by Dan Simmons
The Obelisk remained a black mystery. The tomb still glowed, but it now had no door. Ousters guessed that armies of Shrikes still waited within. Martin Silenus thought that the Obelisk was only a phallic symbol thrown in the valley’s decor as an afterthought. Others thought it might have something to do with the Templars.
Brawne, the Consul, and Martin Silenus drank a toast to True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.
The resealed Crystal Monolith was Colonel Fedmahn Kassad’s tomb. Decoded markings set in stone talked of a cosmic battle and a great warrior from the past who appeared to help defeat the Lord of Pain. Young recruits down from the torchships and attack carriers ate it up. Kassad’s legend would spread as more of these ships returned to the worlds of the old Web.
Brawne, the Consul, and Martin Silenus drank a toast to Fedmahn Kassad.
The first and second of the Cave Tombs seemed to lead nowhere, but the Third appeared to open to labyrinths on a variety of worlds. After a few researchers disappeared, the Ouster research authorities reminded tourists that the labyrinths lay in a different time—possibly hundreds of thousands of years in the past or future—as well as a different space. They sealed the caves off except to qualified experts.
Brawne, the Consul, and Martin Silenus drank a toast to Paul Duré and Lenar Hoyt.
The Shrike Palace remained a mystery. The tiers of bodies were gone when Brawne and the others had returned a few hours later, the interior of the tomb the size it had been previously, but with a single door of light burning in its center. Anyone who stepped through disappeared. None returned.
The researchers had declared the interior off-limits while they worked to decode letters carved in stone but badly eroded by time. So far, they were certain of three words—all in Old Earth Latin—translated as “COLOSSEUM,” “ROME,” and “REPOPULATE.” The legend had already grown up that this portal opened to the missing Old Earth and that the victims of the tree of thorns had been transported there. Hundreds more waited.
“See,” Martin Silenus said to Brawne, “if you hadn’t been so fucking quick to rescue me, I could’ve gone home.”
Theo Lane leaned forward. “Would you really have chosen to go back to Old Earth?”
Martin smiled his sweetest satyr smile. “Not in a fucking million years. It was dull when I lived there and it’ll always be dull. This is where it’s happening.” Silenus drank a toast to himself.
In a sense, Brawne realized, that was true. Hyperion was the meeting place of Ouster and former Hegemony citizen. The Time Tombs alone would mean future trade and tourism and travel as the human universe adjusted to a life without farcasters. She tried to imagine the future as the Ousters saw it, with great fleets expanding humankind’s horizons, with genetically tailored humans colonizing gas giants and asteroids and worlds harsher than preterraformed Mars or Hebron. She could not imagine it. This was a universe her child might see … or her grandchildren.
“What are you thinking, Brawne?” asked the Consul after silence stretched.
She smiled. “About the future,” she said. “And about Johnny.”
“Ah yes,” said Silenus, “the poet who could have been God but who wasn’t.”
“What happened to the second persona, do you think?” asked Brawne.
The Consul made a motion with his hand. “I don’t see how it could have survived the death of the Core. Do you?”
Brawne shook her head. “I’m just jealous. A lot of people seem to have ended up seeing him. Even Melio Arundez said he met him in Jacktown.”
They drank a toast to Melio, who had left five months earlier with the first FORCE spinship returning Webward.
“Everyone saw him but me,” said Brawne, frowning at her brandy and realizing that she had to take more prenatal antialcohol pills before turning in. She realized that she was a little drunk: the stuff couldn’t harm the baby if she took the pills, but it had definitely gotten to her.
“I’m heading back,” she announced and stood, hugging the Consul. “Got to be up bright and early to watch your sunrise launch.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to spend the night on the ship?” asked the Consul. “The guest room has a nice view of the valley.”
Brawne shook her head. “All my stuffs at the old palace.”
“I’ll talk to you before I go,” said the Consul and they hugged again, quickly, before either had to notice Brawne’s tears.
Martin Silenus walked her back to the Poets’ City. They paused in the lighted galleria outside the apartments.
“Were you really on the tree, or only stimsiming it while sleeping in the Shrike Palace?” Brawne asked him.
The poet did not smile. He touched his chest where the steel thorn had pierced him. “Was I a Chinese philosopher dreaming that I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I was a Chinese philosopher? Is that what you’re asking, kid?”
“Yes.”
“That’s correct,” Silenus said softly. “Yes. I was both. And both were real. And both hurt. And I will love and cherish you forever for saving me, Brawne. To me, you will always be able to walk on air.” He raised her hand and kissed it. “Are you going in?”
“No, I think I’ll stroll in the garden for a minute.”
The poet hesitated. “All right. I think. We have patrols—mech and human—and our Grendel-Shrike hasn’t made an encore appearance yet … but be careful, OK?”
“Don’t forget,” said Brawne, “I’m the Grendel killer. I walk on air and turn them into glass goblins to shatter.”
“Uh-huh, but don’t stray beyond the gardens. OK, kiddo?”
“OK,” said Brawne. She touched her stomach. “We’ll be careful.”
• • •
He was waiting in the garden, where the light did not quite touch and the monitor cameras did not quite cover.
“Johnny!” gasped Brawne and took a quick step forward on the path of stones.
“No,” he said and shook his head, a bit sadly perhaps. He looked like Johnny. Precisely the same red-brown hair and hazel eyes and firm chin and high cheekbones and soft smile. He was dressed a bit strangely, with a thick leather jacket, broad belt, heavy shoes, walking stick, and a rough fur cap, which he took off as she came closer.
Brawne stopped less than a meter away. “Of course,” she said in little more than a whisper. She reached out to touch him, and her hand passed through him, although there was none of the flicker or fuzz of a holo.
“This place is still rich in the metasphere fields,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she agreed, not having the slightest idea what he was talking about. “You’re the other Keats. Johnny’s twin.”
The short man smiled and extended a hand as if to touch her swollen abdomen. “That makes me sort of an uncle, doesn’t it, Brawne?”
She nodded. “It was you who saved the baby … Rachel … wasn’t it?”
“Could you see me?”
“No,” breathed Brawne, “but I could feel that you were there.” She hesitated a second. “But you weren’t the one Ummon talked about—the Empathy part of the human UI?”
He shook his head. His curls glinted in the dim light. “I discovered that I am the One Who Comes Before. I prepare the way for the One Who Teaches, and I’m afraid that my only miracle was lifting a baby and waiting until someone could take her from me.”
“You didn’t help me … with the Shrike? Floating?”
John Keats laughed. “No. Nor did Moneta. That was you, Brawne.”
She shook her head vigorously. “That’s impossible.”
“Not impossible,” he said softly. He reached out to touch her stomach again, and she imagined that she could feel the pressure from his palm. He whispered, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,/ Thou foster-child of silence and slow time …”He looked up at Brawne. “Certainly the mother of the One Who Teaches can exercise some prerogatives,” he said.
“The mother of …” Brawne suddenly had to sit down and found a bench just in time. S
he had never been awkward before in her life, but now, at seven months, there was no graceful way she could manage sitting. She thought, irrelevantly, of the dirigible coming in for mooring that morning.
“The One Who Teaches,” repeated Keats. “I have no idea what she will teach, but it will change the universe and set ideas in motion that will be vital ten thousand years from now.”
“My child?” she managed, fighting a bit for air. “Johnny’s and my child?”
The Keats persona rubbed its cheek. “The junction of human spirit and AI logic which Ummon and the Core sought for so long and died not understanding,” he said. He took a step. “I only wish I could be around when she teaches whatever she has to teach. See what effect it has on the world. This world. Other worlds.”
Brawne’s mind was spinning, but she had heard something in his tone. “Why? Where will you be? What’s wrong?”
Keats sighed. “The Core is gone. The dataspheres here are too small to contain me even in reduced form … except for the FORCE ship AIs, and I don’t think I’d like it there. I never took orders well.”
“And there’s nowhere else?” asked Brawne.
“The metasphere,” he said, glancing behind him. “But it’s full of lions and tigers and bears. And I’m not ready yet.”
Brawne let that pass. “I have an idea,” she said. She told him.
The image of her lover came closer, put his arms around her, and said, “You are a miracle, madam.” He stepped back into the shadows.
Brawne shook her head. “Just a pregnant lady.” She put her hand on the swelling under her gown. “The One Who Teaches,” she murmured. Then, to Keats, “All right, you’re the archangel announcing all this. What name shall I give her?”
When there was no answer, Brawne looked up.
The shadows were empty.
Brawne was at the spaceport before the sun rose. It was not exactly a merry group bidding farewell. Beyond the usual sadness of saying goodbye, Martin, the Consul, and Theo were nursing hangovers since day-after pills were out of stock on post-Web Hyperion. Only Brawne was in fine temper.
“Goddamn ship’s computer has been acting weird all morning,” grumbled the Consul.
“How so?” smiled Brawne.
The Consul squinted at her. “I ask it to run through a regular prepunch checklist and the stupid ship gives me verse.”
“Verse?” said Martin Silenus, raising one satyr’s brow.
“Yeah … listen … ” The Consul keyed his comlog.
A voice familiar to Brawne said:
So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in Bowery grass;
For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet lamb in a sentimental farce!
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle sprite,
Into the clouds, and never more return!
Theo Lane said, “A defective AI? I thought your ship had one of the finest intelligences outside of the Core.”
“It does,” said the Consul. “It’s not defective. I ran a full cognitive and function check. Everything’s fine. But it gives me … this!” He gestured at the comlog recording readout.
Martin Silenus glanced at Brawne Lamia, looked carefully at her smile, and then turned back to the Consul. “Well, it looks as if your ship might be getting literate. Don’t worry about it. It will be good company during the long trip there and back.”
In the ensuing pause, Brawne brought out a bulky package. “A going-away present,” she said.
The Consul unwrapped it, slowly at first, and then ripping and tearing as the folded, faded, and much-abused little carpet came into sight. He ran his hands across it, looked up, and spoke with emotion filling his voice. “Where … how did you … ”
Brawne smiled. “An indigenie refugee found it below the Karla Locks. She was trying to sell it in the Jacktown Marketplace when I happened along. No one was interested in buying.”
The Consul took a deep breath and ran his hands across the designs on the hawking mat which had carried his grandfather Merin to the fateful meeting with his grandmother Siri.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t fly anymore,” said Brawne.
“The flight filaments need recharging,” said the Consul. “I don’t know how to thank you … ”
“Don’t,” said Brawne. “It’s for good luck on your voyage.”
The Consul shook his head, hugged Brawne, shook hands with the others, and took the lift up into his ship. Brawne and the others walked back to the terminal.
There were no clouds in Hyperion’s lapis lazuli sky. The sun painted the distant peaks of the Bridle Range in deep tones and promised warmth for the day to come.
Brawne looked over her shoulder at the Poets’ City and the valley beyond. The tops of the taller Time Tombs were just visible. One wing of the Sphinx caught the light.
With little noise and just a hint of heat, the Consul’s ebony ship lifted on a pure blue flame and rose toward the sky.
Brawne tried to remember the poems she had just read and the final lines of her love’s longest and finest unfinished work:
Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;
His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours,
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared …
Brawne felt the warm wind tug at her hair. She raised her face to the sky and waved, not trying to hide or brush away the tears, waving fiercely now as the splendid ship pitched over and climbed toward the heavens with its fierce blue flame and—like a distant shout—created a sudden sonic boom which ripped across the desert and echoed against distant peaks.
Brawne let herself weep and waved again, continued waving, at the departing Consul, and at the sky, and at friends she would never see again, and at part of her past, and at the ship rising above like a perfect, ebony arrow shot from some god’s bow.
On he flared …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAN SIMMONS’s first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award, his science fiction novel Hyperion received the Hugo, and the Horror Writers of America awarded him its highest honor for his novel Carrion Comfort. Simmons is also the author of Phases of Gravity, Hugo and Nebula Awards finalist The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man, and two collections of short fiction, Prayers to Broken Stones and Lovedeath. He lives in Colorado along the front range of the Rockies.
Available Now:
ENDYMION
by Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons’s brilliant novels Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are among the most thunderously applauded science fiction creations of recent years. Now the author returns to the world of Hyperion to complete the tale of mankind’s destiny among the stars. Endymion begins 247 years after the events of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. In the opening scenes, previewed here, shepherd Raul Endymion becomes a convicted murderer. This is a civilization ruled by the Catholic Church and the Pax, whose true believers have gained virtual immortality and physical resurrection by taming the cross-shaped symbiote, the cruciform. The ancient poet Martin Silenius will choose the discredited Endymion to be the bodyguard to the next messiah: Aenea, the girl who stepped backward in time in Hyperion, whose message will change humankind’s fate. This new novel and its companion volume, the forthcoming The Rise of Endymion, are woven across the fabric of a hundred worlds and a fantastic mix of races and individuals rarely encountered in a single tale—including, of course, the horrifying Shrike, part prophet and part killing machine, whose origin and purpose will at long last be revealed. Don’t miss ENDYMION, on sale in paperback from Bantam Spectra Books.
he Fall of Hyperion
(Series: Hyperion Cantos # 2)
