by Dan Simmons
…in the last seconds before orgasm Kassad tries to pull away… his hands on her throat, pressing… she clings like a leech, a lamprey ready to drain him… they roll against dead bodies…
…her eyes like red jewels, blazing with a mad heat like that which fills his aching testicles, expanding like a flame, spilling over…
…Kassad slams both hands against the soil, lifts himself away from her… from it… his strength insane but not enough as terrible gravities press them together… sucking like a lamprey’s mouth as he threatens to explode, looks in her eyes… the death of worlds… the death of worlds!
Kassad screams and pulls away. Strips of his flesh rip away as he lunges up and sideways. Metal teeth click shut in a steel vagina, missing his glans by a moist millimeter.
Kassad slumps on his side, rolls away, hips moving, unable to stop his ejaculation. Semen explodes in streams, falls on the curled fist of a corpse. Kassad moans, rolls again, curls in a fetal position even as he comes again. And again.
He hears the hiss and rustle as she rises behind him.
Kassad rolls on his back and squints up against sunlight and his own pain. She stands above him, legs apart, a silhouette of thorns. Kassad wipes sweat from his eyes, sees his wrist come away red with blood, and waits for the killing blow. His skin contracts in anticipation of the slash of blade into flesh. Panting, Kassad looks up to see Moneta above him, thighs flesh rather than steel, her groin matted from the moisture of their passion. Her face is dark, the sun behind her, but he sees red flames dying in the multifaceted pits of her eyes. She smiles and he sees sunlight glint on rows of metal teeth. “Kassad…” she whispers and it is the sound of sand scraping against bone.
Kassad tears his gaze away, struggles to his feet, and stumbles across corpses and burning rubble in his terror to be free. He does not look back.
Scouting elements of Hyperion’s Self-defense Force found Colonel Fedmahn Kassad almost two days later.
He was discovered lying unconscious on one of the grassy moors which lead to the abandoned Chronos Keep, some twenty kilometers from the dead city and the wreckage of the Ouster ejection pod. Kassad was naked and almost dead from the effects of exposure and several serious wounds, but he responded well to emergency field treatment and was immediately airlifted south of the Bridle Range to a hospital at Keats.
Reconnaissance squads from the SDF battalion moved northward carefully, cautious of the anti-entropic tides around the Time Tombs and wary of any booby traps left behind by the Ousters. There were none. The scouts found only the wreckage of Kassad’s escape mechanism and the burned out hulks of the two assault boats which the Ousters had lanced from orbit. There were no clues as to why they had slagged their own ships and the Ouster bodies—both in and around the boats—had been burned beyond any hope of autopsy or analysis.
Kassad regained consciousness three Hyperion days later, swore that he remembered nothing after stealing the squid, and was shipped out on a FORCE torchship two local weeks later.
Upon returning to the Web, Kassad resigned his commission.
For a while he was active in antiwar movements, occasionally appearing on the All Thing net arguing disarmament. But the attack on Bressia had mobilized the Hegemony toward true interstellar war as had nothing else in three centuries, and Kassad’s voice was either drowned out or dismissed as the guilty conscience of the Butcher of South Bressia.
In the sixteen years after Bressia, Colonel Kassad had disappeared from the Web and from the Web consciousness.
Although there had been no more major battles, the Ousters remained the Hegemony’s prime bogeymen.
Fedmahn Kassad was only a fading memory.
It was late morning when Kassad finished his story. The Consul blinked and looked around him, noticing the ship and its surroundings for the first time in more than two hours. The Benares had come out into the main channel of the Hoolie. The Consul could hear the creaks of the chains and hawsers as the river mantas surged against their harnesses.
The Benares appeared to be the only ship heading upriver, but now numerous small craft were visible going the other way. The Consul rubbed his forehead and was surprised to see his hand come away slick with sweat. The day had grown very warm and the shadow of the tarp had crept away from the Consul without his noticing. He blinked, wiped sweat from his eyes, and moved into the shade to get a drink from one of the liquor bottles the androids had set in a cabinet near the table.
“My God,” Father Hoyt was saying, “so, according to this Moneta creature, the Time Tombs are moving backward in time?”
“Yes,” said Kassad.
“Is that possible?” asked Hoyt.
“Yes.” It was Sol Weintraub who answered.
“If that’s true,” said Brawne Lamia, “then you “met” this Moneta… or whatever her real name is… in her past but your future… in a meeting that’s still to come.”
“Yes,” said Kassad.
Martin Silenus walked to the railing and spat into the river. “Colonel, do you think the bitch was the Shrike?”
“I don’t know.” Kassad’s monotone was barely audible.
Silenus turned to Sol Weintraub. “You’re a scholar. Is there anything in the Shrike mythography that says the thing can change shape?”
“No,” said Weintraub. He was preparing a milk globe to feed his daughter. The infant made soft, mewling noises and moved tiny fingers.
“Colonel,” said Het Masteen, “the forcefield… whatever the fighting suit was… did you bring it with you after the encounter with the Ousters and this… female?”
Kassad looked at the Templar a moment and then shook his head.
The Consul was staring into his drink but his head suddenly snapped upright with the force of a thought.
“Colonel, you said that you saw a vision of the Shrike’s killing tree… the structure, the thing where it impales its victims.”
Kassad moved his basilisk stare from the Templar to the Consul. He slowly nodded.
“And there were bodies on it?”
Another nod.
The Consul wiped sweat from his upper lip. “If the tree is traveling backward in time with the Time Tombs, then the victims are from our future.”
Kassad said nothing. The others also were staring at the Consul now but only Weintraub appeared to understand what the comment meant… and what the Consul’s next question had to be.
The Consul resisted the urge to wipe the sweat from his lips again. His voice was steady. “Did you see any of us there?”
Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft sounds of the river and the ship’s rigging suddenly seemed very loud. Finally Kassad took a breath. “Yes.”
Silence stretched again. Brawne Lamia broke it. “Will you tell us who?”
“No.” Kassad rose and went to the stairway leading to the lower decks.
“Wait,” called Father Hoyt.
Kassad paused at the head of the stairway.
“Will you at least tell us two other things?”
“What?”
Father Hoyt grimaced from a wave of pain. His gaunt face went white under its film of perspiration. He took a breath and said, “First, do you think the Shrike… the woman… somehow wants to use you to start this terrible interstellar war you foresaw?”
“Yes,” Kassad said softly.
“Second, will you tell us what you plan to petition the Shrike for… or this Moneta… when you meet them on the pilgrimage?”
Kassad smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile, and very, very cold. “I will make no petition,” said Kassad. “I will ask nothing of them. When I meet them this time, I will kill them.”
The other pilgrims did not speak or look at one another as Kassad went below. The Benares continued north-northeast into afternoon.
Three
The barge Benares entered the river port of Naiad an hour before sunset.
Crew and pilgrims pressed to the rail to stare at smoldering embers of
what once had been a city of twenty thousand people. Little remained.
The famous River Front Inn, built in the days of Sad King Billy, had burned to the foundations; its charred docks, piers, and screened balconies now collapsed into the shallows of the Hoolie. The customhouse was a burned-out shell. The airship terminal on the north end of town survived only as a blackened hulk, its mooring tower reduced to a spire of charcoal. There was no sign whatsoever of the small riverfront Shrike temple. Worst of all, from the pilgrims’ point of view, was the destruction of the Naiad River Station—the harness dock lay burned and sagging, the manta holding pens open to the river.
“God damn it!” said Martin Silenus.
“Who did it?” asked Father Hoyt. “The Shrike?”
“More likely the SDF,” said the Consul. “Although they may have been fighting the Shrike.”
“I can’t believe this,” snapped Brawne Lamia. She turned to A. Bettik, who had just joined them on the rear deck. “Didn’t you know this had happened?”
“No,” said the android. “There has been no contact with any point north of the locks for more than a week.”
“Why the hell not?” asked Lamia. “Even if this godforsaken world doesn’t have a datasphere, don’t you have radio?”
A. Bettik smiled slightly. “Yes, M. Lamia, there is radio, but the comsats are down, the microwave repeater stations at the Karla Locks were destroyed, and we have no access to shortwave.”
“What about the mantas?” asked Kassad. “Can we press on to Edge with the ones we have?”
Bettik frowned. “We will have to, Colonel,” he said.
“But it is a crime. The two in harness will not recover from such a pull. With fresh mantas we would have put into Edge before dawn. With these two…” The android shrugged. “With luck, if the beasts survive, we will arrive by early afternoon…”
“The windwagon will still be there, will it not?” asked Het Masteen.
“We must assume so,” said A. Bettik. “If you will excuse me, I will see to feeding the poor beasts we have. We should be under way again within the hour.”
They saw no one in or near the ruins of Naiad. No river craft made their appearance above the city. An hour’s pull northeast of the town they entered the region where the forests and farms of the lower Hoolie gave way to the undulating orange prairie south of the Sea of Grass.
Occasionally the Consul would see the mud towers of architect ants, some of their serrated structures near the river reaching almost ten meters in height. There was no sign of intact human habitation. The ferry at Betty’s Ford was totally gone, with not even a towrope or warming shack left to show where it had stood for almost two centuries.
The River Runners Inn at Cave Point was dark and silent. A. Bettik and other crew members hallooed, but there was no response from the black cave mouth.
Sunset brought a sensuous stillness over the river, soon broken by a chorus of insect noises and night-bird calls. For a while the surface of the Hoolie became a mirror of the gray-green disk of twilight sky, disturbed only by the leap of dusk-feeding fish and the wake of the laboring mantas. As true darkness fell, innumerable prairie gossamers—much paler than their forest cousins, but also of greater wingspan, luminescent shades the size of small children—danced in the vales and valleys of the gently rolling hills. By the time the constellations emerged and the meteor trails began scarring the night sky, a brilliant display this far from all man-made light, the lanterns had been lit and dinner set out on the aft deck.
The Shrike pilgrims were subdued, as if still contemplating Colonel Kassad’s grim and confusing tale. The Consul had been drinking steadily since before midday and now he felt the pleasant displacement—from reality, from the pain of memory—which allowed him to get through each day and night. Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only a true alcoholic’s can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.
“Mine,” said Martin Silenus. The poet also had been drinking steadily since early in the day. His voice was as carefully controlled as the Consul’s but redness on his sharp cheeks and an almost manic brightness of eye gave the old poet away. “At least I drew number three…” He held up his slip of paper. “If you still want to hear the fucking thing.”
Brawne Lamia lifted her glass of wine, scowled, and set it down.
“Perhaps we should talk about what we have learned from the first two stories and how it might relate to our current… situation.”
“Not yet,” said Colonel Kassad. “We don’t have enough information.”
“Let M. Silenus speak,” said Sol Weintraub. “Then we can begin discussing what we have heard.”
“I agree,” said Lenar Hoyt.
Het Masteen and the Consul nodded.
“Agreed!” cried Martin Silenus. “I’ll tell my story. Just let me finish my fucking glass of wine.”
The Poet’s Tale:
“Hyperion Cantos”
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor.
Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
Francis Bacon once said, “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” We have all contributed our wonderful obstructions to the mind, have we not? I more than most. One of the twentieth century’s better, forgotten writers—that is better-comma-forgotten, once bon moted: “I love being a writer. It’s the paperwork I can’t stand.” Get it? Well, amigos and amigette, I love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words I can’t stand.
Where to start?
Start with Hyperion perhaps?
(Fade in) Almost two standard centuries ago.
Sad King Billy’s five seedships spin like gold dandelions above this all too familiar lapis sky. We land like conquistadors strutting to and fro; more than two thousand visual artists and writers and sculptors and poets and ARNists and vid makers and holie directors and composers and decomposers and God knows what all, supported by five times that many administrators and technicians and ecologists and supervisors and court chamberlains and professional ass kissers, not to mention the family of royal asses themselves, supported in turn by ten times that many androids willing to till the soil and stoke the reactors and raise the cities and lift that bale and tote that load… hell, you get the idea.
We landed on a world already seeded by the poor buggers who’d gone indigenie two centuries before and were living hand to mouth and cudgel to brain wherever they could. Naturally the noble descendants of these brave pioneers greeted us like gods—especially after a few of our security folk slagged a few of their more aggressive leaders—and naturally we accepted their worship as our due and put them to work next to our blueskins, plowing the south forty and working to build our shining city on the hill.
And it was a shining city on a hill. Seeing the ruins today can tell you nothing of the place. The desert had advanced in three centuries; the aqueducts from the mountains have fallen and shattered; the city itself is only bones. But in its day the City of Poets was fair indeed, a bit of Socrates’s Athens with the intellectual excitement of Renaissance Venice, the artistic fervor of Paris in the days of the Impressionists, the true democracy of the first decade of Orbit City, and the unlimited future of Tau Ceti Center.
But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course.
It was only Hrothgar’s claustrophobic mead hall with the monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our Grendel, to be sure. We even had our Hrothgar if one squints a bit at Sad King Billy’s poor slouched profile.
We lacked only our Geats; our great, broad-shouldered, small-brained Beowulf with his band of merry psychopaths.
So, lacking a Hero, we settled into the role of victims and composed our sonnets and rehearsed our ballets and unrolled our scrolls, while all the while our thorn-and-steel Grendel served the night with fear and harvested thighbones and gristle.
And this was when I—a satyr then, formed in flesh as mirror
to my soul—came as close to completing my Cantos, my life’s work, as I have come in five sad centuries of stubborn continuance.
(Fade to black)
It occurs to me that the Grendel tale is premature. The players have not been brought upon the stage. Dislinear plotting and non-contiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum. Haven’t you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are—at this instant—poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago? At any rate, if this fucking story’s to be told, you should know who’s in it. So—as much as it pains me—I’ll back up to begin at the beginning.
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was programmed in classic binary. And the Word said, “Let there be life!” And so, somewhere in the TechnoCore vaults of my mother’s estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun and part dildo, and—at the magic touch of a trigger—ejaculated into Mother at a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.
Mother didn’t have to be impregnated in this barbaric fashion, of course. She could have chosen ex utero fertilization, a male lover with a transplant of Daddy’s DNA, a clonal surrogate, a gene-spliced virgin birth, you name it… but, as she told me later, she opened her legs to tradition. My guess is that she preferred it that way.
Anyway, I was born.
I was born on Earth… Old Earth… and fuck you, Lamia, if you don’t believe it. We lived on Mother’s estate on an island not far from the North American Preserve.
Notes for sketch of home on Old Earth:
Fragile twilights fading from violet to fuchsia to purple above the crepe-paper silhouettes of trees beyond the southwest sweep of lawn.
Skies as delicate as translucent china, unscarred by cloud or contrail.
