by Dan Simmons
Once, many, many years before, near his beloved Villefranche-sur-Saône, the youngster Paul Duré had stood on a cliff top, secure in the arms of his father and safe in a thick concrete shelter, and watched through a narrow window as forty-meter tall tsunami rushed toward the coast where they lived.
This tsunami was three kilometers high, was made of flame, and was racing at what seemed the speed of light across the helpless roof of the forest toward the Worldtree, Sek Hardeen, and Paul Duré. What the tsunami touched, it destroyed. It raged closer, rising higher and nearer until it obliterated the world and sky with flame and noise.
“No!” screamed Father Paul Duré.
“Go!” cried the True Voice of the Worldtree and pushed the Jesuit through the farcaster portal even as the platform, the Worldtree’s trunk, and the Templar’s robe burst into flames.
The farcaster shut down even as Duré tumbled through, slicing off the heel of his shoe as it contracted, and Duré felt his eardrums rupture and his clothes smolder even as he fell, struck something hard with the back of his head, and fell again into darkness more absolute.
Gladstone and the others watched in horrified silence as the civilian satellites sent images of the death throes of God’s Grove through the farcaster relays.
“We have to blow it now,” cried Admiral Singh over the crackling of forests burning. Meina Gladstone thought that she could hear the screams of human beings and the countless arboreals who lived in the Templar forests.
“We can’t let them get closer!” cried Singh. “We have only the remotes to detonate the sphere.”
“Yes,” said Gladstone, but although her lips moved she heard no sound.
Singh turned and nodded toward a FORCE:space colonel. The Colonel touched his tactical board. The burning forests disappeared, the giant holos went absolutely dark, but the sound of screams somehow remained. Gladstone realized that it was the sound of blood in her ears.
She turned toward Morpurgo. “How long … ” She cleared her throat. “General, how long until Mare Infinitus is attacked?”
“Three hours and fifty-two minutes, M. Executive,” said the General.
Gladstone turned toward the former Commander William Ajunta Lee. “Is your task force ready, Admiral?”
“Yes, CEO,” said Lee, his face pale beneath a tan.
“How many ships will be in the strike?”
“Seventy-four, M. Executive.”
“And you will hit them away from Mare Infinitus?”
“Just within the Oört Cloud, M. Executive.”
“Good,” said Gladstone. “Good hunting, Admiral.”
The young man took this as his cue to salute and leave the chamber. Admiral Singh leaned over and whispered something to General Van Zeidt.
Sedeptra Akasi leaned toward Gladstone and said, “Government House Security reports that a man just farcast into the secured GH terminex with an outdated priority access code. The man was injured, taken to the East Wing infirmary.”
“Leigh?” asked Gladstone. “Severn?”
“No, M. Executive,” said Akasi. “The priest from Pacem. Paul Duré”
Gladstone nodded. “I’ll see him after my meeting with Albedo,” she said to her aide. To the group, she announced, “Unless anyone has anything to add to what we saw, we shall adjourn for thirty minutes and take up the defense of Asquith and Ixion when we reassemble.”
The group stood as the CEO and her entourage stepped through the permanent connecting portal to Government House and filed through a door in the far wall. The rumble of argument and shock resumed when Gladstone was out of sight.
• • •
Meina Gladstone sat back in her leather chair and closed her eyes for precisely five seconds. When she opened them, the cluster of aides still stood there, some looking anxious, some looking eager, all of them waiting for her next word, her next command.
“Get out,” she said softly. “Go on, take a few minutes to get some rest. Put your feet up for ten minutes. There’ll be no more rest for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
The group filed out, some looking on the verge of protest, others on the verge of collapse.
“Sedeptra,” said Gladstone, and the young woman stepped back into the office. “Assign two of my personal guard to the priest who just came through, Duré.”
Akasi nodded and made a note on her faxpad.
“How is the political situation?” asked Gladstone, rubbing her eyes.
“The All Thing is chaos,” said Akasi. “There are factions but they haven’t coalesced into effective opposition yet. The Senate is a different story.”
“Feldstein?” said Gladstone, naming the angry senator from Barnard’s World. Less than forty-two hours remained before Barnard’s World would be attacked by the Ousters.
“Feldstein, Kakinuma, Peters, Sabenstorafem, Richeau … even Sudette Chier is calling for your resignation.”
“What about her husband?” Gladstone considered Senator Kolchev the most influential person in the Senate.
“No word from Senator Kolchev yet. Public or private.”
Gladstone tapped a thumbnail against her lower lip. “How much time do you think this administration has before a vote of no confidence brings us down, Sedeptra?”
Akasi, one of the most astute political operatives Gladstone had ever worked with, returned her boss’s stare. “Seventy-two hours at the outside, CEO. The votes are there. The mob just doesn’t know it’s a mob yet. Somebody has to pay for what’s happening.”
Gladstone nodded absently. “Seventy-two hours,” she murmured. “More than enough time.” She looked up and smiled. “That will be all, Sedeptra. Get some rest.”
The aide nodded but her expression showed her true opinion of that suggestion. It was very quiet in the study when the door closed behind her.
Gladstone sat thinking for a moment, her fist to her chin. Then she said to the walls, “Bring Councilor Albedo here, please.”
Twenty seconds later, the air on the other side of Gladstone’s broad desk misted, shimmered, and solidified. The representative of the TechnoCore looked as handsome as ever, short gray hair gleaming in the light, a healthy tan on his open, honest face.
“M. Executive,” began the holographic projection, “the Advisory Council and the Core predictors continue to offer their services in this time of great—”
“Where is the Core, Albedo?” interrupted Gladstone.
The Councilor’s smile did not falter. “I’m sorry, M. Executive, what was the question?”
“The TechnoCore, Where is it?”
Albedo’s friendly face showed a slight puzzlement but no hostility, no visible emotion other than bemused helpfulness. “You’re certainly aware, M. Executive, that it has been Core policy since the Secession not to reveal the location of the … ah … physical elements of the TechnoCore. In another sense, the Core is nowhere, since—”
“Since you exist on the datumplane and datasphere consensual realities,” said Gladstone, voice flat. “Yes, I’ve heard that crap all of my life, Albedo. So did my father and his father before him. I’m asking a straight question now. Where is the TechnoCore?”
The Councilor shook his head bemusedly, regretfully, as if he were an adult being asked for the thousandth time the child’s question Why is the sky blue, Daddy?
“M. Executive, it is simply not possible to answer that question in a way that would make sense in human three-dimensional coordinates. In a sense we … the Core … exist within the Web and beyond the Web. We swim in the datumplane reality which you call the datasphere, but as for the physical elements … what your ancestors called ‘hardware,’ we find it necessary to—”
“To keep it a secret,” finished Gladstone. She crossed her arms. “Are you aware, Councilor Albedo, that there will be those people in the Hegemony … millions of people … who will firmly believe that the Core … your Advisory Council … has betrayed humankind?”
Albedo made a motion with his hands.
“That will be regrettable, M. Executive. Regrettable but understandable.”
“Your predictors were supposed to be close to foolproof, Councilor. Yet at no time did you tell us of the destruction of worlds by this Ouster fleet.”
The sadness on the projection’s handsome face was very close to convincing. “M. Executive, it is only fair to remind you that the Advisory Council warned you that bringing Hyperion into the Web introduced a random variable which even the Council could not factor.”
“But this isn’t Hyperion!” snapped Gladstone, her voice rising. “It’s God’s Grove burning. Heaven’s Gate reduced to slag. Mare Infinitus waiting for the next hammer blow! What good is the Advisory Council if it cannot predict an invasion of that magnitude?”
“We did predict the inevitability of war with the Ousters, M. Executive. We also predicted the great danger of defending Hyperion. You must believe me that the inclusion of Hyperion in any predictive equation brings the reliability factor down as low as—”
“All right,” sighed Gladstone. “I need to talk to someone else in the Core, Albedo. Someone in your indecipherable hierarchy of intelligences who actually has some decision-making power.”
“I assure you that I represent all Core elements when I—”
“Yes, yes. But I want to speak to one of the … the Powers I believe you call them. One of the elder AIs. One with clout, Albedo. I need to speak to someone who can tell me why the Core kidnapped my artist Severn and my aide Leigh Hunt.”
The holo looked shocked. “I assure you, M. Gladstone, on the honor of four centuries of our alliance, that the Core had nothing to do with the unfortunate disappearance of—”
Gladstone stood. “This is why I need to talk to a Power. The time for assurances is past, Albedo. It is time for straight talk if either of our species is going to survive. That is all.” She turned her attention to the faxpad flimsies on her desk.
Councilor Albedo stood, nodded a farewell, and shimmered out of existence.
Gladstone called her personal farcaster portal into existence, spoke the Government House infirmary codes, and started to step through. In the instant before touching the opaque surface of the energy rectangle, she paused, gave thought to what she was doing, and for the first time in her life felt anxiety about stepping through a farcaster.
What if the Core wanted to kidnap her? Or kill her?
Meina Gladstone suddenly realized that the Core had the power of life and death over every farcaster-traveling citizen in the Web … which was every citizen with power. Leigh and the Severn cybrid did not have to be kidnapped, translated somewhere … only the persistent habit of thinking of farcasters as foolproof transportation created the subconscious conviction that they had gone somewhere. Her aide and the enigmatic cybrid could easily have been translated to …to nothing. To scattered atoms stretched through a singularity. Farcasters did not “teleport” people and things—such a concept was silly—but how much less silly was it to trust a device that punched holes in the fabric of space-time and allowed one to step through black hole “trapdoors”? How silly was it for her to trust the Core to transport her to the infirmary?
Gladstone thought of the War Room … three giant rooms connected by permanently activated, vision-clear farcaster portals … but three rooms nonetheless, separated by at least a thousand light-years of real space, decades of real time even under Hawking drive. Every time Morpurgo or Singh or one of the others moved from a map holo to the plotting board, he or she stepped across great gulfs of space and time. All the Core had to do to destroy the Hegemony or anyone in it was to tamper with the farcasters, allow a slight “mistake” in targeting.
To hell with this, thought Meina Gladstone and stepped through to see Paul Duré in the Government House infirmary.
THIRTY-NINE
The two rooms on the second floor of the house on the Piazza di Spagna are small, narrow, high ceilinged, and—except for a single dim lamp burning in each room as if lighted by ghosts in expectation of a visit by other ghosts—quite dark. My bed is in the smaller of the two rooms: the one facing the Piazza, although all one can see from the high windows this night is darkness creased by deeper shadows and accented by the ceaseless burbling of Bernini’s unseen fountain.
Bells ring on the hour from one of the twin towers of Santa Trinità dei Monti, the church that crouches in the dark like a massive, tawny cat at the head of the stairs outside, and each time I hear the bells toil the brief notes of the early hours of the mom, I imagine ghostly hands pulling rotting bell ropes. Or perhaps rotting hands pulling ghostly bell ropes; I don’t know which image suits my macabre fancies this endless night.
Fever lies upon me this night, as dank and heavy and stifling as a thick, water-soaked blanket. My skin alternately burns and then is clammy to the touch. Twice I have been seized with coughing spasms; the first brought Hunt running in from his couch in the other room, and I watched his eyes widen at the sight of the blood I had vomited on the damask sheets; the second spasm I stifled as best I could, staggering to the basin on the bureau to spit up smaller quantities of black blood and dark phlegm. Hunt did not wake the second time.
To be back here. To come all this way to these dark rooms, this grim bed. I half remember awakening here, miraculously cured, the “real” Severn and Dr. Clark and even little Signora Angeletti hovering in the outer room. That period of convalescence from death; that period of realization that I was not Keats, was not on the true Earth, that this was not in the century I had closed my eyes in that last night … that I was not human.
Sometime after two, I sleep, and as I sleep, I dream. The dream is one I have never suffered before. I dream that I rise slowly through the datumplane, through the datasphere, into and through the megasphere, and finally into a place I do not know, have never dreamt of … a place of infinite spaces, unhurried, indescribable colors, a place with no horizons, no ceilings, no floors or solid areas one might call the ground. I think of it as the metasphere, for I sense immediately that this level of consensual reality includes all of the varieties and vagaries of sensation which I have experienced on Earth, all of the binary analyses and intellectual pleasures I have felt flowing from the TechnoCore through the datasphere, and, above all, a sense of … of what? Expansiveness? Freedom?—potential might be the word I am hunting for.
I am alone in this metasphere. Colors flow above me, under me, through me … sometimes dissolving into vague pastels, sometimes coalescing into cloudlike fantasies, and at other times, rarely, appearing to form into more solid objects, shapes, distinct forms which may or may not be humanoid in appearance—Í watch them the way a child might watch clouds and imagine elephants, crocodiles from the Nile, and great gunboats marching from west to east on a spring day in the Lake District.
After a while I hear sounds: the maddening trickle of the Bernini fountain in the Piazza outside; doves rustling and cooing on the ledges above my window; Leigh Hunt moaning softly in his sleep. But above and beneath these noises, I hear something more stealthy, less real, but infinitely more threatening.
Something large this way comes. I strain to see through the pastel gloom; something is moving just beyond the horizon of sight. I know that it knows my name. I know that it holds my life in one palm and death in its other fist.
There is no place to hide in this space beyond space. I cannot run. The siren song of pain continues to rise and fall from the world I left behind—the everyday pain of each person everywhere, the pain of those suffering from the war just begun, the specific, focused pain of those on the Shrike’s terrible tree, and, worst of all, the pain I feel for and from the pilgrims and those others whose lives and thoughts I now share.
It would be worth rushing to greet this approaching shadow of doom if it would grant me freedom from that song of pain.
“Severn! Severn!”
For a second I think that I am the one calling, just as I had before in these rooms, calling Joseph Severn in the night when my pain and fever ranged
beyond my ability to contain it. And he was always there: Severn with his hulking, well-meaning slowness and that gentle smile which I often wanted to wipe from his face with some small meanness or comment. It is hard to be good-natured when one is dying; I had led a life of some generosity … why then was it my fate to continue that role when I was the one suffering, when I was the one coughing the ragged remnants of my lungs into stained handkerchiefs?
“Severn!”
It is not my voice. Hunt is shaking me by the shoulders, calling Severn’s name. I realize that he thinks he is calling my name. I brush away his hands and sink back into the pillows. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“You were moaning,” says Gladstone’s aide. “Crying out.”
“A nightmare. Nothing more.”
“Your dreams are usually more than dreams,” says Hunt. He glances around the narrow room, illuminated now by the single lamp he has carried in. “What a terrible place, Severn.”
I try to smile. “It cost me twenty-eight shillings a month. Seven scudi. Highway robbery.”
Hunt frowns at me. The stark light makes his wrinkles seem deeper than usual. “Listen, Severn, I know you’re a cybrid. Gladstone told me that you were the retrieval persona of a poet named Keats. Now obviously all this …”—he gestured helplessly toward the room, shadows, tall rectangle of windows, and high bed—“all this has something to do with that. But how? What game is the Core playing here?”
“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.
“But you know this place?”
“Oh yes,” I say with feeling.
“Tell me,” pleads Hunt, and it is his restraint to this point in not asking as much as the earnestness of that plea now which decides me to tell him.
I tell him about the poet John Keats, about his birth in 1795, his short and frequently unhappy life, and about his death from “consumption” in 1821, in Rome, far from his friends and only love. I tell him about my staged “recovery” in this very room, about my decision to take the name of Joseph Severn—the artist acquaintance who stayed with Keats until his death—and, finally, I tell him about my short time in the Web, listening, watching, condemned to dream the lives of the Shrike Pilgrims on Hyperion and the others.