand. “We’ll see if this works on this world.” I paused, raised the comlog closer. “What world is this, anyway? Ship?”

There was a second’s hesitation, as if the ship was busy mulling over its own problems. “I’m sorry, I can’t identify it given the state of my memory banks. My navigation systems could tell us, of course, but I will need a star sighting. I can tell you that there are no unnatural electromagnetic or microwave transmissions currently broadcasting on this area of the planet. Nor are there relay satellites or other man-made objects in synchronous orbit overhead.”

“All right,” I said, “but where
are
we?” I looked at the girl.

“How should I know?” said Aenea.

“You brought us here,” I said. I realized that I was being short-tempered with her, but I
felt
short-tempered right then.

Aenea shook her head. “I just activated the farcaster, Raul. My big plan was to get away from Father Captain Whatshisname and all those ships. That was it.”

“And find your architect,” I said.

“Yes,” said Aenea.

I looked around the jungle and river. “It doesn’t look like a promising place to find an architect. I guess you’re right … we’ll just have to keep moving down the river to the next world.” The vine-shrouded arch of the farcaster we’d passed through caught my eye. I saw now why we’d plowed ashore: the river took a bend to the right here, about half a kilometer from the portal. The ship had come through and just kept going straight, right up through the shallows and onto the beach.

“Wait,” I said, “couldn’t we just reprogram that portal and use it to go somewhere else? Why do we have to find another one?”

A. Bettik stepped away from the ship so he could get a better look at the farcaster arch. “The River Tethys portals did not work like the millions of personal farcasters,” he said softly.
“Nor was it designed to function like the Grand Concourse portals, or the large spaceborne farcasters.” He reached into his pocket and removed a small book. I saw the title—
A Traveler’s Guide to the WorldWeb
. “It seems that the Tethys was designed primarily for wandering and relaxation,” he said. “The distance between the portals varied from a few kilometers to many hundreds of kilometers.…”

“Hundreds of kilometers!” I said. I had been expecting to find the next portal just around the next bend in the river.

“Yes,” continued A. Bettik. “The concept, as I understand it, was to offer the traveler a wide variety of worlds, views, and experiences. To that end only the downstream portals would activate, and they programmed themselves randomly … that is, the sections of river on different worlds were shuffled constantly, like so many cards in a deck.”

I shook my head. “In the old poet’s
Cantos
it says that the rivers were sliced up after the Fall … that they dried up like water holes in the desert.”

Aenea made a noise. “Uncle Martin’s full of shit sometimes, Raul. He never saw what happened to the Tethys after the Fall.… He was on Hyperion, remember? He’s never been back to the Web. He made stuff up.”

It was no way to talk about the greatest work of literature in the past three hundred years—or of the legendary old poet who had composed it—but I started laughing then and found it hard to stop. By the time I did, Aenea was looking at me strangely. “Are you all right, Raul?”

“Yep,” I said. “Just happy.” I turned and made a motion that encompassed the jungle, the river, the farcaster portal—even our beached whale of a ship. “For some reason, I’m just happy,” I said.

Aenea nodded as if she understood perfectly.

To the android I said, “Does the book say what world this is? Jungle, blue sky … it must be about a nine-point-five on the Solmev Scale. That must be fairly rare. Does it list this world?”

A. Bettik flipped through the pages. “I don’t remember a jungle world like this mentioned in the sections I read, M. Endymion. I will read more carefully later.”

“Well, I think we need to look around,” said Aenea, obviously impatient to explore.

“But we should salvage some important things from the ship first,” I said. “I made a list …”

“That could take hours,” said Aenea. “The sun could set before we’re finished.”

“Still,” I said, ready to argue, “we need to get organized here …”

“If I may suggest a course of action,” A. Bettik interrupted softly, “perhaps you and M. Aenea could … ah … reconnoiter, while I begin removing the necessary items you mentioned. Unless you think it wiser to sleep in the ship tonight.”

We all looked at the poor ship. The river swirled around it, and just above the water level I could see the bent and blackened stumps which had been the proud rear fins. I thought of sleeping in that tumble of stuff, in the red-lit emergency light or the absolute darkness of the central levels, and said, “Well, it would be safer in there, but let’s get the stuff out that we’ll need to move downriver, and then we’ll decide.”

The android and I discussed it for several minutes. I had the plasma rifle with me, as well as the .45 in its holster on my belt, but I wanted the 16-gauge shotgun I’d set aside, as well as camping gear I’d seen in the EVA locker closet. I wasn’t sure how we’d get downriver—the hawking mat would probably hold the three of us, but I couldn’t see it transporting us
and
our gear, so we decided to unpack three of the four flybikes from their niches under the spacesuit closet. There was also a flying belt in there that I thought might be handy, as well as some camping accessories such as a heating cube, sleeping bags, foam mats, flashlight lasers for each of us, and the headset communicators I’d noticed. “Oh, and a machete if you see one,” I added. “There were several boxes of knives and multi-use blades in the small EVA closet. I don’t remember a machete, but if there is one … let’s get it out.”