by Dan Simmons
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 proverbial 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,” growed 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.
“Not unless you outlive me.”
“Which I plan to do,” said the King. “While you expire from playing goat to the kingdom’s ewes.”
“Is that an attempt at a metaphor?”
“Not in the least,” said King Billy. “Merely an observation.”
“I haven’t forced my attentions on a ewe since my boyhood days on the farm,” I said. “I promised my mother in song that I wouldn’t indulge in sheep fucking again without asking her permission.” While King Billy looked on mournfully, I sang a few bars of an ancient ditty called “There’ll Never Be Another Ewe.”
“Martin,” he said, “someone or something is killing my people.”
I set aside my paper and pen. “I know,” I said.
“I need your help.”
“How, for Christ’s sake? Am I supposed to track down the killer like some HTV detective? Have a fight to the fucking death on Reichenbach fucking Falls?”
“That would be satisfactory, Martin. But in the meantime a few opinions and words of advice would suffice.”
“Opinion One,” I said, “it was stupid to come here. Opinion Two, it’s stupid to stay. Advice Alpha/Omega: leave.”
King Billy nodded dolefully. “Leave this city or all of Hyperion?”
I shrugged.
His Majesty rose and walked to the window of my small study. It looked out across a three-meter alley to the brick wall of the automated recycling plant next door. King Billy studied the view. “You’re aware,” he said, “of the ancient legend of the Shrike?”
“I’ve heard bits of it.”
“The indigenies associate the monster with the Time Tombs,” he said.
“The indigenies smear paint on their bellies for the harvest celebration and smoke unrecombinant tobacco,” I said.
King Billy nodded at the wisdom of this. He said: “The Hegemony Firstdown Team was wary of this area. They set up the multichannel recorders and kept their bases south of the Bridle.”
“Look,” I said, “Your Majesty … what do you want? Absolution for screwing up and building the city here? You’re absolved. Go and sin no more, my son. Now, if you don’t mind, Your Royalship, adiós. I’ve got dirty limericks to write here.”
King Billy did not turn away from the window. “You recommend that we evacuate the city, Martin?”
I hesitated only a second. “Sure.”
“And would you leave with the rest?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
King Billy turned and looked me in the eye. “Would you?”
I said nothing. After a minute I looked away.
“I thought so,” said the ruler of the planet. He clasped his pudgy hands behind his back and stared at the wall again. “If I were a detective,” he said, “I would be suspicious. The city’s least productive citizen starts writing again after a decade of silence only … what, Martin? … two days after the first murders happened. Now he’s disappeared from the social life he once dominated and spends his time composing an epic poem … shy, even the young girls are safe from his goatish ardor.”
I sighed. “Goatish ardor, m’lord?”
King Billy glanced over his shoulder at me.
“All right,” I said. “You’ve got me. I confess. I’ve been murdering them and bathing in their blood. It works as a fucking literary aphrodisiac. I figure two … three hundred more victims; tops … and I’ll have my next Book ready for publication.”
King Billy turned back to the window.
“What’s the matter,” I said, “don’t you believe me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” said the King, “I know who the murderer is.”
We sat in the darkened holopit and watched the Shrike kill novelist Sira Rob and her lover. The light level was very low; Sira’s middle-aged flesh seemed to glow with a pale phosphorescence while her much younger boyfriend’s white buttocks gave the illusion in the dim light of floating separately from the rest of his tanned body. Their lovemaking was reaching its frenzied peak when the inexplicable occurred. Rather than the final thrusts and sudden pause of orgasm, the young man seemed to levitate up and backward, rising into the air as if Sira had somehow forcefully ejected him from her body. The sound track on the disk, previously consisting of the usual banal pants, gasps, exhortations, and instructions one would expect from such activity, suddenly filled the holopit with screams—first the young man’s, then Sira’s.
There was a thud as the boy’s body struck a wall off camera. Sira’s body lay waiting in tragically comic vulnerability, her legs wide, arms open, breasts flattened, thighs pale. Her head had been thrown back in ecstasy but now she had time to raise it, shock and anger already replacing the oddly similar expression of imminent orgasm. She opened her mouth to shout something.
No words. There came the watermelon-carving sound of blades piercing flesh, of hooks being pulled free of tendon and bone. Sira’s head went back, her mouth opened impossibly wide, and her body exploded from the breastbone down. Flesh separated as if an invisible ax were chopping Sira Rob for kindling. Unseen scalpels completed the job of opening her, lateral incisions appearing like obscene time-lapse footage of a mad surgeon’s favorite operation. It was a brutal autopsy performed on a living person. On a once living person, rather, for when the blood stopped flying and the body ceased spasming, Sira’s limbs relaxed in death, legs opening again in an echo of the obscene display of viscera above. And then—for the briefest second—there was a blur of red and chrome near the bed.
“Freeze, expand, and augment,” King Billy told the house computer.
The blur r
esolved itself into a head out of a jolt addict’s nightmare: a face part steel, part chrome, and part skull, teeth like a mechanized wolf’s crossed with a steam shovel, eyes like ruby lasers burning through blood-filled gems, forehead penetrated by a curved spike-blade rising thirty centimeters from a quicksilver skull, and a neck ringed with similar thorns.
“The Shrike?” I asked.
King Billy nodded—the merest movement of chin and jowls.
“What happened to the boy?” I asked.
“There was no sign of him when Sira’s body was discovered,” said the King. “No one knew he was missing until this disk was discovered. He has been identified as a young recreation specialist from Endymion.”
“You just found the holo?”
“Yesterday,” said King Billy. “The security people found the imager on the ceiling. Less than a millimeter across. Sira had a library of such disks. The camera apparently was there only to record … ah …”
“The bedroom follies,” I said.
“Precisely.”
I stood up and approached the floating image of the creature. My hand passed through forehead, spike, and jaws. The computer had calculated its size and represented it properly. Judging from the thing’s head, our local Grendel stood more than three meters tall. “Shrike,” I muttered, more in greeting than in identification.
“What can you tell me about it, Martin?”
“Why ask me?” I snapped. “I’m a poet, not a mythohistorian.”
“You accessed the seedship computer with a query about the Shrike’s nature and origins.”
I raised an eyebrow. Computer access was supposed to be as private and anonymous as datasphere entry in the Hegemony. “So what?” I said. “Hundreds of people must have checked out the Shrike legend since the killings began. Maybe thousands. It’s the only fucking monster legend we’ve got.”
King Billy moved his wrinkles and folds up and down. “Yes,” he said, “but you searched the files three months before the first disappearance.”
I sighed and slumped into the holopit cushions. “All right,” I said, “I did. So what? I wanted to use the fucking legend in the fucking poem I’m writing, so I researched it. Arrest me.”
“What did you learn?”
I was very angry now. I stamped satyr hooves into the soft carpet. “Just the stuff in the fucking file,” I snapped. “What in the hell do you want from me, Billy?”
The King rubbed his brow and winced as he accidentally stuck his little finger in his eye. “I don’t know,” he said. “The security people wanted to take you up to the ship and put you on full interrogative interface. I chose to talk to you instead.”
I blinked, feeling a strange zero-g sensation in my stomach. Full interrogative meant cortical shunts and sockets in the skull. Most people interrogated that way recovered fully. Most.
“Can you tell me what aspect of the Shrike legend you planned to use in your poem?” King Billy asked softly.
“Sure,” I said. “According to the Shrike Cult gospel that the indigenies started, the Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human race. I liked that conceit.”
“The end of the human race,” repeated King Billy.
“Yeah. He’s Michael the Archangel and Moroni and Satan and Masked Entropy and the Frankenstein monster all rolled into one package,” I said. “He hangs around the Time Tombs waiting to come out and wreak havoc when it’s mankind’s time to join the dodo and the gorilla and the sperm whale on the extinction Hit Parade list.”
“The Frankenstein monster,” mused the short little fat man in the wrinkled cape. “Why him?”
I took a breath. “Because the Shrike Cult believes that mankind somehow created the thing,” I said, although I knew that King Billy knew everything I knew and more.
“Do they know how to kill it?” he asked.
“Not that I know of. He’s supposed to be immortal, beyond time.”
“A god?”
I hesitated. “Not really,” I said at last. “More like one of the universe’s worst nightmares come to life. Sort of like the Grim Reaper, but with a penchant for sticking souls on a giant thorn tree … while the people’s souls are still in their bodies.”
King Billy nodded.
“Look,” I said, “if you insist on splitting hairs from back-world theologies, why don’t you fly to Jacktown and ask a few of the Cult priests?”
“Yes,” said the King, chin on his pudgy fist, obviously distracted, “they’re already on the seedship being interrogated. It’s all most confusing.”
I rose to leave, not sure if I would be allowed to.
“Martin?”
“Yeah.”
“Before you go, can you think of anything else that could help us understand this thing?”
I paused in the doorway, feeling my heart batting at my ribs to get out. “Yeah,” I said, my voice only marginally steady. “I can tell you who and what the Shrike really is.”
“Oh?”
“It’s my muse,” I said, and turned, and went back to my room to write.
Of course I had summoned the Shrike. I knew that. I had summoned it by beginning my epic poem about it. In the beginning was the Word.
I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to sire. Hyperion was the first serious work I had done in many years and it was the best I would ever do. What began as a comic-serious homage to the ghost of John Keats became my last reason for existence, an epic tour de force in an age of mediocre farce. Hyperion Cantos was written with a skill I could never have attained, with a mastery I could never have gained, and sung in a voice which was not mine. The passing of humankind was my topic. The Shrike was my muse.
A score more people died before King Billy evacuated the City of Poets. Some of the evacuees went to Endymion or Keats or one of the other new cities, but most voted to take the seedships back to the Web. King Billy’s dream of a creative utopia died, although the King himself lived on in the gloomy palace at Keats. Leadership of the colony passed to the Home Rule Council, which petitioned the Hegemony for membership and immediately established a Self-defense Force. The SDF—made up primarily of the same indigenies who had been cudgeling each other a decade before, but commanded now by self-styled officers from our new colony—succeeded only in disturbing the peacefulness of the night with their automated skimmer patrols and marring the beauty of the returning desert with their mobile surveillance mechs.
Surprisingly, I was not the only one to stay behind; at least two hundred remained, although most of us avoided social contact, smiling politely when we passed on Poets’ Walk or while we ate apart in the echoing emptiness of the dining dome.
The murders and disappearances continued, averaging about one a local fortnight, although they were usually discovered not by us but by the regional SDF commander, who demanded a head count of citizens every few weeks.
The image that remains in my mind from that first year is an unusually communal one: the night we gathered on the Commons to watch the seedship leave. It was at the height of the autumn meteor season and Hyperion’s night skies were already ablaze with gold streaks and red crisscrosses of flame when the seedship’s engines fired, a small sun flared, and for an hour we watched as friends and fellow artists receded as a streak of fusion flame. Sad King Billy joined us that night and I remember that he looked at me before he solemnly reentered his ornate coach to return to the safety of Keats.
In the dozen years which followed I left the city only half a dozen times; once to find a biosculptor who could rid me of my satyr affectation, the other times to buy food and supplies. The Shrike Temple had renewed the Shrike pilgrimages by this time, a
nd on my trips I would use their elaborate avenue to death in reverse—the walk to Chronos Keep, the aerial tram across the Bridle Range, the windwagons, and the Charon barge down the Hoolie. Coming back, I would stare at the pilgrims and wonder who would survive.
Few visited the City of Poets. Our half-finished towers began to look like tumbled ruins. The gallerias with their splendid metal-glass domes and covered arcades grew heavy with vines; pyreweed and scargrass poked up between the flagstones. The SDF added to the chaos, setting mines and booby traps to kill the Shrike, but only succeeding in devastating once beautiful sections of the city. Irrigation broke down. The aqueduct collapsed. The desert encroached. I moved from room to room in King Billy’s abandoned palace, working on my poem, waiting for my muse.
When you think about it, the cause-effect begins to resemble some mad logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or perhaps a print by Escher: the Shrike had come into existence because of the incantatory powers of my poem but the poem could not have existed without the threat/presence of the Shrike as muse. Perhaps I was a bit mad in those days.
In a dozen years sudden death culled the city of dilettantes until only the Shrike and I remained. The annual passage of the Shrike Pilgrimage was a minor irritation, a distant caravan crossing the desert to the Time Tombs. Sometimes a few figures returned, fleeing across vermilion sands to the refuge of Chronos Keep twenty kilometers to the southwest. More often, no one emerged.
I watched from the shadows of the city. My hair and beard had grown until they covered some of the rags I wore. I came out mostly at night, moving through the ruins like a furtive shadow, sometimes gazing at my lighted palace tower like David Hume peering in his own windows and solemnly deciding that he wasn’t home. I never moved the food synthesizer from the dining dome to my apartments, preferring instead to eat in the echoing silence under that cracked duomo like some addled Eloi fattening himself up for the inevitable Morlock.