by Dan Simmons
The Shrike emerged. The thing had to bend to allow its three-meter bulk and steel blades to clear the top of the doorway. It stepped onto the top porch of the Sphinx and moved forward, part creature, part sculpture, walking with the terrible deliberation of nightmare.
The dying light above rippled on the thing’s carapace, cascaded down across curving breastplate to steel thorns there, shimmering on finger-blades and scalpels rising from every joint. Sol hugged Rachel to his chest and stared into the multifaceted red furnaces that passed for the Shrike’s eyes. The sunset faded into the blood-red glow of Sol’s recurrent dream.
The Shrike’s head turned slightly, swiveling without friction, rotating ninety degrees right, ninety degrees left, as if the creature were surveying its domain.
The Shrike took three steps forward, stopping less than two meters from Sol. The thing’s four arms twisted and rose, fingerblades uncurling.
Sol hugged Rachel tightly to him. Her skin was moist, her face bruised and blotched with the exertions of birth. Seconds remained. Her eyes tracked separately, seemed to focus on Sol.
Say yes, Daddy. Sol remembered the dream.
The Shrike’s head lowered until the ruby eyes in that terrible hood stared at nothing but Sol and his child. The quicksilver jaws parted slightly, showing layers and levels of steel teeth. Four hands came forward, metallic palms up, pausing half a meter from Sol’s face.
Say yes, Daddy. Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith—true faith—was trusting in that love.
Sol lifted his newborn and dying child, seconds old, shrieking now with her first and last breath, and handed her to the Shrike.
The absence of her slight weight struck Sol with a terrible vertigo.
The Shrike lifted Rachel, stepped backward, and was enveloped in light.
Behind the Sphinx, the tree of thorns ceased shimmering, shifted into phase with now, and came into terrible focus.
Sol stepped forward, arms imploring, as the Shrike stepped back into the radiance and was gone. Explosions rippled the clouds and slammed Sol to his knees with shock waves of pressure.
Behind him, around him, the Time Tombs were opening.
PART THREE
THIRTY-ONE
I awoke and was not pleased to be awakened.
Rolling over, squinting and cursing the sudden invasion of light, I saw Leigh Hunt sitting on the edge of the bed, an aerosol injector still in his hand.
“You took enough sleeping pills to keep you in bed all day,” he said. “Rise and shine.”
I sat up, rubbed the morning stubble on my cheeks, and squinted in Hunt’s direction. “Who the hell gave you the right to enter my room?” The effort of speaking started me coughing, and I did not stop until Hunt returned from the bathroom with a glass of water.
“Here.”
I drank, vainly trying to project anger and outrage between spasms of coughing. The remnants of dreams fled like morning mists. I felt a terrible sense of loss descend.
“Get dressed,” said Hunt, standing. “The CEO wants you in her chambers in twenty minutes. While you’ve been sleeping, things have been happening.”
“What things?” I rubbed my eyes and ran fingers through my tousled hair.
Hunt smiled tightly. “Access the datasphere. Then get down to Gladstone’s chambers soonest. Twenty minutes, Severn.” He left.
I accessed the datasphere. One way to visualize one’s entry point to the datasphere is to imagine a patch of Old Earth’s ocean in varying degrees of turbulence. Normal days tended to show a placid sea with interesting patterns of ripples. Crises showed chop and whitecaps. Today there was a hurricane under way. Entry was delayed to any access route, confusion reigned in breaking waves of update surges, the datumplane matrix was wild with storage shifts and major credit transfers, and the All Thing, normally a multilayered buzz of information and political debate, was a raging wind of confusion, abandoned referenda and obsolete position templates blowing by like tattered clouds.
“Dear God,” I whispered, breaking access but feeling the pressure of the information surge still pounding at my implant circuits and brain. War. Surprise attack. Imminent destruction of the Web. Talk of impeaching Gladstone. Riots on a score of worlds. Shrike Cult uprisings on Lusus. The FORCE fleet abandoning Hyperion system in a desperate rearguard action, but too late, too late. Hyperion already under attack. Fear of farcaster incursion.
I rose, ran naked to the shower, and sonicked in record time. Hunt or someone had laid out a formal gray suit and cape, and I dressed in a hurry, brushing back my wet hair so that damp curls fell to my collar.
It wouldn’t do to keep the CEO of the Hegemony of Man waiting. Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all.
“It’s about time you got here,” said Meina Gladstone as I entered her private chambers.
“What the fuck have you done?” I snapped.
Gladstone blinked. Evidently the CEO of the Hegemony of Man was not used to being spoken to in that tone. Tough shit, I thought.
“Remember who you are and to whom you’re speaking,” Gladstone said coldly.
“I don’t know who I am. And I may be speaking to the greatest mass murderer since Horace Glennon-Height. Why the hell did you allow this war to happen?”
Gladstone blinked again and looked around. We were alone. Her sitting room was long and pleasantly dark and hung with original art from Old Earth. At that moment I didn’t care if I was in a room filled with original van Goghs. I stared at Gladstone, the Lincolnesque face merely that of an old woman in the thin light through the blinds. She returned my gaze for a moment, then looked away again.
“I apologize,” I snapped, no apology in my voice, “you didn’t allow it, you made it happen, didn’t you?”
“No, Severn, I did not make it happen.” Gladstone’s voice was hushed, almost a whisper.
“Speak up,” I said. I paced back and forth near the tall windows, watching the light from the blinds move across me like painted stripes. “And I’m not Joseph Severn.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Shall I call you M. Keats?”
“You can call me No Man,” I said. “So that when the other cyclopes come, you can say that No Man has blinded you, and they will go away, saying that it’s the will of the gods. ”
“Do you plan to blind me?”
“Right now I could wring your neck and walk away without a twinge of remorse. Millions will die before this week is out. How could you have allowed it?”
Gladstone touched her lower lip. “The future branches only two directions,” she said softly. “War and total uncertainty, or peace and totally certain annihilation. I chose war.”
“Who says this?” There was more curiosity than anger in my voice now.
“It is a fact.” She glanced at her comlog. “In ten minutes I have to go before the Senate to declare war. Tell me the news of the Hyperion pilgrims.”
I crossed my arms and stared down at her. “I will tell you if you promise to do something.”
“I will if I can.”
I paused, realized that no amount of leverage in the universe could make this woman write a blank check on her word. “All right,” I said. “I want you to fatline Hyperion, release the hold you have on the Consul’s ship, and send someone up the Hoolie River to find the Consul himself. He’s about a hundred and thirty klicks from the capital, above the Karla Locks. He may be hurt.”
Gladstone crooked a finger, rubbed her lip, and nodded. “I will send someone to find him. Releasing the ship depends upon what else you have to tell me. Are the others alive?”
I curled my short cape around me and collapsed on a couch across from her. “Some are.”
“Byron Lamia’s daughter? Brawne?”
“The Shrike took her. For a while, she was unconscious, connected to some sort of neural shunt to the datasphere. I dreamed … she was floating so
mewhere, reunited with the implant persona of the first Keats retrieval personality. Just entering the datasphere … the megasphere really, Core connections and dimensions I never dreamed of as well as the accessible ’sphere.”
“Is she alive now?” Gladstone leaned forward, intense.
“I don’t know. Her body disappeared. I was awakened before I saw where her persona entered the megasphere.”
Gladstone nodded. “What about the Colonel?”
“Kassad was taken somewhere by Moneta, the human female who seems to reside in the Tombs as they travel through time. The last I saw of him, he was attacking the Shrike barehanded. Shrikes, actually, there were thousands of them.”
“Did he survive?”
I opened my hands. “I don’t know. These were dreams. Fragments. Bits and pieces of perception.”
“The poet?”
“Silenus was carried off by the Shrike. Impaled on the tree of thorns. But I glimpsed him there later in Kassad’s dream. Silenus was still alive. I don’t know how.”
“So the tree of thorns is real, not merely Shrike Cult propaganda?”
“Oh yes, it’s real.”
“And the Consul left? Tried to return to the capital?”
“He had his grandmother’s hawking mat. It worked all right until he reached the place near Karla Locks I mentioned. It … and he … fell into the river.” I preempted her next question. “I don’t know if he survived.”
“And the priest? Father Hoyt?”
“The cruciform brought him back as Father Duré.”
“Is it Father Duré? Or a mindless duplicate?”
“It’s Duré,” I said. “But … damaged. Discouraged.”
“And he is still in the valley?”
“No. He disappeared in one of the Cave Tombs. I don’t know what happened to him.”
Gladstone glanced at her comlog. I tried to imagine the confusion and chaos which reigned in the rest of this building … this world … in the Web. The CEO obviously had retreated here for fifteen minutes prior to her speech to the Senate. It might be the last such solitude she would see for the next several weeks. Perhaps ever.
“Captain Masteen?”
“Dead. Buried in the valley.”
She took a breath. “And Weintraub and the child?”
I shook my head. “I dreamed things out of sequence … out of time. I think it’s already happened, but I’m confused.” I looked up. Gladstone was waiting patiently. “The baby was only a few seconds old when the Shrike came,” I said. “Sol offered her to the thing. I think it took her into the Sphinx. The Tombs were glowing very brightly. There were … other Shrikes … emerging.”
“The Tombs have opened, then?”
“Yes.”
Gladstone touched her comlog. “Leigh? Have the duty officer in the communications center contact Theo Lane and the necessary FORCE people on Hyperion. Release the ship we have in quarantine. Also, Leigh, tell the Governor-General that I will have a personal message for him in a few minutes.” The instrument chirped and she looked back at me. “Is there anything else from your dreams?”
“Images. Words. I don’t understand what’s going on. Those are the high points.”
Gladstone smiled slightly. “Are you aware that you are dreaming events beyond the range of the other Keats persona’s experience?”
I said nothing, stunned with the shock of what she said. My contact with the pilgrims had been possible through some Core-based connection to the persona implant in Brawne’s Schrön loop, through it and the primitive datasphere they had shared. But the persona had been liberated; the datasphere destroyed by separation and distance. Even a fatline receiver cannot receive messages when there is no transmitter.
Gladstone’s smile disappeared. “Can you explain this?”
“No.” I looked up. “Perhaps they were only dreams. Real dreams.”
She stood. “Perhaps we’ll know when and if we find the Consul. Or when his ship arrives in the valley. I have two minutes before I appear in the Senate. Is there anything else?”
“A question,” I said. “Who am I? Why am I here?”
The slight smile again. “We all ask those questions, M. Sev—M. Keats.”
“I’m serious. I think you know better than I.”
“The Core sent you to be my liaison with the pilgrims. And to observe. You are, after all, a poet and artist.”
I made a noise and stood. We walked slowly toward the private farcaster portal that would take her to the Senate floor. “What good does observation do when it’s the end of the world?”
“Find out,” said Gladstone. “Go see the end of the world.” She handed me a microcard for my comlog. I inserted it, glanced at the diskey; it was a universal authorization chip, allowing me access to all portals, public, private, or military. It was a ticket to the end of the world.
I said, “What if I get killed?”
“Then we will never hear the answers to your questions,” said CEO Gladstone. She touched my wrist fleetingly, turned her back, and stepped through the portal.
For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist’s room at Arles. Madness is not a new invention.
After a while, I left, let my comlog memory guide me through the maze of Government House until I found the central farcaster terminex, and stepped through to find the end of the world.
There were two full-access farcaster pathways through the Web: the Concourse and River Tethys. I ’cast to the Concourse where the half-kilometer strip of Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna connected to New Earth and the short seaside strip of Nevermore. Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna was a first-wave world, thirty-four hours away from the Ouster onslaught. New Earth had been on the second-wave list, even now being announced, and had a little over a standard week before invasion. Nevermore was deep in the Web, years away from attack.
There were no signs of panic. People were taking to the datasphere and All Thing rather than the streets. Walking the narrow lanes of Tsingtao, I could hear Gladstone’s voice from a thousand receivers and personal comlogs, a strange verbal undertone to the shouts of street vendors and hiss of tires on wet pavement as electric rickshaws hummed overhead on the transport levels.
“… as another leader told his people on the eve of attack almost eight centuries ago— ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ You ask, what is our policy? I say to you: It is to wage war, in space, on land, in the air, by sea, wage war with all our might and with all the strength justice and right can give us. That is our policy … ”
There were FORCE troops near the translation zone between Tsingtao and Nevermore, but the flow of pedestrians seemed normal enough. I wondered when the military would commandeer the pedestrian mall of the Concourse for vehicular traffic and if it would be headed toward the front or away.
I stepped through to Nevermore. The streets were dry there, except for the occasional spray from the ocean thirty meters below the stone ramparts of the Concourse. The sky was its usual tones of threatening ochre and gray, ominous twilight in the middle of the day Small stone shops glowed with light and merchandise. I was aware that the streets were emptier than usual; people standing in shops or sitting on stone walls or benches, heads bowed and eyes distracted as they listened.
“… you ask, what is our aim? I answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival … ”
The lines at Edgartown’s main terminex were short. I coded for Mare Infinitus and stepped through.
The skies were their usual cloudless green, the ocean beneath the float city a deeper green Kelp farms floated to the horizon. The crowds this far from the Concourse were even smaller; the boardwalks were almost empty, some shops closed. A group of men stood near a kipboat dock and listened to a
n antique fatline receiver. Gladstone’s voice was flat and metallic in the sea-rich air.
“… even now, units of FORCE move relentlessly to their stations, firm in their resolve and confident in their ability to rescue not only the threatened worlds but all of the Hegemony of Man from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny ever to stain the annals of history.… ”
Mare Infinitus was eighteen hours from invasion. I looked skyward, half-expecting to see some sign of the enemy swarm, some indication of orbital defenses, spaceborne troop movements. There was only the sky, the warm day, and the gentle rocking of the city on the sea.
Heaven’s Gate was the first world on the list of invasion. I stepped through the Mudflat VIP portal and looked down from Rifkin Heights at the beautiful city which belied its name. It was deep night, so late the mech street sweepers were out, their brushes and sonics humming against cobblestone, but here there was movement, long lines of silent people at the Rifkin Heights public terminex and even longer lines visible below at the Promenade portals. Local police were in evidence, tall figures in brown impact coveralls, but if FORCE units were rushing to reinforce this area, they were invisible.
The people in the lines were not local residents—the Rifkin Heights and Promenade landowners almost certainly had private portals—but looked to be workers from the reclamation projects many klicks out beyond the fern forest and parks. There was no panic and very little conversation. The lines filed past with the patient stoicism of families shuffling toward a theme park attraction. Few carried anything larger than a travel bag or backpack.
Have we attained such equanimity, I wondered, that we handle ourselves with dignity even in the face of invasion?
Heaven’s Gate was thirteen hours from H-hour. I keyed my comlog to the All Thing.
… if we can meet this threat, then worlds we love may remain free and the life of the Web may move forward into the sunlit future. But if we fail, then the whole Web, the Hegemony, everything we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made infinitely more sinister and protracted by the lights of science perverted and human freedom denied.