Hunt shook his head. His lips were almost blue from the cold. “You don’t understand,” came the attenuated voice of her aide. “It’s not just Hyperion. The Ousters are attacking at a dozen points. They’re invading the Web itself!”
Suddenly numb and chilled to her core, more from shock than from the lunar cold, Meina Gladstone nodded, gathered her cape more tightly around her, and stepped back through the portal to a world which would never be the same again.
Nineteen
They gathered at the head of the Valley of the Time Tombs, Brawne Lamia and Martin Silenus burdened with as many backpacks and carrying bags as they could manage, Sol Weintraub, the Consul, and Father Duré standing silent as a tribunal of patriarchs. The first shadows of afternoon were beginning to stretch east across the valley, reaching for the softly glowing Tombs like fingers of darkness.
“I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to split up like this,” said the Consul, rubbing his chin. It was very hot. Sweat gathered on his stubbled cheeks and ran down his neck.
Lamia shrugged. “We knew that we each would be confronting the Shrike alone. Does it matter if we’re separated a few hours? We need the food. You three could come if you want.”
The Consul and Sol glanced at Father Duré. The priest was obviously exhausted. The search for Kassad had drained whatever reserves of energy the man had kept after his ordeal.
“Someone should wait here in case the Colonel returns,” said Sol.
The baby looked very small in his arms.
Lamia nodded agreement. She settled straps on her shoulders and neck. “All right. It should be about two hours getting to the Keep. A little longer coming back. Figure a full hour there loading supplies, and we’ll still be back before dark. Close to dinnertime.”
The Consul and Duré shook hands with Silenus. Sol put his arms around Brawne. “Come back safely,” he whispered.
She touched the bearded man’s cheek, set her hand on the infant’s head for a second, turned, and started up the valley at a brisk pace.
“Hey, wait a nicking minute for me to catch up!” called Martin Silenus, canteens and water bottles clattering as he ran.
They came up out of the saddle between the cliffs together. Silenus glanced back and saw the other three men already dwarfed by distance, small sticks of color amid the boulders and dunes near the Sphinx. “It isn’t going quite as planned, is it?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Lamia. She had changed into shorts for the hike, and the muscles of her short, powerful legs gleamed under a sheen of sweat. “How was it planned?”
“My plan was to finish the universe’s greatest poem and then go home,” said Silenus. He took a drink from the last bottle holding water.
“Goddamn, I wish we’d brought enough wine to last us.”
“I didn’t have a plan,” said Lamia, half to herself. Her short curls, matted with perspiration, clung to her broad neck.
Martin Silenus snorted a laugh. “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that cyborg lover…”
“Client,” she snapped.
“Whatever. It was the Johnny Keats retrieval persona who thought it was important to get here. So now you’ve dragged him this far… you’re still carrying the Schrön loop aren’t you?”
Lamia absently touched the tiny neural shunt behind her left ear. A thin membrane of osmotic polymer kept sand and dust out of the follicle-sized connector sockets. “Yes.”
Silenus laughed again. “What the tuck good is it if there’s no data-sphere to interact with, kid? You might as well have left the Keats persona on Lusus or wherever.” The poet paused a second to adjust straps and packs. “Say, can you access the personality on your own?”
Lamia thought other dreams the night before. The presence in them had felt like Johnny… but the images had been of the Web. Memories? “No,” she said, “I can’t access a Schrön loop by myself. It carries more data than a hundred simple implants could deal with. Now why don’t you shut up and walk?” She picked up the pace and left him standing there.
The sky was cloudless, verdant, and hinting of depths of lapis. The boulder field ahead stretched southwest to the barrens, the barrens surrendering to the dunefields. The two walked in silence for thirty minutes, separated by five meters and their thoughts. Hyperion’s sun hung small and bright to their right.
“The dunes are steeper,” said Lamia as they struggled up to another crest and slid down the other side. The surface was hot, and already her shoes were filling with sand.
Silenus nodded, stopped, and mopped his face with a silken hand kerchief. His floppy purple beret hung low over his brow and left ear, but offered no shade. “It would be easier following the high ground to the north there. Near the dead city.”
Brawne Lamia shielded her eyes to stare in that direction. “We’ll lose at least half an hour going that way.”
“We’ll lose more than that going this way.” Silenus sat on the dune and sipped from his water bottle. He pulled off his cape, folded it, and stuffed it in the largest of his backpacks.
“What are you carrying there?” asked Lamia. “That pack looks full.”
“None of your damned business, woman.”
Lamia shook her head, rubbed her cheeks, and felt the sunburn there. She was not used to so many days in sunlight, and Hyperion’s atmosphere blocked little of the ultraviolet. She fumbled in her pocket for the tube of sunblock cream and smeared some on. “All right,” she said. “We’ll detour that way. Follow the ridgeline until the worst of the dunes are past and then cut back on a straight line toward the Keep.”
The mountains hung on the horizon, seeming to grow no closer. The snow-topped summits tantalized her with their promise of cool breezes and fresh water. The Valley of the Time Tombs was invisible behind them, the view blocked by dunes and the boulder field.
Lamia shifted her packs, turned to her right, and half-slid, half-walked down the crumbling dune.
As they came up out of the sand onto the low gorse and needle grass of the ridge, Martin Silenus could not take his eyes from the ruins of the City of Poets. Lamia had cut left around it, avoiding everything but the stones of the half-buried highways that circled the city, other roads leading out into the barrens until they disappeared beneath the dunes.
Silenus fell farther and farther behind until he stopped and sat on a fallen column, which had once been a portal through which the android laborers filed every evening after working in the fields. Those fields were gone now. The aqueducts, canals, and highways only hinted at by fallen stones, depressions in the sand, or the sand-scoured stumps of trees where once they had overhung a waterway or shaded a pleasant lane.
Martin Silenus used his beret to mop his face as he stared at the ruins. The city was still white… as white as bones uncovered by shifting sands, as white as teeth in an earth-brown skull. From where he sat, Silenus could see that many of the buildings were as he had last seen them more than a century and a half ago. Poets’ Amphitheatre lay half-finished but regal in its ruin, a white, otherworldly Roman Colosseum overgrown with desert creeper and fanfare ivy. The great atrium was open to the sky, the gallerias shattered—not by time, Silenus knew, but by the probes and lances and explosive charges of Sad King Billy’s useless security people in the decades after the evacuation of the city. They were going to kill the Shrike. They were going to use electronics and angry beams of coherent light to kill Grendel after he had laid waste to the mead hall.
Martin Silenus chuckled and leaned forward, suddenly dizzy from the heat and exhaustion.
Silenus could see the great dome of the Common Hall where he had eaten his meals, first with the hundreds in artistic camaraderie, then in separation and silence with the few others who had remained, for their own inscrutable and unrecorded reasons, after Billy’s evacuation to Keats, and then alone. Truly alone. Once he had dropped a goblet and the echo rang for half a minute under the vine-graffitied dome.
Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus.
But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse.
There was a sudden explosion of sound, and a score of white doves burst from some niche in the heap of broken towers that had been Sad King Billy’s palace. Silenus watched them whirl and circle in the overheated sky, marveling that they had survived the centuries here on the edge of nowhere.
If I could do it, why not they?
There were shadows in the city, pools of sweet shade. Silenus wondered if the wells were still good, the great underground reservoirs, sunk before the human seedships had arrived, still filled with sweet water.
He wondered if his wooden worktable, an antique from Old Earth, still sat in the small room in which he had written much of his Cantos.
“What’s wrong?” Brawne Lamia had retraced her steps and was standing near him.
“Nothing.” He squinted up at her. The woman looked like some squat tree, a mass of dark thigh roots and sunburned bark and frozen energy. He tried to imagine her being exhausted… the effort made him tired. “I just realized,” he said. “We’re wasting our time going all the way back to the Keep. There are wells in the city. Probably food reserves too.”
“Uh-uh,” said Lamia. “The Consul and I thought of that, talked about it. The Dead City’s been looted for generations. Shrike Pilgrims must have depleted the stores sixty or eighty years ago. The wells aren’t dependable… the aquifer has shifted, the reservoirs are contaminated. We go to the Keep.”
Silenus felt his anger grow at the woman’s insufferable arrogance, her instant assumption that she could take command in any situation.
“I’m going to explore,” he said. “It might save us hours of travel time.”
Lamia moved between him and the sun. Her black curls glowed with the corona of eclipse. “No. If we waste time here, we won’t be back before dark.”
“Go on, then,” snapped the poet, surprised at what he was saying. “I’m tired. I’m going to check out the warehouse behind the Common Hall. I might remember storage places the pilgrims never found.”
He could see the woman’s body tense as she considered dragging him to his feet, pulling him out onto the dunes again. They were little more than a third of the way to the foothills where the long climb to the Keep staircase began. Her muscles relaxed. “Martin,” she said, “the others are depending on us. Please don’t screw this up.”
He laughed and sat back against the tumbled pillar. “Fuck that,” he said. “I’m tired. You know that you’re going to do ninety-five percent of the transporting anyway. I’m old, woman. Older than you can imagine. Let me stay and rest a while. Maybe I’ll find some food. Maybe I’ll get some writing done.”
Lamia crouched next to him and touched his pack. “That’s what you’ve been carrying. The pages of your poem. The Cantos.”
“Of course,” he said.
“And you still think that proximity to the Shrike will allow you to finish it?”
Silenus shrugged, feeling the heat and dizziness whirl around him.
“The thing is a fucking killer, a sheet-metal Grendel forged in hell,” he said. “But it’s my muse.”
Lamia sighed, squinted at the sun already lowering itself toward the mountains, and then looked back the way they had come. “Go back,” she said softly. “To the valley.” She hesitated a moment. “I’ll go with you, then return.”
Silenus smiled with cracked lips. “Why go back? To play cribbage with three other old men until our beastie comes to tuck us in? No thanks, I’d rather rest here a bit and get some work done. Go on, woman. You can carry more than three poets could.” He struggled out of his empty packs and bottles, handing them to her.
Lamia held the tangle of straps in a fist as short and hard as the head of a steel hammer. “Are you sure? We can walk slowly.”
He struggled to his feet, fueled by a moment of pure anger at her pity and condescension. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Lusian. In case you forgot, the purpose of the pilgrimage was to get here and say hello to the Shrike. Your friend Hoyt didn’t forget. Kassad understood the game. The fucking Shrike’s probably chewing on his stupid military bones right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the three we left behind don’t need food or water by this point. Go on. Get the hell out of here. I’m tired of your company.”
Brawne Lamia remained crouching for a moment, looking up at him as he weaved above her. Then she got to her feet, touched his shoulder for the briefest of seconds, lifted the packs and bottles to her back, and swung away, her pace faster than anything he could have kept up with in his youth. “I’ll be back this way in a few hours,” she called, not turning back to look at him. “Be out on this edge of the city. We’ll return to the Tombs together.”
Martin Silenus said nothing as he watched her diminish and then disappear in the rough ground to the southwest. The mountains shimmered in the heat. He looked down and saw that she had left the water bottle for him. He spat, added the bottle to his load, and walked into the waiting shade of the dead city.
Twenty
Duré all but collapsed while they were eating lunch from the last two ration paks; Sol and the Consul carried him up the Sphinx’s wide stairway into the shade. The priest’s face was as white as his hair.
He attempted a smile as Sol lifted a water bottle to his lips. “All of you accept the fact of my resurrection rather easily,” he said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a finger.
The Consul leaned back against the stone of the Sphinx. “I saw the cruciforms on Hoyt. The same as you wear now.”
“And I believed his story… your story,” said Sol. He passed the water to the Consul.
Duré touched his forehead. “I’ve been listening to the comlog disks. The stories, including mine, are… incredible.”
“Do you doubt any of them?” asked the Consul.
“No. It is making sense of them that is the challenge. Finding the common element… the string of connection.”
Sol lifted Rachel to his chest, rocking her slightly, his hand on the back of her head. “Does there have to be a connection? Other than the Shrike?”
“Oh yes,” said Duré. A bit of color was returning to his cheeks. “This pilgrimage was not an accident. Nor was your selection.”
“Different elements had a say in who came on this pilgrimage,” said the Consul. “The AI Advisory Croup, the Hegemony Senate, even the Shrike Church.”
Duré shook his head. “Yes, but there was only one guiding intelligence behind this selection, my friends.”
Sol leaned closer. “God?”
“Perhaps,” said Duré, smiling, “but I was thinking of the Core… the artificial intelligences who have behaved so mysteriously through this entire sequence of events.”
The baby made soft, mewling noises. Sol found a pacifier for it and tuned the comlog on his wrist to heartbeat rates. The child curled its fists once and relaxed against the scholar’s shoulder. “Brawne’s story suggests that elements in the Core are trying to destabilize the status quo… allow humankind a chance for survival while still pursuing their Ultimate Intelligence project.”
The Consul gestured toward the cloudless sky. “Everything that’s happened… our pilgrimage, even this war… was manufactured because of the internal politics of the Core.”
“And what do we know of the Core?” asked Duré softly.
“Nothing,” said the Consul, and threw a pebble toward the carved stone to the left of the Sphinx’s stairway. “When all is said and done, we know nothing.”
Duré was sitting up now, massaging his face with a slightly moistened cloth. “Yet their goal is oddly similar to our own.”
“What’s that?” asked Sol, still rocking the baby.
“To know God,” said the priest. “Or failing that, to create Him.”
He squinted down the long valley. Shadows were moving farther out from the southwestern walls now, beginning to touch and enfold the Tombs. “I helped promote such an idea within the Church…”
“I’ve read
your treatises on St. Teilhard,” said Sol. “You did a brilliant job defending the necessity of evolution toward the Omega Point—the Godhood—without stumbling into the Socinian Heresy.”
“The what?” asked the Consul.
Father Duré smiled slightly. “Socinus was an Italian heretic in the sixteenth century A. D. His belief… for which he was excommunicated… was that God is a limited being, able to learn and to grow as the world… the universe… becomes more complex. And I did stumble into the Socinian Heresy, Sol. That was the first of my sins.”
Sol’s gaze was level. “And the last of your sins?”
“Besides pride?” said Duré. “The greatest of my sins was falsifying data from a seven-year dig on Armaghast. Trying to provide a connection between the vanished Arch Builders there and a form of protoChristianity.
It did not exist. I fudged data. So the irony is, the greatest of my sins, at least in the Church’s eyes, was to violate the scientific method. In her final days, the Church can accept theological heresy but can brook no tampering with the protocols of science.”
“Was Armaghast like this?” asked Sol, making a gesture with his arm that included the valley, the Tombs, and the encroaching desert.
Duré looked around, his eyes bright for a moment. “The dust and stone and sense of death, yes. But this place is infinitely more threatening. Something here has not yet succumbed to death when it should have.”
The Consul laughed. “Let’s hope that we’re in that category. I’m going to drag the comlog up to that saddle and try again to establish a relay link with the ship.”
“I’ll go too,” said Sol.
“And I,” said Father Duré, getting to his feet, weaving for only a second, and refusing the offer of Weintraub’s hand.
The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down.
The Fall of Hyperion hc-2 Page 19
