Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

Hyperion is the tale of seven people who make a pilgrimage to a terrifying creature called the Shrike in an attempt to save mankind.  
Stunningly written and beautifully crafted, Simmons's Hyperion resonates with technical achievement and the excitement and wonder found only in the best SF.
Dan Simmons, a former teacher and director of programmes for gifted children, now writes full time. He lives with his wife and daughter in Colorado, USA. He has always been interested in writing, composing his first short stories at the age of nine.

Since then he has been co-winner of the first Twilight Zone Magazine short story contest, winner of the Rod Serling Memorial Award, and winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel with Song of Kali. He is also the author of the much-acclaimed horror novel Carrion Comfort, winner of the 1990 Brain Stoker Award, the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel and the British Fantasy Award.

Hyperion is the winner of the 1990 Hugo Award and Locus Award for Best  
Science Fiction Novel.

Also by Dan Simmons  
SONG OF KALI  
Winner of the Worm Fantasy Award  
CARRION COMFORT  
Winner of the British Fantasy Society Award  
Winner of the Brain Stoker Award  
Winner of the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel  
THE FALL OF THE HYPERION  
Winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel  

PHASES OF GRAVITY  
PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES  
Winner of the Btam Stoker Award  
SUMMER OF NIGHT  
Winner of the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel  
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT  
Winner of the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel  
THE HOLLOW MAN LOVEDEATH  
FIRES OF EDEN ENDYMION  

Hyperion  
Dan Simmons  
Copyright 1989 Dan Simmons  
The right of Dan Simmons to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain 1990  
by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING  
First published in paperback in 1990  
by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING  
First HEADLINE FEATURE paperback in 1991  

10987  
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,  
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any  
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be  
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in  
which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on  
the subsequent purchaser.  

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to  
real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  
ISBN 0 7472 3482 5  
Typeset in 10/10h pt English Times  
by Coiset Private Limited, Singapore  
Printed and bound in Great Britain by  

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire  

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING A division of Hodder Headline PLC 338 Euston  
Road  

London NW1 3BH  

This is for Ted  

PROLOGUE  

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below. A thunderstorm was brewing to the north. Bruise-black clouds silhouetted a forest of giant gymnosperms while stratocumulus towered nine kilometers high in a violent sky. Lightning rippled along the horizon. Closer to the ship, occasional vague, reptilian shapes would blunder into the interdiction field, cry out, and then crash away through indigo mists. The Consul concentrated on a difficult section of the Prelude and ignored the approach of storm and nightfall.  

The fatline receiver chimed.  

The Consul stopped, fingers hovering above the keyboard, and listened. Thunder rumbled through the heavy air. From the direction of the gymnosperm forest there came the mournful ululation of a carrion-breed pack. Somewhere in the darkness below, a small-brained beast trumpeted its answering challenge and fell quiet.  

The interdiction field added its sonic undertones to the sudden silence.  
The fatline chimed again.  

'Damn,' said the Consul and went in to answer it.  

While the computer took a few seconds to convert and decode the burst of decaying tachyons, the Consul poured himself a glass of Scotch. He settled into the cushions of the projection pit just 
as the diskey blinked green. 'Play,' he said.  

'You have been chosen to return to Hyperion,' came a woman's husky voice. Full visuals had not yet formed; the air remained empty except for the pulse of transmission  

codes which told the Consul that this fatline squirt had originated on the Hegemony administrative world of Tau Ceti Center. The Consul did not need the transmission coordinates to know this. The aged but still beautiful voice of Meina Gladstone was unmistakable.  

'You have been chosen to return to Hyperion as a member of the Shrike Pilgrimage,' continued the voice.

The hell you say, thought the Consul and rose to leave the pit.  

'You and six others have been selected by the Church of the Shrike and confirmed by the All Thing,' said Meina Gladstone. 'It is in the interest of the Hegemony that you accept."  

The Consul stood motionless in the pit, his back to the flickering transmission codes. Without turning, he raised his glass and drained the last of the Scotch.  

'The situation is very confused,' said Meina Gladstone. Her voice was weary. 'The consulate and Home Rule Council fatlined us three standard weeks ago with the news that the Time Tombs showed signs of opening. The anti-entropic fields around them were expanding rapidly and the Shrike has begun ranging as far south as the Bridle Range."  

The Consul turned and dropped into the cushions. A holo had formed of Meina Gladstone's ancient face. Her eyes looked as tired as her voice sounded.  

'A FORCE:space task force was immediately dispatched from Parvati to evacuate the Hegemony citizens on Hyperion before the Time Tombs open. Their time-debt will be a little more than three Hyperion years." Meina Gladstone paused. The Consul thought he had never seen the Senate CEO look so grim. 'We do not know if the evacuation fleet will arrive in time,' she said, 'but the situation is even more complicated. An Ouster migration cluster of at least four thousand... units... has been detected approaching the Hyperion system.  

Our evacuation task force should arrive only a short while before the Ousters."  

The Consul understood Gladstone's hesitation. An Ouster migration cluster might consist of ships ranging in size from single-person ramscouts to can cities and comet forts holding tens of thousands of the interstellar barbarians.  

'The FORCE joint chiefs believe that this is the Ousters' big push,' said Meina Gladstone. The ship's computer had positioned the holo so that the woman's sad brown eyes seemed to be staring directly at the Consul.  

'Whether they seek to control just Hyperion for the Time Tombs or whether this is an all-out attack on the WorldWeb remains to be seen. In the meantime, a full FORCE:space battle fleet complete with a farcaster construction battalion has spun up from the Camn System to join the  evacuation task force, but this fleet may be recalled depending upon circumstances."  

The Consul nodded and absently raised the Scotch to his lips. He frowned at the empty glass and dropped it onto the thick carpeting of the holopit. Even with no military training he understood the difficult tactical decision Gladstone and the joint chiefs were faced with.  

Unless a military farcaster were hurriedly constructed in the Hyperion system - at staggering expense - there would be no way to resist the Ouster invasion. Whatever secrets the Time Tombs might hold would go to the Hegemony's enemy. If the fleet did construct a farcaster in time and the Hegemony committed the total resources of FORCE to defending the single, distant, colonial world of Hyperion, the WorldWeb ran the terrible risk of suffering an Ouster attack elsewhere on the perimeter, or - in a worst-case scenario - having the barbarians actually seizing the farcaster and penetrating the Web itself. The Consul tried to imagine the reality of armored Ouster troops stepping through farcaster portals into the undefended home cities on a hundred worlds.  

The Consul walked through the holo of Meina Gladstone, retrieved his glass, and went to pour another Scotch.  

'You have been chosen to join the pilgrimage to the Shrike,' said the image of the old CEO whom the press loved to compare to Lincoln or Churchill or Alvarez-Temp or whatever other pre-Hegira legend was in historical vogue at the time. 'The Templars are sending their treeship  Yggdrasil!,' said Gladstone, 'and the evacuation task force commander has instructions to let it pass. With a three-week time-debt, you can rendezvous with the Yggdrasill before it goes quantum from the Parvati system. The six other pilgrims chosen by the Shrike Church will be aboard the treeship. Our intelligence reports suggest that at least one of the seven pilgrims is an agent of the Ousters. We do not... at this time... have any way of knowing which one it is."  

The Consul had to smile. Among all the other risks Gladstone was taking, the old woman had to consider the possibility that he was the spy and that she was fatlining crucial information to an Ouster agent. Or had she given him any crucial information? The fleet movements were detectable as soon as the ships used their Hawking drives, and if the Consul were the spy, the CEO's revelation might be a way to scare him off. The Consul's smile faded and he drank his Scotch.  

'Sol Weintraub and Fedmahn Kassad are among the seven pilgrims chosen,' said Gladstone.  

The Consul's frown deepened. He stared at the cloud of digits flickering like dust motes around the old woman's image. Fifteen seconds of fatline transmission time remained.  

'We need your help,' said Meina Gladstone. 'It is essential that the secrets of the Time Tombs and Shrike be uncovered. This pilgrimage may be our last chance. If the Ousters conquer Hyperion, their agent must be eliminated and the Time Tombs sealed at all cost. The fate of the  Hegemony may depend upon it."  

The transmission ended except for the pulse of rendezvous coordinates. 'Response?" asked the ship's computer.  

Despite the tremendous energies involved, the spacecraft was capable of placing a brief, coded squirt into the incessant babble of FTL bursts which tied the human portions of the galaxy together.  

'No,' said the Consul and went outside to lean on the balcony railing. Night had fallen and the clouds were low. No stars were visible. The darkness would have been absolute except for the intermittent flash of lightning to the north and a soft phosphorescence rising from the marshes. The Consul was suddenly very aware that he was, at that second, the only sentient being on an unnamed world. He listened to the antediluvian night sounds rising from the swamps and he thought about morning, about setting out in the Vikken EMV at first light, about spending the day in sunshine, about hunting big game in the fern forests to the south and then returning to the ship in the evening for a good steak and a cold beer. The Consul thought about the sharp pleasure of the hunt and the equally sharp solace of solitude: solitude he had earned through the pain and nightmare he had already suffered on Hyperion.  

Hyperion.  

The Consul went inside, brought the balcony in, and sealed the ship just as the first heavy raindrops began to fall. He climbed the spiral staircase to his sleeping cabin at the apex of the ship. The circular room was dark except for silent explosions of lightning which outlined rivulets of rain coursing the skylight. The Consul stripped, lay back on the firm mattress, and switched on the sound system and external audio pickups. He listened as the fury of the storm blended with the violence of Wagner's 'Flight of the Valkyries." Hurricane winds buffeted the ship. The sound of thunderclaps filled the room as the skylight flashed white, leaving afterimages burning in the Consul's retinas.  

Wagner is good only for thunderstorms, he thought.  

He closed his eyes but the lightning was visible through closed eyelids. He remembered the glint of ice crystals blowing through the tumbled ruins on the low hills near the Time Tombs and the colder gleam of steel on the Shrike's impossible tree of metal thorns. He remembered screams in the night and the hundred-facet, ruby and-blood gaze of the Shrike itself.  

Hyperion.  

The Consul silently commanded the computer to shut off all speakers and raised his wrist to cover his eyes. In the sudden silence he lay thinking about how insane it would be to return to Hyperion. During his eleven years as Consul on that distant and enigmatic world, the mysterious Church of the Shrike had allowed a dozen barges of offworld pilgrims to depart for the windswept barrens around the Time Tombs, north of the mountains. No one had returned. And that had been in normal times, when the Shrike had been prisoner to the tides of time and forces no one understood, and the anti-entropic fields had been contained to a few dozen meters around the Time Tombs. And there had been no threat of an Ouster invasion.  

The Consul thought of the Shrike, free to wander everywhere on Hyperion, of the millions of indigenies and thousands of Hegemony citizens helpless before a creature which defied physical laws and which communicated only through death, and he shivered despite the warmth of the cabin. 

Hyperion.  

The night and storm passed. Another stormfront raced ahead of the approaching dawn. Gymnosperms two hundred meters tall bent and whipped before the coming torrent. Just before first light, the Consul's ebony spaceship rose on a tail of blue plasma and punched through thickening clouds as it climbed toward space and rendezvous.  

ONE  

The Consul awoke with the peculiar headache, dry throat, and sense of having forgotten a thousand dreams which only periods in cryogenic fugue could bring. He blinked, sat upright on a low couch, and groggily pushed away the last sensor tapes clinging to his skin. There were two very short crew clones and one very tall, hooded Templar with him in the windowless ovoid of a room. One of the clones offered the Consul the traditional post-thaw glass of orange juice. He accepted it and drank greedily.  

'The Tree is two light-minutes and five hours of travel from Hyperion,' said the Templar, and the Consul realized that he was being addressed by Het Masteen, captain of the Templar treeship and True Voice of the Tree. The Consul vaguely realized that it was a great honor to be awakened by the Captain, but he was too groggy and disoriented from fugue to appreciate it.  

'The others have been awake for some hours,' said Het Masteen and gestured for the clones to leave them.

'They have assembled on the foremost dining platform."  

'Hhrghn,' said the Consul and took a drink. He cleared his throat and tried again. 'Thank you, Het Masteen,' he managed. Looking around at the egg-shaped room with its carpet of dark grass, translucent walls, and support ribs of continuous, curved weirwood, the Consul realized that he must be in one of the smaller environment pods. Closing his eyes, he tried to recall his memories of rendezvous just before the Templar ship went quantum.  

The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-long treeship as he closed for rendezvous, the treeship's details blurred by the redundant machine and erg-generated containment fields which surrounded it like a spherical mist, but its leafy bulk clearly ablaze with thousands of lights which shone softly through leaves and thin-walled environment pods, or along countless platforms, bridges, command decks, stairways, and bowers. Around the base of the treeship, engineering and cargo spheres clustered like oversized galls while blue and violet drive streamers trailed behind like ten-kilometer-long roots.  

'The others await,' Her Masteen said softly and nodded toward low  
cushions where the Consul's luggage lay ready to open upon his command.  
The Templar gazed thoughtfully at the weirwood rafters while the Consul  
dressed in semiformal evening wear of loose black trousers, polished  
ship boots, a white silk blouse which ballooned at waist and elbows,  
topaz collar cinch, black demi-coat complete with slashes of Hegemony  
crimson on the epaulets, and a soft gold tricorne. A section of curved  
wall became a mirror and the Consul stared at the image there: a more  

than middle-aged man in semi-formal evening wear, sunburned skin but  
oddly pale under the sad eyes. The Consul frowned, nodded, and turned  
away.  

Het Masteen gestured and the Consul followed the tall, robed figure  
through a dilation in the pod onto an ascending walkway which curved up  
and out of sight around the massive bark wall of the treeship's trunk.  

The Consul paused, moved to the edge of the walkway, and took a quick  
step back. It was at least six hundred meters down- down being created  
by the one-sixth standard gravity being generated by the singularities  
imprisoned at the base of the tree - and there were no railings.  

They resumed their silent ascent, turning off from the main trunk  
walkway thirty meters and half a trunk-spiral later to cross a flimsy  
suspension bridge to a five-meter-wide branch. They followed this  
outward to where the riot of leaves caught the glare of Hyperion's sun.  

'Has my ship been brought out of storage?" asked the Consul.  

'It is fueled and ready in sphere eleven,' said Her Masteen. They  
passed into the shadow of the trunk and stars became visible in the  
black patches between the dark latticework of leaves. 'The other  
pilgrims have agreed to ferry down in your ship if the FORCE authorities  
give permission,' added the Templar.  

The Consul rubbed his eyes and wished that he had been allowed more time  
to retrieve his wits from the cold grip of cryonic fugue. 'You've been  
in touch with the task force?"  

'Oh, yes, we were challenged the moment we tunneled down from quantum  
leap. A Hegemony warship is...  

escorting us.. * this very moment." Het Masteen gestured toward a patch  
of sky above them.  

The Consul squinted upward but at that second segments of the upper  
tiers of branches revolved out of the treeship's shadow and acres of  
leaves ignited in sunset hues. Even in the still shadowed places,  
glowbirds nestled like Japanese lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing  
swingvines, and illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old  
Earth and radiant gossamers from Maul-Covenant blinked and coded their  
way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations  
sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler.  

Het Masteen stepped into a basket lift hanging from a whiskered-carbon  
cable which disappeared into the three hundred meters of tree above  
them. The Consul followed and they were borne silently upward. He  
noted that the walkways, pods, and platforms were conspicuously empty  
except for a few Templars and their diminutive crew clone counterparts.  
The Consul could recall seeing no other passengers during his rushed  
hour between rendezvous and fugue, but he had put that down to the  
imminence of the treeship going quantum, assuming then that the  
passengers were safe in their fugue couches. Now, however, the treeship  
was traveling far below relativistic velocities and its branches should  
be crowded with gawking passengers. He mentioned his observation to the  
Templar.  

'The six of you are our only passengers,' said Het Masteen. The basket  
stopped in a maze of foliage and  

the treeship captain led the way up a wooden escalator worn with age.  

The Consul blinked in surprise. A Templar treeship normally carried  
between two and five thousand passengers; it was easily the most  
desirable way to travel between the stars. Treeships rarely accrued  
more than a four- or five-month time-debt, making short, scenic  
crossings where star systems were a very few light-years apart, thus  
allowing their affluent passengers to spend as little time as necessary  
in fugue. For the treeship to make the trip to Hyperion and back,  
accumulating six years of Web time with no paying passengers would mean  
a staggering financial loss to the Templars.  

Then the Consul realized, belatedly, that the treeship would be ideal  
for the upcoming evacuation, its expenses ultimately to be reimbursed by  
the Hegemony.  

Still, the Consul knew, to bring a ship as beautiful and vulnerable as  
the Yggdrasill - one of only five of its kind - into a war zone was a  
terrible risk for the Templar Brotherhood.  

'Your fellow pilgrims,' announced Het Masteen as he and the Consul  
emerged onto a broad platform where a small group waited at one end of a  
long wooden table.  

Above them the stars burned, rotating occasionally as the treeship  
changed its pitch or yaw, while to either side a solid sphere of foliage  
curved away like the green skin of some great fruit. The Consul  
immediately recognized the setting as the Captain's dining platform,  
even before the five other passengers rose to let Her Masteen take his  
place at the head of the table. The Consul found an empty chair waiting  
for him to the left of the Captain.  

When everyone was seated and quiet, Het Masteen made formal  
introductions. Although the Consul knew none of the others from  
personal experience, several of the names were familiar and he used his  
diplomat's long training to file away identities and impressions.  

To the Consul's left sat Father Lenar Hoyt, a priest of the old-style  
Christian sect known as Catholic. For a second the Consul had forgotten  
the significance of the black clothing and Roman collar, but then he  
remembered St Francis Hospital on Hebron where he had  

received alcohol trauma therapy after his disastrous first diplomatic  
assignment there almost four standard decades earlier. And at the  
mention of Hoyt's name he remembered another priest, one who had  
disappeared on Hyperion halfway through his own tenure there.  

Lenar Hoyt was a young man by the Consul's reckoning - no more than his  
early thirties - but it appeared that something had aged the man  
terribly in the not too distant past. The Consul looked at the thin  
face, cheekbones pressing against sallow flesh, eyes large but hooded in  
deep hollows, thin lips set in a permanent twitch of muscle too  
downturned to be called even a cynical smile, the hairline not so much  

receding as ravaged by radiation, and he felt he was looking at a man  
who had been ill for years. Still, the Consul was surprised that behind  
that mask of concealed pain there remained the physical echo of the boy  
in the man - the faintest remnants of the round face, fair skin, and  
soft mouth which had belonged to a younger, healthier, less cynical  
Lenar Hoyt.  

Next to the priest sat a man whose image had been familiar to most  
citizens of the Hegemony some years before. The Consul wondered if the  
collective attention span in the Worldweb was as short now as it had  
been when he had lived there. Shorter, probably. If so, then Colonel  
Fedmahn Kassad, the so-called Butcher of South Bressia, was probably no  
longer either infamous or famous. To the Consul's generation and to all  
those who lived in the slow, expatriate fringe of things, Kassad was not  
someone one was likely to forget.  

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was tall- almost tall enough to look the  
two-meter Her Masteen in the eye - and dressed in FORCE black with no  
rank insignia or citations showing. The black uniform was oddly similar  
to Father Hoyt's garb, but there was no real resemblance between the two  
men. In lieu of Hoyt's wasted appearance, Kassad was brown, obviously  
fit, and whip-handle lean, with strands of muscle showing in shoulder,  
wrist, and throat. The Colone!'s eyes were small, dark, and as  
all-encompassing as the lenses of some primitive video camera. His face  
was all angles: shadows, planes, and facets. Not gaunt like Father  
Hoyt's, merely carved from cold stone. A thin line of beard along his  
jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as  
blood on a knife blade.  

The Colonel's intense, slow movements reminded the Consul of an  
Earth-bred jaguar he had seen in a private seedship zoo on Lusus many  
years before. Kassad's voice was soft but the Consul did not fail to  
notice that even the Colone!'s silences commanded attention.  

Most of the long table was empty, the group clustered at one end. Across  
from Fedmahn Kassad sat a man introduced as the poet Martin Silenus.  

Silenus appeared to be quite the opposite of the military *****man  
across from him. Where Kassad was lean and tall, Martin Silenus was  
short and visibly out of shape.  

Countering Kassad's stone-cut features, the poet's face was as mobile  
and expressive as an Earth primate's. His voice was a loud, profane  
rasp. There was something, thought the Consul, almost pleasantly  
demonic about Martin Silenus, with his ruddy cheeks, broad mouth,  
pitched eyebrows, sharp ears, and constantly moving hands sporting  
fingers long enough to serve a concert pianist.  

Or a strangler. The poet' s silver hair had been cropped into  
rough-hewn bangs.  

Martin Silenus seemed to be in his late fifties, but the Consul noticed  
the telltale blue tinge to throat and palms and suspected that the man  
had been through more than a few Poulsen treatments. Silenus's true age  
might be anywhere from ninetytoa hundred and fiftystandard years. I f  
he were close to the latter age, the Consul knew, the odds were that the  
poet was quite mad.  

As boisterous and animated as Martin Silenus seemed upon first  
encounter, so the next guest at the table exuded an immediate and  
equally impressive sense of intelligent reticence. Sol Weintranb looked  
up upon introduction and the Consul noted the short gray beard, lined  
forehead, and sad, luminous eyes of the we!i-known scholar. The Consul  
had heard tales of the Wandering Jew and his hopeless quest, but he was  
shocked to realize that the old man now held the infant in his arms - 
his daughter Rachel, no more than a few weeks old. The Consul looked  
away.  

The sixth pilgrim and only woman at the table was Brawne Lamia. When  
introduced, the detective stared at the Consul with such intensity that  
he could feel the pressure of her gaze even after she looked away.  

A former citizen of the 1.3-g world of Lusus, Brawne Lamia was no taller  
than the poet two chairs to her right, but even her loose corduroy  
shipsuit did not conceal the heavy layers of muscle on her compact form.  
Black curls reached to her shoulders, her eyebrows were two dark lines  
dabbed horizontally across a wide brow, and her nose was solid and  
sharp, intensifying the aquiline quality of her stare. Lamia's mouth  
was wide and expressive to the point of being sensuous, curled slightly  
at the coruers in a slight smile which might be cruel or merely playful.  
The woman's dark eyes seemed to dare the observer to discover which was  
the case.  

It occurred to the Consul that Brawne Lamia might well be considered  
beautiful.  

Introductions completed, the Consul cleared his throat and turned toward  
the Templar. 'Het Masteen, you said that there were seven pilgrims. Is  

M.  

Weintraub's child the seventh?"  

Het Masteen's hood moved slowly from side to side.  

'No. Only those who make a conscious decision to seek the Shrike may be  
counted among the pilgrims."  

The group at the table stirred slightly. Each must know what the Consul  
knew; only a group comprising a prime number of pilgrims might make the  
Shrike Church-sponsored trip north.  

'I am the seventh,' said Het Masteen, captain of the Templar treeship  
ggdrasill and the True Voice of the Tree. In the silence which followed  
the announcement, Her Masteen gestured and a group of crew clones began  
serving the pilgrims their last meal before planetfall.  

'So the Ousters are not in-system yet?" asked Brawne Lamia. Her voice  
had a husky, throaty quality which strangely stirred the Consul.  

'No,' said Het Masteen. 'But we cannot be more than a few standard days  
ahead of them. Our instruments  

have detected fusion skirmishes within the system's OOrt cloud."  

'Will there be war."?" asked Father Hoyt. His voice seemed as fatigued  
as his expression. When no one volunteered a response, the priest  
turned to his right as if retroactively directing the question to the  
Consul.  

The Consul sighed. The crew clones had served wine; he wished it had  
been whiskey. 'Who knows what the Ousters will do?" he said. 'They no  
longer appear to be motivated by human logic."  

Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he gestured. 'As if  
we fucking humans were ever motivated by human logic!" He took a deep  
drink, wiped his mouth, and laughed again.  

Brawne Lamia frowned. 'If the serious fighting starts too soon,' she  
said, 'perhaps the authorities will not allow us to land."  

'We will be allowed to pass,; said Her Masteen. Sunlight found its way  
past folds in his cowl to fall on yellowish skin.  

'Saved from certain death in war to be delivered to certain death at the  
hands of the Shrike,' murmured Father Hoyt.  

'There is no death in all the Universe!" intoned Martin Silenus in a  
voice which the Consul felt sure could have awakened someone deep in  
cryogenic fugue. The poet drained the last of his wine and' raised the  
empty goblet in an apparent toast to the stars:  

'No smellof death = there shall be no death, moan, moan; Moan, Cybele,  
moan;for t hy pernicious Babes  

Have changed a god into a shaking palsy.  

Moan, brethren, moan, for l have no strength left;  

Freak as the reed - weak - feeble as my voice- Oh, oh, thepain, thepain  
of feebleness.  

Moan, moan, for still l thaw..."  

.Silenus abruptly broke off and poured more wine, belching once into  
the silence which had followed his recitation.  

The other six looked at one another. The Consul noticed that Sol  
Weintraub was smiling slightly until the baby in his arms stirred and  
distracted him.  

'Well,' said Father Hoyt hesitantly, as if trying to retrieve an earlier  
strand of thought, 'if the Hegemony convoy leaves and the Ousters take  
Hyperion, perhaps the occupation will be bloodless and they'll let us go  
about our business."  

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad laughed softly. 'The Ousters don't want to  
occupy Hyperion,' he said. 'If they take the planet they'll loot what  
they want and then do what they do best. They'll burn the cities into  
charred rubble, break the rubble into smaller' pieces, and then bake the  
pieces until they glow. They'll melt the poles, boil the oceans, and  
then use the residue to salt what's left of the continents so nothing  

will ever grow there again."  

'Well..." began Father Hoyt and then trailed off.  

There was no conversation as the clones cleared the soup and salad  
dishes and brought on the main course.  

'You said that there was a Hegemony warship escorting us,' the Consul  
said to Het Masteen as they finished their roast beef and boiled sky  
squid.  

The Templar nodded and pointed. The Consul squinted but could make out  
nothing moving against the rotating starfield.  

'Here,' said Fedmahn Kassad and leaned across Father Hoyt to hand the  
Consul a collapsible pair of military binoculars.  

The Consul nodded his thanks, thumbed on the power, and scanned the  
patch of sky Het Masteen had indicated. Gyroscopic crystals in the  
binoculars hummed slightly as they stabilized the optics and swept the  
area in a programmed search pattern. Suddenly the image froze, blurred,  
expanded, and steadied.  

The Consul c6uld not avoid an involuntary intake of breath as the  
Hegemony ship filled the viewer. Neither the expected field-blurred  
seed of a solo ramscout nor the bulb of a torchship, the electronically  
outlined image was of a matte-black attack carrier. The thing was  
impressive in the way only warships through the centuries had succeeded  
in being. The Hegemony spinship was incongruously streamlined with its  
four  

sets of boom arms retracted in battle readiness, its sixty-meter command  
probe sharp as a Clovis point, and its Hawking drive and fusion blisters  
set far back along the launch shaft like feathers on an arrow.  

The Consul handed the binoculars back to Kassad without comment. If the  
task force was using a full attack carrier to escort the Yggdrasili,  
what kind of firepower were they setting in place to meet the Ouster  
invasion?  

'How long until we land?" askedBrawne Lamia. She had been using her  
cornlog to access the treeship's datasphere and obviously was frustrated  
with what she had found. Or had not found.  

'Four hours until orbit,' murmured Het Masteen. 'A few minutes more by  
dropship. Our consular friend has offered his private craft to ferry  
you down."  

'To Keats?" said Sol Weintraub. It was the first time the scholar had  
spoken since dinner had been served.  

The Consul nodded. 'It's still the only spaceport on Hyperion set to  
handle passenger vehicles,' he said.  

'Spaceport?" Father Hoyt sounded angry. 'I thought that we were going  
straight to the north. To the Shrike's realm."  

Het Mssteen patiently shook his head. 'The pilgrimage always begins  
from the capital,' he said. 'It will take several days to reach the  
Time Tombs."  

'Several days,' snapped Brawne Lamia. 'That's absurd."  

'Perhaps,' agreed Het Mssteen, 'but it is the case, nonetheless."  

Father Hoyt looked as if something in the meal had caused him  
indigestion even though he had eaten almost nothing. 'Look,' he said,  
'couldn't we change the rules this once - I mean, given the war scare  
and all? And just !and near the Time Tombs or wherever and get it over  
with?"  

The Consul shook his head. 'Spacecraft and aircraft have been trying to  
take the short route to the northern moors for almost four hundred  
years,' he said. 'l know of none who made it."  

'May one inquire,' said Martin Silenus, happily raising his hand like a  
schoolboy, 'just what the gibbering fuck happens to these legions of  
ships?"  

Father Hoyt frowned at the poet. Fedmahn Kassad smiled slightly. Sol  
Weintraub said, 'The Consul did not mean to suggest that the area is  
inaccessible. One may travel by ship or various !and routes. Nor do  
spacecraft and aircraft disappear. They easily land near the ruins or  
the Time Tombs and just as easily return to whatever point their  
computers command. It is merely the pilots and passengers who are never  
seen again." Weintraub lifted the sleeping baby from his lap and set her  
in an infant carrier slung around his neck.  

'So the tired old legend goes,' said Brawne Lamia.  

'What do the ship logs show?"  

'Nothing,' said the Consul. 'No violence. No forced entry. No  
deviation from course. No unexplained time lapses. No unusual energy  
emissions or depletions. No physical phenomena of any sort."  

'No passengers,' said Het Masteen.  

The Consul did a slow double take. If Het Masteen had, indeed, just  
attempted a joke, it was the first sign in all of the Consu!'s decades  
of dealing with the Templars that one of them had shown even a nascent  
sense of humour. What the Consul could see of the Captain's vaguely  
oriental features beneath the cowl gave no hint that a joke had been  
attempted.  

'Marvelous melodrama,' laughed Silenus. 'A real-life, Christ-weeping  
Sargasso of Souls and we're for it.  

Who orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?"  

'Shut up,' said Brawne Lamia. 'You're drunk, old man."  

The Consul sighed. The group had been together for less than a standard  
hour.  

Crew clones swept away the dishes and brought dessert trays showcasing  
sherbets, coffees, treeship fruit, draums, tortes, and concoctions made  
of Renaissance chocolate. Martin Silenus waved away the desserts and  
told the clones to bring him another bottle of wine. The Consul  
reflected a few seconds and then asked for a whiskey.  

'It occurs to me,' Sol Weintraub said as the group was finishing  
dessert, 'that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another."  

'What do you mean?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

Weintraub unconsciously rocked the child sleeping against his chest.  
'For instance, does anyone here know why he or she was chosen by the  
Shrike Church and the  

All Thing to go on this voyage?"  

No one spoke.  

'I thought not,' said Weintraub. 'Even more fascinating, is anyone here  
a member or follower of the Church of the Shrike7 I, for one, am a Jew,  
and however confused my religious notions have become these days, they  
do not include the worship of an organic killing machine." Weintraub  
raised eyebrows and looked around the table.  

'1 am the True Voice of the Tree,' said Het Masteen.  

'While many Templars believe that the Shrike is the Avatar of punishment  
for those who do not feed from the root, I must consider this a heresy  
not founded in the Covenant or the writings of the Muir."  

To the Captain's left, the Consul shrugged. 'I am an atheist,' he said,  
holding the glass of whiskey to the light. '1 have never been in  
contact with the Shrike cult."  

Father Hoyt smiled without humor. 'The Catholic Church ordained me,' he  
said. 'Shrike-worship contradicts everything the Church defends."  

Colonel Kassad shook his head, whether in refusal to respond or to  
indicate that he was not a member of the Shrike Church, it was not  
clear.  

Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. '1 was baptized a Lutheran,'  
he said. 'A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen  
Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. i have been a  
Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound  
Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a  
dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I  
am happy to say, I am a simple pagan." He smiled at everyone. 'To a  
pagan,' he concluded, 'the Shrike is a most acceptable deity."  

'1 ignore religions,' said Brawne Lamia. 'I do not succumb to them."  

'My point has been made, I believe,' said Sol Weintraub. 'None of us  
admits to subscribing to the Shrike cult dogma, yet the elders of that  
perceptive group have chosen us over many millions of the petitioning  

faithful to visit the Time Tombs... and their fierce god... in what  
may be the last such pilgrimage."  

The Consul shook his head. 'Your point may be made, M. Weintraub,' he  
said, 'but I fail to see it."  

The scholar absently stroked his beard. 'It would seem that our reasons  
for returning to Hyperion are so compelling that even the Shrike Church  
and the Hegemony probability intelligences agree that we deserve to  
return,' he said. 'Some of these reasons - mine, for instance - may  
appear to be public knowledge, but I am certain that none are known in  
their entirety except to the individuals at this table. I suggest that  
we share our stories in the few days remaining to us."  

'Why?" said Colonel Kassad. 'It would seem to serve no purpose."  

Weintraub smiled. 'On the. contrary, it would - at the very least - 
amuse us and give at least a glimpse of our fellow travelers' souls  
before the Shrike or some other calamity distracts us. Beyond that, it  
might just give us enough i .nsight to save all of our lives if we are  
intelligent enough to find the common thread of experience which binds  
all our fates to the whim of the Shrike."  

Martin Silenus laughed and closed his eyes. He said:  

'Straddling each a dolphin's back  

And steadied by a fin,  

Those Innocents re-live their death,  

Their wounds open again. '  

'That's Lenista, isn't it?" said Father Hoyt. '1 studied her in  
seminary."  

'Close,' said Silenus, opening his eyes and pouring more wine. 'It's  
Yeats. Bugger lived five hundred years before Lenista tugged at her  
mother's metal teat."  

'Look,' said Lamia, 'what good would telling each other stories do? When  
we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the  
wish, and the others die. Correct?"  

'So goes the myth,' said Weintraub.  

'The Shrike is no myth,' said Kassad. 'Nor its steel tree."  

'So why bore each other with stories?" asked Brawne Lamia, spearing the  
last of her chocolate cheesecake.  

Weintraub gently touched the back of his sleeping infant's head. 'We  
live in strange times,' he said.  

'Because we are part of that one tenth of one tenth of one percent of  
the Hegemony's citizens who travel between the stars rather than along  
the Web, we represent odd epochs of our own recent past. I, for  

example, am sixty-eight standard years old, but because of the  
time-debts my travels could have incurred, I might have spread these  
threescore and eight years across well more  

than a century of Hegemony history."  

'So?" said the woman next to him.  

Weintraub opened his hand in a gesture which included everyone at the  
table. 'Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate  
oceans of perspective.  

Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no  
one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on  
Hyperion." Weintraub scratched his nose. 'It is a mystery,' he said,  
'and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to  
be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of  
understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice."  

'I agree,' said Her Masteen with no emotion. 'It had not occurred to  
me, but I see the wisdom of telling our tales before we confront the  
Shrike."  

'But what's to keep us from lying?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

'Nothing." Martin Silenus grinned. 'That's the beauty of it."  

'We should put it to a vote,' said the Consul. He was thinking about  
Meina Gladstone's contention that one of the group was an Ouster agent.  
Would hearing the stories be a way of revealing the spy? The Consul  
smiled at the thought of an agent so stupid.  

'Who decided that we are a happylittle democracy?" Colonel Kassad asked  
dryly.  

'We had better be,' said the Consul. 'To reach our individual goals,  
this group needs to reach the Shrike regions  

together. We require some means of making decisions." 'We could appoint  
a leader,' said Kassad.  

'Piss on that,' the poet said in a pleasant tone. Others at the table  
also shook their heads.  

'All right,' said the Consul, 'we vote. Our first decision relates to  

M. Weintraub's suggestion that we tell the stories of our past  
involvement with Hyperion."  

'All or nothing,' said Her Masteen. 'We each share our story or none  
does. We will abide by the will of the majority."  

'Agreed,' said the Consul, suddenly curious to hear the others tell  
their stories and equally sure that he would  

never tell his own. 'Those in favor of telling our tales?" 'Yes,' said  
Sol Weintraub.  

'Yes,' said Het Masteen.  

'Absolutely,' said Martin Silenus. 'I wouldn't miss this little comic  
farce for a month in the orgasm baths on Shote."  
'I vote yes also,' said the Consul, surprising himself.  
'Those opposed?"  
'Nay,' said Father Hoyt but there was no energy in his voice.  
'1 think it's stupid,' said Brawne Lamia.  
The Consul turned to Kassad. 'Colonel?" Fedmahn Kassad shrugged.  
' I register four yes votes, two negatives, and one abstention,' said  

the Consul. 'The ayes have it. Who wants to start?"  

The table was silent. Finally Martin Silenus looked up from where he  
had been writing on a small pad of paper.  
He tore a sheet into several smaller strips. 'I've recorded numbers  

from one to seven,' he said. 'Why don't we draw lots and go in the  
order we draw?"  
'That seems rather childish, doesn't it?" said M. Lamia.  

'i'm a childish fellow,' responded Silenus with his  
satyr's smile* 'Ambassador'-he nodded toward the Consul- 'could I borrow  
that gilded pillow you're wearing for a hat?"  

The Consul handed over his tricorne, the folded slips were dropped in,  
and the hat passed around. Sol Weintraub was the first to draw, Martin  
Silenus the last.  

The Consul unfolded his slip, making sure that no one else could see it.  
He was number seven. Tension ebbed out of him like air out of an  
overinflated balloon. It was quite possible, he reasoned, that events  
would intercede before he had to tell his story. Or the war would make  
everything academic. Or the group could lose interest in stories. Or  
the king could die. Or the horse could die. Or he could teach the  
horse how to talk.  

No more whiskey, thought the Consul.  
'Who's first?" asked Martin Silenus.  
In the brief silence, the Consul could hear leaves stirring to unfelt  

breezes.  
'1 am,' said Father Hoyt. The priest's expression showed the same  
barely submerged acceptance of pain which the Consul had seen on the  

faces of terminally ill friends. Hoyt held up his slip of paper with a  
large 1 clearly scrawled on it.  
'All right,' said Silenus. 'Start."  

'Now?" asked the priest.  

'Why not?" said the poet. The only sign that Silenus had finished at  
least two bottles of wine was a slight darkening of the already ruddy  
cheeks and a somewhat more demonic tilt to the pitched eyebrows. 'We  
have a few hours before planetfall,' he said, 'and I for one plan to  
sleep off the freezer fugue when we're safely down and settled among the  
simple natives."  

'Our friend has a point,' Sol Weintraub said softly. 'If the tales are  
to be told, the hour after dinner each day is a civilized time to tell  
them."  

Father Hoyt sighed and stood. 'Just a minute,' he said and left the  
dining platform.  

After some minutes had passed, Brawne Lamia said, 'Do you think he's  
lost his nerve?"  

'No,' said Lenar Hoyt, emerging from the darkness at the head of the  
wooden escalator which served as the main staircase* '! needed these."  
He dropped two small, stained notebooks on the table as he took his  
seat.  

'No fair reading stories from a primer,' said Silenus.  

'These are to be our own tall tales, Magus!'  

'Shut up, damn it!" cried Hoyt. He ran a hand across his face, touched  
his chest. For the second time that night, the Consul knew that he was  
looking at a seriously ill man.  

'I'm sorry,' said Father Hoyt. 'But if I'm to tell my *.. my tale, I  
have to tell someone else's story as well.  

These journals belong to the man who was the reason for my coming to  
Hyperion .  .  .  and why I am returning today." Hoyt took a deep  
breath.  

The Consul touched the journals. They were begrimed and charred, as if  
they had survived a fire. 'Your friend has old-fashioned tastes,' he  
said, 'if he still keeps a written journal."  

'Yes,' said Hoyt. 'If you're all ready, I will begin." The group at the  
table nodded. Beneath the dining platform, a kilometer of treeship  
drove through the cold night with the strong pulse of a living thing.  
Sol Weintraub lifted his sleeping child from the infant carrier and  
carefully set her on a cushioned mat on the floor near his chair. He  
removed his comlog, set it near the mat, and programmed the diskey for  
white noise. The week-old infant lay on her stomach and slept.  

The Consul leaned far back and found the blue and green star which was  
Hyperion. It seemed to grow larger even as he watched. Het Masteen  
drew his cowl forward until only shadows showed for his face. Sol  
Weintraub lighted a pipe. Others accepted refills of coffee and settled  
back in their chairs.  

Martin Silenus seemed the most avid and expectant of the listeners as he  
leaned forward and whispered:  

'He seyde, "Syn I shal bigynne the game,  

What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!  

Now !at us ryde, and herkneth what i seye."  

And with that word we ryden forth oure weye;  

And he bigan with right a myrie cheere  

His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere. '  

THE PRIEST'S TALE: 'The Man Who Cried God'  

'Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,'  
said Father Lenar Hoyt.  

So began the priest's story. Later, dictating the tale into his  
cornlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses,  
hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the  
timeless failings of human speech.  

Lenar Hoyt had been a young priest, born, raised, and only recently  
ordained on the Catholic world of Pacem, when he was given his first  
offworld assignment: he was ordered to escort the respected Jesuit  
Father Paul Dur into quiet exile on the colony world of Hyperion.  

In another time, Father Paul Dur certainly would have become a bishop  
and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from  
a noble brow and eyes too filled with the sharp edge 'of experience to  
hide their pain, Paul Dur was a follower of St Tellhard as well as an  
archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian. Despite the  
decline of the Catholic Church into what amounted to a half-forgotten  
cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the  
mainstream of Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor  
had Father Dur lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic  
Church continued to be humankind's last, best hope for immortality.  

To Lenar Hoyt as a boy, Father Dur had been a somewhat godlike figure  
when glimpsed during his rare visits to the preseminary schools, or on  
the would-be seminarian's even rarer visits to the New Vatican. Then,  
during the years of Hoyt's study in seminary, Dur had been on an  
important Church-sponsored archaeological dig on the nearby world of  
Armaghast. When the Jesuit returned, a few weeks after Hoyt's  
ordination, it had been under a cloud. No one outside the highest  
circles of the New Vatican knew precisely what had happened, but there  
were whispers of excommunication and even of a hearing before the Holy  
Office of the Inquisition, dormant the four centuries since the  
confusion following the death of Earth.  

Instead, Father Dur had asked for a posting to Hyperion, a world most  
people knew of only because of the bizarre Shrike cult which had  
originated there, and Father Hoyt had been chosen to accompany him. It  

would be a thankless job, traveling in a role which combined the worst  
aspects of apprentice, escort, and spy without even the satisfaction of  
seeing a new world; Hoyt was under orders to see Father Dur down to the  
Hyperion spaceport and then reboard the same spinship for its return  
voyage to the Worldweb. What the bishopric was offering Lenar Hoyt was  
twenty months in cryogenic fugue, a few weeks of in-system travel at  
either end of the voyage, and a time-debt which would return him to  
Pacem eight years behind his former classmates in the quest for Vatican  
careers and missionary postings.  

Bound by obedience and schooled in discipline, Lenar Hoyt accepted  
without question.  

Their transport, the aging spinship HS Nadia Oleg, was a pockmarked  
metal tub with no artificial gravity of any sort when it was not under  
drive, no viewports for the passengers, and no on-board recreation  
except for the stimsims piped into the datalink to keep passengers in  
their hammocks and fugue couches. After awakening from fugue, the  
passengers - mostly offworld workers and economy-rate tourists with a  
few cult mystics and would-be Shrike suicides thrown in for good measure  
-slept in those same hammocks and fugue couches, ate recycled food in  
featureless mess decks, and generally tried to cope with spacesickness  
and boredom during their twelve-day, zero-g glide from their spinout  
point to Hyperion.  

Father Hoyt learned little from Father Dur during those days of forced  
intimacy, nothing at all about the events on Armaghast which had sent  
the senior priest into exile. The younger man had keyed his comlog  
implant to seek out as much data as it could on Hyperion and, by the  
time they were three days out from planet fall,  

Father Hoyt considered himself somewhat of an expert on the world.  

'There are records of Catholics coming to Hyperion but no mention of a  
diocese there,' said Hoyt one evening as they hung talking in their  
zero-g hammocks while most of their fellow passengers lay tuned into  
erotic stimsims. '1 presume you're going down to do some mission work?"  

'Not at all,' replied Father Dur. 'The good people of Hyperion have  
done nothing to foist their religious opinions on me, so I see no reason  
to offend them with my proselytizing. Actually, I hope to travel to the  
southern continent- Aquila- and then find a way inland from the city of  
Port Romance. But not in the guise of a missionary. I plan to set up  
an ethnological research station along the Cleft."  

'Research?" Father Hoyt had echoed in surprise. He closed his eyes to  
key his implant. Looking again at Father Dur, he said, 'That section of  
the Pinion Plateau isn't inhabited, Father. The flame forests make it  
totally inaccessible most of the year."  

Father Dur smiled and nodded. He carried no implant and his ancient  
condog had been in his luggage for the duration of the trip. 'Not quite  
inaccessible,' he said softly. 'And not quite uninhabited. The Bikura  
live there."  

'Bikura,' Father Hoyt said and closed his eyes. 'But they're just a  
legend,' he said at last.  

'Hmmm,' said Father Dur. 'Try cross-indexing through Mamet Spedling."  

Father Hoyt closed his eyes again. General Index told him that Mamet  
Spedling had been a minor explorer affiliated with the Shackleton  
Institute on Renaissance Minor who, almost a standard century and a half  
earlier, had filed a short report with the Institute in which he told of  
hacking his way inland from the then newly settled Port Romance, through  
swamplands which had since been reclaimed for fiberplastic plantations,  
passing through the flame forests during a period of rare quietude, and  
climbing high enough on the Pinion Plateau to encounter the Cleft and a  
small tribe of humans who fit the profile of the legendary Bikura.  

Spedling's brief notes hypothesized that the humans were survivors of a  
missing seedship colony from three centuries earlier and clearly  
described a group suffering all of the classic retrograde cultural  
effects of extreme isolation, inhreeding, and overadaptation. In  
Spedling's blunt words, '. * even after less than two days here it is  
obvious that the Bikura are too stupid, lethargic, and dull to waste  
time describing." As it turned out, the flame forests then began to show  
some signs of becoming active and Spedling had not wasted any more time  
observing his discovery but had rushed to reach the coast, losing four  
indigenie bearers, all of his equipment and records, and his left arm to  
the 'quiet' forest in the three months it took him to escape.  

'My God,' Father Hoyt had said as he lay in his hammock on the Nadia  
Oleg, 'why the Bikura?"  

'Why not?" had been Father Dur's mild reply. 'Very little is known  
about them."  

'Very little is known about most of Hyperion,' said the younger priest,  
becoming somewhat agitated. 'What about the Time Tombs and the  
legendary Shrike north of the Bridle Range on Equus?" he said. 'They're  
famous!'  

'Precisely,' said Father Dur6. 'Lenar, how many learned papers have  
been written on the Tombs and the Shrike creature? Hundreds?  
Thousands?" The aging priest had tamped in tobacco and now lighted his  
pipe: no small feat in zero-g, Hoyt observed. 'Besides,' said Paul  
Dur6, 'even if the Shrike-thing is real, it is not human. I am partial  
to human beings."  

'Yes,' said Hoyt, ransacking his mental arsenal for potent arguments,  
'but the Bikura are such a small mystery. At the most you're going to  
find a few dozen indigenies living in a region so cloudy and smoky and  
... unimportant that even the colony's own mapsats haven't noticed  
them. Why choose them when there are big mysteries to study on  
Hyperion.. * like the labyrinths!' Hoyt had brightened. 'Did you know  
that Hyperion is one of the nine labyrinthine worlds, Father?"  

'Of course,' said Dur. A rough hemisphere of smoke expanded from him  
until air currents broke it into tendrils and tributaries. 'But the  
labyrinths have their researchers and admirers throughout the Web,  
Lenar, and the tunnels have been there - on all nine worlds -for how  
long? Half a million standard years? Closer to three quarters of a  
million, I believe. Their secret will last. But how long will the  

Bikura culture last before they're absorbed into modern colonial society  
or, more likely, are simply wiped out by circumstances?"  

Hoyt shrugged. 'Perhaps they're already gone. It's been a long time  
since Spedling's encounter with them and there haven't been any other  
confirmed reports. If they are extinct as a group, then all of your  
time-debt and labor and pain of getting there will be for nothing."  

'Precisely,' was all that Father Paul Dur had said and puffed calmly on  
his pipe.  

It was in their last hour together, during the dropship ride down, that  
Father Hoyt had gained the slightest glimpse into his companion's  
thoughts. The limb of Hyperion had been glowing white and green and  
lapis above them for hours when suddenly the old dropship had cut into  
the upper layers of atmosphere, flame had briefly filled the window, and  
then they were flying silently some sixty kilometers above dark cloud  
masses and starlit seas with the hurtling terminator of Hyperion's  
sunrise rushing toward them like a spectral tidal wave of light.  

'Marvelous,' Paul Dur had whispered, more to himself than to his young  
companion. 'Marvelous. It is at times like this that I have the  
sense... the slightest sense * . . of what a sacrifice it must have  
been for the Son of God to condescend to become the Son of Man."  

Hoyt had wanted to talk then, but Father Dur had continued to stare out  
the window, lost in thought. Ten minutes later they had landed at Keats  
Interstellar, Father Dur was soon swept into the whirlpool of customs  
and luggage rituals, and twenty minutes after that a thoroughly  
disappointed Lenar Hoyt was rising toward space and the Nadia Oleg once  
again.  

'Five weeks later of my time, I returned to Pacem,' said Father Hoyt. 'I  
had mislaid eight years but for some reason my sense of loss randeeper  
than that simple fact.  

Immediately upon my return, the bishop informed me that there had been  
no word from Paul Dur during the four years of his stay on Hyperion. The  
New Vatican had spent a fortune on fatline inquiries, but neither the  
colonial authorities nor the consulate in Keats had been able to locate  
the missing priest."  

Hoyt paused to sip from his water glass and the Consul said, 'I remember  
the search. I never met Dur6, of course, but we did our best to trace  
him. Theo, my aide, spent a lot of energy over the years trying to  
solve the case of the missing cleric. Other than a few contra-dietory  
reports of sightings in Port Romance, there was no trace of him. And  
those sightings went back to the weeks right after his arrival, years  
before. There were hundreds of plantations out there with no radios or  
cornlines, primarily because they were harvesting bootleg drugs as well  
as fiberplastic. I guess we never talked to the people at the right  
plantation. At least I know Father Dur's file was still open when I  
left."  

Father Hoyt nodded. 'I landed in Keats a month after your replacement  
had taken over at the consulate. The bishop had been astonished when I  
volunteered to return. His Holiness himself granted me an audience. I  

was on Hyperion less than seven of its local months. By the time I left  
to return to the Web, I had discovered the fate of Father Dur6." Hoyt  
tapped the two stained leather books on the table. 'If I am to complete  
this,' he said, his voice thick, '1 must read excerpts from these."  

The treeship Yggdrasill had turned so the bulk of the tree had blocked  
the sun. The effect was to plunge the dining platform and the curved  
canopy of leaves beneath it into night, but instead of a few thousand  
stars dotting the sky, as would have been the case from a planet's  
surface, literally a million suns blazed above, beside, and beneath the  
group at the table. Hyperion was a distinct sphere now, hurtling  
directly at them like some deadly missile.  

'Read,' said Martin Silenus.  

FROM THE JOURNAL OF FATHER PAUL DURI :  

Day l:  

So begins my exile.  

I am somewhat at a loss as to how to date my new journal. By the  
monastic calendar on Pacere, it is the seventeenth day of Thomasmonth in  
the Year of Our Lord 2732. By Hegemony Standard, it is October 12, 589  

p.c. By Hyperion reckoning, or so I am told by the wizened little clerk  
in the old hotel where I am staying, it is the twentyzthird day of  
Lycius (the last of their seven forty-day months), either 426 A.D.C.  
(after dropship crash!) or the hundred and twenty-eighth year of the  
reign of Sad King Billy, who has not reigned for at least a hundred of  
those years.  

To hell with it. I'll call it Day I of my exile.  

Exhausting day. (Strange to be tired after months of sleep, but that is  
said to be a common reaction after awakening from fugue. My cells feel  
the fatigue of Ihese past months of travel even if I do not remember  
them. I don't remember feeling this tired from travel when I was  
younger.)  

I felt bad about not getting to know young Hoyt better. He seems a  
decent sort, all proper catechism and bright eyes. It's no fault of  
youngsters like him that the Church is in its final days. It's just  
that his brand of happy naivet6 can do nothing to arrest that slide into  

oblivion which the Church seems destined for. 
Well, my contributions have not helped either. 
Brilliant view of my new world as the dropship brought us down. 
I was 
able to make out two of the three continents- Equus and Aquila. 
The 
third one, Ursa, was not visible. 

Planetfall at Keats and hours of effort getting through customs and  
taking ground transit into the city. Confused images: the mountain  
range to the north with its shifting, blue haze, foothills forested with  
orange and yellow trees, pale sky with its green-blue undercoating, the  
sun too small but more brilliant than Pacem's.  

Colors seem more vivid from a distance, dissolving and scattering as one  
approaches, like a pointi!!ist's palette.  

The great sculpture of Sad King Billy which I had heard so much about  
was oddly disappointing. Seen from the highway, it looked raw and  
rough, a hasty sketch chiseled from the dark mountain, rather than the  
regal figure I had expected. It does brood over this ramshackle city of  
half a million people in a way that the neurotic poet-king probably  
would have appreciated.  

The town itself seems to be separated into the sprawling maze of slums  
and saloons which the locals call Jacktown and Keats itself, the  
so-called Old City although it dates back only four centuries, all  
polished stone and studied sterility. I will take the tour soon.  

I had scheduled a month in Keats but already I am eager to press on. Oh,  
Monsignor Edouard, if you could see me now. Punished but still  
unrepentant. More alone than ever but strangely satisfied with my new  
exile. If my punishment for past excesses brought about by my zeal is  
to be banishment to the seventh circle of desolation, then Hyperion was  
well chosen. I could forget my self-appointed mission to the distant  
Bikura (are they real? 1 think not this night) and content myself with  
living out the remainder of my years in this provincial capital on this  
godforsaken backwater world. My exile would be no less complete.  

Ah, Edouard, boys together, classmates together (although I was not so  
brilliant nor so orthodox as you), now old men together. But now you  
are four years wiser and I am still the mischievous, unrepentant boy you  
remember. I pray that you are alive and well and praying for me.  

Tired. Will sleep. Tomorrow, take the tour of Keats, eat well, and  
arrange transport to Aquila and points south.  

Day $:  

There is a cathedral in Keats. Or, rather, there was one. It has been  
abandoned for at least two standard centuries. It lies in ruins with  
its transept open to the green-blue skies, one of its western towers  
unfinished, and the other tower a skeletal framework of tumbled stone  
and rusted reinforcement rods.  

I stumbled upon it while wandering, lost, along the banks of the Hoolie  
River in the 'sparsely populated section of town where the Old City  
decays into Jacktown amid a jumble of tall warehouses which prevent even  
a glimpse of the ruined towers of the cathedral until one turns a corner  
onto a narrow cul-de-sac and there is the shell of the cathedral; its  
chapter house has half fallen away into the river, its facade is pocked  
with remnants of the mournful, apocalyptic statuary of the post-Hegira  
expansionist period.  

I wandered through the latticework of shadows and fallen blocks into the  
nave. The bishopric on Paccm had not mentioned any history of  
Catholicism on Hyperion, much less the presence of a cathedral. It is  
almost inconceivable that the scattered seedship colony of four  
centuries ago could have supported a large enough congregation to  
warrant the presence of a bishop, much less a cathedral. Yet there it  
was.  

I poked through the shadows of the sacristy. Dust and powdered plaster  
hung in the air like incense, outlining two shafts of sunlight streaming  
down from narrow windows high above. I stepped out into a broader patch  
of sunlight and approached an altar stripped of all decoration except  
for chips and cracks caused by falling masonry. The great cross which  
had hung on the east wall behind the altar had also fallen and now lay  
in ceramic splinters among the heap of stones there. Without conscious  
thought ! stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the  
celebration of the Eucharist.  

There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or  
hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who  
had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and  
who  

now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring  
ritual of that celebration.  

It was with some shock that I realized I had a congregation.  

The old woman was kneeling in the fourth row of pews. The black of her  
dress and scarf blended so perfectly with the shadows there that only  
the pale oval of her face was visible, lined and ancient, floating  
disembodied in the darkness. Startled, I stopped speaking the litany of  
consecration. She was looking at me but something about her eyes, even  
at a distance, instantly convinced me that she was blind. For a moment  
I could not speak and stood there mute, squinting in the dusty light  
bathing the altar, trying to explain this spectral image to myself while  
at the same time attempting to frame an explanation of my own presence  
and actions.  

When I did find my voice and called to her- the words echoing in the  
great hall - I realized that she had moved. I could hear her feet  
scraping on the stone floor.  

There was a rasping sound and then a brief flare of light illuminated  
her profile far to the right of the altar. I shielded my eyes from the  
shafts of sunlight and began picking my way over the detritus where the  
altar railing had once stood. I called to her again, offered  
reassurances, and told her not to be afraid, even though it was I who  
had chills coursing up my back. I moved quickly but when I reached the  
sheltered corner of the nave she was gone. A small door led to the  
crumbling chapter house and the riverbank. There was no sign of her. 1  
returned to the dark interior and would have gladly attributed her  
appearance to my imagination, a waking dream after so many months of  
enforced cryogenic dreamlesshess, but for a single, tangible proof of  
her presence. There in the cool darkness burned a lone red votive  
candle, its tiny flame flickering to unseen drafts and currents.  

I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false  
histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself  
is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.  
There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in  
the town, but the real houses  

of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces  

handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and the Shrike Cult  
temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a  
shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet reeks of mysticism  

without revelation.  

To hell with it.  

Tomorrow I head south. There are skimmers and other aircraft on this  
absurd world but, for the Common Folk, travel between these accursed  
island continents seems restricted to boat- which takes forever, I am  
told- or one of the huge passenger dirigibles which de!arts from Keats  
only once a week.  

I leave early tomorrow by dirigible.  

Day 10:  

Animals.  

The firstdown team for this planet must have had a f',ation on animals.  
Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast  
of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We've spent the  
last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a  
large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and  
freight at Felix, the 'major city' of the island. From what I can see  
from the observation promenade and the mooring tower, there can't be  
more than five thousand people living in that random collection of  
hovels and barracks.  

Next the ship will make its eight-hundred-kilometer crawl down a series  
of smaller islands called the Nine Tails and then take a bold leap  
across seven hundred kilometers of open sea and the equator. The next  
land we see then is the northwest coast of Aquila, the  

so-called Beak.  

Animals.  

To call this conveyance a 'passenger dirigible' is an exercise in  
creative semantics. It is a huge lifting device with cargo holds large  
enough to carry the town of Felix out to sea and still have room for  
thousands of bales of  

fiberplastic. Meanwhile, the less important cargo - we passengers - 
make do wherewe can. I have set up a cot near the aft loading portal  
.and made a rather comfortable niche for myself with my personal luggage  
and three large trunks of expedition gear. Near me is a family of  
eight- indigenie plantation workers returning from a biannual shopping  
expedition of their own to Keats -and although I do not mind the sound  
or scent of their caged pigs or the squeal of their food hamsters, the  
incessant, confused crowing of their poor befuddled rooster is more than  
I can stand some nights.  

Animals!  

Day 11:  

Dinner tonight in the salon above the promenade deck with Citizen  
Heremis Denzel, a retired professor from a small planters' college near  
Endymion. He informed me that the Hyperion firstdown team had no animal  
fetish after all; the official names of the three continents are not  
Equus, Ursa, and Aquila, but Creighton, Allensen, and Lopez. He went on  
to say that this was in honor of three middle-level bureaucrats in the  
old Survey Service.  

Better the animal fetish!  

It is after dinner. I am alone on the outside promenade to watch the  
sunset. The walkway here is sheltered by the forward cargo modules so  
the wind is little more than a salt-tinged breeze. Above me curves the  
orange and green skin of the dirigible. We are between islands; the sea  
is a rich lapis shot through with verdant undertones, a reversal of sky  
tones. A scattering of high cirrus catches the last light of Hyperion's  
too-small sun and ignites like burning coral. There is no sound except  
for the faintest hum of the electric turbines. Three hundred meters  
below, the shadow of a huge, mantalike undersea creature keeps pace with  
the dirigible. A second ago an insect or bird the size and color of a  
hummingbird but with gossamer wings a meter across paused five meters  
out to inspect me before diving toward the sea with folded wings.  

Edouard, 1 feel very alone tonight. !t would help if 1 knew you were  
alive, still wbrking in the garden, writing evenings in your study. I  
thought my travels would stir my-old beliefs in St Teilhard's concept of  
the God in Whom the Christ of Evolution, the Personal, and the  
Universal, the En Haut and the En.4 vant are joined, but no such renewal  
is forthcoming.  

It is growing dark. I am growing old. I feel something *.. not yet  
remorse . .. at my sin of falsifying the evidence on the Armaghast  
dig. But, Edouard, Your Excellency, if the artifacts had indicated the  
presence of a Christ-oriented culture there, six hundred light-years  
from Old Earth, almost three thousand years before man left the surface  
of the homeworld...  

Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which  
would have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our life-time?  

Yes, it was. But not, I think, because of the sin of tampering with the  
data, but the deeper sin of thinking that Christianity could be saved.  
The Church is dying, Edouard. And not merely our beloved branch of the  
Holy Tree, but all of its offshoots, vestiges and cankers.  

The entire Body of Christ is dying as surely as this poorly used body of  
mine, Edouard. You and I knew this in Armaghast, where the blood-sun  
illuminated only dust and death. We knew it that cool, green summer at  
the College when we took our first vows. We knew it as boys in the  
quiet playfields of Villefranche-sur-SaSne. We know it now.  

The light is gone now; I must write by the slight glow from the salon  
windows a deck above. The stars lie in strange constellations. The  
Middle Sea glows at night with a greenish, unhealthy phosphorescence.  
There is a dark mass on the horizon to the southeast. It may be a storm  
or it may be the next island in the chain, the third of the nine  

'tails." (What mythology deals with a cat with nine tails? I know of  
none.)  

For the sake of the bird I saw earlier - if it was a bird - I pray that  
it is an island ahead and not a storm.  

Day 28:  

I have been in Port Romance eight days and I have seen three dead men.  

The first was a beached corpse, a bloated, white parody of a man, that  
had washed up on the mud flats beyond the mooring tower my first evening  
in town.  

Children threw stones at it.  

The second man I watched being pulled from the burned wreckage of a  
methane-unit shop in the poor section of town near my hotel. His body  
was charred beyond recognition and shrunken by the heat, his arms and  
legs pulled tight in the prizefighter posture burning victims have been  
reduced to since time immemorial. I had been fasting all day and I  
confess with shame that I began to salivate when the air filled with the  
rich, frying-fat odor of burned flesh.  

The third man was murdered not three meters from me. I had just emerged  
from the hotel onto the maze of mud-splattered planks that serve as  
sidewalks in this miserable town when shots rang out and a man several  
paces ahead of me lurched as if his foot had slipped, spun toward me  
with a qui=ical look on his face, and fell sideways into the mud and  
sewage.  

He had been shot three times with some sort of projectile weapon. Two  
of the bullets had struck his chest, the third entered just below the  
left eye.  

Incredibly, he was still breathing when I reached him.  

Without thinking about it, I removed my stole from my carrying bag,  
fumbled for the vial of holy water 1 had carried for so long, and  
proceeded to perform the sac-rameut of Extreme Unction. No one in the  
gathering crowd objected. The fallen man stirred once, cleared his  
throat as if he were about to speak, and died. The crowd dispersed even  

before the body was removed. 
The man was middle-aged, sandy-haired, and slightly overweight. 
He 
carried no identification, not even a universal card or comlog. 
There 
were six silver coins in his pocket. 

For some reason, I elected to stay with the body the rest of that day.  
The doctor was a short and cynical man  
who allowed me to stay during the required autopsy. !  

suspect that he was starved for conversation.  
'This is what the whole thing's worth,' he said as he opened the poor  
man'd belly like a pink satchel, pulling the folds of skin and muscle  

back and pinning them down like tent flaps.  

'What thing?" I asked.  

'His life,' said the doctor and pulled the skin of the corpse's face up  
and back like a greasy mask. 'Your life.  

My life." The red and white stripes of overlapping muscle turned to blue  
bruise around the ragged hole just above the cheekbone.  

'There has to be more than this,' I said.  

The doctor looked up from his grim work with a bemused smile. 'Is  
there?" he said. 'Please show me." He lifted the man's heart and seemed  
to weigh it in one hand. 'In the Web worlds, this'd be worth some money  
on the open market. There're those too poor to keep vat-grown, cloned  
parts in store, but too well off to die just for want of a heart. But  
out here it's just offal."  

'There has to be more,' I said, although I felt little conviction. I  
remembered the funeral of His Holiness Pope Urban XV shortly before I  
left Pacem. As has been the custom since pre-Heglra days, the corpse  
was not embalmed. It waited in the anteroom off the main basilica to be  
fitted for the plain wooden coffin. As I helped Edouard and Monsignor  
Frey place the vestments on the stiffened corpse I noticed the browning  
skin and slackening mouth.  

The doctor shrugged and finished the perfunctory autopsy. There was the  
briefest of formal inquiries. No suspect was found, no motive put  
forward. A description of the murdered man was sent to Keats but the  
man himself was buried the next day in a pauper's field between the mud  
flats and the yellow jungle.  

Port Romance is a jumble of yellow, weirwood structures set on a maze of  
scaffolds and planks stretching far out onto the tidal mud flats at the  
mouth of the Kans.  

The river is almost two kilometers wide here where it spills out into  
Toschahai Bay, but only a few channels are navigable and the dredging  
goes on day and night. !  

lie awake each night in my cheap room with the window open to the  
pounding of the dredge-hammer sounding like the booming of this vile  
city's heart, the distant susurration of the surf its wet breathing.  
Tonight I listen to the city breathe and cannot help but give it the  
flayed face of the murdered man.  

The companies keep a skimmerport on the edge of town to ferry men and  
matriel inland to the larger plantations, but 1 do not have enough money  
to bribe my way aboard. Rather, I could get myself aboard but cannot  
afford to transport my three trunks of medical and scientific gear. I  
am still tempted. My service among the Bikura seems more absurd and  
irrational now than ever before. Only my strange need for a destination  
and a certain masochistic determination to complete the terms of my  
self-imposed exile keep me moving upriver.  

There is a riverboat departing up the Kans in two days. I have booked  

passage and will move my trunks onto it tomorrow. It will not be hard  
to leave Port Romance behind.  

Day 41:  

The Emporotic Girandole continues its slow progress upriver. No sight  
of human habitation since we left Melton's Landing two days ago. The  
jungle presses down to the riverbank like a solid wall now; more, it  
almost completely overhangs us in places where the river narrows to  
thirty or forty meterS. The light itself is yellow, rich as liquid  
butter, filtered as it is through foliage and fronds eighty meters above  
the brown surface of the Kans. I sit on the rusted tin roof of the  
center passenger barge and strain to make out my first glimpse of a  
tesla tree. Old Kady sitting nearby pauses in his whittling, spits over  
the side through a gap in his teeth, and laughs at me. 'Ain't going to  
be no flame trees this far down,' he says. 'If they was the forest sure  
all hell wouldn't look like this. You got to get up in the Pinions  
before you see a tesla. We ain't out of the rain forest yet, Padre."  

It rains every afternoon. Actually, rain is too gentle a term for the  
deluge that strikes us each day, obscuring the shore, pounding the tin  
roofs of the barges with a deafening roar, and slowing our upstream  
crawl until it seems we are standing still. It is ns if the river  
becomes a vertical torrent each afternoon, a waterfall which the ship  
must climb if we are to go on.  

The Oirandole is an ancient, flat-bottomed tow with five barges lashed  
around it like ragged children clinging to their tired motheris skins.  
Three of the two-level barges carry bales of goods to be traded or sold  
at the few plantations and settlements along the river. The other two  
offer a simulacrum of lodging for the indigenies traveling upriver,  
although I suspect that some of the barge's residents are permanent. My  
own berth boasts a stained mattress on the floor and lizard-like insects  
on the walls.  

After the rains everyone gathers on the decks to watch the evening mists  
rise from the cooling river. The air 'is very hot and supersaturated  
with moisture most of the day now. Old Kady tells me that I have come  
too late to make the climb through the rain and flame forests before the  
tesla trees become active. We shall see.  

Tonight the mists rise like the spirits of all the dead who sleep  
beneath the river's dark surface. The last tattered remnants of the  
afternoon's cloud cover dissipate through the treetops and color returns  
to the world. I watch ns the dense forest shifts from chrome yellow to  
a translucent saffron and then slowly fades through ocher to umber to  
gloom. Aboard the Girandole, Old Kady lights the lanterns and  
candle-globes hanging from the sagging second tier and, as if not to be  
outdone, the darkened jungle begins to glow with the faint  
phosphorescence of decay while glowbirds and multihued gossamers can be  
seen floating from branch to branch in the darker upper regions.  

Hyperion's small moon is not visible tonight but this world moves  
through more debris than is common for a planet so close to its sun and  
the night skies are illuminated by frequent meteor showers. Tonight the  
heavens are especially fertile and when we move onto wide sections of  
the river we can see a tracery of brilliant meteor trails weaving the  

stars together. Their images burn the retina after a while and I look  
down at the river only to see the same optic echo there in the dark  
waters.  

There is a bright glow on the eastern horizon and Old Kady tells me that  
this is from the orbital mirrors which give light to a few of the larger  
plantations.  

It is too warm to return to my cabin. I spread my thin mat on the  
rooftop of my barge and watch the celestial light show while clusters of  
indigenie families sing haunting songs in an argot I have. not even  
tried to learn. I wonder about the Bikura, still far away from here,  
and a strange anxiety rises in me.  

Somewhere in the forest an animal screams with the voice of a frightened  
woman.  
Day60:  
Arrived Perecebo Plantation. Sick.  

Day 62:  
Very ill. Fever, fits of shaking. All yesterday ! was vomiting black  
bile. The rain is deafening. At night the clouds are !it from above by  
orbital mirrors. The sky seems to be on fire. My fever is very high.  

A woman takes care of me. Bathes me. Too sick to be ashamed. Her hair  
is darker than most indigenies'. She says little. Dark, gentle eyes.  
Oh, God, to be sick so far from home.  
Day  

sheis waiting spying comesin from the rain the thin shirt  
on purpose to tempt me, knows what iam my skin burning on fire thin  
cotton nipples dark against it i  

knowwho they are they are watching, here hear their voices at night they  
bathe me in poison burns me they think I dont know but i hear their  
voices above the rain when the screaming stops stop stop  

My skin is almost gone. red underneath can feel the hole in my cheek.  
when I find the bullet iwill spit it out it out.  
agnusdeiquitolispecattamundi miserer nobis misere nobis miserere  

Day 65:  
Thank you, dear Lord, for deliverance from illness.  
Day 66:  
Shaved today. Was able to make it to the shower.  
Semfa helped me prepare for the administrator's visit. I expected him  

to be one of the large, gruff types I've seen out the window working in  

the sorting compound, but he was a quiet black man with a slight lisp.  

He was most helpful. I had been concerned about paying for my medical  
care but he reassured me that there would be no charge. Even better - 
he will assign a man to lead me into the high country! He says it is  
late in the season but if I can travel in ten days we should be able to  
make it through the flame forest to the Cleft before the tesla trees are  
fully active.  

After he left I sat and talked to Semfa a bit. Her husband died here  
three local months ago in a harvesting accident. Semfa herself had come  
from Port Romance; her marriage to Mikel had been a salvation for her  
and she has chosen to stay on here doing odd jobs rather than go back  
downriver. I do not blame her.  

After a massage, I will sleep. Many dreams about my mother recently.  

Ten days. I will be ready in ten days.  

Day 75:  

Before leaving with Tuk, I went down to the matrix paddies to say  
goodbye to Semfa. She said little but 1 could see in her eyes that she  
was sad to see me go.  

Without premeditation, I blessed her and then kissed her on the  
forehead. Tuk stood nearby, smiling and bobbing. Then we were off,  
leading the two packbrids.  

Supervisor Orlandi came to the end of the road and waved as we entered  
the narrow lane hacked into the  

aureate foliage.  

Domine, dirige nos.  

Day 82:  

After a week on the trail - what trail? - after a week in the  
trackless, yellow rain forest, after a week of exhausting climb up the  
ever steeper shoulder of the.  

Pinion Plateau, we emerged this morning onto a rocky outcropping that  
allowed us a view back across an expanse of jungle toward the Beak and  
the Middle Sea.  

The plateau here is almost three thousand meters above sea level and the  
view was impressive. Heavy rain clouds spread out below us to the foot  
of the Pinion Hills, but through gaps in the white and gray carpet of  
cloud we caught glimpses of the Kans in its leisurely uncoiling toward  
Port R. and the sea, chrome-yellow swatches of the forest we had  
struggled through, and a hint of magenta far to the east that Tuk swore  
was the lower matrix of fiberplastic fields near Perecebo.  

We continued onward and upward late into the evening.  

Tuk is obviously worried that we will be caught in the flame forests  

when the tesla trees become active. I struggle to .keep up, tugging at  
the heavily laden 'brid and saying silent prayers to keep my mind off my  
aches, pains, and general misgivings.  

Day 83:  

Loaded and moving before dawn today. The air smells of smoke and ashes.  

The change in vegetation here on the Plateau is startling.  

No longer evident are the ubiquitous weirwood and leafy chalma. After  
passing through an intermediate zone of short evergreens and everblues,  
then after climbing again through dense strands of mutated lodgepole  
pines and triaspen, we came into the flame forest proper with its groves  
of tall prometheus, trailers of ever present phoenix, and round stands  
of amber !ambents. Occasionally we encountered impenetrable breaks of  
the white-fibrous, bifurcated bestos plants that Tuk picturesquely  
referred to as '... looking like de rotting cocks o' some dead giants  
what be buried shallow here, dat be sure." My guide has a way with  
words.  

It was late afternoon before we saw our first tesla tree. For half an  
hour we had been trudging over an ash-covered forest floor, trying not  
to tread on the tender shoots of phoenix and firewhip gamely pushing up  
through the sooty soil, when suddenly Tuk stopped and pointed.  

The tesla tree, still half a kilometer away, stood at least a hundred  
meters tall, half again as high as the tallest prometheus. Near its  
crown it bulged with the distinctive onion-shaped dome of its  
accumulator gall.  

The radial branches above the gall trailed dozens of nimbus vines, each  
looking silver and metallic against the clear green and lapis sky. The  
whole thing made me think of some elegant High Muslim mosque on New  
Mecca irreverently garlanded with tinsel.  

'We got to get de 'brids and our asses de hell out o' here,' grunted  
Tuk. He insisted that we change into flame forest gear right then and  
there. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening trudging on in  
our osmosis masks and thick, rubber-soled boots, sweating under layers  
of leathery gamma-cloth. Both of the 'brids acted nervous, their long  
ears pricking at the slightest sound. Even through my mask i could  
smell the ozone; it reminded me of electric trains I had played with as  
a child oj lazy Christmas Day afternoons in Vi!!efranche-sur-Sa6ne.  

We are camping as close as we can to a bestos break this night. Tuk  
showed me how to set out the ring of arrestor rods, all the time  
clucking dire warnings to himself and searching the evening sky for  
clouds.  

I plan to sleep well in spite of everything.  

Day 84:  

0400 hours- Sweet Mother of Christ.  

For three hours we have been caught up in the middle of the end of the  

world.  

The explosions started shortly after midnight, mere lightning crashes at  
first, and against our better judgment Tuk and I slid our heads through  
the tent flap to watch the pyrotechnics. I am used to the Matthew-month  
monsoon storms on Pacem, so the first hour of lightning displays did not  
seem too unusual. Only the sight of distant tesla trees as the unerring  
focus of the aerial discharge was a bit unnerving. But soon the forest  
behemoths were glowing and spitting with their own accumulated energy  
and then - just as I was drifting off to sleep despite the continued  
noise - true Armageddon was unleashed.  

At least a hundred arcs of electricity must have been released in the  
first ten seconds of the tesla trees' opening spasms of violent energy.  
A prometheus less than thirty meters from us exploded, dropping flaming  
brands fifty meters to the forest floor. The arrestor rods glowed,  
hissed, and deflected arc after arc of blue-white death over and around  
our small campsite. Tuk screamed something but no mere human sound was  
audible over the onslaught of light and noise. A patch of trailing  
phoenix burst into flame near the tethered 'brids and one of the  
terrified animals - hobbled and blindfolded as it was - broke free and  
lunged through the circle of glowing arrestor rods. Instantly half a  

dozen bolts of lightning from the nearest tesla arced to the hapless  
animal. For a mad second l could have sworn !  

saw the beast's skeleton glowing through boiling flesh and then it  
spasreed high into the air and simply ceased to be.  

For three hours we have watched the end of the world.  

Two of the arrestor rods have fallen but the other eight continue to  
function. Tuk and I huddle in the hot cave of our tent, osmosis masks  
filtering enough cool oxygen out of the superheated, smoky air to allow  
us to breathe. Only the lack of undergrowth and Tuk's skill in placing  
our tent away from other targets and near the sheltering bestos plants  
have allowed us to survive. That and the eight whiskered-alloy rods  
that stand between us and eternity.  

'They seem to be holding up well!" I shout to Tuk over the hiss and  
crackle, crash and split of the storm.  

'Dey be made to stand de hour, mebbe two,' grunts my guide. 'Any time,  
mebbe sooner, dey fuse, we die."  

I nod and sip at lukewarm water through the slipstrip of my osmosis  
mask. If I survive this night, I shall always thank God for His  
generosity in allowing me to see this sight.  

Day 8 7:  

Tuk and I emerged from the smoldering northeastern edge of the flame  
forest at noon yesterday, promptly set up camp by the edge of a small  
stream, and slept for eighteen hours straight; making up for three  
nights of no sleep and two grueling days moving without rest through a  
nightmare of flame and ash. Everywhere we looked as we approached the  
hogback ridge that marked the terminus of the forest, we could see  

seedpods and cones burst open with new life for the various fire species  
that had died in the conflagration of the previous two nights. Five of  
our arrestor rods still functioned, although neither Tuk nor l was eager  
to test them another night. Our surviving packbrid collapsed and died  
the instant the heavy load was lifted off its back.  

I awoke this morning at dawn to the sound of running water. I followed  
the small stream a kilometer to the northeast, following a deepening in  
its sound, until suddenly it dropped from sight.  

The Cleft! I had almost forgotten our destination.  

This morning, stumbling through the fog, leaping from one wet rock to  
another alongside the widening stream, I took a leap to a final boulder,  
teetered there, regained my balance, and looked straight down above a  
waterfall that dropped almost three thousand meters to mist, rock, and  
river far below.  

The Cleft was not carved out of the rising plateau as was the legendary  
Grand Canyon on Old Earth or World Crack on Hebron. In spite of its  
active oceans and seemingly earthlike continents, Hyperion is  
tectonically quite dead; more like Mars, Lusus, or Armaghast in its  
total lack of continental drift. And like Mars and Lusus, HYperion is  
afflicted with its Deep Ice Ages, although here the periodicity is  
spread to thirty-seven million years by the long ellipse of the  
currently absent binary dwarf. The comlog compares the Cleft to the  
pre-tCrraformed Mariner Valley on Mars, both being caused by the  
weakening of crust through periodic freeze and thaw over the aeons,  
followed by the flow of subterranean rivers such as the Kans. Then the  
massive collapse, running like a long scar through the moun-tainons wing  
of the continent Aquila.  

Tuk joined me as I stood on the edge of the Cleft. 1 was naked, rinsing  
the ash smell from my traveling clothes and cassock. I splashed cold  
water over my pale flesh and laughed out loud as the echoes of Tuk's  
shouts came back from the North Wall two thirds of a kilometer away.  
Because of the nature of the crust collapse, Tuk and I stood far out on  
an overhang that hid the South Wall below us. Although perilously  
exposed, we assumed that the rocky cornice which had defied gravity for  
millions of years would last a few more hours as we bathed, relaxed,  
shouted echoing hallos until we were hoarse, and generally acted like  
children liberated from school. Tuk confessed that he had never  
penetrated the full width of the flame forest- nor known anyone who had  
in this season - and announced that, now that the tesla trees were  
becoming fully  

dozen bolts of lightning from the nearest tesla arced to the hapless  
animal. For a mad second I could have sworn !  

saw the beast's skeleton glowing through boiling flesh and then it  
spasmed high into the air and simply ceased to be.  

For three hours we have watched the end of the world.  

Two of the arrestor rods have fallen but the other eight continue to  
function. Tuk and I huddle in the hot cave of our tent, osmosis masks  
filtering enough c°°! oxygen out of the superheated, smoky air to allow  

us to breathe. Only the lack of undergrowth and Tuk's skill in placing  
our tent away from other targets and near the sheltering bestos plants  
have allowed us to survive. That and the eight whiskered-alloy rods  
that stand between us and eternity.  

'They seem to be holding up well!" I shout to Tuk over the hiss and  
crackle, crash and split of the storm.  

'Dey be made to stand de hour, mebbe two,' grunts my guide. 'Any time,  
mebbe sooner, dey fuse, we die."  

I nod and sip at lukewarm water through the slipstrip of my osmosis  
mask. If I survive this night, I shall always thank God for His  
generosity in allowing me to see this sight.  

Day87:  

Tuk and I emerged from the smoldering northeastern edge of the flame  
forest at noon yesterday, promptly set up camp by the edge of a small  
stream, and slept for eighteen hours straight; making up for three  
nights of no sleep and two grueling days moving without rest through a  
nightmare of flame and ash. Everywhere we looked as we approached the  
hogback ridge that marked the terminus of the forest, we could see  
seedpods and cones burst open with new life for the various fire species  
that had died in the conflagration of the previous two nights. Five of  
our arrestor rods still functioned, although neither Tuk nor I was eager  
to test them another night. Our surviving packbrid collapsed and died  
the instant the heavy load was lifted off its back.  

I awoke this morning at dawn to the sound of running water. ! followed  
the small stream a kilometer to the northeast, following a deepening in  
its sound, until suddenly it dropped from sight.  

The Cleft! I had almost forgotten our destination.  

This morning, stumbling through the fog, leaping from one wet rock to  
another alongside the widening stream, I took a leap to a final boulder,  
teetered there, regained my balance, and looked straight down above a  
waterfall that dropped almost three thousand meters to mist, rock, and  
river far below.  

The Cleft was not carved out of the rising plateau as was the legendary  
Grand Canyon on Old Earth or World Crack on Hebron. In spite of its  
active oceans and seemingly earthlike continents, Hyperion is  
tectonically quite dead; more like Mars, Lusus, or Armaghast in its  
total lack of continental drift. And like Mars and Lusus, HYPerion is  
afflicted with its Deep Ice Ages, although here the periodicity is  
spread to thirty-seven million years by the long ellipse of the  
currently absent binary dwarf. The comlog compares the Cleft to the  
pre-terraformed Mariner Valley on Mars, both being caused by the  
weakening of crust through periodic freeze and thaw over the aeons,  
followed by the flow of subterranean rivers such as the Kans. Then the  
massive collapse, running like a long scar through the mountainous wing  
of the continent Aquila.  

Tuk joined me as I stood on the edge of the Cleft. 1 was naked, rinsing  
the ash smell from my traveling clothes and cassock. I splashed cold  

water over my pale flesh and laughed out loud as the echoes of Tuk's  
shouts came back from the North Wall two thirds of a kilometer away.  
Because of the nature of the crust collapse, Tuk and I stood far out on  
an overhang that hid the South Wall below us. Although perilously  
exposed, we assumed that the rocky cornice which had defied gravity for  
millions of years would last a few more hours as we bathed, relaxed,  
shouted echoing hallos until we were hoarse, and generally acted like  
children liberated from school. Tuk confessed that he had never  
penetrated the full width of the flame forest- nor known anyone who had  
in this season - and announced that, now that the tesla trees were  
becoming fully  

active, he would have at least a three-month wait until he could return.  
He did not seem too sorry and I was glad to have him with me.  

In the afternoon we transported my gear in relays, setting up camp near  
the stream a hundred meters back from the cornice and stacking my  
flowfoam boxes of scientific gear for further sorting in the morning.  

It was cold this evening. After dinner, just before sunset, I pulled on  
my thermal jacket and walked alone to a rocky ledge southwest of where I  
had first encountered the Cleft. From my vantage point far out over the  
river, the view was memorable. Mists rose from unseen waterfalls  
tumbling to the river far below, spray rising in shifting curtains of  
mist to multiply the setting sun into a dozen violet spheres and twice  
that many rainbows.  

I watched as each spectrum was born, rose toward the darkening dome of  
sky, and died. As the cooling air settled into the cracks and caverns  
of the plateau and the warm air rushed skyward, pulling leaves, twigs,  
and mist upward in a vertical gale, a sound ebbed up out of the Cleft as  
if the continent itself was calling with the voices of stone giants,  
gigantic bamboo flutes, church organs the size of palaces, the clear,  
perfect notes ranging from the shrillest soprano to the deepest bass. I  
speculated on wind vectors against the fluted rock wails, on caverns far  
below venting deep cracks in the motionless crust, and on the illusion  
of human voices that random harmonics can generate. But in the end l  
set aside speculation and simply listened as the Cleft sang its farewell  
hymn to the sun.  

I walked back to our tent and its circle of biolumi-nescent lantern  
light as the first fusillade of meteor showers burned the skies overhead  
and distant explosions from the flame forests rippled along the southern  
and western horizons like cannon fire from some ancient war on  
pre-Hegira Old Earth.  

Once in the tent I try the long-range comlog bands but there is nothing  
but static. I suspect that even if the primitive comsats that serve the  
fiberplastic plantations were ever to broadcast this far east, anything  
but the tightest laser or fatline beams would be masked by the mountains  
and tesla activity. On Pacem, few of us at the monastery wore or  
carried personal comlogs, but the datasphere was always there if we  
needed to tap into it. Here there is no choice.  

I sit and listen to the last notes from the canyon wind die, watch the  
skies simultaneously darken and blaze, smile at the sound of Tuk's  
snoring from his bedroll outside the tent, and I think to myself, If  

this is exile, so belt.  

Day 88:  

Tuk is dead. Murdered.  

I found his body when I left the tent at sunrise. He had been sleeping  
outside, not more than four meters from me. He had said that he wished  
to sleep under the stars.  

The murderers cut his throat while he slept. I heard no cry. I did  
dream, however: dreams of Semfa ministering to me during my fever.  
Dreams of cool hands touching my neck and chest, touching the crucifix 1  
have worn since childhood. I stood over Tuk's body, staring at the  
wide, dark circle where his blood had soaked into Hyperion's uncaring  
soil, and I shivered at the thought that the dream had been more than a  
dream - that hands had touched me in the night.  

I confess that I reacted more like a frightened old fool than as a  
priest. I did administer Extreme Unction, but then the panic struck me  
and I left my poor guide's body, desperately searched through the  
supplies for a weapon, and took away the machete I had used in the rain  
forest and the low-voltage maser with which I had planned to hunt small  
game. Whether I would have used a weapon on a human being, even to save  
my own life, I do not know. But, in my panic, I carried the machete,  
the maser, and the powered binoculars to a high boulder near the Cleft  
and searched the region for any signs of the murderers. Nothing stirred  
except the tiny arboreais and gossamers we had seen flitting through the  
trees yesterday. The forest itself seemed  

abnormally thick and dark. The Cleft offered a hundred terraces,  
ledges, and rock balconies to the northeast for entire bands of savages.  
An army could have hidden there in the crags and ever present mists.  

After-thirty minutes of fruitless vigilance and foolish cowardice, I  
returned to the campsite and prepared Tuk's body for burial. It took me  
well over two hours to dig a proper grave in the rocky soil of the  
plateau.  

When it was filled and the formal service was finished, I could think of  
nothing personal to say about the rough, funny little man who had been  
my guide. 'Watch over him, Lord,' I said at last, disgusted at my own  
hypocrisy, sure in my heart that I was mouthing words only to myself.  
'Give him safe passage. Amen."  

This evening 1 have moved my camp half a kilometer north. My tent is  
pitched in an open area ten meters away but I am wedged with my back  
against the boulder, sleeping robes pulled around, the machete and maser  
nearby. After Tuk's funeral I went through the supplies and boxes of  
equipment. Nothing had been taken except for the few remaining'  
arrestor rods.  

Immediately I wondered if someone had followed us through the flame  
forest in order to kill Tuk and strand me here, but I could think of no  
motive for such an elaborate action. Anyone from the plantations could  
have killed us as we slept in the rain forest or - better yet from a  
murderer's point of view - deep in the flame forest where no one would  

wonder at two charred corpses. That left the Bikura. My primitive  
charges.  

I considered returning through the flame forest without the rods but  
soon abandoned the idea. It is probable death to stay and certain death  
to go.  

Three months before the teslas become dormant. One hundred twenty of  
the twenty-six-hour local days. An eternity.  

Dear Christ, why has this come to me.9 And why was I spared last night  
if I am merely to be offered up this night... or next?  

I sit here under the darkening crag and I listen to the suddenly ominous  
moaning rising with the night wind  

from the Cleft and I pray as the sky lights with the blood-red streaks  
of meteor trails.  

Mouthing words to myself.  

Day 9.5:  

The terrors of the past week have largely abated. I find that even fear  
fades and becomes commonplace after days of anticlimax.  

I used the machete to cut small trees for a lean-to, covering the roof  
and side with gamma-cloth and caulking between the logs with mud. The  
back wall is the solid stone of the boulder. I have sorted through my  
research gear and set some of it out, although I suspect that I will  
never use it now.  

I have begun foraging to supplement my quickly diminishing cache of  
freeze-dried food. By now, according to the absurd schedule drawn up so  
long ago on Pacem, I was to have been living with the Bikura for some  
weeks and trading small goods for local food. No matter. Besides my  
diet of bland but easily boiled chalma roots, I have found half a dozen  
varieties of berries and larger fruits that the comlog assures me are  
edible; so far only one has disagreed with me enough to keep me  
squatting all night near the edge of the nearest ravine.  

I pace the confines of the region as restlessly as one of those caged  
pelops that were so prized by the minor padishahs on Armaghast. A  
kilometer to the south and four to the west, the flame forests are in  
full form. In the morning, smoke vies with the shifting curtains of  
mist to hide the sky. Only the near-solid breaks of bestos, the rocky  
soil here on the summit plateau, and the hogback ridges running like  
armor-plated vertebrae northeast from here keep the teslas at bay.  

To the north, the plateau widens out and the undergrowth becomes denser  
near the Cleft for some fifteen kilometers until the way is blocked by a  
ravine a third as deep and half as wide as the Cleft itself. Yesterday  
1 reached this northernmost point and stared across the  

gaping barrier with some frustration. I will try again someday,  
detouring to the east to find a crossing point, but from the telltale  
signs of phoenix across the chasm and the pall of smoke along the  

northeastern horizon, I suspect I will find only the chalma-fi!led  
canyons and steppes of flame forest that are roughed in on the orbital  
survey map 1 carry.  

Tonight I visited Tuk's rocky grave as the evening wind began to wail  
its aeolian dirge. I knelt there and tried to pray but nothing came.  

Edouard, nothing came. I am as empty as those fake sarcophagi that you  
and I unearthed by the score from the sterile desert sands near Tarum  
bel Wadi.  

The Zen Gnostics would say that this emptiness is a good sign; that it  
presages openness to a new level of  

awareness, new insights, new experience.  

Merde.  

My emptiness is only... emptiness.  

I have found the Bikura. Or, rather, they have found me. I will write  
what I can before they come to rouse me from my 'sleep."  

Today I was doing some detail mapping a mere four kilometers north of  
camp when the mists lifted in the midday warmth and I noticed a series  
of terraces on my side of the Cleft that had been hidden until then. 1  
was using my powered glasses to inspect the terraces - actually a series  
of !addered ledges, spires, shelves, and tussocks extending far out onto  
the overhang - when i realized that I was staring at man-made  
habitations.  

The dozen or so huts were crude- rough hovels of heaped chalma fronds,  
stones, and spongeturf- but they were unmistakably of human origin.  

I was standing there irresolute, binoculars still lifted, trying to  
decide whether to climb down to the exposed ledges and confront the  
inhabitants or to retreat to my camp, when I felt that lifting chill  
along the back and neck that tells one with absolute certainty that he  
is no  

longer alone. 1. lowered the binoculars and turned slowly. The Bikura  
were there, at least thirty of them, standing in a semi-circle that left  
me no retreat to the forest.  

I do not know what I expected; naked savages, perhaps, with fierce  
expressions and necklaces of teeth.  

Perhaps I had half expected to find the kind of bearded, wild-haired  
hermits that travelers sometimes encountered in the Mosh6 Mountains on  
Hebron. Whatever 1 had held in mind, the reality of the Bikura did not  
fit the template.  

The people who had approached me so silently were short - none came  
higher than my shoulder - and swathed in roughly woven dark robes that  
covered them from neck to toe. When they moved, as some did now, they  
seemed to glide over the rough ground like wraiths.  

From a distance, their appearance reminded me of nothing so much as a  
gaggle of diminutive Jesuits at a New Vatican enclave.  

I almost giggled then, but realized that such a response might well be a  
sign of rising panic. The Bikura showed no outward signs of aggression  
to cause such a panic; they carried no weapons, their small hands were  
empty. As empty as their expressions.  

Their physiognomy is hard to describe succinctly.  

They are bald. All of them. That baldness, the absence of any facial  
hair, and the loose robes that fell in a straight line to the ground,  
all conspired to make it very difficult to tell the men from the women.  
The group now confronting me- more than fifty by this time - looked to  
be all of roughly the same age: somewhere between forty and fifty  
standard years. Their faces were smooth, the skin tinged with a  
yellowish cast that I guessed might be associated with generations of  
ingesting trace minerals in the chalma and other local plant life.  

One might be tempted to describe the round faces of the Bikura as  
cherubic until, upon closer inspection, that impression of sweetness  
fades and is replaced by another interpretation- placid idiocy. As a  
priest, I have spent enough time on backward worlds to see the  

effects of an ancient genetic disorder variously called Down's syndrome,  
mongolism, or generation-ship legacy. This, then, was the overall  
impression created by the sixty or so dark-robed little people who had  
approached me - I was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald,  
retarded children.  

I reminded myself that these were almost certainly the same group of  
'smiling children' who had slit Tuk's throat while he slept and left him  
to die like a butchered pig.  

The closest Bikura stepped forward, stopped five paces from me, and said  
something in a soft monotone.  

'Just a minute,' I said and fumbled out my cornlog. I tapped in the  
translator function.  

'Beyetet ota menna !or cresfem ket?" asked the short man in front of me.  

I slipped on the hearplug just in time to hear the comlng's translation.  
There was no lag time. The apparently foreign.language was a simple  
corruption of archaic seedship English not so far removed from the  
indigene argot of the plantations. 'You are the man who belongs to the  
cross shape/cruciform,' interpreted the cornlog, giving me two choices  
for the final noun.  

'Yes,' I said, knowing now that these were the ones who had touched me  
the night I slept through Tuk's murder. Which meant that these were the  
ones who had murdered Tuk.  

! waited. The hunting maser was in my pack. The pack was set against  
a small chalma not ten paces from me. Half a dozen Bikura stood between  
me and it. It did not matter. I knew at that instant that I would not  
use a weapon against another human being, even a human being who had  

murdered my guide and might well be planning to murder me at any second.  
I closed my eyes and said a silent Act of Contrition. When 1 opened my  
eyes, more of the Bikura had arrived.. There was a cessation of  
movement, as if a quorum had been filled, a decision reached.  

'Yes,' I said again into the silence, '1 am the one who wears the  
cross." I heard the cornlog speaker pronounce the last word 'cresfem."  

The Bikura nodded in unison and - as if from long practice as altar  
boys- all went to one knee, robes rustling softly, in a perfect  
genuflection.  

I opened my mouth to speak and found that I had nothing to say. 1  
closed my mouth.  

The Bikura stood. A breeze moved the brittle chalma fronds and leaves  
together to make a dry, end-of-summer sound above us. The Bikura  
nearest to me on the left stepped closer, grasped my forearm with a  
touch of cool, strong fingers, and spoke a soft sentence that my comlog  
translated as, 'Come. It is time to go to the houses and sleep."  

It was midafternoon. Wondering if the comlog had translated the word  
'sleep' properly or if it might be an idiom or metaphor for 'die,' I  
nodded and followed them toward the village at the edge of the Cleft.  

Now I sit in the hut and wait. There are rustling sounds. Someone else  
is awake now. 1 sit and wait.  

Day 97:  

The Bikura call themselves the 'Three Score and Ten."  

I have spent the past twenty-six hours talking to them, observing,  
making notes when they take their two-hour, midafternoon 'sleep,' and  
generally trying to record as much data as I can before they decide to  
slit my throat.  

Except now I am beginning to believe that they will not hurt me.  

I spoke to them yesterday after our 'sleep." Sometimes they do not  
respond to questions and when they do the responses are little better  
than the grunts or divergent answers one receives from slow children.  

After their initial question and invitation at our first encounter, none  
of them originated a single query or comment my way.  

! questioned them subtly, carefully, cautiously, and with the  
professional calm of a trained ethnologist. 1 asked the simplest, most  
factual questions possible to  

make sure that the'comlog was functioning properly. It was. But the  
sum total of the answers left me almost as ignorant as I had been  
twenty-some hours before.  

Finally, tired in body and spirit, I abandoned professional subtlety and  
asked the group I was sitting with, 'Did you kill my companion?"  

My three interlocutors did not look up from the weaving they were doing  
on a crude loom. 'Yes,' said the one I have come to think of as Alpha  
because he had been the first to approach me in the forest, 'we cut your  
companion's throat with sharpened stones and held him down and silent  
while he struggled. He died the true death."  

'Why?" I asked after a moment. My voice sounded as dry as a corn husk  
crumbling.  

'Why did he die the true death?" said Alpha, still not looking up.  
'Because all of his blood ran out and he stopped breathing."  

'No,' I said. 'Why did you kill him?"  

Alpha did not respond, but Betty - who may or may not be female and  
Alpha's mate - looked up from her  

loom and said simply, 'To make him die."  

'Why?"  

The responses invariably came back and just as invariably failed to  
enlightened me one iota. After much questioning, I had ascertained that  
they had killed Tuk to make him die and that he had died because he had  
been killed.  

'What is the difference between death and true death?" I asked, not  
trusting the cornlog or my temper at this point.  

The third Bikura, Del, grunted a response that the comlog interpreted  
as, 'Your companion died the true death. You did not."  

Finally, in frustration far too close to rage, I snapped, 'Why not? Why  
didn't you kill me?"  

All three stopped in the middle of their mindless weaving and looked at  
me. 'You cannot be killed because you cannot die,' said Alpha. 'You  
cannot die because you belong to the cruciform and follow the way of the  
cross."  

I had no idea why the damn machine would translate cross as 'cross' one  
second and as 'cruciform' the next.  

Because you belong to the cruciform.  

A chill went through me, followed by the urge to laugh. Had I stumbled  
into that old adventure ho10 clich - the lost tribe that worshiped the  
'god' that had tumbled into their jungle until the poor bastard cuts  
himself shaving or something, and the tribespeople, assured and a bit  
relieved at the obvious mortality of their visitor, offer up their  
erstwhile deity as a sacrifice?  

It would have been funny if the image of Tuk's bloodless face and  
raw-rimmed, gaping wound was not so fresh.  

Their reaction to the cross certainly suggested that l had encountered a  
group of survivors of a once Christian colony - Catholics? - even  

though the data in the comiog insisted that the dropship of seventy  
colonists who had crashed on this plateau four hundred years ago had  
held only Neo-Kerwin Marxists, all of whom should have been indifferent  
if not openly hostile to the old religions.  

I considered dropping the matter as being far too dangerous to pursue,  
but my stupid need to know drove me on. 'Do you worship Jesus?" I  
asked.  

Their blank expressions left no need for a verbal negative.  

'Christ?" I tired again. 'Jesus Christ? Christian? The  

Catholic Church?"  

No interest.  

'Catholic? Jesus? Mary? St Peter? Paul? St Tellhard?"  

The comiog made noises but the words seemed to have no meaning for them.  

'You follow the cross?" I said, flailing for some last contact.  

All three looked at me. 'We belong to the cruciform,' said Alpha.  

I nodded, understanding nothing.  

This evening I fell asleep briefly just before sunset and when I awoke  
it was to the organ-pipe music of the Cleft's nightfall winds. It was  
much louder here on the  

village ledges. Even the hovels seemed to join the chorus as the rising  
gusts whistled and whined through stone gaps, flapping fronds, and crude  
smokeholes.  

Something was wrong. It took me a groggy minute to realize that the  
village was abandoned. Every hut was empty. I sat on a cold boulder  
and wondered if my presence had sparked some mass exodus. The wind  
music had ended and meteors were beginning their nightly show through  
cracks in low clouds when I heard a sound behind me and turned to find  
all seventy of the Three Score and Ten behind me.  

They walked past without a word and went to their huts. There were no  
lights. I imagined them sitting in their hovels, staring.  

I stayed outside for some time before returning to my own hut. After a  
while I walked to the edge of the grassy shelf and stood where rock  
dropped away into the abyss. A cluster of vines and roots clung to the  
cliff face but appeared to end a few meters into space and hang there  
above emptiness. No vine could have been long enough to offer a way to  
the river two kilometers below.  

But the Bikura had come from this direction.  

Nothing made sense. I shook my head and went back to my hut.  

Sitting here, writing by the light of the cornlog diskey, I try to think  

of precautions I can take to insure that I will see the sunrise.  

I can think of none.  

Day 103:  

The more I learn, the less 1 understand.  

I have moved most of my gear to the hut they leave empty for me here in  
the village.  

I have taken photographs, recorded video and audio chips, and imaged a  
full holoscan of the village and its inhabitants. They do not seem to  
care. I project their images and they walk right through them, showing  
no interest. 1 play back their words to them and they smile  

and go back into their hovels to sit for hours, doing nothing, saying  
nothing. I offer them trade trinkets and they take them without  
comment, check to see if they are edible, and then leave them lying. The  
grass is littered with plastic beads, mirrors, bits of colored cloth,  
and cheap pens.  

I have set up the full medical lab but to no avail; the Three Score and  
Ten will not let me examine them, will not let me take blood samples,  
even though I have repeatedly shown them that it is painless, will not  
let me scan them with the diagnostic equipment - will not, in short,  
cooperate in any way. They do not argue. They do not explain. They  
simply turn away and go about their nonbusiness.  

After a Week I still cannot tell the males from the females. Their  
faces remind me of those visual puzzles that shift forms as you stare;  
sometimes Betty's face looks undeniably female and ten seconds later the  
sense of gender is gone and I think of her (him?) as Beta again. Their  
voices undergo the same shift. Soft, well modulated, sexless ... they  
remind me of the poorly programmed homecomps one encounters on backward  
worlds.  

I find myself hoping to catch a glimpse of a naked Bikura. This is not  
easy for a Jesuit of forty-eight standard years to admit. Still, it  
would not be an easy task even for a veteran voyeur. The nudity taboo  
seems absolute. They wear the long robes while awake and during their  
two-hour midday nap. They leave the village area to urinate and  
defecate, and I suspect that they do not remove the loose robes even  
then. They do not seem to bathe. One would suspect that this would  
cause olfactory problems, but there is no odor about these primitives  
except for the slight, sweet smell of chalma. 'You must undress  
sometimes,' I said to Alpha one day, abandoning delicacy in favor of  
information.  

'No,' said AI and went elsewhere to sit and do nothing while fully  
dressed.  

They have no names. I found this incredible at first, but now I am  
sure.  

'We are all that was and will be,' said the shortest  

Bikura, one I think of as female and call Eppie. 'We are the Three  
Score and Ten."  

i searched the cornlog records and confirmed what I suspected: in more  
than sixteen thousand known human societies, none are listed where there  
are no individual names at all. Even in the Lusus hive societies,  
individuals respond to their class category followed by a simple code.  

I tell them my name and they stare. 'Father Paul Dur, Father Paul Dur,'  
repeats the cornlog translator but there is no attempt at even simple  
repetition.  

Except for their mass disappearances each day before sunset and their  
common two-hour sleep time, they do very little as a group. Even their  
lodging arrangements appear random. AI will spend one naptime with  
Betty, the next with Gam, and the third with Zelda or Pete. No system  
or schedule is apparent. Every third day the entire group of seventy  
goes into the forest to forage and returns with berries, chalma roots  
and bark, fruit, and whatever else might be edible. I was sure they  
were vegetarians until I saw Del munching on the cold corpse of an  
infant arboreal. The little primate must have fallen from the high  
branches. It seems then that the Three Score and Ten do not disdain  
meat; they simply are too stupid to hunt and kill it.  

When the Bikura are thirsty they walk almost three hundred meters to a  
stream that cascades into the Cleft.  

In spite of this inconvenience, there are no signs of water skins, jugs,  
or any type of pottery. I keep my reserve of water in ten-gallon  
plastic containers but the villagers take no notice. In my plummeting  
respect for these people, I do not find it unlikely that they have spent  
generations in a village with no handy water source.  

'Who built the houses?" I ask. They have no word for viiiaBe.  

'The Three Score and Ten,' responds Will. I can tell him from the  
others only by a broken finger that did not mend well. Each of them has  
at !cast one such distinguishing feature, although sometimes I think it  
would be easier to tell crows apart.  

'When did they build them?" I ask, although I should know by now that  
any question that starts with 'when'  

will not receive an answer.  

I receive no answer.  

They do go into the Cleft each evening. Down the vines. On the third  
evening, I tried to observe this exodus but six of them turned me back  
from the edge and gently but persistently brought me back to my hut.  

It was the first observable action of the Bikura that had hinted at  
aggression and I sat in some apprehension after they had gone.  

The next evening as they departed I went quietly to my hut, not even  
peering out, but after they returned I retrieved the imager and its  
tripod from where I had left them near the edge. The timer had worked  

perfectly.  

The hOlos showed the Bikura grabbing the vines and scrambling down the  
cliff face as nimbly as the little arboreals that fill the chalma and  
weirwood forest.  

Then they disappeared under the overhang.  

'What do you do when you go down the cliff each evening?" I asked AI the  
next day.  

The native looked at me with the seraphic, Buddha smile I have learned  
to hate. 'You belong to the cruciform,' he said as if that answered  
everything.  

'Do you worship when you go down the cliff?." 1 asked.  

No answer.  

I thought a minute. 'I also follow the cross,' I said, knowing that it  
would be translated as 'belong to the cruciform." Any day now I will not  
need the translator program. But this conversation was too important to  
leave to chance. 'Does this mean that I should join you when you go  
down the cliff face?"  

For a second I thought that AI was thinking. His brow furrowed and I  
realized that it was the first time that I had seen one of the Three  
Score and Ten come close to frowning. Then he said, 'You cannot. You  
belong to the cruciform but you are not of the Three Score and Ten."  

I realized that it had taken every neuron and synapse in his brain to  
frame that distinction.  

'What would you do if ! did go down the cliff face?" 1 asked, expecting  
no response. Hypothetical questions almost always had as much luck as  
my time-based queries.  

This time he did respond. The seraphic smile and untroubled countenance  
returned and Alpha said softly, 'If you try to go down the cliff we will  
hold you down on the grass, take sharpened stones, cut your throat, and  
wait until your blood stops flowing and your heart stops beating."  

I said nothing. I wondered if he could hear the pounding of my heart at  
that moment. Well, 1 thought, at least you don't have to worry any  
longer that they think you are a .god.  

The silence stretched. Finally AI added one more sentence that I have  
been thinking about ever since. 'And if you did it again,' he said, 'we  
would have to kill you again."  

We stared at each other for some time after that; each convinced, I am  
sure, that the other was a total idiot.  

Day 104:  

Each new revelation adds to my confusion.  

The absence of children here has bothered me since my first day in the  
village. Looking back through my notes, 1 find frequent mention of it  
in the daily observations I have dictated to my comlog, but no record of  
it in the personal mishmash here that I call a journal. Perhaps the  
implications were too frightening.  

To my frequent and clumsy attempts at piercing this mystery, the Three  
Score and Ten have offered their usual enlightenment. The person  
questioned smiles beatifically and responds in some non sequitur that  
would make the babble of the Web's worst village idiot seem like sage  
aphorisms in comparison. More often than not, they do not answer at  
all.  

One day I stood in front of the one I have tagged as Dei, stayed there  
until he had to acknowledge my presence, and asked, 'Why are there no  
children?"  

'We are the Three Score and Ten,' he said softly.  

'Where are the babies?"  

No response. No sense of evading the question, merely a blank stare.  

i took a breath. 'Who is the youngest among you?" Del appeared to be  
thinking, wrestling with the concept.  

He was overmatched. I wondered if the Bikura had lost their time sense  
so completely that any such question was doomed. After a minute of  
silence, however, Del pointed to where AI was crouched in the sunlight,  
working with his crude hand loom, and said, 'There is the last one to  
return."  

'To return?" I said. 'From where?"  

Del stared at me with no emotion, not even impatience.  

'You belong to the cruciform,' he said. 'You must know the way of the  
cross."  

I nodded. I knew enough to recognize that in this direction lay one of  
the many conversational illogic-loops that usually derailed our  
dialogues. I hunted for some way to keep a grasp of the thin thread of  
information.  

'Then AI,' I said and pointed, 'is the last to be born. To return. But  
others will... return?"  

I was not sure that I understood my own question.  

How does one inquire about birth when the interviewee has no word for  
child and no concept of time? But Del seemed to understand. He nodded.  

Encouraged, I asked, 'Then when will the next of the Three Score and Ten  
be born? Return?"  

'No one can return until one dies,' he said.  

Suddenly I thought I understood. 'So no new children...  

no one will be returned until someone dies,' I said. 'You replace the  
missing one with another to keep the group at Three Score and Ten?"  

Del responded with the type of silence 1 had come to interpret as  
assent.  

The pattern seemed clear enough. The Bikura were quite serious about  
their Three Score and Ten. They kept the tribal population at seventy - 
the same number recorded on the passenger list of the dropship that  
crashed here four hundred years ago. Little chance of coincidence  
there. When someone died, they allowed a  

child .to be born to replace the adult. Simple.  

Simple but impossible. Nature and biology do not work that neatly.  
Besides the problem of minimum-herd population, there were other  
absurdities. Even though it is difficult to tell the ages of these  
smooth-skinned people, it is obvious that no more than ten years  
separates the oldest from the youngest. Although they act like  
children, I would guess their average age to be in the late thirties or  
mid-forties in standard years.  

So where are the very old? Where are the parents, aging uncles, and  
unmarried aunts? At this rate, the entire tribe will enter old age at  
approximately the same time.  

What happens when they all pass beyond childbearing age and it comes  
time to replace members of the tribe?  

The Bikura lead dull, sedentary lives. The accident rate-even while  
living on the very edge of the Cleft - must be low. There are no  
predators. the seasonal variations are minimal and the food supply  
almost certainly remains stable. But, granted all this, there must have  
been times in the four-hundred-year history of this baffling group when  
disease swept the village, when more than the usual number of vines gave  
way and dropped citizens into the Cleft, or when something caused that  
abnormal cluster of sudden deaths that insurance companies have dreaded  
since time immemorial.  

And then what? Do they breed to make up the difference and then revert  
to their current sexless behavior?  

Are the Bikura so different from every other recorded human society that  
they have a rutting period once every few years - once a decade? - once  
in a lifetime?  

It is doubtful.  

I sit here in my hut and review the possibilities. One is that these  
people live very long lifetimes and can reproduce during most of that  
time, allowing for simple replacement of tribal casualties. Only this  
does not explain their common ages. And there is no mechanism to  
explain any such longevity. The best anti-aging drugs the Hegemony has  
to offer only manage to extend an active lifetime a bit over the hundred  
standard-year mark. Preventive health measures have spread the vitality  

of early middle age well into the late sixties - my age - but except for  
clonal transplants, bioengi-neering, and other perqs for the very rich,  
no one in the Worldweb can expect to begin planning a family when they  
are seventy or expect to dance at their hundred-and-tenth birthday  
party. if eating chalma roots or breathing the pure air of the Pinion  
Plateau had a dramatic effect on retarding aging, it would be a sure bet  
that everyone on Hyperion would be living here munching chalma, that  
this planet would have had a farcaster centuries ago, and that every  
citizen of the Hegemony who has a universal card would be planning to  
spend vacations and retirement here.  

No, a more logical conclusion is that the Bikura live normal-length  
lives, have children at a normal rate, but kill them unless a  
replacement is required. They may practice abstinence or birth control- 
other than slaughtering the newborn- until the entire band reaches an  
age where new blood will soon be needed. A mass-birthing time explains  
the apparent common age of the members of the tribe.  

But who teaches the young? What happens to the parents and other older  
people? Do the Bikura pass along the rudiments of their crude excuse  
for a culture and then allow their own deaths? Would this be a 'true  
death' - the rubbing out of an entire generation? Do the Three Score  
and Ten murder individuals at both ends of the be!l-shaped age curve?  

This type of speculation is useless. I am beginning to get furious at  
my own lack of problem-solving skills.  

Let's form a strategy here and act on it, Paul. Get off your lazy,  
Jesuit ass.  

PROBLEM: How to tell the sexes apart?  

SOLUTION." Cajole or coerce a few of these poor devils into a medical  
exam. Find out what all the sex-role mystery and nudity taboo is about.  
A society that depends upon years of rigid sexual abstinence for  
population control is consistent with my new theory.  

PROBLEM: Why are they so fanatical about maintaining the same Three  
Score and Ten population that the lost dropship colony started with?  

SOLUTION: Keep pestering them until you find out.  

PROBLEM: Where are the children?  

SOLUTION: Keep pressing and poking until you find out. Perhaps the  
evening excursion down the cliff is related to all of this. There may  
be a nursery there. Or a pile of small bones.  

PROBLEM: What/s this 'belong to the cruciform' and 'way of the cross'  
business if not a contorted vestige of the original colonists' religious  
belief?.  

SOLUTION: Find out by going to the source. Could  

their daily descent down the cliff be religious in nature?  

PROBLEM: 'What/S down the cliff face?  

SOLUTION: GO down and see.  
Tomorrow, if their pattern holds true, all threescore and ten of the  

Three Score and Ten will wander into the woods for several hours of  
foraging. This time I will go with them.  
This time I am going over the edge and down the cliff.  
Day 105:  
0930 hours o Thank you, O Lord, for allowing me to see what 1 have seen  

today.  
Thank you, O Lord, for bringing me to this place at  
this time to see the proof of Your Presence.  
1125 hours - Edouard... Edouard!  
I have to return. To show you all! To show ,everyone.  
l've packed everything I need, putting the imager disks and film in a  

pouch I wove from bestos leaves. I have food, water, the maser with its  
weakening charge.  
Tent. Sleep robes.  

If only the arrestor rods had not been stolen!  
The Bikura might have kept them. No, i've searched the hovels and the  
nearby forest. They would have no use for them.  

It doesn't matter!  

I'll leave today if I can. Otherwise, as soon as I can.  

Edouard! I have it all here on the film and disks.  

"00- There is no way through the flame forests today. The smoke drove  

me back even before I penetrated the edge of the active zone.  
I returned to the village and went over the holos.  
There is no mistake. The miracle is real.  
1530 hours- The Three Score and Ten will return any moment.  
What if they know... what ff they can tell by looking  
at me that I have been there?  
I could hide.  
No, there is no need to hide. God did not bring me this far and let me  

see what I have seen only to let me  

die at the hands of these poor children.  

1615 hours- The Three Score and Ten returned and went to their huts  
without giving me a glance.  

I sit here in the doorway of my own hut and cannot keep from smiling,  
from laughing, and from praying.  

Earlier I walked to the edge of the Cleft, said Mass, and took  
Communion. The villagers did not bother to watch.  

How soon can I leave? Supervisor Orlandi and Tuk had said that the  
flame forest was fully active for three local months - a hundred and  
twenty days - then relatively quiet for two. Tuk and I arrived here on  
Day $? ....  

I cannot wait another hundred days to bring the news to the world... to  
all of the worlds.  

If only a skimmer would brave the weather and flame forests and pluck me  
out of here. If only I could access one of the datafix sats that serve  
the plantations.  

Anything is possible. More miracles will occur.  

2350 hours- The Three Score and Ten have gone down into the Cleft. The  
voices of the evening wind choir are rising all around.  

How 1 wish I could be with them now! There, below.  

I will do the next best thing. I will drop to my knees here near the  
cliff edge and pray while the organ notes of the planet and sky sing  
what I now know is a hymn to a real and present God.  

Day i06:  

i awoke today to a perfect morning. The sky was a deep turquoise; the  
sun was a sharp, blood-red stone set within.  

I stood outside my hut as the mists cleared, the arboreals ended their  
morning screech concert, and the air began to warm. Then I went in and  
viewed my tapes and disks.  

I realize that in yesterday's excited scribblings I mentioned nothing of  
what I found down the cliff. I will do so now. I have the disks,  
filmtapes, and comlog notes, but there is always the chance that only  
these personal journals will be found.  

I lowered myself over the cliff edge at approximately 0730 hours  
yesterday morning. The Bikura were all foraging in the forest. The  
descent on vines had looked simple enough - they were bound around one  
another sufficiently to create a sort of ladder in most places - but as  
I swung out and began to let myself down, I could feel my heart pounding  
hard enough to be painful. There was a sheer three-thousand-meter drop  
to the rocks and river below. I kept a tight grip on at least two vines  
at all'times and centimetered my way down, trying not to look at the  
abyss beneath my feet.  

It took me the better part of an hour to descend the hundred and fifty  
meters that I am sure the Bikura can cover in ten minutes. Eventually I  
reached the curve of an overhang.  

Some vines trailed away into space but most of them curled under the  
sheer slab of rock toward the cliff wall thirty meters in. Here and  
there the vines 'appeared to have been braided to form crude bridges  
upon which the Bikura probably walked with little or no help from their  
hands. I crawled along these braided strands, clutching other vines for  
support and uttering prayers i had not said since my boyhood. I stared  
straight ahead as if ! could forget that there was only a seemingly  
infinite expanse of air under those swaying, creaking strands of  
vegetable matter.  

There was a broad ledge along the cliff wall. I allowed three meters of  
it to separate me from the gulf before i squeezed through the vines and  
dropped two and a half meters to the stone.  

The ledge was about five meters wide and it terminated a short distance  
to the northeast where the great mass of the overhang began. I followed  
a path along the ledge to the southwest and had gone twenty or thirty  
paces before I stopped in shock. It was a path. A path worn out of  
solid stone. Its shiny surface had been pushed centimeters below the  
level of the surrounding rock. Farther on, where the path descended a  
curving lip of ledge to a lower, wider level, steps had been cut into  
the stone but even these had been worn to the point that they seemed to  
sag in the middle.  

I sat down for a second as the impact of this simple fact struck me.  
Even four centuries of daily travel by the Three Score and Ten could not  
account for such erosion of solid rock. Someone or something had used  
this path long before the Bikura colonists crashed here.  

Someone or something had used this path for millennia.  

I stood and walked on. There was little noise except for the wind  
blowing gently along the half-kilometer-wide Cleft. I realized that I  

could hear the soft sound of the river far below. 
The path curved left around a section of cliff and ended. 
I stepped out 
onto a broad apron of gently descending stone and stared. 
I believe I 
made the sign of the cross without thinking. 

Because this ledge ran due north and south for a hundred-meter cut of  
cliff, I could look due west along a thirty-kilometer slash of Cleft to  
open sky where the plateau ended. I realized at once that the setting  
sun would illuminate this slab of cliff wall under the overhang each  
evening. It would not have surprised me if -on the spring or autumn  
solstice- Hyperion's sun would, from this vantage point, appear to set  
directly into the Cleft, its red sides just touching the pink-toned rock  
walls.  

I turned left and stared at the cliff face. The worn path led across  
the wide ledge to doors carved into the vertical slab of stone. No,  
these were not merely doors, they were portals, intricately carved  
portals with elaborate stone casements and lintels. To either side of  

these twin doors spread broad windows of stained glass, rising  

at least twenty meters toward the overhang. i went closer and inspected  
the facade. Whoever had built this had done so by widening the area  
under the overhang, slicing a sheer, smooth wail into the granite of the  
plateau, and then tunneling directly into the cliff face. l ran my hand  
over the deeply cut folds of ornamental carving around the door. Smooth.  
Everything had been smoothed and worn and softened by time, even here,  
hidden away from most of the elements by the protective lip of overhang.  
How many thousands of years had this... temple... been carved into the  
south wail of the Cleft?  

The stained glass was neither glass nor plastic but some thick,  
translucent substance that seemed as hard as the surrounding stone to  
the touch. Nor was the window a composite of panels; the colors  
swirled, shaded, melded, and blended into one another like oil on water.  

I removed my flashlight from the pack, touched one of the doors, and  
hesitated as the tail portai swung inward with frictionless ease.  

I entered the vestibule- there is no other word for it- crossed the  
silent ten-meter space, and paused in front of another wall made from  
the same stained-glass materiai that even now glowed behind me, filling  
the vestibule with thick light of a hundred subtle hues. 1 reaiized  
instantly that at the sunset hour the direct rays of the sun would fill  
this room with incredibly deep shafts of color, would strike the  
stained-glass wail in front of me, and would illuminate whatever lay  
beyond.  

I found the single door, outlined by thin, dark metal set into the  
stained-glass stone, and 1 passed through it.  

On Pacem we have - as best we could from ancient photos and holos- 
rebuilt the basilica of St Peter's exactly as it stood in the ancient  
Vatican. Almost seven hundred feet long and four hundred and fifty feet  
wide, the church can hold fifty thousand worshipers when His Holiness  
says Mass. We have never had more than five thousand faithful there  
even when the Council of Bishops of All the Worlds is in assembly every  
forty-three years. In the central apse near our copy of Bernini's  
Throne of St Peter, the great dome rises more than a hundred and thirty  
meters above the floor of the altar.  

It is an impressive space.  

This space was larger.  

In the dim light I used the beam of my flashlight to ascertain that !  
was in a single great room - a giant hall hollowed out of solid stone. I  
estimated that the smooth walls rose to a ceiling that must be only a  
few meters beneath the surface of the crag where the Bikura had set  
their huts. There was no ornamentation here, no furniture, no sign of  
any concession to form or function except for the object that sat  
squarely in the center of this huge, echoing cave of a room.  

Centered in the great hail was an altar - a five-meter-square slab of  
stone left when the rest was hollowed out - and from this altar rose a  
cross.  

Four meters high, three meters wide, carved in the old style of the  
elaborate crucifixes of Old Earth, the cross faced the stained-glass  
wall as if awaiting the sun and the explosion of light that would ignite  
the inlaid diamonds, sapphires, blood crystals, lapis beads, queen's  
tears, onyxes, and other precious stones that I could make out in the  
light of the flashlight as 1 approached.  

I knelt and prayed. Shutting off the flashlight, 1 waited several  
minutes before my eyes could discern the cross in the dim, smoky light.  
This was, without a doubt, the cruciform of which the Bikura spoke. And  
it had been set here a minimum of many thousands of years ago- perhaps  
tens of thousands- long before mankind first left Old Earth. Almost  
certainly before  

Christ taught in Galilee.  

I prayed.  

Today ! sit out in the sunlight after reviewing the holodisks. I have  
confirmed what I barely noticed during my return up the cliff after  
discovering what I now think of as 'the basilica." On the ledge outside  
the basilica there are steps descending farther into the Cleft.  

Although not as worn as the path leading to the basilica, they are  
equally intriguing. God alone knows what other wonders wait below.  

I must let the worlds know of this find!  

The irony of my being the one t°discover this is not lost on me. I f it  
had not been for Armaghast and my exile, this discovery might have  
waited more centuries. The Church might have died before this  
revelation could have brought new life to it.  

But I have found it.  

One way or the other, I will leave or get my message out.  

Day 107:  

I am a prisoner.  

This morning I was bathing in my usual place near where the stream drops  
over the cliff edge when I heard a sound and looked up to see the Bikura  
I call Del staring at me with wide eyes. I called a greeting but the  
little Bikura turned and ran. It was perplexing. They rarely hurry.  

Then I realized that even though I had been wearing trousers at the  
time, I had undoubtedly violated their nudity taboo by allowing Del to  
see me naked from the waist up.  

I smiled, shook my head, finished dressing, and returned to the village.  
If I- had known what awaited me there, I would not have been amused.  

The entire Three Score and Ten stood watching as 1 approached. I  
stopped a dozen paces from Al. 'Good morning,' I said.  

Alpha pointed and half a dozen of the Bikura lunged toward me, seized my  
arms and legs, and pinned me to the ground. Beta stepped forward and  
removed a sharp-edged stone from his or her robes. As I struggled in  
vain to pull free, Beta cut my clothes down the front and pulled apart  
the shreds until I was all but naked.  

I ceased struggling as the mob pressed forward. They stared at my pale,  
white body and murmured to themselves.  

I could feel my heart pounding. 'l am sorry if I have offended your  
laws,' I began, 'but there is no reason..."  

'Silence,' said Alpha and spoke to the talt Bikura with the scar on his  
palm - the one I call Zed. 'He is notof the cruciform."  

Zed nodded.  

'Let me explain,' i began again, but Alpha silenced me  

with a backhanded slap that left my lip bleeding and my ears ringing.  
There had been no more sense of hostility in his action than i would  
have shown in silencing a comlog by throwing a switch.  

'What are we to do with him?" asked Alpha.  

'Those who do not follow the cross must die the true death,' said Beta  
and the crowd shifted forward. Many had sharpened stones in their  
hands. 'Those not of the cruciform must die the true death,' said Beta  
and her voice held the tone of complacent finality common to  
oft-repeated formulae and religious litanies.  

'l follow the cross!" I cried out as the crowd tugged me to my feet. I  
grabbed at the crucifix that hung around my neck and struggled against  
the pressure of many arms. Finally I managed to lift the little cross  
over my head.  

Alpha held up his hand and the crowd paused. In the sudden silence I  
could hear the river three kilometers below in the Cleft. 'He does  
carry a cross,' said Alpha.  

Del pressed forward. 'But he is not of the cruciform! I saw. It was  
not as we thought. He is not of the cruciform!" There was murder in his  
voice.  

I cursed myself for being careless and stupid. The future of the Church  
depended upon my survival and l had thrown both away by beguiling myself  
into believing that the Bikura were dull, harmless children.  

'Those who do not follow the cross must die the true death,' repeated  
Beta. It was a final sentencing.  

Stones were being raised by seventy hands when l shouted, knowing that  
it was either my last chance or my final condemnation. 'i have been  
down the cliff and worshiped at your altar! i follow the cross!'  

Alpha and the mob hesitated. I could see that they were wrestling with  
this new thought. It was not easy for them.  

'! follow the cross and wish to be of the cruciform,' !  

said as calmly as I could. '! have been to your altar."  

'Those who do not follow the cross must die the true death,' called  
Gamma.  

'But he follows the cross,' said Alpha. 'He has prayed in the room."  

'This cannot be,' said Zed. 'The Three Score and Ten pray there and he  
is not of the Three Score and Ten."  

'We knew before this that he is not of the Three Score and Ten,' said  
Alpha, frowning slightly as he dealt with the concept of past tense.  

'He is not of the cruciform,' said Delta-two.  

'Those who are not of the cruciform must die the true death,' said Beta.  

'He follows the cross,' said Alpha. 'Can he not then become of the  
cruciform?"  

An outcry arose. In the general babble and shuffle of forms I pulled  
against restraining hands but their grips remained firm.  

'He is not of the Three Score and Ten and is not of the cruciform,' said  
Beta, sounding more puttied than hostile now. 'How is it that he should  
not die the true death?  

We must take the stones and open his throat so that the blood flows  
until his heart stops. He is not of the cruciform."  

'He follows the cross,' said Alpha. 'Can he not become of the  
cruciform?"  

This time silence followed the question.  

'He follows the cross and has prayed at the room of the cruciform,' said  
Alpha, 'He must not die the true death."  

'All die the true death,' said a Bikura whom I did not recognize. My  
arms were aching from the strain of holding the crucifix above my head.  
'Except the Three Score and Ten,' finished the anonymous Bikura.  

'Because they followed the cross, prayed at the room, and became of the  
cruciform,' said Alpha. 'Must he not then become of the cruciform?"  

I stood there gripping the cold metal of the small cross and awaited  
their verdict. I was afraid to die - l felt afraid - but the larger  
part of my mind seemed almost detached. My greatest regret was that I  
would not be able to send out the news of the basilica to an unbelieving  
universe.  

'Come, we will talk of this,' Beta said to the group and they pulled me  
with them as they trod silently back to the village.  

They have imprisoned me here in my hut. There was no chance to try for  
the hunting maser; several of them held me down while they emptied the  
hut of most of my possessions. They took my clothing, leaving me only  
one of their rough-woven robes to cover myself with.  

The longer I sit here the more angry and anxious 1 become. They have  
taken my comlog, imager, disks, chips... everything. I have a single,  
unopened crate of medical diagnostic equipment left up at the old site,  
but that cannot help me document the miracle in the Cleft. If they  
destroy the things they have taken- and then  

destroy me - there will be no record of the basilica.  

If I had a weapon I could kill the guards and  

Oh dear God what am I thinking? Edouard, what am I to do?  

And even if I survive this- make my way back to Keats- arrange travel  
back to the Web- who would believe me?-'after nine years' absence from  
Pacem because of the quantum-leap time-debt- just an old man returning  
with the same lies he was exiled for- Oh, dear God, if they destroy the  
data let them destroy me as well.  

Day 110:  

' After three days they have decided my fate.  

Zed and the one I think of as Theta-Prime came to get me shortly after  
midday. I blinked as they led me out into the light. The Three Score  
and Ten stood in a wide.  

semicircle near the cliff edge. I fully expected to be thrown over that  
edge. Then I noticed the bonfire.  

I had assumed that the Bikura were so primitive that they had lost the  
art of making and using fire. They did not warm themselves with fire  
and their huts were always dark. I had never seen them cook a meal, not  
even the rare corpse of an arboreal they devoured. But now the fire was  
burning strongly and they were the only ones who could have started it.  
I looked to see what fueled the flames.  

They were burning my clothes, my comiog, my field  

notes, the tape cassettes,- video chips, data disks, the imager ...  
everything that had held information. 1 screamed at them, tried to  
throw myself at the fire, and called them names I had not used since the  
street days of my childhood. They ignored me.  

Finally Alpha came close. 'Yu will become of the cruciform,' he said  
softly.  

I did not care. They led me back to my hut where l wept for an hour.  
There is no guard at the door. A minute ago I stood at the doorway and  
considered running for the flame forests. Then I thought of a much  

shorter but no less fatal run to the Cleft.  

I did nothing.  

The sun will be setting in a short time. Already the winds are rising.  
Soon. Soon.  

Day 112:  

Has it been only two days? It has been forever.  

It did not come off this morning. It did not come off.  

The medscanner's image wafer is right here in front of me but I Still  
cannot believe it. And yet I do. I am of the cruciform now.  

They came for me just before sunset. All of them. I did not struggle  
as they led me to the edge of the Cleft.  

They were more agile on the vines than I could have imagined. I slowed  
them down but they were patient, showing me the easiest footholds, the  
fastest route.  

Hyperion's sun had dropped below low clouds and was visible above the  
rim wall to the west as we walked the final few meters to the basilica.  
The evening windsong was louder than I had anticipated; it was as if we  
were caught amid the pipes of a gigantic church organ. The notes rose  
from bass growls so deep that my bones and teeth resonated in sympathy  
to high, piercing screams that slid easily into the ultrasonic.  

Alpha opened the outer doors and we passed through the antechamber into  
the central basilica. The Three Score and Ten made a wide circle around  
the altar and its tall cross. There was no litany. There was no  
singing.  

There was no ceremony. We simply stood there in silence as the wind  
roared through the fluted columns outside and echoed in the great empty  
room carved into the stone - echoed and resonated and grew in volume  
until I clapped my hands over my ears. And all the while the streaming,  
horizontal rays of sunlight f'dled the hall with deepening hues of  
amber, gold, lapis, and then amber again- colors so deep that they made  
the air thick with light and lay like paint against the skin. l watched  
as the cross caught this light and held it in each of its thousand  
precious stones, held it- it seemed - even after the sun had set and the  
windows had faded to a twilight gray. It was as if the great crucifix  
had absorbed the light and was radiating it toward us, into us. Then  
even the cross was dark and the winds died and in the sudden dimness  
Alpha said softly, 'Bring him along."  

We emerged onto the wide ledge of stone and Beta was there with torches.  
As Beta passed them out to a selected few, I wondered if the Bikura  
reserved fire for ritual purposes only. Then Beta was leading the way  
and we descended the narrow staircase carved into the stone.  

At first I crept along, terrified, clutching at the smooth rock and  
searching for any reassuring projection of root or stone. The drop to  
our right was so sheer and endless that it bordered on being absurd.  
Descending the ancient staircase was far worse than clutching at vines  
on the cliff face above. Here I had to look down each time I placed a  

foot on the narrow, age-slickened slabs. A slip and fall at first  
seemed probable, then inevitable.  

I had the urge to stop then, to return at least to the safety of the  
basilica, but most of the Three Score and Ten were behind me on the  
narrow staircase and there seemed little chance that they would stand  
aside to let me pass. Besides this, and even greater than my fear, was  
the nagging curiosity about what was at the bottom of the staircase. I  
did pause long enough to glance up at the .  

lip of the Cleft three hundred meters above and to see  

that the clouds were gone, the stars were out, and the nightly ballet of  
meteor trails was bright against a sable sky. Then I lowered my head,  
began a whispered recitation  

of the rosary, and followed the torchlight and the Bikura into the  
treacherous depths.  

I could not believe that the staircase would take us all the way to the  
bottom of the Cleft, but it did. When, sometime after midnight, I  
realized that we would be descending all the way down to the level of  
the river, 1 estimated that it would take us until noon of the next day,  
but it did not.  

We reached the base of the Cleft shortly before sunrise. The stars  
still shone in the aperture of sky between cliff walls that rose an  
impossible distance on either side. Exhausted, staggering downward step  
by step, recognizing slowly that there were no more steps, I stared  
upward and wondered stupidly if the stars remained visible there in the  
daylight as they did in a well I had lowered myself into once as a child  
in Villefranche-sur-SaSne.  

'Here,' said Beta. It was the first word uttered in many hours and was  
barely audible over the roar of the river. The Three Score and Ten  
stopped where they were and stood motionless. I collapsed to my knees  
and fell on my side. There was no possibility that I could climb that  
stairway we had just descended. Not in a day. Not in a week. Perhaps  
never. l closed my eyes to sleep but the dull fuel of nervous tension  
continued to burn inside me. I looked out across the floor of the  
ravine. The river here was wider than I had anticipated, at least  
seventy meters across, and the noise of it was beyond mere noise; I felt  
that I was being consumed by a great beast's roar.  

I sat up and stared at a patch of darkness in the opposing cliff wall.  
It was a shadow darker than the shadows, more regular than the serrated  
patchwork of buttresses and crevices and columns that mottled the face  
of the cliff. it was a perfect square of darkness, at least thirty  
meters to a side. A door or hole in the cliff wall. I struggled to my  
feet and looked downriver along the wall we had just descended; yes, it  
was there. The other entrance, the one toward which Beta and the others  
even now were walking, was faintly visible in the starlight.  

l had found an entrance to Hyperion's labyrinth.  

'Did you know that Hyperion was one of the nine labyrinthine worlds?"  
someone had asked me on the dropship. Yes, it was the young priest  

named Hoyt. l had said yes and dismissed the fact. I was interested in  
the Bikura - actually more in the self-inflicted pain of my own exile - 
not the labyrinths or their builders.  

Nine worlds have labyrinths. Nine out of a hundred seventy-six  
Webworlds and another two hundred-some colonial and protectorate  
planets. Nine worlds out of eight thousand or more worlds explored - 
however cursorily - since the Hegira.  

There are planetary archaeohistorians who devote their lives to the  
study of the labyrinths. Not I. I had always found them a sterile  
topic, vaguely unreal. Now I walked toward one with the Three Score and  
Ten as the Kans River roared and vibrated and threatened to douse our  
torches with its spray.  

The labyrinths were dug ... tunneled ... created more than three  
quarters of a million standard years ago. The details were inevitably  
the same, their origins inevitably unsoived.  

Labyrinthine worlds are always Earthlike, at least to 7.9 on the Solmev  
Scale, always circling a G-type star, and yet always restricted to  
worlds that are tectonically dead, more like Mars than Old Earth. The  
tunnels themselves are set deep- usually a minimum of ten kilometers but  
often as deep as thirty - and they catacomb the crust of the planet. On  
Svoboda, not far from Pacem's system, over eight hundred thousand  
kilometers of labyrinth have been explored by remotes.  

The tunnels on each world are thirty meters square and carved by some  
technology still not available to the Hegemony. I read once in an  
archaeological journal that Kemp-HS!tzer and Weinstein had postulated a  
'fusion tunneler' that would explain the perfectly smooth walls and lack  
of tailings, but their theory did not explain where the Builders or  
their machines had come from or why they had devoted centuries to such  
an apparently aimless engineering task. Each of the labyrinthine  
worlds- including Hyperion- has been probed and researched. Nothing has  
ever been found. No signs of  

excavation machinery, no rusting miners' helmets, not a single piece of  
shattered plastic or decomposing stimstick wrapper. Researchers have  
not even identified entrance and exit shafts. No suggestion of heavy  
metals or precious ores has been sufficient to explain such a monumental  
effort. No legend or artifact of the Labyrinth Builders has survived.  
The mystery had mildly intrigued me over the years but never concerned  
me.  

Until now.  

We entered the tunnel mouth. It was not a perfect square. Erosion and  
gravity had turned the perfect tunnel into a rough cave for a hundred  
meters into the cliff wall. Beta stopped just where the tunnel floor  
grew smooth and extinguished his torch. The other Bikura did likewise.  

It was very dark. The tunnel had turned enough to block out any  
starlight that might have entered. I had been in caves before. With  
the torches extinguished, I did not expect my eyes to adapt to the  
near-total darkness.  

But they did.  

Within thirty seconds I began to sense a roseate glow, dim at first,  
then ever richer until the cave was brighter than the canyon had been,  
brighter than Pacem under the glow of its triune moons. The light came  
from a hundred sources- a thousand sources. I was able to make out the  
nature of these sources just as the Bikura dropped reverently to their  
knees.  

The cave walls and ceiling were encrusted with crosses ranging in size  
from a few millimeters to almost a meter long. Each glowed with a deep,  
pink light of its own.  

Invisible in the torchlight, these glowing crosses now suffused the  
tunnel with light. I approached one embedded in the wall nearest me.  
Thirty or so centimeters across, it pulsed with a soft, organic flow.  
This was not something that had been carved out of stone or attached to  
the wall; it was definitely organic, definitely alive, resembling soft  
coral. It was slightly warm to the touch.  

There came the slightest whisper of sound - no, not sound, a disturbance  
in the cool air, perhaps - and 1 turned in time to see something enter  
the chamber.  

The Bikura were still kneeling, their heads down, eyes lowered. I  
remained standing. My gaze never left the thing which moved among the  
kneeling Bikura.  

It was vaguely man-shaped but in no way human. It stood at least three  
meters tall. Even when it was at rest, the silvered surface of the  
thing seemed to shift and flow like mercury suspended in midair. The  
reddish glow from the crosses set into the tunnel walls reflected from  
sharp surfaces and glinted on the curved metal blades protruding from  
the thing's forehead, four wrists, oddly jointed elbows, knees, armored  
back, and thorax. It flowed between the kneeling Bikura, and when it  
extended four long arms, hands extended but fingers clicking into place  
like chrome scalpels, I was absurdly reminded of His Holiness on Pacem  
offering a benediction to the faithful.  

I had no doubt that I was looking at the legendary Shrike.  

At that moment I must have moved or made a sound, for large red eyes  
turned my way and I found myself hypnotized by the dance of light within  
the multifaceted prisms there: not merely reflected light but a fierce,  
blood-bright glow which seemed to burn within the creature's barbed  
skull and pulse in the terrible gems set where God meant eyes to be.  

Then it moved ... or, rather, it did not move but ceased being there  
and was here, leaning less than a meter from me, its oddly jointed arms  
encircling me in a fence of body-blades and liquid silver steel. Panting  
hard but unable to take a breath, I saw my own reflection, face white  
and distorted, dancing across the surface of the thing's metallic shell  
and burning eyes.  

I confess that I felt something closer to exaltation than fear.  
Something inexplicable was happening. Forged in Jesuit logic and  
tempered in the cold bath of science, !  

nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the  
God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the  
mindless whirl of Dervish possession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot,  
and the almost erotic surrender of sance, speaking in tongues, and Zen  
Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just  

how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow  
can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis - the God of Abraham.  

Thinking none of this but feeling all of it, I awaited the embrace of  
the Shrike with the imperceptible tremble of a virgin bride.  

It disappeared.  

There was no thunderclap, no sudden smell of brimstone, not even a  
scientifically sound inrush of air. One second the thing was there,  
surrounding me with its beautiful certainty of sharp-edged death, and  
the next instant it was gone.  

Numbed, I stood there and blinked as Alpha rose and approached me in the  
Bosch-tinted gloom. He stood where the Shrike had stood, his own arms  
extended in a pathetic imitation of the deadly perfection I had just  
witnessed, but there was no sign on Alpha's bland, Bikura face that he  
had seen the creature. He made an awkward, open-handed gesture which  
seemed to include the labyrinth, cave wall, and scores of glowing  
crosses embedded there.  

'Cruciform,' said Alpha. The Three Score and Ten rose, came closer, and  
knelt again. I looked at their placid faces in the soft light and I  
also knelt.  

'You will follow the cross all of your days,' said Alpha, and his voice  
carried the cadence of litany. The rest of the Bikura repeated the  
statement in a tone just short of a chant.  

'You wR! be of the cruciform all of your days,' said Alpha, and as the  
others repeated this he reached out and pulled a small cruciform away  
from the cave wall. It was not more than a dozen centimeters long and  
it came away from the wall with the faintest of snaps. Its glow faded  
even as I watched. Alpha removed a small thong from his robe, tied it  
around small knobs at the top of the cruciform, and held the cross above  
my head. 'You  

will be of the cruciform now and forever,' he said.  

'Now and forever,' echoed the Bikura.  

'Amen,' I whispered.  

Beta signaled that I should open the front of my robe.  

Alpha lowered the-small cross until it hung around my  

neck. It eit cool against my chest; the back of it was perfectly flat,  
perfectly smooth.  

The Bikura stood and wandered toward the cave entrance, apparently  
apathetic and indifferent once again. I watched them leave and then I  
gingerly touched the cross, lifted and inspected it. The cruciform was  
cool, inert. If it had truly been living a few seconds earlier, it  
showed no sign of it now. It continued to feel more like coral than  
crystal or rock; there was no sign of any adhesive material on the  
smooth back of it. I speculated on photochemical effects that would  
have created the luminescent quality. I speculated on natural phos- 
phors, bioluminescence, and on the chances that evolution would shape  
such things. I speculated on what, if anything, their presence here had  
to do with the labyrinth and on the aeons necessary to raise this  
plateau so the river and canyon could slice through one of the tunnels.  
I speculated on the basilica and its makers, on the Bikura, on the  
Shrike, and on myself. Eventually I ceased speculating and closed my  
eyes to pray.  

When I emerged from the cave, the cruciform cool against my chest under  
the robe, the Three Score and Ten were .obviously ready to begin the  
three-kilometer climb up the staircase. I looked up to'see a pale slash  
of morning sky between the walls of the Cleft.  

'No!" I shouted, my voice almost lost against the roar of the river. 'I  
need rest. Rest!" I sank to my knees on the sand but half a dozen of  
the Bikura approached, pulled me gently to my feet, and moved me toward  
the staircase.  

I tried, the Lord knows that I tried, but two or three hours into the  
climb I felt my legs give way and I collapsed, sliding across the rock,  
unable to stop my six-hundred-meter fall to the rocks and river. 1  
remember grasping at the cruciform under the thick robe and then half a  
dozen hands stopped my slide, lifted me, carried me. Then I remember no  
more.  

Until this morning. 1 woke to a sunrise pouring light through the  
opening of my hut. I wore only the robe and a touch assured me that the  
cruciform was still hanging from its fibrous thong. As I watched the  
sun lift over the  

forest, I realized that I had lost a day, that somehow 1 had slept  
through not only my ascent up that endless staircase (how could these  
little people carry me two and a half vertical kilometers?) but through  
the next day and night as well*  

I looked around my hut. My comlog and other recording devices were  
gone. Only my medscanner and a few packets of anthropological software  
made useless by the destruction of my other equipment remained. I shook  
my head and went up to the stream to wash.  

The Bikura appeared to be sleeping. Now that I had participated in  
their ritual and 'become of the cruciform,' they seemed to have lost  
interest in me. As 1 stripped to bathe, I decided to take no interest  
in them. I decided that I would leave as soon as I was strong enough. I  
would find a way around the flame forests if necessary. I could descend  
the staircase and follow the Kans if I had to. I knew more than ever  
that word of these miraculous artifacts had to be brought to the outside  
world.  

I pulled off the heavy robe, stood pale and shivering in the morning  
light, and went to lift the small cruciform from my chest.  

It did not come off.  

It lay there as if it were part of my flesh. I pulled, scraped, and  
tore at the thong until it snapped and fell away. I clawed at the  
cross-shaped lump on my chest. It did not come off. It was as if my  
flesh had sealed itself around the edges of the cruciform. Except for  
the scratches from my fingernails, there was no pain or physical  
sensation in the cruciform or surrounding flesh, only sheer terror in my  
soul at the thought of this thing attached to me. After the first rush  
of panic subsided, 1 sat a minute and then hastily pulled on my robe and  
ran back to the village.  

My knife was gone, my maser, scissors, razor - everything that might  
have helped me peel back the growth on my chest. My nails left bloody  
tracks across the red welt and my chest. Then I remembered the  
medscanner. 1 passed the transceiver over my chest, read the diskey  
display, shook my head in disbelief, and then ran an entire body scan.  
After a while I keyed in a request for hard copies of the scan results  
and sat motionless for a very long time..  

I sit here now holding the image wafers. The cruciform is quite visible  
on both the sonic and k-cross images *.. as are the internal fibers  
that spread like thin tentacles, like roots, throughout my body.  

Excess ganglia radiate from a thick nucleus above my sternum to  
filaments everywhere- a nightmare of nematodes. As well as I can tell  
with my simple field scanner, the nematodes terminate in the amygdala  
and other basal ganglia in each cerebral hemisphere. My temperature,  
metabolism, and !ymphocyte level are normal.  

There has been no invasion of foreign tissue.  

According to the scanner, the nematodic filaments are the result of  
extensive but simple metastasis. According to the scanner, the  
cruciform itself is composed of familiar tissue... the DNA is mine.  

I am of the cruciform.  

Day 116:  

Each day I pace the confines of my cage - the flame * forests to the  
south and east, the forested ravines to the northeast, and the Cleft to  
the north and west. The Three Score and Ten will not let me descend  
into the Cleft beyond the basilica. The cruciform will not let me get  
more than ten kilometers from the Cleft.  

At first I could not believe this. I had resolved to enter the flame  
forests, trusting to luck and to God's help to see me through. But I  
had gone no more than two kilometers into the fringes of the forest when  
pain struck me in the chest and arms and head. I was sure that !-was  
having a massive heart attack. But as soon as i turned back toward the  
Cleft the symptoms ceased. I experimented for some time and the results  
were invariably the same. Whenever I ventured deeper into the flame  
forest, away from the Cleft, the pain would return and increase in  

severity until I turned back.  

I begin to understand other things. 'Yesterday I  

happened across the wreckage of the original seedship shuttle as I  
explored to the north. Only a rusted, vine-enmeshed wreck of' metal  
remains among the rocks at the edge of the flame forest near the ravine.  
But crouching among the exposed alloy ribs of the ancient craft, I could  
imagine the rejoicing of the seventy survivors, their short voyage to  
the Cleft, their eventual discovery of the basilica, and ... and what?  
Conjectures beyond that point are useless, but suspicions remain.  
Tomorrow I will attempt another physical exam of one of the Bikura.  
Perhaps now that I am 'of the cruciform' they will allow it.  

Each day I do a reedscan of myself. The nematodes remain - perhaps  
thicker, perhaps not. l am convinced that they are purely parasitic  
although my body has shown no signs of this. I peer at my face in the  
pool near the waterfall and see only the same long, aging countenance  
that I have learned to dislike in recent years: This niorning, while  
gazing at my image in the water, l opened my mouth wide, half thinking  
that I would see gray filaments and nematode clusters growing from the  
roof of my mouth and the back of my throat. There was nothing.  

Day liT:  

The Bikura are sexless. Not celibate or herma-phroditic or undeveloped  

-sexless. They are as devoid of external or internal genitalia as a  
child's flowfoam doll. There is no evidence that the penis or testes or  
comparable female organs have atrophied or been surgically altered.  
There is no sign that they ever existed.  

Urine is conducted through a primitive urethra terminating in a small  
chamber contiguous with the anus - a sort of crude cloaca.  

Beta allowed the examination. The reedscanner confirmed what my eyes  
would not believe. Del and Theta also agreed to be scanned. I have  
absolutely no doubt that the rest of the Three Score and Ten are equally  
sexless. There is no sign that they have been... altered.  

i would suggest that they had all been born that way but from what kind  
of parents?. And how do these sexless lumps of human clay plan to  
reproduce? It must be tied in with the cruciform in some way.  

When I was finished with their medscans I stripped and studied myself.  
The cruciform rises from my chest like pink scar tissue, but I am still  
a man.  

For how long?  

Day 133:  

Alpha is dead.  

I was with him three mornings ago when he fell. We were about three  
kilometers east, hunting for chalma tubers in the large boulders near  
the edge of the Cleft. It had been raining most of the past two days  
and the rocks were quite slippery. I looked up from my own scrambling  

just in time to see Alpha lose his footing and go sliding down a broad  
slab of stone, over the edge. He did not shout. The only sound was the  
rasp of his robe against the rock, followed several seconds later by the  
sickening dropped-melon sound of his body striking a ledge eighty meters  
below.  

It took me an hour to find a route down to him. Even before I began the  
treacherous descent I knew it was too late to help. But it was my duty.  

Alpha's body was half wedged between two large rocks. He must have died  
instantly; his arms and legs were splintered and the right side of his  
skull had been crushed. Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock  
like the refuse of a sad picnic. I wept as I stood over the little  
body. I do not know why I wept, but I did. And as l wept I  
administered Extreme Unction and prayed that God would accept the soul  
of this poor, sexless little person. Later I wrapped the body in vines,  
laboriously climbed the eighty meters of cliff, and - pausing frequently  
to pant with exhaustion- pulled the broken corpse up to me.  

There was little interest as I carried the body of Alpha into the Bikura  
village. Eventually Beta and half a dozen  

others wandered over to stare down indifferently at the corpse. No one  
asked me how he had died. After a few minutes the small crowd  
dispersed.  

Later l'carried Alpha's body to the promontory where I had buried Tuk so  
many weeks earlier. I was digging the shallow grave with a flat stone  
when Gamma appeared. The Bikura's eyes widened and for a brief second I  
thought I saw emotion cross those bland features.  

'What are you doing?" asked Gamma.  

'Burying him." I was too tired to say more. I leaned against a thick  
chalma root and rested.  

'No." It was a command. 'He is of the cruciform."  

I stared as Gamma turned and walked quickly back to the village. When  
the Bikura was gone, I pulled off the crude fiber tarp I had draped over  
the corpse.  

Alpha was, without any doubt, truly dead. It no longer mattered to him  
or the universe whether he was of the cruciform or not. The fall had  
stripped him of most of his clothes and all of his dignity. The right  
side of his skull had been cracked and emptied like a breakfast egg.  

One eye stared sightlessly toward Hyperion's sky through a thickening  
film while the other looked out lazily from under a drooping lid. His  
rib cage had been splintered so thoroughly that shards of bone protruded  
from his flesh. Both arms were broken and his left leg had been twisted  
almost off. I had used the medscanner to perform a perfunctory autopsy  
and it had revealed massive internal injuries; even the poor devil's  
heart had been pulped by the force of the fall.  

I reached out and touched the cold flesh. Rigor mortis was setting in.  
My fingers brushed across the cross-shaped welt on his chest and I  

quickly pulled. my hand  

away. The cruciform was warm.  

'Stand away."  

I looked up to see Beta and the rest of the Bikura standing there. I  
had no doubt that they would murder me in a second if I did not move  
away from the corpse.  

As I did so, an idiotically frightened part of my mind noted that the  
Three Score and Ten were now the Three Score and Nine. It seemed funny  
at the time.  

The Bikura lifted the body and moved back toward the village. Beta  
looked at the sky, looked at me, and said:  

'It is almost time. You will come."  

We went down into the Cleft. The body was carefully tied into a basket  
of vines and lowered with us.  

The sun was not yet illuminating the interior of the basilica when they  
set Alpha's corpse on the broad altar and removed his remaining rags.  

I do not know what I expected next - some ritual act of cannibalism  
perhaps. Nothing would have surprised me. Instead, one of the Bikura  
raised his arms, just as the first shafts of colored light entered the  
basilica, and intoned, 'You will follow the cross all of your days."  

The Three Score and Nine knelt and repeated the sentence. I remained  
standing. I did not speak.  

'You will be of the cruciform all of your days,' said the little Bikura  
and the basilica echoed to the chorus of voices repeating the phrase.  
Light the color and texture of clotting blood threw a huge shadow of the  
cross on the far wall.  

'You will be of the cruciform now and forever and ever,' came the chant  
as the winds rose outside and the organ pipes of the canyon wailed with  
the voice of a tortured child.  

When the Bikura stopped chanting I did not whisper 'Amen." I stood there  
while the others turned and left with the sudden, total indifference of  
spoiled children who have lost interest in their game.  

'There is no reason to stay,' said Beta when the others had gone.  

'l want to,' I said, expecting a command to leave. Beta turned without  
so much as a shrug and left me there. The light dimmed. I went outside  
to watch the sun set and when I returned it had begun.  

Once, years ago in school, I saw a time-lapse holo showing the  
decomposition of a kangaroo mouse. A week's slow work of nature's  
recycling had been accelerated to thirty seconds of horror. There was  
the sudden, almost comic bloating of the little corpse, then the  
stretching of flesh into lesions, followed by the sudden  

appearance of maggots in the mouth, eyes, and open sores, and finally  
the sudden and incredible corkscrew cleaning of meat from the bones- 
there is no other phrase that fits the image- as the pack of maggots  
spiraled right to left, head to tail, in a time-lapsed helix of carrion  
consumption that left behind nothing but bones and gristle and hide.  

Now it was a man's body I watched.  

I stopped and stared, the last of the light fading quickly. There was  
no sound in the echoing silence of the basilica except for the pounding  
of my pulse in my own ears. I stared as Alpha's corpse 'first twitched  
and then visibly vibrated, almost !evitating off the altar in the  
spastic violence of sudden decomposition. For a few seconds the  
cruciform seemed to increase in size and deepen in color, glowing as red  
as raw meat, and I imagined then that I caught a glimpse of the network  
of filaments and nematodes holding the disintegrating body together like  
metal fibers in a sculptor's melting model. Theflesh flowed.  

I stayed in the basilica that night. The area around the altar remained  
!it by the glow of the cruciform on Alpha's chest. When the corpse  
moved the light would cast strange shadows on the walls.  

I did not leave the basilica until Alpha left on the third day, but most  
of the visible changes had taken place by the end of that first night.  
The body of the Bikura I had named .Alpha was broken down and rebuilt as  
1 watched. The corpse t.hat was left was not quite Alpha and not quite  
not Alpha, but it was intact. The face was a flowfoam do!l's face,  
smooth and unlined, features stamped in a slight smile. At sunrise of  
the third day, i saw the corpse's chest begin to rise and fall and I  
heard the first intake of breath- a rasp like water being poured into a  
leather pouch. Shortly before noon I left  

the basilica to climb the vines.  

I followed Alpha.  

He has not spoken, will not reply. His eyes have a fixed, unfocused  
look and occasionally he pauses as if he hears distant voices calling.  

No one paid attention to us when we returned to the  

village. Alpha went to a hut and sits there now. 1 sit in mine. A  
minute ago I opened my robe and ran my fingers across the welt of the  
cruciform. It lies benignly under the flesh of my chest. Waiting.  

Day 140:  

I am recovering from my wounds and the loss of blood. It cannot be cut  
out with a sharpened stone.  

It does not like pain. I lost consciousness long before the pain or  

loss of blood demanded it. 
Each time I awoke and resumed cutting, I 
would be made to pass out. 
It does not like pain. 
Day 158: 

Alpha speaks some now. He seems duller, slower, and only vaguely aware  
of me (or anyone else) but he eats and moves. He appears to recognize  
me to some extent.  

The reedscanner shows the heart and internal organs of a young man - 
perhaps of a boy of sixteen.  

I must walt about another Hyperion month and ten days-about fifty days  
in all- until the flame fores become quiet enough for me to try to walk  
out, pain or no pain. We will see who can stand the most  

pain.  

Day 173:  

Another death.  

The one called Will - the one with the broken finger - had been missing  
for a week. Yesterday the Bikura went several kilometers northeast as  
if following a beacon, and found the remains near the great ravine.  

Evidently a branch had snapped while he was climbing to grasp some  
¢halma fronds. Death must have been instantaneous when he broke his  
neck, but it is where he fell that is important. The body - if one  
could call it  

that - was lying between two great mud cones marking the burrows of the  
large red insects that Tuk called fire mnntises. Carpet beetles might  
have been a more apt phrase. In the past few days the insects had  
stripped the c6rpse clean to the bone. Little was left to be found  
except the skeleton, some random shreds of tissue and tendon, and the  
cruciform - still attached to the rib cage like some splendid cross  
packed in the sarcophagus of a long-dead pope.  

It is terrible, but I cannot help but feel some small sense of triumph  
beneath the sadness. There is no way thai the cruciform can regenerate  
something out of these bare bones; even the terrible illogic of this  
accursed parasite must respect the imperative of the law of conservation  
of mass. The Bikura I called Will has died the true death. The Three  
Score and Ten truly are the Three Score and Nine from this time on.  

Day 174:  

I am a fool.  

Today I inquired about Will, about his dying the true death. I was  
curious at the lack of reaction from the Bikura. They had retrieved the  
cruciform but left the skeleton lying where they had found it; there was  
no attempt to carry the remains to the basilica. During the night I had  
become concerned that I would be made to fill the roll of the missing  
member of the Three Score and Ten. 'It is very sad,' I said, 'that one  
of you has died the true death. What is to become to the Three Score  
and Ten?"  

Beta stared'at me. 'He cannot die the true death,' said the bald little  
androgyny. 'He is of the cruciform."  

Somewhat later, while continuing my medscans of the tribe, I discovered  
the truth. The one 1 have tagged as Theta looks the same and acts the  
same, but now carries two cruciforms embedded in his flesh. I have no  
doubt that this is one Bikura who will tend toward corpulence in coming  
years, swelling and ripening like some obscene E coli cell in a petri  
dish. When he/she/it dies, two will leave the tomb and the Three Score  
and Ten will be complete once more.  

I believe I am going mad.  

Day 195:  

Weeks of studying the damn parasite and still no clue as to how it  
functions. Worse, I no longer care. What I care about now is more  
important.  

Why has GOd allowed this obscenity?  

Why have the Bikura been punished this way?  

Why was I chosen to suffer their fate?  

I ask these questions in nightly prayers but I hear no answers, only the  
blood song of the wind from the Cleft.  

Day 214:  

The last ten pages should have covered all of my field notes and  
technical conjectures. This will be my last entry before attempting the  
quiescent flame forest in the morning.  

There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human  
societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and  
have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.  

Edouard, I have spent-so many hours wrestling with my faith - my lack of  
faith - but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world,  
riddied as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow  
rediscovered a strength of belief the likes of which I have not known  
since you and I were boys. I now understand the need for faith- pure,  
blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith- as a small life preserver in the  
wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally  
indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.  

Day after day I have tried to leave the Cleft area and day after day I  
have suffered pain so terrible that it has become a tangible part of my  
world, like the too small  

sun or the green and lapis sky. Pain has become my ally, my guardian  
angel, my remaining link with humanity.  

The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I  
am willing to use it to serve my purposes.  

And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass  
of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless  
avoidance of death by any means.  

I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an  
eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred - I still 'hold to that as a  
core element of the Church's thought and teachings these past  
twenty-eight hundred years when life has been so cheap - but even more  
sacred is the soul.  

I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was  
offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life  
such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to  
die, it must do so - but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its  
rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well  

-bravely and firm of faith - like the millions who have gone before us, keeping 
faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated  
silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and  
pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerfully  
that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all  
that pain, all those sacrifices.  

All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of  
logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope  
or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if they have been able  
to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I... and  
so must the Church.  

! no longer believe that any surgery or treatment can cure me of this  
thing that infests me, but if someone can separate it and study it and  
destroy it, even at the cost of my death, l will be well satisfied.  

The flame forests are as quiet as they will ever be. To bed now. I  
leave before dawn.  

Day. 215:  

There is no way out.  

Fourteen kilometers into the forest. Stray fires and bursts of current,  
but penetrable. Three weeks of walking would have got me through.  

The cruciform will not let me go.  

The pain was like a heart attack that would not stop.  

Still I staggered forward, stumbling and crawling through the ash.  
Eventually I lost consciousness. When I came to I was crawling toward  
the Cleft. I would turn away, walk a kilometer, crawl fifty meters,  
then lose consciousness again and awakeback where I had started.  

All day this insane battle for my body went on.  

Before sunset the Bikura entered the forest, found me  

five kilometers from the Cleft, and carried me back.  

Dear Jesus, why have you let this be?  

There is no hope now unless someone comes looking for me.  

Day 223:  

Again the attempt. Again the pain. Again the failure.  

Day257:  

I am sixty-eight standard years old today. Work goes on with the chapel  
I am building near the Cleft.  

Attempted to descend to the river yesterday but was turned back by Beta  
and four others.  

Day 280:  

One local year on Hyperion. One year in purgatory.  

Or is it hell?  

Day311:  

Working on quarrying stones on the ledges below the shelf where the  
chapel is going up and I made the discovery today: the arrestor rods.  
The Bikura must have thrown them over the edge when they murdered Tuk  
that night two hundred and twenty-three days ago.  

These rods would allow me to penetrate the flame forest at any time if  
the cruciform would allow it. But it will not. If only they had not  
destroyed my medkits with the painkillers! But still, sitting here  
holding the rods today, I have an idea.  

My crude experiments with the medscanner have continued.  

Two weeks ago when Theta broke his leg in three places, I observed the  
reaction of the cruciform. The parasite did its best to block the pain;  
Theta was unconscious much of the time and his body was producing  
incredible quantities of endorphins. But the break was a very painful  
one and after four days the Bikura slashed Theta's throat and took his  
body to the basilica. It was easier for the cruciform to resurrect his  
corpse than to tolerate such pain over a long period. But before his  
murder my scanner showed an appreciable retreat of the cruciform  
nematodes from some parts of the central nervous system.  

I do not know if it would be possible to inflict on oneself - or to  
tolerate - levels of nonlethal pain sufficient to drive the cruciform  
out completely, but I am sure of one thing: the Bikura would not allow  
it.  

Today I sit on the ledge below the half-finished chapel and I consider  
possibilities.  

Day 438:  

The chapel is finished. It is my !ife's work.  

Tonight, when the Bikura went down into the Cleft for their daily parody  
of worship, I said Mass at the altar of the newly erected chapel. I had  

baked the bread from chalma flour and I am sure that it must have tasted  
of that bland, yellow leaf, but to me the taste was exactly like that of  
the first Host I had partaken of during my first Holy Communion in  
Villefranche-sur-Sa/}ne some sixty standard years earlier.  

!n the morning 1 will do what I have planned. Everything is in  
readiness: my journals and the medscan wafers will be in the pouch of  
woven bestos fibers. That is the best I can do.  

The consecrated wine was only water, but in the dim light of sunset it  
looked blood red and tasted of communion wine.  

The trick will be to penetrate deep enough into the flame forest. I  
will have to trust that there is enough incipient activity in and from  
the tesla trees even during the quiet periods.  

Goodbye, Edouard. I doubt if you are still alive, and should you be, 1  
see no way that we could be reunited, separated aswe are not only by  
years of distance but by a much wider gulf in the form of a cross. My  
hope of seeing you again shall not be placed on this life but on the one  
to come. Strange to hear me speak like this again, is it not? I must  
tell you, Edouard, that after all these decades of uncertainty, and with  
great fear of what lies ahead, my heart and soul are nonetheless at  
peace.  

Oh, my God,  

I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, And I detest all my sins,  
Because of the loss of heaven And the pains of hell,  

But most of all because I have offended Thee, My God,  

Who art all good  

And deserving of all my love."  

I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to  

confess my sins, to do penance,  

And to amend my life,  

Amen.  

2400 hours:  

The sunset comes through the open chapel window and bathes the altar,  
the crudely carved chalice, and me  

in light. The wind from the Cleft rises in the last such chorus that - 
with luck and God's mercy - I will ever hear.  

'That is the final entry,' said Lenar Hoyt.  

When th priest quit reading, the six pilgrims at the table raised their  
faces toward him as if they were awakening from a common dream. The  
Consul glanced upward and saw that Hyperion was much closer now, filling  

a third of the sky, banishing the stars with its cold radiance.  

'I arrived some ten weeks after. 1 had last seen Father Dur6,'  
continued Father Hoyt. His voice was a hoarse rasp. 'More than eight  
years had passed on Hyperion .. seven years since the last entry in  
Father Dul's journal." The priest was visibly in pain now, his face  
paled to a sick !uminescence and filmed with perspiration.  

'Within a month I found my way to Perecebo Plantation upriver from Port  
Romance,' he continued, forcing some strength into his voice. 'My  
assumption was that the fiberplastic growers might tell me the truth  
even if they would have nothing to do with the consulate or Home Rule  
Authorities. I was right. The administrator at Perecebo, a man named  
Orlandi, remembered Father Dur, as did Orlandi's new wife, the woman  
named Semfa whom Father Dur6 mentioned in his journals.  

The plantation manager had tried to mount several rescue operations onto  
the Plateau, but an unprecedented series of active seasons in the flame  
forests had made them abandon their attempts. After several years they  
had given up hope that Dur or their man Tuk could still be alive.  

'Nonetheless, Orlandi recruited two expert bush pilots to fly a rescue  
expedition up the Cleft in two plantation skimmers. We stayed in the  
Cleft itself for as long as we could, trusting to terrain-avoidance  
instruments and luck to get us to Bikura country. Even with bypassing  
most of the flame forest that way, we lost one of the skimmers and four  
people to tesla activity."  

Father Hoyt paused and swayed slightly. Gripping the  

edge of the table to steady himself, he cleared his throat and said,  
'There's little else to tell. We located the Bikura village. There  
were seventy of them, each as stupid and uncommunicative as Dur's notes  
had suggested.  

I managed to ascertain from them that Father Dur6 had died while trying  
to penetrate the flame forest. The bestos pouch had survived and in it  
we found his journals and medical data." Hoyt looked at the others a  
second and then glanced down. 'We persuaded them to show us where  
Father Dur6 had died,' he said. 'They...  

ah... they had not buried him. His remains were badly burned and  
decomposed but complete enough to show us that the intensity of the  
tesla charges had destroyed the... the cruciform... as well as his  
body.  

'Father Dur6 had died the true death We returned the remains to the  
Perecebo Plantation where he was buried following a full funeral Mass."  
Hoyt took a deep breath. 'Over my strong objections, M. Orlandi  
destroyed the Bikura village and a section of the Cleft wall with shaped  
nuclear charges he had brought from the plantation. I do not believe  
that any of the Bikura could have survived. As far as we could tell,  
the entrance to the labyrinth and the so-called basilica also must have  
been destroyed in the landslide.  

'1 had sustained se/eral injuries during the expedition and thus had to  
remain at the plantation for several months before returning to the  

northern continent and booking passage to Pacem. No one knows of these  
journals or their contents except M. Orlandi, Monsignor Edouard, and  
whichever of his superiors Monsignor Edouard chose to tell. As far as I  
know, the Church has issued no declaration relating to the journals of  
Father Paul Dur6."  

Father Hoyt had been standing and now he sat. Sweat dripped from his  
chin and his face was blue-white in the reflected light of Hyperion.  

'Is that... all?" asked Martin Silenus.  

'Yes,' managed Father Hoyt.  

'Gentlemen and lady,' said Het Masteen, 'it is late. 1 suggest that you  
gather your luggage and rendezvous at our friend the Consui's ship on  
sphere eleven in thirty  

minutes or sooner. I will be using one of the tree's drop-ships to join  
you later."  

Most of the group was assembled in less than fifteen minutes. The  
Templars had rigged a gangway from a work pier on the interior of the  
sphere to the ship's top-tier balcony, and the Consul led the way into  
the lounge as crew clones stowed luggage and departed.  

'A fascinating old instrument,' said Colonel Kassad as he ran one hand  
across the top of the Steinway.  

'Harpsichord?"  

'Piano,' said the Consul. 'Pre-Hegira. Are we all here?"  

'Everyone except Hoyt,' said Brawne Lamia as she.  

took a seat in the projection pit.  

Het Masteen entered. 'The Hegemony warship has granted permission for  
you to descend to Keats's space-port,' said the Captain. He glanced  
around. 'I will send a crew member to see if M. Hoyt needs  
assistance."  

'No,' said the Consul. He modulated his voice. 'I'd like to get him.  
Can you tell me the way to his quarters?"  

The treeship Captain looked at the Consul for a long second and then  
reached into the folds of his robe. 'Bon voyage,' he said, handing over  
a wafer. 'I will see you on the planet, sometime before our midnight  
departure time from the Shrike's Temple in Keats."  

The Consul bowed. 'It was a pleasure traveling within the protective  
branches of the Tree, Het Masteen,' he said formally. Turning to the  
others, he gestured.  

'Please make yourselves comfortable in the lounge or the library on the  
desk below this. The ship will see to your needs and answer any  
questions you might have.  

We will depart as soon as Father Hoyt and I return."  

The priest's environment pod was halfway up the treeship, far out on a  
secondary branch. As the Consul expected, the comlog direction wafer  
Het Masteen had given him also served as a palmlock override. After  
useless minutes tapping the announcer chime and pounding on the access  
portal, the Consul triggered the override and stepped into the pod.  

Father Hoyt was on his knees, writhing in the center of the grass  
carpet. Bedclothes, gear, garments, and the contents of a standard  
medkit were strewn on the floor around him. He had torn off his tunic  
and collar and sweated through his shirt so that it now hung in damp  
folds, ripped and tattered where he had clawed through the fabric.  
Hyperion light seeped through the pod wall, making the bizarre tableau  
appear to be staged underwater - or, thought the Consul, in a cathedral.  

Lenar Hoyt's face contorted in agony as his hands raked at his chest.  
Muscles on his exposed forearms writhed like living creatures moving  
beneath his pale tarp of a skin. 'The injector... malfunctioned,'  
gasped Hoyt. 'Please."  

The Consul nodded, commanded the door to close, and knelt next to the  
priest. He removed the useless injector from Hoyt's clenched fist and  
ejected the syrette ampule. Ultramorphine. The Consul nodded again and  
took out an injector from the medkit he had brought from his ship. It  
took less than five seconds to load the ultramorph.  

'Please,' begged Hoyt. His whole body spasmed. The Consul could almost  
see the waves of pain passing through the man.  

'Yes,' said the Consul. He took a ragged breath. 'But first the rest  
of the story."  

Hoyt stared, reached weakly for the injector.  

Sweating himself now, the Consul held the instrument just out of reach.  
'Yes, in a second,' he said. 'After the rest of the story. It's  
important that I know."  

'Oh, God, sweet Christ,' sobbed Hoyt. 'Please!'  

'Yes,' gasped the Consul. 'Yes. As soon as you tell me the truth."  

Father Hoyt collapsed onto his forearms, breathing in quick pants. 'You  
fucking bastard,' he gasped. The priest took several deep breaths, held  
one until his body quit shaking, and tried to sit up. When he looked at  
the Consul, there was something like relief in the maddened  

eyes. 'Then... you'll give me... the shot?"  

'Yes,' said the Consul.  

'All right,' Hoyt managed in a sour whisper. 'The  

truth. Perecebo Plantation... like I said. We flew in ... early  
October ... Lycius ... eight years after Dur6 ... disappeared. Oh,  
Christ, it hurts! Alcohol and endos don't work at all anymore. Only...  

pure ultramorph..."  

'Yes,' whispered the Consul. 'It's ready. As soon as the story is  
done."  

The priest lowered his head. Sweat dripped from his cheeks and nose  
onto the short grass. The Consul saw the man's muscles tense as if he  
were going to attack, then another spasm of pain wracked the thin body  
and Hoyt sagged forward. 'Skimmer wasn't destroyed...  

by tesla. Semfa, two men, and I... forced down near the Cleft while...  
while Orlandi searched upriver. His skimmer... had to wait while the  
lightning storm died down.  

'Bikura came in the night. Killed... killed Semfa, the pilot, the  
other man... forget his name. Left me *.. alive." Hoyt reached for  
his crucifix, realized that he had torn it off. He laughed briefly,  
stopping before the laughter turned to sobs. 'They... told me about  
the way of the cross. About the cruciform. Told me about *.. the Son  
of the Flames.  

'Next morning, they took me to see the Son. Took me *.. to see him."  
Hoyt struggled upright and clawed at his own cheeks. His eyes were  
wide, the ultramorph obviously forgotten despite the pain. 'About three  
kilometers into the flame forest... big tesla... eighty, a hundred  
meters tall, at least. Quiet then, but still a lot ... a lot of charge  
in the air. Ash everywhere.  

'The Bikura wouldn't... wouldn't go too close. Just knelt there with  
their goddamned bald heads bowed. But I... went close... had to. Dear  
God... Oh, Christ, it was him. Dur6. What was left of him.  

'He'd used a ladder to get three ... maybe four meters... up on the  
bole of the tree. Built a sort of platform. For his feet. Broken the  
arrestor rods off...  

little more than spikes ... then sharpened them* Must've used a rock to  
drive the long one through his feet into the bestos platform and tree.  

'His left arm... he'd pounded the stake between the  

radius and ulna ... missed veins ... just like the goddamned Romans.  
Very secure as long as his skeleton was intact. Other hand... right  
hand... palm down.  

He'd driven the spike first. Sharpened both ends. Then * . . impaled  
his right hand. Somehow bent the spike over. Hook.  

'Ladder'd fallen... long ago... but it was bestos.  

Hadn't burned. Used it to climb up to him. Everything'd burned away  
years ago... clothes, skin, top layers of flesh... but the bestos  
pouch was still around his neck.  

'The alloy spikes still conducted current even when *.. I could see  
it... feel it... surging through what was left of the body.  

'It still looked like Paul Dur. Important. I told Monsignor. No skin.  
Flesh raw or boiled away. Nerves and things visible... like gray and  
yellow roots. Christ, the smell. But it still looked like Paul Dur!  

'i understood then. Understood it all. Somehow...  

even before reading the journals. Understood he'd been hanging there...  
oh, dear God... seven years Living.  

Dying* The cruciform .  .  .  forcing him to live again.  

Electricity ... surging through him every second of those ... those  
Seven years. Flames. Hunger. Pain.  

Death. But somehow the goddamned... cruciform...  

!eeching substance from the tree maybe, the air, what was left...  
rebuilding what it could... forcing him to live, to feel the pain, over  
and over and over...  

' 'But he won. Pain was his ally. Oh, Jesus, not a few hours on the  
tree and then the spear and rest, but seven years!  

'But .  .  .  he won. When I removed the pouch, the cruciform on his  
chest fell away also. Just... fell right off... long, bloody roots.  
Then the thing... the thing I'd been sure was a corpse .".. the man  
raised its head.  

No eyelids. Eyes baked white. Lips gone. But it looked at me and  
smiled.  He smiled.  And he died .  .  .  really died... there in my  
arms. The ten thousandth time, but real this time. He smiled at me and  
died."  

Hoyt stopped, communed in silence with his own pain, and then continued  
between bouts of clenching his teeth. 'Bikura took me... back to...  
Cleft Orlandi  

came the next day. Rescued me. He... Semfa... 1 couldn't... he  
iasered the village, burned the Bikura where they stood like stupid  
sheep. I didn't... didn't argue with him. I laughed* Dear God,  
forgive me.  

Orlandi nuked the site with shaped charges they used to *.. to clear  
the jungle*.. fiberplastic matrix."  

Hoyt looked directly at the Consul and made a contorted gesture with his  
right hand. 'The painkillers worked all right at first. But every  
year... every day ... got worse. Even in fugue... the pain. I would  
have had to come back anyway.  How could he .  .  .  seven years! Oh,  
Jesus,' said Father Hoyt and clawed at the carpet.  

The Consul moved quickly, injecting the full ampule of ultramorph just  
under the armpit, catching the priest as he collapsed, and gently  
lowering the unconscious form to the floor. His vision unclear, the  
Consul ripped open Hoyt's sweat-sodden shirt, casting the rags aside.  

It was there, of course, lying under the pale skin of Hoyt's chest like  

some great, raw, cross-shaped worm.  

The Consul took a breath and gently turned the priest over. The second  
cruciform was where he had expected to find it, a slightly smaller,  
cross-shaped welt between the thin man's shoulder blades. It stirred  
slightly as the Consu!'s fingers brushed the fevered flesh.  

The Consul moved slowly but efficiently- packing the priest's  
belongings, straightening the room, dressing the unconscious man with  
the gentle care one would use in clothing the body of a dead family  
member.  

The Consui's.comiog buzzed. 'We need to go,' came Colonel Kassad's  
voice.  

'We're coming,' replied the Consul. He coded the comlog to summon crew  
clones to fetch the luggage, but lifted Father Hoyt himself. The body  
seemed to weigh nothing.  

The door dilated open and the Consul stepped out, moving from the deep  
shadow of the branch into the blue-green glow of the world which filled  
the sky.  

Deciding what cover story he would tell the others, the Consul paused a  
second to look at the sleeping man's face. He glanced up at Hyperion  
and then moved on.  

Even if the gravity field had been full Earth standard, the Consul knew,  
the body in his arms would have been no burden.  

Once a parent to a child now dead, the Consul walked on, knowing once  
again the sensation of bearing a sleeping son to bed.  

TWO  

It had been a warm, rainy day in Keats, Hyperion's capi-tai, and even  
after the rains stopped a layer of clouds moved slow and heavy over the  
city, filling the air with the salt scent of the ocean twenty kilometers  
to the west.  

Toward evening, as the gray daylight was beginning to fade into gray  
twilight, a double sonic boom shook the town and then echoed from the  
single, sculpted peak to the south. The clouds glowed blue-white. Half  
a minute later an ebony spacecraft broke through the overcast and  
descended carefully on a tail of fusion flame, its navigation lights  
blinking red and green against the gray.  

At one thousand meters the craft's landing beacons flared and three  
beams of coherent light from the space-port north of town locked the  
ship in a welcoming ruby tripod. The spacecraft hovered at three  
hundred meters, slipped sideways as smoothly as a mug sliding on a wet  
table top, and then settled weightlessly into a waiting blast pit.  

High-iressure jets of water bathed the pit and the base of the ship,  
sending up billows of steam to blend with the curtain of drizzle blowing  
across the paved plain of the spaceport. When the water jets ceased  
there was no noise except the whisper of rain and the random ticks and  

creaks of the cooling spaceshi.  

A balcony extruded itself from the ship's 'bulkhead twenty meters above  
the pit wail. Five figures emerged.  

'Thank you for the ride, sir,' Colonel Kassad said to the Consul.  

The Consul nodded and leaned on the railing, taking in deep breaths of  
fresh air. Droplets of rain beaded on his shoulders and eyebrows.  

Sol Weintraub lifted his baby from her infant carrier.  

Some change in pressure, temperature, scent, motion, noise, or a  
combination of all of these had awakened her and now she began to cry  
lustily. Weintraub bounced her and cooed to her but the wailing  
continued.  

'An appropriate comment upon our arrival,' said Martin Silenus. The  
poet wore a long purple cape and a red beret which slouched to his right  
shoulder. He took a drink from a wineglass he had carried out from the  
lounge. 'Christ on a stick, this place looks different."  

The Consul, who had been away only eight local years, had to agree. The  
spaceport had been a full nine klicks from the city when he lived in  
Keats; now shacks, tents, and mud streets surrounded the landing field's  
perimeter.  

In the Consui's day, no more than a ship a week had put in at the tiny  
spaceport; now he counted more than twenty spacecraft on the field. The  
small administration and customs building had been superseded by a huge,  
prefabricated structure, a dozen new blast pits and drop-ship grids had  
been added where the field had been hastily extended to the west, and  
the perimeter now was littered with scores of camouflage-sheathed  
modules which the Consul knew must serve as everything from ground  
control stations to barracks. A forest of exotic antennae grew skyward  
from a cluster of such boxes at the far end of the landing apron.  
'Progress,' murmured the Consul.  

'War,' said Colonel Kassad.  

'Those are people,' said Brawne Lamia, pointing toward the main terminal  
gates on the south side of the field. A wave of drab colors crashed  
like a silent surf  

against the outer fence and the violet containment field.  

'My God,' said the Consul, 'you're right."  

Kassad produced his binoculars and they took turns staring at the  
thousands of forms tugging at the wire, pressing against the repelling  
field.  

'Why are they here?" asked Lamia. 'What do they want?" Even from half a  
kilometer away, the mindless will of the mob was daunting. Dark forms  
of FORCE: Marines could be seen patrolling just within the perimeter.  

The Consul realized that between the wire, the containment field, and  

the Marines a strip of raw earth  

almost surely signified mines or a deathbeam zone, or both.  

'What do they want?" repeated Lamia.  

'They want out,' said Kassad.  

Even before the Colonel spoke, the Consul realized that the shack city  
around the spaceport and the mob at the gates were inevitable; the  
people of Hyperion were ready to leave. He guessed that there must be  
such a silent surge toward the gates each time a ship landed.  

'Well, there's one who'll be staying,' said Martin Silenus and pointed  
toward the low mountain across the river to the south. 'Old Weeping  
William Rex, God rest his sinful soul." The sculpted face of Sad King  
Billy was just visible through the light rain and growing darkness.  

'l knew him. Horatio,' said the drunken poet. 'A man of infinite jest.  
Not one of them funny. A real horse's ass, Horatio."  

Sol Weintraub stood just inside the ship, shielding his baby from the  
drizzle and removing her cries from the vicinity of the conversation. He  
pointed. 'Someone is coming."  

A groundcar with its camouflage polymer inert and a military EMV  
modified with hoverfans for Hyperion's weak magnetic field were crossing  
the damp hardpan.  

Martin Silenus's gaze never left Sad King Billy's dour visage. Silenus  
said in a voice almost too soft to be heard:  

'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale  

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and  
eve's one star, Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,  

Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung above  
his head  

Like cloud on cloud..."  

Father Hoyt came onto the balcony, rubbing his face with both hands. His  
eyes were wide and unfocused, a child rising from his nap. 'Are we  
there?" he asked.  

'Fucking aye,' cried Martin Silenus, returning the binoculars to the  
Colonel. 'Let's go down and greet'the gendarmes."  

The young Marine lieutenant seemed unimpressed with the group even after  
he had scanned the authorization wafer Her Masteen had passed along from  
the task force commander. The lieutenant took his time scanning their  
visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a  
comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just  
come into a small bit of power. Then he came to Fedmahn Kassad's chip  
and looked up with the expression of a startled stoat. 'Colonel  
Kassad!'  

'Retired,' said Kassad.  

'l'm sorry, sir,' said the lieutenant, stumbling over his words as he  
fumbled the visas back to everyone. '1 had no idea you were with this  
party, sir. That is ... the Captain just said... I mean... my uncle  
was with you on Bressia, sir. I mean, I'm sorry... anything I or my  
men can do to..."  

'At ease, Lieutenant,' said Kassad. 'Is there any chance of getting  
some transport into the city?"  

'Ah... well, sir..." The young Marine started to rub his chin and then  
remembered that he was wearing his helmet. 'Yes, sir. But the problem  
is, sir, the mobs can get pretty nasty and... well, the damn EMVs don't  
work for shit on this. '. uh, pardon me, sir. You see, the ground  
transports're limited to cargo and we don't have any skimmers free to  
leave the base until 2200 hours but I'!1 be happy to get your party on  
the roster for..."  

'Just a minute,' said the Consul. A battered passenger skimmer with the  
gold geodesic of the Hegemony painted on one flare skirt had landed ten  
meters away. A tall, thin man stepped out. 'Theo!" cried the Consul.  

The two men stepped forward, started to shake hands, and then hugged  
each other instead. 'Damn,' said the Consul, 'you look good, Theo."  
ItWas true. His former aide had gained half a dozen years on the  
Consul, but the younger man still had the boyish smile, thin face, and  
thick red hair that had attracted every unmarried woman - annot a few  
married ones - on the consulate staff. The shyness which had been part  
of Theo Lane's vulnerability was still there, as evidenced by the way he  

now needlessly adjusted his archaic horn-rimmed glasses - the young  
diplomat's one affectation.  

'It's good to have you back,' said Theo.  

The Consul turned, started to introduce his friend to the group, and  
then stopped. 'My God,' he said, 'you're Consul now. I'm sorry, Theo,  
I wasn't thinking."  

Theo Lane smiled and adjusted his glasses. 'No problem, sir,' he said.  
'Actually, l'm no longer Consul. For the last few months I've been  
acting Governor-General.  

The Home Rule council finally requested - and received - formal colonial  
status. Welcome to the newest world in the Hegemony."  

The Consul stared a second and then hugged his former protg again.  
'Congratulations, Your Excellency."  

Theo grinned and glanced at the sky. 'It's going to rain in earnest  
before long. Why don't we get your group aboard the skimmer and VII  
drive you into town." The new Governor-General smiled at the young  
Marine.  

'Lieutenant?"  

'Uh ... yes, sir?" The officer had snapped to attention.  

'Could you get your men to load these good people's luggage, please?  
We'd all like to get in out of the rain."  

The skimmer flew south above the highway at a steady sixty meters. The  
Consul rode in the front passenger seat; the rest of the group relaxed  
in flowfoam recliners behind. Martin Silenus and Father Hoyt appeared  
to be asleep. Weintraub's baby had ceased crying in favor of nursing on  
a soft bottle of synthesized mother's milk.  

'Things have changed,' said the Consul. He rested his cheek against the  
rain-spattered canopy and looked down at the chaos.  

Thousand of shacks and iean-tos covered the hillsides and gullies along  
the three-klick ride to the suburbs.  

Fires were being lighted under wet tarps and the Consul watched  
mud-colored figures moving between mud-colored shacks. High fences had  
been rigged along the old Spaceport Highway and the road itself had been  
widened and regraded. Two lanes of truck and hover traffic,  

ill  

most of it military green or shrouded with inactive camouflage polymer,  
moved sluggishly in both directions.  

Ahead, the lights of Keats seemed to have multiplied and spread across  
new sections of the river valley and hills.  

'Three million,' said Tbeo, as if reading his former boss's mind. 'At  
least three million people and growing every day."  

The Consul stared. 'There were only four and a half million people on  
the planet when I left."  

'Still are,' said the new Governor-General. 'And every one of them  
wants to get to Keats, board a ship, and get the hell out. Some are  
waiting for the farcaster to be built, but most don't believe it'll  
happen in time. They're afraid."  

'Of the Ousters?"  

'Them too,' said Theo, 'but mosfiy of the Shrike."  

The Consul turned his face from the coolness of the canopy. 'It's come  
south of the Bridle Range then?"  

Theo laughed without humor. 'It's everywhere. Or they're everywhere.  
Most people are convinced that there are dozens or hundreds of the  
things now. Shrike deaths have been reported on all three continents.  
Everywhere except Keats, segments of the coast along the Mane, and a few  
of the big cities like Endymion."  

'How many casualties?" The Consul did not really want to know.  

'At least twenty thousand dead or missing,' said Theo.  

'There are a lot of injured people but that isn't the Shrike, is it?"  
Again came the dry laugh. 'The Shrike doesn't just wound people, does  
it? Uh-uh, people shoot each other by accident, fall down stairways or  
jump out windows in their panic, and trample each other in crowds. It's  
a fucking mess."  

In the eleven years the Consul had worked with Theo Lane, he had never  
heard the younger man use profanity of .any sort. 'Is FORCE any help?"  
the Consul asked.  

'Ai'e they what's keeping the Shrike away from the big cities?"  

Theo shook his head. 'FORCE hasn't done a damn thing except control the  
mobs. Oh, the Marines put on a  

show of keeping the spaceport open here and the harbor landing zone at  
Port R secure, but they haven't even tried to confront the Shrike.  
They're waiting to fight the Ousters."  

,'SDF?" asked the Consul, knowing even as he spoke that the poorly  
trained Self-defense Force would have been of little use.  

Theo snorted. 'At least eight thousand of the casualties are SDF.  
General Braxton took the "Fighting Third" up the River Road to "strike  
at the Shrike menace in their lair" and that was the last we heard of  
them."  

'You're joking,' said the Consul, but one look at his friend's face told  
him that he wasn't. 'Theo,' he said, 'how in the world did you have  
time to meet us at the spaceport?"  

'I didn't,' said the Governor-General. He glanced in the back. The  
others were sleeping or staring exhaustedly out windows. 'I needed to  
talk to you,' said Theo. 'Convince you not to go."  

The Consul started to shake his head but Theo grasped his arm, squeezed  
hard. 'Now listen to what I have to say, damn it. I know how hard it  
is for you to come back here after... what happened but, goddamn it,  
there's no sense in your throwing everything away for no reason.  

Abandon this stupid pilgrimage. Stay in Keats."  

'I can't..." began the Consul.  

'Listen to me,' demanded Theo. 'Reason one: you're the finest diplomat  
and crisis manager I've ever seen and  

we need your skills."  

'It doesn't..."  

'Shut up a minute. Reason two: you and the others won't get within two  
hundred klicks of the Time Tombs.  

Thais isn't like the old days when you were here and the goddamned  

suicides could get up there and even sit around for a week and maybeeven  
change their minds and  

come home. The Shrike is on the move. It's like a plague." '1  
understand that but..."  

'Reason three: lneed you. I begged Tau Ceti Center to' send someone  
else out. When I found that you were coming...  

well, hell, it got me through the last two years."  

The Consul shook his head, not understanding.  

Theo started the turn toward the city center and then hovered, taking  
his eyes off the controls to look directly at the Consul. '! want you  
to take over the governor-generalship.  

The Senate won't interfere- except perhaps for Gladstone o and by the  
time she finds out, it will be too late."  

The Consul felt as though someone had struck him below the third rib. He  
looked away, down at the maze of narrow streets and crooked buildings  
that was Jacktown, the Old City. When he could speak again, he said, 'I  
can't, Theo."  

'Listen, if you..."  

'No. I mean I cannot. It would be no good if I did accept it, but the  
simple truth is, I can't. I have to go on this pilgrimage."  

Theo straightened his glasses, stared straight ahead.  

'Look, Theo, you're the most competent and capable Foreign Service  
professional l've ever worked with. I've been out of things for eight  
years. I think..."  

Theo nodded tersely, interrupted. 'I suppose you want  

to go to the Shrike Temple." *  

,yes."  

The skimmer circled and settled. The Consul was staring at  
nothing,.thinking, when the side doors of the skimmer raised and folded  
and Sol Weintraub said, 'Good God."  

The group stepped out and stared at the charred and toppled wreckage of  
what had been the Shrike Temple.  

Since the Time Tombs had been closed as too dangerous some twenty-five  
local years earlier, the Shrike Temple had become Hyperion's most  
popular tourist attraction.  

Filling three full city blocks, rising more than a hundred and fifty  
meters to its central, sharpened spire, the Shrike Church's central  
temple was part awe-inspiring cathedral, part Gothic joke with its  
fluid, buttressed curves of stone permabonded to its whiskered-alloy  

skeleton, part Escher print with its tricks of perspective and  
impossible angles, part Boschian nightmare with its tunnel entrances,  
hidden chambers, dark gardens, and forbidden sections, and - more than  
anything else - it had been part of Hyperion's past.  

Now it was gone. Tall heaps of blackened stone were the only hint of  
the structure's former majesty. Melted alloy girders rose from the  
stones like the ribs of some giant carcass. Much of the rubble had  
tumbled into the pits, basements, and passages which had lain beneath  
the three-century-old landmark. The Consul walked close to the edge of  
a pit and wondered if the deep basements had - as legend decreed - 
actually connected to one of the planet's labyrinths.  

'It looks as if they used a hellwhip on this place,' said Martin  
Silenus, using an archaic term for any high-energy laser weapon. The  
poet seemed suddenly sobered as he joined the Consul at the edge of the  
pit. 'I remember when the Temple and parts of the Old City were the  
only things here,' he said. 'After the disaster near the Tombs, Billy  
decided to relocate Jacktown here because  

of the Temple. Now it's gone. Christ."  

'No,' said Kassad.  

The others looked at him.  

The Colonel rose from where he had been examining the rubble. 'Not a  
hellwhip,' he said. 'Shaped plasma charges. Several of them."  

'Now do you want to stay here and go on this useless pilgrimage?" asked  
Theo. 'Come with me back to the consulate." He was speaking to the  
Consul but extending the invitation to everyone.  

The Consul turned away from the pit, looking at his former aide but now  
seeing, for the first time, the Governor-General of a besieged Hegemony  
world. 'We can't, Your Excellency,' said the Consul. 'At least I  
can't. I won't speak for the others."  

The four men and the woman shook their heads.  

Silenus and Kassad began unloading luggage. The rain returned as a  
light mist falling out of the darkness. At that second the Consul  
noticed the two FORCE attack skimmers hovering above the nearby  
roofiops. Darkness and chameleon-polymer hulls had hidden them we!!,  
but the rain now revealed their outlines. Of course, thought  

the Consul, the Governor-General does not travel unescorted.  

'Did the priests escape? Were there survivors when the  

Temple was destroyed?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

'Yes,' said Theo. The de facto dictator of five million doomed souls  
removed his glasses and dried them on his shirttail. 'All of the Shrike  
Cult priests and acolytes escaped through tunnels. The mob had been  
surrounding this place for months. Their leader, a woman named Cammon  
from somewhere east of the Sea of Grass, gave everyone in the Temple  

plenty of warning before they set off. the DL-20."  

'Where were the police?" asked the Consul. 'The SDF?  

FORCE?"  

Theo Lane smiled and at that second he looked decades older than the  
young man the Consul had known.  

'You folks have been in transit for three years,' he said.  

'The universe has changed. Shrike cultists are being burned out and  
beaten up in the Web. You can imagine the attitude here. The Keats  
police have been absorbed under the martial law I declared fourteen  
months ago.  

They and the SDF watched while the mob torched the Temple. So did 1.  
There were half a million people here that night."  

Sol Weintraub stepped closer. 'Do they know about us? About this final  
pilgrimage?"  

'If they did,' said Theo, 'none of you would be alive.  

You'd think they'd welcome anything that might appease the Shrike, but  
the only thing the mob would notice is that you were chosen by the  
Shrike Church. As it was, I had to overrule my own Advisory Council.  
They were in favor of destroying your ship before it reached the  
atmosphere."  

'Why did you?" asked the Consul. 'Overrule them, 1 mean. '  

Theo sighed and adjusted his glasses. 'Hyperion still needs the  
Hegemony, and Gladstone still has the vote of confidence of the All  
Thing, if not the Senate. And I still need you."  

The Consul looked at the rubble of the Shrike Temple.  

'This pilgrimage was over before you got here,' said Governor-General  
Theo Lane. 'Will you come back to the consulate with me ... at least  
in an advisory capacity?"  

'I'm sorry,' said the Consul. '1 can't."  

Theo turned without a word, dropped into the skimmer, and lifted off.  
His military escort followed as a blur in the rain.  

It was raining harder now. The group moved closer together in the  
growing darkness. Weintraub had rigged a makeshift hood over Rachel and  
the noise of the rain on plastic made the baby cry.  

'What now?" said the Consul, looking around at the night and narrow  
streets. Their luggage lay heaped in a soggy pile. The world smelled  
of ashes.  

Martin Silenus grinned. 'I know a bar."  

It turned out that the Consul also knew the bar; he had all but lived in  
Cicero's for most of his eleven-year assignment on Hyperion.  

Unlike most things in Keats, on Hyperion, Cicero's was not named after  
some piece of pre-Hegira literary trivia. Rumor had it that the bar was  
named after a section of an Old Earth city - some said Chicago, USA,  
others were sure it was Calcutta, AIS - but only Stan Leweski, owner and  
great-grandson of the founder, knew for sure, and Stan had never  
revealed its secret.  

The bar itself had overflowed over the century and a half of its  
existence from a walkup loft in one of Jacktown's sagging older  
buildings along the Hoolie River to nine levels in four sagging old  
buildings along the Hoolie. The only consistent elements of decor at  
Cicero's over the decades were the low ceilings, thick smoke, and  
constant background babble which offered a sense of privacy in the midst  
of bustle.  

There was no privacy this night. The Consul and the others paused as  
they carried their gear through the Marsh Lane entrance.  

'Jesus Wept,' muttered Martin Silenus  

Cicero's looked as if it had been invaded by barbarian hordes. Every  
chair was filled, every table occupied, mostly by men, and the floors  
were littered with packs, weapons, bedrolls, antiquated comm equipment,  
ration boxes, and all of the other detritus of an army of refugees...  

or perhaps a refugee army. The heavy air of  

Cicero's, which once had been filled with the blended scent of broiling  
steaks, wine, stim, ale, and T-free tobacco, was now laden with the  
overlapping smells of unwashed bodies, urine, and hopelessness.  

At that moment the huge form of Stan Leweski materialized out of the  
gloom. The bar owner's forearms were as huge and heavy as ever, but his  
forehead had advanced more than a few centimeters against the receding  
tangle of black hair and there were more creases than the Consul  
remembered around the dark eyes.  

Those eyes were wide now as Leweski stared at the Consul. 'Ghost,' he  
said.  

"No."  

'You are not dead?"  

'No."  

'By damn!" declared Stan Leweski and, grasping the Consul by the upper  
arms, picked him up as easily as a man would lift a five-year-old. 'By  
damn! You are not dead. What are you doing here?"  

'Checking your liquor license,' said the Consul. 'Put me down."  

Leweski carefully set the Consul down, tapped his shoulders, and  
grinned. He looked at Martilt Silenus and the grin changed to a frown.  

'You look familiar but I have never seen you before."  

'I knew your great*grandfather,' said Silenus. 'Which reminds me, do  
you have any of that pre-Hegira ale left?  

The warm, 'British stuff that tastes like recycled moose piss. I could  
never get enough of that."  

'Nothing left,' said Leweski. He pointed at the poet.  

'By damn. Grandfather Jiri's trunk. That old holo of the satyr in the  
original Jacktown. Can it be?" He stared at Silenus and then at the  
Consul, touching them both gingerly with a massive forefinger. 'Two  
ghosts."  

'Six tired people,' said the Consul. The baby began crying again.  
'Seven. Do you have space for us?"  

Leweski turned in a half circle, hands spread, palms up. 'it is all  
like this. No space left. No food. No wine." He squinted at Martin  
Silenus. 'No ale. Now we have become a big hotel with no beds. The  
SDF bastards stay here without paying and drink their own upcountry  

rotgut and wait for the world to end. That will happen soon enough, I  
think."  

The group was standing in what had once been the entrance mezzanine.  
Their heaped luggage joined a riot of gear already littering the floor.  
Small clusters of men shouldered their way through the throng and cast  
appraising glances at the newcomers- especially at Brawne Lamia. She  
returned their stares with a flat, cold glare.  

Stan Leweski looked at the Consul for a moment. '1 have a balcony  
table. Five of those SDF Death Commandos have been parked there for a  
week, telling everyone and each other how they are going to wipe out the  
Ouster Legions with their bare hands. You want the'table, I will  

throw the teat-suckers out."  

'Yes,' said the Consul.  

Leweski had turned to leave when Lamia stopped him with a hand on his  
arm. 'Would you like a little help?" she asked.  

Stan Leweski shrugged, grinned. 'I do not need it, but I might like it.  
Come."  

They disappeared into the crowd.  

The third-floor balcony had just enough room for the splintered table  
and six chairs. Despite the insane crowding on the main floors, stairs,  
and landings, no one had challenged them for the space after Leweski and  
Lamia threw the protesting Death Commandos over the railing and into the  
river nine meters below. Somehow Leweski had managed to send up a  
tankard of beer and a basket of bread and cold beef.  

The group ate in silence, obviously suffering more than the usual amount  

of post fugue hunger, fatigue, and depression. The darkness of the  
balcony was relieved only by dim, reflected light from deeper within  
Cicero's and by the lanterns on passing river barges. Most of the  
buildings along the Hoolie were dark but other city lights reflected  
from low clouds. The Consul could make out the ruins of the Shrike  
Temple half a kilometer upriver.  

'Well,' said Father Hoyt, obviously recovered from the heavy dose of  
ultramorph and teetering on the  

delicate balance between pain and sedation, 'what do we do next?"  

When no one answered, the Consul closed his eyes. He refused to take  
the lead in anything. Sitting on the balcony at Cicero's, it was all  
too easy to fall back into the rhythms of a former life; he would drink  
until the early morning hours, watch the predawn meteor showers as the  
clouds cleared, and then stagger to his empty apartment near the market,  
going into the consulate four hours later showered, shaved, and  
seemingly human except for the blood in his eyes and the insane ache in  
his skull. Trusting in Theo - quiet, efficient Theo - to get him  
through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day.  

Trusting in the drinking at Cicero's to get him through the night.  
Trusting in the unimportance of his posting to get him through life.  

'You are all ready to leave for the pilgrimage?"  

The Consul's eyes snapped open. A hooded figure stood in the doorway  
and for a second the Consul thought it was Het Masteen, but then he  
realized that this man was much shorter, his voice not accented with the  
stilted Templar consonants.  

'If you are ready, we must go,' said the dark figure.  

'Who are you?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

'Come quickly,' was the shadow's only reply.  

Fedmahn Kassad stood, bending to keep his head from striking the  
ceiling, and detained the robed figure, flipping back the man's hood  
with a flick of his left hand.  

'An android!" said Lenar Hoyt, staring at the man's blue skin and  
blue-on-blue eyes.  

The Consul was less surprised. For more than a century it had been  
illegal to own androids in the Hegemony, and none had been biofactured  
for almost that long, but they were still used for manual labor in  
remote parts of backwater, noncolony worlds - worlds like Hyperion. The  
Shrike Temple had used androids extensively, complying with the Church  
of the Shrike doctrine which proclaimed that androids were free from  
original sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind and- 
incidentally-exempt from the Shrike's terrible and inevitable  
retribution.  

'You must come quickly,' whispered the android, setting his hood in  
place.  

'Are you from the Temple?" asked Lamia.  

'Quiet!" snapped the android. He glanced into the hall, turned back,  
and nodded. 'We must hurry. Please follow me."  

All of them stood and then hesitated. The Consul watched as Kassad  
casually unsealed the long leather jacket he was wearing. He caught the  
briefest glimpse of a deathwand tucked in the Colonei's belt. Normally  
the Consul would have been appalled by even the thought of a deathwand  
nearby- the slighttest mistaken touch could pure every synapse on the  
balcony - but at this  

moment he was oddly reassured by the sight of it.  

'Our luggage..." began Weintraub.  

'It has been seen to,' whispered the hooded man.  

'Quickly now."  

The group followed the android down the stairs and into the night, their  
movement as tired and passive as a sigh.  

The Consul slept late. Half an hour after sunrise a rectangle of light  
found its way between the porthole's shutters and fell across his  
pillow. The Consul rolled away and did not wake. An hour after that  
there came a loud clatter as the tired mantas which had pulled the barge  
all night were released and fresh ones harnessed. The Consul slept on.  
In the next hour the footsteps and cries of the crew on the deck outside  
his stateroom grew louder and more persistent, but it was the warning  
klaxon below the locks at Karla which finally brought him up out of his  
sleep.  

Moving slowly in the druglike languor of fugue hangover, the Consul  
bathed as best he could with only basin and pump, dressed in loose  
cotton trousers, an old canvas shirt, and foam-soled walking shoes, and  
found his way to the mid-deck.  

Breakfast had been set out on a long sideboard near a weathered table  
which could be retracted into the deck planking. An awning shaded the  
eating area and the crimson and gold canvas snapped to the breeze of  
their  

passage. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and bright, with Hyperion's  
sun making up in ferocity what it lacked in size.  

M. Weintraub, Lamia, Kassad, and Silenus had been up for some time.  
Lenar Hoyt and Het Masteen joined the group a few minutes after the  
Consul arrived.  

The Consul helped himself to toasted fish, fruit, and orange juice at  
the buffet and then moved to the railing.  

The water was wide here, at least a kilometer from shore to shore, and  
its green and lapis sheen echoed the sky. At first glance the Consul  
did not recognize the land on either side of the river. To the east,  

periscope-bean paddies stretched away into the haze of distance where  
the rising sun reflected on a thousand flooded surfaces.  

A few indigenie huts were visible at the junction of paddy dikes, their  
angled walls made of bleached weirwood or golden half oak. To the west,  
the bottomland along the river was overgrown with low tangles of gissen,  
woman-grove root, and a flamboyant red fern the Consul did not  
recognize, all growing around mud marshes and miniature lagoons which  
stretched another kilometer or so to bluffs where scrub everblues clung  
to any bare spot between granite slabs.  

For a second the Consul felt lost, disoriented on a world he thought he  
knew well, but then he remembered the klaxon at the Karla Locks and  
realized that they had entered a rarely used stretch of the Hoolie north  
of Doukhobor's Copse. The Consul had never seen this part of the river,  
having always traveled on or flown above the Royal Transport Canal which  
lay to the west of the bluffs. He could only surmise that some danger  
or disturbance along the main route to the Sea of Grass had sent them  
this back way along bypassed stretches of the Hoolie. He guessed that  
they were about a hundred and eighty kilometers northwest of Keats.  

'It looks different in the daylight, doesn't it?" said Father Hoyt.  

The Consul looked at the shore again, not sure what Hoyt was talking  
about; then he realized the priest meant the barge.  

It had been strange - following the android messenger  

in the rain, boarding the old barge, making their way through its maze  
of tessellated rooms and passages, picking up Het Masteen at the ruins  
of the Temple, and then watching the lights of Keats fall astern.  

The Consul remembered those hours before and after midnight as from a  
fatigue-blurred dream, and he imagined the others must have been just as  
exhausted and disoriented. He vaguely remembered his surprise that the  
barge's crew were all android, but mostly he recalled his relief at  
finally closing the door of his stateroom and crawling into bed.  

'l was talking to A. Bettik this morning,' said Weintraub, referring to  
the android who had been their guide. 'This old scow has quite a  
history."  

Martin Silenus moved to the sideboard to pour himself more tomato juice,  
added a dash of something from the flask he carried, and said, 'It's  
obviously been around a bit. The goddamn railings've been oiled by  
hands, the stairs worn by feet, the ceilings darkened by lamp soot, and  
the beds beaten saggy by generations of humping.  

I'd say it's several centuries old. The carvings and rococo finishes  
are fucking marvelous. Did you notice that under all the other scents  
the inlaid wood still smells of sandalwood? I wouldn't be surprised if  
this thing came from Old Earth."  

'It does,' said Sol Weintraub. The baby, Rachel, slept on his arm,  
softly blowing bubbles of saliva in her sleep.  

'We're on the proud ship Benares, built in and named after the Old Earth  

city of the same name."  

'I don't remember hearing of any Old Earth city with that name,' said  
the Consul.  

Brawne Lamia looked up from the last of her breakfast.  

'Benares, also known as Varanasi or Gandhipur, Hindi Free State. Part  
of the Second Asian Co-prosperity Sphere after the Third Sino-Japanese  
War.  

Destroyed in the lndo-Soviet Muslim Republic Limited Exchange."  

'Yes,' said Weintraub, 'the Benares was built quite some time before the  
Big Mistake. Mid-twenty-second century, I would guess. A. Bettik  
informs me that it was originally a levitation barge..."  

'Are the EM generators still down there?" interrupted Colonel Kassad.  

'1 believe so,' said Weintraub. 'Next to the main salon on the lowest  
deck. The floor of the salon is clear lunar crystal. Quite nice if we  
were cruising at two thousand meters... quite useless now."  

'Benares,' mused Martin Silenus. He ran his hand lovingly across a  
time-darkened railing. 'I was robbed there once."  

Brawne Lamia put down her coffee mug. 'Old man, are you trying to tell  
us that you're ancient enough to remember Old Earth? We're not fools,  
you know."  

'My dear child,' beamed Martin Silenus, 'I am not trying to tell you  
anything. I just thought it might be entertaining - as well as edifying  
and enlightening - if at some point we exchanged lists of all the  
locations at which we have either robbed or been robbed. Since you have  
the unfair advantage of having been the daughter of a senator, 1 am sure  
that your list would be much more distinguished... and much longer."  

Lamia opened her mouth to retort, frowned, and said nothing.  

"i wonde how this ship got to Hyperion?" murmured Father Hoyt. 'Why  
bring a levitation barge to a world where EM equipment doesn't work?"  

'It would work,' said Colonel Kassad. 'Hyperion has some magnetic  
field. It just would not be reliable in holding anything airborne."  

Father Hoyt raised an eyebrow, obviously at a loss to see the  
distinction.  

'Hey,' cried the poet from his place at the railing, 'the gang's all  
here!'  

'So?" said Brawne Lamia. Her lips all but disappeared into a thin line  
whenever she spoke to Silenus.  

'So we're all here,' he said. 'Let's get on with the storytelling."  

Het Masteen said, '1 thought it had been agreed that we would tell our  

respective stories after the dinner hour."  

Martin Silenus shrugged. 'Breakfast, dinner, who the  

fuck cares? We're assembled. It's not going to take six or seven days  
to get to the Time Tombs, is it?"  

The Consul considered. Less than two days to get as far as the river  
could take them. Two more days, or less if the winds were right, on the  
Sea of Grass. Certainly no more than one more day to cross the  
mountains. 'No,' he said. 'Not quite six days.  

'All right,' said Silenus, 'then let's get on with the telling of tales.  
Besides, there's no guarantee that the Shrike won't come calling before  
We knock on his door.  

If these bedtime stories are supposed to be helpful to our survival  
chances in some way, then I say let's hear from everyone before the  
contributors start getting chopped and diced by that ambulatory food  
processor we're so eager to visit."  

'You're disgusting,' said Brawne Lamia.  

'Ah, darling,' smiled Silenus, 'those are the same words you whispered  
last night after your second orgasm."  

Lamia looked away. Father Hoyt cleared his throat and said, 'Whose turn  
is it? To tell a story, I mean?" The silence stretched.  

'Mine,' said Fedmahn Kassad. The tall man reached into the pocket of  
his white tunic and held up a slip of paper with a large 2 scribbled on  
it.  

'Do you mind doing this now?" asked Sol Weintraub.  

Kassad showed a hint of a smile. 'I wasn't'in favor of doing it at  
all,' he said, 'but if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it  
were done quickly."  

'Hey!" cried Martin Silenus. 'The man knows his pre-Hegira  
playwrights."  

'Shakespeare?" said Father Hoyt.  

'No,' said Silenus. 'Lerner and fucking Lowe. Neii buggering Simon.  
Hamel fucking Posten."  

'Colonel,' Sol Weintraub said formally, 'the weather is nice, none of us  
seems to have anything pressing to do in the next hour or so, and we  
would be obliged if you would share the tale of what brings you to  
Hyperion on the Shrike's last pilgrimage."  

Kassad nodded. The day grew warmer as the canvas awning snapped, the  
decks creaked, and the levitation  

barge Benares worked its steady way upstream toward the mountains, the  
moors, and the Shrike.  

THE SOLDIER'S TALE: The War Lovers  

It was during the Battle of Agincourt that Fedmahn Kassad encountered  
the woman he would spend the rest of his life seeking.  

It was a wet and chilly late October morning in A.D.  

1415. Kassad had been inserted as an archer into the army of Henry V of  
England. The English force had been on French soil since August 14 and  
had been retreating from superior French forces since October 8.  

Henry had convinced his War Council that the army could bent the French  
in a forced march to the safety of Calais. They had failed. Now, as  
October 25 dawned gray and drizzly, seven thousand Englishmen, mostly  
bowmen, faced a force of some twenty-eight thousand French men-at-arms  
across a kilometer of muddy field. '  

Kassad was cold, tired sick, and scared. He and the other archers had  
been surviving on little more than scavenged berries for the past week  
of the march and almost every man on the line that morning was suffering  
from diarrhea. The air temperature was in the low fifties Fahrenheit  
and Kassad had spent a long night trying to sleep on damp ground. He  
was impressed with the unbelievable realism of the experience- the  
Olympus Command School Historical Tactical Network was as far beyond  
regular stimsims as full-form holos were beyond tintypes - but the  
physical sensations were so convincing, so real, that Kassad did not  
relish the thought of being wounded. There were tales of cadets  
receiving fatal wounds in the OCS:HTN sims and being pulled dead from  
their immersion creches.  

Kassad and the other bowmen on Henry's right flank had been staring at  
the larger French force for most of the morning when pennants waved, the  
fifteenth-century equivalent of sergeants brayed, and the archers obeyed  
the King's command and began marching against the  

enemy. The ragged English line, stretching about seven hundred meters  
across the field from treeline to treeline, consisted of clusters of  
archers like Kassad's troop interspersed with smaller groups of  
men-at-arms. The English had no formal cavalry and most of the horses  
Kassad could see on his end of the field were carrying men clustered  
near the King's command group three hundred meters toward the center, or  
huddled around the Duke of York's position much closer to where Kassad  
and the other archers stood near the right flank. These command groups  
reminded Kassad of a FORCE:ground mobile staff HQ, only instead of the  
inevitable forest of comm antennae giving away their position, bright  
banners and pennants hung limp on pikes. An obvious artillery target,  
thought Kassad, and then reminded himself that this particular military  
nuance did not yet exist.  

Kassad noticed that the French had plenty of horses.  

He estimated six or seven hundred mounted men formed in ranks on each of  
the French flanks and a long line of cavalry behind the main battle  
line. Kassad did not like horses. He had seen holos and pictures, of  
course, but he had not encountered the animals themselves until this  
exercise, and the size, smell, and sound of them tended to be unnerving  

-especially so when the damn quadrupeds were armored chest and head, shod 
in steel, and trained to carry armored men wielding four meters of  
lance.  

The English advance halted. Kassad estimated that his battle line was  
about two hundred and fifty meters from the French. He knew from the  
experience of the past week that this was within longbow range, but he  
also knew that he would have to pull his arm half out of its socket to  
hold the pull.  

The French were shouting what Kassad assumed were insults. He ignored  
them as he and his silent comrades stepped forward from where they had  
planted their long arrows and found soft ground in which to drive their  
stakes. The stakes were long and heavy and Kassad had been carrying his  
for a week. Almost a meter and a half long, the clumsy thing had been  
sharpened at both ends.  

When the order first came down for all archers to find saplings and cut  
stakes, somewhere in the deep woods  

just after they had crossed the Somme, Kassad had wondered idly what the  
things were for. Now he knew.  

Every third archer carried a heavy mallet nnd now they took tums driving  
their stakes in at a careful angle.  

Kassad pulled out his long knife, resharpened the end which, even  
leaning, rose almost to his chest, and stepped back through the hedgehog  
of sharpened stakes to await the French charge.  

The French did not charge.  

Kassad waited with the others. His bow was strung, forty-eight arrows  
were planted in two clusters at his  

feet, and his feet were set properly.  

The French did not charge.  

The rain had stopped but a cool breeze had come up and what little body  
heat Kassad had generated by the short march and the task of driving  
stakes had been lost quickly. The only sounds were the metallic  
shufflings of men and horses, occasional mutterings or nervous laughs,  
and the heavier thud of hooves as the French cavalry rearranged itself  
but still refused to charge.  

'Fuck this,' said a gri,.led yeoman a few feet from Kassad. 'Those  
bastards've wasted our whole bleeding morning. They'd better piss or  
get off the pot."  

Kassad nodded. He was not sure if he was hearing and understanding  
Middle English or if the sentence had been in simple Standard. He had  
no idea if the grizzled archer was another Command School cadet, an  
instructor, or merely an artifact of the sire. He could not guess if  
the slang had been correct. He did not care. His heart was pounding  
and his palms were sweaty. He wiped his hands on his jerkin.  

As if King Henry had taken his cue from the old man's muttering, command  
flags suddenly bobbed and rose, sergeants screamed, and row upon row of  
English archers raised their longbows, pulled when commands were  
shouted, released on the next command.  

Four waves of arrows comprised of more than six thousand meter-long,  
chisel-pointed, clothyard missiles rose, seemed to hang in a cloud  
thirty meters up, and fell on the French.  

There came the sound of horses screaming and a  

thousand demented children pounding on ten thousand tin pots as the  
French men-at-arms leaned into the rain of arrows to let their steel  
helmets and their chest and shoulder armor take the brunt of the  
downpour. Kassad knew that in military terms little real damage had  
been done, but this was small solace to the occasional French soldier  
with ten inches of arrow through his eye, or to the scores of horses  
leaping, tumbling, and crashing into one another while their riders  
struggled to remove wooden  

shafts from the creatures' backs and flanks.  

The French did not charge.  

More commands were shouted. Kassad raised, read-led, loosed his arrow.  
Again. And again. The sky darkened every ten seconds. Kassad's arm  
and back ached from the punishing rhythm. He found that he felt neither  
elation nor anger. He was doing his job. His forearm was raw. Again  
the arrows flew. And again. Fifteen of his first sheaf of twenty-four  
arrows were gone when a cry went up along the English line and Kassad  
paused and glanced down while holding full pull.  

The French were charging.  

A cavalry charge was something beyond Kassad's experience.  

Watching twelve hundred armored horses charging directly at him created  
internal sensations which Kassad found a bit unnerving. The charge took  
less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time  
for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have  
problems, and for his testicles to retreat completely into his body. If  
the rest of Kassad could have found a comparable hiding place, he would  
have seriously considered crawling into it.  

As it was, he was too busy to run.  

Firing on command, his line of archers got off five flat volleys at the  
attacking horsemen, managed one more shot in independent fire, and then  
they fell back five paces.  

Horses, it turned out, were too smart to willingly impale themselves  
upon stakes- no matter how hard their human riders implored them to do  
so- but the second and third waves of cavalry did not stop as  

abruptly as the first, and in a single mad moment horses were down and  
screaming, riders were thrown and screaming, and Kassad was out and  
screaming, rushing at every downed Frenchman he could see, wielding a  

mallet on the prostrate form when he could, slashing through gaps in  
armor with his long knife when it was too crowded to swing the mallet.  
Soon he and the grizzled archer and a younger man who had lost his cap  
became an efficient killing team, closing in on a downed rider from  
three sides, Kassad using the mallet to knock the pleading horseman off  
his knees, then all three moving in with their blades.  

Only one knight gained his feet and raised a sword to confront them. The  
Frenchman flipped up his visor and called out a clear request for honor  
and single combat.  

The old man and the youth circled like wolves. Kassad returned with his  
bow and put an arrow into the knight's left eye from ten paces.  

The battle continued in the deadly comic-opera vein common to all armed  
combat since the first rock and thighbone duels on Old Earth. The  
French cavalry managed to turn and flee just as the first wave of ten  
thousand men-at-arms charged the English center on foot.  

The melee broke up the rhythm of the attack and, by the time the French  
had regained their initiative, Henry's own men-at-arms had braced to  
hold them at pike length while Kassad and several thousand other archers  
poured volley fire into the massed French infantry at close range.  

That did not end the battle. It was not necessarily even the decisive  
moment. The turning point, when it came, was lost - as all such moments  
are - within the dust and turmoil of a thousand individual encounters  
where infantrymen faced infantrymen across the distance of their  
personal weapons. Before it was over some three hours later there would  
be minor variations on repeated themes, ineffective thrusts and clumsy  
counterthrusts, and a less than honorable moment when Henry would order  
prisoners killed rather than leave them in the rear when the English  
were confronted with a new threat. But the heralds and historians would  
later agree that the  

outcome had been sealed somewhere in the confusion during the first  
French infantry charge. The French died in their thousands. English  
dominion on that part of the Continent would continue for a while. The  
day of the armored man-at-arms, the knight, the embodiment of *  
chivalry, was over - hammered into history's coffin by a few thousand  
ragtag peasant archers carrying longbows.  

The ultimate insult to the noble-born French dead - if the dead indeed  
could be further insulted - lay in the fact that the English archers  
were not only common men, common in the lowest, most flea-infested sense  
of the word, but that they were draftees. Doughboys. Gls.  

Grunts. AIPs. Spezzes. K-techs. Jump Rats.  

But all that was in the lesson Kassad was supposed to have learned  
during the OCS:HTN exercise. He learned none of it. He was too busy  
having an encounter which would change his life.  

The French man-at-arms went over the head of his falling horse, rolled  
once, and was up and running for the woods before the mud quit flying.  
Kassad followed. He was halfway to the tree line before he realized  
that the youth and the griTsled archer had not come with him. It did  

not matter. Kassad's adrenaline was flowing and the bloodlust had him  
in its grip.  

The man-at-arms, who had just been thrown to the ground from a horse  
moving at full gallop and who was wearing sixty pounds of clumsy armor,  
should have been an easy prey to catch. He was not. The Frenchman  
glanced back once, saw Kassad coming on a full run with a mallet in his  
hand and his eye full of business, and then the man-at-arms shifted into  
a higher gear and reached the trees fifteen meters ahead of his pursuer.  

Kassad was deep into the woods before he stopped, leaned on the mallet,  
gasped, and considered his position.  

Thuds, screams, and crashes from the battlefield behind him were muffled  
by distance and shrubbery.  

The trees were almost bare and still dripped from the rainstorm the  
night before; the floor of the forest was carpeted with a thick layer of  
old leaves and a snarl of shrubs and brambles. The man-at-arms had left  
a trail of  

broken branches and footprints for the first twenty meters or so, but  
now deer trails and overgrown paths made it difficult to see where he  
had passed.  

Kassad moved slowly, stepping deeper into the woods, trying to be alert  
for any noise above the sound of his own panting and the insane pounding  
of his heart. It occurred to Kassad that, tactically speaking, this was  
not a brilliant move; the man-at-arms had been wearing full armor and  
carrying his sword when he disappeared in the bushes. At any moment the  
Frenchman might forget his panic, regret his temporary loss of honor,  
and remember his years of combat training. Kassad also had been  
trained. He looked down at his cloth shirt and leather vest. The  
mallet was still in his hands, the knife in his broad belt. He had been  
trained to use high-energy weapons with a killing range of a few meters  
to thousands of kilometers. He had been rated in plasma grenades,  
he!l-whips, fleschette rifles, sonics, recoilless zero-gravity weapons,  
deathwands, kinetic assault guns, and beam gauntlets. He now had a  
working knowledge of an English longbow. None of these objects- 
including the longbow - was on his person at the moment.  

'Ah, shit,' murmured Second Lieutenant Kassad.  

The man-at-arms came out of the bushes like a charging bear, arms up,  
legs apart, the sword coming around in a flat arc meant to disembowel  
Kassad. The OCS cadet tried to leap back and raise his mallet at the  
same time.  

Neither effort was completely successful. The Frenchman's sword knocked  
the heavy mallet out of Kassad's grip while the dull point of the blade  
slashed through leather, shirt, and skin. *  

Kassad bellowed and stumbled backward again, tugging at the knife in his  
belt. His right heel caught the branch of a fallen tree and he went  
down backward, cursing and rolling deeper into the tangle of branches as  
the man-at-arms crashed forward, his heavy sword clearing limbs like an  
oversized machete. Kassad had his knife out by the time the man=at-arms  

had cleared a path through the deadfall, but the ten-inch blade was a  
pitiful thing against armor unless the knight was helpless. This knight  
was not helpless. Kassad knew that he would  

never get inside the arc of sword blade. His only hope was in running,  
but the tall trunk of the fallen tree behind him and the deadfall beyond  
eliminated that option. He did not wish to get cut down from behind as  
he turned.  

Nor from below as he climbed. Kassad did not wish to be cut down from  
any angle.  

Kassad went into a knife fighter's crouch which he hadn't used since his  
street-fighting days in the Tharsis slums. He wondered how the  
simulation would deal with his death.  

The figure appeared behind the man-at-arms like a sudden shadow. The  
noise of Kassad's mallet striking the knight's armored shoulder sounded  
precisely like someone bashing the hood of an EMV with a sledge-hammer.  

The Frenchman staggered, turned to meet the new threat, and took a  
second mallet below in the chest.  

Kassad's savior was small; the man-at-arms did not go down. The French  
knight was raising his sword above his head when Kassad hit him behind  
and below the knees with a shoulder tackle.  

Tree limbs snapped as the Frenchman went down. The small attacker stood  
astride the knight, pinning the armored man's sword arm with one foot  
while bringing the mallet down repeatedly onto helmet and visor.  

Kassad extricated himself from the tangle of legs and branches, sat on  
the downed man's knees, and began slashing through gaps in armor at  
groin, sides, and underarms. Kassad's rescuer jumped aside to plant  
both feet on the knight's wrist and Kassad scrambled forward, stabbing  
through crevices where the helmet met chest armor, finally slamming the  
blade through slits in the visor itself.  

The knight screamed as the mallet came down a final time, almost  
catching Kassad's hand as the hammer drove the blade through the visor  
slit like a ten-inch tent peg. The man-at-arms arched,'lifting Kassad  
and sixty pounds of armor clear of the ground in a final violent spasm  
and then fell back limply.  

Kassad rolled onto his side. His rescuer collapsed beside him. Both  
were covered with sweat and the dead  

man's blood. Kassad looked at his savior. The woman was dressed in  
clothes not dissimilar to Kassad's. For a moment they merely lay there  
and gasped for air.  

'Are you... all fight?" Kassad managed after a while.  

He was suddenly struck by her appearance. Her brown hair was short by  
current Worldweb fashion, short and straight and cut so that the longest  
strands fell from the part, just a few centimeters left of the center of  
her forehead, to just above her right ear. It was a boy's haircut from  

some forgotten time, but she was no boy. Kassad thought that she was  
perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen: bone structure so  
perfect that chin and cheekbones were shaped without being too sharp,  
large eyes glowing with life and intelligence, a gentle mouth with a  
soft underlip. Lying next to her, Kassad realized that she was tall - 
not so tall as he but obviously not a woman from the fifteenth century - 
and even under her of the tunic and baggy trousers he could see the soft  
swell of hipg and breast. She appeared to be a few years older than  
Kassad, perhaps in her late twenties, but this fact barely registered as  
she continued staring into his face with those soft, beguiling,  
endlessly deep eyes.  

'Are you all right?" he asked again. His voice sounded strange, even to  
himself.  

She did not answer. Or, rather, she answered by sliding long fingers  
across Kassad's chest, ripping away the leather thongs which bound the  
rough vest. Her hands found his shirt. It was soaked with blood and  
ripped halfway down the front. The woman ripped it open the rest Of the  
way. She moved against him now, her fingers and lips on his chest, hips  
already beginning to move.  

Her fight hand found the cords to his trouser front, ripped them free.  

Kassad helped her pull off the rest of his clothes, removed hers with  
three fluid movements. She wore nothing under her shirt and  
coarse-cloth trousers.  

Kassad's hand slid between her thighs, behind her, cupped her moving  
buttocks, pulled her closer, and slid to the moist roughness in front.  
She opened to him, her mouth closing on his. Somehow, with all of their  
motion and disrobing, their skin never lost contact. Kassad felt  

his own excitement rubbing against the cusp of her belly.  

She rolled above him then, her thighs astride his hips, her gaze still  
locked with his. Kassad had never been so excited. He gasped as her  
right hand went behind her, found him, guided him into her. When he  
opened his eyes again she was moving slowly, her head back, eyes closed.  
Kassad's hands moved up her sides to cup her perfect breasts. Nipples  
hardened against his palms.  

They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been  
in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way  
and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment  
which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his  
squadmates in the hold of a troop transport.  

With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was  
sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so  
described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share  
the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try.  

They made love in a sudden shaft of late October light with a carpet of  
leaves and clothes beneath them and a film of blood and sweat oiling the  
sweet friction between them. Her green eyes stared down at Kassad,  
widening slightly when he began moving quickly, closing at the same  

second he closed his.  

They moved together then in the sudden tide of sensation as old and  
inevitable as the movement of worlds: pulses racing, flesh quickening  
with its own moist purposes, a further, final rising together, the world  
receding to nothing at all - and then, still joined by touch and  
heartbeat and the fading thrill of passion, allowing consciousness to  
slide back to separate flesh while the world flowed in through forgotten  
senses.  

They lay next to each other. The dead man's armor was cold against  
Kassad's left, arm, her thigh warm against his right leg. The sunlight  
was a benediction.  

Hidden colors rose to the surface of things. Kassad turned his head and  
gazed at her as she rested her head on his shoulder. Her cheeks  
glowed with flush and autumn light and her hair lay like copper threads  
along the flesh  

of his arm. She curved her leg over his thigh and Kassad felt the  
clockwise stirring of renewed passion. The sun was warm on his face. He  
closed his eyes.  

When he awoke she was gone. He was certain that only seconds had passed  

-no more than a minute, certainly -but the sunlight was gone, colors had 
flowed out of the forest, and a cool evening breeze moved bare  
branches.  

Kassad dressed in torn clothes made stiff with blood.  

The French man-at-arms lay still and rigid in the unselfconscious  
attitude of death. He already seemed inanimate, a part of the forest.  
There was no sign whatsoever of the woman.  

Fedmahn Kassad !imPed his way back through the woods, evening gloom, and  
a sudden, chilling drizzle.  

The battlefield still held people, living and dead. The dead lay in  
heaps like the piles of toy soldiers Kassad had played with as a child.  
Wounded men moved slowly with the help of friends. Here and there  
furtive forms picked their way among the dead, and near the opposite  
tree line a lively group of heralds, both French and English, met in  
conclave with much pointing and animated conversation.  

Kassad knew that they had to decide upon a name for the battle so that  
their respective records would agree. He also knew that they would  
settle on the name of the nearest castle, Agincourt, even though it had  
figured in neither strategy nor battle.  

Kassad was beginning to think that this was no simulation, that his life  
in the Worldweb was the dream and that this gray day had to be reality,  
when suddenly the entire scene froze with outlines of human figures,  
horses, and the darkening forest becoming as transparent as a fading  
holo. And then Kassad was being helPed out of his simulation creche at  
the Olympus Command School and the other cadets and instructors were  
rising, talking, laughing with one another - all seemingly unaware that  
the world had changed forever.  

For weeks Kassad sPent every free hour wandering the Command School  
grounds, watching from the ramparts as the evening shadow of Mons  
Olympus covered first  

the Plateau forest, then the heavily settled highlands, then everything  
halfway to the horizon, and then all the world. And every second he  
thought about what had hapPened. He thought about her.  

No one else had noticed anything strange in the simulation.  

No one else had left the battlefield. One instructor explained that  
nothing beyond the battlefield ex/sted in that particular segment of the  
simulation. No one had missed Kassad. It was as if the incident in the  
forest - and the woman - had never happened.  

Kassad knew better. He attended his classes on military history and  
mathematics. He put in his hours at the firing range and gym. He  
walked off barracks punishments on the Caldera Quadrangle, although  
these were rare. In general, young Kassad became an even more excellent  
officer cadet than he had been. But all the while he waited.  

And then she came again.  

Again it was in the final hours of an OCS:HTN simulation.  

By then Kassad had learned that the exercises were something more than  
mere simulations. The OCS:HTN was part of the Worldweb All Thing, the  
real-time network which governed Hegemony politics, fed information to  
tens of billions of data-hungry citizens, and had evolved a form of  
autonomy and consciousness all its own. More than a hundred and fifty  
planetary data-spheres mingled their resources within the framework  
created by six thousand omega-class Als to allow the OCS:HTN to  
function.  

'The HTN stuff doesn't simulate,' whined Cadet Radinski, the best AI  
exPert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, 'it dreams, dreams with  
the best historical accuracy in the Web - way beyond the sum of its  
parts 'cause it plugs in holistic insight as well as facts - and when it  
dreams, it lets us dream with it."  

Kassad had not understood but he had believed. And then she came again.  

In the First US-Vietnam War they made love in the aftermath of an ambush  
during the darkness and terror of a night patrol. Kassad wore rough  
camouflage  

clothes- with no underwear because of the jungle crotch rot - and a  
steel helmet not much more advanced than those at Agincourt. She wore  
black pajamas and sandals, the universal garb of the Southeast Asian  
peasant.  

And the Viet Cong. Then neither of them wore anything as they made love  
standing in the night, her back against a tree and her legs wrapped  
around him, while beyond them the world exploded in the green glow of  
perimeter flares and the sputter-crack of claymores.  

She came to him on the second day of Gettysburg and again at Borodino,  
where the clouds of powder smoke hung above the piles of bodies like a  
vapor congealed from departing souls.  

They made love in the shattered hulk of an APC in Hellas Basin while the  
hovertank battle still raged and the red dust of the approaching simoon  
scraped and shrieked at the titanium hull. 'Tell me your name,' he had  
whispered in Standard. She shook her head. 'Are you real- outside the  
simulation?" he asked in the Japanese-English of that era. She had  
nodded and leaned closer to kiss him.  

They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while  
deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken  
ceramic walls.  

During an unnamed battle after a siege of a forgotten tower city on the  
Russian steppes, he pulled her back into the shattered room where they  
had made love, and he whiSpered, 'I want to stay with you." She touched  
his lips with a finger and shook her head. After the evacuation of New  
Chicago, as they lay on the hundredth-floor balcony where Kassad had set  
his sniper's nest for the last US President's hopeless rear-guard  
action, he placed his hand on the warm flesh between her breasts and  
said, 'Can you ever join me... out there?" She touched his cheek with  
her palm and smiled.  

During the last year in Command School there were only five OCS:HTN sims  
as the cadets' training shifted to live field exercises. Sometimes, as  
when Kitssad was strapped into the tactical command chair during a  
battalion-sized drop onto Ceres, he closed his eyes, looked between the  
primary-colored geographies of the  

cortically generated tactical/terrain matrix, and felt a sense of...  
someone? Of her? He was not sure.  

And then she did not come again. Not in the final months of work. Not  
in the final simulation of the great Coal Sack Battle where General  
Horace Glennon-Height's mutiny was defeated. Not during the parades and  
parties of graduation, nor as the class marched in a final Olympian  
review before the Hegemony CEO, saluting from his red-lit levitation  
deck.  

And there was no time even for dreaming as the young officers farcast to  
Earth's Moon for the Masada Ceremony, farcast again to Tau Ceti Center  
for their formal swearing-in to FORCE, and then they were finished.  

Second Lieutenant Cadet Kassad became Lieutenant Kassad, spent three  
standard weeks free in the Web with a FORCE-issued universal card which  
allow him to farcast as far and as frequently as he wished, and then he  
was shipped out to the Hegemony Colonial Service training school on  
Lusus to prepare for active duty beyond the Web. He was sure that he  
would never see her again.  

He was wrong.  

Fedmahn Kassad had grown up in a culture of poverty and sudden death. As  
a member of the minority who still called themselves Palestinians, he  
and his family had lived in the slums of Tharsis, human testimony to the  

bitter legacy of the terminally dispossessed. Every Palestinian in the  
Worldweb and beyond carried the cul-turai memory of a century of  
struggle capped by a month of nationalist triumph before the Nuclear  
Jihad of 2038 wiped it all away. Then came their second Diaspora, this  
one lasting five centuries and leading to dead-end desert worlds like  
Mars, their dream buried with the death of Old Earth.  

Kassad, like the .other boys of the South Tharsis Relocation Camps,  
either ran with gangs or faced the option of being prey to every  
self-proclaimed predator in the camps. He chose to run with the gangs.  
Kassad had killed another youth by the time he was sixteen standard  
years old.  

If Mars was known for anything in the Worldweb, it  

was for hunting in the Mariner Valley, Schrauder's Zen Massif in Hellas  
Basin, and the Olympus Command School. Kassad did not have to travel to  
Mariner Valley to learn about hunting and being hunted, he had no  
interest in Zen Gnosticism, and as a teenager he felt nothing but  
contempt for the uniformed cadets who came from every part of the Web to  
train for FORCE.  

He joined with his peers in sneering at the New Bushido as a code for  
faggots, but an ancient vein of honor in the young Kassad's soul  
secretly resonated to the thought of a samurai class whose life and work  
revolved around duty, self-respect, and the ultimate value of one's  
word.  

When Kassad was eighteen, a Tharsis Province higher circuit judge  
offered him the choice of a Martian year at polar work camp or  
volunteering for the John Carter Brigade then forming to help FORCE put  
down the resurgent Glennon-Height Rebellion in the Class Three colonies.  
Kassad volunteered and discovered that he enjoyed the discipline and  
cleanliness of military life, even though the John Carter Brigade saw  
only garrison duty within the Web and was dissolved shortly after  
G!ennon-Height's cloned grandson died on Renaissance.  

Two days after his nineteenth birthday, Kassad applied to FORCE:ground  
and was turned down. He  

* went on a nine-day drunk, awoke in one of the deeper hive tunnels of  
Lusus with his military cornlog implant stolen - by someone who  
apparently had taken a correspondence course in surgery-his universal  
card and farcaster access revoked, and his head exploring new frontiers  
of pain.  

Kassad worked on Lusus for a standard year, saving over six thousand  
marks and allowing physical labor in the 1.3-ES gravity to put an end to  
his Martian frailness.  

By the time he used his savings to ship out to Maul-Covenant on an  
ancient solar sail freighter with jury-rigged Hawking drives, Kassad was  
still lean and tall by Web standards, but what muscles there were worked  
wonderfully well by anyone's standards.  

He arrived on Mani-Covenant three days before the vicious and unpopular  
Island War began there, and eventually the FORCE: combined commander at  

Firstsite  

got so tired of seeing the young Kassad waiting in his outer office that  
he allowed the boy to enlist in the 23rd Supply Regiment as an assistant  
hydrofoil driver. Eleven standard months later, Corporal Fedmahn Kassad  
of the Twelfth Mobile Infantry Battalion had received two Distinguished  
Service Clusters, a Senate Commendation for valor in the Equatorial  
Archipelago campaign, and two Purple Hearts. He was also tapped for  
FORCE command school and shipped Webward on the next convoy.  

Kassad dreamed of her often. He had never learned her name, she had  
never spoken, but he could have recognized her touch and scent in total  
darkness among a thousand others. He thought of her as Mystery.  

When other young officers went whoring or seeking girlfriends in the  
indigenie populations, Kassad would remain on base or take long walks  
through strange cities.  

He kept his obsession with Mystery secret, knowing full well how it  
would read on a psych report. Sometimes, on bivouac under multiple  
moons or in the womblike zero-g of a troop transport hold, Kassad would  
realize how insane his love affair with a phantom truly was. But then  
he would recall the small mole under her left breast which he had kissed  
one night, feeling her heartbeat under his lips as the ground itself  
shook from the firing of the big guns near Verdun. He would remember  
the impatient gesture with which she brushed back her hair as her cheek  
rested on his thigh. And the young officers would go to town or to the  
huts near the base, and Fedmahn Kassad would read another history book  
or jog along the perimeter or run tactical strategies on his comiog.  

It was not long before Kassad came to the attention of his superiors.  

During the undeclared war with the Free Miners in the Lambert Ring  
Territories, it was Lieutenant Kassad who led the surviving infantry  
troops and Marine guards in cutting through the bottom of the old  
asteroid bore shaft on Peregrine to evacuate the Hegemony consulate  
staff and citizens.  

But it was during the short reign of the New Prophet  

on Qom-Riyadh that Captain Fedmahn Kassad came to the attention of the  
entire Web.  

The FORCE:space captain of the only Hegemony ship within two leap years  
of the colony world had been paying a courtesy call when the New Prophet  
chose to lead thirty million New Order Shi'ites against two continents  
of Suni shopkeepers and ninety thousand resident Hegemony infidels. The  
ship's captain and five of his executive officers were taken prisoner.  
Urgent fatline messages from Tau Ceti Center demanded that the ranking  
officer aboard the orbiting HS Denieve settle the situation on  
Qom-Riyadh, free all hostages, and depose the New Prophet . . .  
without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons within the planet's  
atmosphere. The Denieve was an aging orbital defense picket. It  
carried no nuclear weapons that could be used within an atmosphere.  

The ranking officer on board was FORCE:combined Captain Fedmahn Kassad.  

On the third day of the revolution, Kassad landed the Denieve's single  
assault boat in the main courtyard of the Grand Mosque at Mashhad. He  
and the other thirty-four FORCE troopers watched as the mob grew to  
three hundred thousand militants kept at bay only by the boat's  
containment field and the lack of an order to attack by the New Prophet.  
The New Prophet himself was no longer in the Grand Mosque; he had flown  
to the northern hemisphere of Riyadh to join in the victory celebrations  
there.  

Two hours after he landed, Captain Kassad stepped out of his ship and  
broadcast a short announcement. He said that he had been raised as a  
Muslim. He also announced that interpretation of the Koran since the  
Shi'ites' seedship days had definitely shown that the God of Islam would  
neither condone nor allow the slaughter of the innocent, no matter how  
many jihads were proclaimed by tinhorn heretics like the New Prophet.  
Captain Kassad gave the leaders of the thirty million zealots three  
hours to surrender their hostages and return to their homes on the  
desert continent of Qom.  

In the first three days of the revolution the armies of the New Prophet  
had occupied most of the cities on two  

continents and had taken more than twenty-seven thousand Hegemony  
hostages. Firing squads had been busy day and night settling ancient  
theological disputes and it was estimated that at least a quarter of a  
million Sunis had been slaughtered in the first two days of the New  
Prophet's occupation. In response to Kassad's ultimatum, the New  
Prophet announced that all of the infidels would be put to death  
immediately following his live television address fhat evening. He also  
ordered an attack on Kassad's assault boat.  

Avoiding high explosives because of the Grand Mosque, the Revolutionary  
Guard used automatic weapons, crude energy cannon, plasma charges, and  
human wave attacks. The containment field held.  

The New Prophet's televised address began fifteen minutes before  
Kassad's ultimatum ran out. The New Prophet agreed with Kassad's  
statement that Allah would horribly punish heretics but announced that  
it was the Hegemony infidels who would be so punished. It was the only  
time the New Prophet ever had been seen to lose his temper on camera.  
Screaming, saliva flying, he ordered the human wave attacks to be  
renewed on the grounded assault boat. He announced that at that moment  
a dozen fission bombs were being assembled at the occupied Power for  
Peace reactor in All. With these, the forces of Allah would be carried  
into space itself. The first fission bomb, he explained, would be used  
on the infidel Kassad's satanic assault boat that very afternoon.  

The New Prophet then began to explain exactly how the Hegemony hostages  
would be executed, but at that moment Kassad's deadline ran out.  

Qom-Riyadh was, by its own choice and the accident of its distant  
location, a technically primitive world. But the inhabitants were not  
so primitive that they did not have an active datasphere. Nor were the  
revolutionary mullahs who had led the invasion so opposed to the 'Great  
Satan of Hegemony Science' that they refused to tie into the global data  
net with their personal cornlogs.  

The HS Denieve had seeded enough spysats so that by 1729 hours  
Qom-Riyadh Central Time, the datasphere had been tapped to the point  
that the Hegemony ship had  

identified sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty revolutionary  
muilahs by their access codes. At 1729:30 hours the spysats began  
feeding their real-time targeting data to the twenty-one perimeter  
defense sats which Kassad's assault boat had left in low orbit. These  
orbital defense weapons were so old that the Denieve's mission had been  
to return them to the Web for safe destruction.  

Kassad had suggested another use for them.  

At precisely 1730 hours, nineteen of the small satellites detonated  
their fusion cores. In the nanoseconds before their self-destruction,  
the resulting X rays were focused, aimed, and released in sixteen  
thousand eight hundred and thirty invisible but very coherent beams. The  
ancient defense sats were not designed for atmospheric use and had an  
effective destructive radius of less than a millimeter.  

Luckily, that was all that was needed. Not all of the targeting beams  
penetrated whatever stood between the mu!lahs and the sky. Fifteen  
thousand seven hundred and eighty-four did.  

The effect was immediate and dramatic. In each case the target's brain  
and cerebral fluid boiled, turned to vapor, and blew the encasing skull  
to bits. The New Prophet was in the middle of his live, planetwide  
broadcast - literally in the middle of pronouncing the word 'heretic' - 
when 1730 hours arrived.  

For almost two minutes the TV screens and walls around the planet  
carried the image of the New Prophet's headless body slumped over the  
microphone. Then Fedmahn Kassad cut in on all bands to announce that  
his next deadline was one hour away and that any actions against the  
hostages would be met with a more dramatic  

demonstration of Allah's displeasure.  

There were no reprisals.  

That night, in orbit around Q0m-Riyadh, Mystery visited Kassad for the  
first time since his cadet days. He was asleep but the visit was more  
than a dream and less than the alternative reality of the OCS:HTN sims.  
The woman and he were lying together under a light blanket beneath a  
broken roof. Her skin was warm and electric, her face little more than  
a pale outline against nighttime darkness. Overhead the stars had just  
begun to fade into  

the false light of predawn. Kassad realized that she was trying to  
speak to him; her soft lips formed words which were just below the  
threshold of Kassad's hearing. He pulled back a second in order to see  
her face better and, in so doing, lost contact completely. He awoke in  
his sleep webbing with moisture on his cheeks and the hum of the ship's  
systems sounding as strange to him as the breathing of some  
half-awakened beast.  

Nine standard ship weeks later, Kassad stood before a FORCE  

court-martial review on Freeholm. He had known when he made his  
decision on Qom-Riyadh that his superiors would have no choice but to  
crucify or promote him.  

FORCE prided itself on preparing itself for all contingencies in the Web  
or the colonial regions, but nothing had properly prepared it for the  
Battle of South Bressia and its implications for the New Bushido.  

The New Bushido Code which governed Colonel Kassad's life had evolved  
out of the necessity for the military class to survive. After the  
obscenities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on  
Old Earth, when military leaders had committed their nations to  
strategies wherein entire civilian populations were legitimate targets  
while their uniformed executioners sat safe in self-contained bunkers  
fifty meters under the earth, the repugnance of the surviving civilians  
was so great that for more than a century the word 'military' was an  
invitation to a lynching.  

As the New Bushido evolved it combined the age-old concepts of honor and  
individual courage with the need to spare civilians whenever possible.  
It also saw the wisdom of returning to the pre-Napoleonic concepts of  
small, 'nontotal' wars with defined goals and proscribed excesses. The  
Code demanded a forsaking of nuclear weapons and strategic bombing  
campaigns in all but the most extreme cases but, more than that, it  
demanded a return to Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between  
small, professional forces at a mutually agreed upon time in a place  
where destruction of public and private property would be kept to a  
minimum.  

This Code worked well for the first four centuries of post-Hegira  
expansion. The fact that essential technologies were essentially frozen  
in place for three of those centuries worked in the Hegemony's favor as  
its monopoly on the use of farcasters allowed it to apply the modest  
resources of FORCE at the right place in the required amount of time.  
Even when separated by the inevitable leap years of time-debt, no  
colonial or independent world could hope to match the power of the  
Hegemony. Incidents .such as the political rebellion on Maui-Covenant,  
with its unique guerrilla warfare, or the religious insanity on  
Qom-Riyadh were put down quickly and firmly and any excesses in the  
campaigns merely pointed out the importance of returning to the strict  
Code of the New Bushido. But for all of FORCE's calculations and  
preparations, no one had adequately planned on the inevitable  
confrontation with the Ousters.  

The Ousters had been the single external threat to the Hegemony for the  
four centuries since the forebears of the barbarian hordes had left Sol  
System in their crude fleet of leaking O'Neill cities, tumbling  
asteroids, and experimental comet farm clusters. Even after the Ousters  
acquired the Hawking drive, it remained official Hegemony policy to  
ignore them as long as their swarms stayed in the darkness between the  
stars and limited their in-system plunderings to scooping small amounts  
of hydrogen from gas giants and water ice from uninhabited moons.  

The early Outback skirmishes such as Bent's World and GHC 2990 were  
considered aberrations, of little interest to the Hegemony. Even the  
pitched battle for Lee Three had been treated as a Colonial Service  
problem and when the FORCE task force arrived six local years after the  

attack, five years after the Ousters departed, any atrocities were  
conveniently forgotten in favor of the view that no barbarian raid would  
repeat itself when the Hegemony chose to flex its muscle.  

In the decades which followed Lee Three, FORCE and Ouster space'forces  
skirmished in a hundred border  

areas, but except for the odd Marine encounters in airless, weightless  
places, there were no infantry confrontations.  

Stories in the Worldweb proliferated: the Ousters would never be a  
threat to Earthlike worlds because of their three centuries of  
adaptation to weight-lessness; the Ousters had evolved into something  
more -or less - than human; the Ousters did not have farcaster  
technology, would never have it, and thus never would.  

be a threat to FORCE. Then came Bressia.  

Bressia was one of those smug, independent worlds, pleased with both its  
convenient access to the Web and its eight-month separation from it,  
growing rich from the export of diamonds, burr root, and its unequaled  
coffee, coyly refusing to become a colony world but still dependent upon  
the Hegemony Protectorate and Common Market to meet its soaring economic  
goals. As with most such worlds, Bressia was proud of its Self-defense  
Force: twelve torchships, a refitted attack carrier which had been  
decommissioned by FORCE:space half a century earlier, twoscore or more  
of small, fast orbital patrol vessels, a standing army of ninety  
thousand volunteers, a respectable oceangoing navy, and a store of  
nuclear weapons stockpiled purely for symbolic purposes.  

The Ouster Hawking wake had been noticed by Hegemony monitoring stations  
but was misinterpreted as merely another swarm migration which would  
pass no closer than half a light-year to the Bressian system.  

Instead, with a single course correction which was not detected until  
the swarm was within the O6rt cloud radius, the Ousters fell on Bressia  
like some Old Testament plague. A minimum of seven standard months  
separated Bressia from any Hegemony rescue or response.  

Bressia's space force was obliterated within the first twenty hours of  
fighting. The Ouster swarm then put more than three thousand ships into  
Bressia's cislunar space and began the systematic reduction of all  
planetary defenses.  

The world had been settled by no-nonsense Central Europeans in the first  
wave of the Hegira, and its two continents bore the prosaic names of  
North Bressia and  

South Bressia. North Bressia held desert, high tundra, and six major  
cities housing mostly burr-root harvesters and petroleum engineers.  
South Bressia, much more temperate in climate and geography, was the  
home for most of the world's four hundred million people and the huge  
coffee plantations.  

As if to demonstrate what war had once been about, the Ousters scoured  
North Bressia - first with several hundred fallout-free nuclear weapons  
and tactical plasma bombs, then with deathbeams, and finally with  

tailored viruses. Only a handful of the fourteen million residents  
escaped. South Bressia received no bombardment except for the lancing  
of specific military targets, airports, and the large harbor at Solno.  

FORCE doctrine held that, while a world could be reduced from orbit,  
actual military invasion of an industrialized planet was an  
impossibility; the problems with landing logistics, the immense area to  
be occupied, and the unwieldy size of the invading army were considered  
to be the ultimate arguments against invasion.  

The Ousters obviously had not read the FORCE doctrine books. On the  
twenty-third day of the investiture, more than two thousand dropships  
and assault boats fell on South Bressia. What was left of the Bressian  
air force was destroyed in those first hours of the invasion. Two  
nuclear' devices were actually detonated against Ouster staging areas:  
the first was deflected by energy fields and the second destroyed a  
single scoutship which may have been a decoy.  

Ousters, it turned out, had changed physically in three centuries. They  
did prefer zero-gravity environments.  

But their mobile infantry's powered exoskeletons served very well and it  
was only, a matter of days before the black-clad, 1ong-limbed Ouster  
troops were swarming over South Bressia's cities like an infestation of  
giant spiders.  

The last organized resistance collapsed on the nineteenth day of the  
invasion. Buckminster, the capital, fell the same day. The last  
fatline message from Bressia to the Hegemony was cut off in  
mid-transmission an hour after Ouster troops entered the city.  

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad arrived with FORCE Fleet One twenty-nine standard  
weeks later. Thirty omega-class torchships protecting a single,  
farcaster-equipped JumpShip penetrated the system at high speed. The  
singularity sphere was activated three hours after spin-down and ten  
hours after that there were four hundred FORCE ships of the line in  
system. The counterinvasion began twenty-one hours later.  

Those were the mathematics of the first minutes of the Battle of  
Bressia. For Kassad, the memory of those days and weeks held not  
mathematics but the terrible beauty of combat. It was the first time  
JumpShips had been used on anything above a division level and there was  
the expected confusion. Kassad went through from five light-minutes out  
and fell into gravel and yellow dust because. the assault boat  
farcaster portal was facing down a steep incline made slick with mud and  
the blood of the first squads through. Kassad lay in the mud and looked  
down the hillside at madness. Ten of the seventeen farcaster assault  
boats were down and burning, scattered across the foothills and  
plantation fields like broken toys. The containment fields of the  
surviving boats were shrinking under an onslaught of missile and CPB  
fire that turned the landing areas into domes of orange flame. Kassad's  
tactical display was a hopeless mess; his visor showed a garble of  
impossible fire vectors, blinking red phosphors where FORCE troops lay  
dying, and overlays of Ouster jamming ghosts. Someone was screaming  
'Oh, goddammit! Goddammit! Oh, goddammit!" on his primary command  
circuit and the implants registered a void where Command Group's data  
should be.  

An enlisted man helped him up, Kassad flicked mud off his command wand  
and got out of the way of the next squad farcasting through, and the war  
was on.  

From his first minutes on South Bressia, Kassad realized that the New  
Bushido was dead. Eighty thousand superbly armed and trained  
FORCE:ground troops advanced from their staging areas, seeking battle in  
an unpopulated place. Ouster forces retreated behind a line  

of scorched earth, leaving only booby traps and dead civilians. FORCE  
used farcasters to outmaneuver the enemy, to force him to fight. The  
Ousters responded with a barrage of nuclear and plasma weapons, pinning  
the ground troops under forcefields while the Ouster infantry retreated  
to prepared 'defenses around cities and dropship staging areas.  

There were no quick victories in space to shift the balance on South  
Bressia. Despite feints and occasional fierce battles, the Ousters  
retained complete control of everything within three AU of Bressia.  
FORCE:space units fell back and concentrated on keeping the fleet within  
farcaster range and protecting the primary JumpShip.  

What had been. forecast as a two-day battle ground on for thirty days,  
then sixty. Warfare had been thrown back to the twentieth or  
twenty-first century: long, grim campaigns fought through the brick dust  
of ruined cities over the corpses of civilians. The eighty thousand  
original FORCE troops were ground up, reinforced with a hundred thousand  
more, and were still being decimated when the call went out for two  
hundred thousand more.  

Only the grim resolve of Meina Gladstone and a dozen other determined  
senators kept the war alive and the troops dying while the billions of  
voices of the All Thing and the AI Advisory Council called for  
disengagement.  

Kassad had understood the change of tactics almost at once. His  
street-fighting instincts had risen to the forefront even before most of  
his division was wiped out in the Battle of the Stoneheap. While other  
FORCE commanders were all but ceasing to function, frozen into  
indecision by this violation of the New Bushido, Kassad - in command of  
his regiment and in temporary command of his division after the nuking  
of Command Group Delta - was trading men for time and calling for the  
release of fusion weapons to spearhead his own counterattack. By the  
time the Ousters withdrew ninety-seven days after the FORCE 'rescue' of  
Bressia, Kassad had earned the double-edged nickname of the Butcher of  
South Bressia. It was rumored that even his own troops were afraid of  
him.  

And Kassad dreamed of her with dreams that were more - and less - than  
dreams.  

On the last night of the Battle for Stoneheap, in the maze of dark  
tunnels where Kassad and his hunter-killer groups used sonics and T-5  
gas to flush out the last warrens of Ouster commandos, the Colonel fell  
asleep amid the flame and screams and felt the touch of her long fingers  
on his cheek and the soft compression of her breasts against him.  

When they entered New Vienna on the morning after the space strike  
Kassad had called in, the troops following the glass-smooth,  
twenty-meter-wide burn grooves into the lanced city, Kassad had stared  
without blinking at the rows of human heads lying on the pavement,  
carefully lined up as if to welcome the rescuing FORCE troops with their  
accusatory stares. Kassad had returned to his command EMV, closed the  
hatches, and - curling up in the warm darkness smelling of rubber,  
heated plastics, charged ions - had heard her whispers over the babble  
of the C3 channels and implant coding.  

On the night before the Ouster retreat, Kassad left the command  
conference on the HS Brazil, farcast to his HQ in the Indelibles north  
of the Hyne Valley, and took his command car to the summit to watch the  
final bombardment.  

The nearest of the tactical nuclear strikes was forty-five kilometers  
away. The plasma bombs blossomed like orange and blood-red flowers  
planted in a perfect grid.  

Kassad counted more than two hundred dancing columns of green light as  
the hellwhip lances ripped the broad plateau to shreds. And even before  
he slept, while he sat on the flare skirt of the EMV and shook pale  
afterimages from his eyes, she came. She wore a pale blue dress and  
walked lightly between the dead burr-root plants on the hillside.  

The breeze lifted the hem of the soft fabric of her dress. Her face and  
arms were pale, almost translucent. She called his name - 
hecouldalmosthearthewords - andthenthesec-ond wave of bombardment rolled  
in across the plain below him and everything was lost in noise and  
flame.  

As tends to be the case in a universe apparently ruled by irony, Fedmahn  
Kassad passed unscathed through ninety° seven days of the worst fighting  
the Hegemony had ever  

seen, only to be wounded two days after the last of the Ousters had  
retreated to their fleeing swarmships. He was in the Civic Center  
Building in Buckminster, one of only three buildings left standing in  
the city, giving curt answers to stupid questions from a Worldweb  
newsteep when a plasma booby trap no larger than a microswitch exploded  
fifteen floors above, blew the newsteep and two of Kassad's aides  
through a ventilator grille into the street beyond, and dropped the  
building on him.  

Kassad was medevacked to division HQ and then far-cast to the JumpShip  
now in orbit around Bressia's second moon. There he was resuscitated  
and put on full life support while the military brass and Hegemony  
politicians decided what to do with him.  

Because of the farcaster connection and the real-time media coverage of  
Bressia, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had become somewhat of a cause cdibre.  
Those billions who had been appalled by the unprecedented savagery of  
the South Bressia campaign would have been pleased to see Kassad  
court-martialed or tried for war crimes. CEO Gladstone and many others  
considered Kassad and the other FORCE commanders as saviors.  

In the end, Kassad was put on a hospital spinship for the slow trip back  

to the Web. Since most of the physical repair would be done in fugue  
anyway, it made some sense to let the old hospital ships work on the  
seriously wounded and the revivable dead. By the time Kassad and  

' the other patients reached the Worldweb, they would be ready for  
active duty. More importantly, Kassad would have accrued a time-debt of  
at least eighteen standard months and whatever controversy surrounded  
him might well be over by that time.  

Kassad awoke to see the dark shape of a woman bending over him. For a  
second he was sure that it was her, and  

then he realized that it was aFORCE medic.  

'Am I dead?" he whispered.  

'You were. You're on the HS Merrick. You've been through resuscitation  
and renewal several times but you probably don't. remember because of  
the fugue hangover.  

We're ready to start the next step in physical  

therapy. Do you feel like trying to walk?"  

Kassad lifted his arm to cover his eyes. Even through the  
disorientation of fugue state, he now remembered the painful therapy  
sessions, the long hours in the RNA virus baths, and the surgery. Most  
of all the surgery.  

'What's our route?" he asked, still shielding his eyes. 'I forget how  
we're getting back to the Web."  

The medic smiled as if this were a question he asked each time he came  
out of fugue. Perhaps it was. 'We'll be putting in at Hyperion and  
Garden,' she said. 'We're just entering the orbit of..."  

The woman was interrupted by the sound of the end of the world - great  
brass trumpets blowing, metal ripping, furies screaming. Kassad rolled  
off the bed, wrapping the mattress around him as he fell in the  
one-sixth g.  

Hurricane winds slid him across the deck and hurled pitchers, trays,  
bedclothes, books, bodies, metal instruments, and countless other  
objects at him. Men and women were screaming, their voices rising  
through falsetto as the air rushed out of the ward. Kassad felt the  
mattress slam into the wall; he looked out between clenched fists.  

A meter from him, a football-sized spider with wildly waving legs was  
trying to force itself into a crack which had suddenly appeared in the  
bulkhead. The thing's jointless legs seemed to be swatting at the paper  
and other detritus whirling around it. The spider rotated and Kassad  
realized that it was the head of the medic; she had been decapitated in  
the initial explosion. Her long hair writhed at Kassad's face. Then  
the crack widened to the width of a fist and the head disappeared  
through it.  

Kassad pulled himself up just as the boom arm quit spinning and 'up'  

ceased to be. The only forces now in play were the hurricane winds  
still flinging everything in the ward toward the cracks and gaps in the  
bulkhead and the sickening lurch and tumble of the ship. Kassad swam  
against it all, pulling himself toward the door to the boom-arm  
corridor, using every handhold he could find, kicking free the last five  
meters. A metal tray struck him above the eye; a corpse with  
hemorrhaged eyes almost tumbled him back into the ward. The airtight  
emergency  

doors were slamming uselessly into a dead Marine whose spacesuited body  
blocked the seal from closing. Kassad rolled through into the boom-arm  
shaft and pulled the corpse after him. The door sealed behind him, but  
there was no more air in the shaft than there had been in the ward.  
Somewhere a klaxon's scream thinned to inaudibility.  

Kassad also screamed, trying to relieve the pressure so that his lungs  
and eardrums would not burst. The boom arm was still draining air; he  
and the corpse were being sucked the hundred and thirty meters to the  
main body of the ship. He and the dead Marine tumbled along the  
boom-arm shaft in a grisly waltz.  

It took Kassad twenty seconds to slap open the emergency releases on the  
Marine's suit, another minute to eject the man's corpse and to get his  
own body in. He was at least ten centimeters taller than the dead man,  
and although the suit was built to allow some expansion, it still  
pinched painfully at his neck and wrists and knees.  

The helmet squeezed his forehead like a cushioned vise.  

Gobbets of blood and a moist white material clung to tbe inside of the  
visor. The piece of shrapnel which had killed the Marine had left  
entrance and exit holes, but tbe suit had done its best to seal itself.  
Most of the chest lights were red and the suit did not respond when  
Kassad ordered it to give a status report, but the rebreather worked,  
although with a worrying rasp.  

Kassad tried the suit radio. Nothing, not even background static. He  
found the comlog lead, jacked into a hull termex. Nothing. The ship  
pitched again then, metal reverberating to a succession of blows, and  
Kassad was thrown against the wall of the boom-arm shaft. One of the  
transport cages tumbled by, its severed cables whipping like the  
tentacles of an agitated sea anemone. There were corpses in the cage  
and more bodies tangled along the segments of spiral staircase still  
intac along the shaft wall. Kassad kicked the remaining distance to the  
end of the shaft and found all of the airtight doors there sealed, the  
boom-arm shaft itself irised shut, but there were holes in the primary  
bulkhead large enough to drive a commercial EMV through.  

The ship lurched again and began to tumble more wildly, imparting  
complex new Coriolis forces to Kassad and everything else in the shaft.  
Kassad hung on torn metal and pulled himself through a rent in the  
triple hull of the HS Merrick.  

He almost laughed when he saw the interior. Whoever had lanced the old  
hospital ship had done it right, chopping and stabbing the hull with  
CPBs until pressure seals failed, self-seal units ruptured,  
damage-control remotes overloaded, and the interior bulkheads collapsed.  

Then the enemy ship had put missiles into the guts of the hulk with  
warheads o f what the FORCE:space people quaintly called canister shot.  
The effect had been quite similar to setting off an antipersonnel  
grenade in a crowded rat maze.  

Lights shone through a thousand holes, here and there becoming colorful  
rays where they found a colloidal base in floating haze of dust or blood  
or lubricant. From where Kassad hung, twisting with the lurch and  
tumble of the ship, he could see a score or more of bodies, naked and  
torn, each moving with the deceptive underwater-ballet grace of the  
zero-gravity dead. Most of the corpses floated within their own small  
solar systems of blood and tissue. Several of them watched Kassad with  
the cartoon-character sares of their pressure-expanded eyes and seemed  
to beckon him closer with random, languid movements of arms and hands.  

Kassad kicked through the wreckage to reach the main dropshaft to the  
command core. He had seen no weapons - it seemed that no one except the  
Marine had managed to suit up - but he knew that there would be a  
weapons locker in the command core or in the Marine quarters aft.  

Kassad stopped at the last torn pressure seal and stared. He did laugh  
this time. Beyond this point there was no main dropshaft, no aft  
section. There was no ship. This section - a boom-arm and medical ward  
mod, a ragged chunk of the hull - had been ripped free of the ship as  
easily as Beowulf had torn the arm from Grendel's body. The final,  
unsealed doorway to the dropshaft led to open space. Some kilometers  
away,  

Kassad could see a dozen other ravaged fragments of the HS Merrick  
tumbling in the glare of sunlight. A green and lapis planet loomed so  
close that Kassad felt a surge of acrophobia and clung more tightly to  
the doorframe.  

Even as he watched, a star moved above the limb of the planet, laser  
weapons winked their ruby morse, and a gutted ship section half a  
kilometer away across the gulf of vacuum from Kassad burst again in a  
gout of vaporized metal, freezing volatiles, and tumbling black specks  
which Kassad realized were bodies.  

Kassad pulled himself deeper into the concealing tangle of wreckage and  
considered his situation. The Marine's suit could not last more than  
another hour -already Kassad could smell the rotten-eggs stench of the  
malfunctioning rebreather - and he had seen no airtight compartment or  
container during his struggle through the wreckage. And even if he  
found a closet or air-lock to shelter in, what then? Kassad did not  
know if the planet below was Hyperion or Garden, but he was sure that  
there was no FORCE presence on either world. He was also quite sure  
that no local defense forces would challenge an Ouster warship. It  
would be days before any patrol craft investigated the wreckage. It was  
quite possible, Kassad knew, that the orbit of the tumbling piece of  
junk he now inhabited would decay before they sent anyone up to check on  
it, sending thousands of tons of twisted metal burning through the  
atmosphere.  

The locals would not like that, Kassad knew, but from their point of  
view it might be preferable to let a bit of sky fall than to antagonize  
the Ousters. If the planet had primitive orbital defenses or  

ground-based CPBs, he realized with a grim smile, it would make more  
sense for them to blast the wreckage than to fire on the Ouster ship.  

It would make no difference to Kassad. Unless he did something quickly,  
he would be dead long before the remnants of the ship entered atmosphere  
or the locals took action.  

The Marine's amplification shield had been cracked by the shrapnel which  
had killed him, but now Kassad tugged what was left of the viewplate  
down over the  

visor. Telltales winked red but there was still enough suit power to  
show the amplified view glowing pale green through the spiderweb of  
cracks. Kassad watched as the Ouster torchship stood off a hundred  
klicks, its defense fields blurring background stars, and launched  
several objects. For an instant Kassad was sure that these were the  
coup de grdce missiles and he found himself grinning joylessly at the  
certainty of having only a few seconds to live. Then he noticed their  
low velocity and notched the amplification higher. The power lights  
blinked red and the amplifier failed, but not before Kassad had seen the  
tapering ovoid shapes, spotted with thrusters and cockpit blisters, each  
trailing a tangle of six jointless manipulator arms. 'Squids,' the  
FORCE:space people had called the Ouster boarding craft.  

Kassad pulled himself farther back in the wreckage.  

He had only a few minutes before one or more of the squids reached his  
piece of the ship. How many Ousters would one of those things carry?  
Ten? Twenty? Kassad was sure that it would be no fewer than ten. And  
they would be well armed and rigged with infrared and motion sensors.  
The elite Ouster equivalent of Hegemony Space Marines, the commandos  
would not only have been trained for free-fall combat but had been born  
and bred to zero-g. Their long limbs, prehensile toes, and prosthetic  
tails would be added advantages for this environment, although Kassad  
doubted that they needed any more advantages than they already had.  

He began to pull himself carefully back through the labyrinth of twisted  
metal, fighting the adrenaline fear-surge that made him want to kick off  
screaming through the darkness. What did they want? Prisoners. That  
would solve his immediate survival problem. All he had to do to survive  
was surrender. The difficulty with that solution' was that Kassad had  
seen the FORCE:intelligence holos of the Ouster ship they had captured  
off Bressia. There had been more than two hundred prisoners in the  
storage bay of that ship. And the Ousters obviously had many questions  
for these Hegemony citizens.  

Perhaps they had found it inconvenient to feed and imprison so many- or  
perhaps it was their basic  

interrogation policy - but the fact was that the Bressian civilians and  
captured FORCE troops had been found flayed open and pinned down on  
steel trays like frogs in a biology lab, their organs bathed with  
nutrient fluids, arms and legs efficiently amputated, eyes removed, and  
their minds readied for interrogators' questions with crude cortical  
comtaps and shunt-plugs jacked directly through three-centimeter holes  
in the skulls.  

Kassad pulled himself along, floating through debris and the tangled  
entrails of the ship's wiring. He felt no inclination whatsoever to  
surrender. The tumbling hulk vibrated and then steadied some as at  
least one of the squids attached itself to the hull or bulkhead. Think,  
Kassad commanded. He needed a weapon more than a hiding place. Had he  
seen anything during his crawl through the wreckage that would help him  
survive?  

Kassad stopped moving and hung from an exposed section of fiberoptic  
cable while he thought. The medical ward where he had awakened, beds,  
fugue tanks, intensive care apparatus... most of it expelled through  
the breaches in the spinmod's hull. Boom-arm shaft, elevator cage,  
corpses on the stairs. No weapons. Most of the bodies had been  
stripped by the canister shot explosions or sudden decompression. The  
elevator cables? No, too long, impossible to sever without tools.  
Tools? He had seen none. The medical offices fiayed open along the  
corridors beyond the main dropshaft. Medical imaging rooms, MRI tanks,  
and CPD bays flung open like looted sarcophagi. At least one operating  
room intact, its interior a maze of scattered instruments and floating  
cables.  

The solarium, scraped clean when the windows exploded outward. Patient  
lounges. Medics' lounges. The scrub rooms, corridors, and  
unidentifiable cubicles. The corpses.  

Kassad hung there a second longer, oriented himself in tbe tumbling maze  
of light and shadow, and then kicked off.  

He had hoped for ten minutes; he was given less than eight. He knew  
that the Ousters would be methodical and efficient but had  
underestimated how efficient they could be in zero-g. He gambled his  
life that there would  

be at least two of them on each sweep - basic Space Marine procedure,  
much as FORCE:ground jump rats had learned to go door to door il city  
fighting, one to burst into each room, the other to provide cover fire.  
If there were more than two, if the Ousters worked in squads of four,  
Kassad almost certainly would be dead.  

He was floating in the middle of Operating Room 3 when the Ouster came  
through the door. Kassad's febfeather had all but failed, he was  
floating immobile, gasping foul air, as the Ouster commando swung in,  
swung aside, and brought his two weapons to bear on the unarmed figure  
in a battered Marine spacesuit.  

Kassad had bargained that the gruesome condition of his suit and visor  
would gain him a second or two.  

Behind his gore-smeared faceplate, Kassad's eyes stared sightlessly  
upward as the Ouster's chestlight swept across him. The commando  
carried two weapons- a sonic stunner in one hand and a smaller but much  
more lethal tightbeam pistol in the long toes of his left 'foot." He  
raised the sonic. Kassad had time to notice the killing spike on the  
prosthetic tail and then he triggered the mouse in his gauntleted right  
hand.  

It had taken Kassad most of his eight minutes to tie in the emergency  

generator to the operating-room circuits.  

Not all of the surgery lasers had survived, but six still worked. Kassad  
had positioned four of the smaller ones to cover the area just to the  
left of the doorway, the two bone-cutters to target the space to the  
right. The Ouster had moved to the right.  

The Ouster's suit exploded. The lasers continued to slice away in their  
preprogrammed circles as Kassad propelled himself forward, ducking under  
the blue beams now swirling in a spreading mist of useless suit sealant  
and boiling blood. He wrested the sonic away just as the second Ouster  
swung into the room, agile as an Old Earth chimp.  

Kassad pressed the sonic against the man's helmet and fired. The suited  
figure went !imp. The prosthetic tail spasmed a few times from random  
nerve impulses. Triggering the sonic that close was no way to take a  
prisoner; a burst from that distance turned a human brain into  

something resembling oatmeal mush. Kassad did not want to take a  
prisoner.  

He kicked free,. grabbed a girder, swept the active sonic across the  
open doorway. No one else came through. A check twenty seconds later  
showed an empty corridor.  

Kassad ignored the first body and stripped the man with the intact suit.  
The commando was naked under the spacesuit and it turned out not to be a  
man; the female commando had short-cropped blond hair, small breasts,  
and a tattoo just above her line of pubic hair. She was very pale and  
droplets of blood floated from her nose, ears, and eyes. Kassad made a  
note that the Ousters used women in their Marines. All of the Ouster  
bodies on Bressia had been male.  

He kept his helmet and rebreather pack on as he kicked the body aside  
and tugged on the unfamiliar suit.  

Vacuum exploded blood vessels in his flesh. Deep cold nipped at him as  
he struggled with strange clasps and locks. Tall as he was, he was too  
short for the woman's suit. He could operate the hand gauntlets by  
stretching, but the foot gloves and tail connections were hopeless.  

Hc let them hang useless as he bailed out of his own helmet and wrestled  
the Ouster bubble into place.  

Lights in the collar diskey glowed amber and violet.  

Kassad heard the rush of air through aching eardrums and almost gagged  
as a thick, rich stench assailed him.  

He assumed it was the sweet smell of home to an Ouster.  

Earphone patches in the bubble whispered coded commands in a language  
which sounded like an audio tape of Ancient English played backward at  
high speed.  

Kassad was gambling again, this time on the fact that Ouster ground  
units on Bressia had functioned as semi-independent teams united by  

voice radio and basic telemetry rather than a FORCE:ground type of  
tactical implant web. If they used the same system here, then the  
commando leader might know that two of his (or her) troops were missing,  
possibly even have medcom readings on them, but might not know exactly  
where they were.  

Kassad decided that it was time to quit hypothesizing  

and to get moving. He programmed the mouse to have the surgical lasers  
fire on anything entering the operating room, and then bounce-stumbled  
his way down the corridor.  

Moving in one of these damn suits, he thought, was like trying to walk  
in a gravity field while standing on your own trousers. He had brought  
along both energy pistols and - finding no belt, lockrings, hooks,  
Velcro pads, macclamps, or pockets to secure them with - now floated  
along like some drunken holodrama pirate, a weapon in each hand,  
bouncing from wall to wall. Reluc-tanfly, he left one pistol floating  
behind him while he tried to hook himself along one-handed. The  
gauntlet fit like a size fifteen mitten on a size two hand. The damned  
tail wobbled, banged against his helmet bubble, and was a literal pain  
in the ass.  

Twice he squeezed into crevices when he saw lights in the distance. He  
was just about to the deck opening where he had watched the squid  
approach when he rounded a corner and almost floated into three Ouster  
commandos.  

The fact that he was wearing an Ouster suit gave him at least a  
two-second advantage. He shot the first suited figure in the helmet at  
point-blank range. The second man- or woman- fired a wild sonic burst  
past Kassad's left shoulder a second before he put three bolts into the  
Ouster's chestplate. The third commando flipped backward, found three  
handholds, and was out of sight around a broken bulkhead before Kassad  
could retarget. His headset rang with curses, commands, and questions.  
Kassad gave silent chase.  

The third Ouster would have escaped if he had not rediscovered honor and  
turned to fight. Kassad felt an inexplicable sense of djt vu as he put  
an energy bolt through the man's left eye from five meters away.  

The corpse tumbled backward into sunlight. Kassad pulled himself to the  
opening and stared at the squid moored not twenty meters'away. It was,  
he thought, the first undiluted piece of luck he had had in some time.  

He kicked across the gap, knowing that if someone wanted to shoot him  
from the squid or the wreckage there was nothing he could do about it.  
He felt the  

scrotum-lifting tension he always experienced when he was an obvious  
target. No shots were fired. Commands and interrogatives squawked in  
his ears. He could not understand them, did not know where they  
originated, and, on the whole, thought it best if he stayed out of the  
dialogue.  

The clumsiness of the suit almost caused him to miss the squid. He  
thought briefly that such an anticlimax would be the universe's fitting  

verdict on his martial pretensions: the brave warrior floating off into  
near-planet orbit, no maneuvering systems, no propellant, no reaction  
mass of any sort - even the pistol was non-recoil.  

He would end his life as useless and harmless as a child's runaway  
balloon.  

Kassad stretched until his joints popped, caught a whip antenna, and  
pulled himself hand over handto the squid's hull.  

Where the hell was the airlock? The hull was relatively smooth for a  
spacefaring vessel but was decorated with a riot of designs, decals, and  
panels announcing what he assumed were the Ouster equivalents of NO STEP  
and DANGER: THRUSTER PORT. No entrances were visible. He guessed that  
there were Ousters on board, a pilot at least, and that they were  
probably wondering why their returning commando was crawling around the  
hull like a spavined crab rather than cycling the airlock. Or perhaps  
they knew why and were waiting inside with drawn pistols.  

At any rate, it was obvious that no one was going to open the door for  
him.  

The hell with it, thought Kassad and shot out one of 'the observation  
blisters.  

The Ousters kept a tidy ship. Not much more than the equivalent of a  
few lost paper clips and coins geysered out with the ship's air. Kassad  
waited until the eruption had died down and squeezed through the gap.  

He was in the carrier section: a cushioned hold looking a lot like the  
jump rat bay of any dropship or APC.  

Kassad made a mental note that a squid probably held about twenty Ouster  
commandos in full vacuum combat gear. Now it was empty. An open hatch  
led to the cockpit.  

Only the command pilot had remained on board and he was in the final  
process of unbelting when Kassad shot him. Kassad pushed the body into  
the carrier section and strapped himself into what he hoped was the  
command chair.  

Warm sunlight came through the blister above him.  

Video monitors and console hoios showed scenes from dead ahead, astern,  
and shoulder-camera glimpses of the search operation inside. Kassad  
caught a glimpse of the nude body in Operating Room 3 and several  
figures in a firefight with surgical lasers.  

In the holodramas of Fedmahn Kassad's childhood, heroes always seemed to  
know how to operate skimmers, spacecraft, exotic EMVs, and other strange  
machinery whenever the need arose. Kassad had been trained to handle  
military transports, simple tanks and APCs, even an assault boat or  
dropship if he was desperate. If stranded on a runaway FORCE  
spacecraft, a remote possibility, he could find his way around the  
command core sufficiently to communicate with the primary computer or  
put out a distress call on a radio or fatline transmitter.  

Sitting in the command chair of an Ouster squid, Kassad did not have a  
clue.  

That was not quite true. He immediately recognized the remote grip  
slots for the squid's tentacle manipulators, and given two or three  
hours of thought and inspection, he might have figured out several other  
controls. He did not have the time. The forward screen showed three  
spacesuited figures jumping for the squid, firing as they came. The  
pale, oddly alien head of an Ouster commander suddenly materialized on  
the holo console. Kassad heard shouts from his bubble earpatches.  

Globules of sweat hung in front of his eyes and streaked the inside of  
his helmet. He shook them away as best he could, squinted at the  
control consoles, and pushed several likely-looking surfaces. If there  
were voice command circuits, override controls, or a suspicious ship's  
computer, Kassad knew, he was screwed. He had thought of all this in  
the second or two before he shot the pilot but had not been able to  
think of a way to coerce  

or trust the man. No, this had to be the way, thought  

Kassad even as he tapped more control surfaces.  

A thruster began firing.  

The squid pulled and tugged at its moorings. Kassad bounced back and  
forth in his webbing. 'Shit,' he whispered, his first audible comment  
since he had asked the FORCE medic where the ship was putting in. He  
strained far enough forward to get his gauntleted fingers into the grip  
slots. Four of the six manipulators released. One ripped off. The  
final one tore away a chunk of bulkhead from the HS Merrick.  

The squid tumbled free. Video cameras showed two of the space-suited  
figures missing their jumps, the third clutching at the same whip  
antenna which had saved Kassad. Knowing roughly where the thruster  
controls were'now, Kassad tapped in a frenzy. An overhead light came  
on. All of the holo projectors went dead. The squid commenced a  
maneuver which incorporated all of the most violent elements of pitch,  
roll, and yaw. Kassad saw the spacesuited form tumble past the overhead  
blister, appear briefly on the forward video screen, become a speck on  
the aft screen. The Ouster was still firing energy bolts as he - or she  

-became too small to see. 
Kassad struggled to stay conscious as the violent tumbling continued.  
Various voice and visual alarms were screaming for his attention. Kassad  
tapped at thruster controls, considered it a success, and pulled his  
hands away when he felt as if he were being pulled apart in only two  
directions rather than five.  

A random camera shot showed him that the torchship was receding. Good.  
Kassad had no doubt that the Ouster warship could destroy him at any  
second, and that it would if he approached or threatened it in any way.  
He did not know if the squid was armed, personally doubted if it would  
carry anything larger than antipersonnel weapons, but he knew beyond a  
doubt that no torchship commander would allow an out-of-control  
shuttlecraft to come anywhere near his ship.  

Kassad assumed that the Ousters all knew by now that the squid had been  
hijacked by the enemy. He would not be surprised - disappointed, but  
not surprised - if the  

torchship vaporized him at any second, but in the meantime he was  
counting on two emotions that were quint-essentially human if not  
necessarily Ouster human: curiosity and the desire for revenge.  

Curiosity, he knew, could easily be overridden in times of stress, but  
he counted on a paramilitary, semifeudal culture like the Ousters' to be  
deeply involved with revenge. Everything else being equal, with no  
chance to hurt them further and almost no chance to escape, it would  
seem that Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had become a prime candidate for one of  
their dissection trays. He hoped so.  

Kassad looked at the forward video display, frowned, and loosened his  
harness long enough to look out the overhead blister. The ship was  
tumbling but not nearly so violently as before. The planet seemed  
closer - one hemisphere filled the view 'above' him - but he had no idea  
how close the squid Was to atmosphere. He could read none of the data  
displays. He could only guess what their orbital velocity had been and  
how violent a reentry shock would be. His one long glimpse from the  
wreckage of the Merrick had suggested to Kassad that they were very  
close, perhaps only five or six hundred klicks above the surface, and in  
the kind of parking orbit which he knew preceded the launching of  
dropships.  

Kassad tried to wipe his face and frowned when the tips of loose  
gauntlet fingers tapped at his visor. He was tired. Hell, only a few  
hours earlier he had been in fugue and just a few ship-weeks before that  
he had almost certainly been body-dead.  

He wondered if the world below was Hyperion or Garden; he had been to  
neither but knew that Garden was more widely settled, closer to becoming  
a Hegemony colony. He hoped it was Garden.  

The torchship launched three assault boats. Kassad saw them clearly  
before the aft camera panned beyond range. He tapped at the thruster  
controls until it felt as though the ship was tumbling more quickly  
toward the wall of planet above. There was little else he could do.  

The squid reached atmosphere before the three Ouster assault boats  
reached the squid. The boats undoubtedly were armed and well within  
range, but someone on the command circuit must have been curious. Or  
furious.  

Kassad's squid was in no way aerodynamic. As with most ship-to-ship  
craft, the squid could flirt with planetary atmospheres but was doomed  
if it dove too deeply into the gravity well. Kassad saw the telltale  
red glow of reentry, heard the ion buildup on the active radio channels,  
and suddenly wondered if this had been such a good idea.  

Atmospheric drag stabilized the squid and Kassad felt the first  
tentative tug of gravity as he searched the console and the command  
chair arms for the control circuit he prayed would be there. A  
static-filled video screen showed one of the dropships growing a  
blue-plasma tall as it decelerated. The illusion created was similar to  

that encountered when one skydiver watched another open his chute or  
activate his suspension rig; the assault boat seemed to climb suddenly.  

Kassad had other things to worry about. There seemed to be no obvious  
bail-out control, no ejection apparatus.  

Every FORCE:space shuttle carried some sort of atmospheric egress  
device- it was a custom dating back almost eight centuries to when the  
entire realm of space flight consisted only of tentative excursions just  
above the skin of Old Earth's atmosphere. A ship-to-ship shuttle  
probably would never need a planetary bail-out device, but age-old fears  
written into ancient regulations tended 'to die hard.  

Or so the theory went. Kassad could find nothing. The ship was quaking  
now, spinning, and beginning to heat up in earnest. Kassad slapped open  
his harness release and pulled himself toward the rear of the squid, not  
even sure what he was looking for. Suspension packs? Parachutes?  

A set of wings?  

There was nothing in the troop carrier section except the corpse of the  
Ouster pilot and a few storage compartments not much larger than  
lunchboxes. Kassad tore through them, finding nothing bigger than a  
medkit. No miracle devices.  

Kassad could hear the squid shaking and beginning to break up as he hung  
on a pivot ring and all but accepted the fact that the Ousters had not  
wasted money or space on such low-probability rescue devices for their  
squids.  

Why should they? Their lifetimes were spent in the dark-nesses between  
star systems; their concept of an atmosphere was the eight-klick  
pressurized tube of a can city.  

The external audio sensors on Kassad's bubble helmet began to pick up  
the raging hiss of air on the hull and through the broken blister in the  
aft section. Kassad shrugged. He had gambled too many times and lost.  

The squid shuddered and bounced. Kassad could hear the manipulator  
tentacles tearing away from the bow.  

The Ouster's corpse suddenly was sucked up and out of the broken blister  
like an ant into a vacuum cleaner.  

Kassad clung to the pivot ring and stared through the open hatch at the  
control seats in the cockpit. It struck him that they were wonderfully  
archaic, like something out of a textbook of the earliest spacecraft.  
Parts of the ship's exterior were burning away now, roaring past the  
observation blisters like gobbets of lava. Kassad closed his eyes and  
tried to remember lectures from Olympus Command School on the structure  
and layout of ancient spacegoing craft. The squid began a terminal  
tumble.  

The noise was incredible.  

'By Allah!" gasped Kassad, a cry he had not uttered since childhood. He  
began pulling himself forward into the cockpit, bracing himself on the  

open hatch, finding handholds on the deck as if he were climbing a  
vertical wall. He was climbing a wall. The squid had spun, stabilized  
in a stern-first death dive. Kassad climbed under a 3-g load, knowing  
that a single slip would break every bone in his body. Behind 'him,  
atmospheric hiss turned to a scream and then to a dragon roar. The  
troop carrier section was burning through in fierce, molten explosions.  

Climbing into the command seat was like negotiating a rock overhang with  
the weight of two other climbers swinging from his back. The clumsy  
gauntlets made his grip on the headrest even less sure as Kassad hung  
over the vertical drop to the flaming cauldron of the carrier  

section. The ship lurched, Kassad swung his legs up, and he was in the  
command seat. The display videos were dead. Flame heated the overhead  
blister to a sick red.  

Kassad almost lost consciousness as he bent forward, his fingers feeling  
in the darkness below the command seat, between his knees. There was  
nothing. Wait... a hand-grip.  

No, sweet Christ and Allah .  .  .  a D-ring. Something out of the  
history books.  

The squid began o break up. Overhead, the blister burned through and  
spattered liquid Perspex throughout the interior of the cockpit,  
splashing Kassad's suit and visor. He smelled plastic melting* The  
squid was spinning as it broke up. Kassad's sight turned pink, dimmed,  
was gone. He used numb fingers to tighten the harness * . . tighter...  
either it was cutting into his chest or the Perspex had burned through.  
His hand went back to the D-ring. Fingers too clumsy to close around  
it... no.  

Pull.  

Too late. The squid flew apart in a final screech and explosion of  
flame, the control console tearing through the cockpit in ten thousand  
shrapnel-sized bits.  

Kassad was slammed into his seat. Up. Out. Into the  

heart of the flame.  

Tumbling*  

Kassad was dimly aware that the seat was projecting its own containment  
field as it tumbled. Flame was centimeters from his face.  

Pyrobolts fired, kicking the ejection seat out of the squid's blazing  
slipstream. The command seat made its own track of blue flame across  
the sky. Microprocessors spun the seat so that the disc of the  
forcefield was between Kassad and the furnace of friction. A giant sat  
on Kassad's chest as he decelerated across two thousand kilometers of  
sky at eight gravities.  

Kassad forced his eyelids open once, noted that he lay curled in the  
belly of a long column of blue-white flame, and then he closed his eyes  
again. He saw no sign of a control for a parachute, suspension pack, or  

any other braking device* It didn't matter* He could not move his arms  
or hands in any case.  

The giant shifted, grew heavier*  
Kassad realized that part of his helmet bubble had melted or been blown  
away. The noise was indescribable.  

It didn't matter.  
He closed his eyes more tightly. It was a good time to take a nap.  
Kassad opened his eyes and saw the dark shape of a woman bending over  

him. For a second he thought it was her. He looked again and realized  
that it was her. She touched his cheek with cool fingers.  

'Am I dead?" whispered Kassad, raising his own hand to grip her wrist.  
'No." Her voice was soft and throaty, burred with the hint of an accent  
he could not place. He had never heard  

her speak before.  
'You're real?" 'Yes."  
Kassad sighed and looked around. He lay naked under a thin robe on some  

sort of couch or platform set in the middle of a dark, cavernous room.  
Overhead, starlight was visible through a broken roof. Kassad raised  
his other hand to touch her shoulder. Her hair was a dark nimbus above  
him. She wore a loose, thin gown which -even in the starlight - allowed  
him to see the outlines of her body. He caught her scent, the fragrant  
hint of soap and skin and her that he knew so well from their other  
times together.  

'You must have questions,' she whispered as Kassad released the gold  
clasp which held her gown in place. The gown whispered to the floor.  
She wore nothing underneath.  

Above them, the band of the Milky Way was clearly visible*  
'No,' said Kassad and pulled her to him.  
Toward morning a breeze arose, and Kassad pulled the light cover over  

them. The thin material seemed to preserve all of their body heat and  
they lay together in perfect warmth. Somewhere sand or snow rasped at  
bare walls. The stars were very clear and very bright.  

They awoke at the first hint of dawn, their faces close  
together under the silken coverlet. She ran her hand  
down Kassad's side, finding old and recent scars.  
'Your name?" whispered Kassad.  
'Hush,' she whispered back, her hand sliding lower.  

Kassad moved his face into the scented curve of her neck. Her breasts  
were soft against him. Night paled to morning. Somewhere sand or snow  
blew against bare walls.  

They made love, slept, made love again. In full light they rose and  
dressed. She had laid out underwear, gray tunic and trousers for  
Kassad. They fit perfectly, as did the spongesocks and soft hoots. The  
woman wore a similar outfit of navy blue.  

'Your name?" Kassad asked as they left the building with the shattered  

dome and walked through a dead city.  
'Moneta,' said his dream, 'or Mnemosyne, whichever name pleases you  
more."  

'Moneta,' whispered Kassad. He looked up at a small  
sun rising into a lapis sky. 'This is Hyperion?"  
'Yes."  
'How did I land? Suspensor field? Parachute?" 'You descended under a  

wing of gold foil." 'I don't hurt. There were no wounds?" 'They were  

tended to." 'What is this place?"  
'The City of Poets. Abandoned more than a hundred years ago. Beyond  
that hill lie the Time Tombs."  

'The Ouster assault boats that were following me?"  
'One landed nearby. The Pain Lord took the crew unto  
himself. The other two set down some distance away." 'Who is the Pain  

Lord?"  
'Come,' said Moneta. The dead city ended in desert.  
Fine sand slid across white marble half buried in dunes.  
To the west an Ouster dropship sat with its portals irised open. Nearby,  

on a fallen column, a thermcube yielded hot coffee and fresh-baked  

rolls. They ate and drank in silence.  
Kassad worked to recall the legends of Hyperion. 'The Pain Lord is the  
Shrike,' he said at last.  

'Of course."  

'You're from here... from the City of Poets?" Moneta smiled and slowly  
shook her head.  
Kassad finished his coffee and set the cup down. The feeling that he  

was in a dream persisted, much stronger than during any sim he had ever  
participated in. But the coffee had tasted pleasantly bitter; the sun  
was warm on his face and hands.  

'Come, Kassad,' said Moneta.  

They crossed expanses of cold sand. Kassad found himself glancing  
skyward, knowing that the Ouster torchship could lance them from  
orbit... then knowing with a sudden certainty that it would not.  

The Time Tombs lay in a valley. A low obelisk glowed softly. A stone  
sphinx seemed to absorb the light. A complex structure of twisted  
pylons threw shadows onto itself. Other tombs were silhouettes against  
the rising sun. Each of the tombs had a door and each door was open.  
Kassad knew that they had been open when the first explorers discovered  
the Tombs and that the structures were empty. More than three  
centuries of searching for hidden rooms, tombs, vaults, and passageways  
had been fruitless.  

'This is as far as you can go,' Moneta said as they neared the cliff at  
the head of the valley. 'The time tides are strong today."  

Kassad's tactical implant was silent. He had no comlog. He searched  
his memory. 'There are anti entropic forcefields around the Time  
Tombs,' he said.  

'Yes."  

'The tombs are ancient. The anti-entropic fields keep them from aging."  

'No,' said Moneta. 'The time tides drive the Tombs backward through  
time."  

'Backward through time,' Kassad repeated stupidly.  

'Look."  

Shimmering, miragelike, a tree of steel thorns appeared out of the haze  
and a sudden dust storm of ochre sand. The thing seemed to fill the  
valley, rising at least two hundred meters to the height of the cliffs.  

Branches shifted, dissolved, and reformed like elements of a poorly  
tuned hologram. Sunlight danced on five meter-long thorns. Corpses of  
Ouster men and women, all naked, were impaled on at least a score of  
these thorns. Other branches held other bodies. Not all were human.  

The dust storm obscured the view for a moment and when the winds  
subsided the vision was gone. 'Come,' said Moneta.  

Kassad followed her through the fringes of the time tides, avoiding the  
ebb and flow of the anti-entropic field the way children would play tag  
with an ocean surf on a broad beach. Kassad felt the pull of the time  
tides like waves of ddjd vu tugging at every cell of his body.  

Just beyond the entrance to the valley, where hills opened to the dunes  
and low moors led to the City of Poets, Moneta touched a wall of blue  
slate and an entrance opened to a long, low room set into the cliff  
face.  

'Is this where you live?" asked Kassad but saw immediately that there  
were no signs of habitation. The stone walls of the room were inset  
with shelves and crowded niches.  

'We must ready ourselves,' whispered Moneta and the lighting shifted to  
a golden hue. A long rack lowered its wares. A wafer-thin strip of  
reflective polymer curtained from the ceiling to serve as a mirror.  

Kassad watched with the calm passivity of a dreamer as Moneta stripped  
off her clothes and then his. Their nudity was no longer erotic, merely  
ceremonial.  

'You have been in my dreams for years,' he told her.  

'Yes. Your past. My future. The shock wave of events moves across  
time like ripples on a pond."  

Kassad blinked as she raised a gold ferule and touched his chest. He  
felt a slight shock and his flesh became a mirror, his head and face a  
featureless ovoid reflecting all the color tones and textures of the  
room. A second later Moneta joined him, her body becoming a cascade of  
reflections, water over quicksilver over chrome.  

Kassad saw his own reflecting reflection in every curve and muscle of  
her body. Moneta's breasts caught and bent the light; her nipples rose  
like small splashes on a mirrored pond. Kassad moved to embrace her and  
felt  

their surfaces flow together like magnetized fluid. Under the connected  
fields, his flesh touched hers.  

'Your enemies await beyond the city,' she whispered.  

The chrome of her face flowed with light.  

'Enemies?"  

'The Ousters. The ones who followed you here."  

Kassad shook his head, saw the reflection do likewise.  

'They're not important anymore."  

'Oh, yes,' whispered Moneta, 'the enemy is always important. You must  
arm yourself."  

'With what?" But even as he spoke, Kassad realized that she was touching  
him with a bronze sphere, a dull blue toroid. His altered body spoke to  
him now as clearly as troops reporting in on an implant command circuit.  

Kassad felt the bloodlust build in him with turgid strength.  

'Come." Moneta led the way into open desert again.  

The sunlight seemed polarized and heavy. Kassad felt that they were  
gliding across the dunes, flowing like liquid through the white marble  
streets of the dead city.  

Near the west end of town, near the shattered remnants of a structure  
still bearing the inscribed lintel of Poets' Amphitheatre, something  

stood waiting.  

For a second Kassad thought it was another person wearing the chromium  
forcefields he and Moneta were draped in - but only for a second. There  
was nothing human about this particular quicksilver-over-chrome  
construct. Kassad dreamily noted the four arms, retractable  
fingerblades, the profusion of thornspikes on throat, forehead, wrists,  
knees, and body, but not once did his gaze leave the two  
thousand-faceted eyes which burned with a red flame that paled sunlight  
and dimmed the day to blood shadows.  

The Shrike, thought Kassad.  

'The Lord of Pain,' whispered Moneta.  

The thing turned and led them out of the dead city.  

Kassad approved of the way the Ousters had prepared their defenses. The  
two assault boats were grounded less than half a kilometer apart, their  
guns, projectors, and missile turrets covering each other and a full  
three  

hundred and sixty degrees of fire. Ouster ground troops had been busy  
diing revetments a hundred meters out from the boats and Kassad could  
see at least two EM tanks hull down, their projection arrays and launch  
tubes commanding the wide, empty moor between the Poets' City and the  
boats. Kassad's vision had been altered; he could see the overlapping  
ship containment fields as ribbons of yellow haze, the motion sensors  
and antipersonnel mines as eggs of pulsing red light.  

He blinked, realizing that something was wrong with the image. Then it  
came to him: besides the thickness of the light and his enhanced  
perception of energy fields, nothing was moving. The Ouster troops,  
even those set in attitudes of motion, were as stiff as the toy soldiers  
he had played with as a boy in the Thatsis slums. The EM tanks were dug  
into their hull-down positions, but Kassad noticed that now even their  
acquisition radars - visible to him as concentric purple arcs - were  
motionless.  

He glanced skyward and saw some sort of large bird hanging in the sky,  
as unmoving as an insect frozen in amber. He passed a cloud of  
windblown dust hanging suspended, extended one chrome hand, and flicked  
spirals of particles to the ground.  

Ahead of them, the Shrike strode casually through the red maze of  
sensor-mines, stepped over the blue lines of tripbeams, ducked under the  
violet pulses of the autofire scanners, passed through the yellow  
containment field and the green wall of the sonic defense perimeter, and  
walked into the assault boat's shadow. Moneta and Kassad followed.  

--How is this possible? Kas,xi realized that he had posed the question  
through a medium that was something less than telepathy but something  
far more sophis ticated than implant conduction.  

--He controls time.  

-- The Pain Lord?  

--Of course.  

--Why are we here?  

Moneta gestured toward the motionless Ousters.  

-- They are your enemies.  

Kassad felt that he was finally awaking from a long  

dream. This was real. The Ouster trooper's eyes, unblinking behind his  
helmet, were real. The Ouster assault boat, rising like a bronze  
tombstone to his left, was real.  

Fedmahn Kassad realized that he could kill them all -commandos, assault  
boat crew, all of them- and they could do nothing about it. He knew  
that time had not stopped - any more than it stopped while a ship was  
under Hawking drive - it was merely a matter of varying rates. The bird  
frozen above them would complete the flap of its wings given enough  
minutes or hours. The Ouster in front of him would close his eyes in a  
blink if Kassad had the patience to watch long enough. Meanwhile,  
Kassad and Moneta and the Shrike could kill all of them without the  
Ousters realizing that they were under attack.  

It was not fair, Kassad realized. It was wrong. It was the ultimate  
violation of the New Bushido, worse in its way than the wanton murder of  
civilians. The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between  
equals. He was about to communicate this to Moneta when she  
said/thought -- Watch.  

Time began again with an explosion of sound not unlike the rush of air  
into an airlock. The bird soared and circled overhead. A desert breeze  
threw dust against the static-charged containment field. An Ouster  
commando rose from one knee, saw the Shrike and the two human shapes,  
screamed something over his tactical comm channel, and raised his energy  
weapon.  

The Shrike did not seem to move - to Kassad it merely ceased being here  
and appeared there. The Ouster commando emitted a second, shorter  
scream, and then looked down in disbelief as the Shrike's arm withdrew  
with the man's heart in its bladed fist. The Ouster stared, opened his  
mouth as if to speak, and collapsed.  

Kassad turned to his right and found himself face to face with an  
armored Ouster. The commando ponderously lifted a weapon. Kassad swung  
his arm, felt the chrome forcefield hum, and saw the flat of his hand  
cut through body armor, helmet, and neck. The Ouster's head rolled in  
the dust.  

Kassad leaped into a low trench and saw several troopers begin to turn.  
Time was still out of joint; the enemy moved in extreme slow motion one  
second, jerked like a damaged holo to four-fifths speed in the next  
instant.  

They were never as quick as Kassad. Gone were his thoughts of the New  
Bushido. These were the barbarians who had tried to kill him. He broke  

one man's back, stepped aside, jabbed rigid, chrome fingers through the  
body armor of a second man, crushed the larynx of a third, dodged a  
knife blade moving in slow motion and kicked the spine out of the knife  
wielder. He leaped up  

out of the ditch.  

--Kassad!  

Kassad ducked as the laser beam crept past his shoulder, burning its way  
through the air like a slow fuse of ruby light. Kassad smelled ozone as  
it crackled past.  

Impossible. l've dodged a laser/He picked up a stone and flung it at  
the Ouster manning the tank-mounted he!iwhip. A sonic boom cracked; the  
gunner exploded backward. Kassad pulled a plasma grenade from a  
corpse's bandolier, leaped to the tank hatch, was thirty meters away  
before the explosion geysered flame as high as the assault boat's bow.  

Kassad paused in the eye of the storm to see Moneta in the center of her  
own circle of carnage. Blood splashed her but did not adhere, flowing  
like oil on water across the rainbow curves of chin, shoulder, breast,  
and belly.  

She looked at him across the battlefield and Kassad felt a renewed surge  
of bloodlust in himself.  

Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos, choosing victims  
as if he were harvesting. Kassad watched the creature wink in and out  
of existence and real'-d that to the Pain Lord he and Moneta would  
appear to be moving as slowly as the Ousters did to Kassado  

Time jumped, moved to four-fifths speed. The surviving troops were  
panicking now, firing into one another, deserting their posts, and  
fighting to get aboard the assault boat. Kassad tried to realize what  
the past minute or two had been like for them: blurs moving through  
their defensive positions, comrades dying in  

great gouts of blood. Kassad watched Moneta moving through their ranks,  
killing at her leisure. To his amazement, he discovered that he had  
some control of time: blink and his opponents slowed to one-third speed,  
blink and events moved at nearly their normal pace. Kassad's sense of  
honor and sanity called out for him to stop the slaughter but his almost  
sexual bloodlust overpowered any objections.  

Someone in the assault boat had sealed the airlock and now a terrified  
commando used a shaped plasma charge to blow the portal open. The mob  
pressed in, trampling the wounded in their flight from unseen killers.  
Kassad followed them in.  

The phrase 'fight like a cornered rat' is an extremely apt description.  
Throughout the history of military encounters, human combatants have  
been known to fight at their fiercest when challenged in enclosed places  
where flight is not an option. Whether in the passageways of La Haye  
Sainte and Hougoumont at Waterloo or in the Hive tunnels of Lusus, some  
of the most terrible hand-to-hand battles in history have been fought in  
cramped spaces where no retreat is possible. It was true this day. The  

Ousters fought... and died... like cornered rats.  

The Shrike had disabled the assault boat. Moneta remained outside to  
kill the threescore commandos who had stayed at their posts. Kassad  
killed those within.  

In the end, the final assault boat fired on its doomed counterpart.  
Kassad was outside by then and he watched the particle beams and  
high-intensity lasers creep toward him, followed an eternity later by  
missiles which seemed to move so slowly that he could have written his  
name on them in flight. By that time all of the Ousters were dead in  
and around the overrun boat, but its containment field held. Energy  
dispersion and impact explosions tossed corpses around on the outer  
perimeter, set fire to equipment, and glazed the sand to glass, but  
Kassad and Moneta watched from inside a dome of orange flame as the  
remaining assault boat retreated to space.  

--Can we stop them? Kassad was panting, pouring sweat, and literally  
quivering from excitement.  

-- We could, replied Moneta, but we do not want to.  

They will carry the message to the swarm.  

--Wt message?  

'Come here, Kassad?  

He turned at the sound of her voice. The reflective forcefield was  
gone* Moneta's flesh was oiled with sweat; her dark hair was matted  
against her temples; her nipples were hard. 'Come here."  

Kassad glanced down at himself. His own forcefield was gone - he had  
willed it away - and he was more  

sexually excited than he could ever remember being.  

'Come here." Moneta whispered this time*  

Kassad went to her, lifted her, felt the sweat-slick smoothness of her  
buttocks as he carried her to an empty stretch of grass atop a  
wind-carved hummock. He lowered her to the ground between piles of  
Ouster bodies, roughly opened her legs, took both her hands in the grasp  
of one of his, lifted her arms above her head, pinned them to the  
ground, and lowered his long body between her legs.  

'Yes,' whispered Morteta as he kissed the lobe of her left ear, set his  
lips to the pulse at the hollow of her neck, licked the salt tang of  
sweat from her breasts. Lying among the dead. More dead to come. The  
thousands.  

The millions. Laughter out of dead bellies. The long lines of troops  
emerging from JumpShips to enter the waiting flames.  

'Yes." Her breath was hot in his ear. She freed her hands, slid them  
along Kassad's damp shoulders, trailed long nails down his back, grasped  
his buttocks to pull him closer. Kassad's erection scraped her pubic  

hair, throbbed against the cusp of her belly. Farcaster portals opening  
to admit the cold lengths of attack carriers. The warmth of plasma  
explosions. Hundreds of ships, thousands, dancing and dying like dust  
motes in a whirlwind.  

Great columns of solid ruby light lancing across great distances,  
bathing targets in the ultimate surge of warmth, bodies boiling in red  
light.  

'Yes." Moneta opened her mouth and body to him.  

Warmth above and below, her tongue in his mouth as he entered her,.  
welcomed by warm friction. His body  

strained deep, pulled back slightly, allowed the moist warmth to engulf  
him further as they began to move together. Heat on a hundred worlds.  
Continents burning in bright spasms, the roll of boiling seas. The air  
itself aflame. Oceans of superheated air swelling like warm skin rising  
to a lover's touch.  

'Yes... yes... yes." Moneta breathes warmth against his lips. Her  
skin is oil and velvet. Kassad thrusts quickly now, the universe  
contracting as sensation expands, senses dwindling as she closes warm  
and wet and tight around him. Her hips thrust harshly in response now,  
as if sensing the terrible build in pressure at the base of his being.  

Demanding. Kassad grimaces, closes his eyes, sees...  

* . . fireballs expanding, stars dying, suns exploding in great pulses  
of flame, star systems perishing in an ecstasy of destruction... .  

*.. he feels pain in his chest, his hips not stopping, moving faster,  
even as he opens his eyes and sees...  

... the great thorn of steel rising from between Moneta's breasts,  
almost impaling him as he unconsciously pulls up and back, the  
thornblade drawing blood which drips on her flesh, her pale flesh,  
reflective now, flesh as cold as dead metal, his hips still moving even  
as he watches through passion-dimmed eyes as Moneta's lips wither and  
curl back, revealing rows of steel blades where teeth had been, metal  
blades slash at his buttocks where fingers had gripped, legs like  
powerful steel bands imprison his pumping hips, her eyes* . .  

*.. in thelast seconds before orgasm Kassad tries to pull away* . .  
his hands on her throat, pressing*.. she clings like a leech, a lamprey  
ready to drain him... they roll against dead bodies...  

* . . her eyes like red jewels, blazing with a mad heat like that  
which fills his aching testicles, expanding like a flame, spillingover*  
. .  

* . . Kassad slams both hands against the soil, lifts himself away  
from her... from it... his strength insan but not enough as terrible  
gravities press them together...  

sucking like a lamprey's mouth as he threatens to explode, looks in her  
eyes* . . the death of worlds... the death of worlds!  

Kassad screams and pulls away. Strips of his flesh rip away as he  
lunges up and sideways. Metal teeth click shut in a steel vagina,  
missing his glans by a moist millimeter.  

Kassad slumps on his side, rolls away, hips moving, unable to stop his  
ejaculation. Semen explodes in streams, falls on the curled fist of a  
corpse. Kassad moans, rolls again, curls in a fetal position even as he  
comes again. And again.  

He hears the hiss and rustle as she rises behind him.  

Kassad rolls on his back and squints up against sunlight and his own  
pain. She stands above him, legs apart, a silhouette' of thorns. Kassad  
wipes sweat from his eyes, sees his wrist come away red with blood, and  
waits for the killing blow. His skin contracts in anticipation of the  
slash of blade into flesh. Panting, Kassad looks up to see Moneta above  
him, thighs flesh rather than steel, her groin matted from the moisture  
of their passion. Her face is dark, the sun behind her, but he sees red  
flames dying in the multifaceted pits of her eyes. She smiles and he  
sees sunlight glint on rows of metal teeth. 'Kassad * . ." she  
whispers and it is the sound of sand scraping against bone.  

Kassad tears his gaze away, struggles to his feet, and stumbles across  
corpses and burning rubble in his terror to be free. He does not look  
back.  

Scouting elements of Hyperion's Self-defense Force found Colonel Fedmahn  
Kassad almost two days later.  

He was discovered lying unconscious on one of the grassy moors which  
lead to the abandoned Chronos Keep, some twenty kilometers from the dead  
city and the wreckage of the Ouster ejection pod. Kassad was naked and  
almost dead from the effects of exposure and several serious wounds, but  
he responded well to emergency field treatment and was immediately  
airlifted south of the Bridle Range to a hospital at Keats*  
Reconnaissance squads from the SDF battalion moved northward carefully,  
cautious of the anti-entropic tides around the Time Tombs and wary of  
any booby traps left behind by the Ousters. There were none. The  
scouts found only the wreckage of Kassad's escape mechanism and the  
burned out hulks of the two assault boats which the Ousters had lanced  
from orbit. There were no clues as to why they had slagged their own  
ships and the Ouster bodies-both in and around the boats - had been  
burned beyond any hope of autopsy or analysis.  

Kassad regained consciousness three Hyperion days later, swore that he  
remembered nothing after stealing the squid, and was shipped out on a  
FORCE torchship two local weeks later.  

Upon returning to the Web, Kassad resigned his commission.  

For a while he was active in antiwar movements, occasionally appearing  
on the All Thing net arguing disarmament. But the attack on Bressia had  
mobilized the Hegemony toward true interstellar war as had nothing else  
in three centuries, and Kassad's voice was either drowned out or  
dismissed as the guilty conscience of the Butcher of South Bressia.  

In the sixteen years after Bressia, Colonel Kassad had disappeared from  
the Web and from the Web consciousness.  

Although there had been no more major battles, the Ousters remained the  
Hegemony's prime bogeymen.  

Fedmahn Kassad was only a fading memory.  

It was late morning when Kassad finished his story. The Consul blinked  
and looked around him, noticing the ship and its surroundings for the  
first time in more than two hours. The Benares had come out into the  
main channel of the Hoolie. The Consul could hear the creaks of the  
chains and hawsers as the river mantas surged against their harnesses.  
The Benares appeared to be the only ship heading upriver, but now  
numerous small craft were visible going the other way. The Consul  
rubbed his forehead and was surprised to see his hand come away slick  
with sweat. The day had grown very warm and the shadow of the tarp had  
crept away from the Consul without his noticing. He blinked, wiped  
sweat from his eyes, and moved into the shade to get a drink from one of  
the liquor bottles the androids had set in a cabinet near the table.  

'My God,' Father Hoyt was saying, 'so, according to this Moneta  
creature, the Time Tombs are moving backward in time?"  

'Yes,' said Kassad.  

'Is that possible?" asked Hoyt.  

'Yes." It was Sol Weintraub who answered.  

'If that's true,' said Brawne Lamia, 'then you "met" this Moneta... or  
whatever her real name is... in her past but your future ... in a  
meeting that's still to come."  

'Yes,' said Kassad.  

Martin Silenus walked to the railing and spat into the river. 'Colonel,  
do you think the bitch was the Shrike?"  

'I don't know." Kassad's monotone was barely audible.  

Silenus turned to Sol Weintraub. 'You're a scholar. Is there anything  
in the Shrike mythography that says the thing can change shape?"  

'No,' said Weintraub. He was preparing a milk globe to feed his  
daughter. The infant made soft, mewling noises and moved tiny fingers.  

'Colonel,' said Het Masteen, 'the forcefield... whatever the fighting  
suit was... did you bring it with you after the encounter with the  
Ousters and this ...  

female?"  

Kassad looked at the Templar a moment and then shook his head.  

The Consul was staring into his drink but his head suddenly snapped  
upright with the force of a thought.  

'Colonel, you said that you saw a vision of the Shrikc's killing tree...  

the structure, the thing where it impales its victims."  
Kassad moved his basilisk stare from the Templar to the Consul. He  
slowly nodded.  

'And there were bodies on it?"  
Another nod.  
The Consul wiped sweat from his upper lip. 'If the tree is traveling  

backward in time with the Time Tombs, then the victims are from our  

future."  
Kassad said nothing. The others also were staring at the Consul now but  
only Weintraub appeared to understand what the comment meant... and  
what the Con-su!'s next question had to be.  

The Consul resisted the urge to wipe the sweat from his  
lips again. His voice was steady. 'Did you see any of us there?"  
Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft sounds of the  

river and the ship's rigging suddenly seemed very loud. Finally Kassad  

took a breath. 'Yes."  
Silence stretched again. Brawne Lamia broke it. 'Will you tell us  
who?"  

'No." Kassad rose and went to the stairway leading to the lower decks.  
'Wait,' called Father Hoyt.  
Kassad paused at the head of the stairway.  
'Will you at least tell us two other things?" 'What?"  
Father Hoyt grimaced from a wave of pain. His gaunt face went white  

under its film of perspiration. He took a breath and said, 'First, do  
you think the Shrike... the woman... somehow wants to use you to start  
this terrible interstellar war you foresaw?"  

'Yes,' Kassad said softly.  

'Second, will you tell us what you plan to petition the Shrike for... or  
this Moneta... when you meet them on the pilgrimage?"  
Kassad smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile, and very, very  

cold. 'I will make no petition,' said Kassad. 'I will ask nothing of  

them. When I meet them this time, I will kill them:'  
The other pilgrims did not speak or look at one another as Kassad went  
below. The Benares continued north-northeast into afternoon.  

THREE  

The barge Benares entered the river port of Naiad an hour before sunset.  
Crew and pilgrims pressed to the rail to stare at smoldering embers of  
what once had been a city of twenty thousand people. Little remained.  
The famous River Front Inn, built in the days of Sad King Billy, had  
burned to the foundations; its charred docks, piers, and screened  
balconies now collapsed into the shallows of the Hoolie. The  
customhouse was a burned-out shell. The airship terminal on the north  
end of town survived only as a blackened hulk, its mooring tower reduced  
to a spire of charcoal. There was no sign whatsoever of the small  
riverfront Shrike temple. Worst of all, from the pilgrims' point of  
view, was the destruction of the Naiad River Station - the harness dock  
lay burned and sagging, the manta holding pens open to the river.  

'God damn it!" said Martin Silenus.  

'Who did it?" asked Father Hoyt. 'The Shrike?"  

'More likely the SDF,' said the Consul. 'Although they may have been  
fighting the Shrike."  

'I can't believe this,' snapped Brawne Lamia. She turned to A. Bettik,  
who had just joined them on the rear deck. 'Didn't you know this had  
happened?"  

'No,' said the android. 'There has been no contact with any point north  
of the locks for more than a week."  

'Why the hell not?" asked Lamia. 'Even if this godforsaken world  
doesn't have a datasphere, don't you have radio?"  

A. Bettik smiled slightly. 'Yes, M. Lamia, there is radio, but the  
comsats are down, the microwave repeater stations at the Karla Locks  
were destroyed, and we have no access to shortwave."  

'What about'the mantas?" asked Kassad. 'Can we press on to Edge with  
the ones we have."?"  

Bettik frowned. 'We will have to, Colonel,' he said.  

'But it is a crime. The two in harness will not recover from such a  
pull. With fresh mantas we would have put into Edge before dawn. With  
these two..." The android shrugged. 'With luck, if the beasts survive,  
we will arrive by early afternoon..."  

'The windwagon will still be there, will it not?" asked Het Masteen.  

'We must assume so,' said A. Bettik. 'If you will excuse me, I will  
see to feeding the poor beasts we have.  

We should be under way again within the hour."  

They saw no one in or near the ruins of Naiad. No river craft made  
their appearance above the city. An hour's pull northeast of the town  
they entered the region where the forests and farms of the lower Hoolie  
gave way to the undulating orange prairie south of the Sea of Grass.  

Occasionally the Consul would see the 'mud towers of architect ants,  

some of their serrated structures near the river reaching almost ten  
meters in height. There was no sign of intact human habitation. The  
ferry at Betty's Ford was totally gone, with not even a towrope or  
warming shack left to show where it had stood for almost two centuries.  
The River Runners Inn at Cave Point was dark and silent. A. Bettik and  
other crew members hallooed, but there was no response from the black  
cave mouth.  

Sunset brought a sensuous stillness over the river, soon broken by a  
chorus of insect noises and night-bird calls. For a while the surface  
of the Hoolie became a mirror of the gray-green disk of twilight sky,  
disturbed only by the leap of dusk-feeding fish and the wake of the  
laboring mantas. As true darkness fell, innumerable prairie gossamers - 
much paler than their forest cousins, but also of greater wingspan,  
luminescent shades the size of small children - danced in the vales and  
valleys of the gently rolling hills. By the time the constellations  
emerged and the meteor trails began scarring the night sky, a brilliant  
display this far from all man-made light, the lanterns had been lit and  
dinner set out on the aft deck.  

The Shrike pilgrims were subdued, as if still contemplating Colonel  
Kassad's grim and confusing tale. The Consul had been drinking steadily  
since before midday and now he felt the pleasant displacement - from  
reality, from the pain of memory - which allowed him to get through each  
day and night. Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as only  
a true alcoholic's can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.  

'Mine,' said Martin Silenus. The poet also had been drinking steadily  
since early in the day. His voice was as carefully controlled as the  
Consul's but redness on his sharp cheeks and an almost manic brightness  
of eye gave the old poet away. 'At least I drew number three..." He  
held up his slip of paper. 'If you still want to hear the fucking  
thing."  

Brawne Lamia lifted her glass of wine, scowled, and set it down.  
'Perhaps we should talk about what we have learned from the first two  
stories and how it might relate to our current... situation."  

'Not yet,' said Colonel Kassad. 'We don't have enough information."  

'Let M. Silenus speak,' said Sol Weintruab. 'Then we  

can begin discussing what we have heard."  

'I agree,' said Lenar Hoyt.  

Het Mastcen and the Consul nodded.  

'Agreed!" cried Martin Silenus. 'I'11 tell my story. Just let me  
finish my fucking glass of wine."  

THE POET'S TALE: 'Hyperion Cantos'  

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor.  
Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And  
so it goes.  

Francis Bacon once said, 'There arises from a bad and unapt formation of  
words a wonderful obstruction to the mind." We have all contributed our  
wonderful obstructions to the mind, have we not? I more than most. One  
of the twentieth century's better, forgotten writers- that is  
better-comma-forgotten, once bon  

rnoted: 'i love being a writer. It's the paperwork I can't stand." Get  
it? Well, amigos and amigette, I love being a  

poet. It's the goddamned words I can't stand.  

Where to start?  

Start with Hyperion perhaps?  

(Fade in) Almost two standard centuries ago.  

Sad King Billy's five seedships spin like gold dandelions above this all  
too familiar lapis sky. We land like conquistadors strutting to and  
fro; more than two thousand visual artists and writers and sculptors and  
poets and ARNists and vid makers and holie directors and composers and  
decomposers and God knows what all, supported by five times that many  
administrators and technicians and ecologists and supervisors and court  
chamberlains and professional ass kissers, not to mention the family of  
royal asses themselves, supported in turn by ten times that many  
androids willing to till the soil and stoke the reactors and raise the  
cities and lift that bale and tote that load... hell, you get the idea.  

We landed on a world already seeded by the poor buggers who'd gone  
indigenie two centuries before and were living hand to mouth and cudgel  
to brain wherever they could. Naturally the noble descendants of these  
brave pioneers greeted us like gods - especially after a few of our  
security folk slagged a few of their more aggressive leaders- and  
naturally we accepted their worship as our due and put them to work next  
to our blueskins, plowing the south forty and working to build our  
shining city on the hill.  

And it was a shining city on a hill. Seeing the ruins today can tell  
you nothing of the place. The desert had advanced in three centuries;  
the aqueducts from the mountains have fallen and shattered; the city  
itself is only bones. But in its day the City of Poets was fair indeed,  
a bit of Socrates's Athens with the intellectual excitement of  
Renaissance Venice, the artistic fervor of Paris in the days of the  
Impressionists, the true democracy of the first decade of Orbit City,  
and the unlimited future of Tau Ceti Center.  

But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course.  

It was only Hrothgar's claustrophobic mead hall with  

the monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our Grendel, to be  
sure. We even had our Hrothgar if one squints a bit at Sad King Billy's  
poor slouched profile.  

We lacked only our Geats; our great, broad-shouldered, small-brained  
Beowulf with his band of merry psycho-paths.  

So, lacking a Hero, we settled into the role of victims and composed our  
sonnets and rehearsed our ballets and unrolled our scrolls, while all  
the while our thorn-and-steel Grendel served the night with fear and  
harvested thighbones and gristle.  

And this was when I - a satyr then, formed in flesh as mirror to my soul  

-came as close to completing my Cantos, my life's work, as I have come in five 
sad centuries of  

stubborn continuance.  

(Fade to black)  

It occurs to me that the Grendel tale is premature. The players have  
not been brought upon the stage. Dislinear plotting and non-contiguous  
prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end,  
my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the  
vellum. Haven't you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere  
Huck and Jim are- at this instant-poling their raft down some river just  
beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who  
fitted us just a forgotten day ago? At any rate, if this fucking  
story's to be told, you should know who's in it. So --as much as it  
pains me - VII back up to begin at the beginning.  

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was programmed in classic  
binary. And the Word said, 'Let there be life!" And so, somewhere in  
the TechnoCore vaults of my mother's estate, frozen sperm from my  
long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the  
vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun and part  
dildo, and - at the magic touch of a trigger - ejaculated into Mother at  
a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.  

Mother didn't have to be impregnated in this barbaric fashion, of  
course. She could have chosen ex utero fertilization, a male lover with  
a transplant of Daddy's  

DNA, a clonal surrogate, a gene-spliced virgin birth, you name it...  
but, as she told me later, she opened her legs  

to tradition. My guess is that she preferred it that way.  

Anyway, I was born.  

I was born on Earth... Old Earth... and fuck you, Lamia, if you don't  
believe it. We lived on Mother's estate on an island not far from the  
North American Preserve.  

Notes for sketch of home on Old Earth:  

Fragile twilights fading from violet to fuchsia to purple above the  
crepe-paper silhouettes of trees beyond the southwest sweep of lawn.  
Skies as delicate as translucent china, unscarred by cloud or contrail.  
The presymphony hush of first light followed by the cymbal crash of  
sunrise. Oranges and russets igniting to gold, the long, cool descent  
to green: leaf shadow, shade, tendrils of cypress and weeping willow,  
the hushed green velvet of the glade.  

Mother's estate - our estate - a thousand acres centered in a million  
more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it  
beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble  
shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in  
stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally  
stretching eastward with the dying of the day.  

Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai.  
Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple  
roofed by sky.  

Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their  
hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.  

Our house rises on a low hill where, in the winter, the browning curves  
of lawn look like the smooth flank of some female beast, all thigh  
muscle and meant for speed.  

The house shows its centuries of accretion: a jade tower on the east  
courtyard catching the first light of dawn, a series of gables on the  
south wing throwing triangles of shadow on the crystal conservatory at  
teatime, the balconies and maze of exterior stairways along the east  
porticoes playing Escher games with afternoon's shadows.  

It was after the Big Mistake but before everything grew uninhabitable.  
Mostly we occupied the estate during what we quaintly called 'periods of  
remission'-stretches of ten to eighteen quiet months between planet-wide  
spasms as the Kiev Team's goddamn little black hole digested bits of the  
Earth's center and waited for its next feast. During the 'Bad Times,'  
we vacationed at Uncle Kowa's place out beyond the moon, on a  
terra-formed asteroid brought there before the Ouster migration.  

You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up  
my ass. I offer no apologies. After three thousand years of dabbling  
with democracy, the remaining Old Earth families had come to the  
realization that the only way to avoid such riffraff was not to allow  
them to breed. Or, rather, to sponsor seedship fleets; spinship  
explorations, new farcaster migrations ... all of the panicked urgency  
of the Hegira... as long as they bred out there and left Old Earth  
alone. The fact that the homeworld was a diseased old bitch, gone in  
the teeth, didn't hurt the riffraff's urge to pioneer. No fools they.  

And like the Buddha, I was almost grown before I saw my first hint of  
poverty. I was sixteen standard years old, on my Wanderjahr, and  
backpacking through India when I saw a beggar. The Hindu Old Families  
kept them around for religious reasons, but all I knew at the time was  
that here was a man in rags, ribs showing, holding out a wicker basket  
with an ancient credit diskey in it, begging for a touch of my universal  
card. My friends thought it was hysterical. I threw up. It was in  
Benares.  

My childhood was privileged but not obnoxiously so. I have pleasant  
memories of Grande Dame Sybil's famous parties (she was a great-aunt on  
my mother's side). 1 remember one three-day affair she threw in the  
Manhattan Archipelago, guests ferried in by dropship from Orbit City and  
from the European arcologies. I remember the Empire State Building  
rising from the water, its many lights reflecting on the lagoons and  

fern canals; the EMVs unloading passengers on the observation deck while  
cooking fires burned on the overgrown island mounds of lower buildings  
all around.  

The North American Preserve was our private playground in those days. It  
was said that about eight thousand people still resided in that  
mysterious continent, but half of these were rangers. The rest included  
the renegade ARNists who plied their trade by resurrecting species of  
plants and animals long absent from their antediluvian North American  
haunts, the ecology engineers, licensed primitives such as the Ogalalla  
Sioux or the He!l's Angel Guild, and the occasional tourist. I had a  
cousin who reportedly backpacked from one observation zone to the other  
in the Preserve, but he did so in the Midwest where the zones were  
relatively close together and where the dinosaur herds were much  
scarcer.  

In the first century after the Big Mistake, Gaea was mortally injured  
but slow in the dying. The devastation was great during the Bad Times - 
and these came more often in precisely plotted spasms, shorter  
remissions, more terrible consequences after each attack - but the Earth  
abided and repaired itself as best it could.  

The Preserve was, as I say, our playground but, in a real sense, so was  
all of the dying Earth. Mother let me have my own EMV when I was seven  
and there was no place on the globe farther than an hour's flight from  
home. My best friend, Amalfi Schwartz, lived in the Mount Erebus  
Estates in what had once been the Antarctic Republic. We saw each other  
daily. The fact that Old Earth law forbade farcasters did not bother us  
in the least; lying on some hillside at night looking up through the ten  
thousand Orbiting Lights and the twenty thousand beacons of the Ring, at  
the two or three thousand visible stars, we felt no jealousy, no urge to  
join the Hegira that even then was spinning the farcaster silk of the  
Worldweb. We were happy.  

My memories of Mother are oddly stylized, as if she were another  
fictional construct from one of my Dying Earth novels. Perhaps she was.  
Perhaps I was raised by robots in the automated cities of Europe,  
suckled by androids in the Amazon Desert, or simply grown in a vat like  
brewer's yeast. What I recall is Mother's white gown sliding ghostlike  
through the shadowed rooms of the estate; infinitely delicate blue veins  
on the back of her  

thin-fingered hand as she poured tea in the damask and dust light of the  
conservatory; candlelight caught like a gold fly in the spiderweb sheen  
of her hair, hair done up in a bun in the style of the Grandes Dames.  
Sometimes 1 dream that I remember her voice, the lilt and tone and  
turn-in-the-womb centerhess of it, but then I awake and it becomes only  
the wind moving lace curtains or the sound of some alien sea on stone.  

From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be - should be - a  
poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all  
about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to  
play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race's  
thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a  
poet.  

I had a tutor whose name was Balthazar, human but ancient, a refugee  

from ancient Alexandria's flesh-scented alleys. Balthazar all but  
glowed blue-white from those crude, early Poulsen treatments; he was  
like an irradiated mummy of a man, sealed in liquid plastic.  

And randy as the proverbial goat. Centuries later, when I was in my  
satyr period, I felt that I finally understood poor don Balthazar's  
priapic compulsions, but in those days it was mostly a hindrance to  
keeping young girls on the estate's staff. Human or android, don  
Baitbazar did not discriminate - he poinked them all.  

Luckily for my education, there was nothing homosexual in don  
Balthazar's addiction to young flesh, so his escapades evidenced  
themselves either as absences from our tutorial sessions or an  
inordinate amount of attention lavished on memorizing verses from Ovid,  
Senesh, or Wu.  

He was an excellent tutor. We studied the ancients and the late  
classical period, took field trips to the ruins of Athens, Rome, London,  
and Hannibal, Missouri, and never once had a quiz or test. Don  
Balthazar expected me to learn everything by heart at first encounter  
and I did not disappoint him. He convinced my mother that the pitfalls  
of 'progressive education' were not for an Old Earth family, so ! never  
knew the mind-stunting shortcuts of RNA medication, datasphere  
immersion,  

systemic flashback training, stylized encounter groups, 'higher-level  
thinking skills' at the expense of facts, or preliterate programming. As  
a result of these deprivations, I was able to recite all of Fitzgerald's  
translation of the Odyssey by the time I was six, compose a sestina  
before I could dress myself, and think in spiral fugue-verse before I  
ever interfaced with an AI.  

My scientific education, on the other hand, was something less than  
stringent. Don Balthazar had little interest in what he referred to as  
'the mechanical side of the universe." I was twenty-two before I  
realized that computers, RMUs, and Uncle Kowa's asteroidal life-support  
devices were machines and not some benevolent manifestations of the  
animas around us. I believed in fairies, woodsprites, numerology,  
astrology, and the magic of Midsummer's Eve deep in the primitive  
forests of the NAP. Like Keats and Lamb in Haydon's studio, don  
Balthazar and 1 drank toasts to 'the confusion of mathematics' ancl  
mourned the destruction of' the poetry of the rainbow by M. Newton's  
prying prism.. The early distrust and actual hatred of all things  
scientific and clinical served me well in later life. It is not  
difficult, 1 have learned, to remain a pre-Copernican pagan in the  
postscientific Hegemony.  

My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of  
this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave  
some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. My mother  
remained tolerant even as I left reeking little piles of doggerel lying  
around the house. She was indulgent of her only child even if he was as  
blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken llama.  

Don Balthazar never commented on my work; primarily, I assume, because I  
never showed him any of it. Don Baithazar thought that the venerable  
Daton was a fraud, that Salmud Brevy and Robert Frost should have hanged  

themselves with their own entrails, that Wordsworth was a fool, and that  
anything less than Shakespeare's sonnets was a profanation of the  
language. I saw no reason to bother don Baitbazar with my verse, rife  
with budding genius though I knew it to be.  

I published several of these little literary turds in the various  
hardcopy journals then in vogue in the various arcologies of the  
European Houses, the amateur editors of these crude journals being as  
indulgent of my mother as she was of me. Occasionally I would press  
Amalfi or one of my other playmates - less aristocratic than I and thus  
with access to the datasphere or fatline transmitters - to uplink some  
of my verses to the Ring or to Mars, and thus to the burgeoning  
farcaster colonies.  

They never replied. I assumed they were too busy.  

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of  
publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's  
immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.  

My mother died with Old Earth. About half the Old Families stayed  
during that last cataclysm; I was twenty years old then and had made my  
own romantic plans to die with the homeworld. Mother decided otherwise.  

What concerned her was not my premature demise - like me, she was far  
too self-centered to think of someone else at a time like that - nor  
even the fact that the death of my DNA would mark the end of a line of  
aristocrats which stretched back to the Mayflower;, no, what bothered  
Mother was that the family was going to die out in debt. Our last  
hundred years of extravagance, it seems, had been financed through  
massive loans from the Ring Bank and other discreet extraterrestrial  
institutions.  

Now that the continents of Earth were crashing under the impact of  
contraction, the great forests aflame, the oceans heaving and heating  
themselves into a lifeless soup, the very air transforming itself into  
something too hot and thick to break and too thin to plow, now the banks  
wanted their money back. I was collateral.  

Or, rather, Mother's plan was. She liquidated all available assets some  
weeks before that phrase became a literal reality, deposited a quarter  
of a million marks in long-term accounts in the fleeing Ring Bank, and  
dispatched me on a trip to the Rifkin Atmospheric Protectorate on  
Heaven's Gate, a minor world circling the star Vega. Even then, that  
poisonous world had a  

farcaster connection to Sol System, but I did not farcast.  

Nor was I a passenger on the single spinship with Hawking drive which  
put into Heaven's Gate each standard year. No, Mother sent me to this  
back end of the outback on a Phase Three ramship, slower than light,  
frozen with the cattle embryos and orange juice concentrate and feeder  
viruses, on a trip that took one hundred and twenty-nine shipboard  
years, with an objective time-debt of one hundred and sixty-seven  
standard years!  

Mother figured that the accrued interest on the long-term accounts would  

be enough to pay off our family debt and perhaps allow me to survive  
comfortably for a while. For the first and last time in her life,  
Mother figured wrong.  

Notes for a sketch of Heaven's Gate:  

Mud lanes which run back from the station's conversion docks like a  
pattern of sores on a leper's back.  

Sufrus-brown clouds which hang in tatters from a rotten burlap sky. A  
tangle of shapeless wooden structures half decayed before they were ever  
fully constructed, their paneless windows now staring sightlessly into  
the gaping mouths of their neighbors. lndigenies breeding like...  

like humans, I suppose ... eyeless cripples, lungs burned out with air  
rot, squiring a nest of a dozen offspring, the children's skin scabrous  
by age five-standard, their eyes watering incessantly from the sting of  
an atmosphere which will kill them before they're forty, their smiles  
carious, their oily hair rife with lice and the blood bags of dracula  
ticks. Proud parents beaming. Twenty million of these doomed schmucks,  
crowded into slums overflowing an island smaller than my family's west  
lawn on Old Earth, all of them fighting to breathe the only breathable  
air on a world where the standard is to inhale and die, crowding ever  
closer to the center of the sixty-mile radius of survivable atmosphere  
which the Atmospheric Generating Station had been  

able to provide before it began to malfunction.  

Heaven's Gate: my new home.  

Mother had not taken into account the possibility that all Old Earth  
accounts would be frozen- and then  

appropriated into the growing Worldweb economy. Nor had she remembered  
that the reason people had waited for the Hawking drive to see the  
spiral arm of the galaxy is that in long-term cryogenic sleep - as  
opposed to a few weeks or months of fugue - chances of terminal brain  
damage were one in six. I was lucky. When I was uncrated on Heaven's  
Gate and put to work digging out acid canals beyond the perimeter, I had  
suffered only a cerebral accident - a stroke. Physically, I was able to  
work in the mud pits within a few local weeks. Mentally, there was much  
left to be desired.  

The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a  
spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed  
compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the right  
side of my body soon returned. Only the language centers had been  
damaged beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer wedged in  
my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The  
right hemisphere was not without some language - but only the most  
emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective  
hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned  
later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.)  
For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck,  
shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.  

A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal  

eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could  
double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single  
adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. My new  
language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound  
words, and two baby-talk repetitions.  

My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of  
elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for divine  
imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a  
coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother  
was deeeased.  

All in all, it was enough.  

I will not say that I remember my three years in the mud pits and slime  
slums of Heaven's Gate with fondnexs, but it is true that these years  
were at least as formative as - and probably more so than - my previous  
two decades on Old Earth.  

I soon found that among my intimate acquaintances - Old Sludge, the  
scoop-shovel foreman; Unk, the slum-yard bully to whom I paid my  
protection bribes; Kiti, the lice-ridden crib doxy whom I slept with  
when I could afford it - my vocabulary served me well. 'Shit-fuck,' I  
would grunt, gesticulating. 'Asshole cunt peepec fuck."  

'Ah,' grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, 'going to the company  
store to get some algae chewies, huh?"  

'Goddamn poopoo,' I would grin back at him.  

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of  
expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and  
memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and  
remembered. My three local years on Heaven's Gate, almost fifteen  
hundred standard days, allowed me to see, to feel, to hear -to remember,  
as if I literally had been born again. Little matter that I had been  
born again in hell; reworked experience is the stuff of all true poetry  
and raw experience was the birthing gift of my new life.  

There was no problem adapting to a brave new world a century and a half  
beyond my own. For all of our talk of expansion and pioneering spirit  
these past five centuries, we all know how stultified and static our  
human universe has become. We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the  
inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual  
evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps crablike in  
a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great intuitive bounds;  
devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be  
instantly identifiable- and operable!- to our great-grandfathers.  

So while I slept the Hegemony became a formal entity, the Worldweb was  
spun to something close to its final shape, the All Thing took its  
democratic place among the list of humanity's benevolent despots, the  
TechnoCore seceded from human service and then offered its help as an  
ally rather than a slave, and the Ousters retreated to darkness and the  
role of Nemesis * . . but all these things had been creeping toward  
critical mass even before I was frozen into my ice coffin between the  
pork bellies and sherbet, and such obvious extensions of old trends took  

little effort to understand. Besides, history viewed from the inside is  
always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily  
recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.  

My life was Heaven's Gate and the minute-to-minute demands of survival  
there. The sky was always an eternal yellow-brown sunset hanging like a  
collapsing ceiling mere meters above my shack. My shack was oddly  
comfortable: a table for eating, a cot for sleeping and fucking, a hole  
for pissing and shitting, and a window for silent staring. My  
environment mirrored my vocabulary.  

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does,  
the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and Heaven's Gate was no  
exception. The Atmospheric Protectorate owned my body but my mind - or  
what was left of it - was mine.  

On Old Earth, my poetry was composed on a Sadu-Dekenar cornlog thought  
processor while I lounged in a padded chaise 1ongue or floated in my EM  
barge above dark lagoons or walked pensively through scented bowers.  

The execrable, undisciplined, limp-wristed flatulent products of those  
reveries already have been described.  

On Heaven's Gate, I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor  
could be; not mere physical labor, 1 should add, but absolutely  
spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and  
ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous  
and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to  
more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.  

Thus, on Heaven's Gate, as I dredged bottom scum from the slop canals  
under the red gaze of Vega Primo or crawled on hands and knees through  
stalactites and  

stalagmites of rebreather bacteria in labyrinthine lungpipes, I became a  
poet.  

All I lacked were the words.  

the station's  

The twentieth century's most honored writer, William Gass, once said in  
an interview; 'Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things."  

And so they are. As pure and transcendent as any Idea which ever cast a  
shadow into Plato's dark cave of our perceptions. But they are also  
pitfalls of deceit and misperception. Words bend our thinking to  
infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our  
mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the  
objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which  
language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for 'integrity' is a  

two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. 
So far, 
so good. 
But what does the Late English word 'honesty' mean? 
Or 
'Motherland'? 
Or 'progress'7 Or 'democracy'? 

Or 'beauty'? 
But even in our self-deception, we become gods. 

A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell, who lived and died  
in the same century as Gass, once wrote: 'Language serves not only to  
express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist  
without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the  
edifices of civiliz.tion nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it,  
but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatazoa attacking an  
ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin infants of word/idea are  
the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the  
reveling cosmos.  

(Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander's. Yes, we construct  
artifacts but so have species ranging from beavers to the architect ants  
whose crenellated towers are visible right now off the port bow. Yes,  
we weave real-fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the  
universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and :r peeps  
out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe's formulae lie waiting  
under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe  
hidden a word  

under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?) Even the  
traces of other intelligent life we have found - the blimps on Jove II,  
the Labyrinth Builders, the Seneschai empaths on Hebron, the Stick  
People of Durulis, the architects of the Time Tombs, the Shrike itself - 
have left us mysteries and obscure artifacts but no language. No words.  

The poet John Keats once wrote to a friend of his named Bailey: 'I am  
certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the  
truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be  
truth - whether it existed before or not."  

The Chinese poet George Wu, who died in the Last Sino-Japanese War about  
three centuries before the Hegira, understood this when he recorded on  
his comlog: 'Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what  
is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to  
his lover the week before he died, Wu said: 'Words are the only bullets  
in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers."  

You see, in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh in  
the weave of the human universe.  

And only the poet can expand this universe, finding shortcuts to new  
realities the way the Hawking drive tunnels under the barriers of  
Einsteinian space/time.  

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.  

I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate.  

'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn.  
Cunt. Peepee cunt. Goddamn!'  

They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away.  

Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.  

The yellow-brown clouds rained acid on me. I waded in mud up to my  
thighs and cleaned leechweed from the city sewer pipes. Old Sludge died  
during my second year there when we were all working on a project  
extending the First Avenue Canal to the Midsump Mudflats. An  

accident. He was climbing a slime dune to rescue a single sulfur-rose  
from the advancing grouter when there was a mudquake. Kiti married  
shortly after that. She still worked part time as a crib doxy, but I  
saw less and less of her. She died in childbirth shortly after the  
green tsunami carried away Mudflat City. I continued to write poetry.  

How is it, you might ask, that someone can write fine verse with a  
vocabulary of only nine right-hemisphere words?  

The answer is that I used no words at all. Poetry is only secondarily  
about words. Primarily, it is about tuth. I dealt with the Ding an  
$i¢h, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts,  
similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper  
with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the  
glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.  

And slowly the words returned. The brain retrains and retools itself  
amazingly well. What had been lost in the left hemisphere found a home  
elsewhere or reasserted their primacy in the damaged regions like  
pioneers returning to a fire-damaged plain made more fertile by the  
flames. Where before a simple word like 'salt' would leave me  
stuttering and. gasping, my mind probing emptiness like a tongue  
prodding the socket of a missing tooth, now the words and phrases flowed  
back slowly, like the names of forgotten playmates. During the day I  
labored in the slimefields, but at night I sat at my splintered table  
and wrote my Cantos by the light of a hissing ghee lamp. Mark Twain  
once opined in his homey way: 'The difference between the right word and  
the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the  
lightning bug." He was droll but incomplete.  

During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven's Gate, I  
discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed  
to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being  
struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.  

So my Cantos began and grew. Written on the flimsy sheets of recycled  
leechweed fiber which they issued by  

the ton for use as toilet paper, scribbled by one of the cheap felt-tip  
pens sold at the Company Store, the Cantos took shape. As the words  
returned, slipping into place like once scattered pieces of a 3-D  
pu:,le, I needed a form. Returning to don Baithazar's teachings, 1  
tried on the measured nobility of Milton's epic verse. Gaining  
confidence, I added the romantic sensuality of a Byron matured by a  
Keatsish celebration of the language. Stirring all this, I seasoned the  
mixture with a dash of Yeats's brilliant cynicism and a pinch of Pound's  
obscure, scholastic arrogance. I chopped, diced, and added such  
ingredients as Eliot's control of imagery, Dylan Thomas's feel for  
place, Delmore Schwartz's sense of doom, Steve Tem's touch of horror,  

Salmud Brevy's plea for innocence; Daton's love of the convoluted rhyme  
scheme, Wu's worship of the physical, and Edmond Ki Fererra's radical  
playfulness.  

In the end, of course, I threw this entire mixture out and wrote the  
Cantos in a style all my own.  

If it had not been for Unk the slumyard bully, I probably still would be  
on Heaven's Gate, digging acid canals by day and writing Cantos by  
night.  

It was my day off and I was carrying my Cantos - the only copy of my  
manuscript! - to the Company Library in the Common Hall to do some  
research when Unk and two of his cronies appeared from an alley and  
demanded immediate payment of the next month's protection money. We had  
no universal cards in the Heaven's Gate Atmospheric Protectorate; we  
paid our debts in company scrip or bootleg marks. I had neither. Unk  
demanded to see what was in my plastic shoulder bag.  

Without thinking, I refused. It was a mistake. If I'd shown Unk the  
manuscript, he most probably would have scattered it in the mud and  
slapped me around after making threats. As it was, my refusal angered  
him so he and his two Neanderthal companions tore open the bag,  
scattered the manuscript in the mud, and beat me within the proverbial  
inch of my life.  

It so happened that on this day an EMV belonging to a Protectorate air  
quality control manager was passing  

low above and the wife of the manager, traveling alone to the arc's  
Company Residential Store, ordered the EMV down, had her android servant  
retrieve me and what was left of my Cantos, and then personally drove me  
to the Company Hospital. Normally, the members of the bonded work force  
received medical aid, if any, at the walk-in Bio Clinic, but the  
hospital did not want to refuse the wife of a manager so I was admitted  

-still unconscious - and watched over by a human doctor and the 
manager's wife while I recovered in a healing tank.  

All right, to make a banal long story into a banal short story, I'll cut  
to the uplink. Helenda - that was the manager's wife - read my  
manuscript while I was floating in renewal nutrient. She liked it. On  
the same day I was being decanted in the Company Hospital, Helenda  
farcast to Renaissance where she showed my Cantos to her sister Felia,  
who had a friend whose lover knew an editor at Transline Publishing.  
When I awoke the next day, my broken ribs had been set, my shattered  
cheekbone had been healed, my bruises were gone, and I'd received five  
new teeth, a new cornea for my left eye, and a contract with Transline.  

My book came out five weeks later. A week after that, Helenda divorced  
her manager and married me. It was her seventh marriage, my first. We  
honeymooned on the Concourse and, when we returned a month later, my  
book had sold more than a billion copies - the first book of verse to  
hit the bestseller lists in four centuries - and I was a millionaire  
many times over.  

Tyrena Wingreen-Feif was my first editor at Transline. It was her idea  
to title the book The Dying Earth (a records search showed a novel by  

that name five hundred years earlier, but the copyright had lapsed and  
the book was out of print). It was her idea to publish just the  
sections of the Cantos which dealt with the nostalgic final days of Old  
Earth. And it was her idea to remove the sections which she thought  
would bore the readers - the philosophical passages, the descriptions of  
my mother, the sections which paid homage to earlier poets, the places  
where I played with experimental verse, the more personal  

passages - everything, in fact, except the descriptions of the idyllic  
final days which, emptied of all heavier freight, came across as  
sentimental and insipid. Four months after publication The Dying Earth  
had sold two and a half billion hardfax copies, an abridged and  
digitalized version was available on the See Thing datasphere, and it  
had been optioned for the holies.  

Tyrena pointed out that the timing had been perfect...  

that the original trauma shock of the death of Old Earth had meant a  
century of denial, almost as if Earth had never existed, followed by a  
period of revived interest culminating in the Old Earth nostalgia cults  
which could now be found on every world in the Web. A book - even a  
book of verse - dealing with the final days had struck at precisely the  
right moment.  

For me, the first few months of life as a celebrity in the Hegemony were  
far more disorienting than my earlier transition from spoiled son of Old  
Earth to enslaved stroke victim on Heaven's Gate. During those first  
months I did book and fax signing on more than a hundred worlds; I  
appeared on 'The AllNet Now!" show with Marmon Hamlit; I met CEO  
Senister Per6t and All Thing Speaker Drury Fein aswell as a score of  
senators; I spoke to the Interplanetary Society of PEN Women and to the  
Lusus Writers' Union; I was given honorary degrees at the University of  
New Earth and at Cambridge Two; I was feted, interviewed, imaged,  
reviewed (favorably), bioed (unauthorized), lionized, serialized, and  
swindled. It was a busy time.  

Notes for a sketch of life in the Hegemony:  

My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds.  

No doors: the arched entrances are farcaster portals, a few opaqued with  
privacy curtains, most open to observation and entry. Each room has  
windows everywhere and at least two walls with portals. From the grand  
dining hall on Renaissance Vector, 1 can see the bronze skies and the  
verdigris towers of Keep Enable in the valley below my volcanic peak,  
and by turning my head I can look through the farcaster portal and  
across the expense of white carpet in the formal living area to see  

the Edgar Allan Sea crash against the spires of Point Prospero on  
Nevermore. My library looks out on the glaciers and green skies of  
Nordholm while a walk of ten paces allows me to descend a short stairway  
to my tower study, a comfortable, open room encircled by polarized glass  
which offers a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the highest peaks of  
the Kushpat Karakoram, a mountain range two thousand kilometers from the  
nearest settlement in the easternmost reaches of the Jamnu Republic on  
Deneb Drei.  

The huge sleeping room Helenda and I share rocks gently in the boughs of  
a three-hundred-meter Worldtree on the Templar world of God's Grove and  
connects to a solarium which sits alone on the arid saltflats of Hebron.  

Not all of our views are of wilderness: the media room opens to a  
skimmer pad on the hundred and thirty-eighth floor of a Tau Ceti Center  
arctower and our patio lies on a terrace overlooking the market in the  
Old Section of bustling New Jerusalem. The architect, a student of the  
legendary Millon DeHaVre, has incorporated several small jokes into the  
house's design: the steps go down to the tower room, of course, but  
equally droll is the exit from the eyrie which leads to the exercise  
room on the lowest level of Lusus's deepest Hive, or perhaps the guest  
bathroom which consists of toilet, bidet, sink and shower stall on an  
open, wall-less raft afloat on the violet seaworld of Mare Infinitus.  

At qst the shifts in gravity from room to room were disturbing, out I  
soon adapted, subconsciously bracing myself for the drag of Lusus and  
Hebron and Sol Draconi Septera, unconsciously anticipating the less than  
l-stanclra-g freedom of the majority of the rooms.  

In the te ,,t nclard months Helenda and I are together we spend little  
6--. in our home, preferring instead to move with frcids ,,nong the  
resorts and vacation arcologies and night spots of the Worldweb. Our  
'friends' are the former farcaster set, now calling themselves the  
Caribou Herd after an extinct, Old Earth migratory mammal. This herd  
consists of other writers, a few successful visual artists, Concourse  
intellectuals, All Thing media representatives, a few radical ARNists  

and cosmetic gene splicers, Web aristocrats, wealthy farcaster freaks  
and Flashback addicts, a few holie and stage directors, a scattering of  
actors and performance artists, several Mafia dons gone straight, and a  
revolving list of recent celebrities... myself included.  

Everyone drinks, uses stims and autoimplants, takes the wire, and can  
afford the best drugs. The drug of choice is Flashback. It is  
definitely an upper-class vice: one needs the full range of expensive  
implants to fully experience it.  

Helenda has seen to it that I have been so fitted: biomonitors, sensory  
extenders, and internal comlog, neural shunts, kickers, metacortex  
processors, blood chips, RNA tapeworms .  .  .  my mother wouldn't have  
recognized my insides.  

I try Flashback twice. The first time is a glide - I target my ninth  
birthday party and hit it with the first salvo. It is all there: the  
servants singing on the north lawn at daybreak, don Balthazar grudgingly  
canceling classes so I can spend the day with Amalfi in my EMV,  
streaking across the gray dunes of the Amazon Basin in gay abandon; the  
torchlight procession that evening as representatives of the other Old  
Families arrive at dusk, their brightly wrapped presents gleaming under  
the moon and the Ten Thousand Lights. I rise from nine hours in  
Flashback with a smile on my face. The second trip almost kills me.  

I am four and crying, seeking my mother through endless rooms smelling  
of dust and old furniture. Android servants seek to console me but I  
shake off their hands, running down hallways soiled with shadows and the  
soot of too many generations. Breaking the first rule I ever learned, I  

throw open the doors to Mother's sewing room, her sanctum sanctorum-to  
which she retires for three hours every afternoon and from which she  
emerges with her soft smile, the hem of her pale dress whispering across  
the carpet like the echo of a ghost's sigh.  

Mother is sitting there in the shadows. ! am four and my finger has  
been hurt and I rush to her, throwing myself into her arms.  

She does not respond. One of her elegant arms remains reclined along  
the back of the chaise !ongue, the other remains limp on the cushion.  

I pull back, shocked by her cool plasticity. I tug open the heavy  
velvet drapes without rising from her lap.  

Mother's eyes are white, rolled back in her head. Her lips are slightly  
open. Drool moistens the corners of her mouth and glints on her perfect  
chin. From the gold threads of her hair - done up in the Grande Dame  
style she favors - I see the cold steel gleam of the stim wire and the  
duller sheen of the skull socket she has plugged it into. The patch of  
bone on either side is very white. On the table near her left hand lies  
the empty Flashback syringe.  

The servants arrive and pull me away. Mother never blinks. I am pulled  
screaming from the room.  

I wake screaming.  

Perhaps it was my refusal to use Flashback again which hastened  
Helenda's departure, but I doubt it. I was a toy to her - a primitive  
who amused her by my innocence about a life she had taken for granted  
for many decades.  

Whatever the case, my refusal to Flashback left me with many days  
without her; the time spent in replay is real time and Flashback users  
often die having spent more days of their lives under the drug than they  
ever experienced conscious.  

At first I entertained myself with the implants and technotoys which had  
been denied to me as a member of an Old Earth Family. The datasphere  
was a constant delight that first year - I called up information almost  
continually, living in a frenzy of full interface. I was as addicted to  
raw data as the Caribou Herd were to their stims and drugs. I could  
imagine don Balthazar spinning in his molten grave as I gave up  
long-term memory for the transient satisfaction of implant omniscience.  
It was only later that I felt the loss- Fitzgerald's Odyssey, Wu's  
FinalMarch, and a score of other epics which had survived my stroke now  
were shredded like cloud fragments in a high wind. Much later, freed of  
implants, I painstakingly learned them all again.  

For the first and only time in my life 1 became political.  

Days and nights would pass with me monitoring the Senate on farcaster  
cable or lying tapped into the All Thing. Someone once estimated that  
the All Thing deals with about a hundred active pieces of Hegemony  
legislation per day, and during my months spent screwed into the  
sensorium I missed none of them. My voice and name became well known on  
the debate channels. No bill was too small, no issue too simple or too  

complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave  
me a false sense of having accomplished something. I finally gave up  
the political obsession only after I realized that accessing the All  
Thing regularly meant either staying home or turning into a walking  
zombie. A person constantly busy accessing on his implants makes a  
pitiful sight in public and it didn't take Helenda's derision to make me  
realize that if I stayed home I would turn into an All Thing sponge like  
so many millions of other slugs around the Web. So I gave up politics.  
But by then I had found a new passion: religion.  

I joined religions. Hell, I helped create religions. The Zen Gnostic  
Church was expanding exponentially and I became a true believer,  
appearing on HTV talk shows and searching for my Places of Power with  
all of the devoutness of a pre-Hegira Muslim pilgrimaging to Mecca.  
Besides, I loved farcasting. I had earned almost a hundred million  
marks from royalties for The Dying Earth, and Helenda had invested well,  
but someone once figured that a farcaster home such as mine cost more  
than fifty thousand marks a day just to keep in the Web and I did not  
limit my farcasting to the thirty-six worlds of my home. Transline  
Publishing had qualified me for a gold universal card and I used it  
liberally, farcasting to unlikely corners of the Web and then spending  
weeks staying in luxury accommodations and leasing EMVs to find my  
Places of Power in remote areas of backwater worlds.  

I found none. I renounced Zen Gnosticism about the same time Helenda  
divorced me. By that time the bills were piling up and I had to  
liquidate most of the stocks and long-term investments remaining to me  
after Helenda had taken her share. (1 was not only naive and in love  
when she had had her attorneys draw up the marriage contract... I was  
stupid.)  

Eventually, even with such economies as cutting down my farcasting and  
dismissing the android servants, I was facing financial disaster.  

I went to see Tyrena Wingreen-Feif.  

'No one wants to read poetry,' she said, leafing through the thin stack  
of Cantos I had written in the past year and a half.  

'What do you mean?" I said. 'The Dying Earth was poetry:'  

'The Dying Earth was a fluke,' said Tyrena. Her nails were long and  
green and curved in the latest mandarin fashion; they curled around my  
manuscript like the claws of some chlorophyll beast. 'It sold because  
the mass subconscious was ready for it."  

'Maybe the mass subconscious is ready for this,' 1 said. I was  
beginning to get angry.  

Tyrena laughed. It was not an altogether pleasant sound. 'Martin,  
Martin, Martin,' she said. 'This is poetry. You're writing about  
Heaven's Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness,  

displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity." 'So?"  

'So no one wants topay for a look at another person's angst,' laughed  
Tyrena.  

I turned away from her desk and walked to the far side of the room. Her  
office took up the entire four hundred and thirty-fifth floor of the  
Transline Spire in the Babel section of Tau Ceti Center. There were no  
windows; the circular room was open from floor to ceiling, shielded by a  
solar-generated containment field which showed no shimmer whatsoever. It  
was like standing between two gray plates suspended halfway between the  
sky and earth. I watched crimson clouds move between the lesser spires  
half a kilometer below and I thought about hubris.  

Tyrena's office had no doorways, stairways, elevators, field lifts, or  
trapdoors: no connection to the other levels at all. One entered  
Tyrena's office through the five-faceted farcaster which shimmered in  
midair like an abstract hoiosculpture. I found myself thinking about  
tower fires and power failures as well as hubris. I said,  

'Are you saying that you won't publish it?"  

'Not at all,' smiled my editor. 'You've earned Transline several  
billion marks, Martin. We will publish it. All I am saying is that no  
one will buy it."  

'You're wrong!" I shouted. 'Not everyone recognizes fine poetry, but  
there are still enough people who read to make it a bestseller."  

Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of  
green lips. 'Martin, Martin, Martin,' she said, 'the population of  
literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By  
the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the  
so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And  
that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly  
environments. By the Hegira, ninety-eight percent of the Hegemony's  
population had no reason to read anything. So they didn't bother  
learning how to. It's worse t$day. There are more than a hundred  
billion human beings in the Worldweb and less than one percent of them  
bothers to hardfax any printed material, much less read a book."  

'The Dying Earth sold almost three billion copies,' I reminded her.  

'Mm-hmm,' said Tyrena. 'It was the Pilgrim's Progress Effect."  

'The what?"  

'Pilgrim's Progress Effect. In the Massachusetts Colony of... what was  
it! - seventeenth-century Old Earth, every decent family had to have a  
copy in the household. But, my heavens, no one had to read it. It was  
the same with Hitler's Mein Kampfor Stukatsky's  

Visions in the Eye of a Decapitated Child."  

'Who was Hitler?" I said.  

Tyrena smiled slightly. 'An Old Earth politician who did some writing.  
Mein Kampf is still in print ...  

Transline renews the copyright every hundred and thirty-eight years."  

'Well, look,' I said, 'I'm going to take a few weeks to polish up the  
Cantos and give it my best shot."  
'Fine,' smiled Tyrena.  

'1 suppose you'll want to edit it the way you did last time?"  
'Not at all,' said Tyrena. 'Since there's no core of nostalgia this  
time, you might as well write it the way you want."  

I blinked. 'You mean I can keep in the blank verse this time?"  
'Of course."  
'And the philosophy?"  
'Please do."  
'And the experimental sections?"  
'Yes."  
'And you'll print it the way I write it?"  
'Absolutely."  
'Is there a chance it'll sell?"  
'Not a hope in hell."  
My 'few weeks to polish up the Cantos' turned into ten months of  

obsessive labor. I shut off most of the rooms in the house, keeping  
only the tower room on Deneb Drei, the exercise room on Lusus, the  
kitchen, and the bathroom raft on Mare lnfinitus. I worked a straight  
ten hours a day, took a break for some vigorous exercise followed by a  
meal and a nap, and then returned to my writing table for another  
eight-hour stint. It was similar to the time five years before when I  
was recovering from my stroke and it sometimes took an hour or a day for  
a word to come to me, for a concept to sink its roots into the firm soil  
of language. Now it was an even slower process as I agonized over the  
perfect word, the precise rhyme scheme, the most playful image, and the  
most ineffable analog to the most elusive emotion.  

After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism  
to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.  

'What do you think?" I asked Tyrena as she read through the first copy.  
Her eyes were blank, bronze disks in that week's fashion, but this did  
not hide the fact that there were tears there. She brushed one away.  
'It's beautiful,' she said.  

'I tried to discover the voice of some of the Ancients,' 1 said,  
suddenly shy.  
'You succeeded brilliantly."  

'The Heaven's Gate Interlude is still rough,' I said.  

'It's perfect."  

'It's about loneliness,' I said.  

'It is loneliness."  

'Do you think it's ready?" I asked.  

'It's perfect... a masterpiece." 'Do you think it'll sell?" I asked.  

'No fucking way."  

They planned an initial run of seventy million hardfax copies of Cantos.  
Transline ran ads throughout the datasphere, placed HTV commercials,  
transmitted software inserts, successfully solicited blurbs from  
best-selling authors, made sure it was reviewed in the New New York  
Times Book Section and the TC Review, and generally spent a fortune on  
advertising.  

The Cantos sold twenty-three thousand hardfax copies during the first  
year it was in print. At ten percent royalties of the 12MK cover price,  
I had earned back 13,800MK of my 2,000,000MK advance from Transline.  

The second year saw a sale of 638 hardfax copies; there were no  
datasphere rights sold, no holie options, and no book tours.  

What the Cantos lacked in sales it made up for in negative reviews:  
'Indecipherable... archaic... irrelevant to all current concerns,'  
said the Times Book Section. 'M. Silenus has committed the ultimate  
act of non-communication,' wrote Urban Kapry in the TC'v Review, 'by  
indulging himself in an orgy of pretentious obfuscation." Marmon Hamlit  
on 'AllNet Now!" issued the final deathblow: 'Oh, the poetry thing from  
Whatshisname - couldn't read it. Didn't try."  

Tyrena Wingreen-Fef did not seem concerned. Two weeks after the first  
reviews and hardfax returns came in, a day after my thirteen-day binge  
ended, I farcast to her office and threw myself into the black flowfoam  
chair which crouched in the center of the room like a velvet  

panther. One of Tau Ceti Center's legendary thunderstorms was going on  
and Jovian-sized lightning crashes were rending the blood-tinged air  
just beyond the invisible containment field.  

'Don't sweat it,' said Tyrena. This week's fashions included a hairdo  
which sent black spikes thrusting half a meter above her forehead and a  
body field opaciter which left shifting currents of color concealing - 
and revealing- the nudity beneath. 'The first run only amounted to  
sixty thousand fax transmits so we're not out much there."  

'You said seventy million were planned,' I said.  

'Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline's resident AI read  
it."  

I slumped lower in the flowfoam. 'Even the AI hated it?"  

'The AI loved it,' said Tyrena. 'That's when we knew for sure that  
people were going to hate it."  

I sat up. 'Couldn't we have sold copies to the TechnoCore?"  

'We did,' said Tyrena. 'One. The millions of Als there probably  
real-time-shared it the minute it came in over fatline. Interstellar  
copyright doesn't mean shit when you're dealing with silicon."  

'All right,' I said, slumping. 'What next?" Outside, lightning bolts  
the size of Old Earth's ancient super-highways danced between the  
corporate spires and cloud towers.  

Tyrena rose from her desk and walked to the edge of the carpeted circle.  
Her body field flickered like electrically charged oil on water. 'Next,'  
she said, 'you decide if you want to be a writer or the Worldweb's  

biggest jerk-off."  

'What?"  

'You heard me." Tyrena turned and smiled. Her teeth had been capped to  
gold points. 'The contract allows us to recover the advance in any way  
we have to. Seizing your assets at Interbank, recovering the gold coins  
you've got hidden on Homefree, and selling that gaudy farcaster house  
would about do it. And then you can go join the other artistic  
dilettantes and dropouts and  

mental cases that Sad King Billy collects on whatever  

Outback world he lives on."  

I stared.  

'Then again,' she said and smiled her cannibal smile, 'we can just  
forget this temporary setback and you can get to work on your next  
book."  

My next book appeared five standard months later. The Dying Earth H  
picked up where The Dying Earth left off, in plain prose this time, the  
sentence length and chapter content carefully guided by  
neuro-bio-monitored responses on a test group of 638 average hard fax  
readers.  

The book was in novel form, short enough not to intimidate the potential  
buyer at Food Mart checkout stands, and the cover was a twenty-second  
interactive holo wherein the tall, swarthy stranger - Amalfi Schwartz, I  
suppose, although Amalfi was short and pale and wore corrective lenses- 
rips the bodice of the struggling female just to the nipple line before  
the protesting blonde turns toward the viewer and cries for help in a  
breathless  

whisper provided by porn holie star Leeda Swann.  

Dying Earth H sold nineteen million copies.  

'Not bad,' said Tyrena. 'It takes awhile to build an audience."  

'The first Dying Earth sold three billion copies,' I said.  

'Pilgrim's Progress,' she said. 'Mein Kampf. Once in a century. Maybe  
less."  

'But it sold three billion..."  

'Look,' said Tyrena. 'In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain  
took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in  
petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human  
beings. Go figure."  

Dying Earth III introduced the characters of Winona, the escaped slave  
girl who rose to the ownership of her own fiberplastic plantation (never  
mind that fiberplastic never grew on Old Earth), Arturo Redgrave, the  
dashing blockade runner (what blockade?!), and Innocence Sperry, the  
nine-year-old telepath dying of an unspecified Little Nell disease.  
Innocence lasted until  

Dying Earth IX, and on the day Transline allowed mc to kill the little  
shit off, I went out to celebrate with a six-day, ',wenty-world binge. I  
awoke in a lungpipe on Hcaven's Gate, covered with vomit and rebreatber  
mold, nursing the Wcb's biggest beadache and the sure knowledge that I  
soon would have to start on Volume X of The Chronicles of the Dying  
Earth.  

It isn't hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth H and Dying  
Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My  
research was meager, my plots for-mulaic, my characters cardboard, my  
prose preliterate, and my free time was my own. I traveled. I married  
twice more; each wife left me with no hard feelings but with a sizable  
portion of the royalties from my next Dying Earth. I explored religions  
and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter.  

I kept my home, adding six rooms on five worlds, and filled it with fine  
art. I entertained. Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all  
times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting  
the other's successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew  
in his or her heart that he or she was a true artist of the word who  
merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.  

Then, on a cool morning with my sleeping room rocking slightly in the  
upper branches of my tree on the Templar world, I awoke to a gray sky  
and the realization that my muse had fled.  

It had been five years since I had written any poetry.  

The Cantos lay open in the Deneb Drei tower, only a few pages finished  
beyond what had been published. I had been using thought processors to  
write my novels and one of these activated as I entered the study. SHIT,  
it printed out, WHAT DID i DO WITH MY MUSE?  

It says something about the type of writing I had been doing that my  
muse could flee without my noticing. For those who do not write and who  
never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a  

figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the  
Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft  

clay of language which they help to sculpt. When one is writing - 
really writing - it is as if one is given a fatlinc to tbe gods. No  
true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the  
mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or thought  
processor, ordering and expressing the revelations flowing in from  
somewhere else.  

My muse had fled. I sought her in the other worlds of my house but only  
silence echoed back from the art-bedecked walls and empty spaces. I  
farcast and flew to my favorite places, watching the suns set on the  
windblown prairies of Grass and the night fogs obscure the ebony crags  
of Nevermore, but although I emptied my mind of tbe trash-prose of the  
endless Dying Earth, there came no whispers from my muse.  

I sought her in alcohol and Flashback, returning to the productive days  
on Hcaven's Gate when her inspiration was a constant buzzing in my cars,  
interrupting my work, waking mc from sleep, but in the rclived hours and  
days her voice was as muted and garbled as a damaged audio disk from  
some forgotten century.  

My muse had fled.  

I farcast to Tyrena Wingreen-Feif's office at the precise moment of my  
appointment. Tyrena had been promoted from editor-in-chief of the  
hardfax division to publisher.  

Her new office occupied the highest level of the Tau Ceti Center  
Transline Spire and standing there was like perching on the carpeted  
summit of the galaxy's tallest, thinnest peak; only the invisible dome  
of the slightly polarized containment field arched overhead and the edge  
of the carpet ended in a six-kilometer drop. 1 wondered if other  
authors felt the urge to jump.  

'The new opus?" said Tyrena. Lusus was dominating the fashion universe  
this week and 'dominate' was the right word; my editor was dressed in  
leather and iron, rusted spikes on her wrists and neck and a massive  
ban-dolier across her shoulder and left breast. The cartridges looked  
real.  

'Yeah,' I said and tossed the manuscript box on her desk.  

'Martin, Martin, Martin,' she sighed, 'when are you going to transmit  
your books rather than going to all the trouble of printing them out and  
bringing them here in person?"  

'There's a strange satisfaction in delivering them,' I  

said. 'Especially this one."  

'Oh?"  

'Yes,' I said. 'Why don't you read some of it?" Tyrena smiled and  
clicked black fingernails along the cartridges in her bandolicr. 'I'm  
sure it's up to your usual high standards, Martin,' she said. 'I don't  

have to look at it."  

'Please do,' I said.  

'Really,' said Tyrcna, 'there's no reason. It always makes me nervous  
to read a new work while the author is present."  

* 'This one won't,' I said. 'Read just the first few pages."  

She must have heard something in my voice because she frowned slightly  
and opened the box. The frown deepened as she read the first page and  
flipped through the rest of the manuscript.  

Page one had a single sentence: 'And then, one fine morning in October,  
the Dying Earth swallowed its own bowels, spasmed its final spasm and  
died." The other two  

hundred and ninety-nine pages were blank.  

'A joke, Martin?".  

'Nope."  

'A subtle hint then? You would like to begin a new series?"  

'Nope."  

'It's not as if we hadn't expected it, Martin. Our story-liners have  
come up with several exciting series ideas for you. M. Subwaizee  
thinks that you would be perfect for the novelizations of the Crimson  
Avenger holies."  

'You can stick the Crimson Avenger up your corporate ass, Tyrena,' I  
said cordially. 'I'm finished with Transline and this premasticated  
gruel you call fiction."  

Tyrena's expression did not flicker. Her teeth were not pointed; today  
they were rusted iron to match the spikes on her wrists and the collar  
around her neck. 'Martin,  

Martin, Martin,' she sighed, 'you have no idea how finished you will be  
if you don't apologize, straighten up, and fly right. But that can wait  
until tomorrow. Why don't you step home, sober up, and think about  
this?"  

I laughed. 'I'm as sober as l've been in eight years, lady. It just  
took me awhile to realize that it wasn't just me who's writing crap...  
there's not a book published in the Web this year that hasn't been total  
garbage. Well, l'm getting off the scow."  

Tyrena rose. For the first time I noticed that on her simulated canvas  
web belt there hung a FORCE death-wand.  

I hoped that it was a designer-fake as the rest of her costume.  

'Listen, you miserable, no-talent hack,' she hissed.  

'Transline owns you from the balls up. If you give us any more trouble  
we'll have you working in the Gothic Romance factory under the name  
Rosemary Titmouse.  

Now go home, sober up, and get to work on Dying Earth X."  

I smiled and shook my head.  

Tyrena squinted slightly. 'You're still into us for almost a  
million-mark advance,' she said. 'One word to Collections and we'll  
seize every room of your house except that goddamn raft you use as an  
outhouse. You can sit on it until the oceans fill up with crap."  

I laughed a final time. 'It's a self-contained disposal unit,' I said.  
'Besides, I sold the house yesterday. The check for the balance of the  
advance should have been transmitted by now."  

Tyrena tapped the plastic grip of her deathwand.  

'Transline's copyrighted the Dying Earth concept, you  

know. We'll just have someone else write the books."  

I nodded. 'They're welcome to it."  

Something in my ex-editor's voice changed when she realized that I was  
serious. Somewhere, I sensed, there was an advantage to her if I  
stayed. 'Listen,' she said, 'l'm sure we can work this out, Martin. I  
was saying to the director the other day that your advances were too  
small and that Transline should let you develop a new story line..."  

'Tyrena, Tyrena, Tyrena,' I sighed. 'Goodbye."  

I farcast to Renaissance VectOr and then to Parsimony, where ! boarded  
a spinship for the three-week voyage to Asquith and the crowded kingdom  
of Sad King Billy.  

Notes for a sketch of Sad King Billy:  

His Royal Highness King William XXIII, sovereign lord of the Kingdom of  
Windsor-in-Exile, looks a bit like a wax candle of a man who has been  
left on a hot stove.  

His long hair runs in limp rivulets to slumped shoulders while the  
furrows on his brow trickle downward to the tributaries of wrinkles  
around the basset-hound eyes, and then run southward again through folds  
and frown lines to the maze of wattles in neck and jowls. King Billy is  
said to remind anthropologists of the worry dolls of the Outback  
Kinshasa, to make Zen Gnostics recall the Pitiful Buddha after the  
temple fire on Tai Zhin, and to send media historians rushing to their  
archives to check photos of an ancient flat-film movie actor named  
Charles Laughton. None of these references mean anything to me; I look  
at King Billy and think of my long-dead tutor don Balthazar after a  
week-long binge.  

Sad King Billy's reputation for gloominess is exaggerated.  

He often laughs; it is merely his misfortune that his peculiar form of  
laughter makes most people think he is sobbing.  

A man cannot help his physiognomy, but in His Highness's case, the  
entire persona tends to suggest either 'buffoon' or 'victim." He  
dresses, if that can be the word, in something approaching a constant  
state of anarchy, defying the taste and color sense of his android  
servants, so that on some days he clashes with himself and his  
environment simultaneously. Nor is his appearance limited to sartorial  
chaos - King William moves in a permanent sphere of dishabille, his fly  
unsealed, his velvet cape torn and tattered and drawing crumbs  
magnetically from the floor, his left sleeve ruffle twice as long as the  
right, which - in turn - looks as if it has been dipped in jam.  

You get the idea.  

For all this, Sad King Billy has an insightful mind and a passion for  
the arts and literature which has not been equaled since the true  
Renaissance days on old Old Earth.  

In some ways King Billy is the fat child with his face eternally pressed  
to the candy store window. He loves and appreciates fine music but  
cannot produce it. A connoisseur of ballet and all things graceful, His  
Highness is a klutz, a moving series of pratfalls and comic bits of  
clumsiness. A passionate reader, unerring poetry critic, and patron of  
forensics, King Billy combines a stutter in his verbal expression with a  
shyness which will not allow him to show his verse or prose to anyone  
else.  

A lifelong bachelor now entering his sixtieth year, King Billy inhabits  
the tumbledown palace and two-thousand-square-mile kingdom as if it were  
another suit of rumpled, royal clothes. Anecdotes abound: one of the  
famous oil painters whom King Billy supports finds His Majesty walking  
head down, hands clasped behind him, one foot on the garden path and one  
in the mud, obviously lost in thought. The artist hails his patron. Sad  
King Billy looks up, blinks, looks around as if awakening from a long  
nap. 'Excuse me,' His Highness says to the bemused painter, 'b-b-but  
could you p-p-please tell me - was I headed toward the palace or away  
from the p-p-palace?" 'Toward the palace, Your Majesty,' replies the  
artist. 'Oh, g-g-good,' sighs the King, 'then l've had lunch."  

General Horace Glennon-Height had begun his rebellion and the Outback  
world of Asquith lay directly in his path of conquest. Asquith was not  

 -the Hegemony had offered a FORCE:space fleet as a shield - but the royal 
ruler of the Kingdom of Monaco-in-Exile seemed more melted  
than ever when he called me in.  

'Martin,' said His Majesty, 'you've h-h-heard about the b-battle for  
Fomalhaut?"  

'Yeah,' I said. 'It doesn't sound like anything to worry about.  
Fomalhaut was just the kind of place Glennon-Height's been hitting ...  
small, no more than a few thousand colonists, rich in minerals, and with  
a time-debt of at least - what was it? - twenty standard months from  
the Web."  

'Twenty-three,' said Sad King Billy. 'So you d-d-don't think that w-we  

are in d-d-d-jeopardy?"  

'Uh-uh,' I said. 'With only a three-week real-transit time and a  
time-debt of less than a year, the Hegemony can always get forces here  
from the Web faster than the General can spin up from Fomalhaut."  

'Perhaps,' mused King Billy, beginning to lean on a globe and then  
jumping upright as it started to turn under his weight. 'But  
none-the-the less I've decided to start our own m-m-modest Hegira."  

I blinked, surprised. Billy had been talking about relocating the  
kingdom in exile for almost two years, but I had never thought he would  
go through with it.  

'The sp-sp-sp... the ships are ready on Parvati,' he said. 'Asquith  
has agreed to su-su-su... to provide the transport we need to the Web."  

'But the palace?" I said. 'The library? The farms and grounds?"  

'Donated, of course,' said King Billy, 'but the contents of the library  
will travel with us."  

I sat on the arm of the horsehair divan and rubbed my cheek. In the ten  
years I had been in the kingdom, I had progressed from Billy's subject  
of patronage to tutor, to confidant, to friend, but never did I pretend  
to understand this disheveled enigma. Upon my arrival he had granted me  
an immediate audience. 'D-d-do you w-w-wish to j-j-join the other  
t-t-talented people in our little colony?" he had asked.  

'Yes, Your Majesty."  

'And w-w-will you wr-wr-write more books like the D-D-Dying Earth?"  

'Not if I can help it, Your Majesty."  

'i r-r-read it, you know,' the little man had said. 'It was v-v-very  
interesting."  

'You're most kind, Sir."  

'B-b-b-bullshit, M. Silenus. It w-w-was interesting because someone  
had obviously b-b-bowdlerized it and left in all the bad parts."  

I had grinned, surprised by the sudden revelation that I was going to  
like Sad King Billy.  

'B-b-but the Cantos,' he sighed, 'th-th-that was a  

book. Probably the finest volume of v-v... poetry published in the Web  
in the last two centuries. How you managed to get that by the  
mediocrity police I will never know. I ordered twenty thousand copies  
for the k-k-kingdom."  

I bowed my head slightly, at a loss for words for the  

first time since my poststroke days two decades before.  

'Will you write more p-p-poetry like the Cantos?" 'I came here to try,  
Your Majesty."  

'Then welcome,' said Sad King Billy. 'You will stay in the west wing of  
the p-p-p... castle, near my offices, and my door will always be open  
to you."  

Now I glanced at the closed door and at the little sovereign who - even  
when smiling - looked as if he were on the verge of tears. 'Hyperion?"  
I asked. He had mentioned the colony world-gone-primitive many times. ,  

'Precisely. The android seedships have been there for some years,  
M-M-Martin. Preparing the way, as it were."  

I raised an eyebrow. King Billy's wealth came not from the assets of  
the kingdom but from major investments in the Web economy. Even so, if  
he had been carrying on a surreptitious recolonization effort for years,  
the cost must have been staggering.  

'D-d-do you remember why the original colonists named the pluh-pluh-pluh  
... the world Hyperion, Martin?"  

'Sure. Before the Hegira they were a tiny freehold on one of the moons  
of Saturn. They couldn't last without terrestrial resupply, so they  
emigrated to the Outback and named the survey world after their moon."  

King Billy smiled sadly. 'And do you Inow why the name is  
p-p-propitious for our endeavor?"  

It took me about ten seconds to make the connection.  

'Keats,' I said.  

Several years earlier, near the end of a long discussion about the  
essence of poetry, King Billy had asked me who was the purest poet who  
had ever lived.  

'The purest?" I had said. 'Don't you mean the greatest ?"  

'No, no,' said Billy, 'that's absurd t-t-to argue over who is the  
greatest. i'm curious about your opinion of  

the p-p-purest... the closest to the essence you describe."  

I had thought about it a few days and then brought my answer to King  
Billy as we watched the setting suns from the top of the bluff near the  
palace. Red and blue shadows stretched across the amber lawn toward us.  
'Keats,' I said.  

'John Keats,' whispered Sad King Billy. 'Ahh." And then a moment later:  
'Why?"  

So I had told him what I knew about the nineteenth-century Old Earth  
poet; about his upbringing, training, and early death ... but mostly  
about a life dedicated almost totally to the mysteries and beauties of  
poetic creation.  

Billy had seemed interested then; he seemed obsessed now as he waved his  
hand and brought into existence a holo model which all but filled the  
room. I moved backward, stepping through hills and buildings and  
grazing animals to get a better view.  

'Behold Hyperion,' whispered my patron. As was usually the case when he  
was totally absorbed, King Billy forgot to stutter. The holo shifted  
through a series of views: river cities, port cities, mountain eyries, a  
city on a hill filled with monuments to match the strange buildings in a  
nearby valley.  

'The Time Tombs?" I said.  

'Precisely. The greatest mystery in the known universe."  

I frowned at the hyperbole. 'They're fucking empty,' I said. 'They've  
been empty since they were discovered."  

'They are the source of a strange, anti-entropic force-field which  
lingers still,' said King Billy. 'One of the few phenomena outside  
singularities which dares to tamper with time itself."  

'It's no big deal,' I said. 'It must've been like painting rust  
preventative on metal. They were made to last but they're empty. And  
since when do we go bugfuck about technology?"  

'Not technology,' sighed King Billy, his face melting into deeper  
grooves. 'Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some  
creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the  
pagan mystery."  

I shrugged, not impressed.  

Sad King Billy waved the hoio away. 'Has your p-p-poetry improved?"  

I crossed my arms and glared at the regal dwarf-slob.  

'No."  

'Has your m-m-muse returned?"  

I said nothing. If looks could have killed, we would all be crying 'The  
King is dead, long live the King!" before nightfall.  

'Very w-w-we!i,' he said, showing that he could look insufferably smug  
as well as sad. 'P-p-pack your bags, my boy. We're going to Hyperion."  

(Fade in)  

Sad King Billy's five seedships floating like golden dandelions above a  
lapis sky. White cities rising on three continents: Keats, Endymion,  
Port Romance ... the Poets' City itself. More than eight thousand of  
Art's pilgrims seeking escape from the tyranny of mediocrity and  
searching for a renewal of vision on this rough-hewn world.  

Asquith and Windsor-in-Exile had been a center for android biofacture in  
the century following the Hegira, and now these blueskinned  

friends-of-man labored and tilled with the understanding that once these  
final labors were finished they were free at last. The white cities  
rose.  

The indigenies, tired of playing native, came out' of their villages and  
forests and helped us rebuild the colony to more human specifications.  
The technocats and bureaucrats and ecocrats were thawed and let loose  
upon the unsuspecting world and Sad King Billy's dream came one step  
closer to reality.  

By the time we arrived at Hyperion, General Horace Glennon-Height was  
dead, his brief but brutal mutiny already crushed, but there was no  
turning back.  

Some of the more rugged artists and artisans spurned the Poets' City and  
eked out rugged but creative lives in Jacktown or Port Romance, or even  
in the expanding frontiers beyond, but I stayed.  

I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years.  

For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation - 
EMVs were unreliable, skimmers  

scarce - and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence  
of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline  
transmitter - all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new  
realization of what it meant to be  

human and an artist.  

Or so I heard.  

No muse appeared. My verse continued to be techni cally proficient and  
dead as Huck Finn's cat.  

I decided to kill myself.  

But first I spent some time, nine years at least, carrying out a  
community service by providing the one thing new Hyperion lacked:  
decadence.  

From a biosculptor aptly named Graumann Hacket, I obtained the hairy  
flanks, hooves, .and goat legs of a satyr. I cultivated my beard and  
extended my ears.  

Graumann made interesting alterations to my sexual apparatus. Word got  
around. Peasant girls, indigenies, the wives of our true-blue city  
planners and pioneers -all awaited a visit from Hyperion's only resident  
satyr or arranged one themselves. I learned what 'priapic' and  
'satyriasis' really mean. Besides the unending series of sexual  
contests, I allowed my drinking bouts to become legendary and my  
vocabulary to return to something approaching the old poststroke days*  

It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell.  

And then on the night I had set aside to blow my brains out, Grendel  
appeared.  

Notes for a sketch of our visiting monster:  

Our worst dreams have come alive. Something wicked shuns the light.  
Shades of Morbius and the Kre!l. Keep the fires high, Mother, Grendel  
comes tonight.  

At first we think the missing are merely absent; there are no watchers  
on the wails of our city, no walls actually, no warriors at the door of  
our mead hall. Then a husband reports a wife who disappears between the  
eve ning meal and the tucking in of their two children. Then Hoban  
Kristus, the abstract impiosionist, fails to appear at midweek  
performance at Poets' Amphitheatre, his first missed cue in eighty-two  
years of treading the boards. Concern rises. Sad King Billy returns  
from his labors as overseer on the .lacktown restoration and promises  
that security will be tightened. A sensor net is woven around the town.  
ShipSecurity officers sweep the Time Tombs and report that all remains  
empty. Mechs are sent into the labyrinth entrance at the base of the  
Jade Tomb and report nothing in a six-thousand-kilometer probe.  
Skimmers, automated and manned, sweep the area between the city and the  
Bridle Range and sense nothing larger than the heat signature of a rock  
eel.  

For a local week there are no more disappearances.  

Then the deaths begin.  

The sculptor Pete Garcia is found in his studio . . .  

and in his bedroom... and in the yard beyond. Ship-Security Manager  
Truin Hines is foolish enough to tell a newsteep: 'It's like he was  
mauled by some vicious animal.  

But no animal I've ever seen could do that to a man."  

We are all secretly thrilled and titillated. True, the dialogue is bad,  
straight out of a million movies and holies we've scared ourselves with,  
but now we are part of the show.  

Suspicion turns toward the obvious: a psychopath is loose among us,  
probably killing with a pulse-blade or hellwhip. This time he (or she)  
had not found time to dispose of the body. Poor Pete.  

ShipSecurity Manager Hines is sacked and City Manager Pruett receives  
permission from His Majesty to hire, train, and arm a city police force  
of approximately twenty officers. There is talk of truth-testing the  
entire Poets' City population of six thousand. Sidewalk cafes buzz with  
conversation on civil rights... we were technically out of the Hegemony  

-did we have any rights? 
. . and harebrained schemes are hatched to catch the murderer.  

Then the slaughter begins.  

There was no pattern to the murders. Bodies were found in twos and  
threes, or alone, or not at all. Some of the disappearances were  
bloodless; others left gallons of gore. There were no witnesses, no  

survivors of attacks.  

Location did not seem to matter: the Weimont family  

lived in one of the outlying villas but Sira Rob never stirred from her  
tower studio near the center of town; two of the victims disappeared  
alone, at night, apparently while walking in the Zen Garden, but  
Chancellor Lehman's daughter had private bodyguards yet vanished while  
alone in a bathroom on the seventh floor of Sad King Billy's palace.  

On Lusus or Tau Ceti Center or a dozen other of the old Web worlds, the  
deaths of a thousand people add up to minor news - items for datasphere  
short-term or the inside pages of the morning paper - but in a city of  
six thousand on a colony of fifty thousand, a dozen murders - like the  
proverbial sentence to be hanged in the morning- tend to focus one's  
attention wonderfully well.  

I knew one of the first victims. Sissipriss Harris had been one of my  
first conquests as a satyr - and one of my most enthusiastic - a  
beautiful girl, long blond hair too soft to be real, a  
fresh-picked-peach complexion too virginal to dream of touching, a  
beauty too perfect to believe: precisely the sort that even the most  
timid male dreams of violating, Sissipriss now had been violated in  
earnest. They found only her head, lying upright in the center of Lord  
Byron's Plaza as if she had been buried to her neck in pourable marble.  
I knew when I heard these details precisely what kind of creature we  
were dealing with, for a cat I had owned on Mother's estate had left  
similar offerings on the south patio most summer mornings - the head of  
a mouse staring up from the sandstone in pure rodent amazement, or  
perhaps a ground squirrel's toothy grin- killing trophies from a proud  
but hungry predator.  

Sad King Billy came to visit me while I was working on my Cantos.  

'Good morning, Billy,' I said.  

'It's Your Majesty,' grumped His Majesty in a rare show of royal pique.  
His stutter had disappeared the day the royal dropship landed on  
Hyperion.  

'Good morning, Billy, Your Majesty."  

'Hnnrh,' growled my liege lord, moving some papers  

and managing to sit in the only puddle of spilled coffee on an otherwise  
dry bench. 'You're writing again, Silenus."  

I saw no reason to acknowledge an acknowledgment of the obvious.  

'Have you always used a pen7'  

'No,' I said, 'only when I want to write something worth reading."  

'Is that worth reading?" He gestured toward the small heap of manuscript  
I had accrued in two local weeks of work.  

'Yes."  

'Yes? Just yes?"  
'Yes."  
'Will I get to read it soon?"  
'No."  
King Billy looked down and noticed that his leg was in a puddle of  

coffee. He frowned, moved, and mopped at the shrinking pool with the  
hem of his cape. 'Never?" he said.  
'Not unless you outlive me."  
'Which I plan to do,' said the King. 'While you expire  
from playing goat to the kingdom's ewes."  
'Is that an attempt at a metaphor?"  

'Not in the least,' said King Billy. 'Merely an observation. '  
'I haven't forced my attentions on a ewe since my boyhood days on the  
farm,' I said. 'I promised my mother in song that I wouldn't indulge in  
sheep fucking again without asking her permission." While King Billy  
looked on mournfully, I sang a few bars of an ancient ditty called  
'There'll Never Be Another Ewe."  

'Martin,' he said, 'someone or something is killing my people."  
I set aside my paper and pen. '1 know,' I said.  
'I need your help."  
'How, for Christ's sake? Am I supposed to track down the killer like  

some HTV detective? Have a fight to the fucking death on Reichenbach  

fucking Falls?"  
'That would be satisfactory, Martin. But in the meantime a few opinions  
and words of advice would suffice."  

'Opinion One,' I said, 'it was stupid to come here.  
Opinion Two, it's stupid to stay. Advice Alpha/Omega: leave."  
King Billy nodded dolefully. 'Leave this city or all of Hyperion?"  
I shrugged.  
His Majesty rose and walked to the window of my small study. It looked  

out across a three-meter alley to the brick wall of the automated  
recycling plant next door. King Billy studied the view. 'You're  
aware,' he  

said, 'of the ancient legend of the Shrike?"  

'I've heard bits of it."  
'The indigenies associate the monster with the Time Tombs,' he said.  
'The indigenies smear paint on their bellies for the harvest celebration  

and smoke unrecombinant tobacco,' I said.  
King Billy nodded at the wisdom of this. He said: 'The Hegemony  

Firstdown Team was wary of this area. They set up the multichannel  
recorders and kept their bases south of the Bridle."  
'Look,' I said, 'Your Majesty... what do you want?  
Absolution for screwing up and building the city here?  
You're absolved. Go and sin no more, my son. Now, if you don't mind,  

Your Royalship, adi6s. l've got dirty limericks to write here."  
King Billy did not turn away from the window. 'You  
recommend that we evacuate the city, Martin?" I hesitated only a second.  

'Sure." 'And would you leave with the rest?" 'Why wouldn't I?"  
King Billy turned and looked me in the eye. 'Would you?"  
I said nothing. After a minute I looked away.  
'I thought so,' said the ruler of the planet. He clasped his pudgy  

hands behind his back and stared at the wall again. 'If I were a  

detective,' he said, 'I would be suspicious.  
The city's least productive citizen starts writing again after a decade  
of silence only... what, Martin?  

* . . two days after the first murders happened. Now he's disappeared  
from the social life he once dominated and  
spends his time composing an epic poem... why, even  
the young girls are safe from his goatish ardor."  
i sighed. 'Goatish ardor, m'!ord?"  

King Billy glanced over his shoulder at me.  
'All right,' I said. 'You've got me. I confess. I've been murdering  
them and bathing in their blood. It works as a fucking literary  
aphrodisiac. I figure two... three hundred more victims, tops... and  
I'll have my next book ready for publication."  

King Billy turned back to the window.  
'What's the matter,' I said, 'don't you believe me?" 'No." 'Why not?"  
'Because,' said the King, 'I know who the murderer is."  
We sat in the darkened holopit and watched the Shrike kill novelist Sira  

Rob and her lover. The light level was very low; Sira's middle-aged  
flesh seemed to glow with a pale phosphorescence while her much younger  
boyfriend's white buttocks gave the illusion in the dim light of  
floating separately from the rest of his tanned body.  

Their lovemaking was reaching its frenzied peak when the inexplicable  
occurred. Rather than the final thrusts and sudden pause of orgasm, the  
young man seemed to levitate up and backward, rising into the air as if  
Sira had somehow forcefully ejected him from her body. The sound track  
on the disk, previously consisting of the usual banal pants, gasps,  
exhortations, and instructions one would expect from such activity,  
suddenly filled the holopit with screams- first the young man's, then  
Sira's.  

There was a thud as the boy's body struck a wall off camera. Sira's  
body lay waiting in tragically comic vulnerability, her legs wide, arms  
open, breasts flattened, thighs pale. Her head had been thrown back in  
ecstasy but now she had time to raise it, shock and anger already  
replacing the oddly similar expression of imminent orgasm. She opened  
her mouth to shout something.  

No words. There came the watermelon-carving sound of blades piercing  
flesh, of hooks being pulled free of  

tendon and bone. Sira's head went back, her mouth opened impossibly  
wide, and her body exploded from the breastbone down. Flesh separated a  
if an invisible ax were chopping Sira Rob for kindling. Unseen scalpels  
completed the job of opening her, lateral incisions appearing like  
obscene time-lapse footage of a mad surgeon's favorite operation. It  
was a brutal autopsy performed on a living person. On a once living  
person, rather, for when the blood stopped flying and the body ceased  
spasming, Sira's limbs relaxed in death, legs opening again in an echo  
of the obscene display of viscera above. And then- for the briefest  
second - there was a blur of red and chrome near the bed.  

'Freeze, expand, and augment,' King Billy told the house computer.  

The blur resolved itself into a head out of a jolt addict's nightmare: a  
face part steel, part chrome, and part skull, teeth like a mechanized  
wolf's crossed with a steam shovel, eyes like ruby lasers burning  
through blood-filled gems, forehead penetrated by a curved spike-blade  
rising thirty centimeters from a quicksilver  

skull, and a neck ringed with similar thorns.  

'The Shrike?" I asked.  

King Billy nodded - the merest movement of chin and jowls.  

'What happened to the boy?" I asked.  

'There was no sign of him when Sira's body was discovered,' said the  
King. 'No one knew he was missing until this disk was discovered. He  
has been identified as a  

young recreation specialist from Endymion."  

'You just found the holo?"  
'Yesterday,' said King Billy. 'The security people found the imager on  

the ceiling. Less than a millimeter across. Sira had a library of such  
disks. The camera  
apparently was there only to record... ah..." 'The bedroom follies,' I  

said.  
'Precisely."  
I stood up and approached the floating image of the creature. My hand  

passed through forehead, spike, and jaws. The computer had calculated  

its size and represented  
it properly. Judging from the thing's head, our local Grendel stood  
more than three meters tall. 'Shrike,' I  

muttered, more in greeting than in identification.  
'What can you tell me about it, Martin?"  
'Why ask me?" I snapped. 'I'm a poet, not a mythohistorian."  
'You accessed the seedship computer with a query about the Shrike's  

nature and origins."  
I raised an eyebrow. Computer access was supposed to be as private and  
anonymous as datasphere entry in the Hegemony. 'So what?" I said.  
'Hundreds of people must have checked out the Shrike legend since the  

killings began. Maybe thousands. It's the only fucking monster legend  
we've got."  
King Billy moved his wrinkles and folds up and down.  
'Yes,' he said, 'but you searched the files three months before the  

first disappearance."  
I sighed and slumped into the holopit cushions. 'All right,' I said, 'I  

did. So what? I wanted to use the fucking legend in the fucking poem  
I'm writing, so I researched it.  
Arrest me."  
'What did you learn?"  
I was very angry now. I stamped satyr hooves into the soft carpet.  

'Just the stuff in the fucking file,' I snapped.  
'What in the hell do you want from me, Billy?"  
The King rubbed his brow and winced as he accidentally stuck his little  

finger in his eye. '1 don't know,' he said.  
'The security people wanted to take you up to the ship and put you on  
full interrogative interface. I chose to talk to you instead."  

I blinked, feeling a strange zero-g sensation in my stomach.  

Full interrogative meant cortical shunts and sockets in the skull. Most  
people interrogated that way recovered fully. Most.  
'Can you tell me what aspect of the Shrike legend you planned to use in  

your poem?" King Billy asked softly.  
'Sure,' I said. 'According to the Shrike Cult gospel that the  
indigenies started, the Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of  

Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to announce the end of  
the human race. I liked that conceit."  
'The end of the human race,' repeated King Billy.  
'Yeah. He's Michael the Archangel and Moroni and Satan and Masked  

Entropy and the Frankenstein monster all rolled into one package,' I  
said. 'He hangs around the Time Tombs waiting to come out and wreak  
havoc when it's mankind's time to join the dodo and the gorilla and the  
sperm whale on the extinction Hit Parade list."  

'The Frankenstein monster,' mused the short little fat man in the  

wrinkled cape. 'Why him?"  
I took a breath. 'Because the Shrike Cult believes that mankind somehow  
created the thing,' I said, although I  

knew that King Billy knew everything I knew and more.  
'Do they know how to kill it?" he asked.  
'Not that I know of. He's supposed to be immortal,  
beyond time."  
'A god?"  
I hesitated. 'Not really,' I said at last. 'More like one of the  

universe's worst nightmares come to life. Sort of like the Grim Reaper,  
but with a penchant for sticking souls on a giant thorn tree... while  
the people's souls  

are still in their bodies."  
King Billy nodded.  
'Look,' I said, 'if you insist on splitting hairs from back-world  

theologies, why don't you fly to Jacktown and ask a few of the Cult  

priests?"  
'Yes,' said the King, chin on his pudgy fist, obviously distracted,  
'they're already on the seedship being interrogated.  

It's all most confusing."  
I rose to leave, not sure if I would be allowed to.  

'Martin?" 'Yeah."  

* 'Before you go, can you think of anything else that could help us  
understand this thing?"  

I paused in the doorway, feeling my heart batting at my ribs to get out.  
'Yeah,' I said, my voice only marginally steady. '1 can tell you who  
and what the Shrike  

really is."  

'Oh?"  

'It's my muse,' I said, and turned, and went back to my room to write.  

Of course I had summoned the Shrike. I knew that. I had summoned it by  
beginning my epic poem about it. In the beginning was the Word.  

I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about the planet but  
about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about  
the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld  
through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to  
the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to  
sire. Hyperion was the first serious work I had done in many years and  
it was the best I would ever do. What began as a comic-serious homage  
to the ghost of John Keats became my last reason for existence, an epic  
tour de force in an age of mediocre farce. Hyperion Cantos was written  
with a skill I could never have attained, with a mastery I could never  
have gained, and sung in a voice which was not mine.  

The passing of humankind was my topic. The Shrike was my muse.  

A score more people died before King Billy evacuated the City of Poets.  
Some of the evacuees went to Endymion or Keats or one of the other new  
cities, but most voted to take the seedships back to the Web. King  
Billy's dream of a creative utopia died, although the King himself lived  
on in the gloomy palace at Keats.  

Leadership of the colony passed to the Home Rule Council, which  
petitioned the Hegemony for membership and immediately established a  
Self-defense Force.  

The SDF - made up primarily of the same indigenies who had been  
cudgelinc each other a decade before, but commanded now by self-styled  
officers from our new colony - succeeded only in disturbing the  
peacefulness of the night with their automated skimmer patrols and  
marring the beauty of the returning desert with their mobile  
surveillance mechs.  

Surprisingly, I was not the only one to stay behind; at least two  
hundred remained, although most of us avoided social contact, smiling  
politely when we passed on Poets' Walk or while we ate apart in the  
echoing emptiness of the dining dome.  

The murders and disappearances continued, averaging about one a local  
fortnight, although they were usually discovered not by us but by the  
regional SDF commander, who demanded a head count of citizens every few  

weeks.  

The image that remains in my mind from that first year is an unusually  
communal one: the night we gathered on the Commons to watch the seedship  
leave. It was at the height of the autumn meteor season and Hyperion's  
night skies were already ablaze with gold streaks and red crisscrosses  
of flame when the seedship's engines fired, a small sun flared, and for  
an hour we watched as friends and fellow artists receded as a streak of  
fusion flame. Sad King Billy joined us that night and I remember that  
he looked at me before he solemnly reentered his ornate coach to return  
to the safety of Keats.  

In the dozen years which followed I left the city half a dozen times;  
once to find a biosculptor who could rid me of my satyr affectation, the  
other times to buy food and supplies. The Shrike Temple had renewed the  
Shrike pilgrimages by this time, and on my trips I would use their  
elaborate avenue to death in reverse- the walk to Chronos Keep, the  
aerial tram across the Bridle Range, the windwagons, and the Charon  
barge down the Hoolie.  

Coming back, I would stare at the pilgrims and wonder who would survive.  

Few visited the City of Poets. Our half-finished towers began to look  
like tumbled ruins. The gallerias with their splendid metal-glass domes  
and covered arcades grew heavy with vines; pyreweed and scargrass poked  
up between the flagstones. The SDF added to the chaos, setting mines  
and booby traps to kill the Shrike, but only succeeding in devastating  
once beautiful sections of the city. Irrigation broke down. The  
aqueduct collapsed. The desert encroached. 1 moved from room to room  
in King Billy's abandoned palace, working on my poem, waiting for my  
muse.  

When you think about it, the cause-effect begins to resemble some mad  
logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or perhaps a print by Escher: the  
Shrike had come into existence  

because of the incantatory powers of my poem but the poem could not have  
existed without the threat/presence of the Shrike as muse. Perhaps I  
was a bit mad in those days.  

In a dozen years sudden death culled the city of dilettantes until only  
the Shrike and I remained. The annual passage of the Shrike Pilgrimage  
was a minor irritation, a distant caravan crossing the desert to the  
Time Tombs. Sometimes a few figures returned, fleeing across vermilion  
sands to the refuge of Chronos Keep twenty kilometers to the southwest.  
More often, no one emerged.  

I watched from the shadows of the city. My hair and beard had grown  
until they covered some of the rags I wore. I came out mostly at night,  
moving through the ruins like a furtive shadow, sometimes gazing at my  
lighted palace tower like David Hume peering in his own windows and  
solemnly deciding that he wasn't home. I never moved the food  
synthesizer from the dining dome to my apartments, preferring instead to  
eat in the echoing silence under that cracked duotoo like some addled  
Eloi fattening himself up for the inevitable Morlock.  

I never saw the Shrike. Many nights, just before dawn, I would awaken  

from a nap at a sudden sound -the scratch of metal on stone, the rasp of  
sand under something's foot - but although I was often sure that I was  
being watched, I never saw the watcher.  

Occasionally I made the short trip to the Time Tombs, especially at  
night, avoiding the soft, disconcerting tugs of the anti-entropic time  
tides while I moved through complicated shadows under the wings of the  
Sphinx or stared at stars through the emerald wall of the Jade Tomb. It  
was upon my return from one of these nocturnal pilgrimages that I found  
an intruder in my study.  

'Impressive, M-M-M-Martin,' said King Billy, tapping one of several  
heaps of manuscript which lay about the room. Seated in the oversized  
chair at the long table, the failed monarch looked old, more melted than  
ever. It was obvious that he had been reading for several hours.  

'Do you r-r-really think that mankind d-d-d-deserves  

such an end?" he asked softly. It had been a dozen years since I had  
heard the stutter.  

i moved away from the door but did not answer. Billy had been a friend  
and patron for more than twenty standard years, but at that moment I  
could have killed him. The thought of someone reading Hyperion without  
permission filled me with rage.  

'You d-d-date your p-p-p... cantos?" said King Billy, riffling through  
the most recent stack of completed pages.  

'How did you get here?" I snapped. It was not an idle question.  
Skimmers; dropships, and helicopters had not had much luck flying to the  
Time Tombs region in recent years. The machines arrived sans  
passengers. It had done wonders in fueling the Shrike myth.  

The little man in the rumpled cape shrugged. His uniform was meant to  
be brilliant and regal but merely made him look like an overweight  
Harlequin. '1 followed the last batch of pilgrims,' he said. 'And then  
c-c-came down from Keep Chronos to visit. I notice that you've written  
nothing in many months, M-M-Martin. Can you explain that?"  

I glowered in silence while sidling closer.  

'Perhaps I can explain it,' said King Billy. He looked at the last  
completed page of Hyperion Cantos as if it had the answer to a  
long-puzzled riddle. 'The last stanzas were written the same week last  
year that J.T. Telio disappeared."  

'So?" I had moved to the far edge of the table now.  

Feigning a casual attitude, I pulled a short stack of manuscript pages  
closer and moved them out of Billy's reach.  

'So that w-w-w-was... according to the SDF monitors *.. the d-d-date  
of the death of the last remaining Poets' City dweller,' he said. 'The  
last except for y-y-you, that is, Martin."  

I shrugged and began moving around the table. 1 needed to get to Billy  

without getting the manuscript in the way.  

'You know, you haven't f-f-f-finished it, Martin,' he said in his deep,  
sad voice. 'There is still some hance that humanity s-s-s-survives the  
Fall."  

'No,' I said and sidled closer.  

'But you can't write it, can you, Martin? You can't c-c-c-compose this  
poetry unless your m-m-muse is shedding blood, can you?"  

'Bullshit,' I said.  

'Perhaps. But a fascinating coincidence. Have you ever wondered why  
you have been spared, Martin?"  

I shrugged again and slid another stack of papers out of his reach. I  
was taller, stronger, and meaner than Billy, but I had to be sure that  
none of the manuscript would be damaged if he struggled as I lifted him  
out of his seat and threw him out.  

'It's t-t-t-time we did something about this problem,' said my patron.  

'No,' I said, 'it's time you left." I shoved the last stacks of poetry  
aside and raised my arms, surprised to see a brass candlestick in one  
hand.  

'Stop right there, please,' King Billy said softly and lifted a neural  
stunner from his lap.  

I paused only a second. Then I laughed. 'You miserable little hangdog  
fraud,' I said. 'You couldn't use a fucking weapon if your life  
depended on it."  

I stepped forward to beat him up and throw him out.  

My cheek was against the stone of the courtyard but one eye was open  
enough for me to see that stars still shone through the broken  
latticework of the galleria dome. 1 could not blink. My limbs and  
torso tingled with the pinpricks of returning sensation, as if my entire  
body had fallen asleep and was now coming painfully awake. It made me  
want to scream, but my jaw and tongue refused to work. Suddenly I was  
lifted and propped against a stone bench so that I could see the  
courtyard and the dry fountain which Rithmet Corbet had designed. The  
bronze Laocon wrestled with bronze snakes in the flickering illumination  
of the predawn meteor showers.  

'I'm s-s-sorry, Martin,' came a familiar voice, 'b-b-but this  
m-m-madness has to end." King Billy came into my field of view carrying  
a tall stack of manuscript. Other heaps of pages lay on the shell of  
the fountain at t he foot of the metal Trojan. An open bucket of  
kerosene sat nearby.  

I managed to blink. My eyelids moved like rusted iron.  

'The stun should w-wowear off any s-s-s... any minute,' said King  
Billy. He reached into the fountain, raised a sheaf of manuscript, and  

ignited it with a flick of his cigarette lighter.  
'No!" I managed to scream through clenched jaws.  
The flames danced and died. King Billy let the ashes drop into the  

fountain and lifted another stack of pages, rolling them into a  
cylinder. Tears glistened on lined cheeks illuminated by flame. 'You  
c-c-called it f-f-forth,' gasped the little man. 'It must be  
f-f-finished."  

I struggled to rise. My arms and legs jerked like a marionette's  
mishandled limbs. The pain was incredible.  

I screamed again and the agonized sound echoed from marble and granite.  
King Billy lifted a fat sheaf of papers and paused to read from the top  
page:  

* Without story or prop  
But my own weak mortality, I bore  
The load of this eternal quietude,  
The unchanging gloom, and th three fixed shapes Ponderous upon my senses  

a whole moon.  

For by my burning brain I measured sure Her silver seasons shedded on  
the night And ever day by day I thought I grew  
More gaunt and ghostly - Oftentimes I prayed, Intense, that Death wouM  

take me from the vale And all its burdens - Gasping with despair Of  

change, hour after hour I cursed myself."  
King Billy raised his face to the stars and consigned this page to  
flame.  

'No!" I cried again and forced my legs to bend. I got to one knee,  
tried to steady myself with an arm ablaze with pinpricks, and fell on my  
side.  

The shadow in the cape lifted a stack too thick to roll and peered at it  
in the dim light.  

' Then I saw a wan face  
Not pinned by human sorrows, but bright blanched By an immortal sickness  
which kills not;  

It works a constant change, which happy death  
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing  
To no death was that visage; it had passed  
The lily and the sno w; and beyond these  

I must not think now, though Isaw that face..." ."  

King Billy moved his lighter and this and fifty other pages burst into  
flame. He dropped the burning papers into the fountain and reached for  
more.  

'Please!" I cried and pulled myself up, stiffening my legs against the  
twitches of random nerve impulses while leaning against the stone bench.  
'Please."  

The third figure did not actually appear so much as allow its presence  
to impinge upon my consciousness; it was as if it always had been there  
and King Billy and I had failed to notice it until the flames grew  
bright enough.  

Impossibly tall, four-armed, molded in chrome and cartilage, the Shrike  
turned its red gaze on us.  

King Billy gasped, stepped back, and then moved forward to feed more  
cantos to the fire. Embers rose on warm drafts. A flight of doves  
burst from the vine-choked girders of the broken dome with an explosion  
of wing sound.  

I moved forward in a motion more lurch than step. The Shrike did not  
move, did not shift its bloody gaze.  

'Go!" cried King Billy, stutter forgotten, voice exalted, a blazing mass  
of poetry in each hand. 'Return to the pit whence you came!'  

The Shrike seemed to incline its head ever so slightly.  

Red light gleamed on sharp surfaces.  

'My lord!" I cried, although to King Billy or the apparition from hell I  
did not know then and know not now. 1 staggered the last few paces and  
reached for Billy's arm.  

He was not there. One second the aging King was a hand's length from me  
and in the next instant he was ten meters away, raised high above the  
courtyard stones. Fingers like steel thorns pierced his arms and chest  
and thighs, but he still writhed and my Cantos burned in his fists.  

The Shrike held him out like a father offering his son for baptism.  

'Destroy it!" Billy cried, his pinned arms making pitiful gestures.  
'Destroy it!'  

I stopped at the fountain's edge, tottered weakly against the rim. At  
first 1 thought he meant destroy the Shrike... and then I thought he  
meant the poem...  

and then I realized that he meant both. A thousand pages and more of  
manuscript lay tumbled in the dry fountain.  

I picked up the bucket of kerosene.  

The Shrike did not move except to pull King' Billy slowly back against  

his chest in an oddly affectionate motion. Billy writhed and screamed  
silently as a long steel thorn emerged from his harlequin silk just  
above the breastbone. I stood there stupidly and thought of butterfly  
collections I had displayed as a child. Slowly, mechanically, I sloshed  
kerosene on the scattered pages.  

'End it!" gasped King Billy. 'Martin, for the love of God!'  

I picked up the lighter from where he had dropped it.  

The Shrike made no move. Blood soaked the black patches of Billy's  
tunic until they blended with the crimson squares already here. I  
thumbed the antique lighter once, twice, a third time; sparks only.  
Through my tears I could see my life's work lying in the dusty fountain.  
I dropped the lighter.  

Billy screamed. Dimly, I heard blades rubbing bone as he twisted in the  
Shrike's embrace. 'Finish it!" he cried.  

'Martin... oh, God!'  

I turned then, took five fast paces, and threw the half-full bucket of  
kerosene. Fumes blurred my already blurred vision. Billy and the  
impossible creature that held him were soaked like two comics in a  
slapstick holie.  

I saw Billy blink and splutter, I saw the slickness on the Shrike's  
chiseled muzzle reflect the meteor-brightened sky, and then the dying  
embers of burned pages in Billy's still clenched fists ignited the  
kerosene.  

I raised my hands to protect my face - too late, beard and eyebrows  
singed and smoldered- and staggered backward until the rim of the  
fountain stopped me.  

For a second the pyre was a perfect sculpture of flame, a blue and  
yellow Piet with a four-armed madonna holding a blazing Christ figure.  
Then the burning figure writhed and arched, still pinned by steel thorns  
and a score of scalpeled talons, and a cry went up which to this  

day I cannot believe emanated from the human half of that death-embraced  
pair. The scream knocked me to my knees, echoed from every hard surface  
in the city, and drove the pigeons into wheeling panic. And the scream  
continued for minutes after the flaming vision simply ceased to be,  
leaving behind neither ashes nor retinal image. It was another minute  
or two before I realized that the scream I now heard was mine.  

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things.  

Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.  

It took me several months, perhaps a year, to recopy the  
kerosene-damaged pages and to rewrite the burned Cantos. It will be no  
surprise to learn that I did not finish the poem. It was not by choice.  
My muse had fled.  

The City of Poets decayed in peace. I stayed another year or two - 

perhaps five, I do not know; I was quite mad by then. To this day  
records of early Shrike pilgrims tell of the gaunt figure, all hair and  
rags and bulging eyes, who would wake them from their Gethsemane sleep  
by screaming obscenities and shaking his fist at the silent Time Tombs,  
daring the coward within to show itself.  

Eventually the madness burned itself out - although the embers will  
always glow - and I hiked the fifteen hundred kilometers to  
civilization, my backpack weighted down with just manuscript, surviving  
on rock eels and snow and on nothing at all for the last ten days.  

The two and a half centuries since are not worth telling, much less  
reliving. The Pouisen treatments to keep the instrument alive and  
waiting. Two long, cold sleeps in illegal, sublight, cryogenic voyages;  
each swallowing a century or more; each taking its toll in brain cells  
and memory.  

I waited then. I will still. The poem must be finished. It will be  
finished.  

In the beginning was the Word.  

In the end... past honor, past life, past caring...  

In the end will be the Word.  

FOUR  

The Benares put into Edge a little after noon on the next day. One of  
the mantas had died in harness only twenty kilometers downriver from  
their destination and A. Bettik had cut it loose. The other had lasted  
until they tied up to the bleached pier and then it rolled over in total  
exhaustion, bubbles rising from its twin airholes. Bettik ordered this  
manta cut loose as well, explaining that it had a slim chance of  
surviving if it drifted along in the more rapid current.  

The pilgrims had been awake and watching the scenery roll by since  
before sunrise. They spoke little and none had found anything to say to  
Martin Silenus. The poet did not appear to mind... he drank wine with  
his breakfast and sang bawdy songs as the sun rose.  

The river had widened during the night and by morning it was a  
two-kilometer-wide highway of blue gray cutting through the low green  
hills south of the Sea of Grass. There were no trees this close to the  
Sea, and the browns and golds and heather tones of the Mane shrubs had  
gradually brightened to the bold greens of the two-meter-tall northern  
grasses. All morning the hills had been pressed lower until now they  
were compressed into low bands of grassy bluffs on either side of the  
river.  

An almost invisible darkening hung above the horizon to the north and  
east, and those pilgrims who had lived on ocean worlds and knew it as a  
promise of the approaching sea had to remind themselves that the only  
sea now near was comprised of several billion acres of grass.  

Edge never had been a large outpost and now it was totally deserted. The  
score of buildings lining the rutted lane from the dock had the vacant  

gaze of all abandoned  

structures and there were signs on the riverfront that the population  
had fled weeks earlier. The Pilgrims' Rest, a three-century-old inn  
just below the crest of the hill, had been burned.  

A. Bettik accompanied them to the summit of the low bluff. 'What will  
you do now?" Colonel Kassad asked the android.  

'According to the terms of the Temple bonditure, we are free after this  
trip,' said Bettik. ' We shall leave the Benares here for your return  
and take the launch downriver. And then we go on our way."  

'With the general evacuations?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

'No." Bettik smiled. 'We have our own purposes and pilgrimages on  
Hyperion."  

The group reached the rounded crest of the bluff.  

Behind them, the Benare seemed a small thing tied to a sagging dock; the  
Hoolie ran southwest into the blue haze of distance below the town and  
curved west above it, narrowing toward the impassable Lower Cataracts a  
dozen kilometers uprivcr from Edge. To their north and cast lay the Sea  
of Grass.  

'My God,' breathed Brawne Lamia.  

It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.  

Below them, a scattering of docks, . wharves, and sheds marked the end  
of Edge and the beginning of t he Sea. Grass stretched away forever,  
rippling sensuously in the slight breeze and seeming to lap like a green  
surf at the base of the bluffs. The grass seemed infinite and seamless,  
stretching tO all horizons and apparently rising to precisely the same  
height as far as the eye could see. There was not the slightest hint of  
the snowy peaks of the Bridle Range, which they knew lay some eight  
hundred kilometers to the northwest.  

The illusion that they were gazing at a great green sea was nearly  
perfect, down to the wind-ruffled shimmers of stalks looking like  
whitecaps far from shore.  

'It's beautiful,' said Lamia, who had never seen it before.  

'It's striking at sunset and sunrise,' said the Consul.  

'Fascinating,' murmured Sol Weintraub, lifting his infant so that she  
could see. She wiggled in happiness and concentrated on watching her  
fingers.  

'A well-preserved ecosystem,' Het Masteen said  

approvingly. 'The Muir would be pleased." 'Shit,' said Martin Silenus.  

The others turned to stare.  

'There's no fucking windwagon,' said the poet.  
The four other men, woman, and android stared silently  
at the abandoned wharves and empty plain of grass.  
' It's been delayed,' said the Consul.  
Martin Silenus barked a laugh. 'Or it's left already. We were supposed  

to be here last night."  
Colonel Kassad raised his powered binoculars and swept the horizon. 'I  
find it unlikely that they would have left without us,' he said. 'The  

wagon was to have been sent by the Shrike Temple priests themselves.  
They have a vested interest in our pilgrimage."  
'We could walk,' said Lenar Hoyt. The priest looked pale and weak,  

obviously in the grip of both pain and drugs, and barely able to stand,  

much less walk.  
' No,' said Kassad. ' It' s hundreds o f klic ks and the grass is over  
our heads."  

'Compasses,' said the priest.  

'Compasses don't work on Hyperion,' said Kassad, still watching through  
his binoculars.  
'Direction finders then,' said Hoyt.  
'We have an IDF, but that isn't the point,' said the Consul.  
'The grass is sharp. Halfa klick out and we'd be nothing but tatters."  
'And there are the grass serpents,' said Kassad, lowering the glasses.  

'It's a well-preserved ecosystem but not one to take a stroll in."  
Father Hoyt sighed and half collapsed into the short grass of the  
hilltop. There was something close to relief in his voice when he said.  
'All right, we go back."  

A. Bettik stepped forward. 'The crew will be happy to wait and ferry  
you back to Keats in the Benares should the windwagon not appear."  

'No,' said the Consul, 'take the launch and go."  

'Hey, just a fucking minute!" cried Martin Silenus. 'I don't remember  
electing you dictator, amigo. We need to get there. If the fucking  
windwagon doesn't show, we'!!  

have to find another way."  

The Consul wheeled to face the smaller man. 'How?  

By boat? It takes two weeks to sail up the Mane and around the North  
Littoral to Otho or one of the other staging areas. And that's when  
there are ships available.  

Every seagoing vessel on Hyperion is probably involved in the evacuation  
effort."  

'Dirigible then,' growled the poet.  

Brawne Lamia laughed. 'Oh, yes. We've seen so many in the two days  
we've been on the river."  

Martin Silenus whirled and clenched his fists as if to strike the woman.  
Then he smiled. 'All right then, lady, what do we do? Maybe if we  
sacrifice someone to a grass serpent the transportation gods will smile  
on as."  

Brawne Lamia's stare was arctic. 'I thought burned offerings were more  
your style, little man."  

Colonel Kassad stepped between the two. His voice barked command.  
'Enough. The Consul's right. We stay here until the wagon arrives. M.  
Masteen, M. Lamia, go with A. Bettik to supervise the unloading of our  
gear.  

Father Hoyt and M. Silenus will bring some wood up for a bonfire."  

'A bonfire?" said the priest. It was hot on the hillside.  

'After dark,' said Kassad. 'We want the windwagon to know we're here.  
Now let's move."  

It was a quiet group that watched the powered launch move downriver at  
sunset. Even from two kilometers away the Consul could see the blue  
skins of the crew. The Benares looked old and abandoned at its wharf,  
already a part of the deserted city. When the launch was lost in the  
distance, the group turned to watch the Sea of Grass.  

Long shadows from the river bluffs crept out across what the Consul  
already found himself thinking of as the surf and shallows. Farther  
out, the sea seemed to shift in color, the grass mellowing to an  
aquamarine shimmer before darkening to a hint of verdurous depths. The  
lapis sky melted into the reds and golds of sunset, illuminating their  
hilltop and setting the pilgrims' skins aglow with liquid light. The  
only sound was the whisper of wind in grass.  

'We've got a fucking huge heap of baggage,' Martin Silenus said loudly.  
'For a bunch of folks on a one-way trip."  

It was true, thought the Consul. Their luggage made a small mountain on  
the grassy hilltop.  

'Somewhere in there,' came the quiet voice of Het Masteen, 'may lie our  
salvation."  

'What do you mean?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

'Yeah,' said Martin Silenus, lying back, putting his hands under his  
head, and staring at the sky. 'Did you bring a pair of undershorts that  
are ShrikeProof?. '  

The Templar shook his head slowly. The sudden twilight cast his face in  

shadow under the cowl of the robe.  
'Let us not trivialize or dissemble,' he said. 'It is time to admit  
that each of us has brought on this pilgrimage something which he or she  
hopes will alter the inevitable outcome when the moment arrives that we  
must face the Lord of Pain."  

The poet laughed. 'I didn't bring even my lucky fucking rabbit's foot."  
The Templar's hood moved slightly. 'But your manuscript perhaps?"  
The poet said nothing.  
Het Masteen moved his invisible gaze to the tall man on his left. 'And  

you, Colonel, there are several trunks  
which bear your name. Weapons, perhaps?"  
Kassad raised his head but did not speak.  
'Of course,' said Het Masteen, 'it would be foolish to go hunting  

without a weapon."  

'What about me?" asked Brawne Lamia, folding her arms. 'Do you know  
what secret weapon I've smuggled along?"  
The Templar's oddly accented voice was calm. 'We have not yet heard  

your tale, M. Lamia. It would be premature to speculate."  
'What about the Consul?" asked Lamia.  
'Oh, yes, it is obvious what weapon our diplomatic friend has in store."  
The Consul turned from his contemplation of the sunset. '1 brought only  

some clothes and two books to read,' he said truthfully.  

'Ah,' sighed the Templar, 'but what a beautiful spacecraft you left  
behind."  
Martin Silenus jumped to his feet. 'The fucking ship!' he cried. 'You  

can call it, can't you? Well, goddammit, get your dog whistle out, l'm  
tired of sitting here."  
The Consul pulled a strand of grass and stripped it.  

After a minute he said:  
'Even if I could call it... and you heard A. Bettik say that the  
comsats and repeater stations were down...  

even if I could call it, we couldn't land north of the Bridle Range.  
That meant instant disaster even before the Shrike began ranging south  
of the mountains."  

'Yeah,' said Silenus, waving his arms in agitation, 'but we could get  

across this fucking... lawn! Call the ship."  

'Walt until morning,' said the Consul. 'If the wind-wagon's not here,  
we will discuss alternatives."  

'Fuck that..." began the poet, but Kassad stepped forward with his back  
to him, effectively removing Silenus from the circle.  

'M. Masteen,' said the Colonel, 'what is your secret?" There was enough  
light from the dying sky to show a slight smile on the Templar's thin  
lips. He gestured toward the mound of baggage. 'As you see, my trunk  
is the heaviest and most mysterious of all."  

'It's a MObius cube,' said Father Hoyt. 'l've seen  

ancient artifacts transported that way."  

'Or fusion bombs,' said Kassad.  

Het Masteen shook his head. 'Nothing so crude,' he said.  

'Are you going to tell us?" demanded Lamia.  

'When it is my turn to speak,' said the Templar.  

'Are you next?" asked the Consul. 'We can listen while we wait."  

Sol Weintraub cleared his throat. 'I have number four,' he said,  
showing the slip of paper. 'But I would be more than pleased to trade  
with the True Voice of the Tree." Weintraub lifted Rachel from his left  
shoulder to his right, patting her gently on the back.  

Het Masteen shook his head. 'No, there is time. 1 meant only to point  
out that in hopelessness there is always hope. We have learned much  
from the stories so  

far. Yet each of us has some seed of promise buried even deeper than we  
have admitted."  

'I don't see . . ." began Father Hoyt but was interrupted by Martin  
Silenus's sudden shout.  

'It's the wagon! The fucking windwagon. Here at last!'  

It was another twenty minutes before the windwagon tied up to one of the  
wharves. The craft came out of the north, its sails white squares  
against a dark plain draining of color. The last light had faded by the  
time the large ship had tacked close to the low bluff, folded its main  
sails, and rolled to a stop.  

The Consul was impressed. The thing was wooden, handcrafted, and huge - 
curved in the pregnant lines of some seagoing galleon out of Old Earth's  
ancient history.  

The single gigantic wheel, set in the center of the curving hull,  
normally would have been invisible in the two-meter-tall grass, but the  
Consul caught a glimpse of the underside as he carried luggage onto the  

wharf. From the ground it would be six or seven meters to the railing,  
and more than five times that height to the tip of the mainmast. From  
where he stood, panting from exertion, the Consul could hear the snap of  
pennants far above and a steady, almost subsonic hum that would be  
coming from either the ship's interior flywheel or its massive  
gyroscopes.  

A gangplank extruded from the upper hull and lowered itself to the  
wharf. Father Hoyt and Brawne Lamia had to step back quickly or be  
crushed.  

The windwagon was less well lighted than the Benares; illumination  
appeared to consist of several lanterns hanging from spars. No crew had  
been visible during the approach of the ship and no one came into view  
nOW.  

'Hallo!" called the Consul from the base of the gangplank.  

No one answered.  

'Wait here a minute, please,' said Kassad and mounted the long ramp in  
five strides.  

The others watched while Kassad paused at the top, touched his belt  
where the small deathwand was tucked,  

and then disappeared amidships. Several minutes later a light flared  
through broad windows at the stern, casting trapezoids of yellow on the  
grass below.  

'Come up,' called Kassad from the head of the ramp.  

'It's empty."  

The group struggled with their luggage, making several trips. The  
Consul helped Her Masteen with the heavy MObius cube and through his  
fingertips he could feel a faint but intense vibration.  

'So where the fuck is the crew?" asked Martin Silenus when they were  
assembled on the foredeck. They had taken their single-file tour  
through the narrow corridors and cabins, down stairways more ladder than  
stairs, and through cabins not much bigger than the built-in bunks they  
contained. Only the rearmost cabin - the captain's cabin, if that is  
what it was - approached the size and comfort of standard accommodations  
on the Benares.  

'It's obviously automated,' said Kassad. The FORCE officer pointed to  
halyards which disappeared into slots in the deck, manipulators all but  
invisible among the rigging and spars, and the subtle hint of gears  
halfway up the lateen-rigged rear mast.  

'I didn't see a control center,' said Lamia. 'Not so much as a diskey  
or C-spot nexus." She slipped her comlog from a breast pocket and tried  
to interface on standard data, comm, and biomed frequencies. There was  
no response from the ship.  

'The ships used to be crewed,' said the Consul. 'Temple initiates used  

to accompany the pilgrims to the mountains."  
'We!!, they're not here now,' said Hoyt. 'But I guess we can assume  

that someone is still alive at the tram station or Keep Chronos. They  
sent the wagon for us."  
'Or everyone's dead and the windwagon is running on an automatic  

schedule,' said Lamia. She looked over her shoulders as rigging and  
canvas creaked in a suddengust of wind. 'Damn, it's weird to be cut off  
from everybody and everything like this. It's like being blind and  
deaf. 1 don't know how colonials stand it."  

Martin Silenus approached the group and sat on the railing. He drank  
from a long green bottle and said:  
'Where's the Poet? Show him! Show him,  
Muses mine, that I may know him!  
'Tis the man who with a man  
Is an equal, be he king,  
Or poorest of the beggar-class,  
Or any other wondrous thing  
A man may be 'twixt ape and Plato.  
'Tis the man who with a bird,  
Wren or eagle, finds his way to  
A !! its instincts. He hath heard  
The !ion's roaring, and can tell  
What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the tiger's yell  
Comes articulate and presseth  
On his ear like mother-tongue. '  

'Where did you get that wine bottle?" asked Kassad.  
Martin Silenus smiled. His eyes were small and bright in the lantern  
glow. 'The gailery's fully stocked and there's a bar. I declared it  
open."  

'We should fix some dinner,' said the Consul although all he wanted at  
the moment was some wine. It had been more than ten hours since they  
had last eaten.  

There came a clank and whir and all six of them moved to the starboard  
rail. The gangplank had drawn itself in.  
They whirled again as canvas unfurled, lines grew taut, and somewhere a  

flywheel hummed into the ultrasonic.  

Sails filled, the deck tilted slightly, and the windwagon moved away  
from the wharf and into the darkness. The only sounds were the flap and  
creak of the ship, the distant rumble of the wheel, and the rasp of  
grass on the hull bottom.  

The six of them watched as the shadow of the bluff fell behind, the  
unlighted beacon pyre receding as a faint gleam of starlight on pale  
wood, and then there were only the sky and night and swaying circles of  
lantern light.  

'I'11 go below,' said the Consul, 'and see if I can get a meal  
together."  

The others stayed awhile, feeling the slight surge and rumble through  
the soles of their feet and watching  

darkness pass. The Sea of Grass was visible only as the place where  
stars ended and flat blackness began. Kassad used a handbeam to  
illuminate glimpses of canvas and rigging, lines being pulled tight by  
invisible !ands, and then he checked all the corners and shadowed places  
from stern to bow. The others watched in silence. When he clicked the  
light off, the darkness seemed less oppressive, the starlight brighter.  
A rich, fertile smell - more of a farm in springtime than of the sea - 
came to them on a breeze which had swept across a thousand kilometers of  
grass.  

Sometime later the Consul called to them and they went below to eat.  

The galley was cramped and there was no mess table, so they used the  
large cabin in the stern as their common room, pushing three of the  
trunks together as a makeshift table. Four lanterns swinging from low  
beams made the room bright. A breeze blew in when Het Masteen opened  
one of the tall windows above the bed..  

The Consul set plates piled high with sandwiches on the largest trunk  
and returned again with thick white cups and a coffee therm. He poured  
while the others ate.  

'This is quite good,' said Fedmahn Kassad. 'Where did you get the roast  
been'  

'The cold box is fully stocked. There's another large freezer in the  
aft pantry."  

'Electrical?" asked Het Masteen.  

'No. Double insulated."  

Martin Silenus sniffed ajar, found a knife on the sandwich plate, and  
added great dollops of horseradish to his sandwiches. His eyes sparkled  
with tears as he ate.  

'How long does this crossing generally take?" Lamia asked the Consul.  

He looked up from his study of the circle of hot black coffee in his  

cup. T m sorry, what?"  
'Crossing the Sea of Grass. How long?"  
'A night and half a day to the mountains,' said the Consul. 'If the  

winds are with us."  
'And then... how long to cross the mountains?" asked Father Hoyt.  
'Less than a day,' sid the Consul.  
'If the tramway is running,' added Kassad.  
The Consul sipped the hot coffee and made a face.  
'We have to assume it is. Otherwise..."  
'Otherwise what?" demanded Lamia.  
'Otherwise,' said Colonel Kassad, moving to the open window and putting  

his hands on his hips, 'we will he stranded six hundred klicks from the  

Time Tombs and a thousand from the southern cities."  
The Consul shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'The Temple. priests or  
whoever are behind this pilgrimage have seen to it that we've gotten  
this far. They'll make sure we go all the way."  

Brawne Lamia crossed her arms and frowned. 'As what... sacrifices?"  
Martin Silenus whooped a laugh and brought out his bottle:  
'Who are these coming to the sacrifice?  
To what green altar, 0 mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer  

lowing at the skies,  
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?  
What little town by river or sea-shore,  
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,  
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?  
And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a  

soul, to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. '  
Brawne Lamia reached under her tunic and brought out a cutting laser no  

larger than her little finger. She aimed it at the poet's head. 'You  
miserable little shit.  
One more word out of you and... 1 swear... I'll slag you where you  

stand."  
The silence was suddenly absolute except for the background rumble-groan  
of the ship. The Consul moved toward Martin Silenus. Colonel Kassad  
took two steps behind Lamia.  

The poet took a long drink and smiled at the dark-haired woman. His  
lips were moist. 'Oh build your ship of death,' he whispered. 'Oh  
build it!'  

Lamia's fingers were white on the pencil laser. The Consul edged closer  
to Silenus, not knowing what to do, imagining the whipping beam of light  
fusing his own eyes.  

Kassad leaned toward Lamia like two meters of tensed shadow.  

'Madam,' said Sol Weintraub from where he sat on the bunk against the  
far wall, 'need I remind you that there is a child present?"  

Lamia glanced to her right. Weintraub had removed a deep drawer from a  
ship's cupboard and had set it on the bed as a cradle. He had bathed  
the infant and come in silently just before the poet's recitation. Now  
he set the baby softly in the padded nest.  

'l'm sorry,' said Brawne Lamia and lowered the small laser." It's just  
that he makes me so... angry."  

Weintraub nodded, rocking the drawer slightly. The gentle roll of the  
windwagon combined with the incessant rumble of the great wheel appeared  
to have already put the child to sleep. 'We're all tired and tense,'  
said the scholar.  

'Perhaps we should find our lodgings for the night and turn in."  

The woman sighed and tucked the weapon in her belt." I won't sleep,' she  
said. 'Things are too... strange."  

Others nodded. Martin Silenus was sitting on the broad ledge below the  
stern windows. Now he pulled up his legs, took a drink, and said to  
Weintraub, 'Tell your story, old man."  

'Yes,' said Father Hoyt. The priest looked exhausted to the point of  
being cadaverous, but his feverish eyes burned. 'Tell us. We need to  
have the stories told and time to think about them before we arrive."  

Weintraub passed a hand across his bald scalp. 'It's a dull tale,' he  
said." l've been to Hyperion be fore. There are no confrontations with  
monsters, no acts of heroism. It's a tale by a man whose idea of epic  
adventure is speaking to a class without his notes."  

'All the better,' said Martin Silenus. 'We need a soporific."  

Sol Weintraub sighed, adjusted his glasses, and nodded.  

There were a few streaks of dark in his heard, but most of it had gone  
gray. He turned the lantern low over the baby's  

bed and moved to a chair in the center of the room.  

The Consul turned down the other lamps and poured more coffee for those  
who wanted it. Sol Weintraub's voice was slow, careful in phrase and  
precise in wording, and before long the gentle cadence of his story  

blended with the soft rumble and slow pitchings of the windwagon's  
progress north.  

THE SCHOLAR'S TALE:  

The River Lethe's Taste is Bitter  

Sol Weintraub and his wife Sarai had enjoyed their life even before the  
birth of their daughter; Rachel made things as close to perfect as the  
couple could imagine.  

Sarai was twenty-seven when the child was conceived, Sol was  
twenty-nine. Neither of them had considered Poulsen treatments because  
neither of them could afford it, but even without such care they looked  
forward to another fifty years of health.  

Both had lived their entire lives on Barnard's World, one of the oldest  
but least exciting members of the Hegemony. Barnard's was in the Web,  
but it made little difference to Sol and Sarai since they could not  
afford frequent farcaster travel and had little wish to go at any rate.  
Sol had recently celebrated his tenth year with Nightenhelser College,  
where he taught history and classical studies and did his own research  
on ethical evolution.  

Nightenhelser was a small school, fewer than three thousand students,  
but its academic reputation was outstanding and it attracted young  
people from all over the Web. The primary complaint of these students  
was that Nightenhelser and its surrounding community of Crawford  
constituted an island of civilization in an ocean of corn. It was true;  
the college was three thousand flat kilometers away from the capital of  
Bussard and the terraformed land in between was given over to farming.  

There had been no forests to fell, no hills to deal with, and no  
mountains to break the flat monotony of cornfields, bean-fields,  
cornfields, wheatfields, cornfields, rice paddies, and cornfields. The  
radical poet Salmud  

Brevy had taught briefly at Nightenhelser before the Glennon-Height  
Mutiny, had been fired, and upon far-casting to Renaissance Vector had  
told his friends that Crawford County on South Sinzer on Barnard's World  
constituted the Eighth Circle of Desolation on the smallest pimple on  
the absolute ass-end of Creation.  

Sol and Sarai Weintraub liked it. Crawford, a town of twenty-five  
thousand, might have been reconstructed from some nineteenth-century  
mid-American template.  

The streets were wide and over-arched with elms and oaks. (Barnard's  
had been the second extrasolar Earth colony, centuries before the  
Hawking drive and Hegira, and the seedships then had been huge.) Homes  
in Crawford reflected styles ranging from early Victorian to Canadian  
Revival, but they all seemed to be white and set far back on  
weil-trimmed lawns.  

The college itself was Georgian, an assemblage of red brick and white  
pillars surrounding the oval common.  

Sol's office was on the third floor of Placher Hall, the oldest building  
on campus, and in the winter he could look out on bare branches which  
carved the common into complex geometries. Sol loved the chalk-dust and  
old-wood smell of the place, a smell which had not changed since he was  
a freshman there, and each day climbing to his office he treasured the  
deeply worn grooves in the steps, a legacy of twenty generations of  
Nightenhelser students.  

Sarai had been born on a farm halfway between Bussard and Crawford and  
had received her PhD in music theory a year before Sol earned his  
doctorate. She had been a happy and energetic young woman, making up in  
personality what she lacked in accepted norms of physical beauty, and  
she carried this attractiveness of person into later life. Sarai had  
studied offworld for two years at the University of New Lyons on Deneb  
Drei, but she was homesick there: the sunsets were abrupt, the  
much-vaunted mountains slicing off the sunlight like a ragged scythe,  
and she longed for the hours-long sunsets of home where Barnard's Star  
hung on the horizon like a great, tethered, red balloon while the sky  
congealed to evening. She missed the perfect flatness where - peering  

from her third-floor room under the steep gables- a little girl could  
look fifty kilometers across tasseled fields to watch a storm approach  
like a bruise-black curtain lit within by lightning bolts. And Sarai  
missed her family.  

She and Sot met a week after she transferred to Night-enhelser; it was  
another three years before he proposed marriage and she accepted. At  
first she saw nothing in the short graduate student. She was still  
wearing Web fashions then, involved in Post-Destructionist music  
theories, reading Obit and Nihil and the most avant-garde magazines from  
Renaissance Vector and TC2, feigning sophisticated weariness with life  
and a rebel's vocabulary - and none of this jelled with the undersized  
.but earnest history major who spilled fruit cocktail on her at Dean  
Moore's honors party. Any exotic qualities which might have come from  
Sol Weintraub's Jewish legacy were instantly negated by his BW accent,  
his Crawford Squire Shop wardrobe, and the fact that he had come to the  
party with a copy of Detresque's Solitudes in Variance absentmindedly  
tucked under his arm.  

For Sol it was love at first sight. He stared at the laughing,  
red-cheeked girl and ignored the expensive dress and affected mandarin  
nails in favor of the personality which blazed like a beacon to the  
lonely junior. Sol had not known he was lonely until he met Sarai, but  
after the first time he shook her hand and spilled fruit salad down the  
front of her dress he knew that his life would be empty forever if they  
did not marry.  

They married the week after the announcement of Sol's teaching  
appointment at the college. Their honeymoon was on Maui-Covenant, his  
first farcast trip abroad, and for three weeks they rented a mobile isle  
and sailed alone on it through the wonders of the Equatorial  
Archipelago. Sol never forgot the images from those sun-drenched and  
wind-filled days, and the secret image he would always most cherish was  
of Sarai rising nude from a nighttime swim, the Core stars blazing above  
while her own body glowed constellations from the phosphorescence of the  
island's wake.  

They had wanted a child immediately but it was to be five years before  
nature agreed.  

Sol remembered cradling Sarai in his arms as she curled in pain, a  
difficult delivery, until finally, incredibly, Rachel Sarah Weintraub  
was born at 2:01 A.M. in Crawford County Med Center.  

The presence of an infant intruded upon Sol's solipsistic life as a  
serious academic and Sarai's profession as music critic for Barnard's  
datasphere, but neither minded. The first months were a blend of  
constant fatigue and joy. Late at night, between feedings, Sol would  
tiptoe into the nursery just to check on Rachel and to stand and gaze at  
the baby. More often than not he would find Sarai already there and the  
two would watch, arm in arm, at the miracle of a baby sleeping on its  
stomach, rump in the air, head burrowed into the bumper pad at the head  
of the crib.  

Rachel was one of those rare children who managed to be cute without  
becoming self-consciously precious; by the time she was two standard  
years old her appearance and personality were striking - her mother's  
light brown hair, red cheeks, and broad smile, her father's large brown  
eyes. Friends said that the child combined the best portions of Sarai's  
sensitivity and Sol's intellect.  

Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented  
that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true  
giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others,  
compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.  

One day in his office, studying ancient files from Old Earth, Sol was  
reading about the effect of Beatrice on the world view of Dante  
Alighieri when he was struck by a passage written by a critic from the  
twentieth or twenty-first century:  

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in  
the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark- what Melville  
would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich  
Standard...  

Sol paused to access the definition of Greenwich Standard, and then he  
read on. The critic had added a personal note:  

Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like  
Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness  
and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we  
lie.  

Sol had shut off the display and gazed out at the black geometries of  
branches above the common.  

Rachel was not insufferably perfect. When she was five standard, she  
carefully cut the hair of her five favorite dolls and then cut her own  
hair shortest of all. When she was seven, she decided that the migrant  
workers staying in their run-down houses on the south end of town lacked  
a nutritious diet, so she emptied the house's pantries, cold boxes,  
freezers, and synthesizer banks, talked three friends into accompanying  
her, and distributed several hundred marks' worth of the family's  

monthly food budget.  

When she was ten, Rachel responded to a dare from Stubby Berkowitz and  
tried to climb to the top of Crawford's oldest elm. She was forty  
meters up, less than five meters from the top, when a branch broke and  
she fell two thirds of the way to the ground. Sol was paged on his  
comlog while discussing the moral implications of Earth's first nuclear  
disarmament era and he left the class without a word and ran the twelve  
blocks to the Med Center.  

Rachel had broken her left leg, two ribs, punctured a lung, and  
fractured her jaw. She was floating in a bath of recovery nutrient when  
Sol burst in, but she managed to look over her mother's shoulder, smile  
slightly, and say through the wire cast on her jaw: 'Dad, I was fifteen  
feet from the top. Maybe closer. I'll make it next time."  

Rachel graduated with honors from secondary tutorials and received  
scholarship offers from corporate academies on five worlds and three  
universities, including Harvard on New Earth. She chose Nightenhelser.  

it was little surprise to Sol that his daughter chose  

archaeology as a major. One of his fondest memories of her was the long  
afternoons she had spent under the front porch when she was about two,  
digging in the loam, ignoring spiders and googlepeds, rushing into the  
house to show off every plastic plate and tarnished pfennig she had  
excavated, demanding to know where it had come from, what were the  
people like who had left it there?"  

Rachel received her undergraduate degree when she was nineteen standard,  
worked that summer on her grandmother's farm, and farcast away the next  
fall. She was at Reichs University on Freeholm for twenty-eight local  
months, and when she returned it was as if color had flowed back into  
Sol and Sarai's world.  

For two weeks their daughter - an adult now, self-aware and secure in  
some ways that grown-ups twice her age often failed to be - rested and  
reveled in being home.  

One evening, walking across the campus just after sunset, she pressed  
her father on details of his heritage.  

'Dad, do you still consider yourself a Jew?"  

Sol had run his hand over his thinning hair, surprised by the question.  
'A Jew? Yes, I suppose so. It doesn't mean what it once did, though."  

'Am I a Jew?" asked Rachel. Her cheeks glowed in the fragile light.  

'If you want to be,' said Sol. 'It doesn't have the same significance  
with Old Earth gone."  

'If l'd been a boy, would you have had me circumcised?"  

Sol had laughed, delighted and embarrassed by the question.  

'l'm serious,' said Rachel.  

Sol adjusted his glasses. 'I guess I would have, kiddo. I never  
thought about it."  

'Have you been to the synagogue in Bussard?"  

'Not since my bar mitzvah,' said Sol, thinking back to the day fifty  
years earlier when his father had borrowed Uncle Richard's Vikken and  
had flown the family to the capital for the ritual.  

'Dad, why do Jews feel that things are... less important now than  
before the Hegira?"  

Sol spread his hands - strong hands, more those of a stoneworker than an  
academic. 'That's a good question, Rachel. Probably because so much of  
the dream is dead.  

Israel is gone. The New Temple lasted less time than the first and  
second. God broke His word by destroying the Earth a second time in the  
way He did. And this Diaspora is... forever."  

'But Jews maintain their ethnic and religious identity in some places,'  
his daughter insisted.  

'Oh, sure. On Hebron and isolated areas of the Concourse you can find  
entire communities .  .  .  Hasidic, Orthodox, Hasmonean, you name it...  
but they tend to  

be... nonvital, picturesque... tourist-oriented." 'Like a theme park?"  
'Yes."  

'Could you take me to Temple Beth-el tomorrow? I can borrow Khaki's  
strat."  

'No need,' said Sol. 'We'll use the co!lege's shuttle." He paused.  
'Yes,' he said at last, 'I would like to take you to the synagogue  
tomorrow."  

It was getting dark under the old elms. Streetlights came on up and  
down the wide lane which led to their home.  

'Dad,' said Rachel, 'l'm going to ask you a question l've asked about a  
million times since I was two. Do you believe in God?"  

Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had  
given her a million times. 'l'm waiting to,' he said.  

Rachel's postgraduate work dealt with alien and pre-Hegira artifacts.  
For three standard years Sol and Sarai would receive occasional visits  
followed by fatline flim-sies from exotic worlds near but not within the  
Web. They all knew that her field work in quest of dissertation would  
soon take her beyond the Web, into the Outback where time-debt ate away  
at the lives and memories of those left behind.  

'Where the hell is Hyperion?" Sarai had asked during Rachei's last  
vacation before the expedition left.  

'It sounds like a brand name' for some new household product."  

'It's a great place, Mom. There are more nonhuman artifacts there than  
any place except Armaghast."  

'Then why not go to Armaghast?" said Sarai. 'It's only a few months  
from the Web. Why settle for second best?"  

'Hyperion hasn't become the big tourist attraction yet,' said Rachel.  
'Although they're beginning to become a problem. People with money are  
more willing to travel outside the Web now."  

Sol had found his voice suddenly husky. 'Will you be going to the  
labyrinth or the artifacts called the Time Tombs?"  

'The Time Tombs, Dad. I'll be.working with Dr Melio Arundez and he  
knows more about the Tombs than anyone alive."  

'Aren't they dangerous?" asked Sol, framing the question as casually as  
he could but heating the edge in his voice.  

Rachel smiled. 'Because of the Shrike legend? No.  

Nobody's been bothered by that particular legend for two standard  
centuries."  

'But I've seen documents about the trouble there during the second  
colonization..." began Sol.  

'Me too, Dad. But they didn't know about the big rock eels that came  
down into the desert to hunt. They probably lost a few people to those  
things and panicked. You know how legends begin. Besides, the rock  
eels have been hunted to extinction."  

'Spacecraft don't !and there,' persisted Sol. 'You have to sail to the  
Tombs. Or hike. Or some damn thing."  

Rachel laughed. 'In the early days, people flying in underestimated the  
effects of the anti-entropic fields and there were some accidents. But  
there's dirigible service now. They have a big hotel called Keep  
Chronos at the north edge of the mountains where hundreds of tourists a  
year stay."  

'Will you be staying there?" asked Sarai.  

'Part of the time. It'll be exciting, Mom."  

'Not too exciting, I hope,' said Sarai and all of them had smiled.  

During the four years that Rachel was in transit - a few weeks of  
cryogenic fugue for her - Sol found that he missed his daughter much  
more than if she had been out of touch but busy somewhere in the Web.  
The thought that she was flying away from him faster than the speed of  
light, wrapped in the artificial quantum cocoon of the Hawking effect,  
seemed unnatural and ominous to him.  

They kept busy. Sarai retired from the critic business to devote more  

time to local environmental issues, but for Sol it was one of the most  
hectic times of his life.  

His second and third books came out and the second one - Moral Turning  
Points - caused such a stir that he was in constant demand at offworld  
conferences and symposia. He traveled to a few alone, to a few more  
with Sarai, but although both of them enjoyed the idea of traveling, the  
actual experience of facing strange foods, different gravities, and the  
light from strange suns all paled after a while and Sol found himself  
spending more time at home researching his next book, attending  
conferences, if he had to, via interactive holo from the college.  

It was almost five years after Rachel left on her expedition that Sol  
had a dream which would change his life.  

Sol dreamed that he was wandering through a great structure with columns  
the size of small redwood trees and a ceiling lost to sight far above  
him, through which red light fell in solid shafts. At times he caught  
glimpses of things far off in the gloom to his left or right: once he  
made out a pair of stone legs rising like massive buildings through the  
darkness; another time he spied what appeared to be a crystal scarab  
rotating far above him, its insides ablaze with cool lights.  

Finally Sol stopped to rest. Far behind him he could hear what sounded  
like a great conflagration, entire cities and forests burning. Ahead of  
him glowed the lights he had been walking toward, two ovals of deepest  
red.  

He was mopping sweat from his brow when an immense voice said to him:  

'Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and  
go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering  
at one of the places of which I shall tell you."  

And in his dream Sol had stood and said, 'You can't be serious." And he  
had walked on through darkness, the red orbs glowing now like bloody  
moons hanging above an indistinct plain, and when he stopped to rest the  
immense voice said:  

'Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and  
go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering  
at one of the places of which I shall tell you."  

And SOl had shrugged off the weight of the voice and had said distinctly  
into the darkness, 'I heard you the first time... the answer is still  
no."  

SO! knew he was dreaming then, and part of his mind enjoyed the irony  
of the script, but another part wanted only to waken. Instead, he found  
himself on a low balcony looking down on a room where Rachel lay naked  
on a broad block of stone. The scene was illuminated by the glow of the  
twin red orbs. Sol looked down at his right hand and found a long,  
curved knife there. The blade and handle appeared to be made of bone.  

The voice, sounding more than ever to Sol like some cut-rate holie  
director's shallow idea of what God's voice should sound like, came  
again:  

'SOl! You must listen well. The future of humankind depends upon your  
obedience in this matter.  

You must take your daughter, your daughter Rachel whom you love, and go  
to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at  
one of the places of which I shall tell you."  

And Sol, sick of the whole dream yet somehow alarmed by it, had turned  
and thrown the knife far into the darkness.  

When he turned back to find his daughter, the  

scene had faded. The red orbs hung closer than ever, and now So! could  
see that they were multifaceted gems the size of small worlds.  

The amplified voice came again:  

'So? You have had your chance, SOl Weintraub.  

If you change your mind, you know where to find me."  

And SOl awakened half laughing, half chilled by the dream. Amused by  
the thought that the entire Talmud and the Old Testament might be  
nothing more than a cosmic shaggy-dog story.  

About the time Sol was having his dream, Rachel was on Hyperion  
finishing her first year of research there. The team of nine  
archaeologists and six physicists had found Keep Chronos fascinating but  
far too crowded with tourists and would-be Shrike pilgrims, so after the  
first month spent commuting from the hotel, they had set up a permanent  
camp between the ruined city and the small canyon holding the Time  
Tombs.  

While half the team excavated the more recent site of the unfinished  
city, two of Rache!'s colleagues helped her catalogue every aspect of  
the Tombs. The physicists were finished with the anti-entropic fields  
and spent much of their time setting small flags of different colors to  
mark the limits of the so-called time tides.  

Rachel's team concentrated their work in the structure called the  
Sphinx, although the creature represented in stone was neither human nor  
lion; it may not have been a creature at all, although the smooth lines  
atop the stone monolith suggested curves of a living thing, and the  
sweeping appendages made everyone think of wings.  

Unlike the other Tombs, which lay open and were easily inspected, the  
Sphinx was a mass of heavy blocks honey-combed with narrow corridors,  
some of which tightened to impossibility, some of which widened to  
auditorium-sized proportions, but none of which led anywhere but back on  
themselves. There were no crypts, treasure rooms, plundered sarcophogi,  
wall murals, or secret  

passages, merely a maze of senseless corridors through sweating stone.  

Rachel and her lover, Melio Arundez, began mapping the Sphinx, using a  
method which had been in use for at least seven hundred years, having  

been pioneered in the Egyptian pyramids sometime in the twentieth  
century.  

Arranging sensitive radiation and cosmic ray detectors at the lowest  
point in the Sphinx, they recorded arrival times and deflection patterns  
of the particles passing through the mass of stone above them, watching  
for hidden rooms or passages which would not show up even on deep  
imaging radar. Because of the busy tourist season and the concern of  
the Hyperion Home Rule Council that the Tombs might be damaged by such  
research, Rachel and Melio went out to their site every night at  
midnight, making the half-hour walk and crawl through the corridor maze  
which they had rigged with blue glow-globes.  

There, sitting under hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, they would  
watch their instruments until morning, listening to their earphones ping  
with the sound of particles born in the belly of dying stars.  

The time tides had not been a problem with the Sphinx. Of all the  
Tombs, it seemed the least protected by the anti-entropic fields and the  
physicists had carefully mapped the times when the tide surges might  
pose a threat. High tide was at 1000 hours, receding only twenty  
minutes later back toward the Jade Tomb half a kilometer to the south.  
Tourists were not allowed near the Sphinx until after 1200 hours, and to  
leave a margin of safety, the site made sure they were out by 0900. The  
physics team had planted chronotropic sensors at various points along  
the paths and walkways between the Tombs, both to alert the monitors to  
variations of the tides and to warn the visitors.  

With only three weeks to go of her year of research on Hyperion, Rachel  
awoke one night, left her sleeping lover, and took a ground effect jeep  
from the camp to the Tombs. She and Melio had decided that it was  
foolish for both of them to monitor the equipment every night; now they  
alternated, one working at the site while the other collated data and  
prepared for the final project - a radar  

mapping of the dunes between the Jade Tomb and the Obelisk.  

The night was cool and beautiful. A profusion of stars stretched from  
horizon to horizon, four or five times the number Rachel had grown up  
looking at from Barnard's World. The low dunes whispered and shifted in  
the strong breeze blowing from the mountains in the south.  

Rachel found lights still burning at the site. The physics team was  
just calling it a day loading their own jeep.  

She chatted with them, had a cup of coffee as they drove away, and then  
took her backpack and made the twenty-five-minute trip into the basement  
of the Sphinx.  

For the hundredth time Rachel wondered who had built the Tombs and for  
what purpose. Dating of the construction materials had been useless  
because of the effect of the anti-entropic field. Only analysis of the  
Tombs in relation to the erosion of the canyon and other surrounding  
geological features had suggested an age of at least half a million  
years. The feeling was that the architects of the Time Tombs had been  
humanoid, even though nothing but the gross scale of the structures  
suggested such a thing. Certainly the passageways in the Sphinx  

revealed little: some were human enough in size and shape, but then  
meters farther along the same corridor might dwindle to a tube the size  
of a sewer pipe and then transform itself into something larger and more  
random than a natural cavern. Doorways, if they could be called such  
since they opened to nothing in particular, might be triangular or  
trapezoidal or ten-sided as commonly as rectangular.  

Rachel crawled the last twenty meters down a steep slope, sliding her  
backpack ahead of her. The heatless glow-globes gave the rock and her  
flesh a bluish, bloodless cast. The 'basement,' when she reached it,  
seemed a haven of human clutter and smells. Several folding chairs  
filled the center of the small space while detectors, oscilloscopes, and  
other paraphernalia lined the narrow table against the north wall. A  
plank on sawhorses along the opposite wall held coffee cups, a chess  
set, a half-eaten doughnut, two paperbacks, and a plastic toy of some  
sort of dog in a grass skirt.  

Rachel settled in, set her coffee therm next to the toy, and checked the  
cosmic ray detectors. The data appeared to be the same: no hidden rooms  
or passages, just a few niches even the deep radar had missed. In the  
morning Melio and Stefan would set a deep probe working, getting an  
imager filament in and sampling the air before digging further with a  
micro-manipulator. So far a dozen such niches had turned up nothing of  
interest. The joke at camp was that the next hole, no bigger than a  
fist, would reveal miniature sarcophagi, undersized urns, a petite  
mummy, or- as Melio put it- 'a teeny-tiny Tutankhamen."  

Out of habit, Rachel tried the comm links on her comlog. Nothing. Forty  
meters of stone tended to do that. They had talked of stringing  
telephone wire from the basement to the surface, but there had been no  
pressing need and now their time was almost up. Rachel adjusted the  
input channels on her cornlog to monitor the detector data and then  
settled back for a long, boring night.  

There. was the wonderful story of the Old Earth pharaoh- was it  
Cheops?- who authorized his huge pyramid, agreed to the burial chamber  
being deep under the center of the thing, and then lay awake nights for  
years in a claustrophobic panic, thinking of all those tons of stone  
above him for all eternity. Eventually the pharaoh ordered the burial  
chamber repositioned two thirds the way up the great pyramid. Most  
unorthodox.  

Rachel could understand the king's position. She hoped that - wherever  
he was - he slept better now.  

Rachel was almost dozing herself when - at 0215 -her comlog chirped, the  
detectors screamed, and she jumped to her feet. According to the  
sensors, the Sphinx had suddenly grown a dozen new chambers, some larger  
than the total structure. Rachel keyed displays and the air misted with  
models that changed as she watched.  

Corridor schematics twisted back on themselves like rotating MObius  
strips. The external sensors indicated the upper structure twisting and  
bending like polyfiex in the wind - or like wings.  

Rachel knew that it was some type of multiple malfunction, but even as  
she tried to recalibrate she called data and impressions into her  

comlog. Then several things happened at once.  

She heard the drag of feet in the corridor above her.  

All of the displays went dead simultaneously.  

Somewhere in the maze of corridors a time-tide alarm began to blare.  

All of the lights went off.  

This final event made no sense. The instrument packages held their own  
power supplies and would have stayed lit through a nuclear attack. The  
lamp they used in the basement had a new ten-year power cell. The  
glow-globes in the corridors were bioluminescent and needed no power.  

Nonetheless, the lights were out. Rachel pulled a flashlight laser out  
of the knee pocket of her jumpsuit and triggered it. Nothing happened.  

For the first time in her life, terror closed on Rachel Weintraub like a  
hand on her heart. She could not breathe. For ten seconds she willed  
herself to be absolutely still, not even listening, merely waiting for  
the panic to recede. When it had subsided enough for her to breathe  
without gasping, she felt her way to the instruments and keyed them.  
They did not respond. She lifted her comlog and thumbed the diskey.  
Nothing... which was impossible, of course, given the solid-state  
invul-nerability and power-cell reliability of the thing. Still,  
nothing.  

Rachel could hear her pulse pounding now but she again fought back the  
panic and began feeling her way toward the only exit. The thought of  
finding her way through the maze in absolute darkness made her want to  
scream but she could think of no other alternatives.  

Wait. There had been old lights throughout the Sphinx maze but the  
research team had strung the glow-globes.  

Strung them. There was a perIon line connecting them all the way to the  
surface.  

Fine. Rachel groped her way toward the exit, feeling the cold stone  
under her fingers. Was it this cold before?  

There came the clear sound of something sharp scraping its way down the  
access shaft.  

'Melio?" called Rachel into the blackness. 'Tanya?  

Kurt?"  

The scraping sounded very close. Rachel backed away, knocking over an  
instrument and chair in the blackness. Something touched her hair and  
she gasped, raised her hand.  

The ceiling was lower. The solid block of stone, five meters square,  
slid lower even as she raised her other hand to touch it. The opening  
to the corridor was halfway up the wall. Rachel staggered toward it,  
swinging her hands in front of her like a blind person. She tripped  

over a folding chair, found the instrument table, followed it to the far  
wall, felt the bottom of the corridor shaft disappearing as the ceiling  
came lower. She pulled back her fingers a second before they were  
sliced off.  

Rachel sat down in the darkness. An oscilloscope scraped against the  
ceiling until the table cracked and collapsed under it. Rachel moved  
her head in short, desperate arcs. There was a metallic rasp - almost a  
breathing sound - less than a meter from her. She began to back away,  
sliding across a floor suddenly filled with broken equipment. The  
breathing grew louder.  

Something sharp and infinitely cold grasped her wrist.  

Rachel screamed at last.  

There was no fatline transmitter on Hyperion in those days. Nor did the  
spinship HS Farraux City have FTL-comm capability. So the first Sol and  
Sarai heard of their daughter's accident was when the Hegemony consulate  
on Parvati fatlined the college that Rachel had been injured, that she  
was stable but unconscious, and that she was being transferred from  
Parvati to the Web world of Renaissance Vector via medical torchship.  
The trip would take a little over ten days' shiptime with a five-month  
time-debt. Those five months were agony for Sol and his wife, and by  
the time the medical ship put in at the Renaissance farcaster nexus,  
they had imagined the worst a thousand times. It had been eight years  
since they had last seen Rachel.  

The Med Center in DaVinci was a floating tower sustained by direct  
broadcast power. The view over the  

Como Sea was breathtaking but neither Sol nor Sarai had time for it as  
they went from level to level in search of their daughter. Dr Singh and  
Melio Arundez met them in the  

hub of Intensive Care. Introductions were rushed.  

'Rachel?" asked Sarai.  

'Asleep,' said Dr Singh. She was a tall woman, aristocratic but with  
kind eyes. 'As far as we can tell, Rachel has suffered no physical...  
ah... injury. But she has been unconscious now for some seventeen  
standardweeks, her time. Only in the past ten days have her brain waves  
registered deep sleep rather than coma."  

' I don't understand,' said Sol."Was there an accident at the site? A  
concussion?"  

'Something happened,' said Melio Arundez, 'but we're not sure what.  
Rachel was in one of the artifacts... alone * . . her comlog and  
other instruments recorded nothing out of the ordinary. But there was a  
surge in a phenomenon there known as anti-entropic fields..."  

'The time tides,' said Sol. 'We know about them.  

Go on. '  

Arundez nodded and opened his hands as if molding air. 'There was a...  
field surge... more like a tsunami than a tide... the Sphinx... the  
artifact Rachel was in * . . was totally inundated. I mean, there was  
nophysical damage but Rachel was unconscious when we found her * . ."  
He turned to Dr Singh for help.  

'Your daughter was in a coma,' said the doctor. 'It was not possible to  
put her into cryogenic fugue in that condition..."  

'So she came through quantum leap without fugue?" demanded Sol. He had  
read about the psychological damage to travelers who had experienced the  
Hawking effect directly.  

'No, no,' soothed Singh. 'She was unconscious in a way  

which shielded her quite as well as fugue state."  

'Is she hurt?" demanded Sarai.  

'We don't know,' said Singh 'All life signs have returned to near  
normal. Brain-wave activity is nearing a conscious state. The problem  
is that her body appears to have absorbed... that is, the anti-entropic  
field appears to have contaminated her."  

Sol rubbed his forehead. 'Like radiation sickness?" Dr Singh hesitated.  
'Not precisely... ah... this case is quite unprecedented. Specialists  
in aging diseases are due in this afternoon from Tau Ceti Center, Lusus,  
and Metaxas."  

Sol met the woman's gaze. 'Doctor, are you saying that Rachel  
contracted some aging disease on Hyperion?" He paused a second to search  
his memory. 'Something like Methuselah syndrome or early Alzheimer's  
disease?"  

'No,' said Singh, 'in fact your daughter's illness has no name. The  
medics here are calling it Merlin's sickness.  

You see .  .  .  your daughter is aging at a normal rate ... but as far  
as we can tell, she is aging backward."  

Sarai pulled away from the group and stared at Singh as if the doctor  
were insane. 'I want to see my daughter,'  

she said, quietly but very firmly. 'I want to see Rachel  

tO W. '  

Rachel awakened less than forty hours after Sol and Saral arrived.  
Within minutes she was sitting up in bed, talking even while the medics  
and technicians bustled around her. 'Morn! Dad! What are you doing  
here?" Before either could answer, she looked around her and blinked.  
'Wait a minute, where's here? Are we in Keats?"  

Her mother took her hand. 'We're in a hospital in DaVinci, dear. On  
Renaissance Vector."  

Rachel's eyes widened almost comically. 'Renaissance.  

We're in the Web?" She looked around her in total bewilderment.  

'Rachel, what is the last thing you remember?" asked Dr Singh.  

The young woman looked uncomprehendingly at the medic. 'The last thing  
I... I remember going to sleep next to Melio after..." She glanced at  
her parents and touched her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. 'Melio?  

The others? Are they..."  

'Everyone on the expedition is all right,' soothed Dr Singh. 'You had a  
slight accident. About seventeen weeks have passed. You're back in the  
Web. Safe. Everyone in your party is all right."  

'Seventeen weeks..." Under the fading remnant of her tan, Rachel went  
very pale.  

Sol took her hand. 'How do you feel, kiddo?" The return pressure on his  
fingers was heartbreakingly weak.  

'I don't know, Daddy,' she managed. 'Tired. Dizzy.  

Confused."  

Sarai sat on the bed and put her arms around her. 'It's all fight,  
baby. Everything's going to be all right."  

Melio entered the room, unshaven, his hair rumpled from the nap he had  
been taking in the outer lounge.  

'Rache?"  

Rachel looked at him from the safety of her mother's arm. 'Hi,' she  
said, almost shyly. 'l'm back."  

SoI's opinion had been and continued to be that medicine hadn't really  
changed much since the days of leeches and poultices; nowadays they  
whirred one in centrifuges, realigned the body's magnetic field;  
bombarded the victim with sonic waves, tapped into the cells to  
interrogate the RNA, and then admitted their ignorance without actually  
coming out and saying so. The only thing that had changed was that the  
bills were bigger.  

He was dozing in a chair when Rachel's voice awoke him.  

'Daddy?"  

He sat up, reached for her hand. 'Here, kiddo." 'Where am I, Dad?  
What's happened?"  

'You're in a hospital on Renaissance, baby. There was an accident on  
Hyperion. You're all right now except it's affecting your memory a  
bit."  

Rachel clung to his hand. 'A hospital? In the Web?  

How'd Iget here? How long have I been here?"  

'About five weeks,' whispered Sol. 'What's the last thing you remember,  
Rachel?"  

She sat back on her pillows and touched her forehead, feeling the tiny  
sensors there. 'Melio and I had been at the meeting. Talking with the  
team about setting up the search equipment in the Sphinx. Oh ... Dad  
... 1 haven't told you about Melio... he's..."  

'Yes,' said Sol and handed Rachel her comiog. 'Here, kiddo. Listen to  
this." He left the room.  

Rachel touched the diskey and blinked as her own voice began talking to  
her. 'OK, Rache, you just woke up. You're confused. You don't know  
how you got here.  

Well, something's happened to you, kid. Listen up.  

'I'm recording this on the twelfth day of Tenmonth, year 457 of the  
Hegira, A.D. 2739 old reckoning. Yes, I know that's half a standard  
year from the last thing you remember. Listen.  

'Something happened in the Sphinx. You got caught up in the time tide.  
It changed you. You're aging backward, as dumb as that sounds. Your  
body's getting younger every minute, although that's not the important  
part right now. When you sleep... when we sleep...  

you forget. You lose another day from your memory before the accident,  
and you lose everything since. Don't ask me why. The doctors don't  
know. The experts don't know. If you want an analogy, just think of a  
tapeworm virus... one of the old kind... that's chewing up the data in  
your comlog... backward from the last entry.  

'They don't know why the memory loss hits you when you sleep, either.  
They tried stay-awakes, but after about thirty hours you just go  
catatonic for a while and the virus does its thing anyway. So what the  
hell.  

'You know something? This talking about yourself in the third person is  
sort of therapeutic. Actually, I'm lying here waiting for them to take  
me up to imaging, knowing I'll fall asleep when I get back... knowing  
VII forget everything again .  .  .  and it scares the shit out of me.  

'OK, key the diskey for short-term and you get a prepared spiel here  
that should catch you up on everything since the accident. Oh... Mom  
and Dad are both here and they know about Melio. But/don't know as much  
as I used to. When did we first make love with him, mmm?  

The second month on Hyperion? Then we have just a few weeks left,  
Rachel, and then we'll be just acquain tances. Enjoy your memories  
while you can, girl.  

'This is yesterday's Rachel, signing off."  

Sol came in to find his daughter sitting upright in the bed, still  
grasping the comlog tightly, her face pale and terrified. 'Daddy..."  

He went to sit next to her and let her cry... for the twentieth night  
in a row.  

Eight standard weeks after she arrived on Renaissance, Sol and Sarai  
waved goodbye to Rachel and Melio at the Da Vinci farcaster multiport  
and then farcast home to Barnard's World.  

'l don't think she should have left the hospital,' muttered Sarai as  
they took the evening shuttle to Crawford.  

The continent was a patchwork of harvest-ready right angles below them.  

'Mother,' said Sol, touching her knee, 'the doctors would have kept her  
there forever. But they're doing it for their own curiosity now.  
They've done everything they can to help her... nothing. She has a  
life to live."  

'But why go away with... with him?" said Sarai. 'She barely knows  
him."  

Sol sighed andJeaned back against the cushions of his seat. 'In two  
weeks she won't remember him at all,' he said. 'At least in the way  
they share now. Look at it from her position, Mother. Fighting every  
day to reorient herself in a world gone mad. She's twenty-five years  
old and in love. Let her be happy."  

Sarai turned her face to the window and together, not speaking, they  
watched the red sun hang like a tethered balloon on the edge of evening.  

Sol was well into the second semester when Rachel called. It was a  
one-way message via farcaster cable from Freeholm and her image hung in  
the center of the old holopit like a familiar ghost.  

'Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Sorry I haven't written or called the past few  
weeks. I guess you know that i've left the university. And Melio. It  
was dumb to try to take new graduate-level stuff. I'd just forget  
Tuesday whatever was discussed Monday. Even with disks and comlog  
prompts it was a losing battle. I may enroll in the undergraduate  
program again .  .  .  I remember all of it! Just kidding.  

'It was just too hard with Melio, too. Or so my notes tell me. It  
wasn't his fault, I'm sure of that. He was  

gentle and patient and loving to the end. It's just that*..  

well, you can't start from scratch on a relationship every day. Our  
apartment was filled with photos of us, notes 1 wrote to myself about  
us, holos of us on Hyperion, but . . you know. In the morning he  
would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe what  
we'd had, even if I couldn't remember. By evening I'd be crying in his  
arms... then, sooner or later, I'd go to sleep. It's better this way."  

Rachel's image paused, turned as if she was going to break contact, and  
then steadied. She smiled at them.  

'So anyway, I've left school for a while. The Freeholm Med Center wants  

me full time but they'd have to get in line... I got an offer from the  
Tau Ceti Research Institute that's hard to turn down. They offer a... I  
think they call it a "research honorarium" .  .  .  that's bigger than  
what we paid for four years at Nightenhelser and all of Reichs combined.  

'I turned them down. I'm still going in as an outpatient, but the RNA  
transplant series just leaves me with bruises and a depressed feeling.  
Of course, I could just be depressed because every morning I can't  
remember where the bruises came from. Ha-ha.  

'Anyway, 1'11 be staying with Tanya for a while and then maybe... I  
thought maybe I'd come home for a while. Secondmonth's my birthday...  
I'll be twenty-two again. Weird, huh? At any rate, it's a lot easier  
being around people I know and I met Tanya just after I transferred here  
when I was twenty-two ... I think you understand.  

'So... is my old room still here, Mom, or have you turned it into a  
mah-jongg parlor like you've always threatened? So write or give me a  
call. Next time l'll shell out the money for two-way so we can really  
talk. I just * . . 1 guess I thought..."  

Rachel waved. 'Gottago. See you later, alligators. I love you both."  

Sol flew to Bussard City the week before Rachel's birthday to pick her  
up at the world's only public farcaster terminex. He saw her first,  
standing with her luggage  

near the floral clock. She looked young but not noticeably younger than  
when they had waved goodbye on Renaissance Vector. No, Sol realized,  
there was something less confident about her posture. He shook his head  
to rid himself of such thoughts, called to her, and ran to hug her.  

The look of shock on her face when he released her was so profound that  
he could not ignore it. 'What is it, sweetie? What's wrong?"  

It was one of the few times he had ever seen his daughter totally at a  
loss for words.  

'I... you... I forgot,' she stammered. She shook her head in a  
familiar way and managed to laugh and cry at the same instant. 'You  
look a little different is all, Dad. I remember leaving here like it  
was... literally... yesterday.  

When I saw... your hair..." Rachel covered her mouth.  

Sol ran his hand across his scalp. 'Ah, yes,' he said, suddenly close  
to laughing and crying himself. 'With your school and travels, it's  
been more than eleven years. I'm old. And bald." He opened his arms  
again. 'Welcome back, little one."  

Rachel moved into the protective circle of his embrace.  

For several months things went well. Rachel felt more secure with  
familiar things around, and for Sarai the heartbreak of their daughter's  
illness was temporarily offset by the pleasure of having her home again.  

Rachel rose early every morning and viewed her private 'orientation  

show' which, Sol knew, contained images of him and Sarai a dozen years  
older than she remembered.  

He tried to imagine what it was like for Rachel: she awoke in her own  
bed, memory fresh, twenty-two years old, home on vacation before going  
offworld to graduate school, only to find her parents suddenly aged, a  
hundred small changes in the house and town, the news different * . .  
years of history having passed her by.  

Sol could not imagine it.  

Their first mistake was acceding to Rachel's wishes in inviting her old  
friends to her twenty-second birthday party: the same crew who had  
celebrated the first  

time- irrepressible Niki, Don Stewart and his friend Howard, Kathi Obeg  
and Marta Tyn, her best friend Linna McKyler - all of them then just out  
of college, shucking off cocoons of childhood for new lives.  

Rachel had seen them all since her return. But she had slept... and  
forgotten. And Sol and Sarai this one time did not remember that she  
had forgotten.  

Niki was thirty-four standard, with two children of her own - still  
energetic, still irrepressible, but ancient by Rachel's standards. Don  
and Howard talked about their investments, their children's sports  
accomplishments, and their upcoming vacations. Kathi was confused,  
speaking only twice to Rachel and then as if she was speaking to an  
impostor. Marta was openly jealous of Rachel's youth. Linna, who had  
become an ardent Zen Gnostic in the years between, cried and left early.  

When they had gone, Rachel sat in the postparty ruin of the living room  
and stared at the half-eaten cake. She did not cry. Before going  
upstairs she hugged her mother and whispered to her father, 'Dad, please  
don't let me do anything like that again."  

Then she went upstairs to sleep.  

It was that spring when Sol again had the dream. He was lost in a  
great, dark place, lighted only by two red orbs. It was not absurd when  
the flat voice said:  

'Sol. Take your daughter, your only Rachel, whom you love, and go to  
the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one  
of the places of which I shall tell you."  

And Sol had screamed into the darkness:  

'You already have her, you son of a bitch! What do I have to do to get  
her back? Tell me! Tell me, goddamn you!'  

And Sol Weintraub woke sweating with tears in his eyes and anger in his  
heart. In the other room he could feel his daughter sleeping while the  
great worm devoured her.  

In the months which followed Sol became obsessive about obtaining  
information on Hyperion, the Time Tombs, and the Shrike. As a trained  

researcher, he was astounded that there were so little hard data on so  
provocative a topic. There was the Church of the Shrike, of course - 
there were no temples on Barnard's World but many in the Web - but he  
soon found that seeking hard information in Shrike cult literature was  
like trying to map the geography of Sarnath by visiting a Buddhist  
monastery. Time was mentioned in Shrike Church dogma, but only in the  
sense that the Shrike was supposed to be '... the Angel of Retribution  
from Beyond Time' and that true time had ended for the human race when  
Old Earth died and that the four centuries since had been 'false time."  
Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel  
lint-gathering common to most religions. Still, he planned to visit a  
Shrike Church temple as soon as he had explored more serious avenues of  
research.  

Melio Arundez launched another Hyperion expedition, also sponsored by  
Reichs University, this one with the stated goal of isolating and  
understanding the time-tide phenomenon which had inflicted the Merlin  
sickness on Rachel. A major development was the Hegemony Protectorate's  
decision to send along on that expedition a fatline transmitter for  
installation at the Hegemony consulate in Keats. Even so, it would be  
more than three years' Web time before the expedition arrived on  
Hyperion. SoI's first instinct was to go with Arundez and his team - 
certainly any holodrama would have the primary characters returning to  
the scene of the action. But Sol overrode the instinctive urge within  
minutes. He was a historian and philosopher; any contribution he might  
make to the expedition's success would be minute, at best. Rachel still  
retained the interest and skills of a we!l-trained undergraduate  
archaeologist-to-be, but those skills dwindled a bit each day and Sol  
could see no benefit to her returning to the site of the accident. Each  
day would be a shock to her, awakening on a strange world, on a mission  
which would require skills unknown to her.  

Sarai would not allow such a thing.  

Sol set aside the book he was working on - an analysis of Kierkegaard's  
theories of ethics as compromise morality as applied to the legal  
machinery of the Hegemony - and concentrated on collecting arcane data  
on time, on Hyperion, and on the story of Abraham.  

Months spent carrying on business as usual and collecting information  
did little to satisfy his need for action. Occasionally he vented his  
frustration on the medical and scientific specialists who came to  
examine Rachel like streams of pilgrims to a holy shrine.  

'How the hell can this be happening!" he screamed at one little  
specialist who had made the mistake of being both smug and condescending  
to the patient's father.  

The doctor had a head so hairless, his face looked like lines painted on  
a billiard ball. 'She's begun growing smaller!" Sol shouted, literally  
buttonholing the retreating expert. 'Not so one can see, but bone mass  
is decreasing. How can she even begin to become a child again? What  
the hell does that do to the law of conservation of mass?"  

The expert had moved his mouth but had been too rattled to speak. His  
bearded colleague answered for him. 'M. Weintranb,' he said, 'sir. You  
have to understand that your daughter is currently inhabiting... ah *..  

think of it as a localized region of reversed entropy."  

Sol wheeled on the other man. 'Are you saying that she is merely stuck  
in a bubble of backwardness?"  

'Ah... no,' said the colleague, massaging his chin nervously. 'Perhaps  
a better analogy is that ...  

biologically at least... 
the life/metabolism mechanism has been 
reversed... 
ah..." 

'Nonsense,' snapped Sol. 
'She doesn't excrete for nutrition or 

regurgitate her food. And what about all the neurological activity?  
Reverse'the electrochemical impulses and you get nonsense. Her brain  
works, gentlemen ... it's her memory that is disappearing. Why,  
gentlemen? Why?"  

The specialist finally found his voice. 'We don't know why, M.  
Weintraub. Mathematically, your daughter's body resembles a  
time-reversed equation... or perhaps an object which has passed through  
a rapidly spinning  

black hole* We don't know how this has happened or why the physically  
impossible is occurring in this instance, M. Weintraub. We just don't  
know enough."  

Sol shook each man's hand. 'Fine. That's all I wanted to know,  
gentlemen. Have a good trip back." +  

On Rachel's twenty-first birthday she came to Sol's door an hour after  
they had all turned in. 'Daddy?"  

'What is it, kiddo?" Sol pulled on his robe and joined her in the  
doorway. 'Can't sleep?"  

'I haven't slept for two days,' she whispered. 'Been taking stay-awakes  
so 1 can get through all of the brief ing stuff I left in the Wanta  
Know? file."  

Sol nodded.  

'Daddy, would you come downstairs and have a drink with me? I've got  
some things I want to talk about."  

Sol got his glasses from the nightstand and joined her downstairs.  

It proved to be the first and only time that Sol would get drunk with  
his daughter. It was not a boisterous drunk- for a while they chatted,  
then began telling jokes and making puns, until each was giggling too  
hard to continue. Rachel started to tell another story, sipped her  
drink just at the funniest part, and almost snorted whiskey out her  
nose, she was laughing so hard. Each of them thought it was the  
funniest thing that had ever happened.  

'I'll get another bottle,' said Sol when the tears had ceased. 'Dean  
Moore gave me some Scotch last Christmas...  

I think."  

When he returned, walking carefully, Rachel had sat up on the couch and  
brushed her hair with her fingers.  
He poured her a small amount and the two drank in  
silence for a while.  
'Daddy?" 'Yes?"  
'I went through the whole thing. Saw myself, listened to myself, saw  

the holos of Linna and the others all middle-aged..."  

'Hardly middle-aged,' said Sol. 'Liana will be thirty-five next  
month..."  
'Well, old, you know what ! mean, Anyway, I read the medical briefs,  

saw the photos from Hyperion, and  
you know what?"  
'What?"  
'I don't believe any of it, Dad."  
Sol put down his drink and looked at his daughter.  
Her face was fuller than before, less sophisticated. And even more  

beautiful.  
'1 mean, I do believe it,' she said with a small, scared laugh. 'It's  
not like you and Mom would put on such a cruel joke. Plus there's  

your... your age... and the news and all. I know it's real, but I  
don't believe it. Do  
you know what I mean, Dad?"  
'Yes,' said Sol.  
'I mean I woke up this morning and I thought, Great .  .  .  tomorrow's  

the paleontology exam and l've hardly studied. I was looking forward to  

showing Roger Sherman a thing or two... he thinks he's so smart."  
Sol took a drink. 'Roger died three years ago in a plane crash south of  
Bussard,' he said. He would not have spoken without the whiskey in him,  
but he had to find out if there was a Rachel hiding within the Rachel.  

'I know,' said Rachel and pulled her knees up to her chin. '1 accessed  
everybody I knew. Gram's dead. Professor Eikhardt isn't teaching  
anymore. Niki married some... salesman. A lot happens in four years."  

'More than eleven years,' said Sol. 'The trip to and from Hyperion left  

you six years behind us stay-at-homes."  
'But that's normal,' cried Rachel. 'People travel outside the Web all  
the time. They cope."  

Sol nodded. 'But this is different, kiddo."  

Rachel managed a smile and drained the last of her whiskey. 'Boy, what  
an understatement." She set the glass down with a sharp, final sound.  
'Look, here's what l've decided. I've spent two and a half days going  
through all of the stuff she... !... prepared to let me know what's  
happened, what's going on... and #just doesn't help."  

Sol sat perfectly still, not even daring to breathe.  

'I mean,' said Rachel, 'knowing that I'm getting  

younger every day, losing the memory of people 1 haven't even met yet...  
I mean, what happens next? 1 just keep getting younger and smaller and  
less capable until I just disappear someday? Jesus, Dad." Rachel  
wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees. 'It's  

sort of funny in a weird way, isn't it?"  

'No,' Sol said quietly.  

'No, I'm sure it's not,' said Rachel. Her eyes, always large and dark,  
were moist. 'It must be the worst nightmare in the world for you and  
Morn. Every day you have to watch me come down the stairs . . .  
confused . . .  

waking up with yesterday's memories but hearing my own voice tell me  
that yesterday was years ago. That I  

had a love affair with some guy named Areclio..." 'Melio,' whispered  
Sol.  

'Whatever. It just doesn't help, Dad. By the time I can even begin to  
absorb it, I'm so worn out that I have to sleep. Then... well, you  
know what happens then."  

'What ..." began Sol and had to clear his throat.  

'What do you want us to do, little one?"  

Rachel looked him in the eye and smiled. It was the same smile she had  
gifted him with since her fifth week of life. 'Don't tell me, Dad,' she  
said firmly. 'Don't let me tell me. It just hurts. I mean, I didn't  
live those times  

' She paused and touched her forehead. 'You know vit I mean, Dad. The  
Rachel who went to another planet and fell in love and got hurt ... that  
was a different Rachel! I shouldn't have to suffer her pain." She was  
crying now. 'Do you understand? Do you?"  

'Yes,' said Sol. He opened his arms and felt her warmth and tears  
against his chest. 'Yes, I understand."  

Fatline messages from Hyperion came frequently the next year but they  
were all negative. The nature and source of the anti-entropic fields  
had not been found.  

No unusual time-tide activity had been measured around the Sphinx.  
Experiments with laboratory animals in and around the tidal regions had  
resulted in sudden death for some animals, but the Merlin sickness had  
not been replicated. Melio ended every message with 'My love to  
Rachel."  

Sol and Sarai used money loaned from Reichs University to receive  
limited Poulsen treatments in Bussard City. They were already too old  
for the process to extend their lives for another century, but it  
restored the look of a couple approaching fifty standard rather than  
seventy.  

They studied old family photos and found that it was not too difficult  
to dress the way they had a decade and a half before.  

Sixteen-year-old Rachel tripped down the stairs with her comlog tuned to  
the college radio station. 'Can I have rice cereal?"  

'Don't you have it every morning?" smiled Sarai.  

'Yes,' grinned Rachel. 'I just thought we might be out  

or something. I heard the phone. Was that Niki?" 'No,' said Sol.  

'Damn,' said Rachel and glanced at them. 'Sorry. But she promised  
she'd call as soon as the standardized scores came in. Three weeks  
since tutorials. You'd think l'd have heard something."  

'Don't worry,' said Sarai. She brought the coffeepot to the table,  
started to pour Rachel a cup, poured it for herself. 'Don't worry,  
honey. I promise you that your scores will be good enough to get you  
into any school you want."  

'More,' sighed Rachel. 'You don't know. It's a dog-eat-dog world out  
there." She frowned. 'Have you seen my math ansible? My room was all  
messed around. I couldn't find anything."  

Sol cleared his throat. 'No classes today, kiddo."  

Rachel stared. 'No classes? On a Tuesday? Six weeks from graduation?  
What's up?"'  

'You've been sick,' Sarai said firmly. 'You can stay home one day. Just  
today."  

Rachel's frown deepened. 'Sick? I don't feel sick. Just sort of  
weird. Like things aren't... aren't right somehow.  

Like why's the couch moved around in the media room? And where's Chips?  
I called and called but he didn't come."  

Sol touched his daughter's wrist. 'You've been sick for a while,' he  
said. 'The doctor said you might wake  

up with a few gaps. Let's talk while we walk over to the campus. Want  
to?"  

Rachel brightened. 'Skip classes and go to the college?  

Sure." She faked a look of consternation. 'As long as we don't run into  
Roger Sherman. He's taking freshman calculus up there and he's such a  
pain."  

'We won't see Roger,' said Sol. 'Ready to go?"  

'Almost." Rachel leaned over and gave her mother a huge hug. ' 'Later  
alligator."  

' 'While, crocodile,' said Sarai.  

'Okay,' grinned Rachel, her long hair bouncing. 'l'm ready."  

The constant trips to Bussard City had required the purchase of an EMV  
and on a cool day in autumn Sol took the slowest route, far below the  
traffic lanes, enjoying the sight and smell of the harvested fields  
below. More than a few men and women working in the fields waved to  
him.  

Bussard had grown impressively since Sol's childhood, but the synagogue  
was still there on the edge of one of the oldest neighborhoods in the  
city. The temple was old, Sol felt old, even the yarmulke he put on as  
he entered seemed ancient, worn thin by decades of use, but the rabbi  
was young. Sol realized that the man was at least forty - his hair was  
thinning on either side of the dark skullcap - but to Sol's eyes he was  
little more than a boy. Sol was relieved when the younger man suggested  
that they finish their conversation in the park across the street.  

They sat on a park bench. Sol was surprised to find himself still  
carrying the yarmulke, passing the cloth from hand to hand. The day  
smelled of burning leaves and the previous night's rain.  

'1 don't quite understand, M. Weintraub,' said the rabbi. 'Is it the  
dream you're disturbed about or the fact that your daughter has become  
ill since you began the dream?"  

Sol raised his head to feel the sunlight on his face.  

'Neither, exactly,' he said. '1 just can't help but feel that the two  
are connected somehow."  

The rabbi ran a finger over his lower lip. 'How old is your daughter?"  

'Thirteen,' said Sol after an imperceptible pause.  

'And is the illness... serious? Life threatening?" 'Not life  
threatening,' said Sol. 'Not yet."  

The rabbi folded his arms across an ample belly. 'You  

don't believe... may I call you Sol?"  

'Of course."  

'Sol, you don't believe that by having this dream...  

that somehow you've caused your little girl's illness.  

Do you?"  

'No,' said Sol and sat a moment, wondering deep within if he was telling  
the truth. 'No, Rabbi, I don't think..."  

'Call me Mort, Sol."  

'All right, Mort. I didn't come because I believe that I - or the dream  

-am causing Rachel's illness. But I believe my subconscious might be  
trying to tell me something."  

Mort rocked back and forth slightly. 'Perhaps a neuro-specialist or  
psychologist could help you more there, Sol. I'm not sure what I..."  

'I'm interested in the story of Abraham,' interrupted Sol. 'I mean,  
I've had some experience with different ethical systems, but it's hard  
for me to understand one which began with the order to a father to slay  
his son."  

'No, no, no!" cried the rabbi, waving oddly childlike fingers in front  
of him. 'When the time came, God stayed Abraham's hand. He would not  
have allowed a human sacrifice in His name. It was the obedience to the  
will of the Lord that..."  

'Yes,' said Sol. 'Obedience. But it says, "Then Abraham put forth his  
hand, and took the knife to slay his son." God must have looked into his  
soul and seen that Abraham was ready to slay Isaac. A mere show of  
obedience without inner commitment would not have appeased the God of  
Genesis. What would have happened if Abraham had loved his son more  
than he loved .God?"  

Mort drummed his fingers on his knee a moment and then reached out to  
grasp So!'s upper arm. 'Sol, I can see  

you're upset about your daughter's illness. Don't get it mixed up with  
a document written eight thousand years ago. Tell me more about your  
little girl. I mean, children don't die of diseases anymore. Not in  
the Web."  

Sol rose, smiled, and stepped back to free his arm. 'I'd like to talk  
more, Mort. I want to. But I have to get back.  

I have a class this evening."  

'Will you come to temple this Sabbath?" asked the rabbi, extending  
stubby fingers for a final human contact.  

Sol dropped the yarmulke into the younger man's hands. 'Perhaps one of  
these days, Mort. One of these days I will."  

Later the same autumn Sol looked out the window of his study to see the  
dark figure of a man standing under the bare elm in front of the house.  
The media, thought Sol, his heart sinking. For a decade he had been  

dreading the day the secret got out, knowing it would mean the end of  
their simple life in Crawford. He walked out into the evening chill.  
'Melio!" he said when he saw the tall man's face.  

The archaeologist stood with his hands in the pockets of his long blue  
coat. Despite the ten standard years since their last contact, Arundez  
had aged but little -Sol guessed that he was still in his late twenties.  

But the younger man's heavily tanned face was lined with worry. 'Sol,'  
he said and extended his hand almost shyly.  

Sol shook his hand warmly. 'I didn't know you were back. Come into the  
house."  

'No." The archaeologist took a half step back. 'I've been out here for  
an hour, Sol. I didn't have the courage to come to the door."  

Sol started to speak but then merely nodded. He put his hands in his  
own pockets against the chill. The first stars were becoming visible  
above the dark gables of the house. 'Rachel's not home right now,' he  
said at last.  

'She went to the library.  She .  .  .  she thinks she has a history  
paper due."  

Melio took a ragged breath and nodded in return.  

'Sol,' he said, his voice thick, 'you and Sarai need to understand that  
we did everything we could. The team was on Hyperion for almost three  
standard years. We would have stayed if the university hadn't cut our  
funds.  

There was nothing..."  

'We know,' said Sol. 'We appreciated the fatline messages."  

'I spent months alone in the Sphinx myself,' said Melio. 'According to  
the instruments, it was just an inert pile of stones, but sometimes I  
thought I felt... something .... ' He shook his head again. 'I failed  
her, Sol."  

'No,' said Sol and gripped the younger man's shoulder through the wool  
coat. 'But I have a question. We've been in touch with our senators...  
even talked to the Science Council directors; . . but no one can  
explain to me why the Hegemony hasn't spent more time and money  
investigating the phenomena on Hyperion. It seems to me that they  
should have invested that world into the Web long ago, if only for its  
scientific potential.  

How can they ignore an enigma like the Tombs?"  

'I know what you mean, Sol. Even the early cutoff of our funds was  
suspicious. It's as if the Hegemony had a policy to keep Hyperion at  
arm's length."  

'Do you think . . ." began Sol but at the moment Rachel approached  
them in the autumn twilight. Her hands were thrust deep in her red  

jacket, her hair was cut short in the decades-old style of adolescents  
everywhere, and her full cheeks were flushed with the cold. Rachel was  
teetering on the brink of childhood and young adulthood; her long legs  
in jeans, sports shoes, and bulky jacket might have been the silhouette  
of a boy.  

,. She grinned at them. 'Hi, Dad." Stepping closer in the dim light,  
she nodded at Melio shyly. 'Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt your  
conversation."  

Sol took a breath. 'That's all right, kiddo. Rachel, this is Dr  
Arundez from Reichs University on Freeholm.  

Dr Arundez, my daughter Rachel."  

'Pleased to meet you,' said Rachel, beaming in earnest now. 'Wow,  
Reichs. I've read their catalogues. I'd love to go there someday."  

Melio nodded rigidly. Sol could see the stiffness in his  

shoulders and torso. 'Do you..." began Melio. 'That is, what would you  
like to study there?"  

Sol thought the pain in the man's voice must be audible to Rachel but  
she only shrugged and laughed.  

'Oh, jeez, everything. Old Mr Eikhardt- he's the  
paleontology/archaeology tute in the advanced class I take up at the Ed  
Center - he says they have a great  

classics and ancient artifacts department."  

'They do,' managed Melio.  

Rachel glanced shyly from her father to the stranger, apparently sensing  
the tension there but not knowing the source. 'Well, l'm just  
interrupting your conversation more here. l've got to get in and get to  
bed. I guess I've had this strange virus... sort of like meningitis,  
More says, only it must make me sort of goofy. Anyway, nice to meet  
you, Dr Arundez. I hope I'll see you at Reichs someday. '  

'I hope that too,' said Melio, staring at her so intensely in the gloom  
that Sol had the feeling he was trying to memorize everything about the  
instant.  

'Okay, well . . ." said Rachel and stepped back, her rubber-soled  
shoes squeaking on the sidewalk, 'good  

night, then. See you in the morning, Dad."  

'Good night, Rachel."  

She paused at the doorway. The gaslight on the lawn made her look much  
younger than thirteen. ' 'Later, alligators."  

' 'While, crocodile,' said Sol and heard Melio whisper it in unison.  

They stood awhile in silence, feeling the night settle on the small  
town. A boy on a bicycle rode by, leaves crackling under his wheels,  
spokes gleaming in the pools of light under the old streetlamps. 'Come  
in the house,' Sol said to the silent man. 'Sarai will be very pleased  
to see you. Rachel will be asleep."  

'Not now,' said Melio. He was a shadow there, his hands still in his  
pockets. '1 need to... it was a mistake, Sol." He started to turn  
away, looked back. 'I'!1 phone when I get to Freeholm,' he said. 'We'll  
get another expedition put together."  

Sol nodded. Three years transit, he thought. If they  

left tonight she wouM be... not quite ten before they arrive. 'Good,'  
he said.  

Melio paused, raised a hand in farewell, and walked away along the curb,  
ignoring the leaves that crunched underfoot.  

Sol never saw him in person again.  

The largest Church of the Shrike in the Web was on Lusus and Sol farcast  
there a few weeks before Rachel's tenth birthday. The building itself  
was not much larger than an Old Earth cathedral, but it seemed gigantic  
with its effect of flying buttresses in search of a church, twisted  
upper stories, and support walls of stained glass.  

Sol's mood was low and the brutal Lusian gravity did nothing to lighten  
it. Despite his appointment with the bishop, Sol had to wait more than  
five hours before he was allowed into the inner sanctum. He spent most  
of the time staring at the slowly rotating twenty-meter, steel and  
polychrome sculpture which might have been of the legendary Shrike . .  
. and might have been an abstract homage to every edged weapon ever  
invented.  

What interested Sol the most were the two red orbs floating within the  
nightmare space which might have been a skull.  

'M. Weintraub?"  

'Your Excellency,' said Sol. He noticed that the acolytes, exorcists,  
!ectors, and ostiaries who had kept him company during the long wait had  
prostrated themselves on the dark tiles at the high priest's entry. Sol  
managed a formal bow.  

'Please, please, do come in, M. Weintraub,' said the priest. He  
indicated the doorway to the Shrike sanctuary with a sweep of his robed  
arm.  

Sol passed through, found himself in a dark and echoing place not too  
dissimilar from the setting of his recurrent dream, and took a seat  
where the bishop indicated. As the cleric moved to his own place at  
what looked like a small throne behind an intricately carved but  
thoroughly modern desk, Sol noticed that the high priest was a native  
Lusian, gone to fat and heavy in the jowls, but formidable in the way  
all Lusus residents  

seemed to be. His robe was striking in its redness... a bright,  
arterial red, flowing more like a contained liquid than like silk or  
velvet, trimmed in onyx ermine. The bishop wore a large ring on each  
finger and they alternated red and black, producing a disturbing effect  
in Sol.  

'Your Excellency,' began Sol, 'I apologize in advance for any breach in  
church protocol which I have committed...  

or may commit. I confess I.know little about the Church of the Shrike,  
but what I do know has brought me here. Please forgive me if I  
inadvertently display my ignorance by my clumsy use of titles or terms."  

The bishop wiggled his fingers at Sol. Red and black stones flashed in  
the weak light. 'Titles are unimportant, M. Weintraub. Addressing us  
as "Your Excellency" is quite acceptable for a nonbeliever. We must  
advise you, however, that the formal name of our modest group is the  
Church of the Final Atonement and the entity whom the world so blithely  
calls... the Shrike... we refer to * . . if we take His name at  
all... as the Lord of Pain or, more commonly, the Avatar. Please  
proceed with the important query you said you had for us."  

Sol bowed slightly. 'Your Excellency, I am a teacher..."  

'Excuse us for interrupting, M. Weintraub, but you are much more than a  
teacher. You are a scholar. We are very familiar with your writings on  
moral hermeneutics.  

The reasoning therein is flawed but quite challenging.  

We use it regularly in our courses in doctrinal apologetics.  

Please proceed."  

Sol blinked. His work was almost unknown outside the most rarefied  
academic circles and this recognition had thrown him. In the five  
seconds it took him to recover, Sol found it preferable to believe that  
the Shrike bishop wanted to know with whom he spoke and had an excellent  
staff. 'Your Excellency, my background is immaterial. 1 asked to see  
you because my child... my .daughter... has taken ill as a possible  
result of research she was carrying out in an area which is of some  
importance to your Church. I speak, of course, of the so-called Time  
Tombs on the world of Hyperion."  

The bishop nodded slowly. Sol wondered if he knew about Rachel.  

'You are aware, M. Weintraub, that the area you referred to . . .  
what we call the Covenant Arks . . .  

has recently been declared off limits to so-called researchers by the  
Home Rule Council of Hyperion?"  

'Yes, Your Excellency. I have heard that. I understand that your  
Church was instrumental in that legislation being passed."  

The bishop showed no response to this. Far off in the incense-layered  
gloom, small chimes sounded 'At any rate, Your Excellency, I hoped that  

some aspect of your Church's doctrine might shed light on my daughter's  
illness."  

The bishop inclined his head forward so that the single shaft of light  
which illuminated him gleamed on his forehead and cast his eyes into  
shadow. 'Do you wish to receive religious instruction in the mysteries  
of the Church, M. Weintraub?"  

Sol touched his beard with a finger. 'No, Your Excellency, unless in so  
doing I might improve the wellbeing of my daughter."  

'And does your daughter wish to be initiated into the Church of the  
Final Atonement?"  

Sol hesitated a beat. 'Again, Your Excellency, she wishes to be well.  
If joining the Church would heal or help her, it would be a very serious  
consideration."  

The bishop sat back in a rustle of robes. Redness seemed to flow from  
him into the gloom. 'You speak of physical wellbeing, M. Weintraub.  
Our Church is the final arbiter of spiritual salvation. Are you aware  
that the former invariably flows from the latter?"  

'I am aware that this is an old and widely respected proposition,' said  
Sol. 'The total wellbeing of our daughter is the concern of my wife and  
myself."  

The bishop rested his massive head on his fist. 'What is the nature of  
your daughter's illness, M. Weintraub?" 'It is... a time-related  
illness, Your Excellency."  

The bishop sat forward, suddenly tense. 'And at which of the holy sites  
did you say your daughter contracted this malady, M. Weintraub?"  

'The artifact called the Sphinx, Your Excellency." The bishop stood so  
quickly that papers on his desktop were knocked to the floor. Even  
without the robes, the man would have massed twice Sol's weight. In the  
fluttering red robes, stretched to his full height, the Shrike priest  
now towered over Sol like crimson death incarnate. 'You can go!"  
bellowed the big man. 'Your daughter is the most blessed and cursed of  
individuals.  

There is nothing that you or the Church .  .  .  or any agent in this  
life... can do for her."  

Sol stood .  .  .  or, rather, sat .  .  .  his ground. 'Your  
Excellency, if there is any possibility..."  

'NO!" cried the bishop, red in the face now, a consummately consistent  
apparition. He tapped at his desk.  

Exorcists and lectors appeared in the doorway, their black robes with  
red trim an ominous echo of the bishop. The all-black ostiaries blended  
with the shadows.  

'The audience is at an end,' said the bishop with less volume but  
infinite finality. 'Your daughter has been chosen by the Avatar to  

atone in a way which all sinners and nonbelievers must someday suffer.  
Someday very soon."  

'Your Excellency, if I can have just five minutes more of your time..."  

The bishop snapped his fingers and the exorcists came forward to escort  
Sol out. The men were Lusian. One of them could have handled five  
scholars So!'s size.  

'Your Excellency..." cried Sol after he had shrugged off the first man's  
hands. The three other exorcists came to assist with the equally brawny  
lectors hovering nearby. The bishop had turned his back and seemed to  
be staring into the darkness.  

The outer sanctuary echoed to grunts and the scraping of So!'s heels and  
to at least one loud gasp as Sol's foot made contact with the least  
priestly parts of the lead exorcist. The outcome of the debate was not  
affected.  

Sol landed in the street. The last ostiary to turn away tossed So!'s  
battered hat to him.  

Ten more days on Lusus achieved nothing but more gravity fatigue for  
Sol. The Temple bureaucracy would not answer his calls. The courts  
could offer him no  

wedge. The exorcists waited just within the doors of the vestibule.  

Sol farcast to New Earth and Renaissance Vector, to Fuji and TC2, to  
Deneb Drei and Deneb Vier, but everywhere the Shrike temples were closed  
to him.  

Exhausted, frustrated, out of money, Sol 'cast home to Barnard's World,  
got the EMV out of the long-term lot, and arrived home an hour before  
Rachel's birthday.  

'Did you bring me anything, Daddy?" asked the excited ten-year-old.  
Sarai had told her that day that Sol had been gone.  

Sol brought out the wrapped package. It was the collected Anne of Green  
Gables series. It was not what  

he had wanted to bring her.  

'Can I open it?"  

'Later, little one. With the other things."  

'Oh, please, Dad. Just one thing now. Before Niki and the other kids  
get here?"  

Sol caught Sarai's eye. She shook her head. Rachel remembered inviting  
Niki and Linna and her other friends to the party only days before.  
Sarai had not yet come up with an excuse.  

'All right, Rachel,' he said. 'Just this one before the party."  

While Rachel ripped into the small package, Sol saw the giant package in  
the living room, secured with red ribbon. The new bike, of course.  
Rachel had asked for the new bike for a year before her tenth birthday.  
Sol tiredly wondered if she would be surprised tomorrow to find the new  
bike here the day before her tenth birthday.  

Or perhaps they would get rid of the bike that night, while Rachel  
slept.  

Sol collapsed onto the couch. The red ribbon reminded him of the  
bishop's robes.  

Sarai had never had an easy time of surrendering the past. Every time  
she cleaned and folded and put away a set of Rachel's outgrown baby  
clothes, she had shed secret tears that Sol somehow knew about. Sarai  
had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day  
normaIcy of things; a normaIcy which  

she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the  
essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences,  
the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates  
circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unsetf-conscious  
flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the  
family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and  
connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of  
such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.  

Sol found Sarai in the attic, weeping softly as she went through boxes.  
These were not the gentle tears once shed for the ending of small  
things. Sarai Weintraub was angry.  

'What are you doing, Mother?"  

'Rachel needs clothes. Everything is too big. What fit on an  
eight-year-old won't fit a seven-year-old. I have some more of her  
things here somewhere."  

'Leave it,' said Sol. 'We'll buy something new." Sarai shook her head.  
'And have her wonder every day where all of her favorite clothes have  
gone? No. I've  

saved some things. They're here somewhere."  

'Do it later."  

'Damn it, there/s no later!" shouted Sarai and then turned away from Sol  
and raised her hands to her face.  

'I'm sorry."  

Sol put his arms around her. Despite the limited Poulsen treatments,  
her bare arms were much thinner than he remembered. Knots and cords  
under rough skin.  

He hugged her tightly.  

'l'm sorry,' she repeated, sobbing openly now. 'It's just not fair."  

'No,' agreed Sol. 'It's not fair." The sunlight coming through the  
dusty attic panes had a sad, cathedral quality to it. Sol had always  
loved the smell of an attic - the hot and stale promise of a place so  
underused and filled with future treasures. Today it was ruined.  

He crouched next to a box. 'Come, dear,' he said, 'we'll look  
together."  

Rachel continued to be happy, involved with life, only slightly confused  
by the incongruities which faced her each morning when she awoke. As  
she grew younger it became easier to explain away the changes that  
appeared -to have occurred overnight - the old elm out front gone, the  
new apartment building on the corner where M.  

Nesbitt used to live in a colonial-era home, the absence of her friends  

-and Sol began to see as never before the flexibility of children. He  
now imagined Rachel living on the breaking crest of the wave of time,  
not seeing the murky depths of the sea beyond, keeping her balance with  
her small store of memories and a total commitment to the twelve to  
fifteen hours of now allowed her each day.  

Neither Sol nor Sarai wanted their daughter isolated from other children  
and it was difficult to find ways to make contact. Rachel was delighted  
to play with the 'new girl' or 'new boy' in the neighborhood - children  
of other instructors, the grandchildren of friends, for a while with  
Niki's daughter - but the other children had to grow accustomed to  
Rachel greeting them anew each day, remembering nothing of their common  
past, and only a few had the sensitivity to continue such a charade for  
the sake of a playmate.  

The story of Rachel's unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of  
course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of  
Rachel's return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted  
in the fashion of small towns immemorial- some tongues wagged  
constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone  
else's misfortune out of their voices and gazes - but mostly the  
community folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like  
an awkward mother bird shielding its young.  

Still, they were allowed to live their lives, and even when Sol had to  
cut back classes and then take an early retirement because of trips  
seeking medical treatment for Rachel, the real reason was mentioned by  
no one.  

But it could not last, of course, and on the spring day when Sol stepped  
onto the porch and saw his weeping seven-year-old daughter coming back  
from the park  

surrounded and followed by a pack of newsteeps, their camera implants  
gleaming and cornlogs extended, he knew that a phase of their life was  
over forever. Sol jumped from the porch and ran to Racbel's side.  

'M. Weintraub, is it true that your daughter contracted a terminal time  
illness? What's going to happen in seven years? Will she just  
disappear?"  

'M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Rachel says that she thinks Raben  
Dowell is Senate CEO and this is the year A.D. 2711. Has she lost  
those thirty-four years completely or is this a delusio, caused by the  
Merlin sickness?"  

'Rachel! Do you remember being a grown woman?  

What's it feel like to be a kid again?"  

'M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Just one still image, please. How  
about you get apicture of Rachel when she was older and you and the kid  
stand looking at it?"  

'M. Weintraub! Is it true that this is the curse of the Time Tombs?  
Did Rachel see the Shrike monster?"  

'Hey, Weintraub! Sol! Hey, Solly! What're you and the little woman  
going to do when the kid's gone?"  

There was a newsteep blocking Sol's way to the front door. The man  
leaned forward, the stereo lenses of his eyes elongating as they zoomed  
in for a close-up of Rachel. Sol grabbed the man's long hair - which  
was conveniently tied in a queue - and flung him aside.  

The pack brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol  
realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities:  
they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a  
one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of  
the so-called 'public's right to know."  

The Web did. Rather than have his family become permanent prisoners to  
the besieging reporters, Sol went on the offensive. He arranged  
interviews on the most pervasive farcaster cable news programs,  
participated in All Thing discussions, and personally attended the  
Concourse Medical Research Conclave. In ten standard months he asked  
for help for his daughter on eighty worlds.  

Offers poured in from ten thousand sources but the bulk of the  
communications were from faith healers, project promoters, institutes  
and free-lance researchers offering their services in exchange for the  
publicity, Shrike cultists and other religious zealots pointing out that  
Rachel deserved the punishment, requests from various advertising  
agencies for product endorsements, offers from media agents to 'handle'  
Rachel for such endorsements, offers of sympathy from common people - 
frequently enclosing credit chips, expressions of disbelief from  
scientists, offers from holie producers and book publishers for  
exclusive rights to Rachel's life, and a barrage of real estate offers.  

Reichs University paid for a team of evaluators to sort the offers and  
see if anything might benefit Rachel.  

Most of the communications were discarded. A few medical or research  
offers were seriously considered. In the end, none seemed to offer any  
avenue of research or experimental therapy which Reichs had not already  
tried. One fatline flimsy came to Sol's attention. It was from the  
Chairman of Kibbutz K'far Shalom on Hebron and read simply:  

IF IT BECOMES' TOO MUCH, COME.  

It soon became too much. After the first few months of publicity the  
siege seemed to lift, but this was only the prelude to the second act.  
Faxsimmed tabloids referred to Sol as the 'Wandering Jew,' the desperate  
father wandering afar in search of a cure for his child's bizarre  
illness- an ironic title given Sol's lifelong dislike of travel. Sarai  
inevitably was 'the grieving mother." Rachel was 'the doomed child' or,  
in one inspired headline, 'Virgin Victim of the Time Tombs' Curse." None  
of the family could go outside without finding a newsteep or imager  
hiding behind a tree.  

Crawford discovered that there was money to be found in the Weintraubs'  
misfortune. At first the town held the line, but when entrepreneurs  
from Bussard City moved in with gift shops, T-shirt concessions, tours,  
and datachip booths for the tourists who were coming in larger and  
larger numbers, the local business people first dithered, then wavered,  
then decided unanimously that, if t here was commerce to be carried on,  
the profits should not go to outsiders.  

After four hundred and thirty-eight standard years of comparative  
solitude, the town of Crawford received a farcaster terminex. No longer  
did visitors have to suffer the twenty-minute flight from Bussard City.  
The crowds grew.  

On the day they moved it rained heavily and the streets were empty.  
Rachel did not cry, but her eyes were very wide all day and she spoke in  
subdued tones. It was ten days before  

her sixth birthday." But, Daddy, why do we have to move?" 'We just do,  
honey." 'But why?"  

'It's something we have to do, little one. You'll like Hebron. There  
are lots of parks there."  

'But how come you never saidwe were going to move?" 'We did, sweetie.  
You must have forgotten."  

'But what about Gram and Grams and Uncle Richard  

and Aunt Tetha and Uncle Saul and everybody?"  

'They can come visit us any time."  

'But what about Niki and Linna and my friends?"  

Sol said nothing but carried the last of the luggage to the EMV. The  
house was sold and empty; furniture had been sold or sent ahead to  
Hebron. For a week there had been a steady stream of family and old  
friends, college associates, and even some of the Reichs reed team who  
had worked with Rachel for eighteen years, but now the street was empty.  
Rain streaked the Perspex canopy of the old EMV and ran in complex  
rivulets. The three of them sat in the vehicle for a moment, staring at  
the house. The interior smelled of wet wool and wet hair.  

Rachel clutched the teddy bear Sarai had resurrected from the attic six  
months earlier. She said,' It's not fair."  

'No,' agreed Sol." It's not fair."  

Hebron was a desert world. Four centuries of terra-forming had made the  
atmosphere breathable and a few million acres of land arable. The  
creatures which had lived  

there before were small and tough and infinitely wary, and so were the  
creatures imported from Old Earth, including the human kind.  

'Ahh,' gasped Sol the day they arrived in the sun-baked village of Dan  
above the sun-baked ibbutz of K'far Shalom, 'what masochists we Jews  
are. Twenty thousand surveyed worlds fit for our kind when the Hegira  
began, and those schmucks came here."  

But it was not masochism which brought either the first colonists or Sol  
and his family. Hebron was mostly desert, but the fertile areas were  
almost frighteningly fertile. Sinai University was respected throughout  
the Web and its Med Center brought in wealthy patients and a healthy  
income for the cooperative. Hebron had a single farcaster terminex in  
New Jerusalem and allowed portals nowhere else. Belonging to neither  
the Hegemony nor Protectorate, Hebron taxed travelers heavily for  
farcaster privilege and allowed no tourists outside New Jerusalem. For  
a Jew seeking privacy, it was perhaps the safest place in three hundred  
worlds trod by man.  

The kibbutz was more a cooperative by tradition than in operation. The  
Weintraubs were welcomed to their own home - a modest place offering  
sun-dried adobe, curves instead of right angles, and bare wood floo o,  
b.".  

also offering a view from the hill which showed an infinite expanse of  
desert beyond the orange and olive groves. The sun seemed to dry up  
everything, thought Sol, even .worries and bad dreams. The light was a  
physical thing. In the evening their house glowed pink for an hour  
after the sun had set.  

Each morning Sol sat by his daughter's bed until she awoke. The first  
minutes of her confusion were always painful to him, but he made sure  
that he was the first thing Rachel saw each day. He held her while she  
asked her questions.  

'Where are we, Daddy?"  

'In a wonderful place, little one. I'll tell you all about it over  
breakfast."  

'How did we get here?"  

'By 'casting and flying and walking a bit,' he would say. 'It's not so  
far away... but far enough to make it an adventure."  

'But my bed's here... my stuffed animals... why don't I remember  
coming?"  

And Sol would hold her gently by the shoulders and look into her brown  
eyes and say, 'You had an accident, Rachel. Remember in The Homesick  

Toad where Terrence hits his head and forgets where he lives for a  

few days? It was sort of like that."  

'Am I better?"  

'Yes,' Sol would say, 'you're all better now." And the house would fill  
with the smell of breakfast and they would go out to the terrace where  
Sarai waited.  

Rachel had more playmates than ever. The kibbutz cooperative had a  
school where she was always the welcomed visitor, greeted anew each day.  
In the long afternoons the children played in the orchards and explored  
along the cliffs.  

Avner, Robert, and Ephraim, the Council elders, urged Sol to work on his  
book. Hebron prided itself on the number of scholars, artists,  
musicians, philosophers, writers and composers it sheltered as citizens  
and long-term residents. The house, they pointed out, was a gift of the  
state. Sol's pension, though small by We,b standards, was more than  
adequate for their modest needs in K'far Shalom. To Sol's surprise,  
however, he found that he enjoyed physical labor. Whether working in  
the orchards or clearing stones in the unclaimed fields or repairing a  
wall above the city, Sol found that his mind and spirit were freer than  
they had been in many years. He discovered that he could wrestle with  
Kierkegaard while he waited for mortar to dry and find new insights in  
Kant and Vandeur while carefully checking the apples for worms. At the  
age of seventy-three standard, Sol earned his first calluses.  

In the evenings he would play with Rachel and then take a walk in the  
foothills with Sarai as Judy or one of the other neighbor girls watched  
their sleeping child.  

One weekend they went away to New Jerusalem, just Sol  

and Sarai, the first time they had been alone together for that long  
since Rachel returned to live with them seventeen standard years before.  

But everything was not idyllic. Too frequent were the nights when Sol  
awoke alone and walked barefoot down the hall to see Sarai watching over  
Rachel in her sleep.  

And often at the end of a long day, bathing Rachel in the old ceramic  
tub or tucking her in as the walls glowed pinkly, the child would say,  
'I like it here, Daddy, but can we go home tomorrow?" And Sol would nod.  
And after the good-night story, and the lullaby, and the good-night  
kiss, sure that she was asleep, he would begin to tiptoe out of the room  
only to hear the muffled * 'Later, alligator' from the blanketed form on  
the bed, to which he had to reply ' 'While, crocodile." And lying in bed  
himself, next to the softly breathing and possibly sleeping length of  
the woman he loved, Sol would watch the strips of pale light from one or  
both of Hebron's small moons move across the rough walls and he would  
talk to God.  

Sol had been talking to God for some months before he realized what he  
was doing. The idea amused him. The dialogues were in no way prayers  
but took the form of angry monologues which - just short of the point  

where they became aliatribes- became vigorous arguments with himself.  
Only not just with himself. Sol realized one day that the topics of the  
heated debates were so profound, the stakes to be settled so serious,  
the ground covered so broad, that the only person he could possibly be  
berating for such shortcomings was God Himself.  

Since the concept of a personal God, lying awake at night worrying about  
human beings, intervening in the lives of individuals, always had been  
totally absurd to Sol, the  

thought of such dialogues made him doubt his sanity.  

But the dialogues continue,'  

Sol wanted to know how an 'ical system - much less a religion so  
indomitable that it t,td survived every evil mankind could throw at it- 
could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his on. It  
did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last  
moment. It did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In  
fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to  
become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove  
Sol into fits of fury.  

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of  
ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable  
conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle  
which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being  
was evil.  

-So define 'innocent'?. came the vaguely amused, faintly  
querulous voice which Sol associated with these arguments.  

--A child is innocent, thought Sol. Isaac was.  

Rachel is.  

-'Innocent' by the mere fact of being a child?  

-Yes.  

-And there is no situation where the blood of the innocent must  
be shed for a greater cause?  

-No, thought Sol. None.  

-But the 'innocent' are not restricted to children, I presume.  

-Sol hesitated, sensing a trap, trying to see where his  
subconscious interlocutor was heading. He could not. No, he thought,  
the 'innocent' include others as well as children.  

-Such as Rachel? At age twenty-four? The innocent shouM not  
be sacrificed at any age?  

-That's right.  

--Perhaps this is part of the lesson which Abraham needed to learn  

before he could be  
father to the blessed of the nations of the earth.  
--What lesson? thought Sol. What lesson? But  
the voice in his mind had faded and now there were only the sounds of  

night birds outside and the soft breathing of his wife beside him.  

Rachel could still read at age five. Sol had trouble remembering when  
she had learned to read - it seemed  
she always had been able to. 'Four standard,' said Sarai.  
'It was early summer... three months after her birthday.  
We were picnicking in the field above the college, Rachel was looking at  

her Winnie-the-Pooh book, and  
suddenly she said, "I hear a voice in my head"."  
Sol remembered then.  
He also remembered the joy he and Sarai had felt at the rapid  

acquisition of new skills Rachel had shown at that age. He remembered  

because now they were confronted with the reverse of that process.  
'Dad,' said Rachel from where she lay on the floor of his study,  
carefully coloring, 'how long has it been since Mom's birthday?"  

'It was on Monday,' said Sol, preoccupied with something he was reading.  
Sarai's birthday had not yet come but Rachel remembered it.  

'I know. But how long has it been since then?"  
'Today is Thursday,' said Sol. He was reading a long Talmudic treatise  
on obedience.  

'I know. But how many days?"  

Sol put down. the hard copy. 'Can you name the days of the week?"  
Barnard's World had used the old calendar.  
'Sure,' said Rachel. 'Saturday, Sunday, Monday,  
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday..." 'You said Saturday  

already." 'Yeah. But how many days ago?"  
'Can you count from Monday to Thursday?"  
Rachel frowned, moved her lips. She tried again, counting on her  

fingers this time. 'Four days?"  
'Good,' said Sol. 'Can you tell me what ten minus four is, kiddo?"  
'What does minus mean?"  

Sol forced himself to look at his papers again.  
'Nothing,' he said. 'Something you'll learn at school."  
'When we go home tomorrow?"  
'Yes."  
One morning when Rachel went off with Judy to play with the other  

children - she was too young to attend school any longer - Sarai said:  
'Sol, we have to take her to Hyperion."  

Sol stared at her. 'What?"  
'You heard me. We can't wait until she is too young to walk... to  
talk. Also, we're not getting any younger." Sarai barked a mirthless  
laugh. 'That sounds strange, doesn't it? But we're not. The Poulsen  
treatments will be wearing off in a year or two."  

'Sarai, did you forget? The doctors all say that Rachel could not  
survive cryogenic fugue. No one experiences FTL travel without fugue  
state. The Hawking effect can drive one mad... or worse."  

'It doesn't matter,' said Sarai. 'Rachel has to return to Hyperion."  
'What on earth are you talking about?" said Sol, angered.  
Sarai gripped his hand. 'Do you think you're the only  
one who has had the dream?"  
'Dream?" managed Sol.  
She sighed and sat at the white kitchen table. Morning light struck the  

plants on the sill like a yellow spotlight.  

'The dark place,' she said. 
'The red lights above. 
The voice. 
Telling 
us to... 
telling us to take... 
to go to Hyperion. 
To make... 
an 
offering." 

Sol licked his lips but there was no moisture there.  

His heart pounded. 'Whose name... whose name is called?"  

Sarai looked at him strangely. 'Both of our names. If you weren't  
there... in the dream with me... I could never have borne it all these  
years."  

Sol collapsed into his chair. He looked down at the strange hand and  
forearm lying on the table. The knuckles of the hand were beginning to  
enlarge with arthritis; the forearm was heavily veined, marked with  
liver spots.  

It was his hand, of course. He heard himself say: 'You never mentioned  
it. Never said a word..."  

This time Sarai's laugh was without bitterness. 'As if I had to! All  

those times both of us coming awake in the dark. And you covered with  
sweat. I knew from the first time that it was not merely a dream. We  
have to go, Father. Go to Hyperion."  

Sol moved the hand. It still did not feel a part of him.  

'Why? For God's sake, why, Sarai? We can't... offer Rachel..."  

'Of course not, Father. Haven't you thought about this? We have to go  
to Hyperion .  .  .  to wherever the dream tells us to go... and offer  
ourselves instead."  

'Offer ourselves,' repeated Sol. He wondered if he was having a heart  
attack. His chest ached so terribly that he could not take in a breath.  
He sat for a full minute in silence, convinced that if he attempted to  
utter a word only a sob would escape. After another minute he said:  
'How long have you .  .  .  thought about this, Mother?"  

'Do you mean known what we must do? A year. A little more. Just after  
her fifth birthday."  

'A year! Why haven't you said something?"  

'I was waiting for you. To realize. To know."  

Sol shook his head. The room seemed far away and slightly tilted. 'No.  
I mean, it doesn't seem... I have to think, Mother." Sol watched as the  
strange hand patted Sarai's familiar hand.  

She nodded.  

Sol spent three days and nights in the arid mountains, eating only the  
thick-crusted bread he had brought and drinking from his condenser  
therm.  

Ten thousand times in the past twenty years he had wished that he could  
take Rachel's illness; that if anyone had to suffer it should be the  
father, not the child. Any parent would feel that way - did feel that  
way every time his child lay injured or racked with fever. Surely it  
could not be that simple.  

In the heat of the third afternoon, as he lay half dozing in the shade  
of a thin tablet of rock, Sol learned that it was not that simple.  

Can that be Abraham's answer to God? That he would be the offering, not  
Isaac?  

It could have been Abraham's. It cannot be yours.  

Why?  

As if in answer, Sol had the fever-vision of naked adults filing toward  
the ovens past armed men, mothers hiding their children under piles of  
coats. He saw' men and women with flesh hanging in burned strips  
carrying the dazed children from the ashes of what once had been a city.  
Sol knew that these images were no dreams, were the very stuff of the  
First and Second Holocausts, and in his understanding knew before the  

voice spoke in his mind what the answer was. What it must be.  

The parents have offered themselves. That sacrifice already has been  
accepted. We are beyond that.  

Then what? What!  

Silence answered him. Sol stood in the full glare of the sun, almost  
fell. A black bird wheeled overhead or in his vision. Sol shook his  
fist at the gunmetal sky.  

You use Nazis as your instruments. Madmen.  

Monsters. You're a goddamn monster yourself.  

mtqo.  

The earth tilted and Sol fell on his side against sharp rocks. He  
thought that it was not unlike leaning against a rough wall. A rock the  
size of his fist burned his cheek.  

The correct answer for Abraham was obedience, thought Sol. Ethically,  
Abraham was a child himself. All men were at that time. The correct  
answer for Abraham's children was to become adults and to offer  
themselves instead.  

What is the correct answer for us?  

There was no answer. The ground and sky quit spinning.  

After a while Sol rose shakily, rubbed the blood and grit from his  
cheek, and walked down to the town in the valley below.  

'No,' Sol told Sarai, 'we will not go to Hyperion. It is not the  
correct solution."  

'You would have us do nothing then." Sarai's lips were white with anger  
but her voice was firmly in control.  

'No. I would have us not to do the wrong thing." Sarai expelled her  
breath in a hiss. She waved toward the window where their four-year-old  
was visible playing with her toy horses in the backyard. 'Do you think  
she has time for us to do the wrong thing... or anything * . .  
indefinitely?"  

'Sit down, Mother."  

Sarai remained standing. There was the faintest sprinkling of spilled  
sugar on the front of her tan cotton dress. Sol remembered the young  
woman rising nude from the phosphorescent wake of the motile isle on  
Maul-Covenant.  

'We have to do something,' she said.  

'We've seen over a hundred medical and scientific experts. She's been  
tested, prodded, probed, and tortured by two dozen research centers.  
l've been to the Shrike Church on every world in this Web; they won't  

see me. Melio and the other Hyperion experts at Reichs say that the  
Shrike Cult has nothing like the Merlin sickness in their doctrine and  
the indigenies on Hyperion have no legends of the malady or clues to its  
cure.  

Research during the three years the team was on Hyperion showed nothing.  

Now research there is illegal.  
Access to the Time Tombs is granted only to the so-called pilgrims. Even  
getting a travel visa to Hyperion is becoming almost impossible. And if  
we take Rachel; the trip may kill her."  

Sol paused for breath, touched Sarai's arm again.  
'I'm sorry to repeat all this, Mother. But we have done something."  
'Not enough,' said Sarai. 'What if we go as pilgrims?" Sol folded his  

arms in frustration. 'The Church of the Shrike chooses its sacrificial  
victims from thousands of volunteers. The Web is full of stupid,  
depressed people.  

Few of these return."  

'Doesn't that prove something?" Sarai whispered quickly, urgently.  
'Somebody or something is preying on these people."  
'Bandits,' said Sol.  
Sarai shook her head* 'The golem."  
'You mean the Shrike."  
'It's the golem,' insisted Sarai. 'The same one we see in the dream."  
Sol was uneasy. 'l don't see a golem in the dream.  
What golem?"  
'The red eyes that watch,' said Sarai. 'It's the same  
golem that Rachel heard that night in the Sphinx." 'How do you know that  

she heard anything?"  

'It's in the dream,' said Sarai. 'Before we enter the place where the  
golem waits."  
'We haven't dreamed the same dream,' said Sol.  
'Mother, Mother ... why haven't you told me this before?"  
'I thought I was going mad,' whispered Sarai.  
Sol thought of his secret conversations with God and put his arm around  

his wife.  
'Oh, Sol,' she whispered against him, 'it hurts so much to watch. And  
it's so lonely here."  

Sol held her. They had tried to go home- home would always be Barnard's  
World - half a dozen times to visit family and friends, but each time  
the visits were ruined by an invasion of newsteeps and tourists. It was  
no one's fault. News traveled almost instantaneously through the  
megadatasphere of a hundred and sixty Web worlds. To scratch the  
curiosity itch one had only to pass a universal card across a terminex  
diskey and step through a farcaster. They had tried arriving  
unannounced and traveling incognito but they were not spies and the  
efforts were pitiful. Within twenty-four standard hours of their  
reentry to the Web, they were besieged. Research institutes and large  
med centers easily provided the security screen for such a visit, but  
friends and family suffered. Rachel was NEWS.  

'Perhaps we could invite Tetha and Richard again * . ." began Sarai.  

'I have a better idea,' said Sol. 'Go yourself, Mother.  

You want to see your sister but you also want to see, hear, and smell  
home... watch a sunset where there are no iguanas... walk in the  
fields. Go."  

'Go? Just me? I couldn't be away from Rachel..." 'Nonsense,' said Sol.  
'Twice in twenty years - almost forty if we count the good days before .  
. . anyway, twice in twenty years doesn't constitute child neglect.  

It's a wonder that this family can stand one another, we've been cooped  
up together so long."  

Sarai looked at the tabletop, lost in thought. 'But wouldn't the news  
people find me?"  

'I bet not,' said Sol. 'It's Rachel they seem to key on.  

If they do hound you, come home. But I bet you can have a week visiting  
everyone at home before the teeps catch on."  

'A week,' gasped Sarai. 'I couldn't..."  

'Of course you can. In fact, you must. It will give me a few days to  
spend more time with Rachel and then when you come back refreshed I'll  
spend some days selfishly working on the book."  

'The Kierkegaard one?"  

'No. Something l've been playing with called The Abraham Problem."  

'Clumsy title,' said Sarai.  

'It's a clumsy problem,' said Sol. 'Now go get packed.  

We'll fly you to New Jerusalem tomorrow so you can 'cast out before the  
Sabbath begins."  

'I'11 think about it,' she said, sounding unconvinced.  

'You'll pack,' said Sol, hugging her again. When the hug was completed  

he had turned her away from the window so that she faced the hallway and  
the bedroom door. 'Go. When you return from home VII have thought of  
something we can do."  

Sarai paused. 'Do you promise?"  

Sol looked at her. 'I promise I will before time destroys everything. I  
swear as Rachel's father that VIi find a way."  

Sarai nodded, more relaxed than he had seen her in months. 'l'll go  
pack,' she said.  

When he and the child returned from New Jerusalem the next day, Sol went  
out to water the meager lawn while Rachel played quietly inside. When  
he came in, the pink glow of sunset infusing the walls with a sense of  
sea warmth and quiet, Rachel was not in her bedroom or the other usual  
places. 'Rachel?"  

When there was no answer he checked the backyard again, the empty  
street.  

'Rachel!" Sol ran in to call the neighbors but suddenly there was the  
slightest of sounds from the deep closet Sarai used for storage. Sol  
quietly opened the screen panel.  

Rachel sat beneath the hanging clothes, Sarai's antique pine box open  
between her legs. The floor was littered with photos and holochips of  
Rachel as a high school student, Rachel on the day she set off for  
college, Rachel standing in front of a carved mountainside on Hyperion.  
Rachel's research comlog lay whispering on the four-year-old Rachel's  
lap. Sol's heart seized at the familiar sound of the confident young  
woman's voice.  

'Daddy,' said the child on the floor, her own voice a tiny frightened  
echo of the voice on the comlog, 'you  

never told me that I had a sister."  

'You don't, little one."  

Rachel frowned. 'Is this Mommy when she was . . .  

not so big? Uh-uh, it can't be. Her name's Rachel, too, she says. How  
can..."  

'It's all right,' he said. 'VII explain . . ." Sol realized that the  
phone was ringing in the living room, had been ringing. 'Just a moment,  
sweetie. I'll be right back."  

The holo that formed above the pit was of a man Sol had never seen  
before. Sol did not activate his own imager, eager to get rid of the  
caller. 'Yes?" he said abruptly.  

'M. Weintraub? M. Weintraub who used to live on Barnard's World,  
currently in the village of Dan on Hebron?"  

Sol started to disconnect and then paused. Their access code was  

untiled. Occasionally a salesperson called from New Jerusalem, but  
offworld calls were rare. And, Sol suddenly realized, his stomach  
feeling a stab of cold, it was past sundown on the Sabbath. Only  
emergency holo calls were allowed.  

'Yes?" said Sol.  

'M. Weintraub,' said the man, staring blindly past Sol, 'there's been a  
terrible accident."  

When Rachel awoke her father was sitting by the side of her bed. He  
looked tired. His eyes were red and his cheeks were gray with stubble  
above the line of his beard.  

'Good morning, Daddy."  

'Good morning, sweetheart."  

Rachel looked around and blinked. Some of her dolls and toys and things  
were there, but the room was not hers. The light was different. The  
air felt different. Her  

daddy looked different. 'Where are we, Daddy?" 'We've gone on a trip,  
little one." 'Where to?"  

'It doesn't matter right now. Hop out, sweetie. Your bath is ready and  
then we have to get dressed."  

A dark dress she had never seen before lay at the base of her bed.  
Rachel looked at the dress and then back at her father. 'Daddy, what's  
the matter? Where's Mommy?" *  

Sol rubbed his cheek. It was the third morning since the accident. It  
was the day of the funeral. He had told her each of the preceding days  
because he could not imagine lying to her then; it seemed the ultimate  
betrayal- of both Sarai and Rachel. But hc did not think he could do it  
again. 'There's been an accident, Rachel,' he said, his voice a pained  
rasp. 'Mommy died.  

We're going to go say goodbye to her today." Sol paused. He knew by now  
that it would take a minute for the fact of her mother's death to become  
real for Rachel.  

On the first day he had not known if a four-year-old could truly  
comprehend the concept of death. He knew now that Rachel could.  

Later, as he held the sobbing child, Sol tried to understand the  
accident he had described so briefly to her.  

EMVs were by far the safest form of personal transportation mankind had  
ever designed. Their lifters could fail but, even so, the residual  
charge in the EM generators would allow the aircar to descend safely  
from any altitude. The basic, failsafe design of an EMV's  
collision-avoidance equipment had not changed in centuries. But  
everything failed. In this case it was a joy-riding teenage couple in a  
stolen EMV outside the traffic lanes, accelerating to Mach 1.5 with all  
lights and transponders off to avoid detection, who defied all odds by  

colliding with Aunt Tetha's ancient Vikken as it descended toward the  
Bussard City Opera House landing apron. Besides Tetha and Sarai and the  
teenagers, three others died in the crash as pieces of falling vehicles  
cartwheeled into the crowded atrium of the Opera House  

itself.  

Sarai.  

'Will we ever see Mommy again?" Rachel asked between sobs. She had  
asked this each time.  

'I don't know, sweetheart,' responded Sol truthfully.  

The funeral was at the family cemetery in gates County on Barnard's  
World. The press did not invade the graveyard itself but teeps hovered  
beyond the trees and pressed against the black iron gate like an angry  
storm tide.  

Richard wanted Sol and Rachel to stay a few days, but Sol knew what pain  
would be inflicted on the quiet farmer if the press continued their  
assault. Instead, he hugged Richard, spoke briefly to the clamoring  
reporters beyond the fence, and fled to Hebron with a stunned and silent  
Rachel in tow.  

Newsteeps followed to New Jerusalem and then attempted to follow to Dan,  
but military police overrode their chartered EMVs, threw a dozen in jail  
as an example, and revoked the farcaster visas of the rest.  

In the evening Sol walked the ridge lines above the village while Judy  
watched his sleeping child. He found that his dialogue with God was  
audible now and he resisted the urge to shake his fist at the sky, to  
shout obscenities, to throw stones. Instead he asked questions, always  
ending with - Why?  

There was no answer. Hebron's sun set behind distant ridges and the  
rocks glowed as they gave up their heat. Sol sat on a boulder and  
rubbed his temples with his palms.  

Sarai.  

They had lived a full life, even with the tragedy of Rachel's illness  
hanging over them. It was too ironic that in Sarai's first hour of  
relaxation with her sister... Sol moaned aloud.  

The trap, of course, had been in their total absorption with Rache!'s  
illness. Neither had been able to face the future beyond Racbe!'s...  
death? Disappearance? The world had hinged upon each day their child  
lived and no thought had been given to the chance of accident, the  
perverse antilogic of a sharp-edged universe. Sol was sure that Sarai  
had considered suicide just as he had, but neither of them could ever  
have abandoned the other. Or Rachel. He had never considered the  
possibility of being  

alone with Rachel when...  

Sarai!  

At that moment Sol realized that the often angry dialogue which his  
people had been having with God for so many millennia had not ended with  
the death of Old Earth... nor with the new Diaspora... but continued  
still. He and Rachel and Sarai had been part of it, were part of it  
now. He let the pain come. It filled him with the sharp-edged agony of  
resolve.  

Sol stood on the ridge line and wept as darkness fell.  

In the morning he was next to Rachel's bed when sunlight filled the  
room.  
'Good morning, Daddy." 'Good morning, sweetheart." 'Where are we,  

Daddy?"  
'We've gone on a trip. It's a pretty place."  
'Where's Mommy?"  
'She's with Aunt Tetha today."  
'Will we see her tomorrow?"  
'Yes,' said Sol. 'Now let's get you dressed and I'll make breakfast."  
Sol began to petition the Church of the Shrike when Rachel turned three.  

Travel to Hyperion was severely limited and access to the Time Tombs had  
become all but impossible. Only the occasional Shrike Pilgrimage sent  
people to that region.  

Rachel was sad that she had to be away from her  
mother on her birthday but the visit of several children from the  
kibbutz distracted her a bit. Her big present was an illustrated book  

of fairy tales which Sarai had picked out in New Jerusalem months  
before.  
S01 read some of the stories to Rachel before bedtime.  
It had been seven months since she could read any of the words herself.  

But she loved the stories- especially 'Sleeping Beauty' - and made her  

father read it to her twice.  
'I'm gonna show Mommy it when we get home,' she said through a yawn as  
Sol turned out the overhead light.  

'Good night, kiddo,' he said softly, pausing at the door.  
'Hey, Daddy?"  
'Yes?"  
' 'Later, alligator."  
' 'While, crocodile."  

Rachel giggled into her pillow.  

It was, Sol thought during the final two years, not so much different  
from watching a loved one falling into old age. Only worse. A thousand  
times worse.  

Rachel's permanent teeth had fallen out over intervals between her  
eighth and second birthdays. Baby teeth replaced them but by her  
eighteenth month half of these had receded into her jaw.  

Rachei's hair, always her one vanity, grew shorter and thinner. Her  
face lost its familiar structure as baby fat obscured the cheekbones and  
firm chin. Her coordination failed by degrees, noticeable at first in a  
sudden clumsiness as she handled a fork or pencil. On the day she could  
no longer walk, Sol put her down in her crib early and then went into  
his study to get thoroughly and quietly drunk.  

Language was the hardest for him. Her vocabulary loss was like the  
burning of a bridge between them, the severing of a final line of hope.  
It was sometime after her second birthday receded that Sol tucked her in  
and, pausing in the doorway, said, ''Later, alligator."  

'Huh?"  

'See you later, alligator.  

Rachel si,led.  

'You say- "In a while, crocodile," ' said Sol. He  

told her what an alligator and crocodile were.  

'In a while, 'acadile,' giggled Rachel.  

In the morning she had forgotten.  

Sol took Rachel with him as he traveled the Web - no longer caring about  
the newsteeps- petitioning the Shrike Church for pilgrimage rights,  
lobbying the Senate for a visa and access to forbidden areas on  
Hyperion, and visiting any research institute or clinic which might  
offer a cure. Months were lost while more medics admitted failure. When  
he fled back to Hebron, Rachel was fifteen standard months old; in the  
ancient units used on Hebron she weighed twenty-five pounds and measured  
thirty inches tall. She could no longer dress herself. Her vocabulary  
consisted of twenty-five words, of which her favorites were 'Mommy' and  
'Daddy."  

SOl loved carrying his daughter. There were times when the curve of her  
head against his cheek, her warmth against his chest, the smell of her  
skin - all worked to allow him to forget the fierce injustice of it all.  
At those times Sol would have been temporarily at peace with the  
universe if only Sarai had been there. As it was, there were temporary  
cease-fires in his angry dialogue with a God in Whom he did not believe.  

What possible reason can there be for this?  

What reason has been visible for all of the forms of pain suffered by  

humankind?  

Precisely, thought Sol, wondering if he had just won a point for the  
first time. He doubted it.  

The fact of a thing not being visible does not mean it does not exist.  

That's clumsy. It shouldn't take three negatives to make a statement.  
Especially to state something as nonprofound as that.  

-Precisely, Sol. You're beginning to get the drift of all  
this.  

-What?  

There was no answer to his thoughts. Sol lay in his house and listened  
to the desert wind blow.  

Rachel's last word was 'Mamma,' uttered when she was just over five  
months old.  

She awoke in her crib and did not - could not - ask where she was. Her  
world was one of mealtimes, naps, and toys. Sometimes when she cried  
Sol wondered if she was crying for her mother.  

Sol shopped in the small stores in Dan, taking the infant with him as he  
selected diapers, nursing paks, and the occasional new toy.  

The week before Sol left for Tau Ceti Center, Ephraim and the two other  
elders came to talk. It was evening and the fading light glowed on  
Ephraim's bald scalp. 'Sol, we're worried about you. The next few  
weeks will be hard. The women want to help. We want to help."  

Sol laid his hand on the older man's forearm. 'It's appreciated,  
Ephraim. Everything the last few years is appreciated. This is our  
home now, too. $arai would have... would have wanted me to say thank  
you. But we're leaving on Sunday. Rachel is going to get better."  

The three men on the long bench looked at one another.  

Avner said, 'They've found a cure?"  

'No,' said Sol, 'but I've found a reason to hope." 'Hope is good,'  
Robert said in cautious tones.  

Sol grinned, his teeth white against the gray of his beard. 'It had  
better be,' he said. 'Sometimes it is all we're given."  

The studio holo camera zoomed in for a close-up of Rachel as the infant  
sat cradled in Sol's arm on the set of 'Common Talk." 'So you're  
saying,' said Devon Whiteshire, the show's host and the third-best-known  
face in the Web datasphere, 'that the Shrike Church's refusal to allow  
you to return to the Time Tombs...  

and the Hegemony's tardiness in processing a visa...  

these things will doom your child to this... extinction?"  

'Precisely,' said Sol. 'The voyage to Hyperion cannot be made in under  
six weeks. Rachel is now twelve weeks old.  

Any further delay by either the Shrike Church or the Web bureaucracy  
will kill this child."  

The studio audience stirred. Devon Whiteshire turned toward the nearest  
imaging remote. His craggy, friendly visage filled the monitor frame.  
'This man doesn't know if he can save his child,' said Whiteshire, his  
voice powerful with subtle feeling, 'but all he asks is a chance. Do  
you think he... and the baby... deserve one? If so, access your  
planetary representatives and your nearest Church of the Shrike temple.  
The number of your nearest temple should be appearing now." He turned  
back to Sol. 'We wish you luck, M. Weintraub. And' - Whiteshire's  
large hand touched Rache!'s cheek - 'we wish you Godspeed, our young  
friend."  

The monitor image held on Rachel until it faded to black.  

The Hawking effect caused nausea, vertigo, headache, and hallucinations.  
The first leg of the voyage was the ten-day transit to Parvati on the  
Hegemony torchship HS Intrepid.  

Sol held Rachel and endured. They were the only people fully conscious  
aboard the warship. At first Rachel cried, but after some hours she lay  
quietly in SOI's arms and stared up at him with large, dark eyes. Sol  
remembered the day she was born - the medics had taken tbe infant from  
atop Sarai's warm stomach and handed her to Sol.  

Rachel's dark hair was not much shorter then, her gaze no less profound.  

Eventually they slept from sheer exhaustion.  

Sol dreamed that he was wandering through a structure with columns the  
size of redwood trees and a ceiling lost to sight far above him. Red  
light bathed cool emptiness. Sol was surprised to find that he still  
carried Rachel in his arms.  

Rachel as a child had never been in his dream before. The infant looked  
up at him and Sol felt the contact of her consciousness as surely as if  
she had spoken aloud.  

Suddenly a different voice, immense and cold, echoed through the void:  

'Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, Whom you love, and  
go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering  
at one of the places of which I shall tell you."  

Sol hesitated and looked back to Rachel. The baby's eyes were deep and  
luminous as she looked up at her father. Sol felt the unspoken yes.  
Holding her tightly, he stepped forward into the darkness and raised his  
voice against the silence:  

'Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent.  
There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human.  
The time of obedience and atonement is past."  

Sol listened. He could feel the pounding of his heart and Rachel's  
warmth against his arm. From somewhere high above there came the cold  
sound of wind through unseen fissures. Sol cupped his hand to his mouth  
and shouted:  

'That's all! Now either leave us alone or join us as a father rather  
than a receiver of sacrifices. You have the choice of Abraham!'  

Rachel stirred in his arms as a rumble grew out of the stone floor.  
Columns vibrated. The red gloom deepened and then winked out, leaving  
only darkness.  

From far away there came the boom of huge footsteps.  

Sol hugged Rachel to him as a violent wind roared past.  

There was a glimmer of light as both he and Rachel awoke on the HS  
Intrepid outward bound for Parvati to transfer to the treeship  
Yggdrasill for the planet Hyperion. Sol smiled at his seven-week-old  
daughter.  

She smiled back.  

It was her last and her first smile.  

The main cabin of the windwagon was silent when the old scholar finished  
his story. Sol cleared his throat and took a drink of water from a  
crystal goblet. Rachel slept on in the makeshift cradle of the open  
drawer. The windwagon rocked gently on its way, the rumble of the great  
wheel and the hum of the main gyroscope a lu!ling background noise.  

'My God,' Brawne Lamia said softly. She started to speak again and then  
merely shook her head.  

Martin Silenus closed his eyes and said:  

'Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical  
innocence  

And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing,  
seif-affrighting,  

And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will; She can, though every face  
will scowl  

And every windy quarter howl  

Or every bellows burst, be happy still."  

Sol Weintraub asked, 'William Butler Yeats?" Silenus nodded. ' "A  
Prayer for My Daughter." '  

'I think l'm going up on deck for a breath of air before turning in,'  
said the Consul. 'Would anyone care to join me?"  

Everyone did. The breeze of their passage was refreshing as the group  

stood on the quarterdeck and watched the darkened Sea of Grass rumble  
by. The sky was a great, star-splashed bowl above them, scarred by  
meteor trails. The sails and rigging creaked with a sound as old as  
human travel.  

'I think we should post guards tonight,' said Colonel Kassad. 'One  
person on watch while the others sleep.  

Two-hours intervals."  

'I agree,' said the Consul. 'l'il take the first watch." 'In the  
morning..." began Kassad.  

'Look!" cried Father Hoyt.  

They followed his pointing arm. Between the blaze of constellations,  
colored fireballs flared- green, violet,  

orange, green again- illuminating the great plain of grass around them  
like flashes of heat lightning. The stars and meteor trails paled to  
insignificance beside the sudden display.  

'Explosions?" ventured the priest.  

'Space battle,' said Kassad. 'Cislunar. Fusion weapons." He went below  
quickly.  

'The Tree,' said l-let Masteen, pointing to a speck of light which moved  
among the explosions like an ember floating through a fireworks display.  

Kassad returned with his powered binoculars and handed them around.  

'Ousters?" asked Lamia. 'Is it the invasion?" 'Ousters, almost  
certainly,' said Kassad. 'But almost as certainly just a scouting raid.  
See the clusters? Those are Hegemony missiles being exploded by the  
Ouster ramscouts' countermeasures."  

The binoculars came to the Consul. The flashes were quite clear now, an  
expanding cumulus of flame. He could see the speck and long blue tail  
of at least two scoutships fleeing from the Hegemony pursuers.  

'I don't think..." began Kassad and then stopped as the ship and sails  
and Sea of Grass glowed bright orange in reflected glare.  

'Dear Christ,' whispered Father Hoyt. 'They've hit the treeship."  

The Consult swept the glass left. The growing nimbus of flames could be  
seen with the naked eye but in the binoculars the kilometer-long trunk  
and branch array of the Yggdrasiil was visible for an instant as it  
burned and flared, long tendrils of flame arcing away into space as the  
containment fields failed and the oxygen burned.  

The orange cloud pulsed, faded, and fell back on itself as the trunk  
became visible for a final second even as it glowed and broke up like  
the last long ember in a dying fire. Nothing could have survived. The  
treeship Yggdrasill with its crew and complement of clones and  
semisentient erg drivers was dead.  

The Consul turned toward Het Masteen and belatedly held out the  

binoculars. 'I'm so ... sorry,' he whispered.  
The tall Templar did not take the glasses. Slowly he lowered his gaze  
from the skies, pulled forward his cowl, and went below without a word.  

The death of the treeship was the final explosion.  

When ten minutes had passed and no more flares had disturbed the night,  
Brawne Lamia spoke. 'Do you think they got them?"  
'The Ousters?" said Kassad. 'Probably not. The scoutships are built  

for speed and defense. They're light-minutes away by now."  

'Did they go after the treeship on purpose?" asked Silenus. The poet  
sounded very sober.  
'I think not,' said Kassad. 'Merely a target of opportunity."  
'Target of opportunity,' echoed Sol Weintraub. The scholar shook his  

head. 'I'm going to get a few hours' sleep before sunrise."  

One by one the others went below. When only Kassad and the Consul were  
left on deck, the Consul said, 'Where should I stand watch?"  
'Make a circuit,' said the Colonel. 'From the main corridor at the base  

of the ladder you can see all of the stateroom doors and the entrance to  
the mess and galley.  
Come above and check the gangway and decks. Keep the  
lanterns lit. Do you have a weapon?"  

The Consul shook his head.  
Kassad handed over his deathwand. 'It's on tight beam - about half a  
meter at ten meters' range. Don't use it unless you're sure that  
there's an intruder.  

The rough plate that slides forward is the safety.  
It's on."  
The Consul nodded, making sure that his finger stayed away from the  

firing stud.  
'VII relieve you in two hours,' said Kassad. He checked his comlog.  
'It'll be sunrise before my watch is over." Kassad looked at the sky as  
if expecting the Yggdrasill to reappear and continue its firefly path  

across the sky. Only the stars glowed back. On the northeastern  
horizon a moving mass of black promised a storm.  
Kassad shook his head. 'A waste,' he said and went below.  
The Consul stood there awhile and listened to the wind in the canvas,  

the creek of rigging, and the rumble of the wheel. After a while he  

went to the railing and stared at darkness while he thought.  

FIVE  

Sunrise over the Sea of Grass was a thing of beauty. The Consul watched  
from the highest point on the aft deck.  

After his watch he had tried to sleep, given it up, and come up onto  
deck to watch the night fade into day. The stormfront had covered the  
sky with low clouds and the rising sun lit the world with brilliant gold  
reflected from above and below. The windwagon's sails and lines and  
weathered planks glowed in the brief benediction of light in the few  
minutes before the sun was blocked by the ceiling of clouds and color  
flowed out of the world once again. The wind which followed this  
curtain closing was chill, as if it had blown down from the snowy peaks  
of the Bridle Range just visible as a dark blur on the northeastern  
horizon.  

Brawne Lamia and Martin Silenus joined the Consul on the aft deck, each  
nursing a cup of coffee from the galley. The wind whipped and tugged at  
the rigging.  

Brawne Lamia's thick mass of curls fluttered around her face like a dark  
nimbus.  

'Morning,' muttered Silenus, squinting out over his coffee cup at the  
wind-rippled Sea of Grass.  

'Good morning,' replied the Consul, amazed at how alert and refreshed he  
felt for not having slept at all the night before. 'We have a headwind,  
but the wagon still seems to be making decent time. We'll definitely be  
to the mountains before nightfall."  

'Hrrgnn,' commented Silenus and buried his nose in the coffee cup.  

'1 didn't sleep at all last night,' said Brawne Lamia, 'just for  
thinking about M. Weintraub's story. '  

'I don't think..." began the poet and then broke off  

as Weintraub came onto deck, his baby peering over the lip of an infant  
carrier sling on his chest.  

'Good morning, everyone,' said Weintraub, looking around and taking a  
deep breath. 'Mmm, brisk, isn't it?"  

'Fucking freezing,' said Silenus. 'North of the mountains it'll be even  
worse."  

'I think l'll go down to get a jacket,' said Lamia, but before she could  
move there came a single shrill cry from the deck below.  

'Blood!'  

There was, indeed, blood everywhere. Het Masteen's cabin was strangely  
neat - bed unslept in, travel trunk and other boxes stacked precisely in  
one corner, robe folded over a chair - except for the blood which  

covered great sections of the deck, bulkhead, and overhead. The six  

pilgrims crowded just inside the entrance, reluctant to go farther in.  
'I was passing on my way to the upper deck,' said Father Hoyt, his voice  
a strange monotone. 'The door was slightly ajar. I caught a glimpse  
of... the blood on the wall."  

'Is it blood?" demanded Martin Silenus.  
Brawn. Lamia stepped into the room, ran a hand through a thick smear on  
the bulkhead, and raised her fingers to her lips. 'It's blood." She  

looked around, walked to the wardrobe, looked briefly among the empty  
shelves and hangers, and then went to the small porthole.  
It was latched and bolted from the inside.  
Lenar Hoyt looked more ill than usual and staggered to a chair. 'Is he  

dead then?"  
'We don't know a damn thing except that Captain Masteen isn't in his  

room and a lot of blood/s,' said Lamia. She wiped her hand on her pant  
leg. 'The thing to do now is search the ship thoroughly."  
'Precisely,' said Colonel Kassad, 'and if we do not find the Captain?"  
Brawne Lamia opened the porthole. Fresh air dissipated the  

slaughterhouse smell of blood and brought in the rumble of the wheel and  
the rustle of grass under the hull. 'If we don't find Captain Masteen,'  
she  

said, 'then we assume that he either left the ship under his own will or  
was taken off."  
'But the blood..." began Father Hoyt.  

'Doesn't prove anything,' finished Kassad.  
'M. Lamia's correct. We don't know Masteen's blood type or genotype.  
Did anyone see or hear anything?"  

There was silence except for negative grunts and the shaking of heads.  

Martin Silenus looked around. 'Don't you people recognize the work of  
our friend the Shrike when you see it?"  
'We don't know that,' snapped Lamia. 'Maybe someone wanted us to think  

that it was the Shrike's doing."  
'That doesn't make sense,' said Hoyt, still gasping for air.  
'Nonetheless,' said Lamia, 'we'll search in twos. Who has weapons  

besides myself?."  

'I do,' said Colonel Kassad. 'I have extras if needed." 'No,' said  
Hoyt.  
The poet shook his head.  

Sol Weintraub had returned to the corridor with his child. Now he  

looked in again. 'I have nothing,' he said.  
'No,' said the Consul. He had returned the deathwand to Kassad when his  
shift ended two hours before first light.  

'All right,' said Lamia, 'the priest will come with me on the lower  
deck. Silenus, go with the Colonel. Search the mid-deck. M.  
Weintraub, you and the Consul check everything above. Look for anything  
out of the ordinary.  

Any sign of struggle."  
'One question,' said Silenus.  
'What?"  
'Who the hell elected you queen of the prom?"  
'I'm a private investigator,' said Lamia, leveling her gaze on the poet.  
Martin Silenus shrugged. 'Hoyt here is a priest of some forgotten  

religion. That doesn't mean we have to genuflect when he says Mass."  

'All right,' sighed Brawne Lamia. 'I'll give you a better reason." The  
woman moved so fast that the Consul  
almost missed the action in a blink. One second she was standing by the  

open port and in the next she was half* way across the stateroom,  
lifting Martin Silenus off the deck with one arm, her massive hand  
around the poet's thin neck. 'How about,' she said, 'that you do the  
logical  

thing because it's the logical thing to do?"  
'Gkkrgghh,' managed Martin Silenus.  
'Good,' said Lamia without emotion and dropped the poet to the deck.  

Silenus staggered a meter and almost sat on Father Hoyt.  

'Here,' said Kassad, returning with two small neural stunners. He  
handed one to Sol Weintraub. 'What do you have?" Kassad asked Lamia.  
The woman reached into a pocket of her loose tunic and produced an  

ancient pistol.  
Kassad looked at the relic for a moment and then nodded. 'Stay with  

your partner,' he said. 'Don't shoot at anything unless it's positively  
identified and unquestionably threatening."  
'That describes the bitch I plan to shoot,' said Silenus, still  

massaging his throat.  
Brawne Lamia took a half step toward the poet.  
Fedmahn Kassad said, 'Shut up. Let's get this over with." Silenus  

followed the Colonel out of the stateroom.  

Sol Weintraub approached the Consul, handed him the stunner. 'I don't  
want to hold this thing with Rachel.  
Shall we go up?"  
The Consul took the weapon and nodded.  
The windwagon held no further sign of Templar Voice of the Tree Het  

Masteen. After an hour of searching, the group met in the stateroom of  

the missing man. The blood there seemed darker and drier.  
'Is there a chance that we missed something?" said Father Hoyt. 'Secret  
passages? Hidden compartments?"  

'There's a chance,' said Kassad, 'but l swept the ship with heat and  
motion sensors. If there's anything else on board larger than a mouse,  
I can't find it."  

'If you had these sensors,' said Silenus, 'why the fuck did you have us  

crawling through bilge and byways for an hour?"  
'Because the right equipment or apparel can hide a man from a  
heat-'n'-beat search."  

'So, in answer to my question,' said Hoyt, pausing a second as a visible  
wave of pain passed through him, 'with the right equipment or apparel,  
Captain Masteen might be hiding in a secret compartment somewhere."  

'Possible but improbable,' said Brawne Lamia. 'My guess is that he's no  
longer aboard."  
'The Shrike,' said Martin Silenus in a disgusted tone.  

It was not a question.  
'Perhaps,' said Lamia. 'Colonel, you and the Consul were on watch  
through those four hours. Are you sure  

that you heard and saw nothing?"  
Both men nodded.  
'The ship was quiet,' said Kassad. 'I would have heard a struggle even  

before I went on watch."  
'And I didn't sleep after my watch,' said the Consul.  
'My room shared a bulkhead with Masteen's. I heard nothing."  
'Well,' said Silenus, 'we've heard from the two men who were creeping  

around in the dark with weapons when the poor shit was killed. They say  
they're innocent.  
Next case! '  

'If Masteen was killed,' said Kassad, 'it was with no deathwand. No  
silent modern weapon I know throws that much blood around. There were  
no gunshots heard -no bullet holes found- so I presume M. Lamia's  
automatic pistol is not suspect. If this is Captain Masteen's blood,  
then I would guess an edged weapon was used."  

'The Shrike/s an edged weapon,' said Martin Silenus.  

Lamia moved to the small stack of luggage. 'Debating isn't going to  
solve anything. Let's see if there's anything in Masteen's belongings."  

Father Hoyt raised a hesitant hand. 'That's... well, private, isn't  
it? I don't think we have the right."  

Brawne Lamia crossed her arms. 'Look, Father, if Masteen's dead, it  
doesn't matter to him. If he's still alive, looking through this stuff  
might give us some idea where he was taken. Either way, we have to try  
to find a clue."  

Hoyt looked dubious but nodded. In the end, there was little invasion  
of privacy. Masteen's first trunk held only a few changes of linen and  
a copy of Muir's Book of Life. The second bag held a hundred separately  
wrapped seedlings, flash-dried and nestled in moist soil.  

'Templars must plant at least a hundred offspring of the Eternal Tree on  
whatever. world they visit,' explained the Consul. 'The shoots rarely  
take, but it's a ritual."  

Browne Lamia moved toward the large metal box which had sat at the  
bottom of the pile.  

'Don't touch that!" snapped the Consul.  

'Why not?"  

'It's a MObius cube,' responded Colonel Kassad for the Consul. 'A  
carbon-carbon-shell set around a zero impedance containment field folded  
back on itself."  

'So?" said Lamia. 'MObius cubes seal artifacts and stuff in. They  
don't explode or anything."  

'No,' agreed the Consul, 'but what they contain may explode. May  
already have exploded, for that matter."  

'A cube that size could hold a kiloton nuclear explosion in check as  
long as it was boxed during the nanosecond of ignition,' added Fedmahn  
Kassad.  

Lamia scowled at the trunk. 'Then how do we know that something in  
there didn't kill Masteen?"  

Kassad pointed to a faintly glowing green strip along the trunk's only  
seam. 'It's sealed. Once unsealed, a MObius cube has to be reactivated  
at a place where containment fields can be generated. Whatever's in  
there didn't harm Captain Masteen."  

'So there's no way to tell?" mused Lamia.  

'I have a good guess,' said the Consul.  

The others looked at him. Rachel began to cry and Sol pulled a heating  
strip on a nursing pak.  

'Remember,' said the Consul, 'at Edge yesterday when M. Masteen made a  
big deal out of the cube? He  

talked about it as if it were a secret weapon?"  

'A weapon?" said Lamia.  

'Of course!" Kassad said suddenly. 'An erg!'  

'Erg?" Martin Silenus stared at the small crate. 'l thought ergs were  
those forcefield critters that Templars use on their treeships."  

'They are,' said the Consul. 'The things were found about three  
centuries ago living on asteroids around Aldebaran. Bodies about as big  
as a cat's spine, mostly a piezoelectric nervous system sheathed in  
silicon gristle, but they feed on... and manipulate... forcefields as  
large as those generated by small spinships."  

'So how do you get all that into such a little box?" asked Silenus,  
staring at the MObius cube. 'Mirrors?"  

'In a sense,' said Kassad. 'The thing's field would be damped ...  
neither starving nor feeding. Rather like cryogenic fugue for us. Plus  
this must be a small one. A cub, so to speak."  

Lamia ran her hand along the metal sheath. 'Templars control these  
things? Communicate with them?"  

'Yes,' said Kassad. 'No one is quite sure how. It's one of the  
Brotherhood secrets. But Het Masteen must have been confident that the  
erg would help him with..."  

'The Shrike,' finished Martin Silenus. 'The Templar thought that this  
energy imp would be his secret weapon when he faced the Lord of Pain."  
The poet laughed.  

Father Hoyt cleared his throat. 'The Church has accepted the Hegemony's  
ruling that... these creatures *.. ergs... are not sentient beings...  
and thus not candidates for salvation."  

'Oh, they're sentient, all right, Father,' said the Consul.  

'They perceive things far better than we could ever imagine. But if you  
meant intelligent... self-aware...  

then you're dealing with something along the lines of a smart  
grasshopper. Are grasshoppers candidates for salvation?"  

Hoyt said nothing. Brawne Lamia said, 'Well, evidently Captain Masteen  
thought this thing was going to be his salvation. Something went  

wrong." She looked around at the bloodstained bulkheads and at the  

drying stains on the deck. 'Let's get out of here."  
The windwagon tacked into increasingly strong winds as the storm  
approached from the northeast. Ragged banners of clouds raced white  
beneath the low, gray ceiling of stormfront. Grasses whipped and bent  
under gusts of cold wind. Ripples of lightning illuminated the horizon  

and were followed by rolls of thunder sounding like warning shots across  
the windwagon's bow. The pilgrims watched in silence until the first  
icy raindrops drove them below to the large stateroom in the stern.  

'This was in his robe pocket,' said Brawne Lamia, holding up a slip of  
paper with the number $ on it.  

'So Masteen would have told his story next,' muttered the Consul.  
Martin Silenus tilted his chair until his back touched the tall windows.  
Storm light made his satyr's features appear slightly demonic. 'There's  
another possibility,' he said. 'Perhaps someone who hasn't spoken yet  
had the fifth spot and killed the Templar to trade places."  

Lamia stared at the poet. 'That would have to be the  
Consul or me,' she said, her voice flat.  
Silenus shrugged.  
Brawne Lamia pulled another piece of paper from her tunic. 'I have  

number six. What would I have achieved? I go next anyway."  

'Then perhaps it's what Masteen would have said that needed to be  
silenced,' said the poet. He shrugged again.  
'Personally, I think the Shrike has begun harvesting us.  
Why did we think we'd be allowed to get to the Tombs when the thing's  

been slaughtering people halfway from here to Keats?"  
'This is different,' said Sol Weintraub. 'This is the  
Shrike Pilgrimage."  
,So?,  
In the silence that followed, the Consul walked to the windows.  

Wind-driven torrents of rain obscured the Sea and rattled the leaded  
panes. The wagon creaked and leaned heavily to starboard as it began  
another leg of its tack.  

'M. Lamia,' asked Colonel Kassad, 'do you want to tell your story now?"  

Lamia folded her arms and looked at the rain-streaked glass. 'No. Let's  
wait until we get off this damned ship. It stinks of death."  
The windwagon reached the port of Pilgrims' Rest in midafternoon but the  

storm and tired light made it feel  

like late evening to the weary passengers. The Consul had expected  
representatives from the Shrike Temple to meet them here at the  
beginning of the penultimate stage of their journey but Pilgrims' Rest  
appeared to the Consul to be as empty as Edge had been.  

The approach to the foothills and the first sight of the Bridle Range  
was as exciting as any !andfall and brought all six of the would-be  
pilgrims on deck despite the cold rain which continued to fall. The  
foothills were sere and sensuous, their brown curves and sudden  
upthrustings contrasting strongly with the verdant monochrome of the Sea  
of Grass. The nine-thousand-meter peaks beyond were only hinted at by  
gray and white planes soon intersected by low clouds, but even so  
truncated were powerful to behold. The snow line came down to a point  
just above the collection of burned-out hovels and cheap hotels which  
had been Pilgrims' Rest.  

'If they destroyed the tramway, we're finished,' muttered the Consul.  
The thought of it, forbidden until now, made his stomach turn over.  

'I see the first five towers,' said Colonel Kassad, using  

his powered glasses. 'They seem intact."  

'Any sign of a car?"  

'No... wait, yes. There's one in the gate at the station platform."  

'Any moving?" asked Martin Silenus, who obviously understood how  
desperate their situation would be if the  

tramway was not intact.  

'No."  

The Consul shook his head. Even in the worst weather with no  
passengers, the cars had been kept moving to keep the great cables  
flexed and free of ice.  

The six of them had their luggage on deck even before the windwagon  
reefed its sails and extended a gangplank.  

Each now wore a heavy coat against the elements - Kassad in FORCE-issue  
thermouflage cape, Brawne Lamia in a long garment called a trenchcoat  
for reasons long forgotten, Martin Silenus in thick furs which rippled  
now sable, now gray with the vagaries of wind, Father Hoyt in long black  
which made him more of a scarecrow figure than ever, Sol Weintraub in a  
thick  

goosedown jacket which covered him and the child, and the Consul in the  
thinning but serviceable greatcoat his wife had given him some decades  
before.  

'What about Captain Masteen's things?" asked Sol as they stood at the  
head of the gangplank. Kassad had gone ahead to reconnoiter the  
village.  

'I brought them up,' said Lamia. 'We'll take them with us."  
'It doesn't seem right somehow,' said Father Hoyt.  
'Just going on, I mean. There should be some... service.  
Some recognition that a man has died."  
'May have died,' reminded Lamia, easily lifting a forty-kilo backpack  

with one hand.  

Hoyt looked incredulous. 'Do you really believe that M. Masteen might  
be alive?"  
'No,' said Lamia. Snowflakes settled on her black hair.  
Kassad waved to them from the end of the dock and they carried their  

luggage off the silent windwagon. No one looked back.  
'Empty?" called Lamia as they approached the Colonel.  
The tall man's cloak was still fading from its gray  
and black chameleon mode.  
'Empty." 'Bodies?"  
'No,' said Kassad. He turned toward Sol and the Con sul. 'Did you get  

the things from the galley?"  
Both men nodded.  
'What things?" asked Silenus.  
'A week's worth of food,' said Kassad, turning to look up the hill  

toward the tramway station. For the first time the Consul noticed the  
long assault weapon in the crook of the Colonel's arm, barely visible  
under the cloak.  

'We're not sure if there are any provisions beyond this point."  
Will we be alive a week from now? thought the Consul.  
He said nothing.  
They ferried the gear to the station in two trips. Wind whistled  

through the open windows and shattered domes of the dark buildings. On  
the second trip, the Consul carried one end of Masteen's M6bius cube  
while Lunar Hoyt puffed and panted under the other end.  

'Why are we taking the erg thing with us?" gasped Hoyt as they reached  
the base of the metal stairway leading to the station. Rust streaked  
and spotted the platform like orange lichen.  

'I don't know,' said the Consul, gasping for breath himself.  
From the terminal platform they could see far out over the Sea of Grass.  

The windwagon sat where they had left it, sails reefed, a dark and  
lifeless thing. Snow squalls moved across the prairie and gave the  
illusion of whitecaps on the numberless stalks of high grass.  

'Get the material aboard,' called Kassad. 'I'11 see if the running gear  
can be reset from the operator's cabin up there."  

'Isn't it automatic?" asked Martin Silenus, his small head almost lost  
in thick furs. 'Like the windwagon?"  

'I don't think so,' said Kassad. 'Go on, I'll see if I can get it  
started up."  

'What if it leaves without you?" called Lamia at the Colonel's  
retreating back.  

'It won't."  

The interior of the tramcar was cold and bare except for metal benches  
in the forward compartment and a dozen rough bunks in the smaller, rear  
area. The car was big -at least eight meters long by five wide. The  
rear compartment was partitioned from the front cabin by a thin metal  
bulkhead with an opening but no door. A small commode took up a  
closet-sized corner of this aft compartment.  

Windows rising from waist height to the roof-line lined the forward  
compartment.  

The pilgrims heaped their luggage in the center of the wide floor and  
stomped around, waved their arms, or otherwise worked to stay warm.  
Martin Silenus lay full length on one of the benches, with only his feet  
and the top of his head emerging from fur. '1 forgot,' he said, 'how  
the fuck do you turn on the heat in this thing?"  

The Consul glanced at the dark lighting panels. 'It's electrical. It'll  
come on when the Colonel gets us moving."  

'If the Colonel gets us moving,' said Silenus.  

Sol Weintraub had changed Rachei's diaper. Now he bundled her up again  
in an infant's thermsuit and rocked her in his arms. 'Obviously l've  
never been here before,'  

he said. 'Both of you gentlemen have?"  

'Yeah,' said the poet.  

'No,' said the Consul. 'But I've seen pictures of the tramway."  

'Kassad said he returned to Keats once this way,' called Brawne Lamia  
from the other room.  

'I think ..." began Sol Weintraub and was interrupted by a great  
grinding of gears and a wild lurch as the long car rocked sickeningly  
and then swung forward under the suddenly moving cable. Everyone rushed  
to the window on the platform side.  

Kassad had thrown his gear aboard before climbing the long ladder to the  
operator's cabin. Now he appeared in the cabin's doorway, slid down the  
long ladder, and ran toward the car. The car was already passing beyond  
the loading area of the platform.  

'He isn't going to make it,' whispered Father Hoyt.  

Kassad sprinted the last ten meters with legs that looked impossibly  
long, a cartoon stick figure of a mall  

The tramcar slid out of the loading notch, swung free of the station.  
Space opened between the car and the station. It was eight meters to  
the rocks below. The platform deck was streaked with ice. Kassad ran  
full speed ahead even as the car pulled away.  

'Come on!" screamed Brawne Lamia. The others picked up the cry.  

The Consul looked up at sheaths of ice cracking and dropping away from  
the cable as the tramcar moved up and forward. He looked back. There  
was too much space. Kassad could never make it.  

Fedmahn Kassad was moving at an incredible speed when he reached the  
edge of the platform. The Consul was reminded for the second time of  
the Old Earth jaguar he had seen in a Lusus zoo. He half expected to  
see the Colone!'s feet slip on a patch of ice, the long legs flying out  
horizontal, the man failing silently to the snowy boulders below.  
Instead, Kassad seemed to fly for  

an endless moment, long arms extended, cape flying out behind. He  
disappeared behind the car.  

There came a thud, followed by a long minute when no one spoke or moved.  
They were forty meters high now, climbing toward the first tower. A  
second later Kassad became visible at the corner of the car, pulling  
himself along a series of icy niches and handholds in the metal.  

Brawne Lamia flung open the cabin door. Ten hands helped pull Kassad  
inside.  

'Thank God,' said Father Hoyt.  

The Colonel took a deep breath and smiled grimly.  

'There was a dead man's brake. I had to rig the lever with a sandbag. I  
didn't want to bring the car back for a second try."  

Martin Silenus pointed to the rapidly approaching support tower and the  
ceiling of clouds just beyond. The cable stretched upward into  
oblivion. 'I guess we're  

crossing the mountains now whether we want to or not." 'How long to make  
the crossing?" asked Hoyt.  

'Twelve hours. A little less perhaps. Sometimes the operators would  
stop the cars if the wind rose too high or the ice got too bad."  

'We won't be stopping on this trip,' said Kassad.  

'Unless the cable's breached somewhere,' said the poet. 'Or we hit a  
snag."  

'Shut up,' said Lamia. 'Who's interested in heating some dinner?"  

'Look,' said the Consul.  

They moved to the forward windows. The tram rose a hundred meters above  
the last brown curve of foothills.  

Kilometers below and behind they caught a final glimpse of the station,  
the haunted hovels of Pilgrims' Rest, and the motionless windwagon.  

Then snow and thick cloud enveloped them.  

The tramcar had no real cooking facilities but the aft bulkhead offered  
a cold box and a microwave for reheating. Lamia and Weintraub combined  
various meats and vegetables from the windwagon's galley to produce a  
passable stew. Martin Silenus had brought along wine bottles from the  
Benares and the windwagon  

and he chose a Hyperion burgundy to go with the stew.  

They were nearly finished with their dinner when the gloom pressing  
against the windows lightened and then lifted altogether. The Consul  
turned on his bench to see the sun suddenly reappear, filling the  
tramcar with a transcendent golden light.  

There was a collective sigh from the group. It had seemed that darkness  
had fallen hours before, but now, as they rose above a sea of clouds  
from which rose an island chain of mountains, they were treated to a  
brilliant sunset. Hyperion's sky had deepened from its daytime glaucous  
glare to the bottomless lapis !azuli of evening while a red-gold sun  
ignited cloud towers and great summits of ice and rock. The Consul  
looked around. His fellow pilgrims, who had seemed gray and small in  
the dim light of half a minute earlier, now glowed in the gold of  
sunset.  

Martin Silenus raised his glass. 'That's better, by God."  

The Consul looked up at their line of travel, the massive cable  
dwindling to threadlike thinness far ahead and then to nothing at all.  
On a summit several kilometers beyond, gold light glinted on the next  
support tower.  

'One hundred and ninety-two pylons,' said Silenus in a singsong tour  
guide's bored tones. 'Each pylon is constructed of duralloy and  
whiskered carbon and stands eighty-three meters high."  

'We must be high,' said Brawne Lamia in a low voice.  

'The high point of the ninety-six-kilometer tramcar voyage lies above  
the summit of Mount Dryden, the fifth highest peak in the Bridle Range,  
at nine thousand two hundred forty-six meters,' droned on Martin  
Silenus.  

Colonel Kassad looked around. 'The cabin's pressur ized. I felt the  
change-over some time ago."  

'Look,' said Brawne Lamia.  

The sun had been resting on the horizon line of clouds for a long  
moment. Now it dipped below, seemingly igniting the depths of storm  
cloud from beneath and casting a panoply of colors along the entire  
western edge of the world. Snow cornices and glaze ice still glowed  
along the western side of the peaks, which rose a  

kilometer or more above the rising tramcar. A few brighter stars  
appeared in the deepening dome of sky.  

The Consul turned to Brawne Lamia. 'Why don't you tell your story now,  

M. Lamia? We'll want to sleep later, before arriving at the Keep."  

Lamia sipped the last of her wine. 'Does everyone want to hear it now?"  

Heads nodded in the roseate twilight. Martin Silenus shrugged.  

'All right,' said Brawne Lamia. She set down her empty glass, pulled  
her feet up on the bench so that her elbows rested on her knees, and  
began her tale.  

THE DETECTIVE'S TALE: The Long Good-Bye  

I knew the case was going to be special the minute that he walked into  
my office. He was beautiful. By that I don't mean effeminate or  
'pretty' in the male-model, HTV-star mode, merely... beautiful.  

He was a short man, no taller than I, and I was born and raised in  
Lusus's 1.3-g field. It was apparent in a second that my visitor was  
not from Lusus - his compact form was well proportioned by Web  
standards, athletic but thin. His face was a study in purposeful  
energy: low brow, sharp cheekbones, compact nose, solid jaw, and a wide  
mouth that suggested both a sensuous side and a stubborn streak. His  
eyes were large and hazel-colored.  

He looked to be in his late twenties standard.  

Understand, I didn't itemize all this the moment he walked in. My first  
thought was, Is this a client? My  

second thought was, Shit, this guy'$ beautiful.  

'M. Lamia?" 'Yeah."  

'M. Brawne Lamia of AllWeb Investigations?" 'Yeah."  

He looked around as if he didn't quite believe it. I understood the  
look. My office is on the twenty-third level of an old industrial hive  
in the Old Digs section of Iron Pig on Lusus. I have three big windows  
that look  

out on Service Trench 9 where it's always dark and always drizzling  
thanks to a massive filter drip from the Hive above. The view is mostly  

of abandoned automated loading docks and rusted girders.  

What the hell, it's cheap. And most of my clients call rather than show  
up in person.  

'May I sit down?" he asked, evidently satisfied that a bona fide  
investigatory agency would operate out of such a slum.  

'Sure,' I said and waved him to a chair. 'M... ah?" 'Johnny,' he said.  

He didn't look like a first-name type to me. Something about him  
breathed money. It wasn't his clothes - common enough casuals in black  
and gray, although the fabric was better than average - it was just a  
sense that the guy had class. There was something about his accent.  

l'm good at placing dialects- it helps in this profession - but I  
couldn't place this guy's homeworld, much less local region.  

'How can I help you, Johnny?" I held out the bottle of Scotch I had been  
ready to put away as he entered.  

Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought 1 wanted him to drink from  
the bottle. Hell, I have more class than that. There are paper cups  
over by the water cooler. 'M. Lamia,' he said, the cultivated accent  
still  

bugging me by its elusiveness, 'I need an investigator." 'That's what I  
do."  

He paused. Shy. A lot of my clients are hesitant to tell me what the  
job is. No wonder, since ninety-five percent of my work is divorce and  
domestic stuff. I waited him out.  

'It's a somewhat sensitive matter,' he said at last.  

'Yeah, M .  .  .  ah, Johnny, most of my work falls under that category.  
I'm bonded with UniWeb and everything having to do with a client falls  
under the Privacy Protection Act. Everything is confidential, even the  
fact that we're talking now. Even if you decide not to hire me." That  
was basic bullshit since the authorities could get at my files in a  
moment if they ever wanted to, but I sensed that I had to put this guy  
at ease somehow.  

God, he was beautiful.  

'Uh-huh,' he said and glanced around again. He leaned forward. 'M.  
Lamia, I would want you to investigate a murder."  

This got my attention. I'd been reclining with my feet on the desk; now  
I sat up and leaned forward. 'A mur der? Are you sure? What about the  
cops?"  

'They aren't involved."  

'That's not possible,' I said with the sinking feeling that I was  
dealing with a loony rather than a client. 'It's a crime to conceal a  
murder from the authorities." What I thought was: Are you the murderer,  

Johnny?  

He smiled and shook his head. 'Not in this case." 'What do you mean?"  

'1 mean, M. Lamia, that a murder was committed but that the police- 
local and Hegemony- have neither knowledge of it nor jurisdiction over  
it."  

'Not possible,' I said again. Outside, sparks from an industrial  
welder's torch cascaded into the trench along with the rusty drizzle.  
'Explain."  

'A murder was committed outside of the Web. Outside of the  
Protectorate. There were no local authorities."  

That made sense. Sort of. For the life of me, though, I couldn't  
figure where he was talking about. Even the Outback settlements and  
colonial worlds have cops. On board some sort of spaceship? Uh-uh. The  
Interstellar Transit Authority has jurisdiction there.  

'I see,' I said. It'd been some weeks since l'd had a case. 'All  
right, tell me the details."  

'And the conversation will be confidential even if you  

do not take the case?"  

'Absolutely."  

'And if you do take the case, you will report only to me?"  

'Of course."  

My prospective client hesitated, rubbing his fingers against his chin.  
His hands were exquisite. 'All right,' he said at last.  

'Start at the beginning,' 1 said. 'Who was murdered?"  

Johnny sat up straight, an attentive schoolboy. There was no doubting  
his sincerity. He said, 'I was."  

It took ten minutes to get the story out of him. When he was finished,  
I no longer thought he was crazy. I was. Or I would be if I took the  
job.  

Johnny - his real name was a code of digits, letters, and cipher bands  
longer than my arm - was a cybrid.  

I'd heard about cybrids. Who hasn't? I once accused my first husband  
of being one. But I never expected to be sitting in the same room with  
one. Or to find it so damned attractive.  

Johnny was an AI. His consciousness or ego or whatever you want to call  
it floated somewhere in the megadatasphere datumplane of TechnoCore.  
Like everyone else except maybe the current Senate CEO or the Als'  
garbage removers, I had no idea where the TechnoCore was. The Als had  
peacefully seceded from human control more than three centuries ago - 

before my time- and while they continued to serve the Hegemony as allies  
by advising the All Thing, monitoring the dataspheres, occasionally  
using their predictive abilities to help us avoid major mistakes or  
natural disasters, the TechnoCore generally went about its own  
indecipherable and distinctly nonhuman business in privacy.  

Fair enough, it seemed to me.  

Usually Als do business with humans and human machines via the  
datasphere. They can manufacture an interactive holo if they need to - 
I remembered during the Maui-Covenant incorporation, the TechnoCore  
ambassadors at the treaty signing looked suspiciously like the old holo  
star Tyrone Bathwaite.  

Cybrids are a whole different matter. Tailored from human genetic  
stock, they are far more human in appearance and outward behavior than  
androids are allowed to be. Agreements between the TechnoCore and the  
Hegemony allow only a handful of cybrids to be in existence.  

I looked at Johnny. Fom an AI's perspective, the beautiful body and  
intriguing personality sitting across the desk from me must be merely  
another appendage, a remote, somewhat more complex but otherwise no more  
important than any one of ten thousand such sensors, manipulators,  
autonomous units, or other remotes that an AI might use in a day's work.  
Discarding 'Johnny' probably would create no more concern in an AI than  
clip ping a fingernail would bother me.  

What a waste, I thought.  

'A cybrid,' I said.  

'Yes. Licensed. I have a Worldweb user's visa."  

'Good,' I heard myself say. 'And someone... murdered your cybrid and  
you want me to f'md out who?"  

'No,' said the young man. He had brownish-red curls.  

Like his accent, the hairstyle eluded me. It seemed archaic somehow,  
but I had seen it somewhere. 'It was not merely  

this body that was murdered. My assailant murdered me." 'You?" 'Yes."  

'You as in the... ah... AI itself?."  

'Precisely."  

I didn't get it. Als can't die. Not as far as anyone in the Web knew.  
'I don't get it,' I said.  

Johnny nodded, 'Unlike a human personality which can .  .  .  I believe  
the consensus is .  .  .  be destroyed at death, my own consciousness  
cannot be terminated.  

There was, however, as a result of the assault, an...  

interruption. Although I possessed... ah... shall we say duplicate  

recordings of memories, personality, et cetera, there was a loss. Some  
data were destroyed in the attack. In that sense, the assailant  
committed murder."  

'I see,' I lied. I took a breath. 'What about the AI authorities ...  
if there are such things ... or the Hegemony cybercops? Wouldn't they  
be the ones to go tO?"  

'For personal reasons,' said the attractive young man whom I was trying  
to see as a cybrid, 'it is important - even necessary - that I do not  
consult these sources."  

I raised an eyebrow. This sounded more like one of my regular clients.  

'I assure you,' he said, 'it is nothing illegal. Nor unethical. Merely  
.  .  .  embarrassing to me on a level which I cannot explain."  
I folded my arms across my chest. 'Look, Johnny.  
This is a pretty half-assed story. I mean, I only have your word that  

you're a cybrid. You might be a scam artist for all I know."  

He looked surprised. 'I had not thought of that. How would you like me  
to show you that I am what I say I am?"  
I did not hesitate a second. 'Transfer a million marks to my checking  

account in TransWeb,' I said.  
Johnny smiled. At the same instant my phone rang and the image of a  
harried man with the TransWeb code block floating behind him said,  
'Excuse me, M. Lamia, but we wondered with a... ah... deposit of this  

size if you would be interested in investigating our long-term savings  
options or our mutual assured market possibilities?"  
'Later,' I said.  
The bank manager nodded and vanished.  
'That could've been a simulation,' I said.  
Johnny's smile was pleasant. 'Yes, but even that  
would be a satisfactory demonstration, would it not?" 'Not necessarily."  
He shrugged. 'Assuming I am what I say I am, will you take the case?"  
'Yeah." I sighed. 'One thing though. My fee isn't a million marks. I  

get five hundred a day plus expenses."  
The cybrid nodded. 'Does that mean you will take the case?"  
I stood up, put on my hat, and pulled an old coat from a rack by the  

window. I bent over the lower desk drawer, smoothly sliding my father's  
pistol into a coat pocket.  
'Let's go,' I said.  

'Yes,' said Johnny. 'Go where?"  

'I want to see where you were murdered."  

Stereotype has it' that someone born on Lusus hates to leave the Hive  
and suffers from instant agoraphobia if we visit anything more open to  
the elements that a shopping mall. The truth of it is, most of my  
business comes from ... and leads to ... offworld. Skiptracing  
deadbeats who use the farcaster system and a change of  

identity to try to start over. Finding philandering spouses who think  
rendezvousing on a different planet will keep them safe from discovery.  
Tracking down missing kids and absent parents.  

Still, I was surprised to the point of hesitating a second when we  
stepped through the Iron Pig Concourse far-caster onto an empty stone  
plateau which seemed to stretch to infinity. Except for the bronze  
rectangle of the farcaster portal behind us, there was no sign of  
civilization anywhere. The air smelled like rotten eggs. The sky was a  
yellow-brown cauldron of sick-looking clouds.  

The ground around us was gray and scaled and held no visible life, not  
even lichen. I had no idea how far away the horizon really was, but we  
felt high and it looked far, and there was no hint of trees, shrubs, or  
animal life in the distance either.  

'Where the hell are we?" I asked. I had been sure that I knew all of  
the worlds in the Web.  

'Madhya,' said Johnny, pronouncing it something like 'Mudye."  

'I never heard of it,' I said, putting one hand in my pocket and finding  
the pearl-handled grip of Dad's automatic.  

'It's not officially in the Web yet,' said the cybrid.  

'Officially it's a colony of Parvati. But it's only light-minutes from  
the FORCE base there and the farcaster connections have been set up  
before Madhya joins the Protectorate."  

I looked at the desolation. The hydrogen-sulfide stench was making me  
ill and I was afraid it was going to ruin my suit. 'Colonies? Nearby?"  

'No. There are several small cities on the other side of the planet."  

'What's the nearest inhabited area?"  

'N.nda Devi. A town of about three hundred people.  

It's more than two thousand kilometers to the south." 'Then why put a  
farcaster portal here?"  

'Potential mining sites,' said Johnny. He gestured toward the gray  
plateau. 'Heavy metals. The consortium authorized over a hundred  
farcaster portals in this hemisphere for easy access once the  
development began."  

'Okay,' ! said. 'It's a good place for a murder. Why'd you come  

here?"  
' I don't know. It was part of the memory section lost." 'Who'd you  
come with?" 'I don't know that either." 'What do you know?"  

The young man put his graceful hands in his pockets.  
'Whoever... whatever... attacked me used a type of  
weapon known in the Core as an AIDS II virus." 'What'sthat?"  
'AIDS II was a human plague disease back long before the Hegira,' said  

Johnny." It disabled the immune system.  
This... virus... worksthesamewith anal. Inlessthana second it  

infiltrates security systems and turns lethal phagocyte programs against  
the host... against the AI itself. Against me."  
'So you couldn't have contracted this virus naturally?" Johnny smiled.  

'Impossible. l?s comparable to asking a shooting victim if he might not  

have fallen on the bullets."  
I shrugged." Look, if you want a datumnet or AI expert, you've come to  
the wrong woman. Other than accessing the sphere like twenty billion  
other chumps, I know zilch about the ghost world." I used the old term  
to see if it would get a rise out of him.  

'I know,' said Johnny, still equable. 'That's not what I want you to  
do."  
'What do you want me to do?"  
'Find out who brought me here and killed me. And why."  

'All right. Why do you think this is where the murder took place?"  
'Because this is where I regained control of my cybrid when I was...  
reconstituted."  

'You mean your cybrid was incapacitated while the  
virus destroyed you?"  
'Yes."  
'And how long did that last?"  
'My death? Almost a minute before my reserve persona could be  

activated."  
I laughed. I couldn't help myself.  
'What is amusing, M. Lamia?"  
'Your concept of death,' I said.  

The hazel eyes looked sad. 'Perhaps it is amusing to you, but you have  
no idea what a minute of... disconnection...  
means to an element of the TechnoCore.  

It is eons of time and information. Millennia of non-communication."  
'Yeah,' I said, able to hold back my own tears without too much effort.  
'So what did your body, your cybrid do  

while you were changing personae tapes or whatever?" '1 presume it was  
comatose."  
'It can't handle itself autonomously?"  
'Oh, yes, but not when there's a general systems failure."  
'So where did you come to?"  

'Pardon me?"  
'When you reactivated the cybrid, where was it?" Johnny nodded in  
understanding. He pointed to a boulder less than five meters from the  
farcaster. 'Lying there."  

'Oh this side or the other side?"  
'The other side."  
I went over and examined the spot. No blood. No notes. No murder  

weapons left lying about. Not even a footprint or indication that  
Johnny's body had lain there for that eternity of a minute. A police  
forensics team might have read volumes into the microscopic and biotic  
clues left there, but all I could see was hard rock.  

'If your memory's really gone,' I said, 'how do you  
know someone else came here with you?"  
'I accessed the farcaster records."  
'Did you bother to check the mystery person or person's name on the  

universal card charge?"  
'We both farcast on my card,' said Johnny.  
'Just one other person?" 'Yes."  
I nodded. Farcaster records would solve every inter-world crime if the  

portals were true teleportation; the transport data record could have  
re-created the subject down to the last gram and follicle. Instead, a  
farcaster essentially is just a crude hole ripped in space/time by a  
phased singularity. If the farcaster criminal doesn't use  

his or her own card, the only data we get are origination and  
destination.  

'Where'd you two farcast from?" I asked.  

'Tau Ceti Center."  

'You have the portal code?"  

'Of course."  

'Let's go there and finish this conversation,' I said.  

'This place stinks to high heaven."  

TC, the age-old nickname for Tau Ceti Center, is certainly the most  
crowded world in the Web. Besides its population of five billion people  
scrabbling for room on less than half the land area of Old Earth, it has  
an orbital ring ecology that is home for half a billion more. In  
addition to being the capital of the Hegemony and home of the Senate,  
TC2 is the business nexus for Webtrade.  

Naturally the portal number Johnny had found brought us to a  
six-hundred-portal terminex in one of the biggest spires in New London,  
one of the oldest and largest city sections.  

'Hell,' I said, 'let's get a drink."  

There was a choice of bars near the terminex and I picked one that was  
relatively quiet: a simulated 'ship's tavern, dark, cool, with plenty of  
fake wood and brass. I ordered a beer. I never drink the hard stuff or  
use Flashback when on a case. Sometimes I think that need for  
self-discipline is what keeps me in the business.  

Johnny also ordered a beer, a dark, German brew bottled on Renaissance  
Vector. I found myself wondering what vices a cybrid might have. I  
said:  

'What else did you find out before coming to see me?" The young man  
opened his hands. 'Nothing."  

'Shit,' I said reverently. 'This is a joke. With all the powers of an  
AI at your disposal, you can't trace your cybrid's whereabouts and  
actions for a few days prior to your... accident?"  

'No." Johnny sipped his beer. 'Rather, I could but there are important  
reasons why I. do not want my fellow Als to find me investigating."  

'You suspect one of them?"  

Instead of answering, Johnny handed me a flimsy of his universal card  
purchases. 'The blackout caused by my murder left five standard days  
unaccounted for.  

Here are the card charges for that time."  

'I thought you said you were only disconnected for a minute."  

Johnny scratched his cheek with one finger. 'I was lucky to lose only  
five days' worth of data,' he said.  

I waved over the human waiter and ordered another beer. 'Look,' I said,  
'Johnny... whoever you are, VII never be able to get an angle on this  
case unless I know more about you and your situation. Why would someone  
want to kill you if they know you'll be reconstituted or whatever the  
hell it is?"  

'I see two possible motives,' said Johnny over his beer.  
I nodded. 'One would be to create just the memory loss they succeeded  
in getting,' I said. 'That would suggest that, whatever it was they  

wanted you to forget, it'd occurred or come to your attention in the  
past week or so. What's the second motive?"  
'To send me a message,' said Johnny. '1 just don't know what it is. Or  

from whom."  
'Do you know who would want to kill you?"  
'No."  
'No guesses at all?"  
'None."  
'Most murders,' I said, 'are acts of sudden, mindless rage committed by  

someone the victim knows well.  

Family. A friend or lover. A majority of the premeditated ones are  
usually carried out by someone close to the victim."  
Johnny said nothing. There was something about his face that I found  

incredibly attractive - a sort of masculine strength combined with a  
feminine sense of awareness.  
Perhaps it was the eyes.  
'Do Als have families?" I asked. 'Feuds? Squabbles?  

Lovers' spats?"  
'No." He smiled slightly. 'There are quasi-family arrangements, but  
they share none of the requirements of emotion or responsibility that  
human families exhibit.  

AI "families" are primarily convenient code groups for 
showing where  
certain processing trends originated."  
350.  

'So you don't think another AI attacked you?"  
'It's possible." Johnny rotated his glass in his hands. 'I just do not  
see why they would attack me through my cybrid."  

'Easier access?"  

'Perhaps* But it complicates things for the assailant.  

An attack in datumplane would have been infinitely more lethal. Also, I  
do fail to see any motive for another AI. It makes no sense. I'm a  
threat to no one."  

'Why do you have a cybrid, Johnny? Maybe if I understood your role in  
things, I could get a motive*'  

He picked up a pretzel and played with it. 'I have a cybrid... in some  
ways I am a cybrid, because my...  

function... is to observe and react to human beings. In a sense, I was  
human once myself."  

I frowned and shook my head. So far nothing he'd said had made sense*  

'You've heard of personality retrieval projects?" he asked.  

'No."  

'A standard year ago, when the FORCE sims re-created the personality of  
General Horace Glennon-Height to see what made him such a brilliant  
general? It was in all  

the news*'  

'Yeah."  

'Well, I am... or was... an earlier and much more complicated  
retrieval project. My core persona was based on a pre-Hegira Old Earth  
poet. Ancient. Born late eighteenth century Old Calendar."  

'How the hell can they reconstruct a personality that lost in time?"  

'Writings,' said Johnny* 'His letters. Diaries. Critical biographies.  
Testimony of friends. But mostly through his verse. The sim re-creates  
the environment, plugs in the known factors, and works backward from the  
creative products. Voild - a persona core. Crude at first but, by the  
time I came into being, relatively refined. Our first attempt was a  
twentieth-century poet named Ezra Pound. Our persona was opinionated to  
the point of absurdity, prejudiced beyond rationality, and functionally  
insane. It took a year of tinkering before we  

discovered that the persona was accurate; it was the man who had been  
nuts. A genius but nuts'  

'And then what?" I said. 'They build your personality around a dead  
poet. Then what?"  

'This becomes the template upon which the AI is grown,' said Johnny.  
'The cybrid allows me to carry out  

my role in the datumplane community."  

'As poet?"  

Johnny smiled again. 'More as poem,' he said.  
'A poem?"  
'An ongoing work of art... but not in the human sense* A puzzle  

perhaps. A variable enigma which occasionally offers unusual insights  
into more serious lines of analysis."  
'I don't get it,' I said.  

'It probably does not matter. I very much doubt if my  
* . . purpose... was the cause of the assault*' 'What do you think  
was the cause?" 'I have no idea."  

I felt us closing a circle. 'All right,' I said. 'I'11 try to find out  
what you were doing and who you were with during these lost five days.  
Is there anything besides the credit flimsy that you can think of to  
help?"  

Johnny shook his head. 'You know, of course, why it is important for me  
to know the identity and motive of my assailant?"  
'Sure,' I said, 'they might try it again."  

'Precisely."  
'How can I get hold of you if I need to?" Johnny passed me an access  
chip.  

'A secure line?" ! said.  
' Very. '  
'Okay,' I said, 'I'11 get back to you if and when I get some  

information."  
We moved out of the bar and toward the terminex. He was moving away  
when I took three quick steps and grabbed his arm. It was the first  

time that I had touched him. 'Johnny. What's the name of the Old Earth  
poet  
they resurrected..."  
'Retrieved."  
'Whatever. The one they built your AI persona on?"  
The attractive cybrid hesitated. 1 noticed that his eyelashes were very  

long. 'How can it be important?" he asked.  
'Who knows what's important?"  
He nodded. 'Keats,' he said. 'Born in A.D. 1795. Died of  

tuberculosis in 1821. John Keats."  
Following someone through a series of farcaster changes is damn near  

impossible. Especially if you want to remain undetected. The Web cops  
can do it, given about fifty agents assigned to the task, plus some  
exotic and damned expensive high-tech toys, not to mention the  
cooperation of the Transit Authority. For a solo, the task is almost  
impossible.  

Still, it was fairly important for me to see where my new client was  
headed.  

Johnny did not look back as he crossed the terminex plaza. I moved to a  
nearby kiosk and watched through my pocket-sized imager as he punched  
codes on a manual diskey, inserted his card, and stepped through the  
glowing rectangle.  

The use of the manual diskey probably meant that he was headed for a  
general access portal since private 'caster codes are usually imprinted  
on eyes-only chips.  

Great. I'd narrowed his destination down to approximately two million  
portals on a hundred and fifty-some Web worlds and half that many moons.  

With one hand I pulled the red 'lining' out of my overcoat while I hit  
replay on the imager, watching through the eyepiece as it magnified the  
diskey sequence.  

I tugged out a red cap to go with my new red jacket and pulled the brim  
low over my face. Moving quickly across the plaza, I queried my comlog  
about the nine-digit transfer code I'd seen on the imager. I knew the  
first three digits meant the world of Tsingtao-Hsishuang Parma -I'd  
memorized all the planetary prefixes - and was told an instant later  
that the portal code led to a residential district in the First  
Expansion city of Wansiehn.  

I hurried to the first open booth and 'cast there, stepping out onto a  
small terminex plaza paved in worn brick. Ancient oriental shops leaned  
against one  

another, caves of their pagoda roofs hanging over narrow side streets.  
People thronged the plaza and stood in doorways and, while most of those  
in sight were obviously descendants of the Long Flight exiles who  
settled THP, many were offworlders. The air smelled of alien  
vegetation, sewage, and cooking rice.  

'Damn,' I whispered. There were three other farcaster portals there and  
none were in constant use. Johnny could have farcast out immediately.  

Instead of 'casting back to Lusus, I spent a few minutes checking the  
plaza and side streets. By this time the melanin pill I'd swallowed had  
worked and I was a young black woman - or man, it was hard to tell in my  
trendy red balloon jacket and polarized visor, strolling idly while  
taking pictures with my tourist imager.  

The trace pellet I'd dissolved in Johnny's second German beer had had  
more than enough time to work. The UV-positive microspores were almost  
hanging in the air by now - I could almost follow the trail of  
exhalations he had left. Instead, I found a bright yellow handprint on  
a dark wall (bright yellow to my especially fitted visor of course,  

invisible out of the UV spectrum) and then followed the trail of vague  
blotches where saturated clothing had touched market stalls or stone.  

Johnny was eating in a Cantonese restaurant less than two blocks from  
the terminex plaza. The frying food smelled delicious but I restrained  
myself from entering - checking prices in alley bookstalls and haggling  
in the market for almost an hour before he finished, returned to the  
plaza, and farcast out. This time he used a chip code - a private  
portal, certainly, possibly a private home - and I two took chances by  
using my pilot-fish card to follow him. Two chances because first the  
card is totally illegal and would someday cost me my license if caught - 
less than likely if I kept using Daddy Silva's obscenely expensive but  
aesthetically perfect shapechanger chips - and, second, I ran a better  
than even chance of ending up in the living room of Johnny's house ...  
never an easy situation to talk one's way out of.  

It was not his living room. Even before I'd located the  

street signs I recognized the familiar extra tug of gravity, the dim,  
bronze light, the scent of oil and ozone in the air, and knew I was home  
on Lusus.  

Johnny had 'cast into a medium-security private residential tower in one  
of the Bergson Hives. Perhaps that was why he'd chosen my agency- we  
were almost neighbors, less than six hundred klicks apart.  

My cybrid was not in sight. I walked purposefully so as not to alert  
any security vids programmed to respond to loitering. There was no  
residents' directory, no numbers or names on the apartment doorways, and  
no listings accessible by comlog. I guessed that there were about  
twenty thousand residential cubbies in East Bergson Hive.  

The telltales were fading as the spore soup died, but 1 checked only two  
of the radial corridors before I found a trail. Johnny lived far out on  
a glass-floored wing above a methane lake. His palmlock showed a  
faintly glowing handprint. I used my cat-burglar tools to take a  
reading of the lock and then I 'cast home.  

All in all, I'd watched my man go out for Chinese food and then go home  
for the night. Enough accomplished for one day.  

BB Surbringer was my Al expert. BB worked in Hegemony Flow Control  
Records and Statistics and spent most of his life reclining on a  
free-fall couch with half a dozen microleads running from his skull  
while he communed with other bureaucrats in datumplane. I'd known him  
in college when he was a pure cyberpuke, a twentieth-generation hacker,  
cortically shunted when he was twelve standard. His real name was  
Ernest but he'd earned the nickname BB when he went out with a friend of  
mine named Shayla Toyo. Shayla'd seen him naked on their second date  
and had laughed for a solid half hour: Ernest was - and is - almost two  
meters tall but masses less than fifty kilos. Shayla said that he had a  
butt like two BBs and - like most cruel things do - the nickname stuck.  

I visited him in one of the windowless worker monoliths on TC2. No  
cloud towers for BB and his ilk.  

'So, Brawne,' he said, 'how come you're getting information-literate in  

your old age? You're too old to get a real job."  

'I just want to know about-Als, BB."  

'Only one of the most complex topics in the known universe,' he sighed  
and looked longingly at his disconnected neural shunt and metacortex  
leads.  

Cyberpukes never come down, but civil servants are required to dismount  
for lunch. BB was like most cyberpukes in that he never felt  
comfortable exchanging information when he wasn't riding a data wave.  
'So what do you want to know?" he said.  

'Why did the Als drop out?" I had to start somewhere.  

BB made a convoluted gesture with his hands. 'They said they had  
projects which were not compatible with total immersion in Hegemony - 
read human - affairs.  

Truth is, nobody knows."  

'But they're still around. Still managing things?" 'Sure. The system  
couldn't run without them. You know that, Brawne. Even the All Thing  
couldn't work without AI management of the real-time Schwarzschild  
patterning..."  

'Okay,' I said, cutting him off before he lapsed into cyberpukese, 'but  
what are their "other projects"?"  

'No one knows. Branner and Swayze up at ArtIntel Corp think that the  
Als are pursuing the evolution of consciousness on a galactic scale. We  
know they have their own probes out far deeper into the Outback than..."  

'What about cybrids?"  

'Cybrids?" BB sat up and looked interested for the first time. 'Why do  
you mention cybrids?"  

'Why are you surprised that I mentioned them, BB?" He absently rubbed  
his shunt socket. 'Well, first of all, most people forget they exist.  
Two centuries ago it was all alarmism and pod people taking over and all  
that, but now nobody thinks about them. Also, I just ran across an  
anomaly advisory yesterday that said that cybrids were disappearing."  

'Disappearing?" It was my turn to sit up.  

'You know, being phased out. The Als used to maintain  

about a thousand licensed cybrids in the Web. About half of them based  
right here on TC2. Last week's census showed about two thirds of  
those'd been recalled in the past month or so."  

'What happens when an AI recalls its cybrid?"  

'I dunno. They're destroyed, I suppose. AIs don't like to waste  
things, so I imagine the genetic material's recycled somehow."  

'Why are they being recycled?"  
'Nobody knows, Brawne. But then most of us don't  
know why the AIs do most of the things they do."  
'Do experts see them - the AIs - as a threat?"  
'Are you kidding? Six hundred years ago, maybe. Two centuries ago the  

Secession made us leery. But if the things wanted to hurt humanity,  
they could're done it long before this. Worrying about Als turning on  
us is about as productive as worrying that farm animals are going to  
revolt."  

'Except the Als are smarter than us,' I said.  
'Yeah, well, there is that."  
'BB, have you heard of personality retrieval projects?" 'Like the  

Glennon-Height thing? Sure. Everyone has.  
I even worked on one at Reichs University a few years  
ago. But they're passe. No one's doing them anymore." 'Why's that?"  
'Jesus, you don't know shit about anything, do you, Brawne? The  

personality retrieval projects were all washouts. Even with the best  
sim control... they got the FORCE OCS:HTN network involved... you  
can't factor all variables successfully. The persona template becomes  
self-aware .  .  .  I don't mean just self-aware, like you and me, but  
self-aware that it's an artificially self-aware persona - and that leads  
to terminal Strange Loops and nonharmonic labyrinths that go straight to  
Escher-space."  

'Translate,' I said.  
BB sighed and glanced at the blue and gold time band on the wall. Five  
minutes and his mandatory lunch hour was over. He could rejoin the real  

world. 'Translated,' he said, 'the retrieved personality breaks down.  
Goes crazy. Psycho City. Bugfuck."  
'All of them?"  
'All of them."  
'But the Als are still interested in the process?"  
'Oh, yeah? Who says? They've never done one. All the retrieval  

efforts I've ever heard of were human-run...  

mostly botched university projects. Brain-dead academics spending  
fortunes to bring back dead academic brains."  
I forced a smile. 'There were three minutes until he could plug back  

in. 'Were all the retrieved personalities given cybrid remotes?"  
'Uh-uh. What gave you that idea, Brawne? None  

were. Couldn't work."  

'Why not?"  

'It'd just fuck up the stimsim. Plus you'd need perfect clone stock and  
an interactive environment precise to the last detail. You see, kiddo,  
with a retrieved personality, you let it live in its world via  
full-scale sim and then you just sneaked a few questions in via dreams  
or scenario interactives. Pulling a persona out of sim reality into  
slow time..."  

This was the cyberpukes' age-old term for the . . .  

pardon the expression... real world.  

'... would just drive it bugfuck all the sooner,' he finished.  

I shook my head. 'Yeah, well, thanks, BB." I moved to the door. There  
were thirty seconds left before my old college friend could escape from  
slow time.  

'BB,' I said as an afterthought, 'have you ever heard of a persona  
retrieved from an Old Earth poet named John Keats?"  

'Keats? Oh, sure there was a big write-up on that in my undergrad text.  
Marti Carollus did that about fifty years  

ago at New Cambridge."  

'What happened?"  

'The usual. Persona went Strange Loop. But before it broke up it died  
a full sim death. Some ancient disease." BB glanced at the clock,  
smiled, and lifted his shunt.  

Before clicking it into his skull socket he looked at me again, almost  
beatifically. 'I remember now,' he said through his dreamy smile, 'it  
was tuberculosis."  

If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the  
instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In  
a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a  
person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the  
credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws  
protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or  
abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.  

Johnny's credit wake for the five-day period leading to his murder  
showed a man of regular habits and modest expenses. Before following up  
the leads on the credit flimsy l'd spent a dull two days following  
Johnny himself.  

Data: He lived alone in East Bergson Hive. A routine check showed that  
he'd lived there about seven local months - less than five standard. In  
the morning he had breakfast at a local cafe and then farcast to  
Renaissance Vector where he worked for about five hours, evidently  

gathering research of some sort in the print archives, followed by a  
light lunch at a courtyard vendor's stand, another hour or two in the  
library, and then 'cast home to Lusus or to some favorite eating spot on  
another world. In his cubby by 2200 hours. More farcasting than the  
average Lusian middle-class drone, but an otherwise uninspiring  
schedule. The credit flimsies confirmed that he had held to the agenda  
on the week he was murdered, with the addition of a few extra purchases  

-shoes one day, groceries the next - and one stop at a bar on 
Renaissance V on the day of his 'murder."  

I joined him for dinner at the small restaurant on Red Dragon Street  
near the Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna por tal. The food was very hot, very  
spicy, and very good.  

'How is it going,' he asked.  

'Great. l'm a thousand marks richer than when we met and I found a good  
Cantonese restaurant."  

'I'm glad my money is going toward something important."  

'Speaking of your money... where does it come from?  

Hanging out in a Renaissance Vector library can't pay much."  

Johnny raised an eyebrow. 'I live on a small ...  

inheritance."  

'Not too small, I hope. I want to be paid."  

'It will be adequate for our purposes, M. Lamia. Have you discovered  
anything of interest?"  

I shrugged. 'Tell me what you do in that library." 'Can it possibly be  
germane?" 'Yeah, could be."  

He looked at me strangely. Something about his eyes made me go weak at  
the knees. 'You remind me of someone,' he said softly.  

'Oh?" From anyone else that line would have been cause for an exit.  
'Who?" I asked.  

'A... woman I once knew. Long ago." He brushed fingers across his brow  
as if he were suddenly tired or dizzy.  

'What was her name?"  

'Fanny." The word was almost whispered.  

I knew who he was talking about. John Keats had a fiancce named Fanny.  
Their love affair had been a series of romantic frustrations which  
almost drove the poet mad. When he died in Italy, alone except for one  
fellow traveler, feeling abandoned by friends and his lover, Keats had  
asked that unopened letters from Fanny and a lock of her hair be buried  
with him.  

l'd never heard of John Keats before this week; I'd accessed all this  
shit with my comlog. I said, 'So what do you do at the library?"  

The cybrid cleared his throat. 'l'm researching a  
poem. Searching for fragments of the original." 'Something by Keats?"  
'Yes."  

'Wouldn't it be easier to access it?"  
'Of course. But it is important for me to see the original...  
to touch it."  
I thought about that. 'What's the poem about?"  
He smiled... or at least his lips did. The hazel eyes still seemed  

troubled. 'It's called Hyperion. It's difficult to describe what it's  
about. Artistic failure, I suppose.  
Keats never finished it."  
I pushed aside my plate and sipped warm tea. 'You say  

Keats never finished it. Don't you mean you never finished it?"  
His look of shock had to be genuine... unless Als were consummate  
actors. For all I knew, they could be.  

'Good God,' he said, 'I'm not John Keats. Having a persona based upon a  
retrieval template no more makes me Keats than having the name Lamia  
makes you a monster.  

There've been a million influences that have separated me from that  
poor, sad genius."  

'You said I reminded you of Fanny."  
'An echo of a dream. Less. You've taken RNA learn ing medication,  
yes?"  

,yes.,  
'It's like that. Memories which feel... hollow."  
A human waiter brought fortune cookies.  
'Do you have any interest in visiting the real  
Hyperion?" I asked.  
'What's that?"  
'The Outback world. Somewhere beyond Parvati, I think."  
Johnny looked puzzled. He had broken open the cookie but had not yet  

read the fortune.  

'It used to be called Poets' World, I think,' I said. 'It even has a  
city named after you... after Keats."  

The young man shook his head. 'I'm sorry, I haven't heard of the  
place."  

'How can that be? Don't Als know everything?"  

His laugh was short and sharp. 'This one knows very little." He read  
his fortune: BE WARY OF SUDDEN IMPULSES.  

I crossed my arms. 'You know, except for that parlor trick with the  
bank manager holo, I have no proof that  

you are what you say you are." 'Give me your hand." 'My hand?"  

'Yes. Either one. Thank you."  

Johnny held my right hand in both of his. His fingers  

were longer than mine. Mine were stronger.  

'Close your eyes,' he said.  

I did. There was no transition: one instant I was sitting in the Blue  
Lotus on Red Dragon Street and the next I  

was... nowhere. Somewhere. Streaking through gray-blue datumplane,  
banking along chrome-yellow information highways, passing over and under  
and titrough great cities of glowing information storage, red  
skyscrapers sheathed in black security ice, simple entities like  
personal accounts or corporate files blazing like burning refineries in  
the night. Above it all, just out of sight as if poised in twisted  
space, hung the gigantic weights of the AIs, their simplest  
communications pulsing like violent heat lightning along the infinite  
horizons.  

Somewhere in the distance, all but lost in the maze of three-dimensional  
neon that partitioned one tiny second of arc in the incredible  
datasphere of one small world, I sensed rather than saw those soft,  
hazel eyes waiting for me.  

Johnny released my hand. He cracked my fortune cookie open. The strip  
of paper read: INVEST WISELY IN NEW VENTURES.  

'Jesus,' I whispered. BB had taken me flying in datumplane before, but  
without a shunt the experience had been a shadow of this. It was the  
difference between watching a black and white holo of fireworks display  
and being there. 'How do you do that?"  

'Will you be making any progress on the case tomorrow?" he asked.  

I regained my composure. 'Tomorrow,' I said, 'I 101an to solve it."  

Well, maybe not solve it, but at least get things moving.  

The last charge on Johnny's credit flimsy had been the bar on  
Renaissance V. I'd checked it out the first day, of course, talked to  
several of the regulars since there was no human bartender, but had come  
up with no one who remembered Johnny. I'd been back twice with no  
greater luck. But on the third day I went back to stay until something  
broke.  

The bar was definitely not in the class of the wood and brass place  
Johnny and I had visited on TC2. This place was tucked on a second  
floor of a decaying building in a run-down neighborhood two blocks from  
the Renaissance library where Johnny spent his days. Not the kind  

of place he would stop in on the way to the farcaster plaza, but just  
the kind of place he might end up if he met someone in or near the  
library - someone who wanted to talk in private.  

l'd been there six hours and was getting damned tired of salted nuts and  
fiat beer when an old derelict came in.  

I guessed that he was a regular by the way he didn't pause in the  
doorway or look around, but headed straight for a small table in the bak  
and ordered a whiskey before the serving mech had come to a full stop.  
When I joined him at the table I realized that he wasn't so much a  
derelict as an example of the tired men and women .I'd seen in the junk  
shops and street stalls in that neighborhood. He  

squinted up at me through defeated eyes.  

'May I sit down?"  

'Depends, sister. What're you selling?"  

'l'm buying." I sat, set my beer mug on the table, and slid across a  
fiat photo of Johnny entering the farcaster booth on TC2. 'Seen this  
guy?"  

The old man Danced at the photo and returned his full attention to his  
whiskey. 'Maybe."  

I waved over the mech for another round. 'If you did see him, it's your  
lucky day."  

The old man snoed and rubbed the back of his hand against the gray  
stubble on his cheek. 'If it is, it'll be the first time in a long  
fucking time." He focused on me.  

'How much? For what?"  

'Information. How much depends on the information.  

Have you seen him?" I removed a black market  

fifty-mark bill from my tunic pocket.  

'eaho'  

The bill came down to the table but remained in my hand. 'When?"  

'Last Tuesday. Tuesday morning."  

That was the correct day. I slid the fifty marks to him and removed  
another bill. 'Was he alone?"  
The old man licked his lips. 'Let me think. I don't think... no, he  

was there." He pointed toward a table at the rear. 'Two other guys with  
him. One of them...  
well, that's why I remembered."  
'What's that?"  
The old man rubbed finger and thumb in a gesture as old as greed.  

'Tell me about the two men,' I coaxed.  
'The young guy... your guy... he was with one of them, you know, the  
nature freaks with robes. You see'em on HTV all the time. Them and  
their damn trees."  

Trees? 'A Templar?" I said, astounded. What would a Templar be doing  
in a Renaissance V bar? If he'd been after Johnny, why would he wear  
his robe? That would be like a murderer going out to do business in a  
clown suit.  

'Yeah. Templar. Brown robe, sort of oriental-looking." 'A man?"  
'Yeah, I said he was."  
'Can you describe him more?"  
'Nah, Templar. Tall son of a bitch. Couldn't see his face very well."  
'What about the other one?"  
The old man shrugged. I removed a second bill and set them both near my  

glass.  
'Did they come in together?" I prompted. 'The three of them?"  
'I don't... I can't... No, wait. Your guy and the Templar guy came in  

first. I remember seeing the robe  
before the other guy sat down."  
'Describe the other man."  
The old man waved over the mech and ordered a third drink. I used my  

card and the servitor slid away on noisy repellers.  
'Like you,' he said. 'Sort of like you."  
'Short?" I said. 'Strong arms and legs? A Lusian?" 'Yeah. I guess so.  

Never been there." 'What else?"  

' No hair,' said the old man." Just a whattyacallit like my  
niece used to wear. A pony tail."  
'A queue,' I said.  
'Yeah. Whatever." He started to reach for the bills.  
'Couple more questions. Did they argue?"  
'Nab. Don't think so. Talked real quiet. Place's pretty empty that  

time of day."  
'What time of day was it ?"  
'Morning. About ten o'clock."  
This coincided with the credit flimsy code.  
'Did you hear any of the conversation?" 'Uh-uh."  
'Who did most of the talking?"  
The old man took a drink and furrowed his brow in thought. 'Templar guy  

did at first. Your man seemed to be answering questions. Seemed  

surprised once when I was looking."  

'Shocked?"  
'Uh-uh, just surprised. Like the guy in the robe'd said something he  
didn't expect."  

'You said the Templar did most of the talking at first.  

Who spoke later? My guy?"  

'Uh-uh, the one with the pony tail. Then they left." 'All three of them  

left?"  
'Nah. Your guy and the pony tail."  
'The Templar stayed behind?"  
'Yeah. I guess so. I think. I went to the lay. When I got back I  

don't think he was there."  
'What way did the other two go?"  
'I don't know, goddammit. I wasn't paying much attention. I was having  

a drink, not playing spy!'  

I nodded. The mech rolled over again but I waved it away. The old man  
scowled at its back.  
'So they weren't arguing when they left? No sign of a  
disagreement or that one was forcing the other to leave?" 'Who?"  

'My guy and the queue."  

'Uh-uh. Shit, I don't know." Hc looked down at the bills in his grimy  
hand and at the whiskey in the mech's display panel, realizing, perhaps,  
that he wasn't going to get any more of either from me. 'Why do you  
want to know all this shit, anyway?"  

Tm looking for the guy,' I said. I looked around the bar. About twenty  
customers sat at tables. Most of them looked like neighborhood  
regulars. 'Anyone else here who might've seen them? Or somebody else  
you might remember who was here?"  

'Uh-uh,' he said dully. I realized then that the old man's eyes were  
precisely the color of the whiskey he'd been drinking.  

I stood, set a final twenty-mark bill on the table.  

'Thanks, friend."  

'Any time, sister."  

The mech was rolling toward him before l'd reached the door.  

I walked back toward the library, paused a minute in the busy farcaster  
plaza, and stood there a minute. Scenario so far: Johnny had met the  
Templar or been approached by him, either in the library or outside when  
he arrived in midmorning. They went somewhere private to talk, the bar,  
and something the Templar said surprised Johnny.  

A man with a queue - possibly a Lusian - showed up and took over the  
conversation. Johnny and Queue left together. Sometime after that,  
Johnny farcast to TC2 and then farcast from there with one other person  

-possibly Queue or the Templar - to Madhya where someone tried to kill him. 
Did kill him.  

Too many gaps. Too many 'someones." Not a hell of a lot to show for a  
day's work.  

I was debating whether to 'cast back to Lusus when my comlog chirped on  
the restricted comm frequency I'd given to Johnny.  

His voice was raw. 'M. Lamia. Come quickly, please.  

I think they've just tried again. To kill me." The coordinates which  
followed were for the East Bergson Hive.  

I ran for the farcaster.  

The door to Johnny's cubby was open a crack. There was no one in the  
corridor, no sounds from the apartment.  

Whatever had happened hadn't brought the authorities yet.  

I brought out Dad's automatic pistol from my coat pocket, jacked a round  
info the chamber, and clicked on the laser targeting beam with a single  
motion.  

I went in low, both arms extended, the red dot sliding across the dark  
walls, a cheap print on the far wall, a darker hall leading into the  
cubby. The foyer was empty.  

The living room and media pit were empty.  

Johnny lay on the floor of the bedroom, his head against the bed. Blood  
soaked the sheet. He struggled to  

prop himself up, fell back. The sliding door behind him was open and a  
dank industrial wind blew in from the open mall beyond.  

I checked the single closet, short hall, kitchen niche, and came back to  
step out on the balcony. The view was spectacular from the perch two  
hundred or so meters up the curved Hive wall, looking down the ten or  
twenty kilometers of the Trench Mall. The roof of the Hive was a dark  
mass of girders another hundred or so meters above. Thousands of  
lights, commercial hoios, and neon lights glowed from the mall, joining  
in the haze of dis rance to a brilliant, throbbing electric blur.  

There were hundreds of similar balconies on this wall of the Hive, all  
deserted. The nearest was twenty meters away. They were the kind of  
thing rental agents like to point to as a plus - God knows that Johnny  
probably paid plenty extra for an outside room - but the balconies were  
totally impractical because of the strong wind rushing up toward the  
ventilators, carrying the usual grit and debris as well as the eternal  
Hive scent of oil and ozone.  

I put my pistol away and went back to check on Johnny.  

The cut ran from his hairline to his eyebrow, superficial but messy. He  
was sitting up as I returned from the bathroom with a sterile drypad and  
pressed it against the cut. 'What happened?" I said.  

'Two men... were waiting in the bedroom when 1 came in. They'd  
bypassed the alarms on the balcony door."  

'You deserve a refund on your security tax,' I said.  

'What happened next?"  

'We struggled. They seemed to be dragging me toward the door. One of  
them had an injector but I managed to knock it out of his hand."  

'What made them leave?"  

'I activated the in-house alarms."  

'But not Hive security?"  

'No. I didn't want them involved."  

'Who hit you?"  

Johnny smiled sheepishly. 'I did. They released me, I went after them.  
I managed to trip and fall against the nightstand."  

'Not a very graceful brawl on either side,' I said. I switched on a  
lamp and checked the carpet until I found  
the injection ampule where it had rolled under the bed.  
Johnny eyed it as if it were a viper.  
'What's your guess?" I said. 'More AIDS II?"  
He shook his head.  

'I know a place where we can get it analyzed,' I said.  
'My guess is that it's just a hypnotic trank. They just wanted you to  
come along... not to kill you."  

Johnny moved the drypad and grimaced. The blood was still flowing. 'Why  
would anyone want to kidnap a cybrid?"  

'You tell me. I'm beginning to think that the so-called  
murder was just a botched kidnapping attempt." Johnny shook his head  
again.  

I said, 'Did one of the men wear a queue?"  
'I don't know. They wore caps and osmosis masks."  
'Was either one tall enough to be a Templar or strong enough to be a  

Lusian?"  
'A Templar?" Johnny was surprised. 'No. One was about average Web  

height. The one with the ampule could have been Lusian. Strong  
enough."  
'So you went after a Lusian thug with your bare hands. Do you have some  

bioprocessors or augmenta tion implants I don't know about?"  
'No. I was just mad."  
I helped him to his feet. 'So Als get angry?"  
'I do."  
'Come on,' I said, 'I know an automated med clinic that's discount. Then  

you'll be staying with me for a while."  
'With you7 Why?"  
'Because you've graduated from just needing a detective,' I said. 'Now  

you need a bodyguard."  
My cubby wasn't registered in the Hive zoning schematic as an apartment;  
I'd taken over a renovated warehouse loft from a friend of mine who'd  
run afoul of loan sharks. My friend had decided late in life to  
emigrate to  

one of the Outback colonies and I'd gotten a good deal on a place just a  
klick down the corridor from my office.  

The environment was a littl rough and sometimes the noise from the  
loading docks could drown out conversation, but it gave me ten times the  
room of a normal cubby and I could use my weights and workout equipment  
right at home.  

Johnny honestly seemed intrigued by the place and I had to kick myself  
for being pleased. Next thing you knew, l'd be putting on lipstick and  
body rouge for this cybrid.  

'So why do you live on Lusus?" I asked him. 'Most offworiders find the  
gravity a pain and the scenery monotonous. Plus your research  
material's at the library on Renaissance V. Why here?"  

I found myself looking and listening very carefully as he answered. His  
hair was straight on top, parted in the middle, and fell in  
reddish-brown curls to his collar. He had the habit of resting his  
cheek on his fist as he spoke.  

It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who  
has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of  
someone born to it.  

And beneath that there was a hint of lilt that brought back the  
overtones of a cat burglar l'd known who had grown up on Asquith, a  
quiet, backwater Web world settled by First Expansion immigrants from  
what had once been the British Isles.  

'I have lived on many worlds,' he said. 'My purpose is to observe."  

He shook his head, winced, and gingerly touched the stitches. 'No. I'm  
not a poet. He ,,os."  

Despite the circumstances, there was an energy and vitality to Johnny  
that l'd found in too few men. It was hard to describe, but I'd seen  
rooms full of more important personages rearrange themselves to orbit  
around personalities like his. It was not merely his reticence and  
sensitivity, it was an intensity that he emanated even when merely  
observing.  

'Why doyou live here?" he asked.  

'I was born here."  

'Yes, but you spent your childhood years on Tau Ceti  

Center. Your father was a senator."  

I said nothing.  

'Many people expected you to go into politics,' he  

said. 'Did your father's suicide dissuade you?" 'It wasn't suicide,' I  
said.  

'No?"  

'All the news reports and the inquest said it was,' I said tonelessly,  
'but they were wrong. My father never would  

have taken his own life." 'So it was murder?" 'Yes."  

'Despite the fact that there was no motive or hint of a  

suspect?"  

'Yes."  

'I see,' said Johnny. The yellow glow from the loading dock lamps came  
through the dusty windows and made his hair gleam like new copper. 'Do  
you like being a detective?"  

'When I do it well,' I said. 'Are you hungry?"  

' No. '  

'Then let's get some sleep. You can have the couch." 'Do you do it well  
often?" he said. 'Being a detective?" 'We'll see tomorrow."  

In the morning Johnny farcast to Renaissance Vector at about the usual  
time, waited a moment in the plaza, and then 'cast to the Old Settlers'  
Museum on Sol Draconi Septera. From there he jumped to the main  
terminex on Nordholm and then 'cast to the Templar world of God's Grove.  

We'd worked out the timing ahead of time and I was waiting for him on  
Renaissance V, standing back in the shadows of the colonnade.  

A man with a queue was the third through after Johnny. There was no  
doubt he was Lusian - between the Hive pallor, the muscle and body mass,  
and the arrogant way of walking, he might have been my long-lost  
brother.  

He never looked at Johnny but I could tell that he was surprised when  
the cybrid circled around to the outbound  

portals. I stayed back and only caught a glimpse of his card but  
would've bet anything that it was a tracer.  

Queue was careful in the Old Settlers' Museum, keeping Johnny in sight  
but checking his own back as well. i was dressed in a Zen Gnostic's  
meditation jumper, isolation visor and all, and I never looked their way  
as 1 circled to the museum outportal and 'cast directly to God's Grove.  

It made me feel funny, leaving Johnny alone through the museum and  
Nordholm terminex, but both were public places and it was a calculated  
risk.  

Johnny came through the Worldtree arrival portal right on time and  
bought a ticket for the tour. His shadow had to scurry to catch up,  
breaking cover to board the omnibus skimmer before it left. I was  
already settled in the rear seat on the upper deck and Johnny found a  

place near the front, just as we had planned.  

Now I was wearing basic tourist garb and my imager was one of a dozen in  
action when Queue hurried to take his place three rows behind Johnny.  

The tour of the Worldtree is always fun - Dad first took me there when I  
was only three standard - but this time as the skimmer moved above  
branches the size of freeways and circled higher around a trunk the  
width of Olympus Mons, I found myself reacting to the glimpses of hooded  
Templars with something approaching anxiety.  

Johnny and I had discussed various clever and infinitely subtle ways to  
trail Queue if he showed up, to follow him to his lair and spend weeks  
if necessary deducing his game. In the end I opted for something less  
than the subtle approach.  

The omnibus had dumped us out near the Muir Museum and people were  
milling around on the plaza, torn between spending ten marks for a  
ticket to educate themselves or going straight for the gift shop, when I  
walked up to Queue, gripped him by the upper arm, and said in  
conversational tones, 'Hi. Do you mind telling me what the fuck you  
want with my client?"  

There's an old stereotype that says that Lusians are as subtle as a  
stomach pump and about half as pleasant. If  

I'd helped confirm the first part of that, Queue went a long way toward  
reinforcing the second prejudice.  

He was fast. Even with my seemingly casual grip paralyzing the muscles  
of his right arm, the knife in his left hand sliced up and around in  
less than a second.  

I let myself fall to my right, the knife slicing air centimeters from my  
cheek, hitting pavement and rolling as I palmed the neural stunner and  
came up on one knee to meet the threat.  

No threat. Queue was running. Away from me. Away from Johnny. He  
shoved tourists aside, dodged behind them, moving toward the museum  
entrance.  

I slid the stunner back into its wristband and began running myself.  
Stunners are great close-range weapons - as easy to aim as a shotgun  
without the dire effects if the spread pattern finds innocent bystanders  

-but they aren't worth anything beyond eight or ten meters. 
On full dispersal, I could give half the tourists in the plaza a  
miserable headache but Queue was already too far away to bring down. I  
ran after him.  

Johnny ran toward me. I waved him back. 'My place!' I shouted. 'Use  
the locks!'  

Queue had reached the museum entrance and now he looked back at me; the  
knife was still in his hand.  

I charged at him, feeling something like joy at the thought of the next  

few minutes.  

Queue vaulted a turnstile and shoved tourists aside to get through the  
doors. I followed.  

It was only when I reached the hushed interior of the Grand Hall and saw  
him shoving his way up the crowded escalator to the Excursion Mezzanine  
that I realized where he was headed.  

My father had taken me on the Templar Excursion when I was three. The  
farcaster portals were permanently open; it took about three hours to  
walk all the guided tours on the thirty worlds where the Templar  
ecologists had preserved some bit of nature which they thought would  
please the Muir. I couldn't remember for sure, but I thought the paths  
were loop trails with the portals relatively close together for easy  
transit by Templar guides and maintenance people.  

Shit.  

A uniformed guard near the tour portal saw the confusion as Queue cut  
through and stepped forward to intercept the rude intruder. Even from  
fifteen meters away I could see the shock and disbelief on the old  
guard's face as he staggered backward, the hilt of Queue's long knife  
protruding from his chest.  

The old guard, probably a retired local cop, looked down, face white,  
touched the bone hilL gingerly as if it were a gag, and collapsed face  
first on the mezzanine tiles. Tourists screamed. Someone yelled for a  
medic. I saw Queue shove a Templar guide aside and throw himself  
through the glowing portal.  

This was not going as I'd planned.  

I vaulted for the portal without slowing.  

Through and half sliding on the slippery grass of a hillside. Sky lemon  
yellow above us. Tropical scents. I saw startled faces turned my way.  
Queue was halfway to the other farcaster, cutting through elaborate  
flower beds and kicking aside bonsai topiary. I recognized the world of  
Fuji and careened down the hillside, clambering uphill again through the  
flower beds, following the trail of destruction Queue had left. 'Stop  
that man!" I screamed, realizing how foolish it sounded. No one made a  
move except for a Nipponese tourist who raised her imager and recorded a  
sequence.  

Queue looked back, shoved past a gawking tour group, and stepped through  
the farcast portal.  

I had the stunner in my hand again and waved it at the crowd. 'Back!  
Back!" They hastily made room.  

I went through warily, stunner raised. Queue no longer had his knife  
but I didn't know what other toys he carried.  

Brilliant light on water. The violent waves of Mare Infinitus. The  
path was a narrow wooden walkway ten meters above the support floats. It  
led out and away, curving above a fairyland coral reef and a sargasso of  

yellow island kelp before curving back, but a narrow catwalk cut across  
to the portal at the end of the trail.  

Queue had climbed the NO ACCESS gate and was halfway across the catwalk.  

I ran the ten paces to the edge of the platform, selected tightbeam, and  
held the stunner on full auto, sweeping the invisible beam hack and  
forth as if I were aiming a garden hose.  

Queue seemed to stumble a half step but then made the last ten meters to  
the portal and dived through. I cursed and climbed the gate, ignoring  
shouts from a Templar guide behind me. I caught a glimpse of a sign  
which reminded tourists to don therm gear and then I was through the  
portal, barely sensing the shower-tingle sensation of passing through  
the farcaster screen.  

A blizzard roared, whipping against the arched con-talnment field which  
turned the tourist trail into a tunnel through fierce whiteness. Sol  
Draconi Septem- the northern reaches where Templar lobbying of the All  
Thing had stopped the colonial heating project in order to save the  
arctic wraiths. I could feel the 1.7-standard gravity on my shoulders  
like the yoke of my workout machine. It was a shame that Queue was a  
Lushan also; if he'd been Web-standard in physique, there would have  
been no contest if I caught him here. Now we would see who was in  
better shape.  

Queue was fifty meters down the trail and looking back over his  
shoulder. The other farcaster was somewhere near but the blizzard made  
anything off the trail invisible and inaccessible. I began loping after  
him. In deference to the gravity, this was the shortest of the Templar  
Excursion trails, curving back after only two hundred or so meters. I  
could hear Queue's panting as I closed on him. I was running easily;  
there was no way that he was going to beat me to the next farcaster. I  
saw no tourists on the trail and so far no one had given chase.  

I thought that this would not be a bad place to interrogate him.  

Queue was thirty meters short of the exit portal when he turned, dropped  
to one knee, and aimed an energy pistol. The first bolt was short,  
possibly because of the unaccustomed weight of the weapon in Sol  
Draconi's gravity field, but it was close enough to leave a scorched  
slash of slagged walkway and melted permafrost to within a meter of me.  
He adjusted his aim.  

I went out through the containment field, shouldering my way through the  
elastic resistance and stumbling into drifts above my waist. The cold  
air burned my lungs and wind-driven snow caked my face and bare arms in  
seconds.  

I could see Queue looking for me from within the lighted pathway, but  
the blizzard dimness worked in my favor now as I threw myself through  
drifts in his direction.  

Queue forced his head, shoulders, and right arm through the field wall,  
squinting in the barrage of icy particles which coated his cheeks and  
brow in an instant.  

His second shot was high and I felt the heat of the bolt as it passed  
over. I was within ten meters of him now; I set the stunner on widest  
dispersal and sprayed it in his direction without lifting my head from  
the snowdrift where I had dropped.  

Queue let the energy pistol tumble into the snow and fell back through  
the containment field.  

I screamed in triumph, my shout lost in the wind roar, and staggered  
toward the field wall. My hands and feet were distant things now,  
beyond the pain of cold. My cheeks and ears burned. I put the thought  
of frostbite out of my mind and threw myself against the field.  

It was a class-three field, designed to keep out the elements and  
anything as huge as an arctic wraith, while allowing the occasional  
errant tourist or errand-bent Templar reentry to the path, but in my  
cold-weakened condition I found myself batting against it for a moment  
like a fly against plastic, my feet slipping on snow and ice. Finally I  
threw myself forward, landing heavily and clumsily, dragging my legs  
through.  

The sudden warmth of the pathway set me to shaking uncontrollably.  
Shards of sleet fell from me as I forced myself to my knees, then to my  
feet.  

Queue ran the last five yards to the exit portal with his right arm  
dangling as if broken. I knew the nerve-fire agony of a neural stunner  
and did not envy him. He looked back once as I began running toward him  
and then he went through.  

Maui-Covenant. The air was tropical and smelled of ocean and  
vegetation. The sky was an Old Earth blue. I saw immediately that the  
trail had led to one of the few free motile isles which the Templars had  
saved from Hegemony domestication. It was a large isle, perhaps half a  
kilometer from end to end, and from the access portal's vantage point on  
a wide deck encircling the main treesail trunk I could see the expansive  
sail leaves filling with wind and the indigo rudder vines trailing far  
behind.  

The exit portal lay only fifteen meters away down a staircase but I saw  
at once that Queue had run the other way, along the main trail, toward a  
cluster of huts and concession stands near the edge of the isle.  

It was only here, halfway along the Templar Excursion trail, that they  
allowed human structures to shelter weary hikers while they purchased  
refreshments or souvenirs to benefit the Templar Brotherhood. I began  
jogging down the wide staircase to the trail below, still shivering, my  
clothes soaked with rapidly melting snow.  

Why was Queue running toward the cluster of people there?  

I saw the bright carpets laid out for rental and understood.  

The hawking mats were illegal on most Web worlds but still a tradition  
on Maui-Covenant because of the Siri legend; less than two meters long  
and a meter wide, the ancient playthings lay waiting to carry tourists  
out over the sea and back again to the wandering isle. If Queue reached  

one of those... I broke into a full sprint, catching the other Lusian a  
few meters short of the hawking mat area and tackling him just below the  
knees.  

We rolled into the concession stand area and the few tourists there  
shouted and scattered.  

My father taught me one thing which any child ignores at his or her own  
peril: a good big guy can always beat a good little guy. In this case  
we were about even. Queue twisted free and jumped to his feet, falling  
into an arms-out, fingers-splayed oriental fighting stance. Now we'd  
see who the better guy was.  

Queue got the first blow in, feinting a straight-fingered jab with his  
left hand and coming up and around with a swinging kick instead. I  
ducked but he connected solidly enough to make my left shoulder and  
upper arm go numb.  

Queue danced backward. I followed. He swung a close-fisted  
right-handed punch. I blocked it. He chopped with his left hand. I  
blocked with my right forearm.  

Queue danced back, whirled, and unleashed a left-footed kick. I ducked,  
caught his leg as it passed over, and dumped him on the sand.  

Queue jumped up. I knocked him down with a short left hook. He rolled  
away and scrambled to his knees. 1 kicked him behind his left ear,  
pulling the blow enough to leave him conscious.  

Too conscious, I realized a second later as he ran four fingers under my  
guard in an attempted heart jab.  

Instead, he bruised the layers of muscle under my right breast. I  
punched him full force in the mouth, sending blood spraying as he rolled  
to the waterline and lay still.  

Behind us, people ran toward the exit portal, calling to the few others  
to get the police.  

I lifted Johnny's would-be assassin by his queue, dragged him to the  
edge of the isle, and dipped his face in the water until he came to.  
Then I rolled him over and lifted him by his torn and stained  
shirtfront. We would have only a minute or two until someone arrived.  

Queue stared up at me with a glazed glare. I shook him once and leaned  
close. 'Listen, my friend,' I whispered.  

'We're going to have a short but sincere conversation.  

We'll start with who you are and why you're bothering the guy you were  
following."  

I felt the surge of current before I saw the blue. I cursed and let go  
of his shirtfront. The electrical nimbus seemed to surround Queue's  
entire body at once. I jumped back but not before my own hair stood on  
end and surge control alarms on my comlog chirped urgently. Queue  
opened his mouth to scream and I could see the blue within like a poorly  

done holo special effect.  

His shirtfront sizzled, blackened, and burst into flame.  

Beneath it his chest grew blue spots like an ancient film burning  
through. The spots widened, joined, widened again. I looked into his  
chest cavity and saw organs melting in blue flame. He screamed again,  
audibly this time, and I watched as teeth and eyes collapsed into blue  
fire.  

I took another step back.  

Queue was burning now, the orange-red flames superseding the blue glow.  
His flesh exploded outward with flame as if his bones had ignited.  
Within a minute he was a smoking caricature of charred flesh, the body  
reduced to the ancient dwarf-boxer posture of burning victims  
everywhere. I turned away and put a hand over my mouth, searching the  
faces of the few watchers to see if any of them could have done this.  
Wide, frightened eyes stared back. Far above, gray security uniforms  
burst from the farcaster.  

Damn. I looked around. The treesails surged and bil-lowed overhead.  
Radiant gossamers, beautiful even in daylight, flitted among tropical  
vegetation of a hundred hues. Sunlight danced on blue ocean. The way  
to both portals was blocked. The security guard leading the group had  
drawn a weapon.  

I was to the first hawking mat in three strides, trying to remember from  
my own ride two decades earlier how the flight threads were activated. I  
tapped designs in desperation.  

The hawking mat went rigid and lifted ten centimeters off the beach. I  
could hear the shouts now as security guards reached the edge of the  
crowd. A woman in gaudy Renaissance Minor garb pointed my way. I  
jumped off the hawking mat, gathered up the other seven mats, and jumped  
aboard my own. Barely able to find the flight designs under the tumble  
of rugs, I slapped the forward controls until the mat lurched into  
flight, almost tumbling me off as it rose.  

Fifty meters out, thirty meters high, I dumped the other mats into the  
sea and swiveled to see what was happening on the beach. Several gray  
uniforms were huddled around the burned remains. Another pointed a  
silver wand in my direction.  

Delicate needles of pain tingled along my arm, shoulders, and neck. My  
eyelids drooped and I almost slid off the mat to my right. I gripped  
the far side with my left hand, slumped forward, and tapped at the  
ascent design with fingers made of wood. Climbing again, I fumbled at  
my right sleeve for my own stunner. The wristband was empty.  

A minute later I sat up and shook off most of the effects of the stun,  
although my fingers still burned and I had a fierce headache. The  
motile isle was far behind, shrinking more each second. A century ago  
the island would have been driven by the bands of dolphins brought here  
originally during the Hegira, but the Hegemony pacification program  
during the Siri Rebellion had killed off most of the aquatic mammals and  
now the islands wandered listlessly, carrying their cargo of Web  

tourists and resort owners*  

I checked the horizons for another island, a hint of one of the rare  
mainlands. Nothing. Or, rather, blue sky, endless. ocean, and soft  
brushstrokes of clouds far to the west. Or was it to the east?  

I pulled my comiog off my belt lock and keyed in general datasphere  
access, then stopped. If the authorities had chased me this far, the  
next step would be to pinpoint my location and send out a skimmer or  
security EMV. I wasn't sure if they could trace my comlog when I logged  
in but I saw no reason to help them. I thumbed the comm-link on standby  
and looked around again.  

Good move, Brawne. Poking along at two hundred meters on a  
three-century-old hawking mat with who knows how many... or how few!...  
hours of charge in its flight threads, possibly a thousand klicks or  
more from land of any sort. And lost. Great. I crossed my arms and  
sat back to think.  

'M. Lamia?" Johnny's soft voice almost made me jump off the mat.  

'Johnny?" I stared at the cornlog. It was still on standby. The  
general comm frequency indicator was dark. 'Johnny, is that you?"  

'Of course. I thought you'd never turn your comlog on."  

'How did you trace me? What band are you calling o!i?"  

'Never mind that. Where are you headed?"  

I laughed and told him that I didn't have the slightest idea. 'Can you  
help?"  

'Wait." There was the briefest second of pause. 'All  

right, I have you on one of the weather-mapping sats. A terribly  
primitive thing. Good thing your hawking mat has a passive  
transponder."  

I stared at the rug that was the only thing between me and a long, loud  
fall to the sea. 'It does? Can the others track me?"  

'They could,' said Johnny, 'but I'm jamming this par ticular signal.  
Now, where do you want to go?" 'Home."  

'I'm not sure if that's wise after the death of... ah * . . our  
suspect."  

I squinted, suddenly suspicious. 'How do you know about that? I didn't  
say anything."  

'Be serious, M. Lamia. The security bands are full of it on six  
worlds. They have a reasonable description of you. '  

'Shit."  

'Precisely. Now where would you like to go?" 'Where are you?" I asked.  

'My place?"  

'No. I left there when the security bands mentioned you. I'm... near  
a farcaster."  
'That's where I need to be." I looked around again.  
Ocean sky, a hint of clouds. At least no fleets of EMVs.  
'All right,' said Johnny's disembodied voice. 'There's a powered-down  

FORCE multi-portal less than ten klicks from your present location."  
I shielded my eyes and rotated three hundred and sixty degrees. 'The  

hell there is,' I said. 'I don't know how far away the horizon is on  
this world, but it's at least forty klicks and I can't see anything."  
'Submersible base,' said Johnny. 'Hang on. l'm going to take control."  
The hawking mat lurched again, dipped once, and then fell steadily. I  

held on with both hands and resisted the urge to scream.  
'Submersible,' I called against the wind rush, 'how far?"  
'Do you mean how deep?"  
'Yeah!'  
'Eight fathoms."  
I converted the archaic units to meters. This time I did  
scream. 'That's almost fourteen meters underwater!' 'Where else do you  

expect a submersible to be?"  

'What the hell do you expect me to do, hold my breath?" The ocean rushed  
toward me.  
'Not necessary,' said my comlog. 'The hawking mat has a primitive crash  

field. It should easily hold for a mere eight fathoms. Please hang  
on."  

I hung on.  
Johnny was waiting for me when I arrived. The submersible had been dark  
and dank with the sweat of abandonment; the farcaster had been of a  
military variety l'd never seen before. It was a relief to step into  
sunlight and a city street with Johnny waiting.  

I told him what had happened to Queue. We walked empty streets past old  
buildings. The sky was pale blue fading toward evening. No one was in  
sight. 'Hey,' I said, stopping, 'where are we?" It was an incredibly  
Earthlike world but the sky, the gravity, the texture of the place was  
like nothing I'd visited.  

Johnny smiled. 'I'11 let you guess. Let's walk some more."  
There were ruins to our left as we walked down a wide street. I stopped  

and stared. 'That's the Colosseum,' I said. 'The Roman Colosseum on  
Old Earth." I looked around at the aging buildings, the cobblestone  
streets, and the trees swaying slightly in a soft breeze. 'This is a  
reconstruction of the Old Earth city of Rome,' I said, trying to keep  
the astonishment out of my voice. 'New Earth?" I knew at once that it  
wasn't. I'd been to New Earth numerous times and the sky tones, smells,  
and gravity had not been like this.  

Johnny shook his head. 'This is nowhere in the Web." I stopped walking.  
'That's impossible." By definition, any world which could be reached by  
farcaster was in the Web.  

'Nonetheless, it is not in the Web." 'Where is it then?" 'Old Earth."  

We walked on. Johnny pointed out another ruin. 'The Forum." Descending  
a long staircase, he said, 'Ahead is the Piazza di Spagna where we'll  
spend the night."  

'Old Earth,' I said, my first comment in twenty minutes.  

'Time travel?"  

'That is not possible, M. Lamia."  

'A theme park then?"  

Johnny laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, unself-conscious and easy.  
'Perhaps. I don't really know its purpose or function. It is... an  
analog."  

'An analog." I squinted at the red, setting sun just visible down a  
narrow street. 'It looks like the holos I've seen of Old Earth. It  
feels right, even though l've never been there."  

'It is very accurate."  

'Where is it? I mean, what star?"  

'I don't know the number,' said Johnny. 'It's in the Hercules Cluster."  

I managed not to repeat what he said but I stopped and sat down on one  
of the steps. With the Hawking drive humankind had explored, colonized,  
and linked with farcaster worlds across many thousands of light-years.  

But no one had tried to reach the exploding Core suns.  

We had barely crawled out of the cradle of one spiral arm. The Hercules  
Cluster.  

'Why has the TechnoCore built a replica of Rome in the Hercules  
Cluster?" 1 asked.  

Johnny sat next to me. We both looked up as a whirling mass of pigeons  
exploded into flight and wheeled above the rooftops. 'I don't know, M.  
Lamia.  

There is much that I have not learned ... at least partially because I  

have not been interested until now. '  

'Brawne,' I said.  

'Excuse me?" 'Call me Brawne."  

Johnny smiled and inclined his head. 'Thank you, Brawne. One thing,  
though. I do not believe that it is a replica of the city of Rome  
alone. It is all of Old Earth."  

l set both hands on the sun-warmed stone of the step I was sitting on.  
'All of Old Earth? All of its... continents, cities?"  

'l believe so. I haven't been out of ltaly and England  

except for a sea voyage between the two, but I believe the analog is  
complete."  

'Why, for God's sake?"  

Johnny nodded slowly. 'That may indeed be the case.  

Why don't we go inside and eat and talk more about this? It may relate  
to who tried to kill me and why."  

'Inside' was an apartment in a large house at the foot of the marble  
stairs. Windows looked out on what Johnny called the 'piazza' and I  
could see up the staircase to a large, yellow-brown church above, and  
down to the square where a boat-shaped fountain tossed water into the  
evening stillness. Johnny said that the fountain had been designed by  
Bernini but the name meant nothing to me.  

The rooms were small but high-ceilinged, with rough but elaborately  
carved furniture from an era I did not recognize. There was no sign of  
electricity or modern appliances. The house did not respond when I  
spoke to it at the door and again in the apartment upstairs. As dusk  
fell over the square and city outside the tall windows, the only lights  
were a few streetlamps of gas or some more primitive combustible.  

'This is out of Old Earth's past,' I said, touching the thick pillows. I  
raised my head, suddenly understanding.  

'Keats died in Italy. Early... nineteenth or twentieth century. This  
is... then."  

'Yes. Early nineteenth century: 1821, to be precise." 'The whole world  
is a museum?"  

'Oh no. Different areas are different eras, of course. It depends upon  
the analog being pursued."  

'I don't understand." We had moved into a room cluttered with thick  
furniture and I sat on an oddly carved couch by a window. A film of  
gold evening light still touched the spire of the tawny church up the  
steps.  

Pigeons wheeled white against blue sky. 'Are there millions of  

people... cybrids... living on this fake Old Earth?"  

'I do not believe so,' said Johnny. 'Only the number necessary for the  
particular analog project." He saw that ! still did not understand and  
took a breath before continuing. 'When I... awoke here, there were  
cybrid analogs of Joseph Severn, Dr Clark, the landlady Anna Angeletti,  
young Lieutenant Elton, and a few others.  

Italian shopkeepers, the owner of the trattoria across the square who  
used to bring us our food, passersby, that  

sort of thing. No more than a score at the most." 'What happened to  
them?"  

'They were probably... recycled. Like the man with the queue."  

'Queue..." I suddenly stared across the darkening room at Johnny. 'He  
was a cybrid?"  

'Without doubt. The self-destruction you described is precisely the way  
I would rid myself of this cybrid if I had tO."  

My mind was racing. I realized how stupid I had been, how little I had  
learned about anything. 'Then it was  

another AI who tried to kill you." 'It seems that way." 'Why?"  

Johnny made a gesture with his hands. 'Possibly to erase some quantum  
of knowledge that died with my cybrid. Something I had learned only  
recently and the other AI ... or Als knew would be destroyed in my  
systems crash."  

I stood, paced back and forth, and stopped at the window. The darkness  
was settling in earnest now. There were lamps in the room but Johnny  
made no move to light them and I preferred the dimness. It made the  
unreality of what I was hearing even that much more unreal. I looked  
into the bedroom. The western windows admitted the last of the light;  
bedclothes glowed whitely.  

'You died here,' I said.  

'He did,' said Johnny. 'I am not he." 'But you have his memories."  
'Half-forgotten dreams. There are gaps." 'But you know what he felt."  

'1 remember what the designers thought that he felt." 'Tell me."  

'What?" Johnny's skin was very pale in the gloom. His short curls  
looked black.  

'What it was like to die. What it was like to be reborn."  

Johnny told me, his voice very soft, almost melodic, lapsing sometimes  
into an English too archaic to be understood but far more beautiful to  
the ear than the hybrid tongue we speak today.  

He told me what it was like to be a poet obsessed with perfection, far  
harsher toward his own efforts than even the most vicious critic. And  

the critics were vicious. His work was dismissed, ridiculed, described  
as derivative and silly. Too poor to marry the woman he loved, loaning  
money to his brother in America and thus losing the last chance of  
financial security... and then the brief glory of growing into the full  
maturation of his poetic powers just as he fell prey to the  
'consumption' which had claimed his mother and his brother Tom. Then  
sent off to exile in Italy, reputedly 'for his health' while knowing all  
the while it meant a lonely, painful death at the age of twenty-six. He  
talked of the agony of seeing Fanny's handwriting on the letters he  
found too painful to open; he talked of the loyalty of the young artist  
Joseph Severn, who had been chosen as a traveling companion for Keats by  
'friends' who had abandoned the poet at the end, of how Severn had  
nursed the dying man and stayed with him during the final days. He told  
of the hemorrhages in the night, of Dr Clark bleeding him and  
prescribing 'exercise and good air,' and of the ultimate religious and  
personal despair which had led Keats to demand his own epitaph be carved  
in stone as: 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."  

Only the dimmest light from below outlined the tall windows. Johnny's  
voice seemed to fioat in the night-scented air. He spoke of awakening  
after his death in the bed where he died, still attended by the loyal  
Severn and Dr Clark, of remembering that he was the poet John Keats the  
way one remembers an identity from a fast-fading dream while all the  
while knowing that he was something else.  

He told of the illusion continued, the trip back to England, the reunion  
with the Fanny-who-was-not-Fanny and the near mental breakdown this had  
engendered.  

He told of his inability to write further poetry, of his increasing  
estrangement from the cybrid impostors,  

of his retreat into something resembling catatonia combined with  
'hallucinations' of his true AI existence in the nearly incomprehensible  
(to a nineteenth-century poet) TechnoCore, and of the ultimate crumbling  
of the illusion and the abandonment of the 'Keats Project."  

'In truth,' he said, 'the entire, evil charade made me think of nothing  
so much as a passage in a letter I wrote * . . he wrote... to his  
brother George some time before his illness. Keats said:  

'May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though  
instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the  
alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the  
streets is a thing to be hated, the energies dis* played in it are fine.  
By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone - though  
erroneous they may be fine - This is the very thing in which consists  
poetry."  

'You think the .  .  .  Keats Project .  .  .  was evil?" I asked.  

'Anything which deceives is evil, I believe."  

'Perhaps you are more John Keats than you are willing to admit."  

'No. The absence of poetic instinct showed otherwise even in the midst  
of the most elaborate illusion."  

I looked at the dark outlines of shapes in the dark house. 'Do the AIs  
know that we're here?"  

'Probably. Almost surely. There is no place that I can go that the  
TechnoCore cannot trace and follow. But it was the Web authorities and  
brigands from whom we fled, no?"  

'But you know now that it was someone .  .  .  some intelligence in the  
TechnoCore who assaulted you."  

'Yes, but only in the Web. Such violence in the Core would not be  
tolerated."  

There came a noise from the street. A pigeon, I hoped.  

Wind blowing trash across cobblestones perhaps. 1 said, 'How will the  
TechnoCore respond to my being here?"  

'1 have no idea."  

'Surely it must be a secret."  

'It is ... something they consider irrelevant to humanity."  

I shook my head, a futile gesture in the darkness. 'The re-creation of  
Old Earth... the resurrection of... how many? ... human  
personalities as cybrids on this re-created world... AIs killing Als...  
irrelevant!" I laughed but managed to keep the laughter under control.  

'Jesus wept, Johnny."  

'Almost certainly."  

I moved to the window, not caring what sort of target l would afford  
anyone in t he dark street below, and fumbled out a cigarette. They  
were damp from the afteruoon's chase through the snowdrifts but one  
lighted when I struck it. 'Johnny, earlier when you said that the Old  
Earth analog was complete, I said,"Why, for God's sake?" and you said  
something like "That may be the case." Was that  

just a wiseass comment or did you mean something?" 'I mean that it might  
indeed be for God's sake." 'Explain."  

Johnny sighed in the darkness. 'I don't understand the exact purpose of  
the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it  
is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven standard  
centuries to realize the Ultimate Intelligence."  

'The Ultimate Intelligence,' I said, exhaling smoke.  

'Uh-huh. So theTechnoCore is trying to... what?... to  

build God." 'Yes,' 'Why?"  

'There is no simple answer, Brawne. Any more than there is a simple  
answer to the question of why humankind has sought God in a million  

guises for ten thousand generations.  

But with the Core, the interest lies more in the quest for more  
efficiency, more reliable ways to handle...  

variables."  

'But the TechnoCore can draw on itself and the mega-datasphere of two  
hundred worlds."  

'And there still will be blanks in the .  .  .  predictive powers."  

I threw my cigarette out the window, watching the ember fall into the  
night. The breeze was suddenly cold; 1 hugged my arms. 'How does all  
this... Old Earth, the resurrection projects, the cybrids... how does  
it lead to creating the Ultimate Intelligence?"  

'I don't know, Brawne. Eight standard centuries ago, at the beginning  
of the First Information Age, a man named Norbert Wiener wrote: "Can God  
play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a  
limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?"  

Humanity dealt with this inconclusively with their early Als. The Core  
wrestles with it in the resurrection projects. Perhaps the UI program  
has been completed and all of this remains a function of the ultimate  
Creature/Creator, a personality whose motives are as far beyond the  
Core's understanding as the Core's are beyond humanity's."  

I started to move in the dark room, bumped a low table with my knee, and  
remained standing. 'None of which tells us who is trying to kill you,'  
I said.  

'No." Johnny rose and moved to the far wall. A match flared and he  
lighted a candle. Our shadows wavered on the walls and ceiling.  

Johnny came closer and softly gripped my upper arms. The soft light  
painted his curls and eyelashes copper and touched his high cheekbones  
and firm chin.  

'Why are you so tough?" he asked.  

I stared at him. His face was only inches from mine.  

We were the same height. 'Let go,' I said.  

Instead, he leaned forward and kissed me. His lips were soft and warm  
and the kiss seemed to last for hours.  

He's a machine, I thought. Human, but a machine behind that. 1 closed  
my eyes. His soft hand touched my cheek, my neck, the back of my head.  

'Listen..." I whispered when we broke apart for an instant.  

Johnny did not let me finish. He lifted me in his arms and carried me  
into the other room. The tall bed. The soft mattress and deep  
comforter. The candlelight from the other room flickered and danced as  
we undressed each other in a sudden urgency.  

We made love three times that night, each time responding to slow, sweet  
imperatives of touch and warmth and closeness and the escalating  
intensity of sensation.  

I remember looking down at him the second time; his eyes were closed,  
hair fell loosely across his forehead, the candlelight showing the flush  
across his pale chest, his surprisingly strong arms and hands rising to  
hold me in place. He had opened his eyes that second to look back at me  
and I saw only the emotion and passion of that moment reflected there.  

Sometime before dawn we slept; just as I turned away and drifted off, I  
felt the cool touch of his hand on my hip in a movement protective and  
casual without being possessive.  

They hit us just after first light. There were five of them, not Lusian  
but heavily muscled, all men, and they worked well together as a team.  

The first I heard of them was when the door to the apartment was kicked  
open. I rolled out of bed, jumped to the side of the bedroom door, and  
watched them come through. Johnny sat up and shouted something as the  
first man leveled a stunner. Johnny had pulled on cotton shorts before  
going to sleep; I was nude. There are real disadvantages to fighting in  
the nude when one's opponents are dressed, but the greatest problem is  
psychological.  

If you can get over the sense of heightened vulnerability, the rest is  
easy to compensate for.  

The first man saw me, decided to stun Johnny anyway, and paid for the  
mistake. I kicked the weapon out of his hand and clubbed him down with  
a blow behind the left ear. Two more men pushed into the room. This  
time both of them were smart enough to deal with me first. Two others  
leaped for Johnny.  

I blocked a stiff-fingered jab, parried a kick that would have done real  
damage, and backed away. There was a tall dresser to my left and the  
top drawer came out smooth and heavy. The big man in front of me  
shielded his face with both arms so that the thick wood splintered, but  
the instinctive reaction gave me a second's opening and I took it,  
putting my entire body into the kick.  

Number two man grunted and fell back against his partner.  

Johnny was struggling but one of the intruders had him around the throat  
in a choke hold while the other pinned his legs. I came off the floor  
in a crouch, accepted the blow from my number two, and leaped across the  
bed. The guy holding Johnny's legs went through the glass and wood of  
the window without a word.  

Someone landed on my back and I completed the roll across the bed and  
floor, bringing him up against the wall. He was good. He took the blow  
on his shoulder and went for a nerve pinch beneath my ear. He had a  
second of trouble because of the extra layers of muscle there and I got  
an elbow deep into his stomach and rolled away.  

The man choking Johnny dropped him and delivered a text-book-perfect  

kick to my ribs. I took half the impact, feeling at least one rib go,  
and spun inside, attempting no elegance as I used my left hand to crush  
his left testicle.  

The man screamed and was out of it.  
I'd never forgotten the stunner on the floor and neither had the last of  
the opposition. He scurried around to the far side of the bed, out of  
reach, and dropped to all fours to grab the weapon. Definitely feeling  

the pain from the broken rib now, I lifted the massive bed with Johnny  
in it and dropped it on the guy's head and shoulders.  
I went under the bed from my side, retrieved the stunner, and backed  

into an empty corner.  
One guy had gone out the window. We were on the second floor. The  
first man to enter was still lying in the doorway. The guy I'd kicked  
had managed to get to one knee and both elbows. From the blood on his  
mouth and chin, I guessed that a rib had punctured a lung. He was  
breathing very raggedly. The bed had crushed the skull of the other man  
on the floor. The guy who'd been choking Johnny was curled up near the  

window, holding his crotch and vomiting. I stunned him into silence and  
went over to the one I'd kicked and lifted him by the hair.  
'Who sent you?"  
'Fuck you." He sprayed some bloody spittle in my face.  
'Maybe later,' I said* 'Again, who sent you?" I placed three fingers  

against his side where the ribcage seemed concave and pressed.  

The man screamed and went very white. When he coughed the blood was too  
red against pale skin.  
'Who sent you?" I set four fingers against his ribs.  
'The bishop!" He tried to levitate away from my fingers.  
'What bishop?"  
'Shrike Temple... Lusus... don't, please... oh, shit..."  
'What were you going to do with him... us?"  
'Nothing ...  Oh, God damn .  .  .  don't! I need a medic, please!'  
'Sure. Answer."  
'Stun him, bring him .  .  .  back to the Temple . . .  
Lusus. Please. I can't breathe."  
'And me?"  
'Kill you if you resisted."  
'Okay,' I said, lifting him a little higher by his hair, 'we're doing  

fine here. What did they want him for?"  
'I don't know." He screamed very loudly. I kept one eye on the doorway  

to the apartment. The stunner .was still in my palm under a fistful of  
hair. 'I... don't...  
know..." he gasped. He was hemorrhaging in earnest  
now. The blood dripped on my arm and left breast.  
'How'd you get here?" 'EMV... roof." 'Where'd you 'cast in?"  
'Don't know... I swear... some city in the water.  
Cat's set to return there... please!'  
I ripped at his clothes. No comlog. No other weapons.  
There was a tattoo of a blue trident just above his heart.  
'Goonda?" I said.  
'Yeah... Parvati Brotherhood."  
Outside the Web. Probably very hard to trace. 'All of you?"  
'Yeah... please... get me some help... oh, shit *.. please..." He  

sagged, almost unconscious.  
I dropped him, stepped back, and sprayed the stun beam over him.  
Johnny was sitting up, rubbing his throat, and staring at me with a  

strange gaze.  
'Get dressed,' I said. 'We're leaving."  
The EMV was an old, transparent Vikken Scenic with no palmlocks on the  

ignition plate or diskey. We caught up to the terminator before we had  
crossed France and looked down on darkness that Johnny said was the  
Atlantic Ocean. Except for lights of the occasional floating city or  
drilling platform, the only illumination came from the stars and the  
broad, swimming-pool glows of the undersea colonies.  

'Why are we taking their vehicle?" asked Johnny.  

'I want to see where they farcast from." :He said the Lusus Shrike  
Temple." 'Yeah. Now we'll see."  
Johnny's face was barely visible as he looked down at the dark sea  

twenty klicks below. 'Do you think those men will die?"  
'One was already dead,' I said. 'The guy with the punctured lung will  

need help. Two of them'll be okay. I don't know about the one who went  
out the window. Do you care?"  
'Yes. The violence was... barbaric."  

' "Though a quarrel in the street is a thing to be hated, the energies  
displayed in it are fine," ' I quoted. 'They  
weren't cybrids, were they?"  

'I think not."  
'So there are at least two groups out to get you the Als and the bishop  
of the Shrike Temple. And we still don't know why."  

'I do have an idea now."  
I swiveled in the foam reelinet. The constellations above us - familiar  
neither from holos of Old Earth's skies nor from any Web world I knew - 

cast just enough light to allow me to see Johnny's eyes. 'Tell me,' I  
said.  
'Your mention of Hyperion gave me a clue,' he said.  
'The fact that I had no knowledge of it. Its absence said that it was  

important."  
'The strange case of the dog barking in the night,' l said.  
'What?"  
'Nothing. Go on."  
Johnny leaned closer* 'The only reason that I would not be aware of it  

is that some elements of the Techno-Core have blocked my knowledge of  

it."  
'Your cybrid..." It was strange to talk to Johnny that way now. 'You  
spend most of your time in the Web,  

don't you?"  
'Yes."  
'Wouldn't you run across mention of Hyperion somewhere?  
It's in the news every once in a while, especially when the Shrike  

Cult's topical."  
'Perhaps I did hear. Perhaps that is why I was murdered."  
I lay back and looked at the stars. 'Let's go ask the bishop,' I said.  
Johnny said that the lights ahead were an analog of New York City in the  

mid-twenty-first century. He didn't know what resurrection project the  

city had been rebuilt for. I took the EMV off auto and dropped lower.  
Tall buildings from the phallic-symbol era of urban architecture rose  
from the swamps and lagoons of the North American littoral. Several had  
lights burning.  

Johnny pointed to one decrepit but oddly elegant structure and said,  

'The Empire State Building."  

'Okay,' I said. 'Whatever it is, that's where the EMV  

wants to land."  

'Is it safe?"  

I grinned at him. 'Nothing in life's safe." I let the car have its head  
and we dropped to a small, open platform below the building's spire. We  
got out and stood on the cracked balcony. It was quite dark except for  
the few building lights far below and the stars. A few paces away, a  
vague blue glow outlined a farcaster portal where elevator doors may  
once have been.  

'I'11 go first,' I said but Johnny had already stepped through. I  
palmed the borrowed stunner and followed him.  

I'd never been in the Shrike Temple on Lusus before but there was no  
doubt that we were there now. Johnny stood a few paces ahead of me but  
other than him there was no one around* The place was cool and dark and  
cavernous if caverns could really be that large. A frightening  
polychrome sculpture which hung from invisible cables rotated to unfelt  
breezes. Johnny and I both turned as the farcaster portal winked out of  
existence.  

'Well, we did their work for them, didn't we?" I whispered to Johnny.  
Even the whisper seemed to echo in the red-lit hall. I hadn't planned  
on Johnny 'casting to the Temple with me.  

The light seemed to come up then, not really illuminating the great hall  
but widening its scope so that we could see the semicircle of men there.  
I remembered that some were called exorcists and others lectors and  
there was some other category I forgot. Whoever they were, it was  
alarming to see them standing there, at least two dozen of them, their  
robes variations on red and black and their high foreheads glowing from  
the red light above. I had no trouble recognizing the bishop. He was  
from my world, although shorter and fatter than most of us, and his robe  
was very red.  

I did not try to hide the stunner. It was possible that if they all  
tried to rush us I could bring them all down.  

Possible but not probable. I could not see any weapons but their robes  
could have hidden entire arsenals.  

Johnny walked toward the bishop and I followed. Ten paces from the man  
we stopped. The bishop was the only one not standing. His chair was  
made of wood and looked as if it could be folded so that the intricate  
arms, supports, back, and legs could be carried in a compact form. One  
couldn't say the same of the mass of muscle and fat evident under the  
bishop's robes.  

Johnny took another step forward. 'Why did you try to kidnap my  
cybrid?" He spoke to the Shrike Cult holy man as if the rest of us were  
not there.  

The bishop chuckled and shook his head. 'My dear * . . entity... it  
is true that we wished your presence in our place of worship, but you  
have no evidence that we were involved in any attempt to kidnap you."  

'I'm not interested in evidence,' said Johnny. 'I'm curious as to why  
you want me here." I heard a rustling behind us and I swiveled quickly,  
the  

stunner charged and pointed, but the broad circle of Shrike priests  
remained motionless. Most were out of the stunner's range. I wished  
that I had brought my father's projectile weapon with me.  

The bishop's voice was deep and textured and seemed to fill the huge  
space. 'Surely you know that the Church of the Final Atonement has a  
deep and abiding interest in  

the world of Hyperion."  

'Yes."  

'And surely you are aware that during the past several centuries the  
persona of the Old Earth poet Keats has been woven into the cultural  
mythos of the Hyperion colony?"  

'Yes. So?"  

The bishop rubbed his cheek with a large red ring on one finger. 'So  
when you offered to go on the Shrike Pilgrimage we agreed. We were  
distressed when you reneged on this offer."  

Johnny's look of amazement .was most human. 'I offered? When?"  

'Eight local days ago,' said the bishop. 'In this room.  

You approached us with the idea."  

'Did I say why I wanted to go on the .  .  .  Shrike Pilgrimage?"  

'You said that it was... I believe the phrase you used was...  
"important for your education." We can show you the recording if you  
wish. All such conversations in the Temple are recorded. Or you may  
have a duplicate of  

the recording to view at your own convenience."  

'Yes,' said Johnny.  

The bishop nodded and an acolyte or whatever the hell he was disappeared  
into the gloom for a moment and returned with a standard video chip in  
his hand. The bishop nodded again and the blackrobed man came forward  
and handed the chip to Johnny. I kept the stunner ready until the guy  
had returned to the semicircle of watchers.  

'Why did you send the goondas after us?" I asked. It was the first time  
I'd spoken in front of the bishop and my voice sounded too loud and too  
raw.  

The Shrike holy man made a gesture with one pudgy  

hand. 'M. Keats had expressed an interest in joining our holiest  
pilgrimage. Since it is our belief that the Final Atonement is drawing  
closer each day, this is of no little importance to us. Consequently,  
our agents reported that M. Keats may have been the victim of one or  
more assaults and that a certain private investigator... you, M.  
Lamia... was responsible for destroying the cybrid  

bodyguard provided M. Keats by the TechnoCore." 'Bodyguard!" It was my  
turn to sound amazed.  

'Of course,' said the bishop. He turned toward Johnny. 'The gentleman  
with the queue who was recently murdered on the Temple Excursion, was  
this not the same man whom you introduced as your bodyguard a week  
earlier? He is visible in the recording."  

Johnny said nothing. He seemed to be straining to remember something.  

'At any rate,' continued the bishop, 'we must have your answer about the  
pilgrimage before the week is out.  

The Sequoia Sernpervirens departs from the Web in nine local days."  

'But that'S a Templar treeship,' said Johnny. 'They don't make the long  
leap to Hyperion."  

The bishop smiled. 'In this case it does. We have reason to believe  
that this may be the last Church-sponsored pilgrimage and we have  
chartered the Templar craft to allow as many of the faithful as possible  
to make the trip." The bishop gestured and red-and-black-robed men faded  
back into darkness. Two exorcists came forward to fold his stool as the  
bishop stood. 'Please give us your answer as soon as possible." He was  
gone. The remaining exorcist stayed to show us out.  

There were no more farcasters. We exited by the main door of the Temple  
and stood on the top step of the long staircase, looking down on the  
Concourse Mall of Hive Center and breathing in the cool, oil-scented  
air.  

My father's automatic was in the drawer where I'd left it.  

I made sure there was a full load of fl6chettes, palmed the magazine  
back in, and carried the weapon into the kitchen where breakfast was  
cooking. Johnny sat at the long table, staring down through gray  
windows at the  

loading dock. I carried the omelets over and set one in front of him.  
He looked up as I poured the coffee.  

'Do you believe him?" I asked. 'That it was your idea7' 'You saw the  
video recording." 'Recordings can be faked." 'Yes. But this one  
wasn't."  

'Then why did you volunteer to go on this pilgrimage?  

And why did your bodyguard try to kill you after you talked to the  

Shrike Church and the Templar captain?"  
Johnny tried the omelet, nodded, and took another forkful. 'The...  
bodyguard... is a complete unknown to me. He must have been assigned  
to me during the week lost to memory. His real purpose obviously was to  

make sure that I did not discover something... or, if I did stumble  
upon it, to eliminate me."  
'Something in the Web or in datumplane?"  
'In the Web, I presume."  
'We need to know who he... it... worked for and why they assigned him  

to you."  
'I do know,' said Johnny. 'I just asked. The Core responds that I  

requested a bodyguard. The cybrid was controlled by an AI nexus which  
corresponds to a security force."  
'Ask why he tried to kill you."  
'I did. They emphatically deny that such a thing is possible."  
'Then why was this so-called bodyguard slinking around after you a week  

after the murder?"  
'They respond that while I did not request security again after my...  

discontinuity... the Core authorities felt that it would be prudent to  
provide protection."  
I laughed. 'Some protection. Why the hell did he run on the Templar  

world when I caught up to him? They aren't  
even trying to give you a plausible story, Johnny."  
'No."  
'Nor did the bishop explain how the Shrike Church had farcaster access  

to Old Earth... or whatever you call that stage-set world."  
'And we did not ask."  
'/didn't ask because I wanted to get out of that damn Temple in one  

piece."  
Johnny didn't seem to hear. He was sipping his coffee,  
his gaze focused somewhere else.  
'What?" I said.  
He turned to look at me, tapping his thumbnail on his  
lower lip. 'There is a paradox here, Brawne."  
'What7'  

'If it was truly my aim to go to Hyperion... for my cybrid to travel  
there... I could not have remained in the TechnoCore. I would have had  
to invest all consciousness in the cybrid itself."  

'Why?" But even as I asked I saw the reason.  

'Think. Datumplane itself is an abstract. A commingling of computer  
and AI-generated dataspheres and the quasi-perceptual Gibsonian matrix  
designed originally for human operators, now accepted as common ground  
for man, machine, and AI."  

'But AI hardware exists somewhere in real space,' I said. 'Somewhere in  
the TechnoCore."  

'Yes, but that is irrelevant to the function of AI consciousness,' said  
Johnny. 'I can "be" anywhere the overlapping dataspheres allow me to  
travel .  .  .  all of the Web worlds, of course, datumplane, and any of  
the TechnoCore constructs such as Old Earth... but it's only within  
that milieu that I can claim "consciousness" or operate sensors or  
remotes such as this cybrid."  

I set my coffee cup down and stared at the thing I had loved as a man  
during the night just past. 'Yes?"  

'The colony worlds have limited dataspheres,' said Johnny. 'While there  
is some contact with the Techno-Core via fatline transmissions, it is an  
exchange of data only... rather like the First Information Age computer  
interfaces ... rather than a flow of consciousness.  

Hyperion's datasphere is primitive to the point of nonexistence.  

And from what I can access, the Core has no contact whatsoever with that  
world."  

'Would that be normaIT I asked. 'I mean with a colony world that far  
away?"  

'No. The Core has contact with every colony world, with such  
interstellar barbarians as the Ousters, and with other sources the  
Hegemony could not imagine."  

I sat stunned. 'With the Ousters?" Since the war on  

Bressia a few years earlier, the Ousters had been the Web's prime  
bogeymen.  The idea of the Core .  .  .  the same congregation of Als  
which advises the Senate and the All Thing and which allows our entire  
economy, farcaster system, and technological civilization to run * . .  
the idea of the Core being in touch with the Ousters was frightening.  
And what the hell did Johnny mean by 'other sources'? I didn't really  
want to know right then.  

'But you said it is possible for your cybrid to travel there?" I said.  
'What did you mean by "investing all consciousness" in your cybrid? Can  
an AI become...  

human? Can you exist only in your cybrid?"  

'It has been done,' Johnny said softly. 'Once. A personality  
reconstruction not too different from my own.  

A twentieth-century poet named Ezra Pound. He abandoned his AI persona  
and fled from the Web in his  

cybrid. But the Pound reconstruction was insane." 'Or sane,' I said.  

'Yes."  

'So all of the data and personality of an AI can survive in a cybrid's  
organic brain."  

'Of course not, Brawne. Not one percent of one percent of my total  
consciousness would survive the transition. Organic brains can't  
process even the most primitive information the way we can. The  
resultant personality would not be the AI persona .  .  .  neither would  
it be a truly human consciousness or cybrid..." Johnny stopped in  
mid-sentence and turned quickly to look out the window.  

After a long minute I said, 'What is it?" I reached out a hand but did  
not touch him.  

He spoke without turning. 'Perhaps I was wrong to say that the  
consciousness would not be human,' he whispered. 'It is possible that  
the resulting persona could be human touched with a certain divine  
madness and meta-human perspective.  It could be .  .  .  if purged of  
all memory of our age, of all consciousness of the Core * . . it could  
be the person the cybrid was programmed to be..."  

'John Keats,' I said.  

Johnny turned away from the window and closed his eyes. His voice was  
hoarse with emotion. It was the first time I had heard him recite  
poetry:  

'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect,  
the savage too  

From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at Heaven; pity  
these have not  

Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf  

The shadows of melodious utterance.  

But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;  

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,  

With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable  
charm  

And dumb enchantment. 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 don't get it,' I said. 'What does it mean?"  
'It means,' said Johnny, smiling gently, 'that I know what decision I  
made and why I made it. I wanted to cease being a cybrid and become a  
man. I wanted to go to Hyperion. I still do."  

'Somebody killed you for that decision a week ago,' 1 said.  
'Yes."  
'And you're going to try again?"  
'Yes."  
'Why not invest consciousness in your cybrid here?  
Become human in the Web?"  
'It would never work,' said Johnny. 'What you see as a complex  

interstellar society is only a small part of the Core reality matrix. I  
would be constantly confronted with and at the mercy of the Als. The  
Keats persona...  

reality... would never survive."  

'All right,' I said, 'you need to get out of the Web. But there are  
other colonies. Why Hyperion?"  
Johnny took my hand. His finger were long and warm and strong. 'Don't  

you see, Brawne? There is some con-neetion here. It may well be that  
Keats's dreams of Hyperion were some sort of transtemporal communication  
between his then persona and his now persona. If nothing else, Hyperion  
is the key mystery of our age - physical and poetic - and it is quite  
probable that he... that I was born, died, and was born again to  
explore it."  

'It sounds like madness to me,' I said. 'Delusions of grandeur."  
'Almost certainly,' laughed Johnny. 'And I never have been happier!" He  

grabbed my arms and brought me to my feet, his arms around me. 'Will  
you go with me, Brawne? Go with me to Hyperion?"  
I blinked in surprise, both at his question and the answer, which filled  

me like a rush of warmth. 'Yes,' I said. 'I'11 go."  
We went into the sleeping area then and made love the rest of that day,  
sleeping finally to awaken to the low light of Shift Three in the  

industrial trench outside.  

Johnny was lying on his back, his hazel eyes open and staring at the  
ceiling, lost in thought. But not so lost he did not smile and put his  
arm around me. I nestled my cheek against him, settling into the small  
curve where shoulder meets chest, and went back to sleep.  

I was wearing my best clothes - a suit of black whipcord, a blouse woven  
of Renaissance silk with a Carvnel blood-stone at the throat, a cocked  
Eulin Br6 tricorne - when Johnny and I farcast to TC2 the next day. I  
left him in the wood and brass bar near the central terminex, but not  
before I slid Dad's automatic across to him in a paper bag and told him  
to shoot anyone who even looked cross-eyed at him.  

'Web English is such a subtle tongue,' he said.  

'That phrase is older than the Web,' I said. 'Just do it." I squeezed  
his hand and left without looking back.  

I took a skycab to the Administration Complex and walked my way through  
about nine security checks before they let me into the Center grounds. I  
walked the half klick across Deer Park, admiring the swans in the nearby  
lake and the white buildings on the hilltop in the distance, and then  
there were nine more checkpoints before a Center security woman led me  
up the flagstoned path to Government House, a low, graceful building set  
amid flower gardens and landscaped hills. There was an elegantly  
furnished waiting room but I barely had time to sit down on an authentic  
pre-Hegira de Kooning before an aide appeared and ushered me into the  
CEO's private office.  

Meina Gladstone came around the desk to shake my hand and show me to a  
chair. It was strange to see her in person again after all those years  
of watching her on HTV. She was even more impressive in the flesh: her  
hair was cut short but seemed to be blowing back in gray-white waves;  
her cheeks and chin were as sharp and Lincolnesque as all the  
history-prone pundits insisted, but it was the large, sad, brown eyes  
which dominated the face and made one feel as if he or she were in the  
presence of a truly original person.  

I found that my mouth was dry. 'Thank you for seeing me, M. Executive.  
I know how busy you are."  

'I'm never too busy to see you, Brawne. Just as your father was never  
too busy to see me when I was a junior senator."  

I nodded. Dad had once described Meina Gladstone as the only political  
genius in the Hegemony. He knew that she would be CEO someday despite  
her late start in poli tics. I wished Dad had lived to see it.  

'How is your mother, Brawne?"  

'She's well, M. Executive. She rarely leaves our old summer place on  
Freeholm anymore but I see her every Christmas Fest."  

Gladstone nodded. She had been sitting casually on the edge of a  
massive desk which the tabloids said had once belonged to an  
assassinated President- not Lincoln - of the pre-Mistake USA, but now  

she smiled and went around to the simple chair behind it. 'I miss your  
father, Brawne. I wish he were in this administration.  

Did you see the lake when you came in?"  

'Yes."  

'Do you remember sailing toy boats there with my Kresten when you were  
both toddlers?"  

'Just barely, M. Executive. I was pretty young."  

Meina Gladstone smiled. An intercom chimed but she waved it into  
silence. 'How can I help you, Brawne?"  

I took a breath. 'M. Executive, you may be aware that I'm working as  
an independent private investigator..." I didn't wait for her nod. 'A  
case I've been working on recently has led me back to Dad's suicide..."  

'Brawne, you know that was investigated most thoroughly.  

I saw the commission's report."  

'Yeah,' I said. 'I did too. But recently l've discovered some very  
strange things about the TechnoCore and its attitude toward the world  
Hyperion. Weren't you and Dad working on a bill that would have brought  
Hyperion into the Hegemony Protectorate?"  

Gladstone nodded. 'Yes, Brawne, but there were over a dozen other  
colonies being considered that year. None were allowed in."  

'Right. But did the Core or the AI Advisory Council take a special  
interest in Hyperion?"  

The CEO tapped a stylus against her lower lip. 'What kind of  
information do you have, Brawne?" I started to answer but she held up a  
blunt finger. 'Wait!" She keyed an interactive. 'Thomas, VII be  
stepping out for a few minutes. Please be sure that the Sol Draconi  
trade delegation is entertained if I fail a bit behind schedule."  

I didn't see her key anything else but suddenly a blue and gold  
farcaster portai hummed into life near the far wall. She gestured me to  
go through first.  

A plain of gold, knee-high grass stretched to horizons which seemed  
farther away than most. The sky was a pale yellow with burnished copper  
streaks which may have been clouds. I didn't recognize the world.  

Meina Gladstone stepped through and touched the comlog design on her  
sleeve. The farcaster portal winked out. A warm breeze blew spice  
scents to us.  

Gladstone touched her sleeve again, glanced skyward, and nodded. 'I'm  
sorry for the inconvenience, Brawne.  

Kastrop-Rauxel has no datasphere or sats of any kind.  

NOw please go ahead with what you were saying. What kind of information  
have you come across?"  

I looked around at the empty grasslands. 'Nothing to warrant this  
security... probably. l've just discovered that the TechnoCore seems  
very interested in Hyperion.  

They've also built some sort of analog to Old Earth... an entire  
world!'  

If I expected shock or surprise I was disappointed.  

Gladstone nodded. 'Yes. We know about the Old Earth analog."  

I was shocked. 'Then why hasn't it even been announced? If the Core  
can rebuild Old Earth, a lot of people would be interested."  

Gladstone began walking and I strolled with her, walking faster to keep  
up with her long-legged strides.  

'Brawne, it would not be in the Hegemony's interest to announce it. Our  
best !uman intelligence sources have no idea why the Core is doing such  
a thing. They have offered no insight. The best policy now is to wait.  
What information do you have about Hyperion?"  

I had no idea whether I could trust Meina Gladstone, old times or not.  
But I knew that if I was going to get information I would have to give  
some. 'They built an analog reconstruction of an Old Earth poet,' I  
said, 'and they seem obsessed with keeping any information about  
Hyperion away from him."  

Gladstone picked a long stem of grass and sucked on it.  

'The John Keats cybrid."  

'Yes." I was careful not to show surprise this time. 'I know that Dad  
was pushing hard to get Protectorate status for Hyperion. If the Core  
has some special interest in the place, they may have had something to  
do... may have manipulated..."  

'His apparent suicide?"  

'Yeah?"  

The wind moved gold grass in waves. Something very small scurried away  
in the stalks at our feet. 'It is not beyond the realm of possibility,  
Brawne. But there was absolutely no evidence. Tell me what this cybrid  
is going to do."  

'First tell me why the Core is so interested in Hyperion."  

The older woman spread her hands. 'If we knew that, Brawne, I would  
sleep much easier nights. As far as we know, the TechnoCore has been  
obsessed with Hyperion for centuries. When CEO Yevshensky allowed King  
Billy of Asquith to recolonize the planet, it almost precipitated a true  
secession of AIs from the Web. Recently the establishment of our  
fatline transmitter there brought about a similar crisis."  

'But the AIs didn't secede."  

'No, Brawne, it appears that, for whatever reason, they need us almost  
as badly as we need them."  

'But if they're so interested in Hyperion, why don't they allow it into  
the Web so they can go there themselves?"  

Gladstone ran a hand through her hair. The bronze clouds far above  
rippled in what must be a fantastic jet stream. 'They are adamant about  
Hyperion not being admitted to the Web,' she said. 'It is an  
interesting paradox.  

Tell me what the cybrid is going to do."  

'First tell me why the Core is obsessed with Hyperion." 'We do not know  
for sure." 'Best guess then."  

CEO Gladstone removed the stem of grass from her mouth and regarded it.  
'We believe that the Core is embarked on a truly incredible project  
which would allow them to predict .  .  .  everything. To handle every  
variable of space, time, and history as a quantum of manageable  
information."  

'Their Ultimate Intelligence Project,' I said, knowing that I was being  
careless and not caring.  

This time CEO Gladstone did register shock. 'How do you know about  
that?"  

'What does that project have to do with Hyperion?" Gladstone sighed. 'We  
don't know for sure, Brawne.  

But we do know that there is an anomaly on Hyperion which they have not  
been able to factor into their predictive analyses. Do you know about  
the so-called Time Tombs that the Shrike Church holds holy?"  

'Sure. They've been off limits to tourists for a while."  

'Yes. Because of an accident to a researcher there a few decades ago,  
our scientists have confirmed that the anti-entropic fields around the  
Tombs are not merely a protection against time's erosive effects as has  
been widely believed."  

'What are they?"  

'The remnants of a field... or force... which has actually propelled  
the Tombs and their contents backward in time from some distant future."  

'Contents?" I managed. 'But the Tombs are empty.  

Ever since they were discovered."  

'Empty now,' said Meina Gladstone. 'But there is evidence that they  
were full... will be full... when they open. In our near future."  

I stared at her. 'How near?"  

Her dark eyes remained soft but the movement of her head was final.  
'l've told you too much already, Brawne.  

You are forbidden to repeat it. We'll ensure that silence if  
necessary."  

I hid my own confusion by finding a piece of grass to strip for chewing.  
'All right,' I said. 'What's going to come out of the Tombs? Aliens?  
Bombs? Some sort of reverse time capsules?"  

Gladstone smiled tightly. 'If we knew that, Brawne, we would be ahead  
of the Core, and we are not." The smile disappeared. 'One hypothesis is  
that the Tombs relate to some future war. A settling of future scores  
by rearranging the past, perhaps."  

'A war between who, for Chrissakes?"  

She opened her hands again. 'We need to be getting back, Brawne. Would  
you please tell me what the Keats cybrid is going to do now?"  

I looked down and then back up to meet her steady gaze. I couldn't  
trust anyone, but the Core and the Shrike Church already knew Johnny's  
plans. If this was a three-sided game, perhaps each side should know in  
case there was a good guy in the bunch, 'He's going to invest all  
consciousness in the cybrid,' I said rather clumsily. 'He's going to  
become human, M. Gladstone, and then go to Hyperion. I'm going with  
him."  

The CEO of the Senate and All Thing, chief officer for a government  
which spanned almost two hundred worlds and billions of people, stared  
at me in silence for a  

long moment. Then she said, 'He plans to go with the  

Templar ship on the pilgrimage then."  

'Yes."  

'No,' said Meina Gladstone.  

'What do you mean?"  

'I mean that the Sequoia Sempervirens will not be allowed to leave  
Hegemony space. There will be no pilgrimage unless the Senate decides  
it is in our interest." Her voice was iron-hard.  

'Johnny and VII go by spinship,' I said. 'The pilgrimage is a loser's  
game anyway."  

'No,' she said. 'There will be no more civilian spin-ships to Hyperion  
for some time."  

The word 'civilian' tipped me. 'War?"  

Gladstone's lips were tight. She nodded. 'Before most  

spinships could reach the region."  

'A war with... the Ousters?"  

'Initially. View it as a way to force the issue between the TechnoCore  
and ourselves, Brawne. We will either have to incorporate the Hyperion  
system into the Web to allow it FORCE protection, or it will fall to a  
race which despises and distrusts the Core and all Als."  

I didn't mention Johnny's comment that the Core had been in touch with  
the Ousters. I said, 'A way to force the issue. Fine. But who  
manipulated the Ousters into attacking?"  

Gladstone looked at me. If her face was Lincolnesque at that moment,  
then Old Earth's Lincoln was one tough son of a bitch. 'It's time to  
get back, Brawne. You appreciate how important it is that none of this  
information gets out."  

'I appreciate the fact that you wouldn't have told me unless you had a  
reason to,' I said. 'I don't know who you want the stuff to go to, but  
I know l'm a messenger, not a confidante."  

'Don't underestimate our resolve to keep this classified, Brawne."  

I laughed. 'Lady, I wouldn't underestimate your resolve in anything."  

Meina Gladstone gestured for me to step through the farcaster portal  
first.  

' I know a way we can discover what the Core is up to,' said Johnny as  
we rode alone in a rented jetboat on Mare  

I nfinitus. 'But it would be dangerous."  

'So what else is new?"  

'I'm serious. We should only attempt it if we feel that it is  
imperative to understand what the Core fears from  

Hyperion."  

'Ido."  

'We will need an operative. Someone who is an artist in datumplane  
operations. Someone smart but not so smart that they won't take a  
chance. And someone who would risk everything and keep the secret just  
for the ultimate in cyberpuke pranks."  

I grinned at Johnny. 'l'vegot just the man."  

BB lived alone in a cheap apartment at the base of a cheap tower in a  
cheap TC2 neighborhood. But there was nothing cheap about the hardware  
that filled most of the space in the four-room flat. Most of BB's  
salary for the past standard decade had gone into state-of-the art  
cyberpuke toys.  

I started by saying that we wanted him to do something illegal. BB said  
that, as a public employee, he couldn't consider such a thing. He asked  
what the thing was. Johnny began to explain. BB leaned forward and I  
saw the old cyberpuke gleam in his eyes from our college days. I half  
expected him to try to dissect Johnny right there just to see how a  
cybrid worked. Then Johnny got to the interesting part and BB's gleam  
turned into a sort of green glow.  

'When I self-destruct my AI persona,' said Johnny, 'the shift to cybrid  
consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but during that time my  
section of the Core perimeter defenses will drop. The security phages  
will fill the gap before too many more nanoseconds pass, but during the  
time..."  

'Entry to the Core,' whispered BB, his eyes glowing like some antique  
VDT.  

'It would be very dangerous,' stressed Johnny. 'To my knowledge, no  
human operator has ever penetrated Core periphery."  

BB rubbed his upper lip. 'There's a legend that Cowboy  

Gibson did it before the Core seceded,' he mumbled.  

'But nobody believes it. And Cowboy disappeared."  

'Even if you penetrate,' said Johnny, 'there would be insufficient time  
to access except for the fact that I have the data coordinates."  

'Fan-fucking-tastic,' whispered BB. He turned back  

to his console and reached for his shunt. 'Let's do it." 'Now?" I said.  
Even Johnny looked taken aback.  

'Why wait?" BB clicked in his shunt and attached metacortex leads, but  
left the deck idling. 'Are we doing this, or what?"  

I went over next to Johnny on the couch and took his hand. His skin was  
cool. He showed no expression now but I could imagine what it must be  
like to be facing imminent destruction of one's personality and previous  
existence. Even if the transfer worked, the human with  

the John Keats persona would not be 'Johnny."  

'He's right,' said Johnny. 'Why wait?"  

I kissed him. 'All right,' I said. 'l'm going in with BB."  

'No!" Johnny squeezed my hand. 'You can't help and the danger would be  
terrible."  

I heard my own voice, as implacable as Meina Gladstone's. 'Perhaps. But  
I can't ask BB to do this if I won't. And I won't leave you in there  
alone." I squeezed his hand a final time and went over to sit by BB at  
the console. 'How do I connect with this fucking thing, BB?"  

You've read all the cyberpuke stuff. You know all about the terrible  

beauty of datumplane, the three-dimensional highways with their  
landscapes of black ice and neon perimeters and Day-Glo Strange Loops  
and shimmering skyscrapers of data blocks under hovering clouds of AI  
presence. I saw all of it riding piggyback on BB's carrier wave. It  
was almost too much. Too intense. Too terrifying.  

I could hear the black threats of the hulking security phages; I could  
smell death on the breath of the counterthrust tapeworm viruses even  
through the ice screens; I could feel the weight of the AIs' wrath above  
us- we were insects under elephants' feet- and we hadn't even done  
anything yet except travel approved dataways on a logged-in access  
errand BB had dreamed up, some homework stuff for his Flow Control  
Records and Statistics job.  

And I was wearing stick-on leads, seeing things in a datumplane version  
of fuzzy black and white TV while Johnny and BB were viewing full  
stimsim holo, as it were.  

I don't know how they took it.  

'OK,' whispered BB in some datumplane equivalent of a whisper, 'we're  
here."  

'Where?" All I saw was an infinite maze of bright lights and even  
brighter shadows, ten thousand cities arrayed in four dimensions.  

'Core periphery,' whispered BB. 'Hang on. It's about time."  

I had no arms to hang on with and nothing physical in this universe to  
grasp, but I concentrated on the  

waveform shades that were our data truck and clung.  

Johnny died then.  

I've seen a nuclear explosion firsthand. When Dad was a senator he took  
Mom and me to Olympus Command School to see a FORCE demonstration. For  
the last course the audience viewing pod was farcast to some godforsaken  
world .  .  .  Armaghast, I think .  .  .  and a FORCE:ground recon  
platoon fired a clean tactical nuke at a pretend adversary some nine  
klicks away. The viewing pod was shielded with a class ten containment  
field, polarized, the nuke only a fifty-kiloton field tactical, but I'll  
never forget the blast, the shock wave rocking the eighty-ton pod like a  
leaf on its repellers, the physical shock of light so obscenely bright  
that it polarized our field to midnight and still brought tears to our  
eyes and  

clamored to get in.  

This was worse.  

A section of datumplane seemed to flash and then to implode on itself,  
reality flushed down a drain of pure black.  

'Hang on!" BB screamed against datumplane static that rasped at my bones  
and we were whirling, tumbling, sucked into the vacuum like insects in  
an oceanic vortex.  

Somehow, incredibly, impossibly, black-armored phages thrust toward us  
through the din and madness.  

BB avoided one, turned the other's acid membranes against itself. We  
were being sucked into something colder and blacker than any void in our  
reality could ever be.  

'There!" called BB, his voice analog almost lost in the tornado rush of  
ripping datasphere.  

There what? Then I saw it: a thin line of yellow rippling in the  
turbulence like a cloth banner in a hurricane.  

BB rolled us, found our own wave to carry us against the storm, matched  
coordinates that danced past me too quickly to see, and we were riding  
the yellow band into...  

* . . into what? Frozen fountains of fireworks. Transparent mountain  
ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks, access ganglia spreading  
like fissures, iron clouds of semisentient internal pro:ess bubbles,  
glowing pyramids of primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes  

of black ice and armies of black-pulse pilages.  

'Shit,' I whispered to no one in particular.  

BB followed the yellow band down, in, through. I felt a connection as  
if someone had suddenly given us a great mass to carry.  

'Got it)." screamed BB, and suddenly there was a sound louder and larger  
than the maelstrom of noise surrounding and consuming us. It was  
neither klaxon nor siren, but it was both in its tone of warning and  
aggression.  

We were climbing out of it all. I could see a vague wall of gray  
through the brilliant chaos and somehow knew it to be the periphery, the  
vacuum dwindling but still breaching the wall like a shrinking black  
stain. We were climbing out.  

But not quickly enough.  

The phages hit us from five sides. During the twelve years I've been an  
investigator I've been shot once, knifed twice* l'd had more than this  
one rib broken. This hurt more than all that combined. BB was fighting  
and climbing at the same time.  

My contribution to the emergency was to scream. I felt cold claws on  
us, pulling us down, back into the brightness and noise and chaos* BB  
was using some program, some formula of enchantment to fight them  

off. But not enough. I could feel the blows slamming home - not  
against me primarily, but connecting to the matrix analog that was BB.  

We were sinking back. Inexorable forces had us in tow. Suddenly I felt  
Johnny's presence and it was as if a huge, strong hand had scooped us  
up, lifted us through the periphery wall an instant before the stain  

snapped our lifeline to existence and the defensive field crashed  
together like steel teeth.  

We moved at impossible speed down congested data-ways, passing  
datumplane couriers and other operator analogs like an EMV ripping past  
oxcarts. Then we were approaching a slow-time gate, leapfrogging  
gridlocked exiting operator analogs in some four-dimensional high jump.  

I felt the inevitable nausea of transition as we came out of the matrix.  
Light burned my retinas. Real light. Then the pain washed in and I  
slumped over the console and groaned.  

'Come on, Brawne." It was Johnny - or someone just like Johnny - helping  
me to my feet and moving us both toward the door.  

'BB,' I gasped.  

' No. '  

I opened aching eyes long enough to see BB Surbringer draped across his  
console. His Stetson had fallen off and rolled to the floor. BB's head  
had exploded, spattering most of the console with gray and red. His  
mouth was open and a thick white foam still issued from it. It looked  
like his eyes had melted.  

Johnny caught me, half lifted me. 'We have to go,' he whispered.  
'Someone will be here any minute."  

I closed my eyes and let him take me away from there.  

I awoke to dim red light and the sound of water dripping.  

I smelled sewage, mildew, and the ozone of uninsulated power cables. I  
opened one eye.  

We were in a low space more cave than room with cables snaking from a  
shattered ceiling and pools of water on the slime-caked tiles. The red  
light came from somewhere beyond the cave- a maintenance access  

shaft perhaps, or automech tunnel. I moaned softly.  

Johnny was there, moving from the rough bedroll of blankets to my side.  
His face was darkened with grease  

or dirt and there was at least one fresh cut.  

'Where are we?"  

He touched my cheek. His other arm went around my shoulders and helped  
me to a sitting position. The awful view shifted and tilted and for a  
moment I thought I was going to be sick. Johnny helped me drink water  
from a plastic tumbler.  

'Dregs' Hive,' said Johnny.  

l'd guessed even before I was fully conscious. Dregs' Hive is the  
deepest pit on Lusus, a no man's land of mech tunnels and illegal  

burrows occupied by half the Web's outcasts and outlaws. It was in  
Dregs' Hive that I'd been shot several years ago and still bore the  
laser scar above my left hipbone.  

I held the tumbler out for more water. Johnny fetched some from a steel  
therm and came back. I panicked for a second as I fumbled in my tunic  
pocket and on my belt: Dad's automatic was gone. Johnny held the weapon  
up and I relaxed, accepting the cup and drinking thirstily.  

'BB?" I said, hoping for a moment that it had all been a terrible  
hallucination.  

Johnny shook his head. 'There were defenses that neither of us had  
anticipated. BB's incursion was brilliant, but he couldn't outright  
Core omega phages. But half the operators in datumplane felt echoes of  
the battle. BB is already the stuff of legend."  

'Fucking great,' I said and gave a laugh that sounded suspiciously like  
the beginning of a sob. 'The stuff of legend. And BB's dead. For  
fuck-all nothing."  

Johnny's arm was tight around me. 'Not for nothing, Brawne. He made  
the grab. And passed the data to me before he died."  

I managed to sit fully upright and to look at Johnny.  

He seemed the same- the same soft eyes, same hair, same voice. But  
something was subtly different, deeper.  

More human? 'You?" I said. 'Did you make the transfer?  

Are you..."  

'Human?" John Keats smiled at me. 'Yes, Brawne. Or  

as close to human as someone forged in the Core could ever be."  

'But you remember ... me ... BB ... what's happened."  

'Yes. And I remember first looking into Chapman's Homer. And my  
brother Tom's eyes as he hemorrhaged in the night. And Severn's kind  
voice when I was too weak to open my own eyes to face my fate. And our  
night in Piazza di Spagna when I touched your lips and imagined Fanny's  
cheek against mine. I remember, Brawne."  

For a second I was confused, and then hurt, but then he set his palm  
against my cheek and he touched me, there was no one else, and I  
understood. I closed my eyes. 'Why are we here?" I whispered against  
his shirt.  

'I couldn't risk using a farcaster. The Core could trace us at once. I  
considered the spaceport but you were in no condition to travel. I  
chose the Dregs'."  

I nodded against him. 'They'll try to kill you."  

'Yes."  

'Are the local cops after us? The Hegemony police?  

Transit cops?"  

'No, I don't think so. The only ones who're challenged us so far were  
two bands of goondas and some of the Dregs' dwellers."  

I opened my eyes. 'What happened with the goondas?" There were more  
deadly hoodlums and contract killers in the Web but I'd never run across  
any.  

Johnny held up Dad's automatic and smiled.  

'I don't remember anything after BB,' I said.  

'You were injured by the phage backlash. You could walk but we were the  
cause of more than a few odd looks in the Concourse."  

'I bet. Tell me about what BB discovered. Why is the Core obsessed  
with Hyperion?"  

'Eat first,' said Johnny. 'It's been more than twenty-eight hours." He  
crossed the dripping width of the cave room and returned with a  
self-heating packet. It was basic hoio fanatic fare - flash-dried and  
reheated cloned beef, potatoes which had never seen soil, and carrots  
which looked like some sort of deep-sea slugs. Nothing had ever tasted  
so good.  

'OK,' I said, 'tell me."  

'The TechnoCore has been divided into three groups for as long as the  
Core has existed,' said Johnny. 'The Stables are the old-line Als, some  
of them dating back to pre-Mistake days; at least one of them gained  
sentience in the First Information Age. The Stables argue that a  
certain level of symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core.  
They've promoted the Ultimate Intelligence Project as a way to avoid  
rash decisions, to delay until all variables can be factored. The  
Volatiles are the force behind the Secession three centuries ago. The  
Vola-tiles have done conclusive studies that show how humankind's  
usefulness is past and from this point on human beings constitute a  
threat to the Core. They advocate immediate and total extinction."  

'Extinction,' I said. After a moment I asked, 'Can they do it?"  

'Of humans in the Web, yes,' said Johnny. 'Core intelligences not only  
create the infrastructure for Hegemony society but are necessary for  
everything from FORCE deployment to the failsafes on stockpiled nuclear  
and plasma arsenals."  

'Did you know about this when you were... in the Core?"  

'No,' said Johnny. 'As a pseudo-poet cybrid retrieval project, I was a  
freak, a pet, a partial thing allowed to roam the Web the way a pet is  
let out of the house each day. I had no idea there were three camps of  
AI influence."  

'Three camps,' I said. 'What's the third? And where does Hyperion come  
in?"  

'Between the Stables and the Volatiles are the Ultimates.  

For the past five centuries the Ultimates have been obsessed with the UI  
Project. The existence or extinction of the human race is of interest  
to them only in how it applies to the project. To this date, they have  
been a force for moderation, an ally of the Stables, because it is their  
perception that such reconstruction and retrieval projects as the Old  
Earth experiment are necessary to the culmination of the UI.  

'Recently, however, the Hyperion issue has caused the Ultimates to move  
toward the Volatiles' views. Since Hyperion was explored four centuries  
ago, the Core has been concerned and nonplussed. It was immediately  
obvious that the so-called Time Tombs were artifacts launched backward  
in time from a point at least ten thousand years in the galaxy's future.  
More disturbing, however, is the fact that Core predictive formulae have  
never been able to factor the Hyperion variable.  

'Brawne, to understand this, you must realize how much the Core relies  
upon prediction. Already, without UI input, the Core knows the details  
of the physical, human, and AI future to a margin of 98.9995 percent for  
a period of at least two centuries. The AI Advisory Council to the All  
Thing with its vague, delphic utterancesconsidered so indispensable by  
humans- is a joke. The Core drops tidbits of revelations to the  
Hegemony when it serves the Core's purposes - sometimes to aid the  
Volatiles, sometimes the Stables, but always to please the Ultimates.  

'Hyperion is a rent in the entire predictive fabric of the Core's  
existence. It is the penultimate oxymoron- a nonfactorable variable.  
Impossible as it seems, Hyperion appears to be exempt from the laws of  
physics, history, human psychology, and AI prediction as practiced by  
the Core.  

'The result has been two futures - two realities if you will- one in  
which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar  
humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first  
strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The  
other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war, and  
the other products of the Time Tombs' opening as a human fist struck  
back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters,  
ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles'  
extinction programs."  

Water dripped on tile. Somewhere in the tunnels nearby a mech  
cauterizer's warning siren echoed from ceramic and stone. I leaned  
against the wall and stared at Johnny.  

'Interstellar war,' I said. 'Both scenarios demand an interstellar  
war?"  

'Yes. There is no escaping that."  

'Can both Core groups be wrong in their prediction?" 'No. What happens  
on Hyperion is problematic, but the disruption in the Web and elsewhere  
is quite clear.  

The Ultimates use this knowledge as the prime argument for hurrying the  
next step in Core evolution."  

'And what did BB's stolen data show about us, Johnny?"  

Johnny smiled, touched my hand, but did not hold it.  

'It showed that I am somehow part of the Hyperion unknown. Their  
creation of a Keats cybrid was a terrible amble. Only my apparent lack  
of success as a Keats analog allowed the Stables to preserve me. When I  
made up my mind to go to Hyperion, the Volatiles killed me with the  
clear intention of obliterating my AI existence if  

my cybrid again made that decision."  

'You did. What happened?"  

'They failed. In the Co.re's limitless arrogance, they failed to take  
two things into account. First, that I might invest all consciousness  
in my cybrid and thus change the nature of the Keats analog. Second,  
that I would go to you."  

'Me!'  

He took my hand. 'Yes, Brawne. It seems that you also are part of the  
Hyperion unknown."  

I shook my head. Realizing that there was a numbness in my scalp above  
and behind my left ear, I raised my hand, half expecting to find damage  
from the datumplane fight. Instead, my fingers encountered the plastic  
of a neural shunt socket.  

I jerked my other hand from Johnny's grasp and stared at him in horror.  
He'd had me wired while I was unconscious.  

Johnny held up both hands, palms toward me. 'I had to, Brawne. It may  
be necessary for the survival of both of us."  

I made a fist. 'You fucking low-life son of a bitch.  

Why do I need to interface directly, you lying bastard?"  

'Not with the Core,' Johnny said softly. 'With me."  

'You?" My arm and fist quivered with the anticipation of smashing his  
vat-cloned face. 'You!" I sneered.  

'You're human now remember?"  

'Yes. But certain cybrid functions remain. Do you remember when I  
touched your hand several days ago and brought us to datumplane?"  

I stared at him. 'I'm not going to datumplane again." 'No. Nor am I.  
But I may need to relay incredible amounts of data to you within a very  
short period of time. I brought you to a black market surgeon in the  
Dregs' last night. She implanted a SchrOn loop."  

'Why?" The SchrOn loop was tiny, no larger than my thumbnail, and very  
expensive. It held countless field-bubble memories, each capable of  
holding near infinite bits of information. $chrOn loops could not be  
accessed by the biological carrier and thus were used for courier  
purposes. ^ man or woman could carry AI personalities or entire  
planetary dataspheres in a Schrn loop. Hell, a dog could carry all  
that.  

'Why?" I said again, wondering if Johnny or some forces behind Johnny  
were using me as such a courier.  

'Why?"  

Johnny moved closer and put his hand around my fist.  

'Trust me, Brawne."  

I don't think I'd trusted anyone since Dad blew his brains out twenty  
years ago and Mom retreated into the pure selfishness of her seclusion.  
There was no reason in  

the universe to trust Johnny now.  

But I did.  

I relaxed my fist and took his hand.  

'All right,' said Johnny. 'Finish your meal and we'll get busy trying  
to save our lives."  

Weapons and drugs were the two easiest things to buy in Dregs' Hive. We  
spent the last of Johnny's considerable stash of black marks to buy  
weapons.  

By 2200 hours, we each wore whiskered titan-poly body armor. Johnny had  
a goonda's mirror-black helmet and I wore a FORCE-surplus command mask.  

Johnny's power gauntlets were massive and a bright red.  

I wore osmosis gloves with killing trim. Johnny carried  

an Ouster hellwhip captured on Bressia and had tucked a laser wand in  
his belt. Along with Dad's automatic, I now carried a Steiner-Ginn  
mini-gun on a gyroed waist brace. It was slaved to my command visor and  
I could keep both hands free while firing.  

Johnny and I looked at each other and began giggling.  

When the laughter stopped there was a long silence.  

'Are you sure the Shrike Temple here on Lusus is our best chance?" I  
asked for the third or fourth time."  

'We can't farcast,' said Johnny. 'All the Core has to do is record a  
malfunction and we're dead. We can't even take an elevator from the  
lower levels. We'll have to find unmonitored stairways and climb the  

hundred and twenty floors. The best chance to make the Temple is  
straight down the Concourse Mall."  

'Yes, but will the Shrike Church people take us in?" Johnny shrugged, a  
strangely insectoid gesture in his combat outfit. The voice through the  
goonda helmet was metallic. 'They're the only group which has a vested  
interest in our survival. And the only ones with enough political pull  
to shield us from the Hegemony while finding transit for us to  
Hyperion."  

I pushed up my visor. 'Meina Gladstone said that no future pilgrimage  
flights to Hyperion would be allowed."  

The dome of mirror black nodded judiciously. 'Well, fuck Meina  
Gladstone,' said my poet lover.  

I took a breath and walked to the opening of our niche, our cave, our  
last sanctuary. Johnny came up behind me. Body armor rubbed against  
body armor.  

'Ready, Brawne?"  

I nodded, brought the mini-gun around on its pivot, and started to  
leave.  

Johnny stopped me with a touch. 'I love you, Brawne."  

I nodded, still tough. I forgot that my visor was up and he could see  
my tears.  

The Hive is awake all twenty-eight hours of the day, but through some  
tradition, Third Shift was the quietest, the least populated. We would  
have had a better chance at the height of First Shift rush hour along  
the pedestrian  

causeways. But if the goondas and thuggees were waiting for us, the  
death toll of civilians would have been staggering.  

It took us more than three hours to climb our way to Concourse Mall, not  
up a single staircase but along an endless series of mech corridors,  
abandoned access verticals swept clean by the Luddite riots eighty years  
ago, and a final stairway that was more rust than metal. We exited onto  
a delivery corridor less than half a klick from the Shrike Temple.  

'I can't believe it was so easy,' I whispered to him on intercom.  

'They are probably concentrating people on the space-port and private  
farcaster clusters."  

We took the least exposed walkway onto the Concourse, thirty meters  
below the first shopping level and four hundred meters below the roof.  
The Shrike Temple was an ornate, free-stranding structure now less than  
half a klick away. A few off-hour shoppers and joggers glanced at us  
and then moved quickly away. I had no doubt that the Mall police were  
being paged, but I'd be surprised if they showed up too quickly.  

A gang of brightly painted street thugs exploded from a lift shaft,  

hollering and whooping. They carried pulse-knives, chains, and power  
gauntlets. Startled, Johnny wheeled toward them with the hellwhip  
sending out a score of targeting beams. The mini-gun whir-whirred out  
of my hands, shifting from aiming point to aiming point as I moved my  
eyes.  

The gang of seven kids skidded to a halt, held up their hands, and  
backed away, eyes wide. They dropped into the lift shaft and were gone.  

I looked at Johnny. Black mirrors looked back. Neither of us laughed.  

We crossed to the northbound shopping lane. The few pedestrians  
scurried for open shopfronts. We were less than a hundred meters from  
the Temple stairs. I could actually hear my heartbeat in the FORCE  
helmet ear-phones.  

We were within fifty meters of the stairs. As if called, an acolyte or  
priest of some sort appeared at the ten-meter door of the Temple and  
watched us approach.  

Thirty meters. If anyone was going to intercept us, they would have  
done it before this.  

I turned toward Johnny to say something funny. At least twenty beams  
and half that many projectiles hit us at once. The outer layer of the  
titan-poly exploded outward, deflecting most of the projectile energy in  
the counterblast. rhe mirrored surface beneath bounced most of the  
killing light. Most of it.  

Johnny was flung off his feet by the impact. I went to one knee and let  
the mini-gun train on the laser source.  

Ten stories up along the residential Hive wall. My visor opaqued. Body  
armor burned off in a steam of reflective gas. The mini-gun sounded  
precisely like the kind' of chainsaw they used in history hoiodramas.  
Ten stories up, a five-meter section of balcony and wall disintegrated  
in a cloud of explosive flchettes and armor-piercing rounds.  

Three heavy slugs struck me from behind.  

I landed on my palms, silenced the mini-gun, and swiveled. There were  
at least a dozen of them on each level, moving quickly in precise combat  
choreography.  

Johnny had reached his knees and was firing the hell-whip in  
orchestrated bursts of light, working his way through the rainbow to  
beat bounce defenses.  

One of the running figures exploded into flame as the shopwindow behind  
it turned to molten glass and spattered fifteen meters onto the  
Concourse. Two more men came up over the level railings and I sent them  
back with a burst from the mini-gun.  

An open skimmer came down from the rafters, repellers laboring as it  
banked around pylons. Rocket fire slammed into concrete around Johnny  
and me. Shop-fronts vomited a billion shards of glass over us. I  
looked, blinked twice, targeted, and fired. The skimmer lurched  

sideways, struck an escalator with a dozen cowering civilians on it, and  
tumbled in a mass of twisting metal and exploding ordnance. I saw one  
shopper leap in flames to the Hive floor eighty meters below.  

'Left!" shouted Johnny over the tightbeam intercom.  

Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper level using personal  
lift packs. The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the  
shifting Iackground but only succeeded in turning each man into a  
brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections. One moved inside the sweep arch  
of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went for Johnny.  

He came in with a pulse-blade, ghetto style. I let it chew at my armor,  
knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but using it to buy the  
second I needed. I got it. I killed the man with the rigid edge of my  
gauntlet and swept the mini-gun fire into the three worrying Johnny.  

Their armor went rigid and I used the gun to sweep them backward like  
someone hosing down a littered sidewalk.  

Only one of the men got to his feet before I blew them all off the level  
overhang.  

Johnny was down again. Parts of his chest armor were gone, melted away.  
I smelled cooking flesh but saw no mortal wounds. I half crouched,  
lifted him.  

'Leave me, Brawne. Run. The stairs." The tightbeam was breaking up.  

'Fuck off,' I said, getting my left arm around him enough to support him  
while allowing room for the mini-gun to track. 'l'm still getting paid  
to be your bodyguard."  

They were sniping at us from both walls of the Hive, the rafters, and  
the shopping levels above us. I counted at least twenty bodies on the  
walkways; about half were brightly clad civilians. The power assist on  
the left leg of my armor was grinding. Straight-legged, I awkwardly  
pulled us another ten meters toward the Temple stairs.  

There were several Shrike priests at the head of the stairs now,  
seemingly oblivious to the gunfire all around them.  

'Above!'  

I swiveled, targeted, and fired in one moment, hearing the gun go empty  
after one burst and seeing the second skimmer get off its missiles in  
the instant before it became a thousand pieces of hurtling, unrelated  
metal and torn flesh. I dropped Johnny heavily to the pavement and fell  
on him, trying to cover his exposed flesh with my body.  

The missiles detonated simultaneously, several in  

airburst and at least two burrowing. Johnny and I were lifted into the  
air and hurled fifteen or twenty meters down the pitching walkway. Good  
thing. The alloy and ferroconcrete pedestrian strip where we had been a  
second before burned, bubbled, sagged, and tumbled down onto the flaming  
walkway below. There was a natural moat there now, a gap between most  

of the other ground troops and us.  

I rose, slapped away the useless mini-gun and mount, pulled off useless  
shards of my own armor, and lifted Johnny in both arms. His helmet had  
been blown off and his face was very bad. Blood seeped through a score  
of gaps in his armor. His right arm and left foot had been blown off. I  
turned and began carrying him up the Shrike Temple stairs.  

There were sirens and security skimmers filling the Concourse flyspace  
now. The goondas on the upper levels and far side of the tumbled  
walkway ran for cover.  

Two of the commandos who had dropped on lift packs ran up the stairs  
after me. I did not turn. I had to lift my straight and useless left  
leg for every step. I knew that I had been seriously burned on my back  
and side and there were shrapnel wounds elsewhere.  

The skimmers whooped and circled but avoided the Temple steps. Gunfire  
rattled up and down the Mall. I could hear metal-shod footsteps coming  
rapidly behind me. I managed another three steps. Twenty steps above,  
impossibly far away, the bishop stood amid a hundred Temple priests.  

I made another step and looked down at Johnny. One eye was open,  
staring up at me. The other was closed with blood and swollen tissue.  
'It's all right,' I whispered, aware for the first time that my own  
helmet was gone. 'It's all right. We're almost there." I managed one  
more step.  

The two men in bright black combat armor blocked my way. Both had  
lifted visors streaked with deflection scars and their faces were very  
hard.  

'Put him down, bitch, and maybe we'll let you live."  

I nodded tiredly, too tired to take another step or do anything but  
stand there and hold him in both arms.  

Johnny's blood dripped on white stone.  

'I said, put the son of a bitch down and..."  

I shot both of them, one in the left eye and one in the right, never  
lifting Dad's automa(ic from where I held it under Johnny's body.  

They fell away. I managed another step. And then another. I rested a  
bit and then lifted my foot for another.  

At the top of the stairs the group of black and red robes parted. The  
doorway was very tall and very dark. I did not look back but I could  
hear from the noise behind us that the crowd on the Concourse was very  
large. The bishop walked by my side as I went through the doors and  
into the dimness.  

I laid Johnny on the cool floor. Robes rustled around us. I pulled my  
own armor off where I could, then batted at Johnny's. It was fused to  
his flesh in several places.  

I touched his burned cheek with my good hand. 'I'm sorry..."  

Johnny's head stirred slightly and his eye opened. He lifted his bare  
left hand to touch my cheek, my hair, the back of my head. 'Fanny..."  

I felt him die then. I also felt the surge as his hand found the neural  
shunt, the white-light warmth of the surge to the Schrn loop as  
everything Johnny Keats ever was or would be exploded into me; almost,  
almost it was like his orgasm inside me two nights earlier, the surge  
and throb and sudden warmth and stillness after, with the echo of  
sensation there.  

I lowered him to the floor and let the acolytes remove the body, taking  
it out to show the crowd and the authorities and the ones who waited to  
know.  

I let them take me away.  

I spent two weeks in a Shrike Temple recovery crche.  

Burns healed, scars removed, alien metal extracted, skin grafted, flesh  
regrown, nerves rewoven. And still I hurt.  

Everyone except the Shrike priests lost interest in me.  

The Core made sure that Johnny was dead; that his presence in the Core  
had left no trace; that his cybrid was dead.  

The authorities took my statement, revoked my license, and covered  
things up as best they could. The Web press reported that a battle  
between Dregs' Level Hive gangs had erupted onto the Concourse Mail.  

Numerous gtng members and innocent bystanders were killed. The police  
contained it.  

A week before word came that the Hegemony would allow the Yggdrasill to  
sail with pilgrims for the war zone near Hyperion, I used a Temple  
farcaster to 'cast to Renaissance Vector where I spent an hour alone in  
the archives there.  

The papers were in vacuum-press so I could not touch them. The  
handwriting was Johnny's; I had seen his writing before. The parchment  
was yellow and brittle with age. There were two fragments. The first  
read:  

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!  

Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, Warm breath,  
light whisper, tender semi-tone,  

Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and languorous waist.t  

Faded the flower and all its budded charms,  

Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,  

Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,  

Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradisem Vanished unseasonably at  

shut of eve,  
When the dusk holiday - or holinight- Of fragrant-curtained love begins  
to weave  

The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;  
But, as I've read iove's missal through today,  
He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.  
The second fragment was in a wilder hand and on rougher paper, as if  

slashed across a notepad in haste:  
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 - see here it is- I hoM it towards you  
I'm pregnant. I think that Johnny knew it. I don't know for sure.  
I'm pregnant twice. Once with Johnny's child and once with the  

Schr6n-loop memory of what he was. I don't know if the two are meant to  
be linked. It will be months before the child is born and only days  
before I face the Shrike.  

But I remember those minutes after Johnny's torn body was taken out to  
the crowd and before I was led away for help. They were all there in  
the darkness, hundreds of the priests and acolytes and exorcists and  
ostiaries and worshipers... and as one voice they began to chant, there  
in that red dimness under the revolving sculpture of the Shrike, and  
their voices echoed in Gothic vaults. And what they chanted went  
something like this:  

'BLESSED BE SHE  
BLESSED BE THE MOTHER OF OUR  
SALVATION  
BLESSED BE THE INSTRUMENT OF OUR  
ATONEMENT  
BLESSED BE THE BRIDE OF OUR CREATION BLESSED BE 
SHE'  

I was injured and in shock. I didn't understand it then.  
I don't understand it now.  
But I know that, when the time arrives and the Shrike comes, Johnny and  

I will face it together.  

It was long after dark. The tramcar rode between stars and ice. The  
group sat in silence, the only sound the creak of cable.  
After a time had passed, Lenar Hoyt said to Brawne Lamia, 'You also  

carry the cruciform."  
Lamia looked at the priest.  
Colonel Kassad leaned toward the woman. 'Do you think Het Masteen was  

the Templar who had spoken to Johnny?"  
'Possibly,' said Brawne Lamia. 'I never found out."  
Kassad did not blink. 'Were you the one who killed  
Masteen?"  
'No."  
Martin Silenus stretched and yawned. 'We have a few hours before  

sunrise,' he said. 'Anyone else interested in getting some sleep?"  
Several heads nodded.  
'I'11 stay up to keep watch,' said Fedmahn Kassad.  
'I'm not tired."  
'I'll keep you company,' said the Consul.  
'I'll heat some coffee for the therm,' said Brawne Lamia.  
When the others slept, the infant Rachel making soft cooing sounds in  

her sleep, the other three sat at the windows and watched the stars burn  
cold and distant in the high night.  

SIX  
Chronos Keep jutted from the easternmost rim of the great Bridle Range:  
a grim, baroque heap of sweating stones with three hundred rooms and  
halls, a maze of lightless corridors leading to deep halls, towers,  
turrets, balconies overlooking the northern moors, airshafts rising half  
a kilometer to light and rumored to drop to the world's labyrinth  
itself, parapets scoured by cold winds from the peaks above, stairways- 
inside and out-carved from the mountain stone and leading nowhere,  
stained-glass windows a hundred meters tall set to catch the first rays  
of solstice sun or the moon on midwinter night, paneless windows the  
size of a man's fist looking out on nothing in particular, an endless  
array of bas-relief, grotesque sculptures in half-hidden niches, and  
more than a thousand gargoyles staring down from eave and parapet,  

transept and sepulcher, peering down through wood rafters in the great  
halls and positioned so as to peer in the blood-tinted windows of the  
northeast face, their winged and hunchbacked shadows moving like grim  
sundial hours, cast by sunlight in the day and gas-fed torches at night.  
And everywhere in Chronos Keep, signs of the Shrike Church's long  
occupation -atonement altars draped in red velvet, hanging and  
free-standing sculptures of the Avatar with polychrome steel for blades  
and bloodgems for eyes, more statues of the Shrike carved from the stone  
of narrow stairways and dark halls so that nowhere in the night would  
one be free of the fear of touching hands emerging from rock, the sharp  
curve of blade descending from stone, four arms enveloping in a final  
embrace. As if in a last measure of ornamentation, a filigree of blood  
in many of the once occupied halls and rooms, arabesques  

of red spattered in almost recognizable patterns along walls and tunnel  
ceilings, bedclothes caked hard with rust-red substance, and a central  
dining hall filled with the stench of food rotting from a meal abandoned  
weeks earlier, the floor and table, chairs and wall adorned with blood,  
stained clothing and shredded robes lying in mute heaps. And everywhere  
the sound of flies.  

'Jolly fucking place, isn't it?" said Martin Silenus, his voice echoing.  

Father Hoyt took several steps deeper into the great hall. Afternoon  
light from the west-facing skylight forty meters above fell in dusty  
columns. 'It's incredible,' he whispered. 'St Peter's in the New  
Vatican is nothing like this."  

Martin Silenus laughed. Thick light outlined his cheekbones and satyr's  
brows. 'This was built for a living deity,' he said.  

Fedmahn Kassad lowered his travel bag to the floor and cleared his  
throat. 'Surely this place predates the Shrike Church."  

'It does,' said the Consul. 'But they've occupied it for the past two  
centuries."  

'It doesn't look too occupied now,' said Brawne Lamia. She held her  
father's automatic in her left hand.  

They had all shouted during their first twenty minutes in the Keep, but  
the dying echoes, silences, and buzz of flies in the dining hall had  
reduced them to silence.  

'Sad King Billy's androids and bond clones built the goddamn thing,'  
said the poet. 'Eight local years of labor before the spinships  
arrived. It was supposed to be the greatest tourist resort in the Web,  
the jumping-off point for the Time Tombs and the City of Poets. But l  
suspect that even then the poor schmuck android laborers knew the  
locals' version of the Shrike story."  

Sol Weintraub stood near an eastern window, holding his daughter up so  
that soft light fell across her cheek and curled fist. 'All that  
matters little now,' he said. 'Let's find a corner free of carnage  
where we can sleep and eat our evening meal."  

'Are we going on tonight?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

'To the Tombs?" asked Silenus, showing real surprise for the first time  
on the voyage. 'You'd go to the Shrike in the dark?"  

Lamia shrugged. 'What difference does it make?" The Consul stood near a  
leaded glass door leading to a stone balcony and closed his eyes. His  
body still lurched and balanced to the movement of the tramcar. The  
night and day of travel above the peaks had blurred together in his  
mind, lost in the fatigue of almost three days without sleep and his  
rising tension. He opened his eyes before he dozed off standing up.  
'We're tired,' he said. 'We'll stay here tonight and go down in the  
morning."  

Father Hoyt had gone out onto the narrow ledge of balcony. He leaned on  
a railing of jagged stone. 'Can we see the Tombs from here?"  

'No,' said Silenus. 'They're beyond that rise of hills.  

But see those white things to the north and west a bit...  

those things gleaming like shards of broken teeth in the sand?"  

'Yes."  

'That's the City of Poets. King Billy's original site for Keats and for  
all things bright and beautiful. The locals  

say that it's haunted now by headless ghosts."  

'Are you one of them?" asked Lamia.  

Martin Silenus turned to say something, looked a moment at the pistol  
still in her hand, shook his head, and turned away.  

Footsteps echoed from an unseen curve of staircase and Colonel Kassad  
reentered the room. 'There are two small storerooms above the dining  
hall,' he said. 'They have a section of balcony outside but no other  
access than this stairway. Easy to defend. The rooms are...  

clean. '  

Silenus laughed. 'Does that mean nothing can get at us or that, when  
something does get at us, we'll have no way to get out?"  

'Where would we go?" asked Sol Weintraub.  

'Where indeedT' said the Consul. He was very tired.  

He lifted his gear and took one handle of the heavy M6bius cube, waiting  
for Father Hoyt to lift the other end. 'Let's do what Kassad says. Find  
a space to spend  

the night. Let's at least get out of this room. It stinks of death."  

Dinner was the last of their dried rations, some wine from Silenus's  
last bottle, and some stale cake which Sol Weintraub had brought along  
to celebrate their last evening together. Rachel was too little to eat  

the cake, but she took her milk and went to sleep on her stomach on a  

mat near her father.  
Lenar Hoyt removed a small balalaika from his pack and strummed a few  
chords.  

'I didn't know you played,' said Brawne Lamia.  
'Poorly."  
The Consul rubbed his eyes. 'I wish we had a piano." 'You do have one,'  

said Martin Silenus.  
The Consul looked at the poet.  
'Bring it here,' said Silenus. 'I'd welcome a Scotch."  
'What are you talking about?" snapped Father Hoyt.  
'Make sense."  
'His ship,' said Silenus. 'Do you remember our dear, departed Voice of  

the Bush Masteen telling our Consul friend that h/s secret weapon was  
that nice Hegemony singleship sitting back at Keats Spaceport? Call it  
up, Your Consulship. Bring it on in."  

Kassad moved away from the stairway where he had been placing tripbeams.  
'The planet's datasphere is dead. The comsats are down. The orbiting  
FORCE ships are on tightbeam. How is he supposed to call it?"  

It was Lamia who spoke. 'A fatline transmitter." The Consul moved his  
stare to her.  

'Fatline transmitters are the size of buildings,' said Kassad.  
Brawne Lamia shrugged. 'What Masteen said made sense. If I were the  
Consul... if I were one of the few thousand individuals in the entire  
damn Web to own a singleship .  .  .  I'd be damn sure I could fly it in  
on remote if I needed it. The planet's too primitive to depend on its  
comm net, the ionosphere's too weak for shortwave, the comsats are the  
first things to go in a skirmish... I'd call it by fatline."  

'And the size?" said the Consul.  
Brawne Lamia returned the diplomat's level gaze.  
'The Hegemony can't yet build portable fatline transmitters.  
There are rumors that the Ousters can."  
The Consul smiled. From somewhere there came a scrape and then the  

sound of metal crashing.  
'Stay here,' said Kassad. He removed a deathwand from his tunic,  
canceled the tripbeams with his tactical comlog, and descended from  
sight.  

'I guess we're under martial law now,' said Silenus  
when the Colonel was gone. 'Mars ascendant."  
'Shut up,' said Lamia.  
'Do you think it's the Shrike?" asked Hoyt.  
The Consul made a gesture. 'The Shrike doesn't have to clank around  

downstairs. It can simply appear...  
here."  
Hoyt shook his head. 'I mean the Shrike that has been the cause of  

everyone's... absence. The signs of slaughter here in the Keep."  
'The empty villages might be the result of the evacuation order,' said  
the Consul. 'No one wants to stay behind to face the Ousters. The SDF  

forces have been running wild. Much of the carnage could be their  
doing."  
'With no bodies?" laughed Martin Silenus. 'Wishful thinking. Our  

absent hosts downstairs dangle now on the  

Shrike's steel tree. Where, ere long, we too will be." 'Shut up,'  
Brawne Lamia said tiredly.  
'And if I don't,' grinned the poet, 'will you shoot me,  
madam?"  
'Yes."  
The silence lasted until Colonel Kassad returned. He reactivated the  

tripbeams and turned to the group seated on packing crates and flowfoam  

cubes. 'It was nothing.  
Some carrion birds - harbingers, I think the locals call them - had come  
in through the broken glass doors in the dining hall and were finishing  
the feast."  

Silenus chuckled. 'Harbingers. Very appropriate." Kassad sighed, sat  
on a blanket with his back to a crate, and poked at his cold food. A  
single lantern brought from the windwagon lighted the room and the  
shadows were beginning to mount the walls in the corners away from the  
door to the balcony. 'It's our last  

night,' said Kassad. 'One more story to tell." He looked at the Consul.  
The Consul had been twisting his slip of paper with the number 7  

scrawled on it. He licked his lips. 'What's the purpose? The purpose  
of the pilgrimage has been destroyed already."  
The others stirred.  
'What do you mean?" asked Father Hoyt.  

The Consul crumpled the paper and threw it into a corner. 'For the  
Shrike to grant a request, the band of pilgrims must constitute a prime  
number. We had seven.  

Masteen's ... disappearance ... reduces us to six.  

We go to our deaths now with no hope of a wish being granted."  

'Superstition,' said Lamia.  

The Consul sighed and rubbed his brow. 'Yes. But that is our final  
hope."  

Father Hoyt gestured toward the sleeping infant.  

'Can't Rachel be our seventh?"  

Sol Weintraub rubbed his beard. 'No. A pilgrim must come to the Tombs  
of his or her own free will."  

'But she did once,' said Hoyt. 'Maybe it qualifies." 'No,' said the  
Consul.  

Martin Silenus had been writing notes on a pad but now he stood and  
paced the length of the room. 'Jesus Christ, people. Look at us. We're  
not six fucking pilgrims, we're a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform  
carrying the ghost of Paul Dur6. Our "semisentient" erg in the box  
there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if  
we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead  
Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be.  

Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he's brought  
to this insane trek. My God, people, we should have received a fucking  
group rate for this trip."  

'Sit down,' said Lamia in a dead even tone.  

'No, he's right,' said Hoyt. 'Even the presence of Father Dur6 in  
cruciform must affect the prime-number superstition somehow. I say that  
we press on in the morning in the belief that..."  

'Look!" cried Brawne Lamia, pointing to the balcony doorway where the  
fading twilight had been replaced with pulses of strong light.  

The group went out into the cool evening air, shielding their eyes from  
the staggering display of silent explosions which filled the sky: pure  
white fusion bursts expanding like explosive ripples across a lapis  
pond; smaller, brighter plasma implosions in blue and yellow and  
brightest red, curling inward like flowers folding for the night: the  
lightning dance of gigantic heliwhip displays, beams the size of small  
worlds cutting their swath across light-hours and being contorted by the  
riptides of defensive singularities: the aurora shimmer of defense  
fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to  
be reborn nanoseconds later. Amid it all, the blue-white fusion tails  
of torchships and larger warships slicing perfectly true lines across  
the sky like diamond scratches on blue glass.  

'The Ousters,' breathed Brawne Lamia.  

'The war's begun,' said Kassad. There was no elation in his voice, no  
emotion of any kind.  

The Consul was shocked to discover that he was weeping silently. He  
turned his face from the group.  

'Are we in danger here?" asked Martin Silenus. He sheltered under the  
stone'archway of the door, squinting at the brilliant display.  

'Not at this distance,' said Kassad. He raised his combat binoculars,  
made an adjustment, and consulted his tactical tomlog. 'Most of the  
engagements are at least three AU away. The Ousters are testing the  
FORCE:space defenses." He lowered the glasses. 'It's just begun."  

'Has the farcaster been activated yet?" asked Brawne Lamia. 'Are the  
people being evacuated from Keats and the other cities?"  

Kassad shook his head. 'I don't believe so. Not yet.  

The fleet will be fighting a holding action until the cislunar sphere is  
completed. Then the evacuation portals will be opened to the Web while  
FORCE units come through by the hundreds." He raised the binoculars  
again. 'It'll be a hell of a show."  

'Look!" It was Father Hoyt pointing this time, not at the fireworks  
display in the sky but out across the low dunes of the northern moors.  
Several kilometers toward the unseen Tombs, a single figure was just  
visible as a speck of a form throwing multiple shadows under the  
fractured sky.  

Kassad trained his glasses on the figure.  

'The Shrike?" asked Lamia.  

'No, I don't think so... I think it's... a Templar by the looks of the  
robe."  

'Het Masteen!" cried Father Hoyt.  

Kassad shrugged and handed the glasses around. The Consul walked back  
to the group and leaned on the balcony.  

There was no sound but the whisper of wind, but that made the violence  
of explosions above them more ominous somehow.  

The Consul took his turn looking when the glasses came to him. The  
figure was tall and robed, its back to the Keep, and strode across the  
flashing vermilion sands with purposeful intent.  

'Is he headed toward us or the Tombs?" asked Lamia.  

'The Tombs,' said the Consul.  

Father Hoyt leaned elbows on the ledge and raised his gaunt face to the  
exploding sky. 'If it is Masteen, then we're back to seven, aren't we?"  

'He'll arrive hours before us,' said the Consul. 'Half a day if we  
sleep here tonight as we proposed."  

Hoyt shrugged. 'That can't matter too much. Seven set out on the  
pilgrimage. Seven will arrive. The Shrike will be satisfied."  

'If it/s Masteen,' said Colonel Kassad, 'why the charade on the  
windwagon? And how did he get here before us? There were no other  
tramcars running and he couldn't have walked over the Bridle Range  
passes."  

'We'll ask him when we arrive at the Tombs tomorrow,' Father Hoyt said  
tiredly.  

Brawne Lamia had been trying to raise someone on her comlog's general  
comm frequencies. Nothing emerged but the hiss of static and the  
occasional growl of distant EMPs. She looked at Colonel Kassad. 'When  
do they start bombing?"  

'1 don't know. It depends uporr the strength of the FORCE fleet  
defenses."  

'The defenses weren't very good the other day when the Ouster scouts got  
through and destroyed the  

Yggdrasi!i,' said Lamia.  

Kassad nodded.  

'Hey,' said Martin Silenus, 'are we sitting on a fucking target?"  

'Of course,' said the Consul. 'If the Ousters are attacking Hyperion to  
prevent the opening of the Time Tombs, as M. Lamia's tale suggests,  
then the Tombs and this entire area would be a primary target."  

'For nukes?" asked Silenus, his voice strained.  

'Almost certainly,' answered Kassad.  

'1 thought something about the anti-entropic fields kept ships away from  
here,' said Father Hoyt.  

'Crewed ships,' said the Consul without looking back at the others from  
where he leaned on the railing. 'The anti-entropic fields won't bother  
guided missiles, smart bombs, or hellwhip beams. It won't bother mech  
infantry, for that matter. The Ousters could land a few attack skimmers  
or automated tanks and watch on remote while they destroy the valley."  

'But they won't,' said Brawne Lamia. 'They want to control Hyperion,  
not destroy it."  

'I wouldn't wager my life on that supposition,' said Kassad.  

Lamia smiled at him, 'But we are, aren't we, Colonel?"  

Above them, a single spark separated itself from the continuous  

patchwork of explosions, grew into a bright orange ember, and streaked  
across the sky. The group on the terrace could see the flames, hear the  
tortured shriek of atmospheric penetration. The fireball disappeared  
beyond the mountains behind the Keep.  

Almost a minute later, the Consul realized that he had been holding his  
breath, his hands rigid on the stone railing. He let out air in a gasp.  
The others seemed to be taking a breath at the same moment. There had  
been no explosion, no shock wave rumbling through the rock.  

'A dud?" asked Father Hoyt.  

'Probably an injured FORCE skirmisher trying to reach the orbital  
perimeter or the spaceport at Keats,' said Colonel Kassad.  

'He didn't make it, did he?" asked Lamia. Kassad did not respond.  

Martin Silenus lifted the field glasses and searched the darkening moors  
for the Templar. 'Out of sight,' said Silenus. 'The good Captain  
either rounded that hill just this side of the Time Tombs valley or he  
pulled his disappearing act again."  

'It's a pity that we'll never hear his story,' said Father Hoyt. He  
turned toward the Consul. 'But we'll hear yours, won't we?"  

The Consul rubbed his palms against his pant legs. His heart was  
racing. 'Yes,' he said, realizing even as he spoke that he had finally  
made up his mind. 'I'11 tell mine."  

The wind roared down the east slopes of the mountains and whistled along  
the escarpment of Chronos Keep. The explosions above them seemed to  
have diminished ever so slightly, but the coming of darkness made each  
one look even more violent than the last.  

'Let's go inside,' said Lamia, her words almost lost in the wind sound.  
'It's getting cold."  

They had turned off the single lamp and the interior of the room was  
lighted only by the heat-lightning pulses of color from the sky outside.  
Shadows sprang into being, vanished, and appeared again as the room was  
painted in many colors. Sometimes the darkness would last several  
seconds before the next barrage.  

The Consul reached into his traveling bag and took out a strange device,  
larger than a comlog, oddly orna-mented, and fronted with a liquid  
crystal diskey like something out of a history holo.  

'Secret fatline transmitter?" Brawne Lamia asked dryly.  

The Consul's smile showed no humor. 'It's an ancient comlog. It came  
out during the Hegira." He removed a standard micro-disk from a pouch on  
his belt and inserted it. 'Like Father Hoyt, I have someone else's tale  
to tell before you can understand my own."  

'Christ on a stick,' sneered Martin Silenus, 'am I the only one who can  
tell a straightforward story in this fucking herd? How long do I have  
to..."  

The Consui's movement surprised even himself. He rose, spun, caught the  
smaller man by the cape and shirt-front, slammed him against the wail,  
draped him over a packing crate with a knee in Silenus's belly and a  
forearm against his throat, and hissed, 'One more word from you, poet,  
and I'll kill you."  

Silenus began to struggle but a tightening on his windpipe and a glance  
at the Consul's eyes made him cease.  

His face was very white.  

Colonel Kassad silently, almost gently, separated the two. 'There will  
be no more comments,' he said. He touched the deathwand in his belt.  

Martin Silenus went to the far side of the circle, still rubbing his  
throat, and slumped against a crate without a word. The Consul strode  
to the door, took several deep breaths, and walked back to the group. He  
spoke to everyone but the poet.  'l'm sorry.  It is just that .  .  .  I  
never expected to share this."  

The light from outside surged red and then white, followed by a blue  
glow which faded to near darkness.  

'We know,' Brawne Lamia said softly. 'We all felt that way."  

The Consul touched his lower lip, nodded, roughly cleared his throat,  
and came to sit by the ancient comlog.  

'The recording is not as old as the instrument,' he said.  

'It was made about fifty standard years ago. I'll have some more to say  
when it's over." He paused as if there were more to be said, shook his  
head, and thumbed the antique diskey.  

There were no visuals. The voice was that of a young man. In the  
background one could hear a breeze blowing through grass or soft  
branches and, more distantly, the roll of surf.  

Outside, the light pulsed madly as the tempo of the distant space battle  
quickened. The Consul tensed as he waited for the crash and concussion.  
There was none. He closed his eyes and listened with the others.  

THE CONSUL'S TALE: Remembering Siri  

I climb the steep hill to Siri's tomb on the day the islands return to  
the shallow seas of the Equatorial Archipelago.  

The day is perfect and I hate it for being so. The sky is as tranquil  
as tales of Old Earth's seas, the shallows are dappled with ultramarine  
tints, and a warm breeze blows in from the sea to ripple the russet  
willowgrass on the hillside near me.  

Better low clouds and gray gloom on such a day. Better mist or a  
shrouding fog which sets the masts in First-site Harbor dripping and  
raises the lighthouse horn from its slumbers. Better one of the great  
sea-simoons blowing up out of the cold belly of the south, lashing  

before it the motile isles and their dolphin herders until they seek  
refuge in the lee of our atolls and stony peaks.  

Anything would be better than this warm spring day when the sun moves  
through a vault of sky so blue that it makes me want to run, to jump in  
great loping arcs, and to roll in the soft grass as Siri and I have done  
at just this spot.  

Just this spot. I pause to look around. The willowgrass bends and  
ripples like the fur of some great beast as the salt-tinged breeze gusts  
up out of the south. I shield my eyes and search the horizon but  
nothing moves there.  

Out beyond the lava reef, the sea begins to chop and lift itself in  
nervous strokes.  

'Siri,' I whisper. I say her name without meaning to do so. A hundred  
meters down the slope, the crowd pauses to watch me and to catch its  
collective breath. The procession of mourners and celebrants stretches  
for more than a kilometer to where the white buildings of the city  
begin. I can make out the gray and balding head of my younger son in  
the vanguard. He is wearing the blue and gold robes of the Hegemony. I  
know that I should wait for him, walk with him, but he and the other  
aging Council members cannot keep up with my young, ship-trained muscles  
and steady stride. But decorum dictates that I should walk with him and  
my granddaughter Lira and my nine-year-old grandson.  

To hell with it. And to hell with them.  

I turn and jog up the steep hillside. Sweat begins to soak my loose  
cotton shirt before I reach the curving  

summit of the ridge and catch sight of the tomb.  

Siri' s tomb.  

I stop. The wind chills me although the sunlight is warm enough as it  
glints off the flawless white stone of the silent mausoleum. The grass  
is high near the sealed entrance to the crypt. Rows of faded festival  
pennants on ebony staffs line the narrow gravel path.  

Hesitating, I circle the tomb and approach the steep cliff edge a few  
meters beyond. The willowgrass is bent and trampled here where  
irreverent picnickers have laid their blankets. There are several fire  
rings formed from the perfectly round, perfectly white stones purloined  
from the border of the gravel path.  

I cannot stop a smile. I know the view from here: the great curve of  
the outer harbor with its natural seawall, the low, white buildings of  
Firstsite, and the colorful hulls and masts of the catamarans bobbing at  
anchorage.  

Near the pebble beach beyond Common Hall, a young woman in a white skirt  
moves toward the water. For a second I think that it is Siri and my  
heart pounds. 1 half prepare to throw up my arms in response to her  
wave but she does not wave. I watch in silence as the distant figure  
turns away and is lost in the shadows of the old boat building.  

Above me, far out from the cliff, a wide-winged Thomas Hawk circles  
above the lagoon on rising thermals and scans the shifting bluekelp beds  
with its infrared vision, seeking out harp seals or torpids. Nature hv  
stupid, I think and sit in the soft grass. Nature sets the stage all  
wrong for such a day and then it is insensitive enough to throw in a  
bird searching for prey which have long since fled the polluted waters  
near the growing city.  

I remember another Thomas Hawk on that first night when Siri and I came  
to this hilltop. I remember the moonlight on its wings and the strange,  
haunting cry  

which echoed off the cliff and seemed to pierce the dark air above the  
gaslights of the village below.  

Siri was sixteen... no, not quite sixteen... and the moonlight that  
touched the hawk's wings above us also painted her bare skin with milky  
light and cast shadows beneath the soft circles of her breasts. We  
looked up guiltily when the bird's cry cut the night and Siri said, '  
"It was the nightingale and not the lark, That pierc'd the fearful  
hollow of thine ear." '  

'Huh?" I said. Siri was almost sixteen. I was nineteen.  

But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under  
the stars. I knew only the stars.  

'Relax, young Shipman,' she whispered and pulled me down beside her  
then. 'It's only an old Tom's Hawk hunting. Stupid bird. Come back,  
Shipman. Come back, Merin."  

The Los Angeles had chosen that moment to rise above the horizon and to  
float like a wind-borne ember west across the strange constellations of  
Maui-Covenant, Siri's world. I lay next to her and described the  
workings of the great Hawking-drive spinship which was catching the high  
sunlight against the drop of night above us, and all the while my hand  
was sliding lower along her smooth side, her skin seemed all velvet and  
electricity, and her breath came more quickly against my shoulder. I  
lowered my face to the hollow of her neck, to the sweat and perfume  
essence of her tousled hair.  

'Siri,' I say and this time her name is not unbidden.  

Below me, below the crest of the hill and the shadow of the white tomb,  
the crowd stands and shuffles. They are impatient with me. They want  
me to unseal the tomb, to enter, and to have my private moment in the  
cool silent emptiness that has replaced the warm presence that was Siri.  
They want me to say my farewells so they can get on with their rites and  
rituals, open the farcaster doors, and  

join the waiting Worldweb of the Hegemony.  

To hell with that. And to hell with them.  

I pull up a tendril of the thickly woven willowgrass, chew on the sweet  
stem, and watch the horizon for the first sign of the migrating islands.  

The shadows are still  

long in the morning light. The day is young. I will sit here for a  
while and remember.  

I will remember Siri.  

Siri was a... what?... a bird, I think, the first time 1 saw her. She  
was wearing some sort of mask with bright feathers. When she removed it  
to join in the raceme quadrille, the torchlight caught the deep auburn  
tints of her hair. She was flushed, cheeks aflame, and even from across  
the crowded common I could see the startling green of her eyes  
contrasting with the summer heat of her face and hair. It was Festival  
Night, of course. The torches danced and sparked to the stiff breeze  
coming in off the harbor and the sound of the flutists on the break-wall  
playing for the passing isles was almost drowned out by surf sounds and  
the crack of pennants snapping in the wind. Siri was almost sixteen and  
her beauty burned more brightly than any of the torches set round the  
throng-filled square. I pushed through the dancing crowd and went to  
her.  

It was five years ago for me. It was more than sixty five years ago for  
us. It seems only yesterday.  

This is not going well.  

Where to start?  

'What say we go find a little nooky, kid?" Mike Osho was speaking.  
Short, squat, his pudgy face a clever caricature of a Buddha, Mike was a  
god to me then. We were all gods; long-lived if not immortal, well paid  
if not quite divine. The Hegemony had chosen us to help crew one of its  
precious quantum-leap spinships, so how could we be less than gods? It  
was just that Mike, brilliant, mercurial, irreverent Mike, was a little  
older and a little higher in the Shipboard pantheon than young Merin  
Aspic.  

'Hah. Zero probability of that,' I said. We were scrubbing up after a  
twelve-hour shift with the farcaster construction crew. Shuttling the  
workers around their chosen singularity point some one hundred and  
sixty-three thousand kilometers out from Maul-Covenant was a lot less  
glamorous for us than the four-month leap from Hegemony-space. During  
the C-plus portion of the  

trip we had been master specialists; forty-nine starship experts  
shepherding some two hundred nervous passengers.  

Now the passengers had their hardsuits on and we Shipmen had been  
reduced to serving as glorified truck drivers as the construction crew  
wrestled the bulky singularity containment sphere into place.  

'Zero probability,' I repeated. 'Unless the groundlings have added a  
whorehouse to that quarantine island they leased us."  

'Nope. They haven't,' grinned Mike. He and I had our three days of  
planetary R and R coming up but we knew from Shipmaster Singh's  
briefings and the moans of our Shipmates that the only ground time we  

had to look forward to would be spent on a seven-by-four-kilometer  
island administered by the Hegemony. It wasn't even one of the motile  
isles we had heard about, just another volcanic peak near the equator.  
Once there, we could i:ount on real gravity underfoot, unfiltered air to  
breathe, and the chance to taste unsynthesized food. But we could also  
count on the fact that the only intercourse we would have with the  
Maul-Covenant colonists would be through buying local artifacts at the  
duty-free store.  

Even those were sold by Hegemony trade specialists.  

Many of our Shipmates had chosen to spend their R and R on the Los  
Angeles.  

'So how do we find a little nooky, Mike? The colonies are off limits  
until the farcaster's working. That's about sixty years away, local  
time. Or are you talking about Meg in spincomp?"  

'Stick with me, kid,' said Mike. 'Where there's a will, there's a way."  

I stuck with Mike. There were only five of us in the dropship. It was  
always a thrill to me to fall out of high orbit into the atmosphere of a  
real world. Especially a world that looked as much like Old Earth as  
Maul-Covenant did. I stared at the blue and white limb of the planet  
until the seas were down and we were in atmosphere, approaching the  
twilight terminator in a gentle glide at three times the speed of our  
own sound.  

We were gods then. But even gods must descend from their high thrones  
upon occasion.  

AAA  

Siri's body never ceased to amaze me. That time on the Archipelago.  
Three weeks in that huge, swaying tree-house under the billowing  
treesails with the dolphin herders keeping pace like outriders, tropical  
sunsets filling the evening with wonder, the canopy of stars at night,  
and our own wake marked by a thousand phosphorescent swirls that  
mirrored the constellations above. And still it is Siri's body I  
remember. For some reason-shyness, the years of separation - she wore  
two strips of swimsuit for the first few days of our Archipelago stay  
and the soft white of her breasts and lower belly had not darkened to  
match the rest of her tan before I had to leave again.  

I remember her that first time. Triangles in the moonlight as we lay in  
the soft grass above Firstsite Harbor.  

Her silk pants catching on a weave of willowgrass. There was a child's  
modesty then; the slight hesitation of something given prematurely. But  
also pride. The same pride that later allowed her to face down the  
angry mob of Separatists on the steps of the Hegemony consulate in South  
Tern and send them to their homes in shame.  

I remember my fifth planetfall, our Fourth Reunion.  

It was one of the few times I ever saw her cry. She was almost regal in  
her fame and wisdom by then. She had been elected four times to the All  

Thing and the Hegemony Council turned to her for advice and guidance.  

She wore her independence like a royal cloak and her fierce pride had  
never burned more brightly. But when we were alone in the stone villa  
south of Fevarone, it was she who turned away. I was nervous,  
frightened by this powerful stranger, but it was $iri- Siri of the  
straight back and proud eyes, who turned her face to the wall and said  
through tears, 'Go away. Go away, Merin.  

I don't want you to see me. I'm a crone, all slack and sagging. Go  
away."  

I confess that I was rough with her then. I pinned her wrists with my  
left hand - using a strength which surprised even me - and tore her  
silken robe down the front in one move. I kissed her shoulders, her  
neck, the faded shadows of stretch marks on her taut belly, and the scar  

on her upper leg from the skimmer crash some forty of her years earlier.  
I kissed her graying hair and the lines etched in the once smooth  
cheeks. I kissed her tears.  

'Jesus, Mike, this can't be legal,' I'd said when my friend unrolled the  
hawking mat from his backpack. We were on island 241, as the Hegemony  
traders had so romantically named the desolate volcanic blemish which  
they had chosen for our R and R site. Island 241 was less than fifty  
kilometers from the oldest of the colonial settlements but it might as  
well have been fifty light-years away. No native ships were to put in  
at the island while Los Angeles crewmen or farcaster workmen were  
present.  

The Maul-Covenant colonists had a few ancient skimmers still in working  
order, but by mutual agreement there would be no overflights. Except  
for the dormitories, swimming beach, and the duty-free store, there was  
little on the island to interest us Shipmen.  

Someday, when the last components had been brought in-system by the Los  
Angeles and the farcaster finished, Hegemony officials would make island  
241 into a center for trade and tourism. Until then it was a primitive  
place with a dropship grid, newly finished buildings of the local white  
stone, and a few bored maintenance people.  

Mike checked the two of us out for three days of backpacking on the  
steepest and most inaccessible end of the little island.  

'I don't want to go backpacking, for Chrissake,' I'd said. 'I'd rather  
stay on the L.A. and plug into a stimsim."  

'Shut up and follow me,' said Mike and, like a lesser member of the  
pantheon following an older and wiser deity, I had shut up and followed.  
Two hours of heavy tramping up the slopes through sharp-branched  
scrubtrees brought us to a lip of lava several hundred meters above the  
crashing surf. We were near the equator on a mostly tropical world but  
on this exposed ledge the wind was howling and my teeth were chattering.  
The sunset was a red smear between dark cumulus to the west and ! had  
no wish to be out in the open when full night descended.  

'Come on,' I said. 'Let's get out of the wind and build a fire. I  

don't know how the hell we're going to set up a tent on all of this  
rock."  

Mike sat down and lit a cannabis stick. 'Take a look in your pack,  
kid."  

I hesitated. His voice had been neutral but it was the flat neutrality  
of the practical joker's voice just before the bucket of water descends.  
I crouched down and began pawing through the nylon sack. The pack was  
empty except for old flowfoam packing cubes to fill it out. Those and a  
Harlequin's costume complete with mask and bells on the toes.  

'Are you... is this... are you goddamn crazy?" I spluttered. It was  
getting dark quickly now. The storm might or might not pass to the  
south of us. The surf was rasping below like a hungry beast. If I had  
known how to find my own way back to .the trade compound in the dark, I  
might have considered leaving Mike Osho's remains to feed the fishes far  
below.  

'Now look at what's in my pack,' he said. Mike dumped out some flowfoam  
cubes and then removed some jewelry of the type I'd seen handcrafted on  
Renaissance Vector, an inertial compass, a laser pen which might or  
might not be labeled a concealed weapon by ShipSecurity, another  
Harlequin costume - this one tailored to his more rotund form ' and a  
hawking mat.  

'Jesus, Mike,' I said while running my hand over the exquisite design of  
the old carpet, 'this can't be legal."  

'I didn't notice any customs agents back there,' grinned Mike. 'And I  
seriously doubt that the locals have any traffic control ordinances."  

'Yes, but..." I trailed off and unrolled the rest of the mat. It was a  
little more than a meter wide and about two meters long. The rich  
fabric had faded with age but the flight threads were still as bright as  
new copper. 'Where did you get it?" I asked. 'Does it still work?"  

'On Garden,' said Mike and stuffed my costume and his other gear into  
his backpack. 'Yes, it does."  

It had been more than a century since old Vladimir Sholokov, Old Earth  
emigrant, master lepidopterist, and EM systems engineer, had handcrafted  
the first  

hawking mat for his beautiful young niece on New Earth. Legend had it  
that the niece had scorned the gift but over the decades the toys had  
become almost absurdly popular - more with rich adults than with  
childrenuntil they were outlawed on most Hegemony worlds. Dangerous to  
handle, a waste of shielded monofilaments, almost impossible to deal  
with in controlled airspace, hawking mats had become curiosities  
reserved for bedtime stories, museums, and a few colony worlds.  

'It must have cost you a fortune,' I said.  

'Thirty marks,' said Mike and settled himself on the center of the  
carpet. 'The old dealer in Carvnel Marketplace thought it was  
worthless.  It was .  .  .  for him. 1 brought it back to the ship,  

charged it up, reprogrammed the inertia chips, and voild!" Mike palmed  
the intricate design and the mat stiffened and rose fifteen centimeters  
above the rock ledge.  

I stared doubtfully. 'All right,' I said, 'but what if it..."  

'It won't,' said Mike and impatiently patted the carpet behind him.  
'It's fully charged. I know how to handle it.  

Come on, climb on or stand back. I want to get going  

before that storm gets any closer."  

'But I don't think..."  

'Come on, Merin. Make up your mind. I'm in a hurry."  

I hesitated for another second or two. If we were caught leaving the  
island, we would both be kicked off the ship. Shipwork was my life now.  
I had made that decision when I accepted the eight-mission Maui-Covenant  
contract. More than that, I was two hundred light-years and five and a  
half leap years from civilization.  

Even if they brought us back to Hegemony-space, the round trip would  
have cost us eleven years' worth of friends and family. The time-debt  
was irrevocable.  

I crawled on the hovering hawking mat behind Mike.  

He stuffed the backpack between us, told me to hang on, and tapped at  
the flight designs. The mat rose five meters above the ledge, banked  
quickly to the left, and shot out over the alien ocean. Three hundred  
meters below us, the  

surf crashed whitely in the deepening gloom. We rose higher above the  
rough water and headed north into the night.  

In such seconds of decision entire futures arc made.  

I remember talking to Siri during our Second Reunion, shortly after we  
first visited the villa along the coast near Fevarone. We were walking  
along the beach. A16n had been allowed to stay in the city under  
Magritte's supervision.  

It was just as well. I was not truly comfortable with the boy. Only  
the undeniable green solemnity of his eyes and the disturbing  
mirror-familiarity of his short, dark curls and snub of a nose served to  
tie him to me...  to us .  .  .  in my mind. That and the quick, almost  
sardonic smile I would catch him hiding from Siri when she reprimanded  
him. It was a smile too cynically amused and self-observant to be so  
practiced in a ten-year-old. I knew it well. I would have thought such  
things were learned, not inherited.  

'You know very little,' Siri said to me. She was wading, shoeless, in a  
shallow tidepool. From time to time she would lift the delicate shell  
of a frenchhorn conch, inspect it for flaws, and drop it back into the  
silty water.  

Tve been well trained,' I replied.  

'Yes, I'm sure you've been well trained,' agreed Siri. 'I know you are  
quite skillful, Merin. But you know very little."  

Irritated, unsure of how to respond, I walked along with my head  
lowered. I dug a white lavastone out of the sand and tossed it far out  
into the bay. Rain clouds were piling along the eastern horizon. I  
found myself wishing that I was back aboard the ship. I had been  
reluctant to return this time and now I knew that it had been a mistake.  

It was my third visit to Maui-Covenant, our Second Reunion as the poets  
and her people were calling it. I was five months away from being  
twenty-one standard years old. Siri had just celebrated her  
thirty-seventh birthday three weeks earlier.  

'I've been to a lot of places you've never seen,' I said at last. It  
sounded petulant and childish even to me.  

'Oh, yes,' said Siri and clapped her hands together.  

For a second, in her enthusiasm, I glimpsed my other Siri -the young  
girl I had dreamed about during the long nine.months of turnaround. Then  
the image slid back to harsh reality and I was all too aware of her  
short hair, the loosening neck muscles, and the cords appearing on the  
backs of those once beloved hands.  

'You've been to places I'll never see,' said Siri in a rush.  

Her voice was the same. Almost the same. 'Merin, my love, you've  
already seen things I cannot even imagine.  

You probably know more facts about the universe than I would guess  
exist. But you know very little, my darling."  

'What the hell are you talking about, Siri?" I sat down on a  
half-submerged log near the strip of wet sand and drew my knees up like  
a fence between us.  

Siri strode out of the tidepool and came to kneel in front of me. She  
took my hands in hers and, although mine were bigger, heavier, bluntcr  
of finger and bone, I could feel the strength in hers. I imagined it as  
the strength of years I had not shared. 'You have to live to really  
know things, my love. Having A16n has helped me to understand that.  
There is something about raising a  

child that helps to sharpen one's sense of what is real." 'How do you  
mean?"  

Siri squinted away from me for a few seconds and absently brushed back a  
strand of hair. Her left hand stayed firmly around both of mine. 'I'm  
not sure,' she said softly. 'I think one begins to feel when things  
aren't important. I'm not sure how to put it. When you've spent thirty  
years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than  
when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know  
what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go  

looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go  
about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and  
how little time there is to learn the difference. Do you understand,  
Merin? Do you  

follow me even a little bit?"  

'No,' I said.  

Siri nodded and bit her lower lip. But she did not speak again for a  
while. Instead, she leaned over and kissed me.  

Her lips were dry and a little questioning. I held back for a second,  
seeing the sky beyond her, wanting time to think. But then I felt the  
warm intrusion of her tongue and closed my eyes. The tide was coming in  
behind us. I felt a sympathetic warmth and rising as Siri unbuttoned my  
shirt and ran sharp fingernails across my chest. There was a second of  
emptiness between us and I opened my eyes in time to see her unfastening  
the last buttons on the front of her white dress. Her breasts were  
larger than 1 remembered, heavier, the nipples broader and darker.  

The chill air nipped at both of us until I pulled the fabric down her  
shoulders and brought our upper bodies together. We slid down along the  
log to the warm sand. I pressed her closer, all the While wondering how  
I possibly could have thought her the stronger one. Her skin tasted of  
salt.  

Siri's hands helped me. Her short hair pressed back against bleached  
wood, white cotton, and sand. My pulse outraced the surf.  

'Do you understand, Merin?" she whispered to me seconds later as her  
warmth connected us.  

'Yes,' I whispered back. But I did not.  

Mike brought the hawking mat in from the east toward Firstsite. The  
flight had taken over an hour in the dark and I had spent most of the  
time huddling from the wind and waiting for the carpet to fold up and  
tumble us both into the sea. We were still half an hour out when we saw  
the first of the motile isles. Racing before the storm, treesails  
billowing, the islands sailed up from their southern feeding grounds in  
seemingly endless procession.  

Many were !it brilliantly, festooned with colored  

lanterns and shifting veils of gossamer light.  

'You sure this is the way?" I shouted.  

'Yes,' shouted Mike. He did not turn his head. The wind whipped his  
long black hair back against my face.  

From time to time he would check his compass and make small corrections  
to our course. It might have been easier to follow the isles. We  
passed one - a large one almost half a kilometer in length - and I  
strained to make out details but the isle was dark except for the glow  
of its  

phosphorescent wake. Dark shapes cut through the milky waves. I tapped  
Mike on the shoulder and pointed.  

'Dolphins!" he shouted. 'That's what this colony was all about,  
remember? A bunch of do-gooders during the Hegira wanted to save all  
the mammals in Old Earth's oceans. Didn't succeed."  

I would have shouted another question but at that moment the headland  
and Firstsite Harbor came into view.  

I had thought the stars were bright above Maui-Covenant.  

I had thought the migrating islands were memorable in their colorful  
display. But the city of First-site, wrapped about with harbor and  
hills, was a blazing beacon in the night. Its brilliance reminded me of  
a torchship I once had watched while it created its own plasma nova  
against the dark limb of a sullen gas giant..  

The city was a five-tiered honeycomb of white buildings, all illuminated  
by warmly glowing lanterns from within and by countless torches from  
without. The white lava-stone of the volcanic island itself seemed to  
glow from the city light. Beyond the town were tents, pavilions,  
campfires, cooking fires, and great flaming pyres, too large for  
function, too large for anything except to serve as a welcome to the  
returning isles.  

The harbor was filled with boats: bobbing catamarans with cow-bells  
clanking from their masts, large-hulled, flat-bottomed house-boats built  
for creeping from port to port in the calm equatorial shallows but  
proudly ablaze with strings of lights this night, and then the  
occasional oceangoing yacht, sleek and functional as a shark.  

A lighthouse set out on the pincer's end of the harbor reef threw its  
beam far out to sea, illuminated wave and isle alike, and then swept its  
light back in to catch the colorful bobbing of ships and men.  

Even from two kilometers out we could hear the noise.  

Sounds of celebration were clearly audible. Above the shouts and  
constant susurration of the surf rose the unmistakable notes of a Bach  
flute sonata. I learned later that this welcoming chorus was  
transmitted through hydrophones to the Passage Channels where dolphins  
leaped and cavorted to the music.  

'My God, Mike, how did you know all of this was going on?"  

' 1 asked the main ship computer,' said Mike. The hawking mat banked  
right to keep us far out from the ships and lighthouse beam. Then we  
curved back in north of Firstsite toward a dark spit o fland. I could  
hear the soft booming of waves on the shallows ahead. 'They have this  
festival every year,' Mike went on, 'but this is their sesquicentennial.  

The party's been going on for three weeks now and is scheduled to  
continue another two. There are only about a hundred thousand colonists  
on this whole world, Merin, and I bet half of them are here partying."  

We slowed, came in carefully, and touched down on a rocky outcropping  
not far from the beach. The storm had missed us to the south but  
intermittent flashes of lightning and the distant lights of advancing  
isles still marked the horizon. Overhead, the stars were not dimmed by  
the glow from Firstsite just over the rise from us. The air was warmer  
here and I caught the scent of orchards on the breeze. We folded up the  
hawking mat and hurried to get into our Harlequin costumes. Mike  
slipped his laser pen and jewelry into loose pockets.  

'What are those for?" I asked as we secured the backpack and hawking mat  
under a large boulder.  

'These?" asked Mike as he dangled a Renaissance necklace from his  
fingers. 'These are currency in case we have to  

negotiate for favors."  

'Favors?"  

'Favors,' repeated Mike. 'A lady's largesse. Comfort to a weary  
spacefarer. Nooky to you, kid."  

'Oh,' I said and adjusted my mask and fool's cap. The bells made a soft  
sound in the dark.  

'Come on,' said Mike. 'We'll miss the party." I nodded and followed  
him, bells jangling, as we picked our way over stone and scrub toward  
the waiting light.  

I sit here in the sunlight and wait. I am not totally certain what I am  
waiting for. I can feel a growing warmth on my back as the morning  
sunlight is reflected from the white stone of Siri's tomb.  

Siri's tomb?  

There are no clouds in the sky. I raise my head and squint skyward as  
if I might be able to see the L.A. and the newly finished farcaster  
array through the glare of atmosphere. I cannot. Part of me knows that  
they have not risen yet. Part of me knows to the second the time  
remaining before ship and farcaster complete their transit to the  
zenith. Part of me does not want to think  

about it.  

Siri, am I doing the right thing?  

There is the sudden sound of pennants stirring on their staffs as the  
wind comes up. I sense rather than see the restlessness of the waiting  
crowd. For the first time since my planetfall for this, our Seventh  
Reunion, I am filled with sorrow. No, not sorrow, not yet, but a  
sharp-toothed sadness which soon will open into grief. For years I have  
carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself  
for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold  
clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness  
begins to grow inside me.  

* Should I let it happen, Siri?  

There is no response except for the growing murmurs of the crowd. In a  
few minutes-they will send Donel, my younger and surviving son, or his  
daughter Lira and her brother up the hill to urge me on. I toss away  
the sprig of willowgrass I've been chewing on. There is a hint of  
shadow on the horizon. It could be a cloud. Or it could be the first  
of the isles, driven by instinct and the spring northerlies to migrate  
back to the great band of the equa torial shallows whence they came. It  
does not matter.  

Siri, am I doing the right thing?  

There is no answer and the time grows shorter.  

Sometimes Siri seemed so ignorant it made me sick.  

She knew nothing of my life away from her. She would ask questions but  
I sometimes wondered if she was interested in the answers. I spent many  
hours explaining the beautiful physics behind our spinships but she  
never did seem to understand. Once, after I had taken great care to  
detail the differences between their ancient seedship and the Los  
Angeles, Siri astounded me by asking, 'But why  

did it take my ancestors eighty years of shiptime to reach Maul-Covenant  
when you can make the trip in a hundred and thirty days?" She had  
understood nothing.  

Siri's sense of history was, at best, pitiful. She viewed the Hegemony  
and the Worldweb the way a child would view the fantasy world of a  
pleasant but rather silly myth; there was an indifference there that  
almost drove me mad at times.  

Siri knew all about the early days of the Hegira - at least insofar as  
they pertained to the Maui-Covenant and the colonists - and she  
occasionally would come up with delightful bits of archaic trivia or  
phraseology, but she knew nothing of post-Hegira realities. Names like  
Garden and the Ousters, Renaissance and Lusus meant little to her. I  
could mention Salmud Brew or General Horace Glennon-Height and she would  
have no associations or reactions at all. None.  

The last time I saw Siri she was seventy standard years old. She was  
seventy years old and still she had never traveled offworld, used a  
fatline, tasted any alcoholic drink except wine, interfaced with an  
empathy surgeon, stepped through a farcaster door, smoked a cannahis  
stick, received gene tailoring, plugged into a stimsim, received any  
formal schooling, taken any RNA medication, heard of Zen Gnostics or the  
Shrike Church, or flown any vehicle except an ancient Vikken skimmer  
belonging to her family.  

Siri had never made love to anyone except me. Or so she said. And so I  
believed. ,  

It was during our First Reunion, that time on the Archipelago, when Siri  
took me to talk with the dolphins.  

We had risen to watch the dawn. The highest levels of the tree-house  
were a perfect place from which to watch the eastern sky pale and fade  

to morning. Ripples of high cirrus turned to rose and then the sea  
itself grew molten as the sun floated above the flat horizon.  

'Let's go swimming,' said Sift. The rich, horizontal light bathed her  
skin and threw her shadow four meters across the boards of the platform.  

'I'm too tired,' I said. 'Later." We had lain awake  

most of the night talking, making love, talking, and making love again.  
In the glare of morning I felt empty and vaguely nauseated. I sensed  
the slight movement of the isle under me as a tinge of vertigo, a  
drunkard's disconnection from gravity.  

'No. Let's go now,' said Siri and grasped my hand to pull me along. I  
was irritated but did not argue. Siri was twenty-six, seven years older  
than I during that First Reunion, but her impulsive behavior often  
reminded me of the teen-aged Siri I had carried away from the Festival  
only ten of my months earlier. Her deep, unselfconious laugh was the  
same. Her green eyes cut as sharply when she was impatient. The long  
mane of auburn hair had not changed. But her body had ripened, filled  
out with a promise which had been only hinted at before. Her breasts  
were still high and full, almost girlish, bordered above by freckles  
that gave way to a whiteness so translucent that a gentle blue tracery  
of veins could be seen. But they were different somehow. She was  
different.  

'Are you going to join me or just sit there staring?" asked Siri. She  
had slipped off her caftan as we came out onto the lowest deck. Our  
small ship was still tied to the dock. Above us, the island's treesails  
were beginning to open to the morning breeze. For the past several days  
Siri had insisted on wearing swimstrips when we went into the water. She  
wore none now. Her nipples rose in the cool air.  

'Won't we be left behind?" I asked, squinting up at the flapping  
treesails. On previous days we had waited for the doldrums in the  
middle of the day when the isle was still in the water, the sea a glazed  
mirror. Now the jibvines were beginning to pull taut as the thick  
leaves filled with wind.  

'Don't be silly,' said Siri. 'We could always catch a keel-root and  
follow it back. That or a feeding tendril. Come on." She tossed an  
osmosis mask at me and donned her own. The transparent film made her  
face look slick with oil. From the pocket of her discarded caftan she  
lifted a thick medallion and set it in place around her neck. The  

metal looked dark and ominous against her skin.  

'What's that?" I asked.  

Siri did not lift the osmosis mask to answer. She set the  

comthreads in place against her neck and handed me the earplugs. Her  
voice was tinny. 'Translation disk,' she said. 'Thought you knew all  
about gadgets, Merin. Last one in's a seaslug." She held the disk in  
place between her breasts with one hand and stepped off the isle. I  
could see the pale globes of her buttocks as she pirouetted and kicked  
for depth. In seconds she was only a white blur deep in the water. I  

slipped my own mask on, pressed the comthreads tight, and stepped into  
the sea.  

The bottom of the isle was a dark stain on a ceiling of crystalline  
light. I was wary of the thick feeding tendrils even though Siri had  
amply demonstrated that they were interested in devouring nothing larger  
than the tiny zooplankton that even now caught the sunlight like dust in  
an abandoned ballroom. Keeiroots descended like gnarled stalactites for  
hundreds of meters into the purple depths.  

The isle was moving. I could see the faint fibrillation of the tendrils  
as they trailed along. A wake caught the light ten meters above me. For  
a second I was choking, the gel of the mask smothering me as surely as  
the surrounding water would, and then I relaxed and the air flowed  
freely into my lungs.  

'Deeper, Merin,' came Siri's voice. I blinked - a slow-motion blink as  
the mask readjusted itself over my eyes- and caught sight of Siri twenty  
meters lower, grasping a keelroot and trailing effortlessly above the  
colder, deeper currents where the light did not reach. 1 thought of the  
thousands of meters of water under me, of the things which might lurk  
there, unknown, unsought out by the human colonists. I thought of the  
dark and the depths and my scrotum tightened involuntarily.  

'Come on down." Siri's voice was an insect buzz in my ears. I rotated  
and kicked. The buoyancy here was not so great as in Old Earth'sseas,  
but it still took energy to dive so deep. The mask compensated for  
depth and nitrogen but I could feel the pressure against my skin and  
ears.  

Finally i quit kicking, grabbed a keelroot, and roughly hauled myself  
down to Siri's level.  

We floated side by side in the dim light. Siri was a  

spectral figure here, her long hair swirling in a wine-dark nimbus, the  
pale strips of her body glowing in the blue-green light. The surface  
seemed impossibly distant. The widening V of the wake and the drift of  
the scores of tendrils showed that the isle was moving more quickly now,  
moving mindlessly to other feeding grounds, distant waters.  

'Where are the..." I began to subvocalize.  

'Shhh,' said Siri. She fiddled with the medallion. I could hear them  
then: the shrieks and trills and whistles and cat purrs and echoing  
cries. The depths were suddenly filled with strange music.  

'Jesus,' I said and because Siri had tuned our cornthreads to the  
translator, the word was broadcast as a senseless whistle and toot.  

'Hello!" she called and the translated greeting echoed from the  
transmitter; a high-speed bird's call sliding into the ultrasonic.  
'Hello!" she called again.  

Minutes passed before the dolphins came to investigate.  

They rolled past us, surprisingly large, alarmingly large, their skin  

looking slick and muscled in the uncertain light. A large one swam  
within a meter of us, turning at the last moment so that the white of  
his belly curved past us like a wall. I could see the dark eye rotate  
to follow me as he passed. One stroke of his wide fluke kicked up a  
turbulence strong enough to convince me of the animal's power.  

'Hello,' called Siri but the swift form faded into distant haze and  
there was a sudden silence. Siri clicked off the translator. 'Do you  
want to talk to them?" she asked.  

'Sure." I was dubious. More than three centuries of effort had not  
raised much of a dialogue between man and sea mammal. Mike had once  
told me that the thought structures of Old Earth's two groups of orphans  
were too different, the referents too few. One pre-Hegira expert had  
written that speaking to a dolphin or porpoise was about as rewarding as  
speaking to a one-year-old human infant. Both sides usually enjoyed the  
exchange and there was a simulacrum of conversation, but neither party  
would come away the more knowledgeable. Siri switched the translator  
disk back on. 'Hello,' I said.  

There was a final minute of silence and then our ear-phones were buzzing  
while the sea echoed shrill ululations.  

distance/noofiuke/heilo-tone?/current pulse/circle me/funny?  

'What the hell?" I asked Siri and the translator trilled out my  
question. Siri was grinning under her osmosis mask.  

I tried again. 'Hello! Greetings from... uh... the surface. How are  
you?"  

The large male .  .  .  I assumed it to be a male . . .  

curved in toward us like a torpedo. He arch-kicked his way through the  
water ten times faster than I could have swum even if I had remembered  
to don flippers that morning. For a second I thought he was going to  
ram us and I raised my knees and clung tightly to the keelroot.  

Then he was past us, climbing for air, while Siri and I reeled from his  
turbulent wake and the high tones of his shout.  

no-fiuke/no-feed/no-swim/no-play/no-fun.  

Siri switched off the translator and floated closer. She lightly  
grasped my shoulders while I held on to the keel-root with my right  
hand. Our legs touched as we drifted through the warm water. A school  
of tiny crimson warriorfish flickered above us while the dark shapes of  
the dolphins circled farther out.  

'Had enough?" she asked. Her hand was flat on my chest.  

'One more try,' I said. Siri nodded and twisted the disk to life. The  
current pushed us together again. She slid her arm around me.  

'Why do you herd the islands?" I asked the bottle-nosed shapes circling  
in the dappled light. 'How does it benefit you to stay with the isles?"  

sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new  
songs.  

Siri's body lay along the length of me now. Her left arm tightened  
around me. 'Great Voices were the whales,' she whispered. Her hair  
fanned out in streamers.  

Her right hand moved down and seemed surprised at what it found.  

'Do you miss the Great Voices?" I asked the shadows.  

There was no response. Sift slid her legs around my hips.  

The surface was a churning bowl of light forty meters above us.  

'What do you miss most of Old Earth's oceans?" I asked.  

With my left arm I pulled Sift closer, slid my hand down along the curve  
of her back to where her buttocks rose to meet my palm, held her tight.  
To the circling dolphins we must have appeared a single-creature. Sift  
lifted herself against me and we became a single creature.  

The translator disk had twisted around so it trailed over Siri's  
shoulder. I reached to shut it off but paused as the answer to my  
question buzzed urgently in our ears.  

miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/ Shark/Shark/Shark.  

I turned off the disk and shook my head. I did not understand.  

There was so much I did not understand. I closed my eyes as Siri and I  
moved gently to the rhythms of the current and ourselves while the  
dolphins swam nearby and the cadenceof their calls took on the sad, slow  
trilling of an old lament.  

Siri and I came down out of the hills and returned to the Festival just  
before sunrise of the second day. For a night and a day we had roamed  
the hills, eaten with strangers in pavilions of orange silk, bathed  
together in the icy waters of the Shree, and danced to the music which  
never ceased going out to the endless file of passing isles. We were  
hungry.  

I had awakened at sunset to find Siri gone. She returned before the  
moon of Maui-Covenant rose. She told me that her parents had gone off  
with friends for several days on a slow-moving houseboat. They had left  
the family skimmer in Firstsite. Now we worked our way from dance to  
dance, bonfire to bonfire, back to the center of the city. We planned  
to fly west to her family estate ndlr Fevarone.  

It was very late but Firstsite Common still had its share of revelers. I  
was very happy. I was nineteen and I was in love and the .93 gravity of  
Maui-Covenant seemed much less to me. I could have flown had I wished.  
I could have done anything.  

We had stopped at a booth and bought fried dough and mugs of black  
coffee. Suddenly a thought struck me.  

I asked, 'How did you know I was a Shipman?"  

'Hush, friend Merin. Eat your poor breakfast. When we get to the  
villa, I will fix a true meal to break our fast."  

'No, I'm serious,' I said and wiped grease off my chin with the sleeve  
of my less than clean Harlequin's costume.  

'This morning you said that you knew right away last night that I was  
from the ship. Why was that? Was it my accent? My costume? Mike and  
I saw other fellows dressed like this."  

Siri laughed and brushed back her hair. 'Just be glad it was I who  
spied you out, Merin, my love. Had it been my Uncle Gresham or his  
friends it would have meant trouble."  

'Oh? Why is that?" I picked up one more fried ring and Sift paid for  
it. I followed her through the thinning crowd. Despite the motion and  
the music all about, I felt weariness beginning to work on me.  

'They are Separatists,' said Sift. 'Uncle Gresham recently gave a  
speech before the Council urging that we fight rather than agree to be  
swallowed into your Hegemony.  

He said that we should destroy your farcaster device before it destroys  
us."  

'Oh?" I said. 'Did he say how he was going to do that?  

The last I heard, you folks had no craft to get off-world in."  

'Nay, nor for the past fifty years have we,' said Siri.  

'But it shows how irrational the Separatists can be."  

I nodded. Shipmaster Singh and Councilor Halmyn had briefed us on the  
so-called Separatists of Maui-Covenant.  

'The usual coalition of colonial jingoists and throwbacks,' Singh had  
said. 'Another reason we go slow and develop the world's trade  
potential before finishing the fareaster. The Worldweb doesn't need  
these yahoos coming in prematurely. And groups like the Separatists are  
another reason to keep you crew and construction workers the hell away  
from the groundlings."  

'Where is your skimmer?" I asked. The Common was emptying quickly. Most  
of the bands had packed up their instruments for the night. Gaily  
costumed heaps lay  

snoring on the grass or cobblestones amid the litter and unlit lanterns.  
Only a few enclaves of merriment remained, groups dancing slowly to a  
lone guitar or singing drunkenly to themselves. I saw Mike Osho at  
once, a patchworked fool, his mask long gone, a girl on either arm. He  
was trying to teach the 'Hava Nagilia' to a rapt but inept circle of  
admirers. One of the troupe would stumble and they would all fall down.  
Mike would flog them to their feet among general laughter and they would  
start again, hopping clumsily to his basso profundo chant.  

'There it is,' said Siri and pointed to a short line of skimmers parked  
behind the Common Hall. I nodded and waved to Mike but he was too busy  
hanging on to his two ladies to notice me. Siri and I had crossed the  
square and were in the shadows of the old building when the shout went  
up.  

'Shipmanl Turn around, you Hegemony son of a bitch."  

I froze and then wheeled around with fists clenched but no one was near  
me. Six young men had descended the steps from the grandstand and were  
standing in a semicircle behind Mike. The man in front was tall, slim,  
and strikingly handsome. He was twenty-five or twenty-six years old and  
his long blond curls spilled down on a crimson silk suit that emphasized  
his physique. In his right hand he carried a meter-long sword that  
looked to be of tempered steel.  

Mike turned slowly. Even from a distance I could see his eyes sobering  
as he surveyed the situation. The women at his side and a couple of the  
young men in his group tittered as if something humorous had been said.  

Mike allowed the inebriated grin to stay on his face. 'You address me,  
sir?" he asked.  

'I address you, you Hegemony whore's son,' hissed the leader of the  
group. His handsome face was twisted into a sneer.  

'Bertol,' whispered Siri. 'My cousin. Gresham's younger son." I nodded  
and stepped out of the shadows.  

Siri caught my arm.  

'That is twice you have referred unkindly to my  

mother, sir,' slurred Mike. 'Have she or I offended you in some way? If  
so, a thousand pardons." Mike bowed so deeply that the bells on his cap  
almost brushed the ground. Members of his group applauded.  

'Your presence offends me, you Hegemony bastard.  

You stink up our air with your fat carcass."  

Mike's eyebrows rose comically. A young man near him in a fish costume  
waved his hand. 'Oh, come on, Bertol. He's just..."  

'Shut up, Ferick. It is this fat shithead I am speaking to."  

'Shithead?" repeated Mike, eyebrows still raised. 'I've traveled two  
hundred light-years to be called a fat shit-head?  

It hardly seems worth it." He pivoted gracefully, untangling himself  
from the women as he did so. I would have joined Mike then but Siri  
clung tightly to my arm, whispering unheard entrearies. When I was free  
I saw that Mike was still smiling, still playing the fool. But his left  
hand was in his baggy shirt pocket.  

'Give him your blade, Creg,' snapped Bertol. One of the younger men  

tossed a sword hilt-first to Mike. Mike watched it arc by and clang  
loudly on the cobblestones.  

'You can't be serious,' said Mike in a soft voice that was suddenly  
quite sober. 'You cretinous cow turd. Do you really think I'm going to  
play duel with you just because you get a hard-on acting the hero for  
these yokels?"  

'Pick up the sword,' screamed Bertol, 'or, by God, I'll carve you where  
you stand." He took a quick step forward.  

The youth's face contorted with fury as he advanced.  

'Fuck off,' said Mike. In his left hand was the laser pen.  

'No!" I yelled and ran into the light. That pen was used by  
construction workers to scrawl marks on girders of whiskered alloy.  

Things happened very quickly then. Bertoi took another step and Mike  
flicked the green beam across him almost casually. The colonist let out  
a cry and leaped back; a smoking line of black was slashed diagonally  
across his silk shirtfront. I hesitated. Mike had the  

setting as low as it could go. Two of Bertol's friends started forward  
and Mike swung the light across their shins. One dropped to his knees  
cursing and the other hopped away holding his leg and hooting.  

A crowd had gathered. They laughed as Mike swept off his fooi's cap in  
another bow. 'I thank you,' said Mike. 'My mother thanks you."  

Siri's cousin strained against his rage. Froths of spittle spilled on  
his lips and chin. I pushed through the crowd and stepped between Mike  
and the tail colonist.  

'Hey, it's all right,' I said. 'We're leaving. We're going now.".  

'Goddamn it, Merin, get out of the way,' said Mike.  

'It's all right,' I said as I turned to him. 'l'm with a girl named  
Siri who has a..." Bertol stepped forward and lunged past me with his  
blade. I wrapped my left arm around his shoulder and flung him back. He  
tumbled heavily onto the grass.  

'Oh, shit,' said Mike as he backed up several paces. He looked tired  
and a little disgusted as he sat down on a stone step. 'Aw, damn,' he  
said softly. There was a short line of crimson in one of the black  
patches on the left side of his Harlequin costume. As I watched, the  
narrow slit spilled over and blood ran down across Mike Osho's broad  
belly.  

'Oh, Jesus, Mike." I tore a strip of fabric from my shirt and tried to  
staunch the flow. I could remember none of the first aid we'd been  
taught as mid-Shipmen. 1 pawed at my wrist but my cornlog was not  
there. We had left them on the Los Angeles.  

'It's not so bad, Mike,' I gasped. 'It's. just a little cut." The  
blood flowed down over my hand and wrist.  

'It will serve,' said Mike. His voice was held taut by a cord of pain.  
'Damn. A fucking sword. Do you believe it, Merin? Cut down in the  
prime of my prime by a piece of fucking cutlery out of a fucking  
one-penny opera. Oh, damn, that smarts."  

'Three-penny opera,' I said and changed hands. The rag was soaked.  

'You know what your fucking problem is, Merin?  

You're always sticking your fucking two cents in.  

Awwwww." Mike's face went white and then gray. He lowered his chin to  
his chest and breathed deeply. 'To hell with this, kid. Let's go home,  
huh?"  

I looked over my shoulder. Bertol was slowly moving away with his  
friends. The rest of the crowd milled around in shock. 'Call a  
doctor!" I screamed. 'Get some medics up here!" Two men ran down the  
street. There was no sign of Siri.  

'Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" said Mike in a stronger voice as if he  
had forgotten something important.  

'Just a minute,' he said and died.  

Died. A real death. Brain death. His mouth opened obscenely, his eyes  
rolled back so only the whites showed, and a minute later the blood  
ceased pumping from the wound.  

For a few mad seconds I cursed the sky. I could see the L.A. moving  
across the fading starfield and I knew that I could bring Mike back if I  
could get him there in a few minutes. The crowd backed away as I  
screamed and ranted at the stars.  

Eventually I turned to Bertol. 'You,' I said.  

The young man had stopped at the far end of the Common. His face was  
ashen. He stared wordlessly.  

'You,' I said again. I picked up the laser pen from where it had  
rolled, clicked the power to maximum, and walked to where Bertol and his  
friends stood waiting.  

Later, through the haze of screams and scorched flesh, I was dimly aware  
of Siri's skimmer setting down in the crowded square, of dust flying up  
all around, and of her voice commanding me to join her. We lifted away  
from the light and madness. The cool wind blew my sweat-soaked hair  
away from my neck.  

'We will go to Fevarone,' said Siri. 'Bertol was drunk.  

The Separatists are a small, violent group. There will be no reprisals.  
You will stay with me until the Council holds the inquest."  

'No,' I said. 'There. Land there." I pointed to a spit of land not far  
from the city.  

Siri landed despite her protests. I glanced at the boulder to make sure  
the backpack was still there and then climbed out of the skimmer. Siri  
slid across the seat and  

pulled my head down to hers. 'Merin, my love." Her lips were warm and  
open but I felt nothing. My body felt anesthetized. I stepped back and  
waved her away. She brushed her hair back and stared at me from green  
eyes filled with tears. Then the skimmer lifted, turned, and sped to  
the south in the early morning light.  

Just a minute, I felt like calling. I sat on a rock and gripped my  
knees as several ragged sobs were torn up out of me. Then I stood and  
threw the laser pen into the surf below. I tugged out the backpack and  
dumped the contents on the ground.  

The hawking mat was gone.  

I sat back down, too drained to laugh or cry or walk away. The sun rose  
as I sat there. I was still sitting there three hours later when the  
large black skimmer from ShipSecurity set down silently beside me.  

'Father? Father, it is getting late."  

I turn to see my son Donel standing behind me. He is wearing the blue  
and gold robe of the Hegemony Council.  

His bald scalp is flushed and beaded with sweat.  

Donel is only forty-three but he seems much older to me.  

'Please, Father,' he says. I nod and rise, brushing off the grass and  
dirt. We walk together to the front of the tomb. The crowd has pressed  
closer now. Gravel crunches under their feet as they shift restlessly.  
'Shall I enter with you, Father?" Donel asks.  

I pause to look at this aging stranger who is my child.  

There is little of Siri or me reflected in him. His face is friendly,  
florid, and tense with the excitement of the day.  

I can sense in him the open honesty which often takes the place of  
intelligence in some people. I cannot help but compare this balding  
puppy of a man to A!bn - A!bn of the dark curls and silences and  
sardonic smile. But Albn is thirty-three years dead, cut down in a  
stupid battle which had nothing to do with him.  

'No,' ! say. 'I'll go in by myself. Thank you, Donel." He nods and  
steps back. The pennants snap above the heads of the straining crowd. 1  
turn my attention to the tomb.  

The entrance is sealed with a palmlock. I have only to touch it.  

During the past few minutes I have developed a fantasy which will save  
me from both the growing sadness within and the external series o f  
events which I have initiated. Siri is not dead. In the last stages of  
her illness she had called together the doctors and the few technicians  

left in the colony and they rebuilt for her one of the ancient  
hibernation chambers used in their seedship two centuries earlier.  

Siri is only sleeping. What is more, the year-long sleep has somehow  
restored her youth. When I wake her she will be the Siri I remember  
from our early days. We will walk out into the sunlight together and  
when the farcaster doors  

open we shall be the first through.  

'Father?"  

'Yes." I step forward and set my hand to the door of the crypt. There  
is a whisper of electric motors and the white slab of stone slides back.  
I bow my head and enter Siri's tomb.  

'Damn it, Merin, secure that line before it knocks you overboard.  
Hurry!" I hurried. The wet rope was hard to coil, harder to tie off.  
Siri shook her head in disgust and leaned over to tie a bowline knot  
with one hand.  

It was our Sixth Reunion. I had been three months too late for her  
birthday but more than five thousand other people had made it to the  
celebration. The CEO of the All Thing had wished her well in a  
forty-minute speech. A poet read his most recent verses to the Love  
Cycle sonnets.  

The Hegemony Ambassador had presented her with a scroll and a new ship,  
a small submersible powered by the first fusion cells to be allowed on  
Maul-Covenant.  

Siri had eighteen other ships. Twelve belonged to her fleet of swift  
catamarans that plied their trade between the wandering Archipelago and  
the home islands. Two were b.autiful racing yachts that were used only  
twice a year to wm the Founder's Regatta and the Covenant Criterium.  

The other four craft were ancient fishing boats, homely and awkward,  
well maintained but little more than scows.  

Siri had nineteen ships but we were on a fishing boat - the Ginnie Paul.  
For the past eight days we had  

fished the shelf of the Equatorial Shallows; a crew of two, casting and  
pulling nets, wading knee-deep through stinking fish and crunching  
trilobites, wallowing over every wave, casting and pulling nets, keeping  
watch, and sleeping like exhausted children during our brief rest  
periods. I was not quite twenty-three. I thought I was used to heavy  
labor aboard the L.,4. and it was my custom to put in an hour of  
exercise in the 1.3-g pod every second shift, but now my arms and back  
ached from the strain and my hands were blistered between the calluses.  

Siri had just turned seventy.  

'Merin, go forward and reef the foresail. Do the same for the jib and  
then go below to see to the sandwiches.  

Plenty of mustard."  

I nodded and went forward. For a day and a half we had been playing  
hide-and-seek with a storm: sailing before it when we could, turning  
about and accepting its punishment when we had to. At first it had been  
exciting, a welcome respite from the endless casting and pulling and  
mending. But after the first few hours the adrenaline rush faded to be  
replaced by constant nausea, fatigue, and a terrible tiredness. The  
seas did not relent. The waves grew to six meters and higher. The  
Ginnie Paul wallowed like the broad-beamed matron she was. Everything  
was wet. My skin was soaked under three layers of rain gear. For Siri  
it was a long-awaited vacation.  

'This is nothing,' she had said during the darkest hour of the night as  
waves washed over the deck and smashed against the scarred plastic of  
the cockpit. 'You should see it during simoon season."  

The clouds still hung low and blended into gray waves in the distance  
but the sea was down to a gentle five-foot chop. I spread mustard  
across the roast beef sandwiches and poured steaming coffee into thick  
white mugs. It would have been easier to transport the coffee in zero-g  
without spilling it than to get up the pitching shaft of the  
companionway. Siri accepted her depleted cup without commenting. We  
sat in silence for a bit, appreciating the food and the tongue-scalding  
warmth. I took the wheel when Siri went below to refill our mugs. The  
gray day was dimming almost imperceptibly into night.  

'Merin,' she said after handing me my mug and taking a seat on the long  
cushioned bench which encircled the cockpit, 'what will happen after  
they open the farcaster?"  

l was surprised by the question. We had almost never talked about the  
time when Maul-Covenant would join the Hegemony. I glanced over at Siri  
and was struck by how ancient she suddenly seemed. Her face was a  
mosaic of seams and shadows. Her beautiful green eyes had sunken into  
wells of darkness and her cheekbones were knife edges against brittle  
parchment. She kept her gray hair cut short now and it stuck out in  
damp spikes. Her neck and wrists were tendoned cords emerging from a  
shapeless sweater.  

'What do you mean?" I asked.  

'What will happen after they open the farcaster?" 'You know what the  
Council says, Siri." I spoke loudly because she was hard of hearing in  
one ear. 'It will open a new era of trade and technology for  
Maul-Covenant.  

And you won't be restricted to one little world any longer. When you  
become citizens, everyone will be entitled to use the farcaster doors."  

'Yes,' said Siri. Her voice was weary. 'I have heard all of that,  
Merin. But what will happen? Who will be the first through to us?"  

I shrugged. 'More diplomats, I suppose. Cultural contact specialists.  
Anthropologists. Ethnologists. Marine biologists."  

'And then?"  

I paused. It was dark out. The sea was almost gentle.  

Our running lights glowed red and green against the night. I felt the  
same anxiety I had known two days earlier when the wall of storm  
appeared on the horizon.  

I said, 'And then will come the missionaries.  

The petroleum geologists. The sea farmers. The developers. '  

Siri sipped at her coffee. 'I would have thought your Hegemony was far  
beyond a petroleum economy."  

I laughed and locked the wheel in. 'Nobody gets beyond a petroleum  
economy. Not while there's petroleum there. We don't burn it, if  
that's what you mean.  

But it's still essential for the production of plastics, synthetics,  
food base, and keroids. Two hundred billion people use a lot of  
plastic."  

'And Mani-Covenant has oil?"  

'Oh, yes,' I said. There was no more laughter in me.  

'There are billions of barrels reservoired under the Equatorial Shallows  
alone."  

'How will they get it, Merin? Platforms?"  

'Yeah. Platforms. Submersibles. Sub-sea colonies with tailored  
workers brought in from Mare Infinitus."  

'And the motile isles?" asked Siri. 'They must return each year to the  
shallows to feed on the bluekelp there and to reproduce. What will  
become of the isles?"  

I shrugged again. I had drunk too much coffee and it had left a bitter  
taste in my mouth. 'I don't know,' I said.  

'They haven't told the crew much. But back on our first trip out, Mike  
heard that they planned to develop as many of the isles as they can so  
some will be protected."  

'Develop?" Siri's voice showed surprise for the first time. 'How can  
they develop the isles? Even the First Families must ask permission of  
the Sea Folk to build our treehouse retreats there."  

I smiled at Siri's use of the local term for the dolphins.  

The Maul-Covenant colonists were such children when it came to their  
damned dolphins. 'The plans are all set,' I said. 'There are 128,573  

motile isles big enough to build a dwelling on. 
Leases to those have 
long since been sold. 

The smaller isles will be broken up, I suppose. 
The home islands will 
be developed for recreation purposes." 

'Recreation purposes,' echoed Siri. 'How many-peo-ple from the Hegemony  
will use the farcaster to come here... for recreation purposes?"  

'At first, you mean?" I asked. 'Just a few thousand the first year. As  
long as the only door is on Island 241...  

the Trade Center .  .  .  it will be limited. Perhaps 'fifty thousand  
the second year when Firstsite gets its door.  

It'll be quite the luxury tour. Always is after a seed  

colony is first opened to the Web."  

'And later?"  

'After the five-year probation? There will be thousands of doors, of  
course. I would imagine that there will  

be twenty or thirty million new residents coming through during the  
first year of full citizenship."  

'Twenty or thirty million,' said Siri. The light from the compass stand  
illuminated her lined face from below.  

There was still a beauty there. But there was no anger or shock. I had  
expected both.  

'But you'll be citizens then yourself,' I said. 'Free to step anywhere  
in the Worldweb. There will be sixteen new worlds to choose from.  
Probably more by then."  

'Yes,' said Siri and set aside her empty mug. A fine rain streaked the  
glass around us. The crude radar screen set in its hand-carved frame  
showed the seas empty, the storm past. 'Is it true, Merin, that people  
in the Hegemony have their homes on a dozen worlds? One house, I mean,  
with windows facing out on a dozen skies?"  

'Sure,' I said. 'But not many people. Only the rich can afford  
multiworld residences like that."  

Siri smiled and set her hand on my knee. The back of her hand was  
mottled and blue-veined. 'But you are very rich, are you not, Shipman?"  

I looked away. 'Not yet I'm not."  

'Ah, but soon, Merin, soon. How long for you, my love? Less than two  
weeks here and then the voyage back to your Hegemony. Five months more  
of your time to bring the last components back, a few weeks to finish,  
and then you step home a rich man. Step two hundred empty light-years  
home. What a strange thought... but where was I? That is how long?  
Less than a standard year."  

'Ten months,' I said. 'Three hundred and six standard days. Three  
hundred fourteen of yours. Nine hundred eighteen shifts."  

'And then your exile will be over."  

'Yes."  

'And you wili be twenty-four years old and very rich." 'Yes."  

'I'm tired, Merin. I want to sleep now."  

We programmed the tiller, set the collision alarm, and went below. The  
wind had risen some and the old vessel  

wallowed from wave crest to trough with every swell. We undressed in  
the dim light of the swinging lamp. I was first in the bunk and under  
the covers. It was the first time Siri and I had shared a sleep period.  
Remembering our last Reunion and her shyness at the villa, I expected  
her to douse the light. Instead she stood a minute, nude in the chill  
air, thin arms calmly at her sides.  

Time had claimed Siri but had not ravaged her. Gravity had done its  
inevitable work on her breasts and buttocks and she was much thinner. I  
stared at the gaunt outlines of ribs and breastbone and remembered the  
sixteen-year=old girl with baby fat and skin like warm velvet. In the  
cold light of the swinging lamp I stared at Siri's sagging flesh and  
remembered moonlight on budding breasts. Yet somehow, strangely,  
inexplicably, it was the same Siri who stood before me now.  

'Move over, Merin." She slipped into the bunk beside me. The sheets  
were cool against our skin, the rough blanket welcome. I turned off the  
light. The little ship swayed to the regular rhythm of the sea's  
breathing. I could hear the sympathetic creak of masts and rigging.  

In the morning we could be casting and pulling and mending but now there  
was time to sleep. I began to doze  

to the sound of waves against wood.  

'Merin?" 'Yes."  

'What would happen if the Separatists attacked the Hegemony tourists or  
the new residents?"  

'I thought the Separatists had all been carted off to he isles."  

'They have been. But what if they resisted?"  

'Tbe Hegemony would send in FORCE troops who could kick the shit out of  
the Separatists."  

'What if the farcaster itself were attacked ...  

destroyed before it was operational?"  

'Impossible."  

'Yes, I know, but what if it were?"  

'Then the LosAngeles would return nine months later with Hegemony troops  
who would proceed to kick the shit out of the Separatists... and anyone  

else on Maui-Covenant who got in their way."  
'Nine months' shiptime,' said Siri. 'Eleven years of our time."  
'But inevitable either way,' I said. 'Let's talk about something else."  
'All right,' said Siri but we did not speak. I listened to the crack  

and sigh of the ship. Siri had nestled in the hollow of my arm. Her  
head was on my shoulder and her breathing was so deep and regular that I  
thought her to be asleep. I was almost asleep myself when her warm hand  
slid up my leg and lightly cupped me. I was startled even as I began to  
stir and stiffen. Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. 'No,  
Merin, one is never really too old.  

At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness.  
You decide, my love. I will be content either way."  
I decided. Toward the dawn we slept.  
The tomb is empty.  
'Donel, come in here!'  
He bustles in, robes rustling in the hollow emptiness.  
The tomb/s empty. There is no hibernation chamber - I did not truly  

expect there to be one - but neither is there sarcophagus or coffin. A  
bright bulb illuminates the white interior. 'What the hell is this,  
Donel? I thought this was Siri's tomb."  

'It is, Father."  
'Where is she interred? Under the floor for Chrissake?" Donel mops at  

his brow. I remember that it is his mother I am speaking of. I also  
remember that he has had almost  
two years to accustom himself to the idea of her death.  
'No one told you?" he asks.  
'Told me what?" The anger and confusion are already ebbing. 'I was  

rushed here from the dropship station and told that I was to visit  

Siri's tomb before the farcaster opening. What?"  
'Mother was cremated as per her instructions. Her ashes were spread on  
the Great South Sea from the highest platform of the family isle."  

'Then why this... crypt?" I watch what I say. Donel is sensitive.  

He mops his brow again and glances to the door. We are shielded from  
the view of the crowd but we are far behind  
schedule. Already the other members of the Council have had to hurry  

down the hill to join the dignitaries on the bandstand. My slow grief  
this day has been worse than bad timing - it has turned into bad  
theater.  

'Mother left instructions. They were carried out." He touches a panel  
on the inner wall and it slides up to reveal  

a small niche containing a metal box. My name is on it.  

'What is that?"  

Donel shakes his head. 'Personal items Mother left for you. Only  
Magritte knew the details and she died last winter without telling  
anyone."  

'All right,' I say. 'Thank you. I'll be out in a moment." Donel  
glances at his chronometer. 'The ceremony begins in eight minutes. They  
will activate the farcaster in twenty minutes."  

'I know,' I say. I do know. Part of me knows precisely how much time  
is left. 'VII be out in a moment."  

Donel hesitates and then departs. I close the door behind him with a  
touch of my palm. The metal box is surprisingly heavy. I set it on the  
stone floor and crouch beside it. A smaller palmlock gives me access.  
The lid clicks open and I peer into the container.  

'Well I'll be damned,' I say softly. I do not know what I expected- 
artifacts perhaps, nostalgic mementos of our hundred and three days  
together - perhaps a pressed flower from some forgotten offering or the  
frenchhorn conch we dove for off Fevarone. But there are no mementos - 
not as such.  

The box holds a small Steiner-Ginn handlaser, one of the most powerful  
projection weapons ever made. The accumulator is attached by a power  
lead to a small fusion cell that Siri must have cannibalized from her  
new submersible. Also attached to the fusion cell is an ancient  
cornlog, an antique with a solid state interior and a liquid crystal  
diskey. The charge indicator glows green.  

There are two other objects in the box. One is the translator medallion  
we had used so long ago. The final object makes me literally gape in  
surprise.  

'Why, you little bitch,' I say. Things fall into place. I cannot stop  
a smile. 'You dear, conniving, little bitch."  

There, rolled carefully, power lead correctly attached,  

lies the hawking mat Mike Osho bought in Carvnel Marketplace for thirty  
marks. I leave the hawking mat there, disconnect the comlog, and lift  
it out. I sit crosslegged on the cold stone and thumb the diskey. The  
light in the crypt fades out and suddenly Siri is there before me.  

They did not throw me off the ship when Mike died.  

They could have but they did not. They did not leave me to the mercy of  
provincial justice on Maui-Covenant.  

They could have but they chose not to. For two days 1 was held in  

Security and questioned, once by Shipmaster Singh himself. Then they  
let me return to duty. For the four months of the long leap back I  
tortured myself with the memory of Mike's murder. I knew that in my  
clumsy way I had helped to murder him. I put in my shifts, dreamed my  
sweaty nightmares, and wondered if they would dismiss me when we reached  
the Web. They could have told me but they chose not to.  

They did not dismiss me. I was to have my normal leave in the Web but  
could take no off-Ship R and R while in the Maui-Covenant system. In  
addition, there was a written reprimand and temporary reduction in rank.  
That was what Mike's life had been worth- a reprimand and reduction in  
rank.  

I took my three-week. leave with the rest of the crew but, unlike the  
others, I did not plan to return. I farcast to Esperance and made the  
classic Shipman's mistake of trying to visit family. Two days in the  
crowded residential bulb was enough and I stepped to Lusus and took my  
pleasure in three days of whoring on the Rue des Chats.  

When my mood turned darker I 'cast to Fuji and lost most of my ready  
marks betting on the bloody samurai fights there.  

Finally 1 found myself farcasting to Homesystem Station and taking the  
two-day pilgrim shuttle down to Hellas Basin. I had never been to  
Homesystem or Mars before and I never plan to return, but the ten days I  
spent there, alone and wandering the dusty, haunted corridors of the  
Monastery, served to send me back to the ship.  

Back to Siri.  

Occasionally I would leave the red-stoned maze of the  

megalith and, clad only in skinsuit and mask, stand on one of the  
uncounted thousands of stone balconies and stare skyward at the pale  
gray star which had once been Old Earth. Sometimes then I thought of  
the brave and stupid idealists heading out into the great dark in their  
slow and leaking ships, carrying embryos and ideologies with equal faith  
and care. But most times I did not try to think. Most times I simply  
stood in the purple night and let Siri come to me. There in the  
Master's Rock, where perfect satori had eluded so many much worthier  
pilgrims, I achieved it through the memory of a not quite  
sixteen-year-old womanchild's body lying next to mine while moonlight  
spilled from a Thomas Hawk's wings.  

When the Los Angeles spun back up to a quantum state, I went with her.  
Four months later I was content to pull my shift with the construction  
crew, plug into my usual stims, and sleep my R and R away. Then Singh  
came to me. 'You're going down,' he said. I did not understand. 'In  
the past eleven years the groundlings have turned your screw-up with  
Osho into a goddamned legend,' said Singh. 'There's an entire cultural  
mythos built around your little roll in the hay with that colonial  
girl."  

'Siri,' I said.  

'Get your gear,' said Singh. 'You'll spend your three weeks groundside.  
The Ambassador's experts say you'll do the Hegemony'more good down there  

than up here.  

We'll see."  

The world was waiting. Crowds were cheering. Siri was waving. We left  
the harbor in a yellow catamaran and sailed south-southeast, bound for  
the Archipelago and her family isle.  

'Hello, Merin." Siri floats in the darkness of her tomb.  

The holo is not perfect; a haziness mars the edges. But it is Siri - 
Siri as I last saw, gray hair shorn rather than cut, head high, face  
sharpened with shadows. 'Hello, Merin, my love."  

'Hello, Siri,' I say. The tomb door is closed.  

'I am sorry I cannot share our Seventh Reunion, Merin. I looked forward  
to it." Siri pauses and looks  

down at her hands. The image flickers slightly as dust motes float  
through her form. 'I had carefully planned what to say here,' she goes  
on. 'How to say it. Arguments to be pied. Instructions to be given.  
But I know how useless that would have been. Either I have said it  
already and you have heard or there is nothing left to say and silence  
would best suit the moment."  

Siri's voice had grown even more beautiful with age.  

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing  
pain. Siri moves her hands and they disappear beyond the border of the  
projection. 'Merin, my love, how strange our days apart and together  
have been. How beautifully absurd the myth that bound us.  

My days were but heartbeats to you. I hated you for that.  

You were the mirror that would not lie. If you could have seen your  
face at the beginning of each Reunion! The least you could have done  
was to hide your shock...  

that, at least, you could have done for me.  

'But through your clumsy naivet there has always been... what?...  
something, Merin. There is something there that belies the callowhess  
and thoughtless egotism which you wear so well. A caring, perhaps. A  
respect for caring, if nothing else.  

'Merin, this diary has hundreds of entries... thousands, I fear... I  
have kept it since I was thirteen. By the time you see this, they will  
all have been erased except the ones which follow. Adieu, my love.  
Adieu."  

I shut off the comlog and sit in silence for a minute. The crowd sounds  
are barely audible through the thick walls of the tomb. I take a breath  
and thumb the diskey.  

Siri appears. She is in her late forties. I know immediately the day  
and place she recorded this image. I remember the cloak she wears, the  

eelstone pendant at her neck, and the strand of hair which has escaped  
her barrette and even now falls across her cheek. I remember everything  
about that day. It was the last day of our Third Reunion and we were  
with friends on the heights above South Tern. Donel was ten and we were  
trying to convince him to slide on the snowfield with us. He was  
crying. Siri turned away from us even before the skimmer settled.  

When Magritte stepped out we knew from Siri's face that something had  
happened.  

The same face stares at me now. She brushes absently at the unruly  
strand of hair. Her eyes are red but her voice is controlled. 'Merin,  
they killed our son today.  

Albn was twenty-one and they killed him. You were so confused today,  
Merin. "How could such a mistake have happened?" you kept repeating.  
You did not really know our son but I could see the loss in your face  
when we heard. Merin, it was not an accident. If nothing else  
survives, no other record, if you never understand why I allowed a  
sentimental myth to rule my life, let this be known - it was not an  
accident that killed Albn. He was with the Separatists when the Council  
police arrived.  

Even then he could have escaped. We had prepared an alibi together. The  
police would have believed his story.  

He chose to stay.  

'Today, Merin, you were impressed with what I said to the crowd... the  
mob... at the embassy. Know this, Shipman - when I said, "Now is not  
the time to show your anger and your hatred," that is precisely what I  
meant. No more, no less. Today is not the time. But the day will  
come. It will surely come. The Covenant was not taken lightly in those  
final days, Merin. It is not taken lightly now. Those who have  
forgotten will be surprised when the day comes but it will surely come."  

The image fades to another and in the split second of overlap the face  
of a twenty-six-year-old Siri appears superimposed on the older woman's  
features. 'Merin, I am pregnant. I'm so glad. You've been gone five  
weeks now and I miss. you. Ten years you'll be gone. More than that.  
Merin, why didn't you think to invite me to go with you? I could not  
have gone but I would have loved it if you had just invited me. But I'm  
pregnant, Merin. The doctors say that it will be a boy. I will tell  
him about you, my love. Perhaps someday you and he will sail in the  
Archipelago and listen to the songs of the Sea Folk as you and I have  
done these past few weeks. Perhaps you'll understand them by then.  
Merin, I miss' you. Please hurry back."  

The holographic image shimmers and shifts. The sixteen-year-old girl is  
red-faced. Her long hair cascades over bare shoulders and a white  
nightgown. She speaks in a rush, racing tears. 'Shipman Merin Aspic,  
I'm sorry about your friend - I really am - but you left without even  
saying goodbye. I had such plans about how you would help us... how  
you and I... you didn't even say goodbye. I don't care what happens to  
you. I hope you go back to your stinking, crowded Hegemony hives and  
rot for all I care. In fact, Merin Aspic, I wouldn't want to see you  
again even if they paid me. Goodbye."  

She turns her back before the projection fades. It is dark in the tomb  
now but the audio continues for a second. There is a soft chuckle and  
Siri's voice - I cannot tell the age - comes one last time. 'Adieu,  
Merin.  

Adieu."  

'Adieu,' I say and thumb the diskey off.  

The crowd parts as I emerge blinking from the tomb. My poor timing has  
ruined the drama of the event and now the smile on my face incites angry  
whispers. Loudspeakers carry the rhetoric of the official ceremony even  
to our hilltop. '... beginning a new era of cooperation,' echoes the  
rich voice of the Ambassador.  

I set the box on the grass and remove the hawking mat.  

The crowd presses forward to see as I unroll the carpet.  

The tapestry is faded but the flight threads gleam like new copper. I  
sit in the center of the mat and slide the heavy box on behind me.  

'... and more will follow until space and time will cease to be  
obstacles."  

The crowd moves back as I tap the flight design and the hawking mat  
rises four meters into the air. Now I can see beyond the roof of the  
tomb. The islands are returning to form the Equatorial Archipelago. I  
can see them, hundreds of them, borne up out of the hungry south by  
gentle winds.  

'So it is with great' pleasure that I close this circuit and welcome  
you, the colony of Maui-Covenant, into the community of the Hegemony of  
Man."  

The thin thread of the ceremonial comm-laser pulses  

to the zenith. There is a spattering of applause and the band begins  
playing. I squint skyward just in time to see a new star being born.  
Part of me knew to the microsecond what has just occurred.  

For a few microseconds the farcaster had been functional.  

For a few microseconds time and space had ceased to be obstacles. Then  
the massive tidal pull of the artificial singularity triggered the  
thermite charge I had placed on the outer containment sphere. That tiny  
explosion had not been visible but a second later the expanding  
Schwarzschild radius is eating its shell, swallowing thirty-six thousand  
tons of fragile dodecahedron, and growing quickly to gobble several  
thousand kilometers of space around it. And that is visible - 
magnificently visible - as a miniature nova flares whitely in the clear  
blue sky.  

The band stops playing. People scream and run for cover. There is no  
reason to. There is a burst of X rays tunneling out as the farcaster  
continues to collapse into itself, but not enough to cause harm through  

Maui-Covenant's generous atmosphere. A second streak of plasma becomes  
visible as the Los Angeles puts more distance between itself and the  
rapidly decaying little black hole. The winds rise and the seas are  
choppier.  

There will be strange tides tonight.  

I want to say something profound but I can think of nothing. Besides,  
the crowd is in no mood to listen. I tell myself that I can hear some  
cheers mixed in with the screams and shouts.  

I tap at the flight designs and the hawking mat speeds out over the  
cliff and above the harbor. A Thomas Hawk lazing on midday thermals  
flaps in panic at my approach.  

'Let them come!" I shout at the fleeing hawk. 'Let them come! I'll be  
thirty-five and not alone and let them come if they dare!" I drop my  
fist and laugh. The wind is blowing my hair and cooling the sweat on my  
chest and arms.  

Cooler now, I take a sighting and set my course for the most distant of  
the isles. I look forward to meeting the others. Even more, I look  
forward to talking to the Sea  

Folk and telling them that it is time for the Shark to come at last to  
the seas of Maui-Covenant.  

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell  
them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.  

The cascade of light from the distant space battle continued.  

There was no sound except for the slide of wind across escarpments. The  
group sat close together, leaning forward and looking at the antique  
comlog as if expecting more.  

There was no more. The Consul removed the micro-disk and pocketed it.  

Sol Weintraub rubbed the back of his sleeping infant and spoke to the  
Consul. 'Surely you!re not Merin Aspic."  

'No,' said the Consul. 'Merin Aspic died during the Rebellion. Siri's  
Rebellion."  

'How did you come to possess this recording?" asked Father Hoyt. Through  
the priest's mask of pain, it was visible that he had been moved. 'This  
incredible recording..."  

'He gave it to me,' said the Consul. 'A few weeks before he was killed  
in the Battle of the Archipelago." The Consul looked at the  
uncomprehending faces before him. 'I'm their grandson,' he said.  
'Siri's and Merin's.  

My father ... the Donel whom Aspic mentions ...  

became the first Home Rule Councilor when Maui-Covenant was admitted to  
the Protectorate. Later he was elected Senator and served until his  

death. I was nine years old that day on the hill near Siri's tomb. I  
was twenty - old enough to join the rebels and fight -- when Aspic came  
to our isle at night, took me aside, and forbade me to join their band."  

'Would you have fought?" asked Brawne Lamia.  

'Oh, yes. And died. Like a third of our menfolk and a fifth of our  
women. Like all of the dolphins and many of the isles themselves,  
although the Hegemony tried to keep as many of those intact as  
possible."  

'It is a moving document,' said Sol Weintraub. 'But why are you here?  
Why the pilgrimage to the Shrike?"  

'I am not finished,' said the Consul. 'Listen."  

My father was as weak as my grandmother had been strong. The Hegemony  
did not wait eleven local years to return - the FORCE torchships were in  
orbit before five years had elapsed. Father watched as the rebels'  
hastily constructed ships were swatted aside. He continued to defend  
the Hegemony as they laid siege to our world. I remember when I was  
fifteen, watching with my family from the upper deck of our ancestral  
isle as a dozen other islands burned in the distance, the Hegemony  
skimmers lighting the sea with their depth charges. In the morning, the  
waves were gray with the bodies of the dead dolphins.  

My older sister Lira went to fight with the rebels in those hopeless  
days after the Battle of the Archipelago.  

Eyewitnesses saw her die. Her body was never recovered.  

My father never mentioned her name again.  

Within three years after the cease-fire and admission to the  
Protectorate, we original colonists were a minority on our own world.  
The isles were tamed and said to tourists, just as Merin had predicted  
to Siri. Firstsite is a city of eleven million now, the condos and  
spires and EM cities extending around the entire island along the coast.  

Firstsite Harbor remains as a quaint bazaar, with descendants of the  
First Families selling crafts and overpriced art there.  

We lived on Tau Ceti Center for a while when Father was first elected  
Senator, and I finished school there. I was the dutiful son, extolling  
the virtues of life in the Web, studying the glorious history of the  
Hegemony of Man, andpreparing for my own career in the diplomatic corps.  

And all the time I waited.  

I returned to Maul-Covenant briefly after graduation, working in the  
offices on Central Administration Isle.  

Part of my job was to visit the hundreds of drilling platforms going up  
in the shallows, to report on the rapidly multiplying undersea  
complexes, and to act as liaison with the development corporations  
coming in from TC and Sol Draconi Septem. I did not enjoy the work. But  
I was efficient. And I smiled. And I waited.  

I courted and married a girl from one of the First  

Families, from Siri's cousin Bertol's line, and after receiving a rare  
'First' on diplomatic corps examinations, I requested a post out of the  
Web.  

Thus began our personal Diaspora, Gresha's and mine. I was efficient. I  
was born to diplomacy. Within .five standard years I was an Under  
Consul. Within eight, a Consul in my own right. As long as I stayed in  
the Outback, this was as far as I would rise.  

It was my choice. I worked for the Hegemony. And I waited.  

At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the colonists do  
what they do best - destroy truly indigenous life. It is no. accident  
that in six centuries of interstellar expansion the Hegemony has  
encountered no species considered intelligent on the Drake- Turing-Chen  
Index. On Old Earth, it had long been accepted that if a species put  
mankind on itsfood-chain menu the species would be extinct before long.  
As the Web expanded, if a species attempted serious competition with  
humanity's intellect, that species wouM be extinct before the first  

farcaster opened in-system. 
On Whirl we stalked the elusive zeplen through their cloud towers. 
It 
is possible that they were not sapient by human or Core standards. 
But 
they were beautiful. 

When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages  
unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death  
agony was beyond words. We sam their photoreceptive skins to Web  
corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven's Gate, and ground their  
bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and  
superstitious on a score of other colony worlds.  

On Garden I was adviser to the arcology engineers who drained Grand Fen,  
ending the short reign of the marsh centaurs who had ruled- and  
threatened Hegemony progress - there. They tried to migrate in the end,  
but the North Reaches were far too dry and when I visited the region  
decades later, when Garden entered the Web, the desiccated remains of  
the centaurs still littered some of the distant Reaches like the husks  
of exotic plants from some more colorful era.  

On Hebron I arrived just as the Jewish settlers were ending their long  
feud with the Seneschal Aluit, creatures as fragile as the world's  
waterless ecology. The Aluit were empathic and it was our fear and  
greed which killed them - that and our unbreachable alienness. But on  
Hebron it was not the death of the Aluit which turned my heart to stone,  
but my part in dooming the colonists themselves.  

On Old Earth they had a word for what I was-quisling.  

For, although Hebron was not my world, the settlers who had fled there  
had done so for reasons as clear as those of my ancestors who signed the  
Covenant of Life on the Old Earth island of MauL But I was waiting. And  
in my waiting I acted... in all senses of the word.  

They trusted me. They grew to believe in my candid revelations of how  
wonderful it was to rejoin the community of mankind... to join the Web.  
They insisted that only the one city might be open to foreigners. I  
smiled and agreed. And now New Jerusalem holds sixty millions while the  
continent holds ten million Jewish indigenies, dependent upon the Web  
city for most of what they need. Another decade. Perhaps less.  

I broke down a bit after Hebron was opened to the Web. I discovered  
alcohol, the blessed antithesis of Flashback and wireheading. Gresha  
stayed with me in the hospital there until I dried out. Oddly, for a  
Jewish world, the clinic was Catholic. I remember the rustle of robes  
in the halls at night.  

My breakdown had been very quiet and very far away.  

My career was not damaged. As full Consul, I took my wife and son to  
Bressia.  

How delicate our role there! How Byzantine the fine line we walked. For  
decades, Colonel Kassad, forces of the TechnoCore had been harassing the  
Ouster swarms wherever they fled. Now the forces-that-be in the Senate  
and AI Advisory Council had determined that some test had to be made of  
Ouster might in the Outback itself.  

Bressia was chosen. I admit, the Bressians had been our surrogates for  
decades before I arrived. Their society.  

was archaically and delightfully Prussian, militaristic to a fault,  
arrogant in their economic pretensions, xenophobic to the point of  
happily enlisting to wipe out the 'Ouster Menace." A t first, a few  
lend-lease torchships so that they could reach the swarms. Plasma  
weapons.  

Impact probes with tailored viruses.  

It was a slight miscalculation that I was still on Bressia when the  
Ouster hordes arrived. A few months' difference.  

A military-political analysis team should have been there in my place.  

It did not matter. Hegemony purposes were served.  

The resolve and rapid-deployment capabilities of FORCE were properly  
tested where no real harm was done to Hegemony interests. Gresha died,  
of course. In the first bombardment. And A!On, my ten-year-old son.  

He had been with me... had survived the war itself...  

only to die when some FORCE idiot set off a booby trap or demolition  
charge too near the refugee barracks in Buckminster, the capital.  

I was not with him when he died.  

I was promoted after Bressia. I was given the most challenging and  
sensitive assignment ever relegated to someone of mere consular rank:  
diplomat in charge of direct negotiations with the Ousters themselves.  

First I was 'cast to Tau Ceti Center for long conferences with Senator  
Gladstone's committee and some of the AI Councilors. I met with  
Gladstone herself. The plan was very complicated. Essentially the  
Ousters had to be provoked into attacking, and the key to that  
provocation was the world of Hyperion.  

The Ousters had been observing Hyperion since before the Battle of  
Bressia. Our intelligence suggested that they were obsessed with the  
Time Tombs and the Shrike. Their attack on the Hegemony hospital ship  
carrying Colonel Kassad, among others, had been a miscalculation; their  
ship captain had panicked when the hospital ship had been mistakenly  
identified as a military spinship. Worse, from the Ousters' point of  
view, was the fact that by setting their dropships down near the Tombs  
themselves, the same commander had revealed their ability to defy the  
time tides. After the Shrike had  

decimated their commando teams, the torchship captain returned to the  
Swarm to be executed.  

But our intelligence suggested that the Ouster miscalculation had not  
been a total disaster. Valuable information had been obtained about the  
Shrike. And their obsession with Hyperion had deepened.  

Gladstone explained to me how the Hegemony planned to capitalize on that  
obsession.  

The essence of the plan was that the Ousters had to be provoked into  
attacking the Hegemony. The focus of that attack was to be Hyperion  
itself. I was made to understand that the resulting battle had more to  
do with internal Web politics than with the Ousters. Elements of the  
TechnoCore had opposed Hyperion's entry into the Hegemony for centuries.  
Gladstone explained that this was no longer in the interest of humanity  
and that a forcible annexation of Hyperion - under the guise of  
defending the Web itself- would allow more progressive Al coalitions in  
the Core to gain power. This shift of the power balance in the Core  
would benefit the Senate and the Web in ways not fully explained to me.  
The Ousters would be eradicated as a potential menace once and for all.  
A new era of Hegemony glory would begin.  

Gladstone explained that I need not volunteer, that the mission would be  
fraught with dangers - both for my career and my life. I accepted  
anyway.  

The Hegemony provided me with a private spacecraft.  

I asked for only one modification: the addition of an an tique Stein way  
piano.  

For months I traveled alone under Hawking drive. For more months I  
wandered in regions where the Ouster Swarms regularly migrated.  
Eventually my ship was sensed and seized. They accepted that I was a  
courier and knew that I was a spy. They debated killing me and did not.  
They debated negotiating with me and eventually decided to do so.  

I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm - their  
zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their  
micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors  

and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I  

believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past  
millennia: evolved. While we llve in our derivative cultures, pale  
reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions  
of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that  
must change and grow to reflect the human soul.  

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our  
Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and  
proclaim ourselves civilized.  

Within ten standard months, I had told them my greatest secret and they  
had told me theirs. I explained in all the detail I could what plans  
for extinction had been laid for them by Gladstone's people. I told  
them what little the Web scientists understood of the ttnomaly of the  
Time Tombs and revealed the TechnoCore's inexplicable fear of Hyperion.  
I described how Hyperion would be a trap for them if they dared attempt  
to occupy it, how every element of FORCE would be brought to Hyperion  
System to crush them. I revealed everything I knew and waited once  
again to die.  

Instead of killing me, they told me something. They showed me fatline  
intercepts, tightbeam recordings, and their own records from the date  
they fled Old Earth System, four and a half centuries earlier. Their  
facts were terrible and simple.  

The Big Mistake of '38 had been no mistake. The death of Old Earth had  
been deliberate, planned by elements of the TechnoCore and their human  
counterparts in the fledgling government of the Hegemony. The Hegira  
had been planned in detail decades before the runaway black hole had  
'accidentally' been plunged into the heart of Old Earth.  

The Worldweb, the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man - allof them had been  
built on the most vicious type of patricide. Now they were being  
maintained by a quiet and deliberate policy of fraticide - the murder of  
any species with even the slightest potential of being a competitor.  

And the Ousters, the only other tribe of humanity free to wander between  
the stars and the only group not dominated by the TechnoCore, was next  
on our list of extinction.  

I returned to the Web. Over thirty years of Web-time had passed. Meina  
Gladstone was CEO. Siri's Rebellion was a romantic legend, a minor  
footnote in the history of the Hegemony.  

I met with Gladstone. I told her many - but not all -of the things the  
Ousters had revealed. I told her that they knew that any battle for  
Hyperion would be a trap, but that they were coming anyway. I told her  
that the Ousters wanted me to become Consul on Hyperion so that I might  
be a double agent when war came.  

I did not tell her that they had promised to give me a device which  
would open the Time Tombs and allow the Shrike free rein.,  

CEO Gladstone had long talks with me. FORCE: Intelligence agents had  
even longer talks with me, some lasting months. Technologies and drugs  

were used to confirm that I was telling the truth and keeping nothing  
back. The Ousters also had been very good with technologies and drugs.  
I was telling the truth. I was also keeping something back.  

In the end, I was assigned to Hyperion. Gladstone offered to raise the  
world to Protectorate status and me to an ambassadorship. I declined  
both offers, although I asked if I could keep my private spacecraft. I  
arrived on a regularly scheduled spinship, and my own ship arrived  
several weeks later in the belly of a visiting torchship. It was left  
in a parking orbit with the understanding that I could summon it and  
leave any time I wished.  

Alone on Hyperion, I waited. Years passed. I allowed my aide to govern  
the Outback world while I drank at Cicero's and waited.  

The Ousters contacted me through private fatline and I took a three  
weeks' leave from the Consulate, brought my ship down to an isolated  
place near the Sea of Grass, rendezvoused with their scoutship near the  
OOrt Cloud, picked up their agent - a woman named Andil - and a trio of  
technicians, and dropped down north of the Bridle Range, a few  
kilometers from the Tombs themselves.  

The Ousters did not have farcasters. They spent their lives on the long  
marches between the stars, watching life in the Web speed by like some  
film or holie set at a frenzied speed. They were obsessed with time.  
The TechnoCore had given the Hegemony the farcaster and continued to  
maintain it. No human scientists or team of human scientists had come  
close to understanding it. The Ousters tried. They failed. But even  
in their failures they made inroads into understanding the manipulation  
of space/time.  

They understood the time tides, the anti-entropic fields surrounding the  
Tombs. They could not generate such fields, but they could shield  
against them and-theoretically - collapse them. The Time Tombs and all  
their contents would cease to age backward. The Tombs would 'open. '  
The Shrike would slip its tether, no longer connected to the vicinity of  
the Tombs. Whatever else was inside would now be freed.  

The Ousters believed that the Time Tombs were artifacts from their  
future, the Shrike a weapon of redemption awaiting the proper hand to  
seize it. The Shrike Cult saw the monster as an avenging angel; the  
Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to  
deliver humanity from the TechnoCore. Andil and the technicians were  
there to calibrate and experiment.  

'You won't use it now?" I asked. We were standing in the shadow of the  
structure called the Sphinx.  

'Not now,' said Andil. 'When the invasion is imminent."  

'But you said it would take months for the device to work,' I said, for  
the Tombs to open."  

Andil nodded. Her eyes were a dark green. She was very tall, and I  
could make out the subtle stripes of the powered exoskeleton on her  
skinsuit. 'Perhaps a year or longer,' she said. 'The device causes the  
anti-entropic field to decay slowly. But once begun, the process is  

irrevocable. But we will not activate it until the Ten Councils have  
decided that invasion of the Web is necessary. '  

'There are doubts?" I said.  

'Ethical debates,' said A ndii. A few meters from us, the three  
technicians were covering the device with chameleon cloth and a coded  
containment field. 'And interstellar war will cause the deaths of  
millions, perhaps  

billions. Releasing the Shrike into the Web will have unforeseen  
consequences. As much as we need to strike at the Core, there are  
debates as to which is the best way. '  

I nodded and looked at the device and the valley of the Tombs. 'But  
once this is activated,' I said, 'there is no turning back. The Shrike  
will be released, and you will  

have to have won the war to control it?"  

Andil smiled slightly. 'That is true."  

I shot her then, her and then the three technicians.  

Then I tossed Grandmother Siri's Steiner-Ginn laser far into the drift  
dunes and sat on an empty flowfoam crate and sobbed for several minutes.  
Then I walked over, used a techniciqn's cornlog to enter the containment  
field, threw off the chameleon cloth, and triggered the device.  

There was no immediate change. The air held the same rich, late-winter  
light. The Jade Tomb glowed softly while the Sphinx continued to stare  
down at nothing.  

The only sound was the rasp of sand across the crates and bodies. Only  
a glowing indicator on the Ouster device showed that it was working ...  
had already worked.  

I walked slowly back to the ship, half expecting the Shrike to appear,  
half hoping that it would. I sat on the balcony of my ship for more  
than an hour, watching the shadows filling the valley and the sand  
covering the distant corpses. There was no Shrike. No thorn tree.  
After a while I played a Bach Prelude on the Steinway, buttoned up the  
ship, and rose into space.  

I contacted the Ouster ship and said that there had been an accident.  
The Shrike had taken the others; the device had been activated  
prematurely. Even in their confusion and panic, the Ousters offered me  
refuge. I declined the offer and turned my ship toward the Web.  

The Ousters did not pursue.  

I used myfatline transmitter to contact Gladstone and to tell her that  
the Ouster agents had been eliminated. !  

told her that the invasion was very likely, that the trap would be  
sprung as planned. I did not tell her about the device. Gladstone  
congratulated me and called me home. I declined. I told her that I  

needed silence and solitude. I turned my ship toward the Outback world  
nearest the Hyperion system, knowing that travel itself would eat time  
until the next act commenced.  

Later, when the fatline call to pilgrimage came from Gladstone herself,  
I knew the role the Ousters had planned for me in these final days: the  
Ousters, or the Core, or Gladstone and her machinations. It no longer  
matters who consider themselves the masters of events.  

Events no longer obey their masters.  

The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter what happens to  
us. As for me, I have no request of the Shrike. I bring no final words  
for it or the universe.  

I have returned because I must, because this is my fate. I've known  
what I must do since I was a child, returning alone to Siri's tomb and  
swearing vengeance on the Hegemony. I've known what price I must pay,  
both in life and in history.  

But when the time comes to judge, to understand a betrayal which will  
spread like fame across the Web, which will end worlds, l ask you not to  
think of me - my name was not even writ on water as your lost poet's  
soul said - but to think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of  
the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun, to see - 
as I have seen - the motile isles with no place to wander, their feeding  
grounds destroyed, the Equatorial Shallows scabbed with drilling  
platforms, the islands themselves burdened with shouting, trammeling  
tourists smelling of UV lotion and cannabis.  

Or better yet, think of none of that. Stand as l did after throwing the  
switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on  
Hyperion's shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky,  
crying 'A plague on both your houses.t'  

For you see, I remember my grandmother's dream. I remember the way it  
could have been.  

I remember Siri.  

'Are you the spy?" asked Father Hoyt. 'The Ouster spy?"  

The Consul rubbed his cheeks and said nothing. He looked tired, spent.  

'Yeah,' said Martin Silenus. 'CEO Gladstone warned  

me when I was chosen for the pilgrimage. She said that there was a  
spy."  

'She told all of us,' snapped Brawne Lamia. She stared at the Consul.  
Her gaze seemed sad.  

'Our friend is a spy,' said Sol Weintraub, 'but not merely an Ouster  
spy." The baby had awakened.  

Weintraub lifted her to calm her crying. 'He is what they call in the  
thrillers a double agent, a triple agent in this case, an agent to  

infinite regression. In truth, an agent of retribution."  
The Consul looked at the old scholar.  
'He's still a spy,' said Silenus. 'Spies are executed, aren't they?" ,  
Colonel Kassad had the deathwand in his hand. It was not aimed in  

anyone's direction. 'Are you in touch with  
your ship?" he asked the Consul.  
'Yes." 'How?"  
'Through Siri's comlog. It was... modified."  
Kassad nodded slightly. 'And you've been in touch  
with the Ousters via the ship's fatline transmitter?" 'Yes."  
'Making reports on the pilgrimage as they expected?" 'Yes."  
'Have they replied?"  
'No."  
'How can we believe him?" cried the poet. 'He's a fucking spy."  
'Shut up,' Colonel Kassad said flatly, finally. His gaze never left the  

Consul. 'Did you attack Her Masteen?"  
'No,' said the Consul. 'But when the Yggdrasili  
burned, I knew that something was wrong."  
'What do you mean?" said Kassad.  
The Consul cleared his throat. 'I've spent time with Templar Voices of  

the Tree. Their connection to their treeships is almost telepathic.  
Masteen's reaction was far too subdued. Either he wasn't what he said  
he was, or he had known that the ship was to be destroyed and had  
severed contact with it. When I was on guard duty, 1 went below to  
confront him. He was gone. The cabin was as we found it, except for  
the fact that the MObius cube was in a neutral state. The erg could  
have escaped. I secured it and went above."  

'You did not harm Het Masteen?" Kassad asked again.  
'No."  
'1 repeat, why the fuck should we believe you?" said Silenus. The poet  

was drinking Scotch from the last bottle he had brought along.  

The Consul looked at the bottle as he answered. 'You have no reason to  
believe me. It doesn't matter."  
Colonel Kassad's long fingers idly tapped the dull casing of the  

deathwand. 'What will you do with your fatline commlink now?"  

The Consul took a tired breath. 'Report when the Time Tombs open. If  
I'm still alive then."  

Brawne Lamia pointed at the antique comlog. 'We could destroy it."  

The Consul shrugged.  

'It could be of use,' said the Colonel. 'We can eavesdrop on military  
and civilian transmissions made in the clear. If we have to, we can  
call the Consul's ship."  

'No!" cried the Consul. It was the first time he had shown emotion in  
many minutes. 'We can't turn back now."  

'l believe we have no intention of turning back,' said Colonel Kassad.  
He looked around at pale faces. No one spoke for a moment.  

'There is a decision we have to make,' said Sol Weintraub. He rocked  
his infant and nodded in the direction of the Consul.  

Martin Silenus had been resting his forehead on the mouth of the empty  
bottle of Scotch. He looked up. 'The penalty for treason is death." He  
giggled. 'We're all going to die within a few hours anyway. Why not  
make our last act an execution?"  

Father Hoyt grimaced as a spasm of pain gripped him.  

He touched his cracked lips with a trembling finger.  

'We're not a court."  

'Yes,' said Colonel Kassad, 'we are."  

The Consul drew up his legs, rested his forearms on his knees, and laced  
his fingers. 'Decide then." There was no emotion in his voice.  

Brawne Lamia had brought out her father's automatic pistol. Now she set  
it on the floor near where she sat. Her eyes darted from the Consul to  
Kassad. 'We're talking treason here?" she said. 'Treason toward what?  
None of us except maybe the Colonel there is exactly a leading citizen.  
We've all been kicked around by forces beyond our control."  

Sol Weintraub spoke directly to the Consul. 'What you have ignored, my  
friend, is that if Meina Gladstone and elements of the Core chose you  
for the Ouster contact, they knew very well what you would do. Perhaps  
they could not have guessed that the Ousters had the means by which o  
open the Tombs - although with the Als of the Core one can never know - 
but they certainly knew that you would turn on both societies, both  
camps which have injured your family. It is all part of some bizarre  
plan. You were no more an instrument of your own will than was' - he  
held the baby up - 'this child."  

The Consul looked confused. He started to speak, shook his head  
instead.  

'That may be correct,' said Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, 'but however they  

may try to use all of us as pawns, we must attempt to choose our own  
actions." He glanced up at the wall where pulses of light from the  
distant space battle painted the plaster blood red. 'Because of this  
war, thousands will die. Perhaps millions. If the Ousters or the  
Shrike gain access to the Web's farcaster system, billions of lives on  
hundreds of worlds are at risk."  

The Consul watched as Kassad raised the deathwand.  

'This would be faster for all of us,' said Kassad. 'The Shrike knows no  
mercy."  

No one spoke. The Consul seemed to be staring at something at a great  
distance.  

Kassad pressed on the safety and set the wand back in his belt. 'We've  
come this far,' he said. 'We will go the rest of the way together."  

Brawne Lamia put away her father's pistol, rose, crossed the small  
space, knelt next to the Consul, and put her arms around him. Startled,  
the Consul raised one arm. Light danced on the wall behind them.  

A moment later, Sol Weintraub came close and  

hugged them both with one arm around their shoulders.  

The baby wriggled in pleasure at the sudden warmth of bodies. The  
Consul smelled the talc-and-newborn scent of her.  

'I was wrong,' said the Consul. 'I will make a reqtlest of the Shrike.  
I will ask for her." He gently touched Rache!'s head where the small  
skull curved in to neck.  

Martin Silenus made a noise which began as a laugh and died as a sob.  
'Our last requests,' he said. 'Does the muse grant requests? I have no  
request. I want only for the poem to be finished."  

Father Hoyt turned toward the poet. 'Is it so important?"  

'Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes,' gasped Silenus. He dropped the empty Scotch  
bottle, reached into his bag, and lifted out a handful of flimsies,  
holding them high as if offering them to the group. 'Do you want to  
read it? Do you want me to read it to you? It's flowing again. Read  
the old parts. Read the Cantos I wrote three centuries ago and never  
published. It's all here. We're all here. My name, yours, this trip.  
Don't you see... I'm not creating a poem, I'm creating the future!" He  
let the flimsies fall, raised the empty bottle, frowned, and held it  
like a chalice. 'I'm creating the future,' he repeated without looking  
up, 'but it's the past which must be changed.  

One instant. One decision."  

Martin Silenus raised his face. His eyes were red. 'This thing that is  
going to kill us tomorrow - my muse, our maker, our unmaker - it's  
traveled back through time.  

Well, let it. This time, let it take me and leave Billy alone.  

Let it take me and let the poem end there, unfinished for all time." He  
raised the bottle higher, closed his eyes, and threw it against the far  
wall. Glass shards reflected orange light from the silent explosions.  

Colonel Kassad stepped closer and laid long fingers on the poet's  
shoulder.  

For a few seconds the room seemed warmed by the mere fact of human  
contact. Father Lenar Hoyt stepped away from the wall where he had been  
leaning, raised his right hand with thumb and little finger touching,  
three fingers raised, the gesture somehow including himself as  

well as those before him, and said softly, 'Ego te absolvo. '  

Wind scraped at the outer walls and whistled around the gargoyles and  
balconies. Light from a battle a hundred million kilometers away  
painted the group in blood hues.  

Colonel Kassad walked to the doorway. The group moved apart.  

'Let's try to get some sleep,' said Brawne Lamia.  

Later, alone in his bedroll, listening to the wind shriek and howl, the  
Consul set his cheek against his pack and pulled the rough blanket  
higher. It had been years since he had been able to fall asleep easily.  

The Consul se[ his curled fist against his cheek, closed his eyes, and  
slept.  

EPILOGUE  

The Consul awoke to the sound 'of a balalaika being played so softly  
that at first he thought it was an undercurrent of his dream.  

The Consul rose, shivered in the cold air, wrapped his blanket around  
him, and went out onto the long balcony.  

It was not yet dawn. The skies still burned with the light of battle.  

'I'm sorry,' said Lenar Hoyt, looking up from his instrument. The  
priest was huddled deep in his cape.  

'It's all right,' said the Consul. 'I was ready to awaken." It was  
true. He could not remember feeling more rested. 'Please continue,' he  
said. The notes were sharp and clear but barely audible above the wind  
noise. It was as if Hoyt was playing a duet with the cold wind from the  
peaks above. The Consul found the clarity almost painful.  

Brawne Lamia and Colonel Kassad came out. A minute later Sol Weintraub  
joined them. Rachel twisted in his arms, reaching toward the night sky  
as if she could grasp the bright blossoms there.  

Hoyt played. The wind was rising in the hour before dawn, and the  
gargoyles and escarpments acted' like reeds to the Keep's cold bassoon.  

Martin Silenus emerged, holding his head. 'No fucking respect for a  

hangover,' he said. He leaned on the broad railing. 'If I barf from  
this height, it'll be half an hour before the vomitus lands."  

Father Hoyt did not look up. His fingers flew across the strings of the  
small instrument. The northwest wind grew stronger and colder and the  
balalaika played  

counterpart, its notes warm and alive. The Consul and the others  
huddled in blankets and capes as the breeze grew to a torrent and the  
unnamed music kept pace with it. It was the strangest and most  
beautiful symphony the Consul had ever heard.  

The wind gusted, roared, peaked, and died. Hoyt ended his tune.  

Brawne Lamia looked around. 'It's almost dawn." 'We have another hour,'  
said Colonel Kassad.  

Lamia shrugged. 'Why walt?"  

'Why indeed?" said Sol Weintraub. He looked to the east where the only  
hint of sunrise was the faintest of palings in constellations there. 'It  
looks like a good day is coming."  

'Let's get ready,' said Hoyt. 'Do we need our luggage?"  

The group looked at one another.  

'No, I think not,' said the Consul. 'The Colonel will bring the comlog  
with the fatline communicator.  

Bring anything necessary for your audience with the Shrike. We'll leave  
the rest of the stuff here."  

'All right,' said Brawne Lamia, turning back from the dark doorway,  
gesturing toward the others, 'let's do it."  

There were six hundred and sixty-one steps from the northeast portal of  
the Keep to the moor below. There were no railings. The group  
descended carefully, watching their step in the insecure light.  

Once onto the valley floor, they looked back at the outcrop of stone  
above. Chronos Keep looked like part of the mountain, its balconies and  
external stairways mere slashes in the rock. Occasionally a brighter  
explosion would illuminate a window or throw a gargoyle shadow, but  
except for those instances it was as if the Keep had vanished behind  
them.  

They crossed the low hills below the Keep, staying on grass and avoiding  
the sharp shrubs which extended thorns like claws. In ten minutes they  
had crossed to sand and were descending low dunes toward the valley.  

Brawne Lamia led the group. She wore her finest cape and a red silk  
suit with black trim. Her cornlog gleamed on her wrist. Colonel Kassad  
came next. He was in full battle armor, camouflage polymer not yet  
activated so the suit looked matte black, absorbing even the light from  
above. Kassad carried a standard-issue FORCE assault rifle. His visor  
gleamed like a black mirror.  

Father Hoyt wore his black cape, black suit, and clerical collar. The  
balalaika was cradled in his arms like a child. He continued to set his  
feet carefully, as if each step caused pain. The Consul followed. He  
was dressed in his diplomatic best, starched blouse, formal black  
trousers and demi-jacket, velvet cape, and the gold tricome he had worn  
the first day on the treeship.  

He had to keep a grip on the hat against the wind that had come up  
again, hurling grains of sand in his face and sliding across the dune  
tops like a serpent. Martin Silenus followed close behind in his coat  
of wind-rippled fur.  

So! Weintraub brought up the rear. Rachel rode in the infant carrier,  
nestled under the cape and coat against her father's chest. Weintraub  
was singing a low tune to her, the notes lost in the breeze.  

Forty minutes out and they had come even with the dead city. Marble and  
granite gleamed in the violet light. The peaks glowed behind them, the  
Keep indistinguishable from the other mountain-sides. The group crossed  
a sandy vale, climbed a low dune, and suddenly the head of the valley of  
the Time Tombs was visible for the first time. The Consul could make  
out the thrust of the Sphinx's wings and a glow of jade.  

A rumble and crash from far behind them made the Consul turn, startled,  
his heart pounding.  

'Isn't it beginning?" asked Lamia. 'The bombardment?" 'No, look,' said  
Kassad. He pointed to a point above  

the mountain peaks where blackness obliterated the stars. Lightning  
exploded along the false horizon, illuminating icefields and glaciers.  
'Only a storm,' he said.  

They resumed their trek across vermilion sands. The Consul found  
himself straining to make out the shape of a figure near the Tombs or at  
the head of the valley. He was certain beyond all certainty that  

something awaited them there .  .  .  that it  

awaited.  

'Look at that,' said Brawne Lamia, her whisper almost lost in the wind.  

The Time Tombs were glowing. What the Consul had first taken to be  
light reflected from above was not.  

Each Tomb glowed a different hue and each was clearly visible now, the  
glow brightening, the Tombs receding far back into the darkness of the  
valley. The air smelled of ozone.  

'Is that a common phenomenon?" asked Father Hoyt, his voice thin.  

The Consul shook his head. 'l've never heard of it." 'It had never been  
reported at the time Rachel came to study the Tombs,' said Sol  
Weintraub. He began to hum the low tune as the group started forward  
again through shifting sands.  

They paused at the head of the valley. Soft dunes gave way to rock and  
ink-black shadows at the swale which led down to the glowing Tombs. No  
one led the way. No one pokc. The Consul felt his heart beating wildly  
against his ribs. Worse than fear or knowledge of what lay below was  
the blackness of spirit which seemed to have come into him on the wind,  
chilling him and making him want to run screaming toward the hills from  
which they had come.  

The Consul turned to Sol Weintraub. 'What's that tune you're singing to  
Rachel?"  

The scholar forced a grin and scratched his short beard. 'It's from an  
ancient flat film. Pre-Hegira. Hell, it's pre-everything."  

'Let's hear it,' said Brawne Lamia, understand ing what the Consul was  
doing. Her face was very pale.  

Weintraub sang it, his voice thin and barely audible at first. But the  
tune was forceful and oddly compelling.  

Father Hoyt uncradled the balalaika and played along, the notes gaining  
confidence.  

Brawne Lamia laughed. Martin Silenus said in awe, 'My God, I used to  
sing this in my childhood. It's ancient."  

'But who is the wizard?" asked Colonel Kassad, the amplified voice  
through his helmet oddly amusing in this context.  

'And what is Oz?" asked Lamia.  

'And just who is off to see this wizard?" asked the Consul, feeling the  
black panic in him fade ever so slightly.  

Sol Weintraub paused and tried to answer their questions, explaining the  
plot of a flat film which had been dust for centuries.  

'Never mind,' said Brawne Lamia. 'You can tell us later. Just sing it  
again."  

Behind them, the darkness had engulfed the mountains as the storm swept  
down and across the moors toward them. The sky continued to bleed light  
but now the eastern horizon had paled slightly more than the rest. The  
dead city glowed to their left like stone teeth.  

Brawne Lamia took the lead again. Sol Weintraub sang more loudly,  
Rachel wiggling in delight. Lenar Hoyt threw back his cape so as to  
better play the balalaika. Martin Silenus threw an empty bottle far out  
onto the sands and sang along, his deep voice surprisingly strong and  
pleasant above the wind.  

Fedmahn Kassad pushed up his visor, shouldered his weapon, and joined in  
the chorus. The Consul started to sing, thought about the absurd  
lyrics, laughed aloud, and started again.  

Just where the darkness began, the trail broadened.  

The Consul moved to his right, Kassad joining him, Sol Weintraub filling  
the gap, so that instead of a single-file  

procession, the six adults were walking abreast. Brawne Lamia took  
Silenus's hand in hers, joined hands with Sol on the other side.  

Still singing loudly, not looking back, matching stride for stride, they  
descended into the valley.  

More Compelling Fiction from Headline Feature  

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PASSION AND HORROR  

Love and death are almost obsessive themes in Dan Simmon's  

fiction.  

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FLASHBACK explores the point where the ability to recapture the past - 
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'First-rate storytelling' Publishers Weekly  

'Simmons has never been more stylish than here ... "The Great Lover" is  
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AN UNFORGETTABLE JOURNEY INTO THE DARK HEART OF MORTALITY FROM  
AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR  
All his life, Jeremy Bremen has been cursed with the unwanted ability to  

read minds. He can hear the thoughts behind the placid expressions of  
strangers, colleagues and friends: their dreams, their fears, their most  
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For years his wife Gall has served as a shield between Jeremy and the  
world's neurobabble; her presence has protected him from the intrusive  
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of the world's leading mathematicians. But now Gail is dying and Jeremy  
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Jeremy is on the run - from his mind, from his past, and from himself - 
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mean streets of an uncaring city, from the lair of a killer to the gaudy  
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of the voice that is calling him to the secret of existence itself.  

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A selection of bestsellers from Headline  
A HEROINE OF THE WORLD Tanith Lee 5 pounds 99 pence[]  
THE HUNGRY MOON Ramsey Campbell 5 pounds 99 pence[]  
BEWARE Richard Laymon 4 pounds 99 pence[]  
THIS DARK PARADISE Wendy Haley 4 pounds 99 pence[]  
THE PRESENCE David B. Silva 5 pounds 99 pence[]  
BLOOD RED MOON Ed Gorman 4.99 []  
WIZRD Steve Zell 5 pounds 99 pence[]  
ROAD KILL Jack Ketchurn 4.99 []  
RED BALL John Gideon 5.99 []  
COVENANT WITH THE VAMPIRE Jeanne Kalogridis 4 pounds 99 pence[]  
THE SUMMONING Bentley Little 5 pounds 99 pence[]  
WINTER MOON Dean Koontz 5.99 []  
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