Endymion

10

It was the morning after our banquet, and we were in the spaceship again. That is, the android A. Bettik and I were in the ship, having walked there the convenient way, through the tunnel connecting the two towers; Martin Silenus was present as a hologram. It was a strange holographic image, since the old poet chose to have the transmitter of the ship’s computer represent him as a younger version of himself—an ancient satyr, still, but one who stood on his own legs and had hair on his sharp-eared head. I looked at the poet with his maroon cape, full-sleeved blouse, balloon trousers, and floppy beret, and realized what a dandy he must have been when those clothes had been in fashion. I was looking at Martin Silenus as he must have appeared when he had returned to Hyperion as a pilgrim three centuries earlier.

“Do you just want to stare at me like some fucking yokel,” said the holographic image, “or do you want to finish the fucking tour so we can get on with business?” The old man was either hung over from the previous night’s wine or had regained enough health to be in an even more vicious mood than usual. “Lead on,” I said.

From our tunnel we had taken the ship’s lift up to the lowest air lock. A. Bettik and the poet’s holo led me through the ascending levels: the engine room with its indecipherable instruments and webs of pipes and cables; then the cold-sleep level-four cryogenic-fugue couches in their supercooled cubbies (one couch missing, I discovered, since Martin Silenus had removed it for his own purposes); then the central air-lock corridor I had entered by the day before—the “wood” walls concealing a multitude of storage lockers holding such things as spacesuits, all-terrain vehicles, skybikes, and even some archaic weapons; then the living area with its Steinway and holopit; then up the spiral staircase again to what A. Bettik called the “navigation room”—there was indeed a cubby with some electronic navigation instruments visible—but which I saw as the library with shelf after shelf of books—real books, print books—and several couches and daybeds next to windows in the ship’s hull; and finally up the stairs to the apex of the ship, which was simply a round bedroom with a single bed in the center of it.

“The Consul used to enjoy watching the weather from here while listening to music,” said Martin Silenus. “Ship?”

The arching bulkhead around the circular room went transparent, as did the bow of the ship above us. There were only the dark stones of the tower interior around us, but from above there fell a filtered light through the rotting roof of the silo. Soft music suddenly filled the room. It was a piano, unaccompanied, and the melody was ancient and haunting.

“Czerchyvik?” I guessed.

The old poet snorted. “Rachmaninoff.” The satyrish features seemed suddenly mellow in the dim light. “Can you guess who’s playing?”

I listened. The pianist was very good. I had no idea who it was.

“The Consul,” said A. Bettik. The android’s voice was very soft.

Martin Silenus grunted. “Ship… opaque.” The walls solidified. The old poet’s holo disappeared from its place by the bulkhead and flashed into existence near the spiral stairs. He kept doing that, and the effect was disconcerting. “Well, if we’re finished with the fucking tour, let’s go down to the living room and figure out how to outsmart the Pax.”

The maps were the old kind—ink on paper—and they were spread out across the top of the gleaming grand piano. The continent of Aquila spread its wings above the keyboard, and the horse head of Equus curled as a separate map above. Martin Silenus’s holo strode on powerful legs to the piano and stabbed a finger down about where the horse’s eye should be. “Here,” he said. “And here.” The massless finger made no noise against the paper. “The Pope’s got his fucking troops all the way from Chronos Keep here”—the weightless finger jabbed at a point where the Bridle Range of mountains came to their easternmost point behind the eye—“all the way down the snout. They have aircraft here, at Sad King Billy’s cursed city”—the finger pounded silently at a point only a few kilometers northwest of the Valley of the Time Tombs—“and have massed the Swiss Guard in the Valley itself.”

I looked at the map. Except for the abandoned Poet’s City and the Valley, the eastern fourth of Equus had been empty desert and out of bounds for anyone except Pax troops for more than two centuries. “How do you know the Swiss Guard troops are there?” I asked.

The satyr’s brows arched. “I have my sources,” he said.

“Do your sources tell you the units and armament?”

The holo made a noise that sounded as if the old man were going to spit on the carpet. “You don’t need to know the units,” he snapped. “Suffice it to say that there are thirty thousand soldiers between you and the Sphinx, where Aenea will step out tomorrow. Three thousand of those troops are Swiss Guard. Now, how are you going to get through them?”

I felt like laughing aloud. I doubted if the entire Home Guard of Hyperion, with air and space support, could “get through” half a dozen Swiss Guard. Their weapons, training, and defensive systems were that good. Instead of laughing, I studied the map again.

“You say that aircraft are staging out of the Poet’s City… Do you know the type of planes?”

The poet shrugged. “Fighters. EMVs don’t work worth shit here, of course, so they’ve brought in thrust-reaction planes. Jets, I think.”

“Scram, ram, pulse, or air breathing?” I said. I was trying to sound as if I knew what I was talking about, but my military knowledge gleaned in the Home Guard had been centered on fieldstripping my weapon, cleaning my weapon, firing my weapon, marching through nasty weather without getting my weapon wet, trying to get a few hours’ sleep when I wasn’t marching, cleaning, or fieldstripping, trying not to freeze to death when I was asleep, and—upon occasion—keeping my head down so that I wouldn’t get killed by Ursus snipers.

“What the fuck does it matter what kind of planes?” growled Martin Silenus. Losing three centuries in appearance certainly had not mellowed him. “They’re fighters. We’ve clocked them at… Ship? What the fuck was the speed we clocked those last blips at?”

“Mach three,” said the ship.

“Mach three,” repeated the poet. “Fast enough to fly down here, firebomb this place to ashes, and be back to the north continent before their beers get warm.”

I looked up from the map. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said. “Why don’t they?”

The poet’s head turned my way. “Why don’t they what?”

“Fly down here, firebomb you to ashes, and be home before their beer is warm,” I said. “You’re a threat to them. Why do they tolerate you?”

Martin Silenus grunted. “I’m dead. They think I’m dead. How could a dead man be a threat to anyone?”

I sighed and looked back at the map. “There has to be a troopship in orbit, but I don’t suppose you know what kind of craft escorted it here?”

Surprisingly, it was the ship who replied. “The troopship is a three-hundred-thousand-ton Akira-class spinship,” came the soft voice. “It was escorted by two standard Pax-class torchships—the St. Anthony and the St. Bonaventure. There is also a C-three ship in high orbit.”

“What the fuck is a C-three ship?” grumbled the poet’s holo.

I glanced at him. How could anyone live for a thousand years and not learn such a basic thing? Poets were strange. “Command, communications, control,” I said.

“So the Pax SOB who’s in charge is up there?” asked Silenus.

I rubbed my cheek and stared at the map. “Not necessarily,” I said. “The commander of the space task force will be there, but the head of operations may be on the ground. The Pax trains its commanders for combined operations. With so many of the Swiss Guard here, someone important is in command on the ground.”

“All right,” said the poet. “How are you going to get through them and get my little friend out?”

“Excuse me,” said the ship, “but there is an additional spacecraft in orbit. It arrived about three weeks ago, standard, and sent a dropship to the Valley of the Time Tombs.”

“What kind of ship?” I asked.

There was the briefest hesitation. “I do not know,” said the ship. “The configuration is strange to me. Small… perhaps courier-sized… but the propulsion profile is… strange.”

“It probably is a courier,” I said to Silenus. “Poor bugger’s been stuck in cryogenic fugue for months, paying years of time-debt, just to deliver some message Pax Central forgot to give the commander before he or she left.”

The poet’s holographic hand brushed at the map again. “Stick to the subject. How do you get Aenea away from these motherhumpers?”

I stepped away from the piano. My voice held anger when I spoke. “How the hell should I know? You’re the one who’s had two and a half centuries to plan this stupid escape.” I waved my hand, indicating the ship. “I presume this thing is our ticket to outrunning the torchships.” I paused. “Ship? Can you outrun a Pax torchship to C-plus translation?” All Hawking drives provided the same pseudo-velocity above light-speed, of course, so our escape and survival, or capture and destruction, depended upon the race to that quantum point.

“Oh, yes,” said the ship immediately. “Parts of my memory are missing, but I am aware that the Consul had me modified during a visit to an Ouster colony.”

“An Ouster colony?” I repeated stupidly. My skin prickled, despite logic. I had grown up fearing another Ouster invasion. Ousters were the ultimate bogeymen.

“Yes,” said the ship with something like pride audible in its voice. “We will be able to spin up to C-plus velocities almost twenty-three percent faster than a Pax torchship of the line.”

“They can lance you at half an AU,” I said, not convinced.

“Yes,” agreed the ship. “Nothing to worry about… if we have fifteen minutes’ head start.”

I turned back to the frowning holo and silent android. “That’s all great,” I said. “If it’s true. But it doesn’t help me figure out how to get the girl to the ship or the ship away from Hyperion with that fifteen-minute head start. The torchships will be in what’s called a COP—a combat orbiting patrol. One or more of them will be over Equus every second, covering every cubic meter of space from a hundred light-minutes out to the upper atmosphere. At about thirty kilometers, the combat air patrol—probably Scorpion-class pulse fighters, able to scram into low orbit if need be—will take over. Neither the space nor atmospheric patrol would allow the ship fifteen seconds on their screens, much less fifteen minutes.” I looked at the old man’s younger face. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling me. Ship? Did the Ousters fit you with some sort of magical stealth technology? An invisibility shield or something?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” said the ship. After a second it added, “That wouldn’t be possible, would it?”

I ignored the ship. “Look,” I said to Martin Silenus, “I’d like to help you get the girl—”

“Aenea,” said the old man.

“I’d like to get Aenea away from these guys, but if she’s as important as you say she is to the Pax… I mean, three thousand Swiss Guard, good Christ… there’s no way we can get within five hundred kilometers of the Valley of the Time Tombs, even with this nifty-keen spaceship.”

I saw the doubt in Silenus’s eyes, even through holographic distortion, so I continued. “I’m serious,” I said. “Even if there were no space or air cover, no torchships or fighters or airborne radar, there’s the Swiss Guard. I mean”—I found that I was clenching my hands into fists as I spoke—“these guys are deadly. They’re trained to work in squads of five, and any one of those squads could bring down a spaceship like this.”

The satyr’s brows arched in surprise or doubt.

“Listen,” I said again. “Ship?”

“Yes, M. Endymion?”

“Do you have defensive shields?”

“No, M. Endymion. I do have Ouster-enhanced containment fields, but they are only for civilian use.”

I didn’t know what “Ouster-enhanced containment fields” were, but I went on. “Could they stop a standard torchship CPB or lance?”

“No,” said the ship.

“Could you defeat C-plus or conventional kinetic torpedoes?”

“No.”

“Could you outrun them?”

“No.”

“Could you prevent a boarding party from entering?”

“No.”

“Do you have any offensive or defensive abilities that could deal with Pax warships?”

“Unless one counts being able to run like hell, M. Endymion, the answer is no,” said the ship.

I looked back at Martin Silenus. “We’re screwed,” I said softly. “Even if I could get to the girl, they’d just capture me as well as her.”

Martin Silenus smiled. “Perhaps not,” he said. He nodded to A. Bettik, and the android went up the spiral stairway to the upper level and returned in less than a minute. He was carrying a rolled cylinder of something.

“If this is the secret weapon,” I said, “it had better be good.”

“It is,” said the poet’s smirking hologram. He nodded again and A. Bettik unrolled the cylinder.

It was a rug, a bit less than two meters long and a bit more than a meter wide. The cloth was frayed and faded, but I could see intricate designs and patterns. A complex weave of gold threads were still as bright as…

“My God,” I said, the realization hitting me like a fist to the solar plexus. “A hawking mat.”

The holo of Martin Silenus cleared his throat as if preparing to spit. “Not a hawking mat,” he grumbled. “The hawking mat.”

I took a step back. This was the stuff of pure legend, and I was almost standing on it.

There had been only a few hundred hawking mats in existence, ever, and this was the first one—created by the Old Earth lepidopterist and legendary EM-systems inventor Vladimir Sholokov shortly after the destruction of Old Earth. Sholokov—already in his seventies, standard, had fallen madly in love with his teenage niece, Alotila, and had created this flying carpet to win her love in return. After a passionate interlude, the teenager had spurned the old man, Sholokov had killed himself on New Earth only weeks after perfecting the current Hawking spin-drive, and the carpet had been lost for centuries… until Mike Osho bought it in Carvnel Marketplace and took it to Maui-Covenant, using it with his fellow shipman Merin Aspic in what would become another love affair that would enter legend—the love of Merin and Siri. This second legend, of course, had become part of Martin Silenus’s epic Cantos, and if his tale was to be believed, Siri had been the Consul’s grandmother. In the Cantos the Hegemony Consul had used this very same hawking mat (“hawking” here with a small h because it referred to the Old Earth bird, not to the pre-Hegira scientist named Hawking whose work had led to the C-plus breakthrough with the improved interstellar drive) to cross Hyperion in one final legend—this being the Consul’s epic flight toward the city of Keats from the Valley of the Time Tombs to free this very ship and fly it back to the tombs.

I went to one knee and reverently touched the artifact.

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Silenus, “it’s only a fucking rug. And an ugly one at that. I wouldn’t have it in my house—it clashes with everything.”

I looked up.

“Yes,” said A. Bettik, “this is the same hawking mat.”

“Does it still fly?” I asked.

A. Bettik dropped to one knee next to me and extended his blue-fingered hand, tapping at the curled and complicated design. The hawking mat grew as rigid as a board and hovered ten centimeters above the floor.

I shook my head. “I never understood… EM systems don’t work on Hyperion because of the weird magnetic field here…”

“Big EM systems don’t,” snapped Martin Silenus. “EMVs. Levitation barges. Big stuff. The carpet does. And it’s been improved.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Improved?”

“The Ousters again,” came the ship’s voice. “I don’t remember it well, but they tinkered with a lot of things when we visited them two and a half centuries ago.”

“Evidently,” I said. I stood and nudged the legendary mat with my foot. It bounced as if on firm springs but remained hovering where it was. “Okay,” I said, “we have Merin and Sin’s hawking mat, which… if I remember the story… could fly along at about twenty klicks per hour…”

“Twenty-six kilometers per hour was its top speed,” said A. Bettik.

I nodded and nudged the hovering carpet again. “Twenty-six klicks per hour with a good tailwind,” I said. “And the Valley of the Time Tombs is how far from here?”

“One thousand six hundred eighty-nine kilometers,” said the ship.

“And how much time do we have before Aenea steps out of the Sphinx there?” I said.

“Twenty hours,” said Martin Silenus. He must have tired of his younger image, because the holo projection was now of the old man as I had seen him the night before, hoverchair and all.

I glanced at my wrist chronometer. “I’m late,” I said. “I should have started flying a couple of days ago.” I walked back to the grand piano. “And what if I had? This is our secret weapon? Does it have some sort of super defense field to protect me… and the girl… from Swiss Guard lances and bullets?”

“No,” said A. Bettik. “It has no defensive capabilities whatsoever, except for a containment field to deflect the wind and to keep its occupants in place.”

I shrugged. “So what do I do… carry the rug to the Valley and offer the Pax a trade—one old hawking mat for the kid?”

A. Bettik remained kneeling by the hovering carpet. His blue fingers continued to caress the faded fabric. “The Ousters modified it to hold a charge longer—up to a thousand hours.”

I nodded. Impressive superconductor technology, but totally irrelevant.

“And it now flies at speeds in excess of three hundred kilometers per hour,” continued the android.

I chewed my lip. So I could get there by tomorrow. If I wanted to sit on a flying rug for five and a half hours. And then what… ?

“I thought we had to pluck her away in this ship,” I said. “Get her out of the Hyperion system and all that…”

“Yes,” said Martin Silenus, his voice suddenly as tired as his aged image, “but first you have to get her to the ship.”

I walked away from the piano, stopping at the spiral staircase to whirl back toward the android, the holo, and the hovering carpet. “You two just don’t understand, do you?” I said, my voice louder and sharper than I had intended. “These are Swiss Guard! If you think that damned rug can get me in under their radar, motion detectors, and other sensors, you’re crazy. I’d just be a sitting duck flapping along at three hundred klicks per hour. Believe me, the Swiss Guard grunts—much less the pulse jets in combat air patrol—much less the orbiting torchships—would lance this thing in a nanosecond.”

I paused and squinted at them. “Unless… there’s something else you’re not telling me…”

“Of course there is,” said Martin Silenus, and managed a satyr’s tired smile. “Of course there is.”

“Let’s take the hawking mat out to the tower window,” said A. Bettik. “You have to learn how to handle it.”

“Now?” I said, my voice suddenly small. I felt my heart begin to hammer.

“Now,” said Martin Silenus. “You have to be proficient at flying it by the time you leave at oh-three-hundred hours tomorrow.”

“I do?” I said, staring at the hovering, legendary rug with a growing sense of THIS IS REAL… I MAY DIE TOMORROW.

“You do,” said Martin Silenus.

A. Bettik deactivated the hawking mat and rolled it into a cylinder. I followed him down the metal stairs and out the corridor to the tower staircase. The sunlight was bright through the open tower window. My God, I thought as the android spread the carpet on the stone ledge and activated it again. It was still a long drop to the stones below. My God, I thought again, my pulse pounding in my ears. There was no sign of the old poet’s holo.

A. Bettik gestured me onto the hovering hawking mat. “I’ll go with you on the first flight,” the android said softly. A breeze rustled the leaves atop the nearby chalma tree.

My God, I thought a final time, and climbed onto the sill and then onto the hawking mat.