by Dan Simmons
“Nonsense, nonsense,” Hunt muttered over and over like a mantra, squeezing the young man’s hot hand.
“Flowers,” whispered Keats a little later, just after Hunt had lighted a lamp on the bureau. The poet’s eyes were wide as he stared at the ceiling in a look of pure, childish wonder. Hunt glanced upward and saw the faded yellow roses painted in blue squares on the ceiling. “Flowers … above me,” whispered Keats between his efforts to breathe.
Hunt was standing at the window, staring out at the shadows beyond the Spanish Steps, when the painful rasp of breath behind him faltered and stopped and Keats gasped out, “Severn … lift me up! I am dying.”
Hunt sat on the bed and held him. Heat flowed from the small body that seemed to weigh nothing, as if the actual substance of the man had been burned away. “Don’t be frightened. Be firm. And thank God it has come!” gasped Keats, and then the terrible rasping subsided. Hunt helped Keats lie back more comfortably as his breathing eased into a more normal rhythm.
Hunt changed the water in the basin, moistened a fresh cloth, and came back to find Keats dead.
Later, just after the sun rose, Hunt lifted the small body—wrapped in fresh linens from Hunt’s own bed—and went out into the city.
The storm had abated by the time Brawne Lamia reached the end of the valley. As she passed the Cave Tombs, she had seen the same eerie glow the other Tombs were emitting, but there also came a terrible noise—as if of thousands of souls crying out—echoing and moaning from the earth. Brawne hurried on.
The sky was clear by the time she stood in front of the Shrike Palace. The structure was aptly named: the half-dome arched up and outward like the creature’s carapace, support elements curved downward like blades stabbing the valley floor and other buttresses leaped upward and away like Shrike thorns. Walls had become translucent as the interior glow increased, and now the building shone like a giant jack-o’-lantern shaved paper thin; the upper regions glowed red as the Shrike’s gaze.
Brawne took a breath and touched her abdomen. She was pregnant—she had known it before she left Lusus—and didn’t she owe more now to her unborn son or daughter than to the obscene old poet on the Shrike’s tree? Brawne knew that the answer was yes and that it did not matter one damn bit. She let out the breath and approached the Shrike Palace.
From the outside, the Shrike Palace was no more than twenty meters across. Before, when they had entered, Brawne and the other pilgrims had seen the interior as a single open space, empty except for the bladelike supports that crisscrossed the space under the glowing dome. Now, as Brawne stood at the entrance, the interior was a space larger than the valley itself. A dozen tiers of white stone rose rank on rank and stretched into the faded distance. On each tier of stone, human bodies lay, each garbed a different way, each tethered by the same sort of semiorganic, semiparasitic shunt socket and cable which her friends had told Brawne she herself had worn. Only these metallic but translucent umbilicals pulsed red and expanded and contracted regularly, as if blood were being recycled through the sleeping forms’ skulls.
Brawne staggered back, affected by the pull of anti-entropic tides as much as by the view, but when she stood ten meters from the Palace, the exterior was the same size as always. She did not pretend to understand how klicks of interior could fit into such a modest shell. The Time Tombs were opening. This one could coexist in different times for all she knew. What she did understand was that when she was awakening from her own travels under the shunt, she had seen the Shrike’s thorn tree tied with tubes and vines of energy invisible to the eye but now quite obviously connected with the Shrike Palace. She stepped to the entrance again.
The Shrike waited inside. Its carapace, usually gleaming, now seemed black, silhouetted against the light and marble glare around it.
Brawne felt the adrenaline rush fill her, felt the impulse to turn and run, and stepped inside.
The entrance all but vanished behind her, remaining visible only by a faint fuzziness in the uniform glow which emanated from the walls. The Shrike did not move. Its red eyes gleamed from the shadow of its skull.
Brawne stepped forward, her booted heels making no sound on the stone floor. The Shrike was ten meters to her right where the stone biers began, ascending like obscene display racks to a ceiling lost in the glow. She had no illusion that she could make it back to the door before the creature closed on her.
It did not move. The air smelled of ozone and something sickly sweet. Brawne moved along the wall at her back and scanned the rows of bodies for a familiar sleeping face. With each step to her left, she moved farther from the exit and made it easier for the Shrike to cut her off. The creature stood there like a black sculpture in an ocean of light.
The tiers did stretch for kilometers. Stone steps, each almost a meter high, broke the horizontal lines of dark bodies. Several minutes’ walk from the entrance, Brawne climbed the lower third of one of these stairways, touched the nearest body on the second tier, and was relieved to find the flesh warm, the man’s chest rising and falling. It was not Martin Silenus.
Brawne continued onward, half expecting to find Paul Duré or Sol Weintraub or even herself lying among the living dead. Instead, she found a face she had last seen carved into a mountainside. Sad King Billy lay motionless on white stone, five tiers up, his royal robes scorched and stained. The sad face was—as were all the others—contorted in some internal agony. Martin Silenus lay three bodies away on a lower tier.
Brawne crouched next to the poet, glancing over her shoulder at the black speck of the Shrike, still unmoving at the end of the rows of bodies. Like the others, Silenus appeared to be alive, in silent agony, and was attached by a shunt socket connected to a pulsating umbilical which, in turn, ran into the white wall behind the ledge as if wed to the stone.
Brawne panted from fear as she ran her hand over the poet’s skull, feeling the fusion of plastic and bone, and then felt along the umbilical itself, finding no join or opening to the point where it melded with stone. Fluid pulsed beneath her fingers.
“Shit,” whispered Brawne and, in a sudden flurry of panic, looked behind her, certain the Shrike had crept within striking distance. The dark form still stood at the end of the long room.
Her pockets were empty. She had neither weapon nor tool. She realized that she would have to return to the Sphinx, find the packs, dig out something to cut with, and then return and muster enough courage to enter here again.
Brawne knew that she could never come through that door again.
She knelt, took a deep breath, and brought her hand and arm up, then down. The edge of her palm smashed against material that looked like clear plastic and felt harder than steel. Her arm ached from wrist to shoulder from the single blow.
Brawne Lamia glanced to her right. The Shrike was moving toward her, stepping slowly like an old man out for a leisurely walk.
Brawne shouted, knelt, and struck again, palm-edge rigid, thumb locked at right angles. The long room echoed to the impact.
Brawne Lamia had grown up on Lusus at 1.3 standard gravity, and she was athletic for her race. Since she was nine years old, she had dreamed of and worked toward becoming a detective, and a part of that admittedly obsessive and totally illogical preparation had been training in the martial arts. Now she grunted, raised her arm, and struck again, willing her palm to be an axe blade, seeing in her mind the severing blow, the successful strike-through.
The tough umbilical dented imperceptibly, pulsed like a living thing, and seemed to cringe away as she swung again.
Footsteps became audible below and behind her. Brawne almost giggled. The Shrike could move without walking, go from here to there without the effort of going between. It must enjoy scaring its prey. Brawne was not frightened. She was too busy.
She raised her hand, brought it down again. It would have been easier striking the stone for effect. She slammed her palm-edge into the umbilical again, feeling some small bone give in her hand. The pain was like a distant no
ise, like the sliding below her and behind her.
Has it occurred to you, she thought, that it’ll probably kill him if you do manage to break this thing?
She swung again. The footsteps stopped at the base of the stairway below.
Brawne was panting from effort. Sweat dripped from her forehead and cheeks onto the chest of the sleeping poet.
I don’t even like you, she thought at Martin Silenus and chopped again. It was like trying to sever a metal elephant’s leg.
The Shrike began ascending the staircase.
Brawne half-stood and threw the entire weight of her body into a swing which almost dislocated her shoulder and broke her wrist, and smashed small bones in her hand.
And severed the umbilical.
Red fluid too nonviscous for blood spashed across Brawne’s legs and the white stone. The severed cable still extending from the wall spasmed and then thrashed like an agitated tentacle before lying limply and then withdrawing, a bleeding snake sliding into a hole that ceased to exist as soon as the umbilical was out of sight. The stump of umbilical still attached to Silenus’s neural shunt socket withered in five seconds, drying and contracting like a jellyfish out of water. Red splashed the poet’s face and shoulders, the liquid turning blue even as Brawne watched.
Martin Silenus’s eyes twitched and opened like an owl’s.
“Hey,” he said, “do you know the fucking Shrike’s standing right behind you?”
Gladstone ‘cast to her private apartments and went at once to her fatline cubicle. Two messages waited.
The first was from Hyperion space. Gladstone blinked as the soft voice of her former Governor-General on Hyperion, young Lane, gave a quick summary of the meeting with the Ouster Tribunal. Gladstone sat back in the leather seat and raised both fists to her cheeks as Lane repeated the Ouster denials. They were not the invaders. Lane completed the transmission with a brief description of the Swarm, his opinion that the Ousters were telling the truth, a comment that the Consul’s fate was still unknown, and a request for orders.
“Response?” asked the fatline computer.
“Acknowledge receipt of message,” said Gladstone. “Transmit—’stand by’ in diplomatic one-time code.”
Gladstone keyed the second message.
Admiral William Ajunta Lee appeared in a broken flat-image projection, his ship’s fatline transmitter obviously working on reduced energy. Gladstone saw from the peripheral data columns that the squirt had been encrypted among standard fleet telemetry transmissions: FORCE technicians would eventually notice the check-sum discrepancies, but it might be hours or days from now.
Lee’s face was bloodied, and the background was obscured by smoke. From the fuzzy black-and-white image, it appeared to Gladstone that the young man was transmitting from a docking bay of his cruiser. On a metal worktable behind him lay a corpse.
“… a complement of Marines managed to board one of their so-called lancers,” panted Lee. “They are manned—five to a ship—and they do look like Ousters, but watch what happens when we try to carry out an autopsy.” The picture shifted, and Gladstone realized that Lee was using a hand-held imager patched in through the cruiser’s fatline transmitter. Now Lee was gone, and she was looking down into the white, damaged face of a dead Ouster. From the bleeding at the eyes and ears, Gladstone guessed that the man had died of explosive decompression.
Lee’s hand appeared—recognizable by the admiral’s braid on the sleeve—holding a laser scalpel. The young commander did not bother to remove clothing before beginning a vertical incision starting at the breastbone and cutting downward.
The hand with the laser jerked away, and the camera steadied as something began to happen with the Ouster’s corpse. Broad patches began to smolder on the dead man’s chest, as if the laser had ignited clothing. Then the uniform burned through, and it was immediately apparent that the man’s chest was burning in widening, irregular holes, and from those holes shone a light so brilliant that the portable imager had to stop down receptivity. Patches of the corpse’s skull were burning through now, leaving afterimages on the fatline screen and Gladstone’s retinas.
The camera had pulled back before the corpse had been consumed, as if the heat were too great to bear. Lee’s face floated into focus. “You see, CEO, that’s been the case with all of the bodies. We captured none alive. We’ve found no center to the Swarm yet, just more warships, and I think that—”
The image disappeared and data columns said that the squirt had ceased in midtransmission.
“Response?”
Gladstone shook her head and unsealed the cubicle. In her study once again, she looked longingly at the long couch and sat behind her desk, knowing that if she closed her eyes for a second she would be asleep. Sedeptra buzzed on her private comlog frequency and said that General Morpurgo needed to see the CEO on an urgent matter.
The Lusian entered and began pacing back and forth in his agitation. “M. Executive, I understand your reasoning in authorizing the use of this deathwand device, but I have to protest.”
“Why, Arthur?” she asked, calling him by name for the first time in weeks.
“Because we goddamn well don’t know the result. It’s too dangerous. And it’s … it’s immoral.”
Gladstone raised an eyebrow. “Losing billions of citizens in a protracted war of attrition would be moral, but using this thing to kill millions would be immoral? Is this the FORCE position, Arthur?”
“It’s my position, CEO.”
Gladstone nodded. “Understood and noted, Arthur. But the decision has been made and will be implemented.” She saw her old friend draw himself to attention, and before he could open his mouth to protest, or, more likely, offer his resignation, Gladstone said, “Would you take a walk with me, Arthur?”
The FORCE General was nonplussed. “A walk? Why?”
“We need the fresh air.” Without waiting for a further response, Gladstone crossed to her private farcaster, keyed the manual diskey, and stepped through.
Morpurgo stepped through the opaque portal, glared down at the gold grass which rose to his knees and spread to a distant horizon, and raised his face to a saffron yellow sky where bronze cumulus clouds rose in jagged spires. Behind him, the portal winked out of existence, its location marked only by the meter-high control diskey, the only man-made thing visible in the endless reach of gold grass and cloud-filled sky. “Where the hell are we?” he demanded.
Gladstone had pulled a long strand of grass and was chewing on it. “Kastrop-Rauxel. It has no datasphere, no orbital devices, no human or mech habitations of any kind.”
Morpurgo snorted. “Probably no safer from Core surveillance than the places Byron Lamia used to take us, Meina.”
“Perhaps not,” said Gladstone. “Arthur, listen.” She activated the comlog recordings of the two fatline transmissions she had just heard.
When they were finished, when Lee’s face snapped out of existence, Morpurgo walked away through the high grass.
“Well?” asked Gladstone, hurrying to keep up.
“So these Ouster bodies self-destruct the same way cybrid corpses have been known to,” he said. “So what? Do you think the Senate or All Thing will accept this as proof that it’s the Core that’s behind the invasion?”
Gladstone sighed. The grass looked soft, inviting. She imagined lying there and sinking into a nap from which she would never have to return. “It’s proof enough for us. For the group.” Gladstone did not have to elaborate. Since her early Senate days, they had kept in touch with their suspicions of the Core, their hope for true freedom from AI domination someday. When Senator Byron Lamia had led them … but that was long ago.
Morpurgo watched wind whip at the golden steppes. A curious type of ball lightning played inside the bronze clouds near the horizon. “So what? Knowing is useless unless we know where to strike.”
“We have three hours.”
Morpurgo looked at his comlog. “Two hours and forty-two minutes. Hardly tim
e enough for a miracle, Meina.”
Gladstone did not smile. “Hardly time enough for anything else, Arthur.”
She touched the diskey, and the portal hummed to life.
“What can we do?” asked Morpurgo. “The Core AIs are briefing our technicians on that deathwand device right now. The torchship will be ready in an hour.”
“We detonate it where the effect will harm no one,” said Gladstone.
The General quit pacing and stared. “Where the hell is that? That fucker Nansen says that the device has a lethal radius of at least three light-years, but how can we trust him? We set off one device … near Hyperion or anywhere else … and we may be dooming human life everywhere.”
“I have an idea, but I want to sleep on it,” said Gladstone.
“Sleep on it?” growled General Morpurgo.
“I’m going to take a short nap, Arthur,” Gladstone said. “I suggest you do the same.” She stepped through the portal.
Morpurgo muttered a single obscenity, adjusted his cap, and walked through the farcaster with head up, back straight, and eyes forward: a soldier marching to his own execution.
* * *
On the highest terrace of a mountain moving through space some ten light-minutes from Hyperion, the Consul and seventeen Ousters sat on a circle of low stones within a wider circle of taller stones and decided whether the Consul would live.
“Your wife and child died on Bressia,” said Freeman Ghenga. “During the war between that world and Clan Moseman.”
“Yes,” said the Consul. “The Hegemony thought that the entire Swarm was involved in the attack. I said nothing to disabuse them of that opinion.”
“But your wife and child were killed. ”
The Consul looked beyond the stone circle toward the summit already turning toward night. “So what? I ask for no mercy from this Tribunal. I suggest no extenuating circumstances. I killed your Freeman Andil and the three technicians. Killed them with premediation and malice aforethought. Killed them with no other goal than to trigger your machine to open the Time Tombs. It had nothing to do with my wife and child!”