by Dan Simmons
It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.
Gladstone and a handful of her people sat in the middle of all this noise and light, the War Room floating like a gray-carpeted rectangle amidst the stars and explosions, the limb of Hyperion a lapis lazuli brilliance filling half of the north holowall, the screams of dying men and women on every channel and in every ear. I was one of the handful of Gladstone’s people privileged and cursed to be there.
The CEO rotated in her high-backed chair, tapped her lower lip with steepled fingers, and turned toward her military group. “What do you think?”
The seven bemedaled men there looked at one another, and then six of them looked at General Morpurgo. He chewed on an unlighted cigar, “It’s not good,” he said. “We’re keeping them away from the farcaster site … our defenses are holding well there … but they’ve pushed far too far in-system.”
“Admiral?” asked Gladstone, inclining her head a fraction toward the tall, thin man in FORCE:space black.
Admiral Singh touched his closely trimmed beard. “General Morpurgo is correct. The campaign is not going as planned.” He nodded toward the fourth wall, where diagrams—mostly ellipsoids, ovals, and arcs—were superimposed upon a static shot of the Hyperion system. Some of the arcs grew as we watched. The bright blue lines stood for Hegemony trajectories. The red tracks were Ouster. There were far more red lines than blue.
“Both of the attack carriers assigned to Task Force 42 have been put out of action,” said Admiral Singh. “The Olympus Shadow was destroyed with all hands and the Neptune Station was seriously damaged but is returning to the cislunar docking area with five torchships for escort. ”
CEO Gladstone nodded slowly, her lip coming down to touch the top of her steepled fingers. “How many were aboard the Olympus Shadow, Admiral?”
Singh’s brown eyes were as large as the CEO’s, but did not suggest the same depths of sadness. He held her gaze for several seconds. “Forty-two hundred,” he said. “Not counting the Marine detachment of six hundred. Some of those were off-loaded at Farcaster Station Hyperion, so we do not have accurate information on how many were with the ship.”
Gladstone nodded. She looked back at General Morpurgo. “Why the sudden difficulty, General?”
Morpurgo’s face was calm, but he had all but bitten through the cigar clamped between his teeth. “More fighting units than we expected, CEO,” he said. “Plus their lancers … five-person craft, miniature torchships, really, faster and more heavily armed than our long-range fighters … they’re deadly little hornets. We’ve been destroying them by the hundred, but if one gets through, it can make a dash inside fleet defenses and wreak havoc.” Morpurgo shrugged. “More than one’s got through.”
Senator Kolchev sat across the table with eight of his colleagues. Kolchev swiveled until he could see the tactical map. “It looks like they’re almost to Hyperion,” he said. The famous voice was hoarse.
Singh spoke up. “Remember the scale, Senator. The truth is that we still hold most of the system. Everything within ten AU of Hyperion’s star is ours. The battle was out beyond the Oort cloud, and we’ve been regrouping.”
“And those red … blobs … above the plane of the ecliptic?” asked Senator Richeau. The senator wore red herself; it had been one of her trademarks in the Senate.
Singh nodded. “An interesting strategem,” he said. “The Swarm launched an attack of approximately three thousand lancers to complete a pincers movement against Task Force 87.2’s electronic perimeter. It was contained, but one has to admire the cleverness of—”
“Three thousand lancers?” Gladstone interrupted softly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Gladstone smiled. I stopped sketching and thought to myself that I was glad that I had not been the beneficiary of that particular smile.
“Weren’t we told yesterday, in the briefing, that the Ousters would field six … seven hundred fighting units, tops?” The words had been Morpurgo’s. CEO Gladstone swiveled to face the General. Her right eyebrow arched.
General Morpurgo removed the cigar, frowned at it, and fished a smaller piece from behind his lower teeth. “That’s what our intelligence said. It was wrong.”
Gladstone nodded. “Was the AI Advisory Council involved in that intelligence assessment?”
All eyes turned toward Councilor Albedo. It was a perfect projection; he sat in his chair amongst the others, his hands curled on the armrests in a relaxed fashion; there was none of the haziness or see-through common to mobile projections. His face was long, with high cheekbones and a mobile mouth which suggested a hint of a sardonic smile even at the most serious of moments. This was a serious moment.
“No, CEO,” said Councilor Albedo, “the Advisory Group was not asked to assess Ouster strength.”
Gladstone nodded. “I assumed,” she said, still addressing Morpurgo, “that when the FORCE intelligence estimates came in, they incorporated the Council’s projections.”
The FORCE: ground General glared at Albedo. “No ma’am,” he said. “Since the Core acknowledges no contact with the Ousters, we felt that their projections wouldn’t be any better than our own. We did use the OCS:HTN aggregate AI network to run our assessments.” He thrust the foreshortened cigar back into his mouth. His chin jutted. When he spoke, it was around the cigar. “Could the Council have done better?”
Gladstone looked at Albedo.
The Councilor made a small motion with the long fingers of his right hand. “Our estimates … for this Swarm … suggested four to six thousand fighting units.”
“You—” began Morpurgo, his face red.
“You did not mention this during the briefing,” said CEO Gladstone. “Nor during our earlier deliberations.”
Councilor Albedo shrugged. “The General is correct,” he said. “We have no contact with the Ousters. Our estimates are no more reliable than FORCE’S, merely … based upon different premises. The Olympus Command School Historical Tactical Network does excellent work. If the AIs there were one order of acuity higher on the Turing-Demmler scale, we would have to bring them into the Core.” He made the graceful gesture with his hand again. “As it is, the Council’s premises might be of use for future planning. We will, of course, turn over all projections to this group at any time.”
Gladstone nodded. “Do so immediately.”
She turned back to the screen, and the others did so also. Sensing the silence, the room monitors brought the speaker volume back up, and once again we could hear the cries of victory, screams for help, and calm recitation of positions, fire-control directions, and commands.
The closest wall was a real-time feed from the torchship HS N’Djamena as it searched for survivors among the tumbling remnants of Battle Group B. 5. The damaged torchship it was approaching, magnified a thousand times, looked like a pomegranate burst from the inside, its seeds and red rind spilling in slow motion, tumbling into a cloud of particles, gases, frozen volatiles, a million microelectronics ripped from their cradles, food stores, tangled gear, and—recognizable now and then from their marionette tumble of arms or legs—many, many bodies. The N’Djamena’s searchlight, ten meters wide after its coherent leap of twenty thousand miles, played across the starlit frozen wreckage, bringing individual items, facets, and faces into focus. It was quite beautiful in a terrible way. The reflected light made Gladstone’s face look much older.
“Admiral,” she said, “is it pertinent that the Swarm waited until Task Force 87.2 translated in-system?”
Singh touched his beard. “Are you asking if it was a trap, CEO?”
“Yes.”
The Admiral glanced at his colleagues and then at Gladstone. “I think not. We believe … I believe … that when the Ousters saw the intensity of our force commitment, they responded in kind. It does mean, however, that they are totally resolved to take Hyperion system.”
“Can they do it?” asked Gl
adstone, her eyes still on the tumbling wreckage above her. A young man’s body, half in a spacesuit and half out, tumbled toward the camera. The burst eyes and lungs were clearly visible.
“No,” said Admiral Singh. “They can bloody us. They can even drive us back to a totally defensive perimeter around Hyperion itself. But they cannot defeat us or drive us out.”
“Or destroy the farcaster?” Senator Richeau’s voice was taut.
“Nor destroy the farcaster,” said Singh.
“He’s right,” said General Morpurgo. “I’d stake my professional career on it.”
Gladstone smiled and stood. The others, including myself, rushed to stand also. “You have,” Gladstone said softly to Morpurgo. “You have.” She looked around. “We will meet here when events warrant it. M. Hunt will be my liaison with you. In the meantime, gentlemen and ladies, the work of government shall proceed. Good afternoon.”
As the others left, I took my seat again until I was the only one left in the room. The speakers came back up to volume. On one band, a man was crying. Manic laughter came through static. Above me, behind me, on both sides, the starfields moved slowly against blackness, and the starlight glinted coldly on wreckage and ruin.
Government House was constructed in the shape of a Star of David, and within the center of the star, shielded by low walls and strategically planted trees, there was a garden: smaller than the formal acres of flowers in Deer Park but no less beautiful. I was walking there as evening fell, the brilliant blue-white of Tau Ceti fading to golds, when Meina Gladstone approached.
For a while, we walked together in silence. I noticed that she had exchanged her suit for a long robe of the kind worn by grand matrons on Patawpha; the robe was wide and billowing, inset with intricate dark blue and gold designs which almost matched the darkening sky. Gladstone’s hands were out of sight in hidden pockets, the wide sleeves stirred to a breeze; the hem dragged on the milk-white stones of the path.
“You let them interrogate me,” I said. “I’m curious as to why.”
Gladstone’s voice was tired. “They were not transmitting. There was no danger of the information being passed on.”
I smiled. “Nonetheless, you let them put me through that.”
“Security wished to know as much about them as they would divulge.”
“At the expense of any … inconvenience … on my part,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And does Security know who they were working for?”
“The man mentioned Harbrit,” said the CEO. “Security is fairly certain that they meant Emlem Harbrit.”
“The commodities broker on Asquith?”
“Yes. She and Diana Philomel have ties with the old Glennon-Height royalist factions.”
“They were amateurs,” I said, thinking of Hermund mentioning Harbrit’s name, the confused order of Diana’s questioning.
“Of course.”
“Are the royalists connected to any serious group?”
“Only the Shrike church,” said Gladstone. She paused where the path crossed a small stream via a stone bridge. The CEO gathered her robe and sat on a wrought-iron bench. “None of the bishops have yet come out of hiding, you know.”
“With the riots and backlash, I don’t blame them,” I said. I remained standing. There were no bodyguards or monitors in sight, but I knew that if I were to make any threatening move toward Gladstone, I would wake up in ExecSec detention. Above us, the clouds lost their last tinge of gold and began to glow with the reflected silver light of TC2’s countless tower cities. “What did Security do with Diana and her husband?” I asked.
“They’ve been thoroughly interrogated. They’re being … detained.”
I nodded. Thorough interrogation meant that even now their brains were floating in full-shunt tanks. Their bodies would be kept in cryogenic storage until a secret trial determined if their actions had been treasonable. After the trial, the bodies would be destroyed, and Diana and Hermund would remain in “detention,” with all sensory and comm channels turned off. The Hegemony had not used the death penalty for centuries, but the alternatives were not pleasant. I sat on the long bench, six feet from Gladstone.
“Do you still write poetry?”
I was surprised by her question. I glanced down the garden path where floating Japanese lanterns and hidden glow-globes had just come on. “Not really,” I said. “Sometimes I dream in verse. Or used to …”
Meina Gladstone folded her hands on her lap and studied them. “If you were writing about the events unfolding now,” she said, “what kind of poem would you create?”
I laughed. “I’ve already begun it and abandoned it twice … or rather, he had. It was about the death of the gods and their difficulty in accepting their displacement. It was about transformation and suffering and injustice. And it was about the poet … whom he thought suffered most at such injustice.”
Gladstone looked at me. Her face was a mass of lines and shadows in the dimming light. “And who are the gods that are being replaced this time, M. Severn? Is it humanity or the false gods we created to depose us?”
“How the hell should I know?” I snapped and turned away to watch the stream.
“You are part of both worlds, no? Humanity and TechnoCore?”
I laughed again. “I’m part of neither world. A cybrid monster here, a research project there.”
“Yes, but whose research? And for what ends?”
I shrugged.
Gladstone rose and I followed. We crossed the stream and listened to water moving over the stones. The path wound between tall boulders covered with exquisite lichen which glowed in the lantern light.
Gladstone paused at the top of a short flight of stone steps. “Do you think the Ultimates in the Core will succeed in constructing their Ultimate Intelligence, M. Severn?”
“Will they build God?” I said. “There are those AIs which do not want to build God. They learned from the human experience that to construct the next step in awareness is an invitation to slavery, if not actual extinction.”
“But would a true God extinguish his creatures?”
“In the case of the Core and the hypothetical UI,” I said, “God is the creature, not the creator. Perhaps a god must create the lesser beings in contact with it in order for it to feel any responsibility for them. ”
“Yet the Core has appeared to take responsibility for human beings in the centuries since the AI Secession,” said Gladstone. She was gazing intently at me, as if gauging something by my expression.
I looked out at the garden. The path glowed whitely, almost eerily in the dark. “The Core works toward its own ends,” I said, knowing as I spoke that no human being knew that fact better than CEO Meina Gladstone.
“And do you feel that humanity no longer figures as a means toward those ends?”
I made a dismissive gesture with my right hand. “I’m a creature of neither culture,” I said again. “Neither graced by the naïveté of the unintentional creators, nor cursed by the terrible awareness of their creatures.”
“Genetically, you are fully human,” said Gladstone.
It was not a question. I did not respond.
“Jesus Christ was said to be fully human,” she said. “And also fully divine. Humanity and Godhead at intersection.”
I was amazed at her reference to that old religion. Christianity had been replaced first by Zen Christianity, then Zen Gnosticism, then by a hundred more vital theologies and philosophies. Gladstone’s home-world was no repository for discarded beliefs and I assumed—and hoped—that neither was the CEO. “If he was fully human and fully God,” I said, “then I am his antimatter image.”
“No,” said Gladstone, “I would imagine that the Shrike your pilgrim friends are confronting is that.”
I stared. It was the first time she had mentioned the Shrike to me, despite the fact that I knew—and she knew that I knew—that it had been her plan which led the Consul to open the Time Tombs and release the
thing.
“Perhaps you should have been on that pilgrimage, M. Severn,” said the CEO.
“In a way,” I said, “I am.”
Gladstone gestured, and a door to her private quarters opened. “Yes, in a way you are,” she said. “But if the woman who carries your counterpart is crucified on the Shrike’s legendary tree of thorns, will you suffer for all eternity in your dreams?”
I had no answer, so I stood there and said nothing.
“We will talk in the morning after the conference,” said Meina Gladstone. “Good night, M. Severn. Have pleasant dreams.”
EIGHT
Martin Silenus, Sol Weintraub, and the Consul are staggering up the dunes toward the Sphinx as Brawne Lamia and Fedmahn Kassad return with Father Hoyt’s body. Weintraub clutches his cape tight around him, trying to shelter his infant from the rage of blowing sand and crackling light. He watches as Kassad descends the dune, his long legs black and cartoonish against electrified sand, Hoyt’s arms and hands dangling, moving slightly with each slide and step
Silenus is shouting, but the wind whips away words. Brawne Lamia gestures toward the one tent still standing; the storm has collapsed or ripped away the others. They crowd into Silenus’s tent, Colonel Kassad coming last, passing the body in gently. Inside, their shouts can be heard above the crack of fiberplastic canvas and the paper-splitting rip of lightning.
“Dead?” shouts the Consul, peeling back the cloak Kassad had wrapped around Hoyt’s nude body. The cruciforms glow pinkly.
The Colonel points to the telltales blinking on the surface of the FORCE-issue medpak adhered to the priest’s chest. The lights blink red except for the yellow winking of the systems-sustaining filaments and nodules. Hoyt’s head rolls back, and now Weintraub can see the millipede suture holding the ragged edges of the slashed throat together.
Sol Weintraub tries to locate a pulse manually; finds none. He leans forward, sets his ear to the priest’s chest. There is no heartbeat, but the welt of the cruciform there is hot against Sol’s cheek. He looks at Brawne Lamia. “The Shrike?”