by Dan Simmons
“Sol! You must listen well. The future of humankind depends upon your obedience in this matter. You must take your daughter, your 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, sick of the whole dream yet somehow alarmed by it, had turned and thrown the knife far into the darkness. When he turned back to find his daughter, the scene had faded. The red orbs hung closer than ever, and now Sol could see that they were multifaceted gems the size of small worlds.
The amplified voice came again:
“So? You have had your chance, Sol Weintraub. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
And Sol awakened half laughing, half chilled by the dream. Amused by the thought that the entire Talmud and the Old Testament might be nothing more than a cosmic shaggy-dog story.
About the time Sol was having his dream, Rachel was on Hyperion finishing her first year of research there. The team of nine archaeologists and six physicists had found Keep Chronos fascinating but far too crowded with tourists and would-be Shrike pilgrims, so after the first month spent commuting from the hotel, they had set up a permanent camp between the ruined city and the small canyon holding the Time Tombs.
While half the team excavated the more recent site of the unfinished city, two of Rachel’s colleagues helped her catalogue every aspect of the Tombs. The physicists were fascinated with the anti-entropic fields and spent much of their time setting small flags of different colors to mark the limits of the so-called time tides.
Rachel’s team concentrated their work in the structure called the Sphinx, although the creature represented in stone was neither human nor lion; it may not have been a creature at all, although the smooth lines atop the stone monolith suggested curves of a living thing, and the sweeping appendages made everyone think of wings. Unlike the other Tombs, which lay open and were easily inspected, the Sphinx was a mass of heavy blocks honeycombed with narrow corridors, some of which tightened to impossibility, some of which widened to auditorium-sized proportions, but none of which led anywhere but back on themselves. There were no crypts, treasure rooms, plundered sarcophogi, wall murals, or secret passages, merely a maze of senseless corridors through sweating stone.
Rachel and her lover, Melio Arundez, began mapping the Sphinx, using a method which had been in use for at least seven hundred years, having been pioneered in the Egyptian pyramids sometime in the twentieth century. Arranging sensitive radiation and cosmic ray detectors at the lowest point in the Sphinx, they recorded arrival times and deflection patterns of the particles passing through the mass of stone above them, watching for hidden rooms or passages which would not show up even on deep imaging radar. Because of the busy tourist season and the concern of the Hyperion Home Rule Council that the Tombs might be damaged by such research, Rachel and Melio went out to their site every night at midnight, making the half-hour walk and crawl through the corridor maze which they had rigged with blue glow-globes. There, sitting under hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, they would watch their instruments until morning, listening to their earphones ping with the sound of particles born in the belly of dying stars.
The time tides had not been a problem with the Sphinx. Of all the Tombs, it seemed the least protected by the anti-entropic fields and the physicists had carefully mapped the times when the tide surges might pose a threat. High tide was at 1000 hours, receding only twenty minutes later back toward the Jade Tomb half a kilometer to the south. Tourists were not allowed near the Sphinx until after 1200 hours, and to leave a margin of safety, the site made sure they were out by 0900. The physics team had planted chronotropic sensors at various points along the paths and walkways between the Tombs, both to alert the monitors to variations of the tides and to warn the visitors.
With only three weeks to go of her year of research on Hyperion, Rachel awoke one night, left her sleeping lover, and took a ground effect jeep from the camp to the Tombs. She and Melio had decided that it was foolish for both of them to monitor the equipment every night; now they alternated, one working at the site while the other collated data and prepared for the final project—a radar mapping of the dunes between the Jade Tomb and the Obelisk.
The night was cool and beautiful. A profusion of stars stretched from horizon to horizon, four or five times the number Rachel had grown up looking at from Barnard’s World. The low dunes whispered and shifted in the strong breeze blowing from the mountains in the south.
Rachel found lights still burning at the site. The physics team was just calling it a day and loading their own jeep. She chatted with them, had a cup of coffee as they drove away, and then took her backpack and made the twenty-five-minute trip into the basement of the Sphinx.
For the hundredth time Rachel wondered who had built the Tombs and for what purpose. Dating of the construction materials had been useless because of the effect of the anti-entropic field. Only analysis of the Tombs in relation to the erosion of the canyon and other surrounding geological features had suggested an age of at least half a million years. The feeling was that the architects of the Time Tombs had been humanoid, even though nothing but the gross scale of the structures suggested such a thing. Certainly the passageways in the Sphinx revealed little: some were human enough in size and shape, but then meters farther along the same corridor might dwindle to a tube the size of a sewfer pipe and then transform itself into something larger and more random than a natural cavern. Doorways, if they could be called such since they opened to nothing in particular, might be triangular or trapezoidal or ten-sided as commonly as rectangular.
Rachel crawled the last twenty meters down a steep slope, sliding her backpack ahead of her. The heatless glow-globes gave the rock and her flesh a bluish, bloodless cast. The “basement,” when she reached it, seemed a haven of human clutter and smells. Several folding chairs filled the center of the small space while detectors, oscilloscopes, and other paraphernalia lined the narrow table against the north wall. A plank on sawhorses along the opposite wall held coffee cups, a chess set, a half-eaten doughnut, two paperbacks, and a plastic toy of some sort of dog in a grass skirt.
Rachel settled in, set her coffee therm next to the toy, and checked the cosmic ray detectors. The data appeared to be the same: no hidden rooms or passages, just a few niches even the deep radar had missed. In the morning Melio and Stefan would set a deep probe working, getting an imager filament in and sampling the air before digging further with a micro-manipulator. So far a dozen such niches had turned up nothing of interest. The joke at camp was that the next hole, no bigger than a fist, would reveal miniature sarcophagi, undersized urns, a petite mummy, or—as Melio put it—“a teeny-tiny Tutankhamten.”
Out of habit, Rachel tried the comm links on her comlog. Nothing. Forty meters of stone tended to do that. They had talked of stringing telephone wire from the basement to the surface, but there had been no pressing need and now their time was almost up. Rachel adjusted the input channels on her comlog to monitor the detector data and then settled back for a long, boring night.
There was the wonderful story of the Old Earth pharaoh—was it Cheops?—who authorized his huge pyramid, agreed to the burial chamber being deep under the center of the thing, and then lay awake nights for years in a claustrophobic panic, thinking of all those tons of stone above him for all eternity. Eventually the pharaoh ordered the burial chamber repositioned two thirds the way up the great pyramid. Most unorthodox. Rachel could understand the king’s position. She hoped that—wherever he was—he slept better now.
Rachel was almost dozing herself when—at 0215—her comlog chirped, the detectors screamed, and she jumped to her feet. According to the sensors, the Sphinx had suddenly grown a dozen new chambers, some larger than the total structure. Rachel keyed displays and the air misted with models that changed as she watched. Corridor schematics twisted back on themselves like rotating Möbius strips. The external sensors indicated th
e upper structure twisting and bending like polyflex in the wind—or like wings.
Rachel knew that it was some type of multiple malfunction, but even as she tried to recalibrate she called data and impressions into her comlog. Then several things happened at once.
She heard the drag of feet in the corridor above her.
All of the displays went dead simultaneously.
Somewhere in the maze of corridors a time-tide alarm began to blare.
All of the lights went off.
This final event made no sense. The instrument packages held their own power supplies and would have stayed lighted through a nuclear attack. The lamp they used in the basement had a new ten-year power cell. The glow-globes in the corridors were bioluminescent and needed no power.
Nonetheless, the lights were out. Rachel pulled a flashlight laser out of the knee pocket of her jumpsuit and triggered it. Nothing happened.
For the first time in her life, terror closed on Rachel Weintraub like a hand on her heart. She could not breathe. For ten seconds she willed herself to be absolutely still, not even listening, merely waiting for the panic to recede. When it had subsided enough for her to breathe without gasping, she felt her way to the instruments and keyed them. They did not respond. She lifted her comlog and thumbed the diskey. Nothing … which was impossible, of course, given the solid-state invulnerability and power-cell reliability of the thing. Still, nothing.
Rachel could hear her pulse pounding now but she again fought back the panic and began feeling her way toward the only exit. The thought of finding her way through the maze in absolute darkness made her want to scream but she could think of no other alternatives.
Wait. There had been old lights throughout the Sphinx maze but the research team had strung the glow-globes. Strung them. There was a perlon line connecting them all the way to the surface.
Fine. Rachel groped her way toward the exit, feeling the cold stone under her fingers. Was it this cold before?
There came the clear sound of something sharp scraping its way down the access shaft.
“Melio?” called Rachel into the blackness. “Tanya? Kurt?”
The scraping sounded very close. Rachel backed away, knocking over an instrument and chair in the blackness. Something touched her hair and she gasped, raised her hand.
The ceiling was lower. The solid block of stone, five meters square, slid lower even as she raised her other hand to touch it. The opening to the corridor was halfway up the wall. Rachel staggered toward it, swinging her hands in front of her like a blind person. She tripped over a folding chair, found the instrument table, followed it to the far wall, felt the bottom of the corridor shaft disappearing as the ceiling came lower. She pulled back her fingers a second before they were sliced off.
Rachel sat down in the darkness. An oscilloscope scraped against the ceiling until the table cracked and collapsed under it. Rachel moved her head in short, desperate arcs. There was a metallic rasp—almost a breathing sound—less than a meter from her. She began to back away, sliding across a floor suddenly filled with broken equipment. The breathing grew louder.
Something sharp and infinitely cold grasped her wrist.
Rachel screamed at last.
There was no fatline transmitter on Hyperion in those days. Nor did the spinship HS Farraux City have FTL-comm capability. So the first Sol and Sarai heard of their daughter’s accident was when the Hegemony consulate on Parvati fatlined the college that Rachel had been injured, that she was stable but unconscious, and that she was being transferred from Parvati to the Web world of Renaissance Vector via medical torchship. The trip would take a little over ten days’ shiptime with a five-month time-debt. Those five months were agony for Sol and his wife, and by the time the medical ship put in at the Renaissance farcaster nexus, they had imagined the worst a thousand times. It had been eight years since they had last seen Rachel.
The Med Center in Da Vinci was a floating tower sustained by direct broadcast power. The view over the Como Sea was breathtaking but neither Sol nor Sarai had time for it as they went from level to level in search of their daughter. Dr. Singh and Melio Arundez met them in the hub of Intensive Care. Introductions were rushed.
“Rachel?” asked Sarai.
“Asleep,” said Dr. Singh. She was a tall woman, aristocratic but with kind eyes. “As far as we can tell, Rachel has suffered no physical … ah … injury. But she has been unconscious now for some seventeen standard weeks, her time. Only in the past ten days have her brain waves registered deep sleep rather than coma.”
“I don’t understand,” said Sol. “Was there an accident at the site? A concussion?”
“Something happened,” said Melio Arundez, “but we’re not sure what. Rachel was in one of the artifacts … alone … her comlog and other instruments recorded nothing out of the ordinary. But there was a surge in a phenomenon there known as anti-entropic fields …”
“The time tides,” said Sol. “We know about them. Go on.”
Arundez nodded and opened his hands as if molding air. “There was a … field surge … more like a tsunami than a tide … the Sphinx … the artifact Rachel was in … was totally inundated. I mean, there was no physical damage but Rachel was unconscious when we found her …”He turned to Dr. Singh for help.
“Your daughter was in a coma,” said the doctor. “It was not possible to put her into cryogenic fugue in that condition.…”
“So she came through quantum leap without fugue?” demanded Sol. He had read about the psychological damage to travelers who had experienced the Hawking effect directly.
“No, no,” soothed Singh. “She was unconscious in a way which shielded her quite as well as fugue state.”
“Is she hurt?” demanded Sarai.
“We don’t know,” said Singh. “All life signs have returned to near normal. Brain-wave activity is nearing a conscious state. The problem is that her body appears to have absorbed … that is, the anti-entropic field appears to have contaminated her.”
Sol rubbed his forehead. “Like radiation sickness?”
Dr. Singh hesitated. “Not precisely … ah … this case is quite unprecedented. Specialists in aging diseases are due in this afternoon from Tau Ceti Center, Lusus, and Metaxas.”
Sol met the woman’s gaze. “Doctor, are you saying that Rachel contracted some aging disease on Hyperion?” He paused a second to search his memory. “Something like Methuselah syndrome or early Alzheimer’s disease?”
“No,” said Singh, “in fact your daughter’s illness has no name. The medics here are calling it Merlin’s sickness. You see … your daughter is aging at a normal rate … but as far as we can tell, she is aging backward.”
Sarai pulled away from the group and stared at Singh as if the doctor were insane. “I want to see my daughter,” she said, quietly but very firmly. “I want to see Rachel now.”
Rachel awakened less than forty hours after Sol and Sarai arrived. Within minutes she was sitting up in bed, talking even while the medics and technicians bustled around her. “Mom!Dad! What are you doing here?” Before either could answer, she looked around her and blinked. “Wait a minute, where’s here? Are we in Keats?”
Her mother took her hand. “We’re in a hospital in DaVinci, dear. On Renaissance Vector.”
Rachel’s eyes widened almost comically. “Renaissance. We’re in the Web?” She looked around her in total bewilderment.
“Rachel, what is the last thing you remember?” asked Dr. Singh.
The young woman looked uncomprehendingly at the medic. “The last thing I … I remember going to sleep next to Melio after …” She glanced at her parents and touched her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. “Melio? The others? Are they …”
“Everyone on the expedition is all right,” soothed Dr. Singh. “You had a slight accident. About seventeen weeks have passed. You’re back in the Web. Safe. Everyone in your party is all right.”
“Seventeen weeks …” Under the fading remnant of her
tan, Rachel went very pale.
Sol took her hand. “How do you feel, kiddo?” The return pressure on his fingers was heartbreakingly weak.
“I don’t know, Daddy,” she managed. “Tired. Dizzy. Confused.”
Sarai sat on the bed and put her arms around her. “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Melio entered the room, unshaven, his hair rumpled from the nap he had been taking in the outer lounge. “Rache?”
Rachel looked at him from the safety of her mother’s arm. “Hi,” she said, almost shyly. “I’m back.”
Sol’s opinion had been and continued to be that medicine hadn’t really changed much since the days of leeches and poultices; nowadays they whirred one in centrifuges, realigned the body’s magnetic field, bombarded the victim with sonic waves, tapped into the cells to interrogate the RNA, and then admitted their ignorance without actually coming out and saying so. The only thing that had changed was that the bills were bigger.
He was dozing in a chair when Rachel’s voice awoke him.
“Daddy?”
He sat up, reached for her hand. “Here, kiddo.”
“Where am I, Dad? What’s happened?”
“You’re in a hospital on Renaissance, baby. There was an accident on Hyperion. You’re all right now except it’s affecting your memory a bit.”
Rachel clung to his hand. “A hospital? In the Web? How’d I get here? How long have I been here?”
“About five weeks,” whispered Sol. “What’s the last thing you remember, Rachel?”
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.
