by Dan Simmons
Notes for a sketch of Sad King Billy:
His Royal Highness King William XXIII, sovereign lord of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile, looks a bit like a wax candle of a man who has been left on a hot stove. His long hair runs in limp rivulets to slumped shoulders while the furrows on his brow trickle downward to the tributaries of wrinkles around the basset-hound eyes, and then run southward again through folds and frown lines to the maze of wattles in neck and jowls. King Billy is said to remind anthropologists of the worry dolls of the Outback Kinshasa, to make Zen Gnostics recall the Pitiful Buddha after the temple fire on Tai Zhin, and to send media historians rushing to their archives to check photos of an ancient flat-film movie actor named Charles Laughton. None of these references mean anything to me; I look at King Billy and think of my long-dead tutor don Balthazar after a week-long binge.
Sad King Billy’s reputation for gloominess is exaggerated. He often laughs; it is merely his misfortune that his peculiar form of laughter makes most people think he is sobbing.
A man cannot help his physiognomy, but in His Highness’s case, the entire persona tends to suggest either “buffoon” or “victim.” He dresses, if that can be the word, in something approaching a constant state of anarchy, defying the taste and color sense of his android servants, so that on some days he clashes with himself and his environment simultaneously. Nor is his appearance limited to sartorial chaos—King William moves in a permanent sphere of dishabille, his fly unsealed, his velvet cape torn and tattered and drawing crumbs magnetically from the floor, his left sleeve ruffle twice as long as the right, which—in turn—looks as if it has been dipped in jam.
You get the idea.
For all this, Sad King Billy has an insightful mind and a passion for the arts and literature which has not been equaled since the true Renaissance days on old Old Earth.
In some ways King Billy is the fat child with his face eternally pressed to the candy store window. He loves and appreciates fine music but cannot produce it. A connoisseur of ballet and all things graceful, His Highness is a klutz, a moving series of pratfalls and comic bits of clumsiness. A passionate reader, unerring poetry critic, and patron of forensics, King Billy combines a stutter in his verbal expression with a shyness which will not allow him to show his verse or prose to anyone else.
A lifelong bachelor now entering his sixtieth year, King Billy inhabits the tumbledown palace and two-thousand-square-mile kingdom as if it were another suit of rumpled, royal clothes. Anecdotes abound: one of the famous oil painters whom King Billy supports finds His Majesty walking head down, hands clasped behind him, one foot on the garden path and one in the mud, obviously lost in thought. The artist hails his patron. Sad King Billy looks up, blinks, looks around as if awakening from a long nap. “Excuse me,” His Highness says to the bemused painter, “b-b-but could you p-p-please tell me—was I headed toward the palace or away from the p-p-palace?” “Toward the palace, Your Majesty,” replies the artist. “Oh, g-g-good,” sighs the King, “then I’ve had lunch.”
General Horace Glennon-Height had begun his rebellion and the Outback world of Asquith lay directly in his path of conquest. Asquith was not worried—the Hegemony had offered a FORCE:space fleet as a shield—but the royal ruler of the kingdom of Monaco-in-Exile seemed more melted than ever when he called me in.
“Martin,” said His Majesty, “you’ve h-h-heard about the b-battle for Fomalhaut?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like anything to worry about. Fomalhaut was just the kind of place Glennon-Height’s been hitting … small, no more than a few thousand colonists, rich in minerals, and with a time-debt of at least—what was it?—twenty standard months from the Web.”
“Twenty-three,” said Sad King-Billy. “So you d-d-don’t think that w-we are in d-d-d-jeopardy?”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “With only a three-week real-transit time and a time-debt of less than a year, the Hegemony can always get forces here from the Web faster than the General can spin up from Fomalhaut.”
“Perhaps,” mused King Billy, beginning to lean on a globe and then jumping upright as it started to turn under his weight. “But none-the-the-less I’ve decided to start our own m-m-modest Hegira.”
I blinked, surprised. Billy had been talking about relocating the kingdom in exile for almost two years, but I had never thought he would go through with it.
“The sp-sp-sp … the ships are ready on Parvati,” he said. “Asquith has agreed to su-su-su … to provide the transport we need to the Web.”
“But the palace?” I said. “The library? The farms and grounds?”
“Donated, of course,” said King Billy, “but the contents of the library will travel with us.”
I sat on the arm of the horsehair divan and rubbed my cheek. In the ten years I had been in the kingdom, I had progressed from Billy’s subject of patronage to tutor, to confidant, to friend, but never did I pretend to understand this disheveled enigma. Upon my arrival he had granted me an immediate audience. “D-d-do you w-w-wish to j-j-join the other t-t-talented people in our little colony?” he had asked.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“And w-w-will you wr-wr-write more books like the D-D-Dying Earth?”
“Not if I can help it, Your Majesty.”
“I r-r-read it, you know,” the little man had said. “It was v-v-very interesting.”
“You’re most kind, Sir.”
“B-b-b-bullshit, M. Silenus. It w-w-was interesting because someone had obviously b-b-bowdlerized it and left in all the bad parts.”
I had grinned, surprised by the sudden revelation that I was going to like Sad King Billy.
“B-b-but the Cantos,” he sighed, “th-th-that was a book. Probably the finest volume of v-v … poetry published in the Web in the last two centuries. How you managed to get that by the mediocrity police I will never know. I ordered twenty thousand copies for the k-k-kingdom.”
I bowed my head slightly, at a loss for words for the first time since my poststroke days two decades before.
“Will you write more p-p-poetry like the Cantos?”
“I came here to try, Your Majesty.”
“Then welcome,” said Sad King Billy. “You will stay in the west wing of the p-p-p … castle, near my offices, and my door will always be open to you.”
Now I glanced at the closed door and at the little sovereign who—even when smiling—looked as if he were on the verge of tears. “Hyperion?” I asked. He had mentioned the colony world-gone-primitive many times.
“Precisely. The android seedships have been there for some years, M-M-Martin. Preparing the way, as it were.”
I raised an eyebrow. King Billy’s wealth came not from the assets of the kingdom but from major investments in the Web economy. Even so, if he had been carrying on a surreptitious recolonization effort for years, the cost must have been staggering.
“D-d-do you remember why the original colonists named the pluh-pluh-pluh … the world Hyperion, Martin?”
“Sure. Before the Hegira they were a tiny freehold on one of the moons of Saturn. They couldn’t last without terrestrial resupply, so they emigrated to the Outback and named the survey world after their moon.”
King Billy smiled sadly. “And do you know why the name is propitious for our endeavor?”
It took me about ten seconds to make the connection. “Keats,” I said.
Several years earlier, near the end of a long discussion about the essence of poetry, King Billy had asked me who was the purest poet who had ever lived.
“The purest?” I had said. “Don’t you mean the greatest?”
“No, no,” said Billy, “that’s absurd t-t-to argue over who is the greatest. I’m curious about your opinion of the p-p-purest … the closest to the essence you describe.”
I had thought about it a few days and then brought my answer to King Billy as we watched the setting suns from the top of the bluff near the palace. Red and blue shadows stretched across the amber lawn towar
d us. “Keats,” I said.
“John Keats,” whispered Sad King Billy. “Ahh.” And then a moment later: “Why?”
So I had told him what I knew about the nineteenth-century Old Earth poet; about his upbringing, training, and early death … but mostly about a life dedicated almost totally to the mysteries and beauties of poetic creation.
Billy had seemed interested then; he seemed obsessed now as he waved his hand and brought into existence a holo model which all but filled the room. I moved backward, stepping through hills and buildings and grazing animals to get a better view.
“Behold Hyperion,” whispered my patron. As was usually the case when he was totally absorbed, King Billy forgot to stutter. The holo shifted through a series of views: river cities, port cities, mountain eyries, a city on a hill filled with monuments to match the strange buildings in a nearby valley.
“The Time Tombs?” I said.
“Precisely. The greatest mystery in the known universe.”
I frowned at the hyperbole. “They’re fucking empty,” I said. “They’ve been empty since they were discovered.”
“They are the source of a strange, anti-entropic forcefield which lingers still,” said King Billy. “One of the few phenomena outside singularities which dares to tamper with time itself.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It must’ve been like painting rust preventative on metal. They were made to last but they’re empty. And since when do we go bugfuck about technology?”
“Not technology,” sighed King Billy, his face melting into deeper grooves. “Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.”
I shrugged, not impressed.
Sad King Billy waved the holo away. “Has your p-p-poetry improved?”
I crossed my arms and glared at the regal dwarf-slob. “No.”
“Has your m-m-muse returned?”
I said nothing. If looks could have killed, we would all be crying “The King is dead, long live the King!” before nightfall.
“Very w-w-well,” he said, showing that he could look insufferably smug as well as sad. “P-p-pack your bags, my boy. “We’re going to Hyperion.”
(Fade in)
Sad King Billy’s five seedships floating like golden dandelions above a lapis sky. White cities rising on three continents: Keats, Endymion, Port Romance … the Poets’ City itself. More than eight thousand of Art’s pilgrims seeking escape from the tyranny of mediocrity and searching for a renewal of vision on this rough-hewn world.
Asquith and Windsor-in-Exile had been a center for android biofacture in the century following the Hegira, and now these blue-skinned friends-of-man labored and tilled with the understanding that once these final labors were finished they were free at last. The white cities rose. The indigenies, tired of playing native, came out of their villages and forests and helped us rebuild the colony to more human specifications. The technocats and bureaucrats and ecocrats were thawed and let loose upon the unsuspecting world and Sad King Billy’s dream came one step closer to reality.
By the time we arrived at Hyperion, General Horace Glennon-Height was dead, his brief but brutal mutiny already crushed, but there was no turning back.
Some of the more rugged artists and artisans spurned the Poets’ City and eked out rugged but creative lives in Jacktown or Port Romance, or even in the expanding frontiers beyond, but I stayed.
I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation—EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce—and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter—all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist.
Or so I heard.
No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn’s cat.
I decided to kill myself.
But first I spent some time, nine years at least, carrying out a community service by providing the one thing new Hyperion lacked: decadence.
From a biosculptor aptly named Graumann Hacket, I obtained the hairy flanks, hooves, and goat legs of a satyr. I cultivated my beard and extended my ears. Graumann made interesting alterations to my sexual apparatus. Word got around. Peasant girls, indigenies, the wives of our true-blue city planners and pioneers—all awaited a visit from Hyperion’s only resident satyr or arranged one themselves. I learned what “priapic” and “satyriasis” really mean. Besides the unending series of sexual contests, I allowed my drinking bouts to become legendary and my vocabulary to return to something approaching the old poststroke days.
It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell.
And then on the night I had set aside to blow my brains out, Grendel appeared.
Notes for a sketch of our visiting monster:
Our worst dreams have come alive. Something wicked shuns the light. Shades of Morbius and the Krell. Keep the fires high, Mother, Grendel comes tonight.
At first we think the missing are merely absent; there are no watchers on the walls of our city, no walls actually, no warriors at the door of our mead hall. Then a husband reports a wife who disappears between the evening meal and the tucking in of their two children. Then Hoban Kristus, the abstract implosionist, fails to appear at midweek performance at Poets’ Amphitheatre, his first missed cue in eighty-two years of treading the boards. Concern rises. Sad King Billy returns from his labors as overseer on the Jacktown restoration and promises that security will be tightened. A sensor net is woven around the town. ShipSecurity officers sweep the Time Tombs and report that all remains empty. Mechs are sent into the labyrinth entrance at the base of the Jade Tomb and report nothing in a six-thousand-kilometer probe. Skimmers, automated and manned, sweep the area between the city and the Bridle Range and sense nothing larger than the heat signature of a rock eel. For a local week there are no more disappearances.
Then the deaths begin.
The sculptor Pete Garcia is found in his studio … and in his bedroom … and in the yard beyond. ShipSecurity Manager Truin Hines is foolish enough to tell a newsteep: “It’s like he was mauled by some vicious animal. But no animal I’ve ever seen could do that to a man.”
We are all secretly thrilled and titillated. True, the dialogue is bad, straight out of a million movies and holies we’ve scared ourselves with, but now we are part of the show.
Suspicion turns toward the obvious: a psychopath is loose among us, probably killing with a pulse-blade or hellwhip. This time he (or she) had not found time to dispose of the body. Poor Pete.
ShipSecurity Manager Hines is sacked and City Manager Pruett receives permission from His Majesty to hire, train, and arm a city police force of approximately twenty officers. There is talk of truth-testing the entire Poets’ City population of six thousand. Sidewalk cafes buzz with conversation of civil rights … we were technically out of the Hegemony—did we have any rights?… and harebrained schemes are hatched to catch the murderer.
Then the slaughter begins.
There was no pattern to the murders. Bodies were found in twos and threes, or alone, or not at all. Some of the disappearances were bloodless; others left gallons of gore. There were no witnesses, no survivors of attacks. Location did not seem to matter: the Weimont family lived in one of the outlying villas but Sira Rob never stirred from her tower studio near the center of town; two of the victims disappeared alone, at night, apparently while walking in the Zen Garden, but Chancellor Lehman’s daughter had private bodyguards yet vanished while alone in a bathroom on the seventh floor of Sad King Billy’s palace.
On Lusus or Tau Ceti Center or a dozen other of the old Web worlds, the deaths of a thousand people add up to minor news—items for datasphere short-term or the inside pages of the morning paper—but in a city of six thousand on a colony of fifty thousand, a dozen murders—like the proverbia
l sentence to be hanged in the morning—tend to focus one’s attention wonderfully well.
I knew one of the first victims. Sissipriss Harris had been one of my first conquests as a satyr—and one of my most enthusiastic—a beautiful girl, long blond hair too soft to be real, a fresh-picked-peach complexion too virginal to dream of touching, a beauty too perfect to believe: precisely the sort that even the most timid male dreams of violating. Sissipriss now had been violated in earnest. They found only her head, lying upright in the center of Lord Byron’s Plaza as if she had been buried to her neck in pourable marble. I knew when I heard these details precisely what kind of creature we were dealing with, for a cat I had owned on Mother’s estate had left similar offerings on the south patio most summer mornings—the head of a mouse staring up from the sandstone in pure rodent amazement, or perhaps a ground squirrel’s toothy grin—killing trophies from a proud but hungry predator.
Sad King Billy came to visit me while I was working on my Cantos.
“Good morning, Billy,” I said.
“It’s Your Majesty,” grumped His Majesty in a rare show of royal pique. His stutter had disappeared the day the royal dropship landed on Hyperion.
“Good morning, Billy, Your Majesty.”
“Hnnrh,” growled my liege lord, moving some papers and managing to sit in the only puddle of spilled coffee on an otherwise dry bench. “You’re writing again, Silenus.”
I saw no reason to acknowledge an acknowledgment of the obvious.
“Have you always used a pen?”
“No,” I said, “only when I want to write something worth reading.”
“Is that worth reading?” He gestured toward the small heap of manuscript I had accrued in two local weeks of work.
“Yes.”
“Yes? Just yes?”
“Yes.”
“Will I get to read it soon?”
“No.”
King Billy looked down and noticed that his left leg was in a puddle of coffee. He frowned, moved, and mopped at the shrinking pool with the hem of his cape. “Never?” he said.