by Dan Simmons
“There’s no doubt?” asked Arundez.
“None,” said the Consul. “Hyperion is an Outback world again. Only this time there is no Web to be Outback to.”
“It’s so hard to believe,” said Theo Lane. The ex-Governor-General sat drinking Scotch: the only time the Consul had ever seen his aide indulge in a drug. Theo poured another four fingers. “The Web … gone. Five hundred years of expansion wiped out.”
“Not wiped out,” said the Consul. He set his own drink, still unfinished, on a table. “The worlds remain. The cultures will grow apart, but we still have the Hawking drive. The one technological advance we gave ourselves rather than leased from the Core. ”
Melio Arundez leaned forward, his palms together as if praying. “Can the Core really be gone? Destroyed?”
The Consul listened a moment to the babble of voices, cries, entreaties, military reports, and pleas for help coming over the fatline voice-only bands. “Perhaps not destroyed,” he said, “but cut off, sealed away. ”
Theo finished his drink and carefully set his glass down. His green eyes had a placid, glazed look. “You think there are … other spider-webs for them? Other farcaster systems? Reserve Cores?”
The Consul made a gesture with his hand. “We know they succeeded in creating their Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps that UI allowed this … winnowing … of the Core. Perhaps it’s keeping some of the old AIs on line—in a reduced capacity—the way they had planned to keep a few billion humans in reserve.”
Suddenly the fatline babble ceased as if cut off by a knife.
“Ship?” queried the Consul, suspecting a power failure somewhere in the receiver.
“All fatline messages have ceased, most in midtransmission,” said the ship.
The Consul felt his heart pounding as he thought The deathwand device. But no, he realized at once, that couldn’t affect all of the worlds at once. Even with hundreds of such devices detonating simultaneously, there would be lag time as FORCE ships and other far-flung transmission sources got in their final messages. But what then?
“The messages appear to have been cut off by a disturbance in the transmission medium,” said the ship. “Which is, to my current knowledge, impossible.”
The Consul stood. A disturbance in the transmission medium? The fatline medium, as far as humans understood it, was the hyperstring Planck-infinite topography of space-time itself: what AIs had cryptically referred to as the Void Which Binds. There could be no disturbance in that medium.
Suddenly the ship said, “Fatline message coming in—transmission source, everywhere; encryption base, infinite; squirt rate, real-time.”
The Consul opened his mouth to tell the ship to quit spouting nonsense when the air above the holopit misted in something neither image nor data column, and a voice spoke:
“THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL, YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE.”
The three men sat in silence unbroken except for the reassuring rush of ventilator fans and the myriad soft noises of a ship under way. Finally the Consul said, “Ship, please send out a standard fatline time-location squirt without encoding. Add ‘receiving stations respond.’ ”
There was a pause of seconds—an impossibly long response time for the AI-caliber computer that was the ship. “I’m sorry, that is not possible,” it said at last.
“Why not?” demanded the Consul.
“Fatline transmissions are no longer being … allowed. The hyperstring medium is no longer receptive to modulation.”
“There’s nothing on the fatline?” asked Theo, staring at the empty space above the holopit as if someone had turned off a holie just as it was getting to the exciting part.
Again the ship paused. “To all intents and purposes, M. Lane,” it said, “there is no fatline any longer.”
“Jesus wept,” muttered the Consul. He finished his drink in one long gulp and went to the bar for another. “It’s the old Chinese curse,” he muttered.
Melio Arundez looked up. “What’s that?”
The Consul took a long drink. “Old Chinese curse,” he said. “May you live in interesting times.”
As if compensating for the loss of fatline, the ship played audio of in-system radio and intercepted tightbeam babble while it projected a real-time view of the blue-and-white sphere of Hyperion turning and growing as they decelerated toward it at two hundred gravities.
FORTY-FIVE
I escape the Web datasphere just before escape ceases to be an option.
It is incredible and oddly disturbing, the sight of the megasphere swallowing itself. Brawn Lamia’s view of the megasphere as an organic thing, a semisentient organism more analagous to an ecology than a city, was essentially correct. Now, as the farcaster links cease to be and the world inside those avenues folds and collapses upon itself, the external datasphere simultaneously collapsing like a burning big-top tent suddenly without poles, wires, guys, or stakes, the living megasphere devours itself like some ravenous predator gone mad—chewing its own tail, belly, entrails, forepaws, and heart—until only the mindless jaws are left, snapping on emptiness.
The metasphere remains. But it is more wilderness than ever now.
Black forests of unknown time and space.
Sounds in the night.
Lions.
And tigers.
And bears.
When the Void Which Binds convulses and sends its single, banal message to the human universe, it is as if an earthquake has sent ripples through solid rock. Hurrying through the shifting metasphere above Hyperion, I have to smile. It is as if the God-analog has grown tired of the ants scribbling graffiti on Its big toe.
I don’t see God—either one of them—in the metasphere. I don’t try. I have enough problems of my own.
The black vortexes of the Web and Core entrances are gone now, erased from space and time like warts removed, vanished as thoroughly as whirlpools in water when the storm has passed.
I am stuck here unless I want to brave the metasphere.
Which I do not. Not yet.
But this is where I want to be. The datasphere is all but gone here in Hyperion System, the pitiful remnants on the world itself and in what remains of the FORCE fleet drying up like tidepools in the sun, but the Time Tombs glow through the metasphere like beacons in the gathering darkness. If the farcaster links had been black vortexes, the Tombs blaze like white holes shedding an expanding light.
I move toward them. So far, as the One Who Comes Before, all I have accomplished is to appear in others’ dreams. It is time to do something.
Sol waited.
It had been hours since he had handed his only child to the Shrike. It had been days since he had eaten or slept. Around him the storm had raged and abated, the Tombs had glowed and rumbled like runaway reactors, and the time tides had whipped him with tsunami force. But Sol had clung to the stone steps of the Sphinx and waited through it all. He waited now.
Half conscious, pummeled by fatigue and fear for his daughter, Sol found that his scholar’s mind was working at a rapid pace.
For most of his life and for all of his career, Sol Weintraub the historian-cum-classicist-cum-philosopher had dealt with the ethics of human religious behavior. Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. Sol’s most famous book, finally titled Abraham’s Dilemma when it was brought out in a mass-market edition in numbers he had never dreamed of while producing volumes for academic presses, had been written when Rachel was dying of Merlin’s sickness and dealt, obviously enough, with Abraham’s hard choice of obeying or disobeying God’s direct command for him to sacrifice his son.
Sol had written that primitive
times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice—as in the dark nights of the ovens which pocked Old Earth history—and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever form God now took in human consciousness—whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution—humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God’s name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.
Yet hours ago, ages ago, Sol Weintraub had handed his only child to a creature of death.
For years the voice in his dreams had commanded him to do so. For years Sol had refused. He had agreed, finally, only when time was gone, when any other hope was gone, and when he had realized that the voice in his and Sarai’s dreams all those years had not been the voice of God, nor of some dark force allied with the Shrike.
It had been the voice of their daughter.
With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.
It was not obedience.
It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.
Abraham was testing God.
By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.
Sol shuddered as he thought of how no posturing on Abraham’s part, no shamming of his willingness to sacrifice the boy, could have served to forge that bond between greater power and humankind. Abraham had to know in his own heart that he would kill his son. The Deity, whatever form it then took, had to know Abraham’s determination, had to feel that sorrow and commitment to destroy what was to Abraham the most precious thing in the universe.
Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do.
Why then, thought Sol, clinging to the stone stair as the Sphinx seemed to rise and fall on the storm seas of time, why was this test being repeated? What terrible new revelations lay at hand for humankind?
Sol understood then—from what little Brawne had told him, from the stories shared on the pilgrimage, from his own personal revelations of the past few weeks—that the effort of the machine Ultimate Intelligence, whatever the hell it was, to flush out the missing Empathy entity of the human Godhead was useless. Sol no longer saw the tree of thorns on its cliff top, its metal branches and suffering multitudes, but he did see clearly now that the thing was as much an organic machine as the Shrike—an instrument to broadcast suffering through the universe so the human God-part would be forced to respond, to show itself.
If God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must. then that evolution was toward empathy—toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion. But the obscene tree which the pilgrims had glimpsed—-which poor Martin Silenus had been a victim of—was not the way to evoke the missing power.
Sol realized now that the machine god, whatever its form, was insightful enough to see that empathy was a response to others’ pain, but the same UI was too stupid to realize that empathy—in both human terms and the terms of humankind’s UI—was far more than that. Empathy and love were inseparable and inexplicable. The machine UI would never understand it—not even enough to use it as a lure for the part of the human UI who had tired of warfare in the distant future.
Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love.
But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation. Love?
For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.
It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom.
It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothing.
But now, as the Sphinx loomed above him and the first hint of sunrise paled Hyperion’s sky, Sol realized that he had responded to a force more basic and persuasive than the Shrike’s terror or pain’s dominion. If he was right—and he did not know but felt—then love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter/ antimatter. There was room for some sort of God not in the web between the walls, nor in the singularity cracks in the pavement, nor somewhere out before and beyond the sphere of things … but in the very warp and woof of things. Evolving as the universe evolved. Learning as the learning-able parts of the universe learned. Loving as humankind loved.
Sol got to his knees and then to his feet. The time tide storm seemed to have abated a bit, and he thought he could try for the hundredth time to gain access to the tomb.
Bright light still emanated from where the Shrike had emerged, taken Sol’s daughter, and vanished. But now the stars were disappearing as the sky itself lightened toward morning.
Sol climbed the stairs.
He remembered the time at home on Barnard’s World when Rachel—she was ten—had tried to climb the town’s tallest elm and had fallen when she was five meters from the top. Sol had rushed to the med center to find his child floating in the recovery nutrient and suffering from a punctured lung, a broken leg and ribs, a fractured jaw, and innumerable cuts and bruises. She had smiled at him, lifted a thumb, and said through her wired jaw, “I’ll make it next time!”
Sol and Sarai had sat there in the med center that night while Rachel slept. They had waited for morning. Sol had held her hand through the night.
He waited now.
Time tides from the open entrance to the Sphinx still held Sol back like insistent winds, but he leaned into them like an immovable rock and stood there, five meters out and waiting, squinting into the glare.
He glanced up but did not move back when he saw the fusion flame of a descending spacecraft slice the predawn sky. He turned to look but did not retreat when he heard the spacecraft landing and saw three figures emerge. He glanced but did not step back when he heard other noises, shouts, from deeper in the valley and saw a familiar figure lugging another in a fireman’s carry, moving toward him from beyond the Jade Tomb.
None of these things related to his child. He waited for Rachel.
Even without a datasphere, it is quite possible for my persona to travel through the rich, Void-Which-Binds soup which now surrounds Hyperion. My immediate reaction is to want to visit the One Who Will Be, but although that o
ne’s brilliance dominates the metasphere, I am not yet ready for that. I am, after all, little John Keats, not John the Baptist.
The Sphinx—a tomb patterned after a real creature that will not be designed by genetic engineers for centuries to come—is a maelstrom of temporal energies. There are really several Sphinxes visible to my expanded sight: the anti-entropic tomb carrying its Shrike cargo back in time like some sealed container with its deadly bacillus, the active, unstable Sphinx which contaminated Rachel Weintraub in its initial efforts to open a portal through time, and the Sphinx which has opened and is moving forward through time again. This last Sphinx is the blazing portal of light, which, second only to the One Who Will Be, lights Hyperion with its metaspherical bonfire.
I descend to this bright place in time to watch Sol Weintraub hand his daughter to the Shrike.
I could not have interfered with this even if I had arrived earlier. I would not if I were able. Worlds beyond reason depend upon this act.
But I await within the Sphinx for the Shrike to pass, carrying its tender cargo. Now I can see the child. She is seconds old, blotched, moist, and wrinkled. She is crying her newborn lungs out. From my old attitudes of bachelorhood and reflective poet’s stance, I find it hard to understand the attraction this bawling, unaesthetic infant exerts on its father and the cosmos.
Still, the sight of a baby’s flesh—however unattractive this newborn might be—held by the Shrike’s bladed talons stirs something in me.
Three paces into the Sphinx have carried the Shrike and the child hours forward in time. Just beyond the entrance, the river of time accelerates. If I don’t do something within seconds, it will be too late—the Shrike will have used this portal to carry the child off to whatever distant-future dark hole it seeks.
Unbidden, the images arrive of spiders draining their victims of fluids, of digger wasps burying their own larvae in the paralyzed bodies of their prey, perfect sources for incubation and food.
I have to act, but I have no more solidity here than I had in the Core. The Shrike walks through me as if I were an unseen holo. My analog persona is useless here, armless and insubstantial as a wisp of swamp gas.