"Why?" I said.

"You'll see, my friend," said Aenea, touching my gloved hand with hers. "Anyway, Vernadsky wrote in 1926-'Atoms, once drawn into the torrent of living matter, do not readily leave it'"

I thought about this for a moment. I did not know much science-what I had picked up came from Grandam and the Taliesin library-but this made sense to me.

"It was phrased more scientifically twelve hundred years ago as Dollo's Law," said Aenea. "The essence of it is that evolution doesn't back up...exceptions like the Old Earth whale trying to become a fish again after living as a land mammal are just the rare exception. Life moves on...it constantly finds new niches to invade."

"Yeah," I said. "Such as when humanity left Old Earth in its seedships and Hawking-drive vessels."

"Not really," said Aenea. "First of all, we did that prematurely because of the influence of the Core and the fact that Old Earth was dying because of a black hole in its belly...also the Core's work. Secondly, because of the Hawking drive, we could jump through our arm of the galaxy to find Earth-like worlds high on the Solmev Scale...most of which we terraformed anyway and seeded with Old Earth life-forms, starting with soil bacteria and earthworms and moving up to the ducks you used to hunt in the Hyperion fens."

I nodded. But I was thinking, How else should we have done it as a species moving out into s.p.a.ce? What's wrong with going to places that looked and smelled somewhat like home...especially when home wasn't going to be there to go back to? How else should we have done it as a species moving out into s.p.a.ce? What's wrong with going to places that looked and smelled somewhat like home...especially when home wasn't going to be there to go back to?

"There's something more interesting in Vernadsky's observations and Dollo's Law," said Aenea.

"What's that, kiddo?" I was still thinking about ducks.

"Life doesn't retreat."

"How so?" As soon as I asked the question I understood.

"Yeah," said my friend, seeing my understanding. "As soon as life gets a foothold somewhere, it stays. You name it...arctic cold, the Old Mars frozen desert, boiling hot springs, a sheer rockface such as here on T'ien Shan, even in autonomous intelligence programs...once life gets its proverbial foot in the door, it stays forever."

"So what are the implications of that?" I said.

"Simply that left to its own devices...which are clever devices...life will someday fill the universe," said Aenea, "it will be a green galaxy to begin with, then off to our neighboring cl.u.s.ters and galaxies."

"That's a disturbing thought," I said.

She paused to look at me. "Why, Raul? I think it's beautiful."

"Green planets I've seen," I said. "A green atmosphere is imaginable, but weird."

She smiled. "It doesn't have to be just plants. Life adapts...birds, men and women in flying machines, you and me in paragliders, people adapted to flight..."

"That hasn't happened yet," I said. "But what I meant was, well, to have a green galaxy, people and animals and..."

"And living machines," said Aenea. "And androids...artificial life of a thousand forms..."

"Yeah, people, animals, machines, androids, whatever...would have to adapt to s.p.a.ce...I don't see how..."

"We have," said Aenea. "And more will before too long." We reached the next three hundredth step and paused to pant.

"What other directions are there in evolution that we've ignored?" I said when we began to climb again.

"Increasing diversity and complexity," said Aenea. "Scientists argued back and forth about these directions for centuries, but there's no doubt that evolution favors-in the very long run-both these attributes. And of the two, diversity is the more important."

"Why?" I said. She must have been growing tired of that syllable. I sounded like a three-year-old child even to myself.

"Scientists used to think that basic evolutionary designs kept multiplying," said Aenea. "That's called disparity. But that turned out not to be the case. Variety in basic plans tends to decrease as life's antientropic potential-evolution-increases. Look at all the orphans of Old Earth, for instance-same basic DNA, of course, but also the same basic plans: evolved from forms with tubular guts, radial symmetry, eyes, feeding mouths, two s.e.xes...pretty much from the same mold."

"But I thought you said diversity was important," I said.

"It is," said Aenea. "But diversity is different than basic-plan disparity. Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design...thousands of related species...tens of thousands."

"Trilobites," I said, getting the idea.

"Yes," said Aenea, "and when..."

"Beetles," I said. "All those G.o.dd.a.m.n species of beetles."

Aenea grinned at me through her mask. "Precisely. And when..."

"Bugs," I said. "Every world I've been on has the same G.o.dd.a.m.n swarms of bugs. Mosquitoes. Endless varieties of..."

"You've got it," said Aenea. "Life shifts into high gear when the basic plan for an organism is settled and new niches open up. Life settles into those new niches by tweeking the diversity within the basic shape of those organisms. New species. There are thousands of new species of plants and animals that have come into existence in just the last millennium since interstellar flight started...and not all bio-engineered, some just adapted at a furious rate to the new Earth-like worlds they were dumped down on."

"Triaspens," I said, remembering just Hyperion. "Ever-blues. Womangrove root. Tesla trees?"

"They were native," said Aenea.

"So the diversity's good," I said, trying to find the original threads of this discussion.

"Diversity's good," agreed Aenea. "As I said, it lets life shift into high gear and get on with its mindless business of greening up the universe. But there's at least one Old Earth species that hasn't diversified much at all...at least not on the friendly worlds it colonized."

"Us," I said. "Humans."

Aenea nodded grimly. "We've been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals," she said. "Now it's our chance to diversify rapidly, and inst.i.tutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it."

"Does the need to diversify extend to human inst.i.tutions?" I said. "Religions? Social systems?" I was thinking about the people who had helped me on Vitus-Gray-Balia.n.u.s B, Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and their families. I was thinking about the Amoiete Spectrum Helix and its complicated and convoluted beliefs.

"Absolutely," said Aenea. "Look over there."

A. Bettik had paused at a slab of marble upon which words were carved in Chinese and early Web English: High rises the Eastern Peak Soaring up to the blue sky.

Among the rocks-an empty hollow, Secret, still, mysterious!

Unearned and unhewn, Screened by nature with a roof of clouds.Time and Seasons, what things are you, Bringing to my life ceaseless change?

I will lodge forever in this hollow Where springs and autumns unheeded pa.s.s.-Tao-yun, wife of General w.a.n.g Ning-chih, A.D. 400 We climbed on. I thought that I could see something red at the top of this next flight of stairs. The South Gate of Heaven and entry to the summit slope? It was about time.

"Wasn't that beautiful though?" I said, speaking of the poem. "Isn't continuity like that as important or more important in human inst.i.tutions as diversity?"

"It's important," agreed Aenea. "But that's almost all humanity has been doing for the last millennium, Raul...recreating Old Earth inst.i.tutions and ideas on different worlds. Look at the Hegemony. Look at the Church and the Pax. Look at this world..."

"T'ien Shan?" I said. "I think it's wonderful..."

"So do I," said Aenea. "But it's all borrowed. The Buddhism has evolved a bit...at least away from idolatry and ritual back to the open-mindedness that was its earliest hallmark...but everything else is pretty much an attempt to recapture things lost with Old Earth."

"Such as?" I said.

"Such as the language, dress, the names of the mountains, local customs...h.e.l.l, Raul, even this pilgrimage trail and the Temple of the Jade Emperor, if we ever get there."

"You mean there was a T'ai Shan mountain on Old Earth?" I said.

"Absolutely," said Aenea. "With its own City of Peace and Heavenly Gates and Mouth of the Dragon. Confucius climbed it more than three thousand years ago. But the Old Earth stairway had just seven thousand steps."

"I wish we'd climbed it instead," I said, wondering if I could keep climbing. The steps were short, but there had been a h.e.l.l of a lot of them. "I see your point though."

Aenea nodded. "It's wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves...culturally and physically."

"Which brings us back to evolution," I said. "What are the other directions, tendencies, goals, or whatever that you said had been ignored the last few centuries?"

"There are just a few more," said Aenea. "One is an ever increasing number of individuals. Life likes gazillions of species, but it absolutely loves hypergazillions of individuals. In a sense, the universe is tooled up for individuals. There was a book in the Taliesin library called Evolving Hierarchical Systems Evolving Hierarchical Systems by an Old Earth guy named Stanley Salthe. Did you see it?" by an Old Earth guy named Stanley Salthe. Did you see it?"

"No, I must have missed it when I was reading those early twenty-first-century holop.o.r.n novels."

"Uh-huh," said Aenea. "Well, Salthe put it sort of neatly-'An indefinite number of unique individuals can exist in a finite material world if they are nested within each other and that world is expanding.'"

"Nested within each other," I repeated, thinking about it. "Yeah, I get it. Like the Old Earth bacteria in our gut, and the paramecia we've dragged into s.p.a.ce, and the other cells in our bodies...more worlds, more people...yeah."

"The trick is more people," said Aenea. "We have hundreds of billions, but between the Fall and the Pax, the actual human population in the galaxy-not counting Ousters-has leveled off in the last few hundred years."

"Well, birth control is important," I said, repeating what everyone on Hyperion had been taught. "I mean, especially with the cruciform capable of keeping people alive for centuries and centuries..."

"Exactly," said Aenea. "With artificial immortality comes more stagnation...physical and cultural. It's a given."

I frowned. "But that's not a reason to deny people the chance for extended life, is it?"

Aenea's voice seemed remote, as if she were contemplating something much larger. "No," she said at last, "not in itself."

"What are the evolutionary directions?" I asked, seeing the red paG.o.da come closer above us and praying that the conversation would keep my mind off collapsing, rolling back down the twenty-some thousand steps we had climbed.

"Just three more worth mentioning," said Aenea. "Increasing specialization, increasing codependency, and increasing evolvability. All of these are really important, but the last is most so."

"How do you mean, kiddo?"

"I mean that evolution itself evolves. It has to. Evolvability is in itself an inherited survival trait. Systems-living and otherwise-have to learn how to evolve and, to some extent, control the direction and rate of their own evolution. We...I mean the human species...were on the verge of doing that a thousand years ago, and the Core took it away from us. At least from most of us."

"What do you mean, 'most of us'?"

"I promise that you'll see in a few days, Raul."

We reached the South Gate of Heaven and pa.s.sed through its arched entry, a red arch under a golden paG.o.da roof. Beyond it was the Heavenly Way, a gentle slope that ran to the summit that was just visible. The Heavenly Way was nothing more than path on bare, black rock. We could have been walking on an airless moon like Old Earth's-the conditions here were about as amenable to life. I started to say something to Aenea about this being a niche that life hadn't stuck its foot into, when she led the way off the path to a small stone temple set in among the sharp crags and fissures a few hundred meters below the summit. There was an air lock that looked so ancient it appeared to have come out on one of the earliest seedships. Amazingly, it worked when she activated the press pad and the three of us stood in it until it cycled and the inner door opened. We stepped inside.

It was a small room and almost bare except for an ornate bronze pot holding fresh flowers, some sprigs of green on a low dais, and a beautiful statue-once gold-of a life-size woman in robes that appeared to be made of gold. The woman was fat-cheeked and of pleasant demeanor-a sort of female Buddha-and she looked to be wearing a gilded crown of leaves and had an oddly Christian halo of hammered gold behind her head.

A. Bettik pulled off his helmet and said, "The air is good. Air pressure more than adequate."

Aenea and I folded back our skinsuit cowls. It was a pleasure to breathe regularly.

There were incense tapers and a box of matches at the statue's foot. Aenea went to one knee and used a match to light one of the tapers. The smell of incense was very strong.

"This is the Princess of the Azure Clouds," she said, smiling up at the smiling gold face. "The G.o.ddess of the dawn. By lighting this, I've just made an offering for the birth of grandchildren."

I started to smile and then froze. She has a child. My beloved has already had a child She has a child. My beloved has already had a child. My throat tightened and I looked away, but Aenea walked over and took my arm.

"Shall we eat lunch?" she said.

I had forgotten about our brown bag lunch. It would have been difficult to eat it through our helmets and osmosis masks.

We sat in the dim light, in the windowless room, amid the floating smoke and scent of incense, and ate the sandwiches packed by the monks.

"Where now?" I said as Aenea began recycling the inner lock.

"I have heard that there is a precipice on the eastern edge of the summit called Suicide Cliff," said A. Bettik. "It used to be a place for serious sacrifice. Jumping from it is said to provide instant communion with the Jade Emperor and to insure that your offering request is honored. If you really want to guarantee grandchildren, you might jump from there."

I stared at the android. I was never sure if he had a sense of humor or simply a skewed personality.

Aenea laughed. "Let's walk to the Temple of the Jade Emperor first," she said. "See if anyone's home."

Outside, I was struck first by the isolation of the skinsuit and the airless clarity of everything. The osmosis mask had gone almost opaque because of the unfiltered ferocity of the midday sun at this alt.i.tude. Shadows were harsh.

We were about fifty meters from the summit and the temple when a form stepped out of the blackness of shadow behind a boulder and blocked our way. I thought Shrike Shrike and foolishly clenched my hands into fists before I saw what it was. and foolishly clenched my hands into fists before I saw what it was.

A very tall man stood before us, dressed in lance-slashed, vacuum combat armor. Standard Pax Fleet Marine and Swiss Guard issue. I could see his face through the impact-proof visor -his skin was black, his features strong, and his short-cropped hair was white. There were fresh and livid scars on his dark face. His eyes were not friendly. He was carrying a Marine-cla.s.s, multipurpose a.s.sault rifle, and now he raised it and leveled it at us. His transmission was on the skinsuit band.

"Stop!"

We stopped.

The giant did not seem to know what to do next. The Pax finally have us The Pax finally have us, was my first thought.

Aenea took a step forward. "Sergeant Gregorius?" came her voice on the skinsuit band.

The man c.o.c.ked his head but did not lower the weapon. I had no doubt that the rifle would work perfectly in hard vacuum-either flechette cloud, energy lance, charged particle beam, solid slug, or hyper-k. The muzzle was aimed at my beloved's face.

"How do you know my..." began the giant and then seemed to rock backward. "You're her. The one. The girl we sought for so long, across so many systems. Aenea."

"Yes," said Aenea. "Are there others who survived?"

"Three," said the man she had called Gregorius. He gestured to his right and I could just make out a black scar on black rock, with blackened remnants of something that might have been a starship escape bulb.

"Is Father Captain de Soya among them?" said Aenea.

I remembered the name. I remembered de Soya's voice on the dropship radio when he had found us and saved us from Nemes and then let us go on G.o.d's Grove almost ten of his and Aenea's years ago.

"Aye," said Sergeant Gregorius, "the captain's alive, but just barely. He was burned bad on the poor old Raphael Raphael. He'd be atoms with her, if he hadn't pa.s.sed out an' given me the opportunity to drag him to a lifeboat. The other two are hurt, but the father-captain's dyin'." He lowered the rifle and leaned on it wearily. "Dyin' the true death...we have no resurrection creche and the darlin' father-captain made me promise to slag him to atoms when he went, rather than let him be resurrected a mindless idiot."