by Dan Simmons
Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do.
Why then, thought Sol, clinging to the stone stair as the Sphinx seemed to rise and fall on the storm seas of time, why was this test being repeated? What terrible new revelations lay at hand for humankind?
Sol understood then—from what little Brawne had told him, from the stories shared on the pilgrimage, from his own personal revelations of the past few weeks—that the effort of the machine Ultimate Intelligence, whatever the hell it was, to flush out the missing Empathy entity of the human Godhead was useless. Sol no longer saw the tree of thorns on its cliff top, its metal branches and suffering multitudes, but he did see clearly now that the thing was as much an organic machine as the Shrike—an instrument to broadcast suffering through the universe so the human God-part would be forced to respond, to show itself.
If God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must, then that evolution was toward empathy—toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion. But the obscene tree which the pilgrims had glimpsed—which poor Martin Silenus had been a victim of—was not the way to evoke the missing power.
Sol realized now that the machine god, whatever its form, was insightful enough to see that empathy was a response to others’ pain, but the same UI was too stupid to realize that empathy—in both human terms and the terms of humankind’s UI—was far more than that. Empathy and love were inseparable and inexplicable. The machine UI would never understand it—not even enough to use it as a lure for the part of the human UI who had tired of warfare in the distant future.
Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love.
But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation. Love?
For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.
It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom.
It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothing.
But now, as the Sphinx loomed above him and the first hint of sunrise paled Hyperion’s sky, Sol realized that he had responded to a force more basic and persuasive than the Shrike’s terror or pain’s dominion. If he was right—and he did not know but felt—then love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter/antimatter. There was room for some sort of God not in the web between the walls, nor in the singularity cracks in the pavement, nor somewhere out before and beyond the sphere of things … but in the very warp and woof of things. Evolving as the universe evolved. Learning as the learning-able parts of the universe learned. Loving as humankind loved.
Sol got to his knees and then to his feet. The time tide storm seemed to have abated a bit, and he thought he could try for the hundredth time to gain access to the tomb.
Bright light still emanated from where the Shrike had emerged, taken Sol’s daughter, and vanished. But now the stars were disappearing as the sky itself lightened toward morning.
Sol climbed the stairs.
He remembered the time at home on Barnard’s World when Rachel—she was ten—had tried to climb the town’s tallest elm and had fallen when she was five meters from the top. Sol had rushed to the med center to find his child floating in the recovery nutrient and suffering from a punctured lung, a broken leg and ribs, a fractured jaw, and innumerable cuts and bruises. She had smiled at him, lifted a thumb, and said through her wired jaw, “I’ll make it next time!”
Sol and Sarai had sat there in the med center that night while Rachel slept. They had waited for morning. Sol had held her hand through the night.
He waited now.
Time tides from the open entrance to the Sphinx still held Sol back like insistent winds, but he leaned into them like an immovable rock and stood there, five meters out and waiting, squinting into the glare.
He glanced up but did not move back when he saw the fusion flame of a descending spacecraft slice the predawn sky. He turned to look but did not retreat when he heard the spacecraft landing and saw three figures emerge. He glanced but did not step back when he heard other noises, shouts, from deeper in the valley and saw a familiar figure lugging another in a fireman’s carry, moving toward him from beyond the Jade Tomb.
None of these things related to his child. He waited for Rachel.
Even without a datasphere, it is quite possible for my persona to travel through the rich, Void-Which-Binds soup which now surrounds Hyperion. My immediate reaction is to want to visit the One Who Will Be, but although that one’s brilliance dominates the metasphere, I am not yet ready for that. I am, after all, little John Keats, not John the Baptist.
The Sphinx—a tomb patterned after a real creature that will not be designed by genetic engineers for centuries to come—is a maelstrom of temporal energies. There are really several Sphinxes visible to my expanded sight: the anti-entropic tomb carrying its Shrike cargo back in time like some sealed container with its deadly bacillus, the active, unstable Sphinx which contaminated Rachel Weintraub in its initial efforts to open a portal through time, and the Sphinx which has opened and is moving forward through time again. This last Sphinx is the blazing portal of light, which, second only to the One Who Will Be, lights Hyperion with its metaspherical bonfire.
I descend to this bright place in time to watch Sol Weintraub hand his daughter to the Shrike.
I could not have interfered with this even if I had arrived earlier. I would not if I were able. Worlds beyond reason depend upon this act.
But I await within the Sphinx for the Shrike to pass, carrying its tender cargo. Now I can see the child. She is seconds old, blotched, moist, and wrinkled. She is crying her newborn lungs out. From my old attitudes of bachelorhood and reflective poet’s stance, I find it hard to understand the attraction this bawling, unaesthetic infant exerts on its father and the cosmos.
Still, the sight of a baby’s flesh—however unattractive this newborn might be—held by the Shrike’s bladed talons stirs something in me.
Three paces into the Sphinx have carried the Shrike and the child hours forward in time. Just beyond the entrance, the river of time accelerates. If I don’t do something within seconds, it will be too late—the Shrike will have used this portal to carry the child off to whatever distant-future dark hole it seeks.
Unbidden, the images arrive of spiders draining their victims of fluids, of digger wasps burying their own larvae in the paralyzed bodies of their prey, perfect sources for incubation and food.
I h
ave to act, but I have no more solidity here than I had in the Core. The Shrike walks through me as if I were an unseen holo. My analog persona is useless here, armless and insubstantial as a wisp of swamp gas.
But swamp gas has no brain, and John Keats did.
The Shrike takes another two steps, and more hours pass for Sol and the others outside. I can see blood on the crying infant’s skin where the Shrike’s scalpeled fingers have cut into flesh.
To hell with this.
Outside, on the broad stone porch of the Sphinx, caught now in the flood of temporal energies flowing in and through the tomb, lay backpacks, blankets, abandoned food containers, and all the detritus Sol and the pilgrims had left there.
Including a single Möbius cube.
The box had been sealed with a class-eight containment field on the Templar treeship Yggdrasill when Voice of the Tree Het Masteen had prepared for his long voyage. It contained a single erg—sometimes known as a binder—one of the small creatures which might not be intelligent by human standards but which had evolved around distant stars and developed the ability to control more powerful forcefields than any machine known to humankind.
The Templars and Ousters had communicated with the creatures for generations. Templars used them for control redundancy on their beautiful but exposed treeships.
Het Masteen had brought this thing hundreds of light-years to complete the Templar agreement with the Church of the Final Atonement to help fly the Shrike’s thorn tree. But, seeing the Shrike and the tree of torment, Masteen had not been able to fulfill the contract. And so he died.
The Möbius cube remained. The erg was visible to me as a constrained sphere of red energy in the temporal flood.
Outside, through a curtain of darkness, Sol Weintraub was just visible—a sadly comic figure, speeded up like a silent-film figure by the subjective rush of time beyond the Sphinx’s temporal field—but the Möbius cube lay within the Sphinx’s circle.
Rachel cried with the fear even a newborn can know. Fear of falling. Fear of pain. Fear of separation.
The Shrike took a step, and another hour was lost to those outside.
I was insubstantial to the Shrike, but energy fields are something which even we Core-analog ghosts can touch. I canceled the Möbius cube’s containment field. I freed the erg.
Templars communicate with ergs via electromagnetic radiation, coded pulses, simple rewards of radiation when the creature does what they want … but primarily through a near-mystical form of contact which only the Brotherhood and a few Ouster exotics know. Scientists call it a crude telepathy. In truth, it is almost pure empathy.
The Shrike takes another step into the opening portal to the future. Rachel cries with the energy only someone newly born to the universe can muster.
The erg expands, understands, and melds with my persona. John Keats takes on substance and form.
I hurry the five paces to the Shrike, remove the baby from its hands, and step back. Even in the energy maelstrom that is the Sphinx, I can smell the infant-newness of her as I hold the child against my chest and cup her moist head against my cheek.
The Shrike whirls in surprise. Four arms extend, blades snick open, and red eyes focus on me. But the creature is too close to the portal itself. Without moving, it recedes down the storm drain of temporal flow. The thing’s steam-shovel jaws open, steel teeth gnash, but it is already gone, a spot in the distance. Something less.
I turn toward the entrance, but it is too far. The erg’s draining energy could get me there, drag me upstream against the flow, but not with Rachel. Carrying another living thing that far against so much force is more than I can manage even with the erg’s help.
The baby cries, and I bounce her gently, whispering nonsense doggerel in her warm ear.
If we can’t go back and we can’t go forward, we’ll just wait here for a moment. Perhaps someone will come along.
* * *
Martin Silenus’s eyes widened and Brawne Lamia turned quickly, seeing the Shrike floating in midair above and behind her.
“Holy shit,” Brawne whispered reverently.
In the Shrike Palace, tiers of sleeping human bodies receded in the gloom and distance, all of the people except Martin Silenus still connected to the thorn tree, the machine UI, and God knows what else by pulsing umbilicals.
As if to show its power here, the Shrike had quit climbing, opened its arms, and floated up three meters until it hung in the air five meters out from the stone shelf where Brawne crouched next to Martin Silenus.
“Do something,” whispered Silenus. The poet was no longer attached by the neural shunt umbilical, but he was still too weak to hold his head up.
“Ideas?” said Brawne, the brave remark somewhat ruined by the quaver in her voice.
“Trust,” said a voice below them, and Brawne shifted to look down toward the floor.
The young woman whom Brawne had recognized as Moneta in Kassad’s tomb stood far below.
“Help!” cried Brawne.
“Trust,” said Moneta and disappeared. The Shrike had not been distracted. It lowered its hands and stepped forward as if walking on solid stone rather than air.
“Shit,” whispered Brawne.
“Ditto,” rasped Martin Silenus. “Out of the frying pan back into the fucking fire.”
“Shut up,” said Brawne. Then, as if to herself, “Trust what? Who?”
“Trust the fucking Shrike to kill us or stick us both on the fucking tree,” gasped Silenus. He managed to move enough to clutch Brawne’s arm. “Better dead than back on the tree, Brawne.”
Brawne touched his hand briefly and stood, facing the Shrike across five meters of air.
Trust? Brawne held her foot out, felt around on emptiness, closed her eyes for a second, and opened them as her foot seemed to touch a solid step. She opened her eyes.
Nothing was under her foot except air.
Trust? Brawne put her weight on her forward foot and stepped out, teetering a moment before bringing her other foot down.
She and the Shrike stood facing each other ten meters above the stone floor. The creature seemed to grin at her as it opened its arms. Its carapace glowed dully in the dim light. Its red eyes were very bright.
Trust? Feeling the adrenaline rush, Brawne stepped forward on the invisible steps, gaining height as she moved into the Shrike’s embrace.
She felt the fingerblades slicing through fabric and skin as the thing began to hug her to it, toward the curved blade growing out of its metal chest, toward the open jaws and rows of steel teeth. But while still standing firmly on thin air, Brawne leaned forward and set her uninjured hand flat against the Shrike’s chest, feeling the coldness of the carapace but also feeling a rush of warmth as energy rushed from her, out of her, through her.
The blades stopped cutting before they cut anything but skin. The Shrike froze as if the flow of temporal energy surrounding them had turned to a lump of amber.
Brawne set her hand on the thing’s broad chest and pushed.
The Shrike froze completely in place, became brittle, the gleam of metal fading to be replaced by the transparent glow of crystal, the bright sheen of glass.
Brawne stood on air being embraced by a three-meter glass sculpture of the Shrike. In its chest, where a heart might be, something that looked like a large, black moth fluttered and beat sooty wings against the glass.
Brawne took a deep breath and pushed again. The Shrike slid backward on the invisible platform she shared with it, teetered, and fell. Brawne ducked under the encircling arms, hearing and feeling her jacket tearing as still-sharp fingerblades caught in the material and ripped as the thing tumbled, and then she was teetering herself, flailing her good arm for balance as the glass Shrike turned one and a half times in midair, struck the floor, and shattered into a thousand jagged shards.
Brawne pivoted, fell to her knees on the invisible catwalk, and crawled back toward Martin Silenus.
In the last half meter, her confidence fail
ed her, the invisible support simply ceased to be, and she fell heavily, twisting her ankle as she hit the edge of the stone tier and managing to keep from falling off only by grabbing Silenus’s knee.
Cursing from the pain in her shoulder, broken wrist, twisted ankle, and lacerated palms and knees, she pulled herself to safety next to him.
“There’s obviously been some weird shit going on since I left,” Martin Silenus said hoarsely. “Can we go now, or do you plan to walk on water as an encore?”
“Shut up,” Brawne said shakily. The two syllables sounded almost affectionate.
She rested a while and then found that the easiest way to get the still-weak poet down the steps and across the glass-strewn floor of the Shrike Palace was to use the fireman’s carry. They were at the entrance when he pounded unceremoniously on her back and said, “What about King Billy and the others?”
“Later,” panted Brawne and stepped out into the predawn light.
She had hobbled down two-thirds of the valley with Silenus draped over her shoulders like so much limp laundry when the poet said, “Brawne, are you still pregnant?”
“Yes,” she said, praying that that was still true after the day’s exertions.
“You want me to carry you?”
“Shut up,” she said and followed the path down and around the Jade Tomb.
“Look,” said Martin Silenus, twisting to point even as he hung almost upside down over her shoulder.
In the glowing light of morning, Brawne could see that the Consul’s ebony spacecraft now sat on the high ground at the entrance to the valley. But that was not what the poet was pointing toward.
Sol Weintraub stood silhouetted in the glare of the Sphinx’s entrance. His arms were raised.
