by Dan Simmons
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, Colonel Kassad, forces of the TechnoCore had been harassing the Ouster swarms whenever they fled. Now the forces-that-be in the Senate and Al 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 Hyperions 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 Al 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 live 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 fratricide—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 som
ething 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 the 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 antientropic 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 antientropic 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.”
“There are doubts?” I said.
“Ethical debates,” said Andil. A few meters from us, the three technicians were covering the device with chameleon cloth and a coded containment field. “An interstellar war will cause the deaths of millions, perhaps billions Releasing the Shrike into the Web will have unforeseen consequences. As much as we need to strike at the Core, there are debates as to which is the best way.”
I nodded and looked at the device and the valley of the Tombs. “But once this is activated” I said, “there is no turning back. The Shrike will be released, and you will have to have won the war to control it?”
Andil smiled slightly. “That is true.”
I shot her then, her and the three technicians. Then I tossed Grandmother Siri’s Steiner-Ginn laser far into the drift dunes and sat on an empty flowfoam crate and sobbed for several minutes. Then I walked over, used a technicians comlog to enter the containment field, threw off the chameleon cloth, and triggered the device.
There was no immediate change. The air held the same rich, late-winter light. The fade Tomb glowed softly while the Sphinx continued to stare down at nothing. The only sound was the rasp of sand across the crates and bodies. Only a glowing indicator on the Ouster device showed that it was working … had already worked.
I walked slowly back to the ship, half expecting the Shrike to appear, half hoping that it would. I sat on the balcony of my ship for more than an hour, watching the shadows filling the valley and the sand covering the distant corpses. There was no Shrike. No thorn tree. After a while I played a Bach Prelude on the Steinway, buttoned up the ship, and rose into space.
I contacted the Ouster ship and said that there had been an accident. The Shrike had taken the others; the device had been activated prematurely. Even in their confusion and panic, the Ousters offered me refuge. I declined the offer and turned my ship toward the Web. The Ousters did not pursue.
I used my fatline transmitter to contact Gladstone and to tell her that the Ouster agents had been eliminated. I told her that the invasion was very likely, that the trap would be sprung as planned. I did not tell her about the device. Gladstone congratulated me and called me home. I declined. I told her that I needed silence and solitude. I turned my ship toward the Outback world nearest the Hyperion system, knowing that travel itself would eat time until the next act commenced.
Later, when the fatline call to pilgrimage came from Gladstone herself, I knew the role the Ousters had planned for me in these final days: the Ousters, or the Core, or Gladstone and her machinations. It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to us. As for me, I have no request of the Shrike. I bring no final words for it or the universe. I have returned because I must, because this is my fate. I’ve known what I must do since I was a child, returning alone to Siri’s tomb and swearing vengeance on the Hegemony. I’ve known what price I must pay, both in life and in history.
But when the time comes to judge, to understand a betrayal which will spread like flame across the Web, which will end worlds, I ask you not to think of me—my name was not even writ on water as your lost poet’s soul said—but to think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun, to see—as I have seen—the motile isles with no place to wander, their feeding grounds destroyed, the Equatorial Shallows scabbed with drilling platforms, the islands themselves burdened with shouting, trammeling tourists smelling of UV lotion and cannabis.
Or better yet, think of none of that. Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both your houses!”
For you see, I remember my grandmother’s dream. I remember the way it could have been.
I remember Siri.
“Are you the spy?” asked Father Hoyt. “The Ouster spy?”
The Consul rubbed his cheeks and said nothing. He looked tired, spent.
“Yeah,” said Martin Silenus. “CEO Gladstone warned me when I was chosen for the pilgrimage. She said that there was a spy.”
“She told all of us,” Snapped Brawne Lamia. She stared at the Consul. Her gaze seemed sad.
“Our friend is a spy,” said Sol Weintraub, “but not merely an Ouster spy.” The baby had awakened. Weintraub lifted her to calm her crying. “He is what they call in the thrillers a double agent, a triple agent in this case, an agent to infinite regression. In truth, an agent of retribution.”
The Consul looked at the old scholar.
“He’s still a spy,” said Silenus. “Spies are executed, aren’t they?”
Colonel Kassad had the death wand in his hand. It was not aimed in anyone’s direction. “Are you in touch with your ship?” he asked the Consul.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Through Siri’s comlog. It was … modified.”
Kassad nodded slightly. “And you’ve been in touch with the Ousters via the ship’s fatline transmitter?”
“Yes.”
“Making reports
on the pilgrimage as they expected?”
“Yes.”
“Have they replied?”
“No.”
“How can we believe him?” cried the poet. “He’s a fucking spy.”
“Shut up,” Colonel Kassad said flatly, finally. His gaze never left the Consul. “Did you attack Het Masteen?”
“No,” said the Consul. “But when the Yggdrasill burned, I knew that something was wrong.”
“What do you mean?” said Kassad.
The Consul cleared his throat. “I’ve spent time with Templar Voices of the Tree. Their connection to their treeships is almost telepathic. Masteen’s reaction was far too subdued. Either he wasn’t what he said he was, or he had known that the ship was to be destroyed and had severed contact with it. When I was on guard duty, I went below to confront him. He was gone. The cabin was as we found it, except for the fact that the Möbius box was in a neutral state. The erg could have escaped. I secured it and went above.”
“You did not harm Hat Masteen?” Kassad asked again.
“No.”
“I repeat, why the fuck should we believe you?” said Silenus. The poet was drinking Scotch from the last bottle he had brought along.
The Consul looked at the bottle as he answered. “You have no reason to believe me. It doesn’t matter.”
Colonel Kassad’s long fingers idly tapped the dull casing of the deathwand. “What will you do with your fatline commlink now?”
The Consul took a tired breath. “Report when the Time Tombs open. If I’m still alive then.”
Brawne Lamia pointed at the antique comlog. “We could destroy it.”
The Consul shrugged.
“It could be of use,” said the Colonel. “We can eavesdrop on military and civilian transmissions made in the clear. If we have to, we can call the Consul’s ship.”
“No!” cried the Consul. It was the first time he had shown emotion in many minutes. “We can’t turn back now.”
“I believe we have no intention of turning back,” said Colonel Kassad. He looked around at pale faces. No one spoke for a moment.