by Dan Simmons
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the Hegemony of Man and its Protectorate and allies were to last ten thousand years, humankind will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”
Somewhere in the silent, fresh-smelling city below, shooting began. First came the rattle of fléchette guns, then the deep hum of antiriot stunners, then screams and the sizzle of weapon lasers. The crowd on the Promenade surged forward toward the terminex, but riot police emerged from the park, switched on powerful halogen searchlights which bathed the crowd in glare, and began ordering them through bullhorns to resume lines or disperse. The crowd hesitated, surged back and forth like a jellyfish caught in tricky currents, and then—spurred on by the sound of firing, louder and closer now—surged forward toward the portal platforms.
The riot cops fired tear gas and vertigo cannisters. Between the mob and the farcaster, violet interdiction fields whined into existence. A flight of military EMVs and security skimmers came in low over the city, searchlights stabbing downward. One of the beams of light caught me, held me until my comlog winked at an interrogation signal, and then moved on. It began to rain.
So much for equanimity.
The police had secured the Rifkin Heights public terminex and were stepping through the private Atmospheric Protectorate portal I had used. I decided to go elsewhere.
There were FORCE commandos guarding the halls of Government House, screening the farcaster arrivals despite the fact that this portal was one of the most difficult to access in the Web. I passed through three checkpoints before reaching the executive/residential wing where my apartments were. Suddenly, guards stepped out to empty the main hall and secure its tributaries, and Gladstone swept by accompanied by a swirling crowd of advisors, aides, and military leaders. Surprisingly, she saw me, brought her retinue to a clumsy halt, and spoke to me through the barricade of combat-armored Marines.
“How did you like the speech, M. No Man?”
“Fine,” I said. “Stirring. And stolen from Winston Churchill if I’m not mistaken.”
Gladstone smiled and shrugged slightly. “If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters.” The smile faded. “What is the news from the frontier?”
“The reality is just beginning to sink in,” I said. “Expect panic.”
“I always do,” said the CEO. “What news have you from the pilgrims?”
I was surprised. “The pilgrims? I haven’t been … dreaming.”
The current of Gladstone’s retinue and impending events began to sweep her away down the hall. “Perhaps you no longer need to sleep to dream,” she called. “Try it.”
I watched her go, was released to seek out my suite, found the door, and turned away in disgust with myself. I was retreating in fear and shock from the terror descending on us all. I would be quite happy to lie in bed, avoiding sleep, the covers pulled tight to my chin while I wept for the Web, for the child Rachel, and for myself.
I left the residential wing and found my way out to the central garden, wandering down graveled paths. Tiny microremotes buzzed like bees through the air, one pacing me as I passed through the rose garden, into the area where a sunken path twisted through steamy tropical plants, and into the Old Earth section near the bridge. I sat on the stone bench where Gladstone and I had talked.
Perhaps you no longer need to sleep to dream. Try it.
I pulled my feet up on the bench, touched my chin to my knees, set fingertips against my temples, and closed my eyes.
THIRTY-TWO
Martin Silenus twists and writhes in the pure poetry of pain. A steel thorn two meters long enters his body between his shoulder blades and passes out through his chest, extending to a point a terrible, tapering meter beyond him. His flailing arms cannot touch the point. The thorn is frictionless, his sweaty palms and curling fingers can find no purchase there. Despite the thorn’s slickness to the touch, his body does not slide; he is as firmly impaled as a butterfly pinned for exhibition.
There is no blood.
In the hours after rationality returned through the mad haze of pain, Martin Silenus wondered about that. There is no blood. But there is pain. Oh yes, there is pain in abundance here—pain beyond the poet’s wildest imaginings of what pain was, pain beyond human endurance and the boundaries of suffering.
But Silenus endures. And Silenus suffers.
He screams for the thousandth time, a ragged sound, empty of content, free of language, even obscenities. Words fail to convey such agony. Silenus screams and writhes. After a while, he hangs limply, the long thorn bouncing slightly in response to his gyrations. Other people hang above, below, and behind him, but Silenus spends little time observing them. Each is separated by his or her own private cocoon of agony.
“Why this is hell,” thinks Silenus, quoting Marlowe, “nor am I out of it.”
But he knows it is not hell. Nor any afterlife. But he also knows that it is not some subbranch of reality; the thorn passes through his body! Eight centimeters of organic steel through his chest! But he has not died. He does not bleed. This place was somewhere and something, but it was not hell and it was not living.
Time was strange here. Silenus had known time to stretch and slow before—the agony of the exposed nerve in the dentist’s chair, the kidney-stone pain in the Med clinic waiting room—time could slow, seem not to move as the hands of an outraged biological clock stood still in shock. But time did move then. The root canal was finished. The ultramorph finally arrived, took effect. But here the very air is frozen in the absence of time. Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break.
Silenus screams in anger and pain. And writhes upon his thorn.
“Goddamn!” he manages at last. “Goddamn motherfuck sonofabitch.” The words are relics of a different life, artifacts from the dream he had lived before the reality of the tree. Silenus only half remembers that life, as he only half remembers the Shrike carrying him here, impaling him here, leaving him here.
“Oh God!” screams the poet and clutches at the thorn with both hands, trying to lever himself up to relieve the great weight of his body which adds so immeasurably to the unmeasurable pain.
There is a landscape below. He can see for miles. It is a frozen, papier-mâché diorama of the Valley of the Time Tombs and the desert beyond. Even the dead city and the distant mountains are reproduced in plasticized, sterile miniature. It does not matter. For Martin Silenus there is only the tree and the pain, and the two are indivisible. Silenus shows his teeth in a pain-cracked smile. When he was a child on Old Earth, he and Amalfi Schwartz, his best friend, had visited a commune of Christians in the North American Preserve, learned their crude theology, and afterward had made many jokes about crucifixion. Young Martin had spread his arms wide, crossed his legs, lifted his head, and said, “Gee, I can see the whole town from up here.” Amalfi had roared.
Silenus screams.
Time does not truly pass, but after a while Silenus’s mind returns to something resembling linear observation … something other than the scattered oases of clear, pure agony separated by the desert of mindlessly received agony … and in that linear perception of his own pain, Silenus begins to impose time on this timeless place.
First, the obscenities add clarity to his pain. Shouting hurts, but his anger clears and clarifies.
Then, in the exhausted times between shouting or pure spasms of pain, Silenus allows himself thought. At first it is merely an effort to sequence, to recite the times tables in his mind, anything to separate the agony of ten seconds ago from the agony yet to come. Silenus discovers that in the effort of concentrating, the agony is lessened slightly—still unbearable, still driving all true thought like wisps before a wind, but lessened some indefinable amount.
So Silenus concentrates. He screams and rails and writhes, but he concentrates. Since there is nothing else to concentrate on, he concentrates on the pain.
Pain, he discovers, has a structure. It has a floor plan. It ha
s designs more intricate than a chambered nautilus, features more baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral. Even as he screams, Martin Silenus studies the structure of this pain. He realizes that it is a poem.
Silenus arches his body and neck for the ten-thousandth time, seeking relief where no relief is possible, but this time he sees a familiar form five meters above him, hanging from a similar thorn, twisting in the unreal breeze of agony.
“Billy!” gasps Martin Silenus, his first true thought.
His former liege lord and patron stares across a sightless abyss, made blind with the pain that had blinded Silenus, but turning slightly as if in response to the call of his name in this place beyond names.
“Billy!” cries Silenus again and then loses vision and thought to the pain. He concentrates on the structure of pain, following its patterns as if he were tracing the trunk and branches and twigs and thorns of the tree itself. “My lord!”
Silenus hears a voice above the screams and is amazed to find that both the screams and the voice are his:
… Thou art a dreaming thing;
A fever of thyself—think of the Earth;
What bliss even in hope is there for thee?
What haven? every creature hath its home;
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low—
The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
He knows the verse, not his, John Keats’s, and feels the words further structuring the seeming chaos of pain around him. Silenus understands that the pain has been with him since birth—the universe’s gift to a poet. It is a physical reflection of the pain he has felt and futilely tried to set to verse, to pin down with prose, all those useless years of life. It is worse than pain; it is unhappiness because the universe offers pain to all.
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve!
Silenus shouts it but does not scream. The roar of pain from the tree, more psychic than physical, abates for the barest fraction of a second. There is an island of distraction amidst this ocean of single-mindedness.
“Martin!”
Silenus arches, lifts his head, tried to focus through the haze of pain. Sad King Billy is looking at him. Looking.
Sad King Billy croaks a syllable which, after an endless moment, Silenus recognizes as “More!”
Silenus screams in agony, writhes in a palsied spasm of mindless physical response, but when he stops, dangling in exhaustion, the pain not lessened but driven from the motor areas of his brain by fatigue toxins, he allows the voice within him to shout and whisper its song:
Spirit here that reignest!
Spirit here that painest!
Spirit here that burnest!
Spirit here that mournest!
Spirit! I bow
My forehead low,
Enshaded with thy pinions!
Spirit! I look
All passion-struck
Into thy pale dominions!
The small circle of silence widens to include several nearby branches, a handful of thorns carrying their clusters of human beings in extremis.
Silenus stares up at Sad King Billy and sees his betrayed lord open his sad eyes. For the first time in more than two centuries, patron and poet look upon one another. Silenus delivers the message that has brought him here, hung him here. “My lord, I’m sorry.”
Before Billy can respond, before the chorus of screaming drowns out any response, the air changes, the sense of frozen time stirs, and the tree shakes, as if the entire thing has dropped a meter. Silenus screams with the others as the branch shakes and the impaling thorn tears at his insides, rends his flesh anew.
Silenus opens his eyes and sees that the sky is real, the desert real, the Tombs glowing, the wind blowing, and time begun again. There is no lessening of torment, but clarity has returned.
Martin Silenus laughs through tears. “Look, Mom!” he shouts, giggling, the steel spear still protruding a meter beyond his shattered chest, “I can see the whole town from up here!”
“M. Severn? Are you all right?”
Panting, on my hands and knees, I turned toward the voice. Opening my eyes was painful, but no pain could compare to what I had just experienced.
“Are you all right, sir?”
No one was near me in the garden. The voice came from a microremote that buzzed half a meter from my face, probably one of the security people somewhere in Government House.
“Yes,” I managed, getting to my feet and brushing gravel from my knees. “I’m fine. A sudden … pain.”
“Medical help can be there in two minutes, sir. Your biomonitor reports no organic difficulty, but we can—”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine. Leave it be. And leave me alone.”
The remote fluttered like a nervous hummingbird. “Yes, sir. Just call if you need anything. The garden and grounds monitor will respond.”
“Go away,” I said.
I went out of the gardens, through the main hall of Government House—all checkpoints and security guards now—and out across the landscaped acres of Deer Park.
The dock area was quiet, the River Tethys more still than I had ever seen it. “What’s happening?” I asked one of the security people on the pier.
The guard accessed my comlog, confirmed my executive override pip and CEO clearance, but still did not hurry to answer. “The portals’ve been turned off for TC2,” he drawled. “Bypassed.”
“Bypassed? You mean the river doesn’t flow through Tau Ceti Center anymore?”
“Right.” He flipped his visor down as a small boat approached, flipped it up when he identified the two security people in it.
“Can I get out that way?” I pointed upriver to where the tall portals showed an opaque curtain of gray.
The guard shrugged. “Yeah. But you won’t be allowed back that way.”
“That’s all right. Can I take that small boat?”
The guard whispered into his bead mike and nodded. “Go ahead.”
I stepped gingerly into the small craft, sat on the rear bench and held onto the gunwales until the rocking subsided, touched the power diskey and said, “Start.”
The electric jets hummed, the small launch untied itself and pointed its nose into the river, and I pointed the way upstream.
I had never heard of part of River Tethys being cordoned off, but the farcaster curtain was now definitely a one-way and semipermeable membrane. The boat hummed through, and I shrugged off the tingling sensation and looked around.
I was in one of the great canal cities—Ardmen or Pamolo, perhaps—on Renaissance Vector. The Tethys here was a main street from which many tributaries flowed. Ordinarily, the only river traffic here would be the tourist gondolas on the outer lanes and the yachts and go-everywheres of the very rich in the pass-through center lanes. Today it was a madhouse.
Boats of every size and description clogged the center channels, boats headed in both directions. Houseboats were piled high with belongings, smaller craft were so heavily laden that it looked like the smallest wave or wake would capsize them. Hundreds of ornamental junks from Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna and million-mark river condobarges from Fuji vied for their share of the river; I guessed that few of these residential boats had ever left their tie-ups before. Amidst the riot of wood and plasteel and Perspex, go-everywheres moved by like silver eggs, their containment fields set to full reflection.
I queried the datasphere: Renaissance Vector was a second-wave world, one hundred and seven hours from invasion. I thought it odd that Fuji refugees were crowding the waterways here since that world had more than two hundred hours until the axe fell, but then I realized that except for the removal of TC2 from the waterway, the river still flowed through its usual series of worlds. Refugees from Fuji had taken the river from Tsingtao, thirty-three h
ours from the Ousters, through Deneb Drei at a hundred forty-seven hours, through Renaissance Vector toward Parsimony or Grass, both unthreatened at this time. I shook my head, found a relatively sane tributary street from which to watch the madness, and wondered when the authorities would reroute the river so that all threatened worlds flowed to sanctuary.
Can they do that? I wondered, the TechnoCore had installed River Tethys as a gift to the Hegemony during its PentaCentennial. But surely Gladstone or someone had thought to ask the Core to aid in the evacuation. Had they? I wondered. Would the Core help? I knew that Gladstone was convinced that elements of the Core were intent upon eliminating the human species—this war had been her Hobson’s choice given that alternative. What a simple way for the antihuman Core elements to carry out their program—merely refuse to evacuate the billions threatened by the Ousters!
I had been smiling, however grimly, but that smile faded as I realized that the TechnoCore also maintained and controlled the farcaster grid that I depended on to get out of the threatened territories.
I had tied up the launch at the base of a stone stairway that descended into the brackish waters. I noticed green moss growing on the lowest stones. The stone steps themselves—possibly brought from Old Earth, since some of the classical cities were shipped via farcaster in the early years after the Big Mistake—were worn with age, and I could see a fine tracery of cracks connecting sparkling flecks there, looking like a schematic of the Worldweb.
It was very warm, and the air was too thick, too heavy. Renaissance Vector’s sun hung low above the gabled towers. The light was too red and too syrupy for my eyes. Noise from the Tethys was deafening even here, a hundred meters down the equivalent of an alley. Pigeons whirled in agitation between dark walls and overhanging eaves.
What can I do? Everyone seemed to be acting as the world slouched toward destruction, and the best I could do was wander aimlessly.
That’s your job. You’re an observer.
I rubbed my eyes. Who said that poets had to be observers? I thought of Li Po and George Wu leading their armies through China and writing some of the most sensitive verse in history while their soldiers slept. And at least Martin Silenus had led a long, eventful life, even if half the events were obscene and the other half wasted.