by Dan Simmons
The Consul grinned and patted the full backpack on the step. “This should get you and the baby through the first two weeks. If you don’t find a diaper service by then, go to one of those other universes Rachel spoke about.”
Sol shook his head. “Is this happening?”
“Wait a few days or weeks,” said Melio Arundez. “Stay here with us until things get sorted out. There’s no hurry. The future will always be there.”
Sol scratched his beard as he fed the baby with one of the nursing paks the ship had manufactured. “We’re not sure this portal will always be open,” he said. “Besides, I might lose my nerve. I’m getting pretty old to raise a child again … especially as a stranger in a strange land.”
Arundez set his strong hand on Sol’s shoulder. “Let me go with you. I’m dying of curiosity about this place.”
Sol grinned and extended his hand, shook Arundez’s firmly. “Thank you, my friend. But you have a wife and children back in the Web … on Renaissance Vector … who await your return. You have your own duties.”
Arundez nodded and looked at the sky. “If we can return ”
“We’ll return,” the Consul said flatly. “Old-fashioned Hawking drive spaceflight still works, even if the Web is gone forever. It’ll be a few years’ time-debt, Melio, but you’ll get back. ”
Sol nodded, finished feeding the baby, set a clean cloth diaper on his shoulder, and patted her firmly on the back. He looked around the small circle of people. “We all have our duties.” He shook hands with Martin Silenus. The poet had refused to crawl into the nutrient recovery bath or have the neural shunt socket surgically removed. ‘I’ve had these things before,’ he’d said.
“Will you continue your poem?” Sol asked him.
Silenus shook his head. “I finished it on the tree,” he said. “And I discovered something else there, Sol.”
The scholar raised an eyebrow.
“I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God … or anything approaching a God … he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.”
The baby burped.
Martin Silenus grinned and shook Sol’s hand a final time. “Give them hell up there, Weintraub. Tell ‘em you’re their great-great-great-great-great grandaddy, and if they misbehave, you’ll whop their butts. ”
Sol nodded and moved down the line to Brawne Lamia. “I saw you conferring with the ship’s medical terminal,” he said. “Is everything all right with you and your unborn child?”
Brawne grinned. “Everything’s fine.”
“A boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
Sol kissed her on the cheek. Brawne touched his beard and turned her face away to hide tears unbecoming a former private investigator.
“Girls are such a chore,” he said, disentangling Rachel’s fingers from his beard and Brawne’s curls. “Trade yours in for a boy the first chance you get.”
“OK,” said Brawne and stepped back.
He shook hands a final time with the Consul, Theo, and Melio, shouldered his pack while Brawne held the infant, and then took Rachel in his arms. “Hell of an anticlimax if this thing doesn’t work and I end up wandering around the inside of the Sphinx,” he said.
The Consul squinted at the glowing door. “It will work. Although how, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a farcaster of any sort. ”
“A whencaster,” ventured Silenus and held up his arm to block Brawne’s blows. The poet took a step back and shrugged. “If it continues to work, Sol, I have a feeling you won’t be alone up there. Thousands will join you.”
“If the Paradox Board permits,” said Sol, tugging at his beard the way he always did when his mind was elsewhere. He blinked, shifted backpack and baby, and stepped forward. The fields of force from the open door let him advance this time.
“So long everyone!” he cried. “By God, it was all worth it, wasn’t it?” He turned into the light, and he and the baby were gone.
• • •
There was a silence bordering on emptiness which stretched for several minutes. Finally the Consul said, in almost embarrassed tones, “Shall we go up to the ship?”
“Bring the elevator down for the rest of us,” said Martin Silenus. “M. Lamia here will walk on air.”
Brawne glared at the diminutive poet.
“You think it was something Moneta arranged?” said Arundez, referring to something Brawne had suggested earlier.
“It had to be,” said Brawne. “Some bit of future science or something.”
“Ah, yes,” sighed Martin Silenus, “future science … that familiar phrase from those too timid to be superstitious. The alternative, my dear, is that you have this hitherto untapped power to levitate and turn monsters into shatterable glass goblins.”
“Shut up,” said Brawne, with no undertones of affection in her voice now. She looked over her shoulder. “Who says another Shrike won’t show up any minute?”
“Who indeed?” agreed the Consul. “I suspect we’ll always have a Shrike or rumors of a Shrike.”
Theo Lane, always embarrassed by discord, cleared his throat and said, “Look what I found among the baggage strewn around the Sphinx.” He held up an instrument with three strings, a long neck, and bright designs painted on its triangular body. “A guitar?”
“A balalaika,” said Brawne. “It belonged to Father Hoyt.”
The Consul took the instrument and strummed several chords. “Do you know this song?” He played a few notes.
“The ‘Leeda Tits Screwing Song’?” ventured Martin Silenus.
The Consul shook his head and played several more chords.
“Something old?” guessed Brawne.
“ ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ ” said Melio Arundez
“That must be from before my time,” said Theo Lane, nodding along as the Consul strummed.
“It’s from before everybody’s time,” said the Consul. “Come on, I’ll teach you the words as we go.”
Walking together in the hot sun, singing off-key and on-, losing the words and then starting again, they went uphill to the waiting ship.
EPILOGUE
Five and a half months later, seven months pregnant, Brawne Lamia took the morning dirigible north from the capital to the Poets’ City for the Consul’s farewell party.
The capital, now referred to as Jacktown by indigenie, visiting FORCE shipmen, and Ouster alike, looked white and clean in the morning light as the dirigible left the downtown mooring tower and headed northwest up the Hoolie River.
The biggest city on Hyperion had suffered during the fighting, but now most of it had been rebuilt, and a majority of the three million refugees from the fiberplastic plantations and smaller cities on the southern continent had elected to stay, despite recent surges of interest in fiberplastic from the Ousters. So the city had grown like Topsy, with basic services such as electricity, sewage, and cable HTV service just reaching the hilltop warrens between the spaceport and the old town.
But the buildings were white in the morning light, the spring air rich with promise, and Brawne saw the rough slashes of new roads and the bustle of river traffic below as a good sign for the future.
Fighting in Hyperion space had not lasted long after the destruction of the Web. De facto Ouster occupation of the spaceport, and capital had been translated into recognition of the Web’s demise and comanagement with the new Home Rule Council in the treaty brokered primarily by the Consul and former Governor-General Theo Lane. But in the almost six months since the death of the Web, the only traffic at the spaceport had been dropships from the remnants of the FORCE fleet still in-system and frequent planetary excursions from the Swarm. It was no longer unusual to see the tall figures of Ousters shopping in Jacktown Square or their more exotic versions drinking at Cicero’s. Brawne had stayed at Cicero’s during the past few months, residing in one of the larger rooms on the fourth floor of the old wing of the inn while Stan Leweski rebuilt and expanded the damaged sections of the legendary stru
cture. “By God, I don’t need no help from pregnant womens!” Stan would shout each time Brawne offered a hand, but she invariably ended up doing some task while Leweski grumped and mumbled. Brawne might be pregnant, but she was still a Lusian, and her muscles had not completely atrophied after only a few months on Hyperion.
Stan had driven her to the mooring tower that morning, helping her with her luggage and the package she had brought for the Consul. Then the innkeeper had handed her a small package of his own. “It’s a damn, dull trip up into that godforsaken country,” he’d growled. “You have to have something to read, heh?”
The gift was a reproduction of the 1817 edition of John Keats’s Poems, leather bound by Leweski himself.
Brawne embarrassed the giant and delighted watching passengers by hugging him until the bartender’s ribs creaked. “Enough, goddammit,” he muttered, rubbing his side. “Tell that Consul I want to see his worthless hide back here before I give the worthless inn to my son. Tell him that, OK?”
Brawne had nodded and waved with the other passengers to well-wishers seeing them off. Then she had continued waving from the observation mezzanine as the airship untied, discharged ballast, and ponderously moved out over the rooftops.
Now, as the ship left the suburbs behind and swung west to follow the river, Brawne had her first clear view of the mountaintop to the south where the face of Sad King Billy still brooded down on the city. There was a fresh ten-meter scar, slowly fading from weather, on Billy’s cheek where a laser lance had slashed during the fighting.
But it was the larger sculpture taking shape on the northwest face of the mountain which caught Brawne’s attention. Even with modern cutting equipment borrowed from FORCE, the work was slow, and the great aquiline nose, heavy brow, broad mouth, and sad, intelligent eyes were just becoming recognizable. Many of the Hegemony refugees left on Hyperion had objected to Meina Gladstone’s likeness being added to the mountain, but Rithmet Corber III, great-grandson of the sculptor who had created Sad King Billy’s face there—and incidentally the man who now owned the mountain—had said, as diplomatically as possible, “Fuck you” and gone on with the work. Another year, perhaps two, and it would be finished.
Brawne sighed, rubbed her distended stomach—an affectation she had always hated in pregnant women but one she now found impossible to avoid—and walked clumsily to a deck chair on the observation deck. If she was this huge at seven months, what would she be like at full term? Brawne glanced up at the distended curve of the dirigible’s great gas envelope above her and winced.
The airship voyage, with good tail winds, took only twenty hours. Brawne dozed part of the way but spent most of the time watching the familiar landscape unfold below.
They passed the Karla Locks in midmorning, and Brawne smiled and patted the package she had brought for the Consul. By late afternoon, they were approaching the river port of Naiad, and from three thousand feet Brawne looked down on an old passenger barge being pulled upriver by mantas leaving their V-shaped wake. She wondered if that could be the Benares.
They flew over Edge as dinner was being served in the upper lounge and began the crossing of the Sea of Grass just as sunset lighted the great steppe with color and a million grasses rippled to the same breeze that lofted the airship along. Brawne took her coffee to her favorite chair on the mezzanine, opened a window wide, and watched the Sea of Grass unfold like the sensuous felt of a billiard table as the light failed. Just before the lamps were lit on the mezzanine deck, she was rewarded with the sight of a windwagon plying its way from north to south, lanterns swinging fore and aft. Brawne leaned forward and could clearly hear the rumble of the big wheel and the snap of canvas on the jib sail as the wagon hove hard over to take a new tack.
The bed was ready in her sleeping compartment when Brawne went up to slip into her robe, but after reading a few poems she found herself back on the observation deck until dawn, dozing in her favorite chair and breathing in the fresh smell of grass from below.
They moored in Pilgrim’s Rest long enough to take on fresh food and water, renew ballast, and change crews, but Brawne did not go down to walk around. She could see the worklights around the tramway station, and when the voyage resumed at last, the airship seemed to follow the string of cable towers into the Bridle Range.
It was still quite dark as they crossed the mountains, and a steward came along to seal the long windows as the compartments were pressurized, but Brawne could still catch glimpses of the tramcars passing from peak to peak between the clouds below, and icefields that glinted in the starlight.
They passed over Keep Chronos just after dawn, and the stones of the castle emitted little sense of warmth even in the roseate light. Then the high desert appeared, the City of Poets glowed white off the port side, and the dirigible descended toward the mooring tower set on the east end of the new spaceport there.
Brawne had not expected anyone to be there to meet her. Everyone who knew her thought that she was flying up with Theo Lane in his skimmer later in the afternoon. But Brawne had thought the airship voyage the proper way to travel alone with her thoughts. And she had been right.
But even before the mooring cable was pulled tight and the ramp lowered, Brawne saw the familiar face of the Consul in the small crowd. Next to him was Martin Silenus, frowning and squinting at the unfamiliar morning light.
“Damn that Stan,” muttered Brawne, remembering that the microwave links were up now and new comsats in orbit.
The Consul met her with a hug. Martin Silenus yawned, shook her hand, and said, “Couldn’t find a more inconvenient time to arrive, eh?”
There was a party in the evening. It was more than the Consul leaving the next morning—-most of the FORCE fleet still remaining was heading back, and a sizable portion of the Ouster Swarm was going with chem. A dozen dropships littered the small field near the Consul’s spaceship as Ousters paid their last visit to the Time Tombs and FORCE officers stopped by Kassad’s tomb a final time.
The Poets’ City itself now had almost a thousand full-time residents, many of them artists and poets, although Silenus said that most were poseurs. They had twice tried to elect Martin Silenus mayor; he had declined twice and soundly cursed his would-be constituency. But the old poet continued to run things, supervising the restorations, adjudicating disputes, dispensing housing and arranging for supply flights from Jacktown and points south. The Poets’ City was no longer the Dead City.
Martin Silenus said the collective IQ had been higher when the place was deserted.
The banquet was held in the rebuilt dining pavilion, and the great dome echoed to laughter as Martin Silenus read ribald poems and other artists performed skits. Besides the Consul and Silenus, Brawne’s round table boasted half a dozen Ouster guests, including Freeman Ghenga and Coredwell Minmun, as well as Rithmet Corber III, dressed in stitched pelts and a tall cone of a cap. Theo Lane arrived late, with apologies, shared the most recent Jacktown jokes with the audience, and came over to the table to join them for dessert. Lane had been mentioned recently as the people’s choice for Jacktown’s mayor in the Fourthmonth elections soon to be held—both indigenie and Ouster seemed to like his style—and so far Theo had shown no signs of declining if the honor were offered him.
After much wine at the banquet, the Consul quietly invited a few of them up to the ship for music and more wine. They went, Brawne and Martin and Theo, and sat high on the ship’s balcony while the Consul very soberly and feelingly played Gershwin and Studeri and Brahms and Luser and Beatles, and then Gershwin again, finally ending with Rachmaninoff’s heart-stoppingly beautiful Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor.
Then they sat in the low light, looked out over the city and valley, drank a bit more wine, and talked late into the night.
“What do you expect to find in the Web?” Theo asked the Consul. “Anarchy? Mob rule? Reversion to Stone Age life?”
“All of that and more, probably,” smiled the Consul. He swirled the brandy in his glass. “Ser
iously, there were enough squirts before the fatline went dead to let us know that despite some real problems, most of the old worlds of the Web will do all right.”
Theo Lane sat nursing the same glass of wine he had brought up from the dining pavilion. “Why do you think the fatline went dead?”
Martin Silenus snorted. “God got tired of us scribbling graffiti on his outhouse walls.”
They talked of old friends, wondering how Father Duré was doing. They had heard about his new job on one of the last fatline intercepts. They remembered Lenar Hoyt.
“Do you think he’ll automatically become Pope when Duré passes away?” asked the Consul.
“I doubt it,” said Theo. “But at least he’ll get a chance to live again if that extra cruciform Duré carries on his chest still works.”
“I wonder if he’ll come looking for his balalaika,” said Silenus, strumming the instrument. In the low light, Brawne thought, the old poet still looked like a satyr.
They talked about Sol and Rachel. In the past six months, hundreds of people had tried to enter the Sphinx; one had succeeded—a quiet Ouster named Mizenspesht Ammenyet.
The Ouster experts had spent months analyzing the Tombs and the trace of time tides still surviving. On some of the structures, hieroglyphs and oddly familiar cuneiform had appeared after the Tombs’ opening, and these had led to at least educated guesses as to the various Time Tombs’ functions.
The Sphinx was a one-way portal to the future Rachel/Moneta had spoken of. No one knew how it selected those it wished to let pass, but the popular thing for tourists was to try to enter the portal. No sign or hint of Sol and his daughter’s fate had been discovered. Brawne found that she thought of the old scholar often.
Brawne, the Consul, and Martin Silenus drank a toast to Sol and Rachel.
The Jade Tomb appeared to have something to do with gas giant worlds. No one had been passed by its particular portal, but exotic Ousters, designed and bred to live in Jovian habitats, arrived daily to attempt to enter it. Both Ouster and FORCE experts repeatedly pointed out that the Tombs were not farcasters, but some other form of cosmic connection entirely, The tourists didn’t care.