by Dan Simmons
“Brawne was unconscious,” he said. “Evidently taken by the Shrike and attached to some … thing. Some cable. Her mental state was the equivalent of brain death, but the fetus was alive and healthy.”
“And the persona she carried?” asked the Bishop, his voice tense.
Duré remembered what Severn had told him about the death of that persona in the megasphere. Evidently these two did not know about the second Keats persona—the Severn personality that at this moment was warning Gladstone about the dangers of the Core proposal. Duré shook his head. He was very tired. “I don’t know about the persona she carried in the Schrön loop,” he said. “The cable … the thing the Shrike attached to her … seemed to plug into the neural socket like a cortical shunt.”
The Bishop nodded, evidently satisfied. “The prophecies proceed apace. You have served your purpose as messenger, Duré. I must leave now.” The big man stood, nodded toward the True Voice of the World-tree, and swept across the platform and down the stairs toward the elevator and terminex.
Duré sat across from the Templar in silence for several minutes. The sound of leaves blowing and the gentle rocking of the treetop platform was marvelously lulling, inviting the Jesuit to doze off. Above them, the sky was fading through delicate saffron shades as the world of God’s Grove turned into twilight.
“Your statement about a deus ex machina misleading us for generations through false prophecies was a terrible heresy,” the Templar said at last.
“Yes. But terrible heresies have proven to be grim truths many times before in the longer history of my Church, Sek Hardeen.”
“If you were a Templar, I could have you put to death,” the hooded figure said softly.
Duré sighed. At his age, in his situation, and as tired as he was, the thought of death created no fear in his heart. He stood and bowed slightly. “I need to go, Sek Hardeen. I apologize if anything I said offended you. It is a confused and confusing time.” “The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Duré turned and walked to the edge of the platform. And stopped.
The staircase was gone. Thirty vertical meters and fifteen horizontal meters of air separated him from the next lower platform where the elevator waited. The Worldtree dropped away a kilometer or more into leafy depths beneath him. Duré and the True Voice of that Tree were isolated here on the highest platform. Duré walked to a nearby railing, raised his suddenly sweaty face to the evening breeze, and noticed the first of the stars emerging from the ultramarine sky. “What’s going on, Sek Hardeen?”
The robed and cowled figure at the table was wrapped in darkness. “In eighteen minutes, standard, the world of Heaven’s Gate will fall to the Ousters. Our prophecies say that it will be destroyed. Certainly its farcaster will, and its fatline transmitters, and to all intents and purposes, that world will have ceased to exist. Precisely one standard hour later, the skies of God’s Grove will be alight from the fusion fires of Ouster warships. Our prophecies say that all of the Brotherhood who remain—and anyone else, although all Hegemony citizens have long since been evacuated by farcaster—will perish.”
Duré walked slowly back to the table. “It’s imperative that I ’cast to Tau Ceti Center,” he said. “Severn … someone is waiting for me. I have to speak to CEO Gladstone.”
“No,” said True Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen. “We will wait. We will see if the prophecies are correct.”
The Jesuit clenched his fists in frustration, fighting the surge of violent emotion that made him want to strike the robed figure. Duré closed his eyes and said two Hail Marys. It didn’t help.
“Please,” he said. “The prophecies will be confirmed or denied whether I am here or not. And then it will be too late. The FORCE torchships will blow the singularity sphere, and the farcasters will be gone. We’ll be cut off from the Web for years. Billions of lives may depend upon my immediate return to Tau Ceti Center.”
The Templar folded his arms so that his long-fingered hands disappeared in the folds of his robe. “We will wait,” he said. “All things predicted will come to pass. In minutes, the Lord of Pain will be loosed on those in the Web. I do not believe in the Bishop’s faith that those who have sought Atonement will be spared. We are better off here, Father Duré, where the end will be swift and painless.”
Duré searched his tired mind for something decisive to say, to do. Nothing occurred to him. He sat at the table and stared at the cowled and silent figure across from him. Above them, the stars emerged in their fiery multitudes. The world-forest of God’s Grove rustled a final time to the evening breeze and seemed to hold its breath in anticipation.
Paul Duré closed his eyes and prayed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
We walk all day, Hunt and I, and toward evening we find an inn with food set out for us—a fowl, rice pudding, cauliflower, a dish of macaroni, and so forth—although there are no people here, no sign of people other than the fire in the hearth, burning brightly as if just lit, and the food still warm on the stove.
Hunt is unnerved by it; by it and by the terrible withdrawal symptoms he is suffering from the loss of contact with the datasphere. I can imagine his pain. For a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance more than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled. But after the rantings and rages of the first few hours of walking, Hunt finally settled down into a taciturn gloom.
“But the CEO needs me!” he had shouted that first hour.
“She needs the information I was bringing her,” I said, “but there’s nothing to be done about it.”
“Where are we?” demanded Hunt for the tenth time.
I had already explained about this alternate Old Earth, but I knew he meant something else now.
“Quarantine, I think,” I said.
“The Core brought us here?” demanded Hunt.
“I can only assume.”
“How do we get back?”
“I don’t know. I presume that when they feel it’s safe to allow us out of quarantine, a farcaster portal will appear.”
Hunt cursed softly. “Why quarantine me, Severn?”
I shrugged. I assumed it was because he had heard what I said on Pacem, but I was not certain. I was certain of nothing.
The road led through meadows, vineyards, winding over low hills and twisting through valleys where glimpses of the sea were visible.
“Where does this road go?” Hunt demanded just before we discovered the inn.
“All roads lead to Rome.”
“I’m serious, Severn.”
“So am I, M. Hunt.”
Hunt pried a loose stone from the highway and threw it far into the bushes. Somewhere a thrush called.
“You’ve been here before?” Hunt’s tone was one of accusation, as if I had pirated him away. Perhaps I had.
“No,” I said. But Keats had, I almost added. My transplanted memories surged to the surface, almost overwhelming me with their sense of loss and looming mortality. So far from friends, so far from Fanny, his one eternal love.
“You’re sure you can’t access the datasphere?” asked Hunt.
“I’m positive,” I answered. He did not ask about the megasphere, and I did not offer the information. I am terrified of entering the megasphere, of losing myself there.
We found the inn just at sunset. It was nestled in a small valley, and smoke rose from the stone chimney.
While eating, darkness pressing against the panes, our only light the flicker of the fire and two candles on a stone mantle, Hunt said, “This place makes me half-believe in ghosts.”
“I do believe in ghosts,” I said.
Night. I awake coughing, feel wetness on my bare chest, hear Hunt fumbling with the candle, and in its light, look down to see blood on my skin, spotting the bedclothes.
“Hemorrhage,” I manage after the next fit of coughing leaves me weaker and sported with more blood. I start to rise, fall back on the pillow, and gesture toward the basin of water and towel on the night-stand.
“Damn, damn,” mutters Hunt, searching for my comlog to get a med reading. There is no comlog. I had thrown away Hoyt’s useless instrument while we were walking earlier in the day.
Hunt removes his own comlog, adjusts the monitor, and wraps it around my wrist. The readings are meaningless to him, other than to signify urgency and the need for immediate medical care. Like most people of his generation, Hunt had never seen illness or death—that was a professional matter handled out of sight of the populace.
“Never mind,” I whisper, the siege of coughing past but weakness lying on me like a blanket of stones. I gesture toward the towel again, and Hunt moistens it, washes the blood from my chest and arms, helps me sit in the single chair while he removes the spattered sheets and blankets.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asks, real concern in his voice.
“Yes.” I attempt a smile. “Accuracy. Verisimilitude. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.”
“Make sense,” snaps Hunt, helping me back into the bed. “What caused the hemorrhage? What can I do to help?”
“A glass of water, please.” I sip it, feel the boiling in my chest and throat but manage to avoid another round of coughing. My belly feels as if it’s on fire.
“What’s going on?” Hunt asks again.
I talk slowly, carefully, setting each word in place as if placing my feet on soil strewn with mines. The coughing does not return. “It’s an illness called consumption,” I say. “Tuberculosis. The final stages, judging from the severity of the hemorrhage.”
Hunt’s basset-hound face is white. “Good God, Severn. I never heard of tuberculosis.” He raises his wrist as if to consult his comlog memory but the wrist is bare.
I return his instrument. “Tuberculosis has been absent for centuries. Cured. But John Keats had it. Died of it. And this cybrid body belongs to Keats.”
Hunt stands as if ready to rush out the door seeking help. “Surely the Core will allow us to return now! They can’t keep you here on this empty world where there’s no medical assistance!”
I lay my head back in the soft pillows, feeling the feathers under the ticking. “That may be precisely why I am being kept here. We’ll see tomorrow when we arrive in Rome.”
“But you can’t travel! We won’t be going anywhere in the morning.”
“We’ll see,” I say, and close my eyes. “We’ll see.”
• • •
In the morning a vettura, a small carriage, is waiting outside the inn. The horse is a large gray mare, and it rolls its eyes at us as we approach. The creature’s breath rises in the chill morning air.
“Do you know what that is?” says Hunt.
“A horse.”
Hunt raises a hand toward the animal as if it will pop and disappear like a soap bubble when he touches its flank. It does not. Hunt snatches his hand back as the mare’s tail flicks.
“Horses are extinct,” he says. “They’ve never been ARNied back into existence.”
“This one looks real enough,” I say, climbing into the carriage and sitting on the narrow bench there.
Hunt gingerly takes his seat beside me, his long fingers twitching with anxiety. “Who drives?” he says. “Where are the controls?”
There are no reins, and the coachman’s seat is quite empty. “Let’s see if the horse knows the way,” I suggest, and at that instant we start moving at a leisurely pace, the springless carriage jolting over the stones and furrows of the rough road.
“This is some sort of joke, isn’t it?” asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.
I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. “Possibly,” I say. “But then, what isn’t?”
Hunt ignores my sophistry, and we rumble on, jolting and bouncing toward whatever destination and destiny await.
“Where are Hunt and Severn?” asked Mema Gladstone.
Sedeptra Akasi, the young black woman who was Gladstone’s second most important aide, leaned closer so as not to interrupt the flow of the military briefing. “Still no word, M. Executive.”
“That’s impossible. Severn had a tracer and Leigh stepped through to Pacem almost an hour ago. Where the hell are they?”
Akasi glanced toward the faxpad she had unfolded on the tabletop. “Security can’t find them. The transit police can’t locate them. The farcaster unit recorded only that they coded TC2—here—stepped through, but did not arrive.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Yes, M. Executive.”
“I want to talk to Albedo or one of the other AI Councilors as soon as this meeting is over.”
“Yes.”
Both women returned their attention to the briefing. The Government House Tactical Center had been joined to the Olympus Command Center War Room and to the largest Senate briefing room with fifteen-meter-square, visually open portals so that the three spaces created one cavernous and asymetrical conference area. The War Room holos seemed to rise into infinity on the display end of the space, and columns of data floated everywhere along the walls.
“Four minutes until cislunar incursion,” said Admiral Singh.
“Their long-range weapons could have opened up on Heaven’s Gate long before this,” said General Morpurgo. “They seem to be showing some restraint.”
“They didn’t show much restraint toward our torchships,” said Garion Persov of Diplomacy. The group had been assembled an hour earlier when the sortie of the hastily assembled fleet of a dozen Hegemony torchships had been summarily destroyed by the advancing Swarm. Long-range sensors had relayed the briefest image of that Swarm—a cluster of embers with cometlike fusion tails—before the torchships and their remotes quit broadcasting. There had been many, many embers.
“Those were warships,” said General Morpurgo. “We’ve been broadcasting for hours now that Heaven’s Gate is an open planet. We can hope for restraint.”
The holographic images of Heaven’s Gate surrounded them: the quiet streets of Mudflat, airborne images of the coastline, orbital images of the gray-brown world with its constant cloud cover, cislunar images of the baroque dodecahedron of the singularity sphere which tied together all farcasters, and space-aimed telescopic, UV, and X-ray images of the advancing Swarm—much larger than specks or embers now, at less than one AU. Gladstone looked up at the fusion tails of Ouster warships, the tumbling, containment-field-shimmering massiveness of their asteroid farms and bubble worlds, their complex and oddly nonhuman zero-gravity city complexes, and she thought, What if I am wrong?
The lives of billions rested on her belief that the Ousters would not wantonly destroy Hegemony worlds.
“Two minutes until incursion,” Singh said in his professional warrior’s monotone.
“Admiral,” said Gladstone, “is it absolutely necessary to destroy the singularity sphere as soon as the Ousters have penetrated our cordon sanitaire? Couldn’t we wait another few minutes to judge their intentions?”
“No, CEO,” answered the Admiral promptly. “The farcaster link must be destroyed as soon as they are within quick assault range.”
“But if your remaining torchships don’t do it, Admiral, we still have the in-system links, the fatline relays, and the timed devices, don’t we?”
“Yes, M. Executive, but we must assure that all farcaster capability is removed before the Ousters overrun the system. There can be no compromising this already slim safety margin.”
Gladstone nodded. She understood the need for absolute caution. If only there were more time.
“Fifteen seconds until incursion and singularity destruction,” said Singh. “Ten … seven … ”
Suddenly
all of the torchship and cislunar remote holos glowed violet, red, and white.
Gladstone leaned forward. “Was that the singularity sphere going?”
The military men buzzed amongst themselves, calling up further data, switching images on the holos and screens. “No, CEO,” answered Morpurgo. “The torchships are under attack. What you’re seeing is their defensive fields overloading. The … ah … there.”
A central image, possibly from a low orbital relay ship, showed an enhanced image of the dodecahedronal singularity containment sphere, its thirty thousand square meters of surface still intact, still glowing in the harsh light of Heaven’s Gate’s sun. Then, suddenly, the glow increased, the nearest face of the structure seemed to become incandescent and sag in upon itself, and less than three seconds later the sphere expanded as the caged singularity there escaped and devoured itself as well as everything within a six-hundred-kilometer radius.
At the same instant, most of the visual images and many of the data columns went blank.
“All farcaster connections terminated,” announced Singh. “In-system data now relayed by fatline transmitters only.”
There was a buzz of approval and relief from the military people, something closer to a sigh and soft moan from the dozens of senators and political advisors present. The world of Heaven’s Gate had just been amputated from the Web … the first such loss of a Hegemony world in more than four centuries.
Gladstone turned to Sedeptra Akasi. “What is travel time to Heaven’s Gate from the Web now?”
“By Hawking drive, seven months onboard,” said the aide without a pause to access, “a little over nine years time-debt.”
Gladstone nodded. Heaven’s Gate was now nine years distant from the nearest Web world.
“There go our torchships,” intoned Singh. The view had been from one of the orbital pickets, relayed through the jerky, false-color images of high-speed fatline squirts being computer processed in rapid progression. The images were visual mosaics, but they always made Gladstone think of the earliest silent films from the dawn of the Media Age. But this was no Charlie Chaplin comedy. Two, then five, then eight bursts of brilliant light blossomed against the starfield above the limb of the planet.