by Dan Simmons
The baby made soft, mewling noises. Sol found a pacifier for it and tuned the comlog on his wrist to heartbeat rates. The child curled its fists once and relaxed against the scholar’s shoulder. “Brawne’s story suggests that elements in the Core are trying to destabilize the status quo … allow humankind a chance for survival while still pursuing their Ultimate Intelligence project.”
The Consul gestured toward the cloudless sky. “Everything that’s happened … our pilgrimage, even this war … was manufactured because of the internal politics of the Core.”
“And what do we know of the Core?” asked Duré softly.
“Nothing,” said the Consul, and threw a pebble toward the carved stone to the left of the Sphinx’s stairway. “When all is said and done, we know nothing.”
Duré was sitting up now, massaging his face with a slightly moistened cloth. “Yet their goal is oddly similar to our own.”
“What’s that?” asked Sol, still rocking the baby.
“To know God,” said the priest. “Or failing that, to create Him.” He squinted down the long valley. Shadows were moving farther out from the southwestern walls now, beginning to touch and enfold the Tombs. “I helped promote such an idea within the Church … ”
“I’ve read your treatises on St. Teilhard,” said Sol. “You did a brilliant job defending the necessity of evolution toward the Omega Point—the Godhead—without stumbling into the Socinian Heresy.”
“The what?” asked the Consul.
Father Duré smiled slightly. “Socinus was an Italian heretic in the sixteenth century A.D. His belief … for which he was excommunicated … was that God is a limited being, able to learn and to grow as the world … the universe … becomes more complex. And I did stumble into the Socinian Heresy, Sol. That was the first of my sins.”
Sol’s gaze was level. “And the last of your sins?”
“Besides pride?” said Duré. “The greatest of my sins was falsifying data from a seven-year dig on Armaghast. Trying to provide a connection between the vanished Arch Builders there and a form of proto-Christianity. it did not exist. I fudged data. So the irony is, the greatest of my sins, at least in the Church’s eyes, was to violate the scientific method, In her final days, the Church can accept theological heresy but can brook no tampering with the protocols of science.”
“Was Armaghast like this?” asked Sol, making a gesture with his arm that included the valley, the Tombs, and the encroaching desert.
Duré looked around, his eyes bright for a moment. “The dust and stone and sense of death, yes. But this place is infinitely more threatening. Something here has not yet succumbed to death when it should have.”
The Consul laughed. “Let’s hope that we’re in that category. I’m going to drag the comlog up to that saddle and try again to establish a relay link with the ship.”
“I’ll go too,” said Sol.
“And I,” said Father Duré, getting to his feet, weaving for only a second, and refusing the offer of Weintraub’s hand.
The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down.
“Could the ship have been destroyed?” Sol asked the Consul.
“No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.”
Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks closer, the ruins of the City of Poets rose jaggedly against the skyline. “Just as well,” he said. “We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.”
Paul Duré began to laugh then, a deep, sincere sound, and stopped only when he began coughing and had to take a drink of water.
“What is it?” asked the Consul.
“The deus ex machina. What we were talking about earlier. I suspect that this is precisely the reason each of us is here. Poor Lenar with his deus in the machina of the cruciform. Brawne with her resurrected poet trapped in a Schrön loop, seeking the machina to release her personal deus. You, Sol, waiting for the dark deus to solve your daughter’s terrible problem. The Core, machina spawned, seeking to build their own deus.”
The Consul adjusted his sun glasses. “And you, Father?”
Duré shook his head. “I wait for the largest machina of all to produce its deus—the universe. How much of my elevation of St. Teilhard stemmed from the simple fact that I found no sign of a living Creator in the world today? Like the TechnoCore intelligences, I seek to build what I cannot find elsewhere.”
Sol watched the sky. “What deus do the Ousters seek?”
The Consul answered. “Their obsession with Hyperion is real. They think that this will be the birthplace of a new hope for humankind.”
“We’d better go back down,” said Sol, shielding Rachel from the sun. “Brawne and Martin should be returning before dinner.”
But they did not return before dinner. Not was there any sign of them by sunset. Every hour, the Consul walked to the valley entrance, climbed a boulder, and watched for movement out among the dunes and boulder field. There was none. The Consul wished that Kassad had left a pair of his powered binoculars.
Even before the sky faded to twilight the bursts of light across its zenith announced the continuing battle in space. The three men sat on the highest step of the Sphinx’s staircase and watched the light show, slow explosions of pure white, dull red blossoms, and sudden green and orange streaks which left retinal echoes.
“Who’s winning do you think?” said Sol.
The Consul did not look up. “It doesn’t matter. Do you think we should sleep somewhere other than the Sphinx tonight? Wait at one of the other Tombs?”
“I can’t leave the Sphinx,” said Sol. “You’re welcome to go on.”
Duré touched the baby’s cheek. She was working on the pacifier, and her cheek moved against his finger. “How old is she now, Sol?”
“Two days. Almost exactly. She would have been born about fifteen minutes after sunset at this latitude, Hyperion time.”
“I’ll go up and look one last time,” said the Consul. “Then we’ll have to build a bonfire or something to help them find their way back.”
The Consul had descended half the steps toward the trail when Sol stood and pointed. Not toward where the head of the valley glowed in low sunlight, but the other way, into the shadows of the valley itself.
The Consul stopped, and the other two men joined him. The Consul reached into his pocket and removed the small neural stunner Kassad had given him several days earlier. With Lamia and Kassad gone, it was the only weapon they had.
“Can you see?” whispered Sol.
The figure was moving in the darkness beyond the faint glow of the Jade Tomb. It did not look large enough or move quickly enough to be the Shrike; its progress was strange … slow, halting for half a moment at a time, weaving.
Father Duré glanced over his shoulder at the entrance to the valley, then back. “Is there any way Martin Silenus could have entered the valley from that direction?”
“Not unless he jumped down the cliff walls,” whispered the Consul. “Or went eight klicks around to the northeast. Besides, its too tall to be Silenus.”
The figure paused again, weaved, and then fell. From more than a hundred meters away, it looked like another low boulder on the valley floor.
“Come,” said the Consul.
They did not run. The Consul led the way down the staircase, stunner extended, set for twenty meters although he knew the neural effect would be minimal at that range. Father Duré walked close behind, holding Sol’s child while the scholar hunted for a small rock to carry.
“David and Goliath?” asked Duré when Sol came up with palm-sized stone and set it in a fiberplastic sling he had cut from package wrap that afternoon.
The scholar’s sunburned face above the beard turned a darker color. “Something like that. Here, I’ll take Rachel back.”
“I enjoy carrying her. And if there’s any fighting to be done, better the two of you have free hands.”
Sol nodded and closed the gap to walk side by side with the Consul, the priest and the child a few paces behind.
From fifteen meters away it became obvious that the fallen figure was a man—a very tall man—wearing a rough robe and lying face down in the sand.
“Stay here,” said the Consul and ran. The others watched while he turned over the body, set his stunner back in his pocket, and removed a water bottle from his belt.
Sol jogged slowly, feeling his exhaustion as a kind of pleasant vertigo. Duré followed more slowly.
When the priest came into the light thrown by the Consul’s hand torch, he saw the hood of the fallen man pushed back from a vaguely Asian, oddly distorted long face lighted by the glow of the Jade Tomb as well as the torch.
“It’s a Templar,” said Duré, astonished to find a follower of the Muir here.
“It’s the True Voice of the Tree,” said the Consul. “It’s the first of our missing pilgrims … it’s Het Masteen.”
TWENTY-ONE
Martin Silenus worked all afternoon on his epic poem, and only the dying of the light made him pause in his
He had found his old workroom pillaged, the antique table missing. Sad King Billy’s palace had suffered the worst of time’s insults, with all windows broken, miniature dunes drifted across discolored carpets once worth fortunes, and rats and small rock eels living between the tumbled stones. The apartment towers were homes for the doves and hunting falcons gone back to the wild. Finally the poet had returned to the Common Hall under the great geodesic dome of its dining room to sit at a low table and write.
Dust and debris covered the ceramic floor, and the scarlet tones of desert creeper all but obscured the broken panes above, but Silenus ignored these irrelevancies and worked on his Cantos.
The poem dealt with the death and displacement of the Titans by their offspring, the Hellenic gods. It dealt with the Olympian struggle which followed the Titans’ refusal to be displaced—the boiling of great seas as Oceanus struggled with Neptune, his usurper, the extinction of suns as Hyperion struggled with Apollo for control of the light, and the trembling of the universe itself as Saturn struggled with Jupiter for control of the throne of the gods. What was at stake was not the mere passage of one set of deities to be replaced by another, but the end of a golden age and the beginning of dark times which must spell doom for all mortal things.
The Hyperion Cantos made no secret of the multiple identities of these gods: the Titans were easily understood to be the heroes of humankind’s short history in the galaxy, the Olympian usurpers were the TechnoCore AIs, and their battlefield stretched across the familiar continents, oceans, and airways of all the worlds in the Web. Amidst all this, the monster Dis, son of Saturn but eager to inherit the kingdom with Jupiter, stalked its prey, harvesting both god and mortal.
The Cantos were also about the relationship between creatures and their creators, the love between parent and children, artists and their art, all creators and their creations. The poem celebrated love and loyalty but teetered on the brink of nihilism with its constant thread of corruption through love of power, human ambition and intellectual hubris.
Martin Silenus had been working on his Cantos for more than two standard centuries. His finest work had been done in these surroundings-the abandoned city, the desert winds whining like an ominous Greek chorus in the background, the ever-present threat of the Shrike’s sudden interruption. By saving his own life, by leaving, Silenus had abandoned his muse and condemned his pen to silence. Beginning work again, following that sure trail, that perfect circuit which only the inspired writer has experienced, Martin Silenus felt himself returning to life … veins opening wider, lungs filling more deeply, tasting the rich light and pure air without being aware of them, enjoying each stroke of antique pen across the parchment, the great heap of previous pages stacked around on the circular table, chunks of broken masonry serving as paperweights, the story flowing freely again, immortality beckoning with each stanza, each line.
Silenus had come to the most difficult and exciting part of the poem, the scenes where conflict has raged across a thousand landscapes, entire civilizations have been laid waste, and representatives of the Titans call pause to meet and negotiate with the Olympians’ humorless heroes. On this broad landscape of his imagination strode Saturn, Hyperion, Cottus, Iäpetus, Oceanus, Briareus, Mimus, Porphyrion, Enceladus, Rhoetus and others—their equally titanic sisters Tethys, Phoebe, Theia, and Clymene—and opposite them the doleful countenances of Jupiter, Apollo, and their ilk.
Silenus did not know the outcome of this most epic of poems. He lived on now only to finish the tale … had done so for decades. Gone were the dreams of his youth of fame and wealth from apprenticing himself to the Word—he had gained fame and wealth beyond measure and it had all but killed him, had killed his art—and although he knew that the Cantos were the finest literary work of his age, he wanted only to finish it, to know the outcome himself, and to set each stanza, each line, each word, in the finest, clearest, most beautiful form possible.
Now he wrote feverishly, almost mad with desire to finish what he had long thought unfinishable. The words and phrases flew from his antique pen to the antiquated paper; stanzas leaped into being with no effort, cantos found their voice and finished themselves with no need for revision, no pause for inspiration. The poem unfolded with shocking speed, astounding revelations, heart-stopping beauty in both word and image.
Under their flag of truce, Saturn and his usurper, Jupiter, faced each other across a treaty slab of sheer-cut marble. Their dialogue was both epic and simple, their arguments for being, their rationale for war creating the finest debate since Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue. Suddenly something new, something totally unplanned by Martin Silenus in all of his long hours of musing without his muse, entered the poem. Both of the kings of the gods expressed fear of some third usurper, some terrible outside force that threatened the stability of either of their reigns. Silenus watched in pure astonishment as the characters he had created through thousands of hours of effort defied his will and shook hands across the marble slab, setting an alliance against …
Against what?
The poet paused, the pen stopping, as he realized that he could barely see the page. He had been writing in half-darkness for sometime, and now full darkness had descended.
Silenus returned to himself in that process of allowing the world to rush in once more, much like the return to the senses following orgasm. Only the descent of the writer to the world was more painful as he or she returned, trailing clouds of glory which quickly dissipated in the mundane flow of sensory trivia.
Silenus looked around. The great dining hall was quite dark except for the fitful glow of starlight and distant explosions through the panes and ivy above. The tables around him were mere shadows, the walls, thirty meters away in all directions, darker shadows laced through with the varicose darkness of desert creeper. Outside the dining hall, the evening wind had risen, its voices louder now, contralto and soprano solos being sung by cracks in the jagged rafters and rents in the dome above him.
The poet sighed. He had no hand torch in his pack. He had brought nothing but water and his Cantos. He felt his stomach stir in hunger. Where was that goddamn Brawne Lamia? But as soon as he thought of it, he realized that he was pleased that the woman had not returned for him. He needed to stay in solitude to finish the poem … at this rate it would take no longer than a day, the night perhaps. A few hours and he would be finished with his life’s work, ready to rest a while and appreciate the small daily things, the trivia of living which for decades now had been only an interruption of work he could not complete.
Martin Silenus sighed again and began setting manuscript pages in his pack. He would find a light somewhere … start a fire if he had to use Sad King Billy’s ancient tapestries for kindling. He would write outside by the ligh
t of the space battle if he had to.
Silenus held the last few pages and his pen in hand and turned to look for the exit.
Something was standing in the darkness of the hall with him.
Lamia, he thought, feeling relief and disappointment war with one another.
But it was not Brawne Lamia. Silenus noted the distortion, the bulk of mass above and too-long legs below, the play of starlight on carapace and thorn, the shadow of arms under arms, and especially the ruby glow of hell-lighted crystal where the eyes should be.
Silenus let out a groan and sat again. “Not now!” he cried. “Begone, goddamn your eyes!”
The tall shadow moved closer, its footfalls silent on cold ceramic. The sky rippled with blood-red energy, and the poet could see the thorns and blades and razorwire wrappings now.
“No!” cried Martin Silenus. “I refuse. Leave me alone.”
The Shrike stepped closer. Silenus’s hand twitched, lifted the pen again, and wrote across the empty lower margin of his last page: IT IS TIME, MARTIN.
He stared at what he had written, stifling the urge to giggle insanely. To his knowledge, the Shrike had never spoken … never communicated … to anyone. Other than through the paired media of pain and death. “No!” he screamed again. “I have work to do. Take someone else, goddamn you!”
The Shrike took another step forward. The sky pulsed with silent plasma explosions while yellows and reds ran down the creature’s quicksilver chest and arms like spilled paints. Martin Silenus’s hand twitched, wrote across his earlier message—IT IS TIME NOW, MARTIN.
Silenus hugged his manuscript to himself, lifting the last pages from the table so that he could write no more. His teeth showed in a terrible rictus as he all but hissed at the apparition. YOU WERE READY TO TRADE PLACES WITH YOUR PATRON his hand wrote on the tabletop itself.
“Not now!” screamed the poet. “Billy’s dead! Just let me finish. Please!” Martin Silenus had never begged in his long, long life. He begged now. “Please, oh please. Please just let me finish.”