by Dan Simmons
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 time 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 premeditation 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!”
A bearded Ouster whom the Consul had heard introduced as Spokesman Hullcare Amnion stepped forward to the inner circle. “The device was useless. It did nothing.”
The Consul turned, opened his mouth, and closed it without speaking.
“A test,” said Freeman Ghenga.
The Consul’s voice was almost inaudible. “But the Tombs … opened.”
“We knew when they would open,” said Coredwell Minmun. “The decay rate of the anti-entropic fields was known to us. The device was a test.”
“A test,” repeated the Consul. “I killed those four people for nothing. A test.”
“Your wife and child died at Ouster hands,” said Freeman Ghenga. “The Hegemony raped your world of Maui-Covenant. Your actions were predictable within certain parameters. Gladstone counted on this. So did we. But we had to know those parameters.”
The Consul stood, took three steps, and kept his back turned to the others. “Wasted.”
“What was that?” asked Freeman Ghenga. The tall woman’s bare scalp glowed in the starlight and the reflected sunlight from a passing comet farm.
The Consul was laughing softly. “Everything wasted. Even my betrayals. Nothing real. Wasted.”
Spokesman Coredwell Minmun stood and arranged his robes. “This Tribunal has passed sentence,” he said. The other sixteen Ousters nodded.
The Consul turned. There was something like eagerness on his tired face. “Do it, then. For God’s sake get it over with.”
Spokesman Freeman Ghenga stood and faced the Consul. “You are condemned to live. You are condemned to repair some of the damage you have done.”
The Consul staggered as if struck in the face. “No, you can’t … you must …”
“You are condemned to enter the age of chaos which approaches,” said Spokesman Hullcare Amnion. “Condemned to help us find fusion between the separated families of humankind.”
The Consul raised his arms as if trying to defend himself from physical blows. “I can’t … won’t … guilty …”
Freeman Ghenga took three strides, grasped the Consul by the front of his formal bolo jacket, and shook him unceremoniously. “You are guilty. And that is precisely why you must help ameliorate the chaos which is to come. You helped free the Shrike. Now you must return to see that it is caged once again. Then the long reconciliation must begin.”
The Consul had been released, but his shoulders were still shaking. At that moment, the mountain rotated into sunlight, and tears sparkled in the Consul’s eyes. “No,” he whispered.
Freeman Ghenga smoothed his rumpled jacket and moved her long fingers to the diplomat’s shoulders. “We have our own prophets. The Templars will join us in the reseeding of the galaxy. Slowly, those who had lived in the lie called the Hegemony will climb out of the ruins of their Core-dependent worlds and join us in true exploration … exploration of the universe and of that greater realm which is inside each of us.”
The Consul had not seemed to have heard. He turned away brusquely. “The Core will destroy you,” he said, not facing any of them. “Just as it has destroyed the Hegemony.”
“Do you forget that your homeworld was founded on a solemn covenant of life?” said Coredwell Minmun.
The Consul turned toward the Ouster.
“Such a covenant governs our lives and actions,” said Minmun. “Not merely to preserve a few species from Old Earth, but to find unity in diversity. To spread the seed of humankind to all worlds, diverse environments, while treating as sacred the diversity of life we find elsewhere.”
Freeman Ghenga’s face was bright in the sun. “The Core offered unity in unwitting subservience,” she said softly. “Safety in stagnation. Where are the revolutions in human thought and culture and action since the Hegira?”
“Terraformed into pale clones of Old Earth,” answered Coredwell Minmun. “Our new age of human expansion will terraform nothing. We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness. We will not make the universe adapt … we shall adapt.”
Spokesman Hullcare Amnion gestured toward the stars. “If humankind survives this test, our future lies in the dark distances between as well as on the sunlit worlds.”
The Consul sighed. “I have friends on Hyperion,” he said. “May I return to help them?”
“You may,” said Freeman Ghenga.
“And confront the Shrike?” said the Consul.
“You will,” said Coredwell Minmun.
“And survive to see this age of chaos?” said the Consul.
“You must,” said Hullcare Amnion.
The Consul sighed again and moved aside with the others as, above them, a great butterfly with wings of solar cells and glistening skin impervious to hard vacuum or harder radiation lowered itself toward the Stonehenge circle and opened its belly to receive the Consul.
In the Government House infirmary on Tau Ceti Center, Father Paul Duré slept a shallow and medically induced sleep, dreaming of flames and the death of worlds.
Except for the brief visit by CEO Gladstone and an even briefer visit by Bishop Edouard, Duré had been alone all day, drifting in and out of a pain-filled haze. The doctors here had asked for twelve more hours before their patient should be moved, and the College of Cardinals on Pacem had agreed, wishing the patient well and making ready for the ceremonies—still twenty-four hours away—in which Jesuit priest Paul Duré of Villefranche-sur-Saône would become Pope Teilhard I, the 487th Bishop of Rome, direct successor of the disciple Peter.
Still healing, flesh reweaving itself with the guidance of a million RNA directors, nerves similarly regenerating, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine—but not so miraculous, Duré thought, that it keeps me from itching almost to death—the Jesuit lay abed and thought about Hyperion and the Shrike and his long life and the confused state of affairs in God’s universe. Eventually Duré slept and dreamed of God’s Grove burning while the Templar True Voice of the Worldtree pushed him through the portal, and of his mother and of a woman named Semfa, now dead, but formerly a worker on Perecebo Plantation in the outback of the Outback in fiberplastic country east of Port Romance.
And in these dreams, primarily sad, Duré suddenly was aware of another presence there: not of another dream presence, but of another dreamer.
Duré was walking with someone. The air was cool, and the sky was a heart-rending blue. They had just come around a bend in a road, and now a lake became visible before them, its shores lined with graceful trees, mountains framing it from behind, a line of low clouds adding drama and scale to the scene, and a single island seeming to float far out on the mirror-still waters.
“Lake Windermere,” said Duré’s companion.
The Jesuit turned slowly, his heart pounding with anxious anticipation. Whatever he expected, the sight of his companion did not inspire awe.
A short young man walked next to Duré. He wore an archaic jacket with leather buttons and a broad leather belt, sturdy shoes, an old fur cap, a battered knapsack, oddly tailored and frequently patched trousers, and carried a great plaid thrown over one shoulder and a solid walking stick in his right hand. Duré stopped walking, and the other man paused as if welcoming a break.
“The Fells of Furness and the Cumbrian Mountains,” said the young man, using his stick to gesture beyond the lake.
Duré saw
the auburn locks curling out from under the odd cap, noted the large hazel eyes and the man’s short stature, and knew that he had to be dreaming even as he thought I’m not dreaming!
“Who …” began Duré, feeling fear surge in him as his heart pounded.
“John,” said his companion, and the quiet reasonableness of that voice set some of Duré’s fear aside. “I believe we’ll be able to stay in Bowness tonight. Brown tells me that there’s a wonderful inn there hard on the lake.”
Duré nodded. He had absolutely no idea what the man was talking about.
The short young man leaned forward and grasped Duré’s forearm in a gentle but persistent grip. “There will be one who comes after me,” said John. “Neither alpha nor the omega but essential for us to find the way.”
Duré nodded stupidly. A breeze rippled the lake and brought the smell of fresh vegetation from the foothills beyond.
“That one will be born far away,” said John. “Farther away than our race has known for centuries. Your job will be the same as mine now—to prepare the way. You will not live to see the day of that person’s teaching, but your successor will.”
“Yes,” said Paul Duré and found that there was no saliva whatsoever in his mouth.
The young man doffed his cap, tucked it in his belt, and stooped to pick up a rounded stone. He threw it far out onto the lake. Ripples spread in slow progression. “Damn,” said John, “I was trying to skip it.” He looked at Duré. “You have to leave the infirmary and get back to Pacem at once. Do you understand?”
Duré blinked. The statement did not seem to belong in the dream. “Why?”
“Never mind,” said John. “Just do it. Wait for nothing. If you don’t leave at once, there will be no chance later.”
Duré turned in confusion, as if he could walk back to his hospital bed. He looked over his shoulder at the short, thin young man standing on the pebbly shore. “What about you?”
John picked up a second stone, threw it, and shook his head when the rock skipped only once before disappearing beneath the mirrored surface. “I’m happy here for now,” he said, more to himself than to Duré. “I really was happy on this trip.” He seemed to shake himself out of his reverie and lifted his head to smile at Duré. “Go on. Move your ass, Your Holiness.”