For the first time I realized what Aenea and the others had been telling me over and over… there was more internal surface on the sections of the completed Biosphere than the total of all the planetary surfaces discovered by humankind in the past thousand years of interstellar flight. When the Startree was completed, the internal Biosphere quickened, the volume of habitable space would exceed all the inhabitable worlds in the Milky Way galaxy.

We were met by officials, feted for a few moments on crowded one-sixth-g platforms among hundreds of Ouster and Templar dignitaries, then taken into a pod so large that it might have been a small moon. A crowd of several hundred thousand Ousters and Templars waited, with a few hundred Seneschai Aluit and hovering crowds of Akerataeli near the central dais. Blinking, I realized that the ergs had set the internal containment field at a comfortable one-sixth-g, pulling everyone toward the surface of the sphere, but then I noticed that the seats continued up and over and around the full interior of the sphere. I revised my estimate of the crowd to well over a million.

Ouster Freeman Navson Hamnim and Templar True Voice of the Startree Ket Rosteen introduced Aenea, saying that she brought with her the message that their people had awaited for centuries.

My young friend walked to the podium, looking up and around and down, as if making eye contact with every person in the huge space. The sound system was so sophisticated that we could have heard her swallow or breathe. My beloved looked calm.

“Choose again,” said Aenea. And she turned, walked away from the podium, and went down to where the chalices lay on the long table.

Hundreds of us donated our blood, mere drops, as the chalices of wine were passed out to the waiting multitudes. I knew that there was no way that a million waiting Ouster and Templar communicants could be served by a few hundred of us who had already received communion from Aenea, but the aides drew a few drops with sterile lancets, the drops were transferred to the reservoir of wine, scores of helpers passed chalice bulbs under the spigots, and within the hour, those who wished communion with Aenea’s wine-blood had received it. The great sphere began emptying.

After her two words, nothing else had been said through the entire evening. For the first time on that long—endless—day, there was silence in the transport pod traveling home… home, back to our region of the Startree under the shadow of the Yggdrasill destined to depart within twenty hours.

I had felt like a fraud. I had drunk the wine almost twenty-four hours earlier, but I had felt nothing this day… nothing except my usual love for Aenea, which is to say, my absolutely un-usual, unique, totally without referent or equal love for Aenea.

The multitudes who wanted to drink had drunk. The great sphere had emptied, with even those who had not come to the communion silent—whether with disappointment at my beloved’s two-word speech, or pondering something beyond and beneath that, I did not know.

We took the transport pod back to our region of the Startree and we were silent except for the most necessary of communications. It was not an awkward or disappointed silence, more a silence of awe bordering on fear at the terminus of one part of one’s life and the beginning… the hope for a beginning… of another.

Choose again. Aenea and I made love in the darkened living pod, despite our fatigue and the late hour. Our lovemaking was slow and tender and almost unbearably sweet.

Choose again. They were the last words in my mind as I finally drifted… literally… off to sleep. Choose again. I understood. I chose Aenea and life with Aenea. And I believe that she had chosen me.

And I would choose her and she would choose me again tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, and in every hour during those times.

Choose again. Yes. Yes.

27

My name is Jacob Schulmann. I write this letter to my friends in Lodz:

My very dear friends, I waited to write to confirm what I’d heard. Alas, to our great grief, we now know it all. I spoke to an eyewitness who escaped. He told me everything.

They’re exterminated in Chelmno, near Dombie, and they’re all buried in Rzuszow forest. The Jews are killed in two ways: by shooting or gas. It’s just happened to thousands of Lodz Jews. Do not think that this is being written by a madman. Alas, it is the tragic, horrible truth.

“Horror, horror! Man, shed thy clothes, cover thy head with ashes, run in the streets and dance in thy madness.” I am so weary that my pen can no longer write. Creator of the universe, help us!

I write the letter on January 19, A.D. 1942. A few weeks later, during a February thaw when there is a false scent of spring to the woods around our city of Gradow, we—the men in the camp—are loaded into vans. Some of the vans have brightly painted pictures of tropical trees and jungle animals on them.

These are the children’s vans from last summer when they took the children from the camp. The paint has faded over this past winter, and the Germans have not bothered to retouch the images so that the gay pictures seem to be fading like last summer’s dreams.

They drive us fifteen kilometers to Chelmno, which the Germans call Kulmhof.

Here they order us out of the vans and demand that we relieve ourselves in the forest. I cannot do it… not with the guards and the other men looking on, but I pretend that I have urinated and button my pants again.

They put us back in the big vans and drive us to an old castle. Here they order us out again and we are marched through a courtyard littered with clothes and shoes and down into a cellar. On the wall of the cellar, in Yiddish, is written “No one leaves here alive.” There are hundreds of us in the cellar now, all men, all Poles, most of us from the nearby villages such as Gradow and Kolo, but many from Lodz. The air smells of dampness and rot and cold stone and mildew.

After several hours, as the light is waning, we do leave the cellar alive. More vans have arrived, larger vans, with double-leaf doors. These larger vans are green. They have no pictures painted on their sides. The guards open the van doors and I can see that most of these larger vans are almost full, each holding seventy to eighty men. I recognize none of the men in them. The Germans push and beat us to hurry us into the large vans. I hear many of the men I know crying out so I lead them in prayer as we are packed into the foul-smelling vans—Shema Israel, we are praying. We are still praying as the van doors are slammed shut.

Outside, the Germans are shouting at the Polish driver and his Polish helpers. I hear one of the helpers shout “Gas!” in Polish and there comes the sound of a pipe or hose being coupled somewhere under our truck. The engine starts again with a roar.

Some of those around me continue praying with me, but most of the men begin screaming. The van starts to move, very slowly. I know that we are taking the narrow, asphalted road that the Germans built from Chelmno into the forest. All of the villagers marveled at this, because the road goes nowhere… it stops in the forest where the road widens so that there is room for the vans to turn around. But there is nothing there but the forest and the ovens the Germans ordered built and the pits the Germans ordered dug. The Jews in the camp who worked on that road and who dug the pits out there and who worked to build the ovens in the forest have told us this. We had not believed them when they told us, and then they were gone… transported.

The air thickens. The screams rise. My head hurts. It is hard to breathe. My heart is pounding wildly. I am holding the hands of a young man—a boy—on my left, and an old man to my right. Both are praying with me.

Somewhere in our van, someone is singing above the screams, singing in Yiddish, singing in a baritone that has been trained for opera: