by Dan Simmons
Morpurgo wiped sweat from his face. “CEO, we can’t run any risk that this device can fall into enemy hands.”
Gladstone looked at Councilor Nansen and tried to make her expression reveal nothing of what she felt. “Councilor, can this device be rigged so that it detonates automatically if our ship is captured or destroyed?”
“Yes, CEO.”
“Do it. Explain all necessary failsafe devices to the proper FORCE experts.” She turned toward Sedeptra. “Prepare a webwide broadcast for me, scheduled to commence ten minutes before the device is to be detonated. I have to tell our people about this.”
“Is that wise …?” began Senator Feldstein.
“It is necessary,” said Gladstone. She rose, and the thirty-eight people in the room rose a second later. “I’m going to get a few minutes sleep while you people work. I want the device ready and in-system and Hyperion warned immediately. I want contingency plans and priorities for a negotiated settlement ready by the time I awaken in thirty minutes.”
Gladstone looked out at the group, knowing that one way or the other, most of the people there would be out of power and out of office within the next twenty hours. One way or the other, it was her last day as CEO.
Meina Gladstone smiled. “Council dismissed,” she said and farcast to her private quarters to take a nap.
FORTY-THREE
Leigh Hunt had never seen anyone die before. The last day and night he spent with Keats—Hunt still thought of him as Joseph Severn but was sure that the dying man now thought of himself as John Keats—were the most difficult in Hunt’s life. The hemorrhages came frequently during Keat’s last day of life, and between these bouts of retching, Hunt could hear the phlegm boiling in the small man’s throat and chest as he fought for life.
Hunt sat next to the bed in the small front room in the Piazza di Spagna and listened to Keats babble as sunrise moved to midmorning and midmorning faded to early afternoon. Keats was feverish and moving in and out of consciousness, but he insisted that Hunt listen and write everything down—they had found ink, pen, and foolscap in the other room—and Hunt complied, scribbling furiously as the dying cybrid raved on about metaspheres and lost divinities, the responsibilities of poets and the passing of gods, and the Miltonic civil war in the Core.
Hunt had perked up then and squeezed Keats’s feverish hand. “Where is the Core, Sev—Keats? Where is it?”
The dying man had broken into a visible sweat and turned his face away. “Don’t breathe on me—it comes like ice!”
“The Core,” repeated Hunt, leaning back, feeling close to tears from pity and frustration, “where is the Core?”
Keats smiled, his head moving back and forth in pain. The effort he made to breathe sounded like wind through a ruptured bellows. “Like spiders in the web,” he muttered, “spiders in the web. Weaving … letting us weave it for them … then trussing us and draining us. Like flies caught by spiders in the web.”
Hunt quit writing as he listened to more of this seemingly senseless babble. Then he understood. “My God,” he whispered. “They’re in the farcaster system.”
Keats tried to sit up, grasped Hunt’s arm with a terrible strength. “Tell your leader, Hunt. Have Gladstone rip it out. Rip it out. Spiders in the web. Man god and machine god … must find the union. Not me!” He dropped back on the pillows and started weeping without sound. “Not me.”
Keats slept some through the long afternoon, although Hunt knew that it was something closer to death than sleep. The slightest sound would start the dying poet awake and set him wrestling to breathe. By sunset Keats was too weak to expectorate, and Hunt had to help him lower his head over the basin to allow gravity to clear his mouth and throat of bloody mucus.
Several times, when Keats fell into fitful naps, Hunt walked to the window and once down the stairs to the front door to stare into the Piazza. Something tall and sharp edged stood in the deepest shadows opposite the Piazza near the base of the steps.
In the evening, Hunt himself dozed off while sitting upright in the hard chair next to Keats’s bed. He awoke from a dream of falling and put his hand out to steady himself only to find Keats awake and staring at him.
“Did you ever see anyone die?” asked Keats between soft gasps for breath.
“No.” Hunt thought that there was something odd about the young man’s gaze, as if Keats were looking at him but seeing someone else.
“Well then I pity you,” said Keats. “What trouble and danger you have got into for me. Now you must be firm for it will not last long.”
Hunt was struck not only by the gentle courage in that remark, but by the sudden shift in Keats’s dialect from flat Web-standard English to something much older and more interesting.
“Nonsense,” said Hunt heartily, forcing enthusiasm and energy he did not feel. “We’ll be out of this before dawn. I’m going to sneak out as soon as it gets dark and find a farcaster portal.”
Keats shook his head. “The Shrike will take you. It will allow no one to help me. It’s role is to see that I must escape myself through myself.” He closed his eyes as his breathing grew more ragged.
“I don’t understand,” said Leigh Hunt, taking the young man’s hand. He assumed this was more of the fever talking, but since it was one of the few times Keats had been fully conscious in the past two days, Hunt felt it worth the effort to communicate. “What do you mean escape yourself through yourself?”
Keats’s eyes fluttered open. They were hazel and far too bright. “Ummon and the others are trying to make me escape myself through accepting the godhood, Hunt. Bait to catch the white whale, honey to catch the ultimate fly. Fleeing Empathy shall find its home in me … in me, Mister John Keats, five feet high … and then the reconciliation begins, right?”
“What reconciliation?” Hunt leaned closer, trying not to breathe on him. Keats appeared to have shrunk in his bedclothes, tangle of blankets, but heat radiating from him seemed to fill the room. His face was a pale oval in the dying light. Hunt was only faintly aware of a gold band of reflected sunlight moving across the wall just below where it met the ceiling, but Keats’s eyes never left that last smear of day.
“The reconciliation of man and machine, Creator and created,” said Keats and began to cough, stopping only after he had drooled red phlegm into the basin Hunt held for him. He lay back, gasped a moment, and added,” Reconciliation of humankind and those races it tried to exterminate, the Core and the humanity it tried to expunge, the painfully evolved God of the Void Which Binds and its ancestors who tried to expunge it.”
Hunt shook his head and quit writing. “I don’t understand. You can become this … messiah … by leaving your deathbed?”
The pale oval of Keats’s face moved back and forth on the pillow in a motion which might have been a substitute for laughter. “We all could have, Hunt. Humankind’s folly and greatest pride. We accept our pain. We make way for our children. That earned us the right to become the God we dreamed of.”
Hunt looked down and found his own fist clenched in frustration. “If you can do this … become this power … then do it. Get us out of here!”
Keats closed his eyes again. “Can’t. I’m not the One Who Comes but the One Who Comes Before. Not the baptized but the baptist. Merde, Hunt, I’m an atheist! Even Severn couldn’t convince me of these things when I was drowning in death!” Keats gripped Hunt’s shirt with a fierceness that frightened the older man. “Write this!”
And Hunt fumbled to find the ancient pen and rough paper, scribbling furiously to catch the words Keats now whispered:
A wondrous lesson in thy silent face:
Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.
Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had d
runk,
And so become immortal.
Keats lived for three more painful hours, a swimmer rising occasionally from his sea of agony to take a breath or whisper some urgent nonsense. Once, long after dark, he pulled at Hunt’s sleeve and whispered sensibly enough, “When I am dead, the Shrike will not harm you. It waits for me. There may not be a way home, but it will not harm you while you search.” And again, just as Hunt was bending over to hear if the breath still gurgled in the poet’s lungs, Keats began to talk and continued between spasms until he had given Hunt specific instructions for his entombment in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, near the Pyramid of Caius Cestius.
“Nonsense, nonsense,” Hunt muttered over and over like a mantra, squeezing the young man’s hot hand.
“Flowers,” whispered Keats a little later, just after Hunt had lighted a lamp on the bureau. The poet’s eyes were wide as he stared at the ceiling in a look of pure, childish wonder. Hunt glanced upward and saw the faded yellow roses painted in blue squares on the ceiling. “Flowers … above me,” whispered Keats between his efforts to breathe.
Hunt was standing at the window, staring out at the shadows beyond the Spanish Steps, when the painful rasp of breath behind him faltered and stopped and Keats gasped out, “Severn … lift me up! I am dying.”
Hunt sat on the bed and held him. Heat flowed from the small body that seemed to weigh nothing, as if the actual substance of the man had been burned away. “Don’t be frightened. Be firm. And thank God it has come!” gasped Keats, and then the terrible rasping subsided. Hunt helped Keats lie back more comfortably as his breathing eased into a more normal rhythm.
Hunt changed the water in the basin, moistened a fresh cloth, and came back to find Keats dead.
Later, just after the sun rose, Hunt lifted the small body—wrapped in fresh linens from Hunt’s own bed—and went out into the city.
The storm had abated by the time Brawne Lamia reached the end of the valley. As she passed the Cave Tombs, she had seen the same eerie glow the other Tombs were emitting, but there also came a terrible noise—as if of thousands of souls crying out—echoing and moaning from the earth. Brawne hurried on.
The sky was clear by the time she stood in front of the Shrike Palace. The structure was aptly named: the half-dome arched up and outward like the creature’s carapace, support elements curved downward like blades stabbing the valley floor and other buttresses leaped upward and away like Shrike thorns. Walls had become translucent as the interior glow increased, and now the building shone like a giant jack-o’-lantern shaved paper thin; the upper regions glowed red as the Shrike’s gaze.
Brawne took a breath and touched her abdomen. She was pregnant—she had known it before she left Lusus—and didn’t she owe more now to her unborn son or daughter than to the obscene old poet on the Shrike’s tree? Brawne knew that the answer was yes and that it did not matter one damn bit. She let out the breath and approached the Shrike Palace.
From the outside, the Shrike Palace was no more than twenty meters across. Before, when they had entered, Brawne and the other pilgrims had seen the interior as a single open space, empty except for the bladelike supports that crisscrossed the space under the glowing dome. Now, as Brawne stood at the entrance, the interior was a space larger than the valley itself. A dozen tiers of white stone rose rank on rank and stretched into the faded distance. On each tier of stone, human bodies lay, each garbed a different way, each tethered by the same sort of semiorganic, semiparasitic shunt socket and cable which her friends had told Brawne she herself had worn. Only these metallic but translucent umbilicals pulsed red and expanded and contracted regularly, as if blood were being recycled through the sleeping forms’ skulls.
Brawne staggered back, affected by the pull of anti-entropic tides as much as by the view, but when she stood ten meters from the Palace, the exterior was the same size as always. She did not pretend to understand how klicks of interior could fit into such a modest shell. The Time Tombs were opening. This one could coexist in different times for all she knew. What she did understand was that when she was awakening from her own travels under the shunt, she had seen the Shrike’s thorn tree tied with tubes and vines of energy invisible to the eye but now quite obviously connected with the Shrike Palace.
She stepped to the entrance again.
The Shrike waited inside. Its carapace, usually gleaming, now seemed black, silhouetted against the light and marble glare around it.
Brawne felt the adrenaline rush fill her, felt the impulse to turn and run, and stepped inside.
The entrance all but vanished behind her, remaining visible only by a faint fuzziness in the uniform glow which emanated from the walls. The Shrike did not move. Its red eyes gleamed from the shadow of its skull.
Brawne stepped forward, her booted heels making no sound on the stone floor. The Shrike was ten meters to her right where the stone biers began, ascending like obscene display racks to a ceiling lost in the glow. She had no illusion that she could make it back to the door before the creature closed on her.
It did not move. The air smelled of ozone and something sickly sweet. Brawne moved along the wall at her back and scanned the rows of bodies for a familiar sleeping face. With each step to her left, she moved farther from the exit and made it easier for the Shrike to cut her off. The creature stood there like a black sculpture in an ocean of light.
The tiers did stretch for kilometers. Stone steps, each almost a meter high, broke the horizontal lines of dark bodies. Several minutes’ walk from the entrance, Brawne climbed the lower third of one of these stairways, touched the nearest body on the second tier, and was relieved to find the flesh warm, the man’s chest rising and falling. It was not Martin Silenus.
Brawne continued onward, half expecting to find Paul Duré or Sol Weintraub or even herself lying among the living dead. Instead, she found a face she had last seen carved into a mountainside. Sad King Billy lay motionless on white stone, five tiers up, his royal robes scorched and stained. The sad face was—as were all the others—contorted in some internal agony. Martin Silenus lay three bodies away on a lower tier.
Brawne crouched next to the poet, glancing over her shoulder at the black speck of the Shrike, still unmoving at the end of the rows of bodies. Like the others, Silenus appeared to be alive, in silent agony, and was attached by a shunt socket connected to a pulsating umbilical which, in turn, ran into the white wall behind the ledge as if wed to the stone.
Brawne panted from fear as she ran her hand over the poet’s skull, feeling the fusion of plastic and bone, and then felt along the umbilical itself, finding no join or opening to the point where it melded with stone. Fluid pulsed beneath her fingers.
“Shit,” whispered Brawne and, in a sudden flurry of panic, looked behind her, certain the Shrike had crept within striking distance. The dark form still stood at the end of the long room.
Her pockets were empty. She had neither weapon nor tool. She realized that she would have to return to the Sphinx, find the packs, dig out something to cut with, and then return and muster enough courage to enter here again.
Brawne knew that she could never come through that door again.
She knelt, took a deep breath, and brought her hand and arm up, then down. The edge of her palm smashed against material that looked like clear plastic and felt harder than steel. Her arm ached from wrist to shoulder from the single blow.
Brawne Lamia glanced to her right. The Shrike was moving toward her, stepping slowly like an old man out for a leisurely walk.
Brawne shouted, knelt, and struck again, palm-edge rigid, thumb locked at right angles. The long room echoed to the impact.
Brawne Lamia had grown up on Lusus at 1.3 standard gravity, and she was athletic for her race. Since she was nine years old, she had dreamed of and worked toward becoming a detective, and a part of that admittedly obsessive and totally illogical preparation had been training in the martial arts. Now she grunted, raised her arm, and struck again, willing her p
alm to be an axe blade, seeing in her mind the severing blow, the successful strike-through.
The tough umbilical dented imperceptibly, pulsed like a living thing, and seemed to cringe away as she swung again.
Footsteps became audible below and behind her. Brawne almost giggled. The Shrike could move without walking, go from here to there without the effort of going between. It must enjoy scaring its prey. Brawne was not frightened. She was too busy.
She raised her hand, brought it down again. It would have been easier striking the stone for effect. She slammed her palm-edge into the umbilical again, feeling some small bone give in her hand. The pain was like a distant noise, like the sliding below her and behind her.
Has it occurred to you, she thought, that it’ll probably kill him if you do manage to break this thing?
She swung again. The footsteps stopped at the base of the stairway below.
Brawne was panting from effort. Sweat dripped from her forehead and cheeks onto the chest of the sleeping poet.
I don’t even like you, she thought at Martin Silenus and chopped again. It was like trying to sever a metal elephant’s leg.
The Shrike began ascending the staircase.
Brawne half-stood and threw the entire weight of her body into a swing which almost dislocated her shoulder and broke her wrist, and smashed small bones in her hand.
And severed the umbilical.
Red fluid too nonviscous for blood spashed across Brawne’s legs and the white stone. The severed cable still extending from the wall spasmed and then thrashed like an agitated tentacle before lying limply and then withdrawing, a bleeding snake sliding into a hole that ceased to exist as soon as the umbilical was out of sight. The stump of umbilical still attached to Silenus’s neural shunt socket withered in five seconds, drying and contracting like a jellyfish out of water. Red splashed the poet’s face and shoulders, the liquid turning blue even as Brawne watched.
Martin Silenus’s eyes twitched and opened like an owl’s.
“Hey,” he said, “do you know the fucking Shrike’s standing right behind you?”
