by Dan Simmons
“The Ultimate Intelligence,” I said, exhaling smoke. “Uh-huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to… what?… to build God.”
“Yes,”
“Why?”
“There is no simple answer, Brawne. Any more than there is a simple answer to the question of why humankind has sought God in a million guises for ten thousand generations.
But with the Core, the interest lies more in the quest for more efficiency, more reliable ways to handle… variables.”
“But the TechnoCore can draw on itself and the mega-datasphere of two hundred worlds.”
“And there still will be blanks in the… predictive powers.”
I threw my cigarette out the window, watching the ember fall into the night. The breeze was suddenly cold; I hugged my arms. “How does all this… Old Earth, the resurrection projects, the cybrids… how does it lead to creating the Ultimate Intelligence?”
“I don’t know, Brawne. Eight standard centuries ago, at the beginning of the First Information Age, a man named Norbert Wiener wrote: “Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?”
Humanity dealt with this inconclusively with their early AIs. The Core wrestles with it in the resurrection projects. Perhaps the UI program has been completed and all of this remains a function of the ultimate Creature/Creator, a personality whose motives are as far beyond the Core’s understanding as the Core’s are beyond humanity’s.”
I started to move in the dark room, bumped a low table with my knee, and remained standing. “None of which tells us who is trying to kill you,” I said.
“No.” Johnny rose and moved to the far wall. A match flared and he lighted a candle. Our shadows wavered on the walls and ceiling.
Johnny came closer and softly gripped my upper arms. The soft light painted his curls and eyelashes copper and touched his high cheekbones and firm chin.
“Why are you so tough?” he asked.
I stared at him. His face was only inches from mine.
We were the same height. “Let go,” I said.
Instead, he leaned forward and kissed me. His lips were soft and warm and the kiss seemed to last for hours.
He’s a machine, I thought. Human, but a machine behind that. I closed my eyes. His soft hand touched my cheek, my neck, the back of my head.
“Listen…” I whispered when we broke apart for an instant.
Johnny did not let me finish. He lifted me in his arms and carried me into the other room. The tall bed. The soft mattress and deep comforter. The candlelight from the other room flickered and danced as we undressed each other in a sudden urgency.
We made love three times that night, each time responding to slow, sweet imperatives of touch and warmth and closeness and the escalating intensity of sensation.
I remember looking down at him the second time; his eyes were closed, hair fell loosely across his forehead, the candlelight showing the flush across his pale chest, his surprisingly strong arms and hands rising to hold me in place. He had opened his eyes that second to look back at me and I saw only the emotion and passion of that moment reflected there.
Sometime before dawn we slept; just as I turned away and drifted off, I felt the cool touch of his hand on my hip in a movement protective and casual without being possessive.
They hit us just after first light. There were five of them, not Lusian but heavily muscled, all men, and they worked well together as a team.
The first I heard of them was when the door to the apartment was kicked open. I rolled out of bed, jumped to the side of the bedroom door, and watched them come through. Johnny sat up and shouted something as the first man leveled a stunner. Johnny had pulled on cotton shorts before going to sleep; I was nude. There are real disadvantages to fighting in the nude when one’s opponents are dressed, but the greatest problem is psychological.
If you can get over the sense of heightened vulnerability, the rest is easy to compensate for.
The first man saw me, decided to stun Johnny anyway, and paid for the mistake. I kicked the weapon out of his hand and clubbed him down with a blow behind the left ear. Two more men pushed into the room. This time both of them were smart enough to deal with me first. Two others leaped for Johnny.
I blocked a stiff-fingered jab, parried a kick that would have done real damage, and backed away. There was a tall dresser to my left and the top drawer came out smooth and heavy. The big man in front of me shielded his face with both arms so that the thick wood splintered, but the instinctive reaction gave me a second’s opening and I took it, putting my entire body into the kick.
Number two man grunted and fell back against his partner.
Johnny was struggling but one of the intruders had him around the throat in a choke hold while the other pinned his legs. I came off the floor in a crouch, accepted the blow from my number two, and leaped across the bed. The guy holding Johnny’s legs went through the glass and wood of the window without a word.
Someone landed on my back and I completed the roll across the bed and floor, bringing him up against the wall. He was good. He took the blow on his shoulder and went for a nerve pinch beneath my ear. He had a second of trouble because of the extra layers of muscle there and I got an elbow deep into his stomach and rolled away.
The man choking Johnny dropped him and delivered a text-book-perfect kick to my ribs. I took half the impact, feeling at least one rib go, and spun inside, attempting no elegance as I used my left hand to crush his left testicle.
The man screamed and was out of it.
I’d never forgotten the stunner on the floor and neither had the last of the opposition. He scurried around to the far side of the bed, out of reach, and dropped to all fours to grab the weapon. Definitely feeling the pain from the broken rib now, I lifted the massive bed with Johnny in it and dropped it on the guy’s head and shoulders.
I went under the bed from my side, retrieved the stunner, and backed into an empty corner.
One guy had gone out the window. We were on the second floor. The first man to enter was still lying in the doorway. The guy I’d kicked had managed to get to one knee and both elbows. From the blood on his mouth and chin, I guessed that a rib had punctured a lung. He was breathing very raggedly. The bed had crushed the skull of the other man on the floor. The guy who’d been choking Johnny was curled up near the window, holding his crotch and vomiting. I stunned him into silence and went over to the one I’d kicked and lifted him by the hair.
“Who sent you?”
“Fuck you.” He sprayed some bloody spittle in my face.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Again, who sent you?” I placed three fingers against his side where the ribcage seemed concave and pressed.
The man screamed and went very white. When he coughed the blood was too red against pale skin.
“Who sent you?” I set four fingers against his ribs.
“The bishop!” He tried to levitate away from my fingers.
“What bishop?”
“Shrike Temple… Lusus… don’t, please… oh, shit…”
“What were you going to do with him… us?”
“Nothing… Oh, God damn… don’t! I need a medic, please!”
“Sure. Answer.”
“Stun him, bring him… back to the Temple… Lusus. Please. I can’t breathe.”
“And me?”
“Kill you if you resisted.”
“Okay,” I said, lifting him a little higher by his hair, “we’re doing fine here. What did they want him for?”
“I don’t know.” He screamed very loudly. I kept one eye on the doorway to the apartment. The stunner was still in my palm under a fistful of hair. “I… don’t… know…” he gasped. He was hemorrhaging in earnest now. The blood dripped on my arm and left breast.
“How’d you get here?”
“EMV… roof.”
“Where’d you ’cast in?”
“Don’t know… I swe
ar… some city in the water. EMV’s set to return there… please!”
I ripped at his clothes. No comlog. No other weapons.
There was a tattoo of a blue trident just above his heart.
“Goonda?” I said.
“Yeah… Parvati Brotherhood.”
Outside the Web. Probably very hard to trace. “All of you?”
“Yeah… please… get me some help… oh, shit… please…” He sagged, almost unconscious.
I dropped him, stepped back, and sprayed the stun beam over him.
Johnny was sitting up, rubbing his throat, and staring at me with a strange gaze.
“Get dressed,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
The EMV was an old, transparent Vikken Scenic with no palmlocks on the ignition plate or diskey. We caught up to the terminator before we had crossed France and looked down on darkness that Johnny said was the Atlantic Ocean. Except for lights of the occasional floating city or drilling platform, the only illumination came from the stars and the broad, swimming-pool glows of the undersea colonies.
“Why are we taking their vehicle?” asked Johnny.
“I want to see where they farcast from.”
“He said the Lusus Shrike Temple.”
“Yeah. Now we’ll see.”
Johnny’s face was barely visible as he looked down at the dark sea twenty klicks below. “Do you think those men will die?”
“One was already dead,” I said. “The guy with the punctured lung will need help. Two of them’ll be okay. I don’t know about the one who went out the window. Do you care?”
“Yes. The violence was… barbaric.”
“Though a quarrel in the street is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine,” I quoted. “They weren’t cybrids, were they?”
“I think not.”
“So there are at least two groups out to get you—the AIs and the bishop of the Shrike Temple. And we still don’t know why.”
“I do have an idea now.”
I swiveled in the foam reelinet. The constellations above us—familiar neither from holos of Old Earth’s skies nor from any Web world I knew—cast just enough light to allow me to see Johnny’s eyes. “Tell me,” I said.
“Your mention of Hyperion gave me a clue,” he said.
“The fact that I had no knowledge of it. Its absence said that it was important.”
“The strange case of the dog barking in the night,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
Johnny leaned closer. “The only reason that I would not be aware of it is that some elements of the Techno-Core have blocked my knowledge of it.”
“Your cybrid…” It was strange to talk to Johnny that way now. “You spend most of your time in the Web, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t you run across mention of Hyperion somewhere? It’s in the news every once in a while, especially when the Shrike Cult’s topical.”
“Perhaps I did hear. Perhaps that is why I was murdered.”
I lay back and looked at the stars. “Let’s go ask the bishop,” I said.
Johnny said that the lights ahead were an analog of New York City in the mid-twenty-first century. He didn’t know what resurrection project the city had been rebuilt for. I took the EMV off auto and dropped lower.
Tall buildings from the phallic-symbol era of urban architecture rose from the swamps and lagoons of the North American littoral. Several had lights burning.
Johnny pointed to one decrepit but oddly elegant structure and said,
“The Empire State Building.”
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever it is, that’s where the EMV wants to land.”
“Is it safe?”
I grinned at him. “Nothing in life’s safe.” I let the car have its head and we dropped to a small, open platform below the building’s spire. We got out and stood on the cracked balcony. It was quite dark except for the few building lights far below and the stars. A few paces away, a vague blue glow outlined a farcaster portal where elevator doors may once have been.
“I’ll go first,” I said but Johnny had already stepped through. I palmed the borrowed stunner and followed him.
I’d never been in the Shrike Temple on Lusus before but there was no doubt that we were there now. Johnny stood a few paces ahead of me but other than him there was no one around. The place was cool and dark and cavernous if caverns could really be that large. A frightening polychrome sculpture which hung from invisible cables rotated to unfelt breezes. Johnny and I both turned as the farcaster portal winked out of existence.
“Well, we did their work for them, didn’t we?” I whispered to Johnny.
Even the whisper seemed to echo in the red-lit hall. I hadn’t planned on Johnny ’casting to the Temple with me.
The light seemed to come up then, not really illuminating the great hall but widening its scope so that we could see the semicircle of men there.
I remembered that some were called exorcists and others lectors and there was some other category I forgot. Whoever they were, it was alarming to see them standing there, at least two dozen of them, their robes variations on red and black and their high foreheads glowing from the red light above. I had no trouble recognizing the bishop. He was from my world, although shorter and fatter than most of us, and his robe was very red.
I did not try to hide the stunner. It was possible that if they all tried to rush us I could bring them all down.
Possible but not probable. I could not see any weapons but their robes could have hidden entire arsenals.
Johnny walked toward the bishop and I followed. Ten paces from the man we stopped. The bishop was the only one not standing. His chair was made of wood and looked as if it could be folded so that the intricate arms, supports, back, and legs could be carried in a compact form. One couldn’t say the same of the mass of muscle and fat evident under the bishop’s robes.
Johnny took another step forward. “Why did you try to kidnap my cybrid?” He spoke to the Shrike Cult holy man as if the rest of us were not there.
The bishop chuckled and shook his head. “My dear… entity… it is true that we wished your presence in our place of worship, but you have no evidence that we were involved in any attempt to kidnap you.”
“I’m not interested in evidence,” said Johnny. “I’m curious as to why you want me here.” I heard a rustling behind us and I swiveled quickly, the stunner charged and pointed, but the broad circle of Shrike priests remained motionless. Most were out of the stunner’s range. I wished that I had brought my father’s projectile weapon with me.
The bishop’s voice was deep and textured and seemed to fill the huge space. “Surely you know that the Church of the Final Atonement has a deep and abiding interest in the world of Hyperion.”
“Yes.”
“And surely you are aware that during the past several centuries the persona of the Old Earth poet Keats has been woven into the cultural mythos of the Hyperion colony?”
“Yes. So?”
The bishop rubbed his cheek with a large red ring on one finger. “So when you offered to go on the Shrike Pilgrimage we agreed. We were distressed when you reneged on this offer.”
Johnny’s look of amazement was most human. “I offered? When?”
“Eight local days ago,” said the bishop. “In this room. You approached us with the idea.”
“Did I say why I wanted to go on the… Shrike Pilgrimage?”
“You said that it was… I believe the phrase you used was… “important for your education.” We can show you the recording if you wish. All such conversations in the Temple are recorded. Or you may have a duplicate of the recording to view at your own convenience.”
“Yes,” said Johnny.
The bishop nodded and an acolyte or whatever the hell he was disappeared into the gloom for a moment and returned with a standard video chip in his hand. The bishop nodded again and the blackrobed man came forward and
handed the chip to Johnny. I kept the stunner ready until the guy had returned to the semicircle of watchers.
“Why did you send the goondas after us?” I asked. It was the first time I’d spoken in front of the bishop and my voice sounded too loud and too raw.
The Shrike holy man made a gesture with one pudgy hand. “M. Keats had expressed an interest in joining our holiest pilgrimage. Since it is our belief that the Final Atonement is drawing closer each day, this is of no little importance to us. Consequently, our agents reported that M. Keats may have been the victim of one or more assaults and that a certain private investigator… you, M. Lamia… was responsible for destroying the cybrid bodyguard provided M. Keats by the TechnoCore.”
“Bodyguard!” It was my turn to sound amazed.
“Of course,” said the bishop. He turned toward Johnny. “The gentleman with the queue who was recently murdered on the Temple Excursion, was this not the same man whom you introduced as your bodyguard a week earlier? He is visible in the recording.”
Johnny said nothing. He seemed to be straining to remember something.
“At any rate,” continued the bishop, “we must have your answer about the pilgrimage before the week is out.
The Sequoia Sempervirens departs from the Web in nine local days.”
“But that’s a Templar treeship,” said Johnny. “They don’t make the long leap to Hyperion.”
The bishop smiled. “In this case it does. We have reason to believe that this may be the last Church-sponsored pilgrimage and we have chartered the Templar craft to allow as many of the faithful as possible to make the trip.” The bishop gestured and red-and-black-robed men faded back into darkness. Two exorcists came forward to fold his stool as the bishop stood. “Please give us your answer as soon as possible.” He was gone. The remaining exorcist stayed to show us out.
There were no more farcasters. We exited by the main door of the Temple and stood on the top step of the long staircase, looking down on the Concourse Mall of Hive Center and breathing in the cool, oil-scented air.
My father’s automatic was in the drawer where I’d left it.
