Theo Lane stood next to the Consul, fearing that the man might collapse. “We have only your word on this,” Theo said to the Ouster spokesman. “It makes no sense.”
Ghenga did not blink. “We will show you proof. Void-Which-Binds transmission locators. Real-time starfield images from our sister Swarms.”
“Void Which Binds?” said Arundez. His usually calm voice showed agitation.
“What you call the fatline.” Spokesman Freeman Ghenga paced to the nearest stone and ran her hand across its rough surface as if taking warmth from the heat within. Starfields pirouetted above.
“To answer Gladstone’s second question,” she said, “we do not know where the Core resides. We have fled it and fought it and sought it and feared it for centuries, but we have not found it. You must tell us the answer to that question! We have declared war on this parasite entity you call the TechnoCore.”
The Consul seemed to sag. “We have no idea. Authorities in the Web have sought the Core since before the Hegira, but it is as elusive as El Dorado. We’ve found no hidden worlds, no massive asteroids crammed with hardware, and no hint of it on Web worlds.” He gestured tiredly with his left hand. “For all we know, you are hiding the Core in one of your Swarms.”
“We are not,” said Spokesman Coredwell Minmun.
The Consul did shrug at last. “The Hegira bypassed thousands of worlds in the Grand Survey. Anything that didn’t score at least nine point seven on their ten-point terrabase scale was ignored. The Core could be anywhere along those early lines of flight and exploration. We’ll never find it… and if we do, it will be years after the Web is destroyed. You were our last hope for locating it.”
Ghenga shook her head. Far above them, the summit caught the light of sunrise while the terminator moved down the icefields toward them with almost alarming rapidity. “Thirdly, Gladstone asked for our demands for a cease-fire. Except for this Swarm, in this system, we are not the ones attacking. We will accept a cease-fire as soon as Hyperion is under our control… which should be momentarily. We have just been informed that our expeditionary forces now have control of the capital and its spaceport.”
“The hell you say,” said Theo, hands curling into fists despite himself.
“The hell we do say,” agreed Freeman Ghenga. “Tell Gladstone that we will now join you in a common fight against the TechnoCore.”
She glanced toward the silent members of the Tribunal. “Since we are many years’ travel from the Web, however, and we do not trust your Core-controlled farcasters, our help must necessarily come in the form of retaliating for the destruction of your Hegemony. You will be avenged.”
“That’s reassuring,” said the Consul drily.
“Fourthly, Gladstone asks if we will meet with her. The answer is yes… if she is, as she says she is, willing to come to Hyperion system. We have preserved the FORCE farcaster for just that eventuality. We will not travel by farcaster.”
“Why not?” asked Arundez.
A third Ouster, not introduced, one of the furred and beautifully altered type, spoke. “The device you call a farcaster is an abomination… a defilement of the Void Which Binds.”
“Ah, religious reasons,” said the Consul, nodding in understanding.
The exotically striped and furred Ouster shook his head adamantly.
“No! The farcaster web is the yoke on humankind’s neck, the contract of subservience which has bound you to stagnation. We will have none of it.”
“Fifthly,” said Freeman Ghenga, “Gladstone’s mention of the death-wand explosive device is nothing but a crude ultimatum. But as we have said, it is aimed at the wrong opponent. The forces sweeping into your frail and failing Web are not of the Clans of the Twelve Sister Swarms.”
“We have only your word on that,” said the Consul. His gaze, now locked with Ghenga’s, was firm and defiant.
“You have my word on nothing,” said Spokesman Ghenga. “Clan elders do not give their word to Core slaves. But this is the truth.”
The Consul seemed distracted as he half-turned toward Theo. “We have to get this word to Gladstone immediately.” He turned back to Ghenga. “May my friends return to the ship to communicate your response, Spokesman?”
Ghenga nodded and gestured for the gondola to be made ready.
“We’re not going back without you,” Theo said to the Consul, stepping between him and the closest Ousters as if to protect the older man with his own body.
“Yes,” said the Consul, touching Theo’s upper arm again, “you are. You must.”
“He’s right,” said Arundez, pulling Theo away before the young Governor-General can speak again. “This is too important to risk not communicating. You go. I’ll stay with him.”
Ghenga gestured toward two of the more massive exotic Ousters.
“You will both return to the ship. The Consul will remain. The Tribunal has not yet decided his fate.”
Arundez and Theo both wheeled with fists raised, but the furred Ousters seized them and moved them away with the restrained effort of adults handling small but unruly children.
The Consul watched them set in place in the gondola, and he stifled the urge to wave as the boat moved twenty meters down the placid stream, dipped out of sight beyond the curve of the terrace, and then reappeared climbing the waterfall toward black space. It was lost to sight within minutes in the glare of the sun. He turned slowly in a full circle, making eye contact with each of the seventeen Ousters.
“Let’s get it over with,” said the Consul. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”
Sol Weintraub sat between the great paws of the Sphinx and watched the storm abate, wind dying from scream to sigh to whisper, curtains of dust diminishing and then parting to show the stars, and finally the long night settling into a dreadful calm. The Tombs glowed more brightly than before, but nothing came out of the blazing doorway of the Sphinx, and Sol could not enter; the push of blinding light was like a thousand irresistible fingers against his chest, and lean and strain as he might, Sol could get no closer than three meters from the doorway.
Whatever stood or moved or waited inside was lost to sight in the glare of light.
Sol sat and held onto the stone stair as time tides pulled at him, tugged at him, and made him weep in the false shock of déjà vu. The entire Sphinx seemed to rock and pitch in the violent storm of expanding and contracting anti-entropic fields.
Rachel.
Sol would not leave while there was any chance his daughter might be alive. Lying on cold stone, listening to the wind scream die, Sol saw the cold stars appear, saw the meteor trail and laser-lance thrust and counterthrust of orbital war, knew in his heart that the war was lost, that the Web was in danger, that great empires were falling as he watched, the human race might be hanging in the balance this endless night… and he did not care.
Sol Weintraub cared about his daughter.
And even as he lay there, cold, buffeted by winds and time tides, bruised with fatigue and hollow from hunger, Sol felt a certain peace descend on him. He had given his daughter to a monster but not because God had commanded him to, not because fate or fear had willed it, but only because his daughter had appeared to him in a dream and told him that it was all right, that this was the thing to do, that their love—his and Sarai’s and Rachel’s—demanded it.
In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God.
Sol’s comlog no longer worked. It might have been an hour or five hours since he had handed his dying infant to the Shrike. Sol lay back, still gripping stone as the time tides made the Sphinx bob like a small ship on a big sea, and stared at the stars and battle above.
Sparks drifted across the sky, glowed bright as supernovae as laser lances found them, and then fell in a shower of molten debris—white-hot to red to blue flame to darkness. Sol imagined dropships burning, imagined Ouster troops and Hegemony Marines dying in a scream of atmosphere and m
elting titanium… he tried to imagine this… and failed. Sol realized that space battles and the movements of fleets and the fall of empires were beyond his imagining, hidden from the reservoirs of his sympathy or understanding. Such things belonged to Thucydides and Tacitus and Catton and Wu. Sol had met his senator from Barnard’s World, had met with her several times in his and Sarai’s quest to save Rachel from Merlin’s sickness, but Sol could not imagine Feldstein’s participation on the scale of interstellar war—or in anything much larger than dedicating a new medical center in the capital of Bussard or pressing the flesh during a rally at the university in Crawford.
Sol had never met the current Hegemony CEO, but as a scholar, he had enjoyed her subtle replay of the speeches of such classical figures as Churchill and Lincoln and Alvarez-Temp. But now, lying between the paws of a great stone beast and weeping for his daughter, Sol could not imagine what was in that woman’s mind as she made decisions that would save or damn billions, preserve or betray the greatest empire in human history.
Sol didn’t give a damn. He wanted his daughter back. He wanted Rachel to be alive despite all logic to the contrary.
Lying between the Sphinx’s stone paws on a besieged world in a ravaged empire, Sol Weintraub wiped tears from his eyes the better to see the stars and thought of Yeats’s poem “A Prayer for My Daughter":
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack-and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the Hooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea…
All Sol wanted, he realized now, was the same possibility once again to worry about those future years which every parent fears and dreads.
To not allow her childhood and teenage years and awkward young adulthood to be stolen and destroyed by the sickness.
Sol had spent his life willing the return of things unreturnable. He remembered the day he had come upon Sarai folding Rachel’s toddler clothes and setting them in a box in the attic, and he recalled her tears and his own sense of loss for the child they still had but who was lost to them through the simple arrow of time. Sol knew now that little could be returned except by memory—that Sarai was dead and beyond ability to return, that Rachel’s childhood friends and world were gone forever, that even the society he had left only a few weeks of his time ago was in the process of being lost beyond return.
And thinking of that, lying between the taloned paws of the Sphinx as the wind died and the false stars burned, Sol is reminded of part of a different and far more ominous poem by Yeats:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Sol does not know. Sol discovers again that he does not care. Sol wants his daughter back.
The consensus in the War Council seemed to be to drop the bomb.
Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period. To close her eyes, even for a second, meant sliding on the black ice of fatigue, so she did not close her eyes, even when they burned and when the drone of briefings, conversation, and urgent debate faded and receded through thick curtains of exhaustion.
Together the Council had watched as the embers of Task Force 181.2—Commander Lee’s attack group—had winked out one by one until only a dozen of the original seventy-four were left still driving toward the center of the approaching Swarm. Lee’s cruiser was among the survivors.
During this silent attrition, this abstract and oddly attractive representation of violent and all-too-real death, Admiral Singh and General Morpurgo had completed their gloomy assessment of the war.
“…FORCE and the New Bushido were designed for limited conflicts, minor skirmishes, proscribed limits and modest aims,” summarized Morpurgo. “With less than half a million men and women under arms, FORCE would not be comparable to the armies of one of the Old Earth nation states a thousand years ago. The Swarm can swamp us with sheer numbers, outgun our fleets and win through arithmetic.”
Senator Kolchev glowered from his place at the opposite end of the table. The Lusian had been much more active in the briefing and debate than Gladstone—questions were turned his way more frequently than to her—almost as if everyone in the room were subliminally aware that power was shifting, the torch of leadership was being passed.
Nor yet, thought Gladstone, tapping her chin with steepled fingers and listening to Kolchev cross-examine the General.
“…of falling back and defending essential worlds on the second-wave list—Tau Ceti Center, of course, but also necessary industrial worlds such as Renaissance Minor, Fuji, Deneb Vier, and Lusus?”
General Morpurgo looked down and shuffled papers as if to hide the sudden flash of anger in his eyes. “Senator, less than ten standard days remain until the second wave completes its target list. Renaissance Minor will fall under attack within ninety hours. What I am saying is that with the current size, structure, and technology available to FORCE, it would be doubtful if we could hold one system… say, TC2.”
Senator Kakinuma rose. “This is not acceptable. General.”
Morpurgo looked up. “I agree, Senator. But it is true.”
President Pro Tern Denzel-Hiat-Amin sat shaking his gray and mottled head. “It makes no sense. Were there no plans to defend the Web?”
Admiral Singh spoke from his seat. “The best estimates of the threat told us that we would have a minimum of eighteen months should the Swarms ever turn toward the attack.”
Minister of Diplomacy Persov cleared his throat. “And… if we were to concede these twenty-five worlds to the Ousters, Admiral, how long until the first or second wave could attack other Web worlds?”
Singh did not have to refer to his notes or comlog. “Depending upon their target, M. Persov, the nearest Web world—Esperance—would be nine standard months away from the closest Swarm. The most distant target—Home System—would be some fourteen years by Hawking drive.”
“Time enough to shift to a war economy,” said Senator Feldstein.
Her constituency on Barnard’s World had less than forty standard hours to live. Feldstein had vowed to be with them when the end came. Her voice was precise and passionless. “It makes sense. Cut your losses. Even with TC2 and two dozen more worlds lost, the Web can produce incredible quantities of war materiel… even in nine months. Within the years it will take for the Ousters to penetrate farther into the Web, we should be able to beat them through sheer industrial mass.”
Defense Minister Imoto shook his head. “There are irreplaceable raw materials being lost in this first and second wave. The disruption to
Web economy will be staggering.”
“Do we have a choice?” asked Senator Peters from Deneb Drei.
All eyes turned toward the person sitting next to AI Councilor Albedo.
As if to underline the importance of the moment, a new AI persona had been admitted to the War Council and had given the presentation on the awkwardly labeled “deathwand device.” Councilor Nansen was tall, male, tanned, relaxed, impressive, convincing, trustworthy, and imbued with that rare charisma of leadership that made one both like and respect the person on sight.
Meina Gladstone feared and loathed the new Councilor at once. She felt as if this projection had been designed by AI experts to create just the response of trust and obedience she sensed others at the table already granting. And Nansen’s message, she feared, meant death.
The deathwand had been Web technology for centuries—designed by the Core and limited to FORCE personnel and a few specialized security forces such as Government House’s and Gladstone’s Praetorians.
It did not burn, blast, shoot, slag, or incinerate. It made no sound and projected no visible ray or sonic footprint. It simply made the target die.
If the target were human, that is. A deathwand’s range was limited—no more than fifty meters—but within that range, a targeted human died, while other animals and property were totally safe. Autopsies showed scrambled synapses but no other damage. Deathwands merely made one cease to be. FORCE officers had carried them as short-range personal weapons and symbols of authority for generations.
Now, Councilor Nansen revealed, the Core had perfected a device that utilized the deathwand principle on a larger scale. They had hesitated to reveal its existence, but with the imminent and terrible threat of the Ouster invasion…
The questioning had been energetic and sometimes cynical, with the military more skeptical than the politicians. Yes, the deathwand device could rid us of Ousters, but what about the Hegemony population?
The Fall of Hyperion hc-2 Page 51
