by Dan Simmons
Father Duré nodded and leaned forward the better to see the tall figure in the shadows of the platform. Soft glow-globes in the branches below them were their only illumination other than the starlight and moonglow. “Yet you welcomed this war. Aided the Shrike Cult authorities in bringing it about.”
“No, Duré. Not the war. The Brotherhood knew it must be part of the Great Change.”
“And what is that?” asked Duré
“The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.”
“Cancer?”
“It is an ancient disease which—”
“Yes,” said Duré, “I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?”
Sek Hardeen’s perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. “We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the Seneschai empaths on Hebron. The marsh centaurs of Garden. The entire ecology was destroyed on Garden, Duré, so that a few thousand human colonists might live where millions of native life forms once had thrived.”
Duré touched his cheek with a curled finger. “That is one of the drawbacks of terraforming.”
“We did not terraform Whirl,” the Templar said quickly, “but the Jovian life forms there were hunted to extinction.”
“But no one ascertained that the zeplens were intelligent,” said Duré, hearing the lack of conviction in his own voice.
“They sang,” said the Templar. “They called across thousands of kilometers of atmosphere to each other in songs which held meaning and love and sorrow. Yet they were hunted to death like the great whales of Old Earth.”
Duré folded his hands. “Agreed, there have been injustices. But surely there is a better way to right them than to support the cruel philosophy of the Shrike Cult … and to allow this war to go on.”
The Templar’s hood moved back and forth. “No. If these were mere human injustices, other remedies could be found. But much of the illness … much of the insanity which has led to the destruction of races and the despoiling of worlds … this has come from the sinful symbiosis.”
“Symbiosis?”
“Humankind and the TechnoCore,” said Sek Hardeen in the harshest tones Duré had ever heard a Templar use. “Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other? Neither part of the symbiote can now tell. But it is an evil thing, a work of the Anti-Nature. Worse than that, Duré, it is an evolutionary dead end.”
The Jesuit stood and walked to the railing. He looked out over the darkened world of treetops spreading out like cloud tops in the night. “Surely there is a better way than turning to the Shrike and interstellar war.”
“The Shrike is a catalyst,” said Hardeen. “It is the cleansing fire when the forest has been stunted and allowed to grow diseased by overplanning. There will be hard times, but the result will be new growth, new life, and a proliferation of species … not merely elsewhere but in the community of humankind itself.”
“Hard times,” mused Duré. “And your Brotherhood is willing to see billions of people die to accomplish this … weeding out?”
The Templar clenched his fists. “That will not occur. The Shrike is the warning. Our Ouster brethren seek only to control Hyperion and the Shrike long enough to strike at the TechnoCore. It will be a surgical procedure … the destruction of a symbiote and the rebirth of humankind as distinct partner in the cycle of life.”
Duré sighed. “No one knows where the TechnoCore resides,” he said. “How can the Ousters strike at it?”
“They will,” said the True Voice of the Worldtree, but there was less confidence in his voice than there had been a moment before.
“And was attacking God’s Grove part of the deal?” asked the priest.
It was the Templar’s turn to stand and pace, first to the railing, then back to the table. “They will not attack God’s Grove. That is what I have kept you here to see. Then you must report to the Hegemony.”
“They’ll know at once whether the Ousters attack,” said Duré, puzzled.
“Yes, but they will not know why our world will be spared. You must bring this message. Explain this truth.”
“To hell with that,” said Father Paul Duré. “I’m tired of being everyone’s messenger. How do you know all this? The coming of the Shrike? The reason for the war?”
“There have been prophecies—” began Sek Hardeen.
Duré slammed his fist into the railing. How could he explain the manipulations of a creature who could—or at least was an agent of a force which could—manipulate time itself?
“You will see …” began the Templar again, and as if to punctuate his words there came a great, soft sound, almost as though a million hidden people had sighed and then moaned softly.
“Good God,” said Duré and looked to the west where it seemed that the sun was rising where it had disappeared less than an hour before. A hot wind rustled leaves and blew across his face.
Five blossoming and inward-curling mushroom clouds climbed above the western horizon, turning night to day as they boiled and faded. Duré had instinctively covered his eyes until he realized that these explosions were so far away that although brilliant as the local sun, they would not blind him.
Sek Hardeen pulled back his cowl so that the hot wind ruffled his long, oddly greenish hair. Duré stared at the man’s long, thin, vaguely Asian features and realized that he saw shock etched there. Shock and disbelief. Hardeen’s cowl whispered with comm calls and the micro-babble of excited voices.
“Explosions on Sierra and Hokkaido,” whispered the Templar to himself. “Nuclear explosions. From the ships in orbit.”
Duré remembered that Sierra was a continent, closed to outsiders, less than eight hundred kilometers from the Worldtree where they stood. He thought that he remembered that Hokkaido was the sacred isle where the potential treeships were grown and prepared.
“Casualties?” he asked, but before Hardeen could answer, the sky was slashed with brilliant light as a score or more tactical lasers, CPBs, and fusion lances cut a swath from horizon to horizon, switching and flashing like searchlights across the roof of the world forest that was God’s Grove. And where the lance beams cut, flame erupted in their wake.
Duré staggered as a hundred-meter-wide beam skipped like a tornado through the forest less than a kilometer from the Worldtree. The ancient forest exploded in flame, creating a corridor of fire rising ten kilometers into the night sky. Wind roared past Duré and Sek Hardeen as air rushed in to feed the fire storm. Another beam slashed north and south, passing close to the Worldtree before disappearing over the horizon. Another swath of flame and smoke rose toward the treacherous stars.
“They promised,” gasped Sek Hardeen. “The Ouster brethren promised!”
“You need help!” cried Duré. “Ask the Web for emergency assistance.”
Hardeen grabbed Duré’s arm, pulled him to the edge of the platform. The stairs were back in place. On the platform below, a farcaster portal shimmered.
“Only the advance units of the Ouster fleet have arrived,” cried the Templar over the sound of forests burning. Ash and smoke filled the air, drifting past amidst hot embers. “But the singularity sphere will be destroyed any second. Go!”
“I’m not leaving without you,” called the Jesuit, sure that his voice could not be heard over the wind roar and terrible crackling. Suddenly, only kilometers to the east, the perfect blue circle of a plasma explosion expanded, imploded inward, then expanded again with visible concentric circles of shock wave. Kilometer-tall trees bent and broke in the first wave of the blast, their eastern sides exploding in flame, leaves flying off by the millions and adding to the almost solid wall of debris hurtling tow
ard the Worldtree. Behind the circle of flame, another plasma bomb went off. Then a third.
Duré and the Templar fell down the steps and were blown across the lower platform like leaves on a sidewalk. The Templar grabbed a burning muirwood baluster, seized Duré’s arm in an iron grip, and struggled to his feet, moving toward the still shimmering farcaster like a man leaning into a cyclone.
Half conscious, half aware of being dragged, Duré managed to get to his own feet just as Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen pulled him to the edge of the portal. Duré clung to the portal frame, too weak to pull himself the final meter, and looked past the farcaster to see something which he would never forget.
Once, many, many years before, near his beloved Villefranche-sur-Saône, the youngster Paul Duré had stood on a cliff top, secure in the arms of his father and safe in a thick concrete shelter, and watched through a narrow window as forty-meter tall tsunami rushed toward the coast where they lived.
This tsunami was three kilometers high, was made of flame, and was racing at what seemed the speed of light across the helpless roof of the forest toward the Worldtree, Sek Hardeen, and Paul Duré. What the tsunami touched, it destroyed. It raged closer, rising higher and nearer until it obliterated the world and sky with flame and noise.
“No!” screamed Father Paul Duré.
“Go!” cried the True Voice of the Worldtree and pushed the Jesuit through the farcaster portal even as the platform, the Worldtree’s trunk, and the Templar’s robe burst into flames.
The farcaster shut down even as Duré tumbled through, slicing off the heel of his shoe as it contracted, and Duré felt his eardrums rupture and his clothes smolder even as he fell, struck something hard with the back of his head, and fell again into darkness more absolute.
Gladstone and the others watched in horrified silence as the civilian satellites sent images of the death throes of God’s Grove through the farcaster relays.
“We have to blow it now,” cried Admiral Singh over the crackling of forests burning. Meina Gladstone thought that she could hear the screams of human beings and the countless arboreals who lived in the Templar forests.
“We can’t let them get closer!” cried Singh. “We have only the remotes to detonate the sphere.”
“Yes,” said Gladstone, but although her lips moved she heard no sound.
Singh turned and nodded toward a FORCE:space colonel. The Colonel touched his tactical board. The burning forests disappeared, the giant holos went absolutely dark, but the sound of screams somehow remained. Gladstone realized that it was the sound of blood in her ears.
She turned toward Morpurgo. “How long …” She cleared her throat. “General, how long until Mare Infinitus is attacked?”
“Three hours and fifty-two minutes, M. Executive,” said the General.
Gladstone turned toward the former Commander William Ajunta Lee. “Is your task force ready, Admiral?”
“Yes, CEO,” said Lee, his face pale beneath a tan.
“How many ships will be in the strike?”
“Seventy-four, M. Executive.”
“And you will hit them away from Mare Infinitus?”
“Just within the Oört Cloud, M. Executive.”
“Good,” said Gladstone. “Good hunting, Admiral.”
The young man took this as his cue to salute and leave the chamber. Admiral Singh leaned over and whispered something to General Van Zeidt.
Sedeptra Akasi leaned toward Gladstone and said, “Government House Security reports that a man just farcast into the secured GH terminex with an outdated priority access code. The man was injured, taken to the East Wing infirmary.”
“Leigh?” asked Gladstone. “Severn?”
“No, M. Executive,” said Akasi. “The priest from Pacem. Paul Duré”
Gladstone nodded. “I’ll see him after my meeting with Albedo,” she said to her aide. To the group, she announced, “Unless anyone has anything to add to what we saw, we shall adjourn for thirty minutes and take up the defense of Asquith and Ixion when we reassemble.”
The group stood as the CEO and her entourage stepped through the permanent connecting portal to Government House and filed through a door in the far wall. The rumble of argument and shock resumed when Gladstone was out of sight.
· · ·
Meina Gladstone sat back in her leather chair and closed her eyes for precisely five seconds. When she opened them, the cluster of aides still stood there, some looking anxious, some looking eager, all of them waiting for her next word, her next command.
“Get out,” she said softly. “Go on, take a few minutes to get some rest. Put your feet up for ten minutes. There’ll be no more rest for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
The group filed out, some looking on the verge of protest, others on the verge of collapse.
“Sedeptra,” said Gladstone, and the young woman stepped back into the office. “Assign two of my personal guard to the priest who just came through, Duré.”
Akasi nodded and made a note on her faxpad.
“How is the political situation?” asked Gladstone, rubbing her eyes.
“The All Thing is chaos,” said Akasi. “There are factions but they haven’t coalesced into effective opposition yet. The Senate is a different story.”
“Feldstein?” said Gladstone, naming the angry senator from Barnard’s World. Less than forty-two hours remained before Barnard’s World would be attacked by the Ousters.
“Feldstein, Kakinuma, Peters, Sabenstorafem, Richeau … even Sudette Chier is calling for your resignation.”
“What about her husband?” Gladstone considered Senator Kolchev the most influential person in the Senate.
“No word from Senator Kolchev yet. Public or private.”
Gladstone tapped a thumbnail against her lower lip. “How much time do you think this administration has before a vote of no confidence brings us down, Sedeptra?”
Akasi, one of the most astute political operatives Gladstone had ever worked with, returned her boss’s stare. “Seventy-two hours at the outside, CEO. The votes are there. The mob just doesn’t know it’s a mob yet. Somebody has to pay for what’s happening.”
Gladstone nodded absently. “Seventy-two hours,” she murmured. “More than enough time.” She looked up and smiled. “That will be all, Sedeptra. Get some rest.”
The aide nodded but her expression showed her true opinion of that suggestion. It was very quiet in the study when the door closed behind her.
Gladstone sat thinking for a moment, her fist to her chin. Then she said to the walls, “Bring Councilor Albedo here, please.”
Twenty seconds later, the air on the other side of Gladstone’s broad desk misted, shimmered, and solidified. The representative of the TechnoCore looked as handsome as ever, short gray hair gleaming in the light, a healthy tan on his open, honest face.
“M. Executive,” began the holographic projection, “the Advisory Council and the Core predictors continue to offer their services in this time of great—”
“Where is the Core, Albedo?” interrupted Gladstone.
The Councilor’s smile did not falter. “I’m sorry, M. Executive, what was the question?”
“The TechnoCore. Where is it?”
Albedo’s friendly face showed a slight puzzlement but no hostility, no visible emotion other than bemused helpfulness. “You’re certainly aware, M. Executive, that it has been Core policy since the Secession not to reveal the location of the … ah … physical elements of the TechnoCore. In another sense, the Core is nowhere, since—”
“Since you exist on the datumplane and datasphere consensual realities,” said Gladstone, voice flat. “Yes, I’ve heard that crap all of my life, Albedo. So did my father and his father before him. I’m asking a straight question now. Where is the TechnoCore?”
The Councilor shook his head bemusedly, regretfully, as if he were an adult being asked for the thousandth time the child’s question Why is the sky blue, Daddy?
“M. Executive, it is simply not possible to answer that question in a way that would make sense in human three-dimensional coordinates. In a sense we … the Core … exist within the Web and beyond the Web. We swim in the datumplane reality which you call the datasphere, but as for the physical elements … what your ancestors called ‘hardware,’ we find it necessary to—”
“To keep it a secret,” finished Gladstone. She crossed her arms. “Are you aware, Councilor Albedo, that there will be those people in the Hegemony … millions of people … who will firmly believe that the Core … your Advisory Council … has betrayed humankind?”
Albedo made a motion with his hands. “That will be regrettable, M. Executive. Regrettable but understandable.”
“Your predictors were supposed to be close to foolproof, Councilor. Yet at no time did you tell us of the destruction of worlds by this Ouster fleet.”
The sadness on the projection’s handsome face was very close to convincing. “M. Executive, it is only fair to remind you that the Advisory Council warned you that bringing Hyperion into the Web introduced a random variable which even the Council could not factor.”
“But this isn’t Hyperion!” snapped Gladstone, her voice rising. “It’s God’s Grove burning. Heaven’s Gate reduced to slag. Mare Infinitus waiting for the next hammer blow! What good is the Advisory Council if it cannot predict an invasion of that magnitude?”
“We did predict the inevitability of war with the Ousters, M. Executive. We also predicted the great danger of defending Hyperion. You must believe me that the inclusion of Hyperion in any predictive equation brings the reliability factor down as low as—”
“All right,” sighed Gladstone. “I need to talk to someone else in the Core, Albedo. Someone in your indecipherable hierarchy of intelligences who actually has some decision-making power.”
“I assure you that I represent all Core elements when I—”
“Yes, yes. But I want to speak to one of the … the Powers I believe you call them. One of the elder AIs. One with clout, Albedo. I need to speak to someone who can tell me why the Core kidnapped my artist Severn and my aide Leigh Hunt.”