by Dan Simmons
She sat back on her pillows and touched her forehead, feeling the tiny sensors there. “Melio and I had been at the meeting. Talking with the team about setting up the search equipment in the Sphinx. Oh … Dad … I haven’t told you about Melio … he’s …”
“Yes,” said Sol and handed Rachel her comlog. “Here, kiddo. Listen to this.” He left the room.
Rachel touched the diskey and blinked as her own voice began talking to her. “OK, Rache, you just woke up. You’re confused. You don’t know how you got here. Well, something’s happened to you, kid. Listen up.
“I’m recording this on the twelfth day of Tenmonth, year 457 of the Hegira, A.D. 2739 old reckoning. Yes, I know that’s half a standard year from the last thing you remember. Listen.
“Something happened in the Sphinx. You got caught up in the time tide. It changed you. You’re aging backward, as dumb as that sounds. Your body’s getting younger every minute, although that’s not the important part right now. When you sleep … when we sleep … you forget. You lose another day from your memory before the accident, and you lose everything since. Don’t ask me why. The doctors don’t know. The experts don’t know. If you want an analogy, just think of a tapeworm virus … one of the old kind … that’s chewing up the data in your comlog … backward from the last entry.
“They don’t know why the memory loss hits you when you sleep, either. They tried stay-awakes, but after about thirty hours you just go catatonic for a while and the virus does its thing anyway. So what the hell.
“You know something? This talking about yourself In the third person is sort of therapeutic. Actually, I’m lying here waiting for them to take me up to imaging, knowing I’ll fall asleep when I get back … knowing I’ll forget everything again … and it scares the shit out of me.
“OK, key the diskey for short-term and you get a prepared spiel here that should catch you up on everything since the accident. Oh … Mom and Dad are both here and they know about Melio. But I don’t know as much as I used to. When did we first make love with him, mmm? The second month on Hyperion? Then we have just a few weeks left, Rachel, and then we’ll be just acquaintances. Enjoy your memories while you can, girl.
“This is yesterday’s Rachel, signing off.”
Sol came in to find his daughter sitting upright in the bed, still grasping the comlog tightly, her face pale and terrified. “Daddy …”
He went to sit next to her and let her cry … for the twentieth night in a row.
Eight standard weeks after she arrived on Renaissance, Sol and Sarai waved goodbye to Rachel and Melio at the Da Vinci farcaster multiport and then farcast home to Barnard’s World.
“I don’t think she should have left the hospital,” muttered Sarai as they took the evening shuttle to Crawford. The continent was a patchwork of harvest-ready right angles below them.
“Mother,” said Sol, touching her knee, “the doctors would have kept her there forever. But they’re doing it for their own curiosity now. They’ve done everything they can to help her … nothing. She has a life to live.”
“But why go away with … with him?” said Sarai. “She barely knows him.”
Sol sighed and leaned back against the cushions of his seat. “In two weeks she won’t remember him at all,” he said. “At least in the way they share now. Look at it from her position, Mother. Fighting every day to reorient herself in a world gone mad. She’s twenty-five years old and in love. Let her be happy.”
Sarai turned her face to the window and together, not speaking, they watched the red sun hang like a tethered balloon on the edge of evening.
Sol was well into the second semester when Rachel called. It was a one-way message via farcaster cable from Freeholm and her image hung in the center of the old holopit like a familiar ghost.
“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Sorry I haven’t written or called the past few weeks. I guess you know that I’ve left the university. And Melio. It was dumb to try to take new graduate-level stuff. I’d just forget Tuesday whatever was discussed Monday. Even with disks and comlog prompts it was a losing battle. I may enroll in the undergraduate program again … I remember all of it! Just kidding.
“It was just too hard with Melio, too. Or so my notes tell me. It wasn’t his fault, I’m sure of that. He was gentle and patient and loving to the end. It’s just that … well, you can’t start from scratch on a relationship every day. Our apartment was filled with photos of us, notes I wrote to myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but … you know. In the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe what we’d had, even if I couldn’t remember. By evening I’d be crying in his arms … then, sooner or later, I’d go to sleep. It’s better this way.”
Rachel’s image paused, turned as if she was going to break contact, and then steadied. She smiled at them. “So anyway, I’ve left school for a while. The Freeholm Med Center wants me full time but they’d have to get in line … I got an offer from the Tau Ceti Research Institute that’s hard to turn down. They offer a … I think they call it a ‘research honorarium’ … that’s bigger than what we paid for four years at Nightenhelser and all of Reichs combined.
“I turned them down. I’m still going in as an outpatient, but the RNA transplant series just leaves me with bruises and a depressed feeling. Of course, I could just be depressed because every morning I can’t remember where the bruises came from. Ha-ha.
“Anyway, I’ll be staying with Tanya for a while and then maybe … I thought maybe I’d come home for a while. Secondmonth’s my birthday … I’ll be twenty-two again. Weird, huh? At any rate, it’s a lot easier being Wound people I know and I met Tanya just after I transferred here when I was twenty-two … I think you understand.
“So … is my old room still there, Mom, or have you turned it into a mah-jongg parlor like you’ve always threatened? So write or give me a call. Next time I’ll shell out the money for two-way so we can really talk. I just … I guess I thought …”
Rachel waved. “Gottago. See you later, alligators. I love you both.”
Sol flew to Bussard City the week before Rachels birthday to pick her up at the world’s only public farcaster terminex. He saw her first, standing with her luggage near the floral clock. She looked young but not noticeably younger than when they had waved goodbye on Renaissance Vector. No, Sol realized, there was something less confident about her posture. He shook his head to rid himself of such thoughts, called to her, and ran to hug her.
The look of shock on her face when he released her was so profound that he could not ignore it. “What is it, sweetie? Whats wrong?”
It was one of the few times he had ever seen his daughter totally at a loss for words.
“I … you … I forgot,” she stammered. She shook her head in a familiar way and managed to laugh and cry at the same instant. “You look a little different is all, Dad. I remember leaving here like it was … literally … yesterday. When I saw … your hair …” Rachel covered her mouth.
Sol ran his hand across his scalp. “Ah, yes,” he said, suddenly close to laughing and crying himself. “With your school and travels, it’s been more than eleven years. I’m old. And bald.” He opened his arms again. “Welcome back, little one.”
Rachel moved into the protective circle of his embrace.
For several months things went well. Rachel felt more secure with familiar things around, and for Sarai the heartbreak of their daughter’s illness was temporarily offset by the pleasure of having her home again.
Rachel rose early every morning and viewed her private “orientation show” which, Sol knew, contained images of him and Sarai a dozen years older than she remembered. He tried to imagine what it was like for Rachel: she awoke in her own bed, memory fresh, twenty-two years old, home on vacation before going off world to graduate school, only to find her parents suddenly aged, a hundred small changes in the house and town, the news different … years of history having passed her by.
Sol could not imagine it.
Their first mistake was acceding to Rachel’s wishes in inviting her old friends to her twenty-second birthday party: the same crew who had celebrated the first time—irrepressible Niki, Don Stewart and his friend Howard, Kathi Obeg and Marta Tyn, her best friend Linna McKyler—all of them then just out of college, shucking off cocoons of childhood for new lives.
Rachel had seen them all since her return. But she had slept … and forgotten. And Sol and Sarai this one time did not remember that she had forgotten.
Niki was thirty-four standard, with two children of her own—still energetic, still irrepressible, but ancient by Rachels standards. Don and Howard talked about their investments, their children’s sports accomplishments, and their upcoming vacations. Kathi was confused, speaking only twice to Rachel and then as if she was speaking to an impostor. Marta was openly jealous of Rachel’s youth. Linna, who had become an ardent Zen Gnostic in the years between, cried and left early.
When they had gone, Rachel sat in the postparty ruin of the living room and stared at the half-eaten cake. She did not cry. Before going upstairs she hugged her mother and whispered to her father, “Dad, please don’t let me do anything like that again.”
Then she went upstairs to sleep.
It was that spring when Sol again had the dream. He was lost in a great, dark place, lighted only by two red orbs. It was not absurd when the flat voice said:
“Sol. Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”
And Sol had screamed into the darkness:
“You already have her, you son of a bitch! What do I have to do to get her back? Tell me! Tell me, goddamn you!”
And Sol Weintraub woke sweating with tears in his eyes and anger in his heart. In the other room he could feel his daughter sleeping while the great worm devoured her.
In the months which followed Sol became obsessive about obtaining information on Hyperion, the Time Tombs, and the Shrike. As a trained researcher, he was astounded that there were so little hard data on so provocative a topic. There was the Church of the Shrike, of course—there were no temples on Barnard’s World but many in the Web—but he soon found that seeking hard information in Shrike cult literature was like trying to map the geography of Sarnath by visiting a Buddhist monastery. Time was mentioned in Shrike Church dogma, but only in the sense that the Shrike was supposed to be “… the Angel of Retribution from Beyond Time” and that true time had ended for the human race when Old Earth died and that the four centuries since had been “false time.” Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions. Still, he planned to visit a Shrike Church temple as soon as he had explored more serious avenues of research.
Melio Arundez launched another Hyperion expedition, also sponsored by Reichs University, this one with the stated goal of isolating and understanding the time-tide phenomenon which had inflicted the Merlin sickness on Rachel. A major development was the Hegemony Protectorate’s decision to send along on that expedition a farcaster transmitter for installation at the Hegemony consulate in Keats. Even so, it would be more than three years’ Web time before the expedition arrived on Hyperion. Sol’s first instinct was to go with Arundez and his team—certainly any holodrama would have the primary characters returning to the scene of the action. But Sol overrode the instinctive urge within minutes. He was a historian and philosopher; any contribution he might make to the expedition’s success would be minute, at best. Rachel still retained the interest and skills of a well-trained undergraduate archaeologist-to-be, but those skills dwindled a bit each day and Sol could see no benefit to her returning to the site of the accident. Each day would be a shock to her, awakening on a strange world, on a mission which would require skills unknown to her. Sarai would not allow such a thing.
Sol set aside the book he was working on—an analysis of Kierkegaard’s theories of ethics as compromise morality as applied to the legal machinery of the Hegemony—and concentrated on collecting arcane data on time, on Hyperion, and on the story of Abraham.
Months spent carrying on business as usual and collecting information did little to satisfy his need for action. Occasionally he vented his frustration on the medical and scientific specialists who came to examine Rachel like streams of pilgrims to a holy shrine.
“How the hell can this be happening!” he screamed at one little specialist who had made the mistake of being both smug and condescending to the patient’s father. The doctor had a head so hairless, his face looked like lines painted on a billiard ball. “She’s begun growing smaller!” Sol shouted, literally buttonholing the retreating expert. “Not so one can see, but bone mass is decreasing. How can she even begin to become a child again? What the hell does that do to the law of conservation of mass?”
The expert had moved his mouth but had been too rattled to speak. His bearded colleague answered for him. “M. Weintraub,” he said, “sir. You have to understand that your daughter is currently inhabiting … ah … think of it as a localized region of reversed entropy.”
Sol wheeled on the other man. “Are you saying that she is merely stuck in a bubble of backwardness?”
“Ah … no,” said the colleague, massaging his chin nervously. “Perhaps a better analogy is that … biologically at least the life/metabolism mechanism has been reversed … ah …”
“Nonsense,” snapped Sol. “She doesn’t excrete for nutrition or regurgitate her food. And what about all the neurological activity? Reverse the electrochemical impulses and you get nonsense. Her brain works, gentlemen … it’s her memory that is disappearing. Why, gentlemen? Why?”
The specialist finally found his voice. “We don’t know why, M. Weintraub. Mathematically, your daughters body resembles a time-reversed equation … or perhaps an object which has passed through a rapidly spinning black hole. We don’t know how this has happened or why the physically impossible is occurring in this instance, M. Weintraub. We just don’t know enough.”
Sol shook each man’s hand. “Fine. That’s all I wanted to know, gentlemen. Have a good trip back.”
On Rachel’s twenty-first birthday she came to Sol’s door an hour after they had all turned in. “Daddy?”
“What is it, kiddo?” Sol pulled on his robe and joined her in the doorway. “Can’t sleep?”
“I haven’t slept for two days,” she whispered. “Been taking stay-awakes so I can get through all of the briefing stuff I left in the Wanta Know? file.”
Sol nodded.
“Daddy, would you come downstairs and have a drink with me? I’ve got some things I want to talk about.”
Sol got his glasses from the nightstand and joined her downstairs.
It proved to be the first and only time that Sol would get drunk with his daughter. It was not a boisterous drunk—for a while they chatted, then began telling jokes and making puns, until each was giggling too hard to continue. Rachel started to tell another story, sipped her drink just at the funniest part, and almost snorted whiskey out her nose, she was laughing so hard. Each of them thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.
“I’ll get another bottle,” said Sol when the tears had ceased. “Dean Moore gave me some Scotch last Christmas … I think.”
When he returned, walking carefully, Rachel had sat up on the couch and brushed her hair back with her fingers. He poured her a small amount and the two drank in silence for a while.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“I went through the whole thing. Saw myself, listened to myself, saw the holos of Linna and the others all middle-aged …”
“Hardly middle-aged,” said Sol. “Linna will be thirty-five next month …”
“Well, old, you know what I mean. Anyway, I read the medical briefs, saw the photos from Hyperion, and you know what?”
“What?”
“I don’t bel
ieve any of it, Dad.”
Sol put down his drink and looked at his daughter. Her face was fuller than before, less sophisticated. And even more beautiful.
“I mean, I do believe it,” she said with a small, scared laugh. “It’s not like you and Mom would put on such a cruel joke. Plus there’s your … your age … and the news and all. I know it’s real, but I don’t believe it. Do you know what I mean, Dad?”
“Yes,” said Sol.
“I mean I woke up this morning and I thought, Great … tomorrow’s the paleontology exam and I’ve hardly studied. I was looking forward to showing Roger Sherman a thing or two … he thinks he’s so smart.”
Sol took a drink. “Roger died three years ago in a plane crash south of Bussard,” he said. He would not have spoken without the whiskey in him, but he had to find out if there was a Rachel hiding within the Rachel.
“I know,” said Rachel and pulled her knees up to her chin. “I accessed everybody I knew. Gram’s dead. Professor Eikhardt isn’t teaching anymore. Niki married some … salesman. A lot happens in four years.”
“More than eleven years,” said Sol. “The trip to and from Hyperion left you six years behind us stay-at-homes.”
“But that’s normal,” cried Rachel. “People travel outside the Web all the time. They cope.”
Sol nodded, “But this is different, kiddo.”
Rachel managed a Smile and drained the last of her whiskey. “Boy, what an understatement.” She set the glass down with a sharp, final sound. “Look, here’s what I’ve decided. I’ve spent two and a half days going through all of the stuff she … I … prepared to let me know what’s happened, what’s going on … and it just doesn’t help.”
Sol sat perfectly still, not even daring to breathe.
“I mean,” said Rachel, “knowing that I’m getting younger every day, losing the memory of people I haven’t even met yet … I mean, what happens next? I just keep getting younger and smaller and less capable until I just disappear someday? Jesus, Dad.” Rachel wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees. “It’s sort of funny in a weird way, isn’t it?”
