by Dan Simmons
Later, as he held the sobbing child, Sol tried to understand the accident he had described so briefly to her. EMVs were by far the safest form of personal transportation mankind had ever designed. Their lifters could fail but, even so, the residual charge in the EM generators would allow the aircar to descend safely from any altitude. The basic, failsafe design of an EMV’s collision-avoidance equipment had not changed in centuries. But everything failed. In this case it was a joy-riding teenage couple in a stolen EMV outside the traffic lanes, accelerating to Mach 1.5 with all lights and transponders off to avoid detection, who defied all odds by colliding with Aunt Tetha’s ancient Vikken as it descended toward the Bussard City Opera House landing apron. Besides Tetha and Sarai and the teenagers, three others died in the crash as pieces of falling vehicles cartwheeled into the crowded atrium of the Opera House itself.
Sarai.
“Will we ever see Mommy again?” Rachel asked between sobs. She had asked this each time.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” responded Sol truthfully.
The funeral was at the family cemetery in Kates County on Barnard’s World. The press did not invade the graveyard itself but teeps hovered beyond the trees and pressed against the black iron gate like an angry storm tide.
Richard wanted Sol and Rachel to stay a few days, but Sol knew what pain would be inflicted on the quiet farmer if the press continued their assault. Instead, he hugged Richard, spoke briefly to the clamoring reporters beyond the fence, and fled to Hebron with a stunned and silent Rachel in tow.
Newsteeps followed to New Jerusalem and then attempted to follow to Dan, but military police overrode their chartered EMVs, threw a dozen in jail as an example, and revoked the farcaster visas of the rest.
In the evening Sol walked the ridge lines above the village while Judy watched his sleeping child. He found that his dialogue with God was audible now and he resisted the urge to shake his fist at the sky, to shout obscenities, to throw stones. Instead he asked questions, always ending with—Why?
There was no answer. Hebron’s sun set behind distant ridges and the rocks glowed as they gave up their heat. Sol sat on a boulder and rubbed his temples with his palms.
Sarai.
They had lived a full life, even with the tragedy of Rachel’s illness hanging over them. It was too ironic that in Sarai’s first hour of relaxation with her sister … Sol moaned aloud.
The trap, of course, had been in their total absorption with Rachel’s illness. Neither had been able to face the future beyond Rachel’s … death? Disappearance? The world had hinged upon each day their child lived and no thought had been given to the chance of accident, the perverse antilogic of a sharp-edged universe. Sol was sure that Sarai had considered suicide just as he had, but neither of them could ever have abandoned the other. Or Rachel. He had never considered the possibility of being alone with Rachel when …
Sarai!
At that moment Sol realized that the often angry dialogue which his people had been having with God for so many millennia had not ended with the death of Old Earth … nor with the new Diaspora … but continued still. He and Rachel and Sarai had been part of it, were part of it now. He let the pain come. It filled him with the sharp-edged agony of resolve.
Sol stood on the ridge line and wept as darkness fell.
In the morning he was next to Rachel’s bed when sunlight filled the room.
“Good morning, Daddy.”
“Good morning, sweetheart.”
“Where are we, Daddy?”
“We’ve gone on a trip. It’s a pretty place.”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“She’s with Aunt Tetha today.”
“Will we see her tomorrow?”
“Yes,” said Sol. “Now let’s get you dressed and I’ll make breakfast.”
Sol began to petition the Church of the Shrike when Rachel turned three. Travel to Hyperion was severely limited and access to the Time Tombs had become all but impossible. Only the occasional Shrike Pilgrimage sent people to that region.
Rachel was sad that she had to be away from her mother on her birthday but the visit of several children from the kibbutz distracted her a bit. Her big present was an illustrated book of fairy tales which Sarai had picked out in New Jerusalem months before.
Sol read some of the stories to Rachel before bedtime. It had been seven months since she could read any of the words herself. But she loved the stories—especially “Sleeping Beauty”—and made her father read it to her twice.
“I’m gonna show Mommy it when we get home,” she said through a yawn as Sol turned out the overhead light.
“Good night, kiddo,” he said softly, pausing at the door.
“Hey, Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“ ’Later, alligator.”
“ ’While, crocodile.”
Rachel giggled into her pillow.
It was, Sol thought during the final two years, not so much different from watching a loved one falling into old age. Only worse. A thousand times worse.
Rachel’s permanent teeth had fallen out over intervals between her eighth and second birthdays. Baby teeth replaced them but by her eighteenth month half of these had receded into her jaw.
Rachel’s hair, always her one vanity, grew shorter and thinner. Her face lost its familiar structure as baby fat obscured the cheekbones and firm chin. Her coordination failed by degrees, noticeable at first in a sudden clumsiness as she handled a fork or pencil. On the day she could no longer walk, Sol put her down in her crib early and then went into his study to get thoroughly and quietly drunk.
Language was the hardest for him. Her vocabulary loss was like the burning of a bridge between them, the severing of a final line of hope. It was sometime after her second birthday receded that Sol tucked her in and, pausing in the doorway, said, “ ’Later, alligator.”
“Huh?”
“See you later, alligator.”
Rachel giggled.
“You say—‘In a while, crocodile,’ ” said Sol. He told her what an alligator and crocodile were.
“In a while, ’acadile,” giggled Rachel.
In the morning she had forgotten.
Sol took Rachel with him as he traveled the Web—no longer caring about the newsteeps—petitioning the Shrike Church for pilgrimage rights, lobbying the Senate for a visa and access to forbidden areas on Hyperion, and visiting any research institute or clinic which might offer a cure. Months were lost while more medics admitted failure. When he fled back to Hebron, Rachel was fifteen standard months old; in the ancient units used on Hebron she weighed twenty-five pounds and measured thirty inches tall. She could no longer dress herself. Her vocabulary consisted of twenty-five words, of which her favorites were “Mommy” and “Daddy.”
Sol loved carrying his daughter. There were times when the curve of her head against his cheek, her warmth against his chest, the smell of her skin—all worked to allow him to forget the fierce injustice of it all. At those times Sol would have been temporarily at peace with the universe if only Sarai had been there. As it was, there were temporary cease-fires in his angry dialogue with a God in Whom he did not believe.
— What possible reason can there be for this?
— What reason has been visible for all of the forms of pain suffered by humankind?
— Precisely, thought Sol, wondering if he had just won a point for the first time. He doubted it.
— The fact of a thing not being visible does not mean it does not exist.
— That’s clumsy. It shouldn’t take three negatives to make a statement. Especially to state something as nonprofound as that.
— Precisely, Sol. You’re beginning to get the drift of all this.
— What?
There was no answer to his thoughts. Sol lay in his house and listened to the desert wind blow.
Rachel’s last word was “Mamma,” uttered when she was just over five months old.
She awoke in her crib and did not—c
ould not—ask where she was. Her world was one of mealtimes, naps, and toys. Sometimes when she cried Sol wondered if she was crying for her mother.
Sol shopped in the small stores in Dan, taking the infant with him as he selected diapers, nursing paks, and the occasional new toy.
The week before Sol left for Tau Ceti Center, Ephraim and the two other elders came to talk. It was evening and the fading light glowed on Ephraim’s bald scalp. “Sol, we’re worried about you. The next few weeks will be hard. The women want to help. We want to help.”
Sol laid his hand on the older man’s forearm. “It’s appreciated, Ephraim. Everything the last few years is appreciated. This is our home now, too. Sarai would have … would have wanted me to say thank you. But we’re leaving on Sunday. Rachel is going to get better.”
The three men on the long bench looked at one another. Avner said, “They’ve found a cure?”
“No,” said Sol, “but I’ve found a reason to hope.”
“Hope is good,” Robert said in cautious tones.
Sol grinned, his teeth white against the gray of his beard. “It had better be,” he said. “Sometimes it is all we’re given.”
The studio holo camera zoomed in for a close-up of Rachel as the infant sat cradled in Sol’s arm on the set of “Common Talk.” “So you’re saying,” said Devon Whiteshire, the show’s host and third-best-known face in the Web datasphere, “that the Shrike Church’s refusal to allow you to return to the Time Tombs … and the Hegemony’s tardiness in processing a visa … these things will doom your child to this … extinction?”
“Precisely,” said Sol. “The voyage to Hyperion cannot be made in under six weeks. Rachel is now twelve weeks old. Any further delay by either the Shrike Church or the Web bureaucracy will kill this child.”
The studio audience stirred. Devon Whiteshire turned toward the nearest imaging remote. His craggy, friendly visage filled the monitor frame. “This man doesn’t know if he can save his child,” said Whiteshire, his voice powerful with subtle feeling, “but all he asks is a chance. Do you think he … and the baby … deserve one? If so, access your planetary representatives and your nearest Church of the Shrike temple. The number of your nearest temple should be appearing now.” He turned back to Sol. “We wish you luck, M. Weintraub. And”—Whiteshire’s large hand touched Rachel’s cheek—“we wish you Godspeed, our young friend.”
The monitor image held on Rachel until it faded to black.
The Hawking effect caused nausea, vertigo, headache, and hallucinations. The first leg of the voyage was the ten-day transit to Parvati on the Hegemony torchship HS Intrepid.
Sol held Rachel and endured. They were the only people fully conscious aboard the warship. At first Rachel cried, but after some hours she lay quietly in Sol’s arms and stared up at him with large, dark eyes. Sol remembered the day she was born—the medics had taken the infant from atop Sarai’s warm stomach and handed her to Sol. Rachel’s dark hair was not much shorter then, her gaze no less profound.
Eventually they slept from sheer exhaustion.
Sol dreamed that he was wandering through a structure with columns the size of redwood trees and a ceiling lost to sight far above him. Red light bathed cool emptiness. Sol was surprised to find that he still carried Rachel in his arms. Rachel as a child had never been in his dream before. The infant looked up at him and Sol felt the contact of her consciousness as surely as if she had spoken aloud.
Suddenly a different voice, immense and cold, echoed through the void:
“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, Whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”
Sol hesitated and looked back to Rachel. The baby’s eyes were deep and luminous as she looked up at her father. Sol felt the unspoken yes. Holding her tightly, he stepped forward into the darkness and raised his voice against the silence:
“Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past.”
Sol listened. He could feel the pounding of his heart and Rachel’s warmth against his arm. From somewhere high above there came the cold sound of wind through unseen fissures. Sol cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted:
“That’s all! Now either leave us alone or join us as a father rather than a receiver of sacrifices. You have the choice of Abraham!”
Rachel stirred in his arms as a rumble grew out of the stone floor. Columns vibrated. The red gloom deepened and then winked out, leaving only darkness. From far away there came the boom of huge footsteps. Sol hugged Rachel to him as a violent wind roared past.
There was a glimmer of light as both he and Rachel awoke on the HS Intrepid outward bound for Parvati to transfer to the treeship Yggdrasill for the planet Hyperion. Sol smiled at his seven-week-old daughter. She smiled back.
It was her last or her first smile.
The main cabin of the windwagon was silent when the old scholar finished his story. Sol cleared his throat and took a drink of water from a crystal goblet. Rachel slept on in the makeshift cradle of the open drawer. The windwagon rocked gently on its way, the rumble of the great wheel and the hum of the main gyroscope a lulling background noise.
“My God,” Brawne Lamia said softly. She started to speak again and then merely shook her head.
Martin Silenus closed his eyes and said:
“Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heavens will;
She can, though every face will scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.”
Sol Weintraub asked, “William Butler Yeats?”
Silenus nodded. “ ‘A Prayer for My Daughter.’ ”
“I think I’m going up on deck for a breath of air before turning in,” said the Consul. “Would anyone care to join me?”
Everyone did. The breeze of their passage was refreshing as the group stood on the quarterdeck and watched the darkened Sea of Grass rumble by. The sky was a great, star-splashed bowl above them, scarred by meteor trails. The sails and rigging creaked with a sound as old as human travel.
“I think we should post guards tonight,” said Colonel Kassad. “One person on watch while the others sleep. Two-hour intervals.”
“I agree,” said the Consul. “I’ll take the first watch.”
“In the morning …” began Kassad.
“Look!” cried Father Hoyt.
They followed his pointing arm. Between the blaze of constellations, colored fireballs flared—green, violet, orange, green again—illuminating the great plain of grass around them like flashes of heat lightning. The stars and meteor trails paled to insignificance beside the sudden display.
“Explosions?” ventured the priest.
“Space battle,” said Kassad. “Cislunar. Fusion weapons.” He went below quickly.
“The Tree,” said Het Masteen, pointing to a speck of light which moved among the explosions like an ember floating through a fireworks display.
Kassad returned with his powered binoculars and handed them around.
“Ousters?” asked Lamia. “Is it the invasion?”
“Ousters, almost certainly,” said Kassad. “But almost as certainly just a scouting raid. See the clusters? Those are Hegemony missiles being exploded by the Ouster ramscouts’ countermeasures.”
The binoculars came to the Consul. The flashes were quite clear now, an expanding cumulus of flame. He could see the speck and long blue tail of at least two scoutships fleeing from the Hegemony pursuers.
“I don’t think …” began Kassad and then stopped as the ship and sails and Sea of Grass glowed bright orange in reflected glare
.
“Dear Christ,” whispered Father Hoyt. “They’ve hit the treeship.”
The Consul swept the glasses left. The growing nimbus of flames could be seen with the naked eye but in the binoculars the kilometer-long trunk and branch array of the Yggdrasill was visible for an instant as it burned and flared, long tendrils of flame arcing away into space as the containment fields failed and the oxygen burned. The orange cloud pulsed, faded, and fell back on itself as the trunk became visible for a final second even as it glowed and broke up like the last long ember in a dying fire. Nothing could have survived. The treeship Yggdrasill with its crew and complement of clones and semisentient erg drivers was dead.
The Consul turned toward Het Masteen and belatedly held out the binoculars. “I’m so … sorry,” he whispered.
The tall Templar did not take the glasses. Slowly he lowered his gaze from the skies, pulled forward his cowl, and went below without a word.
The death of the treeship was the final explosion. When ten minutes had passed and no more flares had disturbed the night, Brawne Lamia spoke. “Do you think they got them?”
“The Ousters?” said Kassad. “Probably not. The scoutships are built for speed and defense. They’re light-minutes away by now.”
“Did they go after the treeship on purpose?” asked Silenus. The poet sounded very sober.
“I think not,” said Kassad. “Merely a target of opportunity.”
“Target of opportunity,” echoed Sol Weintraub. The scholar shook his head. “I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep before sunrise.”
One by one the others went below. When only Kassad and the Consul were left on deck, the Consul said, “Where should I stand watch?”
“Make a circuit,” said the Colonel. “From the main corridor at the base of the ladder you can see all of the stateroom doors and the entrance to the mess and galley. Come above and check the gangway and decks. Keep the lanterns lit. Do you have a weapon?”
