“What things?” I rubbed my eyes and ran fingers through my tousled hair.
Hunt smiled tightly. “Access the datasphere. Then get down to Gladstone’s chambers soonest. Twenty minutes, Severn.” He left.
I accessed the datasphere. One way to visualize one’s entry point to the datasphere is to imagine a patch of Old Earth’s ocean in varying degrees of turbulence. Normal days tended to show a placid sea with interesting patterns of ripples. Crises showed chop and whitecaps. Today there was a hurricane under way. Entry was delayed to any access route, confusion reigned in breaking waves of update surges, the datumplane matrix was wild with storage shifts and major credit transfers, and the All Thing, normally a multilayered buzz of information and political debate, was a raging wind of confusion, abandoned referenda and obsolete position templates blowing by like tattered clouds.
“Dear God,” I whispered, breaking access but feeling the pressure of the information surge still pounding at my implant circuits and brain.
War. Surprise attack. Imminent destruction of the Web. Talk of impeaching Gladstone. Riots on a score of worlds. Shrike Cult uprisings on Lusus. The FORCE fleet abandoning Hyperion system in a desperate rearguard action, but too late, too late. Hyperion already under attack.
Fear of farcaster incursion.
I rose, ran naked to the shower, and sonicked in record time. Hunt or someone had laid out a formal gray suit and cape, and I dressed in a hurry, brushing back my wet hair so that damp curls fell to my collar.
It wouldn’t do to keep the CEO of the Hegemony of Man waiting.
Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all.
“It’s about time you got here,” said Meina Gladstone as I entered her private chambers.
“What the fuck have you done?” I snapped.
Gladstone blinked. Evidently the CEO of the Hegemony of Man was not used to being spoken to in that tone. Tough shit, I thought.
“Remember who you are and to whom you’re speaking,” Gladstone said coldly.
“I don’t know who I am. And I may be speaking to the greatest mass murderer since Horace Glennon-Height. Why the hell did you allow this war to happen?”
Gladstone blinked again and looked around. We were alone. Her sitting room was long and pleasantly dark and hung with original art from Old Earth. At that moment I didn’t care if I was in a room filled with original van Goghs. I stared at Gladstone, the Lincolnesque face merely that of an old woman in the thin light through the blinds. She returned my gaze for a moment, then looked away again.
“I apologize,” I snapped, no apology in my voice, “you didn’t allow it, you made it happen, didn’t you?”
“No, Severn, I did not make it happen.” Gladstone’s voice was hushed, almost a whisper.
“Speak up,” I said. I paced back and forth near the tall windows, watching the light from the blinds move across me like painted stripes. “And I’m not Joseph Severn.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Shall I call you M. Keats?”
“You can call me No Man,” I said. “So that when the other cyclopes come, you can say that No Man has blinded you, and they will go away, saying that it’s the will of the gods.”
“Do you plan to blind me?”
“Right now I could wring your neck and walk away without a twinge of remorse. Millions will die before this week is out. How could you have allowed it?”
Gladstone touched her lower lip. “The future branches only two directions,” she said softly. “War and total uncertainty, or peace and totally certain annihilation. I chose war.”
“Who says this?” There was more curiosity than anger in my voice now.
“It is a fact.” She glanced at her comlog. “In ten minutes I have to go before the Senate to declare war. Tell me the news of the Hyperion pilgrims.”
I crossed my arms and stared down at her. “I will tell you if you promise to do something.”
“I will if I can.”
I paused, realized that no amount of leverage in the universe could make this woman write a blank check on her word. “All right,” I said. “I want you to fatline Hyperion, release the hold you have on the Consul’s ship, and send someone up the Hoolie River to find the Consul himself. He’s about a hundred and thirty klicks from the capital, above the Karia Locks. He may be hurt.”
Gladstone crooked a finger, rubbed her lip, and nodded. “I will send someone to find him. Releasing the ship depends upon what else you have to tell me. Are the others alive?”
I curled my short cape around me and collapsed on a couch across from her. “Some are.”
“Byron Lamia’s daughter? Brawne?”
“The Shrike took her. For a while, she was unconscious, connected to some sort of neural shunt to the datasphere. I dreamed… she was floating somewhere, reunited with the implant persona of the first Keats retrieval personality. Just entering the datasphere… the megasphere really. Core connections and dimensions I never dreamed of as well as the accessible ’sphere.”
“Is she alive now?” Gladstone leaned forward, intense.
“I don’t know. Her body disappeared. I was awakened before I saw where her persona entered the megasphere.”
Gladstone nodded. “What about the Colonel?”
“Kassad was taken somewhere by Moneta, the human female who seems to reside in the Tombs as they travel through time. The last I saw of him, he was attacking the Shrike barehanded. Shrikes, actually, there were thousands of them.”
“Did he survive?”
I opened my hands. “I don’t know. These were dreams. Fragments. Bits and pieces of perception.”
“The poet?”
“Silenus was carried off by the Shrike. Impaled on the tree of thorns. But I glimpsed him there later in Kassad’s dream. Silenus was still alive. I don’t know how.”
“So the tree of thorns is real, not merely Shrike Cult propaganda?”
“Oh yes, it’s real.”
“And the Consul left? Tried to return to the capital?”
“He had his grandmother’s hawking mat. It worked all right until he reached the place near Karia Locks I mentioned. It… and he… fell into the river.” I preempted her next question. “I don’t know if he survived.”
“And the priest? Father Hoyt?”
“The cruciform brought him back as Father Duré.”
“Is it Father Duré? Or a mindless duplicate?”
“It’s Duré,” I said. “But… damaged. Discouraged.”
“And he is still in the valley?”
“No. He disappeared in one of the Cave Tombs. I don’t know what happened to him.”
Gladstone glanced at her comlog. I tried to imagine the confusion and chaos which reigned in the rest of this building… this world… in the Web. The CEO obviously had retreated here for fifteen minutes prior to her speech to the Senate. It might be the last such solitude she would see for the next several weeks. Perhaps ever.
“Captain Masteen?”
“Dead. Buried in the valley.”
She took a breath. “And Weintraub and the child?”
I shook my head. “I dreamed things out of sequence… out of time. I think it’s already happened, but I’m confused.” I looked up. Gladstone was waiting patiently. “The baby was only a few seconds old when the Shrike came,” I said. “Sol offered her to the thing. I think it took her into the Sphinx. The Tombs were glowing very brightly. There were… other Shrikes… emerging.”
“The Tombs have opened, then?”
“Yes.”
Gladstone touched her comlog. “Leigh? Have the duty officer in the communications center contact Theo Lane and the necessary FORCE people on Hyperion. Release the ship we have in quarantine. Also, Leigh, tell the Governor-General that I will have a personal message for him in a few minutes.” The instrument chirped and she looked back at me. “Is there anything else from your dreams?”
“Images. Words. I don’t understand what’s going on. Those are the high points.”
Gladsto
ne smiled slightly. “Are you aware that you are dreaming events beyond the range of the other Keats persona’s experience?”
I said nothing, stunned with the shock of what she said. My contact with the pilgrims had been possible through some Core-based connection to the persona implant in Brawne’s Schrön loop, through it and the primitive datasphere they had shared. But the persona had been liberated; the datasphere destroyed by separation and distance.
Even a fatline receiver cannot receive messages when there is no transmitter.
Gladstone’s smile disappeared. “Can you explain this?”
“No.” I looked up. “Perhaps they were only dreams. Real dreams.”
She stood. “Perhaps we’ll know when and if we find the Consul. Or when his ship arrives in the valley. I have two minutes before I appear in the Senate. Is there anything else?”
“A question,” I said. “Who am I? Why am I here?”
The slight smile again. “We all ask those questions, M. Sev– M. Keats.”
“I’m serious. I think you know better than I.”
“The Core sent you to be my liaison with the pilgrims. And to observe. You are, after all, a poet and artist.”
I made a noise and stood. We walked slowly toward the private farcaster portal that would take her to the Senate floor. “What good does observation do when it’s the end of the world?”
“Find out,” said Gladstone. “Go see the end of the world.” She handed me a microcard for my comlog. I inserted it, glanced at the diskey; it was a universal authorization chip, allowing me access to all portals, public, private, or military. It was a ticket to the end of the world.
I said, “What if I get killed?”
“Then we will never hear the answers to your questions,” said CEO Gladstone. She touched my wrist fleetingly, turned her back, and stepped through the portal.
For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist’s room at Aries. Madness is not a new invention.
After a while, I left, let my comlog memory guide me through the maze of Government House until I found the central farcaster terminex, and stepped through to find the end of the world.
There were two full-access farcaster pathways through the Web: the Concourse and River Tethys. I ’cast to the Concourse where the half-kilometer strip of Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna connected to New Earth and the short seaside strip of Nevermore. Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna was a first-wave world, thirty-four hours away from the Ouster onslaught.
New Earth had been on the second-wave list, even now being announced, and had a little over a standard week before invasion.
Nevermore was deep in the Web, years away from attack.
There were no signs of panic. People were taking to the datasphere and All Thing rather than the streets. Walking the narrow lanes of Tsingtao, I could hear Gladstone’s voice from a thousand receivers and personal comlogs, a strange verbal undertone to the shouts of street vendors and hiss of tires on wet pavement as electric rickshaws hummed overhead on the transport levels.
“…as another leader told his people on the eve of attack almost eight centuries ago—‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ You ask, what is our policy? I say to you: It is to wage war, in space, on land, in the air, by sea, wage war with all our might and with all the strength justice and right can give us. That is our policy…”
There were FORCE troops near the translation zone between Tsingtao and Nevermore, but the flow of pedestrians seemed normal enough.
I wondered when the military would commandeer the pedestrian mall of the Concourse for vehicular traffic and if it would be headed toward the front or away.
I stepped through to Nevermore. The streets were dry there, except for the occasional spray from the ocean thirty meters below the stone ramparts of the Concourse. The sky was its usual tones of threatening ochre and gray, ominous twilight in the middle of the day.
Small stone shops glowed with light and merchandise. I was aware that the streets were emptier than usual; people standing in shops or sitting on stone walls or benches, heads bowed and eyes distracted as they listened.
“…you ask, what is our aim? I answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival…”
The lines at Edgartown’s main terminex were short. I coded for Mare Infinitus and stepped through.
The skies were their usual cloudless green, the ocean beneath the float city a deeper green. Kelp farms floated to the horizon. The crowds this far from the Concourse were even smaller; the boardwalks were almost empty, some shops closed. A group of men stood near a kipboat dock and listened to an antique fatline receiver. Gladstone’s voice was flat and metallic in the sea-rich air.
“…even now, units of FORCE move relentlessly to their stations, firm in their resolve and confident in their ability to rescue not only the threatened worlds but all of the Hegemony of Man from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny ever to stain the annals of history…”
Mare Infinitus was eighteen hours from invasion. I looked skyward, half-expecting to see some sign of the enemy swarm, some indication of orbital defenses, spaceborne troop movements. There was only the sky, the warm day, and the gentle rocking of the city on the sea.
Heaven’s Gate was the first world on the list of invasion. I stepped through the Mudflat VIP portal and looked down from Rifkin Heights at the beautiful city which belied its name. It was deep night, so late the mech street sweepers were out, their brushes and sonics humming against cobblestone, but here there was movement, long lines of silent people at the Rifkin Heights public terminex and even longer lines visible below at the Promenade portals. Local police were in evidence, tall figures in brown impact coveralls, but if FORCE units were rushing to reinforce this area, they were invisible.
The people in the lines were not local residents—the Rifkin Heights and Promenade landowners almost certainly had private portals—but looked to be workers from the reclamation projects many klicks out beyond the fern forest and parks. There was no panic and very little conversation. The lines filed past with the patient stoicism of families shuffling toward a theme park attraction. Few carried anything larger than a travel bag or backpack.
Have we attained such equanimity, I wondered, that we handle ourselves with dignity even in the face of invasion?
Heaven’s Gate was thirteen hours from H-hour. I keyed my comlog to the All Thing.
“…if we can meet this threat, then worlds we love may remain free and the life of the Web may move forward into the sunlit future.
But if we fail, then the whole Web, the Hegemony, everything we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made infinitely more sinister and protracted by the lights of science perverted and human freedom denied.
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the Hegemony of Man and its Protectorate and allies were to last ten thousand years, humankind will still say: 'This was their finest hour.'”
Somewhere in the silent, fresh-smelling city below, shooting began.
First came the rattle of flechette guns, then the deep hum of antiriot stunners, then screams and the sizzle of weapon lasers. The crowd on the Promenade surged forward toward the terminex, but riot police emerged from the park, switched on powerful halogen searchlights which bathed the crowd in glare, and began ordering them through bullhorns to resume lines or disperse. The crowd hesitated, surged back and forth like a jellyfish caught in tricky currents, and then—spurred on by the sound of firing, louder and closer now—surged forward toward the portal platforms.
The riot cops fired tear gas and vertigo cannisters. Between the mob and the farcaster, violet interdiction fields whined into existence. A flight of military EMVs and se
curity skimmers came in low over the city, searchlights stabbing downward. One of the beams of light caught me, held me until my comlog winked at an interrogation signal, and then moved on. It began to rain.
So much for equanimity.
The police had secured the Rifkin Heights public terminex and were stepping through the private Atmospheric Protectorate portal I had used.
I decided to go elsewhere.
There were FORCE commandos guarding the halls of Government House, screening the farcaster arrivals despite the fact that this portal was one of the most difficult to access in the Web. I passed through three checkpoints before reaching the executive/residential wing where my apartments were. Suddenly, guards stepped out to empty the main hall and secure its tributaries, and Gladstone swept by accompanied by a swirling crowd of advisors, aides, and military leaders. Surprisingly, she saw me, brought her retinue to a clumsy halt, and spoke to me through the barricade of combat-armored Marines.
“How did you like the speech, M. No Man?”
“Fine,” I said. “Stirring. And stolen from Winston Churchill if I’m not mistaken.”
Gladstone smiled and shrugged slightly. “If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters.” The smile faded. “What is the news from the frontier?”
“The reality is just beginning to sink in,” I said. “Expect panic.”
“I always do,” said the CEO. “What news have you from the pilgrims?”
I was surprised. “The pilgrims? I haven’t been… dreaming.”
The current of Gladstone’s retinue and impending events began to sweep her away down the hall. “Perhaps you no longer need to sleep to dream,” she called. “Try it.”
I watched her go, was released to seek out my suite, found the door, and turned away in disgust with myself. I was retreating in fear and shock from the terror descending on us all. I would be quite happy to lie in bed, avoiding sleep, the covers pulled tight to my chin while I wept for the Web, for the child Rachel, and for myself.
I left the residential wing and found my way out to the central garden, wandering down graveled paths. Tiny microremotes buzzed like bees through the air, one pacing me as I passed through the rose garden, into the area where a sunken path twisted through steamy tropical plants, and into the Old Earth section near the bridge. I sat on the stone bench where Gladstone and I had talked.
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