by Dan Simmons
At the tunnel through the Aurelian Wall, Hunt paused to look back. The horse, still attached to its carriage, had moved down the long slope to munch on sweeter grass near a small stream. The sheep milled about, munching flowers and leaving their hoofprints in the moist soil of the grave. The Shrike remained where it had been, barely visible beneath its bower of cypress branches. Hunt was almost sure that the creature still faced the grave.
It was late in the afternoon when Hunt found the farcaster, a dull rectangle of dark blue humming in the precise center of the crumbling Colosseum. There was no diskey or punchplate. The portal hung there like an opaque but open door.
But not open to Hunt.
He tried fifty times, but the surface was as solid and resisting as stone. He touched it tentatively with fingertips, stepped confidently into and bounced off its surface, threw himself at the blue rectangle, lobbed stones at the entrance to watch them bounce off, tried both sides and even the edges of the thing, and ended up leaping again and again at the useless thing until his shoulders and upper arms were masses of bruises.
It was a farcaster. He was sure of it. But it would not let him through. Hunt searched the rest of the Colosseum, even the underground passages dripping with moisture and bat guano, but there was no other portal. He searched the nearby streets and all their buildings. No other portal. He searched all afternoon, through basilica and cathedrals, homes and huts, grand apartment buildings and narrow alleys. He even returned to the Piazza di Spagna, ate a hasty meal on the first floor, pocketed the notebook and anything else he found of interest in the rooms above, and then left forever to find a farcaster.
The one in the Colosseum was the only one he could find. By sunset he had clawed at it until his fingers were bloody. It looked right, it hummed right, it felt right, but it would not let him through.
A moon, not Old Earth’s moon judging by the dust storms and clouds visible on its surface, had risen and now hung above the black curve of the Colosseum wall. Hunt sat in the rocky center and glowered at the blue glow of the portal. From somewhere behind him came the frenzied beat of pigeons’ wings and the rattle of a small rock on stone.
Hunt rose painfully, fumbled the laser pen out of his pocket, and stood, legs apart, waiting and straining to see into the shadows of the Colosseum’s many crevices and arches. Nothing stirred.
A sudden noise behind him made him whirl and almost spray the thin beam of laser light across the farcaster portal’s surface. An arm appeared there. Then a leg. A person emerged. Then another.
The Colosseum echoed to Leigh Hunt’s shouts.
Meina Gladstone had known that as tired as she was, it would be folly to nap even as long as thirty minutes. But since childhood, she had trained herself to take five- to fifteen-minute catnaps, shrugging off weariness and fatigue toxins through these brief respites from thought.
Now, sickened with exhaustion and the vertigo of the previous forty-eight hours’ confusion, she lay a few minutes on the long sofa in her study, emptying her mind of trivia and redundancies, letting her subconscious find a path through the jungle of thoughts and events. For a few minutes, she dozed, and while she dozed she dreamed.
Meina Gladstone sat upright, shrugging off the light afghan and tapping at her comlog before her eyes were open. “Sedeptra! Get General Morpurgo and Admiral Singh in my office in three minutes.”
Gladstone stepped into the adjoining bathroom, showered and sonicked, pulled out fresh clothes—her most formal suit of soft, black whipcord velvet, a gold and red Senate scarf held in place by a gold pin showing the geodesic symbol of the Hegemony, earrings dating back to pre-Mistake Old Earth, and the topaz bracelet-cum-comlog given to her by Senator Byron Lamia before his marriage—and was back in the study in time to greet the two FORCE officers.
“CEO, this is very unfortunate timing,” began Admiral Singh. “The final data from Mare Infinitus was being analyzed, and we were discussing fleet movements for the defense of Asquith.”
Gladstone ordered her private farcaster into existence and gestured for the two men to follow her.
Singh glanced around as he stepped through into gold grass under a threatening bronze sky. “Kastrop-Rauxel,” he said. “There were rumors that a previous administration had FORCE:space construct a private farcaster here.”
“CEO Yevshensky had it added to the Web,” said Gladstone. She waved, and the farcaster door vanished. “He felt that the Chief Executive needed someplace where Core listening devices were unlikely.”
Morpurgo looked uneasily toward a wall of clouds near the horizon where ball lightning played. “No place is totally safe from the Core,” he said. “I’ve been telling Admiral Singh about our suspicions.”
“Not suspicions,” said Gladstone. “Facts. And I know where the Core is.”
Both FORCE officers reacted as if the ball lightning had struck them. “Where?” they said almost in unison.
Gladstone paced back and forth. Her short gray hair seemed to glow in the charged air. “In the farcaster web,” she said. “Between the portals. The AIs live in the singularity pseudo-world there like spiders in a dark web. And we wove it for them.”
Morpurgo was the first of the two able to speak. “My God,” he said. “What do we do now? We have less than three hours before the torchship with the Core device translates to Hyperion space.”
Gladstone told them exactly what they were going to do.
“Impossible,” said Singh. He was unconsciously tugging at his short beard. “Simply impossible.”
“No,” said Morpurgo. “It will work. There is enough time. And as frantic and random as the fleet movements have been during the past two days … ”
The Admiral shook his head. “Logistically it might be possible. Rationally and ethically it is not. No, it is impossible.”
Meina Gladstone stepped closer. “Kushwant,” she said, addressing the Admiral by his first name for the first time since she had been a young senator and he an even younger FORCE:space commander, “don’t you remember when Senator Lamia put us in touch with the Stables? The AI named Ummon? His prediction of the two futures—one holding chaos and the other certain extinction for humankind?”
Singh turned away. “My duty is to FORCE and the Hegemony.”
“Your duty is the same as mine,” snapped Gladstone. “To the human race.”
Singh’s fists came up as if he were ready to fight an invisible but powerful opponent. “We don’t know for sure! Where did you get your information?”
“Severn,” said Gladstone. “The cybrid.”
“Cybrid?” snorted the General. “You mean that artist. Or at least that miserable excuse for one.”
“Cybrid,” repeated the CEO. She explained.
“Severn as a retrieval persona?” Morpurgo looked dubious. “And now you’ve found him?”
“He found me. In a dream. Somehow he managed to communicate from wherever he is. That was his role, Arthur, Kushwant. That’s why Ummon sent him to the Web.”
“A dream,” sneered Admiral Singh. “This … cybrid … told you that the Core was hidden in the farcaster web … in a dream.”
“Yes,” said Gladstone, “and we have very little time in which to act.”
“But,” said Morpurgo, “to do what you suggested—”
“Would doom millions,” finished Singh. “Possibly billions. The economy would collapse. Worlds like TC2, Renaissance Vector, New Earth, the Denebs, New Mecca—Lusus, Arthur—scores more depend upon other worlds for their food. Urban planets cannot survive alone.”
“Not as urban planets,” said Gladstone. “But they can learn to farm until interstellar trade is reborn.”
“Bah!” snarled Singh. “After plague, after the breakdown of authority, after the millions of deaths from lack of proper equipment, medicine, and datasphere support.”
“I’ve thought of all that,” said Gladstone, her voice firmer than Morpurgo had ever heard it. “I’ll be the greatest mass murderer in history—great
er than Hitler or Tze Hu or Horace Glennon-Height. The only thing worse is to continue as we are. In which case, I—and you, gentlemen—will be the ultimate betrayers of humankind.”
“We can’t know that,” grunted Kushwant Singh, as if the words were driven from him by blows to the belly.
“We do know that,” said Gladstone. “The Core has no more use for the Web. From now on, the Volatiles and Ultimates will keep a few million slaves penned underground on the nine labyrinthine worlds while they use human synapses for what computing needs remain.”
“Nonsense,” said Singh. “Those humans would die out.”
Meina Gladstone sighed and shook her head. “The Core has devised a parasitic, organic device called the cruciform,” she said, “It … brings back … the dead. After a few generations, the humans will be retarded, listless, and without a future, but their neurons will still serve Core purposes.”
Singh turned his back on them again. His small form was silhouetted against a wall of lightning as the storm approached in a riot of boiling bronze clouds. “Your dream told you this, Meina?”
“Yes.”
“And what else does your dream say?” snapped the Admiral.
“That the Core has no more need for the Web,” said Gladstone. “Not for the human Web. They’ll continue to reside there, rats in the walls, but the original occupants are no longer needed. The AI Ultimate Intelligence will take over the major computing duties.”
Singh turned to look at her. “You are mad, Meina. Quite mad.”
Gladstone moved quickly to grab the Admiral’s arm before he could activate the farcaster. “Kushwant, please listen to—”
Singh pulled a ceremonial fléchette pistol from his tunic and set it against the woman’s breast. “I am sorry, M. Executive. But I serve the Hegemony and … ”
Gladstone stepped back with her hand to her mouth as Admiral Kushwant Singh stopped speaking, stared sightlessly for a second, and fell to the grass. The fléchette pistol tumbled into the weeds.
Morpurgo stepped forward to retrieve it, tucking it into his belt before he put away the deathwand in his hand.
“You killed him,” said the CEO. “If he wouldn’t cooperate, I’d planned to leave him here. Maroon him on Kastrop-Rauxel.”
“We couldn’t take the chance,” said the General, pulling the body farther from the farcaster. “Everything depends upon the next few hours.”
Gladstone looked at her old friend. “You’re willing to go through with it?”
“We have to,” said Morpurgo. “It will be our last chance to get rid of this yoke of oppression. I’ll give the deployment orders at once and hand over sealed orders in person. It will take most of the fleet …”
“My God,” whispered Meina Gladstone, looking down at the body of Admiral Singh. “I’m doing all of this on the strength of a dream.”
“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”
FORTY-FOUR
Death is not, I discovered, a pleasant experience. Leaving the familiar rooms on the Piazza di Spagna and the rapidly cooling body there is similar to being thrust out in the night by fire or flood from the familiar warmth of one’s home. The rush of shock and displacement is severe. Thrown headlong into the metasphere, I experience the same sense of shame and sudden, awkward revelation which we have all had in our dreams when we realize that we have forgotten to get dressed and have come naked to some public place or social gathering.
Naked is the correct word now, as I struggle to keep some shape to my tattered analog persona. I manage to concentrate sufficiently to form this almost random electron cloud of memories and associations into a reasonable simulacrum of the human I had been—or at least the human whose memories I had shared.
Mister John Keats, five feet high.
The metasphere is no less a frightening place than before—worse now that I have no mortal shelter to flee to. Vast shapes move beyond dark horizons, sounds echo in the Void Which Binds like footsteps on tile in an abandoned castle. Under and behind everything there is a constant and unnerving rumble like carriage wheels on a highway made of slate.
Poor Hunt. I am tempted to return to him, pop in like Marley’s ghost to assure him that I am better off than I look, but Old Earth is a dangerous place for me right now: the Shrike’s presence burns on the metasphere datumplane there like flame on black velvet.
The Core summons me with greater force, but that is even more dangerous. I remember Ummon destroying the other Keats in front of Brawne Lamia—squeezing the analog persona to him until it simply dissolved, the basic Core memory of the man deliquescing like a salted slug.
No thank you.
I have chosen death to godhood, but I have chores to do before I sleep.
The metasphere frightens me, the Core frightens me more, the dark tunnels of the datasphere singularities I must travel terrify me to my analog bones. But there is nothing for it.
I sweep into the first black cone, swirling around like a metaphorical leaf in an all-too-real whirlpool, emerging on the proper datumplane, but too dizzy and disoriented to do anything but sit there—visible to any Core AI accessing these ROMwork ganglia or phage routines residing in the violet crevices of any of these data mountain ranges—but the chaos in the TechnoCore saves me here: the great Core personalities are too busy Saying siege to their own personal Troys to watch their back doors.
I find the datasphere access codes I want and the synapse umbilicals I need, and it is the work of a microsecond to follow old paths down to Tau Ceti Center, Government House, the infirmary there, and the drug-induced dreams of Paul Duré.
One thing my persona does exceptionally well is dream, and I discover quite by accident that my memories of my Scottish tour make a pleasant dreamscape in which to convince the priest to flee. As an Englishman and freethinker, I once had been opposed to anything which smacked of popery, but one thing must be said in tribute to the Jesuits—they are taught obedience even above logic, and for once this stands all of humankind in good stead. Duré does not ask why when I tell him to go …he awakes like a good boy, wraps a blanket around him, and goes.
Meina Gladstone thinks of me as Joseph Severn but she accepts my message as if it is being delivered to her by God. I want to tell her no, I am not the One, I am only He Who Comes Before, but the message is the thing, so I deliver that and go.
Passing through the Core on my way to Hyperion’s metasphere, I catch the burning-metal whiff of civil war and glimpse a great light which might well be Ummon in the process of being extinguished. The old Master, if indeed it is he, does not cite koans as he dies, but screams in agony as sincerely as any conscious entity ever has who is in the process of being fed to the ovens.
I hurry on.
The farcaster connection to Hyperion is tenuous at best: a single military farcaster portal and a single, damaged JumpShip in a shrinking perimeter of war-torn Hegemony ships. The singularity containment sphere cannot be protected from Ouster attacks for longer than a few minutes more. The Hegemony torchship carrying the Core deathwand device is preparing to translate in-system even as I come through and find my bearings in the limited datasphere level which allows observation. I pause to watch what happens next.
“Christ,” said Melio Arundez, “Meina Gladstone’s coming through on a priority-one squirt.”
Theo Lane joined the older man as they watched the override data mist the air above the holopit. The Consul came down the iron spiral staircase from the bedroom where he had gone to brood. “Another message from TC2?” he snapped.
“Not to us specifically,” said Theo, reading the red codes as they formed and faded. “It’s an override fatline transmission to everyone, everywhere.”
Arundez lowered himself into the pit cushions. “Something’s very wrong. Has the CEO ever broadcast on total wideband before?”
“Never,” said Theo Lane. “The energy needed just to code such a squirt would be incredible.”<
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The Consul stepped closer and pointed to the codes now disappearing. “It’s not a squirt. Look, it’s a real-time transmission.”
Theo shook his head. “We’re talking transmission values of several hundred million gigaelectron volts here.”
Arundez whistled. “At even a hundred million GeV, it’d better be important. ”
“A general surrender,” said Theo. “It’s the only thing that would call for a universal real-time broadcast. Gladstone’s sending it to the Ousters, Outback worlds, and overrun planets as well as the Web. It must be carried on all comm frequencies, HTV, and datasphere bands too. It must be a surrender.”
“Shut up,” said the Consul. He had been drinking.
The Consul had started drinking immediately upon his return from the Tribunal, and his temper, which had been foul even as Theo and Arundez were slapping him on the back and celebrating his survival, had not improved after the lift-off, clearance of the Swarm, and the two hours he spent alone drinking while they accelerated toward Hyperion.
“Meina Gladstone won’t surrender,” slurred the Consul. The bottle of Scotch was still in his hand. “Just watch.”
On the torchship HS Stephen Hawking, the twenty-third Hegemony spacecraft to carry the revered classical scientist’s name, General Arthur Morpurgo looked up from the C3 board and hushed his two bridge officers. Normally this class of torchship carried a crew of seventy-five. Now, with the Core deathwand device loaded in the weapons bay and armed, Morpurgo and four volunteers were the total crew. Displays and discreet computer voices assured them that the Stephen Hawking was on course, on time, and accelerating steadily toward near-quantum velocities and the military farcaster portal stationed at LaGrange Point Three between Madhya and its oversized moon. The Madhya portal opened directly to the fiercely defended Hyperion-space farcaster.
“One minute eighteen seconds to translation point,” said Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo. The General’s son.
Morpurgo nodded and keyed up the in-system wideband transmission. Bridge projections were busy enough with mission data, so the General allowed voice-only on the CEO’s broadcast. He smiled despite himself. What would Meina say if she knew he was at the helm of the Stephen Hawking? Better she didn’t know. There was nothing else he could do. He preferred not to see the results of his precise, hand-delivered orders of the past two hours.
