by Dan Simmons
The hawking mat seemed to hesitate as the Consul tapped flight designs and urged it higher, but it rose in reluctant steps until it cleared the final nine-thousand-meter peak and he could see the lower mountains beyond, dwindling to foothills a mere three thousand meters above sea level. The Consul descended with gratitude.
He found the tramline gleaming in sunlight, eight klicks south of where he left the Bridle Range. Tramcars hung silently around the west terminal station. Below, the sparse buildings of the village of Pilgrims’ Rest appeared as abandoned as they had several days earlier. There was no sign of the windwagon where it had been left at the low pier leading out over the shallows of the Sea of Grass.
The Consul let down near the pier, deactivated the hawking mat, stretched his legs with some pain before rolling up the mat for safekeeping, and found a toilet in one of the abandoned buildings near the wharf. When he emerged, the morning sun was creeping down the foothills and erasing the last shadows there. As far as he could see to the south and west stretched the Sea of Grass, its tabletop smoothness belied by occasional breezes which sent ripples across the verdant surface, briefly revealing the russet and ultramarine stalks beneath in a movement so wavelike that one expected to see whitecaps and fish leaping.
There were no fish in the Sea of Grass, but there were grass serpents twenty meters long, and if the Consul’s hawking mat failed him out there, even a safe landing would not keep him alive for long.
The Consul unrolled the mat, set his bag behind him, and activated the carpet. He stayed relatively low, twenty-five meters above the surface, but not so low that a grass serpent might mistake him for a low-flying morsel. It had taken the windwagon less than a full Hyperion day to ferry them across the Sea, but with the winds frequently from the northeast, that had involved quite a bit of tacking to and fro. The Consul bet that he could fly across this narrowest part of the Sea in less than fifteen hours. He tapped the forward control designs, and the hawking mat sped faster.
Within twenty minutes, the mountains had fallen behind until the foothills were lost in the haze of distance. Within an hour, the peaks began to shrink as the curve of the world hid their base. Two hours out, and the Consul could see only the highest of the peaks as an indistinct, serrated shadow rising from the haze.
Then the Sea of Grass spread to all horizons, unchanging except for the sensuous ripples and furrows caused by the occasional breeze. It was much warmer here than on the high plateau north of the Bridle Range. The Consul shed his thermal cape, then his coat, then his sweater. The sun beat down with surprising intensity for such high latitudes. The Consul fumbled in his bag, found the wrinkled and battered tricorne cap he had worn with such aplomb just two days earlier, and wedged it on his head to give some shade. His forehead and balding skull were already sunburned.
About four hours out, he ate his first meal of the trip, chewing on the tasteless strips of ration-pak protein as if they were filet mignon. The water was the most delicious part of the meal, and the Consul had to fight his urge to empty all the bottles in a single orgy of drinking.
The Sea of Grass stretched below, behind, and ahead. The Consul dozed, snapping awake each time with a sense of falling, hands gripping the edge of the rigid hawking mat. He realized that he should have tied himself in with the single rope he had brought in his bag, but he didn’t want to land—the grass was sharp and higher than his head. Although he had seen none of the telltale V-shaped wakes of the grass serpents, he could not be sure they were not resting in wait below.
He wondered idly where the windwagon had gone. The thing had been fully automated and presumably programmed by the Church of the Shrike, since they had sponsored the pilgrimage. What other duties might the thing have had? The Consul shook his head, sat upright, and pinched his cheeks. He had been drifting in and out of dreams even as he thought about the windwagon. Fifteen hours had seemed a short enough time as he stood talking about it in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He glanced at his comlog; five hours had passed.
The Consul lifted the mat to two hundred meters, looked carefully for any sign of a serpent, and then brought the mat down to a hover five meters above the grass. Carefully he extracted the rope, made a loop, moved to the front of the carpet, and wound several lengths around the carpet, leaving enough slack to slide his body in before tightening the knot.
If the mat fell, the tether would be worse than useless, but the snug bands of rope against his back gave a sense of security as he leaned forward to tap the flight designs again, leveled the carpet out at forty meters, and laid his cheek against the warm fabric. Sunlight filtered through his fingers, and he realized that his bare forearms were getting a terrible sunburn.
He was too tired to sit up and roll down his sleeves.
A breeze came up. The Consul could hear a rustling and sliding below as either the grasses blew or something large slithered past.
He was too tired to care, The Consul closed his eyes and was asleep in less than thirty seconds.
• • •
The Consul dreamed of his home—his true home—on Maui-Covenant and the dream was filled with color: the bottomless blue sky, the wide expanse of the South Sea, ultramarine fading to green where the Equatorial Shallows began, the startling greens and yellows and orchid reds of the motile isles as they were herded north by the dolphins … extinct now since the Hegemony invasion in the Consul’s childhood, but quite alive in his dream, breaking the water in great leaps that sent a thousand prisms of light dancing in the pure air.
In his dream, the Consul was a child again, and he stood on the highest level of a treehouse on their First Family Isle. Grandmother Siri was next to him—not the regal grande dame he had known but the beautiful young woman his grandfather had met and fallen in love with. The treesails were flapping as the southerlies came up, moving the herd of motile isles in precise formation through the blue channels through the Shallows. Just on the northern horizon, he could see the first of the Equatorial Archipelago islands rising green and permanent against an evening sky.
Siri touched his shoulder and pointed to the west.
The isles were burning, sinking, their keel roots writhing in purposeless pain. The dolphin herders were gone. The sky rained fire. The Consul recognized billion-volt lances as they fried the air and left blue-gray afterimages on his retinas. Underwater explosions lighted the oceans and sent thousands of fish and fragile sea creatures bobbing to the surface in their death throes.
“Why?” asked Grandmother Siri, but her voice was the soft whisper of a teenager.
The Consul tried to answer her but could not. Tears blinded him. He reached for her hand, but she was no longer there, and the sense that she was gone, that he could never make up for his sins, hurt him so badly that he found it impossible to breathe. His throat was clogged with emotion. Then he realized that it was smoke that burned his eyes and filled his lungs; the Family Isle was on fire.
The child who was the Consul staggered forward in the blue-black darkness, hunting blindly for someone to hold his hand, to reassure him.
A hand closed on his. It was not Siri’s. The hand was impossibly firm as it squeezed. The fingers were blades.
• • •
The Consul came awake gasping.
It was dark. He had slept for at least seven hours. Struggling with the ropes, he sat up, stared at his glowing comlog display.
Twelve hours. He had slept for twelve hours.
Every muscle in his body ached as he leaned over and peered below. The hawking mat held a steady altitude of forty meters, but he had no idea where he was. Low hills rose and fell below. The mat must have cleared some by only two or three meters; orange grass and scrub lichen grew in spongy tufts.
Somewhere, sometime in the past few hours, he had passed over the south shore of the Sea of Grass, missed the small port of Edge and the Hoolie River docks where their levitation barge, Benares, had been tied up.
The Consul had no compass—compasses were useless on Hyperio
n—and his comlog had not been programmed as an inertial direction finder. He had planned to find his way back to Keats by following the Hoolie south and west, retracing the laborious path of their upriver pilgrimage minus the bends and turns in the river.
Now he was lost.
The Consul set the hawking mat down on a low hilltop, stepped off to solid ground with a groan of pain, and collapsed the mat. He knew that the charge in the flight threads must be at least a third expended by now … perhaps more. He had no idea how much efficiency the mat lost with age.
The hills looked like the rough country southwest of the Sea of Grass, but there was no sight of the river. His comlog told him that it had been dark for only an hour or two, but the Consul could see no hint of sunset in the west. The skies were overcast, shielding both starlight and any space battles from sight.
“Damn,” whispered the Consul. He walked around until circulation returned, urinated at the edge of a small drop-off, and returned to his mat to drink from a water bottle. Think.
He had set the mat on a southwesterly course that should have left the Sea of Grass at or near the port city of Edge. If he had simply overflown Edge and the river while he slept, the river would be somewhere to his south, off to his left. But if he had aimed poorly as he left Pilgrims’ Rest, been just a few degrees off to his left, then the river would be winding northeast somewhere to his right. Even if he went the wrong way, he eventually would find a landmark—the coast of the Northern Mane if nothing else—but the delay could cost him a full day.
The Consul kicked at a rock and folded his arms. The air was very cool after the heat of the day. A shiver made him realize that he was half-sick from sunburn. He touched his scalp and pulled his fingers away with a curse. Which way?
The wind whistled through low sage and sponge lichen. The Consul felt very far removed from the Time Tombs and the threat of the Shrike, but he felt the presence of Sol and Duré and Het Masteen and Brawne and the missing Silenus and Kassad as an urgent pressure on his shoulders. The Consul had joined the pilgrimage as a final act of nihilism, a pointless suicide to put an end to his own pain, pain at the loss of even the memory of wife and child, killed during the Hegemony’s machinations on Bressia, and pain at the knowledge of his terrible betrayal—betrayal of the government he had served for almost four decades, betrayal of the Ousters who had trusted him.
The Consul sat on a rock and felt that purposeless self-hatred fade as he thought of Sol and his infant child waiting in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He thought of Brawne, that brave woman, energy incarnate, lying helpless with that leechlike extension of the Shrike’s evil growing from her skull.
He sat, activated the mat, and rose to eight hundred meters, so close to the ceiling of clouds that he could have raised a hand and touched them.
A second’s break in the cloud cover far to his left showed a glint of ripple. The Hoolie lay about five klicks to the south.
The Consul banked the hawking mat steeply to his left, feeling the tired containment field trying to press him to the carpet but feeling safer with the ropes still attached. Ten minutes later, he was high over the water, swooping down to ascertain that it was the broad Hoolie rather than some tributary.
It was the Hoolie. Radiant gossamers glowed in the low, marshy areas along the banks. The tall, crenelated towers of architect ants cast ghostly silhouettes against a sky only slightly darker than the land.
The Consul rose to twenty meters, took a drink of water from his bottle, and headed downriver at full speed.
• • •
Sunrise found him below the village of Doukhobor’s Copse, almost to the Karla Locks, where the Royal Transport Canal cut west toward the northern urban settlements and the Mane. The Consul knew that it was less than a hundred and fifty klicks to the capital from here—but still a maddening seven hours away at the hawking mat’s slow pace. This was the point in the trip where he had hoped to find a military skimmer on patrol, one of the passenger dirigibles from the Copse of Naiad, even a fast powerboat he could commandeer. But there was no sign of life along the banks of the Hoolie except for the occasional burning building or ghee lamps in distant windows. The docks had been stripped of all boats. The river manta pens above the Locks were empty, the great gates open to the current, and no transport barges were lined up below where the river widened to twice its upriver size.
The Consul swore and flew on.
It was a beautiful morning as the sunrise illuminated the low clouds and made every bush and tree stand out in the low, horizontal light. It felt to the Consul as if it had been months since he had seen real vegetation. Weirwood and halfoak trees rose to majestic heights on the distant bluffs, while in the floodplain, the rich light caught the green shoots of a million periscope beans rising from their indigenie paddies. Womangrove root and firefern lined the banks, and each branch and twisting stood out in the sharp light of sunrise.
The clouds swallowed the sun. It began to rain. The Consul tugged on the battered tricorne, huddled under Kassad’s extra cloak, and flew on southward at a hundred meters.
The Consul tried to remember. How long did the child Rachel haw?
Despite his long sleep the day before, the Consul’s mind was heavy with fatigue toxins. Rachel had been four days old when they had arrived at the valley. That had been … four days ago.
The Consul rubbed his cheek, reached for a water bottle, and found them all empty. He could easily dip down and refill the bottles in the river, but he did not want to take the time. His sunburn ached and made him shiver as the rain dripped from his cap.
Sol said that as long as I’m back by nightfall it would be all right. Rachel was born after twenty-hundred hours, translated to Hyperion time. If that’s right, if there’s no error, she has until eight tonight. The Consul rubbed water from his cheeks and eyebrows. Say seven more hours to Keats. An hour or two to liberate the ship. Theo will help … he’s Governor-General now. I can convince him that it’s in the Hegemony’s interest to countervene Gladstone’s orders to quarantine the ship. If necessary, I’ll tell him that she ordered me to conspire with the Ousters to betray the Web.
Say, ten hours plus the fifteen-minute flight in the ship. Should be at least an hour to spare before sunset. Rachel will be only a few minutes old, but … what? What do we try besides the cryogenic fugue lockers? Nothing. It has to be that. It was always Sol’s last chance, despite the doctors warnings that it might kill the child. But then, what about Brawne?
The Consul was thirsty. He pulled back the cloak, but the rain had lessened to the point that it was a fine drizzle, just enough to wet his lips and tongue to make him more thirsty. He cursed softly and began to descend slowly. Perhaps he could hover over the river just long enough to fill his bottle.
The hawking mat quit flying thirty meters above the river. One second it was descending gradually, as smooth as a carpet on a gentle glass incline, and the next instant it was tumbling and plummeting out of control, a two-meter rug and terrified man thrown out of the window of a ten-story building.
The Consul screamed and tried to jump free, but the rope connecting him to the carpet and the duffel strap tied to his belt tangled him in the flapping mass of hawking mat, and he fell with it, tumbling and twisting, the final twenty meters to the hard surface of the waiting Hoolie River.
TWENTY-NINE
Sol Weintraub had high hopes the night the Consul left. At long last, they were doing something. Or trying to. Sol did not believe that the cryogenic vaults of the Consul’s ship would be the answer to saving Rachel—medical experts on Renaissance Vector had pointed out the extreme danger of that procedure—but it was good to have an alternative, any alternative. And Sol felt that they had been passive long enough, awaiting the Shrike’s pleasure like condemned criminals awaiting the guillotine.
The interior of the Sphinx seemed too treacherous this night, and Sol brought their possessions out on the broad granite porch of the tomb, where he and Duré sought to make Masteen and
Brawne comfortable under blankets and capes, with packs for pillows. Brawne’s medical monitors continued to show no brain activity whatsoever, while her body rested comfortably. Masteen turned and tossed in the grip of fever.
“What do you think the Templar’s problem is?” asked Duré. “Disease?”
“It could be simple exposure,” said Sol. “After being abducted from the windwagon, he found himself wandering in the barrens and here in the Valley of the Time Tombs. He was eating snow for liquid and had no food at all.”
Duré nodded and checked the FORCE medpatch they had attached to the inside of Masteen’s arm. The telltales showed the steady drip of intravenous solution. “But it seems to be something else,” said the Jesuit. “Almost a madness.”
“Templars have an almost telepathic connection to their treeships,” said Sol. “It must have driven Voice of the Tree Masteen a bit mad when he watched the destruction of the Yggdrasill. Especially if he somehow knew it was necessary.”
Duré nodded and continued sponging the Templar’s waxy forehead. It was after midnight, and the wind had come up, moving vermilion dust in lazy spirals and moaning around the wings and rough edges of the Sphinx. The Tombs glowed brightly and then dimmed, now one tomb, then the next, in no apparent order or sequence. Occasionally the tug of time tides would assail both men, making them gasp and grip the stone, but the wave of déjà vu and vertigo would fade after a moment. With Brawne Lamia attached to the Sphinx via the cable welded to her skull, they could not leave.