by Dan Simmons
Instead of activating the translation, her comlog warned her of the dangers of going there. She overrode it.
Her microremote buzzed into existence, its tiny voice in her implant suggesting that it was not a good idea for the Chief Executive to travel to such an unstable place. She silenced it.
The farcaster portal itself began to argue with her choice until she used her universal card to program it manually.
The farcaster door blurred into existence, and Gladstone stepped through.
The only place on Old Earth’s moon still habitable was the mountain and Mare area preserved for the FORCE Masada Ceremony, and it was here that Gladstone stepped out. The viewing stands and marching field were empty. Class-ten containment fields blurred the stars and the distant rim walls, but Gladstone could see where internal heating from terrible gravity tides had melted the distant mountains and made them flow into new seas of rock.
She moved across a plain of gray sand, feeling the light gravity like an invitation to fly She imagined herself as one of the Templar balloons, lightly tethered but eager to be away. She resisted the impulse to jump, to leap along in giant bounds, but her step was light, and dust flew in improbable patterns behind her.
The air was very thin under the containment field dome, and Gladstone found herself shivering despite the heating elements in her cape. For a long moment she stood in the center of the featureless plain and tried to imagine just the moon, humankind’s first step in its long stagger from the cradle. But the FORCE viewing stands and equipment sheds distracted her, made such imaginings futile, and finally she raised her eyes to see what she had actually come for.
Old Earth hung in the black sky. But not Old Earth, of course, merely the pulsing accretion disk and globular cloud of debris which had once been Old Earth. It was very bright, brighter than any of the stars seen from Patawpha on even the rarest clear night, but its brightness was strangely ominous, and it cast a sick light across the mud-gray field.
Gladstone stood and stared. She had never been here before, had made herself not come before, and now that she was here, she desperately wanted to feel something, hear something, as if some voice of caution or inspiration or perhaps merely commiseration would come to her here.
She heard nothing.
She stood there another few minutes, thinking of little, feeling her ears and nose beginning to freeze, before she decided to go. It would be almost dawn on TC2.
Gladstone had activated the portal and was taking a final look around when another portable farcaster door blurred into existence less than ten meters away. She paused. Not five human beings in the Web had individual access to Earth’s moon.
The microremote buzzed down to float between her and the figure emerging from the portal.
Leigh Hunt stepped out, glanced around, shivered from the cold, and walked quickly toward her. His voice was thin, almost amusingly childlike in the thin air.
“M. Chief Executive, you must return at once. The Ousters have succeeded in breaking through in an amazing counterattack.”
Gladstone sighed. She had known that this would be the next step. “All right,” she said. “Has Hyperion fallen? Can we evacuate our forces from there?”
Hunt shook his head. His lips were almost blue from the cold. “You don’t understand,” came the attenuated voice of her aide. “It’s not just Hyperion. The Ousters are attacking at a dozen points. They’re invading the Web itself!”
Suddenly numb and chilled to her core, more from shock than from the lunar cold, Meina Gladstone nodded, gathered her cape more tightly around her, and stepped back through the portal to a world which would never be the same again.
NINETEEN
They gathered at the head of the Valley of the Time Tombs, Brawne Lamia and Martin Silenus burdened with as many backpacks and carrying bags as they could manage, Sol Weintraub, the Consul, and Father Duré standing silent as a tribunal of patriarchs. The first shadows of afternoon were beginning to stretch east across the valley, reaching for the softly glowing Tombs like fingers of darkness.
“I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to split up like this,” said the Consul, rubbing his chin. It was very hot. Sweat gathered on his stub-bled cheeks and ran down his neck.
Lamia shrugged. “We knew that we each would be confronting the Shrike alone. Does it matter if we’re separated a few hours? We need the food. You three could come if you want.”
The Consul and Sol glanced at Father Duré. The priest was obviously exhausted. The search for Kassad had drained whatever reserves of energy the man had kept after his ordeal.
“Someone should wait here in case the Colonel returns,” said Sol. The baby looked very small in his arms.
Lamia nodded agreement. She settled straps on her shoulders and neck. “All right. It should be about two hours getting to the Keep. A little longer coming back. Figure a full hour there loading supplies, and we’ll still be back before dark. Close to dinnertime.”
The Consul and Duré shook hands with Silenus. Sol put his arms around Brawne. “Come back safely,” he whispered.
She touched the bearded man’s cheek, set her hand on the infant’s head for a second, turned, and started up the valley at a brisk pace.
“Hey, wait a fucking minute for me to catch up!” called Martin Silenus, canteens and water bottles clattering as he ran.
They came up out of the saddle between the cliffs together. Silenus glanced back and saw the other three men already dwarfed by distance, small sticks of color amid the boulders and dunes near the Sphinx. “It isn’t going quite as planned, is it?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Lamia. She had changed into shorts for the hike, and the muscles of her short, powerful legs gleamed under a sheen of sweat. “How was it planned?”
“My plan was to finish the universe’s greatest poem and then go home,” said Silenus. He took a drink from the last bottle holding water. “Goddamn, I wish we’d brought enough wine to last us.”
“I didn’t have a plan,” said Lamia, half to herself. Her short curls, matted with perspiration, clung to her broad neck.
Martin Silenus snorted a laugh. “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that cyborg lover … ”
“Client,” she snapped.
“Whatever. It was the Johnny Keats retrieval persona who thought it was important to get here. So now you’ve dragged him this far … you’re still carrying the Schrön loop aren’t you?”
Lamia absently touched the tiny neural shunt behind her left ear. A thin membrane of osmotic polymer kept sand and dust out of the follicle-sized connector sockets. “Yes.”
Silenus laughed again. “What the fuck good is it if there’s no data-sphere to interact with, kid? You might as well have left the Keats persona on Lusus or wherever.” The poet paused a second to adjust straps and packs. “Say, can you access the personality on your own?”
Lamia thought of her dreams the night before. The presence in them had felt like Johnny … but the images had been of the Web. Memories? “No,” she said, “I can’t access a Schron loop by myself. It carries more data than a hundred simple implants could deal with. Now why don’t you shut up and walk?” She picked up the pace and left him standing there.
The sky was cloudless, verdant, and hinting of depths of lapis. The boulder field ahead stretched southwest to the barrens, the barrens surrendering to the dunefields. The two walked in silence for thirty minutes, separated by five meters and their thoughts. Hyperion’s sun hung small and bright to their right.
“The dunes are steeper,” said Lamia as they struggled up to another crest and slid down the other side. The surface was hot, and already her shoes were filling with sand.
Silenus nodded, stopped, and mopped his face with a silken handkerchief. His floppy purple beret hung low over his brow and left ear, but offered no shade. “It would be easier following the high ground to the north there. Near the dead city.”
Brawne Lamia shielded her eyes to stare in that direct
ion. “We’ll lose at least half an hour going that way.”
“We’ll lose more than that going this way.” Silenus sat on the dune and sipped from his water bottle. He pulled off his cape, folded it, and stuffed it in the largest of his backpacks.
“What are you carrying there?” asked Lamia. “That pack looks full.”
“None of your damned business, woman.”
Lamia shook her head, rubbed her cheeks, and felt the sunburn there. She was not used to so many days in sunlight, and Hyperion’s atmosphere blocked little of the ultraviolet. She fumbled in her pocket for the tube of sunblock cream and smeared some on. “All right,” she said. “We’ll detour that way. Follow the ridgeline until the worst of the dunes are past and then cut back on a straight line toward the Keep.” The mountains hung on the horizon, seeming to grow no closer. The snow-topped summits tantalized her with their promise of cool breezes and fresh water. The Valley of the Time Tombs was invisible behind them, the view blocked by dunes and the boulder field.
Lamia shifted her packs, turned to her right, and half-slid, half-walked down the crumbling dune.
As they came up out of the sand onto the low gorse and needle grass of the ridge, Martin Silenus could not take his eyes from the ruins of the City of Poets. Lamia had cut left around it, avoiding everything but the stones of the half-buried highways that circled the city, other roads leading out into the barrens until they disappeared beneath the dunes.
Silenus fell farther and farther behind until he stopped and sat on a fallen column, which had once been a portal through which the android laborers filed every evening after working in the fields. Those fields were gone now. The aqueducts, canals, and highways only hinted at by fallen stones, depressions in the sand, or the sand-scoured stumps of trees where once they had overhung a waterway or shaded a pleasant lane.
Martin Silenus used his beret to mop his face as he stared at the ruins. The city was still white … as white as bones uncovered by shifting sands, as white as teeth in an earth-brown skull. From where he sat, Silenus could see that many of the buildings were as he had last seen them more than a century and a half ago. Poets’ Ampitheatre lay half-finished but regal in its ruin, a white, otherworldly Roman Colosseum overgrown with desert creeper and fanfare ivy. The great atrium was open to the sky, the gallerias shattered—not by time, Silenus knew, but by the probes and lances and explosive charges of Sad King Billy’s useless security people in the decades after the evacuation of the city. They were going to kill the Shrike. They were going to use electronics and angry beams of coherent light to kill Grendel after he had laid waste to the mead hall.
Martin Silenus chuckled and leaned forward, suddenly dizzy from the heat and exhaustion.
Silenus could see the great dome of the Common Hall where he had eaten his meals, first with the hundreds in artistic camaraderie, then in separation and silence with the few others who had remained, for their own inscrutable and unrecorded reasons, after Billy’s evacuation to Keats, and then alone. Truly alone. Once he had dropped a goblet and the echo rang for half a minute under the vine-graffitied dome.
Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse.
There was a sudden explosion of sound, and a score of white doves burst from some niche in the heap of broken towers that had been Sad King Billy’s palace. Silenus watched them whirl and circle in the overheated sky, marveling that they had survived the centuries here on the edge of nowhere.
If I could do it, why not they?
There were shadows in the city, pools of sweet shade. Silenus wondered if the wells were still good, the great underground reservoirs, sunk before the human seedships had arrived, still filled with sweet water. He wondered if his wooden worktable, an antique from Old Earth, still sat in the small room in which he had written much of his Cantos.
“What’s wrong?” Brawne Lamia had retraced her steps and was standing near him.
“Nothing.” He squinted up at her. The woman looked like some squat tree, a mass of dark thigh roots and sunburned bark and frozen energy. He tried to imagine her being exhausted … the effort made him tired. “I just realized,” he said. “We’re wasting our time going all the way back to the Keep. There are wells in the city. Probably food reserves too.”
“Uh-uh,” said Lamia. “The Consul and I thought of that, talked about it. The Dead City’s been looted for generations. Shrike Pilgrims must have depleted the stores sixty or eighty years ago. The wells aren’t dependable … the aquifer has shifted, the reservoirs are contaminated. We go to the Keep.”
Silenus felt his anger grow at the woman’s insufferable arrogance, her instant assumption that she could take command in any situation. “I’m going to explore,” he said. “It might save us hours of travel time.”
Lamia moved between him and the sun. Her black curls glowed with the corona of eclipse. “No. If we waste time here, we won’t be back before dark.”
“Go on, then,” snapped the poet, surprised at what he was saying. “I’m tired. I’m going to check out the warehouse behind the Common Hall. I might remember storage places the pilgrims never found.”
He could see the woman’s body tense as she considered dragging him to his feet, pulling him out onto the dunes again. They were little more than a third of the way to the foothills where the long climb to the Keep staircase began. Her muscles relaxed. “Martin,” she said, “the others are depending on us. Please don’t screw this up.”
He laughed and sat back against the tumbled pillar. “Fuck that,” he said. “I’m tired. You know that you’re going to do ninety-five percent of the transporting anyway. I’m old, woman. Older than you can imagine. Let me stay and rest a while. Maybe I’ll find some food. Maybe I’ll get some writing done.”
Lamia crouched next to him and touched his pack. “That’s what you’ve been carrying. The pages of your poem. The Cantos.”
“Of course,” he said.
“And you still think that proximity to the Shrike will allow you to finish it?”
Silenus shrugged, feeling the heat and dizziness whirl around him. “The thing is a fucking killer, a sheet-metal Grendel forged in hell,” he said. “But it’s my muse.”
Lamia sighed, squinted at the sun already lowering itself toward the mountains, and then looked back the way they had come. “Go back,” she said softly. “To the valley.” She hesitated a moment. “I’ll go with you, then return.”
Silenus smiled with cracked lips. “Why go back? To play cribbage with three other old men until our beastie comes to tuck us in? No thanks, I’d rather rest here a bit and get some work done. Go on, woman. You can carry more than three poets could.” He struggled out of his empty packs and bottles, handing them to her.
Lamia held the tangle of straps in a fist as short and hard as the head of a steel hammer. “Are you sure? We can walk slowly.”
He struggled to his feet, fueled by a moment of pure anger at her pity and condescension. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Lusian. In case you forgot, the purpose of the pilgrimage was to get here and say hello to the Shrike. Your friend Hoyt didn’t forget. Kassad understood the game. The fucking Shrike’s probably chewing on his stupid military bones right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the three we left behind don’t need food or water by this point. Go on. Get the hell out of here. I’m tired of your company.”
Brawne Lamia remained crouching for a moment, looking up at him as he weaved above her. Then she got to her feet, touched his shoulder for the briefest of seconds, lifted the packs and bottles to her back, and swung away, her pace faster than anything he could have kept up with in his youth. “I’ll be back this way in a few hours,” she called, not turning back to look at him. “Be out on this edge of the city. We’ll return to the Tombs together.”
Martin Silenus said nothing as he watched her diminish and then disappear in the rough ground to the southwest. The mountains shimmered in the heat. He looked down and saw that she
had left the water bottle for him. He spat, added the bottle to his load, and walked into the waiting shade of the dead city.
TWENTY
Duré all but collapsed while they were eating lunch from the last two ration paks; Sol and the Consul carried him up the Sphinx’s wide stairway into the shade. The priest’s face was as white as his hair.
He attempted a smile as Sol lifted a water bottle to his lips. “All of you accept the fact of my resurrection rather easily,” he said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a finger.
The Consul leaned back against the stone of the Sphinx. “I saw the cruciforms on Hoyt. The same as you wear now.”
“And I believed his story … your story,” said Sol. He passed the water to the Consul.
Duré touched his forehead. “I’ve been listening to the comlog disks. The stories, including mine, are … incredible.”
“Do you doubt any of them?” asked the Consul.
“No. It is making sense of them that is the challenge. Finding the common element … the string of connection.”
Sol lifted Rachel to his chest, rocking her slightly, his hand on the back of her head. “Does there have to be a connection? Other than the Shrike?”
“Oh yes,” said Duré. A bit of color was returning to his cheeks. “This pilgrimage was not an accident. Nor was your selection.”
“Different elements had a say in who came on this pilgrimage,” said the Consul. “The AI Advisory Group, the Hegemony Senate, even the Shrike Church.”
Duré shook his head. “Yes, but there was only one guiding intelligence behind this selection, my friends.”
Sol leaned closer. “God?”
“Perhaps,” said Duré, smiling, “but I was thinking of the Core … the artificial intelligences who have behaved so mysteriously through this entire sequence of events.”