by Dan Simmons
“This is different,” said Sol Weintraub. “This is the Shrike Pilgrimage.”
“So?”
In the silence that followed, the Consul walked to the windows. Wind-driven torrents of rain obscured the Sea and rattled the leaded panes. The wagon creaked and leaned heavily to starboard as it began another leg of its tack.
“M. Lamia,” asked Colonel Kassad, “do you want to tell your story now?”
Lamia folded her arms and looked at the rain-streaked glass. “No. Let’s wait until we get off this damned ship. It stinks of death.”
The windwagon reached the port of Pilgrims’ Rest in midafternoon but the storm and tired light made it feel like late evening to the weary passengers. The Consul had expected representatives from the Shrike Temple to meet them here at the beginning of the penultimate stage of their journey but Pilgrims’ Rest appeared to the Consul to be as empty as Edge had been.
The approach to the foothills and the first sight of the Bridle Range was as exciting as any landfall and brought all six of the would-be pilgrims on deck despite the cold rain which continued to fall. The foothills were sere and sensuous, their brown curves and sudden upthrustings contrasting strongly with the verdant monochrome of the Sea of Crass. The nine-thousand-meter peaks beyond were only hinted at by gray and white planes soon intersected by low clouds, but even so truncated were powerful to behold. The snow line came down to a point just above the collection of burned-out hovels and cheap hotels which had been Pilgrims’ Rest.
“If they destroyed the tramway, we’re finished,” muttered the Consul. The thought of it, forbidden until now, made his stomach turn over.
“I see the first five towers,” said Colonel Kassad, using his powered glasses. “They seem intact.”
“Any sign of a car?”
“No … wait, yes. There’s one in the gate at the station platform.”
“Any moving?” asked Martin Silenus, who obviously understood how desperate their situation would be if the tramway was not intact.
“No.”
The Consul shook his head. Even in the worst weather with no passengers, the cars had been kept moving to keep the great cables flexed and free of ice.
The six of them had their luggage on deck even before the wind-wagon reefed its sails and extended a gangplank. Each now wore a heavy coat against the elements—Kassad in FORCE-issue thermouflage cape, Brawne Lamia in a long garment called a trenchcoat for reasons long forgotten, Martin Silenus in thick furs which rippled now sable, now gray with the vagaries of wind, Father Hoyt in long black which made him more of a scarecrow figure than ever, Sol Weintraub in a thick goosedown jacket which covered him and the child, and the Consul in the thinning but serviceable greatcoat his wife had given him some decades before.
“What about Captain Masteen’s things?” asked Sol as they stood at the head of the gangplank. Kassad had gone ahead to reconnoiter the village.
“I brought them up,” said Lamia. “We’ll take them with us.”
“It doesn’t seem right somehow,” said Father Hoyt. “Just going on, I mean. There should be some … service. Some recognition that a man has died.”
“May have died,” reminded Lamia, easily lifting a forty-kilo backpack with one hand.
Hoyt looked incredulous. “Do you really believe that M. Masteen might be alive?”
“No,” said Lamia. Snowflakes settled on her black hair.
Kassad waved to them from the end of the dock and they carried their luggage off the silent windwagon. No one looked back.
“Empty?” called Lamia as they approached the Colonel. The tall man’s cloak was still fading from its gray and black chameleon mode.
“Empty.”
“Bodies?”
“No,” said Kassad. He turned toward Sol and the Consul. “Did you get the things from the galley?”
Both men nodded.
“What things?” asked Silenus.
“A week’s worth of food,” said Kassad, turning to look up the hill toward the tramway station. For the first time the Consul noticed the long assault weapon in the crook of the Colonel’s arm, barely visible under the cloak. “We’re not sure if there are any provisions beyond this point.”
Will we be alive a week from now? thought the Consul. He said nothing.
They ferried the gear to the station in two trips. Wind whistled through the open windows and shattered domes of the dark buildings. On the second trip, the Consul carried one end of Masteen’s Möbius cube while Lenar Hoyt puffed and panted under the other end.
“Why are we taking the erg thing with us?” gasped Hoyt as they reached the base of the metal stairway leading to the station. Rust streaked and spotted the platform like orange lichen.
“I don’t know,” said the Consul, gasping for breath himself.
From the terminal platform they could see far out over the Sea of Crass. The windwagon sat where they had left it, sails reefed, a dark and lifeless thing. Snow squalls moved across the prairie and gave the illusion of whitecaps on the numberless stalks of high grass.
“Get the material aboard,” called Kassad. “I’ll see if the running gear can be reset from the operator’s cabin up there.”
“Isn’t it automatic?” asked Martin Silenus, his small head almost lost in thick furs. “Like the windwagon?”
“I don’t think so,” said Kassad. “Go on, I’ll see if I can get it started up.”
“What if it leaves without you?” called Lamia at the Colonel’s retreating back.
“It won’t.”
The interior of the tramcar was cold and bare except for metal benches in the forward compartment and a dozen rough bunks in the smaller, rear area. The car was big—at least eight meters long by five wide. The rear compartment was partitioned from the front cabin by a thin metal bulkhead with an opening but no door. A small commode took up a closet-sized corner of this, aft compartment. Windows rising from waist height to the roofline lined the forward compartment.
The pilgrims heaped their luggage in the center of the wide floor and stomped around, waved their arms, or otherwise worked to stay warm. Martin Silenus lay full length on one of the benches, with only his feet and the top of his head emerging from fur. “I forgot,” he said, “how the fuck do you turn on the heat in this thing?”
The Consul glanced at the dark lighting panels. “It’s electrical. It’ll come on when the Colonel gets us moving.”
“If the Colonel gets us moving,” said Silenus.
Sol Weintraub had changed Rachel’s diaper. Now he bundled her up again in an infant’s thermsuit and rocked her in his arms. “Obviously I’ve never been here before,” he said. “Both of you gentlemen have?”
“Yeah,” said the poet.
“No,” said the Consul. “But I’ve seen pictures of the tramway.”
“Kassad said he returned to Keats once this way,” called Brawne Lamia from the other room.
“I think …” began Sol Weintraub and was interrupted by a great grinding of gears and a wild lurch as the long car rockcd sickeningly and then swung forward under the suddenly moving cable. Everyone rushed to the window on the platform side.
Kassad had thrown his gear aboard before climbing the long ladder to the operator’s cabin. Now he appeared in the cabin’s doorway, slid down the long ladder, and ran toward the car. The car was already passing beyond the loading area of the platform.
“He isn’t going to make it,” whispered Father Hoyt.
Kassad sprinted the last ten meters with legs that looked impossibly long, a cartoon stick figure of a man.
The tramcar slid out of the loading notch, swung free of the station. Space opened between the car and the station. It was eight meters to the rocks below. The platform deck was streaked with ice. Kassad ran full speed ahead even as the car pulled away.
“Come on!” screamed Brawne Lamia. The others picked up the cry.
The Consul looked up at sheaths of ice cracking and dropping away from the cable as the tramc
ar moved up and forward. He looked back. There was too much space. Kassad could never make it.
Fedmahn Kassad was moving at an incredible speed when he reached the edge of the platform. The Consul was reminded for the second time of the Old Earth jaguar he had seen in a Lusus zoo. He half expected to see the Colonels feet slip on a patch of ice, the long legs flying out horizontal, the man falling silently to the snowy boulders below. Instead, Kassad seemed to fly for an endless moment, long arms extended, cape flying out behind. He disappeared behind the car.
There came a thud, followed by a long minute when no one spoke or moved. They were forty meters high now, climbing toward the first tower. A second later Kassad became visible at the corner of the car, pulling himself along a series of icy niches and handholds in the metal. Brawne Lamia flung open the cabin door. Ten hands helped pull Kassad inside.
“Thank God,” said Father Hoyt.
The Colonel took a deep breath and smiled grimly. “There was a dead man’s brake, I had to rig the lever with a sandbag. I didn’t want to bring the ear back for a second try.”
Martin Silenus pointed to the rapidly approaching support tower and the ceiling of clouds just beyond. The cable stretched upward into oblivion. “I guess we’re crossing the mountains now whether v’e want to or not.”
“How long to make the crossing?” asked Hoyt.
“Twelve hours. A little less perhaps. Sometimes the operators would stop the cars if the wind rose too high or the ice got too bad.”
“We won’t be stopping on this trip,” said Kassad.
“Unless the cable’s breached somewhere,” said the poet. “Or we hit a snag.”
“Shut up,” said Lamia. “Who’s interested in heating some dinner?”
“Look,” said the Consul.
They moved to the forward windows. The tram rose a hundred meters above the last brown curve of foothills. Kilometers below and behind they caught a final glimpse of the station, the haunted hovels of Pilgrims’ Rest, and the motionless windwagon.
Then snow and thick cloud enveloped them.
The tramcar had no real cooking facilities but the aft bulkhead offered a cold box and a microwave for reheating. Lamia and Weintraub combined various meats and vegetables from the windwagon’s galley to produce a passable stew. Martin Silenus had brought along wine bottles from both the Benares and the windwagon and he chose a Hyperion burgundy to go with the stew.
They were nearly finished with their dinner when the gloom pressing against the windows lightened and then lifted altogether. The Consul turned on his bench to see the sun suddenly reappear, filling the tramcar with a transcendent golden light.
There was a collective sigh from the group. It had seemed that darkness had fallen hours before, but now, as they rose above a sea of clouds from which rose an island chain of mountains, they were treated to a brilliant sunset. Hyperion’s sky had deepened from its daytime glaucous glare to the bottomless lapis lazuli of evening while a red-gold sun ignited cloud towers and great summits of ice and rock. The Consul looked around. His fellow pilgrims, who had seemed gray and small in the dim light of half a minute earlier, now glowed in the gold of sunset.
Martin Silenus raised his glass. “That’s better, by God.”
The Consul looked up at their line of travel, the massive cable dwindling to threadlike thinness far ahead and then to nothing at all. On a summit several kilometers beyond, gold light glinted on the next support tower.
“One hundred and ninety-two pylons,” said Silenus in a singsong tour guide’s bored tones. “Each pylon is constructed of duralloy and whiskered carbon and stands eighty-three meters high.”
“We must be high,” said Brawne Lamia in a low voice.
“The high point of the ninety-six-kilometer tramcar voyage lies above the summit of Mount Dryden, the fifth highest peak in the Bridle Range, at nine thousand two hundred forty-six meters,” droned on Martin Silenus.
Colonel Kassad looked around. “The cabin’s pressurized. I felt the change-over some time ago.”
“Look,” said Brawne Lamia.
The sun had been resting on the horizon line of clouds for a long moment. Now it dipped below, seemingly igniting the depths of storm cloud from beneath and casting a panoply of colors along the entire western edge of the world. Snow cornices and glaze ice still glowed along the western side of the peaks, which rose a kilometer or more above the rising tramcar. A few brighter stars appeared in the deepening dome of sky.
The Consul turned to Brawne Lamia. “Why don’t you tell your story now, M. Lamia? Well want to sleep later, before arriving at the Keep.”
Lamia sipped the last of her wine. “Does everyone want to hear it now?”
Heads nodded in the roseate twilight. Martin Silenus shrugged.
“All right,” said Brawne Lamia. She set down her empty glass, pulled her feet up on the bench so that her elbows rested on her knees, and began her tale.
THE DETECTIVE’S TALE:
THE LONG GOOD-BYE
I knew the case was going to be special the minute that he walked into my office. He was beautiful. By that I don’t mean effeminate or “pretty” in the male-model, HTV-star mode, merely … beautiful.
He was a short man, no taller than I, and I was born and raised in Lusus’s 1.3-g field. It was apparent in a second that my visitor was not from Lusus—his compact form was well proportioned by Web standards, athletic but thin. His face was a study in purposeful energy: low brow, sharp cheekbones, compact nose, solid jaw, and a wide mouth that suggested both a sensuous side and a stubborn streak. His eyes were large and hazel-colored. He looked to be in his late twenties standard.
Understand, I didn’t itemize all this the moment he walked in. My first thought was, Is this a client? My second thought was, Shit, this guy’s beautiful.
“M. Lamia?”
“Yeah.”
“M. Brawne Lamia of AllWeb Investigations?”
“Yeah.”
He looked around as if he didn’t quite believe it. I understood the look. My office is on the twenty-third level of an old industrial hive in the Old Digs section of Iron Pig on Lusus. I have three big windows that look out on Service Trench 9 where it’s always dark and always drizzling thanks to a massive filter drip from the Hive above. The view is mostly of abandoned automated loading docks and rusted girders.
What the hell, it’s cheap. And most of my clients call rather than show up in person.
“May I sit down?” he asked, evidently satisfied that a bona fide investigatory agency would operate out of such a slum.
“Sure,” I said and waved him to a chair. “M.… ah?”
“Johnny,” he said.
He didn’t look like a first-name type to me. Something about him breathed money. It wasn’t his clothes—common enough casuals in black and gray, although the fabric was better than average—it was just a sense that the guy had class. There was something about his accent. I’m good at placing dialects—it helps in this profession—but I couldn’t place this guy’s homeworld, much less local region.
“How can I help you, Johnny?” I held out the bottle of Scotch I had been ready to put away just as he entered.
Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought I wanted him to drink from the bottle. Hell, I have more class than that. There are paper cups over by the water cooler. “M. Lamia,” he said, the cultivated accent still bugging me by its elusiveness, “I need an investigator.”
“That’s what I do.”
He paused. Shy. A lot of my clients are hesitant to tell me what the job is. No wonder, since ninety-five percent of my work is divorce and domestic stuff. I waited him out.
“It’s a somewhat sensitive matter,” he said at last.
“Yeah, M.… ah, Johnny, most of my work falls under that category. I’m bonded with UniWeb and everything having to do with a client falls under the Privacy Protection Act. Everything is confidential, even the fact that we’re talking now. Even if you decide not to hire me.” Tha
t was basic bullshit since the authorities could get at my files in a moment if they ever wanted to, but I sensed that I had to put this guy at ease somehow. God, he was beautiful.
“Uh-huh,” he said and glanced around again. He leaned forward. “M. Lamia, I would want you to investigate a murder.”
This got my attention. I’d been reclining with my feet on the desk; now I sat up and leaned forward. “A murder? Are you sure? What about the cops?”
“They aren’t involved.”
“That’s not possible,” I said with the sinking feeling that I was dealing with a loony rather than a client. “It’s a crime to conceal a murder from the authorities.” What I thought was: Are you the murderer, Johnny?
He smiled and shook his head. “Not in this case.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, M. Lamia, that a murder was committed but that the police—local and Hegemony—have neither knowledge of it nor jurisdiction over it.”
“Not possible,” I said again. Outside, sparks from an industrial welder’s torch cascaded into the trench along with the rusty drizzle. “Explain.”
“A murder was committed outside of the Web. Outside of the Protectorate. There were no local authorities.”
That made sense. Sort of. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t figure where he was talking about. Even the Outback settlements and colonial worlds have cops. On board some sort of spaceship? Uh-uh. The Interstellar Transit Authority has jurisdiction there.
“I see,” I said. It’d been some weeks since I’d had a case. “All right, tell me the details.”
“And the conversation will be confidential even if you do not take the case?”
“Absolutely.”
“And if you do take the case, you will report only to me?”
“Of course.”
My prospective client hesitated, rubbing his fingers against his chin. His hands were exquisite. “All right,” he said at last.