At any rate, I wrote for more months, began to see the true immensity—and futility—of Aenea’s brave quest and hopeless sacrifice, and then I finished the frenzied scribbling, found the courage to describe Aenea’s terrible death and my own helplessness as she died, wept as I printed out the last few pages of microvellum, read them, recycled them, ordered the ’scriber to keep the complete narrative in its memory, and shut the stylus off for what I thought was the final time.
Aenea did not appear. She did not lead me out of captivity. She was dead. I felt her absence from the universe as clearly as I had felt any resonance from the Void Which Binds since my communion.
So I lay in my Schrödinger cat box, tried to sleep, forgot to eat, and waited for death.
Some of my explorations among the voices of the dead had led to revelations that had no direct relevance to my narrative. Some were personal and private—waking dreams of my long-dead father hunting with his brothers, for instance, and an insight into the generosity of that quiet man I had never known, or chronicles of human cruelty that, like the memories of Jacob Schulmann from the forgotten twentieth century, acted only as subtext for my deeper understanding of today’s barbarisms.
But other voices…
So I had finished the narrative of my life with Aenea and was waiting to die, spending longer and longer sleep periods, hoping that the decisive quantum event would occur while I was asleep, aware of the text in the memory of my ’scriber and wondering vaguely if anyone would ever figure out a way through the fixed-to-explode-if-tampered-with shell of my Schrödinger box and find my narrative someday, perhaps centuries hence, when I fell asleep again and had this dream. I knew at once that this was not a regular dream—that wave-front dance of possibilities—but was a call from one of the voices of the dead.
In my dream, the Hegemony Consul was playing the Steinway on the balcony of his ebony spaceship—that spaceship that I knew so well—while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the nearby swamps. He was playing Schubert. I did not recognize the world beyond the balcony, but it was a place of huge, primitive plants, towering storm clouds, and frightening animal roars.
The Consul was a smaller man than I had always imagined. When he was finished with the piece, he sat quietly for a moment in the twilight until the ship spoke in a voice I did not recognize—a smarter, more human voice.
“Very nice,” said the ship. “Very nice indeed.”
“Thank you, John,” said the Consul, rising from the bench and bringing the balcony into the ship with him.
It was beginning to rain.
“Do you still insist on going hunting in the morning?” asked the disembodied voice that was not the ship’s as I knew it.
“Yes,” said the Consul. “It is something I do here upon occasion.”
“Do you like the taste of dinosaur meat?” asked the ship’s AI.
“Not at all,” said the Consul. “Almost inedible. It is the hunt I enjoy.”
“You mean the risk,” said the ship.
“That too.” The Consul chuckled. “Although I do take care.”
“But what if you don’t come back from your hunt tomorrow?” asked the ship. His voice was of a young man with an Old Earth British accent.
The Consul shrugged. “We’ve spent—what?—more than six years exploring the old Hegemony worlds. We know the pattern… chaos, civil war, starvation, fragmentation. We’ve seen the fruit of the Fall of the Farcaster system.”
“Do you think that Gladstone was wrong in ordering the attack?” asked the ship softly.
The Consul had poured himself a brandy at the sideboard and now carried it to the chess table set near the bookcase. He took a seat and looked at the game pieces already engaged in battle on the board in front of him. “Not at all,” he said. “She did the right thing. But the result is sad. It will be decades, perhaps centuries before the Web begins to weave itself together in a new form.”
He had been warming the brandy and sloshing it gently as he spoke, now he inhaled it and sipped.
Looking up, the Consul said, “Would you like to join me for the completion of our game, John?”
The holo of a young man appeared in the seat opposite. He was a striking young man with clear hazel-colored eyes, low brow, hollow cheeks, a compact nose and stubborn jaw, and a wide mouth that suggested both a calm masculinity and a hint of pugnaciousness. The young man was dressed in a loose blouse and high-cut breeches. His hair was auburn-colored, thick, and very curly. The Consul knew that his guest had once been described as having “a brisk, winning face,” and he put that down to the easy mobility of expression that came with the young man’s great intelligence and vitality. “Your move,” said John. The Consul studied his options for several moments and then moved a bishop.
John responded at once, pointing to a pawn that the Consul obediently moved one rank forward for him. The young man looked up with sincere curiosity in his eyes. “What if you don’t come back from the hunt tomorrow?” he said softly.
Startled out of his reverie, the Consul smiled.
“Then the ship is yours, which it obviously is anyway.” He moved his bishop back. “What will you do, John, if this should be the end of our travels together?”
John gestured to have his rook moved forward at the same lightning speed with which he replied. “Take it back to Hyperion,” he said. “Program it to return to Brawne if all is well. Or possibly to Martin Silenus, if the old man is still alive and working on his Cantos.”
“Program it?” said the Consul, frowning at the board. “You mean you’d leave the ship’s AI?”
He moved his bishop diagonally another square.
“Yes,” said John, pointing to have his pawn advanced again. “I will do that in the next few days, at any rate.”
His frown deepening, the Consul looked at the board, then at the hologram across from him, and then at the board again. “Where will you go?” he said and moved his queen to protect his king.
“Back into the Core,” said John, moving the rook two spaces.
“To confront your maker again?” asked the Consul, attacking again with his bishop.
John shook his head. His bearing was very upright and he had the habit of clearing his forehead of curls with an elegant, backward toss of his head.
“No,” he said softly, “to start raising hell with the Core entities. To accelerate their endless civil wars and internecine rivalries. To be what my template had been to the poetic community—an irritant.” He pointed to where he wanted his remaining knight moved.
The Consul considered that move, found it not a threat, and frowned at his own bishop. “For what reason?” he said at last.
John smiled again and pointed to the square where his rook should next appear. “My daughter will need the help in a few years,” he said. He chuckled. “Well, in two hundred and seventy-some years, actually. Checkmate.”
“What?” said the Consul, startled, and studied the board. “It can’t be…”
John waited.
“Damn,” said the Hegemony Consul at last, tipping over his king. “Goddamn and spit and hell.”
“Yes,” said John, extending his hand. “Thank you again for a pleasant game. And I do hope that tomorrow’s hunt turns out more agreeably for you.”
“Damn,” said the Consul and, without thinking, attempted to shake the hologram’s thin-fingered hand. For the hundredth time, his solid fingers went through the other’s insubstantial palm. “Damn,” he said again.
That night in the Schrödinger cell, I awoke with two words echoing in my mind. “The child!” The knowledge that Aenea had been married before our relationship had become a full-fledged love affair, the knowledge that she had given birth to a child, had burned in my soul and gut like a painful ember, but except for my almost obsessive curiosity about who and why—curiosity unsatisfied by my questioning of A. Bettik, Rachel, and the others who had seen her leave during her odyssey with them but who had no idea themselves where she had gone or with whom—I had not considered the reality of that child alive somewhere in the same universe I inhabited. Her child. The thought made me want to weep for several reasons.