by Dan Simmons
Gladstone’s aide has moved to the window and seems absorbed in the view of the Piazza below. I can hear Bernini’s accursed fountain trickling. “I was going out for a walk while you slept,” Hunt says slowly, “just in case there might be people out and about. Or a phone or farcaster.”
“Of course,” I say.
“I’d just stepped out … the …”He turns and licks his lips. “There’s something out there, Severn. In the street at the bottom of the stairs. I’m not sure, but I think that it’s … ”
“The Shrike,” I say.
Hunt nods. “Did you see it?”
“No, but I am not surprised.”
“It’s … it’s terrible, Severn. There’s something about it that makes my flesh crawl. Here … you can just get a glimpse of it in the shadows on the other side of the staircase.”
I start to rise, but a sudden fit of coughing and the feel of phlegm rising in my chest and throat makes me settle back on the pillows. “I know what it looks like, Hunt. Don’t worry, it’s not here for you.” My voice sounds more confident than I feel.
“For you?”
“I don’t think so,” I say between gasps for air. “I think it’s just here to make sure I don’t try to leave … to find another place to die.”
Hunt returns to the bed. “You’re not going to die, Severn.”
I say nothing.
He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. “If you die, what happens to me?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “If I die, I don’t even know what happens to me.”
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one’s attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius. The day passes slowly, and I am exquisitely aware of the movement of sunlight across the rough wall, the feel of bedclothes beneath my palm, the fever which rises in me like nausea and burns itself out in the furnace of my mind, and, mostly, of the pain. Not my pain now, for a few hours or days of the constriction in my throat and the burning in my chest are bearable, almost welcomed like an obnoxious old friend met in a strange city, but the pain of the others … all the others. It strikes my mind like the noise of shattering slate, like hammer iron slammed repeatedly on anvil iron, and there is no escape from it.
My brain receives this as din and restructures it as poetry. All day and all night the pain of the universe floods in and wanders the fevered corridors of my mind as verse, imagery, images in verse, the intricate, endless dance of language, now as calming as a flute solo, now as shrill and strident and confusing as a dozen orchestras tuning up, but always verse, always poetry.
Sometime near sunset I awake from a half-doze, shattering the dream of Colonel Kassad fighting the Shrike for the lives of Sol and Brawne Lamia, and find Hunt sitting at the window, his long face colored by evening light the hue of terra-cotta.
“Is it still there?” I ask, my voice the rasp of file on stone.
Hunt jumps, then turns towards me with an apologetic smile and the first blush I have ever seen on that dour countenance. “The Shrike?” he says. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it for a while. I feel that it is.” He looks at me. “How are you?”
“Dying.” I instantly regret the self-indulgence of that flippancy, however accurate it is, when I see the pain it causes Hunt. “It’s all right,” I say almost jovially, “I’ve done it before. It’s not as if it were me that is dying. I exist as a personality deep in the TechnoCore. It’s just this body. This cybrid of John Keats. This twenty-seven-year-old illusion of flesh and blood and borrowed associations.”
Hunt comes over to sit on the edge of the bed. I realize with a shock that he has changed the sheets during the day, exchanging my blood-bespeckled coverlet for one of his own. “Your personality is an AI in the Core,” he says. “Then you must be able to access the datasphere.”
I shake my head, too weary to argue.
“When the Philomels kidnapped you, we tracked you through your access route to the datasphere,” he persisted. “You don’t have to contact Gladstone personally. Just leave a message where Security can find it.”
“No,” I rasp, “the Core does not wish it.”
“Are they blocking you? Stopping you?”
“Not yet. But they would.” I set the words separately between gasps, like laying delicate eggs back in a nest. Suddenly I remember a note I sent to dear Fanny shortly after a serious hemorrhage but almost a year before they would kill me. I had written: “If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” This strikes me now as futile and self-centered and idiotic and naive … and yet I desperately believe it still. If I had had time … the months I had spent on Esperance, pretending to be a visual artist; the days wasted with Gladstone in the halls of government when I could have been writing …
“How do you know until you try?” asks Hunt.
“What’s that?” I ask. The simple effort of two syllables sets me coughing again, the spasm ending only when I spit up half-solid spheres of blood into the basin which Hunt has hastily fetched. I lie back, trying to focus on his face. It is getting dark in the narrow room, and neither of us has lighted a lamp. Outside, the fountain burbles loudly.
“What’s that?” I ask again, trying to remain here even as sleep and sleep’s dreams tug at me. “Try what?”
“Try leaving a message through the datasphere,” he whispers. “Contacting someone.”
“And what message should we leave, Leigh?” I ask. It is the first time I have used his first name.
“Where we are. How the Core kidnapped us. Anything.”
“All right,” I say, closing my eyes. “I’ll try. I don’t think they’ll let me, but I promise I’ll try.”
I feel Hunt’s hand holding mine. Even through the winning tides of weariness, this sudden human contact is enough to make tears come to my eyes.
I will try. Before surrendering to the dreams or death, I will try.
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad shouted a FORCE battle cry and charged through the dust storm to intercept the Shrike before it covered the final thirty meters to where Sol Weintraub crouched next to Brawne Lamia.
The Shrike paused, its head swiveling frictionlessly, red eyes gleaming. Kassad armed his assault rifle and moved down the slope with reckless speed.
The Shrike shifted.
Kassad saw its movement through time as a slow blur, noting even as he watched the Shrike that movement in the valley had ceased, sand hung motionless in the air, and the light from the glowing Tombs had taken on a thick, amberish quality. Kassad’s skinsuit was somehow shifting with the Shrike, following it through its movements through time.
The creature’s head snapped up, attentive now, and its four arms extended like blades from a knife, fingers snapping open in sharp greeting.
Kassad skidded to a halt ten meters from the thing and activated the assault rifle, slagging the sand beneath the Shrike in a full-power wide-beam burst.
The Shrike glowed as its carapace and steel-sculpture legs reflected the hellish light beneath and around it. Then the three meters of monster began to sink as the sand bubbled into a lake of molten glass beneath it. Kassad shouted in triumph as he stepped closer, playing the widebeam on the Shrike and ground the way he had sprayed his friends with stolen irrigation hoses in the Tharsis slums as a boy.
The Shrike sank. Its arms splayed at the sand and rock, trying to find purchase. Sparks flew. It shifted, time running backward like a reversed holie, but Kassad shifted with it, realizing that Moneta was helping him, her suit slaved to his but guiding him through time, and then he was spraying the creature again with concentrated heat greater than the surface of a sun, melting sand beneath it, and watching the rocks around it burst into flame.
Sinking in this cauldron of flame and molten rock, the Shrike threw back its head, opened its wide crevasse of a mouth, and bellowed.
Kassad almost stopped firing in his shock at hearing noise from the thing. The Shrike’s scream resounded like a dragon’s roar mixed with the blast of a fusion rocket. The screech set Kassad’s teeth on edge, vibrated from the cliff walls, and tumbled suspended dust to the ground. Kassad switched to high-velocity solid shot and fired ten thousand microfléchettes at the creature’s face.
The Shrike shifted, years by the giddy feel of the transition in Kassad’s bones and brain, and they were no longer in the valley but aboard a windwagon rumbling across the Sea of Grass. Time resumed, and the Shrike leaped forward, metallic arms dripping molten glass, and seized Kassad’s assault rifle. The Colonel did not relinquish the weapon, and the two staggered around in a clumsy dance, the Shrike swinging its extra pair of arms and a leg festooned with steel spikes, Kassad leaping and dodging while clinging desperately to his rifle.
They were in some sort of small compartment. Moneta was present as a sort of shadow in one corner, and another figure, a tall, hooded man, moved in ultra-slow motion to avoid the sudden blur of arms and blades in the confined space. Through his skinsuit filters, Kassad saw the blue-and-violet energy field of an erg binder in the space, pulsing and growing, then retracting from the time-violence of the Shrike’s organic anti-entropic fields.
The Shrike slashed and cut through Kassad’s skinsuit to find flesh and muscle. Blood spattered the walls. Kassad forced the muzzle of his rifle into the creature’s mouth and fired. A cloud of two thousand high-velocity fléchettes snapped the Shrike’s head back as if on a spring and slammed the thing’s body into a far wall. But even as it fell away, leg spikes caught Kassad in the thigh and sent a rising spiral of blood splashing the windows and walls of the windwagon’s cabin.
The Shrike shifted.
Teeth clenched, feeling the skinsuit automatically compress and suture the wounds, Kassad glanced at Moneta, nodded once, and followed the thing through time and space.
• • •
Sol Weintraub and Brawne Lamia looked behind them as a terrible cyclone of heat and light seemed to swirl and die there. Sol shielded the young woman with his body as molten glass spattered around them, landing hissing and sizzling on the cold sand. Then the noise was gone, the dust storm obscured the bubbling pool where the violence had occurred, and the wind whipped Sol’s cape around them both.
“What was that?” gasped Brawne.
Sol shook his head, helping her to her feet in the roaring wind. “The Tombs are opening!” yelled Sol. “Some sort of explosion, maybe.”
Brawne staggered, found her balance, and touched Sol’s arm. “Rachel?” she called above the storm.
Sol clenched his fists. His beard was already caked with sand. “The Shrike … took her … can’t get in the Sphinx. Waiting!”
Brawne nodded and squinted toward the Sphinx, visible only as a glowing outline in the fierce swirl of dust.
“Are you all right?” called Sol.
“What?”
“Are you … all right?”
Brawne nodded absently and touched her head. The neural shunt was gone. Not merely the Shrike’s obscene attachment, but the shunt which Johnny had surgically applied when they were hiding out in Dregs’ Hive so very, very long ago. With the shunt and Schron loop gone forever, there was no way she could get in touch with Johnny. Brawne remembered Ummon destroying Johnny’s persona, crushing and absorbing it with no more effort than she would use to swat an insect.
Brawne said, “I’m all right,” but she sagged so that Sol had to keep her from falling.
He was shouting something. Brawne tried to concentrate, tried to focus on here and now. After the megasphere, reality seemed narrow and constricted.
“… can’t talk here,” Sol was shouting. “ … back to the Sphinx.”
Brawne shook her head. She pointed to the cliffs on the north side of the valley where the immense Shrike tree became visible between passing clouds of dust. “The poet … Silenus … is there. Saw him!”
“We can’t do anything about that!” cried Sol, shielding them with his cape. The vermilion sand rattled against the fiberplastic like fléchettes on armor.
“Maybe we can,” called Brawne, feeling his warmth as she sheltered within his arms. For a second, she imagined that she could curl up next to him as easily as Rachel had and sleep, sleep. “I saw … connections … when I was coming out of the megasphere!” she called above the wind roar. “The thorn tree’s connected to the Shrike Palace in some way! If we can get there, try to find a way to free Silenus … ”
Sol shook his head. “Can’t leave the Sphinx. Rachel … ”
Brawne understood. She touched the scholar’s cheek with her hand and then leaned closer, feeling his beard against her own cheek. “The Tombs are opening,” she said. “I don’t know when we’ll get another chance.”
There were tears in Sol’s eyes. “I know. I want to help. But I can’t leave the Sphinx, in case … in case she … ”
“I understand,” said Brawne. “Go back there. I’m going to the Shrike Palace to see if I can see how it relates to that thorn tree.”
Sol nodded unhappily. “You say you were in the megasphere,” he called “What did you see? What did you learn? Your Keats persona … is it—”
“We’ll talk when I come back,” called Brawne, moving away a step so she could see him more clearly. Sol’s face was a mask of pain: the face of a parent who had lost his child.
“Go back,” she said firmly. “I’ll meet you at the Sphinx in an hour or less.”
Sol rubbed his beard. “Everyone’s gone but you and me, Brawne. We shouldn’t separate … ”
“We have to for a while,” called Brawne, stepping away from him so that the wind whipped the fabric of her pants and jacket. “See you in an hour or less.” She walked away quickly, before she gave in to the urge to move into the warmth of his arms again. The wind was much stronger here, blowing straight down from the head of the valley now so that sand struck at her eyes and pelted her cheeks. Only by keeping her head down could Brawne stay close to the trail, much less on it. Only the bright, pulsing glow of the Tombs lighted her way. Brawne felt time tides tug at her like a physical assault.
Minutes later, she was vaguely aware that she had passed the Obelisk and was on the debris-littered trail near the Crystal Monolith. Sol and the Sphinx were already lost to sight behind her, the Jade Tomb only a pale green glow in the nightmare of dust and wind.
Brawne stopped, weaving slightly as the gales and time tides pulled at her. It was more than half a kilometer down the valley to the Shrike Palace. Despite her sudden understanding when leaving the megasphere of the connection between tree and tomb, what good could she possibly do when she got there? And what had the damn poet ever done for her except curse her and drive her crazy? Why should she die for him?
The wind screamed in the valley, but above that noise Brawne thought she could hear cries more shrill, more human. She looked toward the northern cliffs, but the dust obscured all.
Brawne Lamia leaned forward, tugged her jacket collar high around her, and kept moving into the wind.
Before Meina Gladstone stepped out of the fatline booth, an incoming call chimed, and she settled back in place, staring into the holo tank with great intensity. The Consul’s ship had acknowledged her message, but no transmission had followed. Perhaps he had changed his mind.
No. The data columns floating in the rectangular prism in front of her showed that the squirt had originated in the Mare Infinitus System. Admiral William Ajunta Lee was calling her, using the private code she had given him.
FORCE:space had been incensed when Gladstone had insisted on the naval commander’s promotion and had assigned him as “Government Liaison” for the strike mission originally scheduled for Hebron. After the massacres on Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove, the strike force had been translated to the
Mare Infinitus system: seventy-four ships of the line, capital ships heavily protected by torchships and defense-shield pickets, the entire task force ordered to strike through the advancing Swarm warships as quickly as possible to hit the Swarm center.
Lee was the CEO’s spy and contact. While his new rank and orders allowed him to be privy to command decisions, four FORCE:space commanders on the scene outranked him.
That was all right. Gladstone wanted him on the scene to report.
The tank misted and the determined face of William Ajunta Lee filled the space. “CEO, reporting as ordered. Task Force 181.2 has successfully translated to System 3996.12.22 … ”
Gladstone blinked in surprise before remembering that this was the official code for the G-star system that held Mare Infinitus. One rarely thought of geography beyond the Web world itself.
“… Swarm attack ships remain a hundred and twenty minutes from target world lethal radius,” Lee was saying. Gladstone knew that the lethal radius was the roughly .13 AU distance at which standard ship weapons became effective despite ground field defenses. Mare Infinitus had no field defenses. The new Admiral continued. “Contact with forward elements estimated at 1732:26 Web standard, approximately twenty-five minutes from now. The task force is configured for maximum penetration. Two JumpShips will allow introduction of new personnel or weapons until the farcasters are sealed during combat. The cruiser on which I carry my flag—HS Garden Odyssey—will carry out your special directive at the earliest possible opportunity. William Lee, out.”
The image collapsed to a spinning sphere of white while transmission codes ended their crawl.
“Response?” queried the transmitter’s computer.
“Message acknowledged,” said Gladstone. “Carry on.”
Gladstone stepped out into her study and found Sedeptra Akasi waiting, a frown of concern on her attractive face.
“What is it?”
“The War Council is ready to readjourn,” said the aide. “Senator Kolchev is waiting to see you on a matter he says is urgent.”
“Send him in. Tell the Council I will be there in five minutes.” Gladstone sat behind her ancient desk and resisted the impulse to close her eyes. She was very tired. But her eyes were open when Kolchev entered. “Sit down, Gabriel Fyodor.”