by Dan Simmons
I never saw the Shrike. Many nights, just before dawn, I would awaken from a nap at a sudden sound—the scratch of metal on stone, the rasp of sand under something’s foot—but although I was often sure that I was being watched, I never saw the watcher.
Occasionally I made the short trip to the Time Tombs, especially at night, avoiding the soft, disconcerting tugs of the anti-entropic time tides while I moved through complicated shadows under the wings of the Sphinx or stared at stars through the emerald wall of the Jade Tomb. It was upon my return from one of these nocturnal pilgrimages that I found an intruder in my study.
“Impressive, M-M-M-Martin,” said King Billy, tapping one of several heaps of manuscript which lay about the room. Seated in the oversized chair at the long table, the failed monarch looked old, more melted than ever. It was obvious that he had been reading for several hours. “Do you r-r-really think that mankind d-d-d-deserves such an end?” he asked softly. It had been a dozen years since I had heard the stutter.
I moved away from the door but did not answer. Billy had been a friend and patron for more than twenty standard years, but at that moment I could have killed him. The thought of someone reading Hyperion without permission filled me with rage.
“You d-d-date your p-p-p … cantos?” said King Billy, riffling through the most recent stack of completed pages.
“How did you get here?” I snapped. It was not an idle question. Skimmers, dropships, and helicopters had not had much luck flying to the Time Tombs region in recent years. The machines arrived sans passengers. It had done wonders in fueling the Shrike myth.
The little man in the rumpled cape shrugged. His uniform was meant to be brilliant and regal but merely made him look like an overweight Harlequin. “I followed the last batch of pilgrims,” he said. “And then c-c-came down from Keep Chronos to visit. I notice that you’ve written nothing in many months, M-M-Martin. Can you explain that?”
I glowered in silence while sidling closer.
“Perhaps I can explain it,” said King Billy. He looked at the last completed page of Hyperion Cantos as if it had the answer to a long-puzzled riddle. “The last stanzas were written the same week last year that J. T. Telio disappeared.”
“So?” I had moved to the far edge of the table now. Feigning a casual attitude, I pulled a short stack of manuscript pages closer and moved them out of Billy’s reach.
“So that w-w-w-was … according to the SDF monitors … the d-d-date of the death of the last remaining Poets’ City dweller,” he said. “The last except for y-y-you, that is, Martin.”
I shrugged and began moving around the table. I needed to get to Billy without getting the manuscript in the way.
“You know, you haven’t f-f-f-finished it, Martin,” he said in his deep, sad voice. “There is still some chance that humanity s-s-s-survives the Fall.”
“No,” I said and sidled closer.
“But you can’t write it, can you, Martin? You can’t c-c-c-compose this poetry unless your m-m-muse is shedding blood, can you?”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Perhaps. But a fascinating coincidence. Have you ever wondered why you have been spared, Martin?”
I shrugged again and slid another stack of papers out of his reach. I was taller, stronger, and meaner than Billy, but I had to be sure that none of the manuscript would be damaged if he struggled as I lifted him out of his seat and threw him out.
“It’s t-t-t-time we did something about this problem,” said my patron.
“No,” I said, “it’s time you left.” I shoved the last stacks of poetry aside and raised my arms, surprised to see a brass candlestick in one hand.
“Stop right there, please,” King Billy said softly and lifted a neural stunner from his lap.
I paused only a second. Then I laughed. “You miserable little hangdog fraud,” I said. “You couldn’t use a fucking weapon if your life depended on it.”
I stepped forward to beat him up and throw him out.
My cheek was against the stone of the courtyard but one eye was open enough for me to see that stars still shone through the broken latticework of the galleria dome. I could not blink. My limbs and torso tingled with the pinpricks of returning sensation, as if my entire body had fallen asleep and was now coming painfully awake. It made me want to scream, but my jaw and tongue refused to work. Suddenly I was lifted and propped against a stone bench so that I could see the courtyard and the dry fountain which Rithmet Corbet had designed. The bronze Laocoön wrestled with bronze snakes in the flickering illumination of the predawn meteor showers.
“I’m s-s-sorry, Martin,” came a familiar voice, “b-b-but this m-m-madness has to end.” King Billy came into my field of view carrying a tall stack of manuscript. Other heaps of pages lay on the shelf of the fountain at the foot of the metal Trojan. An open bucket of kerosene sat nearby.
I managed to blink. My eyelids moved like rusted iron.
“The stun should w-w-wear off any s-s-s … any minute,” said King Billy. He reached into the fountain, raised a sheaf of manuscript, and ignited it with a flick of his cigarette lighter.
“No!” I managed to scream through clenched jaws.
The flames danced and died. King Billy let the ashes drop into the fountain and lifted another stack of pages, rolling them into a cylinder. Tears glistened on lined cheeks illuminated by flame. “You c-c-called it f-f-forth,” gasped the little man. “It must be f-f-finished.”
I struggled to rise. My arms and legs jerked like a marionette’s mishandled limbs. The pain was incredible. I screamed again and the agonized sound echoed from marble and granite.
King Billy lifted a fat sheaf of papers and paused to read from the top page:
“Without story or prop
But my own weak mortality, I bore
The load of this eternal quietude,
The unchanging gloom, and the three fixed shapes
Ponderous upon my senses a whole moon.
For by my burning brain I measured sure
Her silver seasons shedded on the night
And ever day by day I thought I grew
More gaunt and ghostly—Oftentimes I prayed,
Intense, that Death would take me from the vale
And all its burdens—Gasping with despair
Of change, hour after hour I cursed myself.”
King Billy raised his face to the stars and consigned this page to flame.
“No!” I cried again and forced my legs to bend. I got to one knee, tried to steady myself with an arm ablaze with pinpricks, and fell on my side.
The shadow in the cape lifted a stack too thick to roll and peered at it in the dim light.
“Then I saw a wan face
Not pinned by human sorrows, but bright blanched
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had passed
The lily and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face …”
King Billy moved his lighter and this and fifty other pages burst into flame. He dropped the burning papers into the fountain and reached for more.
“Please!” I cried and pulled myself up, stiffening my legs against the twitches of random nerve impulses while leaning against the stone bench. “Please.”
The third figure did not actually appear so much as allow its presence to impinge upon my consciousness; it was as if it always had been there and King Billy and I had failed to notice it until the flames grew bright enough. Impossibly tall, four-armed, molded in chrome and cartilage, the Shrike turned its red gaze on us.
King Billy gasped, stepped back, and then moved forward to feed more cantos to the fire. Embers rose on warm drafts. A flight of doves burst from the vine-choked girders of the broken dome with an explosion of wing sound.
I moved forward in a motion more lurch
than step. The Shrike did not move, did not shift its bloody gaze.
“Go!” cried King Billy, stutter forgotten, voice exalted, a blazing mass of poetry in each hand. “Return to the pit from whence you came!”
The Shrike seemed to incline its head ever so slightly. Red light gleamed on sharp surfaces.
“My lord!” I cried, although to King Billy or the apparition from hell I did not know then and know not now. I staggered the last few paces and reached for Billy’s arm.
He was not there. One second the aging King was a hand’s length from me and in the next instant he was ten meters away, raised high above the courtyard stones. Fingers like steel thorns pierced his arms and chest and thighs, but he still writhed and my Cantos burned in his fists. The Shrike held him out like a father offering his son for baptism.
“Destroy it!” Billy cried, his pinned arms making pitiful gestures. “Destroy it!”
I stopped at the fountain’s edge, tottered weakly against the rim. At first I thought he meant destroy the Shrike … and then I thought he meant the poem … and then I realized that he meant both. A thousand pages and more of manuscript lay tumbled in the dry fountain. I picked up the bucket of kerosene.
The Shrike did not move except to pull King Billy slowly back against his chest in an oddly affectionate motion. Billy writhed and screamed silently as a long steel thorn emerged from his harlequin silk just above the breastbone. I stood there stupidly and thought of butterfly collections I had displayed as a child. Slowly, mechanically, I sloshed kerosene on the scattered pages.
“End it!” gasped King Billy. “Martin, for the love of God!”
I picked up the lighter from where he had dropped it. The Shrike made no move. Blood soaked the black patches of Billy’s tunic until they blended with the crimson squares already there. I thumbed the antique lighter once, twice, a third time; sparks only. Through my tears I could see my life’s work lying in the dusty fountain. I dropped the lighter.
Billy screamed. Dimly, I heard blades rubbing bone as he twisted in the Shrike’s embrace. “Finish it!” he cried. “Martin … oh, God!”
I turned then, took five fast paces, and threw the half-full bucket of kerosene. Fumes blurred my already blurred vision. Billy and the impossible creature that held him were soaked like two comics in a slapstick holie. I saw Billy blink and splutter, I saw the slickness on the Shrike’s chiseled muzzle reflect the meteor-brightened sky, and then the dying embers of burned pages in Billy’s still clenched fists ignited the kerosene.
I raised my hands to protect my face—too late, beard and eyebrows singed and smoldered—and staggered backward until the rim of the fountain stopped me.
For a second the pyre was a perfect sculpture of flame, a blue and yellow Pietà with a four-armed madonna holding a blazing Christ figure. Then the burning figure writhed and arched, still pinned by steel thorns and a score of scalpeled talons, and a cry went up which to this day I cannot believe emanated from the human half of that death-embraced pair. The scream knocked me to my knees, echoed from every hard surface in the city, and drove the pigeons into wheeling panic. And the scream continued for minutes after the flaming vision simply ceased to be, leaving behind neither ashes nor retinal image. It was another minute or two before I realized that the scream I now heard was mine.
Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
It took me several months, perhaps a year, to recopy the kerosene-damaged pages and to rewrite the burned Cantos. It will be no surprise to learn that I did not finish the poem. It was not by choice. My muse had fled.
The City of Poets decayed in peace. I stayed another year or two—perhaps five, I do not know; I was quite mad by then. To this day records of early Shrike pilgrims tell of the gaunt figure, all hair and rags and bulging eyes, who would wake them from their Gethsemane sleep by screaming obscenities and shaking his fist at the silent Time Tombs, daring the coward within to show itself.
Eventually the madness burned itself out—although the embers will always glow—and I hiked the fifteen hundred kilometers to civilization, my backpack weighted down with just manuscript, surviving on rock eels and snow and on nothing at all for the last ten days.
The two and a half centuries since are not worth telling, much less reliving. The Poulsen treatments to keep the instrument alive and waiting. Two long, cold sleeps in illegal, sublight, cryogenic voyages; each swallowing a century or more; each taking its toll in brain cells and memory.
I waited then. I wait still. The poem must be finished. It will be finished.
In the beginning was the Word.
In the end … past honor, past life, past caring …
In the end will be the Word.
4
The Benares put into Edge a little after noon on the next day. One of the mantas had died in harness only twenty kilometers downriver from their destination and A. Bettik had cut it loose. The other had lasted until they tied up to the bleached pier and then it rolled over in total exhaustion, bubbles rising from its twin airholes. Bettik ordered this manta cut loose as well, explaining that it had a slim chance of surviving if it drifted along in the more rapid current.
The pilgrims had been awake and watching the scenery roll by since before sunrise. They spoke little and none had found anything to say to Martin Silenus. The poet did not appear to mind … he drank wine with his breakfast and sang bawdy songs as the sun rose.
The river had widened during the night and by morning it was a two-kilometer-wide highway of blue gray cutting through the low green hills south of the Sea of Grass. There were no trees this close to the Sea, and the browns and golds and heather tones of the Mane shrubs had gradually brightened to the bold greens of the two-meter-tall northern grasses. All morning the hills had been pressed lower until now they were compressed into low bands of grassy bluffs on either side of the river. An almost invisible darkening hung above the horizon to the north arid east, and those pilgrims who had lived on ocean worlds and knew it as a promise of the approaching sea had to remind themselves that the only sea now near was comprised of several billion acres of grass.
Edge never had been a large outpost and now it was totally deserted. The score of buildings lining the rutted lane from the dock had the vacant gaze of all abandoned structures and there were signs on the riverfront that the population had fled weeks earlier. The Pilgrims’ Rest, a three-century-old inn just below the crest of the hill, had been burned.
A. Bettik accompanied them to the summit of the low bluff. “What will you do now?” Colonel Kassad asked the android.
“According to the terms of the Temple bonditure, we are free after this trip,” said Bettik. “We shall leave the Benares here for your return and take the launch downriver. And then we go on our way.”
“With the general evacuations?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“No.” Bettik smiled. “We have our own purposes and pilgrimages on Hyperion.”
The group reached the rounded crest of the bluff Behind them, the Benares seemed a small thing tied to a sagging dock; the Hoolie ran southwest into the blue haze of distance below the town and curved west above it, narrowing toward the impassable Lower Cataracts a dozen kilometers upriver from Edge. To their north and east lay the Sea of Grass.
“My God,” breathed Brawne Lamia.
It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation. Below them, a scattering of docks, wharves, and sheds marked the end of Edge and the beginning of the Sea. Grass stretched away forever, rippling sensuously in the slight breeze and seeming to lap like a green surf at the base of the bluffs. The grass seemed infinite and seamless, stretching to all horizons and apparently rising to precisely the same height as far as the eye could see. There was not the slightest hint of the snowy peaks of the Bridle Range, which they knew lay some eight hundred kilometers to the northeast. The illusion that they were gazing at a great green sea was nearly perfect, down to the wind-ruffled shimmers of st
alks looking like whitecaps far from shore.
“Its beautiful,” said Lamia, who had never seen it before.
“It’s striking at sunset and sunrise,” said the Consul.
“Fascinating,” murmured Sol Weintraub, lifting his infant so that she could see. She wiggled in happiness and concentrated on watching her fingers.
“A well-preserved ecosystem,” Het Masteen said approvingly. “The Muir would be pleased.”
“Shit,” said Martin Silenus.
The others turned to stare.
“There’s no fucking windwagon,” said the poet.
The four other men, woman, and android stared silently at the abandoned wharves and empty plain of grass.
“It’s been delayed,” said the Consul.
Martin Silenus barked a laugh. “Or it’s left already. We were supposed to be here last night.”
Colonel Kassad raised his powered binoculars and swept the horizon. “I find it unlikely that they would have left without us,” he said. “The wagon was to have been sent by the Shrike Temple priests themselves. They have a vested interest in our pilgrimage.”
“We could walk,” said Lenar Hoyt. The priest looked pale and weak, obviously in the grip of both pain and drugs, and barely able to stand, much less walk.
“No,” said Kassad. “It’s hundreds of klicks and the grass is over our heads.”
“Compasses,” said the priest.
“Compasses don’t work on Hyperion,” said Kassad, still watching through his binoculars.
“Direction finders then,” said Hoyt.
“We have an IDF, but that isn’t the point,” said the Consul. “The grass is sharp. Half a klick out and we’d be nothing but tatters.”
“And there are the grass serpents,” said Kassad, lowering the glasses. “It’s a well-preserved ecosystem but not one to take a stroll in.”
Father Hoyt sighed and half collapsed into the short grass of the hilltop. There was something close to relief in his voice When he said, “All right, we go back.”