by Dan Simmons
—Agreed.
—Can I go first, Johnny?
Brawne watches her lover’s analog bow slightly and make a you-first gesture and then she returns her attention to the energy megalith:
—Who killed my father? Senator Byron Lamia?
[Elements of the Core authorized it Myself included]
—Why? What did he do to you?
[He insisted on bringing Hyperion into the equation before it could be tactored/predicted/absorbed]
—Why? Did he know what you just told us?
[He knew only that the Volatiles were pressing for quick
extinction
of humankind
He passed this knowledge
to his colleague
Gladstone]
—Then why haven’t you murdered her?
[Some of us have precluded
that possibility/inevitability
The time is right now
for the Hyperion Variable
to be played]
—Who murdered Johnny’s first cybrid? Attacked his Core persona?
[I did It was
Ummon’s will which prevailed]
—Why?
[We created him
We found it necessary to discontinue him
for a while
Your lover is a persona retrieved
from a humankind poet
now long dead
Except for the Ultimate Intelligence Project
no effort has been
so complicated
nor little understood
as this resurrection
Like your kind/
we usually destroy
what we cannot understand]
Johnny raises his fists toward the megalith:
—But there is another of me. You failed!
[Not failure You had to be destroyed
so that the other
might live]
—But I am not destroyed! cries Johnny.
[Yes
You are]
The megalith seizes Johnny with a second massive pseudopod before Brawne can either react or touch her poet lover a final time. Johnny twists a second in the AI’s massive grip, and then his analog—Keats’s small but beautiful body—-is torn, compacted, smashed into an unrecognizable mass which Ummon sets against his megalith flesh, absorbing the analog’s remains back into the orange-and-red depths of itself.
Brawne falls to her knees and weeps. She wills rage … prays for a shield of anger … but feels only loss.
Ummon turns his gaze on her. The egg-chamber ovoid collapses, allowing the din and electric insanity of the megasphere to surround them.
[Go away now
Play out the last
of this act
so that we may live
or sleep
as fate decrees]
—Fuck you! Brawne pounds the palm-platform on which she kneels, kicks and pummels the pseudoflesh beneath her. You’re a goddamned loser! You and all your fucking AI pals. And our UI can beat your UI any day of the week!
[That is
doubtful]
—We built you, Buster. And well find your Core. And when we do we’ll tear your silicon guts out!
[I have no silicon guts/organs/internal components]
—And another thing, screams Brawne, still slashing at the megalith with her hands and nails. You’re a piss-poor storyteller. Not a tenth the poet that Johnny is! You couldn’t tell a straightforward tale if your stupid Al ass depended—
[Go away]
Ummon the AI megalith drops her, sending her analog tumbling and falling into the upless and downless crackling immensity of the megasphere.
Brawne is buffeted by data traffic, almost trod upon by AIs the size of Old Earth’s moon, but even as she tumbles and blows with the winds of dataflow, she senses a light in the distance, cold but beckoning, and knows that neither life nor the Shrike is finished with her.
And she is not finished with them.
Following the cold glow, Brawne Lamia heads home.
THIRTY-FOUR
Are you all right, sir?”
I realized that I had doubled over in the chair, my elbows on my knees, my fingers curled through my hair, gripping fiercely, palms pressed hard against the sides of my head. I sat up, stared at the archivist.
“You cried out, sir. I thought that perhaps something was wrong.”
“No,” I said. I cleared my throat and tried again. “No, it’s all right. A headache.” I looked down in confusion. Every joint in my body ached. My comlog must have malfunctioned, because it said that eight hours had elapsed since I first entered the library.
“What time is it?” I asked the archivist. “Web standard?”
He told me. Eight hours had elapsed. I rubbed my face again, and my fingers came away slick with sweat. “I must be keeping you past closing time,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It is no problem,” said the little man. “I am pleased to keep the archives open late for scholars.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Especially today. With all of the confusion, there is little incentive to go home.”
“Confusion,” I said, forgetting everything for a moment … everything except the nightmarish dream of Brawne Lamia, the AI named Ummon, and the death of my Keats-persona counterpart. “Oh, the war. What is the news?”
The archivist shook his head:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I smiled at the archivist. “And do you believe that some ‘rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’?”
The archivist did not smile. “Yes, sir, I do.”
I stood and moved past the vacuum-press display cases, not looking down at my handwriting on parchment nine hundred years old. “You may be right,” I said. “You may well be right.”
It was late; the parking lot was empty except for the wreck of my stolen Vikken Scenic and a single, ornate EMV sedan obviously handcrafted here on Renaissance Vector.
“Can I drop you somewhere, sir?”
I breathed in the cool night air, smelling the fish-and-spilled-oil scent of the canals. “No thanks, I’ll cast home.”
The archivist shook his head. “That may be difficult, sir. All of the public terminexes have been placed under martial law. There have been … riots.” The word was obviously distasteful to the little archivist, a man who seemed to value order and continuity above most things. “Come,” he said, “I’ll give you a lift to a private farcaster.”
I squinted at him. In another era on Old Earth, he would have been the head monk in a monastery devoted to saving the few remnants of a classical past. I glanced at the old archives building behind him and realized that indeed he was just that.
“What is your name?” I asked, no longer caring if I should have known it because the other Keats cybrid had known it.
“Ewdrad B. Tynar,” he said, blinking at my extended hand and then taking it. His handshake was firm.
“I’m … Joseph Severn.” I couldn’t very well tell him that I was the technological reincarnation of the man whose literary crypt we had just left.
M. Tynar hesitated only a fraction of a second before nodding, but I realized that to a scholar such as he, the name of the artist who was with Keats at his death would be no disguise.
“What about Hyperion?” I asked.
“Hyperion? Oh, the Protectorate world where the space fleet went a few days ago. Well, I understand that there’s been some trouble recalling the necessary warships. The fighting has been very fierce there. Hyperion, I mean. Odd, I was just thinking of Keats and his unfinished masterwork. Strange how these small coincidences seem to crop up.”
“Has it b
een invaded? Hyperion?”
M. Tynar had stopped by his EMV, and now he laid his hand on the palmlock on the driver’s side. Doors lifted and accordioned inward. I lowered myself into the sandalwood-and-leather smell of the passenger cell; Tynar’s car smelled like the archives, like Tynar himself, I realized, as the archivist reclined in the driver’s seat next to me.
“I don’t really know if it’s been invaded,” he said, sealing the doors and activating the vehicle with a touch and command. Under the sandalwood-and-leather scent, the cockpit had that new-car smell of fresh polymers and ozone, lubricants and energy which had seduced mankind for almost a millennium. “It’s so hard to access properly today,” he continued, “the datasphere is more overloaded than I’ve ever seen it. This afternoon I actually had to wait for a query on Robinson Jeffers!”
We lifted out and over the canal, right over a public square much like the one where I’d almost been killed earlier this day, and leveled off on a lower flyway three hundred meters above the rooftops. The city was pretty at night: most of the ancient buildings were outlined in old-fashioned glowstrips, and there were more street lamps than advertising holos. But I could see crowds surging in side streets, and there were Renaissance SDF military vehicles hovering over the main avenues and terminex squares. Tynar’s EMV was queried twice for ID, once by local traffic control and again by a human, FORCE-confident voice.
We flew on.
“The archives doesn’t have a farcaster?” I said, looking off in the distance to where fires seemed to be burning.
“No. There was no need. We have few visitors, and the scholars who do come do not mind the walk of a few blocks.”
“Where’s the private farcaster that you think I might be able to use?”
“Here,” said the archivist. We dropped out of the flyway and circled a low building, no more than thirty stories, and settled onto an extruded landing flange just where the Glennon-Height Period Deco flanges grew out of stone and plasteel. “My order keeps its residence here,” he said. “I belong to a forgotten branch of Christianity called Catholicism.” He looked embarrassed. “But you are a scholar, M. Severn. You must know of our Church from the old days.”
“I know of it from more than books,” I said. “Is there an order of priests here?”
Tynar smiled. “Hardly priests, M. Severn. There are eight of us in the lay order of Historical and Literary Brethren. Five serve at the Reichs University. Two are art historians, working on the restoration of Lutzchendorf Abbey. I maintain the literary archives. The Church has found it cheaper to allow us to live here than to commute daily from Pacem.”
We entered the apartment hive—old even by Old Web standards: retrofitted lighting in corridors of real stone, hinged doors, a building that did not even challenge or welcome us as we entered. On an impulse, I said, “I’d like to cast to Pacem.”
The archivist looked surprised. “Tonight? This moment?”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. I realized that to this man, the hundred-mark farcaster fee would represent several weeks’ pay.
“Our building has its own portal,” he said. “This way.”
The central staircase was faded stone and corroded wrought iron with a sixty-meter drop in the center. From somewhere down a darkened corridor came the wail of an infant, followed by a man’s shouting and a woman’s crying.
“How long have you lived here, M. Tynar?”
“Seventeen local years, M. Severn. Ah … thirty-two standard, I believe. Here it is.”
The farcaster portal was as ancient as the building, its translation frame surrounded by gilded bas-relief gone green and gray.
“There are Web restrictions on travel tonight,” he said. “Pacem should be accessible. Some two hundred hours remain before the barbarians … whatever they’re called … are scheduled to reach there. Twice the time left to Renaissance Vector.” He reached out and grasped my wrist. I could feel his tension as a slight vibration through tendon and bone. “M. Severn … do you think they will burn my archives? Would even they destroy ten thousand years of thought?” His hand dropped away.
I was not sure who the “they” were—Ousters? Shrike Cult saboteurs? Rioters? Gladstone and the Hegemony leaders were willing to sacrifice these “first-wave” worlds. “No,” I said, extending my hand to shake his. “I don’t believe they’ll allow the archives to be destroyed.”
M. Ewdrad B. Tynar smiled and stood back a step, embarrassed at showing emotion. He shook hands. “Good luck, M. Severn. Wherever your travels take you.”
“God bless you, M. Tynar.” I had never used that phrase before, and it shocked me that I had spoken it now. I looked down, fumbled out Gladstone’s override card, and tapped the three-digit code for Pacem. The portal apologized, said that it was not possible at the moment, finally got it through its microcephalic processors that this was an override card, and hummed into existence.
I nodded at Tynar and stepped through, half expecting that I was making a serious mistake not going straight home to TC2.
It was night on Pacem, much darker than Renaissance Vector’s urban glow, and it was raining to boot. Raining hard with that fist-on-metal pounding violence that makes one want to curl up under thick blankets and wait for morning.
The portal was under cover in some half-roofed courtyard but outside enough for me to feel the night, the rain, and the cold. Especially the cold. Pacem’s air was half as thick as Web standard, its single habitable plateau twice as high as Renaissance V’s sea-level cities. I would have turned back then rather than step into that night and downpour, but a FORCE Marine stepped out of the shadows, multipurpose assault rifle slung but ready to swivel, and asked me for my ID.
I let him scan the card, and he snapped to attention. “Yes, sir!”
“Is this the New Vatican?”
“Yes, sir.”
I caught a glimpse of illuminated dome through the downpour. I pointed over the courtyard wall. “Is that St. Peter’s?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would Monsignor Edouard be found there?”
“Across this courtyard, left at the plaza, the low building to the left of the cathedral, sir!”
“Thank you, Corporal.”
“It’s Private, sir!”
I pulled my short cape around me, ceremonial and quite useless against such a rain as it was, and ran across the courtyard.
A human … perhaps a priest, although he wore no robe or clerical collar … opened the door to the residential hall. Another human behind a wooden desk told me that Monsignor Edouard was in residence and was awake, despite the late hour. Did I have an appointment?
No, I did not have an appointment but wished to speak to the Monsignor. It was important.
On what topic? the man behind the desk politely but firmly asked. He had not been impressed by my override card. I suspected that I was speaking to a bishop.
On the topic of Father Paul Duré and Father Lenar Hoyt, I told him.
The gentleman nodded, whispered into a bead mike so small that I had not noticed it on his collar, and led me into the residential hall.
This place made the old tower that M. Tynar lived in look like a sybarite’s palace. The corridor was absolutely featureless except for the rough plaster walls and even rougher wooden doors. One of the doors was open, and as we passed, I glimpsed a chamber more prison cell than sleeping room: low cot, rough blanket, wooden kneeling stool, an unadorned dresser holding a pitcher of water and simple basin; no windows, no media walls, no holo pit, no data access deck. I suspected the room wasn’t even interactive.
From somewhere there echoed voices rising in a chanting/ singing so elegant and atavistic that it made the hair on my neck tingle. Gregorian. We passed through a large eating area as simple as the cells had been, through a kitchen that would have been familiar to cooks in John Keats’s day, down a worn stone staircase, through an ill-lighted corridor, and up another, narrower staircase. The other man left me, and I stepp
ed into one of the most beautiful spaces I had ever seen.
Although part of me realized that the Church had moved and reconstructed St. Peter’s Basilica, down to transplanting the bones believed to be those of Peter himself to their new burial beneath the altar, another part of me felt that I had been transported back to the Rome I had first seen in mid-November of 1820: the Rome I had seen, stayed in, suffered in, and died in.
This space was more beautiful and elegant than any mile-high office spire on Tau Ceti Center could ever hope to be; St. Peter’s Basilica stretched more than six hundred feet into shadows, was four hundred and fifty feet wide where the “cross” of the transept intersected the nave, and was capped by the perfection of Michelangelo’s dome, rising almost four hundred feet above the altar. Bernini’s bronze baldachin, the ornate canopy supported by twisting, Byzantine columns, capped the main altar and gave the immense space the human dimension necessary for perspective on the intimate ceremonies conducted there. Soft lamp- and candlelight illuminated discrete areas of the basilica, gleamed on smooth travertine stone, brought gold mosaics into bold relief, and picked out the infinite detail painted, embossed, and raised on the walls, columns, cornices, and grand dome itself. Far above, the continuous flash of lightning from the storm poured thickly through yellow stained-glass windows and sent columns of violent light slanting toward Bernini’s “Throne of St. Peter.”
I paused there, just beyond the apse, afraid that my footsteps in such a space would be a desecration and that even my breathing would send echoes the length of the basilica. In a moment, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, compensated for the contrasts between the storm light above and candlelight below, and it was then I realized that there were no pews to fill the apse or long nave, no columns here beneath the dome, only two chairs set near the altar some fifty feet away. Two men sat talking in these chairs, close together, both leaning forward in apparent urgency to communicate. Lamplight and candlelight and the glow from a large mosaic of Christ on the front of the dark altar illuminated bits and fragments of the men’s faces. Both were elderly. Both were priests, the white bands of their collars glowing in the dimness. With a start of recognition, I realized that one was Monsignor Edouard.