by Dan Simmons
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 them. 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. “Seriously, 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.
The Obel
isk remained a black mystery. The tomb still glowed, but it now had no door. Ousters guessed that armies of Shrikes still waited within. Martin Silenus thought that the Obelisk was only a phallic symbol thrown in the valley’s decor as an afterthought. Others thought it might have something to do with the Templars.
Brawne, the Consul, and Martin Silenus drank a toast to True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen.
The resealed Crystal Monolith was Colonel Fedmahn Kassad’s tomb. Decoded markings set in stone talked of a cosmic battle and a great warrior from the past who appeared to help defeat the Lord of Pain. Young recruits down from the torchships and attack carriers ate it up. Kassad’s legend would spread as more of these ships returned to the worlds of the old Web.
Brawne, the Consul, and Martin Silenus drank a toast to Fedmahn Kassad.
The first and second of the Cave Tombs seemed to lead nowhere, but the Third appeared to open to labyrinths on a variety of worlds. After a few researchers disappeared, the Ouster research authorities reminded tourists that the labyrinths lay in a different time—possibly hundreds of thousands of years in the past or future—as well as a different space. They sealed the caves off except to qualified experts.
Brawne, the Consul, and Martin Silenus drank a toast to Paul Duré and Lenar Hoyt.
The Shrike Palace remained a mystery. The tiers of bodies were gone when Brawne and the others had returned a few hours later, the interior of the tomb the size it had been previously, but with a single door of light burning in its center. Anyone who stepped through disappeared. None returned.
The researchers had declared the interior off-limits while they worked to decode letters carved in stone but badly eroded by time. So far, they were certain of three words—all in Old Earth Latin—translated as “COLOSSEUM,” “ROME,” and “REPOPULATE.” The legend had already grown up that this portal opened to the missing Old Earth and that the victims of the tree of thorns had been transported there. Hundreds more waited.
“See,” Martin Silenus said to Brawne, “if you hadn’t been so fucking quick to rescue me, I could’ve gone home.”
Theo Lane leaned forward. “Would you really have chosen to go back to Old Earth?”
Martin smiled his sweetest satyr smile. “Not in a fucking million years. It was dull when I lived there and it’ll always be dull. This is where it’s happening.” Silenus drank a toast to himself.
In a sense, Brawne realized, that was true. Hyperion was the meeting place of Ouster and former Hegemony citizen. The Time Tombs alone would mean future trade and tourism and travel as the human universe adjusted to a life without farcasters. She tried to imagine the future as the Ousters saw it, with great fleets expanding humankind’s horizons, with genetically tailored humans colonizing gas giants and asteroids and worlds harsher than preterraformed Mars or Hebron. She could not imagine it. This was a universe her child might see … or her grandchildren.
“What are you thinking, Brawne?” asked the Consul after silence stretched.
She smiled. “About the future,” she said. “And about Johnny.”
“Ah yes,” said Silenus, “the poet who could have been God but who wasn’t.”
“What happened to the second persona, do you think?” asked Brawne.
The Consul made a motion with his hand. “I don’t see how it could have survived the death of the Core. Do you?”
Brawne shook her head. “I’m just jealous. A lot of people seem to have ended up seeing him. Even Melio Arundez said he met him in Jacktown.”
They drank a toast to Melio, who had left five months earlier with the first FORCE spinship returning Webward.
“Everyone saw him but me,” said Brawne, frowning at her brandy and realizing that she had to take more prenatal antialcohol pills before turning in. She realized that she was a little drunk: the stuff couldn’t harm the baby if she took the pills, but it had definitely gotten to her.
“I’m heading back,” she announced and stood, hugging the Consul. “Got to be up bright and early to watch your sunrise launch.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to spend the night on the ship?” asked the Consul. “The guest room has a nice view of the valley.”
Brawne shook her head. “All my stuff’s at the old palace.”
“I’ll talk to you before I go,” said the Consul and they hugged again, quickly, before either had to notice Brawne’s tears.
Martin Silenus walked her back to the Poets’ City. They paused in the lighted galleria outside the apartments.
“Were you really on the tree, or only stimsiming it while sleeping in the Shrike Palace?” Brawne asked him.
The poet did not smile. He touched his chest where the steel thorn had pierced him. “Was I a Chinese philosopher dreaming that I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I was a Chinese philosopher? Is that what you’re asking, kid?”
“Yes.”
“That’s correct,” Silenus said softly. “Yes. I was both. And both were real. And both hurt. And I will love and cherish you forever for saving me, Brawne. To me, you will always be able to walk on air.” He raised her hand and kissed it. “Are you going in?”
“No, I think I’ll stroll in the garden for a minute.”
The poet hesitated. “All right. I think. We have patrols—mech and human—and our Grendel-Shrike hasn’t made an encore appearance yet … but be careful, OK?”
“Don’t forget,” said Brawne, “I’m the Grendel killer. I walk on air and turn them into glass goblins to shatter.”
“Uh-huh, but don’t stray beyond the gardens. OK, kiddo?”
“OK,” said Brawne. She touched her stomach. “We’ll be careful.”
· · ·
He was waiting in the garden, where the light did not quite touch and the monitor cameras did not quite cover.
“Johnny!” gasped Brawne and took a quick step forward on the path of stones.
“No,” he said and shook his head, a bit sadly perhaps. He looked like Johnny. Precisely the same red-brown hair and hazel eyes and firm chin and high cheekbones and soft smile. He was dressed a bit strangely, with a thick leather jacket, broad belt, heavy shoes, walking stick, and a rough fur cap, which he took off as she came closer.
Brawne stopped less than a meter away. “Of course,” she said in little more than a whisper. She reached out to touch him, and her hand passed through him, although there was none of the flicker or fuzz of a holo.
“This place is still rich in the metasphere fields,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she agreed, not having the slightest idea what he was talking about. “You’re the other Keats. Johnny’s twin.”
The short man smiled and extended a hand as if to touch her swollen abdomen. “That makes me sort of an uncle, doesn’t it, Brawne?”
She nodded. “It was you who saved the baby … Rachel … wasn’t it?”
“Could you see me?”
“No,” breathed Brawne, “but I could feel that you were there.” She hesitated a second. “But you weren’t the one Ummon talked about—the Empathy part of the human UI?”
He shook his head. His curls glinted in the dim light. “I discovered that I am the One Who Comes Before. I prepare the way for the One Who Teaches, and I’m afraid that my only miracle was lifting a baby and waiting until someone could take her from me.”
“You didn’t help me … with the Shrike? Floating?”
John Keats laughed. “No. Nor did Moneta. That was you, Brawne.”
She shook her head vigorously. “That’s impossible.”
“Not impossible,” he said softly. He reached out to touch her stomach again, and she imagined that she could feel the pressure from his palm. He whispered, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,/ Thou foster-child of silence and slow time …” He looked up at Brawne. “Certainly the mother of the One Who Teaches can exercise some prerogatives,” he said.
“The mother of …” Brawne suddenly had to sit down and found a bench just in time. She had never been awkward b
efore in her life, but now, at seven months, there was no graceful way she could manage sitting. She thought, irrelevantly, of the dirigible coming in for mooring that morning.
“The One Who Teaches,” repeated Keats. “I have no idea what she will teach, but it will change the universe and set ideas in motion that will be vital ten thousand years from now.”
“My child?” she managed, fighting a bit for air. “Johnny’s and my child?”
The Keats persona rubbed its cheek. “The junction of human spirit and AI logic which Ummon and the Core sought for so long and died not understanding,” he said. He took a step. “I only wish I could be around when she teaches whatever she has to teach. See what effect it has on the world. This world. Other worlds.”
Brawne’s mind was spinning, but she had heard something in his tone. “Why? Where will you be? What’s wrong?”
Keats sighed. “The Core is gone. The dataspheres here are too small to contain me even in reduced form … except for the FORCE ship AIs, and I don’t think I’d like it there. I never took orders well.”
“And there’s nowhere else?” asked Brawne.
“The metasphere,” he said, glancing behind him. “But it’s full of lions and tigers and bears. And I’m not ready yet.”
Brawne let that pass. “I have an idea,” she said. She told him.
The image of her lover came closer, put his arms around her, and said, “You are a miracle, madam.” He stepped back into the shadows.
Brawne shook her head. “Just a pregnant lady.” She put her hand on the swelling under her gown. “The One Who Teaches,” she murmured. Then, to Keats, “All right, you’re the archangel announcing all this. What name shall I give her?”