by Dan Simmons
The Consul turned down the other lamps and poured more coffee for those who wanted it. Sol Weintraub’s voice was slow, careful in phrase and precise in wording, and before long the gentle cadence of his story blended with the soft rumble and slow pitchings of the wind wagon’s progress north.
THE SCHOLAR’S TALE:
THE RIVER LETHE’S TASTE IS BITTER
Sol Weintraub and his wife Sarai had enjoyed their life even before the birth of their daughter; Rachel made things as close to perfect as the couple could imagine.
Sarai was twenty-seven when the child was conceived, Sol was twenty-nine. Neither of them had considered Poulsen treatments because neither of them could afford it, but even without such care they looked forward to another fifty years of health.
Both had lived their entire lives on Barnard’s World, one of the oldest but least exciting members of the Hegemony. Barnard’s was in the Web, but it made little difference to Sol and Sarai since they could not afford frequent farcaster travel and had little wish to go at any rate. Sol had recently celebrated his tenth year With Nightenhelser College, where he taught history and classical studies and did his own research on ethical evolution. Nightenhelser was a small school, fewer than three thousand students, but its academic reputation was outstanding and it attracted young people from all over the Web. The primary complaint of these students was that Nightenhelser and its surrounding community of Crawford constituted an island of civilization in an ocean of corn. It was true; the college was three thousand flat kilometers away from the capital of Bussard and the terraformed land in between was given over to farming. There had been no forests to fell, no hills to deal with, and no mountains to break the flat monotony of cornfields, beanfields, cornfields, wheatfields, cornfields, rice paddies, and cornfields. The radical poet Salmud Brevy had taught briefly at Nightenhelser before the Glennon-Height Mutiny, had been fired, and upon farcasting to Renaissance Vector had told his friends that Crawford County on South Sinzer on Barnards World constituted the Eighth Circle of Desolation on the smallest pimple on the absolute ass-end of Creation.
Sol and Sarai Weintraub liked it. Crawford, a town of twenty-five thousand, might have been reconstructed from some nineteenth-century mid-American template. The streets were wide and overarched with elms and oaks. (Barnard’s had been the second extrasolar Earth colony, centuries before the Hawking drive and Hegira, and the seedships then had been huge.) Homes in Crawford reflected styles ranging from early Victorian to Canadian Revival, but they all seemed to be white and set far back on well-trimmed lawns.
The college itself was Georgian, an assemblage of red brick and white pillars surrounding the oval common. Sol’s office was on the third floor of Placher Hall, the oldest building on campus, and in the winter he could look out on bare branches which carved the common into complex geometries. Sol loved the chalk-dust and old-wood smell of the place, a smell which had not changed since he was a freshman there, and each day climbing to his office he treasured the deeply worn grooves in the steps, a legacy of twenty generations of Nightenhelser students.
Sarai had been born on a farm halfway between Bussard and Crawford and had received her PhD in music theory a year before Sol earned his doctorate. She had been a happy and energetic young woman, making up in personality what she lacked in accepted norms of physical beauty, and she carried this attractiveness of person into later life. Sarai had studied off world for two years at the University of New Lyons on Deneb Drei, but she was homesick there: the sunsets were abrupt, the much-vaunted mountains slicing off the sunlight like a ragged scythe, and she longed for the hours-long sunsets of home where Barnard’s Star hung on the horizon like a great, tethered, red balloon while the sky congealed to evening. She missed the perfect flatness where—peering from her third-floor room under the steep gables—a little girl could look fifty kilometers across tasseled fields to watch a storm approach like a bruise-black curtain lit within by lightning bolts. And Sarai missed her family.
She and Sol met a week after she transferred to Nightenhelser; it was another three years before he proposed marriage and she accepted. At first she saw nothing in the short graduate student. She was still wearing Web fashions then, involved in Post-Destructionist music theories, reading Obit and Nihil and the most avant-garde magazines from Renaissance Vector and TC2, feigning sophisticated weariness with life and a rebel’s vocabulary—and none of this jelled with the undersized but earnest history major who spilled fruit cocktail on her at Dean Moore’s honors party. Any exotic qualities which might have come from Sol Weintraub’s Jewish legacy were instantly negated by his BW accent, his Crawford Squire Shop wardrobe, and the fact that he had come to the party with a copy of Detresque’s Solitudes in Variance absentmindedly tucked under his arm.
For Sol it was love at first sight. He stared at the laughing, red-cheeked girl and ignored the expensive dress and affected mandarin nails in favor of the personality which blazed like a beacon to the lonely junior. Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai, but after the first time he shook her hand and spilled fruit salad down the front of her dress he knew that his life would be empty forever if they did not marry.
They married the week after the announcement of Sol’s teaching appointment at the college. Their honeymoon was on Maui-Covenant, his first farcast trip abroad, and for three weeks they rented a mobile isle and sailed alone on it through the wonders of the Equatorial Archipelago. Sol never forgot the images from those sundrenched and wind-filled days, and the secret image he would always most cherish was of Sarai rising nude from a nighttime swim, the Core stars blazing above while her own body glowed constellations from the phosphorescence of the island’s wake.
They had wanted a child immediately but it was to be five years before nature agreed.
Sol remembered cradling Sarai in his arms as she curled in pain, a difficult delivery, until finally, incredibly, Rachel Sarah Weintraub was born at 2:01 A.M. in Crawford County Med Center.
The presence of an infant intruded upon Sol’s solipsistic life as a serious academic and Sarai’s profession as music critic for Barnard’s datasphere, but neither minded. The first months were a blend of constant fatigue and joy. Late at night, between feedings, Sol would tiptoe into the nursery just to check on Rachel and to stand and gaze at the baby. More often than not he would find Sarai already there and the two would watch, arm in arm, at the miracle of a baby sleeping on its stomach, rump in the air, head burrowed into the bumper pad at the head of the crib.
Rachel was one of those rare children who managed to be cute without becoming self-consciously precious; by the time she was two standard years old her appearance and personality were striking—her mother’s light brown hair, red cheeks, and broad smile, her father’s large brown eyes. Friends said that the child combined the best portions of Sarai’s sensitivity and Sol’s intellect. Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.
One day in his office, studying ancient files from Old Earth, Sol was reading about the effect of Beatrice on the world view of Dante Alighieri when he was struck by a passage written by a critic from the twentieth or twenty-first century:
She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark—what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard.…
Sol paused to access the definition of Greenwich Standard, and then he read on. The critic had added a personal note:
Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.
Sol had shut off the display and gazed out at the black geometries of branches above the common.
Rachel was
not insufferably perfect. When she was five standard, she carefully cut the hair of her five favorite dolls and then cut her own hair shortest of all. When she was seven, she decided that the migrant workers staying in their run-down houses on the south end of town lacked a nutritious diet, so she emptied the house’s pantries, cold boxes, freezers, and synthesizer banks, talked three friends into accompanying her, and distributed several hundred marks’ worth of the family’s monthly food budget.
When she was ten, Rachel responded to a dare from Stubby Berkowitz and tried to climb to the top of Crawford’s oldest elm. She was forty meters up, less than five meters from the top, when a branch broke and she fell two thirds of the way to the ground. Sol was paged on his comlog while discussing the moral implications of Earth’s first nuclear disarmament era and he left the class without a word and ran the twelve blocks to the Med Center.
Rachel had broken her left leg, two ribs, punctured a lung, and fractured her jaw. She was floating in a bath of recovery nutrient when Sol burst in, but she managed to look over her mother’s shoulder, smile slightly, and say through the wire cast on her jaw: “Dad, I was fifteen feet from the top. Maybe closer. I’ll make it next time.”
Rachel graduated with honors from secondary tutorials and received scholarship offers from corporate academies on five worlds and three universities, including Harvard on New Earth. She chose Nightenhelser.
It was little surprise to Sol that his daughter chose archaeology as a major. One of his fondest memories of her was the long afternoons she had spent under the front porch when she was about two, digging in the loam, ignoring spiders and googlepeds, rushing into the house to show off every plastic plate and tarnished pfennig she had excavated, demanding to know where it had come from, what were the people like who had left it there?
Rachel received her undergraduate degree when she was nineteen standard, worked that summer on her grandmother’s farm, and far-cast away the next fall. She was at Reichs University on Freeholm for twenty-eight local months, and when she returned it was as if color had flowed back into Sol and Sarai’s world.
For two weeks their daughter—an adult now, self-aware and secure in some ways that grown-ups twice her age often failed to be—rested and reveled in being home. One evening, walking across the campus just after sunset, she pressed her father on details of his heritage. “Dad, do you still consider yourself a Jew?”
Sol had run his hand over his thinning hair, surprised by the question. “A Jew? Yes, I suppose so. It doesn’t mean what it once did, though.”
“Am I a Jew?” asked Rachel. Her cheeks glowed in the fragile light.
“If you want to be,” said Sol. “It doesn’t have the same significance with Old Earth gone.”
“If I’d been a boy, would you have had me circumcised?”
Sol had laughed, delighted and embarrassed by the question.
“I’m serious,” said Rachel.
Sol adjusted his glasses. “I guess I would have, kiddo. I never thought about it.”
“Have you been to the synagogue in Bussard?”
“Not since my bar mitzvah,” said Sol, thinking back to the day fifty years earlier when his father had borrowed Uncle Richard’s Vikken and had flown the family to the capital for the ritual.
“Dad, why do Jews feel that things are … less important now than before the Hegira?”
Sol spread his hands—strong hands, more those of a stoneworker than an academic. “That’s a good question, Rachel. Probably because so much of the dream is dead. Israel is gone. The New Temple lasted less time than the first and second. God broke His word by destroying the Earth a second time in the way He did. And this Diaspora is … forever.”
“But Jews maintain their ethnic and religious identity in some places,” his daughter insisted.
“Oh, sure. On Hebron and isolated areas of the Concourse you can find entire communities … Hasidic, Orthodox, Hasmonean, you name it … but they tend to be … nonvital, picturesque … tourist-oriented.”
“Like a theme park?”
“Yes.”
“Could you take me to Temple Beth-el tomorrow? I can borrow Khaki’s strat.”
“No need,” said Sol. “We’ll use the college’s shuttle.” He paused. “Yes,” he said at last, “I would like to take you to the synagogue tomorrow.”
It was getting dark under the old elms. Streetlights came on up and down the wide lane which led to their home.
“Dad,” said Rachel, “I’m going to ask you a question I’ve asked about a million times since I was two. Do you believe in God?”
Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. “I’m waiting to,” he said.
Rachel’s postgraduate work dealt with alien and pre-Hegira artifacts. For three standard years Sol and Sarai would receive occasional visits followed by fatline flimsies from exotic worlds near but not within the Web. They all knew that her field work in quest of dissertation would soon take her beyond the Web, into the Outback where time-debt ate away at the lives and memorie’s of those left behind.
“Where the hell is Hyperion?” Sarai had asked during Rachel’s last vacation before the expedition left. “It sounds like a brand name for some new household product.”
“It’s a great place, Mom. There are more nonhuman artifacts there than any place except Armaghast.”
“Then why not go to Armaghast?” said Sarai. “Its only a few months from the Web. Why settle for second best?”
“Hyperion hasn’t become the big tourist attraction yet,” said Rachel. “Although they’re beginning to become a problem. People with money are more willing to travel outside the Web now.”
Sol had found his voice suddenly husky. “Will you be going to the labyrinth or the artifacts called the Time Tombs?”
“The Time Tombs, Dad. I’ll be working with Dr. Melio Arundez and he knows more about the Tombs than anyone alive.”
“Aren’t they dangerous?” asked Sol, framing the question as casually as he could but hearing the edge in his voice.
Rachel smiled. “Because of the Shrike legend? No. Nobody’s been bothered by that particular legend for two standard centuries.”
“But I’ve seen documents about the trouble there during the second colonization …” began Sol.
“Me too, Dad. But they didn’t know about the big rock eels that came down into the desert to hunt. They probably lost a few people to those things and panicked. You know how legends begin. Besides, the rock eels have been hunted to extinction.”
“Spacecraft don’t land there,” persisted Sol. “You have to sail to the Tombs. Or hike. Or some damn thing.”
Rachel laughed. “In the early days, people flying in underestimated the effects of the anti-entropic fields and there were some accidents. But there’s dirigible service now. They have a big hotel called Keep Chronos at the north edge of the mountains where hundreds of tourists a year stay.”
“Will you be staying there?” asked Sarai.
“Part of the time. It’ll be exciting, Mom.”
“Not too exciting, I hope,” said Sarai and all of them had smiled.
During the four years that Rachel was in transit—a few weeks of cryogenic fugue for her—Sol found that he missed his daughter much more than if she had been out of touch but busy somewhere in the Web. The thought that she was flying away from him faster than the speed of light, wrapped in the artificial quantum cocoon of the Hawking effect, seemed unnatural and ominous to him.
They kept busy. Sarai retired from the critic business to devote more time to local environmental issues, but for Sol it was one of the most hectic times of his life. His second and third books came out and the second one—Moral Turning Points—caused such a stir that he was in constant demand at off world conferences and symposia. He traveled to a few alone, to a few more with Sarai, but although both of them enjoyed the idea of traveling, the actual experience of facing strange foods, different gravities, and the li
ght from strange suns all paled after a while and Sol found himself spending more time at home researching his next book, attending conferences, if he had to, via interactive holo from the college.
It was almost five years after Rachel left on her expedition that Sol had a dream which would change his life.
Sol dreamed that he was wandering through a great structure with columns the size of small redwood trees and a ceiling lost to sight far above him, through which red light fell in solid shafts. At times he caught glimpses of things far off in the gloom to his left or right: once he made out a pair of stone legs rising like massive buildings through the darkness; another time he spied what appeared to be a crystal scarab rotating far above him, its insides ablaze with cool lights.
Finally Sol stopped to rest. Far behind him he could hear what sounded like a great conflagration, entire cities and forests burning. Ahead of him glowed the lights he had been walking toward, two ovals of deepest red.
He was mopping sweat from his brow when an immense voice said to him:
“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”
And in his dream Sol had stood and said, “You can’t be serious.” And he had walked on through darkness, the red orbs glowing now like bloody moons hanging above an indistinct plain, and when he stopped to rest the immense voice said:
“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”
And Sol had shrugged off the weight of the voice and had said distinctly into the darkness, “I heard you the first time … the answer is still no.”
Sol knew he was dreaming then, and part of his mind enjoyed the irony of the script, but another part wanted only to waken. Instead, he found himself on a low balcony looking down on a room where Rachel lay naked on a broad block of stone. The scene was illuminated by the glow of the twin red orbs. Sol looked down at his right hand and found a long, curved knife there. The blade and handle appeared to be made of bone.