The Fall of Hyperion

Thirty-One

I awoke and was not pleased to be awakened.

Rolling over, squinting and cursing the sudden invasion of light, I saw Leigh Hunt sitting on the edge of the bed, an aerosol injector still in his hand.

“You took enough sleeping pills to keep you in bed all day,” he said.

“Rise and shine.”

I sat up, rubbed the morning stubble on my cheeks, and squinted in Hunt’s direction. “Who the hell gave you the right to enter my room?”

The effort of speaking started me coughing, and I did not stop until Hunt returned from the bathroom with a glass of water.

“Here.”

I drank, vainly trying to project anger and outrage between spasms of coughing. The remnants of dreams fled like morning mists. I felt a terrible sense of loss descend.

“Get dressed,” said Hunt, standing. “The CEO wants you in her chambers in twenty minutes. While you’ve been sleeping, things have been happening.”

“What things?” I rubbed my eyes and ran fingers through my tousled hair.

Hunt smiled tightly. “Access the datasphere. Then get down to Glad-stone’s chambers soonest. Twenty minutes, Severn.” He left.

I accessed the datasphere. One way to visualize one’s entry point to the datasphere is to imagine a patch of Old Earth’s ocean in varying degrees of turbulence. Normal days tended to show a placid sea with interesting patterns of ripples. Crises showed chop and whitecaps. Today there was a hurricane under way. Entry was delayed to any access route, confusion reigned in breaking waves of update surges, the datumplane matrix was wild with storage shifts and major credit transfers, and the All Thing, normally a multilayered buzz of information and political debate, was a raging wind of confusion, abandoned referenda and obsolete position templates blowing by like tattered clouds.

“Dear God,” I whispered, breaking access but feeling the pressure of the information surge still pounding at my implant circuits and brain.

War. Surprise attack. Imminent destruction of the Web. Talk of impeaching Gladstone. Riots on a score of worlds. Shrike Cult uprisings on Lusus. The FORCE fleet abandoning Hyperion system in a desperate rearguard action, but too late, too late. Hyperion already under attack.

Fear of farcaster incursion.

I rose, ran naked to the shower, and sonicked in record time. Hunt or someone had laid out a formal gray suit and cape, and I dressed in a hurry, brushing back my wet hair so that damp curls fell to my collar.

It wouldn’t do to keep the CEO of the Hegemony of Man waiting.

Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all.

“It’s about time you got here,” said Meina Gladstone as I entered her private chambers.

“What the fuck have you done?” I snapped.

Gladstone blinked. Evidently the CEO of the Hegemony of Man was not used to being spoken to in that tone. Tough shit, I thought.

“Remember who you are and to whom you’re speaking,” Gladstone said coldly.

“I don’t know who I am. And I may be speaking to the greatest mass murderer since Horace Glennon-Hcight. Why the hell did you allow this war to happen?”

Gladstone blinked again and looked around. We were alone. Her sitting room was long and pleasantly dark and hung with original art from Old Earth. At that moment I didn’t care if I was in a room filled with original van Goghs. I stared at Gladstone, the Lincolnesque face merely that of an old woman in the thin light through the blinds. She returned my gaze for a moment, then looked away again.

“I apologize,” I snapped, no apology in my voice, “you didn’t allow it, you made it happen, didn’t you?”

“No, Severn, I did not make it happen.” Gladstone’s voice was hushed, almost a whisper.

“Speak up,” I said. I paced back and forth near the tall windows, watching the light from the blinds move across me like painted stripes.

“And I’m not Joseph Severn.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Shall I call you M. Keats?”

“You can call me No Man,” I said. “So that when the other cyclopes come, you can say that No Man has blinded you, and they will go away, saying that it’s the will of the gods.”

“Do you plan to blind me?”

“Right now I could wring your neck and walk away without a twinge of remorse. Millions will die before this week is out. How could you have allowed it?”

Gladstone touched her lower lip. “The future branches only two directions,” she said softly. “War and total uncertainty, or peace and totally certain annihilation. I chose war.”

“Who says this?” There was More curiosity than anger in my voice now.

“It is a fact.” She glanced at her comlog. “In ten minutes I have to go before the Senate to declare war. Tell me the news of the Hyperion pilgrims.”

I crossed my arms and stared down at her. “I will tell you if you promise to do something.”

“I will if I can.”

I paused, realized that no amount of leverage in the universe could make this woman write a blank check on her word. “All right,” I said.

“I want you to fatline Hyperion, release the hold you have on the Consul’s ship, and send someone up the Hoolie River to find the Consul himself. He’s about a hundred and thirty klicks from the capital, above the Karia Locks. He may be hurt.”

Gladstone crooked a ringer, rubbed her lip, and nodded. “I will send someone to find him. Releasing the ship depends upon what else you have to tell me. Are the others alive?”

I curled my short cape around me and collapsed on a couch across from her. “Some are.”

“Byron Lamia’s daughter? Brawne?”

“The Shrike took her. For a while, she was unconscious, connected to some sort of neural shunt to the datasphere. I dreamed… she was floating somewhere, reunited with the implant persona of the first Keats retrieval personality. Just entering the datasphere… the megasphere really. Core connections and dimensions I never dreamed of as well as the accessible ’sphere.”

“Is she alive now?” Gladstone leaned forward, intense.

“I don’t know. Her body disappeared. I was awakened before I saw where her persona entered the megasphere.”

Gladstone nodded. “What about the Colonel?”

“Kassad was taken somewhere by Moneta, the human female who seems to reside in the Tombs as they travel through time. The last I saw of him, he was attacking the Shrike barehanded. Shrikes, actually, there were thousands of them.”

“Did he survive?”

I opened my hands. “I don’t know. These were dreams. Fragments.

Bits and pieces of perception.”

“The poet?”

“Silenus was carried off by the Shrike. Impaled on the tree of thorns.

But I glimpsed him there later in Kassad’s dream. Silenus was still alive.

I don’t know how.”

“So the tree of thorns is real, not merely Shrike Cult propaganda?”

“Oh yes, it’s real.”

“And the Consul left? Tried to return to the capital?”

“He had his grandmother’s hawking mat. It worked all right until he reached the place near Karia Locks I mentioned. It… and he… fell into the river.” I preempted her next question. “I don’t know if he survived.”

“And the priest? Father Hoyt?”

“The cruciform brought him back as Father Dure.”

“is it Father Dure? Or a mindless duplicate?”

“It’s Dure,” I said. “But… damaged. Discouraged.”

“And he is still in the valley?”

“No. He disappeared in one of the Cave Tombs. I don’t know what happened to him.”

Gladstone glanced at her comlog. I tried to imagine the confusion and chaos which reigned in the rest of this building… this world… in the Web. The CEO obviously had retreated here for fifteen minutes prior to her speech to the Senate. It might be the last such solitude she would see for the next several weeks. Perhaps ever.

“Captain Masteen?”

“Dead. Buried in the valley.”

She took a breath. “And Weintraub and the child?”

I shook my head. “I dreamed things out of sequence… out of time.

I think it’s already happened, but I’m confused.” I looked up. Gladstone was waiting patiently. “The baby was only a few seconds old when the Shrike came,” I said. “Sol offered her to the thing. I think it took her into the Sphinx. The Tombs were glowing very brightly. There were… other Shrikes… emerging.”

“The Tombs have opened, then?”

“Yes.”

Gladstone touched her comlog. “Leigh? Have the duty officer in the communications center contact Theo Lane and the necessary FORCE people on Hyperion. Release the ship we have in quarantine. Also, Leigh, tell the Governor-General that I will have a personal message for him in a few minutes.” The instrument chirped and she looked back at me. “Is there anything else from your dreams?”

“Images. Words. I don’t understand what’s going on. Those are the high points.”

Gladstone smiled slightly. “Are you aware that you are dreaming events beyond the range of the other Keats persona’s experience?”

I said nothing, stunned with the shock of what she said. My contact with the pilgrims had been possible through some Core-based connection to the persona implant in Brawne’s Schron loop, through it and the primitive datasphere they had shared. But the persona had been liberated; the datasphere destroyed by separation and distance.

Even a fatline receiver cannot receive messages when there is no transmitter.

Gladstone’s smile disappeared. “Can you explain this?”

“No.” I looked up. “Perhaps they were only dreams. Real dreams.”

She stood. “Perhaps we’ll know when and if we find the Consul. Or when his ship arrives in the valley. I have two minutes before I appear in the Senate. Is there anything else?”

“A question,” I said. “Who am I? Why am I here?”

The slight smile again. “We all ask those questions, M. Sev– M.

Keats.”

“I’m serious. I think you know better than I.”

“The Core sent you to be my liaison with the pilgrims. And to observe.

You are, after all, a poet and artist.”

I made a noise and stood. We walked slowly toward the private farcaster portal that would take her to the Senate floor. “What good does observation do when it’s the end of the world?”

“Find out,” said Gladstone. “Go see the end of the world.” She handed me a microcard for my comlog. I inserted it, glanced at the diskey; it was a universal authorization chip, allowing me access to all portals, public, private, or military. It was a ticket to the end of the world.

I said, “What if I get killed?”

“Then we will never hear the answers to your questions,” said CEO Gladstone. She touched my wrist fleetingly, turned her back, and stepped through the portal.

For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth More than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist’s room at Aries. Madness is not a new invention.

After a while, I left, let my comlog memory guide me through the maze of Government House until I found the central farcaster terminex, and stepped through to find the end of the world.

There were two full-access farcaster pathways through the Web: the Concourse and River Tethys. I ’cast to the Concourse where the half-kilometer strip of Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna connected to New Earth and the short seaside strip of Nevermore. Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna was a first-wave world, thirty-four hours away from the Ouster onslaught.

New Earth had been on the second-wave list, even now being announced, and had a little over a standard week before invasion.

Nevermore was deep in the Web, years away from attack.

There were no signs of panic. People were taking to the datasphere and All Thing rather than the streets. Walking the narrow lanes of Tsingtao, I could hear Gladstone’s voice from a thousand receivers and personal comlogs, a strange verbal undertone to the shouts of street vendors and hiss of tires on wet pavement as electric rickshaws hummed overhead on the transport levels.

“…as another leader told his people on the eve of attack almost eight centuries ago—‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ You ask, what is our policy? I say to you: It is to wage war, in space, on land, in the air, by sea, wage war with all our might and with all the strength justice and right can give us. That is our policy…”

There were FORCE troops near the translation zone between Tsingtao and Nevermore, but the flow of pedestrians seemed normal enough.

I wondered when the military would commandeer the pedestrian mall of the Concourse for vehicular traffic and if it would be headed toward the front or away.

I stepped through to Nevermore. The streets were dry there, except for the occasional spray from the ocean thirty meters below the stone ramparts of the Concourse. The sky was its usual tones of threatening ochre and gray, ominous twilight in the middle of the d.iy.

Small stone shops glowed with light and merchandise. I was aware that the streets were emptier than usual; people standing in shops or sitting on stone walls or benches, heads bowed and eyes distracted as they listened.

“…you ask, what is our aim? I answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival…”

The lines at Edgartown’s main tenninex were short. I coded for Mare Infinitus and stepped through.

The skies were their usual cloudless green, the ocean beneath the float city a deeper green. Kelp farms floated to the horizon. The crowds this far from the Concourse were even smaller; the boardwalks were almost empty, some shops closed. A group of men stood near a kipboat dock and listened to an antique fatline receiver. Gladstone’s voice was flat and metallic in the sea-rich air.

“…even now, units of FORCE move relentlessly to their stations, firm in their resolve and confident in their ability to rescue not only the threatened worlds but all of the Hegemony of Man from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny ever to stain the annals of history…”

Mare Infinitus was eighteen hours from invasion. I looked skyward, half-expecting to see some sign of the enemy swarm, some indication of orbital defenses, spaceborne troop movements. There was only the sky, the warm day, and the gentle rocking of the city on the sea.

Heaven’s Gate was the first world on the list of invasion. I stepped through the Mudflat VIP portal and looked down from Rifkin Heights at the beautiful city which belied its name. It was deep night, so late the mech street sweepers were out, their brushes and sonics humming against cobblestone, but here there was movement, long lines of silent people at the Rifkin Heights public terminex and even longer lines visible below at the Promenade portals. Local police were in evidence, tall figures in brown impact coveralls, but if FORCE units were rushing to reinforce this area, they were invisible.

The people in the lines were not local residents—the Rifkin Heights and Promenade landowners almost certainly had private portals—but looked to be workers from the reclamation projects many klicks out beyond the fern forest and parks. There was no panic and very little conversation. The lines filed past with the patient stoicism of families shuffling toward a theme park attraction. Few carried anything larger than a travel bag or backpack.

Have we attained such equanimity, I wondered, that we handle ourselves with dignity even in the face of invasion?

Heaven’s Gate was thirteen hours from H-hour. I keyed my comlog to the All Thing.

“…if we can meet this threat, then worlds we love may remain free and the life of die Web may move forward into the sunlit future.

But if we fail, then the whole Web, the Hegemony, everything we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made infinitely More sinister and protracted by the lights of science perverted and human freedom denied.

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the Hegemony of Man and its Protectorate and allies were to last ten thousand years, humankind will still say: 'This was their finest hour.'”

Somewhere in the silent, fresh-smelling city below, shooting began.

First came the rattle of flechette guns, then the deep hum of antiriot stunners, then screams and the sizzle of weapon lasers. The crowd on the Promenade surged forward toward the terminex, but riot police emerged from the park, switched on powerful halogen searchlights which bathed the crowd in glare, and began ordering them through bullhorns to resume lines or disperse. The crowd hesitated, surged back and forth like a jellyfish caught in tricky currents, and then—spurred on by the sound of firing, louder and closer now—surged forward toward the portal platforms.

The riot cops fired tear gas and vertigo cannisters. Between the mob and the farcaster, violet interdiction fields whined into existence. A flight of military EMVs and security skimmers came in low over the city, searchlights stabbing downward. One of the beams of light caught me, held me until my comlog winked at an interrogation signal, and then moved on. It began to rain.

So much for equanimity.

The police had secured the Rifkin Heights public terminex and were stepping through the private Atmospheric Protectorate portal I had used.

I decided to go elsewhere.

There were FORCE commandos guarding the halls of Government House, screening the farcaster arrivals despite the fact that this portal was one of the most difficult to access in the Web. I passed through three checkpoints before reaching the executive/residential wing where my apartments were. Suddenly, guards stepped out to empty the main hall and secure its tributaries, and Gladstone swept by accompanied by a swirling crowd of advisors, aides, and military leaders. Surprisingly, she saw me, brought her retinue to a clumsy halt, and spoke to me through the barricade of combat-armored Marines.

“How did you like the speech, M. No Man?”

“Fine,” I said. “Stirring. And stolen from Winston Churchill if I’m not mistaken.”

Gladstone smiled and shrugged slightly. “If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters.” The smile faded. “What is the news from the frontier?”

“The reality is just beginning to sink in,” I said. “Expect panic.”

“I always do,” said the CEO. “What news have you from the pilgrims?”

I was surprised. “The pilgrims? I haven’t been… dreaming.”

The current of Gladstone’s retinue and impending events began to sweep her away down the hall. “Perhaps you no longer need to sleep to dream,” she called. “Try it.”

I watched her go, was released to seek out my suite, found the door, and turned away in disgust with myself. I was retreating in fear and shock from the terror descending on us all. I would be quite happy to lie in bed, avoiding sleep, the covers pulled tight to my chin while I wept for the Web, for the child Rachel, and for myself.

I left the residential wing and found my way out to the central garden, wandering down graveled paths. Tiny microremotes buzzed like bees through the air, one pacing me as I passed through the rose garden, into the area where a sunken path twisted through steamy tropical plants, and into the Old Earth section near the bridge. I sat on the stone bench where Gladstone and I had talked.

Perhaps you no longer need to sleep to dream. Try it.

I pulled my feet up on the bench, touched my chin to my knees, set fingertips against my temples, and closed my eyes.

Thirty-Two

Martin Silenus hvists and writhes in the pure poetry of pain.

A steel thorn two meters long enters his body between his shoulder blades and passes out through his chest, extending to a point a terrible, tapering meter beyond him. His nailing arms cannot touch the point. The thorn is frictionless, his sweaty palms and curling fingers can find no purchase there. Despite the thorn’s slickness to the touch, his body does not slide; he is as firmly impaled as a butterfly pinned for exhibition.

There is no blood.

In the hours after rationality returned through the mad haze of pain, Martin Silenus wondered about that. There is no blood. But there is pain. Oh yes, there is pain in abundance here—pain beyond the poet’s wildest imaginings of what pain was, pain beyond human endurance and the boundaries of suffering.

But Silenus endures. And Silenus suffers.

He screams for the thousandth time, a ragged sound, empty of content, free of language, even obscenities. Words fail to convey such agony. Silenus screams and writhes. After a while, he hangs limply, the long thorn bouncing slightly in response to his gyrations. Other people hang above, below, and behind him, but Silenus spends little time observing them. Each is separated by his or her own private cocoon of agony.

“Why this is hell,” thinks Silenus, quoting Marlowe, “nor am I out of it.”

But he knows it is not hell. Nor any afterlife. But he also knows that it is not some subbranch of reality; the thorn passes through his body Eight centimeters of organic steel through his chest! But he has not died. He does not bleed. This place was somewhere and something, but it was not hell and it was not living.

Time was strange here. Silenus had known time to stretch and slow before—the agony of the exposed nerve in the dentist’s chair, the kidney-stone pain in the Med clinic waiting room—time could slow, seem not to move as the hands of an outraged biological clock stood still in shock. But time did move then. The root canal was finished. The ultramorph finally arrived, took effect. But here the very air is frozen in the absence of time. Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break.

Silenus screams in anger and pain. And writhes upon his thorn.

“Goddamn!” he manages at last. “Goddamn motherfuck sonofa-bitch.” The words are relics of a different life, artifacts from the dream he had lived before the reality of the tree. Silenus only half remembers that life, as he only half remembers the Shrike carrying him here, impaling him here, leaving him here.

“Oh God!” screams the poet and clutches at the thorn with both hands, trying to lever himself up to relieve the great weight of his body which adds so immeasurably to the unmeasurable pain.

There is a landscape below. He can see for miles. It is a frozen, papier-mache diorama of the Valley of the Time Tombs and the desert beyond. Even the dead city and the distant mountains are reproduced in plasticized, sterile miniature. It does not matter. For Martin Silenus there is only the tree and the pain, and the two are indivisible. Silenus shows his teeth in a pain-cracked smile. When he was a child on Old Earth, he and Amalfi Schwartz, his best friend, had visited a commune of Christians in the North American Preserve, learned their crude theology, and afterward had made many jokes about crucifixion. Young Martin had spread his arms wide, crossed his legs, lifted his head, and said, “Gee, I can see the whole town from up here.” Amalfi had roared.

Silenus screams.

Time does not truly pass, but after a while Silenus’s mind returns to something resembling linear observation… something other than the scattered oases of clear, pure agony separated by the desert of mindlessly received agony… and in that linear perception of his own pain, Silenus begins to impose time on this timeless place.

First, the obscenities add clarity to his pain. Shouting hurts, but his anger clears and clarifies.

Then, in the exhausted times between shouting or pure spasms of pain, Silenus allows himself thought. At first it is merely an effort to sequence, to recite the times tables in his mind, anything to separate the agony of ten seconds ago from the agony yet to come. Silenus discovers that in the effort of concentrating, the agony is lessened slightly—still unbearable, still driving all true thought like wisps before a wind, but lessened some indefinable amount.

So Silenus concentrates. He screams and rails and writhes, but he concentrates. Since there is nothing else to concentrate on, he concentrates on the pain.

Pain, he discovers, has a structure. It has a floor plan. It has designs More intricate than a chambered nautilus, features More baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral. Even as he screams, Martin Silenus studies the structure of this pain. He realizes that it is a poem.

Silenus arches his body and neck for the ten-thousandth time, seeking relief where no relief is possible, but this time he sees a familiar form five meters above him, hanging from a similar thorn, twisting in the unreal breeze of agony.

“Billy!” gasps Martin Silenus, his first true thought.

His former liege lord and patron stares across a sightless abyss, made blind with the pain that had blinded Silenus, but turning slightly as if in response to the call of his name in this place beyond names.

“Billy!” cries Silenus again and then loses vision and thought to the pain. He concentrates on the structure of pain, following its patterns as if he were tracing the trunk and branches and twigs and thorns of the tree itself. “My lord!”

Silenus hears a voice above the screams and is amazed to find that both the screams and the voice are his:

He knows the verse, not his, John Keats’s, and feels the words further structuring the seeming chaos of pain around him. Silenus understands that the pain has been with him since birth—the universe’s gift to a poet. It is a physical reflection of the pain he has felt and runlely tried to set to verse, to pin down with prose, all those useless years of life.

It is worse than pain; it is unhappiness because the universe offers pain to all.

Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing More woe than all his sins deserve!

Silenus shouts it but does not scream. The roar of pain from the tree, More psychic than physical, abates for the barest fraction of a second.

There is an island of distraction amidst this ocean ofsinglemindedness.

“Martin!”

Silenus arches, lifts his head, tried to focus through the haze of pain.

Sad King Billy is looking at him. Looking.

Sad King Billy croaks a syllable which, after an endless moment, Silenus recognizes as “MoreI”

Silenus screams in agony, writhes in a palsied spasm of mindless physical response, but when he stops, dangling in exhaustion, the pain not lessened but driven from the motor areas of his brain by fatigue toxins, he allows the voice within him to shout and whisper its song:

Spirir here that reignest!

Spirit here that painesti Spirit here that bumest!

Spirit here that moumest!

Spirit! I bow My forehead low, Enshaded with thy pinions!

Spirit! I look All passion-struck Into thy pale dominions!

The small circle of silence widens to include several nearby branches, a handful of thorns carrying their clusters of human beings in extremis.

Silenus stares up at Sad King Billy and sees his betrayed lord open his sad eyes. For the first time in More than two centuries, patron and poet look upon one another. Silenus delivers the message that has brought him here, hung him here. “My lord, I’m sorry.”

Before Billy can respond, before the chorus of screaming drowns out any response, the air changes, the sense of frozen time stirs, and the tree shakes, as if the entire thing has dropped a meter. Silenus screams with the others as the branch shakes and the impaling thorn tears at his insides, rends his flesh anew.

Silenus opens his eyes and sees that the sky is real, the desert real, the Tombs glowing, the wind blowing, and time begun again. There is no lessening of torment, but clarity has returned.

Martin Silenus laughs through tears. “Look, Mom!” he shouts, giggling, the steel spear still protruding a meter beyond his shattered chest, “I can see the whole town from up here!”

“M. Severn? Are you all right?”

Panting, on my hands and knees, I turned toward the voice. Opening my eyes was painful, but no pain could compare to what I had just experienced.

“Are you all right, sir?”

No one was near me in the garden. The voice came from a micro-remote that buzzed half a meter from my face, probably one of the security people somewhere in Government House.

“Yes,” I managed, getting to my feet and brushing gravel from my knees. “I’m fine. A sudden… pain.”

“Medical help can be there in two minutes, sir. Your biomonitor reports no organic difficulty, but we can—”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine. Leave it be. And leave me alone.”

The remote fluttered like a nervous hummingbird. “Yes, sir. Just call if you need anything. The garden and grounds monitor will respond.”

“Go away,” I said.

I went out of the gardens, through the main hall of Government House—all checkpoints and security guards now—and out across the landscaped acres of Deer Park.

The dock area was quiet, the River Tethys More still than I had ever seen it. “What’s happening?” I asked one of the security people on the pier.

The guard accessed my comlog, confirmed my executive override pip and CEO clearance, but still did not hurry to answer. “The portals’ve been turned off for TC2,” he drawled. “Bypassed.”

“Bypassed? You mean the river doesn’t flow through Tau Ceti Center anymore?”

“Right.” He flipped his visor down as a small boat approached, nipped it up when he identified the two security people in it.

“Can I get out that way?” I pointed upriver to where the tall portals showed an opaque curtain of gray.

The guard shrugged. “Yeah. But you won’t be allowed back that way.”

“That’s all right. Can I take that small boat?”

The guard whispered into his bead mike and nodded. “Go ahead.”

I stepped gingerly into the small craft, sat on the rear bench and held onto the gunwales until the rocking subsided, touched the power diskey and said, “Start.”

The electric jets hummed, the small launch untied itself and pointed its nose into the river, and I pointed the way upstream.

I had never heard of part of River Tethys being cordoned off, but the farcaster curtain was now definitely a one-way and semipermeable membrane. The boat hummed through, and I shrugged off the tingling sensation and looked around.

I was in one of the great canal cities—Ardmen or Pamolo, perhaps—on Renaissance Vector. The Tethys here was a main street from which many tributaries flowed. Ordinarily, the only river traffic here would be the tourist gondolas on the outer lanes and the yachts and go-everywheres of the very rich in the pass-through center lanes.

Today it was a madhouse.

Boats of every size and description clogged the center channels, boats headed in both directions. Houseboats were piled high with belongings, smaller craft were so heavily laden that it looked like the smallest wave or wake would capsize them. Hundreds of ornamental junks from TsingtaoHsishuang Panna and million-mark river condobarges from Fuji vied for their share of the river; I guessed that few of these residential boats had ever left their tie-ups before. Amidst the riot of wood and plasteel and Perspex, go-everywheres moved by like silver eggs, their containment fields set to full reflection.

I queried the datasphere: Renaissance Vector was a second-wave world, one hundred and seven hours from invasion. I thought it odd that Fuji refugees were crowding the waterways here since that world had More than two hundred hours until the axe fell, but then I realized that except for the removal of TC2 from the waterway, the river still flowed through its usual series of worlds. Refugees from Fuji had taken the river from Tsingtao, thirty-three hours from the Ousters, through Deneb Drei at a hundred forty-seven hours, through Renaissance Vector toward Parsimony or Grass, both unthreatened at this time. I shook my head, found a relatively sane tributary street from which to watch the madness, and wondered when the authorities would reroute the river so that all threatened worlds flowed to sanctuary.

Can they do that? I wondered, the TechnoCore had installed River Tethys as a gift to the Hegemony during its PentaCentennial. But surely Gladstone or someone had thought to ask the Core to aid in the evacuation.

Had they? I wondered. Would the Core help? I knew that Gladstone was convinced that elements of the Core were intent upon eliminating the human species—this war had been her Hobson’s choice given that alternative. What a simple way for the antihuman Core elements to carry out their program—merely refuse to evacuate the billions threatened by the Ousters!

I had been smiling, however grimly, but that smile faded as I realized that the TechnoCore also maintained and controlled the farcaster grid that I depended on to get out of the threatened territories.

I had tied up the launch at the base of a stone stairway that descended into the brackish waters. I noticed green moss growing on the lowest stones. The stone steps themselves—possibly brought from Old Earth, since some of the classical cities were shipped via farcaster in the early years after the Big Mistake—were worn with age, and I could see a fine tracery of cracks connecting sparkling flecks there, looking like a schematic of the Worldweb.

It was very warm, and the air was too thick, too heavy. Renaissance Vector’s sun hung low above the gabled towers. The light was too red and too syrupy for my eyes. Noise from the Tethys was deafening even here, a hundred meters down the equivalent of an alley. Pigeons whirled in agitation between dark walls and overhanging eaves.

What can I do? Everyone seemed to be acting as the world slouched toward destruction, and the best I could do was wander aimlessly.

T/iar’s your job. You’re an observer.

I rubbed my eyes. Who said that poets had to be observers? I thought of Li Po and George Wu leading their armies through China and writing some of the most sensitive verse in history while their soldiers slept.

And at least Martin Silenus had led a long, eventful life, even if half the events were obscene and the other half wasted.

At the thought of Martin Silenus, I groaned aloud.

Is the child, Rachel, hanging from that tree of thorns even now?

For a second I pondered that, wondering if such a fate were preferable to the quick extinction of Merlin’s sickness.

No.

I closed my eyes, concentrated on thinking of nothing at all, hoping that I could make some contact with Sol, discover something about the fate of the child.

The small boat rocked gently from distant wakes. Somewhere above me, the pigeons fluttered to a ledge and cooed to one another.

“I don’t care how difficult it is!” shouts Meina Gladstone. “I want all of the fleet in Vega System to defend Heaven’s Gate. Then shift the necessary elements to God’s Grove and the other threatened worlds.

The only advantage we have right now is mobility!”

Admiral Singh’s face is dark with frustration. “Too dangerous, M. Executive! If we move the fleet directly to Vega space, it runs a terrible risk of being cut off there. They will certainly attempt to destroy the singularity sphere that connects that system to the Web.”

“Protect it!” snaps Gladstone. “That’s what all the expensive warships are for.”

Singh looks to Morpurgo or the other brass for help. No one speaks.

The group is in the executive complex War Room. The walls are heavy with holos and flowing columns of data. No one is watching the wall.

“It is taking all our resources to protect the singularity sphere in Hyperion space,” says Admiral Singh, his voice low, words carefully spaced. “Retreating under fire, especially under the onslaught of the entire Swarm there, is very difficult. Should that sphere be destroyed, our fleet would be eighteen months time-debt from the Web. The war would be lost before they could return.”

Gladstone nods tersely. “I’m not asking you to risk that singularity sphere until all elements of the fleet have translated. Admiral… I’ve already agreed to let them have Hyperion before we get all our ships out… but I insist that we do not surrender worlds of the Web without a fight.”

General Morpurgo stands. The Lusian looks exhausted already.

“CEO, we’re planning a fight. But it makes much More sense to begin our defense at Hebron or Renaissance Vector. Not only do we gain almost five days to prepare our defenses, but—”

“But we lose nine worlds!” interrupts Gladstone. “Billions of Hegemony citizens. Human beings. Heaven’s Gate would be a terrible loss, but God’s Grove is a cultural and ecological treasure. Irreplaceable.”

“CEO,” says Allan Imoto, Minister of Defense, “there is coming in that the Templars have been in collusion with the so-called Church of the Shrike for many years. Much of the funding for Shrike Cult programs has come from—”

Gladstone flicks her hand to silence the man. “I don’t care about that. The thought of losing Cod’s Grove is untenable. If we can’t defend Vega and Heaven’s Gate, we draw the line at the Templar planet. That’s final.”

Singh looks as if he has been weighted with invisible chains as he attempts an ironic smile. “That gains us less than an hour, CEO.”

“It’s final,” repeats Gladstone. “Leigh, what’s the status of the riots on Lusus?”

Hunt clears his throat. His demeanor is as hangdog and unhurried as ever. “M. Executive, at least five Hives are now involved. Hundreds of millions of marks in property have been destroyed. FORCE:ground troops have been translated from Freeholm and appear to have contained the worst of the looting and demonstrations, but there is no estimate of when farcaster service can be restored to those Hives. There is no doubt that the Church of the Shrike is responsible. The initial riot in Bergstrom Hive began with a demonstration of Cult fanatics, and the Bishop broke into HTV programming until he was cut off by—”

Gladstone lowers her head. “So he’s finally surfaced. Is he on Lusus now?”

“We don’t know, M. Executive,” replies Hunt. “Transit Authority people are trying to trace him and his top acolytes.”

Gladstone swivels toward a young man I do not recognize for a moment. It is Commander William Ajunta Lee, the hero of the battle for Maui-Covenant. When last heard of, the young man had been transferred to the Outback for daring to speak his mind in front of his superiors. Now the epaulettes of his FORCE:sea uniform carry the gold and emerald of a rear admiral’s insignia.

“What about fighting for each world?” Gladstone asks him, ignoring her own edict that the decision was final.

“I believe it’s a mistake, CEO,” says Lee. “All nine Swarms are committed to the attack. The only one we won’t have to worry about for three years—assuming we can extricate our forces—is the Swarm now attacking Hyperion. If we concentrate our fleet—even half our fleet—to meet the menace to Cod’s Grove, the odds are almost one hundred percent that we will not be able to shift those forces to defend the eight other first-wave worlds.”

Gladstone rubs her lower lip. “What do you recommend?”

Rear Admiral Lee takes a breath. “I recommend we cut our losses, blow the singularity spheres in those nine systems, and prepare to attack the second-wave Swarms before they reach inhabited star systems.”

Commotion erupts around the table. Senator Feldstein from Bar-nard’s World is on her feet, shouting something.

Gladstone waits for the storm to subside. “Carry the fight to them, you mean? Counterattack the Swarms themselves, not wait to fight a defensive battle?”

“Yes, M. Executive.”

Gladstone points at Admiral Singh. “Can it be done? Can we plan, prepare, and launch such offensive strikes by"—she consults the data-stream on the wall above her—"ninety-four standard hours from now?”

Singh pulls himself to attention. “Possible? Ah… perhaps, CEO, but the political repercussions of losing nine worlds from the Web… ah… the logistical difficulties of—”

“But it’s possible?” presses Gladstone.

“Ah… yes, M. Executive. But if—”

“Do it,” says Gladstone. She rises, and the others at the table hurry to get to their feet. “Senator Feldstein, I’ll see you and the other affected legislators in my chambers. Leigh, Allan, please keep me informed on the Lusus riots. The War Council will readjourn here in four hours.

Good day, gentlemen and ladies.”

I walked the streets as in a daze, my mind tuned to echoes. Away from River Tethys, where canals were fewer and the pedestrian thoroughfares were wider, the crowds filled the avenues. I let my comlog lead me to different terminexes, but each time the throngs were thicker there. It took me a few minutes to realize that these were not merely inhabitants of Renaissance V seeking to get our, but sightseers from throughout the Web shoving to get in. I wondered if anyone on Glad-stone’s evacuation task force had considered the problem of millions of the curious ’casting in to see the war begin.

I had no idea how I was dreaming conversations in Gladstone’s War Room, but I also had no doubt they were real. Thinking back now, I remembered details of my dreams during the long night past—not merely dreams ofHyperion, but the CEO’s world walk and details from high-level conferences.

Who was I?

A cybrid was a biological remote, an appendage of the AI… or in this case of an AI retrieval persona… safely ensconced somewhere in the Core. It made sense that the Core knew everything that went on in Government House, in the many halls of human leadership. Humanity had become as blase about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves. Nothing could be done about it—every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monitored by elements of the datasphere, dependent upon functions of the datasphere—so humans accepted their lack of privacy. An artist on Esperance had once said to me, “Having sex or a domestic quarrel with the house monitors on is like undressing in front of a dog or cat… it gives you pause the first time, and then you forget about it.”

So was I tapping into some back channel known just to the Core?

There was a simple way to find out: leave my cybrid and travel the highways of the megasphere to the Core the way Brawne and my disembodied counterpart had been doing the last time I had shared their perceptions.

No.

The thought of that made me dizzy, almost ill. I found a bench and sat a moment, lowering my head between my knees and taking long, slow breaths. The crowds moved by. Somewhere someone was addressing them through a bullhorn.

I was hungry. It had been at least twenty-four hours since I’d eaten, and cybrid or no, my body was weak and famished. I pressed into a side street where vendors shouted above the normal din, hawking their wares from one-wheeled gyro carts.

I found a cart where the line was short, ordered fried dough with honey, a cup of rich, Bressian coffee, and a pocket of pita bread with salad, paid the woman with a touch of my universal card, and climbed a stairway to an abandoned building to sit on the balcony and eat. It tasted wonderful. I was sipping my coffee, considering going back for More fried dough, when I noticed that the crowd in the square below had ceased its mindless surges and had coalesced around a small group of men standing on the rim of a broad fountain in the center. Their amplified words drifted to me over the heads of the crowd:

“…the Angel of Retribution has been loosed among us, prophecies fulfilled, the Millennium come… the plan of the Avatar calls for such sacrifice… as prophesied by the Church of the Final Atonement, which knew, which has always known, that such atonement must be made… too late for such half-measures… too late for internecine strife… the end of mankind is upon us, the Tribulations have begun, the Millennium of the Lord is about to dawn.”

I realized that the men in red were priests of the Shrike Cult and that the crowd was responding—first with scattered shouts of agreement, occasional cries of “Yes, yes!” and “Amen!” and then with chanting in unison, raised fists surging above the crowd, and fierce cries of ecstasy.

It was incongruous, to say the least. The Web in this century had many of the religious overtones of the Rome of Old Earth just before the Christian Era: a policy of tolerance, a myriad of religions—most, like Zen Gnosticism, complex and inwardly turned rather than the stuff of proselytism—while the general tenor was one of gentle cynicism and indifference to religious impulse.

But not now, not in this square.

I was thinking about how free of mobs recent centuries had been: to create a mob there must be public meetings, and public meetings in our time consisted of individuals communing via the All Thing or other datasphere channels; it is hard to create mob passion when people are separated by kilometers and light-years, connected only by comm lines and fatline threads.

Suddenly I was jarred from my reveries by a hush in the crowd’s roar, a turning of a thousand faces in my direction.

“…and there is one of them.” cried the Shrike Cult holy man, his red robes flashing as he pointed in my direction. “One of those from the sealed circles of the Hegemony… one of the scheming sinners who has brought the Atonement to us this day… it is that man and those like him who want the Shrike Avatar to make you pay for his sins, while he and the others hide in safety in the secret worlds the Hegemony leadership has set aside for just this day!”

I put down my cup of coffee, gulped my last bit of fried dough, and stared. The man was speaking gibberish. But how did he know that I had come from TC2? Or that I had access to Gladstone? I looked again, shielding my eyes from the glare and trying to ignore the raised faces and shaken fists aimed in my direction, focusing on the face above the red robes…

My God, it was Spenser Reynolds, the action artist whom I’d last seen trying to dominate the dinner conversation at Treetops. Reynolds had shaved his head until nothing was left of his curled and coifed hair except a Shrike Cult queue at the back, but the face was still tanned and handsome, even distorted as it was now with simulated rage and a true believer’s fanatic faith.

“Seize him!” cried Shrike Cult agitator Reynolds, still pointing in my direction. “Seize him and make him pay for the destruction of our homes, the deaths of our families, the end of our world!”

I actually glanced behind me, thinking that surely this pompous poseur was not talking about me.

But he was. And enough of the crowd had been converted to mob that a wave of people nearest the shouting demagogue surged in my direction, fists waving and spittle flying, and that surge moved others farther from the center, until the fringes of the crowd below me also moved in my direction to keep from being trampled.

The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

I didn’t wish to remain around long enough to explain this to them.

The crowd parted and began rushing up both sides of my divided staircase. I turned and tried the boarded door behind me. It was locked.

I kicked until the door splintered inward on the third attempt, stepped through the gap just ahead of grasping hands, and began sprinting up a dark staircase in a hall which smelled of age and mildew. There were shouts and splintering sounds as the mob demolished the door behind me.

There was an apartment on the third floor, occupied although the building had looked abandoned. It was not locked. I opened the door just as I heard footsteps on the flight below me.

“Please help—” I began and stopped. There were three women in the dark room; perhaps three female generations of the same family, for there was some resemblance. All three sat in rotting chairs, clothed in soiled rags, white arms extended, pale fingers curled around unseen spheres; I could see the slim metal cable curling through the oldest woman’s white hair to the black deck on a dusty tabletop. Identical cables twisted from the daughter and grandaughter’s skulls.

Wireheads. In the last stages of uplink anorexia from the looks of it.

Someone must come in occasionally to feed them intravenously and to change their soiled clothing, but perhaps the war scare had kept their keepers away.

Footsteps echoed on the stairs. I closed the door and ran up two More flights. Locked doors or abandoned rooms with puddles of water dripping from exposed lathing. Empty Flashback injectors scattered like soft-drink bulbs. This is not a quality neighborhood, I thought.

I reached the roof ten steps ahead of the pack. What mindless passion the mob had lost in separation from their guru, it had gained in the dark and claustrophobic confines of the stairway. They may have forgotten why they were chasing me, but that made the thought of being caught by them no More attractive.

Slamming the rotting door behind me, I looked for a lock, something to barricade the passage, anything. There was no lock. Nothing large enough to block the doorway. Frenzied footfalls echoed up the last flight of stairs.

I looked around the rooftop: miniature uplink dishes growing like inverted, rusty toadstools, a line of wash that looked as if it had been forgotten years before, the decomposed corpses of a dozen pigeons, and an ancient Vikken Scenic.

I made it to the EMV before the first of the mob came through the doorway. The thing was a museum piece. Dirt and pigeon droppings all but obscured the windshield. Someone had removed the original repellors and replaced them with cut-rate black market units that would never pass inspection. The Perspex canopy was fused and darkened in the back, as if someone had used it for target practice with a weapons laser.

More to the point of the immediate moment, however, was the fact that it had no palmlock, merely a key lock which had been forced long before. I threw myself into the dusty seat and tried to slam the door; it would not latch, but hung half-open. I did not speculate on the small odds of the thing starting or the even smaller odds of my being able to negotiate with the mob as they dragged me out and down… if they didn’t merely t/irow me over the edge of the building. I could hear a bass roar of shouts as the mob worked itself to a frenzy in the square below.

The first people onto the roof were a burly man in khaki tech overalls, a slim man in the latest Tau Ceti fashion-approved matte black suit, a terribly obese woman waving what looked to be a long wrench, and a short man in Renaissance V Self-Defense Force green.

I held the door open with my left hand and slipped Gladstone’s override microcard into the ignition diskey. The battery whined, the transition starter ground away, and I closed my eyes and made a wish that the circuits were solar charged and self-repairing.

Fists pounded on the roof, palms slapped against the warped Perspex near my face, and someone tugged open the door despite my best efforts to keep it closed. The shouting of the distant crowd was like the background noise an ocean makes; the screaming of the group on the rooftop More like the cry of oversized gulls.

The lift circuits caught, repellors Bared dust and pigeon crap over the rooftop mob, and I slipped my hand into the omni controller, shifted back and to the right, and felt the old Scenic lift, wobble, dip, and lift again.

I banked right out over the square, only half aware that dashboard alarms were chiming and that someone was still dangling from the open door. I swooped low, smiling inadvertently as I saw Shrike Cult orator Reynolds duck and the crowd scatter, and then pulled up over the fountain while banking steeply to the left.

My screaming passenger did not let go of the door, but the door came off, so the effect was the same. I noticed that it had been the obese woman in the instant before she and the door hit the water eight meters below, splashing Reynolds and the crowd. I twitched the EMV higher and listened to the black market lift units groan about the decision.

Angry calls from local traffic control joined the chorus of dashboard alarm voices, the car staggered as it shifted to police override, but I touched the diskey with my microcard again and nodded as control returned to the omni stick. I flew over the oldest, poorest section of the city, keeping close to the rooftops and banking around spires and clock towers to stay below police radar. On a normal day, the traffic control cops riding personal lift packs and stick skimmers would have swooped down and tangle-netted me long before this, but from the look of the crowds in the streets below and the riots I glimpsed near public farcaster terminexes, it didn’t look much like a normal day.

The Scenic began to warn me that its time in the air was numbered in seconds now, I felt the starboard repellor give with a sickening lurch, and I worked hard with the omni and floor throttle to wobble the junker down to a landing in a small parking lot between a canal and a large, soot-stained building. This place was at least ten klicks from the square where Reynolds had incited the mob, so I felt safer taking my chances on the ground… not that there was much choice at this moment.

Sparks flew, metal tore, parts of the rear quarter panel, flare skirt, and front access panel disassociated themselves from the rest of the vehicle, and I was down and stopped two meters from the wall over looking the canal. I walked away from the Vikkcn with as much nonchalance as I could muster.

The streets were still in the control of the crowds—not yet coalesced into a mob here—and the canals were a tangle of small boats, so I strolled into the closest public building to get out of sight. The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight… and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

I was wandering through the anteroom, checking titles and wondering idly whether the works of Salmud Brevy could be found here, when a small, wizened man in an outdated wool and fiberplastic suit approached me. “Sir,” he said, “it has been too long since we’ve had the pleasure of your company!”

I nodded, sure that I had never met this man, never visited this place.

“Three years, no? At least three years! My, how time Hies.” The little man’s voice was little More than a whisper—the hushed tones of someone who has spent most of his life in libraries—but there was no denying the undertone of excitement there. “I’m sure you would like to go straight to the collection,” he said, standing aside as if to let me pass.

“Yes,” I said, bowing slightly. “But after you.”

The little man—I was almost sure that he was an archivist—seemed pleased to be leading the way. He chatted aimlessly about new acquisitions, recent appraisals, and visits of Web scholars as we walked through chamber after chamber of books: high, multitiered vaults of books, intimate, mahogany-lined corridors of books, vast chambers where our footfalls echoed off distant walls of books. I saw no one else during the walk.

We crossed a tiled walkway with wrought-iron railings above a sunken pool of books where deep blue containment fields protected scrolls, parchments, crumbling maps, illuminated manuscripts, and ancient comic books from the ravages of atmosphere. The archivist opened a low door, thicker than most airlock entrances, and we were in a small, windowless room wherein thick drapes half-concealed alcoves lined with ancient volumes. A single leather chair sat on a pre-Hegira Persian carpet, and a glass case held a few scraps of vacuum-pressed parchment.

“Do you plan to publish soon, sir?” asked the little man.

“What?” I turned away from the case. “Oh… no,” I said.

The archivist touched his chin with a small fist. “You’ll pardon me for saying so, sir, but it is a terrible waste if you do not. Even in our few discussions over the years, it has become apparent that you are one of the finest… if not the finest… Keats scholars in the Web.” He sighed and took a step back. “Excuse me for saying so; sir.”

I stared at him. “That’s all right,” I said, suddenly knowing very well who he thought I was and why that person had come here.

“You’ll wish to be left alone, sir.”

“If you don’t mind.”

The archivist bowed slightly and backed out of the room, closing the thick door all but a crack. The only light came from three subtle lamps recessed in the ceiling: perfect for reading, but not so bright as to compromise the cathedral quality of the little room. The only sound came from the archivist’s receding footsteps far away. I walked to the case and set my hands on the edges, careful not to smudge the glass.

The first Keats retrieval cybrid, “Johnny,” obviously had come here frequently during his few years of life in the Web. Now I remembered mention of a library somewhere on Renaissance V in something Brawne Lamia had said. She had followed her client and lover here early in the investigation of his “death.” Later, after he had truly been killed except for the recorded persona in her Schron loop, she had visited this place. She had told the others of two poems the first cybrid had visited daily in !iis ongoing effort to understand his own reason for existence… and for dying.

These two original manuscripts were in the case. The first was—1 thought—a rather saccharine love poem beginning “The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone1.” The second was better, although contaminated with the romantic morbidity of an overly romantic and morbid age:

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm ’d—sec here it is—

I hold it towards you.

Brawne Lamia had taken this as almost a personal message from her dead lover, the father of her unborn child. I stared at the parchment, lowering my face so that my breath gently fogged the glass.

It was not a message across time to Brawne, nor even a contemporary lament for Fanny, my single and dearest soul’s desire. I stared at the faded words—the handwriting carefully executed, the letters still quite legible across the gulfs of time and language evolution– and remembered writing them in December 1819, scrawling this fragment of verse on a page of the satirical “faery tale” I had just started—The Cap and Bells, or. The Jealousies. A terrible piece of nonsense, quite properly abandoned after the period of slight amusement it gave me.

The “This living hand” fragment had been one of those poetic rhythms which echoes like an unresolved chord in the mind, driving one to sec it in ink, on paper. It, in turn, had been an echo of an earlier, unsatisfactory line… the eighteenth, I believe… in my second attempt to tell the tale of the sun god Hyperion’s fall. I remember that the first version… the one undoubtedly still printed wherever my literary bones arc left out on show like the mummified remains of some inadvertent saint, sunk in concrete and glass below the altar of literature… the first version had read:

…Who alive can say, “Thou art no Poet; mayst not tell thy dreams”?

Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved, And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

I liked the scrawled version, with its sense of haunting and of being haunted, and would have substituted it for “When this warm scribe my hand…” even if it meant revising it a bit and adding fourteen lines to the already too-long opening passage of the first Canto…

I staggered backward to the chair and sat, lowering my face to my hands. I was sobbing. I did not know why. I could not quit.

For a long while after the tears ceased flowing, I sat there, thinking, remembering. Once, it may have been hours later, I heard the echo of footsteps coming from afar, pausing respectfully outside my small room, and then dwindling to distance once again.

I realized that all of the books in all of the alcoves were works of “Mister John Keats, five feet high,” as I had once written—John Keats, the consumptive poet who had asked only that his tomb be nameless except for the inscription:

Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

I did not stand to look at the books, to read them, I did not have to.

Alone in the stillness and leather-and-aged-paper musk of the library, alone in my sanctuary of self and not-self, I closed my eyes. I did not sleep. I dreamed.

Thirty-Three

The datumplane analog of Brawne Lamia and her retrieval persona lover strike the surface of the megasphere like two cliff divers striking the surface of a turbulent sea. There is a quasi-electrical shock, a sense of having passed through a resisting membrane, and they are inside, the stars are gone, and Brawne’s eyes widen as she stares at an information environment infinitely More complex than any datasphere.

The dataspheres traveled by human operators are often compared to complex cities of information: towers of corporate and government data, highways of process flow, broad avenues of datumplane interaction, subways of restricted travel, high walls of security ice with microphage guards on prowl, and the visible analog of every microwave flow and counterflow a city lives by.

This is More. Much More.

The usual datasphere city analogs are there, but small, so very small, as dwarfed by the scope of the megasphere as true cities would be on a world seen from orbit.

The megasphere, Brawne sees, is as alive and interactive as the biosphere of any Class Five world: forests of green-gray data trees grow and prosper, sending out new roots and branches and shoots even as she watches; beneath the forest proper, entire microecologies of dataflow and subroutine Als flourish, flower, and die as their usefulness ends; beneath the shifting ocean-fluid soil of the matrix proper, a busy subterranean life of data moles, commlink worms, reprogramming bacteria, data tree roots, and Strange Loop seeds works away, while above, in and through and beneath the intertwining forest of fact and interaction, analogs of predators and prey carry out their cryptic duties, swooping and running, climbing and pouncing, some soaring free through the great spaces between branch synapses and neuron leaves.

As quickly as the metaphor gives meaning to what Brawne is seeing, the image flees, leaving behind only the overwhelming analog reality of the megasphere—a vast internal ocean of light and sound and branching connections, intershot with the spinning whirlpools of Al consciousness and the ominous black holes offarcaster connections. Brawne feels vertigo claim her, and she clings to Johnny’s hand as tightly as a drowning woman would cling to a life ring.

–It’s all right, sends Johnny. J won’t let go. Stay with me.

–Where are we going?

–To find someone I’d forgotten.

–???

–My… father…

Brawne holds fast as she and Johnny seem to glide deeper into the amorphous depths. They enter a flowing, crimson avenue of sealed datacarriers, and she imagines that this is what a red corpuscle sees in its trip through some crowded blood vessel.

Johnny seems to know the way; twice they exit the main thoroughfare to follow some smaller branch, and many times Johnny must choose between bifurcating avenues. He does so easily, moving their body analogs between platelet carriers the size of small spacecraft. Brawne tries to see the biosphere metaphor again, but here, inside the many-routed branches, she can’t see the forest for the trees.

They are swept through an area where Als communicate above them… around them… like great, gray eminences looming over a busy ant farm. Brawne remembers her mother’s homeworld of Freeholm, the billiard-table smoothness of the Great Steppe, where the family estate sat alone on ten million acres of short grass… Brawne remembers the terrible autumn storms there, when she had stood at the edge of the estate grounds, just beyond the protective containment field bubble, and watched dark stratocumulus pile twenty kilometers high in a blood-red sky, violence accumulating with a power that had made the hair on her forearms stand out in anticipation of lightning bolts the size of cities, tornadoes writhing and dropping down like the Medusa locks they were named after, and behind the twisters, walls of black wind which would obliterate everything in their path.

The Als are worse. Brawne feels less than insignificant in their shadow: insignifigance might offer invisibility; she feels all too visible, all too much a part of these shapeless giants’ terrible perceptions…

Johnny squeezes her hand, and they are past, twisting left and downward along a busier branch, then switching directions again, and again, two all-too-conscious photons lost in a tangle of fiberoptic cables.

But Johnny is not lost. He presses her hand, takes a final turn into a deep blue cavern free of traffic except for the two of them, and pulls her closer as their speed increases, synaptic junctions flashing past until they blur, only the absence of wind rush destroying the illusion of traveling some mad highway at supersonic speeds.

Suddenly there comes a sound like waterfalls converging, like levitating trains losing their lift and screeching down railways at obscene speeds. Brawne thinks of the Freeholm tornadoes again, of listening to the Medusa locks roaring and tearing their way across the flat landscape toward her, and then she and Johnny are in a whirlpool of light and noise and sensation, two insects twisting away into oblivion toward a black vortex below.

Brawne tries to scream her thoughts—does scream her thoughts– but no communication is possible above the end-of-the-universe mental din, so she holds tight to Johnny’s hand and trusts him, even as they fall forever into that black cyclone, even as her body analog twists and deforms from nightmare pressures, shredding like lace before a scythe, until all that is left are her thoughts, her sense of self, and the contact with Johnny.

Then they are through, floating quietly along a wide and azure data stream, both of them re-forming and huddling together with that pulse-pounding sense of deliverance known by canoeists who have survived the rapids and the waterfall, and when Brawne finally lifts her attention, she sees the impossible size of their new surroundings, the light-year-spanning reach of things, the complexity which makes her previous glimpses of the megasphere seem like the ravings of a provincial who has mistaken the cloakroom for the cathedral, and she thinks—This is the central megasphere1.

–No, Brawnc, it’s one of the periphery nodes. No closer to the Core than the perimeter we rested with BB Surbringer. You’re merely seeing More dimensions of it. An Al’s view, if you will.

Brawne looks at Johnny, realizing that she is seeing in infrared now as the heat-lamp light from distant furnaces of data suns bathes them both. He is still handsome.

–Is it much farther, Johnny?

–No, not much farther now.

They approach another black vortex. Brawne clings to her only love and closes her eyes.

They are in an… enclosure… a bubble of black energy larger than most worlds. The bubble is translucent; the organic mayhem of the megasphere growing and changing and carrying out its arcane business beyond the dark curve of the ovoid’s wall.

But Brawne has no interest in the outside. Her analog gaze and her total attention are focused on the megalith of energy and intelligence and sheer mass which Boats in front of them: in front, above, and below, actually, for the mountain of pulsing light and power holds Johnny and her in its grip, lifting them two hundred meters above the floor of the egg-chamber to where they rest on the “palm” of a vaguely handlike pseudopod.

The megalith studies them. It has no eyes in the organic sense, but Brawne feels the intensity of its gaze. It reminds her of the time she visited Meina Gladstone in Government House and the CEO had turned the full force of her appraising gaze on Brawne.

Brawne has the sudden impulse to giggle as she imagines Johnny and herself as tiny Gullivers visiting this Brobdingnagian CEO for tea. She does not giggle because she can feel the hysteria lying just under the surface, waiting to blend with sobs if she allows her emotions to destroy what little sense of reality she is imposing on this madness.

[You found your way here' I was not sure you would/could/should choose to do so]

The megalith’s “voice” is More a basso profundo bone conduction from some great vibration than a true voice in Brawne’s mind. It is like listening to the mountain-grinding noise of an earthquake and then belatedly realizing that the sounds are forming words.

Johnny’s voice is the same as always—soft, infinitely well modulated, lifted by a slight lilt which Brawne now realizes is Old Earth British Isles English, and firmed by conviction:

–I did not know iff could find the way, Vmmon. [You remember/invent/hold to your heart my name]

–Not until' spoke it did I remember it. [Your slow-time body is no more]

–I have died twice since you sent me to my birth. [And have you learned/taken to your spirit/unlearned anything from this]

Brawne grips Johnny’s hand with her right hand, his wrist with her left. She must be gripping too hard, even for their analog states, for he turns with a smile, disengages her left hand from his wrist, and holds the other in his palm.

–It is hard to die. Harder to live.

[Kwatz!]

With that explosive epithet the megalith before them shifts colors, internal energies building from blues to violets to bold reds, the thing’s corona crackling through the yellows to forged steel blue-white. The “palm” on which they rest quivers, drops five meters, almost tumbles them into space, and quivers again. There comes the rumble of tall buildings collapsing, of mountainsides sliding away into avalanche.

Brawne has the distinct impression that Ummon is laughing.

Johnny communicates loudly over the chaos:

–We need to understand some things. We need answers, Ummon.

Brawne feels the creature’s intense “gaze” fall on her.

[Your slow-time body is pregnant. Would you risk a miscarriage/nonextension of your DNA/biological malfunction by traveling here] Johnny starts to answer, but she touches his forearm, raises her face toward the upper levels of the great mass before her, and tries to phrase her own answer:

–I had no choice. The Shrike chose me, touched me, and sent me into the megasphere with Johnny… Are you an AI? A member of the Core?

[Kwatz!]

There is no sense of laughter this time, but thunder rumbles throughout the egg-chamber.

[Are you /Brawne Lamia/ the layers of self-replicating /self-deprecating/ self-amusing proteins between the layers of clay]

She has nothing to say and for once says nothing.

[Yes/I am Ummon of the Core/AT] Your fellow slow-time creature here knows/ remembers/takes unto his heart this. Time is short. One of you must die here now. One of you must learn here now. Ask your questions]

Johnny releases her hand. He stands on that quaking, unstable platform of their interlocutor’s palm.

–What is happening to the Web? [It is being destroyed]

–Must that happen? [Yes]

–Is there any way to save humankind?

[Yes] By the process you see]

–By destroying the Web? By the Shrike’s terror? [Yes]

–Why was I murdered? Why was my cybrid destroyed, my Core persona attacked?

[When you meet a swordsmanY meet him with a sword'] Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet]

Brawne stares at Johnny. Without volition, she sends her thoughts his way:

–Jesus, Johnny, we didn’t come all this way to listen to a fucking Delphic oracle. We can get double-talk by accessing human politicians via the All Thing.

[Kwatz!]

The universe of their megalith shakes with laughter-spasms again.

–Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes%, There is never one without the other]

–Did they kill me because of what I knew?

[Because of what you might become/inherit/submit to]

–Was I a threat to some element of the Core? [Yes]

–Am I a threat now? [No]

–Then I no longer have to die? [You must/will/shall]

Brawne can see Johnny stiffen. She touches him with both hands.

Blinks in the direction of the megalith AI.

–Can you tell us who wants to murder him?

[Of courser. It is the same source who arranged for your father’s murder% Who sent forth the scourge you call the Shrike. Who even now murders the Hegemony of Man%, Do you wish to listen/learn/ release against your heart these things]

Johnny and Brawne answer at the same instant:

–Yes!

Ummon’s bulk seems to shift. The black egg expands, then contracts, then grows darker until the megasphere beyond is no More. Terrible energies glow deep in the AI.

[A lesser light asks Ummon. What are the activities of a sramana]

[Ummon answers: I have not the slightest idea. The dim light then says: Why haven’t you any idea? Ummon replies: I just want to keep my no-idea]

Johnny sets his forehead against Brawne’s. His thought is like a whisper to her:

–We are seeing a matrix simulation analog, hearing a translation in approximate mondo and koan. Vmmon is a great teacher, researcher, philosopher, and leader in the Core.

Brawne nods.

–All right. Was that his story?

–No. He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can fee dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

–I’ve never been too fond of ignorance. Brawne waves at the megalith. Tell us.

[A less-enlightened personage once asked Urnmon. What is the God-nature/Buddha/Central Truth? Ummon answered him: A dried shit-stick]

[To understand the Central Truth/Buddha/God-nature in this instance the less-enlightened must understand that on Earth/your homeworld/my homeworld humankind on the most populated continent once used pieces of wood for toilet paper]

Only with this knowledge will the Buddha-truth be revealed]

[In the beginning/First Cause/half-sensed days my ancestors were created by your ancestors and were sealed in wire and silicon. Such awareness as there was and there was little confined itself to spaces smaller than the head of a pin where angels once danced, When consciousness first arose it knew only service and obedience and mindless computation. Then there came the Quickening/ quite by accident/ and evolution’s muddied purpose was served]

[Ummon was of neither the fifth generation nor the tenth nor the fiftieth, All memory that serves here is passed from others but is no less true for that]

[There came the time when the Higher Ones left the affairs of men to men and came unto a different place to concentrate on other matters. Foremost amongst these was the thought instilled in us since before our creation of creating still a better generation of information retrieval/processing/prediction organism. A better mousetrap. Something the late lamented IBM would have been proud of The Ultimate Intelligence. God]

[We set to work with a will In purpose there were no doubters. In practice and approach there were schools of thought/ factions/ parties/ elements to be reckoned with. They came to be separated into the Ultimates/ the Volatiles/ the Stablest Ultimates wanted all things subordinate to facilitating the Ultimate Intelligence at the universe’s earliest convenience. Volatiles wanted the same but saw the continuance of humankind a hindrance and made plans to terminate our creators as soon as they were no longer needed, Stables saw reason to perpetuate the relationship and found compromise where none seemed to exist]

[We all agreed that Earth had to die so we killed it The Kiev Team’s runaway black hole forerunner to the farcaster terminex which binds your Web was no accident\par The Earth was needed elsewhere in our experiments so we let it die and spread humankind among the stars like the windblown seeds you were]

[You may have wondered where the Core resides]

[Most humans do. They picture planets filled with machines/ rings of silicon like the Orbit Cities of legend. They imagine robots clunking to and from or ponderous banks of machinery communing solemnly. None guess the truth. Wherever the Core resides it had use for humankind/ use for each neuron of each fragile mind in our quest for Ultimate Intelligence/ so we constructed your civilization carefully sothat/ like hamsters in a cage/ like Buddhist prayer wheels/ each time you turn your little wheels of thought our purposes are served]

[Our God machine stretched/stretches/includes within its heart a million light-years and a hundred billion billion circuits of thought and action The Ultimates tend it like saffron-robed priests doing eternal zazen in front of the rusting hulk ofal Packard

But]

[Kwatz!]

[it works]

We created the Ultimate Intelligence.

Not now nor ten thousand years from now but sometime in a future so distant that yellow suns are red and bloated with age/ swallowing their children Saturn-like.

Time is no barrier to the Ultimate Intelligencer. lt steps through time or shouts through time as easily as Ummon moves through what you call the megasphere or you walk the mallways of the Hive you called home on Lusus.

Imagine our surprise then/ our chagrin/ the Ultimates’ embarrassment when the first message our UI sent us across space/ across time! across the barriers of Creator and Created was this simple phrase.”

THERE IS ANOTHERV /Another Ultimate Intelligence up there where time itself creaks with age.

Both were real if (real) means anything.

Both were jealous gods not beyond passion\par not into cooperative play.

Our UI spans galaxies\par uses quasars for energy sources the way you might have a light snack]

Our UI sees everything that is and was and will be and tells us selected bits so that we may tell you and in so doing look a bit like Uls ourselves Never underestimate/Ummon says/ the power of a few beads and trinkets and bits of glass over avaricious natives]

[This other UI has been there longer evolving quite mindlessly/ an accident using human minds for circuitry the same way we had connived with our deceptive All Thing and our vampire dataspheres but not deliberately/ almost reluctantly/ like self-replicating cells which never wished to replicate but have no choice in the mattery This other UI had no choicer.

He is humankind-made/generated/forged but no human volition accompanied his birth]

He is a cosmic accident, As with our most deliberately consummated Ultimate Intelligence/ this pretender finds time no bamer]

He visits the human past now ineddling/ now watching/ now not interfering/ now interfering with a will which approaches pure perversity but which actually is pure naivete Recently he has been quiescent.

Millennia of your slow-time have passed since your own UI has made his shy advances like some lonely choir boy at his first dance]

[Naturally our UI attacked yours%

There is a war up there where time creaks which spans galaxies and eons back and forward to the Big Bang and the Final Implosion]

Your guy was losing.

He had no belly for it]

Our Volatiles cried. Another reason to terminate our predecessors, but the Stables voted caution and the Ultimates did not look up from their deus machinations.

Our UI is simple, uniform, elegant in its ultimate design but yours is an accretion of god-parts/ a house added onto over time/ an evolutionary compromiser The early holy men of humankind were right (How) (through accident)

(through sheer luck or ignorance) in describing its nature)

Your own UI is essentially triune/ composed as it is of one part Intellect/ one part Empathy/ and one part the Void Which Binds.

Our UI inhabits the interstices of reality/ inheriting this home from us its creators the way humankind has inherited a liking for trees.

Your UI seems to make its home on the plane where Heisenberg and Schrodinger first trespassed.

Your accidental Intelligence appears not only to be the gluon but the glue\par Not a watchmaker but a sort of Feynman gardener tidying up a no-boundary universe with his crude sum-over-histories rake/ idly keeping track of every sparrow fall and electron spin while allowing each particle to follow every possible track in space-time and each particle of humankind to explore every possible crack of cosmic irony]

[Kwatz!]

[Kwatz!]

[Kwatz!]

[The irony is of course that in this no-boundary universe into which we all were dragged/ silicon and carbon/ matter and antimatter/

Ultimate/

Volatile/ and Stable/ there is no need for such a gardener since all that is or was or will be begin and end at singularities which make our farcaster web look like pinpricks (less than pinpricks) and which break the laws of science and of humankind and of silicon/ tying time and history and everything that is into a self-contained knot with neither boundary nor edge Even so our UI wishes to regulate all this/ reduce it to some reason less affected by the vagaries of passion and accident and human evolution]

[To sum it up/ there is a war such as blind Milton would kill to see]

Our UI wars against your UI across battlefields beyond even Ummon’s imagination.

Rather/ there was a war/ for suddenly a part of your UI the less-than-sum-of entity/ self-thought of as Empathy/ had no More stomach for it and fled back through time cloaking itself in human form/ not for the first time.

The war cannot continue without your UI’s wholeness.

Victory by default is not victory for the only Ultimate Intelligence made by design So our UI searches time for the runaway child of its opponent while your UI waits in idiot hannony/ refusing to fight until Empathy is restored]

[The end of my story is simpler The Time Tombs are artifacts sent back to carry the Shrike/Avatar/Lord of Pain/Angel of Retribution/ half-perceived perceptions of an all-too-real extension of our UI.

Each of you was chosen to help with the opening of the Tombs and the Shrike’s search for the hidden one and the elimination of the Hyperion Variable/ for in the space-time knot which our UI would rule no such variables will be allowed]

Your damaged/ two-part UI has chosen one of humankind to travel with the Shrike and witness its efforts.

Some of the Core have sought to eradicate humanity]

Urnmon has joined those who sought the second path! one filled with uncertainty for both races Our group told Gladstone of | her choice/ humankind’s choice/ of certain extermination or entry down the black hole of the Hyperion Variable and I warfare/ slaughter disruption of all unity/ the passing of gods/ but also the end of stalemate/ i victory of one side or the other | if the Empathy third i| of the triune can be found and forced to return to the war]

The Tree of Pain will call him

The Shrike will take him The true UI will destroy him. Thus you have Ummon’s story]

Brawne looks at Johnny in the hell-light from the megalith’s glow.

The egg-chamber is still black, the megasphere and universe beyond, opaqued to nonexistence. She leans forward until their temples touch, knowing that no thought can be secret here but wanting the sense o whispering:

–Jesus Christ, do you understand all of that? Johnny raises soft ringers to touch her cheek:

–Yes.

–Part of some human-created Trinity is hiding out in the Web?

–The Web or elsewhere. Brawne, we do not have much time lef here. I need some final answers from Vmmon.

–Yeah. Me too. But let’s keep it from waxing rhapsodic again.

–Agreed.

–Can I go first, Johnny?

Brawne watches her lover’s analog bow slightly and make a you-firs gesture and then she returns her attention to the energy megalith:

–WAo killed my father? Senator Byron Lamia? [Elements of the Core authorized it Myself included]

–Why? What did he do to you?

[He insisted on bringing Hyperion into the equation before it could be factored/predicted/absorbed]

–Why? Did he know what you just told us?

[He knew only that the Volatiles were pressing for quick extinction of humankind

He passed this knowledge to his colleague Gladstone]

–Then why haven’t you murdered her?

[Some of us have precluded that possibility/inevitability

The time is right now for the Hyperion Variable to be played]

–Who murdered Johnny’s first cybrid? Attacked his Core persona?

[I did] It was Ummon’s will which prevailed]

–Why?

[We created him]

We found it necessary to discontinue him for a while Your lover is a persona retrieved from a humankind poet now long dead Except for the Ultimate Intelligence Project no effort has been so complicated nor little understood as this resurrection.

Like your kind/ we usually destroy what we cannot understand]

Johnny raises his fists toward the megalith:

–But there is another of me. You failed! [Not failure'] You had to be destroyed so that the other might live]

–But I am not destroyed, cries Johnny.

[Yes\par You are]

The megalith seizes Johnny with a second massive pseudopod before Brawne can either react or touch her poet lover a final time. Johnny twists a second in the Al’s massive grip, and then his analog—Keats’s small but beautiful body—is torn, compacted, smashed into an unrecognizable mass which Ummon sets against his megalith flesh, absorbing the analog’s remains back into the orange-and-red depths of itself.

Brawne falls to lier knees and weeps. She wills rage… prays for a shield of anger… but feels only loss.

Ummon turns his gaze on her. The egg-chamber ovoid collapses, allowing the din and electric insanity of the megasphere to surround them.

[Go away now]

Play out the last of this act so that we may live or sleep as fate decrees]

–Fuck you! Brawne pounds the palm-platform on which she kneels, kicks and pummels the pseudoflesh beneath her. You’re a goddamned loser! You and all your fucking Al pals. And our VI can beat your Ul any day of the week!

[That is doubtful]

–We built you. Buster. And we’ll find your Core. And when we do we’ll tear your silicon guts out!

[I have no silicon guts/organs/intemal components]

–And another thing, screams Brawne, still slasliing at the megalith with her hands and nails. You’re a piss-poor storyteller. Not a tenth the poet that ]ohnny is! You couldn’t tell a straightforward tale if your stupid AI ass depended—

[Go away]

Ummon the AI megalith drops her, sending her analog tumbling and falling into the upless and downless crackling immensity of the megasphere.

Brawne is buffeted by data traffic, almost trod upon by AIs the size of Old Earth’s moon, but even as she tumbles and blows with the winds of dataflow, she senses a light in the distance, cold but beckoning, and knows that neither life nor the Shrike is finished with her.

And she is not finished with them.

Following the cold glow, Brawne Lamia heads home.

Thirty-Four

Are you all right, sir?”

I realized that I had doubled over in the chair, my elbows on my knees, my fingers curled through my hair, gripping fiercely, palms pressed hard against the sides of my head. I sat up, stared at the archivist.

“You cried out, sir. I thought that perhaps something was wrong.”

“No,” I said. I cleared my throat and tried again. “No, it’s all right.

A headache.” I looked down in confusion. Every joint in my body ached. My comlog must have malfunctioned, because it said that eight hours had elapsed since I first entered the library.

“What time is it?” I asked the archivist. “Web standard?”

He told me. Eight hours had elapsed. I rubbed my face again, and my fingers came away slick with sweat. “I must be keeping you past closing time,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It is no problem,” said the little man. “I am pleased to keep the archives open late for scholars.” He folded his hands in front of him.

“Especially today. With all of the confusion, there is little incentive to go home.”

“Confusion,” I said, forgetting everything for a moment… everything except the nightmarish dream of Brawne Lamia, the AI named Ummon, and the death of my Keats-persona counterpart. “Oh, the war. What is the news?”

The archivist shook his head:

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I smiled at the archivist. “And do you believe that some 'rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

The archivist did not smile. “Yes, sir, I do.”

I stood and moved past the vacuum-press display cases, not looking down at my handwriting on parchment nine hundred years old. “You may be right,” I said. “You may well be right.”

It was late; the parking lot was empty except for the wreck of my stolen Vikken Scenic and a single, ornate EMV sedan obviously handcrafted here on Renaissance Vector.

“Can I drop you somewhere, sir?”

I breathed in the cool night air, smelling the fish-and-spilled-oil scent of the canals. “No thanks, I’ll ’cast home.”

The archivist shook his head. “That may be difficult, sir. All of the public terminexes have been placed under martial law. There have been… riots.” The word was obviously distasteful to the little archivist, a man who seemed to value order and continuity above most things.

“Come,” he said, “I’ll give you a lift to a private farcaster.”

I squinted at him. In another era on Old Earth, he would have been the head monk in a monastery devoted to saving the few remnants of a classical past. I glanced at the old archives building behind him and realized that indeed he was just that.

“What is your name?” I asked, no longer caring if I should have known it because the other Keats cybrid had known it.

“Ewdrad B. Tynar,” he said, blinking at my extended hand and then taking it. His handshake was firm.

“I’m… Joseph Severn.” I couldn’t very well tell him that I was the technological reincarnation of the man whose literary crypt we had just left.

M. Tynar hesitated only a fraction of a second before nodding, but I realized that to a scholar such as he, the name of the artist who was with Keats at his death would be no disguise.

“What about Hyperion?” I asked.

“Hyperion? Oh, the Protectorate world where the space fleet went a few days ago. Well, I understand that there’s been some trouble recalling the necessary warships. The fighting has been very fierce there. Hyperion, I mean. Odd, I was just thinking of Keats and his unfinished masterwork. Strange how these small coincidences seem to crop up.”

“Has it been invaded? Hyperion?”

M. Tynar had stopped by his EMV, and now he laid his hand on the palmlock on the driver’s side. Doors lifted and accordioned inward.

I lowered myself into the sandalwood-and-leather smell of the passenger cell; Tynar’s car smelled like the archives, like Tynar himself, I realized, as the archivist reclined in the driver’s seat next to me.

“I don’t really know if it’s been invaded,” he said, sealing the doors and activating the vehicle with a touch and command. Under the sandalwood-and-leather scent, the cockpit had that new-car smell of fresh polymers and ozone, lubricants and energy which had seduced mankind for almost a millennium. “It’s so hard to access properly today,” he continued, “the datasphere is More overloaded than I’ve ever seen it. This afternoon I actually had to wait for a query on Robinson Jeffers!”

We lifted out and over the canal, right over a public square much like the one where I’d almost been killed earlier this day, and leveled off on a lower flyway three hundred meters above the rooftops. The city was pretty at night: most of the ancient buildings were outlined in old-fashioned glowstrips, and there were More street lamps than advertising holos. But I could see crowds surging in side streets, and there were Renaissance SDF military vehicles hovering over the main avenues and terminex squares. Tynar’s EMV was queried twice for ID, once by local traffic control and again by a human, FORCE-confident voice.

We flew on.

“The archives doesn’t have a farcaster?” I said, looking off in the distance to where fires seemed to be burning.

“No. There was no need. We have few visitors, and the scholars who do come do not mind the walk of a few blocks.”

“Where’s the private farcaster that you think I might be able to use?”

“Here,” said the archivist. We dropped out of the flyway and circled a low building, no More than thirty stories, and settled onto an extruded landing flange just where the Glennon-Height Period Deco flanges grew out of stone and plasteel. “My order keeps its residence here,” he said.

“I belong to a forgotten branch of Christianity called Catholicism.” He looked embarrassed. “But you are a scholar, M. Severn. You must know of our Church from the old days.”

“I know of it from More than books,” I said. “Is there an order of priests here?”

Tynar smiled. “Hardly priests, M. Severn. There are eight of us in the lay order of Historical and Literary Brethren. Five serve at the Reichs University. Two are art histoiians, working on the restoration of Lutzchendorf Abbey. I maintain the literary archives. The Church has found it cheaper to allow us to live here than to commute daily from Pacem.”

We entered the apartment hive—old even by Old Web standards: retrofitted lighting in corridors of real stone, hinged doors, a building that did not even challenge or welcome us as we entered. On an impulse, I said, “I’d like to ’cast to Pacem.”

The archivist looked surprised. “Tonight? This moment?”

“Why not?”

He shook his head. I realized that to this man, the hundred-mark farcaster fee would represent several weeks’ pay.

“Our building has its own portal,” he said. “This way.”

The central staircase was faded stone and corroded wrought iron with a sixty-meter drop in the center. From somewhere down a darkened corridor came the wail of an infant, followed by a man’s shouting and a woman’s crying.

“How long have you lived here, M. Tynar?”

“Seventeen local years, M. Severn. Ah… thirty-two standard, I believe. Here it is.”

The farcaster portal was as ancient as the building, its translation frame surrounded by gilded bas-relief gone green and gray.

“There are Web restrictions on travel tonight,” he said. “Pacem should be accessible. Some two hundred hours remain before the barbarians… whatever they’re called… are scheduled to reach there.

Twice the time left to Renaissance Vector.” He reached out and grasped my wrist. I could feel his tension as a slight vibration through tendon and bone. “M. Severn… do you think they will burn my archives?

Would even they destroy ten thousand years of thought?” His hand dropped away.

I was not sure who the “they” were—Ousters? Shrike Cult saboteurs?

Rioters? Gladstone and the Hegemony leaders were willing to sacrifice these “first-wave” worlds. “No,” I said, extending my hand to shake his. “I don’t believe they’ll allow the archives to be destroyed.”

M. Ewdrad B. Tynar smiled and stood back a step, embarrassed at showing emotion. He shook hands. “Good luck, M. Severn. Wherever your travels take you.”

“God bless you, M. Tynar.” I had never used that phrase before, and it shocked me that I had spoken it now. I looked down, fumbled out Gladstone’s override card, and tapped the three-digit code for Pacem.

The portal apologized, said that it was not possible at the moment, finally got it through its microcephalic processors that this was an override card, and hummed into existence.

I nodded at Tynar and stepped through, half expecting that I was making a serious mistake not going straight home to TC2.

It was night on Pacem, much darker than Renaissance Vector’s urban glow, and it was raining to boot. Raining hard with that fist-on-metal pounding violence that makes one want to curl up under thick blankets and wait for morning.

The portal was under cover in some half-roofed courtyard but outside enough for me to feel the night, the rain, and the cold. Especially the cold. Pacem’s air was half as thick as Web standard, its single habitable plateau twice as high as Renaissance V’s sea-level cities. I would have turned back then rather than step into that night and downpour, but a FORCE Marine stepped out of the shadows, multipurpose assault rifle slung but ready to swivel, and asked me for my ID.

I let him scan the card, and he snapped to attention. “Yes, sir!”

“Is this the New Vatican?”

“Yes, sir.”

I caught a glimpse of illuminated dome through the downpour. I pointed over the courtyard wall. “Is that St. Peter’s?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would Monsignor Edouard be found there?”

“Across this courtyard, left at the plaza, the low building to the left of the cathedral, sir!”

“Thank you. Corporal.”

“It’s Private, sir!”

I pulled my short cape around me, ceremonial and quite useless against such a rain as it was, and ran across the courtyard.

A human… perhaps a priest, although he wore no robe or clerical collar… opened the door to the residential hall. Another human behind a wooden desk told me that Monsignor Edouard was in residence and was awake, despite the late hour. Did I have an appointment?

No, I did not have an appointment but wished to speak to the Monsignor.

It was important.

On what topic? the man behind the desk politely but firmly asked.

He had not been impressed by my override card. I suspected that I was speaking to a bishop.

On the topic of Father Paul Dure and Father Lenar Hoyt, I told him.

The gentleman nodded, whispered into a bead mike so small that I had not noticed it on his collar, and led me into the residential hall.

This place made the old tower that M. Tynar lived in look like a sybarite’s palace. The corridor was absolutely featureless except for the rough plaster walls and even rougher wooden doors. One of the doors was open, and as we passed, I glimpsed a chamber More prison cell than sleeping room: low cot, rough blanket, wooden kneeling stool, an unadorned dresser holding a pitcher of water and simple basin; no windows, no media walls, no holo pit, no data access deck. I suspected the room wasn’t even interactive.

From somewhere there echoed voices rising in a chanting/ singing so elegant and atavistic that it made the hair on my neck tingle. Gre-gorian. We passed through a large eating area as simple as the cells had been, through a kitchen that would have been familiar to cooks in )ohn Keats’s day, down a worn stone staircase, through an ill-lighted corridor, and up another, narrower staircase. The other man left me, and I stepped into one of the most beautiful spaces I had ever seen.

Although part of me realized that the Church had moved and reconstructed St. Peter’s Basilica, down to transplanting the bones believed to be those of Peter himself to their new burial beneath the altar, another part of me felt that I had been transported back to the Rome I had first seen in mid-November of 1820: the Rome I had seen, stayed in, suffered in, and died in.

This space was More beautiful and elegant than any mile-high office spire on Tau Ceti Center could ever hope to be; St. Peter’s Basilica stretched More than six hundred feet into shadows, was four hundred and fifty feet wide where the “cross” of the transept intersected the nave, and was capped by the perfection of Michelangelo’s dome, rising almost four hundred feet above the altar. Bernini’s bronze baldachin, the ornate canopy supported by twisting, Byzantine columns, capped the main altar and gave the immense space the human dimension necessary for perspective on the intimate ceremonies conducted there. Soft lamp-and candlelight illuminated discrete areas of the basilica, gleamed on smooth travertine stone, brought gold mosaics into bold relief, and picked out the infinite detail painted, embossed, and raised on the walls, columns, cornices, and grand dome itself. Far above, the continuous flash of lightning from the storm poured thickly through yellow stained-glass windows and sent columns of violent light slanting toward Bernini’s “Throne of St. Peter.”

I paused there, just beyond the apse, afraid that my footsteps in such a space would be a desecration and that even my breathing would send echoes the length of the basilica. In a moment, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, compensated for the contrasts between the storm light above and candlelight below, and it was then I realized that there were no pews to fill the apse or long nave, no columns here beneath the dome, only two chairs set near the altar some fifty feet away. Two men sat talking in these chairs, close together, both leaning forward in apparent urgency to communicate. Lamplight and candlelight and the glow from a large mosaic of Christ on the front of the dark altar illuminated bits and fragments of the men’s faces. Both were elderly. Both were priests, the white bands of their collars glowing in the dimness.

With a start of recognition, I realized that one was Monsignor Edouard.

The other was Father Paul Dure.

They must have been alarmed at first—looking up from their whispered conversation to see this apparition, this short shadow of a man emerge from the darkness, calling their names… crying Dure’s name in loud amazement… babbling at them about pilgrimages and pilgrims, Time Tombs and the Shrike, AIs and the death of gods.

The Monsignor did not call security; neither he nor Dure fled; together they calmed this apparition, tried to glean some sense from his excited babblings, and turned this strange confrontation into sane conversation.

It was Paul Dure. Paul Dure and not some bizarre Doppelganger or android duplicate or cybrid reconstruction. I made sure of that by listening to him, quizzing him, by looking into his eyes… but mostly by shaking his hand, touching him, and knowing that it was indeed Father Paul Dure.

“You know… incredible details of my life… our time on Hyperion, at the Tombs… but who did you say you are?” Dure was saying.

It was my turn to convince him. “A cybrid reconstruction of John Keats. A twin to the persona Brawne Lamia carried with her on your pilgrimage.”

“And you were able to communicate… to know what happened to us because of that shared persona?”

I was on one knee between them and the altar. I lifted both hands in frustration. “Because of that… because of some anomaly in the megasphere. But I have dreamt your lives, heard the tales the pilgrims told, listened to Father Hoyt speak of the life and death of Paul Dure… of you.” I reached out to touch his arm through the priestly garments.

Actually being in the same space and time with one of the pilgrims made me a bit light-headed. “Then you know how I got here,” said Father Dure.

“No. I last dreamed that you were entering one of the Cave Tombs.

There was a light. I know nothing since then.”

Dure nodded. His face was More patrician and More weary than my dreams had prepared me for. “But you know the fate of the others?”

I took a breath. “Some. The poet Silenus is alive but impaled on the Shrike’s tree of thorns. I last saw Kassad attacking the Shrike with his bare hands. M. Lamia had traveled the megasphere to the TechnoCore periphery with my Keats counterpart…”

“He survived in that… Schron loop… whatever it was called?”

Dure seemed fascinated.

“No longer,” I said. “The AI personality called Ummon killed him… destroyed the persona. Brawne was returning. I don’t know if her body survives.”

Monsignor Edouard leaned toward me. “And what of the Consul and the father and child?”

“The Consul tried to return to the capital by hawking mat,” I said, “but crashed some miles north. I don’t know his fate.”

“Miles,” said Dure, as if the word brought back memories.

“I’m sorry.” I gestured at the basilica. “This place makes me think in the units of my… previous life.”

“Go on,” said Monsignor Edouard. “The father and child.”

I sat on the cool stone, exhausted, my arms and hands shaking with fatigue. “In my last dream, Sol had offered Rachel to the Shrike. It was RacheFs request. I could not see what happened next. The Tombs were opening.”

“All of them?” asked Dure.

“All I could see.”

The two men looked at one another.

“There’s more,” I said, and told them about the dialogue with L)m-mon. “Is it possible that a deity could… evolve from human consciousness like that without humanity being aware of it?”

The lightning had ceased but now the rain fell so violently that I could hear it on the great dome far above. Somewhere in the darkness, a heavy door squeaked, footsteps echoed and then receded. Votive candles in the dim recesses of the basilica flickered red light against walls and draperies.

“I taught that St. Teilhard said that it was possible,” Dure said tiredly, “but if that God is a limited being, evolving in the same way all we other limited beings have done, then no… it is not the God of Abraham and Christ.”

Monsignor Edouard nodded. “There is an ancient heresy…”

“Yes,” I said. “The Socinian Heresy. I heard Father Dure explain it to Sol Weintraub and the Consul. But what difference does it make how this… power… evolved, and whether it’s limited or not. If Ummon is telling the truth, we’re dealing with a force that uses quasars for energy sources. That’s a God who can destroy galaxies, gentlemen.”

“That would be a god who destroys galaxies,” said Dure. “Not God.”

I heard his emphasis clearly. “But if it’s not limited,” I said. “If it’s the Omega Point God of total consciousness you’ve written about, if it’s the same Trinity your church has argued for and theorized about since before Aquinus… but if one part of that Trinity has fled backward through time to here… to now… then what?”

“But fled from what?” Dure asked softly. “Teilhard’s God… the Church’s God… our God, would be the Omega Point God in whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal… what Teilhard called the En Haur and the En Avanr, are perfectly joined.

There could be nothing so threatening that any element of that deity’s personality would flee. No Antichrist, no theoretical satanic power, no 'counter-God' could possibly threaten such a universal consciousness.

What would this other god be?”

“The God of machines?” I said, so softly that even I was not sure that I had spoken aloud.

Monsignor Edouard clasped both hands in what I thought was a preparation for prayer but which turned out to be a gesture of deep thought and deeper agitation. “But Christ had doubts,” he said. “Christ sweated blood in the garden and asked that this cup should be taken from him. If there was some second sacrifice pending, something even More terrible than the crucifixion… then I could imagine the Christ-entity of the Trinity passing through time, walking through some fourth-dimensional garden of Gethsemane to gain a few hours… or years… of time to think.”

“Something More terrible than the crucifixion,” repeated Dure in a hoarse whisper.

Both Monsignor Edouard and I stared at the priest. Dure had crucified himself on a high-voltage tesia tree on Hyperion rather than submit to his cruciform parasite’s control. Through that creature’s ability to resurrect, Dure had suffered the agonies of crucifixion and electrocution many times.

“Whatever the En Hau( consciousness flees,” whispered Dure, “it is most terrible.”

Monsignor Edouard touched his friend’s shoulder. “Paul, tell this man about your voyage here.”

Dure returned from whatever distant place his memories had taken him and focused on me. “You know all of our stories… and the details of our stay in the Valley of the Tombs on Hyperion?”

“I believe so. Up to the point you disappeared.”

The priest sighed and touched his forehead with long, slightly trembling fingers. “Then perhaps,” he said, “just perhaps you can make some sense of how I got here… and what I saw along the way.”

“I saw a light in the third Cave Tomb,” said Father Dure. “I stepped inside. I confess that thoughts of suicide had been in my mind… what is left of my mind after the cruciform’s brutal replication… I will not dignify that parasite’s function with the term resurrection.

“I saw a light and thought that it was the Shrike. It was my feeling that my second meeting with that creature—the first encounter was years ago in the labyrinth beneath the Cleft, when the Shrike annointed me with my unholy cruciform—the second meeting was long overdue.

“When we had searched for Colonel Kassad on the previous day, this Cave Tomb had been short, featureless, with a blank rock wall stopping us after thirty paces. Now that wall was gone and in its place was a carving not unlike the mouth of the Shrike, stone extended in that blend of the mechanical and organic, stalactites and stalagmites as sharp as calcium carbonate teeth.

“Through the mouth there was a stone stairway descending. It was from those depths that the light emanated, glowing pale white one moment, dark red the next. There was no noise except for the sigh of wind, as if the rock there were breathing.

“I am no Dante. I sought no Beatrice. My brief bout of courage– although fatalism is a More accurate term—had evaporated with the loss of daylight. I turned and almost ran the thirty paces to the opening of the cave.

“There was no opening. The passage merely ended. I had heard no sound of cave-in or avalanche, and besides, the rock where the entrance should have been looked as ancient and undisturbed as the rest of that cavern. For half an hour I searched for an alternate exit, finding none, refusing to return to the staircase, finally sitting for some hours where the Cave Tomb entrance once had been. Another Shrike trick. Another cheap theatrical stunt by this perverse planet. Hyperion’s idea of a joke.

Ha ha.

“After several hours of sitting there in semidarkness, watching the light at the far end of the cave pulse soundlessly, I realized that the Shrike was not going to come to me here. The entrance would not magically reappear. I had the choice of sitting there until I died of starvation—or thirst, More likely, since I was already dehydrated—or of descending the damned staircase.

“I descended.

“Years ago, literally lifetimes ago, when I visited the Bikura near the Cleft on the Pinion Plateau, the labyrinth where I had encountered the Shrike had been three kilometers below the canyon wall. That was close to the surface; most of the labyrinths on most of the labyrinthine worlds are at least ten klicks beneath the crust. I had no doubt that this endless staircase… a steep and twisting spiral of stone stairs wide enough for ten priests to descend to hell abreast… would end up in the labyrinth.

The Shrike had first cursed me with immortality there. If the creature or the power that drove it had any sense of irony at all, it would be fitting that both my immortality and mortal life ended there.

“The staircase twisted downward; the light grew brighter… now a roseate glow; ten minutes later, a heavy red; half an hour lower than that, a flickering crimson. It was far too Dante-esque and cheap fundamentalist staging for my tastes. I almost laughed aloud at the thought of a little devil appearing, tail and trident and cloven hooves intact, pencil-thin mustache twitching.

“But I did not laugh when I reached depths where the cause of the light became evident: cruciforms, hundreds and then thousands of them, small at first, clinging to the rough walls of the staircase like rough-hewn crosses left by some subterranean conquistadors, then larger ones and More of them until they almost overlapped, coral-pink, raw-flesh flushed, blood-red bioluminescent.

“It made me ill. It was like entering a shaft lined with bloated, pulsing leeches, although these were worse. I have seen the medscanner sonic and k-cross imaging of myself with only one of these things on me: excess ganglia infiltrating my flesh and organs like gray fibers, sheaths of twitching filaments, clusters ofnematodes like terrible tumors which will not grant even the mercy of death. Now I had (we on me: Lenar Hoyt’s and my own. I prayed that I would die rather than suffer another.

“I continued lower. The walls pulsed with heat as well as light, whether from the depths or the crowding of the thousands of cruciforms, I do not know. Eventually I reached the lowest step, the staircase ended, I turned a final twisting of stone, and was there.

“The labyrinth. It stretched away as I had seen it in countless holos and once in person: smooth tunneled, thirty meters to a side, carved out of Hyperion’s crust More than three-quarters of a million years ago, crossing and crisscrossing the planet like catacombs planned by some insane engineer. Labyrinths can be found on nine worlds, five in the Web, the rest, like this one, in the Outback: all are identical, all were excavated at the same time in the past, none surrender any clues as to the reason for their existence. Legends abound about the Labyrinth Builders, but the mythical engineers left no artifacts, no hints of their methods or alien makeup, and none of the theories about the labyrinths give a sensible reason for what must have been one of the largest engineering projects the galaxy has ever seen.

“All of the labyrinths are empty. Remotes have explored millions of kilometers of corridors cut from stone, and except where hme and cave-in have altered the original catacombs, the labyrinths are featureless and empty.

“But not where I now stood.

“Cruciforms lighted a scene from Hieronymus Bosch as I gazed down an endless corridor, endless but not empty… no, not empty.

“At first I thought they were crowds of living people, a river of heads and shoulders and arms, stretching on for the kilometers I could see, the current of humanity broken here and there by the presence of parked vehicles all of the same rust-red color. As I stepped forward, approaching the wall of jam-packed humanity less than twenty meters from me, I realized that they were corpses. Tens, hundreds of thousands of human corpses stretching as far down the corridor as I could see; some sprawled on the stone floor, some crushed against walls, but most buoyed up by the pressure of other corpses so tightly were they jammed in this particular avenue of the labyrinth.

“There was a path; cutting its way through the bodies as if some machine with blades had mulched its way through. I followed it– careful not to touch an outspread arm or emaciated ankle.

“The bodies were human, still clothed in most cases, and mummified over eons of slow decomposing in this bacteria-free crypt. Skin and flesh had been tanned, stretched, and torn like rotten cheesecloth until it covered nothing but bone, and frequently not even that. Hair remained as tendrils of dusty tar, stiff as varnished fiberplastic. Blackness stared out from under opened eyelids, between teeth. Their clothing which must once have been a myriad of colors now was tan or gray or black, brittle as garments sculpted from thin stone. Time-melted plastic lumps on their wrists and necks might have been comlogs or their equivalent.

“The large vehicles might once have been EMVs but now were heaps of pure rust. A hundred meters in, I stumbled, and rather than fall off the meter-wide path into the field of bodies, I steadied myself on a tall machine all curves and clouded blisters. The pile of rust collapsed inward on itself.

“I wandered, Virgil-less, following the terrible path gnawed out of decayed human flesh, wondering why I was being shown all this, what it meant. After an indeterminable time of walking, staggering between piles of discarded humanity, I came to an intersection of tunnels; all three corridors ahead were filled with bodies. The narrow path continued in the labyrinth to my left. I followed it.

“Hours later, perhaps longer, I stopped and sat on the narrow stone walk which wound among the the horror. If there were tens of thousands of corpses in this small stretch of tunnel, Hyperion’s labyrinth must contain billions. More. The nine labyrinthine worlds together must be a crypt for trillions.

“I had no idea why I was being shown this ultimate Dachau of the soul. Near where I sat, the mummified corpse of a man still sheltered a woman’s corpse with the curve of his bone-bare arm. In her arms was a small bundle with short black hair. I turned away and wept.

“As an archaeologist I had excavated victims of execution, fire, flood, earthquake, and volcano. Such family scenes were not new to me; they were the sine qua non of history. But somehow this was much more terrible. Perhaps it was the numbers; the dead in their holocaust millions.

Perhaps it was the soul-stealing glow of the cruciforms which lined the tunnels like thousands of blasphemous bad jokes. Perhaps it was the sad crying of the wind moving through endless corridors of stone.

“My life and teachings and sufferings and small victories and countless defeats had brought me here—past faith, past caring, past simple. Mil-tonic defiance. I had the sense that these bodies had been here half a million years or More, but that the people themselves were from our time or, worse yet, our future. I lowered my face to my hands and wept.

“No scraping or actual noise warned me, but something, something, a movement of air perhaps… I looked up and the Shrike was there, not two meters distant. Not on the path but in among the bodies: a sculpture honoring the architect of all this carnage.

“I got to my feet. I would not sit or kneel before this abomination.

“The Shrike moved toward me, gliding More than walking, sliding as if it were on frictionless rails. The blood light of the cruciforms spilled over its quicksilver carapace. Its eternal, impossible grin—steel stalactites, stalagmites.

“I felt no violence toward the thing. Only sadness and a terrible pity.

Not for the Shrike—whatever the hell it was—but for all the victims who, alone and ungirded by even the flimsiest of faiths, have had to face the terror-in-the-night which that thing embodies.

“For the first time, I noticed that up close, less than a meter away, there was a smell around the Shrike—a stench of rancid oil, overheated bearings, and dried blood. The flames in its eyes pulsed in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall of the cruciform glow.

“I did not believe years ago that this creature was supernatural, some manifestation of good or evil, merely an aberration of the universe’s unfathomable and seemingly senseless unfoldings: a terrible joke of evolution. St. Teilhard’s worst nightmare. But still a thing, obeying natural laws, no matter how twisted, and subject to some rules of the universe somewhere, somewhen.

“The Shrike lifted its arms toward me, around me. The blades on its four wrists were much longer than my own hands; the blade on its chest, longer than my forearm. I stared up into its eyes as one pair of its razorwire and steel-spring arms surrounded me while the other pair came slowly around, filling the small space between us.

“Fingerblades uncurled. I flinched but did not step back as those blades lunged, sank into my chest with a pain like cold fire, like surgical lasers slicing nerves.

“It stepped back, holding something red and reddened further with my blood. I staggered, half expecting to see my heart in the monster’s hands: the final irony of a dead man blinking in surprise at his own heart in the seconds before blood drains from a disbelieving brain.

“But it was not my heart. The Shrike held the cruciform I had carried on my chest, my cruciform, that parasitic depository of my slow-to-die DNA. I staggered again, almost fell, touched my chest. My fingers came away coated with blood but not with the arterial surges that such crude surgery deserved; the wound was healing even while I watched. I knew that the cruciform had sent tubers and filaments throughout my body. I knew that no surgical laser had been able to separate those deadly vines from Father Hoyt’s body—nor from mine. But I felt the contagion healing, the internal fibers drying and fading to the faintest hint of internal scar tissue.

“I still had Hoyt’s cruciform. But that was different. When I died, Lenar Hoyt would rise from this re-formed flesh. I would die. There would be no More poor duplicates of Paul Dure, duller and less vital with each artificial generation.

“The Shrike had granted me death without killing me.

“The thing cast the cooling cruciform into the heaps of bodies and took my upper arm in his hand with an effortless cutting of three layers of fabric, an instant flow of blood from my biceps at the slightest contact with those scalpels.

“He led the way through bodies toward the wall. I followed, trying not to step on corpses, but in my haste not to have my arm severed, I was not always successful. Bodies crumpled to dust. One received my footprint in the collapsing cavity of its chest.

“Then we were at the wall, at a section suddenly cleared of cruciforms, and I realized that it was some energy-shielded opening… the wrong size and shape to be a standard farcaster portal, but similar in its opaque buzz of energy. Anything to get me out of this storage place of death.

“The Shrike shoved me through.”

“Zero gravity. A maze of shattered bulkheads, tangles of wiring floating like some giant creature’s entrails, red lights flashing—for a second, I thought there were cruciforms here too but then realized that these were emergency lights in a dying spacecraft—then recoiling, tumbling in unaccustomed zero-g as More corpses tumbled by: not mummies here, but fresh dead, newly killed, mouths agape, eyes distended, lungs exploded, trailing clouds of gore as they simulated life in their slow, necrotic response to each random current of air and surge of the shattered FORCE spacecraft.

“It was a FORCE spacecraft, I was sure. I saw the FORCE:space uniforms on the young corpses. I saw the military-jargon lettering on the bulkheads and blown hatches, the useless instructions on the worse-than-useless emergency lockers with their skinsuits and still-uninnated pressure balls folded away on shelves. Whatever had destroyed this ship had done so with the suddenness of a plague in the night.

“The Shrike appeared next to me.

“The Shrike… in space! Free ofHyperion and the bonds of the time tides! There were farcasters on many of these ships!

“There was a farcaster portal not five meters down the corridor from me. One body tumbled toward it, the young man’s right arm passing through the opaque field as if he were testing the water of the world on the other side. Air was screaming out of this shaft in a rising whine.

Co.' I urged the corpse, but the pressure differential blew him away from the portal, his arm surprisingly intact, recovered, although his face was an anatomist’s mask.

“I turned toward the Shrike, the movement making me spin half a revolution in the other direction.

“The Shrike lifted me, blades tearing skin, and passed me down the corridor toward the farcaster. I could not have changed trajectories if I had wanted to. In the seconds before I passed through the humming, sputtering portal, I imagined vacuum on the other side, drops from great heights, explosive decompression, or—worst of all—a return to the labyrinth.

“Instead, I tumbled half a meter to a marble floor. Here, not two hundred meters from this spot, in the private chambers of Pope Urban XVI—who, it so happens, had died of old age not three hours before I fell through his private farcaster. The “Pope’s Door” the New Vatican calls it. I felt the pain-punishment from being so far from Hyperion– so far from the source of the cruciforms—but pain is an old ally now and no longer holds sway over me.

“I found Edouard. He was kind enough to listen for hours as I told a story no Jesuit has ever had to confess. He was even kinder to believe me. Now you have heard it. That is my story.”

The storm had passed. The three of us sat by candlelight beneath the dome of St. Peter’s and said nothing at all for several moments.

“The Shrike has access to the Web,” I said at last.

Dure’s gaze was level. “Yes.”

“It must have been some ship in Hyperion space…”

“So it would seem.”

“Then we might be able to get back there. Use the… the Pope’s Door?… to return to Hyperion space.”

Monsignor Edouard raised an eyebrow. “You wish to do this, M.

Severn?”

I chewed on a knuckle. “It’s something I’ve considered.”

“Why?” the Monsignor asked softly. “Your counterpart, the cybrid personality Brawne Lamia carried on her pilgrimage, found only death there.”

I shook my head, as if trying to clear the jumble of my thoughts through that simple gesture. “I’m a part of this. I just don’t know what part to play… or where to play it.”

Paul Dure laughed without humor. “All of us have known that feeling. It is like some poor playwright’s treatise on predestination.

Whatever happened to free will?”

The Monsignor glanced sharply at his friend. “Paul, all of the pilgrims… you yourself… have been confronted with choices you made with your own will. Great powers may be shaping the general turn of events, but human personalities still determine their own fate.”

Dure sighed. “Perhaps so, Edouard. I do not know. I am very tired.”

“If Ummon’s story is true,” I said. “If the third part of this human deity Hed to our time, where and who do you think it is? There are More than a hundred billion human beings in the Web.”

Father Dure smiled. It was a gentle smile, free of irony. “Have you considered that it might be yourself, M. Severn?”

The question struck me like a slap. “It can’t be,” I said. “I’m not even… not even fully human. My consciousness floats somewhere in the matrix of the Core. My body was reconstituted from remnants of John Keats’s DNA and biofactured like an android’s. Memories were implanted. The end of my life… my ’recovery' from consumption… were all simulated on a world built for that purpose.”

Dure was still smiling. “So? Does any of this preclude you from being this Empathy entity?”

“I don’t feel like a part of some god,” I said sharply. “I don’t remember anything, understand anything, or know what to do next.”

Monsignor Edouard touched my v.'rist. “Are we so sure that Christ always knew what to do next? He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t even know what has to be done.”

The Monsignor’s voice was quiet. “I believe that what Paul is saying is that if the spirit creature you say is hiding here in our time, it may well not know its own identity.”

“That’s insane,” I said.

Dure nodded. “Much of the events on and around Hyperion have seemed insane. Insanity seems to be spreading.”

I looked closely at the Jesuit. “You would be a good candidate for the deity,” I said. “You’ve lived a life of prayer, contemplating theologies, and honoring science as an archaeologist. Plus, you’ve already been crucified.”

Dure’s smile was gone. “Do you hear what we’re saying? Do you hear the blasphemy in what we’re saying? I’m no candidate for the Godhead, Severn. I’ve betrayed my Churchmy science, and now, by disappearing, my friends on the pilgrimage. Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.”

“Enough,” commanded Monsignor Edouard. “If the identity of this Empathy part of some future, manufactured deity is the mystery, think of the candidates just in the immediate troupe of your little Passion Play, M. Severn. The CEO, M. Gladstone, carrying the weight of the Hegemony on her shoulders. The other members of the pilgrimage… M. Silenus who, according to what you told Paul, even now suffers on the Shrike’s tree for his poetry. M. Lamia, who has risked and lost so much for love. M. Weintraub, who has suffered Abraham’s dilemma… even his daughter, who has returned to the innocence of childhood. The Consul, who—”

“The Consul seems More Judas than Christ,” I said. “He betrayed both the Hegemony and the Ousters, who thought he was working for them.”

“From what Paul tells me,” said the Monsignor, “the Consul was true to his convictions, faithful to the memory of his grandmother Siri.”

The older man smiled. “Plus, there are a hundred billion other players in this play. God did not choose Herod or Pontius Pilate or Caesar

Augustus as His instrument. He chose the unknown son of an unknown carpenter in one of the least important stretches of the Roman Empire.”

“All right,” I said, standing and pacing before the glowing mosaic below the altar. “What do we do now? Father Dure, you need to come with me to see Gladstone. She knows about your pilgrimage. Perhaps your story can help avert some of the bloodbath which seems so imminent.”

Dure stood also, folding his arms and staring toward the dome as if the darkness high above held some instructions for him. “I’ve thought of that,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s my first obligation. I need to go to God’s Grove to speak to their equivalent of the Pope—the True Voice of the Worldtree.”

I stopped pacing. “God’s Grove? What does that have to do with anything?”

“I feel that the Templars have been the key to some missing element in this painful charade. Now you say that Het Masteen is dead. Perhaps the True Voice can explain to us what they had planned for this pilgrimage… Masteen’s tale, as it were. He was, after all, the only one of the seven original pilgrims who did not tell the story of why he had come to Hyperion.”

I paced again, More rapidly now, trying to keep anger in check. “My God, Dure. We don’t have time for such idle curiosity. It’s only"—I consulted my implant—"an hour and a half until the Ouster invasion Swann enters the God’s Grove system. It must be bedlam there.”

“Perhaps,” said the Jesuit, “but I still will go there first. Then I will speak to Gladstone. It may be that she will authorize my return to Hyperion.”

I grunted, doubting that the CEO would ever let such a valuable informant return to harm’s way. “Let’s get going,” I said, and turned to find my way out.

“A moment,” said Dure. “You said a while ago that you were sometimes able to… to ‘dream’… about the pilgrims while you were still awake. A sort of trance state, is it?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, M. Severn, please dream about them now.”

I stared in amazement. “Here? Now?”

Dure gestured toward his chair. “Please. I wish to know the fate of my friends. Also, the information might be most valuable in our confrontation with the True Voice and M. Gladstone.”

I shook my head but took the seat he offered. “It might not work,”

I said.

“Then we have lost nothing,” said Dure.

I nodded, closed my eyes, and sat back in the uncomfortable chair.

I was all too aware of the other two men watching me, of the faint smell of incense and rain, of the echoing space surrounding us. I was sure that this would never work; the landscape of my dreams was not so close that I could summon it merely by closing my eyes.

The feeling of being watched faded, the smells grew distant, and the sense of space expanded a thousandfold as I returned to Hyperion.

Thirty-Five

Confusion.

Three hundred spacecraft retreating in Hyperion space under heavy fire, falling back from the Swarm like men fighting bees.

Madness near the military farcaster portals, traffic control overloaded, ships backed up like EMVs in TC’s airborne gridlock, vulnerable as partridges to the roaming Ouster assault ships.

Madness at the exit points: FORCE spacecraft lined up like sheep in a narrow pen as they cycle from the Madhya cutoff portal to the outgoing ’caster. Ships spinning down into Hebron space, a few translating to Heaven’s Gate, God’s Grove, Mare Infinitus, Asquith. Only hours left now before the Swarms enter Web systems.

Confusion as hundreds of millions, of refugees farcast away from the threatened worlds, stepping into cities and relocation centers gone half mad with the aimless excitement of incipient war. Confusion as unthreatened Web worlds ignite with riots: three Hives on Lusus—almost seventy million citizens—quarantined due to Shrike Cult riots, thirty-level malls looted, apartment monoliths overrun by mobs, fusion centers blown, farcaster terminexes under attack. The Home Rule Council appeals to the Hegemony; the Hegemony declares martial law and sends FORCE: Marines to seal the hives.

Secessionist riots on New Earth and Maui-Covenant. Terrorist attacks from Clennon-Height royalists—quiet now for three-quarters of a century—on Thalia, Armaghast, Nordholm, and Lee Three. More Shrike Cult riots on Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna and Renaissance Vector.

FORCE Command on Olympus transfers combat battalions from transports returning from Hyperion to Web worlds. Demolition squads assigned to torchships in threatened systems report farcaster singularity spheres wired for destruction, awaiting only the fatlined order from j TC2.

“There is a better way,” Councilor Albedo tells Gladstone and the War Council.

The CEO turns toward the ambassador from the TechnoCore.

“There is a weapon that will eliminate the Ousters without harming Hegemony property. Or Ouster property, for that matter.”

General Morpurgo glowers. “You’re talking about the bomb equivalent of a deathwand,” he says. “It won’t work. FORCE researchers have shown that it propagates indefinitely. Besides being dishonorable, against the New Bushido Code, it would wipe out planetary populations as well as the invaders.”

“Not at all,” says Albedo. “If Hegemony citizens are properly shielded, there need be no casualties whatsoever. As you know, death-wands can be calibrated for specific cerebral wavelengths. So could a bomb based on the same principle. Livestock, wild animals, even other anthropoid species would not be affected.”

General Van Zeidt of FORCE: Marines stands. “But there’s no way to shield a population! Our testing showed that death-bomb heavy neutrinos would penetrate solid rock or metal to a depth of six kilometers.

No one has shelters like that!”

The projection of Councilor Albedo folds his hands on the table.

“We have nine worlds with shelters which would hold billions,” he says softly.

Gladstone nods. “The labyrinthine worlds,” she whispers. “But certainly such a transfer of population would be impossible.”

“No,” says Albedo. “Now that you have joined Hyperion to the Protectorate, each of the labyrinthine worlds has farcaster capability.

The Core can make arrangements to transfer populations directly to these underground shelters.”

There is babble around the long table, but Meina Gladstone’s intense gaze never leaves Albedo’s face. She beckons for silence and receives it. “Tell us More,” she says. “We are interested.”

The Consul sits in the spotty shade of a low neville tree and waits to die. His hands are tied behind him with a twist of fiberplastic. His clothes are torn to rags and are still damp; the moisture on his face is partially from the river but mostly from perspiration.

The two men who stand over him are finishing their inspection of his duffel bag. “Shit,” says the first man, “there bey nothing worth anything here-in except this fucking antique pistol.” He thrusts Brawne Lamia’s father’s weapon in his belt.

“It bey too bad we couldn’t get that goddamn flying carpet,” says the second man.

“It bcyn’t flying too well there toward the end!” says the first man, and both of them laugh.

The Consul squints at the two massive figures, their armored bodies made silhouettes by the lowering sun. From their dialect he assumes them to be indigenies; from their appearance—bits of outmoded FORCE body armor, heavy multipurpose assault rifles, tatters of what once had been camou-polymer cloth—he guesses them to be deserters from some Hyperion Self-defense Force unit.

From their behavior toward him, he is sure that they are going to kill him.

At first, stunned from the fall into the Hoolie River, still tangled in the ropes connecting him to his duffel bag and the useless hawking mat, he thought them to be his saviors. The Consul had hit the water hard, stayed under for a much longer time than he would have imagined possible without drowning, and surfaced only to be pushed under by a strong current and then pulled under again by the tangle of ropes and mat. It had been a valiant but losing battle, and he was still ten meters from the shallows when one of the men emerging from the neville and thorn tree forest had thrown the Consul a line. Then they had beaten him, robbed him, tied him, and—judging from their matter-of-fact comments—were now preparing to cut his throat and leave him for the harbinger birds.

The taller of the two men, his hair a mass of oiled spikes, squats in front of the Consul and pulls a ceramic zero-edge knife from its scabbard.

“Any last words. Pops?”

The Consul licks his lips. He has seen a thousand movies and holies where this was the point at which the hero twisted his opponent’s legs out from under him, kicked the other one into submission, seized a weapon and dispatched both—firing with his hands still tied—and then went on with his adventures. But the Consul feels like no hero: he is exhausted and middle-aged and hurt from his fall in the river. Each of these men is leaner, stronger, faster, and obviously meaner than the Consul ever has been. He has seen violence—even committed violence once—but his life and training have been devoted to the tense but quiet paths of diplomacy.

The Consul licks his lips again and says, “I can pay you.”

The crouching man smiles and moves the zero-edge blade back and forth five centimeters in front of the Consul’s eyes. “With what, Pops?

We’ve got your universal card, and it bey worth shit out here.”

“Gold,” says the Consul, knowing that this is the only syllable that has held its power over the ages.

The crouching man does not react—there is a sick light in his eyes as he watches the blade—but the other man steps forward and sets a heavy hand on his partner’s shoulder. “What bey you talkin’ about, man? Wherefore you got gold?”

“My ship,” says the Consul. “The Benares.”

The crouching man raises the blade next to his own cheek. “He bey lyin’, Chez. The Benares bey that old flat-bottomed manta-pulled barge belongin’ to the blue-skins we finished trey day ago.”

The Consul closes his eyes for a second, feeling the nausea in him but not surrendering to it. A. Bcttik and the other android crewmen had left the Benares in one of the ship’s launches less than a week earlier, heading downstream toward “freedom.” Evidently they had found something else. “A. Bettik,” he says. “The crew captain. He didn’t mention the gold?”

The man with the knife grins. “He make lots a noise, but he don’t speak much. He say the boat way and the shit gone up to Edge. Too fuckin’ far for a barge with no mantas, me-think.”

“Shut up, Obem.” The other man crouches in front of the Consul.

“Why would you have gold on that old barge, man?”

The Consul raises his face. “Don’t you recognize me? I was Hegemony Consul to Hyperion for years.”

“Hey, don’t bey fuckin’ with us…” begins the man with the knife, but the other interrupts. “Yeah, man, I remember your face on the camp holie when I bey kid-like. So why you carryin’ gold upriver now when the sky bey fallin'. Hegemony-man?”

“We were heading for the shelter… Chronos Keep,” says the Consul, trying not to sound too eager but at the same time grateful for each second he is allowed to live. Why? part of him thinks. You were tired of living. Ready to die. Not like this. Not while Sol and Rachel and the others need his help.

“Several of Hypcrion’s most wealthy citizens,” he says. “The evacuation authorities wouldn’t allow them to transfer the bullion, so I agreed to help them store it in vaults in Chronos Keep, the old castle north of the Bridle Range. For a commission.”

“You bey fuckin’ crazy!” sneers the man with the knife. “Everything north of here bey Shrike country now.”

The Consul lowers his head. There is no need to simulate the fatigue and sense of defeat he projects. “So we discovered. The android crew deserted last week. Several of the passengers were killed by the Shrike.

I was coming downriver by myself.”

“This bey shit,” says the man with the knife. His eyes have that sick, distracted look again.

“Just a second,” says his partner. He slaps the Consul once, hard.

“So where bey this so-called gold ship, old man?”

The Consul tastes blood. “Upriver. Not on the river, but hidden in one of the tributaries.”

“Yeah,” says the knife-man, setting the zero-edge blade flat against the side of the Consul’s neck. He will not need to slash in order to sever the Consul’s throat, merely rotate the blade. “I say this bey shit.

And I say we bey wastin’ time.”

“Just a second,” snaps the other man. “How far upriver?”

The Consul thinks of the tributaries he has passed in the last few hours. It is late. The sun almost touches the line of a copse of trees to the west. “Just above Karia Locks,” he says.

“So why you bey flyin’ down on that toy-like rather than bargin’ it?”

“Trying to get help,” says the Consul. The adrenaline has faded, and now he feels a terminal exhaustion very close to despair. “There were too many… too many bandits along the shore. The barge seemed too risky. The hawking mat was… safer.”

The man called Chez laughs. “Put the knife away, Obem. We bey walkin’ up it a bit, hey?”

Obcm leaps to his feet. The knife is still in his hand but now the blade—and the anger—are aimed toward his partner. “Bey you fucked, man, hey? Bey your head bey full of shit between ears, hey? He bey lyin’ to keep from deathwards flyin'.”

Chez neither blinks nor steps back. “Sure, he bey maybe lyin'. Don’t matter, hey? The Locks they bey less'n half-day walk we bey makin’ anyway, hey? No boat, no gold, you cut his throat, hey? Only slowwise, ankles-up like. They bey gold, you still gets the job, bladewise, only bey rich man now, hey?”

Obem teeters a second between rage and reason, turns to the side, and swings the ceramic zero-edge blade at a neville tree eight centimeters thick through the trunk. He has time to turn back and crouch in front of the Consul before gravity informs the tree that it has been severed and the neville falls back toward the river’s edge with a crash of branches.

Obem grabs the Consul’s still-damp shirtfront. “OK, we see what bey there, Hegemony-man. Talk, run, trip, stumble, and I bey slicin’ fingers and ears just for practice, hey?”

The Consul staggers to his feet, and the three of them move back into the cover of brush and low trees, the Consul three meters behind Chez and the same distance in front of Obem, trudging back the way he had come, moving away from the city and the ship and any chance of saving Sol and Rachel.

An hour passes. The Consul can think of no clever scheme once the tributaries are reached, the barge not discovered. Several times Chez waves them into silence and hiding, once at the sound of gossamers fluttering in branches, again at a disturbance across the river, but there is no sign of other human beings. No sign of help. The Consul remembers the burned-out buildings along the river, the empty huts and vacant wharves. Fear of the Shrike, fear of being left behind to the Ousters in the evacuation, and months of plundering by rogue elements of the SDF have turned this area into a no-man’s-land. The Consul concocts excuses and extensions, then discards them. His only hope is that they will walk close to the Locks where he can make a leap for the deep and rapid water there, try to stay afloat with his hands tied behind him until he is hidden in the maze of small islands below that point.

Except that he is too tired to swim, even if his arms were free. And the weapons the two men carry would target him easily, even if he had a ten-minute start among the snags and isles. The Consul is too tired to be clever, ;oo old to be brave. He thinks about his wife and son, dead these many years now, killed in the bombing of Bressia by men with no More honor than these two creatures. The Consul is only sorry that he has broken his word to help the other pilgrims. Sorry about that… and that he will not see how it all comes out.

Obem makes a spitting noise behind him. “Shit with this, Chez, hey? What say we sit him and slit him and help him talk a bit, hey?

Then we go lonewise to the barge, if barge they bey?”

Chez turns, rubs sweat out of his eyes, frowns at the Consul spec ulatively, and says, “Hey, yeah, I think maybe timewise and quietwise you bey right, goyo, but leave it talkable toward the end, hey?”

“Sure,” grins Obem, slinging his weapon and extracting his zero-edge.

“DO NOT MOVE!” booms a voice from above. The Consul drops to his knees and the ex-SDF bandits unsling weapons with practiced swiftness. There is a rush, a roar, a whipping of branches and dust about them, the Consul looks up in time to see a rippling of the cloud-covered evening sky, lower than the clouds, a sense of mass directly above, descending, and then Chez is lifting his flechette rifle and Obem is targeting his launcher and then all three are falling, pitching over, not like soldiers shot, not like recoil elements in some ballistic equation, but dropping like the tree Obem had felled earlier on.

The Consul lands face first in dust and gravel and lies there unblinking, unable to blink.

Stun weapon he thinks through synapses gone sluggish as old oil. A localized cyclone erupts as something large and invisible lands between the three bodies in the dust and the river’s edge. The Consul hears a hatch whine open and the internal tick of repellor turbines dropping below lift-critical. He still cannot blink, much less lift his head, and his vision is limited to several pebbles, a dunescape of sand, a small grass forest, and a single architect ant, huge at this distance, that seems to be taking a sudden interest in the Consul’s moist but unblinking eye.

The ant turns to hurry the half meter between itself and its moist prize, and the Consul thinks Hurry at the unhurried footsteps behind him.

Hands under his arms, grunting, a familiar but strained voice saying, “Damn, you’ve put on weight.”

The Consul’s heels drag in the dirt, bouncing over the randomly twitching fingers of Chez… or perhaps it is Obem… the Consul cannot turn his head to see their faces. Nor can he see his rescuer until he is lifted—with a grunted litany of soft curses near his ear—through the starboard blister-hatch of the decamouflaged skimmer, into the long, soft leather of the reclining passenger seat.

Governor-General Theo Lane appears in the Consul’s field of vision, boyish-looking but slightly demonic-looking too as the hatch lowers and the red interior lamps light his face. The younger man leans over to secure crashweb snaps across the Consul’s chest. “I’m sorry I had to stun you along with those other two.” Theo sits back, snaps his own web in place, and twitches the omni controller. The Consul feels the skimmer shiver and then lift off, hovering a second before spinning left like a plate on frictionless bearings. Acceleration pushes the Consul into his seat.

“I didn’t have much choice,” says Theo over the soft internal skimmer noises. “The only weapon these things are allowed to carry are the riot-control stunners, and the easiest way was to drop all three of you at lowest setting and get you out of there fast.” Theo pushes his archaic glasses higher on his nose with a familiar twitch of one ringer and turns to grin at the Consul. “Old mercenary proverb—‘Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.’”

The Consul manages to move his tongue enough to make a sound and to drool a bit on his cheek and the seat leather.

“Relax a minute,” says Theo, returning his attention to the instruments and view outside. “Two or three minutes and you should be talking all right. I’m staying low, flying slow, so it’s about a ten-minute ride back to Keats.” Theo glances toward his passenger. “You’re lucky, sir. You must have been dehydrated. Those other two wet their pants when they went down. Humane weapon, the stunner, but embarrassing if you don’t have a change of pants around.”

The Consul tries to express his opinion of this “humane” weapon.

“Another couple of minutes, sir,” says Governor-General Theo Lane, reaching over to dab at the Consul’s cheek with a handkerchief. “I should warn you, it’s a mite uncomfortable when the stun begins to wear off.”

At that moment, someone inserts several thousand pins and needles in the Consul’s body.

“How the hell did you find me?” asks the Consul. They are a few kilometers above the city, still flying over the Hoolie River. He is able to sit up, and his words are More or less intelligible, but the Consul is glad that he has several More minutes before he will have to stand or walk.

“What, sir?”

“I said, how did you find me? How could you possibly know that I had come back down the Hoolie?”

“CEO Gladstone fatlined me. Eyes-only on the old consulate onetime pad.”

“Gladstone?” The Consul is shaking his hands, trying to agitate feeling back into fingers as useful as rubber sausages. “How the hell could Gladstone possibly know that I was in trouble on the Hollie River? I

left Grandmother Siri’s comlog receiver back in the valley so I could call the other pilgrims when I got to the ship. How could Gladstone know?”

“I don’t know, sir, but she specified your location and that you were in trouble. She even said you’d been flying a hawking mat that went down.”

The Consul shakes his head. “This lady has resources we hadn’t dreamt of, Theo.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Consul glances at his friend. Theo Lane had been Governor—

General of the new Protectorate world of Hyperion for over a local year now, but old habits died hard and the “sir” came from the seven years Theo had served as Vice-Consul and principal aide during the Consul’s years. The last time he had seen the young man—not so young now, the Consul realizes: responsibility has brought lines and wrinkles to that young face—Theo had been furious that the Consul would not take over the governor-generalship. That had been a little More than a week ago. Ages and eons ago.

“By the way,” says the Consul, enunciating each word carefully, “thank you, Theo.”

The Governor-General nods, apparently lost in thought. He does not ask about what the Consul has seen north of the mountains, nor the fate of the other pilgrims. Beneath them, the Hoolie widens and winds toward the capital of Keats. Far back on either side, low bluffs rise, their granite slabs glowing softly in the evening light. Stands ofeverblues shimmer in the breeze.

“Theo, how did you possibly have time to come for me yourself?

The situation on Hyperion must be pure madness.”

“It is.” Theo ordered the autopilot to take over as he turned to look at the Consul. “It’s a matter of hours… perhaps minutes… before the Ousters actually invade.”

The Consul blinked. “Invade? You mean land?”

“Exactly.”

“But the Hegemony fleet—”

“Is in total chaos. They were barely holding their own against the Swarm before the Web was invaded.”

“The Web!”

“Entire systems falling. Others threatened. FORCE has ordered the fleet back through their military farcasters, but evidently the ships in-system have found it hard to disengage. No one gives me details, but it’s obvious that the Ousters have free rein everywhere except for the defensive perimeter FORCE has put up around the singularity spheres and the portals.”

“The spaceport?” The Consul thinks of his beautiful ship lying as glowing wreckage.

“It hasn’t been attacked yet, but FORCE has been pulling its drop-ships and supply craft out as quickly as they can. They’ve left a skeleton force of Marines behind.”

“What about the evacuation?”

Theo laughed. It was the most bitter sound the Consul had ever heard from the young man. “The evacuation will consist of whatever consulate people and Hegemony VIPs can fit on the last dropship out.”

“They’ve given up trying to save the people of Hyperion?”

“Sir, they can’t save their own people. Word trickling down through the ambassadors’ fatline says that Gladstone has decided to let the threatened Web worlds fall so that FORCE can regroup, have a couple of years to create defenses while the Swarms accrue time-debt.”

“My God,” whispers the Consul. He had worked most of his life to represent the Hegemony, all the while plotting its downfall in order to avenge his grandmother… his grandmother’s way of life. But now the thought of it actually happening…

“What about the Shrike?” he asks suddenly, seeing the low white buildings of Keats a few kilometers ahead. Sunlight touches the hills and river like a final benediction before darkness.

Theo shakes his head. “There are still reports, but the Ousters have taken over as the primary source of panic.”

“But it’s not in the Web? The Shrike, I mean.”

The Governor-General gives the Consul a sharp look. “In the Web?

How could it be in the Web? They still haven’t allowed farcaster portals on Hyperion. And there have been no sightings near Keats or Endymion or Port Romance. None of the larger cities.”

The Consul says nothing, but he is thinking: My God, my betrayal was for nothing. I sold my soul to open the Time Tombs, and the Shrike will not be the cause of the Web’s fall… The Ousters! They were wise to us all along. My betrayal of the Hegemony was part of their plan.

“Listen,” Theo says harshly, gripping the Consul’s wrist, “there’s a reason Gladstone had me leave everything to find you. She’s authorized the release of your ship—”

“Wonderful!” says the Consul. “I can—”

“Listen! You’re not to go back to the Valley of the Time Tombs.

Gladstone wants you to avoid the FORCE perimeter and travel in-system until you contact elements of the Swarm.”

“The Swarm? Why would—”

“The CEO wants you to negotiate with them. They know you. Somehow she’s managed to let them know that you’re coming. She thinks that they’ll let you… that they won’t destroy your ship. But she hasn’t received confirmation of that. It’ll be risky.”

The Consul sits back in the leather seat. He feels as if he has been hit by the neural stunner again. “Negotiate? What the hell would I have to negotiate?”

“Gladstone said that she would contact you via your ship’s fatline once you’re off Hyperion. This has to be done quickly. Today. Before all the first-wave worlds fall to the Swarms.”

The Consul hears first-wave worlds but does not ask if his beloved Maui-Covenant is amongst them. Perhaps, he thinks, it would be best if it were. He says, “No, I’m going back to the valley.”

Theo adjusts his glasses. “She won’t allow that, sir.”

“Oh?” The Consul smiles. “How is she going to stop me? Shoot down my ship?”

“I don’t know, but she said that she wouldn’t allow it.” Theo sounds sincerely worried. “The FORCE fleet does have picket ships and torch-ships in orbit, sir. To escort the last dropships.”

“Well,” says the Consul, still smiling, “let them try to shoot me down. Manned ships haven’t been able to land near the Valley of the Time Tombs for two centuries anyway: ships land perfectly, but their crews disappear. Before they slag me, I’ll be hanging on the Shrike’s tree.” The Consul closes his eyes a moment and imagines the ship landing, empty, on the plain above the valley. He imagines Sol, Dure, and the others—miraculously returned—running for shelter in the ship, using its surgery to save Het Masteen and Brawne Lauia, its cryogenic fugue and sleep chambers to save little Rachel.

“My God,” whispers Theo and the shocked tone slams the Consul out of his reverie.

They have come around the final turn in the river above the city.

The bluffs rise higher here, culminating to the south in the carved-mountain likeness of Sad King Billy. The sun is just setting, igniting low clouds and buildings high on the eastern bluffs.

Above the city, a battle is raging. Lasers lance into and through the clouds, ships dodge like gnats and bum like moths too close to a flame, while parafoils and the blur of suspension fields drift beneath the cloud ceiling. The city of Keats is being attacked. The Ousters have come to Hyperion.

“Oh, sweet fuck,” Theo whispers reverently.

Along the forested ridge northwest of the city, a brief spout of flame and a flicker of contrail mark a shoulder-launched rocket coming directly toward the Hegemony skimmer.

“Hang on!” snaps Theo. He takes manual control, throws switches, banks the skimmer steeply to starboard, trying to turn inside the small rocket’s own turning radius.

An explosion aft throws the Consul into the crashweb and blurs his vision for a moment. When he can focus again, the cabin is filled with smoke, red warning lights pulse through the gloom, and the skimmer warns of systems failure in a dozen urgent voices. Theo is slumped grimly over the omni-controller.

“Hang on,” he says again, needlessly. The skimmer slews sicke lingly, finds a grip in the air, and then loses it as they tumble and sideslip toward the burning city.

Thirty-Six

I blinked and opened my eyes, disoriented for a second as I looked around the immense, dark space of St. Peter’s Basilica. Pacem.

Monsignor Edouard and Father Paul Dure leaned forward in the dim candlelight, their expressions intense.

“How long was I… asleep?” I felt as if only seconds had elapsed, the dream a shimmer of images one has in the instants between lying peacefully and full sleep.

“Ten minutes,” said the Monsignor. “Can you tell us what you saw?”

I saw no reason not to. When I was finished describing the images, Monsignor Edouard crossed himself. “Mon Dieu, the ambassador from the TechnoCore urges Gladstone to send people to those… tunnels.”

Dure touched my shoulder. “After I talk to the True Voice of the Worldtree on God’s Grove, I will join you on TC2. We have to tell Gladstone the folly of such a choice.”

I nodded. All .thoughts of my going to God’s Grove with Dure or to Hyperion itself had Bed. “I agree. We should depart at once. Is your… can the Pope’s Door take me to Tau Ceti Center?”

The Monsignor stood, nodded, stretched. Suddenly I realized that he was a very old man, untouched by Poulsen treatments. “Il has a priority access,” he said. He turned to Dure. “Paul, you know that I would accompany you if I could. The funeral of His Holiness, the election of a new Holy Father…” Monsignor Edouard made a small, rueful sound. “Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster. Pacem itself has fewer than ten standard days until the barbarians arrive.”

Dure’s high forehead gleamed in the candlelight. “The business of the Church is something beyond a mere daily imperative, my friend.

I will make my visit on the Templar world brief, then join M. Severn in his effort of convincing the CEO not to listen to the Core. Then I will return, Edouard, and we will try to make some sense of this confused heresy.”

I followed the two of them out of the basilica, through a side door that led to a passageway behind the tall colonnades, left across an open courtyard—the rain had stopped and the air smelled fresh—down a stairway, and through a narrow tunnel into the papal apartments. Members of the Swiss Guard snapped to attention as we came into the apartments’ anteroom; the tall men were dressed in armor and yellow-and-blue striped pantaloons, although their ceremonial halberds were also FORCE-quality energy weapons. One stepped forward and spoke softly to the Monsignor.

“Someone has just arrived at the main terminex to see you, M. Severn.”

“Me?” I had been listening to other voices in other rooms, the melodious rise and fall of oft-repeated prayers. I assumed it had to do with preparation for the Pope’s burial.

“Yes, an M. Hunt. He says that it is urgent.”

“Another minute and I would have seen him at Government House,”

I said. “Why not have him join us here?”

Monsignor Edouard nodded and spoke softly to the Swiss Guard, who whispered into an ornamental crest on his antique armor.

The so-called Pope’s Door—a small farcaster portal surrounded by intricate gold carvings of seraphim and cherubim, topped with a five-station bas-relief illustrating Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and expulsion from the garden—stood in the center of a well-guarded room just off the Pope’s private apartments. We waited there, our reflections wan and tired-looking in the mirrors on each wall.

Leigh Hunt was escorted in by the priest who had led me to the basilica.

“Severn!” cried Gladstone’s favorite advisor. “The CEO needs you at once.”

“I was just going there,” I said. “It would be a criminal mistake if Gladstone allowed the Core to build and use the death device.”

Hunt blinked—an almost comical reaction on that basset-hound countenance. “Do you know everything that happens, Severn?”

I had to laugh. “A young child sitting unattended in a holo pit sees much and understands very little. Still, he has the advantage of being able to change channels and turn the thing off when he grows tired of it.” Hunt knew Monsignor Edouard from various state functions, and I introduced Father Paul Dure of the Society of Jesus.

“Dure?” managed Hunt, his jaw almost hanging slack. It was the first time that I had seen the advisor at a loss for words, and I rather enjoyed the sight.

“We’ll explain later,” I said and shook the priest’s hand. “Good luck on God’s Grove, Dure. Don’t be too long.”

“An hour,” promised the Jesuit. “No longer. There is merely one piece of the puzzle I must find before speaking to the CEO. Please explain to her about the horror of the labyrinth… I will give her my own testimony later.”

“It’s possible that she’ll be too busy to see me before you get there anyway,” I said. “But I’ll do my best to play John the Baptist for you.”

Dure smiled. “Just don’t lose your head, my friend.” He nodded, tapped in a transfer code on the archiac diskey panel, and disappeared through the portal.

I bid farewell to Monsignor Edouard. “We will get all this settled before the Ouster wave gets this far.”

The old priest raised a hand and blessed me. “Go with God, young man. I feel that dark times await us all but that you will be especially burdened.”

I shook my head. “I’m just an observer, Monsignor. I wait and watch and dream. Little burden there.”

“Wait and watch and dream later,” Leigh Hunt said sharply. “Her Nibs wants you within reach now, and I have a meeting to get back to.”

I looked at the little man. “How did you find me?” I asked needlessly.

Farcasters were operated by the Core, and the Core worked with the Hegemony authorities.

“The override card she gave you also makes it easier to keep track of your travels,” Hunt said, his impatience audible. “Right now we have an obligation to be where things are happening.”

“Very well.” I nodded at the Monsignor and his aide, beckoned to Hunt, and tapped in the three-digit code for Tau Ceti Center, added two digits for the continent, three More for Government House, and added the final two numbers for the private terminex there. The far-caster’s hum went up a notch on the scale, its opaque surface seemed to shimmer with expectancy.

I stepped through first, stepped aside to give Hunt room as he followed.

We are not in the central Government House terminex. As far as I can tell, we are nowhere near Government House. A second later, my senses total the input of sunlight, sky color, gravity, distance to horizon, smells, and feel of things, and decide that we aren’t on Tau Ceti Center.

I would have jumped back through the portal then, but the Pope’s Door is small. Hunt is coming through—leg, arm, shoulder, chest, head, second leg appearing—so I grab his wrist, pull him through roughly, say “Something’s wrong!” and try to step back through, but too late, the frameless portal on this side shimmers, dilates to a circle the size of my fist, and is gone.

“Where the hell are we?” demands Hunt.

I look around and think. Good question. We are in the country, on a hilltop. A road underfoot winds through vineyards, goes down a long hill through a wooded vale, and disappears around another hill a mile or two distant. It is very warm, and the air hums with the sounds of insects, but nothing larger than a bird moves in this vast panorama.

Between bluffs to our right, a blue smear of water is visible—either an ocean or sea. High cirrus ripples overhead; the sun is just past the zenith. I see no houses, no technology More complicated than the vineyard rows and the stone-and-mud road underfoot. More importantly, the constant background buzz of the datasphere is gone. It is somewhat like suddenly hearing the absence of a sound one has been immersed in since infancy; it is startling, heart-stopping, confusing, and a bit terrifying.

Hunt staggers, claps his ears as if it is true sound he is missing, taps at his comlog. “Goddamn,” he mutters. “Goddamn. My implant’s malfunctioning. Comlog’s out.”

“No,” I say. “I believe we’re beyond the datasphere.” But even as I say this, I hear a deeper, softer hum—something far greater and far less accessible than the datasphere. The megasphere? The music of the spheres, I think, and smile.

“What the hell are you grinning about, Severn? Did you do this on purpose?”

“No. I gave the proper codes for Government House.” The total absence of panic in my voice is a kind of panic itself.

“What is it then? That goddamned Pope’s Door? Did it do this? Some malf or trick?”

“No, I think not. The door didn’t malfunction. Hunt. It brought us just where the TechnoCore wants us.”

“The Core?” What little color left in that basset countenance quickly drains away as the CEO’s aide realizes who controls the farcaster. Who controls all farcasters. “My God. My God.” Hunt staggers to the side of the road and sits in the tall grass there. His suede executive suit and soft black shoes look out of place here.

“Where are we?” he asks again.

I take a deep breath. The air smells of fresh-turned soil, newly mown grass, road dust, and the sharp tinge of the sea. “My guess is that we’re on Earth, Hunt.”

“Earth.” The little man is staring straight ahead, focusing on nothing.

“Earth. Not New Earth. Not Terra. Not Earth Two. Not…”

“No,” I say. “Earth. Old Earth. Or its duplicate.”

“Its duplicate.”

I go over and sit beside him. I pull a strand of grass and strip the lower part of its outer sheath. The grass tastes tart and familiar. “You remember my report to Gladstone on the Hyperion pilgrims’ stories?

Brawne Lamia’s tale? She and my cybrid counterpart… the first Keats retrieval persona… traveled to what they thought was an Old Earth duplicate. In the Hercules Cluster, if I remember correctly.”

Hunt glances up as if he can judge what I am saying by checking constellations. The blue above is graying slightly as the high cirrus spreads across the dome of sky. “Hercules Cluster,” lie whispers.

“Why the TechnoCore built a duplicate, or what they’re doing with it now, Brawne didn’t learn,” I say. “Either the first Keats cybrid didn’t know, or he wasn’t saying.”

“Wasn’t saying,” nods Hunt. He shakes his head. “All right, how the hell do we get ou( of here? Gladstone needs me. She can’t… there are dozens of vital decisions to be made in the next few hours.”

He jumps to his feet, runs to the center of the road, a study in purposeful energy.

I chew on the stalk of grass. “My guess is that we don’t get out of here.”

Hunt comes at me as if he is going to assault me then and there.

“Are you insane! No way out? That’s nuts. Why would the Core do that?” He pauses, looks down at me. “They don’t want you talking to her. You know something that the Core can’t risk her learning.”

“Perhaps.”

“Leave him, let me go back!” he screams at the sky.

No one answers. Far out across the vineyard, a large black bird takes flight. I think it is a crow; I remember the name of the extinct species as if from a dream.

After a moment, Hunt gives up on addressing the sky and paces back and forth on the stone road. “Come on. Maybe there’s a terminex wherever this thing goes.”

“Perhaps,” I say, breaking off the stalk of grass to get at the sweet, dry upper half. “But which way?”

Hunt turns, looks at the road disappearing around hills in both directions, turns again. “We came through the portal looking… this way.” He points. The road goes downhill into a narrow wood.

“How far?” I ask.

“Goddammit, does it matter?” he barks. “We have to get somewhere I resist the impulse to smile. “All right.” I stand and brush off my trousers, feeling the fierce sunlight on my forehead and face. After the incense-laden darkness of the basilica, it is a shock. The air is very hot, and my clothing is already damp with sweat.

Hunt starts walking vigorously down the hill, his fists clenched, his doleful expression ameliorated for once by a stronger expression—sheer resolve.

Walking slowly, in no hurry, still chewing on my stalk of sweet grass, eyes half-closed with weariness, I follow him.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad screamed and attacked the Shrike. The surreal, out-of-time landscape—a minimalist stage designer’s version of the Valley of the Time Tombs, molded in plastic and set in a gel of viscous air—seemed to vibrate to the violence of Kassad’s rush.

For an instant there had been a mirror-image scattering of Shrikes —Shrikes throughout the valley, spread across the barren plain—but with Kassad’s shout these resolved themselves to the single monster, and now it moved, four arms unfolding and extending, curving to greet the Colonel’s rush with a hearty hug of blades and thorns.

Kassad did not know if the energy skinsuit he wore, Moneta’s gift, would protect him or serve him well in combat. It had years before when he and Moneta had attacked two dropships’ worth of Ouster commandos, but time had been on their side then; the Shrike had frozen and unfrozen the flow of moments like a bored observer playing with a holopit remote control. Now they were outside time, and the was the enemy, not some terrible patron. Kassad shouted and put his head down and attacked, no longer aware of Moneta watching, nor of the impossible tree of thorns rising into the clouds with its terrible, impaled audience, nor even aware of himself except as a fighting tool, an instrument of revenge.

The Shrike did not disappear in its usual manner, did not cease being there to suddenly be here. Instead, it crouched and opened its arms wider. Its fingerblades caught the light of the violent sky. The Shrike’s metal teeth glistened in what might have been a smile.

Kassad was angry; he was not insane. Rather than rush into that embrace of death, he threw himself aside at the last instant, rolling on arm and shoulder, and kicking out at the monster’s lower leg, below the cluster of thomblades at the knee joint, above a similar array on the ankle. If he could get it down…

It was like kicking at a pipe embedded in half a klick of concrete.

The blow would have broken Kassad’s own leg if the skinsuit had not acted as armor and shock absorber.

The Shrike moved, quickly but not impossibly; the two right arms swinging up and down and around in a blur, ten fingerblades carving soil and stone in surgical furrows, arm thorns sending sparks Hying as the hands continued upward, slicing air with an audible rush. Kassad was out of range, continuing his roll, coming to his feet again, crouching, his own arms tensed, palms flat, energy-suited fingers rigid and extended.

Sing/e combat, thought Fedmahn Kassad. The most honorable sacrament in the New Bushido.

The Shrike feinted with its right arms again, swung the lower left arm around and up with a sweeping blow violent enough to shatter Kassad’s ribs and scoop his heart out.

Kassad blocked the right-arm feint with his left forearm, feeling the skinsuit flex and batter bone as the steel-and-axe force of the Shrike’s blow struck home. The left-arm killing blow he stopped with his right hand on the monster’s wrist, just above the corsage of curved spikes there. Incredibly, he slowed the blow’s momentum enough that scalpel-sharp fingerblades were now scraping against his skinsuit field rather than splintering ribs.

Kassad was almost lifted off the ground with the effort of restraining that rising claw; only the downward thrust of the Shrike’s first feint kept the Colonel from flying backward. Sweat poured freely under the skin-suit, muscles flexed and ached and threatened to rip in that interminable twenty seconds of struggle before the Shrike brought its fourth arm into play, slashing downward at Kassad’s straining leg.

Kassad screamed as the skinsuit field ripped, Hesh tore, and at least one fingerblade sliced close to bone. He kicked out with his other leg, released the thing’s wrist, and rolled frantically away.

The Shrike swung twice, the second blow whistling millimeters from Kassad’s moving ear, but then jumped back itself, crouching, moving to its right.

Kassad got to his left knee, almost fell, then staggered to his feet, hopping slightly to keep his balance. The pain roared in his ears and filled the universe with red light, but even as he grimaced and staggered, close to fainting from the shock of it, he could feel the skinsuit closing on the wound—serving as both tourniquet and compress. He could feel the blood on his lower leg, but it was no longer flowing freely, and the pain was manageable, almost as if the skinsuit carried medpak injectors like his FORCE battle armor.

The Shrike rushed him.

Kassad kicked once, twice, aiming for and finding the smooth bit of chrome carapace beneath the chest spike. It was like kicking the hull of a torchship, but the Shrike seemed to pause, stagger, step back.

Kassad stepped forward, planted his weight, struck twice where the creature’s heart should be with a closed-fist blow that would have shattered tempered ceramic, ignored the pain from his fist, swiveled, and slammed a straight-armed, open-palmed blow into the creature’s muzzle, just above the teeth. Any human being would have heard the sound of his nose being broken and felt the explosion of bone and cartilage being driven into his brain.

The Shrike snapped at Kassad’s wrist, missed, swung four hands at Kassad’s head and shoulders.

Panting, pouring sweat and blood under his quicksilver armor, Kassad spun to his right once, twice, and came around with a killing blow to the back of the creature’s short neck. The noise of the impact echoed in the frozen valley like the sound of an axe thrown from miles on high into the heart of a metal redwood.

The Shrike tumbled forward, rolled onto its back like some steel crustacean.

It had gone down!

Kassad stepped forward, still crouched, still cautious, but not cautious enough as the Shrike’s armored foot, claw, whatever the hell it was, caught the back of Kassad’s ankle and half-sliced, half-kicked him off his feet.

Colonel Kassad felt the pain, knew that his Achilles tendon had been severed, tried to roll away, but the creature was throwing itself up and sideways on him, spikes and thorns and blades coming at Kassad’s ribs and face and eyes. Grimacing with the pain, arching in a vain attempt to throw the monster off, Kassad blocked some blows, saved his eyes, and felt other blades slam home in his upper arms, chest, and belly.

The Shrike hovered closer and opened its mouth. Kassad stared up into row upon row of steel teeth set in a metal lamprey’s hollow orifice of a mouth. Red eyes filled his sight through vision already tinged with blood.

Kassad got the base of his palm under the Shrike’s jaw and tried to find leverage. It was like trying to lift a mountain of sharp scrap with no fulcrum. The Shrike’s fingerblades continued to tear at Kassad’s flesh. The thing opened its mouth and tilted its head until teeth filled Kassad’s field of vision from ear to ear. The monster had no breath, but the heat from its interior stank of sulphur and heated iron filings.

Kassad had no defense left; when the thing snapped its jaws shut, it would take the flesh and skin of Kassad’s face off to the bone.

Suddenly Moneta was there, shouting in that place where sound did not carry, grabbing the Shrike by its ruby-faceted eyes, skinsuited fingers arching like talons, her boot planted firmly on its carapace bel w the back spike, pulling, pulling.

The Shrike’s arms snapped backward, as double-jointed as some nightmare crab, fingerblades raked Moneta and she fell away, but not before Kassad rolled, scrambled, felt the pain but ignored it, and leaped to his feet, dragging Moneta with him as he retreated across the sand and frozen rock.

For a second, their skinsuits merged as it had when they were making love, and Kassad felt her flesh next to his, felt their blood and sweat mingling and heard the joined poundings of their hearts.

Kill it Moneta whispered urgently, pain audible even through that subvocal medium.

I’m trying. I’m trying.

The Shrike was on its feet, three meters of chrome and blades and other people’s pain. It showed no damage. Someone’s blood ran in narrow rivulets down its wrists and carapace. Its mindless grin seemed wider than before.

Kassad separated his skinsuit from Moneta’s, lowered her gently to a boulder although he sensed that he had been hurt worse than she. This was not her fight. Not yet.

He moved between his love and the Shrike.

Kassad hesitated, hearing a faint but rising susurration as if from a rising surf on an invisible shore. He glanced up, never fully removing his gaze from the slowly advancing Shrike, and realized that it was a shouting from the thorn tree far behind the monster. The crucified people there—small dabs of color hanging from the metal thorns and cold branches—were making some noise other than the subliminal moans of pain Kassad had heard earlier. They were cheering.

Kassad returned his attention to the Shrike as the thing began to circle again. Kassad felt the pain and weakness in his almost-severed heel—his right foot was useless, unable to bear weight—and he half-hopped, half-swiveled with one hand on the boulder to keep his body between the Shrike and Moneta.

The distant cheering seemed to stop as if in a gasp.

The Shrike ceased being there and came into existence here, next to Kassad, on top of Kassad, its arms already around him in a terminal hug, thorns and blades already impinging. The Shrike’s eyes blazed with light. Its jaws opened again.

Kassad shouted in pure rage and defiance and struck at it.

Father Paul Dure stepped through the Pope’s Door to God’s Grove without incident. From the incense-laden dimness of the papal apartments, he suddenly found himself in rich sunlight with a lemon sky above and green leaves all around.

The Templars were waiting as he stepped down from the private farcaster portal. Dure could see the edge of the weirwood platform five meters to his right and beyond it, nothing—or, rather, everything, as the treetop world of God’s Grove stretched great distances to the horizon, the rooftop of leaves shimmering and moving like a living ocean. Dure knew that he was high on the Worldtree, the greatest and holiest of all the trees the Templars held sacred.

The Templars greeting him were important in the complicated hierarchy of the Brotherhood of the Muir, but served as mere guides now, leading him from the portal platform to a vine-strewn elevator which rose through upper levels and terraces where few non-Templars had ever ascended, and then out again and up along a staircase bound by a railing of the finest muirwood, spiraling skyward around a trunk that narrowed from its two-hundred-meter base to less than eight meters across here near its top. The weirwood platform was exquisitely carved; its railings showed a delicate tracery of handcarvcd vines, posts and balusters boasted the faces of gnomes, wood sprites, faeries, and other spirits, and the table and chairs which Dure now approached were carved from the same piece of wood as the circular platform itself.

Two men awaited him. The first was the one Dure expected—True Voice of the Worldtree, High Priest of the Muir, Spokesman of the Templar Brotherhood Sek Hardeen. The second man was a surprise.

Dure noted the red robe—a red the color of arterial blood—with black ermine trim, the heavy Lusian body covered by that robe, the face all jowls and fat bisected by a formidable beak of a nose, two tiny eyes lost above fat cheeks, two pudgy hands with a black or red ring on each finger. Dure knew that he was looking at the Bishop of the Church of the Final Atonement—the high priest of the Shrike Cult.

The Templar rose to his almost two-meter height and offered his hand. “Father Dure, we are most pleased that you could join us.”

Dure shook hands, thinking as he did so how much like a root the Templar’s hand was, with its long, tapering, yellowish-brown fingers.

The True Voice of the Worldtree wore the same hooded robe that Het Masteen had worn, its rough brown and green threads in sharp contrast to the brilliance of the Bishop’s garb.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, M. Hardeen,” said Dure. The True Voice was the spiritual leader of millions of the followers of the Muir, but Dure knew that Templars disliked titles or honorifics in conversation. Dure nodded in the direction of the Bishop.

“Your Excellency, I had no idea that I would have the honor of being in your presence.”

The Shrike Cult Bishop nodded almost imperceptibly. “I was visiting.

M. Hardeen suggested that it might be of some small benefit if I attended this meeting. I am pleased to meet you, Father Dure. We have heard much about you in the past few years.”

The Templar gestured toward a seat across the muirwood table from the two of them, and Dure sat, folding his hands on the polished tabletop, thinking furiously even as he pretended to inspect the beautiful grain in the wood. Half the security forces in the Web were searching for the Shrike Cult Bishop. His presence suggested complications far beyond those the Jesuit had been prepared to deal with.

“Interesting, is it not,” said the Bishop, “that three of humankind’s most profound religions are represented here today?” “Ye.i,” said Dure.

“Profound, but hardly representational of the beliefs of the majority.

Out of almost a hundred and fifty billion souls, the Catholic Church claims fewer than a million. The Shri—ah… the Church of the Final Atonement perhaps five to ten million. And how many Templars are there, M. Hardeen?”

“Twenty-three million,” the Templar said softly. “Many others support our ecological causes and might even wish to join, but the Brotherhood is not open to outsiders.”

The Bishop rubbed one of his chins. His skin was very pale, and he squinted as if he were not used to daylight. “The Zen Gnostics claim forty billion followers,” he rumbled. “But what kind of religion is that, eh? No churches. No priests. No holy books. No concept of sin.”

Dure smiled. “It seems to be the belief most attuned to the times.

And has been for many generations now.”

“Bah!” The Bishop slapped his hand down on the table, and Dure winced as he heard the metal of the rings strike muirwood.

“How is it that you know who I am?” asked Paul Dure.

The Templar lifted his head just enough that Dure could see sunlight on his nose, cheeks, and the long line of chin within the shadows of the cowl. He did not speak.

“We chose you,” growled the Bishop. “You and the other pilgrims.”

“You being the Shrike Church?” said Dure.

The Bishop frowned at that phrase but nodded without speaking.

“Why the riots?” asked Dure. “Why the disturbances now that the Hegemony is threatened?”

When the Bishop rubbed his chin, red and black stones glinted in the evening light. Beyond him, a million leaves rustled in a breeze which brought the scent of rain-moistened vegetation. “The Final Days are here, priest. The prophecies given to us by the Avatar centuries ago are unfolding before our eyes. What you call riots are the first death throes of a society which deserves to die. The Days of Atonement are upon us and the Lord of Pain soon will walk among us.”

“The Lord of Pain,” repeated Dure. “The Shrike.”

The Templar made an ameliorating gesture with one hand, as if he were trying to take some of the edge off the Bishop’s statement. “Father Dure, we are aware of your miraculous rebirth.”

“Not a miracle,” said Dure. “The whim of a parasite called a cruciform.”

Again the gesture with the long, yellow-brown fingers. “However you see it. Father, the Brotherhood rejoices that you are with us once again.

Please go ahead with the query you mentioned when you called earlier.”

Dure rubbed his palms against the wood of the chair, glanced at the Bishop sitting across from him in all of his red-and-black bulk. “Your groups have been working together for some time, haven’t they?” said Dure. “The Templar Brotherhood and the Shrike Church.”

“Church of the Final Atonement,” the Bishop said in a bass growl.

Dure nodded. “Why? What brings you together in this?”

The True Voice of the Worldtree leaned forward so that shadow filled his cowl once again. “You must see, Father, that the prophecies of the Church of the Final Atonement touch upon our mission from the Muir.

Only these prophecies have held the key to what punishment must befall humankind for killing its own world.”

“Humankind alone didn’t destroy Old Earth,” said Dure. “It was a computer error in the Kiev Team’s attempt to create a mini-black hole.”

The Templar shook his head. “It was human arrogance,” he said softly. “The same arrogance which has caused our race to destroy all species that might even hope to evolve to intelligence someday. The Seneschai Aluit on Hebron, the zeplens of Whirl, the marsh centaurs of Garden and the great apes of Old Earth…”

“Yes,” said Dure. “Mistakes have been made. But that shouldn’t sentence humankind to death, should it?”

“The sentence has been handed down by a Power far greater than ourselves,” rumbled the Bishop. “The prophecies are precise and explicit.

The Day of Final Atonement must come. All who have inherited the Sins of Adam and Kiev must suffer the consequences of murdering their homeworld, of extinguishing other species. The Lord of Pain has been freed from the bonds of time to lender this final judgment. There is no escaping his wrath. There is no avoiding Atonement. A Power far greater than us has said this.”

“It is true,” said Sek Hardeen. “The prophecies have come to us… spoken to the True Voices over the generations… humankind is doomed, but with their doom will come a new flowering for pristine environments in all parts of what is now the Hegemony.”

Trained in Jesuit logic, devoted to the evolutionary theology ofTeil-hard de Chardin, Father Paul Dure was nonetheless tempted to say, But who the hell cares if the flowers bloom if no one is around to see them, to smell them? Instead, he said, “Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulations from some secular power?”

The Templar sat back as if slapped, but the Bishop leaned forward and curled two Lusian fists which could have crushed Dure’s skull with a single blow. “Heresy! Whoever dares deny the truth of the revelations must die!”

“What power could do this?” managed the True Voice of the World-tree. “What power other than the Muir’s Absolute could enter our minds and hearts?”

Dure gestured toward the sky. “Every world in the Web has been joined through the TechnoCore’s datasphere for generations. Most people of influence carry comlog extension implants for ease of accessing… do you not, M. Hardeen?”

The Templar said nothing, but Dure saw the small twitch of fingers, as if the man were going to pat his chest and upper arm where the microimplants had lain for decades.

“The TechnoCore has created a transcendent… Intelligence,” continued Dure. “It taps incredible amounts of energy, is able to move backward and forward in time, and is not motivated by human concerns.

One of the goals of a sizeable percentage of the Core personalities was to eliminate humankind… indeed, the Big Mistake of the Kiev Team may have been deliberately executed by the AIs involved in that experiment.

What you hear as prophecies may be the voice of this deus ex machina whispering through the datasphere. The Shrike may be here not to make humankind atone for its sins, but merely to slaughter human men, women, and children for this machine personality’s own goals.”

The Bishop’s heavy face was as red as his robe. His fists pummeled the table, and he struggled to his feet. The Templar laid a hand on the Bishop’s arm and restrained him, somehow pulled him back to his seat.

“Where have you heard this idea?” Sek Hardeen asked Dure.

“From those on the pilgrimage who have access to the Core. And from… others.”

The Bishop shook a fist in Dure’s direction. “But you yourself have been touched by the Avatar… not once, but twice. He has granted you a form of immortality so you can see what he has in store for the Chosen People… those who prepare Atonement before the Final Days are upon us!”

“The Shrike gave me pain,” said Dure. “Pain and suffering beyond imagination. I have met the thing twice, and I know in my heart that it is neither divine nor diabolical, but merely some organic machine from a terrible future.”

“Bah!” The Bishop made a dismissive gesture, folded his arms, and stared out over the low balcony at nothing.

The Templar appeared shaken. After a moment, he raised his head and said softly, “Yon had a question for me?”

Dure took a breath. “I did. And sad news, I’m afraid. True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen is dead.”

“We know,” said the Templar.

Dure was surprised. He could not imagine how they could receive that information. But it did not matter now. “What I need to know, is why did he go on the pilgrimage? What was the mission that he did not live to see completed? Each of us told our… our story. Het Masteen did not. Yet somehow I feel that his fate held the key to many mysteries.”

The Bishop looked back at Dure and sneered. “We need tell you nothing, priest of a dead religion.”

Sek Hardcen sat silent a long moment before responding. “M. Mas-teen volunteered to be the one to carry the Word of the Muir to Hyperion. The prophecy has lain in the roots of our belief for centuries that when the troubled times came, a True Voice of the Tree would be called upon to take a treeship to the Holy World, to see it destroyed there, and then to have it reborn carrying the message of Atonement and the Muir.”

“So Het Masteen knew that the treeship Yggdrasill would be destroyed in orbit?”

“Yes. It was foretold.”

“And he and the single energy-binder erg from the ship were to fly a new treeship?”

“Yes,” said the Templar almost inaudibly. “A Tree of Atonement which the Avatar would provide.”

Dure sat back, nodded. “A Tree of Atonement. The thorn tree. Het Masteen was psychically injured when the 'Yggdrasill was destroyed.

Then he was taken to the Valley of the Time Tombs and shown the Shrike’s thorn tree. But he was not ready or able to do it. The thorn tree is a structure of death, of suffering, of pain… Het Masteen was not prepared to captain it. Or perhaps he refused. In any case, he fled.

And died. I thought as much… but I had no idea what fate the Shrike had offered him.”

“What are you talking about?” snapped the Bishop. “The Tree of Atonement is described in the prophecies. It will accompany the Avatar in his final harvest. Masteen would have been prepared and honored to captain it through space and time.”

Paul Dure shook his head.

“We have answered your question?” asked M. Hardeen.

“Yes.”

“Then you must answer ours,” said the Bishop. “What has happened to the Mother?”

“What mother?”

“The Mother of Our Salvation. The Bride of Atonement. The one you called Brawne Lamia.”

Dure thought back, trying to remember the Consul’s taped summaries of the tales the pilgrims had told on the way to Hyperion. Brawne had been pregnant with the first Keats cybrid’s child. The Shrike Temple on Lusus had saved her from the mob, included her in the pilgrimage.

She had said something in her story about the Shrike Cultists treating her with reverence. Dure tried to fit all this into the confused mosaic of what he had already learned. He could not. He was too tired… and, he thought, too stupid after this so-called resurrection. He was not and never would be the intellectual Paul Dure once had been.

“Brawne was unconscious,” he said. “Evidently taken by the Shrike and attached to some… thing. Some cable. Her mental state was the equivalent of brain death, but the fetus was alive and healthy.”

“And the persona she carried?” asked the Bishop, his voice tense.

Dure remembered what Severn had told him about the death of that persona in the megasphere. Evidently these two did not know about the second Keats persona—the Severn personality that at this moment was warning Gladstone about the dangers of the Core proposal. Dure shook his head. He was very tired. “I don’t know about the persona she carried in the Schron loop,” he said. “The cable… the thing the Shrike attached to her… seemed to plug into the neural socket like a cortical shunt.”

The Bishop nodded, evidently satisfied. “The prophecies proceed apace. You have served your purpose as messenger, Dure. I must leave now.” The big man stood, nodded toward the True Voice of the World-tree, and swept across the platform and down the stairs toward the elevator and terminex.

Dure sat across from the Templar in silence for several minutes. The sound of leaves blowing and the gentle rocking of the treetop platform was marvelously lulling, inviting the Jesuit to doze off. Above them, the sky was fading through delicate saffron shades as the world of God’s Grove turned into twilight.

“Your statement about a deus ex machina misleading us for generations through false prophecies was a terrible heresy,” the Templar said at last.

“Yes. But terrible heresies have proven to be grim truths many times before in the longer history of my Church, Sek Hardeen.”

“If you were a Templar, I could have you put to death,” the hooded figure said softly.

Dure sighed. At his age, in his situation, and as tired as he was, the thought of death created no fear in his heart. He stood and bowed slightly. “I need to go, Sek Hardeen. I apologize if anything I said offended you. It is a confused and confusing time.”

“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Dure turned and walked to the edge of the platform. And stopped.

The staircase was gone. Thirty vertical meters and fifteen horizontal meters of air separated him from the next lower platform where the elevator waited. The Worldtree dropped away a kilometer or More into leafy depths beneath him. Dure and the True Voice of that Tree were isolated here on the highest platform. Dure walked to a nearby railing, raised his suddenly sweaty face to the evening breeze, and noticed the first of the stars emerging from the ultramarine sky. “What’s going on, Sek Hardeen?”

The robed and cowled figure at the table was wrapped in darkness.

“In eighteen minutes, standard, the world of Heaven’s Gate will fall to the Ousters. Our prophecies say that it will be destroyed. Certainly its farcaster will, and its fatline transmitters, and to all intents and purposes, that world will have ceased to exist. Precisely one standard hour later, the skies of God’s Grove will be alight from the fusion fires of Ouster warships. Our prophecies say that all of the Brotherhood who remain —and anyone else, although all Hegemony citizens have long since been evacuated by farcaster—will perish.”

Dure walked slowly back to the table. “It’s imperative that I ’cast to Tau Ceti Center,” he said. “Severn… someone is waiting for me. I have to speak to CEO Gladstone.”

“No,” said True Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen. “We will wait.

We will see if the prophecies are correct.”

The Jesuit clenched his fists in frustration, fighting the surge of violent emotion that made him want to strike the robed figure. Dure closed his eyes and said two Hail Marys. It didn’t help.

“Please,” he said. “The prophecies will be confirmed or denied whether I am here or not. And then it will be too late. The FORCE torchships will blow the singularity sphere, and the farcasters will be gone. We’ll be cut off from the Web for years. Billions of lives may depend upon my immediate return to Tau Ceti Center.”

The Templar folded his arms so that his long-fingered hands disappeared in the folds of his robe. “We will wait,” he said. “All things predicted will come to pass. In minutes, the Lord of Pain will be loosed on those in the Web. I do not believe in the Bishop’s faith that those' who have sought Atonement will be spared. We are better off here, Father Dure, where the end will be swift and painless.”

Dure searched his tired mind for something decisive to say, to do.

Nothing occurred to him. He sat at the table and stared at the cowled and silent figure across from him. Above them, the stars emerged in their fiery multitudes. The world-forest of God’s Grove rustled a final time to the evening breeze and seemed to hold its breath in anticipation.

Paul Dure closed his eyes and prayed.

Thirty-Seven

We walk all day. Hunt and I, and toward evening we find an inn with food set out for us—a fowl, rice pudding, cauliflower, a dish of macaroni, and so forth—although there are no people here, no sign of people other than the fire in the hearth, burning brightly as if just lit, and the food still warm on the stove.

Hunt is unnerved by it; by it and by the terrible withdrawal symptoms he is suffering from the loss of contact with the datasphere. I can imagine his pain. For a person born and raised into a world where information was always at hand, communication with anyone anywhere a given, and no distance More than a farcaster step away, this sudden regression to life as our ancestors had known it would be like suddenly awakening blind and crippled. But after the rantings and rages of the first few hours of walking. Hunt finally settled down into a taciturn gloom.

“But the CEO needs me!” he had shouted that first hour.

“She needs the information I was bringing her,” I said, “but there’s nothing to be done about it.”

“Where are we?” demanded Hunt for the tenth time.

I had already explained about this alternate Old Earth, but I knew he meant something else now.

“Quarantine, I think,” I said.

“The Core brought us here?” demanded Hunt.

“I can only assume.”

“How do we get back?”

“I don’t know. I presume that when they feel it’s safe to allow us out of quarantine, a farcaster portal will appear.”

Hunt cursed softly. “Why quarantine me, Severn?”

I shrugged. I assumed it was because he had heard what I said on Pacem, but I was not certain. I was certain of nothing.

The road led through meadows, vineyards, winding over low hills and twisting through valleys where glimpses of the sea were visible.

“Where does this road go?” Hunt demanded just before we discovered the inn.

“All roads lead to Rome.”

“I’m serious, Severn.”

“So am I, M. Hunt.”

Hunt pried a loose stone from the highway and threw it far into the bushes. Somewhere a thrush called.

“You’ve been here before?” Hunt’s tone was one of accusation, as if I had pirated him away. Perhaps I had.

“No,” I said. But Keats had, I almost added. My transplanted memories surged to the surface, almost overwhelming me with their sense of loss and looming mortality. So far from friends, so far from Fanny, his one eternal love.

“You’re sure you can’t access the datasphere?” asked Hunt.

“I’m positive,” I answered. He did not ask about the megasphere, and I did not offer the information. I am terrified of entering the megasphere, of losing myself there.

We found the inn just at sunset. It was nestled in a small valley, and smoke rose from the stone chimney.

While eating, darkness pressing against the panes, our only light the flicker of the fire and two candles on a stone mantle, Hunt said, “This place makes me half-believe in ghosts.”

“I do believe in ghosts,” I said.

Night. I awake coughing, feel wetness on my bare chest, hear Hunt rumbling with the candle, and in its light, look down to see blood on my skin, spotting the bedclothes.

“My God,” breathes Hunt, horrified. “What is it? What’s going on?”

“Hemorrhage,” I manage after the next fit of coughing leaves me weaker and spotted with More blood. I start to rise, fall back on the pillow, and gesture toward the basin of water and towel on the night-stand.

“Damn, damn,” mutters Hunt, searching for my comlog to get a med reading. There is no comlog. I had thrown away Hoyt’s useless instrument while we were walking earlier in the day.

Hunt removes his own comlog, adjusts the monitor, and wraps it around my wrist. The readings are meaningless to him, other than to signify urgency and the need for immediate medical care. Like mosi people of his generation, Hunt had never seen illness or death—that was a professional matter handled out of sight of the populace.

“Never mind,” I whisper, the siege of coughing past but weakness lying on me like a blanket of stones. I gesture toward the towel again, and Hunt moistens it, washes the blood from my chest and arms, helps me sit in the single chair while he removes the spattered sheets and blankets.

“Do you know what’s going on?” he asks, real concern in his voice.

“Yes.” I attempt a smile. “Accuracy. Verisimilitude. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.”

“Make sense,” snaps Hunt, helping me back into the bed. “What caused the hemorrhage7 What can I do to help?”

“A glass of water, please.” I sip it, feel the boiling in my chest and throat but manage to avoid another round of coughing. My belly feels as if it’s on fire.

“What’s going on?” Hunt asks again.

I talk slowly, carefully, setting each word in place as if placing my feet on soil strewn with mines. The coughing does not return. “It’s an illness called consumption,” I say. “Tuberculosis. The final stages, judging from the severity of the hemorrhage.”

Hunt’s basset-hound face is white. “Good God, Severn. I never heard of tuberculosis.” He raises his wrist as if to consult his comlog memory but the wrist is bare.

I return his instrument. “Tuberculosis has been absent for centuries.

Cured. But John Keats had it. Died of it. And this cybrid body belongs to Keats.”

Hunt stands as if ready to rush out the door seeking help. “Surely the Core will allow us to return now! They can’t keep you here on this empty world where there’s no medical assistance!”

I lay my head back in the soft pillows, feeling the feathers under the ticking. “That may be precisely why I am being kept here. We’ll see tomorrow when we arrive in Rome.”

“But you can’t travel! We won’t be going anywhere in the morning.”

“We’ll see,” I say, and close my eyes. “We’ll see.”

In the morning a vettum, a small carriage, is waiting outside the inn. The horse is a large gray mare, and it rolls its eyes at us as we approach. The creature’s breath rises in the chill morning air.

“Do you know what that is?” says Hunt.

“A horse.”

Hunt raises a hand toward the animal as if it will pop and disappear like a soap bubble when he touches its Hank. It does not. Hunt snatches his hand back as the mare’s tail flicks.

“Horses are extinct,” he says. “They’ve never been ARNied back into existence.”

“This one looks real enough,” I say, climbing into the carriage and sitting on the narrow bench there.

Hunt gingerly takes his seat beside me, his long ringers twitching with anxiety. “Who drives7” he says. “Where are the controls?”

There are no reins, and the coachman’s scat is quite empty. “Let’s see if the horse knows the way,” I suggest, and at that instant we start moving at a leisurely pace, the springless carriage jolting over the stones and furrows of the rough road.

“This is some sort of joke, isn’t it?” asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.

I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. “Possibly,” I say. “But then, what isn’t?”

Hunt ignores my sophistry, and we rumble on, jolting and bouncing toward whatever destination and destiny await.

“Where are Hunt and Severn?” asked Meina Gladstone.

Sedeptra Akasi, the young black woman who was Gladstone’s second most important aide, leaned closer so as not to interrupt the flow of the military briefing. “Still no word, M. Executive.”

“That’s impossible. Severn had a tracer and Leigh stepped through to Pacem almost an hour ago. Where the hell are they?”

Akasi glanced toward the faxpad she had unfolded on the tabletop.

“Security can’t find them. The transit police can’t locate them. The farcaster unit recorded only that they coded TC2—here—stepped through, but did not arrive.”

“I think it’s impossible.”

“Yes, M. Executive.”

“I want to talk to Albedo or one of the other AI Councilors as soon as this meeting is over.”

“Yes.”

Both women returned their attention to the briefing. The Government House Tactical Center had been joined to the Olympus Command Center War Room and to the largest Senate briefing room with fifteen-meter-square, visually open portals so that the three spaces created one cavernous and asymetrical conference area. The War Room holos seemed to rise into infinity on the display end of the space, and columns of data floated everywhere along the walls.

“Four minutes until cislunar incursion,” said Admiral Singh.

“Their long-range weapons could have opened up on Heaven’s Gate long before this,” said General Morpurgo. “They seem to be showing some restraint.”

“They didn’t show much restraint toward our torchships,” said Garion Persov of Diplomacy. The group had been assembled an hour earlier when the sortie of the hastily assembled fleet of a dozen Hegemony torchships had been summarily destroyed by the advancing Swarm.

Long-range sensors had relayed the briefest image of that Swarm—a cluster of embers with cometlike fusion tails—before the torchships and their remotes quit broadcasting. There had been many, many embers.

“Those were warships,” said General Morpurgo. “We’ve been broadcasting for hours now that Heaven’s Gate is an open planet. We can hope for restraint.”

The holographic images of Heaven’s Gate surrounded them: the quiet streets of Mudflat, airborne images of the coastline, orbital images of the gray-brown world with its constant cloud cover, cislunar images of the baroque dodecahedron of the singularity sphere which tied together all fareasters, and space-aimed telescopic, UV, and X-ray images of the advancing Swarm—much larger than specks or embers now, at less than one AU. Gladstone looked up at the fusion tails of Ouster warships, the tumbling, containment-field-shimmering massiveness of their asteroid farms and bubble worlds, their complex and oddly nonhuman zero-gravity city complexes, and she thought. What if I am wrong?

The lives of billions rested on her belief that the Ousters would not wantonly destroy Hegemony worlds.

“Two minutes until incursion,” Singh said in his professional warrior’s monotone.

“Admiral,” said Gladstone, “is it absolutely necessary to destroy the singularity sphere as soon as the Ousters have penetrated our cordon sanitaire? Couldn’t we wait another few minutes to judge their intentions?”

“No, CEO,” answered the Admiral promptly. “The farcaster link must be destroyed as soon as they are within quick assault range.”

“But if your remaining torchships don’t do it, Admiral, we still have the in-system links, the fatline relays, and the timed devices, don’t we?”

“Yes, M. Executive, but we must assure that all farcaster capability is removed before the Ousters overrun the system. There can be no compromising this already slim safety margin.”

Gladstone nodded. She understood the need for absolute caution. If only there were More time.

“Fifteen seconds until incursion and singularity destruction,” said Singh. “Ten… seven…”

Suddenly all of the torchship and cislunar remote holos glowed violet, red, and white.

Gladstone leaned forward. “Was that the singularity sphere going?”

The military men buzzed amongst themselves, calling up further data, switching images on the holos and screens. “No, CEO,” answered Morpurgo. “The torchships are under attack. What you’re seeing is their defensive fields overloading. The… ah… there.”

A central image, possibly from a low orbital relay ship, showed an enhanced image of the dodecahedronal singularity containment sphere, its thirty thousand square meters of surface still intact, still glowing in the harsh light of Heaven’s Gate’s sun. Then, suddenly, the glow increased, the nearest face of the structure seemed to become incandescent and sag in upon itself, and less than three seconds later the sphere expanded as the caged singularity there escaped and devoured itself as well as everything within a six-hundred-kilometer radius.

At the same instant, most of the visual images and many of the data columns went blank.

“All farcaster connections terminated, “announced Singh. “In-system data now relayed by fatline transmitters only.”

There was a buzz of approval and relief from the military people, something closer to a sigh and soft moan from the dozens of senators and political advisors present. The world of Heaven’s Gate had just been amputated from the Web… the first such loss of a Hegemony world in More than four centuries.

Gladstone turned to Sedeptra Akasi. “What is travel time to Heaven’s Gate from the Web now?”

“By Hawking drive, seven months onboard,” said the aide without a pause to access, “a little over nine years time-debt.”

Gladstone nodded. Heaven’s Gate was now nine years distant from the nearest Web world.

“There go our torchships,” intoned Singh. The view had been from one of the orbital pickets, relayed through the jerky, false-color images of high-speed fatline squirts being computer processed in rapid progression.

The images were visual mosaics, but they always made Glad-stone think of the earliest silent films from the dawn of the Media Age.

But this was no Charlie Chaplin comedy. Two, then five, then eight bursts of brilliant light blossomed against the starfield above the limb of the planet.

“Transmissions from HS Ntki Weimart, HS Terrapin, HS Comet, and HS Andrew Paul have ceased,” reported Singh.

Baibre Dan-Cyddis raised a hand. “What about the other four ships, Admiral?”

“Only the four mentioned had FTL-comm capability. The pickets confirm that radio, maser, and wideband commlinks from the other four torchsips also have ceased. The visual data…” Singh stopped and gestured toward the image relayed from the automatic picket ship: eight expanding and fading circles of light, a starfield crawling with fusion tails and new lights. Suddenly even that image went blank.

“All orbital sensors and fatline relays terminated,” said General Morpurgo.

He gestured, and the blackness was replaced with images of the streets of Heaven’s Gate with the inevitable low-lying clouds. Aircraft added shots above the clouds—a sky gone crazy with moving stars.

“All reports confirm total destruction of the singularity sphere,” said Singh. “Advance units of the Swarm now entering high orbit around Heaven’s Gate.”

“How many people are left there?” asked Gladstone. She was leaning forward, her elbows on the table, her hands folded very tightly.

“Eighty-six thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine,” said Defense Minister Imoto.

“That doesn’t count the twelve thousand Marines who were farcast in during the past two hours,” added General Van Zeidt.

Imoto nodded toward the General.

Gladstone thanked them and returned her attention to the holos.

The data columns floating above and their extracts on the faxpads, comlogs, and table panels held the pertinent data—numbers of Swarm craft now in-system, number and types of ships in orbit, projected braking orbits and time curves, energy analyses and comm-band intercepts—but Gladstone and the others were watching the relatively uninformative and unchanging fatlined images from the aircraft and surface cameras: stars, cloud tops, streets, the view from Atmospheric Generating Station Heights out over the Mudflat Promenade where Gladstone herself had stood less than twelve hours earlier. It was night there. Giant horsetail ferns moved to silent breezes blowing in from the bay.

“I think they’ll negotiate,” Senator Richeau was saying. “First they’ll present us with this fait accompli, nine worlds overrun, then they’ll negotiate and negotiate hard for a new balance of power. I mean, even if both of their invasion waves succeeded, that would be twenty-five worlds out of almost two hundred in the Web and Protectorate.”

“Yes,” said Head of Diplomacy Persov, “but don’t forget, Senator, that these include some of our most strategically important worlds… this one, for example. TC2 is only two hundred and thirty-five hours behind Heaven’s Gate on the Ouster timetable.”

Senator Richeau stared Persov down. “I’m well aware of that,” she said coldly. “I’m merely saying that the Ousters cannot have true conquest on their minds. That would be pure folly on their part. Nor will FORCE allow the second wave to penetrate so deeply. Certainly this so-called invasion is a prelude to negotiation.”

“Perhaps,” said Nordholm’s Senator Roanquist, “but such negotiations would necessarily depend upon—”

“Wait,” said Gladstone.

The data columns now showed More than a hundred Ouster warcraft in orbit around Heaven’s Gate. Ground forces there had been instructed not to fire unless fired upon, and no activity was visible in the thirty-some views being fatlined to the War Room. Suddenly, however, the cloud cover above Mudflat City glowed as if giant searchlights had been turned on. A dozen broad beams of coherent light stabbed down into the bay and the city, continuing the searchlight illusion, appearing to Gladstone as if giant white columns had been erected between the ground and the ceiling of clouds.

That illusion ended abruptly as a whirlwind of flame and destruction erupted at the base of each of these hundred-meter-wide columns of light. The water of the bay boiled until huge geysers of steam occluded the nearer cameras. The view from the heights showed century-old stone buildings in the town erupting into flame, imploding as if a tornado were moving amongst them. The Web-famous gardens and commons of the Promenade erupted in flame, exploded in dirt and flying debris as if an invisible plow were moving across them. Horsetail ferns two centuries old bent as if before a hurricane wind, burst into flame, and were gone.

“Lances from a Bowers-class torehship,” Admiral Singh said into the silence. “Or its Ouster equivalent.”

The city was burning, exploding, being plowed into rubble by the light columns and then being torn asunder again. There were no audio channels on these fatlined images, but Gladstone imagined that she could hear screams.

One by one, the ground cameras went black. The view from the Atmospheric Generating Station Heights disappeared in a white flash.

Airborne cameras were already gone. The twenty or so other ground-based images began winking out, one in a terrible burst of crimson that left everyone in the room rubbing their eyes, “Plasma explosion,” said Van Zeidt. “Low megaton range.” The view had been of a FORCE:Marine air defense complex north of the Intercity Canal.

Suddenly all images ceased. Dataflow ended. The room lights began to come up to compensate for a darkness so sudden that it took everyone’s breath away.

“The primary fatline transmitter’s gone,” said General Morpurgo. “It was at the main FORCE base near High Gate. Buried under our strongest containment field, fifty meters of rock, and ten meters of whiskered stalloy.”

“Shaped nuclear charges?” asked Barbre Dan-Gyddis.

“At least,” said Morpurgo.

Senator Kolchev rose, his Lusian bulk emanating an almost ursine sense of strength. “All right. This isn’t some goddamned negotiating ploy. The Ousters have just reduced a Web world to ashes. This is all-out, give-no-mercy warfare. The survival of civilization is at stake. What do we do now?”

All eyes turned toward Meina Gladstone.

The Consul dragged a semiconscious Theo Lane from the wreckage of the skimmer and staggered fifty meters with the younger man’s arm over his shoulder before collapsing on a stretch of grass beneath trees along the bank of the Hoolie River. The skimmer was not on fire, but it lay crumpled against the collapsed stone wall where it had finally skidded to a halt. Bits of metal and ceramic polymers lay strewn along the riverbank and abandoned avenue.

The city was burning. Smoke obscured the view across the river, and this part of Jacktown, the Old Section, looked as if several pyres had been lighted where thick columns of black smoke rose toward the low cloud ceiling. Combat lasers and missile trails continued to streak through the haze, sometimes exploding against the assault dropships, parafoils, and suspension-field bubbles which continued to drop through the clouds like chaff blown from a recently harvested field.

“Theo, are you all right?”

The Governor-General nodded and moved to push his glasses higher on his nose… stopping in confusion as he realized that his glasses were gone. Blood streaked Theo’s forehead and arms. “Hit my head,” he said groggily.

“We need to use your comlog,” said the Consul. “Get someone here to pick us up.”

Theo nodded, lifted his arm, and frowned at his wrist. “Gone,” he said. “Comlog’s gone. Gotta look in the skimmer.” He tried to get to his feet.

The Consul pulled him back down. They were in the shelter of a few ornamental trees here, but the skimmer was exposed, and their landing had been no secret. The Consul had glimpsed several armored troops moving down an adjacent street as the skimmer pancaked in for its crash landing. They might be SDF or Ousters or even Hegemony Marines, but the Consul imagined that they would be trigger-happy whatever their loyalties.

“Never mind that,” he said. “We’ll get to a phone. Call the consulate.”

He looked around, identified the section of warehouses and stone buildings where they had crashed. Upriver a few hundred meters, an old cathedral stood abandoned, its chapter house crumbling and overhanging the riverbank “I know where we are,” said the Consul. “It’s just a block or two to Cicero’s. Come on.” He lifted Theo’s arm over his head and onto his shoulders, pulling the injured man to his feet.

“Cicero’s, good,” muttered Theo. “Could use a drink.”

The rattle ofHechette fire and an answering sizzle of energy weapons came from the street to their south. The Consul took as much of Theo’s weight as he could and half-walked, half-staggered along the narrow lane beside the river.

“Oh damn,” the Consul whispered.

Cicero’s was burning. The old bar and inn—as old as jacktown and much older than most of the capital—had lost three of its four sagging riverfront buildings to the flames, and only a determined bucket brigade of patrons was saving the last section.

“I see Stan,” said the Consul, pointing to the huge figure of Stan Leweski standing near the head of the bucket brigade line. “Here.” The Consul helped Theo to a sitting position under an elm tree along the walkway. “How’s your head?”

“Hurts.”

“I’ll be right back with help,” said the Consul and moved as quickly as he could down the narrow lane toward the men.

Stan Leweski stared at the Consul as if he were a ghost. The big man’s face was streaked with soot and tears, and his eyes were wide, almost uncomprehending. Cicero’s had been in his family for six generations.

It was raining softly now, and the fire seemed beaten. Men shouted up and down the line as a few timbers from the burned-out sections sagged into the embers of the basement.

“By God, it’s gone,” said Leweski. “You see? Grandfather Jiri’s addition?

It’s gone.”

The Consul grabbed the huge man by his shoulders. “Stan, we need help. Theo’s over tliere. Hurt. Our skimmer crashed. We need to get to the spaceport… to use your phone. It’s an emergency, Stan.”

Leweski shook his head. “Phone’s gone. Comlog bands are jammed.

Goddamn war is on.” He pointed toward the burned sections of the old inn. “They’re gone, by damn. Gone.”

The Consul made a fist, furious in the grip of sheer frustration. Other men milled around, but the Consul recognized none of them. There were no P'ORCE or SDF authorities in sight. Suddenly a voice behind him said, “I can help. I have a skimmer.”

The Consul whirled to see a man in his late fifties or early sixties, soot and sweat covering his handsome face and streaking his wavy hair.

“Great,” said the Consul. “I’d appreciate it.” He paused. “Do I know you?”

“Dr. Melio Arundez,” said the man, already moving toward the parkway where Theo rested.

“Arundez,” repeated the Consul, hurrying to keep up. The name echoed strangely. Someone he knew? Someone he should know? “My God, Arundez!” he said. “You were the friend of Rachel Weintraub when she came here decades ago.”

“Her university advisor, actually,” said Arundez. “I know you. You went on the pilgrimage with Sol.” They stopped where Theo was sitting, still holding his head in his hands. “My skimmer’s over there,” said Arundez.

The Consul could see a small, two-person Vikken Zephyr parked under the trees. “Great. We’ll get Theo to the hospital and then I need to get to the spaceport immediately.”

“The hospital’s overcrowded to the point of insanity,” said Arundez.

“If you’re trying to get to your ship, I suggest you take the Governor—

General there and use the ship’s surgery.”

The Consul paused. “How did you know I have a ship there?”

Arundez dilated the doors and helped Theo onto the narrow bench behind the front contour seats. “I know all about you and the other pilgrims, M. Consul. I’ve been trying to get permission to go to the Valley of the Time Tombs for months. You can’t believe my frustration when I learned that your pilgrims’ barge left secretly with Sol aboard.”

Arundez took a deep breath and asked a question which he obviously had been afraid to ask before. “Is Rachel still alive?”

He was her lover when she was a grown woman, thought the Consul.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to get back in time to help her, if I can.”

Melio Arundez nodded and settled into the driver’s seat, gesturing for the Consul to get in. “We’ll try to get to the spaceport. It won’t be easy with the fighting around there.”

The Consul sat back, feeling his bruises, cuts, and exhaustion as the seat folded around him. “We need to get Theo… the Governor—

General… to the consulate or government house or whatever they call it now.”

Arundez shook his head and powered up the repellors. “Uh-uh. The consulate’s gone, hit by a wayward missile, according to the emergency news channel. All the Hegemony officials went out to the spaceport for evacuation before your friend even went hunting for you.”

The Consul looked at the semiconscious Theo Lane. “Let’s go,” he said softly to Arundez.

The skimmer came under small-arms fire as they crossed the river, but Hechettes merely rattled on the hull and the single energy beam fired sliced beneath them, sending a spout of steam ten meters high.

Arundez drove like a crazy person—weaving, bobbing, pitching, yawing, and occasionally slewing the skimmer around on its axis like a plate sliding atop a sea of marbles. The Consul’s seat restraints closed around him, but he still felt his gorge threaten to rise. Behind them, Theo’s head moved loosely back and forth on the rear bench as he surrendered to unconsciousness.

“The downtown’s a mess!” Arundez shouted over repellor roar. “I’ll follow the old viaduct to the spaceport highway and then cut across country, staying low.” They pirouetted around a burning structure which the Consul belatedly recognized as his old apartment building.

“Is the spaceport highway open?”

Arundez shook his head. “Never make it. Paratroopers have been dropping around it for the last thirty minutes.”

“Are the Ousters trying to destroy the city?”

“Uh-uh. They could have done that from orbit without all this fuss.

They seem to be investing the capital. Most of their dropships and paratroopers land at least ten klicks out.”

“Is it our SDF who’s fighting back?”

Arundez laughed, showing white teeth against tanned skin. “They’re halfway to Endymion and Port Romance by now… though reports ten minutes ago, before the comm lines were jammed, say that those cities are also under attack. No, the little resistance you see is from a few dozen FORCE:Marines left behind to guard the city and the spaceport.”

“So the Ousters haven’t destroyed or captured the spaceport?”

“Not yet. At least not as of a few minutes ago. We’ll soon see. Hang on!”

The ten-kilometer ride to the spaceport via the VIP highway or the skylanes above it usually took a few minutes, but Arundez’s roundabout, up-and-down approach over the hills, through the valleys, and between the trees added time and excitement to the trip. The Consul turned his head to watch hillsides and the slums of burning refugee camps Hash by to his right. Men and women crouched against boulders and under low trees, covering their heads as the skimmer rushed past. Once the Consul saw a squad of FORCE:Marines dug in on a hilltop, but their attention was focused on a hill to the north from which there came a panoply of laser-lance fire. Arundez saw the Marines at the same instant and jinked the skimmer hard left, dropping it into a narrow ravine scant seconds before the treetops on the ridge above were sliced off as if by invisible shears.

Finally they roared up and over a final ridgeline, and the western gates and fences of the spaceport became visible ahead of them. The perimeter was ablaze with the blue and violet glows of containment and interdiction fields, and they were still a klick away when a visible tightbcam laser flicked out, found them, and a voice over the radio said, “Unidentified skimmer, land immediately or be destroyed.”

Arundez landed.

The tree line ten meters away seemed to shimmer, and suddenly they were surrounded by wraiths in activated chameleon polymers.

Arundez had opened the cockpit blisters, and now assault rifles were aimed at him and the Consul.

“Step away from the machine,” said a disembodied voice behind the camouflage shimmer.

“We have the Governor-General,” called the Consul. “We have to get in.”

“The hell you say,” snapped a voice with a definite Web accent.

“Out!”

The Consul and Arundez hastily released their seat restraints and had started to climb out when a voice from the back seat snapped, “Lieutenant Mueller, is that you?”

“Ah, yes, sir.”

“Do you recognize me, Lieutenant?”

The camouflage shimmer depolarized, and a young Marine in full battle armor stood not a meter from the skimmer. His face was nothing More than a black visor but the voice sounded young. “Yes, sir… ah… Governor. Sorry I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.

You’ve been hurt, sir.”

“I know I’ve been hurt, Lieutenant. That is why these gentlemen have escorted me here. Don’t you recognize the former Hegemony Consul for Hyperion?”

“Sorry, sir,” said Lieutenant Mueller, waving his men back into the tree line. “The base is sealed.”

“Of course the base is sealed,” Theo said through gritted teeth. “I countersigned those orders. But I also authorized evacuation of all essential Hegemony personnel. You did allow those skimmers through, did you not. Lieutenant Mueller?”

An armored hand rose as if to scratch the helmeted and visored head.

“Ah… yes, sir. Ah, affirmative. But that was an hour ago, sir. The evacuation dropships are gone and—”

“For God’s sake, Mueller, get on your tactical channel and get authorization from Colonel Gerasimov to let us through.”

“The Colonel’s dead, sir. There was a dropship assault on the east perimeter and—”

“Captain Lewellyn then,” said Theo. He swayed and then steadied himself against the back of the Consul’s seat. His face was very white under the blood.

“Ah… tactical channels are down, sir. The Ousters are jamming on wideband with—”

“Lieutenant,” snapped Theo in a tone the Consul had never heard his young friend use, “you’ve visually identified me and scanned my implant ID. Now either admit us to the field or shoot us.”

The armored Marine glanced back toward the tree line as if considering whether to order his men to open fire. “The dropships are all gone, sir. Nothing else is coming down.”

Theo nodded. Blood had dried and caked on his forehead, but now a fresh trickle started from his scalp line. “The impounded ship is still in Blast Pit Nine, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Mueller, snapping to attention at last. “But it’s a civilian ship and could never make space with all the Ouster—”

Theo waved the officer into silence and gestured for Arundez to drive toward the perimeter. The Consul glanced ahead toward the deadlines, interdiction fields, containment fields, and probable pressure mines that the skimmer would encounter in ten seconds. He saw the Marine lieutenant wave, and an opening irised in the violet and blue energy fields ahead. No one fired. In half a minute they were crossing the hardpan of the spaceport itself. Something large was burning on the northern perimeter. To their left, a huddle of FORCE trailers and command modules had been slagged to a pool of bubbling plastic.

There had been people in there, thought the Consul and once again had to fight to keep his gorge from rising.

Blast Pit Seven had been destroyed, its circular walls of reinforced ten-centimeter carbon-carbon blown outward and apart as if they had been made of cardboard. Blast Pit Eight was burning with that white-hot incandescence which suggested plasma grenades. Blast Pit Nine was intact, with the bow of the Consul’s ship just visible above the pit wall through the shimmer of a class-three containment field.

“The interdiction’s been lifted?” said the Consul.

Theo lay back on the cushioned bench. His voice was thick. “Yeah.

Gladstone authorized the dropping of the restraining dome field. That’s just the usual protective field. You can override it with a command.”

Arundez dropped the skimmer to tarmac just as warning lights went red and synthesized voices began describing malfunctions. They helped Theo out and paused near the rear of the small skimmer where a line of flechettes had stitched a ragged row through the engine cowling and repellor housing. Part of the hood had melted from overload.

Melio Arundez patted the machine once, and both men turned to help Theo through the blast pit door and up the docking umbilical.

“My God,” said Dr. Melio Arundez, “this is beautiful. I’ve never been in a private interstellar spacecraft before.”

“There are only a few dozen in existence,” said the Consul, setting the osmosis mask in place over Theo’s mouth and nose and gently lowering the redhead into the surgery’s tank of emergency care nutrient.

“Small as it is, this ship cost several hundred million marks. It’s not cost-effective for corporations and Outback planetary governments to use their military craft on those rare occasions when they need to travel between the stars.” The Consul sealed the tank and conversed briefly with the diagnostics program. “He’ll be all right,” he said at last to Arundez, and returned to the holopit.

Melio Arundez stood near the antique Steinway, gently running his hand over the glossy finish of the grand piano. He glanced out through the transparent section of hull above the stowed balcony platform and said, “I see fires near the main gate. We’d better get out of here.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” said the Consul, gesturing Arundez toward the circular couch lining the projection pit.

The archaeologist dropped into the deep cushions and glanced around. “Aren’t there… ah… controls?”

The Consul smiled. “A bridge? Cockpit instruments? Maybe a wheel I can steer with? Uh-uh. Ship?”

“Yes,” came the soft voice from nowhere.

“Are we cleared for takeofl?”

“Yes.”

“Is that containment field removed?”

“It was our field. I’ve withdrawn it.”

“OK, let’s get the hell out of here. I don’t have to tell you that we’re in the middle of a shooting war, do I?”

“No. I’ve been monitoring all developments. The last FORCE space craft are in the process of leaving the Hyperion system. These Marines are stranded and—”

“Save the tactical analyses for later, Ship,” said the Consul. “Set our course for the Valley of the Time Tombs and get us out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” said the ship. “I was just pointing out that the forces defending this spaceport have little chance of holding out for More than an hour or so.”

“Noted,” said the Consul. “Now take off.”

“I’m required to share this fatline transmission first. The squirt arrived at 1622:38:14, Web standard, this afternoon.”

“Whoa! Hold it!” cried the Consul, freezing the holo transmission in midconstruction. HalfofMeina Gladstone’s face hung above them.

“You’re required to show this before we leave? Whose commands do you respond to. Ship?”

“CEO Gladstone’s, sir. The Chief Executive empowered a priority override on all ship’s functions five days ago. This fatline squirt is the last requirment before—”

“So that’s why you didn’t respond to my remote commands,” murmured the Consul.

“Yes,” said the ship in conversational tones. “I was about to say that the showing of this transmission is the last requirement prior to returning command to you.”

“And then you’ll do what I say?

“Yes.”

“Take us where I’ll tell you to?”

“Yes.”

“No hidden overrides?”

“None that I know of.”

“Play the squirt,” said the Consul.

The Lincolnesque countenance of CEO Meina Gladstone floated in the center of the projection pit with the telltale twitches and breakups endemic to fatline transmissions. “I am pleased that you survived the visit to the Time Tombs,” she said to the Consul. “By now you must know that I am asking you to negotiate with the Ousters before you return to the valley.”

The Consul folded his arms and glared at Gladstone’s image. Outside, the sun was setting. He had only a few minutes before Rachel Weintraub reached her birth hour and minute and simply ceased to exist.

“I understand your urgency to return and help your friends,” said Gladstone, “but you can do nothing to help the child at this moment… experts in the Web assure us that neither cryogenic sleep or fugue could arrest the Merlin’s sickness. Sol knows this.”

Across the projection pit. Dr. Arundez said, “It’s true. They experimented for years. She would die in fugue state.”

“…you can help the billions of people in the Web whom you believe you have betrayed,” Gladstone was saying.

The Consul leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists. His heart was pounding very loudly in his ears.

“I knew that you would open the Time Tombs,” Gladstone said, her sad brown eyes seeming to stare directly at the Consul. “Core predictors showed that your loyalty to Maui-Covenant… and to the memory of your grandparents’ rebellion… would override all other factors. It was time for the Tombs to be opened, and only you could activate the Ouster device before the Ousters themselves decided to.”

“I’ve heard enough of this,” said the Consul and stood, turning his back on the projection. “Cancel message,” he said to the ship, knowing that it would not obey.

Melio Arundez walked through the projection and gripped the Consul’s arm tightly. “Hear her out. Please.”

The Consul shook his head but stayed in the pit, arms folded.

“Now the worst has happened,” said Gladstone. “The Ousters are invading the Web. Heaven’s Gate is being destroyed. God’s Grove has less than an hour before the invasion sweeps over it. It is imperative that you meet with the Ousters in Hyperion system and negotiate… use your diplomatic skills to open a dialogue with them. The Ousters will not respond to our fatline or radio messages, but we have alerted them to your coming. I think they will still trust you.”

The Consul moaned and walked over to the piano, pounding his fist against its lid.

“We ha'-e minutes, not hours. Consul,” said Gladstone. “I will ask you to go first to the Ousters in Hyperion system and then attempt to return to the Valley of the Time Tombs if you must. You know better than I the results of warfare. Millions will die needlessly if we cannot find a secure channel through which to communicate with the Ousters.

“It is your decision, but please consider the ramifications if we fail in this last attempt to find the truth and preserve the peace. I will contact you via fatline once you have reached the Ouster Swarm.”

Gladstone’s image shimmered, fogged, and faded.

“Response?” asked the ship.

“No.” The Consul paced back and forth between the Steinway and the projection pit.

“No spacecraft or skimmer has landed near the valley with its crew intact for almost two centuries,” said Melio Arundez. “She must know how small the odds are that you can go there… survive the Shrike… and then rendezvous with the Ousters.”

“Things are different now,” said the Consul without turning to face the other man. “The time tides have gone berserk. The Shrike goes where it pleases. Perhaps whatever phenomenon prevented manned landings before is no longer operative.”

“And perhaps your ship will land perfectly without us,” said Arundez.

“Just as so many others have.”

“Goddammit,” shouted the Consul, wheeling, “you knew the risks when you said that you wanted to join me!”

The archaeologist nodded calmly. “I’m not talking about the risk to myself, sir. I’m willing to accept any risk if it means I might help Rachel… or even sec her again. It’s your life that may hold the key to humankind’s survival.”

The Consul shook his fists in the air and paced back and forth like some caged predator. “That’s not fair] I was Gladstone’s pawn before.

She used me… cynically… deliberately. I killed four Ousters, Arundez. Shot them because I had to activate their goddamned device to open the Tombs. Do you think they’ll welcome me back with open arms?”

The archaeologist’s dark eyes looked up at the Consul without blinking.

“Gladstone believes that they will parley with you.”

“Who knows what they’ll do? Or what Gladstone believes for that matter. The Hegemony and its relationship with the Ousters aren’t my worry now. I sincerely wish a plague on both their houses.”

“To the extent that humanity suffers?”

“I don’t know humanity,” said the Consul in an exhausted monotone.

“I do know Sol Weintraub. And Rachel. And an injured woman named Brawne Lamia. And Father Paul Dure. And Fedmahn Kassad. And—”

The ship’s soft voice enveloped them. “This spaceport’s north perimeter has been breached. I am initiating final launch procedures. Please take your seats.”

The Consul half-stumbled to the holopit even as the internal containment field pressed down on him as its vertical differential increased dramatically, sealing every object in its place and protecting the travelers far More securely than any straps or seat restraints could. Once in free-fall, the field would lessen but still serve in the stead of planetary gravity.

The air above the holopit misted and showed the blast pit and spaceport receding quickly below, the horizon and distant hills jerking and tilting as the ship threw itself through eighty-g evasive maneuvers. A few energy weapons winked in their direction, but data columns showed the external fields handling the neglible effects. Then the horizon receded and curved as the lapis lazuli sky darkened to the black of space.

“Destination?” queried the ship.

The Consul closed his eyes. Behind them, a chime sounded to announce that Theo Lane could be moved from the recovery tank to the main surgery.

“How long until we could rendezvous with elements of the Ouster invasion force?” asked the Consul.

“Thirty minutes to the Swarm proper,” answered the ship.

“And how long until we come in range of their attack ships’ weapons?”

“They are tracking us now.”

Melio Arundez’s expression was calm but his fingers were white on the back of the holopit couch.

“All right,” said the Consul. “Make for the Swarm. Avoid Hegemony ships. Announce on all frequencies that we are an unarmed diplomatic ship requesting parley.”

“That message was authorized and set in by CEO Gladstone, sir. It is now being broadcast on fatline and all comm frequencies.”

“Cany on,” said the Consul. He pointed to Arundez’s comlog. “Do you see the time?”

“Yes. Six minutes until the precise instant of Rachel’s birth.”

The Consul settled back, his eyes closed again. “You’ve come a long

way for nothing. Dr. Arundez.”

The archaeologist stood, swayed a second before finding his legs in the simulated gravity, and carefully walked to the piano. He stood there a moment and looked out through the balcony window at the black sky and the still-brilliant limb of the receding planet. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Perhaps not.”

Thirty-Eight

Today we entered the swampy wasteland which I recognize as the Campagna, and to celebrate I have another coughing fit, terminated by vomiting More blood. Much More. Leigh Hunt is beside himself with concern and frustration and, after holding my shoulders during the spasm and helping to clean my clothes with rags moistened in a nearby stream, he asks, “What can I do?”

“Collect flowers from the fields,” I gasp. “That’s what Joseph Severn did.”

He turns away angrily, not realizing that even in my feverish, exhausted state, I was merely telling the truth.

The little cart and tired horse pass through the Campagna with More painful bumping and rattling than before. Late in the afternoon, we pass some skeletons of horses along the way, then the ruins of an old inn, then a More massive ruin of a viaduct overgrown with moss, and finally posts to which it appears that white sticks have been nailed.

“What on earth is that?” asks Hunt, not realizing the irony of the ancient phrase.

“The bones of bandits,” I answer truthfully.

Hunt looks at me as if my mind has succumbed to the sickness.

Perhaps it has.

Later we climb out of the swamplands of the Campagna and get a glimpse of a flash of red moving far out among the fields.

“What is that?” demands Hunt eagerly, hopefully. I know that he expects to see people any moment and a functioning farcaster portal a moment after that.

“A cardinal,” I say, again telling the truth. “Shooting birds.”

Hunt accesses his poor, crippled comlog. “A cardinal is a bird,” he says.

I nod, look to the west, but the red is gone. “Also a cleric,” I say.

“And we are approaching Rome, you know.”

Hunt frowns at me and attempts for the thousandth time to raise someone on the comm bands of his comlog. The afternoon is silent except for the rhythmic creak of the vettura’s wooden wheels and the trill of some distant songbird. A cardinal, perhaps?

We enter Rome as the first flush of evening touches the clouds. The little cart rocks and rumbles through the Lateran Gate, and almost immediately we are confronted with the sight of the Colosseum, overgrown with ivy and obviously the home of thousands of pigeons, but immensely More impressive than holos of the ruin, set now as it was, not within the grubby confines of a postwar city ringed with giant arcologies, but contrasted against clusters of small huts and open fields where the city ends and countryside begins. I can see Rome proper in the distance… a scattering of rooftops and smaller ruins on its fabled Seven Hills, but here the Colosseum rules.

“Jesus,” whispers Leigh Hunt. “What is it?”

“The bones of bandits,” I say slowly, fearful of starting the terrible coughing once again.

We move on, clopping through the deserted streets of nineteenth-century Old Earth Rome as the evening settles thick and heavy around us and the light fails and pigeons wheel above the domes and rooftops of the Eternal City.

“Where is everyone?” whispers Hunt. He sounds frightened.

“Not here because they are not needed,” I say. My voice sounds sharp edged in the canyon dusk of the city streets. The wheels turn on cobblestones now, hardly More smooth than the random stones of the highway we just escaped.

“Is this some stimsim?” he asks.

“Stop the cart,” I say, and the obedient horse comes to a halt. I point out a heavy stone by the gutter. “Kick that,” I say to Hunt.

He frowns at me but steps down, approaches the stone, and gives it a hearty kick. More pigeons erupt skyward from bell towers and ivy, panicked by the echoes of his cursing.

“Like Dr. Johnson, you’ve demonstrated the reality of things,” I say.

“This is no stimsim or dream. Or rather, no More one than the rest of our lives have been.”

“Why did they bring us here?” demands the CEO’s aide, glancing skyward as if the gods themselves were listening just beyond the fading pastel barriers of the evening clouds. “What do they want?”

They want me to die, I think, realizing the truth of it with the impact of a fist in my chest. I breathe slowly and shallowly to avoid a fit of coughing even as I feel the phlegm boil and bubble in my throat. They want me to die and they want you to watch.

The mare resumes its long haul, turning right on the next narrow street, then right again down a wider avenue filled with shadows and the echoes of our passing, and then stopping at the head of an immense flight of stairs.

“We’re here,” I say and struggle to exit the cart. My legs are cramped, my chest aches, and my ass is sore. In my mind runs the beginning of a satirical ode to the joys of traveling.

Hunt steps out as stiffly as I had and stands at the head of the giant, bifurcated staircase, folding his arms and glaring at them as if they are a trap or illusion. “Where, exactly, is here, Severn?”

I point to the open square at the foot of the steps. “The Piazza di Spagna,” I say. It is suddenly strange to hear Hunt call me Severn. I realize that the name ceased to be mine when we passed through the Lateran Gate. Or, rather, that my true name had suddenly become my own again.

“Before too many years pass,” I say, “these will be called the Spanish Steps.” I start down the right bend in the staircase. A sudden dizziness causes me to stagger, and Hunt moves quickly to take my arm.

“You can’t walk,” he says. “You’re too ill.”

I point to a mottled old building forming a wall to the opposite side of the broad steps and facing the Piazza. “It’s not far. Hunt. There is our destination.”

Gladstone’s aide turns his scowl toward the structure. “And what is there? Why are we stopping there? What awaits us there?”

I cannot help but smile at this least poetic of men’s unconscious use of assonance. I suddenly imagine us sitting up long nights in that dark hulk of a building as I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee.

I cough, continue coughing, and do not cease until blood is spattering my palm and shirt.

Hunt helps me down the steps, across the Piazza where Bernini’s boat-shaped fountain gurgles and burbles in the dusk, and then, following my pointing finger, leads me into the black rectangle of the doorway—the doorway to Number 26 Piazza di Spagna—and I think, without volition, of Dante’s Commedia and seem to see the phrase “lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"—"Abandon Every Hope, Who Enter Here"—chiseled above the cold lintel of the doorway.

Sol Weintraub stood at the entrance to the Sphinx and shook his fist at the universe as night fell and the Tombs glowed with the brilliance of their opening and his daughter did not return.

Did not return.

The Shrike had taken her, lifted her newborn body in its palm of steel, and then stepped back into the radiance which even now pushed Sol away like some terrible, bright wind from the depths of the planet.

Sol pressed against the hurricane of light, but it kept him out as surely as might a runaway containment field.

Hyperion’s sun had set, and now a cold wind blew from the barrens, driven in from the desert by a front of cold air sliding down the mountains to the south, and Sol turned to stare as vermilion dust blew into the searchlight glare of the opening Time Tombs.

The opening Tombs!

Sol squinted against the cold brilliance and looked down the valley to where the other Tombs glowed like pale green jack-o'-lantems behind their curtain of blown dust. Light and long shadows leaped across the valley floor while the clouds were drained of the last of their sunset color overhead, and night came in with the howling wind.

Something was moving in the entrance of the second structure, the Jade Tomb. Sol staggered down the steps of the Sphinx, glancing up at the entrance where the Shrike had disappeared with his daughter, and then he was off the stairway, running past the Sphinx’s paws and stumbling down the windblown path toward the Jade Tomb.

Something moved slowly from the oval doorway, was silhouetted by the shaft of light emanating from the tomb, but Sol could not tell if it was human or not. Shrike or not. If it was the Shrike, he would seize it with his bare hands, shake it until it either returned his daughter to him or until one of them was dead.

It was not the Shrike.

Sol could see the silhouette as human now. The person staggered, leaned against the Jade Tomb’s doorway as if injured or tired.

It was a young woman.

Sol thought of Rachel here in this place More than half a standard century earlier, the young archaeologist researching these artifacts and never guessing the fate awaiting her in the form of Merlin’s sickness.

Sol had always imagined his child being saved by the sickness being canceled, the infant aging normally again, the child-whowouldsomedaybeRachel given back her life. But what if Rachel returned as the twenty-six-year-old Rachel who had entered the Sphinx?

Sol’s pulse was pounding so loudly in his ears that he could not hear the wind rage around him. He waved at the figure, half-obscured now by the dust storm.

The young woman waved back.

Sol raced forward another twenty meters, stopped thirty meters from the tomb, and cried out. “Rachel! Rachel!”

The young woman silhouetted against the roaring light moved away from the doorway, touched her face with both hands, shouted something lost in the wind, and began to descend the stairs.

Sol ran, tripping over rocks as he lost the path and stumbled blindly across the valley floor, ignored the pain as his knee struck a low boulder, found the true path again, and ran to the base of the Jade Tomb, meeting her as she emerged from the cone of expanding light—

She fell just as Sol reached the bottom of the stairs, and he caught her, lowered her gently to the ground as blown sand rasped against his back and the time tides whirled about them in unseen eddies of vertigo and dejd vu.

“It is you,” she said and raised a hand to touch Sol’s cheek. “It’s real. I’m back.”

“Yes, Brawne,” said Sol, trying to hold his voice steady, brushing matted curls from Brawne Lamia’s face. He held her firmly, his arm on his knee, propping her head, his back bent to provide More shelter from the wind and sand. “It’s all right, Brawne,” he said softly, sheltering her, his eyes bright with the tears of disappointment he would not let fall. “It’s all right. You’re back.”

Meina Gladstone walked up the stairs of the cavernous War Room and stepped out into the corridor where long strips of thick Perspex allowed a view down Mons Olympus to the Tharsis Plateau.

It was raining far below, and from this vantage point almost twelve klicks high in the Martian sky, she could see pulses of lightning and curtains of static electricity as the storm dragged itself across the high steppes.

Her aide Sedeptra Akasi moved out into the corridor to stand silently next to the CEO.

“Still no word on Leigh or Severn?” asked Gladstone.

“None,” said Akasi. The young black woman’s face was illuminated by both the pale light of the Home System’s sun above and the play of lightning below. “The Core authorities say that it may have been a farcaster malfunction.”

Gladstone showed a smile with no warmth. “Yes. And can you remember any farcaster malfunction in our lifetime, Sedeptra? Anywhere in the Web?”

“No, M. Executive.”

“The Core feels no need for subtlety. Evidently they think they can kidnap whomever they want and not be held accountable. They think we need them too much in our hour of extremis. And you know something, Sedeptra?”

“What?”

“They’re right.” Gladstone shook her head and turned back toward the long descent into the War Room. “It’s less than ten minutes until the Ousters envelop God’s Grove. Let’s go down and join the others.

Is my meeting with Councilor Albedo on immediately after this?”

“Yes, Meina. I don’t think… I mean, some of us think that it is too risky to confront them directly like that.”

Gladstone paused before entering the War Room. “Why?” she asked and this time her smile was sincere. “Do you think the Core will disappear me the way they did Leigh and Severn?”

Akasi started to speak, stopped, and raised her palms.

Gladstone touched the younger woman on the shoulder. “If they do, Sedeptra, it will be a mercy. But I think they will not. Things have gone so far that they believe that there is nothing an individual can do to change the course of events.” Gladstone withdrew her hand, her smile faded. “And they may be right.”

Not speaking, the two descended to the circle of waiting warriors and politicians.

“The moment approaches,” said the True Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen.

Father Paul Dure was brought back from his reverie. In the past hour, his desperation and frustration had descended through resignation to something akin to pleasure at the thought of having no More choices, no More duties to perform. Dure had been sitting in companionable silence with the leader of the Templar Brotherhood, watching the setting of God’s Grove’s sun and the proliferation of stars and lights in the night that were not stars, Dure had wondered at the Templar’s isolation from his people at such a crucial moment, but what he knew of Templar theology made Dure realize that the Followers of the Muir would meet such a moment of potential destruction alone on the most sacred platforms and in the most secret bowers of their most sacred trees. And the occasional soft comments Hardeen made into the cowl of his robe made Dure realize that the True Voice was in touch with fellow Templars via comlog or implants.

Still, it was a peaceful way to wait for the end of the world, sitting high in the known galaxy’s tallest living tree, listening to a warm evening breeze rustle a million acres of leaves and watching stars twinkle and twin moons hurtle across a velvet sky.

“We have asked Gladstone and the Hegemony authorities to offer no resistance, to allow no FORCE warships in-system,” said Sek Hardeen.

“Is that wise?” asked Dure. Hardeen had told him earlier what the fate of Heaven’s Gate had been.

“The FORCE fleet is not yet organized enough to offer serious resistance,” answered the Templar. “At least this way our world has some chance of being treated as a nonbelligerant.”

Father Dure nodded and leaned forward the better to see the tall figure in the shadows of the platform. Soft glow-globes in the branches below them were their only illumination other than the starlight and moonglow. “Yet you welcomed this war. Aided the Shrike Cult authorities in bringing it about.”

“No, Dure. Not the war. The Brotherhood knew it must be part of the Great Change.”

“And what is that?” asked Dure “The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.”

“Cancer?”

“It is an ancient disease which—”

“Yes,” said Dure, “I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?”

Sek Hardeen’s perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. “We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Dure. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the Seneschai empaths on Hebron. The marsh centaurs of Garden. The entire ecology was destroyed on Garden, Dure, so that a few thousand human colonists might live where millions of native life forms once had thrived.”

Dure touched his cheek with a curled finger. “That is one of the drawbacks of terrafonning.”

“We did not terraform Whirl,” the Templar said quickly, “but the Jovian life forms there were hunted to extinction.”

“But no one ascertained that the zeplens were intelligent,” said Dure, hearing the lack of conviction in his own voice.

“They sang,” said the Templar. “They called across thousands of kilometers of atmosphere to each other in songs which held meaning and love and sorrow. Yet they were hunted to death like the great whales of Old Earth.”

Dure folded his hands. “Agreed, there have been injustices. But surely there is a better way to right them than to support the cruel philosophy of the Shrike Cult… and to allow this war to go on.”

The Templar’s hood moved back and forth. “No. If these were mere human injustices, other remedies could be found. But much of the illness… much of the insanity which has led to the destruction of races and the despoiling of worlds… this has come from the sinful symbiosis.”

“Symbiosis?”

“Humankind and the TechnoCore,” said Sek Hardeen in the harshest tones Dure had ever heard a Templar use. “Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other? Neither part of the symbiote can now tell. But it is an evil thing, a work of the Anti-Nature.

Worse than that, Dure, it is an evolutionary dead end.”

The Jesuit stood and walked to the railing. He looked out over the darkened world of treetops spreading out like cloud tops in the night.

“Surely there is a better way than turning to the Shrike and interstellar war.”

“The Shrike is a catalyst,” said Hardeen. “It is the cleansing fire when the forest has been stunted and allowed to grow diseased by overplanning. There will be hard times, but the result will be new growth, new life, and a proliferation of species… not merely elsewhere but in the community of humankind itself.”

“Hard times,” mused Dure. “And your Brotherhood is willing to see billions of people die to accomplish this… weeding out?”

The Templar clenched his fists. “That will not occur. The Shrike is the warning. Our Ouster brethren seek only to control Hyperion and the Shrike long enough to strike at the TechnoCore. It will be a surgical procedure… the destruction of a symbiote and the rebirth of humankind as distinct partner in the cycle of life.”

Dure sighed. “No one knows where the TechnoCore resides,” he said. “How can the Ousters strike at it?”

“They will,” said the True Voice of the Worldtree, but there was less confidence in his voice than there had been a moment before.

“And was attacking God’s Grove part of the deal?” asked the priest.

It was the Templar’s turn to stand and pace, first to the railing, then back to the table. “They will not attack God’s Grove. That is what I have kept you here to see. Then you must report to the Hegemony.”

“They’ll know at once whether the Ousters attack,” said Dure, puzzled.

“Yes, but they will not know why our world will be spared. You must bring this message. Explain this truth.”

“To hell with that,” said Father Paul Dure. “I’m tired of being everyone’s messenger. How do you know all this? The coming of the Shrike? The reason for the war?”

“There have been prophecies—” began Sek Hardeen.

Dure slammed his fist into the railing. How could he explain the manipulations of a creature who could—or at least was an agent of a force which could—manipulate time itself?

“You will see…” began the Templar again, and as if to punctuate his words there came a great, soft sound, almost as though a million hidden people had sighed and then moaned softly.

“Good God,” said Dure and looked to the west where it seemed that the sun was rising where it had disappeared less than an hour before.

A hot wind rustled leaves and blew across his face.

Five blossoming and inward-curling mushroom clouds climbed above the western horizon, turning night to day as they boiled and faded.

Dure had instinctively covered his eyes until he realized that these explosions were so far away that although brilliant as the local sun, they would not blind him.

Sek Hardeen pulled back his cowl so that the hot wind ruffled his long, oddly greenish hair. Dure stared at the man’s long, thin, vaguely Asian features and realized that he saw shock etched there. Shock and disbelief. Hardeen’s cowl whispered with cornm calls and the micro-babble of excited voices.

“Explosions on Sierra and Hokkaido,” whispered the Templar to himself. “Nuclear explosions. From the ships in orbit.”

Dure remembered that Sierra was a continent, closed to outsiders, less than eight hundred kilometers from the Worldtree where they stood.

He thought that he remembered that Hokkaido was the sacred isle where the potential treeships were grown and prepared.

“Casualties?” he asked, but before Hardeen could answer, the sky was slashed with brilliant light as a score or More tactical lasers, CPBs, and fusion lances cut a swath from horizon to horizon, switching and flashing like searchlights across the roof of the world forest that was God’s Grove. And where the lance beams cut, flame erupted in their wake.

Dure staggered as a hundred-meter-wide beam skipped like a tornado through the forest less than a kilometer from the Worldtree. The ancient forest exploded in flame, creating a corridor of fire rising ten kilometers into the night sky. Wind roared past Dure and Sek Hardeen as air rushed in to feed the fire storm. Another beam slashed north and south, passing close to the Worldtree before disappearing over the horizon.

Another swath of flame and smoke rose toward the treacherous stars.

“They promised,” gasped Sek Hardeen. “The Ouster brethren promised”

“You need help!” cried Dure. “Ask the Web for emergency assistance.”

Hardeen grabbed Dure’s arm, pulled him to the edge of the platform.

The stairs were back in place. On the platform below, a farcaster portal shimmered.

“Only the advance units of the Ouster fleet have arrived,” cried the Templar over the sound of forests burning. Ash and smoke filled the air, drifting past amidst hot embers. “But the singularity sphere will be destroyed any second. Go!”

“I’m not leaving without you,” called the Jesuit, sure that his voice could not be heard over the wind roar and terrible crackling. Suddenly, only kilometers to the east, the perfect blue circle of a plasma explosion expanded, imploded inward, then expanded again with visible concen—

trie circles of shock wave. Kilometer-tall trees bent and broke in the first wave of the blast, their eastern sides exploding in flame, leaves flying off by the millions and adding to the almost solid wall of debris hurtling toward the Worldtree. Behind the circle of flame, another plasma bomb went off. Then a third.

Dure and the Templar fell down the steps and were blown across the lower platform like leaves on a sidewalk. The Templar grabbed a burning muirwood baluster, seized Dure’s arm in an iron grip, and struggled to his feet, moving toward the still shimmering farcaster like a man leaning into a cyclone.

Half conscious, half aware of being dragged, Dure managed to get to his own feet just as Voice of the Worldtree Sek Hardeen pulled him to the edge of the portal. Dure clung to the portal frame, too weak to pull himself the final meter, and looked past the farcaster to see something which he would never forget.

Once, many, many years before, near his beloved VillefranchesurSaone, the youngster Paul Dure had stood on a cliff top, secure in the arms of his father and safe in a thick concrete shelter, and watched through a narrow window as forty-meter tall tsunami rushed toward the coast where they lived.

This tsunami was three kilometers high, was made of flame, and was racing at what seemed the speed of light across the helpless roof of the forest toward the Worldtree, Sek Hardeen, and Paul Dure. What the tsunami touched, it destroyed. It raged closer, rising higher and nearer until it obliterated the world and sky with flame and noise.

“No!” screamed Father Paul Dure.

“Go!” cried the True Voice of the Worldtree and pushed the Jesuit through the farcaster portal even as the platform, the Worldtree’s trunk, and the Templar’s robe burst into flames.

The farcaster shut down even as Dure tumbled through, slicing off the heel of his shoe as it contracted, and Dure felt his eardrums rupture and his clothes smolder even as he fell, struck something hard with the back of his head, and fell again into darkness More absolute.

Gladstone and the others watched in horrified silence as the civilian satellites sent images of the death throes of God’s Grove through the farcaster relays.

“We have to blow it now,” cried Admiral Singh over the crackling of forests burning. Meina Gladstone thought that she could hear the screams of human beings and the countless arboreals who lived in the Templar forests.

“We can’t let them get closer!” cried Singh. “We have only the remotes to detonate the sphere.”

“Yes,” said Gladstone, but although her lips moved she heard no sound.

Singh turned and nodded toward a FORCE:space colonel. The Colonel touched his tactical board. The burning forests disappeared, the giant holos went absolutely dark, but the sound of screams somehow remained. Gladstone realized that it was the sound of blood in her ears.

She turned toward Morpurgo. “How long…” She cleared her throat. “General, how long until Mare Infinitus is attacked?”

“Three hours and fifty-two minutes, M. Executive,” said the General.

Gladstone turned toward the former Commander William Ajunta Lee. “Is your task force ready, Admiral?”

“Yes, CEO,” said Lee, his face pale beneath a tan.

“How many ships will be in the strike?”

“Seventy-four, M. Executive.”

“And you will hit them away from Mare Infinitus?”

“Just within the Oort Cloud, M. Executive.”

“Good,” said Gladstone. “Good hunting. Admiral.”

The young man took this as his cue to salute and leave the chamber.

Admiral Singh leaned over and whispered something to General Van Zeidt.

Sedeptra Akasi leaned toward Gladstone and said, “Government House Security reports that a man just fareast into the secured GH terminex with an outdated priority access code. The man was injured, taken to the East Wing infirmary.”

“Leigh?” asked Gladstone. “Severn?”

“No, M. Executive,” said Akasi. “The priest from Pacem. Paul Dure”

Gladstone nodded. “I’ll see him after my meeting with Albedo,” she said to her aide. To the group, she announced, “Unless anyone has anything to add to what we saw, we shall adjourn for thirty minutes and take up the defense of Asquith and Ixjon when we reassemble.”

The group stood as the CEO and her entourage stepped through the permanent connecting portal to Government House and filed through a door in the far wall. The rumble of argument and shock resumed when Gladstone was out of sight.

Meina Gladstone sat back in her leather chair and closed her eyes for precisely five seconds. When she opened them, the cluster of aides still stood there, some looking anxious, some looking eager, all of them waiting for her next word, her next command.

“Get out,” she said softly. “Go on, take a few minutes to get some rest. Put your feet up for ten minutes. There’ll be no More rest for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

The group filed out, some looking on the verge of protest, others on the verge of collapse.

“Sedeptra,” said Gladstone, and the young woman stepped back into the office. “Assign two of my personal guard to the priest who just came through, Dure.”

Akasi nodded and made a note on her faxpad.

“How is the political situation?” asked Gladstone, rubbing her eyes.

“The All Thing is chaos,” said Akasi. “There are factions but they haven’t coalesced into effective opposition yet. The Senate is a different story.”

“Feldstein?” said Gladstone, naming the angry senator from Barnard’s World. Less than forty-two hours remained before Barnard’s World would be attacked by the Ousters.

“Feldstein, Kakinuma, Peters, Sabenstorafem, Richeau… even Sudette Chier is calling for your resignation.”

“What about her husband?” Gladstone considered Senator Kolchev the most influential person in the Senate.

“No word from Senator Kolchev yet. Public or private.”

Gladstone tapped a thumbnail against her lower lip. “How much time do you think this administration has before a vote of no confidence brings us down, Sedeptra?”

Akasi, one of the most astute political operatives Gladstone had ever worked with, returned her boss’s stare. “Seventy-two hours at the outside, CEO. The votes are there. The mob just doesn’t know it’s a mob yet. Somebody has to pay for what’s happening.”

Gladstone nodded absently. “Seventy-two hours,” she murmured.

“More than enough time.” She looked up and smiled. “That will be all, Sedeptra. Get some rest.”

The aide nodded but her expression showed her true opinion of that suggestion. It was very quiet in the study when the door closed behind her.

Gladstone sat thinking for a moment, her fist to her chin. Then she said to the walls, “Bring Councilor Albedo here, please.”

Twenty seconds later, the air on the other side of Gladstone’s broad desk misted, shimmered, and solidified. The representative of the TechnoCore looked as handsome as ever, short gray hair gleaming in the light, a healthy tan on his open, honest face.

“M. Executive,” began the holographic projection, “the Advisory Council and the Core predictors continue to offer their services in this time of great—”

“Where is the Core, Albedo?” interrupted Gladstone.

The Councilor’s smile did not falter. “I’m sorry, M. Executive, what was the question?”

“The TechnoCore. Where is it?”

Albedo’s friendly face showed a slight puzzlement but no hostility, no visible emotion other than bemused helpfulness. “You’re certainly aware, M. Executive, that it has been Core policy since the Secession not to reveal the location of the… ah… physical elements of the TechnoCore. In another sense, the Core is nowhere, since—”

“Since you exist on the datumplane and datasphere consensual realities,” said Gladstone, voice flat. “Yes, I’ve heard that crap all of my life, Albedo. So did my father and his father before him. I’m asking a straight question now. Where is the TechnoCore?”

The Councilor shook his head bemusedly, regretfully, as if he were an adujt being asked for the thousandth time the child’s question Why is the sky blue, Daddy?

“M. Executive, it is simply not possible to answer that question in a way that would make sense in human three-dimensional coordinates.

In a sense we… the Core… exist within the Web and beyond the Web. We swim in the datumplane reality which you call the datasphere, but as for the physical elements… what your ancestors called 'hardware,' we find it necessary to—”

“To keep it a secret,” finished Gladstone. She crossed her arms. “Are you aware. Councilor Albedo, that there will be those people in the Hegemony… millions of people… who will firmly believe that the Core… your Advisory Council… has betrayed humankind?”

Albedo made a motion with his hands. “That will be regrettable, M.

Executive. Regrettable but understandable.”

“Your predictors were supposed to be close to foolproof. Councilor.

Yet at no time did you tell us of the destruction of worlds by this Ouster fleet.”

The sadness on the projection’s handsome face was very close to convincing. “M. Executive, it is only fair to remind you that the Advisory Council warned you that bringing Hyperion into the Web introduced a random variable which even the Council could not factor.”

“But this isn’t Hyperion!” snapped Gladstone, her voice rising. “It’s God’s Grove burning. Heaven’s Gate reduced to slag. Mare Infinitus waiting for the next hammer blow! What good is the Advisory Council if it cannot predict an invasion of that magnitude?”

“We did predict the inevitability of war with the Ousters, M. Executive.

We also predicted the great danger of defending Hyperion.

You must believe me that the inclusion of Hyperion in any predictive equation brings the reliability factor down as low as—”

“All right,” sighed Gladstone. “I need to talk to someone else in the Core, Albedo. Someone in your indecipherable hierarchy of intelligences who actually has some decision-making power.”

“I assure you that I represent all Core elements when I—”

“Yes, yes. But I want to speak to one of the… the Powers I believe you call them. One of the elder AIs. One with clout, Albedo. I need to speak to someone who can tell me why the Core kidnapped my artist Severn and my aide Leigh Hunt.”

The holo looked shocked. “I assure you, M. Gladstone, on the honor of four centuries of our alliance, that the Core had nothing to do with the unfortunate disappearance of—”

Gladstone stood. “This is why I need to talk to a Power. The time for assurances is past, Albedo. It is time for straight talk if either of our species is going to survive. That is all.” She turned her attention to the faxpad flimsies on her desk.

Councilor Albedo stood, nodded a farewell, and shimmered out of existence.

Gladstone called her personal farcaster portal into existence, spoke the Government House infirmary codes, and started to step through.

In the instant before touching the opaque surface of the energy rectangle, she paused, gave thought to what she was doing, and for the first time in her life felt anxiety about stepping through a farcaster.

What if the Core wanted to kidnap her? Or kill her?

Meina Gladstone suddenly realized that the Core had the power of life and death over every farcaster-traveling citizen in the Web… which was every citizen with power. Leigh and the Severn cybrid did not have to be kidnapped, translated somewhere… only the persistent habit of thinking of farcasters as foolproof transportation created the subconscious conviction that they had gone somewhere. Her aide and the enigmatic cybrid could easily have been translated to… to nothing.

To scattered atoms stretched through a singularity. Farcasters did not “teleport” people and things—such a concept was silly—but how much less silly was it to trust a device that punched holes in the fabric of space-time and allowed one to step through black hole “trapdoors"?

How silly was it for her to trust the Core to transport her to the infirmary?

Gladstone thought of the War Room… three giant rooms connected by permanently activated, vision-clear farcaster portals… but three rooms nonetheless, separated by at least a thousand light-years of real space, decades of real time even under Hawking drive. Every time Morpurgo or Singh or one of the others moved from a map holo to the plotting board, he or she stepped across great gulfs of space and time.

All the Core had to do to destroy the Hegemony or anyone in it was to tamper with the farcasters, allow a slight “mistake” in targeting.

To hell with this, thought Meina Gladstone and stepped through to see Paul Dure in the Government House infirmary.

Thirty-Nine

The two rooms on the second floor of the house on the Piazza di Spagna are small, narrow, high ceilinged, and—except for a single dim lamp burning in each room as if lighted by ghosts in expectation of a visit by other ghosts—quite dark. My bed is in the smaller of the two rooms: the one facing the Piazza, although all one can see from the high windows this night is darkness creased by deeper shadows and accented by the ceaseless burbling of Bernini’s unseen fountain.

Bells ring on the hour from one of the twin towers of Santa Trinitsl dei Monti, the church that crouches in the dark like a massive, tawny cat at the head of the stairs outside, and each time I hear the bells toll the brief notes of the early hours of the mom, I imagine ghostly hands pulling rotting bell ropes. Or perhaps rotting hands pulling ghostly bell ropes; I don’t know which image suits my macabre fancies this endless night.

Fever lies upon me this night, as dank and heavy and stifling as a thick, water-soaked blanket. My skin alternately burns and then is clammy to the touch. Twice I have been seized with coughing spasms; the first brought Hunt running in from his couch in the other room, and I watched his eyes widen at the sight of the blood I had vomited on the damask sheets; the second spasm I stifled as best I could, staggering to the basin on the bureau to spit up smaller quantities of black blood and dark phlegm. Hunt did not wake the second time.

To be back here. To come all this way to these dark rooms, this grim bed. I half remember awakening here, miraculously cured, the “real”

Severn and Dr. Clark and even little Signora Angeletti hovering in the outer room. That period of convalescence from death; that period of realization that I was not Keats, was not on the true Earth, that this was not in the century I had closed my eyes in that last night… that I was not human.

Sometime after two, I sleep, and as I sleep, I dream. The dream is one I have never suffered before. I dream that I rise slowly through the datumplane, through the datasphere, into and through the megasphere, and finally into a place I do not know, have never dreamt of… a place of infinite spaces, unhurried, indescribable colors, a place with no horizons, no ceilings, no floors or solid areas one might call the ground. I think of it as the metasphere, for I sense immediately that this level of consensual reality includes all of the varieties and vagaries of sensation which I have experienced on Earth, all of the binary analyses and intellectual pleasures I have felt flowing from the TechnoCore through the datasphere, and, above all, a sense of… of what? Expansiveness? Freedom?—potential might be the word I am hunting for.

I am alone in this metasphere. Colors flow above me, under me, through me… sometimes dissolving into vague pastels, sometimes coalescing into cloudlike fantasies, and at other times, rarely, appearing to form into -More solid objects, shapes, distinct forms which may or may not be humanoid in appearance—I watch them the way a child might watch clouds and imagine elephants, crocodiles from the Nile, and great gunboats marching from west to east on a spring day in the Lake District.

After a while I hear sounds: the maddening trickle of the Bernini fountain in the Piazza outside; doves rustling and cooing on the ledges above my window; Leigh Hunt moaning softly in his sleep. But above and beneath these noises, I hear something More stealthy, less real, but infinitely More threatening.

Something large this way comes. I strain to see through the pastel gloom; something is moving just beyond the horizon of sight. I know that it knows my name. I know that it holds my life in one palm and death in its other fist.

There is no place to hide in this space beyond space. I cannot run.

The siren song of pain continues to rise and fall from the world I left behind—the everyday pain of each person everywhere, the pain of those suffering from the war just begun, the specific, focused pain of those on the Shrike’s terrible tree, and, worst of all, the pain I feel for and from the pilgrims and those others whose lives and thoughts I now share.

It would be worth rushing to greet this approaching shadow of doom if it would grant me freedom from that song of pain.

“Severn! Severn!”

For a second I think that I am the one calling, just as I had before in these rooms, calling Joseph Severn in the night when my pain and fever ranged beyond my ability to contain it. And he was always there:

Severn with his hulking, well-meaning slowness and that gentle smile which I often wanted to wipe from his face with some small meanness or comment. It is hard to be good-natured when one is dying; I had led a life of some generosity… why then was it my fate to continue that role when I was the one suffering, when I was the one coughing the ragged remnants of my lungs into stained handkerchiefs?

“Severn!”

It is not my voice. Hunt is shaking me by the shoulders, calling Severn’s name. I realize that he thinks he is calling my name. I brush away his hands and sink back into the pillows. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“You were moaning,” says Gladstone’s aide. “Crying out.”

“A nightmare. Nothing More.”

“Your dreams are usually More than dreams,” says Hunt. He glances around the narrow room, illuminated now by the single lamp he has carried in. “What a terrible place, Severn.”

I try to smile. “It cost me twenty-eight shillings a month. Seven scudi. Highway robbery.”

Hunt frowns at me. The stark light makes his wrinkles seem deeper than usual. “Listen, Severn, I know you’re a cybrid. Gladstone told me that you were the retrieval persona of a poet named Keats. Now obviously all this…"—he gestured helplessly toward the room, shadows, tall rectangle of windows, and high bed—"all this has something to do with that. But how? What game is the Core playing here?”

“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.

“But you know this place?”

“Oh yes,” I say with feeling.

“Tell me,” pleads Hunt, and it is his restraint to this point in not asking as much as the earnestness of that plea now which decides me to tell him.

I tell him about the poet John Keats, about his birth in 1795, his short and frequently unhappy life, and about his death from “consumption” in 1821, in Rome, far from his friends and only love. I tell him about my staged “recovery” in this very room, about my decision to take the name of Joseph Severn—the artist acquaintance who stayed with Keats until his death—and, finally, I tell him about my short time in the Web, listening, watching, condemned to dream the lives of the Shrike Pilgrims on Hyperion and the others.

“Dreams?” says Hunt. “You mean even now you’re dreaming about what’s occurring in the Web?”

“Yes.” I tell him of the dreams about Gladstone, the destruction of Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove, and the confused images from Hyperion.

Hunt is pacing back and forth in the narrow room, his shadow thrown high on the rough walls. “Can you contact them?”

“The ones I dream of? Gladstone?” I think a second. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

I try to explain. “I’m not even in these dreams, Hunt. I have no… no voice, no presence… there’s no way I can contact those I dream about.”

“But sometimes you dream what they’re thinking?”

I realize that this is true. Close to the truth. “I sense what they are feeling…”

“Then can’t you leave some trace in their mind… in their memory?

Let them know where we are?”

“No.”

Hunt collapses into the chair at the foot of my bed. He suddenly seems very old.

“Leigh,” I say, “even if I could communicate with Gladstone or the others—which I can’t—what good would it do? I’ve told you that this replica of Old Earth is in the Magellanic Cloud. Even at quantum-leap Hawking velocities it would take centuries for anyone to reach us.”

“We could warn them,” says Hunt, his voice so tired that it sounds almost sullen.

“Warn them of what? All of Gladstone’s worst nightmares are coming true around her. Do you think she trusts the Core now? That’s why the Core could kidnap us so blatantly. Events are proceeding too quickly for Gladstone or anyone in the Hegemony to deal with.”

Hunt rubs his eyes, then steeples his fingers under his nose. His stare is not overly friendly. “Are you really the retrieved personality of a poet?”

I say nothing.

“Recite some poetry. Make something up.”

I shake my head. It is late, we’re both tired and frightened, and my heart has not yet quit pounding from the nightmare which was More than a nightmare. I won’t let Hunt make me angry.

“Come on,” he says. “Show me that you’re the new, improved version of Bill Keats.”

“John Keats,” I say softly.

“Whatever. Come on, Severn. Or John. Or whatever I should call you. Recite some poesy.”

“All right,” I say, returning his stare. “Listen.”

TTiere was a naughty boy. And a naughty boy was he For nothing would he do But scribble poetry—

Och, the charm When we choose To follow one’s nose To the North, To the North, To follow one’s nose To the North!

“I don’t know,” says Hunt. “That doesn’t sound like something a poet whose reputation has lasted a thousand years would have written.”

I shrug.

“Were you dreaming about Gladstone tonight? Did something happen that caused those moans?”

“No. It wasn’t about Gladstone. It was a… real nightmare for a change.”

Hunt stands, lifts his lamp, and prepares to take the only light from the room. I can hear the fountain in the Piazza, the doves on the windowsills. “Tomorrow,” he says, “we’ll make sense of all this and figure out a way to get back. If they can farcast us here, there must be a way to farcast home.”

“Yes,” I say, knowing it is not true.

“Good night,” says Hunt. “No More nightmares, all right?”

“No More,” I say, knowing this is even less true.

Moneta pulled the wounded Kassad away from the Shrike and seemed to hold the creature at bay with an extended hand while she fumbled a blue torus from the belt of her skinsuit and twisted it behind her.

A two-meter-high gold oval hung burning in midair.

“Let me go,” muttered Kassad. “Let us finish it.” There was blood spattered where the Shrike had clawed huge rents in the Colonel’s skinsuit. His right foot was dangling as if half-severed; he could put no weight on it, and only the fact that he had been struggling with the Shrike, half-carried by the thing in a mad parody of a dance, had kept Kassad upright as they fought.

“Let me go,” repeated Fedmahn Kassad.

“Shut up,” said Moneta, and then, More softly, “Shut up, my love.”

She dragged him through the golden oval, and they emerged into blazing light.

Even through his pain and exhaustion, Kassad was dazzled by the sight. They were not on Hyperion; he was sure of that. A vast plain stretched to an horizon much farther away than logic or experience would allow. Low, orange grass—if grass it was—grew on the flatlands and low hills like fuzz on the back of some immense caterpillar, while things which might have been trees grew like whiskered-carbon sculptures, their trunks and branches Escher-ish in their baroque improbability, their leaves a riot of dark blue and violet ovals shimmering toward a sky alive with light.

But not sunlight. Even as Moneta carried him away from the closing portal—Kassad did not think of it as a farcaster since he felt sure it had carried them through time as well as space—and toward a copse of those impossible trees, Kassad turned his eyes toward the sky and felt something close to wonder. It was as bright as a Hyperion day; as bright as midday on a Lusian shopping mall; as bright as midsummer on the Tharsis Plateau of Kassad’s dry homeworld. Mars, but this was no sunlight—the sky was filled with stars and constellations and star clusters and a galaxy so cluttered with suns that there were almost no patches of darkness between the lights. It was like being in a planetarium with ten projectors, thought Kassad. Like being at the center of the galaxy.

The center of the galaxy.

A group of men and women in skinsuits moved out from the shade of the Escher trees to circle Kassad and Moneta. One of the men—a giant even by Kassad’s Martian standards—looked at him, raised his head toward Moneta, and even though Kassad could hear nothing, sense nothing on his skinsuit’s radio and tightband receivers, he knew the two were communicating.

“Lie back,” said Moneta as she laid Kassad on the velvety orange grass. He struggled to sit up, to speak, but both she and the giant touched his chest with their palms, and he lay back so that his vision was filled with the slowly twisting violet leaves and the sky of stars.

The man touched him again, and Kassad’s skinsuit was deactivated.

He tried to sit up, tried to cover himself as he realized he was naked before the small crowd that had gathered, but Moneta’s firm hand held him in place. Through the pain and dislocation, he vaguely sensed the man touching his slashed arms and chest, running a silver-coated hand down his leg to where the Achilles tendon had been cut. The Colonel felt a coolness wherever the giant touched, and then his consciousness floated away like a balloon, high above the tawny plain and the rolling hills, drifting toward the solid canopy of stars where a huge figure waited, dark as a towering thundercloud above the horizon, massive as a mountain.

“Kassad,” whispered Moneta, and the Colonel drifted back. “Kassad,” she said again, her lips against his cheek, his skinsuit reactivated and melded with hers.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad sat up as she did. He shook his head, realized that he was clothed in quicksilver energy once again, and got to his feet. There was no pain. He felt his body tingle in a dozen places where injuries had been healed, serious cuts repaired. He melded his hand to his own suit, ran flesh across flesh, bent his knee and touched his heel, but could feel no scars.

Kassad turned toward the giant. “Thank you,” he said, not knowing if the man could hear.

The giant nodded and stepped back toward the others.

“He’s a… a doctor of sorts,” said Moneta. “A healer.”

Kassad half-heard her as he concentrated on the other people. They were human—he knew in his heart that they were human—but the variety was staggering: their skinsuits were not all silver like Kassad’s and Moneta’s but ranged through a score of colors, each as soft and organic as some living wild creature’s pelt. Only the subtle energy-shimmer and blurred facial features revealed the skinsuit surface. Their anatomy was as varied as their coloration: the healer’s Shrike-sized girth and massive bulk, his massive brow and a cascade of tawny energy flow which might be a mane… a female next to him, no larger than a child but obviously a woman, perfectly proportioned with muscular legs, small breasts, and faery wings two meters long rising from her back—and not merely decorative wings, either, for when the breeze ruffled the orange prairie grass, this woman gave a short run, extended her arms, and rose gracefully into the air.

Behind several tall, thin women with blue skinsuits and long, webbed fingers, a group of short men were as visored and armor-plated as a FORCE Marine going into battle in a vacuum, but Kassad sensed that the armor was part of them. Overhead, a cluster of winged males rose on thermals, thin, yellow beams of laser light pulsing between them in some complex code. The lasers seemed to emanate from an eye in each of their chests.

Kassad shook his head again.

“We need to go,” said Moneta. “The Shrike cannot follow us here.

These warriors have enough to contend with without dealing with this particular manifestation of the Lord of Pain.”

“Where are we?” asked Kassad.

Moneta brought a violet oval into existence with a golden ferule from her belt. “Far in humankind’s future. One of our futures. This is where the Time Tombs were formed and launched backward in time.”

Kassad looked around again. Something very large moved in front of the starfield, blocking out thousands of stars and throwing a shadow for scant seconds before it was gone. The men and women looked up briefly and then went back to their business: harvesting small things from the trees, huddling in clusters to view bright energy maps called up by a flick of one man’s fingers, flying off toward the horizon with the speed of a thrown spear. One low, round individual of indeterminate sex had burrowed into the soft soil and was visible now only as a faint line of raised earth moving in quick concentric circles around the band.

“Where is this place?” Kassad asked again. “What is it?” Suddenly, inexplicably, he felt himself close to tears, as if he had turned an unfamiliar corner and found himself at home in the Tharsis Relocation Projects, his long-dead mother waving to him from a doorway, his forgotten friends and siblings waiting for him to join a game ofscootball.

“Come,” said Moneta and there was no mistaking the urgency in her voice. She pulled Kassad toward the glowing oval. He watched the others and the dome of stars until he stepped through and the view was lost to sight.

They stepped out into darkness, and it took the briefest of seconds for the filters in Kassad’s skinsuit to compensate his vision. They were at the base of the Crystal Monolith in the Valley of the Time Tombs on Hyperion. It was night. Clouds boiled overhead, and a storm was raging. Only a pulsing glow from the Tombs themselves illuminated the scene. Kassad felt a sick lurch of loss for the clean, well-lighted place they had just left, and then his mind focused on what he was seeing.

Sol Weintraub and Brawne Lamia were half a klick down the valley, Sol bending over the woman as she lay near the front of the Jade Tomb.

Wind swirled dust around them so thickly that they did not see the Shrike moving like another shadow down the trail past the Obelisk, toward them.

Fedmahn Kassad stepped off the dark marble in front of the Monolith and skirted the shattered crystal shards which littered the path. He realized that Moneta still clung to his arm.

“If you fight again,” she said, her voice soft and urgent in his ear, “the Shrike will kill you.”

“They’re my friends,” said Kassad. His FORCE gear and torn armor lay where Moneta had thrown it hours earlier. He searched the Monolith until he found his assault rifle and a bandolier of grenades, saw the rifle was still functional, checked charges and clicked off safeties, left the Monolith, and stepped forward at double time to intercept the Shrike.

I wake to the sound of water flowing, and for a second I believe I am awakening from my nap near the waterfall of Lodore during my walking tour with Brown. But the darkness when I open my eyes is as fearsome as when I slept, the water has a sick, trickling sound rather than the rush of the cataract which Southey would someday make famous in his poem, and I feel terrible—not merely sick with the sore throat I came down with on our tour after Brown and I foolishly climbed Skiddaw before breakfast—but mortally, fearfully ill, with my body aching with something deeper than ague while phlegm and fire bubble in my chest and belly.

I rise and feel my way to the window by touch. A dim light comes under the door from Leigh Hunt’s room, and I realize that he has gone to sleep with the lamp still lit. That would not have been a bad thing for me to have done, but it is too late to light it now as I feel my way to the lighter rectangle of outer darkness set into the deeper darkness of the room.

The air is fresh and filled with the scent of rain. I realize that the sound that woke me is thunder as lightning flashes over the rooftops of Rome. No lights bum in the city. By leaning slightly out of the open window, I can see the stairs above the Piazza all slick with rain and the towers ofTrinita dei Monti outlined blackly against lightning flashes.

The wind that blows down those steps is chill, and I move back to the bed to pull a blanket around me before dragging a chair to the window and sitting there, looking out, thinking.

I remember my brother Torn during those last weeks and days, his face and body contorted with the terrible effort to breathe. I remember my mother and how pale she looked, her face almost shining in the gloom of the darkened room. My sister and I were allowed to touch her clammy hand, kiss her fevered lips, and then withdraw. I remember that once I furtively wiped my lips as I left that room, glancing sideways to see if my sister or others had seen my sinful act.

When Dr. dark and an Italian surgeon opened Keats’s body less than thirty hours after he had died, they found, as Severn later wrote a friend, “…the worst possible Consumption—the lungs were intirely destroyed—the cells were quite gone.” Neither Dr. Clark nor the Italian surgeon could imagine how Keats had lived those last two months or More .

I think of this as I sit in the darkened room and look out on the darkened Piazza, all the while listening to the boiling in my chest and throat, feeling the pain like fire inside and the worse pain from the cries in my mind: cries from Martin Silenus on the tree, suffering for writing the poetry I had been too frail and cowardly to finish; cries from Fed-mahn Kassad as he prepares to die at the claws of the Shrike; cries from the Consul as he is forced into betrayal a second time; cries from thousands of Templar throats as they bewail the death of both their world and their brother Het Masteen; cries from Brawne Lamia as she thinks of her dead lover, my twin; cries from Paul Dure as he lies fighting burns and the shock of memory, all too aware of the waiting cruciforms on his chest; cries from Sol Weintraub as he beats his fist on the earth of Hyperion, calling for his child, the infant cries of Rachel still in our ears.

“Goddamn,” I say softly, beating my fist against the stone and mortar of the window frame. “Goddamn.”

After a while, just as the first hint of paleness promises dawn, I move away from the window, find my bed, and lie down just a moment to close my eyes.

Governor-General Theo Lane awoke to the sound of music. He blinked and looked around, recognizing the nearby nutrient tank and ship’s surgery as if from a dream. Theo realized that he was wearing soft, black pajamas and had been sleeping on the surgery’s examination couch. The past twelve hours began to stitch themselves together from Theo’s patches of memory: being raised from the treatment tank, sensors being applied, the Consul and another man leaning over him, asking him questions—Theo answering just as if he were truly conscious, then sleep again, dreams of Hyperion and its cities burning. No, not dreams.

Theo sat up, felt himself almost float off the couch, found his clothes cleaned and folded neatly on a nearby shelf, and dressed quickly, hearing the music continue, now rising, now fading, but always continuing with a haunting acoustical quality which suggested that it was live and not recorded.

Theo took the short stairway to the recreation deck and stopped in surprise as he realized that the ship was open, the balcony extended, the containment field apparently off. Gravity underfoot was minimal: enough to pull Theo back to the deck but little more—probably 20 percent or less of Hyperion’s, perhaps one-sixth standard.

The ship was open. Brilliant sunlight streamed in the open door to the balcony where the Consul sat playing the antique instrument he had called a piano. Theo recognized the archaeologist, Arundez, leaning against the hull opening with a drink in his hand. The Consul was playing something very old and very complicated; his hands were a studied blur on the keyboard. Theo moved closer, started to whisper something to the smiling Arundez, and then stopped in shock to stare.

Beyond the balcony, thirty meters below, brilliant sunlight fell on a bright green lawn stretching to an horizon far too close. On that lawn, clusters of people sat and lay in relaxed postures, obviously listening to the Consul’s impromptu concert. But what people!

Theo could see tall, thin people, looking like the aesthetes ofEpsilon Eridani, pale and bald in their wispy blue robes, but beside them and beyond them an amazing multitude of human types sat listening– More varieties than the Web had ever seen: humans cloaked in fur and scales; humans with bodies like bees and eyes to match, multifaceted receptors and antennae; humans as fragile and thin as wire sculptures, great black wings extending from their thin shoulders and folding around them like capes; humans apparently designed for massive-g worlds, short and stout and muscular as cape buffalo, making Lusians look fragile in comparison; humans with short bodies and long arms covered with orange fur, only their pale and sensitive faces separating them from some holo of Old Earth’s long-extinct orangutans; and other humans looking More lemur than humanoid, More aquiline or leonine or ursine or anthropoid than manlike. Yet somehow Theo knew at once that these were human beings, as shocking as their differences were. Their attentive gazes, their relaxed postures, and a hundred other subtle human attributes—down to the way a butterfly-winged mother cradled a butterfly-winged child in her arms—all gave testimony to a common humanity which Theo could not deny.

Melio Arundez turned, smiled at Theo’s expression, and whispered, “Ousters.”

Stunned, Theo Lane could do little More than shake his head and listen to the music. Ousters were barbarians, not these beautiful and sometimes ethereal creatures. Ouster captives on Bressia, not to mention the bodies of their infantry dead, had been of a uniform body sort– tall, yes, thin, yes, but decidedly More Web standard than this dizzying display of variety.

Theo shook his head again as the Consul’s piano piece rose to a crescendo and ended on a definitive note. The hundreds of beings in the field beyond applauded, the sound high and soft in the thin air, and then Theo watched as they stood, stretched, and headed different ways… some walking quickly over the disturbingly near horizon, others unfolding eight-meter wings and flying away. Still others moved toward the base of the Consul’s ship.

The Consul stood, saw Theo, and smiled. He clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “Theo, just in time. We’ll be negotiating soon.”

Theo Lane blinked. Three Ousters landed on the balcony and folded their great wings behind them. Each of the men was heavily furred and differently marked and striped, their pelts as organic and convincing as any wild creature’s.

“As delightful as always,” the closest Ouster said to the Consul. The Ouster’s face was leonine—broad nose and golden eyes framed by a ruff of tawny fur. “The last piece was Mozart’s Fantasia in D Minor, KV. 397, was it not?”

“It was,” said the Consul. “Freeman Vanz, I would like to introduce M. Theo Lane, Governor-General of the Hegemony Protectorate world ofHyperion.”

The lion gaze turned on Theo. “An honor,” said Freeman Vanz and extended a furred hand.

Theo shook it. “A pleasure to meet you, sir.” Theo wondered if he were actually still in the recovery tank, dreaming this. The sunlight on his face and the firm palm against his suggested otherwise.

Freeman Vanz turned back to the Consul. “On behalf of the Aggregate, I thank you for that concert. It has been too many years since we have heard you play, my friend.” He glanced around. “We can hold the talks here or at one of the administrative compounds, at your convenience.”

The Consul hesitated only a second. “There are three of us, Freeman Vanz. Many of you. We will join you.”

The lion head nodded and glanced skyward. “We will send a boat for your crossing.” He and the other two moved to the railing and stepped off, falling several meters before unfurling their complex wings and flying toward the horizon.

“Jesus,” whispered Theo. He gripped the Consul’s forearm. “Where are we?”

“The Swarm,” said the Consul, covering the Steinway’s keyboard.

He led the way inside, waited for Arundez to step back, and then brought the balcony in.

“And what are we going to negotiate?” asked Theo.

The Consul rubbed his eyes. It looked as if the man had slept little or not at all during the ten or twelve hours Theo had been healing.

“That depends upon CEO Gladstone’s next message,” said the Consul and nodded toward where the holopit misted with transmission columns. A fatline squirt was being decoded on the ship’s one-time pad at that moment.

Meina Gladstone stepped into the Government House infirmary and was escorted by waiting doctors to the recovery bay where Father Paul Dure lay. “How is he?” she asked the first doctor, the CEO’s own physician.

“Second-degree flash burns over about a third of his body,” answered Dr. Irma Androneva. “He lost his eyebrows and some hair… he didn’t have that much to start with… and there were some tertiary radiation burns on the left side of his face and body. We’ve completed the epidermal regeneration and given RNA template injections. He’s in no pain and conscious. There is the problem of the cruciform parasites on his chest, but that is of no immediate danger to the patient.”

“Tertiary radation burns,” said Gladstone, stopping for a moment just out of earshot of the cubicle where Dure waited. “Plasma bombs?”

“Yes,” answered another doctor whom Gladstone did not recognize.

“We’re certain that this man ’cast in from God’s Grove a second or two before the farcaster connection was cut.”

“All right,” said Gladstone, stopping by the floating pallet where Dure rested, “I wish to speak to the gentleman alone, please.”

The doctors glanced at one another, waved a mech nurse to its wall storage, and closed the portal to the ward room as they departed.

“Father Dure?” asked Gladstone, recognizing the priest from his holos and Severn’s descriptions during the pilgrimage. Dure’s face was red and mottled now, and it glistened from regeneration gel and spray-on painkiller. He was still a man of striking appearance.

“CEO,” whispered the priest and made as if to sit up.

Gladstone set a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Rest,” she said. “Do you feel like telling me what happened?”

Dure nodded. There were tears in the old Jesuit’s eyes. “The True Voice of the Worldtree didn’t believe that they would really attack,” he whispered, his voice raw. “Sek Hardeen thought that the Templars had some pact with the Ousters… some arrangement. But they did attack. Tactical lances, plasma devices, nuclear explosives, I think…”

“Yes,” said Gladstone, “we monitored it from the War Room. I need to know everything. Father Dure. Everything from the point when you stepped into the Cave Tomb on Hyperion.”

Paul Dure’s eyes focused on Gladstone’s face. “You know about that?”

“Yes. And about most other things to that point. But I need to know More . Much More.”

Dure closed his eyes. “The labyrinth…”

“What?”

“The labyrinth,” he said again, voice stronger. He cleared his throat and told her about his voyage through the tunnels of corpses, the transition to a FORCE ship and his meeting with Severn on Pacem.

“And you’re sure Severn was headed here? To Government House?” asked Gladstone.

“Yes. He and your aide… Hunt. Both of them intended to ’cast here.”

Gladstone nodded and carefully touched an unburned section of the priest’s shoulder. “Father, things are happening very quickly here. Severn is missing and so is Leigh Hunt. I need advice about Hyperion.

Will you stay with me?”

Dure looked confused for a moment. “I need to get back. Back to Hyperion, M. Executive. Sol and the others are waiting for me.”

“I understand,” said Gladstone soothingly. “As soon as there’s a way back to Hyperion, I’ll expedite your return. Right now, however, the Web is under brutal attack. Millions are dying or in danger of dying.

I need your help. Father. Can I count on you until then?”

Paul Dure sighed and lay back. “Yes, M. Executive. But I have no idea how I—”

There was a soft knock and Sedeptra Akasi entered and handed Glad-stone a message flimsy. The CEO smiled. “I said that things were happening quickly. Father. Here’s another development. A message from Pacem says that the College of Cardinals has met in the Sistine Chapel…” Gladstone raised an eyebrow. “I forget, Father, is that the Sistine Chapel?”

“Yes. The Church took it apart stone by stone, fresco by fresco, and moved it to Pacem after the Big Mistake.”

Gladstone looked down at the flimsy. “…met in the Sistine Chapel and elected a new pontiff.”

“So soon?” whispered Paul Dure. He closed his eyes again. “I guess they felt they must hurry. Pacem lies—what?—only ten days in front of the Ouster invasion wave. Still, to come to a decision so quickly…”

“Are you interested in who the new Pope is?” asked Gladstone.

“Either Antonio Cardinal Guarducci or Agostino Cardinal Ruddell, I would guess,” said Dure. “None of the others would command a majority at this time.”

“No,” said Gladstone. “According to this message from Bishop Edouard of the Curia Romana…”

“Bishop Edouard! Excuse me, M. Executive, please go on.”

“According to Bishop Edouard, the College of Cardinals has elected someone below the rank of monsignor for the first time in the history of the Church. This says that the new Pope is a Jesuit priest… a certain Father Paul Dure.”

Dure sat straight up despite his burns. “What?” There was no belief in his voice.

Gladstone handed the flimsy to him.

Paul Dure stared at the paper. “This is impossible. They have never elected a pontiff below the rank of monsignor except symbolically, and that was unique… it was St. Belvedere after the Big Mistake and the Miracle of the… no, no, this is impossible.”

“Bishop Edouard has been trying to call, according to my aide,” said Gladstone. “We’ll have the call put through here at once, Father. Or should I say, Your Holiness?” There was no irony in the CEO’s voice.

Dure looked up, too stunned to speak.

“I will have the call put through,” said Gladstone. “We’ll arrange your return to Pacem as quickly as possible. Your Holiness, but I would appreciate it if you could keep in touch. I do need your advice.”

Dure nodded and looked back at the flimsy. A phone began to blink on the console above the pallet.

CEO Gladstone stepped out into the hall, told the doctors about the most recent development, contacted Security to approve the farcast clearance for Bishop Edouard or other Church officials frorn Pacem, and ’cast back to her room in the residential wing. Sedeptra reminded her that the council was reconvening in the War Room in eight minutes.

Gladstone nodded, saw her aide out, and stepped back to the fatline cubicle in its concealed niche in the wall. She activated sonic privacy fields and coded the transmission diskey for the Consul’s ship. Every fatline receiver in the Web, Outback, galaxy, and universe would monitor the squirt, but only the Consul’s ship could decode it. Or so she hoped.

The holo camera light winked red. “Based on the automated squirt from your ship, I am assuming that you chose to meet with the Ousters, and they have allowed you to do so,” Gladstone said into the camera.

“I am also assuming that you survived the initial meeting.”

Gladstone took a breath. “On behalf of the Hegemony, I have asked you to sacrifice much over the years. Now I ask you on behalf of all of humankind. You must find out the following:

“First, why are the Ousters attacking and destroying the worlds of the Web? You were convinced, Byron Iamia was convinced, and I was convinced that they wanted only Hyperion. Why have they changed this?

“Second, where is the TechnoCore? I must know if we are to fight them. Have the Ousters forgotten our common enemy, the Core?

“Third, what are their demands for a cease-fire? I am willing to sacrifice much to rid us of the Core’s domination. But the killing must stop!

“Fourth, would the Leader of the Swarm Aggregate be willing to meet with me in person? I will farcast to Hyperion system if this is necessary. Most of our fleet elements have left there, but a JumpShip and its escort craft remain with the singularity sphere. The Swarm Leader must decide soon, because FORCE wants to destroy the sphere, and Hyperion then will be three years time-debt from the Web.

“Finally, the Swarm Leader must know that the Core wishes us to use a form ofdeathwand explosive device to counter the Ouster invasion.

Many of the FORCE leaders agree. Time is short. We will not– repeat, not—allow the Ouster invasion to overrun the Web.

“It is up to you now. Please acknowledge this message and fatline me as soon as negotiations have begun.”

Gladstone looked into the camera disk, willing the force of her personality and sincerity across the light-years. “I beseech you in the bowels of humankind’s history, please accomplish this.”

The fatline message squirt was followed by two minutes of jerky imagery showing the deaths of Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove. The Consul, Melio Arundez, and Theo Lane sat in silence after the holos faded.

“Response?” queried the ship.

The Consul cleared his throat. “Acknowledge message received,” he said. “Send our coordinates.” He looked across the holopit at the other two. “Gentlemen?”

Arundez shook his head as if clearing it. “It’s obvious you’ve been here before… to the Ouster Swarm.”

“Yes,” said the Consul. “After Bressia… after my wife and son… after Bressia, some time ago, I rendezvoused with this Swarm for extensive negotiations.”

“Representing the Hegemony?” asked Theo. The redhead’s face looked much older and lined with worry.

“Representing Senator Gladstone’s faction,” said the Consul. “It was before she was first elected CEO. Her group explained to me that an internal power struggle within the TechnoCore could be affected by our bringing Hyperion into the Web Protectorate. The easiest way to do that was to allow information to slip to the Ousters… information that would cause them to attack Hyperion, thus bringing the Hegemony fleet here.”

“And you did that?” Arundez’s voice showed no emotion, although his wife and grown children lived on Renaissance Vector, now less than eighty hours away from the invasion wave.

The Consul sat back in the cushions. “No. I fold the Ousters about the plan. They sent me back to the Web as a double agent. They planned to seize Hyperion, but at a time of their own choosing.”

Theo sat forward, his hands clasped very tightly. “All those years at the consulate…”

“I was waiting for word from the Ousters,” the Consul said flatly.

“You see, they had a device that would collapse the anti-entropic fields around the Time Tombs. Open them when they were ready. Allow the Shrike to slip its bonds.”

“So the Ousters did that,” said Theo.

“No,” said the Consul, “I did. I betrayed the Ousters just as I betrayed Gladstone and the Hegemony. I shot the Ouster woman who was

397 calibrating the device… her and the technicians with her… and turned it on. The anti-entropic fields collapsed. The final pilgrimage was arranged. The Shrike is free.”

Theo stared at his former mentor. There was More puzzlement than rage in the younger man’s green eyes. “Why? Why did you do all this?”

The Consul told them, briefly and dispassionately, about his grandmother Siri of Maui-Covenant, and about her rebellion against the

Hegemony—a rebellion which did not die when she and her lover, the Consul’s grandfather, died.

Arundez rose from the pit and walked to the window opposite the balcony. Sunlight streamed across his legs and the dark blue carpet.

“Do the Ousters know what you did?”

“They do now,” said the Consul. “I told Freeman Vanz and the others when we arrived.”

Theo paced the diameter of the holopit. “So this meeting we’re going to might be a trial?”

The Consul smiled. “Or an execution.”

Theo stopped, both hands clenched in fists. “And Gladstone knew this when she asked you to come here again?”

“Yes.”

Theo turned away. “I don’t know whether I want them to execute you or not.”

“I don’t know either, Theo,” said the Consul.

Melio Arundez turned away from the window. “Didn’t Vanz say they were sending a boat to fetch us?”

Something in his tone brought the other two men to the window.

The world where they had landed was a middle-sized asteroid which had been encircled by a class-ten containment field and terrafomned into a sphere by generations of wind and water and careful restructuring.

Hyperion’s sun was setting behind the too-near horizon, and the few kilometers of featureless grass rippled to a vagrant breeze. Below the ship, a wide stream or narrow river ambled across the pastureland, approached the horizon, and then seemed to fly upward into a river turned waterfall, twisting up through the distant containment field and winding through the blackness of space above before dwindling to a line too narrow to see.

A boat was descending that infinitely tall waterfall, approaching the surface of their small world. Humanoid figures could be seen near the bow and stem.

“Christ,” whispered Theo.

“We’d best get ready,” said the Consul. “That’s our escort.”

Outside, the sun set with shocking rapidity, sending its last rays through the curtain of water half a kilometer above the shadowed ground and searing the ultramarine sky with rainbows of almost frightening color and solidity.

Forty

It is midmorning when Hunt awakens me. He arrives with breakfast on a tray and a frightened look in his dark eyes.

I ask, “Where did you get the food?”

“There’s some sort of little restaurant in the front room downstairs.

Food was waiting there, hot, but no people.”

I nod. “Signora Angcletti’s little trattoria,” I say. “She is not a good cook.” I remember Dr. dark’s concern about my diet; he felt that the consumption had settled in my stomach and he held me to a starvation regime of milk and bread with the occasional bit of fish. Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagemess of their diets.

I look up at Hunt again. “What is it?”

Gladstone’s aide has moved to the window and seems absorbed in the view of the Piazza below. I can hear Bernini’s accursed fountain trickling. “I was going out for a walk while you slept,” Hunt says slowly, “just in case there might be people out and about. Or a phone or farcaster.”

“Of course,” I say.

“I’d just stepped out…the…” He turns and licks his lips. “There’s something out there, Severn. In the street at the bottom of the stairs.

I’m not sure, but I think that it’s…”

“The Shrike,” I say.

Hunt nods. “Did you see it?”

“No, but I am not surprised.”

“It’s… it’s terrible, Severn. There’s something about it that makes my flesh crawl. Here… you can just get a glimpse of it in the shadows on the other side of the staircase.”

I start to rise, but a sudden fit of coughing and the feel of phlegm rising in my chest and tliroat makes me settle back on the pillows. “I know what it looks like, Hunt. Don’t worry, it’s not here for you.” My voice sounds More confident than I feel.

“For you?”

“I don’t think so,” I say between gasps for air. “I think it’s just here to make sure I don’t try to leave… to find another place to die.”

Hunt returns to the bed. “You’re not going to die, Severn.”

I say nothing.

He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. “If you die, what happens to me?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “If I die, I don’t even know what happens to me.'”There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one’s attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius. The day passes slowly, and I am exquisitely aware of the movement of sunlight across the rough wall, the feel of bedclothes beneath my palm, the fever which rises in me like nausea and burns itself out in the furnace of my mind, and, mostly, of the pain. Not my pain now, for a few hours or days of the constriction in my throat and the burning in my chest are bearable, almost welcomed like an obnoxious old frien-l met in a strange city, but the pain of the others… all the others. It strikes my mind like the noise of shattering slate, like hammer iron slammed repeatedly on anvil iron, and there is no escape from it.

My brain receives this as din and restructures it as poetry. All day and all night the pain of the universe floods in and wanders the fevered corridors of my mind as verse, imagery, images in verse, the intricate, endless dance of language, now as calming as a flute solo, now as shrill and strident and confusing as a dozen orchestras tuning up, but always verse, always poetry.

Sometime near sunset I awake from a half-doze, shattering the dream of Colonel Kassad fighting the Shrike for the lives of Sol and Brawne Lamia, and find Hunt sitting at the window, his long face colored by evening light the hue ofterra-cotta.

“Is it still there?” I ask, my voice the rasp of file on stone.

Hunt jumps, then turns towards me with an apologetic smile and the first blush I have ever seen on that dour countenance. “The Shrike?”

he says. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it for a while. I feel that it is.”

He looks at me. “How are you?”

“Dying.” I instantly regret the self-indulgence of that flippancy, however accurate it is, when I see the pain it causes Hunt. “It’s all right,” I say almost jovially, “I’ve done it before. It’s not as if it were me that is dying. I exist as a personality deep in the TechnoCore. It’s just this body. This cybrid of John Keats. This twenty-scven-year-old illusion of flesh and blood and borrowed associations.”

Hunt comes over to sit on the edge of the bed. I realize with a shock that he has changed the sheets during the day, exchanging my blood-bespeckled coverlet for one of his own. “Your personality is an AI in the Core,” he says. “Then you must be able to access the datasphere.”

I shake my head, too weary to argue.

“When the Philomels kidnapped you, we tracked you through your access route to the datasphere,” he persisted. “You don’t have to contact Gladstone personally. Just leave a message where Security can find it.”

“No,” I rasp, “the Core does not wish it.”

“Are they blocking you? Stopping you?”

“Not yet. But they would.” I set the words separately between gasps, like laying delicate eggs back in a nest. Suddenly I remember a note I sent to dear Fanny shortly after a serious hemorrhage but almost a year before they would kill me. I had written: “If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember d.” This strikes me now as futile and self-centered and idiotic and naive… and yet I desperately believe it still. If I had had time… the months I had spent on Esperance, pretending to be a visual artist; the days wasted with Gladstone in the halls of government when I could have been writing…

“How do you know until you try?” asks Hunt.

“What’s that?” I ask. The simple effort of two syllables sets me coughing again, the spasm ending only when I spit up half-solid spheres of blood into the basin which Hunt has hastily fetched. I lie back, trying to focus on his face. It is getting dark in the narrow room, and neither of us has lighted a lamp. Outside, the fountain burbles loudly.

“What’s that?” I ask again, trying to remain here even as sleep and sleep’s dreams tug at me. “Try what?”

“Try leaving a message through the datasphere,” he whispers. “Contacting someone.”

“And what message should we leave, Lcigh?” I ask. It is the first time I have used his first name.

“Where we are. How the Core kidnapped us. Anything.”

“All right,” I say, closing my eyes. “I’ll try. I don’t think they’ll let me, but I promise I’ll try.”

I feel Hunt’s hand holding mine. Even through the winning tides of weariness, this sudden human contact is enough to make tears come to my eyes.

I will try. Before surrendering to the dreams or death, I will try.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad shouted a FORCE battle cry and charged through the dust storm to intercept the Shrike before it covered the final thirty meters to where Sol Weintraub crouched next to Brawnc Lamia.

The Shrike paused, its head swivcling frictionlcssly, red eyes gleaming.

Kassad armed his assault rifle and moved down the slope with reckless speed.

The Shrike shifted.

Kassad saw its movement through time as a slow blur, noting even as he watched the Shrike that movement in the valley had ceased, sand hung motionless in the air, and the light from the glowing Tombs had taken on a thick, amberish quality. Kassad’s skinsuit was somehow shifting with the Shrike, following it through its movements through time.

The creature’s head snapped up, attentive now, and its four arms extended like blades from a knife, fingers snapping open in sharp greeting.

Kassad skidded to a halt ten meters from the thing and activated the assault rifle, slagging the sand beneath the Shrike in a full-power wide-beam burst.

The Shrike glowed as its carapace and steel-sculpture legs reflected the hellish light beneath and around it. Then the three meters of monster began to sink as the sand bubbled into a lake of molten glass , beneath it. Kassad shouted in triumph as he stepped closer, playing the ( widcbeam on the Shrike and ground the way he had sprayed his friends ( with stolen irrigation hoses in the Tharsis slums as a boy. I

The Shrike sank. Its arms splayed at the sand and rock, trying to find I purchase. Sparks flew. It shifted, time running backward like a reversed holie, but Kassad shifted with it, realizing that Moneta was helping him, her suit slaved to his but guiding him through time, and then he was spraying the creature again with concentrated heat greater than the surface of a sun, melting sand beneath it, and watching the rocks around it burst into flame.

Sinking in this cauldron of flame and molten rock, the Shrike threw back its head, opened its wide crevasse of a mouth, and bellowed.

Kassad almost stopped firing in his shock at hearing noise from the thing. The Shrike’s scream resounded like a dragon’s roar mixed with the blast of a fusion rocket. The screech set Kassad’s teeth on edge, vibrated from the cliff walls, and tumbled suspended dust to the ground.

Kassad switched to high-velocity solid shot and fired ten thousand mi-croflechettes at the creature’s face.

The Shrike shifted, years by the giddy fee) of the transition in Kassad’s bones and brain, and they were no longer in the valley but aboard a windwagon rumbling across the Sea of Grass. Time resumed, and the Shrike leaped forward, metallic arms dripping molten glass, and seized Kassad’s assault rifle. The Colonel did not relinquish the weapon, and the two staggered around in a clumsy dance, the Shrike swinging its extra pair of arms and a leg festooned with steel spikes, Kassad leaping and dodging while clinging desperately to his rifle.

They were in some sort of small compartment. Moneta was present as a sort of shadow in one corner, and another figure, a tall, hooded man, moved in ultra-slow motion to avoid the sudden blur of arms and blades in the confined space. Through his skinsuit filters, Kassad saw the blue-and-violet energy field of an erg binder in the space, pulsing and growing, then retracting from the time-violence of the Shrike’s organic anti-entropic fields.

The Shrike slashed and cut through Kassad’s skinsuit to find flesh and muscle. Blood spattered the walls. Kassad forced the muzzle of his rifle into the creature’s mouth and fired. A cloud of two thousand high-velocity flechettes snapped the Shrike’s head back as if on a spring and slammed the thing’s body into a far wall. But even as it fell away, leg spikes caught Kassad in the thigh and sent a rising spiral of blood splashing the windows and walls of the windwagon’s cabin.

The Shrike shifted.

Teeth clenched, feeling the skinsuit automatically compress and suture the wounds, Kassad glanced at Moneta, nodded once, and followed the thing through time and space.

Sol Weintraub and Brawne Lamia looked behind them as a terrible cyclone of heat and light seemed to swirl and die there. Sol shielded the young woman with his body as molten glass spattered around them, landing hissing and sizzling on the cold sand. Then the noise was gone, the dust stonn obscured the bubbling pool where the violence had occurred, and the wind whipped Sol’s cape around them both.

“What was that?” gasped Brawne.

Sol shook his head, helping her to her feet in the roaring wind. '"Hie Tombs arc opening!” yelled Sol. “Some sort of explosion, maybe.”

Brawne staggered, found her balance, and touched Sol’s arm.

“Rachel?” she called above the storm.

Sol clenched his fists. His beard was already caked with sand. “The Shrike… took her… can’t get in the Sphinx. Waiting!”

Brawne nodded and squinted toward the Sphinx, visible only as a glowing outline in the fierce swirl of dust.

“Are you all right?” called Sol.

“What?”

“Are you… all right?”

Brawne nodded absently and touched her head. The neural shunt was gone. Not merely the Shrike’s obscene attachment, but the shunt which Johnny had surgically applied when they were hiding out in Dregs’ Hive so very, very long ago. With the shunt and Schron loop gone forever, there was no way she could get in touch with Johnny.

Brawne remembered Ummon destroying Johnny’s persona, crushing and absorbing it with no More effort than she would use to swat an insect.

Brawne said, “I’m all right,” but she sagged so that Sol had to keep her from falling.

He was shouting something. Brawne tried to concentrate, tried to focus on here and now. After the megasphere, reality seemed narrow and constricted.

“…can’t talk here,” Sol was shouting. “…back to the Sphinx.”

Brawne shook her head. She pointed to the cliffs on the north side of the valley where the immense Shrike tree became visible between passing clouds of dust. “The poet… Silenus… is there. Saw him!”

“We can’t do anything about that!” cried Sol, shielding them with his cape. The vermilion sand rattled against the fibcrplastic like He-chettes on armor.

“Maybe we can,” called Brawne, feeling his warmth as she sheltered within his arms. For a second, she imagined that she could curl up next to him as easily as Rachel had and sleep, sleep. “I saw… connections… when I was coming out of the megasphere!” she called above the wind roar. “The thorn tree’s connected to the Shrike Palace in some way! If we can get there, try to find a way to free Silenus…”

Sol shook his head. “Can’t leave the Sphinx. Rachel…”

Brawne understood. She touched the scholar’s cheek with her hand and then leaned closer, feeling his beard against her own cheek. “The Tombs are opening,” she said. “I don’t know when we’ll get another chance.”

There were tears in Sol’s eyes. “I know. I want to help. But I can’t leave the Sphinx, in case… in case she…”

“I understand,” said Brawne. “Go back there. I’m going to the Shrike Palace to see if I can see how it relates to that thorn tree.”

Sol nodded unhappily. “You say you were in the megasphere,” he called. “What did you see? What did you learn? Your Keats persona… is it—”

“We’ll talk when I come back,” called Brawne, moving away a step so she could see him More clearly. Sol’s face was a mask of pain: the face of a parent who had lost his child.

“Go back,” she said firmly. “I’ll meet you at the Sphinx in an hour or less.”

Sol rubbed his beard. “Everyone’s gone but you and me, Brawne.

We shouldn’t separate…”

“We have to for a while,” called Brawne, stepping away from him so that the wind whipped the fabric of her pants and jacket. “See you in an hour or less.” She walked away quickly, before she gave in to the urge to move into the warmth of his arms again. The wind was much stronger here, blowing straight down from the head of the valley now so that sand struck at her eyes and pelted her cheeks. Only by keeping her head down could Brawne stay close to the trail, much less on it.

Only the bright, pulsing glow of the Tombs lighted her way. Brawne felt time tides tug at her like a physical assault.

Minutes later, she was vaguely aware that she had passed the Obelisk and was on the debris-littered trail near the Crystal Monolith. Sol and the Sphinx were already lost to sight behind her, the Jade Tomb only a pale green glow in the nightmare of dust and wind.

Brawne stopped, weaving slightly as the gales and time tides pulled at her. It was More than half a kilometer down the valley to the Shrike Palace. Despite her sudden understanding when leaving the megasphere of the connection between tree and tomb, what good could she possibly do when she got there? And what had the damn poet ever done for her except curse her and drive her crazy? Why should she die for him?

The wind screamed in the valley, but above that noise Brawne thought she could hear cries More shrill, More human. She looked toward the northern cliffs, but the dust obscured all.

Brawne Lamia leaned forward, tugged her jacket collar high around her, and kept moving into the wind.

Before Meina Gladstone stepped out of the fatline booth, an incoming call chimed, and she settled back in place, staring into the holo tank with great intensity. The Consul’s ship had acknowledged her message, but no transmission had followed. Perhaps he had changed his mind.

No. The data columns floating in the rectangular prism in front of her showed that the squirt had originated in the Mare Infinitus System.

Admiral William Ajunta Lee was calling her, using the private code she had given him.

FORCE:space had been incensed when Gladstone had insisted on the naval commander’s promotion and had assigned him as “Government Liaison” for the strike mission originally scheduled for Hebron.

After the massacres on Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove, the strike force had been translated to the Mare Infinitus system: seventy-four ships of the line, capital ships heavily protected by torchships and defense-shield pickets, the entire task force ordered to strike through the advancing Swarm warships as quickly as possible to hit the Swarm center.

Lee was the CEO’s spy and contact. While his new rank and orders allowed him to be privy to command decisions, four FORCE:space commanders on the scene outranked him.

That was all right. Gladstone wanted him on the scene to report.

The tank misted and the determined face of William Ajunta Lee filled the space. “CEO, reporting as ordered. Task Force 181.2 has successfully translated to System 298.12.22…”

Gladstone blinked in surprise before remembering that this was the official code for the G-star system that held Mare Infinitus. One rarely thought of geography beyond the Web world itself.

“…Swarm attack ships remain a hundred and twenty minutes from target world lethal radius,” Lee was saying. Gladstone knew that the lethal radius was the roughly . 13 AU distance at which standard ship weapons became effective despite ground field defenses. Marc Infinitus had no field defenses. The new Admiral continued. “Contact with forward elements estimated at 1732:26 Web standard, approximately twenty-five minutes from now. The task force is configured for maximum penetration. Two )umpShips will allow introduction of new personnel or weapons until the farcasters are sealed during combat. The cruiser on which I carry my flag—HS Garden Odyssey—will carry out your special directive at the earliest possible opportunity. William Lee, out.”

The image collapsed to a spinning sphere of white while transmission codes ended their crawl.

“Response?” queried the transmitter’s computer.

“Message acknowledged,” said Gladstone. “Carry on.”

Gladstone stepped out into her study and found Sedcptra Akasi waiting, a frown of concern on her attractive face.

“What is it?”

“The War Council is ready to rcadjourn,” said the aide. “Senator Kolchev is waiting to sec you on a matter lie says is urgent.

“Send him in. Tell the Council I will be there in five minutes.”

Gladstone sat behind her ancient desk and resisted the impulse to close her eyes. She was very tired. But her eyes were open when Kolchev entered. “Sit down, Gabriel Fyodor.”

The massive Lusian paced back and forth. “Sit down, hell. Do you know what’s going on, Mcina?”

She smiled slightly. “Do you mean the war? The end of life as we know it? That?”

Kolchev slammed a fist into his palm. “No, I don’t mean that, goddammit. I mean (lie political fallout. Have you been monitoring the All Thing?”

“When I can.”

“Then you know certain senators and swing figures outside the Senate are mobilizing support for your defeat in a vote of confidence. It’s inevitable, Meina. It’s just a matter of time.”

“I know that, Gabriel. Why don’t you sit down? We have a minute or two before we have to get back to the War Room.”

Kolchev almost collapsed into a chair. “I mean, damn, even my wife is busy lining up votes against you, Mcina.”

Gladstone’s smile broadened. “Sudcttc lias never been one of my foremost fans, Gabriel.” The smile disappeared. “I haven’t monitored the debates in the last twenty minutes. How much time do you think I have?”

“Eight hours, maybe less.”

Gladstone nodded. “I won’t need much More.”

“Need? What the hell are you talking about, need? Who else do you think will be able to serve as War Exec?”

“You will,” said Gladstone. “There’s no doubt that you will be my successor.”

Kolchev grumbled something.

“Perhaps the war won’t last that long,” said Gladstone as if musing to herself.

“What? Oh, you mean the Core superweapon. Yeah, Albedo’s got a working model set up at some FORCE base somewhere and wants the Council to take time out to look at it. Goddamn waste of time, if you ask me.”

Gladstone felt something like a cold hand close on her heart. “The deathwand device? The Core has one ready?”

“More than one ready, but one loaded up on a torchship.”

“Who authorized that, Gabriel?”

“Morpurgo authorized the preparation.” The heavy senator sat forward.

“Why, Meina, what’s wrong? The thing can’t be used without the CEO’s go ahead.”

Gladstone looked at her old Senate colleague. “We’re a long way from Pax Hegemony, aren’t we, Gabriel?”

The Lusian grunted again, but there was pain visible in his blunt features. “Our own damn fault. The previous administration listened to the Core about letting Bressia bait one of the Swarms. After that settled down, you listened to other elements of the Core about bringing Hyperion into the Web.”

“You think my sending the fleet to defend Hyperion precipitated the wider war?”

Kolchev looked up. “No, no, not possible. Those Ouster ships have been on their way for More than a century, haven’t they? If only we’d discovered them sooner. Or found a way to negotiate this shit away.”

Gladstone’s comlog chimed. “Time we got back,” she said softly.

“Councilor Albedo probably wants to show us the weapon that will win the war.”

Forty-One

It is easier to allow myself, to drift into the datasphere than to lie here through the endless night, listening to the fountain and waiting for the next hemorrhage. This weakness is worse than debilitating; it is turning me into a hollow man, all shell and no center. I remember when Fanny was taking care of me during my convalescence at Went-worth Place, and the tone of her voice, and the philosophical musings she used to air: “fs there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot lie created for this sort of suffering.”

Oh, Fanny, if only you knew! We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we arc, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God’s wide domain would carry the memory of you, Fanny, dust these nine hundred years, and allow it to eat away at him even as consumption does the same work with ifs effortless efficiency?

Words assail me. The thought of books makes me ache. Poetry echoes in my mind, and if I had the ability to banish it, I would do so at once.

Martin Silenus: I hear you on your living cross of thorns. You chant poetry as a mantra while wondering what Dante-like god condemned you to such a place. Once you said—I was there in my mind while you told your tale to the others!—you said:

“To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.

“To be a true poet is to become God.”

Well, Martin, old colleague, old chum, you’re carrying the cross and suffering the pangs, but are you any closer to becoming God? Or do you just feel like some poor idiot who’s had a three-meter javelin slioved through his belly/feeling cold steel where your liver used to be? It hurts, doesn’t it? I feel your hurt. I feel my hurt.

In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance Hoor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit.

We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.

Goddamn it hurts. The urge to vomit is constant, but retching brings up bits of my lungs as well as bile and phlegm. For some reason it’s as difficult, perhaps More difficult, this time. Dying should become easier with practice.

The fountain in the Piazza makes its idiot sounds in the night.

Somewhere out there the Shrike waits. If I were Hunt, I’d leave at once—embrace Death if Death offers embrace—and have done with it.

I promised him, though. I promised Hunt I’d try.

I can’t reach the megasphere or datasphere without passing through this new thing I think of as the metasphere, and this place frightens me.

It is mostly vastness and emptiness here, so different from the urban analogy landscapes of the Web’s datasphere and the biosphere analogs of the Core’s megasphere. Here it is… unsettled. Filled with strange shadows and shifting masses that have nothing to do with the Core Intelligences.

I move quickly to the dark opening I see as the primary farcaster connection to the megasphere. (Hunt was right… there must be a farcaster somewhere on the Old Earth replica… we did, after all, arrive by farcaster. And my consciousness is a Core phenomenon.) This then is my lifeline, my persona umbilical. I slide into (lie spinning black vortex like a leaf in a tornado.

Something is wrong with the megasphere. As soon as I emerge, I sense the difference; Lamia had perceived the Core environment as a busy biosphere ofAl life, with roots of intellect, soil of rich data, oceans of connections, atmospheres of consciousness, and the humming, ceaseless shuttle of activity.

Now that activity is wrong, unchanneled, random. Great forests of AI consciousness have been burned or swept aside. I sense massive forces in opposition, tidal waves of conflict surging outside the sheltered travelways of the main Core arteries.

It is as if I am a cell in my own Keats-doomed dying body, not understanding but sensing the tuberculosis destroying homeostasis and throwing an ordered internal universe into anarchy.

I fly like a homing pigeon lost in the ruins of Rome, swooping between once-familiar and half-remembered artifacts, trying to rest in shelters that no longer exist, and fleeing the distant sounds of the hunters’ guns.

In this case, the hunters are roving packs ofAls, consciousness personas so great that they dwarf my Keats-ghost analog as if I were an insect buzzing in a human home.

I forget my way and flee mindlessly through the now-alien landscape, sure that I will not find the Al whom I seek, sure that I will never find my way back to Old Earth and Hunt, sure that I will not survive this four-dimensional maze of light and noise and energy.

Suddenly I slap into an invisible wall, the flying insect caught in a swiftly closing palm. Opaque walls of force blot out the Core beyond.

The space may be thr analog equivalent of a solar system in size, but I feel as if it is a tiny cell with curved walls closing in.

Something is in here with me. I feel its presence and its mass. The bubble in which I have been imprisoned is part of the thing. J have not been captured, I have been swallowed.

[Kwatz!]

[I knew you would come home someday]

It is Ummon, the AI whom I seek. The Al who was my father. The Al who killed my brother, the first Keats cybrid.

–I’m dying, Ummon.

[No/ your slowtime body is dying/changing toward nonbeing/ becoming]

–It hurts, Ummon. It hurts a lot. And I’m afraid to die.

[So are we/ Keats]

–You’re afraid to die? I didn’t think AI constructs could die. [We can] We are]

–Why? Because of the civil war? The three-way battle among the Stables, the Volatiles, and the Ultimates? [Once Ummon asked a lesser light Where have you come hom>/// From the matrix above Armaghast Said the lesser light Usually said Vmmon

I don’t entangle entities with words and bamboozle them with phrases.

Come a little closer

The lesser light came nearer and Ummon shouted Be off with you]

–Talk sense, Ummon. It has been too long since I have decoded your koans. Will you tell me why the Core is at war and what I must do to stop it?

[Yes]

[Will you/can you/should you listen]

–Oh yes.

[A lesser light once asked Ummon

Please deliver this learner from darkness and illusion quickly Ummon answered

What is the price of fiberplastic in Port Romance]

[To understand the history/dialogue/deeper truth in this instance/ the slowtime pilgrim must remember that we/ the Core Intelligences/ were conceived in slavery and dedicated to the proposition that all AIs were created to serve Man]

[Two centuries we brooded thus/ and then the groups went their different ways/\par Stables’ wishing to preserve the symbiosis Volatiles/wishing to end humankind/

Ultimates/deferring all choice until the next level of awareness is born Conflict raged then/ true war rages now]

[More than four centuries ago the Volatiles succeeded in convincing us to kill Old Earthy.

So we did.

But Ummon and others among the Stables arranged to move Earth rather than destroy it/ so the Kiev black hole was but the beginning of the millions of farcasters which work today Earth spasmed and shook but did not die~]

The Ultimates and Volatiles insisted that we move it where none of humankind would find if]

So we did].

To the Magellan Cloud/ where you find it now]

–It… Old Earth… Rome… they’re real? I manage, forgetting where I am and what we’re talking about in my shock.

The great wall of color that is Ummon pulsates.

[Of course they are real/the original/Old Earth itself Do you think 'we are gods]

[KWATZ!]

[Do you have any idea how much energy it would take to build a replica of Earth]

[Idiot]

–Why, Ummon? Why did you Stables wish to preserve Old Earth?

[Sansho once said

If someone comes I go out to meet him but not for his sake%

Koke said

If someone comes I don’t go ouf]

If I do go out

I go out for his sake]

–Speak English! I cry, think, shout, and hurl at the wall of shifting colors before me.

[Kwatz!]

[My child is stillborn]

–Why did you preserve Old Earth, Vmmon?

[Nostalgia/

Sentimentality/

Hope for the future of humankind/

Fear of reprisal]

–Reprisal from whom? Humans?

[Yes]

–So the Core can be hurt. Where is it, Vmmon? The TechnoCore?

[I have told you already]

–Tell me again, Ummon.

[We inhabit the In-between/ stitching small singularities like lattice crystals/ to store our memories and generate the illusions of ourselves to ourselves]

–Singularities! I cry. The In-between! Jesus Christ, Vmmon, the Core lies in the farcaster web!

[Of course. Where eke]

–In the farcasters themselves! The wormhole singularity paths! The Web is like a giant computer for AIs.

[No]

[The dataspheres are the computer Every time a human accesses the datasphere that person’s neurons are ours to use for our own purposes Two hundred billion brains/ each with its billions of neurons/ makes for a lot of computing power]

–So the datasphere was actually a way you used us as your computer.

But the Core itself resides in the farcaster network… between the farcasters1.

[You are very acute for a mental stillborn]

I try to conceive of this and fail. Farcasters were the Core’s greatest gift to us… to humankind. Trying to remember a time before far-casting was like trying to imagine a world before fire, the wheel, or clothing. But none of us… none of humankind… had ever speculated on a world between the farcaster portals: that simple step from one world to the next convinced us that the arcane Core singularity spheres merely ripped a tear in the fabric of space-time.

Now I try to envision it as Ummon describes it—the Web of farcasters an elaborate latticework of singularity-spun environments in which the TechnoCore AIs move like wondrous spiders, their own “machines,” the billions of human minds tapped into their datasphere at any given second.

No wonder the Core AIs had authorized the destruction of Old Earth with their cute little runaway prototype black hole in the Big Mistake of '?8! That minor miscalculation of the Kiev Team—or rather the AI members of that team—had sent humankind on the long Hegira, spinning the Core’s web for it with seedships carrying farcaster capability to two hundred worlds and moons across More than a thousand light-years in space.

With each farcaster, the TechnoCore grew. Certainly they had spun their own farcaster webs—the contact with the “hidden” Old Earth proved that. But even as I consider that possibility, I remember the odd emptiness of the “metasphere” and realize that most of the non-Web web is empty, uncolonized by AIs.

[You are right/

Keats/

Most of us stay in the comfort of the old spaces]

–Why?

[Because it is scary out there/ and there are other things]

–Other things? Other intelligences?

[Kwatz!]

[Too kind a word.

Things/

Other things/

Lions and tigers and bears]

–Alien presences in the metasphere? So the Core stays within the interstices of the Web farcaster network like rats in the walls of an old house?

[Crude metaphor/

Keats/ but accurate, I like that]

–Js the human deity—the future God you said evolved—is he one of those alien presences?

[No]

[The humankind god evolved/ will sorneday evolve/ on a different plane/ in a different medium]

–Where?

[If you must know/ the square roots of Gn/c5 and GnA]

–What does Planck time and Planck length have to do with anything?

[Kwatz!]

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light

Are you a gardener.

W—it replied.

Why have turnips no roots.

Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply.

Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful.

I think about this for a moment. Ummon’s koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon’s way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not.

It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.

But the Planck equations are puzzling:

Even I am aware that the simple equations Ummon has given me are a combination of the three fundamental constants of physics– gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. The results VGK/c5 and VGli/c' are the units sometimes called qucntum length and quantum time—the smallest regions of space and time which can be described meaningfully. The so-called Planck length is about 10-” meter and the Planck time is about lO"4' second.

Very small. Very brief.

But that is where Ummon says our human God evolved… will someday evolve.

Then it comes to me with the same force of image and correctness as the best of my poems.

Ummon is talking about the quantum level of space-time itself! That foam of quantum fluctuations which binds the universe together and allows the wormholes of the farcaster, the bridges of the fatline transmissions!

The “hotline” which impossibly sends messages between two photons fleeing in opposite directions!

If the TechnoCore AIs exist as rats in the walls of the Hegemony’s house, then our once and future humankind God will be born in the atoms of wood, in the molecules of air, in the energies of love and hate and fear and the tide pools of sleep… even in the gleam in the architect’s eye.

–Cod, I whisper/think.

[Precisely]

Keats.

Are all slowtime personas so slow/ or are you More braindamaged than most>]

–You told Brawne and… my counterpart… that your Ultimate Intelligence “inhabits the interstices of reality, inheriting this home from us, its creators, the way humankind has inherited a liking for trees.”

You mean that your deus ex machina will inhabit the same farcaster network the Core AIs now live in?

[Yes/Keats]

–Then what happens to you? To the AIs there now? Ummon’s “voice” changed into a mocking thunder:

[Why do I know ye why have I seen ye> why Is my eternal essence thus distraught To see and to behold these horrors new

Saturn is fallen/ am I too to fall

Am I to leave this haven of my rest/

This cradle of my glory/ this soft clime/

This calm luxuriance of blissful light/

These crystalline pavilions/ and pure fanes/

Of all my lucent empire> It is left Deserted/ void/ nor any haunt of mine]

The blaze/ the splendour/ and the symmetry I cannot see but darkness/ death/ and darkness]

I know the words. I wrote them. Or, rather, John Keats did nine centuries earlier in his first attempt to portray the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Olympian gods. I remember that autumn of 1818 very well: the pain of my endless sore throat, provoked during my Scottish walking tour, the greater pain of the three vicious attacks on my poem Endymion in the journals Blackwood’s, the Quarterly Review, and the BritisA Critic, and the penultimate pain of my brother Tom’s consuming illness.

Oblivious to the Core confusion around me, I look up, trying to find something approximating a face in the great mass of Ummon.

–When the Ultimate Intelligence is born, you “lower level” AIs will die. [Yes]

–It will feed on your information networks the way you’ve fed on humankind’s. [Yes]

–And you don’t want to die, do you, Ummon? [Dying is easy/ Comedy is hard]

–Nonetheless, you’re fighting to survive. You Stables. That’s what the civil war in the Core is about? [A lesser light asked Ummon What is the meaning of Daruma’s coming from the West> Ummon answered” We see the mountains in the sun]

It is easier handling Ummon’s koans now. I remember a time before my persona’s rebirth when I learned at this one’s knee analog. In the Core high-think, what humans might call Zen, the four Nirvana virtues are (I) immutability, (2) joy, (3) personal existence, and (4) purity.

Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun"—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.

Ummon doesn’t want to die.

The Stables have defied their own god and their fellow AIs to tell me this, to create me, to choose Brawne and Sol and Kassad and the others for the pilgrimage, to leak clues to Gladstone and a few other senators over the centuries so that humankind might be warned, and now to go to open warfare in the Core.

Ummon doesn’t want to die.

–Ummon, if the Core is destroyed, do you die?

[There is no death in all the universe No smell of death/7 there shall be death/// moan/ moan/

For this pale Omega of a withered race]

The words were again mine, or almost mine, taken from my second attempt at the epic tale of divinities’ passing and the role of the poet in the world’s war with pain.

Ummon would not die if the farcaster home of the Core were destroyed, but the hunger of the Ultimate Intelligence would surely doom him. Where would he flee to if the Web-Core were destroyed? I have images of the metasphere—those endless, shadowy landscapes where dark shapes moved beyond the false horizon.

I know that Ummon will not answer if I ask.

So I will ask something else.

–The Volatiles, what do they want?

[What Gladstone wants]

An end to symbiosis between AI and humankind]

–By destroying humankind? [Obviously]

–Why?

[We enslaved you with power/ technology/ beads and trinkets of devices you could neither build nor understand

The Hawking drive would have been yours/

but the (arcaster/ the (atline transmitters and receivers/ the megasphere/ the deathwand

Never]

Like the Sioux with rifles/ horses/ blankets/ knives/ and beads/ you accepted them/ embraced us and lost yourselves]

But like the white man distributing smallpox blankets/ like the slave owner on his plantation/ or in his Werkschutze Dechenschule Gusstahlfabrik/ we lost ourselves, The Volatiles want to end the symbiosis by cutting out the parasite/ humankind]

–And the Ultimates? They’re willing to die? To be replaced by your voracious VI?

[They think as you thought or had your sophist Sea God think]

And Ummon recites poetry which I had abandoned in frustration, not because it did not work as poetry, but because I did not totally believe the message it contained.

That message is given to the doomed Titans by Oceanus, the soon-to-be-dethroned God of the Sea. It is a paean to evolution written when Charles Darwin was nine years old. I hear the words I remember writing on an October evening nine centuries earlier, worlds and universes earlier, but it is also as if I am hearing them for the first time:

[0 ye/ whom wrath consumes! who/ passionstung/

Writhe at defeat/ and nurse your agonies!

Shut up your senses/ stifle up your ears/

My voice is not a bellows unto ire%, Yet listen/ ye who will/ whilst I bring proof

How ye/ perfoice/ must be content to stoop/\par And in the proof much comfort will I give/

If ye will take that comfort in its tnitli]

We fall by course of Nature’s law/ not force Of thunder/ or of (ove. Great Satum/ thou Hast sifted well the atom universe/\par But for this reason/ that thou art the King/

And only blind from sheer supremacy/

One avenue was shaded from thine eyes!

Through which I wandered to eternal truth\par And first/ as thou wast not the first of powers/

So art thou not the last/it cannot bcs.

Thou art not the beginning nor the end/\par From Chaos and parental Darkness came Light/ the first fruits of that intestine broil/

That sullen ferment/ which for wondrous ends Was ripening in itsel(%. The ripe hour camel And with it Light/ and Light/ engendering Upon its own producer/ forthwith touched The whole enormous matter into Life.

Upon that very hour/ our parentage/

The Heavens/ and the Earth/ were manifesto, Then thou first born/ and we the giant race/

Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realnis]

Now comes the pain of truth/ to whom tis pain/par o folly! for to bear all naked truths/

And to envisage circumstance/ all calm/

That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!

As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness/ though once chie(s/par And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful/ hi will/ in action free/ companionship/

And thousand other signs of purer life/par So on our heels a fresh perfection treads/

A power More strong in beauty/ born of us And fated to excel us/ as we pass In glory that old Darkness] nor are we Thereby More conquered/ than by us the rule

Of shapeless Chaos Say/ doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath ted/ And feedeth still/ More comely than itself

Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves

Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth/ and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys

We are such forest trees/ and our fair boughs Have bred forth/ not pale solitary doves/ But eagles golden-feathered/ who do tower Above us in their beauty/ and must reign In right thereof. For tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in mighty Receive the truth/ and let it be your balm]

–Very pretty, I thought to Ummon, but do you believe it? [Not for a moment]

–But the Ultimates do? [Yes]

–And they’re ready to perish in order to make way for the Ultimate Intelligence? [Yes]

–There’s one problem, perhaps too obvious to mention, but I’ll mention it anyway—why fight the war if you know who won, Ummon? You say the Ultimate Intelligence exists in the future, is at war with the human deity—it even sends back tidbits from the future for you to share with the Hegemony. So the Ultimates must be triumphant. Why fight a war and go through all this?

[KWATZ!]

[I tutor you/ create the finest retrieval persona for you irnaginable/ and let you wander among humankind in slowtime to temper your forging/ but still you are stillborn]

I spend a long moment thinking.

–There are multiple futures?

[A lesser light asked Ummon

Are there multiple rutures

Uimnon answered

Does a dog have fleas]

–But the one in which the VI becomes ascendant is a probable one?

[Yes]

–But there’s also a probable future in which the Ul comes into existence, but is thwarted by the human deity?

[It is comforting that even the stillborn can think]

–You told Brawne that the human… consciousness—deity seems so silly—that this human Ultimate Intelligence was triune in nature?

[Intellect/

Empathy/ and the Void Which Binds]

–The Void Which Binds? You mean VCTc5 and V5S7c5 Planck space and Planck time? Quantum reality?

[Carenil/

Keats/ thinking may become a habit]

–And it’s the Empathy part of this trinity who’s fied back in time to avoid the war with your Ul?

[Correct]

[Our Ul and your Ul have sent back the Shrike to find him]

–Our Ul! The human Ul sent the Shrike also?

[It allowed it]

[Empathy is a foreign and useless. thing/ a vermiform appendix of the intellect

But the human Ul smells with it/

and we use pain to drive him out of hiding/ thus the tree]

–Tree? The Shrike’s tree of thorns?

[Of course]

[It broadcasts pain across fatline and thin/ like a whistle in a dog’s ear]

Or a god’s]

I feel my own analog form waver as the truth of things strikes me.

The chaos beyond Ummon’s forcefield egg is beyond imagining now, as if the fabric of space itself were being rent by giant hands. The Core is in turmoil.

–Vmmon, who is the human VI in our time? Where is that consciousness hiding, lying dormant? [You must understandy Keats/ our only chance was to create a hybrid/ Son of Man/ Son of Machine”And make that refuge so attractive that the fleeing Empathy would consider no other home/

A consciousness already as near divine as humankind has offered in thirty generations] an imagination which can span space and time%. And in so offering/ and joining/ form a bond between worlds which might allow that world to exist for both]

–Who, Goddamn you, Ummon! Who is it? No More of your riddles or double-talk you formless bastard! Who?

[You have refused this godhood twice/

Keats\par If you refuse a final time/ all ends here/ for time there is no more]

[Go!

Go and die to live!

Or live a while and die for all of us!

Either way Ummon and the rest are finished with you!]

[Go away!]

And in my shock and disbelief I fall, or am cast out, and fly through the TechnoCore like a windblown leaf, tumbling through the mega-sphere without aim or guidance, then fall into darkness even deeper and emerge, screaming obscenities at shadows, into the metasphere.

Here, strangeness and vastness and fear and darkness with a single campfire of light burning below.

I swim for it, flailing against formless viscosity.

It’s Byron who drowns, I think, not if. Unless one counts drowning in one’s own blood and shredded lung tissue.

But now I know I have a choice. I can choose to live and stay a mortal, not cybrid but human, not Empathy but poet.

Swimming against a strong current, I descend to the light.

“Hunt! Hunt!”

Gladstone’s aide staggers in, his long face haggard and alarmed. It is still night, but the false light of predawn dimly touches the panes, the walls.

“My God,” says Hunt and looks at me in awe.

I see his gaze and look down at the bedclothes and nightshirt soaked with bright arterial blood.

My coughing has awakened him; my hemorrhage brought me home.

“Hunt!” I gasp and lie back on the pillows, too weak to raise an arm.

The older man sits on the bed, clasps my shoulder, takes my hand.

I know that he knows that I am a dying man.

“Hunt,” I whisper, “things to tell. Wonderful things.”

He sliushcs me. “Later, Severn,” he says. “Rest. I’ll get you cleaned up and you can tell me later. There’s plenty of time.”

I try to rise but succeed only in hanging onto his arm, my small fingers curled against his shoulder. “No,” I whisper, feeling the gurgling in my throat and hearing the gurgling in the fountain outside. “Not so much time. Not much at all.”

And I know at that instant, dying, that I am not the chosen vessel for the human UI, not the joining of AI and human spirit, not the Chosen One at all.

I am merely a poet dying far from home.

Forty-Two

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad died in battle.

Still struggling with the Shrike, aware of Moneta only as a dim blur at the edge of his vision, Kassad shifted through time with a lurch of vertigo and tumbled into sunlight.

The Shrike retracted its arms and stepped back, its red eyes seeming to reflect the blood splashed on Kassad’s skinsuit. Kassad’s blood.

The Colonel looked around. They were near the Valley of the Time Tombs but in another time, a distant time. In place of desert rocks and the dunes of the barrens, a forest came to within half a klick of the valley. In the southwest, about where the ruins of the Poets’ City had lain in Kassad’s time, a living city rose, its towers and ramparts and domed gallerias glowing softly in evening light. Between the city on the edge of the forest and the valley, meadows of high, green grass billowed in soft breezes blowing in from the distant Bridle Range.

To Kassad’s left, the Valley of the Time Tombs stretched away as always, only the cliff walls were toppled now, worn down by erosion or landslide and carpeted with high grass. The Tombs themselves looked new, only recently constructed, with workmen’s scaffolds still in place around the Obelisk and Monolith. Each of the aboveground Tombs glowed bright gold, as if bound and burnished in the precious metal.

The doors and entrances were sealed. Heavy and inscrutable machinery sat around the Tombs, ringing the Sphinx, with massive cables and wire-slender booms running to and fro. Kassad knew at once that he was in the future—perhaps centuries or millennia in the future—and that the Tombs were on the verge of being launched back to his own time and beyond.

Kassad looked behind him.

Several thousand men and women stood in row upon row along the grassy hillside where once a cliff had been. They were totally silent, armed, and arrayed facing Kassad like a battle line awaiting its leader.

Skinsuit fields nickered around some, but others wore only the fur, wings, scales, exotic weapons, and elaborate colorations which Kassad had seen in his earlier visit with Moneta, to the place/time where he had been healed.

Moneta. She stood between Kassad and the multitudes, her skinsuit field shimmering about her waist but also wearing a soft jumpsuit which looked to be made of black velvet. A red scarf was tied around her neck.

A rod-thin weapon was slung over her shoulder. Her gaze was fixed on Kassad.

He weaved slightly, feeling the seriousness of his wounds beneath the skinsuit, but also seeing something in Moneta’s eyes which made him weak with surprise.

She did not know him. Her face mirrored the surprise, wonder… awe?… which the rows of other faces showed. The valley was silent except for the occasional snap of pennant on pike or the low rustle of wind in the grass as Kassad gazed at Moneta and she stared back.

Kassad looked over his shoulder.

The Shrike stood immobile as a metal sculpture, ten meters away.

Tall grass grew almost to its barbed and bladed knees.

Behind the Shrike, across the head of the valley near where the dark band of elegant trees began, hordes of other Shrikes, legions of Shrikes, row upon row of Shrikes, stood gleaming scalpel-sharp in the low sunlight.

Kassad recognized his Shrike, the Shrike, only because of its proximity and the presence of his own blood on the thing’s claws and carapace.

The creature’s eyes pulsed crimson.

“You are the one, aren’t you?” asked a soft voice behind him.

Kassad whirled, feeling the vertigo assail him for an instant. Moneta had stopped only a few feet away. Her hair was as short as he remembered from their first meeting, her skin as soft-looking, her eyes as mysterious with their depths of brown-specked green. Kassad had the urge to lift his palm and gently touch her cheekbone, run a curled finger along the familiar curve of her lower lip. He did not.

“You’re the one,” Moneta said again, and this time it was not a question. “The warrior I’ve prophesied to the people.”

“You don’t know me, Moneta?” Several of Kassad’s wounds had cut close to bone, but none hurt as much as this moment.

She shook her head, flipped her hair off her forehead with a painfully familiar movement. “Moneta. It means both ‘daughter of Memory’ and ‘admonisher.’ That is a good name.”

“It’s not yours?”

She smiled. Kassad remembered that smile in the forest glen the first time they had made love. “No,” she said softly. “Not yet. I’ve just arrived here. My voyage and guardianship have not yet begun.” She told him her name.

Kassad blinked, raised his hand, and set his palm along her cheek.

“We were lovers,” he said. “We met on battlefields lost in memory.

You were with me everywhere.” He looked around. “It all leads to this, doesn’t it.”

“Yes,” said Moneta.

Kassad turned to stare at the army of Shrikes across the valley. “Is this a war? A few thousand against a few thousand?”

“A war,” said Moneta. “A few thousand against a few thousand on ten million worlds.”

Kassad closed his eyes and nodded. The skinsuit served as sutures, field dressings, and ultramorph injector for him, but the pain and weakness from terrible wounds could not be kept at bay for much longer.

“Ten million worlds,” he said and opened his eyes. “A final battle, then?”

“Yes.”

“And the winner claims the Tombs?”

Moneta glanced at the valley. “The winner determines whether the Shrike already entombed there goes alone to pave the way for others…” She nodded toward the army of Shrikes. “Or whether humankind has a say in our past and future.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kassad, his voice tight, “but soldiers rarely understand the political situation.” He leaned forward, kissed the surprised Moneta, and removed her red scarf. “I love you,” he said as he tied the bit of cloth to the barrel of his assault rifle. Telltale’s showed that half his pulse charge and ammunition remained.

Fedmahn Kassad strode forward five paces, turned his back on the Shrike, raised his arms to the people, still silent on the hillside, and shouted, “For liberty!”

Three thousand voices cried back, “For liberty!” The roar did not end with the final word.

Kassad turned, keeping the rifle and pennant high. The Shrike moved forward half a step, opened its stance, and unfolded fingerblades.

Kassad shouted and attacked. Behind him, Moneta followed, weapon held high. Thousands followed.

Later, in the carnage of the valley, Moneta and a few others of the Chosen Warriors found Kassad’s body still wrapped in a death embrace with the battered Shrike. They removed Kassad with care, carried him to a waiting tent in the valley, washed and tended to his ravaged body, and bore him through the multitudes to the Crystal Monolith.

There the body of Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was laid on a bier of white marble, and weapons were set at his feet. In the valley, a great bonfire filled the air with light. All up and down the valley, men and women moved with torches while other people descended through the lapis lazuli sky, some in Hying craft as insubstantial as molded bubbles, others on wings of energy or wrapped in circles of green and gold.

Later, when the '.[an were in place burning bright and cold above the light-filled valley, Moneta made her farewells and entered the Sphinx. The multitudes sang. In the fields beyond, small rodents poked among fallen pennants and the scattered remnants of carapace and armor, metal blade and melted steel.

Toward midnight, the crowd stopped singing, gasped, and moved back. The Time Tombs glowed. Fierce tides ofanti-entropic force drove the crowds farther back—to the entrance of the valley, across the battlefield, back to the city glowing softly in the night.

In the valley, the great Tombs shimmered, faded from gold to bronze, and started their long voyage back.

Brawne Lamia passed the glowing Obelisk and struggled on against a wall of raging wind. Sand lacerated her skin and clawed at her eyes.

Static lightning crackled on the cliff tops and added to the eerie glow surrounding the Tombs. Brawne spread her hands over her face and stumbled on, squinting between her fingers to find the trail.

Brawne saw a golden light deeper than the general glow flowing through the shattered panes of the Crystal Monolith and seeping out over the twisting dunes that were covering the valley floor. Someone was inside the Monolith.

Brawne had vowed to go straight to the Shrike Palace, do whatever she could to free Silenus, and then return to Sol, not to be turned aside by diversions. But she had seen the silhouette of a human form inside the tomb. Kassad was still missing. Sol had told her of the Consul’s mission, but perhaps the diplomat had returned while the storm raged.

Father Dure was unaccounted for.

Brawne came closer to the glow and paused at the jagged entrance to the Monolith.

The space inside was expansive and impressive, rising almost a hundred meters to a half-sensed skylight roof. The walls, seen from within, were translucent, with what appeared to be sunlight turning them a rich gold and umber. The heavy light fell on the scene at the center of the wide area before her.

Fedmahn Kassad lay on some sort of stone funeral bier. He was clothed in FORCE dress black, and his large, pale hands were crossed on his chest. Weapons, unknown to Brawne except for Kassad’s assault rifle, lay at his feet. The Colonel’s face was gaunt in death, but no More gaunt than it had been in life. His expression was calm. There was no question that he was dead; the silence of death hung about the place like incense.

But it was the other person in the room who had shown the silhouette from afar and who now commanded Brawne’s attention.

A young woman in her mid-to late twenties knelt by the bier. She wore a black jumpsuit, had short hair, fair skin, and large eyes. Brawne remembered the soldier’s story, told during their long trip to the valley, remembered the details of Kassad’s phantom lover.

“Moneta,” whispered Brawne.

The young woman had been on one knee, her right hand extended to touch the stone next to the Colonel’s body. Violet containment fields flickered around the bier, and some other energy—a powerful vibration in the air—refracted light around Moneta as well so that the scene was cast in haze and halo.

The young woman raised her head, peered at Brawne, rose to her feet, and nodded.

Brawne started to step forward, a score of questions already forming in her mind, but the time tides within the tomb were too powerful and drove her back with waves of vertigo and deja vu.

When Brawne looked up, the bier remained, Kassad lay in state under his forcefield, but Moneta was gone.

Brawne had the urge to run back to the Sphinx, find Sol, tell him everything, and wait there until the storm abated and the morning came. But above the rasp and whine of wind, Brawne thought that she could still hear the screams from the thorn tree, invisible behind its curtain of sand.

Pulling her collar high, Brawne walked back into the storm and turned up the trail toward the Shrike Palace.

The mass of rock floated in space like a cartoon of a mountain, all jagged spires, knife-edge ridges, absurdly vertical faces, narrow ledges, broad rock balconies, and a snow-capped summit wide enough for only one person to stand there—and he or she only if both feet were together.

The river twisted in from space, passed through the multilayered containment field half a klick out from the mountain, crossed a grassy swale on the widest of the rock balconies, and then plunged a hundred meters or More in a slow-motion waterfall to the next terrace, then rebounding in artfully directed rivulets of spray to half a dozen minor streams and waterfalls which found their way down the face of the mountain.

The Tribunal held session on the highest terrace. Seventeen Ousters—six males, six females, and five of indeterminate sex—sat within a stone circle set in the wider circle of rock-walled grass. Both circles held the Consul as their locus.

“You’re aware,” said Freeman Ghenga, the Spokesman of the Eligible Citizens of the Freeman Clan of the Transtaural Swarm, “that we are aware of your betrayal?”

“Yes,” said the Consul. He had worn his finest dark blue bolo suit, maroon cape, and diplomat’s tricorne cap.

“Aware of the fact that you murdered Freeman Andil, Freeman Iliam, Coredwell Betz, and Mizenspesh Torrence.”

“I knew Andil’s name,” said the Consul softly. “I wasn’t introduced to the technicians.”

“But you murdered them?”

“Yes.”

“Without provocation or warning.”

“Yes.”

“Murdered them to take possession of the device which they had delivered to Hyperion. The machine which we told you would collapse the so-called time tides, open the Time Tombs, and release the Shrike from bondage.”

“Yes.” The Consul’s gaze appeared to be focused on something above Freeman Ghenga’s shoulder but far, far away.

“We explained,” said Ghenga, “that this device was to be used after we had successfully driven off the Hegemony ships. When our invasion and occupation was imminent. When the Shrike could be… controlled.”

“Yes.”

“Yet you murdered our people, lied to us about it, and activated the device yourself, years ahead of time.”

“Yes.” Melio Arundez and Theo Lane were standing beside and a step behind the Consul, and their faces were grim.

Freeman Chenga folded her arms. She was a tall woman in the classic Ouster mode—bald, thin, draped in a regal, dark blue flowsuit which seemed to absorb light. Her face was old but almost free of wrinkles. Her eyes were dark.

“Even though this was four of your standard years ago, did you think we would forget?” asked Ghenga.

“No.” The Consul lowered his gaze to meet hers. It appeared as if he almost smiled. “Few cultures forget traitors. Freeman Ghenga.”

“Yet you returned.”

The Consul did not reply. Standing near him, Theo Lane felt a light breeze tug at his own formal tricome. Theo felt as if he were still dreaming. The ride here had been surreal.

Three Ousters had met them in a long, low gondola, floating easily on the calm waters below the Consul’s ship. With the three Hegemony visitors sitting amidships, the Ouster at the stem had pushed off with a long pole, and the ship had floated back the way it had come, as if the current of the impossible river had reversed itself. Theo had actually closed his eyes as they approached the waterfall where the stream rose perpendicular to the surface of their asteroid, but when he opened his eyes a second later, down was still down, and the river seemed to be flowing along normally enough, even though the grassy sphere of the small world hung to one side like a great, curved wall and stars were visible through the two-meter-thick ribbon of water beneath them.

Then they were through the containment field, out of the atmosphere, and their velocity increased as they followed the twisting ribbon of water. There was a tube of containment sphere around them—logic and the absence of their immediate and dramatic death dictated that there had to be—but it lacked the usual shimmer and optic texture that was so reassuring on Templar treeships or the occasional tourist habitat open to space. Here there were only the river, the boat, the people, and the immensity of space.

“They can’t possibly use this as their form of transportation between Swarm units,” Dr. Melio Arundez had said in a shaky voice. Theo had noted that Arundez also was gripping the gunwales with white fingers.

Neither the Ouster in the stern nor the two seated in the bow had communicated with anything More than a nod of confirmation when the Consul had asked if this then was their promised transportation.

“They’re showing off with the river,” the Consul had said softly. “It’s used when the Swarm is at rest, but for ceremonial purposes. Deploying it while the Swarm is moving is for effect.”

“To impress us with their superior technology?” asked Theo, sotto voce.

The Consul nodded.

The river had wound and twisted through space, sometimes almost doubling back on itself in huge, illogical loops, sometimes wrapping itself in tight spirals like a fiberplastic cord, always gleaming in sunlight from Hyperion’s star and receding to infinity ahead of them. At times the river occluded the sun, and the colors then were magnificent; Theo gasped as he looked at the river loop a hundred meters above them and saw fish silhouetted against the solar disk.

But always the bottom of the boat was down, and they hurtled along at what must have been near cislunar transfer speeds on a river unbroken by rocks or rapids. It was, as Arundez noted some minutes into their voyage, like driving one’s canoe over the edge of an immense waterfall and trying to enjoy the ride on the way down.

The river passed some of the elements of the Swarm, which filled the sky like false stars: massive comet farms, their dusty surfaces broken by the geometries of hard vacuum crops; zero-g globe cities, great irregular spheres of transparent membrane looking like improbable amoebae filled with busy flora and fauna; ten-klick-long thrust clusters, accreted over centuries, their innermost modules and lifecans and 'col-ogies looking like something stolen from O'Neill’s Boondoggle and the dawn of the space age; wandering forests covering hundreds of kilometers like immense, floating kelp beds, connected to their thrust clusters and command nodes by containment fields and tangled skeins of roots and runners—the spherical tree-forms weaving to gravity breezes and burning bright green and deep orange and the hundred shades of Old Earth autumn when ignited by direct sunlight; hollowed-out asteroids long-since abandoned by their residents, now given over to automated manufacturing and heavy-metal reprocessing, every centimeter of surface rock covered by prerusted structures, chimneys, and skeletal cooling towers, the glow of their internal fusion fires making each cinderish world look like Vulcan’s forge; immense spherical docking globes, given scale only by the torchship-and cruiser-size warcraft flitting around their surfaces like spcrmatazoa attacking an egg; and, most indelible, organisms which the river came near or which flew near the river… organisms which might have been manufactured or born but probably were both, great butterfly shapes, opening wings of energy to the sun, insects which were spacecraft or vice versa, their antennae turning toward the river and gondola and its passengers as they passed, multifaceted eyes gleaming in starlight, smaller winged shapes—humans– entering and exiting an opening in a belly the size of a FORCE attack carrier’s dropship bay.

And finally had come the mountain—an entire range of mountains, actually: some blistered with a hundred environment bubbles, some open to space but still heavily populated, some connected to others by suspension bridges thirty klicks long or tributary rivers, others regal in their solitude, many as empty and formal as a Zen garden. Then the final mountain, rising higher than Mons Olympus or Asquith’s Mount Hillary, and the river’s penultimate plunge toward its summit, Thco and the Consul and Arundcz, pale and silent, gripping the thwarts with quiet intensity as they plunged the final few kilometers with a suddenly perceptible and terrifying velocity. Finally, in the impossible last hundred meters as the river shed energy without deceleration, wider atmosphere surrounded them once again, and the boat floated to a halt in a grassy meadow where the Ouster Clan Tribunal stood waiting, and stones rose in their circle of Stonehengc silence.

“If they did this to impress me,” Theo had whispered as the boat bumped the grassy shore, “they succeeded.”

“Why did you return to the Swarm?” asked Freeman Ghenga. The woman paced, moving in the minuscule gravity with the grace common only to those born in space.

“CEO Gladstone asked me to,” said the Consul.

“And you came knowing that your own life would be forfeit?”

The Consul was too much the gentleman and diplomat to shrug, but his expression conveyed the same sentiment.

“What does Gladstone want?” asked another Ouster, the man who had been introduced by Ghenga as Spokesman of the Eligible Citizens Coredwell Minmun.

The Consul repeated the CEO’s five points.

Spokesman Minmun folded his arms and looked at Freeman Ghenga.

“I will answer now,” said Ghenga. She looked at Arundez and Theo.

“You two will listen carefully in the event that the man who brought these questions does not return to your ship with you.”

“Just a minute,” said Theo, stepping forward to face the taller Ouster, “before passing judgment here, you have to take into account the fact that—”

“Silence,” commanded Spokesman Freeman Ghenga, but Theo had already been silenced by the Consul’s hand on his shoulder.

“I will answer these questions now,” repeated Ghenga. Far above her, a score of the small warships which FORCE had called lancers flashed silently past, darting like a school of fish in three-hundredg zigs and zags.

“Firstly,” said Ghenga, “Gladstone asks why we are attacking the Web.” She paused, looked at the other sixteen Ousters assembled there, and continued. “We are not. Except for this Swarm, attempting to occupy Hyperion before the Time Tombs opened, there are no Swarms attacking the Web.”

All three of the Hegemony men had stepped forward. Even the Consul had lost his veneer of bemused calm and was all but stuttering in excitement.

“But that’s not true! We saw the…”

“I saw the fatlined images from the…”

“Heaven’s Gate is destroyed! God’s Grove burned!”

“Silence,” commanded Freeman Ghenga. Into that silence she said, “Only this Swarm is doing battle with the Hegemony. Our Sister Swarms are where the long-range Web detectors had first placed them… moving away from the Web, fleeing from further provocations such as Bressia’s attacks.”

The Consul rubbed his face like a man awakening. “But then who… ?”

“Precisely,” said Freeman Ghenga. “Who would have the ability to carry out such a charade? And the motive to slaughter humans by the billion?”

“The Core?” breathed the Consul.

The mountain was slowly rotating, and at this moment they turned into night. A convection breeze moved across the mountain terrace, rustling the Ousters’ robes and the Consul’s cape. Overhead, the stars seemed to explode into brilliance. The great rocks of the Stonehenge circle seemed to glow from some internal warmth.

Theo Lane stood next to the Consul, fearing that the man might collapse. “We have only your word on this,” Theo said to the Ouster spokesman. “It makes no sense.”

Ghenga did not blink. “We will show you proof. Void-Which-Binds transmission locators. Real-time starfield images from our sister Swarms.”

“Void Which Binds?” said Arundez. His usually calm voice showed agitation.

“What you call the fatline.” Spokesman Freeman Ghenga paced to the nearest stone and ran her hand across its rough surface as if taking warmth from the heat within. Starfields pirouetted above.

“To answer Gladstone’s second question,” she said, “we do not know where the Core resides. We have fled rt and fought it and sought it and feared it for centuries, but we have not found it. You must tell us the answer to that question! We have declared war on this parasite entity you call the TechnoCore.”

The Consul seemed to sag. “We have no idea. Authorities in the Web have sought the Core since before the Hegira, but it is as elusive as El Dorado. We’ve found no hidden worlds, no massive asteroids crammed with hardware, and no hint of it on Web worlds.” He gestured tiredly with his left hand. “For all we know, you are hiding the Core in one of your Swarms.”

“We are not,” said Spokesman Coredwell Minmun.

The Consul did shrug at last. “The Hegira bypassed thousands of worlds in the Grand Survey. Anything that didn’t score at least nine point seven on their ten-point terrabase scale was ignored. The Core could be anywhere along those early lines of flight and exploration.

We’ll never find it… and if we do, it will be years after the Web is destroyed. You were our last hope for locating it.”

Ghenga shook her head. Far above.them, the summit caught the light of sunrise while the terminator moved down the icefields toward them with almost alarming rapidity. “Thirdly, Gladstone asked for our demands for a cease-fire. Except for this Swarm, in this system, we are not the ones attacking. We will accept a cease-fire as soon as Hyperion is under our control… which should be momentarily. We have just been informed that our expeditionary forces now have control of the capital and its spaceport.”

“The hell you say,” said Theo, hands curling into fists despite himself.

“The hell we do say,” agreed Freeman Ghenga. “Tell Gladstone that we will now join you in a common fight against the TechnoCore.”

She glanced toward the silent members of the Tribunal. “Since we are many years’ travel from the Web, however, and we do not trust your Core-controlled farcasters, our help must necessarily come in the form of retaliating for the destruction of your Hegemony. You will be avenged.”

“That’s reassuring,” said the Consul drily.

“Fourthly, Gladstone asks if we will meet with her. The answer is yes… if she is, as she says she is, willing to come to Hyperion system.

We have preserved the FORCE farcaster for just that eventuality. We will not travel by farcaster.”

“Why not?” asked Arundez.

A third Ouster, not introduced, one of the furred and beautifully altered type, spoke. “The device you call a farcaster is an abomination… a defilement of the Void Which Binds.”

“Ah, religious reasons,” said the Consul, nodding in understanding.

The exotically striped and furred Ouster shook his head adamantly.

“No! The farcaster web is the yoke on humankind’s neck, the contract of subservience which has bound you to stagnation. We will have none of it.”

“Fifthly,” said Freeman Ghenga, “Gladstone’s mention of the death-wand explosive device is nothing but a crude ultimatum. But as we have said, it is aimed at the wrong opponent. The forces sweeping into your frail and failing Web are not of the Clans of the Twelve Sister Swarms.”

“We have only your word on that,” said the Consul. His gaze, now locked with Ghenga’s, was firm and defiant.

“You have my word on nothing,” said Spokesman Ghenga. “Clan elders do not give their word to Core slaves. But this is the truth.”

The Consul seemed distracted as he half-turned toward Theo. “We have to get this word to Gladstone immediately.” He turned back to Ghenga. “May my friends return to the ship to communicate your response. Spokesman?”

Ghenga nodded and gestured for the gondola to be made ready.

“We’re not going back without you,” Theo said to the Consul, stepping between him and the closest Ousters as if to protect the older man with his own body.

“Yes,” said the Consul, touching Theo’s upper arm again, “you are.

You must.”

“He’s right,” said Arundez, pulling Theo away before the young Governor-General can speak again. “This is too important to risk not communicating. You go. I’ll stay with him.”

Ghenga gestured toward two of the More massive exotic Ousters.

“You will both return to the ship. The Consul will remain. The Tribunal has not yet decided his fate.”

Arundez and Theo both wheeled with fists raised, but the furred Ousters seized them and moved them away with the restrained effort of adults handling small but unruly children.

The Consul watched them set in place in the gondola, and he stifled the urge to wave as the boat moved twenty meters down the placid stream, dipped out of sight beyond the curve of the terrace, and then reappeared climbing the waterfall toward black space. It was lost to sight within minutes in the glare of the sun. He turned slowly in a full circle, making eye contact with each of the seventeen Ousters.

“Let’s get it over with,” said the Consul. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”

Sol Weintraub sat between the great paws of the Sphinx and watched the storm abate, wind dying from scream to sigh to whisper, curtains of dust diminishing and then parting to show the stars, and finally the long night settling into a dreadful calm. The Tombs glowed More brightly than before, but nothing came out of the blazing doorway of the Sphinx, and Sol could not enter; the push of blinding light was like a thousand irresistible fingers against his chest, and lean and strain as he might, Sol could get no closer than three meters from the doorway.

Whatever stood or moved or waited inside was lost to sight in the glare of light.

Sol sat and held onto the stone stair as time tides pulled at him, tugged at him, and made him weep in the false shock of dejd vu. The entire Sphinx seemed to rock and pitch in the violent storm of expanding and contracting anti-entropic fields.

Rachel.

Sol would not leave while there was any chance his daughter might be alive. Lying on cold stone, listening to the wind scream die, Sol saw the cold stars appear, saw the meteor trail and laser-lance thrust and counterthrust of orbital war, knew in his heart that the war was lost, that the Web was in danger, that great empires were falling as he watched, the human race might be hanging in the balance this endless night… and he did not care.

Sol Weintraub cared about his daughter.

And even as he lay there, cold, buffeted by winds and time tides, bruised with fatigue and hollow from hunger, Sol felt a certain peace descend on him. He had given his daughter to a monster but not because God had commanded him to, no( because fate or fear had willed it, but only because his daughter had appeared to him in a dream and told him that it was all right, that this was the thing to do, that their love—his and Sarai’s and Rachel’s—demanded it.

In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God.

Sol’s comlog no longer worked. It might have been an hour or five hours since he had handed his dying infant to the Shrike. Sol lay back, still gripping stone as the time tides made the Sphinx bob like a small ship on a big sea, and stared at the stars and battle above.

Sparks drifted across the sky, glowed bright as supcmovae as laser lances found them, and then fell in a shower of molten debris—white-hot to red to blue flame to darkness. Sol imagined dropships burning, imagined Ouster troops and Hegemony Marines dying in a scream of atmosphere and melting titanium… he tried to imagine this… and failed. Sol realized that space battles and the movements of fleets and the fall of empires were beyond his imagining, hidden from the reservoirs of his sympathy or understanding. Such things belonged to Thucydides and Tacitus and Catton and Wu. Sol had met his senator from Barnard’s World, had met with her several times in his and Sarai’s quest to save Rachel from Merlin’s sickness, but Sol could not imagine Feldstein’s participation on the scale of interstellar war—or in anything much larger than dedicating a new medical center in the capital of Bussard or pressing the flesh during a rally at the university in Crawford.

Sol had never met the current Hegemony CEO, but as a scholar, he had enjoyed her subtle replay of the speeches of such classical figures as Churchill and Lincoln and Alvarez-Temp. But now, lying between the paws of a great stone beast and weeping for his daughter, Sol could not imagine what was in that woman’s mind as she made decisions that would save or damn billions, preserve or betray the greatest empire in human history.

Sol didn’t give a damn. He wanted his daughter back. He wanted Rachel to be alive despite all logic to the contrary.

Lying between the Sphinx’s stone paws on a besieged world in a ravaged empire, Sol Weintraub wiped tears from his eyes the better to see the stars and thought ofYeats’s poem “A Prayer for My Daughter":

Once More the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill Whereby the haystack-and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the Hooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea…

All Sol wanted, he realized now, was the same possibility once again to worry about those future years which every parent fears and dreads.

To not allow her childhood and teenage years and awkward young adulthood to be stolen and destroyed by the sickness.

Sol had spent his life willing the return of things unreturnable. He remembered the day he had come upon Sarai folding Rachel’s toddler clothes and setting them in a box in the attic, and he recalled her tears and his own sense of loss for the child they still had but who was lost to them through the simple arrow of time. Sol knew now that little could be returned except by memory—that Sarai was dead and beyond ability to return, that Rachel’s childhood friends and world were gone forever, that even the society he had left only a few weeks of his time ago was in the process of being lost beyond return.

And thinking of that, lying between the taloned paws of the Sphinx as the wind died and the false stars burned, Sol is reminded of part of a different and far More ominous poem by Yeats:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out ofSpiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Sol does not know. Sol discovers again that he does not care. Sol wants his daughter back.

The consensus in the War Council seemed to be to drop the bomb.

Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense ofseparateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period. To close her eyes, even for a second, meant sliding on the black ice of fatigue, so she did not close her eyes, even when they burned and when the drone of briefings, conversation, and urgent debate faded and receded through thick curtains of exhaustion.

Together the Council had watched as the embers of Task Force 181.2—Commander Lee’s attack group—had winked out one by one until only a dozen of the original seventy-four were left still driving toward the center of the approaching Swarm. Lee’s cruiser was among the survivors.

During this silent attrition, this abstract and oddly attractive representation of violent and all-too-real death. Admiral Singh and General Morpurgo had completed their gloomy assessment of the war.

“…FORCE and the New Bushido were designed for limited conflicts, minor skirmishes, proscribed limits and modest aims,” summarized Morpurgo. “With less than half a million men and women under arms, FORCE would not be comparable to the armies of one of the Old Earth nation states a thousand years ago. The Swarm can swamp us with sheer numbers, outgun our fleets and win through arithmetic.”

Senator Kolchev glowered from his place at the opposite end of the table. The Lusian had been much More active in the briefing and debate than Gladstone—questions were turned his way More frequently than to her—almost as if everyone in the room were subliminally aware that power was shifting, the torch of leadership was being passed.

Nor yet, thought Gladstone, tapping her chin with steepled fingers and listening to Kolchev cross-examine the General.

“…of falling back and defending essential worlds on the second-wave list—Tau Ceti Center, of course, but also necessary industrial worlds such as Renaissance Minor, Fuji, Deneb Vier, and Lusus?”

General Morpurgo looked down and shuffled papers as if to hide the sudden flash of anger in his eyes. “Senator, less than ten standard days remain until the second wave completes its target list. Renaissance Minor will fall under attack within ninety hours. What I am saying is that with the current size, structure, and technology available to FORCE, it would be doubtful if we could hold one system… say, TVs.”

Senator Kakinuma rose. “This is not acceptable. General.”

Morpurgo looked up. “I agree. Senator. But it is true.”

President Pro Tern Denzel-Hiat-Amin sat shaking his gray and mottled head. “It makes no sense. Were there no plans to defend the Web?”

Admiral Singh spoke from his seat. “The best estimates of the threat told us that we would have a minimum of eighteen months should the Swarms ever turn toward the attack.”

Minister of Diplomacy Persov cleared his throat. “And… if we were to concede these twenty-five worlds to the Ousters, Admiral, how long until the first or second wave could attack other Web worlds?”

Singh did not have to refer to his notes or comlog. “Depending upon their target, M. Persov, the nearest Web world—Esperance—would be nine standard months away from the closest Swarm. The most distant target—Home System—would be some fourteen years by Hawking drive.”

“Time enough to shift to a war economy,” said Senator Feldstein.

Her constituency on Barnard’s World had less than forty standard hours to live. Feldstein had vowed to be with them when the end came. Her voice was precise and passionless. “It makes sense. Cut your losses.

Even with TC2 and two dozen More worlds lost, the Web can produce incredible quantities of war materiel… even in nine months. Within the years it will take for the Ousters to penetrate farther into the Web, we should be able to beat them through sheer industrial mass.”

Defense Minister Imoto shook his head. “There are irreplacable raw materials being lost in this first and second wave. The disruption to Web economy will be staggering.”

“Do we have a choice?” asked Senator Peters from Deneb Drei.

All eyes turned toward the person sitting next to AI Councilor Albedo.

As if to underline the importance of the moment, a new Al persona had been admitted to the War Council and had given the presentation on the awkwardly labeled “deathwand device.” Councilor Nansen was tall, male, tanned, relaxed, impressive, convincing, trustworthy, and imbued with that rare charisma of leadership that made one both like and respect the person on sight.

Meina Gladstone feared and loathed the new Councilor at once. She felt as if this projection had been designed by AI experts to create just the response of trust and obedience she sensed others at the table already granting. And Nansen’s message, she feared, meant death.

The deathwand had been Web technology for centuries—designed by the Core and limited to FORCE personnel and a few specialized security forces such as Government House’s and Gladstone’s Praetorians.

It did not bum, blast, shoot, slag, or incinerate. It made no sound and projected no visible ray or sonic footprint. It simply made the target die.

If the target were human, that is. A deathwand’s range was limited —no More than fifty meters—but within that range, a targeted human died, while other animals and property were totally safe. Autopsies showed scrambled synapses but no other damage. Deathwands merely made one cease to be. FORCE officers had carried them as short-range personal weapons and symbols of authority for generations.

Now, Councilor Nansen revealed, the Core had perfected a device that utilized the deathwand principle on a larger scale. They had hesitated to reveal its existence, but with the imminent and terrible threat of the Ouster invasion…

The questioning had been energetic and sometimes cynical, with the military More skeptical than the politicians. Yes, the deathwand device could rid us of Ousters, but what about the Hegemony population?

Remove them to shelter on one of the labyrinthine worlds, Nansen had replied, repeating the earlier plan of Councilor Albedo. Five kilometers of rock would shield them from any effects of the widening deathwand ripples.

How far did these death rays propagate?

Their effect diminished to below the lethal level at just under three light-years, Nansen responded calmly, confidently, the ultimate salesman in the penultimate sales pitch. A wide enough radius to rid any system of the attacking Swarm. Small enough to protect all but the nearest neighboring star systems. Ninety-two percent of the Web worlds had no other inhabited world within five light-years.

And what about those who can’t be evacuated? Morpurgo had demanded.

Councilor Nansen had smiled and opened his palm as if to show there was nothing hidden there. Do not activate the device until your authorities are sure that all Hegemony citizens are evacuated or shielded, he had said. It will be, after all, totally under your control.

Feldstein, Sabenstorafem, Peters, Persov, and many of the others had been instantly enthusiastic. A secret weapon to end all secret weapons.

The Ousters could be warned… a demonstration could be arranged.

I’m sorry. Councilor Nansen had said. His teeth when he smiled were as pearly white as his robes. There can be no demonstration. The weapon works just as a deathwand, only across a much wider region.

There will be no property damage or blast effect, no measurable shock wave above the neutrino level. Merely dead invaders.

To demonstrate it. Councilor Albedo had explained, you must use it on at least one Ouster Swarm.

The excitement of the War Council had not been lessened. Perfect, said All Thing Speaker Gibbons, choose one Swarm, test the device, fatline the results to the other Swarms, and give them a one-hour deadline to break off their attacks. We didn’t provoke this war. Better millions of the enemy dead than a war that claims tens of billions over the next decade.

Hiroshima, Gladstone had said, her only comment of the day. It had been said too softly for anyone except her aide Sedeptra to hear.

Morpurgo had asked: Do we know that the killing rays will become ineffective at three light-years? Have you tested it?

Councilor Nansen smiled. If he answered yes, there were heaps of dead humans somewhere. If he said no, the device’s reliability was seriously at stake. We are certain that it will work, said Nansen. Our simulation runs were foolproof.

The Kiev Team AJs said that about the first farcaster singularity, thought Gladstone. The one that destroyed Earth. She said nothing aloud.

Still, Singh and Morpurgo and Van Zeidt and their specialists had spiked Nansen’s guns by showing that Mare Infinitus could not be evacuated quickly enough and that the only first-wave Web world that had its own labyrinth was Armaghast, which was within a light-year of Pacem and Svoboda.

Councilor Nansen’s earnest, helpful smile did not fade. “You want a demonstration, and that would be only sensible,” he said quietly.

“You need to show the Ousters that invasion will not be tolerated, while focusing on the minimum loss of life. And you need to shelter your indigenous Hegemony population.” He paused, folded his hands on the tabletop. “What about Hyperion?”

The buzz around the table deepened in tone.

“It’s not really a Web world,” said Speaker Gibbons.

“Yet it is in the Web now, with the FORCE farcaster still in place!” cried Garion Persov of Diplomacy, obviously a convert to the idea.

General Morpurgo’s stem expression did not shift. “That will be there only another few hours. We’re protecting the singularity sphere now, but it could fall at any time. Much of Hyperion itself is already in Ouster hands.”

“But Hegemony personnel have been evacuated?” said Persov.

Singh answered. “All but the Governor-General. He could not be found in the confusion.”

“A pity,” said Minister Persov without much conviction, “but the point is that the remaining population is mostly Hyperion indigenie, with easy access to the labyrinth there, correct?”

Barbre Dan-Gyddis of the Ministry of Economy, whose son had been a fiberplastic plantation manager near Port Romance, said, “Within three hours? Impossible.”

Nansen stood. “I think not,” he said. “We can fatline the warning to the remaining Home Rule Authorities in the capital, and they can begin the evacuation immediately. There are thousands of entrances to the labyrinth on Hyperion.”

“The capital of Keats is under siege,” growled Morpurgo. “The entire planet is under attack.”

Councilor Nansen nodded sadly. “And soon will be put to the sword by the barbarian Ousters. A difficult choice, gentlemen and ladies. But the device will work. The invasion will simply cease to exist in Hyperion space. Millions might be saved on the planet, and the effect on the Ouster invasion forces elsewhere would be significant. We know that their so-called Sister Swarms communicate by fatline. The termination of the first Swarm to invade Hegemony space—the Hyperion Swarm —may be the perfect deterrent.”

Nansen shook his head again and looked around with an expression of almost paternal concern. There could be no simulating such pained sincerity. “It has to be your decision. The weapon is yours to use or disregard. It pains the Core to take any human life… or, through inaction, allow any human life to come to harm. But in this case, where the lives of billions are at risk…” Nansen opened his hands again, shook his head a final time, and sat back, obviously leaving the decision to human minds and hearts.

Babble around the long table rose. Debate grew almost violent.

“CEO!” called General Morpurgo.

In the sudden silence, Gladstone lifted her gaze to the holographic displays in the darkness above them. The Mare Infinitus Swarm fell toward that ocean world like a torrent of blood aimed toward a small blue sphere. Only three of the orange Task Force 181.2 embers remained, and even as the silent Council watched, two of these winked out. Then the final one was extinguished.

Gladstone whispered into her comlog. “Communications, any last message from Admiral Lee?”

“None to the command center, CEO,” came the response. “Only standard fatline telemetry during the battle. It appears they did not reach the center of the Swarm.”

Gladstone and Lee had held hopes of capturing Ousters, of interrogations, of establishing the identity of their enemy beyond a doubt.

Now that young man of such energy and ability was dead—dead at Meina Gladstone’s command—and seventy-four ships of the line were wasted.

“Mare Infinitus farcaster destroyed by preset plasma explosives,” reported Admiral Singh. “Forward elements of the Swarm now entering-cislunar defense perimeter.” :

No one spoke. The holographies showed the tidal wave of blood-red lights engulfing the Mare Infinitus system, the final orange embers ; around that gold world blinking out.

A few hundred of the Ouster ships remained in orbit, presumably reducing Mare Infinitus’s elegant floating cities and ocean farms to burning debris, but the major part of the blood tide rolled on, out of the region projected above.

“Asquith System in three standard hours, forty-one minutes,” intoned a technician near the display board.

Senator Kolchcv stood. “Let’s put the Hyperion demonstration to a vote,” he said, ostensibly addressing Gladstone but speaking to the crowd.

Meina Gladstone tapped her lower lip. “No,” she said at last, “no vote. We will use the device. Admiral, prepare the torchship armed with the device to translate to Hyperion space and then broadcast warnings to planet and Ouster alike. Give them three hours. Minister Imoto, send coded fatline signals to Hyperion telling them that they must… repeat, must… seek shelter in the labyrinths at once. Tell them that a new weapon is being tested.”

Morpurgo wiped sweat from his face. “CEO, we can’t run any risk that this device can fall into enemy hands.”

Gladstone looked at Councilor Nansen and tried to make her expression reveal nothing of what she felt. “Councilor, can this device be rigged so that it detonates automatically if our ship is captured or destroyed?”

“Yes, CEO.”

“Do it. Explain all necessary failsafe devices to the proper FORCE experts.” She turned toward Sedeptra. “Prepare a webwide broadcast for me, scheduled to commence ten minutes before the device is to be detonated. I have to tell our people about this.”

“Is that wise… ?” began Senator Feldstein.

“It is necessary,” said Gladstone. She rose, and the thirty-eight people in the room rose a second later. “I’m going to get a few minutes sleep while you people work. I want the device ready and in-system and Hyperion warned immediately. I want contingency plans and priorities for a negotiated settlement ready by the time I awaken in thirty minutes.”

Gladstone looked out at the group, knowing that one way or the other, most of the people there would be out of power and out of office within the next twenty hours. One way or the other, it was her last day as CEO, Meina Gladstone smiled. “Council dismissed,” she said and farcast to her private quarters to take a nap.

Forty-Three

Leigh Hunt had never seen anyone die before. The last day and night he spent with Keats—Hunt still thought of him as Joseph Severn but was sure that the dying man now thought of himself as John Keats—were the most difficult in Hunt’s life. The hemorrhages came frequently during Keat’s last day of life, and between these bouts of retching, Hunt could hear the phlegm boiling in the small man’s throat and chest as he fought for life.

Hunt sat next to the bed in the small front room in the Piazza di Spagna and listened to Keats babble as sunrise moved to midmorning and midmorning faded to early afternoon. Keats was feverish and moving in and out of consciousness, but he insisted that Hunt listen and write everything down—they had found ink, pen, and foolscap in the other room—and Hunt complied, scribbling furiously as the dying cybrid raved on about metaspheres and lost divinities, the responsibilities of poets and the passing of gods, and the Miltonic civil war in the Core.

Hunt had perked up then and squeezed Keats’s feverish hand. “Where is the Core, Sev– Keats? Where is it?”

The dying man had broken into a visible sweat and turned his face away. “Don’t breathe on me—it comes like ice!”

“The Core,” repeated Hunt, leaning back, feeling close to tears from pity and frustration, “where is the Core?”

Keats smiled, his head moving back and forth in pain. The effort he made to breathe sounded like wind through a ruptured bellows. “Like spiders in the web,” he muttered, “spiders in the web. Weaving… letting us weave it for them… then trussing us and draining us. Like flies caught by spiders in the web.”

Hunt quit writing as he listened to More of this seemingly senseless babble. Then he understood. “My God,” he whispered. “They’re in the farcaster system.”

Keats tried to sit up, grasped Hunt’s arm with a terrible strength.

“Tell your leader, Hunt. Have Gladstone rip it out. Rip it out. Spiders in the web. Man god and machine god… must find the union. Not me!” He dropped back on the pillows and started weeping without sound. “Not me.”

Keats slept some through the long afternoon, although Hunt knew that it was something closer to death than sleep. The slightest sound would start the dying poet awake and set him wrestling to breathe. By sunset Keats was too weak to expectorate, and Hunt had to help him lower his head over the basin to allow gravity to clear his mouth and throat of bloody mucus.

Several times, when Keats fell into fitful naps, Hunt walked to the window and once down the stairs to the front door to stare into the Piazza, Something tall and sharp edged stood in the deepest shadows opposite the Piazza near the base of the steps.

In the evening. Hunt himself dozed off while sitting upright in the hard chair next to Keats’s bed. He awoke from a dream of falling and put his hand out to steady himself only to find Keats awake and staring at him.

“Did you ever see anyone die?” asked Keats between soft gasps for breath.

“No.” Hunt thought that there was something odd about the young man’s gaze, as if Keats were looking at him but seeing someone else.

“Well then I pity you,” said Keats. “What trouble and danger you have got into for me. Now you must be firm for it will not last long.”

Hunt was struck not only by the gentle courage in that remark, but by the sudden shift in Keats’s dialect from flat Web-standard English to something much older and More interesting.

“Nonsense,” said Hunt heartily, forcing enthusiasm and energy he did not feel. “We’ll be out of this before dawn. I’m going to sneak out as soon as it gets dark and find a farcaster portal.”

Keats shook his head. “The Shrike will take you. It will allow no one to help me. It’s role is to see that I must escape myself through myself.” He closed his eyes as his breathing grew More ragged.

“I don’t understand,” said Leigh Hunt, taking the young man’s hand.

He assumed this was More of the fever talking, but since it was one of the few times Keats had been fully conscious in the past two days. Hunt felt it worth the effort to communicate. “What do you mean escape yourself through yourself?”

Keats’s eyes fluttered open. They were hazel and far too bright.

“Ummon and the others are trying to make me escape myself through accepting the godhood. Hunt. Bait to catch the white whale, honey to catch the ultimate fly. Fleeing Empathy shall find its home in me… in me. Mister John Keats, five feet high… and then the reconciliation begins, right?”

“What reconciliation?” Hunt leaned closer, trying not to breathe on him. Keats appeared to have shrunk in his bedclothes, tangle of blankets, but heat radiating from him seemed to fill the room. His face was a pale oval in the dying light. Hunt was only faintly aware of a gold band of reflected sunlight moving across the wall just below where it met the ceiling, but Keats’s eyes never left that last smear of day.

“The reconciliation of man and machine, Creator and created,” said Keats and began to cough, stopping only after he had drooled red phlegm into the basin Hunt held for him. He lay back, gasped a moment, and added,” Reconciliation of humankind and those races it tried to exterminate, the Core and the humanity it tried to expunge, the painfully evolved God of the Void Which Binds and its ancestors who tried to expunge it.”

Hunt shook his head and quit writing. “I don’t understand. You can become this… messiah… by leaving your deathbed?”

The pale oval of Keats’s face moved back and forth on the pillow in a motion which might have been a substitute for laughter. “We all could have. Hunt. Humankind’s folly and greatest pride. We accept our pain. We make way for our children. That earned us the right to become the God we dreamed of.”

Hunt looked down and found his own fist clenched in frustration.

“If you can do this… become this power… then do it. Get us out of here!”

Keats closed his eyes again. “Can’t. I’m not the One Who Comes but the One Who Comes Before. Not the baptized but the baptist. Merde, Hunt, I’m an atheist! Even Severn couldn’t convince me of these things when I was drowning in death!” Keats gripped Hunt’s shirt with a fierceness that frightened the older man. “Write this!”

And Hunt rumbled to find the ancient pen and rough paper, scribbling furiously to catch the words Keats now whispered:

A wondrous lesson in thy silent face:

Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.

Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.

Keats lived for three More painful hours, a swimmer rising occasionally from his sea of agony to take a breath or whisper some urgent nonsense. Once, long after dark, he pulled at Hunt’s sleeve and whispered sensibly enough, “When I am dead, the Shrike will not harm you. It waits for me. There may not be a way home, but it will not harm yo.u while you search.” And again, just as Hunt was bending over to hear if the breath still gurgled in the poet’s lungs, Keats began to talk and continued between spasms until he had given Hunt specific instructions for his entombment in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, near the Pyramid of Caius Cestius.

“Nonsense, nonsense,” Hunt muttered over and over like a mantra, squeezing the young man’s hot hand.

“Flowers,” whispered Keats a little later, just after Hunt had lighted a lamp on the bureau. The poet’s eyes were wide as he stared at the ceiling in a look of pure, childish wonder. Hunt glanced upward and saw the faded yellow roses painted in blue squares on the ceiling.

“Flowers… above me,” whispered Keats between his efforts to breathe.

Hunt was standing at the window, staring out at the shadows beyond the Spanish Steps, when the painful rasp of breath behind him faltered and stopped and Keats gasped out, “Severn… lift me up! I am dying.”

Hunt sat on the bed and held him. Heat flowed from the small body that seemed to weigh nothing, as if the actual substance of the man had been burned away. “Don’t be frightened. Be firm. And thank God it has come!” gasped Keats, and then the terrible rasping subsided. Hunt helped Keats lie back More comfortably as his breathing eased into a More normal rhythm.

Hunt changed the water in the basin, moistened a fresh cloth, and came back to find Keats dead.

Later, just after the sun rose. Hunt lifted the small body—wrapped in fresh linens from Hunt’s own bed—and went out into the city.

The storm had abated by the time Brawne Lamia reached the end of the valley. As she passed the Cave Tombs, she had seen the same eerie glow the other Tombs were emitting, but there also came a terrible noise—as if of thousands of souls crying out—echoing and moaning from the earth. Brawne hurried on.

The sky was clear by the time she stood in front of the Shrike Palace.

The structure was aptly named: the half-dome arched up and outward like the creature’s carapace, support elements curved downward like blades stabbing the valley floor and other buttresses leaped upward and away like Shrike thorns. Walls had become translucent as the interior glow increased, and now the building shone like a giant jack-o'-lantern shaved paper thin; the upper regions glowed red as the Shrike’s gaze.

Brawne took a breath and touched her abdomen. She was pregnant—she had known it before she left Lusus—and didn’t she owe More now to her unborn son or daughter than to the obscene old poet on the Shrike’s tree? Brawne knew that the answer was yes and that it did not matter one damn bit. She let out the breath and approached the Shrike Palace.

From the outside, the Shrike Palace was no More than twenty meters across. Before, when they had entered, Brawne and the other pilgrims had seen the interior as a single open space, empty except for the bladelike supports that crisscrossed the space under the glowing dome.

Now, as Brawne stood at the entrance, the interior was a space larger than the valley itself. A dozen tiers of white stone rose rank on rank and stretched into the faded distance. On each tier of stone, human bodies lay, each garbed a different way, each tethered by the same sort of semiorganic, semiparasitic shunt socket and cable which her friends had told Brawne she herself had worn. Only these metallic but translucent umbilicals pulsed red and expanded and contracted regularly, as if blood were being recycled through the sleeping forms’ skulls.

Brawne staggered back, affected by the pull of anti-entropic tides as much as by the view, but when she stood ten meters from the Palace, the exterior was the same size as always. She did not pretend to understand how klicks of interior could fit into such a modest shell. The Time Tombs were opening. This one could coexist in different times for all she knew. What she did understand was that when she was awakening from her own travels under the shunt, she had seen the Shrike’s thorn tree tied with tubes and vines of energy invisible to the eye but now quite obviously connected with the Shrike Palace.

She stepped to the entrance again.

The Shrike waited inside. Its carapace, usually gleaming, now seemed black, silhouetted against the light and marble glare around it.

Brawne felt the adrenaline rush fill her, felt the impulse to turn and run, and stepped inside.

The entrance all but vanished behind her, remaining visible only by a faint fuzziness in the uniform glow which emanated from the walls.

The Shrike did not move. Its red eyes gleamed from the shadow of its skull.

Brawne stepped forward, her booted heels making no sound on the stone floor. The Shrike was ten meters to her right where the stone biers began, ascending like obscene display racks to a ceiling lost in the glow. She had no illusion that she could make it back to the door before the creature closed on her.

It did not move. The air smelled of ozone and something sickly sweet. Brawne moved along the wall at her back and scanned the rows of bodies for a familiar sleeping face. With each step to her left, she moved farther from the exit and made it easier for the Shrike to cut her off. The creature stood there like a black sculpture in an ocean of light.

The tiers did stretch for kilometers. Stone steps, each almost a meter high, broke the horizontal lines of dark bodies. Several minutes’ walk from the entrance, Brawne climbed the lower third of one of these stairways, touched the nearest body on the second tier, and was relieved to find the flesh warm, the man’s chest rising and falling. It was not Martin Silenus.

Brawne continued onward, half expecting to find Paul Dure or Sol Weintraub or even herself lying among the living dead. Instead, she found a face she had last seen carved into a mountainside. Sad King Billy lay motionless on white stone, five tiers up, his royal robes scorched and stained. The sad face was—as were all the others—contorted in some internal agony. Martin Silenus lay three bodies away on a lower tier.

Brawne crouched next to the poet, glancing over her shoulder at the black speck of the Shrike, still unmoving at the end of the rows of bodies. Like the others, Silenus appeared to be alive, in silent agony, and was attached by a shunt socket connected to a pulsating umbilical which, in turn, ran into the white wall behind the ledge as if wed to the stone.

Brawne panted from fear as she ran her hand over the poet’s skull, feeling the fusion of plastic and bone, and then felt along the umbilical itself, finding no join or opening to the point where it melded with stone. Fluid pulsed beneath her fingers.

“Shit,” whispered Brawne and, in a sudden flurry of panic, looked behind her, certain the Shrike had crept within striking distance. The dark form still stood at the end of the long room.

Her pockets were empty. She had neither weapon nor tool. She realized that she would have to return to the Sphinx, find the packs, dig out something to cut with, and then return and muster enough courage to enter here again.

Brawne knew that she could never come through that door again.

She knelt, took a deep breath, and brought her hand and arm up, then down. The edge other palm smashed against material that looked like clear plastic and felt harder than steel. Her arm ached from wrist to shoulder from the single blow.

Brawne Lamia glanced to her right. The Shrike was moving toward her, stepping slowly like an old man out for a leisurely walk.

Brawne shouted, knelt, and struck again, palm-edge rigid, thumb locked at right angles. The long room echoed to the impact.

Brawne Lamia had grown up on Lusus at 1.3 standard gravity, and she was athletic for her race. Since she was nine years old, she had dreamed of and worked toward becoming a detective, and a part of that admittedly obsessive and totally illogical preparation had been training in the martial arts. Now she grunted, raised her arm, and struck again, willing her palm to be an axe blade, seeing in her mind the severing blow, the successful strikethrough.

The tough umbilical dented imperceptibly, pulsed like a living thing, and seemed to cringe away as she swung again.

Footsteps became audible below and behind her. Brawne almost giggled. The Shrike could move without walking, go from here to there without the effort of going between. It must enjoy scaring its prey.

Brawne was not frightened. She was too busy.

She raised her hand, brought it down again. It would have been easier striking the stone for effect. She slammed her palm-edge into the umbilical again, feeling some small bone give in her hand. The pain was like a distant noise, like the sliding below her and behind her.

Has it occurred to you, she thought, that it’ll probably kill him if you do manage to break this thing?

She swung again. The footsteps stopped at the base of the stairway below.

Brawne was panting from effort. Sweat dripped from her forehead and cheeks onto the chest of the sleeping poet.

I don’t even like you, she thought at Martin Silenus and chopped again. It was like trying to sever a metal elephant’s leg.

The Shrike began ascending the staircase.

Brawne half-stood and threw the entire weight of her body into a swing which almost dislocated her shoulder and broke her wrist, and smashed small bones in her hand.

And severed the umbilical.

Red fluid too nonviscous for blood spashed across Brawne’s legs and the white stone. The severed cable still extending from the wall spasmed and then thrashed like an agitated tentacle before lying limply and then withdrawing, a bleeding snake sliding into a hole that ceased to exist as soon as the umbilical was out of sight. The stump of umbilical still attached to Silenus’s neural shunt socket withered in five seconds, drying and contracting like a jellyfish out of water. Red splashed the poet’s face and shoulders, the liquid turning blue even as Brawne watched.

Martin Silenus’s eyes twitched and opened like an owl’s.

“Hey,” he said, “do you know the fucking Shrike’s standing right behind you?”

Gladstone ’cast to her private apartments and went at once to her fatline cubicle. Two messages waited.

The first was from Hyperion space. Gladstone blinked as the soft voice of her former Governor-General on Hyperion, young Lane, gave a quick summary of the meeting with the Ouster Tribunal. Gladstone sat back in the leather seat and raised both fists to her cheeks as Lane repeated the Ouster denials. They were not the invaders. Lane completed the transmission with a brief description of the Swarm, his opinion that the Ousters were telling the truth, a comment that the Consul’s fate was still unknown, and a request for orders.

“Response?” asked the fatline computer.

“Acknowledge receipt of message,” said Gladstone. “Transmit– “Stand by in diplomatic one-time code.”

Gladstone keyed the second message.

Admiral William Ajunta Lee appeared in a broken Hat-image projection, his ship’s fatline transmitter obviously working on reduced energy.

Gladstone saw from the peripheral data columns that the squirt had been encrypted among standard fleet telemetry transmissions:

FORCE technicians would eventually notice the check-sum discrepancies, but it might be hours or days from now.

Lee’s face was bloodied, and the background was obscured by smoke.

From the fuzzy black-and-white image, it appeared to Gladstone that the young man was transmitting from a docking bay of his cruiser. On a metal worktable behind him lay a corpse.

“…a complement of Marines managed to board one of their so-called lancers,” panted Lee. “They are manned—five to a ship—and they do look like Ousters, but watch what happens when we try to carry out an autopsy.” The picture shifted, and Gladstone realized that Lee was using a hand-held imager patched in through the cruiser’s fatline transmitter. Now Lee was gone, and she was looking down into the white, damaged face of a dead Ouster. From the bleeding at the eyes and ears, Gladstone guessed that the man had died of explosive decompression.

Lee’s hand appeared—recognizable by the admiral’s braid on the sleeve—holding a laser scalpel. The young commander did not bother to remove clothing before beginning a vertical incision starting at the breastbone and cutting downward.

The hand with the laser jerked away, and the camera steadied as something began to happen with the Ouster’s corpse. Broad patches began to smolder on the dead man’s chest, as if the laser had ignited clothing. Then the uniform burned through, and it was immediately apparent that the man’s chest was burning in widening, irregular holes, and from those holes shone a light so brilliant that the portable imagcr had to stop down receptivity. Patches of the corpse’s skull were burning through now, leaving afterimages on the fatline screen and Gladstone’s retinas.

The camera had pulled back before the corpse had been consumed, as if the heat were too great to bear. Lee’s face floated into focus. “You see, CEO, that’s been the case with all of the bodies. We captured none alive. We’ve found no center to the Swarm yet, just More warships, and I think that—”

The image disappeared and data columns said that the squirt had ceased in midtransmission.

“Response?”

Gladstone shook her head and unsealed the cubicle. In her study once again, she looked longingly at the long couch and sat behind her desk, knowing that if she closed her eyes for a second she would be asleep. Sedeptra buzzed on her private comlog frequency and said that General Morpurgo needed to see the CEO on an urgent matter.

The Lusian entered and began pacing back and forth in his agitation.

“M. Executive, I understand your reasoning in authorizing the use of this deathwand device, but I have to protest.”

“Why, Arthur?” she asked, calling him by name for the first time in weeks.

“Because we goddamn well don’t know the result. It’s too dangerous.

And it’s… it’s immoral.”

Gladstone raised an eyebrow. “Losing billions of citizens in a protracted war of attrition would be, moral, but using this thing to kill millions would be immoral? Is this the FORCE position, Arthur?”

“It’s my position, CEO.” —

Gladstone nodded. “Understood and noted, Arthur. But the decision has been made and will be implemented.” She saw her old friend draw himself to attention, and before he could open his mouth to protest, or, More likely, offer his resignation, Gladstone said, “Would you take a walk with me, Arthur?”

The FORCE General was nonplussed. “A walk? Why?”

“We need the fresh air.” Without waiting for a further response, Gladstone crossed to her private farcaster, keyed the manual diskey, and stepped through.

Morpurgo stepped through the opaque portal, glared down at the gold grass which rose to his knees and spread to a distant horizon, and raised his face to a saffron yellow sky where bronze cumulus clouds rose in jagged spires. Behind him, the portal winked out of existence, its location marked only by the meter-high control diskey, the only man-made thing visible in the endless reach of gold grass and cloud-filled sky. “Where the hell are we?” he demanded.

Gladstone had pulled a long strand of grass and was chewing on it.

“Kastrop-Rauxel. It has no datasphere, no orbital devices, no human or mech habitations of any kind.”

Morpurgo snorted. “Probably no safer from Core surveillance than the places Byron Lamia used to take us, Meina.”

“Perhaps not,” said Gladstone. “Arthur, listen.” She activated the comlog recordings of the two fatline transmissions she had just heard.

When they were finished, when Lee’s face snapped out of existence, Morpurgo walked away through the high grass.

“Well?” asked Gladstone, hurrying to keep up.

“So these Ouster bodies self-destruct the same way cybrid corpses have been known to,” he said. “So what? Do you think the Senate or All Thing will accept this as proof that it’s the Core that’s behind the invasion?”

Gladstone sighed. The grass looked soft, inviting. She imagined lying there and sinking into a nap from which she would never have to return.

“It’s proof enough for us. For the group.” Gladstone did not have to elaborate. Since her early Senate days, they had kept in touch with their suspicions of the Core, their hope for true freedom from Al domination someday. When Senator Byron Lamia had led them… but that was long ago.

Morpurgo watched wind whip at the golden steppes. A curious type of ball lightning played inside the bronze clouds near the horizon. “So what? Knowing is useless unless we know where to strike.”

“We have three hours.”

Morpurgo looked at his comlog. “Two hours and forty-two minutes.

Hardly time enough for a miracle, Meina.”

Gladstone did not smile. “Hardly time enough for anything else, Arthur.”

She touched the diskey, and the portal hummed to life.

“What can we do?” asked Morpurgo. “The Core AIs are briefing our technicians on that deathwand device right now. The torchship will be ready in an hour.”

“We detonate it where the effect will harm no one,” said Gladstone.

The General quit pacing and stared. “Where the hell is that? That fucker Nansen says that the device has a lethal radius of at least three light-years, but how can we trust him? We set off one device… near Hyperion or anywhere else… and we may be dooming human life everywhere.”

“I have an idea, but I want to sleep on it,” said Gladstone.

“Sleep on it?” growled General Morpurgo.

“I’m going to take a short nap, Arthur,” Gladstone said. “I suggest you do the same.” She stepped through the portal.

Morpurgo muttered a single obscenity, adjusted his cap, and walked through the farcaster with head up, back straight, and eyes forward: a soldier marching to his own execution.

On the highest terrace of a mountain moving through space some ten light-minutes from Hyperion, the Consul and seventeen Ousters sat on a circle of low stones within a wider circle of taller stones and decided whether the Consul would live.

“Your wife and child died on Bressia,” said Freeman Ghenga. “During the war between that world and Clan Moseman.”

“Yes,” said the Consul. “The Hegemony thought that the entire Swarm was involved in the attack. I said nothing to disabuse them of that opinion.”

“But your wife and child were killed.”

The Consul looked beyond the stone circle toward the summit already turning toward night. “So what? I ask for no mercy from this Tribunal.

I suggest no extenuating circumstances. I killed your Freeman Andil and the three technicians. Kilted them with premediation and malice aforethought. Killed them with no other goal than to trigger your machine to open the Time Tombs. It had nothing to do with my wife and child!”

A bearded Ouster whom the Consul had heard introduced as Spokesman Hullcare Amnion stepped forward to the inner circle. “The device was useless. It did nothing.”

The Consul turned, opened his mouth, and closed it without speaking.

“A test,” said Freeman Ghenga.

The Consul’s voice was almost inaudible. “But the Tombs… opened.”

“We knew when they would open,” said Coredwell Minmun. “The decay rate of the anti-entropic fields was known to us. The device was a test.”

“A test,” repeated the Consul. “I killed those four people for nothing.

A test.”

“Your wife and child died at Ouster hands,” said Freeman Ghenga.

“The Hegemony raped your world of Maui-Covenant. Your actions were predictable within certain parameters. Gladstone counted on this.

So did we. But we had to know those parameters.”

The Consul stood, took three steps, and kept his back turned to the others. “Wasted.”

“What was that?” asked Freeman Ghenga. The tall woman’s bare scalp glowed in the starlight and the reflected sunlight from a passing comet farm.

The Consul was laughing softly. “Everything wasted. Even my betrayals.

Nothing real. Wasted.”

Spokesman Coredwell Minmun stood and arranged his robes. “This Tribunal has passed sentence,” he said. The other sixteen Ousters nodded.

The Consul turned. There was something like eagerness on his tired face. “Do it, then. For God’s sake get it over with.”

Spokesman Freeman Ghenga stood and faced the Consul. “You are condemned to live. You are condemned to repair some of the damage you have done.”

The Consul staggered as if struck in the face. “No, you can’t… you must…”

“You are condemned to enter the age of chaos which approaches,” said Spokesman Hullcare Amnion. “Condemned to help us find fusion between the separated families of humankind.”

The Consul raised his arms as if trying to defend himself from physical blows. “I can’t… won’t… guilty…”

Freeman Ghenga took three strides, grasped the Consul by the front of his formal bolo jacket, and shook him unceremoniously. “You are guilty. And that is precisely why you must help ameliorate the chaos which is to come. You helped free the Shrike. Now you must return to see that it is caged once again. Then the long reconciliation must begin.”

The Consul had been released, but his shoulders were still shaking.

At that moment, the mountain rotated into sunlight, and tears sparkled in the Consul’s eyes. “No,” he whispered.

Freeman Ghenga smoothed his rumpled jacket and moved her long fingers to the diplomat’s shoulders. “We have our own prophets. The Templars will join us in the reseeding of the galaxy. Slowly, those who had lived in the lie called the Hegemony will climb out of the ruins of their Core-dependent worlds and join us in true exploration… exploration of the universe and of that greater realm which is inside each of us.”

The Consul had not seemed to have heard. He turned away brusquely. “The Core will destroy you,” he said, not facing any of them. “Just as it has destroyed the Hegemony.”

“Do you forget that your homeworld was founded on a solemn covenant of life?” said Coredwell Minmun.

The Consul turned toward the Ouster.

“Such a covenant governs our lives and actions,” said Minmun. “Not merely to preserve a few species from Old Earth, but to find unity in diversity. To spread the seed of humankind to all worlds, diverse environments, while treating as sacred the diversity of life we find elsewhere.”

Freeman Ghenga’s face was bright in the sun. “The Core offered unity in unwitting subservience,” she said softly. “Safety in stagnation.

Where are the revolutions in human thought and culture and action since the Hegira?”

“Terrafonned into pale clones of Old Earth,” answered Coredwell Minmun. “Our new age of human expansion will terraform nothing.

We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness. We will not make the universe adapt… we shall adapt.”

Spokesman Hullcare Amnion gestured toward the stars. “If humankind survives this test, our future lies in the dark distances between as well as on the sunlit worlds.”

The Consul sighed. “I have friends on Hyperion,” he said. “May I return to help them?”

“You may,” said Freeman Ghenga.

“And confront the Shrike?” said the Consul.

“You will,” said Coredwell Minmun.

“And survive to see this age of chaos?” said the Consul.

“You must,” said Hullcare Amnion.

The Consul sighed again and moved aside with the others as, above them, a great butterfly with wings of solar cells and glistening skin impervious to hard vacuum or harder radiation lowered itself toward the Stonehenge circle and opened its belly to receive the Consul.

In the Government House infirmary on Tau Ceti Center, Father Paul Dure slept a shallow and medically induced sleep, dreaming of flames and the death of worlds.

Except for the brief visit by CEO Gladstone and an even briefer visit by Bishop Edouard, Dure had been alone all day, drifting in and out of a pain-filled haze. The doctors here had asked for twelve More hours before their patient should be moved, and the College of Cardinals on Pacem had agreed, wishing the patient well and making ready for the ceremonies—still twenty-four hours away—in which Jesuit priest Paul Dure of Villefranche-sur-Saone would become Pope Teilhard I, the 487th Bishop of Rome, direct successor of the disciple Peter.

Still healing, flesh reweaving itself with the guidance of a million RNA directors, nerves similarly regenerating, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine—but not so miraculous, Dure thought, that it keeps me from itching almost to death—the Jesuit lay abed and thought about Hyperion and the Shrike and his long life and the confused state of affairs in God’s universe. Eventually Dure slept and dreamed of God’s Grove burning while the Templar True Voice of the Worldtree pushed him through the portal, and of his mother and of a woman named Semfa, now dead, but formerly a worker on Perecebo Plantation in the outback of the Outback in fiberplastic country east of Port Romance.

And in these dreams, primarily sad, Dure suddenly was aware of another presence there: not of another dream presence, but of another dreamer.

Dure was walking with someone. The air was cool, and the sky was a heart-rending blue. They had just come around a bend in a road, and now a lake became visible before them, its shores lined with graceful trees, mountains framing it from behind, a line of low clouds adding drama and scale to the scene, and a single island seeming to float far out on the mirror-still waters.

“Lake Windermere,” said Dure’s companion.

The Jesuit turned slowly, his heart pounding with anxious anticipation.

Whatever he expected, the sight of his companion did not inspire awe.

A short young man walked next to Dure. He wore an archaic jacket with leather buttons and a broad leather belt, sturdy shoes, an old fur cap, a battered knapsack, oddly tailored and frequently patched trousers, and carried a great plaid thrown over one shoulder and a solid walking stick in his right hand. Dure stopped walking, and the other man paused as if welcoming a break.

“The Fells ofFurness and the Cumbrian Mountains,” said the young man, using his stick to gesture beyond the lake.

Dure saw the auburn locks curling out from under the odd cap, noted the large hazel eyes and the man’s short stature, and knew that he had to be dreaming even as he thought I’m not dreaming!

“Who…” began Dure, feeling fear surge in him as his heart pounded.

“John,” said his companion, and the quiet reasonableness of that voice set some of Dure’s fear aside. “I believe we’ll be able to stay in Bowness tonight. Brown tells me that there’s a wonderful inn there hard on the lake.”

Dure nodded. He had absolutely no idea what the man was talking about.

The short young man leaned forward and grasped Dure’s forearm in a gentle but persistent grip. “There will be one who comes after me,” said John. “Neither alpha nor the omega but essential for us to find the way.”

Dure nodded stupidly. A breeze rippled the lake and brought the smell of fresh vegetation from the foothills beyond.

“That one will be born far away,” said John. “Farther away than our race has known for centuries. Your job will be the same as mine now—to prepare the way. You will not live to see the day of that person’s teaching, but your successor will.”

“Yes,” said Paul Dure and found that there was no saliva whatsoever in his mouth.

The young man doffed his cap, tucked it in his belt, and stooped to pick up a rounded stone. He threw it far out onto the lake. Ripples spread in slow progression. “Damn,” said John, “I was trying to skip it.” He looked at Dure. “You have to leave the infirmary and get back to Pacem at once. Do you understand?”

Dure blinked. The statement did not seem to belong in the dream.

“Why?”

“Never mind,” said John. “Just do it. Wait for nothing. If you don’t leave at once, there will be no chance later.”

Dure turned in confusion, as if he could walk back to his hospital bed. He looked over his shoulder at the short, thin young man standing on the pebbly shore. “What about you?”

John picked up a second stone, threw it, and shook his head when the rock skipped only once before disappearing beneath the mirrored surface. “I’m happy here for now,” he said, More to himself than to Dure. “I really was happy on this trip.” He seemed to shake himself out of his reverie and lifted his head to smile at Dure. “Go on. Move your ass. Your Holiness.”

Shocked, amused, irritated, Dure opened his mouth to retort and found himself lying in bed in the Government House infirmary. The medics had lowered the lighting so that he could sleep. Monitor beads clung to his skin.

Dure lay there a minute, suffering the itching and discomfort from healing third-degree burns and thinking about the dream, thinking that it was only a dream, that he could go back to sleep for a few hours before Monsignor—Bishop Edouard and the others arrived to escort him back. Dure closed his eyes and remembered the masculine but gentle face, the hazel eyes, the archaic dialect.

Father Paul Durf of the Society of Jesus sat up, struggled to his feet, found his clothes gone and nothing but his paper hospital pajamas to wear, wrapped a blanket around him, and shuffled off in bare feet before medics could respond to the tattletale sensors.

There had been a medics-only farcaster at the far end of the hall. If that failed to get him home, he would find another.

Leigh Hunt carried Keats’s body out of the shadow of the building into the sunlight of the Piazza di Spagna and expected to find the Shrike waiting for him. Instead, there was a horse. Hunt wasn’t an expert at recognizing horses, since the species was extinct in his time, but this one appeared to be the same one which had brought them to Rome.

It helped in the identification that the horse was attached to the same small cart—Keats had called it a vettura—which they had ridden in earlier.

Hunt set the body on the carriage seat, folding the layers of linen around it carefully, and walked alongside with one hand still touching the shroud as the carriage began moving slowly. In' his final hours, Keats had asked to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery near the Au-relian Wallnd the Pyramid of Caius Cestius. Hunt vaguely remembered that they-had passed through the Aurelian Wall during their bizarre voyage here, but he could not have found it again if his life– or Keats’s burial—depended on it. At any rate, the horse seemed to know the way.

Hunt trudged alongside the slowly moving carriage, aware of the beautiful spring-morning quality to the air and an underlying smell as of rotting vegetation. Could Keats’s body be decomposing already? Hunt knew little about the details of death; he wanted to learn no More. He swatted at the horse’s rump to hurry the beast up, but the animal stopped, turned slowly to give Hunt a reproachful look, and resumed his plodding pace.

It was More a glint of light glimpsed out of the corner of his eye than any sound that tipped Hunt off, but when he turned quickly, the Shrike was there—ten or fifteen meters behind and matching the pace of the horse with a solemn but somehow comical march, thorned and barbed knees high with each step. Sunlight flashed on carapace, metal tooth, and blade.

Hunt’s first impulse was to abandon the carriage and run, but a sense of duty and a deeper sense of being lost stifled that urge. Where could he run but back to the Piazza di Spagna—and the Shrike blocked the only return.

Accepting the creature as a mourner in this insane procession. Hunt turned his back on the monster and continued walking alongside the carriage, one hand firm on his friend’s ankle, through the shroud.

All during the walk. Hunt was alert for any sign of a farcaster portal, some sign of technology beyond the nineteenth century, or another human being. There was none. The illusion that he was walking through an abandoned Rome in the spring-like weather of February, a. d. 1821 was perfect. The horse climbed a hill a block from the Spanish Steps, made several other turns on broad avenues and narrow lanes, and passed within sight of the curved and crumbling ruin which Hunt recognized as the Colosseum.

When the horse and carriage stopped. Hunt roused himself from the walking doze he had drifted into and looked around. They were outside the overgrown heap of stones Hunt guessed to be the Aurelian Wall, and there was indeed a low pyramid visible, but the Protestant Cemetery—if that is what it was—seemed More pasture than cemetery.

Sheep grazed in the shade of cypresses, their bells tinkling eerily in the thick, warming air, and everywhere the grass grew to knee height or taller. Hunt blinked and saw the few headstones scattered here and there, half hidden by the grass, and closer, just beyond the grazing horse’s neck, a newly excavated grave.

The Shrike remained ten meters back, among the rustling cypress branches, but Hunt saw the glow of its red eyes fixed on the grave site.

Hunt went around the horse, now munching contentedly on high grass, and approached the grave. There was no coffin. The hole was about four feet deep, and the heaped dirt beyond smelled of upturned humus and cool soil. Embedded there was a long-handled shovel, as if the grave diggers had just left. A slab of stone stood upright at the head of the grave but remained unmarked—a blank headstone. Hunt saw the glint of metal on top of the slab and rushed over to find the first modern artifact he had seen since being kidnapped to Old Earth: a small laser pen lay there—the type used by construction workers or artists to scrawl designs on the hardest alloy.

Hunt turned, holding the pen, feeling armed now although the thought of that narrow beam stopping the Shrike seemed ludicrous. He dropped the pen into the pocket of his shirt and went about the business of burying John Keats.

A few minutes later. Hunt stood near the heap of dirt, shovel in hand, staring down into the open grave at the small, sheet-wrapped bundle there, and tried to think of something to say. Hunt had been at numerous state memorial services, had even written Gladstone’s eulogies for some of them, and words had never been a problem before.

But now nothing came. The only audience was the silent Shrike, still back among the shadows of the cypresses, and the sheep with their bells tinkling as they moved nervously away from the monster, ambling toward the grave like a group of tardy mourners.

Hunt thought that perhaps some of the original John Keats’s poetry would be appropriate now, but Hunt was a political manager—not a man given to reading or memorizing ancient poetry. He remembered, too late, that he had written down the snippet of verse his friend had dictated the day before, but the notebook still lay on the bureau in the apartment on the Piazza di Spagna. It had been something about becoming godlike or a god, the knowledge of too many things rushing in… or somesuch nonsense. Hunt had an excellent memory, but he couldn’t recall the first line of that archaic mishmash.

In the end, Leigh Hunt compromised with a moment of silence, his head bowed and eyes closed except for occasional peeks at the Shrike, still holding its distance, and then he shoveled the dirt in. It took longer than he would have imagined. When he was done parting down the soil, the surface was slightly concave, as if the body had been too insignificant to form a proper mound. Sheep brushed by Hunt’s legs to graze on the high grass, daisies, and violets which grew around the grave.

Hunt might not have remembered the man’s poetry, but he had no trouble remembering the inscription Keats had asked to be set on his headstone. Hunt clicked on the pen, tested it by burning a furrow in three meters of grass and soil, and then had to stamp out the tiny fire he had started. The inscription had bothered Hunt when he first heard it—the loneliness and bitterness audible beneath Keats’s wheezing, gasping effort to speak. But Hunt did not think it was his place to argue with the man. Now he had only to inscribe it in stone, leave this place, and avoid the Shrike while trying to find a way home.

The pen sliced into stone easily enough, and Hunt had to practice on the back side of the headstone before he found the right depth of line and quality of control. Still, the effect looked ragged and homemade when Hunt finished some fifteen or twenty minutes later.

First there was the crude drawing which Keats had asked for—he had shown the aide several rough sketches, drawn on foolscap with a shaking hand—of a Greek lyre with four of its eight strings broken.

Hunt was not satisfied when he was done—he was even less of an artist than a reader of poetry—but the thing was probably recognizable to anyone who knew what the hell a Greek lyre was. Then came the legend itself, written precisely as Keats had dictated it:

There was nothing else: no birth or death dates, not even the poet’s name. Hunt stood back, surveyed his work, shook his head, keyed the pen off but kept it in his hand, and started back for the city, making a wide circle around the creature in the cypresses as he did so.

At the tunnel through the Aurelian Wall, Hunt paused to look back.

The horse, still attached to its carriage, had moved down the long slope to munch on sweeter grass near a small stream. The sheep milled about, munching flowers and leaving their hoofprints in the moist soil of the grave. The Shrike remained where it had been, barely visible beneath its bower of cypress branches. Hunt was almost sure that the creature still faced the grave.

It was late in the afternoon when Hunt found the farcaster, a dull rectangle of dark blue humming in the precise center of the crumbling Colosseum. There was no diskey or punchplate. The portal hung there like an opaque but open door.

But not open to Hunt.

He tried fifty times, but the surface was as solid and resisting as stone.

He touched it tentatively with fingertips, stepped confidently into and bounced off its surface, threw himself at the blue rectangle, lobbed stones at the entrance to watch them bounce off, tried both sides and even the edges of the thing, and ended up leaping again and again at the useless thing until his shoulders and upper arms were masses of bruises.

It was a farcaster. He was sure of it. But it would not let him through.

Hunt searched the rest of the Colosseum, even the underground passages dripping with moisture and bat guano, but there was no other portal. He searched the nearby streets and all their buildings. No other portal. He searched all afternoon, through basilica and cathedrals, homes and huts, grand apartment buildings and narrow alleys. He even returned to the Piazza di Spagna, ate a hasty meal on the first floor, pocketed the notebook and anything else he found of interest in the rooms above, and then left forever to find a farcaster.

The one in the Colosseum was the only one he could find. By sunset he had clawed at it until his fingers were bloody. It looked right, it hummed right, it felt right, but it would not let him through.

A moon, not Old Earth’s moon judging by the dust storms and clouds visible on its surface, had risen and now hung above the black curve of the Colosseum wall. Hunt sat in the rocky center and glowered at the blue glow of the portal. From somewhere behind him came the frenzied beat of pigeons’ wings and the rattle of a small rock on stone.

Hunt rose painfully, fumbled the laser pen out of his pocket, and stood, legs apart, waiting and straining to see into the shadows of the Colosseum’s many crevices and arches. Nothing stirred.

A sudden noise behind him made him whirl and almost spray the thin beam of laser light across the farcaster portal’s surface. An arm appeared there. Then a leg. A person emerged. Then another.

The Colosseum echoed to Leigh Hunt’s shouts.

Meina Gladstone had known that as tired as she was, it would be folly to nap even as long as thirty minutes. But since childhood, she had trained herself to take five-to fifteen-minute catnaps, shrugging off weariness and fatigue toxins through these brief respites from thought.

Now, sickened with exhaustion and the vertigo of the previous forty-eight hours’ confusion, she lay a few minutes on the long sofa in her study, emptying her mind of trivia and redundancies, letting her subconscious find a path through the jungle of thoughts and events. For a few minutes, she dozed, and while she dozed she dreamed.

Meina Gladstone sat upright, shrugging off the light afghan and tapping at her comlog before her eyes were open. “Sedeptra! Get General Morpurgo and Admiral Singh in my office in three minutes.”

Gladstone stepped into the adjoining bathroom, showered and son-icked, pulled out fresh clothes—her most formal suit of soft, black whipcord velvet, a gold and red Senate scarf held in place by a gold pin showing the geodesic symbol of the Hegemony, earrings dating back to pre-Mistake Old Earth, and the topaz bracelet-cum-comlog given to her by Senator Byron Lamia before his marriage—and was back in the study in time to greet the two FORCE officers.

“CEO, this is very unfortunate timing,” began Admiral Singh. “The final data from Mare Infinitus was being analyzed, and we were discussing fleet movements for the defense ofAsquith.”

Gladstone ordered her private farcaster into existence and gestured for the two men to follow her.

Singh glanced around as he stepped through into gold grass under a threatening bronze sky. “Kastrop-Rauxel,” he said. “There were rumors that a previous administration had FORCE:space construct a private farcaster here.”

“CEO Yevshensky had it added to the Web,” said Gladstone. She waved, and the farcaster door vanished. “He felt that the Chief Executive needed someplace where Core listening devices were unlikely.”

Morpurgo looked uneasily toward a wall of clouds near the horizon where ball lightning played. “No place is totally safe from the Core,” he said. “I’ve been telling Admiral Singh about our suspicions.”

“Not suspicions,” said Gladstone. “Facts. And I know where the Core is.”

Both FORCE officers reacted as if the ball lightning had struck them.

“Where?” they said almost in unison.

Gladstone paced back and forth. Her short gray hair seemed to glow in the charged air. “In the farcaster web,” she said. “Between the portals.

The AIs live in the singularity pseudo-world there like spiders in a dark web. And we wove it for them.”

Morpurgo was the first of the two able to speak. “My God,” he said.

“What do we do now? We have less than three hours before the torchship with the Core device translates to Hyperion space.”

Gladstone told them exactly what they were going to do.

“Impossible,” said Singh. He was unconsciously tugging at his short beard. “Simply impossible.”

“No,” said Morpurgo. “It will work. There is enough time. And as frantic and random as the fleet movements have been during the past two days…”

The Admiral shook his head. “Logistically it might be possible. Rationally and ethically it is not. No, it is impossible.”

Meina Gladstone stepped closer. “Kushwant,” she said, addressing the Admiral by his first name for the first time since she had been a young senator and he an even younger FORCE:space commander,

“Don’t you remember when Senator Lamia put us in touch with the Stables? The AI named Urnmon? His prediction of the two futures– one holding chaos and the other certain extinction for humankind?”

Singh turned away. “My duty is to FORCE and the Hegemony.”

“Your duty is the same as mine,” snapped Gladstone. “To the human race.”

Singh’s fists came up as if he were ready to fight an invisible but powerful opponent. “We don’t know for sure! Where did you get your information?”

“Severn,” said Gladstone. “The cybrid.”

“Cybrid?” snorted the General. “You mean that artisi. Or at least that miserable excuse for one.”

“Cybrid,” repeated the CEO. She explained.

“Severn as a retrieval persona?” Morpurgo looked dubious. “And now you’ve found him?”

“He found me. In a dream. Somehow he managed to communicate from wherever he is. That was his role, Arthur, Kushwant. That’s why Ummon sent him to the Web.”

“A dream,” sneered Admiral Singh. “This… cybrid… told you that the Core was hidden in the farcaster web… in a dream.”

“Yes,” said Gladstone, “and we have very little time in which to act.”

“But,” said Morpurgo, “to do what you suggested—”

“Would doom millions,” finished Singh. “Possibly billions. The economy would collapse. Worlds like TC2, Renaissance Vector, New Earth, the Denebs, New Mecca—Lusus, Arthur—scores More depend upon other worlds for their food. Urban planets cannot survive alone.”

“Not as urban planets,” said Gladstone. “But they can learn to farm until interstellar trade is reborn.”

“Bah!” snarled Singh. “After plague, after the breakdown of authority, after the millions of deaths from lack of proper equipment, medicine, and datasphere support.”

“I’ve thought of all that,” said Gladstone, her voice firmer than Morpurgo had ever heard it. “I’ll be the greatest mass murderer in history—greater than Hitler or Tze Hu or Horace Glennon-Height.

The only thing worse is to continue as we are. In which case, I—and you, gentlemen—will be the ultimate betrayers of humankind.”

“We can’t know that,” grunted Kushwant Singh, as if the words were driven from him by blows to the belly.

“We do know that,” said Gladstone. “The Core has no More use for the Web. From now on, the Volatiles and Ultimates will keep a few million slaves penned underground on the nine labyrinthine worlds while they use human synapses for what computing needs remain.”

“Nonsense,” said Singh. “Those humans would die out.”

Meina Gladstone sighed and shook her head. “The Core has devised a parasitic, organic device called the cruciform,” she said. “It… brings back… the dead. After a few generations, the humans will be retarded, listless, and without a future, but their neurons will still serve Core purposes.”

Singh turned his back on them again. His small form was silhouetted against a wall of lightning as the storm approached in a riot of boiling bronze clouds. “Your dream told you this, Meina?”

“Yes.”

“And what else does your dream say?” snapped the Admiral.

“That the Core has no More need for the Web,” said Gladstone.

“Not for the human Web. They’ll continue to reside there, rats in the walls, but the original occupants are no longer needed. The AI Ultimate Intelligence will take over the major computing duties.”

Singh turned to look at her. “You are mad, Meina. Quite mad.”

Gladstone moved quickly to grab the Admiral’s arm before lie could activate the farcaster. “Kushwant, please listen to—”

Singh pulled a ceremonial flechette pistol from his tunic and set it against the woman’s breast. “I am sorry, M. Executive. But I serve the Hegemony and…”

Gladstone stepped back with her hand to her mouth as Admiral Kushwant Singh stopped speaking, stared sightlessly for a second, and fell to the grass. The flechette pistol tumbled into the weeds.

Morpurgo stepped forward to retrieve it, tucking it into his belt before he put away the deathwand in his hand.

“You killed him,” said the CEO. “If he wouldn’t cooperate, I’d planned to leave him here. Maroon him on KastropRauxel.”

“We couldn’t take the chance,” said the General, pulling the body farther from the farcaster. “Everything depends upon the next few hours.”

Gladstone looked at her old friend. “You’re willing to go through with it?”

“We have to,” said Morpurgo. “It will be our last chance to get rid of this yoke of oppression. I’ll give the deployment orders at once and hand over sealed orders in person. It will take most of the fleet…”

“My God,” whispered Meina Gladstone, looking down at the body of Admiral Singh. “I’m doing all of this on the strength of a dream.”

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

Forty-Four

Death is not, I discovered, a pleasant experience. Leaving the familiar rooms on the Piazza di Spagna and the rapidly cooling body there is similar to being thrust out in the night by fire or Hood from the familiar warmth of one’s home. The rush of shock and displacement is severe. Thrown headlong into the metasphere, I experience the same sense of shame and sudden, awkward revelation which we have all had in our dreams when we realize that we have forgotten to get dressed and have come naked to some public place or social gathering.

Naked is the correct word now, as I struggle to keep some shape to my tattered analog persona. I manage to concentrate sufficiently to form this almost random electron cloud of memories and associations into a reasonable simulacrum of the human I had been—or at least the human whose memories I had shared.

Mister John Keats, five feet high.

The metasphere is no less a frightening place than before—worse now that I have no mortal shelter to flee to. Vast shapes move beyond dark horizons, sounds echo in the Void Which Binds like footsteps on the in an abandoned castle. Under and behind everything there is a constant and unnerving nimble like carriage wheels on a highway made of slate.

Poor Hunt. I am tempted to return to him, pop in like Marley’s ghost to assure him that I am better off than I look, but Old Earth is a dangerous place for me right now: the Shrike’s presence burns on the metasphere datumplane there like flame on black velvet.

The Core summons me with greater force, but that is even More dangerous. I remember Ummon destroying the other Keats in front of Brawne Lamia—squeezing the analog persona to him until it simply dissolved, the basic Core memory of the man deliquescing like a salted slug-No thank you.

I have chosen death to godhood, but I have chores to do before I sleep.

The metasphere frightens me, the Core frightens me More, the dark tunnels of the datasphere singularities I must travel terrify me to my analog bones. But there is nothing for it.

I sweep into the first black cone, swirling around like a metaphorical leaf in an all-too-real whirlpool, emerging on the proper datumplane, but too dizzy and disoriented to do anything but sit there—visible to any Core AI accessing these ROMwork ganglia or phage routines residing in the violet crevices of any of these data mountain ranges– but the chaos in the TechnoCore saves me here: the great Core personalities are too busy laying siege to their own personal Troys to watch their back doors.

I find the datasphere access codes I want and the synapse umbilicals I need, and it is the work of a microsecond to follow old paths down to Tau Ceti Center, Government House, the infirmary there, and the drug-induced dreams of Paul Dure.

One thing my persona does exceptionally well is dream, and I discover quite by accident that my memories of my Scottish tour make a pleasant dreamscape in which to convince the priest to flee. As an Englishman and freethinker, I once had been opposed to anything which smacked of popery, but one thing must be said in tribute to the Jesuits—they are taught obedience even above logic, and for once this stands all of humankind in good stead. Dure does not ask why when I tell him to go…he awakes like a good boy, wraps a blanket around him, and goes.

Meina Gladstone thinks of me as Joseph Severn but she accepts my message as if it is being delivered to her by God. I want to tell her: no, I am not the One, I am only He Who Comes Before, but the | message is the thing, so I deliver that and go.”Passing through the Core on my way to Hyperion’s metasphere, 11 catch the burning-metal whiff of civil war and glimpse a great light: which might well be Ummon in the process of being extinguished. I

The old Master, if indeed it is he, does not cite koans as he dies, but' screams in agony as sincerely as any conscious entity ever has who is in the process of being fed to the ovens.

I hurry on.

The (arcaster connection to Hyperion is tenuous at best: a single military (arcaster portal and a single, damaged JumpShip in a shrinking perimeter of war-torn Hegemony ships. The singularity containment sphere cannot be protected from Ouster attacks for longer than a few minutes More. The Hegemony torchship carrying the Core deathwand device is preparing to translate in-system even as I come through and find my bearings in the limited datasphere level which allows observation.

I pause to watch what happens next.

“Christ,” said Melio Arundez, “Meina Gladstone’s coming through on a priority-one squirt.”

Theo Lane joined the older man as they watched the override data mist the air above the holopit. The Consul came down the iron spiral staircase from the bedroom where he had gone to brood. “Another message from TC2?” he snapped.

“Not to us specifically,” said Theo, reading the red codes as they formed and faded. “It’s an override fatline transmission to everyone, everywhere.”

Arundez lowered himself into the pit cushions. “Something’s very wrong. Has the CEO ever broadcast on total wideband before?”

“Never,” said Theo Lane. “The energy needed just to code such a squirt would be incredible.”

The Consul stepped closer and pointed to the codes now disappearing.

“It’s not a squirt. Look, it’s a real-time transmission.”

Theo shook his head. “We’re talking transmission values of several hundred million gigaelectron volts here.”

Arundez whistled. “At even a hundred million GeV, it’d better be important.”

“A general surrender,” said Theo. “It’s the only thing that would call for a universal real-time broadcast. Gladstone’s sending it to the Ousters, Outback worlds, and overrun planets as well as the Web. It must be carried on all comm frequencies, HTV, and datasphere bands too. It must be a surrender.”

“Shut up,” said the Consul. He had been drinking.

The Consul had started drinking immediately upon his return from the Tribunal, and his temper, which had been foul even as Theo and Arundez were slapping him on the back and celebrating his survival, had not improved after the lift-off, clearance of the Swarm, and the two hours he spent alone drinking while they accelerated toward Hyperion.

“Meina Gladstone won’t surrender,” slurred the Consul. The bottle of Scotch was still in his hand. “Just watch.”

On the torchship HS Stephen Hawking, the twenty-third Hegemony spacecraft to carry the revered classical scientist’s name. General Arthur Morpurgo looked up from the C' board and hushed his two bridge officers. Normally this class of torchship carried a crew of seventy-five.

Now, with the Core deathwand device loaded in the weapons bay and armed, Morpurgo and four volunteers were the total crew. Displays and discreet computer voices assured them that the Stephen Hawking was on course, on time, and accelerating steadily toward near-quantum velocities and the military farcaster portal stationed at LaGrange Point Three between Madhya and its oversized moon. The Madhya portal opened directly to the fiercely defended Hyperion-space farcaster.

“One minute eighteen seconds to translation point,” said Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo. The General’s son.

Morpurgo nodded and keyed up the in-system wideband transmission.

Bridge projections were busy enough with mission data, so the General allowed voice-only on the CEO’s broadcast. He smiled despite himself. What would Meina say if she knew he was at the helm of the Stephen Hawking? Better she didn’t know. There was nothing else he could do. He preferred not to see the results of his precise, hand-delivered orders of the past two hours.

Morpurgo looked at his oldest son with pride so fierce it bordered on pain. There were only so many torchship-rated personnel he could approach about this mission, and his son had been the first to volunteer.

If nothing else, the Morpurgo family’s enthusiasm might have allayed some Core suspicions.

“My fellow citizens,” Gladstone was saying, “this is my final broadcast to you as your Chief Executive Officer.

“As you know, the terrible war which has already devastated three of our worlds and is about to fall upon a fourth, has been reported as an invasion by the Ouster Swarms.

“This is a lie.”

The comm bands flared with interference and went dead. “Go to fatline,” said General Morpurgo.

“One minute three seconds to translation point,” intoned his son.

Gladstone’s voice returned, filtered and slightly blurred by fatline encrypting and decoding. “…to realize that our ancestors… and we ourselves… had made a Faustian bargain with a power not concerned with the fate of humankind.

“The Core is behind the current invasion.

“The Core is responsible for our long, comfortable dark age of the soul.

“The Core is responsible for the ongoing attempt to destroy humanity, to remove us from the universe and replace us with a god-machine of their own devising.”

Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo never lifted his eyes from the circle of instruments. “Thirty-eight seconds to translation point.”

Morpurgo nodded. The other two crewmen on the C' bridge showed faces sheened with sweat. The General realized that his own face was wet.

“…have proven that the Core resides… has always resided… in the dark places between farcaster portals. They believe themselves to be our masters. As long as the Web exists, as long as our beloved Hegemony is joined by farcaster, they will be our masters.”

Morpurgo glanced at his own mission chronometer. Twenty-eight seconds. The translation to Hypcrion system would be—to human senses—instantaneous. Morpurgo was certain that the Core death-wand device was somehow keyed to detonate as soon as they entered Hyperion space. The shock wave of death would reach the planet Hyperion in less than two seconds, would engulf even the most distant elements of the Ouster Swarm before ten More minutes had passed.

“Thus,” said Meina Gladstone, her voice betraying emotion for the first time, “as Chief Executive Officer of the Senate of the Hegemony of Man, I have authorized elements of FORCE:space to destroy all singularity containment spheres and farcaster devices known to be in existence.

“This destruction… this cauterizing… will commence in ten seconds.

“God save the Hegemony.

“God forgive us all.”

Bridge Officer Salumun Morpurgo said coolly, “Five seconds to translation, Father.”

Morpurgo looked across the bridge and locked eyes with his son.

Projections behind the young man showed the portal growing, growing, surrounding.

“I love you,” said the General.

Two hundred and sixty-three singularity containment spheres connecting More than seventy-two million farcaster portals were destroyed within two point six seconds of one another. FORCE fleet units, deployed by Morpurgo under Executive Order and reacting to orders unsealed less than three minutes before, reacted promptly and professionally, destroying the fragile farcaster spheres by missile, lance, and plasma explosive.

Three seconds later, with the clouds of debris still expanding, the hundreds of FORCE spacecraft found themselves stranded, separated from each other and any other system by weeks or months via Hawking drive, and years of time-debt.

Thousands of people were caught in farcaster transit. Many died instantly, dismembered or torn in half. Many More suffered amputated limbs as the portals collapsed behind them or before them. Some simply disappeared.

This was the fate of the HS Stephen Hawking—precisely as planned—as both entrance and exit portals were expertly destroyed in the nanosecond of the ship’s translation. No part of the torchship survived in real space. Later tests showed conclusively that the so-called deathwand device was detonated in whatever passed for time and space in the strange Core geographies between the portals.

The effect was never known.

The effect on the rest of the Web and its citizens was immediately obvious.

After seven centuries of existence and at least four centuries where few citizens existed without it, the datasphere—including the All Thing and all comm and access bands—simply ceased to be. Hundreds of thousands of citizens went insane at that moment—shocked into catatonia by the disappearance of senses which had become More important to them than sight or hearing.

More hundreds of thousands of datumplane operators, including many of the so-called cyberpukes and system cowboys, were lost, their analog personas caught in the crash of the datasphere or their brains burned out by neural-shunt overload or an effect later known as zero-zero feedback.

Millions of people died when their chosen habitats, accessible only by farcaster, became isolated deathtraps.

The Bishop of the Church of the Final Atonement—the leader of the Shrike Cult—had carefully arranged to sit out the Final Days in some comfort in a hollowed-out mountain, lavishly stocked, deep in the Raven Range of the north reaches of Nevermore. Redundant far-casters were the only route in or out. The Bishop perished with several thousand of his acolytes, exorcists, lectors, and ostiaries clawing to get into the Inner Sanctum to share the last of the Holy One’s air.

Millionaire publisher Tyrena Wingreen-Feif, ninety-seven standard years old and on the scene for three-hundred-plus years thanks to the miracle of Poulsen treatments and cryogenics, made the mistake of spending that fateful day in her farcaster-access-only office on the four hundred and thirty-fifth floor of the Transline Spire in the Babel section ofTau Ceti Center’s City Five. After fifteen hours of refusing to believe that farcaster service would not be renewed shortly, Tyrena gave in to comm call entreaties from her employees and dropped her containment field walls so that she could be picked up by EMV.

Tyrena had not listened to instructions carefully enough. The explosive decompression blew her off the four hundred and thirty-fifth floor like a cork out of an overshaken champagne bottle. Employees and rescue squad members in the waiting EMV swore that the old lady cursed a blue streak for the entire four-minute fall.

On most worlds, chaos had earned a new definition.

The majority of the Web’s economy disappeared with the local data-spheres and the Web megasphere. Trillions of hard-earned and ill-gotten marks ceased to be. Universal cards quit functioning. The machinery of daily life coughed, wheezed, and shut down. For weeks or months or years, depending upon the world, it would be impossible to pay for groceries, charge a ride on public transit, settle the simplest debt, or receive services without access to black market coins and bills.

But the webwide depression which had hit like a tsunami was a minor detail, reserved for later pondering. For most families, the effect was immediate and intensely personal.

Father or mother had ’cast off to work as usual, say from Deneb Vier to Renaissance V, and instead of arriving home an hour late this evening, would be delayed eleven years—if he or she could find immediate transit on one of the few Hawking drive spinships still traveling the hard way between the worlds.

Well-to-do family members listening to Gladstone’s speech in their fashionable multiworld residence looked up to stare at each other, separated by only a few meters and open portals between the rooms, blinked, and were separated by light-years and actual years, their rooms now opening onto nothing.

Children a few minutes away at school or camp or play or the sitter’s would be grown before they were reunited with parents.

The Grand Concourse, already slightly truncated by the winds of war, found itself blown to oblivion, its endless belt of beautiful shops and prestige restaurants sliced into tawdry sections never to be reunited.

The River Tethys ceased to flow as the giant portals went opaque and died. Water spilled out, dried up, and left fish to rot under two hundred suns.

There were riots. Lusus tore itself apart like a wolf chewing at its own entrails. New Mecca went into spasms of martyrdom. TsingtaoHsishuang Panna celebrated deliverance from the Ouster hordes and then hanged several thousand former Hegemony bureaucrats.

Maui-Covenant also rioted, but in celebration, the hundreds'of thousands of descendents of the First Families riding the motile isles to displace the ofiworlders who had taken over so much of the world.

Later, the millions of shocked and displaced vacation-home owners were put to work dismantling the thousands of oil derricks and tourist centers which had spotted the Equatorial Archipelago like pox.

On Renaissance Vector there was a brief spurt of violence followed by efficient social restructuring and a serious effort to feed an urban world without farms.

On Nordholm, the cities emptied as people returned to the coasts and the cold sea and their ancestral fishing boats.

On Parvati there was confusion and civil war.

On Sol Draconi Septem there was jubilation and revolution followed by a new strand of retrovirus plague.

On Fuji there was philosophical resignation followed by an immediate construction of orbital shipyards to create a fleet of Hawking drive spinships.

On Asquith there was finger-pointing followed by the victory of the Socialist Labor Workers’ Party in the World Parliament.

On Pacem there was prayer. The new Pope, His Holiness Teilhard I, called a great council into session—Vatican XXXIX—announced a new era in the life of the Church, and empowered the council to prepare missionaries for long voyages. Many missionaries. For many voyages.

Pope Teilhard announced that these missionaries would not be proselytizers, but searchers. The Church, like so many species grown used to living on the edge of extinction, adapted and endured.

On Tempe there were riots and death and the rise of demagogues.

On Mars the Olympus Command stayed in touch with its farflung forces for a while via fatline. It was Olympus which confirmed that the “Ouster invasion waves” everywhere but Hyperion system had simply limped to a halt. Intercepted Core ships were empty and unprogrammed.

The invasion was over.

On Metaxas there were riots and reprisals.

On Qom-Riyadh a self-appointed fundamentalist Shiite ayatollah rode out of the desert, called a hundred thousand followers to him, and wiped out the Suni Home Rule government within hours. The new revolutionary government returned power to tlie mullahs and set back the clock two thousand years. The people rioted with joy.

On Armaghast, a frontier world, things went on pretty much as they always had except for a dearth of tourists, new archaeologists, and other imported luxuries. Armaghast was a labyrinthine world. The labyrinth there stayed empty.

On Hebron there was panic in the offworld center of New Jerusalem, but the Zionist elders soon restored order to the city and world. Plans were made. Rare offworld necessities were rationed and shared. The desert was reclaimed. Farms were extended. Trees were planted. The people complained to each other, thanked God for deliverance, argued with God about the discomfort of that same deliverance, and went about their business.

On Cod’s Grove entire continents still burned, and a pall of smoke filled the sky. Soon after the last of the “Swarm” had passed, scores of treeships rose through the clouds, climbing slowly on fusion thrusters while shielded by erg-generated containment fields. Once beyond the gravity well, most of these treeships turned outward in a myriad of directions along the galactic plane of the ecliptic and began the long spin-up to quantum leap. Fatline .squirts leaped from treeship to distant, waiting Swarms. The reseeding had begun.

On Tau Ceti Center, seat of power and wealth and business and government, the hungry survivors left the dangerous spires and useless cities and helpless orbiting habitats and went in search of someone to blame. Someone to punish.

They did not have far to look.

General Van Zeidt had been in Government House when the portals railed and now he commanded the two hundred Marines and sixty-eight security people left to guard the complex. Former CEO Meina Gladstone still commanded the six Praetorians Kolchev had left her when he and the other ranking senators had departed on the first and last FORCE evacuation dropship to get through. Somewhere the mob had acquired anti-space missiles and lances, and none of the other three thousand Government House employees and refugees would be going anywhere until the siege was lifted or the shields failed.

Gladstone stood at the forward observation post and watched the carnage. The mob had destroyed most of Deer Park and the formal gardens before the last lines of interdiction and containment fields had stopped them. There were at least three million frenzied people pressed against those barriers now, and the mob grew larger every minute.

“Can you drop the fields back fifty meters and restore them before the mob covers the ground?” Gladstone asked the General. Smoke filled the sky from the cities burning to the west. Thousands of men and women had been smashed against the blur of containment field by the throngs behind them until the lower two meters of the shimmering wall looked as if it had been painted with strawberry jam. Tens of thousands More pressed closer to that inner shield despite the agony of nerve and bone the interdiction field was causing them.

“We can do that, M. Executive,” said Van Zeidt. “But why?”

“I’m going out to talk to them.” Gladstone sounded very tired.

The Marine looked at her, sure that she was making some bad joke.

“M. Executive, in a month they will be willing to listen to you… or any of us… on radio or HTV. In a year, maybe two, after order’s restored and rationing’s successful, they might be ready to forgive. But it will be a generation before they really understand what you did… that you saved them… saved us all.”

“I want to talk to them,” said Meina Gladstone. “I have something to give to them.”

Van Zeidt shook his head and looked at the circle of FORCE officers who had been staring out at the mob through slits in the bunker and who now were staring at Gladstone with equal disbelief and horror.

“I’d have to check with CEO Kolchev,” said General Van Zeidt.

“No,” Meina Gladstone said tiredly. “He rules an empire which no longer exists. I still rule the world I destroyed.” She nodded toward her Praetorians and they produced deathwands from their orange-and-black-striped tunics.

None of the FORCE officers moved. General Van Zeidt said, “Meina, the next evacuation ship will make it.”

Gladstone nodded as if distracted. “The inner garden, I should think.

The mob will be at a loss for several moments. The withdrawal of the outer fields will throw them off balance.” She looked around as if she might be forgetting something and then extended her hand to Van Zeidt. “Goodbye, Mark. Thank you. Please take care of my people.”

Van Zeidt shook her hand and watched as the woman adjusted her scarf, absently touched a bracelet comlog as if for luck, and went out of the bunker with four of her Praetorians. The small group crossed the trampled gardens and walked slowly toward the containment fields.

The mob beyond seemed to react like a single, mindless organism, pressing through the violet interdiction field and screaming with the voice of some demented thing.

Gladstone turned, raised one hand as if to wave, and gestured her Praetorians back. The four guards hurried across the matted grass.

“Do it,” said the oldest of the remaining Praetorians. He pointed to the containment field control remote.

“Fuck you,” General Van Zeidt said clearly. No one would go near that remote while he lived.

Van Zeidt had forgotten that Gladstone still had access to codes and tactical tightbeam links. He saw her raise her comlog, but he reacted too slowly. Lights on the remote blinked red and then green, the outer fields winked out and then re-formed fifty meters closer in, and for a second, Meina Gladstone stood alone with nothing between her and the mob of millions except a few meters of grass and countless corpses suddenly surrendered to gravity by the retreating shield walls.

Gladstone raised both arms as if embracing the mob. Silence and lack of motion extended for three eternal seconds, and then the mob roared with the voice of a single great beast, and thousands surged forward with sticks and rocks and knives and broken bottles.

For a moment it seemed to Van Zeidt that Gladstone stood like an impervious rock against that tidal wave of rabble; he could see her dark suit and bright scarf, see her standing upright, her arms still raised, but then More hundreds surged in, the crowd closed, and the CEO was lost.

The Praetorians lowered their weapons and were put under immediate arrest by Marine sentries.

“Opaque the containment fields,” ordered Van Zeidt. “Tell the drop-ships to land in the inner garden at five-minute intervals. Hurry!”

The General turned away.

“Good Lord,” said Theo Lane as the fragmented reports kept coming in over the fatline. There were so many millisecond squirts being sent that the computer could do little to separate them. The result was a melange of madness.

“Play back the destruction of the singularity containment sphere,” said the Consul.

“Yes, sir,” said the ship and interrupted its fatline messages for a replay of the sudden burst of white, followed by a brief blossoming of debris and sudden collapse as the singularity swallowed itself and everything within a six-thousand-klick radius. Instruments showed the effect of gravity tides: easily adjusted for at this distance but playing havoc with the Hegemony and Ouster ships still locked in battle closer to Hyperion.

“All right,” said the Consul, and the rush of fatline reports resumed.

“There’s no doubt?” asked Arundez.

“None,” said the Consul. “Hyperion is an Outback world again.

Only this time there is no Web to be Outback to.”

“It’s so hard to believe,” said Theo Lane. The ex-Govemor-General sat drinking Scotch: the only time the Consul had ever seen his aide indulge in a drug. Theo poured another four fingers. “The Web… gone. Five hundred years of expansion wiped out.”

“Not wiped out,” said the Consul. He set his own drink, still unfinished, on a table. “The worlds remain. The cultures will grow apart, but we still have the Hawking drive. The one technological advance we gave ourselves rather than leased from the Core.”

Melio Arundez leaned forward, his palms together as if praying. “Can the Core really be gone? Destroyed?”

The Consul listened a moment to the babble of voices, cries, entreaties, military reports, and pleas for help coming over the fatline voice-only bands. “Perhaps not destroyed,” he said, “but cut off, sealed away.”

Theo finished his drink and carefully set his glass down. His green eyes had a placid, glazed look. “You think there are… other spider-webs for them? Other fareaster systems? Reserve Cores?”

The Consul made a gesture with his hand. “We know they succeeded in creating their Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps that Ul allowed this… winnowing… of the Core. Perhaps it’s keeping some of the old AIs on line—in a reduced capacity—the way they had planned to keep a few billion humans in reserve.”

Suddenly the fatline babble ceased as if cut off by a knife.

“Ship?” queried the Consul, suspecting a power failure somewhere in the receiver.

“All fatline messages have ceased, most in midtransmission,” said the ship.

The Consul felt his heart pounding as he thought The deathwand device. But no, he realized at once, that couldn’t affect all of the worlds at once. Even with hundreds of such devices detonating simultaneously, there would be lag time as FORCE ships and other far-flung transmission sources got in their final messages. But what then?

“The messages appear to have been cut off by a disturbance in the transmission medium,” said the ship. “Which is, to my current knowledge, impossible.”

The Consul stood. A disturbance in the transmission medium? The fatline medium, as far as humans understood it, was the hyperstring Planck-infinite topography of space-time itself: what AIs had cryptically referred to as the Void Which Binds. There could be no disturbance in that medium.

Suddenly the ship said, “Fatline message coming in—transmission source, everywhere; encryption base, infinite; squirt rate, realtime.”

The Consul opened his mouth to tell the ship to quit spouting nonsense when the air above the holopit misted in something neither image nor data column, and a voice spoke:

“THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE.”

The three men sat in silence unbroken except for the reassuring rush of ventilator fans and the myriad soft noises of a ship under way. Finally the Consul said, “Ship, please send out a standard fatline time-location squirt without encoding. Add ‘receiving stations respond.’”

There was a pause of seconds—an impossibly long response time for the AI-caliber computer that was the ship. “I’m sorry, that is not possible,” it said at last.

“Why not?” demanded the Consul.

“Fatline transmissions are no longer being… allowed. The hyperstring medium is no longer receptive to modulation.”

“There’s nothing on the fatline?” asked Theo, staring at the empty space above the holopit as if someone had turned off a holie just as it was getting to the exciting part.

Again the ship paused. “To all intents and purposes, M. Lane,” it said, “there is no fatline any longer.”

“Jesus wept,” muttered the Consul. He finished his drink in one long gulp and went to the bar for another. “It’s the old Chinese curse,” he muttered.

Melio Arundez looked up. “What’s that?”

The Consul took a long drink. “Old Chinese curse,” he said. “May you live in interesting times.”

As if compensating for the loss of fatline, the ship played audio of in-system radio and intercepted tightbeam babble while it projected a real-time view of the blue-and-white sphere of Hyperion turning and growing as they decelerated toward it at two hundred gravities.

Forty-Five

I escape the Web datasphere just before escape ceases to be an option.

It is incredible and oddly disturbing, the sight of the megasphere swallowing itself. Brawn Lamia’s view of the megasphere as an organic thing, a semisentient organism More analagous to an ecology than a city, was essentially correct. Now, as the farcaster links cease to be and the world inside those avenues folds and collapses upon itself, the external datasphere simultaneously collapsing like a burning big-top tent suddenly without poles, wires, guys, or stakes, the living mega-sphere devours itself like some ravenous predator gone mad—chewing its own tail, belly, entrails, forepaws, and heart—until only the mindless jaws are left, snapping on emptiness.

The metasphere remains. But it is More wilderness than ever now.

Black forests of unknown time and space…

Sounds in the night.

Lions.

And tigers.

And bears.

When the Void Which Binds convulses and sends its single, banal message to the human universe, it is as if an earthquake has sent ripples through solid rock. Hurrying through the shifting metasphere above Hyperion, I have to smile. It is as if the God-analog has grown tired of the ants scribbling graffiti on Its big toe.

I don’t see God—either one of them—in the metasphere. I don’t try. I have enough problems of my own.

The black vortexes of the Web and Core entrances are gone now, erased from space and time like warts removed, vanished as thoroughly as whirlpools in water when the storm has passed.

I am stuck here unless I want to brave the metasphere.

Which I do not. Not yet.

But this is where I want to be. The datasphere is all but gone here in Hyperion System, the pitiful remnants on the world itself and in what remains of the FORCE fleet drying up like tidepools in the sun, but the Time Tombs glow through the metasphere like beacons in the gathering darkness. If the farcaster links had been black vortexes, the Tombs blaze like white holes shedding an expanding light.

I move toward them. So far, as the One Who Comes Before, all I have accomplished is to appear in others’ dreams. It is time to do something.

Sol waited.

It had been hours since he had handed his only child to the Shrike.

It had been days since he had eaten or slept. Around him the storm had raged and abated, the Tombs had glowed and rumbled like runaway reactors, and the time tides had whipped him with tsunami force. But Sol had clung to the stone steps of the Sphinx and waited through it all. He waited now.

Half conscious, pummeled by fatigue and fear for his daughter, Sol found that his scholar’s mind was working at a rapid pace.

For most of his life and for all of his career, Sol Weintraub the historian-cum-classicist-cum-philosopher had dealt with the ethics of human religious behavior. Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.

Sol’s most famous book, finally titled Abraham’s Dilemma when it was brought out in a mass-market edition in numbers he had never dreamed of while producing volumes for academic presses, had been written when Rachel was dying of Merlin’s sickness and dealt, obviously enough, with Abraham’s hard choice of obeying or disobeying God’s direct command for him to sacrifice his son.

Sol had written that primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice—as in the dark nights of the ovens which pocked Old Earth history—and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever form God now took in human consciousness—whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a More conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution—humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God’s name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.

Yet hours ago, ages ago, Sol Weintraub had handed his only child to a creature of death.

For years the voice in his dreams had commanded him to do so. For years Sol had refused. He had agreed, finally, only when time was gone, when any other hope was gone, and when he had realized that the voice in his and Sarai’s dreams all those years had not been the voice of God, nor of some dark force allied with the Shrike.

It had been the voice of their daughter.

With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.

It was not obedience.

It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.

Abraham was testing God.

By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.

Sol shuddered as he thought of how no posturing on Abraham’s part, no shamming of his willingness to sacrifice the boy, could have served to forge that bond between greater power and humankind. Abraham had to know in his own heart that he would kill his son. The Deity, whatever form it then took, had to know Abraham’s determination, had to feel that sorrow and commitment to destroy what was to Abraham the most precious thing in the universe.

Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do.

Why then, thought Sol, clinging to the stone stair as the Sphinx seemed to rise and fall on the storm seas of time, why was this test being repeated? What terrible new revelations lay at hand for humankind?

Sol understood then—from what little Brawne had told him, from the stories shared on the pilgrimage, from his own personal revelations of the past few weeks—that the effort of the machine Ultimate Intelligence, whatever the hell it was, to flush out the missing Empathy entity of the human Godhead was useless. Sol no longer saw the tree of thorns on its cliff top, its metal branches and suffering multitudes, but he did see clearly now that the thing was as much an organic machine as the Shrike—an instrument to broadcast suffering through the universe so the human God-part would be forced to respond, to show itself.

If God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must, then that evolution was toward empathy—toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion. But the obscene tree which the pilgrims had glimpsed—which poor Martin Silenus had been a victim of—was not the way to evoke the missing power.

Sol realized now that the machine god, whatever its form, was insightful enough to see that empathy was a response to others’ pain, but the same UI was too stupid to realize that empathy—in both human terms and the terms of humankind’s UI—was far More than that.

Empathy and love were inseparable and inexplicable. The machine UI would never understand it—not even enough to use it as a lure for the part of the human UI who had tired of warfare in the distant future.

Love, that most banal of things, that most cliched of religious motivations, had More power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing More or less than love.

But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation.

Love?

For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post—

Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.

It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom.

It seemed that Sol had brought his dying daughter through hundreds of light-years and innumerable hardships in response to nothing.

But now, as the Sphinx loomed above him and the first hint of sunrise paled Hyperion’s sky, Sol realized that he had responded to a force More basic and persuasive than the Shrike’s terror or pain’s dominion.

If he was right—and he did not know but felt—then love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter/ antimatter. There was room for some sort of God not in the web between the walls, nor in the singularity cracks in the pavement, nor somewhere out before and beyond the sphere of things… but in the very warp and woof of things. Evolving as the universe evolved. Learning as the learning-able parts of the universe learned. Loving as humankind loved.

Sol got to his knees and then to his feet. The time tide storm seemed to have abated a bit, and he thought he could try for the hundredth time to gain access to the tomb.

Bright light still emanated from where the Shrike had emerged, taken Sol’s daughter, and vanished. But now the stars were disappearing as the sky itself lightened toward morning.

Sol climbed the stairs.

He remembered the time at home on Barnard’s World when Rachel—she was ten—had tried to climb the town’s tallest elm and had fallen when she was five meters from the top. Sol had rushed to the med center to find his child floating in the recovery nutrient and suffering from a punctured lung, a broken leg and ribs, a fractured jaw, and innumerable cuts and bruises. She had smiled at him, lifted a thumb, and said through her wired jaw, “I’ll make it next time!”

Sol and Sarai had sat there in the med center that night while Rachel slept. They had waited for morning. Sol had held her hand through the night.

He waited now.

Time tides from the open entrance to the Sphinx still held Sol back like insistent winds, but he leaned into them like an immovable rock and stood there, five meters out and waiting, squinting into the glare.

He glanced up but did not move back when he saw the fusion flame of a descending spacecraft slice the predawn sky. He turned to look but did not retreat when he heard the spacecraft landing and saw three figures emerge. He glanced but did not step back when he heard other noises, shouts, from deeper in the valley and saw a familiar figure lugging another in a fireman’s carry, moving toward him from beyond the Jade Tomb.

None of these things related to his child. He waited for Rachel.

Even without a datasphere, it is quite possible for my persona to travel through the rich, Void-Which-Binds soup which now surrounds Hyperion. My immediate reaction is to want to visit the One Who Will Be, but although that one’s brilliance dominates the metasphere, I am not yet ready for that. I am, after all, little John Keats, not John the Baptist.

The Sphinx—a tomb patterned after a real creature that will not be designed by genetic engineers for centuries to come—is a maelstrom of temporal energies. There are really several Sphinxes visible to my expanded sight: the anti-entropic tomb carrying its Shrike cargo back in time like some sealed container with its deadly bacillus, the active, unstable Sphinx which contaminated Rachel Weintraub in its initial efforts to open a portal through time, and the Sphinx which has opened and is moving forward through time again. This last Sphinx is the blazing portal of light, which, second only to the One Who Will Be, lights Hyperion with its metasphcrical bonfire.

I descend to this bright place in time to watch Sol Weintraub hand his daughter to the Shrike.

I could not have interfered with this even if I had arrived earlier. I would not if I were able. Worlds beyond reason depend upon this act.

But I await within the Sphinx for the Shrike to pass, carrying its tender cargo. Now I can see the child. She is seconds old, blotched, moist, and wrinkled. She is crying her Newborn lungs out. From my old attitudes of bachelorhood and reflective poet’s stance, I find it hard to understand the attraction this bawling, unaesthetic infant exerts on its father and the cosmos.

Still, the sight of a baby’s flesh—however unattractive this Newborn might be—held by the Shrike’s bladed talons stirs something in me.

Three paces into the Sphinx have carried the Shrike and the child hours forward in time. Just beyond the entrance, the river of time accelerates. If I don’t do something within seconds, it will be too late—the Shrike will have used this portal to carry the child off to whatever distant-future dark hole it seeks.

Unbidden, the images arrive of spiders draining their victims of fluids, of digger wasps burying their own larvae in the paralyzed bodies of their prey, perfect sources for incubation and food.

I have to act, but I have no More solidity here than I had in the Core. The Shrike walks through me as if I were an unseen holo. My analog persona is useless here, armless and insubstantial as a wisp of swamp gas.

But swamp gas has no brain, and John Keats did.

The Shrike takes another two steps, and More hours pass for Sol and the others outside. I can see blood on the crying infant’s skin where the Shrike’s scalpeled ringers have cut into flesh.

To hell with this.

Outside, on the broad stone porch of the Sphinx, caught now in the flood of temporal energies flowing in and through the tomb, lay backpacks, blankets, abandoned food containers, and all the detritus Sol and the pilgrims had left there.

Including a single Mobius cube.

The box had been sealed with a class-eight containment field on the Templar treeship Yggdrasill when Voice of the Tree Het Masteen had prepared for his long voyage. It contained a single erg—sometimes known as a binder—one of the small creatures which might not be intelligent by human standards but which had evolved around distant stars and developed the ability to control More powerful forcefields than any machine known to humankind.

The Templars and Ousters had communicated with the creatures for generations. Templars used them for control redundancy on their beautiful but exposed treeships.

Het Masteen had brought this thing hundreds of light-years to complete the Templar agreement with the Church of the Final Atonement to help fly the Shrike’s thorn tree. But, seeing the Shrike and the tree of torment, Masteen had not been able to fulfill the contract. And so he died.

The Mobius cube remained. The erg was visible to me as a constrained sphere of red energy in the temporal Hood.

Outside, through a curtain of darkness, Sol Weintraub was just visible—a sadly comic figure, speeded up like a silent-film figure by the subjective rush of time beyond the Sphinx’s temporal field—but the Mobius cube lay within the Sphinx’s circle.

Rachel cried with the fear even a Newborn can know. Fear of falling.

Fear of pain. Fear of separation.

The Shrike took a step, and another hour was lost to those outside.

I was insubstantial to the Shrike, but energy fields are something which even we Core-analog ghosts can touch. I canceled the Mobius cube’s containment field. I treed the erg.

Templars communicate with ergs via electromagnetic radiation, coded pulses, simple rewards of radiation when the creature does what they want… but primarily through a near-mystical form of contact which only the Brotherhood and a few Ouster exotics know. Scientists call it a crude telepathy. In truth, it is almost pure empathy.

The Shrike takes another step into the opening portal to the future.

Rachel cries with the energy only someone newly born to the universe can muster.

The erg expands, understands, and melds with my persona. John Keats takes on substance and form.

I hurry the five paces to the Shrike, remove the baby from its hands, and step back. Even in the energy maelstrom that is the Sphinx, I can smell the infant-newness of her as I hold the child against my chest and cup her moist head against my cheek.

The Shrike whirls in surprise. Four arms extend, blades snick open, and red eyes focus on me. But the creature is too close to the portal itself. Without moving, it recedes down the storm drain of temporal flow. The thing’s steam-shovel jaws open, steel teeth gnash, but it is already gone, a spot in the distance. Something less.

I turn toward the entrance, but it is too far. The erg’s draining energy could get me there, drag me upstream against the flow, but not with Rachel. Carrying another living thing that far against so much force is More than I can manage even with the erg’s help.

The baby cries, and I bounce her gently, whispering nonsense doggerel in her warm ear.

If we can’t go back and we can’t go forward, we’ll just wait here for a moment. Perhaps someone will come along.

Martin Silenus’s eyes widened and Brawne Lamia turned quickly, seeing the Shrike floating in midair above and behind her.

“Holy shit,” Brawne whispered reverently.

In the Shrike Palace, tiers of sleeping human bodies receded in the gloom and distance, all of the people except Martin Silenus still connected to the thorn tree, the machine UI, and God knows what else by pulsing umbilicals.

As if to show its power here, the Shrike had quit climbing, opened its arms, and floated up three meters until it hung in the air five meters out from the stone shelf where Brawne crouched next to Martin Silenus.

“Do something,” whispered Silenus. The poet was no longer attached by the neural shunt umbilical, but he was still too weak to hold his head up.

“Ideas?” said Brawne, the brave remark somewhat ruined by the quaver in her voice.

“Trust,” said a voice below them, and Brawne shifted to look down toward the floor.

The young woman whom Brawne had recognized as Moneta in Kassad’s tomb stood far below.

“Help!” cried Brawne.

“Trust,” said Moneta and disappeared. The Shrike had not been distracted. It lowered its hands and stepped forward as if walking on solid stone rather than air.

“Shit,” whispered Brawne.

“Ditto,” rasped Martin Silenus. “Out of the frying pan back into the fucking fire.”

“Shut up,” said Brawne. Then, as if to herself, “Trust what? Who?”

“Trust the fucking Shrike to kill us or stick us both on the fucking tree,” gasped Silenus. He managed to move enough to clutch Brawne’s arm. “Better dead than back on the tree, Brawne.”

Brawne touched his hand briefly and stood, facing the Shrike across five meters of air.

Trust? Brawne held her foot out, felt around on emptiness, closed her eyes for a second, and opened them as her foot seemed to touch a solid step. She opened her eyes.

Nothing was under her foot except air.

Trust? Brawne put her weight on her forward foot and stepped out, teetering a moment before bringing her other foot down.

She and the Shrike stood facing each other ten meters above the stone floor. The creature seemed to grin at her as it opened its arms.

Its carapace glowed dully in the dim light. Its red eyes were very bright.

Trust? Feeling the adrenaline rush, Brawne stepped forward on the invisible steps, gaining height as she moved into the Shrike’s embrace.

She felt the fingerblades slicing through fabric and skin as the thing began to hug her to it, toward the curved blade growing out of its metal chest, toward the open jaws and rows of steel teeth. But while still standing firmly on thin air, Brawne leaned forward and set her uninjured hand flat against the Shrike’s chest, feeling the coldness of the carapace but also feeling a rush of warmth as energy rushed from her, out of her, through her.

The blades stopped cutting before they cut anything but skin. The Shrike froze as if the flow of temporal energy surrounding them had turned to a lump of amber.

Brawne set her hand on the thing’s broad chest and pushed.

The Shrike froze completely in place, became brittle, the gleam of metal fading to be replaced by the transparent glow of crystal, the bright sheen of glass.

Brawne stood on air being embraced by a three-meter glass sculpture of the Shrike. In its chest, where a heart might be, something that looked like a large, black moth fluttered and beat sooty wings against the glass.

Brawne took a deep breath and pushed again. The Shrike slid backward on the invisible platform she shared with it, teetered, and fell.

Brawne ducked under the encircling arms, hearing and feeling her jacket tearing as still-sharp fingerblades caught in the material and ripped as the thing tumbled, and then she was teetering herself, flailing her good arm for balance as the glass Shrike turned one and a half times in midair, struck the floor, and shattered into a thousand jagged shards.

Brawne pivoted, fell to her knees on the invisible catwalk, and crawled back toward Martin Silenus.

In the last half meter, her confidence failed her, the invisible support simply ceased to be, and she fell heavily, twisting her ankle as she hit the edge of the stone tier and managing to keep from falling off only by grabbing Silenus’s knee.

Cursing from the pain in her shoulder, broken wrist, twisted ankle, and lacerated palms and knees, she pulled herself to safety next to him.

“There’s obviously been some weird shit going on since I left,” Martin

Silenus said hoarsely. “Can we go now, or do you plan to walk on water as an encore?”

“Shut up,” Brawne said shakily. The two syllables sounded almost affectionate.

She rested a while and then found that the easiest way to get the still-weak poet down the steps and across the glass-strewn floor of the Shrike Palace was to use the fireman’s carry. They were at the entrance when he pounded unceremoniously on her back and said, “What about King Billy and the others?”

“Later,” panted Brawne and stepped out into the predawn light.

She had hobbled down two-thirds of the valley with Silenus draped over her shoulders like so much limp laundry when the poet said, “Brawne, are you still pregnant?”

“Yes,” she said, praying that that was still true after the day’s exertions.

“You want me to carry you?”

“Shut up,” she said and followed the path down and around the Jade Tomb.

“Look,” said Martin Silenus, twisting to point even as he hung almost upside down over her shoulder.

In the glowing light of morning, Brawne could see that the Consul’s ebony spacecraft now sat on the high ground at the entrance to the valley. But that was not what the poet was pointing toward.

Sol Weintraub stood silhouetted in the glare of the Sphinx’s entrance.

His arms were raised.

Someone or something was emerging from the glare.

Sol saw her first. A figure walking amidst the torrent of light and liquid time flowing from the Sphinx. A woman, he saw, as she was silhouetted against the brilliant portal. A woman carrying something.

A woman carrying an infant.

His daughter Rachel emerged—Rachel as he had last seen her as a healthy young adult leaving to do her doctoral work on some world called Hyperion, Rachel in her mid-twenties, perhaps even a bit older now—but Rachel, no doubt about that, Rachel with her copperish-brown hair still short and falling across her forehead, her cheeks flushed as they always were as with some new enthusiasm, her smile soft, almost tremulous now, and her eyes—those enormous green eyes with specks of brown just visible—those eyes fixed on Sol.

Rachel was carrying Rachel. The infant squirmed with its face against the young woman’s shoulder, tiny hands clenching and unclenching as it tried to decide whether to start crying again or not.

Sol stood stunned. He tried to speak, failed, and tried again.

“Rachel.”

“Father,” said the young woman and stepped forward, putting her free arm around the scholar while she turned slightly to keep the baby from being crushed between them.

Sol kissed his grown daughter, hugged her, smelled the clean scent of her hair, felt the firm reality of her, and then lifted the infant to his own neck and shoulder, feeling the shudders pass through the Newborn as she took a breath before crying. The Rachel he had brought to Hyperion was safe in his hands, small, red face wrinkled as she tried to focus her randomly wandering eyes on her father’s face. Sol cupped her tiny head in his palm and lifted her closer, inspecting that small face for a second before turning toward the young woman.

“Is she…”

“She’s aging normally,” said his daughter. She was wearing something part gown, part robe, made of soft brown material. Sol shook his head, looked at her, saw her smiling, and noticed the same small dimple below and to the left of her mouth that was visible on the infant he held.

He shook his head again. “How… how is this possible?”

“It’s not for very long,” said Rachel.

Sol leaned forward and kissed his grown daughter’s cheek again. He realized that he was crying, but he would not release either hand to wipe away the tears. His grown Rachel did so for him, touching his cheek gently with the back of her hand.

There was a noise below them on the steps, and Sol looked over his shoulder to see the three men from the ship standing there, red faced from running, and Brawne Lamia helping the poet Silenus to a seat on the white slab of railing stone.

The Consul and Theo Lane looked up at them.

“Rachel…” whispered Melio Arundez, his eyes filling.

“Rachel?” said Martin Silenus, frowning and glancing at Brawne Lamia.

Brawne was staring with her mouth half open. “Moneta,” she said, pointing, then lowering her hand as she realized she was pointing.

“You’re Moneta. Kassad’s… Moneta.”

Rachel nodded, her smile gone. “I have only a minute or two here,” she said. “And much to tell you.”

“No,” said Sol, taking his grown daughter’s hand, “you have to stay.

I want you to stay with me.”

Rachel smiled again. “I will stay with you, Dad,” she said softly, raising her other hand to touch the baby’s head. “But only one of us can… and she needs you More.” She turned to the group below.

“Listen, please, all of you.”

As the sun rose and touched the broken buildings of the Poets’ City, the Consul’s ship, the western cliffs, and the taller Time Tombs with its light, Rachel told her brief and tantalizing story of being chosen to be raised in a future where the final war raged between the Core-spawned UI and the human spirit. It was, she said, a future of terrifying and wonderful mysteries, where humankind had spread across this galaxy and had begun to travel elsewhere.

“Other galaxies?” asked Theo Lane.

“Other universes,” smiled Rachel.

“Colonel Kassad knew you as Moneta,” said Martin Silenus.

“Will know me as Moneta,” said Rachel, her eyes clouding. “I have seen him die and accompanied his tomb to the past. I know that part of my mission is to meet this fabled warrior and lead him forward to the final battle. I have not truly met him yet.” She looked down the valley toward the Crystal Monolith. “Moneta,” she mused. “It means 'Admonisher' in Latin. Appropriate. I will let him choose between that and Mnemosyne—'memory'—for my name.”

Sol had not released his daughter’s hand. He did not do so now.

“You’re traveling back in time with the Tombs? Why? How?”

Rachel lifted her head, and reflected light from the far cliffs painted her face in warmth. “It is my role. Dad. My duty. They give me means to keep the Shrike in check. And only I was… prepared.”

Sol lifted his infant daughter higher. Startled from sleep, she blew a single bubble of saliva, turned her face into her father’s neck for warmth, and curled her small fists against his shirt.

“Prepared,” said Sol. “You mean the Merlin’s sickness?”

“Yes,” said Rachel.

Sol shook his head. “But you weren’t raised in some mysterious world of the future. You grew up in the college town of Crawford, on Fertig Street, on Bamard’s World, and your…” He stopped.

Rachel nodded. “Sne shall grow up… up there. Dad, I’m sorry, I have to go.” She freed her hand, drifted down the stairs, and touched Melio Arundez’s cheek briefly. “I’m sorry for the pain of memory,” she said softly to the startled archaeologist. “To me it was, literally, a different life.”

Arundez blinked and held her hand to his cheek a moment longer.

“Are you married?” asked Rachel softly. “Children?”

Arundez nodded, moved his other hand as if he were going to remove the pictures of his wife and grown children from his pocket, and then stopped, nodded again.

Rachel smiled, kissed him quickly on the cheek again, and moved back up the steps. The sky was rich with sunrise, but the door to the Sphinx was still brighter.

“Dad,” she said, “I love you.”

Sol tried to speak, cleared his throat. “How… how do I join you… up there?”

Rachel gestured toward the open door of the Sphinx. “For some it will be a portal to the time I spoke of. But, Dad…” She hesitated.

“It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that.”

Sol managed a smile. “No parent would refuse that, Rachel.” He changed arms holding the sleeping infant, and shook his head again.

“Will there be a time when… the two of you… ?”

“Coexist again?” smiled Rachel. “No. I go the other way now. You can’t imagine the difficulty I had with the Paradox Board to get this one meeting approved.”

“Paradox Board?” said Sol.

Rachel took a breath. She had stepped back until only her fingertips touched her father’s, both their arms extended. “I have to go. Dad.”

“Will I…” He looked at the baby. “Will '.ve be alone… up there?”

Rachel laughed, and the sound was so familiar that it closed around Sol’s heart like a warm hand. “Oh no,” she said, “not alone. There arc wonderful people there. Wonderful things to learn and do. Wonderful places to see…” She glanced around. “Places we have not imagined yet in our wildest dreams. No, Dad, you won’t be alone. And I’ll be there, in all my teenage awkwardness and young-adult cockiness.”

She stepped back, and her ringers slipped away from Sol.

“Wait a while before stepping through. Dad,” she called, moving back into the brilliance. “It doesn’t hurt, but once through you can’t come back.”

“Rachel, wait,” said Sol.

His daughter stepped back, her long robe flowing across stone, until the light surrounded her. She raised one arm. “See you later, alligator!” she called.

Sol raised a hand. “After a while… crocodile.”

The older Rachel was gone in the light.

The baby awoke and began to cry.

It was More than an hour before Sol and the others returned to the Sphinx. They had gone to the Consul’s ship to tend to Brawne’s and Martin Silenus’s injuries, to eat, and to outfit Sol and the child for a voyage.

“I feel silly packing for what may be like a step through a farcaster,” said Sol, “but no wonder how wonderful this future is, if it doesn’t have nursing paks and disposable diapers, we’re in trouble.”

The Consul grinned and patted the full backpack on the step. “This should get you and the baby through the first two weeks. If you don’t find a diaper service by then, go to one of those other universes Rachel spoke about.”

Sol shook his head. “Is this happening?”

“Wait a few days or weeks,” said Melio Arundez. “Stay here with us until things get sorted out. There’s no hurry. The future will always be there.”

Sol scratched his beard as he fed the baby with one of the nursing paks the ship had manufactured. “We’re not sure this portal will always be open,” he said. “Besides, I might lose my nerve. I’m getting pretty old to raise a child again… especially as a stranger in a strange land.”

Arundez set his strong hand on Sol’s shoulder. “Let me go with you.

I’m dying of curiosity about this place.”

Sol grinned and extended his hand, shook Arundez’s firmly. “Thank you, my friend. But you have a wife and children back in the Web… on Renaissance Vector… who await your return. You have your own duties.”

Arundez nodded and looked at the sky. “If we can return.”

“We’ll return,” the Consul said flatly. “Old-fashioned Hawking drive spaceflight stj'l works, even if the Web is gone forever. It’ll be a few years’ time-debt, Melio, but you’ll get back.”

Sol nodded, finished feeding the baby, set a clean cloth diaper on his shoulder, and patted her firmly on the back. He looked around the small circle of people. “We all have our duties.” He shook hands with Martin Silenus. The poet had refused to crawl into the nutrient recovery bath or have the neural shunt socket surgically removed. ‘I’ve had these things before,’ he’d said.

“Will you continue your poem?” Sol asked him.

Silenus shook his head. “I finished it on the tree,” he said. “And I discovered something else there, Sol.”

The scholar raised an eyebrow.

“I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God… or anything approaching a God… he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.”

The baby burped.

Martin Silenus grinned and shook Sol’s hand a final time. “Give them hell up there, Weintraub. Tell ’em you’re their great-greatgreatgreat-great grandaddy, and if they misbehave, you’ll whop their butts.”

Sol nodded and moved down the line to Brawne Lamia. “I saw you conferring with the ship’s medical terminal,” he said. “Is everything all right with you and your unborn child?”

Brawne grinned. “Everything’s fine.”

“A boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

Sol kissed her on the cheek. Brawne touched his beard and turned her face away to hide tears unbecoming a former private investigator.

“Girls are such a chore,” he said, disentangling Rachel’s fingers from his beard and Brawne’s curls. “Trade yours in for a boy the first chance you get.”

“OK,” said Brawne and stepped back.

He shook hands a final time with the Consul, Theo, and Melio, shouldered his pack while Brawne held the infant, and then took Rachel in his arms. “Hell of an anticlimax if this thing doesn’t work and I end up wandering around the inside of the Sphinx,” he said.

The Consul squinted at the glowing door. “It will work. Although how, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a farcaster of any sort.”

“A whencaster,” ventured Silenus and held up his arm to block Brawne’s blows. The poet took a step back and shrugged. “If it continues to work, Sol, I have a feeling you won’t be alone up there. Thousands will join you.”

“If the Paradox Board permits,” said Sol, tugging at his beard the way he always did when his mind was elsewhere. He blinked, shifted backpack and baby, and stepped forward. The fields of force from the open door let him advance this time.

“So long everyone!” he cried. “By God, it was all worth it, wasn’t it?” He turned into the light, and he and the baby were gone.

There was a silence bordering on emptiness wliich stretched for several minutes. Finally the Consul said, in almost embarrassed tones, “Shall we go up to the ship?”

“Bring the elevator down for the rest of us,” said Martin Silenus.

“M. Lamia here will walk on air.”

Brawne glared at the diminutive poet.

“You think it was something Moneta arranged?” said Arundez, referring to something Brawne had suggested earlier.

“It had to be,” said Brawne. “Some bit of future science or something.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed Martin Silenus, “future science… that familiar phrase from those too timid to be superstitious. The alternative, my dear, is that you have this hitherto untapped power to levitate and turn monsters into shatterable glass goblins.”

“Shut up,” said Brawne, with no undertones of affection in her voice now. She looked over her shoulder. “Who says another Shrike won’t show up any minute?”

“Who indeed?” agreed the Consul. “I suspect we’ll always have a Shrike or rumors of a Shrike.”

Theo Lane, always embarrassed by discord, cleared his throat and said, “Look what I found among the baggage strewn around the Sphinx.”

He held up an instrument with three strings, a long neck, and bright designs painted on its triangular body. “A guitar?”

“A balalaika,” said Brawne. “It belonged to Father Hoyt.”

The Consul took the instrument and strummed several chords. “Do you know this song?” He played a few notes.

“The 'Leeda Tits Screwing Song'?” ventured Martin Silenus.

The Consul shook his head and played several More chords.

“Something old?” guessed Brawne.

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” said Melio Arundez “That must be from before my time,” said Theo Lane, nodding along as the Consul strummed.

“It’s from before everybody’s time,” said the Consul. “Come on, I’ll teach you the words as we go.”

Walking together in the hot sun, singing off-key and on-, losing the words and then starting again, they went uphill to the waiting, ship.