by Dan Simmons
“Let them come!” I shout at the fleeing hawk. “Let them come! I’ll be thirty-five and not alone and let them come if they dare!” I drop my fist and laugh. The wind is blowing my hair and cooling the sweat on my chest and arms.
Cooler now, I take a sighting and set my course for the most distant of the isles. I look forward to meeting the others. Even more, I look forward to talking to the Sea Folk and telling them that it is time for the Shark to come at last to the seas of Maui-Covenant.
Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.
The cascade of light from the distant space battle continued.
There was no sound except for the slide of wind across escarpments. The group sat close together, leaning forward and looking at the antique comlog as if expecting more.
There was no more. The Consul removed the micro-disk and pocketed it.
Sol Weintraub rubbed the back of his sleeping infant and spoke to the Consul. “Surely you’re not Merin Aspic.”
“No,” said the Consul. “Merin Aspic died during the Rebellion. Siri’s Rebellion.”
“How did you come to possess this recording?” asked Father Hoyt. Through the priest’s mask of pain, it was visible that he had been moved. “This incredible recording…”
“He gave it to me,” said the Consul. “A few weeks before he was killed in the Battle of the Archipelago.” The Consul looked at the uncomprehending faces before him. “I’m their grandson,” he said.
“Siri’s and Merin’s. My father… the Donel whom Aspic mentions… became the first Home Rule Councilor when Maui-Covenant was admitted to the Protectorate. Later he was elected Senator and served until his death. I was nine years old that day on the hill near Siri’s tomb. I was twenty—old enough to join the rebels and fight—when Aspic came to our isle at night, took me aside, and forbade me to join their band.”
“Would you have fought?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“Oh, yes. And died. Like a third of our menfolk and a fifth of our women. Like all of the dolphins and many of the isles themselves, although the Hegemony tried to keep as many of those intact as possible.”
“It is a moving document,” said Sol Weintraub. “But why are you here? Why the pilgrimage to the Shrike?”
“I am not finished,” said the Consul. “Listen.”
My father was as weak as my grandmother had been strong. The Hegemony did not wait eleven local years to return—the FORCE torchships were in orbit before five years had elapsed. Father watched as the rebels’ hastily constructed ships were swatted aside. He continued to defend the Hegemony as they laid siege to our world. I remember when I was fifteen, watching with my family from the upper deck of our ancestral isle as a dozen other islands burned in the distance, the Hegemony skimmers lighting the sea with their depth charges. In the morning, the waves were gray with the bodies of the dead dolphins.
My older sister Lira went to fight with the rebels in those hopeless days after the Battle of the Archipelago.
Eyewitnesses saw her die. Her body was never recovered.
My father never mentioned her name again.
Within three years after the cease-fire and admission to the Protectorate, we original colonists were a minority on our own world.
The isles were tamed and said to tourists, just as Merin had predicted to Siri. Firstsite is a city of eleven million now, the condos and spires and EM cities extending around the entire island along the coast.
Firstsite Harbor remains as a quaint bazaar, with descendants of the First Families selling crafts and overpriced art there.
We lived on Tau Ceti Center for a while when Father was first elected Senator, and I finished school there. I was the dutiful son, extolling the virtues of life in the Web, studying the glorious history of the Hegemony of Man, and preparing for my own career in the diplomatic corps.
And all the time I waited.
I returned to Maui-Covenant briefly after graduation, working in the offices on Central Administration Isle.
Part of my job was to visit the hundreds of drilling platforms going up in the shallows, to report on the rapidly multiplying undersea complexes, and to act as liaison with the development corporations coming in from TC and Sol Draconi Septem. I did not enjoy the work. But I was efficient. And I smiled. And I waited.
I courted and married a girl from one of the First Families, from Siri’s cousin Bertol’s line, and after receiving a rare “First” on diplomatic corps examinations, I requested a post out of the Web.
Thus began our personal Diaspora, Gresha’s and mine. I was efficient. I was born to diplomacy. Within five standard years I was an Under Consul. Within eight, a Consul in my own right. As long as I stayed in the Outback, this was as far as I would rise.
It was my choice. I worked for the Hegemony. And I waited.
At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do what they do best—destroy truly indigenous life. It is no accident that in six centuries of interstellar expansion the Hegemony has encountered no species considered intelligent on the Drake—Turing-Chen Index. On Old Earth, it had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long.
As the Web expanded, if a species attempted serious competition with humanity’s intellect, that species would be extinct before the first farcaster opened in-system.
On Whirl we stalked the elusive zeplen through their cloud towers. It is possible that they were not sapient by human or Core standards. But they were beautiful.
When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death agony was beyond words. We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven’s Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds.
On Garden I was adviser to the arcology engineers who drained Grand Fen, ending the short reign of the marsh centaurs who had ruled—and threatened Hegemony progress—there. They tried to migrate in the end, but the North Reaches were far too dry and when I visited the region decades later, when Garden entered the Web, the desiccated remains of the centaurs still littered some of the distant Reaches like the husks of exotic plants from some more colorful era.
On Hebron I arrived just as the Jewish settlers were ending their long feud with the Seneschai Aluit, creatures as fragile as the world’s waterless ecology. The Aluit were empathic and it was our fear and greed which killed them—that and our unbreachable alienness. But on Hebron it was not the death of the Aluit which turned my heart to stone, but my part in dooming the colonists themselves.
On Old Earth they had a word for what I was—quisling.
For, although Hebron was not my world, the settlers who had fled there had done so for reasons as clear as those of my ancestors who signed the Covenant of Life on the Old Earth island of Maui. But I was waiting. And in my waiting I acted… in all senses of the word.
They trusted me. They grew to believe in my candid revelations of how wonderful it was to rejoin the community of mankind… to join the Web.
They insisted that only the one city might be open to foreigners. I smiled and agreed. And now New Jerusalem holds sixty millions while the continent holds ten million Jewish indigenies, dependent upon the Web city for most of what they need. Another decade. Perhaps less.
I broke down a bit after Hebron was opened to the Web. I discovered alcohol, the blessed antithesis of Flashback and wireheading. Gresha stayed with me in the hospital there until I dried out. Oddly, for a Jewish world, the clinic was Catholic. I remember the rustle of robes in the halls at night.
My breakdown had been very quiet and very far away.
My career was not damaged. As full Consul, I took my wife and son to Bressia.
How delicate our role there! How Byzantine the fine line we walked. For decades, C
olonel Kassad, forces of the TechnoCore had been harassing the Ouster swarms wherever they fled. Now the forces-that-be in the Senate and AI Advisory Council had determined that some test had to be made of Ouster might in the Outback itself.
Bressia was chosen. I admit, the Bressians had been our surrogates for decades before I arrived. Their society was archaically and delightfully Prussian, militaristic to a fault, arrogant in their economic pretensions, xenophobic to the point of happily enlisting to wipe out the “Ouster Menace.” At first, a few lend-lease torchships so that they could reach the swarms. Plasma weapons.
Impact probes with tailored viruses.
It was a slight miscalculation that I was still on Bressia when the Ouster hordes arrived. A few months’ difference.
A military-political analysis team should have been there in my place.
It did not matter. Hegemony purposes were served.
The resolve and rapid-deployment capabilities of FORCE were properly tested where no real harm was done to Hegemony interests. Gresha died, of course. In the first bombardment. And Alón, my ten-year-old son.
He had been with me… had survived the war itself… only to die when some FORCE idiot set off a booby trap or demolition charge too near the refugee barracks in Buckminster, the capital.
I was not with him when he died.
I was promoted after Bressia. I was given the most challenging and sensitive assignment ever relegated to someone of mere consular rank: diplomat in charge of direct negotiations with the Ousters themselves.
First I was ’cast to Tau Ceti Center for long conferences with Senator Gladstone’s committee and some of the AI Councilors. I met with Gladstone herself. The plan was very complicated. Essentially the Ousters had to be provoked into attacking, and the key to that provocation was the world of Hyperion.
The Ousters had been observing Hyperion since before the Battle of Bressia. Our intelligence suggested that they were obsessed with the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Their attack on the Hegemony hospital ship carrying Colonel Kassad, among others, had been a miscalculation; their ship captain had panicked when the hospital ship had been mistakenly identified as a military spinship. Worse, from the Ousters’ point of view, was the fact that by setting their dropships down near the Tombs themselves, the same commander had revealed their ability to defy the time tides. After the Shrike had decimated their commando teams, the torchship captain returned to the Swarm to be executed.
But our intelligence suggested that the Ouster miscalculation had not been a total disaster. Valuable information had been obtained about the Shrike. And their obsession with Hyperion had deepened.
Gladstone explained to me how the Hegemony planned to capitalize on that obsession.
The essence of the plan was that the Ousters had to be provoked into attacking the Hegemony. The focus of that attack was to be Hyperion itself. I was made to understand that the resulting battle had more to do with internal Web politics than with the Ousters. Elements of the TechnoCore had opposed Hyperion’s entry into the Hegemony for centuries.
Gladstone explained that this was no longer in the interest of humanity and that a forcible annexation of Hyperion—under the guise of defending the Web itself—would allow more progressive AI coalitions in the Core to gain power. This shift of the power balance in the Core would benefit the Senate and the Web in ways not fully explained to me.
The Ousters would be eradicated as a potential menace once and for all.
A new era of Hegemony glory would begin.
Gladstone explained that I need not volunteer, that the mission would be fraught with dangers—both for my career and my life. I accepted anyway.
The Hegemony provided me with a private spacecraft.
I asked for only one modification: the addition of an antique Steinway piano.
For months I traveled alone under Hawking drive. For more months I wandered in regions where the Ouster Swarms regularly migrated.
Eventually my ship was sensed and seized. They accepted that I was a courier and knew that I was a spy. They debated killing me and did not.
They debated negotiating with me and eventually decided to do so.
I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm—their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we llve in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.
Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome’s faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.
Within ten standard months, I had told them my greatest secret and they had told me theirs. I explained in all the detail I could what plans for extinction had been laid for them by Gladstone’s people. I told them what little the Web scientists understood of the anomaly of the Time Tombs and revealed the TechnoCore’s inexplicable fear of Hyperion.
I described how Hyperion would be a trap for them if they dared attempt to occupy it, how every element of FORCE would be brought to Hyperion System to crush them. I revealed everything I knew and waited once again to die.
Instead of killing me, they told me something. They showed me fatline intercepts, tightbeam recordings, and their own records from the date they fled Old Earth System, four and a half centuries earlier. Their facts were terrible and simple.
The Big Mistake of ’38 had been no mistake. The death of Old Earth had been deliberate, planned by elements of the TechnoCore and their human counterparts in the fledgling government of the Hegemony. The Hegira had been planned in detail decades before the runaway black hole had “accidentally” been plunged into the heart of Old Earth.
The Worldweb, the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man—all of them had been built on the most vicious type of patricide. Now they were being maintained by a quiet and deliberate policy of fraticide—the murder of any species with even the slightest potential of being a competitor.
And the Ousters, the only other tribe of humanity free to wander between the stars and the only group not dominated by the TechnoCore, was next on our list of extinction.
I returned to the Web. Over thirty years of Web-time had passed. Meina Gladstone was CEO. Siri’s Rebellion was a romantic legend, a minor footnote in the history of the Hegemony.
I met with Gladstone. I told her many—but not all—of the things the Ousters had revealed. I told her that they knew that any battle for Hyperion would be a trap, but that they were coming anyway. I told her that the Ousters wanted me to become Consul on Hyperion so that I might be a double agent when war came.
I did not tell her that they had promised to give me a device which would open the Time Tombs and allow the Shrike free rein…
CEO Gladstone had long talks with me. FORCE: Intelligence agents had even longer talks with me, some lasting months. Technologies and drugs were used to confirm that I was telling the truth and keeping nothing back. The Ousters also had been very good with technologies and drugs.
I was telling the truth. I was also keeping something back.
In the end, I was assigned to Hyperion. Gladstone offered to raise the world to Protectorate status and me to an ambassadorship. I declined both offers, although I asked if I could keep my private spacecraft. I arrived on a regularly scheduled spinship, and my own ship arrived several weeks later in the belly of a visiting torchship. It was left in a parking orbit with the understanding that I could summon it and leave any time I wished.
Alone on Hyperion, I waited. Years passed. I allowed my aide to govern the Outback world while I drank at Cicero’s and waited.
The Ousters contacted me through private fatline and I took a three weeks’ leave from th
e Consulate, brought my ship down to an isolated place near the Sea of Grass, rendezvoused with their scoutship near the Oort Cloud, picked up their agent—a woman named Andil—and a trio of technicians, and dropped down north of the Bridle Range, a few kilometers from the Tombs themselves.
The Ousters did not have farcasters. They spent their lives on the long marches between the stars, watching life in the Web speed by like some film or holie set at a frenzied speed. They were obsessed with time.
The TechnoCore had given the Hegemony the farcaster and continued to maintain it. No human scientists or team of human scientists had come close to understanding it. The Ousters tried. They failed. But even in their failures they made inroads into understanding the manipulation of space/time.
They understood the time tides, the anti-entropic fields surrounding the Tombs. They could not generate such fields, but they could shield against them and—theoretically—collapse them. The Time Tombs and all their contents would cease to age backward. The Tombs would “open.”
The Shrike would slip its tether, no longer connected to the vicinity of the Tombs. Whatever else was inside would now be freed.
The Ousters believed that the Time Tombs were artifacts from their future, the Shrike a weapon of redemption awaiting the proper hand to seize it. The Shrike Cult saw the monster as an avenging angel; the Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to deliver humanity from the TechnoCore. Andil and the technicians were there to calibrate and experiment.
“You won’t use it now?” I asked. We were standing in the shadow of the structure called the Sphinx.
“Not now,” said Andil. “When the invasion is imminent.”
“But you said it would take months for the device to work,” I said, “for the Tombs to open.”
Andil nodded. Her eyes were a dark green. She was very tall, and I could make out the subtle stripes of the powered exoskeleton on her skinsuit. “Perhaps a year or longer,” she said. “The device causes the anti-entropic field to decay slowly. But once begun, the process is irrevocable. But we will not activate it until the Ten Councils have decided that invasion of the Web is necessary.”