by Dan Simmons
“Bishop Edouard has been trying to call, according to my aide,” said Gladstone. “We’ll have the call put through here at once, Father. Or should I say, Your Holiness?” There was no irony in the CEO’s voice.
Duré looked up, too stunned to speak.
“I will have the call put through,” said Gladstone. “We’ll arrange your return to Pacem as quickly as possible, Your Holiness, but I would appreciate it if you could keep in touch. I do need your advice.”
Duré nodded and looked back at the flimsy. A phone began to blink on the console above the pallet.
CEO Gladstone stepped out into the hall, told the doctors about the most recent development, contacted Security to approve the farcast clearance for Bishop Edouard or other Church officials from Pacem, and ’cast back to her room in the residential wing. Sedeptra reminded her that the council was reconvening in the War Room in eight minutes. Gladstone nodded, saw her aide out, and stepped back to the fatline cubicle in its concealed niche in the wall. She activated sonic privacy fields and coded the transmission diskey for the Consul’s ship. Every fatline receiver in the Web, Outback, galaxy, and universe would monitor the squirt, but only the Consul’s ship could decode it. Or so she hoped.
The holo camera light winked red. “Based on the automated squirt from your ship, I am assuming that you chose to meet with the Ousters, and they have allowed you to do so,” Gladstone said into the camera. “I am also assuming that you survived the initial meeting.”
Gladstone took a breath. “On behalf of the Hegemony, I have asked you to sacrifice much over the years. Now I ask you on behalf of all of humankind. You must find out the following:
“First, why are the Ousters attacking and destroying the worlds of the Web? You were convinced, Byron Lamia was convinced, and I was convinced that they wanted only Hyperion. Why have they changed this?
“Second, where is the TechnoCore? I must know if we are to fight them. Have the Ousters forgotten our common enemy, the Core?
“Third, what are their demands for a cease-fire? I am willing to sacrifice much to rid us of the Core’s domination. But the killing must stop!
“Fourth, would the Leader of the Swarm Aggregate be willing to meet with me in person? I will farcast to Hyperion system if this is necessary. Most of our fleet elements have left there, but a JumpShip and its escort craft remain with the singularity sphere. The Swarm Leader must decide soon, because FORCE wants to destroy the sphere, and Hyperion then will be three years time-debt from the Web.
“Finally, the Swarm Leader must know that the Core wishes us to use a form of deathwand explosive device to counter the Ouster invasion. Many of the FORCE leaders agree. Time is short. We will not—repeat, not—allow the Ouster invasion to overrun the Web.
“It is up to you now. Please acknowledge this message and fatline me as soon as negotiations have begun.”
Gladstone looked into the camera disk, willing the force of her personality and sincerity across the light-years. “I beseech you in the bowels of humankind’s history, please accomplish this.”
· · ·
The fatline message squirt was followed by two minutes of jerky imagery showing the deaths of Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove. The Consul, Melio Arundez, and Theo Lane sat in silence after the holos faded.
“Response?” queried the ship.
The Consul cleared his throat. “Acknowledge message received,” he said. “Send our coordinates.” He looked across the holopit at the other two. “Gentlemen?”
Arundez shook his head as if clearing it. “It’s obvious you’ve been here before … to the Ouster Swarm.”
“Yes,” said the Consul. “After Bressia … after my wife and son … after Bressia, some time ago, I rendezvoused with this Swarm for extensive negotiations.”
“Representing the Hegemony?” asked Theo. The redhead’s face looked much older and lined with worry.
“Representing Senator Gladstone’s faction,” said the Consul. “It was before she was first elected CEO. Her group explained to me that an internal power struggle within the TechnoCore could be affected by our bringing Hyperion into the Web Protectorate. The easiest way to do that was to allow information to slip to the Ousters … information that would cause them to attack Hyperion, thus bringing the Hegemony fleet here.”
“And you did that?” Arundez’s voice showed no emotion, although his wife and grown children lived on Renaissance Vector, now less than eighty hours away from the invasion wave.
The Consul sat back in the cushions. “No. I told the Ousters about the plan. They sent me back to the Web as a double agent. They planned to seize Hyperion, but at a time of their own choosing.”
Theo sat forward, his hands clasped very tightly. “All those years at the consulate …”
“I was waiting for word from the Ousters,” the Consul said flatly. “You see, they had a device that would collapse the anti-entropic fields around the Time Tombs. Open them when they were ready. Allow the Shrike to slip its bonds.”
“So the Ousters did that,” said Theo.
“No,” said the Consul, “I did. I betrayed the Ousters just as I betrayed Gladstone and the Hegemony. I shot the Ouster woman who was calibrating the device … her and the technicians with her … and turned it on. The anti-entropic fields collapsed. The final pilgrimage was arranged. The Shrike is free.”
Theo stared at his former mentor. There was more puzzlement than rage in the younger man’s green eyes. “Why? Why did you do all this?”
The Consul told them, briefly and dispassionately, about his grandmother Siri of Maui-Covenant, and about her rebellion against the Hegemony—a rebellion which did not die when she and her lover, the Consul’s grandfather, died.
Arundez rose from the pit and walked to the window opposite the balcony. Sunlight streamed across his legs and the dark blue carpet. “Do the Ousters know what you did?”
“They do now,” said the Consul. “I told Freeman Vanz and the others when we arrived.”
Theo paced the diameter of the holopit. “So this meeting we’re going to might be a trial?”
The Consul smiled. “Or an execution.”
Theo stopped, both hands clenched in fists. “And Gladstone knew this when she asked you to come here again?”
“Yes.”
Theo turned away. “I don’t know whether I want them to execute you or not.”
“I don’t know either, Theo,” said the Consul.
Melio Arundez turned away from the window. “Didn’t Vanz say they were sending a boat to fetch us?”
Something in his tone brought the other two men to the window. The world where they had landed was a middle-sized asteroid which had been encircled by a class-ten containment field and terraformed into a sphere by generations of wind and water and careful restructuring. Hyperion’s sun was setting behind the too-near horizon, and the few kilometers of featureless grass rippled to a vagrant breeze. Below the ship, a wide stream or narrow river ambled across the pastureland, approached the horizon, and then seemed to fly upward into a river turned waterfall, twisting up through the distant containment field and winding through the blackness of space above before dwindling to a line too narrow to see.
A boat was descending that infinitely tall waterfall, approaching the surface of their small world. Humanoid figures could be seen near the bow and stern.
“Christ,” whispered Theo.
“We’d best get ready,” said the Consul. “That’s our escort.”
Outside, the sun set with shocking rapidity, sending its last rays through the curtain of water half a kilometer above the shadowed ground and searing the ultramarine sky with rainbows of almost frightening color and solidity.
FORTY
It is midmorning when Hunt awakens me. He arrives with breakfast on a tray and a frightened look in his dark eyes.
I ask, “Where did you get the food?”
“There’s some sort of little restaurant in the front room downstairs. Food was waiting
there, hot, but no people.”
I nod. “Signora Angeletti’s little trattoria,” I say. “She is not a good cook.” I remember Dr. Clark’s concern about my diet; he felt that the consumption had settled in my stomach and he held me to a starvation regime of milk and bread with the occasional bit of fish. Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets.
I look up at Hunt again. “What is it?”
Gladstone’s aide has moved to the window and seems absorbed in the view of the Piazza below. I can hear Bernini’s accursed fountain trickling. “I was going out for a walk while you slept,” Hunt says slowly, “just in case there might be people out and about. Or a phone or farcaster.”
“Of course,” I say.
“I’d just stepped out … the …” He turns and licks his lips. “There’s something out there, Severn. In the street at the bottom of the stairs. I’m not sure, but I think that it’s …”
“The Shrike,” I say.
Hunt nods. “Did you see it?”
“No, but I am not surprised.”
“It’s … it’s terrible, Severn. There’s something about it that makes my flesh crawl. Here … you can just get a glimpse of it in the shadows on the other side of the staircase.”
I start to rise, but a sudden fit of coughing and the feel of phlegm rising in my chest and throat makes me settle back on the pillows. “I know what it looks like, Hunt. Don’t worry, it’s not here for you.” My voice sounds more confident than I feel.
“For you?”
“I don’t think so,” I say between gasps for air. “I think it’s just here to make sure I don’t try to leave … to find another place to die.”
Hunt returns to the bed. “You’re not going to die, Severn.”
I say nothing.
He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. “If you die, what happens to me?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “If I die, I don’t even know what happens to me.”
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one’s attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius. The day passes slowly, and I am exquisitely aware of the movement of sunlight across the rough wall, the feel of bedclothes beneath my palm, the fever which rises in me like nausea and burns itself out in the furnace of my mind, and, mostly, of the pain. Not my pain now, for a few hours or days of the constriction in my throat and the burning in my chest are bearable, almost welcomed like an obnoxious old friend met in a strange city, but the pain of the others … all the others. It strikes my mind like the noise of shattering slate, like hammer iron slammed repeatedly on anvil iron, and there is no escape from it.
My brain receives this as din and restructures it as poetry. All day and all night the pain of the universe floods in and wanders the fevered corridors of my mind as verse, imagery, images in verse, the intricate, endless dance of language, now as calming as a flute solo, now as shrill and strident and confusing as a dozen orchestras tuning up, but always verse, always poetry.
Sometime near sunset I awake from a half-doze, shattering the dream of Colonel Kassad fighting the Shrike for the lives of Sol and Brawne Lamia, and find Hunt sitting at the window, his long face colored by evening light the hue of terra-cotta.
“Is it still there?” I ask, my voice the rasp of file on stone.
Hunt jumps, then turns towards me with an apologetic smile and the first blush I have ever seen on that dour countenance. “The Shrike?” he says. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it for a while. I feel that it is.” He looks at me. “How are you?”
“Dying.” I instantly regret the self-indulgence of that flippancy, however accurate it is, when I see the pain it causes Hunt. “It’s all right,” I say almost jovially, “I’ve done it before. It’s not as if it were me that is dying. I exist as a personality deep in the TechnoCore. It’s just this body. This cybrid of John Keats. This twenty-seven-year-old illusion of flesh and blood and borrowed associations.”
Hunt comes over to sit on the edge of the bed. I realize with a shock that he has changed the sheets during the day, exchanging my blood-bespeckled coverlet for one of his own. “Your personality is an AI in the Core,” he says. “Then you must be able to access the datasphere.”
I shake my head, too weary to argue.
“When the Philomels kidnapped you, we tracked you through your access route to the datasphere,” he persisted. “You don’t have to contact Gladstone personally. Just leave a message where Security can find it.”
“No,” I rasp, “the Core does not wish it.”
“Are they blocking you? Stopping you?”
“Not yet. But they would.” I set the words separately between gasps, like laying delicate eggs back in a nest. Suddenly I remember a note I sent to dear Fanny shortly after a serious hemorrhage but almost a year before they would kill me. I had written: “If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” This strikes me now as futile and self-centered and idiotic and naive … and yet I desperately believe it still. If I had had time … the months I had spent on Esperance, pretending to be a visual artist; the days wasted with Gladstone in the halls of government when I could have been writing …
“How do you know until you try?” asks Hunt.
“What’s that?” I ask. The simple effort of two syllables sets me coughing again, the spasm ending only when I spit up half-solid spheres of blood into the basin which Hunt has hastily fetched. I lie back, trying to focus on his face. It is getting dark in the narrow room, and neither of us has lighted a lamp. Outside, the fountain burbles loudly.
“What’s that?” I ask again, trying to remain here even as sleep and sleep’s dreams tug at me. “Try what?”
“Try leaving a message through the datasphere,” he whispers. “Contacting someone.”
“And what message should we leave, Leigh?” I ask. It is the first time I have used his first name.
“Where we are. How the Core kidnapped us. Anything.”
“All right,” I say, closing my eyes. “I’ll try. I don’t think they’ll let me, but I promise I’ll try.”
I feel Hunt’s hand holding mine. Even through the winning tides of weariness, this sudden human contact is enough to make tears come to my eyes.
I will try. Before surrendering to the dreams or death, I will try.
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad shouted a FORCE battle cry and charged through the dust storm to intercept the Shrike before it covered the final thirty meters to where Sol Weintraub crouched next to Brawne Lamia.
The Shrike paused, its head swiveling frictionlessly, red eyes gleaming. Kassad armed his assault rifle and moved down the slope with reckless speed.
The Shrike shifted.
Kassad saw its movement through time as a slow blur, noting even as he watched the Shrike that movement in the valley had ceased, sand hung motionless in the air, and the light from the glowing Tombs had taken on a thick, amberish quality. Kassad’s skinsuit was somehow shifting with the Shrike, following it through its movements through time.
The creature’s head snapped up, attentive now, and its four arms extended like blades from a knife, fingers snapping open in sharp greeting.
Kassad skidded to a halt ten meters from the thing and activated the assault rifle, slagging the sand beneath the Shrike in a full-power wide-beam burst.
The Shrike glowed as its carapace and steel-sculpture legs reflected the hellish light beneath and around it. Then the three meters of monster began to sink as the sand bubbled into a lake of molten glass beneath it. Kassad shouted in triumph as he stepped closer, playing the widebeam on the Shrike and ground the way he had sprayed his friends with stolen i
rrigation hoses in the Tharsis slums as a boy.
The Shrike sank. Its arms splayed at the sand and rock, trying to find purchase. Sparks flew. It shifted, time running backward like a reversed holie, but Kassad shifted with it, realizing that Moneta was helping him, her suit slaved to his but guiding him through time, and then he was spraying the creature again with concentrated heat greater than the surface of a sun, melting sand beneath it, and watching the rocks around it burst into flame.
Sinking in this cauldron of flame and molten rock, the Shrike threw back its head, opened its wide crevasse of a mouth, and bellowed.
Kassad almost stopped firing in his shock at hearing noise from the thing. The Shrike’s scream resounded like a dragon’s roar mixed with the blast of a fusion rocket. The screech set Kassad’s teeth on edge, vibrated from the cliff walls, and tumbled suspended dust to the ground. Kassad switched to high-velocity solid shot and fired ten thousand microfléchettes at the creature’s face.
The Shrike shifted, years by the giddy feel of the transition in Kassad’s bones and brain, and they were no longer in the valley but aboard a windwagon rumbling across the Sea of Grass. Time resumed, and the Shrike leaped forward, metallic arms dripping molten glass, and seized Kassad’s assault rifle. The Colonel did not relinquish the weapon, and the two staggered around in a clumsy dance, the Shrike swinging its extra pair of arms and a leg festooned with steel spikes, Kassad leaping and dodging while clinging desperately to his rifle.
They were in some sort of small compartment. Moneta was present as a sort of shadow in one corner, and another figure, a tall, hooded man, moved in ultra—slow motion to avoid the sudden blur of arms and blades in the confined space. Through his skinsuit filters, Kassad saw the blue-and-violet energy field of an erg binder in the space, pulsing and growing, then retracting from the time-violence of the Shrike’s organic anti-entropic fields.
The Shrike slashed and cut through Kassad’s skinsuit to find flesh and muscle. Blood spattered the walls. Kassad forced the muzzle of his rifle into the creature’s mouth and fired. A cloud of two thousand high-velocity fléchettes snapped the Shrike’s head back as if on a spring and slammed the thing’s body into a far wall. But even as it fell away, leg spikes caught Kassad in the thigh and sent a rising spiral of blood splashing the windows and walls of the windwagon’s cabin.
