Hyperion h-1

by Dan Simmons

  “Oh,” I said and adjusted my mask and fool’s cap. The bells made a soft sound in the dark.

  “Come on,” said Mike. “We’ll miss the party.” I nodded and followed him, bells jangling, as we picked our way over stone and scrub toward the waiting light.

  I sit here in the sunlight and wait. I am not totally certain what I am waiting for. I can feel a growing warmth on my back as the morning sunlight is reflected from the white stone of Siri’s tomb.

  Siri’s tomb?

  There are no clouds in the sky. I raise my head and squint skyward as if I might be able to see the L.A. and the newly finished farcaster array through the glare of atmosphere. I cannot. Part of me knows that they have not risen yet. Part of me knows to the second the time remaining before ship and farcaster complete their transit to the zenith. Part of me does not want to think about it.

  Siri, am I doing the right thing?

  There is the sudden sound of pennants stirring on their staffs as the wind comes up. I sense rather than see the restlessness of the waiting crowd. For the first time since my planetfall for this, our Seventh Reunion, I am filled with sorrow. No, not sorrow, not yet, but a sharp-toothed sadness which soon will open into grief. For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness begins to grow inside me.

  Should I let it happen, Siri?

  There is no response except for the growing murmurs of the crowd. In a few minutes they will send Donel, my younger and surviving son, or his daughter Lira and her brother up the hill to urge me on. I toss away the sprig of willowgrass I’ve been chewing on. There is a hint of shadow on the horizon. It could be a cloud. Or it could be the first of the isles, driven by instinct and the spring northerlies to migrate back to the great band of the equatorial shallows whence they came. It does not matter.

  Siri, am I doing the right thing?

  There is no answer and the time grows shorter.

  Sometimes Siri seemed so ignorant it made me sick.

  She knew nothing of my life away from her. She would ask questions but I sometimes wondered if she was interested in the answers. I spent many hours explaining the beautiful physics behind our spinships but she never did seem to understand. Once, after I had taken great care to detail the differences between their ancient seedship and the Los Angeles, Siri astounded me by asking, “But why did it take my ancestors eighty years of shiptime to reach Maui-Covenant when you can make the trip in a hundred and thirty days?” She had understood nothing.

  Siri’s sense of history was, at best, pitiful. She viewed the Hegemony and the Worldweb the way a child would view the fantasy world of a pleasant but rather silly myth; there was an indifference there that almost drove me mad at times.

  Siri knew all about the early days of the Hegira—at least insofar as they pertained to the Maui-Covenant and the colonists—and she occasionally would come up with delightful bits of archaic trivia or phraseology, but she knew nothing of post-Hegira realities. Names like Garden and the Ousters, Renaissance and Lusus meant little to her. I could mention Salmud Brevy or General Horace Glennon-Height and she would have no associations or reactions at all. None.

  The last time I saw Siri she was seventy standard years old. She was seventy years old and still she had never traveled offworld, used a fatline, tasted any alcoholic drink except wine, interfaced with an empathy surgeon, stepped through a farcaster door, smoked a cannabis stick, received gene tailoring, plugged into a stimsim, received any formal schooling, taken any RNA medication, heard of Zen Gnostics or the Shrike Church, or flown any vehicle except an ancient Vikken skimmer belonging to her family.

  Siri had never made love to anyone except me. Or so she said. And so I believed.

  It was during our First Reunion, that time on the Archipelago, when Siri took me to talk with the dolphins.

  We had risen to watch the dawn. The highest levels of the tree-house were a perfect place from which to watch the eastern sky pale and fade to morning. Ripples of high cirrus turned to rose and then the sea itself grew molten as the sun floated above the flat horizon.

  “Let’s go swimming,” said Siri. The rich, horizontal light bathed her skin and threw her shadow four meters across the boards of the platform.

  “I’m too tired,” I said. “Later.” We had lain awake most of the night talking, making love, talking, and making love again.

  In the glare of morning I felt empty and vaguely nauseated. I sensed the slight movement of the isle under me as a tinge of vertigo, a drunkard’s disconnection from gravity.

  “No. Let’s go now,” said Siri and grasped my hand to pull me along. I was irritated but did not argue. Siri was twenty-six, seven years older than I during that First Reunion, but her impulsive behavior often reminded me of the teen-aged Siri I had carried away from the Festival only ten of my months earlier. Her deep, unselfconious laugh was the same. Her green eyes cut as sharply when she was impatient. The long mane of auburn hair had not changed. But her body had ripened, filled out with a promise which had been only hinted at before. Her breasts were still high and full, almost girlish, bordered above by freckles that gave way to a whiteness so translucent that a gentle blue tracery of veins could be seen. But they were different somehow. She was different.

  “Are you going to join me or just sit there staring?” asked Siri. She had slipped off her caftan as we came out onto the lowest deck. Our small ship was still tied to the dock. Above us, the island’s treesails were beginning to open to the morning breeze. For the past several days Siri had insisted on wearing swimstrips when we went into the water. She wore none now. Her nipples rose in the cool air.

  “Won’t we be left behind?” I asked, squinting up at the flapping treesails. On previous days we had waited for the doldrums in the middle of the day when the isle was still in the water, the sea a glazed mirror. Now the jibvines were beginning to pull taut as the thick leaves filled with wind.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Siri. “We could always catch a keel-root and follow it back. That or a feeding tendril. Come on.” She tossed an osmosis mask at me and donned her own. The transparent film made her face look slick with oil. From the pocket of her discarded caftan she lifted a thick medallion and set it in place around her neck. The metal looked dark and ominous against her skin.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Siri did not lift the osmosis mask to answer. She set the comthreads in place against her neck and handed me the earplugs. Her voice was tinny. “Translation disk,” she said. “Thought you knew all about gadgets, Merin. Last one in’s a seaslug.” She held the disk in place between her breasts with one hand and stepped off the isle. I could see the pale globes of her buttocks as she pirouetted and kicked for depth. In seconds she was only a white blur deep in the water. I slipped my own mask on, pressed the comthreads tight, and stepped into the sea.

  The bottom of the isle was a dark stain on a ceiling of crystalline light. I was wary of the thick feeding tendrils even though Siri had amply demonstrated that they were interested in devouring nothing larger than the tiny zooplankton that even now caught the sunlight like dust in an abandoned ballroom. Keelroots descended like gnarled stalactites for hundreds of meters into the purple depths.

  The isle was moving. I could see the faint fibrillation of the tendrils as they trailed along. A wake caught the light ten meters above me. For a second I was choking, the gel of the mask smothering me as surely as the surrounding water would, and then I relaxed and the air flowed freely into my lungs.

  “Deeper, Merin,” came Siri’s voice. I blinked—a slow-motion blink as the mask readjusted itself over my eyes—and caught sight of Siri twenty meters lower, grasping a keelroot and trailing effortlessly above the colder, deeper currents where the light did not reach. I thought of the thousands of meters of water under me, of the things which might lurk there, unknown, unsoug
ht out by the human colonists. I thought of the dark and the depths and my scrotum tightened involuntarily.

  “Come on down.” Siri’s voice was an insect buzz in my ears. I rotated and kicked. The buoyancy here was not so great as in Old Earth’s seas, but it still took energy to dive so deep. The mask compensated for depth and nitrogen but I could feel the pressure against my skin and ears.

  Finally I quit kicking, grabbed a keelroot, and roughly hauled myself down to Siri’s level.

  We floated side by side in the dim light. Siri was a spectral figure here, her long hair swirling in a wine-dark nimbus, the pale strips of her body glowing in the blue-green light. The surface seemed impossibly distant. The widening V of the wake and the drift of the scores of tendrils showed that the isle was moving more quickly now, moving mindlessly to other feeding grounds, distant waters.

  “Where are the…” I began to subvocalize.

  “Shhh,” said Siri. She fiddled with the medallion. I could hear them then: the shrieks and trills and whistles and cat purrs and echoing cries. The depths were suddenly filled with strange music.

  “Jesus,” I said and because Siri had tuned our comthreads to the translator, the word was broadcast as a senseless whistle and toot.

  “Hello!” she called and the translated greeting echoed from the transmitter; a high-speed bird’s call sliding into the ultrasonic.

  “Hello!” she called again.

  Minutes passed before the dolphins came to investigate.

  They rolled past us, surprisingly large, alarmingly large, their skin looking slick and muscled in the uncertain light. A large one swam within a meter of us, turning at the last moment so that the white of his belly curved past us like a wall. I could see the dark eye rotate to follow me as he passed. One stroke of his wide fluke kicked up a turbulence strong enough to convince me of the animal’s power.

  “Hello,” called Siri but the swift form faded into distant haze and there was a sudden silence. Siri clicked off the translator. “Do you want to talk to them?” she asked.

  “Sure.” I was dubious. More than three centuries of effort had not raised much of a dialogue between man and sea mammal. Mike had once told me that the thought structures of Old Earth’s two groups of orphans were too different, the referents too few. One pre-Hegira expert had written that speaking to a dolphin or porpoise was about as rewarding as speaking to a one-year-old human infant. Both sides usually enjoyed the exchange and there was a simulacrum of conversation, but neither party would come away the more knowledgeable. Siri switched the translator disk back on. “Hello,” I said.

  There was a final minute of silence and then our ear-phones were buzzing while the sea echoed shrill ululations. distance/no-fluke/hello-tone?/current pulse/circle me/funny?

  “What the hell?” I asked Siri and the translator trilled out my question. Siri was grinning under her osmosis mask.

  I tried again. “Hello! Greetings from… uh… the surface. How are you?”

  The large male… I assumed it to be a male… curved in toward us like a torpedo. He arch-kicked his way through the water ten times faster than I could have swum even if I had remembered to don flippers that morning. For a second I thought he was going to ram us and I raised my knees and clung tightly to the keelroot.

  Then he was past us, climbing for air, while Siri and I reeled from his turbulent wake and the high tones of his shout. no-fluke/no-feed/no-swim/no-play/no-fun.

  Siri switched off the translator and floated closer. She lightly grasped my shoulders while I held on to the keel-root with my right hand. Our legs touched as we drifted through the warm water. A school of tiny crimson warriorfish flickered above us while the dark shapes of the dolphins circled farther out.

  “Had enough?” she asked. Her hand was flat on my chest.

  “One more try,” I said. Siri nodded and twisted the disk to life. The current pushed us together again. She slid her arm around me.

  “Why do you herd the islands?” I asked the bottle-nosed shapes circling in the dappled light. “How does it benefit you to stay with the isles?” sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs.

  Siri’s body lay along the length of me now. Her left arm tightened around me. “Great Voices were the whales,” she whispered. Her hair fanned out in streamers.

  Her right hand moved down and seemed surprised at what it found.

  “Do you miss the Great Voices?” I asked the shadows.

  There was no response. Siri slid her legs around my hips.

  The surface was a churning bowl of light forty meters above us.

  “What do you miss most of Old Earth’s oceans?” I asked.

  With my left arm I pulled Siri closer, slid my hand down along the curve of her back to where her buttocks rose to meet my palm, held her tight.

  To the circling dolphins we must have appeared a single-creature. Siri lifted herself against me and we became a single creature.

  The translator disk had twisted around so it trailed over Siri’s shoulder. I reached to shut it off but paused as the answer to my question buzzed urgently in our ears. miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/ Shark/Shark/Shark.

  I turned off the disk and shook my head. I did not understand.

  There was so much I did not understand. I closed my eyes as Siri and I moved gently to the rhythms of the current and ourselves while the dolphins swam nearby and the cadence of their calls took on the sad, slow trilling of an old lament.

  Siri and I came down out of the hills and returned to the Festival just before sunrise of the second day. For a night and a day we had roamed the hills, eaten with strangers in pavilions of orange silk, bathed together in the icy waters of the Shree, and danced to the music which never ceased going out to the endless file of passing isles. We were hungry.

  I had awakened at sunset to find Siri gone. She returned before the moon of Maui-Covenant rose. She told me that her parents had gone off with friends for several days on a slow-moving houseboat. They had left the family skimmer in Firstsite. Now we worked our way from dance to dance, bonfire to bonfire, back to the center of the city. We planned to fly west to her family estate near Fevarone.

  It was very late but Firstsite Common still had its share of revelers. I was very happy. I was nineteen and I was in love and the .93 gravity of Maui-Covenant seemed much less to me. I could have flown had I wished.

  I could have done anything.

  We had stopped at a booth and bought fried dough and mugs of black coffee. Suddenly a thought struck me.

  I asked, “How did you know I was a Shipman?”

  “Hush, friend Merin. Eat your poor breakfast. When we get to the villa, I will fix a true meal to break our fast.”

  “No, I’m serious,” I said and wiped grease off my chin with the sleeve of my less than clean Harlequin’s costume.

  “This morning you said that you knew right away last night that I was from the ship. Why was that? Was it my accent? My costume? Mike and I saw other fellows dressed like this.”

  Siri laughed and brushed back her hair. “Just be glad it was I who spied you out, Merin, my love. Had it been my Uncle Gresham or his friends it would have meant trouble.”

  “Oh? Why is that?” I picked up one more fried ring and Siri paid for it. I followed her through the thinning crowd. Despite the motion and the music all about, I felt weariness beginning to work on me.

  “They are Separatists,” said Siri. “Uncle Gresham recently gave a speech before the Council urging that we fight rather than agree to be swallowed into your Hegemony. He said that we should destroy your farcaster device before it destroys us.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Did he say how he was going to do that? The last I heard, you folks had no craft to get off-world in.”

  “Nay, nor for the past fifty years have we,” said Siri. “But it shows how irrational the Separatists can be.”

  I nodded. Shipmaster Singh and Councilor Halmyn had briefed us on the so-called Separat
ists of Maui-Covenant.

  “The usual coalition of colonial jingoists and throwbacks,” Singh had said. “Another reason we go slow and develop the world’s trade potential before finishing the farcaster. The Worldweb doesn’t need these yahoos coming in prematurely. And groups like the Separatists are another reason to keep you crew and construction workers the hell away from the groundlings.”

  “Where is your skimmer?” I asked. The Common was emptying quickly. Most of the bands had packed up their instruments for the night. Gaily costumed heaps lay snoring on the grass or cobblestones amid the litter and unlit lanterns.

  Only a few enclaves of merriment remained, groups dancing slowly to a lone guitar or singing drunkenly to themselves. I saw Mike Osho at once, a patchworked fool, his mask long gone, a girl on either arm. He was trying to teach the “Hava Nagila” to a rapt but inept circle of admirers. One of the troupe would stumble and they would all fall down.

  Mike would flog them to their feet among general laughter and they would start again, hopping clumsily to his basso profundo chant.

  “There it is,” said Siri and pointed to a short line of skimmers parked behind the Common Hall. I nodded and waved to Mike but he was too busy hanging on to his two ladies to notice me. Siri and I had crossed the square and were in the shadows of the old building when the shout went up.

  “Shipman! Turn around, you Hegemony son of a bitch.”

  I froze and then wheeled around with fists clenched but no one was near me. Six young men had descended the steps from the grandstand and were standing in a semicircle behind Mike. The man in front was tall, slim, and strikingly handsome. He was twenty-five or twenty-six years old and his long blond curls spilled down on a crimson silk suit that emphasized his physique. In his right hand he carried a meter-long sword that looked to be of tempered steel.

  Mike turned slowly. Even from a distance I could see his eyes sobering as he surveyed the situation. The women at his side and a couple of the young men in his group tittered as if something humorous had been said.