by Dan Simmons
The Consul remained kneeling, staring at nothing. After a moment he said, “Wait here with her, please,” rose, and disappeared in the dark maw of the Sphinx’s entrance. Five minutes later, he was back with his own large travel bag. He removed a rolled rug from the bottom and unfurled it on the stone of the Sphinx’s top stair.
It was an ancient rug, a little less than two meters long and a bit more than a meter wide. The intricately woven cloth had faded over the centuries, but the monofilament flight threads still glowed like gold in the dim light. Thin leads ran from the carpet to a single power cell which the Consul now detached.
“Good God,” whispered Sol. He remembered the Consul’s tale of his grandmother Siri’s tragic love affair with Hegemony Shipman Merin Aspic. It had been a love affair that had raised a rebellion against the Hegemony and plunged Maui-Covenant into years of war. Merin Aspic had flown to Firstsite on a friend’s hawking mat.
The Consul nodded. “It belonged to Mike Osho, Grandfather Merin’s friend. Siri left it in her tomb for Merin to find. He gave it to me when I was a child—just before the Battle of the archipelago, where he and the dream of freedom died.”
Sol ran his hand across the centuries-old artifact. “It’s a shame it can’t work here.”
The Consul glanced up. “Why can’t it?”
“Hyperion’s magnetic field is below the critical level for EM vehicles,” said Sol. “That’s why there are dirigibles and skimmers rather than EMVs, why the Benares was no longer a levitation barge.” He stopped, feeling foolish explaining this to a man who had been Hegemony Consul on Hyperion for eleven local years. “Or am I wrong?”
The Consul smiled. “You’re right that standard EMVs aren’t reliable here. Too much mass-to-lift ratio. But the hawking mat is all lift, almost no mass. I’ve tried it here when I lived in the capital. It’s not a smooth ride … but it should work with one person aboard.”
Sol glanced back down the valley, past the glowing forms of the Jade Tomb, Obelisk, and Crystal Monolith, to where the shadows of the cliff wall hid the entrance to the Cave Tombs. He wondered if Father Duré and Het Masteen were still alone … still alive. “You’re thinking of going for help?”
“Of one of us going for help. Bringing the ship back. Or at least freeing it and sending it back unmanned. We could draw lots to see who goes.”
It was Sol’s turn to smile. “Think, my friend. Duré is in no condition to travel and does not know the way in any case. I …” Sol lifted Rachel until the top of her head touched his cheek. “The voyage might last several days. I—we—do not have several days. If something is to be done for her, we must remain here and take our chances. It is you who must go.”
The Consul sighed but did not argue.
“Besides,” said Sol, “it is your ship. If anyone can free it from Gladstone’s interdiction, you can. And you know the Governor-General well.”
The Consul looked toward the west. “I wonder if Theo is still in power.”
“Let’s go back and tell Father Duré our plan,” said Sol. “Also, I left the nursing paks in the cave, and Rachel is hungry.”
The Consul rolled the carpet, slipped it in his pack, and stared down at Brawne Lamia, at the obscene cable snaking away into darkness. “Will she be all right?”
“I’ll have Paul come back with a blanket to stay with her while you and I carry our other invalid back here. Will you leave tonight or wait until sunrise?”
The Consul rubbed his cheeks tiredly. “I don’t like the thought of crossing the mountains at night, but we can’t spare the time. I’ll leave as soon as I put some things together.”
Sol nodded and looked toward the entrance to the valley. “I wish Brawne could tell us where Silenus has gone.”
“I’ll look for him as I fly out,” said the Consul. He glanced up at the stars. “Figure thirty-six to forty hours of flying to get back to Keats. A few hours to free the ship. I should be back here within two standard days.”
Sol nodded, rocking the crying child. His tired but amiable expression did not conceal his doubt. He set his hand on the Consul’s shoulder. “It is right that we try, my friend. Come, let us talk to Father Duré, see if our other fellow traveler is awake, and eat a meal together. It looks as if Brawne brought enough supplies to allow us a final feast.”
TWENTY-SIX
When Brawne Lamia had been a child, her father a senator and their home relocated, however briefly, from Lusus to the wooded wonders of Tau Ceti Center’s Administrative Residential Complex, she had seen the ancient flatfilm Walt Disney animation of Peter Pan. After seeing the animation, she had read the book, and both had captured her heart.
For months, the five-standard-year-old girl had waited for Peter Pan to arrive one night and take her away. She had left notes pointing the way to her bedroom under the shingled dormer. She had left the house while her parents slept and lain on the soft grass of the Deer Park lawns, watching the milkish-gray night sky of TC2 and dreaming of the boy from Neverland who would some night soon take her away with him, flying toward the second star to the right, straight on till morning. She would be his companion, the mother to the lost boys, fellow nemesis to the evil Hook, and most of all, Peter’s new Wendy … the new child-friend to the child who would not grow old.
And now, twenty years later, Peter had finally come for her.
Lamia had felt no pain, only the sudden, icy rush of displacement as the Shrike’s steel talon penetrated the neural shunt behind her ear. Then she was away and flying.
She had moved through the datumplane and into the datasphere before. Only weeks before, her time, Lamia had ridden into the TechnoCore matrix with her favorite cyberpuke, silly BB Surbringer, to help Johnny steal back his cybrid retrieval persona. They had penetrated the periphery and stolen the persona, but an alarm had been tripped, BB had died. Lamia never wanted to enter the datasphere again.
But she was there now.
The experience was like nothing she had ever had with comlog leads or nodes before. That was like full stimsim—like being in a holodrama with full color and wraparound stereo—this was like being there.
Peter had finally come to take her away.
Lamia rose above the curve of Hyperion’s planetary limb, seeing the rudimentary channels of microwaved dataflow and tightbeamed commlink that passed for an embryonic datasphere there. She did not pause to tap into it, for she was following an orange umbilical skyward toward the real avenues and highways of datumplane.
Hyperion space had been invaded by FORCE and by the Ouster Swarm, and both had brought the intricate folds and latticework of the datasphere with them. With new eyes, Lamia could see the thousand levels of FORCE dataflow, a turbulent green ocean of information shot through with the red veins of secured channels and the spinning violet spheres with their black phage outriders that were the FORCE AIs. This pseudopod of the great Web megadatasphere flowed out of normal space through black funnels of shipboard farcasters, along expanding wave fronts of overlapping, instantaneous ripples that Lamia recognized as continuous bursts from a score of fatline transmitters.
She paused, suddenly unsure of where to go, which avenue to take. It was as if she had been flying and her uncertainty had endangered the magic—threatening to drop her back to the ground so many miles below.
Then Peter took her hand and buoyed her up.
—Johnny!
—Hello, Brawne.
Her own body image clicked into existence at the same second she saw and felt his. It was Johnny as she had last seen him—her client and lover—Johnny of the sharp cheekbones, hazel eyes, compact nose and solid jaw. Johnny’s brownish-red curls still fell to his collar, and his face remained a study in purposeful energy. His smile still made her melt inside.
Johnny! She hugged him then, and she felt the hug, felt his strong hands on her back as they floated high above everything, felt her breasts flatten against his chest as he returned the hug with surprising strength for his small frame. They kissed, and th
ere was no denying that that was real.
Lamia floated at arms’ length, her hands on his shoulders. Both their faces were lighted by the green and violet glow of the great datasphere ocean above them.
—Is this real? She heard her own voice and dialect in the question even though she knew she had only thought it.
—Yes. Real as any part of the datumplane matrix can be. We’re on the edge of the megasphere in Hyperion space. His voice still held that elusive accent that she found so beguiling and maddening.
—What happened? With the words, she conveyed images to him of the Shrike’s appearance, the sudden, terrible invasion of the blade-finger.
—Yes, thought Johnny, holding her more tightly. Somehow it freed me from the Schrön loop and jacked us directly into the datasphere.
—Am I dead, Johnny?
The face of Johnny Keats smiled down at her. He shook her slightly, kissed her gently, and rotated so that they could both see the spectacle above and below. No, you’re not dead, Brawne, although you may be hooked to some kind of bizarre life support while your datumplane analog wanders here with me.
—Are you dead?
He grinned at her again. Not any longer, although life in a Schrön loop isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It was like dreaming someone else’s dreams.
—I dreamed about you.
Johnny nodded. I don’t think that was me. I dreamed the same dreams … conversations with Meina Gladstone, glimpses of the Hegemony government councils …
—Yes!
He squeezed her hand. I suspect that they reactivated another Keats cybrid. Somehow we were able to connect across all the light-years.
—Another cybrid? How? You destroyed the Core template, liberated the persona …
Her lover shrugged. He was wearing a ruffled shirt and silk waistcoat of a style she had never seen before. The flow of data through the avenues above them painted both of them with pulses of neon light as they floated there. I suspected that there would be more backups than BB and I could find in such a shallow penetration of the Core periphery. It doesn’t matter, Brawne. If there’s another copy, then he’s me, and I can’t believe he’d be an enemy. Come on, let’s explore.
Lamia held back a second as he tugged her upward. Explore what?
—This is our chance to see what’s going on, Brawne. A chance to get to the bottom of a lot of mysteries.
She heard the uncharacteristic timidity in her own voice/thought. I’m not sure I want to, Johnny.
He rotated to look at her. Is this the detective I knew? What happened to the woman who couldn’t stand secrets?
—She’s been through some rough times, Johnny. I’ve been able to look back and see that becoming a detective was—in large part—a reaction to my father’s suicide. I’m still trying to solve the details of his death. In the meantime, a lot of people have gotten hurt in real life. Including you, my dear.
—And have you solved it?
—What?
—Your father’s death?
Lamia frowned at him. I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Johnny pointed toward the fluid mass of the datasphere ebbing and flowing above them. There are a lot of answers waiting up there, Brawne. If we have the courage to go looking for them.
She took his hand again. We could die there.
—Yes.
Lamia paused, looked down toward Hyperion. The world was a dark curve with the few isolated dataflow pockets glowing like campfires in the night. The great ocean above them seethed and pulsated with light and dataflow noise—and Brawne knew that it was only the smallest extension of the megasphere beyond. She knew … she felt … that their reborn datumplane analogs could now go places no cyberpuke cowboy had ever dreamt of.
With Johnny as her guide, Brawne knew that the megasphere and TechnoCore were penetrable to depths no human had plumbed. And she was scared.
But she was with Peter Pan, at last. And Neverland beckoned.
—All right, Johnny. What are we waiting for?
They rose together toward the megasphere.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad followed Moneta through the portal and found himself standing upon a vast lunar plain where a terrible tree of thorns rose five kilometers high into a blood-red sky. Human figures writhed on the many branches and spikes: the closer forms recognizably human and in pain, the farther ones dwarfed by distance until they resembled clusters of pale grapes.
Kassad blinked and took a breath beneath the surface of his quicksilver skinsuit. He looked around, past the silent form of Moneta, tearing his gaze from the obscenity of the tree.
What he had thought was a lunar plain was the surface of Hyperion, at the entrance to the Valley of the Time Tombs, but a Hyperion terribly changed. The dunes were frozen and distorted as if they had been blasted and glazed into glass; the boulders and cliff faces also had flowed and frozen like glaciers of pale stone. There was no atmosphere—the sky was black with the pitiless clarity of airless moons everywhere. The sun was not Hyperion’s; the light was not of human experience. Kassad looked up, and the viewing filters of his skinsuit polarized to deal with terrible energies that filled the sky with bands of blood red and blossoms of fierce white light.
Below him, the valley seemed to vibrate as if to unfelt tremors. The Time Tombs glowed of their own interior energies, pulses of cold light thrown many meters across the valley floor from every entrance, portal, and aperture. The Tombs looked new, slick, and shining.
Kassad realized that only the skinsuit was allowing him to breathe and saving his flesh from the lunar cold that had replaced the desert warmth. He turned to look at Moneta, attempted to phrase an intelligent question, failed, and raised his gaze to the impossible tree once again.
The thorn tree seemed to be made of the same steel and chrome and cartilage as the Shrike itself: obviously artificial and yet horribly organic at the same instant. The trunk was two or three hundred meters thick at its base, the lower branches almost as broad, but the smaller branches and thorns soon tapered to stilleto thinness as they splayed toward the sky with their awful impalement of human fruit.
Impossible that humans so impaled could live for long; doubly impossible that they could survive in the vacuum of this place outside of time and space. But survive and suffer they did. Kassad watched them writhe. All of them were alive. And all were in pain.
Kassad was aware of the pain as a great sound beyond hearing, a huge, incessant foghorn of pain, as if thousands of untrained fingers were falling on thousands of keys playing a massive pipe organ of pain. The pain was so palpable that he searched the blazing sky as if the tree were a pyre or huge beacon with the waves of pain clearly visible.
There was only the harsh light and lunar stillness.
Kassad raised the magnification of his skinsuit viewing lenses and looked from branch to branch, thorn to thorn. The people writhing there were of both genders and all ages. They wore a variety of torn clothing and disarrayed cosmetics that spanned many decades if not centuries. Many of the styles were not familiar to Kassad, and he assumed that he was looking at victims from his future. There were thousands … tens of thousands … of victims there. All were alive. All were in pain.
Kassad stopped, focused on a branch four hundred meters from the bottom, upon a cluster of thorns and bodies far out from the trunk, upon a single thorn three meters long from which a familiar purple cape billowed. The form there writhed, twisted, and turned toward Fedmahn Kassad.
He was looking at the impaled figure of Martin Silenus.
Kassad cursed and formed fists so tight that the bones in his hands ached. He looked around for his weapons, magnifying vision to stare into the Crystal Monolith. There was nothing there.
Colonel Kassad shook his head, realized that his skinsuit was a better weapon than any he had brought to Hyperion, and began to stride toward the tree. He did not know how he would climb it, but he would find a way. He did not know how he would get Silenus down ali
ve—get all of the victims down—but he would do so or die in the trying.
Kassad took ten paces and stopped on a curve of frozen dune. The Shrike stood between him and the tree.
He realized that he was grinning fiercely beneath the chromium forcefield of the skinsuit. This was what he had waited many years for. This was the honorable warfare he had pledged his life and honor for twenty years earlier in the FORCE Masada Ceremony. Single combat between warriors. A struggle to protect the innocent. Kassad grinned, flattened the edge of his right hand into a silver blade, and stepped forward.
—Kassad!
He looked back at Moneta’s call. Light cascaded on the quicksilver surface of her nude body as she pointed toward the valley.
A second Shrike was emerging from the tomb called the Sphinx. Farther down the valley, a Shrike stepped from the entrance to the Jade Tomb. Harsh light glinted from spikes and razorwire as another emerged from the Obelisk, half a klick away.
Kassad ignored them and turned back toward the tree and its protector.
A hundred Shrikes stood between Kassad and the tree. He blinked, and a hundred more appeared to his left. He looked behind him, and a legion of Shrikes stood as impassively as sculptures on the cold dunes and melted boulders of the desert.
Kassad pounded his own knee with his fist. Damn.
Moneta came up next to him until their arms touched. The skinsuits flowed together, and he felt the warm flesh of her forearm against his. She stood, thigh to thigh with him.
—I love you, Kassad.
He gazed at the perfect lines of her face, ignored the riot of reflections and colors there, and tried to remember the first time he had met her, in the forest near Agincourt. He remembered her startling green eyes and short, brown hair. The fullness of her lower lip and how it tasted of tears the time he accidentally had bitten it.
He raised a hand and touched her cheek, feeling the warmth of skin beneath the skinsuit. If you love me, he sent, stay here.
