by Dan Simmons
“Keats had a population of two hundred thousand two years ago,” said Governor-General Lane. “Now, including the shack cities, we’re nearing three and a half million.”
“I thought that there were fewer than five million people on the planet,” said Hunt. “Including indigenies.”
“That’s accurate,” said Lane. “You see why everything’s breaking down. The other two large cities, Port Romance and Endymion, are holding most of the rest of the refugees. Fiberplastic plantations on Aquila are empty, being reclaimed by the jungle and flame forests, the farm belts along the Mane and the Nine Tails aren’t producing—or if they are, can’t get their food to market because of the breakdown of the civilian transport system. ”
Hunt watched the river come closer. “What is the government doing?”
Theo Lane smiled. “You mean what am I doing? Well, the crisis has been brewing for almost three years. The first step was to dissolve the Home Rule Council and formally bring Hyperion into the Protectorate. Once I had executive powers, I moved to nationalize the remaining transit companies and dirigible lines—only the military moves by skimmer here now—and to disband the Self-Defense Force.”
“Disband it?” said Hunt. “I would think you would want to use it.”
Governor-General Lane shook his head. He touched the omni control lightly, confidently, and the skimmer spiraled down toward the center of old Keats. “They were worse than useless,” he said, “they were dangerous. I wasn’t too upset when the ‘Fighting Third’ Legion went north and just disappeared. As soon as the FORCE:ground troops and Marines landed, I disarmed the rest of the SDF thugs. They were the source of most of the looting. Here’s where we’ll get some breakfast and talk.”
The skimmer dropped in low over the river, circled a final time, and dropped lightly into the courtyard of an ancient structure made of stone and sticks and imaginatively designed windows: Cicero’s. Even before Lane identified the place to Leigh Hunt I recognized it from the pilgrims’ passage—the old restaurant/pub/inn lay in the heart of Jacktown and sprawled over four buildings on nine levels, its balconies and piers and darkened weirwood walkways overhanging the slow-moving Hoolie on one side and the narrow lanes and alleys of Jacktown on the other. Cicero’s was older than the stone face of Sad King Billy, and its dim cubicles and deep wine cellars had been the true home of the Consul during his years of exile here.
Stan Leweski met us at the courtyard door. Tall and massive, face as age darkened and cracked as the stone walls of his inn, Leweski was Cicero’s, as had been his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him.
“By damn!” declared the giant, clapping the Governor-General/de facto dictator of this world on his shoulders hard enough to make Theo stagger. “You get up early for a change, heh? Bring your friends to breakfast? Welcome to Cicero’s!” Stan Leweski’s huge hand swallowed Hunt’s and then mine in a welcome that left me checking fingers and joints for damage. “Or is it later—Web time—for you?” he boomed. “Maybe you like a drink or dinner!”
Leigh Hunt squinted at the pub owner. “How did you know we were from the Web?”
Leweski boomed a laugh that sent weathervanes on the roofline spinning. “Hah! Hard to deduct, yes? You come here with Theo at sunrise—you think he give everybody a ride here?—also wearing wool clothes when we got no sheeps here. You’re not FORCE people and not fiberplastic plantation big shots … I know all those! Ipso fact toto, you farcast to ships from Web, drop down here for good food. Now, you want breakfast or plenty to drink?”
Theo Lane sighed. “Give us a quiet corner, Stan. Bacon and eggs and brine kippers for me. Gentlemen?”
“Just coffee,” said Hunt.
“Yes,” I said. We were following the owner through the corridors now, up short staircases and down wrought-iron ramps, through more corridors. The place was lower, darker, smokier, and more fascinating than I remembered from my dreams. A few regulars looked up at us as we passed, but the place was far less crowded than I remembered. Obviously Lane had sent troops to throw out the last of the SDF barbarians who had been occupying the place. We passed a high, narrow window, and I verified that hypothesis by catching a glimpse of a FORCE:ground APC parked in the alley, troops lounging on and near it with obviously loaded weapons.
“Here,” said Leweski, waving us into a small porch which overhung the Hoolie and looked out onto the gabled rooftops and stone towers of Jacktown. “Dommy be here in two minutes with your breakfast and coffees.” He disappeared quickly … for a giant.
Hunt glanced at his comlog. “We have about forty-five minutes before the dropship is supposed to return with us. Let’s talk.”
Lane nodded, removed his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. I realized that he had been up all night … perhaps several nights. “Fine,” he said, setting the glasses back in place. “What does CEO Gladstone want to know?”
Hunt paused while a very short man with parchment-white skin and yellow eyes brought our coffee in deep, thick mugs and set down a platter with Lane’s food. “The CEO wants to know what you feel your priorities are,” said Hunt. “And she needs to know if you can hold out here if the fighting is prolonged.”
Lane ate for a moment before responding. He took a long sip of coffee and stared intently at Hunt. It was real coffee from the taste of it, better than most Web-grown. “First question last,” Lane said. “Define prolonged.”
“Weeks.”
“Weeks, probably. Months, no way.” The Governor-General tried the brine kippers. “You see the state of our economy. If it wasn’t for the supplies dropped in by FORCE, we’d have food riots every day instead of once a week. There are no exports with the quarantine. Half the refugees want to find the Shrike Temple priests and kill them, the other half want to convert before the Shrike finds them.”
“Have you found the priests?” asked Hunt.
“No. We’re sure they escaped the temple bombing, but the authorities can’t locate them. Rumor has it that they’ve gone north to Keep Chronos, a stone castle right above the high steppe where the Time Tombs are.”
I knew better. At least, I knew the pilgrims had not seen any Shrike Temple priests during their brief stay in the Keep. But there had been signs of a slaughter there.
“As for our priorities,” Theo Lane was saying, “the first is evacuation. The second is elimination of the Ouster threat. The third is help with the Shrike scare.”
Leigh Hunt sat back against oiled wood. Steam lifted from the heavy mug in his hands. “Evacuation is not a possibility at this time—”
“Why?” Lane fired the question like a hellwhip bolt.
“CEO Gladstone does not have the political power … at this point … to convince the Senate and All Thing that the Web can accept five million refugees—”
“Bullshit,” said the Governor-General. “There were twice that many tourists flooding Maui-Covenant its first year in the Protectorate. And that destroyed a unique planetary ecology. Put us on Armaghast or some desert world until the war scare is past.”
Hunt shook his head. His basset-hound eyes looked sadder than usual “It isn’t just the logistical question,” he said. “Or the political one. It’s.…”
“The Shrike,” said Lane. He broke a piece of bacon. “The Shrike is the real reason.”
“Yes. As well as fears of an Ouster infiltration of the Web.”
The Governor-General laughed. “So you’re afraid that if you set up farcaster portals here and let us out, a bunch of three-meter Ousters are going to land and get in line without anyone noticing?”
Hunt sipped his coffee. “No,” he said, “but there is a real chance of an invasion. Every farcaster portal is an opening to the Web. The Advisory Council warns against it.”
“All right,” said the younger man, his mouth half-full. “Evacuate us by ship then. Wasn’t that the reason for the original task force?”
“That was the ostensible reason,” said Hunt. “Our real goal now is to defeat the Ousters and
then bring Hyperion fully into the Web.”
“And what about the Shrike threat then?”
“It will be … neutralized,” said Hunt. He paused while a small group of men and women passed by our porch.
I glanced up, started to return my attention to the table, and then snapped my head back around. The group had passed out of sight down the hallway. “Wasn’t that Melio Arundez?” I said, interrupting Governor-General Lane.
“What? Oh, Dr. Arundez. Yes. Do you know him, M. Severn?”
Leigh Hunt was glaring at me, but I ignored it. “Yes,” I said to Lane, although I had never actually met Arundez. “What is he doing on Hyperion?”
“His team landed over six local months ago with a project proposal from Reichs University on Freeholm to do additional research on the Time Tombs.”
“But the Tombs were closed to research and tourists,” I said.
“Yes. But their instruments—we allowed data to be relayed weekly through the consulate fatline transmitter—had already shown the change in the anti-entropic fields surrounding the Tombs. Reichs University knew the Tombs were opening … if that’s really what the change means … and they sent the top researchers in the Web to study it.”
“But you did not grant them permission?” I said.
Theo Lane smiled without warmth. “CEO Gladstone did not grant them permission. The closure of the Tombs is a direct order from TC2. If it were up to me, I would have denied the pilgrims passage and allowed Dr. Arundez’s team priority access.” He turned back to Hunt.
“Excuse me,” I said and slipped out of the booth.
I found Arundez and his people—three women and four men, their clothing and physical styles suggesting different worlds in the Web—two porches away. They were bent over their breakfasts and scientific comlogs, arguing in technical terms so abtruse as to leave a Talmudic scholar envious.
“Dr. Arundez?” I said.
“Yes?” He looked up. He was two decades older than I remembered, entering middle age in his early sixties, but the strikingly handsome profile was the same, with the same bronzed skin, solid jaw, wavy black hair going only slightly gray at the temples, and piercing hazel eyes. I understood how a young female graduate student could have quickly fallen in love with him.
“My name is Joseph Severn,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I knew a friend of yours … Rachel Weintraub.”
Arundez was on his feet in a second, offering apologies to the others, leading me by the elbow until we found an empty booth in a cubicle under a round window looking out on red-tiled rooftops. He released my elbow and appraised me carefully, taking in the Web clothing. He turned my wrists over, looking for the telltale blueness of Poulsen treatments. “You’re too young,” he said. “Unless you knew Rachel as a child.”
“Actually, it’s her father I know best,” I said.
Dr. Arundez let out a breath and nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Where is Sol? I’ve been trying to trace him for months through the consulate. The authorities on Hebron will only say that he’s moved.” He gave me that appraising stare again. “You knew about Rachel’s … illness?”
“Yes,” I said. The Merlin’s sickness which had caused her to age backward, losing memories with each day and hour that passed. Melio Arundez had been one of those memories. “I know that you went to visit her about fifteen standard years ago on Barnard’s World.”
Arundez grimaced. “That was a mistake,” he said. “I thought that I would talk to Sol and Sarai. When I saw her …”He shook his head. “Who are you? Do you know where Sol and Rachel are now? It’s three days until her birthday.”
I nodded. “Her first and last birthday.” I glanced around. The hallway was silent and empty except for a distant murmur of laughter from a lower level. “I’m here on a fact-finding trip from the CEO’s office,” I said. “I have information that Sol Weintraub and his daughter have traveled to the Time Tombs.”
Arundez looked as though I’d struck him in the solar plexus. “Here? On Hyperion?” He stared out at the rooftops for a moment. “I should have realized … although Sol always refused to return here … but with Sarai gone …” He looked at me. “Are you in touch with him? Is she … are they all right?”
I shook my head. “There are no radio or datasphere links with them at present,” I said. “I know that they made the trip safely. The question is, what do you know? Your team? Data on what is occurring at the Time Tombs might be very important to their survival.”
Melio Arundez ran his hand through his hair. “If only they’d let us go there! That damned, stupid, bureaucratic shortsightedness … You say you’re from Gladstone’s office. Can you explain to them why it’s so important for us to get there?”
“I’m only a messenger,” I said. “But tell me why it’s so important, and I’ll try to get the information to someone.”
Arundez’s large hands cupped an invisible shape in midair. His tension and anger were palpable. “For three years, the data was coming via telemetry in the squirts the consulate would allow once a week on their precious fatline transmitter. It showed a slow but relentless degradation of the anti-entropic envelope—the time tides—in and around the Tombs. It was erratic, illogical, but steady. Our team was authorized to travel here shortly after the degradation began. We arrived about six months ago, saw data that suggested that the Tombs were opening … coming into phase with now … but four days after we arrived, the instruments quit sending. All of them. We begged that bastard Lane to let us just go and recalibrate them, set up new sensors if he wouldn’t let us investigate in person.
“Nothing. No transit permission. No communication with the university … even with the coming of FORCE ships to make it easier. We tried going upriver ourselves, without permission, and some of Lane’s Marine goons intercepted us at Karla Locks and brought us back in handcuffs. I spent four weeks in jail. Now we’re allowed to wander around Keats, but we’ll be locked up indefinitely if we leave the city again.” Arundez leaned forward. “Can you help?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I want to help the Werntraubs. Perhaps it would be best if you could take your team to the site. Do you know when the Tombs will open?”
The time-physicist made an angry gesture. “If we had new data!” He sighed. “No, we don’t know. They could be open already or it could be another six months.”
“When you say ‘open,’ ” I said, “you don’t mean physically open?”
“Of course not. The Time Tombs have been physically open for inspection since they were discovered four standard centuries ago. I mean open in the sense of dropping the time curtains that conceal parts of them, bringing the entire complex into phase with the local flow of time.”
“By ‘local’ you mean … ?”
“I mean in this universe, of course.”
“And you’re sure that the Tombs are moving backward in time … from our future?” I asked.
“Backward in time, yes,” said Arundez. “From our future, we can’t say. We’re not even sure what the ‘future’ means in temporal/physical terms. It could be a series of sine-wave probabilities or a decision-branch megaverse, or even—”
“But whatever it is,” I said, “the Time Tombs and the Shrike are coming from there?”
“The Time Tombs are for certain,” said the physicist. “I have no knowledge of the Shrike. My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions.”
“Even after what happened to Rachel?” I said. “You still don’t believe in the Shrike?”
Melio Arundez glowered at me. “Rachel contracted Merlin’s sickness,” he said. “It’s an anti-entropic aging disease, not the bite of a mythical monster.”
“Time’s bite has never been mythical,” I said, surprising myself with such a cheap bit of homespun philosophy. “The question is—will the Shrike or whatever power inhabits the Time Tombs return Rachel to the ‘local’ time flow?”
Arundez
nodded and turned his gaze to the rooftops. The sun had moved into the clouds, and the morning was drab, the red tiles bleached of color. Rain was beginning to fall again.
“And the question is,” I said, surprising myself again, “are you still in love with her?”
The physicist turned his head slowly, fixing me in an angry gaze. I felt the retort—possibly physical—build, crest, and wane. He reached into his coat pocket and showed me a snapshot holo of an attractive woman with graying hair and two children in their late teens. “My wife and children,” said Melio Arundez. “They’re waiting on Renaissance Vector.” He pointed a blunt finger at me. “If Rachel were … were cured today, I would be eighty-two standard years old before she again reached the age she was when we first met.” He lowered the finger, returned the holo to his pocket. “And yes,” he said, “I’m still in love with her.”
“Ready?” The voice broke the silence a moment later. I looked up to see Hunt and Theo Lane in the doorway. “The dropship lifts off in ten minutes,” said Hunt.
I stood and shook hands with Melio Arundez. “I’ll try,” I said.
Governor-General Lane had one of his escort skimmers return us to the spaceport while he went back to the consulate. The military skimmer was no more comfortable than his consulate machine had been, but it was faster. We were strapped and fielded into our webseats aboard the dropship before Hunt said, “What was all that about with that physicist?”
“Just renewing old ties with a stranger,” I said.
Hunt frowned. “What did you promise him that you’d try?”
I felt the dropship rumble, twitch, and then leap as the catapult grid launched us skyward. “I told him I’d try to get him in to visit a sick friend,” I said.