by Dan Simmons
Shocked, amused, irritated, Duré opened his mouth to retort and found himself lying in bed in the Government House infirmary. The medics had lowered the lighting so that he could sleep. Monitor beads clung to his skin.
Duré lay there a minute, suffering the itching and discomfort from healing third-degree burns and thinking about the dream, thinking that it was only a dream, that he could go back to sleep for a few hours before Monsignor—Bishop Edouard and the others arrived to escort him back. Duré closed his eyes and remembered the masculine but gentle face, the hazel eyes, the archaic dialect.
Father Paul Duré of the Society of Jesus sat up, struggled to his feet, found his clothes gone and nothing but his paper hospital pajamas to wear, wrapped a blanket around him, and shuffled off in bare feet before medics could respond to the tattletale sensors.
There had been a medics-only farcaster at the far end of the hall. If that failed to get him home, he would find another.
Leigh Hunt carried Keats’s body out of the shadow of the building into the sunlight of the Piazza di Spagna and expected to find the Shrike waiting for him. Instead, there was a horse. Hunt wasn’t an expert at recognizing horses, since the species was extinct in his time, but this one appeared to be the same one which had brought them to Rome. It helped in the identification that the horse was attached to the same small cart—Keats had called it a vettura—which they had ridden in earlier.
Hunt set the body on the carriage seat, folding the layers of linen around it carefully, and walked alongside with one hand still touching the shroud as the carriage began moving slowly. In his final hours, Keats had asked to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery near the Aurelian Wall and the Pyramid of Caius Cestius. Hunt vaguely remembered that they had passed through the Aurelian Wall during their bizarre voyage here, but he could not have found it again if his life—or Keats’s burial—depended on it. At any rate, the horse seemed to know the way.
Hunt trudged alongside the slowly moving carriage, aware of the beautiful spring-morning quality to the air and an underlying smell as of rotting vegetation. Could Keats’s body be decomposing already? Hunt knew little about the details of death; he wanted to learn no more. He swatted at the horse’s rump to hurry the beast up, but the animal stopped, turned slowly to give Hunt a reproachful look, and resumed his plodding pace.
It was more a glint of light glimpsed out of the corner of his eye than any sound that tipped Hunt off, but when he turned quickly, the Shrike was there—ten or fifteen meters behind and matching the pace of the horse with a solemn but somehow comical march, thorned and barbed knees high with each step. Sunlight flashed on carapace, metal tooth, and blade.
Hunt’s first impulse was to abandon the carriage and run, but a sense of duty and a deeper sense of being lost stifled that urge. Where could he run but back to the Piazza di Spagna—and the Shrike blocked the only return.
Accepting the creature as a mourner in this insane procession, Hunt turned his back on the monster and continued walking alongside the carriage, one hand firm on his friend’s ankle, through the shroud.
All during the walk, Hunt was alert for any sign of a farcaster portal, some sign of technology beyond the nineteenth century, or another human being. There was none. The illusion that he was walking through an abandoned Rome in the spring-like weather of February, A.D. 1821 was perfect. The horse climbed a hill a block from the Spanish Steps, made several other turns on broad avenues and narrow lanes, and passed within sight of the curved and crumbling ruin which Hunt recognized as the Colosseum.
When the horse and carriage stopped, Hunt roused himself from the walking doze he had drifted into and looked around. They were outside the overgrown heap of stones Hunt guessed to be the Aurelian Wall, and there was indeed a low pyramid visible, but the Protestant Cemetery—if that is what it was—seemed more pasture than cemetery. Sheep grazed in the shade of cypresses, their bells tinkling eerily in the thick, warming air, and everywhere the grass grew to knee height or taller. Hunt blinked and saw the few headstones scattered here and there, half hidden by the grass, and closer, just beyond the grazing horse’s neck, a newly excavated grave.
The Shrike remained ten meters back, among the rustling cypress branches, but Hunt saw the glow of its red eyes fixed on the grave site.
Hunt went around the horse, now munching contentedly on high grass, and approached the grave. There was no coffin. The hole was about four feet deep, and the heaped dirt beyond smelled of upturned humus and cool soil. Embedded there was a long-handled shovel, as if the grave diggers had just left. A slab of stone stood upright at the head of the grave but remained unmarked—a blank headstone. Hunt saw the glint of metal on top of the slab and rushed over to find the first modern artifact he had seen since being kidnapped to Old Earth: a small laser pen lay there—the type used by construction workers or artists to scrawl designs on the hardest alloy.
Hunt turned, holding the pen, feeling armed now although the thought of that narrow beam stopping the Shrike seemed ludicrous. He dropped the pen into the pocket of his shirt and went about the business of burying John Keats.
A few minutes later, Hunt stood near the heap of dirt, shovel in hand, staring down into the open grave at the small, sheet-wrapped bundle there, and tried to think of something to say. Hunt had been at numerous state memorial services, had even written Gladstone’s eulogies for some of them, and words had never been a problem before. But now nothing came. The only audience was the silent Shrike, still back among the shadows of the cypresses, and the sheep with their bells tinkling as they moved nervously away from the monster, ambling toward the grave like a group of tardy mourners.
Hunt thought that perhaps some of the original John Keats’s poetry would be appropriate now, but Hunt was a political manager—not a man given to reading or memorizing ancient poetry. He remembered, too late, that he had written down the snippet of verse his friend had dictated the day before, but the notebook still lay on the bureau in the apartment on the Piazza di Spagna. It had been something about becoming godlike or a god, the knowledge of too many things rushing in … or somesuch nonsense. Hunt had an excellent memory, but he couldn’t recall the first line of that archaic mishmash.
In the end, Leigh Hunt compromised with a moment of silence, his head bowed and eyes closed except for occasional peeks at the Shrike, still holding its distance, and then he shoveled the dirt in. It took longer than he would have imagined. When he was done patting down the soil, the surface was slightly concave, as if the body had been too insignificant to form a proper mound. Sheep brushed by Hunt’s legs to graze on the high grass, daisies, and violets which grew around the grave.
Hunt might not have remembered the man’s poetry, but he had no trouble remembering the inscription Keats had asked to be set on his headstone. Hunt clicked on the pen, tested it by burning a furrow in three meters of grass and soil, and then had to stamp out the tiny fire he had started. The inscription had bothered Hunt when he first heard it—the loneliness and bitterness audible beneath Keats’s wheezing, gasping effort to speak. But Hunt did not think it was his place to argue with the man. Now he had only to inscribe it in stone, leave this place, and avoid the Shrike while trying to find a way home.
The pen sliced into stone easily enough, and Hunt had to practice on the back side of the headstone before he found the right depth of line and quality of control. Still, the effect looked ragged and homemade when Hunt finished some fifteen or twenty minutes later.
First there was the crude drawing which Keats had asked for—he had shown the aide several rough sketches, drawn on foolscap with a shaking hand—of a Greek lyre with four of its eight strings broken. Hunt was not satisfied when he was done—he was even less of an artist than a reader of poetry—but the thing was probably recognizable to anyone who knew what the hell a Greek lyre was. Then came the legend itself, written precisely as Keats had dictated it:
HERE LIES ONE
WHOSE NAME
WAS WRIT IN WATER
>
There was nothing else: no birth or death dates, not even the poet’s name. Hunt stood back, surveyed his work, shook his head, keyed the pen off but kept it in his hand, and started back for the city, making a wide circle around the creature in the cypresses as he did so.
At the tunnel through the Aurelian Wall, Hunt paused to look back. The horse, still attached to its carriage, had moved down the long slope to munch on sweeter grass near a small stream. The sheep milled about, munching flowers and leaving their hoofprints in the moist soil of the grave. The Shrike remained where it had been, barely visible beneath its bower of cypress branches. Hunt was almost sure that the creature still faced the grave.
It was late in the afternoon when Hunt found the farcaster, a dull rectangle of dark blue humming in the precise center of the crumbling Colosseum. There was no diskey or punchplate. The portal hung there like an opaque but open door.
But not open to Hunt.
He tried fifty times, but the surface was as solid and resisting as stone. He touched it tentatively with fingertips, stepped confidently into and bounced off its surface, threw himself at the blue rectangle, lobbed stones at the entrance to watch them bounce off, tried both sides and even the edges of the thing, and ended up leaping again and again at the useless thing until his shoulders and upper arms were masses of bruises.
It was a farcaster. He was sure of it. But it would not let him through.
Hunt searched the rest of the Colosseum, even the underground passages dripping with moisture and bat guano, but there was no other portal. He searched the nearby streets and all their buildings. No other portal. He searched all afternoon, through basilica and cathedrals, homes and huts, grand apartment buildings and narrow alleys. He even returned to the Piazza di Spagna, ate a hasty meal on the first floor, pocketed the notebook and anything else he found of interest in the rooms above, and then left forever to find a farcaster.
The one in the Colosseum was the only one he could find. By sunset he had clawed at it until his fingers were bloody. It looked right, it hummed right, it felt right, but it would not let him through.
A moon, not Old Earth’s moon judging by the dust storms and clouds visible on its surface, had risen and now hung above the black curve of the Colosseum wall. Hunt sat in the rocky center and glowered at the blue glow of the portal. From somewhere behind him came the frenzied beat of pigeons’ wings and the rattle of a small rock on stone.
Hunt rose painfully, fumbled the laser pen out of his pocket, and stood, legs apart, waiting and straining to see into the shadows of the Colosseum’s many crevices and arches. Nothing stirred.
A sudden noise behind him made him whirl and almost spray the thin beam of laser light across the farcaster portal’s surface. An arm appeared there. Then a leg. A person emerged. Then another.
The Colosseum echoed to Leigh Hunt’s shouts.
Meina Gladstone had known that as tired as she was, it would be folly to nap even as long as thirty minutes. But since childhood, she had trained herself to take five- to fifteen-minute catnaps, shrugging off weariness and fatigue toxins through these brief respites from thought.
Now, sickened with exhaustion and the vertigo of the previous forty-eight hours’ confusion, she lay a few minutes on the long sofa in her study, emptying her mind of trivia and redundancies, letting her subconscious find a path through the jungle of thoughts and events. For a few minutes, she dozed, and while she dozed she dreamed.
Meina Gladstone sat upright, shrugging off the light afghan and tapping at her comlog before her eyes were open. “Sedeptra! Get General Morpurgo and Admiral Singh in my office in three minutes.”
Gladstone stepped into the adjoining bathroom, showered and sonicked, pulled out fresh clothes—her most formal suit of soft, black whipcord velvet, a gold and red Senate scarf held in place by a gold pin showing the geodesic symbol of the Hegemony, earrings dating back to pre-Mistake Old Earth, and the topaz bracelet-cum-comlog given to her by Senator Byron Lamia before his marriage—and was back in the study in time to greet the two FORCE officers.
“CEO, this is very unfortunate timing,” began Admiral Singh. “The final data from Mare Infinitus was being analyzed, and we were discussing fleet movements for the defense of Asquith.”
Gladstone ordered her private farcaster into existence and gestured for the two men to follow her.
Singh glanced around as he stepped through into gold grass under a threatening bronze sky. “Kastrop-Rauxel,” he said. “There were rumors that a previous administration had FORCE:space construct a private farcaster here.”
“CEO Yevshensky had it added to the Web,” said Gladstone. She waved, and the farcaster door vanished. “He felt that the Chief Executive needed someplace where Core listening devices were unlikely.”
Morpurgo looked uneasily toward a wall of clouds near the horizon where ball lightning played. “No place is totally safe from the Core,” he said. “I’ve been telling Admiral Singh about our suspicions.”
“Not suspicions,” said Gladstone. “Facts. And I know where the Core is.”
Both FORCE officers reacted as if the ball lightning had struck them. “Where?” they said almost in unison.
Gladstone paced back and forth. Her short gray hair seemed to glow in the charged air. “In the farcaster web,” she said. “Between the portals. The AIs live in the singularity pseudo-world there like spiders in a dark web. And we wove it for them.”
Morpurgo was the first of the two able to speak. “My God,” he said. “What do we do now? We have less than three hours before the torchship with the Core device translates to Hyperion space.”
Gladstone told them exactly what they were going to do.
“Impossible,” said Singh. He was unconsciously tugging at his short beard. “Simply impossible.”
“No,” said Morpurgo. “It will work. There is enough time. And as frantic and random as the fleet movements have been during the past two days …”
The Admiral shook his head. “Logistically it might be possible. Rationally and ethically it is not. No, it is impossible.”
Meina Gladstone stepped closer. “Kushwant,” she said, addressing the Admiral by his first name for the first time since she had been a young senator and he an even younger FORCE:space commander, “don’t you remember when Senator Lamia put us in touch with the Stables? The AI named Ummon? His prediction of the two futures—one holding chaos and the other certain extinction for humankind?”
Singh turned away. “My duty is to FORCE and the Hegemony.”
“Your duty is the same as mine,” snapped Gladstone. “To the human race.”
Singh’s fists came up as if he were ready to fight an invisible but powerful opponent. “We don’t know for sure! Where did you get your information?”
“Severn,” said Gladstone. “The cybrid.”
“Cybrid?” snorted the General. “You mean that artist. Or at least that miserable excuse for one.”
“Cybrid,” repeated the CEO. She explained.
“Severn as a retrieval persona?” Morpurgo looked dubious. “And now you’ve found him?”
“He found me. In a dream. Somehow he managed to communicate from wherever he is. That was his role, Arthur, Kushwant. That’s why Ummon sent him to the Web.”
“A dream,” sneered Admiral Singh. “This … cybrid … told you that the Core was hidden in the farcaster web … in a dream.”
“Yes,” said Gladstone, “and we have very little time in which to act.”
“But,” said Morpurgo, “to do what you suggested—”
“Would doom millions,” finished Singh. “Possibly billions. The economy would collapse. Worlds like TC2, Renaissance Vector, New Earth, the Denebs, New Mecca—Lusus, Arthur—scores more depend upon other worlds for their food. Urban planets cannot survive alone.”
“Not as urban planets,” said Gladstone. “But they can learn to farm until interstellar trade is reborn.”
“Bah!” snarled Singh. “After plague, a
fter the breakdown of authority, after the millions of deaths from lack of proper equipment, medicine, and datasphere support.”
“I’ve thought of all that,” said Gladstone, her voice firmer than Morpurgo had ever heard it. “I’ll be the greatest mass murderer in history—greater than Hitler or Tze Hu or Horace Glennon-Height. The only thing worse is to continue as we are. In which case, I—and you, gentlemen—will be the ultimate betrayers of humankind.”
“We can’t know that,” grunted Kushwant Singh, as if the words were driven from him by blows to the belly.
“We do know that,” said Gladstone. “The Core has no more use for the Web. From now on, the Volatiles and Ultimates will keep a few million slaves penned underground on the nine labyrinthine worlds while they use human synapses for what computing needs remain.”
“Nonsense,” said Singh. “Those humans would die out.”
Meina Gladstone sighed and shook her head. “The Core has devised a parasitic, organic device called the cruciform,” she said. “It … brings back … the dead. After a few generations, the humans will be retarded, listless, and without a future, but their neurons will still serve Core purposes.”
Singh turned his back on them again. His small form was silhouetted against a wall of lightning as the storm approached in a riot of boiling bronze clouds. “Your dream told you this, Meina?”
“Yes.”
“And what else does your dream say?” snapped the Admiral.
“That the Core has no more need for the Web,” said Gladstone. “Not for the human Web. They’ll continue to reside there, rats in the walls, but the original occupants are no longer needed. The AI Ultimate Intelligence will take over the major computing duties.”
Singh turned to look at her. “You are mad, Meina. Quite mad.”
Gladstone moved quickly to grab the Admiral’s arm before he could activate the farcaster. “Kushwant, please listen to—”
