by Dan Simmons
“But you did not grant them permission?” I said.
Theo Lane smiled without warmth. “CEO Gladstone did not grant them permission. The closure of the Tombs is a direct order from TC2. If it were up to me, I would have denied the pilgrims passage and allowed Dr. Arundez’s team priority access.” He turned back to Hunt.
“Excuse me,” I said and slipped out of the booth.
I found Arundez and his people—three women and four men, their clothing and physical styles suggesting different worlds in the Web—two porches away. They were bent over their breakfasts and scientific comlogs, arguing in technical terms so abtruse as to leave a Talmudic scholar envious.
“Dr. Arundez?” I said.
“Yes?” He looked up. He was two decades older than I remembered, entering middle age in his early sixties, but the strikingly handsome profile was the same, with the same bronzed skin, solid jaw, wavy black hair going only slightly gray at the temples, and piercing hazel eyes. I understood how a young female graduate student could have quickly fallen in love with him.
“My name is Joseph Severn,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I knew a friend of yours … Rachel Weintraub.”
Arundez was on his feet in a second, offering apologies to the others, leading me by the elbow until we found an empty booth in a cubicle under a round window looking out on red-tiled rooftops. He released my elbow and appraised me carefully, taking in the Web clothing. He turned my wrists over, looking for the telltale blueness of Poulsen treatments. “You’re too young,” he said. “Unless you knew Rachel as a child.”
“Actually, it’s her father I know best,” I said.
Dr. Arundez let out a breath and nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Where is Sol? I’ve been trying to trace him for months through the consulate. The authorities on Hebron will only say that he’s moved.” He gave me that appraising stare again. “You knew about Rachel’s … illness?”
“Yes,” I said. The Merlin’s sickness which had caused her to age backward, losing memories with each day and hour that passed. Melio Arundez had been one of those memories. “I know that you went to visit her about fifteen standard years ago on Barnard’s World.”
Arundez grimaced. “That was a mistake,” he said. “I thought that I would talk to Sol and Sarai. When I saw her …” He shook his head. “Who are you? Do you know where Sol and Rachel are now? It’s three days until her birthday.”
I nodded. “Her first and last birthday.” I glanced around. The hallway was silent and empty except for a distant murmur of laughter from a lower level. “I’m here on a fact-finding trip from the CEO’s office,” I said. “I have information that Sol Weintraub and his daughter have traveled to the Time Tombs.”
Arundez looked as though I’d struck him in the solar plexus. “Here? On Hyperion?” He stared out at the rooftops for a moment. “I should have realized … although Sol always refused to return here … but with Sarai gone …” He looked at me. “Are you in touch with him? Is she … are they all right?”
I shook my head. “There are no radio or datasphere links with them at present,” I said. “I know that they made the trip safely. The question is, what do you know? Your team? Data on what is occurring at the Time Tombs might be very important to their survival.”
Melio Arundez ran his hand through his hair. “If only they’d let us go there! That damned, stupid, bureaucratic shortsightedness … You say you’re from Gladstone’s office. Can you explain to them why it’s so important for us to get there?”
“I’m only a messenger,” I said. “But tell me why it’s so important, and I’ll try to get the information to someone.”
Arundez’s large hands cupped an invisible shape in midair. His tension and anger were palpable. “For three years, the data was coming via telemetry in the squirts the consulate would allow once a week on their precious fatline transmitter. It showed a slow but relentless degradation of the anti-entropic envelope—the time tides—in and around the Tombs. It was erratic, illogical, but steady. Our team was authorized to travel here shortly after the degradation began. We arrived about six months ago, saw data that suggested that the Tombs were opening … coming into phase with now … but four days after we arrived, the instruments quit sending. All of them. We begged that bastard Lane to let us just go and recalibrate them, set up new sensors if he wouldn’t let us investigate in person.
“Nothing. No transit permission. No communication with the university … even with the coming of FORCE ships to make it easier. We tried going upriver ourselves, without permission, and some of Lane’s Marine goons intercepted us at Karla Locks and brought us back in handcuffs. I spent four weeks in jail. Now we’re allowed to wander around Keats, but we’ll be locked up indefinitely if we leave the city again.” Arundez leaned forward. “Can you help?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I want to help the Weintraubs. Perhaps it would be best if you could take your team to the site. Do you know when the Tombs will open?”
The time-physicist made an angry gesture. “If we had new data!” He sighed. “No, we don’t know. They could be open already or it could be another six months.”
“When you say ‘open,’ ” I said, “you don’t mean physically open?”
“Of course not. The Time Tombs have been physically open for inspection since they were discovered four standard centuries ago. I mean open in the sense of dropping the time curtains that conceal parts of them, bringing the entire complex into phase with the local flow of time.”
“By ‘local’ you mean …?”
“I mean in this universe, of course.”
“And you’re sure that the Tombs are moving backward in time … from our future?” I asked.
“Backward in time, yes,” said Arundez. “From our future, we can’t say. We’re not even sure what the ‘future’ means in temporal/physical terms. It could be a series of sine-wave probabilities or a decision-branch megaverse, or even—”
“But whatever it is,” I said, “the Time Tombs and the Shrike are coming from there?”
“The Time Tombs are for certain,” said the physicist. “I have no knowledge of the Shrike. My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions.”
“Even after what happened to Rachel?” I said. “You still don’t believe in the Shrike?”
Melio Arundez glowered at me. “Rachel contracted Merlin’s sickness,” he said. “It’s an anti-entropic aging disease, not the bite of a mythical monster.”
“Time’s bite has never been mythical,” I said, surprising myself with such a cheap bit of homespun philosophy. “The question is—will the Shrike or whatever power inhabits the Time Tombs return Rachel to the ‘local’ time flow?”
Arundez nodded and turned his gaze to the rooftops. The sun had moved into the clouds, and the morning was drab, the red tiles bleached of color. Rain was beginning to fall again.
“And the question is,” I said, surprising myself again, “are you still in love with her?”
The physicist turned his head slowly, fixing me in an angry gaze. I felt the retort—possibly physical—build, crest, and wane. He reached into his coat pocket and showed me a snapshot holo of an attractive woman with graying hair and two children in their late teens. “My wife and children,” said Melio Arundez. “They’re waiting on Renaissance Vector.” He pointed a blunt finger at me. “If Rachel were … were cured today, I would be eighty-two standard years old before she again reached the age she was when we first met.” He lowered the finger, returned the holo to his pocket. “And yes,” he said, “I’m still in love with her.”
“Ready?” The voice broke the silence a moment later. I looked up to see Hunt and Theo Lane in the doorway. “The dropship lifts off in ten minutes,” said Hunt.
I stood and shook hands with Melio Arundez. “I’ll try,” I said.
Governor-General Lane had one of his escort skimmers return us to the spaceport while he went back to t
he consulate. The military skimmer was no more comfortable than his consulate machine had been, but it was faster. We were strapped and fielded into our webseats aboard the dropship before Hunt said, “What was all that about with that physicist?”
“Just renewing old ties with a stranger,” I said.
Hunt frowned. “What did you promise him that you’d try?”
I felt the dropship rumble, twitch, and then leap as the catapult grid launched us skyward. “I told him I’d try to get him in to visit a sick friend,” I said.
Hunt continued to frown, but I pulled out a sketchpad and doodled images of Cicero’s until we docked at the JumpShip fifteen minutes later.
It was a shock to step through the farcaster portal into the executive nexus in Government House. Another step took us to the Senate gallery, where Meina Gladstone was still speaking to a packed house. Imagers and microphones carried her speech to the All Thing and a hundred billion waiting citizens.
I glanced at my chronometer. It was 1038 hours. We had been gone only ninety minutes.
TWELVE
The building housing the Senate of the Hegemony of Man was patterned more after the United States Senate building of eight centuries earlier rather than the more imperial structures of the North American Republic or the First World Council. The main assembly room was large, girded with galleries, and big enough for the three-hundred-plus senators from Web worlds and the more than seventy nonvoting representatives from Protectorate colonics. Carpets were a rich wine red and radiated from the central dais where the President Pro Tem, the Speaker of the All Thing, and, today, the Chief Executive Officer of the Hegemony had their seats. Senators’ desks were made of muirwood, donated by the Templars of God’s Grove, who held such products sacred, and the glow and scent of burnished wood filled the room even when it was as crowded as it was today.
Leigh Hunt and I entered just as Gladstone was finishing her speech. I keyed my comlog for a quick readout. As with most of her talks, it had been short, comparatively simple, without condescension or bombast, yet laced with a certain lilt of original phrasing and imagery which carried great power. Gladstone had reviewed the incidents and conflicts that led to the current state of belligerancy with the Ousters, proclaimed the time-honored wish for peace, which still was paramount in Hegemony policy, and called for unity within the Web and Protectorate until this current crisis was past. I listened to her summation.
“… and so it has come to pass, fellow citizens, that after more than a century of peace we are once again engaged in a struggle to maintain those rights to which our society has been dedicated since before the death of our Mother Earth. After more than a century of peace, we must now pick up—however unwillingly, however distastefully—the shield and sword, which have ever preserved our birthright and vouchsafed our common good, so that peace may again prevail.
“We must not … and shall not … be misled by the stir of trumpets or the rush of near-joy which the call to arms inevitably produces. Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them … they may be forced to die by them. Great sacrifices may lie ahead for all of us. Great sorrows may lie in store for some of us. But come what successes or setbacks must inevitably occur, I say to you now that we must remember these two things above all: First, that we fight for peace and know that war must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health. Second, that we shall never surrender … never surrender or waver or bend to lesser voices or more comfortable impulses … never waver until the victory is ours, aggression is undone, and the peace is won. I thank you.”
Leigh Hunt leaned forward and watched intently as most of the senators rose to give Gladstone an ovation that roared back from the high ceiling and struck us in the gallery in waves. Most of the senators. I could see Hunt counting those who remained sitting, some with arms folded, many with visible frowns. The war was less than two days old, and already the opposition was building … first from the colonial worlds afraid for their own safety while FORCE was diverted to Hyperion, then from Gladstone’s opponents—of which there were many since no one stays in power as long as she without creating cadres of enemies, and finally from members of her own coalition who saw the war as a foolish undoing of unprecedented prosperity.
I watched her leaving the dais, shaking hands with the aged President and young Speaker, then taking the center aisle out—touching and talking to many, smiling the familiar smile. All Thing imagers followed her, and I could feel the pressure of the debate net swell as billions voiced their opinions on the interact levels of the megasphere.
“I need to see her now,” said Hunt. “Are you aware that you’re invited to a state dinner tonight at Treetops?”
“Yes.”
Hunt shook his head slightly, as if incapable of understanding why the CEO wanted me around. “It will run late and will be followed by a meeting with FORCE:command. She wants you to attend both.”
“I’ll be available,” I said.
Hunt paused at the door. “Do you have something to do back at Government House until the dinner?”
I smiled at him. “I’ll work on my portrait sketches,” I said. “Then I’ll probably take a walk through Deer Park. After that … I don’t know … I may take a nap.”
Hunt shook his head again and hurried off.
THIRTEEN
The first shot misses Fedmahn Kassad by less than a meter, splitting a boulder he is passing, and he is moving before the blast strikes him; rolling for cover, his camouflage polymer fully activated, impact armor tensed, assault rifle ready, visor in full targeting mode. Kassad lies there for a long moment, feeling his heart pounding and searching the hills, valley, and Tombs for the slightest hint of heat or movement. Nothing. He begins to grin behind the black mirror of his visor.
Whoever had shot at him had meant to miss, he is sure. They had used a standard pulse bolt, ignited by an 18-mm cartridge, and unless the shooter was ten or more kilometers away … there was no chance of a miss.
Kassad stands up to run toward the shelter of the Jade Tomb, and the second shot catches him in the chest, hurling him backward.
This time he grunts and rolls away, scuttling toward the Jade Tomb’s entrance with all sensors active. The second shot had been a rifle bullet. Whoever is playing with him is using a FORCE multipurpose assault weapon similar to his own. He guesses that the assailant knows he is in body armor, knows that the rifle bullet would be ineffective at any range. But the multipurpose weapon has other settings, and if the next level of play involves a killing laser, Kassad is dead. He throws himself into the doorway of the tomb.
Still no heat or movement on his sensors except for the red-and-yellow images of his fellow pilgrims’ footsteps, rapidly cooling, where they had entered the Sphinx several minutes before.
Kassad uses his tactical implants to switch displays, quickly running through VHF and optical comm channels. Nothing. He magnifies the valley a hundredfold, computes in wind and sand, and activates a moving-target indicator. Nothing larger than an insect is moving. He sends out radar, sonar, and lorfo pulses, daring the sniper to home in on them. Nothing. He calls up tactical displays of the first two shots; blue ballistic trails leap into existence.
The first shot had come from the Poets’ City, more than four klicks to the southwest. The second shot, less than ten seconds later, came from the Crystal Monolith, almost a full klick down the valley to the northeast. Logic dictates that there have to be two snipers. Kassad is sure that there is only one. He refines the display scale. The second shot had come from high on the Monolith, at least thirty meters up on the sheer face.
Kassad swings out, raises amplification, and peers through night and the last vestiges of the sand- and snowstorm toward the huge structure. Nothing. No windows, no slits, no openings of any sort.
Only the billions of colloidal particles
left in the air from the storm allow the laser to be visible for a split second. Kassad sees the green beam after it strikes him in the chest. He rolls back into the entrance of the Jade Tomb, wondering if the green walls will help deter a green light lance, while superconductors in his combat armor radiate heat in every direction and his tactical visor tells him what he already knows: the shot has come from high on the Crystal Monolith.
Kassad feels pain sting his chest, and he looks down in time to see a five-centimeter circle of invulnarmor drip molten fibers onto the floor. Only the last layer has saved him. As it is, his body drips with sweat inside the suit, and he can see the walls of the tomb literally glowing with the heat his suit has discarded. Biomonitors clamor for attention but hold no serious news, his suit sensors report some circuit damage but describe nothing irreplacable, and his weapon is still charged, loaded, and operative.
Kassad thinks about it. All of the Tombs are priceless archaeological treasures, preserved for centuries as a gift to future generations, even if they are moving backward in time. It would be a crime on an interplanetary scale if Colonel Fedmahn Kassad were to put his own life above the preservation of such priceless artifacts.
“Oh fuck it,” whispers Kassad and rolls into firing position.
He sprays laser fire across the face of the Monolith until crystal slags and runs. He pumps high-explosive pulse bolts into the thing at ten-meter intervals, starting with the top levels. Thousands of shards of mirrored material fly out into the night, tumbling in slow motion toward the valley floor, leaving gaps as ugly as missing teeth in the building’s face. Kassad switches back to wide-beam coherent light and sweeps the interior through the gaps, grinning behind his visor when something bursts into flames on several floors. Kassad fires bhees—beams of high-energy electrons—which rip through the Monolith and plow perfectly cylindrical fourteen-centimeter-wide tunnels for half a kilometer through the rock of the valley wall. He fires cannister grenades, which explode into tens of thousands of needle fléchettes after passing through the crystal face of the Monolith. He triggers random pulse-laser swaths, which will blind anyone or anything looking in his direction from the structure. He fires body-heat-seeking darts into every orifice the shattered structure offers him.
