by Dan Simmons
“Yes … I think … I don’t know.” She gestures toward the antique pistol she still holds. “I emptied the magazine. Twelve shots at … whatever it was. ”
“Did you see it?” the Consul asks Kassad.
“No. I entered the room ten seconds after Brawne, but I didn’t see anything.”
“What about your fucking soldier gadgets?” says Martin Silenus. He is crowded in the back of the tent, huddled in a near-fetal position. “Didn’t all that FORCE shit show something?”
“No.”
A small alarm sounds from the medpak, and Kassad detaches another plasma cartridge from his belt, feeds it into the pak’s chamber, and sits back on his heels, flipping his visor down to watch out the opening of the tent. His voice is distorted by the helmet speaker. “He’s lost more blood than we can compensate for here. Did anyone else bring first aid equipment?”
Weintraub rummages in his pack. “I have a basic kit. Not enough for this, though. Whatever slashed his throat cut through everything.”
“The Shrike,” whispers Martin Silenus.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Lamia, hugging herself to stop her body from shaking. “We’ve got to get help for him.” She looks at the Consul.
“He’s dead,” says the Consul. “Even a ship’s surgery won’t bring him back.”
“We have to try!” shouts Lamia, leaning forward to grab the Consul’s tunic front. “We can’t leave him to those … things … ” She gestures toward the cruciform glowing beneath the skin of the dead man’s chest.
The Consul rubs his eyes. “We can destroy the body. Use the Colonel’s rifle … ”
“We’re going to die if we don’t get out of this fucking storm!” cries Silenus. The tent is vibrating, fiberplastic pounding the poet’s head and back with each billow. The sound of sand against fabric is like a rocket taking off just outside. “Call the goddamned ship. Call it!”
The Consul pulls his pack closer, as if guarding the antique comlog inside it. Sweat glistens on his cheeks and forehead.
“We could wait the storm out in one of the Tombs,” says Sol Weintraub. “The Sphinx, perhaps.”
“Fuck that,” says Martin Silenus.
The scholar shifts in the cramped space and stares at the poet. “You came all this way to find the Shrike. Are you telling us that you’ve changed your mind now that he seems to have made an appearance?”
Silenus’s eyes gleam out from under his lowered beret. “I’m not telling you anything except that I want that goddamned ship of his here, and I want it now.”
“It might be a good idea,” says Colonel Kassad.
The Consul looks at him.
“If there’s a chance to save Hoyt’s life, we should take it.”
The Consul is in pain himself. “We can’t leave,” he says. “Can’t leave now.”
“No,” agrees Kassad. “We won’t use the ship to leave. But the surgery might help Hoyt. And we can wait out the storm in it.”
“And maybe find out what’s happening up there,” says Brawne Lamia, jerking her thumb toward the roof of the tent.
The baby, Rachel, is crying shrilly. Weintraub rocks her, holding her head in his broad hand. “I agree,” he says. “If the Shrike wants to find us, it can find us on the ship as easily as out here. We’ll make sure that no one leaves ” He touches Hoyt’s chest. “As horrible as it sounds, the information the surgery gives us on how this parasite works could be priceless to the Web.”
“All right,” says the Consul. He pulls the ancient comlog from his pack, lays his hand on the diskey, and whispers several phrases.
“Is it coming?” asks Martin Silenus.
“It’s confirmed the command. We’ll need to stow our gear for transfer. I told it to land just above the entrance to the valley.”
Lamia is surprised to find that she has been weeping. She wipes her cheeks and smiles.
“What’s funny?” asks the Consul.
“All this,” she says, stabbing at her cheeks with the back of her hand, “and all I can think about is how nice it’ll be to have a shower.”
“A drink,” says Silenus.
“Shelter from the storm,” says Weintraub. The baby is taking milk from a nursing pak.
Kassad leans forward, his head and shoulders outside the tent He raises his weapon and clicks off the safety. “Telltales,” he says. “Something’s moving just beyond the dune.” The visor turns toward them, reflecting a pale and huddled group, the paler body of Lenar Hoyt. “I’m going to check it out,” he says. “Wait here until the ship arrives.”
“Don’t leave,” says Silenus. “It’s like one of those fucking ancient horror holos where they go one by one to … hey!” The poet falls silent. The entrance to the tent is a triangle of light and noise. Fedmahn Kassad is gone.
• • •
The tent is beginning to collapse, stakes and wire anchors giving way as the sand shifts around them. Huddled together, shouting to be heard over the wind roar, the Consul and Lamia wrap Hoyt’s body in his cloak. Readouts on the medpak continue to blink red. Blood has ceased to flow from the crude millipede suture.
Sol Weintraub sets his four-day-old child in the infant carrier on his chest, folds his cape around her, and crouches in the entrance. “No sign of the Colonel!” he shouts. As he watches, a lightning bolt strikes the outstretched wing of the Sphinx.
Brawne Lamia moves to the entrance and lifts the priest’s body. She is amazed at how light it is. “Let’s get Father Hoyt to the ship and in surgery. Then some of us will come back to search for Kassad.”
The Consul tugs his tricorne cap low and shrugs his collar high. “The ship has deep radar and movement sensors. It’ll tell us where the Colonel’s gone.”
“And the Shrike,” says Silenus. “Can’t forget our host.”
“Let’s go,” says Lamia and gets to her feet. She has to lean into the wind to make progress. Loose ends of Hoyt’s cloak flap and crack around her, while her own cloak streams behind. Finding the path by the intermittent flashes of lightning, she moves toward the head of the valley, glancing back only once to see if the others are following
Martin Silenus steps away from the tent, lifts Het Masteen’s Mobius cube, and his purple beret whips away in the wind, climbing as it goes. Silenus stands there and curses impressively, stopping only when his mouth begins to fill with sand.
“Come,” shouts Weintraub, his hand on the poet’s shoulder. Sol feels the sand striking his face, littering his short beard. His other hand covers his chest as if sheltering something infinitely precious. “We’ll lose sight of Brawne if we don’t hurry.” The two help each other move forward against the wind. Silenus’s fur coat ripples wildly as he detours to retrieve his beret from where it has come down in the lee of a dune.
The Consul is the last to leave, carrying both his own pack and Kassad’s. A minute after he leaves the small shelter, stakes give way, fabric tears, and the tent flies into the night, surrounded by a halo of static electricity. He staggers the three hundred meters up the trail, occasionally catching glimpses of the two men ahead of him, more frequently losing the path and having to walk in circles until he comes across it again. The Time Tombs are visible behind him when the sandstorm ebbs a bit and the lightning flashes follow one another in close succession. The Consul sees the Sphinx, still glowing from repeated electrical strikes, the Jade Tomb beyond it, its walls luminescent, and beyond them the Obelisk, no glow there, a vertical swipe of pure black against the cliff walls. Then the Crystal Monolith. There is no sign of Kassad, although the shifting dunes, blowing sand, and sudden flashes make it seem as if many things are moving.
The Consul looks up, seeing the wide entrance to the valley now and the rushing clouds low above it, half expecting to see the blue fusion glow of his ship lowering through them. The storm is terrible, but his spacecraft has landed in worse conditions. He wonders if it is already down and the others are waiting at the base of it for him to arrive.
But when
he reaches the saddle between cliff walls at the opening of the valley, the wind assaults him anew, he sees the four others huddled together at the beginning of the broad, flat plain, but there is no ship.
“Shouldn’t it be here by now?” shouts Lamia as the Consul approaches the group.
He nods and crouches to extract the comlog from his pack. Weintraub and Silenus stand behind him, bending over to offer some shelter from the blowing sand. The Consul extracts the comlog and pauses, looking around. The storm makes it appear as if they are in some mad room where the walls and ceiling change from instant to instant, one second closing in on them, scant meters away, the next second receding to the distance, the ceiling floating upward, as in the scene where the room and Christmas tree expand for Clara in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.
The Consul palms the diskey, bends forward, and whispers into the voice square. The ancient instrument whispers back to him, the words just audible above the rasp of sand. He straightens up and faces the others. “The ship was not allowed to leave.”
There is a babble of protest. “What do you mean not allowed?” asks Lamia when the others fall silent.
The Consul shrugs and looks skyward as if a blue tail of flame might still announce the ship’s coming. “It wasn’t given clearance at the spaceport in Keats.”
“Didn’t you say you had clearance from the fucking queen?” shouts Martin Silenus. “Old Gallstone herself?”
“Gladstone’s clearance pip was in the ship’s memory,” says the Consul. “Both the FORCE and port authorities knew that.”
“So what the hell happened?” Lamia wipes her face. The tears she had shed back at the tent have left tiny rivulets of mud in the coating of sand on her cheeks.
The Consul shrugs. “Gladstone overrode the original pip. There’s a message here from her. Do you want to hear it?”
For a minute, no one answers. After their week of voyage, the thought of being in touch with someone outside their own group is so incongruous that it does not register at once; it was as if the world beyond the pilgrimage had ceased to exist except for the explosions in the night sky. “Yes,” Sol Weintraub says, “let’s hear it.” A sudden lull in the storm makes the words seem very loud.
They gather around and crouch near the old comlog, setting Father Hoyt in the center of their circle. In the minute they have left him unattended, a small dune has begun to form itself around his body. The telltales are all red now except for the extreme-measures monitors glowing amber. Lamia sets another plasma cartridge in place and makes sure that the osmosis mask is secure on Hoyt’s mouth and nose, filtering pure oxygen in and keeping sand out. “All right,” she says.
The Consul triggers the diskey.
The message is a fatline squirt, recorded by the ship some ten minutes earlier. The air mists with the data columns and spherical-image colloid which characterizes comlogs dating back to the Hegira. The image of Gladstone shimmers, her face distorting bizarrely and then almost comically as millions of specks of windblown sand rip through the image. Even at full volume, her voice is almost lost to the storm.
“I’m sorry,” says the familiar image, “but I cannot allow your spacecraft to approach the Tombs just yet. The temptation to leave would be too great, and the importance of your mission must override all other factors. Please understand that the fate of worlds may rest with you. Please be assured that my hopes and prayers are with you. Gladstone out.”
The image folds into itself and fades away. The Consul, Weintraub, and Lamia continue to stare in silence. Martin Silenus stands, throws a handful of sand at the empty air where Gladstone’s face had been seconds earlier, and screams, “Goddamn fatherfucking asshole politician moral paraplegic dipshit drag-queen bitch!” He kicks sand in the air. The others shift their stares to him.
“Well, that really helped,” Brawne Lamia says softly.
Silenus waves his arms in disgust and walks away, still kicking at dunes.
“Is there anything else?” Weintraub asks the Consul.
“No.”
Brawne Lamia crosses her arms and frowns at the comlog. “I forget how you said this thing works. How are you getting through the interference?”
“Tightbeam to a pocket comsat I seeded as we came down from the Yggdrasill,” says the Consul.
Lamia nods. “So when you reported in, you just sent brief messages to the ship, and it sent fatline squirts to Gladstone … and your Ouster contacts.”
“Yes.”
“Can the ship take off without clearance?” asks Weintraub. The older man is sitting, his knees raised and his arms draped on them in a classic posture of pure fatigue. His voice is also tired. “Just override Gladstone’s prohibition?”
“No,” says the Consul. “When Gladstone said no, FORCE set a class-three containment field over the blast pit where we parked the ship.”
“Get in touch with her,” says Brawne Lamia. “Explain things.”
“I’ve tried.” The Consul holds the comlog in his hands, sets it back in the pack. “No response. Also, I mentioned in the original squirt that Hoyt was badly hurt and that we needed medical help. I wanted the ship’s surgery ready for him.”
“Hurt,” repeats Martin Silenus, striding back to where they huddled. “Shit. Our padre friend is dead as Glennon-Height’s dog.” He jerks his thumb in the direction of the cloak-wrapped body; all monitor displays are red.
Brawne Lamia bends closer and touches Hoyt’s cheek. It is cold. Both his comlog biomonitor and the medpak begin chirping brain-death warnings. The osmosis mask continues to force pure O2 into his lungs, and the medpak stimulators still work his lungs and heart, but the chirping rises to a scream and then settles to a steady, terrible tone.
“He lost too much blood,” says Sol Weintraub. He touches the dead priest’s face, his own eyes closed, head bowed.
“Great,” says Silenus. “Fucking great. And according to his own story, Hoyt’s going to decompose and recompose, thanks to that goddamned cruciform thing … two of the goddamn things, the guy’s rich in resurrection insurance … and then come lurching back like some brain-damaged edition of Hamlet’s daddy’s ghost. What are we going to do then?”
“Shut up,” says Brawne Lamia. She is wrapping Hoyt’s body in a layer of tarp she has brought from the tent.
“Shut up yourself,” screams Silenus. “We’ve got one monster lurking around. Old Grendel himself is out there somewhere, sharpening his nails for his next meal, do you really want Hoyt’s zombie joining our happy crew? You remember how he described the Bikura? They’d been letting the cruciforms bring them back for centuries, and talking to one of them was like talking to an ambulatory sponge. Do you really want Hoyt’s corpse hiking with us?”
“Two,” says the Consul.
“What?” Martin Silenus whirls, loses his footing, and lands on his knees near the body. He leans toward the old scholar. “What did you say?”
“Two cruciforms,” says the Consul. “His and Father Paul Duré’s. If his story about the Bikura was true, then they’ll both be … resurrected.”
“Oh, Christ on a stick,” says Silenus and sits in the sand.
Brawne Lamia has finished wrapping the priest’s body. She looks at it. “I remember that in Father Duré’s story about the Bikura named Alpha,” she says. “But I still don’t understand. The Law of Conservation of Mass has to come in there somewhere.”
“They’ll be short zombies,” says Martin Silenus. He pulls his fur coat tighter and pounds the sand with his fist.
“There is so much we could have learned if the ship had arrived,” says the Consul. “The autodiagnostics could have …”He pauses and gestures. “Look. There is less sand in the air. Perhaps the storm is …”
Lightning flashes, and it begins to rain, the icy pellets striking their faces with more fury than the sandstorm had shown.
Martin Silenus begins to laugh. “It’s a fucking desert!” he shouts toward the sky. “We’ll probably drown in a flood.”
&nb
sp; “We need to get out of this,” says Sol Weintraub. His baby’s face is visible between the gaps in his cloak. Rachel is crying; her face is very red. She looks no older than a newborn.
“Keep Chronos?” says Lamia. “It’s a couple of hours … ”
“Too far,” says the Consul. “Let’s bivouac in one of the Tombs.”
Silenus laughs again. He says:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
“Does that mean yes?” asks Lamia.
“That means fucking ‘why not?’ ” laughs Silenus. “Why make it hard for our cold muse to find us? We can watch our friend decompose while we wait. How long did Duré’s tale say it took for one of the Bikura to rejoin the flock after death interrupted their grazing?”
“Three days,” says the Consul.
Martin Silenus slaps his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Of course. How could I forget? How wonderfully fitting, New Testament-wise. In the meantime, maybe our Shrike-wolf will carry off a few of this flock. Do you think the padre would mind if I borrowed one of his cruciforms just in case? I mean, he has a spare … ”
“Let’s go,” says the Consul. Rain drips from his tricorne cap in a steady stream. “We’ll stay in the Sphinx until morning. I’ll carry Kassad’s extra gear and the Möbius cube. Brawne, you carry Hoyt’s things and Sol’s pack. Sol, you keep the baby warm and dry.”
“What about the padre?” asks the poet, jerking his thumb in the direction of the body.
“You’re carrying Father Hoyt,” Brawne Lamia says softly, turning.
Martin Silenus opens his mouth, sees the pistol in Lamia’s hand, shrugs, and bends to lift the body to his shoulder. “Who’s going to carry Kassad when we find him?” he asks. “Of course, he could be in enough pieces that we could all—”
“Please shut up,” Brawne Lamia says tiredly. “If I have to shoot you, it will give us one more thing to carry. Just walk.”
With the Consul leading, Weintraub coming closely behind, Martin Silenus staggering along some meters back, and Brawne Lamia in the rear, the group once again descends the low col into the Valley of the Tombs.