Both Aenea and I loved the films he chose—ancient twentieth-century flat things, many in black and white—and for some reason that he never explained, Mr. Wright preferred to watch them with the “sound track,” optical jiggles and wiggles, visible on the screen. Actually, we’d watched films there for a year before one of the other apprentices told us that they had been made to be watched without the sound track visible.

Today the cabaret theater was empty, the Christmas lights dark. I jogged on, moving from room to room, building to building, rounding up apprentices, workers, and family members until I met A. Bettik by the fountain and we joined the others in the large music pavilion.

The pavilion was a large space, with a broad stage and six rows of eighteen upholstered seats in each row. The walls were of redwood painted Cherokee Red (the Old Architect’s favorite color) and the usual thick desert masonry. A grand piano and a few potted plants were the only things on the red-carpeted stage. Overhead, stretched tight above a gridwork of wood and steel ribs, was the usual white canvas. Aenea had once told me that after the death of the first Mr. Wright, plastic had taken the place of canvas to relieve the necessity of replacing canvas every couple of years. But upon this Mr. Wright’s return, the plastic was ripped out—as was the glass above the main drafting room—so that pure light through white canvas would be the rule once again. A. Bettik and I stood near the rear of the music pavilion as the murmuring apprentices and other workers took their seats, some of the construction workers standing on the aisle steps or at the back with the android and me, as if worried about tracking mud and dust onto the rich carpet and upholstery.

When Aenea entered through the side curtains and jumped to the stage, all the conversation stopped.

The acoustics were good in Mr. Wright’s music pavilion, but Aenea had always been able to project her voice without seeming to raise it.

She spoke softly. “Thank you for gathering. I thought we should talk.”

Jaev Peters, one of the older apprentices, immediately stood up in the fifth row. “You were gone, Aenea. In the desert again.”

The girl on the stage nodded.

“Did you talk to the Lions and Tigers and Bears?”

No one in the audience tittered or giggled.

The question was asked in deadly seriousness and the answer was awaited by ninety people just as seriously. I should explain.

It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago.

That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony, the AI TechnoCore had used their secret farcaster and fatline technologies to weave hundreds of dataspheres into a single, secret, interstellar information medium called the megasphere. But, according to the Cantos, Aenea’s father—the cybrid John Keats—had traveled in disembodied datapersona form to the megasphere’s Core and discovered that there was a larger datumplane medium, perhaps larger than our galaxy, which even the Core AI’s were afraid to explore because it was full of “lions and tigers and bears”—those were Ummon the AI’s words. These were the beings—or intelligences—or gods, for all we knew—who had kidnapped the Earth and brought it here before the Core could destroy it a millennium ago. These Lions and Tigers and Bears were the bugaboo guardians of our world.

No one in the Fellowship had ever seen any of these entities, or spoken to them, or had any solid evidence of their existence. No one except Aenea.

“No,” said the girl on the stage, “I didn’t talk to them.” She looked down as if embarrassed. She was always reticent to talk about this. “But I think I heard them.”

“They spoke to you?” said Jaev Peters. The pavilion was hushed.

“No,” said Aenea. “I didn’t say that. I just… heard them. A bit like when you overhear someone else’s conversation through a dormitory wall.”

There was a rustle of amusement at this. For all the thick stone walls on the Fellowship property, the dorm partitions were notably thin.

“All right,” said Bets Kimbal from the first row. Bets was the chief cook and a large, sensible woman. “Tell us what they said.”

Aenea stepped up to the edge of the red-carpeted stage and looked out at her elders and colleagues. “I can tell you this,” she said softly. “There’ll be no more food and supplies from the Indian Market. That’s gone.”

It was as if she had set off a grenade in the music pavilion. When the babble began to subside, one of the biggest of the construction workers, a man named Hussan, shouted over the noise.

“What do you mean it’s gone? Where do we get our food?”

There was good reason for the panic. In Mr. Wright’s day, way back in the twentieth century, his Fellowship desert camp had been about fifty kilometers from a large town called Phoenix. Unlike the Depression-era Wisconsin Taliesin, where apprentices raised crops in the rich soil even while they worked on Mr. Wright’s construction plans, this desert camp had never been able to grow its own food. So they drove to Phoenix and bartered or paid out their primitive coins and paper money for basic supplies. The Old Architect had always depended upon the largesse of patrons—large loans never to be paid back—for such month-to-month survival.

Here in our reassembled desert camp, there were no towns. The only road—two gravel ruts—led west into hundreds of miles of emptiness.

I knew this because I had flown over the area in the dropship and driven it in the Old Architect’s groundcar. But about thirty klicks from the compound there was a weekly Indian market where we had bartered craft items for food and basic materials.

It had been there for years before Aenea’s and my arrival; everyone had obviously expected it to be there forever.

“What do you mean it’s gone?” repeated Hussan in a hoarse shout. “Where’d the Indians go? Were they just cybrid illusions, like Mr. Wright?”

Aenea made a gesture with her hands that I had grown accustomed to over the years—a graceful setting-aside motion that I had come to see as a physical analog of the Zen expression “mu,” which, in the right context, can mean “unask the question.”

“The market’s gone because we won’t need it anymore,” said Aenea. “The Indians are real enough—Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni—but they have their own lives to live, their own experiments to conduct. Their trading with us has been… a favor.”

The crowd became angry at that, but eventually they settled down again. Bets Kimbal stood. “What do we do, child?”

Aenea sat on the edge of the stage as if trying to become one with the waiting, expectant audience. “The Fellowship is over,” she said. “That part of our lives has to end.”

One of the younger apprentices was shouting from the back of the pavilion. “No it doesn’t! Mr. Wright could still return! He was a cybrid, remember… a construct! The Core… or the Lions and Tigers and Bears… whoever shaped him can send him back to us…”

Aenea shook her head, sadly but firmly. “No. Mr. Wright is gone. The Fellowship is over. Without the food and materials the Indians brought from so far away, this desert camp can’t last a month. We have to go.”

It was a young female apprentice named Peret who spoke quietly into the silence. “Where, Aenea?”

Perhaps it was at this moment that I first realized how this entire group had given themselves over to the young woman I had known as a child. When the Old Architect was around, giving lectures, holding forth in seminars and drafting-room bull sessions, leading his flock on picnics and swimming outings in the mountains, demanding solicitude and the best food, the reality of Aenea’s leadership had been somewhat masked. But now it was evident.