by Dan Simmons
“Yes,” whispered the ancient thing in the hoverbed. “Sol and Rachel and a precious few others disappeared into the Sphinx before the Pax sealed it and closed off the Valley of the Time Tombs. Many tried in those early days—tried to find a shortcut to the future—but the Sphinx seemed to choose who might travel its tunnel through time.”
“And it accepted the girl,” I said.
The old man merely grunted at this statement of the obvious. “Raul Endymion,” he rasped at last, “do you know what I am going to ask of you?”
“No,” I said, although once again I had a strong suspicion.
“I want you to go after my Aenea,” said the old man. “I want you to find her, to protect her from the Pax, to flee with her, and—when she has grown up and become what she must become—to give her a message. I want you to tell her that her uncle Martin is dying and that if she wishes to speak to him again, she must come home.”
I tried not to sigh. I’d guessed that this ancient thing had once been the poet Martin Silenus. Everyone knew the Cantos and its author. How he had escaped the Pax purges and been allowed to live in this restricted place was a mystery, but one I did not choose to explore. “You want me to go north to the continent of Equus, fight my way past several thousand Pax troops, somehow get into the Valley of the Time Tombs, get into the Sphinx, hope it … accepts me … then chase this child into the distant future, hang around with her for a few decades, and then tell her to go back in time to visit you?”
For a moment there was a silence broken only by the soft sounds of Martin Silenus’s life-support equipment. The machines were breathing. “Not exactly,” he said at last.
I waited.
“She has not traveled to some distant future,” said the old man. “At least not distant from us, now. When she stepped through the entrance of the Sphinx two hundred forty-seven years ago, it was for a short trip through time … two hundred sixty-two Hyperion years, to be exact.”
“How do you know this?” I asked. From everything I had read, no one—not even the Pax scientists who had had two centuries to study the sealed tombs—had been able to predict how far into the future the Sphinx would send someone.
“I know it,” said the ancient poet. “Do you doubt me?”
Instead of responding to that, I said, “So the child … Aenea … will step out of the Sphinx sometime this year.”
“She will step out of the Sphinx in forty-two hours, sixteen minutes,” said the old satyr.
I admit that I blinked.
“And the Pax will be waiting for her,” he continued. “They also know to the minute when she will emerge …”
I did not ask how they came by the information.
“… and capturing Aenea is the single most important thing on the Pax’s agenda,” rasped the old poet. “They know that the future of the universe depends upon this.”
I knew now that the old poet was senile. The future of the universe depended upon no single event … that I knew. I held my silence.
“There are—at this moment—more than thirty thousand Pax troops in and around the Valley of the Time Tombs. At least five thousand of them are Vatican Swiss Guard.”
I whistled at this. The Vatican Swiss Guard was the elite of the elite, the best-trained, best-equipped military force in the far-flung expanse of the Pax. A dozen Vatican Guard troops in full regalia could have beaten the entire ten thousand troops of Hyperion’s Home Guard. “So,” I said, “I have forty-two hours to get to Equus, cross the Sea of Grass and the mountains, somehow get past twenty or thirty thousand of the Pax’s best troops, and rescue the girl?”
“Yes,” said the ancient figure in the bed.
I managed not to roll my eyes. “What then?” I said. “There is nowhere we can hide. The Pax controls all of Hyperion, all spacecraft, the spacelanes, and every world of what used to be the Hegemony. If she is as important as you say, they will turn Hyperion upside down until they find her. Even if we could somehow get offplanet, which we can’t, there would be no way we could escape.”
“There is a way for you to get offplanet,” the poet said in a tired voice. “There is a ship.”
I swallowed hard. There is a ship. The idea of traveling between the stars for months while decades or years passed back home took my breath away. I had joined the Home Guard with the childish notion of someday belonging to the Pax military and flying between the stars. A foolish notion for a youngster who had already decided not to accept the cruciform.
“Still,” I said, not truly believing that there was a ship. No member of the Pax Mercantilus would transport fugitives. “Even if we make it to another world, they would have us. Unless you see us fleeing by ship for centuries of time-debt.”
“No,” said the old man. “Not centuries. Not decades. You will escape by ship to one of the nearest worlds of the old Hegemony. Then you will go a secret way. You will see the old worlds. You will travel the River Tethys.”
I knew now that the old man had lost his reason. When the farcasters fell and the AI TechnoCore abandoned humankind, the WorldWeb and Hegemony had died that same day. The tyranny of interstellar distances had been reimposed upon humanity. Now only the Pax forces, their puppet Mercantilus, and the hated Ousters braved the darkness between the stars.
“Come,” rasped the old man. His fingers would not uncurl as he gestured me closer. I leaned over the low com console. I could smell him … a vague combination of medicine, age, and something like leather.
I DID NOT NEED THE MEMORIES OF GRANDAM’S campfire tales to explain the River Tethys and to know why I now knew that the old man was far gone into senility. Everyone knew about the River Tethys; it and the so-called Grand Concourse had been two constant farcaster avenues between the Hegemony worlds. The Concourse had been a street connecting a hundred-some worlds under a hundred-some suns, its broad avenue open to everyone and stitched together by farcaster portals that never closed. The River Tethys had been a less-traveled route, but still important for bulk commerce and the countless pleasure boats that had floated effortlessly from world to world on the single highway of water.
The Concourse had been sliced into a thousand separate segments by the Fall of the WorldWeb farcaster network; the Tethys had simply ceased to exist, the connecting portals useless, the single river on a hundred worlds reverted to a hundred smaller rivers that would never be connected again. Even the old poet seated before me had described the river’s death. I remembered the words from Grandam’s recitation of the Cantos:
And the river that had flowed on
For two centuries or more
Linked through space and time
By the tricks of TechnoCore
Ceased flowing now
On Fuji and on Barnard’s World
On Acteon and Deneb Drei
On Esperance and Nevermore.
Everywhere the Tethys ran,
Like ribbons through
The worlds of man,
There the portals worked no more,
There the riverbeds ran dry,
There the currents ceased to swirl
Lost were the tricks of TechnoCore,
Lost were the travelers forevermore
Locked the portal, locked the door,
Flowed the Tethys, nevermore.
“COME CLOSER,” WHISPERED THE OLD POET, STILL beckoning me with his yellowed finger. I leaned closer. The ancient creature’s breath was like a dry wind out of an unsealed tomb—free of odor, but ancient, somehow redolent of forgotten centuries—as he whispered to me:
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness …”
I pulled my head back and nodded as if the old man had said something sensible. It was clear that he was mad.
As if reading my mind, the old poet chuckled. “I have often been called insane by those who underestimate the power of poetry. Do not decide now, Raul Endymion. We will meet later for dinner and I will
finish describing your challenge. Decide then. For now … rest! Your death and resurrection must have tired you.” The old man hunched over, and there came the dry rattling that I now understood as laughter.
• • •
THE ANDROID SHOWED ME BACK TO MY ROOM. I caught glimpses of courtyards and outbuildings through the tower windows. Once I saw another android—also male—walking past clerestory windows across the courtyard.
My guide opened the door and stepped back. I realized that I would not be locked in, that I was not a prisoner.
“Evening clothes have been set out for you, sir,” said the blue-skinned man. “You are, of course, free to go or wander the old university grounds as you wish. I should warn you, M. Endymion, that there are dangerous animals in the forest and mountains in this vicinity.”
I nodded and smiled. Dangerous animals would not keep me from leaving if I wished to leave. At the moment I did not.
The android turned to leave then, and on impulse I stepped forward and did something that would change the course of my life forever.
“Wait,” I said. I extended a hand. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Raul Endymion.”
For a long moment the android only looked at my extended hand, and I was sure that I had committed some breach of protocol. Androids had been, after all, considered something less than human centuries ago when they had been biofactured for use during the Hegira expansion. Then the artificial man grasped my hand in his and shook firmly. “I am A. Bettik,” he said softly. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
A. Bettik. The name had some resonance for me that I could not place. I said, “I would like to talk to you, A. Bettik. Learn more about … about you and this place and the old poet.”
The android’s blue eyes lifted, and I thought I glimpsed something like amusement there. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I would be happy to speak with you. I fear that it must be later, since there are many duties I have to oversee at this moment.”
“Later, then,” I said, and stepped back. “I look forward to it.”
A. Bettik nodded and descended the tower stairs.
I walked into my room. Except for the bed being made and a suit of elegant evening clothes laid out there, the space was just as it had been. I went to the window and looked out over the ruins of Endymion University. Tall everblues rustled in the cool breeze. Violet leaves tumbled from the weirwood stand near the tower and scraped across the flagstone pavement twenty meters below. Chalma leaves scented the air with their distinctive cinnamon. I had grown up only a few hundred kilometers northeast, on the Aquila moors between these mountains and the rugged area known as the Beak, but the chill freshness of the mountain air here was new to me. The sky seemed a deeper lapis than any I had seen from the moors or lowlands. I breathed in the autumn air and grinned: whatever strangeness lay ahead, I was damned glad to be alive.
Leaving the window, I headed for the tower stairs and a look around the university and city after which my family had taken its name. However crazy the old man was, dinner conversation should be interesting.
Suddenly, when I was almost at the base of the tower stairs, I stopped in my tracks.
A. Bettik, The name was from Grandam’s telling of the Cantos. A. Bettik was the android who piloted the pilgrims’ levitation barge Benares northeast from the city of Keats on the continent of Equus, up the Hoolie River past Naiad River Station, the Karla Locks, and Doukhobor’s Copse to where the navigable river ended in Edge. From Edge the pilgrims had gone on alone across the Sea of Grass. I remembered listening as a child, wondering why A. Bettik was the only android named, and wondering what had happened to him when the pilgrims left him behind at Edge. The name had been lost to me for more than two decades.
Shaking my head slightly, wondering whether it was the old poet or I who was mad, I went out into the late-afternoon light to explore Endymion.
5
At the same moment that I am taking my leave of A. Bettik, six thousand light-years away, in a star system known only by NGC numbers and navigation coordinates, a Pax task force of three fast-attack torchships led by Father Captain Federico de Soya is destroying an orbital forest. The Ouster trees have no defenses against the Pax warships, and the encounter might be described more accurately as slaughter than battle.
I must explain something here. I am not speculating about these events: they occurred precisely as I describe them. Nor am I extrapolating or guessing in the scenes I am about to share when I tell you what Father Captain de Soya or the other principals did when there were no witnesses present. Or what they thought. Or what emotions they felt. These things are literal truth. Later, I will explain how I came to know these things … to know them without hint of distortion … but for now I ask that you accept them for what they are—the truth.
The three Pax torchships drop from relativistic velocities under more than six hundred gravities of deceleration—what spacefarers for centuries have called “raspberry jam delta-v”—meaning, of course, that if the internal containment fields were to fail for a microsecond, the crews would be little more than a layer of raspberry jam on the deckplates.
The containment fields do not fail. At one AU, Father Captain de Soya brings up the orbital forest in the viewsphere. Everyone in the Combat Control Center pauses to glance at the display: several thousand of the Ouster-tailored trees, each at least half a kilometer long, move in an elaborate choreography along the plane of the ecliptic—gravity-clustered copses, braided strands, and subtly shifting patterns of trees, always moving, their leaves always turned toward the G-type sun, their long branches shifting to find the perfect alignment, their thirsty roots deep in the vaporous fog of moisture and nutrients provided by the shepherd comets moving among the forest clusters like giant dirty snowballs. Flitting between the branches of these trees and between the trees themselves, Ouster variants are visible—humanoid shapes with silver-reflective skin and micron-thin butterfly wings extending hundreds of meters. These wings catch the sunlight from moment to moment as they open and blink like brilliant Christmas lights within the green foliage of the orbital forest.
“Fire!” says Father Captain Federico de Soya.
At two-thirds AU, the three torchships of Pax Task Force MAGI open up with their long-distance weapons. At that distance even energy beams would seem to crawl toward their targets like lightning bugs on a black bedsheet, but the Pax ships carry hypervelocity and hyperkinetic weapons: essentially small Hawking-drive starships in their own right, some carrying plasma warheads, which are spun up to relativistic velocities in microseconds to detonate within the forest, others designed simply to drop back into real space, their mass enlarged, and to plow through the trees like cannonballs fired through wet cardboard at point-blank range. Minutes later the three torchships are within energy-beam distance, and the CPBs lance out in a thousand directions simultaneously, their beams visible because of the riot of colloidal particles now filling space like dust in an old attic.
The forest burns. Tailored bark, oh-two pods, and self-sealing leaves burst from violent decompression or are sawed through by beams and shaped plasma blast-tendrils, and the escaping globules of oxygen fuel the fires amid the vacuum until the air freezes or burns away. And the forest burns. Tens of millions of leaves fly away from the exploding forest, each leaf or cluster of leaves its own blazing pyre, while trunks and branches burn against the black background of space. The shepherd comets are struck and then volatilize in an instant, blasting the braided strands of forest apart in expanding shock waves of steam and molten rock fragments. Space-tailored Ousters—“Lucifer’s angels” as the Pax forces have contemptuously called them for centuries—are caught in the explosions like translucent moths in a flame. Some are simply blown apart by the plasma explosions or comet bursts. Others are caught in the path of CPBs and become hyperkinetic objects themselves before their delicate wings and organs are flung apart. Some attempt to flee, expanding their solar wings to the maximum in a vain attempt to out
run the carnage.
None survive.
The encounter takes less than five minutes. When it is done, the MAGI task force decelerates through the forest at a diminished thirty gravities, the fusion-flame tails of the torchships igniting any tree fragments that have escaped the initial attack. Where the forest had floated in space five minutes before—green leaves catching the sunlight, roots drinking the spheres of comet-water, Ouster angels floating like radiant gossamers among the branches—now there is only a torus of smoke and expanding debris filling the plane of the ecliptic along this arc of space.
“Any survivors?” asks Father Captain de Soya, standing along the edge of the C3 central display, his hands clasped behind his back, balancing easily, with only the balls of his feet touching the sticktight strip around the display rim. Despite the fact that the torchship is still decelerating under thirty gravities, the Combat Control Center is held at a constant one-fiftieth standard-g microgravity. The dozen officers in the room sit and stand with their heads toward the center of the sphere. De Soya is a short man in his midthirties, standard. His face is round, the skin dark, and friends had noticed over the years that his eyes reflected priestly compassion more frequently than military ruthlessness. They are troubled now.
“No survivors,” says Mother Commander Stone, de Soya’s executive officer and another Jesuit. She turns from the tactical display to shunt into a blinking com unit.
De Soya knows that none of his officers in the C3 are pleased by this engagement. Destroying Ouster orbital forests is part of their mission—the seemingly innocuous trees serve as refueling and refitting centers for combat Swarms—but few Pax warriors take pleasure in wanton destruction. They were trained as knights of the Church, defenders of the Pax, not as destroyers of beauty or murderers of unarmed life-forms, even if those life-forms were tailored Ousters who had surrendered their souls.
“Lay in the usual search pattern,” de Soya orders. “Tell the crew to stand down from battle stations.” On a modern torchship the crew consists of only these dozen officers and half a dozen others spread throughout the ship.